#dilonzeres

The lawn has gone again.

Memories of rain torn apart by thunder. Faces faded, nearly disappearing, forgotten to be full. And lullabies wading through storm, as if softness could overpower colossus.

Driving on a street, splashed in misplaced sea, wondering if we should count the lines or the shrimp. But it wasn’t a Friday, it was someday, somewhere, a place I must have been, to be here drenching my mind.

Hopelessly nostalgic. Maybe it is all display. Some theatrical thought for me to replay over and over, hypnotizing myself to believe in its own certainty. Life happened here—it cannot be erased.

And yet, where is it?

Down waterslides and carpools it must have been slithering there, through all these things, wet and lurking. Too young to be independent but old enough to feel like that’s what you wanted.

Drowning in a lunchroom, tables and chairs upturned in the flood, clouds of mustard and soggy biscuits floating the airwaves beside my face.

I am barely there. Hovering. My legs swirl in the deep so my body stays unsubmerged, but I can barely breathe. I see bodies like lily-pads—motionless, complacent. They have all perished but I remain. Just a remainder.

All this talk of I—memory can be so narcissistic. Spaces which you cling to specialness, all for yourself, as if they had been spaces designed just so you could occupy them. Holy relics. Sacred secrets. They told you something they told no one else.

But that must be wrong. Because these spaces go on without me. But they are impressions, furious and sensual in my mind, touching me and cooling me off. Maybe I’m the only one who thinks they’re special—that’s why they let me remember them.

And yet, where are they?

Integration is a slow process. One mired by mires of placement. If I could classify every object I ever felt, every feeling I ever expressed, every motion I ever carried, would I come any closer to being fulfilled by leaving it all behind?

Maybe the weight would disintegrate. All the things which shaped me and defined me would be conditionally completed, and I could be reborn in layers of new and future me. Like the only thing holding me back this whole time were the times before this. But—they appear as fantasy now.

You cannot be stymied by imaginary obstacles. Especially those you made yourself.

But I am so sure my memories are real—they must be real, or else what good is the rest of me? What definition can I chain around my neck and submit to? Do I bathe in clarity or despair?

Liquids inside me turn more murkier by the minute. Until I am a swamp walking upright; a swamp thing being upstanding. Until I am the steps of a temple becoming reef, stone becoming coral, flesh becoming seaweed.

Still I hang my head. Forget the rain falling in my eyes. I was blind once—never again.

I am the threads of a stitch sailing across an open wound, when I make breaking wave on the shore of splintered flesh, do they sing of travels deep or do they whisper their traumas to sleep?

Memories unsung, glitters in glass refracting from a point of nothing; Moments unstuck from their specialness each and every unique part of erased.

Memories blown to shape sparks of sound glistening and grayish— already fading already being made unreal, even in the exact moment they are made.

What do I remember of rain, sunshine? Days on lakes, nights under fireflies? Of faces I once recognized voices I once trusted, persons depersonalized places displaced; What do I remember of Space? Touch? If I could only feel it again I’d know for sure if it was ever real.

A figure in the mirage gazing back at me, a silhouette scene haze is all that remains of my memories; Gas and pain fragments of my life stains on a translucent frame waiting to evaporate.

What do I remember of myself? A frightened doll unsewn without a master to make me act—to make me real

In a storm the sky cleans itself— no more memories no more doubts holding it down, but the sky forgets who it is and the rain repeats all over again all over me, in retrospective shame.

But I can’t remember how to cry or how to sing.

Who I am cannot last.

|I|

What doesn’t kill you makes you wish you had been killed.

Even her hair was wincing as she spoke that. But her listeners were unaware. There was a sound elsewhere, a transient siren wailing in and out of audible seesaw. And then she laughed at the irony, her cigarette failing to stay in her lips, falling to the ground in carelessness.

Her friends were plastic but they were still friends—and in the eyes of the public, who could really cite the difference?

The unannotated life is not worth living.

Something her professor said once—or many times. She could not remember, at least not in that moment. She was too distracted by a scent of burning brick. There was a building nearby, ablaze in the autumn sun. It was an ironic cruelty to her. If only the building had held on for just a couple more months, when the heat of air would have frozen shut, it might have survived.

But spring rain was far gone and distance between seasons immeasurable to sitting brick. Theory versus Praxis. Concept of a building versus an Actual building burning down. Who has more merit?

“They build them too big these days. Too many people trying to live here. Too easy for everything to catch fire.”

Her friend said this without looking up from her screen, which seethed at her, while she adjusted the frolics of her hair and buttered her cheeks in fake blush. It was quite a talent to conversate and remodel yourself at the same time, all for the sake of advancing both your physical life and your digital one. Electricity crackling in identity-indemnity.

Another one of the friends scowled, “No, it’s the air. The planet is warming up. This is just the new reality.”

Same as the old one, Effy thought. But fake concern is fashionable these days, so she nodded, wondering where her cigarette had gone. Did it disappear? Burn out from ash to vapor?

Such a quandary to befall Effy, she secretly wished her philosophy professor was here to help, despite his arrogance and inappropriateness. But she scoffed. She already knew what he would say.

Who got off first? The Thumb or the Cigarette Lighter?

Detach all the parts and reassemble them. Not totally dissimilar to the process required to go through to rebuild that tower of dust next door. Effy sighed. They had been waiting in line forever.

The sky was so still and soothing. It should have been hot. Nay a cloud in sight yet the sun was not visible, and nothing was scalding in horrid heat. It was as though the day had taken the day off and let a cardboard cut-out of itself stand in its place.

Effy nodded. Yes, it was exactly like that—a diorama day.

“I’ll ask what the meaning to life is. Because that’s what everybody asks.”

Hen announced this to useless fanfare, an unresponsive audience hideously indifferent. Even her own friends, Effy and the other one, were totally nonchalant and undisturbed to craft a response.

You see, Hen had always been the boring friend, the mild one, never really understanding anything they went through, being so gullible and terrifically malleable, Effy and Foneface could have their way with her as a neat sycophant without worrying about upsetting whatever imaginary balance of power assembled between them. But unbeknownst to them, Hen was a kind and sorry person. She would never hurt anyone. Is it so wrong to be weak?

Weakness is in the eye of the beholder.

Vulnerability to one predator is poisonous skin to another. Tiny frog can kill giant snake—if the timing is right. Not to refer to Hen as a noxious creature. She was quite the opposite. Phonie could be very mean and viscous toward her sometimes. Effy was never like that. She did her best to stick up for her oily-fleshed friend, even if sometimes she became annoyed and fanged herself.

“Was that a joke?” Phonie snickered. “Hen, darling, if you ask anything you’ll bore the poor thing to tears.”

One time they were out in the night, in the guts of metropolis, all puffed up and skinned, searching for adventure in the form of partying, only to find a rather dead scene. So they decided upon going to an arthouse theater to get high and watch an opaque treat. The decision was between two particular film choices, which Effy and Phonie disagreed on. So, it was Hen assigned to the role of ultimate arbiter.

Both sides attempted to persuade the jury to their view. Phonie offered to assist Hen with her godawful bangs in exchange for a vote. To this, Hen grasped the tendrils of her hair, sheepishly, asking if they thought her hair was actually awful. I…I thought it looked fine. The person who cut it said it looked fine.

Phonie laughed at her. But Effy was stoic. She explained how Hen’s hair was neat as it is and how she did not have to worry about how she looked. That none of that matters anyway, unless you let it matter.

Then Effy wrapped her arm around Hen’s shoulder like a python gripping a branch, and inquired what deep in her heart was her true intent—which facetiously profound, pretentious film did she herself fancy to view. Hen, in pre-sob stage, sniffling and everything, quit clutching her hair and told Effy she would see whatever she wanted to see. Phonie rolled her plastic eyes. You always take her side.

And that is how it has always been. A battle between two superior extroverts, and their subterfuge against one another to manipulate their less inclined best friend to support either of their claims to power. Of course, just as Phonie claimed, Hen did have a tradition of legitimizing Effy’s crown more often than not—except in those times when Phonie managed to scare Hen in to servitude.

“Okie. Something decent then. What is the difference between ‘in to’ and ‘into’? I’ve always wondered that.” Hen queried.

“Is it ‘in to’ or ‘into’?! Does it matter? Why does intent and implication mean anything to you? Can’t things just be things and happen because they happen?” Phonie barked at her.

Effy grinned, something Phonie could not see because she was locked on that crystal ball in her hands, which she plodded her fingers upon precipitously. So Effy turned to Hen, and they both smiled at each other and silently giggled. Despite her aptitude for submissiveness, it was not as if Hen was not capable of inflicting grievance in subtle and sardonic ways. After all—how did they become friends?

The line moved forward like a lazy caterpillar. Sirens still blared in the background. Effy took out another cigarette. It had been an hour—or more.

An hour is nothing when you think about it. Evolution took millions of years to mold man from ooze—though it should have stopped at woman. The universe took billions of years to spark the first atoms and elements, with a few billion more to shape them into anything remarkable.

In a day there are twenty-four hours; in a year there are three-hundred-and-sixty-five days. Everything that is everything is nearly a trillion years aged. So equate that wine and when you realize how deep the red goes, you may find yourself wary of expecting longitude from an hour. Time only works when there is a lot of it.

But an hour waiting in line, doing nothing, among strangers you do not care about or maybe even despise, while the sky is blank, air stale, buildings burning, sirens crying, with friends like these—well, Effy was prepared to blast her brains out on the sidewalk, coloring drab gray in gorgeous gore.

And if love of self proved to be too overwhelming, then Effy considered at least blowing Phonie to pieces.

It is healthy to think about homicide every day.

Her professor joked about this once. Half the class got it. The other half was appalled. But that is what you get for taking things so seriously, opening yourself up to abhorrence and outrage. Not to say these feelings did not come from an authentic place—Effy learned from a former student that Professor had twice attempted to take his own life. Once before he met his wife—again after she left him. Maybe there was a third time, even, which is why his wife abandoned him. Is our marriage not good enough to keep you alive? Why did she not say love?

Effy knew a secret. Something no one else in class knew. Discovered when she came in during off-hours to discuss a missing essay. Her professor showed her the gun he kept in his desk. His face pretended to be humored and casual, but his neck was trembling, and she knew it was the real thing. He told her that every single day he came in to class, he thought about taking the gun out and shooting all these complacent, ignorant fools right in the head—a shepherd come to lay his flock to rest. But then Effy would walk in, and he immediately regretted even thinking it. If you missed just one class, Effy, I—I don’t know what I’d do.

Was that guilt or shame or longing? Effy could not discern the difference. It was a toxic abomination of everything wrong and sublime. Nobody had ever cared so much about her. She related perfectly to his sentiment. Her whole life, she had been waiting for someone to say how she felt—to speak a mind of amoral violence and a disappointment at how society has become. She comforted him. And that is when he kissed her.

Then she pushed him away, embarrassed, thinking she had found a companion in mind, but he was only disgusted flesh, still trying to express itself the only way it knew how.

As Effy thought about this, she felt a nudge on her shoulder. Hen reminded her to take a step, for the long procession of bodies had propelled itself forward for a split-second, only to halt its progress and seethe in its banality.

I wait; therefore I can’t go.

|II|

Smoke strung above. Lengthy laps of bubbling smolder carried with them a dissolved grave of brick and molding. We build and build and build, only to leave ruin and ash.

Her professor resigned the semester after their encounter. For inappropriate physical conduct regarding a female student. Then he killed himself.

Effy wondered if the student had wandered into the same web she had, only instead of escaping, she tore herself out completely. Quite the contradiction it all seemed to be. All these situations never quite as clear as clarity. Effy disliked her professor for that. But it is not like she could criticize his pain—only the method through which he consoled it.

All great pains must first don venomous and suicidal masks before they may have empathy from humanity.

A stellar argument to be made, Effy considered. If evolution transformed the prey into predator, then what transformed the victim into victimizer? Effy recalled her obsession with serial killers during her youth. How mesmerizing they were to her, these persons who consciously chose to torment and murder other people. What a level of disdain one must have. Effy did not think of them as psychotic freaks. Maybe they were hateful, or apathetic, but never freakish. People who let ‘God’ touch them are the true freaks.

God isn’t dead—but He’s getting there.

God is genderless. God is plural. God is everything and nothing and anything we want it to be. God just is. For Effy, damnation was real. Internally. Once you have damned yourself, you may as well be damned by all. But God is fictitious. Only so far as to assume we could ever conceive of God, and then further assume we could have adequate ways of worshiping God. But thank God for God, Effy figured, because without anything above us, we might assume we were God. As if we did not already fight each other over our egos.

Professor had an appreciation for spirituality. One session, he deemed it necessary to educate the class on reincarnation and karma and mediation. One of the students pronounced himself an atheist, arguing ceaselessly against Buddha and Jesus and Peace and Chaos, until finally leaving class cursing and yelling. Professor just chuckled.

Thought experiment: what caused the creation of the universe? Answers? Guess what—nobody knows. No one on the entire spectrum of this molten beach can provide an explanation on how it happened. And this is what Professor proposed to the class: if anyone can say to me with any sort of certainty that there is something to believe, then they automatically pass and do not have to attend class for the remainder of the semester. Many came forth with their own ideas, but they all had their doubts. Effy didn’t even try.

There is no possible certainty in anything we believe and certainly this is true.

Professor must have been quite amused then. When the god-hating student returned the following class, everyone ridiculed him. Except for Effy. Ignorance is its own cross to bear—but vain ignorance is casting the first stone. All you do is set yourself up for failure and invite the possibility of resurrection.

Effy coughed. Smoke got her. She glared at her cigarette, but it was not lit. No, this was vaporous decomposition from the smoldering building around the corner, which looked upon the sky and sought to replace nonexistent clouds with itself. The whole line was coughing, but these toxic fumes did not deter anyone from changing their position. The opportunity here outweighed anything nature could shove at them.

“Is it okay to feel nothing at all?” Hen pondered aloud.

Her friends were caught in their own mental comas, but she had no such entertainment. Phonie ignored her. Effy acted as if she mulled it over, then told Hen, “That’s an alright question. I think the answer is feel how you want to feel. Maybe it’s something to save for another time, you know what I mean?”

Hen nodded, defeated. Without missing a chance for insult, Phonie interposed, “You should ask how to properly wash your skin. They might think I brought my pet toad with me.”

Phonie snapped a portrait of herself snickering, sunglasses hovering in reflected smoke, while Hen bit her lip, staring at her feet sullenly. Effy should have said something, but she was lost again in memory and rhetoric.

Her Professor left behind no suicide note. They say everybody does, but Effy was skeptical of that claim. There was no disbelief, although they say this is a sign of grief. There was no grief. Not for Effy. Probably not for his wife.

It was in the Spring. When life was blooming and being reborn. His class supposedly waited twenty minutes for him to arrive, before they finally just left. Then he was absent a second time. And a third. Counting all the time that must have passed until somebody was concerned enough to notice…

The story goes it was two weeks gone, then at last a student emailed Professor asking what gives. But Effy can tell you what takes. Not God. Not Death. But Choice. Consequence. Chance. What are the chances anybody would have guessed that their caustically sarcastic philosophy Professor would kill himself? Not a high enough amount to care, apparently.

He had contacted Effy over break, around Christmas. When the world stung with cold, bitter spite. He was lonely, spending the holidays all alone. Effy could relate. She chose not to go back home, staying at school instead. She dreaded her family. Like she ever asked to be born. Never.

She fed them some bullshit excuse about an internship and they sent holiday money which she promptly spent on drugs and clothes—because you should look nice in your misery. And feel nice, too.

Professor invited Effy out for a frosty beverage—as if coldness meant nothing to them. Hindsight, so they say, is a twenty divided over another, which in regular sight is one.

How is “one” so supremely wise? The problem was never just one. It was when one was joined by another one. Then these two ones were interrupted by a new one, and this third one hatched the serpentine conspiracy that would undo all of them. Apologies for repeating such a recurrent refrain.

One thing Effy should have done was decline. But she was lonely. She was spending the holidays all alone. Professor could relate. His wife was not there. His dog had passed away. His family condemned him for his menial career choice—besides, he loathed his family. Like he ever asked to be born. Ever.

They met at a collegiate bar, a hole where sometimes other professors watered their snouts. But not this time, especially fortunate since Professor did not deign for others to see him drinking with a former student. He had been exposed before. Nearly plunged into a forceful resignation.

“Fuck them, who cares!” Effy slashed words with her throat. “Why do math professors need to drink? Or engineering ones? Their lives are fine, their students’ lives are fine. Everything up-to-date and paid-for, nothing left behind, no lingering questions, no insurmountable weight surrounding a desire to ask why to everything?”

Effy considered herself to have a point. They never bother asking why. They just learn how to build and then they built. Even while everything burned down eventually.

Professor sipped his beer, smiling like a talking pig. “You’re passionate about this.”

Effy nodded, gulping her beer, hoping to impress with her blasé consumption. Secretly, she thought beer tasted like fetid piss.

Professor shrugged. “Some of our most famous and profound philosophers were mathematicians and engineers themselves. They fancied those things. Math and Science comes from philosophy; those are their roots. The ancients desired to understand the natural wor—”

“I know all this, so what?” She interrupted him. “We’re not talking about the ancients here. We’re talking about 21st-Century Society, a place where everyone is just endlessly complacent and empty-head. Fuck! They don’t care where their roots come from—they don’t even eat the plant anymore!”

They both laughed. He knew what she meant; she knew what he had meant. Then Effy’s mood grew pensive.

“Sometimes… I feel like I’m Angry Adorno. Screaming at everybody to shut the fuck up about superheroes and celebrities already. Mass Culture is fascist poison. All it does is make me furious at Mass Society. I just wish… I just wish that some people would, at least, agree with me.”

Effy finished her beer, its rotten spell swirling around her.

Professor, calmly and comfortably, responded, “Well, sometimes I feel like Regretful Hitler. Which is to say: sometimes the last thing you want is people agreeing with you.”

Effy giggled. A sudden warmness overtook her. They clinked the tip of their bottles together, salutation to their own rightness. Effy pretended there was still a sip left, drinking void. Professor ordered another beer for himself, then asked Effy what she preferred. “I know you don’t like beer. You’re not as good an actress as you think.”

She requested a gin and tonic instead. “Am I a good philosopher at least?”

Some unrecognizable tune fell in the background. He stared at her, silent. Until they uneasily chuckled. Then he asked, “What do you want to do with your life?”

He seemed semi-serious, as if he had doubted his own student. Effy was taken aback, believing he would have been on her side. “Uh, what do you mean? I want to study philosophy. I want to be a thinker. I want to ask the great questions.”

Professor shook his head. “It’s not too late to save yourself.”

Effy insisted. “I enjoy knowing things. But more than that, I enjoy not knowing. I’ll be fine. I won’t be around forever anyway. Probably a shorter time than you think…”

She mumbled the last part while guzzling her gin and tonic, hiding her true intentions. But he knew what she was implying. In a dark and miserable empathy, he approved of it. He accepted it. This is why she was so fond of him. There was no judgment. No pleading out of ignorance. No guilt.

“Alright then, Effy. I believe that’s what you want. Here’s to a life of financial failure and societal mockery—cheers!”

They clunk their glasses once again, contented knowing their only reward in life being what they know. With this difficult topic removed, Effy became more playful.

“If you met God—assuming God exists—what would you ask him?”

Effy posed the question. She was curious to pick the brain of her preferred professor.

“Nothing. I don’t have anything to say to that asshole.”

Effy laughed, genuinely and sweetly. Professor had a smile, too, but it was hung-up, rather than natural.

“What would you ask, Effy?”

“Umm…” She did not know what to say.

She thought about all the possible question, subtracting cliché and obvious queries, configuring together a question of riddle and wit, almost as if she was trying to outsmart a genie rather than god.

After a minute, her Professor egged her on. “Come on, Effy, master philosopher. What are you going to ask?”

“Fuck, I don’t know! I can’t make my mind up!.”

“What kind of philosopher can’t make up their mind?” Professor retorted.

Effy, her nerves loose and whittling at the same time, realized it was not God she was trying to outwit, but her professor.

“Don’t all philosophers essentially ‘make up their minds’?” Effy answered.

Her Professor laughed, the first time he had truly done it sincerely, his usual morbidity bled away in a hurdle of humor. After that, there was no more conversation of philosophy. They spoke about music, art, politics, lost loves, new crushes, poor students and even poorer convictions.

Every time a holiday song appeared in the bar, they would boo at unseen speakers. They rejoiced in each other’s company, without feeling remorse or contempt about separating themselves from their family. They were two cynical and jaded ones, spit upon by life and society, crushed by their knowledge of knowledge, their ability to know better than to think they know anything at all. But then, they must have known that?

They applauded senseless argument and welcomed paradox. They so desperately wanted someone to come by and tell them both they were wrong just so they could agree with it. So they could watch the look of this someone’s face as they muddled an appropriate response to a situation where they were expecting conflict. Effy and Professor both got a wicked joy from defusing the fuse, then igniting it again.

None of that ever happened.

There was no ‘someone’. Effy and Professor intoxicated themselves with toxic liquids and pessimism. By a certain point, Effy was joyously presenting her scars of previous pains as trophies inscribed in her flesh.

“These are my trophy scars,” she proudly proclaimed.

Professor examined them, not an ounce of antipathy visible in his eyes. “Those are dandy but check this ugliness out.”

He pulled his collared shirt away from his neck, revealing a line of bundled flesh across it. Effy gasped. For all her seditious attitude, she still expressed sympathy when she witnessed this.

“Is it from your first time or the second?” she asked.

“How did you know it was two times?”

Effy’s face bellied-up in blush, revealing the only card she had to keep hidden. But Professor was amiable about it, smiling at her, saying it was alright, he knows people talk about him—oh, and by the way, it was both times.

“How about you?” Professor waved for a whiskey.

Effy nibbled on her lip, nervous. “Not yet—but someday soon.”

Suddenly, the scent of smoke.

By now, this linear assembly of people, seemed to have not grown nor wither at all. It was purgatorial—not enough people cared to wait in line to make it longer and yet the people who had been were too many people to be waiting behind in line.

Phonie puckered her lips, then muttered, “Asking questions is arbitrary—when I finally get in there, I’m just going to say, ‘fuck off’ and leave.”

Hen did not appreciate the sentiment, but Effy mumbled a derisive amen and flicked her lighter. Another cigarette is just what she needed.

Hen peered down the street, catching no glimpse of fire, but a cauldron of black air. A sigh sung from her mouth, almost delicately, somewhat rhythmically remorseful. “Why do we have to suffer? Maybe I’ll ask that question.”

Effy sneered at her cigarette.

Man suffers only because he has to.

For all the bluster blowing from that building, Effy thought it bizarre she heard no screaming. No weeping. No torment. None of it. Either they were all dying in silence or Effy was blessed by deafness. Ambulances came and went, inspiring confidence in passersby, but no sirens, while Effy visualized a mental image of charred and scorched corpses stuffed in the back, with those alive churning out organs and blood and skin all over the walls and attendants, and the driver somehow must keep a straight face during all this agony and anguish. Ambulances must be a special kind of hell.

Damnation.

Lying is a sin. At least, Effy recalled it as such. She has had her share of spewing lies and fantasy. When her professor asked her what she wanted to do in life, she imagined she spun a sarcastic joke to him. Truth is, when he asked her this humiliating question, she did not say anything. Effy did not know what she wanted—she still doesn’t. Or she wants everything and anything and nothing. And how can you want that?

Salvation.

Not peace but peace of mind. As if that will ever happen...

Three things are necessary for the absolution of Man: man, men, and Man.

A hulking behemoth of ruby-scorched metal and lucid flash hunkered beside the sidewalk. Not just one either, but multiples, multiplying to a web, almost entrapping all the little flies within their line. Giant chimps in helmets and rubber gowns winded between them, passing out facemasks and cool air.

One of them glared at Effy as her cigarette twinkled beneath smoky sky. “Oh, you don’t know?” She snorted. “We’re all saved now!”

They moved on and so did the line, but Effy was still stuck, the glue of the past enveloping her prescient feet. Everybody else was coughing. Lungs weakening, sweet oxygen stiffened by putrid perfume, tasting like hollowed-out chocolate cooked in a kiva of dust.

“For your dissertation—can I steal a cigarette from you?” Professor asked, back outside the bar.

His breath, diluted by alcohol, lacked a visible exhaust in the frigid moon, instead appearing as normal, which is to say not appearing at all. Still, ice crept everywhere with snow trampling down. Effy stumbled with her carton, its riddling lid unsolvable and beyond her simple skills, confounding her for some time until she accidentally dropped it. With fragile cigarettes drenched in snow, Effy and Professor both cried out, searing the streetlights with their special brand of agnostic sorrow.

“To what God shall we pray?” Professor asked. “The only one that exists!”

He had a charming sort of laugh. It was mischievous but rare. And it involved only his head—his neck remained motionless. What meant most to Effy, however, was the way he looked directly in to her eyes when he did it, sharing and wanting.

Effy knew she probably should not have done what she did—oh, it must be holiday and reverence causing such moments to miraculously sprout into being. Or gin and beer. Both?

Effy thought about her apartment. Nobody was there. Nobody was coming over. Then she thought about friends and family and lovers and suddenly, there was a blank space in her mind where these sort of memories should be, proceeding to an epiphany of the kind only Christmas lights and child-prophets could make you feel.

Her face curdled. “Are we alone in this world?”

Professor shoveled her face from the pavement, coiling his arm around her shoulder, her cynical charm and laissez-faire attitude dissipated to unaffected fear, soon replaced by effectual sorrow.

“Maybe we are, but that’s what makes having each other so wonderful.”

Her tears sloshed down her cheeks. She smashed them in shame, mortified to show emotion, of all things, especially in front of her Professor and philosophical peer. She shook her head, calling herself a baby, a witless loser. Professor waved those aspersions aside, assuring her there was nothing wrong with feeling anything. Rationality is not the only trait that defines human; feelings were as important as rhetoric and logic. Because otherwise, what would we be? Empty machines?

It was placating then, but that shallow sentiment has since soured. Effy meditated on herself. Still empty. Still worthless. Still slithering through life like a worm wearing a corpse.

As affectionate as it was, reason has its regrets.

|III|

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be thinking it instead

Planets spinning while their moons loop around them, stars dancing in place, a constant array, unchanged for eons—thousands of years before, the same constellations hung in their window as in ours. Yet, we think of ours as being so much clearer.

There is no sky anymore. Just a cauldron of black. Some have given up hope and abandoned their gravities. We may move further than ever, but it is still in the same direction, a linear certitude reminding us how lesser our dimension truly is. Oh, there’s something: truth.

Hen has that look on her face again—she’s about to ask a hideously insipid question.

“What if it knows the future? Should I ask if I’ll ever find love? Or if I’ll be successful?”

It isn’t necessary to peer at Phonie because we know already she is going to say something scathing—probably without diverting attention from her precious electric-obelisk.

“It’s not a damn crystal-ball, Hen! God, you can be so obnoxious sometimes!”

When Hen is ashamed, her right arm grasps her left, curling inward, as if trying to make herself smaller, to minimize her disgrace to a reduced surface area. Guilt as gravity.

Not that she has ever done anything wrong. It is the way she does it—so vapid and cloying. A teenager intently acting like a child to appear more innocent and guileless, but they know what they did wrong. She should have learned by now, but perhaps she still behaves in this manner just to infuriate Phonie.

How close are they?

Smoke distorts the view, muddles distance. They must be closer, though, considering it has been hours, they must have gotten somewhere by now.

So it is almost a surprise when Effy sees the roped gates and hanging shrouds of an entrance, or what appears to be an entrance, and the line of people in front of her becomes black bound void. Behind it is the long dark outline of a building, or some supernal structure, holding this abyss contained within, the noise and smoke and pallor of this world seemingly dissipating around it. And it seems to have come out of nowhere, and as she looks around it, she cannot recall what building it is. Had they passed such a building to get here?

Suddenly, Effy’s chest is wringing. No question. No question. Shit, she hasn’t prepared a question yet. What has she been doing this whole damn time?

Phonie struts in front of them. “I’ll go first, it makes the most sense.”

Whatever, that gives Effy ample appendage to fumble something out of the nothingness of her mind. The doormen let Phonie in, their eyes hidden by sunglasses.

It was a surprising lack of security for something so monumental. When it had first arrived from space, the entire world was abrupt. Celebrations, curses, ceremonies. Pacts were forged or reinstated, alliances drawn, supply lines slowed then sped up. For a second, and it was only a second, it seemed as if the human race had finally come to know peace. But eventually the novelty wore off. Countries went back to their places. All the wars and famines and economies continued on. Still, though, it was a nice thing to have, and a nice post on social media to say you had gone and been, spoken to it directly, asked it the one question it promised all people.

That, of course, was the bargain. Every individual was permitted one question to ask. That was it. Many kept secret what they asked. Others bragged. It was like a bunch of apes stuck in this contest of proving shadows to one another.

Effy sighs. She still can’t think of what to ask. And isn’t this just her whole fucking problem?

What would her Professor have asked? Probably nothing. He was too cynical for that. What was Phonie’s question then? Something about how to be more popular, how to gain more followers, how to reap clout? Perhaps the perfect makeup routine? Then there was Hen, oh, cute little Hen, her mind like a roving egg—what could she possibly ask? Does God exist? Is evolution real? What really came first—the chicken or the egg?

Does it even matter? Effy cannot figure this out. She is still going to be Effy after this. She is not going to be richer nor wiser nor prettier. Even if this thing can divine the secret of immortality to her, is Effy capable of executing it? Does she want to live forever? Does she want to see so many winters come to pass, so many summers come to harvest, so much time that time becomes little, to the point that an hour feels like a breath, a year like a splash of water, and her whole life moving through chrysalis and entropy and regeneration so many times that it starts to feel like dressing herself—like life is just another thing to do in the morning before going out.

Funny then that Effy sees time pass her by here. Suddenly, Hen is gone. Effy assumes she’s gone in. Now she’s next in line. The sun is setting while smoke raises it up. The fire is dying down but maybe that’s wishful thinking.

“You’re next,” one of the guards say. “Hey—are you there?”

Effy snaps back. She apologizes. They open the entrance and wave her through. Finally, she’s here. The proverbial line has ended.

As she walks, she feels numb. Almost like she’s forgotten how to walk. She stumbles a bit, smiles, tries to seem as normal as possible out of fear they may consider her out of order and remove her when she’s come so close. But the guards aren’t even paying attention, and Effy is going through a hallway as freely and dumbly as she pleases.

No furniture. No carpet. There are lanterns hanging on the wall, glowing crimson and emerald. A door is at the end—the only door there, with a knob of ebon glass, etched in nothing, with no discernible material on the door itself, leaving wonder if it is made of wood or plastic or whatever carbon manifest it is.

Effy approaches. She holds up her hand but pauses—no, Effy, this is it. You cannot stop now. You need to quit being a frightened little bitch about this. Your whole life you’ve been running—sorry, that’s cliché. My whole life I have been ignoring this thing inside me. I must ask it, ask anything, anything at all. This is it…

Effy opens the door and enters.

In the room is a translucent chair and nothing else. Its back is facing the door, so Effy assumes it’s meant for her. As soon as she sits, the Inquisitor appears.

“Hello to you,” the Inquisitor says.

Its voice is low, cold, like a wind, without any of the attachments or forces. A wind that does not blow or move or carry, but still heard and felt.

Effy shivers, then says hello. She’s nervous yet relieved that the Inquisitor looks like nothing. She was expecting some monstrous alien spectacle, but instead they appear as a spectral shroud, no face or body visible, just waves of a shadow.

“Your name is Effy?” the Inquisitor asks.

“Yes. Do you, uh—do you have name?” Effy replies.

“I have told the people to call me Inquisitor. It is simpler that way. I understand names are a significant symbolic gesture, so I appease that. I am the symbol. You are the guest.”

“Yes, a guest. Thank you for having me.”

Effy bites her lip. She doesn’t want to say the wrong thing. The Inquisitor doesn’t seem bothered by small talk.

“How is your day, Effy?” the Inquisitor asks.

“Oh,” Effy says, surprised. “It’s not bad. A bit rough outside and boring to wait, but—uh, how is your day?”

“Same as every day. And if that day should be different, I shall cease to be useful.”

Effy nods. The two of them stare at each other for a few moments. Are they intrigued? Curious? What is going through either mind at this moment? Certainly questions, or maybe not, something more like feeding, eating the air around each other, placing the crumbs of their lives in comparison to try and make sense of a thing that no longer exists. How else can you assess the past? Whether it be a day or a lifetime.

Effy decides to break the silence, “You’re a lot taller than I thought you’d be.”

The Inquisitor laughs, then says, “Only because you are sitting. So, Effy, as I told everyone else—you can ask me one question and only one, and I shall answer it. I have traversed this universe an infinite times over, seen all things and dreamt all others. I know all that is and all that will ever be. What is your question?”

Effy ponders and ponders. Her thoughts dangle on the edge of her mind, forever out of reach, threatening to cut imaginary flesh and rend her incompletely torn. By now, she should have thought of something. After how many years—after how many books? After all that she had been through and said and done and been and—yet things cannot come together. Yet thoughts are random and distant and inconclusive. Has she failed? Has an ideology never formed? Is hers a system that cannot function to finish even its most fundamental task?

That to have a mind is to think. And to think is to ask questions. To wonder and expand beyond the shroud of primal shadows. Overcoming that abyss and casting ignorant nature to ruin beneath you.

But Effy has never thought about it. All the great questions have been asked. Some of them answered. And here, Effy realizes, is the problem—she doesn’t actually care. Even if the Inquisitor can explain to her the meaning of life, it wouldn’t make her life any more meaningful. She’d still be Effy. She’d still be smoking cigarettes on the sidewalk with her friends. They’d still be Phonie and Hen. Phonie would still be self-absorbed while Hen would remain as delicately obtuse as ever. And, so too, would Effy still be lingering, thinking about her Professor, who is now dead and may never know the meaning of it.

She’s shaking, trying to hide it. But eventually, she decides to tell the truth.

“I can’t make up my mind,” Effy rubs her head in frustration. “What question should I ask you?”

“Ask me why you cannot make up your mind.”

“Why can’t I make up my mind?”

“To answer that, you will have to get back in line and ask again.”

Effy scoffs, then protests, “That’s not an answer.”

“The rules are you only get to ask one question. If you want another, you will have to wait in line again. Please make way for the next guest.”

“No, that’s fucked! You lied. You’re supposed to answer my question. Give me the goddamn truth for once—”

The Inquisitor interrupts her, “I promise you, Effy, I already did.”

And with that, the Inquisitor vanishes.

All that remains is Effy, sitting in a chair, tears going down her cheeks. All that stumbling and stewing and studying, gone to waste in an effusive moment, remaining only an effigy of reason, this thinker’s chair, emptying and lonely.

After a few minutes she sighs, then gets up and leaves the way she came.

All that is real is ridiculous, and all that is ridiculous is real.

Outside Effy returns, the night taking on its appearances while the smoke dissipates. No sirens blare, no people argue. Just the languishing line and its many disciples, coated in dusk, streetlight smog, storefronts gazing in neon eyes and appetites shadowing a taste.

In the distance, Effy thinks she sees snow falling, but that wouldn’t be right. She looks for Phonie and Hen but they’re nowhere to be found—until they find her, through the phone, a message explaining they had gone for bubble tea down the street. They didn’t wait for her.

Effy sighs. She wanders along the sidewalk, not sure where to go. No sense waiting for them or waiting for the line again. Just no sense, nonsense, all senses deprived and spread thin across void until they are no longer alive, no longer being at all.

Effy pinches her skin, trying to stretch it that way, spread it out. But it just hurts, snaps back to place. Then she laughs, truly and genuinely, like she hasn’t in such a long time, no longer waiting for a joke, no longer searching for the punchline. Because it has to be that way, that cycle of nil, that constant draining of things into other things, until the original is indistinguishable from its copy.

“You will accept my submission!”

Mario shouted then flouted rational reason, hurling his keyboard through the window, where it flew like a bird somewhere out-of-season.

Miranda knocked, concerned. She was always concerned. Even though there was no reason for concern—she need not be concerned. What a bother it was all this concern she would impose on others. It almost reached the point where it itself was concerning.

“Is everything alright?” she peeked around the corner of the door to the room, an uninvited guest, but it was her lighthouse, and it was her light keeping Mario awake in the hours of the night most unfathomably dark.

“Is everything matter?” Mario replied, imbued with a sardonic rage almost contradictory.

He thought he was being awfully clever, and his temper dissipated into conceited amusement, sitting there on his chair grinning like an ape who just stole the zookeeper’s keys. Little good that does when he still doesn’t know how to work a lock. But Mario was content here, being king of caged apes, stupid and prideful.

“I suppose it is—except when it’s not. They’ve observed non-matter and dark-matter and striped-matter and plaid-matter and… I could go on?

Miranda spoke as tenderly moist as an angel in a bathhouse, soft and steamy. She crossed her arms and Mario knew it was over. He stopped smiling and itched his scaly arms, glaring at the floor, defeated.

Miranda offered him a cup of tea, but he sorely refused. “I have better things to do with my time—much like the matter you so cherish to speak of!”

Mario groaned, climbing out the window without an umbrella, even though it was raining proportions of poseidon outside, and Miranda just sighed. She’d make the tea anyway, for when he returned dampened and damned.

But Mario strolled to the precipice of the shore, swirling night wrapped around him. A full-moon hung in intrepid suicide, illuminating the world with its despair. Craggy rocks slashed foamy beasts in half as the sea coughed wave after wave in perpetual sickness. Mario felt nauseous watching this process. He stared ahead, over the gloomy void of ocean, unto the horizon where the shadowed sky, prickling in glowy stars, caressed the feverishly churning blades of distant sea, melting into each other to a singular point of blurred paint.

This was an illusion, however, for Mario knew the sea was eternal. There was no such physical instance where the sky and the sea actually met. Nor did they blend together like cheap paints.

“Why can I not be accepted?” Mario mused. But nobody and nothing had any sort of answer.

In reluctance, he tilted his view, looking back in lucid nostalgia at the lighthouse, whose height splintered into the clouds. A hazy ray spiraled around it, like some sort of radiant and formless dragon. Then Mario returned to the eternal sea, perplexed and perspired, ready to dive in and let the guts of winding ocean organs digest him.

It was then he considered the inconsiderable: maybe he was unsubmittable. Maybe he was a boring clod with overlong phrases and ridiculously unrealistic descriptors. Maybe his language was unrestrained and quirkily variant for the sake of being quirkily variant. Maybe he had no sense of narrative form or empathetic characterization. Maybe he was pretentious to even think so, or too unaffected to care. Maybe his stories were not meaningful enough, indulging in nihilist literary-noodling, curving in angles unrecognizable for purposes unentertaining and quite turgid.

Oh, but then he remembered Miranda and the cup of tea and the way she folded her arms like an origami volcano—oh, what the fuck is this?

I couldn’t think of the next thing to write because I realized I wrote myself into a corner—one of those irredeemable corners, where even mice scuttle around and spiders snicker at any fool who tries to set themselves there.

I snarled at my screen and snapped the keyboard from its electric veins—

Okay, I brought it back and reconnected it to its life-juice. But the furious discontentment remains as fury-fused as ever, and Miranda still hasn’t finished the tea. Is there even tea? I’m beginning to suspect not. Wait—

Is there even a Miranda?

No, that was a trick. I wouldn’t be so daft to twist a story in such a banal method. No, really, Mario decides it was just the airs of the night or something in the humors of the evening or something like that. He returns to the lighthouse. Miranda greets him with a fresh-towel and tenderizing honey-hibiscus tea.

Mario apologizes. Miranda smirks, then grips him in a sympathetic embrace, whispering to his lonely ear, “I know it doesn’t matter much to you. But I would accept you no matter who you come as and how you be.”

Then she kisses his cheek and they make themselves comfortable by the eternal fire.

Dido stands tall as trees on a plastic beach. Shoreline reversing—waves wider but less thick. A final bastion of being from a thing trying its best to not die. So—so they call it the earth.

Sticky sand, melting rocks, sweet gales. Winds of sugar and smoke, honied and horny, tasty and reviling. From somewhere, glass is air, water is volcanic, and towers of trash break the difference between these caustic currents.

Tornadoes pillage the seaside, aeolian lancers tending to garden on a continuous cleft they are often told they cannot have, but teenage anxiety is whirling in all of them, and these once tiny spirals of sound are now giants of gull, ripping their way to self-actualized maturity.

Hurricanes sprout up from the inland, furious trees of spinning roots and thunderous leaf—they are all at once appearing as a squalid squid, a haze of ink and blue, tentacles pulling over hill and mountain, as if the terrain was aquatic, and things terrene were marine.

Look to the feast of cities dotting across the coastline, eating up its soiled foundations, turning under itself like self-inflicted fellatio! Erosion as erotic. See the blob of nations expanding in heat, like a pregnant belly or fresh-cooked jell-o. Cuisine as causation.

Source?

Dido wonders—oh, human beings, why do you always wonder?

If answers were carbon your atmosphere would be drowning in wisdom-dioxide; a smog of pure truth suffocating your ignorant sensibilities. If habit was not so stubborn your societies may have grown out of this phase, and come to appreciate the limitations of being around each other.

Viruses manifest—but a good species spreads.

A genetic jam over telluric crust, making so many copied bubbles of flavor just waiting to be snapped by those cosmic turtles of lore, those ones which are infinite with maws of definity. All the way down they go, much like human hubris and its ability to hide in so many unconscious folds.

Dido, in her tyrian jersey, vibrant and voluminous, examines the little remains of sky as they are buried beneath fragrant fog. Poisonous, yet pomegranate-scented, as to make one forget they are being poisoned with each breath.

Look! she ignites a cigarette, her best impression of cool in these hot times, then she wades into the shallows, shins kicking around relics of recycling, corpses of consumerism. Behind her are the palaces of silicon saints, and she wants them to observe her backside like some old mammalian code of dominate body language—a back that strikes the marrow to pieces without ever wasting its spine.

“Katie, you know—you’re a warm girl and it’s a cold world.” She knows. How could she not? And what could she do? Nothing about anything. Things don’t mean anything these days anyway. Extinction is everywhere. All around her things are dying. “There aren’t as many birds now as when I was younger,” her father says. But his brain is demented, as they say, forgetting what it means and pretending it has seen things that have never been. She cries and he asks her why and she says it’s because of the birds. “They’ll come back,” he assures her. “Just a long vacation. Some people just want to stay on vacation forever.” People are not birds—nor the other way around. Birds have wings, they have ascent, ascending upward, all into those sticky skies where they cling to air, wind like glue, feathers like rubber, contested yet continuous in their glide. Whenever she gets down like this, there is a clay-caricature of a woolly mammoth she keeps hidden in her room—a great, big, haired beast her father has never heard of or seen, but what she assures him is a giant prize. Her little mastodon lacks the titan bones and husk of herculean-hair that a real one possesses, for it is clay—hard-fired to resemble glass, fakely presumptuous about never going extinct. Everything is hotter like a kiln, the world bubbling and hardening in its brute heat. So where is the glow? Where is the warmth? Everywhere she goes, a procession of funeral strings could be playing, and its dirge would not be misplaced. Everyone seems so sad—or drained, exhausted, maybe some even outraged. Society fluctuates in its mania and depression, never deciding if it wants to be in sorrow or in rage. Katie looks at people now and she can’t figure out their age, as young and young no more grow closer in appearance—stress is an incredible enforcer of time’s damage. Even the animals seem lethargic and careless. Deer wandering the streets; birds performing suicidal acrobatics against windows. Are they killing themselves by accident or do they know something we don’t know—or we refuse to acknowledge? Every species follows two paths: evolution or extinction. No organism alive or deceased has ever gotten the better of this system, playing its binary game to every final point and last move, never able to quite escape either oblivion or distortion. “We were once fish,” her father explains, staring away from her. “Then we got perverted in to monkeys. I don’t blame nature.” Katie nods while she cuts his nails, which have grown in to glaring grossness. She blames nature for everything. Her father would take care of himself if not for nature. He would not be weak and resigned. He would remember her name, at least. Just her name. Her father coughs, then continues, “I blame time. The King known as Time, he just wasn’t impressed by Nature’s trick. ‘Oh, you made these cells in to fish? Boring. What else can you do?’ So poor Nature, she had no choice but to keep going. Trick after trick. Trying to entertain this useless pervert.” Her father was a paleontologist. His condition broke his mind, however, his catalogue of skeletons and species disappearing like the ink of pages washed away by rain. What good was he then? What could he do then? If Katie had the money, he would have a caretaker. Someone completely committed to his every need, every habit relating to health and hygiene and happiness which he cannot conduct himself. But here she is, staring at his grimy fingers, hurtful reminders of how far from grace they both have fallen. It reminds her of landfills, those gigantic gorges of garbage, with volcanoes of trash, exploding sludge and fetid mist. Sunken suburbs and anorexic polar bears. Infested forests collapsing in waves of amber carcasses, more mud than tree now. Of bodies, decomposed but still moving, undead, unrecognizable—another species of sapiens, paler and gorier, leprotic cannibals and pariahs. But she loves her father. And she still remembers when she was an adolescent specimen, taking in every experience coming her way, joyfully following her father along on trips to dig-sites and museums, begging him to let her ride on a mammoth of her own. For whatever reason, her child-self could never understand what “extinct” truly meant. But her father gave in to her demands regardless, and he crafted her a woolly mammoth from prehistoric clay, and she has kept this relic her entire life. “Life as we know it,” her father declares. “Is all just a big impersonation.” All the world is fading away. Degradation. Degeneration. Damnation. Things don’t grow the same anymore. Katie is absolute about this. Her father is not speaking nonsense—there were more birds when he was young. There was more world… Anyways. Let them down easy, they always say. They must not have ever been down there then. In the abyss. In the deep. In the crushing darkness of worthlessness, denial, discontentment. Though Katie, to her character’s credit, has skin like a shell. She was not disturbed or disappointed. Just left out there, so to speak, feeling separate, like a ghost, where if she touched a wall she would faze through and totally vanish. Walls, walls, walls. Prison. Is there any difference? The evolutionary perspective claims it is “shelter”. But isn’t that the point of deception? To make you feel safe and secure enough to accept it, let it in, so it can poison you from the inside-out. Like a parasite. Don’t ever say nature doesn’t have a strategy. It’s just one designed against you. “The world is ending, and I can’t even get a fucking story published,” Katie lamented to her dearest friend once. “This is what—my eleventh rejection? By now, you think someone would just accept me out of mercy!” Katie did not sip but chugged her surly stout, nearly choking, its moldy molasses pouring down her throat like thick refuse. She wasn’t even fond of stouts, but they were strong enough to overlook bitter taste for rolling contentedness. And it did roll, suddenly, like an intoxicated train over Katie and she sucked in all the balminess from it, regenerated. “It’s not your fault,” her friend insisted. “Nobody cares about stuff like that anymore.” Katie nodded, stirring in her seat, but she vehemently opposed such a notion. She cared. And besides, she realizes it all already. Nobody writes anymore because nobody reads anymore. So why do entities of “publishing” still exist? Why are trees and forests and Gaia all ruined and raped for the sake of sporting thin slices of paper bound together, pages containing the same recycled sentiments and feelings already expressed a timeless many times over—sometimes in superior style and fashion—that people never look at anyway, propping these tomes of torn-tree on shelves of wracked-wood, these totems of destroyed life glazed over in tales of artificial life? Yet, Katie sticks to them, her leech-teeth searching for a hole of praise she can gnaw her way in through—if only to justify her own horrible and outdated life decisions. If only to save her father from thinking his daughter is more important than she really is. “Every fossil is a story,” he’d often say. “Left behind, in spite of all the damage; Life desperately trying to express itself despite Time’s objections.” And what is yeast? A limerick? Katie considered this as her belly fizzed, careful as it digested the drunken cream unexpectedly dropped upon it. Then she examined her empty glass, curved and sensuous, internally caked in leftover foam and spit. Humans and their utensils. Where are the gorilla beer glasses? The fish forks? Swan spoons? Wallaby wallpapers and barracuda bidets? Nonsense. We degrade the earth. We steal from it, all its gems and materials, to build ourselves butter-knives and cereal-bowls. As if touching our food with our hands is totally vile, despite how intimate it is to tongue and chew and swallow it all the same. But Gaia forbid, a single finger even grazes our food and suddenly it is tainted, infused with disease and perversion. This glass, in Katie’s hands, is an idol of immolation—the self-destruction of nature’s finest in pursuits of nature’s pettiest. Drink deep, it’s just the taste—and it won’t be here for you someday. Anyways. Why do so many people want to be writers these days? We float and electrify across the timeline, masters of plastics and robotics and quantum romance—so, why do we still think primitive language can impress? Why do we still think we have things to say? Is it not “the end of history” as some have proclaimed? Or was history only a short recourse humanity offered itself to convince itself it had any sense of processional meaning? Like we weren’t just repeating ourselves for repetition’s sake—we have been learning something this whole time, all the wars and disasters and conflicts, all for a lesson we needed to understand. And the moral of the story is…? It is that Katie, we know, is a sweet girl, but the world is cruel and indifferent. She feels so embarrassed about her profession’s plight she doesn’t even admit to people she is a writer. It makes her feel like she’s raising the dead—like she is some kind of necromancer, casting her spells of spellings, invoking her magic words of poeticism, trying to revive a revenant significance once meant across the world, all levels of society, now buried and rotted. Books used to mean something. They once had ideas and feelings in them that no other thing could express. The capability of reading and writing letters once broke society, shattered divisions, united visionaries, and liberated mankind from its ignorant, reptilian darkness. Now they are props. Picturesque decorations for pictures on profiles of people who never read a book but prefer themselves to be pretty and perceptive. Phooey. Insert something about elitism and cultural classism, and the dearth of intellectualism, and the fading ubiquity of meaningful connection and communication in exchange for consumerist delight and ego-sucking personas. Do these people ever look at themselves in a mirror? Redact the last question because it is so obviously rhetorical. Of course, all this is disdain. And as much as Katie complains about everything, raging against the machinations of society and its ever-evolving competition to outwit itself, she never once blamed herself for favoring dead arts, even if in the subconscious sea of her mind, the thought swims to remind her. Stomp it down, drown it out. Damn useless thing. Anyways. “Penguins are dying,” Katie’s friend announces. “It’s not just polar bears anymore but the penguins too!” Katie nods, walking along the sidewalk, intermittently avoiding people, objects, structures. No signs or forced-trees or pedestrians—she just wants a straight, clear path, and she doesn’t care how much careless temper she has to put into each and every one of her steps; so long as she never interacts with anything, she can pretend it isn’t there. Everything is dying, Katie thinks. But she doesn’t dare say it aloud for her friend is worried enough. “Cute little penguins, with their little furry flippers and little waddling walks, dropping dead!” her friend wails on. Why do people always refer to “cute” things as “little”? Are humans so insecure they must ensure nothing is bigger than them? Even things they enjoy, and which bring them happiness? Katie can’t say. She is still upset from earlier, another rejection reducing her self-esteem to rubble. Maybe there were too many others—too much competition. But then this must mean she didn’t stand out as special, that she can’t compete. Which means she would be inferior to others. She might as well just die then. In such an environment, you must always compete. Resources—including attention and printing space—are finite. With so many trying to win them, only the strongest and best prevail, while all others are either diminished to bottom-feeding or rendered extinct. The traits of Katie must not be good ones, or ones necessary to survive and prosper in the current environment, so Katie wonders why she still does it, when she knows she is lesser and weak. She should just let herself go extinct for the betterment of the whole. If only her sentences had been sharper, her metaphors more muscular, characters clearer, thoughts thicker, plots more prepared and propellant—maybe she would have survived, no matter the lash of scorn or climate of critique hurled her way by the harsh habitat she so dearly desired to dominate. If only she had been someone else besides Katie. Oh, poor Katie. Still woozy from her brew, she fails to notice a rising situation of noise, of shrieks and shouts, nearing. Until she stumbles into someone, their body shocking hers, and in a finale of all her angst and fears and failures, she screams at the person to watch where they are going. But much to her astonishment, the person ignores her. They are focused ahead, their indignation channeling along a long crowd of angry sound. Katie perks up. They are gathered in the streets and sidewalks and skies, hundreds of them, all their voices dinning to a chorus of rage and retribution, breaking out into discordant threats here and there, but all integrated in to their hatred of a common enemy. Without stopping, Katie enters them, weaving through the shaking bodies, wanting desperately to stop herself, but unable to control her drunk feet, which have riled themselves into a stupor-march. A primal fear overtakes her. There are signs and pickets, dressed in scornful slogans and homicidal images. Some people hide their faces in black hoods and masks, some of them carrying unmarked canisters and bats. They are yelling and crying, piercing the clouds with their fists, a fog of flares and sweat embattling their battalion. Nobody is happy to be here. Katie angles her arms anxiously, trying to keep away from people thrashing about violently, and stop herself from being crushed by the waves of people, quaking, moving like magma on their way, swaying between whims of rhythmic violence and uncoordinated compulsion. Helpless echoes of shattering glass and crunching metal almost become overwhelmed by the thunder of voices, fighting each other for control of the audio, striking Katie’s ears in dissonant shock. Her vision blurs, the temperatures of so many people vaporizing, bundles of unknown smoke and flashes from flares and sulfurous sticks. She weeps, her optics quivering in a heat they didn’t even know could exist. From her view, faint figures of chaotic color and fury spike themselves across the scene. Her brain responds to the action, nearly engorging her heart on the blood it was pushing in to it. All her senses heighten, causing smells of smoke and swells of shrieking to be that much more debilitating; her touch so sensitive she dreads collapsing should one of these bodies bounce into her.

“SAVE MOTHER EARTH!

LEAVE HER ALONE!

SAVE OUR PLANET!

LEAVE US ALONE!”

Held onto by a plastic pole, a recreated globe hovers above the crowd, which Katie recognizes to represent the Earth, but which someone has doused in gasoline, igniting it and bounding the whole world in flames. As she gazes at the emblazoned earth, hurtling above their heads like some sort of fiery god, descending to its death, a comet of destruction, she imagines what her father would think, if he could still think anything at all. He certainly would approve of the message, but being in the midst of their wrath, would he wonder if they had it all wrong? As they destroyed the monuments of plastic and steel which adorned our cities, crying havoc against their own kind, building replicas of earth from the very supplies it gives, then conflagrating their creations, a self-destructive sort of glory—if we’re going down, you’re coming with us. Katie, coughing, staggers against the impaling bodies. She is beaten in one direction, sideways, until she falls onto the pavement, her throat convulsing, still coughing incessantly. She should rise, but her chest is palpating, her throat trapped in its madness, her lungs seizing control of her whole body, insisting its concern is the most immediate. People charge forward, and Katie, on the ground, forcefully flails her body to avoid their hooves, maneuvering through the stampede with the frantic grace of a split-snake, parts nearly coiling to death. Katie can’t breathe. She continues coughing, her entire upper-torso vibrating in agonizing puffs, until she reaches for the frame of a nearby doorway, pulling herself in, crawling out from the crowd. There she is, in some unknown entrance, the languid lava of protest curdling passed her, slow and sinister, like a bunch of cold atoms going against their internal rules to bound into each other in violent velocity, without their cold vessel ever increasing in speed. Yet still it is hot. Katie doesn’t take any energy to consider the paradox of physics this protest puts on; instead, she ceases and gasps and waits until her air can revive, then she lay there, panting, scared, fallen. Just like an animal dying of starvation.

“DEATH TO CORPORATE WASTE!

YOUR POLLUTION IS OUR EXTINCTION!

DEATH TO THE HUMAN RACE!

YOUR POLLUTION IS YOUR EXTINCTION!”

The appearance of my love is a star. Exploding in the dark. Until only shadowed dust remains.

My love is higher. Too high to see.

I inhale you—deep and longing. The longing is too much. It is causing me apart. There are so many spikes within my heart. I cannot stand when we belong to the same shard—it paralyzes me.

My love is deep. So deep it hurts.

All the peaks, all the stars, all the realms. From everything above to everything below. Side to side. Within and without. Together and apart. The troubles of gods; the qualms of aliens. From the linguistics of force and quantity, to the language of demise and infinity. The inevitable.

My love is higher than yours. You will see.

I see you. Out in that world of yours. Spinning around the questions they ask—what makes me think you would listen to me? On your toes, you’re looking every direction but mine. Yet, in your eyes I notice the tilting reflection of a loneliness beyond. You want to let someone in; but you do not know who. It could be me—why do I think it would be me?

It will never be me.

My love adores you. But it mourns me.

A glass tongue shatters on my lips, cutting corners from my mouth, blood and bits. Whenever I try to speak to you, my voice is taken away it seems. In canyons far away—where vultures screech more sensibly than me. When you come near, my orbit goes awry. Planets fall from every side, ricocheting off the stars. How could such little things be so hard? I should not care, but then again, I should not be anywhere near your space. I do not want to ruin your heaven.

I ruin everything.

My love idolizes you. But it defeats me.

In the hallowed shallows of shadowed halls, a place of holiness and above, I build your face. In shiny stone and jewels plucked from the cores of earth, I wrap the elements to develop the pose of which all shall know you. I recreate the delicate points of your shape, from the tender tips of your swallowing cheeks, to the nose that twinkles when you grin. The articulate deepness of your eyes, lashes so perfectly astride, with irises the color of martian skies. But it is not tender enough; it lacks the glow. All it takes is a single crack and my idol collapses into a puddle of ash and smoke.

I cannot make anything worth anything.

My love worships you. But it breaks me.

Sometimes you are so clear to me. A transparent vision of the other side of infinity. I can see within your translucent frame, your gnashing tubes and webbed veins. Your organs doused in fluid, constricting and expanding to a rhythm without a metronome. Squirting tiny specks of heat and joy, the body slurps it up and more—everything grows. Everything knows where it goes. Where do I belong in there? I peek into the dungeons of heart—peeling back the gates, guts spewing out. The leftover remains of forgotten hopes and dreams. On the floor beneath the room where I thought I should be, I do not see anything. It is all empty. All belongs to you.

I belong to nothing.

My love deserves you. But I do not deserve love.

Do you even notice me? When you are caught in my gaze, do you know how you make me feel? The sight of you makes my body constrict and swallow itself. I can’t stay stable around you. My heart implodes and the organs in my cavities push so much they rip and tear and swell into blistered faces, spewing spit and blood in vain desperation to capture just a single breath. But there is no breath. Not when you are around. My throat enflames. My head dizzies. My whole vision blurs. I am so dizzy, I will trip over every thought that passes, or every moment that continues, until you are gone and away. Even then, you remain stuck in my imagination, as if you were really there, the mere appearance of you smearing my stability in to a paralytic seizure. I cannot imagine talking to you. If I did, what would I say? I might say nothing. Or I might say some garbled shrieking that is only reminiscent of speaking in the sense that my lips are physically mobile, but the sounds are discordant dystopia. I might spit on you. Snot might drip out from my nose. Saliva might leak on the side of my lip. I get so dry around you. The air is suffused by your heat—your conflagrating attractiveness. And you are attractive. Not just because I love you, but you are attractive to everyone else I imagine. All to the detriment of my pursuit.

I do not think I will ever catch you.

My love devours you. But it cripples me.

I am afraid of losing you to the coyotes and vultures. To the scavengers with their shallow skin and nervous appetite. They do not desire you for you—not for your person, your being, your affectation, your composite of atoms that makes you up, your inimitable quantum frame that is the same lustrous beauty no matter where in the universe you are, or where in time you go, or whatever the circumstances of which you should be put somewhere, for it does not matter, you are the same glorious deity in all dimensions—they desire to consume your flesh and lick your bones and leave the remnants to dissolve away in the desert of abandonment. They want to make a feast of you—I want to make a symphony. A rising tide of lushness, of melody, curving into bends, loops of technical marvel, as if imitating the structural mathematics of physical forces, gravity converted to lucid harmonies, plucked strings, choirs of molten voices creating suns as they sing, shining in darkness like luminous eyes on a lustrid spider. If you have ever seen the interloping folds of time and space, dimension within dimension within dimension, the endless quantum coils that form the appearance of reality; if you have ever seen reality cast into cascades, across voids and fades, the fractal grid of physical existence, the architecture of the universe—if you have ever seen these things, then you know what exists in your eyes. And these scavengers would pick their teeth with every line and vector and vortex, digest these cosmicalities into excrement, then move on to their next lesser victim. They do not distinguish between gods and goats—they eat them all with the same hollow satisfaction, the same meaningless hunger. That is not love—so why do they even try? And I am afraid you may be cornered by them. Surrounded by their neurotic hunger. I fear such a scenario. It is impossible to know if you would choose me over them. I keep waiting for a sign from you, but I do not receive anything. You seem elated to speak to the wolves. You smile and twirl for them while continuing to ignore me. My conducting hand falls, my orchestra becomes silent. I see now there will be no crescendo of forces. No passionate physics to be recreated. No design to be revealed. How long can I watch you share attention with wolves before I surrender the hunt?

I do not have the strength to fight them.

My love is a spectator sport.

If only you acknowledged me. Or maybe you do. It is difficult to discern the implications of human ceremony. The forced and cyclical habits we conform to—we obey. Such as three times now, you may have grinned at me. In a passing glance. But is it politeness? I bet you smile at everyone. Strangers. Stalkers. Savages. Are you just being polite? When the scavengers approach you, you smile and laugh with them—or is it at them? Perhaps you’re only amusing them? But do you want me to approach you? I must admit, I am a perishable coward. I do not know if I have the spine to go to you and say to you these things, thoughts, emotions, opinions—to share my portion of the human condition with yours, hoping the two shall intertwine and form the veritable identity of humanity, and then we will send it across the stars through the edgeless scapes of discovery. Ascension. Transcendence. Or maybe just hello. I will disappoint you. I will not provide anything of value to you. I am just an admirer. A voyeur. An astrologist peering through a telescope into the soul, viewing clusters of miraculous being and divine shores, constellations of heavens, never being able to touch these celestial beaches—never able to hold in ny hands the purest sand, fine and crystalline, slipping through my fingers with the smoothness of hours through a day. I will never know. And I, too, will never know what it is to touch your love and have it touch me. You are smoldering. If we could dance, move in sequence and symmetry, we would undo the heavens above and hells below, and all earths and suns between, the whole portrait of the cosmos spiraling out in tangent volts; the wheel of time, spinning, spinning, spinning, stopped. And when we finally stop, our feet stomped, our chests heaving, panting, ceasing—the universe will have its heat death, and we will have our love. It will keep us together when everything else is vanishing. If only you knew how we could dance. And be in love. Be with me. I would invent languages for you. New ways of describing your beauty. I would devise equations of you. To explain the material of your beauty. There would be new elements, new forces, new modes of consciousness; I would remake the entire vale of knowledge, reshape it in your form, redo the universe as if it only belonged to you—if it does not already. It seems so. So unreal. It will never be. Because you will never love me. Why should you? I am less than dust. I am not even the shadows on the edge of your light. I am worse. I am sinking in the abyss. Deeper and deeper into insignificant existence. Until even the tiniest particles laugh at me. The only grace I shall save is the memory of you—and I will make each remembrance feel like an eternity.

So goes my grace.

My love is doubtful. But not of you.

Shall I compare you to the mysteries of the universe? You are sound. Bending. Curving. Waning. Constantly dying. Perpetually fading. The way every note exists for only as long as it is a note, then it disappears into the ether. A fiber in a patchwork behemoth. You are vibration. Curling. Waving. Bounding. Leaping to and fro, across spatial scenes, across fields of intrepid distance, across intimate bounds, the close stitches in a patchwork atom, or as far out as the untouchable edges of opposite galaxies, spanning across every conceivable possibility and every possible conception, more infinite than infinite itself—you are vibrating through everything. Everything pulls in and pushes out with you. Your every breath is a pulse of life, of the universe, of soul—you are the elysian ring, repeating circles throughout the graves of gods, of creators and destroyers, of whatever it was before it all began and whatever it will be after it is all over. In the blank disposition, in the realm of nothingness, in the prison of that eternal white slate, there is no feeling or thinking or seeing—but you will hear a gulp inside you, one last pulse and then you are gone forever. And not just gone, but entirely away. Totally without being. Being anything or anywhere. No anytime. And yet, there you are, the sound of whatever it is keeping this whole thing going. I do not believe in a god. But I do believe in you and your music, which is the only reason any of this exists in the first place. To give meaning to music. To conceive of what music is. So that when I hear you, I will know I am being blessed by the voice of the void. You have been given life for this sole purpose. And now you have achieved it. You have come full-circle. And you—cosmic siren you are—could lead me into a black hole and I would not care or be concerned. I would cease for you. If you asked me to. You should ask me. But I cannot make demands of you. I want to share with you. Share a meal. Share a planet. Share a lifetime. Share a secret—the most internal, deep, profoundly affecting secret. I want to be a part of you. Be your eyes. Be your lips. Be your hair. Your fingernails—I really don’t care. Any piece or fragment of you is enough because you are so imbued with wonder and perfection, even a speck of crud behind your ears is worth spending an endless vacation being there. Any part of you is a home for me.

What do you hear when you listen to yourself?

My love is deafening.

You are light. Crippling light. Blinding. Burning. Fearsome. A cold burst, slashing onto the spectrum of sight, icy and lucid. Lines of you everywhere. Spotted snowflakes of shimmers, slicing their way through every side and corner. Shadows move from space, shoved from their home by wherever the randomness of your luminosity chooses to go. A spectral plume. You are magma within a darkened cave, your shine molten and makeshift. But powerful. Ancient. Dissolving. Melting. You are the first light of life and the new light after death. You are golden steam. You are glimmering breeze. You are an eruption of colors and cadences. Your frequency is lashing and lucid. All darkness is scorned by you. You are ethereal as you pass through barriers and spaces, expanding across the whole universe effortlessly, traveling at a speed all your own, harnessing the hue of energy and reflecting your shade off every conceivable object that has been conceived. And in the future, too, you extend, dangling your dazzling rays in flirtatious dimensions, peeking between past and present, between what is and what is not, between the ceaseless born and dying, through the holes of time and out the other side in unfazed ferocity, still gleaming and glowing like the heart of Zeus. Rip it out and eat it. Your light—you are light—tints the universe in your palette, rather playfully, as if you aren’t even trying. It just emanates from you so naturally, like the universe was created for the precise purpose of providing you a canvas upon which to bleed your light. And just like light, you are there one moment, but the next flash —

Gone. Never around my ugly shadow.

My love is blinding.

I’m higher than space now. Floating up there, in an above beyond scope, a place so high it is bending from frame and folding into itself like a galaxy collapsing. So far from fire I can see no smoke; so far from light I can see no shadow. There is only me, I, myself—whatever you prefer, though I know you prefer nothing, absolutely nothing, because if you had a preference I wouldn’t be here. I’d be with you. Or I wouldn’t be alone at least. I’d have you here with me. We could float together, hand in hand, drifting along our own daydream. We could be the clouds in each other’s skies, the petals on each other’s flowers, the mountains on each other’s planets. All of that as a simple, imaginary space to us, up here, so high we are ascension, we are seraph in sex and sound and soul. We are angels, full of magnificent wings, lustrous and lucent and feathery like the lashes of a star. We may never come down—we should never come down. We should be architecture. Things should be built within us and around us. Our design should evoke an era, the era of us, that the time we spend together should startle the ages, shall pulse throughout the momentum of the universe, so potent until we strike heat death itself, twisting our bone flame blade through void heart and bleed another big bang god to crawl from its remains and vomit the universe once more. That we should be eldritch and eternal and elegiac. That we should be more ancient than spirits and gases and thoughts. O, let us be that dust between webs, that hanging and ethereal phantom of passages and passing time and passed through worlds. Divine us, and we shall be the matter, energy, force. O—so many things we could be! But you have forsaken us. I am so high now I cannot even know you. I’ve lost touch with body, form. I—is it still an I?—higher than god now. I can see the celestial throne. There is a kingdom beneath me, that of a heaven, of one and many elysian places, draped in vines that never cease growing, and clouds of gold that cry a crystal rain so pure it shatters on the air. Angels sing to me, a whole choir of eyes and rings, emitting in their voices a ballad of two lovers split apart and the universe that forms in the space between them. There is all the passion, longing, desire, heartbreak, pain, envy, hatred, suffering—all of it of all the mortal and non-mortal things, echoing to me. I can feel the vibration of every atom; the breath of every living thing. Flesh is like clay in my hands. I turn water to blood and blood to life. Flowers bloom. Babes are born. But I can take them, just as easily, and turn them to rot. I can peel the skin by a whisper, and deprive the seas with a flick. I can fell galaxies at will, crumble them into less than ash, roll up the world into a ball of decay, crush it no different than crushing a blade of grass. Let me burn this garden in glorious flames until all that is left is my own sadistic joy. Destroy everything, laughing, pleasuring, rending it by claws unimaginable, tearing in directions of nightmarish geometry that your brain would coagulate itself just trying to hold a concept of. End, let it be, end to all things—until I am alone. Alone. High I have gone—so high I am truly alone. Nothing else is near me. Not even myself. And as I fade, I believe I see a memory of you.

O, let it be that I see you as the last thing!