36
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"I lived in the mines from a born age. That shit sucked so hard. It was lonelifying. It was the deep end of the stick. All i could think about was a rhythm i admired in the robots, and small noises comforting to be around and hear and ear it. I’ve seen one get eaten. I saw my friend rip it apart. How do you eat something like that, something built to be your mentor, silent teacher. Things were bad but they always got solved eventually, I think. It took a long time this time and also this time it was really getting to me, to us. And that’s when he did it. It was then, so quiet. I heard people trying to emulate their presences but nothing was the same. The fuzz i attached to those noises and movements-- jagged armband, small metal rectangle on a line of many pushes, and also pulls, forward amongst others in a chorus of shaping and reshaping actions and connecting to reimbursements within the structure of tubules and rigid silver leafing to wrap around and coat the used-to-be human organs, converted into not-human organs with the spray of a button… I escaped”
“I tried jumping out of a transport vehicle as it neared a bangate and somehow I made it. I grabbed onto the outside. It felt hard and crackly in my grip, and it scared me. There was many less sturdiness to it, super un-understandable. It scared me. I kept thinking, up, up, n I jumped it. In the twist I felt a difference in my weight, in my body. Getting up I saw it. I lost my damn arm. Now I only have less arms. Two. It hurt a good one in me. I still had my sunglasses though. I stole them from a tourist lost and found that the higher-ups leave for eachother. They liked me there.”
"Looking down was a nightmare... The first person I saw was some kinda desert. I think. But with boulders."
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37
"It's really strange to be receiving requests I need to go out for… I wonder if we’re being tricked or something… "
"I mean, I wasn't tricking you"
"Yeah but maybe… maybe someone is tricking us through you, or like through our customers… "
"Like something was tricking through me??"
The glib, the customer, they were watching me pack things. They had taken me back home after the incident and we had talked a while. They slept on my floor. I already was being interrupted by having to go to work. I was more annoyed than usual, felt like I was leaving something comfortable but strange. It was like I was mad at them, when they had done nothing wrong.
“I… can go with you? I can help. I've seen a house far away enough that it's gotta be a Willow Spearer’s. Small pock in dust land. It's gotta be. They'd know where we could find a mound. I walk a whole lot for work, tryna find exotic trash and things to use in the food. That's how I know.”
I felt better.
38
I think I know what you mean, now. I think I know how some things are maybe inside of you, or they must be, but you can't access them. People treat me like they know me but I don't know them. The bosses can be scared of me sometimes, in a way. Confused of me. I feel that I've been living in a bubble… I have a routine and I upsettingly stick to it because as far as I know that's all I have to do to survive. You say a lot of things I don't understand.
The Willow Spearer stayed facing me square. Clouds barely moved outside in this barren landscape. I felt a small anxiety building, confusing and upsetting. A feeling I usually feel if I'm not at the Tower Field, or in sight of it.
I guess they noticed my eyes wandering like they were sticking to the glass and trying to leave my body, trying to return to what they knew out of fear or whatever.
Their sleek, weighted flap arm descended onto mine at the table.
“It will help you. You will find it.
I will help you sleep now. An inkdrop will form. I will be here.”
39
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Walking was forever fervor, man.
I hear the chirps in my head trying to keep me going. Sometimes I can keep going when the reminder of the rhythm is strong enough n i let it take over me. I only see the mines, the factory. I remember the solid cutlets of mushroomy people sliding into the divot from the long-stem culverts up high. I never noticed the smell as I was around so much but when you leave you realize how strong your living smell is.
I see myself moving the melted mozzarella-esque physical essence of peoples and soaking them in a brine of lowtac, varying their states of matter and creating a constant shift in em. Some of the older samples grow hard tree knots in them. I know a guy that learned to turn em into the greatest soup, oil bubbles at my face with a burst of tongue. I don’t remember who figured out we could grow em like that. People didn’t like it at first, they weren’t with it. But they caved in.
I remember passing through the TSN main shaft in between shifts. I never knew what the deal was. I meant to ask a tour guide but we don’t really see em outside of their jobs n they can’t converse with us on the job, we, no one can converse on the job. I hadn’t told you. We practice ticking and chirping and little noises, ones that get soaked up by the muddy walls and sheets of rock and hold them for others to hear. I know the earthen has a wish for us. The robots knew.
40
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A wash of darkness had somehow cleared me. I didn't want to go back to the towers. I don't remember what I saw in my sleep but something had ripped me from it for now. I stayed with the Willow Spearer, and they thanked me. I was to walk with them now.
I was starting to notice the things I thought about often. They were always there but I never looked at them… they were permanent fixtures, slapping onto eachother one after the other like shit coming from a large creature’s ass, folding over the mounds and building up. And I had never looked at them before.
