shon

so priss and i graduated high school, high-schooled (pot blends with undergrowth knots, and boy was Nine rife) but soundly educated, and went our separate ways. she split to ivy leagues, away from corn hell and the limber stalks it hid; i went nowhere of importance but Nine. drifting, listing, always stern-bound by the seas lagging the rest of life's loafer-crew. we ran her ship terribly and harangued society's worse. merchant plunderers by day, forest scavengers at moonrise. but we didn't scavenge sustenance; we scavenged for sustainable places, locales fit for lingering in the moon-coat mists that swept across fertile floors. every oak a ship, every leaf a sail. chipper winds of change, tomorrow's echoing siren call. up on a bark-mast one saw all, from the rolling golf-hills, where priss presented her gifts, to the salt-colored pillar, paint-palette blank, at the flotilla's center. sweeping, swooping canopy, left to right: a panorama fit for universal studios. intrinsic beauty: Nine's best distraction. if one saw all Nine presented, one didn't see what i did.

Nine didn't like us. 

that's why we scampered. 

that's why shon found moe.

a few weeks of survival, baptized in night summer, unveiled Nine's true colors. Nine's tenacious ability to hunt should not go understated. Nine kicked us, the pirate-bums, into working shape, and pulled all others under. starlit nights heralded Nine's release and remained the cut-off point for ship boarding sessions. we all arrived port-side at different times from the surrounding towns, told more about ourselves through tree-branch movements than any office monkey desk chatter deduced. grimy feet, the goat-veterans of night-Nine, began tracks over fresh mud early as 6. others, those opportunist wolf-snatchers, didn't trundle in until 7. at 8 sharp rushed all the larks: bird-brains, quack-heads, beak-buzzers, nutsos in flight. they snatched patches fastest, took to roost squawking. seagulls in a sultry land, vivacious wood erect at their light patting up and over. out poured others: buck-does pairs clopping out bushes (a pang to wisp-errs, mistakes last time mitigated), peacocks prance-looked but piss-prepped (nobody fully took in what Nine threatened anyway), and our worst output: red-tape, red-assed baboon buffoonery. jolts, familiar neck-tingles and hair-pointing paired with a growing constraint of Nine's velvet atmosphere, motivated us instinctuals on deck, but no, those monkey-fucks -couldn't- mar their grubby thumb-paws with our musk. instead, on went the prattling, on went the foraging, on went their brief, knuckled-up exposure to Nine's nighttime dirt and grime.

then the moon rose right and our alarms all buzzed for 9's arrival.

there isn't a much cornier movement besides that into a 2nd person. 

well, you wouldn't know that with what corn-errs cut you there. 

ghastly. an adjective summed up by the rest. what followed for the gorillas, proud of what chimp-imitation of man's domination they brought forth for a moment on Nine's glob-gut. what followed your visions, to hell and too far back, glimpsing through pandemonium. the few to my crew (kodiak, swallow, and arctic snarler), they all said they gazed into the abyss, into lathered umbra left as existential excess. i failed to fall fool. you would too, if you looked close and took note of how no black spot stayed static. how dark thoughts slunk, sank and sizzled but never stopped. snap! and a man-beast, cut off, dove low again. SLASH proceeded harbor vandalism, fingernails left ingrained in sap as another ape flailed through bush. snip, some slushy twirling shlopped tangled bone-column knots onto our mast-main. another sentence couldn't do Nine's justice, couldn't make visible what savaged those poor desk-draggers. yelps, tears, even faintly human pleads dissolved into cicada chirp, washed out across the blossoming buzz of deck talk, as Nine's night tore on.

we enjoyed our sacrifice. 

uneased, but at ease. 

filthy land-lubbers.

no ungainly parts littered the shore as Nine's wildlife stripped down, brought au naturale groundward out of its nightly repression. everyone, every time afterwards, wondered what ravaged our bay with unmatched consistency. theories abounded, crawling out person to person, eager infection under truthful masquerade. our quarantine kept it kosher.

"devils. devils, i'm positivo. not demons," kodiak motioned at the tranquility, "because demons'd have swallowed err'one yesterday. them devils, they're lawyer-types. only exert claim on this ground, at this date, and ain't ever late. Nine ain't ever late. ain't ever miss a spot, neither."

arctic snarler did his namesake. "who saw shit up there in our treehouses? how we know these aren't people on the ground? people like us? in three weeks, three weeks since the first night, everybody's comfortable in branches. what could three years do to us? what if they're us...exposed to age?"

and the swallow, who sprouted into (and burst out of) my mind as shon, swallowed hard, missed by coincidence. flick, went your captain's vision. a pale moon-head craned starboard, then vanished to night star-board. blips of static leading off a tell.

an exception to daytime 'panzees.

worth future investigation.

soon.

but exemption doesn't do much besides screw us on fate's weaving board. my good reader, you wouldn't make it out alive. not you, not any baboon-beast. that's all the better. these comments don't stem from disrespect. no mockeries adhere to Nine's jungle-book visitation. all those baboon-loons kept their positions at one world in mind: that "real" one, that place so mired in miming as to mimic itself meaningless. that place that told hu(bris)man they were themselves. that place which embraced a genesis of genetic invigoration, of scientific, God-given objectivity. that place that ignored and ignores Nine, that pretends its existence doesn't rejoin their divisions.

shon kept his head at two...

...and ended up worse split.