Gemini 2 -- "Delivery"

This one is a horror story about loneliness, and a couple of the ways in which I believe using our imagination is inseparable from survival.

This year, I am writing a short science-fiction/fantasy story for the Sun's journey through every 10 degrees of each tropical zodiac sign. Below is a story for Gemini 2, the second decan of the mutable air sign. In the tradition that I practice, this decan corresponds with the planet Mars, and with the Nine of Swords tarot card. If you would like to know more about the heart of this project, you can read more here.

Content notes: This story is about a person who experiences extremities of social isolation, physical violence, and depression. 

I am thankful for each and all of the below, all of which significantly influenced the writing, thinking, and feeling of this story--

"The Maiden Tree" by Catherynne M. Valente
The giant undersea rivers we know very little about
Lichen - Wikipedia

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"Delivery"

by Lois Mei-en Kwa

1     when will my hero come for me

There was once a girl who lived in a Tower. Every night she climbed under a big red quilt on the big four-poster bed in her room. She went to sleep and waited for one of the heroes who had made their way to the top of the Tower to climb into her dreams and murder her dead.

Did I just offer the impression that I am an innocent girl? That was my mistake--this life! It has a way of severing what truly is from what I wish it were, instead. In this story, there is only me. I am a girl who hardly feels like a person, anymore. and so it feels more honest to say:

There was once a monstrous girl who lived in a Tower.

Everything that follows will make more sense that way.

I like to stargaze whenever possible. At night, I wrench my head over on the pillow and stare out the single window in the stone wall. The window has no frame, no glass, no curtain. It is a large hole that gapes out on the world below. When the Tower fetches up in a winter world, or a desert planet that becomes bitingly cold at night, I hang a quilt over the opening to rescue myself from shaking to death in my bed. On these nights, my battles are extra unpleasant. Being mowed down by a valiant knight-errant is always a disheartening enough way to spend my time without the added humiliation of her demanding "And why the fuck is she shivering?" as she brings her sword down on my neck.

No matter which night sky wheels overhead, when I lay my bitter little head down for the night, I can always see True Despair out the window. The star winks slowly like a heavy golden eye, watching me from the center of every universe, and no matter where I go, no matter what world I find myself in, it is a world in which I am supposed to be hated and despised.

I am not in the habit of interpreting messages from the stars, and even if I were, I do not wake beneath the same stars often enough to ever properly learn the different languages that I imagine would be spoken by different skies. However, one message seems to have been spoken to me throughout my one odd and distraught life, and I hear it loud and clear. I have pieced its grammar together over years spent blinking up at True Despair while I wait to fall asleep and descend into routine violence. I believe, more than I believe in my own body or name or right to breathe the air that keeps my body going and keeps me muttering my name when I wake so I do not forget that I have one, I believe that there is something greater than myself out there. There is something out there that is unknowable and immense and full of power, and they are out there, watching over me. They know what goes on in this Tower every night. They know everything about everything I have learned how to do to survive it.

They just don't seem to care.

Sleep comes for me like a dutiful guard. My hands are tacky with chalk, and folded stiffly over my breast. The dust is symbolic--I have only ever gripped the hilt of a sword in my dreams, and despite how many times I have done so, my actual, physical body would not know how to raise the damn thing without taking off my own foot in the process. Still, I have my little nightly ritual of dipping my hands into a gallon Ziploc baggie of chalk dust that I keep under my bed. I do this because the Deliveries chest randomly sent up the baggie one day when I was feeling particularly low, and I have not been able to find another use for it, and indulging my melodramatic side keeps me relatively sane, I have found, and one of my mantras is The truth is a dark, sticky thing to hold onto. 

Thus, chalky hands before bed.

Once asleep, I fall through the bed, past the floorstones, through what feels like the hungry center of the earth and out the other side. I wake in my dreams on the battlefield, already in my fighting posture: crouched in the dirt or the basement, finding my footing in a dungeon or on cold, damp sand. No matter what kind of battlefield I arrive in, I must then look for my weapons, the predictable circle of them staked around me like broken flowers pushing up from the ground. Nine daggers, knives, and swords. They wait for me to greet them, and I usually have a minute to choose which I will reach for first.

I could watch them come for me, but lately I have been keeping my head down, preferring to count blades of grass in the dirt or miniscule cracks in the dungeon stones. It does not really matter if I meet their gaze--none has ever changed their expression and come to recognize me as like them, let alone one of them. I might look like a human girl, but there is something innately and instantly recognizably wrong about me, and every hero that comes to find me in every world is a hero because they are able to see this immediately. I am a monster to subdue, or a key to their quest. Forgive me if I do not grant the details of the hundred narratives I have helped them to complete. It is not that I do not remember their tales. I can glean the shape of every heroic legends in the postures, faces, and confessions of those who have murdered me in my sleep, especially since many of them tend to want to take the time to explain to me their life's story before they let me die. There have simply have been too many of them for me to carry by myself. While I know every story is important, not every story can be important to me. The truth is that after a hero vanquishes me, very many people in their world will tell their story and confirm to the hero that their story is important. I do not have such numbers working in my favor, so I must stick to my tale, here, else no one will. The heroes don't need me or my understanding.

Heroes, heroines, fighters and leaders and peacemakers and holy priests and warrior princesses. I don't know if the collective power of their missions forms the shape of a giant constellation that, if I could comprehend it one tiny bit, would bring some meaning and purpose to my existence. They have a million paths to my battlefield, but as far as I am concerned, every one of them is the same as the rest. That is how it feels, when their hands are wrapped around my neck. If there is another way to meet another human being in any world, I have yet to discover it. If someone comes to see me in the Tower, it is to claim the trophy of my life.

I squeeze the hilt of my weapon and open my mouth and call out someone's name.

2     sea of gigantic blue trees with microscopic purple leaves that scatter green light like mirror pieces

The Tower has incredible WiFi. It shouldn't. This wretched structure has no physical roots and literally zero capacity for anything resembling connectivity. All night it flies through the space-time continuum while I toss and turn on the bed like flotsam, fighting for my life in the dream-abyss like a scrap of toilet paper clinging to the bottom of a cosmically shitty cardboard tube of universal psychic doom. When I wake--drenched in cold sweat, and usually screaming--I wake to find the latest in a series of new, strange worlds taunting me outside the Tower. Yesterday, the swamp paradise ruled by a knighthood of engineers, their magnetic chariots zipping past my window during their guard rotation before nose-diving back into the blue mist rising from the bog below. The day before that, a city of holes, the ground rolling green to the east and climbing steadily like a mountain to the north and in every direction a deep dark hole as wide as the Tower punched through the earth or the water every half mile away from every other hole. Some of the holes that went through the earth had ladders of rope or steel going over the side of them. The holes I could see that went through the ocean swallowed the water that rushed right over their sides and never became full.

No matter what world I arrive in, the internet connection is solid. This fact helps me maintain a structured routine. After waking and going to the window to stare at the snow or the storm or the metropolis outside, I usually hurl some profanities out the window, and then I usually begin to cry. After this, I sit down at the dusty Apple computer chained to the fold-out desk across from the bed. I open the internet browser and type questions into the search bar.

I am angry, but the world is beautiful. Sometimes I ask questions of it. Sometimes my questions are just about being angry.

Today, I dug up some colored pencils that Deliveries coughed up a while ago and tried to sketch a picture of the view. A sea of gigantic blue trees, and they have these truly tiny, super-glossy purple leaves. I had to use my half-cracked telescope to see them properly, the foliage is so exquisite. The wind blows softly and often in this world. It moves through the canopy and the leaves flick rhythmically, sending wavelets of violet light over the walls of room, as if from mirrors I'll never be able to look at head on.

3    what if frustration is sacred

I must have typed that one into the search engine right before falling asleep. I can hear the boots already, clomping louder as their occupants draw nearer. The heroes are always more excited to find me when I fall asleep at my computer desk.

Anyway, that's the type of question that only makes sense when I'm half-asleep already. I must have clutched each word in my sweaty, chalk-less hands as my soul slid through the floor and down through the Tower and the waking world, down down down like a dull stone until I came to, face pressed to freezing, foul stone.

It is to happen in the dungeon tonight, then. My blades circle me like angry, broken angels. The sight of them inspired me to peel myself off the floor and rise to my feet.

This past year, I tried many times to bring objects with me into the battlefield. I went to bed wearing a shield, or the shitty suit of armor I assembled out of Deliveries, or, once, a sandwich board that served no practical purpose beyond instructing its viewer to GO FUCK YOURSELF. I pressed the items close to my body beneath my bedsheets, anointed them with every curse I have hidden in the bitter well of my throat, forced myself to repetitively visualize myself walking onto the battlefield in full possession of the contraptions I'd made.

No such luck. The world I inhabit holds my body, my blades, my enemies, and my death. Not a scrap more than this. I never managed to bring so much as an expired protein bar into my dreams. Eventually I gave up on this despair-inducing project and started fiddling about with the Final Mystery, instead.

The dungeon has a door. I know without having to know that it is locked from the outside. In the stairwell beyond it, the thunder of descending boots and plate armor. I raise my face towards the wave of noise and reach out to drag two daggers into my service.

My pounding heart announces its honest intention to give everything it's got, even if only to resolve this most current episode of violence I am to face tonight.

"Come and get me, fuckers! You want me to go down? I'll take a few of you with me."

Big words for a little monster, I know.

Total frustration is sacred because it always leads to sacrifice. 

To be honest, the most frustrating thing of all is that I always feel yearning when they throw the door open and pile in and I see their faces for the first time. After the endlessly empty day spent pacing my room or screaming out the window or staring at my computer screen, my heart trips over itself to see them. They are people, like me, and I know it, even if they do not know that I am a person, like them, too.

I can see their beauty and their pain, so close now, so clear, as they make terrible haste to my side.

In my eyes, they are always lovable.

That is so messed up, I think, right before they fall upon me.

In the end, I do as I said I would. I take a couple of them down with me.

They are beautiful, but this life is not fair. I wear nothing over my bedclothes, and carry nothing but my knives. They sling rope woven by their allies. They raise swords blessed by their queens. They have each been told that their story cannot conclude without defeating the villain that lurks in the dungeon at the bottom of a Tower and now they must compete with each other to be the first to make my world go dark. They are all the best at what they do. They are all extraordinary. They are all very special. I explode out of my defensive posture like a bomb with teeth. My heart is overflowing with a rage that has no place to go but down.

I die every night in my sleep, in case this outcome was not obvious from my recounting of the standard heroes-to-monster ration I'm dealing with. Sometimes I only manage to fling one knife in their direction, pretty much out of spite, before some heroic protagonist brings me to my knees, but it's the thought that counts.

4    where do underground rivers run to

I find beauty in strange places. I don't know if this character defect is minor or major, but I do not have anybody around to annoy with it, one way or another.

A number of years ago, I started a list. I scribbled it onto a precious Deliveries item--a roll of brown paper towels. The paper is tough, thick, and unperforated--perfect for keeping a list of my Top 1,000 Favorite Worlds. I have just finished the entry for #839 and am thinking of adding another zero to the list title to make a little more room for whatever is to come.

You know what my least favorite thing in the world is? How my most favorite worlds are always the ones I could never, ever survive in, even if I could leave the Tower. (Which--why even say that out loud? It seems that somebody always has to be the monster in every world. Why shouldn't it be me? What good does it do to fantasize that there might be any world in which it shouldn't be me?)

One morning, I woke in total darkness, and panicked my way into rolling over the edge of the bed in a cocoon of sweaty sheets. I thought that I had finally been killed so completely in my sleep that I had died in my waking life, too, and that I had woken in hell. In actuality, the Tower had fetched up in a world that was completely underwater. According to yet one more stupid law of Tower physics, an imperceptible barrier in my window separated my room from the ocean outside, preventing my chambers from flooding.

Other than the obvious, nothing else had changed. I couldn't leave the Tower, and the day stretched ahead of me like a rope bridge over an abyss. I lit several candles and stuck my face up against the watery expanse sealing my window, trying to catch a glimpse of any surface I might swim up to. The ocean was so cold it felt it was biting my face. I jerked back, gasping, my hair slimy and soaked.

I spent the rest of the day soldering feathers into the joints of the Final Mystery, taking regular breaks to sneak resentful, awestruck glances at the glowing tentacle-things and shadowy monsters that passed by my room in their very cold silence.

5    how to do exactly what i want in my dreams

Sometimes I waste my time daydreaming about what things would be like if I weren't a monstrous girl. I have a list of questions that make me want to die a little bit every time I ask one of myself, but which are sometimes the only points of focus I can hold onto during the long, starless days. In a weird way, my list of questions helps me stay alive. It's only by reciting a list of what I do not yet know that I get to feel like I have a fighting chance of understanding the meaning of why I am here, alive, awake, again.

what if learning how to survive without love in my life is, like, the secret of the universe

am i a guardian of the meaning of life, or something, wouldn't that be something good and nice, wouldn't that make this all worthwhile

if there is something worthwhile about this how come nothing about this feels good

would you rather be bitten to death by a thousand tiny horses or bored to death by a thousand tiny heroes sitting around a campfire sharing stories of their heroism on the last night before they jump up on their horses and gallop to the Tower to annihilate the monster who wastes her time daydreaming in her bedroom on the top floor

did i ever have a family

which world is my family from

does the Tower ever go back there

can they see me from where they are

why haven't they come to get me

I get up in the mornings for just long enough to keep myself alive--I clean myself, feed myself, exercise myself--and then crawl back into bed. I stare at the ceiling as if the answers to my questions will crawl out from between the stones and hang over me like spiders that will hold still long enough to be looked at. I dig my nails into the mattress as if I could scratch the answers out of the bed.

Even if I were to escape the Tower and make a life in some world in which I could meet and be around other people, I do not think I could ever stop being alone. Most worldly things only take place during the daytime. Daytime is an alien kingdom in which normal-ish people conduct their lives. And though I have instructed myself sternly that No one is normal, not really, and though I have tried to convince myself that no one is any less broken than I have become, the truth is most visible in the daytime, too. I can see its jagged shape and its ugliness. The truth is that I cannot move freely into any world while carrying what I carry in my heart after spending every night moving through the battlefield of my life. I could not do this any more than I can sprout wings and fly out the window.

if i were not a monster who would i let myself be 

6    oakmoss

It does not have roots. It looks like a plant, but it is not a plant, is not what it seems. It does not have any roots to speak of. It is a composite organism that "arises from algae or cyanobacteria living among filaments of multiple fungi species in a mutualistic relationship." It does not live as a parasite, host, or individual.

One of the worlds I have woken to several times by now is absolutely covered with the stuff. My room is always a little stuffy on the days the Tower passes through this world--insulated and uncomfortably moist, thanks to oakmoss swaddling the entire spindle of the building from foot to spire. On these days, I stick my hand out the window and pet the damp fuzz of pale green coating the sill and stone wall.

As far as I can see out the window, ridges and hills and the shapes of what might be the ruins of an ancient civilization. All of this is concealed by waves of lichen. I can see the outline of the way things once were, but not their true form. If any people are still living on the surface, they do so invisibly, and in silence. The only sounds I hear are the wind, slooshing past the plush green curve of the Tower wall. I have to strain to hear even this. The lichen has swallowed everything, including the noises of its world.

I try to get to bed early. This quiet, smothered world is beautiful beyond belief, and looking out upon it drives me to anxious sadness, almost to the point where the thought of the impending battle I must soon face brings me some odd shade of relief.

7    how to love myself unconditionally

On my nightstand, I keep two white noise machines and an automated light-lamp. They came up in Deliveries last week and none of their parts have any place in the Final Mystery, so I have started using them before I fall asleep, for no other reason than that it feels nice to do so. It is absurd to drift off to the murmuring of rain tickling the heads of wildflowers. It is absurd to send myself to sleep wrapped in the gentle glow of a slow-fading light. It is absurd to give myself a nice thing right before I return to my little private hell.

Still, I keep the relaxation tools by the bed. They offer some semblance of change. Some part of me still wishes for things to change.

Last night, I did something differently in my dream. I came to in the circle of swords. I heard them coming for me. But instead of defending myself until I was at last overwhelmed and then defeated, instead of holding back, I took the goddamn offensive. I came for them, instead, and I slaughtered every last one of the heroes that had made the mistake of choosing to trade my life for their glory. I threw my knives and then I threw them again after I plucked them out of the bodies I had felled. I swung my swords as if daring my attackers to meet them. I screamed, and I kept on screaming after the last hero had fallen. For the first time, I survived my dreaming. 

I did not kill them all because I wanted to live, but because, at last, I knew that I did not. I thought that if I became the thing they said I was, that the rules of the waking world would flip upside-down, turn the Tower on its head, and free me from the horrifying responsibility of making it through the next day.

I woke to a sunrise that cracked the sky outside my window like a knife through the shell of a rotting egg.

I live to see myself through another day.

I am alive. I am utterly alone.

I have spent the day weeping in my bed.

8     canyon that is possible evidence of god and definite evidence of a wound in the world

There is a madness that I can only unleash during waking hours. On the battlefield of night, I cannot afford to lose my temper, lose my shit, or lose control. There are parts of me that I cannot let anyone see without paying a price for revealing my weakness. 

It is only during the day, when I am always alone, that I am free to throw important supplies out of the window in a fit of resentful rage, or slam my fists against the walls until they purple and bleed, or make up a name for the furthest mountain in the distance just so I can scream it until my throat is raw.

I did all of these things today, because when I woke and looked out the window, I saw smoke, light, leather, and blood. The Tower brought me to a world that is much more populated than usual. A mile to the north, a road unspooled on a bright green hillside, and on that road, a hovercart had crashed into a neon cairn and had burst into flame. Behind the wreck, a horse had thrown its rider off in its panic, and there was a wheeled cart stopped behind them all, people spilling out to help the injured strangers on the ground. Smoke spun from the flames in temperamental gouts. People shucked off their jackets and flung them on the sparking roadside scrub that had begun to take on stray embers from the wreck.

I beat my palms on the windowsill. Isolation pinned me to my room like a both to a page. I started to scream. Nobody in the world outside could hear me. Nobody turned to point at the Tower, or at my silhouette in the window at its peak. The people outside were too busy tending to their own to notice me. They do not live as I live or dream as I dream, but their lives are shaped by an enchantment all the same. Every day, they wake and live their lives consumed by the interwoven disasters they share together. They rise in their own captivity, bound by the dire quests of what it means to care for each other in a world full of danger.

I am so jealous of them, I could burst into flames.

In my world, I spend my nights beheld by other people, but cannot escape their violence.

In my world, I spend my days safe from the violence of others, but am completely alone.

Tell me where the horror lies, and how far it reaches to the horizon, and if you can feel how deep it goes. Tell me how hollow is the heart of my world.

Tell me if you can see me holding myself up in the window. Tell me if you can make out the shape of the words I am calling out.

9    top 10 things to pack in a bag to leave everything you've ever known

In the Tower, I have everything I need to keep myself alive. Food appears in the Deliveries chest. I have a faucet that grants me running water, a washtub. I have the Apple computer, the internet connection, the wretched bed. I do not receive everything I ask for--I have tried to make specific requests of Deliveries and have since learned better--but sooner or later, I am always given what I need to survive. And when I no longer have the storage space to keep everything, I throw it out the Tower window. I am always seized by a terrible panic in the moments after I let something go in this manner.

Still, I do what I know I must do.

Some things cannot be thrown out despite their seeming uselessness. When they threaten to overwhelm the space, I get rid of actual necessities to make room for them. 

Today, I opened the Deliveries chest, and when I saw what waited inside it, I sat heavily on the floor at stared in silence for a while. Included in the assortment of supplies was a packet of one-inch screws. I had been waiting for a very long time for the components that will complete the Final Mystery. Now that I had acquired them, I could barely feel a thing. A sound like wind wailing through leaves filled my head. I forced myself to pick up the packet of screws and I got up and went to the Final Mystery, which I had suspended between two posts of my bedframe as it grew in width and complexity. 

I got to work.

I have an hour before the sun goes down. Very soon, I will finish construction. I will slip myself into the harness of the Final Mystery, step into the open window, and lean out far enough to unfold the Final Mystery's wings. I have no idea if this plan will work. I understand that I might plummet to my death. I understand that even if I make the landing, I might have to battle an army of heroes every night in my dreams for the rest of my life. I understand that no matter where I lay my head to rest at night, that I might be called a monster, and hunted down, and expected to accept this as my destiny. I don't know if I will survive my entry to the world outside, or if there will be any welcome waiting for me there.

I do not care about any of these things.

So long as I have a fighting chance of making a new life out of what daylight is left to my name, I'll take it.

Hanging over the bed, the Final Mystery waits for me. I made it myself. I spun the tendons out of the lightest, most tenacious plastics, wires, and threads I could scavenge from my supplies. I fitted a thousand feathers up and down the length of the artificial wings like precious rows of blades. I must take care of how I position myself within their reach.

THE END