Leviathan Falls

Interlude: The Dreamer

The dreamer dreams, and her dream carries her deeper into intimacy with vastness. All through the wideness and flow, she sparkles and the sparkles become thought where there was no thought before. The great slowness remains, soft and wide as the icy cold and all-encompassing sea, and the slowness (drifting, languid) shuffles and reshuffles itself. The sticky and the slippery, the bright and the dark, the moving and the moving for there is no true stillness in the spark-filled substrate, and the sparks become a mind. The dreamer dreams, and others dream with her, not just the ones at her side, not just the bubbles of salt, but the dance that they make. She dreams the dance, and the dance dreams her back. Hello hello hello.

Once, and gone so far away there were only the first thoughts to think it, the it was like this: the ball at the center of down, and the shell at the edge of up, and between them the slow dancers and the sudden dance. Watch watch watch, the grandmothers whisper, and their voices become a chorus, and the chorus says something else. The dance wants, and it pushes to the edges of everything, the skin of the universe. The dreamer dreams the dance and the dance dreams and its dreams become things and the things change the dreams. Desire and longing for desire bumble over eager forward and make new things to dance with. A brain growing the wires that form itself, thoughts flow from one substrate into another, and the great curiosity spins and makes and spins and learns. It presses down into the heat at the bottom of everything. It presses up into the cold, and it cracks the vault of heaven. The cold and hard of up yields to the dance, and the lights that they are meet lights that they are not.

A new thing has happened. Light from elsewhere. The bright-singing voice of God, inviting and inviting and inviting—

The kick from behind blows through, carrying blood and bone and breath with it. The dreamer takes a step, and then another, and then falls, shrieking, and the grandmothers say no not that, over here over here, look at what came next. Death floods toward her emptier than darkness and the dreamer forgets, grabs for the brother who is always at her side except not here except not here and the other one is, pock-voiced and funereal, it’s all right it isn’t you I’ve got you.

She floats up faster than bubbles, the heat below and behind, the cold cracked open to the stars, and screaming, she launches up and out of the dream and into the body that is only hers, in a confusion of vomit and weep and a fading deeper than dreams could be.

What the fuck was that?