(Fiction) Social Darwinism
He ate cashews with chopsticks waving them at me as in a way that was both holy and dangerous—saying,
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“Social Darwinism.”
Like they were magic words and he was turning me into a handful of silk roses.
He’s talking with his face close to mine and his words fall against my lips and conjugate with my breath. His skin smells like cashew butter and I ask him if he’s ever seen a cashew in its shell, but he’s never thought about it, so he ignores me.
“Nobody says beautiful things anymore—adaptation for survival.”
And he is trying to make the world a better place—starting with me.
“History is a survivors game so you gotta stay around for a little while,”
Even though society was going to hell you gotta stick around—to cry into the annals of history with your lungs filled with volcanic ash and your chest out expanding against the stars and with your eyes leaking nostalgia down your cheeks and—you look like you just made love to the devil himself. And “you gotta keep me company—because I don’t want to be alone and if you live without risk, might as well be dead. Defeats the hole point of survival of the fittest.”
To get to the files of history you have to pass by history's receptionist.
Because history is a survivors game whose score is tallied by the winners. The files are kept in a storage room belonging to the ages. To get to the files of history you have to pass by history's receptionist—and she’s a large woman of indeterminable heritage and she sits like a sentry in front of the past. She has a bottle of white-out that can be used on your legacy—so you got to be nice to history's receptionist when you go to see her. I suggest you give her cigarettes—I know she is fond of Turkish tobacco. Shakespeare always brought her chocolates.
Because—History is a game for the living,
“You gotta stay around for a little while longer. Keep your DNA in the gene pool”
And when you’re sitting in the lobby of history and you’re trying to look like you belong there and the receptionist hasn’t said anything in a millennia and you’re waiting for the one and only forgone conclusion and you go looking for the bathroom and tripping over forgotten genocides and lost wars—listen for the murmurs of the stoics in your footsteps, laughing hard with every footfall—because when you are dead, all of existence becomes an inside joke—it is all an inside joke that is suddenly very, very funny.
“The world has all gone downhill and you only live once—but even if you live more than once you only remember this time—so you might as well be happy and do what you want.”
He is saying this with his cashew flavored breath and his lips the color of fairies blood and he is trying to convince me to sleep with him.
“Because you’re always going from one immediate past to the next—and when you die it all catches up to you—but by then it is too late, because you’re already dead, so there will be nothing to regret.”
There will be nothing to regret.
And nobodies going to remember this anyway—
