FORECAST/FOREVER KINGDOM.

         Forecast was a meteorological empire (also known as a weather despotism, or cloud hegemony) which maintained continental authority through the control of atmospheric resources, specifically climate, precipitation, and cloud composition.  Forecast was regarded as the only foundational or forever kingdom, due to the continent’s perpetual dependence on weather phenomena (both for spiritual and surface needs), which required central coordination and a specialized bureaucracy. 
         Often associated with these terms and concepts was the notion of a cloud dynasty, a political structure characterized by a system of hierarchy and power based around cloud class or caste (often classified as the Four Castes of Forecast: Cirrus, Cumulus, Stratus, and Nimbus, though others did exist), each with their own characteristic approach, opinion, outlook and position toward the continents.  
         Generally, the lower altitude classes (the towering clouds) were imperialistic by nature, capable of employing devastating tactics (including the "wind axe",  “hurricane shears”, and "shelf of anvil") to establish continental dominion.  When settlements proved resistant to these external forces, a type of occupied convection could also be utilized, whereby the inner weather (metabolic currents and vapor pressure) of living bodies could be overthrown and controlled by coordinated agents within.  This type of "puppet state" could be cultivated without the knowledge of the affected persons, effectively allowing cloud regimes to conduct the powers and population of the continents according to their own needs.  This practice was typically used to incite surface disappearances and disturbances, a form of ambush and invasion known as "faded vassalage" or "full grown fog."  
         By contrast, representatives of the higher ranges of altitude (the mother clouds) showed greater terrestrial allegiance, and on occasion, may have even exhibited clear compassion toward the continents.  Given proper sacrifice and devotion, certain clans of vapor were known to reward inhabitants of the continent with decorations and companions, such as auroras, sun dogs, and halos.  These phenomena were seen as temporary distractions and compensation to some, and considered as holy covenants to others.
         The term Forecast was believed to have first been used to describe the spread and effects of the Glacial Century, a lower-altitude cloud kingdom whose power came primarily from the use of climate sickness.  Recovery from this event took many eras (for generations the term Forecast itself simply referred to any type of atmospheric supremacy, in either the commercial or military sense of the word "supremacy"), with the effects leaving a lasting impression upon continental memory.  Indeed, many successive settlements prophesied the inevitable return of such cloud dynasties, and spoke to the need to counter these and similar incarnations of weather despotism by openly denying the authority of meteorological rule, declaring independence from all conditions and conquests of the sky, and demanding the continents and their collective territories be known and acknowledged as the fifth and final class of Forecast, the "Free Reign of Forever's Rest."

         They decorated her remains with escape clauses and expiration dates, a row of arrows through the skin.  They asked for a warm body to replace a need elsewhere, a marker of muscle and a moistened gauze.
         For seven weeks, one by one, she cut her wrists into kites and string.  The thunder was a torn cast, a toy model opening and closing.  It came from everywhere, nothing for color to cheapen or heal, a non-zero recovery again.
         Her sickness was trespassing, a mesh prepared over the skin, when it was it was the most of her, there was only a a lottery of fog to tell the difference between day and night again. 

         She told them the clouds were broken ornaments without a box, they weren’t even close.  She said the sky was replaced by means of riot control, they threw it in a back room, probably burned it.

         She gave me a reason.  I knew what veins and evaporation she was trying to wear.
         I waited for her in a white cornered room, in between cabinets, crouching, listening.  I was little more than a torso, with or without legs.  At most an extra arm, shoulders and a patch of hair.  Nearly invisible, no sky marrow, either partial or total.

         She separated herself in embryonic underdevelopments, her eyes loosened and widely spaced.  Her skin was muted, semi-permanent, pulled apart by rubber and heat.  If she was sinking or sunken or still a circus mirror where the conditions met.  I didn’t know.  They put her on a saline drip and said she started to improve, stopped vomitting, started drinking water and milk.  She showed a normal spinal curve for once, the kind held still by someone with even their good overcasts gone.
         She told me it was over, and I watched her.  She went and made a small meal and saw four suns now.  Another typical forecast and all I could think of a was less crowded sky where her sickness came even closer.

RAPTOR TALON TALISMAN.

         At the Jillison site, we identified seven raptor talons, suggesting the claws from a minimum of two predators were preserved as a group.  In addition, a single phalanx was found at the same level.  

          Of the collection, four talons bear multiple, edge-smoothed cut marks; seven show polishing facets and/or abrasion.  Three of the largest talons have small geomantic symbols at roughly the same place along the plantar surface, interrupting the proximal margin of the talon blade.  The associated phalanx articulates with one of the talons and also has numerous alchemical emblems, some of which are eroded.

          These features suggest they were part of a talisman assemblage, the manipulations a consequence of mounting the talons in a necklace or bracelet.

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         Sacramental ornaments are commonly associated with the fossil born civilizations of Early Eos and are thought to represent the special cognitive abilities and allegorical capacities of the youngest continent.  Studies in recent eras have documented the fossil born using or producing art and symbolic items evidenced by unusual lithic objects, feathered remnants, knotted string, modified shells, ochre paintings, and very rarely, raptor talons, presumably used as protective pendants.

         In Early Eos, a raptor talon was believed to be all-powerful, being the ideal symbol of the absolute predator, and therefore connected to both planetary and elemental forces.  In its constitution, the upward curve of the claw represented the good of the continents, and with its inverted hook, the evils of the unknown.  Consecrated talismans made from raptor talons were trusted to protect against threats and fatalities, and were also thought capable of providing good luck, granting wishes, and warding off hostile or vindictive forecasts.

          The presence of talon designs such as those found at the Jillison site provide multiple new lines of evidence for the existence of an ancient raptor cult on the continent of Eos.   Taken as a collection, these talismans represent the earliest attempted forms of resurrectionist jewelry and demonstrate that the fossil born civilizations possessed a complex understanding of anatomical reckoning and resurrection long before the afterlife of fault lines arrived.

         Every day in tunnels, in the cave, I wore the talisman and swore the talon's oath.

         Seven claws hung high and sharp around my neck, each one easily reachable by either hand.  They were Jillison’s grave luck piece, an empty ornament to remember where we’d been.

          Avalanche was the only calendar I had left.  It was our cold and voiceless season, more violence was unspoken than snow and ice could show.

          We were alone and almost unconscious.  Children of the youngest continent, still lost enough to trust a raptor would protect us.

          Jillison called them savior claws and said they were enough to start us over again.

With injuries removed, I thought, maybe this time it would be new.  We could charcoal a path to a colorless sun, work around the frost killed instincts, sharpen the talons to keep us together for good.

          I counted past seven and tried to imagine the lasting alternatives.  An uncornered darkness, a devil’s advocate, an extinction with eyes open or closed.  Always an outcome might overlap to keep our evolution vague.

          False positives or future imperfects, it was up to us to tell the difference. 

          What raptors had we known before?  Slavewrecker sons, town ruiners, nocturnal outliers.  Anyone looking backward and forward at the same time, feathers and scales in the same place.  No viscera for division, no need for symmetry, no reason to ask for it.

          Like Jillison said, first birds of the afterlife.  Blind and incapable of of sustaining their own body heat.  Hatched in caves or sinkholes, brought up by the opposites of each other.

          For all we knew, they learned to leave flight behind.

          We had traces of a location, a continent, a constellation.  Navigation was guided by hail and thunder, handfuls of necessary dispersal.

          Jillison told me we could become an inside-out winter, he called me his blood white.   I could barely see how backwards the days went.  Missed opportunities, specific routes, the speed at which light attaches to past and present tense.

          And even if his skin had been paper thin, hardly resistant to a ready flame.  Maybe I should have taken that trespass for him.  Maybe that’s what love was then.

          Could have been one of those sacraments still to come, a collapsing season, a coincidence of solar reckoning.  Unstable weather often accompanied a raptor’s shadow, when warmer air begun to invade the caves, while glacial currents was still pushed on occasions from the poles.

          An upward branch died and fell, left a small scar, a knot-hole.  Exactly as the continents moved without us, a preparation for migratory abandonment.  Before our wings were grown back, we were brought toward a stop to make our bodies forget.

          Even with snow up to my neck I was still soaking wet with sweat.  We waited there afraid and tired with denial.  I clung to serrated edges, sharpened curves, seven talons on a torn red string.  Jillison’s apology in advance, and I clung with both hands, honestly.

          With or without a talisman to tell what came next, I still searched for steady light and tried to stay ahead.  I was alone, with no sky to read or crutch to keep the cold in place.  I fought against cave fall like it was a form of frozen war.  I crossed out charcoal characters from the walls and ceiling, corrected for casualties to keep us both awake.

          If raptors evolved to leave those losses to the past, we would have to too.

          But suppose we never left each other.  Suppose I held up the talons like they were actually a lantern to lean on.  And what if Jillison really was better and weaker now?   How much was an adaptation and how much depended on climate and chance?  How much of it was true?

          All our nesting circles were like coils of a spring.  As soon as we separated, I knew Jillison had a secret that would set them in motion again.

WISH UPON WILLING CHRYSALIS.

          In Western Hestia, a wish upon a willing chrysalis was a supernatural demand placed on a recipient undergoing memory transformation or unconscious metamorphosis.  The belief that blessings could be granted through enclosure came from the understanding that skin was a scarce commodity, a preparatory shelter, or had been placed upon the body as a source of possible atonement. 
          Expressed invocations within the chrysalis may have lasted weeks, months or even entered dormancy until the appropriate season or stage of advancement.   In Western Hestian climate, many desires stayed inactive through the vernal season, while in South Hestia they usually did so during the sleepless cycle.  Certain longing may have lasted in a comatose state throughout the length of the continent, hiding within a hard protective coating to evade potential predators.
          Upon exit, an uncontested or willing desire generally emerged as a liquid, sometimes called “ fulfillment”, which softened the shell of the chrysalis.  Additionally, two sharp hooks located at the base of the request could be used to sever the sheathing inside.  The finalized wish may have appeared solid or unstable, opaque or translucent, of various colors, or composed of multiple layers, depending on the types of memory killed within the casing or overcome upon completion.

          Cut through that chrysalis you confessed for them, all those nevers and maybes you couldn’t stop collecting.
          Read your needle twitch, your “tetanus shot”, your target practice therapy.  Tried to put a pin in each excuse like it was a missing specimen, like the pack of them would be extinct by the end of the night.
          Yes, fine, tell them all that bullshit again.  You had a life before this.  Take it.  Stay the fuck away from me.

          Memories are trapped using funnels, pitfalls, malaise netting, bottleneck interceptions and other types of passive traps, some of which are baited with small bits of sensation (such as a wish, when formed, or a want, once found).
          Want (as a general preference) versus want (as a statement of an action).  Two very different definitions for the same word.

          You hid yourself in a language under glass, called it all a metamorphosis, but I know what you meant Jillison.  That's not what happened.
          Wings or not.  Chrysalis or not.  Summer or not.   I never asked you to protect me, I never asked for that. I just wanted you to feel vulnerable for once.  No.  I just wanted to forget you.
          Jillison,  if you only wanted me as an unname, tell me, what had changed at all?

          Another recovery to nowhere from an abscessed war, another addict's shelter not worth letting my guard down for.
          Don't lie to them.  Don't you dare to try and convince them there was a coming promise, a peripheral meaning to be pulled back or peeled away.  I lived through your incarnates Jillison, I knew how you kept yourself secret. 
          Black eyed permanent, believe me now.  I won't be your abuse of corpse anymore. I know you didn’t leave any of it here on purpose.

          Do I need to make this simpler?  Could I?  Jillison, do you really think it mattered who was willing or when?   Another consequence of covering your tracks in cracks of glass, I could you see up close and all too clearly.
          Avoidance was your warmed over armor (ongoing and without adaptation.)  How long had you let it fight alive in your place now?  Blood loss in a crowd, yes.  Dried lips underground, yes.   Stitch-work swollen or stolen entirely, veins open and closed and always alone with you.
          Placement of a trap was all we had left to tell.  Transverse orientation, everything else too plain to touch.  Not nearly willing enough, so you said it would be perfect.

          Remember who you were before?   Temporary pins and proper needles, I wish I didn't.
          Watched you work over a dead moth’s flame, wearing only wallpaper skin, strips of mold and sweat.  If it could be called a chrysalis at all, then a desperate one, defenselessness, hungry, decaying, and alone.
          You still want me to honest? Jillison, I didn’t even need a wish.  You never trusted me, I never trusted you.  Cut you open like a child from a cocoon, knew you would be the easiest kill.

RAINY DAY IN AN AMPHIBIOUS HOUSE.

         The amphibious house may be found in a wide variety of habitats throughout North Themis, with most structures living within terrestrial, fossorial, arboreal or freshwater aquatic ecosystems.  Little is known of the territorial behavior of these buildings, but some have been know to defend home ranges.  These are usually feeding, breeding or sheltering sites.
          An amphibious house typically starts out as sunken hut or underwater settlement, but some have developed several adaptations to bypass this.  The youngest structures generally undergo metamorphosis from a basic, gilled building to a larger, air-breathing structure with fully developed lungs suspended from the first, second, or third floor.  After metamorphosis, many rooms and areas become redundant and are absorbed through a controlled restructuring known as eviction or resident removal.
          The amphibious house has a soft scaffolding and thin skin, lacks claws, defensive armor or spines and seems relatively helpless. Nevertheless it has evolved various defense mechanisms to keep itself alive.  When an amphibious house is attacked, such as in a storm or sky contraction, a distress or fright call is emitted, often resembling the crying of a child, adolescent, or incomplete adult.

          A crooked, crooked, crooked house rises from a lily pad.  Cringes. Sinks.  Starts a collapse.  Kelp and seaweed sweep up to the second floor.  Crawdads and prawns crawl up the staircase.  Nurses run in with their skin swollen, their eyes weaker than wastes of space.
          I can't remember what sound the house made when they pulled the lungs out.  My stomach is cramped and sharp at the corners.  I shouldn't be able to feel it like this. What if the blood is still looking for a lesson in the undertow?  
          I can hear the breath of the house breaking through a blue outline, there's nothing else but residue to it.  There's no pause, no pull along, nowhere to put the water away.  Even the first gills are giving in.
          Jillison told me this would happen, the house would hyperventilate and then the instincts would take over.   She was right.  It shouldn't be this cold.  I shouldn't be this cold.
          On the second floor, I can hear the storm outside splitting in two, another drowning to crowd the clouds over the house.   My eyes are as pale as prison cups.  There's nothing to watch and a wave of accidents to wade through.
           If there's any sky still surviving I can't tell.  If the suns are shivering in their cage, I can't tell.
          The staircase sinks into the current, the scraps are gray and gnawed through and swept up to my waist.  The house is shrieking like it's over already.
          I don't know how to stop the walls from howling.
          I don't know what they mean when they say it is a two-headed storm, that home isn't always where the moat won't show.
         All I can see is what the rain lets me see.  Weakness, sleepiness, numbness.  The reflection of a house relearning to breathe, desperate and drenched and disappearing back into debris.

KITE'S EYE EXTINCTION.

  A kite’s eye extinction (which included the eventual extermination of almost all kite forms, including the scissor-tailed kite, the bat hawk, the whistling kite, the war kite, the letter-winged kite, and the electric kite) was a type of sky erasure that appeared on multiple occasions, most notably in the era of East Hestia.  These episodes typically involved an intersection and disintegration of the continental and atmospheric border, and may have been instrumental in divorcing the culture from the control and surveillance of supracontinental forces.   
  Certain sources describe killing the kite’s eye for a variety of purposes, such as measuring distances, lifting men, testing the wind, and mythological signaling, but the true residue of the extinction was unknown.  It has been suggested, though not without controversy, that the cultural center of gravity, spinal curve, and balance of tension may have played a role in it’s occurrence, and that the extinction could have been prevented through the management of fear, anger, or the inhibition of normal behavior.  Skeptics have argued that the extinction was unlikely the cause or responsibility of continental inhabitants, rather it was more likely the will of a restless afterlife (either maternal or paternal) or the result of a rupture and separation that had spread out of the Hereafter’s control.
  Regardless of origin, exposure to continental and atmospheric conflict and instability at an early age often had negative consequences.  For still developing children, the lack of supracontinental surveillance was a direct emotional stressor and cause for discomfort, anxiety, and self-doubt.  In addition, as neither color dissolution nor total cloud decay were natural features of the continents, observing this phenomenon was often accompanied by a sensation of tingling, pricking, or numbness of skin (parasthesia), or on occasion may have even lead to partial or complete loss of motor control (paralysis). In most cases, the longer the “erasure” lasted the stronger the sensory detachment tended to be.  Those children who viewed and survived a kite’s eye extinction may have responded to the event in a variety of ways, though many came to consider the chaos of non-commitment as a grey moment, a give-away crisis, or necessary cause for creation.

One body, indivisible.  
  Wind was thin and stripped and wilted, kite’s eyes were widened to stripes in the sky.  Jillison stared alone and my neck stiffened instead.  All I could see was cloud tissue torn to clumps and sulfur, I had to hold the ground to keep from throwing up.  It’s not that no one was watching us, it’s that who was supposed to never did. 
  Jillison said she could make out shadows of St. Anesthesia in the air, a new atmosphere of creased gray, slate, concrete.  She told me there was no use trying not to look, there were more exposures coming.   She said, hold on to me.
  Another assault, another accident.  Spine snapped in half.   Full or partial paralysis.  Little movement or growth.  There is no such thing as an honest extinction.

  This is where we came from: 
   First sky (mother) was tired,  the second sky (father) was dead as they used to be, the third sky (you and I) was tired again.  After that I lost track. 
Hands deaf and quiet and covered in cloth, that was called a childhood.  

  If the kites were older now, held up only by crutches of sky, if our strings were alone and touching and alone again.  
  Jillison caught me alive and hiding.  Maybe, I caught her too?  I never knew which one of us was blind and which wanted to change.  Who rented which vision, and on what terms? 
  Fixed and fallen anchors from the Hereafter (hospital) on down.  Nothing lasts forever, effects of Heaven included.

   "Evidence of absence is not absence of evidence.
   "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

A faceful of blowout fractures.  A cavity in each cloud, irises resized by lack of light, same blank injuries for anyone to see. 
  Jillison looked to the sky like an escape clause or a process of elimination was up there somewhere.  She said the erasures wouldn’t all go at once.
  Suns stolen or out of socket, it was if you didn’t even recognize me anymore.  Did I still look like color loss to you too?  Numb to what trauma blindness test now?  Did you ever want to get better?  
  Jillison, I would be lying if I said it didn’t bother me.  Jillison, I would be lying if I said I could look at you without the sky collapsing all around me.

  Just show them a shadow Jillison, it doesn’t have to be enough to become a target (all over again).
  Use conditions if you have to (no iris, no window, no index of the external trauma).  Please.  Jillison, I can’t stay topside anymore.  Dusk was leftover.  Dawn was forced fed.   When I wasn't careful I could only see what else a sky could do. 
  Tether your extinction to wind if you have to. Anywhere else but here.

  This is where we came from: 
  Sky quaked until the ambulances were wide awake on our street.  Red lights flashing, white lights screaming, full orbital floor collapse.  
  It was if you barely recognized me, loneliness walled up and losing white in the usual way.  Scattered topside with the rest of them, I still needed someone.   

  Woke up to an empty waiting room, kite corpses covering the bed, knots wrapped into a noose around my neck.  I told myself not to forget and then I left a note instead.
  Trust me, Jillison, they aren’t even trying to protecting us, they are letting it happen on purpose.   How many skies do you need to blind not to know by now?   What evidence of absence are you still looking for?
  Eye to eye, Jillison they're trying to kill us here.  Paralysis is an empty apology, extinction has a point, they aren’t your parents anymore.  

A PRISMATIC SCALE OF SAINTS AND ANGELS.

           The prismatic scale arranges the spectrum of heaven according to the seven constituent colors of saints and angels, each a specific intermediary above or below another. In the located afterlife or other equal-tempered eternities, a continuum of color is formed when a person of divinity is dispersed (as by passage from one world to the next) so that their component elements remain in order.
               Typically, a saint figure consists of a superposition of shades separated by holiness, sanctity, and virtue. On the prismatic scale the six colors of sainthood include (red: an exemplary model, orange: an extraordinary teacher, yellow: a source of benevolent power, green: an intercessor, blue: one who has refused material attachments or comforts, and purple: one who possesses a special and revelatory relation to the celestial prism). When perceived with these primary colors revealed a saint may be seen as "a chromatic measuring stick."
               The seventh color of the prismatic scale is specifically recognized as a holy calling and is often called an angel (though alternative names exist, including messenger, spirit and guardian). It is composed of a near transparent element with flat polished surfaces that refracts the will of the infinite and invisible. At least two of the angel's surfaces must have skin between them. This creates the illusion of a being that continually ascends or descends in spectral divinity, yet which ultimately seems no higher or lower than the observer. 

            Everyone was devoted for a while, even Jillison and me. One foot in front of the other, and then the surface would follow, we added color and subtracted color and that's how Jillison said it would go. When our palette was crooked or corrupted we acted like a chase was close.
              We worshiped in the morning, our hands were together or hovering toward holes in the sky, our legs were always moving. We read from the scale and it showed us how to warn the suns away. It told us all light was false light, a figure of want or need. If we could empty the spectrum, it would be impossible to see what our skin could hold.
              The scale said that was what it took. It said everything we left would be a measure of luminance, the long way to what can't be seen, a test of our willingness. I tried to believe it, but my body kept telling me the difference was in the shades. When the colors darkened, I could feel my stomach turning over, and when they lightened I was almost collapsing. It started on the outside and then it worked through oppositional colors next.  I was solid gray half of the day and faintly there the next.
            Still, I kept walking and spreading the scale, I kept asking for a transparency to come and take me. I tried to hold on to whatever color came next and prayed it would be clear enough to clean or capture or complete me. I tried to have faith in a final spectrum, a piece of invisibility shaped exactly like me. Somewhere under my skin, though, I knew it was hopeless, I knew closure wasn't an unseen color or contrast or covering, it was a collection of organs and anatomy, it was a compromise no one ever intended to keep.

THIS WINDPAPER PYRAMID.

          The Windpaper Pyramid was the oldest and most well known mnemonic monument of Middle Themis.  It was constructed from colossal scrolls of windpaper, parchment and papyrus and was notable for its alleged ability to organize memory impressions, improve recall, and assist in the combination and 'invention' of ideas.
          There were three known chapters located within the monument. The first was cut into the pulp upon which the Pyramid was built and consisted entirely of introductory hieroglyphic text.   Among these inscriptions, “capture” could be clearly seen, but who or what was captured was unknown as the corresponding glyphs were incomplete,  indecipherable.
          The second and third chapters of the Pyramid were larger in dimension and connected by an descending corridor ('linear narrative').  Located within these passages was an abridged chronicle of Themis and its changing role in the culture, including four human skeletons, an organized collection of finch bones, and an obsidian blade.  For various philosophers and scholars, proximity to these offerings and reference material was said to function as "as a thought-form incubator” and “aid in information retention”, as well as cause other supernatural or paranormal effects.  If such an assessment is correct, it has been suggested that the combined use of  ‘symbolic magnetism’ and ‘chronicle architecture’ to develop and preserve mental content (masonry of loci) may have been a vital technique in Themis memory arts.  
          Of equal compositional importance to the Pyramid’s inner narrative was its outer facade.  At completion, the monument was surfaced by white "windpaper" – slant-faced, but flat-topped, scrolls of highly polished white parchment.  This near transparent casing served as a palimpsest for societal amendments and meteorological commentary, so that Pyramid may continue as living monument beyond its initial construction.  The exposed and pending nature of this parchment was associated with views that contemporaneous continents should be taken into account when interpreting Themis history, or else the Pyramid itself would exist as nothing more than an open grave or  gesture of defeat.
          Many alternative, often contradictory, theories have been proposed regarding the Windpaper Pyramid’s intent and capacity for communication.  Most accepted hypotheses were based on the idea that the symbolic exchange of context created from the monument’s fixed inner history and it’s continually inscribed outer casing could be ‘read’ as a type of 'writing', and not as something different from it.  The ultimate purpose of this dialogue, however, remained unclear.  Certain researchers have speculated that that Pyramid may have had no prepared intent or directive, or that it may not have been a mnenomic structure at all.  Rather, the construction itself may be seen as an inevitable discussion of recurrence and vulnerability, a conversation never meant for paper, papyrus, or parchment, but patiently waiting, misplaced, aching to escape them.


          Jillison, we both knew it was an obvious ritual.  A pyramid of pain as a consent to pain, a monument to a trauma body.
          What surface of it were you still tricking yourself into worshipping?  Bruise marks as building blocks towards a body of your own, Jillison, I understood why you wanted to relive it, on purpose this time, but what did you expect would happen next?
          Scars were stacked on the bed.  I hoped you were underground, blood heavy, inheriting nothing.  All those bodies ago, that’s what you said you wanted anyway.

          What geometry do ghosts learn as language, either alone or together?
          Cause and effect comes first, and then consequence, and then control.  It wasn’t an unexpected outcome, it wasn’t anomalous terrain.   You can never heal or humiliate yourself more than never existing at all.
          Still, I was angrier than I thought I would be, watching you act it all out, erasures of us in your hands, windpaper chained and whipped to white out your skin.
          You had to know you were taught to act like that, trained to crave it, as a narrative, as an infinite regress (or the illusory alternative).   Anatomy as reclamation material (humiliation), all those empty blocks of mirror box therapy you stacked to an apex and then kept going.
          Even if you did it right, Jillison.  It was already a well practiced revenge.
          Jillison, I didn't want to talk about practice.  Rewrite it however you want, you already left me anyway.

          What were the stereotypes of being called sensitive? Or more appropriately,  "over sensitive?"  What were you thinking when you told them it hurt only as much as I let it hurt?
          What did you think would last?  A phantom instinct or a phantom pain? Is there a difference now?
          (More questions I didn't mean rhetorically.  I meant them honestly and completely.  What about us were you still hoping to avoid or unknow? Jillison, what did that mean, geometry is a language with no word for  grave?  Or living.
          There were times I thought our trauma would translate each other, I thought shared ruins were almost all we could need.  Believe me, it never lasted long.
 
         Blunt force, breaking point, a blankness for clothes and mouth and sweat.  Arm hair and leg hair left in heavy portions.  Palms covered in sweat and both colors of blood (lost and loss).  Just another performance of pain for a body that couldn't speak on its own.
         Parchment scraps and pieces, one last paradox of the heap.   Death may not be removed from language, but its location may be translated to loss and shame.
          If you wanted to call it a power dynamic, that was your choice.  They taught you the Prismatic Scale of Saints and Angels, didn't they?   Self-dual, shadow limits versus spectral density.  By now you had to be young enough to know there was no resurrection coming.  All that the edgework of expectation and demand, I know I don't have to remind you.
          No matter how much of your past you think a pyramid will protect, no matter what architecture of  pain you think it will outlast.
          Be careful with a broken record Jillison, don’t use it as a base to hide inside.

          Wrong geometry, wrong time, when you ripped up wind paper to write over your past,  when you let your skin look like that again.
          Cheeks hot and red and soaking well.  Welts waiting on dry water, eyes off-white from all those addictions ritual without me.  Discipline and punish and how else did you expect an afterlife to find you?
          We were different, maybe too different this time.   Windpaper kept you clothed, rewrote our name, but it was a bandage, a temporary ache, not a whole body, or even close.  I didn’t want to keep trying to build a natural language to try to and hold it in anymore.   I was taught courage is not in leaving, it’s in never coming home.

LEFTOVER VEIN FOREST.

       A Leftover Vein Forest was a form of anatomical habitat fragmentation, which occurred when paired bodies were divided or stripped apart in a manner that left relatively small, isolated scraps of personal or circulatory connection.  The intervening matrix that separated the remaining patches could be natural open areas, farmland, or developed areas.  Following the principles of island evolution, vein forests acted like bonds of biogeography in a sea of pastures, fields, subdivisions, shopping malls, etc.
          Throughout much of Themis and Eris, a vein forest severance was considered a solution for overpopulated anatomy.  Though the consequences of such separation were almost always destructive, the overall effect of fragmentation depended on the pulse and location of the division and its degree of isolation.  Generally, isolation was determined by the distance to the nearest similar incision, and the contrast of split lives with the surrounding anatomy.  For example, if two bodies were recombined or allowed to regenerate, the increasing structural diversity of the Leftover Vein Forest would lessen the detachment of the fragments. However, when formerly connected bodies were converted permanently to divided habitats, agricultural fields, or human-inhabited developed areas, the remaining fragments, and the contact between them was often lost or confined.
          Leftover Vein Forests that were smaller or more secluded commonly lost circulatory connection faster than those that are highly specified or less isolated.  In addition, a large number of small vein forest "leftovers" could not support the same biogeographical bond that a single contiguous anatomy would hold, even if their combined area is much greater than the original body.  Despite these limiting factors, a Leftover Vein Forest could serve as a necessary recourse for those without choice in their division, an embodiment of a bond almost or already gone.

          Seven days of slash and burn, six clinics, one back canopy, no one said your name.  Jillison, not even once.
          Should it have surprised me, what surgical rain was still sinking in?   New eyelids.  New hands.  New blood light mingled between.  Silver lining of a sudden vein, just had to cut it clearly, let it find it’s type.
          Knew how to do short division by now, Jillison.  And how long did you say it would take before bodies would be gone again?



          When I was a makeshift girl with organs missing and you were mine.  We carried our maps in a windowless pile, we used walk away writing to remember what was home.

          Scalpel split that trail a long time ago.  They covered your body in small stones and patches of cloth, picked at tributaries under a torn blanket.  A pale gray kept the canopy marked clearly and they peeled it back without you.
          Space was cleared for living and settlements, a scar curtain that never changed.  Erosion and charcoal soil.  Scraped off your skin so many times I stopped looking for a face.

          A broken landscape kept the door open.  Brought up on a sky island, lips dry and blind, eyes dead and idle, deforestation just like it used to be.
          Did you look at them like they used to look at you?  Like a consumable resource.  What made it wrong once?  Jillison, is that a question you want to keep asking?

          You’d been sick for a while now, it didn’t change the leftovers they saw.


          Leaves were parted to the let the veins in.
          Leftover forest was littered in yellowed newsprint, torn scraps and stems, emotion removal exercises.  Another round of photosynthesis treatment, anesthesia medicine, when the remainders were counted, it wouldn’t make a difference.  You knew it and I knew it too.
          Still only a shadow where a twofold once lived.  Simple whole division Jillison.  I always thought if you left me and of course I hoped it would be then.

HER GUNPOWDER HOROSCOPE.

 

         Her Gunpowder Horoscope was the first chemical explosive used as a method of divination, and the only one known until mid-Eris. 
         Due to its burning properties and the amount of heat and gas that it generates, a Gunpowder Horoscope has its own unique way of diagramming the heavens: we can view the Sidereal Zodiac in the simple reaction of saltpeter and charcoal, the tropical signs located in the decomposition of black powder and the Ecliptic Constellations scattered through the shrapnel of the outermost ballistic zone. 
         In order for a Gunpowder Horoscope to be read and exploded effectively, an amalgam of celestial mechanics must be reduced to their smallest possible particles and mixed with one another as intimately possible. The combustion of fixed stars and wandering stars does not take place as a single reaction, however, and the byproducts are not always easily predicted.

         Yes, it was a fog season, neutral territory, a canvas of reciprocal rain and decayed air at the same time. 
         Gray for safe keeping, I didn't mind if they blamed it on the names they gave us.
         That was all we could ask for a while, a fireworks of ordinary explanations.

         We collected comet moths to keep the hours and months apart, measured each eclipse with insect wings until the separation straightened out.
         Iron rations, private veins, who slept where and when?  All our little arcs of habit.  Consequences of a water cure, that was called having a body again.
         Or else call it a directionless war, a natural war, that way there’s less distractions, less long term plans.  And then before long, a primacy of ammunition I never claimed to comprehend.

         They said, fix those dead already.  That’s how they kept it simple.  There were holes in our windows from wishing more on words then shrapnel.
         I remembered where we were, a cellar home with rotational parts, a town that was a heap of stones or a shapeless column of wood.  
         I remembered they told us every halo was a shortness of breath, a form of hungered loneliness.  There were many kinds of discrimination, and most of them were contagious.
         Sleeplessly, I taught myself the slab avalanche, the last initials, how to translate a detonation.  I cut into scare crows like there might have been charcoal hiding inside.
          That was your approach to forcing boulders open, folding bodies from view.  I started to understand when sulfur and saltpeter were only kept for saving face, and I was beginning to believe you.

NIGHTMARE OF MOTH FLAME.

          The Nightmare of Moth Flame was a mid-Eris eruption of elemental pairs (commonly classified as “the fire” and “the house”), which caused widespread devastation and violent rioting before being brought under control after six days.  The impact event was particularly unusual in that there was no apparent radiant, that is to say, no point in the sky or upon the terrestrial surface from which the conflagration appeared to originate.  Even less properly understood are primary accounts which report the fire survived the initial collision by passing through inhabitants of the house, and then almost a week later, exited the continent through them again.  Differing records either blame these persons for encouraging the catastrophe or credit them with organizing measures to contain it and provide relief for refugees. 

          When the conflagration spread, the population fled first to the open fields and unaffected areas and later to rural roads surrounding the house. Looters and arsonists were reported to have spread the flames by throwing torches or, acting in groups, to have hindered measures being made to halt or slow the progress of the flames.  No reliable evidence survives to allow an accurate estimate of the number of casualties caused by the event, however the fire was so destructive that archaeologists still use the clearly defined layer of ash deposited by the collision to date the strata below the continent.
          The celestial conflagration would come to be known as the Nightmare of Moth Flame for many common reasons.  As the house was the region perceived as darker than any other part of the society, it was widely believed that comets, asteroids, and meteors could be attracted to it out of a desire for cover or concealment, or conversely, that these objects used the house residents as safe reference points and fixed their  flight patterns according to their growth and movement.  A similar theory speculated the inhabitants of the house were born with or believed in an escape-route mechanism related to combustion and light (a form of “thermogenesis” or “comet magnetism”), and invited the impact event as an advantageous response to cultural crisis and upheaval.  
          Contemporary examination and analysis of multi-continental remains offers an alternative explanation.  Operating under a “total house” hypothesis, researchers now suggest that the collision represented a remnant of a circumterrestrial chain of events, one formed from the ejecta of the continents at their inception.  The consensus of their studies regard the rare-chemical, isotropic, and bulk composition of the charred strata as definitive evidence that the impact was the product of non-temporal command, a coordinated effort of eternal forces, and therefore unlikely to be avoided or assessed by any known surface, structure, or society.