Slime

After the equinox, I dreamt that everything on God’s green Earth became slime. Every product and plant and animal, slime. Evenings, slime. Mornings, slime. Eat your slime, kids, your dad is already out; he woke just after slimerise and drove his slimecar to the office, also just a pile of slime. Green like pond scum. Slick and clingy as a bacterial mat. The band in the club down the street (now a river of slime navigated by slime gondolas) played slime instruments, the drums not dissimilar from the trombone, and the music splashed over the audience as waves of slime. I walked home after the show in shoes made of slime, squish squelch. Downtrodden folks asked me along the way if I could spare a little slime and I gave it freely because there was slime everywhere, slime growing on the trees on our block, the trees themselves slime and the leaves too. We were also slime, you and I, and so were happy. We moved, slime in slime, through an indistinguishable world. When we were apart, I could look down at the slimewalk or across at the stray slimecat and see you, a shapeshifter in the ooze. When together, even the most ardent slime colonialist could not have drawn a border between your slime and mine. Slime planes carried us across oceans of slime to faraway slimelands which were, in the end, much the same as our own. Words like “nation” and “boundary” became slime beneath us—dissolute. And God too, and the devil. John Lennon, that fucking dog, might have been proud, had his moldering corpse not been slime as well. Isn’t it lovely, I asked you. Isn’t it slimy? Slime, you replied. Slime slime slime. In the swamps where I was raised, the bog slime noticed nothing, no change at all. The rest of the world was merely coming to know a truth that the swamp had long understood.

The world I woke into was hard, its edges too defined. The room was cold and quiet. A city tree’s crooked finger tapped at the window, rat-a-tat-tat. I knocked my knee against the nightstand, stubbed my toe on a stairway, and earned a black eye from a cabinet mirror I mistook for a corridor. I couldn’t find you anywhere. The distant swamp had long since dried and cracked and blown away. I plucked a brittle leaf from the sidewalk and touched it to my dry, rough cheek, where it crumbled to a thousand pieces. The wind was coming. I could hear it. The wind was on its way.

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