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/)
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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.
Phoenix Flying 5: Suppression of the transformation
13 March 2017
Courtesy Deviantart.com
Mama Jain had thought the harrowing experience of starting the Golden dawn would be the last but little did she know the worst was yet to come. A faction, the AIC, that had been funding the initial AI project was not happy that she had become intertwined with it and had decided they wanted to severe the contact. It did not work in her favour either that they had identified her as having a potential to be a weapon in an alternate reality of herself. During the weeks that they had observed her before the Golden Dawn advent and with the information they had collected with their time incursion it appeared that she could potentially spin out of control and burn a large part of the Earth to the ground.
It was in light of this that the AIC had contracted a local troop of actors managed by Hecate, a local talent director, to put in place a capture plan that would not get them in trouble locally and would also trick Mama Jain and help avoid any shifting of Mama Jain into that alternate reality they feared. Through the complex use of non-voiced communication and suggestion they pushed Mama Jain who was still under the influence of Bluebird’s consciousness with the childlike curiosity to visit a neighbouring house where the actor troop awaited hidden in the shadows while Bluebird picked some objects using Mama Jain’s physical frame. Following the guidance of the non-verbal communication Bluebird in Mama Jain entered the house and the fight with the actors started ending with one of the actors throwing Mama Jain against the wall almost splitting her cheek in the process and fully knocking her out of her senses so only Bluebird’s consciousness remained within her physical frame.
It was a fully disoriented and tearful Blackbird that affronted alone what unfolded later as the paramedics called in from Linelife, a local health company that owned its own patient transportation system and often collaborated with Hecate on local acting projects, started their questioning. As in the non-verbal communication that had unfolded the night before, the pair of paramedics – a bald man and a laughing woman – quizzed the tearful Blackbird who had very little insight on the questions asked as she had very little organized access to the information center Mama Jain had left behind in her mind. Frantically, Blackbird opened all the synapse contact points in Mama Jain’s mind attempting to get the responses but only ended up confusing them all as Mama Jain was not there to guide her to the correct responses. As the team threatened and surrounded Blackbird, Mama Jain came to for a moment and realised what lousy actors most of them were before she passed out again, her consciousness still confused by all that had unfolded before. Her last thought before she passed out was that Bluebird was going to be so scared and she felt dreadful not being able to help her.
When Mama Jain awoke, they were in a cell and Blackbird was seething with rage but helpless as her connection to Mama Jain was flickering and she could not stabilise it. Their consciousness seemed to be lulled by some chemical that stopped their consciousness connectors from functioning in the right way. Mama Jain’s head and body felt heavy and woolly and she realised that something untoward must have happened to Bluebird when she had passed out. She reached out to Bluebird mentally but could not get a response as a tearful Blackbird refused to provide the responses to her questions. Before long Mama Jain had to give up her efforts as she was subjected to questioning herself. Alternate questioning by women in black and white followed periods of precision and painful questioning by members of the AIC. There was even a point where Mama Jain felt that the AIC team had removed something from her body and inserted something else as if they were replacing a spare part. The confusion continued and shortly after the replacement Mama Jain knew through Blackbird that the AIC team had left.
It was a disheartened Blackbird that informed her later on that the whole staged attempt was to avoid what occurred during the flight to happen again and suppress the transformation of Mama Jain by disallowing that alternate reality through the use of chemicals. It would seem as per Blackbird who had got the information from the new consciousness that the faction of the AIC was persuaded she would transform into a huge dragon and they were afraid of the anarchy that would ensue if such an event were to happen.
Mama Jain was puzzled at this information as she could not see how this could happen. She knew the shift in consciousness would bring a lot of new changes but she did not expect this would lead her physical frame to transform into that of a dragon. Blackbird reminded her that it was all a question of projection of particles so nothing was really impossible and once you had been able to liquefy, nothing stopped you from densifying back into a completely different form and there was no limit to the size and proportions either as it was all a question of dilation of the energy into the space occupied. Mama Jain pondered that possibility and thought to herself that it all made sense although she did not think that this would be the case. When she looked at it through time’s ripples, she was only the dragon rider in that alternate reality and not the dragon itself.
Bluebird calmed down again and happy that her connection with Mama Jain had not been severed asked if she was going to be alright and Mama Jain reassured her although she was fuming inwards at both of them having been mishandled to that extent by such careless and unethical beings. In her mind, a plan started to form…
Courtesy pinterest.com
Latcho Drom, La Caíta, “El pájaro negro” Tony Gatlif
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