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0. (One reason birds have more anxiety than people.)
00. (One reason people have more anxiety than birds.)

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.  Jonathan, you are a bird feeder."

1. "The Earth, in relation to the distance of the fixed stars, has no appreciable size and must be treated as a mathematical point."
-Ptolemy, The Almagest, 147 A.D.

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

2. (If you could build a house in the shape of any bodily organ, which would you pick?)

When we first met I was living in a blue house (as it ripped 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 all changed when the candle came down.

3. "Il lupo perde il pelo ma non il vizio."

3b. "The wolf may lose its hair but not its vice." -Italian Proverb.

The curtains were 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 didn't know what was coming.

She swung the wood with both her arms and he crumpled.  Like a mannequin who had been up all night.

4. (If the first person you loved was a body of water, which would they be?)

Our first date: A bird storm blocks out the black of the sun.  South of the skylights we clothe our torsos in sizes too small.  Everything feels closed too tight.  Like corsets on candlesticks.

He builds me blind spots to breath through.  My lungs are blunt and hushed. We undress.  

Into the lake, from the front seat.  Tinfoil salmon sweating around our thighs.  Yawns in their gills, their fins, their reflexes.  

5a. "Don't worry, we will always be together."  -Dolores.

5b. "That's what Diana Ross said." -Mary Lazarus.

-Whoopi Goldberg and Mary Wickes, Sister Act, 1992.

He takes me to his home, the bulk of which was similar to mine.

 We watch two strangers swinging across trapeze bars. They throw trash and gunpowder across the gaps. Neither side seems to understands the delicacy of when to stop short.

Below them, there's a kitchen full of children marching.  The littlest one pukes up a balloon. Skull-sized and blue. Others cough out plastic bags.

In the stands, I can see his neighbors staring back at us.  They keep an ice age in each eye.  Behind them on the walls, their still-lifes look healthy.

6. "I am looking for a candle. I have it. I am putting it in a Venetian box. Please leave it alone. Don't tease me. I have it. I can place it."
-Gertrude Stein, Geography and Plays, 1910-1920.

After September, every skeleton had a view. They told us we looked like puddles of soft water. They said, "if it weren't for all the skin in the way."

His mother told me once that in the Middle Ages, even scarecrows were skinned alive.  She told me it's the same sort of pulse behind poltergeist argument we've all lost since.

She said. "Jonathan, not all attention is good attention."  I could see every single one of her teeth as she sneered it at me.

7a. (Three ways to describe what a fistful of fireflies would feel like.)
7b. (One reason nobody "falls in love like they used to...")

7c. (One reason nobody "falls in love like they used to...")
7d. (One reason nobody "falls in love like they used to...")

He was gone for a while.  It was another autumn, another off shore after exhaustion. We kept each other propped up in parked positions while we waited for the postcards to come.  I asked him if there was such a thing as patience in the first person, if every sigh needs legs to stand and so on.

He said maybe the calendar is clumsiest at sunset.  I could hear a fault line flaring across his vocal cords.  He told me to wait another week, another month.  

Certainly small stakes were better than either of us ever being right.

8. The Starling equation is an equation that illustrates the role of hydrostatic and onkotic forces (the so-called Starling forces) in the movement of fluid across capillary membranes.  Capillary fluid movement may occur as a result of two processes: diffusion and filtration.

The weather was wait listed against the basement windows again. We were carving cadaver letters into our sleep when he told me, "maybe this anatomy is a promise nobody ever intends to keep."

We were alone when they found us there.  First his mother, then his father from behind.  They found us like we were two birds born inside a rifle barrel. The bullet hadn't even got out of bed and it was over already.  He pulled his forearms into right angles and I tried to run.

They kept the door blocked from me  His face was swollen as a coal stove by the time I got out of there.

9. "We do not really know why the Woolly Mammoth became extinct. Early Man killed some of them, of course. But most of the time Early Man stayed right in his cave, holding hands with Early Woman. I wouldn't know what the Woolly Mammoth did about that sort of thing. Not nearly enough, I suspect.” -Wlliam Cuppy, How to Become Extinct, 1941.

Our last date:

Clouds crawl into plaster casts.  Crowds cough from crosswalk to crosswalk.  Chickadees split themselves into fishhooks and hangnails as they ricochet between roofs.

I put my ear to his shirt and listen to a candle wick flickering.  He tells me his ribcage is lined with cave paintings.  There are buffaloes composed of crude circles and streaks.  There are mammoths colored with iron oxide.  There is a boy with flint in his fist.

Even at the end, he still wouldn't give me a name to leave him with.  His hand still shivered when mine hit his.

10. "Think it o-o-over, haven't I been good to you?" -Diana Ross, 1965, age 21.

I never saw him again, I don't think anybody did. It didn't matter, his posture had done things to me I couldn't undo.

Years later, I can still see him picking at his skin like he expects something good to come of it. Years later, his skeleton is still the softest sinkhole I ever slept inside.

11a. (Two ways to amputate a phantom limb.)
11b. (Two ways a compliment and a threat are the same thing.)

I was brought up believing that heaven is an empty threat, that the true meaning of "ghost" is "honest mistake". I was brought up believing that when they tell you the ghost will thaw, that means the ghost will thaw.

He told me once the weather is never more than enzymes on wires, he said our cells were nothing but forecasts filled with heat and sealing wax. I have tried to trace transparencies over his words. Were repercussions cutting into his mouth? Was he overwhelmed by the weight of oxygen on skin? I didn't know then. I don't know now.

12. Birds, by their quickness and intelligence and alertness in acting upon every thought, are a ready instrument of God, who can prompt their movements, their cries and songs, their pauses and wind-like flights, thus bidding some men check, and others pursue to the end, their course of action or ambitions." -Plutarch, 46-120 A.D.

Maybe that's not the issue, maybe the new definition of "ending" is too different to explain.  Maybe he meant it when he said he didn't want nobody.

Either way, it doesn't matter, certain anatomies never change.

 You're still seventeen and waiting at Main Street and Stinson's, you still have this same map and you can tell it's a match that's already burnt you in bed.

13a. (Your favorite way to sleep, on your back, on your side, on your stomach, other.)
13b. (Your favorite way to sleep, on your back, on your side, on your stomach, other.)

Shoulder high, I read that at the end of the world there will be a wolf that swallows the zodiac whole.  I told my Mom I wasn't going to get up for that.  I had to tell her twice, I told her, "Mom, I am as brave as unmade bed."  "Mom, I ain't getting up for that."

She said to me something I still remember, she said, "None of that is ever, ever going to happen, Jonathan.  There is no wolf, no zodiac.  No planets but this one.  Everything else is horseshit."

14. "Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion." -Democritus of Abdera, 460-370 B.C.

There was a time when I said there were things I sometimes miss.  I said there was a candle that could correct everything.

But by now I know it's true when they say sometimes solid memories are nothing more than old roles in relief.  Making any sense of them is all in the arrangement of axis and anatomy, it's all in the course of those orbits I should've stopped ignoring.

15a. "There are bread winners and there are bird feeders.  Jonathan, you are a bird feeder." -Chris Tierney, age 46.
15b. "I hope you love birds too, it is economical.  It saves going to heaven." -Emily Dickinson, age unknown.

Now that I'm older I can see that the Earth is one place and then overnight it can become someplace else. This can happen without changes in cloud lining, continental migration, or the consonants people use when asking to be carved in two.

Here is the secret: You can hollow out your bone and hold your breath in there.  You can teach yourself how to do it so that no one even notices.  You can learn to drown yourself in midair, you can drown yourself before they ever get to the door.

AN INSECT CENTURY.

        An Insect Century is a condition of Dyschronometria in which an individual cannot accurately estimate the amount of time that has passed.  Time perception is a construction of chronological drift that is manipulable and distortable under certain circumstances. These temporal illusions help to expose the underlying mechanisms of time perception.

        Distorted time perception is often associated with cerebellar ataxia, a lack of spatial awareness, poor short term memory, and loss of focus (disorientation).  Regions of trauma and rate of indefinite or unfolding events may also alter the subjective experience of time.  Another’s impressions of the Insect Century may not be directly experienced or understood, but it can be objectively inferred through a number of conditions: accidental abuse, disease, and genetics.

        The Insect Century is a verifiable by an experiment wherein the duration between a sequence of consecutive stimuli is thought to be relatively longer or shorter than its actual elapsed time, due to the spatial/auditory/tactile/species separation between each consecutive stimuli. The Insect Century can be displayed when considering a journey made in two parts that take an equal amount of time. Between these two parts, the journey that covers more distance may appear to take longer than the journey covering less distance, even though they take an equal amount of time.

You worked at the church, waited for the animals of your family to die. Hundreds of acres of skin and skin and still no surprises.   No shreddings of recognized baggage, you had become natural enemies.

Legs moved like a hydraulic system, unnatural, mathematical.   Limbs controlled by blood pressure or judgements of lesser parts, meaningless movement in a complete and metallic and accurate machine.

They disgust us because they show us what we are, always, eventually.  Small, scattered.  Confused.  We took out the bed and then the whole room.

I remember a lot of movement without momentum.  Angular and divided, a stack of empty decisions rather than a new skeleton built of them.  I remember they came out like an ink storm on the sheets and bedspread.   Holes and lows and life sized set ups and interviews.  

Just introduce yourself to a stranger.  It’s exactly the same thing.  Sun came down, and you were looking at me.

Insects have their own scenery of denial.

An endless stream of modest success and failure and success stories.  Microscopically priced.  Near invisible penalties.  One payment a year instead of twelve.

Almost at random, an eruption of beginning and end.  Exoskeleton up and crashed.

Pins in the fingertips.  Deadline missed, guessed at us breaking up again.

Another room that tasted the same, a ringing in the ears, a shrinking in the space between shadow and skeleton.

You can wear people down, the longer you talk.  Lies and blind string, otherwise intelligent people ask for a rush of guilt too. All that filament, all the flickering for limbs.  Like six times one is one instead.  Don’t ever mistake activity for achievement, they already had a name for that, they called it the insect century.

Jillison.  Listen to me.

             Do you still have no idea what the problem is? I don't understand the arc, that's what you said.   Tired and unhappy, felt like a century on repeat.  Willfully entered into codependence you admitted.  Jillison.  Listen to me.  Your past comes with you.  If you have any insects, you have all of them.

FOSSILS OF THE TOWER FELL.

         1.) Fragments of the First and Only Tower of Eos, be they skin or sediment. Preserved primarily in silt colonies, scavenger territories, river beds, cities without outlines or upbringing. Remnants of the age are fossilized in free fall, arms open to absorb the blow, eyes outstretched and screaming through the stone.
         2.) An uncommon currency among criminals and captured men. The worth of the fossil is determined by the warmth and pulse it has preserved. Those without decay are said to reveal an escape from certain fate. Their value is incalculable, held like a lifespan packed into a prisoner's hands.

         Jillison, I thought there would be more to say. My eyes were top heavy, traveling in reverse, they kept teaching you how to disappear from me.
         There was no sound left. My storm tent was soaking wet. Even the birds were secret and barely cut through the sky to speak. Did I need a working knife? A cloth to cover the organs I couldn't keep?
          Walk right over it, that's what they said. The sky was too short sighted to tell.
          I told you to drop it. It didn't concern you or me. I should've known by then.  You yelled through your first mouth and then a fire door.
          It was another reconstruction site I couldn't hear this time. There was a sinkful of broken glass and cans and I wouldn't listen to it again. My ears were wrecked close and then I couldn't see where you went.
         You always left like that, bricks up to your neck and bones broke out of the rest. When you were gone, the blankness went with you. Two years, one day I was in an identical place.
         Did you ever wonder what I did? Pinned rain, red air, it was all pretend. Wishful thinking. We were going backwards Jillison, I couldn't believe you bled the echoes out of me again. You should've seen me. I told them you'd be home by the scaffolding hours. I didn't see it coming. I said I'd keep the storm tent open for you.
         All the unbelievers, the ones that built the birdless sky. They'd been right about you all along.
         I went over it and over. I knew you would've said my organs were opening on their weaker side, but that was wrong.
         I wasn't petrified or unprepared.  I wasn't petrified or unprepared.
         I'd unwalled enough and saw the same lesson leaving naked each time.  If it was all I had left, I would learn to dress it as a deafness, my wearable absence and defense.

GOD OF TECTONICS.

          The God of Tectonics was believed to represent an extremely large accumulation of lives and afterlives—intrusive, extrusive, or both—located the anatomical core.  The definition of both God and Tectonics has been expanded and refined, and is still a work in progress.  God is now frequently used to describe voluminous areas of, not just mafic, but all types of metamorphic identity.  Sub-categorization of God into continental categories and chronological drift, and including pressures produced by tectonic processes, has been proposed.

          Natural evidence of the God of Tectonics remains inconclusive, while other possible remnants may have been dismembered by anatomical tectonic motion, such as the Transfinite Rift—the before and after effects of which are found throughout Eos, eastern Hestia and Themis, and north-western Amphitrite.

          While the interaction between these continents (localized but ever shifting) lacks a defined cause, a number of Gods (i.e. a mechanizing force) have been represented in the history of anatomical geophysics, allowing for a diversity of insular or anecdotal interpretations of this still indeterminant influence.  The God of Tectonics in particular, was believed by the hollow born (those born without identity) and the fossil born (those searching for purpose in the performance of anatomical metamorphosis) to be the originating fault line of the afterlife itself.

          How much does he know? How much does he know? How much does he know? How much does he know now.

          Not used to being behind there.  First time in someone else's eyes, without allowance to go to waste.  Did you think I was a talentless actor, hacking at a role, least of all authority showing? Did you think, now it all makes makes sense?  The distance.  The abstraction.  The anger.  The confusion.  

          Absent by whose definition.   I didn’t have a plan (hidden or purposely vague).  I mail fail, be a failure.  Did you think she did this to me too?  How well do you know the tectonic processes, how much of the research have you done?

          Transfinite Rift.  Unthought known.  For once it had nothing to do with you.   

          In terms of transparency, there wasn’t even a tally.  I have considered my options as carefully as I am capable of.  Could barely explain what it meant to be obsolete now.  Nobody know.  Whole forms flawed, a disconnect between the mechanics of the body.   All I could hear was a thicket inside.
          There is nothing wrong with me.   There is nothing wrong with me.  There is nothing wrong with me.  Shame is not a solvent or a solution.  So I don't try.  I don't hide it.
It’s not where you find all of my kind.  Ghostless to know, fossil born, afterlife neither eternal nor a form of interpretation.  Honestly, nothing has happened at all as I expected.  I never thought anyone cared if I got back to you.
          A god is a glacier, a gemstone, an accident of dust and glass.  A god is the only continent left in your place.

          What now?  A continent of lost addictions, clear as erosion, the littlest sands caving in.  There was no common sense or realistic approach.  Most likely, one of us will ask for this to die first.  Another trench where I sleep.  Where we sleep?  Differences between.

          If I don’t get out of this body (these bodies), off these continents alive (alone).

          "I didn't recognize you...  from a distance.  That's supposed to be my job."

          Were you motivated by jealousy, insecurity, lacks of perceived ability?  Did you think things should be happening faster?  If I could save one moment from the start.  See?  There are more than a few.

          An argument out of habit, there is little difference between nothing and everything happening.  This is how it is happening.

          Yes, I will wait for you.  Where you found me, up on the (continental) shelf, grounding my apologies, keeping the attic shadow hidden.  Curating, collating, collecting.  Not making progress, not making choice.

          Composition as a cycle of consequence and condition.  I would be lying if I said that it didn't bother me.  I think because I created, with the mistakes I made in my life, I created a picture of me.  That's not me.

          All light is the afterlife of mass.  A compromise has to count down.  Rules have to change.  Can’t you tell there's no one else around?

FALSE MARTYR CARTOGRAPHY.

  Martyr cartography was the systematic transformation of events of an anatomical body onto the surface of the tectonic continents.  Although all map projections demand a distortion of physical form, some irregularities were considered acceptable whereas others were not.  Therefore, different projections existed to preserve the core of the self at the expense of the surface.

  Originally used to understand physiological (or psychosomatic) suffering on the tectonic surface,  certain projections of anatomy may have contained deliberate errors or distortions, either as “scar tissue” or "gender dysphoria" in order to help the original owner identify errors of the misrepresented, misnamed, deformed, or nonexistent body.
  While many maps of anatomical tectonics clearly advocate or depict these inaccuracies, those which display an inability to comply with the transformation of the original body have come be known as examples of “false martyr cartography.”  These maps are now often used to locate others imprisoned or executed within their own anatomy, playing a significant role in afterlife recovery and transfinite relations.

  Jillison.  What contours now are clearer than what came before?
  You've been drinking all night (and day).  Still repeating to me the same secret you can't (won't tell anyone else.  Plague water still your only map to nothing to say.

  Latitude.  Longitude.  Everywhere is an identical break down Jillison.

  You just want to ignore as much as you can.  Talk about black me out weather, trustlessness, language backing up into empty space.  Saying to me over and over, I don’t ever want to be us.
  Bottles covering the floor.  Castle points cracking in your voice  Torture rituals (self versus self).  For all the years I’ve known Jillison.  It still felt like I was on my own, alone.  Adjustments to anatomy were only surface deep.  A rotation of body blindness.  Core kept opening and closing.
  Jillison, consciousness causes collapse.  We are here now.  Can't make a map of anywhere else.

  Center of your eye like a compass screaming at me.
  I remember you Jillison.  Awake with your maps, north and blind, south and unable to breathe.  Weak and shivered thin, diet and stress interchangeable, terrified of cracks in the hide.  Still puking?  Jillison.  You said it wasn't going to be same (again).

  Mapskin creased over and over.  Kept blaming it on the answer you couldn’t become.
  Like writing you meant I owed you, an obligation (gesture) toward understanding, certainty, elimination of possibilities.  An identity held, at least, temporarily.
  It was all a cartography of illusion points.  An embarrassment, in every direction, shame, denial of chronological drift.  Continents gone into hiding.  Jillison, I needed a perimeter, an apology from you instead.
  I wanted you tell me (even just once, Jillison), there’s a reason you are here.  There’s a reason you stay here.  

A CENTURY OF CLIMATE SICKNESS.

         The Glacial Century, was a geologically brief (130 ± 40 years) period of torrential storms and cold climatic conditions which occurred on the corners of West Eos.  It is believed to have been caused by the disintegration of one or several ice sheets separating the earth and sky, although rival theories have been proposed.
          While debate remains concerning the scope and origin of the Glacial Century, there is notable consensus regarding its role in the collapse of cloud agriculture.  Previous to the Glacial Century, numerous and varied forms of atmospheric cultivation were well recorded, including convective lifting, cyclonic circulation and condensation dispersal.  Through the implementation of these and similar sustenance strategies a lasting surplus of nutrients and nourishment was established on nearly every continent.  By the later years of the Glacial Century, evidence of these processes is almost entirely non-existent, rapidly and noticeably abandoned by cave settlers, hunter gatherers,  and tribal villages alike.
          A further consequence of the Glacier Century of which there exists no dispute was the spread and transmission of an assortment of maladies and infections collectively known as climate sickness.  Primarily carried by viral precipitation (or less commonly rainmaking bacteria) and spread to humans via cloud and vapor carcasses, the diseases were notorious throughout Eos, due to the countless settlements they contaminated, corrupted or completely destroyed.  

          It was our century of climate sickness.  The cold was youngest inside the cave, it came without warning and then it colored through the rest.  I wore two layers of skin, one fur side in, the other facing out.  Jillison used stone tools to soften her touch, her own way of wearing the glaciers down.  We watched for warring states and waited for an animal king to call our own.  
          The sky was small and starved of steam.  Jillison said her ancestors lived inside there, but I never saw what she meant. We were alone and outliving the continent I had come to know.  Jillison huddled next to me and we hunted for ropes to hold the thunder down.
          When the weather was hollow the harvests had fallen around us.  It wasn't work, we rotated crops in every cloud and each season gave us more than enough.  Since the sickness started it was just the least of everything, sometimes less.
          We were children but I knew Jillison would take care of me.  She covered me in clay, careful recitations, crash remains.  Her hands were white blooded and unblinded by the ice.  She gave me a handful of raptor talons and said they would protect us.

          We were living in the same cave that gave the sickness a name.  When the fire was full, I sharpened arrowheads against my skeleton.  Every escape started at the spine and shone d0wn from there.   In the overhang, Jillison stamped her handprints on the cave walls.  They were almost as thin as those of a new born.  Half were worn over and half glowed orange if I looked at them right. 
          When the dark was too strong to see I unwrapped my skin and Jillison whispered to me.  The story was always the same.  An animal king with halos with in its eyelids, a cloud garden with crops that never gave in, a season where the ice was see through and still breathing. 
          The glaciation was growing inside of us in ways I couldn't always understand.  I could speak it as a kind of language and lose my words inside of it.  Sometimes my mouth was useless for weeks. 

          The weaker we got, the more work we had to do, the climate kept cornering the clouds, the ice was in my eyes and then it was a scar between me and the sky.  My skin shook on and off like the switch had been severed in two.  The sickness had done this to me before.  Jillison taught me a to do list and how to blackout right through it.
          Extinctions were early and often.  Elk, bears, cats, mice, migratory birds, deer.  Some went north of the sky and couldn't be found anymore.  Some stayed under the ice and tried to get a revenge on us.  We never knew which ones the sickness would let live. 
          We searched for paper and bark and rootstalks and starch.  I woke up kill pits and planted warning flags.  We took turns guarding the cave from below.  Jillison prepared a cremation for a pack of clouds that never came. 

          I wanted to ask her how many animal kings had lived too slow for the sky to keep?  How many had chose their cave and come already?  It had been a century since the climate left us.  I knew how to fill the sled and carry the wood and drag the rope away.  When my hands were weak, I got under the cloth with Jillison and we counted backwards from the cave. 
          We asked the ancestors for a tar pit, a trap, a crate and grains.  The ornaments couldn't keep the weather down.   We pulled the ground open and searched for clouds to swallow.  We undressed our eyes and pulled the permafrost out of their place.  Jillison said when the king came we could take the hide and heal the sickness with it.  We could chew the marrow and be made strong.  She said it was coming.
          Every breath built a blister inside of me.  I wasn't old enough to know how afraid to be.  I watched Jillison remove the skulls and stretch out the spines of our smallest prey.  Back in the cave the cold cut us out of our only clothes.  When they were gone, we were there still, scrubbed together and shivering.
          I held tightly to the talons Jillison gave me.  I prayed for the wind to whisper the plague away.   There wasn't another choice. I promised I wouldn't mistake a cured sky for the reoccuring kind. 

CRYOSPHERE ULTIMA.

         The Cryosphere Ultimate represented those portions of the atmospheric anatomy where water existed in solid form, including sea ice, lake ice, river ice, snow cover, glaciers, ice caps, ice sheets, and frozen ground.   Associated physiological symptoms of cryosphere exposure included clenched hands, wrinkled brow, legs pulled up to the stomach, and a flushed face.

          Thus, there was a wide overlap with the Century of Climate Sickness. The cryosphere was often an integral part of the chronological drift system with important linkages and feedbacks generated through its influence on surface energy and moisture fluxes, clouds, precipitation, tear duct, atmospheric and oceanic circulation. 

          Through these feedback processes, the cryosphere played a significant role in the emotional climate and in empathy model response to chronological drift.  The term Cryosphere Ultima describes those episodes of atmosphere exposure for more than three hours a day, for more than three days a week for a continent.  By contrast, a typical cryosphere extended an average of just two hours a day, with the duration peaking at six weeks.  Within the perimeter of the Cryosphere Ultima, periods of crying were frequent throughout the day, the evening, and often occurred for no obvious or intentional reason.

          Listen.  Atmosphere was coming down now.  Either way you looked at the controls, the pollutants.  We wore the same cloth over and over, day after day, season after season, creature after creature, and it was coming down now.  

          Inside out again, if the sky was not color blind, but sense blind entirely.

          You threw up on Stranger’s Day.  I remember Jillison.  How it started, the shade of ozone, the holes in our pores.

          A year or so ago, when you worked without a face.  Do you remember why you told me you loved me?

          Stomach spilled out over the floor.  How do you tell real from fake?  Jillison?  What did it feel like on your side too?

          Numb.  Paresthesia.  Wore three layers to leave out my own organs.  Drank clear water.  Cloth was an enemy and an ocean of toxins.  Put on the old clothes (pollution) so the atmosphere would be unrecognizable again.

          Colorless gives up too.  Eventually.

          Did you know I thought of you too?  

          So Jillison, when you wore that.  Every hole in the atompshere showed.  Is that what you wanted to spread?  That kind of coughing, sickness, atmospheric decay?  Try.  Try to arrange it in any other way.

          Jillison.  Courage is not in hiding cloth, it's in never showing bones.

          It wasn’t common for everyone.  I hope you know that now.  To come to know cloth as a kind of pollutant, as a sickness, a virus.  To watch it cover the body as a cold exoskeleton.  Decorative shame, manic symptoms, small engravings in white and gray.

          Jillison, did I make you ashamed too?  On your side of sky?  Did you ask to heave and turn your world around?  Open fire when the fabric hit the shore?

          I remember you told me you had that much of enough.  I remember you said, numbness was the same above.

MIRACLE/MISTAKES OF MINERAL RAIN.

          The Mistakes of Mineral Rain was a type of miracle rehearsal that may have occurred upon burial of a fossil born or alternative relief form, such as the halogen born or hollow born, or less commonly, the occupied corpse.   Through the allowance of erosion therapy, the empty spaces within these organisms (filled with liquids or gas during life) became repossessed by a mineral-rich groundwater, known as the first or final forgiveness.  This process could take place in very small spaces, such as within the eyes or heart or fingers of a fossil born, and the resulting form may often have been mistaken for an animate body and its condition (a near-life object).  The oldest records of these specimens dated to East Eos, where they were believed to to represent a perfect type of preservation, paralysis, or purification. 
          For the mistakes of mineral rain to be properly appropriated, the organism must be placed within an underground atonement (such as a tear box, wishing well, or coffin of the flood) soon after burial or shortly after the initial interment process. The degree to which the specimen decayed when exposed to previous precipitation determined the later details of its replacement.  Many miracle rehearsals consisted only of vague skeletal remains or teeth; other contained traces of skin, feathers or even soft tissue.  
  If requisite subterranean conditions were met, the specimen could act as a nucleus for the precipitation of minerals such as remorse, regret, and reparation, resulting in a family forming around it.  Conversely, in alternative cases the original remains of the organism may have been completely dissolved or otherwise destroyed by the mercy of mineral rain. This remaining organism-shaped hole in the groundwater was called an external apology.  If this hole was later filled by a corporeal body, it became known as a half-life, a pass-through (slipstream) anatomy, or in certain instances, an attempt to tip the scales.  

THE TROPICS OF CARTILAGE.

         The Tropics of Cartilage were a barren area on the latitudinal body of time where little precipitatory entanglement occurs and consequently living conditions are hostile for animal and particle life.  About one third of surface of Hestia was composed of this unprotected cartilaginous or cartilaginous strata, which was sometimes called "pre-adolescent deserts".  Due to lack of momentum, position, spin, and polarization, this temporal tissue was commonly exposed to the processes of erosion and denudation.
           Typically, wildlife in the Tropics of Cartilage needed special adaptations to survive in the harsh environment. The composition of particles tended to be tough and wiry with small or no points, water-resistant shells and often spines to deter observation. Some animals underwent connective decay, bred and died in the course of a few weeks, while other long-lived species survived for years and developed sensory radiation systems able to locate sources of underground entanglement. 
          Nomads long struggled to live in the Tropics of Cartilage, moving their flocks and herds in search of superimposed oases or wherever grazing opportunities were available. Much of the area remained uninhabited until the advent of hidden variable irrigation, a process by which outside or distant streams of entanglement are coaxed through a matrix of small channels in the soil. Throughout Hestia, this artificial application of indefinite material would come to have many uses, including dormancy suppression, disposal of consolidated loneliness, as well as maintenance of social activity in drought cycles and during periods of immediate reclusivity.