Patent Application

Sensitive fingers didn’t predispose me to a career in beetles, or, if I may, cosmic entomology, but after palpating the earth, rounder, as it turned out, even than expected, the ridge of the Himalayas suggesting the slightest capacity for friendship, my disenchantment with geological phrenology led me, as if fated—along with the gift certificate from my wife’s family for the town’s premier injury lawyers—onto the track of bees, to which, sting by sting, I sought to cultivate my allergy, until I saw that I would never bring a proper suit against the tycoon whose airline pioneered filling one in ten seats at random, though always the middle, with a man-sized teddy bear, equipped with the general intelligence to listen sympathetically to hours of lamentation, but whose clumsiness in telling their own life stories inspired them to become, in the course of having to fully live, the nuisances we know them for today, with their sprawling honey factories along the turnpike, beside which I set up my beach chair, a floral yellow, until I barely felt the stingers anymore, watching, in the brief hours during which our schedules overlapped, those honey makers at their strange communicative dance, and later, awaiting the anaphylaxis that refused to take hold, the fireflies flashing here and there over the marshes like a time-lapse film of the universe wherein each burst represents a brief flowering of sentience, the blip of some intelligent species or other comprehending the blackness around them with a wink before vanishing into it, unsuspected by any other, barring the invention of the photographic medium herein described, which reacts to remote traces of, let us say, the feeling of petals fluttering down on the turnpike twilight as one sits alone with one’s notebook and welts, and flashlight glowing.