Virus Child
My virus child, not even close to full grown, plays virus princess on the dying summer beach, bending the wilderness of virus kingdom to her will. She strains the salt out of the ocean, guts sea creatures in the crashing surf, builds castles in the middle of muddy wave pools so any fellow monarch can shelter behind makeshift moats. All those unable to shed their old world shell and find a home in this novel, wild land become hapless hosts for shape-shifter switchers on the brink of spillover and will be buried whole in the dirty sand. This is adaptation at its finest; there is no fresh water or controllable fire or magical medicine anywhere in virus world. Evolution works in myriad ways.
My virus child has never been this powerful. She has arrived in this first new moment of natural selection and rules with a small iron fist: there will be sacrifice, offerings, in the virus years ahead. All must suffer the eventual loss of evolutionary leftovers, the consequences for what can’t be gleaned. This virus princess, my only royal issue, grew in this body, my only body, but I will never know the taste of her task. I am caught in the mouth of this moment: soft-bodied, toothless, out of my shell; in thrall to the dank smell of moist predators, the sharp bite of dangerous fish, the rogue waves beating the shifting shore of the giant virus sea.
My virus child will never be free. Not one more unfettered moment. The gloaming comes and goes; it is night on the beach. Virus time moves forward toward a dimmed future. She yearns for chilled milk, bath before bed, a lost story: even virus princesses remember what came before the end of time. The sun will set after this summer; the sky will darken so she can finally sleep. All her subjects threaten mutiny. A potential coup etched in her mind, she is exposed to the rougher elements of restless virus stress. The crowned virus princess speaks in her regal virus dream: don’t worry, virus mother queen, the years are still stretched out until death.
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Open Letter to My Grifter
I owe you brain and breath, but I can’t make good on it with so few years left. Caught up, as I am, in the strange tangle of your buying and selling world. Suddenly, in late life, I embraced the bracing shudder of sudden change and the clean break of stolen identity. Leave it to me to hold out for so long and still suffer an old-fashioned split, a breakdown, nervous or not, for such a simple scheme, such sly clever theft from such a confidence man. You have never been free, I have never been free, and now I know the life-changing pleasure of wanting, getting, what I can’t afford, what doesn’t belong to me.
I don’t remember my past bodies, or how I was swindled into ending up in this one. How I owe you essential parts of this one; how I’ll pay for this one. Perhaps all my previous forms were both rousing successes and abject failures, unperfect, too, and maybe I worked them past exhaustion, accepted every questionable invitation. It seems I freely joined your masquerade, even after my recent incarnation. So I go through the long process of being born and reborn in different forms. I grow and grow, become fully grown, in negative space, around and surrounding, defining, your negative space, where there was previously no space at all.
How you got me moving. How you got me on the make, thriving in the margins. How I made my way up the loyal ranks in your work the gap system. As if I didn’t understand what you were into. As if I didn’t understand all the expectations in your well-versed, expert seduction. I, fledgling, novice, stripped down to salt and meat, gristle in my teeth, expected to pay you back with interest. What I wanted was to be a thousand-year-old thing with muscular thigh-lines, everywhere feathers, giant mighty wings, but a true body is beyond reasonable reach from the other side: now there is no other way for you, for me, to stay alive.
Even with the debt I can’t draw down. If you are hungry, I am hungry. An animal body is always hungry. It leaks, betrays, quietly celebrates the unquiet of being somewhat more than halfway to the grave. This is where I’m going, too. So even now, you pull at me. Even now. I have learned nothing: I keep doing it.