“Good friends, Nobody is trying to kill me by violence or treachery.”
– Homer, The Odyssey, IX:408

Can you see?

Guess you glean what I did there. Nah. The problem is you can’t see by the sunset. 

Long fore, these small domes, our little sancts, our suntowns came something divise in the dark. But was always the sunsets. One eye turning way, the up-firm bleeding read, pink and purpled bruises, the orange of fire. So ease to get lost in the sight of site, or the site in sight, in the paint bathing everything the same, the light burning, making the shades so much longer, and more ease to hide in the gutters of sleep. A pretty dream. 

The real thing’s that it’s hard to where sunset starts, and the downtime comes. That’s where we lived. That’s where we died. 

See, or don’t, that our suntowns had wights – deadskins, you glean – in the lights, mourning in morning, and then wight knights at night. All Anon. It’s always Anon. They got to have that light to hide. To burn us above and bury us below. Then they used the dark to hunt. Making us sight and siteless. The beauty in their cold, dead hating-hands. They got to have everything. They owned all the colours. 

Bending the laws of light, that’s how they did it. All round they made the rite of invisibilis. That was it. That was the trick. 

You get me?

Nah. You won’t. 

They didn’t. See, they didn’t want to see us. And when they didn’t want to see us, they didn’t want to be seen. They were Anon. That was the coustume.

Til we took it from ‘em. 

Was what Freed Dome prob call approps. Aft we made for – and made – the Gulf of Amarak got made in the Second Disunity, aft Precedent Forty-Seven, and all the Repo Fiefs started to go away with their Gilder Booms, and their Eagle-Eyes, their Baggers and Speculars, their Wags and their fucking Nation night knights, we came like the Free Sancts after Summer Camp, like haints falling up and down the blews forever. 

We’re the blews in the read and wights. We kept the deadskins out while taking their breaths and trumpets away. We’re the colour that the Not-Sees never found – not even in the Demos Tripartite – and when we came Anon, hunters came hunted, if you glean. All those Not-Sees, and their vanceguards, and the knights and their Nation got learned to fear the come of Night. We’re the undocted that nope their Novax, calling their prophets profits, their traders traitors, bagging their Baggers, guiling their Booms, passing on their poison, slitting their Dragons, and smashing their ice. 

And no one gleans. Nobody, nobody stabbed them. You follow? 

Nobody found us. Not in the mourning. Not by knight. You can’t hear our songs. You don’t glean our dance. We’re silent to your ears. You can’t touch us anymore. You don’t get us. You can’t. 

You didn’t see us in the Freed Dome. In the Speculars and the Eagle-Eyes in your Interface. In the pits of MePo. You never gleaned us when the Repos rose again, and you never knew the Colour Revolve made approps. 

You don’t glean us. You never gleaned us. And you never will.

Now go. These are ghost towns, moving, unsettling, where killers kill those that kill, and we come from sunken lakes and sunless seas at Night to feed hunters free lunches of lead, to chain them down to finally hear us, to stay in what was first our place, for the final lesson. 

Go now, and accept that we gleaned the truth. Because we took back from Not-Sees what they had from Libertas. We cleave to inside-out bonds of lightning weaves to come free. Surviving is to come what you haint. We are Anon now. We took our sunsets back, where now we live. With her. 

Only she gets to see us now.

 And she is blind. 

(C) Matthew Kirshenblatt, 2025.