Winner of Thunderdome 2018-2019: Day 2. Check out the prompt here.

This book is an insult. But that should not shock you.

How could it say anything of worth? How could it abandon a symbol so important to our writing, how could it banish so many words, so many things, and still say anything I should know?

Think of what is lost!

Lost: animals with trunks and tusks, big and smart. Lost: big plants with trunks of wood. Lost: bonds amongst humans that surpass companionship. Lost: companions. Lost: imaginations that allow us to hurt from what that human across from us is hurting from. Lost: conjugations of “is”. Lost: that famous bit from that old play about living and dying. How will that inquiry form in our mouths?

But it is good. I can’t stand it but it is good. For all its cutting and chopping and slicing, it still astounds. Astounds for though it abandons so many things, burns things without thought, it still is. Still is.