Moira's story

Moira had lived 126,000 blinks in a limbo. It was silent and white, but it is not certain whether it was dry or wet, nor whether the action she repeated was swimming or galloping. Someone or something must have brought her to that place, because–except for a few days a year–Moira was not endowed with free will. Or rather, she believed she was not.
The dimension she came from, which she had crossed and by then abandoned, was not her native land. It mainly developed on a vertical axis and consisted of solid shapes, which in turn were made up of letters and words. There was no trace of milk or flat bread on the horizon. Since, at times, it was the horizon itself that was missing.

After a stay of a few thousand blinks, for lack of anything else, Moira had started to tear off blocks of letters protruding from the large solid constructions with her claws and eat them. Sometimes she could eat an entire word, and in those moments she felt mysterious forces pushing her eastward. To figure out where to go, Moira would trace in the air with her own body the word EAST and orient herself in the direction indicated by the limb outlining the last part of the letter. Sometimes she would finish the sequence by drawing the vertical bar of the T from top to bottom, so then she would go down Other times she would draw the top horizontal line last, from right to left, and move accordingly. Or she would start from the centre. The directions she could take were endless and were all correct, she was sure of that.

The effect of eating the individual letters, often already detached from the solids and rotting, was different. Having more of a liquid nature, the individual letters would clump in the stomach in groups of two or three, move together and cause previously ingested words to flow back to the gullet. In such cases, Moira had the feeling that she made a mistake, as if the combination of completed words and loose letters created a nefarious chemical reaction in the intestines. Both the smell produced by the fermentation of the words and the buzzing sound generated by their friction carried her to another physical and psychic dimension. Each time the digestive process was completed, Moira knew she was in a different point in space, even though the surrounding landscape had remained almost unchanged.
Somewhere along the way Moira discovered a mechanism that allowed her to shorten her walking time: all she had to do was replace the word-objects she saw as smaller with those she saw as larger. The process was troublesome but rather advantageous, as it allowed her to cover an undefined distance in a shorter time and Moira was used to moving large masses effortlessly, having been a Dolmen builder in a previous life.

At the base of one of the large solid constructions, after about 2520 beats reduced by this process to 300, Moira glimpsed at a surface of a different kind, embedded between the words our, click on, remov, guaranteed, visit, basenumb14, dollar, price, will, the most, pleas. It was a flat surface 1 bulb thick, divided into four mutually communicating portions, each circumscribed by a semi-movable frame. From the lower left-hand portion came a warm wind; from the upper right-hand portion a sequence of regular, low, dry and powerful sounds; in the other two portions one could see stagnating masses of water and vacuum. Immediately attracted by the water and perhaps even thirsty, Moira had slipped into the upper left portion without questioning the space, assuming that she would be able to come into contact with a matter so different from what she had been used to for the last 126,000 blinks. Moira ignored the word passage and was sure she didn’t eat it, however knowing no other way but to continue and having encountered no obstacles, she didn’t care about the consequences. Perhaps she took a decision or perhaps the decision chose her.

The transition from the solid world to the new dimension was painless. Moira swam through the liquid mass, yet the water didn’t wet her nor quenched her thirst. The room she had landed in was simple and bare, there was a fresh milk dispenser in one corner and a loaf of unsalted bread on a small table.

Moira was tired and felt her breath linger unnaturally from top to bottom with a new, prolonged hiss, she had to get used to that. The air penetrated her limbs, moved to her paws and then returned to her snout like a cool breeze: she thought it helped her stay upright on her roots. Previously, the drafts crossed her from right to left, entered from behind and immediately left in front, without holding back.

She felt something bounce inside her with a dull, steady thud, creating a tempo. Fshhh-tic-hhhhsf. Moira listened and thought of when there was no noise, of that boundless and unhindered before, longer than a life and shorter than a journey. Fshhhh-tic-hhhhsf.
After exploring the space in various directions, she hungrily approached the table and greedily ate a slice of bread. Two. She drank the milk eagerly, clutching a cylindrical glass in her right limb. Once full, she placed the glass on the floor and laid down wishing to rest. However, when her body was in a horizontal position, the words she swallowed in the other dimension began to echo through her stomach, throat and jaws. Perhaps it was the composition of the milk or the interaction of the bread with the matter within her body that triggered the process: Moira began to vomit and utter the words. She mimicked them with her limbs, walked them on the ground; she was somehow acted upon by them, not fully in control. Voice, gestures and actions followed one another randomly, then seemed to organise themselves into a rhythm, interrupted and cadenced by the sipping of milk. And then again chaos took over from order, in a process that seemed to have no end.