mary and i.

Who is Mary, you ask?

Fuck if I know.

However afraid I am of her, I long to know so that I can keep her in line. All I can gather is that she is annoying and makes my life hard. I make my living as her speech-writer.

I do all of her paperwork, actually, in order to shift the ocean current toward responsibility and respectability, giving her the right words to say and the proper amount of coyness and ambition. I also picked out her glasses. They help to fool most people into thinking that she is very smart. She says she doesn’t need them, that she doesn’t mind bumping into everything and everyone, that she can see everything she needs to.

Oh bother.

The little bitch keeps me from sleeping, in part because she refuses to do any of this work on her own and in part because I can never find her. She hides in baskets of fluff and behind squares of fabric, projecting light signals to strangers.

What a fucking weirdo!

She does do what I tell her to, most of the time, but she easily stumbles. Sometimes she flat-out rejects the stories I give her to tell and tells her own. They are about owls and scorpions and phallic-shaped factories, but she never speaks – at most she makes a low, guttural, intelligible noise (“eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeehhhhh”).

She gives everybody hugs. It’s embarrassing.

I try to keep her at bay by pushing her onto her back, like a turtle, and I watch her flounder, plastron up, for a little while. But then she just morphs into an archaeopteryx or a whale or a hedgehog and flies or swims or scurries away, vomiting out litters of amorphous babies and sticking arrows into her hard palate. She is happy.

It is deplorable. This is no place to be content.

Without me, she logically makes no sense in this world. And as much as she protests that this world is not the right one, I am at least able to intimidate her into staying here. She needs me. I give her speech, I give her purpose, I give her meaning.

I do not know if this means anything at all.