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This is our story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration. The first time you get our message, you only / find one thread. It mimics your language in / its simplest form, a single strand of words / laid end to end. You will have to work hard if / you want to understand us properly. You / must learn to hold more than one thread of / language simultaneously in your mind.
As with Robert Johnson, a lot of people who believed in the devil also believed that Jack Malagan had made a deal with him. Jack was a six-string prodigy, getting pulled onstage by the likes of Grohl and Kravitz by the time he was twelve. He could swing the blues as hard as Bonamassa, but it was just the foundation for his love for rock.
Lester swung his chainsaw, mowing a path through the mob of needle-toothed quantum parasites, while Kit batted clean-up with her Louisville Slugger. Across the plain of dark rock, their destination: a whirling, gnashing portal that could doom all humanity. It wasn’t ideal timing for an awkward conversation, but it never was.
Welcome, Stranger! This is a story for you, you who wait for my words to fall into your ear, so that we can share being and become more than we are alone. The tales I have to tell today are woven into this fabric that unrolls before you as I work my Loom. As to who or what I am, you have the right to ask, but I won’t tell you as yet. To be honest, I am not quite sure, myself.
All of us remember what Mother’s Day was like before we became sterile: flowers and candy for living mothers and tears for dead ones and anger at bad ones, and women who couldn’t be mothers or who’d lost children marinating in grief, and nobody really profiting from any of it except Hallmark and the restaurants and florists.
There is a city called Salemo. Salemo sits atop a cliffside at the edge of a sea. The water of that sea is always clearest blue, except when it is clearest green, or clearest purple. The colors change with the tides, but the waves are always safe to swim in, with schools of luminescent fish dashing between the coral reefs. In Salemo, you can spend your days lying on its pristine beaches.
Jo drives urgently as they race toward the star, not sure how far to go, racing because the baby is coming tonight, now, and He (a He, of course) is supposed to be born under the star, that’s how the story goes. The story, the new story and the old, begins with a visitor, a messenger. Molly had just logged out for the day when the monk knocked on her door.
I know you’ve been following me since I left school, boarded the train, and took to the alley. Why didn’t I run? I’m not scared of you anymore. Right now, I’m scared for you. Be careful the way you drag me into a corner, shove me against the wall, dig your puny fists into my belly, and search me for valuables if you do not want to incur the wrath of my father.
mãe, There are few moments that I remember with clarity. From those early days, I recall mostly a vast, pervading numbness. Profound dissociation. I remember Salt. I remember Hog. At night, I would curl between them. With my eyes closed, I would try to see them as they were just in that moment. I would block out what I knew would be.
So, this is awkward. We aren’t at the stage in our relationship where I’d feel comfortable revising your life-poem on the fly. Even as a backup plan . . . yet here we are. I’m sorry. I know I should have said that to you before the anesthesiologist put you under and the surgeon opened up your skull. But now the surgeon is staring at the quivering quill in my hand.
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