THE GREATER REALITY AREA

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Uel Aramchek

TRILOBITE BLUES

In life, your pet trilobite never got to meet you. The little oval spent quiet days scurrying about the seafloor, as its kind had always done for hundreds of millions of years. Sometimes it would curl up into a ball to protect itself from danger; other times, just because it

BURIED SKY LODGE

“I mean, I guess it’s been like ten years.” Derrick was filling maraschino cherries with cream cheese for some godawful dessert cocktail. “Sure, why not, I’ll tell you about the weird ski lodge. "There was a group of us who lived out in Durango who got paid

DEAD HAND

After a tornado struck Cincinnati in 1974, Sears floor manager Joe Fishbourne attempted to call his ex-wife from a downtown payphone with the excuse of checking whether or not she was okay. When he opened the attached phonebook, however, his attention was diverted to the unusual name “Philistine Causeway,

THE SECRET OF THE SNAIL

In the art of the classic Rider-Waite-Smith tarot, the Nine of Pentacles depicts a noblewoman alone, surrounded by a decadence of grapes. In her left hand is a hooded falcon, as calm and indifferent to the surrounding world as she is. This is the card of Venus in

KLAXON AND CHRYON

PIPING HOT SKY MUSHROOMS

When cultivated in darkness, enoki mushrooms spill outward into long, pale tendrils in a sprawl not unlike that of fireworks. At this stand, sponsored by the University Beneath St. Paul, they were being sold-tempura fried, then drenched in all manner of colorful sauces: red-orange calabrianero-chili buffalo, verdant

THE TWELVE HOURS OF UNIVERSAL NIGHT

Leister Helmer, Wisconsinite inventor of the Universal Night Clock (patented 1954), rejected the standard observation of February 29th taking place every four years, denouncing it as a “depraved and uncreative use of man’s most hard-won resource.” In its place, he personally observed an undated set of twelve extra

EAT ALL YOU CAN

The Florida Keys themselves were once alive. Their bedrock formed from the calcified remains of what was once a sprawling forest of coral, strangled of all color and complexity by the sudden onset of an Ice Age. Above this once-living stone is a slime congealed from centuries of rotting

THE MYRMECOLEON EFFECT REVISITED

ALLOCATION

Those who live out of suitcases learn to spend their evenings in bars. An endless tunnel of concourses, fuselages, trams, and front desks creates a dissociative environment where the realm of dreams provides more sure footing than any permanent address. There is no salvation from this state of mind in