Sublime

She was seventeen,

She got the feeling she might drown in gender fluids if she stepped inside, or that her own gender, not all that solid to begin with, might deliquesce like fungi and stain the pink counter stool, but that it might be good for her, just what she needed. She stared at the bright fruit painted on the side of the building and wondered if she should cut

I drove to Bend, to the Carmichael Candy factory. Everyday the janitors swept from its floors enough cookie crumbs to fill a fifty-gallon drum. For twenty bucks, they let me take all of it, along with a compromised batch of caramel. At home, in an industrial bucket, I mashed up a few pounds of cookie crumbs and caramel,

She broke off a piece from a candy bar and put it in your mouth while you sat in the high chair. As the stearate in the cocoa butter absorbed the heat from your mouth and melted over your tongue, complex alkaloids were released and seeped into your taste buds: twitchy caffeine, giddy phenethylamine, serotonic theobromine.

gingerly

Eu queria e ainda quero desesperadamente aquele “depois”.