~1~

~2~

CONTENTS ~
Editors Note Nathan T. Dean
THE WORK:
Norns Thomas Jude Barclay Morrison
www.tjbmorrison.com

We All Secretly Want To Be Adam & Eve & That Other

Guy Nathan T. Dean
awriterscowardice.tumblr.com/bibliography

Assumptions of the Skin Evelyn Hollow

www.e-x-n-i-h-i-l-o.tumblr.com

Selected Works {3 poems} Brooks Lampe

uutpoetry.tumblr.com

The Bonsai Diary {Excerpt} Lily West

lilley124.tumblr.com

INTERLUDE ILLUSTRATIONS:
Septych: The Tree of Grief Sean Oxspring
oxyoxspring.co.uk

SOUNDTRACK:
Roots Myles Curwen

myles-curwen.bandcamp.com/album/roots

THE INTERVIEW:
Robots Paintbrush Anthony Prestia / @GreatArtBot

~3~

~4~

EDITORS NOTE
by NATHAN T. DEAN
The Hostess prepares for the
opening of the next exhibition. The
Wrenboy sells dream weevils down
at the market.
That was the last tweet from the @ESOTERICAZINE twitter
account, from the world I am trying to build around this little
corner of eccentric writing and now artwork being curated.
The characters were born out of translating this zine into an
entire universe, easily shifting into a Victoriana Orphanpunk
landscape of dusty art galleries and electric museums, of which
exists the little gallery owned by The Hostess, with her secondin-command, the Wrenboy. They are now ready to let you see
what the phantoms our writers and creators have sent into
the depths of the gallery, which, in this reality, is the zine you are
reading now.
It seemed apt to make the world of the zine in such a
manner, especially after you devour the work of this issue.
Weve expanded once more since Volume One, now opening
the rusty gateway of the weird to artists. This issue contains THE
TREE OF GRIEF, by SEAN OXSPRING, who has pushed his
original image through twitter algorithms relating to depression;
the tweets directly influenced the artwork and created the seven
images you see here, each named after one of the seven deadly
sins. Also, were proud to announce our first interview, this
issue looking at the twitterbot generated glitchwork of
ANTHONY PRESTIA: read my email-chat with him at the back of
the issue. We also, to complement the new imagery, have new
sounds, music composed by MYLES CURWEN specifically for
this issue that youll receive if youve bought this zine (or if you
go directly to his bandcamp).

~5~

Also found lurking in the eternal corridors of The Hostess

Gallery of The Esoteric, we have returning writer Evelyn
Hollow (always a pleasure, even if this tale, specifically, has a
sour taste, in the best possible way of course), and new writers
TJB Morrison and Lily West. Lily has offered an excerpt of her
experimental piece The Bonsai Diary, which I cant wait to help
promote when she creates more of that floral world. Mr.
Morrison, at once showing again how twitter is a wonderful
landscape (Victoriana etc.) for finding writers that deserve all the
attention in the universe, has given us a lovely tale that
encapsulates the theme of this issue squarely on the head.
And that is my final point. Plant. Growth. Volume Two is
giving this little writer hope on new levels, that bringing people
together to support the arts, that finding talent from all corners,
is more than just possible. This issue is a further development,
growth, of the talent all around us in the arts. So I hope you
enjoy this issue, and keep on the crusade, to support esoteric,
fringe art in all its flavours.

~6~

~7~

NORNS
by THOMAS JUDE BARCLAY MORRISON
...the Norns who live near the Well of Fate
draw water from it every day . . . and
besprinkle the Cosmic Tree so that its
branches shall not wither or decay.
The Prose Edda
Three knowing Norns,
From the Well beneath the Tree:
Fate, Becoming and Necessity are their names.
They make laws, they choose lives,
They set our fates.
The Poetic Edda
The silver ship plummets from the star-strewn stratosphere, like
a phosphorescent, quicksilver meteor. At first it is but a rapidly
falling point of pure white light, but its brilliant circle swells as it
descends, until the hull's metallic disk obscures a substantial
swathe of sky, directly above you. It halts with impossible
suddenness, some one hundred feet in the air, and hangs
absolutely motionless, in perfect silence.
In the centre of the looming hull, a hatch irises open, and
blinding white-blue light comes beaming down all around you,
pinning you in the centre of a dazzling circle. Paralysed,
weightless, your rag-doll body rises on the rays, ascending to the
ship, drawn as by gravity to the source of the amnesiac light,
which smothers you with anaesthesia as it swallows you. The last
thing you remember is strange, skinny, silhouetted figures inside
the hatch, and three-fingered hands reaching out to you.
~

~8~

You awake an unknown time later, lying flat on your back,

your nostrils filled with the faint but persisting odour of some
unfamiliar, acrid chemical. A low frequency and almost inaudible
humming fills your ears. You cannot move, or cry out, or even
deeply breathe it is as though a great weight is pushing down
on you. By a mighty effort of will, you force your eyelids to
open.
You are lying on a metal slab, in a brightly-lit metal room.
The walls are lined with flickering displays, and other electronic
possibly medical machinery. Three short, slim, androgynous,
humanoid beings, with large, bald, high-domed heads, and big,
black, almond-shaped, iris-less eyes, are gathered around you.
Their faces are characterless and inexpressive, with babysmooth, hairless, pale grey skin, and no ears or nose just slitted
ear-holes and nostrils and mouths like narrow incisions, and
small, pointed chins. Their arms particularly their forearms
are lengthy in relation to their diminutive torsos, and extremely
thin, although their skeletal condition in no way suggests to you
malnourishment or sickness. Their hands have three long,
slender digits, with no fingerprints. They are in every way
identical to one another. There is something of the mannequin,
the marionette and the mask about them.
An impersonal voice, like the voice of a machine, begins
speaking inside your mind. Although their thin lips never move,
you know that it is the voice of the figures gathered around you.
It emanates from them collectively, rather than from any one of
them in particular.
We are gardeners, and we have come here from beyond
your universe's boundaries, to tend to the tree that it is our task
to cultivate. We are servitors, avatars, ghosts in the machine, a
subroutine in your universe's programming.

~9~

Our kind have dwelt beyond your cosmos since long before
it began, and it was we who carefully planted its seed in the
fertile soil of the garden. That seed was so small that it occupied
no space, and so dark that it actively devoured light and under
our care, it germinated, and quickly grew, until it had become a
majestic tree, with many a deep-delving root, and a complex
crown of boughs and branches.
Your eyes can see nothing of the tree's stately trunks and
limbs, and you will never behold the colours of its leaves, or the
textures of its bark, or the grain of its wood, for light and even
x-rays, radio waves, and all other forms of electromagnetic
radiation pass unhindered through by far the greater part of its
substance. Your eyes can see only the trillions of twinkling
blossoms, trailing the boughs and branches in galactic filaments
although you have inferred the existence of the underlying
structure's substance, from the way that the clustered flowers
keep clinging to the branches, like dewdrops clinging to a
spider's otherwise invisible web.
Your cosmos is very young it has only just begun to
flower, and its fruit is far from ripe. It has only been in flower
for just under fourteen billion of your mayfly years, and will not
cease flowering until some one hundred trillion of those years
have gone by and even then most of its life will still lie ahead
of it. Its blacker-than-black fruit forms in the centre of each
galactic whorl of blossom, like holes in the starry sky. In the
centre of each fruit there is a cosmic seed, and when the harvest
time comes when the fruit has at last ripened, long after the
last blossom has fallen we will pluck every last fruit from the
tree, and from the garnered seed grow a new generation of
universes.
There are many other trees in the garden, and many of
them are very different to your own. Each was grown from a
unique seed, pregnant with unique natural laws, that bring about

~ 10 ~

unique outcomes. We carefully cross-pollinate, to enhance or

eliminate particular inherited attributes although a seed's
dormant characteristics are also always at least in part
determined by blind chance. It is a game of both skill and
chance, and we play purely because we are curious to discover
what might happen. Our garden is our ongoing playful
exploration of the infinite possibilities of being.
Although we are by no means blind to the simple charm of
the burgeoning astral blossom, or the straightforward elegance
of the orchard's arching branches, our horticulture also aims for
more complex and subtle aesthetic ideals. The beauty of starry
flowers pales next to the beauty of the minds that almost always
also blossom in a cosmos and yet even the beauty of the
fullest bloom of a universe's most advanced and enlightened
minds is to us not an end in itself, but rather a means by which
we cultivate the blossom that we prize above all others: the
flower of story. Narrative is a universe's finest flower, and our
garden is first and foremost a garden of story.
When we tell you that a story is a flower, we do not intend
it as a metaphor, or a figure of speech it is a literal description
of our perceptions. We are atemporal, and perceive all narratives
from the timeless perspective of eternity, from whence the
beginning, end, and all that lies between the seeds, the roots,
the flowering, the fruits can be observed in a single glance. We
experience story more as an object than a process. A narrative,
in our sight, is quite literally a beautiful, living, four-dimensional
flower.
Just as an earthly gardener might feed or prune, or train a
climbing vine along a wall or trellis, so does our artifice
intervene in the natural development of the narratives we
nurture for what is a garden if not nature lead by artifice
towards the infinitely distant vanishing point of perfection? We
directly alter only the most seemingly trivial narrative details

~ 11 ~

but those tiny changes are like seeds, and cause effects that
themselves become causes, and so the causal ripples go radiating
out through the universal web of ten trillion intertwined stories,
until trifling causes have blossomed into potent effects, that
bring our inexorable plans to fruition. We have toppled ancient
empires, and decided the fates of worlds, by setting in motion
causal chains that began with events of no more seeming
significance than the beating of a butterfly's wing although
that is not to say that we cherish the universe's smaller stories
any less than the epic narratives of history.
Today we implanted in you a series of hypnotic suggestions,
that will trigger certain behaviours in you, in response to specific
stimuli. You will not recognise those behaviours, even as you
enact them it will seem to you that they are motivated
entirely by your own volition. Those pre-programmed
behaviours will have no consequences for your own life's story,
and are designed to exert their influence solely upon narratives
that will only momentarily and tangentially impinge upon your
own in this way setting in motion chains of events that will
follow crooked but carefully calculated paths through the
cosmic labyrinths of interwoven stories that surround you, until
they arrive at the curious destinations of our choosing.
Such is the seed we have planted in you it lies dormant,
now, awaiting the conditions of its germination. Return, then, to
living your narrative although you will never comprehend its
significance, it is by no means an insignificant story.

~ 12 ~

~ 13 ~

WE ALL SECRETLY WANT TO BE ADAM &

EVE & THAT OTHER GUY
by NATHAN T. DEAN
Being cryogenically frozen is precisely as boring as youd expect.
They shove you Youll want to know what they are. Let me
think. Do you remember, sweetheart, Ulysses? In the garden?
Hed spray the plants with the bioregenerators and all that newfangled crap we were told the rosebushes needed. Like Ulysses
himself. Itself. It was designed to look like a him with the
Nazi-blue eyes and the ability to furrow its brow, but it was all
servos. It was all Asimovian flashing, blinking, bleeping lights
and the idea of a soul. Well, the they I speak of, were like
Ulysses, except they werent as kindly-shaped like a person. They
were taller, broader, and if you tapped them on the chest youd
be rewarded with a hollow thunk. They had four arms, for each
of your limbs, and then theyd quite unceremoniously throw you
into the tank, fill it with liquid nitrogen and the spec-chems that
meant you didnt die instead, and thats the last you saw of them.
I cant remember if they gave them faces.
But speaking of ceremony I was surprised by how much they
didnt add a bit of spectacle to the matter at hand. Me, and you,
we were part of the first group to be frozen in that godforsaken
manner. Ok, ok, we werent the first. That Juliette de Merignon
and her African Despot father, they were the first two to be sent
into the recesses of the void, all wrapped up warm-in-cold. So
maybe that was why we didnt get much ceremony. We werent
Buzz Aldrin. We werent Neil Armstrong. We were the other
one. All I remember, sweetheart, were the things-not-Ulysses
shoving us into the tanks and off we went. Wed wake up in a
few years cant recall if they meant time or space, time-years or
light-years and go be the Adam & Eve that all humans secretly
want to be. I think thats the case, right? We all want to be
Adam. We all want to be Eve. Was there another guy in that

~ 14 ~

pairing? If Adam is Buzz and Eve is Neil, was there a third? Did
a threesome build a world? I suppose not.
Oh god, I wish these chems would get out of my blood.
Theyre out of yours. I can see. Youre sat on that rock in the
suit that makes you look like Buck Rogers (was that the third
guy, no, no it wasnt), and youve turned on all the halogens in
the edges of the suit in the headset, the wrists, even the soles
of your feet and like some burning angel you sit and ponder
where the fuck we are. You look sad, sweetheart. But are you
sad with me? I cant tell. I think youre sad this sky is not the
one planned.
Im trying to tell you what happened so I can remember, you
do get that right? Im not being stupid, am I? Were in this
together. You put me in the suit as unceremoniously as they put
me in the tank. I put you down on that rock to think whilst I
vomit in this tube in my suit to get the chems out of me. Im
warming up to actual body-temp now, and that makes me kind
of happy. I think, soon, well be able to talk like we used to. In
the Garden. Our Eden. On Earth. Before we have to go out
there and become Adam & Eve & that other guy.
We need to find out where we are? When we are? You ask,
part question, part answer, part spectator sport for the unholy
fucking gods of this part of the cosmos. The sky is made from
quasars. We head back to the ship to consult the onboard A.I. I
think we named him Stan, after Kubrick. Arent we a bunch of
comedians.
CANT SAY WHERE YOU ARE, SORRY GUYS! Stan is cheery.
If he was a person hed be a gameshow host, and we put him in
charge of repopulation triremes in the depths of space. Arent
we a bunch of comedians Mark II.
And when? You seem more despondent than me, but I
aint saying much still, truth be told, thinking about how we
should have had a bigger ceremony for setting off like this and

~ 15 ~

youre answering the questions in your head you already know

the answers too; you already know were doomed.
I CAN BEGIN CALCULATING THAT FOR YOU NOW! BE A
HELL OF A JOB THOUGH, COULD TAKE A BIT OF TIME. ILL
FETCH YOU GUYS A CUP OF JOE, HOWS THAT SOUND
FRIENDEREENOS?
Im fine.
Ill have a cup. I say, and I watch the screen shift to
something like a clock, something like a clickerboard
countdown-countup, the kind in old airports where the plates
spin round to tell you everything is delayed. I ignore the display,
and wait for my cup of Joe.
It doesnt come in a cup, more like a tankard of glass, easier
to store in the walls. I went to the bathroom, had my first real
piss in a century (or so it felt) and it was there when I came
back. I didnt ask who brought it. Youre still sat like you were
outside, just inside now. Youve only taken Buck Rogers
headpiece off. Im back in civilian get-up. I miss the feel of real
Jeans.
I drink the coffee and it reminds me of the garden again.
Ulysses spraying from all his sides, keeping everything alive, and
us holding a BBQ for all our space-faring buddies. Were all
scared so we drink a lot of beer, and dont eat much. I slept with
that girl who came, the daughter of the guy going on the fifth
trip. She was hot. I should feel more sorry for doing that to you,
in our bed, but we were about to be catapulted into the depths
of Hell where the black holes and the quasars live so at the
time I felt owed it. I even celebrated with another beer. Ill never
tell you this. I cant believe they picked us for this challenge. If it
is a challenge. Stay asleep a few years and then find a place to set
up camp. Well come later, they said. Like fuck they would. I
already knew they wouldnt. The coffee was bitter and
translucent.

~ 16 ~

How are we doing? You ask Stan, and if he had that

gameshow host face hed have shook his head, embarrassed for
you: sorry that is the wrong answer.
WELL, IM STILL CLOCKING UP. YOU SEE. I could see. The
screen displayed a swiftly clocking up year, currently somewhere
in the eight-billions, and the numbers were still going up, IM
BUILT TO SHOW THE DATE LIKE THIS AS ITS MORE FUN! SPIN
THE WHEEL AND HERE WE GO, ITS YOUR BIRTHDAY! I hate
this A.I., BUT IM STILL GOING CHAPS AND CHAPETTES AND, I
HATE TO BREAK IT TO YOU, BUT I PUT UP ANOTHER TIMER TO
SEE HOW LONG IT WOULD TAKE TO GET TO THE NUMBER IN
THIS ANIMATION. APPARENTLY THE ANIMATION WILL TAKE
TWENTY YEARS TO COMPLETE.

Wait a second.
AFRAID I CANT WAIT A SECOND, OR YOULL BE WAITING
EVEN LONGER. It even laughed. Someone had programmed
laughter into the damn thing.
So you know the date, but because you show it through this
spinning date-clock animation, itll take too long to show it.
The computer blinked a yes.
Itll take twenty years
YEP! FRAID SHOW CHAPETTE. FRAID SO. IN TWENTY
YEARS MY ANIMATION FINISHES AND YOU SEE WHEN YOU AT!
It had just reached the year 245,612,345,709. By the time I
finished reading the number, to you, my sweetheart, it had
reached the three-hundred billions. Still going. I remember when
we left the ship it was still going. I kind of wanted to see it end.
But I cant wait twenty years. I have no idea what my life
expectancy is. Apparently that was the piss of the century, and a
few more besides.
~
Something had happened to Stan. We asked him what but he
got all sheepish. We asked him to show anything he had seen I

~ 17 ~

mean, as much as a ship can see, its all infrared sensors and
pocket-viewers and other some-such new-fangled crap and
after a lot of coaxing, like asking a scared child to touch the
dolly in the places the bad man had touched you, it eventually
unravelled a piece of video. It was mostly purple light, flashing
out of something with a biological shape. Said it was the depths
of space though, or so did the coordinates; looked like Stan was
having a breakdown. Seeing things. Or something the shape of a
skull-jellyfish-god had glowed over the stern, the bow, the heart
of our ship and sent us so off course into a future beyond the
future. Well, fuck. Couldnt make this shit up. I wanted another
coffee, but we were walking across the surface of a dead world.
The last thing Stan had told us was to be careful out there, and
that he probably dropped us off on this heap of rock for a
reason. Stan had begun to cry. I knew then never to trust a
computer programmer again.
Youre still sad sweetheart but I can tell not because of the
situation. Im beyond those kinds of feelings. Im just watching
the flares of dead stars in the sky, and how it bounces off the
onyx and obsidian in the rock formations around us. I quite
liked being a geologist. You quite liked linguistics. Proper Star
Trek pairing. This hunk of rock sure is pretty. Like you. I should
never have slept with that girl. It was because she was blonde.
So we traverse the end of the world and Im trying to talk to
you but you wont answer, and to be fair I aint saying anything.
How can I? What is there to say? I cant really ask how the flight
went, as it was the most boring, semi-conscious ride of my
lifetime. Lasted hours. Thats when I knew it had gone wrong.
They say you are asleep in cryo, and thats bullshit. Youre awake
but super slowed down. A century feels like five minutes. And it
felt like hours on that journey. With just me and my infidelity
for company. I couldnt even turn my head to look at you, see if
you were awake like I was awake, or if you had found a way to
sleep in the ice. We were prehistoric.

~ 18 ~

We pass this chasm and walk over this little hillock and the
ground is crunching and all of a sudden I think I see something.
I point it out to you.
I see it too. You say, dead-pan as ever. I dont reply. I just
head towards it. A kind of light, but like something shining off
something. Like the sun off a razorblade. Like a torch off a
mirror. Stan was right; he had crash-landed here for a reason.
Good ol Stan. Could never say a bad word about him Sorry,
ok, am I not allowed to be delirious too?
We stop on a ridge and I turn to you and I nearly tell you.
You look at me and I realise you have been waiting for me to
tell you. I realise you already know. You already know how
much of a prick I am. So I dont tell you. I cant give you that
satisfaction. But I can give you the shimmer of light at the end
of the world, so I help you down, and youre thankful.
~
It takes a few hours. Thankful the suits are filled with
nutrient-packets, the kind that dissolve against the skin when
you need them. My body is buzzing with energy. Ive never felt
this good. Comes with only taking vitamins through a protective
spacesuit, and not by eating a burger. I wish Id never had that
BBQ.
Wed have been stunned at the sight if we werent exhausted.
But our blood was filled with vitapacks, and our minds were
filled with dreams-we-had-awake, and so the sight of this
floating factory didnt much do anything for us. It was shaped
like an enormous flower, something like a lotus or some other
plant. And made of a metal I couldnt identify with sight. But it
shimmered. It reflected the lights of dying stars off its shell just
perfectly. Near 100%. Light out of light out of light. It
undulated on the edges and curled inwards in the middle, like
some tesseract I studied them in high school, when we first

~ 19 ~

met, and I saw you over my quantum mathematics text book, by

the stairs, talking to that other guy, and I decided I had to be
your man and not him, and I took you, and we got that house,
and we got that Garden, and with our intellects we became the
Adam & Eve we all secretly want to be, after a BBQ, which at
the time seems oh so fucking appropriate bursting out this
strange light, hovering a few feet off the ground. A truck could
have driven underneath the enormous metal flower without a
second thought. The rock though had a heavy gravity, could feel
it in my aching knees. So how this thing kept in the air, I
couldnt say. I asked you, eventually, and you didnt know either.
You walked away from me, as if to your death.
It hummed, kind of sang in a way. We just peered up at it for
some time, working out if we had to go inside, or just wait. If
this even was an answer. If this hunk of rock had days and
nights, we would have been stood looking at the damn thing for
a few of them. Perhaps a week. Suits made sure we didnt need
to sleep. We just talked of the old days on the rocks in little
pockets of time less than a minute. Most of the time we sat in
silence, listening to the floating factory hum, sing. Quite
beautiful in any other circumstance. No. Wrong. Beautiful
because of this circumstance. Like hearing your own funeral dirge.
~
It didnt speak to us. It just looked down and we knew what
it wanted. And because of this telepathy if that is what it is
we werent as scared as we ought to have been. Humanoid in as
much as it had a torso a head and some limbs, it stood over us
at about twelve feet. Any emotions it had, I couldnt
comprehend. I just felt a serenity. I just felt a kind of
meaningfulness amongst this desolation. It had skin pale, like a
conch shell you buy at a beach giftshop, and indents in the head
where facial features would have sat. Tendrils of glowing light
came out of it, green and blue, and it pointed with one of its

~ 20 ~

many limbs I want to say like arms but they werent anything
like any limb I had seen before towards the factory.
We stood, the three of us, under the undulating flower. And
a sphincter opened at its base. I assumed wed float, or
something would come down, like a ladder, but then we were
just inside like we had always been inside. I sometimes, even
now, consider the possibility that I have been nowhere else in
the whole universe apart from inside this flower. I could see the
figure that had found us more clearly now. It had no feet to
walk on, and seemed to just hover precisely where it needed to
be. It didnt float around, or walk, itd just appear somewhere
else, like it had always been there, in the same way I have always
been in the flower yet I have been outside it it just is what it
is, lets keep it at that. This shimmering angelic thing without
wings, but with hundreds of limbs not arms, with billions of
threaded tendrils of light like hair on a newborn. I felt newborn.
I turned to you to tell you but you just werent there. I worry
you have never been there. I worry I dont have a name. Id tell
you my name the next time we meet, if we ever meet.
I turned to the figure, still not scared, and asked where my
wife had gone. It didnt tell me, it just motioned upwards for me
to look. It was truly a factory, a kind of cosmic plant. Thousands
of conveyor belts churned thousands of things around. Some of
the belts were invisible, merely currents of pressure lifting and
moving the things between rooms I couldnt comprehend. Some
were metallic. Others glass. One seemed to be made of moss.
On each conveyor, anything from rocks to tiny people. The
people were all asleep and curled like foetuses. But some were
not foetal. Some were. Some were very young indeed. I realised
some of them were merely cells and that, somehow, I could see
them from miles down at the base of the factory. The rest were
enormous, blue whale-like leviathans, elephantine behemoths.

~ 21 ~

I looked up at my guide and it nodded, in a sense, at what I

had seen. Yes, I was correct. It was building everything. But
there was no one manning the factory. And the creatures
continually were pushed and moved to each room and then
around again. Nothing ever happened. It was a cycle without
end, without purpose.
Should you not fix it? Finish them. The rocks for planets.
The particles for atmosphere. The creatures for populations.
My guide flashed light of a different shade purple and
that meant it was sad. I just knew this.
You made this, did you not?
It had not.
It had not built this place.
It ushered me forward and forced me against a control panel.
I assumed it was a control panel. It was shaped like a ribcage
with no buttons or levers, no control switches I recognised. I
reached out to touch it, and my guide slapped my wrist. It
howled deep in its own torso at my ignorance.
I dont know how to use this. I said.
My guide flashed purple again and looked between the
conveyor belts in abject horror. Before pushing me again, like a
child, towards the control ribs.
What do you want?
It flashed purple and green, and sniffed the air without any
lungs. It pressed its telepathy against me, and I felt a fear like no
other. My guide was alone, it had lost its lover, and its people,
and had found this. It had been built long ago.
I can barely work a BBQ. I can barely work my own lust.
And yet this angel believed I could work this factory. I kept
screaming at it, for a few years, that it should fix it. It was

~ 22 ~

responsible for it. And then it would cry, and vanish. These long
vanishings were a hunt, to find more of me, more of my wife.
And it always came back with no one. It was only when I was an
old man, and the creature began to die when I began to die
with the infinite creatures rotating through the folds of a flower,
a plant, at the end of time that I realised it knew as much as I.
It was my guide, and it was a caretaker. It dusted the floors of
the factory. Ulysses gardened. They froze. It hired the people for
the factory. And it thought I was its labourer.
I cackled once, a corpse in the last human achievement,
remembering, somewhere, Stan had finished working out what
year it was.

~ 23 ~

~ 24 ~

ASSUMPTIONS OF THE SKIN

by EVELYN HOLLOW
The radio talks to itself for a good ten minutes before I mute it.
The morning is watery light through the unclean glass of the
bedroom window and a nerve in my shoulder jumps as I try to
sit up on my side. Bullet shrapnel shifts under the skin and I
stretch my neck, tracing the embossed edges of the scar with my
fingertips. Three years have passed since some fucking kid trying
to rob a gas station thought he'd take a crack at me with a 9mm
it's never healed right. He could've at least done me the
favour of making it a through and through.
I'm thinking of paying that kid a visit when I notice that my
left leg feels damp, from calf to hip. My underwear is sticking to
me in an uncomfortable web. I twist onto my back and realise
that the room smells like un-watered plants. There's something
sour beneath it. Gin? I don't know.
The white shoulder of my wife lying next to me breaks from
the surface of the duvet, she doesn't stir as I pull back the covers
to inspect the dampness. The sour smell is suddenly right in my
nose, singeing the back of my sinuses. There's a darker shade of
white spread out on the sheet between us, I touch it and it's still
wet. Both my underwear and hers is darker at the edges, did one
of us piss ourselves in the night? How old are we?
Lucy
No response.
Lucy
She doesn't hear me and I can't bear the smell any more. I
get out of bed and put on clean clothes. I go to the linen chest
under the window and pull out clean sheets. It doesn't smell
quite like urine, did she come to bed drunk and fall asleep with
the glass in her hand? It wouldn't be the first time.
Lucy, get up, I need to change the bed
She doesn't move. Oh for Christ's sake. Drunks can sleep
through hurricanes. I dump the linen on the floor and tug the

~ 25 ~

duvet off the bed, as a magician would whip a table cloth from
under a full dinner set. I'm left clutching the wet sheets and
there is my wife's body exposed on the mattress. Her
discoloured underwear and t-shirt seem to hang off of her small
form. She looks like she has the bones of a bird and I wonder
when she became so thin. Tiny bird.
There's vomit in her hair. Oh god, that's what the rest of the
smell is. Lucy, Lucy, you fucking drunk. I go into the en suite
bathroom and start running a bath. When I come back through
to the bedroom it seems different, as if someone has reshuffled
all of the furniture a few inches to the left. I'm looking at it from
her side. I am half way to the bed when I realise that the
furniture has not moved, in fact nothing has moved. Lucy has
not moved.
My wife is not breathing.
Cop mode comes on like a primordial instinct. I drag the wet
hair out of her face to get to her mouth. I check her pulse and it
is absent. She is cold; she is Sunday morning church cold.
I peel back her eye-lids and the pupils are fixed, glassy. The
blue of her irises are filmy, already changing to a paler shade. I
let her head go and sit on the floor. Her body is all wrong,
discolouring, wilting, decaying. She's been dead for hours. She's
frozen in sleep, a souvenir.
I hear pizzicato strings of music playing from the stereo of a
car outside. The Doppler Effect pulls it away, out into the
morning sun somewhere, and I am left in the stale silence of the
room.
The static of bath water filling the tub breaks the vigil of
what is now a crime scene.
Oh Lucy, what did you do?
I stand and pull her from the bed. She is marble and my
shoulder twinges again. Even with so much fluid drained out of
her already minute form, she is concrete.
The dead are always heavier than the living.
I carry her into the bathroom and, without much grace,
lower her into the bath tub. I shut off the taps and she drifts

~ 26 ~

there, suspended by the water. I pull her soiled clothes off her,
which is harder to do than anything I'd like to be doing at this
time on a Tuesday morning. I toss them in the hamper with
mine and sit down on the floor. Fuck.
I light a cigarette and watch the smoke pirouette under the
light. Everything smells terrible and I fight back the urge to
vomit in order not to add to it. Fuck.
I peer over the edge of the tub and gaze upon the permanent
expression of my dead wife's face. I'm just glad her eyes are
shut. I don't want her to look at me right now. I know I should
call an ambulance; I should have called one ten minutes ago, as
soon as I pressed my fingers to her arteries and found them
stagnant. But it seems so, pointless?
Like an afterthought. I know she's dead. What can they
possibly do for either of us?
I knock cigarette ash onto the floor and take my own pulse.
Perfectly steady. Cop trick. We're hard-wired that way.
I'm fine, but this is not.
God damn it Lucy, this was supposed to be my day off.
I run the nail of my thumb under my jaw and it feels like the
sharp side of a match-book. I need to shave, but standing in
front of the mirror over the sink means turning my back to her.
I have the uncomfortable feeling that she might sit up and wrap
her stiff white hands around my throat as soon as I glance away.
She'd have liked to have wrapped her hands around my throat
when she was still living, though she never did, but now she has
nothing to lose.
I wonder exactly how inappropriate it would be if I went
downstairs and made coffee.
Before I can reach a conclusion to that thought the door-bell
chimes and the house is filled with a strangled electronic
polyphony.
Oh boy.
I get up and wander out of the bathroom. I leave the door
open behind me; it's not as if she's going anywhere.

~ 27 ~

I toss my spent cigarette into a rotting orchid in the hall and

pray that this is the fucking mail man. I don't need today to get
any more complicated than it already is.
I open the door and there stands a hulk of black leather lost
in a cloud of cigarette smoke. A dirty skull protrudes from the
top, sharp and geometric. The skull spits the cigarette away from
itself and I get a good look at the damage on its right side as it
turns. A wound running from the temple to the back of the earlobe. Freshly stapled and still oozing a little at the seam, exposed
entirely due to the lack of hair. The skull does not look happy to
see me.
You look like shit, kid
You don't look too fresh yourself, old boy
This grimy piece of work standing on my doorstep is Ada. A
confidential police informant who has been working for us for
perhaps a little too long.
She pushes past me into the hall way. I don't have time for
this shit.
What the fuck happened to you? You look like somebody
tried to scalp you
Something like that. There was a minor disagreement
Does this look like a hospital to you? What are you doing
here? I didn't think you ever came out in daylight
I'm making a special effort. You know get up early, eat
well, go for a jog, five a day, whatever
Right. That's working out well so far, no?
Ada doesn't know what to do with herself, she looks wrong
standing in my hallway, shuffling between knick-knacks and
carriage clocks. Lucy was a fucking hoarder, by genetic
disposition, half this stuff is her mother's. My house looks like a
time capsule, the front of a thrift store.
They know
...Who knows what?
The Manouva gang, they know I'm tapped, somebody
found out I'm CI and ratted me out
Fuck

~ 28 ~

Yeah
There goes my day off.
I'm guessing that wound on your head isn't from a bar
fight?
I wish it was, at least then I could have had a drink
I pad through to the lounge and open the glass side-cabinet.
I take out two high-ballers and a bottle of Jamesons.
I down two fingers before I pour us both a half-glass
measure. We stand there sipping whiskey like it's a dinner party.
I should have never gotten out of bed today.
I look at her and she seems younger than I remember, even
with the stitches and the dirt. She looks like somebody loved her
once. Took her to parks when she was a kid, read her bedtime
stories, flipped pancakes with her for Shrove Tuesday. She looks
like somebodies kid and my stomach burns. God damn it.
I gesture for her to take a seat. I go through to the kitchen
and pull a bag of peas out of the freezer. I wrap them in a towel
and toss them onto Ada's lap.
For your head
Thanks
I light another cigarette and sit down on the edge of the
coffee table. Her jeans are torn on one calf and I can see the
slender flesh of her leg, paler than the rest. I wonder if only her
hands and face are dirty, if the rest is polished clean, several
shades lighter. I wonder what she does when she's not getting
herself into these clusterfuck nightmares.
Ada, do you ever go to the movies?
What?
Nothing
I get up and open the patio doors out into the conservatory,
which is less a conservatory and more a self-contained botanical
garden. The sunlight here is transformed into the eternal warm
light of better memories. This was Lucy's room of the house.
Expensive plants I don't know the name of cover every surface.
The colours hurt my eyes, every flower is a part of Lucy. Red
bursts like fits of blood, long-stemmed flowers the pale colour

~ 29 ~

of her dead skin, neat blue blossoms the shade of her fixed eyes.
I stand there and feel as though my dead wife is looking right
back at me.
Ada appears behind me and huffs.
Well isn't this pretty. Middle class people have such nice
shit
It was my wife's. She liked gardening better than she liked
me
Cry me a river
In the middle of the blooms stands a bird cage like structure,
suspended on hooks. It's covered with a cloth but I can hear the
movement inside. I tug the sheet off and reveal a closure of
butterflies. Ada coos like a child at the zoo.
Inside are at least 30 or 40 butterflies. A breathing, living,
shuddering, chaos of wings. I don't know what any of them are,
with the exception of the regal looking ones, those are red
admirals. My mother used to have them in her garden every
summer.
Ada downs the last of her scotch and leaves the glass on the
only available surface. She approaches the enclosure with
tentative apprehension, as if she may frighten them away with
her rude appearance.
What kind of broad keeps butterflies?
She's whispering and I want to laugh. Do butterflies have
ears? Are they deaf to the world? I don't know.
I lift a vase of flowers Lucy had been working on yesterday.
An arrangement of dark lilac shades and congealed crimsons. I
hand it to Ada.
Take these
I lean past her and lift the enclosure from its hooks. Ada's
eyes follow it with reverence.
Definitely somebodies kid.
I hold it against me with both hands. The movement within
sends tremors down my rib cage and I think of entering Lucy. I
think of pushing her legs open and slipping inside of her,
disappearing. I think of keeping her until she disintegrates to

~ 30 ~

mush, would the smell turn me off of her flesh? Maybe not. I
think of cable tying her in any position I can imagine. I think of
the possibilities.
My wife is dead
Ada chokes on her own saliva.
I turn out of the conservatory, still carrying the butterfly
cage. I walk back through to the hall-way, Ada frantically
bobbing at my back.
What do you mean your wife is dead? Dead? As in dead
dead?
What other kind of dead is there?
I ascend the stairs. The cage swings like a monks incense
torch in front of me and the butterflies form weather patterns of
colour with my movement. I carry it into the bedroom and set it
down on the bed. The bottom sheet is still stained. The last
remains of Lucy. Spilled fluids evacuated from her form at the
moment of departure.
What is the fucking smell?
I hear Ada choking behind me. I guess it's worse than I
thought.
Come with me
I lead her into the bathroom and enter once more into the
scene of my abstract sentimentality.
Ada holds the sleeve of her jacket over her face to feign off
the scent.
She appears at my side and there is a jerk of sound from her
bruised lips.
Fuck. Fuck. Oh my god. Is that? Jesus fucking Christ
It is
You have to call someone. What the fuck. You have to call
someone
I take the vase from Ada's hands and set it on the counter. I
begin pulling out the flowers and snapping the heads from the
stalks. I toss each flower into the bath tub. They land on Lucy
like confetti at a church service. The sound is faint gun fire.

~ 31 ~

Ada is flapping her mouth like a marionette without a master

and I ignore her terror.
The blooms drift in the water like discarded kisses and I take
the last handful from the vase, the three largest and most
pristine. I snap the heads off into my hand and kneel by the
bath.
With my left hand I pry Lucy's cold mouth open and with
my right I insert the flowers. I push them into the back of her
throat. I expect her to choke but she doesn't so much as twitch.
My fingers trace her teeth under the petals and I want to insert
myself here too. In amongst the crushed red of the flowers and
the sharp ivory of her teeth. I release her jaw and it remains
wedged open by the roses. As if the fauna has grown out of her,
seeded in her stomach and blooming from her every orifice. I
have made her part of the earth she will return to.
I push past Ada, who is clutching her face so hard that she's
pulling at the staples in her skull. I can see a seam of red
dribbling down the back of her neck and I want to run my
tongue along the line of her to taste it. But perhaps now is not
the time.
I retrieve the enclosure from the bed and carry it back
through into the bathroom.
I look upon Lucy and she is a body upon a body of water.
Still is the morning.
I haven't discharged my gun since the gas station altercation
but I think of it now, locked in the bed-side drawer, still
holstered from yesterday evening's duty. I think of discharging it
now, emptying a clip into her, and filling the entry points with
more flowers. I think of creating wounds upon her, as more
ways for me to get inside of her. I think of all the spaces I could
fill.
I open the enclosure and feel Ada jerk back behind me, she
clatters into the wall and I roll my eyes. I tap the back of the
cage with my hand, like chest compressions. Slowly the
butterflies escape into the bathroom. A few at first and then
whole clusters. Colliding into one another, flapping around

~ 32 ~

wildly, ecstatic at their freedom. A few land on my arm and cling

to me as I continue banging on the cage, until every last one has
escaped. I set the empty closure on the floor and marvel at the
sight.
A plague of butterflies.
They settle on every surface, but most of them nestle onto
Lucy.
They cover her like war paint and I am satisfied.
A large azure coloured one has found a spot on Ada's head
and balances there, unmoved by the context of the situation.
She is so frozen with confusion that she remains as still as my
wife and I feel as though I have wandered into a store room of
mannequins.
I look at Lucy and she is complete. She is a mortal example
of Ophelia in the river. She is singing and only I can hear her.
I open the window and let a small breeze into the room, the
butterflies stir at the change in air current and bring Lucy back
to this living realm again. She moves and they move with her.
I light a cigarette and listen to Ada throw up into the sink at
my elbow.
In between the choking and retching I can hear birds caught
on the wind outside. But their requiem is nothing to the one I
hear Lucy singing. The sound is jarred squawking and tremors
of dissonance. In the 21st century the birds no longer sing, they
simply imitate the noises of their surroundings, they imitate car
horns and cell-phone notifications. The lullaby's are all digital
noise pollution and I hear no melody there.

~ 33 ~

~ 34 ~

SELECTED WORKS {3 POEMS}

by BROOKS LAMPE / UUT POETRY
HYACINTHS FLESH

A FORMER VERSION OF THIS POEM WAS PUBLISHED ON UUT POETRY, JUL. 3 2011

Hyacinths flesh slowly disappeared in the kings

dark cell. No chow.
90 degrees, very sunny,
but the plants in my garden hold perfectly still.
What god drove them to keep up this way?
With mathematical certainty, llama-shaped pilots
come to see hissing fonts eat the salad of gall.
In Arkansas, they are saying yes at all the service stations.
Todays coffee is just okay and was gone too quickly.
Tomorrow will come and go without me doing anything
important.
This is the problem with martyrs with
flower names: theyre always blooming
when theres nothing to eat.
~

~ 35 ~

[WHY YOUR MONUMENTAL BOWING NECKS?]

A FORMER VERSION OF THIS POEM WAS PUBLISHED ON UUT POETRY, APR. 21

2011

Why your monumental bowing necks O pinks?

I hear birds all around us
and a lawn mower angrily attacking salvation.
Were you at war with other plants
in ancient times?
We have tried to make peace but somehow I sense
democracy is not working.
I know stories about populations
that have ugly belts and high-pitched organs
They are better than rented fingers
itching strawberries with understanding.
Wonderfully, a broken piece of trellis
tumbles of its own accord into an ambiguous tortured posture
at the foot of the rusty grill.
Kites keep moving around in adjacent backyards.
There is nothing hard about April.
~

~ 36 ~

FLORIFEROUS PEDICELS
1
Behold these plants!
doing my favorite thing
pointing up:
asparagus sprouting
from the armpits of
collapsing justice.
2
He guided his blade with a whoosh
jabbing crates of diagonal stars
that had been hiding behind millet bread
like inattentive children
on an island of disjointed light.
3
What is the banana?
A speeding car.
What are apples?
The shaved heads of young men.
What is inside the heart of the redwood forest?
A crumpled tissue.
What, truly, is a twig?
King Arthur's snot.
What are taproots?
Mosquitoes sucking the dark blood of history.

~ 37 ~

4
Hold your straw with two fingers
churn your mushy frappuccino
look deeply into his eyes
and say autumn.

~ 38 ~

~ 39 ~

THE BONSAI DIARY {EXCERPT}

by LILY WEST
I woke up alone and afraid in a green haze. Where was Mum,
Dad? There were some shadows in the distance; maybe I am not
alone. I couldn't see with the haze of my newborn eyes.
I opened my mouth to speak but no words came out, just a
wailing noise. Peering around, I noticed that there was no
sunlight, just this strange artificial glare above me.
It was warm and wet. I was learning these words slowly. The
misty haze I realised was not my eyes but the warmth and wet
meeting: Ill call it wet-th. The wet-th was cloying.
A few days went past, the air finally caused my mood to shift
and I noticed my extremities starting to feel weak and useless. I
called again, hoping that I would have found my voice.
"Muuuum?"
"I ain't your mother, your mother is long gone in someone
else's arms by now," said someone in a Southern American
drawl
"What? Who are you?" I muttered into the wet-th still unable
to see anyone.
"I said I ain't your mother, now see here boy. You need to
learn some things."
By now Im feeling more alone than ever and now this voice
is giving me some sort of speech; my brain wasn't ready. I
couldn't hear or understand most of it; the accent was so thick.

~ 40 ~

I lost the voice after the speech and when I called again no
one answered.
I got lost in the atmosphere and the muttering I could hear
across the room for the next while, and I couldn't tell you how
many days went past.
"Hello there my loverly." A blinding light appeared above me
and this object moved forward to grab me. I had nowhere to go.
Trapped. I shut my eyes and waited for the end.
It didn't come. I opened my eyes slowly after a few seconds
and realised what had happened. It was a person, a real live
person. I was far from the ground so the person must be tall.
Most importantly there was air up here, and sunlight!!
"Sorry I didn't come and get you sooner petal but you need
some time to get some growing on ya."
Most of this was gibberish to me: all I care is that he came.
Although I felt that green place was killing me, maybe it did me
some good. My body and arms all seemed really strong or
maybe that was the fresh air that's revived me a bit.
"I've gotta put you back for a few days." My mood wilted a
little. "Don't worry though flower, Ill sort you out."
When I got back in, the air had cleared the wet-th a little and
I could see my surroundings all of a sudden.
"Lucky." The voice from the other day returned and this
time I could see a withered figure to match the drawl.

~ 41 ~

"Sorry. Did I break the rules? You said about rules the other
day?"
"Nah kid I was jus' trying ta scare ya." He chucked and
smiled to himself.
It definitely wasn't funny.
"We are in the orphanage, some of us get chosen. Some of
us never leave," he said in an ominous tone
"Get chosen? What? All you seem to do is speak in rhyme"
"Not really if you want to talk about rhyming wildlife, read
Alice in Wonderland"
"WHAT?" At this point I was pretty frustrated.
"Fine, okay. Kid, one day a family will come to choose you
so you get out of this green nightmare. The nice man upstairs
takes us out to be chosen." And with that exasperated tone the
withered one turned away.
That night I tossed and turned thinking about what it meant
to live a life like this and I chose to change it.
I woke up and the man appeared in the burning light above.
"Its your turn little-un." The nice man said.
He chose me and a couple of the others and stacked us into
this rickety old car and I headed to my destiny.
Some family isn't going to choose me.

~ 42 ~

I will choose them.

~ 43 ~

~ 44 ~

ROBOTS PAINTBRUSH
AN INTERVIEW with ANTHONY PRESTIA / @GREATARTBOT

Lets begin with the usual. Youre an attorney who also

creates twitter-bots, but how would you tell our readers
who you are and what you do?
Ha. An attorney who creates twitter bots is a pretty accurate
description, and one I get often. More accurately, Im a privacy
attorney who has a lifelong fascination with systems. I think
most of what I do is ultimately an effort to understand systems
and test their limitsI love edge cases. Twitter bots and the law

~ 45 ~

are just two manifestations of that interest, but it also extends to

high-level play in a variety of games and innumerable other
types of programming and hardware projects.
Do you see your creations, like @greatartbot, as art pieces
in their own right? Can a piece of programming be art? Did
you even consider the artistic implications when you made
them?
I always have reservations about addressing the is-this-art
question because I think it leads to a lot of energy being wasted
justifying whether a creation (or a person's entire body of work)
fits in the "art world" instead of considering the work on its
own merits. That said, I guess I kind of invite the question by
having a bot named Great Artist.
The short answer is: Yes, I do think that software can be art.
I was fortunate to grow up in a family with a lot of talented
artists. For a long time, I was deeply into visual art (mostly
drawing) and later poetry and creative writing. For me, the
programming I do is every bit as creative and expressive as
those more traditional forms of art. I can understand the
skepticism around calling programming art (especially if
youve ever written anything in Java or for enterprise), but
programming is not my job and every project I start is because I
want to express something. To me, thats art. But Im an
attorney, so what do I know about art?

~ 46 ~

How did you get into the creation of twitter bots? How do
you decide what you want them to do? (Which is trying to
ask where do you get your ideas from without saying it in
quite such a frustrating way.)
Twitter bots were a direct result of my interest in systems. I
think social networks, Twitter in particular, are fascinating
systems. Twitter is this place where people interact with one
another, with brands and with bots on a daily basis. Its really
sort of bizarre when you take a step back and look at it. When I
started making Twitter bots, I wanted to explore those

~ 47 ~

interactions between people, companies and software. I started

by making games you could play over the service and then
continued to find random inspiration in day-to-day life. When
people find out you make bots, every other conversation also
tends to start with "You know what would be a great bot?"
Often these are not great ideas, but they can lead to good ones.
The bot-making community is also extremely supportive and
has been a great source of inspiration. Darius Kazemi has done
an incredible job rallying people together to make creative web
toys. And people like Thrice Dotted are so staggeringly
talented that you cant help but want to try harder and harder to
do interesting things.
We talk a lot in our day to day lives about the use of
Artificial Intelligence, to help save lives, construction,
explorative missions. Do you employ Artificial Intelligence
in your work, as some games do? And do you see A.I.
entering other fields, such as Law or the Arts?
I've experimented with AI (@greatartbot was "learning" for a
while), but I've been somewhat unhappy with the results. This is
probably not because AI can't be used effectively in art (in fact, I
think there are several examples where it has), but is more
indicative of my own failings as a programmer.
I think AI will (if it doesn't already) eventually influence every
sort of job and hobby. I'd like to say that the practice of law is
somewhat immune, but I'm sure everyone likes to think that
about their own career. I guess, worst case scenario, my day job
could eventually become programming bots to do my current
day job.

~ 48 ~

@greatartbot is how I first discovered your twitterbots. I

love the idea of a computer being able to create such
wonderful pieces of abstract pixilation. Do you see a future
for the arts that is built on technologies like what you
programmed? Do you see this is as a problem for other
artists, institutions? Is this television taking over from
radio?
I think we already have a lot of interesting art based in or
derived from code. Code and APIs are, for me, just a new kind
of paintbrush and canvas.
Art based in codeespecially when it, like @greatartbot,
interacts with social networkshas a really unique ability to
reach people. It shows up in your feed and it's available from the
comfort of your home in its intended form. This is a pretty
drastic shift from galleries and museums, which are really great
but can be intimidating for some people and just have generally
higher barriers to entry. That said, I don't think this creates a
problem for other artists. If anything, I think exposing more
people to art benefits all artists.
What is the future for your programmed artistic work?
Youve dabbled in linguistics, artistry and the lyricism of
rappers, but what can come next? How far do you want to
take your bots, once you let them loose in the internet
wilds?
I think I'll continue to make bots because they're fun, quick
projects with a lot of interesting potential. However, I spend
more of my free time these days working on larger scale projects
that explore identity and privacy online. These are issues that

~ 49 ~

come up in my day-to-day work and, with regard to online

identity, that I have long had difficulty understanding.

Anthony Prestia is a privacy attorney that also makes Internet

things. At any given time, he can be found on Twitter or (more likely)
email.

~ 50 ~

~ 51 ~