It had never occurred to me to eat a walnut. When a friend brought a plastic bag of them to the park, and a railroad spike, I saw that the shell could be cracked if one took the initiative to find the right tool for it. Then the tornado siren came on, like the sound of a calf in agony, a few paces from my ears, and along with everyone, I scattered.

...

Once there was a snake in the road, slithering along, trying to find someone to digest over a period of several weeks. I could really go for a nice juicy rat, the snake thought, imagining how the scratchings of its forelimbs might tickle his throat, which went all the way to the tip of his tail. Right as the snake was having this thought, an elephant walked by and stepped on him, raising his blood pressure so high that his brains squeezed out like silly string through his nostrils. I could really go for some nice juicy leaves, the elephant thought as he plodded on.

...

You are at your 70th birthday. It is a welcome home party, as you have been indisposed for the past four to six decades. You are ravenous. You have been eyeing the hummus. Everyone is there: your children, your mentors, the Prime Minister of Australia, three of your crushes, and one of your grandmas. You are imagining the smooshed chickpeas on your tongue, washing the pita down your throat with Diet Sprite. You see your rival approaching. He is your best friend from childhood. His plate is piled with brownie squares, gooey in the sun. He has become successful.

...

Goats have rectangular pupils. I am afraid of the eyes of goats. Look into a goat’s eyes: they are not eyes exactly. Eyes are abstractions. The eyes of a goat are little devices to scan a horizon for predators. Goats’ eyes are not abstractions. You have beautiful eyes but your eyes are devices. They are not gifts. Look at them. They are results.

...

When your parents are in town to visit, you visit the fossil gorge. These kinds of visits are only possible as sub-visits of other visits. When I lived in New York, I never once went to the Museum of Natural History. That’s not exactly true. I went there with some regularity, but I never got past the marsupial exhibit.

...

At a picnic, an impeccable friend tells you not to be alarmed by the joke from the previous night. You hadn’t been worried about it, you think, as you retreat into your plate of hors d’oeuvres. You hadn’t been, but now you are. 

...

Once there was a lizard. The lizard was watching, ruefully, her friends developing buds that would eventually turn into what we now call feathers. They were becoming birds, though there was no word for this yet. The lizard thought to herself: Why do I have to be here, alive, witnessing this great and terrible transformation? Her friends looked on with pity and one by one took to the sky, first in brief, staccatoed, flapping skids and then in soaring flights. The lizard walked to her patch of sun, as she did every morning, and basked in it.

...

In a museum of natural history, a family of wombats looks at me through the glass cabinet. Strange, one of them says, regarding me, how his eyes both face forward—and the awkward angle of his hips. None of the other wombats respond. The two children have skittered off sideways into the nearby lecture hall to play tag, and the husband is checking the outcome of a sports match.

...

As Ruskin said, we could have evolved to see the danger in thunder without seeing its majesty. I am grateful for this majesty and cultivating an appreciation for the majesty in other dangerous things. On my nightstand I have built a small shrine to the goddess of deer ticks.

...

At dinner my father said: Sometimes I do think about the strangeness of being discrete, walking around the earth, a unitary capsule, bordered from the ether by skin. My mother was confused. I said, Suppose we were alive as a cloud of electrical zaps, or a tangle of mycelium underground. We all looked down ashamed at our dinner: oyster mushrooms. Beside the napkins were nine-volt batteries the restaurant had placed for decoration. This is why I feel strange at restaurants. Each table is having its own separate and oblivious conversation. We never bother to exchange ideas. There is always room for dessert. A fragrant lemon cake. The waiter probably hates us.

...

The first summer I swam naked alone in a lake, I had an epiphany. I have only four senses, and I have been neglecting at least two of them. My two married friends lifted glasses of porter to their lips like synchronized swimmers. Now they both had froth mustaches. Unlike hearing and vision, there is no medium in the sense called smell-and-taste. No waves between the bell and the ear. Your tongue-and-nose simply reads the air for particles, like a snake. Is there geranium in the vicinity. Garlic. Eucalyptus. Lemon. Yes. No. They overlap unpredictably: the gland of a whale redolent of sweet moss. Lavender and lichen coterminous with a vase of Barbicide.

...

I am sitting in a meadow. I would ask you not to picture it as bucolic since in truth it is not. Around me, a school-bus of insects is hovering. I don’t know what they are—something in the fly family, I would guess, since they are flying. One of them begins to speak: Dry as a bone today, yes? He has a European accent. I wouldn’t say so, says the other bug, a distant sibling. They hang in the awkwardness of this small disagreement. At that moment, my boss walks by—she is very accomplished in her field. And I think, Great, one more thing to worry about.

...

An old acquaintance comes at me with a jump rope and a boxcutter. It is the jump rope that alarms me. I try to pay attention to this. Maybe I am him, in a way, afraid of dancing, confined to one motion of the body. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Why. Why. Why. Why. People are enraged when they face a question they cannot answer. I know because I’ve been the ones who can’t answer.

...

What will you come back as? I ask my friend, looking at the jewel case of dead beings. A cricket, she says. A cricket? I ask, or a swarm of crickets? A cricket, she says.

...

A deer lives near the World’s Largest Truck Stop. He sees all sorts coming from all over. An 18-wheeler from England with false teeth and Herman’s Hermits LPs. A semi from China full of lapsang souchong. A pickup from Mexico carrying fine herb. He has a soft spot for the van from Poland filled with Kielbasa. Though he keeps a decoy wallet for when they pass the bowl around at church, he can’t resist throwing a few bucks to the Polish driver for a burger and onion rings. When the truck from Australia comes in, he feels a pang of worry neither of us can place.

...

My parents have put all the tag sale paintings in a stack on what was once my bed. My sister is a welfare queen. My brother is a Wall Street man. All that’s left for me is to be a Knight of Columbus or a trade unionist, so I am learning to plumb. All of the most famous plumbers of history were in cahoots. Their portraits hang on the walls of the sewer system like employees of many months. Am I meant to believe it was all a coincidence all the greatest plumbers had charming noses? Everyone else seems agreeable to it. They want all the plumbers to know each other. But I think some isolated pipes might give the city a good think. I was under a house when an earthquake happened upon my city. I considered the fact of a house falling on me, the fact of my rib cage. There was nothing more to it. Some days there is no one or nothing to cling to and this is one of those days. Not every paragraph needs to end on an aphorism.

...

A mouse is walking to work. Meanwhile, a mountain goat is also walking to work. A small stone kicked by the goat is a large stone to the mouse, and it lands on his tail, pinning him in place. A fox walks by. How convenient! she says with enthusiasm. I have been looking for a door stop. The fox walks away with the stone and the mouse is free to go to work, at a bakery, though by now he will be late. Dough in the oven, he is free to imagine the size of the fox’s door.

...

Under the house, I wake up shaking. Like a tablecloth whose table has been pulled out from under. Realizing the magnitude, I picture the ground beneath me splitting and a rift opening. Would I fall into the crack, or stay put, becoming an island while the plates that had been contiguous drift off into a horizon of water? No such thing. A mug a friend had thrown and fired at a community center becomes a corner of dust and shards, occasions a broom. A poster behind it: Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color, is torn in thirds. Interaction or interactions? I can’t recall. The tile my ex painted Iberian yellow and blue slides down the wall. Like a lizard that releases its tail, with a flick of blood. I recover it intact. She is with someone new now. I believe he’s Tasmanian.

Jake Goldwasser is a writer and translator. His work can be found in The Baffler, the New England Review, Lit Hub, and elsewhere.