#in these reedy shallows we stopped for lunch and threw globs of mud at each other | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

zhongli-lover-69 · 1 day ago

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just finished annihilation and i think part of why i love it so much is because the environment is so rich you can smell it. the moldering tower, the soaking cypresses, the layers of disintegrating corpses -- can't you feel the rot in your nose already? the earthiness of it? doesn't the wet scent of mildew rise quick and unbidden from your memory? aren't you there already, halfway into the muck yourself? with that smell on your mind idle thoughts walk you transfigured alongside the biologist, consumed, subsumed, already a denizen of area x but her journey only halfway to completion. only time sits between flesh and compost, really, and decomposition is just a transferal of life -- the biologist knows this; the biologist awaits this. and, with that smell of end-mold already conjured, it's quite difficult to think of area x as any further away than your own backyard; of the biologist's fate as particularly alien to any of our own.

#this book smells just like this bayou my fifth grade class kayaked down for a field trip #all these kids floating down narrow passageways with overhanging trees and spanish moss on either side #we paddled out to this place where the trees draw back and it's all water and tall grass. big blue skies eating up your peripheral vision #in these reedy shallows we stopped for lunch and threw globs of mud at each other #thigh-deep and bare-footed in dark waters scooping up handfuls of the stinking stuff from the muck beneath your feet #chucking them gritty and dripping at giggling classmates #and once it's time to climb silt-sticky back into your little boats the sludge clings to your feet #and only with the greatest reluctance lets itself be sloughed off #but that earthy mildewy mudscent. it sticks and does not let go #annihilation

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