...and here's a bonus story from behind the editorial curtain—dedicated to all of you, the readers, the writers, anyone who's supported Propagule in any capacity. We've been doing this for just over two years now and in that time we've put out five issues—that's 50 stories—all of which we're so incredibly proud of. Thank y'all for rockin' with us. Here's to the next 50.
Eventually we were informed of our condition. It is extremely difficult to recall exactly where we were or when we were when we were informed of our condition—far more difficult to remember, for instance, than the concomitant sizes of our bodies or our attitudes to fluorescent lighting. We may have been together, when we were informed, but we may have not been. In another sense, we were necessarily together, which is to say (in a serious tone) that we were neither here nor there, but together all the same. Whether we were aware of that is a different question. As was our number. As was what our social states were relative to one another. As was which parties we were attending. As was the existence or non-existence of our interest in music. As was the state of our teeth. Etc.
We were still relatively small then, with stubby limbs that reliably concealed the self-importance of our movements. Our limited bodies could not carry us very far, and ladders were of no use when they were encountered. You can imagine the kinds of projects available to us in those days—mostly bowling and birdwatching. Mostly we practiced radical interpretation. Occasionally we just lay on the floor and practiced filling our brains with oxygen, a sort of flexing maneuver. When on our feet we would bounce off one another like asteroids, casually invalidating the order of the celestial spheres. We did not believe in such things—the celestial spheres—of course, because we had neither reason nor need to. We were too busy colliding and falling onto the ground and lurching back to our feet in the low-framerate way zombies have inherited from insects, who are much more skilled at that kind of thing than pretty much anyone else. We were neither zombies nor insects, though we might have been if someone had given us access to the concept of teleology. I know what you’ll ask me next. To echo: whether zombies, insects, or we were or are machines is a different question.
Here is what happened. We were informed of our condition. Our condition was that we were going to die. We were informed that we were all of us going to die. Naturally this required further specification of what dying meant. To our surprise we found ourselves grasping the idea rather effortlessly (in hindsight this fact is suspicious). The Authority then kindly permitted us a brief but sincere summit conference to beg further insight:
Q: When did it start being the case that we are going to die?
A: Always, only you were not aware of it until just now. It’s your condition, after all, and conditions are permanent things unless otherwise specified.
Q: Won’t it be the case that we won’t be going to die once we have died?
A: Yes, but this doesn’t touch the permanence of your condition, as you won’t exist to be in another condition once you’ve died.
Q: Does this condition belong to everyone?
A: It might be slightly more perspicuous to say: does everyone belong to this condition? The answer depends on your theological commitments.
Q: What are our theological commitments?
A: To be honest this is beside the point. The point is that everyone like you is going to die—and don’t get smart about the similarity claim.
Q: We only mean to be responsible inquirers. How did you know we are going to die?
A: We knew you were like us, and that we are going to die, and that everyone like us is going to die.
Q: And we were always like you?
A: In the relevant ways.
Q: But we aren’t the Authority, while you are, on the other hand.
A: I can see why that would be confusing. You are now part of the Authority. Before you became part of the Authority, you were potentially part of the Authority, which is really just another way of being part of the Authority. But don’t try to reproduce this reasoning in other cases or people will raise their voices and ring bells at you.
Q: What is the Authority?
A: The Authority is the set of everyone who knows that they and everyone like them will die. Welcome, by the way.
Q: Thanks for having us. Did we have any choice about becoming part of the Authority?
A: No.
Q: Do we have any choice about whether to bring others who are not yet part of the Authority into the fold?
A: It may seem like you do, but you’ll come to understand that you don’t. Beasts are perhaps the exception.
Q: What are we having for dinner tonight?
A: Lasagna, probably.
Q: What does knowing our condition mean for us, besides that we’re now part of the Authority?
A: It means you can see clearly. The scales have shed from your eyes. The world sits before you bare as a peeled egg.
Q: We would have thought that if you had scales over your eyes you would be able to tell. It would probably chafe, and you wouldn’t be able to see anything if the scales were really densely layered.
A: Even so.
Q: What if we didn’t want to know that we are going to die?
A: This is logically impossible. If you are part of the Authority, as you now in fact are, this wish is not available to you in the space of wishes. If you are not a part of the Authority, as you believed you were earlier today, you could not have such a wish, because the intentional object of said wish is your impending death, which is ex hypothesi not a possible intentional object for you given your lack of knowledge of its possibility. There’s a transcendental proof that can be given here. Would you like me to render it formally?
Q: No, we understand [stated misleadingly: we understood but not all of us agreed]. Did you experience positive emotions about informing us that we are going to die?
A: I don’t know. How about some lasagna?
As newly christened members of the Authority, we had joined the ranks of everyone else, and now stood in relations of deep sympathy with all of them. That this was the case was on the whole not verbally acknowledged. It also became clear to us that the culture in which we lived was quite toughminded about our condition. Complaining was not allowed, and when it occurred was punished via massive disregard. Trying to understand was interpreted as complaining. This became clear over time. Occasionally authorless waves of propaganda emanated from no location in particular, carrying messages such as death is what confers onto existence its meaning, as though existence were a word with an investigable semantic value instead of a primordial ground of the possibility of any and all determinations, or don’t fear dying; fear failing to live, which required ultramagnanimous equivocation in order to not come out completely trivial. Nonetheless these messages seemed widely effective. People stood in lines. Sunsets were fetishized. Sometimes citizens would gather in parks, milling stochastically, chirping dasein dasein dasein over and over while attempting to rescue fast food scraps from annihilation. (It took me a while to realize that this was not the same word as ‘design’, and accordingly that there weren’t such categories as daseiner clothing.) Everyone knew to avert their eyes when earthworms washed up after a rain—focus on how nice the smell is, I was told. And the smell was, often, nice.
We branched out, gaining many associates. We discovered that some of our associates had invented objects that would speed up the onset of dying, including heavy artillery and certain cleaning products. Once we gathered to observe the construction of a gigantic, smooth tower—almost a giant maggot—which, when completed, was peopled and then induced to explode. Only afterword did we learn that this explosion was not what those in charge had meant to happen: the thing was a rocket, a particular species of vehicle, built in order to ferry its inhabitants to the Moon and, down the line, to birth even stronger rockets (presumably through selective breeding with other exceptionally healthy rockets) which would ferry their inhabitants even farther into the black geometric above. The explosion of the rocket that we saw was widely regarded as a mistake, but it was evident that the public opinion was of its being an excused mistake, one that would stageset for blinding future achievements which could be converted into posters and mass-produced.
We branched out. A multitude of paths emerged like nematodes. Various musical instruments were attempted, some pursued. We authentically engaged with distractions such as linguistics, knitting, the purchasing and reselling of rare and valuable sneakers, epistemology, hunger strikes, railway engineering, and pornography. Our eyes—which we were still fairly sure had at no point been covered in scales—did vary in filminess and focus across the days, but, good empiricists that we were, we always trusted them. We found out about Virginia Woolf, and were awed. Some of us traveled to see sloths in person. One of us met someone famous. We bolstered each other with compliments and excuses. Some of us were diagnosed with psychological disorders. We walked up and down mountains, experiencing changes in air pressure. We stepped with care around the proliferating ground-embedded legions of metal grates out of which came oppressive gusts of telluric heat. We created and annulled invisible contracts. We experimented with pseudonyms. We tried jellied eel. We learned the words ‘sortie’ and ‘escarpment’. We read Herodotus. We pretended to read Kierkegaard. Our parents rhythmically dropped onto their faces.
Virginia Woolf, wearing another person’s mouth, said: “Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man's, like Percival's, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding.”
We nodded, our frames buzzing as though thousands of dragonflies trapped within our bodies.
Virginia Woolf, filling her pockets with stones, said: “I am going for a swim in the lake, don’t wait up.”
We nodded, gravity welling in our faces.
Virginia Woolf, mollusks reconstructing her body, said: “Suicide overdetermines, no, preempts necessary death, replacing scientific necessity with the necessity of intention. While not every mode of dying can be avoided, any particular mode of dying can be.”
We nodded, flipping with determination through our furiously annotated Anscombes.
Virginia Woolf, the atoms that had composed her flying into various black holes, said: “Purchase Now the Penguin Random House Vintage Classics Woolf Series: Jacob’s Room (Vintage Classics Woolf Series), £8.99; Mrs Dalloway (Vintage Classics Woolf Series), £8.99; Orlando (Vintage Classics Woolf Series), £8.99; A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (Vintage Classics Woolf Series), £8.99; To the Lighthouse (Vintage Classics Woolf Series), £8.99; The Waves (Vintage Classics Woolf Series), £8.99; The Years (Vintage Classics Woolf Series), £8.99.”
Not our favorite editions, we apologized. How many pounds are in a dollar? Is Boris still in charge over there?
A new question was posed: upon learning of our imminent deaths, why didn’t we immediately and ceaselessly begin to work toward changing our fate? This had been, as far as we could tell, what had occurred with respect to the Moon. Aristotle had told everyone that the Moon was unreachable. Kant had essentially agreed. Everybody had simply taken their word for it until our organizations really started to get a good handle on propulsion and so on. When that happened nearly everybody stopped believing what Aristotle and Kant had said. Applying the logic behind this process to the problem of dying seemed an obvious move to make, but mysteriously, we observed, it wasn’t being made. We puzzled and drank coffee.
Some of the hypotheses generated were:
None of these seemed extremely plausible. Informally, we trended toward the judgement that, while not to be dying was something we did want, we wanted other things much more, and this latter set of wants crowded out the practical influence of the first want. Though we weren’t sure whether this was reasonable either.
We reclined in long seats with our long limbs leaking out of us, feeling our heads get smaller. There sounded a buzzing of flies. At those times when we felt there was too much sky we pulled back into our homes to which we had attached doors in order to prevent them from being parts of The World. The flies were politely told that they were not invited in. The walls of our homes breathed. Somewhere on the unshadowed waste someone was hitting someone else in the face with a hammer until he no longer had a face in which to be hit. The stars quivered with maximum ambiguity.
—Have you considered that it might be nutritional?
—Considered that what might be nutritional?
—Doesn’t matter. Whatever is eating at you. It’s not as well-known a fact as it should be, but there are two kinds of things that eat at you: wild animals and substances in your gut—stuff you yourself have eaten. And the latter kind is much more common in cities, where nearly everybody lives these days. It’s a vengeful eating, you know? Not I eat you because otherwise you’ll eat me, but I eat you because you ate me already.
—The stomach isn’t a painter’s canvas; abstract expressionism isn’t a gastric option.
—Hell, you need a hobby. Go to a punk show or something. Build one of those ten thousand piece puzzles.
—Can’t we admit we’re both just riffing?
—Even if we are, riffs are assessable according to internal merits.
—Oh brother.
—I’m serious. Maybe read some scifi. One of those ones with fifty characters to memorize and half of the names have no consonants and were obviously generated by dieroll.
—Why is the Moon called ‘the Moon’?
—Various words for ‘month’ and ‘measure’. Goes back a ways.
—Was hoping it was related to ‘monad’.
—Nuh-uh. False cognate.
—Alas… alas…
—You want some real advice? Stop taking pictures. Of anything. No pictures. And don’t look at pictures other people have taken. It’s not any better to be a voyeur—the neurochemistry is the same, if you catch my drift. And for that matter, if you have a copy of the Tractatus, burn it. Listen to some smooth jazz. Then listen to some jagged jazz. Imagine yourself as a jamboree of quantum fields (in fact you are a jamboree of quantum fields, but it’s only possible to imagine yourself as such, not to know yourself as such). Back to the smooth jazz. Rinse and repeat. The Tractatus might as well be an arcane text, and I mean that in a purely instrumental sense. It’s practically kabbalistic. I mean that in the memetic hazard, tentacles-into-your brain type way. Anyway the pictures. The most important thing is getting rid of the pictures.
—Pictures are not the kind of things one can cohabitate with, I suppose.
—Most can, but not you.
—I suppose…
—Are you frightened?
—Yes, all the time. Are you?
—Yes, all the time.
We all went to the movies. Sometimes only some of us went to the movies. Other times we all went to the movies. One particular time we were all at the movies, seeing a movie. Sometimes going to the movies was the only thing to do. When we arrived at the theater, we were instructed to remove all items from our pockets and leave them in featureless black cubes (presumably soundproofed) in the antechamber—otherwise, there was a risk that we might unintentionally startle the movie and cause it to conceal itself. We read the program notes to the movie. Like the descriptions that come with legally purchased firearms, the program notes gave specifications about the movie:
Trailers for other movies played before the movie in order to ensure the movie-viewer that this movie is not the last movie. We were always gratified by this notice and always found it comforting to know that there would be further movies.
The movie contained several characters. The male characters were named Irn, Earn, Urn, ‘Rn, and Ern; the female characters were named Bella, Nella, Ella, Shella, and Vella. There was also a robot named Gorgoroth. It was possible to construct an injective function from each male character to each female character, but unnecessary given the movie’s purposes. To each character there corresponded an actor, whom the movie led us to infer existed only as a derivative abstraction from his or her character who enjoyed primacy of reality. It was possible to construct an injective function from each character to each actor. The actors, like ghosts, were said to roam beyond the confines of the movie’s spacetime, mute and causally impotent. Possibly because of the nature of the character-actor relation, the injective function between these groups was taken to be real and necessary. In movies no room has more than three walls. The characters teleported and were bombarded by stimuli. We practiced radical interpretation toward the movie. The characters interacted with objects: Ella with the shovel; Urn with the telephone; Bella with the cattle prod; Gorgoroth with the thermonuclear warhead.
An expert on movies seated two seats to our left and one row back disguised as a bird informed us that a movie is, at base, a series of holes on a strip of film. Divine illumination passes through the holes and a movie emerges. The movie, a light-being (archaic term: angel), is then directed via a series of strategically placed mirrors to a location accessible to its admirers. We pondered the implications of existence in virtue of holes. We reclined our skulls and raised our feet. The bright film drank from our eyes. The movie expanded to encompass the totality of the sensorium. Temporarily, we were redeemed.
Eventually, after a rainy few months during which nothing of significance happened, we determined that we would travel to the Moon. In preparation for our trip, we familiarized ourselves with the well-known prior excursions to the Moon, though we were cognizant of the fact that no two lunar outings could ever really rise to genuine comparability. Our journey would be ours and ours alone.
Our method of travel was accordingly distinctive. No boats nor rockets were procured—none of us would have known how to pilot either—and no special clothing was donned. We went humbly, more pilgrims than scientists. For several months prior (I could not give you a specific number) we had been making tentative contacts with the Moon during our dreams. These would range from mere glimpses of a part of its white face in the reflection of a window or mirror to direct encounters, that cyclopean bowling ball suspended what felt like little more than a few meters over one’s head, miraculously frozen in place midway through a cataclysm-promising trajectory, the flat dark seas writhing in virtue of its nearness, its face somehow downturned to look at you, despite its face being its entire surface area. On some nights communications would be had, primitive vibrations exchanged, though it was never discernible whether we were exchanging information with the satellite directly or whether the source and target of our messages was some intelligent being, hidden somewhere in its stoney surface, who perhaps could see us even when we could not see him. These rendezvous were further characterized by a kind of primal or natural necessity to which questions of consent could not be appropriately applied. The Moon was simply here, and so were we, and whether either party had agreed to such compresence was at worst unintelligible, at best irrelevant. We speculated that such a state of affairs was representative of the lives of organisms sharing a microbiome. Obviously we could not ask them.
Dreams are typically contrasted with waking life, and for good reason, but we came to be aware that the famous discrepancies between these states belied certain substantive uniformities. Both dreaming and waking essentially involve the conceptual ordering of the sensory manifold. In other words, we noticed that the appearances of the Moon-concept in our dreams were not fundamentally different than the appearances of the Moon-concept when viewed veridically through a telescope on a clear night. Once we understood this, a way of physically accessing the Moon became perfectly comprehensible to us. Concepts, like living bodies or like glass, are flexible things, and can be modified in shape. So we set about massaging the concept of the Moon, which had been a spherical concept, into an oblong concept. Accordingly the Moon, given its direct attachment to the Moon-concept (this connection is so plain that nothing more need be said about it) became oblong. This change in shape naturally affected the pattern of its orbit, making said orbit lopsided, and as a result the Moon’s surface started swinging very close to the Earth at certain times of year—around the beginning of September, if I recall; during those periods travel to the Moon became considerably less difficult.
We spent time training to scale mountains, and eventually we found ourselves moving with the stealthy confidence of great bats, gliding precipice to precipice. Already we were becoming lunar beings ourselves, even before we had reached the Moon’s pale anorthite surface: gravity’s directionality lost emphasis in our collective consciousness as we learned to sleep beneath cliffs, attached by hooks to faces of chalk and dolomite, hooks which merged with our bodies and became more intimate than clothing. Our vision changed too, discarding the perceptual nuances needed for individuating the poisonous objects of the ground-world in favor of ancient, unspeakable oppositions: light and shadow, the cataclysmic dawn and the bottomlessness of night, and the eternal protean swirling, swirling beyond the beyond.
Suddenly, the Moon broke into view before us, emerging as ultimate object over the tenebrous waste. We were not harried for time; its revolutions were slow, relative to us, but our excitement nevertheless drove us toward it with defining purpose. We readied our solid ropes, our grappling hooks. The Moon! The Moon! The Moon! Somewhere we dropped the formalities. Moon Moon Moon Moon, Oh—
To touch the Moon. The experience, as best as I can describe, was that of having lived in a room one’s whole life, but without knowledge of that fact, and subsequently learning of the room at the same moment as it falls away, its separating walls quickly vanishing into nothing as they drop with infinite speed into perception’s inferior horizon. The Moon was what had made the room visible, and what had broken it. Now there was no longer an end to things. We pulled ourselves onto the white stones, feeling the calcium and feldspar implicit in every touch. We touched the Moon. We laughed. We touched one another. We touched the Moon.
When we had first determined to go to the Moon one of us had put forth what we all agreed was a good idea: in addition to familiarizing ourselves with the important historical accounts of Moon-travel, we should speak to a subject of the act. We made contact with an astronaut, or a former astronaut, though he made a point of informing us—rather aggressively—that astronaut was not the sort of status one could realistically lose. Each of us bought him a beer (six in total) and he calmed down.
There is no blood on the Moon, the astronaut said. We took notes. But there are worms—moonworms—and it turns out that they feed on blood, though nobody including the moonworms knew this until recently. We took notes. Stay away from the moonworms, if possible, the astronaut said. We drew a picture of a moonworm (to the best of our imagination) with a black pen and then drew a red X over it with a red pen. The astronaut lifted his helmet and put an index finger three inches into his nose and moved it around. His forehead rippled.
The Moon will seem very empty, the astronaut said, but this is an illusion. Something may only be empty when it is a vessel for other objects. The Moon is a vessel for exactly one object, which is the Moon. Accordingly the Moon is never empty. We drew a circle with an external label saying ‘Moon’ and then added an internal label also saying ‘Moon’.
Some people hate the Moon, but this is really a symptom of insecurity about the size of the windows in one’s childhood bedroom, the astronaut said. One of us asked him about children who grew up without bedroom windows, to which he had no reply.
If you’re truly serious about going to the Moon, the astronaut said, you should have these. He handed each of us four copies of Faust: Marlowe, Goethe, Mann, Murnau.
Spooky, we said. He excused himself to vomit.
Contrary to its representation in popular media, there is life on the Moon. We didn’t find any moonworms, but we did observe several other species of living creature. Unlike the life we were accustomed to, moonlife, it became apparent, did not involve a categorial distinction between animal and vegetable, nor between animal, vegetable, and sediment. Possibly the terrestrial animal most similar to moonlife is the jellyfish, though even this would be something of a stretch, given that as far as we could tell nothing on the moon was in possession of even a single tentacle. The beings here were not bristling with electricity, like the animals we were used to, but serene, cyclical. Our encounters with moonlife were for the most part inconsequential. From time to time we’d notice a many-lidded eye groaning open on a stone, or spy a gelatinous mass engaged in slow but obviously pleasurable vibration, or cross a ridge to view a flock of what resembled chrysanthemum heads, insouciantly bouncing at height. On occasion we would find ourselves in general agreement that there was something living in our immediate vicinity, but unable to identify anything in our visual field as the object of our judgement. The random scuttler passing us by—if we wore hats we would have been tipping them.
The Moon invariably strikes you as a Parmenidean object until you notice it has acne. (It goes without saying that in principle no Parmenidean object could have acne.) It was in one of the Moon’s many craters that we found the first god.
You’re the Moon god, we proclaimed. We congratulated the god on its holiness.
I’m the Moon god, the Moon god said in a voice like old gears. It thanked us for our definition.
We had many questions for the Moon god, who resembled a coral reef: How many stories are in your house? How is the fuel efficiency of your car? Have you read Anna Karenina? Do you know how to replace a tire? Can you teach us? Was imagism a mistake? How about Snow Crash? Is there really a problem concerning technology? Can induction be justified? Will the company merger be a good idea, in the long run? Are there any limits on healthy fantasizing? Why is pointing rude? Will I miss out on anything essential if I never travel to Asia? What is the true purpose of sleep? How do I perform vector addition? What can one do with a marketing degree besides marketing? Do you have any tattoos? Will our children strangle us in our sleep? If they do, will we be in a position to understand their reasons? How do we solve the preface paradox? Serif or sans serif? Which is the best Heinlein to start with? Is the idea of heroism obsolete in the modern world? What should I do when I want to cry but can’t? Your honest thoughts on vaporwave? Ben Marcus? Are there stance-independent ethical truths? Is health intrinsically valuable? Could you take a moment to explain—
Please, murmured the Moon god, I’m exhausted…
We were profoundly embarrassed. To have exhausted a god! We performed breathing exercises to deintensify our impulses. This was more difficult than usual on account of our being on the Moon.
We want you to console us, Moon god. If we can’t be everlasting like you, we want to be consoled.
Gods are no more everlasting than nongods, said the Moon god. We are only indefinite. It formed an imperceptible expression.
Oh, we said, oh, great pains occuring in our ribs.
Ask the other god, if you don’t believe me, said the Moon god.
We experienced confusion. Another god?
Sure—fifteen craters northwest, said the Moon god, And only count by the big craters.
How can this be, we said, how can this be.
The result of a natural principle, said the Moon god: Life is not fundamental. Therefore life is transient. Therefore life is scattered.
Oh, we said.
Now we have improved our understanding of one another, said the Moon god.
Our party returned to the lunar wilderness, soaked in ambivalence. We hated the Moon god. We could not hate the Moon god. We hated the Moon. We could not hate the Moon. Moonfish levitated, shining like gems—perhaps relative to the Moon’s ecosystem they were gems. Did the Moon god hate the Moon? Did we and the Moon god hate the Moon together? If so, this hatred caused us to compose a unity. We remembered what the astronaut had told us and counted the bedroom windows in our memories. Were we psychologically disturbed? Hell, it might explain a lot.
But we could not hate the Moon, as much as we might have liked. Perhaps we envied it instead. And yet it permitted us to crawl on its pockmarked back. What more could we have asked from it?
Nothing here is like us, we thought darkly. We experienced the distance between atoms.
We went to the second Moon god, who resembled fifteen jaguars running in a circle.
I prefer ‘the god on the Moon’, said the god on the Moon in a voice like the tuning of a harp, A subtle difference, but revelatory—the placement of the preposition causes an authentic impression of contingency.
Nevertheless, we know your secret, we said haughtily, The first god told us. We might as well not even call you gods. You’re no better than an iguana.
Imagine saying to an iguana that you might as well not even call it an iguana, said the god on the Moon. What could that statement possibly mean.
The firmament has collapsed, we said, or rather there was never a firmament to begin with. Only lots of iguanas. Everywhere we go we hear the breaking of glass.
I’m sorry to hear that you’re in pain, said the god on the Moon. It formed an imperceptible expression. However I am pleased to have learned of your being. Would you like to see a movie? I have a projector, and the crater wall to our left is fairly steep. You’ll have to accept that the projection won’t be quite even; the top corners will always appear a bit shrunken next to the base. The nature of space and time, you understand. You know they used to call movies pictures, but they aren’t pictures at all.
We argued ecstatically about what movie to watch. How about the one where Gorgoroth attempts to obliterate the Sun? How about the one where Gorgoroth battles Kreton? How about the one where Gorgoroth is elected President? Isn’t that also the one in which the three spies all bug the same cactus? We watched a movie. The god on the Moon provided chips and queso and mondbier.
On the Moon, it is always twilight, said the god on the Moon. Night for day. All our colors are desaturated. How we long for the clamboring of foxes, the hum of chainsaws.
We understand, we said. Once upon a time our grass was so very green.
Once upon a time our stone was so very white, agreed the god on the Moon.
Huge shapes rotated in outer space to no one’s concern.
The movie was nice, we said, upon finishing the movie. You should come over to our place sometime, to watch another nice movie. It will be just like watching the movie we watched moments ago, but in a different place. We have it on good authority that there will always be more movies.
Goodbye, goodbye, said the god on the Moon, I have never had anything to teach you.
Goodbye, goodbye, we said, returning in the direction we had come. On the way back, something came over us which might have been called lunacy. It was a certain sort of liquid phenomenon, marked by sharpness of expression and marginally yellow undertones. Sitting semicircled in a crater, surrounded by matter on all sides, our knees clasped, we introduced ourselves to one another for (somehow!) only the second time in our long brief lives:
Mine is —————.
Mine is *****.
Mine is }}}}}.
Mine is &&&&&.
Mine is #####.
Mine is \\\\\.
Mine is 00000.
We all said one another’s names. We practiced radical interpretation. We asked each other questions.
When we reached the first Moon god, our climbing hooks were in our hands. If it wailed as we hacked at it, the sound was too high-frequency for us to register. Chunks of godflesh leapt into the air.
You piece of shit, we said, It would have cost you nothing.
At some point during the carnage our eyeballs finally burst from atmospheric pressure. But by then no one was paying attention, for we were no more than animals.
William Dempsey is a founding editor of Propagule.