The Tower - XVI

A Slice of a Novella from Tarot Blanco to @emptywheel.bsky.social

Evicsetude manage: pity the y’coreference wished held even empty lulz

Limerick: Somewhere in the dark days of February 2025

It cracked, and in the intellectual vapor of the soundless lightning came to a halt. It was not in America.

The silent steam came rolling from her nostrils as she put together the most delicate insult that she could think of. Then, set it down in calligraphy on the screen. It was in those moments when her research combined with her delicate Snark made her the most proud in the business of conglomerate facts in two delicious humor.

It was a gift, though she did not know exactly when it came to her. Perhaps it was fully flowered and zinged its zang to topple the Golden Crown down the gray walls and spattered all over the nobles in their flophood. It was a long way down from the windowed tower to the gray ledge which plunged below into the clouds all a broken with yellow rain cascading down with red rain conspiring up.

In truth, this was merely an off-handed démarche on her way to her real point, which is why it pleased her so much, even if her readers skipped to the larger point.

It cracked. From outside the window, terror lightning followed, followed by minutes of silence. Then, the boom settled over the entire house. Why couldn’t the average person connect the flash and the rumble? It seemed so obvious to her. Why could they not remember? because it is the remembering of one fact placed on top of another, placed on top of another, that truly had resonance.

She looked out of the window to see another lightning flash, and she imagined because she could not have actually seen, the rivers sluice wide down the green, green, sward of grass that proliferated along the town. She knew there was no way that the church spire comes as grey creeps of sodden brick when the faint trimmings of mortars. She could not think of it other than as a town because her life revolved around real cities where real things happened. But it was strange, the real things that happened were for the most part silent, and silent as a tomb, where one person said abstractions which had consequences that reverberated in the same way that the lightning flash did. And it was piecing together those actions which was the real trick of the tail.

Then she again fixed her eyes on the screen. Every iteration did not change the basic interaction: because really it was in the mind that connected. This is why her website was plain: because it was sorting through all the quiet which made all of the difference.

Then she sweated because she needed to adjoint the imperative: to show how one thing and its inverse is the monetary connection. And it is within that that her eyes concentrated not on the words themselves but the meaning behind the words.

Then in reverie, a vision appeared and ordered chaos that she knew from the first was the objective of the actor. It was here but not here in front of a different screen which at the time was the CRT, long since gone and forgotten found in history books and screenshots but rarely in the round except in reconstructions of that lost age. But the theme was the same: an empty head with his flunkies causing spectacular failure after spectacular failure in exigent details which would eventually be found in the correspondence from hither to yon.

And it was down one of these rabbit holes that she read the exact enunciation of a crime which was phrased in words that had nothing to do with the crime itself. Only the the discussion draft and particular to cross-reference to Title I. “Will you be in town and available?”

And then the every stopped with that question that made all the difference in the world: because there was something that was said in person which was not in the correspondence. An empty wheel filled with detail.

America, when did you stop speaking what you were speaking to say? She laughed because she did not wish to crack and cry.