a gathering of high school, dearest friends cooking dinner someone's beautiful home. instead, we became distracted by a giant black rat up to something in the laundry room. we had an automatic relationship of mutual trust with him for some reason. when we let him out, he dragged the corpse of his most recent mouse victim up the wall to the mantle. He and we, the audience, treated the mantle as his stage as we gaped at his meticulous performace: with a surgeon's precision he removed the innards of his mouse which were neither dry nor wet but tiny tubes, opaque white encasing bright blue. I don't remember if we clapped afterwards, but our collective amazement applauded him. Dinner time came and my friend's mom insisted we taste the seal she had prepared, just because there was a ton of it in the fridge and she needed to get rid of it. It was uncooked, yet the outside appeared as the bark of a tree, but bright green, cracked, and overgrown with broccoli-shaped growths. After it was cut open, the insides spilled out: a cross between chunky clear jelly and sushi rice. No one was disgusted.