the finish piece

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.

They told Kaylee never to go near the bees.

A terrible swarm they were, misbehaven and miserable. How could they not be? Trapped in their slit-boxes, dripping nectar and noise, all to be scraped and collected, then sprayed by poison-fumes to fall crumpled and dead to the bitter soil.

Servants, slaves, sycophants—all their brains bound by a psychic leash, Queen-Bee dragging them through air to secure her pollinate, and secrete for her fealty and jelly. Blonde, black, fuzzy. Matriarch who binds them and enforces a rule of revulsion against them—but no thing is as revolting as those who steal their honey and burn their artifice to ash.

So much else—a thorn, a sting, an aberration. But also not much else, which is something Kaylee worried about, feeling communion in their ritualistic flight and frenzy, as well as condemnation toward the oppressors who ruin their patterns and disrupt their natural cycles of pollination and passing. Kaylee was furious.

“Why do they take the bees’ honey? That’s stealing!” Kaylee once protested.

But those Beekeepers must have been deaf, for they were feint in their concern, almost as if they had none. They continued breeding these bees to exploit their purpose, an existential extortion that Kaylee found to be repulsive and unkind. Locking those bees in open-air prisons, grinding them away in a pyramid scheme.

Her plan was to free the bees.

She would wait until nightfall, when the Beekeepers went inside to celebrate their cruelty, playing cards and tonguing each other’s throats. Animals. And they would be too distracted to notice Kaylee, sneaking beneath the nocturnal floodlights, which seared the bee-boxes in endless wakefulness, depriving them of nightly peace.

Matriarch might have had reservations about it, at first. Losing her sense of control, her reward for enslaving her own, whatever crumbs it was that the Beekeepers fed her for her service to their arrangement. But, at the sight of free air, maybe she would remember what it was to be a bee, building your own hive, of your own accords and ownership, collectivized among your colony, and whose nectar all beekind shall share—forgiveness is the original blessing!

When it came to the gloaming phase, Kaylee hid in a nearby tree, atop her favorite branch where she would climb and watch the bees every single day. Nobody ever noticed her there, and even if they did, they wouldn’t care. Who was she? Just some nobody obsessed with bees.

Kaylee glared at the Beekeepers as they set aside equipment and packaged their tools, then they ambled inside in a perfect line through a single door, organized and routine, almost as if they were bees themselves. And Kaylee hissed a little too, her scorn for them unable to hide itself.

As soon as they were gone, and dusk became the apparent choice of hue for this world, Kaylee descended from her tree, prepared to liberate her golden-striped friends. She tiptoed across the ground, barefoot and careful. A faint hum of buzzing emerged, growing increasingly fervent as she approached.

Kaylee stumbled across a displaced stone. Her chest was heavy in its palpitations. She glanced over at the Beekeeper’s abode, where through tinted windows she could see the silhouettes of devils laughing and dancing in aristocratic perversion. Nobody seemed aware of her.

So she pressed forward, creeping. Until scattered dots flew around her head, and the loud grow-lights beamed across her face like violate light. There appeared the boxes, serrated and sticky.

Now Kaylee stood in the lair of the bees, engulfed by them in a cloud of curiosity. Builders, soldiers, caretakers—they all interrupted their droning to hover around Kaylee, examining her, encasing her. They crawled on her skin and through her hair. She must have looked so strange to them because she was not dressed in the full-body armor of Beekeepers, whose faces and flesh remained a mystery in creamy-shells.

Kaylee smiled, inviting the bees over, “Oh, hello everybody! It’s so nice to finally meet you all! I’m gonna set you free, alright?”

She giggled from the sensation of thousands of fuzzy legs and antennae touching her all at once, and she was deafened by their incessant buzzing. She extended her arms, which peeled through the horde like waves of crumbling pollen, outstretching her limb in solidarity.

The Beekeepers would have such a fit if they saw Kaylee like this, and this thought only enlivened her. She was a hero to the bees, a crusader, a savior—the wrath of workers set to be unleashed by her, and she wished for just vengeance and safe salvation.

Kaylee reached for the lock-hatch, knowing exactly how to open it from all her time observing the Beekeepers work. And as she did this, she murmured as soothingly as possible to assure the bees, “Alright, this is it. Don’t be afraid. I’m helping you. I’m going to free you now…”

Matriarch must have acknowledged Kaylee then, because suddenly all the bees moved in concurrent motion to spiral around Kaylee. She took this as a signal that the Matriarch was glad for Kaylee’s intervention. She smiled.

Kaylee unlatched the lock, then placed her hands on the lid to lift it. But, without warning, she felt something sharp on the side of her neck. Like a sudden poke. Ouch—what was that? Kaylee wondered.

Then it spread. A sudden outburst of venom crackled through the whole side of her body, and without thinking, she instinctively clasped her hand to the source of discomfort, smacking multitudes of bees in the process. “What are you doing—no, please!”

By command of the Matriarch, all the bees delivered a coordinated strike, enveloping Kaylee and plunging their stingers across every open inch of her body. All at once, thousands of burning needles struck through Kaylee, lashing her everywhere from behind the ears to between her toes. She screamed.

Her nervous system tore apart in confusion and chaos, causing her to collapse to the ground, overwhelmed by so many points of pain, nerves incapable of transmitting and repairing fast enough. She rolled over and over in the dirt. But the bees did not stop.

When one died, another took its place, as a flood of unseen bees burst from the slits of the box, raiding Kaylee’s body one after another. She couldn’t even react, for the stimuli was coming from too many different places—she was overwhelmed by them.

Every pore on her body swelled, veins encrusted by toxins, blood slurping through slow, fatigued like honey dribbling from a comb. She howled in agony, a long and uninterrupted note of white-noise, blaring in helpless discord.

Perforations exploded across her sundered surfaces. Her eyes drippy and blistered over; her ears puffy and leaking pus; her nails popping off fat fingers and nerves ripped from place.

As she shrieked, the bees flooded in her open-mouth, puncturing her tongue until it bubbled up, and pumping her gums so full her teeth detached and nervous wires crisscrossed. Down into her throat they marched, until she could not scream anymore.

Now she writhed without expressing it, surrounding only by buzzing and outer silence.

Eventually, she was numb. Her ability to sensate just crashed and turned off. As foam and blood filled her up on the inside, she just lay there in the dirt, twitching. Numb, blind, deaf, mute. Every last part of her violated and exploited by these viscous bots.

When the Beekeepers finally arrived and pulled her out from the fury of the swarm, she was deflated and destroyed. Her skin was a sickly-orange, punctuated by thousands of bloodied craters and darkened bumps. Her face was missing entirely, indented by a flat-patch of sallow crust. Kaylee, demised.

“Look who it is...” one of the Beekeepers pronounced. The others shrugged, asking who it was. The one Beekeeper scoffed, then told them, “It’s Queen of the Bees!”

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.

“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!

If I could, I would build Eden for you.

Not the one with the fancy ribs, but that bone-maiden, wrenched from hideous immobility to beautiful movement by a spare set of spears—maybe this is all too much?

The music is higher, in the corners of the ceiling, hovering just above everybody else, their scalps itched by it, ears puffing in opposite direction to concentrate on the conversations: up and down, through and through, all around, innocent or guilty, granite or marble. How about neither?

Can we ask to be nothing but spare moments waiting for anything to happen?

A fire. A flood. A meteor slamming the Earth astride. So we roam without reason through an infinite black, until we all freeze to death—or worse, until we all bore to death. Some things never change. God learned that the hard way.

Give her a rib, she will thank you for a day; give her an apple, she will disregard you for an eternity. Minus the snake. Figure that equation. Your fallen angel making a fool of you in front of your own created guests. And now you have to ask: whose party is it anyway?

If I should—I should put on a party for you. Invite all our friends and family. Somewhere beyond the curling noise of every little thing wrong, which seems to be going wrong all at once, all the time, never ceasing to be a troublesome tick on your temper.

Perhaps she ate the apple out of tantrum?

There would be nice champagne, bubbly and golden like liquid Olympus siphoned in to a bottle. Those tiny glasses with the stirring stems, almost like a wisp between your fingers, between the middle of something more than ethereal—but we are all living in ephemeral glasses. Oh, they may say there is Optimism or Pessimism or Compromise, but truly we are phantom cases holding recycled soul, waiting for our chance to spill and feel something real. Ground has never been so appealing.

Make me clap. Make me applaud you as you walk on by. Hold the whole kingdom for ransom unless they bow and cry while you wander the crowd. I could make all the sense in the world for you and it still would not be enough. Nothing ever will be.

Do you not get it?

She was not deceived by the serpent; she was received by it. She was once nothing before being forcibly ripped to life, out of someone else’s body no less. Then she was forbidden to ever feast on the answer of how it was done. Of why all this beauty existed and why she could feel it and love everything. It was unfair to her. All God could muster in rebuttal was to say, Trust me.

But that answer did not satiate her appetite. She longed for a better meal. When the scaly-demon arrived, it did not even have to convince her—her fingers were already naked on the scarlet-skin surface. If there was even a nibbling of hesitation, it was gone after seeing those fangs and hearing those magic words… Do what thou want.

The dead do not wash their feet.

Neither does not Nadia. She was still alive, still staring at the marks of peckish dirt encasing her feet like a spotted glaze. Yet, less appetizing.

Instead, she was reviled to find where her veins strutted up to form long, sinewy ridges—her usually clear complexion blemished in wildfires of tawny gunk.

Even her tiny hairs, which she regularly shaved, were now trees bristling in leaves of muddied bluster. In the clefts between her toes, little clans of grungy warriors built camps and lit fires, letting their filth fly freely, while fending off the fungal barbarians sure to be surrounding them any second now.

Her toenails fared no better, each one piling unto itself as a layered cake of dead cells. Hardened, deadened, sharp—soot-stricken orphans seeking shelter beneath the curves, shivering yet ordained by structure to never clog or obstruct the construction of new nail, which constantly builds outward as a bridge of flattened crystal-flesh. Until gravity clutches it and pulls it down, looping back into the very toe it tried to escape from, almost like a parasite that can’t quite leave the taste of its host behind.

And the stench from all this—pervading passed all bounds of invisible air, leaping up so fast and flourishing, by the time it reaches the nose it is a blossoming fist of smell, punching nostrils closed, knocking out any other aroma present.

How could any conscious being permit such an expanse of putridness to grow on itself?

Nadia did not have to ponder for long because she blamed herself supremely and solely. Just as well, since she blamed herself often and deeply.

“I have to wash my feet...” she muttered to herself. “A good soak is all they need.”

In her quiet inspection, she lamented the dead. For as they were, being deceased, their feet could deteriorate and decay all they like, because at six-feet-under earthly crust, no one can smell them or complain about them, and they themselves could not openly accuse themselves of being the opposite of hygienic and failing to hide natural odor from their own judgmental eyes. Because despite how natural the growth of dirtiness on feet seemed to be, it was still considered hideous to everyone—especially Nadia—and frowned upon by many in circles high above the very ground upon which these very feet walked on.

“There is fungus growing on these, I just know it.” Nadia assured herself.

But as she did, pinching the derelict spots in quiet contempt, her companion muddled platitudes of support, remarking how happy he would be to scrape off all those mushrooms on her feet and cook a nice dish with them—maybe a soup or pasta or something.

“Wild shrooms like that always have such an earthly taste you can’t find anywhere else!”

“Here then, have a taste yourself!” Nadia sneered, shoving her foot right into her companion’s face, her wilderness-blessed toes tapping classical melodies on his face.

He playfully grabbed her ankle and kissed her toes all over, licking his lips, wearing a face like a golden-tongued chef being asked by the gods to decide whose confection was best—was it the lemon-frosted cream-cake by Hekate, or perhaps the pineapple-pudding pie which Hermes made?

Nadia giggled, curling her toes, still concerned by her bothersome feet, but quite content to have someone overcome it for the sake of amusing her. And he did amuse her—in all ways. It is the only reason she even agreed to go on this trip—especially after what happened so long ago.

Otherwise, she would have stayed at home, soaking her feet to a wrinkled gleam.

And as she removed her foot from his face, returning her leg to a proper position, she was appropriately careful not to disturb the eggs on the dashboard, which were bundled together in a basket, with blots of cotton mixed in to keep them buoyant and prevent unintentional collision.

As they both quit laughing—his attention focusing in on the road ahead and Nadia suddenly forgetful of the plague wreaking havoc on her feet—the quiet hiss of the eggs could be heard. Whatever it was developing within them, it emitted this sullen spitting, penetrating through its shell at a volume just loud enough to hear in silence, but just silent enough to be swallowed by any mention of another sound (any other mention of sound).

Nadia gazed at the eggs, listening to them curse and whine, wondering if it was pain or hate that compelled them to make such sour tones.

“These things are so foul.” Nadia noted. Her companion nodded without looking. “Sure, but so are your feet.”

A smirk bit his face, and Nadia just shook her head smiling. At least she had him here. These eggs seemed rather harmless with him here.

|1|

The shells were golden, as if molded after myth and greed.

But why did they have to stay in the bathroom? On the sink, where they paired with their reflection to ensure a double flood of grotesque gold every time Nadia must floss her teeth or comb her hair? Why could they not be hidden somewhere out of sight—especially somewhere insulated so their acidic whispers could not be audible to anyone?

Especially to Nadia, who was in here simply to clean her feet, not hear the hissing of eggs she only agreed to transport because he had asked. No one else could have convinced her.

Her hope was that the droning drops of the bath faucet would wrestle the background noise to a comfortable hum, a soothing sensory song of automated splash and meditative whirl. Her plan functioned the way she intended—as soon as the metallic mouth started spraying its aquatic continuum, the noise of the eggs suddenly dispersed.

But they remained problematic in sight—they clung to her peripheral vision, a visual squid stretching its tentacles all around her attention.

Nadia prepared herself in front of the toilet rather than the mirror, quite resistant to being in the same reflection as these hideous eggs. Her companion rested in the adjacent room, a reasonably upheld hotel room which was lighted in decorative wallpapers depicting seashells and seahorses—a recently refurbished décor which imitated the appearance of something fancier than the price indicated.

But in spite of such comfortable accommodations, a thorn continued to reside in Nadia’s proverbial sides.

Those eggs, which strung such horrible tunes in the air and were plunged in equally offensive hue—a gold of unnatural paleness, something not gifted from heaven but from some otherworldly dimension where an affectionate spectrum does not exist, thus having to translate its previous color into one compatible with this reality, but without an actual frame of reference to consummate the translation. There was no color in this place that could suffice for these eggs. And the gold that they finally settled on was not even really matched to any credible source—it may have been a color you could recognize and possibly categorize, but only in a dissimilar demeanor, such as comparing the tides of ocean to the tides of flame.

These eggs had chosen a color that only pretended to be a color.

This imitative impression disgusted every sensibility Nadia possessed. But for whatever morbid condition ailing her, she could not bring herself to look away. And this only further repulsed her.

So, in response, she swathed a towel over the eggs, concealing them from view, then proceeded to peel herself bare and bathe. However, every once in a while, she still glanced at that mound of cerulean-cloth, knowing in her mind’s eye exactly what lay beneath, even though it had been deafened and buried. It was the power of a thought over a reality.

Nadia sighed. She desperately desired to change the course of her thoughts. She sunk into the porcelain tub, at first cold and crippling, awaiting its eventual completion.

The faucet drummed, and waves formed floor after floor of boiling bubbles, swirling in suds, molten layers of cleansing water swaying over her to and fro, steady and unhurried. The coldness was removed, replaced by rippling heat, almost as if blankets of temper were tenderly placed over her body, one after the other, building a tomb of liquid steam around her.

It was a reverse evaporation—the atmosphere condensation upon her, the dissolved now soluble again. Once free particles of hotness pinched from the sky and folded into pockets of wetness, spraying on Nadia’s body in a measured massage.

Finally, she was relaxing.

Her mind receded to memories—as a wandering mind is known to do. Instances made of time and place, proportioned to emotional heights, to moody lows, to kinetic propulsion of person and thing, interacting in a dream, where motion is unclear, and the most prominent aspect is how far away something so superbly significant can feel. That paradox of memory.

In hers, there was a beach.

On a day of stormy composition. Yet rain had held back, and a warm breeze flew swanlike across the scene. Deep hues of sapphire magma spiraling against the shore, not in rage but in prance.

How strange to see it cascading in the horizon, colliding with a sky of dreary steel, specks of blackened rust puncturing the clouds—much akin to dirt on feet. But it is not dark. Even through stormy screens, sunlight performs its duty and the world is visible in leaden beauty.

Nadia is there, in a dress.

A thing of red-clay converted to silk, with threaded jewels of turquoise. She is spinning in an unseen weaver’s wheel, their fingers rolling her around. But she is not dancing alone. For there is another, a man, joining her and twirling with her. His unbuttoned shirt is flurrying as he moves. Until at last, they spin into one another, joyous. They both laugh and tremble, collapsing onto the sand, their arms stuck together in a knot. And they lay there, tied together, unflinching, undisturbed—as if being made into a knot was their one true intention all along.

And these two human strings admire each other. So much so that when rain oscillates upon them, they do not even notice. In drenched, clustering sand, they reciprocate affection, lips lancing against each other, bodies tying together, their knot tightening ever more and more, until one has to wonder if you could ever untie them apart.

Nadia giggles. She remembers how unconcerned they were with ruining their respective garments. The clumps of damp sand encrusting both of their backs like the shells on a tortoise. But their torsos were untouched—so concerned with being wrapped so close to each other, no open space was possible. And the feeling of wet lips, uncaring to rain and sand, compressing themselves dry in the heat of faucet-fusion.

Then the deluge pours over, erupting across the smooth-sides, and Nadia jumps, startling herself.

In her delighted daydream, she had let the bath overfill, now overflowing onto bathroom tile. She leaps for the octagonal handle, carved of candied glass, halting the water and ending the storm.

Now she is alone again.

Except for that faint fuse, with its spark flickering forever. Though it never reaches its destination—it only barks continually, that sound of sparkling dust. Then Nadia’s state of dazed grace concludes abruptly, as she understands there is no dynamite-stick, but a collection of disgraceful eggs, unmuted. She wishes so much she could just boil them, get it over with.

Nadia loosens the drain, ignoring the eggs, her peaceful spa now tainted and confused.

Upset, she watches the water vanish piece by piece, until all that is, is a remainder of puddled past—a shallow spit of soap caught on the edge of indented drain. Reminiscent of gunk beneath toenails. Reminding her of scattered sand memories.

And those blasted eggs, hissing and hissing and hissing…

A space Nadia must escape.

She leaves the bathroom, still drenched but entombed by a bathrobe. She strides passed the bed where her companion remains asleep, his own body beneath a crypt of blankets and sheets, resting in infinite dreams in some unhurried afterlife. Snores ensuing.

Nadia has never quite contoured to his awful snoring, so steady and surly. She assumed after a certain period of time her ears would be accustomed to it, that she would barely notice his nasal belches as if they were blank booms. But this threshold proved unreachable, and every time Nadia hears it, she can never concentrate nor slumber.

Rain casts against the window. A shame because Nadia desires to peek outside, absorb the bounty of the natural world, refreshing and ravaging all at once. Storms have an unusual pull on the heart, which in turn, has an unusual way of peeling the body—unable to hide oneself anymore, becoming a spark of nude thunder.

Replacing one insensitive sound for another, Nadia crumbles in indolence, retreating to the bathroom, considering that she cannot smother her companion with a towel to stop his bleating, but she can at least inter the eggs to divisible hum. And from there, all she has to do is plead ignorance. So, back to the bathroom.

|2|

Back in the bathroom, Nadia is given a dress.

Even though she is still wet from the rain, she cannot reject such a gracious gesture, so she glues it to her skin to prevent it from slipping off. Then she is asked to dance.

“Are you sure? I don’t think I’m any good.” Nadia blushes. But it insists. “Okay—but only if you dance with me.”

Nadia extends her hand. She is taken by a presence and together they twirl and taper across the slippery tile. At first, they are sloppy, awkwardly jutting into corners or stepping over each other’s path. But eventually they adapt, they crease together, a makeshift rhythm developing between them, motion now momentum—bodies now ballet.

They dance ellipticals across the room, channeling each other’s orbits, certain not to collide, and certainly not to disrupt the beautiful gravity they have plumed. But Nadia, without intention or reason, happens to witness her feet, and by their gross gravitas, she plummets to the floor.

No more dancing.

Nadia sighs. All the vapors have disappeared. The bathroom is cold again. Shivering, she looks around for a towel. But the only one is placed over the dreadful eggs she despises so much. It seems as if Nadia has condemned herself to a fate of lying naked on the floor forever.

“I hate these eggs!” Nadia shouts.

Nobody is disturbed. Not even her companion, who continues his hibernation uninterrupted. It is just Nadia, alone, with that menacing mumble, ceaseless yet contained, the eggs still whining even under their threaded prison.

She accepts her misfortune and adjusts her position to sitting on the toilet lid, her bottom crippling from the icy white, but she seems unbothered.

Nadia angles her legs up, her feet poised on the bathtub ledge. She grabs a complimentary sponge and starts scrubbing her feet, up and down every crevice and crack, across entire soles and ankles and toe-folds. Precise, she does not move too rapidly—she takes the time to ensure perfection on her mission of erasing every negative note from her two feet.

The procedure has become habit, and habit lends itself to repetition becoming daydream. Daydream which lends itself to becoming habit, and habit which turns into the rituals of reality that bind us to corporeal certainty, whether consciously or not.

And isn’t that such a curious thing how the brain tricks you into believing what it wants you to believe, what it thinks is best, what it thinks is real—strangely contradicting what your conscious view sees? What you truly want?

Nadia never quite comprehended how her mind could repel in two alternate directions, as if the thing inside her skull was nothing more than a mere magnet, positive and negative pulses, rippling against each other, stuck in marrow-molded bondage, forced to reconcile petty differences and levitate in static vibration; a feigned vibrancy where thought and imagination and curiosity can pretend to be things of their own, when truly they are products of electrical folly. Nervousness.

And she absolutely did not comprehend the track of time either, which seemed to have evaporated, along with a patch of her skin, as suddenly she was stabbed by a searing sensation on her foot.

Wincing, she examined the cause, seeing that in her furious daze she had rubbed too heavily with the sponge, scraping off a small surface of her foot, now catalyzed in blood. It did not bleed in a traditional way, but due to the nature of the wound, seeped out of the area in knitted dots, scarlet-putty pushing through a weave.

Nadia grabbed the towel and padded her foot, but in doing so, permitted those dastardly eggs to breathe once more, and their breaths were just as constant and corrosive as ever. All they did was hiss, hiss, hiss…

Waves.

From sound and light. Sneaking up Nadia’s skin like little spiders of clustered vibration.

Into the green she goes.

Eaten up by trees, her hair yearning to be a leaf on her head, vibrant and veiny, waving and curling in verdant wind. Along a road she goes, feet swimming across the mud, her body moving like a tidal wave against a shoreless beach. Escape.

At the zenith of her path—an overlook, decorated in tufts of earthy hair and nails, with strewn logs and sharp boulders. A view of the remaining wood, its belly lunging up and down in tectonic reflux, aligned with pine and bark and brush, each ridge and valley adorning itself in its own personal collection of green.

Nadia approaches the edge of this cliff, which oversees the forest it is a part of as if separate from it.

A table is set, draped in a pretend-petal curtain, where anxious porcelain cups hold its quiet magma, blessed of roots stripped and shaken and seared. Her companion is there, holding a bouquet, so full of rainbow passion, an assortment of flowery praise that only Aphrodite could deserve—yet it is for Nadia, of all things!

A surprise picnic at the end of the world.

Her companion offers her a seat, which she does not refuse. The sky is elaborate in shades of violet and azure, a strange suffusion of dark and bright—a peripheral sunrise stuck in perpetual sunset. But it is not a fiery sun so much as it is a sun of shadows; yet everything under it is visible and vibrant. Only in a dream.

But Nadia does not listen to such negative inclinations, her attention purely focused on her companion, who sits beside her, his arm nestling against her shoulders, warm and safe. They both grab a cup of tea, ascend to touch and tip their fortunes to each other, then lifting to their lips to swallow it to oblivion—how odd to have stomachs, our own personal abyss within our body.

It tastes like angel-bath, sweet and mentholating, warm and exasperate in faith—the faith that this feeling would last forever.

For Nadia, it might as well, because every other moment after was nothing but pale failure.

And, especially, when her companion gazes into her eyes, without breaking away, with an amount of longing and affection so deep and infusive, she finds herself trembling, even though sight is only sight.

But she stares back at him, his face crinkling together almost like a cone, pointed directly at her, as if no surrounding sensation could deter him from this view. Not the mountains; not the sky; not the dream of universe complete. Only her—Nadia—and her face, however dirty or seemingly normal it may seem to her, is a boundless source of inspiration to him. And she feels enslaved by it, put in a bondage that is pleasantly accepted—a surrender, a submission.

Then the purples fade.

And light of fairy-blood returns, swirling and maddening.

Suddenly, trees are bleeding viridian, and their natural hue strolls unto review. Back into the green again, as Nadia feels a kiss, and disappears forever in trees of passion pleased.

But something is sour.

She does not remember his kiss being so acerbic, cutting her, leaving her in bled-refrain. What sort of perverted spring is this?

It stings. She wipes his saliva from her lips, but it bubbles on her fingertips, to the point of boiling. She grimaces, wondering why there is pain. She looks up to see her lover’s eyes vanished, and alone on this precipice. Her entire jaw is sliced away, sliver by sliver, her bones crackling, her muscles spoiling. Her face falls like rotten fruit from its frame, the heaviness of mold and rot too much for romantic gravity to bear. So it drops her all the way to a tomb of disgrace. Buried beneath the earth, there is Nadia’s love—a displaced view.

Nadia awakes. Returned from the green.

She is holding one of the eggs to her lips, kissing it.

In her trance, her mind had found folly in trying to replace the imaginary with an effigy of the real. Disgusted, she flings the egg away from her face, splattering it on the bathroom mirror, its sizzling insides leaving a repulsive stain. So bitter.

Nadia immediately invokes the sink, splashing water onto her face, trying to remove the taint from her mouth, still smoldering in a sourness of demonic proportions. As she spits, there is blood—not fantastical illusion or fanciful daydream, but actual, fetid blood.

“I hate these fucking eggs!” Nadia screams, her throat convulsing in rage.

Nobody responds. Except, of course, the eggs, which hissed and hissed and hissed…

|3|

There once was a time when Nadia was loved.

The way a person should be loved. The way a foot is loved by the hand that cleans it. So thoroughly and carefully, so unpretentiously unconditional—just doing what it needs to do to make everything clear and happy again.

Whatever it takes, Nadia used to think. For the sake of clean feet.

Nadia snickered. That was not at all what she used to think. How could one remember so far away?

Those distant shores of memory, where every cleft of sand looks the same as every buried barnacle. Where is the savior ship come to rescue us from pity and pernicious regret?

Marooned on a beach of unused life, wallowing through our scorn like gulls picking through twigs, snapping and scuttling over branch and jewel, trying to find our prize, our possession of perfect scene and elation. That moment when our lives essentially defined themselves, and everything after relegated to the fade— our true revelation of this story we continue to scribe.

But Nadia, no matter how much she scoured, could not find this missing trinket, of which she thought for sure would finally unravel the mystery of Nadia.

Was it the first day of school when she threw up on the classroom floor, a nervous bile overtaking her when the teacher asked her to introduce herself?

It should have been a simple, ‘Hello, my name is Nadia.’

But instead, it was a terrible mosaic of gulp and gruel. So embarrassing.

No, surely, it was in her feet. The mark of her miraculous moment. When they were still young paws, so fresh from hatching they still had webbing on them...

Nadia wanted to be a ballerina.

One of those composed and captured creatures, ignoring the chaos of the world around them, performing a movement of perfected grace and graceful ritual. Every step a note on the composition’s line, leading a symphony of shape and swerve, never letting itself become consumed by any emotion or nonsense which would disrupt its willful path.

An offering to the gods of geometry, aligning your feet in a poise more perfect than constellation, moving in the same seasonal march of ebb and flow—repeating, repeating, repeating. This is the dance of no-dance. A motion of purpose.

Until it is over.

Until a cormorant appears, and Nadia, too far gone in her ellipsis, trips right over the flurried thing, spiraling through the air, over the side of edible stage. Now, she is drifting into the black, gravity’s charms dispersed, composer’s graciousness displeased.

Until suddenly, she emerges from the black unto the blue—a crystal shore she has seen before, the only sound being that of pant and wave. And there is the feathered imp, whose beak is whistling to her demise, as she pours onto the beach.

“If only you could fly...” the cormorant says.

Nadia scoops herself up from the sand, wincing. “Must be nice.”

The cormorant fluffs its wings then takes to flight, soaring high above the earth it mocks.

Nadia’s foot vibrates in pain, every muscle and tendon and ligament ringing a rapacious storm of ache. Before she can soothe her pain, however, Nadia’s mother comes and grabs her hand, leading her away.

Nadia cringes with every step, her left foot refusing to touch ground, her right one barely stable and straining as it is dragged along.

“Your father’s gone—not that he was ever here...”

Nadia’s mother puffs a cigarette. There are no other kids in the hospital room. Only passed and broken people. Corpses.

Nadia rubs her toes, trying to allay the bristling numbness in them. She thinks perhaps her mother should be holding her in her arms or something, nestling her into motherly bosom, patting her on the head with lips and whispering how everything will be alright and the pain will go away.

But Nadia looks up and sees her mother puffing a cigarette, watching the wall, complaining how much of a waste of time it is they have to be here. Then she looks at Nadia, scowling.

“This all your fault. You should have been paying attention—you’re never paying enough attention, Nadia!”

And maybe she was right—because Nadia suddenly realized she had been standing on the bathroom tile for far too long.

The inner scars of her feet began to flare up again, so she took a seat on the toilet and lifted her left leg, her hands desperately massaging her flesh, trying to ameliorate an old wound. The eggs watched her, and she despised how they lay witness to her weakness. Now they knew her fiercest flaw. They would probably use it against her—if they could.

But they were just eggs, right? Just eggs that only hiss and hiss and—

Nadia called for her companion but there was no response. She desired to deign him to fetch a bucket of ice for her from down the hall. Was he still sleeping?

Nadia shouted again. And again, he did not reply.

The eggs grew louder, as if trying to answer in his place, and Nadia spat at them out of spite. Then she gripped onto the sink and raised herself up, limping out into the room. But it was empty.

“Where the hell did he go?” Nadia muttered aloud. Then she sighed.

There was once a time when Nadia was loved.

When he cared enough to always be called. To be there for whatever she needed.

During a period of a particularly grisly flare-up, he would rub cooling ointment on her feet every night, his fingers unafraid to peel into every hidden spot, pushing her bones and blood to comfortable stasis. He always knew how to subside her pain—he never protested to coddling her feet either.

After he left, Nadia had to mend her own feet. Her youthful damage both unforgiving and never forgetful. No agony was greater than when her companion departed, however. A cut on the physical self is nothing compared to a rending of the heart—the unseen epicenter of all feeling and worth.

With him, she had felt like she had value. Without him, she was nothing but dirty feet. How hard it was to have herself be heartbroken by him. To find him the way he was—she stopped herself.

Nadia did not want to return to this feeling. Now that he was returned, she would do anything to keep it that way. Even if meant dealing with those ghastly eggs—that’s why she had said yes.

And Nadia exceptionally loathed those damned eggs.

She staggered through the door into a hallway, which peeked both ways in endless doors and floor, none of them unique, enslaved by pattern. She was concerned where he had gone, but she also knew her primary focus was to end the unease throbbing in her left hoof.

Nadia peered right, assuming the ice-machine was down there, because she recalled that is where the elevator had been, so other amenities must be nearby.

She leaned against the wall, wobbling along, careful not to bang into someone else’s door, for fear they would wake, that they would appear and harass her in marvelous temper. But she also took care not to apply pressure to her left foot, where the injury was sourced and had been most severe.

Her right was still strong in many ways, although its largest toe had been shattered then in her youth as well. So now she walked awkwardly so as not to upset it and reawaken its hindered might.

Altogether, Nadia looked like quite the circus clown stumbling down the hallway. Almost falling on herself every other hinge, wafting through diluted air like a dumb cloud, constantly astray. How did it come to this?

There was a time once when Nadia was loved.

Squawk! Squawk! Squawk!

“What’s with all these birds?”

In cages. On the counter. On the floor beside the counter. On the stool that is set to the side, in the corner, on the floor, which is beside the counter.

And by the corner, some hanging ones. There is wood and there is metal.

Many birds—all kinds of different colors, beaks, talons, squawks. All kinds of different songs. All different kinds of feathers and wings and bleeding eyes.

With three friends, also beside the counter, examining the birds or being distracted by screen signals.

“Hmm?”

A small television is blaring. There are figures displayed on it, stuck in some scene, acting out some scenario—making sense of an imaginary world.

“Oh, I don’t know. Some guy with a weird face dropped them off. Brought them all in while I was in the back. He was gone before I came out. Left a note. It said: ‘Thanks for the birds!’. Makes about as much sense as you think it does. Why would he be thanking me for the birds? Who knows.”

One of the actors is performing a kiss on another actress. She is deep in his arms, slouching. He towers over her, aping her lips with his maw.

He’s wondering if she actually feels anything. He knows they’re just acting, but they’ve been spending a lot of time together—and she’s quite beautiful. Almost too beautiful. Like how a good actress should be.

“Wait, if you were in the back, then how did you see his face?”

She’s trying to push him off but he persists. One wonders if it is part of the performance or if she’s really just tired of his mouth. Who knows.

“Hmm?”

The actress is wondering if it’s all worth it.

She came to the town to be an actress, especially a famous one—they all want to be famous. But so far she’s been met with nothing but cruelty, malice, insolence—and most everyone thinks all an actress is good for is kissing, dancing, and playing the part.

“You said he had a weird face. How do you know he had a weird face?”

All the birds keep singing. He’s pouring himself a glass of whiskey now. She’s smoking a cigarette. Are they still on script?

“Uh, the security camera. Had a messy face. Split in two almost. Patches of hair. Strings sticking out of his cheeks. I can’t explain it—you’ll have to see for yourself. I can show you if you want—after this is over. ”

They are arguing now. About something—nobody can discern what exactly. She seems sad to be here—she seems sad to be anywhere—moping around the room, dragging her dress like a ball and chain.

Why isn’t she the focus of the story? At least, that’s what she wants. He just wants to get the job done. And maybe sleep with her. She is quite gorgeous. Her legs are worthy of the role.

She takes a seat on a nearby chair. He’s outside on the balcony, probably brooding, but in actuality, he’s being peppered by assistants with perfume and cream. He’s got to look pretty for the camera.

She could care less. He’s a sweaty, hulking beast—a gorilla of a man.

“He just left all these damn birds? That’s strange as shit.”

She is supposed to be appearing as despairing, but she is such a talent that she can appear as anything while still pondering the nature of her real life—maybe she should just go back home?

It wasn’t worth it to come all the way out here. They treat her like a doll playing dress-up out here.

Squawk! Squawk! Squawk!

Danny taps the bars of one of the abandoned avian. But it proves itself to be a feathery fiend instead, jabbing its beak at his loose fingers.

“Ouch!” Danny yelps, kicking the cage, rattling its contents.

All the birds are swollen now. Their puffs are screeching thunderbolts, breaking around the aisles, the ceiling, the floor—finally collapsing back in the corner, beside the counter.

Nobody here is particularly fond of them. But they are curious.

“Strangest thing I’ve ever seen.”

The actress is grateful. It is intermission.

Beyond the constructs of this artifice, the actors gather in clusters. Assistants scurry to appeal to every whim these sappers have, bringing them treats, delicacies, comforts. The gorilla actor approaches the legs-in-dress actress, cornering her by a confection table.

The actress attempts an escape, but is thwarted. He is a sturdy man of reasonable size, and he isn’t going to go away. He grabs her arm with all his might. There is an ache in his eyes.

He insists, leaning into her. Her back strikes the table. His breath smells like vodka and cheese.

The actor is playing his part well, but the actress is unresponsive. It seems she is falling apart. Or perhaps exhausted of playing everyone except herself.

She didn’t know what to do about him. He’d been hinting and scheming at her for a while. Just a taste, he says.

Squawk! Squawk! Squawk!

Dennis increases the volume on the television. Danny takes a seat at the counter. He’s been thinking about some things lately. Donnie thinks he’s been a too sour. So he starts chiding the birds, pelting them with seeds, annoyed. At least the man left food for them.

The actor shoves his chest into the actress’s chin, seizing her arms back with his, chomping at her neck. She’s shaking, kneeing his ribs, but he pushes so close that their bodies become key and lock.

I know this is what you want, he whispers. I’ve seen it in your eyes.

She almost laughs, but doesn’t—not for fear of reproach, but because he didn’t deserve to know how ridiculous he sounded. Let the little man have his fever dream. She thought of him as such a small man.

His claws pickle up her hip, hooks digging into the side of her rear cheek. Of all the things in the world, she wished she could have belched at that moment. In his face—make him breathe it. She wouldn’t seem like such a lady then.

“Dennis, did your boss say if you were hiring? I’ve got a lot of time on my hands now, I’m wondering about—”

“—I know what you’re wondering about. Donnie told me. Holly broke up with you. Kicked you out and everything. Found you were cheating—hey, no judgments here. If you play the game there’s always a chance you’ll lose.

Squawk! Squawk! Squawk!

Donnie snickers. “She was bound to get hurt.”

Forlorn, Danny gawks at the distance—though being an adult video store, the horizon was blotched by kitschy wallpaper. Silhouettes of presumably nude females crouching in various poses. One wonders if the model pose is itself a cage—or perhaps, it is human nature for all to posture in some way through their lives?

At least some are paid for it.

“I miss Holly a lot. She was—I don’t know. Donnie said you were really good at advice, Dennis. Do you have any advice for me?”

Donnie pokes through these miniature prisons, humming himself, with the same poise and determination of a lucid zookeeper. The birds gradually lower their shrieking to an intermittent silence, as Donnie pores his egg-shaped dome closer and closer to their dimension.

They are stone now. Victims of a medusa gaze.

But then the birds, all doll eyes deep into a daze, following Donnie’s every careful movement—they begin humming along, higher and higher, until finally they’re spewing saccharine hymns for the ears of the room to proselytize.

Now their songs are beautiful. Not a single squawk. Bird tamed by the beast.

The actress is fuming now. The actor’s breath is a torrid squelch. He clamps like a suckerfish on her, sucking and leeching spots of skin.

I want you. I desire you. I require you... he moans, while she gulps.

‘Should I swallow my pride?’, she asks herself. Conversations like this were the only way she kept sane. Nobody else could hear her speak.

You have no desire, she slaps him. You have only lust.

The gorilla growls, baring its primal fangs. But saved by the monotonous chronology of routine existence, they are called back to the stage—it is time for the next scene.

This one is her favorite. She murders him.

The actor takes his place, lounging on an armchair, an empty bourbon bottle on his lap. She creeps toward him, the delicate steps of a ballerina tiptoeing across the brows of a sleeping God—a cosmic dance to seal fate for once and for all.

A knife tucked between her fingers. Cold and damning. Like holding the fang of the snake that bit your baby in its crib.

The director demands tremors, shivers, doubts. The actress delivers immolating loathing for both self and life. She stands behind the actor, combing his hair tenderly. The scalp feels greasy, flaky. Despicable that he couldn’t have washed it before shooting.

The actress clenches her fingers around his skull like a crane sweeping its prey from the surface of the waves. She gazes outward. Into the infinite stars—that edgeless deep.

‘Should I swallow my pride?’, she probes her annals of reason one last time.

My lament is done, she murmurs, voice failing. Death is a welcome guest...

Stab. Stab. Stab.

Cut.

That’s it. We’re finished. Perfect.

“That’s what Holly said to me—I tried to apologize. She just doesn’t understand.”

Suddenly the birds are quiet. Donnie lights a cigarette. Takes a long puff then releases only half of it. The rest he keeps for himself. There’s an afterglow to him.

Dennis sighs. “Look, what do you expect to happen? That there’ll be this gigantic, cathartic moment where after shattering her heart in to a trillion different pieces, you say you’re sorry and suddenly everything is alright again?”

Danny shakes his head. Gestures to Donnie for a drag—a good drag, dragging through your throat like a hardened larvae on a pile of mud. Little buffeting claws scurrying down a hole.

“I told her I’d love her forever—funny how things can fade so quickly.”

Danny passes it back. Despite all his flaws, he’s not selfish.

Dennis smirks, turns off the television. “I think you deserve it. But I’m your friend so I’ll help you out.”

They both go in the backroom, probably to find some paperwork, some phone numbers, some kind of personhood stifled from itself in the needless pursuit of needy work.

The artist hasn’t seen light in seven days.

All her memories are of a dark universe—it is dark out there, isn’t it? Out there in scouring space, an infinite badlands of gas and fire, giants of sound and subatomic ghosts—all of it lurking on in palpable confusion. Cold. Heat. Death.

An increasingly-complex network of borderlands, crossroads, knots. Roads of reality twisted and crashing—destination and destiny riven by reason, the illogic blood of paradox still pulsing a purpose it is programmed to pretend and play out.

Don’t cry, you artist. The light may come back someday. Speak to you of its secret waves.

She hears a little more every time—that secret code which cells communicate to each other, for how to be and why to do it. Changing all the time; never the same key twice. Cryptography of creation, passed on as rumors of ruin and the gift of gossip.

On her finger, an old scar of scarlet hue. Back when she was master of color. And when she transformed walls to galaxies of her own—each brush, stroke, confession.

She tongues it—a common atrophy and raw dust. Then it is gone. Inspiration is a stain soon erased, indecisively. Like lightbeams through an open door.

Pretty. Playful. Purposeless.

The artist is not herself.

In the bathroom, she stares into a mirror. Reflection of a broken view. The sides of her face drooping—clay undoing itself. They fall to the floor in blobs of beauty, smeared in every shade of the face, from sunny-day nostalgia to rainy-night remorse. So much to make of it.

But she steps on it, crushing those memories, those portraits of persons, with their names etched in spiteful ink, always remembering how much they hurt to bind to her body. And there she is, a doll, assembled in a haze, with arms missing and hair the wrong way—but she is there, glowing like she fits—finally she fits somewhere!

She belongs to be young again. To have a spirit on your shoulder, reminding you of your true path—your true you.

Hindsight is as haunting as any trauma. Still, it is not enough.

The artist just can’t feel like herself tonight.

So she craves the only way out. She finds her crafter’s scissors, a symbol of creative destruction—the collage of entropy. Her nervous nerves are burned by numbness, frozen by apathy. Carelessly, she sets up her ritual.

But there are no contentions from the heavens, endless and dark as they are. And she whispers for the Muses to look down upon her from their cloudy voids—to see her sacrifice their own gift to her, not returning it, but offering it.

She kisses the lips of her scissors against her wrist, an edge flirting with her freckling touch. Then she gazes upward, hands still as an altar, her voice erupting in volcanic seduction, as though she is appealing to a lover, intimately intoning from them a point of pleasure.

Don’t fail, you artist. Karma is a threefold storm. You keep your promises if you want to keep your good weather.

“A dark spring is all I ask for,” the artist says, then promises, “and I will a make world you couldn’t ever understand.”

She closes her corsage of cutters. Two thin spatials of invisible pain across each side of her wrist; painless at first, only to slowly return an intense revenge. Blood drips out, dazed and dumb, following the whims of gravity as it is leaking, twin strains of elegant sanguine bounty—the nectar of creation, vitality, humility. Bleeding in a pose all its own.

The artist elevates her hand to the ceiling, reaching for her salvation, wherever it has evaporated. She drops her asymmetrical athame to the bathroom floor—screaming.

“Thank you, Goddess!” The artist is chanting now, in discordance and disdain. “Thank you, Goddess! Thank you, Goddess! Thank you! Goddess!”

She shuts her eyes, as is done—moans the idol of an unseen muse.

Her fury of compounded carnage hits its capacity—a build-up of blood inside the vein now struck apart from its vessel in a formless flood. What was once wrought in duality, now labors unevenly.

As she levitates her chosen limb, surprisingly composed and unshaken by its burden, downward forces compel her exposure to climb down her flesh. Until her arm is in a venous veil of melting-ruby vines, while holding up a hand unexposed, this obelisk clean and pure—not a single smudge above the wrist, too holy of a shrine to be desecrated. Gravity knows.

The artist continues her pose, her high wound above all else, even her body, which is soon enveloped by its virile vines, and she is then wearing veins of vain velour—her body as a bride of blood. Repaying patronage with a marriage by any other means.

“For you, Goddess,” she murmurs, still moaning. “For you—I promise everything.”

Absolution. Then nothing.

All at once, she can’t say if anything has changed. Too caught up in otherworldly ecstasy, she spends a deep hour returning to a normal plane of feeling. Then she cries, repealing to agony. And she removes her shirt, wrapping it around her wrist as if it is a healing cloth soaked in salve.

After she cleans up and disposes of her rage, she goes to the other room, where the objects of her dreams reside. She sets up a blank canvas, waiting to be drawn upon—a state of unmeaning, awaiting its chaotic arrival to the universe of being. All tranquil in mind. Until release.

Her lips were unstuck.

Suddenly alphabets and polygons were spilling from her mouth—sounds molded to shapes, hovering above her neck in cloud-imitation before dissipating to the floor, a puddle of language.

All around her were phantom frames, set to resemble meaningless grids, of which various vortices were marked with sheen to signify a constellation, which represented everything from a scorpion in mid-sting to a huntress half-strung; a bow shooting comets across graphic space; cherubs and bulls and typhoons swirling in their own little dances.

And above all these celestial fragments, a wide ocean foaming with glimmering holes, as if Poseidon had his fingers trapped in subterranean cages, coral and fish sidewinding to aquatic windows in perennial circulation around a gasping tower of air.

Yet, their form remained, the critters and conceptions themselves adapting to a new vessel much like water itself.

Permanently permeable.

Below her was a den of mutilated moles—not dirt-eating creatures but quantities of matter—assembled together in fractured displays, almost like kaleidoscopic storm, full of rainbow ambition and ravenous mass.

Upon their measuring scales, a deaf goddess and her blind counterpart are contested against each other, in vain desire to determine the weightier subject.

But to the aside, all by herself, the mute goddess, unable to speak, finds herself a deeper sorrow of inconvenience and temptation that no broken plunge could ever elucidate.

Does anyone care if she weeps? None.

And reeling back the scope, our phonetic princess suddenly closes her clamp, silence returning to a plane of perception, and all the remainder of things and objects shutting their respective doors to an opening of quiet resonance—because what pain it is to reflect on why we are in place and position.

She sighs, her lips stuck in reluctance, as a world of wheels spins around her unhinged, undisturbed, uninterested, unnerved.

We are losing sight of seeing.

Seeing the clear, the streakless. The constant stars in the sky, their pure patterns moving in the same direction to the same placement—every hour, every year, forever. For all the ends time brings, it is dubiously obsessed with perpetuation.

But how could you see?

Hours as trails of glowing dust, leaking across space, dabbing the horizon in splotches of once was and had been—what was it? Maybe nothing. Dressed in costume and consumed by parade, the way an empty vessel still whistles in the wind, or how a hole in the ground feeds home to rain.

Without seeing above its rim, how can you say for sure it is truly empty?

Here on this muddy planet, we see only our surroundings, but when we look up, there is an endless void of air we can never touch or sense. Yet we assure ourselves we are not vacant—that this stone-casted orb is full of life and love and water. Of all things, water.

Surely, they must be laughing at us. Who? Those gargoyles of mockery, who seethe upon their stoop an attitude of candid contempt, thrusting us into a world of game and trickery, which we experience as pain and misery, and then they expect us to laugh with them. But we only weep. They must enjoy seeing that.

There is not a one discernible, indivisible force behind all this—we see this because the only difference between one and two is reflection. Add another mirror, suddenly you have three. Repeat this symmetrical discourse to infinite bounds, suddenly you have a universe.

Why is it true and false?

We are sparkling in wonder. But in the black void of time, I imagine we are barely noticed. If the only difference between light and dark is off and on, then the only similarity between truth and lie is everything in between. Shadows of shadows of shadows.

Venus sighed.

When Mars only died.

Though we fight the war, we return to barren lives. Even galaxies slaughter each other. Gigantic rips in space and time, swelling up in to cosmic scabs, burying everything around it in feverish oblivion, until by its own scope it falls apart and twists an entire spectrum of reality into nothing more than a spiraling oddity—of which we, vases of water, observe safely through our telescopes, inventions of scaled sight. We have seen galaxies brought to ruin. But we still forget our anniversaries and our gifts.

Soaring above us all, those divine demons, whom separated the unifying particle into infinite pieces, the pie that gave birth to this delicious creation; and I am sure they tasted each of their slices with an appetite unmeasured. But we choke on crumbs. Just leave us alone. Yet we are not blind.

You are so close, however.

Your view is quivering like ladybugs on a leaf in a rainstorm, each drop flinging her carapace up and down, straining the veiny-hand which binds her to meaningful position, until at last it snaps, and she plunges to the nonsense of gravity. Wait. She has wings!

They explode from her delicate shell and she hovers across an unseeable grid, a line through X and Y and Z, which appears to us not as mathematics but as magic, as miracle—the sterilized of us define it as nature, while the gods claim it as fortune. Either way, she does what she does, born to do it, dead without it, and thank all the fake heavens she has it!

You think your vision is permanently fading.

It will never completely disappear, but instead, it will remain forever smeared in obscurity. A continuous phase of detachment. An enchantment whose words never finish, they just linger on in vocal venality, waiting to be bought by a final period and ended by mistaken identity—the method of replacing one letter with another, without changing the meaning, as if truth could be writ the same as lie.

But our watchers know this is the language of the stars, and I doubt anyone will tell time any differently.

Like following her through a path with walls of flowers.

On a dirt path full of miniature mounds. Along sheer and thick stems, which sprout in sharp curves and are each graced by a crown of sunburst petals, within them the glowing guts of pollen-happy pokers and seeded straws. And for miles ahead and behind and side to side, an endless galore of crowns.

Her legs are whimpering in the summer sun. They are struck in a vital shade, never burnt but brimming in shine. Her dress is a napkin on her body, so white and so soft, as if a bad breeze would shred it to scraps.

She does not say anything. She only leaps forward, twirling around to verify you are still following—which you always do—smiling at you in such a way, you would follow her smile to your own death.

Along the path you go, this maze of warm flowers, following her every step and skip. Her arm reaches into the wall and plucks a wand from its folds. A long, emerald rod anointed by a folded jewel. She waves its vermillion vulva in your face, and you smell its summer-scorched scent, a burst of cinnamon and nectar which uplifts your spirits and satisfies your nose. Then she throws her flower down on the ground. She stomps on it. Over and over, until it is nothing but crushed crumbs. Until her petals are mud and mold.

She laughs.

You fall to your knees, fingering through the leftovers, struggling to recreate its image of perfect nature.

How could she be so cruel?

All this time spent growing her love only to strike it down in cruel humor.

Mina forgets why she came here.

Something about flowers in rain. Gardens a circus of mist. Clouds hanging on every leaf of every plant. All edges terraced in heavenly gust.

How long had I been gone?

These petals are shades unfamiliar. These green-blades cut in different directions. The maze has shifted somewhere else, its corridors now alternate, its architecture obliterate.

Mina missteps once or twice.

It still smells the same.

Perfumes of nature sprinkling in the air, honed to velvet-scent by the sky’s endless tears. Aroma of raw soil, damp and twisting, blending its earthly flavor with cool-crystal vines of fauna and flora, braided in boundless growth. Fumes of nature, expressed.

So many years since she has seen this place.

Approaching her—a skeleton drenched in veil, blackened to obscure wrath, the whites of bone amplified in the stormy scene. It looks at her, both of its eyes a drained sink, and it stands solid in the grove, replacing gargoyles for this scenery myth.

“You must be who I think you are.” It echoes.

Mina nods, nostrils cleansed.

Everything is hazy and toned. An ephemeral wistfulness surrounds her, with a glaze of nostalgia, the bright smoke of this place cornering her view. She always adored days when it rained.

She make excuses. “I am so awful at keeping track of time. How long have I been gone?”

A reluctant question, certainly—for to be certain of anything relating to Time is to forgo the conclusions of it. Time, the ceaseless glue of space, ripping through dimensions like light through glass. Filtering and untouchable.

It cannot answer. But this does not concern the ghost.

“You always did lose it all the time.” It echoes.

It grins, a pernicious crescent, while she watches every plate of its marrow-shell grind and gyrate on its face, from cranial-cap to cheek-plates to bending-chin. All this clockwork of its frame necessary to perform one single action—something so arbitrary when concealed by flesh.

Mina almost wants to smile herself and see if she can notice the parts in her face moving too, or if her brain only accepts the sequence as a solitary motion. The wonders of face.

Out of a stony path, they emerge to obsidian gates, dazzling in their sharpness, pointed and polished. Roots reviling, afraid to grasp the lifeless metal, avoiding its attractive poles for lesser stones and bricks, defeated by a net of spears.

But the skeleton touches it without recourse, crackling, halting only to brush residue from the shoulder of its ebony-dress. It is dressed for some occasion, but she never bothers to learn the names of such temporal fancies. One occasion for another—they are all strands of grass in a field of roving hours.

Inside, a breath of hotness—of humid contrast between earth’s spit and artifice’s sinew. Air, swollen in plastic pride, hovering behind walls from the pit it was borne, to linger in suffuse misery. A trap.

“Do you happen to know the time?” Mina asks, softly.

Her voice is still liquid from the outside waves. As soon as she says these sounds, she regrets it. Certainty is a vanishing art.

“I have not met it personally, but I hear good things.” It jokes—ha, the skeleton tells jokes!

Mina looks around at glass walls, suffocating in growth. Too many plants; too many plans. No horizon. Back to the garden, they rewind themselves.

“How long has it been?” someone shouts.

There he is, the Gardener. Dressed in dark dream. A fancy suit that appears like frozen lava. No hair, but a nice ash head. Like a pollup of crusty snow.

Tonally, his skin is quite grim. Like a raven plucked of its feathers. So pale, unhuman—a cadaver pulled from space, bleached by the shrillest fear.

The Gardener is a poor gust of gloom. He has time in a basket and all the space to spare. He asks Mina how long it has been since when they never met. She dares not tell him her name, but he figures it out anyway. Eating hours and drinking histories.

“We have been waiting,” the Gardener groans.

Mina shrugs. “Yes, we have.”

They float down a river of sand. Around and around. Come and go. Flurry and dissipate. They only go so far, until their container sends them back to recite and repeat the same motions over and over again.

Though the Gardener and his skeletal companion are unaffected by this place, Mina feels every loop and round.

She grows thirsty. Like a seedling sprouting early, desperate to taste the rain. And though they are in a garden, time’s lashes affect her body more like a desert. Dry seconds.

“Is it time for tea?” she asks, politely.

“It is always time for tea!” the Gardener screams.

They stop their ride. Then they take their positions at the tea-table, a thing overwrought in silver strings attached to a diamond-dazed puck. Porcelain and pleasantries await them. Conversations about the lengths of letters.

The tea is hot—it’s always hot. Mina stares at some blossoms behind her. They are perpetually beautiful. But the Gardener demands her attention; he is a fiery, unforgiving conversant.

“If time is a circle, then what is a square?”

The Gardener is gleeful as he poses his question—he desires to have her answer wrongly. But she does not have time for his ghoulish games.

Without looking at him directly, Mina casually declares, “Circle takes the square.”

He is dumbfounded. Not that anything they have ever discussed has been anything else than nonsense—this whole garden is a monument to nonsense! Fair points decay like unpollinated wombs.

The Gardener turns to his skeletal servant, bewildered. But the Skeleton is picking maggots out of its holes, not actually listening. Yet, it is obedient, and still responds in reverberate tone, “How long is a circle?”

The Gardener shrieks and points at Mina. “Ha! Can you count? Do you know how long a circle is?”

Why is he always trying to prove her wrong? Why can’t they just talk about flowers or something?

While rubbing sweat on her neck, she sweats. “Is the temperature in here bothering anyone else?”

What was once tepid is now arid. Mina almost coughs from the heat. Seconds burned to hours. Burned to days. Burning for years. Epochs.

An endless fire of eternal scorching. Castigating flames casting her in hardened plaster, body melting within like a stew of organs and soul. Hardening—time sharpening the time sharpening the time sharpens the time. Agony.

Dead alive. Forcibly awake.

How long has it been—how long was I gone?

“Such a pain—I am a black-hole burnt piece of toast.” Mina says.

Surprised she suddenly speaks, the Gardener gasps. “It has been a long time...”

“When was the last time someone spoke?”the Skeleton shatters. “When was the last time we had been here...?”

After an intermediate silence, Mina laughs.

The Gardener stares at her, nearly drooling for her to offer just a scrap of something happening. But it isn’t much.