A New Day

There should be a pylon up there.

It’s what I think whenever I’m here.

There really should be a pylon up there.

And this time I was running up there, up to up there. To the free space at the top of the rock, New Gibraltar, in the eastern domain of the Dome.

From the ground to the summit, it is about a mile on a steadily rising incline, this western slope. Treeless after the first rise, this dome-shaped mountain of stone is not quite dome-smooth, but it’s northern face was smoothed by an early us, a pre-us, in the 21st century. A blank slate for projecting and reflecting colors and entertainment. A tabula rasa for everyone. This rock, this New Gibraltar, this mountain of stone.

I leapt an oblong chunk of granite, feeling a giddy glee for that moment aloft. Low, but aloft. Cooler air breathing through my carbon fiber boots, and then the soft-squish-rubber landing. A little breeze into the collar of my navy blue, zipped-up jump suit. And I kept on running.

When I run like this, I have to distract my mind. On this day and place, it wasn’t difficult. The lack of a pylon anywhere at the summit loomed over my head and upon my mind. The lack loomed. The bald head of the rock shined.

And it is just a rock, a pluton, an intrusion of igneous rock out of the soil’s top layer. In actuality, a multitude of rocks in amalgam. Like leaves of grass. Granite in combination with quartz monzonite, granodiorite, and pink granite. The rock and rocks, mostly blanched and seer.

Welled-up, 350 million years past, magma from our core to cool here. When this dome was young, Africa touched our shores. One world of many.

Up, I jumped, climbed, and ran over a series of inclines with regular sub-summits. I avoided stretches of ramps and steps, reenforcing my training, feeling and honing my body. I relished the hopeful flora, reaching and poking through cracks and crags, life prevailing through this nesting dome within a greater dome. I steadied my breath through naming.

Wildflowers. So many subsets. Agrimonia gryposepala. Yellow daisies. Dewberry. Thimbleberry. Small bugbane. Least bluets. Then little rock pools and plants. Gratiola amphiantha... pool sprite... snorklewort...

From an awkward hop, the tip of my boot landed on the corner of a low rock that looked like a truncated cone cupping a shallow, dark pool. The petals of a snorklewort in bloom along the water’s surface were ground by my boot into the rock, and the scent—subtle, pungent, bitter—rose up to my passing olfactory awareness.

On the wind, I caught relief through some rosewood, a waft of someone’s body oil, then back into the thick of life. I jumped into, and ran up through, a crowd. I ducked and climbed around casual hikers, vista-viewers, and some other people expressing their bodies in a similar manner as my own, but at different speeds.

The scents enveloped me, and I embraced them. Sour, tangy, onions and cabbage through glandular filters, and musks and pheromones and Somber Hope and the sweat of panicky guilt, that urge to implode and the subsequent shivers, and still then there was the smell of breath, sticky saliva of lips parting, mucus drying as corners were pulled into a smile and for a tenth of a second it was right by my ear, a face in the crowd, and I felt-it-heard-it-smelt-it, and then nothing but my boots beating against the rock, the rocks, up steep, off the steps, out of the crowd, up rock. And I craned my neck towards the not-too-distant summit.

There should be a pylon up there.

Read the rest of Chapter 1 in The Shrieking of Nothing by Jordan A. Rothacker.

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Jordan A. Rothacker is a writer who lives in Athens, Georgia where he received a MA in Religion and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Georgia. He also received a BA in Philosophy from Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York, the state in which he was born. His essays, reviews, interviews, poetry, and fiction have been featured in such publications as The Exquisite Corpse, Guernica, Bomb Magazine, Entropy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Brooklyn Rail, Rain Taxi, Dead Flowers, Literary Hub, and The Believer.

Rothacker is the author of the novels: The Pit, and No Other Stories (Black Hill Press, 2015/Spaceboy Books, 2022); And Wind Will Wash Away (Deeds, 2016); My Shadow Book by Maawaam (Spaceboy Books, 2017); and The Death of the Cyborg Oracle (Spaceboy Books, 2020); and the short story collection, Gristle: weird tales (Stalking Horse Press, 2019).

2021 saw the French language publication of The Death of the Cyborg Oracle and The Celestial Bandit: A Tribute to Isidore Ducasse, the Comte de Lautréamont, Upon the 175th Anniversary of His Birth edited by Rothacker.

For publishing news visit jordanrothacker.com.