Everyone on the Moon Is Essential Personnel

by Julian K. Jarboe

The first nice thing I ever did to my body was tear it open. Before then, my standard cruelty to myself was taking things in that hurt and holding them there. I said yes when I meant no: at work, at dinner, in parked cars. I tried to annihilate myself through abundance, absorbing and sloshing and wallowing along. I wanted to be swollen with misery.

Well, I’m practical when I’m nothing else. I got out my box cutter and I started making ways out. I sliced along the planes of my skin and squeezed until everything on the inside that ought not to have been there was on the outside again. I expected to recognize each individual trouble, but everything had melded together into a civilization of its own.

If you want to witness my anger then GET ANGRY ALONGSIDE ME!!!

The Church always gets its cassocks in a twist about witches but witchcraft has all the props I do like about religion that I first acquired in church anyway: 1. singing and chanting in dead languages, 2. lighting things on fire, 3. impractical headgear.

They waved and smiled, in the way of sick confused little children who run back towards conflict because it gives them meaning, and I thought, what the hell: life is short, treasure moments of radical vulnerability and speaking my truth, so I tossed down my cigarette and flipped them off with BOTH of my hands. Bert and I got to talking some more. We had very different kinds of terrible lives and not really too much in common but she NEVER once called me valid, THANK GOD, and that’s why we were best friends.

It made me miss my mom and feel bad about my abortions.

It went on that way for a while and that night I had a prophetic dream (one of my strongest powers) that everyone’s true name was what they were known for plus “bitch.” Bert was Hard Driving Bitch and Father Gaspren was Priest Bitch or Daddy Bitch and so on. The only person without a true name was me. I didn’t know what kind of bitch I was. I woke up in a cold sweat and lay awake the rest of the night still smelling like bleach.

“You’re right, we are NOT the same, because you are EMPTY inside while I CARE about these people so at least I’m a CAREFAG while you’re just an ELITIST FAGGORATI PRICK!!!”

I was the Witch King of Trash Town. The Carefag Bitch That Gave a Fuck. I surveyed my surroundings for enemies. I gathered strength from the elements to better manifest my powers.

Professionals yammer on about the “mental health crisis” in These Turbulent Times, like, GEE I WONDER if it has anything to do with most people being constantly in a state of desperation to sell their joy to oligarchs forever and ever? None of that goes away EVEN IF I could travel back in time and get un-fucked-up.

So I shouted back, “I GET TO KEEP MY RAGE!”

Like all liminal spaces, this one can be elusive, and sometimes it’s hungry, draws you near and lures you in. It gives, and it takes away.

The boys rip a wound in the world and walk through it together, still holding hands.

Jamie is silent and still. AJ’s eyes well with tears, and he imagines himself gouging out Derek’s eyes, twisting off his balls, anything, but he can barely stop his lip from quivering. He might like to kick Jamie in the shins, too.

A new portal offers itself to the boys. A deeper sort of nothingness. Almost a void. In the dark, dark night outside, only they can see that the fabric of the veil is coming undone entirely.

I am ten years old and I ask him how it could be possible for orchards to be endless. He is annoyed but clearly does not expect someone so young to understand infinity and eternity, much less gratitude or respect. But I know how many hours go into tending fruit trees, because I have so many ancestors with their pears and apples coming in that autumn, and I’ve pruned and harvested as much as my calloused little hands could manage. Nothing simply appears, I insist, it must be cultivated. I picked a lot of those apples right there, I add. The Arbor sends me home early, tells me if I’m old enough to make cider and know so much about it, well then I’m old enough to drink it and learn for myself.

Their animal children know nothing of our secrets.

In the cellar, I pry open a plum wine and drink about half the bottle. The drink makes me peckish so I open two or three jars of syruped pear, dried apples, jellied melon, and fermented radish. The fruit of the prophets and teachers and neighbors and witnesses and gossips that I devour disintegrates in my mouth, my stomach, my guts. My dilemma digests and I want to vomit, but I lay down and keep still with a tight throat. I need to understand, no matter how repulsive the ingredients.

I gorge myself on the secrets of the dead late into the night and wake up in the cellar with a stomach distended and aching, but resolved. I have something special in mind for the stone, something I have pieced together from so many sweet and sour voices at once. I go back upstairs and approach my Dah, greet him gently, take his old hands, and propose another way. I will arrange him his favorite dinner with a nectar that will turn him back into a child himself. A brew of my own recipe which fulfills the word of the custom, so that I might have made a child, and he might achieve a time before his sorrows, find his expectations for himself, and we could stay together always. He agrees.

This year we have such an abundance that I can imagine an infinite yield in an eternal harvest. Each ripe little orb looks like a sunset hurling down to the ground, a tiny mystical vision I can hold in my palm.

And from the brightness of him, from his presence, the storm came.

What, stranger, do you forfeit to endure them?

We relished glimpses of our god-beasts and were grateful. The god of night emerged at dusk, a cautious black rabbit. At dawn, she dashed and hid from the god of day, that ferocious golden weasel in constant hunt of her. Do you see the flash of dark fur at the corners of the sunrise? We asked each other in greeting. We gestured with a pinch over our hearts, released over our shoulders. Did you catch the glorious sight of a shining tooth? We set aside a bit of our hunts and forages, a bit of our pride and sentiment, with the turn of each new day and each new year.

Our mountain concedes survival only to the hearty, to life that is willing and able to yield to her in return.

I made myself as soft and still as solitude,

I praised the god once more, and said before my lanspeople that no longer did it matter if he loved us in return. That he was all mighty, that he held such power at all, was reason enough to destroy him.

I turned my knife away from my chest and towards the fog-white god, and my lanspeople took me into their fold, and we closed our flanks into a shining ring around him, like a crown of many stones inlaid within a single will. And we stepped forward on the bleakest valley of our land toward his fog-white hide. And we took him to slaughter, and we sang.

Might they never come, or might we become the ones to bring them? Might they no longer be tied to any force but their own? Have we become him, or have we destroyed the need for him?

We stoke the fires and chew at the marrow and sing to our youth. Once, the song goes, we were giants, but we did not know we were giants until we felled a god.

What are the certainties of your lands, stranger? We wish to learn. What questions would you ask of it? And would ...

Do you hear our hundred songs in the recitation of these words? Have you hospitality to grant our messengers? They have committed our questions to memory. They have raced to the gate and ground of your country to meet you. Do you hear us ringing out as one voice through their voices? Will you give them your answers? Will you permit them safe passage to return?

Do you hunt the gods of your country, stranger? Or do they prey upon you, neighbor, friend? If you slay them as we have slain ours, and if you eat them as we eat ours, I beg, describe to me the taste? I, alone, request this knowledge, as I eat my fill from the great abundance of his body, and my nameless flesh takes repossession of its power, chew by swallow.

I will tell you this. The flavor is as bright as lightning. It is as rich as thunder...

Why does God create grapes and wheat, but not wine and bread? God does this because God wants us to share in the act of creation. To be how you made me, to become how God made me, through you, I can remake myself. You and I: we are already only whole, and shifting towards the divine.

Make me edible but make me poisonous.

Give me a sex that has never been seen before and a soft outline exactly the size and shape of my lovers, and when they lay their entire selves within it, that is how we are going to fuck, since you keep asking, and everybody wants to know.

To take shape is to sever the infinite possibilities of wanting into a fragile burden of being.

what if I come to resent having changed myself, having become myself, for any reason at all? It is a dangerous, ridiculous, and insatiable curiosity. It is the only concrete act to save my own life. My life, which is worth more than the probability of outcomes, is greater than the sum and synthesis of its parts, so I am no longer afraid.

My life, which is worth more than anyone’s wanting, including your own, is not diminished by its smallness, but honed.

With Kitane done, there are no more snake women but me, Ariadne. That is, unless you are somehow alive. How to find you, if you’re there at all? What charm or lure exists in all my fumbling powers? You are not in a place like these buildings are in a place. You are veiled by my grief, so obvious by these letters I cannot send. I don’t agonize about eternity much. I just want my friends back.

But I am looking for your version, a closed text, a definitive narrative, though the Ariadne I knew as a girl would laugh at me for saying so. I’d ask you, were we friends or lovers? You’d answer, If I loved you, would it change anything? And so on until I’d beg you to decide your fate was with me.

I relate much more to the white-knuckled shock of survivors. It’s that feeling of having time but no future. The sense that you are part of an endangered species, but too frightened or bitter or numb or off your gourd to cooperate with the other rare beasts. So I seek out remainders and reminders, and take what I can get. An aftermath impersonating a woman, irreconcilably over-guarded and over-generous, and surrounded by citations.

I was so obviously not from anyone’s neighborhood. I am ugly and androgynous and intelligent. I am a beast.

I remember thinking about you when I looked into the holes I had dug, thinking I might find you there instead of shadows. I remember feeling that this made sense. I remember that it was very hot and bright outside, but that I shivered.

But when I search the time where you should be, there’s response without action, tone without setting, mood without plot. All I possess of witnessing what happened to our lives and our love first hand is reflex and residue. Some days I forget to bathe and eat and sleep because I’ve been reminded of what I know but cannot think. I flinch, retreat within myself, lose time.

In my first thousand years, I was proud to have no trace of what must be shattering grief, a pride in what I thought was maturity, because I still did not yet understand that I am a great wounded bundle of coping mechanisms.

People seem best equipped, historically, to breed tyrants. I am no different. In those blackouts, those blank spaces, in the deepest base of my nature now, is but a pit of hungry serpents, eating their own young.

What am I without them? Without you? What else but this graphomancy can reaffix my memory, can answer me when you do not?

“Oh, so I should kill myself instead? No. I’m still learning to live well. Any thought of dying well is premature. Give me another thousand years, at least.” Give me until the sun swells to an angry, deadly red and swallows the whole planet.

I laughed with all the bitterness in me, Ariadne, which was hardly fair to Dimas. Yet, in the hideous release of that air, I jostled some small ache in the middle of my chest that had sat so long I hadn’t realized I was carrying it anymore. All at once, there it was, come loose and rattling about in my ribs, hardening my throat and my humors and the very glands of my venom. It was a memory, forgotten, and then retrieved, and then it exploding in a great starburst of anger, so that like Dimas, I stood there, possessed and weeping.