Banking
The teller wasn’t particularly likable in general, but he was much less likable while working. He was good at making people feel like he was content to never have met them at all. They had to patronize the bank, though, because that’s where everything was, all the cash. No one could get it out from inside of there.
The teller was also a banker – the bank manager, and the owner of the bank. The teller had no other employees besides himself.
At night he would sit inside the vault amid the valuables people had entrusted with him and he thought about them for a long, long time. Their being there made him truly happy. Then a pile of money began to glow and opened up so that he could have sex with it, and he did have sex with the pulsating, now vaguely anthropomorphic money pile. He had sex with it late into the night, every night.
He often awoke exhausted and still inside the safe and still inside the money pile, which was essentially restored to its normal appearance. He cleaned himself off in the bank’s comfortable bathroom and prepared to begin the day’s already slated workload.
That was the secret of banking. It wasn’t savvy investment. It wasn’t knowing how to take advantage of worthwhile risks. It wasn’t being subsidized by the government. It wasn’t being wealthy to start with. It was being ready to have sex with the valuables whenever they beckoned.
When you did that, had sex with literal money, everything else just fell into place. But the teller would never tell this secret to anyone. It would be his own, along with all the other valuables that technically didn’t belong to him but basically did.
And the child he bore with the money, naturally. The child would also be his own.
The child, a boy, appeared next to the pile one day. He was tiny, and looked like the teller but also had a green face filled with rectangles and the images of presidents. The teller kept the child out of sight, but he continued to grow larger and hungrier, and there was little that would sate the boy’s appetite after a while.
Hands
Hands are across America. I can’t see anything but hands. They’re just fists in spots, so I’m sucker punched a lot. But there are always hands to catch me before I fall too far. What I’m saying is this is a situation with pros and cons.
The pros outweigh the cons.
A scarier thought is no hands.
Consider a world with no hands. Yes, you could walk freely wherever and not feel like you were on the verge of literally being strangled. That’s true.
But, tell me, how would you live without these, your hands? Who’d be there to catch you after they pushed you, eh? Who’d be there to grip you to sleep? There’d be no one to massage you without asking? Or inadvertently (well one would hope inadvertently) grope you?
Of course there was a question about whether the hands did anything with purpose. Given their ubiquity and their seeming lack of bodies and, especially, brains attached, it was reasonable to doubt it. Hands did what hands did. Nevertheless, there is an essential truth they seem to have been connected to, something embedded in the universe – a higher truth, one only detached hands can know. It’s the higher truth those of us with entire bodies are always metaphorically trying to grasp.
So you see you need those hands, those hands that squeeze and grab and pinch and pluck and gouge and cup and wave and more.
You couldn’t possibly expect to understand higher truths without helping hands to guide you along the way, could you?
Matt Rowan lives in Los Angeles. He edits Untoward and is author of the collections, Big Venerable, Why God Why, and How the Moon Works (Cobalt Press, 2021). His work has appeared in Barrelhouse, HAD, Beaver Magazine, Moon City Review, Maudlin House, TRNSFR, and Necessary Fiction, among others.
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