Non-threatening Knife Animal, for Chris

This animal is trying very, very hard to be a line. Sharp things are, most of the time. Something fluid and complex, a body thinning and thinning and slimming and shaving down into a moment right before it doesn’t exist anymore, where it is 2-dimensional and so all the things have to choose a side and rend. It doesn’t want to be a line. This animal just knows that trying will make it lighter, will make it gentler and smoother and it will get to tag along the edges of your shadow more easily without getting caught, without weighing you down. 

This animal doesn’t quite have a name yet. It has a sound, like, the sound of insubstantial shavings of wind whistling their way into the outer seal of double-paned airplane windows. Or the sound of an iron gate, but from far away. Sounds a silence makes when all the breathing in the room changes. Those sorts of sounds, towards a name. Anyway, you can name it, if you want.

They mostly live on pipes and shelving. Stuff they can sink their head into, that will surround them when they go to sleep, like a soft pillow. They might wake you up quite a lot. All the metal flakes and the images of airline windows at night and the brightness of the rooms with the breathing silences, that makes them very glinty. They’re just excited. I think you can housetrain them. Like, calming exercises and dreaming of dark places you enjoy instead. Might as well give it a go.

This animal wants to be an instrument. The way it doesn’t want to be a line. Not quite a tool, more specific or elusive. They like romps in the park in the sunlight and hiding under beds for years. They like stars and stacks of albums and letting the mice run around the room when it’s impossible to ever find them. They dislike slam poetry. They’re mostly good at waiting and occasionally very bad at it. Due to their insistence on the Line Attempt, we imagine they’re in a lot of pain, but we don’t ever hear them cry and they have never bitten any of us. A lot of people pet it when they come to visit, but we don’t know if the animal has ever had a home before. We don’t imagine so.