I found a skull on the beach, it was just a little skull, maybe that of a canary. White sand trickled through the sockets. It seemed to smile at me and I tried feeding it some crumbs. Oh well, cookies are for frogs, and maybe this isn’t a skull at all, but an egg or a bulb of some sort. Maybe I will glue some sequins on it and donate it to the local monastery. It would be happy there, supervising the luncheon menu, pounding its forehead through the lilac sermons, patrolling the starched brainwaves in the library. But what if it’s my own long lost ancestor? Shouldn’t I guzzle a toast about now? Raise a kite, or faint in a spiral upward? The whole episode is lamentable, I’m simply rehearsing for another kind of scrutiny, an expedition into the heart of heresy where dowdy, abusive hobgoblins lounge yanking at one another’s hair and snapping newcomers with hot towels. I expect to be incarcerated there for some time. All nectar will taste like insecticide. Privileges, such as holding this bird’s skull in the palm of my hand, will surely be rare. And so, better to forfeit it now, savor forever its twirling arc back into the sea, and circulate among the clustered natives, sniffing for honey, whisking flies from laughing faces.