Needing/Getting

Ancient Civilizations: Lost and Found Entry by Yigit Koroglu

Iranian battle-mask, from the Safavid Dynasty (16th-18th c.) 

Aries: Jörmungandr- The jörmungandr, which can be found in Norse mythology, is also known as World Serpent. As a baby, the monster was thrown into the ocean by Odin. By the time it had grown, it was large enough to wrap itself around the earth and grasp its own tail. Legend says that it is still holding onto its own tail and the day it releases it, various natural disasters and battles will ensue known as Ragnarök.  Ragnarök will end up destroying the world.

Taurus: Cuchivilu- The cuchivilu is an aquatic creature from Chilota mythology. It is approximately the size of a sea lion and is half pig, half snake. This creature inhabits the bottom of the sea and occasionally will rest on the muddy, shallow shores. They can also be found in lagoons and swamps. You should always be careful when wading or bathing near a cuchivilu because if you do, soon you will be covered in grains and scabies. The grunt of a cuchivilu is also said to curse you with a short life. The creature will destroy fishing pens and eat all of the fish- the water in which this is done is then cursed and no fisherman will ever be able to catch another fish.

Gemini: Aspidochelone- Described as a large whale or sea turtle, it is a sea monster that is so enormous it is often mistaken for an island. This is understandable because the back of the aspidochelone is covered with rocks, valleys, sand dunes, trees and other greenery. It comes to the surface from the depths of the ocean and entices sailors to land upon it. It then dives deep, pulling its victims deep under the water where they are then devoured. 

Cancer: Umibōzu- The umibōzu is a Japanese sea spirit said to live in the ocean and destroy or capsize the ship of anyone who dares speak to it. Believed to be the angry spirits of drowned monks or priests, they take on the shape of a giant human with pitch black skin and large eyes. Sometimes instead of capsizing the ship right away, the umibōzu will ask the crew members for a barrel and then use it to fill the ship with water, eventually sinking it. The only way to avoid this fate is to trick the umibōzu by giving it a bottomless barrel. Only then will you have a chance to escape.

Leo: Kraken- This legendary sea monster is one feared by many. It is said to dwell off the coasts of Norway and Greenland. Stories of the monster may have originated from giant squid sightings. The Kraken is depicted as a large octopus-like creature with spikes on it’s suckers. It will attack ships or eat them whole. It also is known to create very sudden and very dangerous currents.

Virgo: Siren- Sirens are dangerous creatures that can be found in Greek mythology. Using their enchanting music and voices, they lure nearby sailors, causing their ship to crash on the coast of the siren’s island. Now trapped, the sirens kill and eat them. Sometimes, instead of being lured, the sailors are lulled to sleep with the creature’s beautiful voice. Once asleep, the sirens come aboard the ship and kill them. In early Greek art, sirens are depicted as woman-bird hybrids. Later, they were depicted to resemble beautiful and seductive women. In addition to their beautiful appearance and voice, they can also be heard playing a harp.

Libra: Abaia- The abaia is a large and magical eel-like creature which can be found in Melanesian mythology. It is said to dwell in freshwater lakes. The abaia considers all of the creatures in the lake to be its children. Therefore, it will kill anyone who tries to harm or disturb them. Legend says that once a man fished in the lake of an abaia and caught an abundance of fish. The next day, he brought all of the townspeople to fish some more. This angered the abaia. The next day, the abaia caused a huge rainstorm which significantly raised the water level, flooding the town and drowning everyone in it with exception of one woman who did not eat any of the fish.

Scorpio: Leviathan- The leviathan is an extremely powerful and terrifying biblical creature. During the Middle Ages, it was used as an image of Satan. The leviathan would endanger God’s creatures by attempting to eat them. It is known to be one of the Seven Princes of Hell, classified as the demon of envy. It can also breathe fire, sometimes boiling the surrounding water which completely melts the skin off of unsuspecting victims. When the leviathan consumes its prey, the victim’s life, knowledge and complexity are absorbed into the monster.

Sagittarius: Each-uisge- This creature is a mythological Scottish water spirit and can be found near a water’s edge. It is a shapeshifter, usually disguising itself as a beautiful horse. It lures victims through it’s sheer beauty and majesty. If ever mounted, the skin of the each-uisge becomes adhesive and it dives to the deepest part of the nearest body of water with the rider helplessly stuck on its back. After the victim has drowned, it rips apart and devours the entire body except for the liver, which then floats to the surface.

Capricorn: Charybdis- This horrifying beast is sometimes portrayed simply as a massive whirlpool. Other times, it is depicted as an actual creature that lies at the bottom of the ocean and create whirlpools by sucking in thousands of gallon of water and spewing it out. If a ship was caught in the middle of it, there would be no chance of survival as the ship and crew would be dragged down to the deepest depths of the ocean never to be seen again.

Aquarius: Hydra- The hydra, which originated in Greek mythology, is a giant snake-like creature with nine heads, one of which is immortal. If one head was cut off, two more would emerge from the fresh wound. It’s poisonous breath and blood are so toxic that even its scent is deadly. The hydra is native to the marshes of Lerna, Greece, where it would periodically appear and eat the people and livestock. 

Pisces: Qalupalik- The qalupalik is a monster from Inuit mythology. They can be described as human-like creatures with green skin, long hair and long blackened fingernails. They are also known to wear an amautiit (a type of pouch worn by Inuit parents to carry their children) so they can take away babies and children who disobey their parents. What they do with the children is unknown. Some say they eat them and others say they keep them as their own. Qalupaliks are also said to make a distinct humming noise when they are around. One can hear it before they can see it.

— H. P. Lovecraft,

◊ Print Shop ◊

When you hike down to the creek sometimes you see bones litteringthe ground.  Just squirrel bones, you tell your friend.  Must be acoyote in the area.  Sometimes you see big bones in the leaves.  Big squirrel, your friend says.  Must be a coyote in the area.  Neither of you knows who said that.

No matter how many times you visit St. Louis, the arch never seems to get any closer.  You walk and walk and drive and drive and it never seems to get any closer.  Where is it?

There is an abandoned house in town with red notices on the door. No one has lived there for years.  There are two grave markers beside the house, and the writing has worn away over time. Must have been their pets, everyone says.  Sometimes when you pass that house, the furniture is moved around and you swear you see someone rustling the curtains.

It’s March.  The Blues are still playing.  Around you, you start to see snatches of red.  Red hat. Red shirt.  Red.  You know it’s coming.  But the Blues are still playing, you say.  The Blues, you yell.  It’s not enough.  The red will come.  The red will overtake you.  It’s March.  Cardinals season is coming.

You do not know where the Mississippi River really is.  You can see it from the street, but when you try to get closer, it only seems to get farther.  There is something about that river.  You drive into town, maybe you can get closer in town.  The river never manifests. You try to get closer. Finally you give up.  No one has ever touched the Mississippi River.  

You hear train whistles every twilight, but you never see the trains.  When you hear the whistles, you lock the doors.  Do not look at the train tracks.

The trees are screaming. “Don’t mind the cicadas” an old man laughs. It’s winter.

Towns are nothing but islands speckling the vast sea of corn. You feel safe within civilisations walls, but going from one town to another fills you with dread. You don’t know why. You drive on. Stalks start rustling in your rearview mirror.

The humidity is suffocating. The summers are sweltering. You feel more liquid than person. You don’t even have the energy to blink when you look down and see that it’s true.

What the corn doesn’t touch, the forests own. The creatures in the forest aren’t nearly as secretive. You’ve never seen one clearly, but there’s always one darting along the edges of your vision. It invites you further in. You turn and leave. You can’t see it well, but you think it’s disappointed.

One year the leaves don’t come back. You’d be lying if you said this didn’t concern you. What will change this fall?

The potholes are always plenty after a harsh winter. They’re filled once spring rolls around. Whatever they’re filled with squelches as you drive over it. You stop noticing it after a while.

Your dog stares at the ceiling when it rains. He never looks away. You learn to never question it.

The rain sounds like footsteps. It makes it easier to ignore the footsteps upstairs. You live alone.

Someone goes missing again. Everyone knows that it’s either the cornfields or the river. Nobody ever says which.

The snow always seems to take more of the year up. It’s always wanting more.

There’s cats everywhere. At night, they come in from the forest and fields and hide under the cars. They stare with yellow eyes when you look. People only say to never turn your back.

The sounds of the trains in the middle of the night are common. Nobody wakes up to them. They keep their eyes shut tight. Those who look take that risk.

The old farmhouses are covered in multicolored writing, and abandoned but at night, the sound of breaking glass can be heard.

You drive past the drug neighborhood and wave to someone you go to school with. Their thin face barely registers you and you’re gone by the time they’re able to get their hand up. 

The internet doesn’t always work, but being cut off is better than facing it all.

From the woods, the noises come, past all the fog. People shove headphones in their ears to block it out. 

The back roads are everywhere and go everywhere. Nobody talks about where they don’t go.

Don’t stop for the woman in the white dress. Don’t stop at all.

The highways away from this place are always used but nobody really goes anywhere.

The moon shines across the fields here more than the sun.

“In town” is deserted by 8 and only the dared walk through after.

The wind whispers the secrets of the dead who never left and the trees hold onto them.

Every third Thursday of the month, cars line up down main street and select persons in suits or flannels walk into a two story building with new paint and furniture. The lights go on, and the rest of the town is dark and silent. Then their gone, and the building is dark. Any other day, the windows are boarded, the paint chipped, and the building is empty.

Coyotes are starting to move towards town, the officials tell us. It’s not the coyotes, the officials tell us by being the next ones missing.

You still deny how allegedly empty the Twin Cities get during the cold, but you suppose you’ve never been around to see whether it’s true; you stayed inside because of the cold. If the streets are empty in February, who sees that the streets are empty in February?

Cold, grey, dead eyes staring out from their apartment windows looking out into the street. They’re so empty in February.

Cold, grey, dead eyes passing by the completely visible dressing room hallway above the Guthrie. The joy of eavesdropping screams to a halt in February. No one has souls in February.

“Damn Packers.” You must hate the Packers. You must hate the cheese heads. The Vikings are horrible. Everyone knows the Packers are better. No one speaks it out loud. Repeat: “damn Packers. damn Packers.” You at least know your roads are smoother.

Garrison Keillor’s low Lutheran grandfatherly voice is drawling out of that old truck on the side of the road. You know, it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity, your makeup drips off your face, your hair sticks to the back of your neck, it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity. You wheeze on your way to down to Farmington, dust in your throat. At least it’s a dry heat.

The gas station you hoped to buy pop at is abandoned.

You feel a cold, dry sense of dread when that stranger tells you how her day is going. She is an Iowan. She breaks the law of “How are you doing? I’m doing good, how are you.” Your words seize in your throat at the cash register. You know something about a stranger. She has stepped out of the traditional stranger dance. Mention the cold. Oh god. She does not stop. You know she is under the weather. You care, but she cannot know you care. You cannot know that she is under the weather. Oh god. Oh god, mention the cold.

There is frost on the roof. It has begun. Girl scout troops go up north to inch through high ropes courses in their boots and parkas. Lone girl scouts standing alone on a rickety bridge, harnasses swinging in the wind.

You have lost feeling in your hands. You trudge through your customary six inches of white shit. Your familiar surroundings are a grim, icy parody of what they were before. At least it’s warm enough to snow.

- the gas station said “live bait,” but whatever’s swimming in those tanks, dark, slick, writhing things, do not seem like minnows to you when you stand before them, trembling with a useless net in hand.

- the tornado sirens for the farmers went off at noon today, like usual, but they still haven’t stopped.

- you’re surrounded by faith, different churches, hosts of crucifixions and gods and books and no one can seem to agree on anything besides two things - hell, and the power of the blood. whose blood is still debated.

- knee high by the fourth of july, the platitude says, but your corn seems to be doing much better, yes, towering over you on independence day, and whispering. much better than the neighbors’ fields, much better.

- when you go to church on sunday, you find the crucifix surprisingly lifelike.

- “you’re not from here, are you?” the man asked when you strolled into his shop, shivering, and jokingly asked when the winter would end. his face is concerned. “wherever did you hear that it ends?”

- the man who sold you this land said the earth was good, fertile, alive. when you dig, the soil beneath your feet is clay, dark clay, red clay, the reddest clay, a crimson, liquid, sanguine, saturated clay.

- the worst part about the whiteout isn’t the snow, you think, it’s the fact that you can see the black things in your peripheral vision so much clearer now.

- really, you should be used to the strange colors the sky turns during summer thunderstorms, but the dark and simmering orange is new. the wind has stopped blowing.

The sandhill cranes come through each year in enormous flocks, hundreds of thousands of wings beating against the sick-yellow evening sky, to congregate outside of town and pick your fields clean. Your father sends you out to shoo them away from the grain one night but you stop dead when a hundred of them twist their necks around to fix you with those ancient yellow eyes (you cannot help but notice the cruel curve of their beaks) and one gives a guttural squawk. It sounds a little like language — not one any human has spoken in thousands of years, but you still understand what it means. You take a step back. Then another. Then you run. When you make it back inside, your sister cheerfully informs you that sandhill cranes, as a highly migrant species, are opportunistic feeders. They eat whatever happens to be available.

It was supposed to be a tourist attraction, back when the city government was stupid or desperate enough to believe that your town might ever see tourists, but today the museum is a dusty old ruin full of Pony Express kitsch. (The only reason it’s still standing at all, your mother says, is that it cost $10 million to build back in 2000 and the city’s too embarrassed to knock that kind of investment down.) You go in one night with your best friend to raid the gift shop and take pictures with the chipped, noseless pioneer mannequins. They move when you aren’t looking. You can’t prove it, but you know. The headphones you pick up at the entrance will still spit out fragments of the guided tour narration at odd intervals: “—came to the West searching for opportunity — a world unlike anything they’d ever seen — untamed and ripe for the taking — all of them hoping — hoping — hoping —”

Everyone knows that Mr. Klein’s been having a rough time since his wife died. It’d be impolite to ask too much (why was she out on that road so late? what kind of animal leaves marks like that?), nosy to insist on checking up when he insists he’ll be fine soon, so you leave a casserole on his doorstep and that’s that. A few days later you walk by on your way home from school and think you see him sitting hunched at his kitchen table, breathing but not moving otherwise, flies buzzing around the dozens of uneaten consolation dishes left by the neighbors.

In sixth grade, you found out that the love notes your friend Mandy paraded around the classroom every day — to the prettiest girl I know, love David — were fake. She’d written them herself. She made you promise to keep it a secret, and you did because Mandy was your best friend before you met Alex, and anyway she stopped with the whole scam pretty quickly afterward. Embarrassment, probably. Even one person knowing the truth was enough to shame her out of doing it again. When she pulls you aside in eleventh grade and whispers I got a note from David today, you try to shrug her off. You know the truth, remember? Her fingers dig into your upper arm. I did, I really did, I didn’t write it this time. He won’t leave me alone.

sky unbroken by hills or mountains or even clouds, yellow and orange and pink and blue, so much sky you think it could swallow you up whole. you’re grateful for the corn because at least you’d have something to hang onto if the world ever upended itself. for a while.

Your classmate Jenny gets pregnant senior year and her parents won’t let her get rid of it, so she and Bobby (who insists he isn’t the father) get married and set up house in a little apartment. She dies in childbirth, which you didn’t think really happened anymore. The thing inside her lives until Bobby throws it into the Platte a few years later. The cops aren’t quite sure if they can call what he did a homicide.