#9 Foundations

"The island we are entering is a negative island: it’s not a peak but a cavity, a round hole in the world, a sewer. A clogged, dirty sewer; the place where all the unwanted remnants from the city gather together. I’m talking wild weeds and broken pipes, teenagers numbing their brains with laughing gas, poets, blue herons, misfit fishermen, bonfires and scrap scavengers. Scattered debris in Strugatsky’s zone.

And then us. Is it the same guttural gravity that brought us here? We let ourselves be dragged by the retreating tongue, back to the mouth and to the hole. And in the hole we wander forever. We descended wearing thigh-high waders, walking slow to feel safer but you still want to go behind me, looking down, staring at the impressions of my steps with the binoculars: ×10 magnification.

Last time I brought something: a swarf from our world to be melted down, to try to participate in the drainage’s landscape.

But now it’s gone, or I can’t find it, or maybe it really became the island. What else became the island? Is that our fate as well? We promised each other not to leave ourselves behind. We know that in the mud maze the water luxuriates and that it’s risky to get mesmerized by it for too long. One high, one low, and the tide will hook us. Water pockets are filled and emptied a hundred times a day. In which one will we sink? Tangled in my ear, a stringy tendril whispers: it is not your choice to make."

Víctor Santamarina