This story appears in SUM FLUX, V.4: “Fragmentation,” a curated collection of boundary-pushing original fiction. Read the full lineup here.
Stray Legs pulls over and offers a ride with a curling hand signal. No time for the Penetrating Vision, we must jump to the occasion, pulling up hem, latching the door behind. Inside, the blue pick-up smells like ash and bone, but we dare not flinch, though our nostrils betray us, flaring, sniffing forbidden flesh.
Before he asks, we tell him, To the city, and he makes the grunt smile, it's a good sign. We let the spine unwind but do not look back. We let the tissue stretch thin. This is the body, we whisper, an exhalation, like a bye-bye prayer as the gravel spits away from the shoulder. The separation is painful. Hollow, like hunger, growling beneath the robe. Is this shard the body now? It sounds unbelievable.
Our Temple Home Arcology pinches away over the shoulder. Brothers and sisters will now bandage the wound, crying the tears of Excisement. We are the body, they incant, there is synthesis through specialization, but their eye and vision gland, rips away, tearing down the sticky ribbon of road. Bound for a vulgar dream-meat quest.
"Where ya comin' from?" says the driver.
We don't answer with quick words. Let the long moment pass. Easy question with difficult answers, we tell him, but realize this is not what he is expecting to hear so we give a distracting joy-laugh to make things less awkward.
"S'okay–not the first time I picked up a drifter," he speaks, moving on, "expect you're a bit hungry, are ya?" eye pointing toward the greasy brown bag.
And we understand the outsider. His offering. It is more than a knowing, it is the hunger awakening like morning bears. It is familiar, a fix and a returning fantasy giving away the secret we have hidden these months. Hunting bugs, then mice, then rats, dove, suckerfish. Burning them over keep-low twig fires by the river. Then gnawing, wet mouthed and drippy, feeling the fracture and lonely cool of selfiness.
"It's a ham n cheese on rye," says Stray Legs, "Go ahead, s'all yers"
We crinkle the bag open and two hand the sandwich to our face. Molars thick with chewy clumps of salt muscle. We hum happy, like fox boys on a chipmunk. We are breaking rules and breaking out. Breaking down the body to mash, sliding inside and coming apart. We are exploded, the body in pieces.
After a spell, the stray wakes us up at the 10th street off-ramp, “This is as far as I’m goin in your direction”. And as we get out and watch the truck dust away, we wonder if we really have a direction. Up? Out? Around? Over? Under?
Dismembered and broken, we move, scaredy-stepping toward the ear-clog exhaust of the city.
In. This is the only path. Are we individual now? A separateness in the wild surrounded by beasts and nomads. We are the me in the meat. God in our own skin.
I have arrived.
My hands cover the ears, blocking out the bang bang and wah of the street. It smells crotchy, but also corn sweet. There are more people around me brushing the gown than I've ever seen before in one place. Too many colors to count. All free pieces jumbling and jagging around with busymaking and bustle. I am part of them, but we are not Unity, we are not the body. This world is undone, held loosely in place with barricades and a web of invisible forces.
"Spare Change?" Stray Sitter says holding out paper coffee cup. 𝔸𝕊𝕂 𝕄𝔼 𝔸𝔹𝕆𝕌𝕋 𝕄𝕐 𝔻𝕀𝕊𝔾𝕌𝕀𝕊𝔼, is markered across the cardboard sign in their lap. They catch my eyes in theirs, so I stop and stand in front of them, my long dress hiding the sun in blue shadow. "I'm hungry and I need money" they tell me after a Deep Searching Gaze.
I pluck out the material draping my hips and tell them I don't have any, then ask them how i can get some money too.
"You just ask for it," says Stray Sitter, "but this is my corner, go someplace else—weirdo"
On the next block I start asking people for money and am surprised at how many coins I have collected in a short time. I cup my palms and rattle the money in my hands as I walk. An elder woman, possibly startled by my coming-on-strong, gives me her bag and tells me to take it all. Convenient, as I now have a place to put my donations.
Between towers, the gamey smells draw me to a Silver Cart of Fire cooking sizzling brown tubes that make my cheeks squirt with spit. The Stray Cook says people usually buy just one or two, but he's happy to part with all the dogs for thirty bucks.
Is a decision for one still a decision for many? My new powers overwhelm. My glee spiced with greed.
And after some counting of the paper money in my new shoulder bag, we make the exchange and I fill my purse with delicious Charred Animal Logs.
Under a tree on a bench in a park, I rest the body, my body. My mouth sucking cylinders. My face aching with pleasure. In the city. Independent but incomplete. I shutter my vision, hoping to sense the limbs, the feels, the organs of knowledge, but there is only sweat on the forehead and grease on my fingers. Proprietary yet profane, no one joins me in this experience, though I have much to share.
And as I settle solitary in the scene, I hear the tink and plink of a distant memory. The bumping tones of melody from an early space. Before the time of Motherfathers and Teacherlovers. Far away bells pull at my ears and lead me through the neighbourhood. A hive of homes stuck together with rock tar and the slime of abundance.
What is home now? With no Garden Circle, no Dream Pool, no Teat of Divine Nourishment. I am afraid I cannot make it alone.
These chimes may ring me home. So I follow the thread of song, sometimes drifting to nothing, then landing again in bands of brittle frequency. Feeling for direction, I walk until there is nowhere left to go.
Here at the end of a street in front of elevated tracks is an overgrown house with boards on the windows, and spray paint on the bricks. On the porch, wooden chimes twist and percuss, a diatonic prelude on humid tendrils of hot air. Each note forming and reforming harmonic patterns, the coherence is effortless.
The past is taken by the present but my roots still crawl here. Birth home, broken egg, lost sanctuary, I have been called back.
Voices carry and lead me to the side fence over-eaten by creeper. Looking over the gate, there are six of them, drinking from cans, sitting in lawn chairs and smoking Spirit Weed.
"Hey Prophet, what can we do you for?" says the Stray Mouth turning everyone's heads in my direction.
The question bobs in mid air, and for the first time today, I feel the Serenity of Communion alight on my aura and I tell them that if they're hungry, I am happy to share my bag of meat dogs.
"In that case, we've got a place for another buddy at the squat." they say and motion me in with the curling hand signal, "Welcome home."
I join the circle, like a spoke in the hub. These are my people. Nested in suburban decay, we hunker between the pricking thistle and wild cucumber in a domain of fellowship. A revival and return.
We consume the body, the eye, the mouth, the ears, the nose, the fingers, legs and heart. We are the Regurgitation and Reconstitution. Meat of the Body, we have found ourselves. Rejoice, for we have rejoined.
Jon’s work from earlier volumes (1 & 2) appears here: Night at the Plaza & Jumping with Janus
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This is so breathless and full of momentum. I love the pacing, the choppy sentences.
When I read your stuff, I feel like I'm a visitor to a foreign land where they speak in a strange mashup of English and some long-forgotten spirit tongue. Equal parts acid-soaked waking dream sequence and sheer poetry. Uniquely Jon T. Great stuff, man.