Did this fracture off that cocktail shaker? The one with docked tails leaping over hedges to follow the hounds only to off their riders in-
to a morass? The one with riders walking back to the stable, days after first dark after first cast?— encountering the tracks of a stag on their long
walk back the conundrum of cooperation settling over one by one by each daring defeat daring to defect. The housekeeper left a note. Says the shaker fell
and fell on her head, second time, so sorry. She is sorry and don’t we own many hundred cocktail shakers yet mix our cocktails
in tall glasses with a fork. What does that suggest about the tone of your latest apology, or mine, about the texture of our wrought-zinc bar top,
about the taste of the curling peel in your fifth negroni. What does that suggest about pretense. About the stag hunt. The answer matters
but we have a new blender. This shard will fit in the blender, will blend down to fragments, splinters, particles, dust, will taste good
if I add crushed ice. Glass is liquid after all and these horses were frozen, frozen because the hunt has no end nor maxim, the hunt
is not a hunt, it is a dance, a dance charging toward self-deceit with guns and hounds to settle into a still, sad, now-fractured unreality.
Zoë Hitzig will soon finish an undergraduate degree in Mathematics & Philosophy.