Let them know the way it hurt somewhere so basic, so plain, so laid bare, that I could not hide from it. I could not hide could not fight could not kill myself but was only ever forced to leap and lunge into the effort. Forced to return. But I was always dead when I came back. They couldn’t fix that, consequences of coordinates, of fixing coordinates, of the struggle to know what mind meant, what they meant by body or even journey. To form a map, to advance the borders of the map, even as the compass was no use.

They had changed my genes. I could breathe without air. I could breathe without body or mind. In water. Buried deep in the earth. They opened my head, fixed me like switchblades flickering and snickering, my thoughts thick as smoke and swirling, cut and recut, toward the ceiling. Only so I could go back again. Go black again.

My mind had had enough. My mind gave everything up. I gave it all up in the moment. I wanted nothing of me left, nothing they could put back together. Would’ve smashed it with a rock until you couldn’t recognize it. But that was just my mind. My body didn’t agree. My body wanted to fight back. My body wanted to murder them all until the walls were covered in blood and the floor and it smashed down the door to that place. My body knew what my mind did not.

Would there ever be a way out?

Dread coordinates. A compass in my head that spun wild. Picked up the scent. Found the trail. Disintegrated into molecules.

Fragments are what I have.

the coded sky and the scaffolding

brought to the other place through the eye

there came the blurring speed, the blurring of speed

and the stillness in the midst of motion

there was the burning speed and the stillness

the stillness and the burning speed

putting me to the torch putting me to

putting me where i did not

want to be

My house was full of holes already, so they sent me down another. All the burrows of the dark, of the night sky. The stars changed above me, but I was constant beneath them. I was astronaut and spaceship both. I had no suit. Just my fur. I had no instruments. Just my brain. Devoured, I vaulted space and time. Devoured, I became other other. Another.

What would be the story I made up to understand. I hadn’t the luxury. I had to know what it actually was. I had to know. And slowly … I did.

Maw tunnel burrow maw.