Oct 17 - Letters to Luna - The Mermaid and the Starfish

A Short Story dedicated to Luna

By Severus

Alice sat in the meadow grass still as the breeze passed her eyelashes bent into a book.  She read about the constellations, planets, and heavily bodies.  There was an exam on the upcoming Wednesday.  Alice had to decide whether to study or drop the course.  Astronomy was her third major.  She already had two degrees one in Russian literature and another in art history.

A brooding oak towered in the center of the meadow like a gnarling elegant grandmother.  Lightning had struck the canopy seven years ago, but the plant survived as it had before.  Alice leaned her back against the trunk sequestered in the shade.  Her cellular phone had thirty-seven alerts, four voice mails, and three texts.  One was a picture of a gray kitten clawing out from a cardboard box at a group of bulldogs with the title, “If any of you bitches move I’ll execute every last one of you motherfuckers.”

The device vibrated again from her handbag as her mind descended from the stars.  This was her mother’s ringtone.

“Alice, you’re late again.  Are you still coming?”

“I am still getting ready.  I need time to prepare.”

“You always need time.  When I ask you be somewhere I expect you to show.  Frank’s boss and the guys from the dealership are here.  The twins, your brother, Uncle Snake, Mary, and Geoffrey all came, but you?  Where the hell are you?”

“I’m thinking.  I’m thinking I would rather not show.  I wish you and Frank well.  I own who I am.”

Alice hung up.  Any retort from her mother was moot.  The oak tree was better.  The necklace her father gave her at sixteen hung warm resting on her chest.  She twirled the bent metal between her fingers, closed her eyes and thought of a motorcycle in the desert, the smell of engine oil, and the Sangre de Cristo mountains against an unbreakable horizon.

The sun was sinking into twilight of City Park in New Orleans.  There was a wedding in the sculpture garden of the museum of art in the distance and the sound of a violinist feathered her ear.  Cars lined the concrete likes steel bullets. 

Alice began to walk home in the puddles from the afternoon rain.  New Orleans summers tend to burst humid at three p.m. like the only thing the city does on schedule.  An orange tabby slinked out from beneath the tire well of one of the parked ammunitions.  Alice placed her index finger rounding curves of the feline’s skull smoothing counterclockwise.  She told the fully grown cat, “You look like the devil.  I might just take you home with me.”

There was no collar or indication other than the animal appeared worn, hungry, and the moment she saw him wander out from the Ford Mustang her eyes paused.  As she picked the length of fur up his belly grew.  His chest expanded.  Alice felt her heart beating, but instead of screaming or opening her mouth Alice stood sterile staring at him stoically like he was some sort of wonderful monster. 

Alice’s mind told her to run, but her legs rooted.  Blood rushed her face white.  The cat’s eyes dilated into blackened orbs of darkness as his head grew to fifteen feet lofting above knocking over the street light crashing it onto the Mustang.  The cat’s mouth opened as tall as a doorway.  The tip of his tongue formed a handle flickering like silent speech. 

The cat could easily swallow her whole, but he was merely breathing in and out focused on the moment.  Alice clutched her purse with her phone thinking to call, but in all her contacts, none would believe her this.  Her normal life was nothing normal, wild stories were expected playful musings.

Travelers passed the street.  None stopped.  Pedestrians paced in pairs conveniently with their heads towards each other or away.  There was no single person looking in her direction to perceive this fifty foot cat standing on its hind legs.  There was only Alice, the cat and whatever was inside the beast.

She pried one hand away from her bag and slipped her palm onto the door’s tongue lever.  As she did the maw vacuumed her in a snap of movement.  The corridor was utter darkness.  Alice closed her eyes and smelled sand and sea foam. 

Her feet were planted in the crushed seashells pulverized in the beach.  Her mind felt like she had not moved, as if touching the cat transported her, but her roots downward remained. 

The sun showed above the line of undulating waves from a blurred distance just after dawn.  By her toes was a cache of empty turtle eggs that appeared to have hatched the night prior.  Alice bent to inspect the yolk glistening against the inner shards.  The mother’s burrowed trove was perforated by a hundred holes.  Alice saw shore birds hovering and imagined the contents of their bellies.  She cracked a subtle smile daydreaming of what was in the waves as she stood in her golden high heels. 

A blazing cannon ball flew over her head bursting.  Alice fell peering into the distance.  A giant elephant that resembled a pirate frigate was sailing with figures of anthropomorphic crabs scurrying upright upon its stomach.  Alice smiled at the oddity like a pleasant grip of participation. 

Alice thought, “I have not been here long enough to cause such offense to generate attack.  I have said nothing, barley done a thing but examine the aftermath of the birth of a group of hatchlings.  How could anyone have time to form an opinion on me?”  Out in the rocks Alice could see at whom the crabs were firing. 

A troop of sirens motioned arms.  Their song became audible as Alice started to run.  Between trusting the thing firing or the group being fired at Alice chose the latter.  Some had legs, others mermaid tails pressed upon a reef scattered with skulls of odd variety.  The bones were bovine, human, canine, piscine, and some unrecognizable, but in the non-human iterations larger than what she was accustomed. 

The pachyderm ship was charging launching assault from both its nostrils and its elongated penis.  The phallus shot erect as the sailed mast of the vessel with a bent turret blasting bloody fire from his member.  One of the sirens burned alive as Alice was four feet away.  The sea creature’s breasts fell limp as her breathing ceased in the char.

The mermaids rallied as the legged-ones leapt into the sea prancing on the water forming a coven circle.  The one with the blondest hair Alice had ever seen, turned her head and said, “Join us.”  Alice’s toes were already wading in the tide.  She noticed her gold strapped shoes were gone.  Her black dress with the red flowers pressed in the wind bellowing in from the ocean.  Alice dove to join their dance. 

The song began like a Tantric ohm.  The link between the sisters formed harmony as the song taunted the tide in the cove to rise a hundred feet in the air like a pair of hands and clasp the bloated boat knocking the crabs into the sea.  The penis of the elephant cracked in two like a splinted pine tree gushing the bay in crimson.  The crabs still flickering for life appeared to choke sucking in the blood gargling air bubbles and floating adrift.  Not a sailor was left alive.

The blonde one turned to Alice, “That was marvelous.  We have never made waves so large before.  Come let us feast!”

Alice felt a tingling in her chest like the eyesight of the crabs engulfed bending back upon her skin.  It was if the song gave her an impenetrable armor and their vision could not impale.  She could feel their gaze seeking, wanting her, coming to her, but she was enlivened with such power.  Alice felt a thirst like she never had, “What was that?”

“That my sister were the Attorneys of Quagmire.  They get out of from the Island of Courts on the sixth sun in casts celebrating their victories for prohibiting reproductive rights in the Valley of Ants and prosecuting speeders going over the limits in the Middle Banks.  They never shut the fuck up and think they know everything. 

They set out in their elephant warships drunk sometimes raping the Bunny Rabbits of Algernon or worse holding church trying to convince younglings to go to their law school.  They sign up ignorant magpies, carp, and crustaceans that could have had good careers in burglary or wine making to contracts of debt to toil in their halls until death.  Their only reprieves are these horrific cruises. 

We do them favor by putting the zombies out of a misery which they have long sense forgotten in the numbed humdrum of their daily grind clock.  The monotony is like pacified lotus bliss to the sad fools.  The fish and bird among them are forced to stay on the scrotum of the elephant stroking the tissue to its cock to keep the vessel sailing.

Sometimes they do kill one or a few of us.  The one you saw fall was my lover from the northern lands. She was an amazing mermaid.  Her song was like silken fire.  I grieve her with this tear.  Here drink it; you will become one of us.  We are indebted to you.”

The siren held her ring finger out to Alice like a droplet on the edge.  Alice suckled her mouth around the digit, closed her eyes and became aglow.  Her legs felt like they could glide within the space of air or water shifting like magnetic atoms pulling the buzz of the universe to her essence. 

“We will dine in the waters.  You should be able to swim with us now and breathe beneath the waves.  As the sea hits your skin you can choose.  Press your knees together and dream of the happiest thought you have ever had.  A water will coat from your womb and spin your legs to a tail of flippers or you may control the rush and keep your legs which will now kick faster than you have ever dreamed.”

Alice was wary of the alternation.  So much had changed so quickly.  Alice threw her dress upon the sand and cast her body like an instrument of expression naked into the sea.  Her hesitant mind thrashed biped appendages as the thrill of violent conquering flooded her body like a high.  The excitement made her aroused pulsing in her loins like making love with the waves feeling the foam between her toes as if she would never need anything else in the world again. 

The sirens dined on the crab men laughing.  The blonde one named Lola held a mash of flesh out from a cracked claw still gripping a rifle.  Alice took the meat and ate it.  Alice felt a shell form around the inside of her breast plate.  The cartilage stiffened.  The sound of her heart beat altered echoing like from within a newly formed maze.

The mermaids played for hours until diving down at the moon’s peek to snag the fingers of starfish.  The orb was in a waxing crescent.  Tearing fleshy muscle of the starfish echoed a scream through the ocean.  Alice thought not to bite, but succumbed to her curiosity.  Lola whispered, “They grow back.  No matter how much you hurt them they always grow back.  It’s ok.  Wasn’t the taste wonderful?”

Alice swayed silently thirty feet under the ocean’s surface savoring the morsels appreciating the pinching rough and pulling more.  Alice closed her eyes like sealed whirlpools and flipped crippled starfish to the bottom.  When she swam towards the sky, the moonlight became too bright, but the waves felt like unction. 

Near dawn the troop wrestled back to sleep upon the rocks and the shallows depending on the legs they chose to keep.  One narcoleptic siren told Alice, “I am too in love with the moon to sleep.”  Alice awoke last.  She slipped her black dress on the beach over her form.

Alice saw an owl in the daylight perched upon a redwood tree at the end of the beach.  The bird had a red rose in its beak.  Alice’s natural mind wandered distracted.  There was a forest of redwoods each eight hundred feet tall and as round as Biblical logic. 

The darkness between the trunks beckoned her to touch the petals upon that rose.  Lola called back to Alice as she began to sprint in sand away from the coven.  Lola’s words fell into the hush of the air rushing back as if memory itself drained in each stride. 

Alice met the tree line peering in knowing not where the owl had flown only that she proceed barefoot.  At her stance were stones flowing a path of roots and leaves, but the road could be made navigable with focus within like a deep compass.  Bees hummed the traps of honey, but Alice dare not wander off the trail, for she felt she may not regain her bearing in the labyrinth. 

Alice walked for several hours weaving between the light rays bending in from the canopy.  The sun never left her completely.  The beams were always there reflecting somewhere nearby. 

Alice came upon a stream with a wading pool leading to a waterfall.  A sleuth of bears were sodomizing each other, smoking cigarettes, and listening to thumping house music echoing from the throat of a forty pound bull frog tied to a rock by a brassiere.  The bears on the bottom grunted and the tops said a tornado of phrases, “Damn it you’re so fucking hot” “Pay your taxes!” “Roawoar!” “So unicorns turn you on.  I’ll show you a unicorn.” “Ah uh!” “I’m better aren’t I?” “You look so good in my mascara!”  “I love you more than the kitty.  I do.” “Bite me hard!”

Alice paced down to the bears whistling and clapping.  The tops slanted up their eyes like opening pink umbrellas.  A slew of corsets and panties scattered the bank.  The shortest of the tops dislodged himself from the tallest of the bottoms speaking, “Oh my what have we hear?  You certainly are a lovely thing.”

“I am Alice.  I am searching for an owl.  I could not help but see the happiness on your faces and felt I come to greet you and maybe have a drink from your pool.”

“I am Ebola and this is Epilepsy my husband.  We come to play in between our work.  I am a cosmologist working on the Towering Crucifix Telescope set to speak to the stars at the peak of the Vampire Mountains.  My partner is a solider in the lubrication wars in the Gorilla Province.  The government is cutting off supplies and the cunts of apes are withering to dust.  The unrest in the streets is madness!”

“That sounds awful, where I come from lube is a detestable word.  A vagina is meant to be loved and make its own way, but that sir is a truly terrible fate.  Your husband is a hero.”

“Thank you my siren.”

Alice froze thinking back wondering how he saw in to place her with such status.  She dare not dwell, but for a moment she remembered how much she suddenly missed her sisters.

“The owl you seek is heading to the telescope we are building.  The owls scour our forest for the flowers to help fuel the telescope’s lens.  The petals and their feathers are pressed into grit like sand to form the glass the machine requires.  Without it our world is doomed.”

“How so?”

“We need the telescope to see into time.  In the movement of the stars, planets and their satellites time melts into an atomic story that pulses in every particle of our world.  Only with the lens peering out from the proper height and angle may we see what we have already done and will do to alter who we are now to prevent the great undoing.”

“What’s that?”

“Oh, the great undoing is a tear in the soul of the universe ripping like cloth.  The seam was severed long ago.  The beings of water, forest, mountain, grass, and swamp each have their theories as to why.  Some are even tax exempt, but at some point the breach occurred and without repair everything we know is lost.  The telescope is our best hope to see how to do that. 

Some believe in talking to the Granite wall of the Great Frisbee Hat or twisting a jive around the untouchable Rock of Pork.  Some hum in the Garden of Lost Belly Buttons or compete in the Cattle Races of the Unanswerable Phone Banks. 

Some believe the Lamb of the Uncramping Lily Vagina of Pittsburgh dying trying to suck his own penis did it.  Tales say he got there.  Followers wear the image of his folded lotus flower around their necks praising the great reach.  There is a whole cult dedicated to giving up sex in constant limber stretch of their own great suck and praise of the immaculate vagina from which the Lamb came.  They claim his body ascended and cut the universe right through its soul saving the righteous and damning those deemed infidels. 

They say a Great Gollum of the Claus will fly a carriage of alarm clocks blaring the most awful chorus bursting the ear drums of all unworthy beings.  The sound will explode skulls like melons sending their spirits into the drenched ass crack of Jameson to try to milk whisky from cats’ nipples for all eternity tormented that the little fuckers buddy up and then slice your ass.  The felines lounge on a carpet of bubble wrap batting a draped ceiling of yarn looking so damn cute, but screwing with you the whole time.

It is foretold that one is allowed to leave as soon as one can drink a full shot and ignite the belly fire to ascend.  In the tomes it reads one takes an entire week to drip a quarter of an ounce and every time one reaches for the shot glass the little kitty knocks it over in escalating inventive ways. 

I myself believe something is coming.  Maybe not the Great Cat Stables of Jameson, but something wickedly wholesome that this world is ill prepared.  Other beings believe the fiendish bastard chef that invents the food that is not food at the Great Chapel of the Taco Bell and the Monastic Brewery of the Mountain’s Dew is at the center, but I have dedicated my life to finding out.  That and I get health insurance for Epilepsy.  Working as a resistance fighter my hubby comes home smelling like tainted hoo-hah fish.  The prices for over the counter spray treatments are ridiculous on a bear scientist’s salary.”

Alice shared a few gallon beers and danced into the night to the frog’s thumping bass.  The bears showed her their fabric tree where they clipped yards to make beautiful costumes.  Alice used the bobby pin porcupine to fix Ebola’s hair into a splendid grace.  It took a thousand, but Alice appreciated beauty.  Alice painted a portrait with Epilepsy’s berry dye and played a fife of reeds.  She found peace cuddled up to the bear’s warm bodies saving her from the lonely hollows of the forest. 

In the morning the sun curled her cheek to a natural wake in her brief respite.  The bears were picking out what they wanted to wear on the banks.  Alice thanked Ebola and Epilepsy for their hospitality as they showed her back to the forest path directing her south towards the telescope.

Alice walked spotting a caterpillar’s cocoon.  The sun was still with her as she felt like a fern.  The flowers on her dress appreciated the heat.  Her back began to tingle and her legs grew heavy as if she was being watched.  She began to feel claustrophobic. 

An arrow fired from a hunter’s bow in the distance pierced her back slamming her body to the soil.  Tendrils of roots began to grow from the penetrated breach fleshing out strands of green blooming crocuses.  Alice felt her heart beating faster but shadowed. 

A centaur strode up to Alice as her body was morphing into the forest itself.  “Trespasser!  You have not paid homage.  The sun beats upon you yet you do not breathe back the giving breath.  Your selfish lungs only take.”

“I did not mean to offend you centaur.  I can dance to repay my toll if you give me back my legs.”

The centaur saw the repentance in Alice’s ghostly cheeks.  Her pensive gaze was like a deep still placid lake.  The centaur took a phial from his satchel and dripped a single drop down one of the crocus pistils.  The vines and petals soaked into Alice’s dress changing its weight heavier like leaden thread.  The spot of the arrow’s tip left a crocus tattoo.

Alice rose in her garments like an empress of the glade.  Her arms extended slowly swaying, hinting at the grip of her dress, bowing to the sun.  Her eyes spoke both of peace and wry rebellion.  Her mind focused solely in the present movement, alive and felicitous in the possibility for her motion sustained. 

The centaur lowered his head in appreciation of the joyous gambol.  “I find you worthy my lady.  You honor your roots.  How do you come to dance so?”

“My grandmother taught me the spirit of conviction.  My father taught me strength.  My heart my tenderness and my trials my fire.”

“My lovely take this phial with you and if you find yourself in requirement take only a drop.  This is from the ovules of our crocuses in the Western part of the forest.  Remember it is made of the essence of all of life.  If you forget of that which you are made it will return you to it, but only if you recall will it save you.”

Alice took the tube of stoppered liquid and placed it into a small rainbow-heart handbag the bears had made her out of fashion pity.  The bag now contained the phial, an apple that looked like its absent stem created a butthole, and a legion of almost microscopic fireflies performing a burlesque-opera in Viking helmets and Mormon garb, but if you took a step back the lights from their buts spelled messages like fortune cookies. 

“Why do you bestow me with such gifts centaur?”

“Your dance reminds me of someone dear to me.  I am in my time of dying.  I have seen three wars and am within the fourth within my body.  Even the crocuses cannot stave this death, it is my time.  As in all seasons into death so is birth, I pass this onto you.”

The centaur guided Alice to the edge of the forest to the Moors of Clamp Trap.  “Be wary these swamps have a path of solid ground, but keep watch.  Hands with rings of gleam will rise from the bog attempting to grab you.  Your mind may be filled with voices of a most compelling tone. 

Do not take their bargain.  These creatures know not the sun.  It is not their darkness to be wary; it is their forgetfulness. The beings here are truly lost.  They stare beneath at their rings wanting travelers to look as well.  To these sad souls the worlds ceased the day they received them.  The rings do not exist.  The plants that grow in the swamp secrete pollen that hardens into their veins swelling into the band.”

Alice knew she had to find the place the owl flew and touch its rose.  The lens had answers to her search.  The swamp had cypress trees and bayou inlets with irises growing purple with yellow tongues.  The flowers sang an ancient song that made Alice feel she was supposed to remember something she did not wish to remember. 

Amongst some of the trunks were sloths sleeping with clouds above their skulls like a drive-through movie theater where the world of wake and sleep were reversed.  Alice could see their dreams of oral sex with dryads, battles with flailing swords dripping with the blood of hummingbirds, a cat meditating, or a sloth snorting white powder off the stomach of an ostrich librarian. 

Alice kept watch on the path as the centaur instructed.  She almost stepped on a grasshopper mouse eating a scorpion.  There was a section between two banks where Alice had to leap to cross.  Alice closed her eyes, focusing herself to a count of two, and jumped.  A hairy arm grabbed her dress tearing one of the crocuses pulling her under. 

Alice thought, “Remember the sun.  Remember the sun.  This is not so scary.  I can do this.  In the murk all she could see was the ring and the hand, no face.  Alice pressed her knees together and thought of the spirit of love most dear to her being.  Her toes transformed into flippers, her legs like a dolphin’s tail as her mermaid strength thrust her out of the darkened waters.  Alice’s body catapulted thirty feet in the air.

The setting dusk present as she descended was now bright moonlight.  She felt like she could kiss the moon with her arms spread like a bird as she flew through the sky.  Alice’s body landed in grass on the other side of the bank at the exiting edge of the swamp.

Alice was full of smiles so thankful for her liberation.  She swayed her hips and the waters from her body gushed around her tail as it morphed back into legs.  Alice could not help but dance in the moonlight twirling as she once did for her father in his living room.  Suddenly she stopped, remembered the seriousness of her quest and paced into the prairie before her.

The grassy plains brushed her ankles like walking through fingers tickling skin.  Joy waved back into her bones as if the obligation of the swamp’s censure was a faded tale of another woman’s life.  Bison stood on their hind legs playing some manner of sport resembling rugby with a tortoise as a ball to the far left.  To the right were sparrows watching their chicks play soccer next to a parking lot of minivans. 

Straight ahead expanding across the entire prairie was a roadhouse bar with a two-hundred foot tall neon sign with blinking Mickey Mouse ears reading, “Big Ass Beers, Home of Ursula the Blue Haired Octopus and all your Disney Escorts!”  There was no way around it.

Alice thought Disney had no place in this world.  These were creatures of proper etiquette, almost British in their politeness and French in their sexual appetite.  What would something so commercially American be doing here? 

The bar had a giant wrap-around porch and was miles wide and deep.  There were talking ducks snorting crystal meth on the steps.  A crow perched on the electrical wire to the venue watching.  Several hundred saddled horses were tied up on posts, but they appeared mute and every way normal to her traditional expectations. 

Alice faced the mule bouncer who was smoking a joint.  He sounded like an emphysema petri dish and held a whip cuffed to his upper left hoof.  “You want to come up to the house?  Want to celebrate New Day’s Eve with the rest of these fish?  You’ve got to pay the whale to get in.  He’s here in my pocket.”

The mule stretched his coat pocket three inches.  Alice peered through the aperture and saw an endless cavern that could engulf continents.  Alice gripped her handbag and leapt into the shadowed cloth.  In an instant Alice sat at a four chaired table sharing bubble tea full of tapioca balls. 

Alice faced a triad.  To her left was a doe with faux-antlers adorned upon her skull wearing an evening gown.  To her right was a platypus in a business suit with a mow hawk and a noticeable scar upon is bill.  Center was a two foot tall blue whale wearing a top hat seated upon a stack of Dostoyevsky novels inside a bowl of Sailor Jerry rum.  The whale spoke and neither the doe nor the platypus reacted, “I see you got bad directions to end up here.  Do you have the thunder?”

“My thunder is in my dance.  I can dance for you.”

“No it’s not.  You cannot hide here.  Speak into my ear.  I see what you carry.” 

Alice closed her eyes, bit her lip, stood and pressed her mouth to wherever the hell whales keep their ears.  Alice whispered something she had never told anyone, maybe once, but she was not going to remember that in the moment.  The whale’s eyes closed and reopened slowly.  “You are now open to enter.”

With the whale’s breath Alice faced the mule once more.  The mule coughed and chuckled as if he knew a secret.  Alice fixed her hair, straightened her dress to her typical refined presentation then told the ass, “I hope your dick rots off from termites and pixies invade your balls and start a funeral home.  Have a nice evening.”  

Alice entered and saw a theme park of debauchery, souvenirs, and moneychangers.  Every character was available for sex, riding go carts, helping with your taxes, a serenade of any Tom Waits song, or doing that deep kind of listening that only made up fantastic storybook beings are capable.  As long as you paid the whale admission everything was included.

Pinocchio was in jean shorts with rouge cheeks with his arm around Peter Pan.  Sleeping Beauty had overalls, a hard hat, and a sledge hammer.  Winnie the Pooh was naked with his penis slung into a pot of honey.  Pocahontas was elegantly refined and dressed in 1920’s flapper garb seated at the bar drinking gin.  Aladdin had a trench coat and a holstered gun at his hip as he smoked in a bowler hat.  Belle was dressed in a leather corset piercing Cinderella’s clit in the corner.

Bambi and Thumper walked up to Alice, “Ursula wants to see you.” 

“Can I get the most complicated drink possible first?  A Pimm’s Cup with extra starfish.  Slice the cucumber the long way and no talking oranges.  Take your time, I’ll occupy myself.  I think I’ll analyze everyone’s life story in these walls, keep quiet, and grab a book from that shelf over there.”

After twenty minutes Thumper brought Alice with the concoction to Ursula’s lounging pool in the rear of the bar.  On the walk Alice saw the kennels of whips, the archery of foxes and hens firing bows, Sheer Khan eating Minnie Mouse out on a pool table, Hercules lifting weights staring at mirrors, Dalmatians shooting heroin, and the Hunchback of Notre Dame writing at an escritoire.  Ursula’s chamber was dank, but had a bright make-up mirror.  Professional photos dotted the walls with Ursula posing in her purple tentacles and pushing her breasts.

“Siren come here.  I am interested in a trade.”

Alice’s face offered a haughty laugh.  She stood firm and proud as if this den got it all wrong.  The payment, it was the wrong kind of payment.  The art was dead here.  This was nothingness and full of cotton and bubblegum. 

“I know you wish passage.  I will let you free to swim out through my pool if you change your legs for me and let me take your photograph with my cool new iPhone sixty-nine with my magic mirror app and put it on my wall so everyone can know we’re friends.  Millions comment on my beauty, but with your essence in my collection I will break my records of admirers.

If you don’t, I will take this dagger cut your hair and make a garter belt.  Then I’ll slit your throat.  Sound like a bucket of cuddles?”

Alice knew there was no way she would be controlled.  A picture is such a simple thing.  Maybe if asked politely Alice might have obliged.  Manners and decorum trumped sexy octopi hocking fantasy parks bearing threats to take things from her. 

Alice raised the phial from her purse and pressed a droplet between her fingers. “Do your worst your tentacled-twat!  At least my tits are real!”  Ursula spun her suction cup limbs round Alice’s neck, sliced her black locks leaving only a foot from the usual three.  Alice used the moment to lick her pinky finger smiling the widest grin.  Ursula’s blade passed Alice’s jugular as she cast her body into her pool to sink. 

Alice’s body sunk like an origami swan folding in an inky sea of red.  As the droplet streamed into her heart a blonde feathered scar stitched across Alice’s throat sealing the wound.  Alice could breathe under the water and was so jubilant she pressed her knees again into a tail by her volition.  A light pierced the pool’s darkness illuminating syringes, weight loss video cassettes, and a rodent in scuba gear and split red shorts shitting gold coins chained to an anvil and a dead unicorn. 

Alice saw the unicorn and began to cry.  In the water her tears congealed a glowing blue brilliantly sparkling.  She waved her hands as the tears blotted her palms and cheeks leaving a trail of shining glitter.  Alice kept her distance from the rat which was so busy defecating the gilded disks it did not seem concerned with her presence.  Alice passed her hands over the unicorn’s face and stroked its front leg wishing for her peace. 

Alice felt the steed begin respiration as her hands moved over the unicorn’s nostrils.  Alice smiled like a warrior priestess.  The unicorn wriggled free from the chain bursting as her muscles flexed.  Her horn glowed the hue of Alice’s tears, opening her eyes she said, “Thank you my mermaid.  I am Ophelia.  I owe you a life debt.”

Alice and the unicorn swam out to a surfacing pool at the end of the cavern.  Alice returned her legs.  Ophelia stood on all fours like a magnificent creature shaking the beads like lead.  Alice looked into the reflection of the water.  She saw her shortened black hair with the blonde scar across her neck.  Speckles of blue glitter rounded her eyes and a sphinxlike smile. 

“I am traveling to the Vampire Mountains to find a telescope that may be able to see into time. Do you know them?”

“I was born there.  The Vampire’s do not take well to unicorns.  Some try to make dildos out of our horns.  There is a huge fake plastic molding market, but beings across the five lands are known to pay a high price for a true horn.  I can lead you there, but I might have to stab a bloodfucker.” 

Alice and Ophelia walked side by side taking many forks in the path.  The light in Ophelia’s horn dimmed but changed the shading from its original white to cerulean.  Ophelia said, “I had it rough growing up.  My parents were embarrassed when my horn sprouted around thirteen.  Unicorn genes skip generations.  There are few of us left.  So many have been captured as slaves like me, forced to be ridden or worse to show up at mall events and help sell as-seen-on-TV blenders.  That shit never works and the juice comes out chunky.  The spiel made me feel like a giant asshole. 

I went crazy one day and shanked a forty-year old pig in golf pants after he wouldn’t shut the fuck up on his Bluetooth while I was doing my thing.  The Whale knew I wouldn’t listen after that and made me drink cow’s milk which is poisonous to unicorns and sent me to the bottom of Ursula’s grotto. ”

Ophelia reminded Alice of a bunny rabbit that would visit the vegetable garden she planted with her father by the forest behind her house.  Alice would tell the hare her secrets. 

The peak of the Vampire Mountains rocketed past clouds in distance.  Leading to the base was a town scattered with peasant shacks, a hotel of twenty-three floors of crack heads, and two skyscraping concrete office buildings.  The mountains kept the carved valley dim.  There was no formal gate only green signs saying Armadillo Rectal Leprosy Exam Depot, Luna’s Lucky Charms, Nuclear Winter Training Facility, and The World’s Largest Cronut x miles ahead.

A few vampires meandered the quarter square in clothes Alice recognized as French aristocracy with high white wigs and beaded gowns.  Others had Indian headdresses of Cherokee tribes in equal regalia.  A vampire stood still painted in silver paint like a statute with a jug for blood tips.  A haggard camel operated an A-positive Lucky Dog cart selling blood sausages. 

There were titty-cut shows with flashing lights and necks swinging out of windows advertising reveal.  Cell phone cameras flashed stealing souls back to Kansas.  There was a beauty pageant advertising for Miss Luscious Fang.  Sheep wearing t-shirts with the folded lotus flower of the Lily Uncramping Vagina protested with a giant sign, “Stonings at six o’clock.  Come for your free stoning heathens!  The Vagina cannot be ignored!”  A transvestite vampire played Ziggy on guitar with a spider on his lapel.

A Lioness was walking with her partner.  A group of vampire children flew out of the side streets and began to feed on both of them.  The Lion scratched but was inept at thwarting their numbers.  Ophelia’s eyes grew puce as she charged.  Alice sunk meditative as if she knew to hold.  Ophelia stabbed the kiddy-vamps transforming them into bloody tampons, but the swarm only increased. 

Alice closed her eyes and felt like a key passing a lock.  The winds of the valley thrust from left and right smashing into the street.  The vampire younglings smacked to the buildings at each end liquefied in the tempest.  Ophelia and the lions stood breathing. 

A dark cloud flashed a vampire queen and her entourage hovered a foot off the cobble stone street.  “I am Shanika the Vampire Queen; to court with you.”  Alice and Ophelia were transported to a chamber resembling a large cathedral bustling with pews of onlookers.  The Queen presided as magistrate.  A jury of a dodo bird, a buck naked walrus, an inch worm, vampires, a sailor, and a bear sat munching on cucumber sandwiches. 

At the start of the trial the Queen pounded a gavel made of meat and blood splattered from her chair twenty feet above.  As the sound hit, Alice turned to see a reciprocating gun shot by a creature made of newspapers blowing his brains out in the second pew.  No one else flinched. 

Alice was now the center of attention being primed for inspection.  Alice could see members from her travels around the room: the doe, the platypus, the mule, Ebola and a group of bears.  Lola and the sirens stood up in the left rear when most of the room was seated.  The centaur was nowhere to be seen.

The prosecuting officer was a flamingo dressed in a pinstripe suit with a clerical collar.  The sound of his voice made Alice think of the place she feared most wishing she could runaway more than ever.  The Queen wearing nothing but a red apron and her giant brown ass cheeks hanging out spoke, “The offender has killed two hundred of our nest; the horned-one seven. What has she to say for her cause before sentencing?”

Alice stood uttering nothing.  In the focus Alice enveloped the fury in her heart deeper as if lower than ever.  Speech was feckless. Alice did not give a fuck about being judged.

“It is the race for the two of you.”  Several more members of the audience enacted suicide right there. 

The race was held in a giant sandy coliseum around The Lake of Misery Oil.  In a box suite at the top of the grandstands sat the Blue Whale with a megaphone dwarfing his tiny stature.  To his sides were Shanika the Vampire Queen and Ursula playing with her phone.  The Whale announced, “One of you will win your freedom.  The rest of you will swim in the lake slowly boiling to death for sixty days. 

A jelly bean has been inserted down your food hole.  If you miss a single gate, the bean will explode in your stomach forcing your entrails to smolder and hardening you into a statue where you will live, see, and feel everything as snarky tourists visit our wax-museum encouraged to poke, molest, and comment on your anatomy until we grind you and sell you to the Great Chapel of the Taco Bell.”

Alice and Ophelia stood together around a track with a crew of racers in all manner or chariot.  A sea urchin sat in ten-foot high motorized wheel with tank treads.  A polar bear had shoes made out of penguin carcasses that could spark fire like rocket sand-skates.  A country-boy in a tractor-cap had a Hemi pickup truck with a removed muffler grinding the most obnoxious testicle-less howl.  A six foot lizard appeared to remove his own tail and was floating above the ground like it was a witch’s broom stick. 

At the far end was a hipster schmuck in an ironic plaid 1890’s English vest, suit shorts, black glasses, bow tie, a grizzly beard, and sock garters on a saddled unicorn with bolted plates as blinders.  Ophelia gasped, “The bolts! That is a slave unicorn!  That douche-bottle of twat is using him as a vessel beyond his will!” 

“Ophelia we have to win.  The other offenders must have had more time to prepare.  We only have each other.  In water I could out speed them all.  In this desert I pray your humility that we may ride together.  I will attack them and hold no fury back.  Will you run your thunder?  I like to go fast.”

“I shall my mermaid.  The line has been crossed and we do what we must.”  Alice jumped upon Ophelia’s back grasping her mane and balanced with the power in her hips and thighs.  Ophelia did not lower an inch. 

The racers were lined behind a portcullis descended from the large arch.  The Whale let out a bellow for the raise.  The urchin’s wheel spun ahead churning a mist of sand in the tongues of the other prisoners.  The Hemi pickup raised a tank-like shotgun from the rear cab and blew a hole in the urchin’s giant wheel careening the mollusk into the oil.  The lot pushed past the melee with the polar bear taking advantage of the pause.  The hipster focused on applying pomade and updating his Instagram into gate two. 

The lizard floated above the polar bear, shot his tongue onto her nose, yelling “Westside!”  When the bear went to smack the tongue away her rocket-feet altered direction forcing her to miss as the lizard flew under gate three.  The bear immediately stiffened like a stone commercial mascot. 

The country boy shot the lizard out of the air and rushed to the side of Ophelia.  Alice stared straight into the gun barrel pointed directly at her, leapt forward into the air performing a twisting summersault dance pulling at her cleavage, but exposing nothing distracting the driver and landing in stride as Ophelia stabbed through the front window piercing his heart. 

The race was coming into the final gate.  The hipster took out a manual type writer and was tweeting freshly scribed poems riding backwards as his slave-corn was hauling ass.  Alice pulled the apple that looked like it had a butthole out of her bag.  Ophelia got just ahead of the other unicorn’s blinders.  Alice split the ass cheeks off the apple on his horn causing him to buck.  The hipster missed the gate and froze solid in mid-air while changing the giant front tire on his penny-farthing.

After Alice and Ophelia passed the gate, the slave-corn paced through.  Alice dismounted Ophelia, removed the saddle and blinders.  Ophelia told her, “You are free.  Live your life as you wish.”  The unicorn did not talk.  Alice noticed legs crawling out the bottom the horn and saw it to be a hermit crab of some sort, “That hipster prick.”  Ophelia felt a little more alone in the world.

The Vampire Queen descended, “You have earned your freedom.  Your transgression for blood has been repaid in blood.”  Alice spoke, “We wish to go to the telescope.” 

The Vampire Queen said the path up the mountains to the telescope was by the T.G.I. Fridays next to the abortion clinic that gave out coupons for Friday specials for cross-marketing with Siracha chicken potato skins.  Alice and Ophelia walked the path eating some berries and drinking from a stream along the way.  They found a place to rest in the moonlight by a pond of fairies who danced naked making circles over the water.

In the morning Ophelia told Alice of her days singing in a folk duo and how she liked to date wizards because they always seemed to know her thoughts and conjure chocolate.  Alice said she missed the ocean and motorcycles. 

The Crucifix Telescope was three hundred feet high with a crosspiece that served as an aviary for the owls.  At the bottom was a small sign that read, “For Admission Speak Password.” 

“Fuck, we came all this way.”  Alice rested her head against Ophelia’s front leg flopping her handbag to the ground.  Alice saw the rainbow fabric spread.  Her eyes went to the mini-opera of fireflies inside from the height of the unicorn’s shoulder.  Alice could make out the words, “Love is Never Wrong.”

Alice formed the words and an elevator descended with a giant panda in a white coat with a name tag listing Rufus.  Alice stepped inside and Ophelia halted, “This is where I must leave you my mermaid.  I have so longed to be free.  I have repaid my life debt and brought you to that which you seek.  I am not meant for a partner, but to run.”  Alice understood. 

The Panda looked at Alice.  “I am here because of Ebola to help stop the great undoing.  He gave me the password.  I have ruminated long and I think I know how to help.” Rufus said, “I know.  We have been expecting you mermaid.”

The elevator went sideways then up, then down, then up again unloading in a room bustling with all manner of animal working together in groups.  Rufus was the head cosmologist on the project, “We have done the calculations, but our lens is not firm enough to yet carry the beam.  We need to position the lens straight into the heart of the sun creating a highway of light.  We have waited for the traveler.”

Rufus brought Alice to the very top of the crucifix where the lens was revealed.  The glass was a thousand yards wide.  Alice closed her eyes searched her spirit and grabbed the hem of her dress and rubbed it against the lens.  The feather tattoo on her neck and the crocus on her back began to glow a bright glittering blue.  The whole lens sparkled as if it was alive itself.  Rufus smiled as if sometimes when beings dream of God’s grace they do not believe they will ever see it in physical form. 

Alice and Rufus descended to a platform at the bottom of the telescope.  Alice said, “Ok. Turn it on.  Do your math.”

“The telescope is now active, but it is not that simple.  There is a legend of a warrior who will wield the oceans and the skies, rise from the grave and save more than herself.  She will kill and be killed, be judged and say no plea to defend herself, reveal nothing rather than explain.  She is resolute beyond measure in fury, movement, and conviction holding the rarest of elements of water, birth, death, revelry, and fire.  Alice, we need you to ride the light beam.”

Alice did not know how to accomplish that which the room of scientists requested.  Alice resigned herself into her quiet, the place no one could see.  She saw the words, “Love is Never Wrong,” like a book in her consciousness.  The words gave her the most terrible grief.  Alice started shaking her glittering tears flowing washing her face to her chest.  She dropped to her knees with her arms extended, “I cannot do this.  I am not that strong.  What you see me as I am not.”

Alice’s dress tore in two bifurcating down the center slipping to the ground.  Flowers grew around her in a circle of crocuses.  Her neck dropped upon her naked chest.  The cage of her ribs cracked a bird of light flowing up through the telescope’s lens.  Her body sat limp like a shell upon soil.

The girl flew a path no one could touch out her heart like a supernova.  Alice shot through the light without flapping a single wing.  She could feel no heat or cold.  Breath had no bearing outside the pulse in her being.  The trip took eight minutes until Alice jolted breathing again.

Alice was in a dimly lit corridor bathed in darkness.  The walls and floor felt like flesh.  Alice had a body.  She pulled her hair into her hands.  The strands had grown longer than ever in silken blonde.  Her skin was ghost white.  She had a dress of seeds, no petals or roots.  Her toenails were painted black on her bare feet.  She could feel two large wings in her back one pinned, the other free. 

Alice walked down the hallway finding an open portal with no door halfway down.  A pale man sat at a writing desk with a spinning wheel and a floating cloud like a marshmallow in opposite corners.  His hair was dirty blonde.  He had a bareback and wore black shorts that looked like embers.  Alice could see a green-shelled birthmark and a missing ring finger on his left arm as he held his quill in his right.

Alice could tell the man knew she was there, but neither spoke.  After a pause Alice could hear a deep resounding breath exit the man’s chest.  He rose.  His eyes cried fire dripping down his cheeks leaving shell marks on his chest that disappeared almost as soon as they were made. 

“I am Edmond.  I have seen you in the light.  I hoped through the shadows.  I am the keeper of the star who lives in the belly of the sun.  I write down the story of everywhere the light goes in unstoppable fusion.  The spectrum instantaneously appears in my mind.  I stitch the portrait through my quill sewing into the fabric of time.

I live in the center of darkness enshrouded by a ball of light. The darkness never breaks in its infinite possibilities.  Darkness is the canvas of dreams on which light paints.”

Alice looked at the steady man with his blue angel eyes leaking fire, “I am here to stop the great undoing.  It is said there is a tear that must be mended.  Can you help me?”

“With you we can.  I hoped there was someone.  I saw you appear like a flash out of the darkness after I had all but given up.  I do not see with my eyes.  I see with feelings through the light.  I see the spirit of all the life the light of this star touches.  As does each star keeper with the star they are charged to sew in this infinitely expanding universe, for an infinitely greater sum of souls dependent on each star.” 

“How long have you been here?”

“I have been here for almost a billion years now, less than some of the keepers before me.  I was once a turtle living on the world you traveled here from, before that a beggar pariah, before that a unicorn.  I died and was shifted here destined for this alone.  You are the first soul I have truly seen with my own eyes and whom has truly seen me with hers since that time.

I have felt your spirit from your dances with the sirens, your kindness and art with the bears, your humility to the centaur, your faith to leap in the mire, your conviction in the octopus’ grotto, your empathy to the unicorn and your fury to defend her, your courage and skill to face the Queen and your intelligence to solve the crucifix.  I see the light that reflects in your foundation from before this world.

You are a rare being to have traveled here.  There may be others that exist, but I have never witnessed another in all these rotations.”

“You don’t even know me.  I just got here seconds ago.”

“Alice, we are both like aliens.  I see what you feel and how deeply you feel it.  Other beings are not like you.  The height of the wave that crashed the elephant, the winds that smashed the vampires, the marvel in the cowboy’s eyes as he was entranced to see you dance in the sky; you are what it is called a living muse. 

The reason for the fear of the great undoing and the tear in the soul of the universe is the moon of the world you traveled from is losing her muse.  The light of her heart is giving out and if she passes, balance will be lost.  The universe will be out of equilibrium and sever.  You are here to choose whether or not to take her place.

It is the balance.  Some few of us are stars, others the muses of the moons, comets traveling in between.  Most are players in the theater of the planets awaiting the lines of our current lifetime to come into their appropriate scene to make our say in the instance where we are needed most, for ourselves, for another, for the universe.  We know not the hours only in the soliloquy of purpose we choose between love and fear.  We tilt the neck of the universe to alter its gaze.  So many meet their spotlight never knowing the ripples we inspire or destroy.  Some beings have special light that ricochets back, most do not.  This is true resonance.  This is why you are able to travel the star’s rays.  ”

Alice paused as she began to cry blue tears of glitter.  A flower coughed out her mouth.  “I always knew I was going to be alone.  I filled my life with such loud things to hide my quiet.  My heart knew the blood in me was as much poison to others as theirs was to my own.  How long do we have?”

“We have a little under an hour as it will feel here, but time here is different.  When I am not holding the quill everything pauses where the star reaches.  No one on the outside feels time move in the interim.  So they do not notice.  I can take breaks for an hour in my time to sleep once a new day of the world you traveled from.  As a muse you will have same reprieve in the same hour. 

I will be able to feel your thoughts and you mine in the distance.  You will inspire them as they gaze upon you.  I will record their folly, heroics, and evils judging not, but scribing true and be able to read back what always was.  I was not the only one who was a unicorn once and you were not always alone.”

Alice felt her arms and her bound wing.  She looked into Edmond’s eyes and knew there was only this moment.  This was all that could ever be.  Edmond stepped to her inches away and kissed her, pausing as if what it felt inside so clearly could possibly be different than Alice in that flicker.  Alice whispered, “I did not say stop.”

Edmond’s fingers gripped a seed in Alice’s dress pulling thread which began to float in the air winding its way to the spinning wheel in the corner.  The wheel spun itself unraveling the seeds sowing upon the fleshy floor.  The embers from Edmond’s shorts burst like ashen soil covering the lot.  Edmond picked Alice up and took her upon the cushioned cloud in the opposing corner. 

Flowers began to bloom inside the room: floor, walls and ceiling as they made love.  The fire pushed rough as their bodies flared in taunt embrace, the sun bursting around them.  Their hearts opened as each closed their eyes seeing the same portrait in unison. 

A turtle sat on a river bank with only his head exposed from his shell.  A mermaid waded in the water.  A bird sat on a branch.  Alice knew she had to choose in that moment, to dive down or to let go into flight. 

As she did her pinioned wing released in a climax of star light bursting her form flying to the center of the moon.  There she found a dying woman of refined taste, impeccable manners, and etiquette.  Alice spent only a few hours with her as she learned the beauty of being beautiful as the muse of the moon inspiring an entire world knowing the she must be who she is.

As the woman turned into dust, the light of the sun engulfed Alice’s body.  Alice felt the pulse flow through every pore and she could see it all in a theater of the night.  Every naughty, baleful, playful, sexy, splendid thing life created Alice felt at the seed.  The entire world was her budding flower. 

Alice closed her eyes still seeing it all.  Her facade grew pensive, silent, and still.  On the inside she was so incredibly happy. 

Alice felt her halcyon cheek wet and a smile surfacing.  She opened her eyes to see an orange tabby licking her face.