26th
Day Four
I’ve learned to pilot a small, white boat. Only how I’ve learned is that I know how to sink it instantly. A man and I are painted like zebras, but our whites are purple and blue. We kiss. He shows me his face on the side of a kid’s product: a rubber band gun. In the picture, he’s grinning wildly, but I can barely see it through the plastic, which has clouded, and gets cloudier. He wears a cowboy hat. That is all I can make out. Soon we are shooting each other with rubber bands. He shows me a letter he wrote, he opens the envelope. Inside are coils of string, the screw top of a plastic bottle, a button, a tiny piece of cheese. “I wrote this letter to a child, and when he couldn’t read it, I could never bring myself to write him again.” He hands me a letter with my name on it, which I can feel contains much the same thing.
