PART I THE WILDMAN IN THE BASEMENT
…Ascending through the paling atmosphere and stratosphere, through swirling clouds and skies of incandescent blue, I fell upwards into an abyssal horizon of deep turquoise, propelled by the feathery undulating wings of my centipede nerve endings. Cut off from the mooring of the shrinking blue sphere, a jungle planet which thrummed with unimaginable immanence and vitality, I was propelled into cosmic regions beyond my wildest comprehension, piercing the heavenly veil with the violence of some howling leviathan.
I found myself floating in some immense courtyard, some antediluvian temple whose perimeter extended far beyond understanding. Its floor seemed to be devised of an innumerable array of precious stones, sparkling of their own accord with some mysterious inner light. Vibrating tendrils now outstretched before my ruined visage, I basked in a symphony of light that had no earthly comparison. Ill-prepared by my subterranean ventures and I could find no respite from their overpowering brilliance. I realized then that the stones were inter-laid not with mortar or with gold, but with a floor of moss which heaved and contracted like some Great Lung, stretching across infinite vistas with a terrible vitality. Beyond this courtyard there stood the outline of an impossible city writhing with vines; mossy mansions which seemed to scrape the belly of the black chaosmos, a vast sky teeming with decaying nests of starlight, alive with swirling vapour spinning and shrinking into new terrible forms.
It was then that I began to understand the universe not as a static, eternal promise, but rather something writhing with impossible contradiction, something cut through by death and yet pregnant with that which is utterly new, the fury of life eternally erupting from decay, giving birth to…
“Who is worthy to open the scroll, to break its seals?” Cried a melancholic voice.
My perception shifted in a blur, and lo, before me floated an otherworldly host, strange figures comprised of great weeping eyes, kept aloft by knotted feathery wings, rotating golden wheels, and other impossible geometries. Around a tremendous throne stood 24 figures clad in crimson robes, who’s countenances were transforming with immeasurable speed across the entire spectrum of every living thing – terrestrial or otherwise. And on that throne, a structure comprised of something like crystal, I beheld something like a molten rainbow, something like a Great Amoeba – a towering, translucent Being, with no discernible limbs or features, shimmering like something out of time. As it shifted on its crystal throne, shining louder and brighter than anything else, it produced a drawling and guttural enunciation, like a wheezing, buzzing synthesizer, like the dripping of honey over river-washed stones underwritten by an anxious low note. With the sound of gushing afterbirth, a fissure opened in its upper regions, and the smell of cattle out to pasture, the smell of green fields beneath a late-April downpour, filled my senses.
Out of the rupture rolled something like a tongue, its texture like that of rough pink parchment. The heaving temple of moss and stones began to quiver around me, the motion of inhaling and exhaling increasing in tempo, causing the crystalline throne to wave about like the masthead of some primordial vessel in a tempest. The 24 figures swayed in time as the Great Amoeba burbled pleasantly, its nondescript interior shifting and pulsating at random beneath its translucent exterior. Rising in unison with the low synthesizer hum, the Seraphim joined in with strange and wavering ululations.
When when the tongue unrolled once more like a fleshy wax scroll before that wide panorama of living things, I began to understand.
Through lights pulsating madly, through the perception of the Great Amoeba, I envisioned myself as a single cell in the womb, ignorant and free of excitation within a swirling oceanic bliss. But with terrifying speed, I watched as one cell became two, two became four, four became sixteen, forced to transform by some unknown inner contradiction, unfolding according to internal algorithmic forces beyond my comprehension. Following a period of gestation came the horrible ejection into the vista of life, a permanent expulsion from that primordial garden of non-existence.
And I watched the child grow, being enfolded into dreams of its keepers, being enveloped into the sordid phantasisms of that decrepit little town, being swallowed whole by the voracious maw of the Schoolhouse. Like a wave of creeping sleep, I watched the fantasies of others wash over me in a black tide of fungal growth, cascading over the child, pouring into its lungs and extinguishing its vision. Gagging, retching, and fighting for speech, I saw the toddler reach down its throat under much duress, choking forth its larynx. And from the sphincter of its mouth, it began to babble inanely with unceasing repetition, like the chopping of a knife as is fighting for its very self.
At this, the black fungal carapace began producing horrible wet slurping sounds, shimmering like wet obsidian and pulsating in something approximating pain, as if a legion of demons were confronted by an exorcist. From the child’s feet it fled upwards like dirty bathwater towards a drain, flowing like some garbage-choked river, hastily out of sight and into the child’s ears.
But it was too late, for although those primitive words succeeded in abating the black fungus, it had now gathered itself deep within the child’s underself where it began to feed upon his primitive impulses, swelling like a tumor on the right side of his small head as he grew. Thus engorged, it burst out the side of his skull in a triad of skullcap mushrooms which cajoled the poor tot with its foul mouths. The older he became, the greater the power of the fungal triptych, a parasitic underself which mimicked the venomous ideological frequencies of the Schoolhouse, amplifying its hold over the child’s mind, interpolating him into a culture of death, punishing any and all attempts at independence with a horrid mycelium screeching.
Caught between life and and this living death, I watched the child self stagger onward, caught in a war between psychic forces far beyond his comprehension, colliding inside his mind like tectonic plates, forming into a misshapen caricature of selfhood. I realized then that this creature was me. From my spinal cord perception I found myself at odds with the figure far below. My nervous system, torn from my body and floating upon a heavenly horizon of greenery and precious stones, was the vivid and awful testament to an interior chasm – an inner rift between myself and me. It was the song of the Wildman, I realized, that was responsible for the division of my entire psyche, a terrible dissonance now mirrored in the very chaosmos above.
Nothing but a flayed and disembodied spectre, floating far above myself, I stared in horror and in wonderment at myself below, the self revealed to me somehow by that fantastical and hallowed scroll unrolling now in a creeping surge of parchment. I simply could not recognize the personage below me – that tortured body of death gaping vacantly skywards, a bouquet of mushrooms murmuring to it in the dark like some sentient, malefic tumor. I was nothing more than a host enamored with its own parasite, an assemblage of anonymous calories destined for slow digestion by the Schoolhouse’s Great Intestine, destined for little more than some awful defecation into the Sewer-of-the-world. I understood then that all that awaited me was the sickly half-life in a darkened womb, a white-washed tomb beneath a smoke-filled prairie sky. In that moment, the bitter sense of self-alienation became impossible to bear.
But even as I considered this, there came a sticky sound accompanied by the overpowering stench of wildflowers as the scroll spooled out further, rolling down, down, down to the base of the crystalline throne, and all the strange heavenly creatures began to chitter and hoot with cacophonous glee, not unlike the amplified noises of a garden creeping forth in spring. I shuddered in wonderment, my feathery tendrils jittering like spiderwebs in a breeze.
And I watched in renewed awe as movement proceeded upon a now primordial Pangaea-earth below where wild apes waged war upon the plains, some of them evolving and coalescing into humanoid forms while others retreated to their leafy abodes. I watched as tribes divided like cells into nomads, nomads into villagers, and villagers into farmers. Farms became cities and cities became civilizations, rising and falling before me in the tempest of history, spurred downward or onward by some inner civil-war, leaving behind sprawling boneyards innumerable as sand upon the seashore. Like some bewildered and superfluous god squatting over some tremendous insect hive, I peered downwards as if through a cosmic looking-glass, discerning patterns emerging from the disordered static of life.
I witnessed then gods bursting forth in their thousands from the fields and machines of men: agrarian shepherds and warriors, judges and kings. There too were gods of chaos and plague, many-limbed monstrosities which gurgled and howled for blood-sacrifice. Like shadows, they appeared to ape the activities of humanity, evolving in cadence with their industry and their social formations, bringing small solace or causing great mischief as they swirled through the dreamscape below. I watched as imperial fail-sons receded and atrophied, as empires rose and fell, bursting forth upon the world in greater and greater complexity, their gods seemingly voracious for the very stars themselves. And in perfect symmetry, the divine pantheons died and were reborn, until all that remained was Babylon and its One True God, bristling with spines and teeth, utterly transcendent above the world.
Even as I considered this, the fleshy scroll continued to unroll, traversing the moss-encrusted rhinestones and rubies like a river of secret wisdom across molten ponds of light. The lens of my vision sharpened then, magnified somehow as I peered into the messes of men far below. Inner divisions within the mighty Babylon came into focus, and I witnessed classes of patricians and knights, plebeians and slaves, colonies and fat coastal cities which glimmered like iridescent leeches. This visceral contrast of immiseration and opulence plucked my raw feathery tendrils like the strings of some empyrean harp, the clamor of the inner civil-war within all things reverberating through my senses.
I watched as slaves and plebeians morphed into peasants, joined thereby in a kind of cellular fusion with multitudes of barbarians and disenfranchised freemen. Simultaneously, I watched as patricians and bishops and knights morphed into a class of feudal power, creeping together into a cancerous formation upon the petri dish of history. I watched too as primitive tools were fashioned into windmills and metalworks, into waterwheels and steam engines, into immense looms and trains and monstrous factories which belched and farted noxious fumes. Out of the fires of industry came legions of Proletarians, caught in the bloody maw of a vampiric Bourgeoisie. All the while, these disparate classes clashed with greater and greater intensity, a battle to the death over the social fruits of labour. Slave insurrections were met with crucifixes, peasant uprisings were met with gleaming lines of cavalry, and industrial disturbances were met in turn with the chatter of gunfire and steaming walls of poison gas.
In the aftermath of these clashes there had formed a Great Scab, a garish membrane of infected pus spanning wounded cancerous plains. And beneath those fields of coagulation, gelation, and desiccation, I detected fiendish forces at play, fascistic demons shitting festering balms of ‘peace’ into the cavernous wound of history. And from beneath this Great Scab there came the squealing command of the Great Hog, calling out for a mass infection, an infernal fungal marking which was to be inscribed upon every hand and forehead. But behind this blasphemous proclamation, I could detect a legion of swinish anxieties, for even now beneath the weeping scab, there seemed to squirm the outlines of new life that threatened to burst forth into the light of day.
But it was not the voice of the Great Hog, but this prospect of immanent abundance which filled me with a strange sense of dread, a terror I now saw mirrored in the vitality and excess of that heavenly vista which teemed with the fury of life. For this good news of the cosmic contradiction, this Gospel of the Scythe was in fact a confrontation with the terrible possibility of superabundance, with the outpouring of life into life. Like a golden field before me, the world below was alive with tremendous productive forces, held back by nothing but a scabbed membrane. The sprawling array of satellites, factories and webs of transportation below not only had the capacity to provide humanity’s basic needs, but could produce them in utterly terrifying excess. Such an abundant harvest haunted the world as if a spectre, simply waiting to be unleashed by those with the agency to do so.
At this I was filled with despair, for although the harvest was great, the workers were few. On a planet blinded by the blight of the fungal accuser, where agency had been long-ago foreclosed upon and liberation transvaluated into unfreedom, Satan held sway. Enslaved by death poverty and mediocracy, a willingly impoverished humanity skittered like cockroaches from the light of salvation beneath a web of obfuscation, wallowing in the insipid freedom of bondage and spiritual impoverishment.
As I ruminated on this, a great portent appeared in the heavens, and the 24 figures began to wail mournfully as an undulating shadow passed like an odious cloud in the chaosmos above, the outline of a swarming mass of tendrils flailing at random like some deep-sea abomination. Eclipsing planets and stars as it passed by, there now came a mountain of blackness whose passage shook the very cosmos.
Downward it fell, ensconced in shadow, leaving celestial bodies spinning off-kilter in its terrible wake, a blackened hive of wickedness teeming with calamity and malevolence. Alongside the heavenly host, I watched as it fell to the earth, the scroll all the while unrolling madly like fleshy ticker-tape from the Great Amoeba. With demonic ferocity, the lunatic shadow fell into the sea, somewhere off the coast of Los Angeles. But to my surprise, its arrival brought no tsunami, no earthquake, no cascade of mutilated sea life. Instead, it simply disappeared beneath the waves, leaving nothing but an inky black ether which dissipated into the salty air as quickly as it had arrived. And there was silence in heaven for a time as the fleshy scroll ceased its revelation.
Like an inverted sunrise, a figure then arose from the ocean, dragging itself onto the seashore before an enraptured crowd of sunbathers and revelers. On cloven hooves the thing rose upon six hairy and disjointed legs, ascending proudly into an azure sky. Rising above the bewildered children with their buckets and shovels, above the palm trees rippling sweetly in the breeze. Rising above the highways and box-shaped stores, over the plains and the hills and the skyscrapers sweltering beneath a dispassionate sun. And its titanic frame, dripping in flotsam and jetsam was like that of a lamb, its newborn wool gleaming white and brilliant for all to see.
Above its deformed body there erupted an elongated neck, thicker than a redwood tree, swaying serenely from side to side like an ancient serpent. But its twisted countenance was that of a goat – leering lips curling into a cruel grin, half-lidded eyes lolling with mischievous intent, its bemused nostrils flaring as the thing sniffed deliciously at the coastal air, taking in the measure of man. Between ten obsidian horns curling madly into the sky, festooned with barnacles and tattered fishing nets, there presided an oozing nest of mushrooms: Basket Stinkhorns, Priest’s Fingers, and Bleeding Tooth-Fungus, from which emanated a low humming sound, a choir of madness suggesting somehow the spaces between the stars or the burbling groanings of some primordial sea.
Finding its feet with the awkwardness of a newborn, the Beast shook itself like a hound, sending a torrent of water across the beach and the city, steaming upon window panes and asphalt in a stinking cloud of smoke. Unafraid, the bewildered revelers began to giggle at and applaud the Beast before them, guffawing like deranged children at some carnival of darkness.
Leering knowingly with a billboard grin, the Beast then revealed its stained and crooked rows of teeth, and the beach-goers and the businessmen and the drivers upon their smoking overpasses grinned right back with white smiles, the thick black fumes of burning cars swirling in their midst. And the Beast bent low, crouching upon its six disjoined legs, its neck arched like a swan. Puffing itself up with a mighty breath, the Beast began to dance like an ivory tarantula, scuttling back and forth along the beach in time to the mushroom choir, its leering visage bobbing and swaying, making strange gesticulations in the air, the mushroom choir rising in pitch as the Beast wobbled and tottered and skipped about with Satanic glee.
And along with these wild gyrations, all the people joined in – sunbathers shaking their asses, construction workers pirouetting across fields of rebar, businessmen waltzing in their boardrooms or ballrooms, all in perfect time to the cacophonic fungal song. They remained indifferent to the changing sky above, whose blue had retreated beyond the horizon, fading into the rotten pallet of a bruise – swatches of brown and green and pink swirling and whorling above with doomful significance.
Meanwhile, the song of Heaven had risen into a melancholic tenor of unbearable sorrow a warbling ululation of woe, which seemed to seep from all around me.
Suddenly, the Beast aborted its prancing, freezing as if in mid-frame, its frontmost legs flailing at the air like awful sun-bleached tendrils. In that moment suspended in time, I watched as its long snaking neck began to descend down, down, and down to the shore, bringing its wild, sneering visage to bear upon the businessmen, upon the construction workers, upon the beach-goers, and indeed upon the entire world, its flaring nostrils consuming their scents, a rare and delicious incense. Like some ancient and malevolent god presiding over burning fields of carrion, the Beast then opened its gaping maw, licking its blackened lips voraciously. With a tremendous, wavering bleating, it uttered but one haughty and blasphemous proclamation:
MY YOKE IS EASY AND MY COMMANDMENT IS LIGHT
THOU SHALT ENJOY
And from its awful maw – from behind its double rows of flat, cracked teeth, came the laughter of children, a chaotic babbling spilling forth upon a tide of halitosis, and in a fungal miasma, a volley of spores cascaded over the inhabitants of the city in a blackened insect wind, a sulphuric fog which burst and popped as it spread like a litany of maggot nests in the night. And the people below continued their maddened dancing, spinning and twirling and gyrating in time to the obscene fungal song.
They danced in unison while the colour ran out of everything and drained into the sea. They shimmied as Basket Stinkhorns, Priest’s Fingers, and Bleeding Tooth-Fungus burst like fetid bouquets from their hands and from foreheads. They swayed as the sun hid itself behind a full and pale moon, shadows flitting in the neon glow of a culture in total decay. Then everything began to flicker madly, as if caught in a stuttering strobe light or a lightning storm, and I could scarcely make out the goings-on below. But before the light died altogether, I saw the Beast skitter up the Hollywood cross, where it danced obscenely for the entranced masses below. And even as the cherubim concealed their gaze behind veils of plumed white wings, a total darkness washed over the earth, until all that could be perceived was that terrible fungal hum.
There was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour, and I waited anxiously for what was to come. And after a time came that fleshy, maddening whirring from within the Great Amoeba as its parchment-tongue resumed its prophecy. By now it had coalesced into a massive pile beneath the throne, a great mound of waxy parchment covered in strange symbols and figures, and as I gazed below, I saw that the earth was illumined in the light of its sun. But it was no longer an orb of ocean blue shrouded in part by a swirling vapour of cloud. It was now a tortured sphere of red, its surface an infinite expanse of irritated and weepy flesh, pock-marked by mountain ranges of epidermis which were contrasted by chasms and valleys of sticky haemostasis. Across the wide plains of inflammation, upon the shores of vast oceans of pus, there arose sprawling megalopolises of iron. Encircled by billowing clouds of mephitic industrial fumes, these undead factory towns pumped strange ointments and balms through sprawling webs of rusted pipelines, which punctured the scabbed earth at points innumerable, causing the most grievous wounds upon its tortured crust to clot and close in the garish moonlight.
Like nothing else before, this vision weighed upon me with the weight of all the oceans, and all the mountains, and all the heavenly bodies above, for I now understood the world as nothing more than a prodigious scab, a fortified foreclosure upon the future, riven through with the markings of an extensive tectonic violence, simmering beneath an omnipresent industry of compromise and repression, of delusion and repression .
Before me stood the Kingdom of the Beast. Its blathering anthem was the cacophony of insect wings.
Then I heard the voice of one of the cherubim,
“Why do you despair? For all of this must come to pass.
All of this must take place before the final seal is broken.
Before the Great Unveiling occurs”
After a time, the scrolly tongue unrolled once more, and from the scabbed and weeping earth I heard a voice beyond the horizon, I heard singing, clarion and sweet beneath the yellow miasma sky. The sun was rising timidly from its hiding place, and even the configurations of industrial iron seemed to anticipate its arrival, seemed to welcome its triumphant glow in some way, leaning and creaking eagerly towards the cracked fissure of light between hideous earth and anxious sky. I realized then that I knew this voice. Delirious with the prospect of salvation, I shuddered as I recognized its origin. It was the voice of the Wildman.
Driving a wild donkey, he came over the horizon, and its eyes were fire, its snorting breaths were hurricanes. There too were the sounds of trumpets and of flutes, a long wavering note of discord which caused the very air to tremble. Shrouded in crimson and gold, the Wildman carried a mighty sickle in his hand, and his countenance was one of great authority cut through with insanity – the emphatic affirmation of life palpable at the corners of his wide smile. With practiced skill, he tilled the wretched earth by means of a colossal instrument, a blade taller than even the crystalline throne in heaven above. Its blade was sharper than any knife, shining brighter than the fire of starlight in which it was forged, a plow forged long before the foundations of the earth had even been laid. And as this implement careened down the warped highway which was called “Division St.” (let the reader understand!), the blade sheared through the fleshy road as if it were butter, rupturing pipelines full of foul ointments, baring the tattered flesh of the earth to the sky, revealing its secrets for the world to see.
With his sickle he toppled the nests of black trumpets, blasphemous devices wrought to broadcast the frequency of the Beast both day and night. And as he rode past me, a chasm of crimson spilling in his wake, his eyes met mine, and with a bemused look at me he winked and shouted
“Behold, I am making all things new!”
Bucking and snorting, the donkey trotted by, they made for the sea, and I knew that they would make war upon the shambling, six-legged Beast. And all those in its sway wept and gnashed their teeth and called upon the mountains to fall on them as the Wildman rode past, satisfied in their unfreedom, content in their dissatisfaction upon that horizon of scabbed flesh, a planet now revealed as nothing but a weeping ball of infection encircled in an undead crown of derelict satellites.
Emboldened by the prospect of liberation, I returned to my spinal cord perception at the heavenly throne, assured that salvation was nigh. But to my horror, that ethereal island which stood firm in that swirling sea of chaosmos was now revealed as nothing more than a haunted mansion. Autumn, it seemed, had come to Heaven.
Cherubim and seraphim were dropping to the floor like wet, over-ripened fruit, strange antediluvian fluids bursting forth in concert with the pungent odours of low-tide. The far-off mansions on their hillocks were falling into themselves as if sodden termite hives, sending up great clouds of eternal detritus into the blackness above. But the blackness was not just above, for now the luminescence of the heavenly stones was slowly ebbing, in rolling, sorrowful waves, while the mossy floor underfoot calloused and expired, reduced to little more than a blackened carapace inlaid with dying starlight. Cadaver dogs howled in the distance, and the shrieks of dying angels resounded mournfully in a woeful chorus. To my great horror I realized that the Great Harvest was nigh.
I watched as the Great Amoeba began to twitch and pulsate, alive it seemed with a legion of inner contradictions, an inner turmoil which I now understood too well. A hideous transfiguration was underway, and the over-ripeness of things filled the air – the birth pangs or the death pangs of the something that was to come. But that something terrified me, for just as the Great Amoeba began to quiver and squelch, its translucent exterior shimmering with the fury of autumn, I felt that same decay, that same inner war approaching an intensity hitherto unknown. It had been lurking within me from the dawning of my consciousness, but now to see the Great Amoeba equally riven, I felt my self-alienation redouble itself, feeling the void of outer space seeping into my every pore as Heaven festered and rotted, barring me from the promise of any home or haven.
As heaven putrefied around me, the stars shining hysterically above, I watched the scroll unravel one last time. As the crystalline throne melted into sticky, translucent rainbow rivers, the Great Amoeba produced a tremendous cry of self-annihilation which resounded despairingly through all of eternity. From its bulging midsection, there had erupted a bright red blade which sliced from bottom to top, and the bellowing was transformed into incomprehensible burbling and mewling. Emerging clutched in a knotted fist, there was birthed a farming implement adapted for war. Another hand emerged, pushing aside the rendered flesh with some struggle. Then with the rolling of thunder, one leg followed another, finding purchase on the rotten floor below. With immense struggle, a figure was incarnated, eyes blazing like the dawn.
The Wildman had come to Heaven. He bore not peace but the Scythe
With the translucent membrane wilting beneath his feet like sordid bedsheets, the Wildman took in the disordered scene about us, inhaling the putrid odours with great interest. Dripping with strange afterbirth, he shook his head like a dog, flashing me that lunatic grin.
And with tremendous violence, he smote the rotten floor of heaven, opening up a great chasm in the decaying courtyard with a crack of lightning. And like the unclogging of some hair-filled drain, that cosmic sewer began to empty into the fissure, an holy whirlpool of rotten muck, starlight, and the wreckage of God. Caught in the swirling current, bobbing alongside the Wildman in an autumnal slurry, we spiraled into it, sucked forwards and downwards into the Age of the Spirit.
I came into wakefulness upon a cold concrete floor, my head throbbing as if from some great impact. My mouth was as dry as cotton. With bewilderment, I realized that I was once again in the Schoolhouse basement. The boiler was no longer hissing, and the furnaces slept silently thereby. Illumined by the dim glow of moonlight breaching the small window, I saw that everything was covered in a thick layer of dust. All was silent, but for the trickle of water into the sump.
I ascended from beneath the Schoolhouse and out into the hallway. But the heavenly decay that I had just witnessed could scarcely prepare me for what I saw. Burst pipes were revealed in the roof above, ceiling tiles cast down like children’s playthings. From beneath the door of the Experiment Room there pooled a mess of noxious chemicals, the radio still blaring incoherently. Classrooms stood in total disarray, blackboards broken on the floor, desks thrown into piles while sodden Algebra books hummed beneath swarms of silverfish. The Virus Room was reduced to a pile of broken computers, the Gymnasium a heap of ancient sports equipment. The Music Room, dusty and forlorn, had been relieved of its brass instruments along with the handbells and towering metronome. Seeing the end had come, I made one final journey through the Great Intestine of the Schoolhouse, kicking the dust off my boots beneath the emergency exit sign at the end of the corridor, where I was excreted unceremoniously out into that degenerate little town.
The debauchery was in full swing that night, the populace (normally shuttered and suspicious) were about the town, reveling and hooting, and well into their cups. A moderate sized crowd milled about on the grounds, laughing and cajoling in the brisk October air, the trees above shimmering orange, red, and gold in the soft glow of the crooked street lights. Upon a rusty tractor trailer an impoverished band of children played out of time (and out of tune) before bandstands arranged with crumpled sheet music, the conductor gesticulating madly from atop a sinister metronome. The smells of roasted carrion rose above the usual odour of the local hog barn, while the cacophony of the band swirled among the primal hoots of farmhands, the screech of truck tires and the explosion of fire-crackers. A large engine sputtering to life. Twin plumes of black smoke choked out the luminescence of the full-moon, and from behind a pathetic line of pine trees it rolled violently onto the Schoolhouse grounds – a decrepit yellow excavator shifting gears aggressively as it rolled across the open field, framed by a hand-painted banner in the trees that read
“HOME TO STROME!”
“MUSIC! EXCAVATIONS! AND MORE!”
Spurred on by the roaring crowd, I watched the drunken mayor ascend the flagpole, waving a cowboy hat above his head with total abandon. I felt the excavator shake the earth as it rolled towards the abandoned Schoolhouse. The delirious cries of the crowd swelled as it crashed through the Gymnasium wall, and the demented little town consecrated its centenary with a festival of destruction.
I turned my back on the little town that night, following the trail of butterflies toward the westbound railway track. Limping through the forest, my fingers absently traced the long scar which ran crudely from my navel to my chin. The world around me was now an open wound, and everything was beautiful.
transfigurations 