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seasons of creature

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“But there are some who declare that such creatures of two sexes are monstrosities, and coming rarely into the world as they do they have the quality of presaging the future, sometimes for evil and sometimes for good.”

― Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library, 1st century BC.

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“Suppose someone were to say: ‘Imagine this butterfly exactly as it is, but ugly instead of beautiful’?!”

― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, 1889-1951

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We were swallowed whole and there we were, warm and inside, with the breath of that creature reaching over everything.

Our city was captured, a crash site covered in skin.

There was no exit or escape, every echo was an earthquake about to erupt, each exhale was a heat wave waiting for us.

The outcome was over already, we were the creature’s city now.

—

We woke up to stomachfuls of wrecking balls, wet food, worn debris. One storm after another, scattering against our shingles and gathering gray hair on the ground.

The city called it the creature’s rain, they collected it in their cellars and their stairwells, they carved their names into the cement it made.

You watched me there, collecting what remains I could, keeping myself unkilled in the creature’s cartilage.

Your eyes were on strings, swinging from a ceiling I couldn’t see. Your eyes were wide as white flags, watching me.

—

This city here, the one we’ve been left in, it’s a residual collapse, a heavy gasp. In the distance, the shape of it seems dimly scribbled against the inside of the creature, like the sketch of a spent explosive, it sprawls and then it shivers and then it sprawls some more.

The most of us that survived stuck to the center of the city, in small rooms in short skyscrapers, we searched for shelf lives that stayed just out reach.

Beneath the buildings, the creature’s ground was cold, coffee-colored, full of fault lines that caught fire whenever the fevers came.

You kept matchbooks in your pockets and I copied you. I rubbed gunpowder on my palms to get them pale like yours. I untrapped my hands as close to you as I could.

You told me maybe there were enough fault lines here to find us again. You said sooner or later the motion sickness might miss us both.

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We spent the first season scavenging the creature for a skeleton key.

I searched in shrapnel piles and stolen terrain, I said over and over there had to be a way out of there.

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Day after day, the creature’s rain wouldn’t stop painting us the way we truly were.

Each time I looked at you and your hair was heavier and darker. The build-ups in your breath came and went like birds stealing bread.

Your skin stayed sheet-white and still hid the stage whispers from me.

I was your hang-wire, your hiding place. I was your charade of ways to count backwards from the couple we didn’t become.

Our city stayed a knot in the creature’s stomach, a choke hold you couldn’t stop choosing over me. If there ever was a key, it couldn’t keep me from remembering it all too well.

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This was what I knew about you: you grew up without a favorite cease fire.

Your mother was a pushcart, a towel rack, your father was the same. By the time you were five, every eavesdrop knew your name. By the time your flashback fell into mine, your face was still a fitting room you were trying to find.

We were living in a summer creature, one that had emptied out its echoes long before the leftovers fell in. The erosion was exposed, cloth wasn’t always an obstacle.

I found you in the back fields, burning bones in an old paper bag. They looked like black candles buried in there.

I remember your face was ragged, bruised under the eyes and bluish on the blind sides. I remember what you told me first, “the big wars are over, and the small ones never end.”

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rainy day in an amphibious house / letters

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Nevada / 16 May to 14 June

Dear Jillison,

There are two kinds of half-life (blood loss, sentimentality) and they can both kill you quietly.

Me? Myself? I suffer from a lack of generative imagery, imaginative capacity.

An eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out of-the-way New England village cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar.

Oblivion lurks in the immediate neighborhood.
Said Thomas Bailey Aldrich of Emily Dickinson, 1885.

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I’ve tried to prepare an explanation for you the best I can:

Nosebleed, ear ache, stomach cramps. Highly derivative ways of forcing back weight. Slow. Sluggish. Already lost more than arms and legs.

I’m pretty sure we both can’t keep using exhaustion as an excuse.

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Julin / 15 June to 15 July

Dear Jillison,

Consider.

Most hummingbirds are continuously hours away from starving to death and consume the human equivalent of 140,000 calories per day to compensate.

They enter an mini-hibernation mode (torpor) each night just to survive the suspension of calories.

Jillison, This is how I imagine it must be to live the way you do.

Incurable, without sleep, not dead enough. Still scrambling to write your same zero-sum diaries. Childless too, obviously.

This how I imagine it to be at least.

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Castle / 16 November to 15 December

Dear Jillison,

OK, so what did I actually actually see? These days? It wasn’t much.

Gray splotches, dust storms, pale clouds. A disconnect between patchwork and puncture sites.

You told me once, every scar has to have an origin story. Do you remember that? You said, “a cautionary tale is just culture (however you choose to to define it) designed to improve our survival rate.“

Scavenger’s daughter was right. I wasn’t going to last.

—

Castle / 16 November to 15 December

Dear Jillison,

Before proper mirrors, the ocean or lake was the looking glass, the reflective world.

Lacking semantic or declarative memory, many of us, we still mistake this metaphor, we have a hard time remembering what lap we are on, we mistake denotation for connotation.

Even when the differences are glaring at us right in the face.

—

The act of predation can be broken down into a maximum of four stages: Detection of prey, attack, capture and finally consumption.

What I mean is? We have been adapting to the afterlife as if it were a normal error. Everything has slowed down. Completely.

Jillison, have you considered? Many hereafters won’t belong to humans at all.

This should come as no surprise to you by now.

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Plowshare / 16 January to 12 or 13 February

Dear Jillison,

I said I was going to stop writing you these letters. I should have.

We often fail to appreciate this critical aspect of the natural world: it’s brutal. Even apex predators are very often constantly on the edge of starvation.

Emily Dickinson’s complete refusal to sit for a photographer. In the end, unwilling to leave her bedroom, hiding from all visitors, even in her own home.

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What is here since you left?

Some days are like hummingbirds in plastic bags and some have some have been so long and flat they may as well have been laid out on a stretcher.

Every one I thought of you at some point or another.

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Why are there so many myths and folklore where humans are punished for wanting better than their present lot in life?

It’s because you can’t have it. Ultimately.

empty hell theory / hospital 2

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Once, there were rumors in hell that human beings were happy. So Lucifer sent some minor demon or other up to see if these rumors were true.

They weren’t. Yes. We can zero in on that a little bit.

Children think their imaginary friends know more than flesh and blood people do. It seems ingrained in our mental programming that a mind without a body will know more than a mind within a body.

Dreaming up gods that don’t exist yet (but maybe should soon?). This is how the afterlife comes to devour actual life.

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December. Dotted lines across the eyelids. Hair and teeth gives the illusion that there is more body there.

A tenth less atoms. Many times our memories are very low resolution and highly suggestible.

It would be unsettling if we didn’t have all these other identities and read throughs to fall back on.

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What are the other possibilities before us? Another tired light hypothesis? The entire framework is much more fallible than we think. Flawed.

We humans are descended from a need. This need. I don’t think there is any use in trying to hide it anymore.

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hopeful monster hypotheses

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Hopeful monster theory suggests that major evolutionary transformations have occurred not through the gradual accretion of small steps but rather through large leaps between species.

“Biologists seem inclined to think that because they have not themselves seen a ‘large’ mutation, such a thing cannot be possible.”

― Richard Goldschmidt, The Material Basis of Evolution, 1940

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Corpus linguistics is the study of language as expressed in samples (corpora) of “real world” text.

“The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject.”

― Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 1980

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A cloud of opaque materials.

Macromutations.

Revenge fantasies? Yes, of course those too.

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Rhapsodomancy is a form of divination in which guidance was sought through the chance selection of a passage in literature, often by opening a book and selecting the first line seen.

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Parable underused: Preincarnation.

Men who do not devote their lives to pursuing wisdom will be reborn as women. Determined Plato.

There are so many ways of earning a living, and most of them are failures. Wrote Gertrude Stein.

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“I know, indeed, the evil of that I purpose; but my inclination gets the better of my judgment.”

Allows Euripides, Medea, 5th century BC.

True carnivory is thought to have evolved independently nine times in five different orders of flowering plants.

Monotonous and gloomy variations of the same dismal theme.

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“Each individual is separated from others by a taboo of personal isolation, a narcissism of minor differences.”

States anthropologist Ernest Crawley, Sexual Taboo: A Study of the Relations of the Sexes, 1895.

“When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathe News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax.”

Admits Flannery O’Connor.

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In the Middle Ages. the most important events occurred in cemeteries: local elections, trials, sermons, and theater plays. Prostitutes would also operate within cemetery grounds.

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Little moon faced girl from the woods. Picked over, pock marked.

For humans, repetition is inherently transgressive.

Predictive brain, inference generating machine.

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Many people, taking this into account, and holding that such a change of sex is against nature, have been at great pains to prove:

(1) that Orlando had always been a woman

(2) that Orlando is at this moment a man.

Let biologists and psychologists determine. It is enough for us to state the simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since.

Instructs Virgina Woolf, Orlando: A Biography, 1928.

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Contact metamorphism.

“Devastating birds wither everything with their breath.”

Irish myth: Cross.

Adult. Reproductive or cannibalistic.

A “parataxon” (not to be confused with parataxonomy), or “sciotaxon” (Gr. “shadow taxon”), is a classification based on incomplete data: for instance, the v larval stage of an organism that cannot be matched up with an adult.

Pretend they’re all children in adult costumes. It gets easier.

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“The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering.”

Writes Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 1981.

Hypothesis. That the body itself is capable of storing memories, as opposed to only the brain.

Categorical perceptions. We’re trying as quickly as possible to fit it in within our taste.

If there were no thinking beings in the universe would numbers exist?

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“Trahit sua quemque voluptas.

Everyone is dragged on by their favorite pleasure.”

― Virgil, Eclogues, 1st century BC.

“Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.”

― Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter, 1993.

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In classical astronomy, androgyn was a name given to planets that were sometimes warm and sometimes cold.

General structure is largely (in terms of record and filter): more potential than production.

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From a 1906 psychiatric journal, The Alienist and Neurologist:

Then, there is a fear of being seen and a shamefacedness, which one sees in asylums. […] We called it scopophobia — a morbid dread of being seen.

In minor degree, it is morbid shamefacedness, and the patient covers the face with his or her hands. In greater degree, the patient will shun the visitor and escape from his or her sight where this is possible. Scopophobia is more often manifest among women than among men.

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“The basic anxiety, the anxiety of a finite being about the threat of nonbeing, cannot be eliminated. It belongs to existence itself.”

Admits Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be, 1952.

“Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.”

Admits Hector Berlioz in a letter written in November,1856.

The most common types of suicide include copycat, euthanasia, familicide, forced, honor, internet, martyrdom, ritual, attack, and cop suicides.

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Corpus linguistics adherents believe that reliable language analysis best occurs on field-collected samples, in natural contexts and with minimal experimental interference.

Until the late 15th century the word ‘girl’ simply means a child of either sex.

Boys, where they had to be differentiated, were referred to as ‘knave girls’ and girls in the female sense were called ‘gay girls’.

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“Female monsters take things as personally as they really are. They study facts. Even if rejection makes them feel like the girl who’s not invited to the party, they have to understand the reasons why.

… Every question, once it’s formulated, is a paradigm, contains its own internal truth. We have to stop diverting ourselves with false questions. And I told Warren: I aim to be a female monster too.”

― Chris Kraus, I Love Dick, 1997.

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“I didn’t recognize you… from a distance. That’s supposed to be my job.”

A security guard says to me.

Equally a boy could be a ‘knave child’ and a girl a ‘maiden child’.

Hybridization is actually quite common in nature. Equines. Elephants. Big cats.

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Hopeful monster hypotheses. The root of ‘monstrum’ is ‘monere’—which does not only mean to warn, but also to instruct, and forms the basis of the modern English “demonstrate.”

Thus, the monster is also a sign or instruction.

Repetition and deficiency.

Exaggerated intuitions for how unlikely some things are.

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“And identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself.”

Writes Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography, 1937.

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leftover vein forest / hospital 3

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For seven weeks, one by one, she cut her wrists into kites and string.

They decorated her remains with escape clauses and expiration dates, a row of arrows through the skin.

They asked for a warm body to replace a need elsewhere, a marker of muscle and a moistened gauze.

She gave me a reason. Leaves were parted to let the veins in.

—

I waited for her in a short cornered room, in between cabinets, crouching, listening. I was little more than a torso, with or without legs. At most an extra arm, shoulders and a patch of hair.

I caught them staring at a capillary and calling it a certain ripple, I saw a still life disappearing on the inner corner of each hand.

—

Six hours of slash and burn, six clinics, one back canopy, no one said your name. Jillison, not even once.

They put her on a saline drip and said she was starting to improve, stopped vomitting, started drinking water and milk. She showed a normal spinal curve for once.

Her waiting room was windowless, walls nearly invisible, as close as we could come to a non-zero recovery again.

They never say exactly what shame takes away from you, the landscape of anatomy that gets subtracted entirely.

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A faceful of blowout fractures. A cavity in each cornea, irises resized by lack of light, same blank injuries for anyone to see.

She told them the clouds were broken ornaments without a box, they weren’t even close.

She said the sky was replaced by means of riot control, they threw it in a back room, probably burned it.

She said you can’t replace a black hole, when all you have is a body full of black holes.

Silver lining of a sudden vein. Just had to cut it cleanly, let it find it’s type.

—

They told me it was over, and I watched her.

Woke up to an empty waiting room, a blanket kite corpses covering the bed. I told myself not to forget and then I left a note for her instead

Jillison, the ripples on the mirror show up as shadows below your skin. I always thought if you left me and of course I hoped it would be then.

false martyr cartography.

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“The malignant self-obsession and childish vitriol only scratches the surface of the man’s flaws. His compulsions aren’t hidden or covered up. They are broadcast for the entire country to see, for hours on end, every day, late into the night.”

—

Never underestimate temporary paralysis. It only takes one lifetime to forget all of human history.

The oldest burial sites and artifacts suggest such a belief in an afterlife goes back more than 50,000 years.

Can the dead talk at all? Leave the afterlife alone. You open a door only to find a fire inside.

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Petulant borderline (including negativistic features): Negativistic, impatient, restless, as well as stubborn, defiant, sullen, pessimistic, and resentful; easily feels “slighted” and quickly disillusioned.

Hollow, small, sunken, confused, jealousy. It just dominates so much of my thoughts. Intensities of abandonment or reckless abstraction. It doesn’t ever go away.

Everything was poorly communicated and treated as disposable. Identities. Aspirations. Jobs. Relationships. People, in general. We didn’t hang on to anything for very long.

Entropy was common and collective. Maybe we had more to learn from it than we think.

—

Days were sharp and light, and the afterlife did both things. I had shingles in my breath and a throat stacked with wood to burn. We often lit a fire just to remember what the world felt like before.

She carried bags of ash and gray air. We had good seasons and bad seasons. More choices did not necessarily make either of us happier. The afterlife highlights the lack in each.

Causality is murky and hubristic. Causality is irrelevant. Falling masonry offers little refuge.

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Impulsive borderline (including histrionic or antisocial features): Captivating, capricious, superficial, flighty, distractable, frenetic, and seductive; fearing loss, the individual becomes agitated; gloomy and irritable; and potentially suicidal.

Hospitals were on their “worst case scenarios.” Every bird was made of metal and plastic. The weathervanes couldn’t tell the difference between wires and waves. There were too many angles to count. I think I was just tired.

We counted backwards from the crash site. There were few basic signifiers to indicate anything inhabitable. I used to hide survival tags in my room at night.

Chin, jawbone, brow, mouth, hairline. There wasn’t much I would choose to keep.

I wanted to cry, to feel my face wet and shallow and weak.

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What kind of nightmares are the easiest to nail down? The ones that already know your name.

I was short, stumpy-bodied, big nosed. My skin looked someone was trying to kill the color pink. I had wrinkles, my teeth were cigarette yellow and crooked and disorganized.

She preferred an affectionate cloth to a wire frame.

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Self-destructive borderline (including depressive or masochistic features): Inward-turning, intropunitive (self-punishing), angry; conforming, deferential, and ingratiating behaviors have deteriorated; increasingly high-strung and moody; possible suicide.

The barometer kept saying: chance of apocalypse. If only.

Big veins. Low self esteem. Not a risk taker. The center could not hold.

Peak-end rule. You pick apart the cemetery dimensions, go over the outline in your head. You make no payments to the future and repeat the same mistakes. You wear makeup and paint as if it will feel any safer. Just goes to show, the past you bleed is just the past you know.

For worse or for worse, felt like another afterlife was ready to fall.

aurora nervosa

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On an ancient sundial in Ibiza: Ultima mvltis.

The last day for many.

—

Our town was glass domes in a row. Crates and conveyor belts replaced cars and roads. Every horizon was high density sprawl.

Jillison was the only one left who still paid any attention to me. She was a shortage of a girl. Raw wire shadow, skin off white, washed her hands twenty to thirty times a day.

It was hard to tell what was real, what was projection. There was little way to make any of it last. We were losing track. Jillison kept checking dirt lines on the window. We did our best to make sense of the background noise.

We lost light every day, atmosphere was worthless as toilet paper. Might as well have been no windows. There was a long way to go, or maybe not, I didn’t actually know. We had a hole in our bucket, dear darling, a hole.

—

The sun came out in halves or less, rarely for long. Eclipses came in the shape of rectangles or squares. We helped each other, the two of us there.

We kept ourselves on steady behavior authoring programs. Clouds were gray and on repeat. Jillison held a script against screen molds and I spread the movable press.

Most people, if they could, were still playing pretend.

Anxiety became another bill we received daily. Scattered randomness became static disappointment: Sky was still expensive. Trees were expensive. Oxygen was expensive.

My mental health was mostly just arranging voids in a row. Is trauma walled or unguarded? Does it matter?

You can’t defeat yourself into a success. The hole only gets deeper, only goes way.

the curtsies

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They weren’t birds and they weren’t people, so we didn’t know what to call them at first. They had feathers on the front of their arms and who the hell knew where else. My husband was one of the ones who was afraid of them, but I didn’t marry him for his bravery, I married him because he knew more about the weather than I ever could.

I remember it all too well, we were half-young and all-married and living in a town known for its toothlessness, it made me feel like I was in a cartoon sometimes, the way everyone walked past us, smiling with their big blank gums, and all those pets they pulled along with them too. Big pets and little pets. So many fucking pets.

I wasn’t a detective by any means, but I could tell as soon as we moved, something was going on there. The sky was loud in all the wrong places, the days were short and long and everybody said the sun could do all sorts of other things if it wanted to… I didn’t get what they meant by that. Again, I was no Sherlock Holmes.

When they showed up we thought they might be some sort of new pet too, but as soon as we got a good look at their faces we knew they couldn’t possibly be, there was too much action behind their eyes, it was obvious they knew better than to be leashed around.

While I’m telling you about their faces, I’ll tell you this too, they were round and slightly pink, and sharp in the middle. They didn’t quite have beaks, they looked a lot like people. Maybe seventy-five percent like people. I think I liked the way they looked, avian and mammalian and big eyed. Like children.

My husband would take a big breath whenever we saw one on the street. He’s always been a fragile man.

There had been a break in the summer and we weren’t expecting anything special. The garbage was piling up in the kitchen, the mannequins were on display on the street, I was trying on new ways to be mad at buildings. I used to wear my frustration on my sleeves, but then I was doing my best to cover my contempt under my clothes. As deep as it could go I guess.
My husband would tell me to take the elevator to meet him for lunch and sometimes I did. He ate a lot of salads and chewed quietly, one day he found a butterfly in his lunch bag, its wings were blue as a baby boy’s room, we laughed as it waved away. Summer was when we got along best, I bet it’s like that for a lot of couples, I don’t know.

Anyways, we were closer to black and white living than I’m letting on, it was pretty boring for the most part. I was working in a field I understood too well, sharpening equations and balancing ledgers for people who had grown up taller than me. I didn’t have a fling with my boss despite what my husband says. My hands were just too tired to get into it, even though I could’ve.

Maybe I was waiting for something larger to walk its way all over me. One way or another, I was just waiting.

My husband started to call them bird people after a few days of calling them, “them” and “they.” I kind of felt that name was disrespectful to birds and people both, these creatures were something new, and needed a new name of course, not some hackneyed mashup of their most accessible characteristics.
I tried on a few names, “flickities”, “koo koo karoos”, “laylas”, before I settled on one I liked, “curtsies” (after the ways their legs bowed when they walked). I never thought to ask them what they wanted to be called. Sooner or later they’d tell me I guess I imagined.

The big question we had to begin with was whether or not they could fly. They could, but not very high and not very far. They were better at gliding, but even still, they didn’t take to the air too often, not that I saw anyways. Every once in a while when I was driving around in my car (it was yellow) I would see one up perched in a tree, but I always assumed they just crawled up there to get a better view, it barely occurred to me they could be flying around all the time when I wasn’t looking.
I barely ever saw it happen, I don’t have a terribly good sense of my surroundings sometimes, that’s all I’m saying.

Another question is where they came from. My husband insisted they came from bad families, but I eventually convinced him otherwise. My theory was they came from some place colder and migrated here for the warm summer weather. It wasn’t much of a theory, a hog-tied kindergartner could’ve come up with it on the spot. I liked it. It was simple.

I guess it didn’t really matter where they came from, but we were curious of course. Either way, there they were, a couple of them at first, and then more and then probably somewhere between ten and twenty. It was easy to tell them apart, some had long, fat, feathers, some had tiny, prickly ones, some had skinny necks and some were stubby shaped.
Also, believe it or not, they had numbers on their backs. Big numbers, like the ones on sports jerseys. That made a lot of people think they escapees of some sort of experiment, but I just figured they liked numbers. I liked numbers, I guess probably I was projecting.

My husband had these horrible glasses then. We still danced in the living room sometimes, but he was clumsier than ever. At work someone kept telling him the Earth’s poles were reversing fast (too fast!), that’s the sort of stuff he brought home at least. Our lives were less than fireworks on the rise, that’s for sure, far, far less, but there was a lot lower we could go too. My hands were still soft, they didn’t hurt like they do now.
I still believed one day there would be a stage in the sky where I would watch something spectacular happen. I’m pretty sure I don’t feel that anymore.

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insect century / hospital 7

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You worked at the church, waited for the animals of your family to die. Hundreds of acres of skin and stitches and still no surprises.

They disgust us because they show us what we are, always, eventually. Small, scattered. Confused. They make a mockery of our pretense of “progress”.

Legs moved like a hydraulic system, unnatural, mathematical, controlled by blood pressure, judgements of lesser parts, meaningless never ending methodical action.

—

Insects have their own scenery of denial.

I remember a lot of movement without momentum. Angular. Divided. I remember they came out like an ink storm on the sheets and the bedspread.

We took out the mattress and then we took out the whole room.

—

Jillison. Listen to me.

Don’t ever mistake activity for achievement. They already had a name for that, they called it the insect century.

Do you still not understand what the problem is? I don’t understand the entomology, that’s what you said.

Jillison. Listen to me. This is the truth. Your past comes with you. If you have any insects, you have all of them.

wish upon willing chrysalis / hospital 8

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Cut through all that chrysalis you would never confess for them, all those “maybes” and “if only’s” that you couldn’t stop collecting.

Read your needle twitch, your ‘tetanus shot’, your target practice therapy.

Tried to put a pin in each excuse like it was a missing specimen, like the pack of them would be extinct by the end of the night.

—

Memories are trapped using funnels, pitfalls, malaise netting, bottleneck interceptions and other types of passive traps, some of which are baited with small bits of sensation (such as a wish, when formed, or a want, once found).

Want (as a general preference) versus want (as a statement of an action). Two very different definitions for the same word.

—

Yes, fine, tell them all that bullshit again. You had a life before this. Take it.

Do I need to make this simpler? Could I? Jillison, do you really think it matters who was willing or when? Another consequence of covering your tracks in cracks of glass, I could you see up close and all too clearly.

Remember who you were before? Temporary pins and proper needles, I wish I didn’t.

Jillison, do you still want me to honest? You never trusted me, I never trusted you.

Cut you open like a child from a cocoon, I knew you would be the easiest kill.

great zodiacal wars / afterlife 1

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Abnormal bleeding, a prolonged cough, unexplained weight loss.

As a result of coordinated attacks, water triplicity was also a concern.

Constellations infected your reflection in unpredictable ways. Cloud reservoirs were polluted to a point where neither of us could drink from them anymore.

Heavensick, if you wanted to call it that.

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They tried an asymmetrical insurgency, using magnetism and electrolysis.

You prayed for recovery to calculate a more accurate afterlife. One with appropriate tectonic and volcanic activity, occasional softness as a twofold surrender.

The myth had many variations: the creator and the raven, collaborating in a coequal way; or the creator alone, using the birds only as interventional assistants.

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They took over a table of dates, described a location and an ability to view the damage by land.

Dissection was doubtful, blood flowed from the right ventricle to the left ventricle.

Undeclared symptoms may manifest themselves in fatigue cases, confusional states, conversion hysteria, anxiety, obsessional and compulsive states, and character disorders.

When you reached a passing condition, the ascendant and vertex started switching hands.

Several factors may have contributed to a body being accidentally debilitated, including the cancer being: faster than its average speed, retrograde, combust or aspecting a malefic planet or fixed star.

—

End it there, and it only had to be our half of the horoscope alone. A slip away, structurally and socially invisible. They probably wouldn’t even be able to tell.

Like a sketch of sunspots from a start over sky. A zodiac trial easily lost, or won.

It would become another targeted tumor treatment, another unequal treaty and the nearest we had to get to zero was zero.

You told me the Hereafter was a form of far away and only once before. I always hoped that was right.

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A failed supernova is an event in time domain astronomy in which a star suddenly brightens as in the early stage of a supernova, but then does not increase to the massive flux of a supernova.

They could be counted as a subcategory of supernova imposters. They have sometimes misleadingly been called unnovae.

emergency atlas strategy.

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“If I remember correctly writers usually find some excuse for their books, although why one should excuse oneself for having such a quiet and peaceful occupation I really don’t know. Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody.”
― Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

“Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.”
— Jean Baudrillard

“She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.”
— Louisa May Alcott, (Work: A Story of Experience)

“An invisible landscape conditions the visible one”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“A very small part of this great system, during a very short time, is very imperfectly discovered to us; and do we thence pronounce decisively concerning the origin of the whole?”
— David Hume, Dialogues, 1779.

It’s the same old story as before, a beam of light from before.

Pooh: “Christopher Robin, what exactly is “doing nothing”?
Christopher Robin: “Well, I’m told it means, “Going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”

The point is although we think there’s a very solid distinction between where our bodies end and the world begins, in fact the brain has to work quite hard to produce this kind of consistency of experience.

And, of course, clearly it can go wrong.

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