Self Portrait

She was eating books. With total abandon, she consumed the pages. Like a greedy toddler, bits and pieces of them splattered on her face and clothes. They dripped onto her thighs and smeared up her hands. Unattainable fragments streaked down her chin. She stuffed phrases into her pockets for later. Chapters fell lightly into her stomach, leaving her hunger unabated. Sometimes she swallowed them whole, sharp teeth barely grazing the sentences. More more more, but she didn't care for nutritional value. It was the thrill of the act. Turning pages as if they were spoonfuls, marveling at the broth which gave way to meat, and then an empty bowl which smelled of all of the spices she'd ever tasted. When the dish was done she paused for a moment and took a breath. “I tasted,” she thought, and then inhaled and opened to another first page.

At work, she was an amateur painter who had never seen a nude body. Bits and pieces of the figure in front of her were familiar. Cheekily concealed by a shawl on the cover of a magazine, she'd seen a hint of the divergence of a vector field. A movie could still be rated PG-13 if it only had one instance of tensor calculus. When she had pirated Game of Thrones, a popup ad had offered her the chance to watch a couple engage in a closure problem, but she had closed the window. The show itself gave a few glimpses of the Laplacian, enough to make her blush. But in this room it is all laid out. A greyish-yellow voice says the unthinkable. A Dijon accent orders “describe to me this body.” She shivers and dips a clumsy brush.

A tulip bloomed in a desert. As she walks along the river people watch her and think “she will die soon.” They have an irresistible desire to pick her, to bring about that end, but why grasp at what is probably a mirage? They drool for her, with greedy eyes, and she wilts under the glare. Nothing is more obvious than the fact that she does not belong. Dew on petals falls into cracks in parched earth. While the sage grows sturdily and aloe gives the weary some relief, it's hard to remember why she was ever there.