All Rights Reserved.<\/strong><\/p>\n Night and day it traipses across your lawn, a wind-up toy begging you to play\u2014such charm<\/em>!\u00a0See the neighbors, in the middle of a sunny afternoon, put down their barbeque tongs to\u00a0clap while it merrily spills its sea of tongues, its chorus of dissemblers, its tiny doll-sized\u00a0voices into the streets, the playgrounds, the backyards, where it creeps onward through\u00a0doors and windows, seeps deep into walls and floors. Hear the chirpy chatter! The fizzy\u00a0laughter! Such witty views! A Fox News Live! Faces, shining\u2014so pretty<\/em>! Sleek-furred hides,\u00a0shining\u2014so soft<\/em>! And just this morning, Saturday\u2019s newspaper held the glossy mag called The\u00a0<\/em>Journal of Illusive Thought<\/em>. You opened the polished spread and read. Dr. Barthes warns: The virus\u00a0<\/em>is tenacious! You use language? You are never free!<\/em> You close The Journal of Illusive Thought<\/em> because\u00a0you are hungry and there\u2019s a barbeque in the street today. But Dr. B\u2019s words haunt you. You\u00a0<\/em>be careful now. Be careful whom you invite to play, whose hamburger you eat, whom you clink your drink to,\u00a0<\/em>where you lay your head at the end of a long day.<\/em> It\u2019s not hiding in the streets or in the shed or\u00a0under your bed. It stands grim as an invisible giant in front of you\u2014pet him!<\/em>\u2014 and then snap\u00a0back your hand\u2014for the anthill\u2019s been shaken, and out they spill, their tiny mouths binging\u00a0as the virus spreads. And yet Dr. B had a promise in that article you read. There is a tonic,\u00a0<\/em>strange and transitory and hard to find. Go! Fall in love! Only then will your speech be released, your lives\u00a0<\/em>freed. But heed the warning on that bottle: Healthy hours are ephemeral. Take advantage if you find wide-<\/em>awake solace. And please consume with greatest care.<\/em><\/p>\n By Andrea Witzke Slot All Rights Reserved. Night and day it traipses across your lawn, a wind-up toy begging you to play\u2014such charm!\u00a0See the neighbors, in the middle of a sunny afternoon, put down their barbeque tongs to\u00a0clap while it merrily spills its sea of tongues, its chorus of dissemblers, its tiny doll-sized\u00a0voices into the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":947,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1018","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1018"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1018\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1020,"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1018\/revisions\/1020"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Andrea Witzke Slot lives between London and Chicago. She writes poetry, fiction, essays, and academic work, and is particularly interested in the places in which cultures, ideas, and genres intersect. She is author of the poetry collection\u00a0<\/em>To find a new beauty\u00a0(Gold Wake Press, 2012), and her work is forthcoming or has recently appeared in such places as\u00a0<\/em>Bellevue Literary Review,\u00a0Tupelo Quarterly,\u00a0Fiction Southeast,\u00a0Mid-American Review,\u00a0Southeast Review,\u00a0Nimrod,\u00a0SRPR,\u00a0Litro, and<\/em>\u00a0The Chronicle of Higher Education, while her academic work on poetry and social change has been included in books published by SUNY Press (2013) and Palgrave Macmillan (2014). She\u2019s been a finalist, runner-up, and honorable mention in several recent writing awards, including AROHO\u2019s Clarissa Dalloway book prize for her first novel and the 2014 Calvino Prize for her short fiction.\u00a0<\/em><\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"