Tower of lessons; hole of punishment

I don’t want to be told yes. I don’t want to be told no. At the Moonlight Hotel in the Petaling District, the concierge looks me up and down and then directs me, with the solemnity of an archangel delivering the burden of the inevitable, to the bar across the street. Looking down as I dart across the tar, my mind is briefly netted by the streaks of dark red light that swim in the gutter puddles. Drifting, garnet tadpoles. The metabolism of the red and tender, that is, the glimmer of the other than affirms contrast, scarlet to my baby blue, that promises togetherness despite difference. To be so entranced is to know I still have some vital force left to me. Right? I still have some life left, however meagre? The staggered lines of cars watch me, a bowed and penitent shadow against the headlights.

I’m deep inside the grotto of the bar—far, far too late to back out—when I finally notice him, the man I never dated. It’s the iris of my id that recognizes him first: the straightness of his back, perfect posture to the last. Then I feel, like the yank of a rope around my waist, the pull from the cratered gold moon inside his torso. His gravity catches my breath like a fish on a hook. I wriggle pointlessly, a spotted mackerel with a split of red on my gilled neck, a sprig of parsley and lemon wedge against my solar plexus. Then, to my horror, I register another feeling: the relief of a return from exile. Hunted through a crevasse by a masked killer but thrilled to be caught, delighted to have my heart extruded by Azrael himself. Oh no. No, no, no.

Wait, yes. Now that I’ve recognized him, now that there is no going back, I am no longer capable of treading carefully. I stare like a freak. I take him in like a long drink of saltwater. The feeling trickles in, brines my organs. Jar burial, early formaldehyde. Later, I will retch like I am dying on the floor of the ruined temple. I can tell from how his fingers move that the frosted glass between his hands is lightly wet. Gentle, transparent petals of touch left behind. He doesn’t have a buzzcut anymore. The hair curls at the nape of his neck. Pinkish tan line just under his collar. Vines on the wrought-iron balustrade. Imagining myself in Romeo’s green tights, that I were a glove on that neck, that I could announce my desire in dramatic pentameter. Outrageous. At this slanted angle, his eyes are to me seeds of wheat, cast over the watery delta. Sleepy eyes, but secretly alert, cat-like, as yellow as I remember, trained on the amber grain of the table. He hasn’t noticed me. A disappointment, sure, but also a major mercy. I don’t know what I would do if he was looking at me. I used his name as my email password for ten years and had a panic attack every time I entered it in.

Everything about me is wound so tight, so suddenly. Coiled, forced, rewired by a map of undercover copper that has chosen this moment to activate, to hobble and kidnap the dreams of my life, my presence of mind. But then again, did I ever have dreams, before this? Did I ever have a mind? I am clenching my fists, the muscles in my thighs, the teeth in my mouth. Iron on my gumline. Stick me hard and I’ll drain out, obediently. A pewter tub of pus, marrow and love. Frantic, supercharged. Every cell ripening to burst. Every bone, a gold-handled steak knife, pointed in one direction. No, a crowd of tuning forks, all vibrating in one low voice. Threaten to play my chords in your order and I’ll cry out, no hesitation. Ouch. The cardinal I have raised from infancy is pecking at my breast, flighty even in the feeding, and, unsatisfied, he takes bloodied wing. I am mortified to think of the expression on my face and the injuries it communicates. Both those I feel and those I could rise to inflict.

I meet the bartender’s eyes. He smiles knowingly, with such infinite pity that I could kill him. I have to choke down the urge to go up and admit everything to him, my plainclothes confessor. Everything that was dead is alive, and I am seeing symbols everywhere, I’d say. You only just got here, idiot, he’d reply. What is with your generation’s obsession with symbols? Blue heart, red shirt. Chapped lips, drilled lock. Silver cross and my shattered faith not only reformed but taken to an unnatural extreme. Makes me want to drive along the rocky coast for forty hours, at careless speed. I don’t have a car or a driver’s license. I don’t even know where the brake pedal is. But isn’t that obvious? Just you wait until I break apart and all my diamonds are cast on the waters. Maybe I am a masochist after all. My hand was once his hand underneath the sheets. You have no idea what I imagined by the crush of blue and scarlet moonlight. The pure excess of fantasy that began as smoke but that solidified, perversely, finally taking real, wriggling, pained shape. Lost media, in the broken vein of scrolls dug out of the black, salty sediment of a coastal cave. I park at the shoulder and begin to dig. I believe, not that it happened, but that it will. That it lies waiting. A vividness of amphibian life—half-passion, half-punishment—that I cannot locate in the fossil record, no matter how I dig through sable sands, so I defer instead, trowel falling from my hands as I get to my knees, to the ultimate paleness of the sky. Do the clouds accept my prayer, do they reclothe into omens? You have no idea how stupid I could be just to belong to someone who doesn’t want me, and never did.

It’s happening now, in real-time. My heart is pulp, is polymer in a press. I am watching him stand to leave. Palm on the grimy surface. Wrist flexing as he turns. He is going to face me. He is going to see that I am there, that I am older and less pretty. One rotation of the violet planet. The jaundiced satellite, trembling in orbit. My vision goes dark. They say passion is red but really, it’s the darkest black imaginable, once you’ve fallen into its hole. The ritual starts. Justify that trance. The puddled candles, the discarded pilgrim’s shawl, the succubus summoned for romantic counsel. You serious, girl? Do you not see you will be punished for this willingness to believe? But I am already rationalizing the way I anchored myself to the flood of ichor, to the bridge over the abyss. Obsessing over fragments in the dust. Puzzle of bones, maze of desire. Chanting poorly from haunted gospel. Seek his permission, you, the independent woman. Betray your code, you, the rational actor. Offer your flesh like a tray of deli meat. A grade-A calf, fuzzy ears clipped. The succubus, sitting on the bar, sharpening her horns with a nail file, looks at me with contempt. Nothing in the world could stop me now. Scratch out the compass rose over your heart. Bloody, festering mark. Repress and then explode. Don’t say yes, and don’t say no.

Don’t you know it’s a privilege to be loved by me? So why don’t you act like it? God damn it, why don’t you act like it?

Checking out of the Moonlight Hotel in the hour before dawn, the concierge gives me a long look. I’ve realized too late that he can read my ego like a neon marquee. From the tall windows, I see the wide-eyed cars, the garnet tadpoles, the school of mackerel pass by. They are at a loss for words and so scream into the light instead.

The last great story

I stop, mid-walk, to watch a king preside over a flower. I get close enough, breath held, to examine his tightly wound, shiny, hairy face. The proboscis dangles, then descends. It hovers, then it lunges, needling the center of the flower, with less precision and much more urgent confusion than I had imagined. Is the terror I see only my projection? A tear in that wobbly eye, but would a butterfly cry? For the first time, I understand clearly that feeding is fighting. I need you to eat, the wings beat out in frantic code. Orange flower, October late-comer, your petals are limp, your nectar thin and insipid, but I need you. I need you to live.

On my way to practice, in the tunnel under the road, I spot Menelaus again, wings splayed permanently, in a cobweb. The next day, I see three of him, lined up in a neat row in the gutter. I stare a long while, though I have a place to be, to keep this picture in my mind. In the darkroom of my brain, I slowly immerse his body in fixing liquid. Gloved hands, itchy in latex. Upside-down butterfly, crushed against the wings of my corneas and then the web of my cortex. I’ll keep you perfectly preserved, I promise. I’m loyal like that. I mate for life.

Flashing from the traffic lights, cracks in the pavement along the sewer. I take fistfuls of the grillpill. I salt the meat of my soul. I grow muscle. I stop reading books. I gag when I hear the news. I choke down the memories. The cypresses on the horizon are black triangles against the red sunset. I stare at them until it feels like my head is on fire. My arms drip candlewax like an ancient saint. I ache like a mistake.

Ah, if I were a holy saint, I’d wear a gold hair net and deliver cynical blessings. My color palette would be stone gray, slate blue, clay red, piss yellow. Take heart, I’d say, bending over a broken woman, you will never be a mother. Your body will nourish no life but your own. Take heart, I’d whisper to my ancestor, you will never be a father. No son of yours will ever disgrace the Earth. Not a holy saint, then, but a holy fool.

Take this key, open that door. You were better than expected, but not the best, not the brightest, and you never were.

Of course I tolerate ambiguity, of course I’ll campaign for nuance, but the way you hold contradictory thoughts in your mind and pretend they’re both true is a coping strategy. Just admit you have no courage. Just say you can’t decide and want to leave an opening for plausible deniability. I’d take you back, then. Honesty really gets me going. Just say you will hold back on the decision until the collective tells you what to believe, you jackal of the city. Once the banners go up, only then will you know what you believe, and you will claim to have always believed it. Turn to me and say I don’t know, and I don’t care, I just need to feed. You and me both, sinner.

The test

A band of purple clouds moves over the sun and floods the room in blue. I whip the sheets off and hit the floor. I haven’t slept in three weeks. I’m emotional but I’m cool about it. God, I’m so cool about it. I could bottle this feeling up and peddle it as antifreeze. Would you buy it from me? Would you buy anything, from me?

The air takes an ovoid shape around me. Veined petals of gritty blood, wet on my forehead and on my greenish chicken claws. I close my eyes and wait. Soon, I know, the bells will chime. The pounding will begin. This speckled eggshell will crack into shards, and many calloused angel hands will clamp around my waist and chuck me unceremoniously, like a poorly pitched ball, into the current of current affairs, the flood of the flood.

I try my best, I do. I try my best until I don’t.

My thoughts of you are a talisman from a temple. Your hand on the handle, and then into the wound of the conventional. My thoughts of you are so replete with terrifying potential that I think I could summon you, as though through a pentagram. You emerge, head first, from the center of this star.

You shadow me through the banality of the light and you have been everywhere I have been. You were there when I skipped an afternoon meeting to walk the beach, feeling my heart fall to my feet and surge and break like the surf. Both baby-blue sneakers hanging from the fingers of one hand. At the bridge, you sent your messenger, a brown-eyed stray, poised, pert, expectant. Seeing him there, I trembled and returned the way I came. Humidity dripping in tears down my back at Rama IX Park. Under the tulipwoods, you were there, cast in shadow, pressing play on one song over and over, rubbing its chords into my brain like marinade until every strip of lace in me ripped with agony.

Enough is enough!

In a moment of bravery or cowardice, I bite you back. But you bubble up again like fat off a broth, foam off a fountain and suddenly I am shit-scared and three seconds from breaking down at the Linjiang Street Night Market. Light glancing off the water of the bay like a blow. The sunset over the rail line, pinking the wrinkled silk of my emotions. Your breath, hot at my back as I wander the market. I whirl around but I am alone in the maze of stalls, surrounded by strangers in the purple twilight, only a girl of two-hundred bones cast haphazard on an altar.

What’s the lesson at the end of this story? I bust a blood vessel in my finger and find blue, fig-shaped, under the skin. Tape the middle and index together in a white cross. Tongue-tied, you cross my mind. Cross my heart, hope to die. Body heat so hot off me, I could boil the ocean. I say nothing but I radiate this pain like a belt of moonlight. Meteorites pinballing a path through my stomach, knocking hard against the pulp of my hips. I am as proud and as ignorant as ever. I look up at the suffering of a shooting star and try my best to sympathize.

User error

It’s confusing to be told not to give up. Give up on what? Surely not on myself. I may be a cynic, occasionally even a depressive, but I have never doubted that I know my own mind like a best friend. No, what they mean is don’t give up on us. Us? Us! The people, the planet, the pastiche, the thousand blistered pantheons, the torn paintings in pastel, the pastures with their peonies, clouds and horses. I can’t respond to this because I don’t know how. I mean, could a drop of water give up on the ocean? Could David give up on Michelangelo? I can’t give up on us any more than my shadow could give up on me. But maybe I’m told oh, Emma, don’t give up so often because my desire to run away is so obvious on my face. My desire to summon a wave or a scalpel to cleanse, to cut myself away. The desire not to belong, to separate, to be distant, to be chemical isolate in the bubbling char.

I look up how to fix an old piece of technology and find a review condemning me: This issue is just user error. I laugh. What else could I apply this to? Is my pain just user error? I broke my life apart but a smarter user would have known better. Lacking in the appropriate technical acumen, I did not plan, I did not optimize, I did not buy the optional protective case, and I failed in a way that is not just permanent but also eternal, because the manufacturer doesn’t even make this item anymore.

What’s my problem? My problem is that my father has the pride of a temporarily embarrassed millionaire, and my mother the fanatical vulnerability of a martyr, and these qualities have not mixed well in their daughter’s helix. My problem is that my brother, infinitely more sensitive, infinitely the better version, is proof that I cannot be so bold as to attribute all my issues to the uncontrollable forces of nature. Something went wrong that cannot be blamed on another. User error. My problem is that I left my heart behind at a convenience store. Even the promise of care of the manufacturer under warranty could not have fixed that.

Jean, who I do not speak to anymore, once compared a piece of writing to a block of ice. Clear, powerful as ice, she said. Instantly, I saw her vision in my mind: Massive, perfectly rectangular, sat in a small cool pool of its own transparent blood, the reddish light of the sunrise slicing through the blue body. I wished I could have communicated to her how much I loved her description. As it was, I was only able to smile idiotically and say wow, cool repeatedly. Maybe my most significant problem is that, as my brother once said, my soul won’t fit through my mouth. Instead, my spirit seethes in time with the beat of undistilled and uncommunicated feeling. So many people have left my life through a door that won’t open again. So many people have left my life through a door that I myself locked behind them, and I called that independence, I called it victory, instead of giving up. But still I think of her, still I retrieve the thought of ice from my pocket when I need to remember what it is to be clear and perfectly legible, to be honest and forthcoming in that honesty, that is, to be true. To be ice unrobed into liquid and then back into the red.

Truth or dare

I am seeing pilgrims constantly at practice. Butterflies racing through the air. A beetle, hopeless on the tatami. Briefly, a wasp. On my knees, wiping down the floor, I notice a segmented copper coin with two twitching antenna. Tonight, I am come to your rescue, agent of the swarm. Tonight, even I am foreign here, though I am not a third as holy as you.

When I am not at practice, I am thinking about practice. In my heart, a constant and painful double-take. Everything reminds me of moves, stances, positions. Feet forward, backward. Hands up, then down. Soul, on and off. Going for a run in the rain, I start to dream again. Blood in my roots, down my chest, I can feel shame grow petals in my shadow. For God’s sake, hold it together. You must have a life outside of practice. But could I?

At night, along you come, red messenger. You have taken a new form this time but of course I recognize you. You emerge from the foamy surf with rusted hands. Trailing rubies from the dagger between your fingers. Over the sand, I will follow you, half-frantic, first running and then falling to crawl on hands and knees. I will fight, mouth filled with gold dust, to pick up the necessary speed to match your stride though I know I cannot catch up. Only when you reach the top of the dune do you take pity. You turn to look down at me through the mirage and you declare, with a laugh: Truth or dare?

Moving through forms on the mat, I again fantasize about being stabbed, because then I would have proof of a body, proof of sacrifice. The symmetry on both sides of the photograph tells a terrifying story. The passion I am holding in my chest like a poison pill. The faith that lies in the fallow field, featureless only on the surface. The belt, tightening around me. Truth or dare? Either way, just tell me your name. I know your future already; I saw it as I closed the door, crossing my path. Hand on the hilt, fever in my face coiled like a snake, I met your eyes in the mirrored glass. Never before have I been so chained to a single blade of grass.

I cry for no reason. No, there’s a reason. I feel like the Little Mermaid. No voice, only tears that bead on my face and then evaporate on the sand. Truth or dare? If truth, machete open your mind and kneel for me so I can stand on tiptoes to peer inside. If dare, forgo the blow and tell me everything yourself.

Blister the night / 合宿

Two streaks of red on my white boxing gloves. I check my body for damage but other than the rift in my chest, from which every piece of broken silver has already been plundered, I am disturbingly whole.

To be uninjured is such a disappointment. I’d love to lift my arm up and show you all the blood gushing from me. Geyser from the armpit, lava lacquering the snow fields and olive trees of Mount Olympus, sticky plasma gunking my hair, clogging the joints, flooding the mechanism. Alkaline red pooling at my feet until I am bled dry. Maybe then I could stop trying to prove how much I am trying.

The heat, an intrusion. I am afraid by what’s in front of and behind me, so I look up. Green and aquamarine, blessing of a breeze and call of the cicada on the staggered stone steps. I imagine turning on a dime, splitting from the group, sprinting out of the parking lot, my plastic flip-flops loud on the hot asphalt. I imagine disappearing into the siege of the trees. What version of me, what story of mine would follow me over that line?

The nighttime, a sweetness. After the typhoon, the evening clouds are pink and black. Store-bought fireworks by the seaside. The dark sand, grit in my underwear. The moss on the cypress saying a prayer and the waves joining in. I wait by the pillar and, though I have never had faith, I look down to find that I am pressing my hands together. As the air trembles and cools, I watch the shadows race one another across the upper floor. Horrifyingly, I reexamine my hands to find that the little courage I first mustered has grown by itself into a bonfire. What am I supposed to do with all this new bravery? Where do I put it?

When the light moves, I don’t see where it goes. Alvin comes out and asks me what I’m doing and dumbly I say, “I wanted to see the sky.” Later I realize that though this was not the truth, it was no lie.

Sitting in rows to eat. Eye contact from across the room. Riding the bus down the bridge that spans the bay. So steep, it’s like flying. Water like a sheet of pressed steel. Hammer me down so I remember who I am, so I can stop this longing for a place I have never been. From the window, mountains, denuded. Sweat on me as though I were clothed in it. Sparring is a relationship and I get dumped each time. Every breath, a live wire. Every look, a cardinal direction and I follow it obediently until I am knee-deep in endless salt flats. I don’t think. Me, not think? But I have never been more myself. A beckoning hand and I die inside. But I go down with no bitterness. Every single soft spot is dear to me now. Where is that girl who nursed every cut so vindictively, who held every grudge against her chest like a phantom limb, like Kali chucking her skulls with four arms? Has it always been so easy for her to step aside?

Clear your mind like a rag over a blackboard. Stand in stance. Power through. Hit hard. Head swims. Briefly, I meet God at the meat market and tell him it hurts to breathe. He is unimpressed, but I hardly expected or wanted more. Fish in a net. Fluid blister on my foot. Blood on my gloves, from a wound no one can see. From the open doorway, a butterfly and then a crow. Aim true. Clear your mind. Close the distance.

I thought you should know that the ice in the set of your frame has the tightest possible grip on me. It wakes me like a thump in the night. It pushes me to a place beyond the orange-barked cedars. When the ice returns home, like a green-scaled salmon upriver, to the delta of your jaw, it fists the moonlight in me and cracks it hard, robin’s-egg blue. It melts me down to the clay.

Two streaks of red on my white boxing gloves. Where’d that come from? You won’t hold my hands so, when you tell me, meet my eyes instead. Where’d that come from?

Want what you have

What happens is this. They say they want money, but they don’t. They want love. They say they want the truth, but they don’t. They want love. They say they want to make a difference, but they don’t. They want love. They say they want attention, but they don’t. They want love. They want love. They want love. They want to possess it and then, once possessed, to discard it.

I like the pain of contrast. I like putting different ideas side-by-side and observing how they behave. Animals at dusk, in the glade of the vanities. Under the lights, masks on stage. Vassals kneeling on the studded battlefield. Do they rise to circle each other, warily? Do they reach for one another? And when they touch, do they then flinch from the blaze of contact? Or do they ignore each other, pallid and impassive? If it doesn’t rupture immediately, does the connection deepen? Do they whisper about me, do they form an alliance? What then? How long until the threshold is crossed, the seal broken, the contract shredded, and they turn on me?

O crassa ingenia. O caecos coeli spectatores. The stars must think us perfect, paranoid fools.

What happens is this. From the tiled floor of the fun house, my neck cuffed in a ruffled clown collar, I pick up a long list of horrors and I train my gaze on them. It’s an earnest effort, though it has the blush of voyeuristic perversion, the blandness of stupidity. The mirrors spin around me. I rotate the pages, I flip them over, I stare at the typewriter script, but still I cannot get my brain to understand what I am reading. In the long shadow of that incomprehension, the animals, the masks, the vassals are totally still. They wait to see what I will do. Some part of my heart lets out a long shuddering breath, as though trying to keep from crying. Gamely, I continue reading, but that part of my heart resists, that part stays sheltered in place, and I never have more contempt for myself than in that moment.

The most heroic thing I have ever done, the most cowardly. The loveliest photo of me, the ugliest. It’s all in the angles, isn’t it? But which one was me? How closely have I been captured, to the degree? Both, neither, you say, but that only leaves me as the bruise in between, where I can be heard but I will possess no meaning, like noise, where I can be seen but I will occupy no space, like smoke.

The Vessel

I haven’t thought seriously about the vessel in at least five years. But as of late, I’ve had reason to think of it again. To examine it, to feel its shape, to remember its movement in the dark. The neck and joints of the urn. The nails and cross of the mast. The peach-pink, olive-green, the red and the white.

I watch, from a third perspective, as men watch the vessel move and briefly, I am confused. I can’t immediately pinpoint what so fascinates them. It takes a moment before I remember that they don’t know me, they only know and only see this vessel, and what the vessel represents.

That I am the vessel is not worth denying. I am this drumming of puckered skin, grayish brain and bones, this mouthful of ash. That the vessel is vital is also not worth denying. The vessel takes me here and there, now and forever. But taken alone, and seen in isolation, the vessel mounted on the wall casts a shadow too dark for me to breathe easily.

It’s not all bad. Most times, I register first the fear and the innocence in the glance and I sympathize. I remember being there. I remember getting tangled up in the thorny maze of a conventionally unattractive face. Isn’t it funny, how attraction works? Thinking about past passions, my specific interest has felt random, incidental, even. That realization is a healthy one, because when I am transformed into object, my ego plays less of a part, and in that vacuum, humor and compassion can flourish.

Of course I remember the pull of the fantasy, the pouring of the vessel. I won’t begrudge it. But it can’t be left at that. If it could, I wouldn’t be writing this. What I no longer understand is what is said—no, proclaimed—to get ahold of a handle of the vessel, to shake its contents. Women are too this, too that. Women should this or that. Women demand too much. Women give too little. Don’t even get me started on the aesthetics of the vessel, which is a subject that we have failed and that has failed us. On the assembly line, examining options, my gloved hands pass over a floral jumpsuit of Monsanto cotton, a muscled arm of swords and skull tattoos, wombs jug-shaped, vessel-in-vessel, fallow, pulpy, brimming, empty. Femininity and masculinity both bore me to bits. I don’t want to be one or the other. I don’t want to be “neither” or “both”, to be a forced blend, a compromise.

I don’t know anymore, what’s expected of me, what is expected on account of the vessel. I don’t know anymore, why I can’t simply do what I want, in good faith, good-naturedly. More importantly, I don’t remember why I need to care about any of this. Is that growth, or is it giving up? Is it confidence, or cope? Is it only longing?

I have this daydream in which I am grievously injured in front of a crowd of men. Punctured like a balloon. Blood puddled on the sidewalk, wet to the touch. Would they remember then, the real purpose of the vessel?

Watch before you buy

Something in my body topples over an edge, then shatters. The day wastes me away. I grip my shoulders and hold my breath. I draw the blinds to avoid cloud-gazing. The endless sky reminds me of a different place, a different time, so powerfully that I react physically, as though burned. But what part of me grazed the bonfire? Some surface, undulating like a mesh plot in a simulation, a rainbow-colored scrap representing the end of life or the change in interest rates. Some surface in my body that I can’t see but upon which everything else somehow rests.

When practice starts, a butterfly wings in from the darkness and spends the next hour floating through the air between the rows. I think: Isn’t it frightened to be here? But it stays until the lesson ends and then as I go to the changing room, I see it fluttering on the padded floor. What kind of omen is that? Surely if I figure it out, that would that fix things?

Life these days is like a metallic taste in my mouth. I become dependent on eye drops. Flavored chilled drinks. Emails for deals on ebooks and appliances. Pyramids of yellowcake. Climb to the top and survey your new kingdom, Ozymandias. I don’t shave my legs and I don’t wear a bra. I used to pretend this was a principled stance or a show of rebellion (visible nipples, the new hammer and sickle!), but it’s nothing like that. I just cannot be bothered to put another bell on my collar. Submission or opposition, I don’t care for either artifice. Both can be bought at a store. At the same store, even. I distrust everyone. Despite being the only millennial left with any empathy for mothers, I find maternal emotion intolerable because I cannot distinguish its particular brand of sacrifice from servitude. I have come to respect my mother more because she never made me feel like she needed me more than her own independence. Thank you for your attention to this matter. My vanity has morphed into something twisted. I don’t want to be pathetic, I want to be disgusting. I want to be impossible to look at, like a sandstorm, stinging your eyes, scoring your skin and toppling you to the floor, like a tortured butterfly in a tortured anecdote.

The kids are antisocial so put a gun in their hands. Put down the phone and let’s go! To the killing field! Are people only ever either masters or victims? Oh, remember the dress that was either blue or gold? I hope this finds you very well.

How is it that the modern world, which feels less like a “world” and more like a “moment,” experienced over and over, over and over and over, can be both under and overanalyzed by every pundit, pervert, preacher, poet, parishioner and skeptic? What’s the opposite of walking on eggshells? Running over spikes in a monster truck? Horsepower that could win a medal, and maybe that’s all we want. Woah, wuff-wuff. Stop there. Can’t get too close to the mood of a thinkpiece. The fountain on the mountain is just a decoy.

Eldest daughter of the martyr

A crow flies by, parallel to me, dipping down low, briefly, to my knee-level, with an unripe orange plum in its beak. It soars above the black-tiled eaves and then vanishes.

So many conversations rehearsed in my mind, enough times that the skin of the fruit has split down the middle, revealing the ordinary flesh of the ordinary ego. If I was kind to you, it was for me, not you. If I was cruel to you, it was for me, not you. I simulated you too much in my imagination and now you are never real to me. I touch your face and hear plastic sounds. I throw your things in the fireplace and see them transform into relics.

I sit at the meeting table and scratch at the broken thing inside me. Inside my ill-fitting work suit, I feel like a witch. Test me and I will pull out my potions. But hunt me and I will go willingly, because I am a coward.

I plug prompts idly into an LLM. It runs frantically on its hamster wheel and discharges delusions in the form of pellets in the woodchips. I ask it to name every martyred woman. Dutifully, it churns, then sighs in sepia: Alice Kyriakus – Found burnt to still another classic

Ah. I pause the seance. To emerge from the greenish turpentine with not only a lie, but also a broken thought, fished out from under the table—I have to smile.

A bumblebee, tiny legs so heavy with pollen it seems to wobble in the rain-speckled air, buzzing from bud to bud on the dying purple heather. I watch it with real fondness and think: You do the only meaningful work here. Then I think, boringly, predictably: I could reach out and crush you in my fist. Of course I never could. I spend enough of my time already trying my hardest not to kill only to then turn and see, again, the trail of bodies.

Godspeed, Alice Kyriakus. I saw you board the ark on a Saturday, the rain a mess of sickly light, the signs on the water around the port flashing neon red, and I knew then that we were finally past the power of miracles. You turned one last time before you disappeared inside but you never saw me. I knew then that man’s most fundamental curse is hindsight. I knew then that we live already in a past life.