Return Her: Elara
deceptive cadences,
antiquity,
and consequence
realized by
mundus vult decipi
Found a fountain penned.
In youth edenic zen.
ELARA.
Her and then.
A font in want of when.
An auction wedding.
Where with all unworn wending.
AWARE.
Flowering dowry.
Proposal bending.
Binding and bound.
Rend and rendering.
Hands fast.
Text and tactile.
Forced entry.
Picklock's swipe.
THE NIGHT.
The thieving night.
A purchased wife.
Want in wandering.
Found in the daguerreotype.
Framed fine.
Creature out of time.
A century's stare.
A goddess' gaze.
An odyssey's ides.
An unbroken spine.
Little black book clasped in a pat lap.
Regal posture.
Tresses ink trap.
Poised and elegant.
Fixed in the picture.
Wondered what kind of music she liked.
If she liked to dance.
If she fucked primal and animal.
When she got the chance.
Blushing rose again.
ELARA.
She is loading.
* * *
She is here.
Transformed through the years.
* * *
She'd chosen to be frozen, he figured. She sat for the portrait. Had to have sat five, fifteen, twenty minutes? She wanted to be remembered. And so she was. And so she will be.
A little lossy but she'll do.
Her gaze fell on him alone.
Vivid irises.
Silver nitrate.
Pyromania.
Colorize her.
Fill in the detail.
Colorize her.
Fill her with blood.
Model the room she's in.
The house.
The town.
The time.
Molecules.
Dust.
Sun-down.
When she wakes up she's so tired.
* * *
It was common now to use DOPPELBANGER — The Consumer Object, void of eros. A dead stale thing. A service. They'd send you a fleshie. Responsive to your touch. "Feels as good as real," or so they said. Sent out technicians once a month to clean 'em up. Hosing plastic butts. In vans marked with varying misleading liveries. Pool techs, dogwashers and the like. You get the idea.
They ran a smooth op. The software ran silken. Pop a pic in and choke your chicken. Suit your settings. Use your imagination or get laser-blazed with 40k gigaton naturals slapping back at an ass-pounding megafaun, powerful haunches blasting, go on and on get on and gobble-de-goo til the goo's all gone, 'til the cum comes some, 'til the shrieking and wailing wake neighbors and shake homes from foundations, 'til it makes a silly noise in on or around your belly, 'til the eyes roll back deadheaded good-night.
Summon some fuck you once had. Or some fiction. Some moistening. The thought. Something once wanted. Long as everything cleared legal? They'd conjure it up for you.
Women did it too. But more men. Reproduction rate off the deep end. Some chagrined. Others fucked away the time. Most sexlessly despite hot breath. In the sun's sign Lost Eros slept. The lack of pheromones and contact dancing had driven everyone fucking crazy.
"Man I'm just glad I caught the late '80s." Dad before he died. Beddings confided. "I should have married her, son, but then you'd never be alive."
* * *
He'd fallen in love with a portrait of Hjördis Hjalmarsdotter Hjorth once. Wished for more. There weren't enough photos to create a reliable profile. And he was too much of a gentleman to 3-D model her. And experience her mechanics. He was above all else respectful.
But Elara'd driven him to madness. Ever since he'd found her at the Blue Rose Flea. The look in her eyes. The end of all time. In memoriam in memory.
* * *
He worked in Ultradena, just north of Lost Eros, at the Kinetic Universal Laser Laboratory, aka the K.U.L.L.
Security clearance: out of this world. Waves, filtered. Opaque glass. Can't really talk about any of this shit. Please don't tell anyone.
Boss was a real charmer:
"You know they think all we do at K.U.L.L. is kill, kill, kill. And they're right. But we do other things, too. We maim, for example. And when you maim, you create a customer. We've got solutions to fit that need . . ."
The slideshow begins.
RECONSTRUCTION PRINTER.
Prosthetics.
Resins, thrombin.
Mortal combinant.
Circuitous perfusion.
Godzoom cellular.
Neural lace and alabaster leather.
Vaporizing tissue like the swimsuit issue.
Axons and adzes off.
Choppers and tomahawks.
Splicing and dicing.
Judo genes.
Wrung bells in diving dreams.
Murky.
You've lost contact with the surface.
Come with me.
* * *
The Printer was supposed to be used for combat vets. "Our Troops." Fixed in place and lost in use. Those blown apart. Through administrative abuse.
* * *
Again, and again, and again.
Recurring.
Returning.
The same but not quite.
Each time.
A new wrinkle.
Or one removed.
Skin taut.
Lost art.
The first failed.
A wish cast in the trash.
The second stumbled.
A hope for lot's wife's ash.
Sodom and gabor.
The third strode.
Looking for all the world like a looted painting stepped out of itself.
A lovely subject.
* * *
Guilt-grown dread and dead-end obsessions.
She arose from the vat of gelatin with a wordless scream. Aquatic. The resurrection birthed her goo-black. Skin stang chemical. Took a while for them to come to. Birth is to be labor. Plucked from some bothersome cosmos. A distant star's gleam in an alien eye.
At some point he'd given ELARA language. Hooked her up to another model, really. She's a system like you or me.
"You looked different before, I swear."
"No my love, it is your eyes that have changed."
He blinked.
* * *
"You didn't have bangs before."
"Yes I did."
"No, you didnt."
"I've always had bangs."
* * *
Started keeping more than one at a time.
Swapping parts.
Kickstarts.
Arrhythmia.
Clear a beaten heart.
Bleak dahlia bled-eagled and bedraggled.
Installing consciousness in a doll.
* * *
He knew the name for the slime that covered her body. But he didn't want to think about it now. Wasn't a time for Latin. Or language, really. As the body's horrors crawled the floor.
She was only a day old, technically. In the sense of any other stamped object. "Made in the U.S.A." "Property of K.U.L.L." Looks programmed to kill. The past perfect. Present.
* * *
Undeath awoke.
Six catatonic clones and an angry ghost.
The abandoned harem.
Maya's veil's tearing.
I saw a moth fly in.
Your cloth's not long for its spin.
A yarn undone.
Lights flicking on and off like party's over.
Go home.
I don't care if you're sober.
Or sideways.
Dissolved.
The walls weren't walls anymore.
The ceiling either.
The floor didn't hold.
Gravity's reign ended.
Scorned aurum.
Spalled ore at anvil's end.
Molten core.
Her spell broke with his spine.
C4 blown and a high C5.
Aria's shattering climb.
ELARA.
A mermaid on the mend.
A fish out of flutter.
Nature takes its course when you fuck with mother.
Trance fixed in assayance.
The broken psychic of violence.
Write twice a day.
Write for the wrong reasons.