Vehicular Language

Somebody’s taffy is ready to be pulled, and somebody else suffers from summer’s hot thatch. Somebody is right around the corner. Somebody wants to get up close and personal. Somebody called Enid has left a private message. Somebody wants to buy lunch. Somebody is selling girth and stamina, and somebody else is selling a berth on a fjord cruise. Somebody is lonely and bored and they want to meet on a corner of mutual convenience. Somebody has news for you. Somebody is sourcing a crowd. Somebody has found you on a branch of their family tree. Somebody wishes to share their deepest secret, which is that sailors bringing convicts to Australia dreamed they saw colours flash across the skin of a bonito fish they were beating to death, rippling numinous shades, peacock blue dredging to palest nacreous pink, but those sailors hadn’t been too long at sea, they were not dreaming, that fish does in fact change colour most wildly and energetically at the point of death, and the secret is that somebody would like to take on such camouflage during intimacy.

Somebody orders you get ready to have a good time. Somebody you know in passing is traveling in a remote war-torn region and needs you most urgently to send money, for they have been robbed at knife-point and are at their wit’s end and don’t speak any of the vehicular languages and the consulate cannot help because it has been under siege for several years, so you are the only person they can count on, indeed you have always been the only person they could count on, all the way back to that time, you know what they mean.

Vehicular Language

Somebody wonders if you have ever located your inland self. Somebody wants to know something about you they would find surprising, and the uniqueness they share in return is that the artist said drawing was taking a line for a walk, so they began to take shorter and shorter daily constitutionals, until their walk slowed to two steps, then it became a simple foot on the ground, then they stood on the ball of that foot and worked up notch by notch until the plantar fascia screamed and the metatarsals protested most aggrievedly and it all took several days and Philip Glass, but they got there, they were entirely on tiptoe, with nothing tethering them to the earth but the narrowest sliver of keratin and red polish, and in that moment, they believed, they had drawn themselves to their most perfect.