KUOTOA = CROATOAN

You don't belong here.

The seasons are queer. The crops grow bitter, when they grow at all. The hard-cut trails are swallowed up again in weeks. The birds mock you with their songs.

Hungry men go out to hunt and don't return.

Your encompassing reason which carried you across the ocean wavers here.

The deer walk on their hind legs when they think you're not looking, and watch with shining eyes at the edge of the firelight when they know you are. You pull up a fish and it meets your stare, whispering the name of the love you left behind.

There's a hole in your cellar. There wasn't before. It smells like the dead things that washed up on the beach.

There's a hole in the street where the mud sucked down, after the fog and the rain and the children went mad and ran and sang. It smells the same.

The ocean, never lovely, now hates. The fishermen give pieces of themselves to it before setting sail - fingertips, earlobes, noses, nipples. The other day they tore your god from its temple, leaving it in a ditch as they hoisted a chunk of sodden driftwood in its place. The priest was found bloated and drowned, the altar boy with him, and they called it a lovers' suicide before a spitting liturgy.

You're beginning to understand the words. You're starting to see the faces in the driftwood. You're beginning to understand.

The ocean is a mask. Its true face lies deeper. It's under the land too, its fingers like the hollows left by worms. This earth and this water are sacred. They are haunted by a billion gods, uncountable, unnameable. Your liturgy is a rapture of tongues.

The priest had to die. He was a liar, and one shouldn't lie about such things.

The true priests are there, in the deep and the dark, in the dreams you wake from weeping. They speak with the gods and give birth to them, are strangled and devoured by them.

Your colony will be another sunken investment. Another emptied shell, with only a gutteral scrawl left behind, scratched into pews and bed-posts and the bark of dead trees:

"KUOTOA"