28
​
Along the saltforms near the ridge are often giant creatures, creatures like bugs. They're metallic red wine/earth color there. I think that beneath their thin shells are actual layers of gas so heavy they could almost be skin, contained in that stiff but flexible casing. Their spirits are held there, those who have been crushed and those who've otherwise perished. The air swirls around and the movement pushes their giant bodies forward, the carriers of their kinsouls. They take on a new life in their spirit conglomerate form, burrowing into the mountains. No one knows what they do inside but people know not to bother them.
29
​
Once when I was fired from my first job, I felt really hopeless. I had jobs before, but this was my first instance of Employment and I was fired so quickly. I hadn't expected it. I felt complete hopelessness. I had been reading into the signs of everything-that-wasn't-actually-happening and those signs told me I was a fucking failure and this quickness was uncommon (it was common for the city actually) and I knew no one and this pace was killing me and I got shit sleep.
So I went to see the saltforms to watch the ants.
They look and move as if they experienced time differently, so swift and yet their movements large, long and sweeping. I walked a far way to get there. I was sad enough that I didn't mind the walk. I knew I was near when fog rolled in around me. The particles of salt frozen between the action of breaking down into the air from force and being wooshed around (from force) makes this chalky sort of air. The air sits very slowly and takes a lot of time to choose if it's sand or cloud. I closed my eyes and decided to move further into the cloud.
I heard the echo of my breaths in my brain, the hairs of cloth sticking into me from my covering i took from the mines. I start to feel a sort of rhythm in the shakes of the tiny salt particles. It almost feels like I'm swimming through the softest crystals all attached to various strings I can't see, grazing against whatever is exposed outside my covering. I'm sifting through. There are thinner spots in the air I like to feel for with my long arms and wheel through for fun, feeling the slight difference in air quality at the tips of my finger curves first.
All I remember is doing this dance with the air-- eyes closed, hoping a bug would crush me. I remember dreaming, maybe. Imagining the home I'd come from in as much detail as I could. And when I woke up I saw two huge plateaus carved out like bowls along either side of a path leading to what I can only describe as a giant castle-like mound full of clusters of holes.
“Cathedral mounds are like, what an elder would say the giant ghost bugs go to when they disappear. They say it's where they reform, and where they begin.”
“Wait but the plateaus though. What are those about?”
“I'm not sure. They held something in them, liquid at best.”
30
“So I woke up, meat on the floor, dark room abound, my left and right shaking.”
“What? With no one there?”
“The customer was there, hovering. We spoke about it and they told me what happened. They think it was their watch, but personally I don’t get it…”
They stared at me. For a minute there seemed to be a glimmer of spritz in their eyes… glossy and cloudy like spheres filled with cloud gas. It almost seemed as if time had stilled. I felt nauseous.
​
31
​
"Are you OK?"
​
“I’ve seen you before.”
​
“...”
“What did you see?”
That question surprised me.
​
“I’d visited once. Burger City.”
“I lived there for a lotta time. Just like. So fucking long. Although everyone else seems to have stayed for longer, or like, people don’t leave. They keep grinding their teeth. I had to leave. I haven’t processed my time there very well… I keep the connected emotional stuff in my watch for later but I just keep avoiding it. I don’t think of it otherwise unless i connect my brain with the watch. And I just keep… not doing that. The watch wells up with patterns sometimes, or becomes gooey like thick clear plastic with just enough liquid in it (or air?) that it’s almost busting at the seams but really just enough to stretch the full filled shape out. I don’t have the manual and didn’t think I’d need one, but here I am. Yeah. I had to remove it. Something happened to it while I was listening to the asmr… uh... recording, and what happened to me wasn’t your burger city but it was some… other… shit, some of it happened while I lived there.”
“So then… what did you see?”
32
"He hated work. He got fired from so many jobs, walked out on so many jobs, he was like… addicted. I told him he should go to see a Willow Spearer, the ones that can detect what's in your body and help you manifest it as a 3D wireframe of something you have to kill if you are to survive without destroying shit."
"One night he called me saying he had just made it to the tower field nearby, and that he was going to cross something. I never got what that meant. "
"After that night he kept going back. He always had to tell me when he was there, and then he left me on his watch to hear him doing things and breathing, and he would never respond once he got going so after a few times I stopped trying to figure out what was happening and I just listened. It would be hours of sounds, of night and beeping, metal clanging, chest murmurs, machine murmurs, my brain murmuring “why is this happening”, thuds. But it was like a show, a mystery, and I felt compelled to watch it. I wanted to understand."
~
“His head was erased after they found him. He had a fishbowl head. Or an ancient candy bowl head. He wouldn't go anywhere that the water towers weren't in sight range though. He stayed and worked in the Watts Tower Field as payment for making a Complete Ass of himself but also exposing the lack of security measures and Also brewing a huge accidental fiasco for the company, now a sitting duck with a dead boy in their hands. No one would have noticed but me and I hated him so I just let it happen. Every now and again I visit and he lifts me to the tower since he’s a huge fishbowl candy head robot now and I do whatever up there.”
“I'm sorry you had to go through that.”
33
I tend to leave at a certain time of sky because the sun setting reminds me of this entry in my private online journal from a now defunct intranet page-civ where I made up rocks and warped them back and forth on faces and powdered them and stroked their hairs around their gummy lids and wet squelching flatform eyeballs and… god that page-civ was so good… anyway you could have Ur own online diary and I remember distinctly how I described kissing him and remembering the shine of the setting sun on the almost white ceramic tile ground as if it was the flattest most still ocean. And it makes me want to gag my eyes out. Good thing they wiped him I guess? I still don't know how I feel about it but regardless life is better for me now
34
​
I rolled over to see my pinky nail flashing. I synced in just to see, to know and go back to fucking sleep.
Something just came in that I don't quite understand. Are any of ya'll awake? I'm unsure of the request and when I looked it up in our database nothing seemed to connect to it automatically even in the smallest way so.. I mean…
Another from scratch?
Hey! Yeah. Yeah… exactly
Twice now? This is pretty weird
For real. What is it?
I'll wire the request to y'all right quick. I don't think I'll pronounce it right anyway. Thanks for the help, let me know what you find or if you know about it. If not
Maybe we can go to the nearest stone city and look up some stuff
Right yeah, if not we can go to a stone city and connect some dots. I'll let the customer know what's up. Thanks again.
35
The rustle and jingle of my covering. Thick steps like the lift and loft motion of being through snow.
Approaching the first plateau along the way was like nearing a celestial, ancestral column, ones from legends and myths and religion. But laying my front against whatever surface area I warmed up to was the feeling of having your hand carrying a bowl with water in it across a room-- feeling the motion of an inside while the outside of it touches you the same. It was like wombing. The rocks were vertical slates congealed. You could crackle a piece off and pat it back on. Sharp and weird. I wanted it to absorb me.
“And the mound?”
“Yes, Yeah. … inside the mound.”
~
I remembered once, before I knew I was remembering. I slept and it came into me, came through me.
I was singing, my singing sounds like flatline underwater tones. High and boppy and otherwise spread out, muffley. Something was bubbling up inside of me as I was singing. Sometimes I get things in my head, thoughts, patterns, tiny songs, movements, visions. I heard a phrase, *a lyric*, and so I asked it. Who are You? And it answered with a wall of diminishing organ cries, slow and colossal and smooth. I felt i needed to shake, to get the energy out. Sounds were coming from me. I keep feeling a presence behind me. I feel in between sleep and waking. I feel like the pill. I feel like I can see myself. I feel like something is beyond me, wrapping my house. I keep feeling scared behind me, keep feeling unsure and accepting.
The cathedral mound was welling up in my heart as I shut my eyes, overwhelmed.
I opened them.
Things were slow to come to, but I was back at my table, intentions of singing.
I felt then that I had to share this, but figure out what it was first. This memory of the cathedral mound.
Slow colossal music plays in chords when i see myself enter and that’s all I can grasp for now. I can go with that.
Will you help me find it? I can show you how to look into yourself as payment.
