This final piece from V.4 “Fragmentation” is a deliberate straggler.
This unannounced transmission arrives as the connective tissue begins to tear, stretch, reform.
Not an epilogue, but a lesion.
Scorched prose. Feral syntax. Multimedia wounds stitched with ruin and ritual.
Emil Ottoman and Pablo Baez return not to resolve V.4 but to tear through its final veil.
Fragmentation not as theme, but as weapon.
This story appears in SUM FLUX, V.4: “Fragmentation,” a curated collection of boundary-pushing original fiction. Read the full lineup here.
(Opening digital collage, me. limited Photo curation by the multitalented Pablo Báez. Any bad collage work on his photography by me, any other horrors perpetrated herein, also me.)
Intermezzo
You speak in narrative collapse between the walls closing in. The fractal fractalizing. The tesseract tesseracting. The terror terrorizing. The liminal fracture between the myth and the reality that created the myth and the reality but only in looking back at the cracks in the myth, and the reality becomes both the myth and the reality.
Intermezzo.
She was sitting on the side of the runway, full lotus, nude, covered in frost, breath steaming hot white clouds six times a minute. Her one thought, am I dead now?
The shattering came from all sides.
The sun rose cold copper and slow over the neighborhood singing a fine mist off Halloween decorations set out on yard after yard. In the brass light of morning they all looked more fake and uncanny. Dew wet plastic skeletons and zombies. Soggy fake spider webs like cotton shreds hanging from trees. A new kind of fear settles in as morning brightens. His stomach morphine cramps and doubles him in half at the fear of the reality of life ahead.
And in a circular room, glass walls and an infinity of holograms competing for space refracted on your shadow. All that light overlaying itself how physics ends in math creates one perfect image of you moving through the world.
“My favorite thing about having a car” he said and let the bait hang between them. Is? The chemist asked. “I can just disappear, poof, gone, and no one would be able to find me.” Unlikely, the chemist says. There is never any real inflection in her voice, not unless her emotions flare; sudden, violent, always in a pyroclasm of passions. Never mind if they made any sense. “Was that a dare or a challenge?” he asks. Unlikely, she said, I think it’s a statement of fact. That night when she was asleep he got up from the daybed, walked outside, and proved her wrong. The chemist was crawling her bedroom floor, combing the carpet looking for specks of crack she had cooked after dinner that may have fallen in the shag when she went to smoke it. She didn’t notice he had gone until six AM the morning after next.
This works for so long.
I tap my coffee mug “Rolling your car can be a religious experience.” She tells me it sounds like a really expensive way to get in touch with your higher power.
When it starts to break, the first time a movement is out of sync, one ghost twitch of an arm, or your image in the bathroom mirror left in linger of its own life after you turn to walk away.
They all walk single file through the end of their own lives, surrounded on all sides by set piece stage plays of their final moments played by masked actors, ahead of them a black hole in the path marks a dead end with everyone walking straight off the cliff and tumbling down into the abyss. A pink neon sign flickering above it: “this is not an exit”
You don’t notice.
The day you wake up alone, not alone like no one in your bed, more like alone like no one else on the planet. The first thing you do is you walk out your front door to go find a pistol to suck on like a cold hard cock.
You walk off from yourself, one of you goes to the kitchen, another the sink, another answers your phone vibrating on the counter, you just want a pineapple.
The first time an insect crawls out of a hole in your skin, on your arm, a red swollen spot you thought was a spider bite until the scratching and pain came from inside. That first time a wet bloody beetle crawled out of you, you screamed. The hundredth time it happens, a horned beetle burrowing out a bloody hole in your side, from under your ribcage, and you bleed like Jesus on the cross when they took a spear to him, you just say hello, take the big shiny beetle outside, and set him down on a log in your garden.
You’re breaking into pieces of yourself before you notice it. A burning palm tree above you. Bloody hands are clean hands. A perfect blue Florida sky is opening to a clear black void. Ten thousand of you walking around south Florida.
I know this house has a demon in it. She whispers in my ear. He keeps me from going to sleep, and when I do I wake up in a pool of night sweat with sore kidneys and a panic attack crawling up my throat. I drink to escape him until it stops working and I'm just an alcoholic. I'm the most beautiful girl in the world, so I know the demon is a man. I have only ever known men to be this cruel.
Muscovy Ducks raping each other.
All those homeless people talking nonsense, it took me too long to figure out they weren’t terribly mentally ill. That’s just a story our society tells us so we can feel better about leaving them out to rot. Every single one of them is speaking with the dead. It took me so long to figure it out because I ended up one of them.
The house is full of corpses and full of life. Bloody hands and clean hands. You make rice for Lazarus and you make potstickers for Lazarus.
None of the other people on this bus would look at me. I was sweating through my clothes, blood dripped from my nose. My vision was strobing from black to the bus and back again and again. A child stopped in the aisle as he passed and asked if I wanted a piece of candy. Had that “hey mister” innocence in his kiddy voice. My voice came out a hoarse rasp when I said sure, please and thank you. The kid handed me a palm full of Perc 30s and went to the back of the bus.
The Judge is going to New York and the judge is going on a cruise.
She hadn’t felt right since she left work, and for some reason she wasn’t alarmed when she spat up a wine bottle’s worth of blood in her kitchen sink while doing the dishes. She wasn’t alarmed when her knees went and she started to slide down the sink and cabinets below to the cold tacky tile floor of her apartment kitchen she’d always hated. She wasn’t alarmed when her vision blurred and she felt the hot wet spread at her crotch as she pissed herself uncontrollably. But, when she heard “and now ladies and gentlemen, Tom Jones!” she panicked. The start of Love Light Live in Las Vegas boomed in her ears, and she wept for her future.
You’re only one place at once, lying on the bed in the guest room attached to Lazarus’ room, on the bed, lying on those shit red gingham sheets picking a bar of Mexican Xanax out of the bottle and, everywhere else at once. You’re a flickering LED light bulb.
Waking up in the middle of the woods being confused that you’re still alive is great for five minutes of confused laughter until you remember, oh yeah, you’re being hunted for sport.
You wake up, and were you dreaming or are you out there in Humboldt kicking down a door?
“Never eat the brain,” she told me, “that’s how you get Kuru.” She stopped and looked me in the eyes, her serious authoritative face painted on. “Mad people disease, you know, like mad cow disease. You’ll go insane. It will kill you.”
The only thing left of her is cooking on rusty sheet metal over an open flame. It’s her brain. I’m sitting here and hey, could be worse.
When you left to come to Florida did you write Love you mom, I’ll be back soon, and a huge heart, or did you write “we’ll be back soon.”
Halloween was fun until your best friend killed herself in may and then October 13th you start to see her all over the city. Flash glimpses of her black hair in crowds. The glass front door of the apartment, because she had a key, unlocking and swinging open only for you to go down the stairs and the door is open but no one is there. Then you don’t go to a Halloween rave and people tell you the next day that she was there and so were you. Halloween was fun until the 31st when the door unlocks and does the spooky swing open thing again, and you sigh again, and go downstairs to close it again, but your dead best friend is sitting there on your porch, legs crossed, cloudy eyes, eating a Honeycrisp apple the size of a toddler’s head.
To be a saint.
People don’t realize how simple life really is until you introduce a pistol into a normal situation with the casual air of pulling out your wallet.
First you have to be made a martyr.
It took her all night and into the misty predawn to sew his bound, drugged, fetal curled figure into the hollowed out carcass of the dead elk. Hearing his muffled screams was a perfect way to start the day.
Congenital tinnitus runs in your family, a gift from your momses’ mom. Silence has always been a violence to you all on its own. Lying in bed you’ve clicked your teeth an impossible number of times to make sure you could head above the neversilence.
When the dam burst it did flooded the valley where my family lived. The concrete thick wall of green polluted water dismantling to only constituent parts house, home, possessions, history, mother, father, and three siblings. I had did never asked to live there on the mud flats in shadow of the crumbling infrastructure holding back nature’s conquered horror. Now did never want abuse heaped on me as oldest daughter. So yes, I did blow the dam. Lucky luck on me, no corporate entities cared interest for the dam, nor the mud flats then now sunk and filed with by count I made at least a score’s thousand dancing water mummies. This now is how I will celebrate the new year, by grabbing my pack for to get on.
The walls of the hologram reality you’re inside of have been stressing the walls of the hologram reality you’re inside of have been stressing for so long before you lie down the last time you’ll ever lie down to bed for so long before you lie down the last time you’ll ever lie down to bed.
Never go back to your childhood home. OK, there’s a caveat to this. Don’t go back if you grew up young till Grandma died in a house on ten acres in West Kentucky ten miles off the Cumberland. OK so on more caveat here, don’t go back if grandma’s house was damn fool sold soon after she passed on. But, if you do go back, be sure that you’re both stupid and brave, be dumb as a shiny polished ball of mud. See your childhood home, white clapboard, depression era small, white siding, but with trees sprouting 30 years tall out of it. Branches coming out mortar wound size holes, grown over on all sides. The forest coming back from the edge of the back nine acres making claim to your personal history, and be sure to be so dumb and angry that this is the one house on the long unpaved gravel circle drive gone to real and absolute shit. Next lot over Dennis’ old trailer is alive and well and brimming with the detritus of the new rural poor, complete with an All American made in China Trump flag hung off the porch like a banner. Now walk around the entire perimeter of your childhood wreckage and feel like a war orphan for some reason you can’t put a finger on. Forget completely though nominally a Presbyterian grandma was county wide whispered to confer with forest spirits. After all, she was twice widowed and she cursed in Gaelic. Have a beer or two, take pictures of the whole house on your space age phone, and on beer three decide your life just will not be complete without seeing the wrecked insides of the house that will look like neither your memories of it nor any of the backdrops to your baby pictures. Ignore the deer in the field out there watching you because when you grew up deer were everywhere out here and certainly hadn’t been hunted to skittishness in 30 gone years. Cut your way into the house, ignore the pale red glow you are pushing towards.
And you thrash. 180dB is the death zone for sonic pressure levels. A trope they use as a weapon in stupid movies. Not something you’re hearing in your head while you try to sleep.
Waking up with blood drying on your hands only comes as a shock to people who go their entire lives without a real sense of purpose. A monolith they may be, but the rest of us, one day we will, I promise you child, wake up with innocent blood drying to rust brown on our hands. Some of us bloody palmed, a lucky few, coated thick and sticky up to their fucking elbows.
The laminated and tempered three inch thick holographic glass reality is made of can withstand 70MegaPascals. The 33 foot radius room of all reality has a resonant radial frequency of 145Hz.
She took a slow drag from her cigarette, let the smoke back out her nostrils slow and curling. Said the reason hadn’t mattered when she made the decision and it wouldn’t matter after the act. She was frozen concrete, sinew and wet hair, a voice rasping in a storm. “Sometimes people just do things.”
How do you measure the sound of tinnitus? 145 decibels is a low bass hum with a pulse, turn the volume up enough and it drones, but by the time it reached 180 decibels it is no longer sound. It is a physical force you feel and then it kills you. Still, you wake up in the morning remembering the drone. Valentine’s Day 2009, Santa Cruz, Bassnecter, your insides melting in front of the bass bins. That’s the drone.
Her pervasive glowing nihilism drove her to commit atrocities with a smile on her face.
But the room that reality exists inside, the 20MegaPascals from the tinnitus is a resonating oscillatory pressure and doesn’t give a fuck that the walls of reality can withstand 70MegaPascals, in theory. Inside your head theory meets application.
He live streamed beheading his whole family on Twitch. When they ran him down they went live on Facebook and 600 people got to see 30 seconds of his face being peeled off like the skin of a ripe mango. When the police found them later, still bloody with his face sitting an empty wrinkled Halloween mask on the back seat, they turned off their body cameras.
Always the overlaid images of you in the middle of the room, on the bed, thrashing, the walls shimmer and water ripple because a rock has been thrown into reality by this sound in your head.
I’d always told her to take everything you can from everyone you can, and when I woke up in the Motel 6 with the door open and the room tossed and cleaned out down to stealing all my ways to prove I was myself in the legal sense, I will admit, I was perversely proud that she was going to be OK.
The glass walls of reality breathe with a pulse, rippling, and a frosted fractal pattern of microcracks spirals from 77 geometrically aligned places in the cylinder, where vertices humans can not see overlap.
When you don’t learn, they kill you. Do learn? They kill you. Comply? Kill you. Refuse? Kill you. So why do you keep coming back.
The flower of reality blooms in reverse, a high speed camera slowed down to a crawl, the glass of reality vacuums in and explodes out, wave collapse becomes explosive decompression. The glass showers the inside of the room in overlapping arcs of one and two millimeter shards of twinkle, outside of reality it flies forever voidlong with no friction to stop it.
The floor caved in and her worst fear came true. She fell, but she never landed.
Reality is a 33 foot circle you don’t want to break out of, the curtains to go up. She walked right through the wall and off the edge. Frictionless.
I stalk the streets in the rain. Dressed so normal I fade from a passer’s memory as soon as I’m out of their line of sight. Carry the white cup, the one with the green logo. Besides that, unbranded. Always follow. Never look like it. A hunt is all about patience. Even in the zoo, if a keeper turns their back on the friendly tiger they’ve taken care of for years, the tiger hunches down. That prey drive never dies, and if the keeper doesn’t turn back around fast enough he’s just so much lunchmeat wrapped in poly cotton blend. When you’re behind everyone the whole of humanity is prey. 30% of gunshot wound are lethal, in the United States, but over 70% of knife attacks are lethal. The average number of wounds in a shooting, smoothed out and averaged, is one. The average number of wounds in a knife attack is 37. Police don’t know what to make of it when someone turns up a corpse with only two knife wounds. For fun go look up what the Syke’s ad Fairbairn fighting knife is. Google “silent sentry removal tool.” With a blade pushed through your lung and heart you can’t scream, you can barely gasp a gargle. I toss my coffee in a storm drain. I only hunt in the rain. I am very patient. Then the phone goes off. “Oh, that’s today,” turn around “No, I didn’t forget the PTA meeting, I’m stuck on the highway. What? Oh, my window is open. Just go ahead, I’ll be there as soon as. Yeah, thanks, uhuh, bye, OK, OK, bye.” It’s a mile back to the car, a long stupid walk in the rain.
In the morning the vibes are off. You cook eggs, while you shit, while you vomit, while you shave, while you bang your head into the guest bathroom mirror.
She was obsessed with maps. She saw everything as a map waiting to be drawn. She had file boxes of notebooks mapping her life. But she could not map the trajectory of where the love had burnt out, and it hurt.
Coherence or decoherence? Coherence or decoherence?
Once he realized that every time he hit the terminal point, the place where he had made a wrong turn or gone too far, and he would see the sky darken and open up, then a blink of nonexistence. One perfect second in which there was no noise and then the reset. His ears ring, fingers tingle when he opens his fresh eyes and sees pinwheels of color fading. Once he realized he could fuck up eternal in that same stretch of months he felt like a God. He’d found some cosmic cheat code for reality. Until small things started to change. His shirt would be different. Blink and he would be clean shaven. Blink again and his car was a different model. Blink again and he wakes up with a gun in his hand. Blink, come to in a Motel 6. Blink. In a different state. Maybe it gets to be time to take reality a little bit more seriously is his thought before he loses himself and his original real story and bio forever. Before he forgets the end of the story or what he prayed for the day he woke up and life had turned into a waking nightmare.
Every one of your countless millions makes the call except for him. He watches. He’s wearing postal worker’s pants with a black stripe down their slate blue sides. He’s lighting a cigarette and sitting on the bed you’re not supposed to ever sit on because it’s delicate and inflates and deflates and it’s a wound bed and makes a droning noise you can only sleep through from constant exposure. He’s wearing a cheap rayon t-shirt from Temu with a huge cartoonish classic styled Japanese Tiger on it, fighting a skeleton, surrounded by flames and smoke and chrysanthemums.
I always told her she would make a great cult leader, but she never agreed with me until I came up with a fitting story. Until I came up with a narrative unlike any other. But the truth is she had been waiting her whole life to be made into a living God.
The call back. It’s the worst thing ever. The phone launches as thousands of you throw it across the room in every possible direction, and all make the same sound Lazarus says later he never heard a human make before and never wants to hear a human make again. The watcher, he leans forward and watches the fist you drop your glasses and cry.
Wake up feeling violent and crawl out into a rainstorm know god sent me to drown the world, then curse the motherfucker when his high and mighty deluge soaks all my smokes.
She wanted to be a saint.
He tells me my body burned up in the fire beyond even harvesting, but my insurance only covers discount husks.
But Saints are martyrs. You cannot be alive and be a Saint. No matter what anyone says.
Nails bit to the quick, blood dripping from one nostril, hair full of glass and concrete dust. She stands in the alley market, only one shoe on her left foot, her mind a smooth pane of frosted glass. And she turns the pomegranate over and around in her hand, inspecting it, but not perceiving it. Smoke rises above the buildings behind her, blocks and blocks away from the alley market. Who would have thought a car bomb could be so gentle. So calm. The fruit stall owner is yelling at her. She turns and spins the small red fruit in her hands like it was a Rubik’s Cube. So calm.
Decoherence is impossible to explain outside a fugue, a trance, a drug trip. The fracture of one mind into a million isn’t explicable. If you say you walked out of the room while you were sitting on the couch, you’d get put on the ward. But not the one you visited the Saint on, after The Saint hangs herself, they close it.
They all walked single file. No one knew if the line they were in had a beginning or an end. It was only known that they were all neither the head of the line, nor the end. Everyone, walk until you starve.
And the watcher is the only constant. If you sit he’s next to you. If you walk he’s half inside of you, a film overlay no one can see.
Some days waking up is just a place holder for the act of waiting for a bomb to fall on you.
The watcher doesn’t go into the viewing.
“I wish I could do my whole life over,” she sniffed back a dribble of snot. “I’d fuck up everything so much better with another chance.” Talking like this in the middle of a drug overdose is so gauche it makes me want to scream. “You know?” She asks, struggling to keep her ten ton eyelids open, fighting off the I’m about to stop breathing feeling of one last nod. So I day I think you’re a fucking cliché and you definitely did too much. Whatever she was about to say next dies rattling in her throat.
Solomon slaps a black carbon fiber and metal spirit on your desk, thunk, and says it’s riot season. The Watcher smiles.
The homeless man tells me he never fell in love with the right person. He says he has a college degree. He says we are all so much closer to being him than our brains can admit to us. And finally, he says I’m a demon.
You see yourself sometimes and it gives you vertigo so bad you collapse, spiraling down in whichever direction you were moving, the most graceless ballerina. So you go outside less.
The tent loomed larger than a football stadium over the termite crowds surrounding it. A circus of giants could have come around, set this thing out on the dry grass wastes at the edge of town, and it would have made just as much sense. The tent went up overnight, in silence, and for the whole of the next day it existed. People woke up and took sight of it. Over the course of that first day it was inspected and found to have no entrance. It was impossible for man or forklift to pry any edge from the ground. The four peaked tend measured eight stories high. The lines staking it down, close as anyone could figure, were marine cable, like to anchor a war ship. By 3pm the scene was taped off by police, and this did not stop the whole of the town from inspecting it. By the time the Gold medal sunset settled in the sky, the crowds had all gone home for supper and gossip. Teenagers smoking weed and going back and forth about the tent were the only ones to see a murder of crows thousands strong to be flying in from the northward to land on top of the tent. A final straw to spook off the final observers. The delinquent teens packed up at the sight and headed for the park at the far end of town, all convinced they were in a remake of Killer Klowns From Outer Space.
And the town grew quiet as people ate, laid down to bed, fell all of them to a baby in a crib into uniformly dreamless sleep.
At midnight the goliath awakened. Lights cracked on and the classic red and white tent, big as actual geography, just as solid, as hard to explain as a mountain, came alive. No circus music. No big tent revival churchy music, just a low bass hum.
Everyone in town woke up soaked from night sweats. The hum droned, and a voice over it, “come and see.” Come.
One of you is on the platform, aware of his own existence inside of the illusion of reality, and he is gathering together millimeter long shards of glass and piecing them back together.
She told me she only had one hobby, and it was to go out late at night and cause car crashes in the country. I said she can’t be serious. She ran her fingers around the lip of her teacup and said “yeah, I dress up like a ghoul or a ghost or whatever and go out on a little rural road somewhere and, you know, pick a good spot. And, well, no one want to run over a ghost, or hit a bloody girl crying, running out from the brush on the side of the road.” She said if the people survived, no one ever believed them. She said in all the time she’d been doing this, she’d only once ever been clipped by a car.
Only issue is there’s no map for the territory, it’s terra incognita, and while by the end of the year he’s put together a jagged edged round of three inch thick glass, it’s not in the impossibly precise arrangement it was originally. Reality has no guide.
Once he was dead he had a wide angle bird’s eye view lens on the world. He regretted having done it. And he was forced by time to watch his greatest fear come true as time never stopped moving, and in the end, the real one this time, when the very last person forgot him, once he was consigned past gone but also forgotten in total, he heard a gong noise, followed by clapping, and then darkness.
Your moods become more erratic and you’re confused easy by simple questions. Some of your shadows come walking back but burn up before they can get to you. The Watcher is your divine jealousy.
The house burned down and they moved to a motel. The GoFundMe failed and they moved in with an aunt. No jobs came and the aunt tossed them out. They moved into a more rundown motel. The second GoFundMe failed and a sheriff escorted them out of the more rundown motel. So they lived in their car. They got kicked out of a Wal-Mart parking lot they were trying to overnight in. No matter what, when you asked how he was doing, the husband, the new father, his answer was the same. “Living the dream.” But his eyes were empty, colorless. The painted on eyes of a cheap plastic doll.
The watcher is you as Titan.
Funny how when you get sober people think you gotta go to meetings. I just started picking fights with strangers.
Where the watcher was you was so estranged from where you are now you couldn’t imagine. But you wake up after dreaming of the Salton sea in California and Google to see if it’s still there.
After the event, which he called an enlightening, but the veracity of whether or not this is or is not a misnomer being now in question as only an aside in this recounting of events, of which the “event” hereafter to be applied with quotations to set it aside from any other event, as suicide, grocery shopping, a package arriving, et al., the man in question ordered a 30 foot roll of dumpster to be delivered in front of his house the next day. That night he had saltines and one cup of coffee for dinner and did not sleep, the being from the “event” until present both his every meal and his now regular nonsleep schedule, the morning after which he watched the 30 foot long grunge and graffiti covered rolloff dumpster complete delivery, as was “instructed,” his words used here as instructed in quotations as by the “event” he began the “GRAND PROJECT,” his words, and him insisting they are both written and spoken in “bold, all caps,” his words again, of deconstructing his life. It is of note to now mention that the precursor to the “event” is thought to be the disappearance of his wife, of whom he will not speak and insists he never had, and more presciently who is still missing, and more peculiarly for any psychiatric event of this magnitude and duration, he was investigated for the disappearance of and cleared of any culpability or blame for the disappearance of the wife he insists he never had on no less than six separate occasions, from the third day after the “event” when he was interrupted in the midst of his “GRAND PROJECT” by the authorities, who at the time noted his calm and pleasant demeanor as “odd” for a man found standing at the end of a suburban cul-de-sac in front of a roll of dumpster piled with the entire contents of his house, doused with several cans of kerosene, and burning bright as a star fallen to earth from heaven.
When you wake up and you see the Watcher in the mirror the first time, that’s when you know the only real peace you’d ever known, every shared peak experience, the one who was too close and too smart, martyred herself. Now the Saint is just a pile of shit in her old room in your house.
A pattern will get you killed. I never forget. The one day he went to the same Starbucks twice in a row, he got shot in the face holding a latte. A pattern makes you visible. The secret to staying upright and doing what we do is being invisible. Never do the same thing the same way twice. My tradecraft is to lack so much rhythm and reason I vibrate out of the visible realm. Soon I will take an apprentice. After I slip, and I am meticulous. I am detail oriented. I take notes. Keep records. But the other thing he told me was that everyone slips eventually. So after I slip, she will be the next in our lineage to sit down and write a note reading “A pattern will get you killed,” and I will be dead.
Grief only grows hotter. Burns more. You let yourself go. Gain 40 pounds. Eat the cookies. Don’t work out. Cry at car commercials.
He sat one the shore weeping. Yelling over and over again, “the ship burned. The ship burned.” Between sobs and wails he would blubber, “I was supposed to burn too.”
You lie down next to Bird, and Jewel Claw Rook flashes in your head, and you black out.
Her argument was that since god was all powerful and everything else under the sun, then surely he had the capacity to kill himself, and she made a schizoid if convincingly sober argument for him having done so in the year 2009.
After you’re in bed the Watcher lies down on top of you. Sinks inside of you. The only two you left. The only one of you left. And in the morning you wake up and it’s after the holidays and the roof is leaking under 50,000 lbs of melting snow pack and the Oracle is yelling it’s the apocalypse, but you can’t tell her that already happened a while back and everything was fucked anyway, but you follow into the kitchen. Water is pouring through the ceiling, gallons, she’s in a panic. You can’t think like this. There’s nothing you can do so you go into the bathroom and vomit before getting a cup of coffee poured with shaking hands because the only thing she saved from under the water so far was the Bunn. We’ll be back, you say and go back to the bedroom. You don’t recognize yourself as yourself or the Watcher in the bedroom mirror. You eat three 2mg Pharmapram and drink coffee and check your email, but your mind is on fire. Conflicting memories. You look at Bird and she’s got feathers, blink and they’re gone. Baby, she asks, are you ok? Just fine. Just, this wasn’t expected at all. Just this is fucked.
Snow was covered in enough blood you’d think a giant had been exsanguinated as it were dragged to the treeline. So now imagine all of my perfect shock wherein those woods all I find is a little waif, tatterdemalion, feral youth, cannot be more than 23, wandering around disoriented terminally ,but otherwise outwardly completely fine aside her bleeding from the nose and mouth both unnatural and unceasing. “Help” she gargled to me.
You go back to the kitchen after your coffee and swear she’s standing in her doorway as you pass. You turn, door closed, nothing. And then in the kitchen start to bail water and move essentials, get things you think you all care about out of danger. The Oracle is in a panic, and when you ask her, moving things into the hallways where it’s not pouring water from the ceiling, “what’s my name?” She says that’s not helpful, about to cry. “But what’s my name?” She stares you down, half foreign eyes in those sockets, and cocks her head side on, leans forward, right in your snarky little fucking face, her eyes glazed wet and grey blue, holding it all back. she says Your Name is Your Name. Voice colder than the winter storm brought this melting tragedy upon us. Now could you please help?
Intermezzo is the entr'acte in the Saint Cycle:
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Chills.
I haven't had that much coffee yet to process this level of insanity