Galatea: Commit
A Comic by Balee Leggett and Shan Lind
For the Visually Impaired: Pfilomena Lovelace stands in the market with her arms outstretched. She is speaking to a congregation of Tiny God cultists. They each have a mark on their foreheads, a thumbprint in grease. They adore her. Philomena has no hands, only calcified stumps. Her hair is shorn close to her head. She is announcing that she is about to attend the Fountainhead and commit her body to its glorious purpose.
“I have always known what it means to be part of something larger than myself.”
Pfilomena is walking towards the FH, down a promenade directly towards the edifice of white stone which is depicted on a hill in the distance. She is amassing a following as she goes. Everyone knows what she is about to do. Earlier today, Pfhilomena told the world she was going to die.
“I have never deluded myself, that there be some spectacular purpose awaiting me beyond a closed and golden gate.”
Pfilomena arrives at the green lawn in front of the destroyed Amberdraught Estate. The Fountainhead looms above her. She looks up while the crowd gathers behind her. Her expression is blank and her arms are at her sides. She silently stares into the gaping, doorless mouth into the Fountainhead’s Atrium and considers it.
“And furthermore, I have always found that most doors, when they are to be walked through, are already open.”
Pfilomena takes a step towards the Fountainhead and there is a disturbance behind her in the gathered crowd. A figure, wrapped mostly in linen rags, pushes through the cultists. It is Caleb, Cutthroat Prophet. His hair is orange, like a sunset, and his entire body is otherwise covered in malignant psionic growths. He shouts something, for Pfilomena to stop, but she does not turn back.
“My greatest pride will always be my children. Stubborn and difficult as they may be.”
Pfilomena takes another step, then another, towards the open door of the Atrium. Caleb is pulled back by the cultists and he looks indignant, betrayed.
“Followed only by my flock, who seek for themselves and their children, the same world I do.”
Pfilomena steps into the Atrium of the FH and her body immediately begins to melt away as she passes over the threshold. Her skin pulls away from her muscle, and muscle from bone. She is dying. She turns back towards the crowd and her eyes are full of tears.
“And so I commit the clay of my body to the ardent furnace that will birth our new world we imagined with God.”
Pfilomena’s body is burning away now. The page is mostly blindingly white and her form is becoming obscured and shadowed as it is broken down at the atomic level.
“And hope that this small and spectacular purpose might be the door through which something greater enters the stage of our tiny and tired world.”
The page is blank, save for an ellipsis in the middle.
Far beneath you, engines larger than farmhouses, turn over and begin to churn.
F I N