The War of Something or Other

[Amos]

In Yuvna's opinion, no horse, no matter how well-formed, should ever occasion a journey that would rival the interminable epics of mythology.

Yuvna spoke from experience, not blind opposition. Forty-four years ago she had led a mission comprised of herself, thirty-three standard bearers, twenty-two blind philosophers, eighty-eight monks from eighty-eight unique religious sects, and sixty-six tense handlers handling sixty-six placid jaguars, to recover the bones of a fabled pegasus. The hovering nag had been the property of a demiurge until a chance contraction of Potomac Horse Fever while journeying in China ended her life. The demiurge mummified his former mount and had entombed her within the sacred stones at the base of either the West Great Mountain, Huà Shān, or the North Great Mountain, Héng Shān. Yuvna had wanted to revive the pegasus and keep it for herself, but she had got lost in the Gobi Desert, her retinue subsequently dying of thirst, and wandered the sands for ten years with only scorpions and marbled polecats for company.

All three of the beasts! Yuvna thought wonderingly. Who did she know in Bloomingdale that was strong enough to pull it off?

In alphabetical order: Foltz, Jacob -an employee of the Bloomingdale miliatary circus; Hoschander, Mary - proprieter of the hair and beauty salon where Yuvna worked part-time sweeping up clippings and restacking the magazine pile; Kellens, Gordon - owner of a bookstore and the fortunate victim of a time travel accident that had availed him of a destitute and slovelnly existence as a poet in ancient Sumeria and relocated him in Bloomingdale University, where he had easily passed as a student and eventually earned his Bachelor of Arts for his remarkable thesis that revolutionised the study and interpretation of the Gilgamesh Epos; Litchfield, Thorkild - head swami of the Bloomingdale metaphysical swim team and one of the so-called "Seven Jade Tigers", the sub rosa merchant society who bought and sold Krimsah in enormous quantities across the entire continent; Tajovy, Karel - a handsome and introspective gardener at the palace whom the revolution had ignored and all of society bar Yuvna had forgotten.

The current King was Selena's grandson, she knew.

False, or at least not quite true. Alyas had been adopted by Selena shortly after Yuvna's disappearance. He was the unacknowledged progeny of a dying novelist whom Selena had admired and met several times at the society dinners she otherwise detested so much. When Selena's biological children, a single son and two daughters, died when their blimp was sucked into a magical vortex, she declared Alyas her heir.

Yuvna sat smoking Krimsah, and wrote volumes of splendid literature.

The thousands of pages Yuvna covered with her often confused, occasionally thoughtful, and interminably ecstatic scribblings had survived the flood, but were afterwards turned into paper mache by a leak in her bedroom ceiling.

"Your cat let me in," he said, smirking widely, his evil grin revealing the metal teeth of an automaton. It was the robot! But how had he found her after all these years? No, wait a minute, that had never happened.. He didn't have the metal teeth of an automaton, he was wearing braces.

This fatal second meeting of a dead girl and her masochist never happened outside of the detectives' imagination. All subsequent interactions between the two likewise happened on a purely abstract plane. In one his psychic circumambulations Joshua K. Phoenix stumbled across this weird realm of sublimated desire and, returning often to spy and take notes, based several screeplays on what he saw there. Only one of them was ever actually made into a film, The Empress of the Electric Moon, though only a few hundred people ever watched it - Joshua himself did not, and while Yuvna's ex did, he was unable to recognise it as the twice-removed child of his unrequited love.

[Amos]

I must fail. I must relent. And I must forget.

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All that remains of Yuvna now is the outline of her handprint on the glass. The bones that do not belong to her, never belonged to her, are in a heap before the mirror. How do I say this, that only her mark is hers, that her eyes are not her eyes, that her hands are not her hands, that she has only used them, I suppose is how it must be said, that they were the tools with which she worked. And since her intelligence and sensibilities were never dislocated from this biological machine it is right to say that those were not hers either. Her thoughts were not her thoughts, her anger was not her anger, her love was not her love. There is an emptiness where I once assumed Yuvna to be, and that emptiness is Yuvna. It would be more right to say that the handprint on the mirror is not her either. Her name is not even her name since it cannot refer to anything, so why say it as if it were? And the emptiness I just mentioned is most definitely not Yuvna, why did I write that just now?

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There is a stain on my desk, a round stain from the bottom of a coffee cup, and this right now is Yuvna. In five minutes she will be the rusted shell of a car half-buried in the sand at Oreti Beach. Three days later you will notice her dripping from the roof of a museum, but by nightfall she will be the soft bristles of an old toothbrush; A child will say her in his sleep, and in the morning she will crow with the rising of the slow sun while shaking the dirt from her feathers.

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Yuvna's feet smell like dry barkchips baking in the midday heat. Her toes are small red cherries. Her shaven calves share the softness of the neck-feathers of a painted honeyeater, and her belly is the same white as that of the japanese flying squirrels'. Her buttocks are compressed and spotted and can be found growing under hedges and in the trunks of fallen trees. Her vulva has two pairs of wings but only the forewings are used for flight. Her hips were sawed from a mannequin. Her bellybutton houses a bell cricket and the bell cricket houses another, smaller, bell cricket. Her chest is a jukebox that plays old romantic tunes. Her armpits taste of pasta boiled in salt-water and have the texture of an unripe tomato. Her arms she mostly keeps in a violin case. She takes them out when she goes swimming. Her neck is a wooden barrel stuffed with egyptian cotton. The carpenter who fashioned it went by the unlikely name of Virgil. Her fingers are porcelain cup-handles snapped from store-bought mugs. Her cuticles are snail shells. Her palms are a shelter for runaway dogs.

Her eyes are two white mice. Her ears are secluded paths that lead from here to never. Her mouth is a book of law in Babylon. Her skull is the kitchen of a chinese restaurant wherein her thoughts originate from steaming bowls of rice, and her memories are two grey herons wading at the edge of a lake. Her desire is a seal swimming under the arctic ice.

Her hair is a gypsy moth.

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There is evidence that ultrasound in the range emitted by Yuvna causes forgetfulness in cattle and recursiveness in swans.

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I do not know. I do not know. I do not know. All intentions fade, all horizons recede into the corroded mortar of estrangement. Restless, uncomfortable, exacting, remote.

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My name is Yuvna. I have dreamt this maze that you call a city.