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.

Teeth reflected in the oil caught by a wheel.

Colleen pauses on her way back from the bodega, hands weighed down with food she did not pay for and will not eat. “You want something?” She has been too long alone for politeness.

It comes out of the slick, hair lank and plastered to its body, a gangling thing like an underfed sasquatch, the eight simple black eyes of a spider mostly pointed in her direction. “Just seeing how you were doing. Been a while, kid.” Its voice is low and pleasantly fluting.

She shrugs. “Same as it ever was. War and rumors of war. Children starving, mass graves, cherry blossoms, a solar eclipse, earthquakes in the city, blizzards on the plains, rising sea levels, humidity at 78%, dewpoint at 50 degrees, fingernails, ginger ale, hand lotion, selenium sulfide—” She goes on for some time, mechanically, slightly bored, regurgitating everything she’s taken in or noticed or heard, unsorted, pure. Words strung together in imitation of human speech, but senseless.

It bends towards her, brushes her cheek with fur rank and rotting, breathes a single enochian syllable in her ear. Colleen collapses, claws at the ground, body bent backward with tetanic pleasure.

So; it is enough.

Colleen is sick with wanting, and her whole body quakes with the force of it, her soul quails as the old bruises resurface. She has been many things of late: compulsive, self-harming, manic, invincible, but never yearning. Even as her traitor hands forced soap and hair and rusty nails down her adamantine gullet, even as she fought to stop until her muscles tore, that was a desire born of surfeit, not of lack.

This is not the old hunger, but she dreams of it, nonetheless.

Dreams of starving, of pacing endlessly through the night, too hungry to sleep, of the white hair that sprouted on her arms and the back of her hands, of staring furiously at pictures of food, of eating out of garbage cans, of stealing food from empty sidewalk tables, of lukewarm, half-eaten food, rotten food, scraping mold off with her fingernails, rancid butter, sour oil, the corpselike bloom of raw pizza dough warmed by the sunbaked steel side of a dumpster, of need.

These days are not those, but her body remembers. Her body, still mortal, does not forget.

A story without beginning or end:

One by one they trickle in, teachers, clerks, cashiers, waiters, lawyers, doctors, taxi drivers, writers, singers, ex-soldiers, programmers, house cleaners, postal workers, grocery store workers, dishwashers, street sweepers, you name it. Gamblers, dressmakers, dockworkers, bakers, Quakers, etc etc. Listmaker Colleen counts them, loses track, shrugs, starts again. The counting is compulsory, but caring isn’t, and she’s finally learned that trick, thank the devil.

She moves through the crowd, chanting along, reading signs, studying faces, counting candles. The plaza is ringed with makeshift fencing and cops in riot gear, faces blank and complacent behind mirrored shields. She memorizes badge numbers for later; a plague on all police, one of the few philosophical tenets that bridges the before and after of her life.

She snags the first thrown brick out of the air and snaps it in half with her hands, grinds it to powder with her teeth. No one see her fill her throat and stomach with brick dust and malice, nor when she breathes it out again, but the crowd twitches, newly angry, and snarls toward the suddenly sober jackass that threw it.

The dusty smell of pavement hit by rain.

What she learns, Colleen, later on, is that swallowing is the easier part. By then her throat, her jaws, her muscular stomach have grown hard and used to the unsteady traffic of billiard balls, live frogs, hat pins, human hair, soap bars, steel wool, razor blades. Going down is—not easy, never easy, nothing is easy anymore—but a practiced sequence of contractions. She is tough as nails, and her teeth are sharp and honed on tin cans.

It’s the return that gets her, still. Down, she’s working with gravity, at least, and there’s a pleasant tidiness to a table cleaned down to the boards. Up, though; she burns with the strain, aches to split herself open directly instead of passing a week’s worth of assorted garbage through the unready flex of her mouth.

She locks her teeth against the inevitable, but the six ball won’t be denied. Colleen jackknifes and deposits a whole pool set on the bedspread.