Nils Michals

For years the man and the woman

For years the man and the woman made a straight line of variable lengths. Then one morning the fjordhorse woke up as anime, big in Japan as it were. So he learned Japanese under some trees, which is how he came to understand a cherry blossom, the complexity of which led the man to believe that nothing could really be understood. For example, all satellites tell us is that the higher they go, the more the Earth just looks like the human body under a microscope. Fjords and lungs, fields and skin, and so on. Once the woman asked the man if he would rather be paid by the word or by the light. The man preferred the latter, a difficulty in places where one cannot recharge in a time scale meaningful to humans. For example, a glacier’s idea of a joke is to say here is a massive boulder not from around here. What the glacier really means is one must not walk in there all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, a terrible, terrible revelation for a child. These days the afternoons feel like wildly viral meme beings arriving from some distant cultural cloud. Lincoln Logs among some coffee and juiceboxes. PB&Js and illuminated ponies. Glitter sticker kittens. Little incongruent triangles of sun follow the child wherever she goes, something that just seems to happen more often when one doesn’t yet know how much a body can love the light.