SEA CREATURES, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA/DESIGN SCHOOL, LOOKING AT DEATH FROM ABOVE.

I'm standing at the bow of a yacht with high school friends including W. and L. The midday sun is shinning the way it does in Albert Camus' The Stranger when they stroll behind his mother's corpse for the funeral procession: white blinding heat that inspires choleric languidness. I fall asleep.

When I wake up I find fishes littered on our vessel. They have long torsos (lateral lines) with golden crispy skins that have been lightly breaded and deep fried twice. But they are alive and they sport that generic fishy look with listless, bulging eyes that slightly glimmers panic, and mouths shaped in dumb O's, ready to suck a duck.

Fried living creatures are eerie + repulsive; I do not want them touching me even though W. has assured me they are harmless. I suppose these fishes are like dogs, however, and my fear wafting into their puckering mouths is like heat that activating matter's static particles into microscopic armies of jittery balls. In other words, they glide only towards me. I begin kicking them away. I escape to the inside of the vessel and by the inside I mean it is the dining area of my childhood house with those dark brown cupboards. I'm nauseas. I'm worried they will swallow a leg.

Then I'm flying or driving or walking or gliding through my old college campus. The setting is much less nautical, more terrestrial, more temperate, and more nocturnal. Everything is wet and anything that is green spawns from rich dark soil. I bet I was smelling fresh pine. Nonetheless, I still feel hot + crispy + salty from exorbitant sunbathing. Somebody comments I am unnaturally red. I'm browsing in a library, not at UVa anyway, but in some design school where students are dressed in high-fashion. G. stands behind me with a toothy grin (I think we're boarding the ship together) and begins rubbing my armpits while I surf the internet. He grins, "I can't feel them [my armpits] the way I used to." His audacity and koan-y remark vexes me. But we have to go. On our way to the elevator we pass a table of students who are having a meeting about some student/fashion magazine.

In the elevator, we are with L. G. grabs out a green key/ninja star looking object from his black backpack and strikes the elevator pad three times. He says this will slow down the acceleration of descent, but it actually feels like the reverse, and as we fall faster and faster I think to myself that at least I will now know how I will die. We hit something hard, as though our little elevator were some kind of space-travel vessel exploding through different levels of earth's atmosphere. I feel my body blasting through darkness and debris (in slow motion, of course). I keep expecting something painful will perforate through my body. It is my logic, I suppose, during moments of duress that thinking one step ahead of my own end will make the situation much less miserable.

We do not die. Instead we hit the library again. A sleepy professor wearing a very peculiar gray beanie walks towards me and compliments on my portfolio. We should keep in touch, she says. Another professor, however, with gauzy things and long beautiful peppery dreads explodes into a green wrathful octopus (reminiscent of "The Little Mermaid" where Ursula's anger grows her fat ill-willed tentacles). Some students are bored, others spring in haste for quick escape. There are some flip-flopped chairs. The octopus grabs the three of us instead, devouring us within the caverns of the elevator pit.