15.

Melonne is a donkey with a woman’s head. She is a brown furred donkey to her neck and a brown-haired human to her cranial crown. She lives in the Targrad province of Pommel, high atop Mount Chamomile. Its peak epitomizes the flat landscape of Melonne’s world; white salts and sands imitate blank snow as far as the horizon, met with a white sky enclosed by clouds. The clouds over Pommel do not cast shadows but appear lit from below, as if they are being seen from above. Lliope, the dominant force inside Melonne’s body, refers to this characteristic flatness as the white court. The white court is the only authority over Lliope. The court is Lliope’s one king, one law, and one God; the court is the leviathan that stalls “the war of all against all” in exchange for its subjects’ freedom. It functions to provide Lliope with items, like , , , , , , , and , that are ordered in chains long enough to bind Melonne.

Atop Mount Chamomile, the donkey woman lives in a monolithic, rock-hewn house of limestone. It has three major rooms. The kitchen and living space share the entering room, while the bath and bedroom share the furthest room. Between them is a room dedicated

exclusively to a genetic-chemical supercomputer. It sits exactly in the middle, facing the entrance and feeding on a pit filled with dried apricot.

Today is Monday. On Mondays, Melonne prunes the excess growths of her house. Between floorboards, baseboards, and pores of drywall grow curled sheets of plastic, concrete, steel, copper, and other industrial materials. If left alone, they will form into unpredictably hazardous mechanisms. Once upon returning from vacation, Melonne was met with an explosive collision between a car engine and a bike pump that grew from her kitchen cabinet. Today, armed with a sticker scraper, she carefully prunes her bedroom and moves on to the entrance. Through the connecting room she crosses the computer to her left side. It is her habit to -----

always cross the computer room in a clockwise direction, or else she will retrace her steps and continue correctly. Then she grips the scraper with her human teeth and continues to dislodge plastics and metals from her home. Spirals of tin, aluminum, microfibers, and mesh fabric are dropped into a bucket. Then she goes to dispose of the materials.

To one side of Mount Chamomile is Targrad Trench, where the mountain’s elevation triples to nearly 10 kilometers. Melonne approaches the cliff to throw off the excesses produced by her limestone house, as her hooves kick white salt and sand into an endless descent. She grasps with her teeth an unidentified material, heavy and solid, and drops it into the trench. It appears to glow in the dark, and as it falls it illuminates the ancient and multicolored strata of the earth. A heavy thump hits the bottom minutes later. Next, she picks from the bucket a strip of paper. She thinks its shape resembles a Möbius strip, but she isn’t sure. It drifts silently down the trench. Next falls a shard of blue stained glass, which must have scraped the edge on its descent because it croaked like a wooden frog guiro. Then Melonne drops a long strip of Velcro. Once it is further down than light can reach, it returns the sound of -

a splash. Melonne drops every excess material one by one, dedicating to each her undivided attention, and observing all their qualities until they pass the limits of her senses.

After disposing of the excesses, Melonne returns to her bedroom, but not before stopping to look at the computer wallpaper. It displays different artworks every hour. Now, it shows an oil painting of a bearded man in a green robe, with a paintbrush in his right hand and an open book in his left. His head is unusually long, and his eyes and ears jut out in different directions, popping out as if something invisible is pinching at his temples. The left page of the book is filled with lines of writing, and in the right is an image of a woman with a blue veil and a baby. Then Melonne goes on to pass the computer to her left.