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October 1 - October 7, 2024
They say he crawled the Staircase on his hands and knees until they bled. He never found his love. Or if he did, he passed right over it without recognition. They all looked the same.
Once, June had a dream that Harebell had a forked tongue. In the dream, they
were making out until June realized that the left half of Harebell’s tongue had gotten bored and ditched her for the arcade. June was so embarrassed that she started crying, and the tears were all little tongues, wriggling down her cheeks like leeches. If quantity of tongues equals severity of love, then June might have had a problem. Was Harebell in love with June? No. Harebell was only in love with herself. And the Ramones. And maybe the Eternal Staircase.
They think staircases were just dreamt up by authority figures (parents, cops, local politicians) to scare kids out of loitering after dark. But that’s what we’re here for. To assure you that eternal staircases are very real—as is pretty much everything else you’ve been warned about.
Every object felt either impossibly minute or so leviathan it would devour her.
Do not visit the Eternal Staircase with a sweetheart. They will grow to love the Eternal Staircase more than you. They will accidentally say the Eternal Staircase’s name instead of yours while you’re having sex. Make the Eternal Staircase a part of your vacation today!
We are servants to the rules we set.
That night, when you come to me as yourself, you don’t mention being a fox earlier, so neither do I. If I did, I would have to say something about how many women it looked like you ate, and we agreed that the fastest way to kill the mood is to talk about the other women. Instead, we watch TV. When we fuck, I pretend I am a fox. I imagine triangular ears and soft black mittens and pointy teeth. I bite your shoulder to test them. Foxes don’t fall in love with anyone. Foxes don’t even have a word for love. If you were to ask a fox if he loved you, he would probably eat you, but not for the
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until I wake up.
Perhaps if he ever fully falls asleep, his ears will kiss over the dinner table of his head and start making each other promises neither of them intend to keep.
The banker has always thought that sweethearts looked like cactuses. She could never imagine what draws them to each other—the more in love they grow, the more cactus-like they become. With each pulse of love, they appear more and more painful to the touch.
Hopefully they would have been too busy eating vegetable stew or having sex or walking along a river—all those things you can do when you’re alive and a human and not a church decoration.
I love my father, but I do not enjoy him. This combination occurs not infrequently. The more I grow to love a man, the less I tend to like him.
Imagine. Imagine! You cannot. War cannot be imagined, for those who have not witnessed it cannot truly fathom it, and for those who have borne witness—it is no longer an imagining. It is a boot print permanently crushed into the heart.
When I was young, I believed this was magic. Now that I am older, I know it must be a science I do not yet understand—which is only another way to say “magic.”
Isn’t it true that every sliver of glass in the box has been selected by a past version of myself? A self who spotted a flash of color and reached for it? A me that made a choice?
By then, watching the advance had given way to an excruciating boredom. Humans can grow bored of all things, somehow. This is one of our great blessings. They say that art, that beauty, is what allows us to endure times of great horror—but no. It is our bottomless capacity for boredom.
One of the greatest tragedies of the War of Fog is that it seems to have been fought for no true purpose. Unlike the holy Wars of Quartz, or the moral obligation necessitated by the
Orphan War and the War of Scarlet Rope, the War of Fog was driven neither by faith nor by humanitarianism. It lacked even the base motive of border expansion, colonialism, or other such matters of state.
Though we know, through logic and reason and literary documentation, that we are not, in fact, singular—the heart disagrees. No war could be more sanguinary. More storied. Yes, this is The War. The only war that ever has been or will be—because it is ours.
In this way, war is like love.)
“It is the Second Eternity,” he mutters. “It has all happened.” “What has happened?” I ask him. My father’s eyes are nearly lost in their sleepless sockets. “All that is to come.”
If a thing exists forever, always beginning and happening and ending and beginning again, it both exists and does not exist. The Eternities Paradox thus makes it impossible for curators to gather and preserve, let alone exhibit, the artifacts from the War of Fog. How do you display an object that is at once premade and on a battlefield
and eroded to dust?
(Author’s note: The Eternity Paradox is also what makes us, the survivors of the war, unable to ever know peace.)
I apologize. Language is inefficient in discussing the Army of Fog. Language is designed to be linear. To move a reader through time and story as if it were a road they, themselves, were marching down. Even the visual elements of language, as you can see, force the reader into a relationship with forward, linear progression. Your eyes move
from left to right, one word at a time. In doing so, the reader, too, is dragged through time.
Sometimes I wonder whether these texts will be (are, have been) illegible. Will, now that the Second Eternity is at hand, reading even be possible? Without time, how can a time-dependent language exist? Perhaps we will all be rendered mute. And yet—the Army of Fog has begun singing as it marches. One low lyric after the next.
(Author’s note: I have begun to question the necessity of my work. Without time, there can be no history. Without history, there is no need for a chronicler at all. If nothing can end, then what is the use of remembering it?)
There is wanting and then there is wanting. It’s ridiculous that the word want covers so much. Like, wanting a cool car is not the same thing as wanting Quinn. One of those is surface, material. The other kind of want is molecular. It’s more like a tug. Like all these fishing lines are hooking into me and yanking. You can decide to want a car. You can’t decide to want a person. Not in the same way.
Maybe this is the difference between want and yearn: Want can be flipped on and off like a fuse. Want can be indulged in or set aside. Yearn is something else. You can hear it in the shape of the word. It sounds like the noise a person might make while lying on their stomach on the rim of a well, and reaching down into it, toward the dark. The little grunt they might emit as they reached and reached down into the belly of the well but never quite caught whatever it was they were reaching for.
In AP US History, I learned that the Puritans used to name their daughters things like Creature and Fear, and their boys Truelove. I like the idea of girls with monstrous names. I also like the idea of cars named after girls named after monsters.
There was a time when conversations used to snuff out as she passed through a room, eyes flicking toward her in morbid curiosity. But novelty wears off fast in a town this small. Once people figure you out, they stop caring. She’s like a mascot. All people see is this familiar cartoon outline of a person, completely ignoring the actual person inside.
Imagine being so rich that feeling insignificant was an aesthetic novelty. A sensation so foreign, you experimented with it in your interior design. Just for kicks.
None of that shit ever happened. We never went to the beach as kids. Not once. It would have been nice if the story were true. What I mean is, it’s nice when things have a reason for happening. When a diagnosis has an explanation attached. Cause and effect. Because if you know the why of a malady, you can take steps toward fixing it.
But the fact of it is, we don’t know why this is happening. She drowns and drowns and drowns and there’s no point in any of it.
She doesn’t have any friends at this party. She doesn’t have any friends in this whole town anymore. A low roll of thunder hums over the house, and Sophia’s eyes go glassy. But no rain yet. As long as there’s no rain…
This party she wasn’t even invited to, that her little brother dragged her to because he felt sorry for her. She wouldn’t have had to die, alone in a storm. Again. “No,” I tell her. “No. Nobody saw.”
Before the Marriage, I was a girl, like you. What, you think this impossible? You think huntresses are one sort and you, something completely different? I understand why you would think that way. It’s easier.
Please shut up about the end of the world. Yes, the world changed. It does not matter how or when. All worlds end, at some point,
and new ones sprout from them. There is always a war to slough off our father’s names. A rainfall of bombs to plant as seedlings in our kitchens, in our scalps. Call this new world a sapling. Call me the bough stretching out from a newborn tree. No more chimes. The planet has shrunk down.
Lost its ties to itself. We use the debris of our old lives as weapons. Everything can be a weapon, if held skillfully. The old gods died when the red snow fell. Now the people have new gods: A moon that swells until she almost rots, then retreats into mourning. A fami...
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An efficient predator must think like her prey, so she may always be one step ahead. For the hunted, one step ahead is death. So the best hunters must be already dead.
All creatures become prey when the time is right.
Let to reach so far toward the sky, lesser beings can hardly see the top of you.
My ghost tumbled out of me many years ago. Sometimes I pass it in the forest, mistaking it for a pheasant, and try to shoot it down.
The neighbors want a second huntress. But I will not make one.
Yes, the neighbors—they will be angry. But what can they do to me for freeing you? Kill me? They cannot kill me. I am death.
What is the most hideous thing you ever nurtured? What shape is a phantom limb? What wine pairs best with the most lonesome meal? What is enough?
It truly is the loveliest little insect, especially when the
