The death of a Gisker is a thing to behold. A tremendous feast for the eyes, the ears, and a joyride for the spirit. Color spars with color and sound wrestles around, what was once the inside of Gisker comes out.

Have you seen a rabbit die? How dull, all red. The common haddock? It can be a tease in the throws of death when it appears these convulsions might firework before your eyes – but it only promises a climax and nothing more. Jellyfish dissolve, birds careen, and humans gasp. None of these are worthy of a one-way ticket to the eye of Andromeda. None, except the Gisker.

Eight-thousand Giskers exist in the wild. They are under constant surveillance not due to security of the species, but so that the Giskers United Alliance can alert the universe. On a HyperHopper 10-Eleven it takes ten years to travel to Andromeda from the Milky Way, eye to eye. Gisker’s have a life expectancy of ten to twenty years.

In the homes of the frugal it is common to find a well-massaged copy of the Gisker Atlas. The Gisker Atlas was written by relatives of the ancient farmers whom spent their days toiling in fields and the nights under skies aglow with the implosion of Giskers. In those times of yore, the Giskers outnumbered the humans five-to-one. To witness no Gisker deaths, why, the harvest that year would be small.

The Gisker Atlas is a correlation machine: it crunches causalities from the tails of wispy clouds, harks about demonstrations of Gisker-aging practices, and spews scripts telling of Saint Gisker, a person, it is told, who carried Giskers in the pockets, so magnetic was he. Alas, the Gisker Atlas is not for the faint of heart. The Giskers United Alliance uses red text on their web page to alert readers to the risk of leaning on superstition. They highlight that zero test tubes were involved in the predictions of the Gisker Atlas and the source cannot be trusted.

Should the risk-averse come to seek a “Gisker sprinkler”, as they say, but would prefer to arrive with the knowledge that festivities will be certain, GUA invites you to sign up for the Alert Gisker Alert, or AGA. AGA was organized by a young ecological researcher who studied the origin of the beautiful Gisker death displays. She was eager to invent a way to detect dying Giskers so that a GDMD (Gisker Death Measuring Device) could be attached. The GDMD captures the complete sensory package of the Gisker’s final moment: sight, sound, smell, touch, and thought. Close proximity is essential for the seeker of the Gisker sprinkler, for the insides of the Gisker – launched in any and every direction – will roll along your body like warm pillows packed with electric massage hands.

The Great Gisker Emancipation of 2170 saw to it that the antediluvian practice of embracing a Gisker at its time of parting was forbidden and any person may not breach a ten meter radius around a Gisker. Raw ecstasy was criminalized.

You can’t kill a Gisker if you want the milk inside the coconut, so the saying goes. Gisker’s are matured barrels of cream that only through time become wonderful, wafting cheese. And, like cheese, automation has tried to biochemically, mechanically, and aromatically reproduce, as they say, a “Gisker misting.” They branded these can chemicals under the name Gisker-sol and they were aerosols. The GUA does not endorse their usage. Any Gisker seeker with an ounce of sense will ignore any claim of instant Giskerification. As the classic children’s poem by Earlly Thompdon advises:

I missed’a Gisker misting,

now I’ve missed my flight back home,

I missed’a misting Gisker,

I’m happy I’m not alone.

I missed’a Gisker sprinkle,

I’ll find another Gisker goal,

I missed’a sprinkled Gisker,

But I’ll never do Gisker-sol.

An advert that showed a fast-forward of a life from toddler to adulthood was famously broadcast by AGA. The advert tied to each stage of the child’s development a line from Thompdon’s poem. In one scene, the child begs its parents for a holiday to see the passing of a Gisker scheduled to happen in the next year, but the parents had no money for such a luxurious excursion. To quiet the child, the father buys him Gisker-sol and we see the child transform from addict to dependent, and finally to a state of deference from of life. The end moral is that the experience of “Gisker misting” should, by design, be rare. Even the ancient farmers who sought Giskerification only managed to witness two on a good year. In the way of Giskers: there is more value in less.

You might arrive at the close of this column and be left in wonder. What, exactly, is the death of a Giskers like? Surely someone, perhaps a master of the pen with an eye for imagery or a talented wielder of pigments, surely someone must be able to capture something about the Gisker experience. Tell me! Show me!

But Gisker or not, is that ever possible? Does the photo of a punching rainbow shrimp capture the majesty of its velocity? Does not the video of the racing cheetah smear the precision of its spots? To surface from a deep dive, to feel every hair on your body hit by the lapping surface, and drink the air from the invisible tit of the sky, this cannot be captured by the dancing of light rays from screens planted into the eyeballs. No, one must be there to see a Gisker take that final breath. One must be there, and then one will know.

E.G. Hardling

Vice President of Gisker Relations

Giskers United Alliance