A Mayfly Assassinated...: Until I See The Sun You See...

This is for a number of reasons. First, humans are a very curious species, and, with all the spare time on our hands, we have had time to investigate the world around us.

We always feel like life is too short to explore the world and enjoy it. Secondly, mayflies die after laying eggs. Unlike the majority of the human population, the offspring never see their parents pass. Even if they have enough brain power to process the fact that how long their parents live would be how long they would live, mayflies would not have enough time to see this happen. Now we move onto the question of whether we experience life as short. Many say time is an illusion we made up in our minds; others say life is long, life is short, etc.

In the grand scope of the universe, a human life is nothing at all. So what do we live for? As we age, we begin to realize how short life really is. By the time that realization fully hits us, it is often too late to change. So I leave you with this message: Who knows what will happen in the future? Additionally, it is clear that although we use mechanical standards, and think of time in universals, there is nothing like this in nature; particularly organismal nature.

But this is not the standard of time in nature. Yet each human has individual experience of that year, and since there are 7. But each of those human beings contains some 30 trillion cells. And what is duration to a single cell? Is a day a year, a decade, a century? During that time everything nature had in mind for her happened and then she dies.

We look at her life and think, wow, that is a short life. Am I glad I had a lifetime of 80 years. During these 80 years I did everything nature had in mind for me plus, I had some time for myself. I can now rest in peace. A tree looks at us and thinks, 80 years. Im glad I have a lifetime of years during which I can do what nature has in mind for me. You see, organisms have a lifetime and are more than happy if they live it to full extend. You have a lifetime. A mayfly lives for months and months underwater.

I cannot bring to mind any animal that genuinely lives for only a day. There is no evidence that a mayfly is a sentient being. It does what it's DNA tells it to do, but it has no hopes, no dreams, no disappointments. We are aware of ourselves and have control of our lives in ways that would be incomprehensible to the mayfly. This, according to his own mother, Grandma Sweetwine, who never understood how she birthed and raised such a thistle-head.

I glance at him with his lifeguard-like tan and muscles, with his glow-in-the-dark teeth, with all his glow-in-the-dark normal, and feel the curdling — because what would happen if he knew? She nods toward Mom, whose eyes are now closed and whose hands are crossed over her heart.

We bulge our eyes at each other. I bite my cheek not to laugh. Jude does too—she and me, we share a laugh switch. Our feet press together under the table. This is why she gets the professor of the year award so much — everyone always wants to be in her movie with her.

We lean in for her next words, for The Message from Upstairs, but then Dad interrupts, throwing a whole load of boring on the moment. Mom lifts her eyes, the amusement wiped off her face. We discussed what her afterlife attire would be. She hardly left her bedside at the end.

When Mom found them that final morning, one asleep, one dead, they were holding hands. I thought this was supremely creepy but kept it to myself. Grandma told us not to listen to her artichoke of a son and to take those grains of salt and throw them right over our left shoulders to blind the devil. Dad lifts a slice of pizza off his plate. Cheese dives over the edges. He looks at me. I love pizza, meaning: Jude and me have one soul between us that we have to share: And Dad has a plate of maggots for his.

The grease makes his whole mouth gleam. Her hair hangs all around her head like lightcicles. Mom frowns—it makes her look a hundred years old. She used to say it like she was opening a door for him to walk through, not closing one in his face. We all eat pizza. Dad looks at her and his eyes go soft. I keep thinking of that quote by Picasso: The problem is how to remain an artist once one grows up.

This is a chance of a lifetime, guys.

The Invisible Museum

That was the message from the afterlife? It was about some school? Mom has the bananas look again. A school that will let you shout from the rooftops every single day for four years. This makes Dad chuckle under his breath in a thistly way. Dad forges on, oblivious. Mom beams at me. There are no surftards there, I know it. Probably only kids whose blood glows.

I might start flapping my arms. But you two have it. Natural ability and you already know so much. Other kids had picture books, we had art books. You two can have drawing contests. For me, school only stopped being eight hours of daily stomach surgery when I realized everyone wanted me to sketch them more than they wanted to talk to me or bash my face in. I talk to me. She was just left in some church in Reno, Nevada, as a baby. Oh, and I also talk to Rascal next door, who, for all intents and purposes, is a horse, but yeah right.

Dad puts his elbows on the table. The teeth are grinding like mad. I need to talk to your father. She reaches a hand back for me and I take it. I notice then that her dress is as colorful as a clownfish. Grandma taught her to make her clothes.

No one knows who, forget where, Ralph is. Sometimes words fly out of my mouth like warty frogs. We spring for the door. Like if heaven has an ocean, you know? I lean back into the couch, relieved to be just with Jude. During the day, everyone talks in colors instead of sounds. We used to play this with her when we were little. Oh man, oh man, thank you, Grandma. Dad has to cave.

Entertainment

I have to get in. Freaks who make art! And you should stop following me down the beach. What if I were kissing someone? Did you kiss someone? The high school is next to the middle school. Jude touches my arm. Fast, slam them right down with me on one side, her on the other. The time she punched the boulder-come-to-life Michael Stein in the face last year during a soccer game for calling me a retard just because I got distracted by a supremely cool anthill.

Or the time I got caught in a rip and she and Dad had to drag me out of the ocean in front of a whole beach of surftards. This secret is like having hot burning coals under my bare feet all the time. I rise up from the couch to get away from any potential telepathy — when the yelling reaches us.

I sink back down. Jude looks at me. Her eyes are the lightest glacier blue; I use mostly white when I draw them. Normally they make you feel floaty and think of puffy clouds and hear harps, but right now they look just plain scared. Everything else has been forgotten.

When Jude speaks, she sounds like she did when she was little, her voice made of tinsel. Because she saw my flying sand women?

I think she was right the first time. Unlike most everyone else on earth, from the very first cells of us, we were together, we came here together. This is why no one hardly notices that Jude does most of the talking for both of us, why we can only play piano with all four of our hands on the keyboard and not at all alone, why we can never do Rochambeau because not once in thirteen years have we chosen differently. The calm of the smush floods me. She breathes in and I join her. She eye-rolls at me on the sly. I think about giving her a dead leg under the table but resist.

Instead, I drink some hot chocolate and covertly spy on a group of older guys to my left. As far as my eight-foot concrete dork goes, still no fallout except in my mind: The guys at the next table all have rubber plugs in their earlobes and studs in their eyebrows and are joking around with each other like otters. They probably go to CSA, I think, and the thought makes my whole body thrum. One of them has a moon face with blue saucer eyes and a bursting red mouth, the kind Renoir paints.

I love those mouths. He winked at me. My face is starting to boil.

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I try to focus in on Mom and Jude. How Grandma collected ideas from everywhere, everyone, even left the bible open on the counter next to the cash register in her dress shop so all her customers could write in their batshit hogwash too. Like I even want some bible.

We were four years old.