Unconsciously, the lidless eyeball in my wrist searches the knuckle nubs for rough edges in need of gnawing. The thick copper warmth of my blood, glass-smooth as it slides up my throat, nourishes me with guilty panic.
My future won't say anything in public.
Later, they will crawl into my ear and burn my heart wings. They will make me feel ashamed and weak. They'll use their needle claws to strangle the empty spaces in my self-control.
"Rejoice," I'll scream with fluted tongues, "for this is the last of future days when clocks lie with straight faces upon bent tables of ethics. No hand may taste the blood of another without first seeing the bones."
"Rejoice," they'll whisper with ears that have been burnt to putrid orbs, "for this is the future of last beginnings and no soul may clean itself upon the blood meant to stain the living world."
They say this because they never listen. They are righteous in age, forgetting I have yet to be born. I could argue, could regurgitate each with beams of light, but my friends have corded boneless fingers trailing from their skulls, and I have none.
"Authenticity is a disturbing dream." Or, as I learned the day after I died, "No Smith is a Jones more than once."
I lift my nose and feel the rainbow, the knife-edges of color, as it slices off bits of my thought.
They flutter to the sky, tittering sideways before regaining consciousness and screaming that I
should have done more, something - anything. It hurts to breathe, so I inhale the fluffy clouds of sin and wonder why we have to relearn things we know at birth.
Things would be simpler if we grew skin; borders of flesh to contain us, to organize our eyes so we can find them without looking. Even crocodiles have skin, and they don't cry half as much.
I burp, tasting the last of my future, the knotted tendon strings that are so hard to dissolve, and clench my liquid fist - hoping no one smells.
Like I said, it's a nasty habit.
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