by Jeff VanderMeer
–Created through automatic writing, then sculpted afterwards.
Last Drink Bird Head ecleets marnfully at the emptied glissando, jecklated postportal. Sometimes the waste of roilatimus begreaves in him a kind of largesse that throatens and bogrotes into a rainful quertiness. Nothing flumefilled may grain him full. Nothing annihilarge can discrete him from that watch biorthed him. But every tale and stale Last Drink Bird Head cannot hurlerp but forge. And, forging, link. In the underboards, in the overthink, he has no hunkersafe. Once, the forge-link spake s/tale at him, and, earing, must sorb. It never sorbed outside of Last Drink Bird Head, so inpath he grew throaty and thrubb in the earing of it, exempt not scrying: “Pale blue with death, wreathed in seaweed and prawn, the detective climbs from deep beneath a gray ocean where fishermen grope through darkness for bony fish and sharply grotesque creatures swim ever forward in languid menace and from the depths the false promise of phosphorescent light. Above, the wavery thin disc of the sun, radiating weak light across the undersides of waves, becomes brighter with every step. The bubbles of his breathing erupt from his mouth, reach the surface before him, so that his whimpering voice echoes as they pop into air. ‘Please. Please. It was not me. I am not myself,’ they whisper. The sun is a defining circle; by the sharpness of its definition, he measures his progress toward the light. The first steps make him grimace, for here the deep and turgid water fights him, his thighs churning against it. He can hear the tongues of the water pushing at him, screaming out against him. But then, the sun beats hot on him and his struggle becomes easier, until, entering the shadows, his head finally above water so that he can exhale his last breaths recklessly, he runs up the last few steps onto the stage. There to have the roar of waves replaced with the roar of the crowd. To die in bliss. To soak up the sun, basking in it, while shaking the last drops of water and death from his body. Animated. Fully alive. His scalp tingles; he can feel his blood no longer thick and cold in his body, but singing to him, singeing his fingertips. The energy from the gathered audience fibrillates in his bones so that he spins, arms outstretched, for the joy of it, under a sun only inches from his face. He could touch it, kiss it, if he wished. It is a kind of story.” Not mast whorlds cud Last Drink Bird Head, yet thrubb he did to the scree of it and oh how his birnet coiled to forge that in this link there is such a lingering, a thronging, that he links tense. He links large. But he is Last Drink Bird Head. Last Drink Bird Head has only the forge and the link. While founder is dark, Last Drink Bird Head is light. While founder is light, Last Drink Bird Head is dark. No whorld shall ever exchange such a link-forge. And so Last Drink Bird Head sentinels in absynth of relief, ever sorbed, ever sorbering.