THE GREATER REALITY AREA: FIRST HALF OF YEAR ONE IN SUMMARY
Thank you for those who have been reading! The Greater Reality Area is a growing fiction space with a new story added every weekend, and all but one piece per month is free. Relax with some high strangeness and show your favorites to those who love ideas.
"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."
"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."
"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."
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
It emerges from the Pacific Ocean as a direct jut of rock from the planet's hot mantle, tempered in cool seawater, then thrust towards heaven like a crude dagger. The atmosphere has answered its challenge in kind with never-ending antarctic winds, weathering its edge down to mossy stone. Today, this lost piece of Hell is known as Macquarie Island, though it has likely known many other names before.
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.
THE MYRMECOLEON EFFECT REVISITED (SUBSCRIBERS ONLY)
In October of 2017, I published “The Myrmecoleon Effect” on the similarly named predecessor of this website, North of Reality. It explored the strangeness of the history of the antlion: a species named long before its own discovery by man, seemingly produced by the dialectic between religious scholars and bestiary writers over the definition of what such a creature ought to be. Because of the temporal scale of evolution required for any single species to come into being, the relationship between these creative forces was completely irrational yet intuitive. Something marvelous had happened across time allowing extreme improbability.
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.
THE TWELVE HOURS OF UNIVERSAL NIGHT
Leister Helmer, Wisconsinite inventor of the Universal Night Clock (patented 1954), rejected the standard observation of February 29th taking place every four years, denouncing it as a “depraved and uncreative use of man’s most hard-won resource.” In its place, he personally observed an undated set of twelve extra hours every two years, which he accounted for by skipping the rolling of AM and PM on his handcrafted clock once every 730 days. Because of the clock’s duodecimal nature, this allowed for its continuous use without adjustment despite such an extreme departure from timekeeping norms. Helmer also refused to observe Daylight Savings, referring to it in his journal as a “coward’s compromise," and "man bargaining for time and light he is already owed by the gods.”
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.
KLAXON AND CHRYON (SUBSCRIBERS ONLY)
Two gods sat sad by side at a mermaid bar in Montana, drinking eighty-dollar pours of Karuizawa vintage. Some of the girls who worked in the aquarium had been in the industry ever since Atlantis burned. Though young for gods, Klaxon and Chryon had still managed to become old men, sharing in their nostalgia for the Cold War. As heralds-in-waiting of the apocalypse, they remained ever on standby, all the while drinking hard on company time.
In the art of the classic Rider-Waite-Smith tarot, the Nine of Pentacles depicts a noblewoman alone, surrounded by a decadence of grapes. In her left hand is a hooded falcon, as calm and indifferent to the surrounding world as she is. This is the card of Venus in Virgo. It expresses the conservation of beauty and wealth as the establishment of one’s own private, walled garden; yet despite its seemingly favorable imagery, this arcanum reflects a position where its ruling planet is in fall.
After a tornado struck Cincinnati in 1974, Sears floor manager Joe Fishbourne attempted to call his ex-wife from a downtown payphone with the excuse of checking whether or not she was okay. When he opened the attached phonebook, however, his attention was diverted to the unusual name “Philistine Causeway,” which he doubted belonged to a real person. When he dialed the number, the other end was an unresponsive recording of a woman’s voice reciting the same four numbers, repeated thrice before disconnecting.
“I mean, I guess it’s been like ten years.” Derrick was filling maraschino cherries with cream cheese for some godawful dessert cocktail. “Sure, why not, I’ll tell you about the weird ski lodge.
"There was a group of us who lived out in Durango who got paid by an agency to work as on-call event staff for remote parties in the Rockies. You could make a lot of money for just being an outdoorsy kid or meth addict if you could handle working service for the kind of assholes who think they can buy mountains."
In life, your pet trilobite never got to meet you.
The little oval spent quiet days scurrying about the seafloor, as its kind had always done for hundreds of millions of years. Sometimes it would curl up into a ball to protect itself from danger; other times, just because it could. Long whiskers extended from its helmet to help it bumble its way from meal to meal, as there was only so much light left in the dim world to see through its eyes’ foggy calcite lenses.
THE WATER CLOCK PRINCE (SUBSCRIBERS ONLY)
"I sprung into existence, I suppose you could say, when my father was telling me a bedtime story about a princess in a distant land. In that moment, he realized I was the princess from that specific story, and decided he would do everything in his power to give me a life like hers." She sipped her tea.. "He didn't really have a way to make me royalty, though, so his plan was already off to a pretty rough start."
