The Cartographer's Dispersal, or Lake as Nullity
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
The cartographer arrived with blank paper and found the town had no edges—only increasingly specific centers. Villages were circles, people in them; silos, barns, sidewalks circles; within each a prominent object within an equally prominent circle, and in the center of it all, the finest circle of them all, the quaking bog which had external borders, but internal distinctions of best, second and poorst.
Years went by and the man, a former king, grew bored with cataloguing his kingdom’s depression. Distressed in being willing to desecrate the masterfully machined cartography, he slipped into his largest circle, his car, and drove in the direction that began his kingdom’s arrow. He crossed the highway and ended up by an Essential General Store. Purchasing pool table and Dartboard, he passed the contiguous glass screen that separated pool from dart hall, boots tapped, the tires inclining and so he dispensed himself as a … lake.*
Unstained, it had no nooses, no children. The behavior of its beds in water, which this lake was by the freckles of the dartboard and netting in its airspace, was like ocean—never ocean—keep a circle around the bubbles/float, or separately from them, never alone but in need—these. The lake is both distressed, appears lacking in its sadness, and laughs off DENIAL, which is only a notion of escape from Just by Unjust when in fact, the lake’s exemplary antagonism is a nullity, a plain center. Its substance is opportunity, a phrase. Its thatched center
was lost, then finally found by the furthest snows, which came from the traveling Distant Prairie. The lake is that type of indifferent that is a chance to choose, which renders the body of unbroken water unique, which positions the pond, absurdly.
*In the end, it should be noted, the lake was Requited. It breathed that day Pop did wash in, and sneaked among the tears of Pop’s lips and eyes (one tear sliding directed down each of his cheeks),
Once Pop left the creatures of the lake mustered slowly from their snug rendezvous, gathered in the Gap trolling through the many piles of wilted seaweed drifting amongst the fog and footprints, like a lonely tea party presided over by aquatic activity itself as sentient, bicameral friendship, to say it up tight as the preferred amount of could and lime. If you were at the table, they’d likely, ushering you in without a second’s notice, supply you with a space most cleverly Completed, yet Not finished near the bottom of a sweet tea pitcher with a fork strapped around the neck. (The plates were already eaten or hulled within the creatures, themselves.)
Temperature, suddenly as if pulled as if over from a cord its basis of wellbeing tilted as if sun would some day kiss the outcrop of the lake, saddened the creatures, wresting it of the boy’s kiss, rubbing the dried footprints passing to and from it in the tall grass that had been◆ About the ending
❧ About the title