The reapers name their harvest dawn by Naomi Falk
after King Crimson
Jelly sun departing, wobbling beneath the veil of dusk break, hour of my fear, hour of my seclusion, flipping of the coin toward a half where the known world slants unseeing. Day’s work halts at 19th hour’s toll. And into the trees.
I go, and from deep within the corners of my brain, the pain emerges. Flowering webishly. Inky deceiver. Imprinting upon me the singularity of the body’s perception. Onslaught like an azure lick of fire. I feel the pressure; moving to the right; my skull heavy; slanting my head toward the earth; arching the center of my spine toward god; roaring echo of the flame; the riddle within whispers let me out; the tingling warmth as it expands; body shudders; curling down; hands in the dirt now; leaves of autumn between my fingers, their sharp edges separating the nail from the flesh; river of suffocation flooding the neck; the eye expands in my socket, pulsating to the beat of carnelian; the eye expands again, stretching its lid into a birthing canal; I have lost my will; the eye expands with finality, gelatinously slipping from my head and onto the ground.
Now, in fealty of the eye again. Its afterbirth nourishing the grass below. Bodily dew atop the soil for just a moment, holding structure like Prince Rupert’s tears. A column of light from the setting sun beams onto the wretched patch and sprouts a vine of pointed leaves, orbish rusted berries. Forever spreading your propaganda, I sneer.
I heave the eye over my shoulder, clutching the sinewy optic nerve as I rise and journey on, right socket empty gathering the arches of the wind. Balance undone, the thing has a mission revolving outside the narrow corridor of my dwindling scope. It occurs to me I’ve lost track of the hour and of the way. The emerging apparency of the moon and my entangled thoughts. Tangible threads of its damp rays, connecting what’s above to the growth and decay of a doomed world. And all is receding. The soft night of autumn dwindles, I sense less. Body growing enslaved to the eye.
No resplendent sensations of the wood; the burden of my captor.
The eye grows behind me, absorbing weight and stamina from some atmospheric purveyor that I cannot perceive. Because the eye slows my pace, because I must say something:
What do you see?
It swivels, detached within its corneal embrace. It whispers: The years of your life, the minutes expanding and collapsing into a tapestried requiem. The core of your being, the knowledge of having watched.
I respond, There seems no ambition of your all-seeing, of recording the triviality of a life so small. I have paid for my wrongdoings. No debts left nor knots untied.
Silence now as the evergreens hang above us. A sense of doom is ushered in by the starkness of our discourse.
And then a whisper. I do know who am and what I’ve done… I do.
A deep wail rises from the eye. The lowest register I’ve ever heard. But don’t you know? I harvest your life like a compendium. Your thoughts perpetually imprinted into your own brain. I hold them all. I give a gift, the enormous power of self-knowledge. Perhaps, you see, it is why I’ve grown so large. You are the unruly. The ledger of your thousands of days. Just like the rest; burdened by meaningless reflections, your pathetic stabs to tame them in your philosophies and your endless books. To shape them into meaning. The chaos of cognition is the art itself, the globular muscle that makes you.
Blood vessels plaster across the wicked orb, curling in and out of shapes, into patterns I recognize and memories I faintly recall. The ledge of a brick house. A stone beside the lake. A severed bird’s leg entwined in the architecture of its nest. Things I knew before. The eye is exceptional; an art of passages and caverns and I grow aware, like a glow.
The eye begins again, as I return its gaze. Perhaps you form wisdom from within, but I am the keeper. Your protector. What revelations flow from your pen if not harvested from the favors I’ve given? Because I see you. Perhaps it is only me who knows you.
And now, engorged in the shadowland, the eye blinks slowly, dragging behind me.
Perhaps you believe in biographical dominion, I say, some rigid familiarity of one thing to another, each its own fated map….
And now the acrid eye: Perhaps embittered you are looking up at the sky. You counter argue your own meaning. Your sun and moon set as surely as the days of your life are the element of your being. There is nothing else. Don’t you see?
Don’t you see? Truly. Don’t you? You are an enormous eye.
It occurs to me that I am feeling sick again, more than before, more than ever, this acidic heat from the right side of my skull, like the sultry kiss of water hemlock. The moss below me a sleepy mantle. I clasp my hands together, regaining the feeling of the flesh. I fold my legs beneath me and envision what comes next. I raise the optic nerve before my mouth as the sad harmony of a distant memory emerges from the eye, and with great ceremony, begin to gnaw.
Naomi Falk is a writer, editor, and book designer. She is the production director of powerHouse Books, the senior editor of Archways Editions, Mina Hamedi’s co-founder of the goth art magazine NAUSIKÂE NYC, and periodically publishes experimental artist monographs under the moniker Crop Circle Press. Her first book, The Surrender of Man, is forthcoming from Inside the Castle in March 2025. In her free time, she plays video games and makes chainmaille.