FL0004
"PLASTIQUE"
DATELINE: OPEN WATER (4:04 AM, year unknown)
Fellow passengers, it’s another beautiful day in the Limoverse. Red-handed dawn knocks softly at our cabin door and tosses in the dead salmon sun. Fish again!
We unwind our night gauze and reach for our day gauze, nearly knocking over the cups of morning tea clattering with the waves. Foul smoke has been circling the deck for weeks, getting sallower and sallower against the long horizon; now it gathers and leers into our chamber, pressed against the porthole. Staring. Smoking. Sailors say it’s bad luck to look it in the eye. We glance to the gaps between floorboards and wrap our blindfolds once again.
When the cloth hits our skin its humid warmth leaps to every thread in the room: the creased bedsheets, the ancient rug, the tattered lace curtain tied around the door latch in place of a lock. On the lift of a rising wave it all condenses back on our brow in a single hot drip of the obvious: This isn’t our Limo. These aren’t even our breadcrumbs. We remember being on a beach...
We strain to see shapes but there’s only static, an oxblood haze filmed through shut eyes. We’re too close. No, we’re too far. Where are we anyway? Our hands travel to the flat edge of whatever passes for a mattress here, then consult the airspace beyond — landing on a worn metal handle, thin as a bird bone. The drawer opens. We hardly need the aid of sight to find the one toothed wire tucked within that’s meant to do nothing in the world but slice
The banana bread that won’t go away
And we draw it taut across the air, like a thousand times before. If our hands can hold still for just a minute, they might summon the impossible: the board rising to meet the blade, the marionette moon making the cut.