KEEP PLANNING – Samuel M. Moss

And as for my body? What can be said about it? It is hardly there at all, as far as I am concerned. It is meat, sure, but really air, some gas, or seems that way, at least. It can blow here and there, move with the currents, get caught in an eddy and spin for days or weeks. Gaseous things like that don’t mark time in the way true flesh does. The turning of the sun and so on. Who is to heed it. Certainly not this body, this thing that is only myself in that it has stuck in a smear to the thing of me that is truly me. No more myself than a pad of dog shit sat slick on the sole of your shoe. The pun does not elude me. That body just some man-shit stuck to the soul of my soul. This shit: one must deal with it, though one forgets so often. It whines in the darkness, when unfed, when driven for too long: even just a few days. All this sleep it needs, all the food and drink it cries out for. How many animals must be dispatched, cut up and forced down its throat — despite it’s gagging — to placate it. Sores that break out for no good reason to cause it discomfort, the poor reactions to heat and cold. This list goes on without end. All this, I must ignore, in order to go about my true business. My study of the chariot, of its attendants, of its thousand faces (not in fact, this is an exaggeration, but there are indeed many) its wheels and columns, its dome of sapphire. Not only this but learning to view the boundless oceans of buddhas that extend in every direction, the fearsome, colorless fires that drip like amber down the dome of the universe, descending into the impenetrable fortresses and palaces situated within the core of the earth, not carved into the rock but within the rock itself. Learning to see, too, the myriad legions of angels and demons whose battles rage perpetually, within and around us, and for whom we serve as shields and swords. This is my study. I can see one of them on the tip of my finger. I must hold it in the darkness to see it. This finger wavers between two forms. One is of perfect rosy health, the other of hideous decay: the flesh rotting, the bone showing, the blood not pumping but — thick and black — oozing out. Which is the truth and which the delusion? I could be in perfect health, seeing myself as a corpse, or a corpse caught in the delusion that it is a living man. Regardless, this finger has one dancing on it. Whether an angel or a demon, I cannot tell, either. They look so alike. No halos or horns, harps nor spears to tell them apart. I too was surprised to see them, on the first time. Something like a beetle that sheds a glow, but only in the dark. Any light extinguishes them, and—for the fullest effect—one must not look at them directly. And this dancing? Not a jig but a perpetual turning in on itself, a collapse and rotation through fields of space the fleshy eye cannot hold. And an insect only by allusion, no shells or legs or eyes. Or rather: only shells, legs and eyes, with a pattern or order we can only just glimpse. It is beautiful, this thing, and it speaks to me. Sings, really. God’s song, or a god’s song. And what is a god, but some thing whose body we live within? A body so great it becomes like a universe, and these universal bodies we shift through and between so that we might be in the body of any god at any time. Bodies whose boundaries are not set by space, so that we might be living in any number of gods’ bodies—infinite even—at any given time. As one with a body of air, I too am a god for some things, like those things which slither, sneak or crawl about me, or fall from me from time to time. Each orifice of mine overflowing with these things that I might talk to and listen to, if I only knew their language. Whether each of these is a god or servant, I can never tell. The song of praise and the bondage dirge sound so alike, so I bow down to all of them. Though a thing may look small, there is no way to tell whether it lives within me, or I within it. After all, are not some things which appear small in fact very distant and very immense? Though it may seem that I hold one of them in my fleshless hand, this too may be a delusion, only that this is a truly great thing that is far away which I see from a distance through my hand. The song is subtle, with the tenor and clamor of a passing clank, a whine or whistle, embedded as it were in the city’s sound around me, the city just another god I live within. The city’s song, the angel’s song. I seek to learn to sing it, though the thing I call my mouth is ill-equipped to form those sounds. So these instruments have been created to address it, to mimic the numberless sounds that come with the songs. Each instrument formed to make one sound, so I surround myself with them, in columns that reach to the ceiling. They are my creations, though they cannot worship me except in their dumb, one-note way. I pick one, pluck it, place it back. Pull another, make a peal with it, and drop it. Going on in this way, through the light and dark, I seek to recreate the songs I hear, though this airy body is too slow, and gets ever caught up in angles, arcs and hollows of the world that cannot be seen or made sense of. Lagging behind the song I am struck with a sense of sadness, knowing that I will never live up to the demands of the song, that I might never praise fully. When this body wears out, a new one must be found. Once in a century, maybe once in a millennium. The old body: bent, broken, dissolved or flaking. The new body thus takes its place in perfection. Not all bodies fit the bill, not many in fact, can. A span must be set aside, years even, to find the right body. Pure, of course. One known to god, it should be filled with gods even. A shining skin, though not so bright that the skin is an affront to god. Symmetrical and sturdy. Jewel-ridden and liquid. Moving through stillness with perpetual prayer. A pure prayer, one the body does not know. So seeking these bodies, which shine in the darkness, is undertaken only at night. There is a bowl I may see through. I place my relics in it, I bow my face into the bowl and, there, the relics shine, showing me visions of these bodies, and their directions, though not their exact locations. A direction is shown to me, and the image of a shining body. Though this present body is airy and broken, the new body must be found in a pure state. One chamber is set apart (there are many rooms here, each with its purpose, as is the nature of a temple: separation, transmission, dedication, no different from a body) for ablutions. Within: the open air and lack of light. A sheet of skin of god that can be lain on, the waters of life surrounding. Some of this body’s skin can be seen through. An affront to any god that is watching, which only wants to see its own skin, its own flesh, its own likeness in us. For those who seek to become like god must not forsake them in their image. There is a chalice used to cleanse one’s self. Those wrappings around this body are undone and tossed aside so that the full nakedness can be seen. That skin underneath then washed with something burning so that it is ready to be covered anew. Some amber stuff that cleans and steadies the skin for the other skin. The amber stuff turns to gas in seconds, fills the air with a holy scent that sears the lungs and brings visions. Then another chalice, the blackness of its liquid speaks to the skin of god to me. So, when dry, then: this I rub. Across this limb and that limb and that limb and that limb. I have forgotten their names, though the skin (an abomination) peeks through in patches. Across the face: a place with holes and hair. Across another face I had not seen before. Into the hair and about the neck and trunk, the other places seen and not seen. Through the valleys and across the peaks, the plains, the ponds. The cairns, the buttes, the caves, the seams, the stems, the strands, the isles, the capes. All this is covered. The nodes, the napes, the sterns, the scree, the depths, the scrapes. All this is covered. This cataplasm applied, not a patch uncovered, there is the matter of the sealing. God’s shining black skin is not something that should be shown for long, lest it overtake the world with its power, the body becoming the body, revolving through itself endlessly. No worship can happen in that state, and the other gods within it would be abolished, upsetting then the harmony that has taken hold. The sealing must be done with care. In this chamber of ablutions are many relics of the saints. Small pieces found under the night’s air. Thing that shines. Thing that buckles and speaks. Thing that raises a pleasing odor to the heavens. Thing discarded by those who do not comprehend. All these: gathered on pilgrimage, stored where their true power can be seen. Placed then onto the skin of my skin. They know their place, adhere with joy. The tooth of a saint, a small part of the scroll of the law, an angel’s trumpet, a cassock (stained and torn), a thurible, a censer, three tablets. On my brow: two temple stones. To the chest: an altar. I bind my limbs with their law. I wrap my heart in a crown of thorns. Beside my loins the sacrificial blade. What is sacred, what is profane. A seraph’s face, the chariot’s wheel, a hammer, a sword. This body, covered, now becomes the other body. A final wrapping so that the skin is hidden from prying eyes. So cleansed I may, myself, now pray. One recites the words, but the words are motions which the soul undertakes. Those motions the body must too undertake, for the prayer to make it before the gaze of god. The words of the prayer are stillness, thus the soul sits in stillness, thus the body too must sit in stillness. That stillness in a genuflection, the legs folded inwards, the trunk folded over the legs. The head bowed toward the heart, the eyes left open to see. And seeing only darkness. The arms laid out, the hands open, upward. Above each hand, an angel dancing. The drone of the angels is the song of my heart. The song of the heart is the prayer of my mouth. The prayer of my mouth is the movement of the universe, spheres within spheres. Cleansed, adorned with god’s skin, covered in relics and filled with prayer, I set out in the direction I have been shown. Under cover of darkness, I set out. The city appears like the lines of the law to me. Within it are set commentaries on the law, within those commentaries other commentaries are layered and so on. One must be always learning the law, and its commentaries, to navigate the city. Once one knows the law one may navigate the city like a holy text: moving across lines but also down the pages, across sections and chapters, genealogies. The law has many facets, coming to understand it is a perpetual process. I seek to avoid the faces of the fallen, the heretical, those who do not comply, those who shirk the law or work against it out of pride or hatred. To see their faces would debase me. The sin rubs off on contact, or by presence alone. A covered face, covered eyes. Nose and mouth stopped up. Sin breeds and breathes in them, though not in the shining body that is sought. One that is truly holy need not breathe air, they breathe the law and the gods’ holy words. The songs flow in and out, constructing a holy breath that sustains the soul, and the body. Even this feeble, rotting body. One sees in the city, between the lines of the law, every layer of the heavens and hells. Placed one atop another, hidden from the common eye, they can be seen. Here angels gather together to sing praise, but these angels too are demons, scourging each other with hideous taunts and lamentations. And there, a great beast of hell tears down the pride of man, punishing him for that pride, but in doing so raises him up, with terrifying songs of exaltation to a god whose name is unknown. Down, into the tunnels beneath the city, I find a beautiful silence, flowing with the tears of sinful men. These tears, the silence itself, is a song, a dirge, a drone from the most distant and holy angels. The silence a space to be filled by monumental truths. I stoop to drink from those tears, transmuting the lamentation of their sin into forgiveness. Here, below the city’s lines of law, the tunnels are formed by the logic of atonement. Each sin bears within it the punishment for which might make it right. The sins each connected through a hierarchy, family tree or map of descendants. So too, those punishments and atonements, in a map of those sins, though reflected and inverted as through through a curved mirror. Traveling through this is itself a form of atonement and punishment. With each step, the body is caught and snagged then cut and torn. These putrid tears cover one and, with their filth, wash one clean. Lengths are traversed, turns are taken. The plane of atonement is one of endless wandering, and no matter how much one has journeys through it, the body emerges, still, with an endless list of sins that remain. Though no god truly forgives, for even a temporary sin against an eternal being requires eternal punishment. Forgiveness is just a momentary reprieve from one’s punishment, though that moment — through a miracle of grace — may itself appear eternal. But time must not be wasted in securing reprieves for those who are undeserving. I step aside and carry on, the transmuted tears falling from me as pearls that sink into the river of tears. Pearls that will appear before swine, surely. Swine, those beasts that consume their own filth to create more filth. An endless cycle that is its own god. My travels to find another body are endless. I have been performing them for all time and will continue performing them until the end of time. The bodies are forms I take, temporary gods whose needs are many, and always differ. One craves relics, another many pleasant scents, yet another a thousand offspring in which to lodge its own shard. This one seeks to punish its worshippers through plague, that through weeping and gnashing of teeth, another by giving its followers an endless hunger then providing an endless feast of filth so that they consume and retch without cease. In all of these rituals and punishments, I take part. By learning their rituals and abasing myself, I grow closer to the furthest, greatest god. The shape of this god I have seen only once. Emerging from these tunnels, I find myself in a great expanse. Alone. The silence here speaks to my nearness. The body I seek is still hidden from me, but must be near. I proceed and search in a pattern that reflects the path of Neptune through the constellation Adaris. A faint sound, not yet a song but an incoherent moan, comes from below. I stop, set my nails to the earth and dig. A hand’s breadth down the soil writhes and reveals a living coil. I hold it up into the dim, moon’s light. It may be a relic of a dead saint or a serpent that has feasted on demon’s flesh. Whatever it is has lain dormant since time immemorial. Birthed by a god that shed its body in a final act of penance to its own god. A trace, a smear. It coils and uncoils rapidly, its shining black skin like the skin of god, like my own skin. I speak to it, but it is deaf and blind. I pray to it, but it has not yet learned the language of prayer. Every new god creates its own language and that language becomes the god itself, the language its extension out into the world. Each god must learn its own language, then I must learn that language, that I might praise it. This god knows only two words now: coil and uncoil. Soon enough those two words will come into union and birth another to create a third. Those three words couple—each one to another—then there will be five. In time, those couple again to make eleven. Soon enough the language has grown so that there is a name for everything in the universe. A moment after the language has named all other things in the universe it may make a name for the one thing in the universe that does not yet have a name: itself. When the god’s language has birthed a name for itself, this is when the god knows itself. But this will take time. Only then will I know if this god will produce the body that I need. Though it is not the body I seek, I might serve this god so that it might serve me in turn. I place this god within myself. What a curious thing, in that it does not resist. These small gods can be so reactive, crying out for their autonomy, and yet this one acquiesces without protest. The god secure, I retreat. Returning to the temple, my home, I set to building this newly-birthed god an altar. Every altar houses a god, is in fact its eternal home on this plane. The altar must be built around the god itself, sealing it in its place. A young god, especially, is a fearsome force. Flighty and capricious, it has little control over it’s constructive and destructive powers. I place this coiling god on a platform, set four relics around it at the cardinal directions. A section of the law is inscribed above the relics, preceding in a spiral around the platform so that each line rises above the line that came before. A wall of the law. Once this is built, a line of praise is inscribed, in a spiral, outside of this. At its peak, the line of prayer is pulled up into a pinnacle which might send that prayer upward, and so that the prayers of this god may leave it’s altar. Every altar being, after all, its own shrine and temple. Finally, around this, is inscribed a spiral of lamentation. This starts at the top, proceeding downwards. From this, a spike process is drawn into the earth. Exhausted from the physical exertion I attend to my studies. The hours are long and the best way to pass them is in study. I live among my library, the books a labyrinth I pass through, between, over and under. In places the wall of text rises and meets to form arches, tunnels, caverns, grottos. Led to a text by intuition and grace, I pull it from a wall, sit and read it. Light is never needed, for the words printed on the page, only convey the text’s most facile meaning. Bereft of light, and with some concentration, the words behind these words shine through, these words that coil and uncoil through each subsequent layer of meaning. I awake with a start. The furthest reaches of my studies can only be accessed while dreaming. Those lessons, instilled while I sleep, sit locked away in the restful, speechless mind. How long I have been in this state of dream study, I cannot tell. A few minutes, a few months? In that time the god has learned to speak. Not speech but the makings of speech. Speech without structure, speech without substance. It calls to me with its wordless words. This is a wise god then. Or a fast one. I go to its altar. Sheathed in the walls of prayer and lamentation, I cannot see it, though from the sound of its song it has grown considerably. Its song is strange, words and laws that are new to me: half-formed, at once luxurious and austere. Songs of starvation, of the law of the toads, the mind of mud and ecstatic scourging. I wish to see its form, but fear it might break loose and, in its confusion, consume me. Even gods must follow a law, lest they become wild and untamed. But this god has grown too fast, learned more words than law. I wind a strand of binding prayer about its altar, careful not to praise it, lest it grow even faster. If it gets too large, and I cannot find a body, it will surely overtake me. In the altar there is a small door: just large enough to see in, but not so large that the god might escape. This: opened now, careful not to let in too much light. A host of angels — attracted by the god’s song, like moths to a flame — appears around the door for the merest tick of time, then disappears. Only darkness can be found within the altar. But this darkness writhes. All of it. I shut the door. This god grows too fast. It consumes some material I cannot see. Some spiritual garbage which lies around us in invisible heaps and piles, material that would poison any other god: on this the god has learned to gorge. It must be taken to some far-off place, starved of this material which at once feeds it and warps it. The altar is large, but not too large to carry. There is no time for ablutions and rituals, the altar is taken from its place and out of doors. At once some great angry god in the sky bears down on me, beating down with its light and heat. Even a gaseous thing like this body, wrapped in prayers and relics is susceptible to the heat songs of an angry god. The altar set down, I shield my eyes. Ah no, this is that brash thing called Son, which has not seen me for years. A god, yes, but a vacant one, and deaf to our songs, or just ignorant. Less a god than an act. Less an act, even, than an order. The altar can be moved under these prayers, though with duress. And then, to my surprise: so many other gods out now. Not gods, not, their smell is wrong. So are these angels and demons, but gross and bloated? Even then, they fail to dance and sing. Or are these only men? Going about their lives, failing to worship, ignorant of all that goes on around them? One had heard about them, these men, the long forsaken source of each god’s pride. They inhabited this place long ago, but I had thought them long extinct, or secluded in their small places, within a long hibernation while they awaited the return of some one or other whose name I forget. Their faces are so blank and free of concern, caught up in whatever passages are presented to them. Preceding with such strange movements, just the shambling of sleepwalkers, vomiting a handful of empty phrases to one another over and over. They might as well be flies and worms, though so much louder, with a screeching that might wake the god. It takes some days, but I find myself in a far away and desolate place. In the last few miles I have found a struggle: the altar has grown in weight, the god’s whirling and jostling causes it to rock and shake. An airy body is not accustomed to bearing such weight. The sand and the scrub should starve it. Setting the altar down in a hole in the earth, I should be safe. The god sings now with many voices. Muffled, thankfully, by the altar’s walls. If it has many mouths it must too have many hands, many ears and many eyes. The implications of this I cannot know, and they frighten me. A god’s power is in its sight. The more eyes it has, the further it can see. I must then see it for myself, one last time, before leaving it. Something with so much power, so much potential, that feeds on our sludge layer. I open the door, carefully again, slowly. There is some rustling. It has come up against the bounds of the altar, beyond them perhaps, crushing in on itself. Its skin is like black stone that seethes, a mineral coiling back and forth. This curiosity satisfied, I go to close the door, but an appendage rises and pushes it open. It writhes rapidly. An eye meets the door and meets my own eye, this eye that appears like a shining turning thing: the iris a lightless galaxy that rotates about a cluster of pupils like an eternal depth: an instance, a passage, an absence. For a moment our gazes meet, and in that moment it takes all that I am. There is a sense to it that burns into me. Not hatred or caution, but a hard, endless yearning. With the little strength I have left I hammer the door shut. The appendage recoils with a snap. Surely it has passed the point of imprinting, so there should be no harm. Gods, after all, are like all other things—they forever seek the original thing, the thing first seen: their first worshipper—and will pursue it to the ends of the earth, whether for praise or punishment. But that could not be me. It could not. And as for my body? What can I say about it, now? Its state has rapidly gone from bad to worse. I had hoped to find another body by now, but the gassy stuff I once was has burned off or otherwise gone away, the little matter left has become thin and dry. My motion now limited, the guts immobilized and fetid. The senses have dulled so that only patches of light and dark are seen, and only the loudest prayers are heard. For a time sounds of great tumult made it through. Perhaps those men had finally awoken from their slumber to meet the one they were waiting for and that was the sound of their empty rejoicing. More likely those men set to destroying each other in earnest, finally, once and for all. But even those great sounds have long since faded. Now there is only quiet without. My mind fills the darkness and silence with its own images and songs. Though they are only illusions, I do find them beautiful. Of those limbs that are left most have folded into a sitting position from which I say all my prayers. I subsist off the few scraps that are dropped before me by the odd god who passes from time to time and takes pity on my poor form. Strange how one may spend lifetimes praising these gods, only to find, once those prayers cease, oneself forgotten by them. This is a kind of peace then — perhaps even happiness — though the torment, it must be said, is staggering and relentless. Each spot on the body, when it is not numb, is filled with pain. But isn’t this the great and final goal of every devotee? To find the seed of pleasure in all the pain, some exaltation in the punishment, all the praise hidden in each lament? I have not found this fully, yet, but feel I am close. With the passing of my body has passed too parts of my mind. I have forgotten even the shorter names of the chariot, the layout of the throne. The last time I used words in my prayer, it was the same word, repeated over and over. That word? So long has it been since I prayed with words that even it has been forgotten. So I pray silently now. The last parts of my self sink into oblivion, darkness passes into darkness. Then, suddenly, a sound. If it is loud enough that these numb, dull, stopped up ears can hear it, it must be deafening. In the darkness of this house, the first movement I have seen in some time. What is this thing, though? As if from far off it appears like a great black cathedral studded with a thousand rose windows, each spire crowned with a thousand other spires, and each of those spires crowned too, endlessly. Each apse and apse-within-an-apse inverts then reverts, at one moment a dome, the next a cavern. This thing not whirling or dancing but inverting, at once convex, then concave. It stops before me, those parts I can see pulsing and shining. When one of the windows turns to face me I can see through it into a part of it like a nave that extends without termination. This nave inverts, passes through me, and I am at once within it. And within it, once again, I feel that yearning. This body wastes away at once, in all ways: worm, rot, bloat, flame. At once, a new body is born, but before I might rejoice that too rots away. A new body forms again, then immediately cycles into rot. The bodies build and rot before I can know them. I understand then: it knows I need a body but rather than one body for all eternity it gives me every body as fast as it can. The cathedral fills with my rotting bodies. As I fill the nave, it fills me and that yearning too fills me. This god has found me, then. It saw my face as I saw its own, devastated the world in search of me. Its yearning can never cease, is now the engine that drives all things. I see then that the cathedral is only an appendage, a kind of hand. It holds me then. I see too that the yearning can be a kind of peace. For when all there is is yearning, one need seek nothing else. The yearning yearns only for itself. I look up then, with my new eyes. Eyes that see clearly. Before me an endless expanse of the whirls whose center is an endless depth. We will make a new world, after all, this god and myself, or what I will become. A world filled with yearning. A world filled with peace.

***_____ Samuel M. Moss lives in rural Cascadia. He is the author of The Veldt Institute (Double Negative, 2025). His short fiction has been published in 3:AM Magazine, Always Crashing, minor literature[s] and New Sinews among other venues. He runs ergot., a site for innovative horror. Find more at perfidiousscript.com and on Bluesky @perfidiousscript.bsky.social 30 June 2026