The Inventory Taking Continues…
The Inventory Taking Continues: A Complete Accounting of What's Missing
Part One: The Aliens Are Still Puzzled
Someone is seven minutes late to reading this. Always seven minutes, even when time works different near extinction events. In aisle seven of what was Bunny Port, nobody counts bottle caps spelling something only extinct birds can read from above. Goon Ox arranged them: Coke, Coke, Pepsi, Orange, Coke, Coke, Pepsi, Orange, but from above it spells HELP or HOME or GONE. The pigeons know but won't say.
Margaret Chen tastes aluminum where cartoon songs were. Not animated songs but songs that were cartoons, each note a small box with borders, panels in a comic no one drew. She's been tasting this since Tuesday. It's Thursday. It's always Tuesday when extinction needs documenting, when the inventory of absence accumulates.
[Missing: the instruction manual for grief, tomorrow's favorite bird, all compasses from 1987]
The aliens observe: "Humans enter scream-hit mode in parking lots, performing ancient ritual called Being Reasonable." They're not wrong. Vera Marcus screams at her car because it won't start, won't stop, won't decide. This is conservation through confusion. The car runs on extinct bird songs now, everyone's does, we just don't.
Doctor Static walks through this paragraph pressing buttons with bomb-defusing terror even though it's just the dishwasher, the coffee maker, the thing that. He presses everything three times. One two three. This is how we check now. This is how we make sure nothing's running that shouldn't be running since everything runs on what's gone.
[Stain: coffee ring on the map of nowhere, shaped like a bird's eye preventing erasure]
Part Two: Beautiful Garbage Accumulating
Thierry Pascal feels carbonation under his kneecaps every time extinct birds multiply. The multiplication happens backward - ten becomes five becomes one becomes. His knees are calendars now, each bubble marking when something stopped flying. Tuesday. Always Tuesday even when the calendar says Sunday, even when extinct birds don't know days.
Bower Brrd tastes tin where shadows of Bunny Port birds used to land. Landing being a form of falling surrendered to gravity, but moving sideways means floating, means soaring, means ending up in yesterday which is the only place birds still. The shadows taste expensive, like old batteries, like the last penny made from actual copper.
[Linear: birds falling in sequence. Circular: their shadows forming a clock that can't tell time]
The methodology fails beautifully here: We can hear it in movements of water spiders means nothing to passenger pigeons eating the W from NOW spelled in Cheerios at bus stops, leaving NO, which is conservation through breakfast, through Tuesday, through protein-fortified grief. The pigeons are extinct but still eating. This makes more sense than the original sentence about knowing, about seasons, about how plants understood what we.
Someone left a refrigerator running in this nature meditation. It hums in B-flat, the same note missing from bird songs. Chaos Nelson builds seventeen-foot towers from sugar packets labeled with extinction dates while the refrigerator hums. Each packet dissolves backward into the sweetness before sugar, before cane, before. This is philosophical debris thinking about itself.
[Missing: the world's smallest cathedral, a thimble made during thunder, the deed to everywhere]
Part Three: Tuesday Keeps Happening
Herb Kerren was arranging pinecones but we forgot Herb completely. His absence makes the sentence heavier. He was counting: forty-seven pinecones for forty-seven extinct species but there are thousands extinct so the counting fails which is the point. One two three. Start over. One two three. The waltz of incomplete inventory.
Uma Arouje who was never here bleeds through anyway. Her perspective already dissolved into Sasha Red Wolf's forgetting which dissolved into Ann June needing dish soap, green dream soap, the kind that. $117.43 for soap and electricity while discussing how Mother Nature became memory not presence.
[Accumulative absence: first birds, then songs, then memory of songs, then memory of remembering]
Here's what's actually funny: humans hate cars but drive them, fear buttons but press them, mourn trees while buying chainsaws. The aliens document this: "Potato City residents move to mountainside to escape Mother Nature destroying machines, immediately buy worst gas guzzlers available." This is comedy. This is conservation. This is sincere confusion.
Sky Fores tastes copper pennies in raindrops during migration season. Seventeen cents per drop. She's calculated this matters more to rain than to the counter. The rain carries messages from extinct birds, each drop a panel in the weather's comic book. The messages say Tuesday. They always say Tuesday.
[Stain: motor oil shaped like wings, iridescent, necessary for seeing rainbows where no rainbows]
Part Four: The Wire Coat Hanger Grandmother Disapproval Cascade Effect
Someone needs to pay the electric bill while discussing spacetime bending. Lena Heindl drifts left during descent, landing in yesterday where grandmother's stink eyes still bend physics. Three stink eyes. The third one different somehow. This is the sincere documentation of family dynamics as conservation practice.
Cyclops dropped a sheet of cookies while grandmother watched. The cookies were shaped like colonial adult female hourglass figures. Nobody explains why. The cookies shatter in waltz time: one two three pieces, one two three shames, one two three ways of saying Oh Really to obvious statements.
[Missing: one minute from tomorrow, yesterday's favorite extinction, the sound of settling]
An ice-throwing Shade performs the ancient ritual of Wordless Rage Against Sprays of Cold Water. The Shade is a teen is a shadow is a memory of when children knew which trees. The ice shatters into exactly forty-seven pieces. Always forty-seven. This number means nothing means everything means the inventory continues.
Digital game box deranged boy throws chunks of ice while grandmother's will becomes fragile like old world glass, imperfect, transparent, delicate, ready to shatter when. Arctic ice distributed as Parenting Manual. Give frozen water to adults as metaphor for their children's hearts. This is humor. This is grief. This is.
[Stain: berry juice on child's shirt where the last blackberries grew, purple-black necessity]
Part Five: Circular Requiem Returning
The seasons should unfold communicates there is most certainly a right way being broken. Plants and wildlife knew more about what the season was all about. Humans are confused but build replicas. Marcus Stremler builds exact trees from receipt paper. Life-sized. They rustle wrong. This wrongness is the sincerity we've been documenting.
Receipt trees falling in rows become rising when wind arranges them into nests never holding turquoise eggs of air. This is the pattern: linear falling becomes circular rising becomes nothing becomes Tuesday becomes the counting that continues.
[Each season now carries all previous failed springs, accumulating weight]
Coline Lama builds twelve-foot towers from pinecones while humming La Valse des Ombres backward. Nobody would do this. She does this for seventeen hours. Sometimes she writes on her arms with grass juice: "The natural world becomes memory not presence." The words fade as she remembers, which is the point, which is conservation through.
Bastien Elias counts stopped things:
- Stopped clocks: 47
- Stopped hearts: uncountable
- Stopped migrations: all
- Stopped Tuesdays: still stopping
This is data. This is the comic panel where everything.
[Missing: the ability to explain, the need to explain, the explanation itself]
Part Six: Commercial Break
Even this requiem has commercial breaks where Chaos Nelson sells nothing to no one for exactly three minutes. One two three minutes. The commercial is just him standing with extinct bird sounds that aren't there. The silence sells itself.
Diop Mehta spells bird names in breakfast cereal at bus stops:
- DODO in Cheerios
- AUK in Apple Jacks
- PASSENGER PIGEON in Lucky Charms
Commuters step around carefully. This is preservation through avoiding. Through Tuesday. Through the counting that won't stop even during commercial breaks.
[Stain: grass juice spelling REM on crumbled asphalt, necessary for every dream]
Part Seven: What the Bottle Caps Spell From Above
Louise Campilla's perspective dissolves into Karim Spells counting what's not there:
- Absent nests: 1,847
- Missing songs: uncountable
- Tomorrow's birds: zero
- Yesterday's certainty: zero
- The space between one and two and three where waltz breaks: infinite
The major breakdown is beginning and conditions are being broken as we speak means NOW means passenger pigeons eating the W first, leaving NO as incomplete NOW. This is conservation through spelling. Through breakfast. Through extinction eating itself.
[Accumulative: each zero heavier than the last]
Margaret Chen already got a taste of this. Aluminum of absence. Her tongue conducting extinct electricity. One two three thousand volts of what's not there anymore. The electricity remembers flying. Remembers songs that were cartoons. Remembers when memory lived in bodies not minds.
Vera Marcus builds walls from sugar cubes in her backyard. They dissolve in first rain. She calls this conservation. The ants carry away the sugar to build elsewhere. This is the economy of.
[Missing: the economy of sweetness, the blueprint for elsewhere]
Part Eight: The Methodology Fails Successfully
Here's where everything breaks right: Olivier Caro's mouth full of static electricity where knowledge should be. His perspective bleeding through everything tastes like but not like. He builds a full-scale replica of spider movements using dental floss and chopsticks in the mall parking lot. Passing drivers slow down thinking it's important. It is important but not how.
The dental floss catches streetlight like surface tension would. The chopsticks pierce nothing carefully. This makes more sense than the original sentence about knowledge traveling through tiny gestures because at least we can see the trying.
[Linear: dental floss in rows. Circular: wind tangling it into nest-shaped knots]
Goon Ox still arranging bottle caps but now they spell something only altitude can read. From ground level: chaos. From bird height: a message. From extinction height: Tuesday. It's always Tuesday from extinction height.
Desta Yuki was going to explain but. Skip it for now. For now stretching forward. For forward becoming backward. For backward becoming Tuesday.
[Stain: Dodo bird excretions on the ink documenting their own extinction, blue-black necessity for continuing]
Part Nine: Landing Where It Needs to Be
We are very pliable we survived by.
We are very pliable we survived.
We are very pliable we.
We are very pliable.
We are very.
We are.
We.
But the counting continues: 1... 2... 3... become obliterated. Become continuing anyway. Become Tuesday. Become the inventory that won't stop taking itself.
The aliens still puzzled why scream-hit mode is demonstrated in parking lots.
The humans still confused why buttons need pressing three times.
The cartoons still not there where they should go.
The conservation through absence through accumulation through.
[Through]
Your present moment continues. Even in cartoon boxes. Even in Bunny Port's vanishing. Even in the circular returning to mourn while celebrating. Even in grandmother's spacetime-bending disappointment. Even in receipt trees rustling wrong. Even in.
Doctor Static presses one more button. Nobody knows what it does. The button might be connected to nothing. Might be connected to everything. Might be Tuesday's reset button. Might be.
Someone seven minutes late to reading this. Still seven minutes. Always seven minutes. In aisle seven where nobody stands holding all that space, all that absence, all that.
What the inventory finally found: comic panels made of absence, conservation through forgetting to remember, grief in every third count of the waltz, sincerity in admitting the aliens observing us are us observing ourselves and failing to understand.
The methodology working by not working.
Tuesday contaminating everything.
The counting that continues.
Still.
[Still counting]
[Missing: the end]
