The minotaur wore rainbow shades and trekked the canyon, wild-electric. I looked in the mirror and decided to keep the glasses but hurl a sun-hot stone at the gleaming surface that gave our reflection such numbing clarity. The image rippled before the surface tension reasserted itself and gave eye to the sky of blue and cumulus. It mattered not because the trance of the single vision was no longer definitive. Once the spell breaks, the curtain is pulled aside, the illusion no longer durable, is merely incidental. The day teemed and whirred; insect buzz thrummed neural pathways and lizards skittered to their under boulder hide-holes but it seemed too hot for locomotion of warm creatures, excepting those made of flame. I was new-kindled and the whole world was a vision, nothing left that was not wonder. Humming birds took my eyes an flew in every direction, a scene kaleidoscopic such that the narrative thread became infinitely entwined with something organic. It writhed underground and made the very air squirm-bloom in a way that felt so giddy on the skin it was hard not to laugh and it was equally hard not to cry. Terrifying. A taste of oblivion that was to become the flavor of existence. Marvel Mojave, Captain Jack, he said it would come to this.
Wear a brave shirt, they say, ribboned, and reach out to touch without touching. This coup we count thrice. It's important to feel the full impact of a thing, tsunami-like. If you can be the quake, you can take the shore. A seed to split the hull, I planted it there. Right there. What moves creates reverberations that grow across time and space becoming, by exponentially increasing displacement, a wave that cannot be resisted or outrun. We didn't remember why we went to Death Valley, except to see the stones race, which, presumably requires a season or more. It was an itch to go someplace that never got scratched. That's how the story starts. It starts at the Eagle Tavern on Main and it starts with the impulse to find where the impulse began. Try to forget about it, they said. Have you ever tried to forget about something? How did that work out?
I imagine it worked as well for you as it worked for me, meaning the thing attempted un-membered became the most re-membered member of the clan in my head. Minotaur with rainbow kaleido-specs and those are snakes that were our hair, this is how we embark on the labyrinthine road that is the story we have to tell, a story which, in truth, we have nobody but ourselves to tell. Truly, I'm hearing it here for the first time and in time it may find its way to other minds. It probably will because it's a mind of its own, the tale. The view is strange, but true. Clarity, at a certain point, no longer serves. It's like looking in the mirror unbroken, which is the real illusion. The shattered mirror no longer throws back the coherent image, but one that has complexified to many perspectives that, viewed through the focused orbs in one's head, looks entirely wrong. The looking glass we pass through is this multi-faceted one. Time itself becomes a yarn.
Stories, and human culture really, begin with myth. Everything that comes after is poured into those narratives that live in the stars. How far we've fallen from the peoples that dreamed their dreams in the vast cosmos. We're a people of imaginal penury, dreaming our dreams on screens in front of our eyes. Those who came before us, if they lasted long at all, had been steeped in mysteries that humans barely now know exist. When their seers looked at us they saw wraiths.
Wraiths have their particular powers, but they also require substance. Spirits are like us in that.
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