by Christopher KennedyI'm sick of them arriving on the backs of rogue elephants, and I tire of their stories of aborigines. I burrow in my basement while they traverse oceans. When I visit them, I sit in chairs made of rare bamboo and mispronounce, while they speak fluent Cantonese, a rare dialect, spoken only by a cohort of twenty on a remote, exotic plateau that can only be reached on foot. Dishwashers are a type of marsupial, I've decided. So I carry several photographs of my own to show at their dinner parties. They feign interest and project their slides of an ancient fertility ritual, involving the pregnant bellies of black widow spiders they say improved their sex lives yet again. Their papaya sorbet tastes like dung, but I'm forced to smile and watch them hula across the living room in authentic Hawaiian garb. If only their skin were a different shade of umber; if only I weren't reduced to tears by the stories told by their bodies' sway and the graceful movement of their pertinacious, birdlike hands.
