lightning garden

My mind-brain is fertile and warbled with the larvae of the Other Ones, the oil-spill coruscating ones, the flitting ones, the buzzing ones, the spawn of the invisible moon who spin threads of interconnectedness on pillars of extraspectral radiation. Even now I feel them wiggle and stir in their winter nests inside the precincts of my skull and press against the dents where my senses lie. My saliva and tears turn opaque with their secretions; strange imaginings fill my dreams and dreams overtake my wakefulness. I find my hands trembling and my legs taking shuffling steps. I do not have much time. I don’t know if this will cause them to die or to burst free or both or if there even is a difference. Will the holes of my soul be filled with butcher’s jelly?

You have to understand the colonies. Between the adult and the larva there is a polyp phase. It is a parasite upon our architecture, the topology of our lives. Wasps and rats merely nest in spaces we have created and left unoccupied. But the flitting ones droning and humming down their moonbeams take over the space itself, the meaning of it, so it is no longer human, no longer artificial, no longer us but Them. Have you ever feared to enter a cellar? Are there corners in your attic you have never visited, looming with shapes never made out in full, never seen up close? You are hemmed in. The odd spaces, the alien spaces grow larger than the lattice of your daily life until you are the one scurrying in the walls. Or perhaps it is an abandoned factory you walk past every day, a rotting and enormous barn with a sagging roof and doors half open and half stuck in the ground. They were never built: they were always like that. A mud floor embedded with rusty nails, a series of evenly spaced holes in the wall that do not come out the other side. It spreads like tetanus, or rather like the forms of possession that threaten the one who sneezes with feet in the waterline or is startled while touching an anthill. To enter is to become. To intrude is to be infiltrated.

I have seen such places, such spaces out of space — far too many of them. The pores of my skin are as the combs of a wasp’s nest to them. I have spoken with rats the size of cats and cats the size of men, their bulk hidden in the shadow except for a pair of luminous green eyes. I have eaten of the smooth slender and vigorous pink worms writhing upon those floors and drank of the rivulets of clear fluid dripping down concrete walls never cast nor finished in days of being lost upon twisting mazes of stairways and crawl-to’s.