Rare Morsels
rating: +10+x

Six schools of fish. The questionable legality of mind-reading. Well pressed suits. Four separate levels of irony. A wanted poster with a distressing number of zeros. Teleporting walnuts. Extra organs. The project's ethics watchdog. Moonbeams. 70 different kinds of negative space. The etchings of a pristine mind. Heavily-used revolvers. Second chances. The dinner we had last night. Timeless classics. Cherrypicked statistics. Cybernetic enhancements. Dumb internet memes. The world's most obscure academic journal. Crappy fast food. Flesh offerings. The project's former ethics watchdog. The best of-

DYING IN THE DARK

A-Mouth-Shaped-Like-A-Lie rested on the bottom of the ocean floor, letting its feelers suck up the sweet, life-giving succor. As the bits and scraps floated down through the ether, the feelers would creep towards them before swallowing them whole. The dregs slowly but surely drifted down to A-Mouth-Shaped-Like-A-Lie, and it lazily gobbled them up. Big or small, they were pulled into its infinite maw.

A child's bedroom. Three killers arguing in a desert. A purple sunrise. What few pieces of her husband they could find. A 2nd place trophy, with the nameplate faded beyond legibility. Market stalls selling fruits. The equation he could never finish. The assistant cinematographer of that one movie you liked, you know from the 70s? Two beating hearts, crammed together in the same chest cavity. The angels. The expensive car that a self-help guru bought with the profits from his latest book. The spent casings on the forest floor. All four children of a woman whose name doesn't matter. The last time they saw each other. A research paper on John Adams, the second President of the United States of America. A blood-soaked battlefield. Dress shoes. The B+ you got for your research paper on John Ada-

AN UGLY ORANGE JUMPSUIT

Before, A-Mouth-Shaped-Like-A-Lie would savor every individual morsel it could find. It would scavenge and hunt for its meals, and it would strip away layers from the corpses of gods. Every scrap it could find would be dragged into its maw with desperate abandon. But now? Now A-Mouth-Shaped-Like-A-Lie could rest its many scales, and simply let the dregs fall into its lap.

The billboard just outside of town. A handful of coins, all counterfeit. The small number of soldiers who were still alive in that trench. Leftover buckets of plaster. Her favorite song. That one motherfucker. An expired driver's license. You know the one. Every single time he said it. The bones that could not have been from a human. The syringe on the floor of a gas-station bathroom. His ambition to make something of himself. All of the candles in the church that the abbess forced her to replace. The bones that were definitely from a human. Both swords and both scabbards. A three-leaf-clover that she could have sworn had four leaves. What most people think about before they die. The bones tha-

THE BODIES IN THE WATER

A-Mouth-Shaped-Like-A-Lie had never experienced anything like this before in its 122 eons of existence. It had crossed many deserts, barren of life and words. It had dragged its tentacles through the snow of blizzards on hundreds of mountain peaks. It had scoured every last nook and cranny in the rocks of many canyons. It had stuck its feelers into spaces it was glad it was incapable of thinking about. It had dined on many delicacies, and other times it took what it could get. But now A-Mouth-Shaped-Like-A-Lie had a reliable, plentiful source of forgotten memories.

A twisting path through the woods. An unused bookmark. What lies beneath. A can of wallpaper stripper. A stripper. Four score and seven years. The reason she left. Infinity. Breath mints. An expiration date. A small amount of plausible deniability. Five limbs. The new Linkin Park album. The flowers underneath the canopy. The reason that you can't have nice things. Foolishness. Something yellow. A tattered jacket. The dearly departed. Fortune. A pair of wendigos. Every test they could run. My beloved-

A GOD-SHAPED HOLE

A-Mouth-Shaped-Like-A-Lie did not have lips that it could lick, but if it were capable of doing so it would certainly do it now. While all food was of course delectable, some kinds were much better than others.

Truly, the rarest morsels were the sweetest.

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