As a horror artist, Powell’s pieces are some truly disturbing work. He describes them as “miniature environments where imaginary beings evolve, devolve, consume, excrete, multiply and decay”
It certainly creeped me out. The detail is both gruesome and amazing.
I’ve finally finished Ouroboros, in which Collins, Goodsir, and a symbiotic slime symbolizing grief navigate love.
I - Heron
the word is, it is i am combing my reedy that-which-knows through what scant is known for the word i mean for him him whom i remember him whose face was gladness when we woke in our other life and i remember too what ghost means and other things what death meant before i died, it meant something else then and now in this soft new that-which knows i am waiting i am waiting for he from whom what-is-the-word flowered, or is it flowed both mean, do they not, to lovely grow?
II - Collins
Henry Collins wakes to silence in a narrow and dim hospital room. Silent sheeted machines clutter the head of the bed like hulking mourners and the wall at the foot of the bed is dominated by a two-way mirror. Before he can make sense of the scattered fragments in his head, a doctor enters the room.
“You’re awake,” he observes with a soft smile, his eyes crinkling. He’s a narrow-shouldered man with a gentle, tense air about him and a cap of unruly curls. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m… my head hurts a bit but otherwise I’m all right. What happened?”
“You were in an accident. On a dive.” He doesn’t say any more, though Collins expects it. After a pause he sticks his hand out and introduces himself as “your doctor”.
“Henry Collins,” Collins grunts back. “But I suppose you know that.”
“Oh, yes. We know so much about you!”
He doesn’t know how to process that so he sets it aside, shifting uncomfortably in his bed. His muscles are tight from disuse, a ticklishness deep in his calves. That’s when he realizes that what he thought was a headache is not localized to his head at all but rather a diffuse, nebulous kind of pain, and he can’t pinpoint what hurts. Without thinking he reaches for the small of his back, gasps, and yanks his hand away at the answering touch of a warm, rubbery bulge there.
“Ah,” the doctor says. “That would be the, ah, ouroboros. It’s an… organism, a—we speculate—a complex kind of pyrosome, though it…” he sighs. “This may be difficult to hear, Mr. Collins, and I’m afraid there’s no way to say it that will not be shocking, but—well, it did keep you alive, this ouroboros. In the ocean. But unfortunately, it rather… attached itself to you, and I’m afraid it—well, I’m afraid we haven’t yet discovered how to remove it without detriment.” He pauses, smiles again. The expression doesn’t reach his eyes, Collins notices—those are full of fear.