Without a name or need for one, he arrives scattered at the base of a tree and he rests like that, in pieces, for sixty-odd years. He is forty-nine sticky droplets of impulse and intelligence, tucked under dried oak leaves, clinging to a stone. He bathes in a light so overwhelming that when it disappears, it forms, within him, his first sense of missing something. In that time he gathers and extracts, harvests and stores. He converts elements from this atmosphere into what his own organism needs to survive. The particles here are slow to yield, heavy with a chemistry that singes the edges of his being. Still, he reconfigures them. He accumulates.

This is his first translation. He does it automatically, without conscious directed effort. He hasn’t the names of nitrogen or sugars or phosphorus or even rain. He survives because he is meant to; it is already prefigured into his sensorium.

He registers, and what he comes to know forms his own being. He is a being of knowing. He knows by being. Each of his cells is a self-replicating system of memory, experience, and imperative.

He knows that this is a world of cycles: of light and dark, wet and dry, commotion and deep quiet. The temperaments combine and repeat, replacing what was missing previously.

The base of what holds him is itself alive; this he can feel, in the sense that aliveness is change and that feeling is the impression of change.

A red tree towers over him, its arms full of dark, scaly needles that grow to a point at its tallest reaches. For decades, he does not have the organs to see, so he relies on feeling into the tree’s deep underneath. He knows the tree first by everything it knows and is known by: small and infinite sensing filaments that stretch endlessly and pulse with information and material. He traces these twirling networks, soothed by the impression that he is being raised by the origin of all things.

The tree, tall and old, secure in its position, finds young and injured trees and transports across filamentary sparks small packages of food, water, and pulses of meaning that he can’t yet decipher. This happens across distance, season, and time.

His immediate world is a dense thicket of growing things, then they are surrounded by a pond which is circled by forest. The tree’s twisting and knowing threads move quietly under the water, out through the other side.

He grows into a soft thing that can receive and respond. This is a world where it is ordinary to be such a thing, though he becomes aware that this makes him different from the tree. And the tree might be the whole world. Their differences emerge slowly over many cycles. Where he is soft and silvery, shimmering with scales, the tree is ridged and solid, an accumulation of hardnesses. Where he is contained, the tree is diffuse.

He transforms the outside of his body into a shimmering carapace, ringed with many eyes. He realizes how skillful it is to do one’s best growing where they can’t be seen.

As he completes his substantiation, his sense of the world becomes sharper, specific. The heron at the edge of the water shifts the pond’s surface such that the air around him, for a moment, becomes heavier. There is a scent right before the pond crystallizes into ice, and a different scent before it snows. He tracks the birds not only by their songs but by the brief sounds of their feathers slicing through the ether.

With every new field of sensation, he loses his capacity to sink into the tree’s webbed system. He can picture it, all those pinpoints of universes connected by an intelligent stream, but he can no longer wade into it. He is too singular now.

A shade of feeling becomes dense inside of him. Ancient and hollow. A fear of disconnection. His separateness is his pain, and now his only opportunity. As he cries from the rings of eyes along his shimmering body, some of them fall out and pucker over with soft skin. The eyes that fall, he nestles into the earth at the base of the tree. Something settles. He feels close and distant at once, and sways with the feeling.

He looks at everything, and everything looks at him. Frogs gyrate through the pond with noisy desire. Red slider turtles peek their heads out of the water and shuffle back into the deep. Night casts the entire world in still blackness, and the only light comes from the sky, its mirror in the water. The moon slowly disappears and becomes full again and he realizes that he, too, glides along a spiral of cycles.

When the moon is full, he likes to sit at the base of the tree and let the softest part of him, his belly, absorb the moonlight. In the deep winter, he grows coarse hairs across his carapace, sheds half of his eyes to preserve energy, and, still, exposes this most unprotected part of himself to the full moon.

He dreams of roots that snake upwards and thread into the fertile nothingness beyond this world, between the stars.

One night there is a storm that is not unlike other storms: harsh, noisy, and ultimately temporary. This one is gratuitous, recalling a blizzard many seasons ago that felled small trees on the island. The winds howl and whip branches against rocks. The heavy rain comes down in sheets, cracking then refreezing on the pond’s icy surface.

For the night, he rolls himself into the crook of one of the tree’s branches. His carapace forms a tight hood that protects him from the sky’s onslaught of ice pellets. The tree sways and shakes in the roiling wind, but he is sturdy in his seat.

Bright and hot and sudden. He smells it before he feels anything. The smell opens, behind rings and rings of eyes, another world. A haze, a yellow blue orange haze. Maybe it is actually every color that he can possibly imagine. Yellow blue orange amber metallic pink black blue black opalescent black bubble of pond foam green. The smell of all of these colors colliding and, then, the glimpse of so many other figures that look, unmistakably, like him, but unique. They are taller and shorter beings, more limbed, with fewer rings of eyes, fewer eyes, some with no eyes at all, and some with diaphanous wings. Seeing them in all of their numbers, like him and also not quite, makes him feel. It makes him feel. The feeling is heat, inside out and throbbing.

CLAP. FLASH. CRACK. He is jolted out of his vision, thrown onto the wet ground. Lightning cuts through the tree’s branch and he is cast again into this cold, strange world, alone and yearning.

The tree still feels with him, but this feeling arrives to him as information before it becomes experience in his own body. And, at the hint of the density or vibration of the experience, he can choose his capacity for participation. Sometimes he is overcome with the feeling of being one and only, and sometimes he senses that this is its own illusion. Sometimes a spiky tremor drifts into his chest, takes ahold of him, and then he realizes that the anxiety belongs to the tree. The tree quivers and quakes, groans and emits a long, tinny crack. It tells him about the encroachment on the northern bend of the pond, the early signs of drought appearing, the sprawling beetle infestation.

The way the tree transmits its knowledge to him cannot be seen or heard or placed in the external world. But he knows, the way he knows heat or buzzing or even like the way he knows that winter will always come. He knows through connection, the sap-like bond that time makes. He stalls connection to examine. He wonders. He is curious. He doesn’t know what is agitating about an infestation, but something in him produces revulsion. And what hides under the revulsion inevitably propulses right through it, a shooting star: curiosity.

The tree is in motion, drawing water from the pond and sending it to drought-wilted saplings. Then, it conveys its distress over the encroachment. Later, he wonders if what the tree actually conveyed was the future as a chemical.

The tree is never still, always in process, and he considers if he is the same way. This question cracks open his understanding; it is as if a beam of light flashes past all of his rings of eyes. He senses the throngs of beetles not only in their present season, but also their larvae wriggling into the next, then the next, then claiming all territory for the taking. He senses the clouds of their clicking bodies, the blighted land they abandon, the way they move equally in concert and in chaos. His own scales tremor in fear and excitement. And with that same inside-out heat.

The northern bend of the pond is being filled with dirt by creatures smaller and more energetic than him. Like a storm, it happens fast, then the land is different. The pond is more contained, putting a strain on the waterfowl and aquatic plants. And what follows is a shift in behavior, energy, belonging. The tree rolls a thick vibration through their island, to its every corner. It feels like deep gravity, but in a way that shocks everything in response. Other trees still, and their humming, the gushing of fluids in their diffuse minds, flattens completely. All the birds squawk and flee into the sky. The fish and turtles retreat to somewhere low and imperceptible. He can’t place this signal, so he stores its impression in his sensorium. It is the first time that he becomes aware of a pattern on purpose.

He sees more of some creatures, but less of others. Flocks of grey birds once darkened the sky like usherers of brief midnights. Soon, they become mere striations, then nothing. Tiny creatures with bushy tails and frantic energy circle him again and again. At first, he is amused, then the repetition and constancy agitate him. The tree shuffles its needles in the breeze. Coolness, distance, but loving, as if he is a sapling. Silence. His eyes turn and dilate, accumulating awareness, and yet, all he feels is small. He can’t grasp the proportion of himself versus the tree; if they are opposed; if this distance is time or space. And he is confused. The tree only continues to flutter, its needles sparking the air with the lightest touch.

This sedates him. This angers him. In a surge of feeling that coats his being like a rash, he cones his forelegs to points and spears the tiny, bushy-tailed creatures. He stuffs their twitching bodies into his jaw. Swallows with force. They go down hot, unctuous, and gristly. He is shocked and overcome, nearly radiating. He is powerful. He is guilty. The sonic pause after their feral noises have been sucked out of the forest, into his maw, feels like it lasts for decades. He is sick. An entire ring of eyes falls from his body, scattering into the earth, and the skin that scars over is waxy and shineless.

The tree is indifferent. It flutters and holds still, golden light parsing through its arms.

Over very little time, they’ve gotten closer to the island, the creatures that he thinks of as the Builders. As the pond is frozen over into thick sheets of ice, he watches them threading lights through the surrounding rings of trees. The snow falls downwards in fat flakes, piling on itself quickly. Their juveniles scream in joy sliding down the hillside, collapsing into pillows of dried grass tied to the base of trees. The Builders clear snow from the center of the pond, and they twirl on the ice in looping, unsteady circles.

Some day when the snow is falling, two of them approach the island with careful steps, and he tracks the scent approaching him. It’s sharp, like metal and ferment. The core of a flame and unmistakable internal rot. A fever rises along his rings of eyes and the tree sends him quelling chemical waves, which he resists. It antagonizes him. He wants to rise and rise and rise. He wants to know.

The Builders that approach the island are small in stature. They step onto the land and dart around, leaving impressions in the snow, weaving between branches awkwardly. He can smell them breathing.

He holds himself inside his carapace with rigid attention, angled against the tree. They are directly opposite him, oblivious, pressing their bodies into the snow in fan shapes. Their flesh dimples and spills between their outer layers. It’s liquid, he realizes, coursing through them in thin ropes. One of them laughs, and the sound merges with his urge. He wants to break it open, just to see.

A black flash, the midnight of his carapace uncoils, and bands of eyes seeing, seeking, sinking. A scream captures the air, sudden, then quiet as snow. They are on the ground, and slit. Brain to belly button. He is raw with the sense of inside, wanting more inside, wanting to pull it all out. And he’s disappointed, though hungry. He eats quickly, but his fullness is not satisfying.

After all, they are just pulses of sensory material. Chemical and bone. An organ stretched thin and clean, from branch to branch, no longer a bridge, just matter. He wonders what he smelled. What his want signaled. If his body has betrayed him. The snow steams around their poured-out heat. His eyes ache with pressure, his own fluid pooling dully. But the splatter of limbs in the snow is just this: a mess.

He rolls himself into his carapace in the crook of the tree’s broken arm and stays that way, shut, for another few decades.

Seasons pass, then larger cycles. The living world experiences many shifts in rapid succession, and he is frequently adapting himself. Everyone is. There are new blooms in the pond, choking out aquatic life. Debris accumulates that is resistant to deterioration. Smoke fills the sky so often that he develops a carapace adaptation for the hot seasons, too. The ground emits a constant glow, clouding the night sky with a dull orange light. Even the full moon is barely visible.

The pond is flooding on some hot day. It has been a luxurious stretch of many days of rain, and the tree is in another era of prolific growth.

He is rolled into his carapace, not because he cannot take the rain, but because he enjoys the vibration of it against the sensing eye rings on his back. It is an ancient sound, one that reminds him of his first sense of a storm. His first experience of wetness. And farther back than that, he knows somehow that this sound occurred far before his formation.

A smell pervades him so strongly that he feels faint. It is a sharp, hot smell that forces itself upon him violently. He feels charged, a painful thrumming across the various spines and ridges of his body. His rings quiver in deep reception.

He sees. He feels. He hears.

A din of repetitive song, lilting and harmonic. A vision of beings like him, their eyes reflecting a state of intensity. It is pure curiosity, sharpened into a tool. The space vibrates and what he sees he can only understand as light parting on itself.

The smell releases him.

Lightning strikes the pond, and the charge swells back up its own fractal path.
A thin seam of heat sears from his abdomen, then splits him like a husk.

Awake.

She is gravid and so, so hungry.

She unfurls, elongated at the tail. Her exterior is darkened and she has thousands of small egg sacs lining the inside of her carapace. She has far fewer eyes, but a newfound depth to her sensation.

She eats. Guiltlessly. No longer satisfied by subsisting on light and dead matter, she eats cormorants and herons. She scrapes the meat from the inside of a large snapping turtle shell with her forelegs.

She dreams constantly, even as she is awake, of another world where beings like her exist together in communion. She feels ecstasy. She feels rage. She sees a map from her emotions to their release. It is seared into her electrically.

She holds the tree and curls into it, like she’s a juvenile and afraid. The tree hums against her in a low resonance that soothes her agitation for a few moments.

She aches and she can’t sit still. It’s her back. She paws her forelegs on the ground before the tree and feels impossible weakness. She feels the filamentary system beneath her alighting, can almost see it. She is sure that her end is near.

Then, small pricks of heat along her back singe through her carapace. She feels a protuberance, and the sensation unnerves her more than it hurts. She has the sudden, awful thought that all of her egg sacs are getting damaged because she isn’t holding herself carefully.

The bony nodes push out from her injury and open into silvery, diaphanous wings. The release is so easeful that the pain seems imaginary. She is light, competent, hovering above the roots of the tree.

She perches in the tree, at a height she has never accessed before. As night falls, she pushes off a branch of needles and they wobble against her hind legs. This is her last point of contact with this world.

She shoots farther and farther into the sky, then the atmosphere, and finally, in space, she uses her wings. She has a sense of how to do this already somewhere in her cells. Her muscles already know. Tiny hairs grow around her egg sacks as she flies through galaxies and deep, sick quiet. It is so quiet that the map inside of her is a shout. She traces through a pathway that appears empty.

In the ringed eyes of her mind, she senses a vibrating mass of her kin. They will commune in every way that they can. They will exchange understanding, test their physicalities, portend fates through metabolism. They will pulse, excrete, tremor, and receive. She will translate the pond, which has contracted to a thought, to the collective. Everyone will know, then know more deeply, that is, receive.

When they complete their ritual and dust the asteroids with their eggs, they know that only very few will stick, and only an infinitesimal number will actually survive. They will never know that their eggs survive.

This does not, however, occur to her as grief. In a sense, she has her own cellular memory of the future remembering the past, long before itself. This is how she could be, that is, exist.

As she trails through the infinite darkness, she has one consideration for her surviving offspring. She hopes that they will grow into a world like the one she found, a place that was meant for living.

Editor: Austin Dewar

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors