I’ve been hired by a blind old man to smash up a pile of ukuleles. He has hired me to do odd jobs around his yard, but “No more than 13 hours a week.” He has a loving & tall thin wife, who’s also an eager dance partner, & two big dogs, & two teenage boys who love only hip-hop, make fun of their father, & hate me. While I am smashing ukuleles in the shed with the back of a shovel, they shoot potatoes at me with a potato gun, but always miss.

When I go back the next day my work is in a big dusty field, again with a shovel, & again the boys are shooting potatoes at me. But their potatoes don’t reach me—the gun is too weak. They take turns shooting them from a safe distance across the field, & each potato just wobble-rolls up to my feet, where I smash it with the back of my shovel. Once, I bat one back at them with the back of the shovel, but miss.

Then I ignore the boys & look out over the dusty field, where I see on a high plateau a number of Hasidic Jews, in traditional dress, engaged in some sor t of burial ritual. They stand in 3 rows of about 10 people per row, 2 rows facing each other & the 3rd row perpendicular to those—basically making up 3 sides of a square. They are burying someone young, a child maybe, but to honor that person (maybe?), they are eating the bones & dead flesh of other, older people, buried previously. I realize the rows they’re standing in are alongside long & narrow mass graves, made in the same 3-sided formation, & the people are lined up & eating from them as though from a buffet or a trough. I see a young girl chewing on an old dir ty forearm like a chicken leg.

But then the eating causes ‘wounds’ on the people; slight transformations of their bodies or skin. The funeral goers want these changes to happen, but it’s a painful process & they cry out as their bodies morph. Many of the boys become big & bloated, sometimes overly muscular, & all shirtless. They have raw & sorelooking human bite marks on their upper arms, & they say, “I have the mouth-wound!” Children’s faces transform into ugly & disfigured grimaces—turn ‘evil.’

One of the women has become a sort of snakehuman, slithering & writhing & naked on the ground. Her skin is flesh-toned, but covered in little patterns of swirls & geometric shapes painted in bright neon—pink & blue. She has an unnaturally narrow waist, the width of the back of my shovel, which spreads up into her massive, v-shaped back & shoulders. She holds her torso up on her arms while her waist & legs flap & slither behind. There is a design painted on the ground in front of her, & within it, a spiral. She gestures to the spiral with her head & asks, “Is that the wound?” I say, “Yes,” & she slithers down like a reptile & licks at the spiral shape, like a cat cleaning blood from a cut, wiggling her strange body against the ground.