Dearest Tinsel,
I am writing this outside your room. No knock’s needed. One more leap and I’ll be in with you, and then I shall read this letter out loud. You can take this as a declaration, Glass-shine.
Forgive me as I ask you to sit on your questions, I know you must have many. But my mind is scrambled by my journey. I will tell you about it and that will wrap up the why’s. How many journeys I have had to reach into you! How many bloods I’ve lived through over these voyages! These make an offering from you to me, these experiences across species. But even for us creatures comes a time for settling, so I write this letter to you to read, you deserve the formality, one from your own kind, we never write letters, take honour in a first. Though this is more a flick through postcards, snapshots from a trip on our own Orient Express with arteries for tunnels. You could call it an obstacle course as well, like the one your God feller sets up.
How I got to you, some highlights pinned on the map:
1. Soldier: on the move, the adrenaline tang is a satisfying giddy. As he pushed and crept low through brush I played with the parasites dwelling within that would take him by year-end.
2. Wounded mammal on tundra: cold near the end, blood slow like buses.
3. Headless snake: I was almost thrown out onto the grass, his must have been recent. Apparently it’s a kick to fly out through a slit artery into the air, but I’ll save that adventure for later, there’s so much we’ve still to do together.
4. Indian man eating: thin blood alert like a cat tracking prey.
5. Muscovite driving: thick blood congested with lumps that crumble into asteroids to play dodgem with, I can take you there, oh how I wish to take you there! I drank nicotine whilst he swore across nine lanes of maniacs.
6. Sailor: full of iron and booze, shame I was alone, I was there for a while, watching the beasts that always change and move and crash and swallow, but then again he was quite restful.
7. Airline stewardess: I wanted her to push her face through one of the round holes to feel what it feels like to be so high, but she was too busy with the mysterious tedium that your genius fills the incredible with.
In amongst the clotting, the flowing, the spilt, the fed and the burning, I have also learned how to count. (Though clotting is for weirdoes.)
The stuff people say as I pass through them, like one I fell into on a train, what a terrible bat, “there was something with the fire brigade, she couldn’t use the microwave properly she can’t be trusted to use the microwave, she can’t be trusted to put her eyedrops in so she goes blind, she can’t be trusted to take her pills, really what I saying is well something is going to happen, this will have to end soon.” What I wanted to tell her about Ends! Looking out of her, feeling queasy, I went back to you and saw you as a trail of cinders streaking past the train window. Rest assured my roaring heart, I know better how to take care of those close.
Different vessels are like different bars. You get different views, different tastes, but a lot of the familiar too. Or maybe museums. Us creatures, we like a drink or two, or something with that effect. Dogs are a favourite spot for us to meet, us of the Kingdom. For a party and ritual – they’re one and the same to us – wild dogs are the best. We throw silhouettes out of them, wild dog blood makes our shadowy legs dance, a clownish dance like a Labrador trying to walk like a spider. You’ll hoot, precious.
I’ve pinched things for you along the way. They fall away with each jump, but you get the sentiment. I’ve stolen airplane socks to put your treasures inside; a mussel shell to rub under your chin; mint chocolates to consume on our marriage; a silver-framed mirror to absorb the envious; a special potato in a jar, stale, just for the hell of it; graveyard flowers to feed the children; and a brooch to hold between our teeth.
I’m very tired, but on the other hand, if I had hands they would be shaking apart!
But I should tell you how we move, as you might have forgotten. You might not know at all. It’s no doddle.
We learn to move limbs and glass objects first. Then to draw a silhouette, preferably during the day, standing on a balcony. (The silhouette that is, not me. I stand nowhere. Do you have a balcony?) Soon after, a creature learns to move, to swim through blood. We can swim with or against the flow, though one must be careful when one swims against, as it's surprisingly easy to go too far and blow up the vehicle's heart. (Some sorts like to do that, of course, mean creature trick to play on a fleshy.) We learn how to make other shapes, to throw ourselves into material. Finally, we learn how to leap from blood through air to other blood, and this is how I've come to you, following your scent and murmur.
Silhouettes aren’t quite corporeal, but they can twine around you, shimmering ash, I’ll make a cute romantic folly for you to lie in. That’s how I manifest outside of you. And this letter will get material in that sort of fashion.
We met in the Alps, do you remember? Of course you do... That majestic bicycle ride that we shared... Or maybe it was the South Coast, or the road to La Paz, scrambled as I said, still the sun was definitely brightening and it had emptied a box of angles onto the earth, a shower of your cheekbones over which we were pulled along by gravel that spoke to us through rubber and metal spokes and sweat and wind chilling your face even as the sunrise promised a burning, pale blue, this freezing heat that rose out of Arctic undersea in silence, your nuclear submarines rising through ice and all those mighty things you build that you sense a rumble inside even when no noise is to be heard, you were on a bicycle, the world was shaking, there was definitely a sun rising and we were probably going with gravity rather than against, how I whispered to you as I am now.
Do you remember what you said to me? I wish I did.
(I know I keep getting things wrong, but I shall make them right. We grab these words from your brains, but they can muddle. We see things different, no not wrong.)
My darling, your blood smells of moss on old stone walls. Your blood is a carnival in the woods. Your face I forget – my travels have made my existence, and they are a Lethic drop – but your inside, its scent, warmth and feel no I could never forget that.
I hope you recognize me. You must recognize my arterial thump, but I’ll cut out a silhouette once I finish reading this so that you can see my projection as you first saw me wherever it was. I'm curious as to how you will see me as I read this. Could you tell me, please, when I finish? Do I still wear a moustache? Do I still cut a dash?
We creatures fit your world together by picking up bits where we can and stringing them into a chain and tangle, all those bits you people have, all that cluttering matter, how I admire you for it. And you – the species – have a genius for this stringing together. You can stick a piece of wood in the ground, tie some colourful fabric to it that really should serve no purpose, wave it around like you’re calling the wind, and use that as an excuse to raise a glass, recite a speech, write a poem, zip metal screws into another’s head, all the while stitching stories around the contraption to give it sense, what a gift, I tip my hat to how you fit it all together into these magnificent mechanisms that fold and twirl and unfold in the sky, I want to make the same for you. I shall put you together how you your world.
You turn ships into claws to reach into the earth. And that shall be your voice, wrapping me up. The iron you pull out of the ground you burn into ribs and more arms to wrench and tear and clamber up in metal and glass in rectangles and ellipsoids and hyperboloids with wheezes made out of steam for platforms to watch whatever you watch up there – more platforms, I suspect – and that can be the pulsing in your thigh. Descend in one of those cable cars – we’ll take the classiest modes – to your grand singing houses modelled after monster carcasses (you should make those things walk) where your lot sit down to be led by voices transmitted by men shaped like cones painted black and that ringing kerfuffle can be your lungs. Put your feet up and I’ll give your brain a gentle blood massage hemisphere by hemisphere as we watch the television and you can finally tell me how you know all those people who talk to you through it even as they get up to screaming mayhem and that I suppose is your electric cerebral wonderland, a cracking place to stop before we’re taken to your intestines which is to say your winding halls of leaders of you fleshies which is another box of racket with rumbles that send your youngsters into dust and mud to zip those metal screws into each other and shrivel up in spontaneous pops of fire and scream, that song and dance can be your, well, let’s move on from there, I’ll come back later, always a pleasure. I hear from my fellow creatures that you’ve magnified those pops of fire, this is your science and they tell me that your brainiest have dreamt a biggest brightest pop and flame of the Ever, one that made the whole pile, dinosaurs tortoises pencils everything, no matter to me if you take the idea seriously or not, but flood me red if that’s not a feat of speculation, yes we’ll make that your eyes, and we leap from this concept to that, of Universal Healthcare and suffrage and etiquette on tables, that’s all your extremities to keep warm.
I arrived in your postman, made a jump into the old lady in the room along the corridor full of mess. Now I’m inside your neighbour’s cat, rubbing its face against your wall. (We should have a word about her.)
I shall read this through your blood onto the wall
in flaming scorpion tails
or glistening moth wings
or chattering dog song
or flock wallpaper
it doesn't matter, you'll know by the time I read this, or rather I read it to you, through you, through your blood.
And were you not to accept me in you, I would still wish to be around you. I’d throw myself into something dead, throw myself in to a statue. That’s the closest we get to suicide, but near you I would still live.
But it won’t be like that for sure. You’ll take me in. And I shall invigorate your heart! Inflate your lungs! Bring the flush back to your cheeks!
That first time, the way you looked at me and fell back on your bed, as if in a faint, then I knew you were the one, moved as much by me as I by you. We were in your flat, I had arrived there after some crazy night out, some night of parties and our raucous murmuring, I was bleary and just wanting a place to stay. Something in you spoke to me, called me out to throw a silhouette, throw a shape to sit on your bed, cutting a hole in your flat. You looked at me and fell back, and we spoke, at least I did, definitely. With no small difficulty I pushed your clay ashtray to you, along your bedside table. And when I left you I wanted to go back immediately, but our movements are not naturally mapped like yours. I’ve had to learn, sometimes just missing you.
We will build something together, inside of you, something to live through. We’ll be together in a what’s-the-word, a sinopia, cosy.
I shall move things for you, make things for you. In your warmth I am your servant.
Yours,
Canavan
