8.

Carleton enjoyed slowly ruling his paper; he held the ruler up to the sun and wrapped it around the orb that suggested the outer limits of the heat that gave way to the sun’s light. The light, he thought, was much like the heat, but in his mind, heat only had one color – that unearthly red orange glow – whereas light seemed to have many colors, as many as he could imagine, probably more, so he ruled his pages in black ink, because someone once told him, “Carlton, remember that black is the combination of every color;” although, he’d never believed that black light was the combination of all light.

Having organized his lines – his pages were ruled – Carleton began to organize his letters. Individually, they seemed to have no meaning or reason for being at all, until he reached his third letter and found that the word, “The,” had manifested some indication, some reason for paying attention to what had been coming next: “bull strode toward the fecund cow.” This was before artificial insemination, Carleton thought.

“He’d been studying the soggy architecture of her swollen labia, like a man choosing a fruit, and, despite the flies and the mud and the ranch hands surrounding them, he caught that sweet, fetid stink. The bull’s eyes glazed over,” but Carleton had noticed that the lines that his words took went slantwise, compared to the precision of his ruling, and when he tried to write, “the bull’s erect red cock inside suddenly,” his lines went spiralwise and the word that his letters invariably formed, letter after letter was, “cockeyed.”

He stopped. Studying the circling letters, the spiralwise vision of the bull, or the bull’s spiralwise vision of the cow. Carleton wadded up the paper, all the papers which he had so meticulously ruled, threw them away, and began again, with a fresh stack of blank white papers, upon which he drew expanding concentric circles. He placed the letter “A” inside the center circle, then, moving outward concentrically, wrote, “cow, hot, wet, fecund. I came before artificial insemination.”