The Old man and the Cable Box

The old man turned the envelope over in his hands. He still preferred receiving bills in physical form by mail. If he received any communications digitally, via text or email, he wouldn’t know it, he didn’t own a computer and refused to buy a cell phone that was not strictly an analogue flip phone. Of the other relics in his possession, also included his cable box. Even if you didn’t ask, he would tell you, he’d been with the same cable company for 41 years. He told the representative on the phone now, with the torn open envelope on the white-plastic table next to him, which had shown his cable bill had increased once again, this time in the amount of $10.

“I can’t keep doing this with you people” The old man spoke fast, pushing words out nervously into the bottom end of his flip phone. To the representative, whose sole purpose was to prevent the old man from canceling his cable service and to justify the price increase, his voice came through fragmented and inlaid with static.

“Mr. Grady… Now, Mr. Grady. Mr. Grady?” The representative stumbled.

“I’m on a fixed income and I can’t work, the Doctor says I have a bad heart.” The words came out with no pause. The condition of his heart was no secret, pounding away in his chest, even simply to speak. The old man grasped for his neck with his free hand, feeling his thunderous pulse through the loose skin there. Dark blue, nearly black veins as old and used as the pipes beneath the city spiderwebbed from his neck and disappeared beneath his shirt. “I can’t keep doing this with you peo-“

“Mr. Grady, I understand your frustration, Mr. Grady? Mr. Grady-“

Finally, the old man hung up the phone, if only to bring his pulse down. He set the phone on the table and leaned back in his chair, taking a shallow breath. He reached slowly for the television remote and turned the old, and bulbous screen on at a volume too low to discern any specifics, if only for the noise. He dozed for a while in the chair at the white plastic table.

When he awoke, the sun was beginning to set to outside. The old clock on the wall ticked loudly. The white plastic table squealed as he braced against it to come to his feet. His spine fought against the old man’s command to stand straight with a dull pain. His feet wobbled under his weight. His poor heart pounded in his chest. The old man was hungry, but he knew he had nothing to eat or cook. Simply to lift the pots and pans made his heart feel the size of a grape fruit in his chest, and his breathing become as shallow and hurried as a rodents. Bitterness flared behind his eyes as it always did, when the image of his son, now surely in his late 40’s, he must be in his late forties, laughing in a high ceiling kitchen with real granite countertops as he cooked and provided for his family with ease and impunity. Let dad die in front of the T.V. the old man thought. The picture in his mind came against his will, forcing itself upon his conscious making his chest tighten even as he stood completely still. The old man hadn’t spoke to his son in many years. He only knew he had moved out of state. His son had never told him where.

Worse yet, was the image of the woman who had once been his wife. How his mind tortured him. The thought of her craning her neck while she yelled fierce and gratuitous moans of pleasure nearly killed him where he stood in the small apartment right then and there. The clock ticked loudly in his ears. His spine felt as rigid as a spear impaled through his back. He felt his pulse in the back of his throat that made him lower his chin. The old man knew he had to escape his apartment for now, so he decided to venture to the only other safe place nearby, Allen’s Diner. The old man had been a patron at Allen’s Diner, a good old timey place, for at least 41 years. The old man made one stop on his way out the door; to the drawer where he kept the keys to his old Ford Taurus, and where he kept his last protector and companion, his Glock .40 pistol which seemed to be the only weighted object he could easily handle, slipping it in his waistband just below the bellybutton. The feeling of the cold steel relaxed him slightly.

The Taurus’s engine choked and sputtered, the sensors on the dash blinked brightly in the old man’s eyes and the tone of the warning sound gave him ringing in the ears. More choking and sputtering as the engine turned over again. Finally, the car started.

Fresh rain glistened on the street as moonlight rose over the city. The old man kept the radio off, carefully changing lanes to only the sound of rubber wheels whirring over wet asphalt. Finally, he could clear his mind. The old man loved to drive and he loved machines, he used to work on cars with his own father when he was a boy. These thoughts flowered behind his eyes with a warm, golden comfort.

A group of young kids sped passed him on the road in a large, late model SUV with the windows down. Earth shaking bass blasted from out of the vehicle, that rattled the old mans jaw and made him swerve over the yellow lines into oncoming traffic for just a moment before swinging back into his lane. What little gray hair remained on the old man’s head stood up wildly as he watched the car with its thundering bass speakers become just taillights in front of him. Anger boiled in his heart and the blue, almost black veins around his eyelids twitched as his heart pounded.

Inside Allen’s Diner, a young, pretty, waitress brought the old man his food to the red-leather booth he occupied by himself.

“Cheeseburger combo, Mr. Grady” the waitress said.

“Yes.” Said the old man, attempting a smile with his grayish, old man’s teeth.

As he ate, his chest throbbed. He decided not to see the correlation. Instead, the old man’s attention veered toward a woman sitting by herself across the diner. What struck him, is that she had to be almost exactly his age. Silver hair, blue and green veins inlaid her face. She was eating what looked to be a fruit salad. The old man gazed at her unabashedly. He suddenly wondered if perhaps he didn’t have one final nights’ stand in him. His heart raced, and it seemed none of the blood in his body could be spared for his penis without causing a cardiac arrest. A young woman came through the doors of the diner then and let out a sigh of relief.

“Mom! We’d been looking everywhere for you! My god!” The young woman exclaimed to her mother as she picked at her fruit salad. The old woman looked up at her daughter with a stare drawn so blank by dementia, it was comparable only to a corpse.

The old man left a small tip for the waitress soon after and began his journey outside to the parking lot. He heard it before he saw it. It was when he stepped out the doors of Allen’s Diner then braced himself as he stepped off the curb that he saw what he believed was the same late model SUV with its windows down and that horrible bass heavy music as before. He saw the laughing college-aged kids inside of it and they all seemed to be laughing at him. The headlights of the SUV bore down on the old man. The engine revved. His eyes twitched. Are they laughing at me? His heart choked and sputtered in his chest but this time with the satisfying hotness of adrenaline. The music became louder and louder, playing that disgusting rap music, thought the old man, for a moment watching the SUV lurch forward as if to run him down. He pulled the pistol from his waistband and fired three times into the windshield, on the fourth pull his finger simply didn’t have the strength to depress the trigger. His arm dropped to his side.

In the immediate moments after firing, the old man was amazed at how quiet the world became. Seeing now, the headlights were not pointing in his direction at all. The revving of the engine, seemed to be coming from a muscle car out on the main road behind it. The old man took a step forward and saw that it was not the same late model SUV afterall and there was in fact only a single occupant inside the vehicle. This vehicle was much older, the driver of which he could no longer tell if it was a man or woman or even what color their skin as his final bullet had caused an explosive burst in the front of their head and the inside of the car was showered in red and gray material. His bullets left only quarter sized holes in the windshield.

Upon seeing what he had done, his first instinct was to turn the weapon on himself but he utterly lacked the strength in his arms to do it. He hoped then, that his heart would finally give out but that didn’t happen either. He simply dropped to his knees, sending sharp pains up his legs, yet he was numb to it. His conscience seemed outside of himself, and then even farther away, then even more after that. The old man sat there breathing shallowly, his dark blue almost black veins working overtime in his face, neck and chest, as the red and blue emergency lights converged on him.

An Elusive Foe- The Owl

The murder weapon, a Montblanc rollerball pen. The victim, a screeching owl perched on a tree branch just outside of the window. Through the window, in the darkness, he saw only a pair of beady red eyes which on occasion swiveled their sights in another direction, leaving the view once again dark. Always returning.

The creature all the while screeched as shrilly as a fire alarm, in long, territorial breaths. In the early hours of the morning, usually just passed five o clock, the owl finally flees. Gaunt faced and barefoot, he slips out of bed and leans his head against the windowpane. Wide, feathered wingspan for a moment blots out a high, silver moon. The animal seemed as large as a small plane. He listens to the owl’s cries become faint into the distance until the air is once again still. Plum colored sky over head.

Lost sleep began to accumulate as the owl returned night after night. He cringed in the tiny, gray apartment as its walls swelled with the screeching sound. What little sleep he achieved during the onslaught was as brittle as barnyard hay. He dreamed he was an inch tall, trapped inside of a tea kettle that squealed as it boiled on a hot stove. Beads of sweat ran down his face as the noise became louder and louder and he began to burn alive, waking at the last possible moment, to nothing but the owl’s cries in the dark bedroom. The next night, he sat in the car turning the key over and over in the ignition, the engine only choking then dying out. A critical appointment demanded his immediate presence, debilitating tinnitus rang in his ears. He turned the key in the ignition and strained his forearm against it. The engine choked and sputtered. He awoke once again to the owl’s cries in the dark bedroom.

He arrived to work on time at 8:30 each morning with dark circles around his eyes. Strangely, his tiredness relaxed his usual inhibitions in the work place and he began an almost immediate romance with a coworker named Claire Redfield. Care for his productiveness during the workday dissipated quickly, as nights with the Owl turned to weeks.

He tried desperately to shoe the owl away. Even going as far as to open the window and throw pencils and pens in the direction of those beady, red eyes. The animal was either too big, or too far away. He had only deduced it was an owl at all by this time and not some large hawk, because of the nature of its swiveling head. He became especially frustrated when trying to carry on his late-night phone calls with Claire. Going as far as to sitting on the toilet and closing himself in the bathroom to speak to her. They greatly enjoyed each other’s company. Shutting the bathroom door helped the noise very little.

Finally, the night came in which Claire Redfield would rendezvous at his apartment under the pretense of sex. He hoped to have her in the small window of time immediately after work hours and before nightfall, ideally circumventing the owl problem altogether. He was unable or perhaps unwilling to describe the owl problem to her. He was badly sleep deprived. She was in love with him.

Of course, she was late. Plum colored sky was just beginning to set outside the window. The couple sat at the edge of the bed and kissed tenderly. His tongue ran across hers. He laid a eager hand on her thigh and grasped at her cream flesh. His hand began to slide up her leg. When the Owl began to cry outside, maybe the loudest it had ever been. The sudden onset of the sound startled Claire to open her eyes. He pulled his hand back. “What the hell is that?” she asked, her eyes darting anxiously toward the window. She had not seen the red eyes staring back at them, but he did. He stood up, leaving her at the edge of the bed and went to his bedside table, pulling from it his most prized possession, a Montblanc platinum coated rollerball. A fine calligraphy pen. It had been a gift from his father. He returned to the window and opened it. Suddenly, she was at his back. “What the hell are you doing?” asked Claire. He did not hear her. Instead, stepping out from his third-floor window onto the tree branch there. It buckled under his weight, he balanced with his free hand and climbed to the next branch. He squatted there. Claire was reaching out the window for him, orange light fell over gray tree bark. He climbed to the next branch, and now he was close to the Owl. The screech of the animal deafened him. He saw just how big it was. Red eyes bore down on him. Mahogany brown feathers, each of them a foot long inlaid the Owl’s body. It towered over him, as big as a grizzly bear. Up close, he could see a few of the Owl’s feathers mixed into its coat seemed to be made of pure gold.

With a final brace, he uncapped the pen and leaped for the owl. His free hand caught firmly to a bundle of the Owl’s feathers. His other hand drove the pen into its chest. Its huge wingspan opened up around him and suddenly he was inside of it. He pulled out the pen with a spurt of black blood and drove it in again. The owl beat its wings into the air and lifted off. He still clung to its chest. Mahogany and gold feathers scattered from the Owl’s body as it flew higher and higher. He stabbed the Owl repeatedly, black blood splattering his arms and face, feathers stuck in his gritted teeth and hair. The owl flew higher and higher. The shape of their battle for a moment blotted out a high, silver moon. He was carried away with it, to wherever it was it had come from before. Claire never saw him again.

 Keys to a successful nightwalk (serialized)

The first key to a successful nightwalk or “walk at night” is to know the area well, and to have a set course. Be aware of cubby holes on and off the street, where to step and where you’re going. The last thing you’d want is to be lost on a nightwalk. If just moving to an area, especially one with some less than savory tendencies, be sure to traverse the desired path extensively during daylight hours at multiple points. Early, to see the area clearly while it is quiet, and mid-day on a Sunday perhaps to see how the natural flow of traffic proceeds, and to observe what is and isn’t an expected movement.

Of course, if you are the inhabitant of a gated suburban community, known for the jolly hospitality of it’s residents who leave their front doors open and own at least one handgun with a bit of wealth even halfway worth protecting, disregard these keys immediately. However, for even the finest of residences it only takes one good scare to change those sugary reputations completely. Also, even areas which during peak daylight hours may be quite fine, and of median income, the shadowy lonesome of night can and will push these so/so’s over the halfway point to where these keys would make a wise utility.

For instance, one mile East of my apartment complex exists aging San Antonio. Retirees, and old businesses renowned by locals, like themed restaurants and well-known local watch and clock repair men for the Alamo city. One mile west, however, exists the working class area of Austin Highway where the homeless and unfortunate follow this main artery up and down all the way to downtown and back again. Through it all too is a sprawling municipal trail system, of which kinds of all sort may, eb and flow. Of this trail system about two miles perpendicular to Austin highway, which during it’s peak hours is a hotbed of local commerce, sits John James Park. A remarkably unremarkable park, in a city with some very nice parks; where just weeks ago a man jogging in the wee hours of the morning was brutally assaulted by two unwashed assailants. The jogger was not killed, but stripped, robbed and beaten within an inch of his life. In fact, his assailants surely must have thought he was dead when they left him, as he was not discovered and subsequently rescued until the following morning.

I myself had visited John James park shortly after this news to investigate and I did find two things: Loitering homeless smoking cigarettes at around 9:15am, and that it was just flat and ugly enough of a terrain that the general public surely opted for more scenic local options more often. Which brings me to my next key, dress and act like a serial killer. This simile should be taken with a grain of salt, the point is, in an age of fine and expensive sports wear, leave it at home for your nightwalk. Even if your finest outdoor-brand coat protects from cold, wind and rain all in one, the layering of older sweatshirts and flannels will make you look much less organized and empty pocketed. For women, I would recommend tucking the hair and baggy clothing.

An heir of toughness is quite important too, your nightwalk is not the time to make loud calls via blue tooth and earphones should be removed during the nightwalk at all times. Our boy at John James park was in fact robbed of a small sum of cash cash, several credit cards, and his drivers license, which at the very least is a damned hassle to replace. The next key is to carry only a cell phone and a set of housekeys.

On the topic of affluent sportswear, also avoid reflective sneakers on the nightwalk. While dazzling displays like the peacock’s colorful wingspan in the daytime, they present a grave tactical disadvantage in darkness. Say for instance, our boy at John James park, strong runner that he is managed to evade his assailants and take them on a chase. Surely, he would run deeper into the woods nearby and use his distance ahead of them to find a hiding place, squatting deeply in some bushes and disappearing in the darkness. Perhaps he even arms himself with a stone from the ground, waiting like a green beret in heat. Enter assailant with pocket sized flashlight, scanning the dark forest, beginning to think that they might have lost their victim when voila! A pair of fluorescent Nike’s squatted in the bushes some 20 yards ahead. Without those reflective sneakers, implemented into their design to warn passing drivers of your presence, our boy would have made a full escape. Which brings me to the next key: maximize distance from active or potentially active roadways at all times, but stay as close to the light as possible on your nightwalk. Reflective sneakers or not, a hit and runner, the nightwalk’s most dangerous adversary, won’t think twice either way.

Below this line of text consists entirely of work composed before December 31st, 2019. Opinions may no longer be my own and should be considered for scholastic purposes only. Thank you.

Claire (2018)

 She sits up in her bed, matted sheets rest in her lap. The first change she noticed was how soft those sheets suddenly felt. These did not feel like the same mothball smelling, matted sheets Claire had atop her bed for as long as she could remember. Claire realized these weren’t her sheets any longer, but was not at all startled. Instead she ran her fingers through them, silk sheets that were rose gold, and had the slightest metallic tint that caught the room’s dim light the same as the hide of a stallion, standing majestic in the sun on a warm day, that would make any observing rancher relinquish his cap in awe.

That was when Claire noticed she could smell something. Something sweet, wafting from her sheets as she caressed them, a scent like she had put her face right up to a flock of blossomed summer Vincas’. In fact, it was as if a great flock of summer Vinca’s, was sitting right in her lap, the sugary tang of their pollen tickled her nose and she smiled.

Then her bedroom door creaked open. Claire looked up from her sheets to see a young man standing in her doorway. She noticed first how tall he was, then his shoulders broad, and the natural part in his wavy hair, garnished with wide brunette curls: Claire thought him strikingly handsome.

He walks into the room, his chiseled jaw outfitted with a very slight, yet noticeably gentle smile; a gentle smile on a gentle man whom Claire thought she had only imagined in her dreams. As he draws nearer, Claire sees the young man is completely naked, yet again, she was not startled. Instead, his appearance came across as raw and pure, though his muscular, Adonis- physique made her stomach come to life as a thousand butterflies prancing with excitement. The young man sits down on the bed next to Claire, his warm smile widens as he too takes a breath of the summer Vincas’ aroma. He was smiling as much as a person could without bearing his teeth, and his supple lips gazed at Claire; his expression was a smile of such purity, it seemed he was on the verge of tears. Their hands locked automatically as he leaned in towards Claire, the warmth and solid of his body against her own, emanated only safety and euphoria.

Entranced, she gets a peak over the young man’s shoulder at her bedroom ceiling- or where her bedroom ceiling was. Now from beneath her prince charming, her ceiling was a vast, pale blue sky, spotted with cotton candy clouds.

That’s when her eyes opened. Her first breath under the morning light was that of her old, matted, mothball smelling sheets, which filled her lungs and nearly made her cough. Claire closed her eyes and tried to fall back into her prince’s arms, but the desire to do so was the very force that kept the dream just out of reach, as if she could feel the scene drifting passed her finger tips, and leaving her, here.

Claire rolls over in frustration, already beginning to forget her dream, yet the desire to escape back into it, remained. Her knees ripple the musty sheets as she climbs out of bed and stands up in her packed bedroom. Maybe three armlengths from the opposite wall, the humming of her rickety ceiling fan dispersed a thick smell of makeup and disembodied perfume into the whiff of mothballs, her room looked and smelled like a ransacked antique apothecary.

She approaches her dresser mirror and presents herself. At first only the hourglass curves of her hips and waist stare back at her, she feels a sharp guilty pain from under the corpses of a thousand butterflies in her gut. A grave old woman stares back at Claire. At 17 years, the lines of her face are drawn thick and her eyes are black and cold, seeing but preoccupied as if they have horrific secrets of their own, to never tell. She snatches her purse by the straps for her makeup bag, its body so densely filled and solid, it could have been swung in the manner of a medieval flail. Tiny specks of splattered crimson did stain the bags fabric that she ignores, but remembers as she digs through her makeup to cover up her now natural, grave expression like it’s a sort of secret condition.

A small framed picture sits on the corner of the dresser. Within the frame is a thin man, with a warm smile and wavy hair, garnished with wide brunette curls; though he is dreadfully ugly. Claire does not look in its direction to see the man or the smiling young girl in his arms, her eyes sparkling like a happy puppy. Claire never looks at that photo, she hates that photo with every molecule of her being, the corner it sits is a Chernobyl of her dresser and her mind. The only time her eyes ever gain color, is from the rage she feels from the memories which that photo holds. Though a part of her, perhaps what little youth remains within Claire, holds a connection and some dreadful love that causes her to keep the photo and hide a secret even from herself, that she reveres it.

As Claire finishes her makeup, she takes a final look at her reflection. Her skin now milky and vibrant, her lips plump and red, but she can never fill in the eye holes of her mask, still black and cold. She pulls open her top dresser drawer to find a large stack of cash, mostly fifties and hundreds, and a long rusty switchblade. Claire stuffs it all in her purse, then leaves her bedroom.

An Open Letter to Boston Dynamics

 The familiar barnyard smell of hay and livestock had long rot and stale. The wooden panels of the barn and the surrounding earth stunk of the same decay like sawdust, that lingered and itch their throats. Sam sat on her patched wool blanket, fumbling a cigarette between her fingers towards the lamplight burning low beside her.

“Didn’t have much sugar this time” Ralph called just loud enough to be heard, from the dark where the rafters above descended into shadows and met with the platform of wooden panels they had hidden for the last three weeks. He approaches the lamplights glow, hunched beneath the shallow ceiling and sat across from Sam. He held a wet, dripping green and brown stained bag with a rusted metal pale beneath it, sloshing a high note of tin as he plinked it down on the wood.  Sam curls a soft grin through the grime on her cheeks and the nested brown hair that hung into her face. She met eyes with Ralph and he does the same, no matter, the grey of his eyes remained distant from his smile, dark with trepidation and guilt. Sam kept a palm on the round swell of her belly.

As Ralph wrung the swampy brown cheesecloth into the pale, the resulting thin spout of yellow liquid released a high smell of yeast and gasoline. He choked the bag with a furled eager brow until the final drops hesitate, before dispelling of the rotted lemons inside the cloth back into the shadows and folding the rancid fabric back into his coat pocket.

Sam had put out her cigarette and held a chipped yellow mug into the lamplight, lined with brown rings of residue from unwashed use, where Ralph had placed his own, equally dirty and cracked mug, but white. With bated breath, he tipped the pale and filled both mugs to their brims with the fermented yellow juice.

“Cheers.” Ralph said as he raised his cup.

“Cheers.” Said Sam.

 Their mugs meet with a dull chime over the lamplight and they began drinking. The brew was bitter enough to crinkle their expressions with every sip they took but watching each other’s wrenching faces, choking the stuff down had become a playful sort of ritual they wholly enjoyed, and among the few genuine laughs they shared. They giggled deep into the night; darkness draped heavy over the barn that concealed their privacy, and the two became quite drunk.

As the outside air cooled, the pair lay cradled into spoons, cozy beneath their buzz and ratty wool sheets. The lamp had nearly gone out, flickering a faint orange, low and dim, dancing on the edge of pitch black. As did the pair, in between dreams and the dew of sawdust.

When a of high whistle of sorts, traveling in the wind, struck jarring loud against the broad side of the barn, screaming through the night like a distant tea kettle boiling over a stove. Ralph bolts up right, pushing apart from Sam who looked to his silhouette through the dull orange haze, her eyes flayed open wide and silver. Ralph pulls a long, grey revolver from his coat and pulls back the lever, both wincing at its mechanical flick, then Ralph leaned over and blew out the lamp. The extinguished wick smoked silently into the darkness. The barn became pitch black. The screech of the whistle grew louder, one with the darkness and flooding the barn, echoing into the rafters, dizzying and deafening the two, losing each other in black. Submerged.

The noise swelled on a vertical, boiling crescendo, both Sam and Ralph sat dead still, careful to make no noise of their own, now explicitly aware of how rough and rotten the wooden panels had turned and how far of a drop it was to the floor of the barn. The sound carried on screeching and insane, when the smell of shredded grass and soil wafted up to them, coiled in the scent of sawdust.

Dead wood exploded from the barn doors but they did not open, applauded by the pepper of splinters over the empty, rusted pig pens. Pale blue moonlight spilled into the opening where the hole had busted, but it was empty and the barn remained a dense black. Somewhere in the scream, they could hear a low hydraulic spinning, a bit like the sound of a ceiling fan on its highest setting, shuffling around the dry earth below. Sam had closed her eyes and silently prayed to the darkness.

Another blast of wood croaked violently, this time in the floor where Ralph and Sam sat statue, both dusted in rotten chips of broken panel. Still no light reached them, Sam remain petrified, when the bark of the pistol flattened the air. A white flash blinked across the rafters, illuminating the headless metal figure with its wide front plate and spidery titanium limbs, as it charged. Consumed in darkness again, Ralph made a noise like a simultaneous gasp and a deep, guttural wretch. Sam darted her eyes in the direction of the sound but she stared aimlessly. Again the pistol roared. Light flashed again, the creature had instantaneously pounced to Ralph, one of it’s arms craned over its head and burrowed its end deep into Ralph’s chest. Darkness, and the lifeless weight of Ralphs body thumped onto the wood. Sam sat frozen, glazed in cold sweat, and for a moment sat in silence.

When a coin sized green light beamed through the black, letting off a faint neon haze. Sam could see the silhouette of the tall, slim machine standing over Ralphs body, and the hand at the end of it overhead arm holding Ralph’s dripping, still beating heart, before putting it into a compartment on it’s back.  The tiny light beamed out great and wide, enveloping her, and it’s rays began to move down her face. It looked at Sam, analyzing her. The green moved from her eyes, to her shoulders, to her breasts, to her swollen pregnant belly, and the light stopped. The long overhead arm extended into the air and craned down to Sam, closing around her forearm with calculated precision, too quick to react. Sam had closed her eyes and wait. But steam swam from her forearm with the piercing smell of burning hair and flesh, she screamed out. The machine steamed for a moment longer then let go and a small nozzle now protrude from its wide breastplate. Sam’s forearm was smoking and blackened, now branded with a barcode and a small purpled print of the words SUBJECT HARVEST. When the small nozzle fired a leaping net that blew into Sam and tightened around her. The barn slipped into total darkness once again.

It Came from the Drain

 Stanley spotted a patch of fuzzy, black mold on his bathroom tile floor. He stuck his nose right up to it, just like his golden retriever Tarmac had demonstrated. It did smell a bit like rotten vegetables or compost, it must have come from the drain. Stanley open fire with the spray nozzle, execution style, burning over the stench of rot with ammonia. He motioned Tarmac out and shut the bathroom door behind them. Stanley stepped carefully over all of the trash and laundry, stinking in piles of their own across his apartment floor until he could reach onto his bed and lay down, Tarmac nestled in a roll at his feet. Stanley never had an easy time falling asleep, though attempting was his favorite pass-time, the temporary relief of dreamscape, surely felt like death. He thought of the pills in his bedside table. He wondered how long it would take to swallow all of them, he wondered if his filth would continue to grow and consume him even in passing.

In the morning, Stanley woke to Tarmac barking. He stepped between clear areas of the carpet to find Tarmac fully baying at the bathroom door, the hairs on his back, peaked and wild down his spine. Inside, it was that damn patch of fuzzy, black mold on the bathroom floor. Only the thing had multiplied in size, grown up the walls, all the way to the door, thick and porous up close like algae. And the smell, so foul and jagged into the sinus’s even Tarmac recoiled. Stanley was appalled and slammed the door shut. At the mercy of his own filth, stupefied by the mold. It was too much for him, he got back into bed and tried to dream more, of those pills.

When Stanley woke again, it was dark, but it was the smell that woke him. A scent like a pond and hot, rotting vegetables shoed him out of bed, and he put his bare feet down into warm, black algae. He looked up in pallid horror, the mold had overgrown from the bathroom, out from the door and down the hall to his bedroom, it was so thick in the hallway that it began to stalactite and looked almost to breathe. Stanley stepped his way to the bathroom, dizzy from the stench, blinded by it, when he came across Tarmac’s body in the mold, trapped, hordes of black webs burning away his hair and flesh and exposing the dog’s gray innards. Stanley screamed out and turned to run, immediately tripping over a pile of clothes and landing in a puddle of the goo. It stuck to his skin in clumps as it crawled down the walls, across the floor, breathing, consuming him.

Celia the Fat Black Labrador

The sun was white and hot. A suburb of asphalt staled in the sun as if everything was thinly coated in glass. Mikey’s mother had him inside to play today, where the walls were tan and the air conditioning was cool.

A mother, a father, a boy and his sister smile exquisitely in the frame upon the wall. They smile too, from the frame on the mantel, above a gaping dusty fireplace. They smile once in the kitchen, once on the wall in the corridor and twice in the bedroom where the blinds are drawn and the walls are gray. In the bedroom there is also a large and gruesomely realistic crucifix. Jesus’s eyes lolled maniacally as he bleeds in rivers down his olive skin in twinkling pastel.

Mikey did not notice these things often. He plays on the floor pushing a red firetruck that was massive in his stubby infant hands.

His mothers muffled sobs floated down the corridor like an apparition. Mikey didn’t much notice those either. Celia, the fat black Labrador trotted up to him, much bigger than he was. Mikey patted her on the head and Celia wagged her tail agreeably. He loved Celia very much.

The sobs of his mother thickened. A moaning petulance followed close behind.

“Mikey!” said the voice from the corridor.

Celia’s ears turned back.

“Mikey…”

The boy stood up. He was pink and stout.

“Mikey…” the moans continued, cold and enveloping as if they came right out of the air conditioner. His own toothy grin followed him from the walls in the arms of his-

“Mikey…”

He trotted along down the corridor. The cries bloomed in his mind with the instinct of a small boy; hypnotized.

“Come be with your mommy, Mikey…”

“You need your mommy.”

In the bedroom, the world was dark and gray. A rank odor spilled into him like a warm bath drawn over his head. His mother was much too long for the bed. Long, spindly limbs crooked off the bed at the joints like a large pale spider. Her massive gray chest was inladen with the ladder of bones of her breastplate and hungout towards the ceiling. Her breath was low and disturbed by mucus. She was stark naked.

Sweet Dreams Jean: The Musical , Unabridged

Jean Forlet turned fourteen in August. She was a wiry girl, her mother kept her hair cut short and her clothes long-sleeved and decent. Jean was very skinny for her age, wading slowly in the shallow bay of adolescence. The other girls at school jeered her often.

“What are you wearing Jean?”

Snickers.

“Your mother’s a Psycho Jean!”

Snickers.

“Do you ever shower Jean?”

Cackle.

Mrs. Forlet was illusive, indeed. Her daughter was illimitably forbidden from dressing like the other girls, forbidden from socializing with them, forbidden from succumbing to such vital identity’s vanity of the age. Jean Forlet was the spitting image of her mother’s famished ideal how a young girl should be. Jean loathed the pink pony shirts and loose fitting jeans she was forced to wear, her mother restricted her appearance in a chokehold, suffocating even a basic hygiene, she wished to shed from her clothes and peel away from her stinking, unpretty skin like the dead scales of a rattlesnake.

Crackles.

After school, Jean often walked the half mile journey home on the sleepy sidewalk, alone. Her walks home were among the only times Jean found a slightest enjoyment, her freedom was a magical, mysterious, at times tragic place where she basked, though robbed of ambition, Jean fantasized one day that sleepy sidewalk would stretch away and up into dreamlike eternity.

The clouds were heavy and the sky was a looming washed blue.

Trot, Trot, Trot,

Shimmering silver slippers,

All adore the princess!

Plentiful kisses from my Prince,

A castle, And,

 A mighty pair of breasts!

But I’ve got witches bones,

I’ve got witches bones,

Mother’s got my neck,

Dream of prancing woodland critters,

Trot, Trot, Trot

 Jean stay trained at her feet as the sound of rubber tires lurched to a halt on the new pavement behind her. When her shoulders were glued by the indiscriminate beast strength of a grown man’s arms. Before Jean, kicking into the air like an overturned spider, was pulled into the Beige Cadillac with void tinted windows and no plates. The car peeled off.

Oh ho! Why!

Where has my daughter gone?

In lords name, I raised the dame,

She flee with some boy?

I always knew it, yes I did,

The whore, The whore, The whore!

Local police agencies, including departments from three surrounding counties, scoured the city down to the stone beneath its soil. Detectives, deputes, and a force of over one hundred and twenty three volunteers joined the search party for missing Jean Forlet, retracing her steps, searching the school, questioning her family and all known contacts in a blistering, penetrating frenzy. Mixed reactions, though, stirred with a healthy dollop of right-proper disgust from all parties emerged in interaction with Ms. Forlet, Jean’s mother.  

Ms. Forlet garnered some biting attention from the community, ambushed.

Ms. Forlet! what a witch!

Ms. Forlet! Nasty bitch!

Ms. Forlet killed that girl,

With what Ms. Forlet never did!

Attempting to cushion the bombardment of spat vinegar, into her eyes and through her shut blinds, Ms. Forlet publicly changed her opinions, shifting markedly in the barrage of interviews, interrogations and reports she endured. Yet, those initial search party Samaritans knew Ms. Forlet had declared her daughter was a wretched girl who must have run off with some boy. Despite all accounts of Jean herself as an exceedingly homely girl, unpopular, out of touch, underdeveloped and painstakingly lonely. The missing girl became somewhat of a local sensation, and while there was no scapegoat just yet, Ms. Forlet became a nice port to express a widespread frustration.

What Ms. Forlet saw as unwarranted, perplexing harassment, began to take a toll on her… As days of the search turned to weeks, and hopes curdled bleak.

Rip and,

Grunt,

Whole tufts,

From my scalp,

Those people are still,

 out there,

Right now.

I tried, I tried,

Lord Knows! I tried!

Those snowflake, bloodsucker, sap slinging

Grunts,

Have no idea what it was like!

Have no idea how clean her life!

Have no idea what a girl can do,

When temptation creep inside.

Beknownst to all who observed, young Jean was not dead. Yet.

 Fiery oranges and reds of Autumn hued like ripe mangos spilled across oak trees and kept lawns, the air serrated in frost. Astonishing enough, the fourteen year old, trembling youth frame of Jean Forlet was not five full miles away from her house. Jean sat handcuffed to a fixed pipe beneath the sinktop in the bathroom of Scott Ullige-Bradley’s one bed studio apartment. Jean wore a pink shirt with a bedazzled auburn pony across her chest, spotted in blood leaking from her nose. She wailed and squeal wildly, but the ducttape over her mouth tuned her screams closer to a boiling tea kettle, screeching from the next room.

Mhmhmhmhmhm!!!!

Uhmuuhhhmmuuh!!!!

Uahhguammmhmm!!!!

Scott Ullige-Bradley was a jagged rock face that drops vertically into a valley three hundred meters below, with glasses. A troubled man, thirty one years of age, his face cracked and swollen in capillary deltas from one ride too long on the 80 proof wagon. He sits at his tiny foldable kitchen table on his tiny foldable chair, breathing rustled through his swollen nose, fixed on his tiny paper plate. For breakfast was the usual: Two slices of generic brand packaged white bread, one side, as many heaping spoonfuls of extra crunchy peanut butter that would fit, until it rips through the bottom and must be handled with all five fingers. The sound of Jean’s breath heavy moans gave Scott Ullige-Bradley a hot prickly sensation flooding his pores as his veins jet blood down between his legs; on the other, three strikes of his palm to a large-size plastic jar of concord grape jelly, yielding an amorphous crystal purple heap. He snaps the sandwich together and brings it to his lips, smushing into his teeth, oozing heavy globs of peanut butter and jelly out between his fingers and onto his tiny plate. Scott Ullige-Bradley ate his breakfast in a hurry, aching behind his zipper, he yearned the heavenly relief waiting for him, handcuffed under the bathroom sink.

Darling,

Do you love my kiss?

Good god, my mama cooked okay,

But never like this,

Such divine delicacy

Can’t you tell, I’m your prince

If only you could

SHUT THE FUCK UP AND BE STILL FOR TWO SECONDS,

BELIEVE ME, I’M OUT OF BREATH

Spring was near, strands of green sprouted from the soil and the trees. The air thawed and crisped, and the case of Jean Forlet had nearly gone cold. Until a group of women from the local chapter Parent-Teacher Association, provided a tip which proved a vital break in the investigation, fanning the flames of the search once more.

Judith,

Learn to sell it like me,

Learn to squint at a man buying our groceries,

Squint enough and anyone can be a dangerous fiend,

Just take a look at that bum in line at register three,

If you squint enough,

He could be a spy for the Saudi’s!

Huh?

Looks scary to me, Espionage!

An illegal, Arab Yeti, with two cloved feet, giving kids candy laced with amphetamine!

So squint your eyes Judith, now do you see what I mean?

If you want something done right,

Sometimes,

You gotta be willing to cheat.

Willing to cheat, indeed, but the cold gaze of suburbia is perpetual and unforgiving, a report was filed later that evening, which did yield a criminal record. The man had done five months in county jail for POCS, possession of controlled substance less than two grams, it did not specify further. He had initially received two years for the incident but a combination of good behavior and the most powerful legal representation money could buy, lead to an eventual dismissal of the case altogether. The man had a documented fortune, estimated to be somewhere in the seven figures inherited from his late father, a rich investment mogul in Boston. The man in question, of course, was Scott Ullige-Bradley. A warrant was obtained within the week under pretenses of a suspicious figure, and detectives headed to the listed one bed studio apartment, in the center of town.

 Broken Boiling Blisters, Bones and all…

PAK, PAK, PAK,

“Police, search warrant!.”

Silence.

PAK, PAK, PAK,

“Police! Search warrant!”

Silence,

DWUMP, DWUMP, DWUMP,

“POLICE! SEARCH WARRANT! COMING IN!

Police entered Scott Uligge-Bradley’s home guns drawn, business ends at the ready. They called to him and searched the premises top to bottom. The place was empty. The closets were emptied of all clothes and belongings, road maps and tour guides lay splayed across the kitchen counter, any food had been taken from the premises and in the single bedroom, lay dozens of bank statements. DNA samples were lifted from the bathroom tile floor matching those of Mr. Ullige-Bradley and (much to the revulsion of detectives and the community), the DNA of Jean Forlet. The FBI was brought in to investigate and a nationwide manhunt rocketed Scott Ullige- Bradley’s face across media and news outlets everywhere. At the news of her daughters abduction and likely assault, Ms. Forlet had no comments.

But where is Jean?

The air was mild and warm, the sun hung high over a wide belly of cloudless teal. The sea combed salty breeze over the waves, gliding into sandy white dunes. A beige Cadillac with void tinted windows and no plates sat perched in the sand, overlooking the beach, somewhere on the southern Bay of Acapulco. Inside, the backseat was littered with receipts and blankets, in the front, a couple stared longingly into each others eyes, embraced in each others arms, lovers in the midst of their eternal spring. Jean kissed her captor tenderly with supple, youthful lips. Her eyes were wide and empty though dreamily content.

Sweet Dreams Jean

Late Shift.

I hate the late shift. I hate this whole damn place. It’s killing me. There isn’t an inch in here that isn’t flat gray. Gray walls, gray tile, gray washers, gray driers, big dumb grey me.

I let ‘em know alright.

Sometimes I do this thing, I used to do to my parents. It’s impulse I reckon, but that’s just what it takes to be Robin Hood. It happens when my feet get a little too sore dragging through so much bullshit. I’ll start taking bets on things, gamble on what I can get away with. Usually, what I can get away with avoiding.

Ignoring my duties right to their smug little faces in place of my own, on-the-clock loathing in this goddamned pit is just self-preservation when your me.

Well, Ms. Deborah, specifically Mizz Deborah, a lonely toad of a woman if ever I’ve known one, finally brought down the hammer on me. One more slip anywhere, of any kind and I’m out of a job. Did I mention I hate this fucking late shift?

It’s pitch black outside and the place is empty. I’m sleepy. Anywhere downtown this late is a little dodgy. Our cash register has jack shit though, wouldn’t need a gun in my face to open the register on my watch. Most people are just too afraid to ask.

I can still hear someone’s clothes rumbling in one of the machines out there. It’s getting pretty late, if nobody comes for it before closing, I’m locking the doors. I admit, never gone through with it quite so brutally. I’m gonna be here late as shit cleaning up anyways.

Speak of the devil.

Don’t see any headlights out there, but I think someone just chimed through the door. Yep. Probably some kid from the University, didn’t really get a good look at him but he ain’t go for the clothes either. He just made a bee line for the bathroom.

Some mommy-money kid, I imagine. What’s wrong champ? Too much wine cooler? Ha! Man, if he is puking in there, do tell! To whom do I owe such candid amusement? And darling, won’t you please keep it off the floor?

Matter of fact, I think he actually is puking. The kid is wretching whole fucking tennis balls in there. Damn. Stupid kid better not mess around and die on me, Jesus Christ. That’s a conversation with Ms. Deborah, I would passionately like to miss. Oh my, just calling 911 and having to talk to all those crooks frankly, illicit visions of a Giant shooting down the contents of a Port-a-Potty like a shot glass. He’s still going.

Well, let’s give the boy some privacy, shall we? I’m a little caught off guard is all, but let’s see how much he’s got in him.

Okay. Make that four straight minutes of vile sounding wretches in there. I’ve been watching the clock. It doesn’t sound like he’s just gagging either, they’re real juicy.

If a guy is gonna get sick in my bathroom, I gotta at least knock. Fanfuckingtastic. I ought to tell him to take his ass outside…

 I can’t get the kid out. He must be fucking drunk if nothing else. I gave the door a few slugs and shouted in at him, and for a second he just kept hacking away but I heard him kind of shudder like he was about to straighten up. Then that little shit yelled back at me! And his drunk ass echoed my slugging back on his side of the door and totally copy catted me. He even sounded kinda like me. Kudos to his impression, fucking clown. He’s got the door locked too, but I got the keys around here somewhere. I’m definitely not calling anybody, my ice is too thin. Worst case scenario, I beat this kid’s ass a little and send him on his little pest way. I’ve got a ring with a bunch of keys on it in this desk. Maybe I’ll stretch and crack my knuckles a little first…

Okay, what the fuck. I’m shivering. He was dead quiet in there while I tried the keys but when I finally got the door open. This is even weird to write down. The kid was me. Like literally me, crouched in the bathroom. My hair, my acne, my clothes, my eyes, my cologne even hit me in the face, exactly to a fucking tee- me. And pissed as all hell. He pounced on me, growling like a goddamn maniac. He was strong, or at least as strong as I am, and definitely not drunk. I was punching and kicking on him, yelling to just get the fuck out of here, I was scared. I was really scared. We were rolling around on the floor for a minute or so before I got my legs up under me and pushed him off.

He fell back into the bathroom and scrambled back behind the door way. I jumped right up so he couldn’t lock himself in there again and when I stuck my head in. Jesus Christ. He was gone, completely vanished, no clothes, nothing, there was a huge coiled Python or some kind of big black snake like I’d only ever seen in a Zoo, there! on the bathroom floor. He turned into a snake the second I lost sight of him. The thing lunged up and sunk it’s fangs their full length in my neck. I fell backwards and boy did I scream. I screamed bloody fucking murder. I craned my head back and wailed like a damn chimpanzee. Tears were streaming down my face and it was like I was wrestling enough rope to anchor a cruise ship.

I had a pen in my pocket, and started jabbing the fucker where ever I could stick it while the thing kept thrashing it’s head over my shoulder. Blood was squirting everywhere. My pen couldn’t have been doing more than mosquito biting him.

About then, I just prayed to get back to work. Pictured myself cleaning up the place for a sweet, sweet thumbs up and thick paycheck from Ms. Deborah. Then it was like, my pen must have hit his funny bone or some shit. That snake squirmed right off me. It jet right back into the bathroom. I should have jumped right the fuck up and called the cops right then and there, but I felt like I hurt it. I hopped right back into the bathroom doorway and, I’m losing it but I swear on my mama, there was nothing but a cockroach on the ground in there. He was sitting still, looked just about as dumbfounded as I was. And I stepped on him. Squashed him right beneath my sneaker and flushed him down the toilet. Then it was quiet. The place was clean. Aside from a little puddle of my own blood but that’s it.

I gotta get busy around here, that’s all for now. But I still got this bite on my neck, it’s oozing some clear fluid and it kind of stings but you don’t think? It must be getting late. I need to sleep.

IMAGINE by Nicholas Sego, The Archangel

As a modern man, I declare a “modern man” is the son and brother in me speaking. A nod to whom of my great-great-great and to be frank, primitive grandfathers, who likely beat their wives and carried a dirty, matted handkerchief to wipe the grime of their knuckles, from whatever European depression left them famished at the time. For him, who had a night to tell his buddies about, around some dry Malort that he’s got a son of his own coming, and he’s done his part to humanity. His cheeks glow redder than a stove you’d wanna touch, knowing he’s that much closer, just like his old pa’ had taught him, to carry on. Carry on his very own handkerchief rubbing legacy, way out in the future like a dream so good, you’re glad you can’t remember it, when everything is perfect and we all wear aluminum body suits and Jetpacks. For you grandpa, hell, maybe there’s still hope, and for all those who did their part across time, we are modern man. However, for a modern man, I’m awfully superstitious, and I’ve certainly never owned no damn handkerchief. Sir Isaac Newton once said, it is stupid not to be superstitious. Of course, no he didn’t, I made that up. But I can’t barely take my own reflection for face value, then again, maybe that’s just me.

That son and brother in me though, I’ll tell you what, is a little different, he was gullible, kept wiping clean hands on a dirty handkerchief, like it’s something his old pa’ used to do, so the husband and boyfriend in me, had to kick his ass to the curb. At least that’s how it feels sometimes, but family politics tend to piss me off, birds are meant to grow and move from the nest to make more birds and that’s just fact.

Move like this briefcase to the bus stop. Actually, I’m not sure how large a leather container can be, before it’s no longer considered a briefcase at all. This looked more like one of those massive trunks my great grandpa could have probably stuffed half his house into, the night before boots came marching through. But today, boots had already come.

The thing is, he couldn’t entirely carry the damn thing. He shuffles on his heels, his short beefy arms couldn’t reach all the way around it. To passerby, it looked like a wrestling match being lost, aching his fingertips, white with pressure into the leather, leaning it over himself to drag it by the increasingly frayed elbows. People pass by like a stream around a fallen tree. They’re on the sidewalk alright, but the man seems to have a big magnet in his trousers set to negative, contorting people around him. A woman pulls the strap of her purse in close to her chest, and a young father tightens the grip on his boy’s hand as they pass. Though, just as my grandpa likely learned, the grip of a hand can’t always dictate the grip of the eyes, which the boy briefly held as he dragged along, wondering how unfortunate for the man to have so much luggage, yet still forget to close his shampoo bottle, leaking yellow droplets into the street, and stamped to the bottoms of the young boy’s shoes.

It wasn’t long before the man himself noticed the yellow liquid, pinching at it between his fingers, sliding it’s consistency into the spiral of his thumb and forefinger. He looked at the shiny substance, it smelled and behaved a bit like motor oil, runny, it certainly wasn't shampoo. He saw the snail trail he’s left behind on the sidewalk, the few meter distance traveled between a scratching post of trunk marks. His eyebrows startle, getting up too quickly from the dinner table and bumping their head on the low hanging lights of his single forehead wrinkle, and he immediately surrenders to the trunk, stopping dead in his tracks. The ebbing stream of pedestrians dam and foam around him. Perhaps to an onlooker, the man might have looked somewhat distressed. Though, who is to recognize such a subtle, personal expression aside from his mother, friend or wife, that “know when something ain’t right” face, it’s not hard to hide a bit of emotion from the active sidewalk. And with a bit of character about him, the distressed man went by Nolan (if anybody asked.) Nolan didn’t know his old pa’ too well, and neither did his mama. But he’d seen the movers come and take things. Like wooden tables and sofas, how they’d squat at the base, real low as if they perched over a hole in the woods, flaring the muscles of their thighs and using their legs, in conjunction with their beefy forearms just like Nolan’s, to heave! So Nolan heaved! His leaking trunk off the sidewalk and back up the street to apartment 213.

The trek up that flight of metal railed apartment steps coulda’ been enough to wipe out a whole mess of daddy’s, those daddy’s daddys and their granddaddy’s grandaddys, easy as a huff to a lit candle. But Nolan made it to his apartment, his walls bare and grey, little discerning possessions aside those to sit or make light, and he twists all three locks, plus the dead bolt behind him.

Though, before he unbuckles the old buckles on the old trunk that no longer click really, the old thing can at best dull tap, Nolan is tired as all hell, and then some. Nolan is tired to space and back, twice, with a backpack on, actually, make that a big ass trunk, so Nolan takes a nap.

Nona.

If only I coulda,

Nona,

Thing or two,

Before I, well.

Nona was her name, big watery brown eyes with a twinkle like someone behind her nose could have blown bubbles out of them; was her game. Nona was a beautiful girl. It was known well before infant Nona could even wiggle her way out of her mother’s (eventually) equally sought after whom. Nona. No Sarah or Jessica, Amethyst or Fay, Nona. Nona thing wrong with that, her parents, a loving mother and father, wanted a daughter with a name as sweet and humble, with just enough spice, as she would grow to have. Nona. Nona growing up is an understatement, she blossomed. And Nona had a friend, in college at 18 who was in fact, a bit of a Sarah, so much so, her name was indeed Sarah. Her parents, apprehensive to give their daughter a name which proceeded her, tossed a coin for ‘Sarah’ in an attempt to be modest, accidentally sprouting a sense of ambivalence from the moment she wiggled her own, slightly less sought after way out of the whom. Growing well, to eventually find her confidence among a palette of navy’s and blacks’, leather and denim, a bit more aggressive than the flower girl, Nona. However, not a bad Ying and Yang, the pair fit together quite well.

The two young women did what gorgeous 18 year old young women do. –live good honest lives. You think I’m going to generalize? Please! This is a fucking tight rope and I’m not wearing a harness. Anyways, the two girls often went out together. Nona, the eye candy, blinding in a way that stains your vision like staring into a lightbulb; while Sarah, bolder, craftier, still gawked at, could reach into the pockets of distracted males amidst the onslaught of attention the two girls receive at any given time on a Saturday night. Not literally pick pocket of course, but it’s all capitalism. The two girls go out to enjoy themselves with no specific plans in mind, and if men just so happen to approach and become a part of their night, it certainly doesn’t hurt if they’re willing to buy a couple of drinks.

Nona, perhaps a bit naïve, apathetic as one would have to be in order to achieve such perfection, may not have always been the most creative in school, but spoke in poetic tongues like Shakespeare with the power of well, pussy. Pussy does turn the globe with more surety than the arms of a clock, if those arms were to hold a mirror up to man’s insatiable, ape behavior of approaching women, which certainly has eroded amongst metropolis, certainly near the higher learning sanctuaries of university. Sure. But ole me, the pessimist, the girls had a good time, made many friends with some boys who are just fine, and that’s just the way things go. In the grand scheme of things, it would be unhealthy for the two girls not to find their place in the world, and discover who it is they want to be via a little experimentation. Just like my granddaddy used to say, only god gets to choose and only god gets to judge. Moral landscape is at times judged too harshly, sinner schminner chicken dinner, when the landscape is truly scorched earth, there is little explanation to be had or listened to, you’ll get the idea.

The night began late, nearly an hour to midnight, my pa’ was surely fast asleep by then, wherever he was. Sarah and Nona sat across from each other at a dark bar, don’t bother asking how they got in. Ominous blue light leaked from the ceiling, painting the whole place like a full moon over a foggy moor, the type my granny would describe in her stories where werewolves lived.

Their marble complexion glowed pale blue in the darkness, glossy and perfect. So glossy and perfect, the two seemed to reflect gong-sized watchtower spotlights directly into the eyes of everyone in the room. One of them, his fingers curled around a Long Island iced tea- add some water please, hunched alone in a squeaky leather booth, was a fellow by the name of Nolan.

 Nolan was not 18, he was 26. Nor had he ever been to college, hadn’t even stepped foot in a school since his sophomore year of highschool, at 15. He didn’t flunk or dropout, frankly he didn’t really want to leave, but his father had sneezed with his cheeks stretched around both barrels of a Remington, holding it’s weight to his face like a panic-eyed chipmunk at the end of a log. And oh! How a little gunpowder can smudge a man’s jawline as if those buckshot were a finger on wet paint. He survived, sorta, but in the process sent a swarm of lethal bee’s into the ceiling and through his infant daughter’s mattress. In that order, allegedly. As it was, his mother had already been of little use, so Nolan saw to it, to find work. He was lucky, if you could call it that, to find a decent paying job at the time, under a drunkard old man with hanging basset hounds cheeks at a body shop. The old man was a bit like a good ole’ granddaddy, but that ole drunkard hadn’t a single medal from ‘nam, nor did he ever buy a bottle my granddaddy would have even considered, no matter how badly my grandmamma had been hollerin’. Though he kept Nolan employed, and employed he was, spending a few dollars at the bar, nearly an hour to midnight.

I ain’t much into chicken,

Cause’ I grew up eatin’ crows.

Just a feral fella, starvin’

And I didn’t even know.

When the lights were dimmed in apartment 213, she couldn’t quite tell the walls were bare and the place was empty as if he’d moved in last week, and that’s what she’d likely think, the place was new, she was nervous. The bravado of a pretty girl at the bar, drops off pretty quick for a pretty girl at the bar, when the pretty girl herself is young, aiming to please and suddenly realizing how human she is. The leap from pretty girl at the bar, to pretty girl in your bed, is a leap similar in distance to handsome bachelor at the bar, to handsome bachelor in your bed. Both have to fix their attitudes, so important for a young person to upstand in a public setting, that when the time comes to get comfortable, they have to dial back a touch, and hope their partner too, will be courteous and they can overcome together what is quite natural nerve. Just the way things go, a fella doesn’t know until he tries, and for most, a little trial and error is all it takes. The possibility of an encounter with a partner who has ulterior motives, aiming to exploit ones most intimate anxieties in a most horrific of ways, will remain, for the majority of us, well, a damned good number of us, well, at least some of us by golly, a thing of nightmarish legend for the remainder of our lives. Then of course, there’s Nolan.

He sits next to her at an angle, their knees cozy up against eachother like sisters in a photobooth, and neither moves away. Considering the obvious lack of luxury about the sofa’s cradle on her buttocks and what her father would call his backs’ “lumber”, it’s matted grain had a sort of worn, homie-ness about it, not entirely uncomfortable for the girl. Likely, she remembered stories of her great-great grandad, who I assume carried a handkerchief all through the war that was just as soft- hearty if you will, as Nolan’s sofa.  Their eyes meet.

He was handsome, his rosy lips and cheeks purse with the breeze of attraction as a rose in the wind, revealing a most gentle smile.  His thick, hairy forearms shaped fleshy cufflinks beneath his elbows from years of hard work. He was strong, and his arms’ tough, veiny fabric stared at her, prying her attention from Nolan’s dark and seemingly distant eyes. Though by now, she had already made up her mind. The fancy knots and bows of her hot bravado began to pull and come undone, her expression, a look of wanting vulnerability, the kind of face we’ll only ever manage to show our mother’s as infants, or to our lovers, now.

Their lips meet…

 at different heights and they come apart, both giggling at their own nervous attempt to kiss. Their lips meet again…

And they stick.

Now the animal sets in. At this point, was the apex of that great leap from pretty girl at the bar, to pretty girl in your bed, and the ground had entirely escaped beneath her feet. A cape with stars and stripes, a helmet with the same pattern, she was Evil Kenevil, in slow motion above 20 school busses, in the moment just after taking off when the crowd goes silent, between either an eruption of applause if he lands, or one jarring “oohhhh!!” if he, ya know.  But the conditions were right, not too windy, the cheering had already begun it’s climb when,

Nolan laid a heavy forearm on her shoulder, caressing her face, but it seemed as if he tensed up. She brushes a hand over his, to indicate with the fluid motion of intimacy to let go, we can move on, but he doesn’t budge. She kept her eyes closed, in a haze of euphoria just to be wrapped up together, and she brushes at his hand again, to no avail. He seemed to tense up even more, she feels the strength of those beefy cufflinks on her jaw, and his thick fingers curled around her neck. She opens her eyes, but it was far too late. Nolan stood his dirty sneakers on the sofa cushions with wild abandon, squatting over her chest with both hands pressed, vacuumed to her throat. She tried to swipe those beefy forearms away with more force, but his elbows had locked out, he pressed his whole weight against her windpipe, using his legs. Her feet squirm into the air behind him violently, like those of an overturned spider sprinting from it’s back. Her eyes bulge from her face at least an inch, as if wanting a closer look of her final moments: at Nolan’s locked grip trembling with passion, head craned up to taste the rain and chords of his neck popped and flared out, chest wide like a gorilla, looking like my ole pa’ in the gym, huffin’ his heart out, trying to pick up one heavy kettle bell from the floor. Nolan’s face glowed red and his cheeks inflate, throwing haphazard spittle over the girls face, as the overturned spider, dancing it’s legs to the air, slowly died.

“Oohhh!!!” the crowd yelped.

Between the high street of bars and clubs, through the city and into the sanctuary of student housing, the streets became dark and silent. Silent, of course with the exception of a streetlamps buzz or even a distant air conditioning unit always running in the city; or in this case, Nona and Sarah hearing through the buzz of their own alcoholic buzz, a single set of footsteps seeming to keep their tail.

They share a mixed look of strength, sprinkled with fear for each other out the corner of their eyes. Incognito as they would at a party around boys they didn’t know, giving nobody but eachother the slightest clue the two girls were even friends, let alone communicating intricately, (what my granny used to call, girl power.)

The footsteps persisted, drawn nearer in the darkness.

 Previously, in between a movie night of short shorts, cucumber face masks and screw-top wine, the two girls had indeed planned for an occasion like this. Maybe not a whole fire drill protocol, but a little preparation is quickly becoming stone monument in the English language. A stone monument built over humanities most splendid orchard, that surely has my granddaddy diplomatically kneeling from the grave, or shall I say urn, since a mortar shell back in ’44 practically turned the old man to confetti. Poor bastard hadn’t even noticed the damn thing landed at his ankles, he was too busy daydreaming of a future where we all wear aluminum body suits and jetpacks, when these damned wars and famines’ can finally stop, leaving his grandkids nothing to worry about but which galaxy to visit next, but I digress.

After turning corners, turning more corners, stopping, moving across the street, wash, rinse and repeating, there was no question the girls were being followed. The sound of tailing footsteps swelled with the pound of their heartbeats, thudding in their ears. Closer the footsteps came, closer.

Nolan was, at this point, for lack of a better term, completely off of his shit. There was already one dead girl in apartment 213, folded so viciously into his daddy’s old army trunk, it’s contents looked like he filled it to the brim with dirty, tanned bowling pins, minus the hair of course, and yellow discharge leaking from her nose and mouth after a day or two. But at least my granddaddy would be happy to know one thing, forensic evidence is pretty damn impressive nowadays, the investigators themselves- sure, but if you so much as leave a little too much pride at the scene of a crime, some big, grey, growling machine will pin it to right to ya and a SWAT team will come busting down your door, guns blazin’. Nolan knew it too, he was sure he would be caught, a rebel without a pulse, so what did it matter if he could feel it all again with that damn pretty girl with those big watery brown eyes (the other one was alright too).

When Nona and Sarah could hear the rustle of an anxious Nolan’s breath, they turned around. His eyebrows startle, getting up too quickly from the dinner table and bumping their head on the low hanging lights of his single forehead wrinkle. The three exchanged a wide eyed glare, all three of them taking a single resounding exhale before battle. A moment so existential, it seemed to stretch and knead the very fabric of time itself, a lifetime seemed to pass between them. Nona raised her arm out straight like a crossing guard, with a tiny canister in her fist, letting its needlepoint eye peak from beneath her thumb. Like any good daddy would do, knowing he’s got a daughter with eyes like that, Nona’s ole’ pa’ wouldn’t dare send his precious baby off to college without a can of pepper spray and a few lessons on handling. She squeezed. An instant cloud of orange, greasy, syrup exploded from the canister, amazing to see something so big contained in such a small device. A great orange cat, very fat and very fluffy, leaped from the tiny needle point opening and latched onto Nolan’s face, claws out. Sarah, in the same moment, of course in her trade mark denim jacket and dark eyeliner, sent a runway trendy, steel toed boot like an NFL kicker between his legs. Even through the thick leather around her feet, she noted a sensation like stepping on a bit of bubblewrap, or perhaps just a corner on a sheet of bubblewrap with only two bubbles, to be

popped!

By the time Nolan's knees hit the pavement, keeled over and dry heaving vomit with a wheezing noise like the mating call I’d imagine a walrus would make, the two girls were already a block away, together.

Imagine,

Above us, only sky,

These knots are pulled to merely thread

And we’re left with only strings to play,

to the cadence of seasons,

at the speed of flowers bloom.

Imagine,

All the people,

 living for today

Frequent Searches??

Let this not serve to be, a fuck you to Charles Darwin and his Finches. But, with all due respect, fuck you Darwin and your bitch ass Finches. Darwin published his theory on natural selection sometime around 1854.

Let that roll around for a moment, turn away or some shit.

1854 means he could have gone to highschool with your grandpa, a couple grandpas ago. It took us through The Renaissance? Through at least, a millennia of college courses worth of ‘great wars’? For an old white man wearing a monocle and full Jumanji, to travel far and wide, deep into the exotic Galapagos, only to discover what we previously called jobs. And continue to call jobs.

 Now for those unaware, Charles Darwin is responsible for terms like natural selection and survival of the fittest. Terms and research that planted a flag in the soil of history: for good reason. Darwin (likely after a sturdy shoulder rub from at least ten illiterate slaves) observed a variety of finch birds in different geographic regions along the Galapagos Islands.

What he found was the same finches, whose anatomy only differed in direct observable reflection to their surroundings. The finches with broader beaks used them like molars to crush seeds where the soil was dry; while Finches with more pincer beaks could skewer worms out of tight tree holes, where rain was plentiful. Only the best adapted could survive in accordance to each ecosystem. If a dull beaked finch from the North was brought to the pincher-beak turf of the South, he couldn’t get a worm if he tried. The worm family inside their tiny tree home would likely cower, screaming bloody murder in the farthest corner, their family photos rattling, china crashing and exploding from the cabinets as this retarded, starving, dull beaked finch pounds his face on the worm sized opening of their front door until he dies. The survival of the fittest. Only the strongest survive.

Now Darwin was right on that: While there is probably some uncredited Chinese biologist who wrote it years before and another uncredited Russian woman who wrote it down even years before that. Natural Selection.

Speak of the devil. Nearly a decade before Darwin would shock the world with his Finches in 1854. In the Spring of 1846, 90 emigrants of the Donner-Reed party would leave Springfield, Illinois, heading west towards California (primarily by wagon and horseback.) The Donner party encountered some but no more than expected hardships associated with traveling such motley, sprawling lands.- They could adapt as they moved.  That is of course, until sometime in October of that same year, some place deep, swallowed in the Sierra Nevada Mountains: Members of the Donner Party became trapped by heavy snowfall.

In Texas, hail storms will pepper the windshields of pickup trucks with spider-web cracks and the whole town closes. When the roads are iced over, they’re empty. So imagine being some lumberjack’s skinny daughter, her name I assume Rosemary, spooning between two panhandlers for dear life- in negative thirty celsius. The wagon wasn’t going anywhere and there sure as hell wasn’t a wagon model-e.x. with a snow mobile function. They were as stuck and stranded as stuck and stranded gets. Which is when utility gains greater density among the group and the principles of natural selection occurred on a situational basis. The horses suddenly had no wagon to carry, so the horses were selected as the first meal. In true desperation, you claim utility as long as your heart beats enough to help. So, the Donner Party famously only dined on those already deceased. After the horses, Cannibalism.

 Roll this one around for a sec, look away or some shit: Carving and consuming another human. The blood, the feeling at what cost?

 Some forty of the original members of the Donner Party were eventually picked up and made it to California, I just imagine the rest of the ride was awfully quiet.

Now Mr. Darwin, survival of the fittest only partially applies to the Donner Party. There were members strong enough to survive, physically. At the cost of consuming another human’s flesh. However, there was no winged member of the donner party who flew them out from the mountains one by one. All members of the party had officially seen some shit after eating eachother. Finches cannot. Similar to my grandad remembering being only 19,

Next to his boy-faced buddy from highschool. Since grade school actually and how he looked when he was dead, flat on his back in the jungle, gurgling blood from his lips, fingers still twitching with three indiscriminate holes, burping red, still smoking from his chest: whenever the poor old man hears fireworks go off on fourth of July.

PTSD We call it, an acronym that’s only been around since the Vietnam War, around 1968. The soldiers called it shell shock, the Donner Party probably called it the thousand yard stare. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. PTSD.

 We have found that those strong enough to survive, often have a staggering affinity of returning home to safety and killing themselves. What Mr. Darwin could not take into account with Finches, is the mind, specifically the human mind and in the land of Frequent Searches, what is survival and who is the fittest?   mirror mirror

Texas Hot  

(excerpt)

Out in the country where it’s toxic hot, nutty prarie grasses explode and wool. Sprawling blankets of dehydrated quills, stretch far out of sight in every direction towards blinding white horizons. Hordes of nutty whiskers climb the walls of scrawny sheet metal homes like the same unkempt, greasy side-burns on the less than ambitious fellas who sleep in those shacks.

Here at the banks of the interstate- snaking through the hills, ink black asphalt. Witcham, Texas stands, tucked away. “Population: One-Thousand-Four-Hundred-Sixty-Three.”

In Witcham, Texas: Where whole blocks of homes and businesses are left dull and still. Always dull and still. There is no school in Witcham, no grocery store aside from the gas station Quik-Stop and residents primarily remain hidden in the darkness behind boarded windows, as if the sun would disintegrate their flesh on contact and leave nothing but a flat heap of clothes.

Slithering, gliding down that ink black serpent, cars do pass through Witcham. Not much to stop and see really; aside from empty streets and shantys, cracked by the sun into grey eczema. But there is the old inn. High pillar of a sign, rusty once-red Auburn with thick white letters that looked to have been placed individually, rather than fitted with an official logo: INTERSTATE INN.

The inn always has a pulse. Guests tend to keep to themselves, but the Inn’s front office shares a back wall with a tiny Mexican restaurant, unmarked from the highway though known at least by the front desk girl as, The Taqueria.

He nodded and smiled, popped a hot “Thanks!” and turned to the door before the girl behind the counter could say another word.

By this time, he had committed to the inn. Somewhat stranded if we’re being frank. He spent all the worthy bucks he had left to book two days and his next paycheck should come in three.

 Jordan is his name by the way, came to the INTERSTATE INN in a cab (well, an Uber) that he also couldn’t afford. He’s not too worried though. It’s easy to forget the delicacy of silence, of privacy, and just how valuable it can become. The possibility of spending a single, measly night on a park bench later, became quite the profitable trade in exchange for two full days of security now. Jordan was a resourceful boy, aware of his surroundings and knew a little bit of twine, a shower cap and some blankets has done him fine on a park bench before.

So, with what little money Jordan did have and a rumbling belly, he figured The Taqueria was the move. He thought of it for a moment. Jordan took Spanish for three years as his required language course in highschool; not to say he actually studied Spanish for three years, but he was surely supposed to. Granted, this was a proper restaurant, a working kitchen cooking fresh food, packed with family’s, loquacious with chatter and clanging dishes you could hear from outside. Jordan paused. Of course he couldn’t be positive, but he could have sworn the translation of “Taqueria” is like saying “Steak house” accept for tacos, be it a simple stand or a restaurant or whatever. But The Taqueria? “The” in English did seem odd to Jordan, improper maybe,

or at least not much of a title for any functioning full-time business,- that simply could not be achieved without taking some pride in what they do, only to choose “taco restaurant” to represent their work, connected to an INTERSTATE INN? 

Jordan returned to his room, gathered his money and started back down towards the restaurant. Though he walks a deliberate, heel-toe step. Some subliminal red flags had been thrown, he just couldn’t quite place them, Jordan wondered if the girl behind the counter had withheld The Taqueria’s true identity, and if she was willing to lie so quickly.

Jordan stopped himself and sped his walk to a stride. “You’re just getting food” he mutters, guilty at his own paranoia.

“Really just needa sleep..” he groans, still softly.

Jordan suddenly felt vulnerable, his hunger compounded, now only his mind speaks:

“I’m just getting food, and if the counter girl did lie, so what?”

“Maybe it was good lookin’ out, maybe she just letting me know to watch where I’m steppin..”

Jordan rolled the ideas around, but came up to the door of “The Taqueria” regardless.

“Quit tripping, kid” he told himself.

He exhales, perhaps paranoid after all, “Hell, these tacos probably gonna rock my world!”

He pushes his way in.

The Cavalry excerpt revisited:

“Just gonna have to stick it out, I reckon” the optimistic radio announcer croaks over the airways.- Perhaps his most noble though vapid, tone-deaf attempt at using his voice to boost morale. In the process, haphazardly reminding us all such a boost in these times requires full scale excavation. Rumor has it, the Cavalry twins had once been spotted by a scout’s set of military grade binoculars. This Scout apparently knew how to handle himself too, had a real keen eye for trouble, a talented reconnaissance agent.

 He lay completely still and silent, under a bush and prone on his belly. But.

Rumor has it, something about the twins demeanor changed very suddenly. Each sent a nose straight up in the air and they turned in sync, necks snapped with bare eyes and stared right back into that unlucky bastard’s binoculars from four-hundred-fifty meters out. When, allegedly-  at the exact, blinking instant the Scout realized he was lookin’ straight into the whites of their eyes, lookin’ straight back into his: There occurred what the report cited, stamped and forever engraved in the record books as an incident of rare factory defect. To this day, an exceedingly peculiar case of rare factory defect. The Scout was found in the same spot, beneath the same bush, in the same position, prone on his belly. Except when they turned him over, (especially after a few days in the sun) the vacant spaces where his eyeballs once glistened with life, now resembled the deepest and darkest of industrial sink drains, the kind crusted with sharp orange rust and mildew. The binoculars were there too, in the dirt, inches from his head as he left ‘em. Although the pair had no lenses, or any interior pieces intact at all. A pair of top-of-the-line Binoculars, likely worth quite the pretty penny before and certainly worth a few seed bags nowadays; had been reduced to completely hollow, plastic tubes. It seemed as if some sort of pressure build up or air pocket or something had caused his binoculars to effectively explode, sending every shard of fiber glass, plastic bits and steel dials drilling right into his eye sockets. The autopsy would find later: The debris had tunneled from his eyeballs in a perfect horizontal line into his prone posture; through his head, down his throat, into his body, through his organs, as if Vlad The Impaler took the spear home with him. Doc’s had to open him up to see just how far the path of his wound traveled and damn near gave up looking for the missing pieces without a clue. When, one way or another, a majority of the fiberglass was recovered along with all the plastic, steel dials and a little extra runoff in the unfortunate Scout’s profoundly messy underwear.  

At first glance, the binoculars seemed almost professionally disassembled. No sign of burns or even the necessary wiring for an explosion, but what else could explain the most intimate anatomy in a pair of military-grade peepers, blasting through a suckers eyeballs and out his ass? There simply aren’t enough words in a Detective’s vocabulary. Scribbling on the incident report is not the place to document how quarter inch screws and their respective spirals were recovered without any damage, as if the screws almost certainly unwound themselves. Rare factory defect.

Multiple alleged accounts have surfaced out of: “they”- stories of men found half submerged in the soil, usually at the waist, legs stiffened from death into a rigid donkey kick towards the sky. In fact, it’s commonplace now, to hear about a fella found completely embedded in the soil from his ass up, buried headfirst like a dart; often at the epicenter of a crater with proper celestial proportions. Pairs of stiff legs, scraggly chutes from the ground like dead shrubs, have turned up darted in the ground more than half a mile from victim’s torched homes, where they were almost always last known to have stood and fought. Detectives frown and exchange looks standing around such a crime scene, scribbling on an incident report, checking every box that reads blunt force trauma.

 “IH- IH- It, it was as if he fell from the sky and heaven itself!” A woman cried grandly to the microphone just outside of the yellow tape.

An old man in a patched flannel, also in line for air time on the microphone cuts in- “Or som’ real big or som’ real bad or som’ real both! Gave that poor feller a nasss hard toss!” The woman turns with a gentle hand to her gasping chest and grimaced at the man.

"Calvalry" -excerpt- in progress

“Gonna have to stick it out, I reckon” the vapidly optimistic radio announcer croaks- perhaps a tone def attempt to actually raise moral, where it required a full excavation. Rumor has it, the Cavalry twins had once been spotted by a scout’s set of military grade binoculars. Rumor has it, the twins turned with bare eyes and stared right back at that unlucky bastard Scout from four-hundred-fifty meters out. When, according to "they," the talking heads- at the exact moment when that scout knew he was lookin’ right into the whites of the Cavalry Twin’s eyes: There occurred what the report proclaimed, as some sort of factory defect, which seemed to have (apparently) detonated the lenses on either side of those military grade binoculars (“with at least the firepower of a .22” seems to be the consensus) into each of that scout’s eagerly spying eye sockets.

Multiple alleged accounts have surfaced out of: “they”- stories of men found half submerged in the soil, usually at the waist, legs stiffened from death into a rigid donkey kick towards the sky. Not uncommon to hear 'bout a fella turning up completely embedded in the dirt from the ass up, at the epicenter of a right proper crater, some of which allegedly reaching the size of a mini-van. Sometimes nearly half a mile from the victim’s torched home and where they were last known to have stood and fought.

 “IH- IH- It, it was as if he fell from the sky and heaven itself!” A woman exclaimed grandly into the microphone just outside of the yellow tape.

An old man in a patched flannel, also in line for air time on the microphone cuts in- “Or som’ real big or som’ real bad or som’ real both! Gave that poor feller a real, hard toss!” The woman turns with a gentle hand to her gasping chest and grimaced at the man.

So, for about two weeks now. Well, at least twelve sunsets, I hate to admit that I lost count somewhere around the eleven mark: the radio has been off.

'Circus' By Nicholas Sego

By the time we send our children off on the school bus, we put a cellphone in their pockets. Nowadays a really sleek, reflective, Atlantis looking device that meets the same standard of a forty pound, military-grade "super computer" from five years ago. Yeah Mr. Huxley! I’d say the road forked pretty hard around 1985, what the fuck are we supposed to do now?

Ha

I’m just giving you shit Mr. Huxley, please have mercy from the heavens, love ya and I’d definitely give my kid a nice cellphone too. Because: if you need me just call, it’s always on, I love you, we have this great resource so never hesitate to call me, darling. See? Humans have some sense in certain circles, so I’ve heard. Then, in time, the phone becomes an extension of the mind, a new and vital appendage. I’ve heard this same body part analogy too, used (less eloquently) among those who fear the unknowns of technology. My stance is this: Buying a phone could require sewing it to my damn hand, then I’d be a cyborg and could use my apparently, horrifyingly unpredictable time on earth that much more efficiently.

On a Sunday, in October of 1938 (a fact, I quite literally just confirmed with my.) A radio show broadcasted their Halloween special, an adaptation of HG Wells (another futurist just a smidge off the mark) ‘War of The Worlds.’ Well, the radio was the lifeline back then and many people thought the story of aliens coming down and zapping people in the street was just news. A famously botched freak out ensued, causing a mass panic, so it goes.

Though, by today’s standards, even an extinction threatening, alien race would be somewhat refreshing. At least there are some amazing conclusions to be drawn at the sight of giant walking spaceships crushing minivans like ants and swallowing people whole. Now there’s people getting eaten in the streets alright, by statistics, feasting with no prejudice, plucking humans off the sidewalk and spitting belt buckles down the sewers. Not to mention the 4k resolution footage of it all! Footage we see in the morning next to “morning :)” texts from our rose- scented lovers, or alongside nighttime messages from our parents to "be home by midnight or don’t be back until tomorrow." Our youth are callused, Never before has death been so terrifyingly normal while coexisting along such potential to thrive. Succumbing to the stats, the endless chasm of names and documents, lurking with a ravenous hunger for human meat- nobody is safe. In the face of adversity, the human thing to do is carry on, for the sake of growth and survival, even if instinctually and into the obviously unknown. Which is the exact reason why specific methods of passing time have become so popular for the sake of awaiting God’s plan. Even if his plan is sending assault rounds through your body or assaulting you through the blouse in exchange for professional solidarity. At least if I’m in bed all day, god’s plan comes to me.

He kissed the backs of his thumb and forefinger, inhaling two heaping lungfuls of smoke from that blooming cigar. A funny looking cigar, skinny and hand-rolled, damp with spittle, licked up and down like a big envelope. Whose spittle exactly, he no longer remembered, so he passed it to his left. A film of marijuana’s high, pungent odor settled over the room’s atmosphere, a bit skunky, a bit like wool carpet, and a bit fresh cut grass all at once. Still much sweeter and lighter to breathe than, the by comparison, chalky discharge of a cigarette. Music is playing. A deep, hopping bass rumbles, as powerful as it is slow, a bit ‘industrial-disco’ if you will, not quite relaxing but for the six boys that lined the room, maybe a little. A real-estate agent would have called it a bedroom, perhaps one for the tikes, but there was no bed. A matted sofa lined one wall, with four glass eyed, dull and distant looking boys squeezed between it's arms with exposed yellow foam padding innards; two desk chairs look displaced on the empty carpet for the remaining. The walls, blank, aside from a notably gruesome crucifix above the sofa with thick, vibrant, textured reds shining from mini Jesus's wounds through chipped paint. A single bulb hangs like a cyst from the ceiling, barely reaching it's dim, mustard yellow light to the doorway. Around the blunt traveled, each expression kissing the air and showcasing the shape of their smoky exhale, contributing two puffs to the collective cloud which had grown enough to hug the whole lot at once, before passing to their left.

Wooden supports in the ceiling, out of sight behind the dry wall squealed with arthritis. No one bothered to look up, sunk into their respective seats at an obtuse, wide legged angle, not a handful of degrees from laying flat. When a loud thud, like a door slammed hard and split the air around it came from the front of the house. Now the ceiling creeked a persisting holler, the boys only lazily exchange looks.

The two in desk chairs were the first to see that cold, black eye glide around the doorway, followed by the long metallic snout baring the eye and then the trembling hand of the sweaty man holding the pistol.

Each boy froze, hearts lept from their chests and into the smoky haze over the room; their expressions, the same dull, lips slightly parted, relaxed jaw “duhhh” faced, unable to process. The man darted his eyes between motionless boys, how only glossy expressions moved at all from their relaxed stance and how the man’s sweat glistened beneath the dying yellow light as if his skin carried a thin layer of olive oil. Before that snout with its cold cyclops eye found its mark and the room went deaf.

He seemed to fire multiple times, but all sound had left them. The boy sitting second from the left on the sofa now slumped especially still, his head hung back, relaxed as it was, but his eyes stood wide and lifeless. The man seemed to be screaming something too.

“You’re mother’s a whore! This is what you get, you little shit!” as best as a lip reading could tell.

The exact moment he stopped firing is unclear, until the ringing of our eardrums corrective tuner as shrill as a gnat looking to land on ones cheek settled over the noise and sound returned. 

Nobody moved from their place, each boy as slumped into the sofa as they were moments before, now only with a focal point to lean from. Staring silently, wide eyed at their friend, leaking profuse streaks of crimson as did the crucifix above his head with it’s chipped paint. A lifetime seemed to pass in those moments and nobody noticed the man sprint from the room and make that same door slam at the front of the house. A boy in a desk chair held the blunt. He kissed the back of his thumb and forefinger, taking a thick drag to the lungs before joining the exchange of panicked looks.

He was the first to scream.

IMAGINE by Nicholas Sego, The Archangel

As a modern man, I declare a “modern man” is the son and brother in me speaking. A nod to whom of my great-great-great and to be frank, primitive grandfathers, who likely beat their wives and carried a dirty, matted handkerchief to wipe the grime of their knuckles, from whatever European depression left them famished at the time. For him, who had a night to tell his buddies about, around some dry Malort that he’s got a son of his own coming, and he’s done his part to humanity. His cheeks glow redder than a stove you’d wanna touch, knowing he’s that much closer, just like his old pa’ had taught him, to carry on. Carry on his very own handkerchief rubbing legacy, way out in the future like a dream so good, you’re glad you can’t remember it, when everything is perfect and we all wear aluminum body suits and Jetpacks. For you grandpa, hell, maybe there’s still hope, and for all those who did their part across time, we are modern man. However, for a modern man, I’m awfully superstitious, and I’ve certainly never owned no damn handkerchief. Sir Isaac Newton once said, it is stupid not to be superstitious. Of course, no he didn’t, I made that up. But I can’t barely take my own reflection for face value, then again, maybe that’s just me.

That’s the lone man in me speaking. The son and brother in me is a little different, he was gullible, kept wiping clean hands on a dirty handkerchief, like it’s something his old pa’ used to do, so the husband and boyfriend in me, had to kick his ass to the curb. At least that’s how it feels sometimes, but family politics tend to piss me off, birds are meant to grow and move from the nest to make more birds and that’s just fact.

Move like this briefcase to the bus stop. Actually, I’m not sure how large a leather container can be, before it’s no longer considered a briefcase at all. This looked more like one of those massive trunks my great grandpa could have probably stuffed half his house into, the night before boots came marching through. But today, boots had already come.

The thing is, he couldn’t entirely carry the damn thing. He shuffles on his heels, his short beefy arms couldn’t reach all the way around it. To passerby, it looked like a wrestling match being lost, aching his fingertips, white with pressure into the leather, leaning it over himself to drag it by the increasingly frayed elbows. People pass by like a stream around a fallen tree. They’re on the sidewalk alright, but the man seems to have a big magnet in his trousers set to negative, contorting people around him. A woman pulls the strap of her purse in close to her chest, and a young father tightens the grip on his boy’s hand as they pass. Though, just as my grandpa likely learned, the grip of a hand can’t always dictate the grip of the eyes, which the boy briefly held as he dragged along, wondering how unfortunate for the man to have so much luggage, yet still forget to close his shampoo bottle, leaking yellow droplets into the street, and stamped to the bottoms of the young boy’s shoes.

It wasn’t long before the man himself noticed the yellow liquid, pinching at it between his fingers, sliding it’s consistency into the spiral of his thumb and forefinger. He looked at the shiny substance, it smelled and behaved a bit like motor oil, runny, it certainly wasn't shampoo. He saw the snail trail he’s left behind on the sidewalk, the few meter distance traveled between a scratching post of trunk marks. His eyebrows startle, getting up too quickly from the dinner table and bumping their head on the low hanging lights of his single forehead wrinkle, and he immediately surrenders to the trunk, stopping dead in his tracks. The ebbing stream of pedestrians dam and foam around him. Perhaps to an onlooker, the man might have looked somewhat distressed. Though, who is to recognize such a subtle, personal expression aside from his mother, friend or wife, that “know when something ain’t right” face, it’s not hard to hide a bit of emotion from the active sidewalk. And with a bit of character about him, the distressed man went by Nolan (if anybody asked.) Nolan didn’t know his old pa’ too well, and neither did his mama. But he’d seen the movers come and take things. Like wooden tables and sofas, how they’d squat at the base, real low as if they perched over a hole in the woods, flaring the muscles of their thighs and using their legs, in conjunction with their beefy forearms just like Nolan’s, to heave! So Nolan heaved! His leaking trunk off the sidewalk and back up the street to apartment 213.

The trek up that flight of metal railed apartment steps coulda’ been enough to wipe out a whole mess of daddy’s, those daddy’s daddys and their granddaddy’s grandaddys, easy as a huff to a lit candle. But Nolan made it to his apartment, his walls bare and grey, little discerning possessions aside those to sit or make light, and he twists all three locks, plus the dead bolt behind him.

Though, before he unbuckles the old buckles on the old trunk that no longer click really, the old thing can at best dull tap, Nolan is tired as all hell, and then some. Nolan is tired to space and back, twice, with a backpack on, actually, make that a big ass trunk, so Nolan takes a nap.

Nona.

If only I coulda,

Nona,

Thing or two,

Before I, well.

Nona was her name, big watery brown eyes with a twinkle like someone behind her nose could have blown bubbles out of them; was her game. Nona was a beautiful girl. It was known well before infant Nona could even wiggle her way out of her mother’s (eventually) equally sought after whom. Nona. No Sarah or Jessica, Amethyst or Fay, Nona. Nona thing wrong with that, her parents, a loving mother and father, wanted a daughter with a name as sweet and humble, with just enough spice, as she would grow to have. Nona. Nona growing up is an understatement, she blossomed. And Nona had a friend, in college at 18 who was in fact, a bit of a Sarah, so much so, her name was indeed Sarah. Her parents, apprehensive to give their daughter a name which proceeded her, tossed a coin for ‘Sarah’ in an attempt to be modest, accidentally sprouting a sense of ambivalence from the moment she wiggled her own, slightly less sought after way out of the whom. Growing well, to eventually find her confidence among a palette of navy’s and blacks’, leather and denim, a bit more aggressive than the flower girl, Nona. However, not a bad Ying and Yang, the pair fit together quite well.

The two young women did what gorgeous 18 year old young women do. –live good honest lives. You think I’m going to generalize? Please! This is a fucking tight rope and I’m not wearing a harness. Anyways, the two girls often went out together. Nona, the eye candy, blinding in a way that stains your vision like staring into a lightbulb; while Sarah, bolder, craftier, still gawked at, could reach into the pockets of distracted males amidst the onslaught of attention the two girls receive at any given time on a Saturday night. Not literally pick pocket of course, but it’s all capitalism. The two girls go out to enjoy themselves with no specific plans in mind, and if men just so happen to approach and become a part of their night, it certainly doesn’t hurt if they’re willing to buy a couple of drinks.

Nona, perhaps a bit naïve, apathetic as one would have to be in order to achieve such perfection, may not have always been the most creative in school, but spoke in poetic tongues like Shakespeare with the power of well, pussy. Pussy does turn the globe with more surety than the arms of a clock, if those arms were to hold a mirror up to man’s insatiable, ape behavior of approaching women, which certainly has eroded amongst metropolis, certainly near the higher learning sanctuaries of university. Sure. But ole me, the pessimist, the girls had a good time, made many friends with some boys who are just fine, and that’s just the way things go. In the grand scheme of things, it would be unhealthy for the two girls not to find their place in the world, and discover who it is they want to be via a little experimentation. Just like my granddaddy used to say, only god gets to choose and only god gets to judge. Moral landscape is at times judged too harshly, sinner schminner chicken dinner, when the landscape is truly scorched earth, there is little explanation to be had or listened to, you’ll get the idea.

The night began late, nearly an hour to midnight, my pa’ was surely fast asleep by then, wherever he was. Sarah and Nona sat across from each other at a dark bar, don’t bother asking how they got in. Ominous blue light leaked from the ceiling, painting the whole place like a full moon over a foggy moor, the type my granny would describe in her stories where werewolves lived.

Their marble complexion glowed pale blue in the darkness, glossy and perfect. So glossy and perfect, the two seemed to reflect gong-sized watchtower spotlights directly into the eyes of everyone in the room. One of them, his fingers curled around a Long Island iced tea- add some water please, hunched alone in a squeaky leather booth, was a fellow by the name of Nolan.

 Nolan was not 18, he was 26. Nor had he ever been to college, hadn’t even stepped foot in a school since his sophomore year of highschool, at 15. He didn’t flunk or dropout, frankly he didn’t really want to leave, but his father had sneezed with his cheeks stretched around both barrels of a Remington, holding it’s weight to his face like a panic-eyed chipmunk at the end of a log. And oh! How a little gunpowder can smudge a man’s jawline as if those buckshot were a finger on wet paint. He survived, sorta, but in the process sent a swarm of lethal bee’s into the ceiling and through his infant daughter’s mattress. In that order, allegedly. As it was, his mother had already been of little use, so Nolan saw to it, to find work. He was lucky, if you could call it that, to find a decent paying job at the time, under a drunkard old man with hanging basset hounds cheeks at a body shop. The old man was a bit like a good ole’ granddaddy, but that ole drunkard hadn’t a single medal from ‘nam, nor did he ever buy a bottle my granddaddy would have even considered, no matter how badly my grandmamma had been hollerin’. Though he kept Nolan employed, and employed he was, spending a few dollars at the bar, nearly an hour to midnight.

I ain’t much into chicken,

Cause’ I grew up eatin’ crows.

Just a feral fella, starvin’

And I didn’t even know.

When the lights were dimmed in apartment 213, she couldn’t quite tell the walls were bare and the place was empty as if he’d moved in last week, and that’s what she’d likely think, the place was new, she was nervous. The bravado of a pretty girl at the bar, drops off pretty quick for a pretty girl at the bar, when the pretty girl herself is young, aiming to please and suddenly realizing how human she is. The leap from pretty girl at the bar, to pretty girl in your bed, is a leap similar in distance to handsome bachelor at the bar, to handsome bachelor in your bed. Both have to fix their attitudes, so important for a young person to upstand in a public setting, that when the time comes to get comfortable, they have to dial back a touch, and hope their partner too, will be courteous and they can overcome together what is quite natural nerve. Just the way things go, a fella doesn’t know until he tries, and for most, a little trial and error is all it takes. The possibility of an encounter with a partner who has ulterior motives, aiming to exploit ones most intimate anxieties in a most horrific of ways, will remain, for the majority of us, well, a damned good number of us, well, at least some of us by golly, a thing of nightmarish legend for the remainder of our lives. Then of course, there’s Nolan.

He sits next to her at an angle, their knees cozy up against eachother like sisters in a photobooth, and neither moves away. Considering the obvious lack of luxury about the sofa’s cradle on her buttocks and what her father would call his backs’ “lumber”, it’s matted grain had a sort of worn, homie-ness about it, not entirely uncomfortable for the girl. Likely, she remembered stories of her great-great grandad, who I assume carried a handkerchief all through the war that was just as soft- hearty if you will, as Nolan’s sofa.  Their eyes meet.

He was handsome, his rosy lips and cheeks purse with the breeze of attraction as a rose in the wind, revealing a most gentle smile.  His thick, hairy forearms shaped fleshy cufflinks beneath his elbows from years of hard work. He was strong, and his arms’ tough, veiny fabric stared at her, prying her attention from Nolan’s dark and seemingly distant eyes. Though by now, she had already made up her mind. The fancy knots and bows of her hot bravado began to pull and come undone, her expression, a look of wanting vulnerability, the kind of face we’ll only ever manage to show our mother’s as infants, or to our lovers, now.

Their lips meet…

 at different heights and they come apart, both giggling at their own nervous attempt to kiss. Their lips meet again…

And they stick.

Now the animal sets in. At this point, was the apex of that great leap from pretty girl at the bar, to pretty girl in your bed, and the ground had entirely escaped beneath her feet. A cape with stars and stripes, a helmet with the same pattern, she was Evil Kenevil, in slow motion above 20 school busses, in the moment just after taking off when the crowd goes silent, between either an eruption of applause if he lands, or one jarring “oohhhh!!” if he, ya know.  But the conditions were right, not too windy, the cheering had already begun it’s climb when,

Nolan laid a heavy forearm on her shoulder, caressing her face, but it seemed as if he tensed up. She brushes a hand over his, to indicate with the fluid motion of intimacy to let go, we can move on, but he doesn’t budge. She kept her eyes closed, in a haze of euphoria just to be wrapped up together, and she brushes at his hand again, to no avail. He seemed to tense up even more, she feels the strength of those beefy cufflinks on her jaw, and his thick fingers curled around her neck. She opens her eyes, but it was far too late. Nolan stood his dirty sneakers on the sofa cushions with wild abandon, squatting over her chest with both hands pressed, vacuumed to her throat. She tried to swipe those beefy forearms away with more force, but his elbows had locked out, he pressed his whole weight against her windpipe, using his legs. Her feet squirm into the air behind him violently, like those of an overturned spider sprinting from it’s back. Her eyes bulge from her face at least an inch, as if wanting a closer look of her final moments: at Nolan’s locked grip trembling with passion, head craned up to taste the rain and chords of his neck popped and flared out, chest wide like a gorilla, looking like my ole pa’ in the gym, huffin’ his heart out, trying to pick up one heavy kettle bell from the floor. Nolan’s face glowed red and his cheeks inflate, throwing haphazard spittle over the girls face, as the overturned spider, dancing it’s legs to the air, slowly died.

“Oohhh!!!” the crowd yelped.

Between the high street of bars and clubs, through the city and into the sanctuary of student housing, the streets became dark and silent. Silent, of course with the exception of a streetlamps buzz or even a distant air conditioning unit always running in the city; or in this case, Nona and Sarah hearing through the buzz of their own alcoholic buzz, a single set of footsteps seeming to keep their tail.

They share a mixed look of strength, sprinkled with fear for each other out the corner of their eyes. Incognito as they would at a party around boys they didn’t know, giving nobody but eachother the slightest clue the two girls were even friends, let alone communicating intricately, (what my granny used to call, girl power.)

The footsteps persisted, drawn nearer in the darkness.

 Previously, in between a movie night of short shorts, cucumber face masks and screw-top wine, the two girls had indeed planned for an occasion like this. Maybe not a whole fire drill protocol, but a little preparation is quickly becoming stone monument in the English language. A stone monument built over humanities most splendid orchard, that surely has my granddaddy diplomatically kneeling from the grave, or shall I say urn, since a mortar shell back in ’44 practically turned the old man to confetti. Poor bastard hadn’t even noticed the damn thing landed at his ankles, he was too busy daydreaming of a future where we all wear aluminum body suits and jetpacks, when these damned wars and famines’ can finally stop, leaving his grandkids nothing to worry about but which galaxy to visit next, but I digress.

After turning corners, turning more corners, stopping, moving across the street, wash, rinse and repeating, there was no question the girls were being followed. The sound of tailing footsteps swelled with the pound of their heartbeats, thudding in their ears. Closer the footsteps came, closer.

Nolan was, at this point, for lack of a better term, completely off of his shit. There was already one dead girl in apartment 213, folded so viciously into his daddy’s old army trunk, it’s contents looked like he filled it to the brim with dirty, tanned bowling pins, minus the hair of course, and yellow discharge leaking from her nose and mouth after a day or two. But at least my granddaddy would be happy to know one thing, forensic evidence is pretty damn impressive nowadays, the investigators themselves- sure, but if you so much as leave a little too much pride at the scene of a crime, some big, grey, growling machine will pin it to right to ya and a SWAT team will come busting down your door, guns blazin’. Nolan knew it too, he was sure he would be caught, a rebel without a pulse, so what did it matter if he could feel it all again with that damn pretty girl with those big watery brown eyes (the other one was alright too).

When Nona and Sarah could hear the rustle of an anxious Nolan’s breath, they turned around. His eyebrows startle, getting up too quickly from the dinner table and bumping their head on the low hanging lights of his single forehead wrinkle. The three exchanged a wide eyed glare, all three of them taking a single resounding exhale before battle. A moment so existential, it seemed to stretch and knead the very fabric of time itself, a lifetime seemed to pass between them. Nona raised her arm out straight like a crossing guard, with a tiny canister in her fist, letting its needlepoint eye peak from beneath her thumb. Like any good daddy would do, knowing he’s got a daughter with eyes like that, Nona’s ole’ pa’ wouldn’t dare send his precious baby off to college without a can of pepper spray and a few lessons on handling. She squeezed. An instant cloud of orange, greasy, syrup exploded from the canister, amazing to see something so big contained in such a small device. A great orange cat, very fat and very fluffy, leaped from the tiny needle point opening and latched onto Nolan’s face, claws out. Sarah, in the same moment, of course in her trade mark denim jacket and dark eyeliner, sent a runway trendy, steel toed boot like an NFL kicker between his legs. Even through the thick leather around her feet, she noted a sensation like stepping on a bit of bubblewrap, or perhaps just a corner on a sheet of bubblewrap with only two bubbles, to be

popped!

By the time Nolan's knees hit the pavement, keeled over and dry heaving vomit with a wheezing noise like the mating call I’d imagine a walrus would make, the two girls were already a block away, together.

Imagine,

Above us, only sky,

These knots are pulled to merely thread

And we’re left with only strings to play,

to the cadence of seasons,

at the speed of flowers bloom.

Imagine,

All the people,

 living for today

                                                                                          STILL A YOUNG MAN

by Nicholas Sego (the archangel)

"Sail the seas and, kiss the land!

skip the plan, why yes you can!

Until you should, when the time comes,

You’ll understand, likely…

Still a young man"

When Simon turned 13, and the sprouts of adulthood among his classmates peaked their budding heads from the soil, Simon encountered a problem. Well, what started as a problem, though truly, Simon was just a very bright young man. Not in the sense of some wide eyed savant, solving incredible calculus with one hand and a rubics cube between his fingers in the other; yet a boy who could observe the social interactions of his peers, with such detail, it often felt as if Simon had exponentially more data to make sense of than did his average pre-teen counterparts. He had friends, sure, those in class he could look to when the time came to “partner up” or sit with and laugh around the mid-day lunch table. Simon related to his peers as best he could, for a time trying to approach the fanged beasts of sports, grades or school, a succulent steak in hand, looking to be swallowed whole, consumed by their facets as his peers seemed to be, but he simply couldn’t. No port could fully embody the details of Simon’s mind, so he explored the details of his surroundings, musing over them. How silly the politics of school did seem, coaches standing like oak paneled cabins atop sets of oversized chicken feet, grooming those of the boys with ever slightly advanced development in their biceps to emerge as leaders. Who then sought after those young women with the earliest signs of often traditional standards of beauty to inevitably become their overlords. Simon recognized how the workings of school must be navigated, every student learning a deft step at their adolescent waltz through the hallways and each other, be it ducking passed the Adonis physique Kyle Strickland and his rounds in the chamber of insults he learned from his older brother (far superior to any comeback the average middleschooler could compete with) or be it sprinting to the next wing to catch a glimpse of the illustrious Carly Dixon, emerging from her remedial math class, maybe to talk to her, maybe just to look.

Simon learned well the waltz steps danced around him, and learned to anticipate his peers movements and interactions. It was hard not to put a nose up to the seemingly mindless toiling Simon watched his fellow students repeatedly become entangled in, and react to. All who’s identities stood on wobbly knees, while the mother bull of school (enlisted by their parents) could nudge them along until they, the poor defenseless calf could stand and graze on their own.  Simon feeling so confident among his peers, naturally developed a sense of elitism and in time, became a very prideful boy. To his classmates, the quiet boy Simon always seeming to glide beneath the radar, gained a bit of an elusive standing, at times attracting the crushing rosied cheeks and batted lashes of young women who saw depth in his demeanor and thought him mysterious. Though even with his superb awareness and brainpower, Simon became something akin to a wheelchair ridden blind man attempting to climb the Himalayas when faced with understanding of the opposite sex, nevertheless finding few methods of qualifying a mans behavior, more powerful than positive points from a woman. So Simon stayed true to his mind, steadfastly separated and came to define himself by what he was not in regards to his peers.

An electronic bell system chime’s a longing mechanical echo through the classrooms, in the office, in the library, down the halls. In room 0330, an elderly woman scrambled to summarize her lecture in the final moments of class. She twisted and squeezed every last drop of attention out of her students as the bell chimed, talking at a speed even she didn’t seem to be listening to, pointing a finger back to the numbers and half circles that patterned the chalkboard as she was drowned by the noise. Metal legged chairs pulled out along ceramic tile floor, backpacks zipping hurriedly and the exhale of chatter at the bell’s liberating song.

Children rushing from class briefly crowd and mushroom around the doorway before funneling into the hall, Simon at the caboose, lingering behind them until he could walk out in stride.

 Simon, like a rifleman hopping from rooftop to rooftop, retained his high ground stance into the crowded hallway and traversed to his next class with a method he lived by like his Alma matter: First, you must carefully, surgically gauge speed to the crowd so your walk is at a nice goldilocks pace, not too quick and not too slow. Second, you must hug the wall as you walk, do NOT enter the body of the hallway, the key is to slide passed even a wandering peripheral. And third, the final and most important step is to stare with unrelenting concentration to your feet. No matter what, even in the event of an emergency and you happen to cause a hallway collision, keep the head down and hold that position soldier! You’re a bull! And if you can’t see them, they can’t see you.

Of course, those who do spot Simon seeming to mope down the hallway, staring to his feet as if entirely engrossed in some strange prayer, may see him as a loner of sorts or possibly handicapped, and perhaps somewhere deep in his mind, like a buoy so far out to sea, it becomes a barely discernable red speck from the shore, Simon felt the same way, unable to live a life of separation without acknowledging the other end of the spectrum, reflecting a most veiled insecurity by default, and an envy for the life of seeming ignorance- and bliss. But for the sake of the pride where he takes his refuge, Simon draws a firm line in the sand.

He keeps a metronome count of the blue Nike Airmax’s on his feet alternating beneath him mechanically, the wide loops he tied in his laces bounce up towards his face that Simon imagined like the floppy ears of a trotting Basset Hound. Keeping pace with his feet, some words do protrude from the cacophony of babble and slamming aluminum lockers around him, voices that waft into his mind and spread on his canvas of shuffling feet and Basset Hounds.

School ballots had been running all week, and if you were to inquire with the candy perfume, Barbie posture Carly Dixon, everybody voted. Simon could recognize the excitement in the halls, a sort of giddy vulnerability in their voices reminding of himself early in grade school, speaking to his parents after supper on Christmas Eve, just before being sent to bed to anxiously toss and turn until the first crack of dawn. Nowadays, it was quite an occasion when Simon could achieve such whimsical excite, and he saw school awards as the formality they were. There was no pageantry or competition, not really anyways, and frankly the whole process didn’t make much sense to Simon. The school decides the kids should have a vote for each other in the name of “school spirit” which perhaps on the desk of some haughty, tanned superintendent (who wears a fresh suit and a fresh blanket of sugary whiskey smelling cologne every day, though only finds time to shower twice a week) may have seemed like a great idea and surely make for some good press.- YOUMF!, hammer on the stamp of approval and WISHHH, slide the page across the wooden desk and on to the next one.

Simon, on the ground, in the field, in uniform, antennas a’buzzin, pondered among the admired Carly Dixon’s and Kyle Strickland’s. For a supposedly school wide vote, the pool of candidates seemed quite small. There are no flukes in a middle school election, instead a not so motley crew of athletic boys and powdered girls whom make a safe bet as to who will win, only boosting their ego’s and dragging them further and further down the wells of their own hubris. It’s really a bit sinister Simon thought, even those eager yet undecided voters found a bit of a dopamine rush to know they voted who Carly Dixon voted for, or any of her little posse for that matter, with a foggy ghost ship of heinously sweet perfume above their heads. Hell, if Simon were to vote, he would probably decide to vote for Carly Dixon, or whomever of her crowd seemed at least somewhat likeable. School spirit of what little humanity has been murdered in these halls is more like it, less of an election and truly more of a team effort if you will.

The electronic bell system chimes once again. When the hallways are full, the noise is less of a signal to move to or from class and more an interruption of communicating among students, its echo more akin to a countdown of being caught in the vengeful claws of a hall monitor, and the crowds disperse in a sort of riot tactic fashion. Open doors ribbing the hallway suction like open hatches on an airplane and students are sucked through them, filing into classrooms and down rows of desks to their seats, leaving only loose papers, scattered ajar lockers and the vulture-esque poverty ridden hall monitors lurking for stragglers.

Simon finds his seat in second period English which is also his homeroom class, in a classroom indiscernible from the last. He finds the bureaucratic attitude of public school doesn’t always translate well to the actual professional world- in this case architectural world, because most every room in the building looked and was the same, as with every other school in the district, regardless of just about any factor about the school, aside from a need for a building that meets the cleanest shaved minimum to be considered a ‘school’, but I digress. One’s homeroom class is a sub function of organizing children within the grade level and within the classes they take, the homeroom teacher has the added responsibility of advertising school fundraisers and events to students, but today, the aging grey-brunette at the front of class, hunching an elderly arch in her back as if trying to go through a door made for elves, only avoiding face planting because of the long denim pencil skirt she wears up to her bellybutton as a sort of makeshift elderly corset; along with every other homeroom teacher in school, would have their students await the sound of the electronic intercom system (the button just under the electronic bell system) to have Principal Shulgin announce the winners of school ballots.

When the fog horn sound of Principal Shulgin’s nasally voice croaked from the ceiling, Simon barely noticed, nor cared. He was feeling his fingers along the spikey crumbs at the bottom of his backpack for a pencil, or a pen, a marker, or even a paintbrush, he had nothing to write with. “Shit!” a broken record sputtered in his head. “I was sure I had something!” he knew he would have to ask someone, to confront them for an extra pencil. A tribal drumbeat like a hunting anthem thudded in his heart and in his ears, to ask someone, to open himself to the other side, and then be indebted to them, and then have to do it all again to return the pencil after class. This was a situation that gave Simon much anxiety and he avoided like the plague. When,

“Simon!”

“Simon!”

His fingers and toes went cold and he shot up from his backpack, darting his head through the class, everyone had turned to him wide eyed as if he held some hormonal magnet.

“Simon!”

It was the teacher, speaking up into the room from her stooped posture.

“Simon! Congratulations! You won the ballot! You’re new class King!”

Simon’s jaw released, parting his lips but no words could escape them. The class, perplexed, and not quite knowing themselves if in a fit of utter surprise or some subconscious relief that the likes of Kyle Strickland could have one less win to brag about, erupted in applause. The broken record sputtered once again, yet slid on its cradle and changed tune ever slightly,

“Shit!” danced through Simon’s head, frolicked, through a field of wavering sunflowers under a most magnificent radiant sun!

The smiling faces and parade cheering of his peers worked to levitate his feet from the ground, like a golden spotlight shined down on him from heaven itself, he could not help but become a conduit of the applause, as anybody would when presented with an award of such great honor, in arguably the underdog victory of the century. His knees bolted up right from his chair and he let out a single exhaled burst of a giggling cherub chuckle, shooting heart shaped arrows across the room, his cheeks burned a most jolly, humble rosy red, and his eyes sparkled in a way he could feel and could tell the entire class was momentarily dazzled by the Hercules energy that bestowed him.

“Well what are you waiting for Simon!” laughed the old teacher whose voice was now pitched with excitement in a way that made even her and the denim corset seem quite beautiful.

“Go down to the office and get your crown!”  She sang.

Simon skipped through the door, leaving the class behind him to admire from their seats. He strut into the empty hallway feeling like an 800 meter runner, striding with confidence way out in first place, with nothing but empty lanes in front of him. Though of course, Simon did stop and think.

“Could it be a prank?” he thought, thinking to a younger memory, huddled on the sofa next to his mother as his intestines knotted watching Stephen King’s Carrie for the very first time.

Simon hadn’t the slightest clue of who would be out to get him, he raked his brain to think, with all eyes on him, he must be careful. But he came up dry, and Simon’s objective mind dismissed the claims, parting the clouds and his clear mind spoke, “I won.”

Simon walks tall and proud, he looked to the ceilings and walls that have accepted him whole heartedly, just under his nose, and revered him. Butterflies spun giggling figure-eights in his belly, and a daze of dumbfounded flatter fell over him.

“I had no idea!”

Though how proud he was. Simon had never even remotely assumed anyone took a notice to his presence, let alone his thinking, and apparently many people did, apparently everyone. He thinks of Carly Dixon, “my queen?” he couldn’t help but snicker, Simon suddenly understood the draw of living a traditional life, on the slot machine that something like this happens, the adoration and confirm from all of his peers, it sure felt amazing. Of course, Simon thought to himself, many people don’t have much choice from the traditional life, but perhaps the system he once prided to part, and the hierarchy of animal behavior wasn’t so bad after all; how suddenly hungry he felt to greet all of his peers and learn what they had to offer, what they saw in him. Simon had never felt so comfortable in his own skin, no pride more existential than he felt turning into view of Principal Shulgin’s office. Was it Maslow? He thought, who says a sense of belonging is human need, as much food or water. Simon had found his place before, but this

exult, this ecstasy was something he wanted to yell with all the weight of his lungs off the peak of a mountain, how starved he had been just moments ago!

A feast! Hazzah! He felt silly to have rejected a system with such potential,

Simon could feel the support columns of his pride and observation disintegrate behind him. While he does ponder the adoration of his peers is meaningless, he once felt such ease in the pride he felt over them. But school ballot King? If you can't beat em, jo-

Simon turns the flat silver handle on principal Shulgin’s office.

The First Visitor in Weeks

Nicholas Sego

                 "The lord is my shepherd, I shall not want him for long."     

                              -Ernest Hemmingway                                      

1.      

The first visitor in weeks found his way through the storm. Bombarded by the blizzard, the visitor could just discern the warm orange glow of a fireplace as he approached the cottage. Winds stirred and whipped snowy sediment into the air, making visibility extremely low. Had the fire not glowed warm from within the cottage, it’s windows grinning in an artic mirage like a jack-o-lantern, the visitor might have walked right passed.

A boy and his mother sit inside, huddled around the fire on a thick patched carpet. The wooden interior blushes a red-orange tint at the light of the fire, the boy and his mother breath only gentle whisps that cloud in front of them in the cold air, a noise like incomprehensible whispers under the crack of their fireplace.

The first visitor in weeks stands outside the window and tries to see in. He can’t. The heat from inside had fogged the windows while frost from the storm formed over them. He bangs a gloved hand on the frost surface, trying not to shatter the frigid glass. Both the boy and his mother exhale a thick cloud of condensation at their startle, the mother remains still while her wide eyes rotate over to the boy. No visitor aside from the occasional courier ever ventured this far; and since the storm began, neither the boy nor his mother had left the cottage. The boy promptly turns from the fire, away from it’s warm aura and climbs up to the windowsill. He rubs a sleeve on the frost and peers out into the storm, he see’s the visitor standing just outside. The boy feels an instant lethargy fall over him, he feels weighted to the floor and his stomach twists, he falls away from the windowsill. He feels a hot flushing pinch at his cheeks and he turns from the window, back towards the fire, because the first visitor in weeks, was a fever.

2.

“I tucked in your sheets so your feet wouldn’t get cold. My mother used to call them hospital corners.”

 The boy could only respond with chattering teeth. He pulls the crests of the blankets up high to his chin, until only his head peaked from his wool cocoon.

“Some tea? Something hot maybe?”

The boy responded with more chattered teeth, and this time a glare of his white panicked eyes through the wide, dark curls of his hair that hang into his face.

His mother sways briskly from the room. For such a towering woman, she was light footed. When she moved quickly, she would glide across the wooden panel floor. Not even the slightest stomping, and any sound of her footsteps could only be heard in total quiet.

Over the chatter of his teeth and shivering core rattling his thoughts, the boy watched his mother glide across the room, through the doorway, silent, like an apparition. 

Left alone to his feverish vices, he sits in a frenzy of chills for what seemed like a single, long moment. Shivering and shaking until he had surrendered his muscles to the fever, and thus his head. He tried to let go, to separate mind from body and let the sickness ravage his physical being, while his spirit drifted like a cloud, someplace up above, staring down at his writhing body until it was safe to return.

And perhaps he could, for the distance of a blink, he accomplished floating up and out of his body to the sky above. However, no more than the distance of a blink, the reach of an eyelash before he would plummet to earth, careening like an asteroid into a stream of rapid white waters that whirled him as a puppet and smothered him. The boy was falling in and out of consciousness. Dunked into a stream of rapids, then stuck right back under his blankets, soaking them, his dark curly hair glistening and matted to his face.

“Poor thing!” cried his mother from the doorway, now returned with her bulky hands wrapped tightly around a mug of chamomile, whisps of steam swimming off of it’s milky surface- plenty of cream, and plenty of sugar.

His mother glides to his bedside and sits next to him haphazardly, her large trunk sinks into the bed, grabbing his blankets with it and fastens them to his body, constricting his chest ever slightly. His teeth only chatter, the boy’s sickly white eyes staring wild past his sweaty hair. Without speaking, the woman dips a metal spoon into the tea, using only the motion to say “open up.” The boy see’s steam jumping from the spoon as his mother digs it towards his face. His teeth only chatter. He manages to barely lift his neck and catch a hole in the shivering long enough to welcome his mothers scolding hot tea to his lips. The temperature shocks him, suddenly the stream of rapids became lightyears away as he rejects the mouthful of boiling tea. Too hot to even purse his lips and spit it out, he simply opened his jaw and let it escape onto his chin and chest with a single guttural blat! like a puking infant.

His mother recoils. A deep concerned edge boar into her brow, only reminiscent of a maternal instinct- unsettling, her eyes seemed colorless and distant. He thought in her old age, her spirit was constantly drifting from her physical being, into the clouds then into the stream of white waters, while her eyes stayed here on the ground, to stare blankly. She seemed only to be nursing out of memory, that somewhere in her subconscious, she knew it was the correct thing to do and perhaps had done it, or seen the act of nursing in her youth with a mind more whole. But when she watched her boy reject the tea, she became unsure, confused. She knew she was not equipped to handle the boy if he became too sick, but the hierarchy of the home and the quiet was more important to her. She does not wipe the chin of the chattering boy and she quickly glides from the room, without a sound.

3.

The boy had an especially long bout of the shivers. The fever juggled his temperature from very hot, to very cold, sweating profusely all the while. Fading in and out of consciousness, baptized over and over again in the stream of rapids, then opening his eyes into soaked blankets. Through the night, his body tried to sleep, and perhaps it was willing to rest as he fell between the fingers of sandmans gentle clutch. Though he couldn’t. Instead he lay trembling, clutching his wool cocoon tight to his body, helplessly searching for warmth which the fever would not allow. In the dark, when he could briefly drift away to the cadence of his shakes, he could see the roaring stream, see his mother coming back in with hot chamomile and somehow hear the kids from school playing outside. He ached to join them and loathed his mother- dreamily, now physically out of action, a captive of his body, his feelings of exclusion became compounded. The boy suffered through the night, mind and body until sometime around eight in the morning. The sun filtered through the blinds and illuminated a dull haze in the room, and the boy had stopped shaking.

When his teeth finally stopped chattering, the static in his mind began to hush and he could once again think with some clairvoyance. Yet the thought of his peers just outside the house haunted him well into the day. He dare not get up from his blankets for fear of catching another chill, in the manner he was petrified of interaction with his peers though he knew he needed it. Badly. A scenario played in his mind, of leaving his mother in the house to deteriorate in silence, while he went out to find a place among his peers and form relationships; he imagined a faceless woman to host his oppressed love, though the scenario seemed superhuman. When his body did not want food, he was reminded of his biology, of the other things a person needs and his none-material anatomy. He began to fear how famished his mind may truly be, he feared that perhaps his mother had already starved, and that this fever taking such a physical toll on his body was a sign he needed to act.

At around 9:30 his mother appeared in the doorway, he had not heard her come in. Her distant eyes seemed almost to gain life with the forced smile she curled on her cheeks, a high stack of fresh multi-colored  blankets in her arms.

“You look a mess, bunny!” she cried.

He couldn’t disagree. He did not speak back to his mother, though now he could have. His loathing flourished, he was afraid to communicate with her and have to even slightly open himself up to her starved persona. Even the agonizingly lonely thought of his peers seemed healthier (or at least a bit more tethered to the soil) than to navigate his mother, whom in exclusively her presence as he’s been of late, he had become trapped his mind. His identity no longer stretched passed his surroundings and had shaped into a reflection of his setting (her setting), which lacked the boundaries and logic of what little boundaries and logic existed outside, and was often reliant on his mothers unpredictable emotion, which in his mind, exposed him to sickness. Especially while he was weak, he needed to separate.

His hair was still matted to his head, and his sweaty body writhing from extreme lethargy in his sheets still resembled a scene from an exorcism, so he remained silent. His mother off put by his silence, noticing he was no longer shivering yet yearning to interact with him to tether the static of her own mind before it overwhelmed her. She had lost sight of the outside world, but even she knew she needed interaction, though her son lay pained and silent. But hadn’t she come here to nurse him? Let the boy rest. Right? No? Yes! She won’t say a thing, she’ll just help him now like a good mother would and go watch her programs on television, yes, programs- nice.

His mother wraps the boy in fresh blankets and tucks in the superfluous sheets so his feet wouldn’t get cold- hospital corners.

4.

The blizzard seemed to lighten up, bombarding on the wooden cottage supports seemed to quiet. It became just warm enough the boy and his mother did not have to remain huddled around the fire. In fact, the sun became visible and hope that the snow would melt did gleam with it’s rays through the window. Only the boy moved away from the fire. He needed to stretch his legs, since the visitor had come he had been quite ill. His mother remained staring at the fire, as if she was mesmerized by the flames dance and wick, though her vision reaped no depth. Her mind was somewhere else, her eyes simply aimed towards the warmth. The sight of her scared the boy, he was ill and his instincts told him he needed his mother, though he knew her mind was somewhere out lost in the blizzard. Stronger than ever, he thought of leaving the cottage, perhaps he will go when he is healthy, a fever is only a few days. But then recovery. How will he know when he is ready to travel?

The boy tries to shake the ambivalence out of his head, time in the cottage is hurting him. Now he must only focus on getting better, although the nature of his fever seems to have changed. He could not quite put his finger on what the change was, but it stacked worry and nerves as he stares at his mother, entranced.

5.

“Mother!”

“MOTHERRR!”

The door swings open, his mother stands panting as if she had sprinted here, though her glide: silent.

“Mother look at this.”

The boy had his blankets pushed down to his waist, he pulls his shirt up to his chest to showcase his bare ribcage.

“I need to go to a doctor, Mother.”

His mother did gasp.

Down the right side of his abdomen, across the ribs and to his belly button, was a long dark purple bruise, almost black, and shaped like a kidney bean. Though it was not a bruise, it was ever slightly raised from the skin, sickly green veins protrude at it’s very defined borders.

At first glance his mother shared the boys fear and disgust at the sight of the growth. But maybe his mother was already too fragile to asses a new obstacle that could not be solved with muscle memory. She ought to care for him right? Don’t show him you’re scared too, just take control, reassure him, we need calm.

His mother glides to his bedside, a deep edge boar once again in her furry animal brow. She forces a hand through her own disgust towards her son.

“Let me feel it!” She snaps.

She glides the soft tips of her fingers across the blackened kidney bean shape as her feet did across the wooden panel floor. The growth was smooth, and behaved a bit like a blister in that she could press on it, though it was softer. The edges were rough and veiny where the skin was raised, but its plateau was perfectly smooth. It seemed less of a bruise and more of some kind of sack, one that both the mother and her son silently believed housed some dark puss.

His mother took a hard swallow before she spoke, careful not to sustain eye contact and staring toward her bed ridden son with little emotion. Then her cheeks curled into a smile.

“I think your fine” she said.

“A fever can bring on all sorts of things, just watch it and it should go away as you get better…”

She takes a deep yet hasty inhale as if she spent all of her breath squeezing out such feigned positivity, she tries to think on her feet.

“I think I’ll call your grandmother too and see what she thinks, just in case.”

A noticeably weighted silence fell over the boy and his mother, she could feel the uncertainty and sour in his expression towards her, and knew herself, far beneath her denial like a pea under a mattress, that she was mortified by the sack, and to an extent, her degrading mind knew instinctively to suppress it. His mother became confused again, the sight of the growth made her queezy and her senses began to muffle as she was overcome with scared static. She turns to the door and floats its way, emotionless and phantom.

6.

At first the boy simply pulled his shirt back down and his blankets back up to his chin. He tried to rest, to futilely forget about the swelling black mass on the soft of his belly. But in the same way he resented his mother, and feared the interaction with his peers, he felt an importance, a sort of horrible reverence for the growth he reared. Though the patch of stretched and blackened skin was sensitive, and stung on contact with the inside of his shirt similar to the way a sunburn feels on scolded shoulders.

His fever was still high, but his shivers seemed only to come in bursts on a horrific schedule of wind and the expose during the transition to his next set of clean blankets. Now stationary for so many days, the boy had become quite acquainted with the stream of rapid white waters. Somewhere downstream, he could now hear his mother clinging to a log to keep from being washed away, and kids from school began appearing at the banks. At first the boy thought the kids were laughing at him, but even such attention was flattering. The children appeared on the banks but were preoccupied and happy, aiming no attention towards the water and became a sick chimera of the boys mind just to acknowledge a need for his peers like a dollar on a fishing line. And soon enough, when his consciousness did lose its tether to the soil, a new presence became known. Presence or feeling per say, while the stinging sensation on the mass of his belly became perpetual. Just the progression of hours on the day he called his mother in, saw the sensation progress from mere sensitivity, to searing pain that forced an image of his clammy, quivering belly into his mind with every blitz. But when he began to make his rounds to the stream, his belly’s sizzle came with a new, quite vague feeling of almost gratitude, a feeling his mother might have had if perhaps she had nursed him back to health maybe ten years her junior, a feeling as if he was helping something or perhaps feeding something.

The sense became very defined, and he grew increasingly afraid, as he believed there was no possible way he could be nursing anything good considering how he felt. Though the boy had only a suspicion of its catalyst, like moving into a new house and not quite being able to pinpoint what it was he missed from the old one.

As the hours dragged, he began to be tormented by the faces of youth he so missed, especially the perfect jawlines of girls who once fastened his stare, faces now reduced to mere cloudy fragments of imagination. There was no optimism, no hope in his mind, like the conditions for a fire to burn, there was no kindling. A sense of doom that he was forever stuck with only the memories of a healthy mind constructed impenetrable walls to his perception as long as he was bed ridden. He could only sink deeper into the six foot trench, tailing the casket where his mothers sanity lay. His mind was stuck on an icy slope and there was no traction to keep him from sliding farther and farther down, making the fever worse and worse.

7.

Since discovering the mass, his mother only came in to the room one other time. It was later the next day, the sun was setting and the boy was by this hour at a near state of comatose. Although he was still startled, in the shape of a jump of his neck in her direction when he heard the door swing open, his jostle enflamed the mass beneath his many layers of blankets and he winced yet lay silent.

“Well good news!” His mother began, with a forced frilly cheer in her voice, though her eyes looked tired and distant and the lines in her face seemed especially shaded. The boy immediately figured she had been brooding on the existence of the black belly blister almost as much as he had, even her hair was tangled and nested. But the boy could anticipate what she would say to him. He so wished his mother to come in and express horrible worry about the growth, take him to the hospital, or just cry, how refreshing that would be, how sane, how human. She couldn’t be bothered, the boy could tell her mind was someplace downstream, clinging to a log to keep from being washed away, while her body stood here to exhale whatever it was her mindless toiling could invent.

“I spoke to your grandmother on the phone, I told her about your fever sore, and she said the same thing I did. Its definitely not a tumor or anything bad!” she laughed nervously.

“She said to just keep an eye on it and as you get better, it should fade away.”

For the length of a single breath, she made eye contact with her son, who looked in her direction but was silently aghast at what she had said, fever sore? He saw what resembled a scared animal in her iris, her mania and confusion was in plain sight, posed like a camera hungry model. Her eyes dart off of him, she forces one last smile in his direction then turns and hurries from the room.

The door slams, sending woody creaks like the groan of a frog into the floorboards. And even despite his mothers silent step, the boy thought he felt her standing just outside the door for a moment, listening. The boy was silent, but as the stop watch pounded over his heart, he thought just how long his mother must have been poised outside, he imagined her ears tuning in to hear even the shallow breaths from his nostrils. He closed his eyes and laid back, taking as much strain from his breath to make as little noise as possible and he stayed that way for what seemed like hours, not realizing he managed to comfort his body down to a point, where the pendulum of sleep tipped passed his fear, and he slipped away.

8.

 As sandman cradled the sleeping boy, he dreamed. But now he did not see a stream or his mother, the scene was foggy and his peripherals were none existent, but he knew by the handsome sun and the flagpole, that he was in the grass courtyard of some sort of school. This was not his school, he didn’t think, but oh how great it felt to be standing outside- the fresh air! The boy strut across the grass, passing his faceless dreamy peers dressed in varying shades of orange and pollen yellow. The ecstasy, and relief of rest with his mind at ease caused exult even when he was unaware of the dream. It was then somebody walked in front of him. His knees bolt up-right, stopped in his tracks and his eyes widen, he stares at the person and he realizes he can see their face, it was a girl. He felt his cheeks glow red hot, the girl stood, smiling her opulent pearl teeth and diamond iris with the gentle warmth of a nun, though her beauty was youthful and attractive. There was a sense of familiar in her eyes, she stood silently, yet her warmth made it seem perfectly reasonable to accept every last drop of her smile, and offer his own rosy cheeked grin in return. The girl motioned forward for a hug, and the two embrace, the handsome sun’s rays hit the back of his arms around her. He feels his lungs spread like wings for a whirlpool of gleeful breath, how long it had been since the sun seemed to shine and he could feel alive. The two shared a hug for a few seconds, and for that brief moment, he was a man, outside the cottage, free at last and ready to live a full life and find a woman. Although the longer the two stood in grasp, a candle did flicker in his mind. He is hugging for an awfully long time: I don’t know what I’m doing, there are guys who have all kinds of practice with girls, what am I thinking? What will she say to her friends? His loathing crept upon the shaky supports of his happiness, and his dreaming mind knew it. As if a dreamy conduit of his ambivalence, the girl wiggles in his arms, swatting him off of her like she was covered in bugs. Not a foot between them, her smile was gone. Her once soft, welcoming face was now replaced with a horribly familiar deep edge that boar into her now furry animal brow, she had a glare of pure disgust that mirrored the boys esteem, as he looked down to see what she was seeing, his belly now fat and grotesque, peaking from beneath his shirt, and the now apparent stink of his breath wafted up into his nose and he felt instant embarrass. He felt suddenly appropriate to be glared at with such disgust and guilty he ever encouraged a hug in the first place. But then the boy, now fat and wretched, stinking of rotted vegetables, became mortified. He looked at the girl, ready to turn and run back to wherever it is he came, to storm back through the blizzard, to lock himself in the cottage and swallow the key, when he saw an unmistakable look in her eyes beneath her deep, furled brow. The eyes of his mother stare back at him, colorless and distant, she looks fidgety and impatient. Then his mother swings an arm like a witch at the fat boy, who was now too big to dodge and she swipes a thin cut with her nails swiftly across the right side of his abdomen and to his belly button. For a split second, he was still more ashamed than he was in pain, the scratch was momentarily no worse than a paper cut, before he was plowed by a searing ripping sensation across the wound. He screams into the sky, now grey and cloudy, the flagpole hanging limp in the stagnant breeze. He clutches his hands to his belly and is shocked to feel a hot greasy fluid run between his fingers. Horrible black goo was bleeding from his stomach, and the cut had torn into a wide crescent to his bellybutton, exposing his innards. The boy drops to his knees, his head still craned up to the sky screaming, the chords of his neck flared like a lizard ready to shoot venom. He lets out a deep desperate moan, throwing spit off of his bottom lip as he holds his belly, feeling gravity act on his organs, urging them to fall out into his palms. As his intestines begin to escape, he looks down, near fainting at his disembowel, and beginning to wish even deaths rescue. He lets out the worst blood curdling scream of all, shattering his minds standards like a wine glass. His intestines were thick black snakes, falling and uncoiling from his belly, covered in black goo, they writhed and squirmed in their pool of sludge in the grass at his knees. The fat boy looks up to the girl, tears streaming in white water deltas down his cheeks to see his mother, now clear in the light, eyes colorless and distant, her face holding no emotion and her thick fingers wrapped around a mug of chamomile, whisps of steam swimming off of its milky surface. – plenty of cream and plenty of sugar.

9.

The snow outside was melting rapidly. The doormat on the inside entrance of the cottage now doubled as a sponge for the water seeping through the cracks in the wood, and despite the air retaining it’s frigid, aggressive chill, the fire was no longer tended, and had gone out. The thick wooden structure of the cottage shaded the interior to near darkness even when the sky was clear and blue. The boy and his mother’s fire was almost necessary to see around the place, or even see eachother. The boy, still battling his fever lay in one corner of the floor, huddled and shivering that jiggled the beads of sweat quickly down his face. His mother was in the opposite corner, to the best of his knowledge that is. His mother had been so still and so quiet at her end of the floor, he could only assume she still sat idle in the shadows. The boy was in a daze, only his feverish visitor to keep him company and he had gone so long without any interaction aside from navigating his mother, he was unconsciously losing the ability to interact all together. He sits in silence, his eyes colorless and distant, only loosely aware he sat as idle as she did, veiled in the darkness.

10.

As days crawled passed, the boy had lost all concept of time. His mother, he assumed had been driven away at the thought and confusion of the black growth, and to come to terms with the extent of her fears, would mean to come to terms with the extent of her madness, and how she denied it, as if it would even be possible to accept such a thing. So she simply left, and beneath his layers of wool blankets, the boy had become frail and skeletal. Without his mother, when the choice came to get up, to face the air and risk another bout of chills to fix himself any sort of nourishment or fetch fresh blankets not soaked with cold sweat. The choice was clear, he had fully submitted to the fever and stayed huddled, at least slightly warm, where his mind had already sunk to a point of defeat. Almost intentionally starving himself, to deprive his mind of fuel to form any vivid thoughts that only taunted his sanity and how lonely he had become. Now floating on his back downstream, dozing to the white noise chuckle of the water, his unconscious visions and reality began to blend. He could no longer achieve a defined period of sleep, as his mind was constantly at a state somewhere in between.

However, in the back of his mind like a buoy floating as a speck you can barely discern from shore, the boy knew exactly what caused him his unrequited feelings of feeding. Beneath his layers of wool blankets, his black boil-esque growth had burgeoned from it’s original size exponentially, inflated and hanging off of his famished body like a water balloon at the end of a hose, black and polished. The growth was a parasite as was his cannibalistic depression, eating away at him and growing with every day that passed. The boy had not eaten, spoken or changed positions for three days, when his knees finally rippled beneath his wool blankets and he pushed them to the floor.

 Maybe still in his mind, he had not connected that the worse he came to feel, the larger his growth would become. Yet he saw it, if not indirectly as the embodiment of his troubles. When his eyes drift to look at it’s reflective black surface like a bubble of dark ink, he sees the eyes of his mother, the faces of his classmates and his own body, grotesquely sick and pathetic. It was over. He stands with shaky knees as a newborn calf on his knobby ankles and chorded feet, his clothes now hanging off of his starving body, and he walks through the door.

The boy hears every dull clap like the sound of an unpassionate pecking kiss of his bare feet on the wooden panel floor and makes his way down the hall to the kitchen. He leans through the kitchen doorway and nearly loses his footing, collapsing onto his mothers cabinets, but the growth screams in pain and he catches himself. He pulls open one of his mothers drawers at his waist to reveal rows of shining silverware, and he prods his fingers like insect legs around the handle of a steal steak knife. His fist grips the handle and with that, he falls back onto the kitchen floor, landing hard on his bony buttocks. Unbothered by the pain, not stopping to wonder if he’s hurt, the boy kicks his feet to push himself across the floor and prop himself against the wall, he takes a deep breath.

The blade was very slightly serrated, but it was the sharpest his mother owned. He pulls his shirt off with his free hand and drops it beside him, his shoulders are beginning to shake with his cold sweats and even at the sight of the blade, he can hear the rush of the stream and the distant laughs of his peers. The boy holds the blade like a wooden stake, business side down, and touches it’s cool edge to the veiny border of his growth, the skin was stretched and thin. He gently traces the blade around it’s plump, kidney bean shape, dragging a sensitive sting around it’s perimeter. The boy begins to tremble separate from his feverish shakes, and he pushes the point of the blade against a particularly raised green vein on the edge of the growth and punctures it. Even in a semi-conscious state, his eyes widen, blind to the pain at his bewilder. Black oily goo, ever slightly thinner in viscosity than blood began to bubble and run down his abdomen and onto the kitchen floor. He wretches in disgust but sinks back into the stream and examines his now quivering growth. Despite his terror, the boy could not feel total surprise at the black liquid running through his veins, he nearly expected the sight, that his fever and depression had permeated his body like the cold sweat on his blankets. His hungry mind is slow to process, a silent moment of awe passed, when the boy felt a sudden surge of energy, that did bring a hot burst of pain at what he had done, yet it came with a foreign sense of anger. He watches the goo pool on the floor beneath him and once again see’s within it’s black, his mother’s colorless distant eyes, the smiles of his peers, and his own skeletal body. How he felt a victim of those reflections, yet despised them, how horribly he hated them. How unfair that I don’t get to live a life like they do, that I don’t get to laugh, that I don’t get to love! And the boy digs the blade back into the wound at the edge of the growth. He puts both hands around the blade and pulls it along the broad side of it’s kidney bean shape, spilling the dark liquid over his hands, soaking his oversized clothes and running along the floor. The boy becomes frenzied at the site and pulls the blade with more force as if he’s stirring some thick, horrible pot. Fluid splashes in the puddle he now sits, and the boy’s vision began to blur. The growth had burst like a blister, and the outer darkened skin hung into his lap and the boy drops the blade to his side. Underneath the blistered, veiny exterior and torrents of black goo, he saw the true growth protruding from his stomach as his hands began to numb. The boy was mortified at the sight of what he had been feeding, a disgusting offspring. But as he died against the wall, he felt bold to rid his parasite and some pride he does feel.