(A)
Ghost feeling at home by use of a long dead limbic system. A house to house the quickening of Spirit into Ghost. Like the iridescent, white glow from the young fruit of her tomatoes’ vines, whose sublimation precedes its red perfection over time.
Introduction
And, the old gal in her late thirties looked like an ancient ballerina because she was one. In a previous life. By ballet standards, currently morbidly obese. By the urban standards of her previous Pac NW life, she was slightly overweight. In her new small-town New England home, shapely and well-fit.
The Mark moves in Its reckoning, as The Place relocates.
She supposed she’d always felt besmirched; though, she’s unsure why that particular word pops into mind.
She neuroadapted because she had seen heights. Once you’ve stood on The Mountain and suffered hypoxia, nothing compares.
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Chapter One
Part I
“The far-off strange country belongs to me again, the alien has become home.”
Hermann Hesse, Wandering
The World rushes by the Old Gal. Going by in cars. Loud. Stinking. She walks while watching a fellow a few paces before her. Both pacing the Main Drag. Sidewalk parallel and abreast to lanes of traffic with their small-town trickle of a creek of very few cars. It is early and the population of The Mark of this time remains worms and not early birds.
It is a game of Red Light Stop & Green Light Go meets Peekaboo. He is passed by cars driving. The cars hit a stoplight. He hits the crosswalk button and changes the stoplight’s timing. He moves a block ahead of the motors. The light turns green. The cars move ahead of him; until, they are stopped by the next red light.
Progress happens a block at a time. Clicking towards the desired outcome. There is a tedious pleasure to precision.
And, the cars miss the smells. The aroma of lavender permeating from downtown.
She walks toward her place of employment and recalls that
“Parsifal shot the most dead swans from the sky; while strange elections went on underground. ”
What struck her was the force with which such strange thoughts shook her. From placidity to lucidity.
A Sky-Eyed. Her gift. A gift often confused as impediment. The Old Gal is a stop-gap. Better yet, she knows it. A normal gal whose cognition suddenly becomes a vessel for some-thing to use. She didn’t speak of it. It never turned malevolent. She just knew how to keep quiet, look unassuming, and listen. Like an antenna suddenly and silently cognizant. Listening, gathering information as it arrives. But, never transmitting its own message. Just amplifying others. In it she possesses Damocles’ sword. Despite never being an obsequious courtier in the court of Dionysus Two of Syracuse, she understood how a twitch of horse hair could end everything.
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She had to live with it. Others, who didn’t, could fuck right off.
WrittenCasey 