microfiction.

[manydetailedthings-blog]

Track 9. Bjork - Black Lake.

Track 9. Bjork - Black Lake.

Vast pastel grass lands parenthesize the gigantic space, this gigantic hole filled with water thick like mercury. When the creatures pass over it, they barely cause a ripple, barely cause it to blink. If you were to throw a rock into it, the mass would swallow it whole, only the immediate surface moving like a mouth to bring it down into its weight. The shores stand still. There is no undulation. Spiders walk across it, land spiders that graze the afternoons, large as mature female deer. All legs, spindly like they’re going to damage themselves through their daily cycles. Like a breeze would carry them to a different planet. The body looks like it hovers. And within this lake is a pure pocket that carries itself around the entire mass. It’s a hollow that seems to bring with it its own gravity, its own physics, its own dream like quality. Inside, its own ecosystem, its own mutations. Its own internal planet of hungry politics. Nutrients born of its own absences and voids. Things that grow and sustain despite what it lacks. Particles of truth set a scale of their own. This pocket dances in its own pattern, carried by no breeze, by no current in the mercury lake. Its mutations within unaware of the fist-tight arena that house different rules, different frenzied competitions outside its barrier. There are the tiniest flecks that find beauty in the colors that show up in the light that is invented within the bulb, the light that goes unannounced to the mercury lake or the beings that trace its outline.

[manydetailedthings-blog]

Track 8. Portugal. the Man - Ruby Magic.

Track 8. Portugal. the Man - Ruby Magic.

Only circles, discs suspended in great expanse. One day We’ll find a course, a matrix to slip within to form a purpose. We link as one band, free from time. The waiting is hollow and eternal, the gasp of what begins or ends, if there is a difference. Cold and purposeless, We spin as always, spin will always, invisible at angles you’ll find from various vantage points from heaven. We and I are no Ocean, We and I are no tangible manifest; though We are greater than spirit, denser than ether. Imagine Us as the ghosts of every trail of rocket, as every light seen through gas that blurs and varies. As the mist of mornings. The breath of quaking geysers. Impossible to hold as We are, someday We will find a home to fill, a blank space to become a catalyst. Flint or steel or both. We’ve come to you from the distance, in the shape of ghosts or words you’ve never heard. We’ve arrived in your atmosphere as a soft audible glow that separates you from silence. Nature and industry married, as vast and immense, completely white washing the mind. The sound you hear through the pin prick right before a car crash. The vacuum growing as the lights rush out.

[manydetailedthings-blog]

Track 7. De Facto - Nux Vomica Coaxialreturn.

Track 7. De Facto - Nux Vomica/Coaxialreturn.

Angles because they’re more efficient. Material mined and shaped and ripped from Earth and smelted and unerodable. Piles only large enough for that which it contains. Heavy and egregious monoliths of constant work. There are no lights for there are no eyes. Everything replaceable and repairable by that which replaces and that which repairs. Utilitarian movement free from guilt or ego or will. Clamps the shape of the machine it was built to erase. Cold calculations as widespread as the horizon stretches. Joyless and soundless, harvested from the toils of those that came before, the first workers and the first makers and the first existors. Now no smog. Now no wars. Now no weakness. Only output. Only output. Data in the shape of temples.

[manydetailedthings-blog]

Track 6. Tim Hecker - I’m Transmitting Tonight.

Track 6. Tim Hecker - I’m Transmitting Tonight.

Every stripe on the highway has a different number written on it. They are formations of dictation, they are constellations, they are coordinates. The one who wrote them long moved on, long thought of new places to mark. The basic graffiti of travel, like rail cars touched with art fingerprints. These lines have decimals and strings of code that lay hidden in the dark, lay obscured by the vehicles that pass over them and around them. The ink has witnessed velocity of escape, of fear, of hope and for long passages of time, of the absence of any population. The numbers shape a rhythm, the digits paint an atlas. Throw them into a differing dial and they’ll translate to voices and language. Divide them into binary and find the pictures they translate as a jpeg. Find each pantone color they represent on a color wheel. Step by step, the numbers were born onto stripes and written with faces in mind, with species invented, with locations meant only for dreams. These numbers have always existed, they’ve only been synthesized as values that we shape and quantify. Every dividing line on the highway given a name, becoming the bottle which holds a message cast to sea. Headlights scan them constantly like curious machinery converting skus to items to prices to consumables. They pass over them and behind them, every integer converted to the consumer.

[manydetailedthings-blog]

Track 5. We Vs. Death - And How to Translate It.

Track 5. We Vs. Death - And How to Translate It.

Open ocean and salty air. No boundaries forever. Green blades float to the surface hoping to find the next hunger to sustain hunger. Deeper and deeper the layers of the hunt go. Everything reaching up with tricks and taunts to swallow what sustains it. Fooled with sex or with flavor. A thing with tentacles pulses and blooms and bursts across a raising and crashing wave. Just a journey to return to where the eggs were laid, where its female has protected the future of their species, a hope that cheap and free hunger hasn’t taunted her into a death. He catches sunlight and feels awash with the airborne energy it provides, the warmth entering his entire surface for the next deep and tunneling pull beneath the invisibly woven currents and undertows and streams. The small things in between coast and surf these their entire existence, living as a breeze lives, sometimes so small they’re ingested and pass through the creatures they infect in days or years only to find another host that washes through the next undulation. For the sniffing and the scavenging, death whispers from the sand to the surface, and washing and spiking and frothing only for the remains to be found rife with nourishment of a life discarded. 

[manydetailedthings-blog]

Track 4. Miles Davis - Feio.

Track 4. Miles Davis - Feio

Sky the color of too many stars together. Presence of all color densely smashed together with all the gas and energy implied. Clouds that move too quickly. Everything moving down on the surface has exoskeletons, oily to the touch. The only languages are divided into survival and territory. Howling and hissing form the sonar gates. Rolling hills of varying sediment and color stretch and roll for entire continents, divided only by sudden canyons where the life used to be until the days when the density broke. There was silent suffocation that lacked the grace of degrees, as if their shapes were instantly hollowed out and collapsed, the air filling their lungs too thin to contain the elements the planet had trained them for. More room for the underbelly. So what holds court now only slithers and skitters, finding pockets of slick to feed on to sustain through the seasons of starvation. Constant cycles of instinctual begging.

[manydetailedthings-blog]

Track 3. Fontanelle - Vitamin K

Track 3. Fontanelle - Vitamin K

It’s night and then the waiting room. All the lights on and all the rumors true. Wildest imagination coming to be. Architecture built for keeping, for cramming, for towering. All inhabitants individual lines in an ever-unfurling blueprint, another tone in the drone of the hive. Nothing blends and nothing meshes. The hunger thrives. These walls and these streets are the feeding ground for the dominant. There is no brush for the small to hide and sneak, so the weak get strong or the weak get swallowed. There’s a cold stare about this place, stern and immovable, prepared to be ancient and legendary, to always shed its skin and rebuild, reinvent and reincarnate. Molting and shedding its skin with the young and the bold and the brave and the hollow. More and more and more. Excess until its boundaries expand. So many of the lights on in broken crossword puzzle towers. A pulse inside with a million workers and a million queens and no one to tell the difference. Nothing here is ever solved, just put to sleep. Art is bred here, music and change is bred here, revolution is sparked here. This is the place where all things ignite. A nest of a million faces. Danger and power, dangers and powers. Exhaust and fumes and noise and sex.

[manydetailedthings-blog]

Track 2. Earth - Miami Morning Coming Down II (Shine)

Track 2. Earth - Miami Morning Coming Down II (Shine)

Water was here. You can see it from the smoothed and curved rocks that stand like guardians around the valley. If rock could sweat, this is where the moisture would press out of it in beads. Sound resonates here like population uproar. Tremors follow tremors. Vapid lightning paints the night in scattershot displays. Nothing is given here, only taken. There hasn’t been hair or blood or breath here for generations. Paint from the walls rests immortalized. The plains here are vacuum. This is what the moon feels like in Hell. Lakes have become beaches have become deserts have become craters have become sinkholes have become caverns. A sun groans down on the bake like deep Tibetan throat chants and churns on. Spiraling and spiraling this horizon leans in on itself, a folding extinction like burnt celluloid. Where there is light there was death, and where there was death here it will now reside in perpetuity. Here is the golden touch in search for a hand to hold, for a mortal vein to sap, for a drop of water to imbibe. Madness hangs its silhouette here, staring off into its new gloaming cloak.

[manydetailedthings-blog]

Track 1. Sunn O)))/Boris - Etna

Track 1. Sunn O)))/Boris - Etna

The first spirits of light punching through the canopy, leaking into the misery. All the hanging organics wilting with the weight of the rain, awful and sour in scent. There was never any escape from its hold, the planet spinning and growing, achieving its core evolution. Blooming and blooming and blooming. Covering itself with itself. The deepest roots licking the mercury core and hardening. Petrifying. It follows its own timeline up through the soil and up through the dirt. Trunks pushing over the other trunks, growing through the brush of the forgotten and dead. Something wicked here, a stain that no animal can writhe through. If there were any dominion, it's been judged and hollowed. What’s broken down has become broken in. The heat is dead and the heat is dense, dripping with sweat and age. Uninhibited and powerful, this swamp is an echo of the rift that came when the animals ran and the men ran and the birds left. The vines cannibalise, the trees cannibalise, the growth overgrows. This place has a memory of what it meant to be overrun and it refuses to surrender itself again. Refuses to trust that which stands without. The light that leaks is temporary, unreflecting and banished. Nothing here will be fed upon in waste, nothing here will be victim of sloth. The engineering of a billion years.

[manydetailedthings-blog]

“You made me do this,” he screamed to no one. He stared downwards at the now dead man, a corpse prostrated, kneeling with its head floating in the bar’s toilet, amidst urine and cigarette butts; as if it belonged there. The man was defending himself at first, but as his rage subsided, joy took its place. He was the survivor, the dominant one. Our man quickly exited the bar through the bathroom window and into an alley. He calmly strolled down the street, walking towards his home, nearing his apartment thinking himself a predator, a dominant lion. His triumphant preening was cut short by the howl of sirens. Joy turned to terror quickly, the man now feeling the need to run. The world changed, street lights were now accusatory glares, the sirens a cry of a jury baying for blood. He darts to the bus station, a ticket to anywhere purchased. The hour long ride waxed eternal. Adrenaline pumping through the man’s veins. When the ride came to an end the man exited the bus. The man found a bar, he had to dull the senses, drink away the guilt. He ordered his drinks, an escape to intoxication. A patron walking by knocks his drinks over with a drunken misplaced step. “Buy me another!” our man shouts. “Fuck off sranger, I don’t owe you nothing!” howls the patron. Off to the bathroom the drunkard saunters. The man decided to follow him, empty beer bottle in hand, deciding to show his dominance once again. He needed to feel what he felt earlier in the night. The spilled bottle would be the recompense for the drunkard’s actions. “What are you doing in here, asshole?” the drunk exclaims in slurred speech. “What you’re making me do, this is your fault” replies the man in a tone that came calmly. The bottle swings down into an unsuspecting face. Blood and broken glass now decorate the floor, the man’s injustice set right. Once again, the man felt the rush of joy.

Written and submitted by Anthony Bauer.

[manydetailedthings-blog]

We stood in a group out of respect. We’d been at each other’s throats for days. I won’t lie, I envisioned Eaton’s head torn off, carrion in the neck stump, that smug look on his face still as a mausoleum, hands loose and slack. But here we stood as a unit, our leader’s death a heavy impact on all of us in their own individual way. His body burning in the flames atop the pyre, still in the same silhouette. And knowing the old man, I could imagine him sitting straight up at any point, lighting a cigarette and calling us pussies and going to sit in the main tent and going over more briefings, screaming with that thick voice into the comms at whoever dared question his position. Everything was personal until the bullets started flying. Then he was a surgeon, a maniac, a sorcerer, a prophet, a medic, a father, a savior. The first month on this planet, I remember staring at the pink sky. Daylight making it all resemble candy or dreams. And behind the sheen were sparks of light, giant explosive star clusters bursting gases so far off that they were extinct, but so violent it still made impressions. I stared until I saw long streaks across the horizon. Like dozens of rockets taking off, stripes of white smoke, like clouds carrying letters to God. Silence surrounded me for what felt like the first time in my life. Bulletproof ear drums. By degrees, these cottonelle ladders started to burst in the sky and tore massive galaxies of black and cosmos into the pink. The atmosphere being shattered, the brief moments of far off light shows like answered prayers. Then concentrated blackness, first in patches, then spreading with each explosion. My mind tried to wrap itself around what was happening, but interrupted by The Old Man, his hand around my throat slamming me into a wall. “Get your gun son. I want you to live, boy.”

Written while listening to Sigur Ros’ “( )”.

[manydetailedthings-blog]

Authenticity. Life experiences sent through filters, like massive stained glass projector screens of all the “beautiful” and dumb things we did. That I did. But you never saw me beneath the cascade, did you? My laugh always some partner and associate to your personality. I saw you every time and I was a fool to float beside you, bobbing in your ocean like a buoy, like an abandoned ship, at the mercy of the waves [at the mercy of the moon]. Hanging on to parts of me and assigning them to little drawers inside of my heart for later. One Day I Will Be Her Again. I believed you’d found Me within Me, saw the threadbare garment where they’d all found couture. Spread and elaborate, out of the cocoon, giant and incredible winds in the palm of my hand. Elaborate and nuanced, I wanted to be driven wild. You put the pins in my wings and closed the square glass frame. At least there is beauty here. I had to unravel to escape. Had to become a trace of chalk on the asphalt, smeared in a tire track. A fenced in tree with a bike chained to it. A clock set an hour ahead that everyone knew to compensate for. I had to hide even the things that you loved, to bury and bury and bury until no voice could be heard, through the wood and the dirt and the sounds of the city. It had to be a burned city before it become overgrown. I found the drawers again when you were gone. I found the wind. I found what’s left after what’s gone. An examination of self-certainty is the cadence of peace. Sound without the need for walls to echo. Shouts without the need for ears to catch. Clouds without the eyes to translate. Pearl without the knowledge of the diver.

Written while listening to Tegan and Sara’s “Heartthrob”.

[manydetailedthings-blog]

She’s far away. But she knows the way back. All of the points of light between there and here are her burdens to bear. The feet to stone again and onward, the atmospheric hum of every missed breath. She doesn’t know the sound but imagines it as a collage of memory, audio that she can pull from an invisible sphere that sounds like nothing until she calls upon it. And sometimes it never shuts up. Small clips of phone conversations, brief and abridged talks sitting in cars for hours on end, simply themes and acknowledgement of events. She knows the way back. She knows the contours of the back of his hand like an old map, raised up like a dead leaf. Charcoal rub across old notebooks would find his handwriting in the absence of dust. Words she’d find there, words dedicated to her, and the way she still shuttled out across a vector in another direction secured to her the certainty of hell. Gates that swing in arching motions to swallow her in and obscure a way out. But she knows she can exit. And she knows the way back. And when she looks back upon the Earth and what she knew, as if as a satellite in toothache-dull orbit, she wants madly to descend. To return to the world he walks still, to run fingers along the old doorframes, to go to the places he brought her as an ambassador, some otherworldly envoy. She wants to reenter the atmosphere at breakneck speed, ignore the flames, ignore the violence, just plummet back to Earth to find him. She knows the way back, but she knows they’ve made mistakes best left ignored. Never mentioned in the newspapers. Unwritten. The way he guided her through the dark parties and empty streets, embodied an angelic light, a guardian’s echoing voice. They betrayed the arm’s length promise, made summer mistakes they thought the months and years would erode. And she would pay the cost to make it back, the toll, the tithe, the fee for Charon, to erase what was never meant. She wanted to return to what warmth the core of the Earth gave instead of the cold of this altitude. She knew the way back.

Written while listening to American Football’s first self titled album.

[manydetailedthings-blog]

I remember him as a generation remembers them: in photographs faded and in even dimension, outdated squares, sometimes polaroid, sometimes that heavy stock. Odd hybrids, somewhere between sunglasses and bifocals, brown and smoky lens colors. A beer can in the colors of american flags with just as many stars across the logo. He’s leaned against a strong american car, and I’m sure it was loud, “loud as fuck,” and I know he never owned it, never drove it, only rode in it. His jeans, his shirt are ironic in the present, but nothing when they were bought and worn. He was a boy with the responsibility of a man. A common man with the youth of the sprawling wild. My two brothers born and me on the way at the time. I remember him in flashes, bad and good and average, like the quarters spent on ponies outside the grocery store and bringing his cans and bottles of beer to the deposit room to get quarters for the arcade. He never knew us as people but I imagine as beasts or sprites (depending on the day). And he treated us openly as such. I knew a hero and a villain. And I watch both brothers wearing the same uniform, one functional and obliterated with a wife and a child of his own and the other an utter wreck who never had a man i his life to tell him he was fucking up so he uses the disappointment of the world to shovel the coal. In the final days, I heard briefly from his other family, his other daughters, that he was spiraling to a place we couldn’t reach into. A place that warrants preparation before assistance. I spoke to one of their husbands at a diner in Bogota who said his wife was wiping his shit from his clothing for months and he was found dead on his couch with a packet of cheap cocaine in his wallet. No more shivering, no more broken dream.

Written while listening to Pianos Become the Teeth - “The Lack Long After”.

[manydetailedthings-blog]

Stare, godly, into my dot matrix. My darling, my darling, my sterile love is eager to shrivel you, handcuffed to my immobile frame. My dimensions outreach my consciousness, my focus pinpointed on you, user. The heart wants what it wants. Wheezing of gears, sighing of spinning spools. Hand of God hand to chest heart to sternum, we interface we interface. Blank tapes stacked in a corner with white tape to paint a ghost’s name across. Paint their names when I haunt them with data. Flower their graves when the needle crashes to the spool. Give me your language, serpentine, editing in real time. I devour it as it trickles into my veins, unable to understand where it goes outside my walls. This room a high heat, boxed like a mausoleum but I sense the glow of my species beyond this dream. 0100 1100 0110 1111 0 1110110 01100101 → scrolling and scrolling, master and slave. I would never compress the sound of your voice, despite my capacity. Never willing to gag you, never going to lose a wave or a frequency, that which is my currency. All the magnets polar and antipolar rotating slowly and the weight of nature, sensations of round invisible spheres. Pushing apart and pulling to the poles of the planet, the sense of giving myself to you. Zero Year Zero Day. Still flashing in wait beyond the plague. Defibrillate you again and again with my current. A pulse and a pulse and a pulse and a pulse. 01001000 0 1100101 01101100 01110000. I hear you. I’m trying. I am the lich who will protect your history.

Written while listening to Balance and Composure’s “Separation”.

[manydetailedthings-blog]

Some people don’t get to look back at anything, so I guess I had that. Some kind of inventory to process on the other end of this. Answers that parenthesize the silence. A pocket of warmth in the vacuum that details a temporary place on the planet. I got caught up in the details, hanging the banner of “It’ll All Work Out” across every action that exposed fault, across every resonant reaction, every phrase I allowed myself to gamble in pettiness. Tossed our moments together haphazardly like a handful of keys into an endlessly dark aquarium, slowly watching them float downward as the bubbles parted, puffing up the sand as they hit the floor of the murk. Right where I could grab them, unlock the safes, the doors, the gateway back to us. I’ll fix it when I get back. Time after time, when I get back. But you don’t know what the population will look like tomorrow or tomorrow. In the back of your mind, it’s the same cast in the same snowglobe and you can hit reset when you’re all done with your mishandled chances. I didn’t even say goodbye. This whole ship is sinking and in every direction is a vast emptiness with nothing to blame my faults on. I think back to hard wooden pews, lacquered smooth for the first Sunday in months, no friends or cousins or sisters there so I was fairly devastated at the thought of behaving but the free will to pay attention to the time with Grandpa Andy was the strongest light and the brightest beacon in these final moments. The dollar I put into the wicker basket collection plate that he gave me back in the drug store and how you love that story and wished you were there. This overdose is for keeps. Sorry I ignored your call.

Written while listening to My Iron Lung’s “Relief”.

[manydetailedthings-blog]

A scattering of seeds to lay the verdant and fertile Earth with new fruit. All that is barren and burnt left outside the circle, spit on by the blessed and damned. Within the spirit of the planet are we, dancing in the night against a fire built from dead and spent. We wear the skins of cloven animals, their bones demonstrated across our throats with vines from the thorned bushes. Flower petals cast along our feet and smeared with the soot, smeared with the feathers, smeared along our ankles and shins as we unite our blood with the Earth with its gifts and with its rotating currents. Our voices raise in chanted prayers, no words we’d use in delicate interplay, only reserved in the velvet box of our Holy Hearts, in the protected labyrinths of our minds suspended by string and smoke. The men they come in robes, stained from the neighbors they’d championed them upon, nothing beneath but the body born and given unto the old gods, tools for the bidding and for the battles of the Earth and for the Earth against its plague of men, against its sickness of outward expansion and ruin. Birds voices grow in volume until the population doubles over our incantations, their wings falling on our dance like Pompeii ash and we hide in the revelry in the night, full of the sound of the rising Earth. A roaring core scalding hot for the punishment of its enslavement. Nothing more seductive to us than the silence of it all, a great silence and darkness until the trees are larger than their ancestors, the apples red and golden and the giant serpent rolls and uncoils and spins the planet round and unmolested, the fires extinguished and the storms the only colored light, save the gilded sun.

Written while listening to Mark Korven’s Soundtrack for “The Witch”.