I reach into the box and touch it, briefly, the softness of a tennis ball, over-used and squidgy, but covered in lumps, like a disease evenly spread around its surface. I stick my nose in and smell it, the raw pungent stench of a rotten corpse on its sixth week uncovered in the tropical landscape of death. I listen but hear nothing, no something, like a sigh from a tired mother's lips waiting for a husbandโs return under the brightest of moons. I stick my tongue in and lick the lumped facade. The salt fuses with my tongue and in my veins a tingle from the hydrochloric acid burning. I extract it and dread floods my veins, fills my lungs, and whistles in my ears as its thoughts emanates, no reverberates inside my head. It hates me, it loathes me, it wants me -- gone. I can no longer hold it, it falls to the floor, bounces briefly on the unpolished planks before it slowly spins towards the darkest corner of the room. I am left standing, my bewilderment โ gone.
