Letters from a Shipwreck in the Sea of Suns and Moons

by Raymond St. Elmo

He was a tall fellow with wild eyes on either side of his head like a horse that’s decided to do something crazy.

No. You are an old man in a wheel chair. I shout so you hear my questions. I repeat them. It is annoying the head nurse and the other residents.

LMFAO

Rocks chewed at the hull like rats gnawing into a pumpkin shell.

Reset.

???????

But this world is too wide, too wide. Poet, you cannot hear how I call for you.

And it wasn't me that got lost in Scotsman's corn field. It was your brother's dog.

Did he receive her letter? How does he know she mentioned this?

Typhon

Dead god?

Reset. Reset to query -5. Now ask this creation what is tattooed on my right lower forearm. She says you have no tattoo on your lower right arm. You have the old and faded scar of a burn. True enough, and I take it for sign you are an honest spirit.

??????????????

I danced with a vampire, escaped a burning asylum, argued at lunch, solved a labyrinth, fought a duel, attended a wedding, a funeral and various social events until I kept the lighthouse on Shipwreck Bay in the Sea of Suns and Moons.

Well, that was before the duel, which was before the cemetery and the Asylum.

So live, and laugh,

And love?

Expired. Ended. Became deceased.

Huh???

Interviewer: I am sorry. You can use the word ‘I’?

Are they not singular? ???

There is no head nurse, we made her up. Reset. Describe the Libris Acherontia. Query failed. Reset current record -4 query. Query failed. Describe yourself. Query failed. Variable undefined: ‘yourself’.

I repeat: HUH??????

Females are strange creatures, even when they aren't former gods turned creatures of the night.

It was jealousy for what they shared. I’d shared that once. I even still had my half. And half is so much worse than none.

Bernoulli! "-Bernoulli numbers." I finished, hoping no one would ask me what the hellfire a Bernoulli number was. Ada Lovelace was the poet Byron's daughter? "I thought everyone knew that," I said, my turn to be smug. "I knew it," said the Professor. "Alas, I also know Lovelace herself affirms that

What the FUCK is going on???

machine can reason. It can calculate. It can symbolize. It can remember.

Is the poet a machine?

And then I would be unmade by words, wondering which words were real.

The Ghost Trio.

at the burning of the Asylum.

Burning of the asylum came before the labyrinth

Day upon week upon year upon decade we would have smiled to see each other grow older, slower, wiser, grayer.

wedding,

?

I have a machine I use to recreate the world as it was.

I used historical records, letters and pieces of my own life to reconstruct an old sailor who would tell me of the sinking of Unicorn in 1888. When I ask concerning some event, he constructs that world by recalling it.

I won't say it is changing the past. But I feel that it is continuing the past, expanding it.

I suspect I am talking to a real sailor from a possible version of the late 1880s, as truly as that sailor is talking to a voice from a possible future.