We must sacrifice with all our hearts.
Even if others do not know us.
We must fight to save the world.
— unknown man sitting in front of the church at Zitlala

✦

That blond boy is going to save the world. His birth was preordained. The breakers of hope and the eaters of love, slithering and wet and as long as your intestines are, long as they need to be—they don’t stand a chance. His secret club met after school and devised a plan. And he—the greatest scout of all, with so many badges, kind and intelligent, strong and quick, devoted to God and beloved of angels—put it into action. He did everything right. And he has by God he has the power of friendship.

That blond boy is tied up in a garbage bag.

Only Cancer remains.

✦

You smell him a mile away, wearing his stomach for lip gloss. In a shaft of atoll sun, merciless except where the trees cut it, bleeding shadows across those slender legs. A tight little backpack throws his back back, leather straps with steel snaps digging into the soft wet clam meat of his armpits.

His ribbon-bound neck sweats from gym class, and the strain of throwing up. Rape whistle sticks to his soaked white shirt, clinging to the nearly-translucent hollow of his sternum. His teeth peek out, pastel braces wrapping his overbite in colored bands of tight rubber. He sees you, and thick dark eyebrows dig into his skull.

Dark chocolate melts in the sun, weeping across black glass. A fly has died in it, stuck by its wings.

The man sits in the brown leather seat, head hanging back in the cockpit recline of the headrest, mouth open. Another fly buzzes around his mouth.

The tropical sun creeps into his dark hair, heating it white-hot at the tips. His eyes snap open. He gasps, and his chest swells with air. His tongue writhes in his mouth, discovering the bad taste there. His heart beats badly, heaving with his stomach. The agony in his head has him checking for an open wound. His hands feel dead and clumsy, delivering no sensation.

Silver foil covers the surface in front of him. He touches it, then stares in horror at his leathery brown hands, neatly demarcating the healthy skin of his arms like transplants. But his knuckles are pink. And there is a strap across the wrist. A singular wound.

Brown leather driving gloves.

He smells bittersweet chocolate fused to the dashboard. Dead flies are crucified in the brown flow, gilded like corpses in a mudslide exposed to the all-over glare of a midday sun. Gold foil glints like a shred of solar sail.

He reaches for the brown mess, and the sun bites him like a dog. He stares at the brightness of his hand, tendons luminous and distended, suspended in a radiance outside this universe. The hairs seem to tremble, dust motes floating like angels glimpsed from the most extreme distance.

He pulls his hand back into the shade. Nothing is worth burning for.

✦

I run my hand along my arm. Bony. Maybe 5’8’, 5’9’. Adult male. Capricorn.

Something is written on the inside of my wrist. Permanent marker. Worn away, hard to read.

There is a small, wide mirror mounted to the ceiling, tilted forcefully away from me. I pull it back. The glass is covered in writing.

BEAUTIFUL

GORGEOUS

PERFECT BEING

There is so much written, I can’t see myself through it. Not marker. Looks like melted chocolate.

What?

I push the mirror, breaking eye contact. The tiny holes in my gloves are hissing like a phone mouthpiece.

I grab the foil and it rips away in a single sheet of sun shade and the parking lot is raining with silent spatters of sunlight, soundlessly hissing germicidal sparks, and the world develops around it like a photograph. I know this place like you know the sky when you emerge from a pool, strange and glimmering and wet and suddenly huge, pounding with atmosphere in your ears. And I’ve never been in one of those chlorine vats of death, but I know it the same way.

My arm. That was why I needed light. To read this faded marker. I rip away the other sun shades and fold the foil panels like wings into the backseat, and this is when I read it, poised between hot light, my gorge high and tight.

Ribbon.

Gift. Present. Past. Future. Waiting. Unwrap. Something of value. I trace it in my mouth, and deeper down. An ache, an emptiness, a tang.

I taste the chocolate on the dashboard, suddenly certain this is it.

It is not.

Car. That’s this thing. There is a key, even though this is not a door. I twist it. Nothing happens. I fling my hand out, making my mind empty as my stomach, and it wraps around the fearstick, gearstick, doing what it should. I jerk the key again and the machine turns on, loud and hungry all around me. I think I’ve woken up in a trash compactor. Shhh. Just a car.

Why aren’t we moving? I’ve turned the key. I’ve jerked on this oddly organic lever. I wonder if next I might play an enchanted melody or find a false bookcase.

The car leaps forward and a rancid burst of sweat fills it. I roll the window down to the bone and piece together what happened. My foot nudged this pedal. It’s just like a sewing machine. I step on it and the car bucks again. I like stepping on things. I crush it to the floor and the car screeches across the lot. I stomp the slower-goer, and it stops.

The smell of food wafts through the open window, salted by the sea. Shrimp and corn in a chocolatey mole sauce. I don’t think I want that? Although it seems like a good investment, in the long run.

Someone is burning a bonfire. I hate that. But I want the smoke. My finger twitches. Yellow nails. I’m a smoker. But I think I want a little more than that.

We leave the parking lot. My eyes adjust, showing me a tropicool slice of coast, shrill with bikini sluts, tourists, and purists. “A Gorgeous Beach”…I see…how cynically constructed to gull the senses. The sun is a cheap coin of the lowest denomination, tossed endlessly as God wagers against me. I SUPPOSE YOU WOULD LIKE ME TO FEEL “GOOD” RIGHT ABOUT NOW??

On the sidewalk, a pack of bare legs in black shorts and skirts. Sensory homunculi of ammonia-bearing surfaces, warped sculptures of nubile limbs tied in knots, blinking and shrieking.

Ribbons perch on their necks like fly wing trophies, bloodpink and perfumed with nape. My mouth fills with juices. But on the atoll, someone is always watching. Everything folds on itself here, a pop-up book. I follow them up the hill, driving slowly, gaining altitude.

The atoll interior is a wet pink anus of halobacteria. The bubblegum bloom of the lagoon. Dark shapes are visible below the surface, if you can tell them from the reflections of the future. An armada died here.

White clouds float like tufts of toilet paper, casting shadows on the bismuth-pink waters. Below them, porcelain isles make the clouds look like reflections. Shards of the porcelain palace. When the world was perfect. It is sealed with cairns of hazard steel, redpink polyps of INNOCENT. That name is like a brand on my flesh. My knuckles squeeze around the wheel. I look outward, heart pounding.

The atoll is an urbanized halo in a menstrual sea. Beyond the halo: guano isles orbit like teeth, and black freighters groan, bound for Continent, heavy with nitrogen-rich batdung. The entire system of the world is open to me, both visible and transformed by my awful omniscience…

I almost run over a child. But I step on the stopper in time. I am very clever. Even cleverer than I can imagine. This technique of not running over the child is part of my cunning. This car is driven by a good man…with wheels of virtue…

The youths disappear into a awful mountain of life.

This is the last stop before the phantasy wilderness which rises on haunches of retinal purple and hyper-chlorophyll green before crawling into the dark furrow of the atoll canyon, where tidal pink breaches the palustrous skeletons and glittering halophytes of the SwampPalus, the SaltSaltu, scaffolded by a century of failed railways and walkways and always which form canopies over mangrove dungeons, sucking labyrinths of dark brine where things fall and stick and drown, wedged into hungry cages of pneumatophoric roots, breathing oubliettes, and above, the high trail of the tropical saneforest great for hiking until swallowed by the guano caves where the bats make their waxen cathedral, intestinal mazes, a guano dragon hoard, or the citadel of the climax jungle, iridescent with suicidal rainwater draining through a million thirsty leaf-lips into a royal carpet of corpses and cave mouths which drain to the ocean floor, understory whores and omnivores. In aggregate, the place known as the Defile, as it always was, and always will.

Defile StatePark.

Immediately dark and cold. I look back at the gate, as if it might slam shut on those big rails. The atoll is already hidden from me, in this cool and private night, with sun held in strange hostages.

Where are they?

I lean out the window and my nostrils catch the air like sails. The roll of tires over dirt is soothing, like a machine I once knew. So many leaves are falling and the branches are still full.

The road ends at a facility walled with volcanic rock, platforms spilling above it like hanging gardens. The canopy is cut open with laser precision, opened up horribly as if God could witness any, any of this. A science fiction garden, a camp palace, CAMP INNOCENT.

I park where the other cars are. I like cars. You can sit inside them and watch, just as I am watching from behind these eyes. With their dark uniforms and tanned legs, the youths resemble the parasitoid wasp Muscidifurax raptorellus, a hunter of flies. The scouts of INNOCENT.

A bad smell is starting to develop.

In the backseat, a new set of clothes wrapped in clear plastic, identical to the ones I am wearing, which smell like something died in them. White dress shirt. Brown slacks. Tear the tags off. Snap. Snap. I’m outside the car and it feels strange to walk, adjusting to the gait of these bones and this height and where did they go? It’s faster to shut my eyes and swing my head, tugged by hooks in my nostrils. There. Entering the shrinemouth, that marble safe room with zodiac emanations carved from rose quartz. A wall of foliage surrounds it, their flesh cut into shards. Some linger and light torches, despite the bright sun. A napalm reek of citronella. The muscle memory of authority. I must be ready to be inspected. I wouldn’t want them to think I’m some kind of pervert.

I reach into my pocket. Nice wallet. Some kind of reptilian leather. Or a fish. Along with the toxic holograms of the local currency, it contains a few bills of queenmark, dark and modern with snail trails of security foil. Was I traveling? It would be sensible to be someone like that. Someone without ties.

Pan-archipelago ID card. A dead face tries to look at me. I tilt the plastic so glare obliterates it. Scan the text, the icons. I was right. I am a Capricorn. First name: RIPARIAN

I whisper the name, and it’s like I swallowed bile. The first three syllables dance in the front of the mouth, then it pulls to the back of the throat, sawing like a cello, lingering and spiteful.

The swarm dissolves from the shrine, leaking into the halls and gardens of the camp, becoming unattainable as a cloud of mites. And you know what they say about the cookie jar. I don’t like cookies all that much but I like sticking my hands in jars.

I follow my nose and find it. Shining bright in the pack. Skin gilded with bacteria. Didn’t shower this morning.

I stare at the ribbon around her—his throat. His sun-burnt neck is charred with bug bites like cigarette burns.

He’s headed to an outlying restroom. Without his pack.

The one who doesn’t fit in. That’s the one I fit in.

Cancer with the blond streak through his black bangs, peroxide purified.

Cancer with the bloodpink ribbon around his neck like a permanent slash of the carotid.

Cancer with the fetal alcohol syndrome.

Cancer at the altar, a wafer on his tongue.

Will this, too, turn to filth inside him? Or vanish miraculously?

Cross the marble floor. Approach the porcelain font of holy water. Seraphed or plain, the font is always the same. His reflection in the tranquil water, which flows from the CrystalSpring, free of algal pink and tropical sin. This water does not carry the blood of our stain of our—

Confess your sins.

Cancer Prize. Snug ribbon. Smug face. Member of the Halo Club. A real good boy. Real tight ass. So anal.

Confess.

He’s been slovenly. He knows all kinds of words to describe his mistakes. Slovenly, like damp, moldy leaves hanging over him. Skipped his shower again. He doesn’t know why. The handle was turning. Screeching. Whining—

I was lazy. That’s a good one. It’s a stupid kind of bad. The kind they can beat out of you. He can’t tell anyone about the mess inside him—

Confess.

He is self-conscious about his mouth. The cleft lip was poorly repaired, stretching his lip a little too tight, already congenitally inclined to showing off his braceface overbite. Wired with gold and he’s so grateful. What it means to him, is he gets to be an angel too. When he was fostered, it was like getting to visit heaven early. But it took time to correct his congenital fangs. Orthodontic headgear, drooling for a year. And lots of drilling. Now the overbite is the only thing keeping him from the family photo and four perfect smiles. He wants to hide in a dark place until then. But at this moment, he’s forced to expose everything, fingers digging under the ribbon as his throat convulses and he drops to his knees and the marble turns to tile and the porcelain fills with toilet paper. The gawky cartilage of his throat stretches the ribbon, bulging with the contents of his stomach, which explode over his teeth in a spray of acid, spattering the interior and slopping into the bowl as his rape whistle clatters against the sides, dangling and soaked.

Cancer watches his caustic saliva stream into the chunky soup like the hanging vines of a cenote, strands of drool whipping back up into his mouth, tainted with toilet water. The smell makes his esophagus paranoid, muscles tightening as his sinuses inhale more fuel for the part of his brain that says, we have been poisoned, or, we have entered an unclean place—

He can still smell it. Black and glistening. The bloated trash bag. He stuck his knife into the taut plastic, iridescent blade swallowed by that black void, and death burst from it. A snapshot of terror and decomposition.

The bag was full of all the chocolate bars the scout didn’t sell, a brown bog body pregnant with decomposition, every fold of his lungs coated with inhaled chocolate and fecal particulate. Gold wrappers covered him like an imperial dress of lamellar scales, blinding him with riches. INNOCENT INNOCENT it said over his eyes. INNOCENT CHOCOLATE.

Cancer’s backpack lays on the floor, bars spilling out like bullion. $4 TEKN (teocuitlatl, ‘excrement of the gods’; GOLD)/$2 XERAFIM/$1 QUEENMARK. His stomach gurgles lower down. He pushes the bars back inside, against the cooling strip, so they won’t melt everywhere. He didn’t notice he was holding his breath. His lungs heave, sudden and deprived, and a fat flare of acid reignites his throat—

Flies and ants swarmed the flapping slit of the trash bag within seconds, coating the scout’s precious biomass like the ash of a pyre corpse. Under the dark static of vermin, under the mud of death, was someone like you. But the uniform had been ripped open, and there was no ribbon. Throat swollen under a deep sea rictus, as if the sin the ribbon was holding back had burst free.

Cancer hopes he got sick, somehow, from the corpse. He was in the same black cloud of insects, dots of feces and blood hovering in the air, tainted with parasites. He always liked being sick. It meant someone had to take care of him. And it was, if you think about it, a kind of drug. Misty vision, time distortion, altered thinking, purging of the digestive tract. And when he is sick, he gets medicine. And medicine is a drug.

Painkillers. Who doesn’t want to kill pain?

The bittersweet dessert of cough syrup. He drank a whole bottle once. His prayers were extra vivid that night and he felt extremely devoted to God. His eyes kept rolling back to heaven. Nauseous wings sprung from his heels and wrists and he flew naked through the shower. He threw up and watched the purple slime flow down the drain, hot water raining on his back. It smelled good and he wished all his insides were like that.

The chunky soles of his hiking boots are splayed behind him, looking too big for his skinny legs, like a toon rabbit. Gold crucifixes dangle like charms from the stitching, jangling with his heaving. His knees ache on the tile, bruising just above the long socks, but if he stands, he thinks his stomach would snap like a trap.

A little air comes up and he touches his mouth, covering it from an invisible viewer. Is he going to throw up again? Stinking, thinking. Bile radiates. Tilt your nose away. Or it will happen again.

He folds his hands, nose tilted upward, away from the puke, toward the heavens. In the shrine, there is so much amazing dialog. The agony of hell, and the sweet release of repentance. But only the toilet makes him feel it. This desperate, feverish bargaining, forced into a full body prayer, folded over, kneeling, hands tight, oral repetition—martyred until he’s expelled all his sin in a tangible, look-at-it, smell-it sludge.

This is your prayer.

I am afraid of acid.

I am afraid of being dissolved.

The lights go out and he is staring into a black hole. Only the tiniest glimmer tells him the water is still there. Only in the darkness are the cracks in the world revealed. Needlepricks of external light, the place where a single ant can crawl through, or a fly gets stuck in the walls.

Lights on. He is looking at his stupid face again. Just a bad circuit. A mutant puke reflection, overbite peeking through the vibrant slurry. Wipe your mouth. Tug your ribbon tight. Temperance. Chastity. Discipline.

His hands are flushed red. Pink almond soap drips through his fingers, as if the lagoon bloom was oozing directly through the faucet. He washes again. Maybe they’re clean now.

Under the almond-floral scent, a note of acid surprises him. He gags, gripping the sink, terrified he’ll have to use it, sick of seeing everything as a container for the contents of his stomach. He can’t let the filth inside him get out. He gulps down a big mouthful of digestive juice.

“Don’t swallow.”

✦

Riparian’s voice has the quality of an inert stress. A persistent whine, almost invisible to the ears. It starts out strong enough, then gets high at the end of words, dragging them out and leaving them there. Not thin enough to be called nasal, like Cancer is prone to, air leaking through that cleft palate. A coffee table that might break. Words that you could inspect if you liked, although they aren’t of much interest. Speaking through a taut latch, wish I could help you officer. A voice that was used for a different body.

✦

He didn’t hear Riparian enter over the buzz of faulty wiring. He looks up, the black powder under his watery eyes running like mascara. Kohl worn by scouts against the glare of the sun. His rape whistle swings over the sink, jerking with suppressed gagging. A slimy chunk of his insides sticks to the whistle, so wet it seems about to slide off. But it clings, moist and glistening, half-digested by his juices, adhering to the plastic like a smashed fly.

What is this look of recognition? Did he see Riparian following him? Or is it just recognition of the universal adult, unseen as soon as they’re seen, a generic authority that eliminates any need for the personal.

Don’t swallow.

Cancer speaks carefully, trying to dampen the nasality of his cleft palate. “Why?”

“Your mouth is trying to protect itself from the acid. But you should spit, not swallow. Or you’ll feel sicker.”

He’s so ill the mere suggestion opens him up, saliva overflowing the basin of his lip. Kohl darkens the drool, a black tear filling the translucent rope until it snaps and collapses the curse into the shimmering drain, a bubble of him sticking to the rim.

A friendly word of advice, soft and humming with the wires. “Then you should rinse with water, or the acid will erode your enamel.”

He slurps from the faucet, then spits. He smiles apologetically, gold braces wet and shiny. “Thank you.”

A sudden repulsion fills the parasite, at the taint of gratitude in the boy’s voice. A pathetic, soft-belly glimpse. That he could derive this from such a simple, empty interaction gives Riparian a stomachache.

Cancer sniffs, and the parasite becomes self-conscious. Does he stink, still, after a fresh change of clothes? On the atoll, everyone sweats like a pig. But this is an enclosed space, and the boy is tense. You can’t say hello if you don’t say goodbye.

✦

Cancer slings his pack over his shoulder and opens the door. For a moment he is framed by angel-light between his slender legs, a wishbone begging to be broken.

A whiff of jasmine hits his nostrils, strong as perfume or rot. The weight of chocolate drags on his small bones. Then he’s gone.

✦

Riparian turns to follow, then freezes like a startled cat. His reflection is trapped in the mirror.

He sweeps his hair back and it slithers disobediently through his fingers, black tines too sharpened by sweat to control. Long, wiry lashes cage his eyes. His slender body could disappear sideways. But viewed from the front, he’s a citizen, nothing sinister about him. Just a cerebral something—a failed playboy—if he could just stop sweating. Or is he just a rat? His lips aren’t over-full but they are set a little too insistently in the jaw behind sullen inkplumes of eyebrows. Maybe he has already rotted through, or been replaced in subtle strands of keratin and muscle fiber. A dark and poisonous fossil, a coprolite shade. He traces his finger through the dusting of e. Coli on the mirror, the plumes of toilet backblast. BEAUTIFUL. PERFECT. BEING. He sticks his tongue out, craving to taste the words. His hair flows alongside in tingling tendrils—

His hand slams into the glass, glove protecting him from the sensation of this molten mirror, incandescent with juvenile bacteria.

We will never allow them to see us. Until it’s too late. And this is what we have in common with God.

Cancer crawls inside the playground slide, a tunnel of chunky red plastic that bathes him in a mucosal, colonoscopic glow. He drops a handful of wood chips and kneels on them. His knees are already sensitive from the restroom tile, so the pain is quick and aching. He deserves to hurt, needs to hurt to erase the shame of being witnessed in digestive agony. His prayer heats up, a tightly squeezed ember.

Cancer knows that billions of people are praying right now, and he’s just one of them. But he also knows he happens to be one of the few special boys God gives a shit about. And God is going to help him with the—

He takes out his notebook. Is it a mystery? Or a mission? Mystery seems old-fashioned. Mission seems hubristic. He’s just a scout, not an agent.

Case of the…? Case seems overly formal.

He writes (in permanent marker, because consequences are forever):

THE BLACK BAG TORTURES

And now his pencil, pastel pink and heavily chewed. The tool of uncertainty. The tool of mistakes. He scribbles in a cramped, learning-disabled hand:

FACTOID: There is a pseud in the park.

PUTTING US IN BAGS

THE VESSEL

✦ Adult?
✦ Kid?

Adult would be stronger. But a kid could get around…less scrutiny.

✦ Friend?
✦ Stranger?

The pseud probably isn’t one of us. Everyone was just tested.

On the atoll, taking your shots means more than vaccines. Cancer loves when bad things happen, because he gets to drink high-proof, government-standardized alcohol. His brain feels normal swimming in that warm haze, reunited with his mother’s womb.

THE LAIR

It would be easy for a pseud to hide in the park. And how fun to do anything you want at any time. You could go to the bloomside arcade (ignoring the women with sinful clothing and rouged breasts and you can see their thongs and—) or ride the ferrous wheel or win valuable prizes or buy one, two, even three milkshakes, or put someone in a bag who didn’t want to go in that bag. Can’t stop thinking about the bag.

TELL WHAT HE PUTS IN THE BAGS

Or she…?

Pseuds don’t have a gender. They just wear you.

What would that be like? He thinks of wearing his foster brother’s body, just for one day. To be blond and real, to belong so completely. Or you could wear a girl’s body. That would be insane. Haha you could touch boobs…the other boys do what-ifs like that. But Cancer always thinks about the clothes. So many more clothes, with all the colors.

The torture-killer needs a name.

Halo Killer?

That seems like a great name. And very unique. But there’s so many good names. Trash Night. Halo Cutter.

He touches his neck, fingers curling into the warm silk. The ribbon can be worn all kinds of ways.

Tied in bunny ears, like a trash bag, or the way he still ties his shoes because he struggles with the double-knot.

In a bow, like a gift.

Worn loose, ceremonial, spilling like blood from his throat.

WHAT DOES IT WANT?

For a moment he considers the sick thrill of that torture, and it is a combination of 1) the bag splitting open under his knife as if he was complicit in the violence, and 2) the act of inserting a tape into the VCR while knowing it contains a gory videolaga he is not allowed to watch, a violence he has elected to observe and excite himself with, and 3) the pleasure it brings him to cut his own body. From this he assembles a flash of the BLACK BAG TORTURES, while knowing nothing will come close to the actual thing.

His quick breaths are amplified in the stuffy tunnel, abrasive and staticky, deep and rough, and he looks behind him, and the next blink is the longest he’s ever took. When his lids snap open, something is there, the dissolving colors of his eyes, and then his heart catches up. The curving emptiness still seems like something could be waiting just above. But the bottom of the slide has a mouthlike quality, and he doesn’t want to emerge so awkwardly, boots sticking out, then his bare legs, then his seat, skidding on the plastic, and the spread of his thighs for just a moment as he rocks onto his feet. But he does it anyways.

✦

Notebook by Jei

Riparian discovers something incredible.

Cancer is a dancer. If it saves time, he takes a step backwards instead of turning to face that direction first. Rolling the ball of his foot. Toewalker, tiptoes, at the tip of everything. A swing and a sway. He casts his hand in the direction he will go, then sails after it, as if reaching for an invisible partner. But at the same time, so subtle, without ornament, that when he is moving it simply seems the most logical, natural way to move, in accordance with divine principles that were hitherto invisible.

Your peers would have mocked it out of you. You only move like this when you are alone.

Or when you think you are.

Riparian remembers the scouts when they were messengers. Auxiliaries for INNOCENT’s invasion of the atoll. Lithe, nervous boys in shorts that exposed them to bug bites, and ribbons that made their neck seem a prize. Tight leather bags strapped across their backs, packed with letters.

We impaled them on the shore, in sight of the armada. Licking the sweetened poles they writhed on, drenched with the nectar of their insides, and we laughed and read their letters to them. Messages to family. Vital strategic orders. Love letters.

They begged for water. We burnt the letters in front of them.

One day, we caught a little courier with a bulging mail sack. We tied him up inside the sack and the letters stuck to his sweat and everything else that came out of him. We made some other scouts beat him, for the promise of a better fate. We put things in the sack. Scorpions, fire ants, something bad that went extinct between then and now. Was it a giant centipede?

Perhaps he suffocated at some point. On some point.

Then, the sack was delivered to this park. The INNOCENT base where these scouts now train. A red letter day.

What did I feel, then?

Had I become, completely, what I am?

I stare at him, bright and unbroken, and my leg curves in. A butterfly flaps between us, pink as my eyes at midnight. Why does my hand reach for it? For those wings to beat against this leather palm, which I cannot trust to hold it.

The wings burn black under my disease, and it falls and is just another dead leaf beneath this jealous canopy.

Walking quickly through the corridors of a building. At night every building is the same. Every building is like him.

He doesn’t know the way out. He doesn’t know how he got in. A dark window with a face he doesn’t recognize. Outside, men in veils, face masks with trailing fabric, walking around the perimeter. They pretend to be garbage men but he knows they too are concealing their identity. When all disguises are stripped away, they will be men, and he will be garbage.

He presses his face to the glass and it fogs with a sulfurous mist. No one is there. That was another window on another black night. A different smoking mirror.

He likes to smoke. They painted plumes of it coming from his head, smoke, breath, so similar to the word scrolls which rippled like ribbons to the gods. Now they have word bubbles; insular, parenthetical, paranoid. No wonder they can’t communicate with the gods¹The volute, the phylactery, the speech scroll was perverted into the slithering body of the parasite which emerged from its host like a tail, a communion, a question, who will bear me, or the other way around, a supplication for the gift of this immortal viscera. But the armada defaced these depictions, eliminating the tyrant rectum from the equation. The creature of the face dreads to acknowledge, this earth has always been a violent conversation between the invisible cultures in our guts.. But that carries a price.

In preparation for this festival, a young man would impersonate the god for a year. And the boy they selected must be without scars.

(Trace your smooth face, without blemish. As long as you bind yourself to me.)

The boy was trained in the noble arts. He played the flute and sang. His ankles were belled with gold. He smoked from a reed, artfully dyed so the designs only appeared as it burned. He fucked the four impersonators of four goddesses, and ate well. Then the boy ascended, breaking a flute with each step. And at the very top, he was laid down and his heart was cut out and he was devoured, and the next impersonator wore his skin.

And in exchange, many live. Mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters. The venerable old and the innocent young. Is this not love?

Even the great king, the “speaker”, must beg the god-pathogen for breath.

O master, O our lord, O lord of the near, of the night, O night, O wind… Poor am I…for I am blind, I am deaf, I am an imbecile, and in EXCREMENT, in FILTH hath my lifetime been…
Perhaps thou mistaketh me for another; perhaps thou seekest another in my stead…

✦

At some point, the impersonators became the vessel of a very real power. The traditional fasting took on a new meaning, as they made their bowels empty and receptive for the wriggling gift of the gods. And as the year waxed and their fever grew, they began to perform miracles. Then, at the height of their power, they were killed, and this blessing was returned to the earth, and their heart flew to the sun.

It would have been obscene to retain that power. True beauty cannot co-exist with this sinful earth without being contaminated. And the oldest priests and scholars had reasons²This fever will become unbearable. We kill you out of mercy. Or is it because you would become a threat to us? Or this only a superstition of the old, and you are young and brilliant and we are jealous and why should you not keep burning, why should you not have everything you desire— for why it must be no longer than a year.

Riparian was one of these noble impersonators, selected from the finest young men. For a year he waited to have his heart ripped out and his entrails spilled. But how sensual to be trained into the perfect vessel. To be cultivated in the arts of speaking and singing, and to step with the grace of a divine being. And as the power grew in him, he was able to accomplish miracles. He could purify the land with his urine, and cure illnesses with a kiss.

And now he had to die.

But in this time, the atoll was choked with dead fish, the lagoon a buzzing lake of flies. The crops were black. Their enemies triumphed. So this year, it was decided not to sacrifice the impersonators, but to allow the fever of the gods to blossom.

The people of the atoll weren’t stupid. The very existence of their culture proved their rituals worked. It was only when that culture was threatened, that they modified the ritual. An opportunistic infection.

The blade of culture cut both ways. This new ritual honored the act of impersonation, even as it defiled the valor of sacrifice. To lay down your life for others, and become part of the cycle. But desperation made the choice simple.

So when the time came for his sacrifice, he was allowed to keep his racing heart, and the knot of his entrails was not cut. The priests proclaimed an endless spring.

The year passed, and his power grew. It became enough to cure the blight and resurrect the fish. To defeat their rivals of the Archangelpelago, by skirmish, raid, and duel. And with his brothers and sisters, his fellow impersonators, beautifully flushed and sparkling with sweat, he made the atoll a jade crown on the ocean, and none could stand before them.

The festivals became endless, a fever that would not break. Nothing could be sacrificed, so nothing could be gained. But it didn’t matter because they had everything.

It was beautiful, at first.

✦

Let me show you how we survived outside of God’s light.

✦

Stalking through the park before it was a park. Riparian smells the slave like a fire in the trees, because they are never allowed to shower. He is hunting, but fresh meat brings no pleasure, beyond the tyrant joy of spilling blood. It must rot. And so when the hunt is over, they suspend the bodies for the flies and the atoll sun.

Riparian has an alpha-gal problem. He has a lot of problems, most of them allergens. The bite of a tick may trigger an immune response to a carbohydrate in its saliva, galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose, also found in mammalian meat. This is how the parasite trained his body. He is incapable of digesting fresh meat, vegetables, any living thing unless it is decayed. Rotten. Degraded.

Why should you eat what I cannot? Your lips will come to despise bright fresh fruits.

Dogshit in the glove compartment, from a bag someone left like takeout in a garbage can. He eats in a trance and sucks his fingers afterward, and only then does he remember to gag, dogshit twice over, but the true humiliation is that his saliva smells worse than the shit itself, filling the car with the reek of his bacteria that preserves the living, and his enzyme that accelerates the dead.

If you rip me out, you will dissolve.

He is under the tree again. The body was hung upside down so he could get at the tongue. He caresses that rotting mouth and bites down and his body struggles with the texture of a human tongue, this thing it once kissed in so many mouths so tenderly and must be kind to, this early lesson so hard to erase, the preservation of flesh which a god can ignore in itself and in others but it always feels like running to a cliff’s edge and leaping over and it forces the same clenching in his stomach. But he needs to eat this fucking tongue, so he brushes aside the veil of flies and hooks the cheeks with his claws and holds the mouth open and bites down and putrid blood squirts into his mouth and as he retches he bites down harder to stay latched on, allowing his bile to empty into the corpse’s stomach instead of his own, keeping his passages clear for eating, and as he starts chewing, the corpse wakes up and the tongue spasms as it tries to scream, and after all that torture last night they must have forgotten to actually kill it, and the blood he swallowed, far too fresh, bursts back into the slave’s mouth and drains through the upside down nostrils which foam and snort like a dying horse and spray Riparian’s face with blood, painting his naked chest in snotty bursts and he falls to the grass, deeply ill, and the slave won’t stop screaming and he won’t stop screaming and he looks for a rock to slam his head into—

✦

Still walking through the dark hall. There, a way out. He bangs his head on the black glass and as he scrabbles at it, his hands slide off like he’s falling, the building is sinking into the earth—

It’s the windshield. You’re in a car. Close your eyes.

Do it.

The black mirror drips on his face. The vile condensation³Black bile, the slime of melancholy, melaina kholé. Too much black bile causes cancer. of his stomach, a suffocating humidity, a panic that makes him reach for the window crank. But instead of turning it, he rips it off the door.

You don’t need to breathe. Not really.

If you asphyxiate, you’ll wake up again—

He really needs to breathe, even if he doesn’t. A bad flesh dream, waking into the wrong body, forgetting he can never escape this sweating prison of meat and the ten ton shadow pinning it down. The impersonator can’t stop impersonating. No longer has the option to get off the ride. He claws his face, peeling the loose skin around his eyes like the membrane of a hard boiled egg, tearing his lips like strips of waxing paper until his teeth are naked—

I STINK
I STINK

GET ME OUT

GET ME OUT

GET ME OUT

And his skin crawls back into place and his eyelids snap over his twitching pupils and his lips slurp back over his teeth and they are so hungry. The cost of your resistance to this hunger is to become even more ravenous.

Gods don’t die. They eat shit.

Cancer tries not to throw up as he staggers from the nurse office, bitter quinine coating his mouth, making his braces taste oxidized.

He hides in the CrystalSpring. Fever trees surround the pool, phallic pink buds blooming into hairy starfishes, the chintz of a holiday decoration. Curls his bare knees into his chest, black bangs covering his eyes. More than kohl stains their dark rims. He doesn’t feel rested at all from last night. Like his dreams were claws and he was fighting for his life.

Through the trees, he watches janitors work. Trash cans are being emptied, and their bags replaced. Black plastic stretches over the rims, rustling and pulling tight. And it’s like nothing ever happened.

When they zipped the boy’s body into a body bag, he wanted to scream. You’re just putting him in another black bag. He was scared in there. He needs to be free.

In life he had envied and despised the blond, but in death, the humiliation had somehow become his own.

I swear I will avenge you. Death to all parasites.

Envy? Avenge? He barely knew the boy. But that makes it even sadder, somehow. The glimmering summery scintillations of what we could have been. The migration from one failed black chrysalis to another, feels like the close of a cosmic weekend, a quiet and early graduation, the end of the dream.

Even if others do not know us…

Was that a line from a show? It has disintegrated like everything else. Colors bleed across the park like a diarrhea rainbow, the Defile throbbing with chromatic aberration and all the other kinds. Aurulent auras, phosphenes of gold and jade. Dreaming about his mother lately. A piece of him, congenitally corrected but lurking in a pocket of scar tissue.

You have a new mom now. Blond and bright.

With all our hearts…

What show is this?

It’s a show about a very special boy who hunts parasites and saves everyone. It’s a show about trying not to throw up. He clutches his stomach, impaled on a hot fountainous stake trying to punch through either end of him.

Cancer has cinchonism from the quinine building up in his system. Sometimes he thinks the nurse gives him more than the other scouts. As if he needed more to be clean, to be purified. But that’s just paranoia, right?

Every time he takes the quinine, he remembers something he overheard the family doctor say: the boy is lucky to be alive. His mother tried to abort him with quinine.

How did the doctor know that? Was it a guess or diagnosis based on his congenital deficiencies? Or a document, filled on intake at the orphanage, this sterile form his last contact with the dark-haired woman melting in his memory, decaying each time he tries to recall her. She is every woman, every flash of dark tresses, every feminine tallness, every nurturing alto that lilts from the picnic area.

He hates her!

Another wave of prismatic nausea. It wasn’t guns, fire, or God that gave the armada its final victory. It was the bark of the fever-tree, it was quinine that allowed them to penetrate the malarial force field. Quinine, ground into wine. Drunk and prophylactic and burning the atoll black.

Quinine conquered the atoll. Now it conquers Cancer. Her pale hand on his wrist, squeezing as if she could suck the last drop of melanin out.

His ears ring, silver bangles singing from unseen arms, gold coins rattling in his skull. He had to hide his symptoms from the nurse, because there are worse ways to take quinine than by mouth.

Her fingers gliding across the pale yellow suppositories, as if congealed from her flowing blond hair. Tubes and syringes and pumps and needles, like machines adapting to the vines and mosquitoes. Colonization.

If you can’t keep it down…

Can’t let the beautiful clean woman see his writhing innards, some hint or presentiment of what she symbolizes for his future and his molting into manhood, premature oral ejaculation. At the same time, he longed for her pity, to regress through sickness and be cared for like a younger boy.

But as much as he wanted a sick day. As much as he wanted to puke on the floor and messily eject his responsibility, it’s not safe. This is not a time to become Known and Restricted, entered into a registry and confined to a room. So he gave her a sweaty smile and let the bile drain back into his stomach. The parasites are hunting.

Riparian checks his teeth in a pocket mirror. A lady’s compact, smeared with fingerprints. Why does he have that?

Plaque covers his smile, glowing like radium. Cavities throb, healing too slowly in his hunger. The black teeth become a memory of huitlacoche, corn smut, “sleeping excrescence”, the fungus his people encouraged to grow on corn⁴Such talent they had for weaving pathogens. In this smut, a seed of his glory. The parasite that would doom them.. It attacks the ovaries, a cancerous popcorning of the kernels. It was so delicious, he tastes it now, darkly sweet and meaty, smoldering earth, trufflescent, was it the last time he experienced human food? Umami so easily flows into the taste of rotten flesh. Everything rots inside him.

He looks around the camp. Sunny day, whiny with cicadas. Everyone seems to be moving in a trance. How can they not see what I am?

They would first have to see what they are. The power they have given these adults, the patriarchal authority he has pulled on like a parade ground boot. But still the net tightens around him. Under the eyes of tourists, behind this paradise facade, a slow summer dance. They don’t want to alarm anyone. Don’t want people to think the atoll is an unsafe place. He has a day or less before the cautious investigation becomes a merciless hunt.

The other net tightens in his bowels. Summer always makes him unbearably hungry. He, who once drank the black wine of melena from a crystal goblet, who once dug a mother-of-pearl spoon into the finest caviar of septicemia, putrefacted veal scooped like butter—reduced to stalking the public toilets. The most degenerated of his strain live like animals, eating common carrion in the park. But he is an artist. When he feeds, it must be beautiful, and it must be dread. It must demonstrate their inferiority. It must exalt his supremacy over all things. Because if it didn’t, it would look a lot like eating shit and corpses.

His hair is getting friskier, like he just crawled out of the dryer. His mouth waters and he swallows the vile taste. They have these things called garbage cans. Bizarrely fetishistic, but so convenient. He gags as a chunk of mushy banana dissolves in his voracious mouth enzymes. He didn’t even notice picking it up. He tries to spit it out, but his teeth lock into a slimy smile. Shhh. It’s good for you.

And even if we were full. Even if I made your pig belly burst for me. The wound would swallow itself and make you even hungrier. And I would sit you again at a newly laid feast, your fingers trembling and stained. You have to be trained.

We are the vomitorium.

The worst is how his hunger races his disgust. Heaving becomes panting. Rotten strawberry milk, a moldy hot dog bun, spoiled fish cake. So, so hungry. Shh. Get the boy. And we rip this skin off and disappear.

What boy?

A kid skates past and yells EAT SHIT. The words echo from the canopy as the graphic tee expateen vanishes into the sun. Riparian stares, mouth gaping. How did they know? What just happened?

His abdomen tightens like a star athlete, rock-hard and sweating without moving an inch. Focus. What does it say on your wrist.

KILL CANCER

A warm sense of wellbeing and purpose fills him. The curtains are swept aside, illuminating a palace of sadistic dopamine receptors. This is the only reprieve from his cage, from the amnesiac impulse of these pathetic bodies that try to force him inside little dark boxes—forever receiving his own inheritance, prince of flies, torturing angel. Dark hair, idiotic teeth, a dancer’s feet. Prone to puking. Kill Cancer. It really is that simple!

He starts by shutting his eyes. Flames rise around him, the fire of scent. The park is in conflagration as the sun ignites floral oils and geosmin. This too, is bacterial. Even the minerals are fragrant with Actinomycetota. You may smell it as petrichor after rain, but for him, the earth is always freshly fucked. And now upon this stage, the dancers. Tourists with their foreign perfumes and Continental flora (and here he experiences a pang akin to the memory of a deflowering, the loss of something, but it easily slides away), and scouts with their bleach and hair spray like latex nun outfits over their virginal hormone eruptions. Instructors smolder in the eaves, aged tobacco and the stale beer smell of 2-nonenal, produced increasingly in adults over 40, at least in the fish-eating population of Halo Atoll with all their unsaturated aldehydes. The blond expats have a smell like waxed oranges, oily with nonanal which happens to attract mosquitoes, as if punishing them for coming to this place BUT WHO GIVES A SHIT.

One of Riparian’s symptoms: A proliferation of olfactory neurons, infesting his body like prostatic metaplasia. His nose waters and tingles and throbs, fucked by the breeze. This is the morality of the predator. Does It Smell Good. Boy and sea, like salted caramel, and something like copper coins scattering behind.

And then the smell is lost in a wave of bodies, of juvenile apocrine pollution. He opens his eyes, exposing the icterine sclera. He studies their bleached hair like a mycologist trying to tell apart mushrooms. This is Cancer’s scout pack. But Cancer is not among them. On this stage, the star is missing. Impossible. The air is mistaken.

The wind rises, uprooting the scents around him, he is blinded, and this absence exposes the great empty caverns of him, the Mictlanic holes where only bones and obsidian lay. He spins, forced to use his pathetic little eyes, blinking and wet and micropenal, lashes like pubic hair. All around, dismal surfaces reflecting merely the light that is cast upon them. How weak he has become in his hunger. His vision fades and flares, either nothing or overexposed, blinding static of bacteria, like watching a dead channel with the sound off. It tells him nothing but that he is hungry, hungry, hungry. Prize is gone.

The thrill of wind blowing on his bare legs, dark skirt fluttering over his secret. Take a guess, you won’t get it on the first try.

Cancer is a genius.

If the pseud is only bagging boys, he will dress up as a girl. Now he can move without being himself. Like a pseud. A chemical screen of cheap perfume (tween popstar brand) hides his scent. His impersonation is complete with a flu mask, common on the disease-scarred atoll.

✦

Passing over the discomfort provoked by such observations—the observed child who, under the pretext that he is schizophrenic, cannot be peaceful even on the toilet—so as to only remember the undeniable refusal by the child of what destines him to be a boy or girl…
— René Schérer and Guy Hocquenghem, “Co-ire: Album systématique de l’enfance”

✦

He’s not a freak. This is classic detective shit. Disguises. Subterfuge. But did a black cloud still fall during day, and was it in his heart, the impossibility of his task? Everyone else is so hopeful, so certain the adults will fix everything. And in the family portrait, he’s grinning with the rest of them. But like a smile secured with braces, it always slides back. Foster boy knows darkness.

He does the logical thing, and stress eats some of the chocolate he was supposed to sell. Sweetness! Pleasure! It quickly fades to guilt.

✦

A third schizophrenic seven year old boy ritualized dramatically his desire for both male and female sex apparatus. He was able to switch almost instantly from one role to another. As a male, he sat on the toilet facing forward, freely exposing his penis; as a female, he sat hiding it, with his face to the wall. For a long time he did not urinate standing up; this would have been too profound a commitment to the male role. As a male, he freely and openly masturbated only his penis; as a female, he just as freely practiced only anal masturbation. As a boy he used his own name, as a girl he used a make-believe name; sometimes it signified himself as a girl and at other times as a clown who was simultaneously male and female.
— Bruno Bettelheim, “Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious Male”

✦

Selling chocolate, earning badges, his family, his brother, his doomed genetics, and not to mention, the BLACK BAG TORTURES, all this spills from him in bright red drops, landing in a basin of silken gold, a throat of porcelain on which he sits, shivering as he works his knife⁵[IRIDESCENT KNIFE] A knife is a boy’s best friend. A knife is a dependable object that deals a variable but trustworthy amount of damage to wooden objects and strange men that spawn at night, cloned from foreign nations, or begat of the decision, deep in the womb, to be an impoverished scrounger. A knife is for family-friendly pursuits like whittling, firestarting, or dressing game. The knife, like the penis, should only be used with another person when subtracting or adding life. To use it on yourself is perverse onanism.. It has become iridescent and paracrystalline, contaminated with icosahedral micro-scales.

His shorts force him to cut into the shadows of his legs, into the upper inner thighs. He tries to cut where he won’t chafe, but it’s always rubbing against something, that’s what makes it hidden. So it’s nice to let the cuts breathe in this skirt. It encourages him to make more. Just one more notch, tallying up the petty resentments, slights, and neuroses of your day in this permanent way.

Uhh. Nnn. Ahhh. He can cut safely in the girl’s bathroom, because the toilets already have blood stains in them. He is a fucking genius, wouldn’t you agree?

His urine is dangerously golden. He needs to hydrate. But he’s not thirsty. He’s pure fire, super duper sacrificial. Blood falls into the toilet, something ceremonial or medical about this basin where he can inspect what comes out of him, red blood cells swelling with water and bursting into plumes of languid plasma.

Wow. I look like I’m INTERNALLY BLEEDING.

A horrible shiver of excitement at the sight of the blood. Impulsively he makes another cut, and this one is faster and heavier. Fire fills his chest and tingles in his toes, then smolders, leaving the char of dread. He places his hand below, catching the blood before it stains the rim of the bowl and he has to scrub it clean. There is just enough blood in his palm to roll around, and even that slight suggestion of depth sickens some intrinsic part of his brain responsible for survival. He spills it out into the toilet, trembling as it streams over his fingers and paints them red.

On a day like today, he wants to tear open his clothes in front of everyone and show them his pain. When he cuts, the pitiful hope that someone might accidentally see, despite his best efforts, the pain clawing out of him. The pain in the world! Hypocrisy, ugliness, me!!

I deserve this. I should cut deeper. Into my disgusting body. Toughen up the girly meat. But all I do is drip. So pretty.

Drip. Drip. Blood patters on the toilet paper he placed, suffusing the delicate drowned fibers with brilliant scarlet.

The lights turn off. The stall is suddenly a dark pit.

Automatic timer? Or blown generator? The camp has many faulty circuits, just like his brain.

He sits there in the dark, the only sound the tap-tap of his blood into the toilet. If he moves, he might make a mess. Blood is a deep and difficult stain, and menstrual alibi aside, this kind of bright fresh unadulterated blood would leave a curious mess, and worse if it gets all over his legs and clothes, are you hurt, girl? Let’s visit the nurse. She will inspect you for a traumatic period, or try to bandage your cuts, and your skirt will have to lift, and she will see your shameful secret. Panties and porcelain, everything is pale and blemishless around him and he is a sweating bleeding sunburnt freak.

Water splashes on the floor. What the fuck? He looks down, and the toilet is a dark hole widening under him. He scrambles back, hiking boot arched up on the toilet seat, his other leg hanging off, dark skirt crumpled between his legs. It’s just vertigo from the quinine. Just—

A shriek erupts high and mad like a shattered skylight, then drops bonedeep, vibrating the seat.

From the toilet, a dark shape rises, wet and glistening, smooth on all sides. Then a cracking sound, as long arms pop from the bowl and spread like branches through the black hair, and the skin is bright yellow like hazard tape. Arms sheathed in mud, terminating in gloves of cracked earth.

The headless body sways, then the spine crawls back centipedal, and the head surfaces between his legs, yellow and heavy-lidded. She smiles, teeth red with cochineal gore, the tiny hairs of that cactus parasite sticking in her teeth. Her lips are painted too, spreading her smile clown-wide. A brown stain runs from her mouth, spilling down her breasts and belly. Her hair is the shadow of a seven foot sacrifice, thick as blood and black as melena, sticking to the outside of the toilet like ink roots or septic veins.

He frantically stammers and pulls his skirt down—

HELLO BEAUTIFUL GIRL

YOUR SACRIFICE HAS BEEN RECEIVED

(in the cold guts of the earth, in her starving slumber, his blood was petals of poinsettia, cuetlaxōchitl⁶Her people were the first to cultivate the painted leaf, then their conquerors stole it for the winter feasts of their savior. It is now the most commercially significant potted plant in the world. Colors run, and run, and run, the old garments are faded and tattered—, the excrement-flower, for it was propagated by the winged things that no longer exist.)

YOUR RAIMENTS
(Cotton clothes. Not just cotton. Dyed cotton, with ornate tailoring (9.99 at HaloMart). Clearly from a high-ranking caste⁷(And the schoolboy cut resembles hairstyles from her times. Blond dye, another luxurious touch.) capable of receiving her message.)

YOUR SMOKING MIRROR
(Staring into the black glass of the TV set, cathode hot. Only a great sorceress could possess such obsidian.)

YOUR CACAO, YOUR GOLD
(Chocolate stuck in your gold braces)

THESE SACRIFICES I ACCEPT

I, TLAELQUANI, SHE WHO EATS FILTH

✦

Blood drips into the toilet and she sniffs, noticing that it comes from between his legs. She rises to her full height, wet black hair made ultraviolet with the crushed flower of the wild indigo. He could ride her nose like a sawhorse. Her nostrils are question marks.

DO YOUR MENSES HURT, SWEET GIRL?

Um, um—

DO YOU NEED HELP WITH YOUR PLACES? I HAVE CANNABIS AND CHAMOMILE…
OR STEAM?

The toilet starts to boil, the water marrying his sweat and dripping from his legs, and his voice breaks, stop, STOP—

The bubbling slows. His soaked skirt is wet and heavy between his legs, draped across a gentle mound. Wait. You are not a girl. This is not your ritual. Her dimorphic symptoms, tuned to hormonal markers, become inflamed, uncertain of their fitness in this body. It feels like wrath and paranoia. Her body enfolds him like gold mandibles and hungry curtains. Her long nose sniffs the burning red gills of his thigh cuts, scrying the Rorschach skid marks of his panties. A SERVANT OF THE ARMADA? A SPY OF THE FLIES? WE WILL SEE WHAT YOU ARE.

He gasps, and his ribbon comes undone. As it spirals and whips around him, he comes to realize these are his intestines, and they are slurping inside her mouth like spaghetti.

✦

The ribbon is full of poison. Lead, ethanol, microplastics, pesticides, and other epigenetic stress. Exotic taint of empire, industrialized bombardment of armada. And through a crack of this cellular parking lot, agony blossoms like a marigold, the orange flame of cempasúchil. The death-flower of Cancer’s mother.

She worked the UV District. You’ve seen it, haven’t you? Of course you have. The atoll is a panopticon. How beautiful, the blue mercury glow which soothes the eyes on a hot night. Winter in summer. But as you approach, the violet spirit lanterns turn to bug zappers, crackling with auto-annihilation, the cattle prod snap of countless living things. The narrow alleys are choked with cigarettes and insect ash, a labyrinth of volcanic sand.

The UV. Ultimate Violation. Unlimited Violence. And in this fistula of the atoll ring, desperation is bought and sold.

Majolica. Ma-holica. May-o-lick-uh. But none of them cared to know her name. They just wanted something hot to stick it in.

By the ultraviolet frost, she lay there taking the cock of dead-eyed soldiers, money glimmering in her fist. Sometimes the sharp fingers of a female tourist, taking gynecological liberties in a way they couldn’t back home or with someone of their own social class, or roughly punishing what they hated about themselves, affirming that she was some lesser femorphic species with a fate separate from theirs.

Concrete gnawed her fishnet knees, acrylic nails splayed before her. Her friend painted angels on them, and it gave her something to look at. But she could feel the cracks under her palms, and almost hear the screams deep below. A reminder it could get so much worse. So far she had avoided the Wet Market, the Septic Tank, all the places where body parts are assigned monetary values, and souls are converted into a violent perfume. Scar junkies, bugchasers, magic shows. Pick your hell. Eventually she would be too old to compete on the streets, and become just another cut of meat. So taking three to seven inches inside one of the original holes she was born with, wasn’t that bad in comparison. But that night, the condom broke.

It was anal he was conceived by, trickling doggy-style down into her gash. Rivulets of frothy cappuccino, vigorously churned by hard cock. She had no idea who it was, in the drunken blur required to get through the act, one cock replacing the other as soon as it pulled out. Her cervix spun like a roulette wheel. Such a child the gods may nest in. A vessel.

How could she take of him, when she went hungry half the nights? When she had been drinking, snorting, injecting whatever her clients shared with her⁸Because if you know you’ll die (or worse, so much worse) by 30, why be in pain? If they give you the lifespan of a fly, why not eat trash?, all those months until the nausea became unbearable, and she realized it was from more than drinking, and that in fact she should not be drinking, even though what she needed most was a drink.

No fucking way. Look at this shit. You want to bring a child into hell? Sweating and hallucinating in a stairwell, delirium tremens made everything burn and shriek with its inner sin. What’s the point? She knew the thing in her belly was a monster and she had ruined it. She had to get it out of her. She tried with a piece of chain link wire sterilized over burning tires. It hurt too much and she had to stop, fucking terrified.

At the bulletproof church⁹The church was built into the wall that separated the UV District from the rest of the atoll. Like a tourniquet, but that would be too hopeful. More like the cauterization of a septic limb., INNOCENT was handing out free quinine through a stainless steel confessional booth. She wiped off her cat eyes and tried to look like a Good Woman from the waist up. She begged for enough doses for her family. You’re not going to cut cocaine with it, are you? No sir. No ma’am. She vomited everything up for the one-way stained glass, confessing until it hurt her throat and heart. In exchange for her striptease of contrition, the stainless steel drawer slid out, with enough doses for her family, or enough to not have one.

Blister packs of pink pills. Quinine sulphate. The antiparasitic she needed for the parasite inside her. The taste was bitter, so bitter. When she threw it up, she had to lick it off the dirty tile. But it wasn’t enough. Maybe those rumors had been about some other drug, or spuriously correlated with the fact that most births in the UV were miscarriages, quinine or not.

She lost track. Time doesn’t exist in the UV. But it probably wasn’t nine months when she gave birth to him in the worst toilet on the atoll, doors ripped off, floor glittering with sharps, walls sticky with fecal smearing and bloody handprints, used condoms like the molt of angelic animals which had departed this sinful world, stripper heels crunching on glass as she spread her legs.

She strained, and the toilet filled with diarrhea and blood, so much that she thought he had come out already. Where are you, you little shit. Her distended belly stuck out so far she couldn’t see inside the toilet. She swept aside her long black hair because the touch of it on her face had started to make her panic. She felt a nauseous compulsion to strip herself of the sequined whore costume. Being perpetually drunk and high made it a lot easier to tolerate scratchy synthetic fabrics and heavy makeup, and she was devastatingly sober, so sober it had become a bad trip, free hallucinogens. At least her screams were bad enough that no one intruded on her, because they thought someone was being murdered. She clawed at the walls of the stall, acrylic nails dragging through the flaking paint, destroying phone numbers and phalluses until they finally snapped. They were loose enough to come off without ripping the underlying nails, but it still hurt like firecrackers on her fingertips. Glossy nails floated in the water, angels drowning in her waste. And then Cancer crashed into it.

She cut his umbilical cord with a broken bottle and walked away. Limping down the street, badly hurt between the legs, blood leaking down her thigh, difficult to hide in her skimpy skirt. She collapsed, like some animal, in the nearest darkness she could find, sewerblooded lochia oozing from her torn cunt. She felt badly wounded, stabbed, betrayed, and utterly alone. Her shame flowed into the street, trampled or skirted by the denizens of the UV. Most didn’t even look her way. Those who did, turned up their noses or laughed at her melting cat eyes, her stricken face and the apparent absurdity of this portrait of ruined desire. And in all the world, she had nothing that was her own.

She hobbled back and looked down into the toilet. The corpse she expected to see, was a tiny baby struggling in the shitty bowl, coughing and sputtering as he slid down the porcelain slope. He couldn’t even cry, so much of his breath was dedicated to survival. She covered her mouth, eyeliner running faster, dripping in black spots into the water.

She pulled him out and patted his back and he threw up toilet water and meconium and everything her traumatized canal had spewed forth. She picked off a cigarette butt, but knew he needed an immediate and proper cleaning, especially with that gash splitting open his face. At first it had been the confirmation of her worst fears, a monster spawned from her sin, but then she recognized the cleft lip. She used to be a nurse, and so many children had passed through her hands. But she never had one of her own.

The sinks were ripped from the wall. She went toward the park, an overhang of black vines oiled with violet radiance, climbing the steps despite her torn cunt. Her heels swayed, but protected her from broken glass. There was a fence, but she crawled under it, holding him tight to her chest. A little clearing for picnic tables, seldom used due to the eyesore of the UV. She brought him to a drinking fountain, struggling to hold him and push the button at the same time, until finally she jammed her hip against it. She washed him by that miserly stream until the slit in his face ran clean and she could see him by the light of hell. There you are. It’s okay now.

A cold wind came from the ocean and she held him close, drying him with the thin slutty clothes she’d need to buy him baby food tomorrow. Brown eyes, like mommy. Oh, you’re so good.

From the railing of the picnic area, she showed him the atoll. At this height, even the mercury nightmare below them was pretty, or at least its reflection was, bleeding indigo into the lagoon. She looked up at the tranquil sky, seeing it for once with no power lines to garrote it, no alleys to blindfold, unclouded by the suffocating smoke of addiction and machines. She could never see the stars in that perpetual drench of UV and neon, or the accusing floodlights of the walls. But she always looked forward to reading her horoscope, and knew the constellations by heart.

At that moment, the lights went out. The halo of the atoll died in segments, draining to black. Below her, thousands of bug zappers went dark. Into that vacuum, a wave of insects crashed, humming in a chitinous chorus rarely heard since the invention of electric traps and pesticide. Above this symphony of flies, she stood breathlessly overlooking the atoll, now black as the rest of the ocean.

Stars sparkled in her wet eyes. A few trash fires burned here and there like embers, but they were nothing against the rivers and beacons of cosmic dust which blazed above her. Nothing existed on this earth but her and Cancer, his little heartbeat, so fragile and defiant. A tear fell, landing dark on his face, at the realization that her heart was bound to his, and she could not live without him.

She held him tight, rocking him as he cried. There. See that star? Cancer. My prize. The most beautiful thing in this entire shitty world.

The halo flashed. Music burst from gagged loudspeakers. People cheered from balconies and gutters. Neon flooded the dark pit of the lagoon, luminous palaces rippling up from the depths, the true dream of the atoll shimmering uncatchable but realer than anything.

✦

The tears that fall from the goddess are big and warm as the dewdrops an ant may see in summer. Tlaelquani, gut-goddess and arch-fever of fate, filth, and fertility. Those who had been shamed. Those broken by love.

The ribbon runs through her fingers, faster and faster until it burns. Majolica. Fighting to keep them alive one more night. Selling her body and soul for this boy she never meant to have, and would never know.

We must sacrifice with all our hearts.

Even if others do not know us.

We must fight to save the world.

✦

You have so little of her to remember. A cave of dark hair you hid inside. Starved breasts that starved themselves further to feed you. And her tits were full of lead and smoke and poison and they were full of love.

She believed in you. Her boy that the other lost souls called ugly, and the charity workers of INNOCENT called premature and teratogenic. They said he would never survive the atoll summer. The bite of insects, parasites in the dirt and water, a million opportunistic infections. But he is here. And his ribbon is bright.

And he hates her?

He needs her. Needs this touch on his face.

Once, Cancer’s mother would have worked in the Cihuacalli, the house of women, a feminine architectural engine. Prostitutes and priestesses. Menarche and dickgirls. In this structure, there was a statue of Tlaelquani. The goddess of whores and unclean things. It was also the place where the slain warriors were wept over. Cancer’s mother is both.

Steam rises from the toilet, rippling chromatically, and again Cancer tells himself it must be the cinchonism, as the bones in Tlaelquani’s face break and reform. Half herself, half the mother. Her dark hair is two nights.

Oh, Cancer…

The ribbon is on fire. The tape jams, the toilet roll runs empty. The face disappears, and Tlaelquani’s loadbearing cheekbones crunch back into place. It leaves her lost for a moment in her own memories. Was she, too, an impersonator? What rare disease is she, vestal venereal, kept safe from mutation deep in the chilled waters of the earth?

Your mother cared deeply for you.

Her hand on his cheek. Eyes shut, drinking it in. How deeply he wanted this, for so long. But no one ever gave him anything for free. So he forces his brown eyes open, and whatever they were talking about falls away like a dream. Something to do with his mother? Flashes of it cling to his lashes, crumbling with each blink like yesterday’s kohl.

He asks what the giant woman wants, and she responds: you summoned me.

I guess I did. I guess I’m pretty fucking cool.

We must fight

Trying to suppress the nasality of his voice, he says, almost imperiously: Then you have to help me kill the pseud.

to save the world

Tlaelquani leans back like she’s in a hot tub. Her muscles are shark-potent, shining with toilet water. Her arms hang over the sides, spattering tap-tap-tap, the dirty daggers of her nails clicking in counterpoint. Water flows capillary through her dark hair, draining into the lines between tiles until a crimson grid throbs around them, a laser-lattice of glowing red. YOU WOULD HAVE MY WISDOM?

Yes, he lisps.

WISDOM IS PAIN.

CAN YOU HANDLE PAIN?

He hesitates, then pulls his skirt up just enough to show off his damage. Are these cuts enough? Have I bled enough for you?¹⁰Rage at being forced to prove himself, expose himself, story of his life—but also: do you approve? Should I bleed more? Do you know the correct amount for a boy to bleed because I’ve been waiting for someone to tell me—

She rises above him, a statue of majestic mud and gruesome gold. Toilet water splashes to the floor, flickering the grid of bloody neon. And she holds out her hand.

Drink from my palm. This bitter juice.

✦

They drank ritual chocolate and used cocoa beans as currency. Now you sip hot cocoa around the fire and have chocolate bar fundraisers. You sweeten what is bitter. You make mundane what is ritual. So taste now, the primordial cacao.

✦

Cocoa burns his lips and chili pepper activates his capsaicin receptors, licking down his throat and into his stomach and deeper still—

What time is it? Where is he? There is only status, and effect. A fire of chocolate and pepper spreads through his nerves and dilates his blood vessels, burning branches—

A joyous scream. The TV at max volume.

He falls into her palm with a splash. Darkness. An exhumed hyper-smell, as if a guano cave was ripped open for acid rains to slop it out. He is immersed in something warm and thick and suffocating. At first he thinks there is dirt to stand on, but he sinks into it like mud, forced to tread desperately to keep his face above the sucking muck, forced to look up at the mouth of this pit, a rim of dirty marble or bleached bones. On the other side, cliff faces rise even higher into a starless void. Grotesque murals cover the sheer green cliffs, as if painted by some gigantic species of ogre or nephilim. Monstrous penises and a paranoid, biblical repetition of numbers. To every side, the pit is sloped, filth running down it like mud slides. The dense sludge absorbs his struggle, leaving his limbs weak and numb. His last breath comes.

With all our hearts…

He stops fighting. He begins to sink. The air pockets created by his thrashing fill with water, and the suction slows. He gently glides his limbs through the mud, until his hands break the surface for the first time. Sludge climbs his throat again, rising to his lips. He fights the terror of this inexorable sucking, and leans onto his back and spreads like an angel. Muck surrounds his face, lapping greedily around his mouth and nose. And it plugs his ears.

Thump thump. His heart fills his head. He breathes in time with it, slowing the clamor of his chest. Then another pulse is heard. He looks to the side, one eye shut against the filth. A ribbon undulates across the foul mud, barely visible. He grabs it, and it beats into his fist, hotter than anything around it. It pulls taut, and he sees now, it comes from the sky. From the stars. They glow in the shape of a wishbone, or TV aerials, or antennae. He climbs the ribbon and it chafes his hands worse than any climbing exercise, and he is slipping, he is not strong enough.

Just as he falls, dark hair flows down the ribbon, and he grabs onto it. He knows it must hurt, for tears rain upon him. But the hands that descend and cup his face are kind and gentle, and the tears are a summer shower.

My heart. How can I forget my heart?

The pit roars with a great sound, and the brown muck below bubbles and surges as if even the deep unknowable bottom of that cesspool was falling away, and then it violently explodes, filth leaping up and slapping him and soaking the ribbon. He slides down, hair snapping in his fingers. The raging brown eye of the septic maelstrom engulfs his legs, and he cries out.

✦

The brown tide pollutes and restores. Bricks of civilization bake inside you. Monuments and fertilizer, leather and gunpowder. Your bodies fall into the park like bombs and trees burst up.

Who will be fertilizer? And who will be the bright, cherished flowers?

This is the war we fight. The war of all life.

That isn’t the suction of the mud. It is their hands on your ankles. Your dead friends, slaves of night soil. Separate yourself from death! Or be condemned!

✦

He climbs the ribbon, hands bleeding, toes slipping and skinned between, until he is surrounded by the dark hair, and it clings gently to his wounds and his tears, and he grabs it, no, don’t leave, but he breaks through like the surface of a pond covered in filamentous algae.

My heart…

Through the steam, the stall door becomes visible. It is very far away, in this flat and foggy marsh. Marigolds and jasmine glower amid the rushes like drowned bouquets. The toilet is all he can cling to, cold but swiftly warming to his body temperature, becoming slippery with sweat. He does not trust the gaseous mud surrounding it, swirling with slimy and phantasmal eukaryotes.

Something bursts from the water and screams. She hangs in the air, limbs flung out like her back was broken. Against the muted marsh where light dies as you look for it, retreats as you squint, she is toxic yellow, tree frogs and popcorn grease. The scream is still going, long and joyous and jagged in his ears.

tLaElQuAnImOmMy Is HeRe

YoU pAsSeD tHe TeSt

And we are bound together.

She is in the toilet again. She points a long, earth-cracked finger downward. Too long, ghostly or skeletal, the kind of member that stretches beyond a door to herald the appearance of something dead.

Don’t you want that gift, great summoner?

He swallows, forcing himself to look past her chest (muddy and swollen, dark strands clinging in hypnotic spirals) and down her belly (mud flowing into a black nest) and into the toilet, now atrous and fathomless between his trembling legs, a hole that leads to the very core of the earth. Sweat, he hopes it’s sweat, drips from his skirt and is swallowed. Some of the drops are tinted red, glassy and molten.

A cold draft rushes up, cooling the burning slashes across his thighs. His skirt billows around his waist and he cries out, holding it down. Water chases the wind, splashing the rim of the bowl, whirling and settling into a pool of liquid obsidian. His reflection is a palimpsest of skulls, an X-ray of every Cancer who didn’t make it. A scout trapped in the deepest wells of the moon.

Tlaelquani is completely still, as if her mud had hardened. He doesn’t dare look at the dark shape above him, looming like a crag, hairy vines brushing his face in a slow hunger. And it seems now that the darkened marsh around him is of this same water, and only a thin membrane separates him from something he must not allow his eyes to turn upon. This pinhole into wisdom, and nothing more.

In the smoking mirror, he sees a room. The carpet is a tropical pattern like the cottages where tourists stay, and something bad has happened to it. The walls have strange stains like narrow plumes of black mold.

In that room, a trash bag.

The water drains. He looks up at the sudden breath on his head. Tlaelquani smiles, teeth huge, and her eyelids are ocular foreskin glinting with star pre.

OUR TIME IS UP

SEE YOU NEXT TIME

Her whisper tickles his ear like the purr of a jaguar:

AnD bEwArE
tRaSh NiGhT

She drops into the toilet like a water slide, and her black hair crashes after her, and she is gone. His boot slips on the rim and he falls onto the tile, and he is in the girl’s restroom. His fist is squeezed so tight it stings like the cuts on his legs, but as long as he grips it, he can feel the beat of her heart.

fragments of a rough draft. sometimes presented out of order.