Lucid Forgettings – Daniel Jaeger

November 6, 2023

As silence settles over the air between us, my mind retreats, teetering on the edge of a house-sized sinkhole. Human-sounding utterances slither in black depths, suckling my heart. The gravity of unintelligible vowels pulls me into the pit, a glass marionette stumbling on false tunes, I shatter composed, dressed in winter’s stags. The cries of the last generation spin a gossamer uzumaki, dripping datastreams down the rabbithole of my endless gaze. A prism of bits architecting everything we are, disintegrating the more it’s conceptualized. 

“Did I tell you I have over two hundred snakes?” you say. 

Nauseous from the vertigo of being sucked back into this plane, I hold up my hand with only the pointer finger extended. After a few revitalizing breaths, I say “Do you have a big ass aquarium or what?”

“No, I do it professional. I have them in racks,” you say, pantomiming a diagram.

You tell me about this potentially illegal thing I don’t care for as I stare a hole into the cafe’s turquoise brick wall. Handmade Portuguese flowers slip from my mouth as I invert into a hammock, reading your lips in my own glossy eyes.