A Traditional Horror Story

What have I been working for? It had no right, so the map and I got to wrestling.

Things were fine, just fine until the map, up to now lying dormant as a Halloween mask on the floor of my apartment, decided to uncoil and not so gently eat the parrot—my parrot, my pet since childhood. The topographic rings indicating the height of Red mountain hadn't budged until then. Then Skeeters The Parrot disappeared in mid-hop. I'd just yelled NO! fearing he'd mess up my work. Who knew maps had chick teeth, and could use them?

I'd been suspecting something odd for a while, but I had no idea it involved the progress of my research project from simple myth-making to a “journey” whose final moments would be initiated by a rude uncoiling of contour lines from the grid system. I felt a push of air, like somebody snapping their fingers but no sound—push, collapse, equally quiet. Staring down at the couple of feathers hung shocked in air and floating slowly away from the source of danger, I knew implicitly what the map—whose behavior had commandeered all sense of a situation—insisted upon: shut up.

Poor Skeeters, digested by a neat biology of paper cuts and corrosive inks—broken down into blue dashes flurrying somewhere inside a landscape of beasts. I never had much truck in bestiaries or medieval sufferings of serpents or why animals were drawn and quartered; the whole study seemed to me the domain of fat girls who thought often about the Celts and earnestly believed they would be able to fly after they were dead.

But here I am now, a knot in the belly of a late blooming purulent interest in the fantasies of those I still condescend as escapists, sad victims of bad skin, and experts in hysterical realism.

Snapping the bra of Proscription

In mapping the seasonal progress of the Rapture Hat via red mountain, there are journalists of Use, reporters of dread whose dry tongues jot notations to be left in our hairs. Today the cloth jumbles proscriptively somewhere over Alaska, indicates a particularly ummolested Use hog. The Arctic tern's annual migration rolls upward the circumference of the Earth like a snapped sock, during which the bird lucidly monologues to an internal mythologization of its own habits and regularly sleeps on the elastic contents of its pockets before crowning anyone with them. Its lining constantly evacuating for the sake of a "patent" on the Aerial Calendar, the Arctic tern's concern with jerry-rigging a logistical X for the sake of the rapture likely waives by order of the Provision Of Dread required to effectively resent the ground level in a style "after Hemingway."

And so who knows whose Hat is being dusted and by whom, exactly, today? With Informations flourishing unverifiably and the precedent of Only Having Ourselves to Blame reporting into our brunches, We consider converting red mountain to a step apparatus containing the means of its own deposited reportage.

That declared, it's time you disappeared and We stepped in.

We've waited and We've waited for you to leave. If I'm in love I will show it through weakness. My weakness is waiting for others to leave. You won't and now it's time to black out the room.

We wrapped a game hen in a silicon Hardener, brushed at Our beauty mark (at which We are joined at the face) and slammed a fist on the silicon Hardener Setter on the stove top. So it did set and it did harden, boy. I turned Our heads and opened my mouth again. An autumnal siren wiggled throughout the lobby. A yellow leaf slid from under Her shirt, but She's not important right now. We produced a Simplified Injector and dipped it into the hen, cut open the set mould in just a minute or so, poured a dark broth onto the carpet. “Hen-shaped fruit gelatin preparer, anyone?” one of Us joked while we prepared a fruit-shaped gelahen de-sorter. I've tired, the Other one of Us said, of being of Love. You have to go now, You are a menace. You couldn't quite read the hint but You couldn't because we'd jammed tight the doors, it's true, those doors already had been jammed closed by those large pieces of wood one uses to jam such things when passionate about nobody leaving.

Are all family gatherings this way?

With the situation like that, an injection seemed inevitable. You tried to convince me that We had betrayed Us. I pointed suitably. See the beauty mark? This is Our mark of Beauty. Is it not obvious? Naturally it is. It is the internal organ of the timepiece that marks beauty. “But there's a war on” you plaintiffed and whipped the bowl of cream. Put that down I said, that isn't yours.

So You lay down on the sleigh bed of ice and hummed Hit Nativity Singles until disappearing completely.

Did You get the weather, a spot in a journal which is a spot on the Map and which contains the Map? I asked. We are old fashioned in our uppity map abuse, the perils of an Internal Organ inhaled through a pronounced nostril. After You was dead I blew my nose and glared effectively at the abject compasses littering the sheepskin before saying, Grace!

A Case of Abused Room Service

Reconstructing the surface topography of a centipede or massif containing weather, this is what some All-seeing mixers are up against. First Animal, facing right, is in the process of regurgitating a small runner whose legs are already pumping in replication of a predecessor sprinting in track shorts with one arm upraised to extend a pennant for relief.

On its observable left is a figurehead to clarify menace, and in a potential gap on the ground plane are crammed an assortment of unfortunate and ridiculous items busily catching water. The ornamental properties of some squinchy historicized artifice aside, it's been one of the better days for Hatting it up.