I took my lunch to the one of the local museums to eat near a fountain surrounded by the sound of water. I did not know if the water had turned the fountain's base green. The base was a pool to collect the shooting streams and keep them from coming in contact with my feet and recycle the water like a manufactured water cycle. Maybe it had been deigned that way. Designed with materials to convince someone that this cycle has continued without intervention for some time, and has occurred longer before.
I thought that eating my lunch near water would help me figure out how to perform the shape of water; perform a prayer with my hands tied behind my back.
I cracked each peanut individually, not trusting those with two, three, small fruits in them. My thumb holding them steady and pushing apart the fibers, opening a door to what the long seasons and long truck rides had produced. And ate them one by one, popping each into my mouth before my tongue swirled around it, removing the salt. Thicker and thicker, until my tongue was moving towards honey.
I stopped eating before the peanuts ran out, not to stop the cycle. To preserve the shape shifting I could envision my body performing. The white space between each performance never consistent with the next. Eventually becoming solid; all of the water in another form. My body frozen and transporting at the same time, depending of where you look. Water continued to be shot from the fountain and continued to rest in the pool. The air entrapped by the launched water, when it eventually fell, was the only reminder that things were moving. The air still in the water, like minerals formed before glass quenches. Subject to a different measure of light--a different aesthetic--crystalizing their formations underwater.
