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the archive(s):
issue no. 5:
Ontology of Skepticism (ix, x) / Ella McCrystle
IX
There is no divine order. In assuming God we forget the kid that froze to death or crazy Bertha with 97 feral cats who lived in the projects they mowed [ adding Charm to the City. ] Hold your breath for long enough and see how passive "god" really is. AnyGirl vanished from The Avenue -- not THE Pennsylvania Avenue where "humidity" lives in a big white house -- the one 45 miles north, in a blue-collar town where windows roll up and car doors lock to avoid her kind: criminals, the psychic, the Arabber, junkies, whores and their johns, crazies and their cats. AnyGirl might be any or all of them. We'll never know; we've looked away. She knows the importance of invisibility, knows better than to admit she can recite all of Frost's poems. We wouldn't believe her; she's never seen the woods in snow.
X
There are no fields of amity. Amity is a run-down drug corner where Edgar Allen Poe once lived. If you visit, bring your mace and don't tell AnyGirl you rejoice in mankind if you can't look her in the eye. Thoughts -- those thinking thoughts twist the wind. AnyGirl holds no illusions but lets us hold ours. She lifts the arm from the harbor, wraps it in her best t-shirt, clears a space of syringes, used condoms and crack vials, buries it in the abandoned lot with a few weeds. Sitting by the freshly mixed dirt, she smokes a cigarette as a toast. She knows you don't see God in her -- can't see it in herself. AnyGirl has become the reflection we've shown her, the invisible one.
But in this severed limb -- black and bloated with death, she hears the whispered word of God.
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