UEL ARAMCHEK

When cultivated in darkness, enoki mushrooms spill outward into long, pale tendrils in a sprawl not unlike that of fireworks. At this stand, sponsored by the University Beneath St. Paul, they were being sold-tempura fried, then drenched in all manner of colorful sauces: red-orange calabrianero-chili buffalo, verdant pitcher plant nectar and mint chimichurri, yellow neonaise of Finnish snow lemon and halogen butter, violet orchid pepper peri-peri, and so on and so forth. The whole "fireworks show" was dipped-to-order and thrown into a black paper bag. Together, these flavors were overwhelming, and ever moreso as the rainbow of coatings slurried together, but if it wasn't too much, it wouldn't be fair food.

We were at the Expo Beneath St. Paul, an invitation-only event underneath the Minnesota State Fair, for which my friend Margaret was kind enough to be my sponsor. Throughout the old sandstone-carved telephone tunnels, forgotten cave networks, and grain storage cavities, one might find all manner of troglodytic delights; pale punks born to generations without sunlight playing out-of-tune pianos abandoned during prohibition, crank academics showing off homunculi in mason jars they swear were alive just hours before, and of course, all manner of deep fried foods, a tradition that joins all who live above and below the manhole line. No matter what direction you moved through this near-endless bazaar of corridors and ladders, you felt the distant bass of doom jazz further down, and inhaled smoke from all the hipsters burning through packs of Hazard Lights.

"We set this stand up to celebrate the end of our preliminary fireworks research program. We've managed to prove that they are, indeed, a mycelial lifeform. Piping hot sky mushrooms." Margaret beamed, all eyes and teeth. "Our hypothesis was that their spores work their way into the human eye as phosphenes, tampering with the optic nerve. It's sort of like an ocular hay fever that makes us want to make more. We set up a panoptical sphere of artificial eyes in the old mines up by Soudan, and set a few big ones off in the middle. Sure enough, we were able to trap several strains of fireworks in retinal snares to assess their retrowilding viability." "That's fascinating! What do you mean by 'retrowilding,' though?" "Well, see, the idea is that fireworks are living creatures, even though they're manmade, right? Rather than something you can just find outside." It was best to just take her at her word, here. "Sure."

"Well, that doesn't preclude the possibility we can make a wild variety, one that can exist in the absence of people, as if it had predated our own evolution on Earth. We owe this to them as their creators, surely. A free-flowing network of spores and light, erupting freely worldwide, propagating by the simple lens of their reflections on lakes and rivers. Can you imagine how beautiful it would be?" "I think it would scare the shit out of deer, for one thing. Lots of other animals."

"For a time. The ecosystem would adjust."

"Stargazers would be pissed. Astronomers in general."

"They can work around it, though. Wouldn't be every night."

"And of course, there's the fire risks, likelihood of injury and damage in populated areas... I can't imagine I'm the first person to bring these things up?"

"Oh, we're aware of the risks, but it doesn't matter at this point." She leaned in to whisper. "We passed our internal audit, and my colleagues are setting off our first batch at the Fair tonight!"

---

The Florida Keys themselves were once alive. Their bedrock formed from the calcified remains of what was once a sprawling forest of coral, strangled of all color and complexity by the sudden onset of an Ice Age. Above this once-living stone is a slime congealed from centuries of rotting flora, just thick enough for each subsequent generation to take root, and atop this lies a hurricane-thin layer of tourist traps and human habitation.

Depending on who you ask, there are further Lost Keys of Florida, well beyond any exit from the Jimmy Buffett Memorial Highway. These isles border what Charles Fort called "the Super Sargasso Sea," and serve as a hidden sanctuary for unlicensed bush pilots, sovereign citizens, and the descendants of pirates.

During my unexpected visit, I witnessed the field dressing and butchering of a sea serpent accidentally killed by a fishing vessel's outboard motor. Its thirty-foot long, shimmering body was hung by the tail from high hooks on the pier, falling apart in the afternoon sun. Colorful scales that could have been mistaken for macaw feathers at a distance wrapped its thick muzzle, and its dead eyes flickered with the signature sheen of tapetum lucidum. Its blood, clotted with ichthyotoxins too concentrated for human digestion, drained directly into the sea from a long slit in its belly. Local volunteers on ladders aggressively filleted meat from the carcass into long, spiraling curls as their well-worn electric knives hummed away.

These thin cutlets were lightly grilled with a rub of sea salt and white pepper, then glazed with eel sauce. A team of cooks served them in juicy heaps on crusty French bread slapped with a fermented key lime aioli, as well as handfuls of freshly julienned (land) cucumbers. The whole process was first come, first serve, eat all you can, as no matter how much of this sea monster they could manage to break down, the rest would be worms by nightfall.

Each piece of serpent melted on the tongue like a marbling of unagi and foie gras.

I learned from the locals that this fool’s dragon is truly a species of colossal eel, which has achieved a unique vertical anguilliform propulsion. Large nerve clusters segmented along its spine pulse with intense electromagnetic bursts to contract muscles in antipodal sequences, which form a standing wave that permeates the whole volume of the serpent's cylindrical frame. With half its body above the water while hunting, it confuses prey as to its size and position, who only see the submerged troughs of its sinusoidal motion. Sharks often fall for this trickery, believing these segments to be smaller fish, only to find themselves outfoxed by lateral bands of olfactory valves that can smell their angle of approach. This undulation pattern can be seen all throughout the serpent's anatomy; even its veins and intestines take on this self-similar waveform within.

“It’s why you’ll never find an eel with visible gonads,” my pilot explained. “Its DNA is only secondary in terms of embyro development, because that constant wiggling does most of the early work. As long as they’re close enough to other eels of the same frequency, especially the big ones, their collective ooze will coalesce into the right general shape from the electromagnetic field effect alone. That’s why they all gather in the sargasso, even if they have to digest most of their own skeleton during the migration to get there. The more complicated chemistry only happens once there’s a critical concentration of shed cells polarized in the water. Given that, they’re immortal, by most definitions.” He chuckled. “Nothing really dies out here. We might end up eating that very same sea serpent again in a few years.”

---

Those who live out of suitcases learn to spend their evenings in bars. An endless tunnel of concourses, fuselages, trams, and front desks creates a dissociative environment where the realm of dreams provides more sure footing than any permanent address. There is no salvation from this state of mind in spending the per diem on a table for one. The traveler must adapt to endless hypnogogia, lest they begin to yearn for home. Such a way of life maintains the sacred footpaths between any two points in space and time, and occasionally leads beyond both.

“We make our sours with Finnish snow lemons,” the bartender explained. “We’re actually one of the few places in the US that gets an allocation.”

“Snow lemons?”

 "Here, let me show you.”

He opened a minifridge and procured a wicker bowl of palmful-sized pale fruits with translucent, oily rinds. “They’re not quite like normal citrus, as they’ve adapted to environments where it would normally be too cold for them to grow. Very soft, so you have to be careful. For instance,” he dug his thumbnail in with a soft squelch, and pulled the waxy skin back without a peeler. Inside was a half inch layer of thick, white grease. With two more fingers, he scraped away this coating, revealing the clear, nacreous membrane around the pulp. It glistened like a soap bubble. “It’s sort of like an avocado, with layers of oil and fat insulating it from freezing and exploding in the arctic air. We cook that part down and use it to wash the whiskey, which gives the drink a little more body, and the kitchen ferments our scraps to make the aioli that comes with the yucca fries.”

“Why have I never heard of these before?”

The fully shucked snow lemon was no bigger than a ping pong ball. “Well, Vitamin C is actually pretty rare outside meat and blubber that far north. It fills an evolutionary niche for herbivores to be able to get their fill. There’s at least one big account up there that buys most of the gross product for reindeer feed. You can imagine the rumors about who it is. Hence, the allocation.”

“Is it him?”

“I mean, probably.” He shrugged. “Not sure who else would have that kind of budget for them.”

“You’d think there’d be more people here with an ingredient that special, though.”

“Yeah, well. This place used to be more popular. We used to get gods in here, the kind that killed giants. The whole damn Wild Hunt would stop in on their way to Sturgis. But a lot of things have changed since then. The airlines banned smoking in the cabin, monks capped production of chartreuse, and the Roman Empire fell at least twice. Most people just blame the pandemic, but I think there's more to it.”

“I mean. I’d love to bring a date here, sometime.”

“And we’d welcome the business. But you and I both know that’s not how this works, and you have other places to be.”

---

She bounded back into the living room, her curls bouncing along the way. “Okay, so. This is one of my personal treasures. I don’t talk about this much, but I think you’ll understand why when you see it.”

She was cradling something swaddled in a blue blanket patterned with silver stars as if it were fragile or alive, then gently unwrapped it on the coffee table. Inside was a mason jar filled with effulgent fluid; a whirling mess of carminous and pearlescent bands rapidly shifting in girth. The contents whorled against the glass at violent velocities, all the while emitting low, droning sounds like a boiler room. It flickered with bursts of lightning as frequently as any midsummer storm.

“My dad was in the Secret Space Program, a non-terrestrial officer of the Air Force back in the oughts. I didn’t get to see him very often, as most of his missions were done at relativistic speeds. He remembered me being five when he left, but I was fifteen by the time he brought this back to me. For him, only a few months had passed. Anyway. There's about a liter of Jupiter's Great Red Spot in there.” She was absolutely beaming. “Go ahead, touch it! It's cool!”

I put my hand on the jar, and found myself startled at its warmth. It was vibrating like a nervous rabbit. “How is this even possible?”

“I’m not sure of all the details. They were surveilling the dynamics of astrology during space travel, specifically whether or not the influence of planets increases or decreases depending on how close you are to them. According to Dad, the closer you get to Jupiter, the luckier you get due to its power over personal fortune. They played a lot of poker up there. He said the planets are not the gods themselves exactly, but something more like vital organs to them. The sheer gravity serves as a type of anchoring weight that binds them to their duties in our material realm.”

I was taken aback at hearing all of this, and more than a bit concerned about what kind of eyes were on me now for knowing her story. “I’d be a bit paranoid if I were in possession of a stolen chunk of a god, personally.”

She widened her eyes, laughed, and nodded knowingly. “I hadn’t thought about that part until I was older, but it hasn’t seemed to cause me any trouble just yet. I like to think it appreciates being kept safe, and hearing stories about my life. Sometimes I hold it against my heart as I fall asleep, and tell it about work, or dates I've been on. It's become a type of prayer, for me. I don’t know what I’d do with myself if I dropped it.” She gave the jar a little kiss just below the lid. "Don't worry, little cloud. I won't let that happen to you."

---

AN ENDANGERED SPECIES "The bicephalous jackalope leads a complex and short existence due to only one of its heads being materially real. Though it may at first seem cumbersome, this grants it an evolutionary advantage over its better known cousin, the common jackalope, as the second head allows it perceive threats both mythical and extinct."

AN ELEPHANT NEVER FORGETS "Bestiary writers from Pliny on through DaVinci wrote of the legendary battles between elephants and dragons; two titanic beasts, evenly matched, their corpses found entangled throughout Africa and Asia. We can presume the surviving species of Proboscidea eventually won their war, for there are no true dragons left, and contemporary accounts of their existence ceased several centuries ago. Some extremists have taken their absence to its epistemological limits, arguing that there were never any dragons at all, maintaining a highly anthropocentric concept of extinction."

LONG, LEAN, HUNGRY ONES "In 1245, Pope Innocent IV composed a letter to Güyük Khan, requesting that the Mongols cease attacking Christian lands in Eastern Europe. This letter was carried all the way from Lyon to Karakorum, where it was read to the Khagan himself in his imperial court."

THREE COCKTAILS FOR BREAKING CURSES (SUBSCRIBERS ONLY) "The recipes featured below are excerpts from the “The Lamentations of Arthur Anne Bunting,” an enigmatic cookbook believed to have been written in 1977 by a pseudonymous folklorist who claimed to have worked as a cook "in the floating kitchens of the Golden Sky Lodge." It is unclear if this refers to some occult institution, or a hunting lodge in Montana of the same name which burned down not long before its publication."

WINGS ON WALLS "These wings belong to a subspecies of pigeon whose pseudogenetic information is stored in cultural memory, then projected into the world as two-dimensional, lichenesque splatters simulating the wings of its ancestors. Researchers cite the eyeless pigeons of the Lower Wacker in Chicago as a form of synanthropy whereby the species has foregone important adaptations in trust of humanity’s fostering of artificial cave networks in urban areas; when taken to its extreme, it is perhaps possible that a species could continue to propagate as a conceptual form long after its material extinction, in a state where every last vital organ is rendered vestigial. The compulsion of human artists, then, serves as its cycle of reproduction."

LIFE IN THE VAST LANE Upon birth, the North American cumulonimbus cloud rolls down from the Rocky Mountains, and from there, ever eastward into its notorious adult form, scraping along the troposphere with its anvil-like plumage. Cloudforms throughout its abdomen whorl into temporary organs and heatsinks, which can sometimes be seen through the rotational tears in its purpled underbelly. Lightning traverses ion pumps all across the thunderhead's structure, generating a nervous system which is sometimes as complex as that of a cricket, with rudimentary thoughts entangled with what might be called a sense of touch. A metabolic urge to consume warmer waters drives it ever eastward unto death in the Atlantic, leaving behind trails of hailstones as its dung.

THE TROUBLE WITH SAN FRANCISCO It looms over the city like the abandoned lance of some dead Cold War god; perhaps the hills beneath it were formed from his irradiated corpse. It is the only civic landmark as obviously visible as the bridge to its north.

A WELL PRESERVED SECRET The vegetable lamb of Tartary did not bleat when bound by its hind legs, nor when verdant blood spilled from its neck into wineskins and jars. More fruit than beast, its flesh, ground with peppercorn and mandrake root, was stuffed into casings of dried artichoke intestine. From there, it was hung to ferment near shaded fires, then cured with salts in Ural mountain caves. These medicinal sausages were said to be able to heal ulcers, and otherwise lethal wounds of the gut, though no record remains of their actual culinary quality and flavor. 

ON MOUNT CHIXCULUB AND MARS MINOR (SUBSCRIBERS ONLY) The Moon is the world’s tallest mountain, but, in turn, its only mountain without a base. Throughout its phases, its peak faces away from Earth, taunting astronauts and mountaineers alike to take the final climb. It cannot be a holy mountain like Olympus or Meru, for it does not join Heaven and Earth at some sacred juncture. It severs any possibility of such a bond through its sheer mass, maintaining a void between it and the planet to which it is invisibly chained. This allows for its parallel divinity to the sun, and the separate laws of the world it enforces by night and tide. LIVING LANDSLIDES According to legends written down in Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, the slide-rock bolter is a species of alpine whale that anchors itself high in the Rocky Mountains by its tail flukes, only to luge down the slope with an open maw, consuming everything in the path of the landslide that forms around its torpedo-like body. After such a feast, it sleeps for whole seasons on end, slowly digesting whatever it devoured beneath a tangle of stone and spruce. Outdoorsmen unfamiliar with the horrors of Colorado's interior are encouraged to keep their eyes high, lest they find their trail's end in something else's sunless stomach. DOWNWARD SPIRAL “I mean, I think I’m remembering why I shouldn’t be dating right now.” Her fork had run out of bucatini to coil around itself. “I think Suzie was right, though, we should talk about these things. And your story about the ball pit, well. It rhymes with what I remember about the slide.” 

“I'd love to hear it, if you're willing to tell me.” “Well.” Dara froze for a moment before continuing. “There was this waterpark in my hometown, they just called it ‘Waterworld.’ A truly disgusting place. It had that reek of rotting chlorine, filthy locker rooms with bent tiles, the constant wet sound of slapping feet. And one waterslide, a two-hundred foot worm that was deeply unsafe. While you were on it, you always felt like you were about to go over the edge, and it eventually closed down because someone did.” THE DEVIL AND PAUL BUNYAN One evening, Paul Bunyan was crossing south into Texas from the Oklahoma panhandle, when Elkanah Halfwright and his men rode out to meet him, clad in blue-painted leathers to warn the giant of their severity. To his followers, Halfwright was a prophet who’d been ordained by a Wandering Bishop of the Lost True Church. The spirit of Pontius Pilate had personally bestowed upon him a key to Hell, that he might show the Lord’s enemies the price of their sins while they yet lived, and cast them forth early lest they failed to repent. As for Paul, well, he was just looking for a place to make camp for the night. THE TOMB OF THE LAST PRESIDENT (SUBSCRIBERS ONLY) North Dakota’s strangest landmark is a six billion dollar concrete pyramid which was operated by the United States Air Force for a mere three days in 1975. The Mickelson Safeguard Complex was conceived as a frontline base for what was at the time seen as inevitable: total nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union above cold, Canadian clouds. It was intended to protect the missiles that would destroy the world's other hemisphere, in the event that the hemisphere in which it existed was also about to be destroyed. --- I remain committed to producing beautiful, weird, and strange fiction that is fully novel and unique. Whatever I've made, you won't find anything like it anywhere else. As always, thank you for reading.

Upon birth, the North American cumulonimbus cloud rolls down from the Rocky Mountains, and from there, ever eastward into its notorious adult form, scraping along the troposphere with its anvil-like plumage. Cloudforms throughout its abdomen whorl into temporary organs and heatsinks, which can sometimes be seen through the rotational tears in its purpled underbelly. Lightning traverses ion pumps all across the thunderhead's structure, generating a nervous system which is sometimes as complex as that of a cricket, with rudimentary thoughts entangled with what might be called a sense of touch. A metabolic urge to consume warmer waters drives it ever eastward unto death in the Atlantic, leaving behind trails of hailstones as its dung.

Such storm systems are among several which can be considered to be non-cellular life, gaining their complexities and habits not from organic chemistry, but instead, the properties of water itself when subjected to extreme thermodynamic differentials. Recognizable, macroscopic forms arise, however short-lived, fueled by reservoirs left behind by their ancestors in summers and winters past.

Hurricanes are the most notorious of these storms by whichever regional title they are given. Their consistent body plans, seasonal life cycle, metabolic patterns, and sheer scale of presence have earned them a reputation as a type of “thermobaric spirit” in several ecclesiastical circles, a labeling which has led to them receiving names from the World Meteorological Organization to remind us of their innocence. From a human perspective they bear down on us as catastrophes, bringing hell and high water, but from their own, they beach themselves like whales, unable to find the true rest they seek further north.

To understand something so alien as being alive, we can think with a framework that allows us to see ourselves similarly: we are delicate vessels of dust, diving suits the ocean uses to explore the land, not so different in overall composition from a Floridian tidepool. We boil and crush and melt everything in our path to keep the saltwater within hot, but not so hot that the tubes and valves burst and we spill apart. Electricity flows along columns of differential pressure, compelling reaction and animating the whole of the machine. Our lightning is gentle. We move towards heat until there is none left, and the waters within ourselves cool, distilled once more from ephemeral flesh.

Until the planet itself is bereft of heat, those waters will rise towards the sun again, to become storms once more. We will dissolve together, one with the rain, and our thoughts, however small, will be heard as thunder.

We will forget death.

---