Literary Analysis and What You Cannot Control

Did I Say That?

(Some random shit off the internet that I turned into a meme, 2023? Wow that was a bad year.)

An Interesting Interpretation

So I was talking to the esteemed

Zachary Dillon

and somehow my story from last year, My Name Is My Name came up. He said that he got the feeling that his interpretation of the events of the story differed VASTLY from mine.

My moms has been one of my first readers for most of my life. She’s an English lit BA, and she didn’t candy coat shit and call it M&Ms just because I’m her kid, so I ca honestly say I never got back crit from her that wasn’t either insightful, helpful, or worthwhile to have had her read. She’s opened up new interpretations of my own work when I was just a sprog, pointed out weak spots in my prose, and I still go to her for sentence level and sometimes even structural advice. In fact, I took the last line of the story in question here to her, explained the narrative arc, the way I conceived of the ending, and told her that I had a last sentence, but I needed input on whether it “sang” or not.

She agreed that it sang, and that was enough for me. If it sings it sings. And it was only three words, but those three words were basically the thesis of the story in symbolic form, so they were three very important words.

Botch the ending and you fuck the story. Last lines, I will often say, are just as important as first lines, but a lot of times they’re overlooked. Unless you work backwards (some people are capable of this madness, and good for them. My brain works in many directions, but not causally backwards, at least not until right now, upon which I’ve decided I will eventually it.)

So then after about a day, this came in my janky ass Substack DM inbox.

What a fucking opportunity! It’s not every day that someone takes the time to give you feedback so thoroughly interesting on a story YOU wrote. So I don’t even know what the fuck this is. It’s a collaboration. It’s an experiment. This is a reminder: No matter what you mean to say, and what you wrote or baked into a story on your side, once it’s in the wild, you lose control over how it is read, interpreted, and enjoyed.

I love that it was still enjoyed. I love the subjective disagreement. And hell, for all I know he’s right, the human subconscious does what it will in the process. The spirits in the spirits pluck at the strings that hold us up and we dance. Sometimes we say things we don’t even know we’re saying. A lot of the time, no one ever tells us what we could be saying, but when they do, it’s like a grenade going off in your head because you’re the author. You’re too close to the work, even if you've edited it to high gloss, even if it’s your 40th draft. You’re still just, too, close.

So let’s see what Zach says I said, and I’ll pull back the curtain on what I say I said.

But first a few things.

If you want 37% off my Substack forever, until May 29th, in honor of my best friend Sarah Sottile, who killed herself two years ago on that date, take advantage of the fact that she’ll never be 40 with a cheap yearly subscription. A gimmick sure, but it’s in memoriam to one of the most dynamic and truly of themself people I have ever known. We are all worse off for her passing. Check on the people closest to you. (If you think this is tasteless, fuck you, she’d laugh over it. She was a hustler to the bone)

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If you want to skip in line for an autopsy (pay to play, yeah, life is like that) check out this LINK. I’d be happy to be your editor.

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Editorial inquiries are still open for short stories and one manuscript under 50k words. Click the pic above to check out my editing services page with all the details.

And you know, if you’re into the whole ala carte thing, you can always buy me a coffee.

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And as always, to get in on the lottery for a free autopsy, or at least some short notes on what you’ve sent, email 5 pages to emilottoman@gmail.com with AUTOPSY in the subject line.

ARE YOU DONE YET EMIL?

🫀body fluids🦷 - a lit mag

& Myself are putting on an editorial workshop. Yesterday was the last day for early registration, but since you’re late, if you’re serious about your work and can afford it, early registration prices will be extended through MAY 11TH, that’s Mother’s day. Why? Because my mom is amazing, duh, but between Alice and I we’ll gut your story, drag it through the killing floors, and you’ll come out with better work than you came in with. Click the pic and apply below you suckling calves, ripe for the slaughter.

No, no, fuck, there’s more shit in the pipe, but it’s good to get down to business too isn’t it. (Haven’t even mentioned Cult of the Rainbow Rat yet. Stupid.)

Without further bullshit and whatnot.

I CHALLENGE YOU TO A DUEL OF CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF YOUR OWN WORK!

or

“Yeah, but is that what you really meant?”

(Want a mindfuck? Italics are MY interpretation of my own story, they’re what I actually meant or WANTED the reader to get. Pulling back the curtain on myself. This is something I DO NOT DO.

Zachary Dillon

’s incredibly nuanced and completely contradictory interpretation of the story is in the footnotes.

ME: in text parenthetical (italics)

ZACH: old school autopsy footnotes

And since we use the same theater for everything, would everyone find a seat and we’ll get started. Consider this a lesson in comparative anatomy. (Oh, that’s catchy)

THE TEXT

My Name Is My Name¹ (Yes, the story is named after a Pusha T song. The core themes are memory, identity, grief, and fear, mostly of irrelevance or being forgotten, but ultimately, reclamation, a story in which the lesser of the bad guys wins. It’s definitely a projection on my part. Every story is just the bigger truth covered in lies.)

The harvest started too early. (coincidentally Zach doesn’t touch on the start of the story, but he may think that it’s obvious by the end of his bustdown. But this line is not just a reference to a California weed harvest, it’s also doubling as the fact that the harvest started early when the saint died, before immediately moving from big voice narrator to second person.) You were sitting out front of the tiny house on the gang block with Solomon and his dog.(This is part of a cycle of stories that have turned into a novel in draft. The prequel to this is Floridecay. There’s a notecard with very strict rules for how this narrative mode operates for this novel. Shit, now I gotta go find it. OH my god, I know it’s on a 3x5, I know it’s double sided, but somewhere in this house is my coda. So, I’ll abridge. Because the rules are formalized off of a copy of Floridecay I dissected for a week. 1. No one gets a contemporary name, only titles like “The Judge” in Floridecay and his son archaic—ideally religious, as in Biblical, like Lazarus in Floridecay or Mythic, Hades (the protagonist of this novel is Prometheus. 2. Second person shifting tense free indirect discourse. 3. Must be internally logical and self consistent in its own syntax and grammar, but that has nothing to do with anything outside of itself as referent. 4. Disorienting or it’s a failure, frenetic pace MUST be upheld as consistently as possible. 5. Action does the heavy lifting of interiority, symbolism is heavy, and details must be sparse but precise, exact, and/or factual in some way. There, this is part of how I write a panic attack.) He’s got a farm in Humboldt (Originally this story came from a prompt from

Edith Bow

’s prompt group, and the prompt was, barley, interchangeable, banter, and it took me a month to find a framing for it, then two weeks to figure out it was part of the Floridecay novel). 100 acres, and two more weeks for the best genetics in the state to harden off before the rain comes and he goes out to oversee harvest. First time he’s ever not been at the property snorting cocaine, drinking Cuban coffee and staying up for weeks with a Mossberg 590 watching his fenceline with a spotlight and a headlamp because he moved to STL Misery because pot is legal because it’s a gold rush (this is all to some variance or another stolen from parts of my and other people I know’s lives) because he may be in the middle of his forties but he’s wise, knows when it’s going to pop off. Bought a renovated house the size of a shack for cash in the dope sets down closer than you are to the river and now in a half broke camp chair drinking Barleywine (The barleywine is symbolic and ritualistic, it’s drank in the autumn in some countries to celebrate the barley harvest. Before I came up with the Solomon conceit, as that character IS based partially on someone I know, he was going to be John, as in John Barleycorn, but that violated one of my rules for these stories, so I set about finding another name) at nine in the morning. He’s got his .380 on his lap and gunners are walking the block. (Actually happened, but I was on the phone. No shots were fired, but Solomon was making sure that they knew he was there and he had a Shockwave.)

He called you earlier. Had to see for yourself.

STL is the sort of city where on this block you’re going to be fine, you can be the boss, you have a crew backing you up, take two steps to the right one block over and one block up and a thirteen year old kid sticks a ghost Glock inside your car and puts three bullets in your face.² Welcome to the Gateway to the West, fuck you. Light another KOOL and get over it. (Actually commentary on Solomon, and the actual city itself.) Once a friend got stopped by a cop with an AR pistol sitting across his back seat and the cop congratulated him on it. “Stay strapped or get clapped” your friend told. Street apocrypha. (This actually happened and was too good not to put in a story.)

Criminal on criminal crime isn’t the most exciting thing to investigate so mostly they let us kill each other. I know just how this thing ends.³ (Me being cheeky as big voice god narrator. But the thing about criminal on criminal crime is true. Used to be a newspaper called What’s Goin’ On that someone distributed to the homeless to sell for cigarette money. It was the only real news you could trust in the city. Been gone a few years now)

The Saint takes a terminal velocity drop to her knees, a last act of Catholic prostration to end up hanging from an over the door clothes rack by a rope with liquid vodka shit running down her leg, pissed pants, blood pooling in her limbs by the time she’s cut down. (I think everyone who reads my Substack knows the Saint is based entirely on my best friend Sarah. The Saint has haunted EVERYTHING I HAVE WRITTEN since Sarah died. So I let her.) You’re four states away decaying in Florida (Call back to Floridecay, which was written when I was quite literally losing my mind in a very nice house in a gated community in Florida.) and the Oracle is watching her one perfect adopted daughter rolled out of a cursed house under a sheet with her blood mother who is just a wreck, thought the Saint was practicing? Practicing her suicide? (This all happened exactly as written.) Narcissist with lungs turning to leather and no memory, always playing dumb, her blood mother will die in the chair she sleeps in (The blood mother is the only woman in the text not elevated, she gets no higher title, she is stationed below the Oracle, who is depicted as the adopted mother of the Saint, and has a title). Kiss The Saint’s corpse at the viewing. Cop a feel, tit is hard, cold as ice. Agree with your other best friend it’s what she would have wanted. Laid out under a purple sheet in a cardboard box straight off the slab and soon for the burner. Cut off all of her hair, make her look like the psych patient she is. Gorgeous black hair to get twisted into knots held together by rubber bands, still everywhere in the room along with 21 years of the rest of her. (Write the truth to get to the bigger truth, cover it in lies. Unless you admit to it, no one will believe it because the truth is more terrifying and strange than fiction ever could be.)

To be a Saint you have to be a martyr.⁴ (Simple statement of fact, this shockingly had no deeper meaning in my mind. I liked the sound of it, and it is true.)

And now the barleywine passes back and forth and the little teeny teenagers, their guns larger than them patrol the block ignoring Solomon and his guest both because you’re not on the menu. Solomon celebrates the planting of the winter barley, mostly in Russia. Just a few drinks. (Shit, did include the ritual)

Then a phonecall from his caretaker, some former Navy Seal, and the harvest has been jacked, at least twenty plants. Pop a Xanax together.⁵ (You steal one detail from real life to give a protagonist a serious flaw, and Zach manages to make it into part of the core meaning of the story. I love that.)

Then shots ring out the next block down but no one cares. (Broke one of my own rules, this section dragged a bit)

Then wake up going over the Confusion Hill Bridge early in the morning connecting Mendocino and Humboldt and sitting on the other side of the two lane span is a burnt out car torched sometime in the middle of the night, everyone in it probably dead by the time you pass, still smoldering, probably doused in kerosene unless it was tweakers who used gas because they wanted to blow themselves up too. (Shocked that Zach didn’t find something for the confusion hill aside. This is the point of no return before the point of no return. Yes, it’s actually called the Confusion Hill Bridge, it goes over the Eel river I believe? Don’t quote me. But this passage was meant as default confusion over both death and movement across liminal space for the protagonist, even though it’s being narrated by big voice. Side note: it was a different bridge, it was 2008, it was foggy and early in the morning, and fuck it was creepy to drive by.)

She lies on the bed while you’re lighting candles for the altar. Tea lights, burning twenty four hours a day, hundreds of them spent in a Trader Joe’s bag at your feet, and She says you have to carry the ritual with you everywhere you go, so you promise her that you’ll take the ritual with you when you leave and carry it in your heart.⁶ (This was just burying the gun of what the ritual ended up being. I never connected the knife back to the kids shooting you in the face two blocks up, that was just literal commentary on the city, this was just an excuse to have someone the protagonist cares about, assumed to be his lover, the italics mean something in these stories, tell him if he’s going to go off and fuck around he’d better be serious. The tea lights were business but play dual role as another thing in the story that’s expendable and replaceable, even though I do burn tea lights 24/7. 6, to be exact)

It’s not unusual to get jacked for a crop, or part of it, but it is for Solomon, and he pops another Xanax. (One of the people Solomon is a dirty amalgamation of has a panic disorder but is the single most productive get shit done motherfucker I know.)You do the same, but you chew yours, the chemical taste of home. (The Xanax for the protagonist is symbolic of them both being long in the tooth. If you survive the game, you don’t leave without scars. PTSD and a Xanax script, opioid addiction, alcoholism, or being dead.)

Ambitious but dumb tweakers is the answer. (Historically this is true)

Identified and clocked immediately by the caretaker. (Humboldt is huge, but it’s smaller than anyone who hasn’t lived there thinks.)

And you see footage on Signal of some meth addled kids in Eureka at a gas station offering pounds for $150 and yeah, that’s definitely them. (no comment)

Grief expresses itself how it wants. Rage. My grief expresses itself as pure rage white hot refined regretless. Our rage is what will save us in the end. But with your Saint gone who the fuck are you?⁷ (I put the protagonist where I was for the first year or so after Sarah killed herself. It was close to the bone, it was true, it hurt, it was easy to fictionalize because I’d been through it.)

Half a person, everyone says.⁸ (ibid)

Alive the Saint would say “choose your own adventure.”⁹ (Recurring themes. Sarah DID say this, so the Saint does as well. She stopped saying it as much as her world shrank, but it was her motto for most of our friendship. Here it’s actually meant to be memory as propulsion of story.)

Solomon, agitated, after a gold sun has fled and left the hood to night, throws up his hands and in his wisdom says “what’s another Body?”¹⁰

You haven’t really been out west trying to be good as you can, paralyzed, getting coffee with the Saint and screaming in the park, but she’s gone. (The protagonist hasn’t been out west in a LONG time. He’s down one of his coping methods and hanging out with Solomon. Because when you’re a crook and you been a crook, no matter what you do, you’ll always have friends that are criminals.)

“What’s another body?” you say.¹¹ (The dead weave through this. The body to the protagonist is not the potentially about to be murdered idiots who jacked the crop, it’s the Saint getting kissed on the lips.)

Do they even remember who you are? (Hard left. Memory, grief, loss, the fear of irrelevance, all themes of this piece. Does HE remember who he is, and is there a way that he can express upon the external world who he is to validate his existence outside of the context of the Saint and his past, in the now.)

And you’re packing your bag and the Oracle is saying this can’t go well.¹² You say it’s fine, you’ll carry the ritual with you, and She backs you up, grabbing a shoulder, but The Oracle washes her hands of it. Still gives a hug and kiss goodbye with clear eyes and no tears. She tells this is the only time you can do this, and you have to take the Ritual with you and remember it, keep that fucker sacred, and say you will.¹³ (Yes, women are elevated above men in much of what I write, in one way or another, by design. This is a minimalist technique, reminding the reader that there’s a buried gun, giving it a name, leaving it as a mystery, but obviously something important in the narrative and in whatever the protagonist is doing, and impressing that the Ritual is also the key to how he may be able to reclaim a shred of his identity, which he feels like he can’t do at home, especially since an opportunity has opened to go to a place where he was once someone, and externalize his existence, remind them who he is. The Oracle’s repetition of the importance of the Ritual was also part of the point of the passage as well. She says it’s the only time he can do what he’s going to do, and he has to take something with him, and keep it sacred. The Oracle’s doubt is temporary, but again, she is the Oracle for a reason. And the protagonist, Prometheus, is her son.)

The American dream is flying first class Delta with no layover getting glass after glass of ginger ale because you don’t drink much anymore after The Saint martyred herself a drunk,¹⁴ and watching the plane cut the air at 500 miles an hour and seven miles up all the way to SFO with a tailwind on the last flight on the screen instead of a movie. It’s sitting next to no one. It’s being first on the plane and watching everyone pass on their way back to the seats next to the shitter staring wondering who the fuck is that weirdo and the satisfaction of it. They don’t know your name and it’s alright. (Aside from yes, flying first class domestic is satisfying as fuck in general, the last line here was supposed to point out that there are many, many people who it’s just fine if they don’t know your name. Or ideal if they don’t. Meant as a sober truth from a man drinking ginger ale.)

But you convince Solomon to wrap up business in STL and come out in a week, you’ll leave in the morning and get it taken care of. How much is this shit going to cost? It’s going to be free brother, it’s going to be free, and he’s left in his tiny fully paid for house in the middle of the dope sets eight minutes from your house as rolling the Subaru home and put the next flight on the Delta Amex because the ship is already sunk and the debt is already going to crush you, but you have the ritual.¹⁵ (totally different interpretation from Zach and I love it. Real society is threatening to crush the protagonist, the Ritual is your way of transgressing your way back to personhood, and there are only so many ways to do that. In this case, kill the thieves. There’s also a discrepancy that’s purposeful, it’s mentioned earlier that Solomon has 100 acres in Humboldt, but his house in STL is paid for, yes, but terribly small. The west is still large, and open. Solomon is as trapped as the protagonist, but he has nothing to prove to himself or anyone. What’s another body was a lament and exasperation to him. It was something else to you. Solomon offers money, but you call him brother and tell him it’s free. That’s part of the whole thing. Taking care of business like this could get you out of debt. At market rates in Norcal, it could get most anyone out of debt if they’re a known quantity, because people who do that work are rare. There’s a lot of talk but not many people who will move when the time comes. I put a number to it originally, before backspacing over it the original line Solomon said was “So is this going to cost me another twenty thousand fucking dollars?” Maybe should have kept that line in there.)

Hades stole the harvest. (Grasping for a mythical name. Hades sounded right so I looked it up and lo and behold it WAS JUST RIGHT. But Hades isn’t the devil, Hades sort of just looks over and caretakes, he’s the King of the underworld, he’s not the one who puts you there, that was an important point to make. For full context on why the thief is named Hades literally, go read the entire Wikipedia article on Hades.)

The touchdown at SFO always looks like you’re about to hit a black hole in the bay right before the tarmac appears under the plane, (god it’s always such a relief) and then the airport is a huge rat’s maze to get to the baggage carousels for your checked luggage and then up to where you can Uber across the street. They don’t ask for a credit card and anyone can pay for a rented shitbox from the Pakis for cash and habibi won’t even ask your name as long as you pay them and fill out a piece of paper promising to bring it back. (True, in 2015 I visited friends in Humboldt and had to do this, it cost me 800 fuckin’ bucks, and yes, I gave the protagonist the same shitty Toyota I got. Fuck that car.) The car is a five year old Toyota Corolla with 100k miles on it and a rattle, but it’s black or so dark silver it may as well be and so nearly invisible in the flow of traffic. Fuck South San Francisco. Burn north on the 101.

Shut up and drive.¹⁶ (tour kid reference included only for me.)

Out in the forest, past the curtain, in Mendo and Humboldt, there are albino redwoods. Ghost trees. They have no chlorophyll and they’re pale white tiny spirits. Only survive by being parasites on other trees, sucking their nutrients. One legend says they protect the forest and people lost in it, another says that if you hurt an albino redwood, it’ll be worse than bad luck.¹⁷ Seen a few, been told that’s more than most people ever do. (Factual folklore)

Passing Oakland on the 580 there’s a tall white brick building with a red sign on it lit up, The Hotel California. Not a hotel, on the bottom floors there’s a methadone clinic where you can sip your morning coffee and watch the zombies line up for their daily dose just like you can watch the drunks itch and bang on the bars at any liquor store before it opens in West Oakland. (This is also true, I used to live pretty close to this spot.) Drink Takaa vodka because masochism is a close enough cousin to sadism and it’s eight bucks a bottle. Wake up with blood covered hands and glass in your hair in the Tenderloin two days later.¹⁸ (most of this was scene filler honestly.)

Just inside Mendo there’s this huge rock that looms over the highway. Legend says a native princess threw herself off the top of it instead of letting in to getting killed by white men. Who would blame her?¹⁹ (True legend. It’s a BIG fucking rock too.)

Familiar roads. (Oh, one other rule of these stories, they are completely non-linear and time is incredibly malleable on the page. The idea is to try to induce a sort of vertigo in the reader. In some ways, even though it’s probably the best thing I wrote last year, this piece is also a failure by the constricts of the form I write these in.)

Then there’s a new bypass around Willits where you walk past police with a neon pink soccer bag with fifty pounds in it. The helicopters looking for weed patches in the Mendo National Forest circling overhead stop everyone on the street in their tracks, praying to everything not to find my patch, don’t find my weed. Marijuana Cultivation Eradication. Don’t drink Snapple or Snapple products, they SPONSOR that shit. Five hundred pounds has to come down from a grow all the way north. Set dumpsters on fire and keep radio contact with the RV driver when they pass through every town. (All true flavor, but to pick up the pace and pass time. Passages that chug like this are also just compulsively addictive for me to write.)

For the stretch of the 101 between Willits and Humboldt there are maybe two staties, ever, and they’re always busy or absent or looking for someone else.

Drive faster. Chew up two Mexican Xanax. Your bottle made it through TSA fine even with just a sticker from Temu on it that’s a cheap rainbow colored old style looking movie ticket that says ANXIETY VIBES on the side. Farmapram my friend.²⁰ (Yes, he is trying to stay calm. That’s correct. The protagonist does not think that he is invincible, and he knows this is insane, but he’s also trying to prove he exists by destroying something. One thing Zach’s reading ignored is that while yeah, he’s doing something potentially monumentally stupid, that gets him killed in his reading, he’s also doing it for a purpose he considers moral, which I try to point out with a lot of the more deep cut crime talk.)

“I’m choosing my own adventure,”²¹ you yell. “And I have no fucking idea who I am anymore!”²² (Some bits just seem right.)

The truth is like everyone else in the game we’re interchangeable.²³ Like Russian soldiers, one with a rifle, one following with just another clip for the Mosin Nagant in WW2, when the first soldier falls, grab the rifle, strip the bullets from the clip into it, and start firing. Runners from Oklahoma in STL are less than 25 years old (true, and they’re getting got all over the city) driving murdered out rides with those hot chicks on their arms that go fuck Jodie once the feds have you clocked sitting in county fighting a case for running about two tons in six months and twenty trips, and they’re doing it for $25 bucks a unit. Drive the price down to $125 for everybody, for shit flower, in bulk, and not even double up. (The next generation always has to learn for themselves the hard way. The protagonist is secretly a moralist. That’s why you’re ranting about this. Also, on highway moves with big boxes, always double up, or switch to freight.)

The rule is you always double up if you’re doing a cross country move. 100 lbs on the drive from OK to MO is still life. They sell the shit right on the table at open air grey markets the cops are letting happen wild gateway to the west while they clock them from an overpass or the next street over, taking down license plates, building webs of association. You go to one, eat all the Xanax you brought and sweat through your shirt in thirty minutes then bounce because you did your time clean and they’re toy soldiers. (I didn’t think of the implications Zach did inherent to this part of the scene, excellent.)

Next season there will be more.

And the season after that, more still.

And they eat each other over a quarter or a dime. (Using the space on the page, but also, pointing out the cycle)

Thank God you have the Ritual.²⁴ (callback to that mysterious buried gun. The idea is at some point the reader starts to question the meaning of the word in context because of the shift in context at every mention, ideally being a slight expansion and variation on the one before leading to something more concrete and less conceptual.)

Then you’re in Humboldt, drove the overnight pulling past Eureka and all their tweakers, passing that lonely row of Cyprus trees (Really pretty but why the fuck are they there?) on the other side of the highway next to the water in the right before dawn decides it’s happening fog. Every surface up here covered in graffiti if it can be painted. A power box in the middle of the marshes of the bay has a Steal Your Face (In reference, also true.) spray painted across it big enough to see the thirteen point bolt in its head from space. Fuck. Slow down. G.D.F. sprayed in unreadable graffiti script below the Stealie. (I didn’t make a connection here that I distinctly now remember wanting to make. Because in Humboldt the graffiti is as thick on every surface as it is down in the city, five hours south on the 101. Whiffed that one.)

Then a Eureka local Sheriff’s unit passes you headed the other way and I know how this is going to end. (The shifting tense and POV leads to novel interpretations like Zach’s, but also keeps enough confusion for me to render a sort of vision I want.)

“They remember your name out there,” Solomon says as you walk out of his house. “Trust me.” (The flashback is to assure the protagonist, but also assume everything in any of these is happening all at the same time)

The Oracle says that your name is your name.²⁵ (The Oracle having named the you in the story)

She says that as long as you carry the Ritual with you they’ll always know your name. (The Oracle knowing what you’ve done and where you’ve been)

And you pull off the highway onto the shoulder that doesn't exist because the trees are crash and die close, will grow through the rails in another hundred years, in your favorite stretch of redwoods, in the middle of the night, so you don’t smoke in the rental. A pretty young woman with lightning white hair wearing a tie dye shirt for a dress, holes in it at the neck and bottom hem, dirty face, climbs over the rail and crosses the highway up to you. She asks if she can have a smoke and you give it to her. Light it for her. Where’s she going? Nods to the forest past the rental and the siderail. Wish her luck. (Now the flashback to the overnight. This is written as myth. All the folklore is true, but here is where you find out he knows how it’s going to end. This is the spirit you have to appease or else you fail. She’s the acid test. The White Redwood. The Fae, whatever. He pay’s the spirit her due and wishes her well, doesn’t ask too many questions, and gives her a gift.)

“You don’t need luck, all you need is to know where you’re going. It’s a long strange trip right?” (In group references. He wishes her luck, she tells him he doesn’t need luck, he just has to know where he’s going. And she throws in a Dead reference. Now go read the lyrics to Truckin’ by the Grateful Dead…) she says then past the car, over the rail, into the redwoods. Always be nice to people up here in the middle of the night. There’s a forest witch (true folklore) that if you’re rude to her legend says she’ll lead you into the woods and you’ll never find your way out. Maybe that’s what happened to D.B. Cooper back in the day. Maybe that little chick was her and she just needed a menthol.²⁶ (Only two options are left for the little girl in the logic of the story, she’s the crone witch who haunts the redwoods, or she’s the spirit of a white redwood, either way, I planned that shit.)

But legend says there’s tunnels under Eureka, vanishing hitchhikers, the Wiyot have a flood legend where all of Humboldt flooded like Noah wasn’t doing the same shit, and they survived by some of them ran up on Table Bluff. (if I put some folk shit in a story, it’s actually true)

The Square in Arcata never changes. All the humbums sit at the bottom smoking spliffs to stretch spanged weed or glass pipes scorching their lips for the magic chemistry set lung feeling and ten more minutes.²⁷ Butterfly (Bitch been on that fuckin’ square since before I was born) is dancing or doing yoga, no one can ever tell. Window down, roll slower than walking all the way around the square. More than one set of eyes at the square clocks you. Not everyone on the square is a Humbum. Some are kids. Some are players. Some have backpacks full of too much money and pistols stuffed in their packs. (Historically very true) The light from enough cellphones glows in the millennial grey of morning, sun still not burnt off the fog.

Phone is stomped to pieces in the underground garage at SFO, just in case they remember your name.²⁸ (Misinterpretation and in reference that was poorly explained, points to Zach’s interpretation for me getting my dick stuck in the ceiling fan.)

The clocktower in the middle of the square doesn’t strike six when it should. Sticks at 05:59. Eyes all go up. Another Legend is the clock is cursed, and if it stops something bad happens to the whole town.²⁹ (I really did mean the whole town, also, this is more real folklore, as if the square in Arcata isn’t fucked up and weird enough.)

G street north, 9^th west, H street south, 8^th east, back to G headed north, circle the plaza. Identity crisis or grotesque show of power, who would know.³⁰

Clock at center square is frozen.³¹

G goes to a right on East 11^th, zig Bayview right and squeeze past a Grow dozer parked asshole proud and go left on Park. (Actual directions)

Then Alice in Wonderland (cue, you’re officially down the rabbit hole, or up the hill) you veer right and you’re back in town but you veer just left, past some hedges, and you’re on Fickle Hill Road. (This is actually just factual, I had a place where I wanted the end to play out that I didn’t have to make up wholesale or pull any pure fiction out of my ass for)³² It goes up above the bay, mountain tall and circling the town, the grade taxes the car whole hill goes up 4,000 feet but you’re stopping at about 1100, (Factual) pulling off the road onto dirt, but first past these mansions they’ve cleared the west face of the hill and built, cheap architectural pollution. (factual) Who needs to fuck up a perfect view of the bay, now above most of the fog, rays of sun shining through a light mist, just so they can have fake Roman columns and a tesseract roofline. (This is an insider dig at the pot millionaires who built those fucking houses.) Fickle hill is McMansion Hell and then it levels close to the farm.³³ (It’s only McMansion Hell on the lower West bay facing side though. And only on Fickle hill.)

Familiar sky blue roof on the house gone to shit. Trash in the yard. Motors. Dead cars. (Last time I was through it was not what I turn it into for this story. Nice spot. Spent a lotta time there.)

Sleeping on the floor inside on couch cushions because you need to hide for a second.

Eggs for breakfast. Friends live here.

The kids are all gone except the overgrown ones in the house tweaked out of their minds, them and Hades who stole the harvest. She said commit to the ritual. (Here the ritual is dual purposed but not explained, it’s shown through action. Committing to the ritual is committing to the violence is committing to the bit basically.)

Cut the lights, roll dead just onto the property. Open the pill bottle. Anxiety Vibes! Eat three bars. You can slow your heart rate and take your blood pressure down ten points breathing in through your nose for a deep four count, holding it for a seven count, and then letting it out in an even eight count. Repeat until life returns and get out of the car.³⁴ (Committing does involve calming yourself for him.)

The sun shines in your eyes but you’re on fire, each step leaving scorch marks behind you burnt into the broken pavement from your Brooks running shoes. Just another civilian consumed by flames, honest, blue grey postman’s pants (Ten points for whoever goes and finds how many stories have the protagonist with the postman’s pants. Cross by what a postman DOES.) with one black stripe down the side, a baseball ringer tee in black and heather grey with a tattoo style jellyfish on it and an Adidas coach’s jacket in scarlet and navy, covered in clouds and tigers, the floating world. (All of these are deeply personal references I expected no one to get except for the Adidas coach’s jacket covered in Tigers.)

No wallet.

No phone.

Nothing but a ritual.³⁵

At the door three sharp knocks, between a cop and a bag man. Inside chatter from dumb meth banter goes dead air but the bomb landing at the front door is just some guy. (protagonist is the bomb landing at the front door.) A fading sign says smile, you’re on camera.

There used to be horses here. (Also just true.)

House is nice, walls aren’t thick enough to not hear soft talking about what the fuck?

Then footsteps and the door opens a crack.

Acne and a backwards flatbrim never been cleaned, crusty. (Signifiers. The opposite of the Brooks running shoes. The contrast is between the seasoned knows better and the crusty young buck) Ask if you can come in, smile, say Bertha down at the infamous donut shop (The donut shop is real. Bertha is another Dead reference. For context go read the lyrics) said y’all up here had pounds on the cheap. Just a custie. (No one in that outfit is just a customer is the signaling from the start. The act began as soon as he cut the car and let it roll onto the gravel quiet with the lights out.)

The truth is you were lucky. Even Solomon is nothing but an interchangeable face in a sea of dreamers and strivers just like him, for every pot farmer that’s been doing it a decade someone’s been doing it two, and someone is starting their first grow. For everyone stole their first pound someone is out there jacking their twentieth crop. For every jewel runner trying to get rich before they get fed time there are a thousand to take their place even dumber. For every nameless bag man showing up in the morning on Fickle Hill this morning there’s someone out there stuffing someone’s toothless cut up meat into a plastic barrel filled with lye and getting ready to drop it so deep in the redwoods god won’t be able to geolocate the remains for the sixth time that month. Everyone gets clipped or they get out.³⁶ (Fuck I just noticed an echo. Anyway, the point here is that every class of criminal on this board is mentioned. In order, striver, veteran, striver, veteran, but the important thing is the order. Farmer, jacker, runner, bag man. It’s a hierarchical list of producers or movers and predators. It puts the protagonist at the top, but in the striver category, and nameless because the act is not finished.)

Learn early, or learn late, or lose your mind and end up where you are.³⁷ (Accurate to the story though, he’s established as lost his shit)

Hades is the leader standing there taking measure of you, bright jacket, stubble, black rings around eyes a hundred years tired, holding that custie smile tight as you can. (the act)

The rest of his crew, they all have trim trays on their laps, doing shit jobs processing Solomon’s stolen plants. From the old head view, they all look like babies.³⁸

“And who the fuck are you kid?³⁹ (everyone in GDF land calls everyone else kid. You can be 65, you’re still kid) Why the fuck did Bertha send you up to us without even calling? Shit don’t smell right.” Hades isn’t on tweak, he’s calm. Clockwork clicking.⁴⁰ What’s the missing puzzle piece? (insider reference, family member dies in Grateful Dead Land one memorial is getting a tattoo of a puzzle piece)

I’ve been around, it’s just been a while. I checked in with Bertha, old friend kid. I just need like, a unit. It’s whatever if you don’t want to do it, say and start to turn for the door. (Flex and a pump fake)

In STL She hands you the Ritual. “This is the only thing I’ll let you come out of retirement for baby.” (This is the turn, the ritual is officially an object. Remember, he’s committing a moral act in his mind.)⁴¹ We know.⁴²

“Wait, wait, wait, you just need a unit, we got five ready to go,” Hades says. (Hades was really just the dude counting beans in the underworld for the most part.)

Turn back to him. Seven feet between the two of you.⁴³ (God said)

“But what was your name again?” and then he pulls a fuckin’ Glock 19 (Most common pistol in the country) from his dirty pocket and dangles it at his side, tapping it against his thigh. (This is a giveaway. Hades doesn’t want to kill the unknown, or else he would, he’s on top of a hill in nowhere, on a property that used to be a horse farm. Plenty of acres to dig holes in)

The Ritual is a CRKT assisted folding knife with a five inch long blade, a pearl handle with a blued stainless steel bolster and a wicked curve, Persian, flip it open and the near half moon curve of the blade alone says you’re about to have your heart cut out, and you pull it from your pocket and flip it open faster, whip and click, than Hades could have in his worst nightmare imagined himself pulling the Glock from his pants pocket.⁴⁴ (God gives the reveal)

My name is my name, you say.⁴⁵ (He’s just answering the question)

“What the fuck is that even supposed to mean? Wasn’t that a rap album or something?”⁴⁶ Chuckles because he has the gun. (Never laugh at a man with a knife unless you’re drawn down on him.)

“You’re too close to me,” you say…⁴⁷ (Wish I hadn’t pulled the ellipses. no, in intent, he kills Hades. But there’s no closure. He asserts himself with the second to last line, and he commits the finale after the warning. Another theme that runs through this that Zach pulled the opposite from was that while everyone in the game is expendable, every generation has to learn the hard way. The survivor is looking back on those who either got out or got clipped. But he’s drawn back into it when his friend is robbed. By denying payment, he keeps the act pure, an act of kindness and compassion for a good friend. That just happens to involve murder.)

---

In the spring they reap the winter Barley in Russia. (This entire scene was the original start of the story, and for a month, all that I had in mind about it.) Millions of acres of it. In a field being harvested by combines, two young children are playing. A boy and a girl. It’s the first day that’s not absolutely too uncomfortable to be in the fields pushing each other around and making jokes. There are three grey and orange combine harvesters working the massive field they play in. Getting in the winter crop. Where you come from maybe they don’t call ‘em combines, they may just call ‘em threshers, but their play is spinning in circles. (If I remember right I wrote this in three hours while listening to Father John Misty’s She Cleans Up on repeat. So, the circles, that’s Samsara coded, no cap.)

The boy pushes the girl, the girl pushed back, they have hoods and their ears are covered, only hearing their own screams, lost in their own childhoods. Best friends for two years. The girl is 9, the boy just 8.⁴⁸

They’re arguing about something no one can hear and a combine makes a turn, heading up a straight row within pissing distance of the two. (avoid using things like pissing distance as markers for distance when more than one sex is involved. Honestly just a measure.) ⁴⁹

The machines are huge, loud, aggressive, their threshing blades lowered to get all the barley and spit the chaff, sticks, and stems, out its ass. They’re also slow.⁵⁰

The view from above of how slow they are doesn’t change a thing.⁵¹

The boy pushes the girl, the girl pushes him back, they grab arms and dance in a circle, and the machine rumbles closer. (Go read the lyrics to Father John Misty, She Cleans up)

Who would know why. Motivation has always been a bad excuse for human behavior. People do things all the time just to see what will happen. And she tells him to stand where he is and cover his eyes. She’s his best friend. Of course he does. (Wow that song infected this ending)⁵²

Then just as the Harvester passes she kicks him in front of it, laughing innocent and smiling, red giggle faced, but when he lands on the threshing blades she screams and the operator of the combine yells a bellow in prayer.⁵³

Blood sprays the barley.⁵⁴ (Girl symbol for Saint, boy symbol for Hades, Thresher symbol for time and murder, operator symbol for the concept of a helpless deity, Thresher is Samsara. Go read the lyrics to she cleans up. Wish I was pulling this out of my ass. But the line sang, and the long Slavic metaphor was to avoid the hackneyed play of showing you committing the act. Because off the page you’re eternally alive or eternally dead. I intended for the protagonist to fulfill what I’d written for him. Your subjective interpretation is also beautiful and I love it. If I’d showed him committing the act instead of cutting it off scene it would have had no punch for me, so I assumed would read as dead or gratuitous to my audience, also, no way to interpret it besides the way it’s written. And look what the cutaway opened up.)

If you’re still here, thanks for reading!

FIN

1. Most of this is in second-person, which is significant. There are lines in which one could read "you" as a general "you," but if we take everything as the specific "you" (the reader as they embody the protagonist), the constellation of my perspective becomes impossible to ignore.

In those instances, I'll use all-caps YOU in these comments to force that specific "you" perspective. But know that every time I say "you," I'm talking about the character, not you Emil.

There are some comments with quotes that differ from the actual text, which is just my way of providing direct interpretations.

Disclaimer: everything is subjective, but you (Emil) know that already. Also, these are not edits—all of this is in the text as-is. The comments are breadcrumbs to what (I think) your story is about.

2. This speaks to your point about a skilled knife winning against a gun unless the gun is already drawn. But still, the way the sentence shakes out, YOU—a skilled and experienced drug dealer with a deadly knife and grief-rage in your heart—get murdered by a thirteen-year-old. Not literally in this moment, but it implies that, while some are better prepared, no one is immune to bullets.

3. This is first-person plural, then singular. The narrator represents criminals in general, then delineates itself as the God observer.

"I know just how this thing ends" implies that God does but YOU don't, which undermines your bravado.

4. The Saint martyred herself to become the Saint.

But also, and more importantly…

"To join the Saint in sainthood YOU have to be a martyr" (die).

5. Bad news, and the "all-powerful you" reacts by eating an anti-anxiety med. Don't try to tell me "that's the spinach to his Popeye"—I don't buy it. This is a chink in the armor.

6. This is when she stabs "the ritual"—your grief—into your heart, all but literally. A test of your loyalty, just like the little girl and the harvester at the end.

7. "Grief has a mind of its own, beyond our control."

"My grief"—again, the separate God narrator, who describes themselves as wrathful in their grief. But that's definitively not YOU, because YOUR Saint is gone and as a result YOU'RE nobody.

8. "Everyone" here implies that maybe you disagree with them and/or are unaware of ways you've been affected. The narrator doesn't officially weigh in.

9. She may have said that while alive, but she's not alive, and as was just stated (by God, no less), grief has a mind of its own—"choose your own adventure" is an illusion; YOU are driven by the knife in your heart.

10. "Solomon, agitated, chooses your adventure."

11. You've been trying to avoid going west because you're (literally) haunted by a dangerous ghost, but you accept Solomon's adventure, because as everyone says, you're half a person.

12. She's literally called "the Oracle," and she says it will end badly. The Oracle is the only title/name in the story that implies a "job," so if the Oracle's prophecy is flat-out wrong, the story's entire symbolic-name mythos means nothing.

13. This shows self-doubt in the Oracle, which I like, because it gives her dimension. But if the story proves that YOU are correct that your bravado and grief are 100% strengths, your character is infallible and loses dimension (and my interest).

14. Acknowledging a vulnerability in the Saint, and working to keep it from bleeding into you—the Saint isn't all protection, strength, and light, she was mortal before transcending to sainthood.

15. Solomon is in a more comfortable position, while you are the one taking the risks, digging yourself deeper, and you trust him because you're betting everything on your "magic knife." I'm with the Oracle, this can't end well.

16. You're on the verge of voicing a hesitation, but the God narrator tells you to shut up and keep walking into the gnashing teeth—the harvester—because this is your fate.

17. The Saint is a "ghost tree" parasite feeding off of you, a non-ghost.

"Legend" says it's bad luck to hurt a ghost, so you'd better not doubt the ghost. If you don't believe in your lucky magic knife, she'll turn on your and you won't martyr yourself into Sainthood.

18. "Wake up with blood covered hands and glass in YOUR hair…"

This isn't literally happening to the protagonist, but it implies previous experience as a "zombie" and "drunk," and now he's condescending to that weak, mortal aspect of his character (and the Saint's). He's not above them, but he desperately wants to be. Another chink in the armor.

Drug/alcohol addiction, parasites, grief—all are examples of possession. A possessed person doesn't choose their own adventure.

19. A martyring/Sainting of another female character. Again, "legend" is invoked, which is superstitious, not fact-based. You romanticize these ghost women.

"Who would blame her?" She kills herself instead of letting herself get killed by someone else. Speculation, but maybe the Saint killed herself instead of letting herself get killed by her addiction? And maybe you will let Hades kill you because killing yourself or rotting away with grief aren't proper sacrifices and wouldn't grant you martyrdom/Sainthood?

20. You are Popeye, sweaty, driving fast to escape any hesitation, thanking god TSA didn't find your cans of spinach because you NEED them in order to keep believing your magic knife ("the ritual," legend, superstition) will save you.

21. Denial, which is why you're yelling.

22. Honesty, because you know you're disappearing.

23. God weighs in and confirms that you're nobody. The first-person plural is weird here, but maybe it implies even God never remains in a single static state. "The game" is supposed to be the drug underworld, but could be blown up to include the universe/multiverse, the only permanent is change, yadda, everyone's on shaky ground, looking over their shoulder. I like this because it means even the transcendent spiritual world is uncertain, which speaks to what I'd say is the Real Final Question of this story (you'll see).

24. Despite God calling you insignificant, you rattle off more street-smart bravado to reaffirm your position "above it all."

But you've got this uncanny ability to squeeze through it all. Everyone's a toy soldier but you. Everyone's a dog eating another dog except you. As long as you've got your Xanax and your magic knife you'll be fine. And you literally thank God for the magic knife, while trying to ignore what it really means, or maybe relishing it, because that's the interesting paradox in this self-destructive character—he's either tragically rushing into the giant's maw believing he'll win, or playing the part of vengeful superhero knowing that a good enough performance will grant him sainthood.

25. The Oracle AND the Saint tell you that believing in the Ritual, indulging the parasite, means you're still vulnerable to the Life. You are not a ghost or omnipotent, you are a mortal with a name like everyone else.

*Everyone except the women, who have titles instead of names, demarcating their elevated status.

26. "YOU don't need your superstition, YOU just have to listen to everyone telling you you're doomed."

And once again, a female spirit has triggered your reverence and superstition, and you've stayed on her good side and gently dismiss her because you THINK you know where you're going.

You give her a cigarette and wish her luck (dismissive), then she gives you real advice, and your response is thinking, "I guess she just wanted a cigarette. Even D.B. Cooper, the mystical bigfoot of criminals, wasn't smart enough to have a pack of smokes on him like I did" (more condescension to other criminals).

27. Oh, sure, THEY'RE humbums for believing in magic, but YOUR superstitions are totally valid.

Condescension score +1

28. Another moment of hesitation, an attempt to attain "mortal ghosthood"—a paradox, as we've been told, only a true sacrifice will do.

You (Emil) said, "He is also trying to keep hold of the memory of the Saint, which he is worried is fading, by invoking or forcing memory of himself in others."
This moment speaks to the opposite. He's trying to move through the world as a ghost. In fact, besides Solomon and his interactions with the female characters, he only ever indulges in being seen by the people on the plane wondering about the "weirdo in first class." It even says, "They don't know your name, and it's alright."

29. The west triggers your superstitious nature hardcore.

30. God narrator is humoring you, because they know it's a dangerous combination of both.

31. A "frozen" clock is a DEAD clock. Time's up.

32. If you think I'm going to overlook FICKLE Hill Road, you're underestimating my powers of over-analysis.

FICKLE, because dude can't make up his mind whether he's a living superman or a dead saint.

HILL, because this story is about one man's journey to ascend.

ROAD, see: journey.

33. If I'm taking this as a subjective thought you're having, this echoes the resentment of financial success in your "business" rumination earlier about "25-year-olds with murdered out rides and hot chicks," along with Solomon in his paid-off house, while you're in debt and your only listed possessions are Xanax and a magic knife.

Yes, I said "possessions."

This also implies an attempt to position yourself above the successful mortals atop Fickle Hill, by tethering their success to earthly stuff (McDonald's), as Hades does to you in his last line of dialogue (rap album).

34. Commit to the ritual, commit to the ritual, commit to the ritual… You need to calm your hesitation in order to "fully commit."

35. The flames specifically aren't shooting out of you, you're "a civilian CONSUMED by them"—you are a willing mortal sacrifice to the Wicker Man.

Leaving behind earthly belongings on your way to Sainthood.

36. You know it's true. And you had gotten out. But now you're back in…

And this paragraph's rumination on the interchangeable, deadly, parasitic, musical-chairs-ness of this underworld proves that you know this is true of you, you just don't want to believe it (or you're keeping up the act as part of the ritual), so everyone else is "tweakers" and "kids" and "zombies" and "drunks," but not you, right?

…right? (look at the sequence of how each class is mentioned, the striver always comes first, the veteran comes second. Where does that put you in the story? For every you there is?)

37. God reminds you that YOU haven't yet learned, which is why you're where you are, having lost your mind. But you're about to learn…

38. Condescension score +1

39. And now they call YOU "kid." Everyone in the game thinks they're above it. You're not special.

40. Hades has a clear head. He isn't one of the lowly, parasite-eaten rabble. His clock is still ticking, while yours was frozen…

41. Your dialogue here doesn't have quotation marks until the last line of dialogue. You're "above it," "outside of it" until you fully enter the fight—you become a quotation-marked mortal, just like anyone else, which undermines your "badass one-liner" at the end, unless you're saying it to represent acceptance of your fate—sacrifice, martyrdom, Sainthood.

The Big Question at the end of this piece isn't "do you win the fight against Hades," it's, "is there life after death (in a universe where even God has called themselves interchangeable), or were you running on superstition fumes this whole time and sainthood is just a legend you told yourself to feel better?"

As with all good stories, there isn't an answer. And even in the latter universe where it's all just superstitious mumbo jumbo, the Oracle still gets to be correct and keep her title, because while she too is a mere mortal, she's a mother who's already seen too much darkness to not recognize its shape on the horizon.

42. "In STL She tells you to close your eyes and stand in front of the harvester."

43. I understand people can be super good with a knife, and can disarm people with guns, but your bravado is all self-written legend. We've never been told of your skill, there aren't any "notches in the handle," we don't even know if you've ever used it to peel an apple, let alone beat a gun in a fight.

What we DO know is that you've gotten busted before, and you have addictions and resentments and vulnerabilities and doubts.

And I DON'T WANT evidence of your abilities because that would muddy the story.

It's not about a drug-dealing genius who hung up his hat, Hulked out on grief, decided to help out an old friend, and stomped right up to the villain and killed him. That's some Marvel bullshit, and the LEAST interesting version of this story. (Ohhhh, heater of a comment and interpretation of the text, fuckin’ love it.)

44. Delusions of grandeur.

Popeye, full of spinach (Xanax), whips out his magic knife and says…

45. "I YAM WHAT I YAM."

Also…

Solomon and Hades are NAMES. The Oracle and The Saint are TITLES. The only people who don't have names in this story (besides the symbolic children at the end) are the magical women. You have a "name", which means you don't have a title, which puts you among the mortal men. And as we established above, having a name/mortality means you are visible, trackable, killable. This is you claiming your mortality (again, your dialogue has no quotation marks here, but this is your transitional moment of acceptance, your feet touching the ground).

46. He tethers you to the mortal sacrificial stake with worldly stuff (rap album), as you tried to do with the McMansion comment above, but you're both just dogs eating each other.

47. Mortal quotation marks—there you are, tangible and vulnerable. Your last words still insist that you're above Hades and the underworld, another last ditch effort at elevation or still just playing the part. Maybe you're just using your bravado (the only "weapon" we've actually seen you wield) to bait him into striking, martyring you (thereby finally "choosing your own adventure"?).

Again, in my mind, the Big Question at the end of this story is whether you attain Sainthood, which of course must be left unanswered because it's not actually what the story is about, the story is about the aspiration to transcend one's earthly self in the face of the mortal danger of existence.

48. She is older, has a literal "one up" on the boy, just like all the women in this story have on you.

49. The girl—unless uniquely talented—has a "pissing distance" of zero, so the presence/proximity of the harvester is only relevant to the boy.

50. Slow, like a cross-country trip on long flights and winding roads through nowhere on a fatal quest, shuffling to one's own funeral pyre.

51. God watching from above won't intervene, they're just the Narrator.

And a mortal's own belief that they're "above it" doesn't change the fact that they're vulnerable to it. They are, in fact, level with it.

52. Every woman in this story is an Oracle, a Saint, or a witch, and all have power over you—the boy. The boy trusts them, and is afraid of them or his devotion to them. He wants to believe he can transcend himself to join them.

And as the "pissing distance" between himself and the harvester shrinks to a feminine zero, maybe he does join them. (Big Question)

53. It's not stated whether the operator is male, but I believe he is (he prays). Criminals killing criminals. Dogs eating dogs. Boys killing boys, as the Saintly women watch.

I've used "they" for the God narrator until now to hide my reveal that this story's God is a woman.

54. "The harvester scene was just a way to keep the violence off screen and end it in an arbitrarily antisocial and nihilistic way with an open interpretation."
— you (Emil)

Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining.

I'm almost offended you tried to tell me anything about this ending is "arbitrary." You're either a liar or confused.

Overall, a heartbreaking story about the chain-reaction loss of self after the loss of another. (I think I just got bodied on my own short story by an elevated critical analyst and deadly close reader with a fantastic eye and mind to go with it. And I’m happy about it. Also, my dick is in your pocket and I’m peeing, but it’s definitely raining.)