A Thousand Cuts

Rainbow. Light's parts visible encircle the full moon. Owls pass the nights hunting, silent winging, cries cutting the sky littered with aloof stars, incomprehensible and burning in eternity. Everything smokes. Smoke rises, whitish swirl skyward from the lawn chair opposite, from the ramshackle fence, from the weeds, from the dogs, who do not notice. The world is smoldering, day and night. She closes her eyes and still sees smoke. Opens them again, and still, every object has ember-glow faintly visible in its heart. There are fires burning in the mountains and the air reeks of the conflagration, but that isn't the source of this smoke, nor are the cigarettes she lights one after another. Algol blinks, tri-partate, the larger, cooler star occulting its hotter, brighter partner at regular intervals. The existence of the third part is extrapolated from spectrographic analysis. It's the third phase one must attend to. There's a black kernel secreted within the coriolis tango of red and blue. The dark heart is her beacon. She's weaponized now. Her head hisses. She can hear scales whispering against scales. Her head writhes. Her head is a scream. Stupid and smoking, smoking in a smoking and ruined world under the demon star, she is becoming what she is supposed to be.

Sleep visits only fleetingly, and with it dreams. She's piloting the Hindenburg over a forest on fire, knowing it's about to blow. There is a family of mice living inside of her skull conducting experiments in human behavior. They stare out through the eyeholes maintaining an air of clinical detachment no matter how shocking the depravity is that they witness. The depravity they witness is that which she commits with clinical detachment that the mice might see what animals these creatures be. The mice can warn the others. The rainbow arrives. Luz. Light explodes at the base of her skull and he speaks in a voice that has dimensions. The spirit of this place follows, whispering. It's the sound of layered water and the name of this place. She can hear how it was speaking to her a while back, but she didn't recognize the voice.

Television shows a clown rally. Masses of people in clown garb are taking to the streets across the nation. The hearts of metropolises seethe with armies sporting kaliedescopic hair and gag flowers, shedding glitter and mayhem while they babble America-mania. They are looting, upending cars and setting them on fire. They are tearing down government buildings with tools stolen from big box stores. Or that was how it started. Almost in unison one day in August they turned murderous because sometimes a mask is very freeing and murder was what is in their hearts when they were tearing down buildings and torching shit. The mice understand this perfectly. There is a mugshot over the right shoulder of the news anchor displayed with the image of the same man in full regalia. In the first he wears a rainbow wig and giant red smile. In the second he's grey haired and hang-dog, makeup still whitening folds in his sagging visage. He shot up a movie theater in Iowa as a gag, killing seven and wounding 49.

A song comes on the radio she's never heard and it produces a pang of nostalgia so powerful that it frays skeins previously smoothed to coherence in the weft of the past. There is a lyric. "Ragged. Skin sewn on in sheets." That is the way to make oneself anew, a bloody thing. She has a very sharp vegetable peeler. It's a baptism in air. An awakening of the dermis to the chill-pain. Sunlight unthinkable in her nakedness. Mole rat appears on the screen. It's a story about the eldest of the tribe dying in a tunnel in Texas where it lived its long life in a concrete bunker being studied.