“This was true, but the dogs whose bowls I filled only just outnumbered those I injected with pentobarbital, running my hands along their backs as their eyes filmed over, just the way a skin of ice settles still and foggy overtop the glossy water of the creek.”

“We are, after all, witnessing everyone and everything at its most heightened. Each story is imbued with a distinct pathos, be it betrayal, hatred, jubilation, confusion, acceptance, or mercy.”

oiceless
but for when you appear
mirrored, a bloated hag
haw-hawing like a woman
could, I suppose, if he imagined
so.

“I don’t know what the break-in meant to me at the time, but it was like a stray thread, a thread that, once I tugged upon it, unspooled my entire world and snagged open a portal through which I could escape.”

If one of the things we get from engaging with other beings is some sort of reflectivity, reflexivity, this past year I have been alienated not only from other people, but from myself. Much of the life that I have been able to encounter, not through a screen at least, for the past year, has been non-human.