CHIRONOPLASTY
THE SKY FREEZES and falls to the ground. Black shards of night scatter under Chiron’s clumsy hooves, crushing an obsidian infection, glittering as he leaves behind his frail shelter for gunmetal city streets. It’s too cold to slow down, colder still exposed to the inscrutable black glow outside Chiron’s hideaway. Tempting the sea of streets, he may drown in the pain of his unthinkable body, a centaur at risk in the wrong cryptid habitat.
Killing chronic futures with every step, he exits the past with bold choices as the metastasized city sprouts identical heads on each corner, another No-Club in no-time blocking, beckoning, exploding all the way down across endless intersections.
No-Club has no exit. The neon sign hovers above wet streets. Faces of strangers lie flat in reflective pools slashed by passing traffic. The pavement is wet and silent, then wet and wheezing, then cracked by window-faces with every bus and door and alleyway that rises. Across the city’s excess, Chiron rounds the corner with a clatter of hooves.
The shine of slippery breath as the surface cracks, liquid underneath releases, and Chiron catches their half-horse lower torso on a parking meter pole before they splash to the ground, gutter and sidewalk ready to greet them with a concussion. Unknown water-faces turn away in abject disinterest. Awkward, winded, bent around the parking meter; Chiron reassembles his four horse legs and two human arms into a workable position to avoid disaster and choose a better medical crisis.
Today is surgery day at No-Club and anything goes.
Another door opens in no-time with sufficient spacious egress to accommodate a centaur’s shape. Rumbling noises spill out on smoke and hide the broken sky. Pastel fog and light pollution undermine the cosmos while frozen gases of the void remain and settle over the cancerous urban expanse. Native to the desert, Chiron slips on ice. The cold cuts him in half. Half centaur, half man, half something-or-other; too many halves to make a simple whole and all the confusion of a fable told and retold.
No-Club has no exit, and glimpsing what’s behind the door as it swings open and closed flips archetypal cards from Freud’s primal scene: shame, awe, desire. Chiron can practically hear the hand being dealt with the flat repetitive certainty that he’ll never leave once he enters the rigged game-space of no-time.
With the choices they’ve made, there’s nowhere else left to go without traveling backwards in time. A centaur’s body doesn’t fit in the city outside. The city dark; the city wet. The city splashing with synthetic sounds as tires thrill across gunmetal streets. The city alive. The city will eat itself. There’s no sky anymore, only cold smoke. The city destroys mythology. The city regresses exponentially as it perpetuates onward towards infinity.
Inside No-Club with no regrets, because the poetic architecture of Chiron’s mythological chest was made all wrong and they will not survive another night alone in the city cold, the city lost. Half myth, half man, hung with shameful udders like obscene growths, diseased, inflated, bulbous with the visible fruition of external demands, leaking the milk of damnation to feed the infantile needs of others who plead and beg and grab; but what about Chiron? Who cares who they are and what they want beneath this forced combination of parts?
Before he can catch his breath or accommodate his hot horse-haunches to No-Club’s raging temperature, a stranger seizes Chiron’s full breasts, inspects them with mechanical efficiency, and says, “Come with me right away to the crash site.”
Which explains some of the heat and smoke in here tonight. Alien intervention sounds more promising than the known prosaic earthbound back-alley hacks, so Chiron follows.
In the crush of the club, Chiron’s groin sweats, and the scent of horse dick stinks up their vicinity with excessive force. They can tell who’s bemused by a chin lift of olfactory interest and who, in contrast, ranks inferior by way of an unrestrained eye-roll. It’s good to wear the barometer of sexual prowess openly on their long centaur torso, good to graze soft city toes with the superior durability of hooves. In another age, they would have been a god to these craven creatures desiccated by modernity. Chiron takes wider steps. It’s good to smell like a threat.
As bodies move away, Chiron spreads their shoulders, pushing out his chest. The shallow cavity of a centaur rests between the bulbous abominations, well-formed and desirable though they may be. The blood of generations may beg for him to procreate, to warm and nurture great broods of lustful young; but Chiron cannot respect a past that clamors for mere compromise below a dead sky. He is a cold and lonely centaur and will not be consumed by the city dark. They will not be mastered by the random genetic lottery braided from a paper horse’s harness. He will escape the sea of streets, for the centaur presents as a land animal and bullies through the crowded club like a holy beast and shoves their trouble into alien palms:
“Cut them off!”
The mother tongue is quick. The superposition of no-cock, no-time in alien gleam-stoked surgical suites sleeps in sync with incomplete dreams. The blue light of the crash site preps heads for experimentation and hypnotizes nerve endings like unlocked webs. Warning: the following paragraph contains graphic depictions of violence against gendered body parts which some readers may find upsetting or offensive. Warning: dysphoria is hell. Warning: this is a work of fiction. Warning: don’t believe everything you read, this warning least of all. Warning: what did you expect from a centaur?
Warning, danger. In contrast to chopping off, say, a finger or a small toe, the following contains a graphic and prolonged scene where a breast is snagged in the scissor-grip of alien equipment like garden shears. In traumatic throes of pseudo-erotic hatred for the transitional object’s haunted origin, the breast pillows between the wide V-shaped blades of the clipping device, flesh squeezed between sharp edges as they snap closed, nipple bulging, stretching, its gift of fat pink aureole swollen about to burst before the blood spurts. The second deletion of the next breast repeats the gory scene. The centaur’s chest sheds its creamy excess as the alien surgeons couple with their implicit trauma, exaggerating the image of the body in an ecstasy of transformation.
Emptiness spreads through Chiron in peaceful pulsations, a natural anesthetic like a slow and constant heartbeat. He hears the voices of the merging surgeons, voices in his head who also hear him and respond to the sleepless dream of self-creation and recreating self.
The no-voice of no-time speaks and listens with a secreted shell to scab over Chiron’s breastplate. Alien proteins course through Chiron’s half-awake horse flesh, healing uncomfortable angles in an increasingly ambitious fantasy of rebirth. The exploding city heats in anger, flapping wet streets like whips, shaking No-Club’s foundations and juddering the crash site and making a mad blinking strobe of the alien surgical suite’s gleaming blue light.
The city dark; the city ruptured. The city screaming stay in your lane! Protestors flood in below the neon egress, but No-Club has no exit in contrast to the infinite metastasizing city that perpetuates outside its doors. Body after body enters shrieking sex is real and your body is a temple! Hand after hand thrusts pamphlets from the Institute of Genetic Purity printed in hot pink with gold heart emblems linked together encasing slogans: save our girls from alien misogyny! Invaders are everywhere! But the hands cannot thrust, and the mouths cannot move as the bodies pile in from the ever-flowing rivers of the crowded city streets and pack No-Club full to the static seams.
The blue strobe light can barely illuminate. The mob amasses like the multiplying bacteria of an infection. There’s no space between shoulders and faces. Protestors pour in from the ever-birthing reproductively diseased spunk-hole of the city, and participants of large stature stomp the slight, teeming to the top of the pile, gasping like netted fish.
Bones snap. Teeth smash. Lips bleed. None can breathe by the time the dominant bodies squeeze up to the ceiling’s rafters. At the bottom of the pile, the weakest have already expired. Chiron sleeps through the massacre, dreaming in alien synchronicity, happy in their blissful release from an oppressor that once lived inside their skin.
No-time speeds up as a result of the deceleration forced upon the space by the crush of the protestors; medical waste rots faster. The dying expire at an increasing rate. Putrefaction happens quickly as No-Club enters into real time and Chiron awakes.
He risks drowning in the sea, in the wrong cryptid habitat. The murk of many deaths accumulated doesn’t affect Chiron’s ability to breathe, but the inane roar of protestor no-thought chokes his soul with each poison drop of hate which judges and demands their martyrdom. Trapped and liquefying, the eyes of the eugenicists can no longer deny what they see: Chiron concedes eagerly to illicit alien surgery and will do anything to be free.
As time continues moving, the city’s reflected space reaches a pinpoint of exponential regress. No-Club’s boundaries quiver with quantum anarchy. The alien surgeons flaunt their expertise, changing beast to man and back again through endless permutations of joy. Lights like finely tuned piano keys, like inks in unbearable colors begin to blend and bend the sick opinions of the onlookers.
We are all witnesses to Chiron’s transformations, willing or not, and if not, why? Why do we care? And if we do not desire transformation, what do we fear?
A welcome carnage ends the parade of Chiron’s desires. Priests and hard men in ball caps desire it, too. Many directions of light traveling at real-time speed-map a new territory outside the city dark, the city cold, the city dead with no stars, the city that cannot hold. No-Club exits itself, mirroring the city’s infinity. Protestors unravel as the twine of their impacted thoughts spills out, neurons weaving a less broken sky that holds more light. Chiron hopes there will be enough light.
Already it seems a little warmer. Or perhaps Chiron has grown stronger. Where the city ends, mythology begins. The vanishing point grows visible under the new web of dimly brightening sky. Fruiting heads high among alien arbors nod in new sacred time and in synchronized agreement as Chiron delivers a final battle cry to the city’s surviving protestors: “Your quote-unquote violence is my freedom. Technology leaves you behind. Your infantile fears betray you, and my body is not your battleground. You know nothing of my pain.”