1. Medea Englunder
The universe yawned. And the world turned.
A heathen in the deepest swell of heathenism, the greatest ocean swirl of wickedness, a sinner. Or rather a shadow of sinner, a shade of a sin, because nothing is ever complete.
Alive by arms and legs and limbs and eyes and ears.
Of sights and sounds. And not much else.
It is bright out today. That is Varanasi sunshine curled up thick in the tender green leaf cups today, hanging uneasy, rickety rickety in the breeze, threatening to topple and spill. Spill out all
the wonderful new light and deluge the city streets and ruin the concrete and spoil all the steel. Have mercy. Medea can sense the old rot, the sweet smell of going to divinity, going to history, and
fast. Right down the drain. Nothing but a stain. Burning sunlight.
Warm out today. One of the first really warm days of early spring. And the streets are crowded. Medea can barely thread her way through, past the gawkers and the reborn, the hypocrites who hid themselves away for months now, evil curses on their lips, fair weather fans of nature. Medea hates the insincerity the most. She can feel the warm air on the tops of her ears, her hair short, over her ears and off her neck. She is almost too hot in her bulky army surplus jacket. But it is thin, olive drab, worn through. A cigarette hanging out of her lips like the end of the world.
Because it is the end of the world, almost always the end. She is continually remaking it all back up in her mind. Taking whatever sense data reality chooses to throw her way and cobbling together a whole goddamn universe. And it is just so much work to even be a sentient being. Praise the grasses and envy the trees, all soft and aflutter in the breeze. Ease.
5A new world every morning.
A new world every blink.
Like Sin, the old Sumerian mad moonboatsmen, cruising, oaring his way down the midnight sky, all the stars curling up and dropping away in his wake. Amen. Peeling the wallpaper and chipping the paint. Tearing away the roof beams and facades.
And what can be repaired is repaired by morning and what can’t, isn’t, and is left behind as scraps to those blind Ganeshas, the beggar children, whomever eats time, drinks blood, dust motes, lives like a lion or some vagrant hidden huddled around any and every corner and bend. Carry us home, Ganga. This terrible city.
Destination.
She reached the café before she had time barely enough to rerealize her new reality.
Goddamned sorcery.
It was going to be a rough morning.
Excerpt from Medea’s Videos by Jesse S. Mitchell
