LOWER
Trog stops. He’s floating in midair. The world becomes silent all at once, except for a distant voice. It could reasonably be described with words like matronly, beatific, ancient, hellfire missile, and lovely. Trog cringes. She is here, somewhere. Once he pays acknowledgement, she appears right in front of him. She is draped in a sheer veil, but there is nothing behind it. Maybe a shape. She is more place than person, a first home from earliest childhood. A window into oneself. She parts her curtains and the tendrils emerge. Trog readies himself. She is the earthling. The keeper of the dirt haven. The star-nosed mole. She wraps herself around him and takes him in. There is no cause for alarm. This is just another in a long series of dances. She squeezes Trog’s cheeks like a mother overcome with love. He is everywhere. He is being dragged across stars. He is being dragged over rolling green hills somewhere in the idyllic west. He is joining a funeral procession. A man is being lowered into a grave and he is Trog’s brother, but the other mourners are strangers. Trog wants to crawl into the grave, but he is dragged away. A million siblings are being lowered into the earth. They are lower than dirt. They are not lower than dirt. They are everywhere. She tells him that a cry comes out of the earth’s core. She tells him that the nonprofit industrial complex is his grandparent. She tells him that a trillion worms are crying out from their special places in hiding and they need him but his petty grievances are unwelcome in the land of blind things. She tells him that beneath the veil of the strip mall is a truth lying waiting for the abandoned child, and that truth is identifiable as a violation. She tells him that she is the avatar of the abandoned strip mall and she has been waiting for a hundred thousand years, raised aloft by an early human, hunting and gathering with visions of capitalism incomprehensible at the time, succeeded by an American advertising executive in the neolithic, succeeded by a bronze age technocrat, succeeded by a grand litany of freaks and perverts and abject former students with backward knowledge. Trog embraces her and smells anise and roses and cigarettes and sees utter blackness and he wants to be there for the rest of his life.