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[bigegomagick]

Hey Cancer

This month, we urge you to be less conscious of what other people think. Go to your favorite restaurant and get dinner for one. Sneak to the bathroom and apply a quick disguise, maybe a mustache and bandana. Sit back down across from your original plate and order another meal for one. Do this until you’re no longer ashamed to eat out alone.

At the diner, drink your milkshake in one big slurp. Get your Big Mac with two extra buns in the middle, between the cheese and patties. Order pizza and Chinese food and put the Chinese food on the pizza. There’s no such thing as excess when it comes to the gentle, sensual loving of the self.

Wear your silly pants. Wear your silly pants and your clown shoes. Show up to the gym and run around screaming that your hair is on fire before laughing loudly and returning to the treadmill. Do a pantomime on the treadmill, pretend you’re hauling on an endless reel of rope or bend your knees and act as though you’re pushing a boulder ever forward, shoving it towards the console that displays your 3 mph speed at incline 12.

Here’s a metaphor we came up with for your life as we re-enter mercury retrograad, cancer:

Imagine you arrive for the first time at a weekly yoga class, looking to dabble in a “new flow”. As you settle in, the other attendees begin removing every strip of clothing. It’s a nude yoga class. Rather than loosening up, stripping down, and participating, you decide to keep your yoga pants on — what if you smell? Are your breasts smaller and pointier than everyone else’s? You can’t remember the last time you shaved your asshole. As a direct consequence, when a family of squirrels swarms through the window — three of them small, undeveloped baby squirrels— they make a beeline for the safety of your skintight exercise clothes, sheltering themselves in the crevices of your flesh. You might shriek and squirm and complain but there is no denying the causal relationship between your pathetic shame around nudity and the reality of having 6-7 squirrels swaddled in your spandex shorts.

I think you get the picture, Cancer. Go forth and be you! A body hatched by dozens of tiny claws is even less appealing than the unshaven, contorted form of the nude yogi.

[bigegomagick]

Hey Taurus,

This month, paranoia is your friend. Shake off those dusty fears and mold them together into a functioning hypervigilance, a homunculus, with enormous, handsome features. Your nostrils flare widely, your neck is pliable and long, twisting on itself like taffy to give you an amazing 355 degree field of vision, especially if you rotate it constantly, like a search light in the center of the biggest prison in the universe.

Speaking of the universe, Venus in retrograde means something about your love life but we’re not sure what — hey! Chill out. You think you can control the outcome through force? The universe is going to beat that impulse out of you this month. The stars will show that bad things happen regardless of your actions, and because of your actions. If you behave appropriately you might be able to milk an ounce of affection and peace, but don’t expect a code of conduct from us — the universe changes the rules every day. That’s the nature of cosmic evil — it’s entropic. The more you focus on it the more it eludes you, dispersing randomly across the old electrical cord that we’ve been using to represent the linear progress of your life. You’re on the upswing, but also at the fulcrum, and things could go tumbling backwards as easily as they could slide forward. Keep that in mind as you make decisions this month, especially if they pertain to your literal, physical safety. Good luck Taurus — keep seeking the stability you crave so badly — each of us needs that one mindless doomed pursuit to quell our shrieking absence of cogent morality.

[bigegomagick]

Something I wrote years ago about falling in love

I am thinking too hard inside my fishbowl today, and it’s making the wide wells of my eyes all wishy-washy. The gravel pressing hard in the pit of my stomach wants me plastered to the floor,where the full weight of the water can squeeze my raspy chest.

What changed here in my once consistent, climate-controlled home? Maybe a new chemical, atrazine, chlorine, or fluoride, worked some slippery witchcraft in my brain, compelling me to do what I swore I would not.

“Open your mouth,” whispered a little voice from the back of my skull, “we’ve tethered the worm of memory in his place. Tilt your head forward, now, and swallow one stone.”

So now I am full of small rainbow rocks, like a sock full of batteries, or a tiny slimy bag of treasured coins. When I swim, with difficulty, toward the surface, a pleasant sensation grasps my whole body, a ticklish grinding fullness emanating from my stomach’s swell. But then, as my will collapses, glee spent, their density returns and I am reminded of the inevitable doom they will bring and of where I truly belong — nestled stiffly among the artificial pebbles provided by my indifferent benefactor.

Unable to return to the surface meeting point, where flakes of true nutritious food are sprinkled daily, I wait in desperate dread for a meal to drift down to me. In my rocky glut, though, I barely manage to eat, forcing down the smallest portions for survival’s sake. I am like a squirrel gorged on cigarette butts, a turtle in a plastic corset.

My strength drains, and I am left with only one way of passing time. If I shift gingerly, from side to side, the gravel inside my distended belly shakes and shivers, sending it’s magic daggers of euphoria through my chest and into the raggedy threads of my tail.

I think often of the time before, when I lived in dead-eyed fishy pragmatism, and wish I could return to that animal ignorance. But then I would not know this awful bliss.

[bigegomagick]

Horoscope for March 2024

If you’re watching hours and hours of bird videos on YouTube, Gemini, today might be a good day to start weening yourself off. Keeping chickens on the roof of an urban apartment is not feasible for someone who has been unemployed for six weeks. Maybe, instead, think about applying to a grocery store. Your mercury in cancer suggests that your luck in the career sector may be turning around. If you can harness that Gemini charisma for a 15-minute interview, there’s a fantastic chance that the next part-time job you apply for will be yours.

Your Neptune is in Aquarius, which means you need to clear the chicken wire out of your kitchen. The bizarre cage you’ve constructed is now more elaborate than any chicken could require, and presents a hazard when trying to get to your brita filter.

Gemini, chickens do not require hoods as a falcon would, and while anyone could see the tremendous time and effort you’ve put in to hand-sewing delicate headwear for your future gallinaceous friends, the stars implore you to direct your energy towards more lucrative pursuits. Your industrious nature is a boon, but must be shepherded!

[bigegomagick]

Ch. 4

The travelers of flight167 proceeded in an orderly fashion, nursing smashed arms and broken noses. The plane’s rearmost dwellers waited patiently as the more damaged members of first and business class were eased through the center aisle on patented slim stretchers designed and stored for the purpose. Hazel stared blankly at the back of the head of a man tugging his luggage down, leaning against the side of her vacated seat. Blood gasping out of a gash on his scalp made a rorschached second face in matted hair. She smiled at it.

In due time they were ushered by cheery centinels through the final portal out into the next airport. Seats in the waiting area collapsed like folding chairs under the fore of the plane, which was peeking in with the guilty charm of a puppy.

This airport was even larger than the last, a full A to Z of terminals radiating out from a circular central mall, a massive ouroborus stuffed fat with delis, purse shops, juice bars, sushi kiosks, sunglass vending machines, and glowing acrid bathrooms.

Hazel trailed dumbly behind gabriel, who was limping towards the ladies’ room. Two older women already stood in states of minor disarray at the sinks, plucking peanuts and shards of plastic from their hair. They glanced at Gabriel as he entered but shellshock overpowered their urge to chastise and they forgot him. The extra large stall Gabriel chose glittered with opalescent tile. The white throne in the center was smooth and devoid of buttons, operating through a series of eager cuckold sensors all on its own that seemed to protest, flushing inappropriately, as he shut the lid and seated himself on top of it. The two of them unzipped the top halves of their grimy suits and observed and prodded bruises blooming across the other’s chest. Gabriel caressed the curve of hazels waist down to the deep red indentation where the seatbelt had halted her explosive ascent towards the cabin ceiling

Your skin is so soft”, said Gabriel.

Thank you.”

“I want to make you feel good”

Hazel grunted. Their legs overlapped, she in his lap on the toilet seat, a Venn diagram. . Sex occurred. Gabriel lifted Hazel up and bent her over at the hips, she braced one hand on the side of the stall while he grasped the other wrist and pulled. Appropriate resistance created, they coupled quickly and quietly, save for the squeaking of boot soles on tile and the inevitable gasping for breath.

[bigegomagick]

Ch. 3

The flight was leaving in an hour so Gabe purchased tickets at a touch screen kiosk and Hazel waited for him at the gate. The travelers around them sported tidy athleisure sets and white sneakers. Many of them had preemptively donned leis and drank frothy cocktails out of tall plastic cups in a range of jewel tones. Everyone trailed a regulation-sized carry-on stacked with purses and cosmetic cases. Men clustered around charging stations slumped forward under the weight of engorged backpacks.

Gabriel returned as the plane began to board in hierarchical order and when boarding group X was finally called they sped past the checkpoints and accordion bridge through to the back of the plane, where they took their seats and unclenched for the first time.

Once the plane was coasting through thin air, gabe ordered a drink from a swaying attendant and sipped with perfunctory satisfaction.

“Sometimes I’m tortured by the idea that I’ll never be a great man. Drinking a whiskey on a plane doesn’t hold the same simplicity that it does for you, it’s layered with too much awareness and I have to watch myself do it, which is so boring,” Hazel said.

Gabe flipped through sky mall and clinked his ice cubes next to her ear.

“Shall I tell mother we’re coming?” He said with a Brit-like affect.

“No no, don’t want her to roll out the red carpet. Best to see how she’s really been living recently, I don’t think she gets many visitors out there. “

“I say, I do believe you mean to intimidate old mummy by showing up unannounced!”

Mother had refused to sell her land when the travel companies resort-ified the east coast. Her house now squatted precariously between the bulbous cheeks of two adjacent geodomes, privy to unregulated climates and exempt from travel law like a maritime zone. Occasionally, private appraisers would come and stomp through the weeds, waiting impotently outside the house and wrapping impatiently on the softened wood of the porch in hopes that Edwige would emerge and fess to her betrayal of various ordinances. Edwige had the wide front steps removed a decade earlier, so the porch dropped off suddenly, a solid 6 feet above the land, making entrance to the house a humiliating maneuver up splintery trellis. Given that the land Edwige retained between the domes was too small to colonize for their purposes, private companies had little motivation to hoist themselves up outside of a general bureaucratic interest in extirpating any niggling bodies yet unconsumed by their ever-expanding territory.

Gabriel placed a bulky wireless headset around his crown and began talking aloud to a group of online friends, his eyes glazed over as he laughed and quipped. Leaning back in her seat, Hazel inserted a pair of complementary noise-canceling headphones and selected “sound of jungle” from options on the screen set into the back of the chair in front of her. Swallowing a mild, linty sedative from her pocket, she closed her eyes and gradually drifted into sleep.

Hazel dreamed that she woke up on the wing of the plane, seated with her shins dangling over the edge. Wind blasted her in the face and her hair whipped behind her so fast it felt like it was being yanked out of her scalp. Ahead of the plane, against a rich purple cloud, a V of large grey geese pursued some southerly oasis. The nearmost of them was sucked violently into the engine and expelled in a mist of blood and feathers. Hazel gripped the sides of the wing, inched herself over to the tiny porthole and peered in at Gabriel, who had his head tipped back and eyes closed as he continued to chat with the losers on his server. Hazel banged on the window with the flat of her fist and Gabriel startled, looked up, and gasped in horror at her bloodspattered, wind-beaten visage. Through the vignette of the window a silent film played out before her – Gabe jumping up, grabbing a stewardess by the collar, dragging her to the window. The stewardess, seeing nothing, adopted a n stern, authoritative expression as she urged Gabe back into his seat. The panicked expressions of other passengers, overhearing the drama, turning to vague irritation when they saw nothing zfor themselves. Hazel banged again, this time on the window, the side of the plane, with one fist and then both, her grip of her knees slipped and she flew to the side, grabbing the edge of the wing at the last moment, holding on for dear life as her clothes were ripped away until she clung nude in the wind, tits flapping hideously. Now travelers looking out the windows could see her and they laughed but without much interest. She woke up to the chill of aggressive air conditioning blasting her in the face from the ceiling and an announcement piped over the speaker.

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THIS IS YOUR CAPTAIN SPEAKING.

I need to bring your attention to a change in our flight plan. We have encountered unexpected inclement weather that is preventing us from safely landing at our intended airport.

In the interest of your safety and well-being, we have made the decision to divert the aircraft to the nearest suitable airport. Our crew is well-trained to handle such situations, and please rest assured that your safety is our top priority –”

The plane bucked and the audio drowned in a collective squeal from passengers.

“-- weather conditions at our alternate airport are more favorable for a safe landing. The air is fresh and clear, the ground staff and emergency services at the alternate airport are prepared to assist us, and I can truly ensure a smooth transition upon our arrival.

We understand that this may be an inconvenience for some of you, and we sincerely apologize for any disruption to your plans. Connecting flights will be organized upon disembarkment.

Once again, we appreciate your understanding and cooperation during this unexpected turn of events. Thank you for flying with us, we’ll be landing shortly.”

Everything stuttered and Hazel lunged upwards in her seat, the stiff belt at her hip carving into flesh. Weight collected on her shoulders like bags of sand and she slammed back down. Vibration turned her vision to static. The glossy magazine pinched in the seat in front of her a ragged spray of color as the interior of the plane reduced to a wash of gray, and then they dropped, around her bodies collapsed into the ceiling, she imagined the sound of skulls knocking but all she could hear was the ovular wallop of sheet metal flailing and the dense rush of air. She reached down and unbuckled first her seatbelt, then gabriels, and they slammed up, each of them flat against the corrugated plastic facade, their arms and shoulders overlapped, she turned her face to his and he to hers, they looked at the garbled blur of their partner’s eyes and lips and breathed until the plane leveled suddenly and they dropped again, the backs of their knees cracked against headrests in aisle E19, howler monkey screeching peeled out from below, accompanied by a terrible rumbling shiver as the plane sped forth on the vast runway, lights from the airport streaked like lasers in the most beautiful lightshow Hazel had ever seen, getting closer and closer until the nose of the plane plunged into the airport, carving a perfect orifice into terminal C.

[bigegomagick]

Ch. 2

The agony of being followed hadn’t left her, and she seized with panic as she realized they were helplessly heading toward the airport.

“Gabe where are all the exits?? Take an exit!” She demanded. Gabriel shook his head, concentration creasing his brow. Around them, tremendous long loops of road interlaced on every plane without intersection, loosely crocheted together. The great maw of the terminal rose up over the horizon of the freeway, like an anglerfish out of water, ovular, tapered at the back, with a wide dark mouth. The vehicles around them poured in and Hazel clutched helplessly to the handle over the window as they followed. Ships parked in clusters, as many as could fit, just inside the jaw. Gabriel brought theirs down to rest on its squat legs and took her hand.

“I don’t think I can do this,” She said; sweat beading on her upper lip. Her ears were on fire. “I can’t go through security. We have to go back.”

“You know we can’t. Pull it together, stay quiet, and try not to look so sweaty.”

They stepped down and towards the massive glass doors that slammed open and shut as travelers made their way out of the lot. The ceiling rose in an uninterrupted arc 60 feet above them, made of segmented dull sheet metal that absorbed most of the light that the insufficient fluorescents could muster.

She caught a vague glimpse of herself as she passed through the glass doors. Her brown hair was whitened with dust like a powdered gentry-woman. Her green bodysuit, tapered at the waist and ankles, was almost dry but had stiffened from the chlorine to an uncomfortable starchy texture. As she had a thousand times before, she raised her eyebrows and manually loosened her jaw, approximating an expression of ease and smoothing the harsh lines in her face. Soon, she was in line among the others, corralled by the inky boundaries of black stanchions. In the far distance, beyond the geometrically snaking line, she could see security agents waving beeping sticks through the auras of splayed bodies. Figures stepped meditatively, rhythmically, across thin carpet through the series of plastic thresholds. Those in front of her fell forward like dominos, folding to remove shoes and release belts.

On her wrist, she could feel the impatient pulse of her watch ticking. The moist area of softened skin under the band itched.

A security agent with scarecrow blonde hair called her forward. Leaning over her shoulder, she whispered into one ear, and then the other, “hi hi hi hi hi helloooo I’m just going to be giving you a quick check -check - check -chek chek. I’m going to comb your hair back … and then forward. Can you look at this light for me? Can you follow the light - follow the light - follow the light light light? Perfect perfect perfect. You’re doing great. And I’m just gonna *whispered* run my hands down your arms arms arms. And now the insides of your thighs. And calves. On the outsides of your legs legs legs gooooood. Good. I want you to imagine this beeping security stick is cooooombing over your aura. Starting at the top of your head and coming downnnnn — down to your toes. Thank you thank you thank you. And just close your eyes for me. Good you’re doing so good.”

Psychic pain where the bar touched the aura hovering over the crown of her head. Ache behind the eyes, like the fatigue of staring at a screen too long, as it brushed past her face. Cramping, cringing pain as it coasted past her chest. She reached out for Gabe but he’d already moved ahead in line, belt and shoes off, pants slouching indecently. He shuffled the cards from his wallet in his hands like a deck, bridging them between long fingers and letting them fall awkwardly, alternately. He was almost to the last checkpoint: at the center of a final winding line, a monolith or a toll booth. inside, an officer recited interviews through perforations in inch-thick glass.

Previous residences, partners, housemates, names and breeds of various pets through a life time. Address of your pharmacy of choice, streaming subscriptions, state ID and license of registration, papers verifying child abuse clearance and up-to-date vaccinations.

“Name and date of birth?”

“Hazel Crucifix, December 21st, 2058.”

Hazel pulled scans up on her phone and wrinkled papers out of her bag and offered them up. The officer sniffed through suspiciously, nose wrinkling as he came to her vaccination sheet. “It wasn’t flu season, so I’ll be updating that in the coming fall, when they make those available again. “ He nodded without looking at her. “Wrists please,” he said, stamping her inner arm with a rich blue ink that seeped out in a delicate topography of the grooves in her skin. Each wrist marked with the blurred outline of a breaching dolphin.

Hazel shoved the papers back into her bag and proceeded through the dominoed metal detectors, fifty or a hundred of them creating a striated tunnel to the back of the airport.

She caught up to Gabriel and fell in step behind him, each of them barefoot, arms raised over their heads. They emerged onto the other side of the airport and sat side by side with their feet folded under them and sifted through the ten foot pile of shoes. Hazel examined a platform heel that didn’t belong to her. The shoot from the ceiling coughed up a new pair and it tumbled down towards them, dislodging a Jordan that bonked Gabe on the head. Reaching her arm in to the shoulder, Hazel felt around for the smooth capped toe of her high top sneakers and tugged one out, creating a rubber-scented cascade into her lap. The second shoe appeared on her right. Gabriel was tightly lacing a pair of someone else’s combat boots beside her and winked at her as she watched. Long nimble fingers wove aglets through metal-bracketed holes, veins protruded from the pink flesh of his forearms. Hazel took his face in her hands and kissed him. “Let’s go to the airport bar” he said, retracting his tongue from her mouth.

“The drinks are outrageously expensive.

And we’ve made it through security for now, but you and I both know that your name is on a list, with my name as a footnote. I don’t like this at all. If we should go anywhere, it’s to a handicap bathroom stall where we can wait out the next few hours without any cameras recognizing your face.”

“You even know where we’re going yet?”

“I planned the whole last trip, you’re not going to weigh in about where we go next?”

“You mean the charming desert outpost with the electrified pool and googly-eyed monster? That we had to fly ourselves to?”

“There’s a reason we don’t take commercial flights, Gabe. It’s on you that we ended up here, I tried to tell you to get off at the exit—

“There wasn’t an exit. All roads lead to here, we both know that’s no accident.”

Hazel pressed her face into her knees.

“I don’t want to travel anymore. Each dome has been worse than the last.”

Gabriel petted the base of her skull. “I’ve never seen corruption of environment data like that last spot. The whole set felt twisted and wrong. Where’d you hear about it again?”

“Some private channel i got dropped into. Some kid said it had been abandoned for years but that the damage was minimal, said it was a near perfect approx of a mid century bunker. “

“AI geodomes aren’t designed for longer stays, the code has its own sort of scheduled obsolescence so people move on to the next destination. If kids from this channel were squatting there…” he paused. “but I’ve never seen it react so aggressively before. Never been expelled from Eden like that.”

“It was worth a shot, it was free, we’re hemorrhaging cash. Do we even have enough for tix out of here?”

Gabriel pulled cash out of various suit pockets.

“Hmm. Not for anywhere nice. But a seedier destination, sure. At least an uncorrupted one.”

“As long as there’s a shower I don’t care.“

Most of their money they made undermining the travel advisory services, collecting credit numbers and selling them en masse on quiet servers. They never charged the cards themselves, but they had to be so careful, wiring only dribs and drabs from offshore accounts. In the end, it was like having a weekend allowance or a minimal government stipend, more generous than unemployment but just barely. Only ever enough for the grimiest three day trips, two nights and an 8 a.m. checkout.

“Let’s go to the airport bar.”

“Fine.”

The nearest bar was in the back of a restaurant, the Johnny Kuprionis Memorial Bar and Grille, which largely dealt in crab fries and chicken tenders. Hazel and Gabe wove past high top tables to the back, where a 20-something in an ill-fitting black button down doled out unhealthy pours and thick sangria. Gabe handed the laminated menus back to the bartender and ordered them each a glass of shitty red wine.

Leaning back in her stool, Hazel examined the mural that extended from just above the top-shelf liquor, up the wall and across the ceiling. In the foreground, a bald man, presumably Mr. Kuprionis, stood on the deck of a crabbing boat, clutching a cubic wire cage that teemed with crabs. Behind the ship, a frigid ocean roiled, life-vests and crab-pots clung together in buoyant mounds, streaks of lightning illuminated gargantuan waves and turned them an unnatural green. It was a masterful piece, uncanny and artificial, lit from within, recalling the great American landscape painters of the Hudson Valley some two centuries earlier. (Gericault, Turner) Hazel untangled the coiling, delicate letters on the condemned vessel’s hull: “Destination”. She shuddered.

Gabriel misguidedly followed her gaze to the screen embedded in the wall above the bar that displayed rotating descriptions of impending departures.

“What sounds good to you, little monkey? Big city living? Rustic Scandinavian asceticism? Geodome glamping in the Brazilian jungle?”

He was on his third drink and his cheeks had colored, lending him the appearance and affect of a charming toddler. His blue eyes tended to sparkle indiscriminately when he was inebriated, and Hazel could already see a tidy stewardess eyeing him up from the other end of the bar. She despised the sartorial mandates of modern airlines — slim black and silver body suits with ribbed padding on the sleeves, matching ankle moon-boots, all betraying a calculated nostalgia for a 20th century vision of techno-utopia that would never be.

She looked down at her own jumpsuit and dusty boots. Not much better, but at least, she thought, genuinely tattered by a life of adventure, not subservience to a sinister travel conglomerate repackaging nomadism as growth. Then she chastised herself for her superiority, for indulging a fantasy of sidestepping participation in the travel economy. She was here, at the airport, spending money on drinks, spending carbon on travel.

And what adventure? They pursued the crumbling, tertiary destinations forgotten by the airlines and coasted on abandoned amenities. Gabe called it the “mini-fridge diet”. They were train-hopping degenerate crust punks without the dreads. Wincing, she fished a loose wellbutrin from the deep cargo pocket on the outside of her knee.

“Let’s go visit my mother.”

[bigegomagick]

Ch. 1

The plane careened down onto the freeway, sparks and gravel flying out backwards from the point where its convex bottom scraped asphalt. Inside, lights flared in a strobing pattern and Hazel jostled forward, hands, cheek, and chest coming up evenly, mashed against the braille of the buttoned dashboard. Her partner, beside her in the cockpit, reached long arms out to the brake and curbed their speed, bringing them in line with the other oblong transportation projectiles moving steadily around them. They merged into traffic.

The world they’d narrowly escaped faded from view.

In it, they tiptoed around a private pool on the shelf of a dusty red mountain, hoping to find refuge in the neat wood-paneled cabin just beyond. Mid-century half-globe lights winked provocatively at them through moiréed window screens. Even from outside, Hazel could hear the sultry hum of a refrigerator. Gabriel stopped and trailed two fingers through aqua pool water, his blank gaze turning to alarm as he shifted to look at her. The pool’s modest electric current sent a vicious tickling sensation through his hand, an onslaught of tiny teeth. She raised one hand, beckoning him forward. The dry breathy air reminded her of the southwest, though she could see that miles from where she stood, across the canyon to her left, all form gave way to misty whiteness. Beyond that, she knew, there was nothing to find -- no strip malls or rest stops or circle k.

They’d almost reached the simple russet door of the one-story when a cloud of dust spread like fog through the tines of steely desert scrub. Vibrations rose from her feet to her fingers and she released the doorknob she had just grasped, ushering her partner back towards the ship without a word. She felt the great smiling beast erupt through the dirt and rock behind her... thousands of legs waggled in the air as the front of the caterpillarian creature reared up, the massive whites of its eyes carved into crescents by the rolling path of its pupils. She flung herself forward, giving her partner a shove on his chest as the beast slammed down to rest on its spindly appendage-network. Its face was so round, disc-like, with cilia waving in a perfect wheel around its head. As it rushed them, the mane swayed back behind it, then rebounded forward in slow motion, like a regiment of synchronized swimmers. They scrambled to the ship, feet slipping across the dusted cement of the pool edge -- soft and fine, like sanded soap-stone. She felt one booted foot slip to the side, the joint of her knee twinged, and she tumbled gracelessly into the water. Instantly, the electrical current grasped her whole surface, grinding into her with delicate cactus spines.Long moments passed before Gabriel’s hand grasped the meat of her arm and pulled her upper body over the lip. Her skin and muscles throbbed, but she forced herself out, dust clinging to her wet form like latex paint. She tumbled toward the plane. He had the door open already, and was shouting from just inside, pulling gears and booting the system. The writhing shadow of the creature surged forward as she drew herself up the steps and into her seat, and they rose up and over, expelling a hot burst of steam. Below, the face of the beast stared straight up at them, a grinning white plate against the flesh color of baked earth. The plane sped east until it penetrated the far white void, which spit them out onto the freeway.