Ninth Letter By Akilesh Ayyar

I’m telling her why New York now has bakeries to rival Paris when the sluices open and cold fact faster than a flood submerges me.

The words I just said did not come from me.

Those words came, and these words that I am thinking—these very words—come from elsewhere.

I am, after all, not sitting in some little workshop hammering out, from all possible words, these words. They just—zip—come to mind, sequential as a teleprompter. Only better, because this teleprompter reels off not just words but images and sensations of all sorts, like that red elephant on a beach ball I saw before drifting off last night, not to mention feelings and memories.

Strange I never noticed this before.