How do you do it. This is some of the best writing on the site. Yesterday was some of the best, and then today is more and even better of the best. It so real, so quiet. No significant plot, but that's because this is life, where plot is what's imagined by fishers looking down through the eddies at the shadows of fish and imagining the currents and life is what we swim through and feel on our skin: unending, with no resolution, with no true beginning or end. Continuous. This work tastes of wet-pulp newspaper chalky with asphalt grit, ground between the back molars ever waiting and continuing for those little embers of pain that might indicate a rough spot, a score burned down with worry through the exterior and into the enamel, to the nerve. Vampire bats we are, all pain with every bite, nourishment needed and enamel ever strong yet so sensitive we cry as we live and only sigh when we die. But there is no death here — a fermented honeysuckle nectar joy seeping like that sludge from the bottom of a rusted-open broken green and orange dumpster, welcome but wrong somehow, almost, because why could it be here. Suffering is a dry thing, all desert no sand no moisture and no plants, baking under a smoky sky with settling ash that never lands, only appears as a continuous stream of packing dust so white and grey in the evening haze. Joy is that which washes it down, relentlessly making, yes turning the desert into a rush of water and sewage-ready bacteria growing under our toes so squishy but he sky is alive and with the setting sun we can see the blue-silver night of stars like studs on black fabric or queen of the night flowers — oxypetalum — in the dusk pollinated by their so many gnats and moths, whichever they may be. Nona the Ninth is what this reminds me of, and rightfully so. There is pain, but there is life, and for that there is endurance. And with that comes understanding, and that is what makes this taste of the world's history as it happens. Beautiful work. Well done. I cannot wait for tomorrow.
-Styg
