Definitions

• Annual – This is difficult to explain. How often you visit your doctor. How often your wife mutters something about “at least flowers.” This sounds like a bad episode of The $10,000 Pyramid. See “Compliance.”

• Compliance – Don’t fool yourself. Do you dream of having a nova check pattern tattooed onto your skin? With enough botox, your forehead and cheeks can be permanently shaped to support your aviators that reflect the ubiquitous silver sky. Come now—don’t make this impossible. Wear a watch that has two hands and an otherwise black face. If you are always in compliance, the definition of “Annual” is irrelevant.

• Process – A thief wears gloves the color of night. The goose can’t wear gloves. The goose could waddle away but chooses not to because the aroma of fresh bread is baked into the thief’s trench coat. An aroma like that must be consumed entirely or not at all. Due to instinct, the goose chooses the former option. Thus paralysis. The goose has a secret door in its neck. Where’s the diagram illustrating how to find true south when the world is blanketed by darkness? Just bones, bones that do not skip across the nearby lake, bones like a skyscraper’s bare steel frame. The goose’s neck is a limp rope. Maybe it’s dead. Maybe it’s sleeping. Regardless, it hasn’t forgotten that true south is a feeling much like hunger. The thief scans the sky again, a sparkling distraction.

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Jason Fraley works in the financial industry. Thus, he cavorts around Columbus, OH as an argyle sock to maintain anonymity. His work is scattered about online and in print.