Hock Spit Slurp

Let's Play- by Tim Kahl 

She was a ten-year-old girl with one foot in the grave. Her addiction to stories was pulling her down. It is evident now as she slips into the final chapter that none of this will be captured on film. The theme song will not settle into a minor key when she shows up in the famous last scene with the carpenter bees. Hardly anything worth mentioning had happened to her before then. But mention it they will . . . because they prosecute for heaven, and they work to keep the garden clean, free of accidents. They try the hard times of ancestors. They try the bad breaks of laymen and quiet neighbors. They break them down, stare at them the way the righteous glare at a third nipple. So what use will it be for them to grill this ten-year-old girl? What if they find out she thinks of this moment as middle, has no concept of ending? Will they debrief her and give her new information? Cast her as succulent? Agave? Slowly they cut back her intake of water. She finally gives in to her death spiral. Watch out. She is falling through the ground. She has to. But we who understand the folly in controlling outcomes don't have to let her. She is falling, falling according to the rules of story. We can still catch her with our reprobate lives shaped by the interrogators. They ask if we have been plotting against the clock's decisions, its incremental mercies. We act as though nothing's certain, and it isn't, except that time ticks down. So we tell those who question all of us caught somewhere in the unveiling of story, caught there in order to clarify distinctions and determine entrance to heaven: you count, I'll hide, let's play hide-and-go-fuck-yourselves.