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✦

The father keeps a tube of lipstick on his nightstand. Lazur sees it on the rare occasions he is called upstairs, to carry the man’s briefcase or do his tie when the man is falling over drunk. Lazur always assumed it was a memento of the absent mother, until he saw how every trace of her was removed from the house, except for the subliminal rubbish in the basement.

Rich men are freaky. But he’s driven the man to secret and depraved gatherings, and never brought him back with makeup on. The lipstick feels wrong to look at. A sense of something black, congealed, and burnt—yet oozing with endless, leechlike intelligence. The walls must be flaking with toxic pigment. Cadmium red. Lazur holds his breath, and knots the tie.

✦

Prokop’s hands had become transparent through lack of use, but on the other hand they had acquired an extraordinary sense of touch. They felt and detected the potential power of detonation of whatever they encountered. A young body had an enormous explosive tension…

—Karel Čapek, Krakatit

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Darkness forever.

On the contrary: the effect of the bomb is greater than any conceivable end, for this end will necessarily be destroyed by its effect. Every end will be destroyed together with the entire world in which ‘ends and means’ had existed.
— Gunther Anders

✦

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