The Sentence That Inhales Under the Dreaming Oaks

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The bobble head slinky neck keeps wobbling yes/no/yes in time with the breath of the mountain, each nod loosening another symbol from its fastening. The heavy metal sigil hums, not loud but dense, like gravity remembering itself. The void in the heart of the Buddha is not empty but upholstered with weather, cicada-static, the slow thinking of stones. Just below, the dreaming oak trees exhale acorns as hypotheses.

The man with leaf lips tastes autumn when he speaks. Each syllable browns at the edges. His eyes are piped out like organs in a cathedral, and the ink that pours from them does not stain the ground—it alphabetizes it. Rivers learn cursive. Ants march in footnotes. Reality edits itself mid-sentence and leaves the typo because it likes the way it sounds.

Down below—always down below—the man with the changing moon logo rotates phases like a coin flicked by an indifferent god. Crescent to gibbous to absence. His face thins, thickens, collapses into the synoid eye, a waveform blinking itself into belief. Time becomes a hose left running, coiled, uncoiled, forgetting which end drinks.

Homer simpatico wanders through, blind but accurate, tapping the air with a stick made of laughter. A little devil’s horn pokes through his hair, red as punctuation. Schulz follows, wearing a party hat that says TODAY, confetti falling like permission slips. The gag is gentle, the sadness precise. Someone laughs and discovers it was a prayer.

A kingfisher stitches blue lightning across the paragraph, punctuation in flight, correcting the grammar of water. Fish become verbs for a moment, then forgive us. Vaman waits at the feet of the tree of life, small as a comma, already measuring the universe with steps that will someday ask for everything and receive it because the ground has learned how to give.

Roots hum. Bark remembers hands. Sap keeps secrets by flowing. The sigil loosens one last turn. The bobble head stills, finally agreeing with nothing. The ink pauses, listening. The sentence inhales, about to—