“Hard Wave”
On the seventy-second sunrise of the Orange Season, the sky peeled back its tongue and hummed a frequency that boiled memory into pigment. That’s when I saw her—Veil-Mother of the Fire Rivers—bending backward through time like a flame deciding not to burn.
She was wading the Hard Wave, the molten ripple where thoughts from dying universes crash against the shell of ours. Behind her, the horizon chattered—electric and frantic, a tapestry of extinct ideas fizzing into form just long enough to scream their names. They had names like “Skroln” and “Before-Again” and “Yesbut.”
She carried a sphere—a sun too young to know how to explode—and offered it to no one, because offering requires intent and she had transcended direction. A forked tendril reached out of the glacial coral reef, not to stop her, but to witness her passage, etching every swaying motion into liquid topography.
A blue creature in the upper left corner tried to whistle, but it had forgotten how mouths work.
This painting was not made. It was retrieved—pulled like a fish from a depthless sleep.
Hang it crooked. Let it drip. It remembers your dreams better than you do.