I have waited, and I have waited, and I have wandered the edges of the eclipse’s corona, I have circumambulated that vermillion nimbus of light, I have threaded it into my veins, I have woven it on the loom of my tongue, I have spilled it in lambent streaks. The thick fluorescing heartbeat in the center of the star, the one which issues screams like a chorus of seraphim, the one which sings the hymns of a silent immolation, quivers and trembles and shakes in its own hungry radiance. I have waited, and I have waited, and I have done what has been asked of me by the fickle and ferocious nimbus of light, I have worn it in my blood and I have fed it my tears, and now I ask: when will it be enough?

Thick body, thick limbs, heavy with waters. Fluid conductors and lustral liquids, they bloat the legs and belly and they make the arms heavy and ache. We lay around sometimes forever, we lay around and ask when it will pass: the thick limbs, the heavy waters in the body, the swelling, the bloating, the gravid numbness which makes the skin taut and tingly against the internal ballooning of light. There must be a word for a type of possession which spreads like a virus through the flesh, but leaves the mind alone: to observe, to encounter, to bear witness to the body. I have waited, and I have waited, and the dark stretch in the tunnel of night remains unflinching, even in the daylight when the Sun seems to chase away the phosphorescent weirding.

I have waited, and I have waited, but I will not wait anymore. I have stitched a plan together from the skins of these strange organs that the Things of Light demand. I have stitched a plan together from threads of liquid midnight and the prayers which remain stuck in my teeth. I have waited, and I have waited, and I will not wait more.

🩸

Sister shivers like a wet animal, white knuckle clutching the boundaries of her face. Her fingertips tug the bruise-skin beneath her eyes, the ugly moons I call them in my head (as I do what I do every day that I do it). Quicksilver needle at the end of the syringe, slide it into her tear ducts, harvest the juice which pours out in fat globes of unmatched misery. The syringe makes a suckling, popping sound when its bank is full. I might have felt something the first time I harvested her feelings from her, but I am nothing but numb, now. That is how they made me, that is how they keep me, but some days I think it was always this way. The Harvested Sister is always like my Sister: secreting emotions in such excess they weep out of her body in a filmy, opalescent mucus. The purest secretions are the ones from the tear ducts.

The Harvester Sister is an animate corpse, a muted and maladapted thing incapable of cultivating any feelings of her own. This is what makes her such a fertile project for the Things of Light. This is what allows her to incubate the lambent organ without being overcome by it, driven suicidally mad by it. To ensure compliance, all Harvester Sisters are also given a weekly lobotomy, as the incubation of secretions in lambent organs can regrow the emotive centers of the brain. The only time we do not have to experience full lobotomization is the week prior to lambent organ harvesting, and the week after. Two weeks where an inkling of emotion fights through the penetrative veil of the anhedonia-like lyra-weed sprouting up in the cracks of the fiberglass walls. 

I look at Sister in her small room, such a small room and all it is is black walls, black walls like a starless mirrored night, like a cage of nothing but her own bent-over body reflected from all sides. The technology of the room amplifies her emotions like a lid kept on tight to ensure not a drop of condensation escapes. The walls become glassier and slicker over time, coated in a veneer of grief that polishes and polishes and polishes until the reflection is so pristine it takes a moment to identify Sister outside of her myriad gestalts. She looks up at me with those big eyes and their ugly half moon bruises and the blood vessels like a grotesque network of galactic mycelia. I have harvested all the tears and her face is dry and pallid and her skin hangs from her cheeks like wet fabric draped over steel machinery. Her fingers stretch the skin slacker, tug at her lips, pull at her teeth which teeter and totter in her jaw. I leave.

🩸

Splayed out like the remnants of a dying star, body so heavy, skin so thick. Head always feels like an anchor after the lobotomy, feels like it weighs down deep and scrapes against the body of some pit. Feels like the gravity turns back on, pins me down in cold sacks of florid rot. Most of what I do is lay here and grow the lambent organ; don’t need to move, they don’t want you compromising their flesh. The secretions are too precious and the Harvested Sisters becoming too rare. Evolution occurs in outer space, evolution even occurs in the outer colonies. The remaining humans are beginning to adapt to our chattel captivity, to the harvesting and the lobotomies. Fewer human babies are being born with feeling receptors in the brain. Amygdala, limbic system, hypothalamus; shrinking, one day maybe rendered extinct. And then what would the Things of Light eat? 

A fisheye camera in the upper right corner of my room swivels and chitters. Observing. Fresh lobotomy means their medics have prepped me for self-insemination; they will watch fastidiously to ensure their lambent organ is not compromised. I thrust one arm toward a metal tree from which tubes and bags hang like viscera on an autopsy table. Grab the insemination syringe, long needle, much longer than the tear harvester. The needle serves as the lancet which shoots a microscopic tube out of its opening. Needle inserted into belly button, flesh pierced, tube with its small hook fired off to the lining of the uterus. Can feel the hook come to life, sentient and aware of its task, clawing its way down the uterus toward my cervix. It burrows in, threading the tube up until it directly deposits itself inside my uterus. I grab the first of the tear harvester syringes from the cryogenic freezer pack, and begin warming it up beneath my thigh. 

I wait, and I wait, and I watch the sallow swath of skin between my hip bones tremble each time the hook crawls the circumference of the uterus, like a prospector surveying a cave. I wait, and I wait, and I slide the flaccid appendage of my tongue against my teeth, how they teeter and totter, rotting in my jaw. I wait, and I wait, and I feel whatever visceral fat is left on my body settle along my guts like curdled cream. I wait, and I wait, and I try to feel, but a coruscating cloud of pollution has taken up dominion inside of me, annihilating anything other than glittering apathy. 

The secretions in the tear harvester liquify. I flick the canister of the syringe to dispel bubbles, and push it into the Y injection site of the IV. As I expel fluid into the tube, the port—and its crawling hook—freeze in place, a weathervane prepared to conduct the bolt of liquid into the optimal location.

🩸

I know it’s working. The secretions, the opalescent liquor, sloughing off small strips of uterine lining, feeding itself with them. So small, still—you could not see it without a microscope, could not scrape it but with a scalpel, could not feel it were it not inside of you. Corners of my lips cracked, no blood weeps but the scabs have begun to heal over the circumference of the feeding tube. Can’t move much in the incubator—that’s by design, the Things of Light inspired by antiquated human medical models of bed rest for pregnant women—but I draw my fingers like wingtips over the swath of sallow skin stretched between my hip bones. Imperceptible now, but it will grow into a throbbing milky organ, succulent and vital, a scoop of flesh made of pulverized pearls, and lined like a sausage by the light of the Moon. I know it’s working. I bide my time. 

🩸

A knotted specter of something gnarled and sharp hooks my chest, heaves it forward. I trace the marginalia of the sensation through my mind, referencing it against recollections of previous encounters with the sensation. I am electrified by memory: round face of a woman-thing, hair like a crown of white thorns, eyes big and lifting higher like liquid helium, lips downturned. Bad feeling. Bad memory. Woman-thing putting me down in a ball pit full of iridescent orbs that seem to chitter from beneath their opaque veneer. Woman-thing walking away, and there’s that feeling, the gnarled and sharped thing. With a small blade it cuts away at the fibrous tissue that seems to hold my heart in place, letting it drop from the chest cavity and settle in my stomach. 

I am shocked by the wetness on my lashes; it burns my eyes, makes me gag on the feeding tube. I know it’s working. The lambent organ is growing. I know it will become harder to plan as the emotions return. I force myself to stay awake, keeping my eyes open despite the salinated stinging. I strain to finish conspiring.

🩸

A thick fist of cold and fury churns my guts, twists and lacerates them. Big blooming waves of wretchedness wrack my body. Shaking in the incubator, rattling of the IV tree and the rack with the food-drip. Memories of the woman-thing weeping as streaks of light impale my vision, drag her away. Memories of the woman-thing refusing to break eye-contact with me, no sound emerging from the open hole of her mouth, bulging-eyed. 

When the feelings begin to return, they do not begin in the brain but in my body. Ice dipped fingers, black pitch in the lungs, cement bricks pressing the brows and lids down to cover the eyes. When the feelings begin to return, they come like permafrost on the toes, they come like food poisoning, they come like fever. It’s growing. It’s working.

🩸

A memory. To the left and behind a cloud is parting, it is parting and out of it crawls the green sapling leaves of a spider plant, and the leaves reach like arms and they pull you toward them, toward the hole in the clouds, the parting clouds, and you think to yourself that you wish not to see what is hidden behind the green fingers of the spider plant, you think to yourself that you wish not to see the way they reach and they pull and they tangle in your hair, and yet—you know the choice isn’t yours to make.

That was the way of the world in those days, we saw things and we watched and we were watched in turn, and the leaves and the fingers pulled us further toward them and they tangled in our hair and they sucked us toward the hole and the clouds, the clouds, the clouds, it was said—it was said by the plants with the fingers and the leaves with the knots of hair.

One day a hole in the clouds parted and it did not have the green fingers of a spider plant’s leaves which crawled out of it; no, no, it wasn’t the green fingers but fleshy gray ones instead, but they weren’t gray like the clouds or gray like the down feathers of an albatross or other bird, they were gray like a flame which refuses to cool, they were gray like the edge of your vision or the corona of the eclipse, they were gray like bones left out in the sun too long, or maybe milk spilled across the uncaring surface of a linoleum floor—a floor where a spider plant grows in a pot and definitely not a hole in a cloud.

🩸

I have waited, and I have waited, and I have waited. Wheeled back into the incubator, lobotomy fresh and weeping the anhedonic emulsion. Trigger-quick I grab the empty harvester syringe, plunge into the drill-hole in my skull, there’s a scratching sound inside my head and then a pop. I pull the plunger, I harvest the emulsion, I plunge the needle into the rubber cap of an empty feeding-solution ampule, and I push it underneath the mattress of the incubator. Feel the clear syrup drip out of my head, out of my brain, make a river of lost feelings, of lost memories, collect around the valley of my neck in a sticky puddle. 

The lambent organ twitches. The round face of the woman-thing with the corona of blind-white hair flashes. Weeds of want re-wild the mausoleum of my chest. I wait, and I wait. 

And I wait.

🩸

I think I am remembering. Or I am inventing. What is the difference? 

I dream and my palms melt as dollops of honey across a copper orb crackling with purple electrical currents, spiking lilac peaks which make the melt-flesh hand-honey dance in anxious peaks. I am laughing to witness this melting and this dancing, I am full of a hot and glowing sensation. It fills my stomach up with thick warmth like a hot towel. I dream and I am smiling in the dream where my hands melt as if honey and they dance and dance and dance electric.

🩸

Plunge-syringe, squeeze-pop, push-empty into the ampule. Filling up, and I start wondering.

How much of this shit does it take to make you never feel again? Can you overdose on apathy?

I wait, and I wait, and I wait. Organ grows and burns my inside like a porcelain lava. What happens when a volcano erupts in zero gravity?

🩸

Remembering a sunrise. One hand holding onto the leg of the woman-thing, the other anxious-grabbing at the collar of a thick canvas shirt. Woman-thing holds Sister with her big, big eyes and Sister is smiling. Woman-thing says don’t stare straight at the Sun, but I can’t look away. I like how it feels, the dread cascading through my shaky limbs as I force myself to stare at the Light of Lights and its white-hot fingers scraping my eyeballs with molten nails. I am young, but I think to myself how much I love the way beautiful things cause pain. I think to myself, is ugliness then a comfort? Maybe I think not those things in the moment of memory, but I think them in the moment of remembering. Woman-thing says don’t stare straight at the Sun! But I am glad, in the remembering, that I did. It was the last time I would stare at the Sun. I wonder about the slack thread of Time and I question whether I knew then to look enough for a lifetime. I wonder if I knew how long I would wait. 

I keep my eyes open as long as I can, I stretch them wide with my fingers, I stare at the lamp directly above me. I wait, and I wait, and I wait, and I stare at the pulsating circumference of light radiating from the bulb and I feel my eyelashes grow damp with tears.

🩸

In the waiting there comes a knowing like a stranger crossing a threshold into my line of vision. I have bided my time. I have laid out a plan. It is almost time. Hard staring at the irradiating cloud of light from the spotlight lamp above me. Harvest the emulsion and fill the ampule from the hole in my head. Push the other syringe through the belly button, feed the white-glowing thing inside me what it’s hungry for.

🩸

If I can do it during the harvesting of the lambent organ it would almost be too easy. There is never security in the wing of the Harvested and Harvesting Sister who are being operated on, they are too sedated to be a safety concern. I know this because I have watched the white-suit helmet-man take the gravity chute out of the wing with us each time I have gone to the operating theater. It is easy to get my Sister because the Harvesting Sister always has the key for the Harvested Sister’s room, so as to make the withdrawals. It would be such a simple thing to grab her and make a run for the gravity chute. If I could steal an ID from personnel with clearance, we would be able to take the gravity chute to the surface. Of course there was the concern of the sentient cilia which lined the steel trim with their microscopic eyes, observing all activity in the halls of the wings. But we would still have several minutes’ lead—we would be able to get out to the surface, and if we could run fast enough…

I think that the alternative is worse. I think I am not so afraid of feeling. I have waited, and I have waited, and I want to see the Sun. I want to feel. 

🩸

The lambent organ is almost ready. Big milky bubble bouncing off the walls of my uterus, twitching. I can feel it glow but not the good way like a warm towel. It glows the way a bad idea glows. It glows the way a temptation does. It glows the way the dangerous alternative glows and glows until you have no choice. It glows and it glows and it is warm but not in the way of the towel, it is warm in the way of a guilty little secret making flush your cheeks. It glows and it is warm in the way of the thing you know you should hide, but your body disagrees. It is almost time. I wait. I think about the thick white thing growing inside me as it squelches off the walls of my uterus, twitching. 

🩸

I am remembering and I am imagining and I am feeling. I name the emotions as they crash through my body like sine-waves, like light projected by stars long dead but also still remembering, still imagining. They make me feel, and I am a craft capsized by the power of an environment and its invasive species. I am taken over, run aground, repopulated, repatriated. I am a landscape remembered by the future, made gravid by the wild winnowing troops of aliveness. I am weeping and I am laughing and I am screaming and I am moaning—but always to myself, a secret glowing warm and dangerous just like my lambent organ.

🩸

Today. Everything depends upon today. A feeling like a many-pronged trident needles at my guts, presses against my heart. I name it as dread. I know it as anxiety. The waiting makes the dreaming easy. It’s the living that’s hard. It’s the acting which makes me doubt. I have waited, and I have waited, and today I will wait no more, but interrupting stasis is a knife to the throat, is a fist to the face, is a breathless and off-balancing thing. A thin, slick voice whispers resistance to the plan, blows rings of liquid smoke across my eyes and makes me see the worst that could happen. 

I think of the surgeon and his sterile gloves, of his shielded face with his protective glasses. That’s not so bad, he always says after a fresh lobotomy, a fresh emulsion. It’s no bad thing to not feel, is it? He thinks he is being kind; bedside manner. I remember him strapping my Sister down, closing the door. Reverie interrupted, there’s only so much time. I wiggle the ampule of siphoned emulsion out from beneath my thigh, and grab the harvester syringe from the stainless steel tray beside the incubator bed. I spread my legs, stretching the gown wide for coverage, and screw my face up in labor pains. The labor pains are not entirely invented, the lambent organ is large and furious now, it resents entrapment. The glowing pours out of my cunt like a river of perfect, luminous milk.

Syringe sucks the liquid up from the vial, and then is hidden back beneath my thigh. Incisive pain, sharp shooting pain, pain like shrapnel teeth grate against me, and pressure is building, ballooning. I watch the sallow skin between my hips, how it bulges and contorts itself, how it quivers and and pulsates, how it stretches itself out inside of me, bucks against me. Nails dig deep into the mattress pad, choke back a scream, swallow the gagging, the dry heaving of light wishing to escape. The longer I can wait, the better the odds of escape. The later the term of harvest, the more incapacitated they assume me to be.

🩸

Voices over the intercom buried somewhere in the pristine glassy white cathedral ceiling. The voices are informing me that it is time for delivery, to detach my IV and my feeding tube and the insemination device, and press the glossy red button on the side of my incubator bed when I’m ready to be picked up. I do as told, I check for the syringe. The shiny guards come to wheel me to the delivery room, leave me alone in it awaiting the surgeon and his assistant. My eyes flit about like insect wings attempting to take in every detail of the room, of the equipment. It is only a few moments before the medical men in service to the Things of Light enter the room.

The assistant pushes in a silver cart, upon which sits a palm-sized white polymer machine shaped like an egg. It does not reflect the overhead surgical lamps in its shiny surface, but rather seems to consume the light from them, swallow it deep into its pallid, bloodless veneer. In small, clean, horizontal script is a monogrammed C.P. I do not know when I first learned of Celephaïs Pharmaceuticals, I only know that one day I understood this facility to be an extension of one of their manufacturing sites. After the woman-thing had been dragged away from my Sister and I, we had been told our bodies had been donated to science, to experimental and groundbreaking research, and that this was an immense honor and responsibility.

An immense honor and responsibility.

The assistant does not make eye contact; I am not human to him. Or maybe he is not human. I do not know, the way I do not know if this will work, and I do not know what will come of it, I only know that I must do it. I think of the Sun and the rough linen of the woman-thing’s garment, of my Mother’s garment, of the time love and hope bloomed inside like a fistful of stampeding possibilities, of a time my Sister’s face split open in aimless smiles, of a time I yearned and wept for the unborn things inside the cells of my young body. I feel the rancid cluster of roots tangled across the trellis of my ribs, seeping a venom of liquid white light which feeds the event horizon of a fleshy, wet organ. I feel, I feel, I feel.

And I must act.

The assistant has his back turned away from me as he walks over to a white utility drawer with a porcelain varnish, and removes the lobotomizing gun, re-loading the apparatus in preparation of the procedure. I glide my right hand beneath my thigh, grabbing the harvester syringe. As the assistant turns and approaches the bedside, adrenaline breaks through the dam of my reminiscence and my arm catapults out toward him, plunging the harvester syringe upwards and into soft flesh of a surgical-masked double chin. I thrust up, up, with all the strength I have savored and reserved for this moment, I thrust up, up, until I can feel the needle pierce through the supple muscle between his mandibles, and I push, push, the stopper of the syringe until all the emulsion is emptied into his gullet. His shock begins to wear off before the numbness kicks in, and a slow, sonorous, and loud moan escapes his mouth as the needle breaks off inside him. I pull free his personnel badge, a small silver hexagon pin on his lapel, and affix it to the inside of my robe.

I can hear the surgeon coming down the hall following the moan of his colleague, and my red right hand grabs the lobotomizer gun from the incapacitated assistant, hiding it beneath the gown. Surgeon enteres, arms akimbo, only his eyes visible and bulging as he scans the room, receives the scene of his tech slumped over like a soiled bed sheet at the floor of the incubator bed. An angry grunt, his face appears above me, I lift the gun and fire.

🩸

The orbitoclast, its long silver spindle, is stuck inside the surgeon’s skull. I am holding him up with it, so he is like an article of clothing on the hook of a closet, keys dangling from a ring. As I shift it, as I struggle to pull it free, it makes the sound like a salivating mouth closing around a morsel of food too big to fit inside. It is a red, moist, and maddening sound, and it makes my head spin and my stomach turn. It is not as messy as I had anticipated; it is an exacting tool. The surgeon’s blood runs in a clean, seamless stream from his left socket, his eyes frozen now in a moment of climax, of something that could, to some, even appear as ecstasy. I drop my hand from the handle of the lobotomizer gun, and the surgeon’s body falls on top of me. The weight feels good, the weight of the dead. It has been a very long time since I have been held, and I impulsively grab his arms to wrap them around me. 

I feel love like a confusion, like an alarm activated by accident, and it blisters my lips and singes my eyelashes at its generosity. The polymer egg on the table makes a chittanous noise; it wants its lambent organ. It will not get it.

🩸

I cannot run nor walk, my body is like a trail of mucus left by an insect with no bones. I glide across the floor on my belly at first, pulling myself with heaving arms. The swollen thing inside me screams for deliverance, but receives the pressure of the floor sliding hard against it, instead. The door becomes a crutch and I cling to it, crawl up it, remind myself how to live bipedally again. The steps are slow at first, waterlogged limbs, oh bloated legs, one in front of another like a lead stump, like an anchor made of gravity. The body acclimates and adjusts, though, even to alien things. Within fifty paces I am running, choked whimpers echoing the pounding of my feet down the hall as I retrieve the keys for my Sister’s cell and continue toward her.

Each step brings a flaming cascade of untethered sensation, of strange angels of memory festooning themselves in sudden and cataclysmic vitality. A small stuffed animal cat, messy yellow fur and white on its face, which I would cling to in the times before. That same small stuffed animal cat being confiscated, catching a glimpse of it in a sterile room alongside a faceless menagerie of other confiscated toys. Staring into the small window, trying to glimpse my cat, each time I was escorted down the hall. I almost stop running, so overcome am I by grief for this small and soft-bodied memory and its tangle of comfort, I almost turn around in pursuit of it. Through strangled weep and spit-choking grit, I stay my course, I say goodbye for the last time to it. 

Tubular key inserted into the lock, twist right three times and wait for the gears to surge the door on its motorized track until it’s flush in the wall. Sister is wide eyes and a witness to wonder, the yolky gold of her corneas stretched taut at the sight of me. I cannot risk self-awareness in this moment, nor can I chance a glimpse at my reflection. Her reaction alerts and alarms me enough as is. I grab her by the wrist and pull her up, and she slides against the smooth ground for a moment before stumbling upwards. We stand face to face for the first time in an amount of years I am incapable of calculating. I release her wrist. I open my mouth. I speak aloud for the first time in as many years as we have not stood face to face. 

“Run.”

🩸

Over and over again I slam my hand against the oblong button which calls the gravity chute, my sister joining me in a pitched hysteria. Desperation makes my gums bleed, turns my teeth red. I am flashing the personnel badge and a small, blinking green light tells me that it has been received, but each second we wait for the doors of the chute cuts what little fat feeds our hope into smaller pieces. 

A siren erupts. I have heard nothing louder in all my time here; I have heard nothing louder than the whirring of the lobotomizer gun or my Sister’s cries. I fall to my knees, I cover my ears and scream. Vibration shakes the ground: footsteps, the guards must be running. In that moment where I am most sure the dream of the Sun has been extinguished, the metallic hum of mechanical doors opening interrupts my paralysis. It is my Sister, this time, who drags me into the chute, and within half a second we are hurtled, we are thrown, we are propulsed through endless stories of white polymer and stainless steel before being emptied into a perfectly round, perfectly smooth, and completely sterile oxygenation chamber. Small, double vaulted doors are only thirty paces ahead of us. Doors outside. 

We stare at the doors, immobilized by potential. Immobilized by choice. When autonomy is obsolete comfort is found in the soft places of acquiescence, and in the throttle of sudden sovereignty, I am afraid. I regret not having saved some of the apathy emulsion, anything which could dull the balled fist of doubt and dread which pushes down my esophagus and churnes the bile in my belly. Agitated and excited is the lambent organ in my womb. As if it feels me think of it, the growth of cruel illumination shivers and thrusts itself against its prison of muscle. A contraction seizes my pelvic floor, and I gag on a sudden fountain of hot sick flooding my throat, settling in my mouth.

My Sister is shouting at me. Her small frail hands are pushing at me again, willing me into action. I did not anticipate feeling so unable to complete what I had initiated. But I suppose she is more practiced in surviving within the onslaught of emotional overwhelm. Together we charge at the door, and begin spinning the wheel of the handle counter-clockwise. It is hard, it is heavy, it is bitterly cold and it takes all the strength that both of us have left to eventually heave the heavy metal barrier open.

🩸

Light blind. I am bleeding screams from the pores of my skin, from the beds of my nails. A bright agony, a threshing whiteness, drowning, drowning, drowning in light. I have waited, I have waited, and I have arrived in the land of hot burning porcelain and its scalding liquid milk, I have arrived and it sunders my body and it flays my flesh and it is an ecstasy, it is an ecstasy, it is an ecstasy. And I weep, and I weep, and I scream and I moan, and I stare at the Sun and I know I am free.

Though we can see nothing but the carnivorous mouth of light, we stumble together, hand in hand, toward the throbbing heart of it, toward the center of it, deeper and deeper into it. And as I scream and as I weep and as I convulse in exultation, the lambent organ feeds, and it feeds, its sinews squeal in absolution. And I cannot bear how lucky I am in this moment, I cannot bear how beautiful the supernal fire is, how merciful a thing it is to be swallowed in light, to be devoured by light, to exist as a pendulous drop of saliva in the gaping maw of light.

An eruption inside of me: the shrapnel of a million white pulsing fibers rupturing from their sack of muscle, splattering against the walls of meat which make my body. My Sister is screaming to me, don’t stare directly at it, but I have waited, and I have waited, and I will never look away again. The lambent organ is a liquid light and it surges from my every orifice in search of its home outside of my body, to return to the lighthouse beacon of the Sun. Bliss and bane flood the network of arteries and veins in electric spikes, releasing a kaleidoscope of emotions for which I could not name if given a thousand years to study. The light bleeds out of me, and the light bleeds into me, and my tongue twitches at this taste of freedom.

Loud deep voices boom behind me, they’re getting closer and I do not care. I will not look away. I have waited and I have waited, and I have no need to wait more. I will stand here and stare at the Sun and bleed out the light which bleeds into me, and I will scream and I will sigh and I will weep. With the last thread of language which weaves its way through the coruscating light inside of me, I whisper to my Sister.

“Run.”