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A gesture out of place

by Zwei Kreise

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    NOTE: This disc includes a completely different mix of "A gesture out of place" designed to fit on a standard 80-minute compact disc. It is offered in contrast and in addition to the longer version in the digital release.

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1.

about

"A gesture out of place" - he heard his own voice say, as if it were a recording. He had no memory of speaking the phrase, or what it could have meant. It did not even sound like him, to his thinking, beyond the surface-level tonality of his voice. "Like someone using my voice to speak" he thought, in another more transparent voice in his own mind, then wondered about this too, and the dark implications it left him unable to shake.

He stood up, and found that his clothes were caked in dried mud, and brushing it off he winced at the newfound pain of an apparent bullet wound in his arm. He reached his other hand up to the point where he perceived the strongest level of injury, and instead found he, or someone other than he, had already bandaged it, and quite neatly also, which contrasted against his otherwise disheveled appearance.

He was standing in a dried out vista, small dying plants dotting a wide and slowly descending landscape, which seemed to be meant for the water of a lake, only now it was filled with sun-cracked soil. In the half-moment between blinking and opening his eyes again, he saw it as he'd imagined it - perhaps even as it once was - filled with glimmering silver water, and something else, floating along the surface of it, which he could not identify, although it did nothing but unsettle him further to think about what might have been floating there, and also why he could not identify it.

Starting to move, he felt the dull weight of something heavy and metallic shift in his coat pocket - he reached up to grasp it and before he found the object, that transparent voice in his mind told him what it would be. The gun looked strange when he held it out before him, more like a tool or some type of multipurpose technology than a dark metal pistol to match the barren landscape. "Doesn't look like the wild West to me" he absentmindedly mumbled, and then for a moment considered what about his situation did look like the wild West? Nothing immediate came to mind, but he couldn't shake the sense that this assessment of where - and perhaps when - he found himself was indeed the correct assessment to make.

It was then he began to notice the strange fluttering noise, which was sometimes a noise and sometimes a physical sensation, like someone running a cold wire up his spine and neck. When this happened, his vision stuttered, although this was less alarming to realize than his observation of his surroundings filling in and out intermittently with buildings, people, horses and changing weather, everything spinning out of focus, slipping into reality for just a millisecond at a time, never enough to fully comprehend it, but always feeling as if, whoever the people were in these micro-hallucinations, they were seeing him blink in and out before them also.

And just like they began, one such jittering incident snapped, and he was now standing beneath a night sky littered with stars, his clothes different now, cleaner, his wound gone entirely. Before him was a wooden chair sitting empty in a dirt road, oddly set next to an old record player, which was wearily unspooling some distorted piano music at the wrong speed. He found himself compelled to approach the scene, sensing somehow that the chair was meant for him, and unable to force his body from doing so, despite his mind reeling with confusion and wonder at these new surroundings. He saw his jacketed arm reach out and hold the back of the chair as he sat down in it, then waited for something to happen.

He couldn't imagine what would come next - how could he? His only hope, vain though it may have been, was that this were some strange dream he'd soon awake from, only later able to piece together what he had seen into something that made sense. The fluttering began again, this time moving the sun above him in the sky from noon to sunset and back again in some glitched zoetrope, scattering light everywhere, oscillating into a stomach-churning whine of metal sound, bending and modulating, every moment of it more unnatural than the last, until, behind him - a click - and blackness.

It was some time later when he awoke again, though this time he would have completely forgotten the prior events. Not because he could no longer remember them, but because someone else had taken the liberty for him, and helped him clear his head. He opened his eyes, seeing a grey stone room, lit subtly by a fluorescent somewhere out of view, and before him, a door in the unadorned wall opened. A woman stepped in, blonde and slim, but with a slight angled jawline that added a complexity to his assessment of her character, wearing a rather dated blue dress. He knew he'd seen her somewhere before, several times in fact, but he was surprised to find he could no longer remember her name, or really anything about her at all. He tried to speak up and ask what was happening, but also found he could not speak. Something whirred inside of him, prompting the transparent voice to again seep up and inform him, in not speech but shapes and letters, that he would be permitted to speak when he was prompted to.

The nameless woman sat down in her own chair in front of him, and smiled. She too seemed to know who he was, and he could only feel shame at being prostrated here before her unable to define what was happening to him. She reached beneath her chair and picked up an object that had been sitting on the floor, and held it facing him directly. He'd never seen such a thing before - unremarkable, yes - but why then was she holding it before him as she now was? With her face unchanged, clearly not anticipating his answer or reaction, she finally spake: "What do you see?" and something very small, and very far back in his mind, unlatched then, animating his tongue into the vibration of speech, and although he himself could not think of anything to say, he found his body answering for him instead.

"It doesn't look like anything to me"

credits

released January 12, 2023

W/P by Zwei Kreise. Text by Brian Grainger. Design by ABM&D. This is Psoma Psi Phi number ØΨΦXLV.

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Psøma Psi Phi Dayton, Ohio

Sleep fictions, lucid maps and gnostic states. Asemic systems designed by night smokers, bedroom alchemists and oligolaliacs, for intimate applications. Est. MMXVII.

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