There’s no mistaking it. It spoke, just now.

    “This is tiring, philosopher,” it repeats itself, and its non-voice would blow my skin into goose-bumps.

  Oh, I’d tremble even. You’d think I’d have, but I’ve never heard the singularity speaking before. I’ve taunted it and chased it and cursed it. Looked for it in places of worship and dusty libraries. In cold cemeteries and sunlit fields. In the oldest houses and in the looming quiet seconds before the descent of a thunderstorm.

  Hoping to get my hands on it and trap it. So I could look it over with my own eyes and assure myself of its existence. But it isn’t that easy.

  It’s baiting me now, I think, and that’s fine. It knows me. To it, I’m simple. There’s no riddle about me. It knows I deal in portraits and I thrive on thoughts. If I paint faces and minds, I want them cut off from time. And it so happens most mouths are traps. Tied round and round around them in little knots - impressions and snippets press bloody foot and handprints into the jelly slush tissue of the brain, grey and purple.

  I sit up on the edge of the bed and the streetlight cast in the window filters through a familiar white-lace curtain. If it’s invoking distant childhood nights. It plays dirty. It works because I feel the fingertips of slow sadness sinking into me.

  The harpies whirl around me like creeping wind.

    “Why did you wait so long to speak?”

    “You knew I could.”

    “It’s not a surprise,” I say.

  The bird jumps and grabs onto the thin metal bars of the cage, clinking its feet against it. I’m almost unsure whether it’s really answering me or if I’m making it up. I wait for it to beg to be released but it doesn’t. Maybe I shouldn’t expect such a human reaction from it. Maybe it’s indifferent to it all. After all, centuries move as it barely begins to blink an eye. A metaphorical eye, I guess. I wish it had eyes. I squint my own. No, I hope it does. Maybe its vision is infinitely refracted and it somehow keeps up with all sort of timelines effortlessly.

    “Why’d you choose that poor child?” I ask.

    “There wasn’t any choosing. But you’re jealous.”

  Unfortunately for me, I’m the kind divinity despises and runs away from - a dreaded philosopher. It likes keeping us underfoot and unseeing. I can’t blame it since philosophers are sneaky and do very much with very little. It awaits patiently and occasionally teases us with crumb-clues that really only lead nowhere. It has eternity at its disposal and we have a handful of nights.

  I lean toward my case, knowing I’ll find a pair of surgical tweezers, and I do. It doesn’t move away when I bend over the table. My shadow twists over the cage. The harpies try to get a better look. They snicker and whisper. Sharp teeth. Mocking, always.

  As if to say, whose side are you on really? But do sides even matter?

  Philosophers don’t have much shame and begging isn’t particularly difficult. Turns out, it hates to be chased. It hates to be prodded, too, from what I can see. It flinches away from the ends of the tweezers. I wonder if this cage is good enough. It’s probably enough to contain it for now only because it wants it to be.

  Divinity is and isn’t all at once, so its presence, both at once, fills the cage and leaves it devoid of anything. Following this logic it should go: “Ouch, it doesn’t hurt.”

  I pull the tweezers away from it.

    “Im not sure where to start with you,” I say, quite honestly and quite exhausted. I don’t how long I’ve been here for. I wonder briefly about my body, laying in the pharmacists’ backroom.

    “It doesn’t matter very much.”

It’s right. It doesn’t and I’m quite lucky, if I think about it.

    “Surely you realize what a chance this is. You’re not Sunny, anymore. You’ve given me free hand.”

  Oh, I’m of a mind to be a philosophical clinician disturbing hidden sounds in the hollow of its symbolical bones. Squeezing out reluctantly sung melodies. Draining the inter-dimensional. Tearing apart and sifting through moments to find the birth of the burning spark.

  I won’t show it charts and percentages and fill out prescriptions. I can’t cure the chase and I won’t build it statues and altars. I won’t write it sonnets and odes and it won’t feel in delicate alexandrines. All black-marbled tombs, speaking: divinity will bury you, and it will, it will. Just not for now.

  For now, I’m just lucky.

    “Yes, but at what? Don’t you already feel it shifting?” Its non-voice leering and forced, full of an anticipation that would make my heart race. But I can’t feel my heart here. Though, if I try hard enough, I can remember how it usually sounds at the top of my throat.

    “You’re not a pond of endless depth,” I say, and it sizes me up. I look for trances of anger. But it’s wingless now, shackled and caged, if I want it to be. “You’re the victim, the cause and the criminal. You’re the singularity. You’re not a threat anymore but your prophecies still spill out and I don’t know how to patch the immaterial.”

  Scratchy electric guitar feedback drones through the walls.

    I shake my head, “It was you, setting the Crooked House on fire. Knowing he’ll come. You’re trying to get under my skin. It won’t work.”

    “And why not?”

    “Because everyone’s the ghost of something, even you, little divinity,” I say, wondering how I can starve it. How to crack it open without breaking it entirely before it drowns me.

    “Sounds like you’re proposing a wager, philosopher. You want answers and I want Lilian.”

  Ah, there it is. Finally out with it. Master of the wait, even in its state of hungry restless revenge.