On the days when school is in session, the hog moves slowly along the highway. Children clench her teats with their baby teeth, and their fingers and toes dig into her soft abdomen massaging her mammaries as she trots down the rural routes they cling to her body like ticks. The sun is just setting and a breeze rustles the summer leaves. She carefully crosses each intersection. Cautiously snorting to let other denizens of the roads know where she is going. Absentmindedly from time to time she shits and keeps trotting. Flecks of feces splatter on the kids in the back, but they are the slackers in off-brand jeans and torn flannel shirts so no worries there. She stops at the gates of a subdivision and the kids on the front open their mouths and fall, twisting themselves to land on their feet. She has much further to go to take the rural kids home but once there she will be able to root through the dump and rut in the furrows with her feral kith.

The city without tourists feels out of sorts. Stretching into the suburbs, it has put on excess weight. It doesn’t like to be pinched in by other municipalities. It runs its fingers through its mid-century skyscrapers nervously knocking out windows. It scratches some as yet ungentrified neighborhoods in the west. It doesn’t look too bad for its age even if it should depopulate.

A worm emerges from the small of a young lady’s back. It finds its way through a thicket of downy fur. It passes through blonde fuzz like a cherub through spring clouds. It is merely out for a hike… or well… a series of undulations forward. But don’t mind it if it places a meerschaum pipe in one orifice and then another trying to remember which is its mouth and which its anus. Take solace in that we all confuse need and want, compulsion and dearth.

Unable to travel, a capuchin rakes his fur looking for the small cars that have been left. He of course is grateful they are not real automobiles, only simply molded plastic simulations from the game of Life. When he finds one, he removes the peg people and tosses the vehicle off the marble coffee table. He holds the pegs in his cheeks, longing for Skull Island.