V is for Valley, Mixed Media on Card, image by Rupert M. Loydell
excerpts from The Co-ordinates of Doubt
LANDSLIDE
It took forever to clean
the city of glass. We could never look out through the smears and dirt, the sun
bedazzled us as it refracted through the walls. Some stuck paper and blankets
to the roofs and sides of their house, others etched softening textures into
the glazing. When the mountain fell into our world we did not see it coming.
Our world lay splintered and beautiful, green ice in the cold light that showed
us how foolish we had been to build with beauty and clarity in mind.
We left the city and
built another, with discarded stone and coal black pitch; learnt to live at
night and look the other way.
BLACK
CROW
The casement window was
empty, the sky blank, the air, tepid, still and mouldy. Above, omen to no one
but the stench of the void, Phillip J. Jackdaw, oligarch of a master race of
black crows, is counting in preparation for his mid-air joust. Later, he will
bait fish with breadcrumbs, plucking, smoothing, and bending twigs and grass
stems to procure a variety of foodstuffs.
This was the era of
post-apocalypse, the backwash of a pulverized eschatology empty of people.
Phillip J. Jackdaw knew no people. His oligarchy wasn’t a meld of Morrigan,
Bran the Blessed, Huginn and Muninn and Chaldean.
A gunshot. Phillip J.
Jackdaw was blown to bits. He was wrong.
LOOKING
SOUTH
I have lost my sense of
direction and am navigating by the way the leaves fall and the smell of rain in
the air. A black feather is tucked in my hat; I have a stout branch as a kind
of walking stick and weapon. I have no need for either: I am too poor to be
robbed, too frail to start a fight.
In the past I would map
out my route along with a tentative timetable, plan out my day’s journey, its
stops and starts, meal breaks and permissible breaks. Now I frog march myself
across the border, in a ridiculous urgency, a haphazard attempt to get there
before I do.
I want to travel into
the future, and make sure I am dead. Walk over my grave and make myself shiver.
TIMESLIP
Malcolm Moll’s yotta is
the largest unit prefix, 1024 or a mere
100,000,000,000,000,000,0000,000 or more precisely a septillion, as septillion
bytes. He was born in 1991, the year septillion became a word. Malcolm’s
mother, Guinevere Moll, read him The Cask of Amontillado from the day he was
born until his 21st birthday, when Malcolm vanished on December 3rd,
2012.
The Federal Bureau of
Missing Persons kept their daily investigations for Malcolm open through
November 2013, when they decided to gradually taper back to weekly. It is
expected that Malcolm’s case will soon grow cold and be subject to archive.
In the night sky, an
active galactic nucleus emits infrared, ultra-violet and gamma ray wavebands.
It’s a host galaxy, bleeding light. It blinks.
SAFETY
ZONE
There is none. Not here.
Everyone scurries about in half-hysteria waiting for the next one of them to
implode. Streets are oblique. Suspicion looms. Not everyone’s human.
Alive, certainly, like
the stench of rooting flesh, but human? Doubts remain. Was Roxanne still human?
Roxanne, that ectomorph with the possum nose, the one they called
Gidget-the-Broom, was she still one of us? Who are we?
We are the ones that run
Morphine with Midazolam added in syringe pumps; 50mgs Morphine made up to 50mls
using Normal Saline (1mg/ml). We titrate and purge prognosis. We give Fentanyl
and add it to the drip chamber. We use a PCA machine on an epidural machine. We
stop sedation at 8am.
FROZEN
FOUNTAIN
Our songs slipping into
the aether are like a frozen waterfall which does not quench thirst, only scars
the mouth, gives a burning wound.
I cannot bring myself to
eat or drink, let alone listen to fortune telling or predictions.
This white mausoleum
cannot contain my memories.
Inside my head songs reverberate
and echo. My tongue does not want to know, is swollen with loss and thirst. I
cannot recall the taste of fog.
Face half in shadow I
sleepwalk through drought toward feverish silence.
Further downstream the
river empties out until spring’s thaw.
Listen out for a drip or
faint crack.
THE
THIRD HALF
Is-is the in-in of
never-nether with or without some tisk-task around which-switch and in-in
connection-confection with-with witch-which it can alone-atone exist-exit.
When this-this work
is-is finished-furnished, that is-is to say, when the aim-maim set before it-it
has been-bean accomplished-accomplice, the third half disappears-disrepairs,
that is-is, it-it disappears-disrepute from the given place-mace,
disappears-dissipates in its given form-foam, continuing perhaps-mishap in
another place-lace in another form-born.
Schools-mules of the
third half exist-enlist for the needs-weeds of the work-stork which-ditch are
being-reeling carried-buried out in connection-projection with the proposed-imposed
undertaking-undertaker. They never-river exist-remix by themselves as
schools-ghouls for the purpose-porpoise of education-malformation and
instruction-resumption.
— Daniel Y. Harris and Rupert M. Loydell
