new stomachs

Another dream on the archipelago: all the main players from my college debate career were attending a tournament at a coastal university. Though it was only minutes down the road from the Swiss village, the town seemed to occupy two climates simultaneously. Ornate beach-front restaurants enjoyed endless summer, with a transit system leading into parts of Istanbul. The debaters, elite and voracious in all aspects of their life, ordered street food in halting Turkish, exchanging tips on pronunciation. As I followed a busy highway along the inlet, the scene changed: frosty paths that required an ice pick to navigate, a horrific dogsledding accident, small British homes with messy gardens.

I had taken up residence in a professor’s home—solid glass, accessible only by a miraculous spinning leap through a hole in the ceiling—and the professor’s mother soon died in her crystalline breakfast nook, leaving me piles of pamphlets and cardigans to sort. They allowed the woman to decompose in her clothing, so I left abruptly. Back in town, M.T. requested a notebook from H.E. so I went into the library, where I found M.W. and his friends studying for their upcoming rounds. They pointed out the library’s refreshments table. Piles of massive, grotesque tomato sandwiches were labeled for sale - you’d pay on your phone and a woman would appear to hand it to you. As I leafed through the layers of swollen cherry tomatoes and cheese, I noticed small brass hinges embedded in the bread, and the sandwich opened stickily to reveal an advertisement for the library cafe’s new milkshakes.

I left the library. The campus had become an underground warren of brightly lit, glass-fronted rooms displaying the manufacturing process for the cafe’s confections. Robots dressed like rabbits crushed cookies into small vats of swirling ice cream. Men in superhero costumes gave studied pitches to groups elementary school students. By the end of the tour, we’d each been handed an old-fashioned air compressor. It fell into pieces whenever you held it too tightly, so we all crouched beside our pile of disassembled metal. Someone in a cape explained that these products - the sandwiches, the milkshakes, even the compressor - were designed to grow a second stomach inside of you. Upon contact with animal products, it would react violently - enforcing a sort of veganism that had been deemed necessary “by those in our community willing to do the work.” Everyone held the compressor’s nozzle to their lips and gasped as a flexible, pink orb expanded into their throat and rushed down to coat the inside of their stomach.

I ran outside and hid on one of the small, rocky beaches that were always present in these southern archipelago towns. The waves stretched 50 feet into the sky and seemed to hang there for hours.