Josie uses her key to let herself and her sister Amy into Cora’s apartment. She walks in first, then turns to see Amy standing in the doorway, hand braced against the doorframe. Josie says, impatiently, “Come on.” Finally, Amy enters this apartment their mother lived in for three years, moving here after she injured her knee and at last accepted that it made no sense for an older woman to be living in a house with two sets of stairs. But Amy has never seen it, because she’s so stubborn and unforgiving. Watching her older sister walk slowly into the apartment reminds Josie, painfully, of their mother. After she got sick Cora slowed down too, as if just moving her body hurt.Josie opens the window over the kitchen sink. It’s stuffy, the air stale. The apartment has that unlived-in feeling of coming home after a trip. Cora had been in the hospital for twelve days prior to dying, during which Josie came here only once, to pick up her alpaca shawl and pairs of cozy socks. But it’s very neat. There are three plates and a coffee mug drying in the dish rack. Cora never used her dishwasher—“What’s the point?” she’d say. “It’s just me.”. Now Josie puts the plates and the coffee mug in the cabinet. It’s not a big apartment, all one long floor with the bathroom and the bedroom in the back. Nonetheless it’s pretty. Their mother has great taste.Had. Watching Amy look around, Josie wonders what Amy will want, will claim. The painting over the decorative fireplace is quite valuable, for instance. Amy must remember that painting; their mother bought it years ago. It was inspired by a photograph of a girl sitting in a cornfield with her legs bent behind her. The girl in the photograph was crippled, couldn’t walk, though you can’t tell that from the photograph, or from the painting. At any rate, it’s worth money. There are other things in the apartment worth money. Josie wonders whether Amy is assessing these items—the artwork, the knickknacks on the end table, a ceramic pear, a Murano blown-glass vase—and calculating their value. She studies Amy, in her cowl-neck cashmere sweater. Amy, like Cora, values material objects. Earth signs, both of them. Josie feels her lips tighten and thin into a grimace. Amy pauses by the framed photograph of the three of them on the end table, taken that day they went to Point Reyes and ate three dozen oysters—so many oysters! It’s the one photograph of Amy in the living room, though Josie knows there’s another one by Cora’s bedside table, taken after Amy’s graduation from Smith. The living room photo flatters Amy more than Josie, who is squinting. They used to argue about photos. “Delete that one! I have a double chin!” Watching Amy, Josie hopes she feels bad. The heat of the feeling surprises her, since just yesterday she was telling her friend Bridget “My relationship with Mom was good—well, Mom was complicated, but mostly good. I’m worried that Amy will take her passing much harder than me, because they were estranged.” But now, she wants Amy to feel shitty. To confront her rigidity and selfishness. To brim with impossible regrets.How hard could it have been to visit Cora in the hospital? To make peace? Every time Josie visited her, she saw her mother turn to the door, see her, and a flash of disappointment would slip over her face. Because of course Cora would have hoped that the silver lining of dying is that Amy would want to see her. “Mom is dying.” Josie told Amy that, two weeks ago. The only time Amy had come up in conversation was towards the end, when Josie was holding her mother’s bony hand and Cora looked into her eyes and said, “Tell her—” She never completed the sentence, and after waiting a minute, Josie said, “I will, Mom.” And she will. Someday. At some point Amy might ask, “Did Mom give you any message for me?” and Josie will tell her, because Josie knows perfectly well what Cora meant to say, even if she never in fact said “Amy” or completed her own thought. But Amy will have to ask! She will have to fucking ask.Josie watches Amy pause in front of the loveseat and coffee table—that’s where their mother used to sit and watch TV, her Brit Box detective shows, and do her needlepoint. Her sewing basket is on the coffee table, as always. Amy bends, fishes inside of it, and grabs Cora’s embroidery scissors. She always bought the same kind of scissors, tiny ones shaped like a stork, the upturned beak the blades. The loops you stuck your fingers through were the legs. “I want these,” Amy says, looking at Josie. How they loved those scissors when they were little girls! They always wanted to play with them, to cut out their paper dolls and snowflakes. “They are not a toy,” Cora would say, sternly. Also: “Be careful!” Though Josie understands that she probably meant be careful not to cut yourself, not what she’d assumed then—be careful not to damage my scissors. The sisters regard each other. The scissors are lovely, but not valuable. They probably cost less than forty dollars. Amy isn’t asking permission, Josie thinks. She isn’t saying “May I have these?” She gives permission anyway, as if the scissors are hers to dispense. “Take them,” says Josie, putting peculiar emphasis on the verb.
On the Fourth of July the grandmother took Vase to the top of the warehouse where a rickety carriage of iron stairs led to the roof. The sky was as orange as a snake’s belly and smelled of powder and dust and oil. They sat without speaking watching the brilliant detonations which Vase had never seen before just as she had never seen the full horizon of sky over Los Angeles and when the grandmother felt tired Vase was sorry to have to leave the sight so soon. Vase had only been with the grandmother for a couple months at that point. The grandmother had taught her how to garden and read and she was now learning new words from the library of old paperbacks printed on groundwood paper that were stacked in piles over much of the warehouse. While Vase did this the grandmother worked in her private quarters on humming machines doing business for the municipal government. Then in the evening the grandmother would cook herself a stew using the root vegetables Vase had harvested and sit sipping at her table while Vase stewed in the black bath that bubbled in a metal basin which had been built into the center of the kitchen. Then the grandmother would say good night and leave Vase there in the dark until morning.There were no guests. The grandmother made short calls and sent messages through her computer about her work and men in black vans would once in a while knock on the heavy front door to drop off boxes of essential equipment and supplies. When this happened the grandmother would tell Vase to keep to the agriculture room or one of the other out of sight parts of the warehouse before unbolting the latches but the men never stayed anyway. By fall the grandmother began to let Vase ask her lots of questions because neither of them had anyone else to really talk to. She tried to answer in as many words as possible so Vase would learn how to be a conversationalist although she kept professional and revealed as few truths as she could.That winter the grandmother received an especially long phone call and told Vase that she had to leave for the night or possibly two to deal with some pressing matters for the mayor. She packed a briefcase with folders and hard drives and set the black bath to boil and left Vase in the dark locking the door to the warehouse behind her from the outside. The car that arrived for her took her north to City Hall on a circuitous route that was without incident but when the driver started it again in the morning to return the grandmother to her warehouse they were both instantly killed by the detonation of an explosive device that someone had wired to the ignition switch.Vase stayed in the black bath for a long time. Her hair and skin became black and her teeth became black and her eyes became black too. The mayor tried sending some of her staff to the warehouse to retrieve what the grandmother had been working on there but the city broke into real disarray and none of them made it. The lights had been left on in the agriculture room and the vegetable garden overgrew and vines and bunches of foliage took root in the decomposing books and doves and chickens made their way in through one of the windows after it was knocked out by debris from one of the neighboring buildings which had only been reinforced for earthquakes. The sky was red and black then but Vase did not see this.After the bombings stopped boys began to make their way through Los Angeles in search of sustenance and items of value to sell secondhand. One of them entered the grandmother’s warehouse with a crowbar through the door in the roof and was surprised when he found a bubbling vat of what looked like oil with an oil-colored girl asleep in the middle of it. He thought she was very beautiful and took a photograph with his phone and when she remained unresponsive to his camera flash he touched her to see if she would wake. Her skin made his hands itch and smell like copper and he tasted copper in his mouth too. When Vase stood up they were both startled. Vase tried to talk to him after waiting in the dark for a while but by then he was the one who did not move no matter what words she spoke to him. She heard the door swinging upstairs and went to the roof and watched the sun set in the green sky over the far-off encampments of Santa Monica.By that next Fourth of July the rains had really picked up and so had life in the city. Inside the squash and tomatoes rotted into stinking beds of seed. The birds which had survived began to move out of the warehouse and traffic could be heard again on some of the streets in the distance. No one wanted to set off fireworks anymore but the air was so thick that people could use colored spotlights to create patterns in the raindrops and chalk particles in the sky. Vase sat silently on the roof and watched a blue and magenta spiral burn through the atmosphere above City Hall and saw shapes like silver serpents move eastward over the Hollywood Hills and into the long desert where Las Vegas had been. She did not understand that the grandmother would never come back home.The rain covered her completely. Her skin became translucent and she felt warm and cold at the same time. She wondered what the word was to describe this feeling but when she asked the last of the doves it answered with a cruel platitude that had nothing to do with her question at all and soon she was all alone again.
Sienna Liu’s Specimen (Split/Lip Press, 2025) seeks to articulate the ineffable facets of desire. A fragmentary and lyrical hindsight finds lovers in an entanglement as fragile as it is seemingly unwise. Not only an interrogation of memoir, of the compulsion to write other people onto the page, but a probing commentary on the price and rewards of setting out on such a task. When we look back, what do we ask of those who reach out in memory? I spoke to the author about this plaintive and dissecting book.Rebecca Gransden: When did you set out upon writing Specimen? What length of time had elapsed between when the events of the book took place and putting them down on the page?Sienna Liu: I started writing Specimen in February 2023, about ten years after the events in the book took place.RG: I met someone at a party; something about him reminded me of E. I hadn’t thought about E. for a very long time. Too long, so that when I saw this faint replica, it felt as if a complete stranger had caught up with me on a street and started to tell me a secret about myself. We see echoes of others in people. Were there echoes that brought about your decision to write the book? What made you decide to write about this time and these events?SL: Exactly! It happened just like I described—I was at a party one day in February 2023, and met someone there who reminded me of E., a lot. I do tend to find echoes of others in people, but up till then I had not really encountered a true doppelgänger of E., who I had for the longest time thought to be one of a kind. I’ve also thought about writing about E. so many times but was never able to start. But finally meeting someone who was that reminiscent of E. felt like a writing prompt: now, go write. I left that party and started writing the first vignette as soon as I got home.RG: How did you decide upon the title for the book?SL: I can’t remember the precise moment, but at some point I realized I used / would use the word specimen in the book a few times, in different contexts with different meanings (“a specimen of human folly” / butterfly specimens). It seemed to be a great title for this project because a specimen is a thing that is artificially frozen in time (a recollection), and a singularity that also generalizes (which calls for an examination).RG: A theme in the book that stands out to me is that of the gulf between what we project and what is understood, what we transmit and receive, the gaps we leave, both consciously and unconsciously. Are there gaps to be found in what you intended for the book and how it turned out?SL: That’s such an acute observation, and an interesting question! Rather than gaps, to me the writing of the book shows how much perspectives can shift (i.e. how we can learn to acquire different eyes, how we can pick up a loving gaze). I had wanted the book to be on the colder side, and thought that was how it was executed, until very recently I realized how heartfelt it actually is. One of my best friends noticed that too: he read an early draft of this manuscript and told me it hurts because of its sharpness. Two years later, he read it again and told me this time it hurts because of its tenderness. I did not think I intended that tenderness, but it somehow came out in the writing.RG: How do you invoke a sense of place. To what extent does place feed into the direction of the book?SL: Places in this book are the center stage for disappearances (or absences). (“I was never there. Because he was never there. That city was forever defined by his absence.”) The book was organized into four parts, and each part, originally, had a title that was the name of a city. The whole thing was supposed to feel like a chase—a futile pursuit. A chase around the globe for a person or a phantom that was forever unattainable. She looked around and noticed things only because he wasn’t there. He wasn’t there—and that enabled her to live, only she didn’t know it at the time.RG:I often thought about the fact that he introduced himself to me in symbols (the Tarot cards, the music he chose to play, the Yuxi (玉溪) he smoked, the Bombay Sapphire he drank, as if it could only be this way). Literary and mythological vignettes. Symbols, fragments. Digestible bite-sized illusions. He recognized this too. Later on he said, “I was too broken when I first met you.” The book’s relationship to symbols is multifaceted, at once divining and obscuring, especially in relation to the attempt at knowing another person. What was your approach to the symbolic for Specimen?SL: It’s interesting—when you say “the symbolic” I think of the Symbolic of Jacques Lacan, the order of language and laws. According to Lacan, the symbolic is made possible because of our acceptance of the Name-of-the-Father, those laws that control both our desires and the rules of communication. In other words, the symbolic is both enabling and limiting. In Specimen, too, though it’s not quite the same thing, the symbols that float about both enable interpretation and limit imagination—they usurp the image of the other person, but their existence also enables the desire in the first place.RG: A dominant theme of the book is that of time. Specimen explores the limits of looking back on events from a distance, and poses questions on what stays with us, what part of the act of recollection can be trusted. At the conceptual stage, did this theme impact your decision on how to approach form and style for the book?SL: Definitely—it’s a curious (deeply melancholic) position to be writing about a version of oneself that is too distant to be completely legible. In an earlier draft of the book I discussed this dilemma more expressly: There’s nothing more alienating than standing face to face with your former self. That absolute distance—any exchange is doomed to be one-way. That’s why the “I” I’m using now is entirely fictional, and reading this lifeless record is the same thing as mourning, because those two people who had been talking to each other incessantly—and their incessant oscillations and fears and little defeats in life—no longer exist.RG: How do you view Specimen’s relationship to both memoir and fiction? Do you draw a firm line between reportage and narrative, or do boundaries blur? What is your approach to the tensions between these elements?SL: I’m glad you asked this question, because for a while I wasn’t sure whether Specimen was a novella or a short memoir. I didn’t quite decide which one until very late in the process, but to me that distinction didn’t matter as much. It had always been my goal to only speak my personal truth, to do my best to reconstruct and interrogate that part of my history, and to do all of that with full sincerity. In the end I chose to call it non-fiction, but it could very well have been labelled a novella. RG: Do you keep a journal, use notebooks? If so, has this practice impacted Specimen?SL: I kept a handwritten journal at various points in my life, but never did it consistently—and I lost most of those hand-written records after moving countries several times in the past decade. I do keep a lot of notes on my iPhone and still have them to this day. When I was writing Specimen, I mostly looked through those digital notes and text messages and chats on other instant messaging platforms, which helped me reconstruct the timeline and more importantly, what I was feeling back then. In that sense Specimen is a book by and for the first generation, I think, who recorded their youth through digital means.RG: I thought about this thing I once read somewhere: a writer is trying to write about an amorous affair in her youth. She could only do it in fragments and vignettes because she perceives no continuity in that passion. She writes down scenes, dialogues, traces of a memory, on index cards. She puts those cards into drawers, into various books as bookmarks. Years later, after moving and rearranging things and getting rid of things, she realizes all the cards have disappeared or disintegrated. What’s more, she no longer retains one single line from that great passion. What place does passion have in the book?SL: It very much is the book! I think I was only able to write it because of how blazing, gazing it all felt—how violent, almost, as it occurred, that obscured a lot of other things. I once had a conversation with Marie Darrieussecq about passion and love, and she said, “Love is common, trivial, ‘small’, not huge nor scary, love is on a day to day basis, love is regular when passion is intense and deadly. Love helps you to live, passion prevents you from living.” And I could not have put it better. Passion prevents you from living, but it often enables your writing.RG: Several dreams are recounted in the book. Do you dream about Specimen? SL: Dreams mean a lot to me. I tend to have vivid but mythical dreams that have no basis in reality (or so it seems to me). I do keep a log of them that I call my “dream log”—might become a book one day. I don’t dream about Specimen in any literal sense, but the book lives in a kind of dreamscape for me. Writing it felt like navigating a landscape where memory, desire, and uncertainty blur together—much like a dream. RG:I was never there. For instance, I would be making dinner with Nathalie, and she would ask me about my day. “Pas mal,” I said. There was nothing more I could add. In my philosophy class, I could faithfully transcribe everything on time and eternity and the essence of things, but back into the small kitchen in the fifteenth arrondissement, back to the day-to-day, I couldn’t speak a word about how I really felt about anything. A sense of melancholy detachment hangs over the book. Do you consider Specimen as capturing a particularly modern malaise?SL: Yes, I think so, not in the sense of diagnosing a generation, but in inhabiting a kind of quiet, persistent dislocation. It’s the feeling of being “at once myself and not myself.” The body is present, the gestures habitual, but the self is elsewhere, numbed or abstracted by the unsayable. We live in a time where we are inundated with language—surplus language, even—and yet the ability to translate ourselves to others often slips away from us. In a way the melancholy isn’t personal or generational; it’s structural—baked into how we live, how we love, how we try and often fail to connect.RG:A few weeks later I saw a painting at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, a painting by Edvard Munch called “Two Human Beings: The Lonely Ones.” A man and a woman had their back to us. The woman had long blonde hair. She wore a luminous white dress. The man was in a dark suit, a step behind the woman, with one of his legs stretching towards her, as if he were hesitating whether he should take that step. Something about this image of frozen uncertainty made me think of E., and about what is ever possible between two human beings, especially the lonely ones. I thought about us sitting on the floor of his room facing a big loaf of country bread as hard as rock, imitating the silence of the gods, and how I had felt that finally, I was beginning to know him. Another few years later, I saw this exhibition again in New York. This time I just felt sad. Edvard Munch’s Two Human Beings. The Lonely Ones (1894) features on the cover, and is mentioned in the book itself. How did you decide to use this as the cover image?SL: When I first saw that Munch painting in Paris (around the time when E. first broke my heart), I was struck by the space between the figures: it was not dramatic, not hostile, just… irresolvable. They’re close enough to touch, and yet they don’t. That distance—tender, painful, suspended—was exactly how it had felt with E. and how it had felt, writing Specimen. The painting suggests a kind of companionship shaped by silence, by what is withheld rather than expressed. It also evokes the strangeness of time: how people can drift through years beside each other and still remain, in some essential way, unknown. The image holds a tension I wanted the reader to feel before reading a single word.RG:Specimen is littered with references to literature, the use of excerpts, mention of works of art. What writers or artists, if any, do you consider as an influence? Are there works with an affinity to Specimen?SL: Around the time I was writing Specimen I was obsessed with Annie Ernaux (aren’t we all), so I definitely see the influences of, say, Simple Passion, or, A Girl’s Story. I thought about Natalia Ginzburg’s work a lot too. And I have completely forgotten about it until now, but around the time I finished Specimen, a friend of mine recommended Maggie Nelson’s Bluets to me, and I had said to him, this really reminds me of something I’ve been working on! RG: I found Specimen to be a form of spiritual and psychological archaeology, searching for applied meaning in fragments. Do you continue to analyse the book in retrospect? SL: That’s a beautiful question, and it touches on something essential about how Specimen was written. I did interpret the material closely as I was writing. The process was reflective, even analytical at times, but once the book was finished, I didn’t feel the need to keep revisiting it. I don’t return to it to extract further meaning. I trust what it became in the moment of making. Now, I’m more interested in how others read it. RG: A consistent theme is that of how much life is driven by miscommunications, how the quest for connection is at once imbued with the potentially impossible, absurd and joyful. Do you view the book as an act of connection? Has the book changed you?SL: Yes, I do think the book is, in some way, an act of connection, but maybe a paradoxical one. So much of Specimen is about the near-miss: people circling each other, reaching, misunderstanding, saying almost but not quite what they mean. I wanted to write into that space of near-miss, not to resolve it, but to give it form. So while the book acknowledges how difficult and often absurd real connection can be, the writing itself was a way of trying, of saying: this is how it felt, even if I couldn’t really say it in the moment. Whether that counts as connection or just the desire for it, I’m not sure, but the gesture matters to me.RG:Specimen is released by Split/Lip Press. What attracted you to work with them and how have you found that process?SL: I love independent presses and Split/Lip Press has always been one of my favorites. Last year, when I saw they were looking for non-fiction manuscripts, I submitted Specimen and that’s how it all began. And I couldn’t have found a better home for it. The whole team showed so much love and care and true understanding during the entire process of editing / designing / marketing. I felt very lucky and honored to be part of the Split/Lip family.RG: What were your dominant feelings upon completion of the book? And how do you reflect on Specimen, and your time writing it?SL: It’s odd, but it felt as if I had traveled through some distant, strange land, where I met some lovely people, had a great time, but eventually I had to return (had to!), and it was a little bit like that little boy Nils in The Wonderful Adventures of Nils. After he traveled all across Sweden on the back of a goose, he returned to his parents and said: Maman, papa, je suis grand et je suis de nouveau un homme! (I don’t know why but it’s always the French version that I remember—essentially he said, Mom, Dad, I’m big and I’m again a man!) It’s strange, but writing the book was like traveling on the back of a goose through a distant land, where I met all the best people I knew during my youth, and somehow I was meeting them for the first time as a real adult. RG: What is next for you?SL: I’m not completely sure yet. For the past few months I’ve been working on a millennial novel about a group of young professionals and expats in New York city, but I’m now moving away from that and will perhaps work on something more abstract, such as the “dream log” I mentioned. We’ll see!
The babies are all born with phones in their hands. It hadn’t always been this way, but the babies needed a way to call poison control at their own leisure. At night, we hear the babies babble into their phones as we weep into our empty hands, while the soothing tones of the poison control operator tell them how to save themselves.
It’s another hot day, and the tide is rising. The son shoulders his father’s rifle and walks back toward the beach house thinking the reason he’s shot the hole in the tank is because his dad refused to buy him a half million follows.“Please like, comment, and subscribe.” He says, holding his phone at eye level and trying to steady his hand because he is still shaking with generational anger he will probably never understand. Water spills out onto the ground as the cat patiently watches the flapjack octopus scurry to the opposite side of its tank. Time is running out. The big cat hopes to eat soon. There is a large hole in the glass that the son put there, and soon this flapjack octopus will be sucked out with the last of the water onto the beach where the cat is waiting. “I can’t wait until the tank drains,” the really big cat says. “Because I’m going to eat you.”“I don’t know why you want to eat me so bad,’ says the flapjack, who is a gentle creature. “You know, I’ve never ever given you a reason to dislike me. I don’t really have anything against cats. It’s the rich man that bothers me, and I think he should bother you too.” “I imagine you are tasty,” the cat says. “The notion preoccupies me. Anyway, don’t blame me. This isn’t my fault. It’s not anyone’s fault. Blame Capitalism.” Neither of these animals actually say these things. Not strictly speaking. Animals cannot talk. At least not in any way we can understand. What the cat actually says is this:Meow. What it means, and what the flapjack octopus knows it to mean, is this: Blame Capitalism. Because they’re in Miami and because Miami is in Florida and because Florida is in the United States of America, Capitalism is the system on which the cat places most blame. What the cat thinks, and would say if it could, is that their owner, a multi-billionaire, is the reason for a great many conditions directly relevant to their present moment. The flapjack octopus would not deny this, though it does find it a tad ironic. It is a fact that the very big cat, the hole in the tank, and the boy with the rifle have all come to their present circumstances because of this very rich man. This man, a man who heads a notably successful private equity firm, likes guns and cats and rare octopi and has a son. If it were not for him, all of their material circumstances would be very, very different. Incidentally, he is very busy, this rich man, and ignores them all unless it’s convenient for him, which is most of the time.At any rate, there are octopi in large tanks all over the premise of this beachside property. Cats as well. Big. Well fed. Cats. And oh boy, do they want to eat the octopi. Every single one of them, especially this one. Meow. Luckly for this cat, the others haven’t yet come to investigate. That the cats had, up to this point, never been given the opportunity to eat any of the owner’s exotic octopi is a great source of consternation. One that leads them to understand they are living tragic lives, surrounded by what must both be delicious and lovely rubbery meat they can never chew because, among other things, they don’t have the resources. Meow.Capitalism. It was the only reason for all the octopi to be in and around this rich man’s house where the cats could see but not eat them instead of in the ocean where they belonged. This is doubly true for the flapjack octopus, which is exceedingly rare and unattainable to anyone who is not super rich. It’s also the reason for the hole in its pressurized tank, which was put there by the son of the rich man. “How about that, Dad?! How impressive is your big tank now?!” He had shouted while uploading the video of him shooting the tank to his socials. The flap jack octopus, who we might assume is trying to calculate its chances of survival, is running out of time, and the cat has a point as to why this is the case. “Damn this rich man and his son and his cat! God, I don’t want to die.” the flapjack octopus laments. “This is all very frightening. Beyond all that, this cat refuses to take responsibility for any of its actions, the state of its life, or recognize its own culpability in a much larger, very flawed system!” This last part being a common criticism of those who level systemic critique toward their specific and individually lousy lots in life. The flapjack didn’t say this last part. If you wanted to get overly technical, it didn’t say any of the parts, not precisely.What the flapjack octopus actually says is this: Bubble. Bubble.But it says it emphatically so, and as you might imagine, the cat is unmoved. To be fair, the octopus is conflicted as, as much as it’d like to, it can’t really see a clear path beyond our current systems of capital. Not that there couldn’t be one, it’s just that it can’t imagine what that would look like. “I am but a simple creature,” admitted the flapjack octopus on many an occasion, “so, it could be that in this case my pessimism is the result of my limited imagination.”Despite the self-deprecation, it is important we do not underestimate the complexity of the octopus, who it could be said, much like America’s Bard, contains multitudes. The flapjack does not want to die. To be eaten. But even more than this, it doesn’t want to be alone anymore. To be possessed by some rich man. It does have hope for freedom. For too long it’s been like a fish out of water, only instead of a fish, it is an octopus, and instead of being out of water, it is in a tank, separated from any kind of good company, or anything familiar to its species. It has not just been lonely, but existentially lonely. What’s worse than this is that the tank is in clear view of the ocean, so that the octopus, for as long as it’s been here, can see its true home. It can see the surf rolling up, over and over again, inviting him back to the place it knows it belongs, with what we as human beings might think of as equivalents of friends and family.What the cat doesn’t understand is the octopus has actually been waiting for this opportunity because it could be a chance to escape. The boy doesn’t understand this either, though this shouldn’t be a surprise to any of us because there are so many things the boy does not understand.Another thing he doesn’t understand is how, due to increased levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere, the sea level has been raising. For the octopus, this is a very important because if the pressure of the water leaving the tank is strong enough, and the tide is high enough, and the sea level has risen enough, then it has a chance at that thing it’s been waiting for. Freedom. But not just freedom. A return to the world it belongs. This would make the flapjack octopus very happy. Happier than it’s been in a long time, and the flapjack octopus deserves to be happy because it is a gentle creature. Bubble. Bubble.Is this octopus capable of the complicated calculations it needs to solve concerning its chances of survival or not? Probably it’s capable of some math. Most creatures are, even the son of the rich man. Speaking of, he is still walking toward the beach house, checking the engagement on his video. People are watching. They are liking, commenting, and subscribing, which is good because that is what he’s asked them to do. If asked, the son would’ve been able unable to say why he got so mad he shot the hole in the tank other that it felt like the right thing to do after his father refused to buy him a half a million bots to increase his subscriber numbers. And that he thought the video would make good content and generate no small number of followers, which in his mind was only fair since his father had denied him so many. The real reason? He is acting out because he idolizes his father more than anything in the world and never gets to see him because his dad is always too busy figuring out ways to increase his wealth, which communicates to his son, either subtly or unsubtly, that his father loves money more than he loves him. The fact that this was true for all major movers of commerce and industry does nothing to make the son feel more loved. The fact the father is just repeating the behaviors of his father before him doesn’t make the son feel more loved either. Ultimately, what the son wants is for his father to smile at him the way he smiles at his exotic flapjack octopus. To care about him the same way he cares about his money. In the absence of this, the son has learned to seek validation through the praise of people he’s never met by making social media content in hopes of becoming a major influencer. In short, the cat is right. Capitalism is to blame.Meow.And what of the flapjack’s chances of survival? Let’s look at the variables. The number of gallons in the tank. The tide. The position of the sun and moon and their gravitational pull on the ocean.The current. The speed at which this octopus must swim to get to a livable depth. And most of all, the release of CO₂, the warming of the earth, the melting of ice, and the rising sea levels. The conclusion? We cannot know. This story encapsulates only a brief moment in time. But one might imagine the flapjack’s conclusion is this: if the ocean level has come up just enough that when it gets sucked out of the tank, it rockets directly into the choppy surf and out to sea. Then, there is some likelihood that the flapjack octopus can safely get to the bottom of the Atlantic where it can spend its time hanging out with its friends and family waiting and watching the ocean levels rise and rise until everything on the surface, including the rich man, the son, and the cat, eventually drown. It's a very satisfying thought for the octopi. Mostly because the only rich thing left on the surface then would be the irony. Bubble. Bubble.
The pharmacist has to get the key, which is missing for the moment. The tech apologizes. It was hanging by the fridge in the back, just yesterday. He’s not sure where it went, but the pharmacist will find it as soon she finishes filling the Lithium prescription.“Just the 300 mg, right? You guys are pausing the 150s?”Yes, 300 mgs. Once in the morning and twice at night. We’re moving down from the larger dose, but if I say, “Yes, we’re going down in the dose permanently, I hope,” if I say, “So far we’re doing pretty well,” if I say anything at all, we’ll be at the hospital in twenty-four hours.I nod, and everyone smiles. I wait by the register, wishing I’d stopped for a coffee on the way. I can’t dash over to the in-store Starbucks though, not with this old grocery bag full of medicines I need to dispose of, practically spilling over. I can’t carry this to the front of the store and place it down by my feet as I order, as other shoppers walk by and see a bag of more than a hundred, probably close to two hundred, bottles. There’s no situation where that’s normal. Where someone wouldn’t look twice, a third time, then look away. The pharmacist finishes printing up the label. “You can pick up his Synthroid and Benztropine tomorrow.” I pay for the Lithium.“You’ll need a Haldol refill. I’ll call the doctor for you.”She puts the Lithium into a brown paper bag, like the kind you’d get at the liquor store to hide what’s inside. She hands it to me. She walks back behind the shelves and returns in less than a minute, a single key spinning on her pointer finger.“The night team never puts anything away.”The gray disposal unit is out in front, by the sunscreen. It’s R2D2 shaped, and she jams the key in, wiggles it hard, grunts, then clicks it, at last, into place. She pulls the handle, opening the wide metal mouth.“Just four to five bottles at a time. It’ll jam otherwise. I’ll come back to lock up when you’re done.”Four to five bottles at a time, starting at the top. 2024 and early 2025: the shifting doses of two medicines that no longer work. Another that caused breathing and swallowing issues. Still another to help with sleep, but caused worsening psychosis. And then a fifth, a medicine to stop excess salivating, but it tasted so bad we gave up.A layer down takes us to 2023. Then 2022. My hands start to shake. Deep breaths, but there’s a sadness I am less and less able to control when I’m by myself. It’s ugly and it’s here and I’ve been trained, carved into enduring stone, but by 2021 I am on the edge of a profound new, uglier, version of it. By 2020, I am actively sobbing in this grocery store, in front of this pharmacy, as I put bottle after bottle, year after year, into the R2D2 unit and close its mouth to make it swallow. Every failed med trial, every pill that was both hope and fear, both maybe and never. Every sleepless night—not because he woke me up, but because of the guilt.This one will work. I promise.Another layer, another year, repeating until I reach the bottom: 2015. How can medicines from ten years ago still hold on so tightly? The Zoloft, the stimulants, the antihistamines for sleep. The baby diagnoses. The belief that everything would be fine as long as we found the right med or two. The stirring in my gut, something alive, waking. Something that knew better.When the bag is empty, I hand it to the tech, who shoves it into the recycle bin under the counter. The pharmacist comes back out to lock the disposal unit.“Wow, you filled it right up.”How to explain the fear that even if a medicine is wrong, you might need it. At any moment, insurance will stop covering this. At any moment, the school will stop letting him attend. At any moment, these bottles will be all you have left to remember him by.“I kept putting it off.” I smile. I am carved in stone. I pocket the Lithium. He really is doing pretty well this week. I’ll grab him a piece of cake when I get my coffee.
This morning I’m hauling ass across the intersection across from the Krispy Kreme opposite the Kum & Go so I don’t get steamrolled by one of the yokels in their jacked-up pickups when some old lady in a jacked-up pickup swerves across oncoming traffic, throws open her passenger door, calls me honey and hollers for me to get in.I’m thinking she’s about to say she’s from the FBI and somebody has a hit out on me.But then she just says, You late to work, honey?I’m jogging in sweatpants, a sweatshirt, and winter hat. I tell her no I’m just trying not to die. I’m not trying to get anywhere.It’s kind of sad to see the droopy look on her face when she realizes she doesn’t have to rescue me.It’s hard not to interpret this in an existential way.My whole life waiting for someone to rescue me from myself and one day this lady shows up and all she wants to do is make sure I get to a job I don’t have.
A spider took up residence in my conservatory several months ago. It’s not enormous, half an inch in diameter, but I hate spiders. Winter loomed. Those were days of dread. A seasonal terror gnaws at people who live at northern latitudes as the sun sets incrementally sooner. Here in Cornwall, the exact time of sunset means little when clouds and rain can make it night-ish at three. Having a spider suspended overhead by the door, just over my clothes-drying rack, doesn’t help when my insides are already chewing themselves up over the darkness to come.My partner doesn’t hate spiders, or didn’t, or doesn’t. The tension of tenses matters here not because he’s dead but because he’s my ex now. He could have died, perhaps nearly died. When he’d find a spider in his own house, he’d pick it up and toss it out the window. Don’t live in my house, he would say as the thing went airborne. But he didn’t scold the two false widows he found behind the washing machine. Those, he left where they were. They didn’t get him, epilepsy did. It went undiagnosed until his late fifties. In the three and a half years we lasted, he had several smaller seizures. He’d go out for a run and come to an hour later, lying in one of the fields near his home, his dog licking his face. He ignored those episodes in the “surely it’s not that” kind of way that sometimes puts the afflicted in graves. The day a grand mal dropped him flat on his back in his garden, the dog ran up to the house barking to get his son’s attention. The dog saved his life, I suspect. It could have happened in the road. No one let me know until later. I live a short walk from the hospital. I’m American. In my North Carolina of the ‘70s and ‘80s, big cans of bug spray were the answer to everything with more legs than our cats. I couldn’t stand bugs then and I still can’t. Exceptions can be made for the friendly ones: butterflies, dragonflies, ladybugs, grasshoppers, bees. But a wasp flew into my shirt once and stung me several times. I must have been nine or ten. It hurt like what I thought getting shot would, bam bam bam. I still have a sense-memory of the thing crawling down my chest before the pain hit. Even if I hadn’t panicked, hadn’t provoked it, it would have stung me anyway, or so my mother claimed as she daubed baking soda paste on the burning, throbbing welts. I hate wasps and hornets and yellowjackets, anything with a stinger and a mean streak. I hate the zigzag transdimensional flight paths of mosquitoes almost as much as I hate their bites. I hate spiders the most, though: the way they scuttle, their terrible symmetries. When I encounter one, decisions have to be made.My cat’s health began to fail about a year ago. The longhaired breeds are susceptible to kidney trouble. Early on, the vet told us that’s what would kill him. We could expect a lifespan of about 13 years, he said. We got lucky: the trouble started at 13 instead of ending there. Bloodwork in a regular checkup turned up a few red flags. Put him on a renal diet immediately, the vet advised. If he won’t eat it, mix it in with his regular food until you wean him off the stuff he enjoys. I ordered several kidney-friendly options online, mixed them and swapped them out in different combinations, and panicked when he refused to touch them at all. This went on for weeks. He lost so much weight that I took him back to the vet. I can’t starve him to save him, I said. The vet replied, cats are gonna cat. Those were days of dread too. When someone is tired of you, there are clues. You notice they’ve stopped saying I love you first. Then they stop saying it as a reply. You come to feel you shouldn’t say it anymore yourself. It’s too obvious a prompt. Their face hardens instead of softens. There are tight, impatient smiles and the occasional eyeroll. A sharp tone of voice, a note of irritation no effort is made to conceal. Replies to text messages come later and later, if at all. The pattern is hard to ignore. It’s the diagnosis, I kept telling myself. The indignity. The loss of agency. I sobbed the day he told me it was epilepsy. He’d have to give up driving for a year. Cornwall’s public transport sucks at best. Trains get cancelled all the time. Storms hit; fallen trees block the tracks; there are driver shortages. Buses where he lives run every two hours if they show up at all. He’d lose his spontaneous jaunts to the beach or the moors after work. He keeps a classic MG roadster in the garage—British Racing Green, of course. He restored it himself. Now it would be a year until he could drive it again, if and only if he didn’t have another seizure in the months ahead. Everything hinged on the meds working. Side effects were known to include violent mood swings and inchoate rage on top of the baseline despair.Although I didn’t think I could remake myself as the kind of guy who’d pick a spider up, tell it not to live in my house, and chuck it out the nearest window, I tried in my own way. It was more about holding onto something I could see slipping out of my grasp than it was about any sort of release. The occasional bee would fly in. My partner kept bees. Ex-partner keeps bees. Tenses, tension. Even without today’s prevailing apiary doom narratives, I couldn’t bring myself to smash a bee or spray one. They’re important. Instead, I’d trap them with a glass and a piece of stiff paper, then release them outside. Crane flies too, although their spindly legs rarely survived my good intentions. One night I noticed a small spider walking across the wall behind the sofa. Normally that would be a death sentence. It looked like it hadn’t had the best day, though. It looked injured. Can spiders limp? Across the room, my cat was napping on his heated bed. I’d put him back on the food he preferred. He’d gained weight again. He felt normal when I cuddled him or picked him up. But I could see the insidious changes—drinking more water, peeing more, snuggling less, seeming dazed at times, throwing up. I did not smash the spider.The night my partner assaulted me, I didn’t think to call it an assault, nor the next day, nor the day after that. Did that really just happen, I asked his son afterward. He had seen the whole thing. Denial is like that. There’s a first time for everything. It was a dinner party. Half the guests had gone home. There was wine involved. I tripped going up the low stone stairs in the garden, injured my left foot. I limped over to the bench he’d curled up on. Blackout drunk, he snarled when he saw me coming. Think of Jekyll and Hyde. I decided to take video. This wasn’t the first time he’d gotten hammered, morphed into a hateful stranger, and said or done ghastly things he would regret in the morning but not remember. It’s the diagnosis, I kept telling myself. It’s the side effects. The meds. The interactions. He wasn’t like that before. I was thinking epilepsy thoughts when he jumped up from the bench, knocked my phone out of my hand, grabbed me, and threw me to the ground. Already favoring my throbbing left foot, I landed hard on my right one. Fractured something, I think, and didn’t feel it at the time. My left foot already hurt too much. His son and I managed to put him to bed. I stayed up until four trying to convince his son that his dad wasn’t like that, that it wasn’t him. Side effects, meds, interactions. In the morning, my partner woke up with a blinding headache and in a haze of dread. He knew something awful had happened, just not what. He apologized. He was horrified. We both cried. He insisted we go for a walk after breakfast to clear our heads. I couldn’t keep up and he wouldn’t slow down. I still limp some days. I’m autistic. Diagnosed a year ago. Finding that out in my fifties was like being handed a Rosetta stone that deciphered my entire life. The food issues, the texture issues, the constant grinding tension and anxiety, all of it. The night of the dinner party, everyone was sitting around my partner’s living room chatting. Both of his kids were there with their own significant others. Couple of friends from the village as well. With the music turned up, everyone’s voices made sounds shaped like words. I could hear but not follow along. To an extent, lipreading helped. Trouble with auditory processing is another of those quirky, inconvenient autistic things. Rather than adjusting the volume, he handed me my wine glass and told me just drink. He’d once shoved me across the kitchen instead of turning Spotify down so I could hear him better, so this didn’t come as a total surprise. It’s the diagnosis, I kept telling myself. Side effects. Meds. Interactions. He wasn’t like that before.When the end came, he had another ruinous hangover and couldn’t remember the previous night, only that he’d done something bad again. No violence this time, no fractured bones, just a drunken tirade: I disgusted him, he couldn’t stand me. That morning, he confessed he knew how he’d been treating me. He’d been hoping I’d just get sick of his bullshit and walk. Easier that way. For him, at least. And to cope, he’d been keeping a diary. He showed me a year’s worth of handwritten entries, page after page, lines of dense scribble about the relationship he didn’t want to be in. Now he didn’t want to lie anymore, didn’t want to keep pretending. When someone is tired of you, there are clues. I’d seen them all, connected the dots, and prayed it was the diagnosis and not the truth of him. For a year, my insides had been chewing themselves up. Those were days of dread. I felt like ashes.When the next ending came not too long after, there had been a reprieve. The second-hardest thing about taking care of a longhaired cat with failing kidneys is the thirst, as it turned out. The hardest thing is knowing what’s ahead. He’d guzzle water from his bowl, so much and so often that the fur on his face and neck stayed sopping wet. I would chase him around the house with a wad of paper towels or a microfiber cloth, sometimes a hair dryer. Just when I’d get him semi-dry again, he’d go back for more. Cats are gonna cat. This went on for weeks before I thought to buy him a fountain he could drink from without getting drenched. Once his fur finally dried, he bounced back, started eating again, put on the weight he’d lost. Those were days of dread too, albeit sweet ones. I had three more months with him. The decline, when it came, was sharp and sudden. The end happened when it had to. The vet made a home visit. I have his ashes in a bamboo box.I hate spiders. If the one in my conservatory had turned up anywhere else in the house, I’d have killed it without hesitation. One once crawled across my left ear while I was lying in bed. It met a quick, splattery end. But with another living being incrementally slipping away in front of my fireplace, I couldn’t smash this little speck of fading life. They don’t live long, less than a year. Every day I think about getting it over with, spraying it, something. I think about capturing it, telling it not to live in my house, and tossing it out the door into the garden. Yet I’m afraid it will get away when my big clumsy hand tears through its web. I’m also afraid that it won’t, that I’ll end up touching it. I’m afraid of it running up my arm. I’m afraid of it growing larger, maybe jumping at me. I still have sense-memories of a wasp inside my shirt, of a spider crawling across my left ear. In the months ahead, I will be leaving: I don’t want to live in this house anymore; I don’t want to stay in this part of the country. These have been days of dread. I feel like ashes. Decisions have to be made.
In 2023, I published a novel called Pure Cosmos Club. For reasons still unclear to me, it was embraced by the downtown New York literary scene loosely known as “Dimes Square.” Despite the association, I never made real inroads—not because of the rumors (funded by Peter Thiel? Christian reactionaries?) but simply because I was too shy.One of the scene’s more prominent figures is Noah Kumin, founder of The Mars Review of Books. From afar, I watched his profile rise through various ventures: the magazine, a popular podcast, and a reputation for hosting raucous literary parties.When I saw on social media that he had written a novel, I reached out and asked him to send me a copy. Stop All the Clocks centers on Mona Veigh, a misanthropic programmer who’s developed a large language model capable of generating poetry. Her company, Hildegard 2.0, is acquired by a mysterious tech magnate named Avram Parr—who, we soon learn, has committed “suicide.” Something about Parr’s death doesn’t sit right with Veigh, and she sets out to solve the mystery, placing herself in the crosshairs of a plot by powerful tech overlords bent on reshaping human civilization.I’m pleased to report that Stop All the Clocks is a first-rate techno-thriller—sharp, urgent, and extremely timely.Matthew Binder: You’ve written two books with technology at their center, The Machine War and Stop All the Clocks. Given your background and clear interest in tech — a field where you could have pursued a lucrative career — what drew you toward committing yourself to writing instead? Noah Kumin: Robert Graves said something like: "There's no money in poetry. But there's no poetry in money, either."MB: With Stop All the Clocks, you’ve written a literary thriller. Which writers — whether literary or thriller — most shaped your approach to Stop All the Clocks? NK: I learned a lot from the writers I love. You might be able to guess who a few of them are. But I don't think I leaned on any of them very heavily for Stop All the Clocks. John Pistelli argued in his wonderfully perceptive review that this book heralds something entirely new: a break with the decayed modernist "literary fiction" model which has provided, over the past 75 years or so, ever-diminishing returns. Stop All the Clocks is meant to be a new type novel of ideas for the 21st century, and I'm not certain it has any direct predecessors. There's a German term I like: kulturroman, the novel of culture. We haven't had many of those in the States lately—not in a real way—and it's time we did.MB: How do you begin a novel? Did you know what was going to happen in the end from the very beginning? NK: I started with the last lines of the last poem, which came to my mind from a place I did not understand. I wanted to know what the poem meant. I had an idea of the sensation that the reader should have when he or she has finished the book. And I worked backwards from there.MB: In your novel, Mona creates a poetry-generating AI called Hildegard. At one point, she realizes her invention might contribute to the flattening of the literary landscape. I’ll admit I’m too wary of the future to follow the latest developments closely, but it seems inevitable that a flood of AI-generated novels is on the way — if it hasn’t already begun. How worried are you that human novelists could become obsolete, or do you think there are aspects of storytelling that only humans can capture? NK: Certainly LLMs will be able to outcompete humans at the generation of satisfactory bodice-rippers and pulp thrillers. But it doesn't do any good to worry. I write to say something that can't be said and to preserve that saying of the unsayable for those who will be able to understand without understanding. I only need a few readers in mind to feel it's worthwhile to keep on.MB: For a long time, the tech world was associated with the Left, but today Big Tech seems more aligned with the Right. In Stop All the Clocks, you write journal entries from the perspective of a techno-optimist titan. While the novel avoids falling into the typical Left–Right binary, were you thinking consciously about his political leanings as you wrote those entries?NK: I wanted to capture for posterity a new sort of person who is emerging in our age, as Turgenev did with Bazarov in Fathers and Sons. Not necessarily a left-right thing, though I understand if some see it that way.MB: A recent Compact Magazine essay, “The Vanishing White Male Author,” argues that white male writers have been largely shut out of the literary world over the past five years. For example, none of the last 70 finalists for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize have been straight white American men. Since 2020, no white man has been nominated for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Prize for debut fiction. And notably, not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a story in The New Yorker, while at least 25 other millennial writers have.You studied under Martin Amis at NYU. Given the shifts described in essays like this one, did you and Amis ever discuss how these trends might shape your prospects as a fiction writer?NK: Yes, it’s an interesting development. I suppose it means the field is pretty open for me. If I were to win one of those awards or have a short story published in the New Yorker, it might well generate a lot of interest and move a lot of product, since it’s such a rarity these days for those publications. But this is all business talk. Nothing like that came up when I was being mentored by Amis. He only talked craft, and I would have felt monstrously impertinent asking the great man about anything pertaining to business or money, though he is the author of the great chronicle of business and money, Money. Amis recognized that I had a good feel for voice and wanted me to focus more on my plotting. He told me to always keep in mind that the reader is just as busy and put upon as I am—advice which I feel has stood me in good stead.MB: Your publisher, Arcade, an imprint of Skyhorse, has a reputation for taking risks on work that other houses might find too controversial. What was your experience like navigating the publishing world and landing with Arcade?NK: It was a strange journey. It feels a little gauche to go over it. Sorry. But I'm very grateful to the team at Arcade for their intelligence and acumen.MB: A couple of years ago, you started The Mars Review of Books to publish serious literary criticism. I read that you’ve lately been more focused on editing than writing. Given that you’ve just published two books, is that still true?NK: The great Italian writer-publisher Roberto Calasso remarked that to be both a publisher and a writer is a bit like being both a commodities trader and a commodity. It’s a wonderful quip and absolutely true. It does lead to some schizophrenic tendencies. As a writer I try to write only what interests me. But as a publisher I must be a businessman first. Luckily I know how to compartmentalize.MB: What’s next for you?NK: I'm writing a book of nonfiction, tentatively titled The Mystagogues, about occult secrets in the work of a handful of 20th century writers. Either I'm crazy or I'm noticing something very important that most critics over the past 100 years have failed to notice. I feel it could actually have quite a broad audience, though it's technically "literary criticism."
When Mother’s belly bloomed again, she pointed a french-tipped finger at the richest man in town. The accusation, though baseless, haunted him-- it polluted his polished lawn, noosed his silk ties. This was a man shrunken, a spirit corrupted, a man of real stature driven sick. But the town was small, and Mother was only getting bigger, and so he wished her away with a lump sum.Mother had two girls at home. The little one, blue-eyed and painted with the peachy, airbrushed skin of Jesus, thought she might’ve been born of dirt, like Adam, or rib, like Eve. The big one was old enough to know that she was half from mother’s tummy, she assumed the other half might be chipped wallpaper, or oil spills, or the pink in the faces of men at truck stop diners. Even when it seems these things disappear, the rich man often thought to himself, a certain stain is left on a man, a certain debris accumulates inside the soul. The girls had attached to their mother erratically. They sat sunny-side up, transverse, breech-- had to be unknit by gloved hands, unzipped from the same scar on her belly. The births were emergencies-- horrific blurs of fluorescent lighting and hospital blue. Mother requested a mirror for each procedure, glimpsing, in the fuss, creation-- the whole red mess of it. The rich man had three of his own. On Sunday, terror among the parishioners. Mother and her girls arrived late, sulked into a front pew during the Nicene Creed. Wives’ eyes darted in horror between Mother’s belly and their husbands. Through their loyal recitation-- Maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen-- they wondered: who made her a mother? Our fathers? Our sons? -- God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God-- Or worse, someone from out of town? The rich man’s own voice shook at the pulpit. He thought, a man can assemble a kneeling congregation-- He will come again in glory-- A man can raise a town from dirt-- His kingdom will have no end-- and for what. When Mother was young, she’d gone to a city. She was a girl then: golden, freckled, life so everywhere in her. It was a city from tip to toe: sparkling up into the clouds and carrying on a grisly, sticky version of itself underground. Mother stood in the highest point of that city, over evry metal monument reflecting sun and blue, over every creeping thing that crept in concrete veins, over every clay creature men had sculpt from dirt, and, summoning the miracle machinery of her insides, spoke:I will name this silver, and this riverThis, beneath my rib, cityThis, beneath my city, railI, blessed by the maker and the maker myselfWill tear trembling towns through mine divine routeIn agony, I will bear the fruit.
