THE SYLLABLES OF SPRAWL/THE SECRET OF THE WAY THINGS ARE.

         The Seven Syllables of Sprawl, also known as the Secret Language of the Way Things Are, and the Smaragdine Tablet, is a compact and cryptic piece of Hermetica reputed to contain the source of the prima materia and its transmutation.  It was highly regarded by Nyx alchemists as the foundation of their art and its geomantic tradition. 

         The original source of the Smaragdine Tablet is unknown. Although Sprawl is the author named in the text, its first known appearance is in a book written by domestic census takers between the second and third continents. The text was first translated into curse tablature on the seventh continent. Numerous translations, interpretations and commentaries followed.
         The layers of meaning in the Seven Syllables of Sprawl have been associated with the creation of the pollutant’s stone, laboratory experimentation, phase transition, the alchemical magnum opus, the ancient, concrete, symbolic system, and the correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm.

         1. There was another recovery time we called our own, an ending to an era of empty threats everyone knew too well. 

         Just to be clear, they said they were studying anatomy.  That’s what they called it.  By autumn, we had worn out explosives as a kind of worthwhile armor.
         What did you expect to make of that place?  More symptoms to walk across a trench?  More coffin locks and costume designs?  Had you taught yourself to use your hands differently?  
         Lack of exposure is often confused with dislocation of memory, I didn’t realize you could still surprise me.
         There was the story about your parents too.  More than enough craters to tell.

         2. Morning came like a clear mirror in a collapsed mine.  They said the same sky was still our knot to come loose.
         There was a longer explanation, but what worked best in it’s absence?  I cried all day, circles deep beneath my eyes.  I didn’t have to say a thing.  It was a change.
         We waited to wake up, worked together on a note about changing weather and winter coats, and then you went home

         3. Still blind enough to build a backup sun again.  I couldn’t say it to your face.  I think you went to see a doctor, a kind of atmosphere resolver.  There was a desk full of letters I never pretended to read.  
         Yes, unknown.  Yes, out of focus.  Yes, coming apart.  
         Yes, a silhouette lit with matches and hidden underground.  Strictly speaking, over and over and over again. 
         I tried to keep track of  our most obvious tells.  A lump of clouds in the lungs and throat.   Survival knives.  Beginning of injuries. Scar tissue collected like it was the only way home.  
         Syllables of sprawl and how long we said they were the secret language of the way things are.

         4. You ripped a proper cut, pulled me by my jacket.  Two missed asteroids behind each eye, and then another little storm, a blackout stage, a reconstruction site.  I forgot if it was a map or a photograph of us. 
         What did it cost to pick it apart and hold it?  Your hands were hollow knots, a skeletal theory, a collection of coiled bones and skilled remains.
         It was an education in exchanging voids, another outline of chalk we wore when they broke the husk off of our skin.  The fifth and sixth, of how many now? 
         The Hereafter has the highest turnover rate of any infinity.  No one lasts long.  Least of all, those close enough to know.

         5. When I was only a silhouette and salt water, when I said a final break isn’t always a false surrender.  Different stakes at different times.
         Your dressing was drained of any liquids and left with hair and muscles preserved.  
         They linked our syllables in simple, shallow pits, and I could read them still.

         6. Another month was a mechanical failure.  It wasn’t just nothing, though maybe a reach to calling it a willing retreat.
         If we could have stayed in one place and survived.  Like captive animals, kept for display, invisible twins in our place.  I was beginning to think it would never happen, and then it was happening.
         An echo is a kind of choice, a means of backlash weaponry. You told me we could almost kill a man just by targeting him there.

         7. Traces, shadow, names, corpse.    
         On the shores of an unspoken hieroglyph.  More than one but less than three.  With mistakes of sprawl in place, it was possible to die in the afterlife and this death was permanent.
         We hid there twice for every time they passed us overhead.