Yes, I used to contemptualize everything
like the bitter, curmudgeonly professors at
the beginning of my career. They filled the
smoking lounge with grievances and
plotting, derisive cackling in their blur of
fear. But for some the failure has been a
tenderizer, the corrosive beating toward a
climax of surrender. Is what I'm hearing.
by Peg
The shiv will put you into a nightmare you can wake up from as opposed to no-shiv, which you can never wake up from.
I'm on no-shiv.
I'm sorry.
Don't sweat it. I was born that way.
Is that what you were. Born.
Yeah my mom
I know. Her name is Jan Jansdaad.
Was. But you're right, we're all Jans.
I wish I knew more exactly how I came to be. The mode of arrival, that is, not conception.
Whether you came out of a lab dish or a lightning bolt
I am still coming from there
Either way you are this, here.
The last rings of sun, with the moon surrendering backward on its rocker: it's a scary light in which to lose your dog. Only the tiny desert vichos can hear Ilyn whistling for Shab.
Showing up unapologetically late, Shab seems happy to back the cart right up to Ilyn's charred and bloody heap near the decomposed granite pit he's crawled out of.
Shab gets a kinky cord of hemp wrapped in his teeth and pulls, and the door on the back of the cart falls off.
Ilyn then has to figure out how to get into the cart with the least amount of pain. After all, he is not a martyr.
A quiet darkness surrounds the pair except for just beneath Shab's hooded forehead, where his eyes are lending just enough red light to see the flecks of cement dust in the air. They would turn all the way back around to the sun again before they'd even find their trail.
Jan Jansdaad is driving along and thinking what if I lost this hooptie. What if anything happened to it at all. We'd be on our way to the next lower rung of economic class hell...
Wait a minute. I'm back. All the while La Chama must have been leading me towards a hole to The Crack. She knew I'd have to return, at least for a moment, just to see. I see I've been to pharmsupply-- I've got a live bag of hopinaskippina. I'm headed home, for whomever I find there. But what about my daughter-- will she take my place? I just wish we could be all together and safe with descent health insurance.
Then there is a prick near the dew claw. Lloyd? You're drawing my blood.
Not at all, Mrs. Jansdaad. I'm just cuddling here next to you while you nap.
Jan?
I know, Mom. He's from pharmsupply just like daddy said.
Now wait just a minute, ladies.
You're only here to steal our genes and spy.
Oh I'd say it's been quite a lot more than that. I can take you back. Get you reformatted. You'll be an in-between type, like La Chama. Small enough to fit in human structures. Strong enough to
To power one of your slave K's with my brain, as your slave.
It's not like that anymore. We're finding new ways to
To use our natural bodily processes for the greater appetite. Our suffering is inconsequential.
Ok, you know what, you guys? I am getting really sick and tired of walking around with a completely open heart to each of you as persons, and you know I kind of feel like that Begging Rajah, with so much, so much to give, and... no hands. You just scheme to cover up or push your strong identities. What about my purpose? Who am I?
Both Mrs. Jansdaad and Lloyd avert their eyes and tighten their lips. One concept they can agree on is the adorability of Jan and her paroxysms of sincerity.
You say that Ilyn is Shab's "new" master. Who is the old one?
You might have noticed that on Shab's back is an empty saddle made of the finest mantua. It was the seat of the Giving Rajah who became the Begging Rajah but is now the Perpetually Sobbing Rajah. He was so giving of his riches that he even tried to feed gems carved as lady bugs to a living monster poinsettia, which of course bit off his hands. For a while, the raja tried begging from the back of his formerly proud and now ashamed dog, Shab, but it was no use. Shab's eyes only began to glow red with the shame of his master's indiscretion.
Finally the begging rajah was able to give up begging and live here in this place of death and peace and learned to take on sorrow as his only sustenance. If you look over there in the shadow near the gate, you can see him holding himself up in his grief and sobbing against the stones, having just seen Shab wander off once more with the cart and the redundant saddle.
With La Chama off to help Mrs. Jansdaad find herself, Jan and Lloyd find themselves wandering across the stained plaza the morning after Night of Shiv Days. There are two kinds of stains between the cobblestones: the blood of zealots, and the purplish marks left by the shiv left by the K's. Some flekes have scraped it up and made shiny coins selling it; others go on to sell their stories of being scarred by it.
Lloyd and Jan enter a random alley which becomes an artery that leads them out of the town center and into the Graveyard of Gay Guys. They buy some sausages of vicho and tubes of vine from a vendor and rest against an ancient tree.
Soon, there is a groaning squeak, and then a thud. And then again, and again. Uninterrupted in their chewing, they watch a dog and an open cart pass into their line of sight, headed for the far stone gate leading out to the countryside.
It's Shab, says Jan matter of factly, with her new sense of knowledge. That cart he's pulling is thought to have been constructed before the invention of the wheel. It's rotors are hewn square, so they buck upward at the corners and lurch forward coming down on the straight parts. Shab seems to pull it effortlessly, his feet barely touching the ground, if at all. He'll wander in that wasteland until he sees Ilyn surfacing through the rocky scrabble. Dogs think anything that moves must be alive, and if it's alive it must be food or a savior, and that's how he finds Ilyn every time. Shab finds Ilyn and then pulls him along in the cart, which, in all its heaving and jangling, is the only rest that his master will get until the next ascent, the same ascent, to Karihr-Kesh.
It's reassuring in a way, says Lloyd. Ilyn seems to suck up a lot of the pain around here. Is that what he's for?
It might be an unintended effect of his passion, answers Jan.
Ilyn sprints past his single-file train of devotees on the jagged trail up chank to Karihr-Kesh, the sacred springed platform jutting out over Mthyuh's hot mouth.
Standing at the edge of the Kesh, Ilyn drops his robes and bells and marigold garlands until he is strikingly naked and white-grey because of the scars. His skin is scars upon scars from head to feet. Only the brilliant red hair can break through the gnarled scar surfaces and stand out against the blackened rock faces.
His hair and cement-white bottoms of his feet are all the eye can see until he seems to be consumed in the black crustiness of the lava below. The devotees crack rocks together and blow into stone pipes and sing.
A charnel nest sometimes grows around the entire top of a chank as fresh bones are added, wet. They dry while lashed to the rest of the structure with the sinews of the worshipers' bodies from which they came.
Some of them are just hoping for the best.
Chama is looking out at the sunset behind the Mthyuh Town Hall Plaza, crowded shoulder-to shoulder with rubber-wearing, umbrella-holding flekes. The tureens are full to brimming over, the broth coming to a simmer.
They show up thinking maybe their lives will change or they will have a really good time or they will end up doing scar tours at shiv temples for cash or dead in pieces in a filthy charnel nest. Since there's no time, the only way you can move forward is to shove action in a direction.
Jan and Lloyd are Chamatilly's guests. They have all the upper chambers of Mthyuh Town Hall. There are shiv boxes and vine and small snacks of fruits and vichos.
I told your mother, Jan, that I would look after you and Lloyd. She's trying to figure out her destiny, you know?
I do know because lately all I can see is her face when I close my eyes. It is painfully expressive.
They're coming. Lloyd can see the tiny K-shaped figures in stack formation from a starting point somewhere in the sun. There's not yet any thumping of their tymbal apparatus, but already their lung music of high, tinny strings and echoey vocals is reaching the crowd.
As the sky darkens, it is a silent crowd-- no roaring, cheering, or chants. In their black garb, they sound more like a vigil. The beasts are growing bigger as they draw near. La Chama, Jan, and Lloyd are standing at ancient glory holes carved into the stone walls to safely view the event.
Jan might have been a little miffed to miss a chance to turn heads in a crowd, but tonight she felt her full voyeuristic morbo bubble to her surfaces.
La Chama selects saves six virgins from Mthyuh's mouth until they change, and they are then set free.
The virgins are sequestered into six stone chambers and develop tymbal structures between their thumbs and forefingers. They communicate only through the common mirror and by the clacking sounds when they are asleep. Some compare it to the sound of woodpeckers.
Their solemn attendants are the Vikkies, who are mostly trans-women but also cisgender performance artists. The Vikkies are permanently named according to the most glamorous World capital or other point of interest adjacent to their chapter. Present International Chair: Vikki Madrid.
Pinging sounds of much hammering of metal on stone.
Central Mthyuh Chank, the turnaround cleared of all traffic.
Shiv tureens are the size of swimming pools, a little smaller than K nests. Raised on blocks just above eye level,the three festival bowls are being filled with a locally sourced vegetative broth. Below, there are thickly stacked coal and flammables.
Jan and Lloyd are strolling like tourists, but wobblier, having to take in not just a change of existential dimension but also an unfamiliar region and ways.
LLOYD: This is all freaking me out. I don't know if I can handle it.
JAN: It's Shiv Days. But it's real is all. It's not a myth here.
LLOYD: No. I mean everything.
JAN: Maybe we'll go home, or maybe it'll be better here. You better buck up. It's all an amazing adventure, and it's our lives.
LLOYD: Ok.
Every storefront has been scaffolded out past the sidewalk and barred like a jail to allow for jumping in and out of danger.
I get it that we share cultural and historic roots with these people but it's hard for me to imagine actually fitting in and being accepted.
The ancient totalitarian clock tower chimes random hours. Some say there is an algorithm.
How do you know all of this?
She's my mother, and she's developing hyper-archetypal knowledge. I read her facial expressions, but very deeply to the point of pure language, which is actually more accurate than any tongue.
and then there's the guy across the street
between me to the east and Jan on the corner there
like he's ushering his bitches through a man canyon
he turns all purple round about sunset
the nice wife and their scary female pit
are never permitted to get a word in
by Jan
"Until you come back, alls I can do is keep track."
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