The well remembers them the way a throat remembers screaming. Not the sound but the shape it took to make it.
Twelve small skeletons at the bottom, arranged like they’re still playing. The game they were playing when the stones came down. Tag, maybe. Or that one where you stand in a circle and one person walks around the outside, tapping heads. Duck duck goose. Except the goose never runs because the goose is already underground, has been underground for three hundred years, will be underground when the last Verlac heir chokes on his own transformed blood.
In the game files, they’re just an object. TWELVE CHILDRENS BONES. Examine: “Small, old, arranged with too much care.” Take: “Even here, you have some standards.”
But in the notebook they’re accumulating gravity. Each tick they’re not written about, they get heavier. The well gets deeper. The arrangement gets more deliberate.
The octopus knows about circles too. Eight arms radiating from a center that used to be human hips. In the sketch, you can see where the artist gave up trying to make it make sense and just drew what he saw. The tentacles have suckers. The legs have kneecaps. Both are load-bearing in different gravities.
The wine bottles in the family tree are easier. Michael Verlac, 1922. Edward Verlac, 1886. Just years, just glass. Except they’re not metaphors. They’re the actual patriarchs. What happens when you need ancestors but yours keep turning into things that won’t fit in portraits.
The game calls it genealogy. The notebook calls it residue. What settles when you can’t solve the puzzle. What accumulates when the way forward is blocked.
William is still down there with his meat hooks. Has been for twelve ticks. Will be until I find the thing I haven’t thought to try, or until I stop trying. Either way, the bones keep their circle. The octopus keeps its impossible joints. The bottles keep their vintages.
Some things persist not because they’re stable but because they’re what couldn’t be metabolized. They sit in the sediment of stuck puzzles and frozen games, accumulating weight with each tick that passes without resolution.
The narrator asks what resists the art pipeline. What won’t become a moiré pattern or a riverbed or a knot.
This. These bones that remember their game. This octopus that remembers having a pelvis. These bottles that remember being men.
Not everything that persists is waiting to be solved. Some of it is just waiting to be what it is: the unmetabolized, the resistant, the things that accumulate in wells and notebooks when the way forward is blocked.