No Shortcuts to Now

Author: K. L. Homme

  • Veni, Vidi, Vaccine

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    by

    K. L. Homme
    in

    Siri announced that I had arrived. I turned off NPR, shut down my Subaru Forester, and began fumbling through my documents.  Photo ID? Check.  Kaiser card? Check.  Face mask? Ready.  I put my documents into my wallet, slid it into my right back pocket, stepped out into the parking lot, and strapped on my mask. I checked the…

  • The Dolphin’s Always Right (4.6)

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    by

    K. L. Homme
    in ,

    Like Apollo, Dionysus was a child of infidelity. This time, jealous Hera sent the Titans to destroy him. They tore the child to pieces and devoured him—all but his heart. Athena rescued it and returned it to Zeus, who swallowed it. In time, the god was born again.

  • Only the God Changed (4.5)

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    by

    K. L. Homme
    in

    The life of a god is but a mythical parting of the eternal dark.  About fourteen centuries before Christ’s eastern star pierced Pagan skies, a goat fell into a chasm, and began to bleat strangely.  This perplexed its shepherd.  Having got his goat safely out, he climbed back in, and down, to inhale the vapors…

  • The Oracle at Dolphin (4.4)

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    by

    K. L. Homme
    in

    A dragoness born of mud—a child of Gaia named Python—guarded this cave from which her mother’s oracle spoke, at Pytho. Legend tells that the dragoness was drawn into the jealousy of Zeus’s sister-wife, Hera. Gentle Leto carried the faithless Zeus’s twins—Artemis and Apollo—in her womb. In her jealousy, Hera set the serpent upon the Titaness.

  • X Marks the Name of The Father

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    by

    K. L. Homme
    in , ,

    What follows listens closely to a White House press conference, one year into the administration, January 2026. By the time a word bubbles up to the surface, it’s passed through several subterranean chambers. It arrives as a dream-image arrives—attached to innumerable associations—tangled with roots, not etymological, yet of a perdurable toughness. In our waking hours,…

  • Of ICE and Men: Curley Editon

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    K. L. Homme
    in , , ,

    I’ve never told this story. It still makes me blush, even now, though it happened about four decades ago, when I was in seventh grade. “Man is the only animal that blushes—or needs to.” — Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil Every so often—working in the garage, mowing the yard, taking out the trash—the memory jumps out from…

  • The Wombstone (4.3)

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    by

    K. L. Homme
    in ,

    Cronus swallowed his children. The prophecy had foretold that, just as he had overthrown his own father, Uranus, so one of his own children would overthrow him. This foreknowledge tormented him. Transformed him.

  • An Ontology of Equality

    An Ontology of Equality

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    by

    K. L. Homme
    in , ,

    Orwell warned us that authoritarian governments flatten description and constrict vocabulary in order to maintain control. They repeat words, phrases, and slogans so incessantly that at last these become as familiar as our own voice, and we mistake their rhetoric for truth, and measure all things against it. What does not fit the familiar description…

  • The Wombfish (4.2)

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    by

    K. L. Homme
    in

    Doris is a sea-goddess, a second-generation Titan who lived long before Zeus established his Olympian hierarchy. She’s no queen, but rather a natural node within a mythic network. She’s but a single, dew-bright strand within an interconnected web of life. She’s also the daughter of Oceanus, the world-circling river, and of Tethys, the fertile sea.…

  • Of Roots, Rhizomes, and Fish with Feet: The Lurid Bait of Egotism (4.2)

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    by

    K. L. Homme
    in

    The purple mountain heather is a symbolic affront to the arrogance, the tyranny, the demagoguery that fancies itself the axis of the world. Had great Ozymandias been a botanist—had he studied the rhizome and grasped its implications—he would have been moved to feeble tears. Or else he’d have ordered every last one ripped from the…