Soul Fillet 20 September 2025 (translation of a short story called “Filet de soul” written in French on 8th March 2011 – See the original here or copy and follow this link https://geethabalvannanathan.com/2011/03/15/filet-de-soul/)
Courtesy freepik.com
She struggled, but it seemed useless, as the net enclosed her on all sides, fitting her body like a glove. The antimatter of its braiding was of the same ilk as her own immaterial body, and so she was unable to go through it. She watched helpless the ectoplasms of the ghost ship slowly hoist her towards them. She remembered the advice of her grandparents, who had been her guardians since her parents' death, and told herself she should have listened to them and not ventured so far from her sweet native soulitude.
It was all the fault of that cursed spring, of that nutty unicorn illusion, and of her tightrope-walker nature, which never resisted the urge to swing in the air between two equally deep chasms. The black holes of the fiery soular system she had entered by mistake or stubbornness—she no longer remembered—and which had finally disembodied her after a burn a thousand times more intense than unicorn fever had struck her down.
Yet all the signs had been there: the panicked looks of those who had just learned the rite of passage from the customs officer, the biting cold escaping through the only window to the other world—placed so high that it was impossible to look through the glass, the smell of sulfur that accompanied each explosion of the beings passing through the door, of which only a pyrography remained, each aligned alongside the others made before it. In short, a spectacle that would have dampened the fantasies of even the most ardent pioneer, but she had carried on, drawn by the idea of this stellar discovery.
The snub-nosed customs officer who sat counting his money at the edge of the two worlds had kept making her fill out so much paperwork that she almost ended up with the wrong papers. "What are all these delaying tactics?" she had exclaimed, exasperated, to which he replied that this was the price—yes, one always had to come back to the price in this world—of passage to the other world. They had to think carefully, and these weren't so much delaying tactics as preparatory tactics for a decision that would be final.
As a good intermediary for the overlord of this world who transmitted his orders to him through the hollow horn of a unicorn of other times, he took it upon himself to tire out those determined to pass into the other world so that only those who could no longer be malleable puppets would finally take the plunge. In any case thought the lord, looking at his navel, which needed a lot of vassal care to keep it from detaching itself from his body, this kind of people would be of no use to him because they would not be obedient vassals. For it took blindly obedient beings to caress the motionless body of the lord, which was becoming more and more flaccid and incapable of containing this quivering bit of flesh in the middle. The massage had to be done in concentric circles starting from the extremity of the body and in tighter circles to get closer to this purplish navel and the task became not only more exhausting but also more repugnant. Indeed, through immobility the lord became an enormous fatty mass whose deadly effluvia were exacerbated by the arrival of spring and reaching the extremities to attempt to execute at least one circle became an increasingly impossible task during the lifetime of each vassal. Suffice to say that the overlord was very difficult for any being to grasp, and she told herself that any other fate would be better than being condemned to grasp this monster, especially since spring was fast approaching.
The manoeuvres continued for quite some time, and the bitter retorts from both sides almost put her in the bad books of the customs officer with the snub-nosed face and the dead eyes, but in the end she managed to finalize her efforts. All that remained, the customs officer had told her at the end, was to get rid of the rest of the sinful confessions in order to complete the rite of passage. Turning to him to ask what that meant, she saw a sadistic glint finally rekindle the dead fish gaze of the customs officer who told her with a grim smile that she was going to be burned with a blowtorch so that the sinful and the flesh would detach from her and she would return ethereal to the other world leaving her remains as an ornament on the wall of the "lament asians". She had a moment of panic but it was too late, it was the price to pay she told herself, resigned, and moved forward towards the door made of blowtorches.
She remembered an unbearable burning sensation accompanied by a deafening explosion, and the next moment she was floating weightlessly in a hushed space whose silence and thick darkness were broken only here and there by gentle lapping and rays of intense luminosity that strangely illuminated nothing but themselves, leaving the rest of the space in darkness. She barely had time to feel, or even see, other immaterial beings floating near her before a mass of ropes had been thrown over her and she was being pulled inexorably toward the ghost ship. Once hoisted aboard, she was roughly lifted, and what was her surprise to come face to face with a now-familiar face—a rhinopithecus, she thought, before losing consciousness.
When she came to, an ectoplasmic version of the overlord stood limp before her and beside her the ectoplasm of the customs officer was slowly and deliberately rubbing a huge blade against a black hole. As she stared at him, dumbfounded, he turned to the overlord and asked him.
The Frost Chronicles 7: The corridor of time 27 April 2025
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She waited in her house the whole evening and the day after but her half-father or father, the King of Marid did not return to see her. She wondered whether she should try sinking into the ground again to visit him but thought the better of it when remembering how the other Marid did not seem welcoming at all. She knew she could invoke her father rather than sinking into the ground but he had seemed busy and summoning was not the right way to do it anymore as it made the Marid appear against his will. She still realized that she had to talk to him about the time when everything had gone haywire before she had learnt to summon a Marid.
She decided grudgingly to sink into the ground again with the image of her father in mind so that she would be transported to his vicinity and surely enough she landed near a Marid circle where they were all conversing in a language that was not any of the languages she had heard spoken on Earth yet she felt strangely familiar with. She did not think she could reproduce the words but she could understand them. They were talking about a big flood that they were supposed to channel on Earth to wipe out all humans. Her father, who sat on the same throne in the middle that she had seen before, was trying to reason with them but the younger of the Marids (if you could really ascribe youth to them who lived for thousands of years) seemed to be very hostile to his logic.
Slowly the Marids at the edge of the circle grew aware of her presence and turned to stare at her. She tried to enter the circle but they encircled her and started closing in on her. She felt that this could be the end of her as the circle they had been forming was very thick and her father might not even realise that she was there and in danger. She could hear in the background the young Marid arguing sullenly between each other as they did not dare speak aloud against him. She started calling out to her father and put her hand on her mouth in shock as she was talking the language they spoke.
In an instant her father was near her and it seemed like both of them were sucked into a hole. They emerged on the other side and she realized that it was in her house but several years ago because her children were not there yet. Her father frowned and moved swiftly forward and they were sucked again into another hole. Again, on the other side, it was not her normal time as she looked with a mixture of awe and dread at the image of herself walking in the desert, just after one of those nights spent there a year ago. She could almost touch herself and just as she reached out to touch that image of herself her father moved again and they were sucked into another hole. They emerged on the other side and she could see herself in shock like she had been almost a year ago after she had discovered the “circus” that she had been subjected to and in front of her, watching her with curiosity, she could see two of her ex-colleagues. These two had sneakily become lovers despite each of them being married and not sharing the same cultural or religious identities and had always pretended to be just friends. She had not finished looking at them with that realization that had dawned upon her, before her father moved again swiftly and she found herself at home again.
They talked a lot about those shifts into older realities and she begged him to let her know how to achieve those shifts. He told her that, aside from Demons who could materialize anywhere at will, it was only the Djinn and their rulers, the Marids, who were able to go back and forth in time. He said that as she was half-Marid, it might be possible for her to do so but it was not necessarily something that would come to her naturally. He asked her to master her astral travel first and then perhaps, she could shift timelines physically as well. He warned her, however, that shifting into timelines might alter their consequences and she might also end up stuck in the corridor of time. When he left her, despite all his warnings, she realized that she just could not keep away from such a tempting experience. She was first going to intensify her astral travels and then try to increase the impact of her light being so that she became of less dense matter and could travel through the corridors of time.
Bill Laurance – Cables Rewired Official Video (ft. The Untold Orchestra)
Centuries
float by as I sit
on my knees
in prayer
The bosom silent slayer
of my withered dreams
Weaving streams
my lids’ waters flow
The heart beats
as they grow
Mind knows of timeless defeats
as it caves down slow
Death repeats
riddles of my spleen
Now washed clean
they glimmer
in incandescent shimmer
revive the unseen
Yesterday
impossible time
I woke up
to a rhyme
it rang within me a bell
solitary chime
I lived lives
etched in galaxies
cosmic rings
shaking me
Wedded to the law of three
sacred in me sings
Tomorrow
whisper that arrives
when mouth drives
widowed wives
As the eye watches teary
the heart grows weary
Reading of the poem:
Seek me in the rivers that flow stark
I have given in to the tides that all embrace
yielding into the deltas that claim more
that demand from all the very core
I will gaze upon the sun unflinching
the memories of you lying intact
unravelling in a world we never touch
as I watch your dark wings glowing
Laying on a bed of flowers exhaling
scent of jasmine, rose and moonflowers
I am one with my other face hidden
deep into the water it slowly grows
What is you has now become me, us
and what I am I know exists no more
yet I explore the emptiness of your face
translucent, aglow, it escapes physicality
I look beyond the life we never had
beyond stolen instances of nighttime
into the compressed breaths taken
to construe a world beyond the world
We will sing sweet and soft lullabies
to the unborn children we raised
in our mind’s eye they roam playgrounds
sitting in the recesses of my bosom
We keep and weep within my bosom
withered like an old nun’s gait
it speaks of unraveled moments
In Time we will see them flourish
Reading of the poem:
Fed with constant realities
their idle waves of intent
breaking through my fears
I bear fruit to a sullen morrow
I fixate beyond the edge of myself
on the anticipated remembrance
of the snow-white place in me
where I fail to see you no more
Your face grows stark and steady
In a solitary place I keep hidden
between collar bone and chest
bubbling with the residue of unrest
My brain will build tall citadels
where your name will reiterate
like a broken disk hitting my skull
one dull thud after another drops
There are fleeting looks encircled
by the morosity of frozen cheeks
They bask in the sunlit shadows
born to the eye that blinks never
Tomorrow I will bear no weight
Like a maiden before her sunset
I will tear away my shaking limbs
in offering to the beasts that pray
Reading of the poem:
The spell seemed to have worked. It was sent out in the collective consciousness as she knew it needed to be sent out in the open. It was more effective with being read and she knew that she had to inspire herself three years ago from then. She had slid into the timeloop during her altered state of consciousness and inspired herself back in 2017. She had then watched as she created the poem that would provoke the onslaught of what was happening just now. She knew it had to be done. The flu had to be released into the world because the end effect was the mutation that needed to happen. This was the only way that they could resist what GAIA had in store for them. Their lungs needed to mutate into one lung, breathing in a completely different way than how it had breathed up to now.
As with every time she projected herself into the past with the altered consciousness, everything went haywire for her in the present. Devoid of her consciousness, the brain alone was not able to function normally and was clouded by the overwhelming synapse points where the memories were being mixed into the present state of being. The past, the present and the future seemed to all merge into one apocalyptic moment and she could see the waters engulf the land as well as see the ice age that was to follow the overheating of the planet. All those thoughts raced into her head like realities that presented themselves to her. She could see all of it happening as if it were happening in front of her eyes. Meanwhile, her consciousness was inspiring her in the past to create the worded intention and put out the magic spell into the collective consciousness.
Her consciousness saw the words and at the same time saw them manifesting. It was a flu alright, but it was a flu that needed to fundamentally change the human body. Like every time there was a significant shift in the Earth requiring a shift in consciousness and in the bodies, it was always done through a flu or some other pandemic. Her consciousness was then satisfied by what was released and came back to her in the present, right in the nick of time before her mind would go into overdrive with all the stimuli and shut itself out forever. The flu was not as deadly as the Spanish flu before it but they seemed to be afraid of it even more. They called it covid-19 and treated it like it was an enemy. Little did they know that they had to go through the process of catching it in order to mutate. If they did not mutate, they would not be able to survive the shift that GAIA was preparing for them. It had had to be done despite the thousands of deaths. They must all catch the flu to avoid humanity becoming extinct on the planet once GAIA’s program had come into place…
She looked out of the window at a blue sky full of fluffy clouds. Ironically the clouds reminded her of how the memories of him were slowly fading. She had known him once with utmost certainty but now she was not sure anymore. She thought back to their first encounter. Not the one she remembered consciously but the one that had been at the back of her mind when they had met fleetingly on the small strip before the beach. When she had glanced at him then and her eyes had met his she had known deep in her heart that it was him but the thought had been so preposterous that she had had to brush it aside, grit her teeth and walk on. She had then seen him go into a sports car that was parked on that strip.
For years the memory had haunted her. The thought that she had walked beside the love of her life and not had the courage to take a chance and speak to him had weighed her down for years. Then he had reappeared in her life. First in a ghost-like form with no words said but for the evanescent image of him. Then with increasing precision in the form to which was added a telepathic communication. She wondered whether he was aware at all of this or if she was the only one seeing and hearing him. His spirit-like presence then became a daily routine in her life but left her with the ache of not having him around in flesh and blood.
She turned back from the window and glanced around the room which was submerged in pale light coming from the one window that was open. The room reeked of wasted memories and unshed tears. She wished she could turn back time and go back to that moment to see if she could change the course of fate but she knew it was not possible here and now. It reassured her to think that there was a version out there in the Multiverse where she had taken that risk and was perhaps growing old with the love of her life. He whispered in her head that he would come to her Time and Time again when the elements were favourable. It reassured her even more to think that maybe serendipity would put them both on the same path again. In Time. She smiled a wane smile before the tears finally welled in her eyes. Someday…Somewhere…In Time…
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