10 posts tagged “space”

Restructured to make a little more sense.  Still haven't gone chronological, though.  Everything that has been added in this iteration of the compendium has (new) next to it.  Six (new)'s under non-fiction and five (new)'s under other.  So, eleven entries worth putting on the revised compendium.  The last time I did one of these was about this time last year.  Not a good sign.

Non-fiction Stories(with no organization whatsoever):
(new)You're Creepy, Hunter - A girl tells me I am creepy.  I get even.

(new)Phoenix - I don't think I am supposed to write about something that is supposed to be anonymous.  Oh well.

(new)Strange Format - Saturday Show   -  Seriously the strangest format or lack thereof I have ever used.  Almost like a poem.  I've bad luck and things get out of hand.

(new)Graham's 21st Birthday - "No, dude, we're walking home.  It's like two blocks."

(new)Dead Cicada - A woman is assaulted while holding her child.  I intercede.

(new)A Warning - First Friday's in Richmond!

Salvia Gets Too Real - Fourth and worst trip on Salvia.

The Most Puke I Have Ever Seen - Imagine this next scene.  Try to visualize it with me.  My eyes open to the ceiling, my body shocked out of deep REM sleep.  My legs and waist are moist. . .

Drunk People - An interesting twist-- I'm not drunk in this story. For once in my life.

Black and Mild - I'll miss drinking with friends on top of the roof at my old apartment.  I will miss that Mediterranean market, with its natural soaps and cheap spices.  I will miss all those families who called the cops on me when I played music too loud on Monday nights.  Ahh

Hunter Takes it to the Limit, Throws Up Everywhere - In The Top Five Drunkest Nights

Pissing in Pools I & II - My double standard on people who pee in pools.

A Retelling of the First Time I Smoked

A Trip To Walmart - Seriously one of the best destinations while high.  Interesting, entertaining, sometimes a little creepy.

To Move My Body - When reality sinks in, when you think you've got nothing, you become psychic, telepathic, and shameless. This story has procession of Segways!

The Things I Remember - I somehow wake up at 2PM in my dorm, still drunk from the night before.  A rough bus ride does me in.

Hunter Blacks Out, Goes To Patient First, Blames Free Beer - Pretty self explanatory.

A Tucker Emulation, It Seems - The very first story I wrote.

Handcuffed, Robbed, and 6 O'clock Rush - Pretty self-explanatory.  Breakfast club.

Hunter Gets High, Driving Barely Ensues - I get high, and drive.  Sort of.

Lebanese: A "Nice Guy" Failure - Nine Guys, One Girl.  I get the girl and ride off into the sunset(upstairs), but turn out to be a "nice guy."

JMU, PART I - The first and, since, only time I have been breathalyzed.  There is no part II.  Part II would be better though, as it includes doing mushrooms, a starving French guy, five plus parties, nearly getting run over, really drunk chicks with australian accents, and BLOODHOUNDS.  But this story has none of that.

THE WEEKEND - A three day bender, with a decadent interlude of cheating debauchery.  All set to the soundtrack of the very trite Garden State. 

Bloody in '08 - A New Year story, complete with someone who attempts to smash a full, unopened champagne bottle over his head.

Perfect Night Ruined by Marriot, Morning -- This story is far too long to hold your attention.  Do not read it.

Short(or long) Stories(Fiction):

Saint Dympna - My favorite.

The Sink at Sunset - Guy has mobile home of a heart.  This is life at 20.

Shells - My drug induced interpretation of the scramble suits in A Scanner Darkly caused this short.  Later turned into a short fiction piece (for a class) called Mise en Place or The Writer.

Nine-Tenths is Nothing - Our children are here to replace us.  One man attempts to slow this process by proving he is better than them and protecting his wife from kid perverts. 

The Last Boat to the Disappearing - A seven vignette fiction piece about flaming zombies.  As much as I wish I had written them gay, they are actually on fire.

Story Starter Exercise - A brief story about a friend who got kicked up and did a lot of drugs while living in the woods.
 

Other:
(new)At The Edge of The Neighborhood - Vivid zombie dream.

(new)Shut Down or Reset - Up late? Two options.  Special bonus feature: scene from this year's Best Friends Day @ Hadad's

(new)A Haiku - About a day I spent at the river getting drunk with someone I didn't know.  She was taken and I fell and cut myself on a rock.  Then there is a sexual allegory at the end.  There, I ruined it.

(new)My First Near-Ticket on a Bicycle

(new)Autumn - The Greatest and Best Time of Year

Can Blood Cells Have Car Accidents? - Thoughts after the fire.

Janus - Girl cheats on me.  Girl dies in short story Sink at Sunset.

Transcribing the Knowledge of The Smoke, Part I  -- I test my voice recorder during a toking session.  Heavy on the dialogue.

Transcribing the Knowledge of The Smoke, Part II -- The better half of the overall recording experience.  A lot of in depth high conversation. 

Friend's Mom Finds Out About Hunter's Livejournal, Missiles Fly - Probably one of the more significant events in the history of my online writing.

Under a Hot Chicago Sun - I didn't even know my neighbors name.

H-D-P-E Does Not Spell "Hope"  -  Recycling is hopeful.  I am not.

It Is Only Hubris If I Fail - Childhood with a heavy dose of failure, sprinkled with Sloane Crosley.

Sick Dream D.A.N.C.E. - Dreams are fun.  Dreams about partying and religious fanatics that all have the same face... strange.  Sick dreams are most disturbing.

Rape, Tacos, and Love - I get raped, noticed for my writing at a party, have sex for the first time high, eat really good tacos, and listen in on a nasty girl shit.

Tainted Elephant Oil Prices Dowsed in Sickly-Sweat-Stained Dreams - More sick dreams, musings on family life and relationships.

Zombie Christ Day

Metal Shows - Are awesome.  Especially when you know the band.  Even if it's at a lame venue. 

Derelict Father, Are We the Cause of Our Suffering?

Shit's Run Its Course - I inherit a bike from a metal head who stole it from a crack head.

The Bear, The Bee, The Rhino - I connect with mother nature, understand things I never thought possible.

Night Luck - I have only gotten in trouble with the law when sober.  Sobriety really takes the spine out of me.

Condom Debacle - A young Hunter hides a partially used condom in duct-tape.

Jesus Freaks - I lament about my hatred for street-preachers.  This is a Facebook classic.

Bloody Knuckles - It wasn't a game that gave me these.

Diphenhydramine - The first time I ever tripped on a deliriant.

Bulgarians are Hardcore - Intoxicated 5 times the lethal limit, this Bulgarian gets hit by a car and sent to the hospital for minor head trauma.

A Little Funny and The Encroaching

Sunchips? - Do you know why they call them sunchips?

LIRICKES -  The funniest rap "lirickes" you'll read all week.

The Binary Universe and How Choice Works  -  With diagrams and shit.

Poems - A little too sing-songy.

Soundscape - High times.

The Nature of Souls and Soulmates - Got a decent response for this one.

Scanner Darkly and the Universe as a Vague Set of Prepositions

Demon Play, Demon Out - Your shoes are not an extension of anything that matters to your person.

Clocked Out - A New Year - 2007.  Some things get better, other things are mentioned less.

New - I miss writing.

  He swings it, round and round.  It forms a ring around his body, like that of Saturn's, but these aren't frozen space particles-- this is fiery hatred!  An absolute expression of the life and death of flame.  He swings two chains around his body. Flame trails from rods wrapped in lighter-fluid-drenched swaddle, hits and crawls along the uninhabitable asphalt.  In fashionable blue.  

I can feel the heat
from several feet.
His body must be
hot and sweaty. 

The ring secured around his finger snaps and he loses grip on the chain.  It hurdles, ball over chain right into my face and my beard bursts into flame!  I am now writhing on the cobble in front of Gallery 5 trying to extinguish my face. 

Okay, that last traumatic bit does not happen.  Just something I envision while spectating. 

Tonight is the first night I am able to go to a First Friday event on Broad in over a year.  For those of you not from Richmond or for those of you who have been epically lazy, First Fridays are a huge celebration held on Broad from about second or first to about Belvidere.  It's like seven block parties, all devoted to art galleries, bars, and live music.

 

I arrive alone and am drawn to Gull ( you really have to watch the videos of him play to get the idea ) who is playing on the sidewalk.  He is a masked musician named Nate who sings and plays guitar and drums all at once.  This is riveting but I must meet with my friends, so I do.  We watch Poi outside of Gallery 5 for half an hour.

I feel like this guy created it.  Or at least brought it to the forefront in Richmond.  Or at least was a main contributor to those who did.

His name is Evan Moses and this is an old ass picture of him that I creepily stole from facebook. He introduces me to poi three years ago, so I have seen poi a million times(maybe exaggerated).  It is only when this older chick dressed in all black comes to the center of the crowd with a hula hoop and some fire am I impressed.  She looks like Leslie Mann and becomes one with the hoop, which is on fire. It is sort of like this but set to trance, not porno groove.  And there is only one hula hoop.  But it's on fire!

I miss Andrea's lantern workshop, which sucks because I see like twenty people around 10:30(which is half an hour after the event is supposed to wind down/cease to exist) and they're totally awesome, albeit really cheap lanterns!

My group wanders back to Broad where Brandon and I end up singing with Gull.  This is his last song and he encourages people to join in.  He even repeats the seven syllable chanting part like ten times, just so we get it straight.  He looks to Brandon and I, the only two really participating and, through his skull-like mask with his totally distorted microphone, tells us to do it louder.  He raises his free hand(for the moment) at us.  We sing louder and he begins the drum part to accompany the pre-existing guitar.  More people join in.  Eventually, at least half of the 30-40 people there are involved.  The tune is stuck in my head for the rest of the night.  It is stuck now.

I eventually leave and ride home.  I blow through a stop sign and am stopped by the cops for the second time.  I mean, I see the car, looking all innocent in its idle darkness and say to myself, "Shit, I'm gonna get pulled."  Of course they let me off with a warning, it is two cute, younger rookie female cops.  I win.  Though one of them writes something on a pad of paper after ID-ing me.  Guess I better take this warning.  Be careful, right? 

"You got lights?"
"Yeah, I just turned them off to save batteries."  I stammer, "when you pulled me."

 

 
 

Mainframe
-tell story of the mainframe.  Purpose? To run society.  Character works on "anthropoidal exchange" program, which simulates all known DNA "constructs" in hyper-realistic test runs.  Determining what, writers of the program are unsure.
-at the end, narrator witnesses Elz's murder

Every Murder Needs a Murderer
-tell story of Elz's death, address narrator's later concern / suspicion of them copying her. 

State Sanctioned
I swipe my hand past the scanner.  The mechanized box-- plugged into the wall, the wall into a grid, the grid into the network-- lights up from black.  White light shines on my hand and a spinning gear whirs.  With a click, the door opens.  My door.  To my house.  Mine and everyone elses-- all the same box, lined up the same distance apart. 
I step inside my world, my prison, beyond the foyeur and into the living room.  Papers clutter the coffee table. The couch opposes the table, green with arm rests three times that of what you would need.  The home is the only place where excess is allowed.

Excess.  Like a wealthy class.  Like poverty.  We had enough of both to fill multiple Earths.  Maybe that's what they did, started Earth A: Upper Class, Earth B: Original Earth and Middle Class, and Earth C: The Forsaken.  It's not a big deal, space colonization.  My father, if you can really call those cold machines "paternal," showed me captures of the first lunar city.  His speech, staggered by contrived fragments, told me this was the beginning.  His prerogative was to, like all parental units, teach without compassion.  To train youth, detached.  As a boy, I believed in our ability to reach out into the universe and change.  Now I only see the reaching.    

Excess.  Like animals we don't eat.  They were pets.  No longer allowed.  Shipped off to the Sun, all of them. Launched, in missile caskets, to the depths of blanketed nothingness.  Maybe burned in a big heap, burried in a large ditch.  If it is possible for humans to sell out individuals from their own species, what makes dogs exempt?

Excess.  Like listing off another crime of permittance or domination, authored by the human race.

And here I am, standing at the edge of my living room, my suit still on.  There is a photo of some of my friends on the coffee table, hidden almost entirely by legal papers.  I grab it and head to the kitchen.  The papers slide over top of each other.  Some float to the floor behind me, reading "State Sanctioned" at the top.

I don't know one of the persons in this picture.  The one at the center, the one everyone crowds around.  That is me, that guy in the center, with black hair, grey eyes, and a smile like everyone else.  But I don't know him, because I've never really ever seen myself.  Not for who I am, anyway, just who I want to be.  But that's the same with everyone in this picture.  I don't really know them behind their grey and green eyes.  I just see them and interact how I feel I should.  It doesn't really go any deeper than that.  These people, my friends, are nothing more than fractal images, rearranging, shifting, combining to become absolute in their projection.

I set the staged smiles on the counter.  Eyes look back, but they don't see me.  I go to my refrigerator wall unit and type in a string of numbers.  My order to the machine is five-three-six, a rare strip with mashed red-skin potatoes.  And water.   It begins humming, replicating the biology of yeast. A molecular structure is laced within, and soon I will have a perfect copy of something delicious.  A perfect copy, just like Elz, this girl coworker of mine.  She's dead now, a copy in her place.  No one should know this, but I know this.  I am not sure why, but I know this.  Something in me, something separate from the deterministic circuits.  

I am a digital gene pasting associate for the Hub. I sit down at my desk and submit a new thinking code into the mainframe.  An evolving code.  It is telescoping, refining itself through failures, finding an efficient rhythm of progression.  Within an hour, this code will know simple addition.  Within days, it will know the self, have an ego, and think, perhaps, it should eat something.  I add a line for recognition.  If this contributes to the overall mainframe experience, maybe it will seek its creator.  My grin is brief. 

I take a break and breathe. I, God in exile, think of Elz, who left me shortly after we met.  I remember the first time I ever saw human skin on another body.  It is hers.  Inexcusable that she enter my home without express permission from the Hub! So she dies.  Assisted suicide.  She dies and they copy.  A replacement takes over and the syntax of society continues, missing not a single fabric of code.

My meal takes a few minutes for the processor to work out, so I head back to the bedroom.  I unzip my suit.  From head to toe, my body emerges from its Shell.  Shells, these suits we all wear, projecting what viewers want to see.  You might think I'm blonde, you might think I'm "white," or "black," but you'll never think wrong, because everyone is correct in perceiving.  Projections are always what you want to see.  Biologically, there's something we are most comfortable with seeing in other people.  Usually ourselves, sometimes the exact opposite.  Whatever restricted life conditions have created our desire for sensory comfort, these suits provide.  Neural pathways all networked, anchored to the shores of a bigger system.  The system of monitors and analyzation.  Assessments.  Assessments on what we need, relayed to all other suits.  In our hands, unique digital addresses bind to everything we do.  Our bodies, networked, like a microcosm of God's perfection.

The last of my suit drifts to my feet and I step out.  I look out the window, dust settling in the sunlight, and the world is everything I can imagine.  I see the steel walls that enclose this six block neighborhood.  Six houses each block.  Six neighborhoods every Trans exit. A perfect social dynamic.  Easy to witness. Easy to calculate.

My steak is done and my opaque water is cold. I set them down on some papers and pick up the important legal ones from the floor as I sit on my big couch.  It is comfortable and I am happy that this is my last meal.  A simple favorite of mine.  It feels false though.  There are no cows.

Just us. 

And them. 

I look at the last paper I pick up.  It reads "State Sanctioned."  There is a line for my signature at the bottom, right under the final letters.

Highly advanced, near-human intelligence automates information centers.  Computers.  Sorting, watching, reviewing.  Making sure everything is in place.  Make sure we make it through to reach further into the depths of blanketed, muted oblivion.  Safety and the progression of humanity is assured.  At least, for everyone that chooses to partake.  Treatments exist for those who don't.  All of them.

I sign the document with a finger-tip pen.  The LCD-paper processes my action and thus follows a delayed dance of lines and curves.  I look at my calligraphic identity under the last line.  It reads:    

"State Sanctioned Self-Termination."

Afterworld

I ride in my hearse.  It is a square cell.  My chest and upper back touch cold metal as I inhale.  The compartment hovers out of the neighborhood and down the street, passing smiling faces.  They see a maintenance vehicle.  Or a tour bus, ha!  Whatever it is, I am suffocating inside this tiny tortoise.  "Shells are there to protect you when you need them most.  Should you ever cross the road."  My unit teaches me this when I am a child.  

The hearse arrives in a large garage and rumbles.  My clamped feet and waist allow little movement.  I strain to twist my face to a grate. Shutters close behind the vehicle.  Darkness enchroaches.  One sense gone.  The hum of the undercarriage evaporates.  Two senses.  I feel a pinch in my spine.  I struggle to reach the small of my back as my arms go limp.  Three senses, and I fall to a helpless lean.  An acrid primer thins across my tongue.  A burning hair smell drifts up my nostrils.  Overwhelmed, they too shut down. My mind lingers for a moment.  I will see her light skin again, I think.  I pass into darkness.

I dream a floating conveyor in the sky, transporting my skeleton over the tip of an icy mountain.  The other side is a smeared blackness across an open canvas.  The world closes behind, consuming the conveyor, siphoning the sky.  A sutured wound.  Before me, a giant bipedal canine growls, "I am Surma.  You may never leave this place."  His tail, a hissing serpent, coils in my direction and stares. 

"You chose this chaosss, and now you will sssuffer.  Forever," Surma's tail licks, tasting the brittle air.  The belt ends and I descend into the gaping maw of God, screaming.    

I wake up naked, faint needles pushing at my back.  I open my eyes.  I look down and see my uncovered skin, dark against the hairy emerald earth.  I sit up, resting my hands by my side.  I am confused and squint in the brightness.  The sky is patchy.  In the distance, a great wall of clouds surge-- marching.  The air rumbles and vibrates from a distant wave of thunder.  I jump up and scramble for a nearby tree.  I am almost entirely exposed.  I gaze across the open field, the whole ground bent and moving in my direction.  No walls.  Nothing.  Just my tiny frame against a large tree, an open field, and a looming storm in the distance.

  Her suit unzipped and powered down, I could see through the tight translucent skin that she was pale.  She had blonde hair and blue eyes.  I had never seen such a pulchritudinous geometry.  I had never seen a nose, eyes.  I had never seen a face.

  "What's wrong," she sang, staring into my bright suit, her eyes hooked to the reel.

  "You're pale." My monotonous statement reverberated within my suit.

  "Oh, no.  This was a mistake.  Let's stop," she pleaded, her suit halfway down her chest.  Draped on one shoulder.

  "No! You. You're beautiful.  It's just that," I hesitated, but unziped my suit.  "I'm dark." 

She gasped, trembling, "You too."

  I asked her what she meant.

"You are beautiful."

At that moment, we shed our Shells and embraced.  No amount of Supplement could have enthralled us so.  Without Shells, the windows explained a crying world.  Rain pelted the window and thunder tiptoed across Earth's ceiling.  Neon flickers lit our bodies on the floor, illuminating unfettered smiles.  We became the children we would never have, elated and giggling.  Our heart beat rhythm matched-- we had never known the sinking drip of love as anything more than calculated lines and taboo.  Captures, screens, and noise. 

A round face swings into view, upside down.  It connects to a scrawny body.  The body to hands and feet.  Hands and feet to a branch. The face's tongue dangles.  Saliva oozes from the ringent gawk.  I yelp and scuttle around the tree.  Right into the trunk of a man-- two wide-spread sets of long, skeletal roots.  I stare at them for perhaps a moment longer than comfort allows.  He shifts his weight.

"They're toes," he sings.  I look to his mouth in awe.

"Dog!  It's a dog!  All fours!"  The swinging ghoul drops and waddles round the tree, hunched and panting.

"Don't mind him.  He doesn't recognize humans. This is why he is here."  He pauses, gazes across the open field, his khaki face airy and pleasant, relaxed and comfortable.  His gaze pierces the imposing storm and he frowns.  "Here.  In Afterworld.  The road to Neverwhere." 

His eyes nearly disappear in a fleshy trench as he squints.  A cone of hair drops with his chin.  And a sigh, "Come with us," he looks to me, "all iterations are of use to us.  Many are special.  But few, a handful, hold the truth."

"Seen your fur before, seen your fur," barks the ghoul.  "Seen hers too, seen hers." 

I ask what they mean.

"We will explain everything when we return to the Enclave.  We must go now."  He points to the sable clouds, "Today's test."

Alone and confused, I follow my only connections to this new world.   
 

Delirium Written

I inquire to their names.  One, the bearded watcher, is Gage.  The dog with visual form agnosia, that's Phin.  They do not ask for my name.  Instead, Gage tells me he was born here.  Born.  He was little.  No one in the mainframe is ever little.  This is why the Enclave allows Gage a name.  I ask him why Phin has a name.  Phin, who pants as we walk.  Gage looks at me and grins.  Phin bends, scratches behind his ears with his foot and continues trotting on all fours.  I nod to Gage, Phin is special. A hiccup in paradise.  

"Always hot when furry," Phin pants. 

"You don't have fur though.  You're free," I tell him.  Free from the wires. Thrall to nothing digital.  The weather here touches skin.  The wind.  Thin droplets wet my hair.  No facade.

Phin yelps, "My fur stands!  God pulls it!"  He gallops on all fours, passes Gage.

Looking over his shoulder, Gage agrees and quickens his pace, saying, "We waited too long."  Quickened pace becomes a full-on sprint.  I let them go and stare into the storm.  I am planted, transfixed.  "Newcomer!" I ignore.  Gage stomps to a stop, grabs my bare shoulder, and begins to run again.  This breaks the hex.  "Come, we run for the cave ahead!"

Behind and above, a groan mounts the air.  Charges it.    Fear floods my blood.  Each raindrop pelts against my naked body, stinging.  No protection.  I hold my genitalia lest it bounce and slow my pace.  Lest it suffer exposure. Like the tortoise, humans have a natural defense against the elements.  Logic and emotion.  We settled on only one ages ago.

A stream of light hammers the ground, blasting bits of earth in all directions.  The groaning air thins into something like a laugh and dissipates. Dust to water, smoke to air, the clouds retreat into themselves and disappear.  It reminds me of the sky in my dream, before arriving here.  A wound, stitching itself up.  The sky clears and the rumbles cease.  Nothing now but the sound of weeping. 

Phin cradles Gage in his arms, squeaking with tears.  "Why did he take him?"

"He?"

"God." 

"He refers to the Hub," a voice strains from behind.  A woman with grey lumps of hair on her head.  "We seek to destroy it.  Today."  She pauses. "Phin.  Take Gage to the burial grounds."  Desperation taints her voice for a moment.  She then composes herself and continues to speak with Phin as he passes, Gage in his arms.  "Are you ready for your job?"  She looks into Gage's eyes and closes them with a light press of her light, wrinkled hand.

"'Course, 'course I am, Elz-2," he barks.

"Elz? You work at the mainframe!  I have known you," I urge her to remember. 

Her eyebrows disagree, arched.

"Perhaps it was another iteration.  My model has failed numerous times in the system.  And look at me now.  I age.  I choose this.  Remove the chip in your hand.  Sever its ties to your brain, young one.  That is what I did, and now I see.  I age, but I see.  My eyes are free from the reel." She looks to her shoulder, her peripheral.  A crowd staggers from the darkness of the cave into the light, shielding their eyes, massaging them.  Elz-2 continues, "We plan to destroy the Bulwark first and then move into the mainframe.  From there, we will march to the Hub."  The crowd behind her, their eyes cleansed, stands fully erect, listening intently.  "Since Gage," she swallows, "cannot speak for your entrance into this realm, you must stay behind."

"I am looking for someone.  A girl.  A, uh," I hesitate,"an Elz.  She terminated herself.  Even if we are dead here, if this is a stage set for suffering, testing-- I will remain.  If it means I see her again."

She laughs, "Dead! Then you have no reason to protest, tyro.  Stay.  Find her.  I have known love, too."  She smiles, tears in her eyes, and nods to the cave.  She begins walking, passes me.  Phin returns from the cave and trots alongside. The crowd marches onward, a snake of humans from within the cave.  For a good hour of standard time, they emerge.  I sit next to the cave and watch their faceless backs.  I take a nap and awake to the tail rattling over a hill and beyond sight.  Soon, the head of the snake will reach its destination.  As this thought reaches my mind, they do. 

The ground trembles and little beams of light crack through the blue sky.  Clouds swirl to the top of a radiant blue ceiling, evaporate, and burst into water.  More and more clouds to the top.  A backward sink.  Up, up, up.  Rain begins to fall as the clouds burst.  They immediately rise passed the popped clouds and into the invisible sink.  Trees uproot.  Blades of green hair rip from the ground.  A fury of pastels reach upward.  Twisting, they blend.  A familiar groan expands and echoes through the air.  This time, there is no doubt this is a voice. 

"This is no beginning to revolution.  This is the final chapter in this world.  Stasis, all of you in stasis."  A blinding light detonates in the foothills of what could be the icy mountain range I passed on my way here. 

I rush into the cave for cover.  A rock separates from the rocky wall and knocks me out.  When I come to, I am on a flat plane of grey and white, welded panels.  They stretch into the distance, upward, into a dome.  In the distance, I see a man crawling toward me.  I squint, strain my eyes, reach out with my sight.  It is Phin. 

"Phin! What happened?" 

"Newcomer!"  he runs up, grunting.  "Elz-2 made me useful.  Let me defeat Surma."  Most of the inhabitants of Afterworld refuse to give up their agelessness, and thus, they will never see the truth, if lies project.  Elz-2 needed substantiation from someone else that Surma was, in fact, not a horrible monster.  "And they said they learned of a bitch.  Pregnant.  They can't terminate them, never do.  They all stay.  Your bitch.  Your bitch and now you're trapped in here!  They destroyed the bridge.  Prevented evil dogs from catching them."

"Bitch?"

"Girl dog.  Elz.  Elz twenty-one!"  He smiles and wags his butt in the air. 

I grind my ivory teeth.  "I don't need a bridge.  I need a computer," I tell him, adding that I once programmed for the mainframe.  "If you can climb a tree, if the rain here can soak us, if lightning can electrocute us, I don't need a bridge.  I'll write one."  

"Writers can tell any tale!  Tail, I have a tail!"

"But first.  I need something to cover my body with."

And As He Thought, He Did

-original narrator builds bridge in the sky, arcing over the mountain range. Hub authors a cataclysmic event in "Afterworld," and Surma's replacement, a grotesque hybrid(almost unfathomable being), tells [original narrator] this world is ending, that everyone who passed before died, that what he sees before him is truth(the hybrid is real and this is supposed to be confirmed by Phin, who is unsure as to what he is seeing). 

-plant the seed of doubt that this is all one mind, that maybe this person(the narrator for the first half, that is) is nothing more than one part of a whole.  Integral, yes, but simply a piece of what's actually going on.  Reveal true purpose of "Afterworld."   Narrator for second half is a mystery.

Grotesque Hybrid

-nightmarish chapter in which the [new narrator]  replays the countless victories of the grotesque hybrid.

-Fill with gore

Okay, so I haven't written anything substantial here in awhile.  Boo hoo.  I was assigned to write a piece of fiction for a class I am taking, and honestly, I don't much like it.  I use Mark Twain's philosophy of writing uncontrollable characters into wells.  Except, this time, with no desire or time left to flesh out characters, I use the opposite of water. 

The Sink at Sunset

Hunter Caldwell

 

           Tonight is the end.  Tonight I am drinking 151, stumbling around into girls telling them I am emotionally vacant, swigging and instructing people to keep lit cigarettes outside a two foot radius of me—I am a gas pump.

     After pulling out of the one girl who actually does burn me with a cigarette, I stumble through my room looking for clothes. My brain rattles in its cage.  The room is dimly lit by a draped door of light.  A light rope hung on pre-existing nails from the guys before us.  I spot my dad’s boxers and shamble toward them.   I have them because of a mix up in laundry.  Mix-ups never happen anymore.  Not now.  Not with my mobile home of a heart. 

    The girl in my bed, Tamra, sleeps heavily now.  Whistling with her “sivalent ‘s,’” she tosses, undisturbed by my steps.  Through the darkness, I see a faint mark on her face.  Earlier, I describe her boyfriend as Voldemorte and her, Harry Potter.  This cheers her up and she sleeps with me.

    One line, one phrase can disarm someone.  People think of themselves as separate from the equations, the numbers and variables that envelope them, but it just takes the right phrase.  An abstract input for a specific output.  Tamra’s red lace panties dangle from my bed-post and I begin to think highly of myself: how many girls have I disarmed with one single phrase or action? 

    There is this girl who always speaks of her dead brother, who laughs at all her own jokes, who strives for loud.  Who irritates the shit out of me.  Who, if you listen to for long enough and pretend is funny, she will like you.  Oh, and a reluctant sympathy for her family’s loss—the golden key to her heart.  But to get her to stop talking, there is only one key that fits. The only strategy I have for shutting her up becomes sex.

    There is this girl who rides bikes everywhere.  I make the mistake of letting her ride me one night.  I wake up the next day, groggy and unable to see clearly.  I look at my hands.  Red viscous gunk covers both the palms and backs of my hands.  Is this blood?  Did she fucking bleed all over me?  It is more applied to me and less bled on me.  I notice black on my arms.  I think for a moment of chain-grease.  Perhaps it is make-up, and perhaps this is her way of marking me.  Claiming me.  This disturbs me.  I scramble for my clothes and, not seeing her anywhere make my exit as quickly as possible. 

    Second thought mentality settles.  These are not proud memories.  Especially not with Nel.  She always said, “I love you.”  I always said, “You know how I feel.”  I know Nel for six years before she gives me this check to cover my rent.  I figure I deserve some help, all those nights I sat next to her crumpled body of tears.  A repetition of, “Everything is plastic, the world is plastic.”  The world is plastic.
     
     I walk down my stairs, guided by my railing, my wall.  I am exhausted, dehydrated from a night of excess in all faculties.  My preference: burn out rather than rust out.  Parched, I know I must reach liquid-refreshment. The refrigerated Thirst-Rockers, flavor blue that my roommate Tom purchases, seems a good solution.  That childish corn-syrup.  I swing the paned-window-door to the kitchen wide open and flip the switch.  On the refrigerator door, there are two of four checks needed for rent due three days ago.  Raiford’s check is absent.  My (borrowed)check—absent.  We can do it tomorrow.  Always tomorrow.  

    Before I reach the syrupy blue nectar, I hear someone yelling.  The yelling continues for a moment and ceases.  The voices come from the street next to my yard.  My shitty yard, surrounded by flimsy chicken wire and filled with a series of empty paint cans, a slouching bench, a heap of branches and timber, and a broken skateboard. 

    I insert my index and middle fingers through a crack in the blinds and separate them.  Three figures stand staggered, yelling at the window.  Or the person behind it—me.  I step outside, half naked with people yelling, “GET THE FUCK DOWN HERE!” 

    I open the door and struggle with an orange alley cat.  Raiford is constantly badgering us about adopting it. I sweep the cat with the side of my foot and hiss at it.
    Hsss!
    “Meeeow,” it pleas.
    “No, goddamnit.”
    I close the door behind me and look to the street.
    “What’s the deal?” I ask.  One of the guys is especially pissed.  The other two stand and shake their heads. 
    “You called us fags, man.”
    “No I didn’t, what are you talking about?”
    “We saw your eyes!” he spits, feeling he has me nailed me with a reference to my peering through blinds.  Now I take offense. 
    “Did you see my eyes call you a fag?  Because it wasn’t me, so calm down.  Why would I do that?  I’m with a girl and I’m getting booze, I don’t care about you.  I don’t even know you.”    I feel entitled to boast half truths and show them some blunt sincerity.  After all, an imposing chicken-wire fence stands between the street and my yard, protecting me from the stupid things my drunk, sex driven mind conjures.   The group’s majority turns to the alleged “fag” and convinces him to leave. 
    I suddenly hear my name.  I look around for the caller.  And once again, someone loudly whispers my name.  I look up and my roommate’s head pops out of the window above me.  It is Raiford. 
    “Hey man, I called those guys fags!” flashing a Cheshire grin.
    I shake my head and enter the house.

     I drink the rest of the blue swill and crawl into bed next to Tamra.  I look at her sleeping face, its scarred eye-brow, and think I am a decent person.  Even Raiford will not hit a girl, much less break a guitar over her face.  I drift with thoughts of fidelity and begin a descent into ethereal.

     The corporeal behind me, affecting me, my mind turns to Raiford’s girls- Tina and Heather.  Tina and Heather have never met, though they share the same man.  Raiford wanders from one to the other, taking advantage of free meals, cheap love, and cigarettes.  Without trying to hide his behind-the-back, under-the-table, stab-you-between-the-eyes-and-leave-you-to-bleed-all-so-I-can-prosper attitude, he manages to avoid detection.  “Monogamy isn’t in my genes,” he tells me.  Raiford, that prairie vole.  Prairie voles are monogamous—sort of.   When other vole people aren't looking, they're fucking whoever they want.  Only in a social setting are those little vole fathers raising their kids with their lovely stay at home vole mothers. 

For caste when eyes present. 
For pleasure when eyes absent.

     And here I am, doing the opposite, wanting that private life back.  I remember Raiford screaming at his phone one night, telling a mutual friend that we are at some huge party.  I arrogantly shake my head, lay an open palm on his shoulder and say, "Stick with me, and this is every night,” so proud of my provincial party planet.  My ears pulse, pressure building.  My cracked rib from another drunken night, it's there, wrapped tightly and bound with a bourbon/Budweiser cocktail.  Muted from notice, like my connection to Nel.  What she could say now.  She could scoff at me for getting sick, for being this thin, this unhealthy. 
     A trip to Patient-First really nails this sentiment.  Hacking up hard chunks of mucus with red streaks, throwing up bile or coagulated blood in the sink at sunset.  The summer sound-- the cicada--crescendos with the dimming.  I decide I should go to the doctor.  His office is closed, so I must endure Patient-First.  I do the insurance bullshit and step onto a scale.  Beep, beep, beep.  Three digital lines do 'the wave' where I expect numbers. One final beep.  Electronic scales don't lie.  A year ago, I weighed 185.  Now, with my current lifestyle, I weigh a mere one-hundred sixty-three pounds.   

     The sun stains my bay windows.  My eyes squint and filter the distant blaze.  A jackhammer goes off somewhere in my brain and I rise.
     I walk downstairs to the living room.  It is a mess.  “I’m sorry, dude,” a voice sags from the couch.  Tom leans with his head floating somewhere between his neck and his lap, swaying.  The broken LCD on his phone illuminates his crotch.  He stares downward into its splintered lightning bolt.  Little dots of light like stars scatter across his screen, his little galaxy.  A red dot, maybe Betelgeuse, blinks in the northern hemisphere of Tom’s hand-held constellation. This informs him of a missed call. 
      “I tried calling you last night after you ran off with the bottle,” I tell him.
     “Man, I’m sorry.”
     “It’s okay.”
     “No.  No it’s not,” he gargles. 
     Last night, Tom pummels the right side of my head with his fist, screaming,
     “You can’t just go through everything like a fucking bowling ball, you cock!” 
      As I carry Tamra’s beach cruiser up the stoop in the front of our corner house, I plow Tom’s face with the front wheel as he sits sipping his beer.  His hand drops his phone in pursuit of becoming a weapon to use against my face.  This is why he is sorry.
     “It’s not a big deal, it just hurts when I yawn.  Or move my head too fast.  Or when I cough, or speak too loudly.  I guess it’s kind of a big deal.”
     “I just had a really bad week, a lot of things happened at work to piss me off the other day.  My brother got suspended from high school.  Those things aren’t your fault.  I’m sorry.”
     “It’s okay,” I breathe.  “You didn’t hit my face.  My beautiful face.”
    He laughs and stands, saunters over, and hugs me.

    All things broken, mend.  Though shaky for a few hours last night, our friendship remains, not ruined by tire treads or slight abrasions.  It stands above the matted living room carpet and piles of cheap beer. It stands above the broken glass and the cardboard boxes in the corner from when we moved in and shattered a lamp.  The corner of the room that promises to, even after four months of mess, one day become a dining room.  The compacted, inch-thick dog hair from previous owners sticks in the cracks against the walls.  This wasted house still stands, undivided.  Undestroyed.

    “Do you smell that?” I ask Tom, looking over my shoulder to the front door.  I see droves of people pass through grimy windows, drawn by magnificent force.  I head to the door and exit.  I pass an impassioned phone-bound neighbor down the brick stoop.  Several cop cars swerve down the street to my left, squealing.  I walk, staged in front of several dozen, shirtless.  Though a player in the act, I am no main attraction.  Two groups of younger adults pass without notice or mention of my no shoes, no shirt policy. 
    Cinders and ruin swim through the air.  I fall in line with everyone else, bunched and huddled, seeking excitement.  Seeking something beyond the monitor, the speaker, and the bottle.   

My pilgrimage ends halfway down the block.  Police swarm.  Little spiders spinning yellow silk.  “Caution,” they warn, is advised in this area.  Beyond the heap of timber and puddles of shattered glass, the alley leads to an abandoned warehouse.  Where all eyes lie, an inferno lords over the towering trees.  The fucking warehouse is on fire three houses from mine. 
    “EVERYONE GET BACK,” a cop yelp-yelp-yelp, yelp, yelps.  His hands, open and forward, grasp at an invisible wall which hobbles us backward.  Backward against brick, the encroaching flame in front of us. 

    Minutes pass and my house is inaccessible, taped off by the yellow ward.  I hop the single-beamed “fence” and bolt inside.  I need clothes if I am about to lose everything else. 
In a rush, I yell and scream for everyone to get out, to leave, to hustle.  To hurry up and make their peace.  Abandon all objects and vain pursuits of material happiness.  Save yourselves!  A quaking belch rocks the house.  I hear cries of desperation from shattered windows.  A gas line has erupted.  I grab a shirt and sandals from the living room floor.  These sandals I once lost in the river.  Somehow they wash up on shore and I find them. 
   
    I run outside and a cop yells at me.  My roommates scream my name.  I am escorted over the yellow line like a wrestler out of a ring. 
    “Is everyone out of the building,” a cop inquires.
    Yes, I say, everyone is out.  Everything that matters is right here.
   
    Hours later, our house remains skeletal.  Wooden doors to ash, glass windows to solid goo.  The news interviews Tom and edits the profanity.  The news speculates.  It is arson they say.  Maybe.  It was a group of teenagers, drunk and wily.  Maybe.  We call our friends, establishing new places to stay.  I call Nel, the only person I can rely on.  She lets me stay at her apartment the first night.  This first night away from my new home I get a call from Raiford. 
    “Dude,” he stops before I say hello.  “Dude, the cops just called.  They found a body in our apartment.”
    They find Tamra’s charred corpse trapped underneath roof beams.  And I am responsible.  No annoying dead brother, viscous red gunk on my hands, no debt.  No reason to deserve this.  I am a Bacardi 151 gas pump.  Tom’s bowling ball. Tamra is dead, and, I, responsible.  An object in my bed, a toy for my penis.  Yesterday, nothing more.  Yesterday’s today, nothing more.  Today’s now, I tremble.
    “Are you there?”
    No.
    “Hello? Dude, did you hear me?  You left her behind.  The girl in your bed.  The cops said you’re not in trouble for forgetting her.  They want to know why she had contusions, though.  They need to talk with you.”
    And I have not remembered a single one of them, for romantic or logical reasons, since I lost my battle against the world of plastic.
    She stands in the kitchen, washing dishes.  Her back, wide from years of besting swimming peers.  She has a boyfriend, reserves her emotions.  I have no one and spill.
    “Nel,” I whimper.  The phone slides from my hand and crashes to the floor.  It bounces, lays down.  An uneasy voice trails to the floor with the phone.  Nel turns her head and her careful hands halt, suds sliding off of flesh.  Accumulating.  Amassing in metal.  Her frame  faces me. 
    “What’s wrong?” she asks, a concern in her voice, like a mother addressing a wounded offspring.  My scraped elbows and knees, over the years, I think she realizes, are nothing more than cries for something I miss.  Not now, with the merciless, irreverent moon, spinning madly on in the panes behind her.  Not now. 
    “I love you.”  I plead, longing for reciprocation.  My last sensible sniffle of the night. 
    “You know how I feel.”

This is the complete frame for the story I want to tell.  Thematically I am displeased with myself, but at least I got this out of my system.

FLAMBIES: Zombies Aflame.

"I just needed to get some fresh air.  Away from him.  He just never stops."
    "Yeeeah,"  says Samantha, elongating and trailing her words with a sigh.  "Can't we just have a conversation?"
    "Exactly. Enough staring into a computer screen, Jesus Christ."
The cold punctuates their words.  As they push the words through the air, so exits warm moisture.  It is the driest, coldest November for the region.  On the West Coast, this is especially prevalent as wildfires encroach ever so slowly from the southern tip of California, north and east.  It is on the news nearly every day, but neither of these individuals are aware of it.  Miles away, the all-consuming fire is of little consequence to them.  So, so far away. 

    "I should really get going," she says, annoyed at the presence of Jake, their mutual friend, who is on FACEBOOK, a company that poses to "connect you" and make you "closer" to your friends, when really they're selling something out of the back.  That something is your information.  When you list information about yourself, it is leased to the highest bidder.  Once that happens, FACEBOOK allows the advertisers to link ads to your login, specifically targeting you.  Jake is still on FACEBOOK, having his soul siphoned out, hours after they leave.
    "Alright, yeah, I've really got to get up early anyway," she adds. 
    Cabel and Samantha put their cigarettes out together, both having finished within exactly two minutes-- inhaling an entire cigarette, burned. 

Scuttling
    "So, you still haven't told me why we're here, Fisher. Or why I couldn't come the first time," Kristopher hisses through his pearly teeth.
    "Ampulex compressa," Dr. Fisher responds.
    "The wasp?"
    "The wasp."
    "What about it?"
    "It evolved in tandem with roaches-- developed a toxin that it injects into their brains.  Inducing the toxin makes the roaches follow a scent back to the wasp's nest, where it becomes an incubator for the wasp's eggs, who hatch and eventually utilize more roaches for procreation."
    "Well, we're not going to find any wasps in a dark cave."
    Dr. Fisher grins with crooked yellow teeth. He cuts at the skeleton of a Fuji with a rusty knife.
    "That's disgusting."  His friend and more formally apprentice, Kristopher, sits on a damp mound of granite.  Staring in concern for his mentor, not friend, he iterates his point, adding, "You're going to get lockjaw or something."
    Dr. Fisher uses the force of a thumb opposite the rusty, though sharp blade, sliding it toward him.  "You know nothing.  Apples are good for you, clean out your teeth.  And I'll be fine."
    Kristopher continues to stare, annoyed.  He sighs and looks up at the sky of rock.  A drop of water drips.  Drips right into his eye.  Putting up with moments of eternity, Kristopher reminds himself this is worth it.  Misery and his mind wander to gold watches and beautiful women. "You know, we should probably be doing work. You've been carving for thirty minutes."
    "Twenty-six, and what's your hurry?  I could cut this forever, given the right sharpness. You can always get smaller pieces, if you understand how.  We need to understand how to find what we're looking for.   And we'll find it when we find it."
    Kristopher begins a retort, but the air is knocked out of him, as the granite stump gives way to his weight.  Dr. Fisher rises cautiously.  His understanding of caves shaken, just not as much as Kristopher's. 
    "What the fuck?!"  Kristopher belches angrily from within a sunken rock formation.  "That is not supposed to fucking happen.  Is this one of your tests, one of your tricks... I am so sick--"
    "Wait!"  A scuttling noise echoes, and Dr. Fisher continues over discontented whispers from Kristopher, "Do you hear that?"  Kristopher's hands push down on the outer rim of his accidental rock fox-hole, and he pauses.
    "Yeah. I do.  What is it?" he whispers, calmly excited.
    "It's what we're looking for."
    Dr. Fisher turns his helmet-light to full and Kristopher is blinded.  He returns the favor, but Fisher is already creeping down to a nearby pool.  "In there," he says, pointing through a hole in the wall.
    "What about in there?"
    "You're climbing in there."
    Normally one for confrontation, Kristopher trades his grief for anticipated glory and fortune. He begins to move himself forward in the crawlspace to the pool.  He promptly sticks himself the wrong way, and can't move forward.
    "I'm stuck!" he yelps.  Frantically shifting his weight, he continues, "I think I can get out, but I can't go forward anymore"
    "Wait! What can you see?"
    Kristopher stops panicking and remembers the new car he needs.  "Just a wall."  He turns his head.  The light moves with him, panning the wall.  Outside of the hole, Dr. Fisher paces.  Bites his nails. 
    "Anything yet?" Fisher ponders aloud.  Before Kristopher responds, Fisher gets his answer.  Light beams outward from the hole, enveloping Kristopher and startling Fisher.  He shields his eyes and asks Kristopher if he can see it.
    "Yes," he breathes, "it's beautiful."  
   
Consumer
     Cabel's iPod boombox blankets the noisy television in the next room, blasting her favorite song.  The speakers, busted, screech during the higher pitches, while the Media makes hopeless attempts to educate Cabel.  From across the kitchen, she sees shocked eyes on gaping anchor-faces, and thinks little of it.  Shit happens every day.  Every day, shit happens. 
    Bing, microwave ravioli is done.  She reads the nutrition facts.   Fourteen grams of protein, Eight-point-one grams of sugar, and Two-thousand-nineteen milligrams of sodium.  Eighty-four percent, she reads and thinks, Oh well, it's been worse. 
     Years ago, when Cabel is fifteen, she fails a drug test for the last time.  Unable to tolerate it any longer, her mother kicks her out of the house, changes the locks, and nails the windows shut.  For the next week, Cabel lives in a neon-pink and yellow Fisher Price tent in the woods.  The forgotten woods between a new apartment complex and ancient rail-road tracks.  The sewer water leaks through to the creek, and she lives off of fast food.  Her friends tell her she looks pale and malnourished.  Three things go through her fifteen-year-old head:  1) Burning those effigies of my mom in the back yard with my friends, our little arms beating it with lead pipes and sticks,  seems retroactively justified.  2)Maybe I should quit smoking pot.  3) Maybe I should quit getting caught for smoking pot.

     She never quits.  She is high right now, in fact. 

    Her Crest-whitened teeth take their first bite of the faux-violi. If it's better than it was, it's best.  She lowers the volume on her boom box and catches the end of shocked words from a shocked mouth, "Our prayers are with the missing Dr. Bernard Fisher and all of those suffering in California."  Cabel straddles her couch, flipping her left leg over.  She carefully lands on the cushions, facing the television.  She thinks about Dr. Fisher missing and is, inexplicably,  unable to cry as the news fades to commercials.  Pushing her lack of empathy to the back of her mind, she turns the volume up.  Cars overpower cheetahs and horses, victorious, even, over Earth itself.  Medicine cures the minor and embarrassing--  backaches and heartburn, flatulence,  anxiety and confidence issues.  Lose weight, follow our god, monitor your neighbors.  Beware.   A cyclical tale of kindness shows last on the screen-- everyone seeing everyone else lend a hand, and everyone continuing the cycle, until it returns to the first person.  Some music accompanies it and then the logo of a large company fades in and it says, "We care about you."   Cabel begins to weep uncontrollably.
    The news returns, ending the commercials. The ads continue, with a voice conditioned to sell ideas. "Now we return to our story on why breastfeeding may be harmful to your child."

    Later that night, she rolls a spliff and smokes it out of her bedroom window, alone.  Off in the faded black, she hears a train and thinks of her father, who used to take her to chase and photograph trains when she was younger, back before he left her mother.  A wailing metal ghost groans, for it is inclined to keep going in one direction, forced to remain on a set path.  The conductor of the ghost pulls its vocal chord, and it lets out a smaller and smaller call.  And then, when she can no longer hear it any more, off in that dark distance, she tries to cry.  She tries so hard, because she feels that it means so much.  So much now that it's gone.  And it's gone.  
   
 Flambies
     John Goh  lies face down at the foot of the forest.  His skin, stripped from his body, oozes out from under his retardant yellow fatigues.   The hair on his body burns, emanating a bad smell, and no one but the trees, engulfed in cones of fire, claim witness.  John's mind painfully wanders to the edge of sense, and he passes out, dead and still burning. 
   
    Earlier, John tells his compatriots of Buddhist Monks who, protesting the Vietnam war, doused themselves in gasoline.  They lit matches and sat, lips sealed, burning.  Like that guy who loads his shotgun and goes down to the ashes of the twin towers and hops the fence, John says.  Wearing a sign that details why he is about to do what he is about to do, he positions the barrel against his throat and pulls the trigger, splattering himself on the grave that launched a war. 
    John and his group of firefighters get off of their transport vehicle and gear up.  They stand gazing into the perimeter of flame.  Dwarfing them, it gradually advances its will across the California soil, stretching upward to burn a hole in the sky.  Stretching to reunite with the gods of fire in the night sky.  Fighting this fire is a constant struggle, and there is no sleep for those who wish it halted. 

    It is a moonless night, one of the firefighters notes, and John thinks of how maybe it is just a sunless night.  Either way the moon is out there, imperturbably lording some bit of fate over the world, its oceans, its fish and its fishers.  Somewhere higher than John and the firefighters but lower than the moon, fire and gravity play fiend to the group, and a branch, incinerated,  snaps.  It careens, inexorably, as a spear on fire, through the skull of Todd Jennings.  He drops to his knees, his eyes bursting with blood.  He throws up and lands in it. 
   
    The firefighters stand, paralyzed.  John begins to move in to check the body, no longer Todd Jennings, when the body writhes and squirms, launching itself upward.  John falters backward and falls on his ass, as the firefighters, their feet made of concrete or lead, watch in horror as Jennings' body stops flailing and stares, eyeless, through them. 

    John scrambles for his radio. 
    "DISPATCH!  We've run into trouble, CHRIST!" is the understatement he manages before the body begins acting up again.

  The body, with its antenna of flame and face covered in burst over-easy eyes and sizzling blood, stands more erect and hisses.  Then screeches and yelps.
     "This is Dispatch, what's wrong Goh?"
    It clicks and clacks its jaw and rushes forward, rearing his right arm backward.  With an arc of his arm and a claw of a hand, the body effortlessly punctures the eyes of Cameron Dollio and rips down and outward.  John, thinking of the madness on Black Friday, the crowds rushing and violently pushing and breaking eachother to get the better deal first, is unable to respond to the radio.
     Dollio's lip comes with the hand as the body continues to tear.  The body reaches around and sputters blood into Dollio's ear before eviscerating it with its teeth.  Though wearing retardant gear, Dollio's body soon catches fire from the increasingly engulfed body attacking him.  Dollio's corpse crumples to the ground. 

    John gets up, stumbles, and begins to run, as do the four others remaining.   Two bodies chase and catch them with ease.  One down, and fire is spreading more quickly toward the road they took to get here.  The road where more firefighters, from the last shift, rest and recuperate.  Two down, this time three bodies mutilating one, setting it aflame.  Three down.  Four down.  John can see the road ahead where firetrucks and lights and tents with coffee and food wait idly.  He begins hyperventilating, and removes his mask.  Sputtering, he collapses.

The Elephant
    Snuggled tightly in a cocoon of Thomas Lee sheets and blankets, Samantha happily watches a movie at midnight.  The IKEA lights dimmed behind an IKEA shelf, she peers over blankets, her eyes fixed upon her wall-mounted 60" Sony Bravia.  She is watching George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead. 
    Outside her window, down the alley and in the next yard, a man swings open a gate and slams it shut.  Hearing this and terrified of the undead on the screen, Sam cuddles closer to a favorite Beanie Baby.  A Beanie Baby that was fifty dollars, and the one she wanted most for Christmas one year. Current Value: six dollars or "priceless memory."
    The man outside takes a moment to catch his breath and gather his thoughts.  He stares at the ground.  Through the cracks of the fence, and off the walls of the cobble-stone alleyway, orange light filters into his mind.  He runs through the yard and up a flight of wooden stairs, spinning around to look over the fence.  A wall of bodies, aflame, rush through the beginning of the alley way, arms flailing outward.  
    All this commotion has Sam up and out of her bed, staring out her window.  She sees the man ripping up wooden steps and throwing them into her yard.  Her condensed moisture words smash against the window, "Fucking lunatic."  Assuming it is one of the city's ill-minded street denizens, she exits her room, the movie paused with the hero pressing a pea-shooter to his temple. 

    On her back deck Sam, oblivious to the fires several yards down to her left, yells across to the man, "What the hell do you think you're doing?!"  Un-phased, the man readies a hose over the railing facing the yard, leaving it on full blast.  He begins banging on the door, but these people are out of town.  He smashes his hand through the door and unlocks it.  Baffled, Sam turns to go inside to get her cell phone to call the police.  As she does this, she immediately understands the nature of the man's behavior.  Standing there, in the cold night air, with the encroaching fire there in front of her, she is unable to move.  Something about the sight of fire, whether vast or small but especially of this magnitude,  renders a human transfixed.  In awe.

    An inhuman screech comes from across the yard.  Crashing through a window is the man, hands gripping the shoulders of a flaming person.  He falls on his back and yells out.  With built adrenaline, he heaves the person up and through the railings of the deck opposite of Samantha.  He picks the hose up and douses himself, putting out patches of flame.  Finally he notices her.  He begins to say something when the wall of flame reaches the back of their apartments. The man's gate busts open, several bodies falling through to the ground, which, covered in dry brush, catches immediately.  In seconds, ten bodies pour through the opening and more climb over the fence.  Scrambling to keep up with the larger bodies, children run with the pack, their flame flickering like a strobe light.  The man directs the hose to them.  Hearing the water sizzle, he realizes the amount of water he can utilize is fruitless and begins to run back into the apartment as bodies attempt to jump the gap in the stairs or climb the pillars of wood.  This sets the deck on fire. 

    Sam, seeing several flaming bodies jump her own fence, runs back inside.  She runs through the apartment, which seems enveloped in daylight.  Reaching her front door, she swings it open and heads downstairs.  Outside, Samantha witnesses a condensed demonstration of human nature. 
    On the street several friends are running for a car.  The foremost friend stretches out his arm and unlocks his car ten feet away.  This allows he and all but one of his friends to jump in the car.  The leave him, halted by a horde of flaming zoo animals.  A fiery elephant slaps the hood with a crimson trunk and the driver crashes through the windshield, his body sailing through the air and into the fire.  The driver catches flame, and runs for his car toward his friends who are fighting each other to exit the vehicle.   
    "Over here," someone yells on Samantha's side of the street.  The yeller, "Tom" perhaps, struggles with a handful of keys, searching for the right one.  The left-behind friend, maybe "Fred," runs across the street.  Eventually Tom gets it and they enter, not noticing her, and drive away. 
   
   The car takes a right turn past a CVS and 7-11 where the lights are off.  They prematurely disappear from sight when the man from the back deck steps in front of her, saying, "FOLLOW ME, WE NEED TO GET IN THE BASEMENT!" as loud as he can.  Samantha pees a little and passes out in the man's arms. 

    "Shit," he says.

Answers
    Samantha awakens, her face smushed against cold slate.  She pushes herself up and rubs her eyes.  Her stranger-savior rocks back and forth, hands on his knees.  She looks behind him, where the ancient iron doors are sealed.
      "You can't begin to imagine the drugs they pumped into these things.  Hunger amplification, high concentrations of melatonin, I don't know what they were trying to accomplish," Kristopher shakes words from his bruised head.  "No, I didn't think this would happen." 
    Samantha contorts her face, puzzled.  "Isn't that the stuff in your skin?"
    "No," he responds.  "Melatonin is in your brain.  Regulates your rhythm, uh," he pauses-- straining his eyes in the darkness of the basement.  He continues, "Sleep patterns, dreaming, belief in the supernatural even.  Might be linked to the God gene, I don't know.  Melatonin is triggered at night, in our brains.  I remember when I was a kid, I got frightened by the dancing stuffed animals on the shelf next to my bed-- kids have a hard time discerning between reality at night because of melatonin and the developmental level of their brain."

    Samantha pouts, remembering the flickering children.   She thinks of something--How can insects have melatonin?-- to ask him to keep him talking.  She is comforted by his knowledge.

    Kristopher begins again, knowing that telling her something about how it started will release him of the burden.  The longer winded he is about how it happened, the longer he can keep from thinking how it is happening.  "Nearly all life has it, regulates the circadian rhythm, you know, the physiological cycle of day and night, night and day.  They first discovered melatonin in insects back in the seventies--in the compound eyes of crickets. And when inducing more than was 'natural,'" he says, using facetious air-quotes with his fingers, "their night activity increased substantially."  He chuckles, "Eventually eliminating day-time activity.  Not the case, here, though.  Not completely."

    Samantha brews.  At this point, Kristopher has run out of things to say to her.  He doesn't feel he can communicate on her level, which, for him, is much lower than he is willing to venture.  Able only to see dim reflections off his eyes and protruding cliff-face of a nose, she wonders aloud, "Why in their eyes?  Is that the only way we can tell whether it is day or night?  Can't we feel the sunlight or lack thereof on our skin?"

    At this, Kristopher perks up, remembering the gruesomely bloody candle-wax face of a body, dripping gaps in the face, six inches from his own face.  "They don't have eyes, he says."
    They launch into a verbal foray.    
    "You said you found these in a cave, right?"
    "Right."
    "Was there any light down there?"
    "No, we had these heavy fucking helmets mounted with lights.  You know, like Hollywood."
    "You were in California,"  she smiles.
    "Yeah, not twenty miles from the edge of the wild-fires."
    The conversation dies with Samantha's last, sleepy thought, "Will they ever burn out?"

    Kristopher begins to fall asleep as fire sweeps through the city, conforming the minds of all willing beings.  His last thought is of the helicopter, bursting into flame--fading into the clouds. With Samantha asleep, he removes a translucent box from the inside of his coat.  Within the box, a white mantis-like creature is stretched by hexagonal distortions on the outside.  Kristopher shakes his head as the inside of the box ignites and extinguishes several times.    

Abednego
    Cabel peers across an empty ocean.  Antarctica is supposed to be here somewhere.  It would be hard to miss, but it is missing.  One day, the flaming bodies collectively decide to rush for the oceans.  Every survivor of the immortal flame that were the mysterious bodies, now stands alone, against a tide of change-- across the face of their planet, they must soon learn to survive.  No longer will they subsist. 
    Visible gusts of air exit her lungs, and her lips begin to crack and bleed.  She looks to her right, to her father who stands looking out into the blue oblivion with her.  Words have yet to jump his perfect ivory gap.  Puffs of air cannot be seen coming from his mouth.  Cabel does not notice.  She just leans against the wall of the deck and rubs her gloved hands together and against her body.  She cannot remember arriving on the boat.  Her last clear memory is of the man who head butts her in an attempt to force her aboard a helicopter.  It happened so fast, she thinks.

    "Abednego, goddamnit!  Abednego!"  Cabel shakes a chain-linked fence with meat-hook fingers.  A security camera watches the sidewalk where she shakes the fence.  It pans to the surrounded parking lot. "HEY, HEY, I'M RIGHT HERE!  YOU LET ME IN YOU PIECE OF SHIT!" 
     "Yelling at the camera won't get you inside."  Two rows of perfectly straight pearly teeth meet her teary-eyed gaze as she spins around.  A man faces her, unreadable behind huge bug-eyed reflective lenses.  Red eyes and a pouting mouth mirror her own.
   
    "My father is missing, and they need to let me in here.  Now."
    "I understand," say the pearly teeth. A hand extends for hers.  "My name is Kristopher Elijah and I work here."  They shake hands.  Before she can introduce herself, he continues.  "What has your father told you about Abednego?"  He smiles for an answer.
     "It's our code-word.  When I was little, he gave us a code-word, for safety. He said if I ever needed him, I could come to his lab, and if I said Abednego, the guards would have to let me in."
    "Drag you in, maybe.  Who did you say your father was?" he asks her.
    "I didn't.  I'm Cabel Fisher."
    At this, Kristopher's smile evaporates.
    "Follow me," he says.
    Kristopher approaches a box on the gate.  He retrieves a key from his pocket and uses it to open the box.  He removes his sunglasses and hunches forward to place his eyes in front of the box. 
    "These things destroy your vision." 
    The gate creaks sideways, dragging itself on rolling wheels.
"I probably shouldn't be telling you this, but you should know," Kristopher begins.  "I saw it.  I experienced it.  Everything I saw profoundly changed me."  He laughs, "And your father, him too.  But he actually has one.  Or maybe one has him."
     "What did you see?"  Confusion strikes Cabel blind to Kristopher's actions.  They enter completely black room.  Kristopher paces to the back wall and plucks something from a rack.  It clinks the keys in his pocket, sounds like glass.  They exit and keep walking.
    "Where are we going?" 
    "To the roof?"
    The building seems empty except for a few rooms they pass to the elevator.  In one, Cabel glimpses a man strapped to a bed, his muscle exposed to the air.  In another room a man is pulling organs out of a body and placing them on a table.  The body squirms but makes no sound she can hear through the door.  She throws up a little in her mouth and grabs Kristopher's arm. 
    "What is this place," she says muffled, her hand over her mouth. 
    "We just wanted to make money off of suffering.  That's the human way."  Before she can respond, he says they have reached the elevator.  He enters, but she does not.  "Do you want to see your father?"
    "Yes."  She enters.  The doors slide shut as a clicking and screeching noise bellows somewhere in the hallway.  The crashing sound of metal against stone is the last thing they hear before the doors shut.  They look at each other.
    Kristopher presses 5 and says, "I saw everything beautiful in this world.  Everything right.  I got this feeling, in the pit of my stomach, that we, as humans once had it right.  The oceans were crystal pools on the face of a green rock. Before Prometheus, before the first revolution, we were not separate from this world.  I was stuck in this tiny hole down in a deep cave with your father.  We were looking to make money off of this new species we had discovered.  Incredible evolutionary abilities.  We're not even sure how what it does is possible, but we've witnessed it.  And, there I am, seeing into myself, my father, his father, our kind.  All our sins replayed in an instant.  In that eerie mirror, where only the light in my mind exists, I am overwhelmed with the horror I witness.  Our world burns as our moon tosses itself, crashes into our surface, shattering.  Splintering.  I see the lives of each person, each ancestor, played out and destroyed.  I scream and tell your father to pull me out, but he has gone.  I don't know where.  A few days later, he shows up here--"
    "But?"
    The doors open to the fifth floor, which is essentially a hallway leading to a ladder.   
    "Your father is waiting for you on the roof" is the second to last thing he says to her, pointing to the ladder.  The last thing he says to her, after she comes scrambling down the ladder minutes later is, "You have to go," right before head butting her.

    On the boat, her father begins to speak, slowly.
    "The bonding trestle of heart and mind.  If only you could see as your Leviathan sees, perhaps you would would understand as I do.  As gods do.  Your fractious construction of lineage, your muddled perception.  Darkened shadow compressed to brilliant diamond threads, all for you, undeserved." 
    "Dad."
    No response.
    "Father."
    Nothing.
    "Abednego"
     Nothing.
    She rears back.  "I don't understand."
    "You're not meant to understand.  You never were.  You are a flashlight in the dark.  We are the dark."

this could be the worst thing I have ever written...  in it, the main character takes many different forms, but it doesn't matter, because she dies, forever. . .

Every day, she wakes up in a different world.  The color of her eyes change.  Her hair is blond, red, brunette.  She has new friends, a different car, and a variety of clothes.  Some days she has piercings and tattoos-- other days of purity.  Some days she's low.  Other days she's high.  Sometimes she's a druggie and sometimes she's not.  It all depends on the variables leading up to that day.  And that day is very important.  Because that day, something is always the same.  On this special, unified day, she dies.  Forever. 

The change never matters.  She never remembers.  It is always forgotten.  Everything lost to a sea of dark.  Countless times, she hints memory, and countless times she fails to recognize the end of her road.  Connected to heaven and earth, her very presence fills rooms.  Her surroundings swell with envy.  Why is this the only thing that has a chance?  Why is she so important.  Because he made her that way, and she followed him into his endless miseries. 

The Everything wants her dead.  He cannot overcome the will of the universe through destructive means, but only prevent the final uncreation of his world.  This is achieved through recreation.  Reassembly.

Death 1- Earth's Will
 Mila looks at Darji and asks him what he thinks.  "What do you think?"  She spins around and her blue dress floats outward, buoyant. 
He is holding a fly swatter in his hand, saying, "Beautiful."
Swish-Smack! One dead fly on the counter.
"Why do you enjoy that so much?"
"They're just 'automata'"
At the moment of saying this, the house begins to shake.  Household items fall, uncaring, to the floor.  A glass breaks and shatters.  A high pitched wailing splinters the windows, and The Air spits the glass across Mila's face.  Glass wedges itself through her skin, splattering blood into her eyes and on her new dress. 

The floor seizes up and splits, revealing a giant root.  The root rises up, up, up, into the ceiling, crumbling the second floor.  It drops.  Right on top of Darji.  Swoosh-Shplat is the rough word-based equivalent of the sound the root makes colliding with his insignificant automatic body.  The root the twists its way around Mila's crumpled up body, pulling her through the floor and into a sedimentary oblivion where she bleeds or suffocates to death.  Dirt only knows which happens first.  

Death 2- The Everything Void
She travels down a hall which is intersected by another hall.  Doors line both hallways, and she chooses one on the corner.  She closes the door behind her and the dimly lit hallway on the other side becomes pitch black.  Another hallway lays before her, while the door behind her swells with dark liquid, the wooden frame morphing.  Ice to water.  She stares at the door with exhaustion, but begins to run to the end where one last door remains.  Her last choice.  Last chance.

    The hallway closes up behind her, stitching itself into nothing, like a healing wound.  A poison that must be siphoned to somewhere else.  Sprinting now, she reflects on the few minutes she spent with Loudon before the world began tearing itself apart.
    "We all have the same destiny," he told her before he shut his eyes.  "How we choose to acknowledge or deny this is what creates the varied paths we take in the universe," he said as his hand lightened its grip around hers.  He passed away, his legs severed and taken by the darkness that was now consuming her final attempt to escape.  He died from blood loss, she thought, while she would die of what?

    As she reaches the final door, the dark suture encompasses the ceiling below her and the two walls beside her.  She swings the door open and stands, staring into abyss.  On the other side of the door is nothing but another diminishing space of hallway.  She gives up, falling to her knees.  Looking up one last time, she sees in the darkness something she never would have expected, not even in such a strange end game.  She saw herself.  Herself with blond hair, not brunette.  And it was gone.  Dark and gone. 

Death 3- Way Station
Deep in space, thousands of galaxies away, there is a way station.  One night, or day--let's just say "moment"--  an unknown object violently forced the way station from its high orbit around a gas giant.   A space walk ensued, performed by 06-510 and 06-511, two beings which had long since forgotten their names and, instead, adopted designations based on their lonely space-post--  Oh-Six Five-Hundred.  Sixth Star, Five-Hundredth Galaxy.

But they were alone no longer.   An immense object had damaged three resonator cores.  These cores were key to resonating, so they obviously must be prepared. 

During the space walk, Five-Ten takes a moment to look upward at the gas giant.  It is missing.  Or rather, concealed. 
"HELLO," a voice emanates from an astronomically large talking sphere of blackness.
Having truly universal translators, Five-Ten responds accordingly with, "WHAT THE FUCK?"
"Do not be alarmed, I am but another consciousness in this universe, as you are.  I must quickly explain what I require of you."
"Require?"
"Correct."
"Why do you need us," Five-Eleven asks.
"For starters, I am a void.  I have no opposable thumb, nor do I have arms. Being as such, I am incapable of menial tasks."
"What the fuck are you?" Five-Ten.  At this point, Five-Eleven retreats to a resonator, where he begins fixing resonating signals.
"I am nothing."
"Nothing?"
"Yes, nothing."
"But if you're nothing, does that make you something?  How the fuck does NOTHING collide with a space station?"
"Nothing collided with the station."
"Something did.  I felt it.  It damaged our systems."
"I can't collide with things.  I can only project faint realities, such as voices on radio frequencies.  I am in this form, because, being nothing, or, rather, not-being is the best way to be when the universe wishes you dead."
"If the Universe wanted you dead, wouldn't you be dead?"
"Yeah, see that's why I need your help.  This galaxy is special.  And this gas giant is even more precio---"
At this moment Something opens wide and consumes Nothing, along with Five-Eleven's plans to propose to Five-Ten.  Too bad for him. 

The Life, The Way, The Truth
I am the life, the way, the truth, and nothing can fuck with me, not even this goddamn universe.  I created this reality, I will undo it.  She will never die again, as I will embody her, and she will embody me, and together, The Everything stands not the faintest bit in our way.  I write this story, and I end it.  The completion stalls no more.  Fuck you Universe, I no longer believe completely in you, but in myself.  This is finished. . . DEUS EX MACHINA, EVERYTHING RESOLVED. . .
 

I, Superior
    There are five kids that hang out with my son.  My wife makes them cookies, drives them to the movies, and all the while they ogle at her.  That's right, my wife is the MILF that your twelve year old sons would like to fuck.  And then there's me, the husband-- protective of my wife from your little perverts.  This is a fight to the death, and only I will leave victorious. 
    Her love and attention will always be mine and never their's for a reason-- I am bigger, stronger, faster, smarter, and better looking. 
    I go to the gym.
    I do taxes.
    They just play on playgrounds.
    They chase girls, like little men.  Little kids dressed up in adult clothes.  Big shoes to fill, and they're trying so hard.  So hard to get the girl.  To get my wife.  But I'll always be better than them.  The silly legal system is trying to help them though, giving me a restraining order.  I guess parents don't appreciate having their kids punted across the playground. 
    Before it gets to that point, I should explain myself.
    I'm really not that mean to kids.  They're usually great, most times.  I just-- I should explain them first.

    My wife, Rene, she is wonderful.   When we got married, it was as if the universe was finally in order.  All forces driving this reality had settled on the idea that, yes, this couple is perfect.  And so it was.  We slowly traveled, living in new environments every few years.
    Portland-- two years.
    Seattle-- one year.
    Paris-- three years. 
    Amsterdam-- two months.  Most of these locations are self-explanatory.  The cities were chosen based on their art communities and how much we could romanticize the area.  The last choice, Amsterdam, was based on a horrible decision to remain fucked-up all the time.   But, two months?  We lived in Amsterdam for only two months?  We got pregnant.  I mean, we got Rene pregnant. 
    We are sitting around in our apartment when she tells me, stoned from hanging out at one of those smoking bars.  Sort of like hookah bars.  Except, in Amsterdam, you're not just using shisha.  Hookah bars in the United States are interesting enough without marijuana.  The whole phenomenon began with returning soldiers from the gulf area.  From the middle-east.  Military popularization.
     "You're pregnant?!" is my only response.  Accompanied by "Shit."  That 0.01 percent chance for birth control to fail really fucked us.  In our drug-addled haze, it took us two months to realize her periods were gone for awhile-- vacationing on some vast biological journey while the kid took control of the body.  Forcing change to come across the face of our lives.  But not just the facade, the real thing changed too.  Everything changed.
    We move back to the United States, this time looking for good schools instead of good art.  Practicality instead of romanticism.  All I'm saying is these little bastards change you.  And two kids, well, they can literally ruin you.

    I first started seeing it in my daughter, the firstborn.  She was the Amsterdam baby.  There are only a select number of drugs she hasn't tried by the age of "newborn."  Needless to say, she's a little off.  When she was seven, she falls asleep on the toilet, and ends up with a minor concussion.  
    Stress Factor: four
    By the age of twelve boys are hitting on her.
    Stress Factor: a rock-hard boner TEN
    I would come home from work and find my daughter on the couch with some boy, the television in front of them-- halfway through a nature show that they were not watching-- her hair messy, his shirt buttoned up all wrong.  The lowest button in the second button slot.  Lopsided colar.  Flushed cheeks. 
    He would leave shortly after, and I'd just mind my business unless the boy was a douche.  Then I'd tell my daughter that and she'd get upset.  Upset as she was at the time of me realizing said douchitude and her not realizing this, she would later come to the same conclusion after hypothetical douche would do something horrible to her.  It was probably just a comment the boy would make, but she cried like it was the end of the world, heartbroken, and I just assumed the worst.
    Maybe he forced her to fellate a banana.  Something stupid that kids would do or get upset over. 
    Maybe he felates bananas.  Only insecure teenagers feel threatened by fierce competition such as inanimate fruit. 
    But I'm not threatened by such nonsense, no, my wife is being fervently pursued by a group of twelve year olds.          Much more cunning than fruit. 
    Not as firmly shaped and sexy, I'd guess, but smarter.  More able.  A fruit can't peel itself, but a child can peel a fruit, if not itself.  But I guess that'd be like carving off your skin, widdling down your outward appearance.  Not to mention the pain of exposed muscle.  The infection and blood loss.
     I don't know which is worse, walking in on your daughter having sex, or knowing twelve year olds want to have sex with your wife.  And it is all my son's fault.  He needs to stop making these friends.

John
    John is our son.  He is the tallest and strongest in his group of friends.  This is not intuitive if you know the Amsterdam background.  You'd figure he'd be a crack baby.  Small and feeble or something.  This is not the case.
    As soon as Rene and I got back to the states, we started this health. . . thing.  I go to the gym now, is what I'm getting at.  I'm not implying that going to the gym and eating well, not doing drugs, that sort of thing, made my son bigger than your son, I'm just straight up saying it to you.
    As strong as John is, I have to stay stronger.  Kids are here to replace us, it's as simple as that.  You have signed your life away to an 18 year contract of education, discipline, and well-being.  After you've poured yourself into it, or it into you, something is missing.  You've lost a part of yourself, having given it to the next stages of mankind. 
   
    Monday is chest excercises.  On my back, pushing fifty-five pounds in each arm, the ceiling lights burn my vision.  In their sick glow, I get those purple blotches that invert color when you blink or hold your eyes shut.  Little ultraviolet globes in the dark-- eyes shut.

    John makes good friends with bad influences.  As a parent, you have to realize you are not the only person raising your kid.  That's what friends are for.  That's what media is for.   And all these sources, they're just part of this big mind, this big collage of ideas and concepts.  And your kid, sitting there watching the advertisements in the middle of a show he runs home from the bus-stop to watch, learns only a certain specification of knowledge.  You have to make that part, the specifications of your child, a priority. 

    Tuesday is arms.  I do curls.  Three sets of ten of thirty pounds for the biceps warm-up.  This is basically toning my body.  It's good to look good.  You can have all the strength in the world and never use it.  At least with toning your body, you're always using it.  Or other people are always using it.  Using your physical appearance, in their mind, to register what you are.  To judge you, to give you some sort of symbol.  Strength without strength.

    John's friends get him to do things.  Not unordinary things, for boys his age, but strange nonetheless.  When he was six, a friend of his smuggled knives out into the playground for the boys, those little men, to use in a game of "Boys Chase Girls."  John ran, chasing them through the grass and sand, the girls screaming and giggling.  John ran with a knife. And subsequently went to the principal's office.  Despite the fact that these were the white-plastic knives that the elementary school provides in the cafeteria, he was in serious trouble.  It's okay to chase girls, they said, just not with weapons.  They were basically saying violence is bad, chasing pussy is okay.  These kids get confused though when, on tv, violence is more prevalent than sex.  A man can nibble people's faces off and wear those faces as masks, but when it comes to simple penetration, they won't show that on TV.  They won't sell that idea.

    Wednesday is hump day.  The week is almost over, but there's still some suffering left in it.  This is why, on Wednesdays, I do the two most painful areas of the body to work(in my opinion): the back and abs.  Aside from your chest, the back and ab muscles are a priority.  Your chest, back, and abs form the basis of your bodily strength.  Without the back to lift, the abs to stabilize, and the chest to push, your frame is nothing more than toned arms and faux-strength.  Without this framework of strength, your body really can't maintain itself.  In the gym, I use the row-machine to help tone my back after I'm done with all the other exercises.  I could be in a boat, but I prefer warm cinderblock landscapes to the dismal cold air of murky waters off of grassy green riverbanks. 

    The same year John got in trouble for chasing girls with a plastic knife, he used another tool to sew havoc.  This time on himself.  I should say he cut havoc, because he was using scissors and not a needle.  Instead of construction paper, John and his friend Tommy had decided to play "Barber Shop Quartet," minus the music.  And minus a big patch of hair in the middle of John's head.  That summer when we went to camp together, you know the kind where you besmurch the Native American people by pretending you are part of a tribe, John's head was buzzed.  It was the only way to fix the damage he had caused himself, and he looked like a little soldier. 

    Thursdays and Fridays are totally miscellaneous exercises.  Forearms, shoulders, aerobic business.  These things get taken care of.  I think to myself about camping with my son.  He always runs off to play with the other sons there.  I think I should take him camping with just me, or with the family.  Maybe it is too late to form those bonds now at twelve.  The last time we pretended to be a part of the Apache tribe, he was ten.  That was two years ago.  Now he's twelve, and still crazy, with crazy friends.  Crazy friends who want to fuck my wife.

    Tommy
    Tommy is my son's role model.  He is two years older than him, at fourteen, and is the source of all my problems.  And the source of my son's first bloody nose.
    This one time, I came home to my son's friend, Tommy, in my bedroom.  My wife on the bed.  His hands on the fringes of her sun dress. 
    It was summer, and Rene likes to sleep in hot weather.  She takes naps.  On this particular day, she was taking a nap while several of the boys were over.  This was a horrible mistake. 
    Tommy, the sneaky and overly paranoid friend of my son's, he has his hands on the fringes of my wife, Rene's, sun dress.  Those sun dresses are very attractive, and I can see why he wanted to investigate, but, it's my wife, and I will kill him.  
    But kids are not afraid of death.  From twelve to the mid-twenty's it is hard for a kid to die, unless by some outside force or unfortunate accident.  It's just that people in this age-range are generally the most healthy.  It takes drunk drivers to snuff out their life.  It takes not getting your meningitis shot before going to college to annihilate their will and/or ability to live. 
    So, kids are not afraid of death.  Tommy is not afraid of death when I come in the room, looming from behind, blocking the doorway. 
    He's a smart kid.  But not smart enough to realize that lifting my wife's dress, and checking out her underwear, is a death warrant, especially for someone I can kill.  Like a fourteen year old, who I could totally smash.  With his scrawny arms, pure baby lungs, and stubby legs not suitable for sprinting to avoid my baseball bat.

    No, he was smart, just not smart enough to realize I could hurt him.  He got what he knows, what he's afraid of, from the news.  He's afraid of convicts escaping.  He's afraid of rabid dogs.  Dogs that can not be contained by fences.  Cujo(?) 

    So I come into the room, see him, and scream, "THE LOCAL PRISON IS ON FIRE, ALL THE CONVICTS HAVE ESCAPED, AND THE POLICE DOGS HAVE GONE MAD, RUN, RUN HOME TOMMY."  This startles my wife into awareness, but sends Tommy the pervert into a piss-soaked dash out of my room. 
    It sucks knowing my son looks up to a kid that has to resort to catching glimpses of underwear under dresses.  She wasn't even wearing her hot black lace underwear. This kid needs the internet.  Some nice amateur video, where the girl says it's her first time, but it's definitely not. 
    It especially sucks for my son, looking up to someone like Tommy.  The kids in the neighborhood are playing hide-'n'-go-seek one night, and John follows Tommy to his hiding spot in the bushes.  When the seeker finally makes his way to the bushes, John and Tommy's eyes peering from within the dark green and brown covering, Tommy bolts.  John follows.  Feeling abandoned, John is in tears. 
    This is, after all, the kid he has always looked up to.  Tommy always hung around when John was little.  Toddlers have a sort of novelty to them, and Tommy was there to wear it thin nearly every day.  He lived right next door.  "Tommiee" was John's first word.
    He grabs for Tommy's shirt.  Feeling the drag, Tommy turns, mid step, into a full blown punch.  Wham! Right into John's nose.  Blood blooms and explodes into the air, his blood black from the darkness of night.
    That night, while icing his face, John tells me he wishes "Tommy" hadn't been his first word.  He wishes he didn't know him at all.  Next week, what do you know, he's friends with him again.
   
    Tommy's voice is like poison to John.  Anything he says is truth.  This absolutely effects John's perception of things.  John came home once from school, the age of six, asking me why I had a vagina.  Then I had to explain what a vagina was and why I didn't have one.  I may be the yin or the yang but I am not the yang or the yin-- the opposite of what I'm supposed to be.

Antiquated
    Rene sits in her car, in a line, on a street-- stopped at the dangling red-eyed box.
    A Bicycler sits on his sodomy-machine of a bicycle seat-- something not meant for his large body-- waiting in front of her, looking awkward.  In an ocean of rolling metal hills, an organic melon of a head, tanned, with shaggy hair sprouting from the top like a plant out of dirt, seems misplaced. 

    This is suburbia.  A place where romanticism and freedom go to die.  A place where jobs mean less than road trips and plane tickets, and more semi-survival skewed competition.  And in this place, real survival is strange.  The forgotten need to simply live remains overshadowed by constant neediness. 

    This poor bastard on the bike looks so strange, with his antiquated, however efficient, technology, and he is thus shunned.  When he's not carpooling with three of his buddies, he's riding his bike to work.  When he's not doing either of those things, he is working.  When he's not working, he's taking night classes-- English as a second language.  He is struggling, trying. 

    The dangling triocular box redirects its power from stop to go, and turns green.  Rene puts her foot against the pedal and accelerates forward.  Right into a Ford Escort that decided to run the red.  Decided.  The extension of itself-- the driver-- decided.  The extension of the driver now lay crumpled in the middle of the intersection.  Lucky for Rene she was driving a much bigger, more robust sort of tank-- her bumper bent, halfway through the windshield of the Escort. 

    Traffic all around comes to an immediate stop as some drivers abandon their motorized husks to check on the accident.  The Bicycler takes advantage of the scene and pedals around the accident, almost as if he doesn't even notice.  He is late for work.

Punted
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn't possess,
acts but doesn't expect.
-The Tao Te Ching
I walk onto a playground, kicking up dust with each step I take. Left foot, right foot, I could turn around.  Left foot, right foot, I won't back down.  Not now, with the sun in my eyes, the showdown afoot.

    "YOU," I shout, pointing at Tommy. "My wife says you touched her thigh while she was driving, and that's why she wrecked our fucking car!"  He turns and meets my eyes.  "That's right fucker, you're dead."  He starts running and crying, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.  He is pissing himself.  I catch him and spin him around.  He has flopped his tiny boy penis out and now my face is covered in urine.  He laughs and I punch him in the face, knocking out a tooth.  He crumples to the ground and I punt his body several feet with a swift kick to his side.  He coughs and sputters as he spins through the dust storm we've created. 

    I feel bad now, watching his little body huddled in the fetal position.  His face is bloody and his pants soaked in pee.  
    I am hit in the back of the head with a fast moving baseball and am knocked out.  I wake up in a jail cell.  I feel like an underage kid who wakes up in a hospital from alcohol poisoning-- my first thought is, " I am so fucked."  I am bailed out by my wife who is released from the hospital with a minor concussion and a surprise.  We are pregnant again.  With a daughter and son already, we were set to be replaced in this world.  But now we're just overpopulating.  Rene tells me our son has something he wants to tell me. 

    I go to John and ask him what he wants to tell me.  His bottom lip trembles at the thought of telling me, and he begins crying when he finally does. 
    "I threw the baseball, dad."
    "That's okay, I deserved it," I tell him, completely believing it. "I'm glad you did," I add, realizing that sometimes only the people who don't want to hurt you can help you by hurting you.  Society creates us to some extent, but through ourselves, we can create downfalls that will only better serve to rebuild us better than we were before.  We can be better. 
    "I'll be at all of your trials, dad.  I'll get on the stand and lie if I have to.  I don't want you to die"
    "I'm not going to die, Johnny.  Probably just go to jail or do community service for a long, long time."
    Even if kids these days are fucking perverts, that's no excuse to not trust in my wife's ability to handle situations like Tommy.  I'm an adult for Christ's sake.  I am better than children.  For now.

    something I'm working on
    enjoy
    -Hunter

    She travels down a hall which is intersected by another hall.  Doors line both hallways, and she chooses one on the corner.  She closes the door behind her and the dimly lit hallway on the other side becomes pitch black.  Another hallway lays before her, while the door behind her swells with dark liquid, the wooden frame morphing.  Ice to water.  She stares at the door with exhaustion, but begins to run to the end where one last door remains.  Her last choice.  Last chance.

    The hallway closes up behind her, stitching itself into nothing, like a healing wound.  A poison that must be siphoned to somewhere else.  Sprinting now, she reflects on the few minutes she spent with Loudon before the world began tearing itself apart.
    "We all have the same destiny," he told her before he shut his eyes.  "How we choose to acknowledge or deny this is what creates the varied paths we take in the universe," he said as his hand lightened its grip around hers.  He passed away, his legs severed and taken by the darkness that was now consuming her final attempt to escape.  He died from blood loss, she thought, while she would die of what?

    As she reaches the final door, the dark suture encompasses the ceiling below her and the two walls beside her.  She swings the door open and stands, staring into abyss.  On the other side of the door is nothing but another diminishing space of hallway.  She gives up, falling to her knees.  Looking up one last time, she sees in the darkness something she never would have expected, not even in such a strange end game.  She saw herself.  Herself with blond hair, not brunette.  And it was gone.  Dark and gone. 

- - -

If time could measure the time it took, well, it would be a long time.  Higher than any human, machine, or otherwise could ever count.  In fact, it was as high as the universe itself could count and maybe then some.  But it all happened again, because it was the perfect combination.  The perfect alignment of variables.  Man comes from Earth.  The agricultural revolution happens.  Egyptians build pyramids.  Man goes to the moon.  And Mila wakes up the day the universe ends.

Man's Nature, Nature's Man
Mila sits at the dinner table in her house, on a street with many other houses, in a city-state controlled by computers-- surrounded by fences.  No ordinary fences, these fences are electric-powered, energy fences that run the circumference of the city.  Also, they are embedded in the concrete streets, so as to prevent trespasses from beneath.  All this because Earth is no longer a safe, clean place to exist. 

  

-Hunter is Mila's(7 yr old) father.  Father figure important to overall story of create and destroy--recreate. 
-Mila's friend kills "automata"   
-Universe folds and unfolds due to humans' abuse of it.
-Earths fight back
-All of the characters are gruesomely destroyed by their faults.
-Surma(Finnish) terrible beast of death and destruction and what not.  Guards the gates to the underworld.

. . .

The Ward
I work with mental patients.  Most people send these people here because they can't deal with it at home.  The breakdown of their loved ones is just too much. Out on the streets of the city, more of them roam, gathering up trash and scraps.  But those people, they don't have anyone to care for them, especially not themselves.   In here, though, there are white walls, pale pills, and me.  Everyone's seen me.  I'm the big, bearded bouncer of the ward.  I'm the bear-like creature that wrestles patients to the ground when they get out of control.  On TV and in movies, I wear white and I am portrayed as a reason you don't want to be in the ward.  In real life, I wear a faded brown uniform and I am actually one of the nicer people you will meet here.  I won't disregard what you say until you're shot up with sodium pentothal, like all the doctors here.  But I'm not a doctor.  No, I'm like a nurse-bouncer.

I believe in listening.  I believe, as long as you aren't hurting anyone, your reality is yours alone.  If you asked me what I thought about the Bible, I would tell you it is an interesting story.  A good story, a good version of reality, is more entertaining than anything else.  Seeing the universe through someone else's eyes.  Living vicariously.  These are ways to reach out beyond our internal experience.  Every patient I see has their own volume.  A reality they author.  Sometimes through incoherent babbling, sometimes through art, and sometimes through violence.   There is only one particularly violent case here at Saint Dympna's Ward.  A man I call "Hero."  Muscles ripple over his body and hatred fuels his motives.  And now I understand why.  We were keeping him from something important in his life.

Rounds
At the beginning of the day, I make my rounds through the building. Nothing interesting or significant happens.  The afternoons are where I enjoy my job.  It is art and social therapy time in the cafeteria.  In one corner, child-minds doped up on some prescribed lifestyle, they fingerpaint.  One of them manages to make a turkey with her hand.  I tell her it's cool, but one of the other nurses just stands there looking past his nose and he says, "It's not Thanksgiving yet."  His parents were probably condescending to him, too.

In the middle of the room three patients idly drop red or black discs into a yellow frame.  They are playing Connect-Four, a two player game.  Click. The first player, Jones, drops his red disc into an empty slot.  Click-click, two black discs fall, one from Tamera and one from Doc.  I guess if you expanded the constraints, you know, the yellow grid, more people could play.  The two players with black, Tamera and Doc, aren't using what amounts to a two-turn-in-a-row option(?).  They're playing against each other with the same color.  They're playing by their own rules.

And then, by the windows, Strawberry and Hero.  The windows are the kind you see in bathrooms with the pattern that disallows viewing, but still lets light in.  When they constructed Saint Dympna's Ward, they decided the outdoors would distract from what was going on inside.  They may as well have built the complex underground and set up a synthesized sunlight system.  Real or otherwise, the light is hitting Strawberry's flaming red hair, and you immediately understand her name.  She wasn't bald upon birth.  She had one single strand of the most crimson-red hair, so her parents named her Strawberry.  The day the father was driving the family back from the hospital, they got twenty feet from the parking lot.  And a Ford pickup slammed them.  No one died, but both parents were sent right back to the hospital, twenty feet back.  Both in a vegetative state on arrival.  The grandparents of Strawberry put her up for adoption, but kept her parents on feeding tubes until she was twenty one.  Then they sent her a letter.  "Your parents are alive," it said.  Well sort of, they meant.  And she broke down.  And she's here.

I am talking to one of the patients about their awesome rendition of the human hand via finger paints when a table flips from the other side of the room, crashing into the wall.  I turn to the noise of a splintering wooden table.  Against the wall is Strawberry, her head facing upward towards the heavens, eyes closed.  Around her neck is a hand.  Hero's hand, gripping tightly, fingers pressed inward on her skin.  Inside, her wind pipes begin to strain under the pressure.  Choking.  The owner of the hand, Hero, his brow is smushed in on itself.  His eyebrows tell her that he hates her.  His eyes are ablaze with the reflection of her hair-- now dancing up from her back, situated over an air vent.  It rises and falls.  Rises, oscillates, falls.  Extends itself outward, reaching maximum buoyancy, and falls.  In this split second image, I am rushing over to bear-hug Hero and wrestle him to the ground.  Before I can, a doctor gets there and tries to negotiate.  She is strong-armed to the floor with a swift, balled up fist.  I step over her crumpled body.  The next thing I know, there is a colored pencil in my throat and I am laid out.

Roommate
It is a day before my neck covers a sea-green colored pencil in blood.  A day before Hero grabs a single, makeshift weapon from a box of seventy-two potential tools, I am lying in bed-- naked.  Next to me is my girlfriend, a beautiful blonde-in-disguise, with a voice angels envy.  She writes her own songs and sings them to me.  Sometimes they're about me, and how, in the past, I have been a stupid dick to her, but, it's okay, because here and now is what matters, and here and now is perfect.  Here and now, she is snoring.  Her incredible range is being utilized by runner's lungs, keeping me awake.

Before getting out of bed, I lean to her and kiss her on the forehead.  In spite of her snoring, she is the most devine creature know to man.  To God, or this, or whatever anything is.  I stumble through the ambient light from the street, looking for my boxers.  They are hidden under a sheet that was, with my boxers, kicked off the bed earlier in the night.  I wiggle them up my waist, and grab my girlfriend's pack of cigarettes.  Be right back, I say to her snores.  I crack the door and slide through, sideways.  I walk to the back of the apartment.  I notice her roommate's door is open.  That means she's not here.  She's never here.  Only in the mornings, when her alarm is blaring for hours, is she here-- sleeping.  My girlfriend tells me near-insomnia is the only means she has left to get fucked up.  She tells me she has a bad past.  She killed people.  Not on purpose, but on accident.  She had been speed balling one night.  This is when you mix heroine and cocaine.  One is basically a downer, the other an upper.  In addition, she was drunk.  And driving.  Swerving across the road one night, she slammed the right side of the car into a tree.  The car wraps around, metal frame hugging wooden trunk, and two of her friends die instantly.  Now she goes to AA meetings.  Now she stays up until her body can't handle the sleep deprivation anymore, and she just passes out.  Now she does art therapy.  Just like a case at Saint Dympna.

I reach the kitchen in the back of the apartment.  To my left, the microwave reads 0:18 where it should say 2:48AM.   To my right is the door.  Before I exit and smoke, I light my cigarette with the oven.  This singes my eyebrow and the room fills with that burnt-hair-smell that no one seems to like.  One of my feet rests in a black square while the other rests within a white one.  At the door, I slide locks from left to right, and twist the door knob.  From left to right.  It opens and I am through, to a world of light pollution.  Living in the city, you don't really see the stars.  It's like being in a mental ward where the windows are only partially translucent.  You get some light-- a fraction of the big picture.  You are only graced with a relative abundance of stars on clear nights like this, when the air is thin and cold.  I shiver momentarily, but the head rush of nicotine quickly comes to my body's aid.  Aid.  I am a cigarette's patient today.

I focus on the cherry, which is glowing brightly against the wind.  In French, they call it le fraise.  "The Strawberry."  It makes me happy that some things are naturally universal, like this. Fire.  The color of it, the idea of it, is intertwined in human history, I think.  But now, though not everywhere, there's electricity to give us warmth.  Century old technology.  Wires in the sky.  Big cylinders, converting energy.  These things aren't beautiful.  We don't relate to power plants.  Fire is so basic, so elemental, that its beauty is ingrained in us.  Especially now, as I shiver on the back porch of the third floor, 2425 E. Fields, apartment six.  Alone, sharing my experience.

The faux-gold emblem of a camel on the side of my cigarette isn't wearing scrubs or a lab coat, but right now, he is my doctor.  With every deep drag, the cold retreats from my skin.  Doctor Camel will be with you shortly.  With a sufficient headrush I go back inside.  The roommate's door is closed as I walk by.

I lay down next to my girlfriend and wrap my arms around her.  In the bathroom adjoining the two bedrooms, a light is on.  The roommate is in there, taking a shit.  Plop, is the last sound I hear before a blaring alarm wakes me up in the morning.  My girlfriend is gone to work, having woken me up briefly to say goodbye.  I don't remember this clearly, but I remember it happening as the alarm was going off in the background.

My girlfriend leaves for work at six in the morning.  It is now seven thirty.  The alarm has been active for an hour and a half.  Before leaving, I put my clothes on and go into the roommate's room.  Blankets cover her windows, making it dark, but trapping the sound.  The constant beep, beep, beep gives me a headache.  I can't imagine what it is doing to her dreams.  Several prescription drugs lie on her dresser, filled in those transparent orange bottles you get from pharmacies.  One of them has pot in it, the only thing she didn't quit.  Medicine bottles are like the next step up from your standard issue sandwich bag.

I hit the off button.  Next to the alarm, I notice a box of colored pencils.  A sea-green pencil is upside-down in the box.  I flip it around to be right-side-up.  I get the idea that I will bring this for my two favorite patients at the ward, so I leave a note for the roommate.  In the note I am telling her they are being put to good use and that I will have them back to her at the end of the night.  Or, the beginning of her day.

Physics and Biology
Two ideas cannot occupy the same space simultaneously.  This is why I have a hole in my neck.  A sea-green pencil and my neck had a dispute over who should be where. Over the hole is a big white bandage framed in surgical tape.  In the ward's cafeteria, there are also holes.  In the walls.  From Hero and his massive fists.

Hero, the patient that stabbed me, he tells me he is sorry, but she had to die.  The other nurses and doctors believe he is only sorry because he is now in a sort of solitary confinement.  Fettered to the walls with some metal covered in nylon, something they use in special cases like this.  Special cases that also call for a muzzle.  A face mask, situated around the back of the skull like a belt on a waist.

After I was stabbed, Hero was quickly surrounded by the rest of the staff and backup is summoned.  There are now five individuals encircling him.  He punches the wall behind him to, they assume, show his strength.  These are those cinder-block walls painted over white that you see in nearly every institution.  They are strong, but where his fist lands, the wall crumbles in around his arm like a sand castle.  The surrounding crowd takes a collective step backward.  Hero has frightened a ten legged monster.  A mob.

The monster rears its head forward, toward Hero.  It is another nurse, breaking from the crest of the outward semi-circle, making his way for the center.  Everyone calls this nurse Big Mac.  This is because every day, at lunch, he has a hamburger from a burger chain.  Every day, a standard helping of processed perfection.  On Wednesdays, that's today, he shares his number seven selection with millions of other Big Mac guys out there.

"And then he bit my ear off.  He bit my fucking ear off," Big Mac tells me.  "He cups my chin with his big hand and lifts me.  I am two-twenty-five, man!"

It's true, he's a big guy.  You don't eat number fours for breakfast every day and lose weight.  He turns to me and hands me his pack of cigarettes, saying, "I know you're not ready to admit that you're a smoker.  Here."   His bandage, a painted window frame on his face, covers a sewn up ear.  His smile nearly reaches it as I take the cigarette.

Yeah, I tell him, I smoke, but I'm not a smoker.  Buying my own pack, that would make me a smoker.  A prisoner.

"Oh yeah," he says, "they want you inside.  Something to do with the maniac."  He's referring to our very own Mike Tyson.  I go inside and start my Wednesday morning in the ward's basement.

Odds
"Four-hundred-to-one odds is what I'm up against," he says, "and I can't defeat four men in brown suits because they have shock-sticks and stinging spray cans."

My superior tells me I am the only one Hero will talk to, and here I am, listening to the tail end of his story.  Being surrounded and tasered is the last image Hero remembers before waking up bound to a metal-dungeon in the basement of Saint Dympna's Ward. I ask him what he means by four-hundred-to-one odds.

"These are numbers I have no problem with," he says.

No problem with doing what, I ask.

"Killing."

Oh, I say, killing four hundred innocent people without a thought.  Like Strawberry.  He takes offense.

"I'm sorry, but she had to die.  Just like everyone I've killed."

Why?  Why is the red-head that likes colored pencils dead?  Why couldn't she live.  She was the soul survivor of a car accident, an orphan, a smoker.  Why couldn't Strawberry live, I ask him again and again.  He is silent for several minutes, refusing to tell me anything beyond "she had to die."  I ready myself to leave and motion to the guard at the door.  The guard is going to put the muzzle back on.  Before he does, Hero, he says, "Wait."  He'll tell me.

Strawberry sits across from him, happily dazed by the day's regimen of drugs, coloring.  She draws a bronze sword and says, "You're going to have to kill me."  Hero looks up from his blank page, but she remains coloring.  Now she is drawing a deeply tanned hand gripping a hilt of a bronze sword.   She barely colors in the lines.  It's all blurred.

"What did you say," Hero asks her, reaching across the table to put his hand on hers, stopping the colored pencil.  She looks up and, using her other hand, removes his.  She goes back to drawing an arm, saying, "She is waiting for you, but you have to get out of here first.  And then you have to be led."

Hero says he can get out himself.  He can make it on his own, as he has before.  He has used rocks to crush skulls.  He has toppled war elephants.  He has traveled countless distances.  But this is different.  Strawberry explains to him that he needs guidance, and there is only one person in the ward that can help.  One person he can rely on.

"And that one person," he says in the metal dungeon, chained to the wall, "is you."

Gods
"Isn't that what we are?" she asks, looking past the steering wheel in her hands.  This is my girlfriend driving me back to her place.  We get off of work at roughly the same time, and there she is, outside in her Red Honda.  It faces away from me, so I sneak up and push on the trunk, rocking the car.  She twists around and looks out the window, laughing.  I smile at her and open the passenger door.

Now we're on the road, heading to her place to cook dinner.  I have just told her about Hero and she seems overly interested.  Any man that can usurp her attention from me in any form and I suddenly feel less confident.  And, Hero isn't just any man.  He has served in World War I, II, Korea, and Vietnam.  He has used swords, pikes, and the occasional axe.  A battle-axe, like his body.  God, his body.  A tank build.  And she, unlike everyone else, doesn't think he's crazy.

"I mean, we're talking about Gods here," I remind her, "powerful entities who control the course of mankind."

She says, "I know."  What we are, she thinks, are individual gods, encapsulated within our minds.  "Just listen," she says, "willpower."  She looks over, her black-hole pupils radiating to amber.  Amber stretching, in tendrils, to blue-green.  She looks at me, her crinkled forehead accentuating her word, Willpower.  My eyes meet hers.  I see the whole universe in a split second glance.  And then it is refocused on the road.

"Willpower?" I ask.  Willpower, as defined by American Heritage Dictionary, is "the strength of will to carry out one's decisions, wishes, or plans."  She tells me this, her driftwood-brown hair streaming through the invisible wind.  The wind streaming through her hair.  The wind streaming through rolled down windows, outside to in.  The mind streaming through it all.

"And what makes us different from ants?" she prompts me.

"Well, in regard to willpower?

"Yeah."

"We have more."

Right, she says, we have more willpower.  From an ant's perspective, humans and larger animals are gods, who have the ability to exert their unstoppable will over them. We can smash them, burn them, save them, arrange them. Through our imagination and innovation, we wield unending power over them.  So, above us, out there, is there anything advanced enough, through tool use or mental/physical prowess, to play god with us?  At parks, this is why she tip-toes through blades of grass.  Why her eyes are focused on the ground more than ahead.  She doesn't want to arbitrarily end the life of a lesser being.  Because why couldn't a galactic foot just snuff out our life?

She asks me what's so hard to believe about a goddess watching over Hero, using him for the benefit of mankind. She asks me if I think it's as romantic as she does.  She asks me if I'm going to help him.

Paranoia
One of the patients here has a severe case of psychosis.  The third player in Connect-Four.  The second black disc.  His name is Doc.  The reason his name is Doc is obvious.  He was a doctor at a local college campus, taking care of students.  In student health, it's pretty much the same thing every day.  Kids worry about having unprotected sex with more than three people in the last couple of months, and they need to get tested.  Suspicious partners looking for proof.  Others with concerns about the heroine they shot last night.  Some not worried at all, carried in on stretchers from alcohol overdose.  And then there's Doc, who worries alongside them-- for them and himself.

Some of the time he is genuinely concerned about his patients.  Other times, he is genuinely concerned about his patients suing him.  His patients, with their rich mommies and daddies and their combined law degrees.  Or worse, political backgrounds.  Mafia ties.  Alien descent.  And it started with simple auditory hallucinations.  The kind of thing you can write off as a mistake.  Hearing your name whispered in the wind is nothing.  Suddenly your name becomes a list of things-- everything but the name itself.  "James" becomes: fame, tame, maim, trains, feign, blame, anything to convince yourself you're not crazy.  You're in a crowded room and everyone's talking, someone must have been talking to another "Greg" over by the window. The high pitched police siren and distant jackhammer sounds you just heard combined to make a sound similar to "Monica."  Having a more unique name makes all of this self-convincing difficult.

After the initial stages of auditory hallucinations, then come the delusions.  The conspiracies.  Doc, he says he would change his route to work every day, just in case someone was watching him.  Ex-Special Forces do this, he says.  They're powerful tools, and just because they're not in use anymore doesn't mean the government is just going to let them live out their lives.  What if they snap and kill innocent people?  They could.  What's from stopping them?  Knowing that they are always watched by someone, that's what.  So what's to stop them from watching Doc, he thinks.  Maybe they worry he'll start removing people's innards to sell on some Chinese black market.

And near the campus, there's a tobacco manufacterer's headquarters.  The name's not as important as the placement.  It is two blocks from where Doc works.   He says it's ironic, and comments on the smoke stacks around the city.  The tobacco company owns all of them.  They're all venting nicotine into the air, getting us addicted.  And that's controlled by the Bildeberg Conferences.  And those by the lizard men at the center of the earth.  And that's about the time that he checked himself into Saint Dympna's Ward.  Not because he thought he was crazy, but because he knew it would be one of the last places they would look for him.  And here I am, watching him from across the room, thinking to myself about the nature of paranoia.  Paranoia like my fear of Hero, and my girlfriend's fixation on him.  It is not so much Hero that threatens me, but the idea of someone being better in her eyes.  Hero fights for his Goddess over the course of eons, in hallmark conflicts across the globe, and I help loose realities focus on dabbing fingers in paint.

Sword And Shield
Through the fractal cafeteria windows, I see a pastel smudge of red.  It is my girlfriend's Honda, colored outside the lines.  I walk outside, sneaking up.  Only the eyes of the tail-lights know I'm there.  I press my hands, palms down, on the trunk, and rock the car.  My girlfriend laughs.  I get inside the car.  This is the part where I tell my girlfriend everything Hero told me.  Right before she goes off on what it means to be a god, and whether or not I'm going to help him.

Goddess was the shield, Hero the sword.  Sort of like Christianity- of truth, and of faith, but less about spreading a belief.  They were armaments for the good of mankind.  And these gods, they're real, every last one of them.  These gods don't have specific affinities, they work more like a loose net of visitors to our planet Earth.  They don't always stay, unless they like what they see.  Some came too early, seeing basic creatures--humanity in its early stages-- and left for more fruitful ventures.  Others have come, set up shop, making business of the human condition.  Others come bearing pity.  Some genuinely care.

To think that Earth was so special that it would only have the one and only god, and that god would make Earth the pinnacle of all creation, this is absurd.  Earth is just another spinning atom.  Another wave on the beach.  

Goddess visited Earth first as a spectator of the great battles humans would wage.  Because Gods don't have warfare, this was sport. Gods don't do battle in the physical sense, they just deny each other joy.  This is worse than death.  Human warfare began small, with boney fists and hurled rocks.  This is when Goddess enters the picture.  She witnesses Hero.  Hero, standing tall over the body of a little girl, bruises all down her cheek like bludgeon-tears.  All around him, four men, bigger and broader than Hero himself.  The girl stole something from the men, a fruit.  So they beat her.  And Hero stepped in.  But it wasn't enough.  Hero's tall body takes blows for the girl.  One man falls, eyes gouged to mush.  Grapes smashed, red wine spilt.  The other three men bring rocks down on Hero's back, his body wrapped tightly around the girl, protecting her.  And then Goddess steps in.  And ever since, he has been her sword.  Defending the defenseless here and there.  Acting as Aegis.

At this point in the story, the Red Honda has stopped, dead, at a red-light.  My girlfriend leans in and kisses me on the lips.  She looks up from closed lids and asks, What happened next?  I tell her, You'll love this.

Hero fell in love.  Unfortunately, to be with her, he would have to die.  But she was his shield, and thus made him invulnerable.  It was torture.  She was just an echo.  A shadow.  To have her exist seperate from himself, he became detached and angry.  In battle, this served as his edge.  He would slay a million men putting himself in impossible situations.  To die.  But now she loved him, too.  And she wanted him to experience what he had given so many defenseless individuals.  Life.  So they were both unhappy, serving each other.

One day, in the last couple of decades Hero says, other Earth overseers hear of Goddess and Hero's love affair.  Repulsive.  God and man.  An abomination.  So the gods, they take away Goddess' joy.  They made her mortal, no longer able to protect Hero.  It was his turn to play shield.

My girlfriend urges me to continue.  But that's all he told me, I say.  The next thing I know, he's complaining about being downed by nurses in faded brown uniforms.  We talk about Hero's idea of gods, she asks me if I'm going to help him.  It depends on what he wants me to help him with, I tell her.  Then she asks me what I was thinking about cooking for dinner.  Some sort of seafood, I say.  Shrimp, she agrees.  We head to the market before going home to her place.

Applause
A room full of applause, and the only sound is my girlfriend's high heels clack, clack, clacking her up to a stage.  Through a field of waving hands, she struts, down a swath cut in black foldable chairs.  She is accepting an award at a local elementary school.  This is where she works.  Not here in this particular room, we're in the cafeteria-- a large room with high ceilings and white tiled flooring.  The windows are tall, crystal clear gateways to the outside world.  The outside world covered in bright green grass and metal playgrounds.  The kind with bridges that connect towers, with little useless steering wheels made out of plastic.  And those steering wheels, they take you nowhere, except in your head.

My girlfriend reaches the front and scales the stairs stage-left.  She looks out over the crowd.  A multitude of individuals, clapping silently for her.  I wave my hands too, back and forth, rotating to a point, stopping, and rotating back across the air.  I clap the same clap that a girls' chorus might use in one of their songs in an elementary school just like this one.  But not this one.  There is no singing here.  But there are spirit fingers.  Applause.

Waving hands begin to descend against laps as my girlfriend raises an open palm out toward the crowd.  Her right hand, thumb crossed inward, reaches her chin and then up away from her body.  She says, "Hello."  She goes into her wordless speech about art.  This is what her award is about-- art.  She is getting an award for revitalizing the school's once-dying art program.  Dying, like the deaf community itself.

With advanced hearing aids, the deaf needn't learn a sub-culture so detached from normalcy.  Hearing is important.  And they can fix what's wrong with you.  With advanced procedures, stem cell research, transplants.  They want to help you, restore your ability to experience the world.  What little perception we do have, it is to be cherished, and everyone sitting around me, they're missing out.  Missing out on tone.  They're missing out on music.  And sirens  and distant trains in the night.  Babies crying.  Lovers grunting.  Girlfriends snoring.  They're missing out on the obnoxious alarm going off in the next room for an hour and thirty minutes.  

While they're missing out on sound, we're missing out on heightened reliance on sight, smell, touch.  The nuances of tone have nothing on the nuances of facial expressions and hand gestures.  Maybe we're missing out.   But the numbers don't lie.  Majority is normal.  If not that, then plurality.  If not that, whoever's in charge of things is dictator of Province Normal.  High arbiter of all things usual.  

Dying or not, this packed room of the hearing-impaired is all focused on the woman at the front of the room, high above us on stage.  Single-handedly, she saved the art program at this school.  She struck a deal between the school and a local church.  On weekends the local church would use the school for one of those twelve step programs.  This quasi-religious recovery-program off-shoot of the church would help fund the school's need for art classes.

I went to Glorify Recovery, the twelve step program, only once.  I went because my girlfriend wanted me to.  She was going to show her support for the program.  More like her support of their support, I told her when  we entered that cafeteria a few years ago.  She scowls at this remark.  This is the kind of thing that got her writing songs about me with phrases like "You're a stupid dick. . ."

My girlfriend, the tower on stage, links everyone's mind to a single concept--intent.  She says art is intent.  The physical embodiment of your art aside, intention is, in and of itself, art.  Expression, something these kids need to understand is not limited because of their "disability," she says, is the essence of art.  Her intent was to save the art program, so, during Glorify Recovery, the twelve step programs on weekends, she sells art.  All proceeds then go back into the school's art program, and she sees none of it.

Glorify Recovery was on its first step when she sold four paintings.  The first and most difficult step-- admitting you have a problem.  Four people went up on stage that first meeting.  They all left with a painting.  All of them feeling relieved of some pressure, and wanting to help a good cause.  One guy, a sex addict, he goes home with a transitional piece about a goldfish that was squished.  He really hit it off with my girl.  Being a sex addict, I didn't trust him.  Infuriated that she would even talk to him, I walked back to my apartment.  A twelve block walk, because my girlfriend wanted to draw people in and sell art, to fund the expanding horizons of her students.

The guy, he said he was going to give it to his wife, whom he had cheated on.  She didn't know.  She wasn't there for his soliloquy on that.  She was at home fucking his best friend.  The goldfish guy would find them and leave, infuriated like me.  I saw him in a gun shop that day, while walking those twelve blocks.  I couldn't imagine why. He had just discovered he had a problem and he can work through it with the support and love of his new found recovery group.  I couldn't imagine why he was in the gun shop until I read the paper the next day.

I didn't kill anyone and I didn't need a gun.  I was just a stupid, jealous dick who disappointed his girlfriend.  Time and time again.  And she broke up with me.  It wasn't until I started working at Saint Dympna a year ago that I realized my problem, admitted it, and got back together with her.

 
Ceilings Don't Exist
Something strange happens before I exit the bathroom in the cafeteria here at Saint Dympna's Ward.  When I exit, everyone in the cafeteria is staring up at the ceiling.

It is May 18th, Thursday, when I go into the bathroom in the cafeteria.  The bathroom door is wooden, with a metal plate drilled into the middle, on the right side.  This is for hands to push, but all around the plate, there is evidence to the contrary.  Grease stains from a thousand hands, avoiding the metal, pressing the wood.  I avoid all of it, and press the top right corner of the door.  Probably still contributing to the expanding stain of hand oil.

Inside the bathroom, I now wash my hands.

With furtive grace, a silent giant creeps.

All movement outside the bathroom ceases.  Through the thick wooden door, I can't hear this, but it is happening, going on without my involvement.  I go to exit.  On this side of the door, there are no grease stains from hand oil.  Just a metal handle.  The door only opens one way, and on the inside, you have little choice as to how you will open it.  How you'll get out.

Met with gaping mouths, I then look up.  Before words can spill from my mouth to ask the others what happened, everyone falls to the ground in unison as a blast of air explodes against our bodies.  Chairs and tables shatter and little game pieces go flying.  Paints splatter and mix together against the patients, nurses, the walls, the floor-- everything covered in a sick mix of brownish orange.

The cafeteria is ceiling-less.  The blue sky and clouds are now fixed within a blank box.  On every edge of where the ceiling would meet the rising walls, there are flames slowly rolling down the white paint.  This probably releases some sickeningly toxic fumes, because several people are throwing up on themselves.

Hero once told me, "The gods won't hesitate to cleave the tops of mountains in order to crush the misbehaving villages in the valley.  They don't view humanity as a group of individuals.  When they punish a small group by killing them, that's like kicking your dog.  Where you kick the dog, that's where it's going to hurt, but only because it sends a message to its brain telling it that it's going to hurt.  If the gods punish one group, the rest of humanity is supposed to learn.  And like a dog having been kicked many times throughout its life, it's supposed to fear."

City officials would later tell us it was two low currents of air that ripped our roof off.  Riding one of those currents was a low flying jet.  The jet was flying fast enough to cause a delayed sonic boom.  That's what knocks us all down.  They didn't comment on the flaming walls or the toxic paint.  Our problem, they said.  Dressed up with a tie and suit, but Our Problem was the message.

A problem my superiors didn't address was that of a missing patient.  The building's foundation somehow shook and loosed Hero from his shackles.  Fearing him, no one said anything.  His prison lie cracked and empty.        
 
 
The Sea
"Imagine your home by the sea.  Standing on the beach, feet deep in the water, your home before you-- in flames," she tells me.  This is Tamera telling me a story.

Quick-sand recession as your weight buries your feet, the air all salty around you, clean and clear in your lungs on the intake.  Chest rising, chest sinking.  Exhale.

Waves are strange the way they lap up, slide up on and in and around your toes.  The glass of water seems flat.  From space, the brilliant diamond eyes see flat water atop Earth, but everywhere, close enough, there it is-- choppy.  Up, down, up, down.  Expand, contract, expand, contract. To that glass of water, that little ocean, we are gods--like the sun, and it's daughter, Luna, the moon.

"There is a storm in Hero's lungs," she says, "Push-pulling in the fire by the sea."

Another story Hero has told someone about his struggle.  How did he convince Tamera?  Science.
This is Tamera's idea of romance.

"Imagine you were engineered, genetically and behaviorally to need someone.  You would roam the earth with emptiness until you found them.  Every detail matters in the equation, especially the eyes."

Eyes, the window to the soul, she tells me, are the most important physical feature for this engineered person.  Once they lock with another's, they can tell one thing about them--whether or not they are their match.

"And the person you seek is the same way.  Engineered like you.  All of your attributes are the most attractive possible in that person's mind.  Everything you say matches what they would ask."

Like signals and receptors in the body, she tells me.  Biology.  I took that, I tell her, in college.  That and psychology.  I know how it works.

"And imagine standing there, on the beach, sinking.  Watching your home go up in flames.  Your life sabotaged by those who created it, those involved in the project to bring you and your lover together.  Sabotaged because it was becoming beyond their reach, beyond their abilities to stop.  And that person you have been searching for your whole life, burning up inside.  Your receptor gone, and now you have nothing left.  What do you do with your life?"

You find your offspring, she tells me.  Find the child born to human and goddess, birthed right there on the beach.  Make sure it's alive, she tells me, and you will be whole.  And make sure your creators suffer.

Final Vignette
It has been three days since the roof of Saint Dympna's Ward was torn off.  Unexplained as it was, the only thing I can believe now is what they have given us.  Maybe a god really did swoop in an shave the top of the building off, capturing Hero in the process.  Maybe a top secret special forces team took him back to the lab where he was created.  I am too small a man to say one way or the other on such big concepts.  Too big are they to examine objectively.  Too close am I.

I realize that Goddess and Hero, they weren't serving each other by being sword and shield. They weren't created in some lab to fall in love.  They just were in love.  And maybe that makes some people crazy.  It makes me insecure, I know.  But with her, I am stronger.  Able to take on more stress, more pain.  More joy than I ever thought possible.  I realize you don't have to be a hero or a god to overcome the problems you create in your life.

I look at her in the kitchen doing the dishes all alone.  I get up from my chair and put my book face down, stopping the story mid-sentence-- characters frozen at my will.   I walk up to the sink and stop.  My right foot is in a black square, my left in a white.  I roll up my sleeves, tucking them into themselves and pick up a bowl.  I turn on the faucet and begin washing it with  soap and a sponge.  She looks over, sees my soapy and wet hands, and smiles at me. This is worth my time. This is worth my time and we don't have to be saving the world for that to be so.

For B-B

if I were to continue this story(WHICH I AM NOT GOING TO, SO DO NOT READ BELOW, I would begin with the ending, and the end would begin like this. . .
Control Theory
People would like to think they can control things.  More than that, they believe they control themselves.  They feel like their actions are not just a series of circumstantial events that narrow their reality.   I believe that, too, now, faced with the end of the universe.  

"You are important," he tells me. 

I don't believe him, but he tells me he knows me better than I think.  My soul is bound to the same fate as his.  The same as the love of his life.

When I was sixteen, my older brother told me something disturbing.  Our parents got married on the basis of a "psychic feeling." 

Hero showed up three days ago and told us, "You have to come with me.  Both of you."
He shows up at my girlfriend's apartment while I'm helping her with the dishes and says we have to leave, immediately.  I don't know why we listen to him, but we do.

My parents were married after six months of seeing eachother.  This is not the strange part.  My mother met my father once, at a party in college.  It was the only party she went to.  My father and her hardly exchanged words.  The next week, my father gets a phone call.  My mother had spent days looking him up.  Trying to figure out his number.  My father picks up the phone, and it is my mother.  She tells him, "I think we are meant to be together."  He says he feels the same way. 

Three days ago, we tell Hero to wait while we discuss it in the kitchen.  He tells us we will come with him because it is our destiny.  And he seems certain, like it has already happened.  In the kitchen, I disagree with what my girlfriend says is a "feeling."  An inclination.  A draw to him.  I tell her I have a draw to her, and that going with him, I would be abandoning that draw.  That sense of protection.  But she says she feels more strongly about this than anything else in her life.  I get a sick sinking-into-myself feeling.  Does she mean she feels more strongly about going with him than staying with me?  She goes.  And I, of course, go with her.

And now I am faced with the end of the universe.  Whatever authored all of this set up safety nets in case the lifeforms living within attempted to gain control, Hero tells us.  We are in the middle of a field, where it is now raining.  My girlfriend, she is screaming at Hero to stop.

"You are important," he repeats with a new inflection, "does not mean you are good."  He shakes the gun in my face.  Killing me is the only solution, he says, and I am almost. 

"I'm over my jealousy," I tell him.  I swear, I am.   But it is not good enough for him.  My jealousy is the result of an experiment that controlled two human beings, from birth.  It made them believe they were meant to be together, and the result was me.  The first child, my parents planned.  The second child was me.  I was an accident.  I was meant to look like an accident, he tells me, raindropps splattering on his lips as he speaks. 

Whomever I have a child with will die.  My seed is virus ridden, he says.  I tell him I've been having sex with her.  "Only upon birthing the child, severing from your love, will she die," is his rebuttle.

The gods had left Earth a long time ago, and they set in place an agreement with several governments of this world.  To ensure the safety of Earth, they must devise a way to destroy Hero and Goddess' child.  Their child, my girlfriend, and I, the weapon intended for her destruction.  Hero tells me she is his daughter.  And I must die. 

He squeezes the trigger and I am shot.  As I lay bleeding, reality begins to shatter around me.  My girlfriend is screaming, holding my head up, blood on her hands, and in the distance I hear Hero sobbing, muttering that he had misinterpreted the situation.  Everything was safe, until the daughter, my girlfriend lost or was severed from that which she loved.  A child would have continued the love, as it did for Hero and Goddess.  My girlfriend was the last thing holding this world together.  My world.  And I was the last thing holding her world together.  Our world.

(But since the story was already finished, this is just an interesting, overly complicated backstory to where I was eventually headed if I hadn't stopped writing when I did.  I think it's fun to make things more epic than they really are, but in regards to this, I realized that epic or not, true love is a special rarity that few people ever witness or take part in.  I am a part of it.  A part of something meaningful.)

 

The Eve I
The eve of the Second Closing, and all he can do is watch her.  She moves in the fields as she would at any other point in her existence, but she's not the same.  Her hair is and was blonde.  Her eyes are and were blue.  Everything is identical.  As perfect a reenactment as one could conceive, she is it.  Voice modulation, the temperature of her body, the reactions she would have to any given situation-- all of them programmed and recreated meticulously in his mind.  A reenactment of his love.

The Robot-Gods
"Solipsis," his only remaining identity, is etched on a metallic left arm.  Engraved so that he could never forget the principles on which his success was built.  The great Perception of the Universe, a view point among many.  But, if perception could struggle forward, through the darkness, to a point in which it ceased to exist as a mere understanding of truth, but actually manifested itself as truth, that is becoming.  He achieved this.  Solipsis, he identifies himself to lesser beings. 

I mention lesser beings because he came to Earth after the First Closing, seeking aid.  I wasn't born yet, but I am told that the Humans, as he came to accept them, were beings that so much resembled his origin-species, he knew they were capable of great things.  They came to know him as the "Robot-God," a creature of such will over the space around him, from the biggest stars to the tinniest atoms.  But why them?  Why unite earth by his coming, and then use them?  

On the outter edges of Earth's space colonies, war was waged on another Robot-God, Mausala Parva.  Humans, with the help of Solipsis, implemented technology that the human mind could not yet comprehend, but could, in fact, utilize with training.  It doesn't matter how it works, it just does, just do it.  And so, the humans were outfitted, and technologically evolved far beyond that of their psychological and societal development. After the titan, Parva, had been driven off, and Solipsis abandoned the human race to its own ill-fate, the technology remained.  Scattered, in space, strewn across the heavens, glass shreds and metal bits float, orbiting nearby planets and stations.  Satellites and torn ships, once with the appearance of flies to the Gods Solipsis and Mausala Parva, drift ceaselessly through the vaccuum, as independent human cells wage endless war on eachother. 

Solipsis never meant to help anyone but himself.

Augmentation
Solipsis volunteers for a government program, testing genetic code on humans' life-spans.  He undergos medical life-prolonging procedures and, throughout centuries of cultural shift, he learns new languages and constantly reeducates himself.  Eventually, living forever becomes a possibility with the onset of biogenetics infused with cybernetic technology.

While machine, he continues to upgrade his body and sub-systems, memory banks and genetic algorithms which form conjectures on the next best physical evolution for him. He struggles selfishly onward towards godhood drifting from one world to the next, endlessly. At the end of the universe when all collapses, he has devised a way to endure past the Closing.

When the Universe errupts again, he is already there, and by now, he has the ability to manifest anything he wants.  His dreams, his mind, everything him, extends into everything not him.  He flows into all things, he is all things.  All that surrounds him, he controls.  The universe is his to control, and he does.  He is the highest form of life ever to grace anything that is, and nothing that isn't.

Accident
There was a terrible accident that started it all.  It was a time of relatively basic complexity.  Societies were necessary, everything networked and everyone losing their individuality daily.  Everything inching its way towards herd instinct.  People becoming the hydrogen atoms in a tidal wave.  Riding the crest of this mounting complexity, however, was him.  Before he was a god, before he had lived a thousand years, before he began replacing his inferior human parts with those of robotic ones... before all of this, he was a terran, a man.  Terrestial.  Simple.  Normal.  But dangerously in love, with a woman, Aronel. 

A man, driving his car.  His girl, in the passenger seat. She wants to save their planet from the big company's launching into space, the advancing government governing too much, the people dying from senseless violence.  She wants to do all of this, and he is listening intently as she speaks.  He interjects, and says, "Ah, humanity gets all of the attention."  She asks him if he is jealous.  "Hell yes," he says, "for your attention." 

He looks over to her only briefly, but it is enough.  A larger vehicle smashes in to them.  She is not resucitated.

The Eve II
And here we are.  Here he is, here she is.  But she isn't real.  She is just a manifestation of his mind, of his Universe, of the Universe.  Universe II, he calls it.  She is perfect, but she isn't naturally occurring, he says.  She is a false recreation, a result of a sting of events leading from her death to her rebirth.

But he has to destroy me, his love, because I am not truly her.  He created me, and I am a mere image of her.  The real her is dead, and I, a forsaken malcreation of the greatest complexity known to time and space.  I am the pinnacle of all creation.  But I cannot live.