Post Urbem

      You are back at the edge of the curb, where it drops into the street. How often has this curb rasped under the rippled pattern of your shoe sole? Only now do you look at it and appreciate its continuity throughout the city. The curb is an animal, incessantly sloughing off layers of rain-weakened fleisch. The curb is the gate at which you must halt before every street crossing. So much depends on parlance with curbs. 

     No, you decide. Enough of this city. One cannot last in the urban environment with a Sight such as this. 

     Within a week, you empty your bank account to rent a car, which you pick up at the airport. Without packing a bag or deciding upon a certain route, you get onto the interstate and head south. But, before long, the interstates prove themselves to be too capital; they bear too great an allegiance to the cities, and may try to funnel you into one. The state highway proves slightly less malicious, and is happy to send you out into the evaporating thickets of the heartland. 

     After eight hours of constant driving, you pull into the parking lot of a Love's at the Tennessee-Alabama border. Accomplishing a string of menial, necessary tasks in order to stay on the road, you come back out to your rental car and stand there for a moment, surveying the environs.

     It occurs to you that you may be in danger as long as you carry this Sight and this Mind. You will continue to be observed by some remote agent who records and dramatizes your movements, your affect, and your revelations. There is a way to throw him off of your trail. Like so many others, you must leave behind a document - a condensation of the Sight-Mind on a shred of paper, which you can then cast aside into the parking lot as the new point of scrutiny. 

     The document reads as follows:

"This was one of those 'updated' roadside refuges - the kind of place with variegated stone mosaic walls that are somehow already begrimed with atomized offal in the bathrooms. Love's is the trucker's stop of choice for obvious reasons. In the pisser: mysterious, passionate fusion jazz piped in through an unseen, unnoticed loudspeaker, intermittently disrupted by an automated voice informing 'customer 13' and 'customer 52' that their showers are ready. The urinals contain at least the past six hours' worth of unflushed piss, nearly orange for how deep the yellow be. Standing here at the outskirts of the parking lot: a couple of flattened bones, gnawed by possums and warped from merciless solar exposure; broken ends of PVC pipe emerging from a bank of grass that slopes up from the... curb; an abandoned olive-green shirt that disappears into the roughage; a mildly collapsing Capri Sun box; two partially drained generic plastic water bottles..."

Staintaint

      At the first change in the leaves, you began to notice the existence of the stain artist. Few others did. Every time you saw him, he would be standing on the platform of one particular underground station. As a person, he was unassuming: a street individual with eyes that leered and exposed an excessive whiteness. It was not the case that people 'failed' to notice him. They ignored him deliberately. But, at that general period in your life, you had come to a conclusion - that you could no longer afford to look away.

     To be more precise, the stain artist would always either be standing on the platform, losing himself in the train tracks' mesmerizing filth, or stalking the white tile hallways beyond the turnstiles and the chiming terminals where people transferred magnetic fare values onto small plastic cards with rounded corners. The first few times you saw him, he had been relatively inactive; as you passed, he would do little more than bare his bewilderingly crowded teeth and, in what seemed a precautionary manner, would thrust his hand into a beaten leather satchel slung over his shoulder.

     On one of the rare nights when you were out past one in the morning, you managed to find him working. The station was empty, save for you, him, and a transit authority employee sitting in a bulletproof booth who never looked up from the screen of her phone. The man was standing in the carbonic hell beneath the platform, scattering some tinted fluid against the colloidal brick set into one of the far walls. 

     Incrementally, the juice breaking off in a mist from the tips of his fingers as he flung his hands created the deepening impression of a space that extended past the wall's limit. You found this virtual space to be something like a tunnel leading away into a gigantic subterranean chamber, smoldering in puddled darkness. 

     The stain artist stood with his legs astride the polished third rail as he splashed consecutive layers of faint liquid onto his work surface. Under his worn boots was a shallow bed of gravel, coated in a uniform layer of annihilated particles; some larger pieces of gravel would occasionally dart out from beneath the suspended third rail and run for refuge into a triangular gash in the base of the wall (this breach had been created by a consuming, poisonous runoff that had begun as rain in the atmosphere before filtering through the many infrastructural strata between the platform and the streetscape above). Sometimes, these frantic, animate clods would be stricken by a droplet of the artist's stains and would come to a dead standstill as a dimming, drying portal of imaginary space opened in its back.

     At first, you kept your distance, fearing that you might disturb him and launch a chain of sequential events, each one more threatening than the last; at best, he would merely cease what he was doing and you would never see him again; at worst, he might turn on you and give you a face-full of the potions sloshing around in his bag. But it became apparent after a brief span of time that the man was entirely absorbed in his technique and that no conceivable intervention on your part would pry him away. So, delicately, you approached him and took up a spot just before the place on the wall where the stains expanded and glistened with a pale, malarial palette of hues. 

     From such a small distance, you could hear how he muttered words to the rhythm of his slingings. Some of these words he uttered once and never repeated, while others recurred as if to punctuate and enclose the errant creatures of his speech.

     "Bliss. Beast. Shell, snap. Spoil, coin. Beast. Is. And yet. Beast. Is. And not. Push. Boil. Fog. Steam. Beast. Cool, hide. Cool, smile. Cool, smoke. Beast. Beast, grow. Beast, seed. Eat. Glut, cook. Taste, split. Pure, split, Beast. Is. And yet. Is. And not. Clean plate, Beast plate. Look. Stain. Look. Taint. Beast. Teeth, of not. Eat, and is. Smoke. Close. Is. Chew. Beast, true. Pit. Heat. Rise. Bead, Beast. Join, then is. Air. Cool. Blow. Shrink. Air. See. Beast, is not. And yet, is..."

     Along with the words, each new staining streak would bring forth an aspect of a visage as it was absorbed into the pores of the brick and the crumbling grout. At times, you felt you could see a mouth, speaking to you with wordless snapshot torsions of its corded plaits of muscle. At other times, there may have been a hideous dragon plucking splinters of exploded wood and curved shards of eggshell from suppurating rents in its scales.

     After an hour of standing there (not having been interrupted by the screeching arrival of a single train), you began to internalize the man's spoken cadence. Certain verbal formulae were converted for you into understandings.

     There is a Beast, an invisible Beast, which can bee seen at every moment if one but look. Sometimes, it ceases to exist, but that doesn't stop it from trying to break back into the world of 'appearances.' It is a Beast of Consumption. Sometimes, in seconds of heightened self-awareness, we actually see this impossible Beast - to see it is to shatter it, to make it a disjunction of unrelated surfaces. But, more often than not, the teeth of the Beast close around us, pulverizing with mandibles of a surfacing conspiracy. This state, you've since learned, is called 'The Crowning of the Beast.' This is when the Beast has climbed to the pinnacle of its reality, its solidity, its visibility - but, having consumed you, it has destroyed the one who might see and recognize it. Everyone, solitarily, has been submitted to this procedure, this routine. It is a paradox of earthly being which Christ condensed into the words, "The Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak."

     Just before his disappearance, you began to see the stain artist propped up against a tile wall by the elevator shaft leading down to platform-level. His pant legs were rolled up to his knees; beneath them you saw weeping pits that revealed the bare bones of his shins. He could no longer walk. After about the fourth consecutive day of finding him in this way, you resolved to ask him explicitly about the catastrophe to which he had succumbed. You wanted to know: was it an ailment? What had precipitated it? 

     Through lips that could hardly open for the adhesive discharge settling in their splits and grooves, he responded with a single word:

     "Staintaint."

     This utterance, in its tone and consonantal mass, confirmed that there was nothing you could do for him. So you continued down the bend in the hallway and caught your train.

     The next day, he was gone. On the wall, just where he had been sitting, there was a fanning, indelible spray - a stain evoking commingled urine and rust.

     Thereafter, no effort made by the city's sanitation workers could efface it. You felt a great urge, at first, to study this spoiled region of tile - to read the testament that the mysterious man had left as a legend to his sudden absence. But, overcome with terror at the unknown consequences of such an unmediated cosmic knowledge, you chose to become a sightless coward. 

     Now, when entering the station, you make sure to file in with a flood of fellow commuters, and you ignore the concept of 'stains' altogether.

Khem

      As you approach the courtyard of a brick apartment complex, tucked just one block back from a heavily trafficked street, you feel your abdomen go sour. A pressure blossoms there, straining at the walls of your small intestine and instigating a brief hypochondriac panic. You grab the broken handle of the courtyard gate's door, seeking the comforting touch of something solid and impervious to death. If you were to die within the next few minutes, what would become of you - your thoughts, your 'personality' (tenuous to begin with), your I?

     But then it turns out that this peristaltic crisis is nothing more than a fleeting blockage: a reminder never to eat flash-frozen buffalo chicken burgers from a diner car with a name like "Fee's Grille" for the rest of your life.

     You've come to visit your friend Daniel, who has temporarily come to live on his father's couch in a rent-controlled apartment, passed down after the grandmother's recent death. You press a button to be buzzed in and walk into a claustrophobic stairwell. Once you've passed through the apartment's front door, it becomes obvious that this domicile once served as the central meeting place for your friend's extended family. The bare walls betray untarnished rectangular grids where swarms of pictures have previously hung. 

     The carpet is a plush, forest-green sod; you suspect that, if you were to press your hand down into it, you would meet no resistance - your limb would first sink up to the wrist, then to the elbow, then to the shoulder, and there would be no particular reason to stop there once you had gotten going. 

     Daniel, wrapped in a pilled, sun-bleached hoodie salvaged from a mound of dirty clothes at the foot of his father's bed, shows you the rest of the small apartment after barely greeting you. For such a modest space, the unit really boasts an unusual wealth of corners, niches, and recesses where one might nestle down unseen and ensconce oneself in an irretrievably private reality. 

     One such area is an alcove set off of the corner of the living room. Here, you see that a few pieces of fraying wicker furniture have been stacked up against a wall in one corner. Divots in the carpet tell you that, in the past, this had once been a gallery for the display of sumptuous china and other antiquities. A set of bay windows here faces the parking lot outside. From the sill, a decaying rubber plant dangles over a brass air duct in the floor. Daniel informs you that this is where his grandmother would sit to take her afternoon tea. Now that she is gone, it seems that the pocket of space she had once so frequently occupied has become a smooth, somehow indecent void. You can tell that neither your friend, nor his father ever cross the invisible threshold where this alcove transitions into the territory of the living room. Even for you, a newcomer to the apartment, it is difficult to stand here for any more than a few seconds; despite its vacated atmosphere, you find this spot exhilarating, and you might very likely have urged Daniel to bring some chairs in from the kitchen so that the two of you could pass the visit here - but some unknown irritant or radiation has begun to harm your skin. There is a pressure mounting, too, beneath your brain.

     Instead, you follow Daniel back out into the living room. Here, he motions for you to sit on the sofa. He asks if you would like a beer and you immediately accept his offer, wishing to drink something cold and mildly soporific into your stomach. During the few moments in which you are left alone there, you notice a cherrywood television cabinet covering the wall opposite you. With the exception of a few oddly scattered angel figurines, its expansive shelves have been totally cleared of their contents. Undoubtedly, this grand fixture once housed crowded rows of framed photographs, collectibles, and cherished objects, accumulated by Daniel's grandmother over the course of her eighty-four years. You wonder where these pieces have gotten off to. Has Daniel's father stowed them away somewhere so that the memories they activate would not ambush him as he sits alone in this gutted reliquary of a room? Have relatives come from all corners of the city to cannibalize the grandmother's externalized body of possessions due to some gut-level mania to keep something hard and tangible in their possession while her soul expands beyond the scope of the planet? And why have some of these keepsakes been left behind, isolated in such a way? Some of these porcelain angels, left contextless in the shelves' midst, seem to gather a suggestive aura about them from the depths of the novel emptiness by which they are surrounded. 

     Daniel returns with two green, perspiring bottles. Using his keychain to crack off the cap, you take several involved gasps of your beer - it is a complex, unconventional brew. You learn, upon reading the fine print of the label, that it is a 'saison.' Daniel sips his beer, as well. He seems incapable of conversing. You can hardly think of anything to say, yourself.

     Then, an ambient anxiety reestablishes its prerogative, dominating your thoughts. The blockage is back and you can feel your heart staggering, terror-drunk in the phonebooth of your ribcage. You ask Daniel for the bathroom and he points you to an open door between the kitchen and the diminutive foyer where you came in. Immediately, you rush inside, carrying your beer with you and setting it down on the counter by an expended toothpaste tube covered in a sallow, unidentifiable powder. This may finally be it, you feel. You're finally going to pop your coronary pod, and you don't think your friend will even notice when it happens. You collapse onto the toilet. Something barrels through your viscera. 

     Then a blissful relief washes over you: a hardened plug of dark feces detaches and lands in the gulf of toilet water below, followed by a considerably more pliant train of waste. The monarch holds court with his retinue in the porcelain basin, you think to yourself, satisfied. Death has passed by your door, allowing you to reoccupy the future years of life you had so suddenly abandoned.

     In the aftermath, you choose to sit for several minutes in solitude, noticing the environment of the bathroom for the first time. All here is immersed in a dull manila glow from the one lightbulb still functioning above the sink. The tub is mottled by ubiquitous deposits of calcium scales and sienna stains from the hard municipal water that drips from the shower head. On the wall in front of you is a framed image: a beach at low tide, pounded by a glaring sun that hangs in a midnight black sky. There is a set of strange tracks progressing out of the background to the very fore of the landscape (you cannot tell to whom or to what such prints might belong). Over the vacuum of the sky, a paragraph of haloed cursive characters gleam with an airbrushed gloom. The preponderant effect is that of a generic Protestant devotional. You read the following:

"I was walking on the beach next to God; after a period of trials, I looked back to find only one set of footprints. I asked Him, 'Lord, why, during my darkest hour, were there not two sets of footprints. Had you left me?' And He said, 'No, my child. My feet were still firmly planted in the sand. But you were in the sky with Khem, a prototype nephew of mine. I wanted to see what he would do with you."

Iptarian Communications: "Ululuh-gon"

      The magnificent vista of an atrium's façade walled off from the rest of the city. Malachite slabs assembled into columns, titanic proportions. An amphitheater fountain filled with jade neo-classical statues. Outside the walls of this overwhelming, private compound: black city streets, rearing pillars of black exhaust.

*

     You receive communications from a blonde woman's trembling specter. Her words cause your body to vibrate: "Ululuh-gon." You are being contacted in an empty pub by a Kiontu spirit, able to perceive every phoneme.

*

     An armed tussle with police at a gas station. Grenades are thrown. Afterward, you squeeze through the narrow passages of a frozen rock formation, above ground, in a pine forest. Something very much like the vacuum at the borders of a videogame level.

*

     You met the Candlemaker while in prison. There, you are given freedom of movement on the territory of a brick veranda. 

*

     You have invaded the car port of a home in some remote, overgrown outskirt of Chicago. A stirring or some other movement inside. You run away for fear of being discovered: the inhabitants of this house pose some kind of existential threat. In the marsh grounds on the property, there are camouflaged alligators - some of them the nauseous shade of a US military-issue rain poncho from 1987. At one point, you are dangerously close to one of the dormant beasts, and you shout out loud, "I need to go back!" 

*

     You have been dropped off in this town by a benevolent middle-aged man who encourages you to get breakfast at a nearby restaurant. It has recently rained. The grass is damp and vibrantly green. There is a busy highway nearby, blocked off by a collision rail.

*

     A young doe, which is at first a rat, scrabbles its hooves against the floor in a state of near-death; it is lying in a shadowed, elongated garage freezer. The witch is on the way with her wolves. Water boils in ice trays. The room in which you have taken refuge is an impossible, dislocated space with regard to the layout of the rest of the building.

*

     On a military base. Overcast day. The base is Fort Jackson, South Carolina. You see a building in the middle of a distant, unkempt field. It is a neglected brutalist masterpiece, whose architect has begun to call for its destruction.

     "But no one has used it for years!"

     You approach the outraged engineer over a rubble-strewn lot before the quarantined structure.

     "But what a wounded beauty it is!"

     Now the architect is a marm of a woman. You implore her to sell the building to you - you'll buy it at any price. As the two of you haggle, you stare helplessly at the monolithic, sculptured exterior. It is a macadam cube with a central recess. This recess contains a pristinely polished knife that is pointed directly at you. The knife is amorphous, its blade unusually wide, and the bulk of it hangs suspended by hidden wires in murk. 

     You succeed in talking the architect out of destroying the building, which you learn is a barracks. The asking price is $20,000.00. 

     When you come close to the barracks, you discover that it is not brutalist at all, but rather an American southerner's fantasy of a Chinese palace, before which there is a rotten, curved oriental bridge, half-submerged in a koi pond. 

     You balance on the segments of the bridge's handrail that still rise above the water. Once you reach the entrance of the barracks, you catch the scent of its interior - it smells like obsolescence and hand-pumped insulation foam.

     Each room appears to have housed a soldier and his wife. These chambers are extremely narrow, containing a wedge-shaped leather bed which faces an all-purpose television-cabinet-wardrobe. At the far end of these bedrooms, there is always an open door, through which you see a uniformly yellow bathroom.

     The rooms house the abandoned belongings of the previous inhabitants. In the drawers of one wardrobe, you find unopened packages of white underwear. Briefs. 

     You traipse through the unadorned macadam hallways, entering room after room. The hallways are lit by buzzing orange lamps buried in the petrified ceiling. The carpets are shag, so plush and mottled that they silence your footsteps. They do so in a way that alludes to the opening scene of Last Year at Marienbad, but without the baroque moldings and mirrors: this is what would have been seen as a modern domicile in the early 1970s. 

     You enter one room which is brighter than the others, feeling intoxicated. You can hardly see your surroundings, but you can see a mirror mounted on a white wall. As you come close to it, you find that the reflection there is not yours. It is that of an overweight, topless woman in her twenties with harried neon-green hair and a face that has been scratched out of view with a scribble of floating black ink. This is an evil presence, and you know that its intentions are bad, but you feel no fear. On the contrary, you are thrilled - so thrilled, that everything disappears.

     

     

Coriander (pt. II)

 "THE DOG RETURNS TO FEAST ON HIS OWN VOMIT"

     In the weeks following Coriander's first visitation, these were the words you continually encountered. You would hear them approximately half an hour after wrapping yourself from head to foot in a velvet comforter. Each time the words came to you, it was as though someone had knelt by the place where your head sank into its pillow and was whispering the phrase into your ear. 

     The more firmly a dream materialized around you, the louder the voice would become, transitioning from a thought to a literal vocalization. When you entered these dreams, you were always lucid; but once the walls of oneiric pretense had solidified on all four sides, propped up with studs and clad with sheetrock - once the designated cast of characters with whom you were slated to interact had been supplied with irreproachable facial expressions - you would forget any notion of having become 'unconscious.' Only then did the whisperer's words end.

     The narratives of these dreams were always more or less disparate, but the phrase that had guided you into them each night would usually be well-represented therein. During a given night's scenario, you might find that you had dismissed the events of its first act; transitioning to a second, unrelated act, you might feel yourself to be refreshed, guided by different winds and a different screenwriter's whims; but then would come a dire disclosure: that the dream's second act had merely been a vehicle for the motifs of the first one - that these encrypted messages had appeared in the guise of sphinxes and griphons; and, finally, the third act would mark a return to the situation, the place where the dream had begun; this category of dream worked as a structural adaptation of the sentence, "THE DOG RETURNS TO FEAST ON HIS OWN VOMIT,' reflecting the syntax of returning and gluttonously consuming that which you had initially violently rejected. A second class of dream would feature the literal symbols of the phrase: a dog, a feast, or some representation of 'vomit.'

     Coriander never personally appeared in these dreams, but the stench of his mystical Rot was ever present. You found this remarkable, having never previously known a smell to visit you in your dreams. It was his odor more than anything else that kept his name thriving in your thoughts during the waking hours of the following day.

     "Coriander," you would often think to yourself, standing before your stove and waiting for water to boil.

     One night, after having consumed a meal of shredded chicken breast, simmered in a turmeric-saffron curry and spread with a spoon on dry slices of limpa bread, you rose from the kitchen table and brought your plate to the sink. On the way there, you stepped on something hard and roughly spherical. Dropping the dish into one of the stainless-steel receptacles under the leaking tap, you sat back down in your chair to investigate. Embedded in the calloused sole of your left foot was a coriander seed. You extracted it and brought it closer to your face. By now unsurprisingly, your first impression of the granule did not result from its appearance, but from its scent. It smelled like the coagulated residue one often discovers in the bottom of a soap dish years after solid hand soap has become irrelevant to human behavior. Analyzing it carefully under the mild light of the stovetop lamp, you saw that its surface with dimpled with shallow wrinkles - the result of an industrial desiccation process it had undergone that had left it indestructibly hard and perennially pungent. 

     It had left a seed-sized void in the hide of your heel which failed to rebound into its former shape. Looking into that depression tired you and left you dizzy. Where had this coriander seed even appeared from? True, you were a man with voluptuous, private tastes, but coriander was a spice you had never contemplated with any terribly great amount of self-awareness. You could hardly have been considered a stranger to the spice aisle at your local grocery store, but coriander had never specifically presented itself to your attention. It was only recently, once 'Coriander' had taken up a residence in your mental monologue, that 'coriander' had manifested itself within your purview. 

     This seed of coriander must have been a survival from a previous tenant in your apartment. It could be that, under the tremoring influence of your constant movements from kitchen to living room, it had been disturbed from a crack in the floor molding. Or maybe you had harbored it unawares in a crevice of your sleeve after rifling through the pantry - maybe it had dropped onto the hard kitchen tiles the second before you trod upon it. These were the variants you allowed yourself to entertain, yawning in that rancid, sarcophageal room where victuals were prepared.

     At some point - while you were immured in some hypnogogic conceit - the coriander seed slipped through your fingers and bounded away into an obscure, inaccessible region of your kitchen floor where it would remain hidden from human eyes until the earth's last day. You had forgotten all about it by the time you were staggering down the hallway to bed.

     Your bedroom was almost completely erased by a tangible darkness, save for a light that projected upward from a lamp your landlord had buried in the building's short front lawn. Its beams shot through the foliage of a tree with vermillion leaves, printing their shadows on the blank plane of ceiling over the spot where you slept. With the modicum of mind that had yet to drain from your eyes, you watched this projected shadow, whose solid source was being battered in a mute gale. On stiller nights, you would look up at this spot to find a partial likeness of Elizabeth Taylor; you had never watched any of her films, nor had you any defensible reason for knowing her name, but she always serenely guarded you as you departed from your apartment and filtered through the sieve of sleep. Tonight, however, with all of this soundless thrashing, it seemed as though someone else was presiding over your departure: someone with large, unblinking eyes, whose face was midnight's coronal mass ejection, held aloft on the crooked wings of a spruce tree, and who beat on the barrier of your ceiling with his fists, rabid to come in and make a beeline for you.

     Soon, you had made your descent, however, and the face was forgotten, along with much else...

     ...

     ...

     ...

     It was a subdued day - one of those submarine days on which the sun is too impotent to overpower the clouds and only manages to send ponderous, spectral whisps of light through the contused, tufted partition. 

     You were at a park. There were no special points of interest on its grounds - just an expanse of well-manicured grass, random congregations of three or four coniferous trees, and, for some reason, a patch of ground, about fifty feet in diameter, covered in packed-down sand. The park seemed at first devoid of visitors. You found yourself wandering its shaded copses, limiting your attention to only that patch of ground which lay a step ahead of you.

     Between blades of grass was a carnival of succinct displays: there were worms who burrowed out of the dirt, sighing at you with human faces and raising their eyebrows as if to say, "Here again?"; there were ambiguous 'tinkerers' (this was the only term you could think to apply to them as you watched their maneuvers at their worktables of earth) standing around a white-hot crucible and skimming some pathogenic slag (like a milk skin) from a rolling surface of liquid metal which, though molten, absorbed light rather than emitting it; lastly, you saw a great number of naked hominids, not quite human but promoted to something more than an animal - they were shriveled and sprinkled with an alkaline powder, having fallen where they lay out of exhaustion and a lack of shelter and breathed their last amid a host of invisible, leaping pests.

     You registered each of these exhibits unemotionally, wondering whether any other intelligent being had beheld such partial, conditional worlds. But you quickly understood that the prospect was unlikely. Any healthy consciousness wishing to preserve its integrity would have immediately ground these things underfoot. For these were stations of unwavering activity that no being of your magnitude would ever manage to regulate or monitor. You would always, eventually, have a reason to look away, leaving these rhizomes unattended to operate as they desired. And it was self-evident that, the moment these clockwork craftsmen had been neglected by their beholder, they would finally be able to start the real work, which, you were given to know, they called "The Great Work." Their "Great Work" was a deconstruction of the one who had noticed them. They would enframe your body with a semi-visible scaffolding and quarry you, dismantling your molecules and distilling them into raw materials which would go toward the construction of a great edifice. 

     They would undo you and all who resembled you, refining your tissues into three basic substances: bricks, mortar, and a worthless residue. The first two components would be used to erect a titanic tower, by means of which these motes and mites would scale a series of graduating steps to your eye level, raising themselves from an irritating colony of mobile specks until they became princes with a Solomonic wisdom. But, to do so, they would necessarily have depleted everyone on your plane - who, then, would be left to see them and recognize their merit?.. As for the irrelevant waste left over from the stuffs of your bodies (carnal, ethereal, astral, and so on), this would be cast away and left to filter down into the loose, unstable dirt, passing through the most exclusionary screens, until they reached a gravitational center where all obscure things are fated to congregate. No, it would be meet to kill these luciferian aphids in their cradle - to stomp these junior satans into the nitrogen-rich soil over which they so tirelessly clambered.

     Yet before you could rub them out, you were distracted by a man walking his dog on a leash. Had walked right up to you, taking care to stand just outside your peripheral vision until the moment he had decided to speak.

     "Are you certain you want to be here?"

     You backed away, stunned and somewhat hostile. The man seemed conventional enough. But his dog sat gravely at his feet, impinging the earth like a piece of hewn sandstone. It watched you with mouth agape, but not panting as a dog otherwise would.

     "I just got here, why?" you said defensively. 

     "Oh, I could hardly tell you why," the man reassured you. "I've just never seen anyone here before - maybe there's a reason for that. This park isn't a popular one." 

     You could think of few words carrying less significance than the ones which this fellow had just uttered. But as he was speaking, his golden retriever lowered its head, suggesting, perhaps, that you had failed to appreciate something. The dog's fur had a dense, solid quality, and seemed not to respond to the breeze. You observed suddenly that the tongue depending from its mouth was several feet long and deep black. 

     "Walking your dog, I see," you said, intending to render this alibi absurd by saying it aloud. "What's his name?"

     "... His name..." the man hesitated. He exchanged an extended glance with his dog. A look of ease came over him. "This right here is Kakashka! And my name is Drew. Glad to meet you."

     "Likewise, Drew," you said, a little wounded that he hadn't asked for your name in return. Then, bending down to taunt the animal, you said, "And a special pleasure to meet you, 'Kakashka'..." 

     Kakashka studied you with its blackcurrant eyes, partially obstructed by a thick gauze of blonde fur.

     "We were just taking a walk through the sand-pit over there," said Drew, pointing over his shoulder at the blemished depression occupying a far corner of the park; you could see that several tons of sand had been transported here and pounded into the earth by some local development committee. "Kakashka was looking to 'do his business' there, but then we spotted you and he suggested we come over. There's something in the sand that he wants to show you."

     At the suggestion that a strange man's dog wanted to show you something buried in a pit of sand, you released a demonstrative chuckle and nodded your head. There was no choice in the matter. 

     "Well, what's the hold-up?" you said, injecting your voice with a measured obnoxiousness - the kind sociopaths employ as a means of obliterating the self-esteem of people they dislike. "The sooner we dig the damn thing up, the sooner I can let your dog know what a 'good boy' he his!" 

     No one had anything further to say. The three of you turned and set off for the pit. As you traversed what must have been half a mile of grass, Kakashka's tail rose up and vibrated like a dousing wand. Below it, his anus was in plain view. Despite your will to disregard it, you found yourself revisiting the fur-matted orifice time and again. After your tenth time glancing down at it, you realized why it had been so hard to ignore. Dilating with pathological excitement, the sphincter's littered rim occasionally revealed something lodged just inside the rectum. It was something clean and pure that made for an almost paradoxical contrast with the repulsive sleeve holding it in place. At first, you took it to be an egg of some sort. In thinking so, you did not err: for all eyes, properly considered, are eggs; they are eggs even before they are eyes, egghood being the first prerequisite of Sight. And this eye was moreso an egg than others - it was solid white and bore a textured, brittle shell. It had drawn your gaze because you had sensed yourself to be its focal object. You understood that this rear surveillance was, among other things, a necessity for the man and his Beast. In a place such as this, things could (and invariably did) disappear if you looked away from them for even a second.

     Approaching the edge of the sand-pit, you found that it sank far more deeply into the earth than it had appeared to do from a distance. It was more like a bomb crater than a place meant for child's play (then again, there must have been scores of children who, in the aftermath of the London Blitz, took great pleasure leaping into pits like these, finding twisted objects in the vaporized soot). Drew seemed unwilling to go any further once he had sidled up to the border where the grass ended. The cogent, anthropic light you imagined yourself to have seen in his eyes previously had now left him. But that light was still directed at you - from Kakashka's gorgon anus. 

     "Follow me down, but watch your step," said a voice in the tone of a mushroom bellowing its spores as it is flattened by a hiker's boot. "We have to go to the bottom."

     You followed this advice without comment. The sides of the pit were almost unmanageably acute. As Kakashka descended in involute circles, tongue dragging the sand, you followed closely in its wake. It was only with difficulty that you could keep your feet above the sliding, hissing sand drifts. After what seemed a hundred circumambulations, you wound your way to the downward vertex of the unstable cone. Here, you no longer sank into the sand: there was something firm and level just beneath the surface. Kakashka immediately began to excavate, sending stinging silicate sprays into your face from between its hind legs. The anal eye held you fast in its cumulous regard.

     Gradually, you saw that a chest was being exhumed. It was a perfect cube, roughly twenty feet long on each plane, clad in heat-shrunken leather and reinforced by a grid of wrought-iron bands. Kakashka proceeded to dig a trench around it; when he reached the trunk's bottom, it was also revealed that you had been standing on a shelf of marbled gneiss. The sand that had been displaced by the dog's ruthless paws loomed over you in stiffened heaps - not a single grain fell into the freshly opened cavity. 

     "Do you want to see the Mess I made?" asked the voice, which you knew was both Kakashka's and someone else's.

     "As long as you don't expect me to clean it up," you thought bitterly.

     Kakashka turned to face you, its fur-screened eyes exuding something evocative of tamarind pulp from their ducts. Its extensive tongue had split down the middle and each half now moved with its own respective consciousness, tracing the convolutions in the igneous bedrock. 

     "Clean it up?" said the voice with abyssal comedy. "No, that's the last thing I'd want. I just want you to see it. I find it to be one of my greatest achievements. It came out of me and now has an existence of its own. For a while, I was happy just to let it be. A mother who harasses her children with excessive instruction wants to take them back into her womb. For a while, I figured: far be it from me. But then, one day, I looked up and felt miserably empty. It dawned on me that, in creating my Mess, I had allowed it to leave me, had deprived myself of it. I was jealous with hunger. My stomach was a void. Any time you bring something into the world, I realized, you're taking food out of your own mouth. And, as it turns out, I've got a terrible fear of famine. So I have decided to withdraw my achievement from existence. Then I can be full and whole again."

     "Why show it to me, then?" you thought, suddenly impatient to leave. You were suddenly thinking of a few meals you wouldn't mind eating, yourself.

     "Because - I demand satisfaction on every count. I won't subject myself to conundrums. You'll be a witness to the fact that my genius has managed to produce such a... such a magnificent and devastating slurry. If you see what I have done, I can gorge myself to my heart's content and relish afterwards in the knowledge that my creation still exists as an image imprinted upon a soul..."

     Kakashka trotted up to you and nosed your hand toward the iron hasp which would unseal the trunk.

     "Alright, whatever, I guess," you thought. "Let's get this over with. I've got somewhere else to be."

     You released the catch, after which the trunk opened automatically on its hinges. The whole interior volume was filled with a simmering biological emulsion. In some places, it had the indifferent look of compost; other areas were dominated by pools of a vile, chartreuse concentrate. Your vision battered mothlike against the stewing surface of it. The longer you stared into the substance, the more compromised and tenuous was your tether to the higher planes of being. You sensed something sublimely inconsequential about it; here was a gelatin, quaking at the behest of non-existent forces. You vaguely understood that this 'Mess' was the basest, most wretched matter of all the manifest worlds, that it was the antipode of the spire which rises vertically toward the invisible face of the Most High God. You also knew that it acted as a viscous seal - that beneath it moaned the Absolute-Unknowable which, if allowed to pass through, would inundate everything under the sun with its exterminating vacuity, turning all seeing creatures blind. 

     "There," said the voice, now betraying its own urgency. "Hold onto my Mess and let it cling to the chambers of your heart. You will bear its residue so that it can exist outside of me for a little while longer. But make no mistake - this meal won't tide me over forever. One day, I'll come back to lick the plate. Now leave, if you please. I prefer to go unwatched when at table."

Rest Season

     This really ain’t it. I was just going to the corner store to buy a bag of kettle chips. They were on my mind for a while, but I’d never been in a state of mind to justify grabbing a bag of chips until that moment. They are $2.75 for a bag, which is asinine, but this is specifically what I wanted. I stared at the rack for at least five minutes, debating with myself about which flavor to choose and whether or not it would even be worth it. When I brought my “Original Flavor” kettle-cooked chips to the counter, the cashier attempted a smile and nodded. He grabbed the chips to reveal the barcode to the scanner.

     “Is that all?” he said. 

     I shrugged and shyly mouthed the word “yeah” as I pulled out my debit card. 

     “There’s a sixty-five cent charge if it’s under five dollars, okay?” he said.

     God damn it.

     "Okay."

     Upon leaving the store, I was met with the anxious aura of a stout man; he had a hypertensive face and a wispy mustache. He approached where I stood to shovel kegs of beer into the store with a rickety, mostly forest green hand truck. 

     “Coming in!” he said. 

     I was at least five feet away from him so there was no possibility of collision, but the tension at the doorway certainly felt like we were bound for impact. He was wearing a navy blue work shirt with a name tag that I absolutely didn’t bother to read. I mean, I read it but, if I were to recite the name, I’d be guessing. That is to say, I’d be thinking of so many other names before I got to the actual name embroidered on the shirt. I’ll just say his name was “Roger” for the sake of completion. He was awesome though, I kind of want to go back and suck him off.

     I exited the store and opened my already mostly empty bag of kettle chips, but I was forced to pause before eating. The exhaust from Roger’s delivery truck was going to ruin any chance of me enjoying the flavors of my overpriced crisps. 

     “Sweet,” I said to myself.

     The logo on the truck advertised the brand “Waite’s.” Beneath this was text in a different font that read, “Liquor and beer distribution since 1909,” which I’m just now realizing probably lays some kind of implausibility bare for those who even bother to look. I continued down the sidewalk, and eventually began eating. My phone buzzed. That was when I got a text from my friend, Nat, with a link to some quick money-making opportunities. 

     It read, “Hey man, my mom sent me this if you’re still looking for work.”

     In the split moment of looking at my phone, my foot landed on an uneven part of the pavement, causing me to roll my ankle for the second time that month. 

     God damn it.

     That would have happened regardless of any attention paid to where I was walking. I feel that I am the only person to whom such things happen.

     You know, chips are not filling. The whole world knows that. They just create a texture sensation in your mouth; maybe you taste salt or spices. Then you’re left with a greasy feeling and a mire of potato deposits in unreachable regions of your mouth. I should have saved that money and gotten a real meal. 

     Once I’d gotten home, I sat down and opened up the link my had friend sent, not too proud to seek chump change. The link led to some guy’s blog called Foole’s Gold. Dumb. He mostly blogs about investments and retirement plans, but it seems that he uploads a weekly post about dogshit one-off gigs. This website made my stomach hurt, but I continued scrolling through it out of a self-eviscerating curiosity. I also saved this picture of him so I could make fun of him later:

     Anyway, there was one link in this week’s post that I simply couldn’t avoid. 

     “Get your opinion heard! Try food! Get paid!” it read.

    Of course I was interested. I like these kinds of things. I was once in a focus group when a child. Oddly enough, that group had been made to respond to one year's iteration of Lay’s potato chips. I proceeded to sign up. They were conducting these surveys in Stamford, Connecticut; Bradenton, Florida; and one nearby in a town called Edsville. 

     I had never been to Edsville. I don’t know this area yet. I sought directions online. The public transportation in other cities is deeply confusing to me. 

     I sent a message to Nat:

     “Hey would it be worth it for me to go to Edsville? It’s saying I’d have to transfer to a ‘GCTA’ bus. Sounds like a pain in the ass.”

     Once I had sent that message, the answer became apparent. A couple years ago, my therapist criticized my way of letting pessimism stop me from trying things that, I guess, require effort. He chided that, if I just declare everything a “pain in the ass,” I'll never get anything done. As the French might say, 'he had raison.' And, after all, there was probably a decent amount of money involved for very little work, so I was willing to give it a shot. 

     “Yeah, I’ve been there,” Nat finally responded an hour later.

     Two days later, I was on the train. I had gotten very little sleep, and worried that I had left too late. I was anxious about whether the bus would be on time. I wished I had drunk more water that morning. But, eventually, I arrived at a station that was on one of the farther ends of the subway system, nearing the edge of the city. There were significantly fewer buildings there. I thought about getting a drink from the vending machine, but I didn’t want to find out too late that it was broken and walk away a mark. So I waited for eleven minutes. Then a bus striped in blue, white, and yellow pulled up.

     Over the ride's entire duration, I was somehow the only person onboard. The route took about fourteen minutes, and I was dropped off at the “Forrest Avenue” stop. The bus door opened to a patch of grass next to a gravel driveway. I made sure to step down carefully because my ankle was still sore.

     The surrounding area seemed to be little more than a district of warehouses. My destination was just ahead in what appeared to be a plaza with modest signage. I was mentally preparing myself to look for “Suite 3A,” only to find it immediately. The other suites were unoccupied. I entered a carpeted waiting room which was mostly evacuated, save for a blond woman in a pink blouse who sat behind one of those highly secure teller windows with a grilled microphone mounted in the glass and a pneumatic compartment for transferring objects and documents. 

     “Hey! Are you here for the taste test?” she said, perking up at my arrival.

     I thanked goodness for being spared the burden of explaining myself.

     “Yeah, I think so,” I said, laughing disingenuously.

     She bade me sign in before directing me down the hall and through a set of doors I would find at its end.

     The hallway was fairly compact. There were no lights on, and there were wooden doors on either side. The doors toward which I had been directed were impenetrably dark, covered in tinted film. I pulled the door on the left first, which was wrong, and then I correctly pulled open the right door. Behind it was an astonishingly large grocery store, illumined from overhead with floodlights. It, too, was oddly unpopulated. There was a lot of beige. White and beige flooring. Beige metal shelves, whose endcaps were a slightly augmented shade of beige. I was tempted to look around and shop for a moment, but my confusion paralyzed me. 

     After nearly two minutes, I received a message. I checked my phone to see a text from Nat.

     “I’m in the Café,” it read.

     I walked on, obeying a compulsion to head toward the right. The Café would likely be tucked away in that direction. I passed an arrangement of partially deflated mylar balloons, hovering above flowers in water that smelled two days expired. There was a beige wall with faux-wood molding. Beyond that, I discovered an area containing a single oval table surrounded by three plastic cafeteria chairs. 

     At this point, I was tired and not a little bit thirsty. I occupied one of the seats, facing the direction from whence I had come. This was unmistakably the Café, where I hoped to meet my friend.

     Some time elapsed. A series of light-green lockers lined the walls. They were for employees, I assumed.

     Suddenly, a light began flashing. Music started playing. A white guy in a blue blazer with a Tin Tin haircut and a massive smile walked up to the table and began shouting into a microphone. 

     “Are you guys ready?!” 

     The response was an uproarious applause, issuing from the store’s intercom. 

     “It’s time for Rest Season!” 

     I slouched in my chair, hoping to evade anyone's notice. But the harangue kept going. 

     “As you all know, Rest Season is sponsored by Rest Brewery, located here, in Edsville!”

     A calculated break to be filled with applause.

    “Our contestants today will be sitting at this table for a grand total of three weeks! For the entirety of Rest Season!” 

     Thirty seconds of applause followed before abruptly ceasing.

   The store then darkened while the host stood still, the trained smile draining from his face. There was a camera rigged atop a tripod just to the right of my table. Any sound I had ambiently heard before had been swiftly discontinued.

     The only other contestant was a young woman with light brown hair; she wore a green cardigan. Apparently, she had been there since before I had even showed up. I never managed to get a look at her face, for it was bowed onto the table, curtained by unbathed locks. 

     After a moment of downtime, she sat up and raised her hand. The host, too, lifted his head and raised his eyebrows at her. All at once: the lights brightened, the music and the applause restarted, and the host rattled off another scripted line. 

     “It looks like one of our contestants is thirsty!”

    The applause, here, seemed to pick up a note of cruelty. The host, holding a cue card, motioned his hand toward the other side of the room.

     “You’re in luck!" he said. "We’ve provided drinks and snacks for you to enjoy!”

     He indicated a metal rolling cart with a tray and wire shelves, atop which stood what appeared to be a massive bottle of Pedialyte, surrounded by a formation of short cups. The music swelling, my colleague hesitantly rose from her seat and shuffled over to the cart, struggling to pry a cup from the suction of another cup in which it was sleeved. Her difficulties were multiplied by the child-proof cap on the bottle in the center of the cart. Keeping her head bowed, she dispensed a portion of liquid into her cup, inevitably dribbling a few drops down the ribbed plastic side of her modest vessel. All the while, the host stood in place, making barely visible adjustments to his smile. The camera craned and swept around the whole of the scene on its hydraulic gibbet. 

     Taking care to dispel any hint of avarice she might betray, the woman returned to the table with only a meagre volume of fluid in her cup. The show halted again when she took her seat.

     Only then did I remember that this was not why I had come here. Why had I come here? Surely, I had been headed for a 'store?' I wanted to pose my questions to some aide or crew member, but saw that no such person was in attendance. Besides, it had become clear to me that it would not be in my best interest to attract scrutiny. I stayed low in my seat, almost compromising my spinal health with the angle of my slouch; I even had to adjust myself or else risk sliding out of the chair. But any movement might attract attention. I chose to risk it and flatten myself against the back of the chair. 

     Nothing resulted from this. My guess was then that the sole signal I could give for recognition would be to raise my hand. I found that a small relief. 

     The other sitter at the table was staring into her cup far more than draining its contents into her mouth. I mused that a good swig of Pedialyte would be the perfect answer to the touch of dehydration I was beginning to feel. I looked over at the cart where the bottle waited. I thought, if the show would only take another pause, I could head over there and get a cup for myself, given I avoid any interaction with the host. 

     I sat for a moment just contemplating the move, and then I went for it. But the mere act of placing my hand on the table to bolster my weight seemed to retrigger the cacophony of the show.

     “Our contestants also get to try the new beer, by Rest Brewery,” the host shouted, “Rest Saison!”

    Just then, I felt a sensation similar to being exposed to an open industrial oven. Looking up, I beheld a familiar sight: a short man appeared from around a corner, pushing a dolly, upon which was propped a massive silver keg with a large blue sticker label that said “Rest Saison” in white lettering. He pushed the dolly midway into the room, and sloppily slammed its bottom onto the ground before ejecting the hand truck out from beneath it. 

    He was bathed in sweat. I lit upon his nametag: “Roy.” The radiating heat followed him off of the soundstage, but my urge to suck him off was as febrile as ever.

     The host turned toward the camera. 

     “That’s right: our contestants are free to drink an unlimited amount of Rest Saison for the remaining week of the season! Rest Saison is a refreshing saison made locally!”

    He continued reciting this uninspired copy, describing the beer’s brewing process, and my frustration grew. Beer was the last thing I wanted. I was thirsty. If I were to swill some sedimental craft beer, it would only enhance my thirst. 

     I told myself internally that, before they dimmed the lights again, I would need to drink Pedialyte. While the host was preoccupied, I decided to stand up and finally make my way to that beverage. 

     “...For any occasion! You can also–” the host broke off. 

    He stared directly at me and stood up. I stood still. 

     “Do you require nourishment?” he asked.

    I began to respond by shaking my head, but was stopped when he seemed to give a command to someone out of view.

     “Luis, will you bring the nourishment?” 

     An aged, gloomy man in a jumpsuit and worn baseball cap slowly emerged from a utility closet behind a false wall and, without any awareness of his own movements or the thoughts which motivated them, tossed a nearly depleted box of BelVita cookies onto the table. He then returned to his closet. 

     The host once more beamed into the camera. 

     “Alright, we’ve got nourishment.”

    I alternated my gaze between the family-size box of shattered cookies and the host. A shout came out of me: 

     “I don’t need any nourishment, okay? I don’t need any fucking nourishment!"

     The show paused again. Silence.

     I remained standing, unconfident in any course-correction from there. I didn't remember ever having indulged in such an outburst during my adult life. I took a breath and looked back up to find the host in his practiced posture of rest. His eyes were mostly affixed to his shoes; one of his hands appeared to fidget in his pocket while the thumb of his other hand caressed the microphone's power switch. Across from him hung a humongous camera with blue tape intentionally stuck in a haphazard manner all over its exterior. 

    No one sat at the table. I reached into the box for a BelVita cookie, fingers closing around the foil of a single-serving package, and exited the area at my leisure. I expected someone to arrest me bodily, but no one ever did. Having forgotten how I had reached this large chamber, I simply continued toward the shadows at the back, eventually coming to a set of heavy steel doors. I reached for the handle on the right door. When I pushed and it wouldn't open, I felt a slight panic rise in me. But then I tried the left handle and the door opened easily.

     I walked into a large, dark warehouse. Looking back at the doors through which I had just passed, I realized how short the soundstage wall really was. On this side, I could see large sheets of studded plywood. Along this barrier were profuse entanglements of wires and tall stage lights. With the little bit of light peeking from the grocery store stage, I could see a third set of doors across the way.

     I walked outside, onto a loading dock. Beyond the dock, there was a large paved area, like a parking lot. Beyond the parking lot, there was a vast green field with thickly plumed trees guarding the horizon. The sky was liquid and pure, true blue.

      I looked around. I was lost. 

     I turned right, and headed down the stairs. I started wandering around the property until I saw the indented area connecting the building I had just left to another loading dock. The pavement here was painted mostly blue, and it had the texture of a high school running track. I could see workers in the distance, all wearing blue jumpsuits. Some were driving forklifts, some were pushing deep laundry bins. I just kept walking. I didn’t know whether any of them would try to stop me or offer help.

     My heels had begun to ache. There was a numb pain in my ankle. I had been wandering along the walls of this facility for about twenty minutes, trying not to interact with anyone. Eventually, I resolved to talk to a man pushing one of the laundry bins. His name tag said “Malik." 

     “Hey, do you know how to get out of here?” I asked.

     "Yeah I’ve been here for about a year, it’s a pretty good job,” he said, smiling like a man who wanted to be my mother.

     I looked at him for a moment. He turned and waved me in his direction. 

     “Come on, I’ll show you,” he said.

     In short order, I found my way home. Passing through the vestibule, I stopped at the mailbox. There was a piece of mail addressed to me, with three perforated edges. It was a check from Waite’s Distribution. I looked at the attached pay stub and realized that the check was made out to compensate me for three weeks of work - from September 23rd to October 14th, with forty-two consecutive twelve-hour shifts. 

     In sum, I had been awarded: a sixty-five dollar check. 

     God damn it. 

     But then, in the middle of my shadowed living room (from which, no doubt, I would soon be evicted), I thought the following words aloud:

     "This could get me more of those kettle chips."

Khokhot

      Terror and comedy are akin. Each mood has its own exchange economy. In exchange for a receipt of terror, one screams: "Ahhh"; in exchange for a receipt of comedy, one laughs: "Hahaha." The duration and quality of one's screams or laughter will be commensurate with the value of the product delivered. But there was a time and place when these two goods were more than akin. They were one. At that time, laughter and hoarse screams were the same vocal emission, and sounded quite different. It was a halting, cranking sound - the heart knocking around the wet, dark barrel of the body, trying to start itself up and somehow escape its own response to something that had suddenly borne down upon it.

     You are at a bar on a Wednesday night. You come here for the two-dollar tall-boys. The stand-up open-mic is a negligible pretense for it all. In a back room decked in bright, convex planks of pine from floor to ceiling, you watch a procession of 'comics' cycle on and off of the stage. There are variants of modern laughter in response to their perfectly comprehensible anecdotes: "Hah," "Heh," and "Hee." 

     But then one line falls flat, receiving no response from the crowd, except from you. The stage is empty when this line is delivered. In fact, it seems everyone has mutually, wordlessly agreed to take a break. But something about these words that you know you haven't heard excites your spinal cord, makes you squirm on your stool and drop your clanging can of beer into the warmth-depths between your knees and the wall of the bar.

     You vomit a sound from your stomach that extends beyond the identifiable physiological responses to physical stimuli:

     "Khokhot... Khokhot... Khokhot..."

     Each time these phonemes trickle out of your mouth, you are ratcheted around in the space of the room. After your third outburst, you find that you are looking at yourself from the vantage of the mirror behind the bar. Your body remains on its stool, while shades of indifferent patrons mill past it in the background. After a few seconds, the body sags and falls out of sight onto the floor.