I, love, I am the pure acetylene virgin attended by roses.
As if you were on fire from within. The moon lives in the lining of your skin.
The Rememberer by Aimee Bender
My lover is experiencing reverse evolution. I tell no one. I don’t know how it happened, only that one day he was my lover and the next he was some kind of ape. It’s been a month and now he’s a sea turtle.
I keep him on the counter, in a glass baking pan filled with salt water.
“Ben,” I say to his small protruding head, “can you understand me?” and he stares with eyes like little droplets of tar and I drip tears into the pan, a sea of me.
He is shedding a million years a day. I am no scientist, but this is roughly what I figured out. I went to the old biology teacher at the community college and asked him for an approximate time line of our evolution. He was irritated at first—he wanted money. I told him I’d be happy to pay and then he cheered up quite a bit. I can hardly read his time line—he should’ve typed it—and it turns out to be wrong. According to him, the whole process should take about a year, but from the way things are going, I think we have less than a month left.
