Julith Jedamus
The Girl with No Hands
Fire, the Adamant
Flour for Snow
Myles Zavelo
WINTER HEAT
Yuxin Zhao
towards a science of haunting
T.C. Hell
Ritual poses
Finally, a breakthrough. Holy numbers presenting themselves in auspicious sequence, revealing a path towards something that feels like it might be something meaningful.
Began with astrological wisdom eavesdropped in Jollibee’s. Placed in the gobs of two Australian lesbians, spat into buckets of Chickenjoy Spaghetti Fiesta. I’d followed the pair all night. Think they found me funny at first, got a kick noshing off in front of me. After a few bummed cigs I willed myself invisible and by half-eleven they forgot I was there.
Fuggin Kali Yuga tomorrow, slurs the chubby femme, sauce dripping on her elephant-pattern harem pants, boat party fuggsesh crazy mental gonna get mashed vibes.
Lord Rama, I’m thinking, can it be? 5,125 solar years since Krishna died footrotten? Make that 14 divine years, doing the maths. 1,186 to go. How time flies.
5+1+2+5=13. 13 black suns of Mahabharata, dung balls rolling towards oblivion. 13 being J. Iscariot’s front-row seat. 13 chairs in this Jollibee dining room. Baker’s dozen of plastic units, sweating in midnight heat. Yellow. Fading logos of Lipton and Monster Energy. Arranged in threes around kidney-shaped tables with metal tripod legs. One chair apart from the rest, ribboned with hazard tape. Looks fine but must be broken in some unseeable way. By this point they’ve left, the lesbians. Probably back to O’Hara’s, maybe on to Purple Haze for karaoke. I’ll see them down the strip tomorrow, or never.
13+14=27. 27 nakshatras, obscure lunar mansions swimming through my upturned eyes, viscid and yellow like peach-mango pie. I’m minding my own business, drinking deep from the night’s swirling road dust, when with violent honking a bike skitters past, catching my heel. Foreign shouts and further honks zoom into the dark as my left slider hops, skips, jumps into one of the open drains flanking the street. It becomes a soft splash, lost to brown darkness.
1+1+8+6=16. 16 arms of triple-head Pussa, finger-rings fat with nagamani snake stones, six all-hearing ears drooping to her sloped bronze shoulders. White fluoro-bulbs are whistling like wasp angels. Someone’s singing Watch it bring it to your n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-knees, knees, muah-ah, I wanna watch you bleed like really, really well. Meanwhile here’s a whitewashed shack of phone cases and watch straps and me saying shoe please, need shoe please now, please now shoe I need. Doesn’t budge from his phone the little fucker. Looks like he’s about ten. Put my grimed foot on the counter. Point at it. Wiggle my toes. He lights a cigarette. Maybe I am invisible.
16x5=80. 80 goddess fingers dancing. Number of penury, disease, and hunger. 80 shrunken heads on Shiva’s mortuary garland, white against ashen blue skin and bloody drip drip dripping tongue. Limping towards the gathering chants of n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n knees knees, more drone than howl with each recitation, as if civilised by the echo. A drumbeat comes roiling down the track, pushing through heavy smells of camphor, jasmine and diesel. Beneath the sounds and smells, behind wonkily-arrayed Flemish balconies, bikes and tuk-tuks are revving in place, their ochre smog runneling into the vaults of heaven.
Eight ‘n’s into nine, 10, 11, infinity, blooming into a vedic incantation. Axl tantra. The alley hums with it, resonant in reinforced earthquake concrete. Path opens, splits, like Kali’s yoni, onto some kind of square or courtyard, at the centre of which rises an enormous heap. A giant mound. More than a mound. A magic mountain of humming garbage, all sweat soiled sarees, rotten guava, bike tyres, cig butts, and blister packs. This great, stinking Golgotha, this Govardhan Hill, and all around circled mandala-style by bristling vehicles, panting, and growling like a pack of shiny bald dogs.
From the mountaintop you can see everything. Flat roofs bunched hodgepodge. Men on scaffolds, lit by sparking metal and head torches burning like cyclopic eyes. In the day, I’d be seeing the great twisting river and the great white mountain range beyond, the greatest sunset in the world, but at night the light diffuses into a vague rusty fuzz. The city’s ragged edge.
There’s a crowd now. Chanting around the mountain’s base. My feet are wobbly, the trash below shifting as I turn to look. My head feels like it’s full of peach-mango pie. Mosquitos light as falling leaves bite my face and neck. I think I see the boy from the phone shack, cig bouncing beneath a downy tween moustache. There’s a sudden sharp smell of ganja. I look up. I walk towards it, tottering a bit on the rubbish, following my nose. I feel old fruit squeezing through my toes. Smell intensifying, the darkness unrobes to reveal an incoherent silhouette, impossibly top-heavy. I walk closer. A burning censer lurches into view. Swaying saffron fire sends shadows swinging across the form, and I can see that it is, as I thought but couldn’t fathom, an enormous cow. White as a Malibu bottle with hairy black warts and wet eyes. Massive lolling head and twisty ribbed horns too heavy for its neck, crooked floor-wards. Below its chin a swinging mess of wattle, around which someone’s tried to sling a garland of star jasmine. There’s too much mass to contain, so blubber bunches around the sides. Below still is the strangest thing of all - the creature stands on one leg. More like wobbles. A spindly, knock-kneed, flamingo-style leg, a single strut shivering beneath a rib cage that bulges like bilge hoops or mangrove roots.
Dharma, says the lad with the censer, stepping out from behind the bovine. He’s got a chillum of hash dangling off his lip and an old-fashioned umbrella under his arm. Bullock of the Kali Yuga, he says, swinging the censer towards me. His accent is pure Queen's English, old Etonian, Royal Doulton. He’s draped in orange monkish robes and his bearded, haggard face has been whitened with some sort of ash.
On my knees beneath the beast. Jeans soaked with muck. Fella has his hand on my shoulder. Drink, he says, The milk of dharma. Lassi smell. I look up. Muscular brown toes poke out a fake Adidas slider.
Back in the hostel now. Mouth tastes like peach-mango pie. Enrobing 32 teeth. 32 paths to Elohim. 32 forms of Ganesha. 32 Buddhas. 32 stations of puja. 32 lotus petals. Hills in Jerusalem. Pandavas in the woods. Infancy gospels. Draupadi sex positions. Cloud types. Planets. Mantras. Dog breeds. Organs. Yugas. Days. Nights. Hot dinners.Colton Karpman (Founding Editor)
Editor’s Note
Dilara Koz (Art Director)
Em Bauer (Illustrator)
Isaac Zamet (Poetry Editor)
William McGuire (Prose Editor)