Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Future Lovecraft

Sean Cravenregards H.P. Lovecraft and Alfred Jarry as the two literary figures with whom he most strongly identifies. The accuracy of this self-assessment is a stark and shocking testimony to the loving nature, powerful will, and extremely poor short-term memory of his beloved spouse, Karen. Sean’s creative output includes paleontological illustration; editorial illustration; bass, vocals, and songwriting for The Dizzy Toilet Devils; assistant-editing, designing, and illustrating Swill Magazine; scripting for old-school internet cartoons like Thugs On Film , Absolute Zero , and The God And Devil Show; and gallery art in the form of surrealistic landscape montages made out of macrophotographs. Try and make a resume out of that.

ALL THE JELLYHEADS are going to the beach. Emily and me, all our friends. It’s like the water drawing back before the big wave washes everything away. I cared at first, but the world is too big. Now, all I care about is Emily. I don’t get to be her lover, anymore, but I’m still something.

When I started this, it was going to be a book or an article or something. The jellyhead story, the real story. Now I don’t know who I’m writing for, but I can’t lie down and sleep the way she can, and I can’t just sit here. I’ll start screaming or jump through the glass doors or something. I don’t know what. I don’t know how to have a breakdown and I don’t want to find out.

Before Emily lay down, we covered the bed with sheet plastic. She looks so small, curled in the middle, naked, gleaming, the organisms seeping from her body, pooled inches deep around her, ropes of clear jelly clustered in mounds, each snotty, knobbly tendril writhing, burrowing into the mass, away from the air. Just like Brad in jail, in the hospital. Jason in the tank.

Emily, you’re six feet away from me, and we’re going to be together forever, and I still miss you.

That’s why I’m going down to the sea with Emily, instead of checking into the hospital to die. It’s the difference between something and nothing.

Maybe I’m not writing this for anyone. Maybe I’m writing it for Emily. I won’t let her see it, though.

Jelly is not a specific chemical; it is an animal venom. The primary active components are tryptamines, including DMT and bufotenine, but these are potentiated by a variety of psychoactive chemicals, including oxytocin and tetrodotoxin. It cannot be stored. It cannot be eaten. The dose must be delivered by a living source. Jelly.

They talk about the way meth and crack faded away in favour of jelly as a shift in national character, successful drug education, or some other ripe bullshit. Oh, no. The collapse of the shipping economy did it.

When the RIAA gained the rights to aggressively mine government records of Internet activity, they provided solid evidential chains enabling tax boards to monitor Internet sales. And local boards tend to tax out-of-state goods at a higher rate.

Internet shopping had changed the nature of warehousing; in a greenhouse world, fleets of trucks had become the equivalent of warehouses on wheels. All because it was cheaper to buy online. When they added out-of-state sales tax to your Amazon spree? The wheels stopped rolling.

Jelly was something you could grow in cold saltwater, something hard to kill that just needed some mice or something every once in a while. Something that took you away to a place so blue it was black, so cold it snuggled you down, someplace you weren’t alone. And when you came back, you never felt alone again. You’d see someone who’d been there and you’d know.

Brad was lucky. His tank was meant for lobsters and crabs, had a filter and aerator and everything, and it only cost him two hundred bucks and a quarter-pound of seedy ditch weed. In all the shitty little towns and fucked-over industrial centers, all the side-tracked cities and worn-out projects, people were having the same kind of luck. It spread fast. By the time people started pointing at the freaks in Hoboken and Innsmouth, the Omaha scene had been going on for more than a year. Long enough to start feeling permanent, like we’d found our way of life.

Lying there in the dark, all day and all night in piles, listening to slowbeat, hands linked. People who say slowbeat is bad music are missing the point; it’s there to synchronize heartbeats. Emily would lie in my arms for hours, letting me pet her as she pushed against me, moving with the same, slow insistency as the animals in the tank. It was living in a dream, a dream we had on purpose.

And every time we’d touch a strand of jelly to the underside of our tongues (They said Sylvia would hit up in her vagina and we believed it), the tiny little stingers that got us high would break off and swim into us, and make themselves at home.

The motel we’re staying in, we have the living room in the front and a bedroom in the back. At night, when there isn’t any traffic, you can hear the sea. Everyone I know is in the hospital, or they’ve left for the coast.

Emily could still talk when we got here, so when the news hit, she was able to call me from the other room. I came in, and she shushed me and pointed at the screen. “They keep showing it over and over.” Her voice was choked and it was all I could do not to put my arm around her.

The image on the screen was Brad’s big, refrigerated tank, one end bubbling furiously from the aerator. Through the one glass wall, you could see a thick, brown mat growing on top, thinning to threads of clear jelly underneath. Animals float in the chill water, imbedded, threads of jelly bursting from their heads and hindquarters. They are not dead; they shift constantly but very, very slowly. Primitive motion. Mice and dogs and cats and one nude human body, pale, thin, clothed in jelly.

“Shit,” I said. “That’s our house. That’s Jason.”

Brad, microphones in his face, orange jumpsuit, looks awful; he’s crying. “I swear, I didn’t know this…I didn’t know what to do. He crawled in there and he was still alive, and he’s dead now, right? When they took him out, they killed him. I was the one who took care of Jason–”

The way they cut him off, he must have started swearing.

Now we knew we weren’t going home. It was settled.

When Emily seemed asleep, before her jelly came out, I cupped her breast. The nipple pushed into the palm of my hand and made me think of a kitten nosing for a caress. I drew my hand away, filled with shame at my act and resentment that Emily’s body still remembered me, even if Emily had forgotten. I don’t understand why she won’t let me go, but I understand why I’m staying. Hope is a bitch.

There’s a booklet, a ‘zine I made the spring Emily and I got together. I called it “ Deep Blue ” and Xeroxed it onto light blue paper, and embarrassed goosebumps just lifted the hair on my arms. Every time a friend asked for a copy, I gave them a handful and they made their way around. Sometimes, I’d find a copy in someone’s bathroom and get a chance to wave it around and say, “I did this.” I talk about the specimen they found in the Smithsonian from an old Antarctic expedition, claim it was a jelly-infected penguin. It could have been. And there’s something I found from a website for fishermen, talking about ghost nets.

Drift nets get loose from time to time, walls of plastic mesh moving on their own through the ocean, harvesting for nothing but rot. They call them “ghost nets”. So, when the strange things started showing up on sonar, unmoving schools of fish with dolphins floating among them, orcas and seals in an unmoving mass in the dark of the ocean, they figured they were ghost nets.