Asunduh
(a symphonic sermon in seven slow-burning shatters)
Asunduh
(a symphonic sermon in seven slow-burning shatters)
I. THE MOURNING BEFORE
Somewhere between the groaning gears of an indifferent universe & the fading dreamscape of a too-forgotten yesterday, there lies a filament of day, disjointed from the calendar & contorted like the syntax of a dying god’s diary. It was not a Saturday & it refused the pleasantries of a Monday. It dressed in the corpse-clothes of Sunday, but its name had been struck from the hymnbooks. The churches were open but empty. The clocks wept instead of ticking. The sky blinked one eye—sunlight—and the other—thunder.
Welcome to Asunduh: the undone day, the deviant Sabbath, the solemnity that slipped through the floorboards of Time’s cathedral & decided never to come back up.
And on that trembling slice of not-quite-time walked a woman named Indira Vetch—not walking really, more like remembering how to walk, half-body in this world, half in the holy static between radio stations. She wore a jacket too heavy for the heat, stitched with faded patches from causes she could no longer recall. Her boots were unlaced. Her mouth was full of unsent letters. Her hands carried a relic: a cracked, blinking smartphone that refused to die or speak.
She was looking for something—maybe a chapel, maybe a chasm. Maybe someone who remembered how to pronounce “hope” without sounding like a liar.
II. THE UNSUNG CHOIR
She passed the Chapel of St. Rescind, where the choir once belted fireproof hallelujahs, now haunted by soundless echoes of mouths opening to weep instead of sing. The building was a shadowplay of itself: walls that moaned like widows, stained-glass windows depicting saints with their eyes scratched out & halos replaced with price tags. There was a vagrant crow perched on the spire, practicing the sermon it never got to squawk. It spoke in syllables that Indira translated as, “Not everyone gets resurrected.”
Inside, she found Reverend Noam, an unshaven former preacher with a whiskey-stained collar, playing Russian roulette with tarot cards. He dealt The Tower over & over. When Indira asked what it meant, he simply muttered, “It means you already died, you just don’t know it yet. It means Sundays are traps. It means gods can go senile.”
She stayed for tea. It tasted like ash & deja vu.
III. THE CHURCH OF STATIC
Later, she encountered Eliot Pale, a boy who spoke only in poems he stole from other people’s dreams. He was building a shrine made of burnt televisions & discarded pacifiers at the edge of an abandoned shopping mall. His altar hummed with electricity but refused to illuminate. “I pray to the God of Interruption,” he said. “The one who speaks between the sermons.”
Indira asked if he’d seen her sister, Maya, who disappeared seven Sundays ago after saying, “I need to find where the hymns go to die.” He hadn’t, but he did offer her a cassette tape labeled ASUNDUH in smudged, black sharpie. No B-side. Just loops of soft laughter, screaming dials, elevator muzak from a building that never existed, & Maya’s voice whispering: “Sundays rot if no one believes in them.”
IV. THE BAPTISM OF DUST
The world around her started to slouch. The sky sank into its collarbone. The birds flew in squares. Time began to stutter like a corrupted mp3: 1:04 p.m., then 12:58, then 3:33, then none o’clock. Pedestrians appeared like glitches & repeated their gestures in mechanical misery: lighting cigarettes with no flame, dropping pennies into invisible hats, raising their arms toward a sun that wasn’t where they left it.
It was in this dissociative dragstrip of an afternoon that Indira met Dr. Calyx Vox, a rogue psychologist-turned-oracle, exiled from academia for diagnosing Time itself with Dissociative Identity Disorder. He wore a cloak made from shredded library cards & smelled like cinnamon & printer ink. His office was a grocery cart full of clocks, each ticking in a different emotional key.
“You know what Sunday is, don’t you?” he said, blinking sideways. “It’s the placebo day. The lull before capitalism reboots the simulation. The one day they let you pretend to be free before handing your neck back to the yoke.”
“But what about Asunduh?” Indira asked.
“Ah. That’s the one they didn’t write. That’s the page that fell out of the calendar when God sneezed.”
V. THE SABBATH SPLIT
In a sunken cul-de-sac full of plastic flamingos & foreclosure signs, Indira finally stood before the Apostolic Church of Infinite Delay, where Maya had last been seen. Inside, the pews had been replaced with bean bags, & a hologram of a priest looped a sermon made of apology algorithms: “Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me—buffering—loading—lost connection.”
She found Maya's coat draped over the pulpit. Inside the pocket: a mirror. On the mirror, etched with a blood-sharp fingernail, were the words:
"You don't get to leave Sunday until you confront what you became there."
Indira stared at her reflection: not her face, not anymore—just a swirl of failed protests, broken friendships, hashtags that turned into tombstones, & dreams stored in drafts. She smashed the mirror against the pulpit. The sermon skipped. The hologram glitched. Something inside the walls screamed.
And for the first time in that unfrozen non-day, it rained.
VI. THE LITURGY OF LOSS
The streets flooded—not with water, but with voicemail recordings, forgotten passwords, cathedrals of unfinished text messages. People emerged from buildings they didn’t remember entering. Some cried. Some screamed. Some just walked backward.
Indira sat beneath a statue of St. Algorithm, weeping wires from its eyes, & opened her coat to find every object she’d lost since childhood: a locket with no photo, a key to a door that never existed, the sound her mother made when she laughed before the cancer. She held them like sacraments.
A child sat beside her, offering a crayon drawing of the sun with a sad face & the words: “I don’t like Sundays. They make my dad quiet.”
Indira whispered: “Me too.”
VII. THE UNRAVELING BENEDICTION
Asunduh didn’t end.
It didn’t climax or resolve or conclude. There was no moral. No lesson. No sunrise.
Only a gentle blip—like a heart monitor flatlining—and the feeling of being quietly unsubscribed from the newsletter of consensus reality.
Indira walked into a laundromat where all the machines washed memories instead of clothes. She climbed into one. She let it spin.
And when it opened, she was not new, not healed, not reborn.
Just… real again.
Not Sunday. Not sinner. Not saved.
Asunduh.
Postscript from the Chrono-Clerics:
They say Asunduh returns only to those who are too awake to be believers, too skeptical to be saints, too broken to be bricked into a system & too stubborn to stay suicidal.
It’s the Sabbath of the unsaved. The purgatory between plans. The lingering key-change at the end of a forgotten gospel. You don’t visit Asunduh—you realize you’ve never left it.
And if you ever hear static in a church...
…stay.
📻🕯️⛪🌫️🌀🧭🪦🕳️📼📓
#Asunduh #SubversiveSabbath #TheChurchOfStatic #ChronoClerics #IndiraVetch #NoGodsNoMondays #GlitchGospels #UnreliableCalendars #SundayIsALie #AntiSabbathSociety
Physics Factoid:
The entropy of the universe increases not because it wants to die, but because it wants to remember everything. Time exists because matter mourns.
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