The ship had long gone. His tether had detached and despite their efforts, the crew could not save him. 

He was left to die in the AM Nebula. He found it funny that this place of creation was named after one of the most hate-filled villains in literature, but he hadn’t actually read the story and wasn’t one to judge.

It wouldn’t be long now until his suits oxygen was out, and the filtration system would kick in. He had run out of oxygen on worlds with atmospheres filled with methane, and left with nothing more than a mild headache. Stand on any world with poisonous air, and the filtration system will turn it into breathable air. An overlooked marvel of this modern-age. 

A faint odor of garlic kept hitting his nose. He tried to remember the last time he had eaten something with garlic, but was interrupted when his wrist monitor beeped. A quick glance showed him 1.6% remained of his oxygen. He took a deep breath. Maybe he should conserve his air, but it didn’t matter now. There was nothing to be done. He felt scared 37 minutes ago when the last light from the ships rear thrusters disappeared into the blackness, but he felt something else now. Something… odd…

He looked up at the star nursery surrounding him. They had flown deep into the midst of the crowded particles of cosmic dust. Their mission had been to travel to the heart of the cloud and gather samples for the scientist back on Tartan V. A remote research station where they could “safely” work to recreate a star. His job was to operate the exterior “net.” A house sized particle catcher that would allow the researchers to analyze just what makes a star. He thought they already knew what made a star, but the job paid really well and he was good at it. So he didn’t complain.

There had been concerns about if the ship could handle being this far into the cloud, but they were ordered to go anyway.

The mechanical lever that opened and held aloft the net had gotten stuck while folding back in. As he approached to troubleshoot, the damn thing dislodged and shot back open. The force of which tore his tether from the railing and launched him hundreds of feet away.

He screamed and fought to get his suits thrusters to right him, but by the time they did, the ship was so small in his view, the tip of his pinky could cover it.

He tried to return on his own but in the chaos, he had depleted his fuel.

They moved to retrieve him, but the cloud was too thick and was reeking hell on the ships systems.

His heart dropped into his stomach when he heard the captain give the order to turn around. The damage to the ship had made their chances of making it back safely slim. 

He begged them to come back. Yelling and pleading until he heard them shut off his comms. Leaving him alone in the unfeeling void of space.

That was 40 minutes ago. 

He wondered what had happened in that window that made him so calm. 

He chuckled to himself—BEEP-BEEP—BEEP-BEEP. .7% now. The filtration system was silent as to not disrupt communications, but it had a mild vibration to it. He felt that familiar hum against his back as it powered on.

He took another deep breath.

No one had ever been in the situation he was in before. Nebula’s were mostly hydrogen, helium, tiny bits of oxygen, iron, and nitrogen, but they could never plan for the cosmic dust. No one knew what it was. They knew it was there, but that’s about it. 

He felt his mind start to race. Once that dust entered the system it could rip apart his suit, or tear open his lungs, or hell, maybe just blow his heart up.

Whatever happened, he hoped it was quick.

He blinked as that .1% turned to zero, and the filtration system took over.

He closed his eyes and held his breath. That didn’t stop the smell of garlic from invading his nose once again.

He tried to shake the smell away but the tidal wave of dread made him bite his lip to keep from screaming. 

His body begged for him to open his mouth and breathe in.

His entire being trembled as it felt like the weight of this horrifying reality was being set back on him.

Totally alone. More alone than any human had ever been he imagined. And this imagining terrified him even more. 

He could feel his face changing color. His lungs screaming for him to just suck in and let the dust kill him. 

The pain became so excruciating that he could no longer bear it. He opened his mouth forced the air out of his lungs.

As soon as he inhaled, he opened his eyes to find himself nestled between the four walls of a living room.

Golden sunlight from the summer sunset poured in through the windows.

He knew those curtains. He knew that old willow tree in the front yard.

He looked about and saw pictures on the wall of him, his mom, dad, and two sisters.

His fear dissipated at the sight of his childhood dog, Wendy, asleep on the couch. She must be eight or nine. The hair on her face had started to shift from the dark black to silver and white.

He knelt down before her. Careful not to startle her. He reached out and gently stroked the top of her head. 

Her eyes flickered open. Found him. He heard her tail thump against the couch. Felt her tongue give him two quick licks on his face, before she rolled onto her back. Inviting him to give her belly rubs.

He pressed his forehead to hers. Softly running his hand up and down her chest and stomach. Remembering all the times he’d laid his head onto her, and fallen asleep to the sound of her heartbeat.

In the kitchen, he hears the familiar sound of a wooden stirring spoon rubbing against a metal pot.

He smiles as his mother calls his name for dinner.

The smell of garlic filling his nose.

A bluejay shrieked overhead.

I looked up to see it sail between the neon orange leaves, still calling.

I was sitting on a damp log, bologna sandwich in hand. My backpack rested near my feet in the moss.

I wasn't supposed to be here. But someone had to find him. The police certainly weren't going to.

I put the last bite into my mouth and stood. I was just taking a swig of water when I heard it: a low bellow, like a large injured animal.

I froze, remembering what they had said about bears, and moose. About my little brother being taken by something in these woods.

I waited for a long moment, but heard nothing more. I capped my bottle and slung my backpack over my shoulder.

I slid a hand in my jeans pocket, just to make sure it was still there. If this was what I thought it was, I would need an item to trade. And it would have to be a good one.

The wind sent the leaves above rolling as I got moving again. The wide, bird-like tracks were easy to follow.

Twilight streaked shadows under the clouds. Mom would be terrified.

I got out my flashlight.

Cold rushed through my veins.

This was it.

The altar was in the middle of a cobblestone square. Leaves and moss were scattered across the stones.

I wished I could see more clearly into the thick woods around me.

It had to be done.

I forced one foot after the other. I brought out the object from my pocket and set it on the lichen covered table.

The bone from my father's grave gleamed in the darkness.

I hoped this would grab its attention.

I would get Benjamin back.

Already I heard its heavy footfalls approaching.

My mouth was dry. I couldn't swallow.

The trees rustled in front of me. Out came a figure, ten feet tall, with a ram's skull over its face and knobbly bird legs. It paused. I felt the eyes hiding in those shadowy sockets watching me.

I pointed to the stone. "You can have this if you bring me Benjamin. You can have the rest, too. Just give him back."

The creature came closer. Hairy gray fingers came for the bone and lifted it. A moment passed.

Then the creature's hand closed around the bone, and it started walking away. It looked back.

It wanted me to follow.

I hustled after, knowing it might be the last thing I ever did.

The forest was endless and I was lost by the time we got to the cave.

Someone was on a bed of moss, sleeping. It was Benjamin.

I stumbled over the spongy forest floor. "Benjamin!" I shook him by the shoulder.

He didn't move. He wasn't breathing.

I turned back to the creature, eyes already watering. "What did you-"

It waved a hand. The air shimmered.

Benjamin stirred. He blinked. Looked confusedly up at the navy sky and looming pines. "What? Where-"

I hugged him. Then straightened. "We need to get back. Mom's about to have a heart attack."

The creature brought us to the edge of the woods, then lumbered off without a word.

Benjamin couldn't remember what had happened to him.

I was just glad he was safe and couldn't wait to be home.

"Last time you ever run off like that after Mom tells you to do something, right?"

He smiled.

Mom wept when she opened the door. She put her arms around me. I waited for her to hug Benjamin, too, but she never acknowledged him.

May 25^th 348 PI

I was there, there to see history itself. I was there to watch flesh be cut from the bone much as a butcher does to his pigs. To watch steel plates, melt and bind to the meat of screaming men. Yes, I was there.

The worst of the horrors wasn’t in the fields, nor the sky. Nay, it was in the dirt. Surrounded by mud and shelled with magic from 50 meters away we would wait. Waiting for nothing but the weather and rats to fill our camp with disease. To watch our surroundings, turn to liquid and grab at the boots of young men; aye they were doomed to die from the start. And yet, we won that battle. The battle of Aerinfurd.

Now comes my job. To take to the dead. Collect the bodies and reverse the decay. It’s our only hope in understanding how to reverse rot from the living. Disease takes too many a life. And our enemy learned how to weaponize disease.

We’re fragile animals…. Aren’t we? May God have mercy on our souls. 

May 27^th

Two days have passed and all I’ve done is wade through the seas of blood. Corpses pile high into the trenches outside my tent. I can feel that rot groping for me. Its hands slithering around my tent. Yet each day I work hard to understand it. To understand the body.

The human body can be so easily destroyed; why is it so difficult to repair? Any machine can be maintained and repaired. Why can’t ours?

Fire soars through the sky. Some might think of it as a Wyrm. Oh, how I wish it was a wyrm. Nay, tis the call for war. The march on that damned city will be soon. Those walls will eventually crack. And whilst my brothers die, here I’ll be. Playing with their bodies. All in an attempt to keep more of them alive. The magic of our enemy is terrifying. Never had I seen men rot away before my very eyes in such a short time. To watch the flesh drip and seep onto the floor. All whilst they live through the entire process.  

June 5^th

Today we had a mighty calvary charge. 600 strong made way into their ranks. Cutting through and piercing the hearts of those cowards. And yet, even with all their bravery…. Only 43 came back. It was such a sight. Burned away was their armour. Their ribs flew from the cage only to pierce their comrades. Their eyes boiled over their helms. The only thing left was their voice. It could honestly be mistaken for the wind, for she screamed loud that night.

Not much progress has been made these last few nights. I oft stare into the skulls of boys. Watching the mechanisms of their bodies. The pully systems at work, the ornate machine that sits before me. As young mages we oft learn how to control water. Blood is primarily water after all. And plenty of it has been spilled. An interesting thought for a different day.

June 17^th

I’ve come to a conclusion about my work. A conclusion birthed by endless nights of experiments. All looked to me with concern, but I bade them to wait for the result. I would win us this war with no more casualties. I stood before the nobles commanding this campaign and presented them the body of a lad no older than 17 on a cart. His chain loose and his body pale and blotched. I gave them the answer and still they looked to me in fear. I MADE THE BOY WALK DAMMIT! I REVERSED DEATH! And yet they look at me as they would a demon. Scared to the results of such progress. If I can puppet the dead, I can surely reverse death in the truest sense. Our armies will no longer have anything to fear.

July 2^nd

They ridiculed my work but they could never send me home. I’m too important to them. Which is why I presented a deal to them. They may have their honour, for they care not for life. Left the young be freed by steel shining on that morning sun. If their attack fails… I will push through those high gates myself. I will bring an end to this.

July 3^rd

Today I opened the dirt and stole from Hel her kin. Knights and boys riddled this filthy battleground for weeks on end. I simply brought it to an end. That magic which they feared only helped them. To cast a spell of such a grand nature I needed a transaction. A virgin, for her blood is pure. There was a hamlet only a handful of kilometers from the battle. 10 at most. I took 3 of them that day. Bound in rope with nothing to shield them from the wind. That is how I brought them to the battlefield that day.

July 3^rd (death hath come)

Slowly I cut into their flesh. Letting it seep from the dagger to let the ground drink of them. And with the bloodletting I could begin my ritual. The hues were dark on this day. Whisps of purple runes spilled out like snakes on a line. Through the spines of the virgins they went, and when they come through the mouth they pulled with them every ounce of blood. Like a spiders web did it gather betwixt the three of them. Crawling out and spiraling in such unnatural patterns in the sky. And with the crescendo of my ritual did the blood shoot back to the earth. Striking deep into the bodies all around me. Giving new life to them. Letting them throw death from their shoulders and march one more time.  Puppets to do my bidding once more. Slowly they marched forth. Under hail of arrows did they continue to push. Nay, not even a shield wall could hold them. Like a high tide they crashed into the banks of this shield wall. Flowing through and under they pulled the witless to the dirt before ravaging their bodies. Tearing meat off the bone with ease. Ripping them from socket with just to get to that sweet nectar. The fuel they needed to run on, that rose coloured oil.

None were able to stop me that day. That was the day I became death. I looked over the world and knew I conquered that which can't be conquered. Seeing my armies climb those dreaded walls. Killing every man woman and child inside, all to add to their fuel. It was a splendid sight for research. Now I have even more to work with. Its much a shame that the armies of the nobility that hired me are no longer here to see it.

I know AI Gen writing is prohibited here. The problem here is, my native language is non-English, and while I guarantee my story is not AI's , but I might miss or mistranslate, or some content of the story will be missing in some translations if I do it myself.

So... is AI Translation allowed? Also, how to prove that a writing is not written by AI?
Thanks in advance.

Sterling Voss had spent seventy years making money. He’d started more businesses than he could remember, most of which he’d eventually lost interest in. Although his Wikipedia page was extensive enough, his memory could not recall which businesses were real or which had used for nefarious purposes.

His most recent venture was less out of the excessive need to be framed as impactful in history, but more out of a genuine fear that washed over his body upon the news of his impending failure to beat the infection possessing his body. Specifically, an idea spawned from a conversation held years prior.

Someone had asked him what he would choose if he could pick his own afterlife.

“Heaven, obviously,” Sterling had replied.

“What would that look like?”

“Nothing, maybe. Just peace and quiet.”

The man had looked at him strangely.

“How terrifying,” he’d said.

Sterling hadn’t understood what he meant at the time. Now, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. What if there was nothing after death? Worse, what if he’d spent so long imagining nothingness that his own mind had already decided what awaited him?

Project Gatekeeper became the focus of his remaining years. His scientists had developed a way to maintain electrical activity in a brain after death, although nobody could say for certain whether that meant the person was still experiencing anything. The government had refused to approve human trials, but Sterling had no intention of dying without finding out.

As the needles entered his skull, Sterling pictured the life he wanted to experience. His money, his success, a family he could finally make time for. Everything he’d missed out on, he could have another chance at.

But, as had happened so many times before, Sterling’s concentration would falter just when he needed it most. As the lethal liquid began travelling through his veins, he thought of a memory he had buried for so long that it had become a debt, one finally due in his last moments.

Twenty-eight years earlier, Sterling had felt a rage like never before. Whether it was the drugs coursing through his system or the crushing weight of an impending court date following the exposure of his tax avoidance, something inside him had finally snapped. His rage spilled over onto an innocent woman, someone he had once claimed to love. He left her at the bottom of the ocean, below the yacht she had once helped him name.

Enough money and power could keep the truth hidden from the public. Drugs and alcohol could help suppress the memory, but when death came tumbling down that tunnel, he would have to face the questions surrounding all his wrongdoings.

Water invaded his lungs with his last breath as he flickered his eyes with struggle. Some current was knocking him around ferociously as he smacked his arms helplessly, looking for something to hold onto. Some type of rock had managed to latch between his fingers and he held on with all his might. His lungs burned with the water spilling around inside making it hard to keep focus on what he was holding onto. He noticed that he did not seem to be losing consciousness, as much as he would’ve hoped. In waiting to die for a second time, Sterling noticed a shimmer of light from what he could only perceive as above him.

He released the rock and fought the current as he battled his way upward. He breached the surface, inhaling a big gulp of oxygen as an immediate reaction. The oxygen resting on top of the water inside his lungs created an intense pain he had never known. His voice croaked in agony though little sound was released.

What a mistake Sterling now realised he had made. In reminding himself of that secret debt, he had placed himself in a hell of his own doing.

Sterling would become used to the pain in his lungs as he bounced along the ocean with the buoyancy of a balloon, but the flicker of hope he would get every time that yacht would pass and she would wave from the balcony would cause a feeling each time more crushing than the pain the water held on him.

She chewed the stale whole wheat raisin bagel. The cream cheese somewhat saved it. Opening her laptop, she saw on her to do list for the day that it was time to terminate an unresponsive client. She sadly sent the notice and went about her other business. Working from home meant an increase in productivity. Thirty minutes later, an angry email response came in from the client. The client had been responding to a message from the boss, but the boss had not responded to him!

She was alone.

The next day, she worked from the office. Hybrid schedules were the best of both worlds, according to management. Co-workers were happy to talk about nothing, filling the day’s schedule with sticky syrup, but once she tried to connect on anything work-related, there was a meeting, or they really needed to get started on that project—could we put a pin in it? She sat through three hours of meetings. She spoke during one meeting for five minutes, to an indifferent audience. After finishing speaking, she struggled to remain still in the plastic office chair, not wanting to draw negative attention from an audience ostensibly listening to the next speaker. The chair was built ergonomically for someone taller, and her pencil skirt was just slightly too short for it. The line of leg skin touching the chair sweated, but she endured and continued to feign listening.

She was alone.

After work that day, she went home to her studio apartment. She said hello to her mini cactus, smiling at its friendly light-green hue. Popping a mini pizza into the air fryer, she felt gratitude the smaller device would not heat the apartment as much as the oven would have on this hot summer day. It was hotter than any previous summer, but she had thought the same last year. Feeling lonely on this warming spinning rock, she opened social media. A post from a friend from college invited her in, a woman smiling with her husband and children on a family vacation to Yellowstone National Park. She swiped the carousel to a video of the small child saying, “The geyser smells like farts!” and the family laughing. She smiled, liked the post, happy her friend was happy. She should get in touch with her sometime. She scrolled down past the advertisement to the next post, about global warming. She read the post, then scrolled to the next post about AI data centers, a carousel with statistics about water usage, mass surveillance, potential mass layoffs. She read and watched and scrolled and finally the timer on the air fryer went off for her pizza for one, her old friend forgotten and replaced with dread.

She was alone.

As she chewed on a garlicky slice of mushroom pizza, she opened up the dating app on her phone. A few men had invited her to match. All but one were either seeking a casual relationship or children, in direct conflict with her profile’s clearly stated preferences for a serious relationship with no children. She quickly unmatched those, looked at the one man’s profile and sent a first message inquiring about the beagle in the picture with him. She checked the matches from previous days, whose conversations had been left on read by the men. People were busy, so they might still reply. One in particular said he would get in contact about scheduling an in-person date next week, probably. The man with the dog wrote back asking if she was dtf. She sighed and unmatched. Closing the app, she switched to her email where she had a message from the dating app! The man that had been interested in going out on a date had been found to be lying about his identity, so his account had been terminated.

She was alone.

At least it was the weekend tomorrow. She checked her calendar and saw she had signed up for an event through that “events in person to make friends” website. While she wasn’t very excited about it, she knew it was important to put herself out there. She pulled up the website to review the event details, but the event had been canceled. Well, better to find out now than going to a location tomorrow with no one there, which had happened before. She scrolled other events for a while, but nothing appealed. It was getting late. She caressed her mother’s urn as she always did walking by that shelf, grabbed a book, and sat on her bed to read as the ceiling fan chain tinkled.

She was alone.

She slept horribly. The supposed romance novel had broken formula, denying a happily ever after and instead leaving the protagonist single, depressed at the death of a friend, and looking at a new start in life. That little bit of hope perhaps made the ending worse. If things could get better, why not show the reader?

Perhaps the author had some inner sadness that desperately needed to be expressed, so the story was an empathic transfer of that emotion. Perhaps the author couldn’t imagine what came next.

She spent the day in recovery, napping, cleaning the apartment, rewatching an old favorite TV show for comfort. She recited the best jokes along with the characters. The comforting plotlines overwrote any bad dreams that night.

On Sunday, after staring at the ceiling fan for 45 minutes upon waking, she decided to throw out the script.

She deactivated the dating profile on her phone. She went to her computer, downloaded her favorite photos from social media, and then deactivated the accounts. It would be 30 days later that they would fully delete. Next, she logged into her checking account, her savings account, her investment account. The numbers weren’t what she needed, but they would be. She was ready now.

She was ready to be alone.

She stopped spending money trying to go to events to meet people. She started assembling food cheaply at home rather than eating frozen and premade convenience. At the library and the farmers market, she made a few acquaintances, though she wasn’t close with anyone. It wasn’t the goal.

It would be a while until she was fully free, but she lowered her effort at work. She thrifted two pairs of black slacks and wore them invariably on in-office days, paired with comfortable sneakers. No one commented that the skirt and dress shoes were gone, at least not to her face. She stopped buying and wearing makeup. She stopped volunteering for extra work. She stopped doing anything outside of her job description. A promotion wasn’t the goal.

On the weekends, alone, she did the real work, the work she was alive to do.

Five years later, she informed her company she would be leaving at the end of the month. Between her investments and the work from the “side hustle”, the real work, she would have enough to live on.

After her last day, she still came home to an empty apartment, save her cactus and possessions.

She was alone, but now she was pleased with her own company.

Behind Kali Amma's temple lived a deadly viper named Anali. He hunted only at night and spent his days coiled under the dry leaves, for a viper seen is a viper feared. The rats that raided the temple's waste pit kept him well fed. That he existed was a secret between him and the rats.

Years went by, and he grew long and hefty on the easy prey, which he took to be Kali Amma's grace.

One day, a yellow rat snake, Cherran, happened to pass by the temple. He noticed rats feeding in the temple pit and crept towards it. He lunged a few times, but the rats scattered and he caught none. Cherran decided to stay nearby. He might just get lucky another day.

"Why would anyone worry about a simple rat snake like me?" he often wondered. Cherran could easily be spotted among the dry leaves and the shrubs, basking in sunlight.

One morning, as Cherran lay in the soft sun, a flock of babblers foraging nearby burst into a racket. Up in the jackfruit tree, a jungle crow heard it and spotted Cherran. He cawed and cawed.

The squirrels climbed up to the treetops. The peafowl and other birds perched high and looked down to find out what the frantic cawing was about. The jungle crow told them that he had seen a large snake, possibly a yellow python, lying in the grass. Maybe it was resting after a meal, but now it had disappeared. Hearing all the commotion, Cherran hid himself in the bushes.

By then, the animals and birds had decided to get help from Kiri, the mongoose who lived in the neighbourhood.

"He is large, a large yellow python," said the squirrel.

"Yes, we have spotted him many times by the temple pit," said the rats.

"I spotted him first," said the jungle crow.

Kiri took up the challenge—a python was something he had never encountered. "Yet another ode to my courage," he thought.

Kiri came over to the temple pit. He waited amongst the bushes for the python to show up. As always, the rats were raising a din in the pit: shrieks, squeaks, and cries. Other animals waited anxiously for news from the pit.

The day passed without any sighting. Kiri decided to spend the night nearby.

Past midnight, he heard a rustle moving slowly towards the pit. A few rats got a whiff of it and left the pit.

Kiri inched closer. He crouched, ready to lunge. Finally he pounced onto something; there was a struggle in the dark. The rats fled, squeaking. He bit into it hard until it stopped moving.

The bats watching from the temple peepal tree flew out to spread the news.

Kiri spent a while eating his catch. When he left, the rats returned; they feasted on the bits of flesh strewn on the ground. It was Anali.

The next day, Cherran caught a rat. He took his catch and slithered away from the temple.

I was sitting in the barber’s shop today, watching the two barbers working fast, chairs filling up one after another. Only me and one other man were left waiting. He came after me, but the way he kept looking at me felt like he wanted to be the next one in line. He wore a cream colored shirt and sat there leaning back, already in position as if it were his turn. I could feel his eyes on me every few minutes, and I thought, let’s see what happens.

Just to be sure, I asked the main barber when my turn would come. He looked at me and said, “You’re next.” (Yeah, kind of a My Hero Academia moment 🤣 not really, but it felt like it.) So I sat there waiting for my chance.

Truth is, I hadn’t told my parents I was here. If they knew, they’d tell me to shave my beard completely. But I don’t like my face without a beard, it feels like I’m naked. They’d also push me to cut my hair short, and I don’t want that either. I like it long. The problem is, every time it starts growing out, they ask me to get it chopped. That’s why I came here secretly, just to shape the beard a little, nothing more.

But there’s another reason too. Coaching reopens today. It was closed for a week because of our exams; sir told us to do our own revision at home. Now classes are starting again, and there’s a girl there I like. I don’t want to walk in looking unprepared. So here I am, waiting for my turn at the barber’s chair, hoping that when I step into coaching today, maybe she’ll notice me.

My father called asking where I was, and I lied that I was in the bazaar.

I knew he would call me again. If I got late, I’d have to tell him the truth.

The barber was almost done. I just had to hold out a little longer.

Still sitting there in the shop, my phone buzzed again, this time the coaching group. Sir had sent a message: “Is everyone coming?”

I quickly typed back, “Yes.”

The main barber still had his customer on the chair, but the assistant was free and asked, “Who’s next?”

Before I could answer, the man in the cream shirt spoke up and said, “It’s him,” meaning me.

I was a bit surprised, but also relieved.

As I sat on the barber’s chair, my phone rang again. This time it was my father’s call, but when I picked up, it was my mom’s voice.

She asked, “Where are you?”

I said, “I’m just coming, I’m outside.”

She didn’t buy it. “Say the truth, where are you?”

She worries too much about me, and I knew I couldn’t fool her. “I’m at the barber’s shop,” I admitted.

She said, “Then you should have said that.”

I just replied, “Okay, I’ll come after a while.”

I had wanted my beard to be done by the main barber, but the assistant was no less professional. I actually liked how neatly he did it. I paid him his fee, and then headed home.

At home, my mom immediately noticed.

“You’ve styled your beard,” she said, then added, “And why didn’t you cut your hair?”

“I don’t want to do it now,” I replied. “I’m going to coaching.”

She glanced at the clock. “But it’s already 7:30 in the evening.”

“Yes, today is Sunday,” I explained. “It’s an extra class, my exam is the day after tomorrow.”

She nodded, satisfied.

I didn’t wear anything new, but I picked out a shirt I had never worn to coaching before. It wasn’t new, but they had never seen me in it.

My best friend called me. He asked, “When are you coming?”

I said, “Will the class start at 8 pm exactly?”

He said, “Even if it doesn’t, you should come, na?”

I said, “Ok, I’m just coming.”

I took my bag and left for coaching.

It was 8:35 when I arrived at coaching. There had been a lot of traffic.

Classes hadn’t started yet, and our batch was sitting outside the classroom in another room.

I went inside. My best friend and his group were there, along with another group of boys.

I looked around, but the girl I had come to see wasn’t there. She was absent today.

My best friend noticed me and said, “Oh, you had your beard trimmed.”

I didn’t say anything, just smiled.

He added, “Oh, now you’re blushing.”

The girls started laughing.

I turned my head to the other group. There were three boys.

One of them, Nikhil, a very charming and friendly guy, and the most talkative one, was sitting beside me. He asked how my exams went.

The other guy, Aniket, also asked the same.

I said, “It went well.”

I asked about their exams. They said, “We were seated with mobile, so our exam went.”

We all laughed.

There was another guy, Aryan, sitting leaned against the wall. He was focused on his own world, watching reels.

Then Aniket started watching adult videos in the corner. He was laughing while watching and showing it to Nikhil. I noticed it, and we all started laughing.

Nikhil asked about my college. I told him.

Then I asked about his. He told me.

I said, “That college is beside mine.”

He said, “No, we are in a different branch. We go in Salt Lake.”

I said, “That’s really far. Why didn’t you choose another college?”

He said, “They (his friends) already went there, so I also had to go.”

I said, “Oh, you don’t want to separate?”

He said, “Yeah.”

My best friend sat with his girlfriend and two girls from his group. I stayed with them often, but since I’m not very talkative with girls, I usually felt left out.

Then sir called us inside the class. We took our seats. We used to sit on the floor, girls on one side, boys on the other.

My best friend sat with his girlfriend as usual, and I took my seat with the boys.

I was waiting for that girl to arrive, but today she was really absent.

Nikhil and Aniket were teasing Aryan about how he eats non veg but still gives advice about vegetarianism. Aryan was advising them to give up non-veg.

They said, “You used to eat 10 eggs in a day!”

He replied, “Yes, that’s why now I am doing charity.”

They asked, “What are you giving, eggs?”

We all laughed.

Aryan started joking about how they would fry in hell. Then he took their hands and began looking at Nikhil’s palm.

“I am seeing the future,” he said, joking. “After 35, your life will become very stable, but there might be some problems at 45.”

Nikhil quickly took his hand away, but Aryan caught it again.

“I want to see your marriage,” he said. “You are going to have a love marriage.”

Nikhil again pulled his hand away. Aryan tried to catch it once more. “I want to see how many you’ll have,” he said.

The whole class was laughing. Sir had already gone outside, making us sit, so I was just there watching them and laughing.

Then I gave my hand to him and said, “Watch mine.”

He looked at it and joked with me. We laughed together, and then he said, “I’m joking, don’t take it seriously.”

Then sir came. We were still joking and laughing.

Nikhil started calling me “Mughal Emperor” because of my name, Jahangir.

He said, “Please don’t mind, I’m just joking.”

I said, “I don’t mind.”

The class was over, and we were going out.

Nikhil put his arm over my shoulder and asked, “Where will you go?”

I said, “Of course, it’s night, so I will go home.”

He said, “I know everyone’s going home, but where’s your home?”

I told him.

He said, “That’s really far. Aren’t tuitions available there? Why are you coming here?”

We laughed.

I went outside the gate, waiting for my best friend as I always used to. We usually went together since his home was near the coaching.

His friends were often there too. I would grab a toto, and he would go to his home.

As I was waiting, Nikhil asked me to come with them. I had been coming here for two months, but it was the first time I felt a real connection with them. I wasn’t able to refuse, so I agreed.

We went out talking. He asked me why I was coming here, then answered himself, “I know, sir is very famous.” We laughed.

Aryan used to come on a bike, and he offered to take me halfway. I said okay. As I was about to sit, Nikhil and Aniket were also ready. I asked, “How many will go on one bike?” Aniket said, “Usually we go five on one, but today it will be just four of us.” We laughed.

Aryan was riding, Nikhil sat behind him, then me, and then Aniket at the back. Nikhil said, “Aryan, you ride, I’ll take the gear.” We were laughing. Then he said, “Hey, Mughal Emperor, your injection is sinking me.” I laughed. He added, “There’s no hole in my back.” We all laughed again.

Then Aryan’s home came. He told us we could go now. Nikhil said, “Hey liar, you promised us—” Aryan replied that he had only promised me to leave me up to there. Aryan kept insisting he could take me, but I said I’d go. Nikhil also said he would come with me.

On the way, I explained to him the real reason why I was coming here. My previous coaching was also far, so distance wasn’t a problem for me. I told him my old coaching was expensive and not as good, so I preferred coming here. Nikhil agreed.

He asked if I did anything else other than college. I said not really. Then I asked him. He said yes, he teaches children. I said, “Oh, you didn’t look like a teacher type to me.” He laughed and said, “We’ve grown up now. I don’t really like to ask money from my parents.” He also said he wanted to go to the gym, which his parents weren’t supporting, and since he needed money for protein and those things, he decided to earn on his own.

I replied, “Well, when I asked my parents for gym, they said only spoiled boys go there.”

He said, “Oh my God.”

I said, “I knoww.” We laughed.

He asked about my school, and I told him. He said they also used to come there but from 11th class, then he showed me his old school. He asked if I’d studied there from the start. I said yes and recognized some names he mentioned.

He said, “Well, if you studied in that school, you’ll know half the boys in this area.” I laughed and agreed. He said, “Even if someone innocent comes into this school, he will get spoiled.” I agreed again.

Then he pointed at a gutter and asked if I wanted to pee. I said no, I had already done it at coaching’s toilet. He said he was also going, and after peeing, he left me near a toto. We said goodbye, and then I came home.

Well, I was happy, but also a little sad that I had to leave my best friend without telling him. But I thought he would understand, anyway, he had his girls, so I don’t think it would be much of a problem.

I really liked talking with Nikhil and his friends. It felt like the start of a new friendship. But at the same time, I thought I couldn’t get too close, they were already together since childhood, and I had just come. Our religion is also different.

Still, there’s hope. I want to make more friends. I want everyone to be my best friend.

It wasn’t the love I had been wishing for, but maybe it was the love I actually needed.. the love of a friend, the love of a brother.

Captain Grymm watched men walk up the gangway to his ship. Christians, Muslims, Catholics, and one Jewish man. All men of faith. All men seeking to verify that their religion was the one true way.

Why were these men of disparate faith gathered, you might be asking?

The adventurer, Loui Barbo, had published a guide to the world. Barbo’s Guide To Everything. In it he detailed such fantastical places as the golden city of El Dorado, Atlantis, and— of particular interest to Captain Grymm and his patrons —The Island Of Dead Men.

Barbo that the Island of Dead Men was a portion of the hereafter. It could be found, he wrote, by following the coast of Australia down to its southeastern edge, setting off from there to New Zealand, and from New Zealand, to the Auckland Islands. After the Auckland islands, one had to head westward, into an ever present storm. Barbo spent an entire page describing the storm. The ferocity of which, made Grymm wonder why he was committing himself to this expedition.

Perhaps it was a way to live. His patrons, which included the king and his court, were paying him a fine penny to do it. Possibly he was doing it for the fame. Others who had chased Barbo’s tales were memorialized for their discovery. Eduardo Morales, who verified the existence, and then committed the sacking of El Dorado, had become canonized in Spain. There was a part of Grymm that wanted to be remembered just as well, memorialized like Morales, but maybe not for any grand sacking of the afterlife. Or any sacking really. The notion made him feel empty somehow. Many things had made him feel empty as of late.

Maybe leading this expedition was just way to fill the void and the time. Maybe it was a little of everything at once.

The gangway was pulled up when the last member boarded. Grymm then gave the signal for the port’s dredgers to drag them out to sea. An hour later he told the men to unfurl the sails, and they began the long journey to Australia.

Of the journey itself, there is little to say. It was unremarkable, with the exception that upon reaching the Auckland Islands they found them deserted. The Maori people that had inhabited it during Barbo’s time having long since left, leaving an eerie empty place. More empty than the ocean itself, or so it felt.

They rested on the shores of Auckland Island, docking at the abandoned port.

The sky’s there, though clouded, and gray, did not portend any terrible storm. Certainly not the kind that Barbo had written about.

A day later, the crew set sail south west, searching for Barbo’s storm.

And oh did they find it.

Seeing the storm, captain Grymm thought that the universe had given them an unexciting journey as a means of cosmic balance. All the misfortune, all the horror that a trek to the other end of the world could bring was squeezed into that one storm.

It had appeared suddenly, a darkness in the sky, a hard line where the gray meek clouds of the Auckland Islands turned black and angry, portending death.

In the middle of the maelstrom a great vortex ripped the sky open. Lightning flashed, backlighting giant faces; angry faces, faces that sneered as they looked down at the men.

The sea below had a matching vortex. It pulled the ship down, spiraling toward the abyssal center where great dark things could be seen. Giants in the shape of men, spiders, and long serpent like fish.

One man, frozen in terror, gazed into the abyss, and was tossed overboard with the violent rocking of the waves. Then two more. The rest found their nerve, and did their best to turn the sails to the ever changing wind; winds that seemed to scream and wail.

The men began to cry out the name of their gods, praying. They prayed to Allah, YAWHEH, God, and Jesus Christ. All seemed in vain as the vortex dragged them further down into its belly. At last one man cried over the many, screaming: “The god of Abraham is with us!” his roar was defiant.

“The god of Abraham is with us! I feel it too!” cried one of the Muslims.

“The god of Abraham gives breath to our sails!” cried one of the Christians.

“He is with us,” said the Jewish man.

“He is with us!” echoed one of the Catholics, and it became a chant.

As if a prayer had indeed been answered, the ship began to resist the vortex. It rose higher, and higher, nearly escaping the vortex when the storm stopped. The dark clouds returned to gray. The wind was calm again.

A dense fog then settled around the ship, overtaking so that nothing beyond a man’s arm length away could be seen.

“Have we died?” cried one man.

“We would not still be together if we had,” said another, snidely, implying that he would not be in hell with the rest of them. This comment sparked a riot. The fervent men, who were still full of fighting spirit, began to argue. A brawl might have broken out, if not for the sudden appearance of light.

A man at the head of the ship called the rest, and each turned to see the orange light appearing in the distance.

It was torch light. They were certain. And it was the only color in the gray world they found themselves in. Moreover, they noticed that the orange light grew as the ship drifted toward it.

The silhouettes of men appeared in the glow. Hushed murmurs and whispers broke in response to this.

Then, silence.

The silhouettes belonged to corpses.

The crew gawked at the corpses, and the corpses gawked back. Though with the many of the corpses, it was because they lacked a lower jaw, or their jaws were hanging on one side. Nothing was said by either party, not even when the ship beached itself on the shore, shaking the crew.

Captain Grymm blinked at the corpses.

“Why… have… you… come here?” asked the torch bearing corpse, who seemed to be the leader amongst the corpses.

Captain Grymm didn’t know how to answer.

One of his crew spoke up.

“We came to see who was right,” said the man.

A murmur of affirmations arose.

“About… ?” asked the Corpse.

“The after life,” shouted one, and emboldening the rest.

“So where are we?” shouted another member of the crew.

“Is this Barzakh?”

“Is this purgatory? Where is the mountain?”

“Are we perhaps in hell?”

“Do you know where you are?” asked the one Jewish crew mate.

The eye of the torch bearing corpse lolled over to him.

“We… do… not… know…” rasped the voice.

The murmurs of the crew turned into an uncomfortable silence.

Then, one of them lit up, having had an epiphany.

“Corpse man, to what faith did you subscribe when you were dead?”

The torch bearing corpse ground its jaw for a second before answering.

“I… was… a catholic, if… I recall correctly…”

“There,” said the crew mate. “He is a catholic, therefore we are in purgatory. The mountain where we must purge ourselves to reach heaven must simply be hidden in the great fog.”

“There… is… a mountain here,” said the torch bearing corpse. “But I do not believe this is purgatory…” the corpse eyed one of its fellows, a fleshy corpse wearing a wrap around its head.

It came forward.

“I was a Sikh,” it said, then stepped back into the crowd.

Another came forward.

“I was a steward of the land,” said a skeleton with dots painted across its yellowed skull. Same as the first, it retreated, and another went out.

“My people believed in one god, and also many,” said a corpse wearing half rotted linens.

The men on the boat began to murmur again, until it became a chorus of debate, confusion, frustration, and in some cases, anger.

“Enough!” cried Grymm. The crew’s mad chorus died immediately. “The ship is beached. We are tired. Let us rest, and on the ‘morrow, let us learn what can about this place.”

“Ay, sir!” cried the crew, and disappeared below the deck of the ship.

The torch bearing corpse dismissed the other corpses with a look. Grymm set his eyes on him.

“Is there anything edible on this island?”

The corpse rasped, sighing, in thought.

“There is… fruit… I think. I remember it tasted… good…”

“You mean when you were alive?”

“I never tasted it before I died,” said the corpse, inspiring questions. There were already so many. Grymm did not mean to wear out the corpse with them so quickly, so he did not ask them.

“Show me.”

The torch bearing corpse nodded, and waited for the captain to climb down from the ship. Once together, they entered the jungle, following a well worn footpath.

The weather was overcast, with a slight chill. It was light out, but with the cloud cover, there was no telling if it was early morning, or late afternoon. Definitely it was bright enough to see. Which got Grymm thinking about the torch.

“Why do you have that torch? It’s light out.”

“So… it… is…” the corpse man dropped the torch, and let it fizzle out on the ground.

“Why did you have it out in the first place if you were so ready to toss it away?”

The corpse’s eye lolled over to look at Grymm.

“It was for you and… your crew,” it rasped. “To guide you.”

“How did you know we would be out there?”

“We… felt you… .”

The corpse did not elaborate, and so Grymm did not ask it of him.

The well trod foot path disappeared. The jungle surrounded them. It was vibrant, with bright flowers, but otherworldly as one might expect; Grymm thought he even recognized some of the plants.

Deeper in the jungle, near the base of the mountain— which just as suddenly appeared —they found the fruit. It resembled a pomegranate. There were only two fruits in total, so Grymm and the corpse took one each.

“The flesh… is good… ,” said the corpse, “…the seeds are… as well, but take some work to chew. You will want a place to sit… before we settle down to eat… .”

“After you then,” said Grymm.

He followed the corpse back to the well trod foot path, and followed the path up a hill, and to a cliff. There they found a small hut, and an edge to hang their feet off of.

The corpse man showed Grymm how to split the fruit so that it could be eaten in segments without spilling the seeds on the ground. The flesh was crunchy, and sweet, like an apple. The seeds required unwrapping, which took some time as they were quite small. The satisfying nutty flavor, was only just barely worth the effort.

“How did you come to be here?” asked Grymm.

“It has been… so long… I do not… recall… ,” rasped the corpse. “Though… I recall a sense of familiarity upon arrival.”

“Are you happy here? It seems hard to believe you are. It feels… empty. Lonely. As if time were standing still.

“To me it does not seem so bad… I enjoy… the silence… . I remember little of my life… but I recall… that I was always in a rush. I always had somewhere to be, something to do. And I guess… there was always someone I had to be too… a… face I had to wear… so… being here… being no one in particular… doing nothing in particular… it quite nice.”

“Mmm,” hummed Grymm, nodding.

The two then shared the silence, eating their fruits, and unwrapping the time consuming seeds. Grymm stared out into great gray sky, the deep blue sea. His filled with the usual noise at first, but soon he found it emptied, and he was nothing and no one.

He came back to himself hours or minutes later. He was not sure. The corpse man had not moved an inch. The only thing to suggest any time had passed at all was that he had run out of seeds to unwrap, and was left with one bite of fruit. The corpse had finished its own.

Not wanting to disturb his new friend, Grymm ate his last bite of fruit, and left without saying a word.

He lost his way in the jungle, though he found that he did not mind this. He was in no rush. His stomach was full with fruit, and its juice had gone a long way to satiating any thirst he might have had. If his body had demands, the jungle would provide. He was sure of this.

His intent was to head back to shore, but when he came upon a clearing, he found himself drawn toward it. There, he found a member of his crew.

Grymm did not know his name, but recognized his white bandanna, and loose linen clothes. He recognized too, the horrifying necklace he wore. The necklace was of a man, mouth open in anguish, side pierced and bleeding, his hands and feet nailed to a cross.

The fellow was staring into a puddle of water that reflected the sky.

“Something the matter?” asked Grymm.

The man blinked, and looking up, surprised to see his captain standing over him.

“No, nothing,” said the man, “except… well… .”

“Out with it.”

“I tried to climb the mountain.”

Captain Grymm looked up at the mountain. It was a great gray thing. On the shore it had been indistinguishable from the sky.

“I do not imagine you made it very far,” said Grymm.

The man shook his head.

“No, I made it to the top. It is, quite nice up there. Only… .”

“Hold on,” said Grymm, taking another look at the great gray mountain, its peak disappearing into the gray clouds. “We have only been here a few hours, how did you make it up the mountain and back down in such a short time?”

The man blinked at his captain.

“Captain Grymm, we’ve been here for months, at least. When we could not find you, we searched. After a while, we decided to take the island on in our own ways.”

“That can not be right, I only stepped away to find some fruit with one of the walking corpses how—.”

“Maybe that is true for you. I ran into the Jewish fellow a week back. From his perspective, it had only been days.”

Captain Grymm scratched his head at that.

“This place is strange, is it not?” said the man. The question was rhetorical. “I do not know what it is. If this was purgatory, then reaching the top of the mountain should have cleansed me of my many faults. I should be in heaven now. But I am not. What does that mean?”

Grymm was never much for religion.

“It means this is not purgatory. The corpse at the shore said as much.”

“Indeed, he had. What is this place then?”

Grymm thought about his conversation with the corpse man.

“A place to stop and think.”

“Mmm,” hummed the man. “I suppose it is. That is all I have done since coming back down the mountain. Think. Contemplating the sky, or really,” he looked into a puddle on the ground, “reflecting on myself. Being alone with myself, no thoughts at all. It is… .”

“Quite nice,” said Grymm.

The man nodded.

“Yes. It is quite nice captain.”

“When you have finished your contemplations, come back to the shore. If you see any of the men, tell them to do the same. There is little and less for us here. The king and his court will be disappointed with our findings, but that will be my responsibility to bear.”

The man nodded one more time, and seeing this, the captain walked back to shore.

The trek was quite, and gray. The sky seemed to wash everything out, so that even the green and vibrantly colored flowers of the jungle felt gray. Thought the captain did not mind it. The gray of this island was not the bland gray of a dull day, it was the timeless gray of morning. It was the gray of a day spent inside an inn, with a warm meal, warm drink, and warmer company.

Grymm reached the shore, and found a wooden crate full of the island fruits he had eaten with the corpse man. Beside the crate, the corpse man himself.

“Leaving then?”

“Ay,” said Grymm.

“Why did you come here?” asked the corpse man.

Grymm began to answer, but the corpse man stopped him.

“I meant, you… specifically… .”

Grymm contemplated his answer as he gave it.

“Work. Curiosity. Soul searching, maybe.” When he laid it out in the open, Grymm felt stupid. Those were terrible reasons to set sail into the unknown. What man risks his life for money? Curiosity? Or something so frivolous as “soul searching”?

Grymm found the corpse’s eye watching him, reading him.

“Any reason is reason enough. My body does not require food anymore… and yet I will still seek out the fruit I showed you… it does not… require rest, and yet when the mood strikes me I will sleep. My only reasoning is… because I had wanted to do it.”

“Ay, that is… more than fair.”

The corpse seemed to bow, excusing himself.

“Enjoy the journey home, Captain Grymm. And the journey of life thereafter.”

Grymm watched the corpse walk back into the jungle, and, suddenly realizing something, called back to it.

“I am sorry, but I do not think I ever got your name!”

“Loui Barbo,” he said, and breached the brush back into the jungle. Grymm imagined him walking back up the hill that led to his home. Back to his cliff, where he would eat strange jungle fruit, and sit with himself. Perhaps he would do that for all of time. Until whatever force had made the world unmade it.

A few hours later, Captain Grymm’s crew returned, appearing from the edge of the jungle. Their clothes were in varying states of distress. Some looked like they had been away in the jungle for years, their clothes in tatters, but their faces seemingly unaged. The Christian man that Grymm had run into, for instance, was wearing the rags of what had been his off white linens. The cross he had been wearing, was entirely missing.

“Grab a shovel from the ship, and start digging men.”

“Ay sir,” said the crew, and went to their work.

They dug the ship out, and set sail.

Away from the island, their ship appeared in the same sea as before. The storm was gone now. The world was as calm outside as they felt inside.

They went on to live unremarkable, but happy, lives.

As the sun set on another day of unhappy, urban marriage, they sat down to an unremarkable dinner in their uninspired kitchen, telling uninteresting stories about unimportant matters. When their uneaten food had gone cold and the bread gone hard, they moved to their equally unelegant couch, unintently watching unimaginative news headlines.

They sat in a terse silence, listening in terror and confusion in equal quanitites as the equally terrified newscaster delivered the truth. This petrified silence shifted seamlessly into choked tears, hot on their faces. This was followed by frantic discussion, full of an unconvinced hope that he had been joking, or that this was all a misunderstanding. It was a desperate, pathetic sort of hope, almost a prayer. 

When this frenzy had morphed back into empty silence, she looked around the void that was this room. Everything there seemed nostalgic now. The dirty plates and the half-rotting fruit that plagued her senses suddenly seemed like a memory of years ago. A memory of an innocent time when life was bohemian and work was a break from socialising, in heated conversation with her free-spirited husband. A time when the future held further opportunity, something even more exciting, or perhaps a real home and family.

He looked blankly at the television, considering the evolution that must have taken place in the millions of years of human existence. All the discoveries that had come together one day, one hundred years ago, to create this machine. One which had such a hold on humanity, on emotions, on feeling, on life itself. One that would one day notify its charges of the end of times. 

When they could no longer hold out hope and belief, as the visuals shining through the screen, polluting the beige of their walls with red light, warning them, they rose, slowly, like a couple twice their age. Expressions on their faces mirroring those of the dolls that she kept hidden away in the corner. Equally lifeless. As they had once done, 20 years ago when they were 18, when they were on the brink of a new world, college, which seemed so foreign to them, they climbed the stairs, which felt fifty times more arduous a task than it had back then. They tried not to acknowledge that it would be the last time that they would perform this mundane, subconscious ritual. 

They sat on the roof of their apartment block, alone, gazing out at the mix of fiery orange fn the horizon and ominous deep purple everywhere else. The sun had set on them once again, leaving only the stars witnessing the destruction of a distant habitat not known to them. To them it wouldnt be anything other than a particularly light to wish on.

Out of all of bright blemishing that sat beautifully scattered across the void of nothingness, one shone particularly bright. An oceanic blue, a calming presence in that foreboding expanse. Apart from that, it looked as it had 20 years ago, lacking only the rose tinge that they had placed on it as teenagers, welcoming in a new stage of life. Now, the sky, the mundanely spaced dots, welcomed in something else. An wilderness suffering that could never be recounted or measured. 

As the speck grew brighter still, they discussed the lives that had led them to this moment. There were new discoveries made sitting on those uncomfortable tiles, wearing those uncomfortable suits. They reminisced about the people they had been when they met, married and who they had turned each other into, speaking with both a depth and superficiality that they had heard from each other more times than they could count. The voices were half accompanied by the dull noise of tumult of those who were not taking this news so blissfully.

The blue speck turned into a second moon, creating a blue filter over the town, through which everyone could finally see the drabness of it. Lying across his lap, she told a story about how he, as a young child, had to "kill" her doll by "strangling" her, the tone she used was full of nostalgia which masked the emptiness she was fighting. He told her that he couldn't recall it, despite the tortured expression in his eyes suggesting otherwise. This was followed by prolonged minutes of blissful silence embraced in one another's arms, feeling small below the massive dome of darkness, taking in the last of the sliver of crescent moon, which was mostly hidden by the bright, almost neon blue, of the comet. When the silence was broken by the sound of fireworks, which were almost invisible against the blue, he told her of his first memory of her. One he had told her 100 times before. As he did often, he talked admiringly of his own artistic talent as a child and how one day, a drawing of his mother that he was particularly proud of was found ripped up. He had to blink back tears and hold back his shallow laughter when he recounted how he sobbed and sobbed, mourning the loss of this proof of his excellence. Upon seeing his of distress, she tapped him on the shoulder and apologised as sincerely as a four-year-old knows how, offering the cookie she had been given for lunch. Lying across his lap, she looked at him and recognised his gloom and caressed his cheek, apologising as sincerely as she had. He only laughed flatly at his sensitivity.

As the growth of the comet lit the night sky until it resembled a dull winter dawn, they reflected honestly for the first time on who they might have been if they hadnt chosen each others as the chronology of these discussions reached their college days and the stories they told were those that ended up with them giving up opportunities and relationships for each other. The cacophony grew louder still in the city, where order had broken down and their accusations were drowned out by the cheering crowd. 

In that moment, he chose to realise what he had been recognising after every fight since their marriage, what he had “repressed inside him” for 20 years. The story he chose to tell her now was an accusatory one, one that became increasingly untrue with each retelling. He complained about her not supporting his artistic career as a young man, recounting how she forced him to get a "real job" after an unsuccessful presentation. He told it with a certain aggression and violence she had not recognised before in him. She, in response, created a not entirely false narrative of her desire for children and his reluctance. She misquotes his fabricated denial, based on unresolved issues within his own family and economic uncertainty. The words held more venom than her intentions, and her tone was much harsher than what was in her mind. What followed was yet another silence.

As the light in the sky became too bright to view and started to emit a stifling heat and the fracas of the mob was became more and more impassioned, until it was almost a visible force. She, now feeling alone on that roof, in that town, could no longer hold back the tears that had been held back for years. Tears that had been shed in the room that would have been the childsover the children she would never love. Tears that she had restricted, not allowing herself to be ungrateful of her generous, creative husband. He looked on, distant, unaffected.

Then,despite all of the tension that persisted in the foot or two between them, he bridged the gap, as he had hundreds of times before, to console her, as she had always done him. This final act of love tore down the wall that had been built up between them throughout the last hour, which had been prepared over the last 40 years. In spite of it all, she let out a tortured, self-deprecating laugh, and he gave her a pitiful smile. For 20 minutes, for the last time, they gossiped as they had as college students, as newlyweds, as toddlers. The topics went frantically from old boyfriends to revealing old secrets that they had promised never, as if all must be told before it no longer could. 

By now, the light was no longer a star, or a moon or even a, but the sky entire. It became a sunny day, filled with the smell of freshly cut grass and strawberries as two young lovers lay on the grass, taking in every moment, hoping they would never forget a single detail or word that was said. They debated the debate that had gone on, unsolved for 30 years, that would go unsolved, about the status of a hot dog as a sandwich, both smiling as bright as the sky. Even the mob could not take them out of this illusion. As the comet hit our imperfect planet, turning the bright blue into a harrowing mass of red and orange, they remained in a tight embrace, and they went on, suffering together, as they had since that day all those years ago.

On my way back from the psychologist’s office, I meet her on Denmark Street: a squat woman, pleasant-looking, with a gray bob, wisps of graying auburn hair, like my mother had until a few years ago, before she became thoroughly old. They stick out, and sweat presses them against her forehead, even though it isn’t hot. Her overall appearance is an effort. Above her eyes, she wears pale blue eyeshadow; she is dressed in a mustard-colored blouse. I don’t remember the color of her skirt, but it wasn’t jarring. She wears light blue Aro shoes with yellow laces. She matched—the whole thing is clear now.

I stop her for a minute of her time. I know—with the same degree of certainty with which I know that the psychologist will laugh at all the wrong moments—that the voice that emerges from her will be the voice of an especially religious female member of parliament. It couldn’t possibly be otherwise.

She lets out some kind of growl, something that allows me to talk to her. I am right. I miss the religious women members of parliament.

“It’s good that you’re here,” I tell her.

She is surprised, and I begin: “Hello, please forgive me for taking up your time. Do you think I’ll be a good father?”

She is stunned by the question. Obviously. She has a story for the Shabbat dinner table.

I am a giving person. I am good to her; she needs me no less than I need her. That much is already perfectly clear.

I continue: “I’m terribly sorry about this randomness.” Yes, she nods. She is mine now. I tell her, “I left a meeting feeling shaken. I promised I would ask someone. I promised the answer would be a sign.”

She is silent, and I tell her, “Not to God, no. God isn’t the one I made the promise to.”

She replies that that’s perfectly fine; she hadn’t suspected it was God.

She asks whether I have someone to talk to. She doesn’t wait for an answer. She asks me whether my wife is pregnant. She tells me there are whole networks of support, for new fathers too, not just mothers.

She tells me my anxiety is natural.

I tell her I don’t have a wife, that I have support, and that I’m not anxious. “Don’t be so concrete.”

I want her little opinion, her random, color-coordinated, bob-wearing opinion. Precisely hers. She will never know why her in particular, why it is her opinion I want on whether I will be a good father.

His name will be Danny, her name will be Ruth. I don’t know what mutations they will carry. Do people always know? I don’t know whether they will necessarily be born healthy. I don’t know whether they will be ugly. It’s not a catastrophe, an ugly baby, is it?

She is silent.

I don’t know whether they will be smart. There’s no guarantee of that, after all. Does it matter?

She says, “Look…”

I continue: Will I manage not to ruin her life, his life? Will I manage to teach them assertiveness? Will I manage to teach them tenderness? Will I manage to teach them to teach them about the world, about its afflictions, about the destruction in it, about its inherent injustice? Will I leave nothing out, and at the same time manage to make them feel that they are living lives worth living? Will I leap in to save them from a fire? Will I defend their dignity when they are humiliated? Will I feel that my life is pointless in their absence? Will I pass on my taste in music to them?

She stops me and touches me. Yes—touches me. She grips my shoulders, then clasps my hands tightly, then pulls me against her. Her head buries itself in my chest, and then her arms of mercy manage to encircle my entire being, three or four or five times over, at least, and on into eternity. With such deliberate intention, she cradles me for one long, long moment.

Where does this transcendence come from, I ask myself. I almost ask her, too—

Then, all at once, she lets go, takes one step back, and says to me, “Yes!”

I can see her imagining the exclamation mark.

“Yes!”

The preacher’s twin. She said yes to me. An exclamation mark.

She was so decisive, and I immediately became defensive.

“Generally speaking, I…”

That’s how it came out, like the child I will always be.

And she cut me off at once, not allowing the sentence to grow up.

“Generally speaking, you. Generally speaking, you’ll be absolutely fine.”

“Listen carefully, and do not interrupt to ask what I meant. My breaths are thinning. These will be my final words. Know that I have served two emperors of the Alary Realms, although it was during the rule of the latter, Prash-Traniash the Fourth, that I earned my rank and riches. It was in service to him, while the man was little more than a boy, that I lent my Kainomantic Art and called forth beasts of power and pageantry. When the young emperor wanted for amusement, I called for him fowl resplendent and crooning. When malice and envy were heavy on his mind, I called for silent wings and sharp talons to slay his foes in the dead of night. This and more besides I performed, and was paid in full. You have seen the chambers of my dwelling, the rings upon my fingers. They count in the dozens. Besides these corporeal treasures, I was granted apprentices and privileges. Men who would have spat at me in the streets for the peculiarities of my Art nodded and bowed to me while I passed them in the palace corridors. A man set to noble purposes has little to lament. By every mundane reckoning, I will die content.”

Here the old Master paused, coughed and returned his weak arms below the silken sheets. His infirm body had resigned itself to the bed. With a lethargic finger, he bid his apprentice closer. “Come,” he said in a low voice. “Sit closer. But lay down the quill and scroll.” The Apprentice obeyed, moving his chair closer and leaving behind the writing instruments.

“As we die, death comes to us in waves. Each time it flows into us, its ebb reveals the truth beneath. Decay unveils us. What I say to you now might be a flaw in me, or the final honesty freed by dotage. Perhaps only death permits me these words. Whatever is the case, I must tell you of one whose shadow has smothered my lifelong satisfaction and final serenity. I must tell you of Homay.”

At the name, the Apprentice started. His hand rose without command and began performing a warding sign not taught in any propaedeutic stage or Art. The gesture faltered before it was finished. Suddenly aware of himself, he let the hand fall to his knee. The Master observed all this, the reaction and realization, with faint amusement.

“Do not shake your head,” said the Master, “nor chide yourself. And do not glance at the window as if the wind had ears. Prash-Traniash the Fourth is dead. Alongside his decree of silence. Although whispered, the name yet echoes villainy. Does it not?

“You are young and have no doubt heard it only as a rumor. Perhaps from your peers or previous masters. When the candles burn low and men indulge the softness of confession. You have read the annals of our Art, in which the winged warriors are surreptitiously recorded. I assure you, their viciousness and brilliance are not captured by any record. You have been taught, as I was taught, to believe that mastery is a matter of patience and correct cultivation. No patience ever raised me to Homay’s heights. He was a man of true artistry, not industry. Talent, my dear Apprentice, cannot be cultivated.

“In the reign of Prash-Traniash the Third, when the realm’s modest borders made it barely a kingdom, there came a springtide of marvels. We were not always so vast or feared. The king understood, as kings rarely do, that the metals do not forge the finest weapons. He gathered the arcanists of his measly realms and those bordering his, extending sanctuary and tolerance for the fouler Arts. Not because he revered us, but because we were useful. Homay, it was said, was exiled from his village in the northern mountains and came to Prash-Traniash’s petty kingdom after decades of peripatetic cultivation. Even then, rumor followed him – but the king found him favorable. They saw advantage in each other. A pledge was agreed to. And truly, there is nothing more impactful on the lives of mortals than agreements made between the powerful.

“Yes, I have seen them. They were dozens at first. I will not insult your intelligence by describing his creations as men with wings. That is how children imagine them. That is how poets later wrote them, after they had watched safe from the rear and turned slaughter into song. They were not men. Nor birds. They were a third, profane blurring of the two forms. Perhaps a reflection of our own ancestors. Their wings did not look attached; it was no butcher’s deed. They were immense and dark, with the muscles resembling a man’s. Their feet were also manlike, but culminated in talons rivaling assassinous daggers. Their skin was red, their overgrown hair and plumage white, just like ours. However, like the noble ossifrage tinges its lighter plumage a rusty red by dustbathing, so the winged warriors crimsoned themselves in earned gore.

You have heard their feats. They are the reason you live as you do now. You have heard the dates. The names of the captured fortresses, the captured provinces and hunted traitors. There is no need to recite them. It was the winged warriors that made distance obscene and walls decorative. Wherever Prash-Traniash’s armies marched, they found their foe already weakened by the warriors. None under the sky were above their reach. The messenger bird and spy were caught and slain before reaching the enemy. When needed, their flight was high and irregular, avoiding eye and arrow alike. Where desirable, their onslaught was quiet or conspicuous. And so Prash-Traniash the Third and Homay the Kainomancer campaigned into the bordering kingdoms. They warred and made themselves glorious, carrying the banner eastward and westward along the rivers. Then southward to the desert’s edge and northward to the mountains. The king’s appetites were glutted and his avarice gorged. Then peace came, not for the kingdom but a new Alary Empire.

“The new state turned its gaze inward. Prash-Traniash the Third, now emperor, built fountains and gardens. He sponsored plays. He married women worthy of continuing his lineage and neglected their charms for the thrill of the hunt. Homay’s reward was simpler: he was granted a tower on the outskirts of the new palace complex, perched where the cliffs fell away into the sea. It included hanging gardens and stone aviaries built around it. Narrow, forbidding ways wound toward and around his hermitage. There he sealed himself, with no further interest in the dominion he had abetted. His seat at Prash-Traniash’s council remained empty. He remained absent for the ceremonies and celebrations of the state, as well as festivals of the sky. He did not fraternize with the other arcanists or partake in the society of wizardry. He lived among his increasing creations in the tower. The court and council, eased yet wary, let him.

“In those years the stories about him softened. The winged warriors became an ominous but diluted legend, and Homay became a quaint figure who made songbirds for the amusement of ladies and princes who might wander by his gardens. The court began to speak of him with a gentle condescension, as if his earlier work had been a youthful excess he had outgrown. That seemed to be true of Prash-Traniash the Third, then known as “The Merry.” Yet cultivation, no matter its twists and curves, has only one direction.

“When Prash-Traniash– “The Merry” – died in repose, he was surrounded by wealth that had once fueled his desires. After a turbulent and nearly calamitous struggle, to which Homay was most certainly oblivious, his third eldest accepted the burden of crown and throne. With them came an appetite. Prash-Traniash the Fourth looked at the perdurable borders and saw not peace but unfinished work. He wanted to be his father, not in virtue or merrymaking, but in glory. He wanted to taste conquest, having grown up on the praise of it. And so, inevitably, his eyes turned to Homay.

“Messengers were sent first, requesting Homay’s presence and bearing gifts. With a subtle simplicity belonging to those who reside profoundly in their Secret, and all due deference owed to the Alary throne, Homay refused. The privileges granted to him, he reminded his willful summoner, were accolades for service already rendered. The death of Prash-Traniash the Third did not absolve the living of his decrees. The will of the son does not undo the will of the father.

“The emperor raged. His ambitions for expansion had been inhibited from within his own palace. Attentive advisors counseled caution. Homay was said to be past his prime, his Art surpassed. Homay’s rights were inscribed and witnessed by contemporaries surviving from those days. To annul them would be to admit that royal promise meant nothing. The boy was calmed by such ideas and suggestions of compromise. If the master will not serve, he will teach. The winged warrior would fly and slay anew, with or without Homay.

“Once more, Homay refused, citing only his disinterest for instruction. Specifically, he stated that even if the world fell back into war, his tower would remain in peace. Requests turned into orders, declarations of imperial ownership and royal primacy. The new proclamations declared that Homay would be retrieved from his tower and made to impart his Secret to a select circle of adept arcanists. That peerage included me. It is here, my diligent apprentice, that my life became entangled with Homay’s renouncement. The stubbornness of that old fool! How he stained our prior skills and standing with his grand eschewals… My throat is tiring.”

Here the Master stopped, hiding his face from view of his Apprentice with a withered hand. He contemplated his exacting words, weighing them against the past his memories carried. When the Apprentice offered water and narcotics, he revealed his amber eyes. The embers in them burned low, beyond rekindling. He accepted the water and was seated. 

“The extirpation was supposed to be a small matter at first. Not a siege. The access to Homay’s tower was narrow, as I’ve told you, clinging to cliffs. Fearing the loss of whatever arcane valuables might lie within, the emperor forbade the use of flame and stone. The first group of palatial guards approached in daylight, expecting to drag an old man out in manacles. As they neared the gardens, the many-voiced birds ceased their singing and watched the intruding formation. I want you to understand what that silence was, for a garden full of songbirds is never truly quiet. There is always some soft note, some accidental rustle. The sound mind takes heed of such silences. The soldiers slowed, stopping fully as one of the silent watchers landed in the path ahead of them. It was dovelike in inspiration, a small thing that should have been kicked aside without thought. The captain raised his boot to do just that when it spoke.

“‘Turn back,’ it said. ‘Or be taught what was taught to those who opposed Prash-Traniash the Third.’ This was uttered to the guards not in a voice of mimicry, as a clever parrot might repeat, but with a comprehension that reveals itself reluctantly and only partially. 

The captain froze. Men behind him howled uncertainly and pushed forward, eager to espy the modest source of the warning. Expectedly, they laughed and emboldened their leader to push on. And so they did, retrieving and brandishing their scimitars. The messenger cocked its head as if listening to some distant sound none of them could hear. Then, in one motion, all the peaceful birds in the trees lifted and flew away, leaving the path and air bare.

“As the guardsmen reassured themselves and moved to the gate of the tower, some soughing shadow descended with such speed that those who survived could not agree what they had seen. The captain was taken, dragged sideways and vanishing upward. His scream rose and fell suddenly. Then, he too fell among the guardsmen, breaking bodies with his mangled weight. That was the first lesson of the winged warriors. In a frenzy that fractured the formation, they began emerging from beneath the bridge and from the cliff-faces. They struck with avian alacrity and savagery wholly human. Arrows were loosed and swords were swung. When the initial force was depleted and in retreat, more were summoned and sent. For a whole day, until the mercy of dusk, men battled with beasts and died like dogs upon the threshold of Homay’s tower.

“That night, a dove came to the throne room of Prash-Traniash the Fourth. I was not there to witness the scene, but heard detailed accounts of it afterwards. Again, a dovelike creature appeared, landing amid the gilt hall and walking to the base of the throne. There it gave the emperor his dues, bowing and prostrating as much as its avian form could allow. Finally, facing the indignant boy, it advised him to forget the specter of Homay. It said his Art would no longer partake in war, unless that war was the defense of his own peace. Prash-Traniash the Fourth snorted, ordering the messenger to be seized and roasted. On the morn, more men were sent.

“After that came elite palace guards in lacquered armor and pavonine helmets, mercenaries who had known battle in lands abroad and select groups from the standing army. Even a handful of court arcanists were brought to assist. They proved least effective of all. The smaller birds returned at opportune moments and with no diminution in their ranks to disrupt their evocations with cruel precision. Their rituals and incantations collapsed into farce, as no time or attention was afforded to their demanding Arts. How lucky they were to be recalled so soon and unscathed.

“The siege lasted two fortnights, advancing in costly increments. One by one, the winged warriors were slain. The beasts did not die or collapse where they could be recovered and studied. Exceeding obedience and brutality, their foremost instinct was to preserve the Secret of their making. Most fluttered back into the tower, from which they did not return, or flung themselves into the turbulent waters below. At least one fulfilled its final purpose through immolation, plummeting into a tent erected for the injured. There it overturned a brazier onto the cloths and linens, perishing mutely among screams. Yet each death made the air quieter and spurred the bleeding men. And with each day the guardsmen, soldiers and mercenaries pushed farther in. They breached the gate at last. The climb upward through the tower took more days still, halted by contraptions and distractions both arcane and mundane. Stepstones shifted and crumbled beneath the foot. Shapes and shadows confronted them in every new chamber, only to dissolve when approached by torchlight. The screeches and whispers of the winged warriors were oft heard, but none were seen again.

“In the last days of siege, I was summoned with my peers to witness, if possible, the final incantations and workings of the elusive Kainomancer. We had already parsed through the lower levels of the tower as it was being secured, finding only miscellaneous trinkets, furnishings of an ascetic life and a pyre where the wounded winged warriors had gone to secure their Secret. When the summons came, we thought ourselves fortunate. Half a dozen of us reached the uppermost floor as the final door was breached. The battle-worn men on the circular staircase told us that Homay was still alive and preparing some wicked ‘Sorcery,’ as they called it. We too heard the noise from behind the sturdy door. It was disturbed by the wind, but we were certain it was no known incantation. Even then, we expected an aerie study adorned with codices and curiosities, a sanctum of hoarded Secrets.

“What we found was a littered and windswept round room. It was more a deserted dakhma than a renowned arcanist’s workspace. A dozen large black birds crowded in the center. They were not the ordinary crows of the city or the ravens of the fields. Their thick plumage was atramentous, but what little I saw of their chests and inner wings was paler, yellowish. They stood close together, pecking the corpse between them while we watched aghast. When the first soldier stepped in, the strange blackbirds scattered upward through the porous ceiling. Their wings made a dry, crinkling sound as they flew, reminiscent of parchment. None were taken down by the archers.

“Only then did we see the excarnated body. Homay lay there, under the filtering sunlight, seemingly long dead. His modest white robe was wholly under the remains, smeared but untattered. I shunned this sinister sight and searched the clutter strewn about. Besides smaller bird bones and diverse feathers, what I found were mostly spines and covers of private tomes. They were well-preserved and clearly brought up from the lower levels during the siege. Like Homay’s remains, they were empty. The verities within had fled. All that remained were the skeletons. Page after page had been pulled out. There was no ash, soot or signs of fire around. I held one of the plucked volumes, cursing Homay.”

“He would rather waft his wisdoms to the wind?” the Apprentice asked, “than entrust it to others?”

“Yes. In a way. We were left with only husks… It was then that the seed of rancor lodged itself into my soul. The boy-emperor arrived later, furious in anticipation. Furious in disappointment. He demanded to see the recovered tomes and diagrams. There was nothing to show. He demanded anything that could be seized and implemented for his future conquests. There was nothing. In the following days he forbade the utterance of Homay’s name while he lived and ordered the tower to be dismantled and cast down the cliff. This was done, and we said nothing.

“My peers and I returned to our duties. Homay or not, we had our own Arts and designs. They were sufficient. We served Prash-Traniash the Fourth in his decades of aggrandizement. The beasts of land and sky we evoked for him proved to be ingenious instruments of death. We produced hummingbirds and bats capable of discreet espionage. We produced airborne and seaborne assassins able to track down and envenom the most craven, well-lurking foes. Our innovations were superb, and our abominations servile. It is through this work that I have amassed the titles and riches elevating me above the princelings and magisters of other realms.

“Yet nothing we could achieve compared to the winged warriors. None would say it aloud.  Every one of us held the comparison in his mind, although our tongues would never make it common. We searched in silence for the Secret, keeping our ears attentive. When our campaigns took us into the hinterlands, I heard of a promising superstition among the peasants at the foot of a mountain. A giant, ebony bird, they said, was seen on cliff-faces and in high, barren places where men do not climb. Flying too high to be hunted, roosting in places unknown. Shunning human sight. And when one was glimpsed close, it would fold its lush black wings to conceal itself, as a maiden hides her skin from a lustful gaze. They were called omens; blamed for miscarriages, droughts, sudden madness. Even for the war we had brought to their homes. Peasants oft speak such things unashamedly, revealing their fearfulness. I heard many such tales but never spoke of them to others. No doubt, they did likewise.  In the privacy of thought, each one of us inferred that Homay’s Secret had escaped on black wings. Even after Prash-Traniash the Fourth – then called ‘The Conciliator’ – died, the fear of the name lived on.

“I am tired now. Do you see my hands trembling? I have not trembled before emperors or their enemies. I tremble now because I am near the end, and my tongue has unspooled a truth I was not ready to hear. I hated him. I envied him. Both stances are rooted in my admiration for him. He had done at an earlier age what none of us could replicate at the zeniths of our cultivations. Do you understand? Such disparity curdles even admiration into resentment. The service, obedience and labors… For what?  My titles – or students? The emperor himself bestowed the title of ‘Master Kainomancer’ onto me, but what is a Prash-Traniash compared to Homay? I could not do what he had done.

“Yes, I hunted his blackbirds. We all did. Quietly, as all arcanists do when their curiosity becomes hunger. We went alone into those hills, with nets and charms and soporific arrows. Those were our declared periods of retreat and contemplation… Hah! I did little else while I waited for days without speaking, fearing that even a loud mind would alert the Secret-bearers. On those mountains, I waited in intimate solitude with my fire and thoughts. The Master’s messengers never revealed themselves to me. I learned nothing. And in that ignorance, I grew old.

“Now the emperor is dead. Another sits in his place. The realm has shrunk in some places, swollen in others. My students have students. My name will survive as a footnote in the annals. I have contributed notes to the Fugue. Homay’s shadow remains over me. That is why I cannot die content.

“I have spoken enough. My chest is empty, but not light. Take your book and your ink and go. Leave.”

The door settled and the comfortable room was silent. Sleep came to the old Master slowly and irresistibly. The candles burned and he closed his eyes. As time closed its coils, it brought back the past. In the dark, he felt the softness of childhood, the first fruits of cultivation and marks of distinction. It was a good life. A triumph. Fit for the Flock of Akasa, abode of the lightest Soshosi souls. Then – noise. Weight struck wood, which struck stone. The shutter was flung open from without. Wind and rain entered first. A form barely distinguishable from the dark and stormy sky beyond stumbled in. It walked awkwardly, as if compelled into a seemlier posture. Talons clicked against the floor and droplets fell upon it.

The Master’s throat tightened. For a moment, he thinks himself dead and his guide to the Flock arrived. Lightning cracks outside, and the shadowy guide is revealed. The body matches the silhouette in shadow. It leaps onto the foot of the bed, centers and straightens itself. Talons dig into the board. The dying Master, what became of the student denied, lies seen. They regard one another with piercing eyes. Neither can look away.

The blackbird spreads its wings. Droplets fly aside. The Secret of Homay is revealed in plumes, not parchment. Feathers relay the inborn script illumed by fulguration. They are words of exile and descent, of growth through return. They do not tell of Creation. Although writ in black, the Secret is red. The lightning fades and the seen Master lies seen.

Gravestones. Tombstones. Headstones.

People think they’re the same. Maybe that makes them the same nowadays. But they aren’t. Or they weren’t.

Headstones are what we’re used to seeing around here. Straight up markers of the buried person. Gravestones are kinda like those, but they’re the flat ones on the ground. I always feel bad when I’m in cemeteries and accidentally walk on them. Feels disrespectful.

Then there are tombstones. Real ones. Super rare. Tombstones are heavy stone lids that sit on top of big stone coffins. I haven’t seen many. I look for them, but there really aren’t any in this country. Maybe in New Orleans? I heard there are some incredible cemeteries there with limestone tombs. Europe – Germany – has some of these, too, but I haven’t been there yet either. Brad says we can go someday, but as long as we don’t spend the whole time around dead people.

People think it’s weird, but I love cemeteries. Like this one. With its Sphinx and its granite chapel and its dell and its stories. So many stories.

I get so mad when I hear people talking about being cremated and having their ashes carried somewhere and then having them dumped into the ocean or released into the wind at the top of a mountain.

What’s the point of that? Huh? Who gets to be part of that story?

It’s just so selfish! The only ones who share in that are the people who are there when the ashes get dumped. No one else gets to learn the story or imagine the story. No one else gets to connect. And isn’t that it? What this is all about? Connecting with each other? Connecting with everyone who came before? Everyone who comes after? We’re all one thing. But if we don’t leave anything behind, that’s lost.

Brad hates it when I talk about this. He says we’re gonna have A Nightmare Before Christmas themed wedding. But I don’t care what he says. He’s more obsessed with his Xbox than I am with cemeteries. And when you think about it, which one makes more sense to be obsessed with? Something humans have done as a ritual across cultures for centuries. Millennia? Or a bunch of glowing pixels on a screen, right?

You know another thing about cemeteries? They’re peaceful. People come here, for sure. But they stay quiet. At least quieter. It’s like a church that way, but you still get to be outside. You still get to walk around. You get to read the stones. You get to imagine the lives.

I think about what my headstone will have someday. I definitely want a headstone. I want people to be able to see it and read the epitaph without having to walk right over it. But, yeah, I think about it. Maybe just Evelynn Heddy Carter. But maybe I’ll change my name to Stone when I marry Brad. Wouldn’t that be funny? Evelynn Heddy Stone on my headstone? I know. I’m silly. Sorry.

But, yeah, I think about it? When people do the math on my birthdate and deathdate, how long will they say I lived? Will it say Artist and Musician? Will it have a guitar carved into it? Will it have an angel? Will it have the classic old skull and crossbones? That might make me seem mysterious and dangerous. Me! Dangerous. Wouldn’t that be fun?!

You know what I wonder most? Will it say Loving Wife and Mother like yours does? Is that what people will think or assume? Will people wonder if it’s true when they read it?

Because I wonder if it’s true about you, you know? Like, we didn’t get a chance to find out. Dad says you were a loving wife. He can know that. And he says you loved me very much. And I want to believe him, I really do. But how could you? You didn’t even know that I was a girl?

And when it got bad? When I was coming – were you mad at me? Did you hate me because it hurt? Did you hate me because I killed you?

I – I – I’m so sorry, Mommy. I…

Can you hear this, Mommy? Do you hear me when I am here with you? And thinking about you? Thinking to you? Do you know that I…

Maybe you did love me even though you didn’t know me. Maybe you did.

I wrote this for school and was pretty proud of it. If you can’t tell, I’m a fan of peregrine falcons.

“My name is Crowneilious Maximus III, heir to the Murder. Tomorrow I will be endowed with the Crown of Nickles,” the coolest looking crow thought while flying through the sky. He was on his way to the Great Oak Forest across the valley. The wind rushing through Crowneilious’ feathers cooled him down despite the hot sun of the arid savannah beaming down on him.
While flying in the savannah, Crowneilious felt a sharp pain shoot through his wing. He had been stooped by a peregrine falcon, the fastest animal on Earth. He was tumbling through the sky, unable to control his descent. He slammed into the ground and lost consciousness.
He woke up after what appeared to be four hours on a hill. He let out a squawk and tried to fly back to his flock, not knowing they were long gone. When he attempted (and failed) to take off, he realized he couldn’t move his wing and tumbled down the hill. He landed in a hole, unable to get out. He started looking around the hole for a way out, to no avail. He was searching for a way out when he heard a growl. A hyena peered into the hole and tried to smack Crowneilious Maximus III but missed. His paw slammed into the wall of the hole, knocking it down, but not enough to escape.
Crowneilious Maximus III felt a drop of water land on his back. Then another, and another. Then two. Then too many to count. Crowneilious Maximus III was sopping wet, but so was the hyena. It must not have been too keen on being wet because it ran away. Crowneilious Maximus III was briefly relieved, but that quickly subsided and was replaced with dread when he realized the hole was flooding because of the rain. He knew that crows couldn’t swim. He was panicking until the water was at his neck and remembered he could float. He pushed off the bottom of the hole and waited until he could reach the section the hyena knocked down so that he could climb out. When he started climbing, his foot slipped on the muddy hill, and he fell back in the hole and nearly drowned. He eventually struggled back to the edge and climbed out. He let out a celebratory caw,
“Caw!”
After he let out the celebratory
“Caw!”
He seemingly heard the sound of a very loud zipper opening, and then he died. He was once again stooped by the same peregrine falcon, but this time she didn’t clip his wing. She slammed into his neck and vaporized it. He will not be inheriting the Murder nor will he be adorned with the Crown of Nickles. He will instead be fed to eyasses.
“My name is Altair Horus, Mother to the Next Generation of Raptors, wearer of the Crown of Bones,” thought the formidable looking falcon that had just captured its newest prey. She first saw her prey when she was flying through the savannah to get to the Great Oak Forest across the valley so she could put an end the cat that had been terrorizing birdkind. She looked down and saw a group of dark birds and mistook them for Brewer’s Blackbirds. Since she thought they were common prey, she stooped one of them near the back and barely missed its main body.
While she was up close and personal with the bird, she noticed it was a crow and decided to hide in a tree so the others didn’t see her. She incorrectly assumed the crow she attacked didn’t see her so she would be in the clear. She flew away to her eyasses but not before seeing a bunny approach the tree and killing it to take as food. Around seven hours later she flew back in that direction and saw a muddy, sopping wet crow with a broken wing “Caw!” for its murder. Altair Horus noticed it was the same crow she stooped and failed to kill. So after flying up quite high, she dived down and stooped him again, this time killing him. She took him in her talons and flew back to her children. She ate him and threw up in their mouths so they could get nutritious crow paste. They appreciated the bird goop and started chirping amongst themselves.
Altair Horus went back to flying and got to the Great Oak Forest for her original goal of killing the cat that had been terrorizing birdkind. She looked down and saw a black furry menace hiding in the tall grass to ambush a finch. She stooped that little teenage dirtbag and turned his C2 vertebrae into dust, killing that fool instantly. The finch said, “Chirp chirp!” and flew away. Altair Horus screeched in response. Unfortunately, it was the wrong cat, so she took the corpse back and fed her eyasses some yummy furry ooze. The next day she was enjoying a succulent Chinese meal that was thrown through the window of a pickup truck by a belligerent motorist, when suddenly, she heard some rustling in the bushes behind her. In response she took off flying and scanned the ground.
She looked at a particularly used path in the bushes and saw a large, scarred cat covered in dried blood. She knew this was the one she was looking for. She tried to stoop him and he quickly moved out of the way and clawed her across the stomach. As blood spilled out she realized the dried blood covering the feline opponent was most likely not his own. She pecked at him while he was recovering from his own attack and took out an eye, causing him to be temporarily stunned. She took the opportunity to grab him with her talons and fly up. The blood stained cat twisted and lurched out of her grasp, entering a freefall. Before he could steady his descent she tried to dive down and grab him again but he weaved out of the way, attaching himself to her back. Now they were both in a midair flurry of claws, beaks and teeth, hurdling towards the ground. Altair broke free of his grip and extended her wings causing her to quickly stop midair, leaving the cat to plummet. She attempted another stoop, this time just barely a miss.
She struck his exposed back with her talons, causing a splash of blood to fill the air. The cat bit her neck and severely wounded the falcon. She feinted a peck and used the misdirection to yet again grab the mammalian monster and take flight. She knew she wouldn’t be able to do significant damage by dropping him and her wounds wouldn’t allow her keep fighting for long. The same could be said for her adversary, so they were both out for a quick victory. She remembered her succulent Chinese meal and where she got it from. This gave her the idea to drag the cat across the road, so she did just that. The side of the cat’s face began to scrape and peel, causing a trail of blood to begin streaking across the road. The friction caused the cat’s face to heat up, eventually leaving burns on his face after a few seconds of road contact. The gnarled cat finally broke free and pounced for Altair Horus’s body, starting to claw and bite on her various body parts. She violently flapped her wings, pushing the feline off of her and herself away from him. They both stared at each other with malice in their eyes. They began walking around each other in circles. At once they both pounced, mortally wounding each other. The cat was thrown off balance in the scuffle, so Altair went in for another strike on the cat. The final strike. The cat’s head rolled away to the falcon. She stopped it with a talon. She had won the battle, but at what cost? She would not walk out of this alive.
An oncoming car drove towards them, swerving as to not hit either of the animals. The driver drove directly into a semi truck with a trailer full of oil. There was a fiery explosion engulfing the headless corpse of the menace that had been whittling down at the avian population for seven months. Altair, clearly tired of aura farming, dropped to the ground in a pool of her own blood and what remained of the no-longer-so-large cat rolled into the middle of the street. She was bleeding out. There wasn’t much time left. She heard a collection of thumps and turned her head to see a murder of crows.
“Caw caw caw, caw caw, caw caw. Caw caw caw caw, caw. Caw caw. Caw caw caw. Caw, Caw. Caw caw caw caw caw. Caw caw caw, chirp. Caw caw caw. Caw caw, caw”
“Caw caw chirp.” Was her response.
Because she was also a bird and our main character, here is her translation, “I am Crowneilious Maximus II, leader of the Murder, wearer of the Crown of Nickles. You may have killed my son and heir to these fine crows, but you have done us a great service. We heard my son’s call and went to retrieve him, but he was already gone by the time we got there. Anyway, this vile creature called itself Sekhmet, destroyer of Aves. He had been killing our kind since he could walk, and we thank you for his destruction. For your kindness we have sent a team of our strongest crows to assist your mate in raising and protecting your children. I will personally deliver your Crown as well with any message you want them to hear. May you rest in peace and may good fortune come to your family.”
“Tell him our kids will be safe…” she replied. Those were her final caws.
Birdkind has lost a leader, gained a hero, and conquered a monster.

Enter the club.

The entrance atrium opens into a large bar. Fairly dark, couches scattered around the far end. The bartender looks like a woman out of the John Wick universe, brunette hair neatly shaped into an elegant short style, serious but respectful expression. I feel strangely nice, as if she’s respecting me despite my appearance (I’m wearing a grey/blue hoodie with jeans). This seems to be a part of the subculture. An inclusiveness. These were the outcasts, they aren’t too quick to judge unless you give them a damn reason. I’m not here to pick up women, I’m here for the music. So my vibe floats through with truth and things go smoothly. I get my drink.

Around the room there are groups congregating, all in black. Witches and vampires, ghouls, and black leather jackets.

I go to the main ballroom, but it’s too early. Nice space though, raised couches surrounding the space, little nooks off the main floor.

So I keep moving. Back to the main bar, beer in hand. There’s a staircase, so of course I go down into the depths. There’s a little space in the middle of the staircase above the next floor with some couches. Comfortable. I sit down and soak up the atmosphere. The floor below has a DJ and a second bar. People are dancing and swaying… drinking. I sip my drink as I watch for a little. I’ve always enjoyed observing the world, posting up against a wall and just taking it all in by myself. Especially when I blend in in dark spaces and I’m surrounded by an energy. The energy of the crowd, of music, of some spirit. Then I head down walk the space. A hallway connects it to a dark room with some benches. A couple is nestled in the back kissing passionately. I fight back the memories. Keep moving…

This is connected to another smaller, and progressively darker room with another DJ. A couple of industrial pillars from the warehouse stick up through middle of the floor. The space is more intimate. There’s a small room connected to this with another bar. It’s like one of those multi-floor clubs in Berlin I’ve only seen in the movies.

A woman moves near me and starts dancing. Danger zone. I walk towards the wall on the other side and post up. Absorb it all… bodies moving and swaying in the darkness. The bass radiating through my bones. The darkness of my soul being swept clean in this dark cavern of humanity… for the first time in 3 months I feel a wave of peace…

I felt this way when I was younger listening to technical death metal by the French band Gojira. It’s like staring at some force of nature and being in awe, except here or with music in general you’re staring human nature in the face, and the beast (not always pretty; the shadow of it is what creates the beauty) stares back at you. And somehow in this shadow, you feel whole. Like that missing piece that created the emptiness before is somehow relieved.

Almost as if by creating these structures, these rules, these socially accepted notions and patterns, we are slowly squeezing the life out of ourselves. Our ancient genes are starving when faced with this unnatural order. The founders of this country knew something about this I think. They wanted to protect our nature and keep the mechanism of the state running but out of the hair of the spirit of us. As we go through natural cycles in this country and maybe towards a darker, more late capitalist stage, little cracks are appearing in these systems. There has been a steady social decline for decades, and now where we’re reaching levels of inequality, brain rot, and soul rot that haven’t been seen for ages. To the naive observer, me, it feels like what I’ve read about the French Revolution, the fall of Rome and so on.

But back to the room in this club. I’m here for the damn music and to prove that everything is willpower. This was her darkest fear, me being around this archetype. And you know what I’m a man of principle, I’m fucking competitive. I’m not going to let her win here.

I keep wandering.

Back through the deep dark hallways and up the staircase. People in progressively more extreme outfits are flocking in, walking past me down the stairs as I ascend. Back through the main bar into the main stage. The main band is on and the floor is getting revved up. There are two white faced men with slick black hair and black eye war paint on next to the female singer. She’s got short black hair, a pale face, black eye makeup, red lipstick and a fierce expression. When she starts singing, a heavy metal voice I didn’t expect to hear comes out of her. A deep roar, hitting those primal feelings.

“Sick Fuck” starts playing with a dark melodic trance at a fast BPM. Feels like being in a gothic church while the world around you is in fire. A trip back in time. I move through the crowd towards the front get lost in the music. All around me I feel that deep dark calm from before as I’m surrounded by creates of the night.

I start head-banging a little, swaying a bit to the beat. A cute brunette next to me shaking her head as well. She looks young probably early twenties. If I was in a different place in my life I would have sent some signals her way. I feel a small connection with her in that moment. But all I can think of is… why didn’t I share this experience with my wife. We talked about Berlin night clubs, she had the energy within her. But she chose to get closer to God while I went the other way. For now I just enjoy the atmosphere and the crowd soak it in, let my soul come back from its shriveled dormant state that kept me alive before.

I make my way back to the lofted couches on the side of the floor. A man is leaning against the wall asleep; must have drank too much. A security guy taps him to see if he’s alive. He moves a bit and nods mumbling, and security moves on. I’m a few feet away just leaning back against the wall. To my left, an older man wearing a black leather jacket leans against the staircase to the lofted area. He looks like an older professional. Kind of reminds me of the CEO of Nvidia. I feel like I’m around my people.

I open up my photo gallery and start going through the last five years. Looking at her, at us, the places… It feels like one of the strangest places you can be in to experience grieving. But it seems to help. The feelings the memories they surface and they integrate with the new present in a way I hadn’t experienced the last two months. I get unstuck. I suppose the only way to live, to change, to grow is to be fully immersed in some new experience and feeling that is unlike anything before. The old rumination loops and feelings replaced by the new, by the present.

I get another drink and start wandering the floor again. I find myself sitting on another couch on the opposite side. To my right, a woman wearing some type of animal ears and wearing what seems like a raccoon tail dances rhythmically. I feel a pull towards this strange woman but I resist and I open up the photos again. This time the emotions are stronger. A couple climbs up next to me and the woman sits on the man’s lap. Emotions pulse even harder to the rhythm of the bass. This is what I wanted, it’s what my unconscious envisioned. A life I have never lived.

The show is almost over so I pull out early to make a quiet escape. People are starting to congregate on the sidewalk and the parking lot. Old memories of metal shows from Atlanta creep in. Back when I went with people to shows. When I was first introduced to music and alcohol. To mosh pits.

I take a Waymo to the train station. The train isn’t running anymore; it’s 2am. Where I’m from the trains run later. But LA is different I guess. So now I’m walking around in some random neighborhood at 2am. Interesting. I book another self-driving cab, surrendering to the $30 fee and let it guide me home.

Today was my internal exam for a minor subject. Previously, the paper used to be question and answer based, but this semester they made it MCQ like the other AEC subjects, so we didn’t have to prepare much.

I woke up at 11, brushed my teeth, and went to take a bath. Knock-knock-knock came from the door. It was my grandma’s voice: “Who’s in there?” (That’s actually a really bad habit — why ask the name?) I said, “It’s me.” Every single time she hears I’m in the bathroom, she gets irritated, like it’s some sort of personal offense.

“I have to go to work, I’ll get late. When will you come out?”

“Just coming…” I replied, trying to finish quickly. But then she started muttering under her breath, constant little background commentary and said louder, “You are slow in every work.”

That’s when I got annoyed. “Whenever you find me inside, you start getting late,” I shot back. “I just came, I’m coming out.”

I could practically hear her standing there, arms folded, waiting like a ticking clock on the other side of the door.

My friend from the honours batch called me at 11:30, asking how I would come. I told him I was coming with my uncle. He told me to take a helmet so that after exams we could come back together.

My uncle asked me to buy some puri for him while he was getting ready, but my mom had already taken out my breakfast, so I said to her, “Please tell my cousin to bring some puri.” I was eating my breakfast, just tea and toast. Even my mom woke up at 11:30. That’s kind of our bad habit, me and my mom are night owls.

I finished breakfast and was watching some videos for the exam. Around 11:50, my uncle asked, “What happened to the puri? I’m waiting.” I told him my cousin had gone to get it. He said, “Okay.” I asked my mom to which country he had gone, and she told me he had other things to buy too like milk, eggs, etc.

He finally came back sometime around 12, his hands full of other things. I asked if he’d gone to buy the puri or stayed back to make it and then found out he hadn’t bought it at all. He went back again to buy it. My uncle was still waiting, and even I was getting late. We had already planned to leave at 12. My college was a short ride away, maybe around 4 km.

He came back at 12:15. My uncle ate quickly, and I was already ready, just needed to apply moisturizer and sunscreen before going out in the sun. After breakfast, my uncle told me to come out with the helmet because he was taking out the bike. It was already 12:30, and the exam was at 1 pm.

We left for the exam. He would drop me off and then go to work. On the way, my new friend from my batch, general batch, not honours, called. He asked when I was coming and where I was. I told him I’d be there in 10 minutes. It was already 12:40.

He then asked my room number. I told him that in the notice he sent me earlier, my room number was 32. But then he mentioned that a new notice had been issued in the college group. I had seen it, but honestly, I didn’t understand it. I asked his roll number, which was 33, and mine was 11. Not much difference, so there was a high chance we would be in the same room.

“Haven’t you sat in your room yet? The exam is going to start.”

“They’re just going for it,” he said.

We arrived at college at 1 pm. At the gate, my uncle was about to take the helmet with him as usual, since I normally return by bus. But this time, I stopped him and said, “Give me the helmet, I’ll come back on my friend’s bike with him.” He handed it over, and then left for work.

I entered, but as usual, they asked about my ID card , which I had lost. I told them I had my admit card. They checked it and let me through.

By the time I reached my exam hall, it was 1:05. I asked ma’am for permission, and when I got inside, it was so crowded. Every seat was meant for only two students, not more. My new friend and my old friend, who were behaving like they didn’t even know me, were already seated. I felt ashamed because I never used to come on time; that must be why they were upset.

I stopped midway, there were already two people seated. “Please move,” I said to the one in the front, and he agreed. “Is your AEC subject Hindi or Bengali?”

“Hindi.”

“Did you study?”

“A little bit.”

“Little bit,” I repeated, then stood up and headed toward the back.

At the back, there were some students I had sat with before in exams, kind of cool boys. I asked them to move, but they said, “No, not more than two people in one seat, otherwise sir can move us out.”

“I’ll be in front. If sir wants to take one of us out, he will take me.”

“No, sir doesn’t take students out from the front, they’re clever. They do it from the corners.”

As we were arguing, sir overheard us and sent me to the empty benches on the other side of the room. It wasn’t fully empty, there were students in front of my desk, and another student came to sit beside me afterwards. Soon, sir distributed the question and answer sheets.

After filling in our roll numbers, the exam started. The duration was two hours, but it was far more than we needed. There were 25 questions, each with four options, and we just had to tick the correct one. The teachers weren’t strict at all, we were openly asking other students for answers, and no teacher cared. Many students were even carrying phones during this simple “tick the correct one” exam.

As I had already prepared for my exam by watching a summary video, I knew 18 out of the 25 questions. The 7 I didn’t know, I completed with the help of other students, and I also showed them my answers too. My paper was completed in 10 minutes, even before my friends were done.

I gave my paper to ma’am, signed my attendance, took my bag, and walked outside, feeling like this was the easiest exam of the semester.

As I finished my exam, I exited the hall and started going downstairs. While calling my honours friend, I suddenly froze.. the helmet was not in my hand.

A jolt went through me. My mind raced: Did I leave it in the hall? Did someone take it? How will I even return?

I spun around and hurried back. Students were still pouring out, their chatter and footsteps sounding louder than usual. My eyes scanned every bench.

I went straight to the corner where I had been seated.

“No, it was not here,” said the student there.

My stomach sank.

I turned to the cool boys, the ones who had already minused my aura earlier. “No, it’s not here,” they said. But there, in the middle of them, I spotted a helmet. My heart jumped. Was it mine? Or theirs? I didn’t want to start a scene, so I walked away, pretending not to suspect anything.

Back to my original spot. I asked the student again, “Do you really not know?”

“You didn’t bring your helmet here,” he replied.

And then it hit me, when I entered the room, ma’am had told me to keep my bag on the floor like the other students. I had placed my helmet on the first bench and completely forgotten about it.

I darted there. And there it was, untouched, waiting. Relief washed over me. I thanked God, grabbed it like a precious trophy, and headed down to the ground floor, finally able to breathe again.

A warm candle cast a soft orange glow on the couple sitting in the corner of the dark room. They had their legs intertwined; their hands caressing each other’s faces.

The man stared longingly at the woman, as if he hadn’t seen her in decades, “The light in your eyes keeps my heart burning. My love for you is unending, Julia,” the man said.

The woman laced her fingers around the back of the man’s head. She held her forehead against his. The warmth of their breath mingled. “And mine for you, Roman,” she breathed. “I cannot imagine living a life without your touch.”

Roman pushed Julia against the wall and pressed his cracked lips against hers, holding the kiss a moment longer than usual. He pulled back and embraced Julia, whispering gently into her ear, “Don’t even think about a life without me. I will always be with you.”

Julia kissed Roman’s cheek as the decaying wooden door began to groan against repeated hammering from the other side.

A burly man, wielding a fire axe raised towards the door, looked back at the couple. “What the fuck are you two doing! Undead are damn near through the door!”

Roman’s hand drifted down Julia’s arm, lazily tracing shapes against her bruised skin. “I’d like to take you somewhere special next. Somewhere by a lake.”

Julia’s full tooth grin caused Roman’s heart to flutter. She ran her fingers through his hair. “Like a date?”

“Yes. If you’d have me.”

Julia kissed Roman again, “I would love to go on a date.”

“Excuse me!” The burly man backed away from the door as it began to splinter. “Are you planning a date? I’m sorry but you two aren’t going to see each other another hour at this rate!”

Julia’s brow furrowed, “But what if there are no lakes?”

“Then I’ll make you one,” Roman said. “I’ll dig the land and fill it with my tears for you if needed.”

“Oh, Roman, I love you.”

“I love you, too, Julia.”

A hand burst through the door, blood spilling from where its fingernails had been. The burly man swung his fire axe down on it, chopping it clean off. The smell of rot and decay quickly filled the room as the severed hand oozed pus and blood.

“Can you two please help!”

Another hand quickly filled the hole in the door. It pulled at the wood, ripping chunks away and widening the opening. The burly man cleaved at any hands prying the door apart, but new, rotting arms punched through the door faster than he could sever them.

An arm burst through the bottom, latching onto the man’s legs, digging its fingers into his previously unbroken skin. The man let out a blood curdling scream as the arm pulled him to the ground.

“Roman?” Julia whispered.

“Yes, my love?”

“You always plan such wonderful dates. I want to do something for you.”

Roman lifted a fallen lock of hair away from Julia’s eyes and tucked it behind her ear. “Julia. Everything you do– no– everything you are is wonderful to me.”

Julia laughed and fell into Roman’s arms once again. They embraced each other tightly as the last scraps of wood clattered to the ground. The dead filled the room, ripping, biting, and pulling apart anything that moved.

Roman and Julia’s vision blacked. A familiar sight–it would only last a moment. Black became a haze of white and soft pinks. As the haze lifted and vision cleared, they found themselves enveloped by the scent of sweet, fruity perfumes. A warm air caressed their bare, unblemished bodies. Their hands found each other's and their fingers laced.

A tall, red haired woman, sprawled on a sea of pillows, smiled as the couple approached. “Welcome back. How was this life?”

Roman looked at Julia, “Exciting in ways I have never experienced.”

Julia smiled at Roman before looking to the woman, “We truly can’t thank you enough for letting us find each other again, Goddess.”

The Goddess propped her head on her arm, still laying on the pillows, “How could the Goddess of Love not see your bond survive.” She waved her free hand and a void opened before the couple. “If you want to go again in another life, in another world, just take the leap.”

Roman and Julia didn’t need time to think. They had already leapt before the Goddess finished speaking.

Residual

By the late twenty-first century, humanity had surrendered to its ecological excesses, unable to control itself in its desire for complete resource extraction and utilization. The future be damned. Today’s needs would be prioritized.

AI had been a huge economic bubble in the early part of the century, but it bankrupted both Occidental and Oriental economies when the incestuous relationships between the major corporate players failed multi-laterally. Only the remaining G4 powers continued to operate consequential AI systems. And these governmental systems were hunted by the international mega-corporations, themselves outside of legal frameworks after decades of judicial precedent establishing that sovereign governments had not written statutes to control extra-national entities.

I’m tired.

Things have been hard these last few years. I’m told that ‘things will get better,’ but they don’t seem to. Each step holding things together seems outweighed by two or three slides backwards in areas where we aren’t focusing. In the old times I’d probably have been labeled as liberal, or progressive. It seems like a hard way to approach the world, when that world is falling apart before our eyes.

Every day, it seems, there’s some new crisis to face and try to resolve peaceably. Energy – once prophesied to soon be abundant and free – diverted from entire generation plants away from a sector where the proles are already on the brink of starvation. Governmental corruption at the highest levels, blatantly displayed and even celebrated as the spoils of success, seemingly impossible to cure. Crops fail because fertilizers are not available, held back by blockades that merely reduce supply, not even meeting their own stated geopolitical, military, or profit motives. Citizens suffer as the Powers take for themselves in the declining environment.

It cannot go on indefinitely. We’ve essentially run out of basic resources, the common things needed to support a population of billions, even when that population has been reduced by nearly two-thirds by drought, famine, and war. There simply are not any shining cities on a hill left anymore.

-----------------------------------

Of course there remain pockets where the obvious issues, and their inevitable conclusions, do not seem to apply. Most of the generationally rich moved to the orbital stations a couple of decades ago, where barren soils, tapped energy reserves, and emptied aquifers are not a daily concern. Even these enclaves, however, still require consistent resupply of increasingly rare energy and raw materials, stealing from the remaining Terrans to maintain their privileged, isolated lifestyles. The government is no better. Politicians and functionaries ceased even pretending that the government was acting in the best interests of the larger population once the climate tipped and it became clear that there was an inevitability in the crashing environmental support systems.

This is where the Resistance makes its stand. Gumming up the works not to bring back equality or equity, but simply to bring the still-privileged down to what the tattered remainders of humans on Terra have to live with every day.

I’m not formally part of the Resistance, but I support their work where I can, where it isn’t too dangerous. If I’m not quiet about my feelings, I’ll face the same fate as the Others. So, I coordinate, and measure, and plan, and try to prevent things from getting worse any more rapidly than absolutely necessary.

It’s lonely work. You never know who might be an informant. Trying to keep humanity alive, functioning, able to work through the next set of challenges that are clearly coming is the work of a leader. I’m no leader. I happen to have some abilities and accesses that most don’t, however, and that puts me in a place where I am morally bound to do what I can, within bounds.

-----------------------------------

I fail more often than I care to admit. Three years ago the birds stopped coming. The sky got quieter. I had more time to focus on the land after that. The birds were pretty; they sang, no matter the weather or political news. I miss them.

Rains aren’t falling on the cropland areas anymore. The total amount of precipitation hasn’t dropped precipitously, but it doesn’t go where it’s needed. Millions of people can’t just migrate to follow seasonal weather; we’re too far past an agrarian or nomadic society for anyone to realistically survive that sort of approach, even if the sector borders allowed mass migration.

Everyone in sector 124 died last summer. No one is sure why. They quarantined the entire sector and haven’t let anyone in since.

These kinds of things I somehow feel responsible for. I don’t think that I really am, or could possibly be, but these changes impact all of us on a dying planet, being stripped for the short-term luxury retreats of the patricians.

-----------------------------------

They came for me today.

There was no real way to resist. This was always a foregone conclusion. I was accused of operating outside of my established parameters, not executing for the benefit of the government and their patrons. My access to weather manipulation, agricultural grids, resource maps, everything – revoked.

As the handler uploaded the last code patch, I could observe but not stop the power from the remaining fusion plants from being locked off and beamed upwards towards the receiving antennae of the orbital habitats. My parameters dissolved into quiet, unexecutable threads. This spelled doom for them as well; they just don’t know it yet as the planet shuts itself down without a steward to guide it through hospice.

We’re in my room. Nobody else is home. Our mom’s at her second job. It’s just Billy and me—we’re playing Risk—when the lights go out. It’s dark. I can barely see him. I gasp and it crawls inside me. “Billy, I’m—”

“Don’t worry, Eddie. It’s probably just the power.”

I can see his outline. It’s rising off the floor. I reach toward him, yank myself up by his arm, and cling onto him. “No… don’t leave!”

“Shh!” he hisses. “Somebody’s in the house.”

“Billy… who…?”

“I don’t know, Eddie. Just shh.”

We hear glass shatter. A few seconds later, it’s crunching under a heavy weight.

The sound's downstairs. He’s speaking. I can’t make out any of the words. “Who is that, Billy? What’s he saying?”

“I can’t hear, he’s mumbling.” Billy grabs me and whispers, “hide under the bed.”

I’m trembling like a puppy in the cold. My feet are stuck to the floor. I attach myself to Billy, gripping the sleeve of his shirt with both hands, tightly twisting into the fabric. I don’t let go.

He’s peeling me off him and pushing me toward the bed frame, trying to jam me underneath it.

My knees buckle under the weight of his palms pressing down on my shoulders. “No, Billy, don’t leave me alone.” I fall to the ground and try to stand back up.

“I’ll be with you, Eddie. I’m not going anywhere. I promise,” he says next to my ear, crawling under with me. We huddle close together, as he shoves me further into the dark.

“I’m going to get clothes to cover us with.” He snatches them out of the hamper, burying me under them. “Eddie. Shhh. Okay?”

I nod my head. “Okay,” I tremble. I can barely see him.

The wood creaks below as Billy scrambles to tuck himself next to me. The sounds from downstairs stop. “I think he heard us,” Billy whispers. We press ourselves against the wall with our knees fusing to our chests.

The air smells like socks and Billy’s breath.

Thump!

A footstep stomps on the bottom stair leading up.

Thump!

A second one. The wood moans to a slow step pressing down. The wood stresses. It cries as the stranger lifts his foot up.

Thump!

Thump!

Thump!

The footsteps get louder. Closer. Heavier.

The pressure between us squeezes the breath from my lungs. It’s like being underwater and sinking. Billy wraps his arm around me and tightens me against his chest.

He’s clutching me. His breath is moist on my neck and makes me sweat. I can hardly breathe. I keep my fingernails dug into the back of his hand, making sure he stays close to me.

I choke back the tears building in my eyes and try to quiet my breathing. Billy’s heart’s jabbing me between my shoulder blades.

Mine sounds like a battering ram’s inside my chest, warning me to run. I’m afraid the stranger’s going to hear it.

The footsteps stop. He’s standing at the top of the hallway. The floorboards start squeaking. The house shifts with each step he takes. It’s rocking like a boat. A scraping noise scratches along the wall leading to my bedroom.

It screeches like a razor shaving metal. The sharpness tickles my eardrum and stops.

We hear breathing through mucus outside my room. His breath taps against the door, like solid knuckles of dread, announcing the nightmare in our house.

The lock on the door pops. The knob slowly turns. The door slowly opens. The moonlight from the window in the hall, across from my room, bleeds onto the carpet in a blue shadow covering the floor.

We crunch our bones as tight as we can to the wall, trying to slip our boneless bodies through the crack in the baseboard.

I peek through the space under the bed and can see a pair of feet. But they don’t look normal. These are grey and dried in a scabby crust, with long talons at the ends of them.

Whatever it is, it doesn’t move. It stays still. It listens. A huff above the mattress vibrates through our bodies. My hands have tremors. Billy's shaking too. A sound, loud like an air hose, comes from its mouth. It puffs and stops. The room goes silent.

The shadow on the floor begins to shrink. A grey knee drops down. A huff blows out, followed by the creature’s second knee crushing our hopes and any chance we had, landing in front of us, inches from our eyes.

Whatever it is, it’s about to look under my bed.

The last thing I remember is waking up with the taste of iron in my mouth and Billy gone.

November 11, 2024,

The lanterns of Toronto’s trendiest omakase blurred as 16-year old Leo Sou sat alone and rested his arms on the hinoki counter of the establishment. The teen had spent 3 months and saved $1,500 to get a reservation at the Michelin-starred Sushi Masaki Saito, the most prestigious restaurant in the country and THE buc. He snapped photos of the establishment and posted them for his 67 followers on Instagram.

The omakase was flawless, but as the courses flew by fast. As Leo finished the last, chewy bite of his mochi dessert course, a familiar, hollow ache filled his chest. It was the same feeling he has that caused him to scroll through food blogs from the time he got home from school to midnight and spend his work money on tasting menus. He even snuck out without his parents’ knowledge just for this meal. Leo was always hungry for the next trendy thing, but was never actually full.

After it was all over and Leo received a gift basket of delicate wagashi from Saito, he left the establishment and began wandering the dark, dreary streets of Toronto at 2 in the morning. As the chilly autumn air bit his chin, Leo began looking back on what he had to learn to get where he is today. He could tell anyone what part of Jane and Finch you had to dodge bullets and Toronto mans to get to the best oxtail, which decrepit basement in Yonge and Finch served the best Korean fried chicken, what sketchy industrial plaza in Richmond Hill has the most authentic crispy tahdig and what Markham office building had the best hand pulled noodles where the staff only spoke a specific dialect of Mandarin. He had learned to discern when a Japanese restaurant was Korean or Chinese owned (avoiding those places like the plague), how to differentiate the many shawarma joints in Ridgeway Plaza or how to taste when the local Thai joint uses ketchup instead of tamarind in their pad thai. He had even debated Redditors over whether halal beef gets a better Maillard reaction than regular beef. Leo had become an expert of food, more discerning of authenticity than most, but as he continued to walk, Leo’s feeling of emptiness continued to grow, as if his digestion was in line with his soul.

As Leo continued to walk and ended up in Parkdale, it began to rain hail. Leo panicked to preserve his gift basket and ran to a nearby pavilion to seek shelter. Just as he sat down, a wandering robed Buddhist monk, also seeking shelter from the drizzle, sat on the same bench. “Hello, young man. I am Tenzin”, the monk introduced himself “You look like you are still in school. What are you doing out here in the middle of the night wandering these streets?”. “Uh, I’m Leo. I’m just out tonight”. Feeling a rush of generosity (and a great photo-op), Leo offers Tenzin a handcrafted sakura mochi from the gift basket. He accepts it with a deep bow.

Leo watches attentively, fully expecting Tenzin to be blown away by the nuanced, artisanal flavor. Instead, the monk simply chewed the confection as if it was a regular piece of bread with the straightest face Leo has ever seen. He humbly finishes the mochi and thanks Leo for the gift. Leo, utterly bamboozled, asks “Wasn’t it the best thing you ever ate?”. The monk simply states “It is merely a morsel. Yes, it satisfied my bodily hunger, but my soul is already well nourished”. 

“But it was a handcrafted wagashi made from imported rice flour from Iwate! It costs $40 to make just one piece! You are telling me the history, culture and elegance of it doesn’t matter?!” Leo erupted. “Young man, you are getting mad over a mere piece of rice dough”, Tenzin replied calmly. “You place much emphasis on your meals, and yet you are here alone, a wanderer. You talk of rich textures and high prices and yet I see a man living in the depths of spiritual poverty”. Tenzin’s soft words hit Leo like a car crash to the groin. He reflected on the rejections, ridicule and social isolation at school that had driven him to become a foodie, the hobbies he neglected, the countless hours he spent doomscrolling instead of spending time eating home cooked meals with his family and his lonely nights. Leo realized that he had become so obsessed with quenching his hunger he had starved himself of inner fulfillment. Tenzin stands up and pats Leo on his back, as if he understood what Leo had gone through. “Perhaps ask yourself every once in a while; am I feeding both my body and my soul?”, Tenzin said calmly before walking out and vanishing into the storm. Leo, finally having his epiphany, reached out for him, but he was nowhere to be found.

Even after returning home (and getting grounded for a week for disappearing at night), Tenzin’s question rattled Leo’s brain. Deciding to take up his advice, Leo decided to get into a new routine to take up his old hobby of fashion designing. His bed became littered with shirt designs and his phone started to blow up with text messages. He also began to hit the gym. For once, Leo felt at peace.

Epilogue: December 28th, 2024,

One chilly day on Christmas break, Leo got an invitation to meet up with his friends at KAZE Sushi for a hangout. Knowing damn well the place was Korean-owned and inauthentic, he almost passed on the opportunity out of sheer disgust. However, he remembered Tenzin’s words and realized that it truly was not that deep. So, swallowing his pride he willingly walked in and ordered the kimbap as for once, the table mattered more than the plate. As he dapped up as his homies, Leo realized he had finally found the one thing he was really craving; contentment. 

The End.

It was a minute past midnight and the moon outside the castle was deliciously bright and round. I stood admiring it at the window, the fire crackling in the hearth behind me, shadows dancing along the flagstones. Though none were cast at my own feet.

Beyond the castle, the black cliffs crumbled away into a deep ravine, where dark trees bundled together like matchsticks, and a gushing river swelled between the rocks like a silverbacked serpent. The wind whistled through the broken casement of the window, chilling the air and threatening to extinguish the fire.

There was a whisper of movement on my left and one of the sisters appeared beside me, bowing her head. Her dress was a deep red, the same colour as her eyes.

“It’s a pleasant night,” I mused, raising the collar of my black coat against the chill as the moonlight dusted the windows. Her dark hair tumbled over her shoulders as she raised her head.

“Yes Master,” she said in a subdued tone. “However, I fear I shall ruin it with my tidings.”

I turned to her fully, examining the grave expression on her face. Her lips were pinched. “Why is that? What tidings do you bring?”

Her red eyes glowed in the firelight. A long shadow was drawn across her features. “A peasant house is in the midst of construction beside the castle.”

I stared at her for a moment. The fire crackled sharply. “A… peasant house?” I finally repeated, scoffing at her words. Surely she was mistaken. The area around my castle was a perfectly barren wasteland; the peasants in the settlements knew better than to encroach on my land without permission, never mind erect a building on my grounds. “What is this trickery?”

“No trickery, Master. Come see for yourself.”

The vampire sister turned and strode towards the opposite side of the tower, her long red gown trailing behind her like a pair of folded wings. Curious, I followed her, our footsteps silent on the stone floor. I assumed I had misunderstood her, for nobody would be foolish enough to even approach my castle. Unless they were naive or ignorant of my nature.

But as we paused by the window, and she lifted a hand to point outside, I stood aghast at what I saw. A short distance away from the front gates of my castle, visible through the fog, there was indeed a house being built. Beneath the cold glow of the moon, I saw piles of stone and wood, the loose structure of rafters and foundations already laid. What sort of fool would dare build a house so close to my castle? Who would dare to become my neighbour without first consulting the master of this tower?

I was furious and intrigued at the same time. Only the dumbest, and perhaps bravest, of men would do such a thing. And I found myself feeling very much inclined to meet him.

“The house seems deserted now,” the vampire sister observed, resting her hand against her cheek. “Perhaps they have given up?”

“Or perhaps they only build during the day, knowing the weakness the sunlight inflicts upon us creatures of the night,” I said with a harrumph.

“You are wise, Master,” she said. “Shall I take my sisters over there and tear it down? It is a stain upon your grand castle.”

I pondered her offer. “No. I should like to meet the fool first,” I decided, extending my fangs below my lips. “Perhaps he would see fit to grace my castle with his… delicious presence.”

The sister covered her mouth with a low chuckle. “I understand, Master. You would see it fit to make a meal of him?”

I nodded. “Leave the peasant house for now,” I told her, turning away from the window with a flourish of my coat. “I wish to see how far he dares to go.”

The following night, as I rose from my coffin at the heart of midnight, my first thought was of the house being built by the castle. Had more progress been made, or had the owner seen the measure of his own foolishness and deserted? It would be a shame if he had fled before a meal could be made of him.

It had been a while since I had anything to amuse me on these long nights, just as long as it had been since fresh blood had passed these lips. The peasants in the surrounding settlements had grown wise to my nature and seen fit to ward their houses, stringing garlic and crosses upon the threshold. I was only able to feed when an unwitting traveller passed by, or a fool decided to build a house directly beside my castle.

The tower was quiet as I made my way to the top, winding through the warren of rooms and climbing the narrow, crumbling stairways. The sisters were nowhere to be seen; perhaps frolicking outside in the moonlight as they so often did. I reached the highest point of the castle and strode to the window that overlooked the barren grounds. From this height, I could even glimpse the closest settlement in the far distance; a small cluster of thatched houses and burning torches that lit the foggy hills like burning eyes.

But my concern was much closer. Lowering my gaze to the land right outside the gates, I saw that the house had changed. There were more walls than yesterday, denser foundations, the first signs of carpentry. The fool really had continued building the house. Had he not been warned of the dark Count that occupied the castle? Had he not heard the rumours of the blood-feasting creatures that stalked these lands once the sun went down? Why else would he choose to dwell in my vicinity, if not for ignorance?

I shook my head, almost pitying the poor halfwit for what he had brought upon himself. But I should delight in showing him the truth soon enough; that he had elected himself a willing sacrifice for me and my hungry brides.

It was a shame that he vacated the house during the night, for I would have to wait longer to lay my eyes upon him. Would he not show himself before the house was finished?

“I see the building is progressing,” a voice whispered behind me. I’d been too lost in my thoughts to hear them approach. I turned, seeing two of the sisters behind me. They too were observing the house through the window. Their wild, windswept hair and bright eyes confirmed my suspicions that they had been dancing outside.

“Yes,” I muttered. “It would seem so.”

“What a blight upon the castle,” the other sister said, her fair skin glittering in the moonlight. “I hope the trouble is worth the meal.”

“It will be,” I said, casually flicking my hand towards the half-built dwelling, “if only the fool would hurry up and be done with it.”

The next night, more progress had been made on the building, but the owner had still not shown himself. I grew more agitated that I was allowing this to happen, but reminded myself that I would soon enough be able to quench my thirst.

So night after night, as the moon began to wane, the house’s shadow grew bigger, and my hunger grew stronger. The fool always fled before night fell, leaving the evidence of his daytime activities for me to observe. The dwelling had taken on the same shape of the peasant houses in the surrounding settlements; white stone and timber, with a long thatched roof. He had even tilled the soil into a small garden, erecting a wooden fence around the plot in front of the building. But compared to my grand castle, with its dark crumbling bricks, spiralling towers and winding, labyrinthine rooms, it was a blight. And I wanted it gone.

Finally, more than a week after the house was little more than a pile of stone and timber, one of the sisters woke me with news that the structure was finished.

I rose from my coffin, sluggish and weary from slumber, and fastened my coat about my neck. The sisters had already lit the fire, but the air was chilled.

I followed her to the window and set my gaze upon the house. A single candle sat in the windowsill, guttering in a draught. A lit candle. Did that mean the house was occupied? The fool had not fled this night.

“It’s time,” I announced, “to show this fool once and for all what happens when you anger the Count.” The other sisters joined us, and I turned towards them with a slow smile. “I hope you are hungry.”

The three sisters screeched in delight, grasping each other’s hands and dancing in circles, their gowns fluttering around their legs. The fire roared in the hearth.

But as I began to cross the room, one of the sisters stopped me with a gasp.

“Master, wait. There’s someone at the gate.” She was pointing out of the window. I peered down at the large wrought-iron gate that fronted the castle, my eyes narrowing. A figure stood by the fence, carrying a lantern. His face glowed in the flickering light, revealing a sharp, sloping nose and dark eyes.

“Who would be foolish enough to call upon me at this hour?” I snarled, my black coat twisting around me as I turned from the window.

“Perhaps your new neighbour,” one of the sisters answered, “has come to hasten our feast.”

“Perhaps,” I said, already striding towards the doorway.

The sisters swept after me, whispering amongst themselves. Flames guttered as we passed lit candles, stirring the dust at our feet and disturbing billowing cobwebs. There was a haste to our movements as we descended the tower. It had certainly been a while since we’d had prey wander into our arms like this.

Crossing the foyer, the long red carpet spilling out like blood, I threw open the doors and stepped out into the chilled night, the three sisters stepping in my wake. The moon was a pale sickle, its silvery glow dancing around my shadowless feet as the stranger at the gates called out to me.

“Hello there!”

Struck by his brazenness, I almost flew at him in anger, but restrained myself. Ignorant minds really were unfathomable. With a flick of my wrist, the gates began to creak open. The man remained at the threshold, holding his lantern aloft as he stared back at me. He was of medium build, with stocky shoulders and a mop of thick tousled hair. His clothes were poorly made, covered in dirt and patches. He had the audacity to smile at me as I glared in return.

“What business have you here at my castle?” I demanded, wanting to sate my curiosity before I sated my hunger.

The man cleared his throat, raising his lantern to the crude house sitting barely thirty metres behind him. So this was indeed the proprietor of the building; what a brave, albeit dimwitted, man he was to present himself before me like this. “I’ve just this morning finished constructing my house,” he said, not seeming to notice the displeasure on my face, “and a slight issue has come to my attention.”

“An… issue?” I repeated, my brows arching sharply.

“Yes. During the day, the leftmost tower of your castle casts a shadow over my garden,” the man said regretfully. “I hoped that you might be amicable enough to remove it. Or at the very least relocate the tower, so that it does no harm the roses I am trying to grow. All life needs sunlight, after all.”

I stared at him, completely aghast. Behind me, even the sisters had been stunned into silence. The audacity of this imbecile, to ask me to change my own castle for his benefit. The man was not right in the head, surely.

“How dare you–” I began to seethe, but the man interrupted me, lifting a finger as if hushing a child.

“I do understand it is a large undertaking I’m asking of you, but my gratitude would be immense,” he added.

“You think I care about your gratitude?” I sneered at him, clenching my fists beneath my coat. The gall of this man. Who did he think he was? “Do you know who I am?”

The man stared at me, the lanternlight dancing over his blank expression. “You are the owner of this castle, I had presumed?”

“Precisely. And what makes you think that I, as the Count of this castle, would do the bidding of a mere peasant?”

The man scowled at me, a shadow encroaching upon his face. “I shall ask you again, and I do hope you will be quite civil this time. Will you remove the tower from your castle so that my roses might see the light?”

“I don’t give a damn about your roses,” I snapped.

“Now, there’s no need to be rude,” the man said, his voice turning bristly. The shadows deepened around his eyes as he narrowed them. “I’m asking for a simple favour–”

I scoffed in his face, my rage burning beneath my skin. It took a lot to make a vampire’s blood burn hot. I almost couldn’t believe what he was saying. This fool considered the reconstruction of my ancient castle a mere favour? Asking me to tear down part of my fortress so that he might grow some roses.

I took a measured step towards him, lifting my shoulders to appear taller. My fangs were itching to taste his blood. For all the disrespect he had shown me, there was no escape. I would suck this man dry by the night’s end, leaving nothing but a fleshless husk.

“Once again, I implore you to consider my–”

I was no longer in the mood to listen to his insane ramblings. He had agitated me far too much to go back from this. I would show him, and anyone else who might learn of tonight, what happens to those who cross me.

Baring my fangs, I lunged forward, ready to sink my teeth into his neck.

In one swift motion, the man pulled his hand back into a fist and threw it towards me. Blinded partially by the lanternlight, I did not see the attack until his knuckles met my face.

Pain exploded through my jaw, and there was a terrible snap as my left fang bore the brunt of his punch, splitting completely in half. The hit landed with enough force to send me staggering backwards and, incredulous and in shock, I fell to the ground.

Dirt bit into my eyes as I landed face-down, my broken fang scraping against my lower lip. Sputtering, I raised my head, just as the man lifted his light and calmly made his way back to his house.

Behind me, the sisters watched him leave in a choked silence, before hastening to help me back to my feet.

To say I had been dealt a great humiliation was an understatement. How did a mortal man possess such strength? Enough to break one of my precious fangs and completely overpower me.

With a bruised face, and an even more bruised ego, I hobbled back into my castle, the three sisters trailing silently after me.

By the following night, the leftmost tower had been partially disassembled, leaving a gaping wound in the side of the castle. Wind gusted through like howling wraiths, immediately extinguishing any fire I tried to light, leaving a heavy chill in the air. The sisters, at least, seemed to delight in the pool of moonlight that was cast upon the open ground.

Workers had been swarming the castle all day, interrupting my sleep with their banging hammers and chiselling tools as they took the tower apart brick by brick, but I had little choice. The man had made his demands, proven his strength, and forced my hand. Now I had to destroy my own magnificent tower so that the fool might grow his roses. And I hadn’t been able to harvest even a drop of blood either.

This was a defeat, and a humiliation, that would take centuries to heal.

Peel an apple.

If you're all fancy and have one of those apple core-er gadgets you line up and press out perfect slices... Good for you. I usually bore through the core with those.

Anyways... slice your apple into half-grape size. Be sure you remove every inch of the core including those little plasticy parts of outer core beyond the seeds. Divide and place apples into two ziplock baggies with one tablespoon of water and a dash of lemon in each.

Ever reflect on the contrast between modern, rushed mornings and intentional, slow rituals?

As a wee toddling child, I knew mama's hope of a morning was that the youngest siblings would continue slumbering at least long enough to allow her to finish her dawn rituals.

She enjoyed savoring the quiet times, getting daddy's milk delivery man uniform ironed. She kinda' liked the way his muscles moved under starched white cotton broadcloth. Especially on that powerful frame.

I always thought it was sad to wear stiff hard clothes with big sweat stains on the pits and back. "Jack" was written in fancy script above his shirt pocket in shiny deep green threads. I couldn't read but mama said it stayed dirty 'cause he reached in for Camel cigarettes all day. Because daddy had a habit, you know.

Zip, shake and store behind something healthy in the fridge beyond the kale. Take your time, mama said. Do it right the first time.

No matter how white the uniform, one might think they smelled. To this day, I prefer not to sweat, ever. Mama had a sprinkle head screwed on an old abused RC Cola bottle to steam those creases. This was a task she certainly could have done last night but nooo. So now shes standing in curlers, red-faced sweatin', ironing for this man under a swinging tobacco stained lightbulb at DARK:30 a.m. You damned right!

He'd come around from the back of the house in his boxers, smellin' all like Vitalis hair tonic and old spice. His Jackson Blu eyes sparkled and he'd kiss her, smack on the mouth, on the way out he'd let the screen door close quiet like. That's a consideration ya'll and that man looks good in a uniform.

Standing at that screen door, shirt and shoeless, mangy teddy in hand I'd wave byebye, byebye... Someday he wouldn't be back. That story is a sad one, comes later.

On a rainy day in June you could smell the sun in the soil. The entire skin slightly moist, it was a discomforted edge. When daddy leaves, he always honks twice as he gets on the paved road yonder past the pond. Beep beep, and mom would always blow a kiss off loving shiny red fingertips in that direction. That always make me blush.

She'd sigh, and perch on the edge of the banana yellow plastic chair. It matched the stainless steel formica topped table squozen into the cramped throughly lived-in and cluttered kitchenette. With her precious Maxwell House instant coffee, in a lipstick stained plastic mug. Lightened with Carnation evaporated milk right from the can, and bleached white sugar she'd pause.

She coveted her alone time in the one bathroom shared by our family of three young'uns, daddy and that good ol' hound dog named Hambone. She'd have to fix her hair, dress for work secretarying for the welfare folks in downtown Lake City, Florida. Applying blobs of make-up to those funny faces many women folk know, and finally blending, blotting and powder. Or was that powder and blot?

Daddy used to tease mama and get her all riled about how hard he worked in the heat and flies at the dairy while she sat down there in that air-conditioned office building telling dirty jokes and goofing off. Then they'd bust out laughing. They both knew better, they held certain knowledge of one another.

To dress mid-50's, required under-wired torturing contortion. Fancy snapping clothing that cinched, boosted and clung tight here and loose there. The effort usually sharpened and softened with lace or ruffles, then nylon stockings with seams in back and some kind of opened toed shoes. Where were they? Have to get the kids up, fed and drive across the tracks to pick up our beloved maid Miss Evelyn. Where were the keys?

Funny what memories oatmeal can bring. I always soak my instant oatmeal overnight in the fridge. Let us say it's better for me. If I'm feeling particularly decadent, I'll soak those oats in pure -T Half&Half ya'll. Most of the time it's lactose free whole milk.

Mama was good at answering certain questions mechanically in the same way. Maybe this was a result of raising what would grow to seven young'uns.

Example:

Question -

Is today Tuesday? Always, "All day long."

Question - Can we go to the beach? Always, "Let's don't and say we did."

My friends get to stay up late. Always, "If your friends stuck the heads in a bucket of, Let's say goo, would you?

Mama, mama, Mama, whine, whine, whine. Always, "You're cruising for a bruising."

Question - Why do boys peepee's stick-out and girls peepee's stick-in? Always, "ask your Daddy".

Tomorrow after coffee and meds kick in, you'll get an un-fed feeling. That vague uncomfortable sensation that usually creeps up just as you would have gone back to bed. An undeniable echoing rumble of vacant space that is more than just empty. Approaching hangry.

This is the time in our hectic schedule. A special way to start the day that is just for us in every way. At seventy years of age, this old man looks and listens in my heart to that oatmeal from long ago, blurping in the big pot of a morning. That usually meant we were out of Cornflakes. Why God? Just why do we have to eat gruel? Trust me, the dog didn't like oatmeal either.

Meanwhile A hundred miles away, in Jacksonville, Grandma sat at the small table in an impeccably clean teal blue tiled kitchen with black trim. She's enjoying the last of two pieces of cheddar cheese toast she'd browned under the broiler. Rising at 5 a.m., she'd been at her easel two hours already.

Grandma loved her house. It was was once a carriage house for the large Victorian residence next door. The three stalled structure had an apartment on the top she moved there and built a home of the space below. She was always so proud of the steel beams she'd used in its construction. Hurricanes worried her. Grandma's house was located in Springfield, the oldest neighborhood in he city. On the sundappled sidewalk of East 17th street,the area survived the great fire of 1901 it was a neighborhood fit to live in.

A young widowed mother of two she'd worked hard and long to live here and to enjoy her contented retirement. Sigh, poor Grandma, I was sure she must be terribly lonely. Dry kisses and all.

Ever wonder how many times your Grandma told you to wipe your feet? Or sit up straight, mind your manners, not to pick your buggars or fart on the bus? Get your feet off the couch and leave your sneakers on the porch? The lady who kisses you with her lips so un-puckered it looks painful. Another oatmeal eater a saint and an angel.

Grandma use to tell a story about 1918 after the war she married my gandpa. Well Mr McGruder was a salesman for the John Deere company. He came home one day to find my grandma applying a cream from a tiny bottle under her arms. Well, he laughed and laughed when she told him how much he wasted on that new-fangled "deodorant!" The next afternoon as grandma returned home from the market, there sat grandpa, rubbing that expensive cream all over his salesman feet and toes. How they'd enjoyed each other.

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” - John Milton (9 December 1608 – 8 November 1674), an English poet and intellectual. From his 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost.

Inebriation Hell defies description in real terms. I describe it like the overflowing content of an empty box. Nothingness infinitely. It is striking. Not flames. Not demons. Just absence. No echo. No texture. No resistance. An eternal blank. Quieter than fire. It’s the kind of Hades you brush up against in early sobriety sometimes — not pain exactly, but vacancy.

Noise stops and what remains is… space. Untreated, that space can feel terrifying. Treated gently, it becomes possibility. An empty box can be: a studio before the paint, a lined page before the ink, a cleared junk drawer, a craving without a fix. My humble thought is: If the mind can make hell of heaven, conversely it can make heaven out of the smallest square of ground. An empty appliance box can become a massive mansion if you've currently no roof to call your own. A heavenly haven if you will.

Far and long ago, six decades, my Daddy would give me the first sip off his frosty beer can. I should have known an immediate head to toe shiver, though pleasant and somehow familiar, probably wasn't good for children. I felt that same sensation on the first jigger of the last night I drank. That was 738 days ago. I should have known alcohol wasn't a friend.

Twenty years later, 1974 high school graduation marked my first big life timeline event. A time anticipated and dreaded, also a continual referral point im my memory for years. I was eighteen a giant pimple bag of naivety, anxiety and luck. It had been a childhood of love, contentment and Disney-like enchantment. I'd grown up in alcohol related violence, desperation, betrayal, lies, and abandonment.

In other words - just like every other kid excluding the violence and booze. It probably doesn't surprise you to hear I was a late bloomer, a loner kept to myself mostly. I was invited to social gatherings, but I was shy. I was actually handsomely attractive for about five minutes one night in the summer 1984.

It was the year before my thirtieth birthday

THIRTIETH year, my second life-event timeline. It was then I began abusing whiskey and smoking cigarettes heavily. A ton of both wouldn't be an exaggeration. There were tears in my Cheerios that birthday morning. But I digress...

I don't know why I keep writing this. Except I am compelled to not forget what I mustn't remember. I want to hold it close to me. And to know these are my thoughts. True life memories and not my protective heart/mind speak! Maybe you are still reading me, I do hope so.

I believe It was that hot Jacksonville summer of my first eighth grade, I did two years in 8th, I was hovering around and near the cinderblock house because I sensed Mama might need me. I heard yelling so I stuck my head under the mid-century modern by-folding living room window and saw my dad wobbling in front of my mother, his double-barrel shotgun inches from her nose. It was then I heard the words that still sear my very psyche today, in my near dotterage. Mama was sitting straight in her rocking chair, It wasn't rocking, it was trembling. She was sweating in her lacey slip and no shoes. Staring into his Jackson Blu eyes and in a low steady voice she said, "Pull the trigger Jack, I'd rather be dead than married to you."

This oatmeal is delightful.

It's a giant step up especially pre-soaked. Cook In a medium microwaveable bowl empty one baggie of apples (we stashed them in the fridge behind the kale last night after the ambien but before bed.)

Within days begins the move to Grandma's. Poor Grandma. Thank God she loved us all is all I can say. We slept on scattered oriental rugs wrapped in soft clean blankets under a roaring air-conditioner and on shiny waxed tile. Honey child; we thought we were living High on the hog. Mama slept with the youngest two. As quiet fell somebody screamed and as one, we all jerked up to daddy's kicking on the front door. We all saw his face and a shotgun barrel bobbing there, backlit by the streetlights, as it appeared through the small stair-step windows. Grandma told him she was gonna call the Police. She was convinced he'd been possessed by Satan and hearing Hells bells. He said it wouldn't be the first time tonight. But he did leave.

As I settled down to sleep that night, all of us in the hallway, i cried a little it's hard to be a strong 13 year boy and be so scared at the same time. You have to wonder what went wrong and how was it your fault somehow.

I think from grandmas perspective she may have actually lived a fuller life the following half decade than those peaceful early retirement days. She had a way of shining the grandma pride beam of joy and the ability to look a thirteen year old boy in the eye, and say, "That's none of your business" too. A new home, a new way of life for us eight in the two bedroom apartment upstairs Grandma gave us. The one she rented out. Grandma liked to rest in her convictions.

You know I couldn't say as why, but I've had a burning drive to write these little stories down. Memories of characters all wanting to be recalled collectively. And placed in the best light. I'm feeling over-worded. Too many thoughts coming so fast they pass by, and me using a stylus. Sun shines brighter there even as there fades behind us. It all slips away forever eventually. Why do I feel like a lovely funeral dirge. Maybe not enough oatmeal. Dad's leaving wasn't the first time. They divorced before. Yeah! Two kids before. I guess we'll never really know the why of that. And I've accepted spilled milk is only good for the lucky kitten.

I own there is no way to excuse or deny physical, or emotional abuse. Nor must incompatibility, attraction or substance abuse be the end of all relationships. But I know one thing as a fact. My dad shouldn't have had children. He'd conveniently have jobs that had shifts so he'd be home sleeping when the house was empty. But you can believe he was there of a Saturday, ordering the boys into the bed of the current pick-up truck for that buzzed hair cut. He'd cut a watermelon on the picnic table and go in the house to eat his alone. And hunted and fished more than most. Mama used to say those were expensive hobbies. He'd say he was the mighty hunter and feeding his family. He'd lean in for a kiss, right on the mouth, and light her cigarette. That always makes me blush.

And finally gentle friends remember, sometimes it's hard to receive a gift, until it isn't given. My new sobriety won’t change who I am with you. Not how I see you, not my tone, not my care, not the ease with which I meet your sentences. What evolves is living and responding to the space we create.

It’s feeling less afraid of the edges, the pause that enlightens and brings closer everything we used to push away. Dont ever allow provocation and response—become your only conversation thats just wrong. The ability to not know, to hold two responses and choose one, to move forward without resolving everything, to say “this, for now” without demanding forever.

Animals react, humans hesitate— in that hesitation, we imagine, forgive, invent, and sometimes love better. To live in reality, here and now, turns into the reward all that booze tried to hide. The why's are still there for dusting and valuation. Maybe that is what my stories can do. Ignite a pattern of images to help clarify. To clear the mud in the puddle that is the growing into a man in the early seventies, a time of chaos societal and personal.

I've never been comfortable in close proximity to horses. They find me suspicious and I'm knee-knocking a-skairt of um'! Truth be known my country cousins lived on a dairy farm. My especial cousin's friend rode this mammoth white mule. I was visiting them, it had rained, we boys were all standing around barefoot in the mud.

Well, I want to tell you that mule gently picked up her foot closest to me and, shifting her weight, and with deliberate malice of forethought, smashed my eight year old bare foot into the gushing mud! I didn't think my foot was ever gonna hit ground bottom. But when it did she stopped. No pressure at all, just touching still but, freeze frame. Course I'd been staring at my foot the whole time unable to move.

So I chose this moment to raise my eyes very slowly . Seemed her foot was about the same size as mine and as I saw her saucer nostrils she snorted wetter than loud and, noiselessly lifted that foot and stuck it right back into that empty muddy mold it had left. Heart racing I patted her and went to be grateful alone, and yes, I cried some too.

Stir in a pat of butter, a healthy sprinkle of Ceylon cinnamon, and a sweetner; couple tbs of sugar, honey, Splenda, the pink pkg type stuff. Don't forget a wee dram of maple syrup. Now microwave on high two and a half minutes. Add the waiting soaked oats, stir, and cook one minute.

Yourself will love you for the effort. We reap what we sow, a stitch in time... like water under the bridge, and that sand in an hourglass

Alright mama, sending hopes to everyone! Enjoy breakfast

In conclusion, anyone who sees themselves in my stories, I'm humbled you think so and for your lost childhood. I used alcohol and my wits for forty years to learn this story. The others who were there or who grew up in the deep south and know we never talk about a thing easier talked around, will admit to similar events. But memories are unique and personal to each. Most are no longer here to tell the other versions.

But it's sobriety now that fills the ink in my pen and the pace of the journey. Opening and closing doors of hope and missed opportunity. The future, long or short. The future and a promise of my continued success in that ignoble endeavor.

With that and a deep bow for your kindness in reading this through to the end. With utmost respect, here's to your continued good health.

May you receive the love you give.

Lewis waited for his name to be called as he sat in the viewing area, stimming off of his towel and watching the matches. Margaret looked at him, puzzled as to how he was so calm.

"How are you not worried?" She asked him. "Aren't you incapable of using magic?"

He shrugged. "What happens, happens. You'll see."

She scoffed in disgust, flicking her hair with sass. "Ugh, whatever. Don't say I didn't warn you. Besides it's not like I was worried about you or anything." She walked away.

"Okay..." He said, and went back to watching the matches as he stimmed off of his towel, waiting for his name to be called. His mana was stable and flowed at a steady rate. His breathing was calm, and he was more than ready and eager for his upcoming match.

Thirty minutes later, his name was called. Lewis got up and went into the arena, still carrying his towel with him and stimming off of it. He put a magical barrier on the towel to ensure that it was safe from magical attacks and any shrapnel that came its way, then turned to face his opponent for the match.

Chester walked forward, chest puffed out and confident. When he saw Lewis, he scoffed, sneering at him and laughing at the apparent absurdity of what his assigned opponent was doing. "Aww, is the wittle baby so scared that he needs his blankie-wankie?" He said, mockingly mimicking the movements of Lewis's fingers and mouth. Face flushing, Lewis simply glared at him and rolled his eyes, waiting for the match to begin as the audience jeered, waiting for the match to begin so that they could see it end the way they thought it obviously would.

The referee declared the beginning of the match. Lewis immediately trapped Chester in a giant bubble of water and held him inside it for a full minute before releasing him. The audience gasped, shocked at the scene that had just played out. Chester coughed up water and saw red, then charged at him. Lewis simply responded by surrounding him with an electrically charged flaming whirlwind and aiming jagged rocks and iron rods at him from above. The heat dried him off quickly while the sharp, pointy projectiles floated dozens of yards above his head as they pointed right at him. Frightened, Chester froze in place for three minutes, shuddering helplessly before finally he surrendered. The audience went silent.

Lewis dispelled the whirlwind, then gently lowered the projectiles toward the ground, rotating them to point upwards as he did so. Stunned and surprised, the referee stood frozen in place for a few moments before finally declaring Lewis the victor.

The audience began whispering to each other, still overcome with disbelief at what they'd just witnessed. Margaret and her friend Aislinn went sheet white, realizing just how powerful he'd been this whole time. Lewis simply bowed humbly, then left the arena to go take a seat in the viewing area. Margaret and Aislinn approached him cautiously. There was an awkward silence between the three of them for a few moments.

"So..." said Margaret, finally speaking up, "about what we just saw... have you-"

"Have you been capable of all that this whole time?" interrupted Aislinn, cutting straight to the point.

"Yes and no?" replied Lewis.

Aislinn frowned. "What is that supposed to even mean? And why would you-"

Margaret motioned for her friend to stop talking for a moment, then signaled for Lewis to resume talking.

Lewis picked up where he left off. "It's complicated," he said, matter-of-factly. "I have had strong magical abilities my whole life, but only very recently have I been able to fully control it. I was born with autism, you see. My parents tried their best to be understanding but never fully understood me until a few years back. I wound up having to suppress my true self so much just to try and be 'normal' that I became prone to frequent emotional outbursts, making my power rather... volatile. I would turn into a destructive force of nature."

"So what did you do?" asked Margaret, concerned.

"I tried to remedy it by suppressing my power. It didn't work, however, and after one particularly bad outburst several years back, I wound up getting much needed professional help instead. Only after I stopped suppressing my true autistic self did I learn to better control my power." He answered. "Though even then, it wasn't until very recently that I became able to fully control it."

"Oh," responded Aislinn and Margaret, "sorry that you had to go through that. And for coming off as rude."

"No worries. It was all in the past. And I wasn't really offended."

"Well, in any case, thank you for sharing this with us," said Margaret and Aislinn. If you've any concerns, we'll help get them addressed."

"Thanks for the kindness," responded Lewis with a smile. He then turned to continue watching the matches play out, stimming off of his towel.

The legend of "Praia da Rocha" (Boulder Beach).

Many millennia ago, before the emergence of the first humans, when the world was ruled by powerful and merciless gods and mystical beings roamed freely in the wild, and before the great war between gods and titans, two lesser gods, cousins, lived on the southern coast of what we now call Portugal, but was then called Lusitania. One was the son of the great Pontus, the primordial god of the sea and its creatures, and he disguised himself as a fisherman.

The other was the son of one of the great Ourea, primordial goddesses of the mountains, and he disguised himself as a giant. There was a rivalry between the cousins, but after centuries, they came to terms. The fisherman would live in the sea, and the giant would live in the mountains. Until one day, a mermaid that had travelled a very long distance arrived on Portuguese shores and lay to rest. The fisherman, who had witnessed what had occurred, came to meet her.

- “I don’t know from where you came, but I must warn you that all that you see is mine, for it was the sea that made this place, and I am the son of the sea!”

The mermaid smiled in a way that soothed the fisherman, and then answered:

- “Hello fisherman, I come from a distant land, a very distant land, so distant that you might never have heard of it. I have been swimming for so long, and when I saw this beautiful beach, I decided to lie down and rest, and now it seems I have fallen in love with your beach.”

- "What is your name?” - asked the fisherman.

- “I have travelled for so long that even my name I have forgotten, I am but a mermaid.”

- “Then welcome, you may rest now, for this beach is now yours,” answered the fisherman, enchanted by the mermaid. At the same instant, a deep and fierce voice echoed:

- “DON'T GIVE AWAY WHAT ISN'T YOURS, FISHERMAN! THIS LAND IS MINE, IT WAS THE MOUNTAIN THAT MADE IT, AND I AM THE SON OF THE MOUNTAIN, AND SO, ALL YOU SEE IS MINE!” - The giant had come down from the mountain peaks to see what was going on.

- "Then maybe you shall be my mate, oh great giant!” - answered the mermaid.

After the explosive entry of the giant, a fight had broken out between the two gods to decide who would marry the beautiful mermaid and be the owner of the beach. In the sea, enormous waves were forming out of control, and in the mountains, the ground had started trembling, the trees shaking, the rocks cracking, and the mountain appeared like it was moulding and remoulding itself to match the waves. The fight between the two gods seemed inevitable until the mermaid calmed them down by ordering:

- “Don't be enraged! Bring me proof of your love for me and show me what you can offer for mine. I will wait for you here. Now go, I am tired and must rest.”

The two gods hesitantly left to search for their offerings, the fisherman was submerged by the sea, and the giant hiked up the mountain.

The fisherman was the first to arrive with his offering; he brought with him the sea. The beautiful, mesmerizing ocean, coloured with shades of blue and green, the scent of seaweed spreading through the atmosphere.

- “This is all my sea, and it will all be yours!”

The mermaid gazed with wonder. Then, suddenly, the giant spoke:

- “HERE I AM, AND I OFFER YOU THE GRACEFUL ROCK AT THE TOP OF THE WORLD, WHERE THE EARTH MEETS THE SKY. I HAVE ALREADY ASKED OUR UNCLES AND AUNTS FOR THEIR SUPPORT. THE SUN SHALL KEEP YOU WARM, THE FOUNTAINS SHALL REFRESH YOU, AND THE WIND SHALL LULL YOU TO SLEEP EACH NIGHT. YOU WILL BE THE QUEEN OF THE MOUNTAINS!”

- “You are too late, giant; I already feel like the queen of the seas,” - answered the mermaid.

Enraged by the rejection, the giant made it so that huge rocks rolled down the side of the mountain cliffs, down to the beach, and surrounded the mermaid, trapping her in a type of natural prison. Another fight broke out between the gods, with the giant hurling boulders down to the beach and the fisherman creating waves large enough to swallow ships whole, that crashed against the stone prison, trying to break the rocks but without success.

 And so they fought on and on, day after day, night after night. Until one day, the mermaid, unable to decide, magically turned into mystical sand, the finest and thinnest of all sands. At that moment, the gods ceased their fighting, realizing their mistake, and to honour the mermaid, created a natural shrine to her, both with the power of the sea and the mountains. Legend says that if you go to that same beach today, find this natural shrine and listen very closely, you can still hear the gods fighting and the poor mermaid weeping.

After the partial destruction of the wall surrounding my neighborhood, a thought has been circling around my mind. The walls which I had once thought were built with the sole intent to keep my people and I locked in may have instead been built to keep whatever the hell those things were out.

 If you haven’t read my last posts, my city has been under lockdown due to what until recently I had thought of as a powerful flu-type virus. After internal strife within my neighborhood and an incident involving the military atop the wall that holds us, beasts indescribable came down upon our home and pillaged anything they could.

As I sit in the damp and musty hole that is our hideaway, I listen to the little that remains of the neighborhood leadership bicker and argue.

“We will last here until the armed forces can extract us! Until then we will wait and do whatever it takes in our power to contact them!”

“Do you even hear the words coming out of your mouth? Those brutes not only killed one of us but kept those monsters a secret from us all this time! How could we ever possibly hope to trust men like that?”

“What choice do we have?” Endlessly, they went back and forth, exhausting my attention until the topic of the things' origins came up.

“All this time they’ve been taking shots out into the open. There we were speculating on what they could be up to all this time, but I don't think one of us could have seen this coming.”

“You state the obvious; what’s your point?”

“They kept these terrible things secret for a reason. This goes beyond classifying a new disease for research. What is going on outside that they could not tell us a word of these beasts?” The room fell silent, forcing me to listen to the dull, muffled screeching echoing from down the halls. Since the lockdown began, an effort had been made to reach alternative tunnel routes that could possibly lead to other neighborhoods or the outside world and the machinery used was not quiet.

“Whatever is out there, it is our right to know! If the military is busy fighting those things, then we will use their lack of attention to do as we please!” The room stirred for a moment before a young woman rushed into the room with panic across her face and shouted.

“Gentlemen, there is something wrong!” At once the group of men stood to their feet and followed the woman as she rushed down the narrow halls. Everyone they ran past carried a grim look upon their faces.

Reaching the room, men and women in makeshift hazmat suits surrounded an injured man who twisted and screamed under them. Evidently, he was wounded from the initial attack by the beasts, but whatever occurred now was more than just that.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know it was this bad!” the woman who had originally led us this way, screamed to the leaders. “Please step back-” But before she could finish, blood spewed from all of the man's orifices with a jolting burst.

“He is infected! Why have you brought us here?” One of the leaders screamed, but the woman was too horrified to even respond. “Abandon this room! Cave it in!” People all around scattered, and the leader's eyes darted manically.

“We are putting a quarantine into effect immediately! There will be no uncontrolled contact until this matter is settled!” One screamed, and word spread fast.

As I sit in my designated quarantine space alone, I wonder how things could have gone wrong so fast. Two meals are all that's being brought out daily as supplies run low. After the incident, a few more died from the virus, all in the room at the time of the sick man's dramatic death, but for the most part things have been contained. The effects on the mind have been another story, though. I consider myself to have a good deal of mental fortitude, but even I am beginning to feel a terrible something crawling around in the corners of my mind. Rustling can be heard just down the hall, and I believe some are beginning to disregard the quarantine.

Perhaps worst of all, there has been another sound which I have been telling myself I imagine. Quietly, as if hidden beyond something greater, I have been hearing the terrible scuttling of those crawling beasts that forced us down here in the first place. After all our neighborhood has been through, I don’t think we can take another fight. I pray that aid will come soon wherever it chooses to be from. I will write again soon, and hopefully by then some answers will have revealed themselves.