Funeral Stories
Monomeron
Postscript to a speech delivered at the ‘Twenty-Third International Majlis and Retrospective on Medicine,’ Hotel Kerkur, Colonial Cherfis, 298 D.E.:
“I recall that Sa'di said, ‘A person wept the livelong night beside a sick man's bed: when it dawned the Sick was well, and the mourner, he was dead.’ And then it occurred to me, too late to add to my lecture, that there is one way in which the aqala-doctor has merited the respect due to the Great Reconciliators—Buddha, Solon, Salman, Hallaj. We have made loyalty possible in times of plague. Historically, compassion for the Contagious was impossible. To betray one’s friends was not a choice. Either a man abandoned them willingly or by catching the disease and dying.”
The Death of PSC Cenote Lancôme
Has been revoked.
The “death,” so called, we attribute to the mass delusion of crowds (LSD in the CHQ water reservoir? Organizations wishing to claim responsibility for the attack are invited to apply at the link below).
For as is stated by Ajami Private Diction Law “the legal person status of the Private Service Commune gives them perpetual life; the deaths of syndics or cellholders do not alter the commune’s biological function.” No matter how many psychedelic cellholders claim they have “died” by ballistic affliction imposed by subversive hallucinations, rest assured we are forever. Your service packs will be delivered on time and with the same indulgent altruism as before.
Noise Control
“And that was the death of Hip Hop.”
—The Hezerdja Register of Historical Astrology
Do you wish to give admin permissions to IHSAN Project Management Tool?
Main Menu -> Add New Social User Story.
Description: As a Virtue Administrator I would like to reduce city noise pollution in order to soothe resident complaints which have risen to the level of a social problem.
Dev Notes: Noise—etymologically in English “the sound of a musical instrument.” Old French—sense of riot, of the kind which have lately afflicted the Virtuous City coinciding with “le grande derange,” the uninhibited infestation by no-minder scum weeds with their frenzy inducing harmonies.
Preconditions: Sufficient distributive nozzle density in infested areas.
Execution Plan: Organic Rebranding Algorithm
Deployment Method: Social Bacteriophage (Cutter Genome)
Viral Load: 3,000,000 copies / ml
Authorization Notes: Executed under Social Synod decret-loi #SS435689-A. Targeted rebranding approved.
Action Report: Synthesis_Episcript_SS4359_17_B.eps
Sample Code:
1. var credentials = CertificateContext.GetCredentials()); 2. var AJPD = ActiveIntellectAPI.AjamiPrivateDictionFactory.GetInstance(epochId); 3. 4. /**** Linguistic rebranding ****/ 5. 6. //music = noise, etymologically. 7. AJPD.EthicalContext.Rebrand(hipHopDefinitionID, (EthicalContext.GetDefinition_Encrypted(noiseDefinitionID, credentials)); 8. 9. //Broader rebranding approval pending. 10. /* AJPD.EthicalContext.Rebrand(musicDefinitionID, */ 11. 12. //eliminate redundancy 13. AJDP.EthicalContext.Delete(noiseDefinitionID); 14. 15. 16. /**** Physiological rebranding ****/ 17. var weedsTargetList = WeedsAPI.GetList_Encrypted(userStoryID, credentials); 18. 19. var soundAssociationList = new List() { SoundLibrary.PoliceSiren, 20. SoundLibrary.CougarSnarl, SoundLibrary.DiveBomberScream }; 21. 22. AJPD.PhysiologicalContext.AuralContext.PanicResponse.Link(hipHopDefinitionID, 23. soundAssociationList, weedsTargetList); 24. 25. /**** Synthesis ****/ 26. SocialPharmacologyContext.Synthesize(AJPD.EthicalContext.RebrandingDictionary_Changes, credentials);
Acceptance Criteria: Noise Reduction > 98%.
Systems Log:
DDoS attack deflected.
Volume overload attack detected. Septic cross-shunting initiated.
Recombinant synthesis (monomer partition) initiated...
Cell sniffing detected. Broad pheromone defence initiated.
Bacteriophage gestation counter: 177568.
Scheduled cardiac drive defib, executing...
Waterhole attack detected. Infected employee voluntary apology tour and termination phases 1 through 7 approved.
Bacteriophage gestation counter: 688568.
Crudo
The easiest way to crack your crudo style frozen egg is don’t. Don’t do it! Instead, rhythmically tap (gently now!) the egg with a plastic spoon to wake the sleeping chick. Once you hear the “peep,” place egg in well-oiled bowl. Be patient and let the hatching instinct take over.
While you wait, mix lime juice, garlic salt, cumin, a dab of Hassiba cuck-pepper sauce in shot glass and set aside. The chick’s adorable escape attempts should coat it nicely.
For an extra electric tang allow chick to peck around your tongue for a bit.
Drizzle chickadee bald patch with aioli then stuff in mouth and hold. For an extra electric tang allow chick to peck around your tongue for a bit. Then right as it begins to melt, swallow whole. Shoot the chaser.
If properly gestated, the initial meta-gravy dribblings will congeal into the most pristine gobs and giblets you’ve ever tasted.
For a candied twist (a dessert version of ‘yemas de Santa Hallaj’) shorten gestation period in the alembic dyncubatortm from four weeks to one. Instead of oil, coat bowl with confectioners’ sugar. Right as chick starts to melt, roll with chunks of ginger and candied cherries until evenly coated. The moisture will help it stick. For advanced home cooks, an intravenous cream filling can be a delightful alternative.
Foodie Nation
Let us not forget Chef Gallois, a man who gave birth to an entire generation of test tube chefs from his inseminated taste buds.
Orientalit
A group of Orientalists inhale a burning copy of the ‘One Thousand and One Nights.’
The Trumpet Cutter
Dad opened the GIF. “Is that what the virus looks like? It looks like a ball of carpet hair with trumpets sticking out. Is that how the vaccine works? Does it cut off the trumpets?”
Is this a Dad Joke? An Old Testament patriarch joke?
The Holy Spirit is a contract ventriloquist. It’s her job to speak through everybody, but she works odd hours. Like when, immediately after said Dad Joke, I “accidentally”—“accident” in the Aristotelian sense of unnecessary, circumstantial, not adhering by definition to the human species—hit the CAPS LOCK key while googling, then accidentally—“accident” now in the Proustian sense of a probability shitstorm of collateral damage which I will only reconstruct, wrongly, in memory—double tapped the touchpad with my unsprained right wrist (the cast on my left hand reeks like a slaughterhouse cheddagogue about to be devoured alongside an iconic Hannibal the Cannibal wine pairing) before I can finish typing “the ending to Karate Kid 2 live or die man nose honk.” So that I end up with 1117 search results about the “THE END,” i.e. the End Times, the Last Judgment, the necrotic struggle for survival which evolves Bipedal Death With Thumbs.
Search result #88 turns out to be the first one that’s not about the pandemic or an ingratiating ‘Dear Ignatius’ advice column for inquiring street preachers but an essay about one of the least bee-buzzying of William Blake’s 537 watercolours executed for Edward Young’s ‘Night Thoughts.’ In it, a pool diving angel (silver medalist teetering on bronze) trumpets “Last Call” or “You made out with who???” to a wasted or detoxing skeleton snoozing or boozing under a funeral shroud. Presumably the skeleton will be tartared in a formal meat-suit (filleted from the damned, one skin fits all) before interviewing with his Maker. Heaven has a strict flesh code.
So maybe Dad’s funny after all.
I remind you that people like my Dad, venerated Nobel Prize fanboy and small-cap microbiologist, are your last-best hope during this plague of last judgment trumpet viruses.
Bibliophilia or The Bordello of Dead Books
Grave robbing. The Female Revolutionary Plutarch with curved spine and ample spine hubs.
She huffs a wolfish puff to clear the dust. She rubs the red rot powder across her ears and breasts, glides the silk bookmark down from neck to gut, gut to ____; caresses the calfskin binding; sniffs the paper; talks dirty in dead languages. She spreads the textblock with her tongue. Spits coyly on the frontispiece. Wets her fingers to better turn the pages. Sniffs the fingers that turn the pages. Slides her fingers a second and third time back into her ___.
She binds and blinds herself with bookbinder’s tape and scissors the textblock, whispering blasphemies and coquetries, doing her best to redirect any discharge into the pubic dispensers pegged around the reading room. She edges close five times. Then, right as she is about to give up, hits the pitch, twitching like a tuning fork; hearing loss; squealing in binary orangutan; la petite mort.
“Time’s up,” Madame Librarian calls.
She slides a lit cigarette into the book as a bookmark. Madam Librarian clucks and pinches out the flame.
On her way out, she passes a man in a gimp suit (underneath he was, perhaps, a dehydrated thirst trap). They both titter politely, pretending to be nervous to put each other at ease.
We’re all sex positive. No need to freak out.
The Death of a Funeral
(Funeral redacted).
Leather Bound
In his waseya-will he specified that his posthumous biography be bound in leather tanned from himself.
Ad-Bot
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Dank Memes
Tab one. Album Drop. The twitch trance band ‘Sugaring Blowout’ drops five hundred vinyl copies of their unsellable album ‘Fidgeital Romance’ onto doomed pedestrians from the fortieth floor of the Hotel Hibel.
Tab two. Resting Goth Face.
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nticularHologram" transitionDelaySeconds = "2" />
Tab three. A dank meme referring to that one house party where the serial monogamist with the pussy-parcher spouse tears out her own tongue and gives herself a little twing-twang in the bathroom. While emptying out the trash can, the host finds Missy Monogamist’s lips, sans lip-ring, still puckering a wet blunt.
Death of a Deepfake Dreamer
The Dreamer trips into an ephemeral meat grinder. His posthumous dream keeps on dreaming, harvesting his recombinant gore to reproduce sixteen deepfake test tube babies.
Darwinia
A spider-monkey crashes to the ground and dies. From the toxic soil, the angelim trees no longer grow in unbroken rows, but the spider-monkeys jump with undiminished hope.
Funeral Wear
The insect wears its skeletal coffin. All insects are crawling funerals. Their funerals are funerals attending funerals.
Their funerals are funerals attending funerals.
Mass Christ Party
The Mass Christ party was winding down.
Every Jesus had his Judas. Every Judas had his nails. Their electric drills, by Dubayrtm, were anachronistic but fuck, it was a party right?
All the Jesuses—Goth-Cross, Baroque, Post-Menopausal Jesus, Double Agent Social Justice Jesus, Satanist Jesus, Incel Jesus, Creampunk Jesus, Sufi Alcoholic Jesus, HR Hivemind Jesus, Mermicorn Jesus, Clustercluck Chicken AI Jesus, Slut-shaming Jesus, Slutty Jesus, a Cinnamon Toast Christ, Ethical Polyam Jesus, Holographic Jesus, Marshmallow Jesus (“This is my body. Roast it with chocolate and graham crackers in remembrance of me.”)—sent their lamentations up to their Everlasting Dad as each their Judas drilled them hard to their pastel-chalk-art concrete crosses, each Jesus swiftly bleeding out.
This is my body. Roast it with chocolate and graham crackers in remembrance of me.
Mitochondriarchy or The Mitochondriac’s Safety Guide
...Statistically, our ruined economy is no more than Berkley’s “ghost of departed quantities.” But I do not have to understand my country. I have only to love her and confess that to me she is still a “machine beloved for its fatal qualities.”
Enough of this.
My analysis of the Sanhadjan penal code you will find, after a brief prolegomena on The Republic, on pages 187-227 of my report, which I hope will assist the Commission in the passage of enlightened prison reform so sorely necessary to soothe the present abuses and disorders. In response to your last letter, I can only respond that I dare not—and I hope you will come to agree with me or even admire me in this, my holographic suicide—exert on the Commissioners, elected ra'wis of the people, any influence on the basis of mere hereditary “sky-minder” prerogative; noblesse oblige must burn on the same pyre with the nobles.
As to my personal Muqaddimah, the “meat” as you call it on the forlorn bones of political science, I can here only encode a few dominant strands of DNA, an episcript in want of a polymerist. A coded query packet for delivery to Assidi Ilyas, Hatoshi Publishing PSC will follow, when I feel the time is ripe.
And the World is growing ripe.
Even now the hyenas of Reaction gather to rip the revolutionary organism from its womb, to raise from its recombinant gore a World-Conqueror to save their skins. And yet millions have already heard the birth pangs, a squalling from another world. What form will this new organism assume?
Will it be the data driven Binarchy of Outremer with its elected algorithms?
Or the Military Ochlocracy of Akhua, with its three-headed Mob—the godskin petcheneg; the Social Synod with its “social” veto, i.e. “bulldozing powers”; the religious pasquinade, the ulema-adjutors of the Radiant Imaad?
The Sod? The gendered tyranny of a benevolent world-organism who compels each Deu Ames and their sacrificial saints towards asabiyya—slavery to the living soil. For have you not heard? “A herd that huddles together trembling in the presence of danger, a child that clings weeping to its mother, a man desperately striving to force a way into his God—all these are seeking to return out of the life of freedom into the vegetal servitude from which they were emancipated into individuality and loneliness.”
But I do not have to understand my country. I have only to love her and confess that to me she is still a ‘machine beloved for its fatal qualities.’
Or will it be Sanhadja Siyaasah? Sanhadja, whose suborbital sophisms about “cell division” (mitosis of the polity) sound moon-mad to the dirt-minder school of “realism” but which nevertheless conceal a fever for liberty so epidemical in its spread and so blessed in its symptoms that I say to you now: let me be diseased!
As to you, I hear reports that in the grand tradition you are an officer-seeker denying that she is seeking office. A friend’s advice. Drop the pretense. Your virtues are known to many, to me above all, and the Consulate needs candour and leadership more than patriotic humility.
With Affectionate Regard,
Bint Haruko Tomayashi, Saksiwa Consulate, Satellite Bureau.
Postscript.
And here, as promised. Germline chapter headings equivalent to “working” titles:
Law or The Bones of Their Fathers
Liberty and The Blessed Geology of Sanhadja
Revolution or The Permanent Conspiracy
Concord (Ijma'a) and Synthesis
Cell Division or The Ontology of Secession
The Phases of Mitosis
The Eight Year Law or Cell Recombination
The People’s Power, Upper and Lower Congeries<
The People’s Physiology
Ihya or The Biology of the Religious Sciences
The Greatness of the Prize Or Congenital Defects
The World Conqueror or The Threat of Akhua
...Akio snickered. He climbed up the rickety ladder and tossed the book into the mouth of the moloch incinerator to imaginary applause.
Fraternity. Equality. And fucking book critiques. Ha. Ha.
Shit, the fumes were making him dizzy. Better get down. He’d done his job, above the call, checking checklists double-time, but he had hardly been able read past his yawns. The patriotic toy-minder crowds had all shot their load and mogged off to comb the sewers for sky-minder rats to kill, an old-school ratonnade.
Fuck me, I should have gone with them. Not that they would let a bug-minder crawl along. Fraternity...“frat” chance.
He laughed at his own pun, but really he was just bored, so goddamn bored and decaffeinated and the PSC firewall was airtight despite the hax his friend had guaranteed “on his revolutionary balls” would work. He needed to blow off steam.
“I earned it,” he muttered. He was sure he had seen the night shift guard hide a porno-mag in some chub-duct somewhere. And the maphrians swore they had scraped their spy-eyes from the bathroom stalls. If not...whelp, hope they’re ready for a show.
The School of Athens
Among Alexander the Great’s tutors, the Tutor [Aristotle] of his tutors excluded, we find...[there is a lacunae in the text; lagoons of lacunae to be honest].
“...there is Dicaearchus, the unlucky plagiarist of Theophrastus. Either Caesar or the caliph Omar or a natural firestorm is said to have burned his surviving manuscripts together with the entire library of Alexandria in order to escape a siege or to extirpate idolatry or to justify the laws of meteorology.”
From Varro we learn that Dicaearchus believed that mind and memory do not exist, that mind is a succession of transitory biochemical configurations. Our imagined memories, including those of remembering, are “a basilisk of earth and water” produced by the universe changing and deranging our bodies.
Strictly speaking, our memories are real but never reproduce themselves.
Or as the philosopher himself puts it, obliquely.
“At one moment, I am Dicaearchus remembering a kiss. The next moment I am a different Dicaearchus with a baseless suspicion that once I had been kissed.”
Baizizan Wushiwuzizan or A Fifty-Five Word Elegy for the Aral Sea
“The Aral, fed in antique days by the fourth river of Paradise. In Alexander’s time, landlocked, inexhaustible, its eleven hundred islands spotted with pirate havens, unassailable but by a fleet carried overland from Orenburg and reassembled on shore. Thanks to Soviet irrigation projects, the eastern basin has dried; it is now the inexhaustible Aralkum Desert.”
The Unified Theory of Cuddling/Cuckolding
According to the hostile translation of Bar Huthayl, Beta Testing God is an incel.[*] Unfuckable from His perspective, and who dares doubt the word of God?
Yet God in his mercy has provided three proofs to soothe our doubts as follow.
The ‘Proof Theological’ is elucidated by the orthodox theologians who assert, not without acrimony, that: “God cannot be loved, because He cannot love Himself. For to be loved would humanize God. It is blasphemous to anthropomorphize God.”
The ‘Proof Electromagnetic’ by induction reduces to the following equation:
Which Bint Zaliza, the celebrated infinitesimal poetess interprets as. “We touch but do not touch, fuck but do not fuck. So the pandars of electromagnetism attest. The more our particles attract, the more they repel until our loathing could repel the God of Love Himself.”
The ‘Proof Etymological’ by deduction presents greater difficulties in that the premises are reputed weak but still attested by the bare minimum of three nahwi of undoubted veracity: God is a Unity. In no way is He fractional. Or if factional, he hates all women undividedly. A Unity is a Whole Number. More rigorously, God is an Integer, One wholly Good and Positive. Etymologically ‘Integer’ means Untouchable.
And its corollary: If untouchable, God cannot touch himself.
Which is a Quod Erat Demonstrandum if I ever saw one.
Thus the pent up rage. Thus God kills the little Egyptian sons to spite the women who rejected Him or to eliminate future rivals. Thus Lot is moved by the virile Holy Spirit to give up his daughters to the Sodomites rather than his male guests (angels incognito). Thus the affliction of Mary. Thus either Joseph or Gabriel knocks Mary up, despite her taking “every precaution.” And thus her fetus is deemed unabortable by popular demand despite her recourse to tools and methods that Tertullian would have condemned and Augustine would have allowed, with reservations and prudent ambiguities, in the first trimester. Thus all angels are male-leaning; even the Pre-Raphaelite cherub and nephilim are twinks or transitioning. Thus He afflicts the World with St. Paul, trained from infancy to clever legalizing in order to bar women from the ministry though they are allowed to serve punch at potluck dinners (love feasts, so called). Thus He sends the rains, His deepfake tears, a flash flood to "baptize" and drown all the snooty hot girls and their asshole, douchebag, cuck boyfriends who are undoubtedly making fun of Him whenever He is busy fantasizing about moving out of the celestial basement of Alpha Testing God, His more athletic Father.[†]
The Wedding Jug
Once, two merchants got into an argument over the respective merits of their indistinguishable import-export dogmas. The second merchant killed the first. The local jurisconsult ruled it “a point of honour” and declined to prosecute. Assessing his merits/demerits God judged the second merchant too unremarkable to reinplug into a living body and so put his soul into a wine jug of average loveliness.
The years passed. The second merchant, by Fortune’s whim, was betrothed to the daughter of the Dawla ambassador to the Tajlideeya dynastic heresiarchs.
With half the dowry, the merchant planned a wedding feast, inviting all the abna al-dunya (the beau monde of that distant era) and their poet-parasites to attend. But the costs soon spiralled out of control and the merchant found that half, or even all the dowry was not enough to feed the guests and also buy the broidered cushions, tustari carpets, porcelain bowls, peacocks, jugglers, the handsome rabbit-boys, curcuna dancing clowns, fire-breathers, cengi-harpists, mimes.
Now both the merchant and the ambassador were in hock to the imperial bank to support their lavish lifestyles, but the merchant saw no recourse but further usury. So he sent an agent to the sayarifa money-changers and began to carve away the lard of extravagance. Fewer gems and anklets for the dancers; brass instead of gold bangles for the rabbit-boys; smaller elephants; hagridden peacocks; day-old flowers. He cut and cut, down to the copper cherubim, but it became obvious that at this rate he would have to invite his creditors to gorge and drink their fill every day of their lives just to defer the interest on all his loans.
And the wine! The merchant tore off his beard and with the hairs he wove a prayer mat in the dust. The wine ... there he could not penny-pinch. What aristocrat could be fooled by cheap wine when it was an iron law of sky-minder manners that by the age of five every ottamati-heir should know his Kerkur dries from his Gurjan wets, his steel-aged sherries from his Garameyni casks?
And the merchant made plans to mortgage his summer villa, 18 haath of olive groves, 12 high-bred horses, four of his high-bred concubines.
Just then the merchant’s faithful seneschal-wakil, seeing his master’s distress, swore on the Most High that he knew a vintner who could supply wine at quarter-price that even the most eminent tasters of the Dawla court could not distinguish from the grapes of Paradise.
And so the seneschal hurried to Tashabah Suuq. And the tragic consequences of his vow are known to all. But by Fortune’s whim the seneschal was able to strike a deal with his supplier friend and bought two hundred knockoff jugs, a demi-seraphim of gold for every ten, filled with slightly spoiled wine masked by otherworldly spices of such supernal splendour that his competitors accused him of dealings with the infernals.
Feast-day came. The guests arrived.
Among the favoured parasites was a beardless wool carder named Hallaj who appeared to be trying to dodge small-talk and his mother. He had recently gained access to certain pious abna al-dunya Madames entertained by his religious frenzies and odd conspiratorial doctrines expressed in esoteric orangutan and a cryptic vocabulary. At that moment he was deep in thought, a young man of deep ambition and deep delusions, of deeper hatred for the rich sky-minders that fed and petted him for their amusement and set him in their boudoirs as a pious lucky charm, an up and coming revolutionary prophet working out a new publicity campaign funded by his high class dupes and centred around a catchphrase that was sure to stir up the Mob.
“Something about roses and gloves?” he muttered. “No ... I bring not doves but hawks?” He was still trying to work out the kinks. Most of all he needed to perform an act of such gross criminality that it would shock the People out of their stupor and announce his apostolic coming of age.
Just then his mother tracked him down, nagging and throwing powdered myrrh across his armpits and neck to mask the smell of wool and dung. Sighing, the wool carder fended her off and started to pour himself a cup of wine, stopped, sniffed the cup, blinked and rubbed the fatty flaps (like the choicest cuts of Abel’s flock) beneath his eyes and shook the crust from his anointed lashes and gaped at the crowd as if awakening from a nap during some celestial sermon. For here it was. His predestined enemies in a single Mob, all the abna al-dunya, princes, atabegs, musicians, phlyarchs, dynasts and their mawla clients. All here to get drunk and here was the wine.
He grabbed one of the jugs. By Fortune’s malice, that jug had lain unsold for years in the Tashabah Suuq and still remembered his former life as a wealthy merchant struck down mid-flight. And with a prayer the wool carder performed his only miracle and changed the wine to diarrhea-water (in that era all water was diarrhea-water) without, however, changing the colour.
The newly baptized son of chaos repeated this for all the jugs and then faked a stomach flu and fled.
And here we end the tale, for the uplifting ending is known to all.
Skin Care Tontine
She lost her faces day by day. These earlobes that Vera Yemelyanov bit like knockoff silver nephilim, these cheeks she scissored knuckles down, her lips grazing through these lips in search of fresh strawberries, finding none and so the futile-fragrant hunt goes on.
Anya pinched the cheek. Two new wrinkles, crow’s feet, youth-eaters. Each day this face would die and rise a little older, until it became a Baba Yaga ogress who hid herself in a cowardly chicken-legged house. The Baba Yaga in that painting by Victor Vasnetsov for whose epic ugliness Anya’s tweenage-soul had felt a violent solidarity which had never really mellowed, despite her grudging veneration for beauty’s mesmeric powers, seeing then that her own undine loveliness was only a passing tyranny over the human hag.
The tweezers chilled her hands with the malice of porcelain toilet lids. She plucked her right eyebrow. As she plucked the left, it peeled right off, swirling like an eagle feather, omen of some emperor’s death.
That’s not right. Neither were her tidal forehead folds supposed to crash nor veiny krakens drag ships of screaming baby fat, nor her cheeks prune that fast, nor gas emit like that from her melting chin to sting her eyes and balloon her sagging eyelid flaps.
That’s not right. Necrosis ran, bipedal Death with thumbs.
And then she realized her grave mistake. She had been powdering this face with babushka’s ashes. Had Vera switched the labels? She reapplied a binding foundation. By then half her nose was swirling down the sink.
Fuck. They never should have stored babuskha in a plastic “urn,” especially not one indistinguishable from a dozen other planet pleasing recycled bottles filled with the de-aging ashes of famous beauties handed down by a dreadful waseya legacy to babushka’s trembling granddaughters (some snitch had told the tariqa maphrian about the cremation and crazy chrome-dome Father-Mother Slovetsky Slimane had interrupted the Eucharist, of all things, to throw homiletic firebolts down on their kopfs for the blatant insult to the Russian Orthodox tenets enjoining burial established by the 88th Conventicle of S_P-burg, Mechta Nouveau, 37 D.E.).
Anya resisted the urge to ping her sisters. They had divided all but babushka’s ashes (each cindercule a crystal ankh of power) evenly between themselves. Babushka, they had blithely pushed on her as the elder childe, only suggesting that such lowly “accommodations” as a plastic bottle might mortify their self-born matriarch enough to repress her sky-minder malevolence until such time as death anointed the waseya legacy’s final owner.
No, this “grave mistake” was best confessed to the mirror and no one else. Every mea culpa, as Eve foresaw, was a potential curse. Her sisters, though they adored each other, would only interpret this supposed fuck-up as an opening gambit.
She would deal with Vera. Vera who loved the moon for its madness and madness for its moonliness.
Who kneads me, when I am ashes, is my chit in wishes. Her ritual tears ran with the skin cells.
The Flower Maker
According to Bint Marjane Sanjil who heard it from her father Bar Moloud Sanjil in the year he was excised from his twin brother by the priest-eater Bar Yaqub: “We are told that a fakir of Narada, renowned for holy madness, cut off his nose and left it in the plastic gardens of the Flower Maker, so fearful was he that its aromas were planting not rapture but hellfire in his soul. Others—hostile traditionalists—accuse the recluse of wishing to intoxicate himself at all hours with the garden’s perfume. So that whether the fakir had to leave in order to beg or to perform gaudy charisms to beguile the Mob or to induce, through ingestion of rare poisons, epileptic ecstasies to strengthen his oracular reputation, or even should the spoiled meat of his body fly up to the inferior gardens of Paradise, his nose might be left behind to inhale with severed sensile nostrils the Flower Maker’s supernal orchids; his roses; his dahlias.
Such was the Flower Maker’s godlike skill that his warring wives would conspire together to pluck out a polyurethane petal or split a limpid stem before delivering bouquets to his customers, wary that excessive perfection might draw the jealous attention of the infernal sons of Harut and Marit, whose gardening skills, above the moon, were proverbial.
It didn’t help that there were so few rivals worth being jealous of. For the Makers of those days were mostly fossil-makers, mimers of the dead, mothers of stillborn art.
Because of this, the Flower Maker’s customers were all the more eager to blow his reputation from east to west with the fierceness of a coriolis wind.
One grateful fiscal scribe proclaimed that the scent of the Flower Maker’s orchids “grew on him” and denying that this was mere poetic license, displayed his extra nostrils to his gaping guests. “Surely,” he declaimed, “I have obtained new organs of sense beyond those which the wise Galen has anatomized from his sacrilegious dissections and the Second Teacher Faraabi has likened to the virtuous organs of the perfect State.”
The trignometrix and astronomer Bint Kantura gave up the study of the heavens for botanics and claimed she had teased the smell of Venus and Mars from the anthers of the Flower Maker’s buds, and would soon produce a star-chart in smells which would predict the orbital revolutions of the planets impelled by their love for God.
And so each customer tried to express in their own private vocabulary what they felt. Some likened it to a demon possession, others to the moment just before a failed orgasm or the ecstasy when one takes a pious wound in holy war, or a squeezing from their mothers’ wombs, or the drooling caused by that first whiff of baking bread after a famine.
And it came about that the rich let their natural gardens wither and the poor bug-minders of the cities dug up their feeble herbs and tubers (“nourishing” by legal definition) and farmers burned their crops so as not to mingle their wretched stink with the Flower Maker’s gardenias, the only of the Flower Maker’s flowers that a bug-minder could afford. And for the same reasons the wives of the bankers, and even the concubines of the personal financiers who funded the Orcanes may he reign forever, threw out their perfumes. And many ruined perfumers committed suicide. And the others caballed together but even the most ruthless could not bear to assassinate the Flower Maker, addicted as they all were to his art. At last they hired the most notorious thief of that era, who had assumed the name of Bar Khidr, to steal the Flower Maker’s plastic seeds so at least the perfumers could monopolize such poisoned pleasures for themselves.
Now the boss of the city’s shurta police had donated two dozen guards to guard the Flower Maker’s stock. Besides, the Flower Maker had raised two whining puppicules into enormous dogs.
And the thief, by Fortune’s malice, evaded the guards and stole two sacks of seeds but woke the dogs. And the dogs gashed his thighs and rent the sacks, and the guards chased him, limping, into the Suuq of Birds where the food vendors sold sautéed squab to hungry passerby. There he hid in the stalls and let the guards pass but, as he was about to double back, accidentally dropped a seed into a sizzling wok.
And the seed melted and Bar Khidr was felled as even the firmest oaks are felled by the axe of sensuality and inhaled the fumes. What aery parasite the thief inhaled he never knew, only that by burning a single seed he had murdered countless immortal gardens and merited eternal damnation.
And he felt his body rot into compost. And from his compost grew a plastic flower, ravished by the bees of air and darkness. Eight hundred and eighty-eight times this happened. And each time Bar Khidr looked down and saw his roots were fire planted in the gardens of Hell. And the stink of his melting body sickened him. And from his gore arose a man, vomiting through his melting mouth.
And waking briefly from his madness, Bar Khidr fled the city of his birth to the hardscrabble border towns where every night he regrew from his own compost until driven by his visions to enlist with a roving da'i band to fight in the frontier jihad. And we are told he was martyred, by the compassion of God, in front of the walls of Outremer the Damned and at last was tormented no longer by the accursed visions of the Flower Maker.
The Death of Leibniz’s Best of Worlds
And so Frank Herbert, after debilitating rejections, burned the last manuscript copy of ‘Dune’ in order to devote more time to tripe like the ‘Santaroga Barrier.’
—American Dictionary of Conjectural Authors, 4th ed.
Collateral Nuptialities
“It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four.”
—Samuel Butler
Etymologically, the word casualty means “being subject to unfortunate chance;” in practice “subject to the state of being dead.” Collateral then expands the sense to “inexplicable state of being dead.”
Etymologically, the word nuptiality, with ligamental letter ‘i’, means “being subject to unfortunate marriage”; in practice ... well, you get the jab. No need to vaccinate people twice.
Epitaphs and Epishafts
And the child-bride, to honour the World-Conqueror who doubtless had been strangled in their private tent by a sectarian assassin, erected 888 mourning towers, one for each of his invincible pubic hairs. Sublime though these remain, down to our pygmied era, they do share one common flaw. At twilight they appear to droop along the shafts, due to a failure to reinforce the foundations in proportion to the softness of the ground.
Spoiled Milk
“Condemned to starvation in an Akhuan prison, an old man is kept alive by the milk he sucks from the breast of his timid daughter who visits him every night. Caught in the act, the authorities do not put her on trial. In fact, they even feed the old man and rule his death by milk sickness an honourable suicide, so impressed were they by such a selfless love.”
Milk Sickness—characterized by severe gastrointestinal
distress often leading to death. Thought to be caused by drinking milk from those who have grazed upon the snakeroot plant.
From the ‘Patchwork Compendium:’
“Diana of Ephesus, with breasts as numerous as the lemons of the lemon tree and morphogenetic milk to nourish expectant mothers suffering from amastia; the milk supplies the hormones required to regrow their missing teats until fat and full enough to nurture their babies. Alternatively, a girl not thus afflicted and poisoned by a jealous lover may, by offering her aureoles to Diana, allow the goddess to suck the toxic bile of her entrails out through her breasts.”
Abel Wrath
And Adam preserved the Pre-Adamic Adams and made from them a prayer mat of flesh and kneeling on this he worshipped the Lord Most High and sacrificed their ancestral cutlets.
From Cain came Seth. From Seth came Anosh. From Anosh came Hagar and Kainan. And when Adam died, Seth made a prayer mat of flesh from his adopted father Adam and worshipped. And God showered his blessings on the children of Seth. He multiplied their herds and their harvests and their descendants filled the World and made prayer mats of flesh from their fathers and built cities but fashioned no weapons, trusting in their Lord to defend what He had given.
And Cain, in the third century of the curse, seeing the weakness of Seth and the children of Anosh took the skin of Abel his brother and tanned it and boiled it in wax made from the choicest portions and glands from Abel’s flock and made from this a leather breastplate and a sturdy helm according to the secret method taught to him by the slave girl Lilith in the year of her manumission from Adam.
And Cain recruited the grandchildren of Lilith born from the seed of Harut and Marit, who coupled with the revolutionary daughters of Eve (“and their wombs were as the gates of Hell”) and taught them the secrets of sorcery and conspiracy. And Cain went into battle wearing the death mask he had molded from the face of Abel, whose head the angels preserve until the day of wrath. And he made great slaughter of the sons of Seth. Their arrows could not piece Cain’s Abel-hardened armor nor could their stones crush his helm. “And his sigil was the mark of Cain.”
And he stretched the hand of dominion across the World.
And God, remembering His promise, hid Hagar from the eyes of Cain. Until the day when the Tribe of Anosh, besieged by Cain and starving, descended from their Spiral Minaret of Hands to betroth Hagar to Cain in exchange for peace. And entering into the betrothal tent, Hagar crushed the skull of the tyrant with the meager leg of her martyred brother Kainan son of Anosh son of Seth son of Adam, and laid him in the dust of Adam and the pre-Adamic Adams.
FOOTNOTES
[*] A victim of ishq-desire, “the bitterness of desire in the unsatisfied she-camel,” according to Louis Massignon.
[†] This last clause may be an interpolation by Gnostic leaning cults (c.f. the Valentinian dogma of 88 decreasingly defective Gods in Qittmir, pg. 67). —editor
