🗡️ Perfect Little Knives

🗡️ Perfect Little Knives

by Ross McCleary

crude oil leaks from my pores and always has and I’ve always felt the need to hide it from people but then we move into together and I have to sneak into the kitchen at night and scrape it into Gü ramekins which I hide around the flat and the fumes give us headaches and cause our skin to break out in hives that spread across our stomachs like spider-webs and soon the neighbours notice and complain and I finally come clean and while you’re reasonable about it you say We can’t carry on like this so I buy an old oil drum from Facebook Marketplace and try not to think about why TeddyBear1690 had it in the first place and we put it in the spare room next to my last unpublished novel and a box filled with Spanish verbs and for a while that does the trick but it’s not a permanent solution because if I sell it then libertarian bitcoin fascists will use it to paint over the ozone and set it alight like a copy of Das Kapital or people with kinks I don’t understand will use it as a sandwich filling or I’ll be hunted down and assassinated by multinational oil conglomerates who are concerned about their bottom line and we can’t bury it in the garden because the barrel will eventually corrode and leak into the soil and poison the Nature Poets who live in burrows down there now so I buy some machines and synthesise the oil into little plastic hearts and give them to my friends and family as a token of how much I love them and over time these imperfect little discs will wear down into perfect little knives and cut the breathable air into unbreathable ribbons that will catch in our descendants’ throats and they will curse me of course and it works and they’ll know it because they wake up everyday with headaches and the taste of crude oil on their tongues.