Find here several specimen of prose habilitated and released to the wilds. Click the image to complete your experience*
This is my faith: When we observe something long enough, with focused intention, observer and observed blend together. This is my faith.
“The Cayenne-Tailed Skink. Last known entity died on Canal Parkway crushed under the tire of a white Jeep with windows tinted well beyond the legal limit. As is common among skinks, the cayenne could shed its tail as a defense against predation. The bright-red coloration and relative size of the dropped tail lent this skink its common name.”
“Skink. Skink. Skiiiiiink.”
I can’t say exactly what I was doing the first time I heard the hallway in my head. Maybe I sat slouched in an ergonomic chair answering emails when the sound of a narrow, still space opened in my left ear with painless but persistent pressure. Or maybe driving home, and I turned some earnest public radio conversation up a couple notches louder to reassert where I sat physically over this other, sudden place I eavesdropped on against my will.
I can tell you it isn’t easy, two places at the same time.
As it's only me with both a working tongue and a longtime eye for the lingering dead, it's me thrown overside the trawler wearing the diving dress. My lot it is to answer the deep mountain's call for a witness and return with its proclamations. Not for a choice mind you, except choosing to tell on myself all them years ago when too fresh a child for knowing better. Now the lake has swallowed me cool and entire, a surround of silver bubbles gurgling up toward the shrinking vessel overhead. Unfortunate for me the dress' single lens shows clear, and I try to forget it's set in the leathers of others like my own self. And just maybe like you too.
—Age six, outside the McDonald’s on Industrial Boulevard.
Circa 1990, with my legs swinging as I sit on the cracked vinyl backseat of a police cruiser licking blood from my buckteeth. Mom screamed for me to bite down while he wrestled handcuffs onto her pinned wrists. She’s my only known world, so why would I ever second-guess what she tells me? When the world screams your name, pleads in fear, how can you disobey?
1. Silken Skorpion Pulsating Sprinkler®
Lo, the Skorpion crouches a diesel tabernacle atremble upon kwik-lock support poles that do pulse alive, and they are four in number (included at time of purchase for no additional cost), AND WE DO REJOICE, for the Skorpion consecrates the ever three inch blades of our manicured Kentucky blue with droplets of condensation slicking from high polish titanium carapace; WE DO REJOICE, for it anoints the creaseless foreheads of our young as they zip through its shadow upon the blue tongue of the slip 'n slide;
Fact: Those who voice the monstrous tongue are neither unaware nor fully complicit.
They dwell in a state between. Indeed, many have theorized it is in this ambiguous space that the opportunistic seed of malharmonious expression takes root.
Subject [Floriana] describes the emissions as a form of cognitive resistance and assigns blame to a personified external/internal entity found in their speech organs. Note the lingual flux and the prevalence of metaphoric fricatives:
And she licks rainwater from the palm of her hand. And she has that moon-eyed laugh. And she never wears any kind of shoe, no matter what the weather's doing. And she sprinkles menstrual blood over the spider plant's soil. And she puts her rent in a lavender envelope on the fridge under the Dollywood magnet and once when we opened the envelope all these glinting fairyflies skittered out stinging.
When it abandoned the tide and scraped ashore, an ancient articulated island dredging our mainland, when the waters rolling off its thoracic segments flooded outlying neighborhoods, harbinger waves ferrying refugees and debris to the heart of the city, we said: Heck, that’s really something.
The lock was busted, so Salguero pressed the sole of his bare foot against the stall door to prevent interruption. The polished aluminum sent chills running up his leg and he was fuzzy on just what had happened to his shoes, but that could wait. Everything could wait. Seven. He hadn’t made a report to his superiors for days and his body ached for it. Three. Numbers kept interrupting his thoughts, but he couldn’t pin down their meaning so he swatted them aside to focus on the only thing that mattered right now.
The spotlight flared. A familiar collective gasp rippled through the room. The sensation of every eye settling upon Amorpho’s churning body warmed him like an ant under a magnifying glass.
The music started. Solid protrusions emerged from his flowing form, and he rose on two lengthening appendages as two more unfurled to the side for arms. The tissues of his body folded over each another, every inch alive.
So the thing about the Death Squads is that their outfits are super cute. There’s a clear sartorial vision at work, and that reassures me as a dutiful subject of civil authority that they know what they’re doing. I believe clothes really do make the manslaughter.
Some person, or team of persons, as currently defined by the Statutes of Personhood, was given the task of dressing the Death Squads, and this person, or team of persons, as currently defined by the Statutes of Personhood, of course, they really leaned into that shit. Bravo.
The water fills the air with a travelling song. One has to practically press lips to another’s ear to be heard. In fact, if you were to scrape up a yell from your belly and send it up into the swaying green canopy until all the veins bulged from your red face, any hiker or mushroom hunter more than a hundred feet away would only wonder for a moment if maybe they just heard something.
Then they’d go on with their lives.
*The proprietor of this site is not liable for any theophanic revelations, corporeal phase loss, viridian green, synesthesia, or residual cross-dimensional overlay verlay lay.