Inside your arm like inside a red piano
The glass finally broke like a fever, right under our hands, and a fever slapped us immediately. Glass everywhere, fluid red ribbons suddenly opened into our hands and unfurling to the elbow. Plasmic topographical distortions splattering our smocks, ruining them, smouldering. Volcanoes arising from the ocean like monstrous, steaming heads.
This is what it's always been about. The innuendo of a Jazz Age Quija board seance insinuated into the work of Making a Move. Work, work, work. It's all we ever do. We'd been sitting long enough at it too, working through the bronze and iron ages respectively, tectonics striking twelve every twelve hours to let help us pace ourselves. The plasma screens were too delicate and smudgeable to touch with our bare hands, and so they were covered with dangerously volatile glass. Not the kind in modern automotive use that does not warm to the touch--not the kind that shatters into cubelets in your lap you could practically eat if you knew how. This was the old-fashioned kind, the kind that is still technically liquid, and after a few generations would actually conform to the muscular and vascular ridges of your wrists, palms, fingers, thumbs, moving around and over your hands, until served as a razor-thin prophylactic pooling around the starfish-like finger motions that were the trademark of our craftworks.
The glass was necessary. . . one little smear or fingerprint could set into the screen after just a few decades, harden and cause a brittle explosion of cancer in the organism being shaped beneath the plasmic screen. You, the artisan of an Artisan Class, were not the problem. It was the organism, naturally. The organic form beneath your hands with the genetic response coding, responding to the plasmic barrier--in a way, the organism's prophylactic barrier to infection from the radiation-induced plasma screen was as important as the plasma screen's being protected by the fluid-glass prophylactic from infection by the hands that pushed the screen's topographical ripples, rearranged its tectonic patterns, tickled a weather pattern, pressurized volcanic ridges or engaged in Big Picture Erosion Hour instead of just going to lunch.
These were your hands. These were your hands, now split to bloody ribbons, heavy cords that buzzed when exposed to air. That moment of shock as we sat there right after gravity downshifted, our sphere changing gears and spinning a bit faster so gravity dug in its nails and really started throbbing toward its own center. That almost wacky look, both cut badly but you cut worse, with a cord of blood jutting out into the atmosphere like snipped piano wire.
This is what it's always been about. The innuendo of a Jazz Age Quija board seance insinuated into the work of Making a Move. Work, work, work. It's all we ever do. We'd been sitting long enough at it too, working through the bronze and iron ages respectively, tectonics striking twelve every twelve hours to let help us pace ourselves. The plasma screens were too delicate and smudgeable to touch with our bare hands, and so they were covered with dangerously volatile glass. Not the kind in modern automotive use that does not warm to the touch--not the kind that shatters into cubelets in your lap you could practically eat if you knew how. This was the old-fashioned kind, the kind that is still technically liquid, and after a few generations would actually conform to the muscular and vascular ridges of your wrists, palms, fingers, thumbs, moving around and over your hands, until served as a razor-thin prophylactic pooling around the starfish-like finger motions that were the trademark of our craftworks.
The glass was necessary. . . one little smear or fingerprint could set into the screen after just a few decades, harden and cause a brittle explosion of cancer in the organism being shaped beneath the plasmic screen. You, the artisan of an Artisan Class, were not the problem. It was the organism, naturally. The organic form beneath your hands with the genetic response coding, responding to the plasmic barrier--in a way, the organism's prophylactic barrier to infection from the radiation-induced plasma screen was as important as the plasma screen's being protected by the fluid-glass prophylactic from infection by the hands that pushed the screen's topographical ripples, rearranged its tectonic patterns, tickled a weather pattern, pressurized volcanic ridges or engaged in Big Picture Erosion Hour instead of just going to lunch.
These were your hands. These were your hands, now split to bloody ribbons, heavy cords that buzzed when exposed to air. That moment of shock as we sat there right after gravity downshifted, our sphere changing gears and spinning a bit faster so gravity dug in its nails and really started throbbing toward its own center. That almost wacky look, both cut badly but you cut worse, with a cord of blood jutting out into the atmosphere like snipped piano wire.
posted by the landscapers of at 22.3.07
