Dear Giant Squid:

What are some rare facts about the giant squid?

Anonymous

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My dearest Annie of the Nonnie Mouse:

The facts of this world, each is as rare as the next.

1. Fire is not a thing, but a process . . . she is the exchanging most promiscuous of the elemental strings of oxygen and carbon, smoke and ash and heat.

2. Water is not a thing, but a state of mind . . . she is flowing and languorous, vaporous and hot, cold and rigid, all as it should unfold one after the other. She is like the bone of man, white and stiff upon the beach, scraped clean of flesh, of meat and love and heat. And she is like the tears of man, salty-sweet as the crying eyes of a beagle.

3. Energy is made of matter, and matter is made of vibrating strings, and the strings are loops of Hope in the mind of a greater squid than I . . . a squid who has, perhaps, suffered a stroke and now lolls to the side in his tank, his eyes bleary, his ink leaking into the water filtering through all things like a cloud of despair. And that tank is made of matter, which is made of tangled knots of Regret, and each knot rests in the heart of each creature in the Universe.

4. Snow is a most miraculous thing, otherworldly and crystalline as it tumbles from out of the vacant sky . . . she is like a thousand delicate shuriken, and the children below hold out their meaty tongues in wait.

5. Sleep itself is a mystery in this world, fitful and quick to abandon a squid for a thousand years, only to return in ones dotage at inopportune moments, only there to announce for the world that age has caught up, is resting heavy, that the pendulous weight of ones cephalitic sack has pulled long at the chromatically complex flesh about the eyes, that at any moment the electrical disturbance that is sleep might slip free of that single comfort, decontextualized from the natural, if elusive act, and become a lighting storm of the mind. Sleep, she is stalking me.

6. The mind itself, her thoughts and images . . . memory, like a thousand sharp stars, raining down into my maw.

These are the facts that are about the squid today. She is December outside. She is cold outside. She is a day of gray flakéd water, frozen, light in the winds of the terrible Dry Upspace.

sigh

Yours Drearily,
The Giant Squid