II

They roll around in the humors mixed on the floor, they sleep one on top of the other on top of the other, they curl up, they stretch out, and they yawn: they have found a way to choose between justice and hunger and thirst. When one of them starts to drool too much, they bite, scratch, and kick each other.

Before proceeding, Stinkat, Skinnybunny, and Bonehound wrap the body in aluminum foil. Then they sit down in the light of the rising sun to demonstrate the different noises they can make with their bodies. Whoever can turn their noise into a sound, and that sound into music, and that music into awe such that it dispels the mood of despair, will have the solution they chose to defend prevail; nobody is convinced, but they proceed melodically.

Stinkat holds, with the oscillating murmur of the phlegm in her chest and the vibrato of her throat, that justice should be specific, and that—though it be a figurehead, an archetype, an example of an entire lineage they oppose—that specific body has done nothing to them, thus it is not just that they eat it and drink its blood. The others hold hands, they weep.

Skinnybunny argues, with the steady rhythm of his joints, to which he hypnotically adds the tapping of paws and jaw, that justice is a concept, and that, in order to conceptualize, the organism must first have attended to its biological necessities; thus the notion of justice is invalid when there is a body of which they can eat and drink, as they so need to do. The others dance, they applaud.

Bonehound points out, after a profound silence, in which the chorus of each of his hairs brushing against all the others becomes more and more perceptible, that justice is nothing but an arbitrary accord, a game they play among themselves, thus if one simply convinces a second that hunger and thirst are more important than declaiming convincingly before some unknown entity all the harm that body and its ilk have caused them for as long as they can remember, the third should submit to those rules. The others begin to sing.

The sun rises. Then Stinkat, Skinnybunny, and Bonehound leap all at once to snatch a coin they want to slip under their skin. They don’t know it is just the aluminum foil attracts them, and so, all of a sudden, they find themselves on the ground scratching each other, hurting each other, because the place is infested with coins of every size and denomination. All riled up, it occurs to them to open the aluminum foil and let the plague of money depart with the body. And yet, would that be just?