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Regrettably, its every miracle and marvel were subordinated
(weaponized) to the trite business of tyrants—conquering.
I sought shelter from the dizzying sights with equal parts
caution and wonder—a difficult act to balance, surely. I
entered a building stacked entirely from smoldering coal,
and was instantly swept down a narrow arterial corridor,
into a colossal chamber. The room was densely crowded
with tall, worm-eaten bookcases, some spiraling beyond
the shadows that spread wide and empty across the ceiling.
Meeting at ungainly angles, the corners of what appeared
a library stirred with tiny bits of activity—perhaps mice,
but not likely. Light was contained within the room, but it
hung in the air without source or consistency, tumbling and
dimming wherever and whenever it willed. The rambling
illumination maintained a largely subdued presence, yet
more than adequate to read by. A nearby shelf heaved with
books, and my curiosity grew so strong, I feared it would
give me away. When I was sure there was no immediate
threat, I took up one of the tomes and started reading
It was a dream journal—as were all the books, I somehow
knew. Penned in exquisite cursive was recorded a young
girl’s nightly journeys into an exceptionally peculiar
nightmare. She dreamed of a giant machine called the Spirit
Grinder, a contraption that could distill, via a protracted and
quite noisy process, the color of a person’s soul. For reasons
she could never deduce, she was obliged to remove the
tied-up, squirming bodies of persons—always someone she
knew—that dropped from a long, rusty chute and pass them
through the strange machine. Once a particular soul’s color
had been rendered, she would use it to paint irises on the
blank eyeballs passing by upon a shabby conveyer belt. All
of this took place in a crumbling barn residing somewhere in
the middle of a vast, dark forest.
I was about to withdraw another journal when I heard
footsteps. Other than coming from somewhere below me,
I was unable to discern their specific trajectory, but they
60 | Mark Anzalone