I’m gonna name my first born daughter Sestina, says a hairy boar named Basil. He crushes a beer can and grunts. *My god what are you some kind of freak?* squawks his beady little wife. She is a slick oily bird and she hops around and looks at him sideways. Because it is true, no one has yet recorded a successful mating between a boar and a bird. Well there was that one case, says Basil, putting on a jowly grin like a furry John Travolta with steroid cheeks. He is staring not at his wife, but at the TV, as if some kind of reverse-broadcast could happen, and take his words sailing through the ether to a god who somewhere someday might give a damn. With a loosely theatrical gesture he lets an inner voice ask, “What case was that, Basil?” and, pleased, begins to relate what he has heard. Well it seems that once there was this Island in the south seas somewhere, and they had every kind of animal there, and once a year the rains would come and all sense of sobriety and order would get chucked into the current like slippery driftwood. And when that happened, oh! what honey semblances of light! what liquid mastication of the sea crushed in the rock jaws of the beach! (and all the animals got real muddy and all the animals got real muddy and all the animals got real muddy AND THEY FUCKIN FUCKED THEIR BRAINS OUT! (oh my god. he takes a breath.) He pauses to regain his composure on the sofa, Basil does, and he stalks out a cigarette and lifts up the beer can to see if there’s any more. There is and so he takes a drink. It tastes like 85 percent spit. Warm beer the color of the kitchen light. His wife the bird drops something in the kitchen and says *Ow.* Basil goes on with his tale, as the TV glimmers smilingly. Well and it just happened that in a nice cool slick sweet electric earthen moss-grown hollow, this bird landed to get out of the rain a bit, smell the earthsea smells and try to shake some of the mud off her ragged wings. Well imagine her yellow surprise to find a WILD BOAR in there! Just sitting there “like King Lionel on his mossy throne!” she thought. Then, “Oh my,” she thought. “The only boar I’ve ever been this close to was a roast boar!” Can birds sweat? This one did. “Heheh,” chuckled the boar. “I’m a little bit different darling,” and he moved his laughable lovable paunch over by her. And they talked about the stars (which you couldn’t see because it was the rainy season) and the different styles of waves, and while they were talking about taking off their pants, the moon came out. It was like the track of moonlight on the water was the hypotenuse, and the faces of them two was points A and B. At this point Basil allows himself a murky smile, pressing back into the couch while a commercial passes on the TV like a semi truck on a two-lane highway while you’re driving home in summer. And then them two, they went down in that mossy holler without no shoes and socks nor nothin, as easy as if they’d planned it all a hundred years before. Because he is grown quiet now, and the inner voice doesn’t want to disappoint, it asks, “What happens, Basil?” What happened? In the kitchen the clanking of a steel knife in slow motion against the counter makes a slow motion loading sound like another shell into the breech clank-CLANK! Honey can you get me another beer, Basil thinks to himself and for some reason finds that insanely funny, and he is laughing silently, in great rolling heaves like the rain in the rainy season when his wife comes through the room on her way to someplace else. *You are so weird,* she says, shaking her beak. She goes to the garage to get something or to clean something. I think I’ll name my firstborn son Sylvester, Basil says, while the TV blinks once and is silent.