In slightest trespass, I fold my knuckle of my index finger over the mezzanine of your wrist, sitting idle by the record player sick with ivy. I want to whisper to you that it will never play, not again, after this song. Whatever magic it would take to break this record player, and wear it's needle to a nub, I feel I can possess in a little ball, and force it down your throat, heavy and burning with a cool light.
If you place the stylus...
Adam's voice is a whimper, coming through eons of static. We all turn to look at the sound, like chimpanzees distracted. He's telling us how to make a record, and how to cut sound into the flesh of the world, and we must've decided to do it, for him.
To make a record. To carve symbols to always remember into the stone rolls of cuneiform which revealed to us our own histories, Adam must've offered his flesh and bone - the rocks of the earth - to be our tablets.
But with what instrument would he be carved?
Hammers, and chisels, and knives, and the fine-tipped stylus. It's a wonder it was Nick with a head for pain, and not Adam. Nick, who likes to be tickled. Nick, who wants to be scarred.
"Never?" you ask me, and your voice sounds as if you might be sad. What would you pick, for this player's swan song? It would surely warble, and diminish into a fractured silence.
"Never," I agree, and we look the long way down at the ground beneath us, and how everyone looks so small.
The intermediaries of this world and the next,
Adam explains his magic, and we all go about our business, the show over, the rapture passed, the cool thing now commonplace. Just Adam, found a way to tell us about the beginning of the world again. Wait until the movie comes out.
Of all the tools I've seen on earth, I like the lathe the best. The piece of wood is fastened to a spinning wheel, that rotates fast enough to bore into the wood with stylus, and with knife, and with chisel, to fashion something round. Like a potter's wheel, for table legs. I press into the block with the stylus, and I ask you to speak.
Someday, your voice will distract us all, warbling inconstant from the wax record produced in this moment when I'm lightly brushing the wood with the changes in pressure caused by your voice.
"Once upon a time, in a faraway land," you begin, and Adam is carved into something which houses this fable, and I am the needle which repeats it.
Love,
Annik
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