She fell in love with her specimen: took note of his
legs; one, a millimeter shorter than the other, lacked the
purity of hemispheric symmetry. His tiny simple eyes dilated
when the artificial light rays would refract off of the perfect
ninety degree angles of the glass vivarium. His physiology’s
opposition to functional perfection was completely irrelative
and therefore alien in nature—but all the more intriguing for
a vicarious learner as herself. Lymphatic streams were
notable for their quiescence; there was a rational level of
frustration in the blood flow…
Lab observations: spinal staircases, sprawling shafts, infinite
flesh, humidified gardens of tooth and fascia held her utmost
fascination. Immunological reactions were reenactments of a
cosmic phenomenology. Universal parallels.
The complexity of each internal system was directly
proportional to the number of its vulnerabilities. Of all the
systems revealing themselves to her through an imagined
vivisection, his reproductive organs yielded qualities most
absurd. Foreign bodies came with malice per his intracellular
fluidscape—pathogenic dreadnaughts sailing past his
barriers, encroaching on unguarded systems. Many
unnecessary things had distracted her as she remotely
navigated through his body. She’d already begun envisioning
his scintillations of synaptic fires as a starry constellation. It
was largely inevitable, imagining those whirling white lights
of his adolescent stargazing nights—permanent imprints on
the brain.
The conundrums of his body-maze were not only
rudimentary. Beyond components of soft machinery, luridly
raw and vulnerable, and geometrically incongruous were his
distorted emotional and cognitive spectrums. Indeed her
subject was torn between conditioned xenophobic tendencies
and outright xenophilic fantasies; a social dysphoria due to
such aversions as insects and other arthropods which
plasticized into hard memory acquired throughout childhood
and early adolescence.
Inversely there was an incessant yearning for colonial
belonging and meaningful participation with his hive-kin.
Yet, his undoubtedly below-average self-esteem yielded
solitary leanings. He could not perform most necessary
dances of communication without arrhythmias and other
spontaneous errors of coordination.
A tendency to retreat mentally-inward—he’d wish for the
great slumber of the cold to nullify those taxing formulas of
social interaction and to usher in a cycle of communal
hibernation. Between the designated wrinkles in his brain
allotted for genetic and learned memories, there was a
hexagonal hall of mirrors. The repetitive image reflecting off
of every wall within her comb was that of his human form
caught between the college pliers of a giant insect overlord.
Elytron Frass is the pseudonymous author/visual artist of Liber Exuvia (gnOme, 2018). His prosodic fiction features in Tarpaulin Sky Magazine, Sleepingfish, SCAB,
X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, and The Offbeat—with forthcoming work in Parasol: The Journal of the Centre for Experimental Ontology. He tweets @Elytron_Frass.
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 