Answer Key
- Aug 23, 2024
- 3 min read
by Sarah Mills
1. C. In my dreams, I know whether you like grapefruit. I don’t like grapefruit, in case you were wondering. You weren’t wondering. But to answer the question, the red liquid that flamingos feed their young is not blood. It’s called crop milk
2. A. In this economy, nobody would drop a penny off any building, let alone such a tall building, so there is no way of knowing how soon it would hit the ground. When I was a child, my grandmother told me to pick up every penny I found on the sidewalk and one day, I’d be rich. But there were so many more pennies on the ground back then. I found a $20 bill in a shopping mall as a teenager. When I turned it over, it was an advertisement for finding Jesus.
3. D. None of the above. Nobody knows which came first — the red fox sounding like a screaming woman, or the screaming woman sounding like a red fox. Science can only tell us that their screams manifest as pain in our bodies.
4. C. This was a trick question. You will receive partial credit if you chose A or D, but B is implausible. Interceptability is not even a real word. Once, when asked to find the y-intercept on a high school math test, I circled the words the y-intercept and wrote here it is. I wonder what you were like in high school. If we would have been friends.
5. B. Many people have the gene that makes cilantro taste like soap, but few have the gene that makes soap taste like cilantro. Researchers are still trying to parsley why that is. Forgive the pun. I write exams for a living.
6. A. I’m always cutting plastic can rings so animals don’t get stuck in them, but recently I learned they can be repurposed as a scarf hanger or snowflake ornament. I once had a partner who liked to divide everything evenly. If we ordered take-out, he’d say, you owe me $17.68for chana masala and one-half of the samosa appetizer. If we took a trip together, he’d say, you owe me $35.33 for tolls and gas. I can imagine his delight at having a Christmas tree decorated entirely with plastic can ring ornaments.
7. D. None of the above. In my dream, I opened a fortune cookie and found a blank slip of paper inside, while your cookie contained three fortunes. You asked the chef to make alphabet soup with the excess letters. I left the restaurant hungry, imagining all the things I could have done with those letters.
8. D. None of the above. Sylvia Plath wrote I talk to God, but the sky is empty. I am always asking the sky for a sign that any of this matters. If a cloud covers the sun at the exact moment I’m thinking about the accumulation of plastic in the ocean, for instance. One time, I saw an airplane disappear inside a cloud. I kept waiting for it to come out on the other side, but it never did.
9. C. All of the above. Airplanes, even paper ones with poor velocity. Even the word velocity. Lenticular clouds, the lithosphere, monarch butterflies, black holes, lucid dreams, radio waves, starling murmurations. I don’t remember the question. All I want to write is I love you, which translates — roughly — as I’m sorry.
10. D. None of the above. In my dream, we were standing on a beach. You wrote words in the sand but the ocean erased them. When I asked what it said, you laughed and I got a good look inside your mouth. There are so few opportunities to see inside someone’s mouth. Yours resembled a plastic bottle. I saw a headline that said Recycling Isn’t Real and I couldn’t bring myself to read the article. I want to put you in a plastic shredder so I can see what comes out on the other side. Maybe I’ll find the airplane. Maybe I’ll find my fortune. Maybe I’ll finally be able to breathe again.
Note: “I talk to God, but the sky is empty…” is a quote from page 199 of The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath.
Sarah Mills’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in RHINO, Jet Fuel Review, HAD, Rust & Moth, Pithead Chapel, Gone Lawn, Beaver Mag, Identity Theory, The Shore, MoonPark Review, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is online at sarahmillswrites.com, and on Bluesky-@sarahmillswrites.
