Primary Color

As our devices continue to threaten to impede on our reality, and we share more of our space with digital fabrications, we're going to be forced to interrogate reality itself in new and personal ways. Today's Terraform, a surreal and stirring portrait of such a world in motion, does exactly that. Enjoy. -the ed.

Afterward, I played us jazz, and the pink-haired girl produced fruit she had stolen from her job at the gas station. A thought of light hung over us, even though I can’t afford electricity. I let her pick at and unravel my carpet. Yes, she liked the snakes.

I don’t think that I like anything. It’s not fun to put on socks every day. I think about stealing her dress, escape, crawling back to the house later to tell it of living.

I think of curtailing her dew-skin in dirt, flattening what the world expects of us. I can’t leave. I am in charge of putting birds in the sky.

When the birds began to be confused, circling their end, their sacred dialect colluded with robot static—that’s when they got the idea to replace them. Not many notice a difference. I upload, copy, paste, strings of language into nest, beak, hatchling scream.

As a child I used to push my fingernails down, fastidiously, while waiting for the bus, or music. I didn’t think they would fall off, this was just how I taught myself about fearing things I couldn’t name. During this strange act, my fingernails also became alien.

At the end of the day, I can’t go to sleep in my laptop. This is the hard part. I hate sleep. So I make other versions of myself. Hope one of them will do it for me. They chop up Pinochet, turn the ocean up too loud, practice atrophy.

When I see her through the gas station window the next week she hands me a peanut butter sandwich. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with the thing.

We have sex again and I’m not sure it’s what anyone wants. Maybe we’re both gay or behind on our taxes or should be living somewhere else. Maybe we should be living in the Bahamas. I take her hand and squeeze it to ask myself what a hand is for. Grasp or let go. She squeezes back. I push her face away. Too much of it.

On the news a crow is accused of murder, a wrestling mask is running for state rep. I’m not convinced we’re looking at the same sky, despite the fact that I’m the one who writes it.

At night, a version of me likes to visit a supermarket, the old fashioned kind, with all the dirt and uncertainty. My arms and hands stretch infinite. I don’t need anything. I stretch around people in the aisles, hitting all their angles visible.

There was a time I was sure I’d get the surgery, replace my eyes with machines, for my career, I guess. I often feel as if I’m preparing for this, in some kind of payment plan, where I unlatch and let float away parts of my humanity.

I think about how, after the surgery, I will hold a meeting with god.

The third time we have sex, it has no effect. I sit up and walk across the room like Dianne Keaton’s hologram does in that movie where Woody Allen won’t let her smoke grass. What’s the matter? The pink-haired girl asks. Should I leave? I shrug. I don’t care.

Another version, we have kids, we have no idea what to do with kids. We buy them t-shirts.

Another version, we are in the supermarket, I reach around a tower of grapes and grab her, I undo her fly, a stream of black finches escape.

Everything feels like effort. Even the lake behind my house glows chauvinistically with the uranium at its depths, as if trying to absolve this chemical weight.

In another version, the past and future meet in shimmer.

In another version, I ask god what national trucking month means, where we’re headed.

Down, she says. Licking jelly from her fingertips.

The girl and I rent a phosphorescent dome in Atlantic City. I’m giving the whole human eyes thing one last chance.

She asks me if I’ll hold her, I comply. She says, save me from my fear of you. I order us lobster steaks.

God asks me why anyone would order lobster in New Jersey.

I begin pulling at my fingernails on the drive back. I think about how, after the surgery, I’ll learn the antonym of wish fulfillment. I sit up very straight in the driver’s seat and wait to feel unrelated to myself.

If we could just be good to each other, she is saying. I’m burning a hole in the highway over New Brunswick. This does feel good, I think, burning without flame, a shallow burning to be gone.

This time the supermarket is empty, no birds. She’s here because I guess we fell asleep in the same bed. Flaw in the program, my lazy subconscious. She holds out the sandwich, labeled this time, with my name. I don’t take it. In the dark of her pupils, I watch myself change shape.