All of the universe is a union meeting: five minutes into the reading of the proposed amendments and there has already been a motion from the floor, a contention so fierce that the doors have been locked and heads counted, fists raised, temperatures and humidity index alike both spiked sky high.

Sweltering, despite their technology, the air thick and muggy with the smell of the river, the distant sea, a heaving mass of life and breath and dander, shed hair and scales and hides and horns all borne aloft on the slightest breeze to hover threateningly in the uneasy glimmer of the afternoon sun, the bounce light from the LEDs, the soft fill of bioluminescence.

This is not the first time this has happened, nor the last, and yet: every gathering splinters so. What is united must dissolve, what is separate must join together. In the streets they riot, an unruly mob, tails thrash and rhizomes clash, seeking water, seeking soil, a centuries deep humus horizon with the fungal networks carrying messages between. A brick flies through the air, knocking a fascist from his horse; in the hot light of LA Harry Hay flees through the alleys to take shelter with the drag queens.