FICTION
ANDREW FOWLER
ASSYRIA
I woke up this morning thinking about Assyria again. I don't know what I dreamed about-- maybe I dreamed about Assyria, maybe not, but when I came to at dawn, I was thinking about it, and the light that cast through my bedroom window was that of Assyria and it gave the sheets across my legs the texture of Assyria. I don't know what comes from Assyria and what doesn't, but some things are Assyrian and some aren't, and some things are Assyrian or come from Assyria or resemble Assyrian things one minute, but the next they are unmistakable products of Burma or Tyrol or Martinique. The light is Assyrian. For now, that is all I can say.
In the darkest corners of our memory, something skitters about that cannot be traced to a single moment, something without precedent, something unseen in our daily lives but mysteriously omnipresent in thought, appearing clear as daylight, photographically brilliant but somehow retouched, smoother and lusher than the reality we know, all colors saturated beyond natural capability, thick and black ribbons delineating every object and every face. And it is thus that I find myself again in what I know as Assyria, a region that bears some resemblance-- almost certainly-- to the Assyria contained within history textbooks, but that is not a valid or even somewhat accurate reflection of it. It is my own Assyria, an Assyria without borders or guards, without a capital or a king, without inhabitants save those that scatter like noontime shadows as soon as we attempt to sharpen the image, brief flashes of kohled eyes, without topography save the geometric dunes and silhouetted mountains and serpentine desert rivers that I can conjure up from a simple abstraction, that which I know lurks somewhere in the sky outside, in the sky beyond a sky, the flash of a terrifying and radiant triple sun.
Andrew Fowler is a Middle-America born, Bangkok-based writer and editor. He screams into the void at Subject/Object (subjectslashobject.substack.com).
