Issue 1 - Earth Is Huge and We Are All On It Zine

8/9/2019 Issue 1 - Earth Is Huge and We Are All On It Zine

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Issue 1

05/31/2014


2/20

Contents:Introduction

By Georgene Nunn

Creator Bios

I felt like throwing up short fiction; contains suicide, sex

By Amy K

Cool Tat visual art

By Chris Baird

Establishing the CPTTP short fiction

By Ryan Ptomey

VROOM VROOM MOTHERFUCKER comic

By Zachariah Brown

a man dies short fiction; contains death

By Elizabeth Mills

Montreal short fiction; contains self-harm, body horror

By Coyote Victoria Knockwood

Birds

short writing

By scrublord

Lacrimal Cup

digital sketch

By Georgene Nunn

Afterword About This Zine

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 1

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 2-3

………….. 4-6

.………………………………………………………………………………………………. 7

…………………………………………... 8-9

………… 10-11

………………………………………………..... 12-13

……………………... 14-15

……………………………………………………………………………………………….. 16

……………………………………………………………………..... 17


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1

If we’re being honest with one another, as I

believe it’s only right to do, I haven’t the faintest

clue what I’m doing or where this will ultimately

go. I do know that the earth is huge, and we are

all on it, and I hope that’s as exciting for you as

it is for me.

Some very smart people have lead me to believe

that in addition to challenging exclusion from

mainstream spaces, it is important to create

spaces to celebrate the things the mainstream

isn’t. Spaces where weird isn’t weird, it’s simply

life in all it’s messy glory. Spaces wherein the

queer, the curious, the questing, &c can dry the

spittle of the world’s giant cursing mouth o

their wings in the warm sunshine of people who

are excited that they exist.

I myself am highly accustomed to doing two

things very well: not taking up much space and

not upsetting people. In the last few years I ’ ve

come to realize that these two traits have their

positives, but are also a symptom of the sickness

that settles on one’s bones after years and years

of being exposed to a litany of subtle hints and

outright demands that it’s best if someone like

me—perhaps someone like you too—should

have a seat, just pipe down, let the important

people talk.

But as I’m discovering: we don’t need to have all

the answers to sit up and say how we feel. We

don’t need to ask permission to exist. We can

come together and nd ways to redene

important, not just for ourselves, but for

everyone willing to watch and learn. We don’t

deserve to be driven underground; we, like

everyone, deserve a chance to y.

So together, the ignored, the hopeful, the

unusual, the shy, can start creating this new

space with the hope that it will help us soar. I

look forward to making this space a reality for as

long as I can and getting as many people—

exciting, interesting, fucking weird people—in

front of as many eyeballs as I possibly can.

Thank you and welcome. 05/30/2014 GHN

Your work good enough.

You are valuable and the things you

create are valuable!

Introduction


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Introduction, Afterword, and Lacrimal Cup—Georgene

Nunn

Georgene is the editor and coordinator of this zine. Read more about the projecton the Earth Is Huge magazine tumblr. She freelances by day & talks a lot of shit

on twitter at basically all hours, but is generally harmless and friendly. Email

[email protected] to contribute or ask questions about the zine.

I felt like throwing up—Amy K

Amy is a journalist. She is currently in talks with bugs and the birds who eat

them.

Twitter: @sexyprison

VROOM VROOM MOTHERFUCKER—Zachariah Brown

Art:

zozxox.tumblr.com

Comics: bitchimananime.tumblr.com

Zine: tookawaiitodie.tumblr.com

Contributors:

Establishing the CPTTP—Ryan Ptomey

An English major born an raised in Kansas City. A fan of music, beer, and many

other things. You can nd me on Twitter as @WriterRyan.

This piece originally published on author ’ s personal website.

a man dies—Elizabeth Mills

Elizabeth is a writer from Massachusetts and can be found regularly screaming or writing snippets of ction

on Twitter. She one day hopes to look stunning in a dress.

Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/redvetwo

http://earth-is-huge-mag.tumblr.com/http://earth-is-huge-mag.tumblr.com/https://twitter.com/Gianiahttps://twitter.com/Gianiamailto:[email protected]:[email protected]://twitter.com/sexyprisonhttps://twitter.com/sexyprisonhttp://zozxox.tumblr.com/http://zozxox.tumblr.com/http://bitchimananime.tumblr.com/http://bitchimananime.tumblr.com/http://tookawaiitodie.tumblr.com/http://tookawaiitodie.tumblr.com/https://twitter.com/WriterRyanhttps://twitter.com/WriterRyanhttp://slabbulkhead.com/post/60381427495/a-history-of-temporal-understandinghttp://slabbulkhead.com/post/60381427495/a-history-of-temporal-understandinghttp://slabbulkhead.com/post/60381427495/a-history-of-temporal-understandinghttp://slabbulkhead.com/post/60381427495/a-history-of-temporal-understandinghttps://twitter.com/redfivetwohttps://twitter.com/redfivetwohttp://www.patreon.com/redfivetwohttp://www.patreon.com/redfivetwohttp://www.patreon.com/redfivetwohttps://twitter.com/redfivetwohttp://slabbulkhead.com/post/60381427495/a-history-of-temporal-understandinghttps://twitter.com/WriterRyanhttp://tookawaiitodie.tumblr.com/http://bitchimananime.tumblr.com/http://zozxox.tumblr.com/https://twitter.com/sexyprisonmailto:[email protected]://twitter.com/Gianiahttp://earth-is-huge-mag.tumblr.com/


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Montreal—Coyote Victoria Knockwood

Coyote Victoria Knockwood is a two-spirit Mi’kmaq artist, musician and

writer. Born and raised in Alberta, she currently resides in Montreal on

her way to Mi’kma’ki. Heavily inuenced by Cree stories heard as a

youth, Mi’kmaq stories and the works of authors like Clarice Lispector

and Franz Kaa, CVK seeks to share her view of the world. Msit

no’kmaq. Twitter: @2SpiritSexPunk

Cool Tat—Chris Baird

Chris Baird is dead. He draws comix. chrisbairdisdead.tumblr.com

Birds—scrublord

One time scrublord got high and watched two ducks have sex for like two hours in which he later described

as 'a busy day’.

Twitter: @scrublord

Cool pictures of earth seen from space come from the Wikimedia Commons, as provided by NASA.

Fonts are from Apostrophic Laboratories.

Earth Is Huge And We Are All On It by http://earth-is-huge-mag.tumblr.com/ is licensed under a Creative

Commons Attribution-

NonCommercial-

ShareAlike 4.0 International License. All works in this publication are subject to this license except where otherwise specied.

https://twitter.com/2SpiritSexPunkhttps://twitter.com/2SpiritSexPunkhttp://chrisbairdisdead.tumblr.com/http://chrisbairdisdead.tumblr.com/https://twitter.com/scrublordhttps://twitter.com/scrublordhttp://apostrophiclab.pedroreina.net/http://apostrophiclab.pedroreina.net/http://earth-is-huge-mag.tumblr.com/http://earth-is-huge-mag.tumblr.com/http://earth-is-huge-mag.tumblr.com/http://earth-is-huge-mag.tumblr.com/http://earth-is-huge-mag.tumblr.com/http://earth-is-huge-mag.tumblr.com/http://earth-is-huge-mag.tumblr.com/http://earth-is-huge-mag.tumblr.com/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/http://earth-is-huge-mag.tumblr.com/http://apostrophiclab.pedroreina.net/https://twitter.com/scrublordhttp://chrisbairdisdead.tumblr.com/https://twitter.com/2SpiritSexPunk


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4

I had a dream that I was sitting cross-legged in a black room, holding the moon in the palm of my hand. the earth was

there, rotating around and passing through my arm if she needed to. No stars. The moon, herself, no bigger around

than a coin, sitting with such weight as if she were very dense. there is no sun but we are still glowing with his light,

and it is no trouble seeing, although we have our eyes closed. The moon was so young, and that's with shocked me.

Nobody was born yet. simultaneous to the moon in my hand, there was this awareness that I on the earth am under-

neath this same rock in my hand. We talk, and she knows who I am, and she knows that I am sitting underneath her in

a dierent time than when I sit beside her now. We are both learning how the world works. We are young together,

and it is good.

***

A homeless man broke into my hometown movie theater and hung himself by the neck on the stage right side of our

largest screening room on the far end of the building. I don't know whether or not he realized the girl who opens

mornings would nd him, in all his still and all his suggestion. My idea of a good time was to take his leather jacket and

throw it at my best friend Billy who worked with me, there. Then Billy threw the shoes at my head. When I was swat-

ting at them in the air, a couple of my ngers brushed the clammy inside of the shoe and I felt like throwing up but

kept it inside. This uneasy feeling started building.

Later that evening I made my sister smell my ngers even though I washed and worked all day. She, 12, said that she

still smelled it, though I don't see that, not one little bit. "Avery!," Dad said like he was swatting a dog with a newspa-per. "Don't do that to your sister!"

"but dad. she asked."

"Honey, it's gross," mother gently informs me.

"I know it's gross. I told you I feel like throwing up!"

"Dinner table, sweetie."

"yes, yes, alright mother" I said, but still I couldn't stop thinking about the dead guy. the sanctity of the dinner table,

even my deep quiet space in bed wouldn't stop me thinking about him. but Confucius said that it does not matter how

slowly you go so long as you do not stop, and I suppose that's right. and something keeps me on that dead guy, so I

suppose I'll stay on him till he aords me a spoils to my hunt. "Spoils of the hunt," where did I hear that recently? I

asked them, "Doesn't spoil mean to rot, and isn't hunting when you go get something fresh?" Who did I ask? As I get

older, the connective bers that wrap around memory begin to wear thin. My memories tell me my impulses. My im-

pulses are wearing thin or something. I am 16. It is the year 2010. My name is Avery. I have fucked up genitals. I am nei-

ther girl or boy but I present myself as feminine for convenience' sake.

I would love to go around telling the world that I'm intersex, that I feel asexual most days, that sometimes I masturbate

for hours... and see it as a basic human right! which our royal overlords somehow illegalized during the medieval ages,

I felt like throwing upBy Amy K contains mentions of suicide, sex


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5

... that I see myself as an empathic circuit indispensable between women and men societally... and that my dehumaniza-

tion my objectication has hurt me and continues to hurt them more each day... that I love ngers in my butt!

That I love my diary.

I want to scare, but not in actuality. Really I just wants to help because I see what others don't... I wonder if all intersex

people see what I do, between worlds...? I've never met another not that I tried

***

All evening I'm thinking about the dead guy. What did he want? Where was he hangin out last week? Did anybody ever

care about him as much as now? When will he fall away from my point of focus? And what will replace him there?

***

Billy and I kissed and it sounded like the whirrr of childhood nally stopped spinning under my asshole...

***

walking down Main Street in the chaos of summer. I'm listening to my headphones loud, in a black T-shirt and jeans.

the sun is kicking my ass and the sky is blue and I have sunburn on the bridge of my nose. The point in between my

eyes is pale from wearing sunglasses too much. My sweaty butt is kicking my ass. I would not mind dying. I think I'm

unafraid to die. note to self don't drink hot coee in the afternoon during summer you dummy, I love you

***

My Family Unit lives on a small border town near Niagara Falls. We say it's a coastal town because we are at the widest

point in the river and all these old people get such a kick out of it. "Tide is coming in," they say, standing beside that

huge angry torrent. "Tide's coming in, just watch, tides are very slow," and then nothing but the riverow. They'll sit

there waiting for you to make a joke back. But that's too much pressure for me to be able to make a joke. Of the ve

times I've been put on the spot like that, of the ve times, I always try to keep quiet, but on the fth time I cracked my

silence and did this long drawn-out sigh. I told him (my grandpa) everybody in this town loves the tide so much but

nobody fuck-king knows what a tide is. Each man is an island and each island has its own tides, and every person in

this fuck-king town is so hermetically fucking sealed o from their selves that if they saw what their tides carry back to

them, back and forth, back and fuck-king forth, if all these fuck-king people saw what they dump in their own tidewat-

ers, all their gasolines and fuck-king plastic waste, they would shit right in the river, they would shit, I was telling him,

or I would have if he hadn't cut me o at my second "fuck-king" with a "calm down Avery." I love a "calm down Avery"

because it's usually followed by some words like, "every man is an island, an island populated by women," and from this

I can gather that my grandfather actually respects women, and I'm happy to learn this about him. I'm happy to learn

that learning... things like this... makes me happy... because it means that I do establish basic connections that other

humans do... and I'm happy to basically be human, although the idea gives me more grief than not, most of the time.

Continued...


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6

Since Billy and I kissed, I can't stop thinking about his penis. He grabbed my chest more roughly than I expected. At that

moment I resolved to suck him o so good that he respects me as a person more, whatever that means. I want to blow him

so teasingly and so right that he can't help but blow it exactly when I want him to... on my face! I like to imagine giving him

poignant eye contact... He grabbed my tiny tits with a rough hand that I have only known "in passing"... usually when he got

clumsy... or gets clumsy... usually in the past, when he's been clumsy, he shapes right up to my attention. But it's like sex

ipped a switch in his brain that ipped all kinds of random switches through his body like in his stupid strong hand, or his

chest that didn't feel my chest pull away from being tight against his. I'm going to blow him to set the world right again.

Going to blow him to see the world right again. take some of that power he took from me. balance.

***

that idiot Billy I tried to blow him and he said he had too many emotions. boys. I'm sick of being so femme. but if he's my

only alternative. no fuck that I know there's more in between boys and girls than meets your eye. but this suburbia shit is

too much to t all inside my head. sometimes. other times it's neat and tight and ts just right... I dunno.

Our suicide made the national news. Everybody in town said next they would start showing o our local celebs. fucking

completely overlooking how morbid the whole thing is. most big news outlets overlooked it too. They suggested it (morbid

morbidity), but most headlines said "homeless man breaks into movie theater and ends his own life," not "movie theater

swallows psyche and life of depressive homeless" or "industry capitalizing on pure novelty takes over homeless man'sfunctionality," or, "satellite nature of human life overshadowed by intrusive perceptual non-duality"... "communal

disintegration approaches point of debilitating strength"

I don't bleed but my heart ows each 29 days. Sort of crappy I don't even have anything to show for all the energy I crap

into the atmosphere. Nothing to show but my hot bod.. I guess I'm glad though because I've seen pads and tampons and I

dunno. School sucks.

———————————————————————————————

I felt like throwing up (cont.) By Amy K contains mentions of suicide, sex


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Cool Tat By Chris Baird


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Prior to 2036, very little was known about time travel. By the late 2020s, most physicists had completely given up on

the idea, and any further discussion on the subject was both limited to and driven by pop culture depictions in movies

and television. The pursuit had been abandoned after countless failures, but even then it had never been taken serious-

ly. Most concurred that, were time travel possible, travelers from the future would already have revealed themselves to

us. Other points of conjecture suggested that time travel would necessitate incredibly rare phenomena, such as a tra-

versable wormhole. Brief hope arose from experiments involving CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (g. 2-3), but these

would ultimately prove fruitless.

In 2022, the Lausanne Incident sparked a change in global opinions on time travel experiments. Many leaders of the

UWNA had already expressed concern regarding the potential for time travel technology to be abused should it fall into

the wrong hands. When an as of yet unknown error obliterated a signicant portion of the city, leaving an empty, per-

fectly hemispherical crater with a 5 mile radius (g. 2-4), the United Western Nations Alliance was quick to ban any

further experiments. While the Sino-Russian Federation continued its own experiments, western physicists had to be

content with entirely theoretical approaches to time travel. When the SRF’s largest time travel research facility in Ir-

kutsk was lost to an explosion with a yield comparable to the infamous “Little Boy” (a nuclear ssion bomb that was

dropped on Hiroshima in the early 20th century) in 2024, the rest of the world were quick to cease their own experi-

ments as well. By 2027, serious physicists completely abandoned the idea of ever discovering a realistic means of achiev-

ing time travel. Some still gave it thought, but these men and women fell either into the category of hobbyists or

“crackpots”.

On June 2, 2036, the rst recorded instance of time travel was observed when a traveler arrived from the year 3036.

That traveler was Jean Durand (g. 2-5). Durand not only revealed that time travel was possible but also set in motion

the events that would lead to our current understanding of both time travel itself and the nature of parallel universes.

As we came to learn, while time travelers can choose their temporal destination, the process deposits a person in the

same place in a separate parallel universe. Furthermore, due to the Mycroft Eect (g. 2-6), it is impossible for a travel-

er to re-

enter any universe in which they’ ve already existed. Thus, aecting change in one’s own universe initially ap-

peared impossible.

However, with the help of the UWNA, Durand was able to establish Travelers’ Day every 2 years on June 2. Much to the

chagrin of the British royalty, it was necessary to designate a portion of the grounds of Buckingham Palace for this pur-

pose in order to maintain a consistent location that had remained standing for at least a millennium. Through the rst

decades of this practice, Durand and the additional travelers who arrived after him were able to ascertain that there are

only 12 parallel universes (g. 2-6) as opposed to the unending number proposed in the Theory of Innite Universe

Splitting (g. 2-

7) that had been touted by Simon Crowley. This discovery helped to establish the Common Protocol forTime Travel Practices (CPTTP).

Using the CPTTP, eventually a system was created that would allow positive changes to be aected despite a traveler ’s

Establishing the CPTTPBy Ryan Ptomey


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inability to return to his own universe. While certain things had somehow consistently developed independently across

the multiverse, there were still enough dierences to make things dicult. By guiding each universe along an even more

similar path, we were able to eectively guarantee that a traveler would arrive in a past nearly identical to the one in his

or her own universe, thus enabling course correction to take place in all timelines.

- selected from A History of Temporal Understanding (Rosenbaum, Collin M., Phd. Kansas City: Walking Fire Publish-

ing, 2102. Digital.)

———————————————————————————————

Image credit: CERN

http://cds.cern.ch/record/628469http://cds.cern.ch/record/628469http://cds.cern.ch/record/628469


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VROOM VROOM MOTHERFUCKER


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By Zachariah Brown


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A man falls down three ights of stairs and breaks his neck after getting tossed out of an elevator for continuous

leering.

***

A man opens up his fridge, takes a look at boxes of expired takeout, and decides fuck it, you only live once. After

choking down questionable lo mein and three discolored sticks of teriyaki, he takes a shower. The tile of his bathroom

was white twenty years and several tenants ago; it gets slick when the water runs hot. He slips on it after getting out

of the shower (after silently staring at the wall for thirty minutes and feeling a chill coil around his spine,) splitting

his skull on the cracked porcelain of the sink.

***

A man runs through the park at eleven thirty in the morning, chased by three dogs and, almost haleartedly, their

owner. His sneakers are falling apart, the soles loose and near rotting, and he stumbles frequently. One of the dogs, a

mutt with dinosaur parentage, nips at the man ’s exposed calves. He trips, then, and slides across grass while the dogs

bark and cavort around him.

Later, after brushing o the owner’s strenuous apologies and realizing how late he is for a dentist’s appointment, the

man cuts through a construction site and is killed by a falling piece of concrete.

***

A man chucks a rock at a wasp hive and manages to outrun the agitated horde. Weeks and a dozen drunken retellings

of this story to strangers in dimly lit bars later, he comes across the same hive, busted open and empty on the

ground. He marvels at the construction, the holes and passages and material, before going home and feeding his sh.

The man dies in his sleep while dreaming of omnipresent buzzing.

***

A man wakes up hungover and alone, his head freshly shaved and his stomach violent. An hour later, he stumbles out

of his bathroom and manages to fry a few eggs, dousing them in salsa and steak sauce. He ’d picked up the recipe

from an old girlfriend, back when they’d both been freshman in college. He wonders where she went and if she ’s

having a better weekend than his.

(She owns a chain of successful bookstores and is seeing a orist, a woman from England who is terrible at playing

the guitar and loves it all the same. They’re spending their Saturday morning with coee and quiet conversation.)

The man washes his dishes and feels a familiar soreness in his back. He grimaces before stretching until his spine

pops. In thirty years complications from cirrhosis will kill him.

***

a man diesBy Elizabeth Mills contains death


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13

A man fumbles in the dark of a dust held attic, searching for a box and coming up empty. It ’s the middle of summer,

one washed out by humidity and cloudless days. He’s been crouching and scrounging for what feels like hours and

stands up fast, slamming his head against a wooden beam and collapsing to the oor. The heat takes care of the rest

and a pair of detectives nd his body six months later.

***

A man opens the wrong door and is red, with promises of worse should he talk about what he ’s seen. He goes home

and thinks on his options, falling asleep after six beers. An electrical re on the sixth oor takes out his entire

building – someone left their toaster plugged in. The man suocates and dies.

***

A man chokes to death on a cheese lled pretzel while his television broadcasts a preseason baseball game (a grand

slam is hit as he nally lets go.)

***

A man and his dog are involved in a seven car pile-up (the dog survives and is taken in by his sister.)

***

A man accelerates into a Jersey barrier after taunting and sneering at a hatchback driven by a teenage girl. The front

end of his car crumples immediately and his airbags fail to deploy. Several of his ribs are bruised by the seat-belt and

his head comes within inches of ricocheting o the steering column. His car spins a few times before coming to a

stop, leaking uid from where the engine used to growl and cough. A minivan tries to stop short but T-bones him

instead.

The man dies while a line of geese ies by overhead.

———————————————————————————————

The dance of Death 1914-1918 Death awed - Percy Smith—1920 (public domain)

http://www.awm.gov.au/collection/ART50278/http://www.awm.gov.au/collection/ART50278/http://www.awm.gov.au/collection/ART50278/


16/20


17/20

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I check my watch. 23H10. Kaquej will be bringing her chairs inside soon. I decide to keep walking, but at a slower

pace for all the blood loss. My skin is healing quickly, but I still feel a bit dizzy.

When I nally make it to kaquej’s table, she’s not there, and neither are her folding chairs. A black feather is stuck

into a crack in the table. I take it in my left hand, between forenger and thumb, and place it over top of my

bloodstained forearm, and then run my ngers over it gently. It sticks to the still wet blood, sparkles, then begins to

fade. The outline of the feather stays in my skin, but the rest is healed completely.

Looking up at the big brick building, I see that no lights are on. The streetlight above me ickers a bit then returns to

a dull yellow glow. The wind picks up and threatens to knock my hat o. A low groan rumbles from a couple blocks

over. Parc Emile-Berliner, near the tracks. But it’s not the low moaning of metal on metal, it’s as if a great throat is

opening for the rst time, hungry and confused. After so long a time, to suddenly have a voice and not know how to

speak. It grows deeper, and the wind grows stronger. St Jacques is empty. My arm hurts.

The streetlight above me ickers again, this time burning itself out as the ground around me rumbles, and the

groaning shifts to become a howl, a scream. Pain. I bite the inside of my cheek, and step into the street to cross over

to the Parc. The streetlights fade as I get closer, trac lights no longer glowing with bright red, yellow or green, but a

deep and faint purple. They start as spots and become trails in my eyes.

In the centre of Parc Emilie-Berliner is a great pillar of smoke, tinted a bad bruise, billowing into the sky. I stand,

mouth agape, as this thing rips something out of the earth and sends it above. Awestruck, I take a step forward, and

***

I wake up near the tracks. I lift my arm to see what time it is. 09H04. I pause, the face on my watch is cracked. The

skin on my left arm is torn up, as if the esh was twisted to the point of severing. My right arm is the same. That ’s

when I notice the sound of excited chirping from behind me. “Montreal,” I think and close my eyes again.

“Montreal.”

Glossary of Mi

kmaq Terms

Jipji

l – A bird

Kaquej – Crow

Kitpu

l – An eagle

Lnuwi

t

k kji

toq klusuaqan lnueiei – (Singular) they use the native word(s), if they know it/them

Nkij – My mother

Nukumi – My grandmother

Pi

jkwej – Night hawk (Una’maki dialect)

———————————————————————————————


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16

When I was younger, I thought birds were dumb. That

they were stupid balls of feather that could somehow

break through the realm of impossibility and y. What

kind of bullshit is that? Humans invented the internet,

ice cream and war, yet birds are the ones that can y?

That changed as I grew older. I realised my resentment

towards birds was nothing more than jealousy. Ever

since I had developed the neck muscles to look up and

the clarity to look into the sky, I wanted to be up there

with the birds. With this knowledge, I could begin to un-

derstand that birds are basically the best.

Birds are the most powerful creatures alive today. Noth-

ing else can y and poop at the same time. They are like

tiny Gods, swooping around, eating trash and minding

their own business. When have you ever saw a bird be an

asshole? Never. It just doesn't happen.

People don't have the best track record of ying anyways.

Iron Man can y, despite the fact he's a drunk and also

Robert Downey Jnr. Superman can y, and what has he

ever done to deserve that? Pilots claim they can y, but it

isn't their own propulsion which makes them y. They

are basically sitting in a giant metal bird and pretending

that their lives matter.

Flying gives freedom. The freedom to go where you like

is a powerful thing to have. How many times have you

wished you were somewhere else? That you could pack

up everything you own and just get out of there? Birds

can do that, due to a combination of ight and also be-

cause they don't own anything. They just are.

What tethers you to this spot? Work? Responsibility?

Laziness? The paralyzing fear that this is as good as itgets and you are too terried to even take a step out of

your comfort zone in case it is all downhill from here?

Birds don't have these thoughts. Some people may argue

they don't have any thoughts at all, but we know that

isn't true. When you are free, you don't worry about con-

strictions. Why would you?

I know where I would go to if I could y. Far far away

from where I am now. But it isn't a place, exactly. I want

to y to a feeling. I know that sounds like the kind of

song you'd hear sung live at a Republican Rally while

white dudes talk about guns. I don't want to go any-

where so much as knowing I could if I so wanted is com-

forting.

I think, on some level, we all want to y. But do we de-

serve to do so? Can you say that we are as pure as birds?

Or would we abuse our ying privilege to have sex in

midair or poop on people we don't like? Is all human

endeavor just an attempt to reach a point where we can

reclaim the skies from our Bird Gods?

I don't know. Thanks for reading.

————————————————————

BirdsBy scrublord

Natural History Birds—cuckoo (public domain)

https://archive.org/details/NaturalHistoryBirdshttps://archive.org/details/NaturalHistoryBirdshttps://archive.org/details/NaturalHistoryBirds


19/20

17

Lacrimal Cup By Georgene Nunn


20/20

This art and writing was brought to you by

some very talented, and intelligent people, and it

is my utmost pleasure to present it to you here

in as neat a form as I could put together in

about two days.

I hope that there were things for you to enjoy in

this rst issue. I hope that something contained

herein gave you pause. I hope that you will share

with your friends. I hope that you will join usagain at the end of June for Issue 2. And I

denitely hope that you will consider

contributing to a future issue.

Each of these issues won’t necessarily have a

central theme or topic, but each month will

have a prompt, to help if the muses aren ’t

forthcoming.

June’s prompt is: Petrichor

Petrichor is dened as a pleasant smell of rain

on dry rocks or earth. It is made up of prex

petro- meaning “relating to rocks” and ichor,

meaning “the uid that ows like the blood in

the veins of the gods”. Ichor can also pertain to

any bloodlike uid, and has older use related to

the discharge from wounds.

Scent memory is a pretty powerful thing, and

rain is something everyone experiences in their

lifetime, so petrichor seems like a goodcandidate for drawing from memory, from rain,

and from scent.

The roots of the word itself, stone, and ichor, are

rife with potential also, invoking chthonic awe of

the earth and the gods we have drawn from it,

as well as the awe of the heavens bringing rain

and the gods we seek in them.

With this basket of potential in hand I leave you

to your work. I know you can do it.

~GHN 05/31/2014

Afterword

About Earth is Huge and We Are All On It is an online zine that intends to publish monthly. Fiction, non-ction,poetry, comics, stand-alone visual art, and anything that can be put on a page is welcome here. We seek to create space for all

sorts of ideas and all sorts of people, and in particular want to create a welcoming environment for those who nd themselves

existing in the margins of society. Any brief study of historical texts will show that marginalia is where all the really interesting

stu lives.

Visit us on tumblr for updates, calls for submissions, progress reports, and more: earth-is-huge-mag.tumblr.com

Email [email protected] with questions, submissions, fan mail, hate mail, etc.

Earth Is Huge And We Are All On It by http://earth-is-huge-mag.tumblr.com/ is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribu-

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Issue 1 - Earth Is Huge and We Are All On It Zine

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