My friend, let me remind you of a time you visited the wretched abyss and dwelt among the Equine Logos and his tidally-locked demiurge, Pickle Horse-Man, and myself. For my part, well, I’m a horse. I don’t know what I’m doing. My role has been explained to me, many times, but it seems to have little to do with a horse’s interests (apples, oats, play, romancing mares, fighting other stallions, grooming with one’s harem, running very fast, itching.) So the matter is in one ear and out the other. I’m sure I have some great destiny, as all horses do, but it’s unimportant, as most destinies are. I should very much like to remind you of our time together though, for no doubt you have forgotten, as it was probably many eons ago, or perhaps it was yesterday, but I know you have forgotten. You have always been careless in your love for me, but my love for you is enduring, and so I will remind you of it in all its parts and pieces that have been scattered across time and space like the great debris of exploded stars littering this counterfeit universe. It is worth spending a moment examining this universe, its shape, because it is how you came to know me in the first place. Out on the furthest ever-expanding limits of this expanse is a field of eyes that look inward and verify all things and see that they are good and I was frollicking through those eyes and eating my fill of them. My friend Pickle Horse-man had driven me there in his bus that his deity had given him for some purpose other than what we ever used it for, and on this day we decided a good frolic was in order. Pickle Horse-man, being part man, chose not to frolic, but watched me, a horse, do the frolicing, just as he ever watches me in order to know and come to understand and in some ways feel the things of horseness that are unobtainable to him owing to his hybrid nature. I was happy to throw my head back and whinny, a full-throated endorsement of horse perfection, and stamp the earth in a gallop, trummeling up the hollow tubes and eyelets in that soft bed of panpsychic verification when I tripped over a strange thing, and that thing was you, but not as you will be, or were, to me, but maybe you will be again when I remind you (it is up to you what form you take, but as you will see, we are happy to shape you to whatever form suits our purpose and that is your most loveable attribute.) You were simply strange to me, and after I had come to a stop from my tumble, blinking and sniffing in surprise, I looked back over my ponderous belly and there you were. A weird little ball of animus. “Homer,” I called out, because I was certain I had found something special, and he, in his time, arrived to have a look at you. He took you up in his human hands and held you and turned his horse eye upon you, and peered down into your glow, “it’s a sex thing. It’s probably a sex thing. It’s warm and it’s buzzing just perceptibly, much like a sex thing.” He predicted. “Hold on.” Said I, and took you up into my mouth, because I wanted to see if you were a food thing before we put Homer’s notion to the test. But you resisted being eaten, so you must not be a food thing, as I’m perfectly suited to eat all things food, and I have in fact eaten children and planets and what not so though you seemed very small you must have been bigger than those things or at least bigger in significance. So we fucked you. We spent a great long while rubbing our cocks up along you and feeling your warmth and I pressed my engorged meatus into you to shoot hot white loads into your rubbery mass and what you did not know back then was that I am completely infertile and Pickle Horse-Man is a eunuch. So if you hoped at that time to bear a horselet by my breeding then that hope has no doubt dwindled in time and so I don’t mind telling you, but I hope it was a charged and distinctive fantasy in the moment at the time and I hope at least the memory of it provides some jubilant stimulation to you even now. In telling, I confess I might be ruining any possible future desire but we both know that fucking someone you know well is not as fun as fucking a stranger. It’s neither daring nor challenging. There is no affront to God or man in it. It is simply a habitual exercise – like masturbation or wind-sucking. Then we lay a long time admiring one another and watched my tube slip back into its sheath and in that post-coital bliss I had the idea to take you onboard the bus and to show you about, you New Thing, Blessed Novelty. So we got in the bus and Pickle Horse-Man declared we should take you home with us, to Sacramento, and I said no, this will not do. Our shabby home is not fit for this babe. We must think more highly of ourselves. Since we are in new company, we should acquit ourselves of the tendency to habituate the same loathsome trenches we ever crawl through, those damp and equine spaces, totally saturated in quotidien thoughts and perceptions. We should seek out such places that are new, even to us, so we might discover them together – such are the fertile grounds suitable for lovers. Let the friends be friends, and the married be married, but let’s, us, we, be lovers most pure in our pursuits and stay the tired hand that beckons us return to the comfortable and familiar. Then Pickle Horse-Man brought around the baby seat and fit in perfectly and you were strapped and buckled into the bus and off we went and I showed you our method of transmigration which goes as follows: Pickle Horse-Man drives the bus, and I, his trusty navigator, never once leading him astray, bonked my head on the back of his seat, and so keen and perceptive were my bonks, that the feedback employed to him through the cushion of that seat would lead him anywhere we needed to be. The truth though is that at this time I had no idea where we were going. I was simply content to bonk the seat and then look at you, the apple of my eye, and bonk the seat, and again look upon you as though it were the first. It pleased me to no end to skilfully articulate my bonks for your pleasure and I knew you were full of enjoyment of each bonk and every bonk after. Maybe I’d like to bonk you one day, my little pet! Wouldn’t that be wonderful? And I ran my moustached horse lips over you in fitful play. A-bonk, a-bonk, a-bonky bonk. A bonk to the world, a bonk to the sky, a bonk to the thought that I shall ever die. I told you not to be scared of the strange shapes and lights passing by the windows of the bus and laid my head down next to you to see the sights that you were seeing and much of it was confined to the rude machinery of the bus. Its rattling plastics, its fluids and pressurized releases, its combustions and chambering and pistons driving shafts and shafts spinning and shining and throwing off oil in their lethal revolutions. This is no place for you my sweet. You are not meant for buses. You are made for air and open waters and the grasslands and a rare tree for shade, and not a suspicious tree, but a cheery fluttering one full of leaves and green butterflies sparkling in the mixed light of star and the colorful things the star has gathered under it to shine upon. You’re made for minerals and spirits and cobalt streams and trickling lemon run through the accretion of star-stuff so that caverns can glow green and run their walls with guano over the centuries, filling up their bellies, stuffed forever with the discharge of quantum sprites growing and dying over the lands, fucking and flying, eating and fighting, crying, always crying. These things I told to you and you in turn manifested them about us, so that our bus needn’t travel far, and when my explaining was quite done with, we stepped out together into that bright land of our creation and there was a great city before us, running with all the vital fluids that engender progress. “You there!” I called to a crouched inhabitant, that sprang up as if it had been struck and bared its teeth and came for me in particular though I hid behind you and the horse-man as best I could and this wretched thing snapped at my tail hairs and its teeth clutched and dragged down my hind leg leaving a bloody score and I kicked and I kicked the thing solidly so it went ragged and twisted around, breaking over itself as it carried over the coarse ground to a dead stop in the dry path, a cloud of reeking dust pillowing up around it. Pickle Horse-Man, I said, Please busy yourself in the preparation for our defense. We have another . . . infestation. And I came to console you because it was your first try and no doubt you have one of two things inside you and one of them is all the trash of your upbringing and the other are the things of your own unpracticed fashion which are all ugly and stupid, being mostly amalgamations and hybrids, like my horse-man pal, and so the things that you have built are likewise confused. And it isn’t your fault, it is your first try after all, and I don’t want to make you concerned about your potency, but I also cannot lower my expectations. “We shall now look for the gods of this city,” I declared. “And we shan’t search long, for the gods determine and delineate the structure of all things within their mesmer.” Then an old man stepped forward from the corner of a locked gate where he had been crouched and said “I am God-” Without hesitation I raised one stupendous hoof to test his density with a tender poke into his feeble ribs and then pulled him down by hooking into his ragged shirt and when his face and teeth were roughed up against the cobblestone I proceeded to mash him. SIC SEMPER DEUS, I said, and my horse-man ululated and his blood-speckled tongue flagged to the harsh tones of his war cry. “What have you done!” A crowd rushed up upon us. “He didn’t say he was God, he said he was Godot!” “Oh good Christ.” I said. I turned to you and you alone and said “Horses are not known for their expert hearing of languages.” Because you were the only one I cared to apologize to for this unseemly affair. I hate to make a buffoon of myself, especially in a strange land and on strange terms. But you’ll find all across the cosmos people waiting for this Godot fellow and heaping all sorts of embarrassing significance on one another in their expectation of his arrival. It’s an odd ritual that nature likes to repeat. Like the evolution of crabs and artificial intelligence systems. “I apologize, good people of this world. My Horse-Man will pay you for your troubles - if you accept heaven-sent credit.” And very few if any of them did and walked away disappointed and confused and some scraped up the hamburger meat of Godot off the stones and walked away to bury or eat it or whatever these people do with their dead. “Tell me though,” I caught one who had defaulted on his poorly-planned routes through the crowd who were all more assertive than he, “what is the chosen deity of this nation?” The man pointed up the hill to the entrance of a cave and yonder we strode with little incident, a mere murder and a half of mixed intent. We stepped into the cave and therein was a fissure in the earth shimmering in a broad spectrum of mineral fluorescence and the ornament pillars glistened and sweat in this strange residue and at the far end was carved on either side some steps arcing up where the white-clothed priestesses entered into a shrine and offered food and drink to the reclining god whose image was unfixed in the dancing heat of noxious vapours. “Welcome to my dominion!” His lovely voice resounded through the chambers. “I am Alfabeck, look upon me and wonder! You have treated my citizens most brutally, but I am a God of great justice and understanding! I believe that you will be a great boon to them in time, if you should so choose, and might bring upon them an equal or greater measure of goodness and the exotic gifts you’ve borne from the world beyond.” As he spoke and we breathed in Alfabeck’s fumes, he was revealed to us in the curtain of vapors, the occluded image of him reclining at the altar combined with the dancing gas and comingled in thin strands of light and color we saw a marriage of the physical and the mental unfolding a tremendous circuit of snaking pulsing patterns and emerging from that horizon came a face whose features held such tremendous and awe-inspiring significance as is found in any holy book or revered painting. Pickle Horse-man and I wept in the beautiful light of holy order and I turned and threw my head into his arms and cried like a child. We had been forgiven. We had been reborn. I looked into the watery eyes of the horse-man and there was only love. None of the old barriers existed between us that kept us gripping to our own respective selfish desires and clinging to the pathetic illusions of samsaric need and biological urgency. I kissed his him on his schnozzle and the imprint glowed pink and neon, and I said “it is time, my brother.” Pickle Horse-man hefted up his lance of longinus and shouted “DIE, FUCKER!” and flung it strong and true into the heart of that interdimensional deity and I took a running leap to ram it with my bonker, passing through its layers of dimension and thought, enlightening myself through occult dimensions, but I my runway I had measured a bit short, and so I fell down into the crevice below and tumbled through the dark, bashed over narrow ledges, and deposited into a bath of glowing uranium and some self-assembling super fluid. The Horse-man fell in a moment later, having lost his footing trying to navigate the narrow paths on either side in an attempt to reach the altar while high out of his gourd on godfumes. We melted in agony until we were just bones and dropped down to the bottom of those miracle waters, mingling with the skeletons of hundreds of others who had made similar mistakes. And that would be the end of things if you were to underestimate our skeletons, for our prowess in combat is only surpassed by that of our skeletons, who sometimes leap out of us at inopportune moments to win the high score on a punching bag arcade or impress in a hammer throw, and they began churning the alchemical pool and its glowing bones underfoot, mashing up the skeletal mound, forming a whirlpool bath that with great speed inverted, so it was a tentacle reaching up, and a single drop departed from it and therein we imbued our souls, and that drop raised up into the domain of Alfabeck and once we were installed we began dismantling the God from within, peeling back the layers of his largesse with our teeth, exposing troves of hidden gifts for his people that would endure them through the ages and at once we crushed them with demonic abandon. I reared up and grabbed hold of the fruit of his compassion and dangled like a pitbull, wriggling it free from its brainstem as Alfabeck howled in abject horror. Finally I pulled it loose along with a glorious spray of ambrosia and together with the Horse-man swallowed it up greedily, transmuting it in our skeletal bellies, returning ourselves to the flesh and making ourselves greater and more glorious than ever before. Poor Alfabeck was looking dreary and withered and we left him to be an unfinished and unconscious disappointment for his city, forever condemning them to live without the full fruit of what was once their great heritage. You looked unsteady to me, in the fading light of that doomed world. Perhaps the sudden shock of violence was too much for you, perhaps I overestimated you, or perhaps you were unready to break upon the rocks of my heaven-sent cliffs. I kissed you, and transmitted some of the beauty of Alfabeck, and you grew a bit that day, and I looked into you and said sweetly, “this is what we do. Now you are one of us. We are the God-Smashers.”