“I read juuust enough philosophy to remain skeptical of the reality circumventing around me, but like, not enough philosophy to really know what I’m talking about.”

"You have a huge mosquito bite on your back,” Becca said, ignoring me.

“It's angry and red and quite noticeable. I might have some ointment.” Becca rummaged in her bag.

It was late July, a workday. We were laying in the park across from the office, a derelict copy of an Alan Watts book beside me, on loan from my stoner brother, and a bag of pretzels half-eaten. We’d told our boss we’d be taking all our meetings outside. Mmhmm, he’d said.

That day, I’d worn a plain dress and a push-up bra. The dress was old and worn. The bra brand new and packed with foam. On this occasion, my coworkers remarked how pretty I looked in blue. Nice tits, they could have said instead.

My legs were getting marked up by the grass, indented and itchy from the herbicides and small creatures burrowing through a microscopic jungle. Feeling a phantom irritation, I looked down, tilting my left elbow, anxious to find an insect. Instead, there was nothing. My fear centre glitching and flickering and ever wrong.

While I studied the tiny forest beneath us, Becca spoke eagerly, recounting the details of her weekend. She had met someone. They’d made out in her car. This wasn’t remarkable, but it was a bummer for her husband. Despite her leaving Sex at Dawn on their shared nightstand, he had not yet clued in to their open relationship.

Becca’s crush was a bartender, a musician, an artist, also. He designed concert posters using old xerox machines, photocopying layer upon layer, ink over ink, distorting whatever originality caught his inspiration. I knew him, or of him rather. He followed me on instagram, though we had never been introduced. He seemed charming, decent enough.

“It was super hot, Becca said. “But he didn’t invite me up.”

“Well?” I shrugged. What could I say?

“I feel like I threw myself at him.”

“That’s the problem,” I replied with tenderness. “That, or your husband.”

“Oh, I don’t think he’d care I’m married.”

“Maybe he just hadn’t cleaned.”

Becca asked me about someone I was seeing. I blushed, lowered my gaze, and began pulling grass by their rooted whites. I was timid with details. My contentment bore her, and the conversation bowed back to gossip. Though this time —

“Ahh!” A shriek. Clearly mine, yet somehow distant.

I was startled to find a grasshopper perched on my calf. It was alien in its angles, its bony, repellent structure. I brushed it off, feeling deceived by my senses, alarmed I hadn’t felt its grim presence.

We had seen a woman dancing the other day, in this same park. She looked incandescent. Radiant. I turned to Becca and said, “isn’t it nice to see adults expressing joy?”

“She’s being chased by a bee,” she answered flatly.