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.

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