They made you and a snake pure, then put you inside a machine together.
There was somebody who told you once: pain is unavoidable, suffering is optional.
She was one of the children of Noah, and she understood, but did not speak, your language. No child of Noah can speak your language.
It was said to you in a medical tent outside Chambéry, and it was no comfort. Plate enamel had to be drilled to reach the shrapnel inside you, and they had no idea there was a nerve root in between. The children of Noah don’t understand bodies, they never have.
When the pain came, you saw their faces contort at your voice.
It may be called a war retroactively, but it wasn’t thought of that way until long after it ended. Nobody thought to name it.
There is no name for the state of things where the sun rises and falls. There’s no name for the state of things where people die some years after being born, or where gravity secures the Dry Land to the base of the Firmament in adherence to the Word, or where grass is eaten by cattle and plants give bloom in the spring or summer.
There is no name for these things to distinguish them from some way which things might otherwise be.
It wasn’t called a war until after it ended. Before an end of the war could be regarded as something possible or impossible, it first had to be conceived of.
You held their hand in yours, and raw muscles snaked their way through your palmar orifice, richly innervated. You held their hand in yours and clasped hard around the chitinous indentations where your claws were meant to find purchase, and they entered your carpal and you shuddered, deep in the satisfaction of exchange.
Remember through your ulnar and radial interfaces, dual-woven. Know where the Noachians sent their mechanized convoy and how many cores and tanks of water and tons of food and crates of rifles were counted by the dragonfly, receive the images shattered in foamgrain clarity through wide-arc compound eyes.
Bone reeds quiver inside the body linked to yours, and you love the quality of their voice.
Your partner’s head is a crown of sensory fronds and eyes arranged ornamentally, in the starburst style they prefer in the north. As you admire the pattern, their head disassembles itself around a line drawn through its center mass, the path of a tungsten-core bullet which you will only hear fired a microsecond from now.
Their head bursts outward and becomes a spatter of hemolymph and brain across your chest. It’s warm and ugly and you are now interwoven with a corpse, and inside your carpal cavity you feel the moment when information dissolves into shrill noise, and you feel the hand in yours writhing in its death, and you scream in spite of yourself.
A moment after, the children of Noah take you.
This is a place which has been given no name, where the work of the second-stage reclaimers has been undone. It has been reduced again to the blank slate left by the ravens, as it was after they scoured Tehom.
It is a place of clinging mud, churned endlessly by a rain of mortars. You, child of Noah, are lying in a wet crater blasted into the mud, and your fingers are numb around your rifle. A murderous beating of dragonfly wings descends from the low clouds above, and you hear the screams of myokinetic catapults launching their many-winged missiles.
You have no warning, and of course, neither do the Bathysians’ gunships. Light comes, the prismatic blast of an immanentizing bomb, something like a fuel-air explosive meant to react with the clouds and the matter of the rainfall.
It’s silent, and you only see it briefly. In the aftermath, you can hear tar raining down on the mud all around you. Feel your eyes leaking down your cheeks like warm egg yolks.
They made you and a snake pure, then put you inside a machine together.
Across from you, trying desperately to approach, the snake slithers toward you. In turn, you reach toward it, and the two of you fall toward each other, endlessly in love. Between you, God has placed enmity; its hand is a splinterthin plane of glassy force radiating outward from the point of union where you and the snake attempt to become one and find rest in one another.
The enmity flows outward on a perfectly flat, infinitesimal plane, and is captured by the machine forever.
