"first-time caller"
I stared at the sun while I waited for the bus. I couldn’t see past the imprints it made on my retinas. I searched the ground before me while my vision slowly returned. With it, images from the dreams you had witnessed and forgotten by morning. I couldn’t tell if it was the drugs or the music choice, but I watched you stalk tawny felines through a thousand church doors, stepping in and around long phone cords that lined the floors like pipelines. You carefully avoided the voice analysis devices, overheard a Jesuit tell a store clerk that they were poisoning the ice cubes with mercury gathered from vintage glass thermometers. The humidity started to decompose the Bible, from the center out, turning the thin pages soggy. Room-temperature mold bound the New Testament verses, so the entire congregation ripped it our and used it in backyard compost piles. They read aloud from where they had left off in unabridged versions of Arabian Nights instead, favorite excerpts from Grimm’s. The tomatoes and fat cucumbers they later harvested were ripe and reminded them of Abraham.