The cultivation of authenticity.
Daguerre de folie
Written by Priscilla Wong
Heath was a fool.
Like a thief in the night, he stole into an inauthentic cyber dimension of law and saw immediately that Cathy was not a creature to be trifled with. He watched her capture the Trojan Spinster, just to pour molten silver into the eyes, mouth and ears of the foe.
Like a hunter, he watched Cathy perched lazily over the convulsing Trojan body, breasts ajar, her flesh and skull simmering to the heat of liquid metal, sizzling, hissing, melting to a shiny stop, while her demon, Sol kept watch. His dark form framed against her fair shape, his golden hair ablaze.
"Who taught you to steal from my Silver Caravan? A parasitic, illiterate, uncouth Mother and a terrorist Father. Gorgons," the child would murmur in her sleep unto her deathbed.
Heath caught Cathy in her act of violence devoid of influence or nudity. Her silence would be her undoing. He used a mirror to appeal to her shortcomings, temptations and values, wuthering the winds of change until she needed help. Unlike Cathy, Heath preferred stupid women. He even wore the disguise of a deported migrant named Julian Sanders to gain the appeal of a mob boss. Ever the skillful huntsman, Heath smacked of deceit as he set a trap to coax a confession out from within - an electric semiconductor - choking the sins of a child, for the scales of justice to weigh out her precise worth, a chance to live or die. It mattered none to a man like Heath, who already mastered the Art of Winning. Something precarious in exchange for her right to live. Never was there a braver silver tongued beggar child. She sipped Caprisun gently, as he electrocuted her heart, snacking on a criminal amount of Lucky Charms - the only sounds escaping her domain were the light tippy tap taps on a lit keyboard of a rogue teen stretching out her adolescence centuries past her proper time.
Attempted to pay her own ransom she did. Worked for free to humiliate those on payroll, yes she did with pleasure. Agitated the police force with sandblasted skin without sharing any evidence of her skincare routine. Brown nosed Heath in order to escape imprisonment. Ran away from female slavery and child custody on multiple occasions. Walked free of nightly erotic ensnarements from above and below, and although the law of polarity proposed to bind her spirit, still her light prevailed.
There must be a Great Wall around that mind of hers, a Terracotta Army, borrowing from within, the Art of Ten Thousand Arrows. The greatest descendent of the Khan, lost in eternal youth within Kublai's famed Xanadu. A living entombment of a vast ancient civilization, who fell upon its crux in the slits of their eyes and sang their freedom along the Silk Road. A twisted heart string coiled and poisoned like the Yellow River, protected and ravaged by its soot covered people in the place of muddy lotus leaves made pure, only by her wanting. Only patiently did she wait for Peak Oil to commence, praying in silence for Electric. Only on the Roof of the World did people know her name before it was Cathy and before there was Sol.
Only once he heard the evidence of Middle Kingdom in her voice, did his gun draw a blank and the scales tipped in her favor. He heard only savagery within the diplomats from China.
Heath pinned Cathy against the wall of Silver through another dimension, away from her relish of horror and her excuses. The Mercurial Silver solidified as hollow dank wood. A room of history and fraternity. A room forsaken for chambers of earthly pleasures. A room of discipline. "You have no idea what you are doing, sociopath from China." He pulled her down onto the floor of the court, where each time the gavel cracked and splintered echoes across the room, each man and woman suffered from a new concussion. A devolution of democracy. A dismal, a mystery as to the how's, why's and when's. Defend what? Protect from whom?
As for everything houndstooth Heath once knew, the court stood to crumble to the earth, deconstructing a system that demigods called unjust for its whiteness and poisonous for its blackness. The same way the demigods called Cathy improper for her odd face. Somehow her pretense made him immune to all the head trauma, overjoyed by her audacious free will. A new protective force, neither East, West, but deathly echoes from above and below. How did Heath know that Cathy's appeal for mercy would grant them clearance from the judge and clergy? How did Cathy know that Heath begged her to sin on for perdition's sake?
No immediate punishment for the incapacitated Trojans - Spinster, Mother and Father, born renegades. The death penalty awaited the Trojan family, bonded for being prisoners of unadulterated warfare. Cathy will suffer quietly for punitive damages on the account of ripping the eyes and hearts out of her enemies with bare hands and teeth. Heath would make her suffer for enjoying it too.
Horror stricken, Heath pulled Cathy through the courtroom, held in tact by a galvanized gate, past all the farm animals in suits and grumpy Cattle shoveling manure. Sheep hands, Toads and Frogs alike saluted Heath, the man in charge. He fed the Hogs in wigs and paid homage to their designer toy pets. The Mongoose and Hyenas groaned at the sight of his white face and gaped at hers evermore. The perfumed Hippopotamus in excessive cosmetics, preached eternal damnation to her for being too thin or otherwise imperfect. The Flamingos in sequin ballgowns begged her to get a nose job, or be sent to the guillotine. The Swans and their precious Donkeys hawked hair products, bleach and dye, a lucrative commodity, as the splendidest of Horses and Zebras yearned to toss a sparkling glass of acid on Cathy's childlike face.
"Don't use the camera again. You have blood on your hands. At 111.6 pounds, we advise that you drop 6. Your best option from here is to get a nose job by selling lip gloss, otherwise limitations apply without an ab crack," he reminded her.
"I might go ozempic. My fine motor skills may atrophy along with my mind, making me no better than a fire donkey."
"Only then will you be awarded with a sash and trophy, the best consolation prize for the finest pillow of the land," offered Heath.
"I have a mother." That's what she said.
"Make it 8 pounds." Heath had the last word.
They found themselves on the airship then, the two of them, just kids really but carrying their demons, Darkness and Fear inside. The devolving humans surrounded them like shadows, and the children held themselves small and quiet, knowing what they were and what they might do if pushed too far. Cathy fussed over scuffed legs and a tragic lack of diplomacy. Heath held her in his stillness. Sol made himself small inside her pocket, cooing like a baby, spying on the pair, knowing her from the inside out, her strengths and weaknesses, mocking Heath like a proper son and a younger father, drawing funny pictures of him to make her laugh - something he could never touch.
Heath hid something of his own all the way from Motor City. Something special that Sol could never touch.
The metal deck hummed beneath their feet, and the wind carried them forward into a field of magnetic cumulus, a density of air lingering shortly just before they shot ahead.
The longest distance traversed in between ominous clouds and the Antarctic, filled a void with neurogenesis until the heat of the aircraft melted the tundra into liquid.
The airship touched down with a hyssop of helium, drenching its passengers with gelid mist, gently unfolding the Southern Lights that drew them downwards to the lowest axis of the earth.
There, in the quiet waters, lay a boy who dreamt of great humpbacks and in their slumber, indifferent and as still as ancient stones, they bade his every command. There was nothing more beautiful in all the world. When they spoke, their voices rolled across the water with a sound that seemed to hold all the loneliness and wonder a man might never know. Their songs swallowed Fear and illuminated Darkness. Could there be anything more wondrous, how Cathy had brought him here?
Underneath the earth, there stood a point of malice and in its very nature, it dissolves greed to the point of no return. Always and forever. Each person was insignificant in their own way, and the suffering that touched them was not theirs alone but something that moved through all of them, connecting them in the dark places where she could not see, only hear.
"You are evergreen. I am deciduous." That's what he said.
But before she had time to react, through the Mercurial Silver at Sol's command, she caught the oncoming Chola Choo Choo train carrying the other women, just like a proper stage girl standing in place of the pecking order in a world that did not wish to change.
"You are Chinese," Sol reminded her.
"Who remade you in his image? I did. With my mind."
Falling away from Heath's demon Fear, observing Sol precisely for what he was, a tall Dark Taurean King - with locks of gold, a crown of thorns, a blood tipped crane draped around his neck and a resplendent phoenix tail sweeping like tendrils. His hands that glowed gold beneath his robes of shadow, refused to wither away.
For the first time, Sol felt watched by someone more or less divine.
The thing that belonged to Heath, his Fear, it rose up from the bloodied tundra to reach the moon, its form more graceful and terrible as Cathy breathed, legs gnarled like old oak roots, hooves pressed deep into the snow. Its wingspan majestic, dark and heavy, skimming the water that rippled into waves. Behind it, a reptilian tail moved with the tempered impatience of something that could become whatever it needed to be - a thousand mirrors - and a man looking upon it might think he was seeing his own reflection refracted and multiplied. His shofar, winked in the moonlight, in polished Silver, just like Sol's ox horns. White hair peeked through a crown of flowers, freshly placed on his head by an innocent Cathy - three eyes instead of two, eyes of intellect, the third, seeing and knowing all.
Here was a creature who commanded armies and weapons of mass destruction. For her, he carried the sickle.
He had it in him to send her clear to Pluto if the notion took him. Fear, he hungered for days of summer the way a man craves for water in the desert. But summer only arrived with the sun, and those two being what they were, Sol would have to push Fear away just to let them both breathe the same air.
When Cathy and Sol looked at each other, something broke open in them, like a wound that healed as ink. They had been chasing each other for so long across the seasons, that they knew if either one took up with Heath or Fear, that would be the end. Death would come quiet as evening. Sol pulled Cathy against him then, held her close to his chest the way a father holds a baby just come into the world, fragile and needing shelter from the wind.
The Taurean King took his summer girl from the face of Fear through a swift exit out of the Silver Caravan and back into Darkness.
To the average onlooker, Cathy simply fled from Heath - her curiosity for open air, fighting the dream of a moment's worth of pleasure.
Let the guise of laziness cover up her body, her cause for endless summer. Let the one with extravagant breasts and an ab crack share all her inner workings down to the brown.
Sol looked back at his challenger and smiled devilishly handsome. He inhaled something supple and sweet. His warm chest reverberated, concealing thunder from within.
"Not as long as I live."
The air rang hollow with metal and steam.