decomposer
I only realize when it’s too late, my taking of other people’s things. I blackout then black in and come to having to return somebody’s water bottle.
I could’ve asked for a sip, but I took it because I’m an only child and it's not in my nature to ask for things. The owner is looking at me like I stood on my chair and scream-sung the Gettysburg address. I should hand it back.
Do I say thank you?
Thank you is defined by the Oxford dictionary as a polite expression used to acknowledge a gift. It was not a gift.
Sorry is defined as sympathy for someone else’s misfortune. I am a thief, not a liar.
I remember how it happened. I’m thinking about orange, ‘orange creamsicle’, summer, dairy rain showers, and tart breezes. I see the color stitched on the checkmark on my neighbor’s tennis shoe, ill-fittingly so. Misplacements are the greatest most recurrent tragedies, overlooked, forgotten, replaced. Overlooked, forgotten, replaced. Is every object doomed to a cycle of disposal and replacement?
Images of air pollution, heaving, dry lips, and large sips tickle something stale in my mind. Coquettish condensation, summoned straw, bashful bottle cap begging to come loose: a water bottle. Then black.
I look at my hands again and they’re holding it. Only now, sitting here, her lips parted and mine on a plastic spout, do I recall I don’t own a water bottle. She’s waiting, as am I. I’ve thrust us into a gray. The gray of our lecture hall is dull and sedative, but our gray pleads to be sedated. It pleads to harden into inky black, dribbled by our tongues, crystalized into text. I don’t know what to say.
“Is that mine?”, she mutters. “No”, I say. A backpack rustles to my right. A zipper cracks above my head. Our lecture is over. (Time passing, now that is a gift).
I squeeze my body into subhuman shapes, wading through rows of students. I fly towards the doorway, shedding the last of my guilt-covered skin, metamorphosed. I’m a bug. Realizing is usually the best part. My heart squelches blood cells into brown goo.
“Are you okay?”, her voice vibrates on my forelegs. I drop on all sixes and scurry up the stairs, towards the absurdist fiction floor. She follows, but I’m faster. I find a lounge, and try to shut the door, but can’t because I don’t have thumbs. Her footsteps get louder. I pick at a sticker that says “hydrate or die-drate” and realize I’ve grossly underestimated the white-girl attachment to hydro flasks. Her stupid orange shoe-supported stance reveals itself in slivers uncovered by the lounge window’s shutters. I shut my five eyes tightly until a thumb pops out of my claw. I open the door.
“Sorry, I thought that it was mine”. I hand her the water bottle back casually. She is silent. In another exhilarating wave of indignity, my thumb whittles back into chitin. “It’s okay. It’s a popular one, huh”, she motions to her vomit-yellow hydro flask. I groan as my organs curdle and stack atop each other. “Seems so,” I say, ribs knitted back together, and wink with one eye now, not five. She smiles like she witnessed nothing out of the ordinary and no shapeshifting. She leaves me to myself. I look down at my stocky gummy legs. They take me home.
It was all so brief. I open my cabinet. Sitting coyly behind a can of peas, teasing its tattered plastic edges, I see it: my roommate's bag of Takis. I black out and wriggle back into my exoskeleton, crunching away on red matter.