It comes as a punishment that fits the crime of wanting to change a category of personhood, an arrow expelled from the quiver of constitutive parts. Changed out like a washer and screw for a nail hammered flush or a sticky residue left by soul glue.

I will give you the demesne of eight grown men, warriors all, who have wax in their ears and a captain crucified at mast who made the cavity fillings seem so utterly necessary. You will slice it thin and take it, with circumstantial gladness at heart.

It’s a terrible thing, to think that the lightning strike is genesis for founding and eponymous religion - a final wheel in the spoke of vertiginous metaphysics - and come to fine out it’s just a disease of one, like what used to be Lou Gehrig’s.

Descry the pristine cling that the wet sand makes to all the dry piles above the salt marsh, but don’t imagine for a millisecond that you’d hold fast in the face of the arias they are known for singing.