"I met my friend the cyclops for a drink at a downbeat cocktail bar with damp green walls and mismatched furniture. We went all sorts of places together. Today, he was buying. He’d recently come into some suspect fortune. He was playing tarot on the table nearest the aquarium. It was still light outside, though nearing 11 p.m. In summers in this country, we have extra hours for daylight, which we steal every year from the winter months, like hapless teenagers who think they know what’ll work, what’ll hide the stolen measure of booze this time.
*
So the cyclops is a boy, though a monstrous one, with his green eye very pretty and his slender hips. But his teeth are those of elephants. The Ancient Greeks found the skulls of elephants and mistook them for the skulls of giant men, one big eye where the trunk was missing from the wide white face. He tells me that elephant teeth are not the preserve of any creature. He tells me that he will never die, so long as he is a creature made from this confusion, and not any more complicated. Or he did tell me, once."