Inanna, daughter of the Moon, put on her regal garment, hung a ravishing sash around her neck,
With fearsome, terrifying radiance she bedizened her brow,
She drew a carnelian necklace with rosettes around her divine throat,
She made a hero’s gesture with the seven-lobed mace in her right hand.
She set her foot on the deep blue step.
— The Exaltation of Inanna
An endless breath. At first he thought it was his own. But his air is congealed, unmoving, stuck in his nostrils and throat like clear resin.
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Lazur crosses the tarmac to the private plane. The mansion burns into the red evening, but only the smoke reaches the runway. The concrete under his feet, a blend of pulverized sand and tar, seems to go on forever in the dark.
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Lazur sits in a cramped office, facing a desk with an empty seat. There is a CRT security monitor on the desk playing cartoons. He is exhausted. He can’t sleep. He has to wait for it to ambush him, when all hope is gone.
Dynamite rains behind his eyelids. Scarred lips chewing on a hissing red stick like Bugs Bunny, smearing it like lipstick. Lazur’s head hangs back, mouth open. He is so tired. Wile E. Coyote just made a bunny sexbot full of dynamite to lure that nymphomaniac Bugs Bunny. Bugs counters with a coyote sexbot. They’re just looking for love. They’re crazy about each other.
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Parsani notes that the premature birth of Ahriman is in fact an allegory for the self-introspection of Time (Zurvan) into its more abysmal scales…
— Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia
✦
Greenwich is showering. The concrete floor and gritty sand makes her think of a beach shower. But there is no ocean, only the black sea of petroleum beneath her feet in this desert bunker.
She opens her eyes and her skin gives her vertigo. Serpents barely visible in the murk of deep waters. The qatran is feeding off the violence like a school of red garra. She remembers going with her mother to a salon (the lull of fans and a corner-mounted TV and some toys sticky with other children’s fingers) and her mother’s feet going in a basin of fish which nibbled away the dead skin.
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⭐ Torture Works is now on PDF/EPUB on itchio. and paperback on amzn.
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Dark.
Light.
Dark.
Light.
He thinks he’s blinking. Then some sluggish understanding tells him, his eyes are incapable of movement, swollen so tight his lids can’t close.
His heart is blinking.
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Fear the time when the bombs stop falling while the bombers live.
— Steinbeck
*
The light is orange.
Orange. Orange.
Red.
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There is a minefield in Golan Heights.
A pack of wolves lives among them, too light to trigger the sensors.
If they leave the minefield, they will be shot.
If the mines are removed, their ecosystem will be destroyed. And they will be shot.
Your paw on my sensor. Lithe, watchful. Just delicate enough to keep yourself alive. As long as you don’t push too hard.
*
Rubicon clings naked to the damp body, his finger wiggling inside a bullet hole. His bony legs kneel on either side, his toes curling, what’s left of them. The sun is starting to creep into the room, hot with the smell of gunpowder. His soles are blinding, two side-view mirrors.
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She doesn’t recognize her own voice. Nine months without anyone to talk to. And when she did, it was in a voice changed by the burning substance. As if her time underground had transformed her into a demon.
Time streams black from her head. Hair shaved at different lengths for topical testing. The caustic wax burning into her skull. Somehow more freakish and dehumanizing than if she was shaved completely. Prickly patches and dark chopped lengths.
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The vitals monitor beeps the countdown of the heart. Lazur sits next to the bed reading an old Lispector paperback of his mother’s, The Passion According to G.H. She was never the type to underline, but her presence is still felt. Paper is delicate and fibrous as any tissue. His mother’s hands dog-eared this page, spilled tea on that corner, and in every place the oil of her fingers lead to permanent near invisible changes.
Oh, my unknown love, remember that I was imprisoned there in the collapsed mine, and that by then the room had taken on an unutterable familiarity, like the truthful familiarity of dreams. And, as in dreams, what I can’t reproduce for you is the essential color of its atmosphere.
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Rubicon sits on the plastic stool, shower blasting his scarred back. Water spills through the holes of his face, turning him into a fountain in the dark granite cubicle.
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The shadow walks toward him, empty soles silent on the carpet.
Lazur reaches under the pile of clothes he removed from his body earlier, boxer briefs soft on the back of his hand. He pulls out his gun and aims at the shadow and pulls the trigger faster than he intended, still adjusting to his actual body, and he must have missed because the shadow keeps gliding toward him and there’s a crack on the window like the crack on his mind.
Then he sees the hole in the shadow, edges sparking around a coin of night.
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