Where are the prophecies of my greatness?

Dedicated to A.K. and T.K.

The veins in my hands look like the Paris metro system in this heat, maybe the ones in my neck too, from chewing on ice.

The house was empty today, though heavy too, somehow. I opened every window and door and heard the walls creak out their decades of kitchen fights, scraped knees, report cards, and drunken coworkers, let in the shock and pain that some may say isn't mine to bear but I've always been taught that sharing is caring.

I dumped a four-pound container of off-brand animal crackers on the kitchen counter, left the freezer door open to shroud myself in vapor that smelled of Publix-brand chopped spinach and Cool Whip. I began to rip the pages from the copy of Heavier Than Heaven I shoplifted from Border's, made an ark of Kurt Cobain's early childhood, rows from the photographs of Courtney and his daughter.

I placed a picture of my family over the drain in the double-sink, filled one end with yellow lemonade, the other end with ice, always chewing crunching to keep myself from hearing the Stepford neighbours laughing on the tennis courts and my cellphone vibrating in the microwave. I placed all of the the animal crackers with broken or extra limbs in the boat (and the cats because they are terrible swimmers) to save them from my thought process and dropped the perfect animals into the lemonade, one by one, my eyes registering the lemonade that rose in recoil in stop-motion frames, looking like pawns or jesters' hats or tears and maybe that's what they were, but I was suffering from brainfreeze and could no longer think.

The ark set sail and I watched the healthy little animals dissolve in the solution and felt I had proved some sort of theory. The ark vanished under the pink froth and I unplugged the drain.

Nothing was left but a protein bar wrapper. Not a word, crumb, letter, face. Some of the paint on the sink was chipping away. A panic attack clawed and burned its way up my throat, carried in part by the lemon and pepper dish I'd not even tasted going down. I turned on the hot water and scrubbed my arm, ignoring the reason for all of this.

I poured more lemonade mix on the ice. The label with the image of a big lemon was loose and fell to the floor as I heard a hissing sound like the snake that bit me when I was nine. It had burned a hole straight through.

I never understand why people put shit like drain cleaner in old food containers.