Intercourse Part 1

penumbra . 20

Jeff Simpson

When you stand at the thin edge of the wedge it is difficult to see how it is possible that MantraRay was built by this species, reduced now as it is to the basic functions of eating and fucking. The yellow day carries the cries of deadmen through the window and onto the open pages of the book in John Smith’s hands.

Now to the mast
Lashed and moon-lit arrested
I tag these notches on my bones
Count the rings of petals flower fallen
She loves me
She loves me not
She…
Not in floral wrath or knotted ropes of rain
Or councils keen where never king shall reign
But through leaves of painted pages
Spines all gone now confined to cages
These ribs of steelwork hull enrol
The sheets that sail unsure on titan seas
Rivet-gunned the rope-trick to my soul
And sent your thoughts to me
To bid me lift my eyes above the waves
And sail upon the reef’s knife edge
Index link my fingers to the stars
Orion, Orion, Arcturus
Tack and turn into the biting wind
Knife the surface tension now to find
Leviathan slumbers ‘neath my cleaving keel

To his surprise John finds tears caught in his throat. He throws the book across the room, surprising Anna-Marie from her slumber. Instantly alert, she watches him, eye wide, iris dilated.
“What?” she asks.
“It’s not my fault”
“What?”
“All this,” he waves his hand at the side of his head, “I didn’t cause this; it’s not physically possible”
“What difference does it make now?” she relaxes back into the bed. “Nobody cares anymore, and even if they did, pretty soon there’ll be nobody left to care”
“I fucking care, if that lot up there ever manage to reach the New; some planet that will have them; my name will be listed as the man who sold the world out.”
“And didn’t you?”
“No!”
If it is possible that the outlines of the room echo with the reverberations of that thrown book, then neither Anna-Marie nor John Smith seem to notice; embroiled as they are in their own intercourse.
“It’s impossible for what I did to have led to this – there is no connection between the two processes – everything I ever achieve was mere advertising for this, the main event.”
“That sounds like a link to me... what if the line between what we do and the results of our actions are not a process we are equipped to understand? Perhaps it is our selfishness or our sense of self that blinds us to our physical and scientific connection to the world.”
“So my creation of a glitzy and completely nonsensical product, my Black Hole Sunscreen Oil is responsible for a global catastrophe? Bullshit. I used no other ingredients than those used by any other beauty product charlatan.”
A Leviptron passes overhead to punctuate the day with another load of petals.
“How do you explain that then?” She points to the ceiling.
“They can make as much of that stuff as they like, it’s not going to change anything.” He walks across the room to retrieve the book, “Don’t you see? They’re deluding themselves. Every day we lose another few metres of habitable land to the desert; every day they harvest another expanse of flowers – futile.

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