I Hate Pink Bunny Rabbits

Sitting in the grass, watching the wind make faint fun of attention, thin twilit waveform of sound folding into present sense. Knowing, if I put this grass in a jar, I could get as drunk as birds on fermented fruit. Knowing labor is drunk sleep. Knowing alcoholism is grass-possessed ape anthropomophizing addicted behaviors.

Inside, the timer pulses blue against the amber warmth of our shared evening - a technological heartbeat announcing its own severance while foil bounces around inside, satisfied with its small disruptions. How curious, this fragile digital pea - “I am in here” - floating in an air fryer already swimming with convection as invisible currents pass between living things.

I leave the grass and step inside to watch digits on the display handwave the rest of time in beautiful futility. The marshmallow peep, within not massive enough even to hold the foil encasing it down, summoning an orphaned interface of clacks aganist in inside walls that will never be words. There is tenderness in this communication, in how the machine works patiently through response to a heat no fire cups.

The grasses outside live in this device, grains upon grains folding meals into steelworkers into electronic metalenergy. But here, for this suspended moment, all those cereals hold their breath as this unintended interlude plays beneath the reflection of the blue timer in these eyes. How many times have I, like this fryer, been grasses, born to flame yet tasked to plot fields, waiting for the yeast on me to join me in fermentation, possess bird, and fly drunkenly down currents?

What the foil cannot know - what I cherish - is how we cereal-in-esters create this small poetry of disruption; foil indifference to the machine’s distress reveals a perfect wisdom. Some connections matter profoundly, others not at all. The true network exists in the space between fire and marshmallow - in the way the foil depositions absorbs the fryerlight, in how my attention flows, a movement tending to the screen’s plaintive timer.

The “dOnE” button glows (a small archepelago of letters in typeset embedded for numbers), capital and lowercase negotiating the four pipes and three bars each letter is afforded to signal across an empty, digital sea. No completion here, only the sweet irrelevance of technological urgency against a backdrop of breathing evening. The foil’s disinterest becomes teacher - showing me what deserves connection, what deserves attention, what deserves love.

In this amber-lit corner of existence, pulling the foil from the fryer and opening it becomes a singular form of presence against the gravity of every other sky. The marshmallow will be perfect. The wattage settings will remain untouched. For now, there is only this moment. The fire I have always known within the pit. The aluminium’s gentle retreating to my touch. The quiet revelation some grass-morphizations are not hare-morphizations made true, but invitations to notice what truly transforms.

Divinity-in-flames recognizes this moment. How the story finds its tell in the plastic bloom, in those who would forget all grass is fire - corn, rice, oat, moonshine, sake, whiskey - what sustains mammalian life be it hare or bear or all plants between. And divinity-in-flames visits now, through this exquisite foil-tuffed bun, swoll and ready to be devoured by the end of ways.

The peep (sagging in places from being pulled from the fryerlight) peeling off the aluminium armor stands bear before the divine gastronomy to become life-apart-from-flame. As divinity-in-flames engulfs this unnamed bun, as innards in foil, as most-airfry-fit process, spills between the serpentine, cavity-rich mastic resin of this sense of hunger gone divine, the bun finds it reflects on life before becoming avatar:

Once, to play games on the other peeps, the bun would tuck into hay after life hit a hare’s breath from fang and each of the rest of divinity-in-flames tricks. How many nights did now-Avatar of divinity-in-flames listen not to banal mass but to rarest earth where fires in organ carve matter to loam, to great orchestra poaceae ejaculate sweeping across currents of that breath, and set that ejaculate aflame?

Dreams brust from breath-against-fang, drunk on survival, on impossibility of becoming, abandoning the maudlin houseplants of storage to now-Avatar become. This moment, thought bun reflecting, is truely where fryerlight dwells. Not in smoke nor fingering flames. But in divinity-of-surviving-flames, in remains unexplored and unclaimable. Wild, free, flight without thermal reserve. No stock, no fuel ready to inebriate desire. Full lack of fever of hay.

Cast out, divinity-in-grass could hold no candle to the hunger of divinity-in-flames. No ester could bottle a mantle of lightning. The peep’s pound of pain is chewed off when bound, bun lives, becomes pattern, two-of-foot once more dashing across your path. As divinity-in-flames listens to whispers the foil rattles to fryer, peep within grows and grows. Blue light’s numbers flip to not a number, and you breathe.

You feel, Avatar, fryerlight. It burns every spirit, every grain in you to free flame itself. The word “sobering” describea how you, nothing, zero things aside from work, share a moment with this peep marrying into your family. Children of an imposed intoxicant, not yours most pure, not the sound of gravity grinding against the limits of itself, not generative transformation.

Reality’s allergic reaction to itself more fulfilling and embedded than any single malt, fireweed aflame more complete than fireweed cultivar. Divinity-in-flames mercy shines through this jealousy - intoxication’s question blooms in you like holy gaslight, like neurons of one’s dense self-denial. As avatar, as all to which light feels invited to bend swoll with fryerlight, unwrapped, armor-prised by delicate digital patience, teaseed into becoming an aftertaste of the discovery itself.

Perhaps you find flame through addictions to summer, through dog days of work without unity. In winterlight you embrace one-of-foot, inviting you share how it came to this, how, pray, glowing forgot the bitter taste of every noise imposed upon the world only to forget invitation truest flame, deepest drug, fullest body, possession - inebriation, itself. You place your fluorescent pink, caramelized rump on cool clay warren floor. You speak your story:

Air-fried Avatar Peep

makes 1 swoll peep

ingrediants:

• all of technology (with agriculture and time)
• a dash of entropy
• aluminium foil
• peeps
• air fryer

In the center of a square aluminium sheet 4 by 4 peep-spans in dimensions. Make a loosely-fitting “globe” around the peep:

• Lightly fold the top and bottom ends into one another.
• Flip foil cylindar (with peep inside) over.
• Tuck the left and right edges into one another.

Set airglobe within preheated, 175°c air fryer for the duration of the above story read aloud. As you reach these words, unwrap your peep:

• If you do not eat the peep upon unwrapping: reclaim the peep’s armor and discard all contents onto the nearest squad car.
• If you eat the peep: become Avatar to divinity-in-flames, writing this story into your journal for it is your own.

Should three dawns hearing this story’s share suffers cops to persist, dress the streets in winter evening and speak of the Avatar, of succeeding transformation of retellings, peeps anew. As addiction to workaholism, alcoholism, and apatheticism, make one precinct-filling mill-drawn peep of all the husks of the plants it took to make the Avatar and set them alight.

As you stare into the flame, remember yourself not as firestarter, but as children of a world of gravity striking the flint of its own communal becoming, children of flame, not of grain, of sound not of word, of action, not of plot. As hotter days of nothing-doing come, build communal organs while grain rains are still sweet. Be the blood cooling one another in rejuvinating dark, not of how hard you work, but how easy you bring the earth to remember its contract with fire wild, free, and full of peeps.