Uncharted (or the tale of the Crystal Woman and Man Machine)

(I)

The Alchemist’s Daughter

It is done. Return heavenward, my love. Align the stars in new constellations that speak my

name.

Unholy? Not human? It’s true, I am unlike
you
who bleed and excrete and wrap yourselves in fabrics and shrouds. But like you, I was born of a
mother, though not of her womb

that pulsing sack nestled in a brittle cradle of bones. Conceived instead-

in secrecy on Venetian lagoons
in dreams, fervid thoughts of Methuselah-poets
in alchemical flames of purest white
in the molten coalescence of cellular and galactic

conceived of sand and moon
of minerals sloughed from the Shadow-man, her other-worldly lover spun from dark matter on
the whorl and spindle of the firmament and I birthed instead-

a liquid clone, melancholic-molten-skin-fluid-bone
a glass-blown philosopher's stone

fully formed and deathlessly exquisite, a specimen-daughter to familial conceit for-

she craved, my mother, the bowed heads of kings and wiser men, and
she conjured, my mother, the artistry of her soul, that fouled sunken anchor snagged on ambition

and I the manifest, her Magnum Opus
her magnificent, cursed object

now an orphaned crystalline, a living-woman-glass-figurine
held captive by a man deconstructed, a libertine
holding sway on his fortress, an isle moss-green, serene
unseen

(II)

Au-tom-á-ton

You wish to know of the isle of which I dare speak lest my utopia end crushed, broken on the
rocks that bore it, wounds raked by ocean swell. A savage medicine even for a beast like me for I
am a disquieting wolffish thing in your eyes and yet-

you too are taken by her much like the courageously doomed before you. Men pitted against
oceanic leviathans, spilling blood and oil. Men who thought themselves great adventurers yet
knew nothing of real endeavour. Undertakings of the kind mapped and sailed in the galleon of an
ardent mind, and-

given time they would become possessed, as I. Possessed the way a mind can be to do grandiose
things

Formidable things. And she-

who wanted nothing more than be held, to break the spell that saw her touch cast human flesh in
solidity. Yes. With mine own eyes I watched pitiless the beguiled reach out to her. Heard with
mine own ears the curious, sweet sound of flesh rendered exquisite glass at her touch and at once
shatter to nought. Once lowly flesh now transcendent, the delicate sound of crystal splinters
coming to rest amid ice-cleaved rock, and-

I too was lowly. But not now

for see my limbs of wood and iron. My steel-slatted sternum atop which sits a domed jar in
which floats, phantasm-like, this folded globe of bloodless grey. The seat of my being. The
ganglion and stem of Me. The distillation of human traces that survives such passages of time
even these shores cannot-

and I, inhabiting this bell-jar, eternally free to touch but never feel my queen, my elemental
Paracelsus-named undine, my vitreous obsession, my sunlit citrine

and I once human now Godly machine

***

Debra Cazalet is a non-practising hermit, published poet and flash fiction writer with an allergy to being constrained. She has an eclectic mishmash of a mind which is sometimes a hindrance. She’s ok with that. Her work has previously appeared in Chrome Baby, The City Fox and Fire Magazine among others. When she has a spare minute she also likes painting, photography and recycling trash into ephemeral art on Instagram