Written by kilozombie

Thank you to: feliville, for the wonderful cover;
Thank you to: sophorose, for the wonderful chapter headers;
Thank you to: 3lmer and Wynnie for being sounding boards for ideas throughout this project;
Thank you to: 3lmer, Doobert, gurfan, and Wynnie for your beta reading and feedback;
Thank you to: gurfan, for making this website exist at all.


Use the paintbrush in the top left to change color schemes for readability.

Contains: animal violence, self-harm, and consensual non-consent.

An account
of a relationship
in a house
in the woods.

SECTION 1
ID

Dizzy sensation wakes me up.

Again my world is all sensory. Again it is devoid of memory. In this moment I have only a flood of emotions and senses to give me context as to what it is, as to what I am. Again I don't know whose bed this is, but because I'm in it, I wake up in my own bed. The comforter is six thousand pounds heavy and so is the blanket, the fuzzy blanket that reminds me of Him. The bed is big enough for two, but I'm alone. That dizzy sensation returns, that dizziness like I've been stood for all my life, but I'm tossing and turning now, I can't go back to sleep. I'm panting and drooling against the pillow cases and desperately, desperately hard. I can't figure out the layout of the room from memory.

Memory. Memory. I don't have any of that. When I try to reach back at former thoughts, I think of Him again and then get caught in a loop failing to masturbate with limp hands and limp arms and I'm so, so dizzy now, hanging around and flipping around and flopping onto my stomach. I don't remember the layout of this room. Is this my bedroom?

No, I

haven't had a bedroom

in some time now.

Throughout His house are two dozen unmarked bedrooms, and I am in one of them. Now that memory comes striking back. It's a thorn in my head, and again my world is all sensory, my world is all pain. Memory of last night is just pain and booze on my breath and orgasm still resonating, still reminding me, still a faint chill on my spine.

I turn onto my back and try and breathe and stare at the ceiling. There has to be some kind of grounding rhythm that I could align with that would take me out of a morning stupor. Do I remember how I used to calm down? And then instinct tells me, no, you never calmed down without hands around you. The ceiling is all twisty where the wooden beams meet. From so far below, it looks unintelligible, like a network of snakes all coiling together to form foundation and bedrock for His house's roof.

For a second I think it's pelting down rain, but there's morning sun. Then there's dusk light. I check my watch and it's spinning. I feel so dizzy again and turn over and fall into black.



The mornings are psychedelic in His house. Eventually I find myself having fallen out of the bed and onto the carpeted floor, where the wool again reminds me of His wool, but it's enough of a change in sensation to wake up, and for the world to start pooling into the bottom of my brain again. Sometimes His house does this to me. I lose track of where I am. Then, only after an hour of clutching and crawling to the edge of the bed, falling face-first to the floor, I realize I'm home.



By and large His house is Euclidean in nature; the walls don't curve in on themselves impossibly and the layout doesn't, to my knowledge, change. The lights turn on because of electricity because of a turbine in the basement fed by a hydroelectric dam and all of this is, I think, easy enough to imagine, but I've not seen the dam even through the highest window in the attic, and I can't identify anymore if we're still in Michigan or if we've ended up someplace else, because I don't recognize the landscape. When I stare up at the ceiling, the disorienting height of the rooms can make me think it's taller than it really is, but I know the measurements, and I know that there aren't any tricks at play with the world itself.

The ceilings in the bedrooms are twenty-seven feet, four inches above the floor. The ceilings in the hallways are twenty-nine feet, four inches above the floor. When I stare up at them, they feel the same amount of endless. Looking up doesn't remind me of where I am in His house.

The carpets are a soft wool. I first briefly thought they were His wool, but He has told me that they are not, that they are just soft. Maybe it would be strange if they were not just a reminder, but an actual link to his touch. Maybe then I would hold the carpets close instead of Him, but then I can't suspect that for long, because the carpets do not feel my heartbeat and do not match my breathing and they do not hold my penis softly with inhuman digits, and the carpets don't kiss me. The carpets smell like nothing, instead of smelling like flowers. But I am against the carpet right now and it's making me hard, because my world is all sensory, and they feel close enough. The memory that He is not here in my presence right now doesn't strike me.

A few minutes pass and then it does strike me. I am not basking in the morning light with Him, I am nakedly dry-humping the floor. Those things are a little different.



My robe is a cool-blue, folded up nicely in the corner of the bottom drawer of a dresser, of which there are four in this room alone. Memory saves me from turning the room upside-down. But still memory excludes the whereabouts of my slippers, only offering vague hints here and there—and memory struggles to escape last night and the booze and semen and wooziness, so I don't ask memory any more questions.

I don't go barefoot. I am the sort to wear stockings, and there are nylon ones in the dresser. My world is all sensory and this one, this one, of tight fabric and sleekness and comfort, is the one that takes me out of time, place, thought. They are colored black. They were sewn and then adjusted for me by Him, such that they fit my anatomy. So was the robe. I stretch these thigh-highs up my legs—I feel my two toes on each foot slide into the place where they belong, snug, and then the rest of it is snug, and I feel happiness that is completely divorced from reason and buildup. I feel arousal and safety.

Sometimes my world is all sensory and sometimes it's not. This morning I ponder for a moment where I am and how I am and why I'm shaped like this and why I'm sitting on the edge of a bed that isn't mine. Memory is just begging for some time off, but I am begging for answers.

Memory tells me I am in here because I want to be.

Memory is struggling to elaborate.

I remember knocking on a door

I remember knocking on His door

I remember knocking on a door and seeing the most beautiful, unfathomable, hypnotizing figure floating three inches off the floor. This was in Michigan—the place where I think I might still be. I was trying to deliver something to this address off a rural road upstate and He, in all of his glory, wasn't human. He wasn't like me. He looked overwhelmingly sad. He looked like He was exhausted just to get up and reach the doorway. I was in awe and dropped the package and before I knew it, He was going to close the door, and I was going to forget all about Him—I remember this thoroughly—and I didn't want that. The sensory part of me, the terrified-to-be-alone need-to-hold-somebody part of me, reached in and I grabbed His hand, and suddenly He was real.

His hands were real. His hands were warm. Warm, warm, warm.



Memory gets tired and I stop asking questions. For a short while I just get to feel body heat coming from nowhere. Actually this is what gets me about my own memory as it falters and short-circuits, which is that it's like a winding trail bordered by pitfall traps. I can so easily get caught up in thoughts that, whether comforting or terrifying, stop me in my tracks; I could think hard about how I got here and basically piddle around with the same few snippets of nothing, and I could think for a moment about His body and fall down the drain. I have to be particular with when I let myself go there, or I won't make it anyplace at all. Note the precum stains on the carpet.

I resolve to stick to this morning from now on. I am dressed up; I like to wear something form-fitting under the robe, so I wear panties that don't quite have enough room, and the stockings, and I feel ready and warm enough for the rest of His house.

The door to the bedroom is sixty pounds heavy. The brass handle is cold and stiff, yet it swivels on its axis with infinite smoothness. I can feel through my hands a click, when the mechanism unlocks. The tonnage of this door starts to move when I push. It starts and then persists and all nine feet, eight inches of height gives way to the hallway.

The carpet feels softer out here against my toes. I can tell that even if I were to sprint, it would be hard to hear my footsteps. Most of the transitory places in His house are carpeted. It reminds me sometimes of an airport, with the same feeling that I could fall over and settle down anywhere. I always sense I'm experiencing a very long overnight layover. There isn't another soul in the hallway, but I can see either side where it bends from here. The great dark oaken arches split the hall like a spine running through the west edge of His home, with either end simply leading back to the heart of the building.

Owing to the fact that the bedrooms have windows, this hallway doesn't. So again I am divorced from time. It could be anytime and anyplace.

But it doesn't change Him or His life where it is. And my body feels like it's morning. My brainstem suspects it's morning and so is adjusting my limbs to be more passive and is letting the rest of my cerebral cortex wake up slowly. And my brainstem also wants caffeine, and it suspects that now is the time. Memory tells me where the coffee maker is. Memory also lets me know I don't have to make it, but memory keeps thinking of times in two kinds of shitty apartment where I did have to make it, and memory puts me back there for a second.

Then I'm in the hallway again. And I am moving towards the heart of His house, and after sixty-eight footsteps and after rounding the bend, I feel a rubbing sensation against the back of my neck.



Or, no, that isn't what I would call it. Maybe it's heat against the back of my neck.



Or weightlessness.



Maybe it's pain.



I am missing some sensory information in my life and although my world is often all sensory sometimes it is filled with little holes. Sometimes people will describe what pieces of complex music sound like and I can process the words, but the meaning bounces off me because I am deaf, stone-deaf. Similarly this sensation regarding the back of my neck—where my brainstem is sending signals to increase my heart rate—is not easy to describe if you haven't felt it. Animals have a thousand different little piddly systems designed to sense the outside world and this one is unique. This system detects Him.

Now that heartbeat is going much faster.



When I am near, He feels my presence, too. He has indicated that the same feeling strikes Him in the back of the neck, and that it makes His heart rate increase. I can feel it, that gentle (ba-thump) against His chest, and felt through the palm of His hand, it is like I am holding His heart in my fingers. Ba-thump, I think. Simply the sensation in the back of my neck causes me to remember His heartbeat. His heart beats at ninety ba-thumps per minute. When I'm not around, when the house comes to a standstill at night, it is slower. It is around eighty.

He has a coy little fascination with His body and the measurements and all this. When I told Him I wanted to measure the house, He was surprised by it, and said He didn't remember the measurements either, and He grabbed me in his great big arms and helped me lift the measuring tape all the way up to the coiling, winding ceiling, and it's one of the best pieces of memory I have. It makes me feel as if, although I can't place myself when staring up at that mess, I can at least remember when I measured it, and when He helped me.

And then He taught me how to measure heartbeats based on the ticking of my watch. I can stare at the ticks of the second hand and tap my toe to that rhythm, and compare it to that which I feel in my wrist or His wrist, and make an estimate that gets closer and closer to the truth. When I'm in His presence, there are three ba-thumps in every two seconds, roughly. And when I feel Him in my presence, my heart is beating at about one-oh-five; there are nine ba-thumps in every five seconds. That one is harder to count accurately.

And all of this is just memory working diligently, filing papers, filling forms. Memory likes to know what numbers go in what places.



I don't have to make coffee, memory reminds me. And the walk is almost over, memory reminds me. And the hallway opens up so suddenly and my view expands to the great living room which resides in the heart of the house, which is itself a beating and thrumming and lively thing. With a roaring fireplace along the southern wall bordered by two transitive hallways to the front exit, with an open kitchen along the west wall where the cool blue lights make it look like a little oasis, and with lavish furniture in the center of the room arranged in such a way that it all feels cozy and homely. And the ebony wooden pillars and walls are complemented now with brighter woods that form accent-work along every surface to add depth, and between each exciting point of interest are endless rows of books which lay in intricacy within bookshelves embedded in these walls, and all at once it is a feast for the eyes. And my world is all sensory; and this place makes me feel small.

My eyes stick forward and I lurch to the kitchen. The carpet is softer here and yet more worn, as I can feel individual marks where furniture has been shifted around, both my and His attempts to reorganize to reach an optimal shape for the room. And then the kitchen floor tiles are chill to the touch, somehow exuding coldness like a furnace exudes heat, and I reach the coffee maker, which is this elaborate thing that is embedded in the wall and is made out of pipes and dreams, and is exuding heat like floor tiles exude chill, and I finally reach it, and hell, caffeine is finally in my life again.

The cup is so damn warm. So damn warm. Actually warmer than the touch of Him, so it is its own sensory experience. It is a tap-tap in the ear: I am more powerful than you. And I clasp the cup in my keratinous digits and return it to the marble counter, and then I pour in cream, and then I pour in sugar, and then I put it all back into the fridge, and then I have coffee I can drink.

It is then that I finally bring my eyes up off what I am doing and I see Him floating not far outside the kitchen's confines.



Here is what I have to say about Tabi if I am being completely honest: I love him entirely and wholly and I also don't know if I love him. I don't know what love means anymore.



Here is what I have to say about Tabi if you have not met him: he is seven-feet tall, he is what would be called an anthropomorphic animal. He floats three inches above the ground, so that his delicate caprine feet do not land at any moment, though he can reach ground if he wants to. He resembles a white-wooled male sheep, a ram, though of course he has just two digitigrade legs and two arms, and opposable thumbs, and other remnants of the human form that make him function as such. His head is long and beautiful, with great inquisitive eyes and a pointed muzzle, and a nose that is lovely to tap, and great big ears that waggle as he hears new information. His horns curl around the side of his face twice, or maybe thrice just barely. His mouth curves in such a way that, at all angles and all times, it looks like he is smiling, as if he knew something you did not. His chest is big and fluffy; all of him is, all of him always is. He is covered in smooth, delicate wool, though it does not shed and does not need to be shorn. His keratinous fingers and toes are soft and rounded, such that they do not even threaten to break skin.

He is hypnotizing. Hypnotizing. I use that word a lot for him. When I think of him, my mind mentally wants to capitalize He and so on and treat him godlike, though when he is a form in front of me, I think of Tabi more modestly, as a friend, as a partner. Still there is this intense urge when he enters my mental peripheral to worship him, every inch of him, though especially the softs of his feet and hands, and his lithe thighs, and his asscheeks which can only be felt not seen, and his penis, which bobs playfully against touch, and his face, and every part of me wants to kiss him at every available moment.

And when I see him, and the world all coalesces, and I just have a warm coffee in my hand and no worries, and memory forgets about that shitty apartment once and for all, he uses those hands to speak to me.

"That coffee might be a bit bad," Tabi signs. "I heard rumbling in the pipes. We should do maintenance on it soon."

And I go flush and smile warmly, and I feel that warmth go through my whole body. And I sign back: "We can do that today." And my eyes light up to indicate enthusiasm. And all is good.



I have changed to physically become like Tabi as a result of his caretaking. Or a result of something. Or maybe cause and effect are not relevant.

But the crucial thing is that I'm not human either, I am also what would be called an anthropomorphic animal in much the same vein as Tabi. I stand shorter than him by a head—six feet six—and have a shorter, more pronounced and rounded snout. I resemble a black-furred goat whom walks on two legs, with two-toed feet and four-fingered hands, and I have never felt such euphoria to be alive in my body. Where Tabi's wool is fluffy along all but his extremities, I keep my fur kempt so as to not get irritated when I put on tight clothing. The grooming is a process that I have had to learn by trial and error. It was worth that effort.

I don't think I'm hypnotizing or any word like that. I think I am ordinary. When Tabi signs for me he does it because he wants to communicate with me. He is attracted to me, but I think he feels a great deal of affection for me just in the sense that I am here and another living person, and I enjoy his company, and that's a feedback loop that does a great deal for the soul. Actually Tabi has said he finds the idea of a soul very funny in a grim sort of way. Sometimes there is this air of cynicism about him.

But not now. Right now the air is tranquil with morning laze. I am quickly collapsed on the couch with my fluffy butt between two cracks in the cushions—the cushions are some kind of soft vinyl—and my legs up on the coffee table, and my stockings make me feel so warm, and my coffee is between my hands between my legs, and God, what a sensory experience. My world is all sensory and no part of my sensible brain wants to leave.

Tabi is here. He is sat on the adjoining part of the couch to my right, and he has stopped hovering so that he could lay down on the couch and read. He holds up the book with his mind. The book is called Djiban, and it looks hand-bound, and I can't see the author, but Tabi reads at a quick pace, his quizzical, expressive eyes narrowing and focusing with such beauty that I want to kiss him. He only looks at me now and then to give me a warm little smirk that I return.

Communications besides the romantic are transient by necessity. My hands are occupied with the coffee cup, but as I sip away the brew, the cup gets lighter and I can set it down. And he is laid down, so signing is a little awkward. Still, having that barrier in the way means we are very efficient and cool with our conversation, like murmurs during a massage. He signs, "Did you sleep alright?"

"Yeah," I sign back casually, after setting the cup down. "Well. No. I actually slept with a lot of tossing and turning. But I feel rested."

He gives me a long, knowing look. "The same here. They were difficult nights. But we do feel rested."

Another pause, and I stare up at the ceiling. In this room, the great room, the ceiling is twenty-four feet, six inches above the floor, and then it turns into the same gnarled mess of wood branches and columns as the rest of Tabi's home. However, unlike the rest of the house, this spot has a skylight. Smaller than the whole of the ceiling, yet large enough to let in great quantities of light, this skylight tells my brainstem—for certain—that it is morning. And it is not the kind of psychedelic morning-time that was confusing me during my bedrest, that made me spin-dizzy, but real morning.

The rays of the sun are streaming in at a low angle, bathing the western end of the room in golden light. And though the glass is ever-so-slightly murky, I can watch clouds stream by the bluish-gray sky. Some days there are so many clouds that sunlight struggles to find its way, but today it looks like autumn has been interrupted by a cold spring day come three months early, and there is no doubt that we are eating the best sunlight of our lives. Morning as a platonic concept is just screaming to me. It is morning. It is morning.

I feel like I've slept ten thousand years and ended up right where I wanted to.

Tabi notices my staring and has craned up his beautiful caprine head to join me. We are now cloud-watching at the bottom of the world. I eventually giggle softly and sign to him, "It seems like we got a break."

"It does!" he signs excitedly. Djiban keeps floating, and the pages hang freely. "It looks like it, anyway. We're in for more rainy days after this one. But the home looks so special with that light, don't you think?"

"Special is a good word," I sign. And I let out a long exhale only he can hear. "You should lift me up there so we can cloudwatch later." I motion later because we are doing our morning routine and it would be a bad time, but I really do want him to do it right now, though not enough to make a fuss.

And Tabi senses this, because he senses everything well, and so he flies off the couch and in a motion too quick to parse, picks me up like a bride and starts soaring into the air.



I do not know why Tabi can fly or control things with his mind, but it is a question I've asked him before and received answers for before. Memory gives me a shrug and says it isn't worth re-litigating. Tabi can fly and control things with his mind. This is just how it is.



And now I feel the indoor wind streaming past my face, and I feel my fur cooling down, and we float all the way up and I am laughing with dizziness as we finally reach the skylight. And now all of this far-away business of wondering where I am falls away; I am in some-place where the sky is beautiful. And Tabi has me in his great big arms, and I can feel his wooly chest against my body holding me tight. I am twenty feet in the air but I feel absolutely no worry beyond my brainstem saying you're very high up right now and I ignore it and my breath is taken away.

Tabi carrying me like this means he can't sign to me, but I can sign to him. I could also speak to him, but my confidence is so far gone that I would rather just sign. I motion that this is exactly what I wanted and he, in all of his glory, just gives me a grin. He knows. That's why he did it.

Our breathing is so close. I can feel his warmth and he can feel his; his breathing matches mine, or at least close. And I can feel his heartbeat from here. I can even count it. And our breaths are so close to the skylight, too, that it fogs it up a tad, and the sky is blotted out just enough to remind us that there's glass in the way, in case it were to start raining. And yet still from this angle we can see the whole sky, nearly horizon to horizon, as we sit suspended in the highest spot of the house.

Finally, after a moment to get my head steady, I can cloud-watch, like I wanted to. And Tabi has already begun doing the same. He huffs softly, looking up at a low angle to get a view of the skyline, and I follow his gaze, so that we can see things together. Wordlessly we are both able to find the same cumulus, a white spiral which is only barely a cloud, like the particles of water are still not determined to be one yet, but that at any moment the humidity and temperature may shift it into becoming something more solidly defined. It is shaped like a capital I, with streaks of white more solid and beautiful than others, and some parts so foggy they take squinting to make out.

I am reminded of me and Tabi, for some reason; sometimes so much of this world is undefined, while other parts are just barely defined enough for me to make out. There are some concrete things in my life, and some other things I can't get a grasp on at all. I am hard underneath the robe, and it's just beginning to poke against my panties enough to show visibly. I always get hard when Tabi touches me in any way. That's one concrete thing in my life.

I sign to him, "That cloud reminds me of us."

He gives me a puzzled look and then glances back. He wants to see what I see. He is an empathetic sort of person, or so I've always gathered, because when I express something, he always wants to share that point of view so he can understand it. And here he glances away, and his eyes narrow, and his pupils dilate, and then he glances back, nodding slowly. I elaborate, "It's a symbolic type of thing."

Tabi huffs in approval. And he goes back to looking at the cloud. And his expression, the part I can see, is more thoughtful. He is seeing the clouds for their symbolic shape now, instead of their real shape.

I think he was going to sign that it looked like a capital 'I'. Which is also very true.

And a few moments later, when he is lowering us back down to the couches, I feel my guts turn inward on themselves.

My breath is shorter. My stomach is winding up. A lump in me works its way up my liver to my ears and I do not explain my worry and my ache but these kinds of things never go away easy.



We eat, because it is the morning and eating is important. It is not an incredibly complicated breakfast but it is an incredibly filling one; I make us both three fried eggs in two separate pans and serve it atop two pieces of decadent, bougie wheat bread covered in sesame seeds and oats. While the eggs are frying I reheat some leftover hollandaise sauce—made in bulk on previous days—to drizzle over the homemade concoction in high quantity. Cooking is an activity that is indescribable. When I cook alone, it is nothing like cooking with other people, and in this particular case, that pang of discomfort is starting to snowball.

Two plates with eggs, toast, hollandaise sauce, and I serve them on the little four-person dining table sitting just outside the kitchen. And we eat. And I am trying to fill something—a hole in me that is leaking—but nothing is working. Instead, it is widening, and my breath is growing shorter, worse, less steady. And yet I have no idea what to do about it.

So I eat and drink coffee and get worse.



Tabi is back to reading, and I am back to relaxing between two cushions, but that disoriented feeling now has me uncomfortable with the status quo; I have the coffee in my lap but it is now warm instead of hot, and my stockings make me feel comfortable but they also make me feel embarrassed. Even in the presence of somebody this sexually active, crossdressing strikes me as an activity I should feel ashamed of enjoying. And this discomfort is intensifying all these feelings.

But I can diagnose this. Finally the thought comes to my head and I can diagnose this. This is just caffeine. Caffeine simulates a form of anxiety in the body. I am fine. It's just the caffeine.

At some point Tabi gets to a point in Djiban where he stops, setting the book on the coffee table so that he can rest and stretch out his legs, and I realize by his body language that he is sexually energized. He gives me a flushed little grin, and I return it on instinct, because he is beautiful and he makes me feel loved, and he signs, "I can't help but remember what we wanted to try doing this morning..." And he is referring to something kinky and now I remember and I want to be excited but I am forcing it, I am forcing my energy levels up.

I don't know what is making him so horny, and I envy it. I want this sensation to end. Soon I'll be over the hill, I tell myself. And then I realize my cup has reached bottom.

The fake-anxiety moves me forcefully to fill it back up again. I shuffle into the kitchen—the journey is so sudden I don't even look back at Tabi as I'm doing it—I watch the coffee machine rumble, I retrieve black coffee and make it cream coffee and add sugar. My right hand is trembling. My world is all sensory and I am erect under my robe but my body is jittering and thinking, and thinking, and thinking.

Actually, memory is who is at the driver's seat for a moment. Memory cleans the table of all the other muck and makes me set down the coffee cup on the kitchen counter, and memory is asking me to please, God, double-take. Double-take for a moment. This isn't the caffeine in me stirring, this is something real, this is something in words. I am trying to tell you something, so listen, says memory. Glance over at Tabi and stare into his loving eyes and then remember, remember, remember.



Earlier, Tabi signed that he had the same difficult nights as me.



What does that mean?



Did we sleep for multiple nights?

Ba-thump ba-thump. The current ratio of my heartbeat versus the clock is very simple to calculate: two beats for every one second. That means my heart rate is one twenty. And I can't stop staring at my watch.

I have my left arm pinned on the kitchen counter and my whole body leaning into this pose, staring at my watch, watching the seconds tick up. Eleven A.M. is the time. And that psychedelic morning dizziness comes back and I think about all the times where, in my fugue waking state, I glanced over at my watch: four P.M. and six A.M. and a variety of other times that only make sense as dreams. Also even if I were to see conflicting information like this I would not really care because my mornings are all sensory and I don't keep any memories, even though now that I'm thinking about it, I remember seeing a stormy night, a wintry morning, and I remember the moonlight streaming in alongside overcast daylight, and all in the last time I slept, all in the last time I was wallowing around forever.

Memory and my senses require one another. I am standing here on the cold floor tiles and that's what grounds me to the kitchen, but then I think about being pinned to the bed by a six thousand-pound comforter and sleeping forever, with my limbs all pinned to the mattress. And that pitfall trap I've fallen into is making me stare at my watch and count my heartbeat, and freeze up like a goat in headlights.

Ba-thump ba-thump.

How long

have I

avoided

thinking about this?

Even right now I am inclined to just move on and calm down. This is fake-anxiety caused by coffee and Tabi is right there—Tabi is in view from this position on the counter, and I crane my head to the left and I can see him with his perfect wooly body relaxing on the right-side couch, reading Djiban, tapping at an erection and trying to act cool about it. There is so much pulling me away from these thoughts about my watch. And memory is overworked. Memory is, I personify, somebody with a lot of issues. Personal troubles. Memory has bags under its eyes, in a way of speaking.

Okay, memory says, but I am also the only part of you not taking crazy pills. So pay attention:

Last night was, as all nights in Tabi's home are, psychedelic. And I remember a lot of things in a haphazard sort of way. My world was all sensory information and none of it was processed. You can consider this like a pile of unsorted papers: some of the papers are completely useless, or they're at least not useful to me. And some papers need to be found. They have to be understood, it's a moral imperative. Meanwhile the rest of my cranium is perfectly happy wallowing in the happy emotions of Tabi's care, so if I don't process something right now while leaning on my arm in the kitchen, I'm not going to have access to the paperwork for another dozen or two dozen pages! Or maybe never!

This heap of paperwork is all scraps.

Imagery, striking my visual cortex like a Gatling gun. I remember staring out the window and seeing night and day and morning and noon. I remember rainy nights and I remember fog. I remember feeling so sick to my stomach that my only solution was to crawl into bed, curl up, and sleep some more. I remember forgetting where I was.

I remember—in almost comical fashion—staring at my watch, and seeing all the analog hands spin, spin, spin. I think this was a dream.

I think all of it was.

But memory insists that it's just delivering the papers, and that I should stop treating memory like a piece of shit. I have no response. My heart rate is too high and I'm feeling anxious just processing singular thoughts, and now I can feel every single exhale out of my muzzle, and I can feel my fur fluffing up, and God, my world is swirling down the drain—

—thesis statement, I think night in Tabi's home lasts more than one night—

—thesis statement, I think it lasts many many nights—

—thesis statement, I can't focus on this any more or I will die.

- - -

My gut is turning into spirals. I can feel my stomach trying to escape my body. Actually I lack words for what exactly my internal organs want to do because all they're doing is screeching discomfort, discomfort, discomfort, I don't want to feel this way, I don't want to be this way. And my head is two pounds lighter, and when I sway back and forth my vision of the bathroom blurs. And I want to throw up very very badly. This is what I blurt out to Tabi when he's holding me, his arm soft around my belly and his other arm soft against my back, and I am sure I sound blubbering and incoherent, but his teary-eyed, fearful face seems to sympathize. I want to throw up so badly, but my body doesn't actually need to throw up.

I am not food-sick. I am brain-sick.

But still I am crying and wailing and my hands are too weak to sign to Tabi, so I am just speaking, which my voice hates doing, and if Tabi is speaking I can't read his lips because he is a sheep-person, and the nausea continues until the discomfort is my whole body. I can't black out and pass the time, which is the only thing I want. I want to be anywhere but here.

Then, with an enigmatic look in his eyes, Tabi grips me tighter.

I am gone.



Three hours pass.



I am on my back, and the pain has gone, and the discomfort has gone, and the sense of time has gone. I have a throw pillow covering my torso and two pillows on my belly. Above me is the ceiling, the skylight. I am back in the main room on the flat sofa.

This is all actually very familiar to me as steps inside of a panic attack: anxiety, physical nausea, headaches, dissociation, and finally emptiness. I am empty, and now the remnants of myself are filling me back up again with whatever scraps of sapience they can manage. My prefrontal cortex is flooding me with a low-lying stream of dopamine and warmth, and the back of my neck reminds me again and again, Tabi is close, Tabi is here.

I tilt my neck to the right. He is turned the other way, along the northern wall of the great room, floating twelve feet off the ground to examine the endless bookshelves embedded into the supports, nooks and crannies of the wood that supports the ceiling. The spines of old books can be found winding along this wall in every-which-way; were Tabi not able to float like he does, he could not possibly reach and examine them all. And even with the benefit of eyesight I cannot make out a single title I recognize.

I make a low-lying grunt to let him know I'm present. He turns his head instantly as if he's been waiting for it all this time. His vibrant eyes express so much to me that I can't describe; the midday sun is streaming through the roof, making his wool glow brightly and in a technicolor fashion. He is posed in portrait. From the tips of his cloven hooves to the points of his horns, Tabi is formed out of shapes drawn in stencil, he is made of dreams. He notes that my eyes are open—crimson and beady against my onyx fur—and that stencil-drawn ram descends upon me at pace.

The image is a little unnerving. He does not move with momentum. He just moves.

And he is by my side within moments. And I shoot him a tired smile, and I sign, "It's over." And the relief in him is palpable—all that stiffness of his form droops, and he lowers to the ground to float at his usual height above it. And here his beauty is overwhelming my senses; I feel as if he has appeared out of a dream and is now too real, too present. He is overloading my cerebral cortex. My world is all sensory around Tabi and soon memory will be gone and soon my self will be gone and soon I will be so horny and warm that nothing else will matter.

But I still have willpower right now. Just for a moment. I am not ready to be all senses yet.

"Tabi," I sign, my sickly form retracting further into the sofa, "how long are the nights here?"

And the lights dim,

and the house shudders,

and he becomes quite serious.

He floats back an inch, taking a deep breath, which I am sure must feel and sound heavy. And Tabi signs, after a few moments of consideration, "Did you feel like more than one passed while you slept?"

"No," I sign. "Not just now. That was three hours. I have a good sense of that."

"So you mean the night before. In bed."

I nod. "And you signed plural for nights before, and I started thinking about how badly I rested and how I kept seeing my watch spinning. And that's why I had that panic attack."

"Oh, my darling," he signs, that sympathy oozing, "I am so sorry."

He reaches a hand out to take me upright. And in all of my trust of Tabi, my endless trust because I have noplace else to put my trust, I take it without a second thought.

I feel the carpet against my toes. I feel the warmth of my outfit, composed to feel embarrassing in a good way. These are good senses. And Tabi takes a breath, and with such closeness I can actually feel that breath, feel every aching inch of it, embedded with meaning I can't yet entangle. Finally, he is ready to converse again. "I think I did mis-sign to you. Of course the nights last just one night. Or if they don't it is beyond my knowledge. I do sleep unpleasantly like you, though. I think it's due to all the magic and occult going on." He smiles as if he's just told a joke so I smile back.

Memory is here to tell me that his story checks out—it always does. Actually I think now that maybe I was mistaken. And this is how memory gets those bags under its eyes, because it admits that, yes, Tabi has had to struggle with American Sign Language and maybe I am not the best teacher. Plurals are not an integrated part of signing in ASL like they are with spoken English, so he never signed a plural and I made one up based on context. Yes, memory says, that was my own mistake.

Then, there are some other details that memory is bringing up again. We do sign in ASL, but more and more I have noticed that we fudge with the language. After all, I have not taught Tabi every word and he hardly knows them all, but I never lose the meaning of what he's signing. And when he signs something I simply understand what he means. The understanding comes naturally from my language processor in my temporal lobe, like Tabi has it wrapped around his three fingers. And those three fingers could never be precisely correct, nor can mine—we must make so many adjustments for our less dextrous hands. And I have never mistakenly interpreted a plural. A plural is always correct, with Tabi. His ability to communicate meaning is unparalleled. He is good at judging consent, of wants and wishes, he is always wired into my thoughts. And he did sign "night." And I did interpret "nights."

And yet he does not disagree with my interpretation of events, because I am generally not an unreliable narrator of my own life, just one who gets confused. And when I remember that moment, I think of a lot of things, including his body and his penis and his hands, but also "nights," and my watch spinning endlessly.

It's all a soup.

Just like that, the overhead light—and even the light from the sky itself—seems to brighten.

And the house is calming down. And that jitter in my legs is better, too. All is alright.

And Tabi's smile is so wonderful. He is made out of pastel, out of flowers.

"Magic and occult," I sign back, giggling softly. "And yet coffee makes it all better."

"That is its own kind of magic." He grips me by the back and brings me in, and I can taste coffee just faintly on his breath as we think about it. And I can't stop myself from tilting my head forty-five degrees and embracing him in a kiss, a kiss, a kiss... something that always makes me feel better. And soon through this embrace all those memories dry away like water in a puddle. I am just here, kissing Tabi, the owner of the house, the master of the house, the god of my little universe, holding his stomach, holding his back. The moment is romance after a storm. The moment is love. I am in love with Tabi.

I must be.

At this moment, as if he has descended from the clouds to greet me, Tabi changes the mood. He changes the mood greatly. He signs, "What if we resumed where we left off?"

Before all this, he means. Before I freaked out. Before I interrupted things—when Tabi was there and I could not meet him.

But now I can.

"Yes," I sign. "Yes, that's what I want." I come closer to him, I lurch closer, I let out some kind of sound under my breath, and he pushes back, and I push back, and we dance like this a moment. And I can just barely—just barely—feel him getting excited. He's been excited and I just now reached him, and amidst my sleep I have found my libido intact, blossoming.

I want to love you.

"Then we will," he signs, and then we put our hands down.

He is so close to me that it only requires a slight movement for him to reach his palm down by my groin, and for him to pull up my robe with his wrist. His soft, keratinous fingers cup my genitals through my panties; my balls and folded-up limp penis form a bulge that is instantly warmed by his touch. I feel, again, his breath against my muzzle, as we've pulled away from a kiss. Now he can see that expression on my face. He can see me all flustered, he can see the blood rushing to my face.

A flash in his eyes. An intensity arises from nowhere. Suddenly he is that godlike figure I dream about and he is leaning in my space, and in those goat pupils I can see that he has intentions for me. And my control over the situation will be regulated. This is the divine splendor of bottoming, of being submissive to Tabi, it is the sensation of being in somebody else's care. Actually most prominently it is the sensation of being somebody else's plaything. And I can feel all three hours of Tabi wishing he had a plaything. I can feel all three hours of book-searching, of reading titles but not pages, of scouring the house for anything to do. I can feel his breath get so warm now. I can feel him assuring me, "Now you're mine." And Tabi grips me by the arms and he forces me to the sofa.

This feverish and horny version of him trumps all others. I am actually scared for a moment as I'm pinned by him, as my brainstem tells me I'm being overtaken by a wild animal, and Tabi is suddenly wild-eyed, and I finally feel his dick press up against my belly as he leans in. He is throbbing and antsy and could do something unpredictable if not appeased. My breath is all struggling now and I can feel the confines of my panties being hardly enough for my own shaft, unfurling and pressing up against cotton desperately...

Warmth, that is the theme. My legs and toes feel warm and God, Tabi is so warm, he starts thrusting desperately against my stomach, against the robe which blocks him from kneading my fur with his precum; I blubber softly to beg him to undress me, and I can almost sense the snarling enthusiasm by which he replies. He doesn't stop pinning me against the sofa, but instead forces me down with his elbow. Finally, he undoes my robe with that spare hand. It comes clean off.

I am revealed to Tabi, my black furry chest and stomach, compressing and uncompressing with my breath. And now as he presses against me, his cock, all nine inches of pink inflamed flesh, are felt against that motion of my breath. He is not cautious or loving in his movements, but instead feverish and needy, grunting and huffing in such a way I can feel his breath. Throb. Throb. Thrust. And my panties are not holding in my excitement at all anymore.

Finally, Tabi leans back for a moment to get a good look at me, and his cock is inflamed from all the frotting, coated in a glistening layer of precum that drools beneath him. This sheep is carnivorous, staring at this vulnerable goat that I am. Again that euphoria of being a fuzzy animal person, and of being dominated, and my breath is taken away. He is staring at my dick, and he is silently acknowledging that I am willing.

I lose a few moments as he lunges.

Discomfort against my thigh; he has my undergarments pushed aside such that my dick is finally free, and also such that my ass is no longer shielded. And I am, by this point, so excited by any degree of touch that I emit precum against his fingers, his warm touch, his palm, as he plays with me. I am shifting involuntarily. The arousal is a squeeze of feeling, it is shots of tight, tight, tight pleasure. My shaking hands can only grip his backside. I am so fucking shaky and only Tabi's abdomen, his fluffy wool, can give me any sense of being grounded. And it is right then, as I am shuddery to the point of comic relief, that he starts to fuck me.

We shuffle to align with the sofa lengthwise, and my head is back against the cushions, and my horns rub up against a pillowcase. And Tabi is above me with that inane look in his eyes. And his thighs collide with mine, and my legs wrap around his backside, and his shaft—that lovely thing which I could worship for hours without tiring—is in me. It's in me and the tightness and discomfort is masked out by the sensation of being had. My fluffy asscheeks tell me that something completely unexpected by my genetics is happening: something is going into my ass. It is his tip. He knows my contours and enters without warning, without slowing up, slipping that thin end into me three inches and huffing out and melting on top of me.

I pump again onto my own belly. I feel that sticky precum mat up my fur, but I can't help it, I can't help anything, I am pinned and overwhelmed and hot, and my panties aren't off they're just aside, and Tabi thrusts further, further, further.

One hand of his keeps gripping me, but he's no longer jerking, just slicking my length with his own thrusts.

I yelp out involuntarily. He squeezes some part inside me that is directly connected to the pleasure centers of my brain, and I am flooded with dopamine. My prostate is a cheat button to making my brain release tons of dopamine, as it is the lone device in my body that produces semen. And I think Tabi colliding with it, pressing the walls of my interior against my prostate, is a very direct way of telling my brain, "Hey, we will need to cum soon." And it takes all my will not to cum immediately. Actually there is no way I would be able to stop an anal orgasm with sheer force of will, but I can at least stop the vibrant, tight climax that would result from his death-grip around my shaft.

Tabi continues until he's very, very deep in me. I don't know how deep because I am starting to become dizzy and can't see anything but his eyes, but I know that it feels like I have a brick inside my ass. The discomfort is, perhaps, what's getting me so thoroughly here. The sensory experience of sexual discomfort is, in of itself, deeply arousing. And Tabi is drooling on my muzzle. Here is Tabi's drool, and his wild, enigmatic gaze, and here is his tip fondling my interior so deep that a caver couldn't find him.

It is now that Tabi gets a rhythm in his head. He is good at rhythm, as he taught me how to count those heartbeats. And it is now that he thrusts in a rhythm of sixty BPM, or approximately one forwards and one backwards per second. In, out. In, out. Like the ventricles of my heart he is using me as a cocksleeve. Like a metronome. I can stare into his eyes and see his pupils dilate.

Actually I can see behind the glass of his retina. Actually I can see his pupils swinging like that metronome.

Waving. Hypnotizing. Back and forth. One-two. In-out.

For some reason, fear is once again here with me, and I am losing track of the world. I have kicked memory out of the house. And I am drooling and my limbs are nearly out of my control, and I squeeze my toes in the stockings so hard I fear they'll rip, and I dig into his backside with my digits. Tabi, Tabi, Tabi, I have nothing but shaking and begging and I have Tabi.

I am

a black-furred,

gay,

horny goat

and I have a God.

He is jerking me off now. That flash in His eyes as he gets a sense for my emotional state and senses that I want to cum so, so badly, so He is making it happen. That tight grip around my length slicks up and down and up and down and He fucks my ass until I am crying and I am begging wordlessly with all my breath taken away, and he slams my prostate again, and He exhales with force, and He kisses me

and I cum. I feel it well up in my ravaged prostate first and then the pleasure strikes me like lightning bolts across my entire nervous system. My brainstem explodes into a thousand little pieces and my eyes shut and I am in a sensory deprivation tank of pleasure, hitting me like arrows against my belly. I feel cum, hot seed that has been begging for release for hours or maybe weeks, sputter out onto my belly and His belly, long sticky lines. I shut my muzzle around His muzzle to lock us together.

My world is all sensory; I am experiencing the divine.



The squeeze of intense arousal is compressing my body from the outside in. And He does not stop fucking me, because He has not reached climax, and He is slamming my prostate every half-second and then rubbing against it on the backwards motion, and then back in again, and I am tearing up from the sensation. I keep kissing Him with saliva and drool and I can feel my vocal cords all twisting up in yelps and moans; and finally after a few more pumps His eyes shut and He shudders violently, and I can feel His heartbeat

ba-thump

ba-thump

ba-thump

and now He slams His seed into me. His cum is thick and beady and I can feel my asscheeks vibrate with one, last, definitive slap against them, as He ensures little of it escapes. And He is pumping like I am a stuffed donut, hilted against my butt, exhaling and desperately contorting His body against mine. I can feel every bit of His orgasm through his heartbeat, racing, racing, racing. And He kisses me even harder, and the moment is a soup.

I am floating in this with Him.



Time passes, but not much time.

Disembodied and panting lusciously, I am reeling from the experience in all sorts of ways, with my nerves melting into the sofa. Suddenly gravity is a factor: and the floating Tabi above me is no longer floating, he is settled down on me, and I can feel every pound of his weight. He is the heaviest blanket, even heavier than that comforter that trapped me last night, and he is a reassuring factor by proxy that I do not have to move. He can stay penetrating me even as I am leaking cum from both my own engorged member and from my puckered hole. We can lay and wait for our sexes to soften naturally. And as he gyrates against me... well, his shaft does not soften quick, and mine keeps pumping out the last remnants of orgasm. Every little spew reminds my nervous system to jolt.

Actually I think I can feel gentle laughter from Tabi as he notices me jitter, and I can't help but laugh with him, although I am totally out of breath at this point. And milking the sensation by thrusting against his belly is easy enough, so I keep doing it, I keep grinding against him, and my tip starts to flare up in sensitivity. It is saying, 'no, you idiot, you already came, stop.' But I don't care. I am horny and dizzy and drooling on his neck now.

And he caresses my belly, and then my thighs, and it feels as if it will never end.

This moment I am blind and deaf but I can feel him. I feel him in me, still, and that discomfort is a form of reassurance, because we are locked together. And I feel him on me, his chest, his neck. And with my hands so weakened I can feel his contours, the contours of his body, where his wool masks a soft skin underneath, where his features are utterly inhuman along his shoulderblades and hips, so animalistic in shape; and this all in silence, in noncommunicative bliss. My hands teach me an entire world that is his figure. All seven feet of his height, painted in ivory white pastel, on a canvas so wide, Tabi rests upon a foundation of dreams. And he rests on me. And I make sounds to try to put this into words, but there are no words for this. There are no words for this.

Just murmurs and rumbles and squeaks.

My world is all sensory.



What does that mean for me?

And for a moment I worry that, like that comforter in that bed that wasn't mine, I will lose myself. I will lose myself in time and space and believe that multiple nights have passed when surely they haven't. I will be so hypnotized by thoughts of Tabi, and his presence on top of me, that I will lose my memory. After all, I don't have any of that most of the time. Memory is baggy-eyed and tired of this charade.

Memory writes me a short biography of itself. Back in those shitty apartments it was my method of causing panic attacks unto itself. It was also eidetic, and maybe synesthetic, but I never got myself diagnosed with any of that, so I will simply describe my memory as unusually vibrant. Such is the method that I stumble into pitfall traps. And now that I am in Tabi's home, his presence and my incessant thoughts of him often stop my memory from functioning properly. And memory, so resigned to this fate, has no real qualms about this. Though I suppose that disaffected tone is more a form of defeat than of peace.

But, defeated as memory is, it sticks with me. It has never left. I don't think I've forgotten a thing—just stuffed it in a drawer somewhere. Even the most fleeting of conversations remain in me, because my memory has a very large archive.

Here are the new papers it is serving me, with Tabi as a blanket, still half-fucking me:

What did he mean by "magic and occult'?

Why did I gloss over it before?

Why do I feel so tired of the subject?

And then the situation of his flight, his controlling of objects with his mind, which is something I've been over so many times before, and again memory shrugs off with dejection. Memory says that no matter how often we do this dance, I return here, with Tabi on top of me. He is the way I avoid responsibility.

He is the way that I avoid the subject. But the subject is him. Tabi has now told me that there is magic in the house, and occult in the house; and Tabi has claimed that the night is only one night, even though I actually do not think he is correct, but I didn't want to challenge him, because I just wanted to fuck him, and

and this is it.

This is why memory is so, so tired.

If I questioned all this for too long, then it would reduce the chance that I can stay pinned to the couch by him. If I ask Tabi the same questions, and make him answer me, he will get tired of me. And maybe I will not have him. And maybe the lights will dim and the tone will grow serious, and I will lose the only thing that lets me forget about those shitty apartments, these shitty panic attacks, the human body I used to have that made me miserable.

Is that a reasonable fear?

His breath against me is utterly real. I do not know Tabi well enough to know if he would leave me or make me leave. In fact, I don't know anything about my world except for the sensory details. My amygdala, my detector for danger, has no idea what to say.

I know the feeling of Him, but not His meaning.

So I do not think about it again for a while.

Here is the situation: as with other times that I have taken a midday nap, Tabi has taken it upon himself to schedule the rest of the day in a more compact method. The time is one PM and I will go with him into the walls to work on the heating and water pipes that make the coffee machine function, to check it for kinks and dings, and then at three PM we will go to the Room to enjoy ourselves, before we split up to read or consume media, all leading up to seven PM when we will cook together, eat together, and retire in the Room again—this time with booze and other substances—until we are so tired that we want to go to bed.

Having a timetable for events and circumstances is a prominent method in keeping me excited and active up to individual events. Because I am horny and stupid, I am mostly looking forward to our two slots in The Room; before that point, I can fondle and gaze at Tabi all I want, and be sure I'm not going to have to actually get my ass turned into knots. Yet.

Actually Tabi tells me that the timetable is a remnant of a time when he had more guests in his home. The schedule itself is a great big satin board mounted on the southern wall beside the fireplace, on which disposable sticky notes are placed. "I don't know that I've told you the whole story," he signs. "I had more friends here a couple years ago, right before you arrived. I was... depressed when they left, so your arrival was so perfect I couldn't believe it. The world just lined up."

I can't help but smile at that. He is putting up the last sticky note at seven PM. "I wish I had the opportunity to meet them. Were they like me?" I feel like I have obviously asked this question a thousand times before, but memory waves a noncommittal gesture.

And Tabi signs, "No. Well, not physically. You feel most comfortable being a goat, but they were comfortable with other forms. But also, they were gay and sexually active. So it was that sort of arrangement." He gives me a beautiful, knowing grin, stretching across his caprine head. He sticks the note into the seven PM slot, taps it down, and lets me ponder—in my own flowery mind—all the things we could do with a couple other friends. I think he knows that that's on my mind, as I stare off, and he signs, "I think you would have loved them."

"Any chance they'll return?"

"It is not out of the question!" And he shrugs in a very casual way. "They did not leave on bad terms or anything. It was just circumstances."

I ponder the idea for a moment, and Tabi can sense it. What would it mean to leave his house? I take a breath and sign back. "I don't want to do that, for the record. I like being here." Because I have stated it, I feel reassured, too.

And Tabi's form relaxes even more, and he settles down his normal position, three inches off the floor. Sometimes I believe he would shatter if he were to touch ground, but then I recall how powerful he can be, holding me in his arms. And he tells me, "Only as long as you wish, my dear." And in the back of my mind, I think about what it would be like, saying goodbye. I reckon it wouldn't make sense for me and my current self. I am in love with this house and the routine it affords me, and the life I am able to live here, and the form I am able to take, and I am in love with Tabi or at least something close, and that's enough.

And he floats forward and offers me a hand. I sign, "Are we fixing the coffee machine?" and with a forgotten world trailing behind him, Tabi nods.



Along the western wall is a bookcase with no books on it, and along the ridges of the shelves is a small brass handle which comes familiar to Tabi's touch. I have been here before; this place is designed with all sorts of secrets and shortcuts, and this is my favorite. In order to get to many of the rooms, one must simply sneak past the walls entirely. And we are—very suddenly—behind and within the heart of the house, in one of its many, many ventricles.

Ba-thump. Ba-thump. Ba-thump.



When Tabi's home was built—or maybe time is irrelevant here again—it was decided to be made mostly of wood, a substance that is kaleidoscopic in its many shapes and properties. Again it must be said that I believe the home to be of Euclidean proportion, and spacetime does not distort, but there is the distinct sense that no hands were involved in the construction of the building, and maybe no trees, either. There are no seams in the patchwork of ebony and maple wood that form the ceiling and pillars, and spots of lighter pine are found inlaid within spots of oak in shapes that would be difficult or impossible to woodsmith convincingly. And as a whole the proportions are random and 'wrong' if a judgment could even be assigned to them.

Here in this transitory hallway winding further south, hidden behind a spot of bookshelf that is actually a door, the materials involved dazzle the mind if it ponders too hard. This hall is not built like it is secretive, even though it would be hard to find naturally; it is composed of luxurious black and homely brown woods of all make, all polished and varnished with dutiful care. There are pillars set against patterned walls, which bob in and up and out in an elegantly-derived, nearly symphonic emboss. Here, there are no windows or doors for a while, but to call it 'featureless' would be missing something. And it is entirely transitory as a result. There are many, many halls like this in his house. This is a place built entirely to get you from one place to another. So thus my conclusion that no human hands built it, for the effort involved would be staggering.

And also the concept of work in Tabi's house is funny to me. Because there is so little work involved in the way Tabi moves as he guides me along, and because I am able to soak in the sensory experience without paying the cost of labor, I often completely exclude the word work from my vocabulary. No part of my day-to-day is strenuous, except in the most literal sense of requiring energy to move. But I am listless. I do not need to work to survive. I have Tabi.

In spots along these walls, the wood's grain is hidden by a layer of murky-red wallpaper. I suppose the wallpaper looks nice enough, but I get the distinct sense that it's hiding a spot of woodwork even more intricate. And the thought strikes me as funny, so I gently chuckle, and relay this to Tabi, interrupting our journey to the attic. "What do you think is behind the wallpaper?"

Unexpectedly, he responds instantly, with a witty little look in his eyes. "Mahogany, no detailing. I changed it—I wanted this hall to have some more color. What do you think?"

I picture, for a moment, the hallway in an older, more drab form. The woodwork is now more uniform in color, and the flat sides effectively convey reflection. I can see across the varnish the impression of the overhead lights, and the boards form flat panels that extend all the way downwards towards a shape I can't make out yet. For some reason this strikes me not as a thoughtful version of this hallway, but a memory. Actually memory is at the wheel. Actually memory has brought me here.



But in truth I am in a newer, more red version of the hallway. And the memory is dreamlike, and I believe it was from a dream, too. And I am able to break thinking of that moment so that I can respond properly and honestly. "If I imagine it, drab is the word I come to immediately. Actually, old is."

"It was both of those things," Tabi signs. He is ahead of me now, and soon has met up with an auburn door along which is diminutive, barely matching his height, and which leads—cyclically—into the wall where we just emerged. But it does not open out into the living room, it does not return us to our original place, but instead gives us a glimpse into the very most internal of places. The veins of this house are dark. They are actually not even transitory, as you cannot navigate between them. This is a space between four walls entirely for the purpose of pipe maintenance; it is a spider's home and a cobweb trap. It is dark.

Tabi holds up a hand, and then there is light pooling out of his palm, which rotates gently to expand our view of this vein. Beyond the auburn door is a room roughly eight feet across whose length matches that of the wall, and whose interior is crowded with brass; the pipes are labyrinthine in the same manner as a neural cortex, splitting the ashen-gray boards of the support walls where they wind in and out. Tabi motions me inside, and when I step in, I can feel the limitless cold of the floor, where carpet finally gives way for hardwood. Here, although dust is nowhere to be found, the same is true for heat. And a chill runs up my spine immediately, and expands to become a full-body chill, shuddering me like hands around my shoulders.

It has been a while, but not an overwhelming while, since we've been between the walls. So Tabi takes my left hand, squeezes it, and I am confident enough to proceed.

Though I can't conceptualize all the details, I know why there must be so many pipes. There are sinks and showers in every bathroom, of which there are at least two dozen, to accommodate giving one to every single bedroom, which Tabi has implied were all meant to be filled at once. Below this vein is the basement, someplace, where water cooling and heating is dealt with. I am hoping we don't have to go that far down.

Right here, however, is a stainless steel tank which functions as a heater and storage for water that is meant to be converted into luscious, bitter coffee. It is in the center of the vein, standing a little taller than me but a little shorter than Tabi. And with his palm-light, I can make out where it has dings and bangs, rattling around in here for the past few months unfettered.

He signs to me. As he does, his palm flicks around, moving the illumination in a hypnotic sort of way. "Does any part look missing?"

I shake my head halfway. Nothing jumps to mind, except for the fact that it should be—at present—completely still. And yet it is rattling ever-so-slightly. There is a distinct sense that water is pumping someplace, trying to pump, that heat is not transferring properly, that something is wrong. I sign back, "Can you lift me up to the top and light the inside?"

Tabi takes a moment to prop his arms around me in such a way I can rest on his shoulder—it is not a terrible ordeal but it is suitably awkward—and then I am light, I am weightless with him. And he shifts his non-weight upward until we are floating in-between these walls up and up and up, and then we are above the tank. At this angle, Tabi is able to rotate his palm, illuminating the top, where a lid is. The lid is not shut tight, and I can see that plainly.

A deep and foreboding feeling.

And I reach forward and undo the lid, and note that it is only on by one of the steel threads, and when I pop it off, the gilded light of Tabi's palm is enough to illuminate

something dead

and trapped

inside of the boiler.

The pipe is still rumbling where water is seeping through its fur, its matted and rotted fur, and trying to get into the bottom drain. And the smell is tremendous and atrocious. And I retch completely involuntarily, and then I think about the fact that I drank the coffee and then I retch on purpose.

And bile and mucus and vomit mix into the slurry of corpse.

And I fall backwards.



I am in a room the size of myself. The walls of my prison are throbbing and breathing and with my ears fluttering in abject pain, I can hear them breathing. There is some kind of ebony rubber-plastic on my sides holding me in. There is black and shining light in equal measure and my eyes are going wide and I can't focus on a thing, and I know I am falling, and so is my body. My legs are falling off first, because the tendons are dying. I am falling further down into the floor, melting with death, I am lacking blood flow and stagnating. The plastic is tight and breathing against me and I am panting for air that doesn't exist. My lungs do not respond. I feel my heartbeat screeching along without brakes. When I look down my chest cavity is crawling with insects. I am screaming aimlessly and watching it part, watching me part, down the middle. My breath gives out. My voice gives out. Nobody is screaming. I feel my heartbeat again. Again. Again.



I am rotting from the inside and unable to die.



This is not a dream. I am holding memory's hand. Memory is here. Memory is my guide.



And then I land in Tabi's arms, as he scrambles, all of him scrambles at once to catch me, his comfort and composure flying away. His floating stance sinks, and he is barely able to get to me before I tumble all the way to the hardwood. He has me by his chest, and his breathing brings me back to the present moment.

I cough violently, spit and remnants of vomit, and my vision is all foggy, and I feel him clutching me closer and closer. He takes a look inside the cistern, floating back up high enough—seems to get the picture, exhales, brings me so tight. And I get the sense he is apologizing, overflowing with apology, even though it's not his fault this happened. This is Tabi's tendency.

Finally I lock eyes with him and my breath is heavy, but limply, I sign:

"I am alright."

My mind is such a terrible, fickle thing, making up memories like that, and I will choose to be alright.

And his smile makes me feel right about my decision.



The folds of this house flow through my mind. Given time and attention I could write down every crevice I know of. In the moment, we write its story through our movement.

Back into the transitory hall, then into the living room, then along the shelves until we find a closet embedded in an archway. Here is where the cleaning equipment is stashed for convenience. Here is where the smell of bleach is overwhelming, where the soap and vinegar and little spray-bottles of window cleaner hide, here is where the brushes are.

Tabi carries me to the closet so we can gather tools, and by the time we make it there, my legs are working again, my brain is running diagnostics on all of me and fixing the connections severed. And I am feeling better, a lot faster than the panic attack—the panic attack was truly dire—and I deck myself out with big rubber gloves and boots and we march on back to the place of origin, the pipes, to sterilize and erase the memory of dead animal.

I

am

alright.

The process is indelicate and awful. I retch again and manage to contain my vomit but it's a rough one. Tabi is there. We are noncommunicative. It is just important that we get this over with.

Somehow the memory that I drank the morning coffee—with water this dead thing was stewing in—does not scare me. Memory keeps showing the paperwork to me, and I just tiredly nod. I said I was going to not think about the hard questions for a while and I'm sticking to it. Actually I am walling out the exterior world.

My world is all sensory. I am just hands and feet and pins and needles; I am muscles clenching and unclenching, and fur, and I am wiping down the interior of the boiler and putting bits of flesh and rot and maggots into a trash bag, where they won't be found again. And I am the smell fading slowly from my nostrils until there is nothing but bleach. I am cleaning up until I can focus on something else, and finally that comes to me in the form of Tabi's gaze on me, when we are both scrubbing in the cistern. He gives me a look in his delicate eyes along the lines of, 'this is a very shitty activity to have to do,' and I am in agreement, and I laugh a little. I have always felt like laughing with Tabi is the first step to recovery.

After all, memory tells me that we have been through worse together. And I have probably said mean things to him and he has said or done mean things to me. And in the end it comes through via shared experiences of pain, trauma, dead animals in boilers. This is what truly locks me into this dance with Tabi, my housemaster, my companion, my maybe-in-love—we cannot function alone.

I wonder how true that thought is.



I remember that when Tabi took me in, he was the loneliest person. And his great big eyes were behind glass. I could tell that he was thankful for me, that my very existence was the signifier of better times to come. And he told me that he was going to keep me safe for as long as I wished to stay. And he told me I could become anything I wanted, because he knew how to change my shape and my everything. And he was so eager to please me that he was almost scary, almost too inviting—but that fear was just a little blip on a long road, something easy to forget. Memory says it never likes bringing that part up. I am much happier when I am not scared of Tabi.

I remember first shook me awake that next morning, how he had the biggest smile on his face, his hypnotic eyes lighting up like lanterns, and he let me realize that I was how I currently am now—I was in the body I wanted.

He had transformed me overnights.

I remember the first time Tabi kissed me, which wasn't long after I arrived. And I remember the first time I realized the nights were so long, so long, so long—I remember all the times that I realized that. And I remember all the times I voluntarily chose to push it back, further and further. Kicking the can down the road until it sinks.

I remember the first time we made breakfast together. And all the times I made it on my own. And I remember coffee flowing down my throat. I remember warmth. I remember panic attacks.

I remember throwing up in the toilet, or trying to. And I remember Tabi in that hallway floating towards me. And I remember the lights dimming and I remember him grabbing me when I didn't want him to and





























































I am done scrubbing. Tabi lifts me out of the boiler. When I am upright again, I sink into him. I am tired all of a sudden, and hugging him with my arms wrapped around his back feels right. His breath is a bobbing wave against his ribcage. His muzzle rubs at the top of my head. He kisses me gently. I want to be done with this terrible memory of mine.

And like that, he whisks us away.

The house is yawning with the changing temperature.

It can be felt only barely in the thrums of vibration against the bed. It has started to rain just faintly, and the wood is expanding and contracting throughout the house. My gaze keeps going to the window. It is not voluntary.

I am trying to keep my attention on my clothes. My old clothes, the stockings and the panties and the robe, which are now too dirty with memory to keep wearing for the latter half of the day, are set on the bed. I am naked again in my room. It does not feel like my room. Actually the feeling of being out of place just won't go away, and a gentle anxiety rubs at the back of my neck. It has lingered since that moment fixing the cistern up until now, even as I separated away from Him and took a moment to myself, stripped, breathed. I spent some time on my back in bed, just pondering, but I can't remember much about that thinking session. Time just sort of burned away, in the same way incense does. In the same way, I was not worried about it. Incense is made to be burned.

I take another look out the window and surmise that it could go either way, now. It could explode into a downpour, or it could fade out again. It is a transitory kind of moment.

Here is the thought bubbling up in my mind: I would like to reset. I have had a very contentious day, but it's hardly over yet, and I still have plenty of time before sundown—and after sundown—to make it as meaningful and satisfying as the rest of my days. And I have to start off by dressing appropriately.

I do not really understand my own gender situation, for what it is worth. I am happy being some bit male and happy when He addresses me as such, but my most intimate and comfortable moments come in clothing like this. He has told me this is alright, that my opinion on myself can change freely and fluidly, that I can be all things or nothing, or anywhere in-between. Right now, I hardly know any bit of myself or my identity, except that I would like to dress prettily, so I do. It starts with undergarments...

...I will not get into many details as they're not totally necessary, but I spend half an hour on my evening outfit. It is a skirt, long red stockings, lace-up shoes. Sweater. Cotton jacket. The jacket collar goes up around the back of my neck and makes me look slick, if I have to be honest.

And finally that feeling of wrongness is going away, whether via distraction or euphoria from my appearance. In the mirror I am able to appreciate myself standing in the middle of this bedroom, looking on, neutral or maybe a little worried-looking. I am able to imagine Him looping His arm around me from the back. Our appearances in contrast are a definitive statement of color—black and white. Lightness and darkness in polka-dot, stripe, ripple. My eyes are red, so my thigh-highs are red. His eyes are entrancing, so my thoughts of Him put me into a trance.

Just in time, the rain has died down completely. It's clear outside again.

And the interior lights are bright. I tighten up my stockings and pump my jacket out, and I grin, because I feel bad-ass, and I step outside into the cold halls of His home.



I have two ways of calming down, typically: either I have hands around me, or I recall information. Recitation of memories is how I keep from going crazy, at least when I'm by myself. Nowhere is this more apparent than how I have learned the contours of His house, which is, as I've said, by and large very understandable and Euclidean. There are precisely two exceptions: reaching the Room at the bottom, and reaching the Room at the top. I have never been to the Room at the top, but I have descended into the basement before, so that is how Him and I will find one another again. The issue is that it is entirely unfamiliar.

Whether by matters of magic or the occult, or my own memory, or a combination of the three, I do not know how to get to the Room at the bottom of His house. I only know that by delving deeper into the basement I will reach it. When I emerge from the bedroom I have a directive and a mission, but that is it. Memory is nowhere to be found. As is typical, I have none of that in me.

I am gripping my hands in each other and trying to let them guide my way.



Eventually, I walk to an obscure flight of stairs and go below the floor.

His home has a basement, as I have said. It is a thing carved out of rock and then turned into flatbed, this huge singular interior that is not much taller than Him and has support beams the size of trees every few meters to keep the home steady. In points there is simply concrete and foundation, where the basement does not carve into the earth, but at other points it unsteadily seems to hold up His house all on its own. It is lit with overhead dangly lights that have been placed everywhere, almost as if to dispel the notion that He would dare own a dark, damp, scary basement. It is exactly as unassuming as the rest of His house, if not moreso. If the above is a mansion, the below is an oversized suburban cellar.

As if asleep, I keep walking in a direction.

When I come to again—because my day is all spots—I find that I am standing next to an old memory of mine in the basement. It is a stack of cardboard boxes against a corner of concrete wall. It is what my possessions looked like before I became myself, before I met Him. I don't know how I found myself here, but sometimes the present sneaks up on me, and I suppose my hands lead me to this part of the basement, and I suppose that was a form of physical memory, like my nervous system is a form of mental memory. And these boxes are an old temporal lobe.

Memory gives me a checklist.

In these boxes I had clothes and bags and suitcases and I had car keys and a wallet and I had an old playing card—seven of spades—and I had specifically a picture of my mom, my mom who I don't know very well, and I had a box of old school papers and drawings from a long time ago, and I don't know how it all got here.

And in the back of some of the boxes there is a terrific collection of dust and grime and dirt, and there are cobwebs, and there are two years' worth of time keeps. And in the boxes I also had a picture of myself which is behind two sheets of paper I used to doodle on.

I had a booklet on the local area dotted with Sharpie marks. I had my house keys. I had a picture also of my roommate and I at Lake Michigan. Printed. I had a shopping list for all-in-one shampoo and chips. I had six dollars in cash and a credit card from a long time ago.

And I had a device that goes in the ear.

In the first box on top I had clothes from when I dressed differently and I had zippers broken off and I had socks that don't fit me anymore and I had a baseball cap for a team I used to like. And I had Lexapro in a little orange bottle. Lexapro is a psychoactive prescription drug that turns your brain into a pile of rocks over time. And I had a written version of the prescription, and a spare bottle, which became empty after I used all the pills. And I had a calendar with too many appointments on it. And in the last box on the bottom I had a few other things lost in the muck of it all.

But memory loses interest eventually.

I just recall this is where I will find the entrance to the Room at the bottom of His house. I reach forward and, like before, I feel a brass door handle, cool to the touch. Instinct and reality tell me that there is not a door, but touch tells me that there is. And memory just nods along. And I click the handle down until I sense that it is free to open, and I swing forward all at once.



The back of my neck is screaming. It is saying something that I can't hear.



Here is how I will attempt to describe this, though like many experiences in His house, the words do not come easy. I think I am asleep, and I sense this because all my limbs lose balance, and a staticky tingling is beginning to permeate throughout my fur like slime mold. My inner body begins to feel weightless. And my head is very heavy, and my eyes ache. And when I walk forward, I cannot entirely sense the footsteps as feedback. I cannot touch ground. There is a delay to when reality meets my nervous system.

At first there is no ground. Actually at first there is nothing. There are no directions and there is no forward or back and there is no progress. There are also no sights of anything. If I were to describe this I would not use the words 'empty space' because that at least implies that you may be looking at a night sky, with stars in the distance and galaxies swirling around, and the sense that if you went far enough you might reach an object you could hold onto. In the Room at the bottom of His house I am going nowhere and will never reach anything.

At first.

Then I start waking up, or maybe in a sense I am getting further from the waking world, because I feel a tight clenching sensation around my wrist, then my palm, my fingers. I have no thought about this yet. Then He squeezes my hand. And I realize who it is, and my overworked amygdala responds positively to this news, and I squeeze His hand back.

Quickly I have a hand. I have a body. I have stable footing and gravity. And attached to my hand is another person's hand, and he has a body, and he has a name—Tabi—and he is floating in front of me, leading me in a direction. He is the only splotch of light in this lightless nightmare. He has brightness in his eyes. He brought me here and caught me before I fell all the way down.

I ask him—verbally I think—if we are going somewhere. And I sense immediately that, yes, we are. We are going to an old building that fell through the world.

I am footsteps and the static shock of sound through my body. I cannot perceive sound through my ears due to a manufacturing defect in my head but my nervous system is perfectly capable of detecting sound, and I can sense through touch that this is concrete or cement, something hard and coarse beneath my shoes. And Tabi is floating, so he is a bit pacier than I am. And I hope he can hear me laugh softly as he whisks me along.

The tingling sensation of dropping into the Room below his house is electric.

This location is the only place in the Room that is similar from day to day. This is the concrete floor without sight and without smell. He is taking me along an invisible path through nothingness. Actually Tabi has told me there is something here, but until we go further down, it doesn't have—room?—to manifest. So for a little while we are scurrying along. And then we find our destination, or I guess it finds us.

We do not enter the building that fell through the world.

At first it comes to me, and him, in spots. At first it is smells: salt, savory, gasoline, grease. Then it is a squeaky hardwood floor beneath my feet, and overhead lights, and neon, and then it is a sense of expanse. It is a building that exudes a trash and evening sensation and I am figuring out its layout one ray of light at a time. I see that it comes in two parts separated by stairs, short stairs, liminal stairs. I feel that it is air-conditioned and dry. And despite my mind's attempt to recognize it, to interrogate its purpose, it is—for whatever reason—is completely and overwhelmingly unfamiliar to me, like waking up in a busy crowd. The only piece of familiarity is him, floating in front of me. Tabi has gotten here, too, of course.

He is surely gathering the same clues. This is a newer establishment, probably only a story tall and with rectangular lanes going off into the furthest wall, and solid overhead lights, and a neutral aesthetic of pine wood, plastic, starry wallpaper. We are stood beside those liminal stairs and behind us, as I glance around myself, I can see a bar, soda machines, arcade machines. There is an ATM by the glass double-doors leading out into nothing. Vinyl floors carve apart deep blue carpeting.

I look back to Tabi and he is looking back at me. He seems impressed with himself, puffed out like this. He quickly signs, "I had this place as an idea, but we can move elsewhere if you'd like."

I shake my head. I am flattered being someplace new. "Just tell me about it."

"And then, would you like me to show you how it was used?"

"Yes!"

And so Tabi tells me about it.



This place is Lone Star Lanes and it was—well maybe it wasn't anything, because time does not always work like that when it comes to Tabi. But I will use past tense because he does. My understanding is that there was an establishment on the outskirts of Austin, bordering one of those highways that infest themselves with mattress stores and office parks, and it was having overwhelming financial difficulty as result of its location or its management or any combination of such things. And it was having trouble finding patrons, because people did not really want to be at Lone Star Lanes and the fries were too dry and the onion rings were too rancid for anyone to stick around, or remember it, and the existence of neighborhoods was really an afterthought in where it was placed, because I don't think anyone lived within a mile of the building. And it bordered a furniture store called Maximum Value Home Deco which was having similar troubles, and so the owners were pals, and one time they both came out of the buildings to harass a person without a house who was trying to start a campfire in a vacant lot. And they filmed this, for some reason, so things got worse for them. And eventually the owner of Lone Star Lanes was only intermittently at the building, doing other things to scrounge up money like defrauding his best friend at a building called Fast Loans, and also the employees had very little interest in being there. And as I've said, nobody wanted to buy any of the crappy food or pay to use the facilities, even if they were in alright upkeep.

So one time in April there was nobody in the building, which is pretty common for buildings. And to add to that, nobody was thinking about the building. Nobody was nostalgic for the place as a kid, because it was only open about eight years, and also the owner did not like thinking about it because it was a sore spot for him, and the employees were happy to be thinking about anywhere else. And the previous owner of the land wasn't thinking about it, because selling it was a good thing in her life. And also the contractors who built Lone Star Lanes had better things to be doing. So there really was no human being on the planet who knew about or cared about Lone Star Lanes for a moment. Of course this happens to old buildings all the time, and actually it happens to human beings all the time, too. Normally this is brief and somebody thinks about the thing again and all is normal.

But this time, for reasons related to magic and the occult, the building just fell through the world. It wasn't there anymore. And memory of it wasn't there anymore. And nobody ever thought about Lone Star Lanes ever again.



As Tabi explains, it was a bowling alley.

I cannot explain why, but I don't know what bowling is, even though I get the impression it is a common hobby. My first inkling is that it just fell out of my head, like a lot of other things. It was a misplaced paper.

Tabi teaches me while we play.

I bowl two strikes and a few spares and then a lot of very comical open frames, and still I end up beating him in a full game. We both are handicapped by our limited three fingers on each hand, but Tabi refuses to accept this excuse, and is understandably miffed during his couple of gutter balls. "I am supposed to be good at this," he whines. "Why am I so bad at this?"

Normally I would reassure him, but as I am a little competitive, I just give him a smirk. "No traction, I'm sure."

He disagrees. "The lack of traction ought to make my throws straight every time."

"Ought to," I sign, and then I don't elaborate.

We bicker a little bit and then start kissing, similarly to how I assume old gay couples go about this sort of thing. And we forget all about the game again and scamper off to the other side of the building.



There is a cushioned bench in the corner by the eating area, where I think the sound of the arcade machines blaring is least obtrusive, and where Tabi and I go to cuddle. He has his arms around me tightly and is rubbing my back, and I am rubbing his, and I have kicked my shoes off, and he is playing footsie with me further down the bench. And this has been going on a while, now, and it is completely wordless and senseless and timeless. And having given it some thought, I finally realize what he's going for.

I pull back, and I am still flush with kisses and excitement when I sign to him. "Are you just trying to make me happy so I forget about everything?"

He laughs. "Yes, obviously! And I knew you had not gone bowling before."

"I guess not!"

Tabi gives me this funny look, and kisses me on the snout. And his arms go back around me again and I am locked in this embrace for what feels like, and I think should rightfully be, forever.

I get hard during this. I don't really feel desperate and needy like I did this morning, nor do I feel celibate. My body is just feeling heat and touch and so I get hard, and so does Tabi, and he warbles a little affirmative into the small of my neck when he realizes it is a mutual, ah, accident.

So we frot a tad, but it is just that, and it is soft, and temporary, while the cuddling is endless, and I am able to get pleasantly lost in my mind with him. Although it is hard to avoid difficult subjects of thought.

After all, I am in the Room at the bottom of his house and I do not know really what that means, or where this is, or how I got here or how Lone Star Lanes got here. Though memory is telling me now that Tabi has elaborated on this some times and the answer is not all too clear. The way Tabi would describe it, Lone Star Lanes stopped existing and became an empty lot. And the owner and employees and patrons all did not need it to exist either. And instead, it just fell down and ended up in what he would call a 'Room'. He describes this as a real place, a real place buried beneath his house and above his house, too, and which is unnecessary. In the same way that I think all the rooms in his home are necessary, even the little cobweb traps and empty hallways, this Room is apparently forgettable. And it is so forgettable that it collects other forgotten things like a magnet.

Sometimes these ideas do not need further elaboration.



And now I am thinking about it too hard. And his breath is against mine and it is little help for the situation, because I am pondering the idea of this Room and where things end up when nobody needs them anymore. And I think about it because I am confused about the fact that I'm new to the idea of bowling, because I didn't do half bad, and because my muscular system, the structure by which I make spatial decisions, has no trouble at all with the windup, the delivery, the twist of my fingers. I scored one hundred twenty seven points in the whole game, which strikes me as a perfectly fine achievement.

And actually now that I am thinking about it I might have liked bowling a lot. Or at least as much as anybody can like bowling who isn't particularly good at it.

And memory is telling me I used to play bowling video games with my roommate and I also watched a YouTube video where somebody got as many points as you can get in a single game, which is three hundred. And I have been to a place a lot like this place before.

And memory tells me that it was a shitty place to be, and I was only there twice, once when I was twenty and another time when I was twenty-one. And then I moved away from Austin for a variety of reasons and forgot about it.

It just fell out of my head.

I can feel Tabi's heart beat slow. I can feel my heart beat quicken. I am beginning to feel like I am falling through this bench, through every inch of nothing below us, and sinking into the core of the earth.

- - -

Here is what is running—sprinting—through my mind.

Maybe, or at least wishfully, this 'memory' isn't real, because many of the papers I am served by my memory are false. And if I focus hard enough I can make it sulk back into the cave of nothingness, and maybe I can accept the fact that I have never been to this place called Lone Star Lanes and that my head is making things up to fill empty space. It was a dream. It must have been.

And yet right now, it doesn't feel like a satisfying answer.

I want to know for myself.

I am on air. I am slowly detaching from Tabi just as he is his sleepiest and I am clambering to my feet and I am walking to the bar, which serves both food and drink during operating hours. I have never crossdressed in public and I am feeling cold and warm at the same time, and when I reach the counter I am heaving air in and out, and I am leaning on it for stability. And I am stricken with another Gatling gun of images.

The person who works here is named Megan or something else starting with the letter "M," because I remember seeing her name tag. And also I remember ordering nachos. When you get nachos at a place like this, it's just melted cheese drizzled on some tortilla chips. And I paid for the nachos and got billed $8.55, which is too expensive, obviously. At the time I was friends with a couple people from high school who would later do some terrible things to my body and so the memory is not so nice, but I still remember laughing about how high prices were getting, and something about politics, and then we bowled. And in Austin I later met somebody who was also gay and we hooked up, and a few months later I met somebody named Megan who I recognized from a bowling alley. But I didn't know where I recognized her, so I didn't say anything. It was just one of those passing comets. And then very shortly before I got out of Austin I went to this bowling alley again and she was still working there, I think. And I thought it must have sucked to have spent almost a year working at the same bowling alley that nobody liked and nobody remembered and which had a shitty owner. And I would like to think this was one of many reasons I left Austin and went to New Jersey and stayed with my cousin, and later, a lot later, came to Michigan, which is where I met Tabi, which is where I am. And then I guess this, all of this, just went away.

And I am leaning on the counter and remember, and my head is starting to spin, and my breath is starting to fail.

I am scratching at the back of my neck. The inflammation and screeching is starting to intensify and I am about to cry. I feel like my whole world is falling apart. Why did I forget? Why did this fall out of my head? And my neck is yelling at me to turn around turn around turn around turn around

and here is Tabi hovering behind me.

And he looks so concerned.

And the lights dim again.

And he signs to me, "What's wrong?"

And my limbic system causes me to run away.



But I fail to run properly, because I am terrified and my head is broken into a few ceramic pieces, and when I am two steps away I fall to the carpet, and Tabi is now looming above me, his hands raised like he tried to stop me from falling, and there is an awestruck expression on him. I don't know what is going through his head, and so I am signing rapidly and without words, and then I am out of breath again. And he asks me again, "What is wrong?"

And I blink rapidly and try to respond before my arms break down.

"Why did this fall out of my head?"

And he lowers himself down to me. He places himself on the carpet only a foot away from me. "Oh, darling."



"Your memory sometimes excludes things from you, doesn't it? This is another one of those times. I had a feeling there was some reason that this place ended up in my Room, but I didn't know why. The emotion and your senses are so intensified by the environment of the Room."

"Why did this fall out of my head?" I ask, again.

He shakes his head. "It didn't. Surely you have it all, and it's coming back to you."

But I actually can feel it falling away, further and further away, the senses and feelings and sights of Lone Star Lanes and memory of before I was here with Tabi, and my hands are trembling viciously. And still there is this distinct sense that I have been here before and done this before and I am caught in loops, spinning, spinning. Spinning again. And his eyes lock with mine and I cannot break gaze, even though now I am trying to. And I sign, "Did we sleep for multiple nights?"

And the lights grow dimmer until we are in darkness.

"No. And I want to get that off your mind. The Room is meant to be where we enjoy ourselves." He gives me a warm smile, tilting his head. "I'm sorry your day just keeps getting more messy, but it's important you don't dwell."

Why can't he give me any answers in the world? And I sign again, not as a question but as a statement, "We slept for multiple nights."

He shakes his head.

And I sign, "I remember."

"I don't know what is going on inside your head, but maybe you do remember. It is possible."

My hands are breaking with tension, and they tremble like they are made of styrofoam, but I reach out and try to get to his hand. And quicker than anything else Tabi is willing to grab my hand. I am shaking my head, and he squeezes my palm, trying desperately to ground me. He is trying to help. That must surely be what is happening.

And I shut my eyes and try to breathe.

Do I remember how I used to calm down? And then instinct tells me, no, you never calmed down without hands around you. So Tabi brings his hands around me. He is a great, six-thousand pound comforter shaped like a sheep. He is so worried for me. He is not trying to distract me from truths. He is simply somebody who cares dearly about me, and would follow my trains of thought to their end so that he could help me step off the platform safely. He is my caretaker and my partner and, I think, the person I love most in the world. And if things fall out of my head that is alright. He will help pick them up again.

When he pulls away I am crying but not sobbing. And he is now kneeling on the floor with me, and we are sat across from one another, and he has matched his breathing with mine. And more definitively this time, he is telling me how to feel about this whole thing.

He is telling me

how

to calm down.

"I will stay in your thoughts," he signs. "You can always think of me whenever things get difficult. You can fill your head with reminders that I am here to care for you and love you at all times."

I have been through this before.

"You can shower me with love and affection and always receive it back. You can worship me in your head and will feel invigorated as a result. And you can do this even when memories are falling outside of your head. Even if your memory is all jumbled up, it will retrieve me in an instant. You will never lose me or thoughts of me."

And he grips my hands, and he is no longer signing. And yet still I can sense what he would tell me. I can feel that he will love me always, and I am always welcome as the morning sun in his house. I need not sabotage myself with anger at myself. I am lovable. I am beautiful and important. And I can enjoy my body and his house and my freedom forever.



When I look down I am hard again. I am poking up against lingerie and my skirt and, in spite of my tears and heightened mental state, I am still enchanted by his touch against my hands. And Tabi is staring down warmly at me, seeing this, sensing this. He pulls his hands away. "Do you want to take care of that?"

And I am sniffly when I respond, "Yes. I think I'd rather do that than talk about the stupid fucking bowling alley."

And he laughs so much.

With every laugh, the overheads turn on in stages. Front to back, fluorescent lights reactivate, flicker, and fully illuminate. I like to imagine that an employee remembered this place existed and threw a breaker on.

We are no longer in the dark.

- - -

br>


He is delicate with me. He can tell that I am a little broken right now, that I am sensitive in the physical sense, so his movements are deliberate so that I can watch him reach forward towards my groin, where I am bobbing up against my clothes in an unintentional way. I didn't even realize how erect I had gotten until Tabi pulled my attention to it, and he does not try and rip away my clothes. Instead, he simply puts the tip of his thumb on the tip of the tent I am pitching.

The way I am kneeling against the floor I am basically pinned to this position, and I involuntarily lean back when he pokes my member, and air forces its way out of me. "Can you—" and I have to think about it a moment, because I don't feel kinky or desperate, I just want to feel good so I can forget. And so I just ask him, "Can you just flood my senses?"

And he pulls away to ask, "How much?"

"A lot. Just make my head spin. Like the other times in the Room. I would really like that."

He gives me a long, knowing look. "We can go back to talking about your day in more detail, if you'd prefer."

I shake my head. "No, I don't want any of that. Or well I guess I do but I don't right now." I picture myself, briefly, as a ceramic doll of a goat, whose head has broken open against a dresser. Out of the crack flows memories, shaped like bowling alleys and roommates and rotting animals, and then I snap back to Tabi's gaze forcefully. "I want to feel like a wet dream and make dinner and get really drunk tonight, and then I'll sleep really well, and then we can sort all that out."

"Yes?" Tabi smiles wearily. "Are you certain?"

My body makes me lean further in. I feel tired and kiss Tabi on the nose. "Please," I sign.

His hand goes down again. And it lands on my lap. I can feel him rubbing gently at my thigh, puffed up fur being caressed through multiple layers of fabric. He leans his head down and his forehead now meets mine. I cannot imagine what is going on in his head. When I stare into his eyes at this moment, I see nothing.

Well, again I see his pupils spinning. Or maybe they are not. But my eyes are telling me to stare further in.

And his other hand is on my other thigh, and he is giving me a massage so close to my penis that I am buzzing, buzzing, my fur is all on end. I can't take how sensitive those areas are to the simplest, most delicate of touch. He doesn't approach or wander away; his fingers and palms just rub at me until I can feel my length poke out from the side of my panties and against the cotton of my skirt. I feel engorged, I feel chafing. Just to deal with this sensation I have to close my eyes for a few moments and catch my breath, exhaling into him.

I am a shuddering mess. I am leaning into Tabi for any support at all.

During this moment, the back of my neck tells me to look at him.

And when I open my eyes something is terrifically different about Tabi. I would like to describe this as a threshold being crossed, as when I stare into his pupils, they are no longer the soft and almost dopey rectangles like that of a sheep. They are spirals. Real spirals. My eyes are no longer lying to me.

And the sight of the bowling alley starts to rot away.

Static. Intense electricity. Tabi's hands close in on my groin. His eyes start to grow bigger in my vision. I cannot tell whether my own cognition is narrowing or he is growing, but his face, his muzzle, starts to wrap around me. I am a planet and he is my atmosphere.

Tabi.

Tabi.

I am shaking. The tears are starting to stream again.

And the contours of Tabi's face and his sheep's wool start to lose ground as they are replaced by his pupils swirling into the drink, spinning and enveloping everything. They are two globes forming a whole and expanding and exploding, and I am covered in a freakish form of shivers. The sensation again from my organs that I am falling and I am falling and I am falling, and my head cranes back, and I feel my spine rattle as I stare wide-eyed into Him. All my fur goes on end. And my mind is screeching as the neurons begin to fire at ten thousand times speed, and it is beginning to blast sights and smells and touch against my cerebral cortex. And then I feel at ease.

Wind is blowing against me so quickly now and I am surrounded by Tabi's eyes. To my left they spin clockwise and to my right they spin counter-clockwise. And where I was—or am?—in the bowling alley Lone Star Lanes I am no longer really present. I am hypnotized, or maybe I am something close to hypnotized. And cognition is suddenly reaching me very spottily and composing words is difficult.

Here is where I am: I am in the bottom of a very large pit examining my own biology. And this is a hallucinogenic sort of state as I am not actually anyplace or anything right now, I am just seeing my thoughts spring to life. Here is where Tabi has dissected me with a scalpel and exposed my internals as a series of errant signals all friction against one another. And here is the thesis, wherein he argues that my nerves and brain and various extant systems are built to make me have sexual intercourse so as to fulfill my purpose as a self-reproducing machine. And here is where he playfully notes that I don't fit the model, yet I still have the same parts. I still have the same wiring. And that same wiring can be interconnected and played with and manipulated and, if uncautious, it can be broken.

It feels like the inner world behind my eyeballs is being invaded by the outer world and especially by Tabi. And yet panic or fear does not come up. I am, as I insist, at ease.

Tabi holds my wiring, my neural connections, in his hands. His hands are so soft with my mind. And his swirling eyes are the hands of a god touching my brain at its most base level. Actually I think he has most direct control, and perhaps only control, over my nervous system. This is my route out of the cave. This is my external feedback processing. This is my world.

Senses and all, Tabi grips my brain.



What is there of me except my experiences?



And instinct tells me, no, there is nothing.



Tabi alters the world around me like he once altered my body to make it a goat, and he alters my touch processing to ruffle that fur he created, and he alters my sight so that I see him hovering above me, shaped like nothingness. He is glowing. And from the supple soles of his feet to his glimmering eyes I see my deity. And without using his hands, built not for work but for stage direction, Tabi makes me feel touched.

Touched on my thighs, like where he grabs me in the Room. And I feel touched on my rear, my tail, my short tufts of fur being caressed. And I feel the palms and fingers of grabby hands along my spine and my stomach and sides of my abdomen. And I am shivering intensely from the sensation but my body is paralyzed and my muscles won't respond to my screaming. My nervous system makes me want to try and fight off the sensation but I am stuck.

And I am lifted up.

My legs dangle free. I can feel fabric fluttering against wind, both my skirt and my jacket pounded by turbulence and crushed by palms. I can feel my dick again, I can feel myself hard against nylon, and one of the hands pulls me free of my panties. And Tabi is also touching my neck and chest and compressing me. And my jaw goes slack as I try to yelp.

This is difficult to describe.

I have never been held by this many things.

And my head—my face, my horns. All felt up, all touched. The sensation is unbearable. I am being rubbed and poked and massaged. And down my stockinged legs hands are rubbing at my thighs, calves, feet. He—or some extension of him—is grabbing my extremities and holding my hands. It is like my hands are being held and yet when I look I can see nothing, I can feel no resistance.

Fingers crawl up my chest to my neck like insects.

I am squeezing my hands tightly to try and cope. I feel harder than ever and I don't even know why, I can't explain why, but my body is telling me to get erect because of the sheer overwhelming sensation of it all. The hands and palms are shifting across all the map of my body and Tabi is there in front of me, looming, looming, looming. He has put two hands around my balls and along my perineum. He has made hands grip me by the thighs and he has hands rubbing my feet, caressing my toes like Tabi does for hours. And then Tabi begins to grab a part of me that can't be held.

I think he would say, this is the part of you most interesting. And so he touches my prostate. And my mind is melting, and I go over the limit of what it can handle, and I begin to dissociate.



What words can be used to explain this? My head is hot and can hardly form language.

Physically: my muscles are cramping and my groin is compressing, while at the same time my body feels loose and weightless like I can let myself go. And also my vision is going blurry and I am smiling without meaning to, and I am squeaking I think. My nervous system is being tricked into thinking I am reproducing, so it is filling my cerebral cortex with endorphins to reward this behavior. It is a very simple trick. If I had to guess, every part of me knows this is a trick, and it simply doesn't care.

Mentally: I am happy that somebody, or something, is trying to make me happy.

Maybe Tabi is, above all, good at making me feel wanted.



Tabi.



He opens his arms for me, he beckons me closer. I can hardly catch a breath and he is getting closer and beginning to choke me. Two hands made out of nothingness grip my base and my shaft and massage it and I jolt, I shudder, I wail. And then he shuts me up by shoving fingers into my mouth.

He is telling me something.

I can't hear him.

I can't hear him and then suddenly I can hear him. The words go directly through the language processing center of my brain and it is like I am remembering what he is saying as he says them.

I love you.

I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.

My squealing becomes a scream of overwhelmed bliss or pain or nothing

I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.

I feel orgasm and my limbs fall off and my body falls apart and explodes into a million overworked neurons and still he is grabbing me and choking me and breathing for me and I beg him for help

I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.

My world is all his.



And I wake up.

Or maybe I am still in some kind of beautiful dream.

I am in the place called Lone Star Lanes. A long time ago, or maybe never at all, this place fell through the world because it got forgotten. And sometimes I think of myself the same way. Were it not for Tabi, I think I would be completely absent.

I am on my knees, wallowing in a form of wetness and stickiness that would make me embarrassed, if I were not so exhausted. All the time is lost to me and I have no idea how long I fell into Tabi's world, but my skirt and panties and member are coated in many, many rounds of my own seed, and I have no breath, and the glow comes in waves. Long, trailing waves of happiness and warmth. Orgasm fried all my brain cells and the scent of myself is reminding me of that hypnotized moment again and I feel so, so much relief. A weight is gone. All that fear is gone.

Tabi has me in a bottomless hug. I can't stop kissing his chest.

And I love him.

Or maybe I am still in some kind of beautiful dream.

Eventually he is massaging my feet with his real hands while I drift through near-consciousness, and his fur keeps me from really waking up, until finally we both feel like it is time to go, and so he scoops me up in those great long arms. Tabi's strength feels endless, and it is a perfect match for what feels like infinite weight on my body. He carries me like a bride, but again I have no idea what I feel like I am. So I suppose it is best described as a Tabi carry. I am resting in this Tabi carry. I could sleep here ten thousand years.

And he is rising. First three inches above the floor, and then higher and higher.

The neon plastic-scape of Lone Star Lanes melts away into a kaleidoscope, and the ceiling floats away until we are entering a void where color becomes null-color, and palladium fireworks dot the sky, and all the carpet is on fire. It falls away like a crumpled piece of paper below us, and the linen-sheet stars explode into Reality, and Tabi and I float up, up, up, towards a north star which sparkles into every wavelength imaginable. We are struck by ochre and jade and ruby, and a cold wind starts to blow against us. We are entering the sensory world, the real world, the difficult world. The turbulence picks up until it is a blizzard. And soon all is snow. And all of the static re-enters my body as we pass through the dark place between floors. The elevator is spooling to a stop.

And then I arrive in the basement on my own.

All is still.

And all is still here.

Memory gives me a checklist. In these boxes there are photographs of old places and old people and there are broken devices and shattered glass and in the boxes there is an old me and I never, ever have to open these boxes again. I stand up. My breath is steady. And on the back of my neck there is a little itch, and it is whispering to me where He is, where to go to find Him. And me, and my body, and all the other things trailing behind me, walk back to my God in a stagger.

It is roughly seven PM, and so Tabi and I get to making dinner.

We utilize a recipe book. As with all other nights we have a soft refusal to cook the same thing twice unless we truly love it, so in this case we are trying something new from one of Tabi's many books, specifically one named LDLCT, which he notes is a fiction book, but which contains a detailed, prose-heavy recipe for Korean beef noodles. Of course I have cooked noodles, and many times in this specific kitchen, but Tabi still wishes to follow the book's lead. He is insistent on written instructions sometimes, and especially with meals he participates in. "The hands are fickle memory," he once explained. "Or at least mine are." I think we are both thankful for recipes that are relatively simple, and this is really nothing new for either of us. It is pretty much stir fry with a few extra steps.

We divvy up the labor and finally, finally, get back into a groove.

It is a relief.

Maybe it is a little clearer how I feel about Tabi by now. Maybe it is easier to understand what I mean when I describe him. Maybe by now I no longer need to describe him as if you have never met him. He is a complicated sort of person to pin down in words, but I would like to think that he is not so confusing in the moment. As a person, he is quite congruent. He is always as he seems to be. And I think he really does have my best interest in mind, else I would not be here, else he would not do the little things.

The little things are love, I think.

He retrieves a mixing bowl and the gochujang from a top cupboard for me, so I don't have to go get a stool and reach up. And he is doing more than half the prep work, the half I don't like which involves a knife. And as we're cooking he is working in plain quiet. I glance over and he is focused on the task of slicing up peppers and lean cuts of beef with his delicate hands. And always it seems like Tabi has other things on his mind, and it makes me sure that he has an inner world as complicated and impenetrable as mine. And it is perhaps the times I have seen Tabi vulnerable, hurt, candid, which make me love him, or something close to love. And it really is close to love, I think. It is only a few steps away. It is only my own fear of my mind that keep me from being able to call him my boyfriend.

I live in his house but I don't sleep in his bed.

I let him fuck me but I don't let him cook for me.

We are certainly past the early stages of our relationship in which I was afraid to butt into him and awkward around him. I am completely loose around Tabi now. We bump into each other in the kitchen again and again. And he is chopping peppers and makes a grimace when he accidentally gets a little juice in his face and I poke him—but he really is annoyed that he's got spicy juice on his face, so I'm laughing at his expense, but then I kiss him and the humor is back. And we try to go to separate parts of the kitchen and collide head-on and feel like idiots together.

I have started realizing that if we spill something or break something or make a mess, we will just fix the problem and move on, and then the entirety of the present moment will get washed away by the sea.

It doesn't really matter what happens in the kitchen, or in the Room, or anyplace else. Everything will be here tomorrow.



And it is that self-assuredness of Tabi's presence which reels me back into a grand and holistic happiness. It is the fact that he is not particularly going anywhere. Memory tells me Tabi's goal, which is singularly to have a person in the house he can care for. The house itself is ordinary, and in many ways so is Tabi, but his urge to caretake and love is extraordinary. I get the distinct feeling that I could be in a stasis, a completely unmoving world with Tabi, until the sun burnt out. And maybe some time after that.



We leave the duty of cleaning the kitchen to our future-selves, and instead we just plate up two bowls and scurry on over to the center of the living space. Above the fireplace lay a television, a light-capturing device made to distract the visual cortex, which is currently airing an American football game between two teams in Texas. Neither one is from Austin, so I don't really have a leg in the race.

Tabi lays on the couch. I lay to his opposite, with our legs interlocked, so that I can tease him physically, and also so that I can feel his warmth. I am a sucker for these sorts of arrangements. But quickly I forget about intimacy when I smell the divine odor of our cooking.

The rice noodles are spicy and meaty and savory and the cuts of beef are dripping with sauce and fat, and the heat is radiated in long lines of steam that fog up my face, and we are obliged to spend a while eating before a single thing is signed between us. When Tabi finally gets my attention, he is smiling ear-to-ear with food happiness, and there is a spot of gochujang on the fur bordering his lips. And he is gleeful about what he is telling me.

"I am learning something in that book I read this morning," he signs. "It was written back when a lot of people like me existed all over the place, of course, and it may allow me to restore some of your senses."

I am not sure what he means. I cock my head sideways.

Tabi gives me a warm look and taps at the side of his head. "Your hearing, my darling. I could perform a ritual to bring it back to you."

A short little pause. I mimic his sign as a question. "Ritual?"

"It would only be if you wanted. I know I've tried this before when fixing up your head, and you did not like the results. It reminded you of the Cochlear. I would only accept the results if you could hear music."

Memory confirms that this is a strange loop, that this is a subject I have complicated feelings on, that I have no answers on. I scratch at the side of my head and exhale, and I feel as if I am completely on autopilot. "I am doing alright for now," I sign. "I think."

He grins warmly. "We can wait to decide, obviously! I am sorry if it was a surprise. I know this is a subject I am woe-equipped to figure out."

Tabi's honesty makes me feel almost sorry for him. And sorry for myself. It should be a very simple thing to answer, and yet the part of me that cares about my ability to hear is gone. It is long gone. I suppose I have been swept up in the sensory world of Tabi, his touch and flowery smell, his warmth, his teeth on my neck and saliva on my tongue, and his seed matting my fur, that I have forgotten that I am missing something that he has. Or I at least have forgotten to have an opinion on the subject.

Actually this is a common theme with me.

I answer him with this: "I love when you do things for me like this, so we can try it."

"Well, are you certain?" Tabi tilts his head to match my gesture. "I thought you'd be excited, but I suppose I've just let you down before."

Without meaning to, I shift to get lower in the futon. "It doesn't really matter to me either way, for some reason."

"That is perfectly alright. You can feel any way you wish about this kind of thing, my love." Tabi shrugs plainly, spooling up noodles and a pile of peppers in one grand bite. The air is filled with sesame and spice and it is difficult to think on the subject, difficult to think about anything but food. Actually this is why I like food in general, because it is a fantastic and nonpermanent damage to the psyche that allows you to forget the world a little bit. And when it is so fragrant as these noodles I am constantly distracted from it.

I dip my head down to keep nibbling on what's left.



Eventually I am food-happy too, and defeated with just a few bites left in the bowl. At some point the football game ended and the Cowboys won by four points. I am unsure if Tabi has a fondness for sports and I am unsure if I do, either, but it occupies the eyes, so I watch the subtitles as a few commentators talk about the game and the players and the events, and how the pass percentage was high, and so on. And the flashy graphics and all the screen transitions and talking heads meld into a burning soup. At the bottom there is a ticker that tells me that a team called the New England Patriots are almost out of the race for the playoffs, which is a tournament to decide which group of human beings is best at playing football. It also tells me that it is the eleventh of December. And also it tells me that some player is trying to get traded between teams, and a coach is being yelled at, and so on. And a lot of this is babbling nonsense and so it is only retinal food, not brain food.

Then again, that feels perfect.

Tabi is giving me a footrub, playing with me, playing with my attention. And after a while of this his hands go free and he asks, "Was this a stupid thing to put on?"

It's an amusement to me and I laugh. "No, but I was never really invested in football anyway. Just something to watch, and I like it for that."

He shrugs. "I suppose that means you won't start ignoring me in favor of sports, which is a relief." And he gives me a smirk.

"Obviously." Tabi in his entirety, his entrancing and warm gaze, are obvious to me. There is nothing that would surpass it. But as an aside I mention, "I like watching stuff with you though. So we could find something that's more fun."

A moment, as he ponders this. I spot the television remote float over from who-knows-where and land in Tabi's lap on its own volition. "We could look," he signs. "Cav—another friend from a bit ago—liked hockey, taught me about it. Was there anything in Austin you were a fan of?"

"Literally nothing," I sign, chuckling. "Or I mean a few things, but nothing that I want to do now."

He taps his long chin. "Right, then. Is it too soon to suggest competitive bowling?"

A pang of discomfort and amusement hit me at the same time. "Yes, probably. What about you? Do you have anything you'd really enjoy showing me?"

There's a short pause as Tabi gathers his thoughts on the matter. "I like showing you all kinds of things," he signs, "but we do that enough in the Room, right? I simply don't want you to feel left out on this."

"I don't," I assure him, and then feel unsure. "Or at least I guess I think I don't."

"Is it just one of those nights you don't want to have a whole conversation about things?"

And I nod immediately. He understood me before I understood me. "I'm just happy and tired," I sign. "And we can talk about this later. Maybe we should just get drunk?"

Tabi takes a deep, resolute breath. "Absolutely. Okay, but first I would like to tell you something. Is that alright?"

"Of course."

The great big sheep who keeps me happy starts to unlock from our position on the futon. He has put his empty bowl of noodles aside and lifts up, his beautiful form curling and uncurling as he floats into a position where he can more adequately smother me with his body. He looms until he is three inches above my form, grinning, huffing into me. I can't wipe the smile off my face. The closeness is almost overwhelming.

"My love," he signs, "tonight and all nights, I am so thankful for your company. Thank you for staying with me even though it was crap most of the time today. I am deeply infatuated with you and your mind for the world, and I can't wait to see the rest of what it has to offer us."

And for the first time in a while I am able to return the love, the favor. If only through words. I am able to sign back, "I love you so much, Tabi. Thank you, too."

"You make it sound transactional, darling." He snickers. His breath on my face feels like a tickle. "Well, so long as you like this, all of this, I am glad I'm satisfactory."



Due to functions of magic and the occult, Tabi is able to lower his body to give me a kiss. And then I turn it from one kiss into an infinite kiss by gripping the back of his head and wrapping a hand around one of his curled horns. And light and darkness around us turns into a flashing kaleidoscope of rainbow color, all the many waves splitting into glass.

We discuss a few things on our way over to the kitchen. It is about eight PM now and we are soaked in a sense of overdue enthusiasm, like after I woke up from that panic attack, where the energy has finally returned in our exhausted bodies. Or at least I feel exhausted, and I would like to think I can sense Tabi's mood better than I used to. We talk about football again and mutually confess to not knowing much about the rules, and we talk about what we're going to drink tonight, and Tabi decides to pull out an unpopped bottle of champagne. And then we spitball things to celebrate, since champagne typically means celebration; we try the idea of fixing the coffee machine or learning how to bowl, but both ideas are dumb and trauma, so we settle on celebrating a two-year anniversary of living together. "I don't think it's been that long," he signs, "but close enough."

"Close enough is good enough." And so we pop open the champagne and I drink two flutes in ten minutes. A flute is a kind of tall glass for getting wasted in a dignified way. This wine tastes like sour-sweet carbonation and acid, and actually alcohol is a unique sort of flavor that the tongue can't detect. It is just soft burning, like an anxious memory, and two flutes of champagne is already enough to feel like I am trying to get drunk on purpose. Drunk is a shortcut to cuddling Tabi.

He is compositionally different than me, but mostly of the same parts, and as susceptible to alcohol. He pours himself one flute of champagne and then another and then another. And he keeps drinking. He is so bubbly when the tipsy comes on and his eyes get so warm, and at one point he grips me by the hips and pulls my skirt taut with his fingers and kisses me, and I can taste ethanol between the two of us. And on our next flute of champagne we toast. "Happy two years," he signs, and then drinks and drinks and drinks.

Then we are a little wine-satisfied so we move to the fridge where we have stashed away six cans of Cool Valley Brewery IPA, which strikes me as another company that could easily have met the same fate as Lone Star Lanes where it falls through the world. And actually... maybe it did and that's how we have some beer from there. But regardless we pop open a can each and tap it against each other and drink, drink, and drink, and it tastes like berries and bitters and mint and grass, wheatgrass, and it tastes like alcohol again. It tastes like last nights.

I am not really a fan of beer but it gets to my head faster than wine.

Is that why I'm drinking?

The kissing and cuddling is getting out of control now. We are hovering around the kitchen, and I feel this stupendous heaviness and exhaustion inside my body, which nonetheless makes it exciting to continue being around Tabi. His presence is unpredictable and funny and cute to me. And his ass can only be felt not seen. And at some point I tap his rear and feel his fluffy tail vibrate from that sensation, and he pauses what he's doing in a slow manner. "Hush, Euclid," he signs, "I'm trying to wash the dishes." And he enunciates 'dishes' with his hands like it's a joke, and I make a funny face and kiss him again.

It's just two bowls and a frying pan, and it nonetheless takes forever, because we are stupid and keep trying to grope each other. Or, well, I am the main problem here.

He is heavier than me and taller than me, but still at the same height where I can rather easily brush my hand by his member. He is often naked around the house, so I am used to seeing his limp member and treating it casually, but in this case I am exploiting it, butting up against him, not really helping with the washing process. And Tabi gets excited less easily than me, but he is easy to please once I make physical contact. I am so flush with blood in my face and he is fuzzy and his fur poofs out. "You're trying to wash the dishes," I sign.

"Yes, I'm trying to wash the dishes!" He thumps my chest.

I kiss him on the neck from the side. "Washing the dishes," I sign.

Every sign language can be a kinetic thing, and ASL is no different. Actually I have been doing a lot of translation for the sake of reading these things in English but it must be said that we are—or at least I am—incredibly flowery with my language. The whole of human expression is so vast when it involves the contortions of the body, my expression, how quickly I sign, how loosely I sign. I can yell, whisper, cry. And in this case when I talk to Tabi I am thudding my hands against him. I am kissing him and desperate for touch. The heat is welling up inside my body, the fake-heat, the bodily exhaustion or maybe just expenditure. "Washing the dishes, but you are too distracted," I sign.

And he signs back, "Yes! Obviously!"

And kisses me with a little laugh. And so on.

He drags me out of the kitchen eventually, and he has this wonderfully flustered look on his face. He is—of course—hard now, erect upright against his own belly, tearing me away from him so we can start planning the rest of our night. "Okay," he signs loose, "do we need any more alcohol?"

"Oh no, for sure not," I sign. I am not stumbly or unsteady but I feel like my head is twisted a few times, and that heat is my grounding rhythm. And that heat puts my hand in his hand. I exhale and smell the beer on my breath again, and the crackly sensation of the champagne, and all at once my organs are uproar. I am drunk enough.

Tabi looks down at me. He takes a big, long blink. "Good, my darling. I've got just the place."

"Not from Austin?"

"Not from Austin." And he has a warm, embarrassed grin. "An old building in Leicestershire." Tabi's free hand signs fast, fingerspelling individual letter as he spells out the place-name, and it's all blurry and my mind is the only part that gets the word clearly. And he begins to elaborate...



This place was just called the spot and it was the spot for a few dozen people in the early eighties in England who wanted to get fucked up. But this was a more progressive and transgressive sort of being fucked up which was rather new to the planet, which involved taking pills that attacked the sensory part of the brain with a three-pronged artillery shell so that you have fun without really doing anything at all. For these people the spot was a warehouse building which nobody else was particularly using at the time, and which would eventually sink into the earth after they got done with it and forgot about it. There was a man named Jack who hung out here and had his sources of ecstasy and so was the reason that his friends and tangential-friends would come to the spot to rave. Raving is a kind of dance that you do until you fall over. And this was an arrangement that was convenient and fun until it wasn't.

Temporary and fun arrangements are pretty common not just in the rave scene but all underground scenes. Actually I think this is why my own gay self had a lot of trouble in Austin, in Jersey, et cetera. And maybe even also why I have trouble with Tabi, because sometimes I think to myself, isn't this just a temporary fling between two gay men? And so thus I wonder what it would be like to have Jack be your dealer or friend or whatever he was, and the inevitability of knowing that the eighties will end, and then so will the nineties, and then all the rest of the world will melt away.

In stark contrast there is Tabi. He has told me a lot of times that he has been around a very long while. "I have not gained mental wisdom," he has clarified. "I have to write it all down, or have it written for me." And I wonder what my presence here has felt like to him.

Two years for me. Or at least nearly two years. Good enough for champagne.

And just two minutes for Tabi.

Or at least it can feel that way.



We reach the spot on separate trains through the Room. And first it is the invisible concrete floor again, the emptiness, the running, vastness, echoes. For Tabi and I, it is like we are a pair of those ravers in the early eighties, following instructions that we only half-remember. Actually traversing the Room is a lot of instinct and kinetic memory over our navigation skills. Up is not a concept until we go down. It is like going through a maze not the first time, or second time, but the third time in specific. And Tabi has me by the hand again.

He taps my palm with two fingers. We are going to have to hoof it quite a distance.

I don't want to get lost, and so I grab onto his hand tighter, and then soon his arm. And though he is floating, I think I can feel him lower to my level to keep me steady. I really have lost some of my motor function from the champagne. I am not sure what the saying is—liquor before beer, never feel fear? Except this isn't liquor, it's just sparkling wine. And I am just a lightweight. And in spite of that, I drink a lot of nights, and I suppose thinking about it I drink most nights, especially with Tabi, because it is our tendency. It strikes me as pitiful that I'm such a lightweight.

If I could see Tabi, he would sign that it's all going to be okay.

And for now he just taps my palm.

When we reach the spot it is after a prolonged journey that could not possibly be expressed as a length of real time, because it feels like forever but also seems likely to have only been a few seconds. And again the world comes into view, and again it is all sensory for me.



The spot is tall-ceilinged, and there's moisture and mildew, and holes in the ceiling where sunlight streams in. Low sunlight. Evening sun. And the air tastes a little bit like motor oil and gasoline and smells of candles, and there are fairy lights making up for the spots of darkness, strung along the metal scaffold-pillars and rebar. And the floor is concrete, but it only peeks through in spots where they couldn't cover it with cheap carpets.

Along one wall there are four water coolers and copious cups all piled up half in their packaging. And a paper which details how to get back home to various places in case someone is having a shit time of it. And there are also temporary plastic-wood tables set up around the perimeter of the warehouse and one has been knocked over, but on the other tables there are bagels from a corner store and other various things that fill the stomach fast. And in addition to the water coolers there are discarded water bottles everywhere, everywhere, because it was important nobody dried up.

Like all places in the Room it is empty of people, and yet I know people are around.

Tabi arrived with me. He takes in the room for a little while, but only a little while. And then he gets to the point of this place.

He floats to the darkest corner. Behind a crate marked SOUTHWESTERN SHIPPING, and below a piece of plywood, there is a stash he knows about via methods of magic and the occult. "One second," he signs, but when he signs that, he's already found what he was looking for. And he pulls it free and emerges with a mischievous grin stricken across his face as he shows it off. This is a dusty baggie full of little, wonderful pills known as ecstasy, which we ran out of circa last nights. My tongue instinctively tells me that they are sweet-tasting but I know they don't taste like anything. And when Tabi floats back over, the anticipation, the eagerness, it is overwhelming. My body is crackling with electricity. I think about his penis. I think about crossdressing. I think about being fucked until my brain melts. And Tabi waves the baggie back and forth and when he reaches me, it is to kiss me.

"We aren't doing this here," he indicates. "Are we?"

I feel tired. So I sign back, "No, I want to."

He smiles, and it is still impenetrable. "Easy, then. I'm going to retrieve some toys from deeper in."

And Tabi hands me the baggie, and before my brain can process any movement, he's gone.



While I wait, I obviously inspect the tablets. They are decently homebrew in appearance but somebody has carved or embossed '40' on every single one, so I calculate that I need to take three to get where I want to be. Actually I recall that I should need a lot more, but that He has assured me to always hover around one hundred milligrams in my body, because He is sure it is a perfect number. "You won't have trouble with tolerance," He had signed, a while back. "I have luckily come up with a fix for the both of us." And all this is just magic and the occult.

Coffee is its own kind of magic. And so is alcohol—my throat still stings, and I am heavy, and the heaviness of my head makes me lean over into the baggie until it envelops me. And MDMA is the most magical thing of all.

Memory tells me that I did ecstasy first when I was sixteen. And then later when I was seventeen, a lot of times. Memory tells me that I underwent a process called 'serotonin syndrome' which got close to making my body die. And my tolerance got too high to really enjoy it anymore.

Until I found Him.

I grab three pills and throw them into my stomach from above. They taste like nothing. Actually they do taste like a variety of thoughts passing by my head, they taste like dehydration and heat sickness and serotonin syndrome, and the pills also taste like somebody grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me. She doesn't know that I can't read lips very well and thinks the Cochlear will fix her slurring voice, and she is screaming into my face. She is telling me to stop fucking up my life. It sounds like static.

I think about Him again to fix this.

The water coolers along the walls are filled with clean water to the top. Again the magic and occult of the Room strikes me as funny here, like in Lone Star Lanes where I felt like it had been recently waxed and maintenance was done on the lanes, because it feels like somebody or something set up the spot for Him and I. It might just be that this is some form of platonic ideal for this location, the time it was closest to being remembered, though of course eventually it became empty and forgotten and fell through the world and ended up here. But in its best shape it was stocked with hidden tablets of MDMA and water coolers full of cold water and space to dance. A lot of space to dance.

My body does not want to dance. I am tipsy and exhausted and I want to drink water. I retrieve a discarded plastic bottle and fill it with the chilled water from one of the coolers, down half of it in one gulp, and then fill it up again.

And now I have to wait for anything to happen.



I think surely He hates to wait. I know that He sleeps less than me, and so He spends much of His life waiting for me to wake up again. Maybe that is why the nights feel so long. Maybe it is just one long, torturous night.

I don't mind waiting. There have been many points in my life, I recall, where waiting was the only solace I had for anything. If I wait around, things will eventually be different. And yet that is the only thing untrue in His house. It doesn't matter what I do.

It doesn't matter what I do.

It doesn't matter if I get drunk and then do molly—which I have been told many times is a sort of stupid idea—or if I get drunk and then do various other things we find and use in the Room, like ketamine, which is supposed to be very dangerous with alcohol. And it doesn't matter if I stay deaf or change that part of myself. It doesn't matter if I keep the Cochlear or take it out, though I wanted it out for personal reasons, and because I was in a state of disarray, and He helped with that. But it is all just window dressing.

It is all euphoria and hedonism.

He has told me many times that He will keep me happy when He is in my thoughts. And I reckon even if I were on the floor drooling, puking, dying, that thoughts of Him would bring me joy.

Though of course everything else is nice.

Joy comes in two forms—the longform and the shortform. And many of the concessions I've had in His house are longform, like my body, my clothing, and the love I feel for Him, which is something close enough to love to trick my brain into happiness. And then many of the things He delivers me are shortform joy, like food, ecstasy, sex. Especially sex. It goes unsaid that I am here for His intimacy, specifically his bodily intimacy, because the brain will start believing that shortform joy has longform benefits. As I have said, if I left, I would lose the ability to have Him pin me to the couch. And maybe that is what is keeping me here mostly.

Or maybe just inertia.

Or maybe just the idea that I am a very short-form kind of being. I was made without the parts necessary to aspire for anything more, I think.

I wait for a long time thinking about this, but my head is all loopy, and I just want to stop thinking so I can completely tune out the world. All of it. The spot included. Stop thinking.

So I stop.



...



It will sound obtuse or maybe corny, but I pass the time by counting sheep in my head. I imagine them in my visual cortex as jumping over a fence one by one, left to right, below a moonlit sky. And I count them as they pass—one, two, three, and four, and so on. And the mind, or at least my mind, gets distracted by this, and falls into a daze. I force myself to focus on the sheep until I pass out—when trying to sleep—or zone out, as I do now.

Even as words flit through my mind, even as I think about the act of counting sheep, I am trying to focus on the act itself. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen.

Sixteen. Seventeen.

And I did this before I met Him, of course. Or at least I think it is probable I did. I am unable to calm down without hands around me and so I don't calm down, I just spiral and spiral, and this is one of those methods of spiralling around. Like His eyes when he has me caught in hypnosis. This is a form of time dilation that He would later come to master in me. He can turn my mind off and transport me right to the moment I want to be in, as he has many times, and as I have wanted him to many times. But right now it is just my own, primitive method.

Seventy. Seventy one. Seventy two.

And all this, and et cetera. All I want to do is get high and wait for tomorrow to come.

And I guess it doesn't matter if ten thousand years pass. I wouldn't make good use of it anyway. Just get me to the good part.

One hundred sixty one. One hundred sixty two.

And I am hoping there would still be a world if He disappeared, but I don't think there would be.

He is all the sheep in my mind.



...



Tabi.



The back of my neck tells me he's here, and I turn around, and by this time, I think the ecstasy has started to flow through my veins. The three pills are now aerospace gel and they exist throughout my nervous system, and specifically they are assaulting my nerves that register touch. And it feels like there is a fuzzy, static blanket over me. Around me. In me. And then Tabi appears and he is his own form of fuzzy blanket. He has changed in appearance. He has done this to surprise me, though of course memory tells me this is nothing new, and that it is only a surprise because I am drunk, but Tabi has now given himself makeup. His eyes have this long, trailing eyeliner and a flush eyeshadow which makes his gaze explode, and he is wearing something on his long feet. I said long before that our legs are digitigrade, but still I enjoy wearing stockings even though they had to be adjusted for my form, and now Tabi is wearing two-toed Japanese socks called tabi. Ha.

He is wearing these socks because of a kink that I have.

A kink is another kind of brain malfunction that makes ordinary objects into erotic objects by way of tricking the brain into making false pathways between normalcy and sex. I am equal parts embarrassed and exhausted to have as many kinks as I do, but I think it needed some explanation. I like socks and stockings a lot, and they make me hard, and I don't know why.

I suppose this is a lot like Tabi himself.

He embraces me and I realize I am no longer having trouble with standing. His great big chest is expanding and contracting with pacy breathing. When he pulls back I realize my jaw is wide open to breathe more heavily, to smell him and taste him, his aura of flowery Tabi. He signs, "I can tell you've been thinking of me."

"Yes," I sign. "Did you take any pills before you went?"

"No, but I'm perfectly happy sharing your energy!"

And I sway a little bit. "What were you off getting, besides the socks? And the makeup?"

His big, beautiful eyes blink slowly, as he knows something I do not. "I couldn't quite read your mood, but I was thinking you might like being bound up."

Ba-thump. Ba-thump. I can feel my heart inside my head.

My body shivers involuntarily. And I hop on one foot. I can't control this. And my head is so heavy, it is heavier than the whole world, but my breath keeps it upright. And I sign, "Yes, yes, yes, but I want to fight it, too."

His smile curls back further. "Role-play?"

"Yes. Fuck yes yes yes." And I am tapping his chest with my 'yes'.

I appreciate the part of him that has fun with this. I can tell he's nearly as giddy as me about the prospect. Tabi spends much of his life being the sweetest and most empathetic person I know, and I think he likes playing different parts. He backs up a moment, still floating, those delicate socked feet avoiding touching ground as always. And he signs, "Good. Good. Then we can just... we can say you are just one person raving late into the night, that you are so out of it. Don't you feel out of it?"

And, yes, I do. "I feel like dancing," I sign.

His arms go wide, and he looks at once intimidating and welcoming, but he is floating away from me now. Floating on and on into the corner of the spot. And one last time he signs, "Then dance, my love," and fades. He does not disappear, but he fades. I know he is here, still. The back of my neck assures me that he is here.

I can't focus.

This is why I use. My feelings start to go nowhere. I ponder what he's doing and what might happen and then my brain just trails off into nothing, and again I feel my outfit against my fur and my body jittering, tilting, resting. I try to think about what is happening with my biochemistry, but then I just feel good all over and forget about all that. And I start to dance. I have to dance. I need to work out the energy in my limbs. And it feels good and good and good.

My world is all sensory.

I shut my eyes. When I shut my eyes I can still see the fairy lights dancing in my pupils, hovering, and my vision boggles and tenses. And when I open my eyes again I feel all the lights meld into each other again. And I keep dancing. I have no rhythm, no internal pulse to dance to, except for my own pulse, and I am beating my heart against the wall at two twenty five BPM, or a little more than two every second, and I need to shake out and off the static. Isn't this odd? but I don't even notice that this is odd. I am experiencing the divine. I think my jaw has gone slack some time ago. I think that I must look a fool but it doesn't matter and the thought evaporates again. The ground rumbles through the tips of my hoof-toes and vibrates me from legs to abdomen to chest to head and I float and explode, and my hand goes down the inner band of my skirt so I can fondle myself through my panties, and then I feel hugged, and dance from one leg to the other, and holy shit I feel hard, sometimes ecstasy makes me dysfunctional but clearly that hasn't happened, and I am exhaling happily, and my eyes roll back, and I don't even know where the fuck I am anymore.

Tabi grabs me.



My wrists are compressed by six thousand pounds of force and I am stopped suddenly in my death-dance, and the figure in front of my wide-open eyes is supermassive. He has a fierce look in his eye like a predator animal. My body lets out a yelp for me, but it does nothing to quell his movement, a decisive lunge onto me, and by the time I can process the moment I have been forced to the floor.

Carpet, rough carpet against my back. And he is pinning me down. My arms and legs instinctively fight against this, because they still want to dance, but as soon as I've started to try and kick away, he has pinned my knees down with his feet, perching on me like a beast. And I yelp again when the tightness around my wrists gets tighter. His gaze remains locked with mine, utterly ferocious, and I cannot see what he's doing, but I realize he is binding me, he is locking me in leather cuffs.

I let out a sound resembling his name but it doesn't exist, it doesn't matter. I am not in control anymore.

I am cuffed against the table leg behind me and when I pull down, jolt down, they're stopped suddenly. My fur is compressed and matted instantly. I cannot push him off of me now, and his sheer weight is almost enough to push me through the floor. If I fell here I would fall deep into the Room and far beyond the spot into nothingness and forgotten rooms, and then I realize that his weight is good for me. It feels so indescribably pleasant. He is in control of me, which means he is in control of something, which means someone has this shit figured out.

Between his digitigrade legs, Tabi hangs half-hard. And I see him bob up and down, thrust involuntarily, gyrate his hips. And he is more eager than me. He has had more time to think about this than me. I let out another sound, a weak pleading sound, and he signs, "Hush." He tells me how to feel.

From nowhere and noplace, he retrieves a piece of bondage equipment called a ball gag used for shutting people up in a kinky way. I try to kick up against him but he pushes down harder on my knees with his feet. And he wraps the strap of the gag around the back of my head, coiling behind my horns, and uses this leverage to stuff the rubber ball into my muzzle, past my teeth and deep into my mouth, blocking my tongue. I'm forced to exhale, to nearly dry-heave, and he clicks the strap shut around, tight, tight, tight. He is fucking up my perfect fur.

"Hush," he signs again. And he signs it into my chest. He pulls open my jacket and forces his palm down on my thorax to force me down. And I try to plead and my mouth won't shut and he tells me to hush, hush, hush, and thwacks his fingers against my chest. "You are mine to command."

It doesn't matter

what

I

do.

He decides now that he wants to pull my clothes up and expose my groin. And I have to key into my brain again the fact that I want this, that I am consenting, I want to fight it, too. And I know this. And he knows this. So after Tabi throws aside my skirt, he grabs my neck with both hands.

"Hush." And he is signing it into my throat.

And he gives me such an intense look. And I can feel the air squeezing out of my muzzle against the gag.

He signs again, "Hush," and I ball up my hands into fists involuntarily.

And he pushes down on my windpipe until I go out.

And it is all colors.



At some point I died and left the real world, and maybe this happened many times. Or maybe existence is a trudge into the impossible, and I am just deeper in than I thought.



I come back to air like a head-on collision and heave and breathe and it is all through my nostril, and I can smell fabric softener and booze and I can feel my own sweat from where I went out, and then my other senses try to come back as I struggle for consciousness. And then my dick erases every other sense in my body very suddenly, because pressure is being put on it.

Pressure. Pressure. I am under the weight of the ocean. And the weight of Tabi. And he has pulled my dick free of my undergarments so that he can stick it between two of his asscheeks—which can only be felt not seen—and I am feeling them—he has me pinned so thoroughly that the only movements I can make are with my hips and it's useless because I am just grinding his ass. I mumble out something and my throat feels sore and he pushes down on me, pushes me with "Hush," and I shut up fully.

From below he looks a god. And he has a stiff expression on his face. And when he leans back he is leaning onto my member and squeezing me with his ass, his ultra-soft wool trapping me, locking me in place. Saliva pools up around my teeth and soaks the gag. At least I have something to jaw on. The feeling on my dick is static electricity and chill; I can hardly feel myself before I groan, and then I realize I made a sound, and I am apologizing in my head, I am sorry Tabi, I am sorry, I will shut up, but he reaches forward and grips my face and caresses my cheek and I can feel him enter my mind and say oh darling I love you I love you and then I fade out again.



All I can think of are sheep.



And bliss and goodness and when I come to again I can feel the spots where Tabi has touched my cock, where he has caressed it and coated my length in lubricant, and those spots alight in pleasure and waves of overwhelming, explosive force. My flesh is erupting in song. He is hovering over me with a new smile on his face replacing stern, and he puts his hands on the floor to balance, and when he lowers, he is doing so with his asscheeks cupped around my length. I squirm endlessly and jaw again and bite and shudder, and the chill and tingling and static turns into warmth. Warm, warm, warm.

Tabi's ass can only be felt not seen and his hole, his butthole which is used explicitly for the purpose of penetrating him sexually when he deems it allowed, can only be felt not seen, and now I am in it, I am in him. It is slow going but not difficult because I am outrageously erect like a slab of granite and Tabi's entrance feels at every bit like a tunnel paved through vibrato flesh. My world is alight with color. And he tightens his hole around my length and is telling me in my head, fuck me fuck me fuck me, or else I will choke you unconscious, so I fuck him I fuck him I fuck him. My muscles are all contract release contract release. I am dancing again. I am dancing for him. My legs hardly function. Actually the ligaments are all failure and overexertion. I squeeze my toes inside my shoes. I am wearing stockings and they feel so good and I feel so good and warm, warm, warm. And Tabi pushes down until he bottoms out and I see him erupt into gasps of joy, and finally finally finally, and he does it again from the top.

The cuffs start to ache but I am incapable of feeling it. I am on rough carpet stabbing Tabi's rear with the spear of ecstasy and start to forget where I am again and fall out.



And fall in again and I have been pumping up and down and I can't stop biting the gag. Bite, bite, bite. I am being held by ten thousand invisible hands and then Tabi squeezes my dick with his fluffy ass until I am being milked. Find my fucking prostate now or I will choke you unconscious, so I fuck him I fuck him I fuck him and my brain is really starting to rot now, because I forget that I am fucking him and fall still until I am drooling aimlessly into the gag and then he is back in my head fuck me fuck me fuck me and wakes me back up again.



Do you need this, darling? he asks me and he fulfills my kink my fetish and puts his feet on my face on either side of my muzzle such that he is blocking my sight and he digs his toes into my forehead and squeezes me and I start wallowing in the glee of it for a while, mumbling and yawning and biting down, and he tells me to keep it up, so I keep thrusting even though all my senses are exploding in fireworks. Fuck me fuck me fuck me and I keep doing it and I become a machine built to hit his prostate. I know where your prostate is and I am going to hit it hit it hit it and he shudders, I can feel his shaking through the tips of his toes, I am forcing my face against his soles, I am stupid.

At some point I sense that he is reaching orgasm because it reverberates through me in sheets of snow and then sheets of semen. His breathing rolls through me in waves because it is quaking. He has to take his feet off my face to get stability on the ground and I can see his expression, I can see his eyes. His big beautiful gaze is eyelined and visible from miles around. And it contains a kind of love that I can only examine from that distance. He has a smile on. His dick bobs up and down while he milks me, and drools a line of cum and then shoots out another one, and he is so self-satisfied that his ego itself is experiencing the divine.

And, of course

like with many things

he is not done there.

When I catch my breath, the world has reached something of a calm. I am shaky, but when Tabi lurches forward on top of me, he looks loopy. And he holds me by the shoulders, and he undoes my cuffs. And he is close enough that I can hear his heavy, labored breathing, this panting and exhaustion distinctive to him, which resonates orgasm, like a balloon has popped in him. He is so damn happy.

And when I bring my hands down they feel so weak, but strong enough—barely—to grab the back of his head and kiss him. I am limp. I am all limp.

And, of course

like with many things

we are not done there.

- - -

Sex without a mind looks like this. It looks like four hours spent in the Room and at first it is just the spot but it quickly turns into some other places; it is all horny leg-grabbing and nausea and dizziness, so much dizziness. We visit another place made out of wood and concrete and rusted rebar and Tabi takes a bottle of liquor from there and starts to really knock himself into oblivion and I am just experiencing fairy magic the whole way through. I don't know if I cum at any point but it doesn't matter to me because, like waves on an ocean, there is no beginning or end to any of it. It is melted glass.

My world is all sensory.

What is oblivion? and the answer is that it is true nothingness, and the answer is that I have been trying to find it for a very, very long time. But in some ways this is oblivion, too. It is everything at once and it is also completely meaningless. It is the real world I have been trying to avoid for so long.

Where is my memory? and the answer is that I don't have any of that, I never had any of that.

I bite down and feel my teeth, and Tabi puts a gag back in to protect my tongue. And later he makes sure I am drinking plenty of water so I never stop. My eyes hurt but I can't stop dancing dancing dancing

and eventually the dance comes to an end.

It is two AM. Or something close. I have lost the rest of my hours to ecstasy and booze and when I finally start having coherent thoughts again I am in my bed, or at least a bed. This is my room or at least somebody's room and it is dim, nearly dark, and the window leads out into a plain darkness resembling a deprivation chamber. There is hardly light to see a thing as I peer up below the comforter, which feels like an echo of Him.

I am stripped naked, and my physical memory tells me that He helped me do so when we got tired enough to consider sleeping. I had semen on my femme clothes but that's all in the laundry now, but I still smell vaguely homosexual, and certainly feel the part. It feels right to try and go back to bed, and I shut my eyes, but they can't stay closed for long. My body doesn't want to stay in bed. It is its own entity, and it wants to move.

I have just enough oomph in my body left to crawl out of bed, tossing the covers aimlessly aside as I do, feeling cold air bash against my fur.

I think He dropped me off in bed silently while I had a moment of darkness so I could sleep away the exhaustion, as he has many times before, but in this particular case I have absolutely no intention of getting back in. It feels like looking upon a yawning abyss. Instead I want to go. Anywhere.

My door is ten thousand pounds heavy, and it is difficult, but I manage to turn the handle and swing it inward to make my way into the hallway, where the lights are on deep into the night. I feel as if they should not be on at this time of night, but they always are, and they provide guidance as I step into the rest of the house.

When I begin to meander around, the walls themselves seem to waver, and I forget where I am.

I remember.

I am in here because I want to be.



I have a limp in my left leg and a cramp in my right shoulderblade. I have marks along my fur where saliva used to be, and the spot where one of my horns meets my head is inflamed where I bumped into something. I feel absolutely trashed and disoriented, so I go to what feels familiar, which is the television.

The living room in its vastness feels excruciatingly small right now; the skylight shows a moonlight nothing and feels as if it is lower to floor than usual. The lights are on here too, and they are on pretty bright, but there is no warmth in the bulbs. The magic of the room with His presence is no longer here. It is uncommon that I find myself in this foyer without Him close, but the back of my neck insists that He has gone away someplace else. However many nights He sleeps, I am sure He is getting a head start.

He won't mind if I spend a couple midnight hours awake, watching television. It isn't like it will be loud.

The fact about cable—and shows on television in general—is that nothing good is ever on, especially late at night. I tune into the sports-related channel He used earlier today and it's playing highlights of a game of college football in a town I've never heard of. It is brain trash but it is at least something to dull my senses, which are way heightened after being shocked so long in the tank of ecstasy. I go flat on the couch, shovel a fuzzy blanket over myself, and get sucked into the TV for a while.

I don't remember what my hobbies used to be, really. I was an online furry and also went to sports bars, now and then, to try and feel like I had a social life, but of course being deaf but also having a Cochlear meant I didn't particularly like being around loud people or feel welcome around Deaf people. Nothing was really fated to click. I would hang out in the sports bars and barcades and just watch the quiet televisions playing garbage, endless garbage, and tune out.

Except I should have better hobbies than that, now.

I should learn to knit or write or paint to pass the time when He is not around. In fact He is capable of all these things and has offered to teach me, and I have always told him, yes, but not now. Right now I just want to get drunk.

And so on.

It is only in the quiet moments when I can't sleep that I think about improving my life whatsoever. After all it is already exactly how I want it. I am not built of the right parts to want anything else, except in the most abstract sense, where occasionally I get all existential and worry about the two years I've spent here in His house, mostly happy, mostly satisfied, and with absolutely no looming threat of destruction. And I get to be in the body of a goat. And I can be awake late at night without waking up to work at Seven Eleven.



I think mostly my purpose is to exist. Maybe that is a little relieving. I have been dealt an exceptionally lucky hand, now, after many many years of bad luck. I think being born deaf was bad luck. I think being born gay was bad luck. And finding Him

was such

good

luck

wasn't it?

Commercial break. They are playing an advertisement for a place called Burger King, which sells hamburgers for low prices because they kill cashiers and cooks on a daily basis via starvation and circumstance. I am luckier than them. I am luckier than everyone else.

I am lucky to have Him.

Back in Austin I had a gay friend—actually a friend only for the sake of having a gay friend—and he used to refer to having sex as 'getting lucky'. Actually this is a fairly common way to joke about it. Human beings are particles being shot at ten million miles an hour at each other, and it is pure luck if any of us collide. Sometimes we do it multiple times. It is lucky every time. And with Him it is exceptional luck, because I had to end up encountering every bit of trauma and heartache on my way to Michigan to get to His door, to His house, to end up in this orbit. It is so exceptionally unlikely that in my mind it starts being warped, being misinterpreted, as being the only possible outcome. It overflows. Suddenly this is the only way it ever could have been, myself and Him in this house, in this space, this dance we do between day and nights, sleep and sex, television and silence. So much silence. So much unending space both below and above His house.

The universe does not have randomness, dice, uncertainty. Or maybe it does and we just cannot tell. But I have never felt like it does. There is no justice or injustice to any act which has been done unto my person. It is just how it is.

My eyes ache. They are broadcasting the football game again and it feels too bright in here, suddenly, for the time that it is. I should be going back to sleep.

And then as my limbs start to contort and I start to move to turn off the screen, it turns off on its own.

And the lights dim,

and the lights flicker,

and I feel His presence on the back of my neck.



I feel embarrassed even though I shouldn't. Did I keep Tabi up somehow? Was the volume on and I didn't realize? Maybe he was concerned for me when he saw I wasn't asleep, felt I wasn't asleep, so he's come to find me. The foyer is in half-darkness now and I pull my head up from underneath the fuzzy blanket to search for him, sitting upright, but I don't see him in front of me or behind me.

Or, wait. And my eyes adjust. And I squint.

Tabi hovers in the entranceway between this room and the eastern hall. From this far away his expression, his eyes, are inscrutable. And his white wool is a muted gray in the dim. He is motionless.

I sign, "Tabi?"

There is no response. Tabi hovers in the entranceway.

I sign "Tabi?" again, and then my hands fumble into a string of words. "I was just unable to sleep, but I had such a wonderful night, but I'm just watching something to turn my brain off."

There is no response. Tabi hovers in the entranceway.

I feel His presence on the back of my neck. It is a rubbing sensation or maybe heat or maybe pain, maybe pain. And he hovers in the entranceway.



When I met Tabi he was so impossible to comprehend. He was lucky for me to see. And I think I have been unsure if he was real ever since then. There exists a lingering disbelief even now, even two years later, or almost two years, almost two years of un-reality. Why is he here? Why is He here?

In the entranceway. Hovering. Motionless. This is not like him.

Although it is plenty like him.

I recall him at the end of every hallway. In the half-dimness of the house at night his wool is splotched against the world in a dull gray like static. My eyesight cannot fully process his edges. He melts into the darkness. He hovers in the entranceway to the eastern hall.

I sign again. But I am more long-winded, quieter now in how I sign, because I am feeling like I cannot breathe. "If something went wrong during my trip, we can talk about it, I think I've come down now."

Tabi does not defuse the situation. His arms are down to his sides and do not stir. He refuses to communicate, to reply. I can't even tell if he understands me. And my blood starts running through me and I feel my heartbeat stutter. His presence crawls against the back of my neck like bugs.

"Tabi," I sign, "are we going to talk?"

Then my head grows light.

And the world begins to swirl.

And Tabi comes closer.



I sign his name again and something in me is stirring, shuddering. I slowly peel the blanket off of myself on instinct. I want to stand up to meet him but he is taller than me and floating and floating closer, closer, closer. "What's wrong with you?" And I sign this twice and he is halfway across the room to me. There is nothing in his eyes. His wool is unmoving against a cold wind, and I can feel my heartbeat against my ribs.

I say his name out loud. And again I say it out loud and I can feel my voice hoarse. Tabi is clear to me now, his form, his shadow. His hand is clenched. His muzzle is craned down to stare into me. His gaze is too much to bear.



"Tabi?"



And my limbic system causes me to run away.

Fast footfalls. And fuck me it is hard to move because I am still stunned from the night but I have to run, I have to run, I throw the blanket off into the air and scramble to my feet and something in me stirs aimlessly and forces me towards the side of the western hall. I have to run. I have to run.

When I look behind me over my shoulder to assuage my fears, I am hoping to see his form shocked by the gesture. He will react like himself and back up and

and instead Tabi is floating towards me. He is faster than me. My leg crumbles and I nearly fall. His wool crawls along the walls and fills the space as he approaches.

My breath gives out. My blood feels as if it constricts me in a web of wires.

What did I do? What did I do to you? and there is no reply. And I make it to the entranceway and I can feel him along my back, I can feel him getting closer. Why am I running from you? and there is no reply. I break into a sprint that I can't even manage for a few seconds, and my lungs are on fire, and I turn right to go down the length of the hallway past dozens of doors and the carpet trips up my toes and when I reach the end I realize I have gone down the wrong side and I have nowhere to go, and my legs falter, and exhaustion breaks me down, and I fall onto my ass,

and when I look back around I am hoping he is gone but he is already upon me.

Tabi is the whole world when I fall down and turn to face him. He reached me already. A long time ago.

His arm stretches out to meet me. I try to squirm away but he has me in an embrace. Instantly I am flooded with endorphins, with comfort, his wool, his wool, his hands are so warm

warm, warm, warm

He grips the back of my neck in both his hands, and with a flick of his finger, he permanently severs the bundle of nerves that makes up my spinal cord, specifically between the second and third vertebrae of my spine.







And the world fades out instantly as feeling in my toes and fingers and chest evaporates. My head cranes back on my limp body and then He takes it in his hands, and lifts me up into a Tabi carry.



My world is all sensory and it is burning away. There is no pain along the back of my neck. I can't feel my nervous system talking back to me.



Memory. Memory. I don't have any of that. Have I been here before?



Liquid is welling up in my lungs.



I want to scream and I can't scream.



He lifts us up. The lights are so dim now, and the light itself is fading. My mind is drowning and delirious. Where am I? And I have no sense how tall the ceilings are from the floor. Taller by the minute. He lifts us up. With my head falling back in His arms I can barely see Him but I know that I am drooling aimlessly, that I can't control my muzzle or my neck anymore, that I can't control any of it. My lungs and heart are struggling to follow basic commands from my brainstem. Vision flickers in and out.



When we reach the living room I am entering a delusional state of peace. Or maybe I am just not thinking straightforwardly anymore. I don't have the faculties to panic. Then my eyes focus barely on the skylight

there is no night anymore, no plain darkness, no moonglow and no stars. Instead I see a phantasmagorical light show of every color in existence. The vibrance is endless. I look up to the heavens and I see the Room above His house and I need to run, I need to run, my limbic system is screeching until its vocal cords burn, but I am not my limbic system, I am not anything now. I am just swirling into oblivion.

Where are we going?

He lifts us up into the colors and the universe disappears.

- - -

When I come to again I am in the Room above His house. And He has me on a flat, basic surface of sheet metal. I feel cold. When I come to again I am experiencing the sensation of my left eye being removed with a metal surgical implement called a spatula. I am unable to feel much except for a low-lying buzzing.

Tabi?

and He is here above me taking my eye out. It is then that I remember He has been taking off other parts of me, too. He removed my olfactory sensation by cutting out my nasal cavity from my nose. He has also removed my tongue such that I cannot taste anything, and with my nervous system cut off from my brain I am entering true deprivation. The stupor will set in again. The fog will return.

The Room is a dull white forever.

When I come to again, He realizes I am briefly conscious, and it is then that He tells me the following:



I love you.

I need you to know something extremely important. It will make you feel much better, and you need to know it before we go on.

You will not remember any of this.

Your mind will shield it from you, because it is traumatic. Soon you will wake up and be living normally again. You will have absolutely no trace of this memory and it will not stick with you at all. Your mind is so beautiful and it will protect you no matter what.

What you need to do until then is simple.

You just need to think of me.

Think of me.

Be thinking of me. And my touch. And the wonderful things we will do together.

And you will forget this terrible moment again.





Then He removes my right eye, and soon the rest of me slips into a plastic case.









And I think of Him.















My world is all Him.







































































































Dizzy sensation wakes me up.

SECTION 2
EGO

In April the rain started coming down heavy and relentless for an extended period of time. From the north and up surrounding the Great Lakes the wind became an endless stormfall of rolling cloudy hills, and water was now hammering the surface of the Earth, washing away mud and soil until only rock remained. Along Michigan and eastern Wisconsin the rains came and refused to leave. And the rivers flooded and the water overflowed into every spot of forest and marshland and deadfall, and the fog became so thick so as to feel suffocating. In the dead of the nineteenth night of April the storm became thunder and the unending clouds went alight with electricity and it struck the earth like knives ten thousand times. Around Lake Michigan the dirt roads running up and down bunkhouses and bungalows and vacation homes owned by rich white men were all cleaved, carved, and chopped up into rough loamy pieces at the bottom of sinkholes. And the pickup trucks and four-by-four vans and Ford Broncos sunk and sunk and sunk into the planet, and the satellite dishes and cable towers and power lines quivered and then fell, too, in the face of a sky's worth of river. And from much further east than Detroit came cold air from New England, which had traveled all the way from the Atlantic Ocean to reach the middle of North America, and which layered and flitted between warm and cold air from the North so as to make a blanket of turbulence that eventually formed into a storm so great and endless that it deserved a name. In the northern states by the ocean this was Hurricane Emily, but Michigan does not get hurricanes; here she was a formless and abstract flood the size of the universe.

Storms do not have names. They do not start or end, either. This storm has been going a long time and it will go a long time after this swell. It will exist in every shape that can be dreamed up, all these clouds like fingers touching the sublime. And it is



attacking the skylight.

Above the foyer is a window that looks out upon the atmosphere from the ground. The only thing keeping Emily's rain out is the existence of molded silica glass and pine framing.

Where am I?

For a moment my surroundings are all confusion and static and haze. I have been zoned out so long on the couch that reality itself started to melt away. And I saw words and cosmos in the splatters of water against the skylight. In this room, the great room, the ceiling is twenty-four feet, six inches above the floor, and then it turns into the same gnarled mess of wood branches and columns as the rest of the home. And it has a hole to the sky. It has snared my view like a pitfall trap in the forest.

Raindrops splatter against the window. They have traveled maybe hundreds or even thousands of miles in total to reach here. And their impact is so ephemeral, as it is only the smallest part of a storm. And each droplet is quickly replaced by another, hitting in the same spot, every microsecond, unrelenting in a frenzy. Sometimes it leaves a stain, and the stain is washed away.

The air must be so terrifyingly cold right now, but the house, in its enormous geometry, keeps its temperature to itself.

Where am I?

I'm starving, actually. And my body tells me this in a muted, cold tone. If I had zoned out for three hours I wouldn't be able to tell. And now caffeine has worn off and my appetite is back, or at least a form of physical guilt that my stomach is empty. And, shit, I am not dressed. Or I am sort of dressed but I am just wearing panties and one of my robes, I am hardly the way I'd like to look for what time it is. And of course I have no idea what time it is. It must be past noon. Before I lost myself I think I was masturbating... a lot, actually. My undergarments are sticky with precum and my hands feel numb. Then I lost track of what I was thinking about. I lost track entirely.

These numb hands fumble around to find my surroundings with touch. Yes, this is the sofa in the center of the great room. Yes, I am somewhat awake. I am not unable to move, at least. I can salvage this.

I pick myself up. It's a flailing gesture and my eyes ache and my fur feels unkempt at the moment, but at the very least I'm able to get up and stand, and stretch. God and it feels good to stretch. From my creaking digitigrade ankles to my wrists, all the tendons keeling out and then returning to normalcy. It is warm in here. Or at least it is warm being buried in a matting of black fur. My day is not over yet, something tells me. I can salvage this. I can salvage this.



I make myself a midday meal in the kitchen. It's still unclean from the morning—frying pan, two plates—and there's actually very little in the fridge right now. This, thankfully, doesn't mean I can't slap peanut butter and strawberry jam onto two slices of bread. I eat it in the kitchen and don't bother to sit down. And I'm hungry enough to have another one, so I pull out all the materials again and eat a second sandwich, and finally I feel heavy. And dry.

Water, then. And a long yawn until my jaw aches. I down two full cups of water to kill the dryness in my mouth and maybe in time it'll kill the dryness in my throat. And it helps with the peanut butter stuck between my teeth, now. At least I can make up for time spent daydreaming. I can salvage this.



Some part of me—some very active and undernourished part—wants to improve my life. My stasis, this unrelenting frozen state of mind I've had, has grown too much as of late. I have had so little urge to change that I've finally developed a new part of my brain that is deeply, deeply angry about the stasis, and who will be my guide through it. Don't despair, it is saying. I can salvage this. Through months and years I have managed to wash away my abilities as a human being to act upon discipline and be motivated, but it's alright. I'm not dead yet. I still have facility over myself and years ahead of me. And I am not a lost cause. You are not a lost cause.

This is the mantra being repeated in my head as I lick my teeth to get rid of peanut butter and glance out of the kitchen at the great room, and the skylight, the storm pounding away. Attacking.

I can fix this,

I am not a lost cause,

I can change my life.

Maybe there is a threshold someplace in this house that I could cross and become unfixable, but I haven't found it yet. I know the house very well and can map out all its many corridors in my mind, and I haven't yet found a place that I can't come back from. I haven't yet had a piece of mental damage jackknifed into my brain hard enough that I can't still somewhat function. They haven't killed me yet.

Or at least that is the best wording I can manage.

Change is really, really difficult to manifest in a person, actually. I hope this isn't really surprising or novel to say, because I'm sure everybody has gone through this crisis a lot of times. Except for me it is a very dissociative kind of crisis, because most of me—maybe ninety percent?—is completely fine with the status quo. Whatever that is. Wherever that is. It's only a small little part, a little voice very very far away, that isn't. I can salvage this, it is shouting. Don't despair.

(I want to respond: I wasn't going to despair! But the assumed truth is that I should despair anyway.)



Here is how I'd like to change:



At some point last year I was told about a book called Djiban which contained a story and the story contained a recipe, or a ritual or somesuch, which would be able to give me the ability to hear. This is the same kind of magic and occultism as described by early medical professionals in roughly the nineteen-fifties who invented the cochlear implant, which is a device that was put into me without my consent when I was extremely young. It made me able to understand speech, audible speech, from other human beings. It made me able to 'fake' it. I had a lot of acquaintances who never knew I was deaf, that my inner ears didn't process audio on their own. Actually I had a lot of acquaintances who said I wasn't deaf.

I wasn't deaf, they said, because of the Cochlear. And I also wasn't really hearing, because of all the problems. So I was someplace in the middle. I learned American Sign Language on my own—which took some time, mind—but had very few people interested in communicating with me in any way other than English, spoken English. And of course I didn't sound like I could speak very well. I was told I was 'retarded' a lot of times. 'Retarded' is a nasty English word, a slur, that was turned into an even nastier word as time went on.

And a short time ago, maybe two years, I had the Cochlear implant removed. Surgically. And I don't know how to feel about getting something put back into my head that makes me hearing, that makes me 'not deaf'.

I don't know how to feel about it but I want to know how to feel about it. I haven't had an opinion on anything in a while. I need to develop an opinion or two, now and then. I can salvage this. I can give you the urge to do something about your life.

So I decide to read Djiban.

It is up on a shelf too high for me to reach on my own. Actually the shelves in the great room are absurdly tall, and there are so many books that it takes me ten minutes of searching to find Djiban again, to the far left of the fireplace, about eleven feet up. I have to lug over one of the high chairs from the kitchen all the way across to the far wall and clamber on top just to have enough height, and when I finally reach the book, it has been stuck in tightly between two other books called VARIANCE and Lost Contents of 1771, and it takes half of me just to pull it free.

The book Djiban is leather-bound and heavy. There are pallid, barely-visible stains against the edges of the pages. It isn't handwritten but it looks hand-assembled, and the paper feels just a tad flimsy. When I come down from the high chair, I am as cautious as can be. This is an irreplaceable thing in my hands, now.

Were the skylight to cave in, and water to flood the home, there would be a lot of things—memories—lost to the waves.

I bring the book over to the same couch I've been lounging on all day—or all morning?—and lay back into the same position, able to view Emily, able to watch the clouds swirl and the lightning swell. And I put Djiban in front of it all, holding it up above my head so as to block the world, and I begin to read, starting with the foreword.

Reading is a hobby. I should have a hobby. I've thought about trying a lot of times, but there was always something in the way.

Here is an important part of the book:



...Valdias once told me in a secret language how to unlock secrets from meat. Secrets of the universe, he said! I cackled endlessly when I heard him, but his faults were not insanity, they were intense clarity. In the half-light of last night's evening I thought I saw the moon grinning so wild. I cut up a little thing that scurried between buildings and I took it back home and underground I derived the phase of the stars and I saw God in its flesh. There is such power in a scalpel. When you dissect, you learn that detached skin feels so much indeed! It is alive, it is manifest! Even as I ground it up into little paste and scattered it to the wind it felt trauma. And I felt so much fear that my hair grayed and my eyes dimmed. I am of the same stuff. My empathy for the crying world! In that resemblant morning I sought Valdias in the library again, sopping wet from rain, as it began to rain, as I made it rain...



It is at this point that I get a headache, and then I pull the book away from my face. And when I look back up, and around myself, and all around myself, I see the rows and rows of shelves. Everywhere. As tall as the sky. I know the height of the room but it feels endless. I can't even imagine how many old books are in this room. I couldn't count them if I tried. The very words on this page are starting to make me dizzy.

Above me, the rain has only grown more intense. And when I stare out at the cold, the chill, the endless pouring phantasm, I start to feel it enter me.

Slow.

And an hour passes while I read.



Here is a summary of the book:



Djiban is a story about a madman. In the half-fiction of Djiban there was a group of philosophers in the eighteen-fifties—I am not sure where, or who exactly, besides some last names—who cut up a bunch of little animals and did experiments on the remains. They called themselves 'modern sophists' and did not believe in mainline thinking, and instead subscribed to whatever beliefs fit their reasoning at the time. They were not scientists or even really frauds in the traditional sense, because they did not sell their concoctions, and they did not publish anything either. They wrote a lot of papers and kept them in a library of their own design and over the years more people came by and wrote in books and put them in the library, and more and more, and then it was the nineteen-nineties, and the fictional author of Djiban came along to this library and did a lot of reading. By now there were a lot of 'modern sophists' who cut up little animals. Or they sat in rooms and philosophized, or they tried to summon things from the woods. And this author read some papers, ignored some other papers, and came up with a system of thinking that he called 'true psychic modernism'. In this line of thinking, he argues that the old traumas of the world—murders, genocides, oppressions—are causing all modern traumas. There is a lot of rigamarole, because the book is very long and very bitter and very frustrating to read, and I don't think I digested more than thirty pages total with how much skimming I did, but this is the central argument.

In the book this author says outright that nothing can be fixed. Nothing can be fixed, really, because trauma cannot be mended. It was apparently proven when they cut up a bunch of little animals and tried to put them back together again. But then he says that there is a way. There must be a way, somewhere in the annals of history. After all, it can't all be like this.

It can't all be as boring and sad and mundane as it seems.

And in a deep corner of the book called Djiban, which is a fictional word that means to cut open, the author describes himself giving a little rat—a little lab animal not considered sophisticated enough to think—the ability to hear. It was born deaf and he 'fixes' it, by praying and burning candles and asking his neighbors to cut up their animals as tribute. And not a long time later he cuts up the rat, too, because he needs it for something else.

- - -

I am freezing cold. When I bundle up under my fuzzy blanket and curl my toes and bend my legs to become a little ball of a goat, I am still chilly. The room isn't cold, the house isn't cold, and all the while my hands are stiff and I can hardly hold Djiban anymore. Actually the book has me pissed off, worried, anxious. Actually I am about done with Djiban. I shut it and put it on the coffee table and bundle up, up, even further, wrapping my blanket around myself twice, because all I would like right now is to have an empty head, an empty mind.

I need to shut it out.

The storm named Emily pounds the skylight and soon enough I'm back staring up at it.

Up and away.

In April these rains started and they haven't stopped. Weather in its great unending fury is beautiful to me, the most beautiful thing, because it is the representation of all the many, many forces coming together to manifest chaos. Even if the control variables for turbulence and humidity were simple—which they aren't—there would be no way for us to know the result. We could not have seen Emily coming. I am sure there isn't a soul on the planet who could have seen Emily coming. The whole of Earth is such a complicated photograph that even a single moment in time is too complicated to interpret.

Imagine if a book like Djiban was written every millisecond. And imagine if the whole of this room, with all its many tomes from different eras, none of whom I know, none of whom I have met, was written every second. From the beginning of the planet until the end.

This unrelenting unending infinite is everywhere. It is



attacking the skylight.

Where am I?

Something stirs in my stomach, and another chill runs up my leg and up to my chest. I peel the blanket off of myself and try to get to the bathroom.



The year I turned twenty, I was sick like this all the time. Every day was a new symptom. Aimless. Pointless. My stomach and then my bladder and then my head and then a pervasive cold and my nostrils filled with mucus and so much trying to throw up like this, every time at noon and on and on and on. I am kneeling against the toilet waiting for the puke to come up. Where are you? And back then I was fucking sick all the time to the point where I was truly angry, because it didn't make any sense, it wasn't fair. Throwing up at noon every day. A lot of cramps and diarrhea. And blurry vision. Clammy hands. My head would ache for hours and hours and hours. What do you do when your body is upset like this? How are you supposed to get answers when a doctor costs eleven thousand dollars?

And a friend finally gave me an answer, said I was sick because I was unhappy. The brain can affect the body and something is wrong with my life that is causing this. So the year I turned twenty I also tried so hard to make myself happy, I took medicine, I saw a therapist and then another therapist, and I stopped working at the same time, too, and I was out of money by October. I ate healthy and then I ate shitty. I went for walks and then stayed in bed all day. I destroyed my life. Next February it stopped.

It was worse that it stopped because it meant I had nothing. I had no answers. I had no truth.

I am throwing up. Or, fuck's sake, I wish I was, because nothing will come up. No answers and no truth. My fur itches all over and I just want something to come out. So again I

force it

out

Fingers down my throat and eventually bile and half-digested schmutz goes into the toilet and I retch several times and my body fills with endorphins until the cold and itchiness seeps in again, and I force myself to throw up again, and all this for far too long.

Fuck me it hurts, my whole body is crimping along the edges. Why?

It isn't supposed to feel like this. I am supposed to be happy.

I did everything right.

There is no button to press to fast forward through this. It is agony and weightless dizziness and it lasts forever. And all my time is melting away into frustration and anger.

Do storms ever pass?

How do I know when they're gone? How do I know if they're almost over? The year I turned twenty I thought, many times, that I was nearly through it. People would ask me how I was doing and I'd tell them better, doing better now. And that was just my way of getting around saying, "I am fucking miserable and it will never end." And nobody wants to hear that. I know because later on I was so honest about it that people stopped wanting to be around me. Deaf kid wants everyone to know how unhappy he is. He is a bummer. He is a letdown. He is a broken porcelain doll.

He is homosexual and deaf and we should kick the shit out of him because he won't fight back.

Then in February I turned twenty-one and stopped being sick all the time. My body was completely empty, and everything that used to be me was washed away into the dirt. I was the very sad kind of poor that makes you figure you'll never get out of it, and so was my cousin, but two people in an apartment was cheaper than one. Then the morning shifts at Seven Eleven started and I was good at showing up. Deaf kid refuses to let anyone know how unhappy he is. He is a hard worker. He is a straight shooter. He is a model employee.

We would joke about what we'd do with a million dollars, but my perception was skewed enough at the time that I would have rather become an anthropomorphic goat than have money, so at least I'd stop trying to kill myself. The thing about bodily dysmorphia is that it makes you very eager to destroy your body any way you can. I sound stupid. All of this sounds stupid.

Where am I?

Maybe my storm has passed.

Maybe it's over.



Of course Emily has not passed and I still feel cold. I am nearly passed out on the bathroom floor. From this position... barely I can reach the tissue box and wipe my muzzle clean, scratch my teeth. It is bad to keep bile on your teeth. And after this kind of sick experience I feel all my body's many pieces with overwhelming, unwanted clarity. I can feel that my fur has grown out a little too long. After every night I am just a little fluffier than I want.

There's an itch falling away, fading away. I don't attack it. It gets worse when I make it feel welcome.

I roll over, contort, eventually I drag myself to the sink and stand up halfway—only halfway, my legs don't like me up right now—and retrieve my electric razor. While I'm in here I might as well.

Barely able to get into the bathtub. Now the nausea has sort of dissipated through my whole body, like little globs of unpleasantness in every ligament. I take a few breaths, try to even out, and trim my body bit by bit. I have not described this process before and even now don't have great description for it, but it is incredibly gradual, holding the razor at an off angle, letting it glide against the fluffy parts of my fur and cut off what it may. The only way I've ever been able to get it looking good was by letting my hands become my memory.

Memory.



Memory.



I don't have any of that.



My hands are not fickle memory, I've found. They are better memory than my head. Or at least they are more reliable shepherds to truth, because they do not think. Sometimes I'll find myself doing things with my hands that only make sense to my hands, or my legs move me to rooms entirely on their own. If you collect all my many body parts and let them run wild, they occupy a space, they act as their own person. Another person occupies my space in superposition.

This isn't true for everyone, of course. For some people the head is a better keeper of habits, of routines. I don't even measure or think at all when I trim myself. I have simply fucked it up in the past and now I'm better at it. When I first received this body—or I guess it is me, the other me occupying the same space—I wasn't sure yet how to take care of it. I never was actually a fan of body hair and now I'm all body hair. But it actually feels like it belongs. That's a difficult feeling to get with anything, let alone with the atoms that make up your physical body.

The empty tub is now spattered with little clumps and shavings of my fur. I stand up—wobbly but I have the nearby wall for support—and brush myself off a while, until finally I am done.

And now my thoughts are starting to be a little less aimless, because there's something swirling around in my head out of nowhere. It isn't the new voice, telling me you can salvage this, it's an ancient and formless sort of angst and recognition. It's a face I can't see.

There is something lurking behind me.

...but of course the bathroom is unoccupied, and when I stumble out of the tub I am starting to get steady again, and even though I am sure there is nobody else here, I am certain there is something I'm missing. What the fuck is missing? I came to my senses

on the couch staring up at the skylight, of course, and then I ate food, I was going to wash up but I ate food, and that's what made me sick. And then I went to go read Djiban and it made me sick, too. What's missing from this picture?

I am not due to work anywhere. I don't have to work to live. I am just here. There is nobody who I need to let in the front door, because nobody visits and I would have plenty of questions if somebody did. There is nobody waiting on me. It doesn't matter if ten thousand years pass.

What else?

My arms are trembling. When I search my face in the mirror I can't find anything that wasn't put there by God. No answers and no truth. I'm forgetting something. Something is leaking out of my head, out of the back of my cranium, little drools of liquid into infinity. My body tenses and un-tenses every moment, every heartbeat. I am missing something. I am missing vital information and my mind will never, ever let me find it.

The year I turned twenty I was anxious like this all the time.

My body figures out that I need to look better and make my body better, as if I'm on some kind of time limit. I am stirring in the bathroom for a long time as a result—it started with shaving and then I have to get all the fur out of the tub so it doesn't clog, and then I'm working on my teeth and my horns, I need to give them a soak and a polish, and I decide to wash up, really wash, coating myself in soap and water and showering in the heat of it all for ten minutes. And the shaved fur turns into puffy fur. And I nearly fall over in the shower a couple of times because I'm fooling myself, thinking I'm not still light-headed.

And maybe the most daunting part of this is the cold. I turn the dial up... too far, too much heat, and it doesn't work. Hot water on ice. Ice prevails. And then my skin starts aching from the warmth. All these fucking physical sensations at once and I'm not actually getting any closer to—

—and again I am on the floor—

—writhing. Waiting for the cold to go away. I want somebody to hold me right now and tell me it's going to be better soon and that it's going to be over soon. It's going to end, right?

I am staring up at the ceiling and itching and freezing. All the 'ing' words. In perpetuity.



What if storms don't go away?

What is wrong with me?

Why am I alone right now?



That last question is the one that makes it click, right in the middle another session of trying to puke my guts out. Actually it's been trying to click together for a while now and it got stuck on a rock or pitfall trap in the forest, something like that. Actually I feel enormously stupid. Actually I feel anomalously stupid. Something very stupid in me took over.



Here is what I've been missing this whole stupid time:



I am alone at home right now because I'm waiting for Him.

Him. The owner of His house, my caretaker, He who shaped my body into its current form, and the person I am in love with, or something close. I'm waiting for Him to come home from the Room below His house. He is retrieving groceries. Groceries are items of food that you stuff into a cupboard for later.

Of course I must have zoned out on the couch too much, far too much. Fell in a hole of my own cognition. And for a little while He wasn't on my mind at all. He wasn't in the forefront and He wasn't in the back, either, and He wasn't even in some hidden nook or corner. He wasn't even present in the way that my heartbeat would raise merely from His proximity. And then that phrase entered my head—my hands are fickle memory—and eventually it came together.

He came back to me. He leaked out of my brain and came back. Just a little detour. There isn't anything wrong with that.

And that's why I wanted to wash up, of course. And get trimmed. And eat and drink water so He doesn't think I'm not taking care of myself, all of a sudden. And in spite of feeling sickly and messed up, I am ready to greet Him again. I am ready to be His world.

What in the world was I doing, obsessing over storms and superposition and sickness? I can just think of Him, his electric touch, his hands gripping mine. I can think about His wool, endless rolling hills of softness and warmth, and His embrace, which will carry me out of this place I'm currently at.

I can sense Him assuring me that it's all going to be okay.

Yes, of course

storms

will pass.



When I look up at the ceiling of the foyer, I am doing so fully clothed. I went to get dressed so that I could ignore my bodily discomfort and replace it with bodily euphoria. As I've said a few times I like women's clothing—or I suppose I don't like calling it that, much. It is femme clothing. It matches the person I'd like to be in my head. I am wearing a long skirt and wool stockings and a blazer to try and warm my inner self, since the robe wasn't doing it, obviously, although now I'm just stuffy and chilly at once. Superposition. Whatever. I am looking up at the ceiling of the foyer where a skylight is embedded between the gnarled branches of polished wood, and I can nearly feel the force of heavy rain against the glass, trying desperately to break in. Emily has been trying since the beginning of the universe, and will keep trying until the end.

But I don't want to get lost in all that again, so I return my gaze to ground level. The wait is nearly up and I plan to be ready for Him. And when He appears, it is like He was always in my peripheral.

Just waiting to return from stage left.

"Darling," he signs, overloaded, carrying too many paper bags in his arms.

And I sign back, all flush once more, "Tabi."

He tells me all the places he went. "I wanted those specific fries from that one place that fell through the world, you know, but I got so caught up exploring, trying to find it. The Red Shack, do you remember?"

"Of course!" And I'm snuggling up against him but I swear I am being helpful, too, I'm unpacking things and putting them where we go. Overwhelmingly the trip was for produce—we need a healthy sum of fruits and vegetables to keep up our cooking. But also there is a lot of pantry stuffing. And sometimes—often actually—Tabi finds things in the Room below the house that are just interesting, and he wants to bring them. Things that the world forgot. Especially with food it can be so easy to forget, but even a little reminder can bring back the sights, smells, tastes, all in crystal clarity. And when he mentioned those fries from the Red Shack it brings back so much, the fact that we ate them burning hot, the fact that they were salted way too much and crispy beyond belief, the fact that I ate them while doing some terrifically silly, kinky things to Tabi. My hands are splendid memory for this kind of thing.

And we retrieve the take-out box from one bag and through methods of magic and the occult, they are still hot. Very hot. Steaming. And our heads are aligned on this, because we dig in without pause.

We are leaned in over our dining table on two four-legged stools and we are eating take-out french fries from a place that doesn't exist anymore. And because it has been a long day for him, and a very drab day for me, we are doing something kinky under the table. We are playing footsie. One foot goes over another, our toes sometimes interlock and push against each other... this is not erotic but it is erotic for me. I am semi-hard and warm, buffeted by waves of embarrassed joy. And eating is only a half-distraction.

"Good pick?" he signs, smiling. His mouth curls along his muzzle. He already knows the answer.

I wave around a fry. "Obviously," I reply. They satisfy the primal section of the human brain that craves greasy junk.

He doesn't want to talk about anything lofty and neither do I. He just tells me, "I have a running theory that French fries get enormously better if the rest of the food at a restaurant is subpar."

He's piqued my interest. "Was the rest of the food subpar?"

"Good question. Let's find out!" And with a laugh Tabi holds up another take-out box. "Burger."

"Burger."

We try the burger—a Red Shack Classic with pickles—in tandem, and then try the fries again and then nibble at the burger again, and decide cumulatively that the burger is subpar. It's actually very below par. The bun is cheap and the meat is—well I think I would describe it as empty, it feels insubstantial. When I was a kid I got bougie burgers at local places all the time, but I also enjoy whatever crummy fast food sandwiches I can get my hands on, and this is significantly more flimsy than even that. Tabi and I trade opinions back and forth like an annoying, nitpicky couple. Of course the Red Shack is not operating anymore so they cannot hear our criticism, so I figure it's okay.

His thesis holds true for now. If the food is bad, the fries get better. "I swear I've had good fries at good places," I sign.

"Then we'll just have to find them." And Tabi has the most enormously sly smile. "Tonight?"

"Perfect."

But it isn't tonight yet. And actually at this moment Tabi breaks my heart a little bit, because he mentions something I wasn't expecting, and simultaneously something I was dreading. And Tabi signs to me, "But it will probably have to wait, actually, because of the ritual. You might still need time to recover."

Ritual, and that word echoes in my mind. And I am visualizing all it entails. Magic and the occult.

I am tentative when I ask him, "What exactly is that going to be like?"

His tone is delicate. When I search his eyes, he is clearly unsure of how to phrase things. What words to use, so as to minimize side effects. "I can't promise you much," he tells me. "I have been preparing for it for a while, in spare time. I know you will be safe, but you might feel pain. We'd have to deal with that if it arises."

And my hands feel a tremble roll through them. "And I'll just be able to hear? Like magic?"

"Like magic," he tells me. It is so direct and reassuring. It is difficult to parse the truth in his words. "How do you feel about it?"

"I'm scared," I sign.



Tabi pauses, and so does our game of footsie. He gives me a little defeated look. "That's alright. Like I mentioned, we can cancel at the absolute last minute. And I can't imagine what any of this is like for you, darling, you've got a lot to consider here." And it is like he is in my head again, in all the many corners of the room, when he says what he says next. "I will never consider you not deaf. You are still who you are."

He has the words he knows I would like to be told. "Alright," I sign, muted, after a few long moments. "So long as I can stop it right before it happens. Classic me."

Tabi laughs a single laugh. "You would certainly not be you if you didn't give it thought, right? Lots of thought."

"No idea," I sign, and I am grumbling under my breath. The air still smells like Red Shack Classic with Fries. "Tabi, my mind is terrible at thinking about difficult things, you know this. I can't decide on anything."

"I suppose." He has been in my head. He has had his hands around my nervous system and felt my pitfall traps when I fall into them. "Okay, that is on me. I don't mean to imply that the waffling back and forth is always something you like doing. This is a big life change and I'm sorry that you can't figure it out for yourself."



"It's alright," I tell him, muted in tone. "It isn't remotely your fault."



He cranes his head down so that I can see him, his smile. His smile is muted and dim. Tired. "I know, but still," he signs, a little playful, but a little run-down.

I actually have something here I would like to point out about Tabi, about his looks, about his expressive nature. In his gaze, I see his feeling of powerlessness. He is glancing a little off to the right now and then and his breath is unsteady and all of him is vulnerable, overwhelmed, embarrassed. He feels like I am inscrutable, that I am broken somehow, and that he has ruined my day. Like I have said in the past, it is his tendency to take blame for all things in his little world. But also it his tendency to take responsibility for the bigger questions, like that of suffering, confusion, trauma. I think he feels as if I am meant to be completely in bliss, and anything less is ugly.

For Tabi, all things are his fault.

I am happy almost all of the time. I am extremely happy extremely often. Why isn't that enough for me? And it is like he is here, asking me this question. Why isn't this enough for you?

And another question is bubbling up right this second. It is an uncomfortable question. Why do I feel bad for him?

Why is it that everything is his fault, and I must feel guilt for this fact? I am partially responsible for any bit of Tabi that feels insignificant. I am responsible for my own happiness. If I am unhappy, it means—directly, really—that Tabi has failed to do something, anything. It's an infinite guilt chain. Where to even begin?

Of course I don't believe this. And I don't think he does either. But I am staring into those eyes that won't really meet mine and wondering what it is that this is.

It is sort of love.

I don't know what love means anymore.

You could, if so inclined, slice it up in many different ways. I have pretty often seen our relationship as transactional. This to me means that we are exchanging something for one another, that we are not actually sharing something. Also our relationship is mutual, from a different angle. We have shared experiences and joy. At times when I gain something, we both gain something. There isn't really a loss—or any kind of expenditure on touch, embrace, sex. And these things could not exist if we did not both contribute.

Of course my existence in his house is a transaction in some ways. If I were not in love with him, if there truly was nothing there, then Tabi would surely not be gaining anything, and giving everything.

Then again he has told me he does not view any aspect of our lives as transactional, as an expenditure. Caretaking is his tendency. His world is its own reward. And also he does not really view it as an optional thing, as something that he would ever voluntarily opt out of—Tabi must have a home and he must have people in it, and he would like them to love him dearly, but he would also like for their lives to be sweet and without agony. And he does not want for anything in return. This is mutual.

What is it that he feels? and I don't have the answer. It is mutual in ways that I will never really know, not without asking. And I am built of the wrong parts to ask.

I am built of the wrong parts to ask him, why are you unhappy when I'm unhappy?

Why do you hold me so tight?

Actually in grade school I was yelled at a lot by a teacher named... well he was named something but it isn't here anymore. And yelling in the ear of somebody with a Cochlear implant really doesn't accomplish much, as I've said. And he was frustrated with me, because I wouldn't stop apologizing.

I am sorry that I couldn't do your homework in time,

and I'm sorry that that terrible thing happened to me,

and I'm sorry for the way that I am.



Here is how the author of Djiban describes this:



She is a little misformed thing... a grad student and a fucking poseur of the arts. Behind her eyes she betrays a sort of malevolence. Between all the ley lines I see her true form. She is stinking, rotting meat, responsible for a great deal of worldly injury. Her battered demeanor tells me all I need to know. When I hear those words leave her lips I am so furious with her... "I'm sorry, professor," and her flesh is telling me she is apologizing, but what for? The answer is simple. She is sorry for the Big Bang, she is sorry for what's happened to my leg. She is sorry for the sacrifice of the women and children in the old days—she is sorry for the storms and the earthquakes and the damn solar flares! She's sorry for it all, but she doesn't know it yet. The trauma runs through her. She is part and parcel... for all what's wrong.



Sometimes I feel this way. Responsibility and blame are odd things and I have been accused of being at fault for a lot of what's awful in the world. Of course this starts with the mundane. I still have a vivid recollection of the first time my dad accused me of being responsible for his shitty mood. Fault.



"Darling?" signs Tabi.

My sheep. I am staring off into nothing and my breath is low, lethargic. I have trouble recalling where we were in conversation. His deep, reserved expression says, simply, that he is worried he's said something wrong.

"Sorry," I sign back, slow. "I'm a little zoned out still. I was feeling shitty before you got back—stomach bug or something."

He exhales. "Relentless. You had that yesterday too. Any idea if it's the food, or...?"

I shrug. It's the shrug of the universe. "If we knew, we'd be solving basically everything."

"Well, I won't insist on trying to find the cause too much." There's a hint of relief and satisfaction that I'm not currently inconsolable, that I'll talk back to him. His world is fine. "Anything fascinating on your mind while you zoned out?"

He has given me the smallest section of rope. And because I am still a little hazy, for some reason I decide to bite down. "...Tabi, do you feel unhappy when I'm unhappy?"

And a moment passes, and he gives it some honest thought. Then, he asks, "Do you feel that way?"

"Often, yeah. I want you to be happy."

He scritches at his long chin, and signs with a sort of reverence. His words are so lofty—so pointed. "One way of looking at it is... to view our boats as entwined. Roped together. When the seas take us, we sink together. We can also doom one another by taking on our own water... though I think this is part of why we got connected. There is some tension in this relationship that makes it electric." And Tabi has the most marvelous, unreadable grin. "It's more difficult than floating alone. We must share responsibility, for some reason, for everything that happens. Counterintuitively we are twice as vulnerable to trauma when together, and hardly more guarded."

"But I like this."

"Exactly," Tabi replies, frenetic. "For some reason I like this, too. Much more than if you were static. Pardon the way this sounds, but I like having reality creep in. I like that you are a complicated person. It's fulfilling."

And when I lean back, I feel a little bit of looseness come into my muscles. I find that this always happens when Tabi talks to me in such frank terms. He is capable of playing multiple angles—sometimes unreadable, utterly sure of himself. And right now he is terrifically un-guarded. His painted exterior is missing. He is not the Tabi in my head, but the Tabi in my view. He is reality.

"I don't always really know how to feel about it," I sign, "the way that we share the same shitty feelings. The fact that my bad mood can cascade into yours."

"And yet it will not," he replies. "We are at once the same boat. I do not believe in sinking."

And I don't know how to reply but to snicker, and he laughs, and we both laugh at the absurdity of such a statement. He dips his head in a bit of embarrassment, but we are sharing it. We are the same stupid vessel. And when it all dies down, I feel we have gone nowhere. Just muted smiles and exhaustion.

I can be sorry for whatever I wish. In the end, it is Tabi who will guide us to shore.

I am little against the waves.



And when all this is done, and we sigh, Tabi pushes his left foot against the top of mine. His toes dig into my stockings, soft keratin against wool against fur, all many layers of wonder.

"Ah, thank God," I sign, hiding a bigger grin. "I thought we were done for good."

Tabi shakes his head firmly, doting all over me with his words. "No, of course not. If not for your sake, then for mine. I've been eager to do this all day, darling."

Kink is sort of a shortcut to my heart. Kink and fetish are core facets of homosexuality, and also all the many other branches of the wondrous tree of queer. It is the sense that we are alone in our fetishes that makes them potent, that makes them special—it is the many years spent being weirded out by myself that makes Tabi so lovely. I have a foot fetish. I am gay. I am a furry. Tabi loves all these things about me. He wants to join me in them.

The world is not full of life rafts, and he is mine, and he is rare. And when he locks his toes with mine, and stares at me with the most devilish glare of all, I am hard again so quickly. I am touched by the significance of this moment. "I've been eager too, but I forgot how easy it is to tell you," I sign.

And Tabi pushes his soles down into mine, forcing us into the carpet. Pause. "Right, so—as a reminder, yesterday you mentioned you'd love a footjob during a meal. This may have been sort of joking at the time, but..."

I stop him there. I can't stop smiling, because it's stricken on me like a scar. "Joking to you, maybe, but I'm always serious about that stuff."

"Obviously. You always like it when I do it, so." He performs a subtle maneuver. From his position he stops clamping down on my shins and instead begins crawling his toes up my calf, sliding with some oomph. He has told me that he practices on the legs of tables, sometimes. He likes to make it a dramatic sort of show for me, and moving your leg like this isn't exactly natural. And he is tightening my stockings as he pushes up, and then his other foot begins doing the same... and all the while Tabi stares into me with this fierce, dominant gaze. It is silly. Of course it's silly. I am not the sort of person that likes humiliation in the direct sense, but I am always made a pleasant kind of vulnerable when he looks at me like this, knowing I am easy to fuck with.

"So should I just keep eating?" I am shaky all over. A relentless erotic need is making my body parts shiver. It's right then that I remember how cold I felt earlier, and how warm I feel now.

Tabi leans back in his seat, but I can tell he's doing this partly to get better leverage with his legs. "Of course! Just eat like nothing's happening. Act natural, so I can break your natural."

"Fuuuck's sake." And I laugh one single, exasperated laugh, lean over the table, and try to focus on the meal he brought home.

A Red Shack Classic comes with fries that are crispy and sooty and Tabi is putting his toes between my thighs and forcing my legs apart to stretch my skirt. And the fries always have too much salt, which makes them luscious, forcing you to eat them one at a time, and Tabi is snickering because he's putting his feet up, like he's using my seat as a footrest, but instead his bare soles reside in the incredibly personal zone of my groin, pressing light against my balls and half-hard shaft, all the while a thin layer of cotton panties prevent the chill from becoming overwhelming. The Red Shack was a place in the outskirts of downtown Portland—it doesn't matter which Portland, one of them—and it was mediocre and bougie but it got by for six years and then eventually it fell through the world when everyone forgot about it because the only good part was the fries. And even the fries are barely a distraction for my mind while Tabi begins to massage me. He puts one toe forth, then two, then pulls my panties down my thighs slow.

"Darling," he signs, not pausing his movement under the table, "tell me you haven't had better fast food than this."

He's fucking quizzing me, all the while turning my crossdress into kink. Crossdress is only kink if you have an erection as needy as this. My balls rest against the hem of my skirt, and not long afterwards, I can feel Tabi extending his soles directly into my genitals. Hot and cold. And I try to focus on just talking, talking. "I'm sure I have," I sign. It's very clumsy and stilted. "Especially places that aren't just burgers and fries. Food trucks are—"

Tabi grips my shaft with two keratinous toes. There's a chill present... deep uncertainty, until he clamps those toes together to put grip on me. He grins playfully, like I'm not in on a joke. "What was that? I missed it."

I shift all over. Choking. I need to grip tightly against the table with my free hand while Tabi gropes me. "Food trucks," I sign, "are the best fast food."

"Oh? Like what?" He extends his knee. He is now stepping on my dick sideways, pressing me against my own stomach and waistband. Screw you.

I shudder. "Mexican food is... good, and you can take it to go easily." I sound like a robot. It takes enormous concentration to sign even a single word. I have been translating my ASL into prose in English and this is even more stilted, hands shaking, I am no longer close to fluent. And after I finish my stiff, stupid sentence, I buck my hips without meaning to. A stream of precum drools from my tip down my shaft and into the space between Tabi's grabby toes, and soon he is using that pre to lubricate his foot. His movements are slow and gradual, but there is still a sense of unwieldiness—it's his feet, not his hands. He clenches tighter than he would otherwise. I have to do some of the pumping.

And Tabi leans forward again. It must take all his concentration to be this way. "Sweetheart, go on. And do not stop until you cum."

In his gaze I see myself spinning around, around, around in his orbit.

Particle spin is not literal spin. It's close but it's not the same. And we are in love or something close. Certainly right now... I cannot imagine anything else but his world. Him.

His eyes.

His hooves.



All my focus is put into my dignity. I am—in a way—stumbling over my words, having to re-sign and re-iterate and communicate my stupid ideas about food trucks and metropolitan environments and Mexican food, and of course it is all nonsense, but Tabi is an irritatingly adept listener, and he keeps asking me pointed questions. You think so? Oh? What about...? and so on. And I am digging into the carpet with my toes to try and focus, to try and even maintain eye contact. He is saying so many things with his gaze right now. He is insisting that I will fail, because he has both legs outstretched under the table, and he is massaging my penis with two feet, locked in half-harmonious rhythm. One foot sits at my base, holding me in place with the soft of his sole. His other delicately massages me, rolling up and down the length of my shaft, his toes wrapped around the top of my dick. I am stupidly sensitive now. This is developing into edging—he slows down the closer I am to orgasm.

At this point I am nearly at tears. Tabi asks me, "do you think any place like that would end up in the Room?" and it is then that I break down. I don't care. I just want to thrust

and pump

all I want is what he is giving me.

"Please," I sign. "Please."

Tabi stares at me a long moment, and then as if on air, he crosses one leg over. He puts my dick between two toes, clenches tighter than ever before, and lets me do the moving.

"Careful, darling," he tells me. "Don't make too much of a scene—you look so beautiful like this."

My movements are limited. Right now I have my hands flat on the table and they are my only real method of moving my body. I have to force myself forwards and backwards, I have to contort my hips in a way that is wholly difficult. My breathing is so labored... but there's a sense of peace. I went on looking as normal as possible for as long as possible.

Now I will try and be beautiful.

Over the top end of the table, just as I decide to be warbly and stupid and thrust into Tabi's toes, I feel him wrap one of his hands around mine. He brings my attention sharply to him. He does not tell me anything I don't already know—he simply looks me in the eyes. He wants to see climax face-to-face. I let my muzzle fall open, I let a trail of drool seep down my chin, and I just pant desperately for air, as I thrust, and thrust, and thrust

and continue thrusting even as I realize I'm going over the edge

fuck

and my breath breaks in half. The twitching is full-body, and I can feel no relief until I let it all out out out—I shoot a line of cum with such ferocity that it aches, and then another, and Tabi's toes tighten around my dick, and all the while he is just looking at me, staring my femme self down. I can't imagine I look dignified. I feel like I have forgotten the world. He slicks his foot along my length as I thrust, every inch sopping wet with pre at this point, and the ecstasy of it just makes me feel light.

I am lifting off the chair. I am desperate to breathe but don't feel like retaining the air. This is the splendid power of kink—nobody but Tabi would let me do this with such glee.

Another few spurts. It is these late shots during climax that feel the best, that deliver the most warmth up my spine. It is simply extraordinary how casual this all was—how unfazed Tabi continues to look as I drool cum onto the top of his foot. Every few moments a shudder goes through me so strong that I squeal again.

I would love to bathe in this forever, as I've said. It is only his touch that brings me out. I think I've been gyrating for thirty seconds now, panting, still humping Tabi's foot, and he caresses me by the cheek—his touch is so, so soft. "My love," he signs, pulling away slow, "you sound at ease."

I am still wriggling a bit when he tells me this, and still rather light from orgasm, but it still makes me laugh. "Yeah. Sort of. I feel excellent."

"Tch. But you probably alerted the whole restaurant."

I don't quite have the energy to roll my eyes. "Tabi," I tell him, "it's the Red Shack. Nobody cares."

He snickers gleefully, and I can feel his laughs all the way down to my limpening penis. The cold is really starting to seep in, mixing with this glorious afterglow. It's discomfort, but a fun sort. "Come on, it's not that playful of an establishment. Either way, darling, you really ought to—"

"—clean it up?"

Tabi curls his toes against the fur of my groin. "Mmm-hm. Exactly."

Amidst all this stupid kink, I still have it in me to sink underneath the table without shame, with my panties around my thighs, with my legs nearly buckling under shuddery joy. This is not my favorite part, but it does sound especially fun when I'm horny. Currently my head is amidst a post-orgasm fog, and so it does not strike me as remotely weird to get on my knees and—lick my cum off of Tabi's feet. It should be the most demeaning part, but it is by far the most intimate.

It is a relationship of power, at least in appearance. It used to be that human beings forced other human beings to kiss their feet as a point of humiliation, as a form of power. This—isn't that. I want this. I want to feel a little humiliated, but also a little bit like I'm being humored. I exist in the point of oddity that kink and queerness allows, and Tabi is more willing than anyone to join me in this singular point. His wool is soft, but now matted with sticky seed, and I glide my tongue across his feet to clean them, all the way up his ankles. Cum is this odd and savory taste and heavy texture, and it's only the fact that I'm still drooling with happiness that gets me through it. Just as I lick clean one foot and move onto the next, glittering wet, Tabi places his hand gentle atop my head—grips my fur, lets me soak in the raw dynamic of this moment. It makes me emit a gentle, crooning moan without meaning to.

I am his; I want to be his.

I must look so ridiculous.



When I am done kissing and licking his feet I am embraced in his space, I am using his body as a seat. He can taste the seed still on my tongue and burger grease and salt. He is so fucking warm. I am forgetting the outer world. Against all of this I can clench his hands, so real, so warm.

It is a soup of emotion and sound and blasting, wide-area shamelessness. I am a black-furred goat and never in my life would I give up the feeling of being in my own skin, and having His against mine. He will never tell me not to be the person that I am.

He will, also, never help me out of the holes in my mind.

What's wrong with that?



The reality of caretaking a house creeps in, and we kiss, and cuddle, but finally I want to get rid of the splatter on the floor, because my cumshot was pretty eager and poorly-aimed, and though Tabi's wooly thighs caught some of the blow obviously nothing is perfect. We crawl apart after one more kiss, and unconsciously finish up chores. I would like to save him at least a little bit of effort, so as he puts away the final bits of the groceries—recall that we interrupted that with our Red Shack detour—I retrieve cleaning supplies from the chemistry closet and soak up my mess under the table. I am not going to change panties—it's just precum.

Tabi looks over to me as I finish up soaking the spots in the carpet with a chemical treatment. We just have a bottle with something... I forget exactly what, but with paper towels it does the job. And Tabi signs gently, "Why don't we do this more often? Is it just nicer to surprise you with it?"

"Well," I sign back, flush in my face, "I don't always want to ask. It feels like a favor."

"You know very well it's not."

I have to scratch my neck. I can feel his heartbeat there, still racing. The excitement is always shared. I can see from here that he is hovering in the kitchen three inches above the ground, and his penis is bobbing up and down excited. He's been excited since we started playing footsie, but he never asked for assistance with it. "Still, I feel strange leaving you to your erection."

Tabi has the funniest look on his face, as in, "oh, this?" He grins. "Darling, if I need that kind of care, I will tell you. I have hands." And of course he does not particularly need his hands, even. Tabi can move things with his mind. It is just a fact of him.

I take a long pause. He never fails to make this afterglow warm, inviting, casual. And yet it is creeping back into me, now that I am far from him. Now that my mind is allowed to wander, as it so often does. I am being met with real cold. Cold in my bones, my framework. I am being met with harsh snow.

This wondrous connection to Tabi is all I've had all day that has made it worth it. I tried reading Djiban and it made me so sick that I threw up and threw up and threw up, and I suppose that's what I get for trying to have a hobby. And even before the fog rolled in I was just thinking of Tabi trying to masturbate.

The cold came in.

Why is it that things got so nauseating?

"Tabi, I need to confide," I tell him, "I was really in a bad space before you got back." And it takes me a second to formulate my thoughts, and sit up on my knees so that I can sign more easily from under the table. "It sort of scared me. It was like having you gone just totally fucked up my mood, made me feel like I was freezing to death."

"Oh, darling, I'm sorry I was gone so long, I got caught up and—"

I have to interrupt. "No, I don't mean it like that! You can be gone as long as you need. That isn't a fault of yours." Again the word fault. Two boats chained to one another. "I just wanted to say it got bad. Maybe I really do need help figuring something out."

I think I am imagining the lights flicker.

Tabi floats over, approaches slow. He offers a hand to help me stand, and I take it. Then, once he has me upright, he retreats just far enough so that I am not in his space. Distance. "That does sound unhealthy," he tells me, plainly. "In a more meta sense. I don't know if it's fully true, but obviously you should not rely on me to be happy, right?"

"Right, and—"

"—and thinking of me will help you, because I will always make you feel better if you think of me. I promise. But if that isn't something you want to rely on, then it could be good to get a hobby, or—"

"—but I did try that today, and I read a book from one of your shelves, and it just made me really miserable."

Tabi nods. "Djiban. I picked up on that. You wanted to know more about the ritual."

"Yeah."

And again my hand goes to the back of my neck. I cannot ever describe this sensation between sections of my spine—it is just a link, it is entanglement. It itches right now. Or maybe it doesn't itch, but I'd like very much to touch it. And all of me is just restless, stirring weakly. A cup in a bowl that can't stop rattling.



And it is now that Tabi tells me something:



"Darling," he signs, "I noticed other parts of your morning, too. I never mean to intrude, but something extremely odd happened. And although I want you to know you are not at fault, that you did nothing wrong, it still concerned me." And Tabi's breath is light, gentle. I have no breath. I feel he has taken my breath. "I know why your morning was so off. For a span of about three hours, you stopped thinking about me."

My heart is beating so fast now. I don't have time to count it, don't have time to look away from his gaze to my watch—I can just feel myself accelerating.

"Your thoughts often drifted to the house, to the books... you cleaned yourself up and ate for some nebulous goal. And you also read Djiban because of the ritual inside, and you knew the ritual was going to happen, but you didn't once think of who was going to perform it. It was like your brain was avoiding the subject of me. And this is extremely odd. It is not something that ever happens to you, not something I've ever observed for more than a few minutes. Especially with all of me plastered everywhere."

Part of me doesn't understand. Part of me does understand... maybe the part so detached from memory, memory... maybe the part trying to tell me I can fix this. I sign, "I noticed, and I tried to brush it off, even though it worried me. Why is it so scary?"

He has the strangest smile. It is like he is trying to reach me through a veil. "Well, you know all I've told you about the Room below my house. The way things sink down there... obviously you can understand how this is all connected."

I nod before I really process what all he's saying. It is overwhelming and sudden—the same as all those times I had people lecture me about something. I feel at fault. I feel at fault. What the fuck is wrong with me?

"Nothing," Tabi signs, and he brings a hand to my cheek. He is so close now. He feels my fur, and I shudder weak under the touch. "Nothing, darling, nothing." He is making me just shaky, just shaky and nothing else. "This is for me to worry about. And even then it should be no big deal. It's just odd. And it probably made you very upset, dear."

"It's making me upset right now," I admit. God, my fucking heartbeat. "Why did this happen?"

"I'd have to ponder it," Tabi tells me. "Knowing what I know now."

Maybe this reflects something about me still, even if Tabi insists that it is not my fault, not my fault, over and over, again and again as we drift further towards the center of the drain. Fault as a word implies intent. Maybe my primal self, my id, had no intention of ignoring Tabi's presence in my mind. After all I love his feeling against me above all else, I love his form—he is art on canvas—and when I think of him, when I truly think of him, it is like he is holding me in return. And he has said sometimes... maybe in direct words he has said that when I think of him, it invigorates him. It is like he can feel me clenching his hand anywhere.

In the Room below his house there are many places that have fallen through the world. They get this way because for a very short time nobody thinks about them, nobody at all—and this is usually a reflection of a failure of that place to stay in the minds of those who used to inhabit it. I think this is almost a naturalistic process, one which resembles a Platonic view on the world, where places and objects have purpose and disappear when they have been made irrelevant.

What, then, would it mean for a person to fall through the world?

What would it mean for Tabi?

And for him to feel this way—to feel and know that I didn't think of him for three hours, that my temporal lobe locked him away from me—I don't know what it would do to him. I don't know what it must have felt like.

For over two years, Tabi has been in my every waking thought, and even most of my sleeping thoughts, too. By choice I have overwritten my old coping mechanisms with him. I have buried my old garbage in the basement in cardboard boxes so I never have to think about any of it ever again, and Tabi has occupied everything fond I have in my memory. And when I speak to my memory it only retrieves Tabi. Relentless.

I would personify my memory as being a very sweet person, but overworked, as I've said. And I do not think it would withhold him from me like this. My memory only keeps me from things that hurt me.

Another part of me—a very recent part—wants to bring me towards things that hurt me.

I can salvage this, it says. It's not too late for me.

It reminds me of my dad.



I will not go into this for very long because it's a tiring subject and, of course, there's no need to overdo the exposition. I like it here in Tabi's home more than in old photographs anyway. But when I was young my dad did some terrible things to my body. And for years afterwards he was my caretaker in all things meaningful about me. He was the one making sure I shaped up 'right'.



I can salvage this, it says. I'm not a lost cause. And this part of me was my caretaker this morning. It made me read Djiban and wash my body and, I think, it made me forget all about Tabi for a while. A long while. Longer than in the past few years, and it has me terrified in a way that is unfathomable. It is a glitch in my cognition, a fault. Fault. Fault. Like stones in the geology of my brain clashing until there are endless cracks in the surface. This is my fault. This is my fault.

"Darling," Tabi signs, and he is bringing me back to reality again. He is so beautiful.

Why did I leave you for even a moment, Tabi?

and he has that wonderful expression on his face, the smile from all angles, the expanse. His eyes look into me dimly. He has lost some steam. "I actually do have one idea."

"Alright," I sign. My arms don't have the oomph. "Shoot."

"The ritual. If I had to point at one thing making the past few weeks so complicated for you, it would be the ritual. Either we simply take it off the table forever or we just get it over with immediately, to stem the bleeding. It has me anxious as well."

A gentle grumble in my throat comes from nowhere. "Getting it over with feels impulsive."

"Obviously. That's the word I would use. But also we want to do it eventually, so why not now?"

"Are you actually ready? Aren't you tired from the trip?" I want an easy out.

He shakes his head vigorously. "The opposite, darling. In your space I feel stronger."

The feeling of this is like being thrown through a tumble-dryer. Eventually I will break. Eventually all these barriers... inhibitions or maybe walls of protection, all these sensible decisions I want to make will be confronted by Tabi. Tabi is surefire. Tabi is endlessly empathetic, but he is also capable of being immensely reasonable. He always seems so very reasonable. And it feels obvious, maybe in the abstract, that I should get it over with. I don't want to do it so I should try and fail. He is right.

God

but I would just like to stew in his wool for a while longer.

Wake me up when the planet is enveloped in the Sun, and Emily finally comes to a rest.

But he is being reasonable and I am a reasonable person made out of semi-reasonable transistors, and I make decisions that sometimes benefit me, so I sign back, "Alright. Fuck it. You're right, let's just try it right this second."

He cranes his head down. "...I hope this isn't the wrong choice. I'm sorry I don't know."

"It's alright," I tell him. "It's not your fault."

Here is what the ritual in Djiban is described as:



First I—because I am the rat in Djiban who is deaf—have to be put in a circle surrounded by saltwater. If the floor is too soluble the water won't last, so carpets won't do, so we have to retreat to one of those hallways which exist as tertiary veins in the house, with few entrances and many dead ends. There are no windows and few exits and the walls are that same muted dark-red wallpaper, and on the hardwood a circle wraps around me with little droplets of saltwater. We made this ourselves with table salt and water from the tap, which surely came from Lake Michigan. "It doesn't have to perfectly lock you in," Tabi notes, reading from the text, which somehow looks less fragile than when I handled it. Obviously he does not use his hands to hold Djiban. "The droplets have to be about fifty percent coverage. We will do much more to be safe."

Of course there also must be candles. "Candles are key to a lot of pseudoscientific recipes like this," he tells me. "In the book they are implied to not be fully necessary, but there's no harm in it. So we will use them." There are six which we long ago put into storage, retrieved from someplace called Friendly James in Albany, New York, which fell through the world and sold knick knacks and covered up the abuse of a cashier for two years. The candles are small and half-plastic and burn dim, and they sit behind the ring of saltwater equidistant.

Tabi has brought a lot of materials with him in a laundry basket; the candles and the bottle of saltwater were only the beginning, and it is now that Tabi retrieves something he would call critical for the ritual, something written with emphasis into Djiban. The way that this ritual was described implied some malice in the air, some hatred that had to be kept away from the deaf rat's vital organs. And Tabi levitates a smock from the laundry basket, a black smock of heavy cotton without any holes for arms. It is really more of a heavy blanket with a hole for my head. "Tilt up, darling," he says. "I'll fit it around your horns." And I have to look at the ceiling so he can wrap me up in this thing.

Warm. Too warm. I am still wearing a blazer and stockings made of wool and it all itches with heat. And this smock is thirty pounds heavy and resists even an inkling of chilliness; it weighs down my arms and legs so that I am stuck in my seat, nearly paralyzed. I can't sign to Tabi anymore. I must go along with what he says.

I want to put this off but immediately he is already onto the next thing—the part of this ritual filled with hatred and violence. Tabi pulls a plastic case from the basket and flops it onto the floor.

This is a steak, a T-bone cut from a cow that used to be alive but isn't anymore; we found it in a butcher's shop called Mick and Nikola in Belgrade, which fell through the world for no real clear reason. I watch Tabi leave this slab of flesh on the floor and reach back into the basket and retrieve something else—a knife, a paring knife, which is a sharp object not used for cutting apart living things but instead for cutting apart dead things like bell peppers and potatoes.

When Tabi lowers himself to the floor he stays three inches above it, but with his legs crossed and his delicate fluffy tail nearly reaching ground. And his hands are so steady. With one hand he tells me, "Now watch closely."

I watch closely. It looks odd on Tabi, this dagger, this pose. I have only rarely seen him perform acts like this—acts of the divine, of the occult. Djiban is a book about magical realism, about a world with an undercurrent of anachronism. It is fiction, but it describes our planet from a different point of view: what if the imagined were real? What if it could be tangled up in nonsense?

Tabi is tangled up in nonsense. He has a tiny knife and he holds it above the steak in pose until my eyes are truly locked on it. Watch closely.

And he brings it down.



A moment of abject violence, and blood.

Or—it isn't actually blood, it is just myoglobin, which is runny and red and clear, and it fills the plastic case until the container is slick. It takes enormous effort and his form should have no leverage, floating on air like this, but Tabi has strength from nowhere and uses it to rip open both the casing and the meat in long, precise cuts as if wielding a scalpel. His movements are carefully patterned, planned out. And he tilts his head to read Djiban and study every individual movement, every word on the page, which I can now recount.

One stab into the center. Draw a symbol representing disability, damage, agony. (I would not use those words for myself, not at all.) This symbol is illustrated in Djiban as looking a bit like a figure-eight with a cross drawn through one of the loops, and in this case Tabi has to draw many many lines into the flesh to get it this way, forcing the knife through roughly—it was not meant for this task.

When I look at it from above, it looks like I am going a little crazy. Or maybe it is Tabi that has gone crazy. This is almost comical. He has drawn an old Germanic rune into a piece of steak. It probably isn't even an authentic runic character, just something invented.

But this is Djiban, this is what it talks about with trauma. This piece of meat is part of the air around us and can feel Tabi digging into it with his knife, and it can feel me staring upon it, and somehow I am met with a deep, physical sinking sensation that does not feel entirely made-up. I am to some degree really sinking into the floor.

"We are getting there," Tabi signs, placing the paring knife on the floor a moment. He wants me to know what is happening—he would not leave me in the dark. At least not at this moment. "I need to draw on your forehead, now. Another rune that looks the same way. And then I need to pray a while, apparently, and this will nearly complete what we need to do. Alright?"

And all I can do is nod. Two nods and by the time I get to the second one Tabi has placed a hand on my forehead such that he can spread my fur apart and expose a patch of bare skin—this is not comfortable—and in a matter of moments he has retrieved something with his other hand. A splotch of red powder coats his fingers. It kicks into the air and fills it with dusty particulate when he shifts his hand, and he must be quick to reach over and—

I can feel him drawing into my skin. Rough. My gaze goes to his arm but I can't see what he's doing, obviously. I am a doll being painted. I do not have input in this, nor would it be appropriate. My sense of touch does not particularly like this new sensation. The powder Tabi picked out is like granulated chalk, but it seeps into my fur. It's sticky the same way as wet sand. And he has drawn, I assume, a symbol on me—the symbol of disability, damage, agony. And he pulls away and shakes his hand free into a plastic container, and pats his palms, and looks stiffly upon the scene he has created.

The candles flare up. Tabi takes a breath.

"Now we have to pray," he tells me. I rarely see him so focused on a goal, so direct. "It's a particular kind of praying where we recite mantras in our heads. We don't need to memorize scripture or anything." And he laughs a little, although I think there's some exhaustion behind it—he has had to memorize scripture for acts of magic and the occult.

Tabi looks at me directly, now. He waits until my gaze is trained, until he can feel me patiently waiting for his instruction. "Darling, I need you to have thoughts of thanks. You must deliver love to the noosphere, so it says in Djiban. In return, at the end of this... you will be able to hear. Your inner ear will function correctly."

I am blank. Some part of me chooses to nod.

"And for the rest of the steps," he signs, "I will handle them. All you must do is close your eyes."

But I don't. I tilt my head, instead. I can't get this wrong. I can't get this wrong. What does he actually want me to think about? My head is swirling and I don't feel thankful for anything, I don't feel good about anything. I don't like when he calls my inner ears 'not functioning.'

And Tabi senses all this and takes a deep breath. I see a matched understanding pass through his expression. "The meat I just cut up is crying out to the universe in anguish," he signs. "I need you to confront it. I need you to love it. Go where your mind directs you."

So after this, I close my eyes.

And I am sinking into the static.



A sensory deprivation tank is a metal canister filled with sewage water where dead animals go.



Ignore the itch along my legs and chest and neck. And ignore the smell of burning wax and ignore the warm and cold air swirling around my head. Ignore everything. And shut my eyes.



And think about love.



When I was seven years old, I finally learned what it actually means to be deaf. I learned that deafness is to be locked away from the rest of society in a pervasive and often blatant way—you are below it, you are watching from the outside. You get told that you should learn how to lip-read, because everyone will talk, and you should learn how to listen.

And a lot of very smart people across the centuries decided to do something else, because being deaf is a common enough thing that you aren't alone in being that way. And being even a little hard of hearing can lock you out of the world. So some deaf folks started understanding each other instead. They invented various sign languages. It is a collection of gestures that let us be a little less ostracized. And some people in this same lineage of intelligence started capitalizing the first letter of the word Deaf, because doing so makes you feel a lot less like you're a defect on the human experience.

And I didn't want to be part of all that, at the time.

I had a Cochlear implant put into me when I was very young, as I've said. And it was not voluntary, it couldn't have been, but when I grew up I started to assume I wanted it. And I felt very, very superior to other people who were Deaf or deaf or whatever, because I could mostly get through life. I ended up sort of normal. I was not 'locked out' in the same sense as everybody else, and when kids feel like they've got it made, it's worth bragging about. I didn't learn ASL, a language with my hands, until much later in my life. By then I was very unhappy with the whole deal.

Still for a long time I would have told you, yes, I would love for a wizard to cast a spell on me and make me able to hear. You say this because it is not possible and you don't really think about it very much. But I would have also told you that about me being homosexual. Or an online furry. I would tell you that about a lot of things.

The urge to be typical can be difficult to overcome.



And when I met Tabi I finally stopped thinking that way. I had, for a very long time, been so sickly miserable. Have you noticed? And Tabi did not want me to be even a little bit typical. He is in love with all the parts of me that are atypical. He would never tell me to stop being a goat or stop being gay—he would, if I eventually get to the very obvious point of fritzing around with my gender presentation, let me play around with every shape and identity under the sun. He is wonderful.

Why, then,

are my ears such a concern to him?



I feel love for him. Or something close. But I don't feel love for this. I don't feel love for what this is. I don't feel love for this sensory deprivation tank and this fucking ritual and I don't want to be able to hear—I don't want to be able to hear! I don't want a fucking magician to change my whole life into the image HE WANTS.

HE WANTS THIS FOR ME AND I DON'T.

I DON'T WANT THIS.

And in the middle of this internal roar, this rapturous endless tirade of thoughts and emotions, this warfare going on in my brain, I am greeted with a tapping sensation. It is an invented tapping from an invented part of me. It is memory. Memory is trying to make a connection.

Memory reminds me.

In Djiban the author prays and asks his neighbors to cut up little animals to take away a different animal's deafness. But Tabi and I do not have neighbors. So—

And I open my eyes.



Tabi holds, in his left hand, a small rodent called a rat. He compresses its black-gray fur and fat and ribs in his three fingers rather effortlessly so as to not allow it to escape, but its little limbs are wagging and squirming in shock. In his right hand Tabi holds the paring knife with a surgeon's precision—there is no shake in his wrist. He has already begun digging the tip of the blade into many many parts of the rat while I had my eyes closed, while I was shielded. I can spot the parts along its chest cavity where there are holes, big gaping holes oozing blood down the side of Tabi's hand, where he has stripped the screeching thing of its skin, pulled off fat so as to reach the ribcage and score it. Most noticeably what he is doing now is he is stripping the rat of its ears. He brings the paring knife to one side of its head and grazes its eyeball and then in jagged motions he saws off its ear and its mouth hangs open and then jaws violently. And Tabi's own jaw is moving quiet, but I can tell he is speaking, he is surely saying something under his breath.

And all I want for him to do is stop.

Please.

Please stop doing this to that poor fucking thing, please, please, please.

please

My hands move for me, I am signing, I am signing, why can't you see me? Please stop. I sign stop stop stop stop but Tabi doesn't stop, Tabi continues to cut it apart, and the look in his eyes is nothing—he sees nothing, he is working with a tool. With barely a moment to aim, Tabi brings the knife to the other side of the rat's head and hacks off its remaining ear, all this delicate cartilage and ligament being torn off in a brief firework of gore. And Tabi digs the blunt tip of the knife along its legs and groin and forelegs so that he can get it sopping wet with blood and I can see in its eyes a limitless and wordless terror, a death. And I am signing please please please stop please please stop

I didn't want this

I DON'T WANT THIS.



STOP



and my voice is so rough and coarse and broken and I am screaming now, as loud as I physically can to get Tabi's attention. I have never screamed like this, not in such a long time, and I am yelling, "I don't want this, I don't want this, I never wanted this, stop, stop, stop," and I can't get the smock off of me



and Tabi looks up at last and his hands are coated in crimson and his expression is like it is in my nightmares. His horns curl around his head like knives. And he did not realize what was happening until he met my gaze, my intense and overworked and terrified gaze. There is no sympathy for him to sink into. He is a sheep in headlights.

Darling?



and the overhead lights snap off in an instant.

It takes me fifteen seconds to pull the heavy smock off of myself. We are in a deep and pervasive darkness because this hallway has no windows; we have no light but the flickering candles and Tabi is in a hurry to clear away everything to get a sense of what's going on. By the time I have my hands free, the rat is gone and so are all the body parts and the knife, and finally when I can use sign language again, Tabi is already trying to talk to me. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," he signs. "I'm glad we stopped. You came to that conclusion on your own."

I am shaking so much—my body is alight with pain and terror. I can't breathe. I am still staring at the rat getting its ears cut off and I don't think it was real, it wasn't real. "The lights," I sign, in one clumsy motion.

"Something with the power lines, perhaps—it must be the storm." He brings one hand up and—is there blood?—and wipes away the powder off my forehead with a cloth. He hurls the smock into the laundry basket and looks me in the eyes, he tries to reach me from whatever pit I'm in. "Stay here a moment. I will get us a bigger light."

And I don't listen to him.

I give him one long, stiff look, and then I pick up one of the shitty dollar store candles to serve as my guide. And I stand up on wobbly legs, and I leave.

The moment is over.



I pass through the foyer on my way; I have a limp of mind and body. I can hardly walk.

Emily is attacking the skylight. No sun can be seen from here; the room is cast in a muted pale blue of an upside-down ocean, and shadows upon shadows form in the corners where the faint light cannot reach. I think Tabi is surely right about this. The rain has grown so torrential that it has brought down a piece of infrastructure someplace, someplace else in Michigan. Tabi's home is fed by a turbine in the basement which is powered by electricity which is generated by a dam miles away, even though I have never seen those things. There is no view by which I can verify how Euclidean this place is.

Something does not want me to stay in the foyer. Instead I retreat as far as my body and mind can retreat, which is to my bedroom. It is not my bedroom. It is not anybody's bedroom.

But it is dark and feels safe, so it is where I go.

And when I reach it, the door feels heavier than ever. I have to lean physically against the door and push my weight into it—I have to go slack and I feel like crying, but finally it gives way, and my hands are so, so shaky. I slam it shut behind me and snuff out the candle and in a matter of seconds I have scurried over to the bed to flop on top of it.

The comforter is my sea.



I can salvage this, says a dime-sized voice in a soda can in a grocery bag in a trash bag in a trashcan in a dump truck in an ocean. And the waves roll over each other until the voice is shattered and then it calls out again, I can salvage this, and waves upon waves of turbulent tropical air collide supernova into the seafoam, and the voice is drowned and killed and dies and dies and dies and then it says, I can salvage this, again, and again, and again.

I am sitting here in my bedroom.

It's not mine but it feels safe.

My legs buckle when I stand, and my stomach toils when I lay down, so I sit as a statue on the edge of the bed. My skirt unfurls rough over my legs and rolls of sweat saturate the fabric and my head is so sick, so sick, so awfully turbulent at the moment, and swirling with thoughts, and Emily is



attacking the window.

Where am I?

And the same voice calls out, I can salvage this. And I am stuck to the window once again and hypnotized and, maybe, if I stayed staring at the rainfall against the window long enough, I would forget all about Him for a few hours again, because it would leak out the back of my skull. I can salvage this. What can you fucking salvage, you sack of shit? You are a traumatized little piece of grime on the side of my cranial cavity—you are words shaped like hatred and injury and failure. I am so upset at myself. This is the sort of mood that makes people cut their own heads off.

Who am I angry at? Where is this anger going? The rat, the rat, the rat. I am aimless.

For what feels like forever I am just staring staring staring at the window, and in the window there are imprints of raindrops, which appear and disappear and rocket forward with so much force, and then His house rejects it like it's nothing. And in spite of His house providing such shelter, I feel cold again.

Cold deep inside of me like blood. And I am not just staring at the window, my eyes are still back there, I am still staring at the rat. It can't see me. It can't see anything. It is sinking into a deprivation tank.

I can salvage this.

Who is that knocking at the side of my head?

It isn't somebody new, I realize. All of a sudden I realize it is nobody new.

I personify memory as somebody with a lot on its mind, in a manner of speaking. Memory is always onto bigger and better things. Memory is the sort of person to start getting into cults as soon as college gets boring—does that paint a picture? And memory as of late has been trying to make its own way of fixing me out of thin air. I can salvage this, it has been saying. I can give you the tools to start healing. And for a little while earlier today it made me forget all about Him, about His touch. It made me read Djiban. It made me open my eyes and see the rat getting its ears cut off. Was that real?

Memory has been trying to tell me something in particular.



Here is what my memory has to say—

—and please—

—pay attention:



Months ago we discovered a dead animal in the cistern which boils the water which makes the coffee. And at the time it had become such a deteriorated thing I didn't know what to make of it. Of course I have never really seen animals around His house because it is very well-kempt, but when I strain I can start to recall other strange shapes of beasts in the halls, in the cupboards. And this particular time reminds me of all those other things that I've forgotten—it was a significant and centralizing thing. It is the node at the center of it all: a small thing died in the boiler and rotted and turned into mush. Then again nothing comes into His house that he does not allow.

So I think it would be not unreasonable to think that He keeps animals for all sorts of reasons. After all, this ritual required one. A little rat had its body torn apart to change mine. I wasted that much.

And that day... with the dead thing in the cistern... obviously is very significant if I am mentioning it, if my memory is mentioning it. And there were many other things that day that felt significant—it was one time I can recall Him telling me about how the Room below His house works, how it collects dust, how it collects things that got forgotten. A place called Lone Star Lanes is significant because, like many things that day, it hurt me very bad to think about.

Of course because, as I am now being reminded, Lone Star Lanes is a bowling alley in Austin, Texas where I used to bowl. And my memory lost track of it for a while. Another thing leaked out of my head.

And there is something else significant about that day—

—that day I was terrified of Him—

—that day He lied to me.

Or maybe something close to lying.

He told me, using His hands and His head to form a series of gestures known as American Sign Language, that we slept for multiple nights. And time after time that day I asked Him if he told the truth about that, if there was something odd about the nights.

And He would not admit it. Not a bit.

But I am so certain He meant it. I am so certain He slipped up and simply would not admit it—this is a thing that He has never done, a lie that He would never



except



for every other time



when this happened.



Of course.

And Emily is attacking the window and I am freezing fucking cold, drooling refrigerant instead of saliva. My hands tremble at this thought—all the many times when I have rolled over this fucking wave in the ocean. Memory is so, so tired. So tired. Midnight shift at Seven Eleven. I cannot possibly count the number of times He has accidentally told me that we sleep multiple nights—a little slip, a little tic. I cannot possibly count the number of times I have forgotten information and He has assured me that nothing's wrong. I have had Him explain to me so many so many so many times what the ritual is. We have tried to do it so many times but I have retracted each time and then soon enough He is back insisting, we should try it, we should try it. Did you see any of those? You did not. And He has told me many times many times many times what magic and the occult means, and it slowly slips away. And memory just lets it slip away because it is so tired, so much fog in those eyes. What the fuck is weighing me down?

I erase everything, I blast it clean, I wash it clean in nuclear hellfire, so that I can get to the good parts

and His wool

and all those times, all those singularly terrible times He has told me He loves me. He loves me. He loves me. And I have never said that I am not sure if I love Him.

I am not sure if I love Him.

And so many times so many times so many times I have thought about him in a dreamlike state at the end of every hallway. He is coming closer to me in the dark. And I keep thinking about that rat, that rat, that poor little thing, having its ears cut out, its body dissected—and He is coming closer to me, coming closer, coming closer, at the end of every hallway. After that night with the animal in the cistern and Lone Star Lanes and the spot where did I end up? Where did I go? And I am thinking about the rat again and His gentle hands, his surgeon's hands without a shake at all, tearing it apart, and

And the lights dim and

And so many times



I









I felt







the Room above His house

















and

- - -

The screaming is aimless and confused.

I am crying, crying, crying, endless tears of disoriented agony, just grief, like the world has been stripped away from me. Snot wells up in my nose and my throat hurts, and then I think about it again and pain wells up in all my veins and I am forced violently to yelp out—to yell—to express something, anything, to push out air before I'm forced to breathe up the sobs again.

I am thinking about all the times He has taken me up through the skylight into the Room above His house, and then surgically removed my parts until I cannot feel anything at all. I am thinking about the times I have been put into a plastic case and forgotten about forever. I don't know how I can remember this.

The dam has broken now—in a tide of steaming gory water I feel my memory expand to fill the whole of a canyon. I am struck with pictures of trauma in crystal-clarity every millisecond. I am thinking about Him taking out my left eyeball—

I am thinking about Him gripping me, holding me like He is going to kiss me, and then He severs my spinal cord—

—right here—

—exactly the spot where I can feel Him from afar. A wound. Right now I am thinking about Him killing me every fucking night of my life by holding my neck and cutting it so that I am immobile.

I am thinking of Him knowing that I will erase it, that my memory will erase it and put it away because His wool, His wool, His wool, His touch, my body and my body and my body, and His house, I wouldn't ever want to leave His house. So my memory—

I can salvage this.

You can't salvage anything. I am dead a thousand times. I am in body bags without eyes.

I can salvage this.

You could have kept me forgetting for a thousand years and get me to the good part and why? Why? and why am I going through this and I think about it again Him

Him

He is tearing out my eyeballs and again he is tearing out my eyeballs and my nasal cavity and I can feel him ripping it out and I can still feel it, he doesn't numb the pain, he lets me feel it, he lets me feel his scalpel against skin, blood, so much endless cold runny blood that doesn't mean anything, and he pulls out my nose, my whole nose, and my tongue, and all the things that tie me to the world, and soon the pain drains away, and so does the world, because all I am thinking about is

Him

all I have for comfort is

Him

in rows and rows and rows of plastic cases and the Room is a dull white forever, and I am crying more than I ever have in my life. I am nothing. I am alone.

I am alone with Him in His house and He does this to me. He is the only person I have ever had to be afraid of and I have spent all this time trusting him. He would never tell a lie.

His wool.

And my heart hurts, hurts, hurts, and I wanted to love Him, I want to love Him, I want my body to be made of the right parts. And he tears out my eyeball and disconnects my arms and legs because they're useless and

and the Room is a dull white forever

and He carries me up into the Room

a dull white forever

a dull white forever

a dull white forever I am just screaming now, screaming, and this anguish is in every cell of me, completely without language. I don't want this to be real. Please. Please.

The rat is getting its ears lopped off by a paring knife.

And then, after a while of aimless confused screaming and crying and wallowing in anguish, rolling around on the bed in spurts of agonized shock, I begin to feel His presence on the back of my neck.



Obviously I am not thinking straight at this point. Actually no thinking is going on, not on purpose—thoughts just attack me violently and randomly in a cascade of fire, and so it is my body that moves for me, it is my muscular system that makes me hide. It is the same part of me, a subset of my limbic system, which all those times before has had me running from Him during the night. After each night when we are done with our business and my guard is down, I see Him on the other side of a hallway, and I call for Him, and He does not respond.

It is a gentle sort of thing. It is a clinical action. He does not want my brain to mix up intimacy with violence—to see the act of being mutilated as somehow part of our relationship.

Thus the reason he is blank in those moments.

But most nights of course this does not happen because I am in bed sleeping, because I am done; and most nights I receive almost no thought at all that He would do anything to me, and when I awake in the Room it is in a fugue where He hardly needs to convince me of anything. It is little more than a dream, then.

And still my body would like very, very much to hide. So I stop screaming, I creak open the dusty, wide cabinet at the end of the room—for jackets and other things that need to hang up—and I crawl inside, and I shut it after myself. It takes some dexterity that forces me to take a few tries at it. When my hands fumble and I keep accidentally opening the door I can feel the exasperation welling up, the intensity, the feeling of giving up, but then I try again and again and finally fling the door closed after myself and it stays.

And I am still, and I am in the dark. All is blackness except for a spot between both doors of the cabinet where a very, very gentle stream of light peeks in—from outside, but only the smallest bit of sunlight through rainclouds.

And He is here,

crawling along the back of my neck.



I have no sense for how far He is, only how close He is, ever-closer, ever-closer. I cannot tell but can guess when the door to my bedroom opens—right now—and I am making myself small in the closet, and I sniffle involuntarily, and the tears keep streaming down my face in mosaic terror. I have never felt this degree of powerlessness, of being alone. All those times He has grabbed me, He has torn my spine apart, I have felt a warm rolling comfort that He is doing the right thing, that it is somehow something I just don't understand. In this moment I am completely aware of how small and vulnerable I am. I am His sacrificial goat and pose no threat to Him and He is this lofty thing, this thing which has never been in love with me, or at least I have never been on His level. We have never been safe together. I have always been alone.

Alone.

But His wool—and His wool—His touch, His stomach, His thighs, His penis. And when He calls me 'darling'. And all those nights I have made Him dinner and felt less useless, felt like I am somebody allowed to exist. Why wasn't this real? Why wasn't this real?

He holds me and He gives me a reason to exist and without Him is a world I can't even imagine anymore. And my heartbeat



ba-THUMP



ba-THUMP



as He rolls along my spine closer and closer, I need to take long breaths of agony and pain; what if I want Him to find me? What is any of this? Shock explodes in my face like pepper spray and my jaw goes unhinged again as I am at a loss, and so cold, so cold. Closer and closer and closer until it feels like He is breathing along my neck.

I am alone. He is going to find me as easily as He finds me every night, even though it is not late yet. He will make me forget all about this.

My memory is so, so tired. So heavy are the bags under its eyes.

And the light peering into the cabinet dims.

Dims and then goes dark, as He steps in front of it. And I think my vision is beginning to become psychedelic, because I see a new light, a flickering orangered, which itself reaches forward and—

—and opens the cabinet slow.

And it reveals itself to me.

He floats three inches off the floor, with his hands clasped around a silvery brass candlestick with all the ends lit, and through the gentle flame illuminating his face I can see his eyes. And I see his muted self watching me behind glass.



ba-THUMP



ba-THUMP



and I scream again, and all of me wants to get away.



Legs and arms scrambling, and fur on end, and one of the jackets above me gets torn down by my horns. All the tears come again, all the wailing comes back. All I see in him is that shape—the shape at the end of every hallway. I have nowhere to run.

And Tabi

does not react to this by grabbing me or leaping on me. Instead he retracts like I've hit him with a gust of wind—he floats backwards three inches off the floor until he is no longer filling my vision, nor hardly a bit of it, as he grits his teeth and holds the candlestick close to himself.

And eventually I am done flailing because I am too tired and afraid, and my mouth is craned open in a low, warbly wail. And all I can yell to him is, "Please," and, "don't."

He looks shocked. It feels like mirroring in the worst of ways. I have seen him like this so many times and it is not the agony, the fear, the physical shock I am currently in. I can't process anything or breathe or comprehend or even deal with language, and all my words are made out of ash, and it hurts so much to speak. He, himself, is a wild fucking animal. He is wild because I don't know what to predict anymore.

Or maybe I am losing it and that was what he wanted to avoid.

And I want him to know, all at once, why this is happening. It's not the ritual and it's not him surprising me—it's not my own anxiety and it's not rainfall or Emily and I'm not fucking stupid. So I sign to him, "I know. I know what you do in the Room above the house. I know about it. You kill me. You kill me," and my hands are flailing, and I am nodding furiously to communicate my confidence, and, "please get away from me."

And I have never told Tabi something so strong.

He looks brittle.

In a moment all this room and all this darkness starts to seep onto me like liquid. Tabi's long muzzle and his expression—what always seems to be smiling back—finally fades into a vision of exhaustion.

Exhaustion and powerlessness.

Have I told you how he looks when he feels powerless? All things under his roof are his things to protect, and I am under his roof—and it is his tendency to feel as if he is responsible when I am feeling even a little bit wrong. Out of this context it is cute, it is something pitiable and something I empathize with. It is something that binds us.

Except this is his doing. Unequivocally. It is him. It is his fault.

His hands.

And he lowers slightly, and places the candlestick onto the carpet, where it rests a little wobbly. And he does not seem to regard my tears and exasperation with anything resembling empathy, nor hostility. Tabi is serious and flat.

He signs this to me:

"Darling, you must be aware, then, that this is unhealthy information for you to have. It hurts you extremely badly and you've felt that... for as long as you've been remembering this. I meant to find you earlier with the light."

"Please," I sign, but what does it matter?

And Tabi rests gently on the carpet. He reaches ground. "But while we're here I don't want to make you feel like I'll lie to you about any of it. I am almost entirely made out of authenticity, and now if you would like to know anything, we can talk about it once again. And after we talk, you can sew your brain up well enough, and we can go back to our lives as we were."

My hands mimic his. "Back," I sign. It is worthless. My jaw falls open into a long, drawn out wail.

What can I do?

What can I do anymore?

I am alone.



This is the final part of the shock which hits me:



Catatonia. Complete vague disassociation and a loss of it, it, it. Eventually I've fallen out of the closet and I'm just sobbing and drooling and murmuring on the carpet, and... and eventually Tabi is here, too. Eventually his gentle grasp is around me, reaching up around every corner of me. Sometimes an errant thought goes by—I would describe it as driftwood after a storm—about Tabi tearing my eyeballs out, all the ways in which I have lied to myself about him, and I let out another screech, but he holds me, and he holds me, and he holds me. And all I want is to be gone from this moment. At some point I reach out to grab something, and instantly he is there, holding my hand with only his fingers, putting his touch into my heart. I wail again because it reminds me of the Room above his house, the pale white, the loss of sense until I am gone. I feel like I'm falling into a funnel and circling around. Which one of these moments will be stopped by the sensation of

—yank—

and my spinal cord being ruptured? And I am without answers and sob again and shudder so much, so sweaty, so cold, and then I'm erect under my many layers of clothing, and upset and frantic, and panting, and then Tabi envelops me in his wool again, and the soft warmth of the candlelight beside us starts to calm my breathing. And soon ba-thump ba-thump I am panicked again, and a roar comes out of my chest

and so on

and so on

and so on.

Eventually it fades out like evening waves until all these emotions are just soup and exhaustion. My knowledge of myself is destroyed, and soon so are all the physical sensations, my sensory world, by which I experience all the forms of love that my battered self is even capable of. Soon not even his wool is really present in the folds of my mind. It is a passing car.

And after all my limbs explode into stardust and my hope is gone, I decide it would be alright if I asked Tabi some questions.

- - -

Notice the shape of my movements now which resemble a boat on high seas. Back and forth and back and forth to an uncertain rhythm; the carpet is made out of oobleck. And he does not reach out to hold me. I would be worse off if he did, right now. Though often his touch is so nice.

If he touched me and even if I resisted, it would be so nice.

But I am rocking back and forth because my breath is wildly intense, and waves of agony pass through me in a rickety silence. I don't have it in me to scream right now and his eyes bare down on my soul, waiting patient. Tabi is always so patient. I can get through this. Somewhere within me there are things that I don't know and some part of me still, still, still wants answers. How many times have I asked?

Matters of magic and the occult. My head is swimming. I can get through this. I pull up my hands and use raw inertia to communicate.

"Tabi," I sign, fingerspelling his beautiful name I invented, "why do you kill me every night?"

He tilts his head up, but does not face me directly. It's a few degrees to the right, so as to let me see his expression, which is nonetheless inscrutable. "I don't kill you," he signs. As he moves his hands to talk to me it is only half-visible in the candlelight, as the overheads are still out, as Emily lets in only faint glimmers of blue. "At night in the Room above my house I perform a ritual. It isn't meant to hurt you and it isn't really even about you. My love for you is real and endless."

"Why?" I ask again. He didn't say a thing about why.

He shudders. Needs to find the words. I've surprised him with all this and not given him enough time to prepare softer phrases. "Well, you know what I have told you about the things that fall into the Room below my house. Things that get forgotten."

I am staring with so much ferocity and anger. Don't stop. Keep going. Elaborate.

"And I have also told you that I feel stronger in your presence. When your eyes match mine—" and he signs this with a stunning lackadaisical prose, and his eyes are like diamonds in mine, "—it gives me life. In some ways literal life. So truthfully when I mention that thoughts of me will help you, I mean it, but they also help me. Does that make sense?"

Keep going. I am a stonewall. I empty my head of even thoughts because he has his fingers around my brainstem. "And," I sign, empty in meaning.

Tabi has this forlorn smile on him, plastered weak. "Well, listen, darling."



"In times past I have had other people in my house staying with me. And I have loved every single one of them dearly. They show up for all sorts of reasons, but they always take solace in my presence... and solace is very close to love, it's very close. Sometimes I have many people in the house with me and those are the happiest times in my life, because I am able to caretake people, and in turn they think about me." He pauses. He searches me for understanding and I can't hide it; it is crawling up my spine like a rodent with a toothpick tail and missing ears. "In times past this has been the case but before you arrived I was alone. Alone is a bad thing for me. It's a terrible thing for anyone and so awful for me because I am... weak without people and too sentimental."

He goes on. "Before you were plenty of men who I loved immensely and made me feel very significant to them. Many had gone through some terrible times before meeting me and I provided solace, which is very close to love. But I can't make somebody actually love me." Tabi's eyes sink to meet me. Behind glass is a turning mechanism rolling on without oil. "You know that better than anyone, Euclid."



My heart sings out in this horrible pained song. Bird under pressure. Rocks crashing in. The room is filled with water. It hurts. Can you feel it hurt?



And relentlessly he goes on. "I can't make you love me and I wouldn't like that anyway, because it isn't right. Your mind... your self is still beloved to me. I'm sorry if it ever feels otherwise. That is my fault." He lets that word hang and for some reason I want to hold his hand but his hands are busy speaking to me. "In the Room above the house I do something awful, truly awful, to a version of your body that you won't ever know. Or I suppose I thought that would be the case. This was never supposed to reach you. Everything I ever planned relied on you not ever knowing."

"Why wouldn't I?" I ask. I have fire in me right now and need to spend it before it's snuffed. "Why wouldn't I? I remember everything. It drains out of me but then it's back. And this time I needed to remember."

Tabi swallows spit. It's clear he has an itch. When he signs again, it is peppered in metaphor again—it is art in language. "Imagine a forest, darling, with one hundred trees. Just one hundred and no more. Then imagine that a woodcutter comes along and cuts down the hundred and first tree, the one which doesn't exist. That tree sings out in pain, the pain of a life being snuffed, and then the forest has only one hundred trees still. It has not gained or lost any trees."

And I sign, "But I am there. I am really up there. I can feel what you do to me."

"Yes, well." Tabi stares off a moment. "My hands are fickle memory. One of the times I likely made a mistake and when making you new I did things in the wrong order."

"I remember every time." And this is the worst truth. This is something which hurts to sign out, which makes my limbs ache in abject pain, which makes fear strike me like nails along my spine. "You tell me that I will be protected by my memory but my memory brought it back. It's trying to help me."

"This isn't helping you," he signs, plain and dour. Then he has to take a long pause, to think, to process that he has done this ritual wrong every single time, just a little bit wrong. His breath is slow. "So this was my fault too. I will fix my methods. This won't ever happen again."



The anatomy of an apology is to identify what was done wrongly and to promise you will never ever do it again. My father got very good at this. I'm sorry for mentioning him again. And what Tabi has done is almost an apology.



"Why do you do this to me?" I ask, again. "What happens to the hundred and first tree?"

Tabi shakes his head gently. "I don't think it's good to tell you that. That particular detail would just mean nothing and be harmful. It's for me to bear."

But then even without his words stabbing my language processing center I can see it. I can feel it. I can smell the death in the air all around me all around me, in a torn-out nasal cavity and with eyes that don't exist. I can sense against a numb spine the existence of a plastic case, a body bag, which needs to contain me for as long as I am thinking about him.

I can visualize the rows of me in bags, the rows and rows and rows. How many days have I spent in his house? More than two years. Seven hundred nights and counting. Thinking about Him. Breathing. Barely breathing.

My blood all leaves me at once and I fall over into black.

























Tabi holds me as I go limp and I cannot see him and I cannot understand him. And he takes me up to the bed which is not my bed, and I can't stop gasping and sneezing and murmuring and weeping.

I am so tired of this feeling.

A long time ago, an eternity ago, I was sick like this all the time. Every moment was another incurable symptom and every day was a curse. I've always had this awful sense of claustrophobia, of a fear of lacking options, and right now I have nothing—I have no out, and Tabi would never deliver me an out, not the way I wish he would. Even if I look at it closely, it's hard to like either option.

Stay

or go.

I want him forever; my whole body is falling apart besides Tabi, and all I want to do is hold him, but he is ten thousand miles away and I am made out of mud and at night he does things to me, every night, every night... my vision is failing. Seven hundred and counting. And when he brushes his wool against me I am brought to attention again, and I see his eyes, and we match a form of understanding that hurts me so deep. He can hear my thoughts, of course. His great big ears waggle when they hear new information. He hears the question, too. Stay or go.

And part of me keeps murmuring under its breath,

I want to get out of here.

A thought strikes my head—a hypothetical shaped like three-fingered hands. What if I just held him again and asked him to blast my mind free with pleasure, with sensory bliss, with love of the physical variety? What if I asked him to make my evening all better again? What if I did my usual thing? And I think again to myself, I don't want that again, and instead I sign to him, so weak, so out of place:

"Do we sleep for multiple nights?"

And he stops briefly,

and tells me

"You have asked that so many times, darling. I wish I could give you an answer that satisfied you." And it is this part which hurts the very most. And part of me keeps murmuring under its breath,

I want to get out of here.



Seven hundred and counting. A voice cries out in a wave as it tumbles into a reef, I want to get out of here, and pounds against my psyche like water hammer; all this pent up angst and grief and fear into a rigid, hard ball, racketing, thundering, screaming. The screaming is so so so aimless and if you just give it a direction it will speak, it will cry. He is my whole world and he created me, he created the body I use and he created the person I've sunken into, and he has me by the brainstem, and I'm so scared, and I'm so deeply, unrecoverably alone. And all Tabi can hope for is that I will love him. Why can't I love him? It is something very close. Stop. Stop. Remember that I want to get out of here. Stop falling into the pitfall traps and pay attention. Your brain wants to move. Your brain wants to run. Your brain wants to sprint out of here and forego putting on a jacket and you want to leave him, you want to leave Tabi, and you don't want to end up in the Room above his house anymore, especially if you will never know, you will never feel it. You want his warmth and your body wants his warmth and his hands and his feet and his attention to detail, and his fluffy ears and ignore all that. Ignore it. Fall away from it. Step outside your body for a second.



He is

so

saddening

to look at.



I climb out of bed and put dress shoes on and go to the entrance of His house.



It's a brief affair. I think He is still in shock at this and I am, too. In fact I allow him the opportunity to take me by the neck at this point and cut my spinal column and do what he'd like, but that road isn't taken.

The foyer is dark and so is the entrance. I have not mentioned how to get to the entrance, exactly, but it is Euclidean and it is reachable the same as any other room, even if I cannot exactly remember the route we take, because all the while I am attempting to wall him out, to give him no ground. I feel as if I am breaking up with him but he does not act this way. He does not yell at me. He does not shout in my ear and tell me to listen up, listen through your stupid fucking implant. Tabi is just hovering. He has been in my head with me.

If he stopped me now he would likely calm me down. I would soon sink into his warmth and hold him, and hold him, and hold him. But right now for a split second I am willing to leave.

I ask you to hold a little understanding for him. As carelessly as he regarded that little rat, and as carelessly as he regards the hundred-and-first tree of the forest, Tabi does not stop me from leaving. He reaches the door at the same time as me, and I think I see him crying a quiet sort of cry, as if the thought hasn't really reached him yet. And his hands are fickle memory, see? As they have always been. He is shaky as hell right now and not capable of complex communication. So when he uses sign language, I am certain he means to tell me so many things, he means to say this:



I am so sorry. I want you to stay. I want you to stay, please. Please don't go from me.



But he actually signs, with his two hands:



"If you really are leaving, you ought to know some things."

I am receptive for the moment. I stare at him. I hope I am able to come across as strong, as composed, because I have never felt that way in my life. "Alright."

Tabi is slow in his speech. "If you think of me, I will still be there. But naturally if I were to ever slip your mind again, if you fully forget me, you won't ever be able to return."



And I am unable to stop this force barrelling towards the exit:



"I won't return."

In May the rains wound down. Emily was long gone; she had, I figure, heard enough applause. Thank you, thank you, and so on. On the east coast she tore cities apart and killed people stuck between edges of her radius, because turbulence of that magnitude is thorny around the edges and does not preserve human life much at all. In Michigan it took a while for the downpour to recede, but of course it did, day by day, until it was all forgotten. Just runny creeks and droplets on tin roofing. And on the eighth day of May, as things wound to a close, I went with my roommate to the lake in a hatchback he inherited from his dad. I hid underneath a tarp so passing cars wouldn't see me, and once we arrived, we both stood out on the shore and just watched the skies clear up a little bit.

I hoped from that oblique angle maybe I would see through the cracks in Emily's fingers and see her face, see an identity or a God or something, but I didn't. There is nothing in the sky that is put there on purpose.



He still lives in Grand Rapids. His name is Max and he is not Deaf or hard of hearing, but he is very sweet, and he doesn't ask a lot of questions. Or—the questions he asks are cute and endearing. He will for instance ask me if my horns need shaving or anything like that, and it makes me feel flush in the face, and although I don't want a romantic relationship with my straight roommate of all people, it is a nice kind of warmth that I wasn't ever prepared for from this man.

He doesn't ask about my time elsewhere which lasted a little over two years. He is also in a soft agreement with me that, yes, it would probably be best if I don't advertise to the world that I resemble a goat on two legs with opposable thumbs, because that would be likely to get me picked apart by NASA or the CIA or the USDA or whatever. He is skeptical that such a thing would be the result, but I am fine with the medium we reach. I stay inside almost all the time. I don't contribute any payment to the rent and I don't have very many responsibilities besides keeping the apartment very, very clean.

A spotless house is better for the soul.

There's obviously a depressing quality to the fact that, no, Max did not find an opportunity to move out, and no, he did not get out of the food industry. Which is to say that he is still managing at whatever failing restaurant in town is desperate enough to hire at the time. And I am sort of lucky for this, because I had nobody else to turn to, and he took me back in after such a long time. It was a very silly sequence of events. He does not know ASL so we had to do a lot of back-and-forth, text on an empty memo on his phone, while it was absolutely storming outside. And from the look on his face it was probably the wrong time to land at his doorstep when I did—but Max somehow had the energy to let me in anyway, and hug me, and ask if I was doing okay. And he sensed quick enough that I wasn't keen on talking about where I went, so the questions were all cute and endearing, and suddenly May was over and the rain became just whispers in overcast skies, and I am



tired.

A pervasive kind of tiredness. Again, again. Staring up at the ceiling of the kitchen.

Max works as a general manager at a shitty chain—name one, name all, there's little difference—and pays the bills for a living space that is technically six hundred and twenty square feet but feels like sixty. There is one bedroom and one bathroom and a kitchen attached to a living room and a front door, and if you have been in a place like this before, then little more needs to be said. Max set up a reclining sofa chair in the kitchen for me and gave me blankets and a pillow and I realized just now that it's June.

It smells the same way that white bread tastes.

I should eat. I should eat but I am not hungry. I have to lean left to see the analog clock hung up against the west-facing windows; the minute and hour hands are cat paws and the plastic rim has two pointed ears on top, and there are feline eyes staring back and forth with the second hand. It is two PM. Past noon. It is too late for me to start my day off well.

Some days Max works nights or opens or mids and it's random, always random. And right now I am alone for an indeterminate amount of time. I could be alone forever.

This is not my bed.

I crawl out and splay on the floor ass-up and I am half-naked, just briefs and a shirt with Garfield screen-printed on the front, and I feel horrifically grimy and ugly and worthless all of a sudden, and I haven't eaten all day, and what the hell happened to yesterday? What a fucking mess you've made of this body. Your fur is all on end and itchy and falling off in parts because you haven't trimmed it in a while and I want to go for a walk.

Outside. Or just the hallways. Anywhere.

I am facing an odd problem that is not allegorical in nature; I think in Grand Rapids there is just about nothing comparable to being a furry animal person, to being a goat. I am not persecuted or a minority in that way. It is magic and the occult and nothing more. And still it insists to me in my blood that it would probably be for the best, probably a smart idea, not to broadcast this fact anyplace but this apartment.

Then again I don't know if I'd be ready to actually walk outside now either. Max is taking the same role my parents did before I hit eighteen, or my cousin when we were roommates in Trenton—Max is carrying me while I still have little agency. And in fact this has been the whole of it, the whole of my life, following whatever carrot is dangled in front of me. And at the moment I have no reason to go anywhere or be anything and, if my thoughts are allowed to run like ink, I start to realize how dark that feels.

We are not getting much sun even though the storm ended a while ago.

Lately I've come to the conclusion that I am wired up wrong. And also made up of the wrong parts, as I've said, but specifically the connections between different parts of my brain, the reward mechanisms I'm supposed to have—all of it is just a little bit mismatched, like the manual got thrown out. A long time ago I was taking a medical concoction called Lexapro, or escitalopram, which altered my brain chemistry at random and sometimes I felt better and sometimes I felt miserable and most of all, most of all, I was gone. And none of this particularly fixed underlying issues. And lately I've come to the conclusion that I, whoever I am, treat good things like hot potatoes. I have to get them the fuck away from me as fast as possible.

Things being good is a warning sign. It is cause for immediate alarm and immediate action.

And also I don't know how much of any of that is true. I am spread-eagle on my stomach on the vinyl floor of this kitchen and it's cold and I'm cold and I'm too dejected to get up, because there's little I can think of doing.

I could shower again. It was this morning that I showered, or maybe three mornings ago. And I could use a shave but I don't want to clog the drains, I don't want to make anybody else fix a mistake of mine. I could eat but eating is just a way to occupy time until something else happens.

I could masturbate.



I am in the corner of Max's bedroom on Max's laptop and I am tired. A pervasive kind of tiredness. I thought intensely and passionately about getting choked out by a big burly anthropomorphic wolf, and masturbated until I came into a couple tissues sandwiched together, and then I laid back and stared at the ceiling and waited for the afterglow to go away, which it quickly did. I have run out of things to do.



I am showering again. Or maybe for the first time in several days. It takes a long time to comb myself and get all the knots out of my fur and I am drenched for a half hour running shampoo through myself and I am sorry for Max's water bill, and I am sinking into the heat of the oval-shaped shower head and letting my thoughts just sieve away. I do not have room to think when I'm so warm.



I am shaving directly into the trash. I can see a very fuzzy reflection of myself in the stainless steel garbage bin and I look like I should go to bed already—isn't it dark out?



I am eating a Pop-Tart. I didn't feel like heating it up but it tastes about the same. Goes down quick and then I'm empty.



I am vacuuming the carpet for the second time today.



It is nine o'clock and when Max got home he was tired, he was looking past me. His expression said a few things, I think, but I am actually worse at recognizing facial expressions on human beings now, so it was all muted and distant. He has brown skin and curly hair and pastel-green irises, and a little wound on his cheek where he has been picking at a scab. And I typed this up for him on his laptop:

"You want to go anywhere on the weekend?"

And he took a very long time to parse this, and I don't know why, but he felt this was an appropriate time to tell me:

"I think you gotta make a plan for what to do now. Like with the rest of your life."

And inexplicably this makes me cry, and sob, and I'm not able to respond, and Max tries to apologize but it's not his fault, and I have to take a long time to process. My legs are popsicle sticks and I need to go sit down, and I wave him off, because he does not need to see me like this. I am so easy to accidentally break.

Even when I calm down I want to be small. I am by the window facing out into the parking lot. I have my feet up on the sofa and my arms around my legs to curl up into a little warm fuzzy ball, and I can't stop just staring, staring, staring aimlessly outside.

Across from us there's a place called Julian's which is probably a restaurant, and it is buried into the underside of a living complex which looks exactly identical to every other one across this country and other countries, too. This homogenous building is made out of prefabricated parts and is painted in pastel; it is six stories tall and blocks out everything behind it, every bit of authentic architecture that the city has. You can only go to Julian's by parking out back, because the prospect of someone walking around this section of Grand Rapids for fun is laughable.

I can see Max's car in the parking lot. Always in the same place. He is at least lucky enough to own a car and a license.

My eyes wander towards the few things that are visible from here, still—the kitschy signs for businesses that will go under by tomorrow, the square reflective windows blocked by plastic curtains, the cars and trucks passing so quick they'd flatten a pedestrian, and the smallest snippet of the sky, which is rolling over itself slowly. Still we are stuck with overcast clouds, but no rain. And it would be difficult to imagine a view with less identity.

It's not hard to imagine a version of Grand Rapids that is missing just one part, or maybe even a whole lot of parts, and still works precisely the same. It's not hard to imagine Julian's sinking through the world because it isn't even slightly necessary for the whole to be described. Or for the parking lot to get forgotten about for long enough that all the asphalt and painted lines disappear. And it is not difficult to imagine me, myself, going away.

I am memorable to a few people, maybe. Maybe my time on Earth has been fundamental to a few people's lives—obviously my parents experienced some difficulty and my cousin some levity, and Max thinks I am cute for my animal features, but it still would not be an entirely hard incision to make. I could cut myself right out. Mornings at Seven Eleven are hardly worth remembering and hardly essential. I am only barely here.

This doesn't have to be the case. I know this.

I still have someone in me whispering, now and then,

I can salvage this.

But I have made significant changes in my life and gone through hell and I have a new body and what does it matter? I have already done my best to salvage this. I know that I could, very obviously, reclaim my life somehow and figure things out and get a job or a hobby and feel decent about myself. I could make a plan for what to do with the rest of my life.

But it is much easier to think about



Him.



When the thought occurs to me staring out the window I'm startled, like somebody put electrified paddles on me. I would not describe this as negative or positive or anything. It's just sudden, and I feel like I woke up from a bad dream.

Again it happened. Nearly once a day I forget and then remember Him. And this will keep happening for longer and longer stretches until I spend days without remembering Him, and then weeks, and maybe sometime soon I will just lose Him.

Forever.

I will have permanently forgotten His house and His presence and—fuck, fuck, fuck, His wool and His touch and His feet on my penis, and His insistence that I can be anything I'd like—and I'm not there, I can't be there, I can't be. This is a stupid line of thought. I left His house for so many good reasons that it would be difficult to count them all or write them all down.

Although I suppose

writing it down

wouldn't hurt.

As He exists now, He is only a dimly-lit planet of experiences and thoughts and emotions so potent and acidic that they could melt through the floor. He is two years that felt like twenty, and He is going to fly further and further away unless I tie Him down to the ground somehow. All that time I spent in His house, I refused to contact people—to use the Internet or my mobile phone to tell somebody about Him. I did not tell my parents or my cousin or my online acquaintances anything except I am alive, because what good would it do to talk about Him?

Fuck you, got mine. Same as with the Cochlear.

But as always that was the worst way to go about things. And maybe He led me down that path, but I was willing to be as isolated as I was, because isolation with good company is something electrifying. I never had to want for anything, or at least never got to the point of trying for anything, because I had Him all over me.

And now I don't have Him all over me. He escapes me as easily as gas escapes a cage.

So I put Max's laptop on the couch and write Him down.

Warm, warm, warm.

My hands heat up from the CPU spinning up and my body warms up because I am reminded of all those times He held me. Just a hold, just a platonic hold; He would stay with me as long as I wanted and just love me physically and wrap His great big, wooly arms around me, such that I am squeezed. And I would have to pat His shoulder to tell him to stop, but only after I've gotten my fill.

I am writing Him down. I am writing down all those many experiences that come to me in a pleasant flurry. I have heard many times before that when somebody dies it is good to mourn them by remembering good things about them, and although He is not dead and I am not dead, it feels like something is decomposing. And I very much need to write something nice down about all of it.

Not all of it is worth recounting. And I am not living in the moment so I cannot phrase it in present tense like I have so far, and of course I do not think the day we went to Lone Star Lanes ought to be mentioned, so I also do not include much of that. But I do begin with one thing that has already been said.

Here is how I would describe Tabi if you have not met him:

And it feels so wondrous to do this. It feels like I am without limits, or at least finally free of some self-imposed restrictions. I have never put Him to page before, never even told anyone about these experiences; they have been entirely the language of hearsay, folk tales, trauma. I am trauma manifest. I am only the person I am as a result of the things that have come before, and it has been Max's unspoken responsibility to guess and extrapolate. He may only see the result. He is a geologist studying topsoil.

The truth is that I remember a great number of things. I have a memory that is eidetic or photographic or something along those lines, although I prefer to just call it vivid. And if I spend enough time, I can tell Max

all the places

we went.

Him and I. His house, and the Room below His house, and the many locales, the many nights, the many experiences of abject love against the odds. I can put it all down.

I can tear it all out of my exhausted mind. I can salvage this.

When the body is impulsive it is also very clumsy, and when I am impulsive I fall over myself trying to move, move, move; a rhythm like pistons is broiling up in me and when I have two pages of Him on a text document on a website called Google Documents I decide to show it all to Max. I decide to share Him with somebody. And my thinking is more complex than an infatuation, it is desperate—I have spent many weeks in this apartment being fucking worthless and how did I get here in the first place? Why is any of me the way I am? I need to justify myself.

I am nothing without my excuses.

Max comes out of the shower and throws on a long-sleeved shirt displaying the words "Car Seat Headrest" in a plasticine font, and wants to lay down, and surely what Max would really like to do is sleep right now, and get some free time in the morning, but then again maybe he works at four AM tomorrow and needs to sleep so he can be a functioning automaton. But I beckon him over and I still have tears on my face and I ask him, plead with him, please read this. Please let me confess where I've been all this time. And he is a wonderful friend, so he accepts.

And Max reads about Him. The far-away Him. And the house that only slightly lives in Michigan. And I am unsure what I want his response to be but his eyes narrow and his face curls up and he's only halfway through when he looks back to me in deep-seated confusion.

He knows I am probably not making this up. I am a walking goat and went missing for two years. And yet something is so, so terribly wrong.



Here is the conversation we have on the Notes application on Max's phone:



"What is this"

"This is where I was the whole time. I'm sorry I'm kind of just frenetic right now"

"Why are you here now?"

and Max gives me a very long, intense look. Eyes sharp. More awake than ever. He hasn't finished reading the scant things I wrote. He is looking at me like my fucking head is on fire, and suddenly I feel like it is.

I respond, "I was just trying to find someplace to get some time to myself"

"Why? What happened to you? I believe you but you're scaring the shit out of me. Why did you leave this thing's house if it was going well? What aren't you telling me?"

Stop typing. Stop typing for a second. Give me a second to breathe.

but

then again

he has reminded me of all the things I did not write down.



The Room above His house.

The lying. The incessant lying. Or something close to lying—so close.

The front door. I am so wretched and broken and yet some part of me wants to run. I want to run. And I tell him I won't return, and I slam the door behind me so that I will not look back at Him. My vision is still so fucking hazy, so filled with tears and shock and awe, and it only gets worse when I step out into the torrential weather.

Hello, Emily.

Hello Emily and hello rain and hello mud, stinking endless waves of mud, turning the front courtyard into a brown sea; I am immediately swept away when I try to walk, and I end up at the dirt road drenched so thoroughly that it feels like I will just sink into the ground and die. And hanging onto barely anything, I turn back and saw His house, His mansion, which stands only three stories and cuts into the forest even less than it seemed from inside. And I could go back in and He would be there and He would cry with me, we would cry so long, and He would make me feel better—and in spite of this hope, internally I am screaming so loud so loud I want to get out of here and that is the only thing I have, the only rock I can attach myself to, and I wander through the storm in a half-stagger until my whole body begins to fail. Arms and legs and musculature and fur, soaked, so heavy I am on my knees. I had turned right on the road and now I am going uphill. Where is the lake? Where is north? Where am I? Dizzy like my head is back against His arms and all my body parts are disconnected from my nervous system, and of course I have no plan, I am just running and falling and running. I want to get out of here.

The will can be potent. If it's pointed in the right direction it has the potential to march for a long time.

But I am made out of weak parts and cannot make the journey back to Grand Rapids or even back to His house, I am just on a rural road in the middle of an empty universe, and I cry and wail nonsensically until Emily drowns me in the mud, and I fall unconscious for a long time.







And in the morning I kept walking.

In Michigan the rains were not actually to the level of a hurricane, as I've mentioned. We were left with only the remnants, the detritus, the aftershocks of something much greater out East, and the morning after I left His house was when they called time on Emily. But as I've said the rains here lasted a lot longer.

It was pouring out still when the sun came back up. I was not run over by a car in the night and I suppose cars don't pass by that part of the woods, and I had no real choice but to just continue forward. It would be difficult to list the physical symptoms of being left in the rain all night so I will simply say that things got dire. And all the while He was racing through my mind faster than claps of lightning—He was everything. And I am certain now that He felt my presence along His spine. He felt that I kept Him in my thoughts.

Maybe that is His way of pulling on me, tugging on my leg. I am constantly granting Him something by thinking about Him. Is our relationship transactional, even now?



I made it to Grand Rapids by hitchhiking, which arouses many questions for myself even now, because by then I was deeply and debilitatingly sick along the side of a rural highway and essentially only caught the attention of a driver because it was late at night and I appeared like a dream. I am not entirely proud to admit this but I just told her I was a ghost, and that if she didn't drive me back to Grand Rapids I would keep haunting her.

It worked or at least worked in part, because I showed up at the front door of that apartment building, and buzzed for Max's number, and did not end up dying on my way there.

I was starving and had only drank rainwater and smelled like six kinds of death, and I am certain many people saw me, but I had done my best to get to Max and he took me in.



And now, right now, he is staring at me on the couch. Hunched over. Eyes wide. I want to stare into the street lights and watch the nothingness go by. I need to respond to him, need to come up with something. And yet if I lie to him and tell him all is well then what the hell am I doing?

My body is made of the wrong parts to lie.

"Some really bad stuff happened," I type. Of course Max already could guess this much. "Most of it was extremely good. That's partially why I am so miserable right now and why I don't feel like doing anything most days. I had a good situation and ran away from it."

He takes a deep, deep breath. "You aren't stupid. If you ran away then it was a bad situation for one reason or another. Do you want to talk about it?"

And I type "No," immediately, because it is the truth. Because it is currently not something I would like to think about. It's hitting me in waves again. The Room above His house—

colors—

a dull white forever—

I am very shaky and of course Max notices and I would just like to hide, I want to run, I want to crawl under a rock for a million years. I wouldn't make good use of those years anyway.

"Did he hurt you?" and Max shows this text to me, and he has his face scrunched up, he knows I do not have to reply to give him an answer.

I retract and find someplace to get away.

I don't think He would hurt me.

Why would He hurt me?



It would be so much simpler if I did not think about that part.

Loving Him was easier when I was not scared of Him.

- - -

I am on the sofa chair staring at the ceiling. Eleven o'clock. Max is sleeping, I hope.

When I squint—really squint—the plaster applied to the ceiling of any room can begin to look like a bunch of faces. Maybe only for a few moments until my mind adjusts.

Plaster on drywall in a pattern they call skip trowel, all in a chaotic mess of divots and landscapes painted white-on-white. Randomness creates so many shapes but I can't stop seeing faces in places they weren't intended; humans are designed to see faces in everything and in this ceiling I see a shape that looks like Him. Sort of. Muzzle and eyes and the faint shape of horns when I let my imagination fill in the gaps. More likely I am simply desperate to see anthropomorphization in everything, because I have spent so much of my life being treated less than human, and it feels right to try and treat the everyday world like it, too, can feel a little bit. In Djiban the author describes the very air being able to feel pain. But also I think that Djiban is not really descriptive of the world I live in. It is flush along the surface of its bookshelf. It shares space with hundreds upon hundreds of other books that He deemed useful, helpful, descriptive. I have not read all of them but, in times of boredom and desperation, I have read a few, and I did get a similar impression. The books are useful.

Maybe not as He meant it, but in a different way.

Here is one assertion I agree with: human beings are prone to a form of ideology known as magical thinking. This is actually literal in name. We think of our world as being run by magical forces even when told otherwise and even when we hope otherwise. The human brain is a uniquely imperfect machine and does not inherently possess rigor and formal logic—we do not actually process cause and effect, we only try.

Given enough information maybe we get closer to reality. Or we could just guess.

Human beings used to kill each other ritualistically to cause things to happen in the natural world because it was believed, in earnest, that something impossible governed the universe and would care. And it is nice to think that this thinking evades modern people, but there is another form of ritualistic sacrifice going on in Max's body, over in the bedroom, wherein he is sacrificing his physical and mental health in order to gain money in order to pay to live, and what he does with his life is he sacrifices his physical and mental health in order to gain money in order to pay to live, and what he does with his life is he sacrifices his physical and mental health in order to gain money



and He had all sorts of books on the subject. If you sacrifice a rat you can make a different rat hear. If you paint circles and draw lines and light candles you can make objects and living creatures crawl out of the woods to follow you. If you think very hard about forgotten things, you can fall into a Room below the world. And Djiban is only one book that pretends it knows which magic is 'true'.

And of course He had them all.

One of my favorite books in His collection was an old paperback edition of Peter Pan. It is very demonstrative for what I am talking about right now, because in many ways I think He was my Tinker Bell, He was my fairy. At one part of Peter Pan, which is a play you may have actually heard of, the audience is asked to clap their hands and believe that they can make Tinker Bell live again. Tinker Bell is a dead fairy or at least a dying one, and in the end the wish comes true and she comes back to life. Tada. You did it.

This should need little elaboration.

Sometimes I find myself being very cynical about belief, desire, hope. Those things are good for the soul and He always said that He found the concept of a soul funny, in a grim sort of way.



My world now is completely mundane. I have tried in especially desperate moments to think of things that have been forgotten, and I have tried falling down into the Room, and I have also tried remembering what was written in Djiban or any of these other books said, and I have tried making any magic happen, but it will not and could not. In Peter Pan many years pass and eventually people have forgotten about Tinker Bell and she is dead, because fairies do not live long at all. And for many many years in this world Tinker Bell has been dead and nobody has really figured out a way to believe hard enough to bring her back to life. The commute doesn't get longer because you had a bad morning. The planet does not care about fairness or justice or poetry or art. And He will not come pick you up out of your bed when the world forgets you. He will not hold you and He will not hold me ever again. I saw a fairy tale and it scared me and I ran away.

And laid back in this sofa chair I am back in the same cycles as before. I am back to being alone. I am back to a reality that functions as expected. My eyes won't get scooped out at night and I will get old and die soon, and I am mooching off my roommate and not eating healthy and not bathing enough and losing track of time. And I should go get that degree finished up. Does Grand Rapids have a community college? Maybe Julian's has a dumpster I can grab pastries from.

First things first I need to get a job. Make my half of rent.

Call my mom.



Hey, I'm okay.

Staying with a friend.

Getting back into the swing of things.

I'm working again. Yes, the hours are fine.

Hourly.

Yeah but I have to be on call all the time.

It's okay.



No, I don't need help. I'm fine.

Yes.

What?



No, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It's my fault, my implant—just say that again, please?



Yes.

Okay. I'll talk to you later.

Alright.



and so on. This is what is in front of me. Or I suppose what is in front of me is the ceiling, just the ceiling, and I keep seeing shapes appear in the drywall because I want somebody or something to be a little unreal, to be a little magical. I want to feel something that doesn't fucking hurt so much. Punches in the gut. Realizing again and again that He exists, He is back in that house by the lake, and I ran away from Him. I ran away for what?

You were so lucky and you threw it away.

You will never get to feel His wool again. You got rid of that. He got rid of that. He made your life inhospitable and He ruined everything and fuck Him, fuck His stupid fucking arrogance and ego and why did He do this? Why did He ruin such a good, perfect, immutable thing? It's His fault I can't just have what was so nice. It's my fault for paying attention.

Just

get me

to the good part.

I crawl off the chair and my knees creak and I nearly fall over, all of me is achy and awful, and I am about to do an awful thing. I am about to do several very stupid things and I am responsible for them. It will be my fault. I don't expect Max to give me any sympathy at all because he did his best and I ignored him. After I freaked out in front of him, after he asked me if He hurt me, Max also told me something else, because Max is very smart and wearier of the world than me.



He wrote this:



Don't do anything impulsive now. Please.

Promise I'll be here in the morning. Gonna skip my shift.

Just stay until the morning and sleep. You need it.

A stolen keychain jingles in the ignition and thwacks against my thumb and my eyes are coated in mucus and my body is more sore than ever, because my brain is attacking me with an intense, physical sort of violence. I have never hurt all over like this. I could still turn around. I can salvage this.

Fuck you. I don't care. I don't care.

I care so much. I could still turn around. I can salvage this.

My world is this: the air conditioning is on and my fur is on fire and it's begun to drizzle outside. Grand Rapids is long behind me and Max's hatchback drives a cool sixty on freeway, but of course I'm past freeways now, I'm lost in the winding highways and plains and, eventually, forests, leading north past Ludington and Scottville. Little transitory roads and incessant bending turns that ask you to slow down to twenty miles per hour. And when the road asks me to turn rapidly like this I freeze up and have to park at a standstill—it has been over two years since I've had to drive for any reason and I am absolutely terrified of how easy it would be to screw up. Make a little tiny mistake and explode. I don't know where I'm going. I never found out where His house was, out there in the woods. And it is that broken stupid magical thinking that is causing me to assume that I will just find it on my own, if I drive long enough, surely it will turn up. It has to. I need to get out of this car so that I stop apologizing in my head, sorry Max, sorry Max, sorry Max, I will leave your phone in the car and get GPS coordinates and I will text them to your sister and then maybe someday a thousand years from now you will forgive me. You will say, yes, it is your fault. But you were dumb and lonely and you just made a rash decision. You'd take it back if you could. I forgive you. It's okay. It's all going to be okay.

I'm crying again just on instinct and I can't grip the steering wheel any tighter.

Fuck you. Grinding my teeth. Hate this.

Just two headlights in the dark.

I roll over a pothole and the car shifts and my seat goes rickety and right now all I want to do is scream, just scream, because I don't want to be this person anymore. I don't want to be put into this situation. This is an agony which can't be quenched by anything except a method to escape. It's moods like this that make you prone to cutting your own head off.

I took a road called the Ninety-Six out of Grand Rapids and got on the Thirty-One. Now it's darker and darker and the headlights aren't working as well and I turned the high beams on because I haven't seen a driver in half an hour. Now the roads don't have numbers, they have names. Rows and rows and rows of names and bookshelves and I am diving into the woods. I remember that His house was quite far from the shore but not that far, somewhere embedded in the many tertiary veins of the state. Very far north of Grand Rapids when I went there for the first time. Is it this turn? This turn? I am going to go insane and start seeing spots. When am I going to pass another car?

Pothole.

Ba-thump.

Rabbit.

I slam the brake with all my might and swerve and nearly careen off the road, and I let out a weak, warbly squeal, because I nearly hit the thing. Just a little rabbit crossing the road. It's so dark. I am halfway across the left lane crying my eyes out and the high beams illuminate a pine tree half scratched up by bears. I could have died just now. Crashed and had to wander back to civilization. Worse for wear again.

Or I could have killed a little rabbit that did not want to be part of my mess.

If I keep driving like this I'm going to crash.



Actually the reason things get so bad is much more stupid. I do not crash Max's car, I run out of gas. He was going to fill it up in the morning. I did not check the gauge.

Park by a ditch. Send that message to his sister's phone.

Start walking.



It is three o'clock. The roads have numbers again but the numbers don't mean anything. Five two five nine and five oh three eight. And so on.

In spots I forget about Him. I will find myself walking for five or ten minutes not thinking about anything at all and then I'll remember Him and yelp out, and my legs will grow tired again, and then the darkness seeps into me; it is a half moon out and only the bare minimum of light to keep walking remains. I will forget Him soon, or maybe it just feels like it. I am going delirious to the point of sickness. I want to be somebody else.

And this is maybe what it is all about.

I have been running from my own life for as long as I can remember. I could have salvaged this but I was handed an out, I was handed something nicer than just fucking dealing with it. I was an online furry because the sensory and loving world of anthropomorphization treated me a lot better than the real world of labor and punishment and abuse and disconnect. As an online furry I could tell people I liked them and I liked being around them. I did not have to be so ludicrously alone because I was allowed to dream a little bit, to imagine and manifest the reality of being happy.

I would like to say that this whole mess has been about the concept of 'fantasy.' It has affected me in a very grave way as of late and now it is making me walk in one direction down a rural road in Michigan until I die.

It is likely that the world will forget me. And Max, too. And it is very likely the world will forget Him, because He was already fast on His way to that point. But I have started to not be so afraid of this fact. When things fall through the world, it is like they reach an ideal, a sort of afterlife of ideas; places like the Red Shack and Lone Star Lanes and the spot and, of course, all the parking lots, and transitory highways, and all the old rooms in old houses, and commercials, and garbage on the side of the road. All of it in a big pile for once. All in harmony. I have felt a kinship with things that get forgotten. I don't feel like it was ever fair to treat them as completely less than human.

After all, we get forgotten plenty, too.

As a kid I read a book—this one is famous, too, you have probably read it—called Where The Wild Things Are. It is, in summary, a story about a kid wandering into the wilderness and getting forgotten by the world. He finds a bunch of monsters who take care of him when nothing else does.

In the end he makes his way back home too. But I didn't like that part.

I never wanted to come back.

When I got forgotten by the world, He welcomed me through His front door. And for all the stupid bullshit in-between then and now, I have never lost that sense of touch, of His hands against mine for the first time, of His insistence that fantasy can be reality, and that it is not stupid to want an experience that is an unalloyed good. It is His tendency to want things to be perfect. Anything less is a mistake.

Some people have said life is about misery but I think they can eat shit. Life is about warmth.



Wind picks up.

The gravel is sharp on my feet.

My breath is getting very heavy now and I wasn't expecting it to, but I have been walking a very long time and my gait is a little hunched and a little unoptimized and I'm aching all over as a result. And of course I didn't have the time or intention to make food before I left, because I was not hungry, but now I am once again so hungry. I would kill somebody for a peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwich. And water.

Some water, please. Throat is drying up and cracking.

I haven't seen a car since I delved into the trees and now I can hardly see the road at all, all bits of gravel and dirt scattered piecemeal. I am weaving in-between places that may have once been owned property but are now just mazelike corridors through the wilderness; there are sometimes metal signs telling me where I am but they are few and far between. But I know now, better than I did on the night I left, that I could take a few specific turns and reach a house owned by somebody. In record pace I could be somewhere warm begging someone else for a few minutes of shelter, please, please, a few minutes.

Please, please, warm me up. It's getting so cold. I've never known windchill like this. The drizzle has stopped but now it's just freezing and all the heat from yesterday has finally gone.

I could go back.

I should go back.

Turn around.

I could salvage this.

I can salvage this says a voice in a plastic container for mints buried in the bottom of a purse worn by a chunk of granite falling into the waves; there's peace in the waves and peace in the sinking and there's peace in the sea floor. I have a terrible relationship with my mind and my memory, the part of me that keeps insisting that I can salvage this, because I have been through this before. Many times I have been thirsty and starving and cold and I have, many times, considered killing myself. Sometimes it is playful and sometimes it is not playful at all. And in spite of how I feel about my memory, it has been the thing that has saved me from complete destruction.

I owe it very much and I hate it. I hate how much I have put on my memory's shoulders as of late. All this time forgetting and remembering and trying desperately not to avoid the subject of Him, and this disconnect has made me feel like a thousand disparate ceramic pieces scattered on the ground. Maybe it is better not to ask what I want but what I need.

My body needs to survive and my brain doesn't.

I am two. I am in superposition.

In this way I set myself up to be locked in these cycles of frustration; I cannot simultaneously be safe in His presence and I also cannot be happy anymore without His touch. I absolutely must have answers about what He does to me at night and if we sleep for multiple nights, but I absolutely cannot have these answers, because they are very harmful for me. As He said. And it is true in the worst of ways—it made me walk out and run out and run away and now where am I?

Where am I?

and memory responds, I know.

I know.



I know this road.



Tufts of weedery reach out above the ditches on either side, and a tree curls over the road, and the sun is starting to come up, now, and I can see the expanse as it rolls gently downhill. I can see spots where the rains dug into the road and turned it all into a river of mud, and I can also see the small bits of gravel that remain. I can see a cut-out in the forest far away and off to the left.

The sun crawls over the horizon at pace.



I remember when I drove to His house for the very time. I don't remember if it was on purpose but it was certainly not an accident, and although I cannot say that I remember what happened to my car I do remember what happened to me. I got out and I saw His house in its grandeur and something whispered into me and said that it was alright, it was okay, there will be warmth inside.

Warmth.

Warmth is very close to love.



The road is bordered by trees taller than imagination and, in large part, downhill. Down and down and sinking. When I turn left I am greeted with wilderness so winding and terrifying in the half-light that my heart nearly gives out, but the incessant coldness in my fur keeps me moving forward anyway. The will is a very sad thing and ought to make you sad, the way it keeps trudging on. At this point my left foot is so scratched up by gravel that it's bleeding and I need to limp to get anywhere, and I'm holding my arms around myself for any sense of comfort but there is none.

At the end of this road is His house or nothing. At the end of this road is life or death.

It curls through hills and mud and underbrush and in spots the road is so damp with collapsed branches that there is no way not to cut myself up on brambles, and I am hurrying now, scurrying through pain and limping as I jog, and I just need Him, I need His presence, please, please, please. Just a minute. Just a few more seconds of His touch. I am so sorry that I am doing this to myself. I can still go back. I can salvage this. Over another tree trunk I faceplant and fall into a patch of mud and a half-dissolved puddle and keep waiting to feel Him on the back of my neck but I am still alone. Going on. Going on.

I made it during the storms and I can make it now, I can make it. I can go back. I need Him. I yelp out. Sun is coming up. I should be waking up soon. My shift is early. Only a few minutes now and I can still make it I can

finally

see

His house.

It is at this point that I am almost completely disconnected from my body or reality or emotion and so I simply walk forward until I reach the front courtyard which has been torn apart by rain and wind and collapsing trees, and the power line along the west wing has been repaired, and His house looks so large from here. Sixty stories tall and miles in every direction and still utterly Euclidean and please be real, please be real. No sensation on the back of my spine. Do you know I'm thinking about you?

I step onto a patch of thorns and jitter and contort and limp all the way to the front steps which are slick with mud and then I reach the front doors and I try the handle but the door is locked.

Please.

And I try knocking. And again. And pounding, and pounding, and please do not have fallen through the world. I will step through the doors and find an empty house and I imagined it, I imagined it, the world forgot Him and I will forget Him again, I will forget Him as I always knew I would. I will forget Him. Please.

Please. I'm so sorry—I didn't mean to forget you. It was my fault, I'm so sorry. Please.

Please let me come back.

I'm so sorry.

Pounding and pounding and pounding and the door comes open slowly



please

but He is not the one opening the door. Somebody else undid the lock and creaked the door open just far enough to see me and for me to see him. He is a man my height with short horns and a pronounced, rounded snout. I am sure I recognize him. And he is moving his muzzle as if to speak. Calling back inside for somebody else.



In His house there is this dazzling quality to the first room from the front doors, called the welcome room; the arches curve magnificently to a ceiling on either side and give a unique sensation of freakish grandeur, as if you are embedded in a very large chest cavity. Still as the woodwork approaches the ceiling it develops into a web of snakes, all polished and varnished oak and ebony where the lamplight along either wall doesn't reach. And there is a great white-and-gold rug sixteen feet across which heaps praise upon you, which has been thrown on the hardwood so as to make it feel expansive and like home. In the corners there are statues of faces hardly human, and along each wall there are small tables set up to display amphoras and electronics and sculptures defying space, and there are things mounted on the walls unspeakable, but—most importantly—in front of you there are two great big black lacquered doors, heavy as hell, which insist that there is something fantastical beyond. It takes a good bit of pushing but they will always give way.

SECTION 3
SUPERPOSITION

Devotion is a chemical reaction that wells up in the guts. Little heated kidney stones. I have this all the time lately and as long as I can remember it's been making me frantic. Got to get moving. Got to do something. Time's running out. He has an intense expression and enjoys the way I'm feeling along the ley lines of His wool but maybe I have let Him down by making him wait for me. Got to make up for that. Head is spinning and stomach is on fire again. More.

I feel my trembling fingers up the length of His bent-back calves and knees and thighs and up His stomach and I trace the images of Gods past time and I stare into Him and feel small and powerless and good. Marbles tumbling in me. Poking out against my skirt.

Bedsheets on my knees are rough but not burning. He lays back on the headboard with His fluffy rear posed on two pillows and beckons me forward and gives me chills. Chills aren't welcome. I am panting from the heat. Do you want something? Yes. Press on my stomach. Yes, like that. That feels excellent. I give Him a massage and a pet and a rub like He is prone to primal desires same as me. Leaning over Him. Darling you are hard again. Yes, I know. I don't need help. I'm happy like this. You look very pretty today. I love how you're dressed. I like how I'm dressed too. The skirt is A-line and the rest of the dress has a color that matches me well. Blue or cyan almost. Yes, cyan. I remember where we found this one, even! And He should realize that I was the one who picked out the tights. Black nylon close against my groin and toes. I pulled down the waistband so I can bob erect in the air. I like tights. Have to grunt to let out air. What now? Keep doing this. So I keep doing it and pressing and feeling the ripples in His skin, the spots of slight fat and wool of His stomach, His sides, where His ribcage is and where His hips begin and end. I have much of my weight leaned against Him and His expression has become known to me. He is smiling and satisfied and He is nodding as if he knows something I do not. Is he here? Is he going to interrupt us? No, of course not. There will be no interruptions. And if there were I would not ignore you or make you stop. Thank you. Of course. I would like you to move up with this now. I have to lean further over Him and my legs go against His groin and His penis and I can feel Him growing harder against my fur but I cannot get into all that because I am devoted and I am doing what He asked. Yes, exactly. Hands on my chest. That feels special. Your arms too? Yes, shoulders, armpits, neck. Yes. Good. Devotion is a chemical reaction rolling over and devotion is my ears perking up and pay attention, pay attention, do as He asks. Palm along His pecs and His nipples and His biceps, all this musculature which is hidden beneath His wool. I glide my fingers through that wool and need air. My arms are shaking. Keep going and don't stop, darling. I can feel that you want to stop and masturbate. Don't grind against me. Keep massaging. Do it. I exhale without inhaling and squeeze His shoulders and feel His neck and where His head begins, the sides of His head, and feel along His muzzle and bring my fingers to His horns, tracing them as they revolve around the sides. Helical and beautiful. Don't kiss me but kiss my neck. Suck up to me. Good. Good. And I am drooling. Sides of my muzzle coated in saliva and my teeth clenched and He refuses to embrace me, letting me close to His warmth but not close enough, and I am desperately, desperately erect with no end in sight. Fuck. Keep kissing me now. My head is buried in His wool. Keep kissing, darling. Devotion is Godly. Devotion is to be of divine origin and to reach up into the heavens and put yourself as an object in the cosmology of reality. Devotion is a star.

He has many lines of travel that go up His limbs but my favorite line goes from His eyes to His feet as if He is an embodiment of my obsession, as if He is the Platonic form of a foot fetish gone haywire. I named Him after His feet and He knows more nowadays that I am always ready to go down below Him and humiliate myself. Devotion is shaped like kink. But right now I am devoted to His intense frivolous desire to have hands all over Him. Real hands. Hands that are in His domain. My thumbs against His windpipe, gentle but not too gentle. Yes, like this. Are you thinking about feet again? You are the easiest person to predict in the world. That's not fair. I knew it. I have my hands on your throat. Only because I want it, darling. Fine. Keep massaging me there. It feels good to have you here. I wanted this. I wish I'd come sooner. No, no, this is perfect. Yes, like that. Darling you're poking me in the stomach. Sorry. No, it's good. Now you can frot a bit. Thank God. Not too much, now. I don't want you finishing. Alright. Fine. Keep kissing me there, darling, don't stop. Don't stop until I tell you. Rhythm, now.

My length is barely gliding above the surface of His stomach and ribs, just gliding. Tickling. I didn't say stop. And you're starting to leak and you haven't finished massaging me now. Sorry. Don't apologize just keep it up. Apologize with your actions. I kiss Him and curl my head around His neck and the base of His horns, and I spread my hands wide so as to reach His shoulders and His wrists—then back down back down back down to His chest and belly and hips again, now leaning my furry chest into His wooly one, arms down. Feels like the world can't see us. Dim bedroom dim lights dim house and His arms go around me and my back is suddenly all His. Darling keep that delicate touch and continue what you're doing but massage my penis, now. Do not touch yourself because I will caress you and you will finish on my command. Yes. Please. Do not beg now. Do as I ask. So I do as He asks and put my hands against His length, buzzing and leaking; my hands are sticky in an instant and the sheer notion of touching a naked Him as I grind worthlessly against His wool is electrifying and altogether so uncomfortable. Don't think of your body now. Think of my body. Don't think of your body now. Think of my body. Don't think of your body now. Think of my body. Don't think of your body now. Think of my body. Asphalt liquefying below me and the rains are getting unfathomably strong and I wandered too far from the party and they lost track of me, flashlights in the mist. I'm leaving footsteps and they're getting fainter all the time and along the right side all the rocks are turning up with earthquakes and I land on my shoulder and the skin scrapes off and a streak of blood goes wide along the edge of the concrete hello red red red and think of His body now. Devotion is a bird screeching in a tree. It has a brain parasite that has rewired all of its functions a new way around. Can you see me from all the way over there? Shut off your thoughts and both hands around His penis and squeezing your body against His and I warble and I squeal and the asphalt eats me again it's sunny out going wide again eyes shut devotion is pain in your legs making you kneel for His dick every time He asks devotion is spreading your asshole for Him devotion is jerking Him off now now go, go, don't stop. Just like that, darling. Just like that. You're doing excellently. Yes. Yes. Darling don't stop, please. Please. Kiss me. Kiss me and think of me. Kiss me.

His heartbeat through the veins of His dick into the palms of my hands. He is breathing so hard that I am on a waterbed. Bobbing up and down with His ribcage. Choke me please. Please, I did everything right. Choke me a little bit. I'll try. You have me in a bit of a bind, sweetheart. Arms around the back of my neck and pressing down and muffling me into His wool until it's all black. I'm close now and want you to keep going. Please. Here comes that asphalt again.

Round the corner. Sun spots in His wool. Eyes shut and forgetting everything.

Devotion is not losing sight of the goal.



I've been painting a lot lately.



The anatomy of a man is most apparent from above as His caretaker, His observer. A painter is Godly in some way unseen. I can't see Him from down here. I want to see Him as much as I feel Him. I want to know who He is. I want to exhaust His mystery.

At this point I have pulled back, woozy and half-conscious, and I have put my furry muzzle against the tip of His penis, and His legs are around me, resting on either shoulder, and I am just breathing on Him. I can smell His precum and sweat and all the smells drool onto my nose and He is in my head begging, begging, please, you are just being obnoxious now, fuck's sake, please use your tongue darling, please. You are so beautiful stop teasing me now.

Devotion is reading between the lines of his words and melding them into a gray mush and knowing that He wants me to continue making Him wait. Devotion is being willing to do this until the stars burn out and devotion is eight inches rubbing up against the comforter begging for release but I am not allowed and devotion is utter restraint. Devotion is the heat wave turning lakebed into saltbed. I am kissing Him until His length goes into His belly and He is now rolling around a bit in bed, rocking back and forth, staring at me with an expression of agony in silica. Please. Darling please. I am so close darling, you're not pushing enough. Let me finish. His legs curl around my neck harder and He contorts so as to push me into Him and soon I am suffocating on His precum and His scent, and kissing until my head feels numb. The hours are passing. Ticking along with the clock. He is seabound on tense waves floating back and forth waiting for me to lick Him but all I do is touch my goat lips against His base and suck up fluids. Devotion is half-suffocation that makes you forget yourself. Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Two parts falling in halves down the bedside in streaks of blood. Darling I'll choke you. You're already choking me. Harder. Harder. Please make me cum already. The wool of His thighs starts to crowd my vision and He squeezes and He chokes me with His legs more, more, more, my muzzle is shut tight by the pressure, my cheeks are compressed, all I can breathe is His air, His breath, His rising and falling belly. Kiss me. More. More. Yes, finally—finally I am getting close, please.

I love you, darling.

Sorry. That was an accident.

It's okay.

I'll push harder now. I promise.

Devotion is something special to me. Devotion is acknowledgement that one's self doesn't matter holistically and that other things deserve a part of yourself. A little section of your soul excised out and used in perpetuity for another purpose and that purpose is theological in nature, it is Divine. It doesn't matter how you phrase it. Devotion is a God in front of me and He has a part of me and always will, and devotion is dedication, and devotion is worship via sacrifice. It's all sacrifice all the time. In the tattered pages of the books of His library a great number of ways to commit sacrifice are written down in steady script.

Although in spite of His godhood by necessity I am fascinated by the way His head sinks and He appears dizzy and His vision gets all full of spin. He is a deity but an intensely material one. He savors the physical world and the physical sensations of the world at a higher degree than I can and so the devotion is in search of a higher purpose anyway. I'm sorry for taking my time but I'm so lost in thought about you. Oh, I'm aware. Darling I would very much like to cum right now, because I am as close as I can possibly be and I want you to just please—you are so beautiful and adorable and I want to cum on your face, please. I'm supposed to be studying your ley lines some more. Yes, well, you say that, but maybe you've done enough work on me for now. I think that's enough edging for the morning. My brain is on fire. Yes, I can feel it pretty clearly! Darling you've done marvelously. Let me give you some release. And then if you'd do me the favor of giving me the same. Of course. Anything. Oh, sweetheart, you need this, you're babbling out loud. Am I? God I just want to grind like this. Head like sand. As much as I'd like that we're going to be here a while if that's the way we go. Also your pantyhose are getting in the way of your base a bit, aren't they? A little but I like the feeling. Naturally. Am I disappointing you if we just finish here? Darling

you did all I asked

and more.

So I kiss Him and fall on Him and grind and squeal and moan and all of me is just melting into Him and trying to devote, devote, devote, trying to worship Him, but I am so lost in the physical sensations that, as He insists, I eventually am too shaky and needy to proceed, and He is plenty happy to begin studying me instead. I am not as close to climax as He was so it does not quite bring me to finish just from him floating above me to caress my thighs and my taint and my chest—God, His hands on my chest—taking measurements the same way, but measurements of the soul, measurements unspoken and unknown with no unit. Fingers in my fur. Pressing against my ribs. One hand has thrown aside my skirt and is digging into my pantyhose to jerk me off—it is probably His hand—all precum and nylon and fur and heat like marbles rolling around in a piston shaft and He smiles from ear to ear and He kisses me again from above and my toes and fingers curl and He delivers me the divine. Orgasm feels like an earthquake. Feels hot and explosive like a house being torn apart at the seams. Devotion is not letting up the kiss and devotion is giving Him the satisfaction of feeling every yelp through His embrace with me, and I drool into His tongue, and He sets against me, and He is throbbing against me, and devotion is allowing Him to float up by my face while I swirl around in a typhoon or perhaps a hurricane swell, all cum-stained in my own mess. Darling, kiss me here. Kiss me right here, now. The tip of His penis fits into the small of my muzzle before I realize it and I kiss and suck and tongue Him until He melts and shoots seed against the back of my throat, and I pull him out, dripping with saliva and precum, until He can splatter against my face and mottle my fur. Fuck. Hah. Darling that's good. So good. You look beautiful. He's still dripping cum after fifteen seconds and I massage Him with my tongue to get the last bits out and I can see His belly rising and falling in upside-down cellophane with the motion of His breath.

I melt on top of Him eventually and whimper out in joy and we hold one another like hands of clouds picking up dead animals from the bush, until my breath gives out and comes back, and I fall sober, and I fall limp, and devotion is a star, and devotion is a star, and devotion is a star.



I don't know what's been on my mind this whole time. Him, mostly.

All the shapes have lost their meaning.

He has a soft cloth—from somewhere, He always has something soft like this—which He uses to wipe all His cum off my forehead fur and He cuddles me and He is all the physical sensations in one great bottle of spirits; He lets me kiss Him some more and meet Him in an embrace but soon I insist that we get on with the rest of the day. Yes, of course. This was splendid and I'm glad you brought me aside for it. I can tell he's in the foyer and maybe a little antsy so I'd like to give him some affection if you'd like to come along? Maybe but I have been swirling with ideas. I'd like to go paint. Of course, darling. I'll come with for a little while. I shouldn't be resistant to see him. No, but it's alright if you are. I'm sorry for that slip-up during things. Hm? Nothing. I had an errant thought that broke a boundary. Right, I remember. No worries. You're always sweet about these things. Right, then. Just a minute. You managed to exhaust me with all your teasing, darling, so I need to rest. If not my body then my temperament. Hah.

I hold His hand and lay alongside Him and He does not tell me that He loves me.



My relationship with Him—Tabi is His name, by the way, I don't remember if I mentioned that—my relationship with Him is made out of walls and boundaries and maps and directions. My relationship with Him is not transactional but adversarial instead. Mind you, the definition of the word "adversarial" is not the same as how it feels when written down. I am not His adversary but nonetheless I am no longer really in a sort of romance and instead in a sort of quiet trial, back and forth. Trust is the only worthwhile substance and it's not a commodity to be sold. We share a world of ideas and honesty is our fabric and walls are our binds. My relationship with Him is about the do nots.

We do not use the word "love" for one another anymore. For my part I have done a very good job of this but as you could see He is not perfect and I'm trying to be more insistent about this rule, because of how much it can hurt when disobeyed. At some point I decided that close to love wasn't close enough and so I strayed away with it entirely and now our relationship is not about being in love. Or at least that is the idea. That is the letter of the law. Those are the words we etched into being. We also wrote that He is not to lie to me either—He is not to do the thing that He does, which you have noticed plenty, where he excises information selectively or tells half-truths. He is not to undershare and, in mirror fashion, I am not to block out information that hurts me just because. This was my own rule for myself. In addition He is not to follow me everywhere and He is not to feel the sensation of yearning when I leave the house without Him. And finally I am not to distrust that He is, now, telling me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help Himself. The rules are important, at least, to facilitating the phenomenon of change. When you reform a relationship of any sort after some time away, the whole landscape has to change or the same things will happen. By many accounts I have been terrible at avoiding past mistakes but I suppose not for lack of trying. This thing is different between me and Him. Different than before I first left at the very least.

Then again if I were urged to give an opinion I would tell you that it is not, in fact, very fulfilling.

What does that word mean anyhow?

Happiness is about contentment and a feeling of security and mostly nowadays I just feel free but I do not feel like I am secure. I had that once but I don't anymore. At night per my request I am delivered to the Room above His house and something dire happens that I know all about. Devotion is a commitment to a violence often ephemeral but often physical. Devotion is being cut down in a forest to build a house.



His house is intricate and at times overwhelming and, although in past days I have thought of it as exceedingly Euclidean, quite difficult to fully map out. I have done so but I have rarely told you all the parts in list form because I have been overwhelmingly caught up in things but now I have a spare moment traveling to the foyer with Him, so I will mention what His house is, what it is made of.

There is an arboretum to the south through a hidden door, and more gardens and even a greenhouse that way, extending outdoors further into the woods around the house. There are two playing rooms and a theater buried in the west wing, and a great study free from books that resides between the theater and a room dedicated to a microfiche. There is a second library for books He has not yet fully transcribed or studied; the foyer has walls of books that have been understood but more keep showing up in the Room below His house so more must be done with them. There is a hidden but beautiful loft raised to the second story which resides on the north end of His house, with enormous windows outlooking upon the sparkling forest still inundated in a heat wave. This loft has two sofas too pillowy and soft to resemble anything but a dream, and yet there's a faint chill in the air that makes you want to bundle up. On the eastern end is the entrance and exit and also behind a mahogany divider one can find a tremendous, cavernous stairway spiraling down—you can access this from the basement too if you'd really like—which leads into a buried plaza wherein He displays many pieces of architecture and discarded art all placed on pedestals and studied and framed and photographed. It is very difficult to find the places in His house that He does not show you to, but it still gives me comfort to know the etchings along the walls, the indicators of place. Along the darkened ceiling one can start to use the bramble of polished oak as a form of compass, always pointing westward. You can take a very long walk and get lost but never really learn where you went either. Funnily enough His house has many rooms that seem forgotten, like the Room itself below His house, but I don't think they're forgotten at all. I retrieved a great big sun hat from a costume closet between two columns in a winding northwestern alley-hall and when I showed Him he was uproar in joy because He figured that nobody else would find it and He thought I looked incredible in such a thing. Femme, His word, and adorable, and in my element, and that sort of wonder and splendor is why I am in love with my existence now more than I ever was in love with Him. He cut some holes in the sun hat for my horns and it fits snug and when I walk and study the world I wear it proudly. It didn't get forgotten but it went unused. I think that's a nicer fate. It was not alone in that closet but maybe it felt lonely sometimes.



But the route from any of the unmarked bedrooms to the central foyer is so easy to learn and often the only thing my mental memory can easily process; a right and then a left and we emerge into the home of all that is warm and all that is fascinating. He is always a reader and always a collector and this room holds so many books—how many is not important because the number is a kind of magic. "There are more books here than last time," I sign, but I am not sure I meant to.

"Is that just hitting you now?"

"Well, it always surprises me," I sign. "It feels like the room's getting taller."

"I don't know myself that it's not. You think of the house as very Euclidean but you know it can't be all that."

"Maybe. The measurements don't change."

"Surely measurements aren't the whole world." He gives me a long, coy look.

"Aren't they?"

His ear perks up and He turns away a moment, then back. "Hold that thought, darling. He wants us to come over."

I'm coming, I'm coming. "Maybe not for too long," I sign. "I'm already antsy. Hot rocks in my gut like I've got to do something, you know."

"You call that sensation devotion but it sounds like anxiety."

"It can be both."

The fireplace is lit. Two hickory logs burn slow and they're surrounded by a living well of embers and, although most of the heat is lost to waste and exhaust through the chimney, I can still feel a radiating warmth from over here with Him. He pauses a moment and is telling me so much with just a look. "He sounds... not great. Might appreciate a hug."

"Obviously."

"But you don't have to stay long. He gets you better than me."

Better than even I do. So we head over to the fireplace.

The hundredth-and-first tree is in a two-seat lounge chair curled up wearing a black robe and red stockings and he looks like he's going through one of those things—you have seen them plenty and they are ugly but they're uglier on the outside because it looks like he's been hurt very badly. I'm sorry and I don't want to patronize him and I'm trying to keep all my thoughts to myself but it reminds me of the phrase do we sleep for multiple nights? and he looks uncomfortable even though His house is made of comfort, and it is upsetting, and a part of me harbors a great deal of frustration for the hundredth-and-first tree in spite of everything wonderful he represents. We head over to the fireplace and Him and him exchange something verbally and He sits next to him, presence overwhelming, and eventually he stands up, he matches my height, and there isn't much communication necessary, we just embrace. Shared.

We do not talk to one another very much.

The hundredth-and-first tree still obviously knows how to sign and he's good at it and it's nice to communicate with somebody else who's actually fluent—well as close as I was last year—but it's uncommon that we talk at all. He's in my embrace and his fur is unkempt and he's hugging me so tight, his breath is an intense hoarse rush. Something went terribly wrong with his brain, it must have. And he pulls away briefly and he signs, "I'm having a bad morning. Not your fault or His fault. Just panicking and sick and crying."

"I'm sorry," I sign, on instinct. My hands are close against his. "Anything I can do? I was going to make you lunch after I went painting."

He just shakes his head. "No, I can't eat. Maybe I'll be able to eat later. You're very sweet. He's going to do his best, I don't want to stop you from doing your thing."

And some part of me seeps into guilt again. Always guilt with him. Envy and guilt mixed into one box. "You mind if I stay a bit?"

"Obviously not." He gives me this mixed, wobbly grin through tears. "We'll be talking a bit, is that okay?"

A beat. "I think so."

He means out loud.

He means the world outside mine.



In as straightforward a tone as I can manage: him and I exist in opposite spaces and take opposite roles. In the Room above His house I was born and he died. And He woke the hundredth-and-first tree back up. Right out of limbless eyeless death and woke him up and gave him life again and all this obfuscation and fog and blind love eventually resulted in some things happening to him, including the removal of his Deafness, a chunk of his identity just torn out of him. I have been him so I know that he does not like speaking out loud but now he does, all the time. And he does not keep his fur as well as I do. And he does not have sex with Him like I do, or almost ever. He is intensely physical but he has started to lose libido and started to get a fondness for touch, aimless and pointless touch just for its own sake. Whereas I study His body, the hundredth-and-first tree will just touch Him and feel Him and not understand Him at all.

More than anything he didn't start painting like I did. He didn't find a hobby and he didn't even start reading the horrible books that fill the walls and he doesn't cook anymore. He keeps backsliding, back, back, back. I need a name for him. I need something derogatory. Why do I need that?

Heated and hating and pointless frustration with somebody I won't get through to.

Not today and not ever. Feels that way now anyhow. I need to paint. Get some wrath out of my bones.



And where has he ended up? Staring into the fireplace and talking slowly with Him and only speaking sometimes but when he does speak it lasts a long time, and he curls up further, and tears stain his fur. I am frowning but I have no input because what would I say? And He is saying all the sweet things, I'm sure. All the things that make you feel better. They do make you feel better, if you'd just listen. He really does mean well. Or He means sort-of well. He will take care of you if you let Him. But that isn't what's happening. Of course not. The hundredth-and-first tree stares directly at Him and is experiencing a hellish sensation of some kind and has no respite from this moment. Then they go back and forth and back like a very weighty seesaw. Picture the scene easily: He is upright but the hundredth-and-first tree is recoiled into the chair as far as he can and he keeps asking plodding questions and crying and, from far up above in the heavens, He is recoiling but out of a feeling that He has damaged something because everything in His house is His responsibility to the most comical of faults, but of course it is His words that make this situation dire. Back and forth again. Are they yelling? Tastes lighter. An argument with hushed voices and raised tones. He's loosening his body language out of desperation hoping He will let up and of course He does—are they reaching an equilibrium? Then the hundredth-and-first tree opens his jaw and lets out something weighty and melodramatic, of course, and why the fuck am I still here standing here pointless doing nothing? I'm his anchor and I'm not half enthused to watch a miserable conversation like this. Get away. Paint. Paint. Paint. Get away.

He snatches my arm and then breaks his hold on me to sign.

"Can I come along, please? To the loft? I need a second."

"Yes," I sign, fast and stupid. "Of course. Are you and Him—"

No, no, shaking his head fast. "Him and I are just confused. I'm doing better. I just—would like to paint with you for a little bit."

I look over to my left and He is giving me a weak, exhausted smile. When we are deeply intimate and ludicrously close—within inches—I can hear His thoughts touch mine with soft static, but all I have is His smile. I can guess but I can never know. I can ask but I'll never feel.

Then He turns to face the hundredth-and-first tree and signs to him. "Love you," He tells him. "See you soon."

"Love you too."

Or something close.

Acrylic on canvas paints pictures of old car keys and boxes of nails behind toolboxes and shadows and cobwebs and bugs that evade notice and spots of ripped-up concrete and potholes on old roads and streets that go nowhere and back alleys and back woods and roots and dandelion seeds, and corrupted iPhone photographs dumped on top of plastic boxes of Perler beads and Play-Dough behind couches, and missed car payments and student loan interest and secret transactions claimed by startups that charge monthly without telling you, and symmetries, all kinds of symmetries, I like to paint symmetries because they make my cerebellum happy where physical objects fail. I have the tiniest paintbrush and the tiniest eight-inch by eight-inch canvases I can manage and I lean in and my keratinous fingers are dotted with water spots and dried paint and I draw everything forgotten and everything remembered and I draw penises and I draw two-toed and three-toed and four-toed paws, and I draw long stockings, and the curves of musculature below arms and against rib-bones, and I draw faces. So many faces with jagged mouths and I have a pile of canvases in the corner all in study of a face I keep seeing in the ceiling above the sofa chair in Max's kitchen, all symmetries made from hours spent detailing and correcting and overpainting and study, so much study, so much study. So much measurement of His body especially and the contours of His inner thighs and the ley lines that define His soul; four-fold symmetry as I rotate the canvas and hold up a mirror and close my eyes and wait for waves to come in, and old magazines with pictures of discarded plastic waste and packages coated in advertisement and a seeping wet well of a soul keeps dripping down my back, wait, wait, waste. I draw porn which defies logic but not the description of intimacy. I masturbate sometimes. Acrylic on canvas strewn across the hardwood floor of the loft which overlooks the forest. We can see the haphazard piecemeal way that the trees have been arranged partially by replanting and partially by real overgrowth but the undergrowth is underdeveloped and the birds are uncommon and the coyotes feel unwelcome, and life remains unseen, and figures remain unpainted. Notice the easel propped up against the leg of a sofa, and so many paintings. Boxes and boxes of paintings piled up in the attic corners of a dim room lit by the sun and the warmest of lamps. He tells me one day He'll hang my paintings up in a gallery but this is my hobby and not His and I keep them to myself most of the time. I used to not know how to paint. Online furry who can't do it himself. Always wanted to draw a black goat with red eyes and taller than myself and he would wear stockings but now I see him all the time and I don't feel like painting him. I paint perfect and imperfect things, but I don't paint things that are essential. I have to be here. I have to remember myself and ground myself and not forget why I'm here. A self-portrait is an honest conception of ego but I only have devotion now. Devotion to Him as an entity and myself as a soul. He always found the concept of a soul funny in a cynical kind of way.

I don't feel like teaching the hundredth-and-first tree how to paint. He, too, does not belong in my hobby space, but I also care for him deeply past all the fire in my lungs. I'd say something mean to him if it wouldn't sting him so bad. He is laid back on one of the cushy benches made out of clouds, watching me paint a shape that will eventually become a cistern; pipes emerge out of the back and string around the front and steam courses up light in cyan and fills the ceiling and a pervasive darkness borders the aimless industrial symmetry of the main water tank and I forgot about this one until just now but it was forgotten for a good reason. Vertical lines are the most natural shape for my arm. My brush is petit and, for now, I just cast white and auburn onto black. The hundredth-and-first tree doesn't talk about what I'm painting. Stays out of that. Stays out of conversation mostly by avoiding eye contact until I start, because I am antsy and a lack of communication eventually gets the gears turning.

"Mind if I ask what you were arguing about?" I've been signing one-handed lately. It's the more hip way to sign but it's a little harder for me.

And he always uses two hands. "Not arguing," he tells me, with a weak laugh. "I promise, not arguing."

"Uh-huh." I roll my eyes at him. "Just one of those things."

This is partially why I don't converse with him much. Maybe it's counterintuitive but the sensation of talking to somebody who has, himself, experienced most of my life is often cyclical and boring or uncomfortably earnest. I used to like being a little bit fake with my friends because it's more fun that way. I can't be fake with him. He replies, "I swear! Not that I helped my own breakdown much but it was in good faith. He's still lovely and I'm not hiding from Him." Then he glances off, and back. "I thought it'd just be nice to spend some time with you."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. I mean, I locked you out of that conversation. I should have been signing."

I can only shrug. Maybe he knows that it's a real shrug or maybe he thinks I'm playing off frustration but it's not like I wanted to hear about his panic attack. I have enough. "That's fine. I wasn't feeling social anyway, especially when Him and I aren't fucking." The words make me laugh. "Sorry."

He has a humor about it. "Well, you can do whatever you like."

"Guess so, yeah."

Beat.

A feeling in my guts is always there. I call it devotion sometimes but it's all kinds of things to all kinds of people. Devotion is giving myself away but maybe it's also losing the ability to motivate myself. I'm staring at the little canvas again. Ever read something over and over and understand nothing? I can't focus. I've got him in here taking up all my attention. I glance to him and the tiny canvas and back at him and to some degree I want him to leave but I don't want to hurt myself.

"I'm sorry," he signs, "for invading."

"You aren't. I welcomed you." I offer him a little smile. It's earnest but forced anyway. I'm sorry.

He just exhales. He doesn't look shaky but he's still wavering, like he could stop existing. "No, but I should get a hobby of my own too. Something else to do. I always feel like I'm overbearing on Him."

"I doubt it," I sign. Grinning on accident now. I come across rude. "You know He loves affection unconditionally. If you think of Him he makes you feel warm, of course."

"It's not just affection." And he sits up, now. I can still see parts of his face-fur matted from crying, but he looks better now. Always getting better. "I want to take more trips with Him. Walks, and in the Room, and all that. And it's starting to actually make me so happy. This sounds corny but I feel like I've got a life."

Non-committal is key here. I'm trying to focus. I shrug and sign, "Anything's good." It goes without saying that he is trying to do the thing I do, in response to the things He does. This is a coping mechanism and self-delusion and it's not my responsibility and I'm sorry for having such dim thoughts but

but what do you think you're getting out of this?

He is not your boyfriend. He is not in love with you the way people are in love with each other—He is in love with having you.

He brought you back from your legless armless eyeless deaf infinity because He missed me. He was going to do everything better, wasn't He? Lessons learned. Told you all about the Room above His house—or at least a very nice version—and swore to never do it again and took away your Deafness and made you His little guinea-pig to do it better this time. Got to make sure you don't leave. Maybe you'll start to feel like you have a life but you're in love with a God and He doesn't halfway consider you as anything but the hundredth-and-first tree of somebody He tricked into loving Him unconditionally.

Sorry.

Head rush.

"Anything's good," I sign again, "but you need some alone time, too."

"Well, for what?" He snickers a little. "The absolute worst thought patterns imaginable? You saw me earlier. Sorry to dump that on you, I was just—without Him I'm really good at falling into pitfall traps and whatnot. You know."

Weak nod. "It gets better."

He leans back in the chair, extends his legs out on the overhang and doesn't look at me for a little while.

I'm not much better. When I got to leave I turned out to be a wreck on my own and ran right back to co-dependence. And I think I'm better than him because fuck you got mine because I'm not blind to what's happening but maybe that makes me a hell of a lot worse off. Feel superior and get worse. If I went out on my own right now I'd end up back here. I've made forward progress even if it's in the wrong direction. Devotion is having a purpose even if you don't know where you're going; devotion is an itch you keep looking for.

I am finished, I think, with the long vertical lines that form the cistern's height, thin each as hair. Need to wipe my brush off in water and paint a duller white, one that reflects light, one that indicates machinery. The cistern is bordered by swirling pipework that looks like musculature and veins. In a lot of ways the house is built like a body. Breathing and bleeding in all parts.

The tiny room I draw now is dark and lit only by a God's finger.

I sign, "You can paint too. If you want help you can ask—we're on the same side against this."

"Yeah." Then he pauses and thinks and asks me, "Against what?"

"Terrible thought patterns. And Him."

Then a longer pause and a longer thought and a statement instead of a question. "I'm not sure I like that idea, of being against Him. You keep putting it like that when we talk, but I've started to realize that it's something else, and I don't want to feel like he's my enemy or even somebody I want or should be scared of." He is breathing heavy now but he's looking off like something wonderful is going on in the corner. "I woke up this morning overjoyed. And I was a little hazy, and felt like I'd slept for multiple nights, but I wasn't tired... I felt amazing, you know? I think I'm in love all of a sudden."

"Or something close," I sign, on instinct.

"No," he insists. "Not something close. I meant what I said."

Bless your heart, sweet thing, because you are stupid as hell. I turn to him and give him that look and I'm trying to focus on the cistern, the symmetry, the beauty and ugliness and the path there through the pulmonary veins, but he wants to talk so we'll talk. I've had this in my gut forever. Devotion is knowing what God is. "You think you do," I tell him, "but you can't. You aren't in a relationship with Him, you're in co-dependence." He tries to interrupt me but I'm not paying attention. "If you try to run away you'll want to come back but it won't be because you love Him like a fairytale, it'll be because you missed when things were fantastical and beautiful. He is just your conduit to things feeling good."

Then he catches me when I'm done and just asks me what made me like this and I don't know how to respond.

"What made you so mean?" he signs. Mean. He could have picked a nastier word but he picked one that I don't ever want to be which is mean and I recoil and I don't want to be that, I didn't want to be like that to him.

"I'm not," I sign. Got weak hands and have to set the paintbrush down to enunciate further. "I'm not trying to be, I'm sorry. I just get infuriated by how you talk sometimes but that's on me."

He gives me the most puzzled look. Comical. "What did I do wrong?"

"It's on me."

"You don't have to love Him and obviously this relationship is stupid but I'm actually happy right now. You don't have to treat me like garbage for making it a good thing."

Hold back. Don't hold back. "You were sobbing like crazy back in the foyer over nothing so that's pretty hard to believe, but again it's on me—"

"I was asking about you," he tells me. Like a hurt animal in a corner fighting back with claws, but his claws are all dull, and his head all swivels. "I was asking Him about you. I was asking what He does in the Room above the house with you and it made me miserable because I care about you, but screw me for that. I'm happy. I'm not lying and coping when I say I'm happy. Fuck you."

"Alright." I don't budge.

"I'm sorry."

"It's fine."

He scratches his forehead fur to try to defuse himself. "No, I didn't mean to say fuck you. I'm just upset by how you talk, too. It goes both ways, but that was mean of me."

A long pause. Now I'm the one who doesn't want to look at him, of course. Pain in my gut tumbling around again. Anguish is one word but devotion works too. Devotion to myself. Devotion is a thought loop that never stops you moving, and it's a dance that can't stop. Ba-thump. Ba-thump. Focus on the cistern. Steady your right arm with your left hand so that you stop shaking; your hands have never had surgical precision like His. Stop talking to your other self who didn't make it like you did, who went down the other route, who stopped thinking about potential and started thinking only about what he sees, only about what makes sense to him.



Call him Euclid.



Can't manage to get the symmetry right and I keep forgetting what the cistern looks like. I have to blink and shut my eyes and paint the floor, streaking slats of hardwood in pale amber, and then redo it, and then redo it. And something's been itching at me again. Hot rocks. So I reply to Euclid after a while. "It's not your business, really," I sign, "what He does to me. It's my own choice."

"Why do you do it?"

"You don't even know what it is."

"No," he signs, "He told me. A few weeks ago and today, too. He described the hundredth-and-first tree in a forest—did he tell you about that?"

Uh-huh. I nod with so much exhaustion.

"And..."

Euclid pauses a long while. He swallows spit and does not have it in him to continue, so I stare at him until he does.

"He was going to tell me everything," he signs. "Started talking about a ritual, a ritual He performs that we don't get to see. And I had to stop him." Euclid shakes his head and looks off and can't make head or tail of what he's looking at. "I wanted you to explain it. You, instead of Him. I wanted you to explain what it is and why, so I wouldn't get lied to."

You don't need to know.

You don't need to know and even then I hardly know. But I think I know why I submit myself to it, Euclid. I think it is to protect you from the same fate. I couldn't tell if He was happy with the forest He'd claimed but I asked Him to continue taking me up there and I ended up savoring the opportunity. Devotion is a reason to live and a reason to die. Then again maybe I don't want it to happen and I just can't remember Him changing my mind. Same as He convinced this other person—Euclid—to give up his Deafness. He made Euclid want that and He made me want to devote myself to Him religiously. I have turned into somebody else by now and all that defines me is my ability to delude myself, which I have honed to a sharp edge.

No—there really is nothing in me that loves Him. It hurts to think about. But I also cannot imagine anything without Him now.

The days have been getting so empty.

Hot rocks in my stomach again. I need to paint. Painting won't help. I need to measure His body again. Are you in there? I want you. Please. Please. I'm thinking of you.

How can Euclid love you now? How can he pretend this is a relationship? He knows what you do. He knows what you've done.

"I don't want to think about that," I tell Euclid. "I'm sorry. I don't want to think or talk about it."

"I think you do," he insists.

"No. I'm going to leave if you're like this."

He doesn't know what to reply with so he acts on instinct. "I don't know how to talk to you," he signs. "I wish you didn't hate me so badly."

And that hurts more than anything, because it's untrue. Because in spite of how much Euclid upsets me I care about him endlessly. I destroy my body every night to save him the misfortune. I die for you. I suffer for you. I came back and you got made out of the mud and now you take my pain personally. Just like Him. Just like Him.

So I leave the loft

and don't talk to Euclid

for some months after that.

He shows up in spectrogram when you look at the two of them together. Don't you see them now in pose? Euclid is showing signs of falling out of himself. His picture of Him is just exactly what's visible to the naked eye and that's all there is to it. Wrap up, curtain call.

I wrote a tangled-up messy biography of Him tucked in-between paintings. The Anatomy of Him goes like this at one point: in simple terms He is a creature that crawled out of the woods and does not exist when you're not looking at Him. Although when you are thinking about Him maybe He is a little bit there, a little bit present. If many people are thinking about Him and drawing pictures of Him maybe they can get Him to come out of the woods into a spot in Michigan where they can make Him dance for them and love them and hold them. Then again that was a long while ago and the people aren't around anymore and the books are dust now. If many people are thinking about Him then He is empowered; He is able to move earth and do great things to the planet and the sensory experience which makes up the human condition; and He is able to build and comprehend a house all in His mind, and greater still with every iteration of thought. Sometime in the deepest of winters where He was loneliest He found somebody who had nearly fallen into a Room, which is a place where all the unnecessary clutter goes, and He brought that person in and loved them unconditionally. Love is something I haven't really figured out yet and I'm hoping you've noticed that fact. But He was unnecessary too.

He is made of the same stuff as a Room. Just clutter. Just fluff. He is incidental and He is a fairy-tale story and He does not belong in a world very concerned with the real issues of trauma, abuse, frustration, alienation. People loved Him but He was so quickly forgotten by those people. Just an odd footnote. And anything He did is perhaps allegorical to an experience more real and bountiful in purpose. Clearly, yes, He was abusing me physically and mentally. Maybe He even cut off my support networks. Sure. I'd buy it. His relationship with myself and Euclid is extremely uncomplicated and very literal and there's nothing wonderful or terrifying to be gleaned, nothing fantastical, nothing furry.

The truth is that He is just as He is. You can see parts of Him in photograph but He is not easily drawn or put to written word and does not stay there long besides. Then again nobody is easily reproduced on canvas, least of all somebody breathing divinity like this. Or something close.

If I were to tell you about Him I'd still begin by telling you how I feel for Him. I don't know what it means but I hardly know a thing nowadays. Or maybe I'd tell you how the days go. Even now they excite me and even now they daunt me but I'm in it too deep to ever escape, and at night

in the Room above His house

I am stripped of myself

and given over

to Him.

Darling, you are thinking on an extremely dire subject matter right now.

Sorry. Mind wandered. I almost fell asleep. You have absolutely nothing to apologize for but I do find it fascinating. Do you want to talk about any of that? Actually a little bit. Hold on but give me a minute I really want to keep doing what we're doing. I just got the urge again. Yes, you've been hard for a few minutes. God, really? I lost the time. Where are we again? Tell me you're joking. Yes, obviously.

Him and I are on a bench in the winding mazes of pathwork south of His house and by now it is sunny out but not hot, and light is streaming piecemeal through the trees. They tower above us with leaves faded orange, and the trunks sway in a gentle breeze. They have rhythm though perhaps at a shifting tempo. And I am wearing the sun hat to shield my fur and a flowery dress and some tights and He is letting me lay on top of Him while I recuperate. We came out here just to fuck but we ended up having a conversation I half-remember but wholly cherish and now I'm waiting to get the urge back after an impromptu moment earlier and my mind wandered to—extremely dire subject matter, yes, but I hope that's okay. Yes, of course. I mean I wouldn't have anything against you no matter how dark or frustrated it gets. I hope you're okay with me listening in. I appreciate it. Are you sure? Yeah. I'm always of two minds on subjects but I'm doing well right now. If you insist. Can I hump a little bit? Yes, obviously. Am I poking you? A little bit but not badly. Am I poking you? Oh, yep, I feel it now. Thought that was my dress bundled up. Do you want me to be on top? Yeah. That's good, because I can hardly reach your rear from here. I see how it is. Can you step on me? Yes, obviously. Didn't mean to be so direct, sorry. No! Be more direct! Especially with your kinks, darling, it's nice. If you insist. But I'm always going to be coy because I'm embarrassed. How long have we been together? Three years or more. I think so, yes. Still embarrassed. Don't make fun of me. I am crucially not making fun of you. Uh-huh. Step on you, then. Well, maybe still cuddle a bit, I like this. Take turns, maybe? We can just see where it goes. Okay, crawl off of me, darling. But I like this. Yes, well, everything splendid has to end. Five more minutes. Is that a joke or is it serious? No, it's a joke, I want you to fuck me already. I'm just still half-sleepy. Kiss me.

The trees sway. A breeze is coming in. I think I can see a patchwork of clouds pass by. All temporary.

All hands.

Crawling over one another and passing by one another and speaking in touch-tone.

He's above me now. He is larger than life and He has weight when He deems it necessary. Pins me to the bench and I can feel every inch of Him pressing against me stiff edges and huffing and wool through my fingers and in my face and His naked body is unreal and unfathomable and I've started painting to get my mind off Him. He is so unlike a painting. He moves in the space that nothing can and He reminds me of the worst things. All the time the worst things. Moving targets. I give myself to you. Good. He holds my wrists now, pins me down. I'm woozy. Retracting into my brain again. Stay with me. You're harder than ever and your mind's wandering, darling, is that a good sign? Yes. Yes... yes... and He sinks all of Himself into me until we're not frotting we're just laying.

What does this remind me of?

A sensation of Him over me. Maybe He will sit up and put His socks on my face or maybe He will fuck me or maybe both things will come in time but most of all I am thinking of—

—something else—

—something worse—

—a flat sheet of plain metal and I am laying on it and He is above me. In the light, the endless white, He does not appear as anything but a phantom resembling Himself. The Pagans thought they saw divinity but were told they were mistaken. But I feel it.

I give myself to you.

He holds my wrists now and squeezes into me and groans and His breath is intense and He wants to fuck me but He's too lazy, just like this, just like this, honey. His cock against my thighs poking against my leggings, I can feel Him wet. I give myself to you. I am reminded of—

—a flat sheet of plain metal and I am laying on it and is He holding me? It feels like it. It feels like something close.

The feeling is coming back in my body again. Like He didn't sever my spine. Doesn't need to control me like that but He will still kill me when we're through.

This is sudden. Do you want to play with those thoughts of yours, darling? We don't have to. I want to. Would you like me to play with them, too? If you'd like to. I can.

I very much can.

Hands go from my wrists to my neck.



Once upon a time He wanted to make sure I did not mix up intimacy and violence.

I didn't get it. I never got it, back then, observing fucked-up lunatics online talking about the excitement of gore or murder or the simulacrum of abuse—and abuse, physical abuse, still does not sink into me well. I don't like pain and I don't like restraint, not real restraint. And maybe I don't like any of this anyway but I am hard now because I am thinking about the Room above His house. I am thinking about being killed. Or sort-of killed. Doomed. I am thinking about the inevitability. The lack of control. The urgency. I am thinking about my limited time on Earth and I am thinking about Him pinning me down and putting gentle pressure on my trachea as His penis slips under my skirt, pulls it up until I have no defense. He's going to kill me tonight. Tonight I'm going to fall into the limbless eyeless infinity and there's nothing I can do about it and in spite of how good I feel I'm so scared, so scared, so limited is my time and so weak are my legs now, trembling as He lurches below and prods my ass and He has control over me, He is all I have. He is my enemy. He is my monster.

I am hard beyond belief and groaning and squealing and begging. Yes. Yes, darling, I am your monster. I have you here and you are mine, as you give yourself to me. You have submitted your body and mind to a power beyond your comprehension and tonight I will kill you. You have limited time with a worthless temporary self. You had better make use of it. You had better enjoy yourself. And let me enjoy you. Is that what you'd like? Yes. Fuck. Can you grab my—can you help? I can't reach. Yes, of course. I've got you. Thank you. I don't know if you're role-playing. It's always on a spectrum, darling. The truth is dark and I don't know how to feel about your excitement. I don't know either. I didn't have this kink before. That much I've gathered. Tonight you're going to kill me. Make me worthless. I'm not even worth anything to myself. Kiss me.

Devotion is a physical sensation of having limited time and fucking it up and throwing it away and devotion is an intense fear like a truck's barrelling towards you and devotion is death. I'd die for you. I have died for you. I don't know why. Maybe it's exciting now. You've turned my brain into mush and this is all I want now. I wish you didn't hear how bad this gets. Just fuck me. Maybe—maybe He can't sense me now. Pushing my dress up my stomach and grabbing me around my base and sliding in, sliding in slow, and kissing me. No, I'm with you. I just don't have a response. You're not owed a response. I'll give it to you if I wish. Some nights I'll kill you early. Some nights I'll kill you late.

Yes. Like that. Fuck. Keep—keep doing that. Are you in? Nearly. I had to pull down your leggings. A little sticky.

You'll gouge my eyes out and treat me like nothing. Yes. And I'll still fuck you tomorrow even though I know that. Lured in. Lured in for the few sensations of pleasure. Yes. I'll make you cum now darling but only because I will it. Maybe some more or maybe I'll kill you after you finish. Drag you off into the Room and add you to the forest. Oh, I feel you in now. Keep jerking me off, please. You want to finish so quickly? I feel your breath. You're suffocating in this. He slides in me and He kisses me and He pushes my neck with His palm and strangles me, and soon I'm thinking of the Room again, all this, all this and I'm throbbing and hard and guilty and upset, why do I want myself dead? What does this mean? Is it just sex? Is this just sex? I'm fading now. Every night He will do this to me. I am nothing.

I am nothing.

You're going to die soon. But you will feel good and I will allow you to finish.

He has to move much of His body to actually slip into me but by then all I want is to be told I'm not worth anything and I'll be happy or something close; and He lets me stew in that feeling as He caresses the fur around my neck and holds me hostage against my own consciousness. I can see His face from below, now. His arm holds Him aloft and His eyes dig into mine like spatulas. I have you. I have you so solidly and I'll have you for a long time, darling. You're going to cut all my limbs off soon, aren't you? Soon enough. And all I'll have is this memory. A few fleeting moments of orgasm. I'm close. A smile strikes His face like a dagger. I'll make sure it's a good memory. Please. Drool pools up against my lips and I'm fading out again. Stay with me a little while longer. It might be the last time you're conscious. I'll kill you. I'll kill you. I'll kill you.

I am nothing. It doesn't matter if I die.

Devotion is dancing in the woods until He takes me.

When I cum it's slow and pooling out against my belly and skirt and I'm groaning and moaning and my jaw is so full of drool; and He presses into me with both hands, and He is the one squeezing my pecs and slow-fucking my rear. All the fluff is nothingness. I don't know where I am. I don't feel good. I feel incredible. All the lights are on in the house of my soul and the furniture is on fire.

I'm unable to open my eyes for a while.

Drifting in and out.

I don't know where I am.

He's in me and He goes deeper, and when I open my eyes it's all foggy, but I can see Him gritting His teeth and saliva is trailing down His muzzle, and air goes fast through His nostrils. He can't realize how spent I feel. I know. I'll keep using you. Please do. And my eyes roll back and I'm not allowed to rest, but what would I deserve in terms of rest? Shaking so much now. Stomach warm with cum as it drools through my fur and collects on the bench, and I keep trying to raise my head to reach Him but He is too far in the clouds now. Hey, can you still feel me? Yes, darling. Are you uncomfortable? I'm nowhere. I'm feeling amazing but I'm nowhere. Bench is making me ache. He grips my chest harder and tilts His head down, and I can see half His face illuminated by the sun gleaming against His wool. I'll send you someplace nice. Would you like that? Yes. You able to get any leverage in me? A little. I don't want to move. I'm happy where I am. He's just gently pushing now, leaving my legs semi-spread but not throwing me aside to fuck me silly; I couldn't take that sensation right now anyway. Instead He is looking into my eyes and I can hardly see Him through the haze, but He is telling me, look, look, and then when you see my gaze spinning, close your eyes. He slides another inch in me. Close your eyes now. Don't look. I'll send you someplace nice.

I close my eyes. Are you really going to kill me? No, no, don't respond. I can't stop thinking about it. I feel guilty. I don't think you can feel me. I'm falling through the bench.

Vertigo. Weightlessness in my gut and in my groin. The bench rips apart and I slip through the cracks and fall and fall and fall, and my breath is taken away, and eventually I feel like I'm slipping into a plastic case; but it's all fake and it's all fear and it's all imagination, and when I open my eyes again He is towering above me one thousand times taller and His eyes spin in opposite directions, and His grin is the sky, and when I look down I am amid a sea of fabric. Soft satin. My back rolls over a bump and I am in some kind of nightmare dream where all things are socks and stockings and I feel a rumbling in my ass where He is sticking me again. And again. And I lean my head back against a foot and my eyes can hardly stay open. I used to be somebody who thought sometimes but now I'm in a sensory fever. Can't get the grin off my face. Two toes smocked in tabi socks grip my penis and milk me for the last bits of cum and I wail weakly and He stares at me from above, above in the towers, above in the clouds, and He tells me it's all going to be alright, darling. Whatever happens to you later doesn't matter now. Now is all there is. I am holding you close. I am holding you everywhere. Will you kill me? No, no, you never will. It wouldn't make sense. It would only ever be something worse. He holds my limbs down with soles and He presses me into the mess against my chest and He compresses my stomach with the ball of His foot, and I am suffocating on thigh-highs until He finishes inside of me. I don't know when. I can only feel His breath turning the sensory world into an earthquake. Intensity against every inch of the place until it collapses—all of the walls fall inward—and I fall upward.

He's panting.

The sun streams against Him. He always looks like He came from canvas.

His fingers dig into my fur and only now am I holding Him in return; my hands have gone to His and I am loopy, maybe a little more than I expected. He looks hot in the face and blind from orgasm, and so happy, so happy, my sheep. I give myself to you.

I don't know where I am.

I don't know what I am.

- - -

At some point He takes my hat off.

Turns it over a couple times in His hands. He's delicate with it—He has had it a long time and maybe got it from someplace nice, or maybe somebody nice. Still it feels distinctly mine as I look at it now.

The days are endless and worthless and beautiful.

Would you sit beside me every time I come out here? What would that mean for us? But those thoughts come errantly and I don't want to ask Him those questions right now. And thankfully we are no longer fucking so He cannot sense the intricacies of everything that strikes my brain. I don't like communicating to Him in thought so much. The worst notions bubble up and I have no filter to defend them from Him. I like ASL because it's a language I learned and it has tone, it has intent. You can lie a little bit with language.

I can restrain myself. I can tell him things that matter—only things that matter and nothing else. Although admittedly I like the lack of chatter because it allows me to think a little longer on what I want to say.

I look up.

The trees here are all deciduous. This time of year they're threatening to shed all their leaves—but they're so resistant and they've got a thing for hanging on too long, and so it's all bathed in a stubborn amber from head to toe, and all the trunks are wet with September rains shining in sunlight glow. And only now and then a crumpled-up leaf falls from God and lands beside us or, more likely, amidst other trees in the hundred-strong forest never to be seen or found or remembered, until it rots and sinks away and becomes muck and mud and the bones of better things, and the Room is so full of leaves like you wouldn't believe. Leaves (as in things left) are all over the place and sometimes you can even hold them.

When we used to take more trips down there He would tell me the anatomy of the Room more than He'd tell me His own anatomy. He described it like a mythical place He could only visit and did not construct, and I'm likely to agree on that. I saw it and felt it but I never fully understood it. I can only describe its features: the way that you land on concrete first, a layer of concrete stretching forever, which I am somehow very certain is atop a prison of knowledge holding it at bay. This prison is suspended in darkness that devours light and devours sense. The concrete was set a million years ago and is showing signs of age finally with all our foot traffic or that is at least how He describes it. You must walk in a direction, but—well it is not your direction-taking which actually matters but instead your state of mind and entirely what you conceptualize. I have fallen into the concrete invisible before but I have never found any place.

I once used the phrase "an afterlife of ideas" to describe the Room and that is as close as I have ever gotten to truth. I think His power is not in floating or creating but in His ability to remember, to see past the veil of death, to see into the afterlife of ideas and pluck little things out. Parking lots and soda cans and, yes, above all, a Deaf and gay man who had wandered into













all surrounded by walls like mountains.

But nowadays I like the outdoors and the loft more. It's impossible to paint that Room. Won't stick to canvas. Just like Him, although I can hardly resist painting Him.

And He puts the hat back on my head, slips it back around my horns one by one, pats it playfully. And this is my cue to go back to leaning against Him. I like His touch and I like His warmth but I'm tired of this, right? I might be tired of this or maybe that's self-destruction rolling in again. The same old urge to get killed.

"I'm thinking two rounds was enough for now," He signs.

Can't help but laugh. He breaks my demeanor. "Yes," I tell him, "probably. I'm sorry for getting so kinky."

And He has a wonderful smile. "It was fun, dear. Electrifying. You're certain you like doing that?"

I hesitate. "For some reason, yes."

I'm not prudish or squeamish enough to think that a screwed-up kink should scare me, of course. It wouldn't make me hesitate if I was into this sort of play in any other context, but He really will go through with it.

It is not a safe expression of anything at all.

"Well, just let me know if that changes."

He leaves a very long pause again. I eventually drift away from Him—I am heating up in the sun a bit and I lean over to the other side of the bench, and while in times past I would take off my shoes and ask for another massage it doesn't feel right. I still have things I'd like to say and I don't want to put my guard down. I don't want to feel too comfortable.

Adversarial is better.

"So," He finally signs, with a grin on Him, "may I take you back? I don't want to make you bear a conversation too long with me." He makes like He's about to stand.

I have to stop Him fast before I feel guilty. "Actually, I wanted to ask you something," I tell Him.

"Oh. Yes?"

Well, and I sit down further, and become small, and look out, but there isn't anything living in these woods; or it is all so alive that I feel a little deader. And I ask Him, "From what you see of me, do you think I'm doing okay?"

"Not easy for me to know," He replies. It's not instant but it's quick. "What's on your mind?"

I throw my hands up. "Lately I think something has been making me miserable, some lonely feeling that I've never had this bad. It's a black pool I keep sinking into. It's isolation."

"Euclid's no help, hm." He gives me a sly look.

"Not particularly. We don't talk."

"I know."

There's a gust of wind that's only felt in the layer where all the many branches sway and collide and brake. And He takes a few moments before signing again. "You do have a little bit of social contact with me." He gestures at Himself, His penis. Still glistening. A little wet. "You could go online more often."

"Uh-huh."

"It's a start." He sighs and, I think, scoots a little further away. "I don't know. If it's just a feeling, a physical feeling, then all sorts of things might help you." And He pauses for effect there. "If it's a more mental dread then you would need to examine it."

I shake my head a little. "I've been trying. It's one of those things that doesn't stick to canvas."

"What do you want to do with your days now?"

"Have to think about that one." I've thought about it plenty but no answer ever surfaces. "I think about devotion a lot." And I stop myself because I don't want to bite but I already took the bait. "But that isn't really why I brought any of this up."

He has a plain smile. "Devotion is a lot of things to you, I've gathered. Your devotion to me is not unwelcome but I'm not sure it can be your whole life."

"Right. I agree."

"Well." He takes a deep breath and looks into me. He can't rip apart my mind and pick out the intricacies but He can certainly read an expression. "You have a wonderful hobby and you're more self-directed than you ever used to be, and more than Euclid is. I doubt you need more help on that front—you don't have to do more with your life than paint. I'm ecstatic even if that's all you do. So there ought not be any compulsion there."

There's a little warmth in that statement even if I don't need his encouragement to feel sure. Yes, he's telling me. You can live forever doing nothing but exist. You need not change any more.

But devotion is all I have now. Devotion is a singular black moon evaporating the sun. Devotion is every social interaction I have and devotion colors my perception until it's all dim. I need to be seen by somebody else. Somebody far away.

I am tired of His gaze. At long last it tires me and devotion can't fill that void on its own.

"I think it'd be helpful for you and I," is how I begin. And then I pause and wince a little bit and take a breath, and sign, "if I tried to get somebody else here."

He shakes His head immediately. "Boundary. You know this. I don't want you proselytizing the way you nearly did."

And I shake my head back. An argument last year rattles around in my brain but I don't know the details, only the feelings. "No—no, not like that. I know. Not like that." And I have to wince again and His warmth is radiant but mine is so meager. "I know you have had a lot of friends over the years and I was thinking of trying to get in contact with one of them."

"I see," He signs. Hard to read what expression He is making, but I can swear a little excitement strikes him. Or it could just as easily be frustration. "I don't even know how to do such a thing. I could look up a ritual—possibly Art and a Fly on the Wall has something in it, that book's all about lost contacts. But I'm not certain it'd even be the right choice."

"Yeah?"

He nods slow. "I'm particular about how I ask people to stay with me. Especially after I met you. It can't be trickery and it—would so easily be impulsive for them if I make it sound like an offer. Please, no, not that."

"Maybe for my sake moreso, then. Have somebody else here in the house. You've got so many bedrooms..."

"I don't really like the concept."

"Well, it's odd that you don't."

He gives me a smile beyond half-lidded eyes. "I know. I wasn't always this way."

I have to lean back and stare back out at the trees a second. I used to get told to always maintain eye contact but I need a break from time to time and He doesn't chastise me over it. One of the little things. And I feel like I can try verbalizing myself again. "Maybe just online, and I have a decent idea of how I'd get in contact with people without giving the game away. I just feel so alone and I'm starting to think it's bad for me."

"Of course it is." He lets out a laugh. "It's as bad for you as for me."

"Maybe a little worse for you. You'll disappear."

"It could be. I've been known to overreact." He looks off and then back. "You have it the same way as me with regards to feeling forgotten, I think. It's why you were able to get here twice without so much issue."

I wave off the idea. "No, I've constantly got people worried about me. Or upset at me."

"Max," He signs, one step away from sticking His tongue out.

"Yeah, exactly. I'm a shitbag for what I did to him. Permanently embedded in his brain. And probably my whole family for how spacy I am and how much I go missing."

"—then again possibly not, darling." He pauses a moment to get my attention and He has me squinting, and I feel like I'm sinking a little in the bench. I didn't want the conversation going this way. "I don't know Max and wouldn't presume to, but I have known a lot of people. It tends to be that hatred or frustration comes in spurts. I would not doubt that he forgets about you for very long stretches of time." He is earnest in the way He signs this, and shrugs slowly. Letting me down easy. "It doesn't matter if he hates you now or forgives you or anything along those lines, but it's likely better for his well being if you don't take up a lot of mental space."

"Sure," I sign. I feel slapped. "Maybe. I don't know how to feel about that."

"There isn't anything to be done about it." He puts one leg over the other and gently pokes my knee. "You have been treated very poorly by the world and haven't left a positive impression on all the people around you, but that wasn't owed. I just notice a lot of myself in you. Loneliness and all. Maybe some is misplaced."

I take a deep breath.

"I'd just like to talk to someone that isn't you or Euclid," I sign.

"That's understandable. We can do that."

"And maybe it'd be nice if it were somebody who knew you, too. Somebody who gets it. Somebody who doesn't get hurt just because I'm a sad sack of shit."

He nods. "Also understandable."

"And maybe I'm lonely because I can't love you."

And He nods again. Doesn't sign back. Retracts a little.

Don't keep going. Keep going. "I've told you this before but I haven't even really told you the whole thing," I sign. "I used to hate what you did to me and maybe I still do but now I'm all mixed up in the head. It's something I want. Sometimes it feels like paying rent and sometimes it feels like worship and sometimes it just feels like self-destruction. But I can't even muster up a little bit of good feeling for you. Nothing." And He is looking at me blankly but I give him a scowl because it all needs to come out all at once a torrential outpouring of emotion I've never been able to interrogate and my hands move for me, "and you are all I have and I've done everything to make myself feel better and none of it works. Please. Please, I just want to talk to somebody who gets it. Better than fucking Euclid. He doesn't get anything. He doesn't get it. I want to love somebody. I want to matter to somebody. You don't need me. I don't even need me."

I don't know when but I run out of words and hold Him and cry my eyes out for the first time in months and months and months.

Crying is so ugly. It looks wrong on me the same as it looks wrong on Him.

When I look up He has tears in His eyes and his jaw agape and an expression like He is wounded. I don't think I've ever seen Him this way. And He doesn't have a response, and He doesn't kiss me, and He doesn't want to hug me right now, so we break apart and sit across from one another at a distance.

And we spend a little while like that.

Fingers tapping the bench and the sky threatening to fall.



Eventually He approaches me with a question that seems unrelated but it's so close to the truth of the universe, it's so much closer than anything He's ever asked me in our lives together. It comes out of nowhere and it hits me hard in the stomach, right where my sense of time used to go.

"Am I so exhausting to be around, then?" He asks me. "Do I get hurt when you feel hurt? Do I make you feel guilty for being upset?"

"All of those things," I sign, exhausted, "and all of the time."

"Yes. I believe you. I don't feel like I did it intentionally."

He sinks back into the arm of the bench and I look past Him, and continue. "I want to love you. I want to have it in me, because things would be so much simpler. But I'm too upset with the prospect and too hurt, and the only way somebody could love you is if they didn't know you."

And I have never seen such disgust and pain enter His face. But He does not hate this idea. He is simply in agony at it. "Is that true?"

"Maybe not," I sign, "but it's what strikes my mind."

"I have been told before that I am suffocating."

My expression sinks. "You've probably been through this before, huh. With your other friends."

"Yes." He manages a smile. "In various forms. Always the way I hurt them and always the way I failed to make them at home here. So many attempts at a relationship and I'm the common denominator, darling, and—and I have tried to fix myself and change myself and change the house and you are the only person who's ever stuck around so long, and I figured you had some good reason for it, but you've just become stuck and I didn't even want to let you go."

"Yeah. In spite of the Room above the house, I'm stuck."

"I'm sorry."

The rocks in my belly are cooling off in stomach acid. Devotion is a sense of falling down a hill with no bottom. "Euclid is happy," I sign. Haven't admitted it to myself but it feels true. "Euclid is me but he doesn't know you. He really is happy. I would be him if I forgot a few more things."

"He is happy sometimes, I think."

"I hope so."

Another moment and He feels so loose as to fall apart. "Would things have turned out nicer for you if you stayed with Max?"

Instantly I nod. "Yes. And you'd still have Euclid."

"Right."

"Instead you still have me."

Another long moment that drags on too long. In photographs and crawling amidst the margins in old newspapers and especially in paintings He would show up disheveled and exhausted but He was more content than ever to be worked thin. It meant He meant something. The time trickles down His face like molasses and in short order there isn't any of Him left except for the faint memory left in the woods. If not for movement between trees He would have disappeared completely. I look at Him and He is always thinking of who He could be and what He used to be, always measuring, always comparing. Six inches to eleven feet, and the proportions of His house are unchanging and yet the numbers are insufficient data. He lives in superposition. He must think of what He is missing. I must think of what I am missing. I look at Euclid and see everything I'm not. Winding trails through a forest get overgrown eventually and they stop being trails and eventually, a long eventually, they stop being memories. He is a shadow in every corner. Are you in there or are you resting? And He looks off and I follow his gaze and, someplace in the trees, we both spot a little bird perching on a jagged branch off the side of a birch tree dipping to the left. The bird is flush blue and black and hardly visible but the only thing that can be seen. It has a beak for cutting open nuts and the demeanor of something that's always on watch. Fast heartbeat, hollow bones. And it stays there a moment and considers resting but the branch doesn't look too stable, so in another second it's gone.

Off in the wind.

When I turn back He has taken a deep breath. His chest puffs out and then sinks back down, and so does the rest of him. "Do I seem happy to you?"

"You are too far up to ever understand."

"Alright." He scours my soul for a light but he can't catch one right now. He tries to come up with words a couple times but His hands won't give them to him, so He pauses, He stops, He slumps back in the seat, and He sighs.

I scoot a little further along the bench. I am trying my best now. "You used to be happier, right?" I ask Him, and He does not immediately disagree. "When the house was full?"

He nods, but extremely slowly, as if unsure. "That sort of role doesn't suit me long."

"You want to actually be close with people?"

"No, that's not the problem." A little laugh escapes Him. "I can feel love for a great number of people. But it's the dire effect I have on them when devotion replaces love, replaces intimacy, replaces a relationship. We aren't in a relationship, not a normal one, which is why we're able to have conversations that hurt a little bit without feeling terrible."

I take a deep breath. "We're in something."

"Yes, we are."

"But you don't really like what we're in."

He shakes His head. "No, not particularly—because I feel as if I'm only stealing from you. We have sex and we kiss and I enjoy having you in the house but I'd do that if you were an acquaintance. But because of how often you think of me, how much you worship me, I feel stronger. It's theft of energy, of mind and body." And He scratches at something along His back. The arm of the bench is digging into His skin below the wool. "I feel similarly dire about what I've done in the Room above the house. I began doing it... to feel like I had a congregation, darling, not to feel like I had control. And in accordance to all I've read it shouldn't matter what happens to the hundredth-and-first trees, but then I brought out Euclid, and—"

He pauses. I've never seen all this boil up in His face.

"It is gnawing at me. I'm pulling a lot out of you and you've tricked yourself into thinking it's a good thing."

I don't have much but a shrug. "That's the same as how it felt when we met," I tell Him. "I always wanted to love you but I never got there, but I wanted love. I still do. I'm lonely in the way that you used to fix. It used to be transactional and I got what I wanted."

"No," He signs, "I don't think it always was."

"I can hardly remember."

"It's in there somewhere."

Maybe. I don't feel like disputing that. Although plenty slips out of my head I keep finding it on the floor behind me. Lately I can feel it hit the ground. Ba-thump.

He pauses a second and looks me in the eyes. "You think getting in contact with the people I used to hold close would make you feel better? Sort of in the way I used to?"

"Yeah."

And He grows very serious, very still. "And do you want to bring them back here?"

I am shrunken against the bench. "Maybe. I feel like, deep down, I do."

"It would be like it was a very long time ago," He muses. "A house with all my favorite people in it. I would not run out of love for them or for you, especially not for you. And—" There's a wince from Him and He has to take a moment to recover. "—and that's very manipulative of me, isn't it? To draw in people who left for good reason? I drew you in for terrible reasons. Not all on purpose but you left a good thing to orbit me."

Devotion is running up the hill to reach His house in a forest full of eyes and parked cars out of gas. Devotion is a text message to Max's sister instead of an apology. Devotion is doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons. All ceramic shards buried in dirt with a mason's hammer. Devotion is also a hand out of the clouds plucking me out of misery and devotion is warmth in my belly telling me it's all right, it's okay, you have a reason to exist, you have a person to exist for. Devotion is everything that home isn't. Home is a place where you can always go and devotion is a Room that never lets you leave. Devotion is windowless, doorless, odorless like carbon monoxide. Devotion can only be reached by walking down a stairwell on the eastern end of a house in the woods.

"I didn't just leave a good thing, strictly speaking," I sign. "I left uncertainty for a sure thing."

In times past His wool had never left me.

I'm not sure He really knows what to say next so He just pauses and takes a breath, and asks me if I'd like Him to walk us back to the house, which I accept, because holding His palm is comforting and I could use a stretch. And since it has been a very long conversation and I don't feel as if I've gone anywhere, I ask him one last time: "Can I do this? Can I contact your old friends?"

"I suppose so, darling. You may try and we can see what happens. I don't know what I am anymore but it's roughly time for me to find out."

He takes my hand and, in spite of His hands shaking as He talks to me, and in spite of the fact that He seems a great deal weaker than usual, I feel like He knows where we are going.

Later that night I retract into the same garden. On the same bench. Alone.

Now my hat functions as a shield for the gentle wind. Thank God for tights, too, and fur. Fur is the best protection. It's dark out and a cast-iron lamp post illuminates the path, but only in splotches across the path back to His house. Little fairies in the shadows of the trees. Moonlight streaks through the leaves and breaks them away.

I am staring up at the half-cloudy sky and watching the world stir from the wind. I am a little high but not enough to forget that time is passing. It must be late now.

Very late.

And there's a certain peace beyond imagining before and after the waves crash against the beach; and wherein the moon is visible through missing spots of canopy and I don't feel the urge to move. Stars are above me and nothing can touch them. I rest my hand on my face and lift it up and stare at the creases of my skin and fur, and how the light flits between my fingers, and the mind, the ego, is seeping out of the back of my head into the grass. Fertilizer. When forests burn down they leave some of the most marvelous soil that can be imagined. They keep digging up phosphors in Norway. They keep cutting down forests to build more Rooms. The earth here is dark and black in spots, and there are dead roots and dead weeds, and all manners of histories are told in the ground. Four billion years ago the world started dissolving itself and we lost the history of the stones. Are you there or are you resting? Are you hiding from somebody in the halls? Where did these trees come from? Where did this bench come from? Where is its home?

I don't know. The wood is not sourced locally but then where is it from? Where in the world was the metal unearthed and then where was it melted down and then where was it formed into the shape it has now? Cast iron looped into planks and then the wood was varnished with a whole new substance from someplace else. Even the resin is homeless. I don't know if He brought this bench here or if it was always here or if it has no origin but I have not known any part of His house to have no origin. Right? It all comes from someplace. All someplace forgotten. Maybe if I had a lot of energy these days I could beg Him for information and ask Him where all the benches and path-stones come from. Where does the cedar and oak and pine in your house come from? Which trees died for you? What about the wiring, the lights, the pipes? In what part of our planet was it forged? Who put their soul into it? Where is all this blood going?

I dream of the pipes in cities flowing red every night. The violence is invisible. Koyaanisqatsi.

Okay. Again again. Hands and arms and legs and feet and make sure you're all here. Grounding rhythm. I had to make this up lately to stop freaking out on my own; I touch my chest and make sure my heart is beating, I touch my head again, and my horns, and my belly, and my legs, and I curl up and stretch out and yawn and, yes, I'm here. I am necessary. I am alive. I don't need to paint myself to know. I don't need hands around me. Do you understand?

Remember this: you don't need hands around you.

Deep breath.

This is the plan. I am going to use the Internet. I am going to get on a computer for longer than five minutes and use the Internet to contact His old friends so that I will stop being so alone. I will also keep my messaging vague enough that nobody unrelated will feel interest. And it has to be thorny enough or worrisome enough that His old friends will not feel persuaded to try to find this place. Please, no more stolen cars. You're projecting. You are a special kind of shitty to have done that. Most people wouldn't. Most people didn't. Are you about to steal any more cars? You're not going to steal any more cars. But the damage is done. Move on. Don't incite terrible things.

Imagine a house with all His friends in it.

He would call it a congregation back in the day.

Don't let that happen.

Then also think about it this way: if you are hurt and you were hurt when you left, then the same could easily be applied to those that left Him voluntarily. He is certain that He harmed them in the soul. And while perhaps He had not yet begun building the forest above His house, I think that it was that in all but name. Now He does not require me to think about Him because He has that forest, but what of the others before? What would He ask of them in place of what He did to me? Would He tell them to think about Him? He might say, think about me or I feel miserable. Please. And so on.

I wonder if it was like that. And if it was, I would like to help these people.

Do old wounds need to be opened up? I would be wrong to presume I know better. But in all there is damage done and I would not be completely in the wrong if I tried to mend some of it. My brain has gotten all gummed up and turned into mush by Him and I can only imagine the sorts of terrible thought patterns that got burned into others; but I can also ask, and I can share, and we can get someplace.

We do not have to be alone.

I don't know you yet but I know how your blood flows.

Then again maybe I should start with Euclid.

Obviously I know how he thinks but obviously I don't. What is going on in that head of his? When he isn't making me angry he is keeping his distance, he is living his life on his own. I want him to be happy as a fact because it fits a clean narrative but he has faded orange leaves and he's just hanging on, hanging on, staring at me from across the room and we maintain eye contact but we continue not to talk because what would we say? I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry. What the fuck does that word mean to anyone? In reality I'm not sorry because I feel self-righteous. I might as well be whatever I want to Euclid. I've already screwed up. Can't start making it better now. I am the one with life experience. I am the one who is bitter. I am not as hurt as I look.

Look, see. Look. How rarely do I cry now? So many hours just spent walking outside and being healthy, I have to be better off. Simultaneously better off and worse off. Just enough to always be the better one.

Are you alright, Euclid?

Really. Deep down. What is going on with you? Are you holding on or are you slipping away? Do you want a moment away from Him? Do you want to talk about it? Explain yourself. Lay your thoughts on canvas. I will teach you how to paint if you'd stop knocking over the cups of water. You're clumsy with your inner ear refitted. You had your Deafness stolen from you but you aren't any less of yourself. I want you to be doing okay. Please. I know it hardly feels that way but I want you to be doing okay. I'm not what I am. Please learn how to tell this to him before it's too late.

Again again.

Hands and arms. Chest. Heartbeat.

And a paintbrush against the back of my neck.



One twenty or one thirty, is that the pace of the blood in your body now? Sitting up now on instinct and staring ahead at where the trail dips into night, and I see His eyes in the space where the lamps do not reach. I see His eyes. Tapetum lucidum—His eyes are glowing like searchlights and they have caught me. And in a vague shadow I see the rest of His shape. Frozen in air. It's unfamiliar to me these days. I always forget it's about to happen.

It's about to happen now.

The wind rolls over some leaves and my neck throbs, and my heart is screaming.

How long do I have?

My hands move for me, I am crying, I am sobbing now. Where did the tears come from? I want to live I want to live I want to live, I can fix this, I can fix this. What if I went back in time to Max's apartment and fixed all of this? I'd visit the lake on weekends and get a better job than Seven Eleven and I—I would say I'm sorry to Euclid, I would tell him I'll do better. I'll hold us up. It's not over. I can salvage this. Please. I would do it all better. "Please," I sign, "not now. Not tonight. Please, just not tonight."

Please.

please.

please

























Devotion is two headlights in the dark.

Devotion is fear of God.

Devotion is fear of death.

Devotion is the foundation of a Room.

Devotion is stumbling without reason.

Devotion is hands against hands.

Devotion is rebirth as a corpse.

Devotion is a rubbing sensation.

Devotion is a falling sensation.

Devotion is a star.

Devotion is flashing red and white and red and white and

Devotion is a killed animal in a cistern.

Devotion is being loved wholly.

Devotion is being strangled terribly.

Devotion is years of investment.

Devotion is life with the eyes removed.

Devotion is nine tenths nothing by volume.

Devotion is a chemical reaction that wells up in the guts.

Devotion is a chain reaction that destroys all it touches.

Devotion is staring across the room.

Devotion is wordless and meaningless.

Devotion is meaning itself.

Devotion is anything that insists upon itself.

Devotion is a reason to exist.

Devotion is a star.

Devotion is tall.

Devotion is speaking.

Devotion is signing.

Devotion is silent.

Devotion is anger.

Devotion is infighting.

Devotion is breathing.

Devotion is nameless.

Devotion is a star.





























































But I am not taken away.

Instead when I wake up out of my panic I am half of myself off of the bench—or no, I am completely myself, all of my body parts, but my organs have exploded out of my mouth from terror—no, no, I am intact. I can't stop coughing and heaving and where is the air I used to have? I look up and the night is persistent and the trees still breathe but I have not made sure that this is still Michigan and in fact I think I have been gone for a very long time.

- - -

I am crawling to bed... one of the bedrooms, it doesn't quite matter, and my legs are unsteady so I am constantly stumbling forward through the dim hallways. I pass many other rooms and my eyes ache and I still keep thinking, am I dead? No, no, something worse. No, no, something better. I promise. Euclid, are you there? I don't see him in the halls or in the foyer. I travel north then west further into the bowels of the house and reach that bedroom, whichever is open. They're all open all of the time. You have enough beds for all these people, you should take care of them. When you close your eyes you shall wake up in the entrance. My hands are trembling like they are not attached to me. I keep thinking I'm gone. Am I here? Euclid, are you here? Here or there? Are you there or just resting? And the door caves in on itself and allows me inside where I flick the light on and shut the door and land on the bed limply and sleep for eleven hours.

Amidst this I dream. I have not ever dreamt in His house so I will recount the things that I dreamt about even though I think, in all ways, the physical space I inhabit with His presence is more dreamlike than what my mind can conjure. But regardless,

it begins where else but a Room? Maybe this is my own. Actually I am certain that it is a Room below my own apartment in Austin. The Room below my apartment is where all the things fell that I forgot. Most of all, planted sideways on a battered pillowcase I brought from my old bedroom, I see an orange pill bottle which says Lexapro. And I feel a little anguish for whoever has lost this because the existence of something in a Room necessarily implies that either it is unnecessary or necessary but forgotten. Or is there a difference between those two things? One time I spent two weeks having forgotten to take my medicine. I was delirious and shaky and my head wouldn't stay on straight. Vertigo is the sensory word for it. This bottle of Lexapro is on the pillowcase in the Room below the apartment below a falling sky, it is raining outside, it is April again, and the bottle is of course every ounce of vertigo in my guts. I rush to the bathroom. It's the previous December again. It is that day much later when I found the dead thing in the cistern and I was trying to throw up all day, all day, can you imagine how often I have thrown up in my life? I have been reaching into my body and taking things out. It is raining outside and inside is a little hole in the floor, pinhole, and you fall through it and here you are in a Room where forgotten things go.

In dreams there is no uncertainty as to where things come from. Nothing is homeless. Similarly in the Room below His house I have always been struck with the sensation that, in spite of having been abandoned, each object knows its origin. And so does He. And He would often tell me as if it were as apparent as anything. Well why did Lone Star Lanes fall through the world? Why it and not something else?

Then He would give a look—is this look real, is this memory real?—and tell me, well why are you you and not somebody else? I tell Him I was born with a hearing defect, and then later, very much later, I am staring at the ceiling and telling Euclid, no, it was no defect. Nobody made you. You have no origin. You have no home. Then His hands appear in darkness and God's finger asks to take mine—this is the dream again. In the dream the darkness is pervasive and I am squealing in agony, where did my Lexapro go? Did I forget it? And I have no origin and no home, do I? And He tells me, you are you and not somebody else. Nobody made you. You have no origin. You have no home. Then His hands appear in darkness and I take His lead all the way back home. Walk with me. Walk with me. Vertigo. Did you forget something? Yes, darling, you did. You forgot Him a lot of times a lot of times. You keep running from this fact. This is still the dream. I am sane I am sober I am safe. I don't feel safe right now but I can't leave the dream because it's real. I wake up for four minutes and go back to bed because He is in my thoughts, sprinting, or is he floating? I am back in it and have a second dream much shorter than the first. In about fifteen minutes Max will be over to pick me up from Seven Eleven after my shift ends. I don't need that. I had a car when I worked at Seven Eleven—I had a Honda Civic at the time, ha ha, so why is Max picking me up? Max is picking me up to take me to His house in the woods. He's looking at me through the windshield a mile away with city blocks peeling apart to the left and right. I once told Max that I considered him my best friend and then paused and said (out loud) well I don't mean to be too easily attached to somebody. I know I'm just your roommate. He isn't here right now. I never apologized and never will. But worst of all I made you trust me a little bit and harmed you for it. Why? And he answers but I can't hear him. I wake up again and fall back asleep. One last dream which lasts only a few minutes at most, I'm hardly sure how. I am holding His arms and stopping Him from falling backwards through the skylight. Inside His house are a great number of people who He loves. Don't go in there. I know you will hurt them. He appears short of stature, shorter than me, and behind His back is a dagger. Hello? I bury my snout in Him. We are not on the skylight anymore. We are in a great and unending cloud. You know that if you are alone you are not alone. You know that if you are hopeless you are not hopeless. At the end of every hallway I will be there. Now imagine that you die. I would take you even then, darling. Hello again, and it will be like old times. Do you remember? No, because it did not happen to you, but it did happen to me. I spent many years of my life feeling Self-Absorbed, and Self-Important. As with all things I am trying to interrogate this by reading it. The words are so unkempt darling. Actually can you retrieve the microfiche? No, I can't retrieve the microfiche, it is the size of a Room. Size rarely matters. Place rarely matters. Will you go back there in those woods? The pine tree is oozing sap and the road is melting asphalt. I keep feeling like I'm sinking into the road back to your home, Tabi. I keep trying to figure out what's memory and what's imagination. Is this a dream? Darling what matters is that I will be here. I have never told you this part. And perhaps never will. But listen close: "I love you." And that love has begun eating at me, darling, it is a ravenous thing. It has teeth and claws serrated, and where it bites I feel myself rotting away. When I look at Him I do not get such an impression. Would you like to be held? Oh, He always phrases it like this! Be held. Behold. Parallels, darling. It's all flashing red and white. Blood and wool again. Again again. Please, Euclid, take stock of your body. Euclid isn't my name right now. Still, take stock. Take stock of your legs and arms and have I ever told you this part? Maybe I will one day. I will give you something that you can't hold. I will tell you, "I will not hurt you anymore." How long is this going to last? Hold on. I will tell you in song. I'm Deaf. Right. I keep forgetting. My hands are fickle memory. I feel as if your whole self is fickle memory. Ha. That too. The shape of the dagger in the light again. Parallels, darling. Take stock. I did. I am all here. I am all myself. I am myself and only myself. The dream ends.

No, I didn't suffer physical abuse, but I definitely showed signs of some kind of abuse. I ended up rebuffing Him a lot except when I was really antsy or horny or whatever. Then we'd have a honeymoon period and those were good times always. Change my body, like what do you mean? Oh—oh God yeah it's hard to admit that to somebody but yes. Uh, a bird. Crow. I don't really know how to answer that question. What about you? No, you told me you became a goat person, sorry, I meant how are you doing? It's okay that it's complicated, it's all complicated, hah. Is His house still upstate? I couldn't tell either. The east coast all looks the same from just a skylight. No shit! It wasn't Michigan for me. Okay, I promise. I'm long past that stage of my life. Can I tell you about the guy I'm seeing right now? Okay, then hell yeah.

We met in a bar. Although I had like known him beforehand we just happened to meet in a bar, actually it was karaoke night at, uh, The Swan, and I was like, oh hey, aren't you Andrea's friend? I asked him if I looked like a crow. He has this amazing long black hair, he's so soft-spoken too, like I just couldn't stop doting all over him and making him laugh. Anyway we took the train home and I told him I was gay and maybe overshared a little about Genuine. Yep nice catch. Though He was not always genuine, haha. Anyway this guy—Jackson—kissed me out of the blue and we had the funniest gayest stupid interactions for like five hours and fell asleep on the floor of my apartment. Aw I'm glad to hear it. Think about it this way, Faust: you still have completely unknowable years ahead of you. But... again I wasn't ever physically abused and you're basically saying you were. You wanna get out of there? You'll figure it out eventually. At least I bet ya will, the way you're talking. Yeah, but you're right. Different lives and the same.

Funnily enough I saw your message because Jackson thought it reminded him of me and he showed it to me. He was on 4chan I think. Nooo thank god he's not that kind of guy. At least not yet. Yup I'll fuck off if he gets bad haha. Thank you. You've been asking a lot about me. What's your name for Him anyway? Oh, I get it. Funny.

I promise I won't! I honestly haven't felt the urge since I got out of there. I don't even remember why I was upstate in such a bad state of mind, when I first went. Probably just finished visiting my aunt, I might have been kind of suicidal at the time... and even now I'd be lying if I said I didn't think about Him sometimes. When I remember.

He didn't ever ask me to think about Him but He did tell me how His whole mythology works, so I felt kind of obligated. I don't wanna get into that whole thing right now.

Yeah. Oh, that's all good, I gotta go. But we can talk anytime!



I am staring at these words on a laptop and I can't wipe the grin off of my face. I have long been low-capacity on social interactions besides His but this sticks out to me, these words that we can talk anytime and I don't feel like I am the little broken porcelain doll at the bottom of a bottomless pit anymore, at least not right this moment. My fur is on electric ends. It's been only four days of posting the message and we already got this person, this person calling himself Almond online, sending something friendly (and verifiably real) to my burner email. Also we have gotten ourselves banned on a lot of websites and we keep having to make sockpuppets. He finds this very funny. I have started finding it very funny too, though as somebody who was once addicted to the Internet it still makes me wince when I get an email telling me that I'm kicked off a website. Old habits, but He finds it a neat poetry of sorts. "You are many-faced online," He signed, "looking for faces you can't see." He is in the same room as me—the foyer—but not looming over my shoulder. I wouldn't have liked that. I'm hugging a great cotton pillow and reading the words on the laptop screen and He just relishes my smile, sat a small distance away on an adjoining sofa, reading something that hovers above His head. It is moments like this that I remember for a very long time and very fondly. It's about Him but He is not the only reason I'm happy, and it's comforting to have that security.

"I'm extremely glad you got Almond, of all people," He signs. "Almond is sweet as a sugar pie. I actually imagined I'd never get to see him again. In fact I still won't, but now I know he's doing alright. I worry so much."

I give Him some light from my grin. "Seems like he's doing fantastic. Even out of context it's nice."

We've been here a while today. Early in the day it was a little foggy out and the skylight collects a few leaves but now it is a bright and gleaming noon and light scatters in beautiful eggshell to every corner of the foyer and every bookcase is illuminated but the illumination, of course, makes the titles of the books difficult to make out, and especially the authors. I reckon it's a little absent of old mysticists right now. If I painted one of my tiny portraits of the foyer's appearance at this very moment—excellent idea, actually—I would draw the rows and rows of tomes just blank, blank and nothing else, as if He were collecting nothing but homeopathy. Then again it is not entirely a stray from the truth to call His library a little bit of a placebo. He often has good reading material, but the vast majority of it really isn't for me. Maybe it's for Euclid.

Euclid is in the kitchen. Doesn't normally cook, as I've said, but he offered tonight. Him and I still don't really exchange words, any words whatsoever, so I just nodded and waved from all the way on the sofa while He suggested what Euclid should cook. I think he's trying to pick up a hobby to get obsessed with like mine. Although I haven't painted the last few days. Isn't it meant to be an outlet for this worry? No, but after that night on the bench I have been sleeping in my own bed and I do not feel like I am being stolen away to the Room above His house, or like I am a whole new self in the morning. In fact I do not need to trim my fur every time I wake up. It stays cut down.

And I have been feeling a little nicer.

Able to keep track of time.

The mornings are still harsh.

Actually I feel as if there should be some fanfare after Almond sent that email and we started talking but nonetheless I still have a burning in me, a fire turning over, which insists without words that I ought to keep spreading the message, that I ought to see more, that I ought to ask more, that I ought to understand more. After all He has known many people and some may have seen closer to Him than others. And although Almond has gotten away in body and mind and makes me feel warm to think about, the fire is not warm. The fire is eating.

I have to lay my head back against the sofa now.



His hands have moved fast and the kitchen is a mess and he imprints upon the stovetop and cabinets his shape as an afterimage but also in this shape I see him without a smile or a frown but a great intensity that reminds me of myself of course, and in this he has drawn up some eleven plates and bowls together which form a meal he is utterly proud of. In his expression I see pride for certain. Who else would smile only when he feels validated? And I smile back because it's easy. "I moved all the shrimp from my bowl to your bowls," he signs. "I'm half full, I've been eating all evening." Of course jambalaya is a one-pot deal so the extra dishes are whatever other mixed accouterments he's built in that kitchen and He smiles wide and is astonished and I'm thankful, but Euclid sits across the table from me and we keep our words short. It would be impractical (as I have implied) for us to not talk at all but it's so bare minimum, so faint that it may as well be semaphore. See the shape at the table again: an unfinished triangle. You cannot draw that line across. In some bowls he has diced peppers and onions and garlic into something mediterranean and in another bowl he has something creamy for a melted-together pile of nachos, and there's so much sliced cornbread in a pile there, and of course we won't finish this all in one night so he has already prepared some Tupperware for quarantining the leftovers. And he points over at a communal plate near the center of the dining table. "Jalapeno jelly and cream cheese on crackers here, honey," he signs to Him. He started using that word to refer to Euclid last month, honey. I think honey is sickly-sweet. "You need to try them. The jelly is from Port Street Market. Remember picking it up?"

"Of course." And He is flush in the face with elation. "Of course I do, I was the one begging to try it, you know I've been dying for something sweet and spicy. Crackers are the best way?"

"They're a way." Euclid laughs under himself, and then he says something out loud that I can't make out. He signs, for my courtesy, "we have a whole jar so we'll try everything."

And I look at him and he looks at me and I tell him,

"Thanks for cooking."

And he nods.

Where did the parts of this food come from? Except that answer is comically difficult to find on the best of days. Jambalaya is not my food in the way that I suppose pepper jelly is my food and Euclid's food, in that I used to make it with my dad when I was a little kid, but instead it is a pidgin food that I picked up cooking on especially lavish nights in Grand Rapids and, more than once, in His house. It belongs to a culture I wasn't actually present for, but then again the world is quite big and maybe that is the best way to describe the dish: it is sort of Spanish, sort of French, and entirely American, from Louisiana, which again is not my place. Even still it reminds me of a few bright spots being Max's roommate and compensating a little bit for my tendency to weigh him down. I compensated for being myself by making him dinner, and sometimes it was jambalaya, a few times when I wanted to splurge. Though at that time Max had two roommates including myself and I was less of a shadow on him. Have I told you anything about jambalaya's material components yet? It is delicious. I don't want to elaborate. My head is in steam. Euclid made it too hot, but to be clear too hot is the precisely correct temperature. I am gnawing on shrimp like my teeth were made for it. I wonder if He made my teeth sharp as He crafted me from soil because He knew the future. After all I don't find the concept of eating grass appealing. I can't think about cud right now. I am shoveling rice into my maw.

"Careful," Euclid signs, giggling to himself, "eat around the table too. If you can."

And I nod.

I wonder if you're doing okay in there.

I didn't do what I said I would. I didn't ask you how you were doing lately. I still haven't asked.

I have my life still and I never asked.

To my right He takes a deep breath. He doesn't eat as quickly as me but He has a greater appetite and has not paused, digging His fork into His bowl and mixing his meal with other bowls and, of course, He is sticking whole crackers into his mouth and grinning wide, and now He is so exhausted with food-happiness and still eating more. And He looks at Euclid and

and

is there something there between them? Is there really? Is it different than last time?

I want there to be something there. Magical thinking.

Please. I want it to be possible.

I want it to be real.



I am damn full on the couch now. Hands on my belly and head on a down pillow and Euclid and Him talking over to the left of me, and I can still taste the jalapenos and Cajun seasoning and shrimp all swirling on my tongue and I have to keep my jaw open to air it out, and I'm happy like this. Happy is a strong word but it doesn't have to mean all the things I like to pretend it does. I ate a good meal and didn't have to cook. Maybe that's good. Maybe I could just cook on odd-numbered nights and Euclid cooks on even-numbered ones and he'll make all the best stuff and it has leftovers so maybe he cooks two nights out of three instead, and I just get to fill in the gaps. Would you be okay with that? I want to leave you room to be yourself. I'm not even talking right now I'm just staring up and murmuring happily while my stomach puffs out full of protein. "Thanks for cooking," I sign again at the ceiling, at the skylight, at nobody.

I feel something collide with my face and when I turn left Euclid is laughing his ass off because he threw a tiny chunk of cornbread at me. I give him a played-up look. "You're welcome," he signs. "Glad you enjoyed it."

I am tempted to blow him off and just nod again but, in all honesty, it takes a lot of stubborn effort to live with somebody and not talk to them at all. I have not forgiven him but then again I don't think I'm in the right. Maybe it's okay to have a conversation right now. Just out of convenience. "Do you wanna start cooking more nights?"

And he nods instantly, and he has a stupid beam on his face. "Yes! If I'm not stepping on your toes at all."

"Word choice," I tell him. He rolls his eyes and over on the other sofa chair He is snickering. I sign, "No, you're really not. I'm happy to see you enjoying yourself."

"Well, thank you." Euclid shrugs. "You're sure?"

"I'm sure. Promise."

Truthfully I don't know. I don't know anything anymore. I just settle my head back into that nice divot in the pillow and stare back at the ceiling. Out of the corner of my eye I see that Euclid is talking again, but I am unsure if He can hear him. And I rest.



I remember this next part vividly, and I'm trying to hold onto it. It's slipping away but I cannot let it slip away. What else would I have left?

I wake up with a dry mouth again and I don't even realize I slept and He is gone but when I get up I see Euclid in the kitchen in a dour state and I approach and don't know where it wells up in me but I know something is wrong so I embrace him and he puts down the frying pan in his hand shakily and I feel his breath get taken away and when I hug him and after I pull away I notice that he looks unwell, deeply unwell, set back in those eyes of his. He has been crying.

Then he tells me this: Things have been going so perfectly lately

that I now know that they are going to fall apart. I had a dream last night, a foul and endless and all-encompassing dream,

but it was utterly lucid in such a way that you have never been.

I dreamt that Him and I were stuck out in this place, Puerto Vallarta, sunning and loitering near a breakfast spot on a beach where we had engorged ourselves on fresh sweet and sour fruits orange and green and red and we were drooling still with syrup,

and at this moment I looked Him in the eyes sat back across a wooden chair with slats which were digging into my back. And He asked me

do you want this for the rest of your life?

I told Him, yes, and then I told Him I love you. I love you and I mean it, I finally mean it. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I want to feel like I am on an adventure at all hours of the day.



And as Euclid is signing and telling me his story my mind drifts aimlessly and ponderously as if it has done something wrong, and down a winding trail near Lake Michigan I find myself in the same spot as him but there is no God by me and the skies have opened up to reveal a long, trailing empty. Euclid goes on.



I took His hand and felt myself lifted up across the ocean and for hours and hours and then years we spent our lives on open waters studying fish and birds and grazing insects and we saw incredible things and I told Him I loved Him again and He had the most beautiful smile in the universe.

But now I know that things are wrong.

Now I am completely without hope.

"You want me to make you something to eat?"



He snaps out of his trance. "No, it's alright. I'm making a grilled cheese sandwich for myself. Sorry for saying all this to you. I know you want a lot more space."

"It's okay," I sign.

"Yeah?"

"It's completely alright. I've been worried about you and felt like I shouldn't talk to you on principle."

"Well," he signs, "you can." He pauses a long time, he fishes a spatula off the counter and uses it to flip the sandwich he's cooking, and for a second we are both suspended in air and then he asks me very abruptly,

"What is on the computer? What is the message? He told me but He didn't explain any of the details."

And when Euclid asks this, I don't explain it either. I tell him I wrote it just for my own sake. And I eventually wander away with my head aching from exhaustion and I don't find water.



In truth I wrote the message in a stupor. It is about His house and His body, it damns Him and insults His backwards sort of logic, it professes that I feel as if I have been abused but cannot find the wounds, but it nonetheless expresses a love, a care, a feeling of being home. Yes, I used that word 'love' in the message and don't know how to remove it from my thoughts because, in all, it can't ever really go anywhere even after being buried under so many layers of pretend. I want to love. I want love to reach me. I want love to be as far away from Him as physically possible but His house is only so large and the courtyard fades into the trees until it is untamed, immaterial, and without place. And Euclid can love Him. Euclid can find it in himself or at least that is what is going on right this moment.

And now it is starting to snake into me, it is making my hands tremble down every hallway, and I find myself walking around in the dark with the worst thought on my mind. Almond—far away Almond in New York—says that he's in love with a guy named Jackson with long black hair and he uses the word 'gay' to express a sort of intimacy that is utterly vulnerable. A gay relationship is fragile because of how easily we get killed. Killed, I said. Killed and then brought down to a Room below the world such that we are forgotten utterly. Almond is surviving at least for now. Almond is okay at least for now. Almond is sweet like a sugar pie at least for now.

But His care is not fragile, not temporary. It is a flame that cannot be snuffed. He would not relent. There is no 'for now.'

His love is not going to die.

His love is completely, unfathomably vast, and perhaps endless, and He would not tire of being tired. In the woods he is drooling with pride.

I know where your fear comes from. I know that you are dotted with wounds you can't find.

He opens his arms wide.



Almond





would you







come back









to His house?













Of course not, I already told you.



















You asked me to promise I wouldn't.























And besides that fact,



























Jackson is treating me well.



































I have no reason to leave.

















































for now

Devotion wakes me up hyperventilating out of a swirling violent nightmare again—God all my dreams are fucking violent lately being torn apart limb from limb and screeching with abject anger at a red sky and all the milky blood and pus and urea seeping out of a half-rotting body with tendons snapping help me God please God help me help help me God but I wake up—devotion wakes me up with a headache and a heartache and I pile out of bed on repeat and the floor feels like Tabi's wool and I nearly throw up and bring myself upright again with the bed for comfort. There's a thumping in the floor and the feeling of a presence passing by the bedroom door. Devotion seethes through my veins and rips across my fur and explodes out of my skin. Devotion is an intense heartbeat that I can feel like stabs in my throat. Two hundred beats per minute. Spin glass is a form of magnetism so disconnected from order that it can only be understood as forced randomness wherein individual particles have 'spin' at values which don't correspond. Like strangers. They hate each other in there. Comparison is made to glass because when quartz is melted down and reformed it is no longer crystalline. When you mold anyone or anything into a given shape from the one it was born into then every single layer of the material is wrong and unpredictable, same as where it got poured into the mold hot and steaming, just where the pieces lay, just where the pieces may. Then spin glass is actually just like silica glass because it is stable only because it refuses to change and not because of any structural stability inherent to chaos. It is called 'metastability' because it only implies stubbornness, or else an inability to imagine anything else. Isn't that what stability is in a physical sense? Isn't a bridge stable because it doesn't want to fall? Then again a knife is stable too. All the atoms are very attached to one another and hold still and refuse to change because the status quo is too powerful unless great heat is applied, and until then see the knife go in and out of a chest and reduce it from screaming to rubble. Yes: this is the problem with me. I am unable to imagine. Oh God I am forgetting something, there's a fucking hole in me, devotion is blood seeping out of a wound I can't find. Get up. GET UP. I stumble into the bathroom and switch the light on and I think this might have been somebody else's hair brush maybe Cav's and I wonder if we both slept here last night but no, he's been in a stupor the past few days, all fascinated by Tabi, of course it's Tabi, always making people trail him and treat him like a lord. No, Cav's hair brush all matted with fuzz is obviously just something he forgot. I push it to the corner of the counter and slap water from the sink all over my face and then my naked body and take deep heaving breaths and pant and now I'm dripping all across the floor.

Look at yourself. There is an angry and frantic creature in the mirror there all guilty for no reason and all useless even though he is in the happiest place in the world. Go masturbate before you leave your room you don't want to fall for him, always something I tell people when they arrive, don't fall for him too often, don't you want to be functioning? Maybe you don't. Heart attack and I lean forward and grind my teeth and yell out strangely and dry myself off with a towel hung over the shower and scamper to find clothes again.

I dress up in pastel whites and blues, and a purple blouse, and long pale stockings with garters, and that half-remembered sun hat battered by being folded in a drawer, and I stare at myself again in the mirror and how long has it been?

No answering that. No answer could satisfy. I think about what if it were a month or a year or ten years but the fact is that I've had time scooped out of myself again. And it gets me panting and shuddering with anger. Fuck you. Fuck you who did a single thing to me. I didn't deserve this. I didn't want this. What is wrong with you now? What's wrong with you? I stare at the door and brush back my fur and seat the sun hat further on my horns and exhale and it feels like there's rocks in my throat, but memory assures me that nothing is wrong with me and I'm doing just fine, rather well in fact, rather wonderfully, finally at a good place in my life, et cetera. You ever see a goat as dumb as this one. I open the door inward and step outside and don't close it after me.

His house, Tabi's house, is invulnerable now. There are no scratch marks no track marks no sun spots, and the carpet is kempt like mowed grass, all soft underfoot, all unremarkable and fuzzy. The landscape is six thousand square miles of flower farms where a plane could land and I have to keep my mind low in the troposphere to keep from drowning in cloud cover. Yet in turn in spite of the plushness of the carpet and the slickness of the wood I have come to use the word 'bunker' for this place in the woods because of how it is used to insulate its inhabitants which, as of late, have been a dozen human beings shaped half like animals hiding from the world for many a reason. My steps are heavy and I feel as if I have some kind of fury in me refusing to stay its hand. My hands are refusing to stay.

Shuddering. There are lightning bugs in my palms. I hardly have the breath to get to the end of the hallway. I smell the house before I've turned the corner.

See it now as it is with many subjects on canvas burning in firelight.

A hall, his foyer, with walls upon walls of books and sun's eyes pooling into it all like ambrosia;

and the brightness and astounding fury of it is not masking any of the detail, as sharp shadows bring it all into a sober beauty as if cast out of the cover of some great novel;

and with this my steps become light again and I bear witness to it;

a great unified hotel, where eleven people reside and the furniture is awash with flopped-over clothing and a smell of sex and exhaustion and heat and tiring compulsion;

where upon a kitchen counter a bare-bottomed man flips up on his smartphone and mugs of coffee expunge steam into a worldly atmosphere such that it is all so deeply hot and muggy;

where mixed together like a pile of fuzzy and furry limbs two men curl into their own shapes atop a sofa chair and wait for dawn but dawn has already come;

where with bodies lumped together on a plush-pillowed couch with laptops alight three men have the television on but largely have forgotten why it is here;

where one man spots me with blackened eyes tired from a night half-slept and waves with his stocky limbs all curled up on a stool beside the kitchen and his onyx feathers groomed but not all fully known;

where two mulling around at the corner nook reading standing up notice me and perk up and one of them signs "Hey! Good morning!" in sign that is perfect; all stuck running in place;

where there are no signs, no markers, no numbers, and yet the world is so much easier to understand, craggy and thorny and warm, so warm, so warm.

It is nine AM, as it always is when I wake.

It is my responsibility to be alive.

It is a fantasy that turns over unending.

Bags of luggage splay about the foyer like dissected carcasses sunning and rotting mostly gone but intact for the courtesy of an exit route. Plates and tiny bowls and coffee mugs dot the room always a day or two old and only carried the twenty steps to the kitchen on an uneven tempo. The furniture has all been thrown about every-which-way and no longer maps to beauty but to convenience. The air is oppressive and the floor a maze of clean debris, and as my eyes trail across it all, frozen in body and in pose, I see him.



You have met Tabi. The walls have gone sour and the world is a sauna surrounding him and in his worked musculature and in his matted wool I see a being who is finally as tired as he wishes to be. His limbs are lithe and his head tilted down, and his ears droop, and his gaze remains square on me. There is an expression stricken on him like a smile, but only like a smile. Divots of darkened skin hold his eyes aloft. He is naked but for two features: eyeliner applied such as to bring out a certain authority in him, applied in black and curling up his face; two tabi socks tight against his calves so as to hold up on his digitigrade legs. His pinkish penis hangs dull between his thighs and a spot of wear has applied itself to his stomach shaped like where a head might rest. He saw me long before I saw him.



I give him acknowledgment and in turn he allows me passage into the kitchen and as soon as I make that rightward turn I am followed by another man.

Jay is the other person in the house who cooks but I do not really know what drives him to do it; he has never managed to learn ASL beyond the simplest of things but he writes fast on little slips of yellow paper and allows me a response and in that way at least gives me the opportunity to talk to him. I do not know very much about him at all but he looks like a rat, or a tall rodent of some kind walking around on two legs. His hairs are kempt and gray and his eyes wizened and yet he has the demeanor of someone right out of college, aimless but on edge, trying to attend to the world. By the time we convene and he tells me good morning and I tell him good morning, most of the other men in the house have risen. They are all chattering amongst themselves they approach the spot where a marble-topped island separates the foyer from this kitchen, and they are leaving instructions for what they would like for breakfast. Routine. Jay and I split labor but we both need to know what to cook and the meal of the day today is eggs on toast.

Two men order in ASL. Gaiman and Almond are fluent enough at this point. Bacon, fried eggs, buttered toast. Fried eggs, buttered toast. "Do we have any rye bread?"

"Always," I tell Almond, and I offer him a little smile. His real name out here isn't Almond but that's how I met him so that's the name I use in my head. Gaiman's real name probably isn't Gaiman either, another online name but another good one. He resembles a crocodile or an alligator I don't know which. He is from São Paulo but at some point early in his life—as I gathered—he moved to California then eventually Colorado with a family member, and one of his sisters was Deaf so he learned Libras growing up, and so ASL wasn't as hard a transition. Really he is one of the few people who I feel is actually pretty fluent in the way that Tabi never was—fluency is what makes me feel less alone. Almond learned ASL starting here and is clever enough to be good at it fast, but not as good as Gaiman, but of course I am always rooting for Almond because I feel as if he is doing his best, always, always and with everything. New York for his whole life, mostly Brooklyn, family upstate. Wandered here after his breakup or during it, so I am told.

The other six men do not know any sign language at all, or only token efforts. One orders in ASL but poorly: Eggs, toast. I have to ask Cav how he would like his eggs and he freezes up and writes down 'over easy' and apologizes with his hands over and over. I remind him to try fingerspelling when he can't find the words and he agrees and tries to cool down his panic. Cav looks like a mule deer, ears perked up large. I will get into him later but for now that's adequate information.

Two of them—they were watching the television earlier—enter the kitchen alongside Jay and I; there's David who pulls out an apple and a banana from a bowl and some still-sour strawberries from the fridge and cuts himself up a bowl full of fruit all on his own because he never really wants what everyone else wants. He is a bat but not a fruit bat, although I suppose he's gay enough to be one, but he has the hognose of a vampire bat and does not hardly talk to another person in the house save for Tabi, always Tabi. Then sliding in behind us is Ives who gets himself a bowl of Rice Krispies and kisses Jay and makes the whole process sluggish but at least he doesn't particularly get in my way; he is a bug, maybe a beetle crossed with a praying mantis, but of course with two standing-up legs and a bunch of extra hands. The house is awash in bodily euphoria and undue affection that should somehow deplete eventually, but we are instead drowning in an endless honeymoon of hands, kisses, thank-yous. There has never been an argument in his house longer than a few words.

David is Finnish—met Tabi on a trip he described as heavenly, found the house beneath the woods—he is forty years old. Still giddy about a Quake tournament he won in 2002 though. Ives and Jay were the people who left the house right before I arrived. They are from Montréal and younger than me.

Barry who had his ass on the counter earlier asks for scrambled eggs and salmon on toast and do we have avocado that's any good? I write yes. He writes good. He thanks me with a big smile. He is large, easily distracted, he is a cat and has fuzzy fur all on end as if driven by static electricity, although behind his eyes I see a lack of understanding of me or what I am. He has rarely talked to me, usually just past me. I don't know where he's from or what he does besides fuck Tabi and scroll through videos on his phone. On occasion he makes food—lavish dinners that take four hours—but it's rare. He's chattering with everyone all at once about something I don't follow.

And in general when these men talk they talk to each other out loud and I couldn't have the slightest hope of understanding them. There are no lips to read, not really. There is nary a cursory effort to translate the conversation—what would they even say? Yes we talked about this and that and this and that and so on and you weren't there for any of it. I'll just be here in the kitchen. Far over their heads I feel Tabi's presence but can't see him behind them all in their swarm.

Then there is Kim who gets fried eggs on buttered toast and Lewis who gets the same and I reckon they're just trying to not make a fuss. Lewis has immaculate fuzzy white and purple fur and I don't even know what he's supposed to be. He was popular online and apparently talks loudly, talks romantically. Kim is a hyena or a human who looks like one and he is tall and intense and, besides that, I know practically nothing about him. Don't I know practically nothing about all these people? I know how they look naked, how they look when happy, how they look when exhausted. I know only their effect on canvas. In those fuzzy brush strokes I derive no understanding.

In all I feel that there are too many people to keep track of or care about deeply. Although I think that's an unhelpful line of reasoning, it does explain how poorly I know most of them. It isn't like I don't know how they function. I think they are worthy of painting—they have changed their bodies like I did, or specifically Tabi changed their bodies like he changed mine, all into furry shapes, all mapping to the sensory experience that has tended to bring people here—the want to be in a body that fits your wants. In that way I can appreciate the aestheticism of the house. There are men in pose at all times and they are more beautiful, more themselves, than before Tabi found them. But it is not my house anymore, not really, not my living environment, not one that I am welcome in to the degree that they are all welcome in it.

Then again I am not sure anyone is more welcome than the other. I am simply easy to ostracize. I'm cooking eggs now.

For Gaiman I add hollandaise. It's something he loves but never remembers to ask for. Almond gets some microwaveable fries—I'm not sure why he likes this brand so much but he lights up when we pick it up from the Room—and for Barry I cook his eggs a little underdone because I am guessing he's a purist who hates overcooked eggs, but then again he is rare to complain. Kim salts his eggs no matter how much I season them and Cav compliments everything about my cooking even if I mess something up. He once wrote that he actually likes burnt toast but if he's serious he should phrase it differently.

In all the process takes fifteen minutes. Jay handles the toast and those fries and I handle all the eggs and it fills my vision with steam and burning oil and butter and the scent of stupefying protein and umami and I stare into the pan and it stares back at me; two eggs two pieces of toast per order so two frying pans at once and splitting the scrambled eggs and my hand is trembling and is anyone out there?

Plate.

I serve Lewis and he goes flush and waves at me up close. Then I serve Kim and he re-salts his eggs. Then Barry with avocado, then Cav eggs over easy, then Gaiman with bacon and hollandaise, and Almond with fries, and David and Ives already served themselves, and Jay and I put together his meal last, and it's over.

I don't know what I'm looking at.

I know only their effects on canvas. Do you even remember which names correspond to which people? I've given too much. I've been given too much.

A dream with too many elements. I would call it busy but it isn't getting anything done.

Now it can be seen: a collection of animals lurking on two legs, a collection of human beings stuck and moving, a house in a stinking orgy. Two men of fur and fuzzy chitin continue to grope. I see a cat messing around with a hyena, then a crow, and Almond reciprocates, he's happy for touch, and they all have plates aboard their hands and are eating with speed and oily hands and all the hard work evaporates and it's like Jay forgets he worked on it because he doesn't savor a single bite, and Lewis cracks a joke, and Gaiman signs it to me so I smile. But my eyes are actually on somebody else.

Through all this he hovers unmoving staring back at me.

His shape reminds me of stress. Panic. His gaze reminds me that I woke up in hell and only now am I going back to that mood. I am missing something. I haven't eaten. Don't you want to eat? I don't feel hungry. Something is devouring my insides tearing away fat organs tendons bones. Look at him. Look at Tabi and see how he holds still and then suddenly he doesn't, for the first time he moves.

He floats to the entrance of the kitchen before I've realized. And he signs, "Darling, could I make you something?"

"Yeah." I lower a little and feel myself smile. "That would be nice."

He comes closer and offers his hand. I take it. "Good."



I suppose there has not been a lot of change between us after all. There are boundaries and rules and maybe aesthetic differences but the time has done little to make myself and Tabi interact in new ways. Now and then I have treated him like a god, I was very obsessed with that at one point, but now I'm tired and overwhelmed and sometimes in the tiniest voice at the bottom of an oceanic trench I whisper that I love him, I love you still, and I do not need to devote myself to him because he has nine other men to treat him like a deity. I see how they ogle him as he passes. I see how they protrude thirst. Sometimes somebody like Kim or David will just start masturbating in front of him and Tabi doesn't mind and nobody else protests and sometimes they all get flustered and there is a lot of feverish and impulsive and shameful masturbation in his house; lust overlapping joy overlapping embarrassment and sometimes Tabi simply floats in the center of the foyer and enjoys the company and don't you see his exhaustion showing through in satisfaction? The days are made of fucking, aimless sex and I-love-you and boredom staved off by orgasm and afterglow replacing sunlight and long destitute nights of cuddling in a pile. I don't know if any of these men even know each other. Not in a real way. And then again maybe they really do, maybe there is understanding, maybe the love is real. Same as maybe our love is real, Tabi and I. It is not alone but a crowded room can, at rare moments, feel intimate.

I'm sure intimacy is the real reason they stay.

A cult works its magic on a human mind via a three-pronged attack: first is a contrast to what makes your life shit at a given moment, like your family or friends or your responsibilities or the prospect of terrible uncertain hours at Seven Eleven or, of course, a tendency to self-destruct. A contrast has to be made. In his house you do not work. You do not have to contact family, although you can, but you really won't, not often at all. In his house you don't need to take care of yourself because he will do that for you. Second is an erasure of your memory of everything else. In brief moments it will come back to you because especially in my case nothing is ever really erased, just pushed back, pushed further and further back. You will forget, or maybe choose to forget, that anything else good could ever happen. You will forget that intimacy is not unique to his house and you will forget the abject happiness that you felt sometimes outside, and you will figure that this is the only way that things can be. Third is a voice. It is not always Tabi's voice. Sometimes it is your own. Guiding you forward. Insisting that there is a plan. There is a future.

I do not know that a thing will change in the next thousand years, not in Tabi or me or any of the people he has brought into his orbit, and that is why it is so beautiful and inscrutable, and that is the plan. Paintings are not allowed to die. Paintings are not allowed to change. We are meant to hang up in a museum prettier than anything; then the museum grows; more portraits of men in bliss; gallery; superstructure; tomb.



Tabi has a recipe book. No, it's just a novel. Cat is the title. I've read this book and it is a nightmare. Typical fare for the house, for its bookshelves. There is a recipe for pancakes in Cat and he is making me blueberry pancakes. It is going to take you forever to do that.

"No it's not." He grins. "The book says twenty minutes. Can you wait?"

I am leaned up against a counter and free from the sea in the foyer. "I can."

So I wait.

He looks gaunt, is the word. Like he has burned something away in himself. I still see a remarkable beauty in him that drives me to stare but I reckon he hasn't been eating well the past couple months. Maybe he has and this is just how Tabi looks when he has a house full of people. Not even full, though. Not nearly as full as it could be, but the stomach was running on fumes before. A while back he insisted that he was happy with just me, with just a few people even, but now he is completely unable to hide his satisfaction. He has a congregation. But not quite that. Or at least he wishes it weren't.

I never let him cook for me but we'll let this one slide.

"Are you gonna get grabbed after this?" I ask.

He gives me a sly look. "Obviously. Probably Cav. The others are going to do something in the soft room if you'd like to join them."

"I'll join Cav."

"I assumed as much."

For all that Tabi professes with confidence, I think he is incurious in a deep way about some things. Cooking is, and has always been, an awkward thing for him. Not that he lacks the physicality but it never strikes him to experiment. This recipe asks him to mix dry ingredients together to make a pancake mix; he does not dare to ask me if I'd rather he uses something pre-mixed, he does not realize I'd like it better if it came right out of a box. He also does not try a different proportion than what the recipe tells him. He reads this book Cat and uses it as gospel. I suppose that's alright. We both need gospel. He mixes and mixes and smiles at me and mixes and someone calls out at him and he responds and then he gets into a conversation while mixing, and then finally feels satisfied, then puts a pan on the stove to start heating it up, doesn't even start that early, and then tests the pan with water like I taught him to, and finally mixes in some fresh blueberries into the wet mix—as late as possible, I guess to ensure the freshness he would say—throws it all on the pan in two big blobby chunks and uses a spatula to separate them. Tabi I don't care if they melt together. That makes it better. Sometimes I miss eating cheap shit for breakfast. It makes Tabi happy to cook for me but the best breakfast I've ever had was a day-old Taco Bell burrito in the fridge that I heated up after a long night of sickness and ate while crying. But this is nice too. He peels the pancakes off and piles them in missionary position atop a plate and drools syrup from Best Foods on top and, once it's sat in my hands, he signs, "Enjoy, now." He signs it like a command. Fine, I'll enjoy it. I'll enjoy it right here with you. I scrounge for a fork and keep my eyes on him.

A few brief moments when it's really just him and I. We sign too quickly for even Gaiman or Almond to pick up on.

"Am I supposed to do something today?" I ask.

He considers it. "Not that you told me."

"Can you guess for me? I feel like I forgot something."

"Sure." Tabi leans back against the counter, though of course he is still floating. He takes a deep breath and really ponders. Or at least he has a good thinking face. "Did you invite anyone to get painted? Did you invite anyone to paint? Perhaps you and Gaiman were going to go on another walk?"

"No, that's tomorrow, I thought. And I painted Cav yesterday, so."

"Were you planning to send out the message again?"

And I have to pause.

I haven't thought about the message in a while.

"No, definitely not," I eventually decide to sign. "Not in a long time, you know that."

He nods. "I've been handling it lately."

I don't know what to say. He has me frozen up. I'm in the middle of a bite. "We stopped," I tell him. "After Almond. Didn't we?"

Tabi grins and puts out his arms a little. Motioning at all the others. "Clearly not from what I can see."

"We stopped."

"I don't know why we would."

"We stopped," I sign again. My fork falls onto the plate. "Tabi, we stopped. I'm right. We decided to stop. I remember that vividly. After Almond messaged us I had a nightmare that night and woke up and said we had to stop sending it out so we stopped posting it. Because I was scared he would come here and ruin his life. I remember it perfectly."

He waits for me to finish, takes a deep breath, and his tone is very straightforward. "Yes. I remember this too. But eventually you asked him to come here."

"No."

"Yes, you did. You asked him, would you come back? Your words."

"I didn't do that. You did that." I scowl at him. Fucking cooking me blueberry pancakes and lying to me, piece of shit. Piece of shit cult leader lying to me to feel like he has control. "I wouldn't tell Almond what to do. He came on his own volition. The message is volatile, that's why we stopped sending it."

Tabi's expression sinks. There is never anger in him. "I understand," he signs, "but you certainly did ask him to come here. I do not remember exactly why. But you asked that of Almond—then Gaiman—then everyone else who emailed you. Ask Almond, he'd agree."

"I would not do that in a million years."

He just frowns and shrugs.

And I feel myself welling up. "I don't want to yell," I tell him. "I'm sorry, I don't want to yell. I want to go with you and Cav. I'm just freaking out. You know I don't forget these things."

And he nods to appease me. "Of course, darling," he signs lowly. "Of course you don't. It may easily be my own faulty recollection. It happened so fast, didn't it?"

"Yeah." I tremble. "It did."

"We don't have to talk about it right now." Tabi is smiling now, smiling slightly, or maybe it is a very large grin, maybe he knows something I don't. "You can finish eating and come with Cav and I if that's what you'd like. Or paint, if you'd like some space."

"I want to go with you."

He nods.

I eat like I've got an inferno in me.

Tabi wouldn't lie to me about this. He wouldn't but I wish he would. Our boundaries dictate that Tabi will not lie to me for any reason but wouldn't it be nicer if he were to blame for this? Imagine asking Almond, in the middle of a good thing, to leave. Imagine asking him to go steal a car and walk into the woods like I did. He had that guy, that guy, what was his name? He had a life in New York and he was gay and happy and maybe he had some rough moments but one rough moment shouldn't be enough to ruin it.

But that is the problem, isn't it? If you know Tabi's house is out in the woods somewhere, then any low spot—a breakup or abuse or a depressive streak—is enough to bring you to some very dire thoughts. What if I stopped my life in its tracks and ran away to find him? What if he picked me up out of this? I would not need to do anything anymore. I would be set. It would all be fine.

If I had sent Almond a message asking him to come, then it is my fault that he is here now.

Wasting his life.

Abandoning his family.

I don't even know what he was doing before. Maybe he's doing okay now. He likes to write poetry, I've noticed, and he shows it off, and it's all imagery of faded firelight and woods overtaking campsites; maybe it is okay that Almond is here, maybe he is happy.

"Maybe Almond is happy," I sign, mulling about with a scrap of pancake saturated with syrup.

"Of course he is."

"Maybe."

Tabi laughs. "I can't always know if people are happy, but I can tell you for certain that Almond is, at least on the large scale, at least in the terms of a soul."

"How do you ever know?"

"Because he wouldn't be happier anyplace else."

I don't know what he means, and I stare back at the plate until it devours me.

I am forgetting something. And not just would you come back to his house? but something worse, something greater, something I didn't mean to forget. If I did message Almond and Gaiman and all the others then I would feel awful about it, I would do everything in my power to blast it away from my mind. In fact now I'm doing all I can to forget it once more and never bring it up with Tabi because I'm happier when I am oblivious, I'm happier when I am oblivion. No, this isn't that. I want to remember.

There's an empty chair in the house of my mind and fire is blowing out the windows.

Then I'm done with the pancakes and scrubbing the rest of the sticky syrup down the drain and washing the plate and staring down at my hands and is there blood on me anywhere? No and hardly any in my body. All strained thin with a heartbeat racing again. I leave the plate in the dishwasher and tremble and get hard because I'm crossdressing in a house with ten other people and because I'm looking at Tabi and his socks and trying to forget, blast my mind clean, all of it gone, sex and intimacy and nothing else. "Cav is on the verge of whining," he signs, grinning.

I look over. Cav, the deer-man, has an expression like he just got lucky but instead he is beckoning Tabi forward. Legs a little crossed. Belly full of breakfast and a head of dreams. He waves.

"Alright," I sign. "Lead the way."

What kind of awful person am I? Why would I do this to Almond, to Gaiman, to Cav, to David? Why any of these people? They were living fine. Or maybe fine. Maybe some savior complex rose up in me. Oh, you're helping them. Oh, his care is so good. Reason enough to ruin their lives. I wouldn't. I swear I wouldn't. I am being lied to. I wouldn't message them. I asked them to never come back and they're here so what happened? I'm walking now. Walking with Cav. He keeps looking at me funny. We're passing by everyone else already long-done with their breakfast, and Almond gives me another little look from far off, always so far off, and I don't even catch what he's asking of me but I wish I could.

We're shuffling through the halls. Cav is looking at me and then looking down. He has this habit of staring at my legs. I guess I like it. I guess it's fun. I am tugging at my stockings and he grins stupidly and we reach an unoccupied bedroom and Tabi clicks the handle down and when he shuts the door behind us we turn into animals.



Here is the situation with Cav: Cav has a foot fetish and is decently fond of socks, sort of in the way that I am madly fond of socks. This is one of the only things him and I have in common. Cav used to play hockey and used to be a programmer and is a wine enthusiast—I have nothing of interest in any of those hobbies and Cav does not care at all about painting or cooking or... whatever it is I do all day, lounge around, mope, fuck Tabi. We have that in common. A foot fetish and a tendency to fuck Tabi. It's not like I don't like Cav. When he looks at me I get some of those butterflies in the stomach that I used to when I was really lonely back in Austin, that inclination to do something quick, go, go, go, but also I think that it would be a non-starter for me to call my friendship with Cav a relationship. I think he's just fine with that too. Nobody else in the house has a foot fetish except for him and I, so it is something borne of out of convenience and it is, at times, very intimate.

There is some obscure romance in holding someone's foot. It implies that they want you to touch them there, as it is otherwise hard to do on accident. And having a fetish—and sharing it—is a profoundly vulnerable experience. I am baring my soul. I am welcoming embarrassment and welcoming scrutiny. It makes me shaky.

Cav is shaky. Cav, you're sitting with your legs out on the bed and you have plenty of support with your hands on the comforter and with Tabi putting you in his lap. You have him for support and you're so shaky. I am putting my hands around your feet where you have put on black socks and I am giving you a massage. When he was made into a mule deer on two legs, he asked for plantigrade feet with three toes on each foot. He also asked for his feet to make him aroused when they're touched like this. And since I met him that has been all I've wanted to do with him.

Just touch his soles and make him shake.

Tabi has his arms around him, has him basically hugged and made immobile, and with a little shift of his fingers he is playing with his penis. Just little touches, little taps. Cav trembles so much that his droopy ears sway, and he is panting desperate for air, his belly and chest coming up and down, up and down, and Tabi's fingers droop by his tip again and his head comes back down, and then up again, and his jaw is agape like he has something wrong with him.

Are you close enough to feel my thoughts? Yes, barely. Through him. Are you enjoying yourself down there? I can't see past your skirt. Yeah. I'm in a good mood. I feel like I'm forgetting something. Well, don't trouble yourself when you're busy like this. Alright. Cav swirls his head around in a daze and exhales until he's empty of breath, and squeezes his hips together to try to push down on his balls; he jitters and extends his toes, now, and I have both my hands around his soles as joysticks to his soul. I am posed like I am about to pounce on him, on my knees, divots in the sheets where my legs and elbows support me, skirt hanging down and hiding me but I am erect and I am desperate and I don't want to touch myself because I won't be able to stop myself. Cav's socks are nylon. I like nylon. "I like nylon," I sign to him, awash in the moment, huffing, maw open and I am teething and drooling and Cav doesn't know what I signed but he didn't see anyway and my hand goes back to his left foot. He didn't see that, you know. I like nylon. I love nylon. I could kiss nylon. Do it, then. He likes it. Do it now, darling, don't make him wait. He knows it's coming. I feel something crack in my brain and I sink down further until my head reaches the comforter and a moan escapes me, and I want to masturbate so damn bad, and instead I crawl my face into Cav's foot upright and bury it in the warmth of his sole. And because Cav knows what I like he curls his toes into my face and scrunches up on me and squeezes me and crushes my forehead and my horns bump up against his big toe. This is pathetic. I feel pathetic. I am grunting and groaning aimlessly into a man's foot. I hardly know this man. That's why I like this. I don't have to justify myself. I am nobody to Cav. I am nobody at all and my hand goes down and brushes aside my skirt and when I reach my length it is sopping wet with precum and has escaped my panties and, fuck, fuck, fuck me I want to jerk off, but even just one touch starts getting me jittery. Darling he wants something else. He wants your feet on his groin, do you understand? Yeah. Nylon. Clear your head. You're going to be here a while.

Where nylon expresses slickness and a little coarseness, silk is only soft. It feels the best to wear and according to Cav it feels the best on one's crotch although I like all socks quite well because, again, a fetish corrupts the brain's reasoning centers. These stockings of mine are silk. I have to roll over and crawl into position, inching along with my skirt up and my length throbbing, I feel like the most awkward person in the world, but finally with my feet bare but for silk I have put myself up on Cav and use his penis as a footrest. I lay on my rear and lean back. His legs go to either side of me; he places his feet in my hands and begs me in a moment of clarity to keep going. "Keep going," he signs. That's one of the only signs he knows by heart. He knows 'keep going' and 'please' and 'more' and 'stop' and 'I love you' and it makes sense given what I know that that's all he'll ever bother learning. I'm sorry, Cav. Do I know you? Do I know you, really? Do I know you deep down? Who do you remind me of? I grip his feet and look at the sight of him curling his toes into my hands, and I press his length into his stomach, and it feels perfect. I don't know you. I don't know who you are. He starts curling up against Tabi in completely astonished delight, that face contorting into all sorts of expressions, as I grip him by his soles; he is leaking now against my socks, he is completely powerless against me. I had my body designed in a specific way when I got here too, Cav. Maybe subconsciously. Maybe deep down I wanted to be a goat but I wanted my toes to move independently. It's all fantasy. None of it makes sense. I am making him screech when I squeeze his tip between my soles and eventually he wails and taps out and tries to take a breath and like ten earthquakes he is nothing in my hands and in my feet until finally he is something, he is something tangible, he has thrown himself forward with desperation into my weight into my body and is on top of me weighing as much as a planet and he is kissing me with such fury that it feels like I'm in love but I'm not, but it feels close enough, and I grunt, and I'm smothered.

Sometimes you are overwhelmed and just feel like cuddling. It does not always make sense to fuck in ways that make sense.

God and how this dissolves now, it completely dissolves, no more boundaries no more plans, we both want something but can't decide and Tabi looms over us and we roll into each other's weight and he wants to play with my penis but he's too jittery to keep his attention for long, and we go upright, and I can't breathe through all the kissing, and here is Tabi now, this force of nature into a collapsing building, and he holds me close and holds Cav close and I kiss someone's chest and I am completely lost. I sink over someone and a leg goes over my neck and Tabi's socked feet compress me into the mattress and I start groaning and begging verbally, then signing, then Cav is trying to wrap himself all around my legs; he has been staring at me all morning waiting, waiting, waiting, can I kiss your stockings please. Like we are primordial now we crawl along the bed and I kiss Tabi on the groin and he finds himself hard and chokes me with socked feet and I start begging again please choke me please choke me. Catch your breath darling. Breathe. I am without recourse. Cav is above me now. Leaking pre on my back. Bedlam.

At some point the exhaustion sets in and I am laid on my back throbbing hard and panting for air. Panting. Hah. Hah. Hah. Let me breathe a second. Tabi is up above me and to my left—hello—and he rests his feet on my chest and stomach, his soles pressing into my fur, and it feels like enough to suffocate me. "I'm suffocating," I sign lazily. And below me is Cav. He is eating my toes. Not eating them. Just gnawing on them without his teeth. Soft tongue against silk stockings and his ass up in the air and his little deer tail wagging with no control in it.

My hand goes down to my shaft and I am sopping wet with pre. Skirt is sticky. Do you want to get closer now, darling? Do you want to finish? Cav wants to finish. He is masturbating down there. I look down at him and he is sucking on my foot and his tail is wagging and his shoulder sways back and forth in a dazed masturbation. And my jaw is agape in a hypnotic swill and I am something devoured by a beast. Just my nervous system remains. Cav looks like someone familiar. I look like someone familiar. I am missing a part. Can you give me a little footjob? Oh, of course! Can I help you over there too? I look over and Tabi is hard and how can he just sit there watching? I'm doing very well on my own. I'm always doing well. I want to please you. Devotion is pathetic when it's in me but I can't make it leave. I want to please you. Then be happy for me. Be happy and you will have done precisely as I wish.

Tabi puts his foot on my thigh and his socked toes between my base, and grips me and waggles me around. And Cav starts kissing me faster. I think he's close. I think I'm close. Who is this man below me? Who is he? I'm going to forget you, Cav. I'm going to forget you forever.

Keep jerking. I want you to finish on my socks, honey.

Honey is so sweet.

Honey is sickly-sweet. Where have I heard that before?

Where am I falling? Down a deep dark that envelops me wholly. My breath is going steady again. My hand is finding a rhythm. Tell Cav I'm happy. Tell Cav I love you both. I love this. I'm happy. I'm happy. My head sinks back and all I can feel is soft cloth soft toes masturbation and I love you I love you I love you. I love you. I sink back. Honey is so sickly sweet. I'm close. I'm close—I'm close, put me over, please. Please. Tabi stuffs his right foot into my chest harder until I feel my lungs collapse and explode and I finish.

I empty out like I've been stabbed. My fingers go spindly and I shake and whimper in orgasm that weakens me to the point of paralysis. Good. Good. I'm dribbling cum down my length and it pools up on Tabi's foot and I melt into static on the bed. And Cav won't give up. He won't stop kissing. When I'm drowning in the orgasm and good feeling floods my brain, all the walls cracking open, he makes his move and makes it hurt. Brings my right leg up into the air while I'm still hypersensitive and I wail and cry out but Cav is humping me, the small of my thigh with his dick rubbing into the silk of my stocking. He is kissing my sole, he is begging, he is acting like an unleashed animal. I wail and wail but he doesn't stop.

He's enjoying himself, honey.

Honey is so sweet.

Honey is sickly-sweet. What the fuck am I doing right now? Who is humping me?

Cav hangs his head around my calf and he looks like he's dissociating. And he humps a bit more and finishes. And squirms around on his knees. Warm sensation and my stocking gets sopping wet. I'm trying to shake him off because it actually aches the way he has my leg but he doesn't care and he holds on and I drool and my head falls back and I stare at the ceiling. He keeps humping. His length spewing lines weakly into the small of my knee. And he keeps doing this. And Tabi doesn't even change his expression at all. I'm starting to zone out and feel like I've done something wrong and then my leg falls to the bed limp and my head goes slack and I fall into a concussed daze.

Cav is still wrapped around my lower end. His forehead full of fuzzy hairs scrunches into my thigh and he seems an unthinking thing. And after Tabi has drained me a while with his foot shaky from holding it up, he pulls back, he goes criss-cross, and just stares at the two of us.

"Good," he signs, so quiet, so satisfied, with a grin striking him. He starts to melt into the background and I am not breathing okay. I am not good. "Good."

I am forgetting something.

I'm forgetting myself. Losing all the parts of me. Losing anything that made me myself. I'm sure in a spat of weakness I would cast away my Deafness and become just like the rest of the completely faceless faces in this house. I mean it when I feel that I've forgotten who Cav is. He is as sweet-faced and oblivious as everyone else. As stupid. As pitiable. He is barely able to muster the energy to keep humping my leg through a long-trailing orgasm but he keeps doing it. It could easily be Almond. It could easily be David, I have had several nights with David, almost entirely noncommunicative, aimless joyful blind sex of nothingness. I don't know who you are. I don't know who I am. I am beginning to be an appendage of something else and I am forgetting something. It's fine, darling, if it's something you're forgetting then you'll remember it again soon. You have a brilliant mind in you and nothing leaves you. Nothing leaves you for long. It's fine. I am forgetting something. My heart is pounding do you want some water? I'll get Cav some water, do you want some water, honey? I am forgetting something. Honey is sickly-sweet.

Are you in there? Are you just resting? He hovers over me with a pleasant expression. His wool is matted and white and shimmering in the heat of the lamplight. Tabi is all I can focus on. He starts to sway. Would you like some water?

And then a little thing approaches me in the dark.

Like a rat scurrying between shadows.

It is an old voice I have had for a while called memory.

Memory tells me you forgot all about Euclid.

Haven't you noticed?

Not just you. You forgot about Euclid and so did Tabi. Tabi forgot about Euclid and so did every single person in this house. Then the walls shuddered and the floors gave way and the world ached and a screaming screeching wailing little Euclid fell through and stopped existing and everyone stopped caring at all. There is no trace of him. There are no footsteps. This house is invulnerable.

You forgot about him and he's gone.

He's gone.

He's gone.

For a moment there on my back I am woozy and then all the blood has rushed to my extremities in uneven pulse; I find myself upright and swaying on my ass like I've just been electrocuted by some foul machine and then I have fallen off the bed and onto the floor and Tabi tries to catch me in a carry but his arms are too weak for my sudden weight and I thunk onto the furry carpet like a stone. Concussed again or feeling like it. Euclid. Euclid. The hundredth-and-first tree. He was me. He was me the day before I left this house, and he got his limbs torn off and his face removed, but then Tabi felt so very awful that he fixed him up and put him in the house and then Tabi had two of us, two of us, but I was the worse one, the shittier one, the one who fucked up, and now Euclid is gone I am wailing I am crying what happened what happened what happened?! I am screaming now. My voice is porcelain shattered by a hammer. Cav is peering out at me from the bed and Tabi has floated by my side.

What do you mean what happened? "Can you sign? Are your words intact?"

"Euclid," I spell. Too fast for him to read but Tabi never reads my signs anyway.

"Yes?"

"I forgot. I forgot. Where is he?"

"I don't parse what you mean, darling. I'm sorry."

"Euclid."

"You."

"Euclid."

"You?"

"The hundredth-and-first tree."

And he gives me a little look that indicates no understanding of anything at all. A great and serious pain erupts in my chest and it weighs me down further into the carpet. Quickly I am awash in tears. I don't know what's happening. I lost him. I lost somebody. He's gone in the way that Lone Star Lanes is gone. He's gone in the way that he was never here. Just the hundredth-and-first tree. Irrelevant. And my limbs contort and toes and fingers go into the carpet and I yelp out and I see in Cav a sort of shock like he knows what's going on, but in Tabi I see nothing, in Tabi I see nothing. I have never seen anything past his eyes. A machine turning unending without oil. His gaunt body lowers by me and tries to hold me, but I am not taking it, and so I fall until he has his arms in the open air weak and tired. "What is hurting you so much, my love? What's wrong? I need to understand. I need to understand."

"He fell through the world," I wail.

"Oh my God," he signs, and all goes deathly still in the house at once

and the lights dim

and his eyes require my

full attention

lost in it but finally there is some inkling

of him

in him

all gone

all worthless and tireless

a machine turning

spinning

behind

glass



I am forced to take stock of the damages. I am forced to ask all the empty-eyed souls in the soft room to stop their activities and gather round and I have to ask them a simple question on a slip of paper and they have similar responses. All of them flatly useless against this.

Almond and Gaiman sign that they have never known another goat like me to live here. Gaiman expresses apologies; Almond looks scared. I think they both know what this means.

Cav has nothing. He has never met Euclid. Aren't you Euclid? "I've never used that name with any of you." But Tabi has.

Ives and Jay are still only half-clothed and clutching one another but they tell me that they don't know what I mean. Lewis puts a hand on my shoulder and looks deep into me and I think this poor stupid fucking idiot is crushing on me. Not right now. Please. He doesn't know a second me, either. David, Barry, Kim? Not even a chance they do. Some days I hardly think they know a first me.

So there is no Euclid in the house and no recollection of such a thing. I am unsure how he even came back to me given how much squeezing it took for a place like Lone Star Lanes to return.

There is no Euclid and there was, in effect, never any Euclid. Of course causality fails me here, utterly, completely. Because his effects can be felt. He must exist in some form if my memory has him. But otherwise my words are bows and arrows against lightning. He is nothingness. He is an idea, and a gone one.

Euclid.

Look at these men. Look at these people. How am I supposed to see them as they are, and not as I feel they are? Certainly they all appear empathetic and surprised; nothing betrays this demeanor. And yet I know, or certainly I think I know, that they are desperate to get back to the soft room. Devotion is lobotomy. The soft room is a recent addition made out of artificial fluff and it is an orgasmic house of crawling on each other in a wet and gay mania. It is where they want to be. But I am making that up. I am, like Tabi, assuming so drastically for them.

Maybe they do care. I just can't see it.

Of course when I do explain more of what is going on, I am reminded of the fact that these men are overwhelmingly quite clever and familiar with the source material. One by one they understand and come to the same conclusion as me, the one that feels so obvious as to be screaming in a Cochlear. Euclid has fallen through the world sort of like Tabi always said he, himself, might, or implied he might, but to Euclid this phenomenon has come true—or at least most likely it has come true, why else would he go forgotten by everyone like this?—and so there is only one place where he has ended up and the solution really shouldn't be that terrible, should it? He must have fallen into the Room below the house. Just go and get him. Right?

"No," Tabi tells us. "There are a lot of places down there, places walked by ghosts or staffed by shadows, or which cast the impression of people, but nobody is there. I know it. I am always aware of what falls and comes to me."

So maybe it has not come to you yet. Maybe he has not come to you yet, says Almond.

"Yet is a strange word to use. I don't know how long these things take. The concept of 'taking time' or 'travel' don't really work. I would be lying to say anything for sure."

And I am sunken against a footrest, an ottoman, on my knees looking like a beached fish, my jaw half open, my breath heavy, what do I do? What do I do?

Nothing. You don't do anything. On a day-to-day basis you are practically invisible.

Euclid.

Tabi will proceed to ask me some more questions about Euclid and falling through the world but for a little while I am entirely without input or output, and I simply remain, I freeze, I pause for ten minutes until the most of them have seen my sorry state, offered an apology, and then left without letting me catch them. And Tabi, too, gives me some space. And then the room is empty.

I don't want to be responsible for this.

Or anything.

I don't want to be responsible for Max's car being left by the side of the road. I don't want it to have happened but most of all I don't want to have it on me forever. I don't want to be responsible for anything. I want nobody to rely on me. Or worry about me. I want to be like Euclid.

For a long time now I have stopped wanting to be loved, and I have just wanted to love.

My heart is wracked with some immovable pain, and I fall forward onto the ottoman, and drift into a brief sleep.



Nothing tangible wakes me up.

Maybe an errant heartbeat or a bad dream. I don't remember.

The living room is a disarray of melted-together visions, all still hot with human presence but empty, except for one corner, where a sofa chair lay in ambush, embedded between bookshelf-laden walls, plying a small table, the most isolated section of this entire room all obscure and invisible. In this corner Almond sits half-sunken into the chair writing on notebook paper and he sees me when I come upright, and I see him when he drops what he's doing and stares back.

The room feels cloudy and I am swept through a weep of delirium, dehydration. Body slipping into itself from nausea. A chill runs down my throat and my heart feels like sandpaper, and Almond just stares back at me. His feathers are kempt perfect and his eyes impossible to interrogate, or maybe the opposite is true—maybe it is impossible to ignore the emotion pouring out of him, his empathy, his fear, this fear stirring right now as he looks at me and sees the sickly person I am now. It strikes me not in his eyes but in his pause. He is always looking at me from afar and shooting some message, something, something, but I can't make it out, I can only guess. I have done enough guessing. I spent a long time guessing on the subject of Euclid and it will do me no good to presume.

So I swallow what feels like bile and stand up and walk to him looking probably like shit but I have never known him to judge.

"Hey," is how I start.

And he lights up, and his cheeks show the barest of a smile that a crow's body can. "Hi again," Almond signs.

"You aren't with the others?"

He flashes me a look. "Got too freaked out to feel horny."

And I flash him a look. "Sorry."

"Don't be sorry, man. Please." He enunciates please, and then again, weaker, like an aftershock. He has a tendency to do that. The way he claps his beak, I think he often repeats himself as he signs, under his breath, with his hands.

"Okay, well." I scratch at a matted bit of fur on my body. "Sorry in general. I'm worried about you, now. And me. And Tabi—er, Genuine. You get it, right? You get it."

Almond nods firmly, like he's knocking a tentpole in the ground with his head. "He's been talking about people falling through the world the whole time I've known him—or at least implying it. I didn't buy it. Did you buy it?"

"Yeah."

"But you can see how I didn't."

"Absolutely." I feel myself sinking a little. I don't think it's a good thing, how earnestly I believed Tabi and still believe him about all this, the mythology of this place, the house which is in every spot of the woods. I'm not proud of it. "Did I say anything about who Euclid even was?"

He nods. "Somewhat."

"Tabi made him," I sign, aimless, pointless. "I—I don't even know what to say past that. He was keeping me in the Room above the house, many of me, every night. I knew Tabi wouldn't make this up."

And again Almond nods, a dipper-bird with concern past his blank expression, or at least I hope it is concern. I hope somebody is watching out for me. "I know. You told me all about that online."

"And you still came back."

"Uh-huh."

"Why did I lure you back?"

He pauses and digests this. "That is a very strong word to use," he signs. "Lure, right?" He repeats my sign, laborious, practiced. I'm surprised he knows it. Maybe from context clues. And I don't know why I use that word.

No, I know why.

I am setting traps in the woods for animals to fall in.

I put out bait.

I took them live.

I didn't do that. I wouldn't do that. I am not so terrible as to do that. Please.

"Did I tell you to come here even though you had good reason to leave, Almond?"

"You didn't lure me back," he signs. "If you did, if that's how you see it, I can't tell you why you did it."

"I was lonely," I tell him.

"Yeah, I know."

"It was stupid. It was awful and selfish and I'm sorry. You should get out of here—you of all people do not deserve this fucking treatment. What happened to that guy in New York?"

Almond blinks. "That guy in New York? Jackson?" I nod quick like I am without language again. "We broke up. Please slow down."

"Okay."

I slow down to a halt.

Almond stares at me.

"I love Genuine," he signs, slow, methodical, and straightforward. "It didn't work out the first time, you know? It also wasn't going to work out this time, but he kept working at it. That night last year in that ballroom he found—when he proposed to me. I still think about it." Almond offers me a muted and yet entirely chipper expression. "I have never gotten to tell you how much I worry about you. You take responsibility for everything, but—" He winces as he prepares to hit me. "—you don't really change or remember anything. You hardly remember when we talk, it feels like. That's just how it feels. I want to be your friend again."

"I don't know how long it's been," I sign.

"A while."

In general. I don't know how long it's been.

I don't want to check. I've never wanted to check. It is a wound that only exists when I look at it. How many years has he scooped out of me? How many years was I alright with losing?

Scouring Almond's face for answers is obviously futile. These bodies don't age. Or they do and we never get a chance. "You really want to talk about all this right now?" he asks me.

"It's been haunting me, yeah."

He pauses. He's collected his thought like weapons. "Yes, you did message me asking to come back to the house. Or Genuine did, pretending to be you. But I don't want you martyring over it. Things are as they are."

My jaw is threatening to go agape and I am going to break down again if I let myself process that statement. Okay, then process it, you fucking moron. He is asking you not to martyr over it. He is telling you to just move on. That's the easy route. Don't take responsibility for anything and just carry on.

"I don't want to hurt anyone else in my life," I sign. "I don't think calling people here was a good decision. So I won't do it. Anymore."

"Maybe someone else will, then." He laughs at that but his expression is humorless. It is not a joke and it isn't funny and maybe Almond of all people gets it. "You're allowed to feel bad about it," he elaborates. "But I'm the wrong person to ask for forgiveness, because I turned out okay."

"You're sure?"

And Almond looks me in the eyes and through his material gestures I am unable to discern absolutely no truth, because we are all aberrant planets floating through endless void and our inner worlds are completely alien to one another. I only have the shadows cast by his hands. He has only words, casual, repeated, like mantras against wind. "You should know me by now, man. I'll fuck off if things get bad."



Will you?



What does it matter.



What's happening here is an overflowing sea of aimless, consequenceless emotions, all contained within this house, all contained within these woods, a placeless place, a fountain of love that cannot actually be resisted. You cannot love Tabi but you must be loved by him. You cannot rest. You cannot recuperate. The assault on your brain—your boundaries—your self will be so overwhelming that it will make you into a doll, an automaton, more than you already were. You will wake up one day and Euclid will be gone and who is this in his place.

What does it matter.



I have a headache worse than before when I leave Almond there and then. I bring myself back to the center of the foyer with him just there staring but I can't bear the thought of sleeping any longer and Euclid fell through the world and, most of all, it is difficult for anybody to even bear to care that that happened.

Did you ever read Where The Wild Things Are? The title is referring to people, little kids, all wild-eyed and immature and angry, but I have grown up and I feel no less frustrating to deal with. I look over at the adjoining hallway furthest from Almond and retrace the steps in my mind. I know how to reach the soft room. I know how to be felt again. I know how to continue to dissipate. For years. If it wasn't this fate it would be death in the Room above the house.

I could be here for the rest of my life.

How long have I been here?

The heat from the soft room is cacophonous and catastrophic, it could kill a man, it has killed men. I am thinking of a rat in a boiler. Turning unending. The water is hot and swirling and melting the fur off of the bones. Then I turn to the opposite hallway and then back and all routes lead further in, and I step through the arch, and I walk along the steps in the carpet, which still give no indication of human presence, and at times my gaze goes back up to the gnarled tangled mess above me—polished oak that only feels like branches—and by the time I come to, I have reached the entrance to his house again, and I press on the door and try to pry it open, and I can't open it, and it is too heavy for me, and I falter, and how long has it been? My muscles fail and I sink into the floor and weep aimlessly. I can't go. I can't go. It is not that I am unwilling but I have become physically unable. It isn't that I won't go anymore. It is that I am made of the wrong parts to leave.

I have become so thin.

Half.



I do not expect anyone to find me but especially I do not expect it to be Almond. But he does, and he is here, and a certain level of understanding in him shows through once more, because he asks me:

"Do you need a ride somewhere?"

And while I am unable to articulate precisely where I would like to go, I tell him that I need to go.



For reasons unclear we retrieve some things from the basement. A lot of old things. I used to have camping equipment that now resides in a cardboard box beneath a piece of maple supports and Almond has warmer clothes—right, it's cold out—he has a puffy green jacket from a defunct company which he throws over me and my blouse, and he says the sun hat will work fine but it doesn't look right for the season. He, himself, puts on various wooly things like an extra sweater and a beanie and gloves that Tabi sewed him, and a big backpack to carry stuff, but it's empty now, because we are taking his car, and he does not particularly know where we're going either but he insists that, yes, there is somewhere we need to get to. And also in the basement is a collection of old things that used to belong to somebody with my name, but I have already told you about the bulk of that. But I am back at that pile of old things staring at it and wondering what use any of it is to anyone. Are we going to camp out there? Almond would like to know if we're actually planning on camping or we're just traveling. I need your help with these boxes. There's at least one tent under there. I think I've lost some muscle mass. Almond takes my hand in his. I feel like crying again. He says, yeah. You look gaunt. Gaunt is the word. "Are we coming back?" he asks. I tell him, yeah. I think we're always coming back. But first I would like to go out there because there is a spot in the woods where we need to go. It's in Michigan. Or, no, it's in Jersey. No. It could easily be in Texas. It is somewhere that trees grow and animals live. When we walk outside where the hell are we going to end up. "So a tent would be helpful," says Almond. He helps me lift some boxes and we fail to keep it steady and a pile of school papers splatter across the floor like blood and I am tempted to scrounge it all up again, all the hard-won essays and math diagrams from third grade with little sketches of dogs and birds and goats on all the margins, but in reality it is from so long ago that it no longer matters. It does not belong to me. It belongs to the floor. The tent has a hell of a footprint in the bottommost box and by the time Almond and I retrieve it, there are bits and baubles all over the floor, and gifts, and an old wallet, a broken watch, a book or two. A textbook. I don't know why I brought any of this. Maybe it just ended up here. Rooms like to collect clutter. People don't do it on purpose so who else is to blame?

A tent and a case of water bottles from upstairs and various snack bars and a whole plastic container of cashews and two packages of beef jerky and a soda that Almond's in the mood for and I wrap up a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for myself. How many days are we going to be out and about? I guess my body parts are just excited to feel like we're going somewhere different. I can't stop thinking about visits out to the lake with Max. Maybe they were not essential. Could have fallen through the world. But I liked them well enough.

My neck is starting to ache for some reason, but I am still excited when we reach the door lugging all this with us, and with Almond's old car keys in his left hand, hanging loose, and at that point we find Tabi by the entrance.

He is floating six inches off the floor and naked and blank-faced and he has his hands open-palmed like he is confused.

"Are you two leaving?"

I give him a little, reassuring smile, so that he does not implode. "Just a few days."

Tabi smiles back, of course. "Oh, good. You could certainly use some air."

He looks gaunt, is the word. Like he has been starved and battered and beaten. Like he has given all he has. He is out of himself. This is what you want, isn't it? It is always what you want. And I am looking at him and Almond seems eager to go, but I am eager to have Tabi leave my presence, and I just look back at him, and you know my thoughts, don't you? You are able to know what I know. You are always invading. There is no secrecy that you are not a part of, that you did not orchestrate. So I want to tell you something. Or maybe it is just for me, because you give no indication that you understand.

You told me you would always think of me, but you forgot about Euclid. So what was any of that worth.

You were the last thing he had. I failed him and so did you.

You are a very sad person whose orbit I am unable to escape. I am made of the wrong parts.

You have taken my me from me.

I am out of myself.

He floats there another moment and Almond tells him something out loud and, with the sense somehow that he is intruding, he floats back, back, back and away, and turns face, and retreats to the soft room where he may be worshiped once again. His form is sticks and fur all glued together and his slender digitigrade legs and his socks and his dizzying height catch my eye but then it's gone, and he's gone, and tension wells up in my chest as soon as it leaves the back of my neck reeling. My breath nearly gives out. Going to fall again. And Almond retrieves me by the arm, and holds me up.

"Where are we going exactly?"

And I finally articulate it. "I have a spot near where I used to live," I sign. "I'll know it when I see it."

He hands me a faint bit of levity. "We'd need to get gas to get all the way to Michigan," he signs.

"What do you mean?"

"I parked my car in front of the house, but that was west of Albany," he muses. "New York. Bit of a drive."

"Well," I sign, "let's see where we get dumped out."

Again I try the interior door with my own hands and although I am reinvigorated with some faint sense of purpose, it is simply too heavy. I try again, and again, and then Almond helps, and eventually it gives, like it always does. And we are within this entrance area—this little, cold room which I have not visited in some time, where two coat-racks are wearing somebody else's clothes and there are three pairs of running shoes that don't fit animal bodies, and are tremendously old at this point. They could have belonged to anyone and don't belong to anyone now. And ahead of us is a much lighter doorway whose only purpose is to keep the rain out. Inviting to all but nature. And although it weighs less it feels as if it holds back a lot more.

I am the first one to open the door and, as it swings out emptily into a semi-damp cold morning air, where frost attacks every inch of every bit of shrubbery, I instantly know where I am. I've thought about this a lot. South of Manistee, you turn east off the thirty-one onto Hoague Road, this is the easiest way towards our location—you head east away from Lake Michigan, deeper into the semi-rural that falsifies its status as woods, eastward past people's gargantuan backyards which constitute acres instead of square feet, and you drive around the much smaller Hoags Lake, north, then east again, east until the woods consume you, and finally some patch of road will feel familiar, like you are approaching a place you used to live, and

I'm sorry. Instructions come too easy and I promised I wouldn't give anyone directions like this. Regardless that is where we are again, the maples and beeches all frozen and sodden and dead border a front yard overtaken by a sea of weeds, an endless patch of relentless deadfall turned into livefall, so thick that a path no longer even exists. It has fallen through the world in a more literal sense but I can still just faintly remember when it was intact some years ago, all trimmed and kempt like the prettiest wool of the most beautiful man. Nobody has seen it in a while.

And, of course, Almond's car is not here.

His car is still in New York, it's at least one tremendous road trip away. We are presently in upstate Michigan and we need to go a ways south of Grand Rapids. I don't think my legs could take me a fifth of that distance. I am all sticks.

"Okay," he signs, after a pause to think it all through. He has, by now, noticed the predicament. "Figures. Can I try?"

"Try what."

"I can try opening the door instead. Try looking away and... not thinking about Michigan."

And I give him the most meager smile, but it's an earnest one. "Magic and the occult," I sign.

"Well, maybe."

So we back up off the porch and shut the door, and stupidly—just in the way that you might try thwacking a flashlight to make it work, the same kind of aimless, kinetic hope—we wait a few seconds, we close our eyes, or at least I close my eyes, and then I think about somewhere besides Michigan, anywhere else, I am thinking about a shore on a countryless beach, and then Almond opens the door and it isn't Michigan anymore.

Is this where he found the house? The day is overcast here, foggy and shockingly chill against my face, and I would have to guess it is New York, now. A patch of woods off a side road of a side road—probably a path of nonsense Almond took here both times. The yard is semi-intact, broken up by fallen branches and a cascade of maple leaves, but it is still definitely winter, and a mish-mash of old snow collects in the corners around collapsed wood. It tastes like bark and smells like a creek running through gravel. There are some features of the front of the house that appear the same, like the porch, but it is not the same. It is not made of the same stuff. The scratches and divots from birds or air or water are different. The house is, by all appearances, different. A duplicate. Superposition.

Though I suppose that hasn't stopped it from being real.

There is not a driveway in front of the house but there is a spot in the corroded fence wide enough to fit a vehicle and one is, in fact, sitting right here, an old Nissan Versa half-embedded in loam, coated in muck and branches and leaves at least a year old and probably more. And Almond is holding his keys in one hand, almost slack in the jaw. Then he stuffs the keys in his pocket again, but only to get his hands free, and with an excitement that's almost childlike, he turns to me and signs, "that was very cool."

"So is it whoever opens the door?"

We go back and try, and after a few minutes taking turns swinging open the entrance, we confirm my guess. When we both take hold of the handle at the same time it seems random, but we decide it's picking whoever puts their hand on it first, and we're never quite simultaneous. The thought comes up to ask someone else to join and try the door, to see what happens, to see if it works for them, too. The conversation stops for a second, and then Almond glances off, and signs offhandedly that Gaiman might like to try, or maybe Cav. And then another sort of invisible entity hangs between us and I think about Euclid again, and that is what this is about, and it is this horrifying sort of gnawing sensation that I am fucking up, always completely fucking up, wasting time, losing things, losing memories, losing Euclid, all in this mess of other men and other possibilities and Tabi, always Tabi again, this all-encompassing black hole of thoughts and emotions and I think it would be best if we started driving.

It is silly. We could probably make it to Grand Rapids some other way, I could get us to hitchhike again, or we could just hike if we put in some effort, but Almond has his mind set on checking his car and miraculously the engine turns on and kicks up a few leaves and the windshield wipers start flailing limply, and again he asks if there's anyone else who should come along. I don't have an answer.

"Tell me if you want us to do this alone," he signs.

"I think I do," I sign.

But he pauses and gives me a little smile, just faint, mostly in his eyes. "Are you gonna steal my car, then?"

"No."

"Exactly."

I want to laugh, but by the time I've processed, Almond is already out the driver-side door, running back inside to grab the others.



Six-hundred and fifty miles by car and it is snowing in Pennsylvania and by this point Gaiman has taken up driving to let Almond sleep in the back. I cannot overstate how much I like Gaiman; he has a snarling smile across his reptilian face and can sign one-handed while he's driving, at least when we're coasting, and he keeps me company, and I keep him awake. What do we talk about? What don't we talk about. I am murmuring and rambling all about Euclid, he keeps asking, Almond keeps asking, Cav keeps asking, who was he, what was he? It's like we are untangling a puzzle that Tabi built for us. The Room above the house. The bodies. I am desperate to try and explain my train of thought and why we're headed to Michigan and Almond keeps apologizing—no, he's asleep, he was apologizing earlier—for insisting on this trip, but we're all in good spirits. Irregular snowfall is settling against the windshield and building up along the sides of highways. It's warm in the car now. I am taking off the bulkiest clothes and snuggling up in a sort of half-warmth and staring out the side window for an hour at a time. Almond's car is filled with the kind of endearing trash that you leave behind because you're using it all the time and don't have the energy to pick up wrappers, and he has a phone holder which is empty, and a book with a pale blue cover on the dashboard nuzzling the windshield, and there's a little prayer card in a pocket beneath the sun visor, kept as a kind of joke, Almond doesn't remember where he got it from, but at least Jesus is watching him when he drives. But again he's not driving he's asleep. Gaiman is our guide.

"Should we stop for the night?" I ask him.

"I can make it," Gaiman assures me. "I'm not even tired."

"Yeah, but we brought a tent."

"It looked teensy-tiny."

"Yeah, but you shouldn't have to drive the whole night. Come on." I'm goading him now.

"I can make it." He blinks fast, bonks his head with a fist.

And I just laugh, and I tell him, no, we should really camp out and get him some rest. He tells me he's not even tired. Oh yeah, you're not tired? What's six times eighteen. He pauses. "If anything's going to make me crash the car it's a goat distracting me in the passenger seat. Also, one-hundred and two! Take that! Fuck you!"

By the time we do resolve to park somewhere quiet and camp out, it is only about five o'clock despite it getting dark fast, and Almond is chipper and awake again, and we all eat paltry dinner in the car—I went back inside and made a few extra peanut butter and jelly sandwiches before we left—and we wind through some offbeat roads until Cav spots a sign, starts bouncing up and down in the back seat, finally gets Gaiman to turn left into a designated camping area in the enveloping dark, where oaks and pines loom eagerly over a gravel clearing with only the faintest hints of human presence found in tire tracks leading inward, outward, roundward. A black-barked tupelo rests dead surrounded by a mulch of rotting leaves on the far end. The silhouettes of two outhouses stand in solace and lean like they are praying. Almond's car slides just past, rolling into a relatively-flat spot, and we park, we get out with flashlights; in a hurried excitement we scrounge around for firewood, and in ten minutes we have a variety of dry things from under cover of the outhouses and from bits of a collapsed fence to our right, and Almond drizzles a heap of lighter fluid on a pile and we get a campfire going. We talk about everything we can imagine around the fire—this time we avoid the subjects of Tabi and Euclid. I sign slow for Cav, so slow, I repeat myself until he's able to follow along. I don't hardly mind. It reminds me of when I was taking ASL classes. What's the sign for deer?

We only spend about an hour like this and the fire doesn't last long. There is no way to comfortably sit but we stand and Gaiman tells a ghost story. "This phantom did not occupy a house," he signs, "but it did occupy the space around a house, a very oversized house, which belonged to a man named Arthur Montagnes. Arthur was a rich man—terrifically wealthy and reclusive. He had inherited all he knew from his father, Doctor Ivan Montagnes, a dentist who serviced an entire town out in the Outer Banks. Arthur, in contrast, did not know a trade and could not parse a single academic subject. He was impossible to educate, but he taught himself all kinds of superstitions. And one day, while he was in the middle of setting up two amethysts on a windowsill on the west end of the mansion, one of them toppled over all on its own. And that was when he realized that something was out there. Something in the deep. Something in the dark."

I don't know where Gaiman heard this story or if he is making it up as he goes along. Cav tries his best to follow. Almond is stuck in fierce attention. I cannot think of anything more terrifying than being in that house. And at the end there is no ghost, as Gaiman tells it. There is nothing in the house nor outside of it. I don't want to retell it in detail—it was funnier with Gaiman's delivery.

It is only when the fire starts dying out to another rush of cool wind and gentle snow that we all break apart and realize, individually, that we are exhausted; we spend ten minutes in a frustrating dim light setting up the tent, but Gaiman and Almond start to realize that our idea of actually using it for shelter is hopeful at best. We don't even have sleeping bags. Do you want to freeze to death? Your fur isn't going to keep you warm. You are underweight. He's not getting fed enough. Are you starving this poor thing on purpose. Cav and I are trying to argue for our idea, but it's cold, it's very cold, the wind isn't treating us nice. Just sleep in the car. I feel chilly the moment we get in. Cav bundles up and snuggles up for shared warmth and I think he gets hard from the touch but I can't focus on him, not now.

Instead I just lay across the backseats in a nothing-space. Cav is on top of me but I'm not there with him. I am trying to not lose track of Euclid against every bone in my body trying to tear me away; there is a wilted-away goat somewhere begging for anyone to care about his existence. Are you there or are you just resting?

I don't sleep well.

No dreams but I keep worrying that I'm going to have my eyes extracted out of my head. It wakes me up out of calm and puts me into a dull panic, heart racing but body stiff, and then I fall back into it, and so on. Like a running wound that keeps throbbing with pain.

When I crawl out of the car the gravel is all shimmering in a blue-white morning light and spots of frost cling to the corners of all the windows. Sleep-heat and fur keep me barely warm enough to function, and Gaiman has snatched Almond's old sweater, but I figure he needs it more than me. It fits about as well as you'd expect.

We fold up the unused tent into a crumpled corpse and pile into the car again and Almond peels out with speed. There isn't a lot of talking.

In the passenger seat I watch trees roll by the side of the highway and my mind wanders to the house again, the house in the woods, like a pit with slick edges. Beckoning me in.

But that isn't where we're headed.

There is a place that goes deeper.



For months last year I was painting that spot. It did not appear to me in dreams and it did not stick—it was one of a few things whose memory I could not actually pull up for my mind's eye. I have a memory that is eidetic or photographic or something along those lines, but every time I put this pit on canvas it was different. Harsh auburn lifting up above a blackness, streaks of overpaint with tiny brushes all mottled with dried acrylic, melted hours mixing colors until it was appropriately dingy, dire, cold. Cold above all. It is difficult to express how cold it was at the time. It was early spring when I got there and just being out of the car felt like I was chancing it. It was a four-minute walk from the closest trail which was already obscure, and I walked semi-south but partially east and west in a winding form as I was not using the sun or the stars as a compass and was trusting, or perhaps deliberately not trusting, my own instinct to run. And when I painted it, the only thing that remained was the emotion of the spot—the trees, the size, the form of it are all vague and faceless, but there is a seeming pit in it treading down into the world. I could not get paint black enough for that darkness.

And one time Euclid saw my collection, all these portrayals of a terrible spot in the woods, and he knew where it was, and he knew what it was.

Or maybe it wasn't last year at all. I don't know if Euclid was still around at that point. Maybe he disappeared earlier.

Or later.

A linear description of events is useless.

We're forced to stop for gas as Almond foretold and we head somewhere dingy without people and use one of the pumps glancing every which way, trying to avoid getting any funny questions about our appearances, but the place is mostly quiet aside from a zonked-out clerk behind the counter who doesn't hardly look our way. Gaiman brought cash—it doesn't take cash. Cav fishes up a very old debit card—his account is empty. I suggest we ask the clerk for help and we discuss that idea for a little while, is it okay, are we going to freak him out? How much does it matter? But eventually Almond finds a credit card in-between seats and tries to fill the tank, but it doesn't work, but out of pure desperation he tries to buy only ten gallons and it clears and we speed off over the border into Michigan. It might not have even been Almond's credit card. A lot of things fall through the world and end up where they're not supposed to be.

Besides morning laze and a lack of chatter there is little indication that the drive stopped. The snow is dying down, developing into faint drizzles, occasional rain, all in spots where the cloud cover breaks haphazard over the highway. We avoid Pittsburgh and Akron as a matter of course, weaving between population centers into Ohio and trying to avoid passing cars, but I am sure somebody—or many people—have seen us the way we are now. I'm just not in the mood for traffic. Nobody is. Nobody is certain what it'd feel like.

Earlier when Cav's card declined he looked like he was about to cry. Old habit.

Almond weaves us clockwise around Toledo and across the Maumee, first west on a highway called Six, and then after barrelling through a short stretch of Indiana, we finally cut north on a highway called Sixty-Nine. The roads we ride are buffered by endless leafless bushes pretending to be trees, thickets amidst empty plots and dug-up grass and green-blue skies, and frozen weeds tufting out of every corner, all the cars headed nowhere. I catch the hint of the presence of buildings sometimes; places with names like Dollar Tree and CVS and Burger King, and nobody is ever going to think about these places, but then again they don't think about Gene's Donuts and Ocean Sky and The Green Apron and all the other disappeared places and everything is always falling in line with the waves and sinking, sinking, sinking. All passers-by to something bigger and uglier I can't see.

The heater feels nice. I can feel January trying to claw at me from every angle and Almond knows better than anyone that his car can't keep air in to save its life, but the heater blowing in my face and a blanket over me feels good. We stop someplace unoccupied to use the restrooms and eat—more power bars and the occasional cashew from that big stupid jar—we set up on a picnic table and check phones that are mostly out of charge, and Gaiman thumbs thoughtfully through a book with a laminated cover, and Almond is asking me, can you draw a map for exactly where we're supposed to go? "And," he signs, "a map for exactly how to get back to the house, in case." He signs 'in case' twice. Worrying is his tendency.

I set to the task on the back of a notebook page with Almond's poetry scribbled all over it, and when I sketch things out like this, when I number roads and name all the little curves of the place, I feel in abstract a staggering inability to actually get away from anything in the States. Even these obscure spots are a ten minute drive from a Five Guys or something. The woods are all manmade. You can drive to his house, for fuck's sake—right off a major highway and into a dream. It doesn't feel right. It isn't right. Or at least I was hoping for something different and never realized.

Almond tells me my memory is good. "You're sure this is exactly where it is?"

"I can only assume it's gonna be there for you, even if I'm not," I sign. "But we didn't test that."

"Well, it's not that big a deal." He shoots me a coy grin, a little tired. "We can always just drive all the way back to the house in New York." But he hopes not.

We eat like we're not hungry even though we are, because this really is no way to keep a person fed, but we nibble and groan and stretch for a half-hour until we're tired of the cold, and pile our garbage in an overstuffed garbage bin by one of the bathrooms, and then we pile the garbage that is our own bodies back into Almond's car and get going for one last stretch into the depths of Michigan.



An interchange shaped like a clover and we make three rights to turn left and end up on the Ninety-Four, west a half-hour to a highway called the One-Thirty-One, now aimed directly north, like we are charging forward with a pike, threatening to pierce Grand Rapids. I am staring ahead all sunken into the carseat exhausted and overheated expecting to see some great beast or else expecting something in the shape of Max and his stolen car, but we're too far off, we're too far off, carving wavy lines through more tiny artificial woods with condensation bubbling up around the corners of the windshield, and long stretches of plains and ranches and chill-battered farmland. And then just as we aim true Gaiman and Cav start studying the map I made and compare it to the only remaining phone with charge, and they convince Almond to turn left early, so we do not actually reach Grand Rapids and we never will. We dive onto a miserable main street of a little town called Wayland with a McDonalds on the corner and Almond swerves us left on a road headed out of said town, and like that we are suddenly alone, there are no other vehicles, and it feels easy to imagine that they have never traveled here. Amidst planted trees and mowed lawns this road travels half-injured by the world but mostly intact like concrete that has forgotten it used to be silt and cement. Some trees lay thin and gaunt and others are evergreen yet tired and I can feel my heart pounding because I think I have been on this exact avenue before, alone, blind, my senses all deprived on purpose and my brain rotting from a Lexapro double-dose. I think Almond can see me shaking. I am not shaking but he can see it. He sets a hand on my shoulder.

I know my state of mind. I was trying to find someplace obscure but as someone raised in a variety of mostly-urban environments I had no clue what something like that would look like. I was trying to go to where the wild things were but I was never going to find anything that was not put there on purpose. Tabi was put there on purpose. He was a creature of the woods but he danced around bonfires lit by men who lived in cities.

The road ends where an audience of dead birches gather and Almond parks us sideways between where a dirt road merges with asphalt, and when we get out of the car, the sun has managed to poke through scattered clouds long enough to make it a little muggy, as air from the lake shimmies its way into the forests. Though when the wind picks up as we collect our things it becomes just as chill as this morning.

Cav wants to bring food, stuffs a few snack bars in his pockets. Gaiman lugs a case of water bottles and Almond, to his credit, has been paying attention all this time. "Just a short walk, right?"

"Yeah. We go on this path in the woods and then go south along the creek."

"Okay."

A path goes between those awaiting crowds of birches but they stand as if they have made way. It is rather wide—a couple people across—and there is, against my worst notions, a sort of optimism in me, a sort of excitement, an anticipation, as if something or everything all at once will make sense and be fixed and it will be okay, I will be okay, I will find Euclid doing this, somehow, for some reason, it will just click, like when I stole Max's car and drove aimlessly in the woods and found his house there, laying alone, I do not remember why, I do not remember why I got to that point or for what particular reason I thought that was where I would find it again. More magical thinking now. Just more of it because the tangible world has been uniquely frustrating.

The roots are tangling with the dirt here, all the loamy mud laced with ice and balling up in clumps; the occasional shifting of the trees indicates a spat of wind that we can no longer clearly feel. All around us semi-native trees encroach until the sun is nearly gone but the brush is not thick enough to hide in. There is, instead, the ever-present sense that a human being walks this path every day or so, that it sees the occasional presence, that it will not easily go forgotten. It is familiar enough to me and I am hoping not to lose the way.

When we see the creek up ahead that optimism once again wanes. I know this shore and knowing it is not any comfort, is it. These are memories like blood.

Cav and Almond and Gaiman trail along with me, some distance away. I am not sure what they see in me besides a lost goat. I am not where I am supposed to be. We take a step off where the path fades out of existence and I see it again in my mind's eye—a painful wandering, I can still feel it in my shins hitting branches and going uncaring out as far as my body would take me until I was alone, as alone as I could manage.

Following these old footsteps now. They left no trace, I left no trace. Euclid left no trace at all. No silhouette sitting there cross-legged staring at me from afar, begging to be understood even a little bit, but I did not know him, and he did not know me, and I'm so sorry. I'm sorry. This is my fault. This is my fault. How did it get this bad for you, Euclid? I was supposed to be there for you. I was supposed to be there for Almond too. And Max—I was supposed to take care of my roommate. I should be making money and sending it home to my parents, too, don't you remember that? What about my cousin? I fucked over my cousin somehow I'm sure. I fuck over everyone. I am made of the wrong parts to be trusted. I nearly trip over some roots from a beech and stumble and have to reside on the side of a dead stump with bugs livid from my presence and some thirty feet from the edge of the creek I see a clearing.

I tell the three men following me to stay some distance away in case it opens under me. "Do you mean that literally?" asks Cav. But I simply step back and away and where the underbrush all makes way for a spot of wracked earth, frozen and refrozen and with leaves filling dead stumps and collapsed saplings, and I step into what I presume is the dead center, and I reach out as if there is something to hold. The handle to a door. My door.

I have been here before.

And I get the inclination deep within me to try banging the flashlight again. Trying to get it to turn on. Trying to get things to work like they once did. Magic and the occult.

I turn around and I ask,

"Would you close your eyes and stop thinking about me for a little while?"



The back of my neck is screaming. It is saying something that I can't hear.



Devotion is a willingness, or perhaps an eagerness, to destroy one's self for something else. Erasure. Devotion is evaluating one's self as an object that can be spent for some quantity. Devotion is blood in my veins running cold and I am stood there and then I am very suddenly all static, all my fur wilting off or else clinging to me in a senseless fathomless void, I am falling but falling does not make sense, I am traveling without a destination. Like I have been thrown in the waves. I am weightless. A vacuous underground expands infinitely and I splatter against it and it is dark.

I reach out but it becomes useless. The mere movement of my arm makes me feel like I am splitting in half, all the skin and tendons carefully arranged by Tabi tearing apart suddenly, and then clinging back to bone as I lurch back, stock-still and diving further into a fathomless black. My eyes flicker between open and closed. I feel myself dreaming.

There are no stars in this night sky.

God.

I am holding my breath now.

Please, let there be something, God, please, please, please. I want to feel your hand around mine.

It's taking a while.

It's taking forever.

I will never reach anything.

At first.

Then I start waking up in pieces, like every spot of old fur is clinging back onto me after being lost in a storm, and I feel my wiry body colliding with itself again, clicking together, click click click, a doll, and I groan and scream and wail and beg for him to be here again, but there is no him anymore, there is nobody here for me, I try to feel a hand around mine but all I feel is movement, endless cacophonous movement growing more and more terrifying, the infinite black is a pit I fall into, I fall further, wind against me, or maybe fear, just fear and nothing else. Devotion is a cut spinal column. Can anyone feel me around them? Is there anything of me? Is this what Euclid felt? This is all he went through all day and night for an eternity, all forever being meaningless, an afterlife of ideas that stretches on forever and oh my God please hold my hand, please tell me you're there. Tabi? Tabi? Please, I love you. I love you. Have you heard me say it in a while? I would tell you it ten thousand times. Devotion is a lonely son of a bitch floating adrift in an empty bottle of champagne. There must be some kind of grounding rhythm I can use to bring me back to earth, to ground, please, I just need ground to hold onto, a floor to stop me. Marks in the hardwood where furniture keeps getting dragged around and lingerie popping out of overturned suitcases and all this in a phantasmagorical death-dream like I am wilting away into nothingness, there must be some kind of grounding rhythm says a voice in a typhoon four miles deep in the ocean; memory tells me no, no, no, there has never been anything of yourself capable of holding yourself up. You are useless on your own. From top to bottom. How much of you did you make? Memory tells me all of it. I am myself and only myself. Devotion is my heartbeat. And I land on the concrete.

A blackness still envelops me and a vicious scraping sensation against thin silk stockings on my knees while I scramble forward in an unreality. Concrete is what the human world is made of by weight and by volume and if you touch concrete you should know that human beings are holding you back. It is a hard rocky substance almost like stone but it was ground up and plastered together first like so many body parts congealed in a soup making an end project uglier than sin. My palms struggle to keep me crawling. Can't stand. Too weak. It's entering my body in stages, this overwhelming exhaustion, this cold, this fear, where the fuck am I going? In general. How long has it been. In general. When you mix concrete you put aggregate stones inside a vat of cement like myself. I am still whimpering here. A pain enters me in the shape of a stab wound from years and years ago. Along the back of my neck I can feel my own footsteps that I can't manage. I lurch forward I run I run I run there is no running to be had

there is no night, no light, no anything, just this resemblant concrete plain which is all that there is; we are atop a prison, I know it, I know what these walls are made of. My body is all fuzz and warmth and I wish you were holding me.

I grab clumps of the floor and they seep through frail fingers like sand. You used to know the way, Tabi. You knew how to get where we were going.

I feel like throwing up again. That will fix this. Just give me a second away from the rummaging, all this partying in the foyer, I need to throw up off the balcony. It is cold in April this year and here comes that asphalt again, faceplant, blackened by blood but grayed by sun, a left turn, a dirt path, out and onwards to the creek, another left turn, a pit with slick walls, a sand trap, a monster at the bottom, stop thinking about all that. Try to imagine a place. There has to be a place here. There has to be something here. Horror vacui. This is a Room of my own creation. A trash bin full of everything that collects in the corners of places that don't matter. When the world dies, where do its body parts go? Where do I go?

There are no answers and there is no truth. There are only passages in an empty house. The fire is all it has ever known. My vision alights in a terrible inferno. Light. Light. Light and power. All the lamps flickering to life in a Godless heaven.

I feel it come in spots

then go in spots

it needs space

until we go further down it does not have room to manifest

and then it has all the Room it ever needs.

At the foot of a pile of deaths are all the tiniest of things that got dropped on the floor, leaves and thumbtacks and buttons and knots of thread and scraps of food, and lint collected along the edges of chairs brushed up by wind, then there are toys and baubles and memorabilia, and envelopes opened with careless hands alongside discarded glitter shed by birthday cards and get-well-soon cards and more paper scraps, more blanks, tissues and toilet paper and paper towels with mucus, and a driver's license before the one now, a red phone case, a blue condom case, an eight by eight-inch screen-printed illustration on the front of an eleven dollar T-shirt made out of materials that have no home, a floor all matted with the kind of dust that comes like the sunrise, walls towering out of plaster and polycarbonate, plastic wrap clinging to armchair legs and scraps of wood tossed aside with the brush of a hand, two pencils in a computer case, two pens in a pencil case, a water bottle behind two water glasses too tall to properly use, an account of a relationship in a house in the woods, a diagram of a line going up and down to indicate pressure being put on a metal box, a depiction of two particles interacting at a quantum level, the principles and built-up lies and justifications and heartfelt exhales involved in terminating a relationship that's gone on too long, and is otherwise stale, but for a few lingering hopes and dreams and doubts, and some of the sillier things, like if I break up with you, what is left of me, what about our plans next summer, or our plans last summer, and tufts of grass that find their way inside and the little springtails that cling to that grass and the careless kick of a shoe that shoves it outside, and roots upon roots upon roots, all kaleidoscoping in a quiet rapture of the sky, woods, moons, a simple depiction of breathing, a heart beat, then the shutting sensation of a door, and further up the pile are real deaths, actual deaths, or else the intentions of deaths, broken things, particularly terrible things, corpses of people who I never knew and corpses of those I did, like those wailing dismembered rats, and those goats scurrying through the halls, all shaped like abbatoirs in ecstasy, and the ravens and bats flitting around a blackened corridor, and the deer snatched from birthing rooms still in the muck of life, and hands choking that life out of things drowned in boilers, and the sensation of a bodily death mixed with a mind's death, the corpses of a type of terrified animal trapped in the Room above his house, all earless primarily but also eyeless and noseless and noiseless now, all shut up thinking about him, all these skulls waylaid in perfect symmetry, all those heads nodding along, all those necks cut at the base, all fed piecemeal by plastic tubes and nutrient slurries, and non-Euclidean twisting shapes of bags on heads and endless white formations of land upon land upon land, space unending, pits without edges, skies without seas, and a frying pan from a garage sale, an old couch cushion that got too shit so we threw it out, a chair that leans back with a broken switch, all fluffed up and cushioned so as to let you sleep in it in an emergency, more furniture that died, more ovens that stopped working, some as normal walking husks others as ones that needed replacing, some corpses by the sides of roads, some furniture for free but too shit to justify their price tags, dollar bills lost in tax and in accidental transactions, little fees for breathing, little fees for existing, utensils all clogging up kitchen drawers and drawings that don't get finished, all these disproportionate sketches of watercolor or pencil or ink or acrylic on paper or canvas, all the heads shaped wrong, all the bones misplaced and mislaid, the wild sensation of a panic attack swirled away into it's-fine-it-won't-happen-again, pacing in circles, hours wasted, days wasted, years wasted, lives wasted, or else lost, capsized in a formless and abstract flood the size of the universe, my own Sargasso, and further up along the pile I crawl, I crawl, I have nothing but crawling now, under me lays a colossal and unfathomable monster whose form is and is all that it isn't, all this garbage which is nonetheless crucial gone to waste and wasted and forgotten and all of it dust in a turbulent wind which has me by the neck, with no light overhead, a room in no house at all, a Room in the house still on fire still coughing up great black smoke, and as I reach the peak of the pile there are leaves again and thumbtacks and buttons and knots of thread and scraps of food, and hopes, and dreams, and wind against a battered face, and triumphs, but most of all there is collateral, all these things forgotten for my sake, and for his sake, and why won't you just be a good boyfriend to me, why won't I be a good boyfriend to him, I am made of the wrong parts, all scattered here, all these bodily functions splattered across the pile which are supposed to mean something, if only you step back far enough, if only you look from far enough away, it will appear in the shape of someone, of someone better, surely the parts are there, surely I could improve, but there is nothing and nobody in this pile, only this afterlife of ideas in a dull, still, and aimless horror, all screaming out, all silenced, quenched by a thin stream to the west and a cavernous, yawning pain from the east, still in the shape of a man, still with his hands around me, but there is no trace of him, save for just one piece of him, curled up atop the pile, his legs wrapped around his arms wrapped around his legs, Euclid, this malformed horrified person, who has had his Deafness ripped away from him, that too in the pile, and here he lies utterly paralyzed and whimpering and crying out, is there anybody, but there is only me, and in a weary and thin frenzy I reach out at him and I hold Euclid and hold him tight and sob as his head descends into my arms, I have you, I have you, I have you, and I feel at his chest and I ensure there is a heart still beating.

Ba-thump.

Ba-thump.

Ba-thump.

On April 26th, 2020, I came very close to killing myself. Just ducked under the rung at the last moment, not for any particularly profound reason, not because I was saved or because I had a realization, or even because I wasn't 'capable' because certainly I was going to do it, but on my way to the clearing in the woods I tripped and got my knee all scuffed up, and then I couldn't manage to find the energy to kill myself anymore. It felt silly at that point. I was in that place by the creek because I thought it was deep in the woods—it was just someone's backyard, but let's move on—and hopefully that meant I wouldn't bother anyone or scare anyone. It's stupid, I know it's stupid, and again let's move on. I brought a gun to do this and gave up and took sixty-eight steps all the way back to my car and drove back home to see Max and he had had a really shit day at work, so I made us jambalaya, and I put on a movie, the new Godzilla movie, and we rode the rest of the night out, and I was a ghost. The only reason I existed anymore was a patch of roots that I stumbled over and a thorny bush that made a wound too annoying to ignore. Max didn't know it, didn't need to know it. I was just hanging around in a suspended state like a phantom still attending to my duties, and at any moment I could zone out and imagine I wasn't there. Actually this is a terrible mindset to be in, because it makes repeating the act pretty easy and appealing. But again for no good reason I just never got the chance. There was never a great opportunity. Sometimes I would think about that clearing a few paces away from the creek and ideate, and I'd remember that I was a ghost floating around, not really here, not really intruding, and that would give me some solace. It was my little fantasy for a while. Until, like a lot of things, I forgot about it in favor of whatever was more pressing at the time.

I do not let him go back to the house, but I struggle to avoid it for too long.

I take little stays here and there in whatever spare room feels like mine, although none are mine. Sometimes I feel compelled and other times I feel excited. Sometimes I feel like I am destroying myself when I visit Tabi and his house and the men he keeps with him. Self-destruction has been on the mind a lot lately. In the abstract. I'm not suicidal right now and oddly haven't felt the urge in a long time. I just wonder what the hell I'm doing that I'm still intact and still so insistent on ruining things. Maybe there is no answer to that.

Euclid found a fourth home for himself, this time in North Dakota, he was always insistent he'd like the snow and the cold, and the space, and what's not to like about it. He works a remote job now, an exhausting one, not as nice as he deserves but nothing we haven't dealt with, all the same bullshit, all the same problems, as if we've learned. I check in with him every day. When things get particularly bad I think about holding him again, hugs and fluff and safety, and the sensation of having somebody else there for you. It has replaced my worst urges at least partially.

He has a car again. But he doesn't drive much. But it's still nice that he has that. Don't go stealing cars, I tell him. Aw, screw you. That's a you thing. It's a 2012 Honda Civic he drives, uses it to get groceries and attend little classes at a local community center. He is no longer Deaf, not physically, and he laments this, he misses it. Where did that part of me go? But he has to carry on without it, because he is still somebody worth being.

His life isn't mine but it makes me happy to see it.

I think of him more often than Tabi ever did.



Breathe. Just breathe, I sign. I am giddy. Just breathe, you're so hard you're stabbing me.

I am below a man I fell in love with a year ago and he's holding me down by the chest and feeling his fingers through my fur, and he is exhaling so damn heavy, his touch is a prison, his auburn eyes seem like there is somebody behind them, and it is a good enough sensation to wipe all of that away. He is Deaf too. I found someone I like quite well and I'd like to spend my life with him but I don't want to jinx it by talking about him too much. You know how these things go. He is erect against my skirt, grinding, he is excited just from the sensation of fur against his palm, and from warmth, because warmth is always nice. And I manage to tell him, I sign, would you pretend you're doing the thing? Sure. I love you. Love you too. And he takes a breath, lays on my waist for a moment, squeezes my member beneath his weight, and while we're both excited and tired from this, he tells me, okay, I'm going to kill you soon.

It isn't real when he says it, but I can fool myself well enough.



I never figured out what to do with this body, this goat on two legs I inhabit, but I've started to walk around in spots of woods upstate, the parks and the parts between roads, you know, the bare minimum, where the deer and mooses and wolves feel a little comfortable hiding away from the world, and it feels right. Of course I don't think there are many wild goats in Michigan but it's my fantasy, let me enjoy it.

I had a moment the other day hiking that sticks with me. I met a red squirrel face to face up close. It crawled down from atop a great big maple tree and rested on the flat of the trunk, and then paused, and saw me sitting across from it against an adjoining pine, and it paused, and it didn't run. Hello. I was just trying to eat and it came up to see me. Hello! But I didn't have anything profound to say to this squirrel. We just hung out for a while and then it was over.

This is the easier way to be treated and I wouldn't mind it if it became the norm for me. Some people want to be housepets and be loved unconditionally but I could survive being seen from afar, between the trees, exhausted, happy, eyes glinting in a glare, but I don't see you, I only see through you.



How long are the nights here?

For years I felt as if multiple nights passed while I slept. I don't know if that was real or imagined, but of course Tabi was dragging me up into the Room above the house probably long after I thought he stopped, or at least I never felt the sensation of it end, I never felt safe, I still feel no safety in the house, nothing but physical warmth, arms around me, a grounding rhythm too uneven to nod along with. But then again the question bubbles up in my mind now and then. It is something unanswered that keeps coming up. A persistent, chronic ache, flaring up in my bones at the worst moments. I wouldn't have let it go, even if it ruined the thing between me and Tabi, if it were a more conventional relationship, but one little thing couldn't have done much against those tides.

Still.

It is next June when I visit again. I am happy to see Gaiman and I am even happier to see Almond and Cav gone. There are a couple men I don't recognize. There are rooms I don't remember. There are halls that go forever. Gaiman leads me around, I slip my shoes off, I pull my old sun hat off a shelf, I feel the carpet like wool against my feet, and I bask in it, this warmth of someplace horrible and familiar. There is a persistent excitement in the air. This house cannot rot and cannot exhaust. There are corpses of fresh luggage in the foyer again and the television is on and I say a big hello to Barry and Kim, and they wave back, toothy grins from a cat and a hyena cut out of a picture book, and I stand there and admire how tall the shelves have gotten in the past month. Surely he doesn't read all these, does he? Does he read all these lost books? If he doesn't, does anyone?

Gaiman and I chatter for a little while about life, time, time spent, like how are you doing and I'm doing fine and so on. He's been working on a project but keeps dodging what it's about. He'll show me when it's done. Do you get out of here much? Yeah, on weekends to visit my mom in Seattle. Like tomorrow morning! I'm gonna take off tomorrow morning! Good. Who are the new guys? One from Warsaw, one from Helsinki. Now whose fault was it this time. Take a wild guess.

But Gaiman has something else to attend to and looks at me long off and I hope you're doing okay in there.

And so on.

And in a few minutes the owner of this house, Tabi, my sheep, comes to the foyer and greets me; he is looking spindly and tired, he is still wearing that silly eyeliner that makes him look fierce, but he is warm of expression upon seeing me, and he smells like lavender, he smells like last year; he holds my hands in his hands and he kisses me on the cheek and it all feels natural. He is floating above me, but not far above me, and threatens at every moment to scoop me up in a hug. But I don't want a hug right now, if that's okay.

"How was your travel?"

He cares too much. "Oh, it was easy. I've got a GPS."

And Tabi falls into that expression always on his face, that smile that does not give away anything. "Right, I know, I just want to make sure."

"Well, thank you."

"Of course, darling."

He wants me to sit with him in the kitchen and I oblige. I'm settling in fast, now. It comes so easy. I missed Gaiman, Barry, Kim. I missed Tabi. I did. I missed the heat in the air. It helps not to acknowledge my addiction. And Tabi is fumbling through drawers now, looking for utensils, looking for anything interesting to show me.

He asks, "do you want to eat now or later?"

"Who's doing dinner tonight?"

"My treat, if you'll allow me. I actually unearthed some good champagne from the Room below the house, actual wine directly from the region. You know the difference, right?"

I shrug. "Yeah, but they taste the same."

"I'm sorry, I didn't even ask. Do you want champagne at all?"

"Sure."

"I didn't even ask if you're still drinking. Is this okay?"

And I don't particularly want to dwell on that question. "It's all good! Make whatever you'd like."

He makes a casserole from some recipe or another.

The champagne sits mostly untouched.



There are fairy tales told to children and a lot of those still swim around in my mind, all as things to fear or things to covet, but there are also fairy tales told to adults and many of us tell them to ourselves, and they have precisely the same purpose—they are no more and no less. A story about Tabi would have some lessons to be gained but it would also be aspirational. A story about Tabi would be as inundated with painted depictions of his wool as it would be laden with descriptions of his eyes in the dark, his form floating towards me, his hands taking the life out of me, both in the short term and in the long term, but it would immediately return to those sensory tides, those experiences which have kept me in some part trapped here, his smile, his warmth, his heartbeat.

The only person holding me at night when the fantasy evaporates is Euclid. He is many miles away. And he should keep to his own life, his own people, he has better things to do than worry about me, but I am still present with him when Tabi is gone; I think we are sharing something, maybe space, maybe something else. Sometimes I dream that I am with him in the Room above the house struggling to breathe through a tube. Maybe that is where I get the feeling that my sleep drags on forever.

Morning is always stuck hiding in a cabinet.

It's gotten dark now, night in Michigan, night enough for me to feel it, and I am lying on my back, sinking into a bed that is not mine in a room that is not mine. I'm only going to stay a few days, maybe a week. I'm just tired of my cards getting declined, tired of my body aching, tired of working. I am so, so tired.

Please, just let me take some time away from the world. A touch of his wool.

Now and then.

I am little against the waves.

The Painter, by BrassDragon/FableDragon (https://www.fabledragon.com/)

Cover Illustration by Feliville (https://www.tumblr.com/feliville)

Chapter Illustrations by sophorose

Id

Ego

Superposition

If you have any thoughts or questions, feel free to email me!

[email protected]

Thanks for reading.

Spin Glass should be accompanied afterwards by these stories:

        Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
        Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
        Visiting Narcissa by Patricia Taxxon
        Together by Haus of Decline
        House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski