Iä! Iä! Iä!

Because the dead return. Because light reverses. Because the sky is a gap. Because it’s a shout. Because light reverses. Because the dead return. Because footsteps on the ceiling. Because footsteps in the basement.

We don’t end our lives with completed stories, we don’t cease to exist having answered every question, understood every answer. We die incomplete, half through dinner, an unfinished conversation, mid-bite. We aren’t granted an answer for our life’s pursuits.

But I can no longer plan to die as a complete version of myself. I can only adjust what version of myself I see as complete.

The mortal garden grows and twists and screams and bleeds. It is loved by the hands that tend it, but that love sows only misery and fear. It is the worst place that has ever been beautiful, and it should not exist.

I don’t know how to tell her that there’s nothing left for me. I’m not dreaming of a quiet sanctuary any more.

I don’t want to go back to the places where I was abnormal, and the nightmares were still real, but all in my head.

When I think of tomorrow, all I can think of is the unmade darkness beyond the walls of the hotel. The silence beyond Eskew.

The knife presses harder against your throat, but it doesn’t hurt. Your eyes wander up and you see above you the dark planet of awesome size perched in its sunless void, an invisible titan all thick black forests and jagged mountains and deep, turbulent oceans.

A monster. Spinning. Soundless. Forgotten.

It’s so close now. You see it just above you. Maybe even if you tried very hard, you could touch it.

And I told her this. Once upon a time, there was a leaf that blew about in the wind.

It blew about with a thousand other leaves and made patterns in the air. The leaf did not know it was in the pattern. The pattern did not know how the wind would shape it.

The wind had no idea it was making a pattern with the leaves. And no one was there to see it. And the world spanned on and on.

And in that world, the air was full of patterns. And in those patterns were thousands of leaves. And in those leaves, a single leaf blew about in the wind.

And when I was finished, the line was quiet. The explosion did not make the news.

Because the sky is a shout. Because it’s a gap. Because the grass doesn’t grow, or grows too much, or grows wrong. Because the dead return. Because the dead return.

That — that — is why the chicken crossed the road.