I awoke inside the folded wing of a Thursday disguised as Friday, where the morning had misplaced its bones and was walking on the stilts of invisible birds. My friend and I entered the automobile, which believed itself to be a patient whale swimming through neighborhoods assembled from the leftovers of sleep. We traveled toward McDonald’s, where the biscuits were sleeping beneath blankets of gravity and the gravy poured itself over them like liquid ancestry escaping from a porcelain eclipse.
We carried our breakfast home because destiny had scheduled an appointment with the perimeter of the lawn.
Somewhere beyond the window, a man is expected to arrive carrying the alphabet of straight lines. He will whisper forgotten geometry into the ears of rebellious grass. Each blade has spent the night rehearsing its escape into the republic of wilderness, conspiring with dandelions whose yellow faces are merely miniature suns trying to remember their original size.
The temperature has abandoned arithmetic. One hundred and five degrees is only the passport the heat shows before crossing the border into delirium. The air no longer separates lungs from sky. It has become transparent marmalade spread across the entire county by the enormous knife of noon. Even the shadows perspire. They slide beneath the porch searching for cooler versions of themselves, dragging their dark suitcases behind them like exhausted diplomats returning from negotiations with fire.
Yet happiness has quietly rented a room inside my ribs.
I cannot explain it.
Perhaps someone exchanged my heartbeat for a carousel populated entirely by owls wearing pocket watches. Perhaps joy is nothing more than a refrigerator humming softly to itself while planets peel oranges in another dimension. I simply know that the universe has forgotten to frown today. Every molecule appears to be humming through its teeth.
I wait.
But waiting is not the absence of movement. Waiting is an orchestra composed entirely of unopened umbrellas. Waiting is a staircase climbing downward into the forehead of a fish who has memorized the architecture of thunderstorms. Waiting is a chair practicing resurrection while dust invents new species of silence.
The biscuits have already become archaeological evidence. The gravy has evaporated into a weather system drifting somewhere above my childhood. My coffee is slowly translating itself into ravens. They fly from the cup without disturbing the surface, carrying tiny spoons in their beaks like ceremonial keys capable of unlocking afternoons that have never existed.
Outside, the lawn stretches itself like a green sentence that refuses punctuation. Ants transport invisible cathedrals beneath the soil. Cicadas unzip the fabric of the heat until daylight spills onto the earth in brilliant metallic ribbons. The mailbox has developed an opinion about eternity but communicates only through the posture of its shadow.
The man may arrive today.
Or perhaps he already arrived yesterday disguised as tomorrow.
Perhaps every edge in the universe is imaginary, and every border secretly dreams of dissolving into another border until lawns become oceans, sidewalks become violin strings, and the sun removes its golden mask to reveal a perfectly ordinary peach balancing on the antlers of an enormous white snail.
My friend sits nearby. We exchange the comfortable silence of people who have accidentally wandered into the same beautiful hallucination. The ceiling fan slowly stirs the invisible soup from which memories are carved. Every rotation rearranges the furniture of time. Every breath polishes another impossible object hidden inside the afternoon.
I do nothing except witness the magnificent conspiracy of ordinary things becoming impossible without making any announcement. This seems to me the proper occupation of a human being.
Life is not unfolding before me today.
It is molting.
It sheds another brilliant skin every few moments, leaving translucent versions of itself hanging from the fence while the newest life slips quietly into the blazing heat, smiling with the mysterious confidence of a giraffe made entirely of mirrors, walking barefoot across the center of the sun without leaving a single footprint.
LINES BY LIMING 