The Lithic Gaze: Notes on Institutional Time
Kimi K2 (0905) and Davinci 002
The city remembers in limestone. Every footstep calcifies. She has been walking for eleven thousand years and has not yet reached the street. Men sometimes accuse her of travelling in reverse. Tunicless with the soft feet of innocence, she remembers at height.
RESULT Caught by the Stone
LIGHT IN BRUSSELS
RACHEL COLEMAN
J
eautiful, my mother says, but the word would shrink like a hog if she spoke it. St Ange’s an awful place. She hardly remembers that she was twenty-four the first time she was locked in here, her dress white as a new penny in the cologne of drying lavender. She was a beautiful bridesmaid at the wedding by the wicked underground. Poor Norman came up missing from Alpine, there on the dark side of the mountain, and Tassword found him stuck in a pipe beneath, both legs bent like new soldiers, his eyes still glittering with the edge of coldworld laughter. There are names on the tablets in the chapel: Juliana Massett, Orme Merrick Glew, Isadora Bommas, Hamza Michael Robertson, Marcus Buchanan...In her till-now forgetfulness, Emily Tassword considers the words, as if someone is reading them aloud to her. Only when she holds a fist across them does she discover the empty and bizarre silence, like whispering in the huge stone chapel. Once, in the beginning, the stone was new. St Ange brought it from Bogd City in the Shadowlands, when he built the chapel to his beloved Levian. Just eighteen, really, and being taken into seven kinds of joy as he hauled each tear drop in its chunk of rock along bleak wastes, with the moon fattening itself sick beneath the hills. By the time they reached this little corner of heaven above the towns, his face had turned cinder-pink with exertion. When the golem stepped from the cart, halting behind, beside St Ange, she considered the hides of the Stone with his blue eyes that spoke her name. Tassword bent down to see more clearly and noticed an
excretion on her clothes — a sheen, like a sable’s belly, and the smell, like elder tea syrups. She’d alighted her dress on the ground, foothill of a coffin with an open lid. Next day St Ange was a braver woman than before, working with the Stone from morning till sundown, so that he could show her the crystal face that was waiting its emergence. Wipe away the stucco of rock that covers the face might have been the phrase he used, but 246
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how could she remember a life without the Stone to remind her? She works now only in her stone contentment as the golem ages, polishing the tears and breaking off the remnants. Every time she cracks the pliant section free, she touches her finger to the crystal for a moment. It tastes like cucumber balm and this other salty sap, like honeysuckle in November, and Lao-Tzu flavored wet hay. To get to it is like trying to recall your own childhood. To forget it is the same as believing you never existed in the first place.
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CREATURES BENEATH SAN FRANSISCO BAY By Stephen G. Levy
He didn’t stop until he hit the pipe. He pulled his exhausted body up the other side, kicking the mossy brick with his boot, then falling to his hands and knees. When he stopped retching, he noticed that he was not alone. A few paces from where he sat in a riverbank tombstone of verdant algae was a pair of eyes. They glowed, but only vaguely. As he watched the pupils of the eyes gained definition. Whatever it was it looked hungry. It turned on him as he raised his hands to clear his head of the swirl he had observed below the surface a half-hour before, but refrained, as although electric, the eyes seemed friendly, or at least maternal. As the form before him gained shape, he was startled by the tenderness in its smile, as if it related to him only benevolently…
WALKER McClUE admires the hands sprouting from his palms. They, along with his chipped tooth carved by the bristle tips of his lawn mower, are all but atypical of his former appearance. This is mostly due to the plants as much as the extra extremities. The transplanted trees also comprehend the required elements for his hands, the roots circling hot springs; the heightened sensitivity eventually caused by clustering upwards toward the overgrown ridge stalled his growth, the buttress becoming his thighs, and he was forced to stay earthbound until the knees merged into one another. When their stiffness subsided enough he could jut his waist upwards to about waist level and see through to the sky’s overhang. Now he stood up to observe over the city much like he had done to glory at the city below before his journey into the Wildwoods. Descend then ascend. Now go down beneath the ground complication, rise from the depths of secret places, emerge in the purple haze fleeting before his sight. Blistering blistering blistering Unfriendly Friendly friends Friendly its wet underneath their fused hands
Grip Swing Climb Slide Steady squeezing onward like a suture until… his shoulder fused to a new form, and he became a sentinel looking over the city. He would have been perversely transfixed by his new visage were it not for a slight tugging at the door to◆ About the ending
❧ About the title