et la Reine, la Sorcière qui allume sa braise dans le pot de terre, ne voudra jamais nous raconter ce qu'elle sait, et que nous ignorons. -Artur Rimbuad, Après le Déluge ¹ *** Well, it was only bound to be worse than what it was already. Everything seemed quiet in the doldrums of that night. Streetsweepers sweeping the dead birds; squirrels laying in the midst; blood and milk flowing through the bottom of the gutters of the street. The whole church burned and retransfigured. The stained glass windows melted. That darkness and ash smoked the edges of the fairies and the saints. Though there was something pretty in that sun that still rose. After the deluge there was only hair, pieces of skin, books, the body. And that was the morning in which Milgrom arose, took his knees to his chin, fetal position rolled into the shower, the bath, well... it was only about time til the math said the fate. All these lines and wires written on the walls. Hebrew letters behind the wallpaper. Something sweet or sidden and sewn under the skin. Milgrom's eyes popped out of his body like a corpse. There was something swollen in them like the testicles of a neutered dog, five days out from surgery, walking on the East River, with his owner, a man from New Zealand. That man seemed to float through the water and the grass... seemed to dig holes down beneath the city where the truth of the city sleeps. Society, Milgrom thought, was nothing like the bolgrom of the belly. Nothing like this thin, severed skin that separates the bladder from the body. The urine pouring into each orifice, bleeding out the legs, the feet, the nose, the eyes, the ankles, the tendons turned yellow, the bowels erupted, the vesuvius of shit in the belly, in the mind, in the neck. It was only soon after the sun rose. The water lifted off the ground. Rain returned to the river by means of clouds. By means of condensation on the skin, on the windows, on the jackets. In the churches a fire burned. People returned to mass. Horsemen rode gallantly down the streets in the midst of cars. There was a whole road, out into that sunset of that night, unbeknown to what awaited, in which each light was green, then turned yellow, then turned purple, then turned blue, then torren gold, and then: as the milk began to arise again from the gutters, it was indistinguishable, the red color of the light, and the red color of the b flowing, bleeding, waves and slapping against the walls of the city streets: the blood.