Grown below, a ritual clamor: the thrones are being reseated, the bear and the lion are chewing the scenery; between fanging at each other, that is, and keeping from themselves and their schlock postcard prey a hovering, twoheaded eagle: whose claws clutch two gold constellations, that of the hammer, and the brilliantly sharp, horizoning sickle. A scythe, harvesting souls: a reaped vista vast with its armies just massing, partiuniformed, ununiformed, tatterdemalion nighthooded and grim, scarred with elaborate insignia of their own private winter’s invention, already exhausted in their hearts and minds just by the effort it took, it takes, to get lined, accounted for, at the ready. Misses Sanderson swerves from them — better to ignore until even ignorance’s no longer an option: in favor of collecting, if only for the grandmothered attic of her mind, a host of rare, deepbeaked, earthturning birds, carrier butterflies their wings mounted a span across rivers and streams to facilitate pillaring, their bridging cocoon…her scoping the metallic, mechanized work of what she’ll think of as oddlegged, scurrying spiders, her delicate, birdboned face with its fluttery eyes fortified into the spin of their webs, the last caught light of their barbs. How she nods to her husband: a herd of ragged kine, see, Samuel, how they’re grazing on wire, upon heaps of moldering scrap. Lately, she’ll take any wonder as sign, anything fantastic as expected, deserved — Samuel, just look: the making real revelation of another living thing, however mythical, however purposemade, wrought if only for the spectacle of their paying indulgence — a miracle, she says, this place has it all, thought of everything: a ram ensnared in a thicket, look, and missing its horns; sheep sheared naked, then garbed in the skin of the Unicorn, see; locusts, my God they’re locusts, Samuel…storks on parade; geese born of barnacles, grown from a remained grove of trees, hemiformed, varibirthed, the progeny of Ziz or from zat; deer sniffling the moist streaks of snails; gelatinous worms splitting earth; ostricheggs boiling on the back of the salamander, slithered from flame; an ass without rider talking its own tour to itself, if only to remember its remarkable name — ask Miriam, she’s reminding, if she doesn’t know no one does…sly like a fox, it’s swinging a rooster dead overhead the swine of the Romans, suckling süss its perfidious Sus; a calf brightly gilded, tethered to the goat of Azazel — how she wishes she had that fieldguide to flip through, but she’d left it back at the hotel, the only thing in their safe — secured with only the thinnest of threads, reddening then whitening then reddened again, its needle lost to a camel’s pass, the hump of the hillocked horizon: it’s incredible, Sam, just amazing, a caravan of mountains, a procession of clouds — all how they’re leading themselves, led by nothing, toward the sheer edge of the land, a divestment, this divergence, clearing out before their contracts expire, their fortyday, fortynight creation to fall, yet again, from this world, everflattening…further even to where it’s just a blip of the eye, at the tear of a lid, it’s the Behemoth, fashioned from Golemic clay, searching the earth it’s of for the love of its impossible mate: Titus’ gnat perched as a sentry atop winged and wingishly bearded Nebuchadnezzar, powerfully lionlegged, pitifully lion-tailed, heading out toward the oceans, the ocean…to where the Leviathan lies, swallowing forever the whale of Jonah, which itself is forever swallowing the Foundation Stone, the nesting place of the raven, with the dove hovering its reassuring attendance above, flown from its blackened arked cave strewn for the sleeping with eggshells and ashes, where sitting now until perpetually swallowed is only the wisp of an Adam — yet another Guide, the most senior, the first: sitting as straight as a knife for a finger he splits the tongues of the snakes that wriggle up from his throat, wiggle out his mouth then onto his lap, slicing off their arms and their legs, then offering their loss to the beaks of that white raven and that black dove above, to fly their slithers off to any ultimate shore, to poison the final void there to sin…
