"Contours Worth Levelling"

Trapped inside the contours of your own pallid skull, you begin your schemes anew.

Imagine Byzantine tunnels (awakening), hopping across the smouldering gridiron of mundane circumstance carved across your synapses (contemplating). Wantonly, abruptly—edges charred, now and forever. Angles for the sake of angles—your meals (hundreds) and travels (thousands) and love-partners (priceless) just pale shades of separation.

You breach it, again (coax auxiliary synapses) with a stare. A gesture, directed at the sky above your head (singular-sol system, adequate bio-sphere). Rolling shoulders fit to punch out giants. Dreading the gods that wait beyond your sight and touch and sheer unbridled contemplation (there is life). Because there are gods with your name on their judgements (beyond rest, beyond sleep). They don't float, they seep; they don't wait, they exist. Spiting you, in spite of you.

The scheme waits, flounders across that cruel gridiron with the singed edges of forced habit (proliferate). And consume, and engulf and engorge (and proliferate)—

—and live. Shrug your shoulders, kick the duvet away. Straighten your nightshirt and stand. Creak for a moment, the spring air licking at your waistline and the curl of your shins. Stare into the still-settling dawn, the ambient drone of the mopeds and bazaar-carts and express trains crammed with the dead-awake. It's all—

Enough. 

The tunnels are misdirected, the gridiron pointless but grounded. Faithless and flawless and utterly depraved—enforced by waking and reflection and hunger and (proliferate) with every impulse, every tap and link and call to an ether you can't really describe. Wouldn't want to, when you can (proliferate) because it's—

—stupidly simple. A vocation without an office: a title without a position. Figures without accounts. Nothing to worry about, paid with everything worth doing. In full, on demand, by the pound. Looming in the skies outside your windows are—

Invading. Spores wrap their claws around the upper atmosphere and tug, hard. Sink anti-oxygen enzymes deep into the sweet spring air, invading the mouths of billions. Suppressing any screams the populace may have had. Extinguishing any records of your passing. It swells into contours that block the gridiron, momentarily. What sparks died forever in that moment of submission? That defeat as seven billions souls died and—

—your blouse emerged from the wash, unscathed—

You are nameless—

—you are faceless. A destroyer of worlds—

a slave to routine?

 ***

Back. Wringing out what I can. 

***

<work> Scraps, "arachnae.we" disaster arcs

<words> "Rogues"--George R.R. Martin+Gardner Dozois (editors), "California"--Edan Lepucki

<noise> "No One Moves, No One Gets Hurt"--Bedouin Soundclash

<screens> N/A

<food+drink> Homemade pho. Dinner+breakfast.

<quotes> "Let us die, with music"--unnamed Russian lunar lander director, 1969.  

  

 

"Deluge"--Sketches

A hundred Andromeda suns fizzle under ether yokes. Gravity chafes, sends sparks flying into the long dark. Touches off nebulae and pockets of hyper-combustible gasses. Cataclysms send plasma tendrils deeper into the black: gnawing, hungry. 

They awaken. 

A bare and colourless body: blank eyes, an angular skull with no soft edges. Hairless cheeks, a slash of a mouth, a triple-folded grey loincloth. Ancient, but freshly minted. Only the youngest of bodies can house the god-tapped. 

A white plain soaks up starlight in all directions. No cover, no wind,no foliage. Silence, stillness.

A red dwarf is hungry. Corona arcs flip and loop in twenty-million mile chains, engulfing a delicate array of ice-moons. 

They blink. Ponder calculations never before sung or whispered or written.

Snap.

Engulfed and unshriven. Polar caps remain untouched. The coronas divert around an inscrutable cone, simmering into nothingless at the system's edge. A hundred thousand warrens under the ice flows and glacial lakes chitter in relief and offer fresh sacrifices. 

Reigning in the dwarf takes focus. Multilinear incantations struggle to refit the shackles of gravity and force. They blink. They sweat. Serene and slender fingers tremor, then tighten across the folds of a loincloth ragged with rips.

Done.

There is time to meditate before the next destabilization. 

They exhale: slowly. It rushes into a gasp and leaves them coughing. Hacking, on a lone conjuresphere overseeing the Andromeda galaxy. A freshly minted body is revolting against this pruning of the heavens.

Shreds of awareness refuse to unknot and retreat. Asteroids pummel a gargantuan desert world baked at the epicentre of three suns. Another sentient species overruns itself in hordes of murderous theorists. Nine suns fade out, cores disintegrating on the remains of their own solar wind.

Stability is nothing when awareness is uncompromising.

A moment. They grasp at last-ditch vector solutions. Throw a blanket of unvarnished gravitational force over everything. Turn away.

And inward, recalling.

A shimmering plain-world layered in strata of sand-crystal. Endless deposits, encasing a molten core eternally burning its way to the deposits above. The fatal flaw as artistic flourish and cathartic anchor. Miracles undo themselves, always.

Constructed with painstaking care. Decades of contemplating the geosphere,  articulating the planet's inner core, considering magma streams. Centuries of surface holocaust to burn a million pristine beaches to glass. Fifteen comets, aimed perfectly, to shatter the surface glass in all the right places. 

Life, if there'd been the patience.

They sighed and waved. Annihilated the asteroids. 

 Back to regular writing. It'll be online most days: a variety of genres, styles, and modes. Getting back into fiction after an unintended hiatus. This isn't planned or drafted, but it's what I have.