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1. Good and evil exist in the galaxy—just as various kinds of apes and plants exist on the planet.

2. No poets are found at the bottom of the sea—only photovoltaic creatures and ghostly landscapes.

3. Flesh Gore is a cyborg text, quite possibly the last of its kind.

4. A cyborg text, by definition, is a telepathic entity that induces textual hallucinations.


1. Evil is more prevalent than good in the galaxy—just as there are good apes and evil ones, and medicinal plants and poisonous ones on the planet.

2. Poetry is scarce at the bottom of the sea, and the landscape is bleak, metallic gray, and cold.

3. Flesh Gore is a legendary galactic pirate, the bravest privateer who’s crossed my path.

4. To gain a better understanding of a cyborg text, The Laws of Cosmogonic Fiction and The First-Day Transcendental Narratology are must-reads.


1. Enough good guys exist in the galaxy to deal with evildoers, just as enough plants grow on the planet to feed apes.

2. At the bottom of the sea, poetry sometimes sprouts as an upward blast of lava straight from the core.

3. Flesh Gore, father of the First-Day Transcendental Narratology, has vanished without a trace.

4. The Laws of Cosmogonic Fiction come in three.


a. Fiction is friction.

b. Imagination is round.

c. The cosmos is metafiction.


1. The good guys have lost in the galaxy, but the evildoers haven’t won, just as apes on the planet have discovered fire.

2. At the bottom of the sea, poetry appears and disappears, and some giant clams traverse infinite space in infinite time as if they were responsible for the devastation around them.

3. Flesh Gore, leader of the textual resistance, commandeers the Ecumenical Anti-System Army.

4. It all started when a meteor crossed the atmosphere, destroying our telecommunications systems.


a. Friction is the natural resistance of a body against the doubling of textual dimensions.

b. Imagination has no end. It stems from ecumenical intuition processed by a random system of language sequences.

c. The cosmos is the last frontier, the possibility of Esperanto.


1. In the galaxy, there are forces going against light—just as on the planet some gods are associated with weather phenomena.

2. At the bottom of the sea, poetry occasionally reveals itself as a vibration from the surface that runs through the baroque landscape with its phantom whip.

3. Flesh Gore, also known as Roldán-Epicurus, invented the textual-world machine.

4. We landed with difficulties. At first glance, the place seemed uninhabited.


The textual-world machine converts an entity’s imagination into an editable telepathic emulsion, either in small formats (printed media) or in potent energy capsules.


1. More the Merciless, crux destroyer, telepathic mule, rules the galaxy, just as the palindromes reign over the reversible numbers on the planet.

2. At the bottom of the sea, poetry has sightless eyes that convert light into abstract language codes.

3. Flesh Gore, an iconic sci-fi entity, has argued that Morel’s invention is merely an allegory of the transhistorical struggle of certain fictional forces for control and dominance of the sense of reality as a textual exception, not an exegesis of textual processes within a broad field of cosmogonic hermeneutics.

4. The adaptation of a work through non-textual techniques entails the creation of reminiscent perspective models that condense the flow of the alienated fictional field.


a. According to reception theory, it’s possible to transcend fiction by transposing the horizon as a possible reality and reality as a non-method-confined textual space.

b. Imagination runs away with the acceleration of light.

c. The cosmos is a moment of revelation and understanding of complex textual processes.


1. As an exegetical textual dimension, the galaxy isn’t a utopia but an anagoge, as the history of the planet resembles an epic poem rather than a cartoon series.

2. At the bottom of the sea, poetry explores the possibility of a universal phonetic language, from the genealogy of metafiction that transcends the text, the author, and potential readers.

3. The Ecumenical Anti-System Army relaunches the text and establishes the materialization of fiction in a space deformed by the struggle of antagonistic fictional forces.

4. Fiction is, by itself, the realization of the textual future, as established in the First-Day Transcendental Narratology.


a. Fiction is metafiction, and metafiction is the revelation of a transcendent, ergodic text.

b. The possibility of an imaginative engagement not contained in the moment depends on the textual capacities of a rhizomatic entity that involves life and death, and desire as action.

c. The cosmos is fiction contained within simulacra.


1. In the galaxy, the good guys and the evildoers are distorted by the text, just as on the planet the apes have transformed into clerks in the service of supposed transcendental equality, and the plants into supplementary aesthetic ornaments of domesticated life outside of fiction.

2. At the bottom of the sea, poetry is translated as the narrative possibility of eternal life in the gloom or outside of the light.

3. Flesh Gore revealed himself before More one day after composing an epic poem about the first night of the world in which text and life are transposed, eclogue against the fear of the conscience contained in the moment, Atari to be born from reeds, the fundamental textual discovery before the act of dreaming lambs in the old Lautréamont or Fogwill style.

4. The ability to keep telling stories is hampered by the intensity of the author’s moment or the proximity to life as a demonstration of fiction in the possibility of textual reality.


a. The epic poem about the first night Flesh Gore wrote, the day he revealed himself before More the Merciless, quid ad astra, forbidden word, is also the key to understanding the First-Day Transcendental Narratology conspiracy and the textual saturation of the field flow of language absorbed in the transparency of speech.


a. The text conquers the light and imposes itself as an intermittent unlimited form.

b. The First-Day Transcendental Narratology is a dimension of the metatext. A sparkly, unusual entity, Flesh Gore flying everywhere, beyond the light, in the theatrical epic of the final revelation attempt, the chronic apocalypse that returns indispensable to the imagination as a vanishing point toward blank space, salvation when crossing the street or gazing at the clear sky, the smell of closeness and a lucky coin that burns bright in a forest.


c. The text arises from a blank space, unlike the cosmos that exists in a dimension of gloom and ebb, but both, the text and the cosmos, expand or retract according to the displacements of fiction by a shack on the border. Nothing is left at the end, only the imaginary dimension of what could have been.

c. The text and the cosmos are equal and complementary in the hero’s potential imagination.

c. The cosmos is an unlimited space of imagination.

c. The text exists as a vocation of omens.


Flesh Gore skips the line, stares into the sun, or beyond. With his eyes on the text, he gets into the corners of reality and moves through the place burning endlessly. There’s no way other than the revolver pressed against the temple. Fiction is just a mole next to the mouth. Life is almost a video game. The author of the text vanished from the first line. He went with wild horses through the meadow toward the sea or the cliffs, as in Jorge Pimentel’s poem, not as true as spring and love among friends, and life together, behind the sun, hidden on a planet of apes that barely go around thinking that they exist crammed into a gap of signs and abstract forms, a final equation that surpasses the sense of reality as fiction within fiction, accelerated way of finding ourselves. Flesh Gore is about to be born, or has never existed, anyone else hasn’t either, and no one is necessary. They surrender to the constant stream of cheap entertainment, life as an inconsequential logical sequence, personalized (yes), but undetermined and only apparent, fantasy of the rain to come, all dry and sprawled, the matter becomes sad as it should be. Just the melancholy of a false sketch latitude and very close to the vortex, all there, Flesh Gore and the armies of tradition and the devil with his tail between his legs and More, at the end …


But where do they all fit? If you can leave it behind, start with another luck, another light, another saint. If there’s something left to say, make it cheesy and easy, or whatever, but it’s just a saying …


Discrepancies on the Nature of Rabbits

1. If a story goes beyond reality or if it only reflects the alienated nature of rabbits.


1. A text isn’t democracy or militancy, except when it’s textual militancy.

2. In spite of everything, a text never stops being a serious matter.

3. Because it’s a fictional entity, it’s a round, ecumenical organism, like a bus trip that begins and ends in such a place, starts with a fixed course, and belongs, for an instant, to certain almost clinical paved places.

4. We go from a lit area to an intermittent space, which then turns gloomy.

5. In the end, everything clears up as if by magic.

6. The text and the world are a single distance that sometimes smells of greengrocers or hot bread; to pests or proximity; to sewer or to everything together.

7. I don’t usually take the bus. I prefer to walk, lose myself among the multitudes, and somehow get home, at dusk or the next morning.

8. A text is the same: we don’t know how, but we always reach our destination.

9. I like texts that look deserted but open the door and invite us in.

10. And they even offer to tuck us in, as if we had known each other all our lives.

11. As if in the end we were safe.

12. But make no mistake—a text is as dangerous and savage as any revolution on the other side of the world.

13. A thought revolution?

14. An attempt to believe in something, as if a sufficient light were passing through you.

15. A textual revolution? The possibility of a reality revolution based on fiction? A different reality as hypertext?

16. Nothing changes by blinking or clicking your tongue, but everything has changed.

17. He approaches from behind and asks you for time, and when you’re about to tell him, he spreads a light that goes through you like a precipice or a world to be born behind your gaze.

18. The matter comes down to the origin of rabbits.

19. No one in the room has ever seen a rabbit.

20. Everyone knows rabbits exist, but they imagine them as long-eared squirrels or as carrot-eating rats or as fat men in rabbit suits.

21. They’re all wrong.

22. As far as it’s possible, rabbits exist only in the imagination.

23. That is, they’re what they are, but they’re no more than they are.

24. They survive or are alienated by the charm their mystery produces.

25. Some contemplate the possibility of starting a new theory about the cyborg condition of these textual animals.

26. Rabbits would be defined as textual cyborgs within the hypertext theory.

27. They would be considered shock attempts, possibilities, or null expectations.

28. But most agree rabbits are texts from a bygone era, which aren’t worth remembering.

29. If you have nothing to add, you disappear and appear in another place, or in the same place but being another, and you cross the path with yourself, or with someone very similar with a head full of the same discrepancies about the origin of the rabbits …

Those who find you in the middle of nowhere, remember you from somewhere, squint and state very clearly that yes, of course, and they pat you on the shoulder, they hug you, as if they had known you all their lives. They say they’ve always read you, you’re highly recommended, and how many honors you deserve. They already say it, if it were up to them, the happy world, the room ready.

If it were the other way around, if I found myself as if I knew myself from somewhere else, and I hardly recognized myself, or thought, as a glimpse, that I never became who we are, I’d let him pass, each one with his warmth, without making a peep or letting waters go, feeling no distress, and not a minimum impudence would put us to lead.


1. If life were to write me, on some occasion, due to laziness or vertigo, I’d retrace my steps and read everything that’s worth reading from beginning to end, and I’d only imagine for a moment everything that I could have written.

2. If I found myself in the middle of nowhere, without remembering who I am, perhaps thinking I’m someone else, and I celebrated how well I write and all the accolades I deserve, I’d retrace my steps and say nothing to myself, I’d go past a hint of a smile at most, each one with his warm stroke and his portion of bread, myself with my uncertainty, aware of my own tale by osmosis, the exception of a life that seems fiction but that bends on its even part towards the bottom, burned skin that doesn’t find the light, concave slab that glows by immersion …

3. If my life were to read, by chance or laziness I’d begin to write, from beginning to end, or by lightning …

4. The light, immersed in salt, round and grave, emerges from the other side like a sun. The crown of shadows, behind the sun, we see as an alienated aura, and in its totality with the abstract as a deep animal eye that at a slight trot saves itself from falling off a cliff toward the sea.


1. There’s no galaxy but good and evil fighting to impose their version of reality on a planet that’s nothing more than a wasteland of apes ecstatic with the light that emerges from the other side of the mountains.

2. At the bottom of the sea, there are no poets because this is a desolate, dangerous country.

3. Neither Roberto Bolaño nor Mario Levrero is here to change things. Everything will happen as planned.

4. It’s terrible to assume that the text density is cryptic, but it’s more terrible to reach the end and not discover anything. Feeling cheated.


1. There’s no galaxy but liquor and knives on the brink of extinction.

2. At the bottom of the sea, there are no poets because this country belongs to some giant clams and the inert laws of magnetism.

3. Not even Clarice Lispector would say otherwise. We’ll simply hold hands and wait for the end to come quickly and painlessly.

4. Devote yourself to writing and don’t waver. Suddenly you could shine almost like a planet adrift.


a. A text is a revelation, but not every revelation is an omen.

b. An omen is sometimes a space filled with revelation, a text that acquires reality for an instant.

c. The world floats like a pendulum between revelation and omen. By itself it has no reality. It’s fiction that shapes and contains it, drop after drop, in a sea of possibilities, in a galaxy that is as a preamble.


1. No galaxy or heroes exist, just as no apes, no water, or no life expectancy exists on the planet.

2. At the bottom of the sea, you find only water mice and cockroaches accustomed to the sulfurous heat the nucleus exudes.

3. Not even César Aira could say we were wrong, that we won’t die suddenly if not for lack of food and drinking water in the long run.

4. Some desperate, adventurous poets will try to find the solution in ancient texts to this problem that is not only cryptic but useless, merely aesthetic.


a. A text within a text within a text turns out to be a pearl scooped out of the sea, and we look at it as if reality were inertia returning to the unknown depths from the embedded point of light.


b. A pearl that is everything but never a pearl and never an aleph.

b. A pearl that is a pearl, but that isn’t a pearl—a vanishing point, perhaps.


c. A dark, hollow space that stares back at us as if it were a cockroach.

c. A dark, hollow space that stares at us and that we’d like to crush to return from the dream where we find ourselves.

c. A dark, hollow space that translates into a deeper space of reality.


d. We’re embedded in a text by inertia, in a little rat-killing story where we can hardly move and breathe.


e. The moment doesn’t depend on us.


[The Fictional Origin of Rabbits]

1. There’s no galaxy but random accounts of time and distance only some scientists could claim to understand, as there are different kinds of apes and plants in the world.

2. At the bottom of the sea, there’s no poetry, only subdued archipelagos that crack with macabre voices like in old cartoons.

3. At this dark hour, not even Rimbaud could tell us otherwise. Yes, he would undoubtedly curse his luck, again.

4. Do you remember Flesh Gore? He was killed by a laser beam that came out of nowhere.


a. The night we buried him in the desert of the lawless planet beyond the light.

b. The night we buried him, phytoliths rained, along with small inert phosphorescences and jellyfish of condensed energy that stung our skin on contact.

c. And the knives on this table have hurt my entire palate.


1. I’d start with César Vallejo’s verse, as in the last frontier of the text, but I must continue—there’s no galaxy but verses compressed into residual memory capsules.

2. Where does the story start and where does the novel leave?

3. Is it possible to write a story of the story that turns into a rat with long, rabbit-like ears?

4. Could a rat turn into a rabbit if we put long ears on its head?


a. A rat is a ball of hair that fits in your palm and could live forever if fed enough cheese.


b. On the other hand, a rabbit can be anything that struggles to escape violently from our textual trap.


c. Both rabbits and mice live in burrows, fictional spaces under our feet that lead everywhere, even beyond the stars.


c. Both rabbits and mice feed on the waste of imagination. The latter prefer cheese, especially holed cheese.


c. In cartoons, rabbits only eat carrots.


DARK STAR

DARK STAR

DARK STAR

1. In the galaxy, good guys defend themselves with laser swords and evildoers attack with death squads, just as on the planet apes build catapults, forge helmets, and hide in caves when everything is in ruins.

2. At the bottom of the sea, poetry is lumpen. It starts from stones and accelerates like a cyclone against the species on the surface.

3. “You will never find the way out of this labyrinth. Surrender to the light. Conceive the fiction in which you have inscribed,” says The First-Day Transcendental Narratology.

4. In the long run, nothing happens except in the imagination. Nothing exists outside of fiction.


a. Fiction is faction.

b. Imagination is this.

c. The cosmos is before and behind—and outside.


1. In the galaxy, there’s ecstasy and kitsch, just as there are ritual festivals and funerals on the planet.

2. At the bottom of the sea, life transcends poetry because it arises from the most hostile places and there it remains inert, waiting for the inconceivable fiction.

3. Neither will Fogwill say otherwise. If he said it, it was with rancor, beginning to swim among the dispersion of worlds like the ghost of a whale.

4. The textual capacity of imagination is the space that opens when the serpent is gouged.


a. Every faction is evidence of reality as an instant within fiction.

b. The moment is the instant when the text intersects with the attempt of another text in the imagination.

c. We’re a portion within a larger portion, but we’re here and we're not, fiction that is quick to disappear.


1. In the galaxy, everyone betrays each other, as no one will survive the future on the planet.

2. At the bottom of the sea, poetry is the alienation of cliffs and slopes when you find the small thistles zigzagging through the shadowed space in search of food.

3. Flesh Gore, a feat of storytelling, survivor of the text, maximum score, lost song of Nezahualcóyotl.

4. A text is what it is, and it’s what it isn’t, in a linear and round sense, an attempt at reality glued to fiction, a hypertext, fiction that functions as a potential mechanism of textual reality, the ability to narrate something incredible as if it were true or possible. But no, a text is just a text, a medium for the incredible, a light that condenses in the instant.


1. In the galaxy, the good guys are very good, and the evildoers are very dreadful, as believers and heretics reside on the planet.

2. At the bottom of the sea, poetry is a tunnel that connects this world to the hereafter.

3. When the monsters arrived and easily imposed themselves with their technology, the world became a scheme of good and evil in the shadow of a hidden power that translated fiction into reality through a supposed transcendental equation.

4. We don’t know if it’s before fiction or reality, but both belong to the realm of the possible as a textual instant within the metafiction of the Ecumenical Anti-System Army.


The Ecumenical Anti-System Army Proclaims:

a. Fiction is just a textual dimension, that is, it exists confined within the text.

b. All fiction is the remnant of another fiction, and all fiction is the remnant of a fiction that transcends all fiction.

c. No fiction exists outside of the Fiction that is the Fundamental Ascendant Rhizome.

d. The Fundamental Ascendant Rhizome isn’t fiction. It’s the channel that gives rise to the realization of all fiction as an instant of reality and beyond as textual reality and as an incarnate word.

 

e. No text exists beyond itself.

f. No text confirms the existence of a transcendental text despite its existence.

g. No text depends on more than itself.

h. No text is anything other than a simple text.

 

i. All text is fiction and all fiction is textual reality.

j. All text is textual reality as fiction, as the incarnate word.

k. Every text embodies fiction as textual reality, as it embodies reality for an instant.

 

l. Life is fiction, if you will.

m. Life is reality, if it’s so intended.

n. Life is what it is because it is.

 

o. Fiction doesn’t exist, but fiction does exist.

p. Fiction doesn’t exist, but it exists within fiction.

q. Fiction doesn’t exist, but this is fiction.

 

r. Textual reality is reality for an instant.

s. Textual reality is fiction as potential reality.

t. Textual reality is the incarnate word.

 

u. There’s no more to add.

v. All that has been said before is enough.

w. We’re about to reach the end.

x. What is predicted almost happens.

y. Per aspera ad astra.

z. Nothing happens. Everything stays the same.


1. The galaxy repeats itself in its basic principles, as the planet is reduced to living creatures and infinite spaces to discover.

2. At the bottom of the sea, poetry is a swarm of living lights of abstract language.

3. Life on the surface is just a stain of pulverized bodies on the surface of time about to disappear because of erosion and the impact of a distant light.

4. Another attempt at an equation by César Aira: “Those who complain are always the others, who deep down care about nothing.”


Rabbits Attached to the Story

Better not say anything. Rabbits may be around and get into fiction just when you name them.


What kind of rabbits await us?

Those quick-paced, evil incarnations with long ears and whiskers?

Or those rustic, plush imps that wait underground with sabers and hooks?

At any rate, they’re symbolic figurines of voracious natures and bad taste someone sketched in another time to scare children and the ignorant.


Do rabbits exist or are they just a trace of another fiction?

At any rate, do we exist or are we trapped in a text about rabbits?

Do rabbits exist at the same time as we do?

Does anyone exist?


What world is this where rabbits coexist with us, preachers of the most fundamental good?

Is this the apocalypse?

The lightness of the punishment for failing to fulfill our duty as holy humanity?


1. Good guys and evildoers exist in the galaxy, but that matters to no one.

1. On the planet, apes have learned to farm and have become sedentary.

1. On the planet, villages have emerged across the world.

1. We wait for what will happen to the planet of the apes.


2. At the bottom of the sea, poetry undergoes constant change due to the intrinsic tidal flows and abrupt temperature changes.

2. At the bottom of the sea, a poet’s skeleton once appeared and soon turned into calcium residues and atypical phosphorescent nuclei.

2. At the bottom of the sea, most of the time, nothing happens and that’s fine. Everything seems wrapped in calm and desolation.


3. Not even Octavio Paz could alter our unfortunate lot. The shadow of death haunts us. The fatal bird with a blue beak and black eyes flaps its wings. The dying cosmic space writhes in pain. The inert matter steals our flavor …

3. Nor can anyone else save us. No matter how hard we search, we’re about to be cut out, skin and blood, technicolor bone, all together and endlessly, outside the text, beyond the text, in hypertext, residues of fiction.


4. Flesh Gore crosses the avenue. He tells a horrible joke to an ostrich that pays him no heed. Flesh Gore doesn’t realize that it’s only an ostrich. In a moment of mental confusion, he takes out his ray gun and blows the giant bird’s head off.


Flesh Gore doesn’t regret what he did because he hardly exists within a text that doesn’t belong to him. He moves and acts according to what a higher entity dictates.

Flesh Gore is the reactive memory of a text that long ago ceased to exist, now refuses to disappear, and will blow its head off on the count of three …


The alternate ending of the text is a generic orange soda commercial.

A soda can appears in the foreground, rushes into the atmosphere, and heads straight toward the cliffs.

In the background, a tribe of apes gathers around a newly discovered fire.

In a subliminal way, we think of a sweet, slightly fruity, bubbly drink …




Vraiux Dorós (Cdmx, 1992) Poeta & Mago. Colecciona dinosaurios en miniatura.

Vraiux Dorós (Mexico City, 1992) Poet & Magician. Collects miniature dinosaurs.

 @explosivoss, ejercitodesalvacion.tumblr.com
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18 Mar 2024

Strange Horizons
We are very happy to welcome Dante Luiz as a new fiction editor on the team! Dante is a Ignyte Award winning author, and has been with Strange Horizons working as an Art Director for the past several years. We’re stoked to bring him on to the fiction side and have him bring his wonderful insight and skill to the fiction team.
Day in and day out, the rough waters of the Pacific slam themselves against the protrusion of sandstone the locals refer to as Morro Rock. White streaks of bird shit bleed down the rock, a testament to the rare birds of prey that nest in its pocked face overlooking the bay.
in my defence, juggling biological and artificial, i tripped over my shoelace, and spilled my lungs empty of the innocence that was, before guilt.
the birds, / who carry with them / the many names of the dead
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