Language was a fluid. We drank it in, stored it, absorbed some, and peed the rest out. Sometimes when I peed I could see the words flowing out of me into the bowl -- syllables and fragments of ideas and entire sentences sometimes. All of the words felt different as they came out because they sounded different coming in. Round, soft words felt good and smooth as they made their way down the passage, while sharp words, and words full of hard consonants left a scratchy feeling in me as they emerged. I didn't like peeing out the scratchy words, for obvious reasons.

One day I had a problem. I was able to pee out all of the words I had in me, but the punctuation was getting stuck. With a little extra concerted effort I was able to squeeze out a few more drops of ampersands, semicolons, and tildes. But the exclamation points were just not going to come out, no way, no how. It was like the points of them had become lodged between the soft folds in my bladder, and were permanently planted there, stinging like all get out. They're still there and they still sting.

Dreamed by: Scot Hacker