1636 c/o James Duncan

hehe 666 pt. ?

He holds her shoulder between a thumb and index finger. It feels like sixteen thirty-six—soft, still going. He compares it to the moment. He wonders where all his good ideas went. He says her name and she wakes. He had not thought it would be that easy.

She does a tired, indistinct version of the stretch that she does when she wakes up. She looks at him to ask “are you getting in to or out of bed,” but she cannot manage to speak yet. He smiles. He says it is okay, but he is unsure of what. Why did he need to say that. It is early, it is a lot of things / It is probably okay.

A light wind passes over the windowsill into the room, making the door creak on its hinges / and the image of a tiny wincing star flickers across the area in between his eyes and something else. He thinks about taking a bath but shivers when he thinks about stepping out of it. She wants to eat the soap that smells like Turkish delight and is already asleep again. He slides his side of the blanket between the futon and her body, so that it is pressed close against both. He puts his face on her face and whispers, “Mummified.”

He puts his feet on the floor and stands up. He thinks “dead” and then “no, don’t.”

Later, he sits in the corner and reads a message on Gmail:

also
i don't get the


"it feels like sixteen thirty-six"

why did you decide to write it like that

i mean...

is that the connection to the year?
that line?

ok baby
xxx

He thinks things unrelated to the message like “nnnnmnmnnn,” “are those teeth?” and then “not this again.” He sits on the edge of the bed, almost slipping from it, and looks at the little barely-breathing cocoon that lies there. He replies to the message on Gmail.

i think it might be like a bro with his woman[who is also the ‘piece’] '1636' and then he kills her.. : / iunno iunno iunno iunno iunno

i will make some frickin edit

but does it make sense, that line... dygi?

i feel autistic

He drinks a chocolate flavoured soy-based protein drink, tasting the soy about one second before tasting the chocolate flavour. He feels like this is significant. He considers shaving his face but doesn’t shave his face. He reads a message on Gmail.

well... i mean it's kind of confusing, like...

i really like it, by the way

actually a lot

(sorry i didn't say that already)

i was just confused about how it came across as a 'google file'

and i was like THE FUCK IS THIS GOOGLE WHAT HAVE YOU FRICKEN *DONE*?

but yeah

i do really like it

but

it's like... it's ok if it's abstract, or confusing, as long as i can tell myself "there is a reason that this is 1636 as opposed to just like... 1637 or 1840 or whatever"

does that sounds legit? or fucked?

i mean... could you incorporate something in there... or am i missing it?

that's why i asked about the title...

i thought "am i missing something?"

but ya

fricken

sorry about this... i'm being a butthead

BABY GOOD MORNIN'

He stares at the screen and contemplates the title “um more like 666 frickin meta 1636, hehe,” but feels that it would assume things about an audience or something. In a Microsoft Word document he changes the word “mattress” to “futon”.

Later, on Facebook chat, he writes, “how do I go invisible on chat?” and then “how do I go invisible IRL?” He knows he is confused but can only think about his confusion in a confused way. Yesterday, the Shogun forbade anyone from leaving or returning to the country.

1635 c/o Jared Dawson

Distance is the space between my last word
and your next one. Distance is the arc this knife
will travel as it explores around your neck.

When Maria Callas hits the high note at the end of “Signore, Ascolta” in Puccini’s Turnadot, I cannot help thinking of Rembrandt’s “Sacrifice of Abraham.” Abraham, crouched over his son, one hand planted firmly across Issac’s face – a wave of violence rushing down from the shoulder. His face is turned towards the interruption of the Angel’s voice calling out, “Abraham! Abraham!”

Follow the blue of the Angel’s sleeve to Abraham’s blue robe down to the blanket spilling out underneath the notches of Issac’s spine. A wave crests just off his left shoulder.

Follow the blue that for two months trails Rembrandt’s first born, Rumbartus, and wraps him tight from head to toe.

Follow the blank gaze of the angel that passes in front of Abraham’s face, over Issac’s head. Rembrandt’s Angel of Mercy gropes darkly for Abraham’s wrist and is relieved when the fingers wrap around it.

Abraham says, “Here I am.” He does not move his hand from Issac’s face to wipe away the tear that you will see in the corner of his eye if you creep close to the canvas. His right wrist aches in the grasp of the Angel.

The Angel says, “Do not stretch out your hand against the lad, do not do anything to him,” using a form of the negative imperative that is reserved for expressing immediately pressing, specific commands. “Al-tishlach.” “Al-ta as.”

Abraham can barely hear the Angel speak over the B-flat rolling out from Maria Callas’ throat.

It peels Abraham’s fingers from around the knife.

Listen carefully.

You can hear the soft rattle of Callas’ molars vibrating one against the other in the 1954 recording.

You can hear the sound of a knife falling to the rocks.

1634 c/o Eric Beeny

The Heliocentrist

Galileo drops small things off his balcony onto people’s heads as they pass by his villa in Florence, then he hides behind the stone railing.

Tiny pebbles, rare coins, water balloons.

One guy, Galileo drops a bowling ball on his head and it sinks into his skull like a cake.

The guy looks up at Galileo and yells something in Latin, but Galileo can’t understand him.

Galileo tries seeing the guy's eyes through the dark caves of the bowling ball’s finger holes, but it’s too dark in there.

Galileo just waves the guy on and the guy wobbles down to Galileo’s neighbor’s house, knocks on the door.

A few days later Galileo makes a yo-yo out of a large pulley and a strand of silk.

Galileo practices off the balcony when no one's looking.

* * *

Galileo observes small things through his telescope as the planet he lives on revolves somewhere in space.

He doesn’t think God gives a shit if humans think the Earth is where they think it is, whether or not it’s in the middle of everything.

He goes up to the roof of his villa in Florence and looks at the stars, imagines those small things falling on his head.

Galileo wishes it was his birthday, but for that he’d need a cake with candles to blow out, and since it’s not his birthday he doesn’t have that.

He doesn’t know what he’d wish for other than that it be his birthday, and that he’d once again be young enough to not have to appreciate it.

Galileo’s not sure how small the stars he’s observing are, but he knows they’re far away, and he thinks that must mean something big.

He thinks about what Ptolemy or Copernicus would've thought if Ptolemy or Copernicus were both Galileo thinking they were him.

Galileo watches from his roof, and something moves in the sky, a shooting star, a gash opening the darkness and the darkness healing back in on itself.

“What do these things have in common with my perception of them?” he thinks out loud.

“They both exist,” one of his servants yells up to him from a window below.

“Ah, horseshit,” Galileo says. “You’ve been cooped up inside too long.”

* * *

Galileo can’t sleep.

He has a hernia.

He lies in bed with his eyes closed, grinding his teeth.

He scratches his shoulder, his thigh.

Galileo becomes a star, his theories solar flares.

Controversy revolves around him.

He thinks big thoughts.

Solar system.

The Pope.

God.

Galileo wishes he'd invented the Pope.

Galileo wants to invent a new God, his own God.

Maybe lots of Gods.

God of balconies and God of pebbles, God of stars and God of telescopes, God of bakers and God of cake, God of bowling balls and God of water balloons, God of sleep.

Galileo gets out of bed, looks out the window, the sun shaping with soft light the horizon like a cracked glow stick.

He nails his blanket from one wall to another so it’s suspended in the air, and he puts a bowling ball on the blanket, and the middle of the blanket sinks under the weight of it, the blanket tearing a bit on the nails.

Galileo rolls water balloons onto the blanket and they wiggle in orbit around the bowling ball.

The Earth revolves around the sun.

The sun rising, it’s just the Earth revolving somewhere.

Galileo sends his servant out for more water balloons.

Galileo's eyesight is failing.

When the sun comes up, Galileo will get drunk and cover the window with his blanket, light candles all around his room and sit in the corner squinting with an inquisitive look on his face while the room spins all around him.

1633 c/o Andrea Mullaney

The Big Girl

There came a point when I met my parents’ gaze head on: I was seven. My mother's eyes were full of worry for me; my father’s, I think, held a touch of fear. Perhaps I had a choice then: to keep growing or try to stay there and wait for my age to catch up with my body. But I couldn’t bear looking in their eyes, so I kept going until their heads were far below me. Then I felt like the adult and they were the children, so small, needing protection.

When they put me on show, at carnivals, at court, I felt that I should really be giving them something more for their money – a few tricks, perhaps, or a song. It didn’t seem so very entertaining just to stand there and be myself. Yet the gawkers seemed happy enough just to stare and endlessly ask such ordinary, dull questions: What does she eat? Where does she sleep? Where do you get her shoes?

No one asked what I would have thought the obvious one: What does it feel like?

It feels like my bones are pulling against each other, stretching to grow even larger.

It feels like I am a changeling from another time when everyone will be this size and we will all walk around level with the trees.

It feels like you are all the same, peasant or princess, just craning heads peering up at me, poor little curious children.

It feels lonely and magnificent and terrible and strange and painful, all at once.

It is probably best that they do not ask.

1632 c/o Scott Riley Irvine

The Divine Hand, on the Arm Longer than the Other

The Wrist

Today is dedicated to the hand, its tendons, the pulp gleaned from the forearm.

Dr. Tulp has discreetly concealed the parts he had severed in sessions prior. The cadaver appears newly deceased, except that it has no neck. One arm is longer than the other. The chest is distended and swollen, the color of fly-blown light. Men in black cloaks jostle with one another for a seat as the Vesalius of Amsterdam takes his place at the center of the room. The event begins as an uproarious one. Tulp calms them to a low murmur. Their syncopated breath begins to form tides, like waves tethered to the moon’s pull.

Curling about his stature.

This is a ritual. This is Holland’s bloody church.

Tulp is dizzy from the smell, the cadaver nearing five days old. They leave it beneath several blankets in a back alleyway. The cold has kept rot from gutting what we need of it. The armored tones of an organ fledge the auditorium with deep, brown plumage. The doctor excuses himself from the opening prayer. He ignores the whispered offers of company. He escapes down hallways receding infinitely.

A student has left parchment scattered in the atrium. On them are sketches of Tulp performing surgery. Extracting organs. Striking poses during lectures he wished now that he hadn’t. And the skeletal outlines of his associates, his colleagues, drawn deeper and with darker shades, mouths frothing in his shadow, vultures perched around the cadaver. Tulp licks the creases for the taste of dead skin cells. Tulp folds the parchment into tiny squares. He wants to give them to a professional artist. He wants to burn them in his garden with the portrait of his father.

Tulp has returned, visibly shaken. Tulp has become conscious of his posture. He allows each of his movements several minutes longer. He buttons his gaze sidelong to the angle in which he had been drawn. The artist is among them, he thinks. Tulp’s face is among his pages. The cadaver’s broad feet. The men’s reticella collars, like wilted flowers on the operating floor.


The Elbow

We believe in redemption. Good born from the bad. The hanged man is allowing God's fluency in engineering to be revealed to us. It comes in wet ribbons from out of his mouth.

We are told the hands are God’s greatest of gifts. Great tact has been taken to present them as such. The cadaver’s hands were carefully manicured, given a thin coat of makeup, rosied around the knuckles. We had witnessed the cadaver’s execution. We knew him to be loud. An admirer of young girls. He fell from the gallows so that he may be consecrated by the scalpel.

We have seen his chest splintered into two halves. We praised our Lord for giving us symmetry. We have seen his neck part so easily from the torso. We praised our Lord for our fragility.

I’m a message from the brain. I send it here. His finger moves like so.

There is only the sound of a collective scratching of silverpoint to collagen. Unlit patches painted across the outer circumference of the auditorium. By understanding the body, we understand Him. We fasten ourselves to the bowing of the radial artery at the elbow. We imbibe ourselves with the protein of its wiring. The caustic sheen of the musculature ruptures with unbound intricacies. We don’t understand what Tulp is saying. We understand completely. We glorify him who glorifies our God, and in glorifying the body that allows him the organs, the blood, the dark purple hues beneath the flesh – we glorify ourselves.

1631 c/o Chantel Louise Tattoli

Grandma, Can the Volcano?

Blow its lid, again? Child. They always do.

I remember 1631 was just like AD 79. There was this mushroom cloud. And it looked like Hiroshima. The world—my my, it’s so old. It’s too old to be original anymore.

I remember 1631 was red—all about red, little girl. (You’re a boy? Your hair is so long.)

Red everything. In Pompeii, pumice hit terracotta shingles hard enough to make it crack. It hit people and cracked their heads wide open, and they dripped as they ran, trails of blood that looked like lava to ants.

In 1631, ash from Vesuvius fell on red red tulips in Constantinople. It fell like gray snow in New York. I mean like at Ground Zero. That was red, too. Anger’s red.

Kiddy. I’m sorry. I’m too old to be original.

Does your mother wear red lipstick? In my day, I always wore red lipstick. I dated men with tempers like volcanos. Men who liked to blow up.

Your mother should cut your hair, child.

Me.

I’m only sorry I don’t have any red candy for you.

1630 c/o Kirsty Logan

The Romance of History

If you were lost out on the moors, she says, like because of a snowstorm or a hurricane or a zombie apocalypse or something – and say in this alternate world I was a horse, too – then I'd totally let you disembowel me and then climb inside my body to keep warm. I totally would.

And also, she says, if someone stole the stones of your tomb to build themselves a house, because they weren't scared of ghosts or curses – and say that I was still alive and not buried – then I'd go to that house and tear it apart and rebuild your tomb. With my bare hands, I swear.

Most of all, she says, if the wind and the rain and the escaped prisoners all conspired to wear out the inscription above your kistvaen – or if everyone forgot what the hell a kistvaen even was – then I would remind them, because I would remember. I'll always remember.

I say: you've been reading those damn history books again.