2.   The woman in white has a face like a weapon. Sharpen it. If you could get inside her body you could ride in it like a vast and war-ready ship. Slaves at the oars. Sections of time thrown overboard to lighten the load, for you will get heavier and heavier as time goes on.

3.   The woman in white places her palms against your face, like twin curses, and leaves black marks all over your flesh, as if you were a herd animal being chosen for the next truck, which arrives tomorrow.

4.   You invent the internal tattoo and gently remove each organ for scarification, branding, and the gentle and vivid watercolor of the sewing needle.

5.   You would like to devour permanence and dissolve it in your many stomachs. You would like to replace your skin when you grow weary of its memories, everything that seeps in it and never passes through, never evaporates.

6.   This woman is a disappointment. Can she be exchanged, can she be returned, can she be reborn. Douse it again.

7.   The palm reader does not hesitate to read the palm of any creature. Every creature has a future, every other creature speaks a language we cannot understand. It does not care about our future but it should.

8.   Every woman is a source of terror. She is sublime, she gives chase like the white whale and will destroy your ship and bring you down with her, tethered by a sewing needle. You break the surface of the water and become something else. A foreign object with no memory of your gills. You burn in the icy water. Your last image is of a beautiful woman you saw on a street once: she left a wake of terror you reared back from as if it were fire.

9.   In the nineteenth century, men were obsessed with the sublime, the distant, the unknowable, that which causes awe and terror. Alien, unknowable. Now men have forgotten the gods, but not women, an ever-renewable source and object of this enduring passion. On her hands, those clever spiders, she might wear a band of metal to mark her as yours. A miniature heart of coal compressed by time into something white and shining, a star while it still gives light.

10.   This woman in white is a ghost. She is a machine. She will be a god. Her spirit is a sacrifice to cleanse the land of its sins. Blameless monarch. She is bathing inside you. Find her. A labyrinth, a fork in the path, your future.

Paradise

Paradise

First Sphere (The Moon: The Inconstant)

When I was a child I had a rocking horse, a horse on thick springs, its mane ever tousled in the exact same way, day after year. I would ride it into a hole in the ground that opened just for me, just for my horse and me. The passage of time below was inconstant, while time above rocked back and forth on its unseen springs.

Second Sphere (Mercury: The Ambitious)