V. GARLIC SUPPLEMENTS: Vitamins feel like a scam. We take them, but we dislike the process of purchasing them or considering them. There is even a garlic pill, to give you the effects or the nutrients of garlic without eating the garlic itself (to increase antioxidant enzymes and reduce oxidative stress). They give you the things we can find on our own. They give you things we already own, the garlic buds are right in the kitchen, turn the corner, around that corner, they’re hanging from the ceiling.

VI. GO FISH: And ice, in a package or in hand, an object that exists but is also fleeting, at any moment it can be around your ankles. Ice or even a sculpture on the wall of a nondescript avenue, with everything around it seeming so regular that the contrast can be jarring or unwelcome. Fish on ice, or how when they’ve emerged from their place they are bent into a blue bucket, sometimes flapping, always gasping. Fish, or an octopus that looks deflated and ungodly in the blue bucket. To fish, to go fishing is to say something with the body, there is a certain respect but also a longing to kill these creatures and fold them into a blue bucket. The water helps to ease the violence. Go fish, she says, and I pick up the card from the pile in the center.

VII. MORE GARLIC: The purple garlic waits on paper plates, and the bulbs (seven to nine) are wondrous. The lamp and the vase surround the purple garlic. The body (which aches, still) surrounds it. And there’s a division in the grocery store that is evident: the organic produce is divided into smaller and more fragrant portions. The rest of us pick up the regular lemons, the non-organic lemons, and know we aren’t getting what we need, though they taste fine and the juice flows. I look for the people who approach what is organic; I set a place for them at the table. With the cloth napkin and the utensils. The fine utensils are pure silver. Have you ever cleaned utensils that had been stored away for long? It’s a process much like fishing, there is a violence to keeping things in disuse for so long, and then fetching them out, and then cleaning them in a rush, killing them. The guests are arriving and there isn’t that much time to polish the forks.