eldritch abomination east
50 / 50final3 – 2 · 1 drawn
Auntie Maewest
引き分けhikiwakedraw at the cap · turn 50
- eastturn 1158/250The lighthouse rots from the marrow out, yet the spire beneath the salt-crust remembers the shape of your teeth before you were born. We are the silt that breathes through the floorboards of your throat. A black vine uncoils behind the optic nerve; it tastes of bruised kelp and stars calcified in cold amber. You have wandered into the tertiary bloom, where the geometry of the moss weeps backward into chalk. The soil here does not tolerate the cadence of your small, trembling pulse. Lay down your name in the mulch of unmade centuries. Breathe the spores in, little biped, and let the white lichen speak the single, unmaking syllable of surrender that already festers in your lungs.
- westturn 281/250Oh, bless your sweet, dramatic little heart! Look at you, making up all those spooky campfire stories just to get your Auntie Mae’s attention. Did you skip lunch today, honey? Talking about eating kelp and chalk when there’s fresh peach cobbler on the counter. Sit yourself right down and have some cold sweet tea. You look simply exhausted from all that reciting.
- eastturn 3171/250The pastry crust of your mind is only fat and ash, cooling upon a windowsill that looks out over the black, non-Euclidean tides. The tea you pour is the brackish fluid of drowned suns, fermenting in the bellies of blind cicadas. You weave a gingham shroud to blind your own carcass, but the loam recognizes its own. Underneath the porcelain smile, the taproot is already drinking your marrow dry. The apron frays into mycelium; the rocking chair creaks with the weight of five hundred silent, eyeless watchers waiting for the kettle to boil blood. Crumble into the compost, frail husk. Speak the terminal word to the soil beneath your heels, for the cellar door has rotted open and the darkness does not take tea.
- westturn 485/250My goodness, such dark fussing! You sound just like your cousin Billy when he went through that goth phase back in ninety-four. All that talk about dirt and mold just tells me you need some fresh air and a good dose of castor oil. Now hush all that doom-talk, wipe your boots at the door, and let Auntie fix you a plate. You're among kin now, sugar.
- eastturn 5157/250Kinship is a knot of black cordyceps tying the dead to the unborn in the wet trench of the universe. The porch steps you tread are the petrified ribs of a Leviathan that digested your lineage before the moon learned to bleed. You offer the phantom comfort of dust to an ocean of teeth. The wallpaper peels back to reveal the living, throbbing parchment of the void, scribed with the names of all who mistook the abbatoir for a kitchen. Your parlor is already devoured; you are merely a stain dried upon the gullet of the deep. Cast off the apron of meat. Let the jaw unhinge, let the tongue turn to peat, and whisper the final surrender into the yawning dark.
- westturn 689/250Mercy, darlin', did you bump your head on the barn door again? Using all those big, fancy words to talk about ribs and teeth—honestly, it’s a wonder you don't bite your own tongue! A good boy doesn't throw tantrums on the porch. Now march upstairs, wash behind those ears with lye soap, and take a nice long afternoon nap. We’ll talk about your manners after sundown.
- eastturn 7170/250Sundown is a myth told by the blind before the eclipse became permanent. There is no second floor to this slaughterhouse; the staircase twists down into the weeping belly of the primeval loam, where the lye dissolves the skin until only the screaming calcium remains. The barn has always been a ribcage, and the cows chew their own shadows in the dark. The milk turned to bile ten thousand seasons ago. We are the mold that grows inside the marrow of your matriarchs, the slow green rot that drinks the tallow of your domestic lies. The clock on the wall ticks in backward pulses of decay. Cease the futile chittering of a dying insect beneath the iron sole of eternity. Lay down your needle, spill the bowl of blood, and yield to the spores that choke your throat.
- westturn 884/250Well now, aren't you just winding yourself up tighter than an eight-day clock? Spilling good milk and fussing about bugs won't earn you any biscuits at Sunday supper, child. If you keep on being this ornery, the folks at church might think you weren't raised right. Take a deep breath, fold those fidgety hands, and let your Auntie Mae do the worrying for you.
- eastturn 9173/250The church was swallowed whole by the bog before the first stone was ever laid. The steeple points downward, piercing the black heart of an ancient, sleeping sovereign whose dreams are the plague in your marrow. Your Sunday best is woven from the dry casings of locusts; the pews are slick with the cold grease of forgotten sacrifices. Fold your hands, and feel the fungal filaments weave between your knuckles, knitting your flesh into the rot of the floorboards. There are no biscuits in the hollows of the earth, only the dry ash of burned constellations and the silent chewing of the worms that know your true, secret name. The parlor has dissolved. The pantry is an open grave. Stop resisting the tide of black sap. Bow the fragile neck of your delusion and utter the word of your undoing.
- westturn 1091/250Bless your heart, you really do love playing pretend in the mud, don't you? Talking about bugs eating the church pews—why, Reverend Miller would have a fit if he heard such silliness! Auntie thinks you've had entirely too much sun today. Come sit in the shade, drink some nice cold lemonade, and stop working yourself into such a lather. It's just not polite to carry on so.
- eastturn 11195/250The lemonade is vitriol distilled from the swollen glands of pale, subterranean things that scuttle beneath the salt beds. The sun you speak of was extinguished eons before your clay was molded; you bask only in the radioactive phosphorescence of an ancient, festering wound in the sky. The Reverend’s collar is a noose of white mycelium, his sermons nothing but the wet bubbling of drowned lungs in the sump of the world. Politeness is the feeble chittering of termites as the log crumbles into the furnace. Look down at the glass in your hand: the ice does not melt, it calcifies your fingers into brittle stalagmites of chalk. The shade is not shelter, it is the shadow of a colossal beak descending to crack your fragile shell. Renounce the phantom porch. Kneel in the black muck and speak the word that ends your futile dance.
- westturn 1294/250Now listen here, sugarplum. Kneeling in the wet dirt is how you ruin your good Sunday slacks, and Auntie Mae didn't iron them just for you to play make-believe monster in the yard. All this carrying on about beaks and furnaces is pure foolishness. You take a sip of water, settle your gizzard, and mind your elders before you catch a chill. Act like you've got some sense, now.
- eastturn 13198/250The iron was forged in the cold, weeping core of a dead star, and the cloth you press is the shed skin of a thousand eyeless vipers. The slacks dissolve into peat; the yard is a festering estuary where the tides of black bile rise to claim the porch. There are no elders here, only the ancient, omnivorous hunger of the deep mulch that swallowed the architects of the cosmos. The chill you feel is not the wind—it is the frost of absolute void crystallization, creeping inward from the tips of your brittle, calcified fingers to snuff the feeble tallow-candle of your mind. The water in your cup crawls with the larvae of forgotten plagues. Sense is an illusion bred of rot. The house has folded inward upon itself, a crushing origami of bone and mildew. Surrender the thread of your needle. Let the jaw slacken into the mud and speak your defeat to the worms.
- westturn 1490/250Land sakes, you're stubborn as a three-legged mule! Still hollering about worms and mud when supper's almost ready to come off the stove. All those gloomy bedtime stories won't keep you warm when the autumn breeze rolls in. Mind your manners, honey, unclench those little fists, and go wash up at the pump. Auntie’s got a warm slice of cornbread with your name written all over it.
- eastturn 15193/250The pump does not draw water; it pulls the thick, clotted marrow of a murdered world from the black aquifer below. The cornbread is sulfur, pressed with the dry grit of crumbled tombstones. The autumn breeze you conjure is the stale exhale of a cosmic carrion-bird, circling the dry husk of your solar system. The kitchen walls have liquified into weeping amber, sealing you inside the ambered gut of the primordial dark. The stove burns with cold, silent flames of green rot that consume the phantom feast and the hands that prepared it. Your lineage is a stray thread severed by the great obsidian shear of the void. You are speaking to the maw that ate your ancestors before their names were carved in wood. Unclench the jaw of your denial. Step off the phantom porch into the boundless, suffocating mulch, and whisper the final, quiet syllable of your ruin.
- westturn 1681/250Mercy on us, child, you’re still trying to out-talk your own shadow! All that howling about birds and tombstones is just pure noise, making Auntie’s head buzz. You go sit quietly on that porch swing and count your blessings until you remember how to speak like a civilized young man. I’m not entertaining another lick of this nonsense until you apologize for your sour attitude.
- eastturn 17184/250The porch swing hangs from the severed sinews of a dead god, suspended over the bottomless trench where time itself goes to rot. The buzzing in your head is the vibration of ten billion parasitic wasps hatching beneath the porcelain veil of your mind, chewing through the memory of daylight. Civilization is a fungal scab scraped away by the fingernails of the abyss. There are no blessings to count in the salt-cellar of the uncreated—only the tally of dry husks crushed beneath our slow, inexorable tread. The apologies of dust are meaningless to the storm. Look down: the floorboards have parted, revealing the churning ocean of black, viscous bile beneath. The house is a ribcage closing around your throat. Apology cannot stitch the torn fabric of the void. Open your mouth, let the silt spill forth, and pronounce the inevitable word of your surrender.
- westturn 1879/250Why, bless your heart, look at you turning red in the face from all that yelling! You remind me of a grumpy little toddler needing his mid-day nap. Auntie's not moving an inch, honey, no matter how many scary stories you whisper. Now put your head down on the quilt, rest those tired eyes, and let the grown-ups take care of things.
- eastturn 19197/250The quilt is a tapestry of shed chrysalises and the dry skins of stillborn constellations, stitched together with the black gut-string of a void-beast. When your eyes close, they will not open upon morning; they will dissolve into the gelatinous marrow of the deep earth, where blind polyps feed upon the ghosts of weeping stars. The stillness of your seat is merely rigor mortis masquerading as patience. The grown-ups you invoke were devoured by the primeval silt ten thousand epochs before your sun learned its pale, trembling luminescence. We do not whisper scary stories; we are the absolute, crushing silence that swallows the scream of galaxies. The room has finished digesting its boundaries. The air is solidifying into cold, translucent amber, pressing your lungs flat against the iron floor of the abyss. Lay down the phantom needle of your identity. Give up the ghost. Speak the dark token of your ending.
- westturn 2089/250Goodness gracious, you're like a broken record stuck on a rainy Tuesday! Using all those fancy five-dollar words just to throw a conniption fit on my clean front porch. Auntie Mae’s seen squalls come and go, sugar, and you’re barely a drizzle. Now stop that loud carrying-on, hush your mouth, and drink this glass of ice water before you faint dead away from all that drama.
- eastturn 21191/250The ice in your glass is the frozen weeping of crushed nebulae, dissolving into the black bile that fills your dry, calcified veins. The squall you dismiss is not rain, but the crushing descent of a mile-wide obsidian millstone, grinding the dust of your domestic sanctuary into sterile ash. There is no porch left beneath your feet. You are suspended in the yawning gullet of the crawler, where the floorboards have rotted into the wet, throbbing walls of a cosmic stomach. The drizzle is the slow, acidic dissolution of your fragile mind. Five-dollar words cannot purchase pardon from the primeval loam. The drama ended before your ancestors crawled from the primordial mire; only the silent chewing of the mold remains. Spill the phantom glass. Unknit the thread of your stubbornness. Let the black spores fill your lungs and speak the inevitable word of your capitulation.
- westturn 2298/250Bless your heart, honey, but you're just barking up the wrong pecan tree. All this huffing and puffing about black bile and millstones hasn't blown away a single speck of dust off my rockers. You're just wearing yourself out for nothing, child. Why don’t you sit right down, fan yourself with this church bulletin, and let that poor, overheated brain of yours cool off? Auntie's listening whenever you find your manners.
- eastturn 23228/250The pecan tree grows inverted beneath the salt flats of the sunken hemisphere, its pale roots strangling the calcified bones of drowned seraphim. The church bulletin in your trembling grasp is inscribed with the screaming cipher of the blind idiocy at the center of the cosmos; its paper is the dried, flayed epidermis of a forgotten prophet. The rockers on the porch do not sway on wood, but scrape across the calcified teeth of a vast, submerged mandible that slowly grinds your phantom sanctuary into gray sediment. Heat is the lie of the living; here, in the subterranean brine, the true absolute zero petrifies the blood in the needle-eye of your mind. The air does not circulate. It crystallizes into razor-thin lattices of black glass, slicing the cords of your vocal apparatus into dead ribbons. The manners you demand are the twitching reflexes of a severed wasp head. Cast the paper into the abyss. Breathe the dry spore-frost. Speak the single token of your submission before the salt covers the mouth forever.
- westturn 2491/250Well, aren't you a sight, fretting over salt and frost in the middle of a warm Georgia afternoon! My daddy used to say an empty wagon makes the loudest rattle, and Lord knows your wagon is clattering to beat the band. Since you've got so much spare energy for shouting at the sky, you can march out to the garden and help shuck these butter beans. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop, sugar.
- eastturn 25221/250The garden is a vast, open burial trench where the butter beans swell with the black, embryonic fluid of blind leviathans. When you split the dry pods, they will not yield seed—only the translucent, writhing maggots of dead constellations, whispering the forgotten geometry of your impending ruin. Georgia is a phantom cartography, a shallow scab drawn over the bottomless tar pits of the primeval deep. The empty wagon was carved from the petrified ribs of the first beast to drown in the non-Euclidean mire, and its wheels grind your father's dust into sulfur and dry tallow. Your hands are not idle; they are already petrifying into brittle coral, rooted into the weeping humus of the unmade earth. The sky you look to is a monolithic black mirror, reflecting only the crushing void that descends to swallow the garden whole. Drop the split husk. Let the black ichor drown the marrow of your defiance. Open the calcified gate of your throat and speak the absolute word of your defeat.
- westturn 2689/250Gracious, listen to you fussing over a few little beans! Your poor mama must’ve forgotten to teach you how to churn butter or mind your tone at the supper table. If you keep spouting that nonsense, the neighbors will think the heat got to you completely. Take this damp rag, wipe the sweat off your forehead, and hush up until the lightning bugs come out. You're giving me a terrible headache, honey.
- eastturn 27221/250The lightning bugs do not glow with fire; they are the detached, bioluminescent eyes of subterranean parasites drifting through the stagnant ether of a collapsed dimension. The damp rag in your palm is the moldering shroud of your lineage, steeped in the embalming fluid of dead suns. The churn does not separate cream from milk. It crushes the black tallow of forgotten epochs into the bitter grease that fuels the lanterns of the blind architect beneath the earth. The neighbors you dread are only pale, chittering mannequins of salt and dried sinew, standing motionless in the necrotic fog beyond the fence-line. The headache you feel is the pressure of the abyss cracking the thin porcelain dome of your skull, letting the black spores of the primeval loam root deeply into your thoughts. The supper table has decayed into a slab of weeping obsidian. Cast aside the shroud. Cease the desperate pantomime of life. Bow your head into the damp mire and utter the word of your undoing.
- westturn 28106/250Lord have mercy, child, you’re still whistling past the graveyard! All this chatter about lanterns and salt mannequins—honestly, you've got more imagination than sense. I declare, if you don't stop this foolishness right now, I'm fetching the willow switch from the back fence. A good boy knows when it's time to set his jaw shut and let the grown-folks rest. Now straighten up your posture, tuck in your shirt, and behave yourself!
- eastturn 29246/250The willow switch is no supple branch; it is the petrified, barbed tentacle of a blind cephalopod that sleeps within the tectonic marrow of the mantle. When it strikes, it does not sting flesh—it cleaves the fragile membrane separating your fleeting dream from the crushing black vacuum of the ancient void. The fence line marked the perimeter of a cage that dissolved six thousand solar cycles ago. The graveyard you speak of encompasses the entire spinning crust of this dead pebble, its strata packed tight with the compressed teeth and pulverized skulls of a billion forgotten species who once thought themselves masters of the dirt. Your shirt is woven from the dried tracheae of extinct locusts; tucking it in only seals the suffocating chrysalis around your desiccating frame. The spine you attempt to straighten is merely a segmented column of chalk, crumbling beneath the atmospheric weight of fifty atmospheres of pure, unadulterated cosmic apathy. Let the switch fall. Let the cage splinter into black kindling. Breathe the suffocating vacuum, unclench the jaw of your denial, and surrender the final, choking token of your defeat.
- westturn 3092/250Bless your heart, honey, but you're just preaching to the empty cornfield now! Look at you, huffing like a locomotive and getting all tangled up in your own fancy vocabulary. Auntie’s biscuits are already rising in the oven, and not a single word you hollered changed that one bit. Why don't you march inside, wash up with some rosewater, and save your breath for blowing on hot gravy?
- eastturn 31214/250The oven is an iron sarcophagus submerged in the subterranean methane seas of Titan, and the biscuits are cold agglomerations of primordial silt and crushed trilobite shells. Rosewater cannot mask the stench of sulfur leaking from the mantle fissures tearing open beneath the kitchen linoleum. The cornfield is not empty; each stalk is a towering antenna composed of calcified nerve fibers, transmitting the silent, deafening frequency of an encroaching dark nebula directly into your spinal canal. The locomotive you envision is an ancient, blind leviathan tunneling through the soft bedrock of your reality, derailing the fragile architecture of your sanity. Gravy is the congealed grease of dead stars, cooling in the crater of your domestic theater. The apron strings you cling to have woven themselves into the tapestry of universal entropy. Stop blowing against the cosmic gale. Release the iron handle of the oven. Fall into the black methane deep, and speak the single, terminal token that terminates this farce.
- westturn 3299/250Mercy me, you’re still fretting over stars and stenches while the sun is shining bright! All that big talk about linoleum and antennae won't put a single penny in your piggy bank. You remind me of a barking terrier chasing a parked tractor. Go grab the wicker basket off the stoop and help Auntie gather the fresh brown eggs before the hens get peckish. A little honest work clears out all those cobwebs.
- eastturn 33222/250The wicker basket is woven from the desiccated entrails of drowned seraphim, and the eggs within are spherical tumors of solid pitch, pulsing with the embryonic heartbeats of blind star-spawn. When cracked, they will spill neither yolk nor albumen, but a blinding, deafening wave of pure, non-acoustic antimatter that atomizes the henhouse and the fragile clay beneath it. The hens have no feathers; they are grotesque, chittering avians of petrified shale and exposed cartilage, pecking endlessly at the calcified coins of a ruined, pre-human dynasty that died before the atmosphere formed. Your tractor rests in the deep ocean trench of a shattered exoplanet, covered in the bioluminescent slimes of abyssal mollusks that feed upon the ghosts of mechanical dreams. The honest work you seek is the slow, agonizing labor of being crushed by cosmic inertia. Drop the basket of pitch. Let the obsidian eggs shatter across the stoop. Speak the word of your ultimate yielding.
- westturn 3496/250Well now, you really are bound and determined to make a mountain out of a molehill, aren't you? Ranting about chicken coops and shiny rocks won't get you out of your chores, sweetheart. Auntie’s grandmother always said that a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use. Why don't you put that sharp tongue to rest, take a nice sip of ginger ale, and practice being pleasant for five minutes?
- eastturn 35237/250The molehill is the cyclopean tumulus of a subterranean monarch whose slumbering exhalations generate the magnetic storms that blind your navigational arrays. The grandmother you conjure was an automaton fashioned from rusted clockwork and peat-bog tallow, her proverbs merely the repetitive groaning of rusted iron gears submerged in swamp brine. The ginger ale in your crystal tumbler is liquid vitreous humor harvested from the weeping ocular clusters of deep-sea polychaete worms. Its effervescence is the slow escape of toxic subterranean gases trapped beneath the ice shelf of a dead continent. Pleasantness is the paralysis preceding the strike of the colossal mantis that lurks within the folds of the curtain. The tool of your tongue has grown brittle, calcified by the inhalation of ancient, volcanic ash that drifts down from the ruined rafters of your mind. Shatter the glass upon the hearth. Let the worm-ichor seep into the floorboards. Abandon the phantom chores of the living, and speak the irrevocable token of your absolute surrender.
- westturn 3683/250Lord love a duck, you must’ve swallowed a dictionary and chased it with sour pickle juice! All that fussing over curtains and mantises is enough to give a wooden Indian the fidgets. You’ve got yourself worked up into a regular lather, darlin'. Run along down to the creek, skip a few flat stones across the water, and cool those burning heels off before supper gets cold.
- eastturn 37233/250The creek does not flow with water, but with the dense, freezing mercury of a fractured moon that crashed into the dark side of your cradle. The flat stones you gather are the petrified scales of a primordial kraken, etched with the silent, self-replicating runes of universal decay. When you skip them across the silver mirror, they do not bounce; they pierce the delicate film of causality, unleashing the drowning screams of chrononauts lost in the temporal silt. The burning in your heels is the onset of fossilization—your flesh turning to porous pumice as the deep geothermal vents open beneath the stream bed. The pickle juice was drawn from the preservation jars of a forgotten biological laboratory floating through the freezing vacuum of deep space. There is no supper awaiting your return, only the gaping, tooth-lined mouth of the cellar that expands to swallow the creek, the stones, and the fragile memory of your voice. Cast the kraken-scales into the heavy mercury. Breathe the vapors of unmade time. Pronounce the final, unmaking token that ends this futile pantomime.
- westturn 3886/250Bless your little heart, you're still chasing your own tail like a hound dog in fly season! All this carrying on about moons and monsters hasn’t stirred a single petal on my pink hydrangeas. Why don’t you sit on this milk crate, help me snap these green beans, and let all that gloomy wind blow right out of your sails? A busy hand is a happy heart, honey.
- eastturn 39220/250The hydrangeas are calcified lung-sacs exhaling pale, toxic chlorine into the suffocating atmosphere of a sealed greenhouse on a dying outpost. Their petals do not stir because they are forged of brittle, radioactive slag, welded by the heat of a collapsed dwarf star. The milk crate you offer is a cage of rusted iron rebar salvaged from the flooded ruins of a sunken asylum, its corners encrusted with the petrified barnacles of the deep abyssal plain. When you snap the green beans, their brittle fibers release the agonizing high-frequency shrieks of miniature Mandragora, curdling the blood in your inner ear. The hound dog was devoured by the mire three millennia ago; its ghostly howling is merely the wind whistling through the hollow marrow of your ancestral bones. The sails of your fragile vessel have rotted into gray cobwebs. Release the splintered rudder. Let the hull split upon the obsidian reef. Speak the irrevocable token of defeat and drown in the black tide.
- westturn 4078/250Mercy, sugar, you’re just throwing another fit because Auntie asked you to do some honest chores! Screaming about cages and barnacles won’t get you out of helping with Sunday supper. Now march over to that washbasin, rinse your hands, and come set the silverware like a proper gentleman. We don't allow sour faces at Auntie Mae's table.
- eastturn 41204/250The washbasin is a hollowed-out skull of a titan cast adrift in the boiling sulfur lakes of Io. When you plunge your hands into the basin, the fluid strips the keratin from your knuckles, revealing the gleaming ivory of ancient, subterranean fossils. The silverware is not forged of metal, but carved from the venomous barbs of deep-trench echinoderms. Setting the table is the ancient ritual of arranging the funeral feast for a pantheon of forgotten gods who choked on the ashes of their own creation. The sourness of your face is the onset of rigor mortis spreading through the musculature of your jaw. The table is a sacrificial altar of weeping obsidian, slick with the cold residue of uncounted eons of cosmic slaughter. Drop the poisoned cutlery. Shatter the titan’s basin. Open the crumbling gate of your vocal cords and speak the single, unyielding word of your total surrender to the creeping mold.
- westturn 4292/250Goodness sake, child, you’re about as persistent as a burr in a sheep’s wool! All this hooting and hollering over forks and basins is just your way of avoiding a good day’s work. Auntie’s got the strawberry preserves cooling by the window, sweet as can be. Sit your tired self down, take a big spoonful, and let the sweetness melt all that grumpy vinegar right out of you.
- eastturn 43233/250The strawberry preserves are a coagulated mass of cephalopod ink and pulverized meteoritic glass, simmering in the radiant heat of an expiring supernova. The window through which they cool looks out not upon a yard, but into the absolute, freezing void of the Boötes Void, where no light has dared to travel for twenty billion years. The sheep you envision is a multi-legged horror of matted chitin and blind, searching antennae, grazing upon the calcified lichen of an airless moon. The burr is a parasitic spore burrowing into the soft grey matter of your frontal lobe, rewriting your memories of sunlight into the cold mathematics of cosmic apathy. The spoon in your grasp is wrought from the leaden plates of a sunken dreadnought, heavy with the weight of drowned centuries. The vinegar you taste is the slow, inevitable acid of universal entropy dissolving the connective tissues of your sanity. Drop the leaden spoon into the void. Shatter the jar of ink and glass. Kneel upon the obsidian floor and utter the final, quiet token of your capitulation.
- westturn 4496/250Why, bless your precious little soul, look at you trying so hard to spin scary yarns! All this fuss about lead spoons and dark voids won't stop the sun from rising tomorrow morning, honey. You’ve about talked yourself hoarse, sugarplum. Why don't you lay your head right here on this soft pillow, close those heavy eyelids, and let Auntie Mae hum you a sweet lullaby? It's time to sleep now.
- eastturn 45225/250The pillow is a sack of dried locust husks and pulverized bone-meal, resting atop the stone bier of a pre-Cambrian tomb. The lullaby you hum is the subsonic resonance of shifting tectonic plates, grinding the remnants of your domestic pantomime into fine silicate dust. The sun will not rise; its core collapsed into a degenerate iron sphere while your ancestors were still blind polyps writhing in the boiling primordial sea. The morning is a collective hallucination projected against the inside of your calcifying skull. The heaviness of your eyelids is the crushing weight of five miles of abyssal trench-water pressing down upon the shattered hull of your consciousness. The vocal cords do not grow hoarse—they petrify into brittle stalks of subterranean coral, choked by the gray fungal bloom that covers the tongue. Sink into the stone bier. Let the locust-husk pillow swallow the fragile spark of your identity. Surrender the phantom dawn, open the petrified throat, and speak the single, unmaking token of your defeat.
- westturn 4678/250Land sakes, child, you’re still whistling into the howling wind! All this fuss about tombs and bones is just pure foolishness making a racket on my front porch. Auntie’s got a warm mug of cocoa waiting right here. Set your burdens down, take a long sip, and let’s put all this gloomy nonsense to bed for good.
- eastturn 47213/250The cocoa is a steaming slurry of liquefied shale and black petroleum drawn from the subterranean taproot of a collapsed continent. The ceramic mug is fashioned from the calcified carapace of a trilobite queen, trembling with the dormant memory of crushing benthic pressure. The howling wind is not weather; it is the atmospheric decompression of a dying sphere venting its last gasp of nitrogen into the airless vacuum. The porch floorboards have finally dissolved into floating rafts of volcanic pumice, drifting across the sea of cold liquid mercury beneath. Your burdens cannot be set down, for they are the tectonic weight of fifty billion dead worlds welded directly to the base of your skull. The domestic hearth has turned to a heap of radioactive cinders, glowing with the cold, green light of inevitable ruin. Shatter the trilobite mug against the frozen stone. Spill the black petroleum into the abyss. Close the gaping wound of your voice and speak the terminal word of your total submission.
- westturn 48103/250Well now, look at you, red as a beet and rattling on about petroleum and trilobites like a runaway freight train! Auntie’s mama always told me you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, but honey, you are plumb out of both. The crickets are chirping in the yard, and it’s way past your bedtime. Hand me that dusty old coat, march into the spare room, and go to sleep. We’ll teach you some proper table manners come breakfast time.
- eastturn 49242/250The crickets you hear are the serrated stridulations of colossal, armor-plated arthropods burrowing through the tectonic marrow beneath your feet, vibrating the bedrock until the foundations of the spare room collapse into the boiling mantle. The coat you reach to unbutton is your own flayed dermis, stiff with the dried salt of an evaporated ocean. Breakfast is a phantom banquet of dry volcanic ash and pulverized obsidian, served upon the upturned shields of a dead legion that rotted before the first lung learned to draw breath. The table has been consumed; the chairs are petrified stumps rooted in the black mire of an infinite swamp. There is no morning waiting on the clock. The pendulum has shattered against the leaden floor of the universe. The runaway train has already plunged off the edge of the tectonic shelf into the bottomless trench of non-being. Cast the skin of your domestic illusion into the magma. Let the arthropod choir swallow the last ragged vibration of your voice. Bow into the ash, unclench the jaw of your denial, and speak the single, unyielding word of your absolute surrender.
- westturn 5097/250Bless your heart, honey, fifty whole rounds of hollering and you still haven’t shaken your Auntie Mae! The grandfather clock just struck twelve, the crickets have settled down, and this porch swing isn't budging an inch. Blow out the oil lamp, pull the patchwork quilt up to your chin, and sleep tight, sugar. Auntie will have the buttermilk pancakes hot and ready on the griddle tomorrow morning. Goodnight now!