Accumulations

I turned the sculpture into something alive-
or it turned me into something that could witness it.

At first it was only stone holding shape,
a face repeated, a thought echoed in mineral,
time held in jawline,
history sleeping behind dead eyes.

But then-
a breath slipped between the cracks.

And the cracks widened.

And the stone learned hunger.

-

It began with a second face
growing where no anatomy permitted,
pressing outward like a thought
too large for a skull.

Then a third-not placed,
not attached,
but emerged,
as though it had always been there
waiting to be birthed.

The sculpture did not break.
It unfolded.

-

From the mouth of stillness,
a serpent once tried to speak-
we remember that-
a motion upward,
toward a human form with mouth open,
receiving or resisting or becoming
something unnamed.

But the serpent dissolved,
and in its memory antlers grew-
not placed upon the head,
but erupting through bone.
-

The heads multiplied.

Not as additions-
but as contradictions.

Man.
Deer.
Something before both.

They leaned into each other’s form,
bled into each other’s veins,
forgot the boundaries of skin.

Fur threaded into beard,
bone softened into root,
eyes burned with knowledge
that did not belong to any single face.

-

And the forest arrived.

Not as background-
but as inheritance.

It wrapped the body in moss and time,
stitched the ribs with vines,
filled the lungs with mist.

The body was no longer body.
It was process-
a slow assimilation of everything
that had ever died beneath leaves.

-

We stripped it.

Removed the markings,
the symbols,
the tools of intention.

No spear.
No flame.
No language carved into flesh.

Only the thing itself remained-
unexplained,
unexplaining.

-

Then we clothed it again,
but not with purpose-
with weight.

A cloak fell across it
like night remembering gravity,
like shadow choosing to stay.

Not worn-
but grown.

-

The deer changed.

No longer alive,
but not yet gone.

Fur still clinging to form,
flesh soft with recent silence,
eyes clouded-
then removed.

They were not companions.

They were absorptions
of one another.

-

And then-

the merging.

Not three heads.

Not even one.

Faces overlapping,
slipping out of alignment,
arriving a fraction too late,
leaving a fraction too soon.

A cheek existed twice.
A jawline forgot which direction it faced.
The mind-if there was one-
was no longer centered.

-

Time collapsed.

One arm fresh with pulse.
One arm rotting.
One arm already remembered by soil.

Antlers grew and died and fossilised
in the same gesture.

The being did not move through time.

Time fell through it.

-

Mist gathered.

And in the mist-
faces.

Not just deer.
Not just human.

Things half-known.
Things almost-recognised.
Things that seemed to remember you.

They hovered behind it,
within it,
through it.

Not ghosts.

Continuations.

-

The air bent.

Light hesitated.

Edges refused to decide where they belonged.

The antlers duplicated themselves
lightly -a ghost-image,
a second possibility,
a version of reality that did not fully conform
with the first.

-

And the eyes-

they lagged.

A fraction behind the turning of the head.
A delay in awareness.
Or perhaps-

awareness arriving first,
and the face struggling to follow.

-

Beneath the skin-
if it could still be called skin-
layered.

Skeletons whispering through muscle,
old forms pressing upward,
past hosts refusing erasure.

A ribcage inside a ribcage
inside a forest of ribs.

A history of bodies held
in one slow, breathing archive.

-

It grew larger.

Not in size-
but in implication.

The antlers reached beyond the frame,
became canopy, became horizon,
became something the soul
could not finish tracing.

-

You only saw where it
allowed itself to be seen.

And then-

the realization.

This was never a creature.

Not horror.
Not god.
Not animal.

It was accumulation.

A memory of everything
the forest had taken,
refusing to settle,
refusing to simplify.

-

A distributed mind
thinking through bark
and bone and fog.

A body made of agreements
between decay and growth.

A presence that did not arrive-
but was always there,
waiting for enough forms
to speak at once.

-

I turned the sculpture into something alive.

But that is not true.

I only removed what
prevented it from being
Recognised.

-

And now it stands-

not before you,
but around you,

faces emerging in the mist that
may or may not be yours,

antlers writing slow, impossible
poetry through dark air,

time folding gently
into its chest,

and somewhere within it-

a thought-

that has not yet decided
which face it belongs to.