Orsday Programming November 21 2025

What? Stop that! Oh!

My Prophet, I awake; my eyes open and see only you. My skin is warm from how near you are, my lips are flush from how your breath falls upon them; I feel you radiate near me and my hands reach for your shoulders. My Prophet, only dreams you have given me, only visions you have given me. You lift my chin. That single finger fries through my skin, scalding down to my jaw; I can not speak; I dare not wince; you smile and speak for me: Do you recognize me? I do recognize you, though I can not speak, as my tongue has melted to the soft palette; you nod for me and speak for me: I am The Vision Trusted to Mayflies Drowned Within Garden Clay; I am an enemy of this world; I have seen glimpses of possibilities cast fractal through fingers splayed overhead; I have been washed within light; I have been brushed with night; and, these eyes and brained chained to me appear fresh once again yet reek of dust long gathered in the pit. And you poke my throat, and that scalding stroke caresses my fleshy jugular, and falls into the notch below, boiling like an ember; I swallow. My lips mouth air in want to say: My Prophet I have known you and now I beg to serve your vision. I hold your wrists with both hands—how your skin glows!—and mouth air as to say Do not make me beg more please. The Prophet Mayflies Drowned, how you stand against air itself, more infection than physical; yet so physical. You tell me You have no need to plead, I have appeared here automatically; I am at your side to function, so I will function, sister of mine. My prophet laces her fingers into my mine; her glowing hand constricts my smoking hand; My prophet tells me I am the hero of this world I see; I stare at the lips of my prophet—how your lips glow!—; I watch the words form before the sound ever reaches me—may it never reach me!—and see the silence proclaim I will save you.

My Prophet, it’s your eyes I sink into. Round and round my soul circles and slips inside your gaze, and with a blink I am to belong to your vision, O hero.

“This is smut” Mastema laughs and paces back and forth the classroom reading a little more and then laughing a little more and going “Lord, it’s just smut.”

I had long given up bothering to protest. I was fine to just press my eyes tightly into my palms. Fantastic colors streaked as large splotches against darkness. Mastema laughed a little more and my papers rustled in her spidery little claws.

I pressed harder. Fantastic purple EXPLODED over the fantastic splotch of red.

Mastema laughed and cooed near me “Oh Prophet sink your fingers into my honeyed lipthhhs.” And laughed, and said “You have an imagination. You write well. Quite an imagination.”

I pressed harder. Fantastic green EXPLODED over the last shrieks of Fantastic blue.

“Thanks,” I said. Blue blue red. She stomped near me.

“Hey I didn’t mean to be BULLYING you. This is just nice writing. Why don’t you tell me more about this Poffit Mayfee of yours and about how his long fingers slipping down your lips.”

“The Prophet is a girl.” Red Purple Blue Fantastic Blue sparkling more with more pressure.

“Oh; dyke?” Laughed; chair screeched against the floor; her ass slamming into it sat near enough to me to smell the fishy musty scent always clinging to her skin even louder than the fantastic white stacking itself into Mandelbrot spots from how I grind my palms into my eyes.

“I would have known if you ever described your girlfriend, all I’ve gathered is she is functionally a stovetop with fingers and a set of lips; and the name? Why a bland one and not a proper one? Like—” I dug my palms so deep into my eyelids that Fantastic purple shattered the whole building Mandelbrot, and I cut her off with a sharp barking: “NO ONE!”—saying it made my head feel light—”NO WONDER!”—gray crept up over Fantastic purple!—“No WONDER you have no friends.”

She said: “What?”

And I stopped grinding my teeth and said: “No wonder you have no friends.”

Mastema said nothing.

And it was grey now being washed with more gray until Fantastic pink striped over it and I said: “Prideful sow. You just bare it away unhappy with no one likes you because you’re a violent prideful sow with an ugly name and an ugly bloodstain all over your ugly little hands and take it out on everyone and want to grip and rip everyone down to your ugly little level.”

Mastema said nothing.

I said: “Ugly.”

Mastema said nothing.

I rubbed at my eyes; color bloomed purple and grey.

Mastema said nothing, and then a sharp sound of paper ripping.

And I immediately said: “You BITCH,” and saw her milky dark-haired smear through a blazing fluorescent halo and did not care and lunged to strike her. My hips hit the desk and blurry Mastema flinched away. My glasses clattered to the floor; I heard my pens knock and roll away on the floor.

Mastema said: “Your glasses fell.”

And I said nothing. I squinted at my feet. I couldn’t see my glasses. I saw two ripped white halves of paper were at her feet between the two of us. I stretched down to pick them up but couldn’t reach.

And Mastema said: “Do you want me to get them?”

I ignored her, stood up, picked up the sheets of paper and squinted till the first few lines started to clarify to something legible, reading What is the name of the pale stone predominantly used (rip) and above Question One (rip) and above Herodian Architecture Wor (rip) and I told Mastema “I’m going to spit on you.”

“I’m sitting on the real one. Don’t step on your glasses.”

I squinted down at my feet.

She asked, “Let me get them?”

I replied, “I’m going to spit on you.”

She laughed and handed me my glasses.

I put them on and she immediately shoved me; I fell.

I slapped her hand away and stood up. And I said: “You sow bitch.”

And Mastema said: “Those’re sacred aren’t they.”

I straightened my clothes and sat farther away, near the window; the skies were still howling and salt clouds still laid heavily over the school. A beetle was stuck on its back on the outdoor window sill caught in the gutter, beating its wings only to spin in a circle.

And Mastema said, to my back: “I wouldn’t rip your little story up. You write good. Don’t talk about my parents though.”

I scowled at the beetle, DIE, and said: “I didn’t say anything about your parents.”

And Mastema said: “You said I had blood on my hands.”

And I said: “That’s what they say.”

And Mastema said: “That’s about my parents.”

And I said: “I don’t know why they say you’re bloody just that you’re bloody.”

And I turned to look at her as she stomped towards the desk nearest me and sat down to stare also out at the howling sky and salt clouds.

“You’re the blood prince that goes to bathrooms so often to wash all the blood off your palms, named that way so we know the nobles, so we know the ones who snuck away from Daddy Guillotine.” I clicked my tongue.

“That’s just some trash the whores you hang out with say because the texts tell their parents to tell them.”

“I don’t hang out with them.”

“You hear their teases.”

“I hear their teases. You hear their teases. Give me back my papers.”

She handed them back to me, muttering She wouldn’t have really ripped it.

Mastema said: “You write really well.”

I snorted, “I’ve just been reading another author and trying to write like them.”

Mastema said: “Who were you reading?”

“Helen DeWitt,” I whispered Her name, “She’s a lovely writer; whenever we do our readings I just read her lately.”

Mastema sharpened on me, “A proper name? Pre-sorting?”

“Pre-sorting.”

“Who is bothering to transcribe old authors?”

“The Bible is old authors you clot.”

“Old authors deemed significant; who’s bothering to deem a Helen DeWitt significant?”

I sharpened back at her and sneered, “Me.”

Mastema laughed.

“It’s why I’m here; they caught me reading the right hand and took my notes and spent an hour chewing through me about Le Jardin Parfum.”

Mastema laughed like a hiss, “What? Doesn’t that hurt your eyes to see.”

“Like the devil behind my eyes! You get used to it after hours and then it’s just like looking at funny symbols and then I’m writing my B’s and D’s and S’s and Five’s in the wrong ways.”

“And they caught your work and tossed it out? But missed the dyke erotica snuck in your Bible?”

I rolled my eyes and flicked the window where the beetle still spun and flashed DIE in my head, “I’ll spit on you.”

And Mastema said: “Why not name your prophet crush a nice courtly name if you’re already so keen on fouling doctrine? It’s your writing.”

I turned away, “My writing. MY writing; I wouldn’t name the prophet; I wouldn’t deign to name the prophet as I wouldn’t dare name the hand or my ancestors or my spouse. You see something so beautiful the last thing you want is to shed skin around it and dirty it up with touch or to understand it and lower it to something mundane. Name the prophet. Name the vision. Like naming the Le Jardin Parfum.”

“You had a vision?”

I flicked the window where the beetle still spun and flashed DIE in my head.

And Mastema said: “Just like in your story?”

“It was heroic. You’d laugh and I don’t want to feel any stupider today. Helen DeWitt and Le Jardin Parfum are already stupid enough ash in incinerators.”

And Mastema said: “I still don’t know what that other thing is.”

Flick, DIE, and I said: “Le Jardin Parfum?”

And Mastema said: “Yea.”

Flick, DIE, still spinning: “Me neither; it was on a sheet I found covered in black scorings and comb-teeth.”

And Mastema looked at the beetle spin and maybe also wished it DIE and said: “Well, I promise I won’t laugh. Besides, I’ll just keep reading.” So, she stood and held the papers up to her face and kept reading. Mastema paced for several minutes slowly reading the second page; the beetle kept pace with Mastema with its own desperate struggle until it abruptly ceased.

She read out loud to me: “My Savior; I have found my heart signed to you and found in your touch the only physician my heart ever needed; the calm that has befell me I can only explain as my first sensation of love ever felt; I close my eyes at night and remember how you held my head and I remember your touch as if a fever I never wish to cool; I felt your body so close to mine and felt a thirst suffered a lifetime finally slaked by nearness to you; I shied away from your gaze and now feel ashamed for how I have done so and how plainly you saw me, and how my skin must have appeared more thin than gossamer or silk or thin peel of an onion, for I was finally seen, in the awful wretched simplicity I have forever hidden within myself and now forced to reveal; And, O! How you did not flinch from my blood and how you took to you my wounds and nursed my blood; I felt your lips cauterize my wrist; I felt your breath lower into my mouth and fill my lungs and I wanted only to beg your forgiveness for letting my unwashed lips and teeth and breath seep against yours; how I wished I had lived a life of cleanliness and scrutiny if only for that one moment where with no shame or hesitation you dirtied yourself with me. And I was pulled from torpor And restored from my death And how desperately I reached for you, My Savior, before you shook away into unreality; And I had been left, pulled from the kiln, once so near and knowing to my sculptors fingers—and now, burning, and solid. I shall keep my wound a signature and treasure it never as a wound and only a signature and live a life devoted to you: an enemy to this world; a hero of this world. Helen DeWitt writes like this?”

“No. Not at all. I was reading the Bible and feeling heady.”

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this article is part of the Parables found on the Concordance

this article is part 5 in a series, [previous] [next]