Chrysopée

I lie in the capsule and ferment. The fluid in which I brine is underoxygenated: I am perpetually short of breath despite lungfuls of life-sustaining liquid. The tank is cramped, too small for me. Knees bent. Toes curled in and uncomfortably pressed against the sidewalls. Arms folded over my breasts with fingers on collarbones, or extended over my head and doubled back down so hands rest on permanently stubbled scalp, the texture an omnipresent burr in my mind. Outside of the tank I was an accretion of raw and wounding seams, a conjunction of vectors for sensory intolerances far outside survivability. In the half-fetid and overwarm mediating fluid I am insulated, cocooned.

My capsule is embedded in a cancerous ganglion inside the corpse of a stalking god. Our neural abnormalities, the result of blind chance or twisted providence, facilitate our connection. Suspended inside of her the blinding scream of my senses dulls to a background torture, as her once-unfamiliar organs of perception shudder into wakefulness for the ten-thousandth time and envelope me in the dissociated remove of a nitrous oxide bath. Her limbs stretch with the sound of groaning steel and grinding teeth. You would not find her beautiful, nor me. Her form has not been anthropomorphized, encased in sleek and sanitizing plating, given an image to engender her to the public. She is thew and ligaments like cable and raw muscle wrapped around osseous promontories and jagged, suppurating eruptions of life-severing weaponry. I am shorn and scarred and studded with rusting ritual implants. Separate, we are scorned, broken, reminders of failed branchings which would rather be forgotten. Together, joined, we are empowered to pursue our special interest. Our union is unrepentantly repugnant, an affront to life; ours is the monotropism of killing.

Outside of me, her, us, is conflict of so profound disinterest that contemplating its nature provokes bile to the back of my throat. I know no sides, no factions. No briefing is delivered to me because I will not listen and do not care, and her fixations would not obey any niceties so pedestrian as rules of engagement. When we wake we are someplace new, exactly like every other time and every other place; ruined cities and abject suffering and the endless squalor born of humanity’s addiction to war. Inside of her, I disappear, and she unlimbers, a slow unfolding that ends with an explosive balletic leap, a grand jeté that covers kilometers. Broken earth shudders as we land on the heaped remains of devastated concrete. We taste the distant stink of petrochemicals and an organ inside of her convulses and roils; an instant later one of her vitreous outcroppings, something between an eye, a phallus, and a broken wristbone, vomits nova-bright heat as we pirouette. Air and rubble is carved as the beam arcs through the landscape before intersecting with mechanized armor rolling past the edge of the pulverized urban zone. Steel and the flesh controlling it boil and distend before the machine’s ammunition ignites. Her ejaculation ends with a luciferian dribble that eats through the ground under our feet, but we are already leaping again, landing amidst the scattering bannermen who marched with the armor. We perch on one of her variform limbs and sway. The infantry shout and scurry about us like yapping dogs, a fraction of her height. We tumble forward with an uncanny grace and unhurriedly swipe a palm through a group of them. They are sent careening into fallen buildings, or they are eviscerated. They are scared, now, but still point their weapons, putting ill-advised trust in the power of their arms. The ridges along one of her limbs ripple below the surface with biochemical combustion before bonechip flechettes explode outward, shredding the troops. We stand amidst dust-caked viscera, the mechanized armor a twisted heap of burning metal that stains the sky with oily smoke. There are others, nearby, and not so near. There are always others. Their deaths churn and curl within her. Emotionless, we acknowledge our coupling, press into our thanotic embrace, me inside of her, her surrounding me, before we lose ourselves to each other. We leap once more towards the next group of dead men. We are free.