June 5th, 2012

I loved you before I knew what it meant and before society hid its meaning behind veils of sexual taboo. Everything you did was so unashamed and wonderful, and through the voice of glowing blue orbs and golden-eyed Martians, you taught me it was okay to be human. I remember your words spoken from my mother’s mouth, and as I read you now I remember summer nights on the waterbed, grasping at understanding and trailing away on a thought about rockets blazing orange trails across a purpling Waukegan sky. I never knew farm-life or religion, but I knew that both could be beautiful and dangerous. I never knew people until you brought them to me in a tin-can soaring through outer and inner spaces alike. The universe is benevolent and not indifferent. You saved me from the bitter atheism of my generation. You saved me from resentment and hostile coffee-shop intellectuality, because now I know how to respect all things, because you showed me the insides of their heads and that they’re only just like me. And I miss you, and I miss knowing that you’re somewhere, but because of you I know that you’re everywhere, and when I tell stories in my head, I’m telling them to you.

On the day that you died, Venus was passing far above the Earth. Perhaps you were caught in its shadow and pulled into orbit on your way up. It may not be Mars, but I’m sure you’ll make do.

Orange

The rain outside sounds like tiny people creeping through the garden. He avoids eye contact, instead focusing on the painting on the South Wall. It’s painted in warm sunset colors. The grey sky from the window opposite melts the colors to shades of muddy brown which leak down the wall onto the blue airport-lobby carpet…
“Doc,” he says, his voice breaking. He clears his throat. “Doc, I think he’s back.”

Her brow creases and she shifts slightly on the chaise-lounge.

“Have you been taking your medication?” The man glances quickly up then looks back down at his shaking fingers.
“I think I might need a higher dose.”

“I can up your dosage to 750 mg, but after that I’m going to have to refer you to the pharmacologist.” She reviews the notes on her clipboard.

“John,” she says, frowning. “Is he…hurting you?”

“No,” he says, with a desperate laugh. “No, he’s not hurting me.” She waits for him to say more, but he remains silent.
“Do you need to talk to me, to discuss anything else?”

“No. I just—I just need to up the dosage. That’s all. That’s all I came in for—“ He pauses for a moment, then becomes silent again. She leans forward and raises her eyebrows, waiting. He says nothing.

“Alright. John, I’m going to give you two numbers. The first is my cell phone number, and you can call me at any time. The second is the number of Doctor Mulder, the pharmacologist. If you have any problems with the medication, you need to call her right away.” The man nods quickly into his hands and stands up. He thanks the woman and walks out of the room without looking up.

The keys fall from his hands and onto the front porch when he takes them from his pocket. He leans over to pick them up. The back of his jacket lifts up and the rain falls out of the hood of his raincoat onto the back of his head. He lets out a muffled shriek and the woman next door looks up from her seat on the couch, outside. Her cigarette smoulders in the damp air. He raises his left hand as he rights himself and smiles nervously. She continues to stare as he shuffles inside the dark house.

The pills taste bitter and stick to the back of his tongue, but he is used to it. Fond of it, even. It tastes like hope and comfort, like normality. He hasn’t had a relapse like this in years, not since Shirley left him. He told himself that he would never let it get that bad again. He likes the taste of the medicine, the bitterness; nevertheless, he is always nauseous in the morning when he dry-swallows, so he moves into the kitchen and opens the fridge to get a drink. He freezes, his hand still glued to the door of the refrigerator.  The shaking starts in his hand, then overtakes the rest of his body until he is on the floor, quivering violently. On the top shelf is a bottle of low-pulp orange juice.

He only drinks pulp-free.

WORDSWORDSWORDS (Mr. Remy’s story)

Alright, this is another one. This one didn’t have an original, hand-written draft; I just wrote it on the computer. Tentative title: WORDSWORDSWORDS.

Before I begin to tell my story, let me preface it by saying this: as a moderately gifted artist, and a fiction writer at that, my two greatest talents are drinking and making shit up. There are hundreds of bars in San Francisco, perhaps even thousands, and many of them are dinky and poorly lit and located at the ends of flicker dark corridors or on the top floor of nail salons, so it seems entirely plausible that someone like I could stumble upon one early in the drizzly Saturday morning fog, get plastered, find a taxi home, and then never walk in to the same exact bar ever again. Many of them don’t really welcome newcomers, due to the nature of the wares they peddle, and I suspect that they frequently change their names and pay crooked back-alley officials to keep their locations clandestine. Perhaps the bar exists solely in my head, the product of a lonely, whiskey-soaked cortex searching for higher meaning the random misfiring of my neurons. Or perhaps it is there somewhere, floating in between the fabrics of reality. It doesn’t matter, really. Either way, I know I’ll never be able to find my way back to what I was before. It changed me.

I’ll admit that by the time I got to the bar, I was already drunk. The evening started as a promotion party for a book that a psychologist friend of mine wrote. It was a collection of vignettes, the sum of which illustrated a “great and riveting Truth about the nature of reality and what it means to be human,” or something like that, according to the back flap of the dust jacket. I didn’t really know, I was only half listening to the long-winded and self-indulgent description I had apparently asked for when I raised one eyebrow in mock interest at the conversation that my psychologist friend and one of his colleagues were having by the snack table. Truthfully, my eyebrow elevation was a reaction to the chocolate fondue pot that my friend was about to carelessly stick his elbow in, but the gesture was interpreted as an interest in the conversation, and therefore reason enough to embark on a twenty minute monologue about the subtleties of the form and how it must be easy for people like me, who only write made-up stories, and don’t need to incorporate any deeper, psychological undertones…

The bartender made excellent martinis, and then later excellent screwdrivers and White Russians which only got better as the night went on. I took a break at 11 and nursed a mimosa for a half hour before heading to the bathroom to survey the facilities. To be fair, I don’t even think that the mimosa was alcoholic—it tasted sweet and it went down smooth and I felt almost sober by the time I got down to the pulpy dregs. But then, I stood up, and decided that I could postpone my trip to the toilets no longer. After a brief liaison with the bathroom floor, I washed up in the sink and returned to the bar. My friend had moved over to a small table in the corner and was surrounded by a group of bookies who were eagerly leaning in close to his bearded face, hanging on every word, captivated. Most of them were grad students who had read some of his work for a psychology class, or old women who had been seduced by his schmutsy charm, but a couple of young Lolitas hanging by his left shoulder looked like they could actually get him in trouble, if he wasn’t careful. I didn’t care to warn him, and I wasn’t even sure that he would appreciate my advice, anyway. I snuck up the staircase to the street while he was still distracted.

The streets of the city feel like nostalgia at night, but like the nostalgia you have for a place you’ve never been. I’d equate it to longing, but it’s much more resigned than that. It’s living in a memory and not being able to know it at the same time. The lights flashed around me and cars honked and I wondered how things got to be the way they were. What part of the primordial psyche do the neon lights fulfill, why the poker and the mind-games and the shower gel and the egg beaters? Why pluots? In my head, most of it seems to boil down to power, humanity just wants to flex its technological muscle, but is that really all it is? Who is the show for? Perhaps we think that if we impress enough, impress ourselves or the universe or the Greater Than, that we’ll somehow be preserved, saved from the inevitable entropy which governs everything around us. Or perhaps it’s all just a distraction, to keep ourselves busy until the end, pretend that we’re answering the universal questions while avoiding any question with real substance. These thoughts stumbled, disorderly, through my head.  My body mimicked my mind and I made my way joltingly along the side streets into the dark, quiet spaces in between. The atmosphere squeezed and pulled through my head, in one ear and out the other like floss, threading through my lungs, in-out, in-out, a loop. I held myself up on a slimy brick wall as I paused to pick the string from between my teeth, and suddenly my hand was illuminated by a faint, blue-glowing light. I turned to find the source, and there it was, across the alleyway. A small sign, blue neon, (or perhaps it was a special kind of glow-in-the-dark chalk, the memory grows fainter as I try to remember) above a dark green door which was flush with the brick wall, almost as if it was painted there. The sign read “fmb” in lowercase letters. The font was very modern, but the door looked outstandingly old. It was battered and smeared, and the hinges were rusting and decayed. Around the frame, the brick was crumbling away. It looked as if the oldness of the door was radiating from it, permeating the wall around it. It’s all very fuzzy now, but I remember the door very, very clearly. The door was…a landmark, of sorts. It looked like something that had always been there, since the beginning, and that would continue to be there for a very, very long time. It comforted me, somehow, this essential knowledge, and it gave me the courage to approach, pull the handle, and go inside.

Up until now, perhaps, the story has been mostly believable. The fact that I was drunk is most certainly believable, considering the circumstance of the promotion party (and, I’ll be honest, considering my propensities in general.) The alleyway, perfectly predictable, the sign, almost ordinary, and the door, well, the door could just be the sentimental ramblings of a drunk old man. It wasn’t, I can assure you, but what I mean to be saying is that, so far, nothing out of the realm of the easily imaginable has happened. I approach the next segment of my story with caution, therefore, because there is really no delicate way to stick your needles in the yarn I am about to weave.

The bar was dimly lit, but not in the way that most bars are dimly lit. This lighting wasn’t meant to hide features, rather it seemed to slant in from an unseen source overhead, like in a library in the evening, after everyone has gone home. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a library after hours, but I’m sure that there’s some situation to which it’s akin. It’s like…it’s like a solar eclipse, in a meadow where no one is. It’s what I imagined a primeval sunrise was like, before the sun has actually risen and when the first flickers of daylight start to hint on the horizon. It’s like standing on top of a hill and watching it happen, the sunrise, and knowing that the Earth is totally alone and that you could walk for miles without encountering another person. That’s not something that anyone alive today has ever experienced, but it’s something that we still reminisce about, like what I was talking about earlier: nostalgia for things that you’ve never experienced. Cultural memory, maybe. That’s what the lighting in the bar was like.

At first, I thought I was alone, but as my eyes adjusted, I started to see characters moving in the dim. They seemed to shift in and out of reality unless I held them in my peripheral vision, and then I could see multitudes of people, mingling and chatting with each other. There were so many of them, and as I turned I noticed that the room was actually much larger than I had initially anticipated. It must have taken up the entire block; it was the size fifty grand ballrooms and it stretched back beyond my line of vision. Strangely though, the only noise I heard was a low muttering, like they were speaking from the other side of a thick glass wall. The only one who seemed to notice my abrupt appearance was a young girl, standing about fifteen feet away from me and leaning against a table. She cocked her head inquisitively, and when she began to move towards me she suddenly came into clear focus, as if she was in the foreground and everyone else had faded into wallpaper. She was wearing a floofy turquoise skirt, which swished jauntily around her knees as she walked. Her shirt was barely a shirt at all: it fell off of one shoulder and was held together by a single strip of fabric in the front. The back was kept long, however, and it hung down to the small of her back. She wore nothing else underneath it, and she seemed in constant danger of over-exposure, though it somehow always managed to cover the right places. She had small breasts, and wide-set hips. Her legs were sturdy, like horse legs, but not at all beefy. Her face was long and triangular, and her eyes were small and almond-shaped, and very close together on her face. On her head, she wore paper cranes, stuck into her messy buns with chopsticks. Her hair was bright red. On anyone else, the ensemble would have been appalling, but somehow the discordant nature of it all seemed to play perfectly to her nature. She strode up close and leaned on one hip as she surveyed me, eyeing my sagging shoulders and beat-up leather jacket with a blank face. And then, she asked me—I wish I would have known then what she really meant, because then I could have answered her truly—she asked me what I was called. Not what my name was, or who I was—she asked what I was called. I told her, then, that my name was Jim, and her brow furrowed for a fraction of a second while she pondered my answer. I asked her for her name.

“I’m quirky,” she said jutting her chin forward and tilting her head to one side. Her paper cranes flopped ominously, threatening to fall out.

“Well, yes, but that’s not exactly what I was asking,” I replied. “What is your name? What do people call me.”

“That is what I am called.” She looked perplexed again, pouting her lips to one side and squinting her eyes at me. I let it be. She asked me if I wanted a drink, and I thought about telling her that I was already quite drunk, but before I could form the sentence in my head my mouth had already formed the words  ‘Yes, please,’ and so she hurried off to the bar, leaving me alone by the small table. I took a seat and held my head in my hands, realizing that I hadn’t told her what I wanted and wondering what drinks she would bring back. In the back of my mind, I hoped that it wasn’t something too strong, but even further back in my mind, I secretly wished that it was. She soon returned with two drinks in thin-stemmed glasses.

“What are these?” I asked.

“Martinis,” she replied frankly, and bit the olive off of her toothpick. A woman was sitting on the table in front of me. I thought she must have knocked my glass off, but I was too drunk to care. She was in a tight black pencil skirt with a matching fitted jacket. I hadn’t seen a suit with such wide shoulder pads since the eighties, but it didn’t look tacky. Her nut-brown hair was held up loosely with a pencil, but she pulled it out nonchalantly and the locks came tumbling down playfully around her shoulders. Her eyes danced with golden water and lit up as she laughed a sparkling laugh and threw one leg up over the other. I choked and sputtered for a moment, and then blinked, and she was gone. Miraculously, my drink was still upright. I took a sip and tasted the color of her eyes.

“Who was that?” I asked my strange drinking mate, and she frowned slightly at me. Before she could answer, a huge noise came from over by the bar. Three enormous men were pounding on the counter and kicking at each other’s bar stools, laughing outrageously. The beer slopped from their mugs onto their faces and huge, bushy beards, and mixed with the saliva which came dripping sloppily from their gaping mouths. The one on the far left was the tallest and lankiest, though he was by no means scrawny. His beard was dark and wiry, and his stubby nose sat on top of it like a ruddy cauliflower. The man in the middle was short and fat, his belly pouring over his tiny legs which stuck straight out from his torso and wiggled wildly as he laughed. The last man was leaning over onto the shoulder of the smallest man, tears of mirth streaming from his swollen, bloodshot eyes and combining with the various other fluids which flowed down his face and collected like dew in his burnt-caramel beard. All three of them were dressed in leather tunics and thick woolen tights which were obviously old, but looked generally well cared for. They were all laughing in reaction to something that the man sitting to the right of them had said. The man on the right was much smaller and clean-shaven, and he had his arms across the counter, leaning in eagerly towards the three men. His hair was slicked back and he looked as if he would smell mildly of aftershave. He wore well-creased slacks and a white dress shirt, though the top two buttons were undone and his tie was loose around his neck.

“What the hell are they doing over there? They’re going to bring the place down!”

“Oh, that’s just riot, raucous, and uproar. They’re always like that.” Ignoring her incomprehensible statement, I asked her, “Who’s the man sitting next to him?”

“The one in the tie? He’s clever. He’s generally very nice, but he can be a bit too much to handle sometimes, if you know what I mean.” She gave me a pointed look and took another sip of her martini. I heard the echo of a tinkling laugh. At this point, I was no longer drunk, I was sick, and I was beginning to feel the pressing nausea that comes with being in a strange place at a very strange hour of the night and seeing other people drinking and laughing when you really all ought to be in bed. I really needed to get some answers.

“Look, who are you people? I mean, are you some sort of club? Why do you know everyone?” She didn’t mask her obvious confusion this time and she shook her head as she said,

“People? But, we’re not ALL people. There’s only one of him. We’re words, aren’t we?”

“Words?” Due to my inebriated state, my perception of reality was taking much longer than usual to catch up with my mind, but in the lag time, I was enjoying a wonderful sense of clarity which stemmed from a complete lack of common sense.

“Oh, I see!” I shouted, finally understanding. “You aren’t all named such funny things, you are them! You’re words!”

“Well, of course we are!” Quirky shot her arms into the air in triumph and exasperation.

“Well, I’m not!” I looked at her incredulously.

“What do you mean?”
“I’m…I’m a man.” I patted my hands across my jacket for emphasis, and to confirm my state of existence.

“No, no you can’t be. I just saw man, he’s over there, by the buffet table. He’s always trying to sneak food away under his jacket, even though we all told him that it’s free, once you pay for entry. He never listens.” She glanced over at the table and shook her head slightly.

“No, listen to me, really, I am. I’m a man named Jim, I’m a writer and an apartment owner and…hold on then. How are we talking? How are we using words to talk, if you are all words?”

“Words, used, to, talk, they’re, all, here,” she said, and the words were all there, standing next to her. They waved faintly and dispersed among the crowd.

“But, don’t you know about sentences? What about paragraphs, and dialogue?”

“Oh, please. You believe in that stuff?” She shot me a disapproving look and pursed her lips.

“I mean, I know some are into that sort of thing, but I never pegged you out to be the type. Me myself, I’m illiterate.”

It was then that my mind finally caught up with me, and everything began to grow fuzzy. The table was a table, and then it was a stout, middle-aged woman with short, mousy brown hair, and then a table once again. The barstools were suddenly thin, bald men in sharp, silver suits, balancing the other words on their shoulders like Atlas, and then they were three-legged seats once more. The very atmosphere around me became a being and caressed me in its muggy hold, probing deep inside of me, violating my mouth and lungs. I gasped for breath and realized that it was the first time I had opened my mouth in hours. I felt for my voice in the back of my throat and it croaked out with great difficulty

“No, listen to me! LISTEN TO ME! I’m not a word, I’m a person, a real person! My name’s Jim and I’m a brother, and a cousin, and the father of two cats, I’m a human and a being, I’m an amateur astronomer, please! I’m an AUTHOR!” As I struggled to inhale the newly sentient air I saw my words materialize around me, ‘brother,’ ‘cousin,’ ‘author,’ ‘amateur,’ all of them absorbing the essence that came pouring out of me, each piece of me seeping into its meaning and deepening it, giving it cause and purpose. I felt it leaving me and I wondered what would be left, when they were done, whether there was a word for ‘Jim,’ or whether I was just the composite of so many other things.

I don’t remember how I got out of the bar, but I did, and I don’t remember how I got home, but I did that, as well. Sometime in the early hours of the morning I fell into bed and I didn’t regain consciousness until nearly 6:00 the next evening. It’s been a week, since, and I haven’t been able to write until just today, just now, when I wrote down this story. Every time I’ve tried, I get caught up in the individual words and I never get past the first sentence. I couldn’t get out of the individual word perspective, I couldn’t put them together into whole thoughts, not until now. I had to try to forget, to try to see like I used to, to put my thoughts into sentences and my sentences into paragraphs. I have to block it out, to distract that part of my mind while my subconscious spills itself out onto the paper. Whenever I stop, however, for even just a moment, I am overwhelmed by the vastness of what I am doing, and I have to stop, lest I lose my mind completely. I fear that someday soon, I won’t be able to write anymore, at all. And then, I ask you, what will become of me? And what will I become?

HOPELESS SITUATIONS

Something I wrote for a contest about new beginnings. Just as a fuck-you to the penguins (I replaced the voice of self-doubt and self-loathing in my head with penguins because I thought it would make things easier…long story short, it didn’t. They all wear little horn-rimmed glasses. It’s quite terrifying) I’d like to say that I don’t care whether I think it’s good anymore, I’m going to post it anyway. So shut your fucking quackholes.

There’s something incredibly endearing about being in the middle of a completely hopeless situation. They come around so rarely, I mean truly hopeless. You have to be completely ungrounded, stranded somewhere foreign and unfamiliar with nothing to occupy yourself, no more decisions to make, no possible action that you can take to change your situation. Then, you can simply submit. It feels like magic, or nostalgia, when you know memories are being made. Different rules of etiquette apply in hopeless situations. You can sit in the middle of a group of people, silent and alone in your own head because everyone’s already justified their own lack of conversation to themselves. It has already been decided, by the fates, or by chance, that things must be the way they are, and so you enter a sort of waiting area, a space and time inhabited by people waiting to regain their ignorant misconceptions about the amount of control they have over their own lives. Here I am, waiting for the reboot, my head on Ally’s knees as she and Phil continue their efforts to make stilted, sighing conversation (some people can never admit to the fact that their situation is hopeless) and I am curled up, listening for the sound of the waves thundering on the shore. With my left hand I’m loosely holding a package of cigarillos; I bought them in anticipation of this kind of situation. They’re grape, the flavor I would smoke, if I ever smoked them. I never can, when they’re all individually wrapped, and when they’re so pungent and they sting as they touch my lips. There are too many warning signs. I wish I could smoke. The activity might babysit my neuroses for a while so that my brain could rest, and maybe I’d be thinner, and would look cool and casual while standing on a street corner, but I can’t help feeling the tar coat my cells and imagining it breaking apart my DNA like nucleotide rock candy. I buy them more to legitimize my situation, and sometimes I chew on them for the flavor, but even then I have to face the consequences: sobbing, heaving panic as I feel around with my tongue for cankers and burn the skin away with rubbing alcohol. I want to stuff my mouth full of sand, shovel great big mouthfuls in and polish my guts with the gritty stuff. I want to do it for the texture and the feeling and the symbolism, and also for the shock value. Maybe I have a nervous tic. Maybe if I did, it would give them something to say so that they’d stop arguing over which of the stars in the night sky were their own.

“No, you can’t pick one, just like that, just willy-nilly. You have to develop a relationship with it first.”
The blanket I have wrapped around me smells like Ally, old Ally, who was sometimes Alison when the mood hit her and she wanted to seem old. Now she’s Ally, always Ally, because she is old and she’s not ready to be. She sits behind me smoking pot and flirting with a boy and wanting nothing more than to be a virginal child again, climbing through trees and playing games with make-believe horses.

“You don’t know. We have a very deep relationship. We’ve been developing it for two whole minutes.”

I’d love to love a star, to have a relationship with something so much bigger than I am or could ever be. I would find God but the disdainful atheism of my generation has already left my spirituality in ruins. And besides, I don’t want to love God, I want to make love to God. I want to feel loved by and connected to something that didn’t feel pathetic, that wasn’t so self-conscious and that didn’t get offended when I never, ever call. Something that could connect to me and still remain independent from me. I want to be wanted, not needed. I bet a star would make a good lover. The climax of our lovemaking would engulf entire planetary systems and would be seen from every point in the galaxy. The sky is so fucking beautiful tonight, it’s almost not real. I can see all the constellations, and all the little stars in between and I can even see the great cosmic shapes shifting and rustling behind the sky. One of the tiny in-between stars flickers and grows momentarily brighter and I wonder if it is me in a past life, or a in a future one, or me in five dimensions, making love to my own distant Sol. Perhaps that explains the beautiful, aching pain I feel when I see it. It feels almost like nostalgia.

The Transcendentalist (Mr. Schain’s story)

It’s imperfect and it’s sleep-deprived and it’s pretentious, and I’m already starting to hate it, but at least it’s done. I told myself I’d post it, so here it is.

THE TRANSCENDENTALIST

For Mr. Schain

There are few things in this Earth that interest me anymore. It has been years since I was attracted to a girl my age, and even older women have lost their musky and enigmatic allure. I’m not interested in men. I’m not interested in anyone. I’ve exhausted all possible joys that human contact can provide me, and I’ve moved on to other things. For a while, I dabbled in drugs. They would captivate me for a few hazy moments, but it was a distracted captivation, the kind of captivation that only comes when you are too dulled to feel your lack of purpose, and the process of coming down always left me feeling more wasted and unfulfilled than before. The only consolation that I have found, of late, is in the Books.

Though my family is too poor to afford hard copies of the Books, I’ve found ways to read them all, through ancient hard-sites tucked in the deepest and most remote folds of the dying Web (we are one of the few families at our income level who are graced with one of the slurring whirring behemoths; my father needs access to the old files for his work at the university.)  Most of them are so long and antiquated that they slip out through my eyes and ears the moment I turn away, no matter how hard I clutch and grasp at the content. The Old Anglaise is maddening, and The Dictionary is often of little-to-no help, though I have read it back to front, as most of the entries were lost or butchered during The Descent. But I can’t be too bitter about it; if Jacob the Bringer (may he live forever in our hearts and our heads) had not stood strong against the cruel Republic, though it eventually cost him his life, even the little material we have now may have been lost to its oppressive fist.

There is one fragment, however, that has always intrigued me. The hard book was not saved from the fires, and no matter how I probe and prod, the wheezing Web can only echo bits and phrases back at me. Though it is short, it is the only remnant of the Old World that speaks directly to my heart, in clear, plain words. It is this fragment that has caused me to leave, abandon my house and my home in search for the great purpose which has called out to me from beyond time, translated and immortalized by my one, saving phrase.

“I went into the woods because I wished to live deliberately.”

Of course, no one visits the woods anymore, though the atmosphere has long replenished itself to near-livable levels. There is no need to visit the surface, and even if there was, the road there is not an easy one. No metro-mobiles come close to breaching the surface and the buggies stop working once out of range of the electric signals to which they are enslaved. To reach the woods, one must climb, and straight up.

There are still a few tunnels dug by the ancients, and they hang like giant mole burrows over the heads of the largest cities. These are not practical for my particular purpose. I have little equipment, save my lowly helmet, a few terra-drills which I had obtained through my father’s connections with the university, a mechanical lantern which I could operate by peddling a lever at the base, my father’s hand-held (nearly antique, and merely an access point to the Web), a length of crude silk cloth woven by low-grade industrial worms (about 3 by 10 meters), and a length of rope with which I could tie myself to a rock when I slept. The rest of my pack had to be filled with powdered nutrient substance, anyway, and water, with which to rehydrate the powder, and myself. The city tunnels were far, far too wide, and paved with substance so slick that only the stickiest insects could have scaled its sheer face. I would have to take the back tunnels, the tunnels dug much later, after The Descent, dug up from below by the angry rebels who had not yet learned to deal with the sub-terra life. Of course, none of these reached the surface, as the rebels were eventually found and captured by the New Republic, so for the last few hundred meters, I would have to drill through myself. With my limited knowledge of the inferior tunnels and a sort of fierce fervor running through my blood, I calculated that my journey would take all of eight days. I did not account for the fact that the nutrient powder, though sustaining for long-distance spelunkers and infants who did nothing but roll on their backs and cry, would not prove adequate for an newly post-pubescent young man with a rapacious appetite, such as I am. I will speak little about the process of parting with my former life, as my former life was dull and uneventful. I may have forgotten to mention another item I had packed, and now seems like the time to bring it up, as it illustrates my feelings about my former life. After much deliberation, I had also carefully packed my seeds, a collection which had slowly been growing (no pun intended) since my fifth year of grade school, when I managed to steal a few packets of zucchini from the community garden. Up to this point in my brief biography, I may not have accurately described my feelings about my decision. Actually, I was quite ambivalent. Yes, I had been planning my excursion to the surface since I was young, which is why I had initially stolen the seeds, but it was more of an outlet for my human frustrations than anything else. My obsession with the idea of venturing to the surface was enough to give me purpose at the time, but as I grew older, the prospect of me actually carrying out my plan seemed to grow dimmer and dimmer. I decided that my fear and hesitation was not due to the fact that I would miss my old world, rather it was due to the primordial fear of the unknown which still beat through my veins, though science and reason have proved time and time again that there is no unknown that humankind cannot overcome. And besides, I have never been one to bow to my primal side, so I grit my teeth and set out for the edges of society.

By the end of the first day, I had found the first of the several inferior tunnels, but old stories and documentation from after the Descent told me that this was not the tunnel I wanted, and it was still far too high to be reached without a buggy. The tunnel I wanted, the one dug by the rebel that had gone the furthest, was ten or twenty kilometers sub-west, and I was tired, (though not nearly as tired as I would be when I was running solely on the nutritive powders) so I packed myself a den from the moist earth and fell softly asleep. I woke up the next morning before the lights in town had even been ignited, so it was still too black to see, but I had my little light, and after peddling steadily for a few minutes, the earth in front of me was illuminated. I walked on for hours, straining my eyes ahead into the bleary gloom and trying to discern dark rock from lack-of-rock. I was so transfixed with the path ahead that I had not even noticed the strange phenomenon that had begun to occur above me: the ceiling of the sky had started to descend, and when I held my dim little beacon up I could see its rough surface only a quarter-kilometer above me. The ceiling of the cave out, away from society was much different from the smooth, rounded, civilized ceiling that I was accustomed to. It was craggy and crevassed, and in the folds of damp earth I could see things moving. The ceiling here rippled and crumbled with pale, sightless life. Though I was a hard believer in scientific fact, I could not help recalling the stories passed in secret in the thin, twisting corridors of my former grade school. Wide-eyed children whispered tales of centipedes which were kilometers long, and not domesticated like the frail, segmented beasts of burden which roamed the cavernous halls of the factories. Insects with feral red eyes and shells too thick to pierce with the bits and reigns which kept their weak cousins in check. As I stared into the dark, and into the ceiling, I saw these things moving in and out of peripheral vision, and because I was deprived of my most prominent sense, my mind created wild and fanciful substitutes. There was a moment where I felt the hysterical and shuddering desire to dash back home, stumbling and scraping over and rolling over the landscape like a pill bug. I knew, however, that all I would be returning to was a life of self-loathing and personal disappointment, so though my mind shrieked and protested, I pressed on.

I continued to check the ceiling at regular intervals for reference to my position, but I avoided it as much as possible. After what seemed like weeks, after many back-tracks and second-guesses, I reached the horizon, where the floor and the ceiling melded into a craggy wall. I had overshot the tunnel entrance by about fifty meters or so, and for a few panicked moments, I gave up all hope of reaching my goal, but a quick turn to the left revealed my tunnel, and I ran gratefully to the entrance. The mouth of the tunnel itself was about a meter wide, and the wall was all broken ridges and sharp protrusions, but with my phrase in my heart and a blind, bold perseverance, I began my Ascent.

I will take this time to tell you a bit more about my phrase. It was written about a thousand years before the rise of the Republic, before all the separate human colonies became a great and terrible conglomerate. The name of the author was lost to the times, but I have pieced together select phrases which I believe may also have been written by him. Most of them give vague and confusing advice about material desire and the economy of the time which, though it may be important to paleoanthropologists like my father, interests me very little. There are a few descriptions, however, which I also turned to during my long journey, as a source of inspiration and a reason to keep on. I would allow myself to read one of these each day, but only one, so as to not wear out my motivation before I reached the top. At the end of the first day of climbing, I pulled up a file at random from the sole folder saved on the handheld.

“A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”

The Dictionary has little helpful information about lakes, (lake: an inland body of _______, a pool of ___) and I have little other information about how they are used in this context. I can only assume that the author is not referring to the great spitting lakes whose caustic energy is harvested by the factories and used to make clothing and heat, as the lakes in the phrase are pleasantly referred to as “expressive,” and it would be not at all a pleasant and, in fact, a very grim reality indeed if the industrial factory lakes are the true expression of “the beholder’s own nature.” I can only assume that this is yet another glorious dead truth long ago forgotten in the halls of some ancient bureaucracy. I fell asleep in the wall of the tunnel, lying in a cave no doubt made by my predecessor, perhaps even lying in the same position that he or she had slept in over five-hundred years ago.

Because my equipment was so poor and outdated, (I could only manage to get my hands on the technologies that the university had rejected) I could not dig my own cavern for sleeping, but rather had to climb until I found one hollowed out by my rebellious ancestor. Luckily, this man was far less ambitious than I, and I was able to climb past two of these nooks before I finally settled in on the second night. I was feeling very confident, even verging on cocky, and as I lay back against the cool cave wall and re-read my phrase, I allowed myself to drift off into a fantasy about the surface and what I would do when I arrived. I would, of course, have to build myself an earth dome; though my old dead author sometimes talked of sleeping in the forest, he (though I’ve found no hints as to what gender my author was, he has a decidedly male voice, and anyway I feel a connection too strong to be shared by people of opposing genders) lived during a time when the scorched skies were still smooth and substantial, and provided shelter from the harsh Out There. I had packed enough food to last me for a month, and if I planted immediately upon my surfacing, I could just survive until my little seeds bore fruit. In the sub-terra, sometimes they grew even faster, but I had to account for the alien environment and for chance and bad luck. Beyond that, I had no plans. I would spend my life among the trees, living deliberately and staring into the face of my own being. My quote for the day, however, gave me abundant fodder for my daydream:

“You only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns.”
It had been many hundreds of years since any human had last seen the surface, and in that time, how had the world changed? What strange new creatures were quietly awaiting my arrival? Vividly colored millipedes, colors not blanched by the draining sub-lights. Throngs and swarms and herds of fantastically foreign creatures, breeding a stranger and more wonderful crop with each passing generation. And we had been gone for many, many generations. And an even more extraordinary thought crossed my mind: what if some humans had escaped The Descent, had not made it to the sub-terra? They could have hidden in the tunnels of the old hovels; surely a few might have remained on the surface. What might THEY have become? I fell into a doze and strange images drifted through my field of vision. The floating filaments of filth falling from the ceiling of the tunnel grew into exotic species as they passed through the beam of my lantern, then fell to collect in a fine dust at the bottom of my feet. I wonder if this dust had seen the surface world. It looked soft, and mineral-rich, the kind of soil I would want to plant in, to grow in, to sink my feet into, to build my foundations on, to cushion my head as I slept beneath the vast, endless Sky.

My terra firma, tu to feng, rare desert-marble hanging against the black velvet drapes. Father says there was an old tribe that believed the first people were fashioned from the Great Mound, and that they had to crawl through a long, dark cave to reach the sunlight. To them, Earth was all there is. Infinite Earth. And they were born in its belly, like clay-crafted mammals. On the third day, I made little progress through my birth canal (my Earth canal), but I feel like I made some great spiritual bounds. Perhaps it was my dwindling food supply; I am terrible at rationing, and I had eaten all the desirable food first. All I had left was the nutrient powder. Perhaps this was sufficient for hikers who scaled long horizontal distances, but I was working against gravity, and I felt like all my energy was being drained from my body and dripping out the bottoms of my feet like the juice from a carrot. I couldn’t see very well in the dim lantern light, anyway, the moisture on my feet may have been manna. In any case, my lack of energy put me into a sort of delirium which was rather conducive to my travel, actually, as I could continue climbing without even realizing I was moving. It’s easy to pretend that you are floating when all your muscles grow numb from use and you see nothing ahead of you but the black inside your head. Without the pain of moving, I could turn my eye to my own thoughts. I must admit that I had cheated a bit, that morning: I read my quote early so as to give myself inspiration to climb. My initial fire was already beginning to wear off and I was literally stuck in the middle of my project, much too far to turn back. My quote, for the third day, was as follows:

“Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.”

Well, there I was, being good for something. But for what, exactly? I tried to convince myself that I was trying to preserve some element of the old race, to connect the tired race’s to its roots, so to speak, but I knew that if such was the case, I would have told someone where I was going. No, this journey was for no one but myself. For myself, and maybe for my author. I thought I should feel guilty for my selfishness, but I didn’t, not really. Layering guilt upon guilt never accomplishes anything, and besides, humans are entirely selfish creatures. One cannot be anything else when one sees out of only one set of eyes. I was then and continue to be a part of the cosmos, and my journey to the surface was as much a step for humanity as it was for myself, in the grand scheme of things.

After the third day, mental capacity gradually regressed. This was a great relief for my spirit, which then proceeded to well up inside of me unheeded by my overbearing rational functions. There is not much to say about this time, because my thoughts were no longer translated into words for processing. They skipped that step, and simply existed as emotions, filling up my character to the brim and overflowing into my ambient environment. The walls of the cave were bathed in me, their surfaces slick with me, dripping with the ebb and flow of me. I read my last quote on the fifth night, and then I discontinued the practice, as I no longer felt that it was necessary. Besides, my handheld stopped working in the day or so following; I assume it simply lost touch with the sub-terra satellites. My quote affirmed my decision:

“As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness, weakness.”

I lost track of days, after that. I ran completely out of food by the eighth or ninth day, but I was long beyond caring, by that point. All that was left in my poor malnourished brain was The Ascent. Somewhere around the tenth day, I reached the end of the tunnel. This was the closest anyone had been to the surface in hundreds of years. I did not stop, then, to ruminate, however, I could not stop. I was on automatic pilot, and I began to dig almost without realizing what I was doing. I dug for minutes, or seconds, or hours or days. The time it took is not important. What is important is what came next.

I breached the surface at around dusk, which was too bad, as I didn’t get a chance to see the sun in its full, terrible glory until some time after. My first impression of the surface was that it was very, very cold. The air, drier than bone, pierced through my face flesh and removed any moisture I had left in a split-second gust. I pulled myself out, rolled over on to my cramping stomach, and slept. I slept, and slept, and slept for days perhaps, for when I woke up I was drenched in my own precious life-water and it was once again dark. I had fevered dreams of bristling heat, and when I tried to move, my skin was like fire and dust. I thought I would burn away into ashes on the dry ground, and so soon after I had reached my goal.  I rolled over and took my first look at the sky. I have never been afraid of heights, and during my entire journey through the Earth, I had no fear of falling. I was in my natural element, and my mater-terra had been good to me. My first glance into the gaping, open wound of the sky, however, was as much like falling as anything. It was odd, I had the impression of being steadfastly grounded on Earth, I could feel the piles of white dirt sift through my dry-knuckled hands, but I also felt the great black void pulling on the very essence of me, so as to raise me up into itself. I could not move, nor could I turn away or close my eyes, so instead, I wept, in terror and awe and euphoria, all at once. I still cannot stare the night sky full in the face, it is simply too much nothing and myself all at once. Once I finally regained control, I flopped on to my aching side, and set to work making my shelter. I was weak, and my hands would not make fists, so I pushed my flopping wrists crudely against my pack and hooked by claws around the fabric. I considered simply crawling underneath the fabric and falling asleep again, but I knew that this would be insufficient protection against the parching wind, which was quickly sapping me of all my water, and the scorching sun, which was not particularly hydrating, either. It was then that I took my first look at the surface.

The light from the sky was more than enough to illuminate my surroundings, in fact, it cast deep shadows which were distorted strangely by the craggy earth. By my feet, there were a few rocks and clumps where the dust had cohered to my sweat and formed into little clay balls. This was nothing new to me; this was still familiar to me. A few feet away, there were boulders, also nothing new, but made alien by the textures that are a result of years of blanching sun and acid-rain (I have yet to experience the phenomena, but it is my purely speculative belief that the atmosphere has cleansed itself of all its man-made pollutants. It is hard to even imagine rain in such an arid environment, anyway.)  Beyond these common items, however, was the forest. I knew it immediately by its structure alone, and later by its feel and resonance. The trees both possessed and became the Earth, seamlessly, dwindling up from the ground to twisted, tormented tips, colored grey by the light of the sky. They cast long, stretched shadows, which skipped and collided on the ground in a catastrophic mural of black and white. I could not see the true color of the trees in the night, but I could see from here that they were all the same color, clones, mirrored and reflected in each other forever, in a field which grew dense as my eye followed it to the planet’s edge. They frightened me, but I had not come so far just to disappoint myself and my author with cowardice. I knew then that I must sleep among the trees.

The sun woke me this morning, blazing and brilliant; it filled half the sky and immediately began its work of dragging the moisture from my tissue. I set up my cloth among the branches and set to the work of writing my story. It is worth mentioning, of course, that I regained signal for my hand-held. I must be picking up on an archaic signal from the old Earth satellites. It’s a wonder that any are left, after all this time.

I went into the woods to live deliberately. And how much more deliberation could I have? I dropped my seeds into the cracks of Mother Earth, and I look forward to seeing my plants take root within the next couple of days. I sit here, clutching the cool, unyielding surface of the trees and hear the resounding gong moving through our being, and feel the vibration running up along my spine. This is the strongest connection I’ve ever felt, with anything, with the universe and with myself, with my author. I went into the woods to live deliberately. And I can feel the woods within me, too.

Cormorant Logic

“The fish are disappearing.”
An uncomfortable rustle went around the crowd at this statement. Everyone knew it was true, but they’d been actively avoiding the subject because it seemed simply too serious to be addressed.
“In our villages, hatchlings lie in the reeds dying of starvation, and great bouts of featherplague run rampant among the elder community, feeding on malnutrition and despair! Everyday, the ocean’s endless supply grows less and less plentiful, even our greatest hunters come back with empty mouth-sacks. What we need is a solution! My friends, I stand in front of you today and I ask, I bed for an end to our long suffering! Does anyone have a solution to our plight?” There was a slight pause as a thousand feathered heads turned from side to side, looking for an answer to the seemingly impossible question.
“Need more fish!” cried a bleak voice from the crowd, and a wave of honks answered in agreement.
“Yes! More fish!”
“Fish! Fish good to eat!”
“More fish!”
“Yes, my feathered friends, that is the root of our dilemma. We do not have fish. The fish have all gone. Where they have gone, I do not know. Perhaps they swam to brighter shoals, or to deeper depths, in search of the answers to the great esoteric questions which…”
“No!” interrupted a young male, who rarely entertained thoughts about anything other than dinner and tail-feather.
“Fish-men. They take fish with ropes. They pick fish up and take fish back and feed them to fish-men hatchlings!”
A murmur of agreement bobbed around the flock. (“Yes! Fish-men!” “Fish men ear fish!” “Fish good, I like to eat fish!”)
“Fish-men?” asked the Head Shag quizzically.
“They…eat fish,” explained the young male. “Catch in boats. Eat with rubber lip-holes.”
The Head Shag pondered this for a moment, then replied.
“You say they have hatchlings, these fish-men?”
“Many. They are bald and the mother regurgitates milk for them through her abdomen.” The male, proud of his extensive knowledge of the human race, spoke pointedly and finished his statement with a satisfactory bob of his feathered head.
“Hmm…perhaps these fish-men are both our problem and our solution. Yes, citizens, at last we have reached an agreement! We will steal one of these fish-men-lings, and it will teach us to fish like the others. Then, once we have infiltrated their ranks, we will bring them down from the inside! We will use their own kind against them, and from the rubble of their destroyed society, the great cormorant will rise, triumphant, ruler of all the fish in the sea! Come, my wrested revolutionaries. Tonight, we sleep on empty stomachs, but tomorrow, we take the son of fish-man himself!”

ᶲ ᶲ ᶲ

Stephen was not a disobedient child, he merely hated being told what to do. It was partially his mother’s fault. Had she told him, ‘Stephen, you may go and pet those dirty looking birds over there, if you wish,’ he would have had no interest whatsoever, and would have left it well enough alone. That is not, however, what she said, and due to the circumstances, Stephen suddenly felt a burning, itching, uncontrollable desire to pluck just one feather odd of the crest of the nearest bird. He had not quite gotten the hang of the business of walking yet, but nevertheless he hobbled steadily towards the nearest flock. The birds made no attempt to evade him, but instead stood ominously still, and even let out the occasional encouraging squawk (“Yes, fleshy fishy man,” “Come to us, come to us, fish-man-ling.”) Stephen moved thoughtfully through the flock, searching for the perfect feather to add to his treasure pocket, though it was already full of sandy french-fries and pretty rocks. Finally, he found the perfect specimen.
“Here, burdy,” he cooed quietly, hand outstretched. And they were upon him.

The journey home was long and treacherous, as it involved a complex system of old rope-bits designed to distribute the child’s weight evenly across the cormorant backs, but which ultimately got tangled up in the birds’ wings. The end product was a flapping ball of disgruntled feathers, filled with a chewy human center. They eventually reached the cove, and with many scornful words directed at Beakfry the Flight Mechanic and Drakeford the Rope Engineer, they managed to cut themselves loose and salvage most of their dignity. They shuffled around and raised their crests high, looking rather impressive despite their dreadfully ruffled plumage.

“Fish-maaaan!” cried the Head Shag, spreading his winds to their full capacity and moving his head from side to side for dramatic effect. “Fish man! You and your kind have upset the balance of our oceans, and the time has come for cormorants to seek retribution!” Stephen stared at the large crane-like bird with trepidation. He had learned about water birds in preschool and had even pet one when the lady from the wild-life foundation had come to his class. These birds, however, were nothing like Edgar the Eager Egret, and before he could decide whether or not to offer them his french-fries, some of the more pugnacious little birds had picked up sticks in their beaks and began poking him angrily.

“Owww!” he whimpered. “Stop that!” He took the sticks from the bird beaks and they hissed at him, hopping from foot to foot and feeling less impressive now that they were unarmed. Stephen stood up and dusted the sand off of his overalls, causing a wave of consternation to travel around the flock.
“I dunno what you want! All I wanted wuzza feather, a little feather…” He was cut short by the largest bird, who raised one wing, signaling silence. The bird hopped down off of his rock and went over to a patch of reeds down by the shoreline. He returned with something in his beak, which he presented to Stephen, lying it down in front of him and backing up humbly to his place on the rock. He tucked his head coyly under his wing and made little chirruping noises for effect.
“This…for me?” Stephen asked, picking up the rotting carp and turning it over in his hands. “Um, no thanks, I don’t eat fishies…” One of the armed stick-ducks lunged quickly at Stephen’s outstretched hands, cuasing him to shriek and drop the carcass, which was presently picked up and swallowed whole.
“Oh! You want fishies? We have loadsof them. Up on shore. They’re fried and dipped in mayonnaise…” he suddenly became uncomfortably aware of the hundreds of little orange eyes fixed intently on his face.

“But you wouldn’t like them like that, of course…” a fog horn went off in the distance, and a hundred little black heads turned to face the horizon, where the fishing boats were coming in for the night. There was a violent reaction among the crowd, beaks thrashing and wings flapping furiously.

“Oh! We can just ask THEM for fishies! They have lots and I’m sure they could share. Common, follow me.” Stephen pushed himself up and began to walk towards the beach. The birds sat silent for a moment then, one after the other, began waddling along behind him down the shore.

ᶲ ᶲ ᶲ

The fisherman were just docking and beginning to haul in their day’s load when one of the men pointed to something approaching on the shoreline. A small, toe-headed boy hobbled along, picking up shells and throwing stones into the sea. Behind him came an enormous flock of the largest seagulls they had ever seen. Or were they great black cranes? They watched the group come closer, slowly but surely making its way towards the dock.

Stephen approached the fishing boats like a small, triumphant pied-piper, leading behind him a flock of vicious and battle-ready cormorants. (He did not know this, but many of the birds had bathed and sacred brine and made peace with their enemies in preparation for this telling last battle.) He ambled up to the nearest fisherman who sat, mouth agape, on the edge of the splintered dock.
“’Scuze me,” said the boy, wiping his nose on the back of his shirt sleeve. “Can we have some of your fish? I know you got lots, and I think the birdies are hungry.” The fisherman shifted, gazing uneasily into the eyes of the murderous flock.

“Well, boy,” said the fisherman, keeping one eye on the largest bird, who stood directly behind the boy. “I don’t know id you quite understand how this works. Ya see, the birdies, they get their own fish. I need to feed my family as well, and…” his sentence was broken off by a sudden onslaught of feathers and squawking noises.
“NOW, COMRADES! TO THE FISH, OR TO THE DEATH!” The great flock moved as one, swarming around the ship like a plague of locusts and swooping down on the sailors in an apocalyptic rush of plumage. The battle was short, and within three minutes, victory was assured. The sailors had been trained in knot-tying and net-reeling, but had never been fully prepared for an armament of cormorants. The Shag-Bird took his place at the helm, giving one, long, victorious caw, and the ship pushed out from the dock. The humans stared on in awe at the little fishing boat, which sailed on towards the horizon in a triumphant mass of beaks and feathers. Stephen looked up into the haggard face of the old docksman.

“Um, sorry sir,” he stuttered, sheepishly. “Can you help me find my mommy?”

Edifice Rex

Alright, I’m going to try to keep up to date on this, but routine is hard for me, so this blog may end up having long art-droughts, followed by art-splosions. I have a few posts to do before I catch up with our current project, thus my employment of the past tense. I’m not just writing from the stand-point of future me, sipping wine coolers and eating little caviar pancakes as I discuss my adolescence with a late-night t.v. show host. Though I do that sometimes, too.
Our first collaborative project: Edifice Rex. I think that the prompt was something like “make a place that only exists in your head.” Mama made the beautiful collage and I wrote the story in response.

EDIFICE REX
or
Once Upon a Time

One upon a time there was a girl in love. Unfortunately, she was very plain, and had a face like a mouse, and when she slouched her shoulders and held her head down (as she was want to do), she looked so small and plain and mousy that no one ever noticed her, at all. She watched her boy walk by and followed his gaze as it fell on the full round breasts and slender toes of the other girls, the young women. She looked sadly down at her own flat chest and ugly duck feet and sighed.

At first, the girl hated the others for their physical assets, then she just hated herself for her lack thereof. Some days, her only consolation was in her above-average intelligence. In fact, the girl’s mind far outshone the most polished pair of gold hoop earrings, and surpassed even the curviest of the women in beauty. She wanted desperately to exploit herself, to dress her mind in heels and squeeze it into a corset so tight that her frontal lobe would come bursting suggestively out of the top. Day by day, she watched the other girls, the young women…

One day, she decided she could take it no longer. She packed up a few belongings (a library card a dull bread knife a pack of Camels) and traveled to the city to visit the Medicine Man. He sat on the street corner in his card-board box and scratched his back and listened carefully to her story. He looked through her bag, pocketed her pack of cigarettes, and asked for a light. Then, he offered her a solution. “I can put your knowledge on display; You can wear it like a headdress, carry it proudly on your head for all to see.” The girl had read thousands of books, many of them warning of the deceptive promises of dirty old magic men, but she was too vain, and she didn’t care, because those were all fiction and her life was not a story. She consented, and swallowed the pill the magic man gave her, and sat patiently as he did his work. He opened up her mind, and scooped out all of her thoughts like swirly chunky leafy crusty pudding breadcrumbs dream-stuff. He spread them all out in front of him, right there on the infected sidewalk. Oh, the volumes! It took hours and hours, but eventually, he was done, and the streets glittered with the girl’s beautiful mind. Then, he began to organize. Carefully, he balanced thought after thought, triviality after triviality on top of her head. He alphabetized the books that she’d read, and the poems that she’d written, and wrapped them up in the beautiful songs she had floating in the in-between spaces. When he had finished, the girl’s headdress was as tall as her, and a thousand times as wide, but of course it weighed nothing because they were just one girl’s thoughts, which have no weight in the real world. The girl saw her reflection in the mirrored side of a building and cried tears of joy, for now the whole world could see her beauty. She thanked the medicine man and ran deliriously back into town, streaming ribbons of emotion behind her.

The people of her town saw her coming from two and a half miles away. Her boy noticed her first. They ran to meet her, to admire her now-apparent splendor. They marveled at her shining memories, her literature collection, her extensive volumes of half-written songs and novels and poems (of which she was very proud), all carefully organized, the Great Library of Girl. The people built ladders, and climbed up into her mind, and delved through the stacks of knowledge, self-discoveries, and the answers to problems they themselves had spent their entire lives trying to solve. All out in the open, on display. The people stole her thoughts. Here were the solutions to their worries; Why go through the pain of learning a lesson when the girl had already done it for you? They stripped away her outer shell, volumes of math and science and practical solutions to household conundrums, then they worked deeper down, to the literature and arts and analysis of poetry and thoughts about the world and the flowers and why books smell better with age while milk does not. They exposed her innermost thoughts, her shame and her nudity and her perverted embarrassments and moments of sexuality. The people laughed at these, for they were so silly and awful and secretly they all had the same thoughts themselves. They took everything that she had valued in herself, everything she had took such pride in, and didn’t stop until she tore herself away and ran screaming down the road, away from her village. She ran back to the medicine man and threw herself at his feet and sobbed and sobbed as she reached up and felt the tattered remains of her beautiful mind. She felt around for something to salvage, one last gleaming piece of her former glory. All she found was one tired old phrase, too clichéd and well-worn for anyone to want. She lay down, in the street, next to the cardboard box, and repeated it to herself, over and over and over:

“Once upon a time…”