Arethusa

Missy leans her elbow on a ledge, which sends a boulder crashing down the slope. A mature sugar pine snaps at the base, nicked by a wing tip. She hangs Its face in her hands.

"I take it minorities are well advised to make a strong impression. Is it like the weakling bug who's painted a gargoyle across its papery head? Is it nature makes a swarm come when not backed off so?

Maybe naiads from a previous life rising from nerve venom come to act out, in their wisdom, and with hooks in, wriggles of memory that jar or pull shut levers and consequences that can be accepted as archetypes."

In this way, a graze prey unit outside its hoard contemplates vicariously an apology for the urge to have a bloody meal.

wind whores

who will the wind bring, what whores.
they come slicing with their inner-thigh
meats. their drops in our soup can scar.

why must they fall under cultural artifact.
can't the civil authorities, park rangers.
can't someone reasonable bring them to

their heaven. free release, but outside the
filter; open grazing, but only on natural
animal herds, no other bird species.

one came dipping in, very tiny, against
the full moon. she was shimmering
green before the lilting purple trail.

it was three took my sister, but the
mechanical type. these days they're
all hybrid, running on borrowed time.

Illyn
"They dive like K's falling backward."

Exhibit

I find that generally
people who love me
will always find a
way to love the ones I
love, but not necessarily
hate the ones I hate.
everything I touch now
apparently costs
something; every move
an Exhibit. comes
a Winter when

Comes a tam in a man's laf
when she owns up to disaster.
It created you, a monster,
one who Grips and Carries.
But the shriek of a suparna,
or its roll in sleep, can only
mean an end to an age.

Donna
"They fly with their legs spread eagle."
[Dick Olde has also provided illumination on this piece.]

The Dirty Gory

Connie was so assured of her body that while many of her peers treated theirs as something so precious as to be given like a pink angora sweater: only once, or only in the dark, or hated theirs so much as to let it go only once, or only in the dark, she could feel Pain of Rivening but only along with the knowledge of regeneration and ever-presence. Indeed a joe felt drained and used after paying for a session, and so her clientele was culled.

"I don't claim to be Eryho. I have some implants that make my bones grow. It's a special sponsorship situation from PharmCo. Only one man could keep his lid on, and that was Ted. I bet he wonders wai I'm dead. T'was Wayne that did the dirty gory; he thot that Ted wd break th' story."

My Spread

I'm not in a space-step program. I work hard; I am highly functional, as you've seen-- I am highly functional in defending myself, outcomes aside, hardworking in my own defense, just as I was highly functional before I began to have to defend myself-- and then I was hardworking my functions for the good of the flight school.

When you give me all theez rulz and regulations, train me to strive and try, then wipe everything aside with an arbitrary decision, I get double vision, I get religion but it's upside down right then. It's a dog and pony ride, but my ass growing wide on your office chair means I participated. My spread is your bread, baby.

Cuz I chose this grinder to wind me down, I guess I have to spin in it, find the swing in it, and do my thing. Drown. As in a blender. From all that I remember, it'll be like my hometown, the one I scrammed from when my shoulder bones started poking holes in roof sections. They were tender. Now my life itself is deregulated.

Missy

High Chank Turnoff

Ancient mulatto news anchor and his wife, a K; What kind of messed-up children would they lay? Therz mixed-up situations everywhere; We've got them coming at us by air. We've got to hit them in their nests, where Peg and her assassins rest. I see The Chanks one day with clear skies and no grid, no worship or fear. Devils hide above; wisdom rides alone. We will set bait and track them down. Wayne [Disassociated]

Our Genus

We take in swarms from the windstorms
, give them stillness and warmth, and lay
out glue traps meant for much bigger an-
imals. Everyone is seeing apolyptic mean
-ing into anomalies of nature. There is no
other way that is non-toxic to our genus.

They struggle themselves to exhaustion
and then maybe fall asleep or just sit th-
ere pissed off and starve, helpless stiffs.
Their numbers show how our own lives
depend on killing off as many as possible.
They seem to prefer living sweat even o

-ver shit. Sugar draws few. The smell of
sliced ham poked into the grill of a zappe
-r lamp just makes them crazy writing t-
heir names in the air and lighting on any-
thing but the fry tubes, though now an a-
gin the pups jump at the stray execution.

Wayne [Rebuttal]

Pins n' Buttons

Tom wears a home-sewn vest over every plaid shirt every day. It's covered in commemorative pins and slogan buttons. Even as he lectures, its beige suede rocks against his arteries. His half-naked students find it obscene, but a heart on his chest puts them at ease during drills and bloodletting. K chicks will often leave purple stains on their seats.

Missy is out on suspension for off-limits vittle. Every re-creature must be protected extra much because they are most likely to be eaten with the smallest pang of conscience. Because they come back, because they must, it seems a venal abuse.

Tho flakes are other matter; academy classmates even graver. Flakes are food for bloodsac only; the grrl in the next seat is your sister in pain. Had Connie stepped in The Crack? Were her tertiary characteristics driving her onto the waiting list for shiv clinic and guided skeletal bursting? Had Connie in fact been a casual associate of Reptily among the rotting alfalfa bales of the Low Chanks long before the filter and the MPS? We measured time in WD then. But it lied.

Imagine all the singing night birds before wide feeding. Now there is only one, and he mocks. Fecundity only breeds more episodes: thumping, wailing, spines. Flakes disappear like soap. Soon only those who rule the skies will have a strip of land. They are proud and unsentimental or grieving. They have paid with burning; they have paid in change. They are tired of thieving, of treating. Now we are their petri dish. Death is a privileged doctor.

Phyllis
Lit-Crit Contractor, Embedded
for Sports n' Sex Crimes Bugle

Scald Lines

Reasonable Person

I sometimes call upon the powers of the universe for no reason. But six nights in a row we smelled smoke curling in the blow hole. Six times we felt our bodies screeming NO. But we are still whole. Connie

Affective Filter

While the Chama is in training, I do reconnaissance with flakes. To bring down the affective filter, we build caldron platforms, watch the aurorealis in the twilight, passing giant bongs of shish. All the while I can take the temperature of the chillun while tickling them, whispering passages from Northrup Frye into their pointy ears. Some days She'll ply me for coordinates. After feed school, I'll be using her guide data to find the colonies. I give; the Chama takes. We'll help each other. Phyllis

Wind Quake

A cloud changed into dragon shapes and we must have been experiencing some high winds because the whole chank system quaked, and the shadows seemed to turn down, swooping into invisibility. This is the current that rules our skies and protects the Homeland. When hailstones the size of medicine balls start splashing the soup, they make scald lines. Flakes are making bets on target-shaped diagrams and debris field calculations. We expect a big attack soon. Mike

Missy

AWKWARD MOMENTS FOR CHAMA AS A K FLEDGLING

First Service Requirement

Here, if you plug this receiver, you may get what you want. The second receiver is what you should plug, always. If you agree with the contract, you'll be guaranteed some of what you want. If the contract is productive, you'll also receive a medal.

Couldn't any animal do this?

We are not animals, missy.

Are we dumber? We need incentives?

Without a change of attitude, you will start to discover that you no longer feel physically comfortable in your work environment. Picture shoulder blades so large as to prevent operation of the filing cabinets. Spinal curvature. And the less you'll be able to accomplish. It's a vicious spiral. Your skeletal system requires room, just like a goldfish. Goldfish are animals.

You mean I won't make open release?

Chapel of Forgetting

I'm sorry for leaving butts and halves at the altar, Peg. To tell you the truth, it wasn't sloth. Even though my fingernails by nau do resemble... Anyway, it was avarice. I know I won't be able to infuse one day. Smokers have an instinct not to throw away the shiv. Maybe I'm out and I need a puff. I can come back here. A prolonged dose makes life easier, even though you're back and forth to the fire a lot. I've got another stash over at MPS. They've repaired the Likeness of Mthyuh's crack, and everyone wants to kiss it again.

Soon you will take or spare life according to your bowel structure, decide the fate of flakes, entire families. It will be your scars they bear from the boiling cauldrons, splashed from your plunking judgements. It will be their fires, your bellow, your dunk, your douse. Your mother may have pushed you around in a baby carriage in a fur coat with a butt hanging from her mouth, but you are Mthyuh's only protector. MPS can only exist because you are the enforcer.

Am I forgiven?

I ask you to leave everything.

Shiv is for flakes now.

Shiv is for flakes only. I ask you to fly.

Shiv is... I am free?

All you have is space. And you must find Ted and the chillun. Secure a hole in a high chank.

Live feeding can begin.

No. First we must hear your screeching wading at Fire Shore. The first flake you see will be safe vittle. When you land, you'll be able to walk again, but not without full spread.

K's fly with their legs spread eagle.

That's why they call 'em K's, missy.

One Windy Night

One windy night, a kitty appeared at the mouth of the office. He was four colors, all separated out to indicate the hind sections, flanks, forearms. To the Chama, he manifested as an Ambulatory Meat Diagram. For a blurry moment she turned into Shab, the red-eyed dog who is mad and goes with an empty saddle. Her salient features returned in time to knock over a combination tie rack and shoe tree more than 50 feet away with a flick of her elbow, trapping the vittle. Chama gave into pecking furry cat liver out from between the chrome prongs and rubber-tipped clamps.

Irretractable Post-Feminist Crisis

Total conversion or shutdown.
Shivica ficha 1: Chamatilly, frmrly "Reptily".
Comments: Girl's gone too far. Recommend full brain return, winged flight, excretory updates.

Amicus posts: 3

ap1: Chama is the Honey of Life. Our community would suffer her absence more than the brief monthly assaults. Our K response team is empathic and humanish.
Supervisor, All-Chank
Cement Employees Collective

ap2: Oh, Chamalachamalamachama. Chalamachamamama. We wail in anticipation of your claws.
Ultimate Worship Group
Sports n' Sex Crimes Bugle, Sponsor

ap3: She might as well let it all hang out. She is enduring an irretractable post-feminist crisis. I have submitted a volunteer card for embedded feed monitoring and preliminary intimate grooming license. She will recognize me as a specialist and view historic spatting as too easy for vengeance. She'll eat me last.
Phyllis

Come Down Mthyuh

I stay up in Pennis, near Ground Bay. There's some RV resorts and a gas station with a POD. They have a golf course and some cows grazing moss on the Dirtiest River in the World. Mondays Mike comes down Mthyuh for feed and takes the pups while I work cement and watch cable at Chank Suites, 60 hours a 4-day week. I drop about two-fifty on booze and groceries and lodge it against the back of the bed. Don't need much hay. Llamas ran off with a minstrel. This is just until he can get a second mortgage or some family help. Then we'll build a fence the girlz can't chew and still have gophers on their plates every day. We used to call it Death Farm 3000 for all the graves. But Mthyuh turns up her babes and they walk away. When the filter's up the sky is clear of pests.

Come down Mthyuh with your truck,
Come down the mountain
Where life isn't measured;
Bring your extended cab full of dogs.

Kev

Idling Caprices

Now that the swimming pool had been drained for good, Mike took up with new ways and associates. One amante at the Preservation Society, another down at Shiv Council. A scientist, an accountant, a bum. Let bloom a goatee and a black, open-shirted look. Got into trouble with rents and men all the way to Cliffe Suites. Until he showed up here one morning.

"I'm looking for Julio."

"Do you mean Hoolie?"

"Told me he lived out back in the shed."

"We don't live here at all. We..."

"Julio." He was looking over my shoulder at I guessed Hoolie.

"Mike." Hoolie says behind me. I step out of the way and they say,

"Just because there's no water, don't mean you can't dive."

"We squirmed like eels in another atmosphere."

"Even while lawn salad bobbed on top."

"But now it's a neck breaker."

"NO. We've got lungs now. Ears."

"We've got the Filter down and K's rampaging."

"Yeah. I let 'em out. One of my pranks. Come dark-rule the chanks with me."

"NO. Come with us. We're deities."

"NO. My life is free."

"NO. You are a slave to shiv and idling caprices..."

As the sun set, the two worked out their issues. Silhouettes in pink on the listing log cabin porch. I, a woman, could not intervene. I wasn't even sure if Mike had the right guy. Hoolie isn't Mexican.

Chama-tilly

Canned Corned Beef and Cream Corn Casserole

Chama and Ilyn hid out in the dark cabin. After a while they started asking each other what time it was and then after a while longer they stopped answering. Chama explained later, "We felt that what happened had certainly been important, but we were nevertheless left dumbfounded. Then we began to chafe at the practice of assigning significance to events that were painful and therefore disturbing but really no more than blips of chance on a wheel. The filter wasn't working and a few of the flakes had already been carried away. We could hear commotion, heavy things dropping on pavement. The safest thesis statement? 'You just never know.' But also the most unsatisfactory. Then we decided we just had to break down and create meaning, like the opposite of breadcrumbs, tossing out floating disks on which to step across the Crack. Meaning was in our heads. That was what we were born and trained for: this was our moment to shine a light, as if, and leave nothing in our wake because there was nothing to leave. Everyone in fact paid us for that. Ilyn hurried and thought up some songs. I scarified and painted my chin. We found a canned corned beef and cream corn casserole in the freezer."

Swooping Beast

My partner in the hard-plastic cask where we were buried alive in cellophane sheaths and cables and I took an airborne beat to contemplate what's now a rural legend: how the Chama was sucked through a grapefruit-sized hole in the pressurized cabin when the stainless steel flap suddenly gasped open at the bottom of the commode. In an instant one is there, and then not.

She was a goddess and could sprout again in a dirt lot. He was a prototype for Asian-American goobers. He kept hocking snot into napkins and stuffing them between our seats. He was scanning a spreadsheet and operating three electronic devices while tongue-rolling a toothpick in a baseball cap. He slept hard with his knees bent "indian style" and upon waking had already cleared the virals he'd been farming.

Monday vanishes over Da Nang. It's not ended because it never happened. Throngs phase through their generations as Archie characters in fresh skins. Freckles appear from nowhere into their rightful industrial age of error. In Spain, they called it edad de pavo. Big-headed, pencil-necked beasts. They are miserable and potent and giddy with loose beaks.

Chamatilly birthed as the earth turned her up: back, shoulders, arms, scales, and having been scattered to the winds, desirous of integral flight. It's everyone's problem when a queen takes a spill. Now she swoop in bald headed with piercings and claws and craving easy hot nutrition in tiny disposable dishes.

Thai Business Lounge, BKK

K Coming

Peg heard herself remark as she woke up on her fancy hovering cushions:

"That's the first time a living bone creature in my hand ever proposed marriage."

Crisp sky blue sheets were her universe. Without the kids, life was a cockpit.

Raiding villages in her flying F-suit brought flakes to their knees.

Her turds boiled in outdoor mess cauldrons fetched a hefty consolation for the burns.

World of Mornings

Sure, there was hope, but you woke up
tired.
Fire bear come flying over horizon.
Insects, reptiles click, split.
Now tell me is or is not,
considering nutrition, a dried apricot
as good as its flesh-fulfilled cousin?
Because everything they wrote
can now only be found in the bone
chalk of those scratched letters,
crystal, canvasses, silver, china.

Wiccan Dipsplit

apparently the blind find me goodlookin;
the unsighted obviously think aighm hot.

just when so many naked people are against me,
aigh need people naked against me, and thayr not.

with a witch's fingers on my scalp,
i can travel to new ages as a scab;

before demagnetizing the last few nodes,
i enjoy a robot's timed sense of moving on.

Hoolie, from Birth of the Mthyuh Preservation Society: When K's Gave up Living and Volunteered for Manned Flight.

Hystadelic Rejoinder

Sylvia: I don't want to put away dishes with you while you're in your underwear.

Tom (turning toward her in grey boxer-briefs with a sauce pan in one hand and a rat's tail shivknife sharpener in the other): I want to open up some opportunities for you. To talk about what you saw. I know I was all wrapped up in my time experiment, and nothing registered. Not time. Not even horror.

Sylvia: Time lies, you know. It's a liar. Put on some baggy pants and we'll talk.

While waiting, Sylvia stands absentmindedly pressing what seems like her taint against the back of a faux-Rococo dining room chair. It boasts a darkly varnished hardwood patina, and it's downright cocky about its Shorn Crushed Red borganna brusquely shielding all the parts on which one might normally leave prints. Bare-flesh contact with wood, tile, lead causes Sylvia to auto-hypnotize and occasionally seizure. Even through knits, that kind of pressure triggers a not unpleasant hystadelic rejoinder.

Since that first week when Tom began trying to explain his "announcement" about his "Pax on Us" goddess coming to save the middle chanks, it had been over. Now crime was their bond. Tom's agreement with Collie was so strong, the power of his surrender so profound, that they could only dance with the beckoning animal that kept them stepping on. Tom singlemindedly distribute shivplate, stone compasses, Hopinaskipina for his corporment sponsors until his ears bled for lack of Filter of Loathing. Everything was dephallocentri-size now.

Tom: I'm back.

Sylvia (opening her eyes): Oh.

Tom: Are you calm? Why don't you sit on that for a moment.

Sylvia (lowering slowly, bracing herself on the borgana armpads): It was a bird.... It was obscene. You never believed me; no one did, and I lost my job. Now our whole county can't leave, and our essential compositions have shifted dramatically from gaseous to chemical.

[FLASHBACK: Going over the conversation in his mind, Tom recalls a strobe light of important snippets, a bucket of chicken, Patron shots. He squints, and spits. All he can see is her lips talking. What he hears makes him want to make her stop.]

"...one wing, but like a cape. You could say pleathery. White veins...

"...I thought I saw it again last week, but high up. It looked like a letter K. Going backwards. Flying with its legs spread eagle.

"Are you listening, Tom?"

Hooptie to Tomorrow

I combed the chanks, all of them, to get housing for me and the bitches. It was the end of the longest Off Season ever, and a lot of what was closed down was going to stay that way. I guess I saw about _ spaces and met about the same number of men.

Phil Barleycorn drove me out to a hive where your fwd view and rear shield look the same. Phil was white and pink with the earnest humor of a man who'd been telling challenging jokes to chillun for all time. Never laid a meal in his own way. He also seemed to be sniffing for lint in my mind as he bragged about sending three zygotes to Pig 'n Tongue U. The rental structure had provided final launching pad for an original pioneer famly whose ultimate jump was remote lordship of these spoils.

"You may have seen it, the death march lot for K's right there at the end of the field, but the wind Never Blows this way," counseled Phil, farting. "They started this hole way back when the chanks were still flush and sweating. Then their heartland became a museum for ugly, militaristic protocols. Everyone who came here wanted badly to be a cog. So they called it God. It's where I'm still living."

Next stop, last rest stop before High Chanks and extremer pointz. RIP!
"Hoolie Roll: Hooptie to Tomorrow"