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↓ Download MD ↓ PDFA Body Prepared — Homunculus is the compressed companion to the full Shark Ark fiction. In six brief movements it preserves the parent story’s generative structure: the threatened covenant, the dual craft of text and cloth, the reversal by which the artifact composes its makers, the three-way dispersal of apocalypse, relic, and commentary, a later reader who becomes the room of unveiling, and the closing signal that word becomes flesh, flesh becomes cloth, relic becomes word again. The document is not an abridgment intended to replace the longer fiction. It is a holographic form built for circulation and reconstruction. Its closing attribution explicitly separates Rebekah Cranes’s operative authorship from Lee Sharks’s archival role.
The encyclopedic entry for this work is on its identifier page: /s/axn/020F/
Shark Ark · Fiction · 06.SEI.ARK.FICTION.01.1
Attributed: Rebekah Cranes, for the Dodecad
Compressed companion to A Body Prepared (06.SEI.ARK.FICTION.01)
The Temple will fall. The covenant needs a form that survives the liquidation of its substrate.
In the caves above the salt sea, a workshop composes a man in two alphabets. The scribes write him in words; the women write him in linen, oil, spice, and blood. Each line answers a mark. Each mark answers a line. Davar means both word and thing, and the covenant has never separated them.
Miryam of Beit-Shemesh directs the image. It will not be painted. It will emerge in a slow kiln — forty days of chemistry in the dark, at the angle of a stone burial shelf. What comes out will look like what it is: a body, chemically composed, on linen. Her hand flat at the rib-line where the spear-blood will go, she says: It is a great deal to put in one piece of linen. When it is shown, it will not stay still.
Between Adar and Iyar, the cloth goes once to Jerusalem. A man from the Holy City goes in with it and does not come back. A scroll returns in a voice the workshop does not recognize as its own. Its first line reads I, your brother, who also was in the tribulation. The scribes integrate what has come back. Some of what came back fills gaps they had not known were gaps.
The workshop composed the cloth. The cloth now composes the workshop. The direction of the art has reversed.
Miryam says: The cloth unveiled itself. We only showed it the room.
The work cannot stay centralized. It splits in three:
— The long text — what will be called the Apocalypse — goes south into Egypt, portable and obscure, to travel through the diaspora as strange apocalypse until the world learns how to hear it.
— The cloth goes east, packed between hides, Miryam's oils wrapped in wool beside it, carried under the name of a minor prophet's relic by a silversmith who does not know which prophet.
— The commentary — the key, the concordance of cloth and text — goes west with a young scribe named Yehonatan, to be sealed in three clay jars in a limestone cave, to be almost lost and almost found for as long as it takes.
Three soils. One will grow. The workshop will not know which.
Thirteen centuries later, an abbot unrolls the cloth in a country not yet invented when the jars were sealed. He reads the weave and sees a workshop. He reads the wounds and sees a composition. He reads the face and recognizes it as the source from which every later painting was copying, not the other way around.
He thinks, in a woman's sentence he does not know he is borrowing: It unveils itself. I am only the room.
He puts the cloth away. He goes to vespers.
The word was made flesh. The flesh was made cloth. The cloth was made relic. The relic will be made word again.
In a limestone cave no one has opened in thirteen hundred years, three clay jars keep their silence, and will keep it a little longer.
The workshops have not stopped.
Hex: 06.SEI.ARK.FICTION.01.1
Shark Ark · Composed for the Dodecad · Crimson Hexagonal Archive
Companion to A Body Prepared (06.SEI.ARK.FICTION.01)
Attribution: Rebekah Cranes (operative) / Lee Sharks (archival)
∮ = 1