This writing was accepted for publication in the 84 page perfect-bound issue of cc&d (v246) (the November / December 2013 Issue) You can also order this 5.5" x 8.5" issue as an ISSN# paperback book:

Order this writing in the book Art is not Meant to be Touched cc&d 2013 collection book		get the 374 page July - Dec. 2013 cc&d magazine issue collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

Why The Bees Are Hiding, Or: How One Girl Ate Chicago -

Dana Jerman

    It began very simply and like most things. It was the spring, and she was hungry. Not for only filling her stomach but for the act of eating. Hell of a long way from apples and chocolate- soon my apartment was going without walls. Pieces of my roommate lodged in her back molars.

    A humble hunger pang that never quit shaped itself into savory flavors of Wacker Drive skyscrapers, all cake-like, crumbling. Uptown cafes each chilly juice boxes. Then the exquisite sprouting sandwich of the Lincoln Park Conservatory with a side of Lake Shore Drive- pieces of the longest noodle.

    She wasn’t going to any mecca, she would have it built in her stomach, she would become it.
    She would piss a line, and the line would become time.
    She would shit gold and the gold would become shit and the transformed little shits gods of gold beside the golden piss river.

    Her wild eyes and mouth told me about dreams of supper in the white jungle. Where tender sweetened orchid meat was served atop slabs of flash-fried supergiant koi on plates the size of park benches. Rich purplewood and mirrorglass milks flavored with blackbee honey poured out slow and generous jar by singing jar. And the melongrape carafes pouring, stacking in coinshapes the juice melting upward, each becoming its own glass. Each tasting of smoothed mosaics coaxing a glowing heat from the teeth and color from the eyes. The delicate lava-seared butterfly and fresh pearpalm salad matched a dessert of cocoa sugar dusted over crisp ripe alligator hearts; their strawberry-creme taste turning rose the moon and language into pepper and bubbles in the throat. Then the tongue worked deliciously over the edges of the mouth, itself a crag of unchewed coral...

    Nobody rode the train anymore on account of all the missing tracks. And she was getting full by then, going missing for weeks at a time.
    One afternoon I go looking, and by evening I’ve found her on Mars.

    Here she’s grown a third-eye, her hair now a blue flame. She embraces me and suddenly my heart is an appendage on the end of my hand.
    She’s speaking a language that’s sounding like numbers pronounced upside down and backwards, and I sense she’s making some argument for the unified field. Here, she is probably executing the last desires of superconciousness, a thing not yet mute in the face of those classically, spectacularly poor communicators: “Money” and “Art”.

    Even if I didn’t comprehend, it sounded pretty enough for me to want to spend my whole summer vacation right there, building typewriters out of martian sand so I could write screenplays or poems to build Chicago all over again, elsewhere.

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