OUTLINE TECTONIC/TOPICS OF CONCERN.

          The discovery of the tectonic formation of time has presented historians with more than the typical challenges of periodization or organization by locality and movement; as such, they have responded with an unusual number of designations: "Dimensional Geophysics”, “Coincidences and Consequences of Chronological Drift”, “Epochal Collision Theory", in the hope of exposing, developing, or providing structure to this phenomena.  

          Proceeding with a parallel or cyclic era dispersal rather than an attempt at discrete codification, we will try to do justice to the heterogeneity and eccentricity of the seven incarnate continents (which form the outermost shell of the temporal surface), including Eos, Hestia, Themis, Eris, Amphitrite, Cybele, and Nyx, investigating their adjacent and overlapping concerns by topic, rather than by author.  
          These topics will include: the emergent category of “religion” within animal or written material; aesthetics and belief in relation to spectral activity; supracontinental methods of divination, collusion and transport; the composition and displacement of anatomical strata and anomalous terrain (sex, gender, subcognition); the Velocity of Entanglement and theories of interval collapse; accretionary and contracting archipelagos and coastlines, rites of passages, peripheries and sentiment; antiquarian impulses and forms (convergence, divergence, causation, value, etc.); societal skirmishes over “common” linearity, projection, memory, and the constitution of the "Afterlife of Fault Lines"; traumatology mechanisms and the emergence of islands, insular forms, and discontinuous incognita toward the "Transfinite Rift”; as well as experimental and resurrectionary cultures that may have occurred against, upon and inside the scar tissue of sunken, severed, or subducted time.

SEASONS OF CREATURE.

            Seasons of Creature was a rite of passage from East Eos, occurring in several societies, settlements, and cities that survived consumption by behemoth. These ingested (also referred to as assimilated or miscarried) communities may or may not be identified prior to the threshold event, and many remained undisclosed until the decay of their captor.
              Seasons of Creature and similar ritual initiations were considered necessary to the composition of Eos, not only to mark the transformation from waking to adolescence, but also as a means of transitioning from collective to individualized thought.
            Due to the volatile nature of the behemoth’s environment, these rites of passage  often involved codependent or traumatic bonding of some type, and irrational activity and cognitive dissonance was not uncommon among survivors.  Certain initiates came to blame themselves for the consumption of the settlement, including the many who were lost upon devouring or those whom the behemoth tried unsuccessfully to ingest.  Curiously, other survivors developed sympathetic or positive feelings toward their Creature, sometimes to the point of defending or identifying with the incarceration, calling it a form of symbiotic worship, or more commonly, a starvation of our smallest past.

1.         We were swallowed whole and there we were, warm and inside, with the breath of that creature reaching over everything.  Our city was captured, a crash site covered in skin.  There was no exit or escape, every echo was an earthquake about to erupt, each exhale was a heat wave waiting for us.  The outcome was over already, we were the creature's city now.
            We woke up to stomachfuls of wrecking balls, wet food, worn debris.  One storm after another, scattering against our shingles and gathering gray hair on the ground.  The city called it the creature's rain, they collected it in their cellars and their stairwells, they carved their names into the cement it made.
            You watched me there, collecting what remains I could, keeping myself unkilled in the creature's cartilage.  Your eyes were on strings, swinging from a ceiling I couldn't see.  Your eyes were wide as white flags, watching me.

2.         This city here, the one we've been left in, it's a residual collapse, a heavy gasp.  In the distance, the shape of it seems dimly scribbled against the inside of the creature, like the sketch of a spent explosive, it sprawls and then it shivers and then it sprawls some more.
            The most of us that survived stuck to the center of the city, in small rooms in short skyscrapers, we searched for shelf lives that stayed just out reach. Beneath the buildings, the creature's ground was cold, coffee-colored, full of fault lines that caught fire whenever the fevers came.     
            You kept matchbooks in your pockets and I copied you.  I rubbed gunpowder on my palms to get them pale like yours.  I untrapped my hands as close to you as I could.
            You told me maybe there were enough fault lines here to find us again.  You said sooner or later the motion sickness might miss us both.

3.         I spent the first season scavenging the creature for a skeleton key.
            I searched in shrapnel piles and stolen terrain, I said over and over there had to be a way out of there.  This creature was a relic, a remainder of made before times.  Everything then had a trap door or tear away, a shadow where the warnings wore off.
            It wasn't always true, but I said it enough.  Even when my teeth were bleeding, even when there was an open moat where my mouth should have been.
            Day after day, the creature's rain never stopped painting us the way we really were.  Each time I looked at you and your hair was heavier and darker.  The build-ups in your breath came and went like birds stealing bread.  Your skin stayed sheet-white and still hid the stage whispers from me.
            It wasn’t long before the constellations were catching up to every weakness we never had.  When I woke up, my wrists were stuttering, I had a skeleton made of sweat sunk on top of me.  I couldn’t wash it away, it walked with me while I waited for you.
            I was your hang-wire, your hiding place.  I was your charade of ways to count backwards from the couple we didn’t become.
            Our city stayed a knot in the creature's stomach, a choke hold you couldn’t stop choosing over me.  If there ever was a key, it couldn’t keep me from remembering it all too well.

4.         This was what I knew about you: you grew up without a favorite cease fire.
            Your mother was a pushcart, a towel rack, your father was the same.  By the time you were five, every eavesdrop knew your name.  By the time your flashback fell into mine, your face was still a fitting room you were trying to find.
            We were living in a summer creature, one that had emptied out its echoes long before the leftovers fell in.  The erosion was exposed, cloth wasn’t always an obstacle.
            I found you in the back fields, burning bones in an old paper bag.  They looked like black candles buried in there.  I remember your face was ragged, bruised under the eyes and bluish on the blind sides.  I remember what you told me first, "the big wars are over, and the small ones never end."

5.         The creature was in complete control and some of them knew it and didn't seem to care.  I watched them holding hurricanes in their hands, like they were hoping one day the creature would give in and kill them for good, like they wanted the walls to come down for a while now. 
            When the city slept, I heard them confessing in their beds.  They held each other close and recited the creature's prayer:
            "You are our creature and you will always be our creature. Whatever opens from your mouth, we will worship first. We have been swallowed by you and wish only to have you hold us here.
            Our city is sheltered under your skin and softened by the sky inside you. Forgive us if we trespass in this body you have lent us. If we can help you as you walk this earth, we will. If we can keep the pit of your prey from you, we will. Carry us with you and let your hunger be our hunger, let your thirst be our thirst.
           We are your city and we will always be your city. Now and forever, stay alive and with a small past."

HIEROGLYPH ORNITHOLOGY.

          Hieroglyph Ornithology was a method of divination used in Hestia and Themis to interpret the behavior of predatory houses or their allies, as well as predict domestic entanglement and continental events to come.
          In the most common method, the bird (typically, a sparrow, finch or chickadee) was placed inside a circle of celestial objects around which were positioned esoteric and universal pictographs (originally twenty-four in number, since living, dying are the same as wind, current).  Next the bird was allowed to choose a number of stars, asteroids, comets, or planets to orbit, thereby creating the divinatory message or sign. The chosen pictographs could be either read in order of selection, or rearranged to make an anagram. 
         Another method, supposedly used less often, was based on inscribing pictographs on skin or bone and noting those at which a sparrow or finch screamed or sung. Pictographs were recorded in sequence and then these symbols were interpreted as the answer to the question chosen by seers.
          Although it was mainly the melodic codes and orbital writing of birds that were studied, any characteristically avian text could have been interpreted to either foretell the future or relate the temperament of the house. These fluctuations of architectural and emotional intensity were thought to have absolute purpose by those in Hestia and Themis alike.
           At the onset of the continental rift, conditions for divination were at their most difficult, requiring whole marrow pictographs, rigorous interplanetary measurements, and absolute silence for the validity of observations, a process that would come to be known as "Hollow Born Torture."

0.         My father and I watch a flock of finches flying around the fallout shelter.  Their orbits are slow and worn in, they make it seem like the hours outside are smaller than ours.  My father tells me if we wait long enough one of them will be Mercury, one will be Venus, one will be Earth, one will be Mars.
           Even then, I could tell his astronomy was clumsy and domestic, a way of keeping track of dinner manners and developed etiquette.  A way to make sure an elastic band is all he'd ever be.
           Waist high though, I believed him when he said, "there are bread winners and there are bird feeders.  Jillison, you are a bird feeder."

1.         And if the continent is flatter than we ever gave it credit for, and if the continent is already a dead bird drowned in mid-air.

2.         When we first met I was living in a blue house (as it grew out a red house).  When I was tired I slept in spare shelves or scatter points. When I was awake I tried to keep track of the birds.
           It was all to cradle a collapse, and then the candle came down.

3.         The curtains were as thin as shedded snake skin.  I tore them off to get a better look at him.  He was walking with his mother.  Her legs were made of grey and brick, her head was twice as tall as his.  It looked like there was a tunnel dug underground between the two of them, every time she moved a foot one way, he would follow a foot behind.
           They had been walking that way for a while and then she stopped.  She shouted something at him that I couldn't hear.  He shouted something back at her.
           It felt like there was a family of field mice sneaking through me.  I was already nervous.
           She reached into the sack she carried and pulled out a piece of wood with a nail at its head.  I hadn't met her yet so I couldn't have known what was coming.
           She swung the wood with both her arms and he crumpled.  Like a mannequin who'd been up all night.

WHEN SPLINTERED BY SCAFFOLDING'S TEETH.

The Scaffolding's Teeth was a temporary structure used to support early Hestia and Themis cultures in the construction or repair of heritage, trauma, and other large hierarchies. It was usually a modular system of metal pipes or tubes, vital organs and eternal materials, the spacings of which were standard. Commonly constructed from Near Hereafter Architecture, only rarely was the scaffolding built upon a fresh surface.

Given time to sufficiently cure, the Scaffolding’s Teeth may have been secured to the alimentary canal or molded concrete of an existing structure (such as the predatory shelters and their successors), increasing the capturing area and restricting access to escape. In this respect the scaffolding acted as a staging locality for anticipated or unconsented outcomes of desire, such as separation, consequence, or denial.

To provide stability for the Scaffolding’s Teeth, fabricated coupling and framework ties were often fixed to the mouths of  the moving dead, or else forced through the foundation of the left and living and known by a variety of contradictory terms, including skeleton, house, splinter, or skin.

          Her house was hollow born and hungry still.  What it wanted today, it wanted again tomorrow. There was Jillison and those over Jillison. They told us to bury the ghost in the body of a dead bird and dig around it.  We did.  Jillison shoveled the corners and charred the air.  When the storm closed, no one crossed the door.
          It happened once or else it was only practice.  Every wall was a stranglehold or a complete stop.  They were caught under my eyes and at the end of spine.  Jillison said I wouldn't last.  Someone would have to come and carry the skin over me again.
          A yellow hour came and then a red hour followed. Those that could speak left a stone in the throat of the corpse they chose.  Their hearts beat twice all night.  They weren't wrong.  The house had an hour that would hunt them too.
          Wherever we went we knew the scaffolding could swallow us somehow.  I did my best to keep my eyes down.  Jillison taught me to untie the skeleton knot and I tried not to make mistakes.  She said every obstacle was coiled and conditional and circled around us.  
          I did anything they asked me to.  I wore cold clothes to keep the house forgetting me.  I salted the corridors and unpacked their accidents in the attic.  My backup hands crashed and survived.  They watched me without moving.  They covered themselves in charcoal to keep the house calm.  Jillison carried the dead bird to the basement and tried to wake it up again
          There were alarms we could pull and disappearances we could practice.  But we knew the instincts of a predatory shelter.  We knew the house was patient.  It wouldn't change no matter what escapes we tried to carve or engrave.  When we slept, it slept.  When we were awake it sent the storm to scratch at our skin, it searched for us like our shadows were the last living things.
          I belonged there, or else Jillison was alone again.  I was her simplest form of self-defense, her camouflage from the scaffolding's teeth, her only room to hide when the house was too hungry to hear us scream.

THE MIRROR COLONIES.

          The Mirror Colonies were a collection of near reflective settlements that may have served as a temporary route of migration and trade between Hestia and Themis, as well as a perceptual isthmus for internal conflicts and hidden motives of the continents.
          The territories themselves were myriad in origin and objective, sometimes founded by vanished children who left their homes to escape subjection at the hand of a foreign enemy (convex settlements); sometimes as a sequel to domestic disorders, when the losers in internecine battles left to form a new family elsewhere (rear view settlements); sometimes to get rid of surplus population, and thereby to avoid inward convulsions (concave settlements); and sometimes as a result of ostracism (one way settlements).
          Far from being an incidental exodus or mere series of unrelated migrations, the Mirror Colonies had historical value as they marked a decisive turning-point in the development of the continents, acting as a societal land bridge from East Hestian culture, which was often characterized by illusions of domestic coherence and continuity, to the increasingly perceptive communities of West Themis, where a discrepancy of conceptual outposts and unresolved personal settlements was considered necessary to inhabit a distant identity or resurrect the dead one called ‘home.’ 

         They said our reflection was not the ideal shape to make a lens, but it was the simplest form to which glass could be ground and polished.
          If my body was off-axis when the curvature was chosen, then the coma always came.  It was a common symptom of the migration, no matter what mirror they used to let me in.  I made a comparison when I had Jillison's eyes.  I watched them piece together parallels until I was two points of a decomposition, a profile in off-white, dampened and shedding.
          Jillison told me they were looking for the point where the selves lose step with each other, they were trying to detect the smallest unit of "identity".  She said it was an sort of old fashioned experiment where they didn't know what the result would be.

          I crossed my fingers, walked with a crutch, kept the window open.  I knew a kind of ghost lived in the hypothesis.  I caught them staring at a capillary and calling it a certain ripple, I saw a still life disappearing on the inner corner of each hand.
          Jillison spilled water for luck, painted pebbles with circles and crescents.  I kept the reflection indoors to keep the local climate away.  On the colonies every shelter was separated by silt and sediment and still consisted of a standard infinity.  Jillison said they were a collection of lost and founds fit for forgetting us.  I pulled at my spine like it was a page from a book, and tried to guess which place would hide it best.   

       The coma didn't leave me all at once, but slowly withdrew into a level of living interference.  The only distinguishing figures being diffraction and refraction.  The ripples on the mirror showed up as shadows underneath the house.
          I wasn't asking for a habitat of aftermaths.  I wasn't stacking the floors with wood and kindling.  I limped toward the colonies, struggling against the leftover senses that covered me.  I didn't know what was a short term effect and was evidence.  My reflection was always a step slow, and Jillison told me to leave it there, stopped and exposed, another stillborn stolen from a long time ago.