Timepieces

An excerpt from Morphological Echoes, a forthcoming novel by George Salis.

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And then the exhaust from the cars seeped upward as a coagulation of sluggish bubbles, creasing and crimping into illogical origami. From the driver’s seat, Jasper thought she could see faces in it, limbs, but she knew that smoke proved even more deceptive than when cloud-gazers see portions of their dreams in the sky. While on her way to work, she realized that time began to decelerate, draw out, but not uniformly, only in the speed of her car and those around her. All had slowed down to twenty miles per hour or less as though boring through an invisible slime. The drivers in the other cars—one scratching the bridge of his porcine nose, another attempting to apply magenta lipstick in her rearview mirror—moved in the same gradual manner. And then Jasper saw the light ricocheting off the polished or wash-me hoods and roofs, off the carbon spoiler on the car to her left. The light scattered as golden mist, atomized at the surface, each globule a thing of its own. Yet pedestrians moved at a speed consistent with her former concept of time, most of them children, with some adults in tow, and she heard a giggle-laden scream as a girl with a bunny-eared backpack dashed in front of Jasper’s time-retarded car and she braked so hard she could hear the tires’ extended shrill, audio seemingly edited by an unseen hand. The girl’s mother had sprinted after her child and picked her up with an accelerated speed, and she glowered at Jasper through the windshield, saying in a helium voice, “It’s a school zone, for God’s sake!”

Ahead, Jasper could discern the black-white sign that read School Zone 20 M.P.H., proving the mother right. Suddenly, time returned to Jasper, neither sped up nor slowed down. She felt bewildered, for she had driven to and from her place of work so many times that it seemed automatic, scheduled, expected, requiring the least amount of brain activity, barely an electric blip or two among the mush of her neurons. Only on rare occasions did her consciousness surface through the temporary dominance of the subconscious and wonder at the fact of her automation, regard it with both amazement and unease, that she could do this while thinking about nothing or anything but the task of navigating. I’m an ear-backed rat in a maze, she’d think, a veteran test subject of some meaningless experiment, and then she’d feel a little depressed when she tried to equate the cheese at the maze’s center to something good in her life but couldn’t come up with anything. No, something could have gone there, added meaning to every machination, only she had refused to recall it, that innocent face…. But by then her consciousness would resorb, and her automaton brain would command her hand to push up a rod near the steering wheel to indicate a right turn and then perform the signaled action, the rod itself returning to its original position on its own, and then she would press the brake pedal to slow down at a yellow light ahead, et cetera, et cetera. This life-loop of driving—north on Locust Street for zero-point-one miles, left onto Powers Avenue for three-point-one miles, use the right lane to take I-95 N ramp to Jacksonville for four-point-three miles, take exit 260B for I-4 W toward Orlando for thirteen miles, take Exit 118 B and merge onto FL-44 W/E to New York Avenue in four-point-six miles, and then, in five miles, finally the hospital on the right where she worked as a secretary—a soporific cycle accompanied by other habits. In a rose-chrome thermos she drank homemade coffee with enough sugar to make it taste like a liquid brownie, keeping her awake but not exactly alert. She stole quick sips at stop signs and red lights only, each milliliter savored with a swishing around her mouth and a semi-gurgle before she let it pleasurably scald the back of her throat, all the while inhaling the drink’s heat as though it were frankincense. With high heels on, she felt less weak in the world, but to drive she needed to remove the one from her right foot, and she always found herself toeing through her delicate stockings the glacial ridges of the gas pedal, up and down, side to side, an intimacy she couldn’t describe, nor would she if the words made themselves known to her. She didn’t listen to music as she drove, for a tempo too fast always caused her to speed and swerve from side to side without realizing it, too slow and she ended up steeped in sleep, only to wake up at her destination, drool dripping from the steering wheel or spattered across her blouse in a glassy Lichtenberg figure (once, when “Unforgettable” crooned over the radio, she found herself half-submerged in a lake, the algae-gagged water permeating every loose seam in the vehicle, and she would have drowned had she not already dialed the trinity of emergency numbers in her somnambulant stupor). Her husband, before Everything had happened, used some electrical trick to censor songs from the speakers, for music proved a hazard she couldn’t afford. Rather, on Mondays she always heard on the radio a political debate regarding yet another issue or scandal she didn’t care about; on Tuesdays she tuned in to health news and diet hacks that she invariably decided to try for want of a better mind and body, such as whitening her teeth by brushing them with strawberry paste and baking soda or sharpening her neurons on the whetstone of some quiz app or other, but forgot by the time she pulled into the hospital’s hectic parking lot; on Wednesdays short stories performed with such flourish that she focused more on the sound effects or exclamations and less on the story itself; on Thursdays car experts clucked about mechanical problems she sometimes had with her SUV but nothing she could fix with any degree of finesse, except for the childish pride she milked within herself after once changing a flat, her hands and cheeks dusk-rubbed by the end of it, her lungs stinging with the exhaust from other cars Doppler-swooping down the highway; and on Fridays science facts that surprised her so much and so often that her cortex desensitized to the point where she would sometimes nod her head in response to a never-before-heard illumination of human social interaction or a difficult-to-comprehend statistic of the cosmos, sometimes not.

“I oughta call the police,” yelled the woman from where she now stood on the sidewalk, her bunny-backpacked girl still arm-propped, face buried in her mother’s humid bosom. The eyes of other parents and children had popped in Jasper’s direction. She thought about getting out of the car to plead for forgiveness or to ask why the mother’s child had hopped onto the road in the first place, don’t you know how dangerous every square inch of this asphalt can be, and well beyond, how with one single mistake, one seemingly insignificant slip-up, you can wreck your entire world, the enormous and resounding effects utterly and totally irrevocable, don’t you know? At the honk of a horn behind her—the face of the driver, as she perceived it in her rearview mirror, came across as howlingly lupine in its surplus of hair—she accelerated, somehow freed from the drama by the simple fact that she moved along, contained in her car among a dirt-chrome herd of others, and the contents-under-pressure mother remained immobile on the sidewalk, left to hear the vanishing of Jasper’s rumble-thrumming getaway engine. Before the ostensible slowing down of time, the radio had informed her of a difficult-to-comprehend statistic of the cosmos, that astronomers have so far discovered almost 4,000 exoplanets in almost 3,000 systems, with about one in five sun-like stars harboring an earth-sized planet in the so-called habitable zone. Jasper calmed herself, tuning in to the station once more, her ears’ helixes twitching with the absorption of numbers that corresponded to dimensions of reality, not two but three, not three but ten, not ten but twelve, no, not twelve but infinite, with many dimensions rolled up like sheets of paper turned into spitball shooters, measuring not eleven inches but closer to eleven Planck lengths, or even smaller than that. Little dimensions, so achingly diminutive, the idea of them at once unfathomable and adorable. What secrets and treasures lay hidden in such quantum crevices? She wondered if you could put special things inside them, things you wanted to keep safe and secret, maybe people too, even children, so that if a car did hit them it wouldn’t matter because the rubber would appear as ineffectual ghost slices, an aurora borealis of elastomer. She knew that such dimensions had to exist because she peripherally sensed things out of her reach, and if she could extend her reach with one of those grabbers she always saw beaming elderly people use in midnight infomercials, it would still be out of reach, and if she could extend her reach with a grabber grabbing a grabber, it would still be out of reach, ad infinitum. Wherever her reach ended, that’s where at least one of those rolled-up dimensions subsisted, and it pained her to think of what it contained: her son, kidnapped by her ex-husband. Somehow, she managed to hide the knowledge of her missing son, tucked in a rolled-up dimension in the back of her brain, but every now and then it unfolded at random like an appalling page in a pop-up book, all the details of Everything, the events that led her husband to leave her, to bound and gag her son or trick him or whatever he did to take her boy away….

In the year 1969, she took the form of Neil Armstrong, balancing himself in an awkward spacesuit amid the moon’s weak gravity and scanning a sea of craters through a gold-filmed visor. “Som~thing inter~sting…~n the b~ttom of th~t littl~ cr~ter.” So difficult to see through the blooms of uninhibited sunlight, but whatever he saw held an anthropoid shape, and it seemed to sink deeper into the crater as though in a pool of liquid basalt. Neil stepped forward and said, “It m~y be~~~.”

“What’d you say, Neil?” asked Buzz Aldrin, standing to his left and still admiring the magnificent desolation while cataloging in his mind all of NASA’s assigned tasks. “I’m moving forward. We’ve got a lot more here.”

“It~~~I th~nk it m~y b~ s~m~th~ng…m~v~~~, cr~zy ~s it s~~nds.”

“Neil? There’s a lot of interference or something.”

“~~~~~~,” he said, and began to hobble toward the crater.

Neil approached the crater and used his gray rubber-tipped gloves to part the waterfall of sunlight. “~h m~ G~d.”

“What, Neil?”

“Th~r~’s…so~eth~ng~~~.” Neil scrambled to his knees. A moon boy had sunken into the crater, only his scalp, eyes, and nose bridge broke the surface, camouflaged in leaden hues. “H-hey there, fellah.” Neil extended his bulbous hand, “Need some help?”

The moon boy rose a little higher, revealing the entirety of his mineral-encrusted face.

Buzz said, “Neil, if you can hear me, we’ve got a call from the President here. I’m going to take it.”

Neil swallowed and asked, “Are you all alone?”

The moon boy only blinked. Neil could discern in those features sediments of both awe and fear, but then the moon boy unburied his arm and placed his hand atop Neil’s. Far from crescents, the moon boy’s lunulae featured full white circles afloat in the center of his charcoal fingernails, at once soothingly familiar and terrifyingly uncanny.

“I’m sure you can’t hear me, nor understand me if you could, but…but I got two of my own, two boys.”

Neil held hands with the moon boy now, and an etch of sadness in his brittle brow seemed to erode, contagious particles drifting sunward, and he smiled with silver-lighted teeth.

“I can take you home with me.”

Neil struggled to his feet and pulled the moon boy up, exposing his metamorphic body in a kind of mantle-birth.

“You won’t believe it, Buzz,” and as he turned to lead the moon boy to the lunar module, a wide column shot from the moon’s surface and curved high over their heads, a starscraper, “Holy shit!”

The column’s photophagic shadow engulfed them. Neil felt an emptiness in his hand, and as he said, “Where’d you go,” the column collapsed upon the astronauts, the whole of it crushing before absorbing them into the maternal moon’s catacombs.

And then, on I-95 N, the exhaust from the cars seeped upward as a coagulation of sluggish bubbles, creasing and crimping into illogical origami. From the driver’s seat, Jasper thought she could see her son’s face in it, eyes beseeching and smoke-mouth agape, a hand reaching toward her then getting pulled backward into the plume by a larger hand. She swallowed her sorrow, more scorching than any quick sip of coffee, and realized that time had decelerated again. All cars had slowed down to twenty miles per hour or less, even slower than that, as though submerged in an invisible slime. The drivers in the other cars—one slip-twisting the tip of her pinky in the canal of her ear with thumb extended, another attempting to remove a tendril of broccoli from between his crocodilian teeth with the help of his rearview mirror—moved in the same gradual manner. And then she saw the light ricocheting off the polished or wash-me hoods and roofs, off the police siren on the squad car to her right. The light scattered as golden mist, atomized at the surface, each globule a thing of its own. Jasper searched for but failed to find the black-white sign that read School Zone 20 M.P.H., only spotting a Speed Limit 65 sign, reinforcing her anxiety and confusion, and then time didn’t just slow down, it ceased for all but her being, the increased blood flow in her body a doomsday metronome, her frenzied thoughts now depending on the thump-dump-thump of her cardiovascular system for some semblance of sanity. The surrounding light appeared as prehistoric pollen caught in the black amber of the exhaust pillars. The growl of many engines stretched into an infinite soundscape, akin to the birth of the universe. And the faces of the other drivers looked as though they were aware of their predicament but not, expression-shackled by their own piffling epiphanies. As she rolled down her window, she saw the glass disappear into the car door while also leaving a reflective shadow of itself behind. She pushed her head through the ghost glass and scrutinized ahead at the traffic, only discerning more and more stipples of cars, each an altered echo of the one before it, racing stationary toward a banishing point. She turned to look behind and witnessed the same effect, as though the sky held up massive parallel mirrors. If this was her world now, chilled to absolute zero, she couldn’t live in it, she thought, while also feeling a newfound looseness in her ossified muscles, lightness in her iron spine. If nothing could move, then nothing could run, a law allowing her the freedom to inspect every house, every room, every bed, to peer inside every attic or basement, cupboard or wardrobe, closet or freezer, chest or coffin, every crook and uncanny spot…. The persistent succession of her thoughts startled her and she scanned her surroundings in panic and confusion, beholding a trillion cars stretching out in all directions, each one a clone of hers, a trillion Jaspers in driver’s seats who scanned their surroundings in panic and confusion. Causing a feedback loop of neural activity, of jittery throats and contaminated air, she whispered,

But then the cars started up again, needles arcing across the speedometers’ numbers, twenty-thirty-forty-fifty, and the temporal river of exhaust and aluminum pulled her along. Not a school zone this time, merely a traffic jam, that’s all. A rush of heat in her face opened her pores and she exhaled. Did she have some kind of effervescent fever? Had she always felt such discombobulation? With one hand on the wheel, she used her other to feel for her phone on the passenger seat and call her work and say she was sorry but she felt unwell, something wrong with her breakfast or coffee that turned her stomach, her mind, she promised to make up for it, and for all the times she took off work since Everything had happened. She wondered how she still kept a job period, yet it didn’t matter, none of it did. After the call, she instinctively glimpsed the phone’s screen, which read 8:36, and decided to turn it off, and as though submitting to the force of a chain reaction she disabled the dashboard’s analog clock too, then unlatched her silver wristwatch, an anniversary gift, and threw it out the window. In her side-view mirror, she saw the watch diminish to a glint stolen by the wind. She wished she could snuff out the sun as well, for it proved a nuclear timepiece, unavoidable if but for blind eyes, and even then you could still sense it on the skin as it stimulated melanocytes. Not to mention the globe’s diurnal nature, which in the absence of a sun would still succumb to the ticking stars— horologia galore. Oh, how foolish? She used to boast about her punctuality, her reliability, but all it meant was that while everyone else arrived late, she remained the sucker waiting around, checking the inside of her wrist for the time, the clockwork of which seemed fused to her pulse, making her more aware of the finitude of the circling hands, of matter in totality. She wanted to forget time, although even the cessation of time was a form of it, so she longed for its obliteration, to expunge the temporal laws—the difference between merely pausing death and making it an obsolete abstract. Such silly desires, wishes born of the Wish, itself born of Everything.

In the year 0, with a second skin of slag, she looked for her son among the wreckage of earth. Where parts of walls remained, there existed friezes of ashen shadows, and she compared the height and girth of her son to the smaller silhouettes. The poses, from mid-jump to genuflecting, said something about the perished, but none of them echoed her boy. With the advent of a heated zephyr, one of the calming death throes of the light-booms before, she heard a crying, his crying, but with the wind it ceased, for that was its source. How could the wind mimic her son’s pain? And as she continued to trip and fumble over debris, blood and dust mixing to tattoo her body wounds closed, she caught glints of her son, millisecond phenomena of his essence. His laughter: a series of semi-connected bubbles, sliding past each other and only rupturing in unison at the censored sun’s zenith. His tears: a trickle of acid rain that fell from the storm cloud of her brain and dissolved portions of her innards. His run: the lifeline of the horizon, at once taut and serrated, the delineation itself an unknown blur. His hands: if not the shadows, then the ten-fingered eclipse that orchestrated such chiaroscuros. His smile: the charred and upside-down grill of a gale-stripped SUV ahead. His mind: the frenetic clicks of an omnipresent Geiger counter. Filial glints fell through cracks in the burnt, neutron-flayed sky. They appeared and disappeared as will o’ the wisps behind iridescent sheets of fallout in the distance. She looked at her palms, her bloodlines coursing as lava across the fissures of her carbonized epidermis, and she saw him there as cinders, residue that read the truth: her son had been taken away, atomized at the surface and ever inward, by light, as light, and so, like a post-apocalyptic lepidopterist, she hopped and floundered, trying to capture winged pieces that vanished in her grasp.

She turned the knob of the radio to a station of static and she must have discerned a piece of music in that whitest of noises because she awoke with her head upon the steering wheel. A viscous waterfall of drool blurred the Pleiades star cluster of the car maker’s logo, the SRS/AIRBAG indication below it, and the simplistic car horn symbol at the bottom. She looked up at her house and then rupture-remembered the dream or reality of her driving here: mesmerized by the radio’s well-night mystical hisses, the embedded lunar tune picked up outside the atmosphere by her car’s twitchy antenna, she had exited the highway and reentered in the opposite direction, and throughout her braindead navigating she gazed into the faces of the oncoming cars that dodged her SUV, the four-wheeled instrument of a messianic parting of the traffic. Especially as a child, she had recognized cars’ expressions and personalities, more human than human. Her father’s truck’s headlights slanted inward in a grimace, the grill a mouth of clamped teeth, the entirety of the face perpetually splotched with murderous designs of mud and bug splats, and she wet herself every time she looked at it. Her mother tried all her life to save up for a sports car she never bought, but every time she saw someone else driving it she felt compelled to point it out, and its broad empty eyes and toothless gape seemed both fearful and paralyzed, the engine releasing a helpless purr. This time, the vehicular visages seemed more anthropoid than ever before: smiling with glitter-glam eyes, buck-toothed and mischievous, putty-pouting while squinting, hammer-chinned and confident, flamingo-nosed with an underbite, mustachioed and calm, bashfully lip-squeezed, or all-out battle-crying. In the manner of a cartoon movie she had seen with someone once, they spoke to her in varied voices and intonations, yet continuing the same sentence as the cars skidded past and others appeared. A skull-glaring car uttered no more than a fraction of the first syllable, merely a breath escaped between bleached teeth, and the rest of the curving traffic contributed, “We…finally…see…what…there…is…to…see.”

She subconsciously whispered, “What,” and the word seeped into her car’s air vents, distorted through its piston vocal cords, and expressed through the grill-mouth in automotive language. Some reversal of this process must have allowed her to understand the parted traffic’s speech through her car’s speakers, an additional stratum to the hypnotic noise.

“To…get…your…son…you…must…reverse…the…acts…that…took…him…away.”

“How?”

A horn-headed and fridge-faced semitruck honked the first word of the next sentence, “Think…what…do…the…particles…obey…what…are…all…things…subservient…to?”

“Is it—”

And then the scream, a horn preceding a crash and pileup behind her, the end of the lingual grills. Her dream-reality subsequently faded into a bee-swarm of red and blue lights that she half-remembered losing through strategic zig-zags and skintight shortcuts. But what had she learned from the automobile-ese? The school zone, the traffic jam, yes, these could clue her in. The motor mouths had said, “Reverse,” practically a command, and she placed her hand over the shift knob and pushed it forward, next to R.

In the Beginning, she took the form of a vespine Eve squeezing into the inverted flower of a fig on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. A snake made of smoke guided her. Ssslide through the ssslime, oh if only you could ssslither like me. The cramped cave of the fig’s ostiole amputated her wings and antennae. Leaking hemolymph, she crawled more frantically. Even outssside, I can sssmell your ssson, sssightlesss and flightlesss and sssniveling for tendernesss. As she continued toward the center of the fig, multiple achenes, hard-shelled fruits the size of mace heads, flagellated her head and body. Perhapsss he isss there, perhapsss he isss not, how can you ssssincerely trussst me? She searched for the moist bassinet that, according to the snake, held her son. Many maroon and amber blurs invaded her vision, and when she thought she discerned something promising, it turned out to be just the striking of another achene, but she absorbed the pain-rattles for her son, even though she started to question the snake’s intentions. Ssswerve left, now sssubmerge. She obeyed its commands, and then she saw the bio-cradle in which her son slept. Yesss. Once she crawled up to its petal rim and peered inside, she realized the tragedy of her tardiness, for the fig had already commenced the ingestion of her son, turning him into protein, and what lay before her seemed mostly a translucent carapace. She wept as strings of smoke overhead knitted themselves across the damp chamber. The snake hissed with laughter, Sss-sss-sss-sss-sss-sss. Sss-sss-sss-sss-sss-sss. Sss-sss-sss-sss-sss-sss. The whole fig began to quake and she scuttled atop her son to protect his remains. The abundance of the snake’s breath obstructed her tracheoles and after she heard a fibrous rip she turned around and saw two white stalactites puncture the fig’s skin, fangs of the vaporous charlatan.

Gripping the crusty-soggy steering wheel, she drove in reverse, out of the driveway and down Crumble Oak Avenue, right on Silk Way, and then turning left on the long stretch of road between two HOAs, and as the vehicle gained momentum, the wind backward-hugging the exterior and filling crevices with whispers, the strings of the sky’s fabric vibrating, the sun stabbed by its own spokes, she effected a change in the movement of her surroundings: a squirrel darted tail-first across the road and jumped off its forelegs to cling to a tree with his hind paws, after which he dropped from his fidgety mouth the shards of an acorn; a couple jogged backward and alternated between inhaling carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen, and then the woman spat water into the spout of her plastic bottle, filling a quarter of it; a hawk placed a Yorkshire terrier safely on the ground, the untouch of its talons healing the dog’s wounds, and the handle of the dog’s leash swung into the outreached hand of his owner, followed by the terrier lifting his leg and vacuuming up with his hirsute penis the urine splattered on a bush and part of the sidewalk; standing at the edge of an artificial lake flanked by identical houses, a teenager used his fishing pole to lower a hooked and struggling carp into the water, a concentric splash of droplets rising from ripples then coming together to make the surface stiller; a banana spider stuffed her light-wrapped threads into her bulbous abdomen, dismantling her web as flies and mosquitoes bounced off of it and flew away head-last; a man wiped sweat from his forearm onto his forehead and pulled a lawnmower backward to repair the decapitated grass blades in his front yard; a committee of vultures fought to resurrect roadkill, each one regurgitating bloody tendons and bits of organs and expertly placing them in accordance with raccoon anatomy.

Jasper couldn’t believe it, that she found a way to rewind time, to reverse the acts that took her son away. As she accelerated, actions overturned more quickly and she could imagine her ex-husband opening his car door and her son climbing out heels-first, stopping to place a piece of candy on the ground with each toe-step until, having created a sweet trail scintillating with moonlight, he made it safely inside the house, his bedroom, closing his lids over pinkish sclerae and sleeping once his father’s spark-singed finger touched his lips. Or could it have gone, and ungone, differently? Her ex-husband opening the trunk of his car and picking up the struggling bundle of her son, placing him on his bed and undoing the cable ties from his ankles and wrists by simply sliding the length of plastic material out from under the tie head’s tongue, the serration producing a series of inverse clicks, then removing the duct tape and sock-gag from his mouth. No, none of that. Instead, this unhappened: they ran backward into the house, her ex-husband gripping her son’s forearm, and then her son tucked himself in, but not sleeping until a bedtime tale leaked from his ears, a tale whose words her ex-husband breathed in, words that when held up to a mirror, told her son how his mother was not his mother, but rather a deceitful demon, a jilted jinni, and that, if you glance out the window there, through the whorls of clouds, you’ll see the person who birthed you, yes, that’s right, the moon, you came from her, oh it’s all too true, my boy, come along now and I’ll finally tell you about it in detail, it’s a magnificent story and I’m so sorry I haven’t told you sooner, my moon boy, my prince.

Her ex-husband, such a habitual liar, a verbal prestidigitator, pulling lies like rabbits out of hats, sawing the truth in half yet keeping it alive, seemingly untouched, believable but not, depending on the temperament of the listener’s mind. Oh, she would kill him, cut out his silver tongue once they reunited in their broken home, and she pressed down on the gas pedal until it went flush with the floor. Amid her mounting acceleration, other events both elsewhere and elsewhen reversed: two atom bombs assembled themselves out of arboreal shockwaves of fire and smoke and flew upward as iron droplets into the wombs of B-29s while human-shaped shadows peeled themselves off the streets and walls below to become beings of veins and bones. Whips perfectly cauterized the backs of hive-mind humans and swirls of sand expelled from their eyes’ moisture during the task of disassembling a great limestone mother, beginning with her haloed head, then her moon-barren belly, and eventually her great pyramidal toes. Smog took the shape of a wooly mammoth whose hide shot spears into the hands of icicled cave dwellers. Twin towers built themselves from ashes and metal wreckage, reaching around 1,300 feet, and down below, humans molded from scattered gore super-jumped, performing flips and twirls, into the towers’ windows, the glass in each repairing itself like spectral jigsaw puzzles, and then, after inhaling an industrial amount of smoke, the towers birthed a pair of Boeing 767s that flew away empennage-first. The Nazi Party used shovels and truck beds to sift ashes and bone fragments from rivers, to exhume biological materials from mass ore pockets in the earth, and engineers used chimneys to imbibe the smoke of carbon-based matter and bodily fluids from the atmosphere, mixing the constituents with fire in an oven to roast into existence the effigies of men, women, and children, and once these lifeless forms were dragged and piled upon the floor of a chamber, their pallid mouths and nostrils exhaled Zyklon B, and thus they rose to their feet as forged beings.

In Jasper’s rearview mirror the spectrum of lighted objects dissipated into points and extended into lines that conformed to the aerodynamics of her SUV and went farther and farther away into a black diamond of infinite disappearance. With her rear window open upon the pitch of high night and her windshield glazed with a brilliance of impossible sunlight, she saw in her mind’s eye the astronomical consequences of her actions: the earth’s rotation slowed to a halt before restarting the opposite way, as with Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the other planets in the solar system, likewise the frothy limbs of the Milky Way, and more, for the red-shifted galaxies of forever far dimmed into a newborn blue, flying at near light speed to their point of origin. At the same time, other planets broke into pieces and fanned out in retro-churns, coming together with other pieces of planets in other solar systems to finally join via supernova a dying sun’s body, and more, billions of suns winking out and then reforming through ultraviolent light-birth into ancient suns. Black holes regurgitated the polychromatic ingredients of existence until dry heaving into supernovae, then red supergiants, then massive blue stars, then stellar nebulae. Neutron stars subsumed Morse code messages from across the universe till they imploded with compacted information. Extraterrestrial spaceships undiscovered fathoms of their cosmic oceans, returning home as amnesiacs, their civilizations disassembling, devolving, finally gathering after forms and forms into a sleep of consciousness within puddles of primordial ooze or some extremophile niche in the bowels of their proto-worlds, inhaling life. An atom, and countless like it, that once participated in the rapid eye movement of a dreaming being now merged into the crucible of a star in another galaxy, the whole of which blossomed inward, a lumen-muted bud. These upside-down inside-out fireworks occurred until all and Everything became closer and closer, laws refracted and combined, and in a burst of hypermagnetism, matter and antimatter coalesced into a glowless jewel suspended in nonexisting existence, aching with a millionfold murmur before descending amid kaleidoscopic silence.

The lattice of the silence lightning-splintered when she saw in her rearview mirror a blanket-draped child crawling on hands and knees into the road and she slammed her stockinged foot into the glacial ridges of the brake pedal so quickly she could hear the tires’ extended shrill, audio seemingly edited by an unseen hand, and her car slid, painting the road with streaks of elastomer, only ending with the pain-laden scream of the child.

          In brain’s mind and soul’s body, Jasper could felt that time is shatter.

The lattice of the silence lightning-splintered when the organ of her skin pin-tingled and she let go of the wheel so that she could use her nails to scratch scrape scuff the ichi itch that felt like shichi shichi shichi itches, shit! the nails digging all over her neck and breast, forehead and forearm, shin and scalp, knee and armpit, teeth and nails, lips and eyes, throat and heart, causing the delicate structure of her being to unravel into threads of DNA, residue conscious of then becoming loose-leaf atoms, as with her car, community, continent, and world, as with all and Everything, invisible marbles endlessly raining in the void.

The lattice of the silence lightning-splintered when all of existence did the same, and time didn’t just reverse, it ceased, all and her being, the increased blood flow in her body now clotted, her desperate thoughts laminated within frozen neurons. Reality refracted at numerous minutely altered angles in the omnipresence of cracked glass. On the fringe of eyes blinking, glue-watered, she saw this, and as with all and Everything, could do nothing.

The lattice of the silence lightning-splintered when time didn’t just reverse, it simultaneously fast-forwarded, and she could feel the temporal compression on her skeletal system, anterior-posterior, until a four-dimensional pop coincided with her body flattening and she collapsed on the car floor, a human accordion in one dimension, seeing all and Everything as ghost slices, an aurora borealis of ether.

The lattice of the silence lightning-splintered when her mind and body immatured to the point of babyhood, and with blubbery arms and legs bending and rotating about, puff-dough fingers grasping at the heated air, she blew a saliva bubble that exploded at the precipice of her rosebud nose and wailed, releasing the fluids of all and Everything that had been contained in such a tightly clothes-swaddled package. The heated air heated more, exponential, and she fell asleep while ogling a mobile of sun-pocked shapes: spheres, cones, helixes, pyramids, Klein bottles, tesseracts, polychorons, Mandelbulbs, Escher waterfalls, atomic tombs, chain links of Möbius strips, and a set of Borromean rings pulsating at a pitch the baby could only hear with the tips of her eyelashes. Those shapes, they spelled something equally maternal and eternal.

The lattice of the silence lightning-splintered when she felt an intangible wedge penetrate her fontanelle and unsuture her skull, splitting the imperfect symmetry of her all and Everything, and at the sound of a slug-suck she looked to her right and saw the raw being who was her mitosis twin who looked to her left and saw the raw being who was her mitosis twin. And out of an animalistic terror one or the other or both seized the steering wheel and totaled the SUV.

The lattice of the silence lightning-splintered when a cloud of red and blue lights surrounded her SUV, blotting out the sun even as they bombarded her brain with layered sirens. Pulling over, she witnessed sentient shadows emerge from the red-blue blindness, magnetic liquids coagulating to form the silhouettes of governmental authority. Their weaponry directed crisscrossing cones of light that shaped more shadows. They wrenched her car door open and then the lights merged as a conflagration upon her face to scorch her of all features, including those that signified fear and confusion. The shadows forced her upon the asphalt and immobilized her with the knees of nightmares.

The lattice of the silence lightning-splintered when backward was in fact forward and she noticed her wilting skin and its constellations of liver spots, her cataract eyes and talcum teeth, and the only knowledge she could formulate in her grayed brain took the form of a past-future memory of death, which encompassed all and Everything, and she could almost pronounce it if not for her shrunken tongue. Her heart pumped once more her evaporating blood before collapsing into itself, becoming a bio-star that would burn the rest of her and then some, reduced to red-tainted glints of light sometimes caught within the pupils of strangers, sometimes not.

         The lattice of the silence lightning-splintered when she persisted as the last consciousness, a cosmic wanderer afloat, witnessing the Milky Way and all the other galactic islands dim as they fled into an oblivion of absolute darkness and distance, a cold heat death devoid of awareness, of divinity. She couldn’t mourn, for mourning implied loss, and loss implied prior existence, but even that had vanished. And she could feel this absence of absence reverberate onto the shores of other universes that still pulsed, however feebly, with unknown sorrow.

          Shatter is time that felt Jasper, in body’s soul and mind’s brain.

In the year 1880, she took the form of the inventor Théodore Carmagnolle, testing at ocean’s bottom an atmospheric diving suit, the face an iron compound eye allowing him to peer out of window stalks at various angles, and he discerned fish swimming in sync to grander bodies through marine snow, onyx-eyed sharks inhaling microscopic currents of blood, and colorful coral with shapes ranging from candle wicks to brain sulci. The entirety of Théodore’s exoskeleton, over 800 pounds, felt light amid the physics of water. During the first test, he harbored skepticism regarding the suit’s ability to move, much less to endure containment, but after various modifications, the many joints formed from sections of concentric spheres turned out to be smooth and watertight. Every one of his breaths echoed in the anthropomorphic chamber, and he considered himself the sentient heart of this metal submarine man. And like a heart he remained both aware and unaware of the yearned-for destination. An umbilical cord connected to the diving suit’s fontanelle supplied him with oxygen, and with it sometimes came linguistic reverberations, his brother Alphonse’s whispers into the umbilical’s waterproof fabric. How are you, my brother? But he couldn’t reply, so he only listened, reminded that in this world where the ocean was atmosphere there existed a world outside, of air and clouds and other human beings, of love and loss. Any time, you know the signal. To return to that world, he need only reach up with his iron mitten, grip the cord, and pull it three times. But why would he want to do a thing like that, he thought as he stepped forward into a school of fish that blew across him like a breeze—subsumed into the super-creature if but for a moment—and when it birthed him the coral landscape stretched toward a ravishing point of pure light, yes, his yearned-for destination. There’s a vintage with your name on it, you brave bastard. As though caught in an undertow, he continued forward, passing through a gradient of blue to indigo and beyond, sodden light into darkest dark. Through his compound eye he also witnessed the biological gradient of evolution, for the marine life around him shrank, stretched out into spindles in some areas, creased and crimped in others, the surface of their slick skin crackling with bioluminescence until the creatures became consummate constellations. He beheld the stars of a squid gliding, a jellyfish propelling, a dinoflagellate floating, and above him swayed beaded strings of light from a siphonophore colony. But all of these lights proved inconsequential, for the point of pure light interested him most of all, and he continued toward it, his echoed breathing increasing. Claustrophobic at all? His brother’s whisper seemed a feeble voice transmitted from another galaxy altogether. In the saturated darkness, ebb and flow altered, and he occupied a space of his own, gone from both the world of water and the world of air. He found that he couldn’t walk anymore, but had to paddle his iron legs in the ether.We’re getting nervous up here. We’ll give you five more minutes. The point of pure light expressed a higher stage of radiance, and he saw that it bled out of a fissure in the hull of a sunken ship. When he approached the fissure, he used his iron mitten to peel open a hole large enough for him to swim through. Inside, he could hear only the muted clinking of crystal chandeliers in the abyss and the hyper-beat of his body, heart to the metal submarine man. Brother? And there the light flourished, clearer in its crystal blue, floating in the middle of absolute obscurity. He paddled forward some and his eyes dilated, allowing him to discern a boy with a coronal lure attached to his pallid forehead, his naked body suspended in formaldehyde darkness. As Théodore’s eyes further adjusted to the lure’s light, he saw that the boy’s mouth was the black beak of a giant squid, his toes and fingers fused into flippers, and gills filled in the space between the ridges of his ribs. A silicone rope of scar tissue started at the center of his clavicle and trailed down to his outie bellybutton. In most places his skin appeared so clear as to seem nonexistent. The boy spoke in a giddy voice, “Daddy, you made it! I knew you’d come for me, I just knew it.” “Son?” he said, temporarily fogging one of his window stalks. “But how?” His son died of cholera decades before, and in his final days Théodore had to wipe his boy’s brow, mouth, and buttocks, fluids escaping to prune his body, to sour his soul, and maybe that’s why his ecdysis lips kept forming the word, “Water, water.” Unable to quench his thirst before the end, Théodore and his wife decided to give their boy a water burial, sending him below the surface in an iron coffin with a porthole upon his blanched but peaceful face, and it seemed he had thrived in this underworld, his true home. “Is it really you?” His aquatic child spread his arms open for a hug. Théodore stepped forward to embrace him, but the suit’s umbilical cord began to retract, pulling Théodore slowly backward. His boy looked confused, then irritated, and he flew toward him, yelling, “Daddy!” As Théodore’s son closed his arms around him, the scar on the boy’s translucent chest opened into the impossible spike-toothed maw of an ancient angler, swallowing Théodore into another world, one of bile ducts and corrosive acids where love and loss dissolved.

Jasper cried without sound, scrambling out of her SUV and then faltering toward the back of her car to check on the blanket-draped child, no…not a child but a dog lay on his side, whimpering, his hind leg crumpled into his soot-stained body-nest of matted and curled fur.

“Oh, poor honey.”

Jasper stroked the marsh of his back, scratched behind his thorny ear. The whimpering descended and sputtered before ceasing altogether, and she looked into his emerald eye, at first enlarged and then half-closed in exhaustion. She didn’t believe in resurrection or reincarnation, but the circling iris of this wandering and injured dog made her imagine the universal maelstrom of atoms used and reused, and she could have sworn upon the feelings of her heart that this creature had come from the reformed constituents of a centuries-perished child, now without a home or mother, perhaps still clinging to those past-life memories with his canine neurons, translated into peculiar shapes of sadness.

As she hummed a lullaby, she carefully gathered the dog-child in her arms and said, “My precious Ian.” The origin of the name was a white blank, fading to black at the edges. It simply revealed itself, and she thought it perfect, wonderful and human and perfect. She put Ian in the passenger seat and after she placed her hand over the shift knob and pushed it backward, next to D, she drove home to take care of him.

Once she had washed and scrubbed Ian’s body-nest in the tub, mostly to loosen the fur’s carapace rigidity, she sheared it with heavy-duty clippers and excavated several meadowlarks who dashed from their burrow and blurred out the window. She felt as though she were sculpting Ian from a giant pellet of raw material. As his body lightened, so did his mood, and his cheekless smile was joker wide, his velvet-buttoned tongue lolling. Her face puckered in response to his reptilian breath, “Ooph.” She could almost delineate a green shimmer each time he breathed, the frequency of which heightened, and perhaps in his excitement he thought he could soon fly at peak lightness. Fecal matter and urine mazed through the plumbing, surfaced in the toilet bowl, and jump-squeezed into the bowels and bladder of an apparition. She noted in astonishment the miscellaneous items embedded in the pile of his fur: gum wads, cigarette butts, fishing line, bottle caps, a twisted spork, a balled page from the Bible, a broken dog collar, a porcelain doll’s bald head, and the bottom half of dentures, among other things. She stuffed it in a garbage bag without a second thought, and while she did so Ian had tried to get out of the tub but his injured leg prevented him, reduced to pawing at the tub’s rim with his forelegs and emitting murine whimpers all the while.

“Poor, poor, baby. It’s okay, Ian. You’re going to need one more washing.”

This time he could feel the warm water and the bubbling of the coconut-scented soap, as well as the pleasurable coarseness of the exfoliating sponge, and he alternated between baring his teeth and lapping the apple indent of her chin.

“Oh, I know, I know. It’s so tough. But it’ll be worth it.”

After his second bath, she used her own toothbrush and toothpaste to clean his coprophagic mouth, and he bent his head this way and bowed it that way, and she had to put him in a growling-snorting headlock to get it done, the toothpaste foam spewing and flinging from his black-lilac jowls in the manner of rabies. Next, she dried his coat with a whirring hairdryer, which at one point he tried to mangle but she withdrew the barrel in time. “Enough of that.” She treated his rear leg using a first-aid kit and wrapped it in a gauze. “Don’t you go biting this, Ian. I mean it.” The humming dryer in the laundry room cooled the clothes counterclockwise until they darkened with dampness. She stood, arms akimbo, and admired her dog-child. Aside from the bandage, which gave him character, he now looked like a pedigree-certified pooch. “Royalty.”

It remained a mystery as to how she accomplished the feat of cleaning and grooming Ian in her nearly empty house. Perhaps she had sheared his fur with the clippers of her bare fingers, scrubbed him with the sponge of her palm and the soap of her saliva, dried him with the heat of her heartfelt breath, etc. You see, in a fugue of hysteria after Everything had happened, she hired movers to take it all away, she didn’t care where, pick out whatever you want for yourselves, throw out the rest, I don’t need it anymore, it’s all a museum, a big comical museum, and her mad laugh alone made them rush to finish the task. She couldn’t remember how long it had been since Everything had happened, since the domestic purge, not because it didn’t matter, but because in her mind everything had kept its proper place, the house shifting from museum to protoplasm.

In the year 1805, she took the Form of Sacagawea of the Lemhi Shoshone tribe Akaitikka, the Eaters of Salmon, leading on Horseback Captain Meriwether Lewis, Second Lieutenant William Clark, and thirty-one other members of the Corps of Discovery through the Bitterroot Mountains of the Rockies. Although they followed her through such precarious passages where Wild Spirits preyed, little did they know that she was lost but for the guide of her Baby kept to her Back, an external Heart in a Cloth Womb, pulsing against the center of her Spine and showing her the Way. The White Men mostly kept their distance, whether out of Fear or Respect she did not know. Lewis most of all treated her Child like an Absence, although she remained Grateful for his potion of Snake’s Rattle which had aided her difficult delivery a few months ago. Conversely, Clark gazed upon her Baby as though he were a Totem, and while she named him Jean-Baptist, Clark christened him Pompy, the springy sound of the endearment reminding her of bambi, the Shoshone word for the Head. Perhaps Clark sensed the importance of her Son, that he was more than a mere Infant, but possessed Muscular Links to the Spirit World. Although she shared a Spinal Language with her Child, she knew that there existed more in his Seeing Eyes than she could possibly comprehend. For instance, as they sailed up the Missouri River, she sang a lullaby to Jean-Baptist about Issa the Wolf, Creator of Spirit and Flesh, Water and Earth, and her Baby opened his Mouth to attempt his first Word. Sacagawea smiled in anticipation, but no Word came, or if it did it took the Form of a Squall that made the Captain lose control of the Boat and nearly capsize it, the River Water dancing between Rainbow Colors. She reflected on that message of Wrathful Wind, of Epileptic Spectrums, and wondered if it should be regarded as a warning, and maybe she made a mistake by helping the White Men, but it proved difficult to know for sure. And before she surprisingly met her long-lost brother Chief Cameahwait in their effort to obtain Horses, they had encountered Cloud-swarms of Mosquitoes that attached like Tree Splinters to the exposed Skin of their Bodies, and only the sharpness of Blades successfully removed them, yet Jean-Baptiste remained immaculate, blushing like Rose Petals. The Mosquitoes must have known that his Blood flowed no differently than Pure Wind and that a single sip would have sundered their Carapaces in two. And she noticed that the White Men traveling nearest Jean-Baptist had a higher chance of developing strange maladies: boils that reflected the surface of the Moon during Suntime, Toes that turned into Tree Roots and bored beneath the Earth to drink Groundwater, Pupils that gluttonously ate Light to the point of Blindness (or Second Sight), and the spontaneous Defecation of Bird Eggs (all dashed against Rocks by the fearful White Man Mothers, except for one that Hatched to reveal a Newborn Double, which the Original hurriedly aborted), among other oddities. The Plants and Animals spoke to Sacagawea in the Language of Medicine and Sustenance, and she concocted remedies out of Goose Berries and Camas Root, Buffalo Meat and Furs, Salmon and Trout. But she sometimes heard Words like Witch and Sorceress whispered as Eyes speared the back of her Head, deflected by her Baby’s Cryptic Aura. Still, she didn’t blame the White Men for their Fear.

Come Twilight, their Horses trotted onto a Left-Hand Trail above which the Disembodied Eyes of Owls peppered the Limbs of Trees like Leaves. Some blinked, but most watched with uninterrupted Judgement. When one of the White Men said, “I’ve a funny feeling,” they heard an Echoed Screech enwrapped in rustling and a White Man screamed in agony as Silent Talons wrenched him upward into a Tree Crown. Brandishing torches, The White Men burned and singed the Tree Trunk, the Owl Eye Leaves, despite Sacagawea telling them, “No! You mustn’t!” and then the Tree regurgitated the White Man at their Feet, the formerly eaten Man unhurt but for Talon holes on each side of his Shoulders and the sting of the Digestive Tree Sap that drenched him. Everyone galloped at full speed out of that Trail and only after they entered a small clearing of Darkness did they stop for Sacagawea to treat the White Man’s wounds and to make Camp. By then she could feel their Eyes spearing not the back of her Head but her External Heart, Jean-Baptiste.

At Dawn’s break, Clark overslept in his Tent and the White Men harangued him and hollered obscenities from outside, until Lewis entered to wake him and said, “Judas priest!” After an anxious moment, he exited the Tent with a Skunk Kitten bundled in his arms, his Stone Face dripping with Olive Skunk Squirt. Words of Black Magic and Witchcraft were not-so-whispered by the White Men now, and Lewis handed Sacagawea the bundle while saying, “Do not think we’re unaware of what’s occurring. Remedy this monstrosity, or it’ll be your undoing.” She attempted to scrub Clark’s wooly Head in a nearby Stream, but this effected no change in his illness. She realized that she must cure the curse by bathing the Baby Buhni’atsi in a Transforming Waterfall, and she carried it in a Cloth Womb over her Breasts, wondering why Jean-Baptist had done this. Perhaps he intended to bring the White Men closer to Nature, for they had long abandoned Her, even while traversing across a valve of Her Heart.

They followed Sacagawea many paces behind, going up and down winding forking Paths, the White Men’s guide vigilant of Wild Spirits in any and all Forms, until at last she heard the Liquid Flute of Yellowstone River, and when she saw it she kept it at her side until they encountered roaring growling whimpering Yellowstone Falls. She explained to Lewis what it would take to remedy Clark’s curse. Slowly, Lewis nodded, his Olive-stained Eyes unblinking, and then a solemn voting commenced. Rather than any White Man doctor or medicine, the majority, swayed by their Awe and Fear of her External Heart, ruled in the Waterfall’s favor. And so, with half their numbers atop the Cliff and the rest, including Sacagawea and Lewis, at the Mist-Winded Bottom, someone in the former group pitched the Skunk Kitten into the Rapids and the Animal fell as a black-white-striped dot. Thrashing amid the Cloud-patched Water, Limbs reaching, Head bulging, Tail shrinking, he metamorphosed into a White Man once again, his Body spared the Rock Spears and Rock Tomahawks, finally retrieved by his Brethren where the Water Calmed. Some of the White Men cheered and yipped while most remained silent, aside from a Cicada dispersion of whispers. Spitting up Water, Clark stood Naked and Drip-ridden, stumbling as if awoken mid-Dream before Clark’s Night Man wrapped the former Skunk in several Wool Blankets, and succumbing to exhaustion he rested on all fours like a Wilted Buffalo. Fear became Sacagawea as she realized the pulses on her Spine had ceased, and she reached behind for her External Heart only to find an Absence, the Cloth Womb flattened against her Back. She turned around and witnessed Lewis holding high Jean-Baptist upside-down by his Ankle. Lewis brandished in his other Hand an Onyx Rock, and with a hysteric voice said, “Another vote, gentlemen! Who thinks I should crush the head of evil with this here rock!” The White Men stared, as motionless as Albino Pillars. “What say you! Are we all just pawns to this one’s Satanic power?” And a Red-Sun glow developed in her Baby’s Stomach amid his squirms. At first soundless, her Child teetered on the precipice of releasing an anguished wail, and like his first Word it was more than that, expressing itself as a Light-boom that shrouded the entirety of the Corps of Discovery while Sacagawea dove into the Yellowstone River, her body protected by a Cocoon of Water and Mist, except her left Arm, Shoulder, and Eye, which suffered scorching. She emerged from the Aquatic Cocoon with invisible Bird Wings upon her Back, and she bolted Skyward to witness many different Animals roaming the Blackened Ground below: a disoriented Clark Stag, a confused Lewis Snake, a stunned Toussaint Hog, a freed Night Man Nightingale, everything from Horses to Hummingbirds, all and each to his own Essence. She flew onward, and with her few charred parts she managed to See and Touch the Spirit World in Full, while her other Eye and the rest of her Body remained in chains of Flesh, and so she would simultaneously search both Worlds for whatever Form her Child now took, be it Breath or Beast, Wind or Water, Issa the Wolf or his trickster brother Coyote, or All as One.

The next day, Jasper ate breakfast by sitting on a chair not there, her knees bent at a 45-degree angle, her spine straight, her elbows propped on a table not there, holding a spoon not there to scoop up milk and cereal not there from a bowl not there and into her malnourished mouth. She loved crunchy cereal, a chaotic music orchestrated by her teeth and tongue, and she thought Ian could hear it too, his ear pulled upward, his glands salivating with envy. But she had already fed him, poured dog chow not there from a big bag not there into a bowl not there and he stuck his nose into the area to eat whatever was there or not. The hammer of a mousetrap yawned and the broken neck bones of a dead mouse mended as his brain flickered and he crawled away from the platform’s cheese. When she finished her non-breakfast, she washed the spoon and bowl not there with a sudsy sponge not there and listened to how the paw of Ian’s gauzed leg, out of sync with the rest of him, awkwardly tapped the hardwood floor around the kitchen, the dog sniffing with his glistening snout for food not there, only the crumbs of forgotten meals and the occasional moth or lizard, sometimes alive, sometimes desiccated.

Jasper went to the living room and, through some telepathy, received an incoming phone call, her mouth emitting the ring by vibrating her tongue’s tip against her front incisors—r-r-ring, r-r-ring, r-r-ring—but she feared who it might be, so she let it go to voicemail, and her mouth, in the voice of her boss, played the message after the beep: “Jasper? Jasper, pick up the phone. Jasper? Look, we know what you’re going through. I mean, we can’t know. It’s just, just horrible. And, look, we’ve let you have free reign up until now. I mean, we’ve tried to understand and allow you to heal, to pick the pieces or…um. Jasper? Why aren’t you at work today? I mean really, why? I’m…this can’t go on forever. I’m sorry. Call me back as soon as you get this message. I’m sorry. Just…okay?”

She heard whimpering and for a terrified second she thought that Ian had gotten hurt somehow by someone but she turned and saw him sitting in front of the sliding glass door that led to the backyard. With his foreleg he pawed at the glass and his nails sounded in Jasper’s ears as a fork biting into the surface of a plate. “No!” Ian cocked his head toward her, his ears fallen, the irises of his emerald eyes circling with anticipation, with entreaty. “Oh, forgive me, Ian.” She went over to him and stroked his smooth back and kissed him on his teddy bear head, her nose taking in the corn-chip smell of his fur. A chimney imbibed smoke that mixed with fire and ashes below to slowly create a pair of logs resting upon a hearth’s steel grate. Whispering in his ear, she explained that going outside was too dangerous, all and Everything could get him, hurt him. Looking at his inward hind leg, the white of the gauze contrasting with his coat so as to appear void-like, the paw held in place by magnetic absence, she said that he should know all about it, the danger and uncertainty and loss, that we have everything we need under this roof, all the food and water and love any child could ever need, yes, they had each other, what else could possibly matter? He whimpered once more then licked her cheek with his wet-sand tongue. “You’re killing me, Ian,” she said, and pecked him on the fluffy flap of his ear.

In an oddly elated mood, she spent the rest of the day doing chores. She vacuumed, perhaps sucking up dirt and dust bunnies with her oval mouth, residue accumulating in the crevices between her teeth. She took out the garbage by hefting a heavy bag not there and putting it inside a container not there at the end of the driveway. Ian regurgitated parts of Jasper’s face and soldered them to the flesh of her bleeding head with his teeth, emptying his shriveling stomach. She washed a load of clothes, perhaps spinning them in her hands while spraying them with saliva. She cooked dinner by preparing ingredients not there and putting them in a glass pan not there then placing it in an oven to bake a casserole not there. After eating her non-dinner, she took a shower, her eyes mesmerized by the stop-motion forking and zigzagging of the water droplets on her thighs and arms, her breasts and stomach, and some of them slid upward, rising from her skin and entering the showerhead’s mandala of perforations. When she finished showering, she had one foot in the tub and another on a stringy bathmat not there, reaching for a towel not there, and there was Ian, sticking his lint-speckled snout through the door’s crack. She stilled herself, legs astride, and he limped forward, his head now fully in the bathroom, and his emerald eyes expressed a knowing as they moved from her bloodless toes up to her freckled knee, then the hairy obscurity radiating from her crotch followed by her outie bellybutton, her semi-erect nipple, her parted lips, her own knowing eyes, and neither she nor he moved. Her skin, warm from the memory of the heated water, had tightened in the cool drafts, and only the intermittent falling of droplets on the tub and tiles defied the silence. After some dozen soft splashes, she said in a light scold, “Ian.” He had always echoed his father’s features, but never more than now, and with her left forearm she covered her breasts and with her right hand her crotch.

In the final hours of the day she indulged in a bit of solitude while Ian spent time in his room, and she read aloud a novel not there, composing the story with the skill of someone she once knew, until she got bored and picked up a remote not there and turned on a TV not there, flipping through channels not there until she got to Jeopardy!, playing the show’s audio from her mouth, first the theme song—“duh-nuh-nuh-nuh-duh-nuh-nuh”—and then the introduction of the contestants, et cetera.

She possessed veiled and tunneled memories of the mistakes before, when she reversed in frantic negligence, and between the day’s activities or during them, some spliced timeline, she decided to be more methodical, primed, transforming her car into something that would offer more control over herself, an automobile doppelgänger. A ritual preparation unfolded in the garage: she emptied the wiper fluid and replaced it with her tears by focusing through the haze of her varied deaths to induce crying spells; she emptied the A/C’s refrigerant and replaced it with a mixture of perfumes floral, oriental, citrus, oceanic, and more; she emptied the tank of gasoline and replaced it with her type O negative blood, the donations coming from her fingertips or wrists on one day, then from her palm or elbow crease on another; she shaved off half of her hair and mixed it with the dust and stray strands that had collected in the crevices of the house, after which she taped the toupee mass to the roof of the car; she cut up her clothes with scissors and sewed the pieces together to create seat covers; she snapped the heels off a couple pairs of stilettos and stuck them in the hubcaps in the manner of no such gladiator wheels; she taped silver tassel earrings to the side mirrors; dissatisfied with the ophidian headlights of her eyes, she covered them with electrical tape and painted twin green irises on the cycloptic sclera of the windshield; the chrome grill evoked her high school braces, metal mouth, and she licked her central incisors before removing the grill to let free the radiator of her teeth. She stood, arms akimbo, and admired her SUV-self, the experience akin to gazing into a funhouse mirror squared. “Uncanny.”

It remained a mystery as to how she accomplished the feat of transforming the SUV using non-things in her nearly empty house. Perhaps she had torn off her earlobes and used congealed blood to glue them to the side mirrors, stuck thick twigs from her backyard into the hubcaps, painted her irises on the windshield with her blood as pigment and fingers as brush, etc. The mirror in the living room released the light of incorporeal events: Jasper rubbed and framed her baby bulge, and her husband, on his knees, picked up with his lips circles of saliva around her outie bellybutton; donning a cone party hat, Ian sucked in air and ignited the candles of a birthday cake; a shattered wine glass pieced together against the wall and glided into Jasper’s hand; tears slid up into Jasper’s eyes as she inhaled the word “divorce.” Before she left the garage, she brushed with her fingertips the antenna that jutted from the vehicle’s left tail light and felt a series of sparks escape from the center of her forehead and spread across her scalp, partly painful, partly pleasurable. The antenna acted as a semi-intangible skyward rod of prayer, wishes and worries directed at god and gods, at Mother Nature and the cosmos, at all and Everything that might listen and react by chance and coincidence. Reception, the plucking of string-waves from the air, the way in which a voice returned to sender, both heard and not, said and not, whispered into the dead satellite of the lips’ own ear. The antenna, an instrument of mystery, but whence it came? And then she had a strange idea and before she could question it she walked to the front of the car and unlatched the hood to view the engine of her brain, and she could see that she could see, she knew what she knew, and between the fuse box and intake manifold, deeper, she saw what she didn’t want to see, knew for a nanosecond what she didn’t want to know, and she slapped the support rod away, her cranium-hood crashing down upon her engine-brain. A headache betided, and she clasped her hands to cease their shuddering, after which she retreated to the bathroom to brush her teeth using a toothbrush and toothpaste not there and later fell asleep on a bed not there, perhaps floating three feet off the floor.

In the year 1316, she took the form of Clementia of Hungary, queen consort of France, pushing forth without a scream her newborn baby, and she imagined that the awe and fear in the midwife’s face as she beckoned parturition reflected the saturated baby’s feelings. Humors commingling in her pregnant body, Clementia of Hungary felt connected to her offspring by more than simple biology but also telepathy, and she remained privy to his experience even while she felt the agony of an over-efflorescent cave hewn from the rippled flesh between her legs by the heir’s colossal cranium. Who could dream of abandoning a uterine kingdom in which one’s every desire was satiated and more? Who could bear to entertain the nightmare of exile from such a castle cavity into the undiscovered country? Something like this occurred with the heir’s father, her husband the king who died of a quarreling heart during a jeu de paume competition not yet two moons ago, although rumors of poisoning have already proliferated. Long live the king. The queen’s newborn began to wail, rupturing her solemn silence. Held aloft by the midwife, instinct caused the infant king to clasp his own umbilical cord, the definitive connection to his private kingdom, and with careful tenderness the midwife sliced it, causing his hands to release and his arms to spread outward, and she knotted it. After a pat on the back forced the fluids of the infant king’s former realm from his mouth and nostrils, he was washed and handed to his mother, who couldn’t help but think of her beloved husband. In the realm of death, what forces formulated the postnatal equivalent of the afterlife, and what did one eventually birth into? Perhaps this, their son the infant king, love as the alchemical ingredient of pure being. Clementia kissed his thermal brow and he smiled with pink tongue peeking out and raised his tulip fists, and the love she felt seemed mistakenly linked with another feeling, that of an incremental emptying, and the midwife beheld the area betwixt the queen’s splayed legs and whispered something to her god as she pressed layers of embroidered cloths against Her Majesty’s swollen vagina. And even then the queen equated her exsanguination with exuberant love, her lifeblood either soaked in cloths or pooled baptismally on the floor. Before her emerald irises disappeared into socket darkness, she saw the infant king blow a series of semi-connected saliva bubbles, sliding past each other and only rupturing in unison at the astral canopy’s touch.

         Through no will of her own, the late Clementia of Hungary, former queen consort of France, discovered the undiscovered country without so much as departing from the royal bedchamber. She had exhaled herself out of her own mouth, her pallid corporeal form left behind upon the feather mattress, but her newborn could not follow, held in an early onset rigor mortis embrace from his deceased mother. Skirt gripped in her hands, the midwife had shuffled through the halls as fast as she could, shrieking and praying for help, and finally returned with miscellaneous others. The late Clementia surveyed her surroundings in fretfulness, seeing everything and everyone draped in peacock blue shadows, tendrils swaying with a wind from the void, and her feelings exacerbated when she witnessed the infant king’s ursine uncle dislodging the newborn from her inflexible arms. “Return my son at once!” but her voice, an unworldly howl, remained unheard by the likes of the living. She attempted to take her son from his uncle’s hold but her grasp only passed through them both, and she felt their traumatized humors. Since her exhalation into the Hereafter, the infant king had not ceased wailing, petite twin fountains of youth arcing out of his tear ducts. His uncle placed the infant king in his velvet bassinet and still the tears sprang. As others took her corpse away and the day became deep night, she howled with lupine persistence, perhaps some version of those sounds rebounding throughout the castle as thunderous gales, or maybe reduced to mere whispers, indecipherable, and her baby continued to cry, and though she tried to stroke his flaxen hair strands or rub his crystal ball belly, nothing ameliorated their melancholy. “Dear Lord, what must I do?”

         After she asked this futile question, his ursine uncle entered the bedchamber and approached the velvet bassinet. Crouching, he so easily stroked the infant king’s flaxen hair strands and whispered, “There, there” and then hummed a bard’s tune. He did everything the late Clementia couldn’t, and soon his uncle’s affection stoppered the geysers of her baby’s eyes. Before she fully understood her own actions, she stepped forward and entered the body of his ursine uncle and instantly felt overweight and damp, conscious of a saline droplet vertically lubricating in between the hirsute cheeks of her rump, among a fetid rainstorm of other droplets elsewhere in her bloated crevices, and although she could feel the sensations of his uncle’s existence, she still couldn’t feel the touch of her baby’s brow, nor his roseate cheek, nothing, and so, still possessing his uncle, she fetched the nearest pillow, its fabric decorated with golden vines and pale flowers. Clamping it on each side with her thin hands, she placed it over the infant king’s relaxed and innocent face, his blubber-segmented legs starting to kick, and when they ceased their desperate motion she lifted the pillow, and his infant ghost crawled out of his gummy mouth, the second birth. In conjunction with an omnipresent rustle, the ceiling of the bedchamber vanished and the sky blossomed into the quintillion-colored firmament of Heaven divine and a stained-glass cone of light flashed upon the infant ghost, causing him to drift upward, ethereal ankle wings aflutter, but she grasped his heel and gently pulled him toward her for an embrace, and the light flickered out as Heaven sealed once again, but she didn’t mind, for she could feel him, and he could feel her. Amid a rigmarole of politics, his ursine uncle ascended the throne, but in the cosmos of her bedchamber she ignored everything except her son’s shadow-draped smile. She inhaled and began to form the void into song: Mon trésor, mon John, sombre dans un profond sommeil….

         Yet something about protoplasmic breastmilk made it insubstantial, and her infant ghost, nutrient-deprived, never grew beyond the mind and body of a newborn. In fact, he reduced over time, from infant to chimerical fetus, acquiring a menagerie of various animal parts—gill pouches, a seahorse tail, a porcine nose, a corpuscular unicorn, webbed toes and paws—and then he further devolved into a biological dot in the center of her palm, his singularity evaporated into purgatory by the heat of her heartbroken breath.

            With the advent of morning, Jasper awoke to find herself spooning the lost-found body of her precious Ian. Whenever he had nightmares, under the glow-in-the-dark stars not there on the ceiling above his bed not there, he would sometimes sleepwalk to his mother, like now, and allow her to hug him in her slumber, to squeeze out all the somnambulant badness. She held his paw in her hand, massaging his leathery toe beans, and after she heard Ian’s tuba toot she sprung up and said, “All yours, nasty nasty.” Events incorporeal of light released in the living room’s mirror: Jasper swallowed stomach acid and edible debris as it rose from the toilet bowl; Ian frowned once his skull-vast eyes met his mother’s; Jasper’s husband scrubbed a magenta lipstick stain onto the collar of his work shirt; her husband dismantled the planetary mobile above Ian’s crib—goodnight earth, goodnight moon. After they both ate a non-breakfast and Ian relieved himself on a pee pad not there by his bedroom door, she distracted him from his urge to go out in the backyard by playing tug-of-war with him in the living room, perhaps using her forearm as a chew toy, and his body curved back and forth like a shark above the water’s surface, yet no onyx-eyed marine predator was he, for his emeralds expressed a deeper knowing than ever. Eventually he tuckered out and lay on his back, exposing his whorled belly for a rub, his tongue draped across his jaw and long enough to graze the floor. She rubbed slowly to bring him down from his excitement, to reduce his panting, and she could feel his shipwrecked ribs. His stomach made a noise like a cartoon bomb dropping, but carbonated. “Ian, Ian, Ian. Don’t you tell me you’re not eating enough,” and as she said that, she doubted the noise’s source, whether it came from his stomach or hers, perhaps both. She looked outside to dispel the confusion and her eyes landed upon a red-bellied woodpecker in a tree, her wings an optical illusion of black and white, and Jasper remembered how she used to love feeding them, all species of birds, not as a child, nor now, but as the same person elsewhen, a sideways time. She couldn’t hear the bird’s shrill chirping, so she walked to the sliding glass door and opened it. Along with the ambience of wind came the bird’s mantra: kwirr kwirr kwirr. If only she possessed an avian Rosetta stone, then she could decode this musical language, become privy to the secrets of the winged. Snarl-barking, Ian rushed between Jasper’s legs and tried to jump toward the woodpecker. “Ian! Get back here!” The bird rotated her mechanical head in the opposite direction and took flight, wings beating sunward, farther and farther away into a black cross of infinite disappearance.

And then the spectrum of Jasper’s facial features dissipated into points and extended into lines that conformed to the aerodynamics of her skull, for she received an incoming phone call, her mouth emitting the ring by vibrating her tongue’s tip against her front incisors—r-r-ring, r-r-ring, r-r-ring—but she feared who it might be, so she let it go to voicemail, and her mouth, in the voice of her boss, played the message after the beep: “Jasper? Jasper, answer the phone. Jasper? Look, you can’t just not show up to work and expect no penalties. I mean, no consequences. It’s just, just unprofessional. And, look, we’ve let you skip so much work already. I mean, we’ve let you have so many personal days, to allow you to mend, to fix all the parts or…um. Jasper? Why aren’t you at work again? I mean truly, why? I’m…this can’t go on anymore. I’m sorry. Call me back right when you get this message. I’m sorry. Only…okay?”

She heard a muffled woof and saw Ian sitting by a hole he had dug in the yard and he held in his mouth by its handle a rust-splotched astronaut lunchbox, its moon turned russet, the lunar module enwrapped in a copper cloud. She approached the dog and kneeled in front of him, and with shuddering hands she grasped the lunchbox, and his throat hummed with the beginnings of a growl, his head turning away some. “Drrrop iiit.” As she placed it on the ground between them, she thought, Why this spot, why this hole, why this, why, and she decided to think of it as anything other than an accident, neither chance nor coincidence, for this dog wanted to remind her of something, someone. She unlatched the lid to view the contents of her and her son’s brain, and she could see that she could see, she knew what she knew, that they created this together, this time capsule, so that little parts of his childhood and her parenthood could be unearthed on an altered earth, one where they no longer existed, the far future where new humans with different lives could marvel at the mystery of their mnemonic trinkets, or simply to remind her now of all and Everything.

The first item she plucked from the astronaut lunchbox time capsule? A little see-through plastic bag containing her son Ian’s baby tooth. They all sprouted slowly, she recalled, marrow snow collecting on the peaks of his pink gums, this tiny tooth the quickest, and she had felt it on her nipple when he breastfed, remora-suctioned, once stinging her and causing her to pull away, then little Ian’s eyelids creased and crimped and his mouth opened in a soundless outburst, at which point she spotted a minuscule pearl of blood on the edge of her areola. That incarnadine pearl marked the reality of his inevitable growth, made it tangible in her mind, and the power that came with that reality, power that could ruin her, whether he knew it or not.

She replaced the bagged tooth and picked up a purple plush alien, its limbs and features human but distorted, yet still conforming to body symmetry. She couldn’t remember how Ian had obtained it, perhaps he found it under a staticky slide at the playground, the thing half-covered in rubber mulch, needing a wash to get rid of the dirt and stains and smoggy stench. When she took it out of the dryer and presented it to him in her cupped palms, he clapped and christened it Lazy, the “a” pronounced in the same way as the beginning of Lazarus. After she tried to correct his pronunciation, he said, “Not lazy, Læææzy,” and he snatched it from her and swung it around by its head-sized hands, laughing and exclaiming, “He used to fly!” Ian saw the plush alien as something of an imaginary friend, and he always made sure she set out a plate of food at the dinner table for Lazy. “He wants to eat too, like us. He wants to fit in.” As they ate, Lazy sat in Ian’s old highchair, and Ian engaged in one-sided conversations with him, “How’s the food, Lazy?”

Lazy always slumped, his landscape tongue sticking out of his inflated lips, cosmic-focused eyes never blinking, and he replied, “…”

“Me too. Mom’s the best.”

“…”

“Not, uh. Not true.”

“…”

“You’re lying.”

“…”

“Whatever. Candy Land later?”

“…”

“Yeah, right.”

And she and her husband Steve pretended not to notice, allowed the buildup of imagination to exhaust itself, and it did. One day, a few minutes after they sat down for dinner, Jasper asked, “Where’s Lazy?” And Ian looked up from his fork-raked mashed potatoes and said, “Huh? Oh, he had to leave.” That’s why it surprised her when Ian brought him back from his absence for placement in the time capsule, his embroidered eyes closed in funereal contemplation.

And Lazy, still contemplating, now returned to his tin coffin. She picked up a tarnished silver bicycle bell at the plush alien’s flat feet, then pushed the trigger, and a triple melodious ring slid down the antihelical folds of her ears and into the bell’s blurred casing. The sound evoked an unremembrance of her son backpedaling his bicycle, away from the dangerous street, the erratic city, the too-open world, and farther, swallowing “Mom!” and smile shrinking until he returned to Jasper’s balancing grip and dismounted, after which he removed his metallic blue helmet and stood by to watch Steve use a wrench and uninstall the bike’s training wheels. Her maternal fear took the form of a new memory, or an old one heightened to dizziness, for she knew where Ian had gone, a trajectory beginning with the vacancy of the cave between her legs, the protective cocoon of his crib, then his bedroom, all the places where she could nurture him. The bell might as well have been a klaxon, warning her of hazards that only he could deal with while alone out there, but threats not just out there, in here as well. Hazard in the shape of a husband. The bell slipped from her palm and clanged into the time capsule.

She recalled putting more than these few items inside, but how many in total? She emptied the contents upon the grass—nothing she hadn’t already seen. A tree in the backyard shook off the birds and squirrels in its crown then absorbed its leaves before its limbs and trunk fell vertically into the earth and tucked itself into a seed amid soil. Then she scoured with her fingers the astronaut lunchbox time capsule’s innards and felt something, the edge of feathered paper. Peering inside, it seemed empty but for the light that ricocheted. She touched in the same area and again the invisible edge. “Ow!” It had given her a horizontal paper cut on the tip of her index finger. She licked the pale red slice and kept it between her lips for a second, considering something. She reached for the edge a third time, but not as fast, instead slowly stroking it, feather or cloud or smoke, not there but certainly there. She pinched it between thumb and middle finger and yanked, realizing that this was one of the rolled-up hidden dimensions she had heard about on the radio, now subject to the whim of her curiosity, and like an unbottled note that spills inked words of longing and reminiscence, like an unfurled tapestry that reveals precious family heirlooms from dust-reduced ancestors, the unrolled-up hidden dimension geysered forth a multitude of objects: a yellow flashlight, a wedge of green cheese, a royal pillow case, a bisected fig, an iron mitten, a cloth womb, a black-white wristwatch, the powdery pelt of a hare, a paper airplane, an umbilical stump, a snake’s fang, an icosahedral diamond the size of an eye, filial glints, the pin to a flashbang grenade, a rattle potion, an angler’s snuffed lure, infrared seeds, and untold more.

         In the year 2001, she took the form of Laura the pregnant accountant, stapling together the corners of two sheets of paper on the 100th floor of the North Tower when a deafening burst from below knocked her backward in her chair and, like hawking a loogie, her baby expelled prematurely from her womb, first punching a hole in the crotch of her granny panties, then vaulting the hem of her skirt and landing on her desk, splattering blood and amniotic fluid all over her important documents. While screams and wails from her coworkers filled the cubicles, she could only focus on the murine cries of her too-early baby, and an alarming instinct, a flight response, caused her to chew through the worm shell of her umbilical cord, the taste like al dente calamari. Once freed of her organic encumbrance, Laura stood and reached for the nearest sheet of paper and began to fold an airplane while she hummed a lullaby to calm her baby boy, and she could see in her peripheral vision that he started to relax, shedding less red-stained tears, curiously licking bodily fluids from his tendril lips and smiling a crescent of gums. She had been a paper airplane expert in high school and engineered eccentric combos of creases and folds in order to win every class and regional competition. Even while her planes performed a medley of aerobatic maneuvers with finesse—barrel rolls, hammerheads, inverted spins, infinity swoops, Immelmann turns, inside and outside loops—they always flew the fastest and the farthest. She had received her training from a homeless origami master who lurked by the dumpsters beside her high school and folded cardboard, wrapping paper, packing peanuts, aluminum foil, anything he could find, into innovative plane designs. “Trained” wasn’t exactly the correct word, for if she approached him he would shriek like a bird-raised waif, so she studied the movements of his dexterous fingers and hands with the aid of binoculars, once stealing a delicate fiberglass design that nearly got her neck caught in his infuriated strangle. After all her winnings, she went to the national competition, and when her turn came she gazed into the crowd and spotted the twitching savant, one eye puckered shut and the other fissured eye all too knowing, and she misstepped as she threw the airplane and it performed a Pugachev Cobra into a bystander’s shaven cranium. After that sudden blunder, she never folded so much as a paper fortune teller. But the plane she now folded proved different from anything else she had created before. It contained a cockpit. After she finished, she coughed, breaking her Ritalin focus, aware of the vines of vile smoke tracing her innards. Her son’s vein-lidded eyes blinked with a knowledge of the emergency situation, and he extended an E.T. index finger that shone a little gem of love and hope inside her fearing mind. “Okay, honey. We need to get you out of here. Don’t you worry,” and she picked him up, barely a sprouted potato in her palm, and she lumbered across the pulsing breathing floor through a hedge maze of smoke. She passed coughing coworkers made anonymous by fragments of cloth pressed into their faces as they slouched and stumbled in other directions. In the manner of a laboratory rat, she turned left right right left right, no, right left left right left, or she simply tiptoed on a tightrope like Philippe Petit, until by some miracle she reached a window of pure light where the wind loosely perforated a V-shape in the outside smoke. The multiple fangs of glass around the rectangular perimeter indicated that someone had already battered a copier, or their own body, through the window. When the tower itself started to cough, reverberating its skeletal structure, she quickly kissed her newborn son on the back of his translucent head, baptizing him with ashen saliva, and then placed him in the captain’s seat. His extraterrestrial fingers gripped the control wheel and when she put one foot forward and cocked her elbow, holding the paper airplane at the precise center of its gravity, a gaggle of embers fluttered into her face and scorched the cornea of her aiming eye, puckering it shut, forcing her to open the other eye wider, baring the entirety of the fissured hemisphere, and as she considered calculus and wind velocity, she knew that she already knew it, arc and all, for she had read those equations in the fissured eye of the origami master, yes, he had attended her competition, away from his precious dumpsters, not for revenge but to warn her of this prophecy, this throw that mattered more than anything else because the broiling air would have to bear her son safely to earth, and much hinged on this precarious takeoff. P = 0.00256 * V2… L = 0.6 * CI * r * V2 * A…a = dv/dt = -g * (1 + v^2 / Vt^2). As the savant shrieked the calculations over and over in her mind, she ejected her forearm, flicked her wrist, and let open the pinch of her fingertips, after which she covered her eyes in anomalous prayer. Piloting the paper airplane, the preemie surfed upon a wave of sulfuric smoke, nosedived through a wind-churned funnel, performed an aileron roll between the bent legs of a falling man….

Memories and anti-memories bombarded Jasper’s consciousness, timelines parallel and perpendicular, timecrisscrosses and timezigzags, timespirals stacked and folded, creased and crimped into illogical origami, and she could feel her hippocampus twist into a golden ratio, “Oh, oh no. This isn’t right, none of it’s right.” In the throes of a lightning-splintered headache, she hefted the dog in her trembling hands and retreated to the garage where she put him in the passenger seat of the SUV. In the driver’s seat, Jasper hit the button to open the garage door, and during its roll toward the horizontal tracks, she saw in the rearview mirror that it disappeared above while also leaving a shadow of itself behind. She said in her head, “Reverse,” a command, and she placed her hand over the shift knob and pushed it forward, next to R, and she drove in reverse through the ghost garage door, out of the driveway and down Crumble Oak Avenue, right on Silk Way, and then turning left on the long stretch of road between two HOAs, the whole time smelling the car’s exhaust, a concoction of the sour scent of her urine and the bitter scent of her feces, and on the radio she heard her own schizoid thoughts, a white noise of multi-cosmic recollections: “Are you all alone?” “We…finally…see…what…there…is…to…see.” Ssslide through the ssslime, oh if only you could ssslither like me. Any time, you know the signal. “No! You mustn’t!” “I’m sure you can’t hear me, nor understand me if you could, but…but I got two of my own, two boys.” “Think…what…do…the…particles…obey…what…are…all…things…subservient…to?” Perhapsss he isss there, perhapsss he isss not, how can you ssssincerely trussst me? “Judas priest!” “I can take you home with me.” “Return my son at once!” Yesss. There’s a vintage with your name on it, you brave bastard. “What say you! Are we all just pawns to this one’s Satanic power?” “Dear Lord, what must I do?” “Neil? Come in, Neil?” Sss-sss-sss-sss-sss-sss. Sss-sss-sss-sss-sss-sss. Sss-sss-sss-sss-sss-sss. Mon trésor, mon John, sombre dans un profond sommeil…. Claustrophobic at all? “Okay, honey. We need to get you out of here. Don’t you worry.” Causing, amid the frenetic clicks of an omnipresent Geiger counter, a feedback loop of radio activity, she whispered,

But the longer she listened to the chronicle noise, the more it turned into tacit truth, and as the vehicle gained momentum, the wind backward-hugging the exterior and filling crevices with whispers, the strings of the sky’s fabric vibrating, the sun stabbed by its own spokes, she effected a change in the movement of her surroundings, beyond the unwhirring and unwhirring of the clockwork world (and although in this version she had her SUV, in at least one other twine of time the movers had taken it away, perhaps forcing her to run backward on the asphalt with her knees at a 45 degree angle and her hands on a steering wheel not there, or perhaps she was the engine itself, hunched over and squarish, hands and feet pumping as pistons, and her body sped down the road): the upside-down inside-out fireworks occurred again until all and Everything became closer and closer, laws refracted and combined, and in a burst of hypermagnetism, matter and antimatter coalesced into a glowless jewel suspended in nonexisting existence, aching with a millionfold murmur before descending amid kaleidoscopic silence, and then the silence lightning-splintered when the jewel burst forth to create a universe prior to the universe, which came together again to create a universe prior to those two universes. Always the jewel, expanding and contracting like a heart to create and destroy infinite Everythings. And so Jasper could shift across those cosmic heartbeats to search for a universe where their broken family remained whole and perfect, utopian, but she kept seeing fractures of all kinds at all angles, imperfections upon imperfections, and she braked not because in her rearview mirror she saw a blanket-draped child crawling on his hands and knees into the road but because ahead, through the left emerald pupil on her windshield, she could see a girl who looked like her younger self, constellations of freckles on her face, and she stapled a poster to a tree, its bold letters reading: LOST DOG. Underneath that, a phone number and a picture of the same clueless and panting canine beside Jasper. After all her reversing, Jasper was still here, now, at this moment in time, currently presently in this bubbled zeptosecond, perhaps forever. And she looked at her young self and at the lost dog she mistakenly christened Ian, then down at the shift knob, and she placed her hand atop it, her eyes on the adjacent faintly glowing symbols that read her fate: P R N D.

ⴵ

Portions of this excerpt originally appeared in The Sunlight Press, The Hoosier Review, New Reader Magazine, Unreal Magazine, Nonbinary Review, and Paper Butterfly Flash Fiction.