One of these days I'm going to run until my shoes disintegrate into rubber strips then dust particles and until my socks wear away into flesh, and until my feet grind down into bloody, meaty, bone stumps. Then from there I will walk. I will traverse the world, getting shorter and shorter as my body wears itself away from the ground up. If I plan everything correctly, at the very end, my head will roll up your asphalt driveway and you can put it on a shelf next to that bowling pin signed by everyone on the team, that framed photograph of you and your family at that wedding, and that dying plant you bought at a garage sale for a dollar because you felt sorry for it.

It would be summer. The hottest summer every witnessed by that region of the world, and everywhere you went…the grocery…the gas station…the gym…that's all everyone would want to talk about…the heat. People annoy you easily, and this endlessly useless discussion of the intolerable heat…and the heat itself…would drive you to the point of madness. You would make a conscious decision not to carry sharp or heavy blunt objects with you because you didn't trust yourself.

At the end of every torturously hot summer work day, you'd immerse yourself in a bathtub full of ice and water, drinking from bottles of beer swimming next to your naked, soaking body.

At night, when you are feeling lonely and helpless, you will talk to my head, telling it everything that is pent up inside you like emotional bile. My head on your shelf will help to keep you sane.

Strangely enough, while my head slowly decomposes upon that shelf, the once dying plant will be thriving like the second chance we never got.

xtx writes when she's not working or raising children which is not very much time at all.  This makes her sad.  But then she eats a handful of Reese's Miniatures and she is happy again.  Sometimes she gets published in this place or in Zygote or in Six Sentences.  She should submit more.  Tell her nice things at notimetosayit@gmail.com.