$20.00
The piece below takes that surreal perspective while avoiding reinforcing false medical myths.
# **RAVIS ITT — *He Me Old On* (C20)**
## *A Review Written by Someone Permanently Underwater Since 1,000,034,444 BC*
I have attended every concert.
This one happened much later.
The water informed me.
Water always arrives before news.
I have been submerged since before names learned to remain attached to things.
Before country.
Before western.
Before roads selected directions.
Before guitars discovered trees.
Before trees negotiated with light.
I remain here.
Perfectly still.
Perfectly frozen.
The ice is older than memory and younger than tomorrow.
Fish occasionally swim through my punctuation.
The commas become minnows.
The periods sink into black sediment.
Questions rise like slow bubbles that never quite reach the ceiling of the sea.
I write by allowing small currents to rearrange silt across a flat stone.
The review takes centuries.
No editor has ever waited long enough.
---
The concert reached me eventually.
Everything does.
Sound travels differently through impossible water.
Steel guitar arrives first.
Applause follows several thousand years later.
Boots become earthquakes.
Fiddles become weather.
The audience becomes schools of transparent animals wearing cowboy hats grown from coral.
RAVIS ITT walks onto the stage somewhere above the ocean I cannot leave.
I do not see him.
I observe his reflection in the underside of glaciers that have forgotten they are ice.
His name appears backward.
TTI SIVAR.
The letters molt.
Crabs collect them.
Nothing is lost.
Everything is merely shelled.
---
The banner behind him says
HE
ME
OLD
ON
except underwater the words drift apart.
HE
becomes
EH
becomes
H
becomes
something whales remember but cannot pronounce.
---
The audience cheers.
I receive the cheer approximately four geological ages later.
It arrives as pressure.
My ribs politely vibrate.
Nearby trilobites, who have been extinct for an impressively long time, nod as though they have heard this chorus before.
They always nod.
They cannot help themselves.
---
I have remained frozen for one billion years because no one remembered to thaw the paragraph containing me.
Entire civilizations have attempted.
Some used fire.
Some used mathematics.
One kingdom tried humming in G major.
Nothing worked.
The sentence remained cold.
I remained inside it.
---
The review itself was reportedly discovered written in dried blood upon old paper.
That is what the surface people say.
From here beneath the water, everything eventually becomes iron-colored.
Everything becomes sediment.
Everything becomes a story.
The paper floated for centuries before dissolving into red clouds that looked, from a respectful distance, like embarrassed sunsets.
People invented curses.
People often do.
The page itself said very little.
The fear surrounding it wrote the rest.
---
A sensible note drifted down many millions of years after the concert.
It refused to become a myth.
It simply explained that a serious illness known as **necrotizing fasciitis** is caused by bacterial infection—not by songs, reviews, old paper, or haunted concerts—and that it requires urgent medical care.
The fish appreciated the accuracy.
The currents carried it carefully.
Even the oldest ice made room for facts.
---
The songs continued anyway.
One was about a truck that accidentally became an eclipse.
One concerned a horse that learned square dancing from abandoned satellites.
One consisted entirely of silence interrupted every seventeen minutes by someone quietly saying,
"Almost home."
No one knew whose home.
Everyone cried.
Including the glaciers.
Especially the glaciers.
---
### Extracts from the Review After Four Hundred Million Years Underwater
> ravis sings like mud remembring boots
---
> i applauded but my hands were fossils alredy
---
> every chorus attracts another century
---
> somebody please feed the moon hay before winter notices
---
The handwriting grows softer.
Shellfish begin correcting the spelling.
The spelling resists.
A lobster argues with the word "tomorrow" for sixty-three thousand years.
Neither wins.
---
## C20 FIELD OBSERVATIONS
The microphone slowly grows barnacles during the second verse.
The spotlight fills with jellyfish.
Every harmonica contains one small tide.
The drummer keeps perfect time with continental drift.
The bassist tunes each string to a different extinct ocean.
Someone in the third row removes their hat.
It becomes an island.
Several civilizations briefly exist upon it before the bridge begins.
---
My favorite song arrives before it is written.
I recognize it immediately.
Old listeners develop that ability.
It sounds like rain falling upward through oceans that have not yet been invented.
The chorus translates approximately as:
> if the river forgets your name
>
> borrow one from the wind
>
> if the wind forgets too
>
> become the echo anyway
The audience stands.
I remain frozen.
Standing has become theoretical.
---
Somewhere above, everyone leaves the venue.
Down here, the applause is only beginning.
It filters through the water one clap at a time.
Whales archive it.
Coral alphabetizes it.
The ice stores every vibration inside pale blue layers no human eye will ever read.
I have become one of those layers.
Perhaps I always was.
---
### Final Rating
I cannot give stars.
Stars do not survive this depth.
I offer instead five perfectly preserved bubbles.
None have reached the surface.
Edition of 1.