This is a blood letting, crisis protocol simulation, tea leaf reading, defanging. It’s not going to work the first time.

This, is the first time I’m gunna have to do it again and again, and I want you to watch me, for the record.

 

There’s an application for the pregnant form, bearing babies from a million holes, it has to be plugged up before it goes down. It’s quite a simple procedure, of submersion, swelling and retrieval

 

Some things have been coming to my attention, namely, these marks I’ve been getting on my back, kinda these red welts .They’re different every night. Sometimes they’re completely regular in patterning, and sometimes they are completely irregular. At first I thought: Bed bugs, Fleas, Some kind of suck mark from the paralysis witch.

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Then I was thinking: What these wounds look like they’re from actually, specifically, is a kind of small shark called the cookie cutter shark. They latch on to you and spin to carve out neat wells in flesh.

 

Sometimes, they look like grid marks, have you heard of the grid mark phenomenon?

People waking up with geometric rashes like they’ve been pressed against a machine in their sleep.

Maybe leeches… Basically, they come from a shapeshifting mouth, kinda, anyway.

 

The GSAF (Global Shark Attack File) state that if you fail to see the shark that bites you, you can study the bite patterning to decipher the species and its reasoning for biting. So they get to work formalising and translating bruising and puncture wounds, like cave paintings I’m using the same logic here, but hacking it.

So a conversation begins, so I can actually start a conversation.

I’m responding, putting boundaries around the form of this thing. But not biting back.

 

I took them to the Doctor. They said, stop submerging yourself in standing water, I said, no.

 

As that’s the access point, that’s where I gather my source material.

Dragons, serpents, dogs, wait by the ponds, wells, swamps, lakes, gravel pits, quarries poisoned with heavy metals. And in the spirit of working with symbols: This is a direct, hot, lowering of the lure into a vein. To call forth the…thing that cloaks my every sense (hot breath, scales, fur, enlarged pupils, marrow, bone, baleen, fangs, membrane). So that it might dial out its voice, somehow.

 

This is an intravenous act. An architect invented the IV drip in 1658, with a goose quill and pigs bladder.

His pet dog became the test meat; the recipient of the world’s first intravenous anaesthetic, opium.

See how that is built into the buildings?

 

There was no accounting for the resistance, it didn’t want to go in.

So I had to use a kind of force I don’t usually like to.

Even full of stone it didn’t want to sink, there was something it was holding on to above the barrier.

 

The capacity of its lungs was unprecedented. Despite its inanimate nature, I felt bad crafting something as bait…

which for all intents and purposes made a bait cage of the pond.

I’m still in the process of working out what that makes me.

 

Returning at dawn, there was a different quality to the air, to the water.

I knew something had changed, something had worked.

I was overcome by a sense of peace, the markings on my back hadn’t changed but I began to see them as a doorway.

Some kind of storm was placated…but somewhere in my belly I felt I was returning to the scene of a crime.

 

Following the same route, and tracing the rope back, I found the lure glowing amber.

Collapsed and engorged in equal proportions. Inflated like by-catch deformed the by the terrestrial air pressure.

 

Drawing it towards me, I pulled it out prolapsed and sick.

It spat out a few of the stones, and was in no way ready to return to the surface, so swelled up…primed with information.

I dragged it up with hungry mouth, dribbling like the 5 wounds of christs…

Those wounds also became wells, springs, pools…gravel pits lakes.

 

...Untraceable gouges in the concrete, salt licks, nail files. I’m showing strange behaviour in captivity, water contaminants, sensations of dread, Infested, infected in the memory lapses. Built into the buildings…

 

I picked through the leftovers like greasy fingers scrambling for good meat…

How did the silt fall on the back of the throats?

There I found markings in the mud that hash out a little ‘HellooOo’.

I took note, committed all the changes to memory.

Which mouths were kissed, which tongues pulled?

Working it out…working it out… I want you to keep watching.