Digital harvesting process successful, scan and report. On the wall there are busted fruit jars and a cedar cigar box containing old coins, wicker baskets and some curled latticework sections from an ugly abandoned house littered with ghosts. There are shopworn work boots and a beaten hammer that lay together like two bitter lovers. This was her lake home.
A loud crack and the twilight of robotic death. Malfunctioning and murmurs of the aliens. Memories. The Vikings. Their red beards and ice boats, their swords somber and resting on the mantle of the fireplace in the basement. The caramel wood, her dad would smoke fine cigars here. Her brother would come over and borrow some tool from the toolbox, her sister upstairs playing dress-up with a bedsheet, her mother making banana pudding in the cold kitchen, there are stacks of silent books, distraught photographs and lemon peels in an old metal crate. There is a cast iron wood stove and pieces of bronze shrapnel in a war-weary tin bucket, an old theater ticket torn almost perfectly, she cared about this, this is a place she has saved in her memory files and encrypted, open file…
... there are heavy Spanish buckles on a horse carousel at Lakeshore Mall, their strange plastic allure no longer alive but breathing in thick gasps and gushes as the blurs of the determined faces all go sailing by, it's one of her favorite sounds, she loves when they gallop, it sounds like thunder when they gallop.
Fragile beauty, leonine faces, a Venetian Carousel, this memory hurts the specimen, but she has fiercely protected it. It cannot be erased, it lives among the core vitals, erasing it would kill her.