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.

I'm sitting in some uncomfortable chair, a style of which I have never seen before.  It has the usual aluminum grey frame, a backrest adjusted to a standard of height, blah blah-blah.  But it has these strange pads connecting the seat, pads that shoot up and fill some of the space between the back rest and the ass rest with some sort of. . . spinal rest?  The color of the rotund woman's shirt--toothpaste blue-- outlines this extraneous pad. 

I stare at her, her lumpy body a pile of toothpaste squeezed directly into the same spot.  I play with the bracelet on my right wrist.  I wonder if it is really home made.  I doubt it.

I gaze around the room.  Most of the crowd is young.  A guy in the corner looks like a disgruntled underwear model.  Not big time, just a locally owned department store maybe.  There are many attractive girls my age.

Several people speak out of a small paperback.  Everyone seems to have a copy.  After introducing ourselves, I get one too.  One with numbers.  Not the numbers of the many attractive girls.  Just numbers with male names next to them following MEN: at the top.
 

"How are you?" she asked me.  No, wait, it was "Are you well?"  Or maybe it was neither, but had the tone of both, concern backing the question. 
I told her "I'm fine," with little enthusiasm.  The tree above would wet us occasionally with drops of dew. She bounced her baby a bit, gently, and a breeze blew his wispy hair.  He was concerned with the wind.  He stared into the soul of a wavering plant, trying to understand its movement. 
"He doesn't really understand object permanence yet," the father, my friend Tyler, said.  I didn't want to say Piaget was wrong.  I didn't want to say anything.  But I said something like, "You mean like peek-a-boo?"
 

When I introduce myself, I am the only one that simply says my name.  This is my first time and I have not yet developed the ability to confess my heart to strangers.  A kid younger than me speaks up.  Says his life is better now, says he's happy ninety-five percent of the time.  I think bullshit, life is a constant of inconsistency.  Fuck your 5% estimated blue time.  Then I realize he at least thinks he has something worthy of sharing.  I cannot begin to imagine a similar image of myself.

I said goodbye to the family after a walk down the street.  It was pleasant.  The sun was just beginning to tire and the air cool.  Leaves tumbled to the earth around us as we all hugged.  Phoenix, their child, grabbed hold of my bracelet.  His grip was strong and I didn't want to pry his hands off of what he wanted to hold.  But they had to visit another friend(a mother) and I had to go home.  So Kat pried his demonically possessed fingers from it and we said goodbye.

She looks over her shoulder.  Her face, a chapped jag slanted under two pills, pulls life from the dying world around her.  The air saturates her lungs and dements her spirit.   Leaves drift in purposeless circles to the ground around her.  One lands before her foot, makes a scratchy noise against the cool asphalt.   

She turns her head forward, walks toward the white building.  Brittle leaves crackle under her shoes as she makes her way up the curb, across patches of brown grass and to the side of the stacked white cinder blocks in black trim.  She peers through wooden window frames, the panes within laced with mesh metal.  The opposite side is raised level upon a hill that descends into a shallow valley clear of these trees.  She looks to the side of the building.  A barricaded ladder leads to a further walled well of stairs.  She begins to scramble-- scrapes her stretched triceps.  She makes it, bleeding and teary eyed, to the top of what now seems like a complex.  The roof is black, the sky is grey.   

Over the field her eyes see nothing but colorful streaks of salt water.  The desolation of the empty field breaks her heart and she begins sobbing.  "My husband," she babbles.  "My husband, oh!" she wails.  "This building," she shrieks.  She shrinks into a bouncing mound of hysterical nonsense.  She falls asleep and dreams of her husband-- a lab tech. involved with the whole mess.  His bifocals behind beakers drift in and out of her sleeping head.

This building's flesh decays, its roof rotting.  It squishes underneath weight.  A breathless still settles.  A distant hum approaches.  Closer and closer, the fluttering of a motorized heart.  I stand, rifle in hand.  I walk to the sleeping woman and nudge her with my foot.   This does not work.  I kneel and cup her jaw with my hand, gently rapping with my fingers.  Lids roll back and reveal an empty stage.

"Ride's here," I say.  She staggers and looks to the street.  From this angle, the small car looks like it will crash into the corner of the roof.  It disappears instead so we walk to the edge of the building. 

We carefully descend.  Our backs to the white, we see a dark woman with nappy hair standing frozen in front of the vehicle.  The woman retreats, her gaze locked to us, and bumps into her car.  A pale young man opens the passenger door.  He is clearly mentally retarded. 

"My husband!" cries the woman to my side.  I turn.  The alleged husband stands hunched in a doorway, a now open entrance to the building.

"Get away!" yells the dark woman.  The pale young man rushes toward us. 

"My husband-- we need to get him out of here!"

The husband steps through the doorway.  From black, grey illuminates his lurid face.  His jaw slacks to one side.  Aphotic circles drag away from sunken eyes. 

"You're alive!  I can't believe your alive."  The beady eyed woman swells.  She moves to him.  Before she can reach him, the pale young man has her by the waist.  He drags her, kicking and screaming, away.  I level my rifle and blast the retarded kid in the shoulder.  Bits of shattered bone explode outward.  Blood rains down in giant globules, painting a wide area.  The kid falls back with the woman on top of him. 

The dark woman begins yelling at me. "What the fuck!  You shot him!" 

I return the barrel to the husband. I tell the dark woman the kid should not have grabbed my companion.   

The husband shambles toward me, vines of viscera swaying from his gut.  I squint as the ghoulish pendulum makes his way. 

"Don't, no, don't shoot!" 

"Shoot him!"

"No!"

"If you can shoot a kid, shoot this.  Now!"

I shoot him in the chest.  Cracking ribs echo the rifle.  I shoot him again in the knee.  He drops to the ground and begins crawling.  I pull the trigger once more.  A head shot.  This evaporates the right side of his face.  His eye oozes out of his head and teeth begin pinging off the asphalt.  His rotting flesh slides into a gaping hole in his head.  This does not stop him.  I pull again, nothing happens.  I am out of ammo.  I am frozen.  Closer and closer, the faceless gore inches.  I drop the gun and stare into its vacant eye.  

The bleeding young man escorts a now even lower-functioning life form, the wife, to the car.  They get in. 

The corpse grabs my ankle and looks directly past me.  Its head rears and lunges.  Before contact, the butt of my rifle smacks him in the jaw.  Still, I watch the dark woman roll the corpse over with her foot and circle round me.  She grips the barrel and lands a crushing blow to the skull of the corpse.  It twitches, releases my ankle.  The skull caves in and she takes one final blow which spews goo, grey on everything. 

She drags her breath out, cracks her neck and frowns at me.  "We need to go," she whispers.

Notes: This dream takes place in a park by my grandfather's house in South Boston.
I ended up using a lot of alliterations after seeing a few good ones in a poem the other day.
I would never actually shoot a handicapped person.  Unless they were a zombie. 
I wrote most of this down in one of those black and white composition books as soon as I woke from it.
In an effort to turn this dream into something serious on paper, I removed the fact that the husband was actually William Petersen , pretty much as he is in CSI.
 

   

  

The other night I got called creepy and I really wish I had had a voice recorder on me.  Because I didn't and have no idea what exactly was said, this is a dramatization.

The other night my friend invites me out.  My link to her group is shaky because I hook up with one of their friends and proceed to hit on, while drunk and via text, another one later on. 

Via Text calls me outright creepy, so I begin following her asking her why I am creepy- my actions a self-replicating definition of the word. 

I talk to her through the bathroom door.

"Why am I creepy?"
"Oh my god, are you seriously outside of the bathroom?"

I follow her outside.

"Why am I creepy?" a hint of hurt in my voice.  Who wants to be creepy?
She turns and scowls, says, "You want to know why you're creepy?"  She gets all close staring at me, then breaks and says to follow her.
"Yeah, let's talk over there," I agree, not wanting to be outed as a creepy person in front of presumably non-creepy people.

We sit next to each other on narrow, warped stairs.  Moonlight and bulbs bear down.  I think, this is creepy.  She says I text her when I'm drunk and ask her to hang out, which never happens.  I figure this is more "unreliable" than anything else but she continues to berate my character. 

I feel this is unfair.  I must now get back at her by actually being creepy to her, openly, in front of everyone.

At one point I have the guy next to me looking all physically uncomfortable or offended at what I'm saying.  He is in the middle of introducing himself(and thusly hitting on her) when I interrupt, telling him this girl is bad news, that she broke my heart, had my abortion.  All of which, except maybe the first one, are untrue.  Out loud I imagine how our relationship ended.  I pass this as truth like a delusional person.  Whatever I say at this moment makes the guy uncomfortable.  Via just stands there and shakes her head. 

The guy trying to hit on her attempts to make fun of me.  This is impossible.  I am so imperviously in creepy character that everything he says turns into another offensive and sketchy joke about my faux-love for this girl.  
 
I start harassing Via about going out for coffee.  She says she leaves in a week for good.  I repeat, "and it won't go anywhere, so just come out for coffee with me.  We can make it reeeeal public."  Someone suggests I should try to play with her hair.
"What's the point?" her eyes ask the same thing.

Some time passes. 

I try to reclaim sunglasses I left at my friend's house months ago.  She says they look better on her.  They do.  I am no longer upset about losing them.  I now feel bad for blaming my roommate for losing/breaking/selling them/whatever.  My friend has awesome hair and jumps on my back for a totally one-sided chicken fight. 

Some time passes and the group turns against me.  I hurry to unlock my bike and leave.  Via says something like Take Your Creeper Ass Somewhere Else or You're Insane or whatever.  I don't remember.  As I am riding away-- and I remember this-- she says, "For the record, I don't really think you're creepy."

I say, "Whatever, you are!" and nearly crash my bike into a trashcan.

This is a collection of things I have written that I think are at least half worth putting back up.  Since last I did one of these, I have added two short stories and maybe ten other forms of writing.  With 19 solid "Stories,"  7 short fiction pieces, and over 25 others, I would like to think that what I do for enjoyment is steadily becoming something I could do for money.  Years down the road, that is.  Enjoy.

STORIES(with no organization whatsoever):
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. . .

Perfect Night Ruined by Marriot, Morning -- It turns out that drinking in the dorms is a bad plan.  But, for me, I have a great night, only to have it ruined by a morning hangover and the loss of my license. 

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

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.

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

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!

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

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

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

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.

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."

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

A Retelling of the First Time I Smoked

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

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.

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

Short(or long) Stories(Fiction):

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. 

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.

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.

Solipsism - A creation story.  A story with Robots and Gods and space battles.  A story with a twist.  A story that kind of sucks, but has novelty.

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

Some others:

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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."

    Space was infinite.  Or so we thought, until the day space began to move, inexorably backward, closing in around us.  Our most distant colonies stopped sending transmissions.  And the darkness crept, consuming countless words.  Blotting out the suns.  In Earth's night sky, the stars begin to disappear, and societies fall desperately and collectively on their faces.  The ignorant, or maybe saved, ones cling to their individual religions, never ceasing to disagree.  This is the end, they say.  Repent, they say. 

    Last night, the moon was dipped into the pool of the retracting void.  The emptiness sutured its wound, closed it to another side-- healed.  It seems to get slower, the more it engulfs.  We had hardly begun to understand the inner workings of our own galaxy when this happened.  Of the few left to speak, some voices say this is a contained occurrence.  At the rate it is slowing, perhaps, others are still out there.  Other lifeforms.

     Today, most of Earth slipped into nothingness, gone.  Neverwhere.  First it was the tip of the Northern Hemisphere.  Hours into it, Svalbard and most of Greenland had been eaten.  When the edge first starts hitting major cities, everything erupts in noise.  People screaming.  Last minute bombers, bombing, trying to get into their heaven.  Last minute saints with a last minute prayer.  Everything at its last left, unchanged by imminent unawareness.  Going all out because of nothing, their gods having forgotten them.

    And here I am, on the edge of oblivion, looking out at sea from the small isles of Antarctica, with nothing left to say, really, but "Wait!"  The only light is above me.  A tiny hole of light peering through the remainder of sky.  The sun foolishly opposes the darkness, its force of presence unforced. 

"Wait!" I scream into the abyss.  And it stops. 

"What was done," a booming voice emanates from around my little tube of existence, "to deserve all of you? " the darkness finishes in question.   It resumes its course, and soon I will discover what the rest of my kind have come to see.

(possibly a more serious take on the stupid Axis Mundi story).

    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.

. . .