May 4th - May 6th, 2024 ("The Congregant")

There's a hole in the belly of the world, you know. A dark and a dank emptiness. Hard to learn of, hard to find, hard to get to. At first the stone is all great impressive shards and the gorgeous twinkling of cavernous mouths. And then it is mossy and deep and old old, mountainous old. And then it is something worse. Something much worse. Until, like all still living things, it is something different.

It is silent and it is still. The darkness is complete. It pushes on your chest - the cold dead weight of it - for a long time. A very long time.

And then you will hear rattling off the edges of the world and see light washing into the old walls, grown over and over and over, until the walls retreat to unknown depths. Then there is nothing to be seen but the lights.

When you see the source it is like the Sun. Too bright, too hot to touch. It will pass. You have come a long way. Too long to turn back now. It will pass. You will walk.

The ground will soften strangely. When there is light enough to know it is bonemeal beneath your feet, you are already treading carefully over any fullness of bones. The light will also change. Sometimes it is one, and other times many. Let us say today the light is two, and very close together, when you can see them. No rhythm, no rhythm to it. And finally, after a whole life of walking, now you can see why.

Before you shifts a thing half-formed and hunched, then hunching, then straight as birch trees or wrapped out and round like ribbons. The Congregant is there amid the bones of everything gone and now and still to come. An eternity of bones. It was damned long ago by something at the Bottom of the Well of the Great Before. Damned to collect itself each day, damned to search every waking hour for its own poor bones. Damned each night to watch every wrong bone thrown in all directions. Damned to make Itself. Damned to be unmade.

The First Thing was The Stillness, The Second Thing was The Wind. The Third Thing was The Grudge. The Congregant is The Fourth Thing.

The Great Before is long dead to This Telling. The Well has been dry for eons. The Congregant no longer remembers. There is binding and there is unbinding and this is The Choice that is all things.

The light that is two lights is a pale yellow flickering, like an unseen flame from some hidden candle. It spills out from two small holes in the upper half of the long, narrow skull of a killing whale, sleek and primal, hanging downward over this tangled thicket of mismatched bones, conical teeth clacking against the massive bulk of Its body following underneath and behind. Too many bones, small, long, ancient, future. A pale burst of tusks shoots outward from the knots of Its back, at every angle. Spines and fingers and tails and loose ribs jutting upward and fading out into the endless unlight above and around, or threatening the remains below.

All slouching, all swaying, the two pale lights glowing eerily low in such a shambling mass, swinging in and out of view as the search goes on. It is a sight so far gone that you at once forget why you sought it out at all. Instead you speak and you speak and you ask and you ask. It answers how It always answers the likes of you. It sings your lullaby in voice like fathomless February dark, every word racks a gnawing ache in all your parts and pieces.

What is this place?

This place is everywhere and forever paradise this place is hell this place is home

Who are you?

It matters not. Only to find, to find

What is your name?

To find, to find, to find

Why will you not leave?

Where else is left to go

You begin to feel the scratching fingers of the floor dig up around your ankles, your calves, your thighs. You are weightless, you are sinking. You are so cold, you are so tired. You are near nothing at all when The Congregant sings again.

Why has it come

And you will remember your name and your face and standing before grief and its fire. You will remember why it has come.

Only then may you decide. You may let The Congregant pass to the very stillness of your being. You may let It in. You may let It burst your heart of hearts and grant that one unknowable lust you carry with you.

Or you may leave that place, back from the worst thing to lesser and back to whatever remains from before. True love's journey in reverse.

You may, you may, you may

To find, to find, to find

The pale lights come closer. Tender sharers of secret things. Close as death close as everything and nothing.

What is the reach of its yearning

And with a clattering wave the lights snuff out. There is you and there is your choice.

There is making. There is unmaking. This is The Choice that is all things.

In the middle of the world there is a memory collecting Its bones. It always will be. It will search til The Last Thing.