Breakfast

As soon as I was awake, I had forgotten my dream.


“Good.”

“Why ‘good?”

“It was just a dream.”

“It could have been interesting. It could’ve been something I’d have wanted to write about.”

“Like what?”

“There was something surprising in it… but I can only almost remember.”

“Have you remembered many dreams?”

“Of course.”

“How many?”

“Maybe a hundred.”

“How many pieces of toast do you want?”

“Just one. I get stomachaches when I eat this early. What a treat, the sun hasn't even eaten yet.”

“The Sun? When do you think that happens?”

“When it falls on the ground."

"Well what, then?

"Plants and people and everything. Imagine how big things would get if the Sun weren’t constantly eating away at them, little by little, like a gentle acid on growing mold, or spontaneous wind on a spider-web.”

“Here’s your bread. I think you’re making this up.”

“Look at your cheeks, you were at the dog park, reading on a bench all yesterday, weren’t you? I met you there at sunset and we talked about our studies until the Sun took back its tentacles, off from our planet, and we got growing again. Couldn’t you tell?”

“That’s just a sun burn. The sun isn’t eating anything. It can’t. All it’s doing is exploding out far away and its energies go everywhere, not just here. Do you disagree with that? That the sun’s rays shoot off in all directions?”

“They go all over, 360 degrees.”

“What about where there is nothing but space? What is the point in sending out a hand where there isn’t anything if you want something to eat?”

“We have to think that, having only two hands. It’s sad, we have to be so precise. It matters to us because to catch a fly we have to be careful not to miss it. Remember that couple we saw?”

“In the bathroom. We saw them sneak in together from that bench, we waited to see if something would happen. Ten minutes later, they came back out, the guy first, and then one after the other they saw us watching them in the distance. They shrieked and ran off laughing! I couldn’t help but laugh too, even though it was awful. If they hadn’t run off laughing, I may have felt upset. But because they did, it was sort of cute.”

“It had to have been planned. Not well planned, but do you remember that silly signal the boy made when he came out of the stall after looking around?”

“Yeah! How funny! Like a ‘Ha!’, and then the girl crept out looking careful too, it was then they both saw us.”

“The sun eats everywhere because it has to, because it cant decide to explode in just one direction. That boy and that girl are catching flies, hiding in ditches, wearing dark clothes, seeking out bridges to go under, lying in wet grass, imitating sleep. Probably, they’re spending all their free time imagining themselves without clothes together, soapy-bodied, floating in hot water, or maybe dry, someplace warm- someplace ridiculous; inside an old train car parked at a historic platform that ceased use, in the cabin of a docked submarine, in the back seat of a limo driven by a robot. But they have to choose always, and plan even, to find privacy, which they want, somewhere, and in a bathroom of all of the dirtiest, infamous places to be alone in... They aren't at all like the sun, who eats everything at once.”

“How fun! It doesn’t seem that sad to me. So what if you’re never in the sun? You don’t get eaten, right?”

“Yeah, that must be right.”

“Hm.”