Children are integers. Unique. Indivisible. Atomic.

Adults are decimalized fractions. Work. Family. Friends. Death. Taxes.

Numbers drive all our lives.

Your significant other offers you a three-way with her ex-lover. You should:

a) Say yes.
b) Call the cops.
c) Exercise your Second Amendment rights and purchase a firearm for home defense in case the lying bitch goes through with it behind your back.
d) Say shit yeah!

When you were born they gave you a number. Three digits, then two, then four. The sum of your existence.

Reach in your pocket or purse, pull out your wallet, set it on the table. Good. Now take the social security card out. Write your number on a piece of paper with a felt-tip pen.

Now multiply it by your IQ. If you don't know your IQ, assume that your IQ is 95.

Convert the resulting number to a word using the simplest possible cipher, where 1=A, 2=B and so on through 0=J.

What's it spell?

This is your secret name. Write it on the inside of your forearm in laundry marker so you can give it to police officers, theater ushers and other authority figures. Your good citizenship has been assured

You dream you have given birth to triplets. Each is more beautiful than the next. Each is above average. You decide to:

a) Put them up for adoption.
b) Have a retroactive abortion.
c) Kill the weakest and feed him to the other two to make them stronger.
d) 'Accidentally' lock them in the Hummer all day long while you play video poker.

Later on grocery coupons and a bad rear tire got in the way of love. She argued all the time. The door slamming interfered with your hangover. You woke up one day with that belt so tight around your thigh that you had to go to the emergency room.

The doctors laughed, the nurses whispered behind your back. You almost got gangrene.

It took you two more years to leave her.

Or maybe she left you.

At any rate, there was a trash can full of those little white pee sticks, every single one of them pregnancy pink. Dozens of them. You assembled them into a little female skeleton. You heated one on the gas stove, bending it into a little plastic fetus that you carefully wired inside the skeleton.

Or maybe that was right before she left you.

Question 111

Does mitosis precede meiosis?

a) What the hell are you talking about?
b) Depends. Who paid for the date?
c) I flunked microbiology, okay.
d) Ask the zygote I used to be.

The refrigerator is a symphony of odors.

The condiments lead a slow adagio from the door, pickle juice and rancid mayonnaise with subtle undertones of pot sticker sauce.

The vegetables are recombining into new life forms in the sadly-misnamed crisper drawer. Radicchio and bok choi really do get along, once they're both semi-liquid. The result smells like a bodybuilder's protein shake.

A new strain dawns from the cheese drawer, yellow and bold, an assault on all the senses. It adds a certain piquancy to the slow riot within the shivering white walls.

But the piece de resistance lies languid on your grandmother's silver tray. This mighty oval hosted dead birds every November throughout your childhood, building a legacy of bones in your memory and thought.

You have lived up to that legacy.

Grandmother would be proud.

Your teeth ache.

A very good looking person of your own gender propositions you in a bar. Your body responds, but your religion forbids homosexual conduct. What do you do?

a) Ignore the aching in your nipples and look the other way.
b) Try some sweet tongue.
c) Make conversation, hoping this person will fill the soul-rending void in your life ever since that dirty so-and-so walked out.
d) Recite the Lord's prayer.

Write an essay about a person who lives a happy life. They have your secret name. They have three children, a happy marriage to a lovely and talented spouse, and a successful career. Their refrigerator does not stink. They do not have disturbing art on their kitchen counter. The sum of this person's family is a fat and happy integer.

Explore these questions in your essay:

How are they different from you?

What choices did they make in life?

Why aren't they as lonely as everyone you know?

What the fuck did they do to deserve this, anyway?

When you are done, make an origami pig out of your essay papers and set fire to it. Mix the resulting ashes with flour, water, oil and yeast and bake it into a loaf. Give this loaf to a homeless person. Then go find the person with your secret name and kill them.

Or not. No one cares about you anyway.

Lonely losers are sexy.

Really.

Not.

Consider the set of all even primes. Is this:

a) An oxymoron.
b) Impossible.
c) A mistake.
d) The condition of human survival.

The End

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