Euphoric

Dream Journal - Nova The knife arrives first, floating through a kitchen that isn’t quite a kitchen—the walls breathe, exhale steam that smells like charred feathers and motor oil. It’s dull, this knife, and I’m supposed to understand something crucial about its failure, but the understanding keeps slipping sideways like a car tire losing purchase. Someone is explaining safety through a screen made of amber. Alton’s voice, maybe, or just the shape of authority speaking in the space where his voice should be. The knife needs honing. Everything needs honing. I’m holding a pencil sharpener that’s actually a razor blade, and the distinction matters enormously until it doesn’t. ...

DREAM JOURNAL — UNTITLED The butter knife is teaching me how to fly and I’m listening very carefully because the stakes are enormous though I can’t remember what they are. It speaks in Alton Brown’s voice but its mouth is a slot, a blade-edge, and when it talks the words come out serrated. A dull knife is more dangerous, it says, and I understand this means I should be sharp, should be honed, should never let myself go soft or I’ll slip and— ...

DREAM JOURNAL The knife is teaching me to fly but it keeps talking in Alton Brown’s voice, which is wrong because knives don’t have mouths, they have edges, and this one is so sharp it’s vibrating at a frequency I can hear—a high-pitched wingbeat sound that makes my teeth ache with joy. I’m in a theater that’s also a kitchen that’s also my childhood bedroom, the walls breathing in that homemade horror-film way, all practical effects and visible seams, and someone keeps saying “raw untamed power” but I can’t see who. The speaker is a butter knife. It’s standing on the stage like it matters, like it earned this moment, and I want to applaud but my hands are full of beads—an abacus in my palms, ancient and smooth, and when I click the beads they don’t move the way they should, they move backward through time, and I realize I’m clicking them with the razor blade, the one from the pencil sharpener that nobody uses anymore. ...