You’re on your third or fourth date in this Christmas-light lit dive bar and things are going well so you decide to tell each other something you have never shared with anyone before, a secret, a confession, and since you were previously in that classic third or fourth date territory of discussing your childhoods it’s decided that the secret has to be from when you were a child, and since she refuses to go first it’s up to you to kick the whole game off, but since you grew up in a cookie-cutter house in a cookie-cutter suburb and your dad was an actuary and your mom an H.R. officer you don’t really have a ton of deliciously morbid or fascinating secrets from this period of your life when you were like this developmental embryonic seedling of a thinking feeling thing with its own autonomy and free will, so you make up this story although you’re unsure of its factual accuracy, it might be totally fabricated or just a partially exaggerated memory, but you tell her this one time you were on a family vacation at your uncle’s ranch, although he wasn’t technically at the time your uncle more like your mom’s sister’s ex-husband who had, either because of his wealth or his personality, retained positive and partly healthy relations with your parents, but anyway you were at this cattle ranch in the mid-west that belonged to your uncle who wasn't your uncle but would have been if your aunt could stay still for more than half a year, and he drives back from the fields in his side-by-side and presents to you this decapitated ox head, a fully severed bull cranium complete with this girthy set of horns, and since you and him (your ex-uncle) were both history buffs and had bonded earlier over the Golden Age of Vikings he tells you that you can make a bull’s horn goblet if you bury the head until it totally decomposes and the only part left is the barren skull, so like the developing embryonic seedling you are you pump your fist and yell “AWESOME” and take the head which is still warm and bleeding, and the uncle hands you a square headed shovel and you bury the thing knee deep in a patch of aspens growing behind the ranch house, but the thing is your family vacation is coming to an end in about a week and you really want a bulls horn goblet and this desire nibbles away at you constantly throughout the remaining seven days, so on the evening before you’re due to leave you think to yourself that maybe enough time has passed and the horn might be ready, heck the whole skull might be ready, so you sneak out after dinner and make your way to the cluster of aspens and you find the mound of loose dirt where you buried it, and you start digging but you can’t find it and the sun is going down and you really want this bulls horn, so you keep digging faster and faster and finally your shovel strikes something hard and you know you’re there so you like finagle the shovel between this hard thing and the soft earth and like a true archimedean you fulcrum this puppy up and out of the hole but before it even breaks the surface this stench slams into you like the abyss of umami, like the marianna trench if it was a ham, just the truest depth of meat, your stomach corkscrews and triggers this overwhelming urge to flee, but then this writhing churning mass erupts from the earth on the blade of your shovel and for a moment you don’t know what you’ve unearthed as this huge black and white thing ripples and undulates and folds in on itself, but then you realize its the bulls head but covered in billions and billions of maggots, it’s more maggot than head, and you heave and sway and throw up before gathering your wits and burying it as fast as your tiny eight-year-old limbs can move, then you slink back in the eerie blue light of early dusk to the ranch house where your parents and your kind-of-uncle are playing cards and drinking rum and Pepsi out of Solo cups while you sit wide-eyed and stone-still on a bean bag in the corner, and you’re filled with this buzzing bodily echo that feels as though you have interrupted something that should not have been disturbed and in some way you are being punished for your impatience and greed, and as the deafening whine of the echo drones out the laughter of your parents, your mind replays all the times where you were scolded by grown-ups for trying to rush something that just takes time.  

The girl across from you just looks at you with this amused smirk and this spritish gleam in her eyes, which you notice for the third time are a deep spiralling green, and you say now that you’ve bared your soul and confessed and what not, it’s her turn. So she leans forward with her head cradled in one hand and does that thing some women sometimes do when they’re pretending to deliberate on whether or not they’re going to share something that they’ve already decided to share, where she looks up to the right and sort of rolls her eyes back and forth all the while she’s beaming this gigawatt smile and you notice she has like these stupendous elegant forearms and the way her face lights up when she’s clinging onto a secret right before she lets it go makes you think that you’d do almost anything to keep her around. The next thing you know she’s talking and telling you that as a child she lived in a government subsidized duplex with her mother who loved her very much and made this affection known through many immaterial registers because all her material ones were pretty deficit, but despite the love and care and tender attention the girl received from her devoted mother she nevertheless was, at times, filled with this sometimes constant feeling that, around the age where she could understand some words but speaking them came with its own difficulties and reading them was still well out of the question, there was a secondary world inside of her which she could, during moments of isolation or frustration or anger or sometimes just before she fell asleep, enter into and become this tiny black hole of absolute power, a toddler god of complete destruction that would – and she makes this distinction very clear to you, that she would, not just imagine or fantasize but actually would because this secondary world was real and concrete and had its very own laws of physics – use her total titanic power to violently annihilate, with both joy and ecstasy, her own mother and her mother’s boyfriend and all of her mother’s previous boyfriends, who she would combust and eviscerate one by one, and with every last one of them reduced to confetti she’d then turn her power on the handy man who sometimes came to the duplex to deal with leaky faucets and burnt light bulbs, then she’d decimate her grandmother and her aunt and her babysitter and all of the other children in her art camp and daycare and preschool programs and all the children’s parents, she would systematically and ruthlessly without exception or remorse obliterate every single person retained in her tiny undeveloped memory and then, when all these people were scattered atomic molecules drifting in an apocalyptic wind she would demolish every single person in her city, imagined or real, obliterating houses and buses and cars and then she’d turn her wrath to other cities and then to other countries, she’d become a scourge upon the world incinerating everything she came across until the entire globe was reduced to a smoking and smouldering wasteland, ashen and barren, and when the earth and everything and everyone in it was reduced to fine dark dust still warm from the residue of its own destruction, then, cackling, she would finally turn her horrible awesome power on herself and completely and permanently empty the world. She tells you this as she smiles and laughs and clearly finds the whole thing to be very amusing, more amusing than she found your own morbid secret which you feel quite frankly pales in comparison with what she’s just shared, but you giggle and smile along with her although you have become a vacuum, totally emptied and devoid of any clue as to how to respond to something like this, and if it was anyone else sitting across from you you would be off put and disturbed, but you kind of know her and she seems to be a well adjusted and functioning and beautiful and caring human being, and you want to know exactly what is was like for her as a toddler vapourizing the Eiffel Tower or dismembering her grandmother with telekinesis, but you have no clue what she means or what she went through to produce the string of words she just uttered, you want to ask her very much what it was like, to explain in greater detail, but you suspect that any verbal explanation on her part will completely fail your desire to know and instead just widen the gap between you two and make her seem very far away and unknowable, so instead you compliment her arms, saying they’re the type of arms that look like they would write an incestuous melodrama set among dwindling Russian nobility, and then, as an afterthought, you mention how it's funny that sometimes we want to punish our loved ones for the fact that they have love and for the explicit crime of having squandered it on us.