To Kill a Gloopish

Yesterday, the intermittent fog of the morning had given way to sunlight by the time I came home from work. I lay in the grass and read Chehov, a particularly slow part of a story where the hot, overstimulating boredom of the natural life in the steppes at noontime is evoked. Extremely well, I might add. Most of the characters in the story fall asleep in the sun, as do I.

Later, I woke up, just a bit before the characters in the story, and out of boredom and unwillingness to cook steamed beef in a can, I took a stick and a knife and a rope and a backback, scrambled up a neighboring cliff, surprised a gloopish in her nest, squeezed her under my stick as she tried to get out and attempted to cut her throat. Somehow, I kept missing. She rolled her eyes at me and wheezed. Finally, I found the inside of her brain with my knife and she stopped beating her wings. I picked her up by the feet, took the egg she was sitting on, and went to the water. On the way, I thought about all the chickens I had ever eaten and whether they rolled their eyes and wheezed too.

At the water, I cut out her breast muscles, cut out her red legs, pulled out two edibile looking organs, maybe kidneys. I measured her wingspan (102 cm), cut off her grey feet, cut off her grey head, plucked out a grey wing feather and a grey tail feather, and flung the headless, legless carcass into the still grey-blue sea. I hung the legs outside the door by the puffin's legs. I stashed the head outside with the two feathers, thinking at some point I would try to extract the beak, which is interesting looking. I hardboiled the egg. I marinated the meat in soysauce, lemon and onion. I used a lot of onion, since we have a lot of onion, and there were tears in my eyes. I fried the bits of gloopish with more onions and rice.

I ate the small bits of gloopish with rice and onions outside, looking out at a pale pink and yellow swash at the horizon. The preceding week had been very foggy and there had been no colors in the sky. The colors were subtle, wide and northern. A seagull was picking at the carcass which was floating on the still water at the same spot where I threw it an hour earlier. Wagtails hopped on the rocks at the water and chirped.

I wanted to smoke a cigarette, but discovered that Sergei has smoked most of my tobacco without asking. When Sergei came home, I did not feel like being social.

When he first saw me, he told me he finally got in touch with Burkanov. Since we had just two days earlier lost electronic contact with the outside world when Sergei's computer crashed, this was good news. I said "Oh".

When he came inside to eat, he asked whether he was eating gloopish or puffin. I said "Gloopish".

I brushed my teeth.

As he was eating, he asked whether I preferred gloopish or puffin. I said "Same shit". The right answer, of course, is puffin. The puffin flaps mightily and has well developed breast muscles.

I climbed into my bunk early, at 11:00, thinking I would like to do some work in the morning, since I had wasted an afternoon sleeping and hunting and cooking. Sergei was entering data into the computer. I picked up the Chehov story again. Now, the characters were drinking tea in a sort of inn. The very tired child who is the center of the story falls asleep at the table as the men are conducting business.

Sergei asked how to get the "×" letter on my keyboard. I said "H".

Then I slept.

I slept for fourteen hours, dreaming mostly about friends from home.