JOSHUA CRAFT — EARTHMASK

"What does one do in Paradise?" —Prurient, “Spins The Worlds Wheel Again” IN WANT OF a supine palliation dependent upon the configuration of years now too far amply bleared to retrieve the assuaging scroll of, it is only with partial breadth that I can best attempt to exposit the singular manner in which the animal head, severed, has become the utmost unusual yet simultaneously nonchalant astonishment of our time. The curious advent came when the extant head of a soil-oldened primate was unearthed in an easterly dig east of these abbeys. The core of the cephalic radius contained within it a curious and ringed amalgam of tantalum, poppy, quartz, and hellebore black impaled by vibrant spines of mandrake aclimb in obstinate winding shoot. While it is unknown precisely what occurred in the course of the dig, it is unanimously asserted that one of the scientists was stricken rabid when the item of sempiternal litter’s maw was pried open and an aromatic plume effused. The scientist is said, in his pitiable craze, to have belched a rife spire of gargled water and bilious marsh; an adhesive ichor hardening at once on the sand into the crystalline shape of a pooling star and black and the gnarled twisting consistency of twigs. The biochemical nature of the peculiar effluvia and its tenebrous humors was unidentifiable even to the most world-spun physician at the zone of the turbid affair. The excavation was to be abandoned, but a valued participant of the sojourn (the Duchess’s astronomer) proceeded to spy the vomited hot of the stricken digger seep up onto the decimated fibres of the culpable skull and seem to re-enliven it in the doing, ebbing from it forth hence a blacker reeking wreath of rubbery sputtering fat. When the leathery swarm of the sludge’s defective weather no longer bore an obvious morbidity, the men—in the perilous ardor well-known to mark research’s most unhindered ventures—proceeded to fondle, inhalate, and finally ingest the extraordinary froth still clamoring out the ancient face. After pitching the sorry digger to the quarry, the band was beguiled by a dizzying torpor of the senses; a curious interlude of eccentric numbness followed by euphoric caprice. Once presented in the halls of appropriate study, the substance was identified as a narcotic putrescene—one officially christened crepuscular etherium; a moniker derived from the tonic’s elicitation of hallucinations fugitive to hours diurnal. Samples of the sludge and its foundry of oddity’s flora were cleaved of the remarkable skull and fed to untold articles of vulnerable matter harvested and acquired for this purpose (lampblack, lambsblood, menses, etcetera). Months of noble toil passed, and the findings bore a vast saga of proofs expounding that, while wrangling the exact array of variables did not replicate the inciting night, it was however true that conjuration of crepuscular etherium as an active hallucinatory agent did realize vitality upon its injection into the dead tissue of severed animal heads. The miracle was irreproducible in the skulls of dead persons; the vision could only arrive via medium of external beast beheaded. For reasons inforested, it was required by attending anomaly that head must be shorn away from creature for the virus to ingrain good root and healthily effuse its abtrusive draught before wondering observer. Critics—particularly in the field of alienism, were quick to insist that the living head of the person was the host of the dead one’s infective parasite, while others—namely those magnates and various provincial judges deployed annoyedly to the task of inquiry—insisted the case was but the reverse. Certain was that when the dead, infected, sheared head of an animal was face-close to a participant, a paroxysmic alterization of the world did flood the mental facilities. It was unlike hash, or opium—one maintained one's wits about them; it was the wits of the world that tore askew. Descriptions of the earliest visions are scarce, but it was written that the observer remained fathoming the corporeal grist of extrema anterior the thrall, but subjects were often befallen by disequilibria of sadness at the specter of its traces, likening it to the intrusion of light through curtains as one attempts to sleep. The infirmary arts had, also, soon affirmed that the ensludging nebulae and its animalcules elicited no contestable arc of injurious toll; as long as one’s vigil with the virus was continuous—avoidant of the decrepit cessation of function paling the shovelhand in the prescient quarry who—in foolish hubris—scurried his person adrift of a life-sustaining excreta. Over subsequent months’ experimentation, the visions of patients under the tonic began to alesce into alikeness of posure—first in replicae of another’s, then as integrant united—sans demarcation of different mind; in selfsame chronicity of a mirrored event. Upon this momentous finding famously spake the Duchess’s Astronomer in quorum at the Ministry of Abbeys: ‘…such fancies are not, I submit, ephemera or quizzicist in nature, being that the most contemporaneous of our findings do indeed confirm the theorem of a shared psychical aether, one which thrives upon a nexus of cause and effect that almost pales by storm the one under which our ancestors were wont and beleaguered to suffer…what this portends for the manifold spheres of imperative study, such as medicine—without the communicative impediment of geography, and those incalculable valves of Industry and Academy—even the taciturn quandary of mesmerism!…Let it be said hereby we greet the facelessly bequeathed unzipping of the houndsworld’s true bounds with the interminably mirthful deadpan of a reasonable people who have always known of the spirit but have never seen it universally (in objective snatch as such), now finding our penchants of belief but judiciously confirmed by way of the sciences; and—quite fittingly, one might add—through the amenable and visible face of those ignoble myriad beasts who have volleyed off this world so as to beseech us placidity of port to this abyssal firmament—which would seem to expound that this was perhaps, at end, meant always the gifting conceit of the lowerer beasts—the slashed and smartly stayed appendage lent by their soulless pounds as an unburnt offering offering our endamnedable skins what was once the unaffordable span of heaven’s mirrors.’ In time, the severed heads of most species were found atop domestic mantles, chifforobes, inside bedchambers. This widespread exposure to crepuscular etherium impelled the biochemic and philosophic understanding of the virus to expand. It was now understood that the virus’s spore bore unique within the molecules of each host—with said host’s rendition of the odd germ affecting not merely one’s own visions—but then, the coinciding visions of all other intoxicated hosts (regardless of physical locations cross-proximally); rendering discernible and objective activity within that communal reservoir of sensation and experience frequented by observers with surmassing rituality (a facet affirmed infinitum in the towering tons of studies). A common model of usage might be for the severed head—perhaps that of a sheep—to be left beside or under the bed of an observer overnight, only to be retrieved immediately upon waking and held by one to one's awaking face. Locutors probed in one inquiry confessed that they preferred to access their hallucination before the haze of whatever they had dreamt had faded, thusly replacing one warm, unnamable haze with another—before the crude dawn of this freezing life’s lance could stain upon the breast in predawn dark and so impart its sour of mundanities and dourer troubles. For adult observers of the visions, severed heads were carried everywhere to generate ongoing exposure, either by harness round neck or rigging of reins of leather suspending decapitated face over the human’s for maxima of fumal lode. The greater the stench, the greater the decay of the head, which meant the greater the measure of hallucination, being that the spore excited in decaying’s orbit. Granted, the ornamented animal head obscured one's sight—but, the viral realm (as it was now called) intrepidly provided; irradiating in imaginal schematica a kind of phantastical astrolabe or azimuth meter of the psyche, given to strata on which did roost a provably honest charter of the woesome world that still laid aching, latent and umbral, beneath the viral realm. Many children—far too weak to sustain the weight of such contraption, oft developed great exhaustion of the arms, trotting idly home from schoolhouses, doting inveigled in dullish gaze upon the face of their animal heads—automata to whatever deciduous frivolities its airs had wound inside their heads. Some children began to speak in accents not their own—insisting stringently that this is how their visionary counterparts in the viral realm did spake, and that they themselves had always spoken this way anyway. Children were typically idiotic, and this tawdry parade of lunar gaiety was nary exception. It was easiest, it seemed, for the babes—in their eager, injubilate fat—to encounter iteration of their true face and voice, displaced and transposed within the visual and audial fancies inured, as they crawled in frolic around a family’s severed head; and, so then speak like nothing but themselves both in and out of the viral realm (infants often now empowered by the seizing reach of speaking itself much earlier than had prior been the pact of Nature). It also was well within the first decade of this epoch that the village’s courts and vistas saw the erection of remodelings recapitulating the fanciful embraided beauties (and even the comfortable monotonies) of the viral realm; its evident depths and arcadian frontiers alike. Concurrently, a new form of Portraiture arose, one that was generally referential in representative homage to events that had occurred in the viral realm; or ours, yet conveyed through the new spirits of Beauty augmented by the ineffable thrum of viral experience. Portraiture of this sort (frames often extending ceiling-high) stood contingent upon the materials related to, infected by, or produced therefrom the virus; including severed headmeat, swaths of wet hide soaked in viral particulates, or gobs of the aphotic putrescence itself. That which to our prior or primordial eye (as it was now called) may have appeared in mere to be but a glopped spall of hulked black paint on a black furred canvas—with protrusive truffles of apparent eye sliced and faces caved-in and small, whimsical shocks of white headbone adhering to and half-sealed thick within its vertiginous nectar—may be seen through the dead eye of the animal head hanged over primordial eye as the wriggling green roil of a coral’d ocean floor; resultant aroma’s vapors only further enhancing the immensity of such a perception. The medical consequence of continuous exposure to necrotic tissue and its putrefuge of gaseous blanch to such profound extents was apparently poor, with several elderly, as well as children and adults, falling prey to cataclysms of intestinal revolt, acute frustration of the respiratory matrix, and minor violences of emotions. When a household’s heads became disagreeably ‘pestilent,’ with the attraction of vermin or of maggots often heralding the end of one’s reasonable tolerance (mussing the mouths of beholders, trawling the tongue primordial), or in those cases when the observer succumbed direct to vulnerability before despoilment’s biomes—despite the utter benignity of the salving virus—the head would quickly be replaced; granted the household in question could manage this expenditure. As the presence of heads and Portraiture abounded, it became startlingly apparent, in fact, that exposure to the pathogen than had been hitherto been standard would, in fact, engender the deterrence of the unsavory impacts of the rogue decay; and, of course inculcate one’s greater degree of relation and involvement with hallucination—the ongoing social colony of which was now integral to public affairs, the organs of trade, burdens of travel, and the conduction of Parliament. As per the suggestions of further study, severed animal heads partly hollowed of biotic cargo were put to experiment’s throe, with particular attentions devoted to avoiding the obvious prospect of suffocation or torment of the spinal mast—with the ultimate purpose of permanent affixal to a living observer’s head. Within some forty months, all village occupants were fitted surgically; full-skulled; within the sarcophageal helmet of the dead animal of one’s choosing (and financial heed). Soon followed the revelatory emergence of a new language; about which consensus of surmisal roared void. The tongue, or tongues, was—or were heard first in especially subdolous rookeries and stulms subdural to the hallucination’s planes. These ensconced lairs apparently had been bereaved of a need to pay any semblance or dispatched grammatic axis correspondent to the primordial world of plain materia. Observers, or participants, or hosts, or denizens of the viral (as they were now called) did not, at first, divine the viral tongue outside the confines—nor wholly while within. Yet, after the advent of helmets, a steelier foci was awarded hallucination; through the dead eye of the animal nestled upon one’s old, sad eye; advanced in by its kiss; clarifying its aspects with reliable ubiquity. In accord, the reportedly sputtering, sinewy new grammar began to eclipse that of yore in material jaws of us primordial; throughout the orchards and bourns, parlors and halls, pastures and verges. The enigmatic prattle—flatter, in ways, than its predecessors—shimmered as if the emerging hide of a long-denied leviathan of myth beheld temporarily lifting from and through the glassy lid of the sea. The speech (and its scribings) were not at all a coherent whole—but neither was that of the viral world, which, despite its nature as a shared perception imposed upon the old nature, did seem, so by degrees, to be populate with more and more individually queer hallucinations within the wider, broader environment of visions, snared so by fewer and fewer crew; the majority lone. But the viral languages, flowering soon to plural, did in general figure proficient a bizarre wreckage of disfigured ejaculations between the two genuses of communication; that of the new with what had been the slog and the drag of the bumbling old. Viral language permeating the atmosphere of the world influenced in its heavy contribution to historical progress the mark of Portraiture’s expansion into three-dimensionality (a term referent, of course, to primordial conceptions of measure). The furtive omniforce of Portraiture had blast long past the demesnes of painting, adornment, and sculpture, and had become the fundament of construction. Persons would construct a room that was a portrait, take up within, proceed to paint themselves, the surfaces, and those witnessing (in lieu of fourth walls most homes now lacked as conduit rite of vector) with stupendous agility of inventive spirit fresh surfaces, textures, astronomies (about the viral stars), and events. One could press one’s hand into the wall of a chamber and find yet more virally ripe, inexplicable rind that could be used to repair the chasm befisted. All new monuments, balustrades, bridges, gables cantilevered, overhanging eaves, oriel and oval panes, mirror frames, sash window weights, candelabras, sacristies, and walls from there hereon were foraged, completed, refined with various meats, minerals, metals, stuffs, secretion, excretion, and rot hot with gangrenous viral life; all to the end of solidifying the infinitesimal and effervescent totality of its atomic stretch, its illimited penetration. Despite the vast array of myriad innovation and progression in all societal, parliamentary, scientific, and inhibitional quarters of our time, something did change—undeniably, disconcertingly, toward the end of the century. The curious scathe began when horses—large, and of oldened bones—that had filled the streets to innumerous ends—fell victim to massive bouts of unceasing defecation. Into the next week, even horses purposely starved (for experimentation) still reliably produced an undying stream of superfluous waste that, when squished to one’s ear through the wall of one’s helmet, was said to almost resemble cacophony. Before the foul dilemma could be further conferred, something further unspeakably grave assumed its ghoulish knell before us. Children, throughout the richest provinces, of no apparent catalyst or cognizance viable to pattern, began to embrace brief careers of willful murder; hacking at vicars, conductors, phrenologists, mimes, grocers—any living or unliving thing—with scythes forged from driftwood and aberrant ore. By this juncture, objects were able to be spoken incarnate by speaking viral language into any given piece of Portraiture—and, so by degrees, it was found of further inquisition that these children created and retrieved their instruments of mutilation from their own bedchambers (growing the units of ruin right out of their guts). Hotly, Parliament warred over the idea of removing Portraiture from the rooms of young—yet, despite fair reason to this end, it was not able to be sufficiently answered as to how young would have means to access scholastic, intersocial, recreational, sexual, or religious literatures and experiences (or hygiene, or food), as all were administered and engaged through the channels of the virus’s lattices in us. While it remained a relatively minute amount of young that romanced the ghastly trend, a far larger amount of them began to suicide themselves. This occurred, overwhelmingly, through the practice of throwing oneself down a well, or simply taking up residency within one. The fugitive youth, oft snugly stacked atop each other, tended to grow emaciated after becoming stuck in the upright stone tunnels; many never reaching the bottom at all, due to the amount of children already caught and crumpled up alive in the wells when the latest one would enter; expecting exit into watery outer stark and not the bent and grunting of one’s schoolmates. Twilit missions of cavalries into the woods, guided barely by the emerald light the miasma made of moon behind the thistle, searched for prodigals that had carefully self-stored. When found, the missing were oft sung to, offered meals, promised feasts and civilly commissioned gifts; and, upon refusal of this news, confronted with camphor or pungent spices wound to entice the tenders out of the hard. Many young were saved in that manner; only to return—the well now emptier, with the lack of physical traction prior allotted by the cramming of bodies—leading these lone returners to plummet confidently and successfully to wet ice death. Water was primarily derived from condensation of the fumes of the virus anyhow, so within the next few decades, most wells were sealed—though not without some young, at their own peril, unintentionally entombed in the process. Furthermore, while many youth stated later in fame and inquiry equally that their deathheadedness was a cavorting in hunger for what was ‘beneath the Portraiture’ and that this is what was found in the wells, woods, and killing that allowed them some degree of reprieve, later research implied that the wells and the woods were premade Portraiture themselves, accidentally or intentionally enstationed there for whatever means. In response to this broad turn of agonies accrued communal, we the rest, more large, took too to killing as a thing of implicit intent. We stabbed and stabbed each other in fits of fluid and bloom we couldn’t stop and when the knives bent we sliced our fingers open trying to tie the tendons back together and when this proved too slick we stabbed each other with the new sharp of our bone flints arching up and through our useless crumps and when the knives shattered against each other’s bones we stabbed each other with the shattered knives of bone our lives from womb to then had made, and oblong, obese the gore did grow. Few remember this or what transpired before, or from hereon. What appeared at first in woods as ships comprised of light grew dark. Then the galleons hummed. This was because the dark was flies. The sleepwalker and the insomniac mimicked each other. Moribund jesters burst mobius innards in the foyers of theatres; an attempt at jocularity. Spiders came out of flowers. Flowers came out of men. Donkeys came apart like pinatas. They were filled with things that flew away, crying, but looked like tiny men, crying, hurtling through the multifilth. Angels made of mirrors were pushed out of the air. That was what became of wind. Spirits hovered over graves, laughing at themselves. Rabbits dragged corpses that sang. Shaven angels the color of intestines crawled out of an outhouse’s wound in a portion of the sky to visit sleeping youth; Life By The Visitation of Offal. We consumed deformed fruit with seeds that moved, splashed black when bit into, and described a life in heaven through the slit of a smile. Lips tore out of statues. Plasmatic apparitions appeared, frail and akin to granite; complained of effects of the weather to perplexed house-residents. The picquerist was left alone in a schoolyard with a pearling fishknife. Empty headless horsedrawn omnibuses with no horses jettisoned over cleft edges in the outlands, dashed upon the stonework and the blackened bones of pigs. Tarantulas were worshipped at the command of oracles. Children ate tigers and rhinoceroses. Hyenas and beetles befouled the palazzo, also became delicacy. Porphyria cutanea tarda before the moon grew common. Castrati deemed greensick and dog were drowned in the narthex of the parish. The conqueror howled the hammer supreme. War culled supremacies. Girls who ate tarantulas at lent were considered scapegrace and analyzed. Rabbits that dragged corpses sang. Longswords progradually tumesced additional blades—the silhouette of mandrake. Nephilim trawled the hills like ladders on fire, unnoticed. Ships went sailing through the wood, apparently comprised entirely of flies. Babe with the head of a rabbit and one with the head of a hare devoured each other entire in front of translucent coffins filled with carrots. The waterfall was onions. The streets were filled with a protean dread, an amorous torpor, and the glass of defenestration. Delirious cherubs bashed through unopen doors; glass loved their face. They ran on naked feet, bent arrows in their hands. Nefarious cherubs gagged on jasmine in the open dreams of constables. Proliferation of autonomous performance of perpetual sickness became a controversial past-time; in cummerbunds and bustiers akin to snow. Yellow wick half-massed; a spider older than the rest crawls of the breast of a sodden deacon on hindest legs — the river outside snickers, vials of useless oval papal luster so to rust are clenched. There are flames beneath the frozen lake. The sound of heavenly bodies colliding could be heard. Paranoiac nuns enchanted to manias by visions of looming black planets stopped showing up to a popular dissection they were conducting—of a shark—in the Royal Hall of Medicine. Each week, a succeeding tooth was removed and searched for divine insignia, and another flank would be reaved of the enormous torso. The first Mother Superior retired from the task much prior; her fist twisting in the open gill until she found her hand removed by another, smaller shark still alive inside the larger shark; having subsisted off the creature’s salted and thus suspended blood preserved from desiccation. The Mother Superior’s daughter aspired to now one day dissect this shark, in search of her mother's old hand (most likely also preserved), which could be learnt from, palm-read, and cast in iron. The daughter was a witch. But the girl nevertheless slept with a crucifix around her dolphin-headed lips. The armless were mistaken by crows for forks. Rabbits dragged a corpse away beneath the glow of crucified excrement ablaze. Contempt of the moon amassed. All primordial languages now rolled over the horse skeletons. The defecation of horses was eternal. Tongues belonging to none but holding swords marched out of the pelvic cathedrals that once housed horse sphincters. Within stinking rugs, a snarling fear. A séance above the ocean, table hovering. Chrysanthemums. Longworms of nervous white plasm elongated from their mouths, fading into a gray; bleached tropic of ivy. The zigmaticus major and minor and the orbicularis oris, the levator labii superioris alaeque nasi are all untouched, even by exequy, like the even mothlost furniture of a desolated manor. Unutterable terror before the moon grew darkly. A bodiless head was sliced off of a headless body, falling. The heart awakes in fits and starts. In strangest dreams, the sound of rotting. Life by the visitation of dead gods. At the same time, one’s objectively leveled command of time’s passing dissembled, such that the plane of awareness upon which this tilt of phantasmagorical war prevailed (over almost every pocket of one’s worry) persisted so in almost totally unrelated constellation from those reliable altars on which our usual foibles remained, in yawn, adroitly posed. For example—as an insight into the quagmires and trials of those more routine of our endeavors (in spite of the popular tiresome quarrels), one may remark upon the unfortunate predicament that stood before children in our society, and the question of their excellence in adjudicating their business in perpetual health. There was an unforeseen problem concerning the developmental agency of the original (‘primordial’) skulls of children after having underwent the helmeting procedure, which was all children. If young endured the procedure before the completion of physiologic and biochemic development that begins with pubescence and consummates in onslaught of adulthood—which was universally the case—there was a conflict resultant from the circumference of the child’s skull growing beyond the maximum capacity allotted by the proportions of the helmet. Stunting the head’s growth deforms natural curvatures of the bone, eventually compressing virtually all cranial regions and drastically pressuring the brain, leading to incalculable motor and psychical ailments—almost always ending in fatality. Children could not be fitted at birth with oversized helmets, because the present forms of surgical attachment demand a total stitching of the original skin to the inside of the severed animal head—surface to surface touchdown, it was called. And it was not a viable option to fit children with temporary helmets, gradually replaced with age, as no helmet had ever been successfully removed without massive disfiguration, as well as death (despite the most elegant attempts at total debridement of headflesh by leech). However, it was not an option to not fit helmets to newborns, as there was no known means of feeding them outside of the arterial weave of the viral. As to date, all young born since the advent of helmets have not surpassed the age of twenty-seven, though our means of measuring the passing of time in viral terms have become somewhat opaque, which may, hopefully, mercifully, render the above datum entirely nil. The question of the uncertain health of procreation also adjusted the matter of eros as it is understood in our time. It had become unusual to witness what we could still feasibly designate, in all echelons of still respectable taxonomy, as copulation done at all these days, when not done alone in concert of those coquettish engines of impeded birth that had amassed out of the Portraitsoil. These artisanal machines of web, muscle, rust of nails, root, batter, and tungsten in a blubber state were spherical hulks of what I referred to as protomortal detritus: life that (as if in response to the widespread death) could not wait to be alive and so became itself alive still within soupy, amorphous, soluble being. Some suggested the occasional opening of gapes like mouths in the structure of composition of the thing were meant to be fed, but it had been agreed by popular mimes that these were orifici of expulsion—the seeming ‘teeth’ a stalactite calcification resultant from civilian overuse of the orifice. Regardless of our attempts to helm their arising, the globes—or milquethrones—were grown awry of our volition, and, in time, appeared in homes to all. The spheres were also, later, found in compartments miles under all mass graves (of the endless headless beasts and the quite contested number of civilians demolished and enspeared of late; a matter mostly forgotten), bulbgrown and attached by shoots to the downward mulch of the beheaded, the misheaded, the deathofheaded. Despite persistent recorded attempts at copulation with the spheres; above, below, and upon the ground, the only spawn yielded were strange, lonesome, benumbed, and stumpen deathgrunts of ache-flesh filled with moist clumps of busy root birthed not from orifici but a dripping jut of protrusion force-ripping through the then healing and myriad dermis of the sphere. The non-sum of life in the damnlings rang sardonic, given the degree of sacrifice employed in the labor of prospective paternal effort. Odder yet, these near-spawn remarkably resembled the dead ancestors of those pathetic (us all, numerous times, daily, nightly) who had attempted to produce real children with the sprouted spheres, although as if the original faces of the ancestors had distorted into the general shape of the helmets of the ancestors in question whilst retaining primordial flesh of texture. The biosis of the chunken dworbles was that they shot to life, coughed, shrilly made a mucoid chortle, then died (although the dying rattle was thought by some to seem as laughter). Some of us, in time, attempted to copulate with these root dolls—postulating, and not unreasonably—that doing so might produce a more successful spawn, the cultivation of which might see a new era of longer duration; in effect sparing our species the pangs of its fates by supplanting those with that of another, superiorized nexus of breeding. Copulation with the inchoate globs was conducted both during and after their sparse quark of life, but have been found to yield nothing new, outside of the event of the virile member of the initiating copulator shredded, distended, prolapsed, gelatinized, fallen off, flensed open to flailing ribbonform, classically degloved, urethra harlequin-hatted, uteri plopped octopi upon dolorous chamber floors. Successful, however, as officially exacted otherwise, in what remained as the clear course of the progress of helmeting technics, was a solution of viral formaldehyde—as a circular seal of drily crunching pus, leavened with oily plasma—to be injected in jowl to allow the now silent viral language to spew through holes drilled into both cheeks of the helmet. The diaphanous rain of this form of speaking predicated itself upon silence rather than uttering; upon rips in the constant buzz of viral spores. The alphabet extinct used to move like sand through letting it drop, but the alphabet now, through the sprockets, was in nature more akin to the sound liqueur makes when sloshed upside the inner body of decanters. In a manner that is not wholly unrelated to the present state of grammatic evolution, at this point, what exactly entails even death is, by the hour, growing oblique. As such, many here do not know whether or not they have already died, in the original sense. It is believed that the sound composing now the space between our new words is possibly just the skittering of maggots beneath the overlay of the viral, in the old world, but we do not know if the maggots are here for our desisted bodies, or the dead animal heads we have sown to our heads. It seems like what we used to think of as death does not exist without what we used to call language, that much can be said. It is possible that most of us are dead, which one would never know, when one is befitted with the visage of something already dead. It is possible that I am the only one left alive, although I have been told by many neighbors that they think they are the only ones left alive as well. One of them appeared to thresh to powder, maddened by his displacement from what his memory insists is his memory of his original body, but afterwards, I began to suspect that the man was only a hallucination in the first place, so I let the matter be. Out pane saw the diluted fashion of a parade besotted by droll plombs of massacre, a foundrying geist it felt no sumptuous or unmad account could planche hence through curtains of stable prehension. Through what seemed one's branch-crossed glass to the yard across the court slammed obdurate again deluges ambiguously trembling as to be guesses of themselves. To one's neighbor's court there seen from above: no dress writhed twixt cable and rack. The dress in memory mistakable for an upright ocean the height of a woman. A probably dead assassin spied in the pit, gawking at his own reflection in the dark pooled mirror before him. His head was of a person but also of an ass but also of an antelope but also of a buffalo. Essences candesced into each other, colloidal and molten. The man could have been the eraser of the woman, but it was just as easily, humbly probable she, the dress, may have been the stamper of his ballasted epitaph, his gaped jaw locked fraught as if tribal masque in augered shock. The only constant morningstar was the lost urn of raw earth. The idea of the cease. To divine to funereal sonata the song thrown by her boiled seas. We now begged each other to sever each’s helmeted heads in hopes that through them we could view the old world the way we used to view the viral, and even though we could still see into our own helmeted beheaded head’s eyes, all we saw was the arrived windows of two pair of dead eyes looking through each other at the air where our helmeted head used to be, infinitely and immediately. Auroras of organoid spume rolled sleepily over horizons. The service of one sun preferred to another was uncertain. What one thought was here was ardently there. Monastical individuals stood on the cliffs with ancient weapons. There was no hunt. They listened to buzzards; distant as night. The searing of one sun upon another was certain. A great silence fell a few weeks later, by which we mean an omnipresent hum unstabbed by absence. It may have been just in my mind, whatever that was, but no one could move or communicate or be in any way, other than by the act of blending into each other, becoming nothing more but conduits for the virus upon its momentarily new replicas and spawns of replicas of itself, our physiologies contorted into amoebic shambles, bubbles rolling at each other down old lanes at blinding clips, killing and rebirthing into dull, stonelike tumors of bacteria with each new crash. The last thought that anyone ever had, or so I presumed, excepting this thought, perhaps it was this thought, was that we had only ever existed for this purpose, even in the days of dust and womb and prior, starsmoke and globe, cathedral ceilings and curtains tearing in our stories, virus no less our glory or trophy than our own old world’s death had been. Because, perhaps, it was that, at least. As if agreeing, or disagreeing, the landscape of all quarters and matrices of the virus’s domains and entwining reaches began to rise and tremble, folding, then unfolding, pressing more of itself out of itself and then into itself, killing trillions of namelessnesses in this course, things of which we would have never learned, those lifted and then fallen off of the face of bends and spires as if insects shaken from a great neglected plate of soil, dumb fistfuls of galaxy with it, although these things and words of them and words only existed in one blind, mashed pocket of the virus, that convulsion that kept its own language in its mouth for so many little aeons, that girlish world of soil that was only finally flint, bats, the rack, chattel, flagellants, spikes, vats, clamps, iambs, the matchlock, feet, ergot, galleons, purgatives, sperm, dice, typhoid, forceps, corsets, pyres, charnel houses, truncheons, the fainting couch, xylyl bromide, qualia, sea-coal, the amaranth trampled, diachylon, kites, lead, plutonium, the feasting shrike in syzygy. Joshua Craft lives in the United States. X.