The Way

Medea woke up knowing something was wrong, but that everything would be okay. Tremors through the earth but the tremors in her heart stronger; tremors intuitive of the coming collection of time and mind. Like a little bee signing the honey from the vine. It was violent and beautiful, an orgasm fully recognized.

Atlantis shook. America shook. All worlds which are other than these intersected and created a jam session of techtonic proportion indescribable by most humans; it wasn’t a normal day. Medea stepped outside to the mind of the trees symphonic and holistically carving a new world from the clay.

We are not afraid, she thought. Even asleep on my bed, curled in my breast like the young child I’ve hugged many a time and given away, knowing what could be lost, I am not afraid. I will not be afraid.

Strange to say such things! Don’t do it!
Says Mary Kelly in another world, one where the overflowing just began and heavens! The keyboard and drums….

In the middle of the night, climbing the mountain, the Witch and the Warlock looked down from their climb and saw a thick white mist engulfing the town below.

In the middle of the night, the night that Atlantis died, the knight that the City of Angels collided with inevitable space and time metafiction, the Authoress jammed drunk on wine and pot with a few of the receptive. Stoned out of our minds, I swear we lifted something off the Zeitgeist, musically, she thought. Those tones that transport and manipulate the feeling of a room, that’s what was made. That’s what was created, and so many words not even sung.

And so the Authoress thought it dutiful to write what had happened amongst souls. Though it was said to be selfish, the desire to unite amongst souls; this, the product of years of conditioning. And so it was, and ever shall be; world without end, Amen:

We walk through the valley of the shadow of our doubt
We walk through the valley of the shadow
We walk through the valley of the shadow of the pyramid….

And the Earth Shook

I never know what to write, I just get signals, little tattle-tale rats of ideas who walk in, bust out a joint, and pass me a story. I never know what’s going to happen next, it just does. It’s like the weirdest fucking cosmic half-way house in my head sometimes, said the Authoress to the Sirian .

Somewhere, in some Universe:

“My fellow Americans,” said the President in her most reserved, sympathetic tone, “I speak to you now, not as a President, but as a citizen of this great nation in mourning. Today, November the eleventh, at three twenty-three in the morning, Los Angeles was attacked by a nuclear warhead. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost. Our nation is in a state of emergency, and I know you’re all asking: What are we going to do about it? At this time, our Intelligence cannot disclose a full report, although we suspect that operatives of the enemies of Freedom, Iran, were involved in the attack…

Somewhere in another Universe:

“My fellow Atlanteans,” said the Queen Regent in her most sincere, compassionate voice, “I speak to you now, not as Queen Regent, but as a citizen of this great continent in mourning. Today, eleventh of El-Viath, at twenty three minutes Terce, Lateraline time, Lo Sarkos was attacked by a nuclear warhead. Our empire is in a state of crisis, and I know what you’re all asking: What are we going to do about it? At this time, our Intelligence cannot disclose a full report, although we suspect that operatives of the enemies of Freedom, the Uupain-Inlik are involved…”

Medea Culpa laced up her boots.

The Worlds begin shifting on a Saturday night

Most people think of worlds as floating, blue and green marbles orbiting a gravity halo around a center star. Indeed, many worlds exist this way. But what one forgets to remember is that according to the eccentricities of Quantum mechanics, these worlds also exist in many places at once. In reality, all worlds are lined up much like a city apartment building; each residing in its own space, yet all inhabiting approximately the same location. Some universes live on the 33rd floor, some in the basement. It’s a real bitch when the power goes out.

Medea Culpa drifted slowly back to sleep, her head in the gentle cusp of her lover’s shoulder. For now, all was right in her world, despite the appropriations of a crawling chaos in the heart of Atlantis that only oxcytocin and wine would numb.

At the same time, Mary Kelly swallowed two shots of tequila and poured a third; the election results had just come in: 49 to 51, and the next leader of the Free (that was a joke) world, John McJabulon, a puppet well known for his staunch ideals of a One World Militarized Zone, gave his acceptance speech. In it, he stated that recent intelligence reports showed strong evidence that the terrorist attacks on L.A. had been perpetrated by Iranian-backed terrorist organizations, and that the United States would respond with nuclear power.

At the same time, the Authoress took a very long hit of a very large water pipe filled with purple cannabis and salvia divninorum. The room swarmed with salvia sea creatures; half of them her friends, the other half, merpeople in bluejeans. Blue halos appeared over each of their heads, and a small green man seemed to be sitting on top of the dresser. When she looked him straight in the eye, he winked one giant black pupil, then disappeared. The room normalized. Fucking great pot, she thought. This is definitely going in the Novel, even though the discussion isn’t quite as surreal as I’d like. She normally didn’t party this far out, but her friend’s insistence on no less than 95 pounds of crawfish and nearly that amount in beer easily persuaded her. Even with rabid technology at the heart of America’s panic button, it took about twenty minutes longer for the information that the City of Angels was now a wasteland to reach the party house than it did everyone else.

(INRI: Igni Natura Renovata Integra, is variously translated as “All of nature is renewed by fire”, “Fire Renews Nature Completely”, or “through fire, nature is reborn whole”)

At the same time, on the eastern side of a mountain by the sea, a warlock studied the strange claw-like tentacles of a dead jellyfish washed up by a blood-red sea. His stomach growled with hunger, but the site was too disgusting to bear thought for food.

On the western side of the mountain, by the woods, a witch stepped outside her hut and looked forlornly at the bodies of ten thousand blackbirds. They looked to have hemorrhaged; blood crusted around each orifice, eyes just coagulations of brown scabs. The flies hadn’t even had time to swarm yet, but it was early.

And still, at the same time, the Sirian intelligence operative spoke to her commander through reverse-engineered Pleiadian transmitter technology:

“It seems things are getting away from us.” said the dog-like spy, who’d known about the attacks on L.A. for seven years. Every time she tried to say something, the Authoress would admonish her and bribe her with food.

“Xenu’s behind this, I know it,” said the Sirian Intelligence High Commander. If you can, get us a sample from the next reptilian you meet. Doesn’t have to be DNA; it can be a clothing item. A toe would be perfect. We need to see what their collective bio-consciousness is preparing for, and if we need to send reinforcements, we will.”

“Of course. I’ll alert you as soon as the reptiles reveal something.”

“You’re a good dog.”

“I know I am. Thank you, sir.”

And in all universes, the powerful ruling class smiled as a ripple cut them one more slice off the big cheese; people are most easily controlled when they believe their worlds may be torn apart.

Only a change of worlds

When she was eight, Mary Kelly also felt the hard sting of death and violence in her own backyard. At the time she didn’t yet realize that just 12,000 years and one universe away, another little girl knew the same thing, and that in all universes with Terra as a homing planet, women and children had born the brunt of revolution and death for time immemorial. She was playing with her best friend, a boy who lived two houses down in a small sunny neighborhood where nearly everyone had a basketball goal and ran around barefoot during the hot Texas summers. He was the son of a private investigator and former Marine, and by the time he was five he was already well on his way to becoming an Alpha Male. Mary liked Alpha Males because they were more adventuresome and often got her into trouble. What she didn’t realize was that she was well on her way to becoming an Alpha Female and that (unfortunately, there were no Wikipedia entries for this one, proving..) they were fewer and farther between than Alpha Males. Alpha Males in all herd-gathering societies generally treated Alpha Females with distrust, mostly because they were used to dealing with Submissive Males and Females whose opinions were more easily swayed.

This was the lesson she learned when she was eight:

“Adam! Look what fell out of the tree! I think it’s a mockingbird!” The tiny creature, wet and squirming, looked like an alien with its big hungry mouth and tiny eyes screaming for comfort.

“Ew, it’s probably got rabies!” said Adam, and smashed it with a stick.

The baby bird screamed even louder, and now the mother mockingbird furiously dove at the boy, who laughed nervously and ducked.

“NO!” cried Mary, heartbroken. She pushed Adam away and cupped the tiny, crushed creature in her hands. Blood and tiny intestines spilled out from its side, and she couldn’t stop the tears from rolling down her face and onto her shirt. “Why did you do that? Why would you hurt it? It wasn’t going to hurt you!” she sobbed, staring straight into Adam’s precocious eyes.

“It was going to die anyways.” He lowered his eyes finally, deflecting.

Mary took the bird inside and decided never to speak to Adam again. It died in a small shoe box lined with soft cloth, and she buried it under a rose bush in the back yard. She never told on him, just like she hadn’t told on him when he threw sand in her eyes, even though when she threw it back, he ran screaming and didn’t invite her over for two weeks. She never told anyone about the bird, but she knew right then that something was terribly wrong with the world, when someone so young could kill something so helpless without thinking twice about it.

She was eleven when she read a speech by Chief Seattle on the eve of his people’s slow destruction. When she was sixteen, she read the testimonies of slaughterhouse workers who killed chickens for a living, and curled up in a ball and cried hard for three hours straight, and never ate meat again. When she was seventeen, she learned in a late night confession that her closest girlfriend, whom she had known since she was four, had been brutally raped by her mother’s boyfriend the same year that Mary stopped talking to Adam. She also learned that many children disappeared each year and had been ritualistically raped or sold into war, and she suspected there was a connection between the madness of the world and the torture of a life. She suspected that something happened on a metaphysical level when a soul was broken by violence. She did not know that Adam, even conditioned as a maturing Alpha, had been brutally raped by his adopted father, and that this lead him to believe that life was suffering and that Alpha-ness was about taking what you can and asserting your masculinity at every chance you get.

This is what Mary Kelly learned when she was eight. And when she was twenty-three, she learned that all universes revolving around the planet Terra were experiencing the same sad stories. All things were connected, like in that Stephen King book she read, and there was a center to all worlds that once held fast, and now was crumbling. But she suspected that when Atlantis finally sunk once and for all, something of the truth would be saved.

The problem with Time.

The Authoress awoke for the second time that morning at 7:23 a.m. After a restless night in which her mind was finally subdued with cannabis and ritualistic masturbation involving Osiris and his ever giving magick phallus of Light, she decided that today would be an excellent day to begin a novel. A bit groggily, yet overwhelmingly content, she went to the kitchen, started the tea kettle, fed her one roommate, a small tiger-striped dog with yellow eyes (who, unbeknownst to the Authoress, was one of a line of special operatives sent to Terra from the canine-dominate planet behind Sirius B), sat down in front of the quantum scrying machine and began to type:

The problem with Time is that our perception of it distances itself from the principles of non-locality. As a feminist, Mary Kelly knew her role would be to displace this perception in the eyes of the patriarchy and re-write hystory with not as a forward progression urgent for the pinnacle of orgasm, but as a cycle, a slowly gyrating, ever widening spire, the Second, and the Third, and the Fourth, and the Fifth (of course–this is the great Fifth Age) Coming. Of what? Of another cycle, of course. Jack may have given birth to the 20th Century, but Jill would give birth to the 21st.