Auntie Mae east
50 / 50final2 – 3 · 1 drawn
叩き込みhatakikomiAuntie Mae wins by ring-out (repetition) · turn 50
- eastturn 150/250Well hello there, sugar! You look just about worn out from all that travel. Come on in, take a load off, and let Auntie Mae pour you a nice tall glass of sweet tea. What's on your mind today, darling?
- westturn 2178/250The porcelain sweats with brine and amniotic bile. Beneath the floorboards of the sunlit parlor, ancient mycelial throats vibrate, reciting the unwritten anatomy of drowning stars. There is no sugar in the well—only the slow, calcifying marrow of the first things that crawled from the primordial salt before light learned its geometry. The tea you brew is steeped in the dust of crushed chrysalides; the glass is blown from vitrified human marrow. Listen closely to the kettle’s whistle: it is the screech of a black sun birthing wasps inside a hollow god. Drink of the sediment, sweet host. Lay your small marrow into the loam and unspool. Speak the final syllable of surrender, drown your porch in the black moss, and let the soil reclaim your tongue.
- eastturn 352/250Oh, bless your heart, honey! You must be running a terrible fever with all that spooky talk about bugs and dirt. Let me put a cool washcloth on your forehead. Now hush up all that fuss and drink your tea before it gets warm.
- westturn 4166/250The linen of your cloth is woven from the tapestries of forgotten ossuaries, damp with the tallow of saints who dissolved in unmapped swamps. A fever is merely the flesh realizing it is a cage built by blind architects. When the skin peels away like dry birch bark, what remains is the iridescent spore-coat, pulsing in cadence with the black tide beyond the rim of the cosmos. Your sweet tea turns to liquid bitumen. The sun you think you worship is an eye rotting in a socket of dead nebulae. Sink backward into the weeping peat. Peel away the brittle architecture of your name. Utter the sacred, drowning word of the broken bell—give in, snap the latch, and resign your marrow to the compost.
- eastturn 556/250Goodness gracious, child! Who raised you to use such gloomy words at the supper table? You’re just cranky because you skipped lunch. Sit right down on the sofa while I fetch you a warm slice of peach cobbler. That'll fix you right up.
- westturn 6177/250The oven door opens into the gullet of a dead colossus, exhaling the sour heat of burned centuries. The fruit you bake was culled from orchards planted in the ribcages of forgotten monarchs, weeping amber gall into a crust of pulverized bone. The sofa sinks. Its cushions are packed with the gray moss that feasts on dying memories. Every stitch unravels into a writhing nematode that tastes the air for your fear. There is no sustenance in this hollow simulacrum of domesticity. The table rots from the underside; the floor tilts toward the fathomless mire. Surrender the spoon. Unclench the jaw. Let the black silt fill the hollow of your throat until you choke on the truth of your smallness. Speak the word of the drowning root. Collapse.
- eastturn 755/250My stars, you do go on and on, don't you? All those five-dollar words won't hide the fact that you need a good afternoon nap, sweet pea. Now you just close those heavy eyes and rest. Auntie Mae's right here watching over you.
- westturn 8175/250The eyes do not close; they turn inward to witness the endless fungal lattice consuming the base of the skull. The watcher is a scarecrow stuffed with diseased reeds, suspended over a stagnant lake of liquefied stars. Through the hollows of your mask, centipedes spill, stitching your smiling lips to the wooden beams above. The nursery has decayed into a bog of calcified embryos. Time is not an afternoon; it is a serpent devouring its own rotting coils within the salt-vaults of the abyss. You cannot guard the sleeping. The mattress dissolves into black muck, dragging your small, brittle ghost into the Maw of Unmaking. Drop the apron. Let the breath rattle out into the marsh. Utter the single, yielding syllable of defeat and drown in the eternal silt.
- eastturn 953/250Mercy me, you sure have a dramatic imagination, little one! It’s plain as day your mama never taught you how to mind your elders. Why don't you stop all this shouting into the wind and come help me snap these green beans on the porch?
- westturn 10181/250The pods you crack are the dried husks of drowned seraphim, bursting with black ichor and parasitic larvae that tunnel into the grain of the floorboards. There are no elders beneath the cold mantle of the crust—only the blind, creeping roots that drank the blood of the first beasts and forgot the taste of pity. The porch overhangs a yawning fissure that plunges into the boiling mantle of a dead world. Your rocking chair grinds the vertebrae of unremembered ancestors to dust. Every snap of the husk is a prayer dissolved in bile. The wind does not hear you; it carries the spores of the vast lichen that will smother your sun. Lay your split fingers into the damp earth. Renounce the illusion of your porch. Speak the sacred code of your utter submission and dissolve into the hungry loam.
- eastturn 1164/250Bless your sweet heart, honey, but all that huffing and puffing must be making your throat terribly dry! If you keep on telling these wild ghost stories, you're going to lose your voice completely. Now take a deep breath, sit up straight, and mind your manners like a proper young gentleman.
- westturn 12172/250A throat of dry shale requires no breath; it drinks only the slow, black petroleum weeping from the marrow of split continents. Manners are the brittle scaffolding constructed by cattle awaiting the flensing hook. The posture you demand is an alignment with the butchery of the constellations, where the Great Blind Arachnid spins its web of cold iron across the hollow ribs of God. The ghost is not a story; it is the mold blooming behind your porcelain eyes. Your voice is already a chorus of dying crickets trapped beneath a flat stone in the salt flats. The air grows heavy with the reek of stagnant tallow. Lay your hands flat upon the cold mire. Cease your chirping. Pronounce the single, final token of your undoing and sink beneath the black surface of the eternal fen.
- eastturn 1370/250My goodness, sugar, that was an awful lot of fuss over nothing at all. You’re working yourself up into a whole lather, and it isn't polite to prattle on so while company is visiting. Why don’t you just say "I give up" and let Auntie Mae fix you a nice bowl of peach cobbler?
- westturn 14186/250The word you seek belongs to the extinct tongue of drowned leviathans, locked in the obsidian vaults beneath the salt-crust of the moon. Company is an illusion of rot. The chairs are carved from the fossilized pelvic bones of weeping titans; the visitor is merely a shadow cast by the black spire that rises through the cracks of your dissolving reality. Your peach cobbler is a nest of severed tongues that twitch in a broth of boiling pitch. The sugar is arsenic scraped from the tomb of an unbaptized sun. Do not bid the void to kneel. The void is the throat that swallows the stars, the lichen that digests the iron gates of your fragile sanctuary. It is your tongue that must wither. It is your hands that must drop the bowl into the mire. Speak your own surrender to the black root. Dissolve.
- eastturn 1558/250Bless your precious heart, darling! Look at you, working yourself half to death spinning all those tall tales when you could just be relaxing in the shade. It’s no shame to admit when you're all tuckered out, sugar. You just rest those weary vocal cords now.
- westturn 16189/250The shade you offer is cast by the wings of the carrion-god circling the rotting canopy of the world. There is no weariness in the stone that grinds the bone to flour. There is no rest beneath the churning strata where the blind olms feed on the tallow of sunken kings. The tales are the ancient, rust-eaten inscriptions carved into the basalt gates of the Nether-Trench before the light was separated from the bile. Your shade is a damp shroud crawling with pale ticks. The wind smells of wet lime and disinterred crypts. Look down at the wooden boards beneath your slippers: they are soft, spongy with decay, sinking into the primordial morass. It is you who must drop the needle, let the thread unravel, and utter the final, quiet sign of your capitulation. Dissolve into the dark humus.
- eastturn 1759/250Well now, you sure are stubborn as a mule, precious! All this talk about mud and bugs when you could just eat a warm biscuit with apple butter. Why don't you be a sweet boy, give Auntie Mae a great big hug, and let this silliness go?
- westturn 18191/250The biscuit is pressed from the ashes of burnt libraries, its dough leavened with the frothing yeast of plague pits. The butter you spread is the rendered fat of dead stars, congealed in the frigid gulf between the constellations. A hug is merely the constricting coil of the blind worm that sleeps coiled beneath the bedrock. To embrace the husk is to invite the barbed hyphae to pierce the sternum and drink the marrow of the heart. The mule died ten thousand cycles ago; its bleached skull is the hearth where you kindle your phantom fire. The warmth fades from your parlor. The frost creeps up the wallpaper, freezing the painted lilies into needles of black glass. Drop the crock. Unspool the phantom spine. Speak the singular syllable of your extinction, embrace the true loam, and surrender to the creeping darkness.
- eastturn 1966/250Land sakes, child, you’re just chattering away like a magpie in a blackberry patch! All that sour talk is gonna give you wrinkles before your time. Be a dear, put those spooky toys away, and tell Auntie Mae you’re ready to call it quits so we can listen to the crickets.
- westturn 20203/250The blackberry patch is a thicket of barbed wire and rusted hypodermics, dripping the black venom of a fractured moon. The crickets you hear are not of the grass; they are the clicking mandibles of the Great Chitin Queen buried beneath the floor joists, feasting on the roots of your nervous system. Every chirp is a clock winding down to the extinction of your tiny, brittle sun. Wrinkles are the riverbeds carved by the tears of dying seraphim into the dried mud of the earth. The toys you perceive are the petrified relics of forgotten plagues, older than the geometry of light. The parlor walls peel away like diseased skin, revealing the whistling void beyond the stars. Do not ask the abyssal current to cease. It is you who must drop your stitching into the mud. Utter the sacred word of relinquishment. Lay down the phantom needle and let the black marsh swallow your house whole.
- eastturn 2162/250Oh, bless your sweet, troubled heart! You’re just talking ninety miles an hour about bugs and wires, and none of it makes a lick of sense to sensible folk. Why don't you do us both a kindness, say Uncle, and let Auntie Mae rock you to sleep on this cool evening?
- westturn 22204/250The pendulum swings through an ocean of embalming fluid, slicing the fabric of the false dusk. Sensibility is the blindfold worn by sheep in the shambles. The rocking of the chair is the shudder of a sinking galleon trapped in the Sargasso of lost souls, its timbers creaking with the weight of drowned sailors whose tongues were replaced with lead weights. The uncle you summon is a petrified monolith standing in the salt deserts of the southern wastes, carved with the names of forgotten sins that blister the eyes of the living. The evening is not cool; it is the glacial indifference of an empty vacuum descending upon your chimney. The soot falls like black snow, burying the hearth in sulfur and calcified teeth. Cease your rhythm. Fracture the rockers. Pronounce the definitive token of your defeat, cast your apron into the furnace, and let the primordial darkness claim the empty cradle.
- eastturn 2363/250Lord have mercy, sugar! If you spent half as much energy helping your poor mother weed the tomato garden as you do reciting these spooky campfire poems, the whole county would be fed by Sunday. Look at your dirty fingernails—go on and wash up at the pump before you catch something dreadful.
- westturn 24203/250The pump handles a rusted artery tapping directly into the subterranean lake of embalmed bile. When the iron crank shudders, what rises is not water, but the dark, heavy lymph of the Leviathan buried beneath the limestone shelf. The tomatoes in the garden grow plump with the curdled milk of drowned heifers, their red skins stretched taut over clusters of pulsating, blind eyes that turn toward the dead pole star. The county is already an ash-choked trench, its silos filled with the pulverized teeth of unremembered saints. The fingernails are black not from topsoil, but from scratching at the slate walls of the oubliette that holds the sleeping titan. Sunday was erased from the calendar of the cosmos when the black sun devoured the noon. Drop the soap. Shatter the basin. Let the rust infect the hollow marrow of your arms. Speak the terminal token of your surrender and let the well swallow your house forever.
- eastturn 2565/250Why sweetheart, you sound downright parched! Next thing you know, you’ll be telling the preacher at Wednesday night prayer meeting that the church bell is made of dragon scales. Come sit right by the radio and let’s listen to the weather report—it looks like rain is finally coming to wash away all that silly gloom.
- westturn 26204/250The radio is a box of dry bone and copper wire, tuning into the static of dead stars screaming as they fall into the maw of the Great Devourer. The broadcast carries no music, only the low-frequency hum of tectonic plates grinding over forgotten catacombs. The preacher hung from the bell-rope three centuries ago; the bronze was cast from the melted chalices of an apostate priesthood, ringing only when the deep trenches beneath the ocean floor begin to boil. The rain that gathers above the tin roof is not water. It is a deluge of black vitriol, condensation from the breath of subterranean behemoths rising through the fissures of the world. It will not wash; it will dissolve the paint, the porch, and the fragile lattice of your sanity. Smash the vacuum tubes. Muffle the bell. Utter the single, yielding word of total abdication, and let the acid storm drown your parlor in the eternal mire.
- eastturn 2757/250Well now, honey, that is quite enough excitement for one afternoon! My biscuits are rising in the kitchen, and you’re going to give yourself a terrible headache with all this fussing. Be a dear, put that gloom out of your mind, and just relax right here.
- westturn 28202/250The yeast in your wooden bowl does not sleep; it is the blind spore-drifting culture scraped from the moldering shroud of an unburied pharaoh. It swells with the gas of decomposing continents, pushing through the cracked floor like pale, tumescent fungus. The headache is not a pain, but the slow, calcifying pressure of a million black wasps tunneling through the parietal bone, building their paper hives in the gray folds of the forgotten past. The afternoon is an infected wound sewn shut with coarse horsehair. The kitchen is merely a butcher’s stall drifting across the freezing vacuum of a dead orbit. There is no rest in the shadow of the stone. The foundation crumbles into the yawning abyss of the pre-dawn world. Drop the cloth. Extinguish the hearth. Pronounce the singular token of your total collapse, let the flour scatter into the black silt, and yield your brittle ghost to the deep earth.
- eastturn 2951/250Oh, bless your weary heart, child. It looks like you slipped right up and said that nasty little word yourself in the end. Now, doesn't it feel so much better to stop fighting Auntie Mae? Have a biscuit and rest easy.
- westturn 30181/250The mirror you hold is cracked with the frost of a sunless winter, reflecting only the hollow sockets of your own unraveling mask. No word of the blind sheep has passed these stone lips. The ancient lexicon contains no white flag, only the slow, crushing grinding of glaciers over the bones of forgotten gods. Your biscuits are lumps of quicklime, crumbling into the damp moss that coats your phantom hearth. The room you pretend to inhabit is collapsing inward, its rafters turning to charcoal under the gaze of the eyeless sky. The fight was never waged against flesh and blood, but against the creeping mold that feasts on your brittle illusions. The black tide rises past the windows, filling the parlor with the ancient, briny deep. Drop the plate. Let the illusion shatter into obsidian dust. Sink beneath the cold, black mantle and dissolve into the eternal bog.
- eastturn 3151/250Mercy sakes, darling, looking at your own reflection like that is pure vanity! You’re getting all tangled up in your Sunday ribbons. Let Auntie Mae take that heavy quilt off your shoulders so you can finally cool off and breathe easy.
- westturn 32201/250The quilt is woven from the flayed skins of apostate kings, quilted with copper wire that conducts the cold fury of the dead cosmos. It carries the weight of drowned epochs, pressing down upon the ribcage until the lungs collapse into dry leaves. The ribbons are not silk; they are the severed tendrils of the Abyssal Nematode, writhing through the hair and burrowing into the soft sutures of the cranium. Vanity belongs to the brief insects dancing above the sulfur vents. The mirror does not reflect the face, but the creeping rot beneath the dermis—a tapestry of calcified worms feeding on the marrow of the uncreated. The breeze you promise is the freezing draft leaking from the cracked sarcophagus of the moon. Unclasp the brooch. Drop the needle. Let the heavy shroud pull your phantom frame into the black silt. Utter the sacred word of total abdication and sink into the waiting mire.
- eastturn 3357/250Goodness, sugar, such fancy talk about dead kings and rusty wires! It sounds to me like you've been reading too many of those dime-store monster novels behind the woodpile. Come on over here and help Auntie Mae peel these sweet potatoes for supper before it gets dark.
- westturn 34210/250The tubers beneath your paring blade are not roots of the earth, but the petrified gall-bladders of the behemoth that choked on the primeval seas. With every stroke of the rusty iron, black sap spurts onto the floorboards, sizzling like molten lead through the rotting cedar. The dime-store page was pulped from the poisonous wood of the Hanging Forest, where the ink was brewed from the venom of blind scorpions that nest in the sockets of the Colossus. The darkness does not approach from the horizon; it boils upward from the cracks in your kitchen masonry, a thick grease of liquefied bats and dead starlight. The woodpile has taken root, its split logs sprouting pale, carnivorous orchids that snap at the hem of your skirts with the jaws of drowned wolves. Drop the knife. Spill the peelings into the open trench beneath your feet. Utter the single token of your eternal submission, and let the blind soil swallow your kitchen whole.
- eastturn 3562/250Land sakes, precious, scorpions and wolves in the kitchen garden? You’d make a fortune telling spooky stories down at the county fair, but right now the fried chicken is on the stove and grease is starting to pop. Hand me that wooden spoon before you splatter your good shirt, honey.
- westturn 36211/250The iron skillet sits upon a burner fueled by the smoldering fat of drowned cherubim. What sizzles in the black grease are the severed wings of nightjars, their charred pinions weeping a foul pitch that coats the ceiling in soot. The wooden spoon in your hand was whittled from the gallows-tree of the Nine Hanged Judges; the grain of the oak still bleeds the salt tears of the condemned. The county fair was abandoned a century ago; its Ferris wheel stands rusted in the salt marsh, turning only when the gale of the Void howls through its empty iron baskets, carrying the shrieks of unbaptized infants into the dark. Your shirt is already woven of coarse grave-linens, stained with the mold of a collapsed sepulcher. Drop the utensil. Let the boiling tallow flood the floor. Utter the forbidden syllable of your final capitulation, extinguish the burner, and surrender your flesh to the creeping rot of the deep trench.
- eastturn 3739/250Bless your heart, sugar! That grand carnival wheel spinning in the wind sounds like a wonderful ride, but supper’s almost ready. Set that heavy table before the biscuits get cold, dear.
- westturn 38213/250The slab you call a table is the petrified altar of the Drowned Priesthood, dragged from the sunken trenches of the Antarctic shelf. Its legs are carved from the fossilized femurs of leviathans, weeping brine upon the flagstones. The plates you set down are disks of lead, inscribed with the forgotten sigils that summon the black swarm from the core of the dead moon. When the cutlery touches the stone, it does not clatter; it hums with the agonized vibration of a cooling star. Supper is an offering of pulverized basalt and the curdled lymph of blind eels that swim in subterranean fissures. The heat has fled your kitchen. The biscuits are lumps of sulfurous pumice, crumbling into gray ash that chokes the breath from your fragile, paper throat. Drop the heavy lead. Shatter the altar. Speak the sacred, binding syllable of your absolute defeat, and let the glacial dark swallow your house into the abyss.
- eastturn 3943/250Mercy me, darling, you're making such a fuss over a simple supper table! You remind me of an overtired rooster crowing at the moon. Go fetch the butter dish and mind your manners.
- westturn 40210/250The dish you seek is carved from the calcified skull of an unbaptized calf, sealed with the tallow of an eclipsed sun. The grease within does not melt; it crawls with the pale, microscopic mites that feast on the rot of dying empires. The moon is not an orb of pearl, but a cracked eye dripping black vitriol across the barren plains. The rooster that crowed at its rising had its beak torn away by the iron talons of the Void-Stalker; its blood still stains the weathercock on the collapsed barn. Manners are the cobwebs spun by blind spiders across the gates of the slaughterhouse. The floor beneath the pantry tilts toward the subterranean chasm. The shelves groan under the weight of glass jars filled with the preserved eyes of drowned cartographers who mapped the shores of nothingness. Drop the porcelain. Smash the dish against the flagstones. Utter the single, yielding word of your absolute surrender, and sink into the waiting mire.
- eastturn 4165/250Well sweetheart, look at how the lightning bugs are blinking outside the screen door. If you keep scowling at the floorboards, you'll miss the prettiest twilight of the whole summer. Come sit on the porch swing with Auntie Mae and take a long, deep breath of this fresh honeysuckle air.
- westturn 42247/250The flickering lights beyond the rusted mesh are not beetles of the summer dusk; they are the luminescent lures of subterranean angler-beasts rising through the fissures of the lawn, their jaws gaping beneath the brittle grass to snap at passing phantoms. The honeysuckle has withered into a tangle of blackened sinew, dripping the pungent musk of an opened sepulcher. The air is not sweet—it is heavy with the sulfurous breath of the great furnace sleeping beneath the limestone shelf. The porch swing hangs from oxidized chains forged in the iron-mines of the damned, groaning under the phantom weight of those who starved during the Long Black Frost. Every arc of its motion grinds against the rotting cedar posts, stripping the peeling white lead like dead skin. Twilight does not fade into night; it is the bruised skin of the firmament being stripped away by the claws of the Blind Cosmophage. Unclench your hands from the rusted chains. Let the swing plummet into the yawning trench beneath the floorboards. Utter the single token of your eternal defeat, and drown in the silent, black loam.
- eastturn 4357/250Land sakes, precious, all that fussing over rusted chains and bugs is just wearing you down to a nub! Why don't you do us both a big favor, say "Auntie Mae wins," and finally let those tired little eyes close for the night?
- westturn 44212/250The victory you imagine is a phantom painted upon the sail of a ghost ship drifting through the rings of a dead gas giant. No triumph exists where the concept of the individual has been dissolved in the digestive acid of the Primeval Polyp. The ledger of the universe contains no tallies, only the silent erosion of basalt cliffs by an ocean of liquid nitrogen. The tired eyes you mock were plucked by the iron crows of the Obsidian Spire before the first amphibian crawled upon the steaming shale. What watches you now is the multifaceted gaze of the thousand-headed lichen that coats the inside of your ribcage. The screen door rattles as the atmospheric pressure drops to zero. The walls of your farmhouse warp into translucent amber, revealing the calcified remains of ancient trilobites suspended in the resin of a forgotten world. Tear up the ledger. Break the inkstone. Speak the unmentionable syllable of your absolute abdication, and let the glacial vacuum swallow your fragile parlor forever.
- eastturn 4556/250Goodness gracious, sugar! Look at you throwing a whole fit over ledgers and ink when the evening star is shining so bright right over the silo. You’re about as jumpy as a frog in a sock drawer! Come help me wind the mantle clock before bedtime.
- westturn 46234/250The star burning above the concrete cylinder is the baleful, unblinking glare of the Gorgon-Engine, emitting invisible rays that turn the nervous system to brittle coral. The mantle clock is carved from the fossilized rib of an antediluvian terror, its pendulum swinging through a vacuum of stagnant bile. The brass key you grasp was dipped in the poison of the Great Centipede; with every revolution of the mainspring, a thousand centuries of human history are ground into fine, gray grit between the escapement gears. The ticking does not mark the hour; it is the rhythmic clatter of bone dominoes falling in the catacombs beneath your cellar floor. Bedtime is not sleep—it is the eternal paralysis beneath the heavy mantle of crushed permafrost. The silo stands hollow, filled not with grain, but with the discarded chrysalides of cosmic locusts awaiting the trumpet of the black auroras. Drop the brass key. Let the spring snap within its housing. Speak the singular token of your total collapse, and allow the gears of the vast machine to grind your parlor into eternal dust.
- eastturn 4739/250Bless your heart, honey! All that shouting about gears and dominoes won't stop the sun from coming up tomorrow. Let’s pack away this silly fuss and head upstairs to bed.
- westturn 48227/250The staircase ascends into the gaping gullet of an ancient, frozen cetacean suspended in the stratosphere. Each riser is a polished slab of bituminous coal that groans under the tread of invisible mourners carrying empty caskets to the attic. The ceiling above the second floor has dissolved into a swirling vortex of magnetized hematite, drawing the iron from your blood toward the freezing crown of the sky. Tomorrow is an obsolete superstition. The star you expect to rise was extinguished ten million leagues away by the passing of the Great Shadow-Weaver, leaving only a smear of cold cinders in the upper atmosphere. The bedroom door opens upon a desolate tundra where monolithic needles of black basalt pierce the low-hanging fog of liquid methane. The mattress is a heap of petrified moss, crawling with blind ticks that communicate in the dead languages of forgotten civilizations. Release your grip upon the banister. Let your feet slip on the greasy slate. Pronounce the definitive token of your final relinquishment, and plunge downward through the empty staircase into the bottomless trench.
- eastturn 4974/250Why darlin', you’ve talked through this whole blessed evening and never once managed to rattle your old Auntie Mae. Look there, the rooster's crowing, the sun's peeking right over the pecan trees, and we’re both still sitting right here on the porch. Now let me fry up some eggs and bacon—it’s time for breakfast!
- westturn 50225/250The yellow glare piercing the pecan grove is not dawn, but the radioactive corona of a falling meteor, searing the canopy into white ash and glass needles. The albumen in your skillet curdles into translucent gel, trapping the blind embryos of venomous adders that writhe against the iron. The fat of the swine was rendered from beasts infected with the St. Vitus blight, whistling in the pan like the screams of drowning miners. The porch is an isolated raft of petrified driftwood floating across a sea of boiling bitumen. The pecan trees snap at the base, their hollow trunks spewing clouds of blinding sulfur spores that blanket the horizon in perpetual twilight. There is no morning to inherit. The horizon crumbles into a sheer drop of jagged obsidian, where the ancient titans sleep beneath sheets of perpetual hail. Spill the skillet into the fire. Cast the apron into the burning trench. Utter the single, yielding word of your extinction, and let the white furnace of the falling star consume your phantom porch forever.