Triculant

      Before you in space is not a world, but a cauldron seething above a solvent fire. 

     You pass through the automatic door of your neighborhood grocery store which detects the motion of your approach.

     This is no market, no bazaar of human purposes, but a winding intestine of everyday provision, where you must learn the names of the doormen of Sight. In a place like this, no one wishes to make eye contact: one mustn't commune during initiation.

     The first corridor is the bread aisle, where chemically treated loaves respire, immune to the blossoms of decay in their tight-twisted palls. On the other side are fresh-baked Lithuanian loaves, fire-scorned bricks of rye whose crust need only open its eyes for the invisible host of bacteria to gain purchase and grow their cyan churches. Everywhere, crumbs that relent to gravity's courtship; everywhere, crumbs that succumb. 

     There are thin linoleum squares pasted to the floor which have recorded the chronicle of every shopper's step. The closer one gets to these carelessly manufactured tiles, the further one is divided, dissolved, stripped of face and identity. 

     When people enter this store, they hardly suspect that their progress through its various partitions is a reenactment of an ancient drama born on an antediluvian continent.

     Each step corresponds to a bodily tremor that loosens particles from your corpus and transports them to the curling seams of the aisle floor, where each sebum-anointed cell is weighed in the scales with the Perfect Monad of Iptar before it is shucked and sorted. 

     Following upon this is the gallery of meats and cheeses. Here is a firming refrigeration that solidifies, consolidates. Lipids whiten into their own retreating densities with the indifference of rotting cod as unworthy fingers contemplate the chilled dew of shrink-wrapped packaging. 

     The eyes of butchered pigs, shot through with cataracts, gleam from the miles-distant depths of a discard bin, awaiting their transubstantiation into mucosal souse while their faceless flanks represent them in the senate chamber of the deli counter. 

     This is the bend in the river Duat at which an alternate gravitation of flesh into fleisch resists the catholic gravity of pure reality, which calls only the subtlest grains unto its vapid bosom. 

     A froward heap of London Broil stews in its own garnet gazpacho, waiting to meet its molar dismissal, ensconced in a couch of aerated brioche.

     Here, now, are the Babylonian tiers of the vegetal domain. Mantles flake from the ubiquitous spine of Vidalia orbs, flagellated in the breeze of a passing cart and cast into the threshing floor; there they shall be swept clean by a heart-hungry Beast crouched by the scales. 

     The misted trim of a Swiss chard frond liquefies into a charnel putty, soon to be streaked across the laser-pierced glass of the self-checkout terminal. 

     Beyond these broad floes of effluvia, you enter the crabbed tributaries of goods, dried and canned. Anchovies are scrolled in baths of jaundiced oil, carrying the codes of the century in their thrice-apocalyptic fat. Tongues of halved herring hang in a substrate of blank wine. 

     These tins of weak, available meat are much aligned with the logic of canopic jars. This is the profane time, when that which is retrieved from a man's mouth can hardly hurt his soul, but that which is deposited therein can awaken the hooks of Hell. 

     There are the hieratic aisles of pot and pan, soap and sponge, where all of the temple's accoutrements are kept.

     And then there are pitch-dark wadis lined with bituminous bladders, where self-eliminating chips speak in unheard raspings. They elucidate the mysteries of your necessary death. One need merely handle a bag of them for a few imploding seconds, looking blindly through a transparent window in the rippling plastic, to see what happens to the pulverized maize...

     You are given a second birth in that unnamable aisle where arks of eggs preside. Only the vulgar - they of little faith, whose fleisch is willing, but whose endorphins are weak - will open the lid to check for a fractured shell. But your faith has been tempered in an invisible fire. You are guided to the carton allotted to you in this life. You know that within rests a living Ovoïd Law which no mere letters on a page can embody or dissuade.

     When you leave the store, you feel like a crowned, conquering, beet-red infant, waiting on the corner with your pendulous grocery bags while vehicles caked in a dust of accreted exhaust fumes tear past and miss you by no more than inches. 

     But a worthless residue has stayed behind in that labyrinth to matriculate into the deepest recesses of those grand, floodlit surfaces. Maybe this remainder is the purer life - one which you have unwittingly lost in your desire for convenient feed. Maybe this negated portion is the true molecular body. It is the Triculant from which you are forced to depart, having never known it.