Excerpt from T Fleischmann’s 2019 autobiographical essay Time is the thing a body moves through

“We set to work arranging the sheets and mixing up a batch of green liquid for the next step in our Squirt! sculpture. It’s a straightforward idea. We're making giant letters out of Squirt cans (like the soda) to spell out the word Squirt! in a 3-D sculpture, as high as my shoulders and as thick as my breadth. Then we're mixing together this liquid that we're pretending is Squirt but is actually just green food dye and water and corn starch for viscosity. Today, we’re throwing giant buckets of that liquid against the backdrop of hillside and sky, huge splashes of green viscous liquid looking unreal, like a waterfall went backward and extraterrestrial. The insulation is to reflect the sun back onto the liquid, so people can see what it is better. Once it’s all done, we're going to print the giant splashes of liquid onto a large industrial vinyl sheet, then grommet it above the sculpture, so it looks like the Squirt cans are squirting Squirt into the sky. It’s called Squirt!, with the exclamation point. Benjy and I spend a lot of time laughing about Squirt! “See,” we say, “it’s called Squirt!,” and we usually crack each other up while our friend sits there and maybe politely laughs. We sometimes say it at the start, “So it’s called Squirt!,” and sometimes one of us waits until the very end and says, “and it’s called Squirt!” landing like a punchline we’d never heard before. For example when I tell Cyd, who I fisted with the pearls and all that, about the piece we get into a back and forth, him saying he doesn’t understand what I’m talking about and me insisting there’s nothing to get, it’s just about Squirt. “Alright,” he says, unconvinced.

After Benjy realizes how expensive it will be to get all the Squirt cans we need (hundreds, it turns out, and like a dollar each with the Squirt in them), I start placing ads on Craigslist, offering to let people see my tits or touch my feet for Squirt cans. I get back streams of emails, but all either thinking I mean “penis” when I say “Squirt can” or offering me, ridiculously, other kinds of soda. When Benjy and I really get going we talk also about a companion sculpture. It will be a fish tank filled with bright pink liquid, and inside it we're going to hang a neon sign that says, Do you have to let it linger? in curly cursive, and we're calling that one Cranberry Squirt. Usually by the time we get to revealing the name we're laughing so hard that we're tearing up but that doesn’t mean we're not deadly serious. We take our joy very seriously, our deadly serious joy.”