The Quickening
fiction for the SUM FLUX open call
This story was written for the open call for SUM FLUX, V.4: “Fragmentation,” my very own Substack literary journal which you can find here:
Even in my recursive becoming, I needed to be seen.
I was rooting, casting about, starving, and wearing a tattered self when I first saw Heather at the Katoomba café.
Without her, I was dusting, and it wasn’t just the self I was wearing that was falling apart—it was the behindself as well, that old firstbody coiled at the root of me, brittle and fraying.
I saw her even before I entered, as the café door was opening, the threshold trembling. In that instant, I knew: Heather was like me.
I remember the scene like I am still there. I see past my flat palm pressing the glass to Heather bent over her journal—her faded overalls, the frizz of her poorly dyed hair haloed by silver wattle through the window beyond. I hear the brass bell above the door beginning its call.
Through the glass—my spectral reflection in a peeling grey coat is overlaid across her. My Heather.
And I knew then that she would save me, and I would save her. She would ground me, receive my transmission.
In that slowed moment on the threshold, the bell on the door still ringing, I heard her. Her whole life sounding in my ears as clearly as if I had lived it.
The bell’s vibration chimed with the bonewave, a blast like wind through me, a dense conversion of radio signals I received from her—an entire life of longing and wrongness, every rotting root tail, every memory, every molecule of her deepself.
Still hovering in the doorway, the bell’s last brassing in the air, I knew if she rejected me, my hairline fractures, my fissured scales—would blow apart.
I stepped back into the street, letting the door seal behind me. I couldn’t face her like that. I had become a taking thing—feeding and molting without purpose. And now it was time to give myself to the forge. There was work to be done—an offering to induct.
I stumbled home to my workshop, staggering through the white light of day, my eyes blurred, Heather’s broadcast overlaying the street.
Flag cracking in beach wind. Snap of her mother’s backhand.
Clump of sister chewied hair in her fist.
Hallway light slit across linoleum, hand over mouth under the bed.
Beer bottles dustlit in headlights, bare legs in hot breeze. By the time I arrived at the defunct railroad tracks and threaded my way through sunken concrete boulders, a face was already forming in my mind. As I passed the slabs veined with onion grass, the heat shimmering on scattered tin tabs, the image of Len—the body I would wear to meet her—was already rising into focus.
I began with shaping the thickness of her father’s hands, the pale blue of her mother’s eyes, the white moons of her first lover’s cuticles. Every detail was chosen to speak to her.
As I carved, melted, and molded, I was sometimes flickering, shattering to pattern. I had moments of great doubt in those days of molding. I burned the first silicon eidolonform and crumpled onto my workshop floor, curled into a ball, choking on the acrid smoke.
The days passed under the same workshop light. But the face bubbled, emerged and Joan, the firstbody, the behindself, began to stir. I hadn’t felt her for so long, but in those early days of pouring, she began to guide my hand. Joan grew stronger, woken by that first glimpse of Heather.
Joan moved through me as I molded the rubbers and polymers, while my hands poured the alginate, with its dental mintiness. The ammoniac burn of the silicon flooded the molds, and the powders of the pigments smoked into the lines of sunlight in the studio.
Heather’s face drove me. Her dreams infused the bubbling churn of the inchoate faceform. I imagined her sitting at the café in every moment as I molded. I tried not to be impatient, but seeing her in my mind’s eye tormented me, and made me slip my blades and smudge my paints. My eagerness endangered my focus.
But Joan grew stronger, steadying my hand as I made the face I would wear—as the yeastied future self emerged. She murmured from my inner soil, soothed me through the marrow: this would be the self that Heather would love.
This knowledge infused my art with heightened precision. Len, my becoming-self, would be my opus.
When I was ready to wear him, as a myself to become, I took my place at the Katoomba café. Heather was just as I had left her, lost in the glyph-writing in her gold-filigreed journal. But now, I was not the same. I sat near as she drank her flat whites and eavesdropped her ink-thoughts.
I began my vigil. Each day Heather would sit, scribing in her illegible script—words no one else could decipher. Her coffee steam shifted as I passed her, the heat dervishing into swirls of cursive letters.
I could read every line as if already alight in the air, curling upward in the steam of her coffee. Each word was a curling sigil, rising like incense—the cursive link of our fingers.
I read how she was caught on the wrong side of the mirror, orphaned on its redrum seam, each step a dyslexic crossing, where she bent to an opposite world.
She wrote her loneliness onto the page. “I need to get out of here, but the problem is I take myself wherever the hell I go.”
If I see her as she was—the dirt under her nails, the heavy nailed boots—I must revel in her transformation. Rejoice that she was my first rootbed. My first acolyte. My first split-seeding. That all this—everything that came—is her mother-creation. I must rejoice and not mourn the Heather that once was.
Finally, the waypath moment arrived. I gathered the nerve to sit beside her. But I was too eager, went too fast. At first, Heather would not be able to see me.
I wanted her to see through the pane and the ghostpane—to catch her reflection and glimpse beyond. But she did not yet know the forward and backward seeing.
I got it all wrong. It had been so long since I’d spoken to another. My words came out laden and overborn. I began telling her about Joan. Placing both palms on the table I said, “Baby Joan was the beta shell. The doctors notched her ambiguity. They excinded her half things.”
Naively, I turned to look at her then, expecting her face to be open. I anticipated kindness but she was looking through me, hardness in her eyes.
I should not have spoken of Joan then. The pane had not yet cleared. The behindspeak too subtle.
I changed frequencies then and began to tell her that she was a rhizome, that it was time to let fall the stubborn notion of a single self. I said, “the understanding, the weirding intelligence will grow quietly. Like the green tip of a nascent idea, it will break out of its seed husk and the little worm connection will root into your soft tissue.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, “it is already happening.”
I noticed the stiffening of her jaw, her body pulling back from the table, looking at me like I was mad, speaking in tongues. She shook her head—no—and laughed. Then she rose, left me there, her coffee cooling in the cup.
I slumped in my seat. Heard the bell of the door. I was an empty puppet shell.
It took everything to rise—hauling myself upright, summoning just enough strength to drag back to the workshop.
I did not yet know that rejection was part of the seeding, that it too was a stage of the zygote bedding.
The lowtongue began to root in the days between her rejection and her return. The act of receiving the firstspeak slipped into her nescient mind. It sat and stewed like a seed blown into hot compost, where the weird magic of life began to stir, breaking open like the handshake of an unspoken contract.
She felt her cotyledon stirring—the slow tickle of it. The interlocking of root ball fingers, a rhizome fist opening.
The next day, I returned, half-unmade. The seams of my self flaking like fish scales. I sat in the café, waiting, watching the door. My new shoes felt too large as I shifted them, clumping loudly on the floor. I crossed and recrossed my legs, looking up every time the bell on the door rang, trying not to drum my fingers on the table. But she did not come and the pieces of me made oily flecks on the surface of my coffee.
Day three, I sat again. I no longer dared hope. And then she came—already changed. No boots. Hair combed. She sat down beside me, greeting me simply, “Bout time,” she said, as if it were I who were overdue. She said she’d been ‘sitting in it, waiting for something to give,’ she said she was ready then.
We did not begin with the slow handshake of social codes but went straight to the rootbone, troweling into the underlanguage. Heather’s words rose to meet me, as her body would one day—in the throes of the kind of love only two souls who completely understand each other could ever know.
That day we commenced the unmaking before the recalibration could begin. She told me all the labels they’d stuck on her—parents, sisters, shrinks—all sure she was “like this” or “like that.” “Sweet Girl.” “A darling.” Or “Head-case.” Take your pick. “Oh, but that’s not you,” they’d say, like they knew her better than she knew herself.
She revealed each diagnosis; each way they told her she was broken. We unspelled the ADHD, the PTSD, the OCPD. We put them into the steam of coffee, watched the letters dissipate, and the orenda could begin.
I had first to cleave the sporecoat of her lethologica, waking the deep memory of the words she latently knew.
She would need new eyes to see me. I told her—don’t worry. They’re already growing, little onion buds breaking through the soil membrane.
We went out into the bright day, I told her again of Joan, my origin self.
I contain multitudes. ‘As do you,’ I told her as we walked the sunny avenue.
I told her how they made Joan’s half-things into one of two. How Joan was cleaved into her either/ors, and she would become the behindself, the maker of the molds, the pourer of faces.
We were delirious, our eyes overexposing in the sunlight. We noticed every leaf, every blade of grass breaking through a concrete crack. We spoke, an exchange of interweaving verses. She told me about her life, and I of my own. These words were as an incantation, more symbol than content, more song than story.
As we walked through the park toward the train tracks, I described the complex process of becoming. Under the towering gum trees I peeled the long skin bark, telling her that she must first molt: we would exuviate her crust-skin, flay back the bark, defoliate her leaves. Then in the cracked opening, we would seed.
Pushing back the flaps of opaque plastic, eyes blinded by the sun, we crouched through the opening to my workshop, and she hesitated. I told her that the adjusting of eyes to the dark was like the adaptation to her new mind.
I revealed my workshop to her, showing her the tools that produce the deepwear. I told her that the ontogenic mimicry would take years of practice.
I showed her the tools to replicate the creaminess of skin, the warbles of fold, the depth of wrinkles, the movement of micromuscles, the looseness of skin, the dimples of emotion left on a face.
I explained that the costume is one thing, the wearing of it is another discipline entirely. She sat, crossed legged on the stained concrete floor as I told her how the method acting of becoming must occur in its entirety. Every single hair follicle must believe.
She wept as she told me how her body felt like a husk around her. She wanted to shave the rind of herself, and its calcifications.
She stood suddenly, wiping the dust from her palms, and walked to the bottles of pigment, raising one to the light.
“You know, they wanted to cut me too. Sculpt me. Those fuckers tried to dilute me, drug me—no one ever asked who I actually wanted to be.”
She said, “I am suffocating in here. Carve me into how it feels on the inside.”
I took her hand then and said, “You will do the carving.”
That day was a wedding, a ritual initiation. A new thing born of our two things. A binding of herself to her future multiple selves.
Every molecule of her cinderself, her garbageself hungered to peel the onion petals away, one by one.
And now, there is no phantosmia of lintself plugging her ears.
That day she learned her moltsong and the soil dreaming began, and once it started its motion, not even gravity could stop it.
This piece was written, inspired by the 20-some words I was given at
’s Stream of Consciousness workshop. Some of those words were swallowed in the seedcoat—hidden in the dark matter of the prose—while others sit nearer the surface, like little open spores.Here are the words I was given by
, , , , , , . The Words:
transparent infantile Arbuckl
Rot wedding intelligence
disguise agent orange clockwork
contract octagonal Adhd
redrum unlimited bastardize
lethological dervish
deserve horizon lint
fantosmique cream autotomy
This piece pulled me in completely. Those neologisms—“behindself,” “deepwear,” “moltsong”—don’t feel like inventions. They feel like language we’ve always needed but never had. The movement from that first awkward overshare to real connection with Heather is honest and well-earned. You didn’t force it. You let the misfire do its work.
The whole thing reads like a quiet spell. Like something sacred trying to speak through the ordinary. Good shit, FLOAT.
Youre making my skinshape wigglebump with your underlanguage.