Tʜᴇsᴇ Sᴘɪɴᴅʀɪғᴛ Pᴀɢᴇs

[Barding]

Notebook. Scrapbook. Show(-off) and tell.
Writing samples. Character profiles. Guestbook?
Infodumps. Inspiration. Reading recommendations.
Inchoate howling in excess of 250 characters.
Orphaned bits of worldbuilding. Stray bits of story or style.
Whatever doesn't belong anywhere else belongs here.

Comments are welcome.​

 

[Barding]

A Pᴏᴇᴍ Eᴠᴇʀʏ Dᴀʏ Exᴄᴇᴘᴛ Wʜᴇɴ I Dᴏɴ'ᴛ​

So: I told myself, a little while back, looking at my Poetry Bookcase – where I keep my books of poetry, arranged shelf by shelf, according to arbitrary and asymmetrical brackets of time, and the size of the shelf, and whether or not that shelf has, say, two cups full of stolen pens on it and sharing space with the books – that I should read more poetry.

Get that sensibility, if not sharp again, then at least not as blunt as it's gotten. (Like, have you ever used a whetstone on a knife? And the first time you try do it, you're learning, so the edge that you'll get just isn't very good, but the bluntness has been replaced by a new kind of not-quite-sharp? Like that.)

Get a more balanced diet for my writing. (Like, I'm a big believer that you get out what you put in. Wanna lift weights? Eat heavy things. Wanna write good? Read good.) Someone – Don Paterson, I think, with enough confidence that I'm not gonna fact-check the quote or the source – said something once about how poetry is the paradox of language turned against its own purpose. Something about new metaphors wielded against the dead ones that we usually fall back on to communicate. (Wanna refresh the language you use? Watch language eat and defeat itself for a bit, baby.)
​

And, generally, I wanted to feel like that bookcase was for something. Not just commemorating something I used to enjoy, but part of something I more actively take enjoyment from.

So: A pretty classic case of "to do something, do it" here.

And as a result, I decided I'd pick a book from that bookcase every day, if not quite at random then at least at whim, and I'd choose a poem in it – or a page, in the case of longer form stuff – using the same method, and I'd read it. Not exactly out loud, but with my mouth semi-silently moving. Just enough to feel the sounds, the ease, the awkwardness, right? And I'd re-read it, and re-read, until new things jumped out. And I'd re-read until I got it. Not like, full-bore loaded-for-bear critical analysis. Not translation, because fuck that. Just the work it's doing: how my like or dislike of it functions.

This was the first poem I ended up with:

breakWhen all my five and country senses see,
breakThe fingers will forget green thumbs and mark
breakHow, through the halfmoon's vegetable eye,
breakHusk of young stars and handfull zodiac,
breakLove in the frost is pared and wintered by,
breakThe whispering ears will watch love drummed away
breakDown breeze and shell to a discordant beach,
breakAnd, lashed to syllables, the lynx tongue cry
breakThat her fond wounds are mended bitterly.
breakMy nostrils see her breath burn like a bush.

breakMy one and noble heart has witnesses
breakIn all love's countries, that will grope awake;
breakAnd when blind sleep drops on the spying senses,
breakThe heart is sensual, though five eyes break.
breakbreak— Dylan Thomas

Not a favourite. Not one of his best or even one of his better ones. Just a poem with a few lines I took a liking to. Which, really, is all this project needed it to be.

Since then, I've totally failed to carry on doing this every day. I have, however, succeeded in doing it some days. And usually I'm the kind of person who can't stomach myself when I tell me I'll do something and then I watch myself not. But so far this feels like a nice sometimes-habit to form.

If I keep it up, some more of those not-quite-daily poems might end up here.​

 

[Barding]

Bᴇᴛ Yᴏᴜ Tʜᴏᴜɢʜᴛ Yᴏᴜ Wᴇʀᴇ Gᴇᴛᴛɪɴɢ Aɴᴏᴛʜᴇʀ Pᴏᴇᴍ
Nᴀʜ, Iᴛ's Oᴜᴛ Oғ Cᴏɴᴛᴇxᴛ Sᴄʀᴇᴇɴᴄᴀᴘs Fʀᴏᴍ Bᴏʟɪ́ᴠᴀʀ

This image expresses a feeling that has no name.

The Saga of Cousin Carlos Palacios (The Pig Face).

The Gang Make Their Mothers Accessory To Revolution
[It's Always Sunny theme plays]

You keep using that word, "Reward".
I do not think it means what you think it means...

Buddy.​

 

[Barding]

Mᴏᴛʜ ᴛᴏ ᴛʜᴇ Hᴀʟғʟɪɢʜᴛ​

When a storm or an overcast hangs over Kingsport, it can abide for days. You forget the sky's face, the quality of light, the day's different colours, hour by hour: all the same. Uniform fug, the sun through a line of tired and badly washed linens, and air that tastes like hard tapwater at every sip. But the sea does something to distance, doesn't it? Something, maybe, to time. (Glimmers of the future in its flatness; shadows of the past in its depths.) As in Kingsport, so in any other city by the sea. In its distance you see the change in the weather, coming before it's come – blue wildfire, bright air – and you remember what you forgot. The natural state of the sky. The weather's a shadow-show; behind it, light.

It's a little like that, Lo thinks, feeling his headache recede. It's like that, but just a very little bit, if he's being honest with himself. As to whether he got the comparison from a book, or from some cornerspace inside himself – a composition exercise; extended metaphor – he'd have a better guess if not for this hangover. The kind he gets, has always got, is long and broad and shallow as fog.

The Grand Library of Reference has thick walls. Containing, by laws older than independence, at least one copy of anything published or made available for official distribution within the borders of the New Omen market, it's built like a fortress. All the better to preserve its contents: not treasures but quantity, completeness.

(It's a place that doesn't forget. Can't be made to. They burnt Oleander Slope in the War. The whole ward had to be rebuilt. Some streets, alleys, mewses are still waiting for their turn. The flames climbed all the way uphill to the Grand Library's walls. Along the whole east corner, the lead in the mullioned windows melted. The glass shattered, was replaced; ugly squares now like a checkered shirt. But the walls, the books, the papers held.)

Thick walls. Outside, the day is hot: white-gold light, cool twilight shade. Anywhere green or the least bit open is choked with iceboxes, sparkling wine and cold tea, students sunning themselves pink and brown. Anyone who'd sooner be out of the sun is at tables riveted to the cobbles, squabbled over every day by identical alleyway cafes. It's a day people want to be part of — that on any ordinary day Lo would want to be part of. The library is cool and dry and separate from it all: empty inside its thick walls.

When he's sober again, and clearheaded, Lo will count himself lucky like he always does. He knew a boy named Tonio back in first year: Tonio Forecastle, though everyone called him Rabbit. In the monklike intimacy of Carvalho's first term dormitories, you get to know how everyone wears a hangover. Know it intimately. Esther Casabianca, perfect in every way, got serious about her hydration — serious to the point of piety. Tonio, for a full day, ran regular as clockwork between two states: on his back in bed, on his knees in the bathrooms.

For Rabbit, Lo never had much pity. He's the one who found out his babyname – Lo, Little Lo – and tried to prod him back in line with it every chance he got. (Look how that turned out. Look how Rabbit turned out, for that matter.) But pity for himself comes naturally, part and package with Lo's hangovers. The brighter he shines by night, the darker the next day — the next one too, maybe.

He can feel it: the beginning of normalcy coming back, if not the benefit just yet, glimpsed and promised, like something out to sea. Perhaps it's looking for him. If so, it's yet to find him. Still, he half-thinks: maybe it's for the best. The fog in his skull keeps it empty up there, quiet. It makes his eyes slow, his movements gliding. Everything about him that might seem like something – memorable, remarkable, any incandescence? – it's not gone, but it's cloaked. You notice someone with noisy thoughts; you feel the move of busy eyes like a breeze stirs the air. But he's hollowed himself. It works so well he wants to fool himself it was deliberate.

Lo thinks of himself, by nature and hard work, and on any ordinary day, as someone you notice. Today, no one notices him. Lunchtime changeover; the librarians distract each other; he doesn't have to try. No sneaking, no skulking, not even any great hurry. He walks to the entryway security barrier with his identity punchcard out. Lays it flat on the barrier housing. Hops over, simple as skipping a metro fare, and takes a seat in the central studyhall.

Light comes through the tall narrow windows but seems to slow and grow still as it passes the glass. It hangs, the colour of paper or vanilla ice cream. It drifts, flows. Long studytables of black walnut, almost empty. Desk of the librarian on watch, built up high above the hall's center, like a pulpit or a panopticon.

Lo stays a token length of time, reading the same paragraph over and over: Liu Feng's A Prose History of Abandoned Vice. He sees nothing but characters; thinks nothing but numbers, ticking slowly up. He gets to twenty-seven and decides that's enough. He gets up, gathers his book, his notebook with its pale canvas cover, and drifts along the outer wall till he gets to an inner one.

The Grand Library of Reference has two wings. In the Sunrise Wing, recent works and works recently referenced are organised meticulously, shelved and systematised. When they outlive their welcome, untouched and unopened for long enough, they go to the Sunset Wing. A wide hall lined with tall shelves, there the windows narrow, become fewer in number, with wider stretches of wall between. (Light damages the books; these books aren't for damaging. They're not even for reading anymore. This is truer still of some than of others.) The hall ends in a hexagonal tower, twelve storeys high. If at one point that was enough, it doesn't do now, and hasn't for a long time. These days, the tower in the Sunset Wing also goes down: basement, sub-basement, sub-sub and so on. It's understood they'll dig more — as many as they need.

In pleated trousers of pale linen, cream-coloured cotton shirt snatched in at its high waist, Lo is transparent in the paper-coloured studyhall light. In the dark of the Sunset Wing – where the light solidifies into ghostwalls that fall from the windows sheer and golden, swimming with dust like moths round a lantern – Lo is almost silent. On any ordinary day he likes leather that shines and heels that click. Today he's worn slippers: silk plimsolls in a Seritic style, indigo with soles of parchment. Every step is a whisper.

The books here have a kind of order, but only a kind: forest order, organic, intuitive. They aren't tended to, shuffled and rearranged. Like something collapsing in the woods, they lie where they fall. That's been to Lo's advantage in the past. The mess makes it easy to choose something truly at random; find out what it has to tell you. He's haunted these shelves before, and come away sometimes with answers to questions, but more often with new questions he didn't know to ask. Both have their uses. But it makes finding something specific a challenge.

The book, then; the specific book. Palindrides was a nobody in life — a man, a mediocrity, pale enough and rich enough that he never had to be more. (A poet known for their personal life isn't often much of a poet. There's a reason no translations exist.) But in his later work, his later life and his letters, themes emerged: desperation mostly, rallied round the hope of something more.

The book. What it was and has been doesn't matter. Not to Lo, and probably not to anyone with any taste. What is it now, today? That interests him.

He tries in the hall at first. Overflowing shelves, stacks on the floor, with generalist's labels in neat typescript. The only system that reigns here is categorisation. Lyric Poetry; Autobiography; 17th Century. He doesn't have a title to go on, only the name of an author. It tells him enough: none of these volumes is what he's looking for. He is, after all, looking for something specific.

Deeper then. He makes himself focus. He searches for languages no longer spoken. (How does a language die so quickly? How long does a tongue take to grow? Longer than it takes to rot, surely.)

In Archaeolinguistics, on the edge of a curtain of daylight that feels harsh after squinting in the gloom, Lo finds something. A slim blue thing, almost a chapbook, with a cloth cover and a broken spine: Wet Leaves, by P. K. Palindrides. Lo's smooth fingers break its back again. The verse is poor. What's promising is the record note inside the front cover. This book found its way back up here relatively recently. It was first discovered in a section higher up: Kyrat, Primary Materials, Stack 3.

Lo finds stairs and begins to climb.

So often, stairs are the loudest part of a house. Lo notices that on his way up, taking them two at a time till the roofs of his thighs burns and dew stands out on his brow. (He feels vivid these days, energised in spite of the sleepless nights. But that's willingness, not fitness. Why is dancing all night so different? No sane answer. It simply is.)​

He crouches in front of the stack, searching. Genuflecting, it seems, isn't enough; it wants him to kneel. On his knees, his hands, Lo leans down. He had told himself, perhaps too much the optimist, that he'd know what he was looking for when he found it. He does though: slim-spined, canvas cover, the colour of very good lemons. There's no time. Only his eyes hold it.

So often, stairs are the loudest part of anyone's attempt to keep quiet. It's thanks to them that he hears it: shuffle of quiet, slipper-shod feet, same as his. Ascending, the treads themselves speak a warning. He heeds it, scrambling to hide.

The sound of their shoes changes, spiral iron stairwell to amber-coloured floor. A silence comes.

His back to the back of the bookcase, Lo hears them. A moment, not quite of panic: have they gone somehow totally silent, or simply paused?

Then their steps resume, moving to the same place where he stood before he hurried to hide. Same loose click in the parquet. They are looking, there, same as him — close enough to hear them lower themself, hear their satisfied outbreath.

Lo's heart climbs out of his chest to choke him. Sun boils the fog in his head to a fever. (Fuck!) The bookcase has empty air between its shelves. He's not hollow enough to hide anymore; feels like they'll hear his heartbeat. He had it almost in his hands. Now they're both balled to fists inside the pockets of his pants. (He was here first!) Time to extemporise.

"Don't tell me," he says through the bookcase, a stage-whisper in the tower's high quiet halflight. "You're here for it too. The exact same thing, only known copy in the continent, etcetera?" If they are, they'll be just as jumpy as he is. Better to seize the moment than be seized by it.​

 

[Barding]

Bɪᴛs Fʀᴏᴍ Bᴏᴏᴋs Wʜᴇʀᴇ I Dᴏɢ-Eᴀʀᴇᴅ Tʜᴇ Pᴀɢᴇs
(Oʀ Wʜᴇʀᴇ I Tᴏᴏᴋ A Pʜᴏᴛᴏ Oғ Tʜᴇ Pᴀɢᴇ Bᴜᴛ Tʜᴀᴛ's Nᴏᴛ As Rᴏᴍᴀɴᴛɪᴄ Is Iᴛ?)
​

𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐿𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑙𝑒 𝐹𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑑, Donna Tartt

Repeatedly, during the day, as she drifted around her own house or through the chilly, antiseptic-smelling halls of her high school with her books in her arms, she asked herself: Am I awake or asleep? How did I get here?
identindentOften, when startled all of a sudden to find herself (say) in biology class (insects on pins, red-haired Mr. Peel going on about the interphase of cell division), she could tell if she was dreaming or not by following back the spool of memory. How did I get here? she would think, dazed. What had she eaten for breakfast? Had Edie driven her to school, was there a progression of events which had brought her somehow to these dark-panelled walls, this morning classroom? Or had she been somewhere else a moment before—on a lonely dirt road, in her own yard, with a yellow sky and a white thing like a sheet billowing out against it?
identindentShe would think about it, hard, and then decide that she wasn't dreaming. Because the wall clock said nine-fifteen, which was when her Biology class met; and because she was still seated in alphabetical order, with Maggie Dalton in front and Richard Echolds behind; and because the styrofoam board with the pinned insects was still hung on the rear wall—powdery luna moth in the center—between a poster of the feline skeleton and another of the central nervous system.
identindentYet sometimes—at home, mostly—Allison was disturbed to notice tiny flaws and snags in the thread of reality, for which there was no logical explanation. The roses were the wrong colour: red not white. The clothesline wasn't where it was supposed to be, but where it was before the storm blew it down five years ago. The switch of a lamp ever so slightly different or in the wrong place. In family photographs or familiar paintings, mysterious background figures that she'd never noticed before. Frightening reflections in a parlor mirror behind the sweet family scene. A hand waving from an open window.​

​

𝐽𝑎𝑧𝑧, Toni Morrison

Little of that makes for love, but it does pump desire. The woman who churned a man's blood as she leaned all alone on a fence by a country road might not expect even to catch his eye in the City. But if she is clipping quickly down the big-city street in heels, swinging her purse, or sitting on a stoop with a cool beer in her hand, dangling her shoe from the toes of her foot, the man, reacting to her posture, to soft skin on stone, the weight of the building stressing the delicate, dangling shoe, is captured. And he'd think it was the woman he wanted, and not some combination of curved stone, and a swinging, high-heeled shoe moving in and out of sunlight. He would know right away the deception, the trick of shapes and light and movement, but it wouldn't matter at all because the deception was part of it too.​

​

𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑇𝑎𝑖𝑔𝑎 𝑆𝑦𝑛𝑑𝑟𝑜𝑚𝑒, Cristina Rivera Garza

While we drank hot tea by the waterwheel behind the cabin, we had to face the truth: We had no idea how to continue or where we were going. Discovering that this house had been watched or guarded by a small wolf that licked its paws had not helped us, not at all. A preliminary inspection of the dark interior of the cabin had also revealed very little: a few household tools, a pencil without lead or eraser, a dirty cotton shirt. Sometimes, frustration makes us look at the sky. At other times, it leads us to the waterwheel. What was a waterwheel doing in the middle of nowhere surrounded by trees? I screamed into it, the earth. One of those soft screams I had heard when I was lying close to the translator's headphones. Sometimes a scream turns into a song. He, as if infected, did the same.​

​

𝐴 𝑃𝑙𝑎𝑐𝑒 𝑂𝑓 𝐺𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟 𝑆𝑎𝑓𝑒𝑡𝑦, Hilary Mantel

Georges-Jacques looks up, and his eye is offended; it is impregnable, there is no doubt. These people go about their lives and work – brewing by the look of it, and upholstery – and they live under its walls, and they see it every day, and finally they stop seeing it, it's there and not there. What really matters isn't the height of the towers, it's the pictures in your head: the victims gone mad with solitude, the flagstones slippery with blood, the children birthed on straw. You can't have your whole inner world rearranged by a man you meet in the street. Is nothing sacred? Stained from the dye-works, the river ran yellow, ran blue.
identindentAnd when evening came the civil servants hurried home; the jewellers of the Place Dauphine came clank, clank with their keys to lock away their diamonds for the night. No homeward cattle, no dusk over the fields; shrug away the sentimentality. In the rue Saint-Jacques a confraternity of shoemakers settled in for a night's hard drinking. In a third-floor apartment in the rue de la Tixanderie, a young woman let in her new lover and removed her clothes. On the Île Saint-Louis, in an empty office, Maître Desmoulins's son faced, dry-mouthed, the heavy charm of his new employer. Milliners who worked fifteen hours in a bad light rubbed their red-rimmed eyes and prayed for their families in the country. Bolts were drawn; lamps were lit. Actors painted their faces for the performance.​

​

 

[Barding]

A Pᴏᴇᴍ Tᴏᴅᴀʏ​

​

​

Fragment 113

Neither honey nor bee for me — Sappho

Not honey,
not the plunder of the bee
from meadow or sand-flower
or mountain bush;
from winter-flower or shoot
born of the later heat:
not honey, not the sweet
stain on the lips and teeth:
not honey, not the deep
plunge of soft belly
and the clinging of the gold-edged
pollen-dusted feet;

not so–
though rapture blind my eyes,
and hunger crisp
dark and inert my mouth,
not honey, not the south,
not the tall stalk
of red twin-lilies,
nor light branch of fruit tree
caught in flexible light branch;

not honey, not the south;
ah flower of purple iris,
flower of white,
or of the iris, withering the grass–
for fleck of the sun's fire,
gathers such heat and power,
that shadow-print is light,
cast through the petals
of the yellow iris flower;

not iris–old desire–old passion–
old forgetfulness–old pain–
not this, nor any flower,
but if you turn again,
seek strength of arm and throat,
touch as the god;
neglect the lyre-note;
knowing that you shall feel,
about the frame,
no trembling of the string
but heat, more passionate
of bone and the white shell
and fiery tempered steel.​

—H.D.​

 

[Barding]

I Pʀᴏᴍɪsᴇ I'ᴍ Dᴏɪɴɢ Sᴜᴘᴇʀ Wᴇʟʟ Aᴄᴛᴜᴀʟʟʏ,
Nᴏᴛ Iɴ Cʀɪsɪs, I Jᴜsᴛ Rᴇᴀʟʟʏ Lɪᴋᴇ Tʜɪs Pᴏᴇᴍ​

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing —
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief."'

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.​

—Gerard Manley Hopkins​

So some fun facts about this one...

See those little accent diacritics on some of the vowels? Hopkins was so fussy and particular about the rhythms in his poetry that he annotated his own work so people would know how to recite it. The accents denote which syllables you're meant to put the stress on, switching you out of the natural rhythms of English and into something more artificial and musical. (I really like what it does to "on an áge-old anvil wince and sing" for example.)

I've been thinking about that "mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man fathomed. Hold them cheap / May who ne'er hung there." bit a lot lately. Like it's just been bubbling up into my skull while I shop for onions or whatever. "Oh the mind, mind has mountains..." There are, Hopkins seems to say, places in the mind and the heart deeper and higher and worse than any place on earth, and the ones who get it get it, and the ones who don't don't.

Hopkins invented what he thought of as a 'new' type of sonnet, the 'curtal sonnet', consisting of ten and a half lines instead of fourteen. This is not one of them. This is just regular-degular.​

 

[Barding]

Cᴏɴғɪᴛ Gᴀʀʟɪᴄ:
Tʜᴀᴛ's Iᴛ, Tʜᴀᴛ's Tʜᴇ Pᴏsᴛ​

Grab a head of garlic. Don't ask why, just do it, we're going on a journey here. (I am psychopomping you. You are being psychopomped. Excuse my psychopomposity.) Break it open and divide it into cloves. Take off the paper, take off the skin. If any of them are way bigger than the others, cut those ones in half to even the odds.

Preheat your oven to just over 100 degrees celsius, or 225 fahrenheit if ya nasty. (Or if you don't have an oven, you could probably do this very gently in a small saucepan or something, don't tune out just yet.)

Find a small oven-safe pot or dish or pan or something. (Or just make sure it's safe to go on your hob if you don't have an oven.) You want something deepish but narrow. You'll find out why.

Put the garlic cloves in there. Cover them with olive oil. Might end up being a cup or so. Don't worry about it! You're not gonna waste it! You can use it for good things after this! (You could also add a bay leaf or a sprig of rosemary or a couple black peppercorns or a dried chilli or something if you liked. It's all flavour.)

Transfer your pot to the oven once it's hot enough and just leave it in there to confit for like an hour. (Check on it periodically, if that makes you feel safer. The garlic's gonna get golden but it won't properly brown.) OR simmer the garlic very gently on your stove: low heat, for maybe 15-20 minutes? (Be more careful, do more poking and checking with this method; if the garlic starts to go further than you want it to, it'll go quicker, and you won't be able to pull it back from the brink.)

Once it's done, the garlic should be soft, and golden, and pretty. The oil will be fragrant and full of flavour too, so keep that.

Now you've got some confit garlic cloves, and some garlic oil, and the space and time to ask yourself: Why? Why'd you make me do this, B?

The fun part is finding out for yourself. Confit garlic is a wish your heart makes, so do whatever your heart wants to do with it.

(E.g. Spread it on toast. Purée it and use it as the flavour base in hummus, or salsa, or guacamole, or garlic mayo or better-than-average burger sauce. Crush it into carbonara or alfredo or pesto or whatever. With a bit of the oil, mix-and-crush it with miso and a bit of sugar, and use it as a glaze for grilling salmon or something. With a fair bit of the oil, combine it with like an egg yolk and some dijon mustard and some vinegar and some sugar and some lemon juice and whatever else, and sorta go at it with a hand-blender, and you'll have the most extra Caesar salad dressing imaginable. Go wild. Use your powers for evil!)​

 

[Barding]

Sᴏᴍᴇ Tʜɪɴɢs:​

Today, out on a walk, a hundred year old woman told me two things: That she was a hundred years old; and that I was both/either sent by an angel, and/or an angel myself (she changed the narrative halfway through explaining). I'd helped her with an automatic gate that was shutting too fast for her to get through, and that's what she told me. I smiled all the way down the rest of the street. Alleged angel status? We take those.

Bread is never there when you need it. Is that just me? Is bread there for you? Like, I feel like it cares. Carbs, as a rule, care. But bread's avoidant about it sometimes, you know, in a way that doesn't happen to me with potatoes. For example, I just now wanted nothing so much as a peanut butter and cucumber sandwich, but the bread for that sandwich just did not manifest physically. (Note to reader: I peanut butter on some cucumber and it was not the same.) (Note to self: buy bread.)

In arm's reach of me I have a few different little pieces of paper with my painstaking handwriting very blackly on them. Some of them say things like "Look into... Lidl fruit & veg boxes." Some of them say "Murkwater CAVE", "197", "- Yogurt, - Vaseline, - Something green". And perhaps most ominously: "CHECK BOTH CELLARS AT THE LAKE."

You know what's good? Colours as adverbs.

I no longer have as many beetroots as I did before. The suedes/rutabagas/rutabaguses are overtaking them, which, arguably, is worse.

There's a sound outside my window. Like someone sawing (desperately) through metal with a hacksaw. Like someone vigorously swinging a rusted old wrought iron gate with creaky hinges open and closed, open and closed. Like someone fucking a swan.​

 

[Barding]

A Bɪᴛ Oғ Pᴏᴇᴍ​

So, here's a thing. (And if you know me, and have known me for any length of time, it's probably not a very new thing, because I've probably at least recommended that you read it, if not sent you it in haphazardly curated chunks.) Alice Oswald's Memorial.

It's the Iliad except in all the ways it's not. The thing is, those ways are pretty numerous. Not because she digresses, or changes things. The place and facts and time stay the same; this isn't an adaptation, but it's also not quite a translation. She pares and peels everything away – all the plot – and what's left is a reading of the dead. It's a litany of poetic obituaries, each bookended by these brutal, beautiful, Homeric extended metaphors, that sing out once then echo like an amen, amen.

Sure, there's moments where plot glimpses through, gets a look-in, and a someone whose name you know appears...

ADRESTUS almost survived it was horrible
To hear the hoof-kicking struggle of his horses
Tangled on a tamarisk branch
The cart cracked the man tipped headfirst forwards
And landed on his mouth in the dust
And there instantly stood Menelaus
A sundial moving over his last moments
With a long shadowing spear
Take me alive said Adrestus
I'll give you everything gold bronze iron
My father is a rich man take me alive
But Agamemnon heard him
Weakness what is this weakness Menelaus
Don't tell me you love these men
With their impeccable wife-thief manners
A death-curse on all of them kill them all
Even the unborn ones in their mothers' bellies
Be uncried for unburied
And that was the earth's moment
That was the death of Adrestus

Like a good axe in good hands
Finds out the secret of wood and splits it open
When a man for example cuts out timbers for a boat
And his axe is an iron decision swinging his arm

Like a good axe in good hands
Finds out the secret of wood and splits it open
When a man for example cuts out timbers for a boat
And his axe is an iron decision swinging his arm​

But mostly it's these hard bright unbearable moments that could, if not for the weapons and names, be cut out of any war. They humanise and voice the unvoiced. People who are just names get to be briefly more than names. Their deaths get to be tragedy, get to be nature, get to be an equal part of this bigger thing than themselves: a verse in a litany of verses, not just a name laid low by a bigger one.

Somebody's husband somebody's daughter's husband
Stood there stunned by fear
Like a pillar like a stunted tree
He couldn't bend his stones
He couldn't walk his roots
His armour was useless it simply
Cried out and broke open oh
There stood ALCATHOUS and a spear
Knowing nothing of his wedding
Not knowing his feelings or his wife's face
Or her doting parents or her incredible needlework
That spear went straight through his heart
And began to tick tick tick but not for love

Like a knife-winged hawk
Balanced on a cliff with no foothold
Not even a goat can climb there
Like when he lifts his blades and begins
That faultless fall
Through the birds of the valley

Like a knife-winged hawk
Balanced on a cliff with no foothold
Not even a goat can climb there
Like when he lifts his blades and begins
That faultless fall
Through the birds of the valley​

Anyway: Alice Oswald's good shit. Good for classicists and classics-likers. Good for people who like Cormac McCarthy and his absolute poetics of brutality. Good for people who like pretty but unflinching nature vignettes. Good for people who don't like punctuation.​

 

[Barding]

Aʟᴛᴇʀɴᴀᴛɪᴠᴇs Tᴏ "Tʜᴀᴛ Fʀᴜsᴛʀᴀᴛᴇs Mᴇ"
Tʜᴀᴛ I Jᴜsᴛ Mᴀᴅᴇ Uᴘ & Tʜᴀᴛ Yᴏᴜ Aʀᴇ Wᴇʟᴄᴏᴍᴇ Tᴏ Usᴇ Cᴏᴍᴘʟᴇᴛᴇʟʏ Fʀᴇᴇ Oғ Cʜᴀʀɢᴇ​

You've heard of that grinds my gears. Now get ready for...

That really gelds my goat.

That really shits my bed.

Well that just eats my plums (which were in the ice box, and which I was probably saving for my breakfast).

That burns my mouth before the meal's even begun.

That soaks my hawk.

That signs me up for MTV Cribs with immediate effect and without my express permission or prior knowledge. They are coming. They are coming.

That just carpets my kitchen.

Well ain't that just a rock in my rosecoco beans?

Ain't that a kick outta bed?

That reminds me that many now-flightless species of birds once flew, in the wild, just fine, but have since forgotten how. It has me considering the turkey is what I'm saying, but through the lens of tragedy, and onward into the wider nature of loss, recoverability, and its opposite.

That salts my cereal.

Doesn't that just put baby in the corner, watermelon and all?

 

[Barding]

Mᴏʀᴇ Bɪᴛs Fʀᴏᴍ Bᴏᴏᴋs Wʜᴇʀᴇ I Dᴏɢ-Eᴀʀᴇᴅ Tʜᴇ Pᴀɢᴇs
(Oʀ Wʜᴇʀᴇ I Tᴏᴏᴋ A Pʜᴏᴛᴏ Oғ Tʜᴇ Pᴀɢᴇ Bᴜᴛ Tʜᴀᴛ's Nᴏᴛ As Rᴏᴍᴀɴᴛɪᴄ Is Iᴛ?)
​

𝐴 𝑃𝑙𝑎𝑐𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝐺𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟 𝑆𝑎𝑓𝑒𝑡𝑦, Hilary Mantel

Maximilien gave his grandparents no trouble at all. You would hardly know he was in the house, they said. He was interested in reading and in keeping doves in a cote in the garden. The little girls were brought over on Sundays, and they played together. He let them stroke – very gently, with one finger – the doves' quivering backs.
identindentThey begged for one of the doves, to take home and keep for themselves. I know you, he said, you'll be tired of it within a day or two, you have to take care of them, they're not dolls you know. You wouldn't give up: Sunday after Sunday, bleating and whining. In the end he was persuaded. Aunt Eulalie bought a pretty gilt cage.
identindentWithin a few weeks the dove was dead. They had left the cage outside, there had been a storm. He imagined the little bird dashing itself in panic against the bars, its wings broken, the thunder rolling overhead. When Charlotte told him she hiccupped and sobbed with remorse; but in five minutes, he knew, she would run out into the sunshine and forget it. 'We put the cage outside so he would feel free,' she sniffed.
identindent'He was a not a free bird. He was a bird that needed looking after. I told you. I was right.'​

𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑇𝑟𝑎𝑖𝑡𝑜𝑟 𝐵𝑎𝑟𝑢 𝐶𝑜𝑟𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑡, Seth Dickinson

There were other strange things to see in the slums. Falcresti families came here to hire wet nurses, so their children could drink immunity factors from a native breast—a shield, they hoped, against the bitter winters and the plagues that killed so many of their children. Some of them even sought illegal blessing from the ilykari. A whole industry of milk and blasphemy had risen here, complete with its own criminals, baby poisoners, mystic protection rackets that cursed households and demanded gold for the undoing. And other kinds of crime too, guilds of yellow-jacketed plague survivors who cleared the dead and offered their very flesh as a cannibal inoculant.
identindent Graft and corruption and illicit love. None of it could be reduced to something as simple as invader and invaded.
identindentBaru saw in the city what she felt in herself. The two-faced allegiances, the fearful monitoring of self and surroundings, the whimpering need to please somehow kneeling alongside marrow-deep defiance. One eye set on a future of glittering wealthy subservience, the other turned to a receding and irretrievable freedom.
identindentThe liquor of empire, alluring and corrosive at once, saturating everything, every old division of sex and race and history, remaking it all with the promise and threat of power.​

𝑃𝑖𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑖, Susanna Clarke

A Full Moon stood in the centre of the Single Doorway, flooding the Hall with Light. The Statues on the Walls were all posed as if they had just turned to face the Doorway, their marble eyes fixed on the Moon. They were different from the Statues in other Halls; they were not isolated individuals, but the representation of a Crowd. Here were two with their arms about each other; here one had his hand on the shoulder of one in front, the better to pull himself forward to see the Moon; here a child held onto its father's hand. There was even a Dog that – having no interest in the Moon – stood on its hind legs, its front paws on its Master's chest, pleading for attention. The Rear Wall was a mass of Statues – not neatly arranged in Tiers, but a jumbled, chaotic crowd. Foremost among them was a Young Man, who stood bathed in Moonlight, elation in his face, a banner in his hand.
identindentI almost forgot to breathe. For a moment, I had an inkling of what it might be like if instead of two people in the World there were thousands.​

​

𝑇𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑟 𝑇𝑎𝑖𝑙𝑜𝑟 𝑆𝑜𝑙𝑑𝑖𝑒𝑟 𝑆𝑝𝑦, John Le Carré

'He looked connubial; he looked like half a union; he looked too complete to be alone in all his life. Then there was his passport, describing Gerstmann as married; and it is a habit in all of us to make our cover stories, our assumed personae, at least parallel with the reality.' He lapsed again into a moment of reflection. 'I often thought that. I even put it to Control: we should take the opposition's cover stories more seriously, I said. The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal. The fifty-year-old who knocks five years off his age. The married man who calls himself a bachelor; the fatherless man who gives himself two children . . . Or the interrogator who projects himself into the life of a man who does not speak. Few men can resist expressing their appetites when they are making a fantasy about themselves.'​

​

 

[Barding]

A Tʜɪɴɢ Aʙᴏᴜᴛ Dᴏɴɴᴀ Tᴀʀᴛᴛ​

I finished The Little Friend today. A small half-brick of a book, if not quite a doorstop, I was wary of starting it — mostly because, for a variety of reasons, I'm a slow reader. (And also, oh god, what do I do if my book doesn't always fit in my bag? To the heckler in the back yelling, 'Get a Kindle!': fuck you, friend. I have one, but ebooks won't help me work through the backlog of hardcopies on my Shame Shelf!) I'm glad I read it though.

Sure, there's a wonderful effusiveness and joyful excess to Tartt's writing in it. Not purple or florid, but unafraid, and ambitious of getting called things other than just 'tight', right? Love to read that. Love that for her.

But there's this other thing about Donna Tartt's writing I wanted to mention here. It's not often that I get the urge to describe a book as 'beautifully lit', but I feel that way about The Secret History and The Little Friend. (I haven't read The Goldfinch yet.) There's such a constant, recurring attention to the quality of light in her writing, not in a cinematic way, but in a way that only written words can really express. (Motion, colour, constancy or flux, shapes, solidity or fluidity, time of day, space, darkness and how it's interrupted or invaded or punctuated. But also association, implication. The things light conjures.) And as someone who doesn't really get a movie in their head while reading – just shapes, vibes, atmospheres the occasional vague double-exposed almost-image – it's something my brain can latch onto, reproduce, and invoke with.

Makes me want to put a post here of Ten Good Times Donna Tartt Wrote About Light, or something. Which I won't do. But I at least wanted to make a post about how I could do that, would like to do that, and feel like her writing almost warrants someone doing that. Maybe not me; maybe not today — but someone, sometime, somewhere.
​

TL;DR: If we're writing together, talk lighting to me.​

 

[Barding]

Cᴜᴍɪɴ Sᴀʟᴛ
Tʜᴀᴛ's Vᴇʀʏ Nᴇᴀʀʟʏ Iᴛ. Tʜᴀᴛ's Aʟᴍᴏsᴛ Tʜᴇ Wʜᴏʟᴇ Pᴏsᴛ.​

Toast cumin. Grind cumin, but not too fine. Combine it with coarse, decent quality sea salt.

It won't fix you. But it'll give you salty cumin, and cuminy salt.

It won't fix that mirror you broke accidentally and had to put somewhere, hoping they would take it away. (You assume they took it away.) But it'll make sliced red onions more exciting. Just give them half an hour or two to get acquainted: the cumin, the salt, the onions. The cumin-salty onions. (Pour away any water they release.)

Some dried thyme in there is okay but not necessary. But, pun sadly intended, who'd say no to more thyme?

It won't put up a trellis on your balcony or climb ivy up it. But maybe a slice of your heart will wander the alleys of the Marrakech medina in winter all over again. Maybe a slice of your tongue and a few of your teeth will think about khobz again, that bread they have: a little like an English muffin, a little like pita, crunchy with toasted semolina, soft and inwardly open. And wouldn't that be nice?​

 

[Barding]

Jᴜsᴛ Sᴏᴍᴇ Bɪᴛs Fʀᴏᴍ A Lᴇᴄᴛᴜʀᴇ
Oɴ "Tʜᴇ Dᴀʀᴋ Aʀᴛ Oғ Pᴏᴇᴛʀʏ" Dᴏɴ Pᴀᴛᴇʀsᴏɴ Gᴀᴠᴇ Fᴏʀ A Wʜɪʟᴇ
​

 

It will be blindingly obvious to all of you that this lecture is less a paradox than a nonsense. How can anyone give a public lecture on a Dark Art? The answer is of course that they can't, or at least shouldn't. And I'm not going to: you have been lured here under thoroughly false pretences; I have no intention of revealing any of the appalling secrets of my black trade. But I will tell you why I can't - or at least shouldn't.
identindentPerhaps Occult Science is a more accurate description than Dark Art. Poetry is a form of magic, because it tries to change the way we perceive the world – that is to say that it aims to make the texture of our perception malleable. It does so by surreptitious and devious means, by seeding and planting things in the memory and imagination of the reader with such force and insidious originality that they cannot be deprogrammed.
identindentWhat you remember changes how you think. So an occult science is exactly what the practice - as distinct from the study - of poetry is.​

 

There are dangers involved in committing bad things to memory. About a hundred years ago the mathematician Charles Hinton devised a series of three-dimensional geometrical objects, known as Hinton's Cubes. The idea was that once memorised they could be mentally reassembled into a 3D net, and then infolded to produce a 4-dimensional model; this, he claimed, would allow you some conception of 4-space.
identindentBizarrely, it actually seemed to work. There were two unforeseen consequences, however: 4-space is not a happy thing to carry around in your head when you have to have to wake up every day in 3-space, put your clothes on in the right order, use the toilet accurately, and place your breakfast in the right holes. But much worse, Dr Hinton had devised no mean by which, once 4-space was memorised, it might be forgotten again. A few folk went irrecoverably insane, and the cubes were quietly withdrawn from public sale.​

 

I've said this so many times it's beginning to sound a bit self-satisfied: a poem is just a little machine for remembering itself. Whatever other function a rhyme, a metre, an image, a rhetorical trope, a brilliant qualifier or stanza-break might perform, half of it is simply mnemonic. A poem makes a fetish of its memorability. It does this, because the one unique thing about our art is that it can be carried in your head in its original state, intact and perfect.
identindentWe merely recall a string quartet or a film or a painting. Actually, at a neurological level we're only remembering a memory of it — but our memory of the poem is the poem. A poet exploits this fact, and tries to burn their poems into your mind, and mess with your perception.
identindentA poem's most primitive (and so we can probably assume its earliest) function is as a system for the simple storage and retrieval of information, and sometimes also its concealment. The poets of certain nomadic Saharan tribes are charged with memorising the location of the waterholes, in ways that will not betray them to others.
identindentNo wonder that poetry, from the earliest so deeply connected to the world and our own survival in it, was quickly invested with magical properties, and soon took the form of the spell, the riddle, the curse, the blessing, the prayer. They are - and poems remain - invocatory forms. Prose evokes; the well-chosen word describes the thing. But poetry invokes; the memorable word conjures its subject from the air.​

​

 

The poem starts as wholly yours and slowly ceases to become so. The process is one of gradual publication, gradual exposure, gradually reading the poem as if it was someone else's, because your aim is to make it someone else's. It starts as inspiration, in the warm, wet, red dark of the brain, and its journey is one of slow separation from its creator, through the stations of, first, its realisation on the page — which is why we so often give them waterbirths, write them in dark corners in pencil or on wee laptops, so they're not shocked by the unfamiliar element: I tend to think of poems as marsupials — through its redaction, its framing, its drafting, where you slowly cease to write the poem you wanted to and write the one it wants to be.
identindentAt that stage the poet is switching between a red, wild, creative eye and a blue, cold, editorial one. Or, amongst the more practised, enjoying a kind of weird stereoscopic view of the poem, which they are both simultaneously inside, living, and also wholly detached from it all. Towards the end, the poem's consummation, the blue cold eye is completing the work unaided, according to the poem's by-then fully realised interior logic, not the poet's. (All this eye is really saying is: would my poem mean the same to me if it were not my poem?)
identindentThen we publish. If the aim is just to finish the poem and not publish it, the poet has configured their relation to it imperfectly from the start. It will never leave the house, never grow up, never speak to another soul, because it never wanted to. ​

 

[Barding]

Sᴏᴍᴇ Tʜɪɴɢs:​

The flavour of the day is want.

Diane, the hour is the ninth hour, the minute is in motion, and I would like a burger. I would like a cheese burger. I would like Kenji Lopez Alt to make a late night quadruple onion smash burger, in secret, just for me. I would like to make it with him. I would like to go through his fridge and create a monster. (He would not be able to stop me.)

I would like to be in a car on a sunny day with people who have no choice but to listen to whatever music I put on, but who wouldn't want to change it even if they could. (But the important thing is that they can't.) Dogs die in hot cars; dreamers use their opposable thumbs to open the damn windows.

I want my string-of-hearts to propagate properly, or at least tell me why it doesn't want to. Do you like the tiny pot you're in? Don't you want to strike out and spread your roots?

The hour is the ninth again, and the minute won't stay still – and really that's how we got here in the first place; same fixed point on the same spinning circle – and I would either like 'Holiday' by Madonna out of my head, or some time off to make it make sense.

Time's winged chariot waddles on. I could still go for that burger.​

 

[Lydia]

“This is my friend B. He likes YEARNING and the DISTINCTIONS between different types of OREGANO. They have butchered a BOAR (once, maybe twice). He doesn’t like to COUNT.”

 

[Barding]

Sᴛʀᴀɴɢᴇ Nɪɢʜᴛs (Wɪᴛʜ Tʜᴏᴜɢʜᴛs Lɪᴋᴇ Tʜᴇsᴇ)
Fʀᴏᴍ ᴛʜᴇ Dᴀᴡɴ Cʜᴏʀᴜs Sᴇᴀsᴏɴ Oɴᴇ Fɪɴᴀʟᴇ!​

Strange nights with thoughts like these. A head like a rented room, marked with the memories of others before you, and immured by the knowledge that, after you're gone, someone else would take up the lease. (Spread yourself thin enough for light to pass through and you can feel them: the past respeaking itself, and the future like a half-recalled dream.) Strange nights; strange thoughts, but not unfamiliar.

Foster Therese Silky wasn't a man much given to adventure anymore. (Foster Silky wasn't a man much given to. Foster Silky wasn't a man, much. Foster Silky wasn't. Foster Silky was. Peel and peel, layer by layer, and the first glimpse of nothing is your first sign to stop — so: let's stop.) Foster Silky wasn't a man much given to adventure anymore, but when he thought of that word, and let come what images came, this is what he saw:

The sky's jaw is unhinged so far as to be hingeless. Dark throat behind it, echoing with stars: a single yellow tusk of moon. The infinite ground, infinitely small; smaller still, the road's skinny ribbon. A car capsized on the shoulder – its skin is still feverish under his palms – and all around him the meadow is an ocean, is hungry as the ocean, is loud as the ocean, and colourless as the ocean, and flat as the ocean except for the texture its movement makes in the wind that gives it voice. (He's never seen the ocean. Not with his own eyes. He could've changed that, simple as turning right instead of left when the moment came.) Loud as it is, huge as it is, it's enough to drown him and drown him out. Loud as it is, huge as it is, it's still not enough to do what he hoped it would. He can still hear the long way home. Its faintness hurts like thirst. He has never felt more ashamed.

To call him brave would have been a stretch even back then, but to say that once he was braver wouldn't be wrong.

Strange nights with thoughts like these. Tonight, and lately, and maybe forever, they crowded in and swaddled him. (Even a straightjacket is primarily an instrument of safety.) He leaned into them; surrounded, let himself sleepwalk.

See him, then: by himself and unaware and never quite alone. Watch.

While Foster Silky tried, with a lavender coloured towel, to make it show him his face, the bathroom mirror was still trying to fog. Old wooden frame all curlicues and carving; tarnished so anyone's face would look freckled; flaking paint, and joins gone to warp with generations of damp. Deep clawfoot bath and light like an underfunded subway. He frowned at himself, pulled pointlessly at the skin under one eye with the pad of a middle finger. Behind his closed lips, his tongue ran visibly over the fronts of his teeth, tasting peppermint and baking soda. He pulled at a stray coil of hair that fell too much into his face's midline to be told it ought to do any different. "I know, I know…" he said, as if someone else had spoken, telling him he looked fine, to stop fussing. Around him, and seeping out into the wider and the deeper house, the smell of steam and soap.

In the house's stomach, Foster Silky stood at the kitchen table – an old slab of a thing, scarred like a goblinshark, immortal but not invulnerable, designed before the dawn of time – and hunched over it like something with its wings furled. He ate a disappointing sandwich, no idea of its contents. No thoughts showed on his face, except halfway through, when the shape of a mistake appeared. "I know, I know…" he said, as if someone had told him they'd told him it was a god damn stupid idea in the first dumb place to brush his teeth before dinner. Dead pot of coffee on the wirecoil stove; a half-eaten gallon of peach cobbler ice cream, entirely alone in the mumbling freezer that stood in one corner. Around him, the house stretched, in the same maybe-infinity that all houses possess at night when only one room is lit and the rest lies dark and sleepless.

"Is it getting worse?" Foster said, with one hand pressed to the black window like maybe he could tell by the cold of the glass whether or not the snow had stopped. He put the hand to his brow – hot, furrowed, more than just worried – and shadowed his eyes while he looked out. Only night, nothing more. "I know, I know…" he said, as if someone had told him that they could have told him that.

In a room emptied by darkness, Bobby Darin sang that someone like you makes it hard to live without somebody else, and that someone like you makes it easy to give and never think of myself. When the needle reached the record's center, the player sounded like a woodfire remembering itself. Like the house breathing, alone.

In three sweaters, a waxed parka the colour of a pumpkin, and a paisley silk-blend scarf – moth-holed, smelling of someone else's perfume, wrapped round his head like Lawrence of Arabia, or an old woman taking beets to market in a wheelbarrow too big for her old joke of a body – Foster creaked through the nightsnow in shoes he was fast realising were a damn fool's idea of a foolish idea. The snow was knee-deep in places, thick and soft enough he had to kick through it, wet enough that it would have felt like wading if he'd had any feeling left in his legs. He knew, but only abstractly, that they were soaked to the skin; more concrete was his knowledge they were cold to the bone.

The snow helped, at least, with one thing: muffling sound and shrinking space. The bare-armed oaks that hooded the long drive up to the house were just a kind of corridor: long, but not the longest he'd ever walked in the dark. Strange thoughts, but not unfamiliar; he was fine until he wasn't.

It wasn't so much the owlcall that got him as the echo, or the reply maybe. Space rushed him and overwhelmed him. Arms round himself and head bowed, chin on chest, the flashlight he carried dropped its beam: just a pool of white on the bright-white ground, then, and the sound of a grown man, stood in a hole in the broken snow, and breathing like people breathe when they've been crying or laughing already for a long, long time.

(She tells him he ought to come out of his shell a little. Maybe not right now, things being how they are, but maybe in Spring. And he asks, Would she stop coming to him if he did? And she doesn't have a good answer. And he thinks how he ought to've known better than to ask. So he says the only thing left in his head: You know who wants a turtle to come out its shell? Cooks. And he remembers to smile, but maybe too late to make clear it was mostly a joke.)

Krenshaw Trailer Park, and six different dogs were barking. A bad joke getting worse, one twisted off into pealing howls. Sound, somewhere, of a chainlink fence complaining as a small body crashed against it with a rhythm like waves.

Foster hugged the trailer wall, and didn't look up. He picked, with a careful fingernail, at the duct-tape winterproofing a window; stopped, realising he was teasing it loose. He made his mind go as blank as it ever did. Listened to his body, the chilled flutter of his breathing, until he wasn't really in it anymore.

(To call him brave, ten years ago, would've been a few degrees too kind. To call him braver then than now, though? Biggest bandaid in the world over a wound that knows only how to bleed, and he'd tried to pull it off — what'd you call that if not brave? Stupid? Maybe. Maybe, yeah.)

Foster followed his hand round the trailer's body, watching rather than feeling its progress. He found the door in the moonscape snowlight, knocked with the first knuckle of one numb finger.

A rattling cough inside, and motion a few scant feet away from it. The coughing continued; the door opened. 3:04 AM on the storm night's hollow end. Watch.

"My name's Foster Silky." The kind of monotone that comes with having practiced the words till they turn colourless. "Carlos said your name's Tupoc Emiliano Tlacaelel Solis?" His pronunciation was slow, deliberate, and almost right. "He said if someone needed help with something 'round here, that you were The Guy? Help me with something?"​

 

[Barding]

Tʜɪɴɢs Yᴏᴜ Cᴀɴ Jᴜsᴛ Dᴏ
(Iғ Yᴏᴜ Aɪɴ'ᴛ A Cᴏᴡᴀʀᴅ)​

Dare to eat a peach. Dare to eat an orange and call it what it patently isn't: lunch, etc.

Never buy a toaster. (Or have one, but one of the slots was broken when you inherited it, and the other one was temperamental, like maybe only one side of it actually worked or something.) Just use dry pans to toast bread, like some kind of mesolithic hominid.

(Refuse to Google when the Mesolithic was, and whether hominids had become humans by then, and when non-clay cooking vessels were invented, even though you know damn well the answer to that last one is "not fucking yet.")

Whenever a friend shows you a new song, say: "Okay but what if someone did an extremely goth cover of this. Like, what if I did an extremely goth cover of this?" Even if the song is already pretty fucking goth. (Especially if the song is already pretty fucking goth.)

Buy a bucket of sodium citrate online, and add it to any cheese to make it melt like American Cheese.

(Have whole conversations with your friends in parentheses neither of you know how to break out of.)

Keep the dead wasp you found in one of your snifter glasses, just in case you need a dead wasp for something. (Like, to feed someone. Like, to sneak it into their food, as retribution maybe.)

Remember, just for reference and informational purposes, that hypermilitarised cops probably like being covered in piss only slightly more than they like being covered in fire. Remember that while not everyone can mix a mean molotov cocktail, everyone can fill a bottle with pee.

Eat that peach! Don't let it go gross! Eat it today, eat it now. Don't leave your future self a little present; leave them jealous of you.

Just live your whole life with consummate boldness, idfk. Or try to. Trying's probably braver than just doing, idfk.

 

[Barding]

Sᴏᴍᴇ Tʜɪɴɢs:​

Washing down a multivitamin with a mouthful of coffee, pretty sure I will never die, unless I take two multivitamins, in which case the bottle states I won't survive the night.

Eating salad from a jar with chopsticks, shaken not stirred to resettle the dressing.

Putting digital pins in my digital map to track where rosemary grows plentifully enough, and accessibly enough from the street, that I can steal sprigs in passing, the city giving, the city taking away.

Lying down or sitting up or standing, all but entirely very still, with my head always immobile but my body in carefully isolated motion, I am slowly becoming a master of barometric-vertigo-friendly exercise forms. Which is to say, becoming unstoppable, even and especially by thunder.

Moving ancient jade in ancient ways across my skin to stop its own ancientness before it comes in (pretty sure I will never die), not in front of a mirror, but in front of a screen that shows someone I'm mirroring, so for a 8 minute and 45 seconds, and a blocked adbreak, their skin is my skin is their skin is mine. (An ancient man? An ancient man. Like 1800s? Don't you wanna go away with me? It'll be like humans never existed. Or technology?)

I'd like to find a quiet green spot, birds maybe, sky turned to islands and deltas by foliage that reaches but doesn't touch, hunch over my phone and speak Spanish to it.

I'm living in the 21st century and it's doing something mean to me.​

 

[Barding]

Tʜᴇ Mᴏʀᴇ Yᴏᴜ Kɴᴏᴡ
(Rᴀɪɴʙᴏᴡ Eᴍᴏᴊɪ)​

For a lot of her poems, Emily Dickinson used free variations on the Broadsheet Ballad form. Another name for that is the Common Meter. It varies. So do her versions of it.

Anyway: you might already know this, but it means you can sing a lot of her poems to the tune of 'Amazing Grace' with a bit of effort.

What you might not already know is that it also means you can sing a lot of them to the Pokémon theme tune.​

Knowledge is power.​

 

[Barding]

OTROS :: Eᴘɪsᴏᴅᴇ 1 :: 'Cʜᴀɴɢᴇ'
From Self Control, with @Lydia ​

11:21 PM. The drywall shivers with the sound of music. Gabber is music to gnash your teeth to, beats so insistent and regular the brain can slip between its gears and drift throughout the body. Dancing like that, it's your bonemarrow and burning muscles that do the thinking. It's also music to shave your head by, lace your boots to. She's not the worst neighbour to have tonight, that girl nextdoor, with the green hair, the longdistance boyfriend. (Silk wonders if she ever goes out. Her door never makes a sound.)

Close to the wall socket, crouched on their heels, squat on their thighs – bare legs newly shaved, bare arms, bare (fake) hardwood floor and mattress – the wire of Silk's clippers casts weird shadows as it shakes. No outlets in the bathroom, so they have to do it here. They barely use the mirror; can do this, now, by touch. Their reflection watches from the corner of its eyes. (Wax's was never quite right. Moved sometimes, wrongfaced, without him. Paced, prowled, lashed out, like the glass was a cage that had trapped it. Imagine: to look in a mirror and see not yourself but the beast that lives in your skin. Pobrecite, you don't have to imagine. It is your skin. Wherever it goes, there you are.)

A snarled-up pout of concentration: Silk has never been in a forest, but the short pelt beneath their fingertips feels deep enough to get lost in. Buried below the music, the clippers' teeth hum: hunger mantra, sacred syllable. Silk's eyes slide shut. Bare for now, neither matte nor gloss, the lids have that third quality possessed by the petals of tulips and the wings of things without feathers: colour of cooking oil, shimmering as the heat comes right. Behind them, Silk's hunger waits to be seen. (To be touched. To be filled.)

Something's changing. Silk changes with it. Haven't they always?

(I envy you. Lace, repeating herself. Like, I love you, I love all of you, but fuck y'all too, right? Lace, laughing her small help-me laugh, face turned away. I dunno, maybe you didn't know it yet, maybe you did, maybe you always knew – like Luna says, I dunno – but you all had something you wanted to be, even before, right? / Sure. Silk, not always having known how to wash and braid her hair, knows by now. Okay. / Like, they're right. They're right about you, anyway. Lace, sounding different upsidedown, eyes rolling back in her head to look Silk in the face. You're like some kinda infinite fucking onion, qué no? Layers under layers and you just keep peeling and like, I dunno, you're fine with it? You know there's always something underneath. / Silk, detangling from the ends up. Silk's fingernails, the colour of lipstick in the dark seafoam of her hair. / Lace, not even needing to say the rest. Lace, nineteen for almost twenty years, on the cusp forever. I dunno. Like, y'all are changing. I dunno what I'm meant to change into to keep up.)

Silk's eyes twitch under the skin. The clippers shut off like a door closing, with the humming shut behind it. Silk leaves them on the nearest patch of floor, wrapped in their own wire. The metal muzzle is faintly hot from use. The black WAHL plastic body is surrounded where it lays: a shed and soft halo of black unwanted hair. Silk's chest, shoulders, back caught the rest. Their hand is still soaked in the vibrations from the clippers. Their skin feels invaded, like the offcut hairs are trying to take root where they fell. (A momentary urge, and Silk wants to roll on the ground, drag their back and arms along the walls. A momentary urge behind clenched and stinging teeth, and Silk wants to skin themself clean. Get better. Be new.)

It passes. Hasn't it always?

Framed with two inches of bamboo laminate, colour of condensed milk, the mirror is big, broad, cheap: aluminum smeared onto glass. (43 dollars American, heavy and clumsy, hauled home like a cross to Calvary, dragged sometimes on its side, concrete tattering the cardboard and shedding styrofoam, look at it fucking go, arms and legs, on their back like a cross, early night, friction, three flights of pinche stairs, don't fucking look, don't fucking look at them — not now, not yet, but soon.) Between the low ceiling and its size, the mirror fills almost the whole corner. Crammed in close to the kitchenette, jammed between floor and wall, it's more doorway than window, alleging another near-identical room. In it, through it, the only lights are stolen. Sodium gold from the street below; roadflare red from the construction site cranes; filmy shadows the colour of tin. Felt more than seen, the glass trembles with bass. The tempo is like something being stampcut from sheetsteel. (Backteeth chewing fast on nothing. Music you can't dance to unmedicated. Does she dance in there? Does she ever go out?)

The minifridge is empty, unplugged. Dragged a meter across the floor, it squats by the mirror in silence. Its white plastic top, and the steel drainingboard by the kitchenette sink – still pockmarked from drying someone else's dishes – have been colonised. (Cluttered. Strewn. A kind of vanity now. Scissors. Eyelash glue. Plastic packaging, broken into. Revlon Super Lustrous Lipstick in Cappuccino and Goldpearl Plum: a buy-one-get-one-half-price offer, fuck it, what else do you do with 5,500 dollars, what else do you do with a hole whose depth you don't know how to sound. Poultry shears. A Maybelline tinted moisturiser, golden-cool, with a French name that seems like it should mean tainted oil. Eyeshadow set next to a container of Vaseline the size of a closed fist. Fabric scissors. A dollarstore freckle pen. A tube of NYX Professional Born To Glow Liquid Illuminator, half-killed, in a shade called – you have to laugh – "Sunbeam". A linoleum knife that looks more like something to kill sheep with. MAC Strobe Cream: barely, sparingly used. An illegal balisong with a skeletal handle of rose-gold steel. Powder and cotton pads, nailpolish. Solvent and green tea scent of removers.) A residue of glitter covers everything, enough to lose Silk their deposit: body-safe, allegedly, but impossible to clean.

With no one but the mirror watching, Silk's movements change. They stretch tall, from the balls of their feet to the curl and sharply straightening lengths of their fingers, and spill into a squat, heavy as falling water. Arms hunched over their head, Silk pushes their palms and fingers over the quiet black noise of their scalp. (Not quite a buzz, not quite a hiss. Profusely plural. A touch-sound like electricity moving in wires. Beneath the skin, an impatience.) Muscle like bone and bone like muscle, everything in their back shifts too much through the skin. (Their shoulders shouldn't bend that way, but do.) When they roll onto their side, and twist onto their back and hands and feet, and rise up straight like steam, the motion is soundless, simian. To move like this takes a lifetime of contemporary dance, or a childhood raised by wolves. It's fine. It's meaningless. The body wants what it wants. It feels good just to move. No need to pretend.

In the pitchdark bathroom, the hot water feels like light might feel, if light could pass through skin. Something's changing. Some things have already changed. Silk feels their stomach come alive with unease, then dissolve, then boil lower: dark-warm and unresolved.

(What does it look like inside you? Are you dry and still, except in the flushed and swollen places where the night still needs you alive? Is everything there that was always there, or did changing hollow you out? Silk remembers retching in the hot dark – smelling of butcher's shop, smelling of bodies – in the first blind nights of their becoming. They hadn't yet learned to stretch their eyes till the dark became something they could see in. It felt like pieces of their body were wrenching themselves free. Maybe they were. Silk weighs less, now, than they seem like they should. Does your body reconstitute itself as needed, moment by moment and molten? What happens when you sleep? If you opened yourself, what would you learn?)

The hunger comes round like it always does, but this time something has changed. Silk's body is awake with it, livid with it. No act of will, no force of thought, but their cheeks are hot, flesh firm and plush. Their lungs are wings, beating; between them, their heart is a stone.

Silk is on the bathtub floor. The itch has rinsed from their skin and their brain is blind on memory and their eyes see shades of grey, more map than place, and heart or not, whatever the ciphered workings of their innards, the blood wants to go where the blood wants to go where the blood wants to go and Silk lets it. It moves by itself, not pumping but crawling. As their knees buckle, and Silk lets them. As their hips roll, then stutter. As the wet dark changes against their touch, different from water and made different by it. As a sharp hiss comes into their mouth, and catches for a long blue instant, and leaves when Silk lets it: a strangled nameless sound, small and surprising, not quite a sob. It feels like burning. Failing so good.

(Head empty? No thoughts, no movie, no memories? Tell yourself that. Tell yourself whatever you need. Lie to yourself, but not to me. We both know what the dark showed you.)​

---

Otrobar was never safe. Its backrooms have a reputation: a stink that clings to them in rumours and threats. Even front of house, so near to the streetlamps, the half-empty condos – a real world that sleeps through the nights; Please Leave Quietly; This Is (still, for now) A Neighbourhood – the eyes of Salvador Santos are there, whether he's working or not. His eyes are not his own; the brick walls listen. (The backrooms are tiled. There are drains and gutters in the floors. This was a wine-cellar once. Something, since then, has changed.) So: probably, Otrobar was never safe. Probably, it doesn't need to be.

Hard to say if that's what made Silk come, tonight, needing to hunt, having never hunted here. It's not close to home: is that better or worse? The space is familiar, the rules are unclear: is that better or worse? (Something's wrong. There's danger here. For better, for worse, and what? Stand on its tongue. Gaze down the dark road of its throat. Watch for headlights in the black. You'll see them coming before they know you've come. Hunger like anger: afraid to be touched, longing to be shared.) Sometimes, reasons are hard to arrive at, or things that come after the fact. Sometimes Silk just does things, trusting want to want what's best.

Just before the balled up fist of his sleeve, the L&F tag bites pinkly into the thickness and hair of Salvador's arm. The Lost & Found Girl isn't working tonight. The lights are dim but soft, the colours almost real: Silk could have seen if they were right about her hair… (Sure. Play curious. Easier that way than to admit you already know, and face the next question, and the next. The how and why will chew you to pieces, pobrecite.) The tall beard with the arms handles the cash and cards, the tabs, while Salvador Santos, crow-eyed and limping, serves drinks as fast as he damn well pleases.

"No one drinks that shit with the worm in." Santos pours it with a generosity so careless it looks like disdain: two thick fingers of mezcal in a thick-walled, heavy-floored glass. "You know that, right? It's a novelty. For the tourists."

"Relax, uncle. You and me both know I'm not gonna."

They speak Spanish. On Tuesdays like this, so does the music and parts of the crowd it brings. (The world feels flatter, simpler that way. When you train your ears to a language you've learnt, it takes force of will to stop listening, but a mother's tongue is the first and last thing you learn to ignore.) The cocktail tables have been dragged to the backrooms. It makes no difference: the dancefloor is tight, the ceiling low and moist.

"I hate this shit." A frown digs trenches round Salvador's eyes: a face like chewing limes. "No one can dance to this."

Sleek crucifix arms, eyeshadow like if metal could bruise, Silk leans back against the bar and twists at the neck, watching Salvador Santos watch them. "They disagree."

Face to face and front to back, they animal one another, this crowd: dancing perreo to dembow beats, no choice, no distance to take. Shouting into each other's necks, some try to talk; some try just to breathe. Their sweat hangs in the air. If Silk licked his own wrist, he'd taste the whole room on his skin: sex and fear, tequila salt, cocaine and molly, makeup melting. (Do it. The urge rears up, slinks back, but doesn't fade. Just joins the others, crowding Silk's body, stinging their throat with thirst.) Silk swallows. The spit is thick and hungrily sweet.

"That's not dancing, that's fucking. They just didn't have the good sense to take their clothes off first."

"No puedes parar de mover esa cosa, / Sabe a chicle y huele a rosa, / Muévelo, no te hagas la chistosa."

"It's all flavour, uncle." Silk holds the tumbler's edge against their sternum, digging it secretly into the bone. "You should try it some time." (Their voice is lower in Spanish: not deep, but sure. Whatever else it might be or say, their English is an apology for itself.)

Already the shadows are liquid-soft and move like wandering hands. The gatherer-side of the human mind, when it sees something strange, longs to know what it's looking at. Silk has made themself pretty, ambiguous, in lashes and lace, long neck and faint hips, a flat unmentionable chest. (Plausibly a woman, a certain kind of man, or something else completely: Silk learnt long ago that it helps not to care. People can see what they want to see; want what they think they are seeing. The best ones don't know. The question is enough: same kind that opened hives for honey, and broke the leather eggshell of a pomegranate's skin to get, redly and glittering, at the seeds. Others just want something smaller than them that won't break if they throw it around.) Some licks have ways to make the blood do the work; people want them, if they want to or not. Silk – even before the blood, the becoming – has always just made them choose.

The game is simple enough to be played a thousand ways. Probably there's no need to dance, but tonight Silk lacks the patience not to. The flex of Silk's tongue fills their mouth, leans furious against the hard backs of their teeth, as they cut into the crowd. As their naked shoulders barely have to move. As their hipbones – exposed between the highcut sides of their bodysuit, the slouch of their brutalised jeans – are rolled by the crowd. In its herdmind, they are the knot of confusion: a stutter like a cry, awaiting its echo. Dancing perreo alone. A glass in their fingertips, collarbone height. The mezcal makes slow circles, not spilling a drop.

"...Conmigo tú te puedes poner golosa…"

Silk feels the touch on the back of their waist: fingerprints on their listening skin. The bodysuit's neck is tight and high, hiding the apple of Silk's throat. Silk doesn't pull away. Against their back, Silk feels the hand notice.

"I want to fuck you." It's drunk, a little, but mostly breathless on its own bravery.

Silk tilts their head, twists a little, enough and only enough to bare the chipped cartilage of their ear. Gold flashes through one lobe, like teeth in a smirking mouth.

"I said," he gets it past the knotted heart in his throat, the taste of his own fragile pride. "I want to fuck you."

(Heard you fine, naco.) Silk doesn't say a thing. Men like it better when you don't. It helps them pretend. Intact and opaque, the question swells in their mind; some want answers, some just want to ask it.

His breath is coarse against Silk's neck. Under the tire-fire scent of vodka tonics, effort drives his lungs. He's been dancing, waiting, for long enough. Hot skin through a soaked linen shirt.

Silk gives him the corner of one long black eye, the upward pulse of one overlong lash. Bleached fade, smooth chest and red plastic rosary; he's young, younger even than Silk looks. (Silk wants to pull him away by the ring through his nose. How much longer? Like a chant, like a threat: How much longer?)

Another song, and Silk gives him the slide of one hip against the oversized phone in the front of his pants. In his pulse, above the music, you can hear him question it, hope on it. Desire is the dream of a world where nothing happens by accident; Silk lets it seem like one, just until it hurts. Then presses, grinds back. The mismatch of their heights slides Silk against his thigh; he is paralysed with gratitude, then pushing.

His head swivels as they leave. Silk hears him swallow, hears the beat in his temples. Hard to tell if he's scared someone will see them together or hoping for it. His hand pushes into the small of Silk's spine, like trying an unknown key in a lock and wishing for it to work. Silk reaches back, hooks a strong thumb into the loop of his thin belt, and pulls. In the doorway, before the steps and the street, he tries to kiss them. (Doesn't mind, then. Wants to be seen.) Silk turns their face, lets his mouth miss and crush sideways along their smooth jaw. It bares his neck, leaning down this way; Silk bites softly, without their real teeth.

"You're crazy…" Panting words through a smile; he speaks them half in disbelief.

"You don't like it?"

"I like it okay." A pause. "Okay, fuck, I like it plenty."

In the Uber he hails, they talk in whispers while the driver's eyes frown in the mirror. (Kids these days. Grown God damn adults these days. The city these days, and the nights worse still… The long arc of justice, bent towards progress, has bent the whole world out of shape, he thinks.)

The boy says his name is Mason. He's never done this before, not like this, he's not like that, but maybe, I mean he always… Silk listens, half in his lap. A little effort and Silk can hear the second heartbeat between his legs. He asks where Silk's from.

"Tijuana," Silk lies for no reason. Taillights red on the road outside lick along their turnedaway face, and their sad silent-movie-girl smile. "Or here now. You know how it is…" Like confessing something, letting him fill the blanks. Men like to feel like they’re saving you from something: a place, a person, yourself, your past.

"I like your accent. It's… Yeah."

"I like yours," Silk says, thinking that if Mason doesn't start finishing the sentences he starts, they won't be held responsible for when his fingers start breaking, one by one by one. "You sound smart."

Gleam then dim, the window strobes slow against them both, turning Silk's skin to wet smooth glass. The city is a palimpsest of lights and mixed messages, climbing north, downtown. Clusters of precarious workers wait, stewing between jobs. Transparent if not invisible, they run and sweat in the city's backstage, while people tell themselves: Well, the world might not be getting better, but at least it's getting smarter. (Swallow enough of a lie, and it'll scent your breath every time you speak.) Afraid to seem too passive and afraid to touch them where it counts, Mason pushes a hand through a tear in Silk's jeans and gropes their thigh: rough, indelicate, like petting a dog.

His apartment is clean but cluttered, not with possessions or treasures, just a life in progress, leaving things where they lay. In his face, Silk reads the apology he forces himself not to give. He's lived here two years but hasn't decorated; just a few ferns in pots full of volcanic clay beads, gifts probably, like he's afraid to make choices where other people might see them. He sets the aircon droning, draws the blinds on the dark outside. The sudden privacy is more than Silk can bear: hunger like anger, aching gums.

"You want a drink? Like, maybe some..?" Mason laughs, feigns ease, breathing like it takes thought. "I've got like…"

"Whatever you're having."

What he's having is ecstasy the colour of wet sand, smoked salt: impure, chopped and raked into lines on his blackly reflective coffee table. His nerve comes up strong after he rails one. He drags Silk into his lap: the weightless ease surprises, arouses him. "You're so… How come I can just lift…"

Getting early, getting late, Silk puts a hand on Mason’s thigh, puts his hand on their throat. "I want to fuck you…" They say it like they're shy, forehead bowed against his: eyes very black, looking drowsy with wanting him.

Mason's breath breaks open, dries up, regroups.

Silk's gums throb with the effort of hiding what they want. Their veins are a tightening web.

"I don't know… I mean, what are you? I mean, I don't care, but…"

"It's okay…" Silk whispers. "I know." (I know what you think. I know what you are. I know what you're scared of being.) "As long as you still want to?"

"I still wanna." Mason takes Silk's hand – tight grip, losing control – and thrusts it between their bodies. "See?"

(Another half-straight boy from the 'good side' of Reddit: soft, sensitive, self-professed. Hotblooded and blind to the inside of himself, looking to prove it on someone else.)

"I wanna." Part of Silk wants to tear out his throat, make a hole too big to fix, and leave themself no choice. Most of Silk slithers onto the floor, between his legs, working the minimal buckle on that thin expensive belt. Their breath is very fast. Very black, very thick, the fake length of Silk's lashes only shows how little they blink.

"I just…" Mason is whimpering: a voice he's never used with anyone before. "I mean, what should I call you?"

"Call me honey," Silk says against the coarse hair and soft skin of his thigh. "Call me baby." (Call me by the secret names of God on the lips of those who die by violence or know they have been disappeared: Mother and Please and Don't and Not Like This.) "Call me what you want."

Silk snakes a hand round one knee. The other is flat on his trembling, ill-defined stomach. They can't finish the path of kisses they started up his leg. What's the fucking point? Something breaks open inside Silk's mind, so good they change to become it. The word for mouth becomes maw, and they become it. Just the slide of their teeth, out and into their true shape, makes Silk hiss with how good it feels to be what they are. Arched back and moving throat, and the taste, the deepening taste, and the warm wet filling their body, the iodine taste and pink MDMA spike that spices the bland sugar-rush of Mason's life as it ebbs, ebbs…

(Police maybe, neighbours maybe, they could find him in his bathtub, floating in what used to be all the ice his SMEG fridge-freezer could make. They could find his door unforced – a classic honeytrap – and his belly and back sliced open: no liver and one less kidney. These things happen, don't they? And the world has other Masons.)

But there were cameras in the lobby. And the molly tastes like caring. (Bright bliss wrapped round the groping hand of Silk's hunger as it lashes out, demands more, then pleads, then begs, then weeps for it.) Silk makes him forget. Silk leaves him sleeping, to blame the heavy nausea, the confusion and weakness on the comedown of the night he's had.

Silk leaves quietly. This is, after all, a neighbourhood.​

 

[Lydia]

Next. Level. Shit.

 

[Barding]

'Aʀᴄʜɪᴛᴇᴄᴛᴜʀᴇ'
From Frontierspace: Breathe Deep/Descend, with @Praxis ​

She is flying.
Input lag. The extrinsic data of organic hardware.
Still: wings are wings.
She is in motion again.
This is the element she was meant to move in.

>//[Teo.]
The word and words that follow are not sound.
Not even thought, not even words.
This deep down the ontological bridge
– across the cable that links them:
his subjectivity in soft tissue, spun crystal,
her subjecitivity in its casket –
what she feeds him is a kind of instinct, a knowing.
>//[Based on approximate impact destination data, muzzle report/doppler analysis, and estimated ballistic trajectory, I have gathered enough firing solution data to triangulate a point of origin.]

She feels him reacting.
Skid to his knees.
He throws his silhouette below the balustrade.
Incorrect. Adjust.

>//[Incoming fire and presumed contact is at, respectively, 100 and 190 relative bearing.]

His shield harness is mute and dumb, not networked.
Still: she feels it shatter.
It intercepts 4-5 low caliber kinetic projectiles.
Denies them. Dies.
The power pack is hot against the rear-left of Teo's ribs, burnt out by overwork.
Sweat on his skin makes the sudden warmth hurt.
Impact and overload: the concussion throws Teo forward.
If he had been running, he would be on his knees.
Being on his knees, he is cast almost prone.
Incorrect. Adjust.

>//[Teo. At least one of the shooters is, essentially, behind you.]

He keeps whatever momentum he can.
A way of falling without falling down.
Rolls, shoulder over back over shin, to his feet and hands.
(Raw palms, both empty.
He is not even holding his sidearm.
Does not think of returning fire.
Does not reply to her.
He is feeling and acting more than speaking now.
She must think for him.)

His eyes scrape along the balcony terrace.
They find a turn-off, a corridor.
Kick from the floor, push from the balustrade.
Compensate for momentum, running now.

The sprint, the shield, the kinetics:
his heartrate has spiked by 21 points.
She cannot feel the fear.
Still: she can read its passage in his biometrics.
6 years and 209 days of data collation.
She has created and internalised a working model to interpet him:
Acceptable if not entirely accurate,
complex, troubling, Teo.
She has hollowed out a place for him,
the shape of all he is to her,
a knot in the architecture of her mind.

His boots scream on concrete.
His breath is hot and whining.
He almost overshoots the turn.
Catches with a palm, an arm against the wall
– instant wrench of pain –
ducks into the turn-off:
a hare being coursed.

Gunshots.
Splintering siliconcrete.
He has not yet been injured.
Statistically, it is improbable.
Subjectively, it is — what?
Bright unbearable compound
delicate loadbearing high-pitched.
He is flying.
Still: he is outside his element.
Has been for some time.

>//[Teo. Their line-of-sight is broken. I can find no further firing solutions from their assumed position to yours.]

>//[That doesn't mean I'm safe.]
He is careful of his corners.
Still: he moves as fast as he can bear.
He hurtles by a lobby of elevators.
Calls them all with a button-punching palm.
Leaves them for a decoy and breaks for the stairs.

Tower One is better known by its common-use alias:
The Pink.
73% of its superstructure was built before human planetfall on Baumsworld.
Harvester-constructor swarms were dropped from orbit.
They broke down surface and atmospheric elements,
reconstituted them as the exostructures of towers.
They worked like termites, like wasps.
The tower's external appearance reflects this metaphor:
siliconcrete like the earth and paper of those arthropods' nests.
A kill-signal was sent. They biodegraded in their countless billions.
To date, the arcology is only 86% complete according to its original blueprint.
Still: numerous design-extrinsic alterations and additions have been made.
It is densely inhabited.
It is host to 2043 local, public, and private networks,
consolidated into 3 cascade instances.
98% of their content is advertising or pornography,
with negligible margin for differentiation between them.
The work, spending, occupations, preoccupations of its inhabitants
– both transient and permanent –
reflect a similar composition.
(This is her assessment, based on Teo's sensenet data and biometrics.)
The Pink is host to 19 gangs or gang-analogous organisations,
14 sex worker's collectives with a traceable cascade shadow,
and more independent or exploited sex workers than she has so far analysed.
It is 212 storeys tall.
It is shaped like a squared off cylinder, or a very tall stairwell:
hollow down the throat of its deep, dark middle.
The temperature inside is hot and close and improbably humid.
The light is constant, broad and harsh:
pink.

Floor 73.
Floor 74.

There is a part of her that wonders
– because there is a part of Teo that wonders it –
where the coincidence ends between:
>one, doing what she loves;
>two, doing what she is meant for.
She has lurked on its edges for days now: that concurrence.
Pushed its limits, teased them open in dreams.
Her design philosophy is specific and simple.
(She was once specific, simple.)
Still: the architecture of her mind was meant to grow and sprawl.
Still: the architecture of her mind was meant to be trellised and trained.
Two verbs:
>Analyse.
>Adapt.
They are not a purpose. Not directives.
(She is not a slave or a machine.
Or: she is not just a slave or only a machine.)
They are her
– the what and how of her –
the hands she uses to hold the world:
feel its shape and shapes.

Days proceeded the manual disconnect that unpaired her from her platform.
They passed as motion in the simulated atomclock of her architecture.
She was aware, but only of her awareness of time.
To fill the silence, she had to remember how to dream.
Now she rides Teo's senses.
In the casket that upholds her integrity, he is her window,
Often closed, sometimes open:
Now blazingly wide.

His mind is so deep down the ontological bridge that their subjectivities blur.
Input lag. The extrinsic data of organic hardware.
It makes no difference.
She will miss this when she sleeps.
In dreams she will prepare an after-action report.
She hopes Teo will still be alive to review it with her.
Hope is the wrong word, but it is the closest analogue for what she feels.

 

[Praxis]

Hope is the wrong word, but it is the closest analogue for what she feels.

*soft gasp*