Divination

I ask the alphabet soup to tell me a story, to tell me what to do, where to go because im lost and confused and only mildly hungry. Here I am, twenty-something, where I will be at thirty-something, the way I was at six and thirteen: looking down at the bowl of lettered pasta, wondering what words will come with me. I do not play boggle, have no patience for scrabble. I close my eyes, think of deities worshipped centuries before my time, far along my line of ancestors. I pray to gods and goddesses and amalgamations of nature in the form of animals and sacred icons—I picture the breeze and the fires, the smoke and the water, the dried brush and the tall redwoods, the fantastic and the real.

I eat; my tongue is burnt with the first spoonful and the pain is my sacrifice for this vision, for just a hint, for anything these letters will give me, if they will have me. I am not mystic, can barely even summon the thought of harm against others— something about revenge being a dish served cold, something about the essence of the universe and balance and blah blah bl—

I eat the soup. I throw the bowl in the sink, run the water, and walk away, ignoring the way the leftover letters rise to the surface with bubbles of oil, just edible flotsam and jetsam hovering, forming. Spelling.

A l w a y s f o r w a r d