Orsday Programming October 4 2025

Searching, Finding, Stalking, Stalking

I created a list of every public churches ruin, in Florida, from information I gained by subscribing to postal newsletters, finding the associated ruins connected with those newsletters, and further subscribing to other newsletters associated with sister and brother ruins mentioned; I started with finding my local, a small ruin named Church Where Doves Pool—or Dovepool—, and calling them using a phone number listed on the local plaintext system for Leesburg. No one answered. I did not bother leaving a message, and instead bothered to visit it in person. Dovepool was very near where I lived; I had outlived it, and even had the fortune to witness the prior church—a small Adventist community—empty out over the ‘thin years’ of the neighborhood; summer laid heavy those years and I remember the light at noon having the quality of a milky screen, as if the sky were heaving hot, steamy, breaths down upon the town. Signs went up during the second summer and it was claimed as a protected ruin, and became haunted by a new group of funny creature different than the Adventists but of similar shape.

There was no trouble showing up, and the greeter at the door (an older woman, more gray than silver) had been happy to sign up my address to receive the local communications, and pried very little when I declined showing up to service, and only bothered to keep me a little longer to tell me ‘good news’ about recent insights into Technology—”We’ve found it in the spine already, and within the next four years we’ve a hoping to perfectly test the material by going through the spine,” she said, “The age of prophesy is alive, still, after all,” I said, and she bobbed her head in a nod, slowly, with significance, “I hear it more clear every day; Every day, more clear,” she said—and offering to host me at her house for a ‘guava cheese shortcake,’ which I politely declined but thanked her, and admitted: maybe another time.

Within a week I received printed communication listing the names and numbers of the clergy at Dovepool Ruins, information of religious events for the following week, what relics would be traveling, updates to parent and child texts, word collection information, and concerns regarding the budget. I learned that a relic named Human Hand Holding Twenty Dead Crickets was visiting Dovepool that upcoming week, arriving for the Orsday service, from a ruin in Jacksonville, Our Casting Ground, and would be traveling afterwards from Dovepool to another ruin in Orlando, Church Abandoned.

I thought to visit for that service and to witness Human Hand Holding Twenty Dead Crickets but opted instead to call that morning, after arriving on the corner of Dovepool and being met with a swarm of black vehicles packed together on the lawn, pouring out onto the street where the lawn had been too congested, slender black car doors spreading themselves open, and close; too, the people were thick on the lawn and flowing between vehicles and pushed around fluttering car doors, like so many mites. I went home. The call was productive; a man with a deep voice answered and, after I explained I could not make service this week but hoped to visit the traveling relic for the following Orsday, he was happy to provide me with the number for the Church Abandoned in Orlando.

I repeated this method in the following weeks and months, stalking the relic H.H.H. through their travel up and down the arteries of Florida; as H.H.H. traveled, I traveled with them through telephone calls, postal letters, and plaintext communication.

The list was short, and likely inaccurate, but of my own effort and would be my first entry in my first collection of the word, slotted as the very first page, of my first binder, and neatly columned and written as-if a church registrar itself for a non-existent phonebook.

Where We Cast Glass, Boca Raton

First Orchestra Muting Church, Branford

New Gerasene Ruins, Fort Myers

Fourth Horn Muting Church, Gainesville

Basilica of Our Tumor, Havana

Quieting Cathedral of Shrine Bell, Inglis

Our Casting Ground Ruin, Jacksonville

Ruin of the Lakes, Kissimmee

Our Clay Quieting Church, Lakeland

Church Where Doves Pool, Leesburg

Heap At Our Hand Ruins, Newsnansville

Basilica of the Shrine Sinkhole, Ocala

Molting Home, Ocala

Our Shrine Annihilation Ruins, Orange Park

Our Church Abandoned, Orlando

Home of the Fourth Word Ruins, Orlando

Clay at Gerasene Ruins, Sarasota

Basilica of the Shrine Mayfly, Tarpon Springs

Fourth Orchestra Muting Church, Waldo

Song of the Horn Ruins, Winter Haven

Excluded from this list, but still recorded, were the Communication offices or churches, of which there were only two that served Florida, and both only called “Communications.”

Communications, Orlando

Communications, Tallahassee

Both of these were responsible for receiving communications from the central mother church at Underground and collecting reports from listeners in the region, and collecting scraps of the hidden word, which in turn would be audited for assembly of a new parent text, in turn which new children could be shed and distributed; the Orlando Communications was assigned to support central and south Florida; the Tallahassee Communications was responsible for north Florida, and likely parts of southern Georgia, and the lower right corner of Alabama—this is conjecture, and (as implied) symptom of how incomplete my research yet it (itself, symptom of mostly assembling this list from the trail by H.H.H. and whatever else I could get from phonecalls; notable gap: I did not hear of any church in Tallahassee, where the Communications for north Florida was located).

While stalking, I learned of the underlying conventions that went into naming a ruin. My initial assumption was that the name reflected the prior host of the ruin—perhaps a Baptist church ruin would inherit the culture of Baptist naming conventions, or perhaps a Buddhist ruin would inherit those naming conventions—but, with some regional differences, the naming schemes were distinctly a shade Catholic, and colored a step further with the recent cultural trends of segregationists: the moving away from older, gray, broad idolatrous names (your Mr. Papers, Mrs. Houses, Sister Bones, Brother Doors), to the very specific; and, for these specific names: the tendency to be named after empty and material things—casting a certain gothic, haunted tint over this new strain of believers. These new believers, for their own names, focused on shells, insects, parts of carcasses, bones, refuse, scraps of earth or clay, machinery byproduct, empty buildings, parts of instruments, references to the Arterial system that moves through Underground, and allusions to ‘the space’ of the wound; and, given that buildings were to be seen as Idol Cousins to the left-handed, it was readily adopted to name them with the same conventions of the people. Right-handed abstract names were forbidden—though I did find a church breaking this law, a Biathanatos Hall in Old Eustis, which I did not bother to list—and what became popular was the present trend of very Catholic sounding templates of Basilicas and Cathedrals and references to Our, and a unique trend of tagging the ruin church with the name of a regional shrine (in place of the righteous saint). Some small regional differences popped up—ruins referring to Silences and the Orchestra were more popular in the north, and ruins defying valid convention were more prevalent in central Florida (Biathanatos Hall in Old Eustis; a ruin established in the carcass of an invalid host was local to me in Leesburg). All of this was confirmed over a pleasant phone conversation with a sister by the name of Venetian Blinds Left In Landfill, who asked that I just call her Landfill, while I had hit a dead-end in my following of H.H.H.; the shrine had gone missing somewhere in central Florida while returning from Molting Home in Ocala.

The Sister Landfill, after she had admitted the regional plaintext communications had zero information to the whereabouts of H.H.H. though weren’t quite concerned yet, gossiped to me about local affairs and the current state of the faith, from what she knew amongst her congregation and networks—she’d been quite unbidden by Etiquette, or eager to shrug off some of the reservation imposed by Etiquette, and chatted with me as-if she were a schoolgirl happy to gossip;

“It’s just a beautiful business ain’t it all just, yes. It’s been something here with a few new churches, ruins, popping up—quite a lot in Florida, actually—away from the coasts; no doubt wishing to be farther away from the salt; but, yes, it’s been a beauty here with the extremists running amok with their churches, there’s that place near you, Biathatos? I think that is the name? —Over in Old Eustis, built up from a mosque that had been torn through by a tornado near the start of the year. It’s bad for the faith and people, they get these odd, extreme, ideas and start to want to widen up the door; widen up the night like it was something that fingers can pry up; force the volume to turn up, and up—and they get these absolutely spirited ideas of things; I don’t think them much more than terrorists. If you look at the bombings you’d find them and their garbled ideas. Beautiful business. Completely in arrears of study, and redemption; it comes. It just comes as it is owed. The door opens at its own pace and the night does not get any blacker.”

More, though, Landfill did not seem ready to connect her idea of this religious violence with the disappearance of the shrine;

“Well, suppose that is possible and I’d sing it not be that, but it’d be better and more likely to diagnose the shrine as simply given to a tiring from the constant travels, sermonizing, installing—life befalls us, even simple objects, in strange ways and nips at us equally, with stranger weathers; suppose our shrine was spirited off by an extremist, or felled with a stray bullet, or, more likely, found herself wonderfully tired and indisposed enough to report her condition; perhaps some cause caught her by the guts and pulled her in a new direction; perhaps a night set over her spirit; perhaps the wear had been enough that now she lay clean and redeemed by a cause decided due by her Physician. It does no good to speculate; and, have you met the shrine? She was always an odd one; a sort-of phlegmatic woman who kept herself strict, and’d been carved down by that lifestyle—not so that she did not take any care of herself, but obsessed over how her Physician would like her kept; well, I don’t want to say her business outright.. but, she ate what not the Spirit said for her to eat—she was given to these bouts of complaining at a ‘powerful color’ that appeared to her in the roads, laid over her sight and brain as a wide ellipse, is how she described it, in a bright ‘stygian’ blue where angels all gathered in a group; I knew her when she was a decade younger, she’d always have these episodes and, when describing them, hid her mouth behind her hand, became glassy-eyed recounting them with an automatic expression. ‘The angels accidentally grouped together too close and showed me their body in an ellipse shape that was an awful sickening stygian blue, and their thousand arms and legs were shoving against each other, floating out over the road, impossible to the sunlight, and staring up at me with wide eyes that surely matched my own expression, and they hungered at me, and they wanted me to eat, and they said eat lettuce, and they said eat rabbit, and they said eat peanuts, and they said eat potatoes, and they said eat eggs, and they said eat bread, and’ —she would list quite a few items, I forget exactly what but always in her episodes would list out a substantial amount of foods, and then she would refuse to eat anything listed until the next episode; she became thinner each time I saw her; over the years she ceased to be the girl I had known and had become affixed with a quality of sickness, and weakness. She had been beautiful. She still kept herself clean, but recently her beauty was only a quality kept to faith. So, I suppose it seems not too far-fetched the dearling just dropped, finally starving off the Soul that clung to her; or, became bewitched by an episode and led afear’d by something new revealed to her—perhaps the things inside the blue ellipses stopped telling her to eat, and started to tell her to go places, and her reaction was to do otherwise. She was a queer thing. ‘I can’t stop tasting salt, I’ve ate nothing and I only taste salt,’ I remember her complaining. We had liked each other. I painted her after communications declared her emptied; I knew a shrine—it was a thrilling idea. Understand?”

And, afterwards, we chatted about the politics at her church ruins, Our Church Abandoned, in Orlando;

“It was found in host before my time in service of the church—and I left my life as a layperson over in Ocala, actually, where she [H.H.H.] was meant to be coming down from, over at Moulting Home; I was there as a girl when that founded, my parents—familial—were in the generation, both lucky enough to be of the same material, and I lucky enough to be born of that same thing; quite a blessing, I remember in a car ride with my mother to school one morning, we parked off the side of a street, mother had become irritated with my spirited talking—I had been rhyming or singing something childish, I think, and mothers shushing me only provoked me to defend myself as just having fun—and said if I had been born of the Word that sang then she would have abandoned me in this street, which was by a group of Methodists. It was cruel, but I was spirited as a girl; I was none bothered by spoiling the tempering of my parents faith. And as confusion would lay it out for us, Ma and Pa both were enmeshed with the locals in pushing a scheme to expedite the emptying out of a local Methodist church; it was something I didn’t understand until many years later—but they’d be gone for nightly meetings at ‘a club house’ ran by ‘Aunt Vial’ and often left me alone with a sitter till late morning, when they’d return gaunt in the face but with a cheery glow despite the haunted look; they’d intimidate Methodists at night, and do some strange work to influence the real estate—a beautiful work, my parents; but I had been present for when they acquired the property and the founders came to accord with the Communications to name it; it was an informal affair; just a bunch of scary, serious adults sitting in what had once been a worship hall, having a late breakfast, and talking about the dead Methodist church like it had been long pregnant and finally conceived, and now these pretend parents had the sudden surprise of naming their miracle child. This sorry work of a man, Preserved Flesh of a Mammoth, came up with Moulting Home, ‘We shed a gem of a child off those Methodist tick bastards, so, call it the sensible name: it is a moult, and it is our home, and let’s not complicate it.’ —That’s about how it usually goes, and about how it goes for us, isn’t it? Local interests and everything; up north the sermons have been tinged with recent belief in a quieting orchestra, I think they say, and that’s gotten hold of imagination on the recent believers. That’s about it; Communications isn’t too picky or concerned with naming, as long as it is of host and idolatrous.”

She was eager to talk, and reluctant to end the call, only managing after several ‘goodbyes’ had passed between us.

I did not share the same eagerness as the Sister Landfill towards dismissing the extremists as reasonable cause behind the disappearance of H.H.H.; there would always be a season of salt, and always a season of sugar. Only this year Long Summer had occurred down the central artery of Florida leaving a trail of dead as a terror group associated with left-handed segregationists carried out blasting attacks against hospitals and churches; the group was never named, and their soft targets did not discriminate between the righteous or lesser handed. Targeting of churches had an overt reason: to breed ruins, to tilt the bias of the world askew from righteous. The hospitals had been of a more sly reason: to terrorize and kill menial workers in the care industry—mostly the lesser handed. No specific group was identified, but extremism had a deserved place within the faith—set in a niche carved for it towards any who would ask why; annihilation is our equal conclusion, and our redemption comes from a second death, where spirit is loosened from our person clay; the blasting attacks had an absurd, clear, sense to them: death is the only goal, and affecting the population bias in a way favoring Underground was happy byproduct, better than grace achieved by struggling against Death and material. And, as equally good targets: those brother, sister, cousins who would cause the Grand Silence to wait by constantly ushering more to life by pursuit of grace. I do not sympathize with them.

Calling the ruin H.H.H. departed from, at Moulting Home in Ocala, I spoke with a Sister Rodent Vertebrae Broken In Threshed Wheat. Sister Rodent Wheat spoke as if conversation was a trial to be suffered through, and what information I gathered was strained.

I asked if she had heard H.H.H. was missing,

“Hm?”

And I would then ask if,—rephrasing—she knew that H.H.H. was missing,

“..No.”

She was at your church ruin, Moulting Home, correct?

“Mm.” —I imagined her nodding to the phone, and her thinking it would come across over the line.

Did you see her leave?

“Mm.”

You saw her leave?

“Yes.”

Did she mention where she was going?

“No.”

Did she seem sick while at the service?

“Mm. Well..,” a long pause, “You know.”

I supposed I did; what did she do at the service?

“Sermoned. Read from her pages..,” a long pause, “Death’s Duel.”

Death’s Duel?

“John Donne.”

—and mostly our conversation was along those lines. I tried calling later, hoping to get another person, but immediately closed the line after the person answered the phone and proceeded to say nothing.

The reading reported in the sermon, Death’s Duel by John Donne, I found at a library stored in plaintext; itself, a sermon delivered by John Donne near the end of his life. It begins with this sentence: “Buildings stand by benefit of their foundations that sustain and support them, and of their butteresses that comprehend and embrace them, and of their contignations that knitt and unite them: The foundations suffer them not to sink, the butteresses suffer them not to swerve, and the contignation and knitting sufferes them not to cleave.”

And ends with this sentence: “And then lastly the contignation and knitting of this building, that hee that is our God is the God of all salvation, consists in this Unto this God the Lord belong the issues of death, that is, that this God.”

A month went by before I visited my chatty friend, Sister Landfill.

She was between jobs and didn’t mind hosting me at her apartment; it was an October afternoon, and while we shared drip coffee together in her living room, we discussed a little more of faith, H.H.H., and events.

H.H.H. had been declared missing and her fate became a popular subject of speculation by those who had known of her. “Brother Glass, who’d been there at the last sermon, of hers, swears she was suicidal and wanting to pry open the door. Oh, the man, you,” she put her hand on my shoulder and began to make a spider with her other hand, “he’d been making a dramatic show of the last ‘visage’—’visage’ he’d call it—saying ‘That woman, oh the unsightly visage of her, had long lost any desire to be confused by this life, And, had clear want of nothing more than to pry open the quiet door with ‘er own wasting fingers and slip through, right out, of this sorry wasted world.’” Sister Landfill rose lightly in her seat and, still gripping my shoulder, gestured with her other hand towards the ceiling as if calling to heaven, “‘Such a face given to death I’d ever seen, Spirit fell from her lips as scales with every word of that blasted sermon she gave, And the utterance of foul Righteous sop John was the last chewn cud the unsightly Woman had want to utter or give this world. It was suicide! She pried the door! By gut and root if any a brain you’d believe a truth gave by any who had seen that awful visage.’” She loosened her grip on my shoulder and laughed, standing, and returning to the kitchen to check a stew she had started before I arrived.
”What a heel that man is, beautiful piece of work that he is—about an hour on the stew—so given to dramatics. A drama child, even in his silver years. Likely just that, wanted to sing and was then forbidden and it stewed in him as gas redirected to being loud, pompous, and plain. We can order food if you would like, dear, or—well, I could heat up some rolls; I have butter?”

Later into the evening she remembered to show me her portraits of H.H.H.. There, first, was a series of looser charcoal portraits that had been done when the two both had been younger, and before either had been wedded to Etiquette, promised away to Underground; this, younger, H.H.H. was—I can only explain—extremely plain. The artist had no care to really bother beautifying the charcoal portraits, or to focus on capturing some underlying artistic beauty; they were just hurried drawings done, “over lunches, while out, while bored listening to sermons, while bored with our lives.”

The grander work, which Landfill saw fit to name and store enshrined, was the demon Cadmium Green Portrait of Our Sister, Emptied, and was (as named) entirely done in violent heavy strokes of cadmium green. The portrait only appeared through the textures left by the brush, and the volume of paint applied, giving the cousin demon a strange geographic quality. Too, it was massive. Landfill had moved her bed out of the room that now housed Our Sister, Emptied, and let it live there mostly undisturbed and unaccompanied in the barren room, except for itself (which met the ceiling), and all remnants of material used to create the cousin demon, which lay at its feet. Lines of where furniture had been still scarred the wood floor. The blinds had been removed, too, and replaced with brown paper.

She explained, “I hope to have it officially recognized and perhaps transported, or to have the apartment claimed, with the materialization of Human Hand Holding Twenty Dead Crickets—when fully enshrined, you know? But for now she is here; it’s quite moving for me. I don’t like to look at it. Maybe no more than once a month. Hadn’t seen it at all this latter half of the year; the salt nipped at me and the moods been sour, and I’d wilt before it. It’s my connection to something, I don’t know.”

She lost her thought and stumbled, giving several false starts to continuing, before just giving up and saying, “You know?”

My reason for the visit had been for more information; a week prior, one morning, I called her on a whim asking both if I could still be baptized, and if she knew anyone who was at the last sermon of H.H.H., to which both she said, “Yes.” It was not until sunset did we directly approach either topic—though the latter had been gestured towards throughout the day.

For being baptized, “Typically we leave that for kids; older converts are rare and there’s a period of ‘trying’ to ascertain you’re not of some distress or trouble, or some pain, to cause a fleeting whim to such a commitment. That, well, there is no way around avoiding attendance—why? Is there some event in your life; or, well, how to ask—do you believe?”

To my wanting to be introduced to a person who’d been at the final sermon, “I could; I could absolutely torture you with a business card for that clown, Glass Scattered On Manufacturing Floor; a smart man but an absolute clown and sure to give you a headache, and a confusion, with what-ever garbage he’d loudly, monotonously, ex-plain to you.”

For my part in this evening: it is not worth mentioning.

A week later I had agreed to meet Brother Glass at a nearby cafe in Leesburg. When I called him, he greeted me with a high-pitch, flat, “HELLO? SPEAKING?” and we both found some luck that he was visiting Leesburg “THIS COMING WEEK, THE MYSTERY HAS CALLED ME DOWN TO THAT NECK OF THE WOODS, AS HAPPENS, QUITE, YES—YES THIS ALL SEEMS QUITE PROVIDENCE; ARE YOU OPPOSED TO COFFEE? A HEALTHY DRINK; FLAVINOIDS; SO MANY THINGS—” and similar. Sitting across from him at the cafe, he had ceased his manner of shouting into the phone and spoke in a more timid, controlled, volume; rather, he was a smaller character in person: a meaty complexion, sea-green eyes constantly looking away and downward, behind silver-framed spectacles, and a thin, severe, mouth hidden under a bristling moustache. He had been happy to meet me, eager to speak of the faith and of the sermon, and of the ‘visage’ he’d seen.

“It was, by, by it was a thing of beauty;”

As he spoke, he constantly chewed at the air and kneaded his fingers together, in an open and closing motion,

“..I know the first week I felt electricity flowing right Through my heart, and chest. At night I could barely breathe so the memory would grip down on me; A, a wight would be at my chest, laying down on me staring right atween me with shining blue eyes. A digital blue. That was a prophet in the ruins; heart before my brain I saw the soul steam off her lips, she said an abstracted name with such pure-heart refusal that Lord God sucked the imperfection off perfect clay and returned, return to both. I swear by it that is what happened to that woman; that look at her face; she was dead afore us reading a curse and unaware of it all, spake to us not a person but a shamble of clay heaped in the church and only saying silence. And you know I swear. I swear by it all. The passing inch out the door she left she ceased to be. That then I was wrong. Wrong to say it was suicide; something simple like that, naw; no-way; No way; a miracle of a fleshly thing; a pur-formance by the crooked bard. Those clods thinking extremists on either end took her hadn’t been there, and if they had they each would be tempered at nightly gazes by that digital blue; it was a curse—I swear; those Forty-Eight Finger bastards lay shame to us all cast against a graceful death as the shrine Humans Holding Crickets, or, however her name had been. The, oh; the Forty-Eight Fingers of Our Mother Underground? Yes, a terrible bunch that reckon themselves magi atween worth to name themselves after the demons; you’d not heard of them? Well; maybe you should not know of such things. They are a lot that pry the widening door.” Said, he spit into a napkin, took a sip of water, leaned back into his seat and pulled a travelers bottle of lotion from his trouser pockets, and worked the lotion into his hand, now suddenly checked out of the conversation.

He stood, shook my hand, pulled a twenty from his breast pocket and said it was a good talk, and that I should not bother with those bastards or their nonsense.

The trail went cold, then; a week later I had no new information, and my stalking sputtered. An attempt to visit the local Leesburg ruin produced nothing new; there were no leads on H.H.H., or new rumors about her, or much interest beyond sympathy for ill-fortune that befell a fellow person of a shared faith; I only arrived to be hugged, remembered by several people, to hear a sermon about no differences mattering except the absurdity of our material, and for the day to end with me sitting in the kitchen of the woman who greeted me at Dovepool, trying the guava cheese shortcake she offered me.

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this article is part of the Parables found on the Concordance

this article is part 2 in a series, [1] [2] [3] [4]