by Shaun Lawton
Jozzwen Lucidero woke up feeling like he was lying on top of an altar. His associates called him Jozz because of his four gold crowned canine teeth. In the line of work he was in, his flashing grin lent him an unnerving edge that more often than not worked to his advantage. At the moment of his rousing, the smell of burnt candlewicks and cooled off grilled fat hung in the air. Disoriented, he couldn't recall where he was. Barely opening his eyes to a squint, he saw blurred movement and heard a sort of breathless scurrying approaching. Elongated shadows fell upon him while hushed whispers drifted into the air. He peered through the narrowed slits of his eyelids at the assembly of figures that appeared to gather before him, doing his best to act as if he were still asleep. The impending outlines seemed to slowly inflate as they approached.
By the time they crept up on him with their wavering bulbous fingers, they were enormous, stretched out and looming like fat human balloons. POP pop pop pop they went, sending shreds of translucent vinyl skin floating into the distance. What the Hell...? Before Jozzwen could process what was happening, a well-groomed black and white spotted dog wearing a golden-studded collar manifested before him, standing on its hind legs, offering a silver tray of…steaming lampreys? I really could use some coffee about now.
Teardrops that had accumulated in his lashes began to smart his eyes. The dog stood at attention and gazed at him with a milky white stare. It resembled a cross between a Chihuahua and hyena but with Dalmatian spots. This all happened in micro-instants. Jozzwen considered choosing one of the long gray delicacies which was still coiling in on itself, emitting faint blue sparks on the silver platter. He reached in to pinch it between thumb and forefinger. As his eyelids opened a fraction wider, the canine apparition before him just winked out of existence.
A galvanizing shock seemed to pass from his grasping fingertips to his tongue while he was under the impression that he dropped the sparkling hors d'oeuvre into his mouth, sending mild electric jolts down his throat. That is one hell of a dream, he thought to himself as he awoke into consciousness. At that moment he wanted to be reclined on a beach of clean white sand, drifting off to sleep to the sound of sea gulls crying in the wind. At least that was the original plan. Just as soon as his deposit went through, he would be able to do just that. Instead of the soothing sound of repeatedly incoming waves, a dizzying chorus of beetle wings thrummed in the distance, accompanied by a sort of low frequency electrical hum. The smell of ozone before a rainstorm began drifting in on the wind. Where in the Hell am I? He lifted himself onto his elbows and blearily looked around. Most of his vision was still swimming into focus.
The temperature dropped a couple of degrees and the evanescent lighting around him grew dimmer. It suddenly occurred to him that he may have run out of time. Something was not right about this. Somewhere in the back of his mind he realized there was going to be a tremendous force of vital energy released. He could tell by the crackling smell that lingered in the wind. He could taste it in the air. It had a slight coppery tang, slippery with a moldering pith. The visions upon waking had cleared from his head. His mouth was rank with accumulated bacteria. A shuddering sensation crawled along his scalp. He'd awakened to the mother of hangovers.
With more effort than he was accustomed to, he managed to sit fully upright and look around him. Neither a candlelit sanctuary or ornate chancel met his gaze, nor did the stark and clinical features of a hospital room lay before him, as he was beginning to suspect may be the case. Instead he glimpsed nearby Christmas tree lights disappearing one by one while opening his gummed up eyelids. Instead of the sound of infusion pumps chiming and echoing off the walls, the humming of insects and sporadic birdsong was now reaching his ears. From the fresh air around him and the wet crinkly feel of grass beneath him, he realized he was sitting outside in someone’s back yard. Before he could get a grip on his situation, the world began spinning him backwards.
His center of gravity lurched forward as if he were sitting on a playground carousel that had been given a good hard shove. Everything on both sides of him began slipping forward into the distance, and all that lay ahead shrank by the millisecond. It felt like he was being pulled straight back for an incommensurate period. It generated a real feeling of vertigo, as if the whole moment of existence were rushing past him. It felt like he was placed on a giant stereo turntable. The rosebushes and trees around him streaked into translucence, melding into the backdrop of the sky. It looked like a glitch of stretched out pixels in a virtual reality video. A harrowing storm of bat-winged shadows slipped soundlessly across an invisible dome above.
Jozz felt like he was on a carnival merry-go-round at the state fair. The force of gravity increased until it made his insides feel way too heavy. His nostrils dilated as they inhaled the scent of impending rain. The birds had stopped singing and the susurrations of insects faded while the carousel motion that had taken him by surprise abruptly ceased. The sense of electric humming increased as the first fat rain drops fell, splattering against the hairs on his arm and onto the blades of grass. That's when he remembered having completed his mission the night before. With some unexpected luck, he'd succeeded in scoring a date at his mark's own home. Jozz had been loosely acquainted with her for many years. She was now the heiress to a tattoo emporium, and at the same time conducted a lot of shady business on the side. Well, so much for her legacy. The reign of the Vedma was over now.
Jozz sat up and shook the morning dew from the ringlets of his hair. The bitch should've been lying right next to him, dead as a door nail, snails feeding on the insides of her eye sockets. He quickly scanned her back yard. The tool shed stood with its rusty door left open. She was nowhere to be seen. The poison he'd slipped into her rum and coke last night was enough to kill a horse. He laughed and spat in the grass. Serves her right for laundering at the races. How many times had he warned her to never cross the line with the Caldera Division? Some folk never listen. There's always another score just around the next corner, as he was reminded of all too well. Jozz sighed and forced himself up onto his feet, and began searching every square foot of her back yard. It really was a dog eat dog world.
He found the Vedma's tattooed body sprawled out in the garden behind the shed. She must've staggered over to it during her final agonized moments. She'd dropped into a bed of garlic sprouts. She was sprawled out in the mud, green shoots thrust up between her armpits and legs. At least he'd brought her to one last good climax on the snow leopard rug she kept in the parlor, before the poison concluded his business with her. He'd been crushing on her for years now, from a safe distance of course. He could never tell if her occasional smiles were relegated for him, or if she just looked delighted at everyone. Well, now she'd be smiling permanently. For the beetles and worms.
A sudden wave of dizziness swept through him. Phantom impressions of Spanish moss with glinting mica chips inside reflected the sunlight as clouds rolled by overhead. The rain diminished its intensity, leaving behind the scent of wet leaves, tree bark and grass. Pinpoints of light within the range view of hanging moss before him mirrored each other in stretched-out ribbons of an arboreal tapestry bleeding all the colors of the spectrum. Jozz began feeling dizzy and then sick to his stomach again. He bent over and threw up on a patch of star moss with slender brown mushrooms popping out of it. Spitting out bile, he kept thinking of the winter holiday season to come. The rain drops increased to a steady timpani pattering all about him. The New Year could not come soon enough.
An apparition of mist rose up from the ground before him. Within it he saw a thin network of gelatinous tentacles stretched out and threaded with what looked like miniature lightning displays manifesting frequently within them. They flowed upward in intricate forked directions, blending and disappearing into the air overhead, somehow assimilating into the vault of sky crackling high above. The smell of ozone brought Jozz back to his senses. He wiped the drool off his mouth and headed over toward the shed to look for a shovel. The sound of his own footsteps grew fainter to his ears until they began to get eclipsed as if a wine glass were being lowered over his life, snuffing out every consideration. What the Hell was he thinking? He couldn't just bury the bitch in her own back yard. What was wrong with him? They'd uncover the body for sure. Among his final coherent thoughts was that he needed to dispose of the body as quickly as he could and without any possible trace. For an uncomfortable moment he couldn't even breathe in. It felt like some hardened phlegm had gotten caught in his throat. He hocked it up and spat it out onto the Vedma's tattooed thigh. Pitiless, he observed as the last traces of falling rain washed the loogie away over the inked image of a vampire bat's fanged face.
The rain stopped just as rapidly as it had arrived. Behind him the bloated sun popped up slowly as if from an indisposed jack-in-a-box. The echoes of what sounded like an old calliope faded into the distance. With another nauseating feeling growing around his solar plexus, the vestiges of the twisted melody's tempo increased as the conspicuously cranked refrain began turning faster in his mind until the dry crackling sounds of static merged into a metallic liquidity producing exquisite pinging harmonics that bled into each other in a rainbow of associated articulations. For a surreal moment this modulation cast a melodic sort of shadow across the surface of his hearing. A phantasmagorical resonance warped into shimmering intonations along his mind's cupped ear. The sudden synesthesia caused his smile to widen and his lips curled back and rolled up along with his skin and muscle tissue in six plaited directions, as if his face were being opened like a can of sardines, revealing a hexagonal brain structure pulsing inside above the bracing armature of his jaw.
The ordinary features he'd grown accustomed to from a lifelong habit of seeing them reflected on chrome surfaces and mirrors peeled away while the sound from within him cascaded upward in coruscating columns of electrical feedback mingling with shredding notes disintegrating around an E-minor chord. His spinal column vibrated and flexed and then began bending backwards into an arch which planted his hands and feet onto the earth, digging through the grass and sending them splitting into metamorphic root systems and tubers plunging effortlessly through the ground to reach down into a spreading network that encompassed an area below the lawn equivalent to that of a sixty year old Elm tree.
The whole world flipped upside down during this process and he watched helplessly as the blue sky above pierced a halo through his left eye while a murder of crows flew by squawking up into a storm of wings. The Sun began lowering in the sky while dimming behind a roiling tide of piled up clouds turning blood red. The harmonics had lowered to unbelievable bass pitches of thrumming, shaking the Earth to an 8.0 on the Richter scale. Branches fell from the taller trees in the yard. The neighborhood lurched and rumbled while Jozz's black hair took on a life of its own, slithering into the dirt like the thinnest of root systems, where it began drinking up the moisture through every strand. His skin thickened and encrusted with bark then darkened as his skeletal semblance buckled and began cracking as it solidified into a flesh-like wood while his white blood cells transubstantiated into molecules of sap pulsing through.
Although his viewpoint lost some of its focus, it settled onto a fixed scenario where the Vedma's sprawled out body appeared arched over backward like his, transformed into a twisted tree trunk with what used to be her arms and legs plunged into the dirt, and what was formerly her face turned on its side with a bulbous cheek mashed against the ground. He could see a black widow spider perched across her wide open left eye. It was fiddling its hind legs, building its web over it. The pressure built up into his spine solidified into a dull state of lancing pain. There was no doubt left in him that he had lost his mind and gone completely insane.
His torso transmuted into a bowed tree trunk without limbs or leaves; just a bent over rugged column with both ends grown into the earth. It felt like what used to be the top of his head now lay flat upon the ground with his hair merged into the grass. His old human form had been shed or transformed into a permanent tree-like installation there by the sundial in the witch's backyard garden. Three golden Fox squirrels scampered up what still felt like his thighs and then scrabbled their sharp little toenails across his exposed belly to stop, perched along his lower rib-cage, sniffing the breeze. A memory of being tickled faded away. The obsidian spider with the blurred red hourglass marking continued weaving its web over the Vedma's dead eye across from him. After an indeterminate period of time, the spider shuttled away, eventually revealing a spiral knot that only looked like an eye left staring from a gnarled tree trunk.
Jozz could sense the slightest twitching of the squirrels' noses as they sniffed the wind on this strange neoteric tree he'd become. He could feel the tension and little talons in a bird's grip and hear the ruffling of feathers in the wind. The squirrels sensed some incoming ravens and scampered off. Ashes drifted in on the air, bringing with them the smell of charcoal. A murder of crows alighted atop the contorted human tree, straddling what used to be a navel and now looked like a swirled knot. Thunderclouds rose up behind the horizon, glowering with streaks of lightning flashing in their depths, ushering in a colder shade of darkness that would last for seven-thousand five-hundred and sixty years.
During this period a wholly unfamiliar order of life emerged on Earth, while the planet locked into synchronous rotation with its central host star. Even as the older configurations were subsumed into the latest heaving architectures, the entire process took three months to complete itself. When it was over, there wasn't a single person left to wander the surface of this still familiar but much quieter planet. Within a single season a renewed dominion was established. The odd thing about it was that at least one sixth of humanity survived the process. They had merely lost their former autonomy and locomotive characteristic. The human race had mutated into a chimerical variety of deciduous oak trees. Homo sapiens had flowered, in an unexpected twist, into Homo Quercus. Not a single human being that could walk on two feet remained alive to witness this miracle of transformation.
The majority of the human race, for a variety of reasons, just couldn't handle the grueling transition. Those in poor condition and suffering maladies gave up the ghost all too easily during the unexpected transfiguration. Others rode the shockwave and somehow withstood the transition. Those who died left husks that crumbled into the sediment of Earth's ancient record. The rest weathered the storm and transformed into mutated Trees, retaining some of their vivid memories. These took the shape of haunted dreams that served as a reminder of once having been anthropomorphic in a technological world. What was left of the race became a sort of menagerie receptor colony. A repository of awareness trapped like so many pockets of sap that had accumulated the highlights of humankind over untold generations.
That old human dream was a closed loop system now locked into the circuitry of nocturnal life partitioned to flourish about them. The legacy of the human race was reduced to a fantastical panopticon of fused memories interacting in a virtual theater of mycorrhizal networks. In short, a consensual mass hallucination was forged. It took shape like a blurry holographic image of all their memories blended together into a composite. The trick was learning how to field the impressions sent as chemical signals. Being able to visualize by implication took practice. Those who accepted the deciduous aspect of their metamorphosis over the formerly human autonomy found it easier to envision their dominion over the subterranean landscape and their own gnarled and twisted shapes. Whereas those giving in to their more humanistic penchants found themselves lost in the phantasmagorical pastiche of their recycled nightmares and dreams. It was not a pretty sight for them.
The process occurred after an amalgamation of cosmic orbits in conjunction heretofore unimagined by a persnickety species who always thought itself superior to the lifeforms thriving around it. Suddenly it became evident there was a novel order of biological composites arisen. It wasn't quite like anything that had come before, except for the birds and several other species of multicellular eukaryotic organisms including most plants and the kingdom of fungi thriving along with a random host of other life forms that managed to survive into the new ecosystem. Different phyla reacted in their own manner. For example, certain types of insect merged into greater gestalts. Forty-eight-legged monstrosities became commonplace. The page in the book of evolution turned to an unprecedented chapter.
The strand of DNA that ran through all life on Earth was always executing its program. Constantly shaping the stage for the remainder of life's realm and divergent kingdoms to be played out upon. One of the most ancient species in the galaxy would be accommodated with a newfound elegance. The avian renaissance would enjoy its resurgence with budding splendor. A new legion of nictitating membranes glimmered and blinked. A host of beaks preened their feathers. All of the birds in the world were about to experience an unprecedented liberation.
The original parliament of owls was restored. All the raptors rose up to take over. It would be safe to say they filled in the niche left by humanity with its head now actually buried in the sand. The planet's pollution had cleared up in a fortnight. While all species of birds broke up into clades and were free to continue their lives, they did not even suspect that their obliterated anthropoid counterparts yet held the Earth in their collective grip, so to speak. Strangely do events twist in their turning. Still at about a billion strong, the proud creatures that transformed into Arch Trees planted their limbs into the thickening hide of the planet's crust and tranceived the electromagnetic energy still radiating from within its nickel iron core. The order and class of this newly mutated family conducted an exchange of energy with the magnetic dipole from the Sun, as they'd always done. Only this time, they would continue to do so without interruption for quite some time. The main difference now was that the remaining bandwidth of biodiversity on Earth was reduced to a narrow halo circumventing the edge of the planet's dark side, now locked in a position facing away from the solar system's bright center. A fringed oasis persisted like a patch of ringworm on the surface of the planet. A fertile crescent along the edge of penumbra’s shade. The tenacity of life over countless millennia was such that you could depend on it hanging on by the barest of threads. One could almost consider the definition of life as having traced back to that which survives on a razor's edge.
The planet's interaction with its parent star sparks an electromagnetic conduction. This helps trigger an ionic induction where humanity's consciousness flows into whatever receptacles will have it. During this transitional phase reverberating through tectonic plates an underground network was fashioned where another virtual reality would take several years to coalesce into a shape reconstructed back from the agitated storm of frenzied particles which anterior consciousness had transformed into. It would take nearly the old average human lifespan to re-assimilate into something remotely analogous to the model they had abandoned. Although this advanced form would manifest into a totality not unlike that which had come before it, its resemblance to the old world would be minimal, at best. There would be traces of a holistic integrity formed of the recurring memories and impulses that only the strongest links could manifest. The rest would be wasted on a scattered multitude that would be forced to adapt to its new surrounds.
The transmogrified land merged sluggishly across freshly composed panoramas. It fostered transient and exploratory connections between the human hybrid's expanded digital root systems and the surrounding ecology. Some contacts elicited sharp shocks and glaring sparks that burned and caused recoiling and withdrawal in an instant of panic and pain. Lightning struck from above and thunderheads rolled out to reveal soothing vistas and lush territories that invited creatures into the fold rather than warning them off. In tentative acceptance, occurring one at a time, the human tree behemoths ratified their novel substratospheric anatomical interior landscapes into an interconnected consciousness that melded into the painted dome of a topical amphitheater. A unique humanistic genome blossomed to appear amid the woodland and subterranean stage.
Jozz meditated for a short while, dwelling on the feeling of a slow cascade of warming shades from lavender to pink slipping past his periphery. He anticipated what emotions it would lead to, turning over in his mind an effect that was generated from outside himself. It was a sound...something he'd forgotten he'd been capable of hearing before...only now it was more like the echo of an intonation somehow arriving to his attention and being received backwards. Like it was reflecting a model of that which had created it. It was a surreal reminder that there could be another. This unfamiliar presence was calling out to him. Jozzwen felt a slow dissolution of what must have been rigor mortis until, for the first time in an epoch, he realized it was what must’ve once passed for a smile.
The world was reduced to a slung capstone of compressed darkness heated by a crown of sunlight. Sparks danced and bled through here and there, but mainly a reverberant coldness was contained beyond the perimeter of the oasis, with an unbearable inferno scorching the other side facing the Sun. The scattered heat from these intermittent crawling sparks felt like a colony of ants trying to work their way up what used to be his arms. Like they were headed toward the center of what would have been his heart. Only now the organ that had kept him alive since birth felt like a dead battery fused with rust, stuck in a rib-cage embedded within plaster encased in clay pottery buried in oak wood that barely clung to life. A knot of timber with packed sap that hummed with harmonic vibrations tuned to a melodious note struck in a sealed bell jar and sustained for an eternity.
His whole world was now just half upside down sky and halfway compressed dirt full of earthworms and mycorrhizal networks.. They squirmed and slipped through the mud amid a variety of micro-structures branching out into the tightly packed compost he was half drowning in. Between the clumps of earth and rocks were micro-pockets of air where the tiniest organisms thrived, and bacteria vacillated through its life processes. A network of fungal embroidery glimmered in the shadows. A harmonic craquelure of ambient tonality encompassed Jozzwen's head like a halo of ever emanating bearing. A crown of earth attached to his skull and radiated out in all directions.
Little did he know the aspect of the specter which lay before him. Captivated by his own transmogrification, Jozz could be said to be doing rather well, after all; considering he was holding up as a tree planted in the back yard of a crazy pagan woman. The thing about the apparition of her sprawled out corpse gazing across toward him from a patch beside him in the garden was how it gradually began blurring into the rest of the merging landscape about him. He noticed a lot of old familiar sounds drop away, leaving a disquieting silence. There were reasons for this, of course. The Vedma adapted to her transformation effortlessly. She was practiced in the arts of paying attention to the benefit of great dividends. Therefore, she wasted no time in probing her fresh underground realm in order to make new friends.
Jozzwen could feel another world just beyond the straining tendrils of his mind. He could imagine he might even catch a glimpse of this kingdom if only it did not lay just past the spectrum to which he was attuned. He was focused on the polarity of death. Either he was already held captive in its clutches, or its agents were on their way to welcome him into their domain. He was sure of it. He thought he could hear the distant hissing of their approach. He could tell this sound was getting nearer. He had no choice but to give in to their oncoming inquisition. Then he was struck by an odd thought, as if it had come from someone else. This was indisputable proof of engrams. What once occurred was always fated to become. This thought would have left him paralyzed, once upon a time, were he capable of entertaining it. It now gelled in what was left of his consciousness until it triggered a recollection of laughter. Except the muscles of his face and throat remained petrified.
Jozzwen's thoughts were cast out before him, which is to say, to the sky above in its up-to-date astral condition. He presumed the firmament to be stuck in midnight forevermore. Like a bad nightmare from a forgotten century. Cracked and discharging a seething viral load dropped into a fertile clutch of organisms. Sprouted and germinating into unprecedented manifestations. He ruminated over the grim reality that it was all that lay before him that had indeed been taken away. His upturned body interred within the earth twisted and distended his belly, looped out into the cool shuddering dark side of the night. Fishers and wildcats with glowering eyes scuttled under him in single file. Sniffing along the trails the ants left behind, following them to the carcasses left over for the banquet. Over there just beyond the tips of his very clutches lay the extended roots of her tree. Its contoured trunk reflected the darkened stains and imprints of her old tattoos. Little did he know she had already released extra tannins downwind to the greater colony as a warning to watch out for him. The poison he'd slipped into her drink once upon a time turned out to be ineffective, after all.
Beneath him even further, behind his bowed over back, Jozzwen's arms and legs plunged deep within the garden. There the rocky ground lay, with all it had collected in time. The planet's orbit had undergone a sudden adjustment as an erratic gravitational flux from a nearby quasar adjusted its course. This powerful flux configured a permanent dark side of the Earth, which is how the mother planet was forced into a fresh synchronous rotation with the Sun. From what Jozz could tell during this stretched out moment, it appeared he had been planted within a short range of the darkened slash of shadow the planet was now half sunken into. The thought caused him to shiver. He felt the nearby discharge of energy and reveled in it. He imagined droplets of sweat beading across his brow. He blinked away the memory as a newfound stillness loomed over him.
The Vedma-tree had whispered to her fungal network of the wicked deed the Jozzwenn-tree had done to her, no less, to whom it fell to process the poison he'd placed in her drink. What would they think of a character like that who accepted payment for murder without skipping a beat? He's a loner besides, she reported, already cut off from the tribe. She disclosed in hushed tones to the underbrush and all that would receive. Working to estrange him from mycorrhizal networks, she added emphasis to the spell she conducted by cursing him in longhand with a plague of caterpillars and beetles. She wrote the script that set the chain of events in motion, resulting in a host of eggs being deposited within his bark. The rest of the colony of trees stood in their circle and took notice. They'd received the news and understood the cruelty of his story. They shuddered to think they might have unwittingly let him become one of them.
Just behind him over the horizon the fiery furnace of the Hell of creation awaited. Mercifully for Jozzwen, only its glowing edge could be detected. It could barely even be felt. In the rustling of the interior world about him, a slow flowering cloud of mushroom spores cultivated and spawned all manner of advancing life. Deep within the buried man'o'tree's dreaming mind a diversity of understanding bloomed. Jozz realized then that the underlying sense of gnawing disharmony he was adjusting to was like the hum of a refrigerator in a long lost apartment that he could barely recall. Only now it was the harrowing resonance from the celestial firestorm of never ending fury that licked fastidiously at the other side of the world. It felt as if he were getting more than just a blown kiss on the edge of his face by the burning salutation of a wrathful nemesis. If he could hear anything at all now it was the fading thought of a shrieking echo of mad laughter cackling out of the Vedma's lips, from beyond the grave.
Little did he suspect how quickly beetles and caterpillars could lay waste to a tree. Nevertheless, he was beginning to feel at home here in this restored netherworld where he had hung upside down for what now seemed an incalculable period of time. Nourishment in the form of sugars that should have been streaming to him in greater torrents from the colony surrounding him was diminishing gradually, without elucidation nor a sound. If it was even possible to be darker or more silent. Closing what was left of the memories that once flooded his eyes very slowly, and lowering each dimly remembered lid down over this dreamlike moment of breaking dusk, he allowed the fading impressions of his face to go slack. He imagined reveling in the pleasant sensation of a final gust of wind licking his neck before succumbing to his inescapable petrification.
The silence in this sylvan thicket was deafening. He shuddered as the altered world before him regenerated into a peripheral shadow allowing an oasis of ringed timberland to quietly thrive about him. What was left of his own shadow was but the reflection of a diminishing memory, an endlessly repeating gauge indicating an empty tank, now just a closed-circuit pathway to a dead end. Across from him just several feet away, another low hunched humanitree with darkened blots of iconography covering its bark poised gracefully over its bed of dandelions and garlic and quietly flourished. The Vedma-tree would now slowly grow to a very ripe old proportion within the helpful embrace of her newfound underground community. Meanwhile, what was left of Jozzwen Lucidero in the aftermath of being devoured by pine beetles, leaf hoppers and aphids gradually dimmed away and dusted into humus, sunken into the ground to be forgotten much quicker than the time it had taken for him to arrive on the scene. Beneath the twilit penumbra of a darkening garden, the underworld once again welcomed him into its embrace.
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