from RACFSV

            KJI flicked his digital video recorder on. The red light stared with a comforting familiarity, almost hypnotic in his dusky, shade-drawn den. He was in his jammies. He took a long breath, meditatively chewed his lip. He contemplated a patient, modulated delivery, visualizing the humanity of his furrowed brow, his boyish jowls. 

            “It is with absolute courage we must proceed,” he murmured, pausing to strike a match. “The world will not understand what it is about to receive. Our most endearing and potent abilities, our striking capacities, our wise and generous tendencies...” 

            He could hear the whistles and calls from the main square, preparations for mass demonstrations of support. The phantom jugglers in their plumed jumpsuits, the ghostly cavalcade of old war machines wrapped in neon lights, cardboard martinets directing lines of gauzy, double jointed, holographic teens. 

            A blue flare launched high up into the sky. Through the film of his drapes, he watched it ascend then explode. A branching tumult of fibrous, delicate petals, glorious swans, teeming plasticene children holding out their hands now reflected in the oily sheen of his prescription, photochromic glasses. 

            Later, he rubbed his cold feet together beneath the sheets.

 I swallowed starlight before turning into flame

I recognized her--I knew instinctively it was a her. A certainty with rapidity--as though zipped loose from my spine. I knew her. She. 

The portrait’s arrival into my life was just as sudden as my recognition, its knowledge. I came home that afternoon to find a non-descript brown envelope tucked in with the rest of my mail, addressed to me in black ink--a neat but unfamiliar hand. The envelope tore open easily, crisply. A glossy photograph out twirled out, settling on the floor. I stooped to retrieve it, held it to the amber sunset light. 

The monochrome entity clarified within me. She.

A child--quite androgynously, the way small children are remarkably undefined--stood alone on a gray sidewalk dressed in an overlarge dark coat and black shoes. Her face squeezed tight in a howl, mouth agape, arms rigid and hands balled up at the sides. The hair was dark and cut close to the skull. 

Something from the top of my stomach unmoored. That howl. I felt it gush out from the small mouth captured in vanilla and pepper grains.

If a crinkle, the concatenation from a far star's icy throat in the sky and spun--in such a way, a spiritual parameter loped forth. Did I follow. A heartbeat echoed in descent and dreamlike, no elegance. No chiming daylight but buried and farther past woebegone and fury.