BLUE LIP

I am a morning beachcomber. With my seven arms, I hunt for fresh portals. They grow in the night; golden stalks which stretch upwards, and then bifurcate. From the point of bifurcation, an empty void will arrive. Pulsing, winking. A dull blue lip will encase this growing hole, arresting its progress. The longer the void exists, the harder the blue lips become. Cracks and veins open across it. And the void is slowly covered over, a scab in spacetime. Within the span of eight hours, they completely close. And the golden stalk sinks back into the wet sand, utterly dead.

But there is a bounty in this brief eight hour period of its life, a subtle gift-giving. From distant Otherworlds, chance travelers will drip through. Sometimes machines, sometimes animals. Sometimes plants, minerals, and none of the above. It is these that I gather. It is these that I hunt.

Today being a day like any other, I decide to lay my elastic straw hat upon my cranium, devour a purple burlap sack, and dribble out an unopening door. The hot sea snails are already hungry for their morning kibble, and so they nibble at my feet. A few smaller toes are lost to these rude ones, and yet I am unmad. They are all grown back into proper orbits easily enough, as you well know! And for now? I don’t miss them a lick.

Both the sky and the sea are the same shade of orange at this time of day, which always causes tangled confusion among my pupils. Is it one, is it the other?! Only a quite wise young beachboy can truly tell the difference. And I am old, very old. With eyes much sunken, much dim. Still, I have my aging pleasures. My growing collections of beachstuffs I keep in my hut, much envied by all the Others.

Besides—while the sky is sometimes liquid, it very seldom is. And so the difference can be tested with one’s hand, instead of one’s eye. A quick swipe suffices to nail down the true gender in question. Ocean? Sky? Sky, it seems. And that one over there? Ocean. True, a third gender, Skeon, is sometimes whispered of, but on this particular beach anyway, it still remains rather elusive.

I continue on, following the line of the grasping, greedy waves. If they come too close, I slap them and tell them to mind manners, to avoid getting fresh. Today I’m simply not in the mood to get wet. I’ve got other fishies in the itinerary…void fishies.

I pass around the bend of the island, nearing the nesting site where winged orbs release their spotted eggs into a warm, waiting sea. It is here that I see my first blink—my first glimmer of growing gold.

Closer now, closer. The air bends around its fast-vibrating hole. Reality itself bends. The blue lips orbit it too, all slow, all steady. A scab is already forming around the rim. Time is rather short.

I cast a flat web of geometric sigil-pattern, curve it, and wrap the tasty blue-black morsel within a philosophical net. The dark form beats all the more visibly now, rising like a panicked animal’s heart. I rub my seven tendrils across the tight meshwork until I find the last open orifice in my mathematical unreal. And then I suck through it, and suck, and suck.

Something is always dislodged by this action. Something, someone, and whatever. Bits of the scab fly off, travel down my airtube, get caught in my throat. No real worries. I can absorb.

A few minutes into this, I see a long leg appear. A striped, animalian leg. Black, yet also white. It drips out from the black hole. The hole then shudders, closes. It’s a zebra.

Strange bounty, for a strange day! I lift myself onto his back and ride him all the way home. To my cocoon shack, hidden among the dunes. I place him opposite me, in a chair. At table. I place a plate of white worm-kind at his face, and he devours them. His skin glows gold for just a moment, and then white mist forms above his head. It soon solidifies, revealing a marvelous crown. He opens his toothy, mustachioed mouth, and begins to speak:

“Everything is Skeon,” he says.

“The dog is also the maybe-cat. Let us dissolve into our opposites. Let us become the fruit which feeds upon on the fly...”

He continues on in this way for some time. A completely spotless Hegelian; I can find no fault inside his lecture. And I can feel myself evaporating while he speaks. Becoming Cloud. Feeling joyful, even as the boundaries of the Self which feel said joy are spun out and recombined with other things. I am now ocean-sky. I am planet; I am star. My eye becomes a beach-grown black hole—a grand orifice, obliterating all contradiction…

My hole now spits out Zebra.
My hole now spits out emancipation, kittens, milk.
(Among other things)

And this is the story
of how the universe
became rapturous mist