Once there was an animal different from other animals. This animal lived completely inside its hide. Hidden there. It was a terrible business inside of her, a city of industry, an analytical fleshing, but the horrorshow did not show. Her within passed show, and that hurt more than could be said.
“Why quiet?” the animal’s keepers asked her. She did not answer. Pawing inside herself, over-and-over she scratched her ess-oh-esses. But because she also was the asphalt clawed at—to them her constant, pointless fidgeting read as so much stillness.
She learned to hate her keepers.
As she grew in cognizance of her rage, the animal came to say. Focused, she found the power to force drops of inner population through an eye, through a needle, toward others.
She said “out,” and her keepers breathed easy. They’d feared she was their fault, and though she was, that single word made them think their onus for her pain gone. “Okay then,” they breathed. She was not okay. She was an animal with a living city inside of her. They took her for walks when she wanted exorcism.
All structures made her ache. All museums hospitals and theaters. All firehalls bars and offices. Her anatomy was round as any animal’s—with slopes and spirals, with joints that pivoted and joints like crucibles. But the city drew its spires and rectangles along every soft and slanting-twisting part until it was scored with geometry. Until it was strutted with scar tissue. Inside, she was all connecting lines and abstracted infrastructure, and the calculus razored.
It became a habit: the keepers daily meandros wanderings with the animal. They showed her everything that was left. Aon and the Hancock, Chicago Temple and the Shedd—its lakeside glass witness to so, so many species’ ends. Inside was outside, and the animal’s skin and fatty tissue would ever trap her between. She learned the word “civilization.” She learned the words “manufacture” and “fashion” and “assemble” and “devise.”
The animal settled on “render.” Given such a narrow sieve, her only choice was connotative. She would mimic and make. Burn, reduce. She would render unto keepers what was theirs.
