Jonah sat before the panel of blinking red lights. Merry Christmas, except not merry and not Christmas. It was a hot July night, and he’d just started the second of a double shift.

“Pedantics,” he said, taking the next call.

Jonah could remember when teachers still used red pens. There were moans and groans and no-fairs every time a paper was returned. “God,” his friend Emmett complained after class. “She’s a million years old and half-blind; how can she even see such a tiny mistake and who the fuck even cares?”

Although I’m alone in thinking this, it all started in a small pub at half past closing time. Several drinks in and an unspecified number of brain cells down, we approached the topics of the day with all the swagger of emperors and kings.

It was Madeleine who broached the question first. She wrote it on the back of a beer mat, refusing to buy the next round until we’d considered her words with what she considered to be a suitable measure of gravitas.

The beer mat read:

A vast meteorite heads towards the earth. Then scientists announce it is actually a gigantic poo.

I can’t remember my dreams

but they leave me bathed in sweat.

Maybe the problem is 

I still haven’t figured out how

my family was replaced by three

goldfish, named after the Stooges.

The fourth, who arrived DOA,
was Shemp, and he appears to be
unmourned.

Sometimes I ask myself if it meant anything at all—me, you, the roast chicken, those two years together that now feel murky and placed under thick fog. You driving to work after one hour of sleep, week after week after week. You going crazy from no sleep, from too much me, from us taking each other’s brain hostage. You and me staying up drinking scotch, playing chess, smoking pack after pack, listening to Kid A, taking baths on E. Me taking up the whole bed every night, me waking up laughing, me screaming in my sleep. Us sleeping through every Saturday. Your love for dates and numbers.

While Tolstoy wrote outdoors,
his goat
would eye him suspiciously,
making sure he wrote nothing
that was anti-goat,