The Art of Miguel Pichardo

July 6, 2020July 6, 2020 / Fifthwall Renaissance / 1 Comment

Written by Alexander Greco

June 6, 2020

Hailing from Los Angeles, CA, Miguel Pichardo’s artwork has an incredibly unique, psychedelic blend of surrealism, abstraction and Gonzo-style artwork, which span across a tremendous breadth of style. Miguel and I first got in contact with each other over a year ago when I wrote my first article on him, and since then, his body of work has grown tremendously. In addition to talking about his recent developments in art, Miguel and I talked about his own growth as an artist over the last year, and the influence spirituality has had on Miguel and his art.

Since the last time we spoke, over a year ago, Miguel’s artwork has been getting more and more attention, including a restaurant and cafes his art has been featured in, including the Jesus Wall Brewery Artwalk in LA, and a number of projects and galleries he’s been involved with. Notably, Miguel has been working with Puzzle Crazy, a puzzle-making company who has been turning some of Miguel’s artwork into puzzles, and Miguel’s art was put into in the Pacha Moma Art Museum as a permanent installation.

For any major art lovers reading this, Pacha Moma is an insanely cool museum that features some incredibly talented and imaginative artists (so it’s no surprise Miguel has been featured here). I’ll post links to them, as well as links to Puzzle Crazy, at the end of the article.

Another major aspect to Miguel’s artwork is his focus over the last year on being able to connect more with his art and art process on a more intuitive level.

Untitled
Acrylic and Marker on Paper
June 2020

“Currently what I been doing with my work is that I’ve been practicing letting ‘the flow’ take over and kinda in a way let it create itself. I’ve found so much pleasure and satisfaction through that technique. I’ve gotten countless commission offers, but I turned them all down for the reason that I am focusing my time on creating what I enjoy. 2019 was a very magical year for me, if you will. I learned a lot about myself, as well as directing myself where I want to be. So yes, the goal for the future to me is becoming more clear.

“[…] I used to do it and it would take me hours to get in that zone. And now that I understand better that ‘zone’ I can tap into it faster. Some people also call it the ‘flow zone’ like you become fluent with your craft. Which create real master pieces. I believe.”

This style of creating art becomes especially impressive when you take into consideration the amount of detail in each piece. The ideas seem to be pouring out of Miguel’s head onto his canvas.

I think one piece that epitomizes this improvisational style is Miguel’s painting, “Jazz”. Named after one of the most improvisational and wildly flowing styles of music, “Jazz” zig-zags, twists, curls and loops across the canvas like a vision of controlled chaos. There’s somehow both a precision and a wildness to this painting. Miguel talked a bit about “Jazz” with me:

“I love this one for its simple yet powerful composition. What this piece represents to me is just the vibe of jazz the motion the rhythm the emotion of it. This piece brought back memories of my buddie Grover who has passed away. When I was a kid, he would express to me how much he loved bebop. As I was creating this piece I had him in mind as well. At the time I was have trouble with pricing my work. I finally stuck with a price and the piece sold for the price of $2000 which for me was a sign to have faith in my gut feelings or my intuition.”

While Miguel’s style can vary quite a bit from piece to piece, in general, this wild energy of controlled chaos is practically a staple in Miguel’s artwork. Some of them seem almost alive with movement and personality.

Cosmic Siren
Acrylic and Ink on Canvas
June 2020

Once you get to know Miguel’s style enough, it’s impossible to mistake for anyone else’s style, but it’s still difficult to pin that style down, as it can vary so much from piece to piece. Some paintings, like his recent painting, “Cosmic Siren”, or his painting, “La Catrina”, have a heavy Cubist influence on them, while others range in style from Kandinsky-style abstraction to Ralph Steadman’s Gonzo-style of art. Still, Miguel’s art, though similar in many ways to these styles, blends these elements as much as it breaks free of any of these molds.

In pieces like “The Buddha” and “Enat”, there’s a mix of some realism, and then a sort of static or sheen of color—clouds, lines, splatters, constellations, swirls, sprays.

With “The Buddha”, the Buddha’s eyes have been replaced by twin nebulae of specks, spots, dots and blots. Miguel almost creates a new atmosphere, or a new fabric of reality in some of his pieces. Maybe he’s peeled back the mundane, crisp and clean surface of material reality, and revealed the chaos beneath it all.

“Enat” more deeply enters the realm of realism, though it depicts the ancient and somewhat abstract “Venus of Willendorf”, but even hear, there is that slight mushroom-haze of specs and spots and spatterings of color. This same messy atmosphere or peeled back reality can be found in a wide variety of pieces.

Miguel’s still life paintings, “Florero de Septiembre” and “Still Life Cacophany” are rich and dense with this atmosphere. In “Florero de Septiembre”, the air and the color of the background seem tangible, like I could reach out and grab the fabric of yellow-golden light, hold it like it was clay, or like the air itself was paint. “Still Life Cacophany” is an explosion of colors and lines coming alive with extradimensional energy. Here the blurred lines of slight realism and wild abstraction make the painting feel like its exploding both in front of you, and like the image is coming alive and moving in your head while you’re looking at it.

Magic Clown
Mixed Media on Paper
June 2020

And with others paintings, the fabric of reality seems to erode even further. “Magic Clown” and “Al Fin de la Jornada” are barely clinging on to any semblance of realism. Small threads of realistic detail tie them to something tangible, but a surreal madness has all but overcome the paintings’ subjects.

With “Magic Clown”, the edges of objects have frayed in many places, and in other places, complete chaos has poured out or emerged forth onto the canvas. The crown of the clown’s head is all but nonexistent, and some unbounded limbo-world is exploding out of it. In “Al Fin de la Jornada”, reality has given way to geometric forms blooming out of the subject’s neck, shoulders and chest. Their mouth has transformed into pillars and skyscrapers of lines and color that run off the edge of his face.

My Anxiety Yesterday
Marker on Paper
April 2020

When all semblance of reality breaks down, when humans people are little more than the colors and shapes of ideas of personalities, a psychic geometry of identity, we find highly abstract pieces like “The Sheriff in Town”, “My Anxiety Yesterday”, and “Una Noche”. Pieces like these show an almost final breakdown of reality, where anything tangible or bounded becomes almost formless.

Still, this doesn’t fully describe Miguel’s broad range of style. There’s collages of colliding faces and forms, such as with “Relajate”, or psychedelic fauvist art, reminiscient of Alex Grey, such as “Mama Pacha”. There’s jaw-dropping blends of styles, such as with “Look Forward”, and there’s even a painting of Patrick star losing his mind on acid with “Patrick Star ‘Woah’”.

I can try and articulate these things to you, and I can try to box Miguel’s artwork into this category or that category, but you’ll have to go look at more of his artwork with your own eyes to really get his unique style.

Much of this unique style comes from Miguel’s own spiritual connection to his work.

Spiritual Being
Paintmarker on Paper
June 2019

“This is one of my favorite pieces it’s titled ‘Spiritual Being’ which is basically a self-portrait of my spirit. The significance of this piece is basically the awareness of my connection to the great spirit and that I am a part of it and that I have complete faith in it. As well as gratitude. On the right side you can kinda see another face. Which to me is my spiritual mother. I believe she has always been with me guiding and protecting me

“[…] The hands up on the being (me) signify surrendering to god or the ‘light source’, which creates or births faith, which in many circumstances has brought me peace and understanding.

“The great spirit, or God, or source or the universe I believe to be everything literally. I believe that we are all connected to everything in many different ways. I believe there is so much that we can’t even imagine, imagining the entirety of ‘it’. I believe it is so complex that that we as humans cannot fathom in anyway. So yes, my belief is closer to Native Americans’.

“And yes, ‘Spiritual Being’ the piece was not planned in anyway. It just came out as I went. I built on it. And after I finished it I looked at it for a while and saw the significance in it..but as you can see on the piece . It is in mostly rainbow color and pattern. Which to me represents light. I believe we are in our highest connection with god when we are in light form. A rainbow is created by light. The half skull half human face represents that I am aware of what will happen after death. For I believe I’ve died already in this life once. That’s a long story. But what I experienced was the most significant thing that had ever happened to me hands down. But to answer your question yes. I believe My consciousness or intuition guided me in doing the piece. And the reason I found out after I did it.”

This spiritual connection is evident throughout much of Miguel’s work, which features a wide range of religious themes and iconography. These pieces include “The Buddha”, “Mama Pacha”, “Duality”, “Reborn”, and an untitled drawing with a Mother Mary-like figure. However, this spirituality may spill over into other pieces that might not be overtly religious.

In many religions, just as Miguel mentioned, the Great Spirit, the One God or Monad, the Source, the thing from which reality emerged is everywhere and in everything. From beautiful, cloudy skies to incomprehensibly large galaxies to city streets and empty parking lots. This Spirit fills everything in the universe, permeates it just like atoms and molecules, and likewise, this Spirit might be filling each of Miguel’s pieces of artwork.

In addition to spirituality, Miguel discussed the inspiration for one of his pieces, “Waiting in Time”, and how he’s changed throughout his life:

Waiting in Time
Mixed Media/Collage on Canvas
April 2020

“This one is titled, ‘Waiting in Time’. What it represents is an adolescent me waiting for answers to all my questions. Closure to all my doubts. Around the time I was working on the piece I was receiving some of those answers and closure. And that’s one example on how 2019 was very mystical or magical for me. I was finally using consciousness to bring in what I was waiting for. Even though there are many other favorites of mine.

“[…] I feel like yes, I have changed a lot since that way of thinking. The state of mind I tried to portray in ‘Waiting in Time’ I now understand why I went through all those challenges that I went through as an adolescent which were like karmic cycles repeating so that I can understand more about ‘the afterlife’ understand not anchoring yourself to materialistic state of mind, or to practice living without ego. Which I haven’t accomplished. I believe I now understand and need to start practicing that life style more and more. So that’s the current position I feel I’m in. I feel like I’m entering a new chapter in my spiritual life.”

What I love with this painting is all the tiny details and shapes that comprise the image as a whole. It’s almost like there’s no solid image or figure here, it’s just a formation of fragments of images—even in the landscape around the younger-Miguel and the sky in the background.

I don’t want to put words into Miguel’s mouth, but, for me, it’s like the collection of memories coming together into how we remember the person we used to be. It’s all the photographs in our heads being taped together into a collage that forms a single, solid person, but it’s still a haze. Miguel in this picture seems hazy, maybe only halfway there. In fact, his face in this picture is only halfway there. It’s half normal and half almost alien or monster like. The mouth is almost entirely inhuman, and the teeth look almost like a mismatched collection of wrong shaped, wrong sized pieces, stuck together because there was nothing else to stick in.

“Waiting in Time” as a puzzle (it’s a metaphor within a metaphor)

There’s this puzzle we’re trying to put together of who we once were in order to figure out who we are now (coincidentally, you can buy this painting as a puzzle from Puzzle Crazy).

There’s this puzzle, and at the end, it gives us the image of our identity. The pieces are all made of memories, little bits of emotions and old sensations or feelings, and thoughts we had that we halfway recall. If you pick up all the pieces of who you once were, you get to put them all back together the way you want. Become someone new.

One of the last things we talked about was art pricing.

Miguel mentioned a bit about pricing his art, so I asked him if he had any advice for other artists who are looking to start selling their work:

“Pricing art. There is still no real set structure in pricing art. Just like the freedom of expression is so vast, so is its pricing. If you know a little about the art market, you know paintings have sold for crazy amounts. But basically, there are is way a lot of artists have used to price their work, which is by square inch. So, like $2 the square inch. Which is what I do, but sometimes I price lower or higher depending on the piece, but for the most part that’s how I do it. And as time passes the $ mark increases as well as my popularity.

Reborn
Oil Paint on Paperboard
February 2019 — The King and Queen
Aerosol and Acrylic on Canvas
June 2019

“I guess I’m still kinda new to all this stuff. I feel I still have a lot to learn, but at the same time, I’ve learned a lot in the time I’ve been doing it. Keep in mind, I’m a dad, and my time is divided. And my advice to other artists is just do it. Do it all. We have Google and social media. We have it all in the palm of our hands. Haha all you need is the initiative of starting and finishing. Things are gonna go wrong just like everything else: there is its good times and bad times. Just keep pushing.

I would also say ask questions. If a gallery doesn’t wanna show your work, don’t feel bad keep going! Always practice optimistic mentality. That will help with longevity, and also invest, invest invest. You gotta water the tree before it gives you fruits haha.”

There’s a lot to be learned from Miguel. He’s a father of two children, and, before Covid-19, was working a full-time job, and still managed to find time to make this insanely cool artwork (so shut the fuck up with whatever excuses you have). He’s stuck to his artwork, and keeps consistently growing and developing his style. He’s open to branching out into venues and ways of showing or selling his art.

Possibly most importantly, Miguel’s style is genuine, authentic. There’s no mistaking this style, and Miguel incorporates the things he finds most meaningful into his artwork, especially his spirituality. Miguel’s art comes from somewhere deep, beyond the rational, waking mind. It’s like he opens up this faucet somewhere deep in his unconscious or in his soul, and all these thoughts and emotions and images come spilling out onto canvas. It’s brilliant to see, and if you haven’t checked out more of his artwork, you need to.

You can find Miguel on Instagram @9ichardo. If you want to check out the Pacha Moma museum, they can be found on Instagram @pacha_moma. If you want to buy one of the puzzles made with Miguel’s artwork, or check out some of Puzzle Crazy’s other work, you can find them on Instagram @puzzlecrazyuk, or look them up on Etsy at www.etsy.com/uk/puzzlecrazyGB.

Please give them all a look, follow them if you enjoy what they do, and support artists and other creators in whatever way you can.

The Art of Evlampia: Ginger Dragon Bones

July 29, 2019 / Fifthwall Renaissance / Leave a comment

Written by Xander Greco

June 29, 2019

Wolves, ravens, dragons and rabbits, eyes in the dark, beasts in the deep and blood on a baseball bat: the citizens and denizens of Evlampia’s art form a story of mystique and nostalgia, of fear and tenderness, of survival and belonging, and of making the most of life in the madness of a nocturnal world.

There’s no strict mythos to her corpus of art, but Evlampia’s work contains many overarching themes, communicated by many recurring or similar symbols from wordless thoughts and echoes of dreams. While Evlampia uses her art to reflect the reality we walk around in every day, it maintains an arms-length distance as well, just how the night is a shrouded reflection of day, and dreams an irrational reflection of waking perceptions

“Ginger Dragon Bones is tender cruelty. This is what we can see every day and do not notice. This is what everyone feels at least once.”

Evlampia is a Russian artist who creates primarily black and white art, which often borders on morbid and surreal. Her work is drawn from emotions of old memories, feelings from our experiences, and the thoughts and perceptions in our heads we can’t quite describe with words. Using a wide array of symbols, and a unique style that boarders on macabre and dream-like, Evlampia’s pieces capture those inexplicable emotions, ideas and perceptions, and the stories that surround them.

X: “Could you tell me a bit about yourself?”

E: “I have 3 cats and a dog. I love animals and wildlife. I wouldn’t limit myself having 4 pets if I could.

I don’t like people, fish, and liver.

I love coffee and ginger.

I am happy.

Perhaps this is the most accurate description of me.”

X: “What are some of your inspirations for ideas? Any artists you particularly like? Any music that inspires you? Any books, or movies, or anything like that?”

E: “You know how it is. You’re talking to someone and some of their words stick to your mind. Words are lacking the shape, picture of their description. They are lacking emotion. So you’re only able to draw it.

“I don’t use other artists works as an inspirational source. They have their background, I have my own.

“The same with music. The same song can cause different emotions when placed in different contexts. Our inspiration lives in our brain, not movies, books, music, and other creators.”

X: “What are some other things that interest you outside of art?”

E: “Nothing. Anyhow, things that interest me related to art. I take pictures, prefer reportage photography. I read various literature: Pelevin, Gaiman, A. D. Foster, Castaneda, Tatyana Tolstaya, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, etc.

“I prefer blues, rock, and classical music. Make tattoos, get tattoos. I attend live music shows of my friends and other musicians.”

Evlampia’s style incorporates heavy shadows and solid black fill, a variety of shading—though in particular she uses a mix of hatching and stippling—and often uses a dripping, oily or bloody effect in her art. Though much of her art is black and white, several of her pieces include other colors, particularly red. Many of her pieces incorporate surrealism, whether it’s the depiction of some nighttime horror, or of an otherworldly creature, while others delve into the controlled chaos of abstraction.

X: “How did you get started?”

E: “How does everyone start? Draw circles and stars on notebook margins. Then your drawing spreads beyond the margin lines. Takes up the entire sheet then. They draw on school desks, then someone tells them that they are good at it: ‘Go ahead!’. I never had any of that. No one said anything. The only comment was from the art teacher when I was 11: ‘Don’t draw these torn lines.’

So, I started to draw on margins, notebooks, school desks, asphalt. Then came A4 paper, A3, A2, the walls.”

X: “How did you develop your style?”

E: “It’s still developing, from picture to picture, from detail to detail. I add color to some of my works, or lines which are new for my technics. My style does not stand still. It constantly evolves, absorbing new knowledge.”

X: “Where do you come up with these almost nightmarish ideas?”

E: “From my life. From my head. I’m looking for inspiration in what’s happening around me and my friends. What happens to the world formed into ideas for my works. I think if I had dreams, they’d be like this. I don’t think they look like nightmares. Conversely, many of them nice and innocent.”

Throughout her artwork, Evlampia uses a host of imagery, with a common thread of skulls, bones, nocturnal settings, and magical symbols. Several of her pieces are somewhat gruesome and dark, but many of them maintain a nostalgic or childish quality to them, while others are more fantastic and dream-like. A common theme in Evlampia’s work involves what seems to be a father-daughter pair (or perhaps older brother, younger sister, or something similar).

The pieces pertaining to this father-daughter pair, or an analogous pair, seem to involve the vanquishing of monsters, and the protection and mentoring of youth. It also seems to involve the relationship of different generations; the good and the bad of that relationship: the kindness and the playfulness, the protective and the stern. Both figures in the pair wear skull masks, which give them a sinister appearance.

However, these are only masks, perhaps worn to appear as frightening as the monsters around them, and, despite their appearance, there’s a deeply human bond between the two. The art that portrays them feels like a portrayal of everyday life—the joys, boredoms, fears and loves, and all the in-betweens.

The occult or magical symbols that Evlampia uses giver her work a sense of uncanny mystery, making her artwork seem more esoteric and foreboding. However, despite the typical stigmas or preconceptions of such symbols, and the sort of mainstream ideas we have of magic or the occult, Evlampia uses these symbols in a more personal way to further develop the sense of emotions from moments of our past.

X: “I also noticed you include a fair bit of occult, magic, and alchemical imagery, as well as astrological or celestial imagery. What is the importance of this sort of imagery in your art? What is the importance of occult practices and astrology in your own life?”

E: “For me it is impossible to depict emotions and feelings without resorting to this imagery. They will look vulgar and not authentic. By adding something different, I give the opportunity to tell and compose stories of these emotions: ‘Look how I feel. Feel what I’m seeing.’

But real life is real life. These magic images have no significance in my own. None at all.”

In Evlampia’s works, I also sensed a deep connection with the natural world, though this connection is often tempered with imagery of the modern, industrial world. Throughout much of Evlampia’s work, there are animals, or animalistic chimera-creatures, and natural, plant-filled settings. In several of the pieces with the father-daughter pair, the foreground is grassy or rocky, often with a tree, with a distant city in the background.

In this piece, the “setting” could be in the woods, or in some other natural environment, and has a tree reaching to the black moon at the center of the piece.

Along the inside of the circle are various images, symbols and objects, including a person sitting in a swing among the clouds, a person laying on the ground, gazing up at the sky, and a hand emerging from a pile of pills, holding one of them between their fingers. Among the stars in the sky, there’s a hot air balloon and a space probe.

At the top of the circle, someone is hanging from a noose. They look like they could be standing on the tree, or falling into the dark moon at the center of the circle. Maybe they would fall into space—maybe they want to fall into space—but they’re held down to earth by a rope around their neck.

Try as I might to analyze Evlampia’s work, much of it remains ambiguous. When I asked Evlampia about what some of her pieces might mean, or how they relate to her view of the world, she opted to maintain this ambiguity.

E: “My works are the sound at the moment when you heard it. I caught a moment, an emotion, a touch, a look, a memory and put on paper what has emerged in my consciousness. I don’t overlap my images over the world. It would be a lie, a distortion of reality.”

E: “My pieces have no names. Like I said, my works for me as my feelings applied to paper. So I never gave a name to my works. For me it is redundant. I also don’t really like to talk about the meaning of my works. I’ve noticed that many authors who give a special meaning to their works, they turn out to be those who have nothing to say on closer examination. Well, this is just my observation. I wouldn’t want to be among them. Imagine that the artist died. Give the meaning to my works on your own. Or don’t. Or you can just follow me on Instagram to like my pictures along with your friends’ pets. I don’t mind!”

Bearing in mind the source of inspiration for much of Evlampia’s work—from the moments of emotions and feelings we have from memories and experiences—words might not be able to describe the meanings of her work. How do you describe the meaning of something that emerges from a deeper place in the psyche than language and articulation?

X: “Why do you enjoy making art?”

E: “It’s sublimation. It’s meditation. It’s discovering the world, or rather worlds into myself. It’s opening myself up to the world. I show what’s inside me and the way I feel the world. It’s the way to stop time or kill it. When I’m drawing it captures me. I put my feelings and experiences on paper. When I look at my old drawing, I remember what I exactly felt at that moment. For me it’s important. My works for me are like magic lantern slides with my conditions on them.”

X: “Does your personality match the style and tone of your art?”

E: “Yes, totally. I think I must explain. Everyone sees what they want to see. Someone sees nightmares, fear, and horror. Someone sees tenderness and innocence. I feel that the mood of my art precisely represents my personality.”

Art in a lot of ways is like a Rorschach test—an inkblot. Whatever rests in your unconsciousness—whatever demons and angels of psychological patterns reside there—get projected onto the visual patterns you see in art.

In addition to her pen-and-paint-and-paper art, Evlampia works as a tattoo artist. Here, her personal art style blends into her professional style.

X: “I noticed you do tattoo work. How did you get started in that? What sort of tattoo-work do you normally do? How much of your personal style emerges in your tattoos?”

E: “Since childhood I dreamed of tattooed sleeves. Over time, I fulfilled my dream.

“At some point, I thought, why not me? I can do it too. I’ve been putting it off for a long time. Close friends pushed me out of my box so I started with a good helping kick.

“Regarding my style, I would say that 90 percent of my tattoo works consist of it.”

Though Evlampia’s style is unique, with her own brand of symbols, imagery and combinations of techniques, what really defines her work is how personal it is to her. Her art emerges from a deeper place, and expresses ideas that might not be possible to express otherwise. Who she is bleeds out onto paper, and seals itself into the skin of people she tattoos.

Though her and her artwork’s ambiguity might not immediately reveal a cut-and-paste definition of their meaning, that same ambiguity preserves the memories and feelings they come from. Articulating their meaning with words might detract or alter their original form, and might detract or alter what the observer sees when they look at Evlampia’s artwork. Instead, they remain free to be what they are in Evlampia’s mind, and free to be what they are in our own minds.

X: “Lastly, what is your favorite piece of art, or favorite pieces? And why?”

E: “I don’t have any favorite pieces. Every one of them is a part of me.”

If you want to see more of Evlampia’s artwork, you can find her on Instagram @ginger_dragon_bones. The artwork in this article only barely scratches the surface of what she’s made. If you live in Russia, or find yourself visiting Russia, and you want one of Evlampia’s signature tattoos, you can message her on Instagram to set up an appointment.

Autonsitor

May 3, 2019 / Fifthwall Renaissance / Leave a comment

Written by Alexander Greco

May 3, 2019

My travels have taken me to the Maelulos Forest, in search of the Autonsitor. How do I describe either of these? How do I describe what drew me here? How do I describe what I actually believe I am doing here?

I had been drinking with wily company in Sairn, the City by the Sea, and listening to weathered travelers tell half-remembered tales. Something was in the air, you could smell it above the hops and the pipe-smoke—you could feel it like a static in the air. Yet, it was approached with caution. The Maelulos would be mentioned, and there was a quiet, knowing look in everyone’s eyes. Then the conversations would be diverted—consciously or unconsciously—to something else.

After a story about whaling and battling leviathans off the Garvreil Peninsula, I asked, “What’s the Maelulos? I keep hearing you all mention it, I’m curious. What is it? What’s there?”

Everyone looked at me. I had been quiet for most of the night—laughing yes, jabbing a tease and asking a few questions, sure, but I hadn’t directed the conversation at all until now. A woman who had been a traveler and a woods-woman for the first half of her life, and then a farmer’s wife until three years ago. “You’ve never heard of the Maelulos?” she asked, “The Maelulos Forest?”

“No,” I said, “I’m not from around here.”

“You don’t have to be from around here to ‘ave heard o’ the Maelulos,” a thick-bearded man piped in.

“I’m from far away,” I told him. “Worlds away.”

The bearded man gave me a long look, then the woman spoke up and I turned back to her. “The Maelulos is a forest in Sha’Haro where the Aether spills over into the land. It’s—“

“Aether?” I interrupted.

“What?” the woman asked.

“Did you jus’ ask what Aether is?” the bearded man asked. “How foreign are you? How do you not—”

“Just get on with the story, Freirdei,” a second man—a tall, wiry man with rough stubble—interjected. “We can’t give ‘im physicka lessons tonight, give ‘im directions to the Uni’ if he doesn’t know.”

The woman sighed. “The Maelulos is a forest in Sha’Haro—its own forest, isolated from all the others by miles of plains on all sides—where the Aether… Think of… It’s magic, it’s part of magic, but smarter people than I—or anyone else here—say its more. It’s a part of the fabric of everything, we just can’t see it. They’ve been trying to measure it like electricity or like brain-waves for years, but they haven’t yet. It doesn’t work the-“

“Freirdei,” the thin man interrupted.

“Right,” she said, “the Maelulos. It’s… It’s like walking into a dream. Things aren’t real there the same way they are here.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“The fabric of things is torn there, or perhaps it’s that it blends together there. What separates the physical dimensions from the Aetheric dimension, it’s not there—the borders begin to blur. It glows with colored lights, but there’s no source of the light. There’s things there—there’s things that happen there that can’t be explained. It’s like a dream and an ocean and a storm all at once.”

“But… it’s a forest?”

“Aye,” said Freirdei, “in the easiest of words, it’s a forest.”

“Home of the Autonsitors,” said the thin man, “the only place in the world they live.”

“Autonsitors?” I asked.

“The Lords of the Maelulos,” said the bearded man.

“Not the Druids nor even the Veritasians dispute it. No one owns those woods but the Autonsitors.”

“Who are they?” I asked.

“They are not a ‘who’,” said Freirdi, “they’re beasts.”

“Beasts’ doesn’t do them justice, Freirdi,” said the thin man, “they’re equals with the Dragons.”

“Well, what are they?” I asked, “What are these beasts, or whatever they are?”

There was a small silence. I could see in all three of my companions’ eyes that they were searching for words. The bearded man spoke first. “They make bears look like puppies.”

“They’ve got these tusks,” Freirdi began, “they move like a tiger, and-“

“You’ve never seen a tiger,” said the bearded man.

“Fine, it moves like a mountain lion, you can’t tell me I ‘ahven’t seen those. And it’s got a wolf’s maw, ‘cept its teeth are as long as your forearm.”

“They’re ferocious,” said the bearded man, “they’ll let you into their forest, but you ‘ad better not disturb a single leaf.”

“It sees things,” said the thin man, “that’s what’s important. Something can be big, something can have teeth, and something be fierce, but the Autonsitor sees things. It knows things—like the Dragons, an’ the Elves know things. They spend their entire lives in the Maelulos; their entire lives with those eyes of theirs.”

“That’s enough,” said the bearded man, “let’s-“

“’Ave you ever seen its eyes?” asked the thin man, turning to his bearded compatriot. “Have you ever seen it open its-“

“That’s enough, Pater,” the bearded man said to the thin one.

“Aye, enough,” said Freirdei, “tell us about Korsik,”

The bearded man stared at Pater for a long moment, then smiled slightly. Any tension slowly dissolved as he spoke. “Mah favorite story,” he said, “don’t know why I’ve never been back.”

More stories were told for another hour or so. All the while, the static in the air still hung. I would listen to it ringing, and I would begin to imagine the Maelulos. My mind’s eye would wonder to the Autonsitor. And every time, I would catch Pater looking at me. I’d catch his stare for a moment, and he’d seem to smile with the crease of his eyes. Then he’d look away, back to whoever was telling the story.

Eventually, we all grew tired enough to call it a night. As I was walking up the stairs of the inn, going to my bed, Pater stopped me.

“Are you interested in the Autonsitor?” he asked.

“Interested?” I asked.

“In finding it,” he said, “in going to the Maelulos.”

I stared at Pater for a moment, silently rolling the thought over in my head. “Yes,” I said. I was.

Pater smiled.

In the morning, just as this world’s star—the Sozl, I believe they called it in this country—rose above the horizon, I boarded a train—engine #64, just as Pater had told me to. It wasn’t a long journey to Sha’Haro from the southern hill country of Veritas. Pater had given me a map to the Maelulos, along with some directions and words of advice:

“Stay on the roads. Don’t journey into the forests—it’s the Druids’ land. Once you enter the Mael—the plains surrounding the Maelulos—keep your eye to the Rais [their word for East]. You’ll eventually see the Maelulos from the road.”

Once my train arrived in Sha’Haro, I began walking down the Vahn’Ozl road to the South. For a long time, there was nothing but forest. The first night on the road, I slept just off the side of the road, though I didn’t go any farther than the nearest tree. On the second day, around noon, a merchant came by with a horse-led wagon and offered to let me ride with him. By the end of the second day, we had made it to the Mael.

Night was falling, so we camped out in the grass a few yards from the edge of the road. When I woke up the next day, the Sozl was just beginning to rise on the Mael. It stretched on for miles and miles—a seemingly infinite stretch of grasslands. The merchant and I took to the road again, and by the afternoon, I could see the Maelulos to the East. It looked like a normal forest, though we were still miles away.

An hour or so later, when we were parallel to the Maelulos, I told the merchant to stop so I could get off and go on to the forest. He looked at me for a moment as though I was insane, then nodded and slowed to a stop. He didn’t say anything while I got off and collected my belongings, but as I was about to thank him, he interrupted me and asked, “Are you sure?”

I didn’t understand the question at first, it seemed taken out of context, but then it clicked, “Yes, I’m sure,” I said, “thank you for the ride.”

The merchant nodded and grunted something, then went on his way.

I began walking across the plains toward the Maelulos.

As I near the Maelulos, it seems stranger than when I had first seen it, and with each step it seems to grow wilder—less constrained by any words an individual might craft for such an occasion. Within a mile of its edge, the Maelulos has become a storm of green arms reaching up into the sky. It is comprised of trees, yes, but not like trees I’d ever seen. Not trees of our world, nor trees I’ve seen in other parts of this world.

Maelulos, the Glowing Wood, Pater called it. I am closer now; the Sozl is falling onto the horizon behind me. The forest begins to emanate soft, blue light. The Sozl is now beyond the horizon. All that’s left of it are deep reds and violets exploding into the night’s deep indigo.

I am approaching the edge of the forest now, despite the fall of night. Pater told me the Autonsitor is an animal that never sleeps, but it only walks through the Maelulos at night. By day, it exists invisibly and universally in the leaves and vines and branches of the forest, and in the flowers, seeds and fruits of the forest.

The light blue of the forest is now becoming infused with every color imaginable. Yellow lights like wil-o-wisps dance between shifting boughs of the sprawling, monolithic trees. Indigos of the night sky seem to drift and swirl about with the green of glowing leaves, and echoes the sky blue glimmer permeating the air. Currents of orange, wild violet and burnt red swim between trees like autumnal whales swimming through the forest’s depths.

At the threshold of the forest, I see red fireflies dancing in the air with white moths. In the distance is a great bird—it looks like a giant shoebill, or some monstrous crane. Its feathers are grey shadows painted across snowy fields, and its eyes are yellow gems with piercing abysses cut across them. Fish as large as my head are swimming through the air—possibly propelling through the invisible “Aether”.

The static from the night I first heard of the Maelulos seems to return. Something hums through the air. A ringing brushes across my body like a cool breeze. Why am I here? I wonder. The question is like ice running across my nerves. I couldn’t answer it. My same words that fail to describe the Maelulos begin failing to describe me, or my motivations. I couldn’t tell you why I was here. Could the Maelulos tell me why it was here?

The static and the hum and the ringing grow, drowning out my thoughts until all I hear are the shapes of the trees. All I can think are the colors of the air.

I’ve entered the forest now. My grip on reality begins to fade here, or perhaps there’s simply less reality to hold onto. Less than fifteen minutes of walking—as far as I can tell—and a mouth formed from tree roots and loamy earth opens up, and from its lips fly flocks of birds. They all chirp with distinct melodies in a unified rhythm, and their small, ringing noises form a chaotic yet beautiful and haunting song—a composition that was easily far more complex than even the Elvish symphonies could produce.

Further into the forest. I don’t know how far I’ve walked. I watch a deer bite the air—nothing in the air, it bit the air itself—and tear a hole open. From that hole, a rabbit, a crow and a moth, each the size of my chest, emerge. They all walk together through the forest.

I want to follow, but I realize I’m watching them from above. I realize I’m standing in a canopy of branches and leaves. I thought I was standing in grass and earthen debris, but I realize I must climb back down.

A giant earthworm emerges from the ground. It rises up into the air, then splits into seven. These all become the boughs of a tree, while the part of the tree that remains unified becomes the trunk. A black beak the size of sailing vessel crashes through the forest and plucks at the tree, but pulls a worm from the ground.

I look up to see the crow again. I realize the worm was not giant, and the beak was not the size of a ship. I realize I had been staring at the ground, watching the earthworm, and my eyes had only been inches from the ground. I am sprawled out across the ground, covered in dried leaves and dirt.

The deer, the moth and the rabbit are here as well. I stand up and follow the four animals. As I walk, I seem to be traversing through a tunnel of leaves, boughs and museum exhibits, though I couldn’t tell you which displays I saw. All that stayed constant, all that I can really remember, were the four animals.

So, I come back to my first question, how to describe the Maelulos.

I couldn’t say the Maelulos is a forest anymore. That wouldn’t do. That wouldn’t begin to describe what I see.

As I step into a clearing with the four animals, I watch a small star—one of the wil-o-wisps—burst into a spiraling flower stock that hangs in the air. The bud of this flower opens into an endless pit of sunlight and fire. What I thought were seven golden petals begin to move, and I realize they are seven yellow bees standing on the edge of this fiery pit. They lean in and pluck seven strings from the inferno of sunlight, then fly off into the forest—weaving the seven strings throughout the trees and bushes and limbs and creatures and colors and lights.

But even that doesn’t describe what I see. How do I describe this? How doI describe an object I hear with my body? How do I describe a thought I see with my hands? How do I describe a sound that I feel in my thoughts? Because that’s what I saw, a storm of perception wrapped inside of a single event.

From this clearing, we follow one of the bees as it weaves through the trees. Flower to flower, wrapping a curving vector about the forest. We step inside the hollow of a tree. The tree was no more than three feet thick from the outside, but suddenly we’re walking through a dark hallway carved into the tree, following this bee. We come to a small, circular room, with a hole in the floor. From the floor comes a golden light.

The bee flies into the hole. I look down and see three naked women—one with white hair, one with blonde and one with copper hair. I couldn’t say if they were beautiful or ugly, I couldn’t say if they seemed clean or unkempt, and I couldn’t say if they were happy or furious at the arrival of the bee. They were like oil paintings in the air, their features were crisp yet distant, and I wanted to climb into the golden light to be with them.

From yards away, they might seem perfect. Examining them inches from my face, I might see the Truth. But, from right here, I only saw confusion. I only saw the ideal and the material meeting in the middle, and blurring like rivers of opposing thoughts crashing into each other.

The animals kept walking, and I followed.

We move past the golden light, and onward across this hall through the dark. For a moment, I wonder if the darkness will swallow me, if there will never be an end to it, if I will ever return. Then I see a light at the end of the hall. Now we’re walking out of the hallway, into the forest once more. The descends from the air above us, still carrying its string, and we follow it once more.

How do I describe this?

The Maelulos is like an estuary of what is and what could be. It is where the briny depths of life’s oceans mix with the meltwater of snowcapped epiphanies. It’s where reality doesn’t have to be real anymore, and the thoughts of ours that can never be step foot on solid ground.

I tell you this, I tell you what I’ve seen here, and now I have just as much difficulty telling you what has drawn me here. How do I tell you what pulls me? How do I tell you what strings tug at my joints? How do I tell you what thoughts I followed to find this forest?

Like the search for something you’ve seen once and forgotten. Like the investigation of a dream lost to time. Like you’ve been following a map you didn’t know was in your hands, hunting for something you never knew you needed. How else could I describe it?

It is unknowable, ungraspable and undefinable, yet it is so real. When it brushes up against you in your dreams, it feels far more real than anything you’ve held in your waking hands. When you dance along the edge of reason and the irrational, it embraces you like a star embracing the empty vacuum surrounding it.

This—whatever it is; whatever unknowable angels dance through my head—has drawn me to the Maelulos.

And so I tell you that I search for the Autonsitor, but I tell you also that I search for more. I tell you I hunt for the Autonsitor, but, if you knew the Autonsitor, you would understand what I truly hope to find.

The four animals and I follow the bee on through the Glowing Wood.

We are walking in a space where reality seems to have calmed down once again. I can think again, I can look around, and I can see myself as an individual nested in reality again. Then I hear it. A roar, a howl, a cry—something I’ve never heard in my life, yet it couldn’t be mistaken. The Autonsitor. I hear it from deep in the forest ahead of us, but then I watch as the bee flies into a river, still carrying the string. The four animals follow. I hear the cry once more and hesitate, but I know—for whatever reason; the same reason for why I must search for the Autonsitor—I must follow the four animals into the river.

All of the animals and the bee immediately submerge beneath the water, unafraid of its current, and unafraid of having no air to breathe. I step into the water, and it’s freezing. I walk in as quickly as I can, though I don’t have the same disinhibition as the animals and the bee. The water is up to my waist, then my chest, then my chin. I take a long breath, then submerge my head into the cold water.

On the other side of the river’s surface, I open my eyes and see normally, as if there were no water. Everything around me—the plants, my clothes, the rabbit’s fur—all move as if they were underwater, but I don’t feel the water itself, and I find that I can move normally, as if there was no water. I sip the river into my mouth, and find that I’ve sipped in air. Cautiously, I exhale my breath, then inhale normally. I can breathe underwater, or under-whatever-this-river-is.

The animals and I walk across the silt of the riverbed, following the bee. I glance down the river to either side of me and see fish, but not normal fish. They’ve all got heads of various animals—elephants, tigers, monkeys, goats and snakes—and their dorsal fins were made out of arms, while their tailfins were like long trailing flowers.

As we walked across the riverbed, I watched each fish pick up a stone with its mouth, then carry it to another fish. Two fish would meet with each other, and pick the rocks from each other’s mouths with one of the hands on their dorsal fins, then go to pick up another rock and meet another fish. Eventually, a fish would have every hand of its dorsal arms full of different rocks of different shapes, sizes, colors and origins, and they would find some safe place along the riverbed—either a sunken log, the roots of a tree, or a bush of reeds—and lay down to set every rock in a pile around it.

I watched this for as long as I could, but then I saw from the corner of my eye that we were approaching something. I turned forward, toward the animals and the bee, and I saw we were nearing the bank of the river’s other side, except the bank was opening up like a dark mouth—the same mouth I’d seen the birds fly out of earlier.

Together, the animals and I follow the golden bee into this earthen mouth underwater. The riverbed swallows us into its dark silt. We are walking, though I begin to lose feeling of my body. I know I move my legs, though I don’t feel them move. Maybe it’s too cold to feel anything. A part of me wonders if I’m dead. It seems foolish, I acknowledge that, but it seems to make sense as well.

Warm light shines from ahead. Soon, we are stepping through a tunnel of soil and clay. Ahead, I think I can see buildings where the tunnel opens up. They’re buildings made of metal, I think. They’re buildings made of tree roots, car frames and engine blocks, and a mismatching of many different bricks—red bricks, cobblestones, fired clay, cement blocks, and so forth—I think.

Eventually we come to the end of this tunnel. There is a city, I can see it fully now. There are people here, I see them now. They are like geometric shapes painted into the riverwater-that-isn’t-water. Their faces are squares and triangles, and circles inside of circles, and their bodies are gaunt rectangles, hobbling trapezoids and tall, thin triangles.

We pass the first two blocks on our left and right. Then the bee flies into an open doorway. We follow it, take a staircase to the basement floor. Except the staircase keeps going. And going. And going. It enters my mind, how long has the bee been pulling its string from the flower? How many paths has it woven through? How many paths have the six other bees woven? It enters my mind that—

But we’ve come to the end of the staircase. It empties out into a vast underground—a cavern. A cavern, with doors everywhere. The animals and I follow the bee through one of the doors. There’s sunlight down here, though I don’t know from where. We walk into a hallway, and it leads to endless hallways streaming with sunlight. Hallway after hallway—how many places has the bee’s string woven through by now?

We step out to a dark, midnight beach—the sunlight stays in the halls behind us—and we behold an ocean ahead of us. I wonder how there can be an ocean when we’re already in a river. I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you. But I know there’s a ship waiting for us just offshore. We’re swimming in black water now. My legs are treading air, and my head is underwater, but we’re moving. Now we’re climbing the sides of the ship.

The animals and I stand on the sides of the deck. The bee wraps its string around the masts, and ties a knot around the bowsprit. The bee is pulling now on the ship, pulling the ship through the ocean. We sail for hours, it seems like, across charcoal black waters. Above us, the sky begins to crack and shimmer with color. The sky becomes a wine bottle green, cracks of light barely escaping the underground sky.

In the distance, I see a massive black shape converging to a point above the horizon. Eventually, I realize that this is our destination. We crawl across the water. As time passes, I see phantom shapes find life in the air. I see mice run across the water. I see the ghost-forms of foxes dance in the dark. I see tresses of pale vines climb through the air and disappear.

Then I see the moon come out. It means something. I don’t know what it means. It’s telling me something. The still image of the moon opens an invisible mouth and speaks. What is it saying?

A sudden jolt, a crash. The ship has hit land. The animals begin walking toward the bowsprit. I follow. I end up walking faster than them and make it to the bowsprit first. I climb down from the side of the ship, and my feet touch solid ground. The ship begins to move. I turn around and see the bee pulling the ship away from the coast, the animals still on it.

For a moment, I wonder if I should try climbing back aboard the ship, but I know it’s too late. The ship has left land. It’s gone. I watch to see if the animals turn to look at me, a part of me wants to wave at them, but they don’t.

I turn back.

I am standing at the summit of a black mountain, I realize. I am standing at the summit of a mountain made from the darkest substance I could imagine—something beyond charcoal, something beyond simple shadow, something wholly un-seeable—ore of a black-hole, perhaps, mined from the cosmos.

I know I must begin climbing.

There are rocks beneath my feet, and stones against my hand, but there is no seeing them. Far above me, at what I assume to be the peak, I see a faint light. Hand over hand, I climb this un-seeable mountain. As I do, I feel the pressure of the water I’m in grow stronger and stronger. It grows until I think I feel a hand gripping my entire body, and I wonder how much more I can take. Above me I see the light still, so I go on. Hand over hand, I go on, until the pressure is so great, and the light is so near that I am nothing but a war with myself. The pressure grows, and the light comes closer until I am nothing but collisions of thoughts.

Then my hand finds nothing but water—thick water, which squeezes my hand in a crushing grip. I reach down, and I feel a rounded, pyramidal point where the mountain must end. Above me, there is a small point of light. Then, above me, there is a call.

Above me, I hear a long, trailing keen. If a single saxophone could howl like a wolf, roar like a lion, screech like an eagle, and still croon sweet, blue lullabies in the quiet of the night, it might sound like this keen. It might sound like the call of the Autonsitor.

From the top of the mountain I have climbed, I breach the earthen ceiling with my hands and pull myself through the dirt, back into the forest. The abyssal pressure is gone. I crawl into the hollow of a tree, and turn the bark’s door handle. I crack the door of the tree open just enough to peek outside, into the woods.

There, it stands. The Autonsitor.

It has the body of an ashen-furred lion, except it stands as tall as an elephant at its shoulders. Its head has an elongated snout, like a wolf’s. Thick tusks emerge from its mouth, bent backwards beyond its shoulder blades. Its back is covered in twigs, branches and thick tree boughs all laden with deep, green leaves. It looks just as Pater had described it to me.

I step out of the hollow in the tree and step into the forest. I watch it, and wonder what the Autonsitor is doing. It seems agitated. It seems confused. This wasn’t what I had expected. Sure, it looked like a creature of beauty and elegance, but not in the way it moved.

Lumbering about as though it were in pain or scared, the Autonsitor walked further into the woods—it’s head moving side to side as it did, searching. I follow after it. The woods have seemed to congeal into a less frantic reality here. It is no longer shifting between reality and dream, but rather seems to be one or the other. Whichever one it is—whichever of the two that the forest has chosen—it seems to be holding true.

The Autonsitor stops in a clearing. I come to a stop several yards outside of the clearing. The beast looks around, then its eyes become fixated on something to its left. A song is playing somewhere in the forest, and it gets closer and closer. The Autonsitor begins to open its mouth. A flock of birds—the source of the music in the woods—comes flying directly at the Autonsitor. It opens its mouth, and they all fly into the beast’s mouth.

I step forward to get a better look. The Autonsitor tenses up suddenly. The odd panic in the creature’s body seem to peak. Each movement of its body is quick—its head jerks to one side, it’s legs move to reposition its body, its back arches, ready to lash out. What’s making it so agitated?

It turns, and I see its face from the front now. It has two light blue eyes—the same color as the light permeating this forest—then a single, closed eye at the crown of its skull. It is sniffing the air and turning its head slowly to scan the forest. Its eyes stop on me—it sees me now, I know it does.

For a moment, all the Autonsitor does is stare at me. All I can do is stare back. Then, step by step, it begins to move toward me. There is no running away, so I don’t even try. I just stand there and stare back into the beast’s eyes. It comes to a stop only a few yards away. My fate seems indeterminate for a moment. Then the Autonsitor rumbles and closes its eyes.

The eye at its crown opens. It is white, with a black center.

From this black center, I see seven bees holding seven strings crawl out and fly into the forest. The Autonsitor stands motionless now as the bees fly all around me, wrapping me with their string. Is it looking through its white eye now? Through the black pit at its center? Through the eyes of the seven bees? Is it searching for something? And what does it search for?

The bees wrap me entirely with strings, and I let them. They form something like a chrysalis around my body. The strings cover my face until I can see no more, and then they all melt into my skin, melting me with them. I open my eyes again, and I am floating in an endless, white space, with spirals of color spinning all around me.

Then, the spirals coalesce into a single circle. The circle shimmers. It becomes a mirror. I look into it and see photographs of myself. They are photographs of me from the day I was born until the day I die. They are all layered on top of each other, yet transparent, so I can see them all at once, and so they form one face. In the reflection of the mirror, I see a mirror behind me.

I seem to have no body here, so all I see are two mirrors reflecting each other infinitely, and all the photographs in between. I am just an ethereal body here, watching these two. I move toward the first mirror, and try to push myself through the glass.

The mirror is like a liquid, and my body—whatever my body is—moves into the mirror as though I am emerging from water. My body breaks through the liquid surface of the mirror. I stumble out of it onto grass. It is nighttime. No. I see light on the horizon, it must be morning time. All around me is grasslands, plains—the Mael.

I turn around, and I see Maelulos just behind me—the edge of the woods calling for me to return. But, I know I must leave, though I don’t know why (I assume I must leave for the same reasons I came here, whatever they were). I turn to the horizon, and watch as the Sozl rises above the edge of the horizon. A new morning is here, and I must travel on. I turn to look once more at the Maelulos.

At the heart of this forest is a great animal, searching for something. It turns itself into an instrument. It turns itself into a telescope that scours the surface of pebbles. It turns itself into a tool that navigates from flower to flower, color to color, life to life—a tool prying at the night, prying at the forest, prying at its reflection.

Perhaps one day I will return to the Maelulos.

Perhaps one day I will lose myself in the Maelulos.

Perhaps one day I will find myself still wandering through the Maelulos.

Forest in My Attic

April 5, 2019 / Fifthwall Renaissance / 2 Comments

By Alexander Greco

April 5, 2019

Hours after I planned to begin, hours after the sun had risen above the horizon, I lowered the stairs to my attic. At the top of the staircase, I stopped half inside the attic, half inside everything else.

The Sun beamed through the left-hand window. Outside I could see the forest surrounding my Father’s house. Dust covered everything up here, most of which hadn’t been touched in years. It was a mess up here, a chaotic city of boxes piled against dressers, cardboard towers leaning against bookshelves. Dust covered the city like the snow of an ashen winter. Some parts of the attic clearly hadn’t been explored in years, where some objects were almost invisible beneath a couple decades of dust.

For a moment, I stood still and stared around the attic. For a moment, the attic seemed to stare right back at me.

I had no idea where to begin, or what I might find. Everything in the attic was an accumulation of my Father’s forty-year stay in the house. I had moved in when things first started going downhill, about five years ago. His life slowly came to an end two years ago. Only now did I finally force myself start cleaning the house out, deciding what to keep and what to throw out.

I looked around the attic once more, mentally preparing myself for hours of digging through old memories. I sighed, then stepped forward.

My first steps across the floor were slow and cautious. One wrong step, and who knew what might come tumbling down. One moment of incaution, and-

Shhhf.

…

Something had moved.

I looked around. There was nothing.

Probably a rat, I figured, or a mouse. And god knows how many spiders, cockroaches and cluster flies there up here.

No… No, no, no, I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to deal with

I turned almost went back down the stairs. I’ll call an exterminator, then maybe I’ll hire someone to haul all this stuff downstairs.

But then I stopped, and looked around one more time.

Maybe I shouldn’t have. Maybe I should have looked away. Maybe I should have kept going, closed the ladder, and never looked back, but I didn’t. I looked around, and I started catching sight of things I’d completely forgotten about. Stacks of books my Father owned, old furniture, and ancient relics from childhood.

Old memories began wrapping themselves around me, and I tried pushing them away. Just leave, call the exterminator, and come back to this another day.

Then my eye caught a lone box on the floor, only a yard from the ladder.

“PHOTOGRAPHS” was written in sharpie on the side.

I studied it for a moment. Then took a short step to where it lay on the ground, and knelt down to it. I studied it like it was some curious yet potentially dangerous specimen I’d found in the jungle. I almost stood up to leave, but I wanted to know, “What memories are in this box?”

I picked it up, and the bottom fell out a few feet into the air. Half a dozen 6”x8” albums crashed to the floor. I jumped back, and cursed, “Fuck,” at the sudden calamity.

Then everything settled into a new, stable chaos. The box was empty, and the albums were still.

Again, I almost left. I almost called it a day, right then and there.

But maybe, I thought to myself, I should at least pick these albums up. I set the box down, and knelt at the pile of photo-albums, beginning to re-stack them. At the bottom of the pile, one of the albums had completely opened. I glanced briefly inside. They were pictures of my friends and me, pictures from high school.

I’m not old, I’d say—early-thirties—but people I saw in those pictures were so much younger than the people we’ve become. I honestly don’t know who a lot of these people became.

I flipped through the pages, and wondered how much Joey has changed, or Mike, Kris or Drew—how much they’ve all changed; everyone I knew. Who did they all become? Who are they now? What are their lives like?

Then I saw a picture of Mary, the last we ever took. The one after we’d both graduated from college, after we hadn’t talked in months. We took that picture, ate dinner, hugged and said goodbye, then never talked again.

And then all my memories of her pulled themselves out from the old closets of my mind, like ocean Leviathans being reeled in on 30-pound poles. All the peaks, and all the ravines. All the steps forward, and all the stumbles down. All the nights out, and all the days lost.

Everything we did together, all the thoughts we shared, constructed itself like an architecture of memories. Words we’d spoken that built bridges between us, and dreams we painted onto a shared canvas.

What secrets did we share in our dreams? What cities did we walk through that will never have a map? What people did we meet that will never have a name?

Something moved again.

I looked up.

No.

Mary was standing in the attic. She was looking at me. Looking into my eyes.

I blinked, and she was gone.

No… No, this is impossible—I must have just imagined it—this is impossible.

She had been standing there only a moment ago, but now she’s gone. She had been standing there, standing by my… By my father’s…

My father’s old hunting bag.

No. I stood up. I didn’t want to deal with this, I didn’t have to deal with this. I’m going crazy just being up here. I need an exterminator. I need to hire someone to do all this for me.

I flew down the attic stairs. I didn’t even bother closing the attic up, I just kept walking through the second story, down to the first floor, and out the front door. The moment I was outside, walking out into the trees surrounding the house, I lit a cigarette and took a long drag. I kept walking, and walking, and walking away from the house. I didn’t want to think about what I saw, I just wanted to fall into the trees.

These woods had been my father’s woods—a whole square mile of it my father bought in the 70’s. It was on the outskirts of the suburbs, and in the suburbs, the city at the center of us all kept encroaching on us, so these woods were like a last bastion of something old and natural. They’d been my father’s woods. I guess they’re mine now.

I kept walking, and walking, and walking away, but I was still in my father’s forest—my forest.

Autumn had crept into the world, slowly and subtly until its presence was undeniable. The forest was a small world of silent giants carrying a canopy of green, yellow, red and orange on their shoulders. Beneath the giant’s feet were roots dug into soil, roots cracking stones beneath the earth. Worms, beetles and mice burrowed beneath the grass. Deer eat the grass, wolves eat the deer, vultures eat the wolves, and time eats the vultures.

I kept smoking cigarettes. Each one, I put out on the sole of my shoe, then put in my pocket. I wouldn’t dare leave them in the forest. I wouldn’t dare drop them on the ground. Not even the vultures would eat them.

My father was somewhere in that world now, buried in rock and roots, rivers and grass. Buried somewhere where the world dies, only to feed the dying giants above.

I never made it anywhere near the edge of the forest, I never made it to the deeper trails and through the deeper glades. Eventually I stopped, and sat down on a tangle of knotted roots. I lit one last cigarette—I’d gone through three already—and stared into the forest. I tried not to think about the attic, or my father, or going back to the house. I tried only to stare.

But then I turned back toward the house. What had I just seen?

Was that real?

There wasn’t any answer—not from the woods, not from the grass, not from the dirt, not from my head. The grass churned with the air, the birds chirped, and the air danced across my skin, But there was no answer.

I stood up, and turned toward the house—well out of view through the trees.

It doesn’t matter. No, it wasn’t real. It was your imagination, that’s it.

I have to go back soon. I have to… I don’t know, I have to do something. I’ll call pest control, that’s what I’ll do.

When the house came into view, something seemed odd, but I couldn’t tell what it was at first. The front door was open. I didn’t remember leaving it open. Closer now, and I could see colors across the windows.

Ribbon? Tape? What was it?

And… And there were colors coming out the front door? I started jogging up to the front of the house.

Yarn trailed out from the front door, across the wooden patio, and onto the grass and dead leaves. Yarn of all different colors, and string, twine, strips of silk—what the hell happened? It didn’t make sense—nothing made sense for a moment. Then I saw something run by the windows of the second floor, then through the front door I saw something run across the living room.

Kids. A bunch of dumbass kids tearing up the house. That was my rationalization. I don’t know what they were doing, I don’t know how, but I didn’t care. I would get them out of the house, and I would clean their mess up. I forced myself to be mad, forced myself to be furious, and walked inside.

And the moment I stepped inside, I wasn’t furious anymore. It wasn’t kids. It couldn’t be. The yarn, the ribbon, the string and the twine were everywhere.

All across the walls, coming down from the ceilings, wrapping across the floor, and tied in chaotic nets through the air. Like fauvist cobwebs, ribbon, string and silk covered the walls, and like a surrealist’s spider-webs, all the string and silk and ribbon wove in and out of each other through the air, forming an insane cloud of color between the walls.

Thud thud, thud thud thud…

Something ran across the floor above me. There were voices, people talking.

I looked across the ribbon-strewn ceiling, then around the rooms of the walls, and then to all the doors and hallways littered with yarn.

My heart thumped in my chest, and I could feel my palms getting sweaty. What the hell had happened? What was this? Who was upstairs?

I turned to the staircase. It was almost completely clogged with webs of twine and silk. I studied it nervously for a few moments.

THUD THUD THUD THUD.

I whipped my head up to look at the ceiling. Someone had run across the floor upstairs.

I looked back at the staircase. I had to do something… I had to find out what the hell happened, and who the hell was upstairs.

Slowly, calmly, I approached the staircase—evading hanging webs and bridges of string as I did. I stopped a foot away from the bottom of the stairs. There was so much hanging between the walls—I could avoid getting touched by most of it, but I’d have to come into contact with most of it. I don’t know why it made me so nervous, but I hesitated there for a moment before plunging in.

There was a moment where I wondered if this was real or not—like the moment before you dive into cold water, and wonder if you’re actually diving into cold water.

But as they brushed across my skin, the ribbon and silk and yarn all felt real. This schizophrenic tunnel of craft-supplies felt real—felt tangible, physical, material. There was a part of me that had been wondering whether this was Along the way up the staircase, I began to notice photographs dangling from the webs. Photographs, then newspapers clippings, and then lines of text cut from books, cities cut from maps and definitions cut from dictionaries.

They were all hanging from the string and yarn, like they were apart of some arts-and-crafts mobile, or the creation of some conspiracy theorist. What the hell was this? What had been made in my father’s house? What was this filling the halls and filling the staircase? What happened?

Someone—a child—I think -ran across the top of the staircase. They flitted into existence one moment, then ran into oblivion the next, but I could still hear their footsteps pounding away at the floor. No…

Had children done this? Was this the work of small kids? With many careful steps and uncertain maneuvers, I made it to the top of the staircase. Immediately, I noticed small movements that seem to fill the second-floor hallway. Crawling all across the yarn webs were mice, bugs and spiders… And they were all carrying objects with them.

I saw small mice carrying little nick-knacks with them—pens, miniature figurines, keys—bugs rolling marbles and dice across silk bridges, and spiders preying on toy soldiers caught in a twine web. They all maneuvered through the webs, around and across photographs, and between pillars of newspaper clippings.

For a few moments, I tried to digest what I was looking at. I tried to digest the sight of all the bugs crawling across the silk bridges and yarn spirals, with all the little objects they carried on their backs and in their mouths, and all the mice running through the air like naked tight-rope walkers. But several moments later, it still didn’t make sense. Several minutes later, I still couldn’t understand what I was looking at. It seemed so obvious though, it seemed like everything was right their, like all the pieces of the puzzle had already been put together, and it was just the image the puzzle formed that didn’t make sense. My eyes travelled to the end of the hallway. The staircase to the attic was still open. Mary was standing at the base of the staircase. She was staring at me.

No. No, she couldn’t be real, that couldn’t be right. That person standing there, that can’t be a real person, that can’t be…

“Mary?” I called out.

Mary didn’t move. She kept staring.

I put my hand out, almost as if to wave at her. “Mary,” I spoke, “is that you?”

Mary stood and stared a moment longer, then turned and walked up the stairs into the attic. “Wait!” I called out, “What’s going on? Where are you going?” But she wouldn’t stop.

She disappeared into the attic.

I hesitated only another moment, then plunged into the hallway.

As quickly as I could without tearing the webs of yarn and string down, I made my way down the hallway, toward attic. The webs got thicker the further I went. Only a yard or so from the stairs, the webs were so thick that there was no maneuvering around them anymore. I had to push through thick mats and nots of fabric, ridden with crawling creatures. Mice investigated the back of my neck before scurrying back to the webs. Cockroaches and water beetles crawled across my arms and hands. One spider stepped like a manic dancer across my face before I swatted it away, and god knows how many other spiders had found their home on me.

Finally, my hands found the staircase to the attic, and I swung my feet onto the bottom steps. As I climbed the staircase, the webs only got thicker and thicker toward the top. I was immersed in the fabrics—my entire body—and all across my body was a crawling, scampering, skittering sensation—my scalp, my ears, my lips, my nose, across my chest, inside my pants, and down to my ankles—but I couldn’t see the things crawling across me, and I couldn’t do anything to stop them.

The webs suffocated all light, and the clutter and fabric grew so dense it was like digging my way up from the bottom of a landfill.

Then suddenly my body burst through a membrane of fabric and photographs. I was gasping for air, as if I’d just emerged from underwater, and I pulled my body through the writhing fabric into the attic.

Laying on the ground, I looked around the attic. Networks of yarn wove through the air in complex patterns and structures. Photographs and newspaper clippings dangled from the material like cosmopolitan leaves. The entire attic was a thicket of chaotic material, with a clearing at the center—surrounding the entrance of the stairs—but otherwise there was nowhere to go in here.

Mary was nowhere to be seen.

There was no path to the windows. The only other way out was back down the crawling hole next to me.

There was no path to anything in here.

I sat up and looked around. No path. Nothing. No where to go. No path.

Then my eyes caught sight of something.

No. That wasn’t true. There was one path.

It led to my Father’s old duffel bag. It was my father’s duffel bag he used when he went hunting in the midwest. He would carry the few changes of clothes he brought into the wilderness, his compass, a map, knives, and other small things he brought with him. I crawled across the floor of the attic, hand over hand through to the duffel bag.

It smelled like oiled leather. Gun powder from spent bullet casings. The earthy aroma of dried leaves.

It reminded me of him.

I never went hunting with him. I was afraid of guns. But I can’t count the number of times I wish I’d gone with him.

My thoughts travelled back to when he’d be gone. My mother let me rifle through his things in their room. There was his bed and his closet, his flannel and his coon-skin hat. In a dream I had when I was a small child, I crawled across his floor at night and into this same duffel bag. I wormed my way through the contents until I came out into a forested mountainside. In the dream, my father was there, waiting.

Next to his duffel bag, I saw a pile of old drawings I had made when I was a child.

There was an old picture of mine where the moon was keeping me safe as I slept. When I was a child, I used to think the moon followed me overhead. The moon was alive and thinking. No longer. There’s a picture of a half-man, half-deer person. I’d shown it to my father, and told him he’d meet the deer person one day in the woods.

So many ideas I had, so many creative and beautiful thoughts. Elves in the woods, dancing in whispering glades. Towering monsters that stalked forests in twilight hours. Aliens lost from space, trying to survive on our planet. So many small ideas from when I was child. From long before my father’s disease had taken hold, long before he had passed on.

Something moved behind me.

I turned around. Standing in the center of the room, in the clearing of strings and yarn, stood my father.

It was as if he had never died. As if he was still here with me. No. He was there with me. He looked at me with watery blue eyes and smiled. Every wrinkle cracked across his face with stark detail, and every line was so beautifully human.

“Dad?” I asked.

He only smiled.

Standing up, I took a step toward him into the attic, and stepped into the forested mountainside.

I was in the attic still, I knew I was, but… I was in the forest with him.

My father beckoned me over to him, and I walked with him through the forest. We walked together through this dream, and then we began walking through all my other dreams. He knew the way through all the moonlit cities, where shadowy creatures flew across the sky, and knew the paths up spiraling architecture—bent and contorted as they pierced into the starry heavens.

We went into the castles from various nightmares and spoke happily with the ghosts and the vampires, like long lost friends. Old, hidden caverns and buried temples were rediscovered. We admired these galleries of secrecy like children in a museum.

There were beaches we walked across. Waves crashed against our ankles, and soon we were walking into the ocean. Fish of all colors swam by. We stepped through the streets of coral reefs where eels snaked across winding alleyways and dark tunnels.

A coral reef bloomed around us into walls of buildings, with windows from old shipwrecks, and statues from drowned civilizations. The city in the ocean became every city in the world, and the people of the city became every person I’d ever met. I looked around, and it was still my attic, but the attic was so vast now, so infinite. Time was nothing, and for brief seconds we visited infinity together. The cities we visited, the people I met, the dreams I had, and all the memories forgotten; all were right there, right in front of me.

All of it was right there, right before my eyes.

All the thoughts I had never shared, all the ideas that fell apart and were lost in my head. All the people I hated, all the people I loved, and all the people I passed by without a second thought. We were all standing in my attic, we were all walking through our memories of each other, we were all talking in this forest with my father. There in the attic, I could hear every word and every sentence we’d ever spoken—every movement of the eye, every posture we ever held, every movement we ever witnessed.

All of you. I could see all of you

There in the attic, I could see all of you, and you’re all pulling on me with fistfuls of yarn.

And you were all me. You were all pulling these strings in my head, and you made me all I would ever be. Every word you’d ever said is all I am. Every memory of you is all I am. Everything that you are is all I am. All I could ever be is all of you, because all we are is pieces of each other.

I saw all of you, and I saw the truth. I saw myself, and I knew what I was looking at. I saw all of us, and I knew exactly where I was.

Then it all began to slip. Fall away. In my dreams, I was alone. The vampires slept in coffins I couldn’t open, and the ocean cities were abandoned. In my memories, we never spoke again, and I never found out if any of us had quit smoking. In my childhood, I deciphered all the rational truths, and the moon couldn’t keep me safe anymore. In our forest, you all turned your backs to me. In my attic, you all walked back into the pictures in the boxes.

I ran after all of you, yelling for you to stop. Bookshelves of all our stories fell down around me. The bedrooms of friends I sat in collapsed brick by brick. Kitchens, dining rooms and living rooms of family—blood or no blood—crumbled with age.

I scrambled through all the wreckage, chasing after you all. Secrets glittered in the debris like small gems, but I couldn’t stop to pick them all up. My lost thoughts peered from ruined classrooms I couldn’t go back to. Wherever I looked, I couldn’t find my old memories, or those old feelings I’d felt.

“Come back!” I yelled, pulling on all the strings.

But you all turned away, and now I can’t picture your faces in my head.

“Wait, come on! Where are you going?” but you wouldn’t answer.

You all disappeared somewhere, and I can’t see the lines on the map telling me where.

“Come on, Please! Please! Come back!” I screamed, reaching out for them.

But I couldn’t believe that the moon watched over me anymore, try as I might.

“No, tell me again! Just tell me one more time!” I called out to all my old thoughts.

I couldn’t believe that there were fairies in the forests, dragons in the mountains.

“What did I lose? What was in my head? No, no, what was it? What was it?”

And, despite all my effort, I couldn’t remember the truths I’d known as a child.

In my attic, you all left me to the dusty relics and lifeless debris. In my attic, you all disappeared into the walls, filed down the creaking, wooden stairs, and climbed out the windows. All the webs of strings pulled themselves back into the cracks in the floorboards. I wanted to stop them, I wanted to pull them back, I wanted to dig at the wooden floorboards until my fingers bled, and find wherever these strings led to.

I didn’t know who I was looking at anymore, and it didn’t make any sense. I didn’t see the truth, and I didn’t know the answer. I looked around for everyone, but everyone was gone. I looked around, hoping I was still in a forest of people at the bottom of the ocean, but no. I was here. I was in this attic. I was alone.

It was evening now. Yellows and oranges were streaming in through the right side of the attic. “Damn,” I said to no one, “damn it all.”

I looked out the window, and imagined going outside for a cigarette. “Damn. Damn, damn, damn this place.”

Something moved.

I turned.

Mary stood there in the attic. Staring at me.

I stared back.

Not even meaning to, I blinked. She was gone.

All of it. All that I had seen. All that I knew now, all the places my father had taken me, and all the people I had met. It was almost too much.

I looked around the attic—completely normal again, with no strings or lengths of yarn or ribbon—and imagined myself clearing this room out.

I didn’t know where to begin.