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There is a secret buried beneath the mountain’s gray skin.
many Mothers gone,
To fetch up the secret from Deep-Down requires a long trunk and a longer memory.
We all have secrets, its hard to be vulnerable
but the rock does not tell her daughters,
The Many Mothers have memories longer than stone.
the earth has memmories
It is a truce with the Dead, and the Many Mothers are nothing more and nothing less than the Memories of the Dead, the sum total of every story ever told them.
At night, when the moon shuffles off behind the mountain and the land darkens like wetted skin, they glow. There is a story behind this. No matter how far you march, O best beloved mooncalf, the past will always drag around your ankle, a snapped shackle time cannot pry loose.
debt she’ll never in the holy half-life of uranium pay back,
America innit
half life of uranium = 4.5 billion years. How long it takes for it to be 1/2 not radio active
making elephants glow in the goddamned dark. It figures.
Somewhere her grandmama is sure as hell laughin...
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but nobody could ever settle on one foolproof method to tell people to stay away.
Everyone wants to play god man
Kat grew up, as most American children did, associating elephants with the dangers of radiation.
Kat had taken a long, hard look at all of this, rubbed her chin in a stereotypically pensive fashion, and suggested a warning system so ridiculous nobody took her serious at first.
The harder they laughed, the more sense it seemed to make.
They killed their own just to see time pass. That’s how it started. Humans were as hypnotized by shine as magpies, but no magpie has ever been so thinkful about how many days it has left before it turns into a told story.
(Try not to judge them;
They had no history, no shared Memory.
History allows us to share memmories
Who can blame them for clinging ape-fearful to the only constants they had?)
“What if the sun should go wandering and leave us and we don’t even realize we’ve been left behind?”
piteous little creatures
They gored the earth with gaping holes, shook her bones until crystals like pieces of starless sky fell out.
Humans nasty
they carried sickness within their blood and guts.
Pity the poor...
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Me too
couldn’t smell the W...
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There was a good place, once.
Once
As long as they had each other and the Stories, there was no fang or claw that could make them Not.
She was She—the survivor, the prisoner, the one they called Topsy—and She carried the Stories safe inside her skull, just behind her left eye, so that they lived on in some way. But there is no one left to tell the histories
she cannot see them, and she cannot touch them.
In this mean old dead-dog world you do what you gotta do to put food on the table, even when you’re damn certain deep down in your knowing-marrow that it’s wrong and that God Almighty his own damn self will read you the riot act on Judgment Day.
you swallow your right and you swallow your wrong and you swallow what turns out to be several lethal doses of glowing green graveyard seed and you keep on shoveling shit with a smile (newly missing several teeth) until either the settlement check quietly arrives or you drop, whichever walks down the cut first.
This particular elephant has a reputation for being mean as hell;
Because you are killing them
She pities them, she hates the company so much it’s like a bullet burning beneath her breast bone (or maybe that’s just another tumor taking root),
Without stories there is no past, no future, no We. There is Death. There is Nothing, a night without moon or stars.
Furmother was wise, which means curious.
Furmother was wise, which means crafty.
“What I heard is that you all were just a bunch of loose whores who caught syphilis and decided to milk the company dry.
Topsy’s new owners, the proprietors of Coney Island’s under-construction Luna Park, have promised the show will be free of charge and open to all members of the public. The execution will take place at the foot of the “Electric Tower,” a 200-foot-tall structure that, when finished, will feature almost 20,000 electrified bulbs.
no,
Wrong, should be "know"
She’s never read a paper in her
She loses herself as she gets bigger. She busts so many heads trying to find herself again the circus men get fed up and sell her to a factory
In those days, packing a picnic lunch and taking the family to watch someone or something die horribly wasn’t considered particularly unusual.
There’s no stopping decay, change, or entropy.
This, she signs, is a seed. Crush it and death sprouts. Not just yours. The men with the chains. The circus men, the poison-factory men, the ones who will come to see you burn—all of ’em. Like lightning striking. You’ll be lightning. You’ll burn and you’ll strike and then you’ll be gone. It’s up to you.
