The Daemons – Megan Richardson
October 19, 2025
We got a big puddle to the west of us—still as a hand on glass, still, like the rest of this here Great Basin where silence puts a crust on things.
Melville once said the oceans stop people mid-stride so they look up from their errands, whether from the coast or the top of one of those provincial cranes. From New England to Olympia you could find a man stocked with cigars and an odd sense of hospitality, and enchanted by what else, but water. ‘The phantoms of life,’ a shroud for the Leviathan, or in Scotland the Loch Ness, that mythological phantasmagoria unknowable and unconquerable by man, the sea.
Water and bosom and ectoplasm, all that myth moving under a sheet; no guarantee for what will disturb its deceptively still surface. I’ll stand here and wager you my puddle is honest, not a trick, just haunted in the way anything flat is haunted by what the Pacific dreams—carried in the aquifers of the flesh, the little interstitial matrices that make a person into hydraulics—while the air between me and all that water tech is dry as bone so the carry must happen in the cavities. We, an open heart—this landscape’s carbon conductor of hyperreality.
My Grandmother is on the beach next to me, fat-fingered, as if the sun had invented a new verb for grasping. Some forces will shock the water right out of you like a clear frozen night that snaps your lungs into glass and leaves salt to go on living.
And salt will carry forward, crystallized like a little diamond, cloaked by whatever it was carried through. Salt that rides skin after rain, salt that smudges the windshield of my car parked in the lake bed that can’t climb out of this damned valley.
And my moment of univocal within a moment of univocal within a moment of univocity of being-American is my mind’s camcorder image of my fat-fingered Grandmother reaching for the Good & Plenty, her always haggard face, lips squashed to the straw of a giant diet-coke jug, the too-bright Northern Utah sun bleaching us into prune skins on the shores of the lakes that know no pH balance to leave residue everywhere; and I’m thinking the great American Leviathan, Moby Dick—Gnon, or nature’s God to the Romantics, unknowable Nature to the rest—could be read into her like a thesis if you want, how capital fattens a creature until it swims only in wanting. You could say, my Grandmother—heavy with the indulgences that capital provides—is some new symbolic whale of consumerism; but then she’s just my Grandmother again, in the death-bed where I sang to her “Amazing Grace,” who gifted me the Family Bible as a consolation prize (stubbornness is a tricky thing).
Oh, the Multiplicity of Being! How it refuses our language in a world that is constantly becoming and unbecoming; everything is and isn’t what you say; and for the artist, the seductive urge to reduce everything into symbolic saltshakers to season our own narcissism. As it goes, the Pequod goes down and Ishmael doesn’t. So art can never escape this great—“I think”—a marker surviving by all odds. The inescapable American mythic math is always this: ninety-nine chances in a hundred we will die and yet by sheer will and force and engine and Joe Smith’s frontier spell and the majestic petroleum machine engineered by the Middle Eastern oil daemons, we will survive, we always do; and if God’s ledger gives us one clean percent to live my p(doom) sits at twenty-five (give or take), because Ishmael and because Independence Day reruns and because once I saw the light of God ricochet through the incandescent refraction of a firework burst on a beer can. That great “I think”—humanism, patriotism, anti-capitalism. Nonetheless, trust me, my most dog-eared book is a tie—The Grapes of Wrath and The Book of Mormon—and on that beach I swear I watched a daemon of capital ride my Grandmother’s wrist as her oily fingers grasped at the jug’s handle for one more cold aspartame breath, and for a flicker the shore tipped, the heat hiccupped off the salt, and she lay there—splayed like a beached whale.