print previewback AARON APPS
from Dear Herculine
Dear Herculine,
A LETTER CONCERNING OUR MOVEMENT AS MONSTROUS ANIMALS
Childhood.
The rawest of raw meat.
Steak sawed off the bone in a red bloody flop.
Blue blood in purple veins exposed. Meat. Ugh. The shame before you understand shame, the animal nakedness that gets covered over with guilt. What does it mean to have a vague sadness constantly and completely? What does it mean to retreat into letters, to hide behind pages?
What does it mean to shadow one’s flesh with tree pulp? To know that something is wrong but to fail to understand it in its fullness, roundness. When you were a child you would devour history texts, you’d take them and retreat into the chestnut grove filled with those little spheres of round nut meat. Little round things like gonads. Little tree fetuses ripe for the crunching. Hot pops on the cast iron.
Snap, crackle—the sound below the feet in the chestnut glade as you wander alone, face in your letters, your body hidden like an animal tucked back into the womb after being born. Red. Raw. Meaty. Exposed in seclusion.