The Mouth:

The Uncanny Valley is populated by the infirm and grotesque, and with some investigation the motion of the inhabitants seems to add to the unease of their presence. The Valley sits at the base of a mountain range, its twisting peaks and impossible structures leer overhead, watching the daily lives of its squirming residences.

As an ordained Seeker, such places are my destination, my ticket paid for long ago under the stars.

The plane flight was comfortable, providing a chance to catch up on some sleep. However, there was a delay in taking off from the airport of the Absurd, whose mechanics are blind and feeble, it is really quite surprising they got the single prop plane into the sky. I closed my eyes and waited for the crash, at peace with the idea of being suddenly being incinerated or jerked out of my seat and thrown into a kinetic pile of jelly.

After a quick peanut-butter and jelly dream, I woke slightly hungry. My eyes sustained me as the uncanny valley was seen from the window. Even from the view above, the rivers did not follow the typical course through a delta, but rather seemed to crawl over the fertile basin with right angles and geometric confusion. There was a small town and a smaller airport, both seemed dismally tiny compared to the mountain which cast an enormous darkness over the valley.

The plane landed smoothly, yet when we stopped I noticed the plane was tucked away behind the airport, snug between 2 trash dumpsters, we walked across a makeshift plank leading into the airport. Calling it an airport may be giving the place too much credit. It was also a church of sorts, the baggage claim consisted of an altar, multiple ritual tools of unknown use which decorated the conveyor belt, and an effigy vaguely resembling a tree or maybe a crucified man wearing a crown of thorns, its limbs elongated and curved to resemble the branches of trees. It was though someone had seen a crucifix hundreds of years ago and had recreated it from a distant memory.

I found myself staring at the crucifix. After a time, I went to collect my baggage which had been altered and only vaguely resembled what my baggage looked like before boarding the plane. I had a black duffle bag, but now it looked like it had been stretched and bent into the letter U.

After some small talk and a request from the single ticket-booth attendant I was outside waiting for a taxi to take me to my hotel. The airport road was a Cal-de-sac, horrible design if ever there was more than a few cars. However, there were no others waiting and I found myself looking around at the most banal of things: The streets were curved, not one followed a straight line, the buildings did not look level or plum, their roofs showing signs of water damage as pools gathered in corners of rusted gutters. Every building appeared to be built to exaggerate these errors, and the longer I looked at them the more I felt like the construction was intentional. This satisfied my curiosity slightly, being that the town resided in a place called the Uncanny Valley.

Mental comfort was short lived when I saw the taxi approach. Whether the road was in disrepair or the driver was reckless, the approach was one of a haphazard junk pile. I thought I saw a piece of the vehicle break off when the driver didn’t slow down over the speed bump. I was cautious getting into the car, but I was already starting to become aware of the nature of the place and risking my life to see into such places provided no greater thrill. I told the driver I had not had a chance to exchange my money to the local currency. The driver smiled and said there would be plenty of time for that later, and non-local currency was preferred.

We drove for 2 hours to the remote hotel. I found myself looking at the facial features of the driver. He was an elderly man, with deep creases resembling the lines of the rivers from viewed in the airplane. Some of them took right angles and turns I have not seen before. When he spoke, his joules moved like sacks of groceries, as if a weight dwelled under his skin. He chatted briefly about the beauty of the mountain and the trees and how happy he was was to have a visitor in his homeland. He gave me his contact information and offered to drive me anywhere in the area at a discount. His smile reminded me of a frog or amphibian, it seemed much wider that his lips allowed, the creases drawing out a line which curved up his cheeks.

The remote hotel was near the base of the mountain range, we traveled up in elevation, I could not guess the amount, but the switch backs wrapped around multiple peaks. The mountains were filled with excessive and distinguishing features. Each peak seemed filled with knots and caverns of impossible geometry, large boulders stood on tiny fulcrums, as if they were in mid arc from a catapult, perhaps in a thousand years they would finally land and add to the abundance of craters. It was like watching a battle of giants in slow motion, an avalanche frozen in a slice of time while the flea-like car sputtered up the face of the warriors.

The driver saw my tension and broke the weight with a toothy word from his wrinkled and elastic face: “Don’t worry about those, sticks and stones may break our bones, but their words will never reach us.” I was not relieved, and my knuckles grew a little whiter. I didn’t reply, the terror of the precarious stones occupied my imagination. I felt a little relief when the hotel came into view.

My relief was short lived, and the new terror was not unexpected. The hotel was built before some massive geological upheaval, the foundation rested on a plateau over a cliff. To get to the hotel itself required crawling up a ladder stretching 300 feet. The ladder seemed sturdy at first, but the wiggle and wave became more exaggerated as I got closer to the top. After I reached the precipice I waved the driver away.

The hotel was typical of the type of infection that the rest of the Valley contained, twisted rooftops and a previous sudden jutting of the mountains exaggerated the near collapsed appearance. The family which ran the hotel was modest and kind, they took my things to the top floor, promising the view was worth the trip. The place was clean, yet there seemed to be a smell or musky presence which I could not name. The family consisted of 4 adults, the mother, father and a pair of twins grown to bright eyed young adults. However, both of the twins had lazy-eyes, off-set reflections of each other. This made it easier to tell them apart, but whenever they shared a quick glance with each other, their lazy-eyes peered off into the shadowed corners of the tall ceilings.

The room was warm and clean, a single window afforded me a wide view of the Uncanny Valley and the cliff faces with their dark ravines. The basin of the delta could be seen in its entirety, the crawling streams seemed to defy gravity as some streams doubled back, flowing both upstream and downstream. I found myself staring out the window, unable to remember if I had wrapped up the monetary details of my stay with the hotel family.

I unpacked my belongings, enough for a 5 day stay in this strange place. The obvious infection of discord was clear, but by what impulse did the landscape curve and warp? My room was the 6^th floor, and above the hotel rose 2 fanged peaks of sheer stone. They rose on each side of the hotel and their shadows could be seen over the Valley. They were only seen when I went out to the haphazard constructed balcony, which if any of the floorboards wee to suddenly fail my corpse may never be found in those dark ravines of twisted geometry. I avoided the balcony, keeping my investigation of the place to a less risky investigation.

My first attempt to determine the unease of the place was through conversation with the residences of the hotel. The mother and father were very quiet and had no idea about the apparent strangeness, to them this was the order of things and the impossible orientation of stones, rivers and shadows were an unargued fact of life. The twins were very different.

They were never separated, and each question required a glance at the other before similar responses followed. They told me that the hotel was in the path of some greater creature, a creature they had never seen directly, but had heard its voice. They promised that during my stay I may hear the voice of the unknown beast. They giggled at their own response, as if the beast was a joke of some kind, some sideshow spectacle that would enhance my appreciation of their world.

As a Seeker, my occupation demands a balance of criticism and acceptance. I did not prod too much on the first day, I was a guest after all. I decided to write down the descriptions of the place and listen for the voice of the suspected beast. This of course did not explain the meandering and illogical infection of the place, nor the boulders stacked in towers of precariously threats. I fell sleep with the curtains closed.

I slept in until 3pm on the second day, my dreams were filled with airplane crashes and avalanches.

The night came around 6:30, and the stars dotted the thick darkness. I looked out into the Valley, careful not to stand on the balcony. The darkness exaggerated the Valley below, coloring the vista, yet not diminishing the vast sense of space, infected with strange directions.

9:30pm: The sky grows darker, I can see no clouds, as if the stars are being winked out, disappearing as the hours crawl by. I can no longer recognize any constellations.

11:00pm: Perhaps the clouds were high and hidden, a storm has descended upon the Valley. I can not see the town below nor its even smaller airport. The moon is half-full, and it sits as an angry eye between the twin peaks above.

12:15pm: I have heard the voice of the creature. I marked the time when the howl began, at 12:04 the wind rolled down the peaks followed by a massive deluge of rain. The wind, or perhaps better called the night-wind sounded like the crying of an animal, through the ravines and over the perched boulders it flowed. I heard several boulders crash to the ground, a reverberant echo which drew my eyes to the fanged peaks above, wondering if a stone was rolling towards the hotel.

The animal sound of the wind was like that of a dying bird, squawking in the darkness, then howling out a mournful death note. It continued in a painful choir, I was transfixed, hypnotized, unable to control my feet as they walked out to the rickety construction of the balcony. There I stood, full-faced before the twin peaks and the howl of the night-wind. I felt the creature’s breath; the rain was its spittle, and the darkness its hulking body screaming down the Valley in incorporeal rage.

Unfortunately, it was only this second night that I heard the night-wind blow its fearsome wail.  There was no wind on the subsequent nights. After the storm the twins smiled and laughed whenever they greeted me in the morning. They would jeer half-heartedly and prepare me a complimentary breakfast. “Did the wind scare you? Are you afraid Seeker? Do you think a fish fears the depth of the ocean, or crows the torrent of the storm?”

I requested an extension in my stay here for further investigation, the family apathetically agreed, saying my foreign money would allow a lifetime for whatever I sought here, if I wished.

Passover:

Carrie is the last of her line. She isn’t part of a specific bloodline or nation, she is the last of 5 chickens which were in our stewardship. All 5 chickens were not related to the same mother. We started with 4 of them, acquired a small chicken house and within a few days they provided delicious golden-yoked eggs. 

The first to leave was Little Bastard, they did their best at being the rooster, despite being a hen. She developed slightly differently, becoming more aggressive as time went on. She was named after a few mornings of waking up to a gargling cry, which occasionally broke into a solid cock-a-doodle-do. She had to go, the suburban world does not allow the rooster role. She was given to an Indian gentleman on Craigslist. 

Carrie at this point was at the bottom of the pecking order, she was thin. She named after someone, who was knee deep in bad choices, drugs or perhaps born into addiction. Carrie molten frequently, further accentuating her ragged appearance. The other chickens were named Big Red and Toots due to their coloring. Big Red was cinnamon with lace made of browns and oranges. Toots was completely covered in beautiful black feathers.  They all laid the most wonderful eggs on a regular basis. 

The 5^th chicken we inherited. Her name was BokBok, a gorgeous black and white Italian-laced hen. She had survived a racoon attack in a friends coop. She was part of another hen pair, and now as a singleton, she fit nicely into our yard and collection of hens. BokBok established herself as number 2 in the pecking order, pushing out Toots. Carrie remained at the bottom, but overall was less hen pecked. 

There was chicken harmony for 3 years, and the eggs flowed. 

Toots started getting lethargic and listless. We thought she was broody, a condition where they sit for elongated periods of time on their unfertilized eggs in an instinctual desperation. Often chickens can be broody for days, she was broody for over 2 weeks. We finally dragged her out of the chicken house and inspected her. She cried and whined about being touched, her body winced in pain and she cried softly. 

We discovered she was egg-bound. This is a condition where the eggs get backed-up in the cloaca. There are ways to relieve this, but Toots was too far gone. 

I was the one chosen to cull her. I used garden shears. I had help holding her, which required no effort, she was helpless and in pain. I laid her head in the shears and stroked her head softly. I counted to 3, and by the count of 2, my helper had left and was looking away with wet eyes. She didn’t struggle at all, death was a thin line, it was quick. Now there were 3 chickens and they resumed laying eggs of the most wonderful kind. 

We also used their excrement for fertilizer. We had many years of bountiful raspberries. The chicken house was also home to some of the largest and splendid spiders of the yard. They never bothered me while cleaning, tucking themselves into tight corners to avoid the sweeping hands of thick gloves. 

Big Red died in the night on her 6^th year. I didn’t hear the cries, but others thought they heard the death gargle of a squawking bird. In the morning we found Big Red had been skinned and dragged around the yard. She had not been eaten, she had been murdered. We learned that racoons have a taste for murder and took precautions to prevent the return of the opportunistic predator. 

We were down to a pair of chickens, who at this point were laying only seasonally, stopping in the winter and starting again in the spring. We had considered getting new chickens, perhaps starting with little meepers and socializing them to be affectionate. We decided to wait and let the old hens finish their lives. 

The wait continued 2 years as BokBok and Carrie occasionally laid eggs and produced poop for fertilizer. 

A few nights ago, I heard the death gargle of a chicken. I rushed to the chicken house to investigate. I saw a large racoon exiting the top of the chicken house and jumping unto the fence bordering the street. I grabbed a shovel and investigated. I did not find the racoon. 

If the racoon had killed a chicken, we would get into the mess in the morning. I returned to bed, however I was unable to sleep. 

Within 15 minutes of laying down I heard the death gargle again. This time we went out with flashlights, wide eyes and a tightly gripped shovel. The racoon was back, and after beating the shovel on the stones and against chicken house, they left. I had no intention of killing a racoon, even if they only sought murder. 

The racoon left, and we investigated the chicken house with flashlights. Upon entering the out pen, we found BokBok laying in a pile of feathers. She must have seen the light because she started a weak cry and tried to fluff up a single wing. She was mortally wounded. I heard the words behind me: “Take care of her.” Which meant to finish killing her. It took 3 solid whacks and BokBok was motionless. We opened the chicken house to see if Carrie had also been attacked. She was sleeping silently in the roost. 

I used the shovel to move BokBok’s body. I carried her to the backyard and catapulted her into the darkness. I couldn’t see where she landed, but the offering to the darkness was paid. I couldn’t get back to sleep, every noise provoked my imagination to think the racoon was returning for Carrie. I fell sleep thinking of giant racoons opening the roof of our house and grabbing one of us for some midnight murder. 

In the morning Carrie had come to the side door and was roosting on the low gate. I cleaned the blood out of the coop, made it nice and comfortable. New bedding, swept all the spiders, webs and feathers from every corner. Carrie spent the day by the basement windows twisted her head in strange directions. Chickens normally cannot recognize themselves in mirrors. Perhaps she thinks her reflection is a faded ghost. Either way, Carrie is on top of the pecking order, at least until the spirit of death returns.

Ixiptatli of Toci:

Edward Steeler rode public transit daily. He didn’t like cars and the way society neglected their risk. The cost of lives on a simple yearly basis unnerved him, each year 40,000 people died from the use of rolling machines, justified as necessity. Cars, he thought will be the unbelieved headshake of future anthropologists.

Edward dwelled on car crashes on a frequent basis, perhaps he would be t-boned on the bus, perhaps he would incinerate in a fireball from a collision with an empty gasoline tanker. He rubber-necked whenever he could, listening to the sirens, hoping the accident would be close enough to see some carnage.

He was on his way to an evening engagement, sitting nervously in the back seat of an acquaintance’s 4-door death box. Everyone chattered on, ignoring the kinetic force flowing past, mere inches from their sitting arrangements. One wrong move and the car would be a coffin, their bodies wrapped in metallic funeral linens.

There was traffic, a motorcycle accident had produced an ambulance, 2 cop cars and a tow truck, as well as the need for a body bag. The incident left a smear on the freeway with little bits that belonged to a once living creature. Like all freeways, Edward saw them as rivers of death, first sterilized in concrete then baptized in the blood of dogs, cats, possums, deer, racoons and the thick red of human beings.

The chatter stopped as the car rolled by the accident. Edward kept silent, trying his best to keep his imagination from strangling his composure. The door provided a symbolic barrier between death and buffered Edward with minor success.

Death was unavoidable to Edward, his morbid fascination devolved into all sorts of scenarios of expiration. Sometimes he imagined he was the victim, immersing himself in the experience of what death might feel like. To be burned, cut, smashed, tortured, they all seeped into his dreams. He watched the news, dwelling on the gruesome details.

Regardless, the evening took a grim turn and conversations turned to examples of how to die. His friends, who were accustomed with Edward’s morbid conversation offered their best-case situations of how they would prefer to die. The fundamental questions bubbled up: Is it better die quickly, doing what you love, perhaps after a full life of pleasure? These questions irked Edward, the mere idea that the pain of death was sequestered to its finality, was missing the point. Death was a cloak for him, it sat on his shoulders with weighted uncertainty. The pain of death for Edward was not knowing when or how, to be trapped in the moment of dying without the ability to wake from the experience.

Edward shared his thoughts. He described the panic he would feel if he was in a car crash and not dying quickly; to be bleeding to death and stuck thinking of all the tasks left unfinished, undone. He was plagued by an anxiety that would not allow a courageous or meaningful death, it was all meaninglessness to him. Edward’s friends ignored much of his melancholy, and they secretly pitied him.

The most tongue and check suicide fantasy from Edward’s friends was the Hotdog Vest. A scenario with a vest of hotdogs and ketchup packets would be arranged to resemble a suicide bomber’s vest. Then a mall or similar populated area would be selected and then suicide-by-cop would be used. When the blood and guts would go flying, so would pieces of processed hotdogs and sprays of ketchup. Everyone enjoyed a laugh and the nighttime adventure continued, discarding the malaise of motorcycle crash. 

They parked, gathered their enthusiasm for the night and started walking to the club of choice. The group stopped at a nearby bar, a trans-friendly place with a little sign in the window displaying the rainbow colors and a handwritten sign saying “No TERFS”. Whatever that meant, the place had cheap drinks, and there was no more interest in serious discussion, the night was about madness, lust, music and drink.

Once pleasantly glossed, the group walked a couple blocks to the club. The door fee paid, wrists stamped, and their minds open to receive instructions from the vibe. Skinny Puppy blared over the crowd, with a version of Assimilate, the end of the lyrics echoed a reminder from the crash: “Dead is dead, is dead, is dead is DEAD, IS DEAD!!”

The scene was filled with goth-industrial fashion, a normie with a red trucker hat, a few cross dressers, electric-tapped nipples and countless straps, buckles and black-eyed make up. This place was neutral ground, all things tolerated, this was a place for high-quality wierdos. They took the dance floor for a single evening, like all creatures, fellowship was desired.

The booze flowed, and Edward and his friends fell into a familiar and iridescent stupor.  At midnight the music stopped a moment, lights focused on a makeshift stage. A guy in a long black dress took a microphone, chatted the audience up a bit and introduced the midnight act, a drag show promising to be a truly unique experience. The audience waited, softly chatting.

The music was tribal drumbeat mixed with industrial sounds. There was no vocals and the performer came out wearing what looked like an old woman’s Halloween costume. They had gray stringy hair, baggy black clothes, a leather sunken face, which was not a costume but an undecorated man’s face. The routine was an energetic and expressive feminine tease, and slightly unnerving the atypical character. As the song continued, the baggy clothes fell away, the thin and wrinkled man gyrated and spun in a fever of physical strain. Splits, high-kicks, bends and stretches. The audience tolerated it, as they tolerated everything, some enjoyed it, others took it as a chance to close their tabs.

Edward was fascinated, feeling as though there were some mystery he had missed, some piece of the entertainment he was ignorant of but watched wide-eyed nonetheless.

The routine was nearing its end. The old drag performer finally spoke into the microphone while grabbing something from his baggy clothes. Speaking clearly as the drums rolled out into a slow and steady beat: “My name is Toci, I offer you all my transubstantiation, within this song I am the eternal grandmother, let me show you my heart, for it is your heart, let me show you my flesh, for it is your flesh.”

The performer then produced a thin obsidian knife and began stabbing themselves in the neck. They managed to perforate their artery before the security guards rushed to the stage. They died on site in a pile of black rags. The rest of the evening was filled with confusion, sirens and weeping. The dead performer offered no other explanations.

This was the first time Edward Steeler understood what a religious experience felt like.

Dedication:

The night ebbed, a gray dawn slinked over a greasy horizon. The concrete buildings rose like teeth over a sprawling mouth, the tongue lapping up suburban neighborhoods with lashing freeways. When the city spoke, the forked tongue drooled out a slow traffic in the form of the morning commute after the weekend.

Julie worked early, the gray light was welcome. There was another month before the darkness ate the evening and morning. She could at least see the difference between night and day, a purely symbolic distinction. Julie loved her job, or rather, loved the order her job gave.

Julie worked for the RT corporation, a global creature with mouths in every country. RT took care of their employees, insulated them in company towns. She could walk from her office to the cafeteria, a place filled with enough variety for 3 lifetimes, filled with: Soups, salads, burgers, Pho, Masala, tiny rice crispy treats, not to mention everything was compostable. RT was thoughtful and considerate of their employee’s needs, spending effort to keep their quality of life comfortable. Julie loved the RT company right back, she bled for it, worked through lunches, never took vacation, and dreamt in the language of project management. Organization was her drug and disorder a distant memory.

This is not to say that Julie had no problems, her world simply contained another set of constellations, another sky of brilliance to navigate. At least the corporate world made sense, or so she thought.

It was 10 years before the glamour started to fade and the lattice of order slipped a little. She started to see how reason and logic took back seats to pragmatism. Her bosses had a variety of visions, often at odds with each other, strung like a spider-webs waiting to catch some young idealist.

As with most middle management, whether it be governmental bodies or tier-7 RT managers, she discovered she was more or less a buffer between 2 senseless forces. Being mashed between authorities normally causes a person to feel pressure, tension or some other frantic sense of urgency with no clear action. The biggest force was her direct boss, they were concerned holding on to their position above all else, they didn’t want to be replaced, they didn’t want to be obsolete. The second force was her peer, a leader with the same title. The lead wanted the opposite of her boss, full of glossy principled ideas and vision. They sought to replace themselves, operate only within the vision and principles of the company.

Order broke down slowly after 10 years a glamour. It took roughly 5 more before the glamour was gone and only the teeth of the creature remained. Julie was fraught with night-time anxiety, and the slow-motion shattering of the stained-glass organization gave her an itchy sense of realism.

Julie took it in stride and helped her lead when she could. Her boss was playing the death-do-I-part game, and as luck would have it, they died before her glossy-eyed peer lost their idealism.

One day her boss was there, the next the office was empty, their identity gone and the whole show continued as if they were never there. Her lead became the boss, they tried for 3 years to live by their ideals, but slowly over those years they too turned into a similar shaped creature, one of pronounced stubbornness, resisting changes that threaten their principles. She saw the seasons of turn-over and the gloss faded from manager to manager.

Even after the sparkle dimmed and the senseless world beneath showed itself, Julie loved her job. By this time she had grown into a creature which fit her job-shaped container perfectly. She was cocooned, insulated in the warm and predictable world of making order from chaos. She managed projects even though they fell apart, she organized change, progress and everything in-between. Year after year, month after month the fruits of her labor disintegrated and regenerated.

Then her time came, her work was nearly completed. She had reached the end, the last day before retirement. She said good bye to her friends, and to the last 40 years of her life. Julie received a watch, a pension and nothing else to do.

She committed suicide on the 1110^th day of her retirement, the abyss of options was not something she wanted to wrestle with. Killing herself gave her life one last sense of order, as temporary as the order was, and with that, her work was done.  Julie was the perfect RT employee.

The Emergency:

Very few people understand the slow motion of change. Jennifer thought she understood the waves of life, but something crept up, inched up within a blind spot. Usually it requires a second pair of eyes, a crash of tragedy or some transformation resulting in a wider perspective over a greater horizon.

Jennifer looked to the widest of horizons, the longest of views, spending great effort to dilate out to a vague and nebulous enlightenment. Yet for all her growth and awareness, her bind spots were no smaller, her perspective still miniscule. Perhaps because she sought mystery, the veil was forever being pulled aside revealing layers beneath. These new layers squirmed, teasing her to explore into an even deeper maze of understanding, demanding her mind be contorted to fit the keyholes of other truths.

 She didn’t mind the challenge, she felt it made her more capable of enduring the waves of change.

Year after year she sought the abysmal layers, the glamour of their mystery subsequently replaced by the next layer. Down she fell into the iridescent worlds of reason, floating into the canyons and valleys of alien worlds. She fell like a piece of detritus from the sun-soaked surface, slowly disappearing into a greater blackness. The gravity of her dream-quests began to weigh more than the motions of practical things. She was neglecting her health.

Imperceptible, the foundations of her life were ignored. She ceased the considerations of the flesh, the needs of the stomach and the glamour of stimulation, she instead sought the endurance of the void. The molten gaze of previous truths, simple sentences that nailed her heart to the dark sky. Phrases like: “Revolution does not happen for moral reasons but rather, for practical ones.” Or, when falling into a weightless sleep: “That which changes, lives.”

Not that these phrases contained any secret wisdom, they simply let Jennifer dis-attach from the turbulence of the waking world, the monstrous Land of the Living, where creatures wear masks and lies are the walls of civilization. She stared with wide-open eyes into the night sky and felt its sulfur from behind the veil of darkness. Out there, deep in the recesses of space were countless furnaces, pulling with their nuclear tongues, drawing the contents of creation into their stomachs.

Jennifer was fascinated with stars. Their gravity caused the most fantastic distortions. She saw the photon-light of stars as a back-wash of some distant and divine cleansing, perhaps the decaying skin of a cosmic beast long since dead, the last sparks of its cold neurons. Jennifer loved the largest ideas made small and the smallest ideas made huge. The “stretch” as she called it could happen to anything, there was nothing that was un-stretchable, nothing that could resist the acidic dissolution of flexible perception.

The first concepts she stretched into oblivion were higher identities like nations. Later in life, concepts like family dissolved, turning into a glamour that faded with inspection. Then, the decay crawled into her head, and then into her dreams. First the idea of herself fell away, everything she did, or thought was traced and examined until she found its source. She discovered that every personality trait could be followed back like a river to a mountain and the mountain was biological, as was her habits and appetites. She found that her opportunities in life depended on her desires, and not a single desire was hers alone, all creatures had the same puppet strings. She found her actions were not hers, but things built on the foundations of her pre-existing conditions, qualities which moved to the tides of even larger structures, even larger motions.

Each step of investigation led to blood, her self-hood oozed out in a thick and oily enlightenment. Her self-awareness grew as her self-importance shrunk.

Once her self-hood turned into a puddle she could not be harmed. Nether shame nor encouragement, nether regret or pain, not even the tenderness of love could pierce her numbness. Then, after years of silence, language itself dissolved, but not for long.

The words fell from her lips like a pile of discarded clothes, silence crept in and stretched her out.

Without words or ideas, she fell into a terrible dream. She could feel the tension of distant suns pulling on her, large creatures pressuring her to an unnamed action. She would think on what should be done but no words could be used. She was helpless, and the terror rose up like a black wave made of a thick blanket, muffling everything. No sound could reach her, nothing had a solid form and she slipped into a weightlessness, distant and unending, as if the sky had stretched her into a thin needle.

It was this point, the of the tip of the needle that she returned to words. She named the terror and contained it, she returned to an order by which her biology allowed. She named the terror Carcosa.

The evocation was simple: She stretched the world into a thin darkness, so quiet and still that any thought would shatter it. She stayed in this stillness until the terror rose up, waiting until the blackness surrounded her, right up until the moment when the black wave would consume her, then she whispered the word Carcosa and the silence broke into crystalline jewels of creation.

For practical reasons Jennifer needed words, she could not endure the unnamed terror. She knew it was a deception; there was no one to deceive, only a reflex of a dissociated mind.

The Mark:

Over a careless horizon and down in the dream-time of Carcosa, an edgeless terrain of crawling vines reflected a gray turbulence overhead. Radiant storms of inky black contrasted with the twin suns and their sprawling shadows. The blackness swirled with colored hues; yellows and browns mixed only slightly, casting a tint of decay, as if the entire sky was a rain-soaked collection of tree leaves.

Jennifer floated weightlessly in the voluminous plumes of a brewing storm. Moments ago, she had propelled herself into the clouds by use of her mental will. The dream-time allowed for many things, and the simple use of concentration and focus could move her body through the air with effortless physical ease.

She wrapped herself in the dark clouds of an alien world, concentrating on the stillness of her breath. Too deep an inhale and she would wake up, she needed to be ghost for the storm to pass through her. She let out a little more air, adding to a turbulent carousel crashing around her. The clouds carried enormous amounts of kinetic energy, releasing their force into smaller eddies of hued heterogony, flowers of darkness blossomed in all directions.

Jennifer relaxed her concentration, letting the howl roll over her. She was weightless, half-transparent, occasionally dipping her awareness into the surrounding darkness. She slept in a nothingness until the storm began to dissipate. The black swirls returned to a calm horizon, and the howl turned into a whisper.

Jennifer floated in a half-sleep dream, listening to the winds of lost Carcosa. The whispers were almost silent, but nothing rests in Carcosa, whose twin suns forever rip and pull at the atmosphere.

As the day passed, which is indistinguishable from night, a new storm gathered in an equine shape, hooves of rolling thunder, a mane of darkness twisting with the gray light of the twin suns. Their heavy order of twilight preventing any permanent calmness. The horse-cloud reeled in slow motion, the storm front returning to Jennifer. She thought to define the clouds in a half-reflexive curiosity. Not too much focus or the dream melts. She flung herself through the air and looked again at the returning storm, it looked even more horse-like, a nebulous avalanche galloping towards her on the horizon.

From her perspective in the sky, the eyes were each a sun of Carcosa, whose black sands wait in eternal thirst for a tide that will never rise.  Black plumes flowed from the nostrils, quickening as the storm approached. The dull tone of the horizon provided a hypnotizing spectacle of abysmal delirium. This is what she searched for, these brittle moments.

Jennifer lost concentration and felt the rush of sound rise to a painful scream. She had lapsed in precaution and now the horse-cloud engulfed her. A sudden and jerky wave flung her ghostly form into a series of wrenching undertows. She was dissipated into a thin vapor, and her self-awareness twisted into smoky shapes. She could feel the teeth of the storm as great jets of inky darkness poured through her.

Jennifer woke in a sweat-soaked mattress, her body bruised from a physical seizure. She used a mirror to inspect herself, finding multi-colored bruises and a single hoof print impressed into the skin of her upper back. Her head pounded, a reminder for her not to stare at the twin suns of dim Carcosa, whose nightmare-storms trample the minds of dreamers.

Fictional Obituaries of Forgotten People:

Grak:

Grak started calling themselves something around the age of 8. Before then, using their mouth was reserved for testing berries, eating and the delirious pain of new teeth. Grak knew about all the practical things in life: heat, shelter, food, storage, masturbation, hiding, and the Sun.

Grak adored the Sun, it was the most intensely magical thing in existence. More mysterious and confusing than waterfalls, beaches, mountains and animals. Grak had no words for any of these things, just the impression of their existence. The beach had food, it had the easiest food there was. There was no one to teach Grak, but Grak found that rolling big rocks out to the edge of a low tide could trap fish. The tide would bring in fish and when it rolled back, the fish would stay in shallow pools. Grak always got hungry again, just like masturbation. Every day the hungers washed up like the tide, requiring maintenance.

Animals made strange noises and had hungers just like Grak. They could be crushed with rocks and eaten as food, when not near a familiar beach. Grak never met another human being. They saw their reflection in the still black waters of night occasionally. It didn’t change anything, the image wasn’t clear enough for grooming or inspection, just a reminder that Grak wasn’t like other animals.

Grak thought something was wrong due to physical differences. The furs and hides of other creatures helped, but Grak considered the lack of horns and teeth and hair to be a weakness, a deformation. Grak had no words for these feelings but felt them as strong as hunger, a heavy uneasiness that something was wrong, and that wrongness was deep within Grak.

While Grak wrestled with the senselessness and awe of the world, barely able to abstract in a single syllable name, another creature inside of Grak was masterfully succeeding at existence. A little plasmodium, a microscopic creature was getting ready to proliferate itself in the stomach of Grak.

So, in a manner of speaking; the little plasmodium was on the verge of intergalactic space travel. The amount of distant a human bipedal creature can travel would take a plasmodium eons upon eons to reach. Part of Grak’s brain knew there was a parasite within, but had no way to tell Grak, just a vague and suffocating self-loathing.

Grak didn’t suffer very long, merely 24 years, dying from the successful parasite.

Grak was collecting a fish from the tide pool, which had gotten trapped in a pool of shallow water in the tide-shadow of a large rock. The sunset was a beautiful orange and the clouds brushed the purple sky in a royal gray. A fever rolled over Grak and by the time the sun dipped under the horizon fever and vomiting occurred. The plasmodium was ready to leave, having collected the necessary nutrients from the human being for its procreation needs.

A button was pushed inside Grak’s brain, emptying everything. Another button was pushed and Grak was thrown into fit of sleep. Cramps, fever, and delirious visions of orange sunsets melting into a storm of pain and wrenching. Grak had been sick once from eating, this was more intense, this was a new tide.

Once the plasmodium exited the space-ship-human it no longer could push any buttons in Grak’s head. It went on its way, concerned with its life and its survival, like any other creature. Grak died from the fever, his brain showing him orange sunsets until the last neuron went out; screaming out its little existence in one abstracted syllable: Grak!

Moquequeloa:

Xeno worked most of his time underground. He was a root tender, an occupation designed to maintain the health of tree cities. Their roots required diligent tasks, applying distillates and oils, which are used to maintain their enormous size. Xeno’s entire family had been part of root management at some point of their life, their last name reflected the slow impression of their professional role in elven society. They were called the Blackroots.

Xeno worked alone, walking the long and hunched tunnels of the major roots. The truck was spacious, offering head-space to stand and stretch, but when the further roots required attention, he stooped and shuffled into the darkness. He carried candles, flint and a little piece of petrified root.

For the last 47 years he bent his back and crawled into the tight spaces around the roots. He smeared growth syrup on tree, inspected for unwanted parasites and looked for signs of underground creatures. Some of the dirt dwellers were harmless, some required a little distance.

Underneath the city, large worms and caves squirm in the darkness, often leaving caves or chasms open when only a few hours earlier there was only darkness and earth. Luckily the great trees helped when they could. If you spent enough time feeding and healing them, they warned you of underground currents. They didn’t want their little elves swallowed up by the roaming sinkholes.

Xeno loved listening to tree roots. They spoke in long notes of rumbling peace. Tranquility came with their size; any unease may take years to hear and longer still to know if a salve or sap helped their relief. He would put his ear down before crawling down a tiny tunnel, listen for any warnings, any movement of greater creatures. When all was silent, he crawled to a distant root system, often talking to the tree in calm reassurance.

One evening, or morning, (neither mattered when among the roots) he heard a whisper from a root. The root seemed dark, as if his candle light was dampened, muffled a little. The whispers rose out of the shadowed light with slow words: “I have found something elf, something the roots cannot pierce, something the dirt can not decay, and the worms avoid its presence. “

Xeno had never heard the tree talk to him, not that they couldn’t but rarely did they talk to anyone except the druids of the Grove or River. He trusted the tree and followed the whispers to a root system deep under the tap-root. Down he crawled, and the whispers guided him.

When he reached the end, a place where he could not travel further without digging or cutting. He put his ear to the root and waited.

The whisper rose in a soft wave, cresting into words of clear understanding. It was not the tree talking to him, it was someone else: “The tree has found a tomb, an ancient resting place of a long-forgotten person. Their bones are steeped in magic of some kind, and their arcane knowledge bubbles up from the dirt like a battlefield after a heavy rain. “

Xeno spoke to the darkness, his ear still against the darkened root: “Who are you? You are not the great tree.”

As he strained to hear more he relaxed into the darkness and waited. The whispers returned moments later, as if the message had traveled up through the soil in slow motion. He could feel the rumble before the whispers started, he could feel a presence that was soon to be named: “I am the Lady of Brambles, and the roots are my fingers. These arcane decompositions are no use to me, they plague me with their disembodied clarity.”

Xeno was only slightly familiar with the arcane, he was not a student nor had the desire to be one. He knew what the Lady of Brambles meant, wizards would memorize diagrams, words and visions in their heads until the design was tattooed inside their heads. The style is learning was called the Vancian method.

If what the Lady says is true, then the visions themselves are trapped inside tombs as a disembodied brilliance.

Xeno was overcome with terror: strange things whispering to him in the darkness about ancient magic. He fled the confines of those root chambers. He spent 3 days talking with wizards, and his family, both of which said that visions cannot be disembodied, perhaps he should take a vacation, take some time to get out and see the wide horizon rather than the dirt and darkness.

Sleep was uneasy, and the Lady of Brambles visited his dreams, she dressed herself as a woman laced in vines and thorns. He opened her arms, spread the stalks of needles so he could pass and showed him a taste of the magic. She showed him a piece of the vision buried beneath. In a dream she poured the brilliance into his eyes and flushed his nightmares with vistas of fire.

What laid underneath was a terrible power and if he did not pluck the decaying magic from the ground someone else would, some other creature could unleash the fire, and wash his home away in ashes. After 3 days he calmed his fear, began to trust his dreams and the Lady of Brambles. Having no help from anyone, he descended back into the roots to listen.

He returned again to the same root chamber, he put his ear down and waited. It wasn’t long before he heard the scratches and clamor of brambles and then the voice of the Lady. “The magic is bright, it may hurt to hold the image too long in your head Xeno. To dull the light, place a root within your ear so the tree may transfer the spell without the noise of flesh. “

Xeno had only his fathers petrified root, he placed it in in his ear, and waited, fearing again if he should trust a voice from the deep blackness of the dirt.

The darkness shattered. A wave of crystal clarity rolled over Xeno, sublime order, cosmic diagrams of immaculate linework, alive, flowing like a scroll or a river. The wave hit Xeno hard, his eyes rolled back, his back arched in painful spasms, he screamed until he could not hear his own voice. Purples and blue, black and green, rich color of cascading force pushed down on him and turned his scream into a whisper.

The darkness returned, leaving Xeno alone in in the root chamber. He heard the retreating whispers of the Lady: “Seek the burial places of wizards, listen to the roots and I will show you the brilliance locked away in these moldy tombs.”

A few days later Xeno Blackroot left his beautiful elven village, his trees and his roots. On his fingertips was the flame, he had only to think of the brilliance and fire would dance in his palm. He did not have to memorize any arcane formula or design; the magic was burned his brain. The disembodied fire had found a home, its hunger now pointed at the graves of archwizards.

Xeno dreamed of the Lady of Brambles again before leaving. This time her thorns were not seen, her green stalks full of life, a soft illumination washed over him, soothing his terror. Whispers of new visions, and new brilliance lay at the edge of possibility, waiting for him.

Wallflower:

I was 16, I was trapped. There was nothing that showed me what the future would look like, no vision. I saw Kurt Cobain opt out of the whole mess in middle school. High school was the same story, a bunch of wild creatures figuring out how to crawl in the adult world.

Like most successful creatures I did what I knew, I consumed my way out. I consumed booze, weed, and acid. The only door that offered me anything was acid: It let me taste the terror, it let me know there was something bigger than my puny self-conception.

My school had a rash of suicide. Not the depressive kind, the kind that takes the high achievers and grinds them into dust. I had suicidal friends, for some it was a clear door out. I don’t blame them.

I did drama club at this time. I was in a play called “Go Ask Alice” about a girl who was dosed with acid without her knowledge. The horror was two-fold; memorizing lines during the week, dosing on the weekend. It rivaled late night imaginations of unprotected sex.

My friend Steven owned a car. We were heading to a hook-up for some Jesus Christ acid. The car was a green Dodge Dart. Steven was balls deep into his own vibe, he liked expensive shoes, he had a job and was a senior.  He had plans to be a lawyer, master money, be a smooth operator like the gangsters in movies. We were veterans of terror at this point, travelers testing how the glamour of our heroes held up against the spaghettification of the void.

We got to the house at 11:30pm. A couple with shaved heads were reclined on the couch watching the news. We bought 8 hits, took 1 each on the spot and sat down a few moments. They put on the Doors movie, a familiar bedtime story. The ghost of Jim Morrison was thrashing around, trying to work out of his equivalent mess when the acid snuck up on us.

Acid is a laughing drug, it ramps you up like childhood sugar, then launches you off into a teeth-grinding intensity. That’s the rollercoaster we wanted, and the ride was just starting. I watched the Doors as the yellow/blue/red separated into 3 different versions of everything.

Eventually I went to the bathroom, looked at my black holes for a few minutes and let the slime soak in. When I returned to the living room, Steven was ready to go.

He took the backroads, avoiding too much interaction with high speed objects. We got into a conversation about the movie, finding lizard king amalgamations in the world around us. His tiny mouth pursed on smaller sentences, barely audible. I ignored it, figuring he was probably deep in his own fears.

My brain spun out into all sorts of crash scenarios, all sorts of twisted combinations of metal, flesh and circumstance. Like most trips, I was just a little flea on the back of my imagination as it stretched out in its own directions. I endured it, I had no other choice, keeping it together was the test, merely the doors of perception.

Then he spoke clearly, and the words turned into white streaks as the median dividers rose up over the road: “You ever think that you are a wallflower? Maybe all this existence is a story is about me and you are my sidekick.”

Truth itself had skewered me in the ears. His tiny mouth smiled, and his eyebrows wavered into a different shape and visibly looked like Han Solo. I looked down at myself and I was Chewbacca, I tried to reply but all that came out was a muffled “heirk”. My mouth was full of hair, I looked out at the stars and the Millennium Falcon accelerated.

I was going to die, I knew it.

Then I my feet disappeared, I was turning into a plant. My legs were searching for dirt to grow into but found only vibrating steel. My limbs reached out to the door handle, but my thumbs didn’t work, they had turned into leaves. My eyes were hot, I knew the acid was there, but the terror was more real that the truth. I was a flower, flowers get annihilated all the time, if we crashed it would be a common thing, it wouldn’t be a tragedy.

We got home safely. I was silent for the rest of my trip, my mouth glued shut. I passed over the threshold of another door with my soft-petaled eyes.