The man with soybean arms

He is the cool air that tickles leaves off of their branches when they’ve made their grand transformation. His arms are like shelled soybeans – lean, unwrinkled skin that bulges out where the muscles coil underneath. He doesn’t do CrossFit; he just lifts walruses above his head, a hundred reps a day. That’s how he gets his edamame arms.

I wrote him a letter and sent it to him on a wave of bubblegum breath. “I want to learn how you train blind elephant seals to swim through the clouds,” I said. Two days later, his response: “I’d be more than happy to show you, but have you even seen my elephant seal?” he asked.

In fact, I watch the seal from my bedroom window every night when it spins clouds into diamonds with its trunk. I caught them as they fell to the ground and collected them under my sheets. But I was afraid he would think I was weird if I said that, so with a bed full of elephant seal diamonds, I wrote back, “I think so, once or twice.”

I dreamt that night that when he shook my hand his soybean muscles shattered my bones.

But when I woke up and met him, his hands were soft as he pulled me into the sky. I watched from a cumulus chair as he work with his animals, scratching notes into my skin with my fingernails. I watched his walrus arms tremble in concern as he gave a polar bear a root canal. The bear’s purple-black tongue spilled out of its mouth like taffy because of the anesthesia, and he stroked the bear’s fur as a green-blue liquid bubbled up and solidified in the space left behind.

By 2:00 I was in love, and at the end of the day when I floated down to earth, I felt the leaves inside my chest fall off of their branches. He gave me a diamond the size of a walnut before I left. The blind elephant seal, with its milky blue eyes, crafted it for me and dropped it in my lap.

I keep it under my pillow and when I dream about the man who arranges the constellations before he goes to sleep so the whales can find their way home, his hands fall through my fingers like smoke.

Jenna Bodnar is a student at Carnegie Mellon University studying Professional and Creative Writing. She enjoys exploring a variety of genres, and has just started writing poetry. Other hobbies include learning about killer whales and riding horses.