All pigs feel the knife

 We took several trips out to each of our vast, garbage-choked oceans.  We watched the tides stretch towards the road, then slip back, leaving trash and rot and dead animals on the sand.  We thought about how much we hated each other, or, at least, that's what I was thinking.

"He's still after us," she said.  "The Face."  I stroked my acne scars.

We'd seen The Face's agents across from our hotel.  They read the paper in a black sedan.  They wore black sunglasses.  When we went up and asked them who they were, they told us, "we're with The Face."  We suspected they worked for The Face.

We met a rabbi on the street.  He launched into his rabbi shit, I don't know what provoked him.  "The world is very large," he said.  "Do what you can."  I asked him what the fuck that meant and he winked and hopped on his hog and rode off.

We ended up at some pier.  She started talking about some thing.  I pretended to fall asleep.  I fell forward onto the pier and then rolled off into the water -- I hadn't been trying to, that's just where my momentum had carried me, and I had committed to the sleeping thing and I couldn't give up on it now or else I'd look foolish.  The water smelled like rot -- more rot.  She scooped me out by my shirt.  I pretended to wake up.  She told me I had low self-esteem.  I said, yeah, no shit.

One of The Face's agents came up to us disguised as a little girl in a sundress.  He asked us if our tank tops were mesh.  It was a set-up.  He wanted us to say yes, we were wearing tank tops made of mesh.  We didn't answer and he started crying.  Another agent ran up to us, disguised as the ferry-boat captain.  "How can you do that, make a sweet little girl cry like that?"  He hugged her and held her little head on his breast.  The rabbi zipped past and threw a soda can at us and said "buzz off, lame-os!" and rode off.

And we were lame.  The rabbi was right.  The Face's agents started laughing at us -- we'd been exposed!  We couldn't look at each other.  The rabbi had gotten us good.  We'd ignored him and scoffed at him in the ignorance of youth, and he'd gotten us back.  I could have strangled the rabbi, then -- I could have choked him until his stupid face turned purple.  But it wouldn't have changed a thing.  He would have just looked up at me with his smug rabbi face and it wouldn't have even felt good, choking that rabbi, which is the cruelest cut.