Pablo Piñero Stillmann ~ Letters to a Version of Myself in Another Dimension

There are these crea­tures we have here. Or I guess first of all Hello. Does polite­ness exist in your dimen­sion & is it a good thing? They can have a hun­dred or a bil­lion legs like hairy wires & blink­ing eyes all over their body. Tails of spoilt milk. We hate them for remind­ing us of death. For exam­ple the oth­er day I was car­ry­ing my bike out of the build­ing & there was a dead Jerusalem crick­et with its legs point­ed up. The Jerusalem crick­et is the ugli­est of all insects because its face looks like a boy’s. So you must be ask­ing your­self what reminds me of life. It’s get­ting hard­er & hard­er but maybe the bright greens all smushed togeth­er after a heavy rain. A lost love my friend. What oth­er kind is there? Or the rain itself. The same rain that drowned the cricket.

Letter in Which I Tell a Version of Myself in Another Dimension About the Only Time I Quenched My Thirst for Righteous Vengeance

A bank robbed me & then the bank went under. Couldn’t stop look­ing up the stunned faces of the boss­es while laugh-shout­ing at them like their bolt­ed aus­tral walls had done to me. For a moment I tast­ed the deli­cious met­al of chains. But my lover was still sad. & she wasn’t even my prop­er lover broth­er. Saturdays con­tin­ued stick­ing to my head like old bub­blegum. & of course the rot­ten myceli­um under our feet hummed loud­er. I’m begin­ning to under­stand its dis­gust­ing language.

Letter to a Version of Myself in Another Dimension Who Isn’t a Complete Failure

O won’t you start by telling me what it’s like to have avail­able real estate in your guts or a ner­vous sys­tem that isn’t itchy red. & the view from your office? No false humil­i­ty please regard­ing the syn­thet­ic lake with cloned geese. I hear that your right cen­tral incisor isn’t crooked. The dream: we meet in out­er space & our poly­car­bon­ate hel­mets merge. The dream: a mete­or is head­ed for Earth & I come up with the math­e­mat­i­cal for­mu­la to stop it. Never even took cal­cu­lus. When is it that you began knowing?

Letter in Which I Try to Teach a Version of Myself in Another Dimension How to Read

 Today I woke up with the fear that read­ing & writ­ing are so dif­fer­ent over there that you’re unable to read these mis­sives. Though the “if” of God would have to be the same. My very first mem­o­ry is of lying on the beach ask­ing my father about the ori­gins of the uni­verse. I was twen­ty-sev­en & my father was off in a sub­ma­rine work­ing logis­tics. You first make the noise of the first let­ter with your round mouth & then your eye­lash­es whoosh-whoosh the rest. Then maybe you turn a page? Myself if you can read this then let it be known I love you. If you can’t then let me tell you about the time I con­fessed to an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence that I was hurt­ing. I cried again. What a relief.

Letter in Which I Tell a Version of Myself in Another Dimension About That Time Only One TV Was Working

 In your dimen­sion do quin­decil­lions of minia­ture screens melt into each oth­er to form Reality? Wouldn’t that be the same as one big screen? It hap­pened in the 80s or 90s my friend. Every oth­er tele­vi­sion burst a sil­ver some­thing & we had to all of us crouch around a portable set the size of… Are there toast­ers where you live? Some tried to crawl into the device & that made us won­der what type of per­son wants to be the image. We wore hood­ed sweat­shirts with gen­tri­fied graf­fi­ti because it was the fash­ion. We held hands & let our tongues loose. The leaves all turned par­adise pink & frozen-hell blue for half a sec­ond & then every sin­gle TV set lit up like noth­ing ever hap­pened. & noth­ing has. Ever hap­pened I mean. Doors closed good­byes were said. That’s when I first got a whiff of your hypo­thet­i­cal scent.

~

Pablo Piñero Stillmann’s work has appeared in Best New Poets, Blackbird, Gettysburg Review, Mississippi Review, Washington Square Review, and oth­er jour­nals. He is the author of the novel­la Temblador (Tierra Adentro, 2014) and the short sto­ry col­lec­tion Our Brains and the Brains of Miniature Sharks (Moon City Press, 2020).