Your Small House that Faces Away from the Sea
Michael Grant Smith

Put the sky in a pan and fry some herringbone clouds. Sear those stripy planks of vapor until they're golden-pink. Eat the little bones -- they are digestible enough and you need the enrichment. You were raised to consume whatever you are given. The salt in the air provides seasoning.
Carry your tool satchel at day's end. Etch a path up the last hill, the one that rises to meet your villa. Count the satchel's contents while striking a cadence; each step sets its latch in the gears that keep you from rolling backwards. It helps to name aloud each tool as it's tallied -- claw hammer, shortwave radio, chicken bones, cotton puffs, electrical tape, paste wax, coil of copper wire, blank paper, tin snips. These are the items used today and still at the top.
Olive trees' dagger leaves shade the terrace, their skewed trunks frozen mid-dance by prevailing sea breezes. A hand pump discharges into a granite basin in which you wash your feet. Bend to the spout and splash dust from your face. Pour the tepid flood down your throat: alkaline water, to lager, to sheep's milk, to red wine, to apricot nectar. Thirst doesn't want to be quenched, ever, but how can it know its desire?
Stand in the doorway and let your shadow paint what's inside. Except for the areas your image obscures from the sun, the room is bare. You've not understood the argument that requires possessions to be on display as if enshrined. You'll never enter a space without calculating its internal volume and the length of time its demolition would entail. A trail of damp footprints follows you, but evaporates, once again failing to establish verifiable proof of your passage.
"We're in the business of building dreams" was how the advertisement read, but no one mentioned the part about how last night's old dream must die before a new one is born. If two dreams ever meet, the resulting collision could destroy the world as others know it. Something in your tool satchel addresses this condition, and there's only one hour until bedtime. Let it go, let it go.