Free Gutshot by Amelia Gray

accompanied by music.
    “What will my eventual mate be like?” he asked, tweaking the machine’s color wheel.
    “Skin, hair.” The device buzzed lightly. “Fingernails.”
    “Not too much specificity there.”
    The buzzing stopped. “Grass and milk.”
    “Will she be interested in science?”
    Some process caused a turning over in the internal works of the device.
    The inventor tapped the panel. “Will we be happy?” he asked. He could hear the whirring. “Device, will we be happy?”
    The device was silent. After a while, the young inventor packed his things, collected his lunch bag from the refrigerator, and left.
    The empty room had its own energy. “Algae and bone,” said the device.

 
     
    The Swan as Metaphor for Love
     
    A swan’s foot, like a duck’s, is a webbed claw. In traversing swan shit and mud, these claws naturally gunk up and reek. Nobody in the history of the world, save another swan, has licked a swan’s foot while that foot was still attached to the swan. The feet resemble rabid bats in their sickly color and texture.
    Moving north on the swan’s undercarriage, one will find an eroded civilization of swan shit and pond scum. This is a banal phrase, “pond scum,” one that is easily ignored, but look closer. Swans eat grasses, sedges, and pondweed, each teeming with murk. They will also eat insects, snails, and a fresh shrimp if they’re near one.
    Pond scum is more of the same: swan shit, fish shit, frog shit, half a can of beer poured by some fuck teenager, plastic, photosynthetic residue, algae, permanent bubble, hexagon patch freed from its soccer ball, arthropod corpse. All attached to the swan in its idiot float through its stagnant little inland sea.
    Swans eat tadpoles. A swan will slurp up entire schools of larval amphibians, process them, and shit them out, and then sometimes it will sit in the shit or walk through it, and here we are. Anyone who claims that a swan is a majestic and noble creature has never seen a swan up close.
    Swans will attack you if you are nearing their young or their nest, if you are trying to have a conversation with their mate. They have jagged points on their beaks, which resemble teeth but more closely resemble a plumber’s saw, which plumbers call a Tiny Tim. If you try to take a swan’s picture he will strike you with his beak. Too much attention enrages a swan. The swan has a long neck and will strike at you. The swan will bite you and tear your flesh.
    Swans mate for life, which is maybe ten or fifteen years. Someone found a swan once that was twenty-four years old and probably it was mating for life, which everyone made a big deal out of even though the swan was not even old enough to rent a car. The swan wasn’t yet acquainted with life enough to silently hyperventilate in its bed. The swan didn’t have a bed. The swan was too stupid to have a bed and if it did it would fill the bed with swan shit.
    That’s all for today about swans.

 
     
    Year of the Snake
     
    They didn’t think it would last all year. Ten months at the most. When the snake appeared as a broad green sunrise on the horizon it was January, an inhospitable month for snakes. But this was no ordinary snake. It crested the far range and barreled down the main road, flattening trees like wet reeds in its path. It towered over the farm mercantile and humbled the line of threshing machines. The townspeople ran from the square, but the snake settled and didn’t move to coil around anyone, not even the smaller pets. It wedged silent between the south awning of the schoolhouse and the north entrance of the bank.
    The snake stayed put for a few days before anyone approached. Naturally the first to gather the courage was Martha Swale, the town scientist. She walked to the outskirts of town and into an apple orchard, where the snake was resting its head on the limb of a sturdy Braeburn, its tongue snapping bark off the trees as it tasted the air. Swale propped up a ladder and