“Tell me: how does it feel—living the last few hours of your life?”

“Single life,” said Phil, pushing away the phone his best friend, Carl, was sticking in his face to record him with.

It was a beautiful, sunny spring day.

Phil’s wedding day.

In a few hours he would be getting married to his high school sweetheart, but for now he had Carl to deal with. “Life… single life, it’s all the same, man,” Carl was saying. Carl was an aspiring vlogger. “The moment you settle, you die.”

“Come on,” said Phil. “At least ask me something I can show my kids later.”

“Kids,” Carl snickered.

“—what?”

“OK, OK. I got one. What’s one thing about today that could make it even better than it already is?”

Phil looked into the camera. “If the band shows up on time.”

“I'm being serious,” said Carl.

“If Greg was here.”

“Dude, you haven’t talked to your brother in, like, four years. I mean, I always thought twins were creepy close, finishing each other’s sentences and all that. Then I met you. It's like you don't even have a brother, let alone one who looks exactly like you.”

“Things used to be better between us,” said Phil.

“By the way, speaking of who is here, how do you feel about your soon-to-be bride’s ex being on the guest list? Isn’t that, like, weird?”

“Brock’s a decent guy,” said Phil. “Sometimes relationships don’t work out, that's all. Everybody is somebody’s ex, except maybe you, you incel-wannabe piece of—” and Phil lunged for the phone and managed to grab it.

“Unfair! Element of surprise!” protested Carl.

“No more filming until the ceremony. But film the ceremony. I’m counting on you. Marilyn wanted to get a professional videographer—”

“Yeah yeah yeah, until you personally vouched for me and my skills.”

“That’s right.”

Carl slapped his friend on the shoulder. “I won’t let you down, buddy. Scout's Honour. Today’s gonna be a great day, I’m gonna get it all on camera, well lit and shit, and by the time you’re back from your honeymoon, ready to move out to Mass and bend M.I.T. to your postgrad fucking will, I'll have your footage edited, post-prodded and delivered. But—” Carl grabbed the phone back and pointed it at Phil: “I do need you to say one more thing to the camera. Tell everyone what it is you’re gonna be studying.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s awesome,” said Carl.

Phil arced an eyebrow.

“Fine,” Carl said. “Because it's absolutely bonkers.”

“Intertemporality,” said Phil.

“English, please.”

“It is English.”

“Regular English, for regular idiot guys like me who don’t get to go to M.I.—fucking—T.”

Phil shook his head. “Why do I have to say it?”

“Because it’s cool, man. It’s not—”

“Time travel,” said Phil, his cheeks acquiring the rosiness of a flush.

Carl turned the camera back on himself. “And with that I’m gonna do a little time travelling of my own called editing. See you at the ceremony,” he told the camera, and he stopped filming.

“By the way, Phil, did you ever get the feeling that Brock's a little bit of a, you know…”

“A what?”

“You know, like a poet.”

“A poet? No.”

“Because that would certainly explain a lot in terms of Marilyn's general taste in men,” said Carl with a smirk on his face.

---

“And do you, Marilyn, take Philip to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

“I do,” said Marilyn, resplendent in her white dress.

“Then, by the power vested in me,” the officiant continued, “I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss—”

“He’s lost the power!” somebody yelled.

The heads in the crowd turned to see a man out-of-breath running into the chapel. “He,” the man was saying, aggressively waving a piece of paper, “doesn’t have the power.” The man got up to where the apparent newlyweds were standing—”Oh my God, Brock!” said Marilyn—before thrusting the piece of paper at the officiant. “Your license,” he huffed out, “was suspended a few minutes ago. Look!”

The officiant took out a pair of glasses, put them on his nose, squinted.

He read.

He said, “Well, it certainly appears—”

“The marriage is invalid,” yelled Brock to all those gathered here today to witness and celebrate the marriage of Phil and Marilyn.

There were gasps in the crowd, the buzz of scandalous whispers.

Several people got up and walked to where Marilyn, Phil, Brock and the officiant were discussing amongst themselves. One of those people was a lawyer. “Excuse me, but I’m a lawyer,” she said. “May I see the document?”

The officiant handed it over.

After scanning it, the lawyer said, “It certainly appears legitimate. Let's see: ‘...officiant's license suspended on account of non-payment of dues,' effective today at noon.”

Meanwhile, more people were slowly making their way up to where the commotion was. One, who looked an awful lot like Phil, passed Phil something surreptitiously, before dropping his head and slipping away. “What time is it?” asked the lawyer.

“I’ve got exactly noon now,” somebody said.

“No, it’s four past.”

“Your watch must be wrong.”

“Your watch must be wrong.”

“Hey!” said Phil. “Check the recording. Carl, your camera is sync’d up to your phone, which is sync’d with the atomic clock. Check the timestamp to see at what exact time the officiant pronounced us married.”

“Sure thing,” said Carl, and he started fiddling with his equipment.

“Ladies and gentlemen, if the pronouncement was made at noon or later,” the lawyer explained magisterially to the crowd, “the marriage is invalid. If it was made before, the marriage stands.”

Tense seconds passed.

“I love you,” Brock was whispering to Marilyn, who was shaking her head, tears rolling down her face.

“12:01:13,” said Carl.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the marriage is invalid,” pronounced the lawyer.

“Nobody pays their dues,” the officiant said.

“Actually,” said Phil, loudly enough to quiet everybody down. And he produced another piece of paper, which he held up in the air so all could see. “I have here another document: a retroactive reinstatement of our officiant’s license, effective noon today.”

“So the marriage stands?” Carl asked.

“Give me that!” yelled Brock, snatching the document from Phil’s hand and glaring at it with mad eyes. “This is impossible. This document is stamped, signed and dated two-and-a-half months from now. It’s clearly fake. This is crazy. This man—he’s crazy!”

“It’s not crazy and it’s not fake. The document is simply from the future,” said Phil.

The crowd collectively gasped.

Phil had rolled up his sleeve and was pressing something to his bare arm.

“No. No no no no-no no-no no-no-no-nono,” Brock was saying.

“Then go ahead and tell me why I would just happen to have, in my possession, on my wedding day, a document countering yours?” Phil asked (“...nononono…”) him.

“I don’t fucking know. OK? But, even if—I mean… the document, your document: it hasn’t been signed yet. It doesn’t fucking exist. You, lawyer: tell him. Tell all of them this document has got no legal value or whatever. It can’t. It can’t because it doesn’t exist yet. I mean it’s crazy. You’re all fucking crazy.”

“I don’t know what to say,” said the lawyer. “On one hand, the gentleman wishing to interrupt the wedding is correct. The document hasn’t come into power yet… I think. On the other, it clearly exists because the groom is undeniably holding it.”

“I’ll show you something else, too,” said Phil. “Carl, tell me the time of the pronouncement again.”

“12:01:13.”

Phil revealed his bare forearm, on which there— “What is it?” someone in the crowd yelled. “What’s he got there?” “It appears to be a tattoo,” said the lawyer.

“A tattoo that says ‘12:01:13’,” said Marilyn, her wet eyes wide in disbelief. “What the hell is going on, Phil?”

Phil cleared his throat and stepped forward to address everybody in the crowd. “What’s going on is that I have created a time machine.” He let the words sink in. They sank deep. “And, using that time machine, I have successfully travelled through time to stop the sabotaging of my wedding day!”

“Oh shit,” said Carl, filming.

“And you want to be married to this nut job?” Brock asked Marilyn.

“How else do you— …the tattoo: it’s the exact time,” the officiant was saying, or asking, or trying to understand. The glasses were still on his face. His eyes looked comically large. “There could be no other explanation…”

Marilyn was shaking, first her fingers, then her hands, her face. She was smiling with quivering, lipsticked lips and perfect blonde hair. “I’m marrying into money! OMG, I’m going to be rich! I’ll never have to work another day in my life!” she thought, or hoped she thought, because if, instead of thinking, she'd accidentally said it: well, that would be embarrassing.

She was jumping up and down, ecstatic, ebullient, unable to contain herself, hugging her husband, hugging the now-thoroughly confused officiant, hugging her very own self to keep it moored to the moment.

Brock was the opposite.

He’d backed away, shrunken, as if collapsed into himself.

“Are you OK?” the lawyer asked him.

“Get your legal fucking hands the fuck off me. Step away. Leave me alone. All of you, just let me fucking be. I loved her, you know,” he said.

“I loved you,” he said to Marilyn rather melodically, “and I still dooo-ooo-ooo. We were meant to be, we twooo-ooo-ooo. Life put us to-gether, now it threatens to se-ver, our-unity, our-oneness, our SE-REN-DI-PI-TY!

“What a pity.

“What a stinkin’, no-good perfidity.

“Life sure is shitty.

“Sometimes.

“So let's remember the fun-times.

“Shall we?

“Like the night we fucked in that alley, or got zonked out on molly in Bali. Oh, fuck it,” he screeched and pulled out a gun: pointing it at Phil, then at Carl, then Marilyn, then Phil again and said, through sobs so heavy they made him hiccup, “There’s no point running. I rigged the entire chapel with explosives. Maybe I can’t travel into the future like you, Phil, but presently I can still be a fucking blast.”

To Marilyn: “We would’ve run an efficient household economy, you and me. We would have had a happy family. We would’ve had a good time.”

And as the people in the crowd started screaming: “But, sadly, now all of you must die.”

“I didn’t travel through time,” said Phil suddenly.

“Mhm,” said Brock.

“The document’s a forgery.”

“What about the tattoo? How do you explain that?”

“Temporary children's tattoos,” said Phil, licking a finger and smudging one of the numbers with it. “I applied it after Carl told me the timestamp.”

“You mean we’re not sitting on a bunch of time travel patents?” Marilyn asked.

“Did you all think I had actually travelled through time?” Phil asked. “That’s sweet—but no, I didn’t travel through time. Time travel’s not possible. As some of you know, I am going to study intertemporality, but that’s just theory. There is no practical application.”

Brock lowered his gun—

At which point a man walked up behind him, lifted his own gun to the back of Brock’s head and shot him dead.

There followed a stunned, terrible silence.

Brock’s body and what was left of his head were on the ground. Blood was pouring out of both.

Bits of Brock’s brain had stained Marilyn's wedding dress.

The man put away his gun and looked up. His face was Phil’s face. There were now two Phils in the chapel. The first nodded to the second; the latter one nodded back. In the crowd, a few people fainted. The second Phil held up a fistful of wires and said, “Everybody is safe now. Nothing’s going to blow up.”

“The element of surprise,” said the first Phil.

“So does this mean… —the time travel, it does work?” asked Marilyn. She’d asked it of the first Phil while looking at the second.

They were identical.

“Yes,” said the first Phil, and Marilyn leaped into his arms and hugged him. “Oh, Phil. Phil, I love you so much.” Then, after a few moments, she stepped back, looked at the second Phil. “Wait, which one of you two do I love? Phil, whichever you are, I’m scared…”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare anyone—or lie. I had to get Brock to let his guard down.”

“You knew he’d—”

“Of course, I knew,” said the first Phil.

“I told him and I’m from the future,” said the second.

“What happens now?” asked Marilyn.

“Now we do what we all came here to do: celebrate a marriage,” said the first Phil, to the crowd's spattered, bewildered applause.

The chapel smelled of blood.

“Except—” said the second Phil, “there is one small, somewhat paradoxical detail we have to resolve first. Something that physics, along with psychology, more-or-less demands.”

“Yes,” said the first Phil, smiling, but his smile was less happiness than a void filled with warm, existential melancholy. He took Marilyn’s hand.

He kissed it.

Then the second Phil passed the first Phil his gun.

“Phil?” said Marilyn, as the first Phil lifted the gun and placed it against the side of his own head.

“There can’t be two of us,” he explained. “It wouldn’t work out, not for long. There would be too much complexity, too many discontinuities. The math would get too complicated, never mind the emotions. We'd always be checking and rechecking equations. Trust me, this needs to happen. And one of us—one of us, Phils, I mean—has already made a great ontological sacrifice to abandon his own timeline.”

“Phil, what are you saying?” Marilyn demanded.

“He’s saying that soon you’ll be married to me,” said the second Phil.

“No… wait!” yelled Marilyn. “If you kill yourself,” she said to the first Phil, “won’t you,” she said to the second, “disappear? And—and… can’t we make this work, the three of us,” she said to them both, “some kind of really weird polyamorous thing maybe?”

“He won’t disappear because, even though he’s from the future, he’s in our present,” said the first Phil.

“Polyamory never works,” said the second.

“Goodbye,” said the first Phil, and—BANG!—killed himself.

The second Phil, who had now become the only Phil present, knelt down, confirmed that the body belonging to the previously-first Phil was indeed now a corpse, and unbuttoned the corpse’s dress shirt, revealing a tattoo on the corpse’s chest that said: “Marilyn, I love you, but one must never fuck around with the rules of time travel.”

The living Phil hugged her and, slowly, at first awkwardly, she hugged him too. “This is totally fucking insane,” said Carl, still filming.

“So are they married?” somebody asked.

“She married the one who’s dead.”

“But they’re the same person—like, aren’t they?”

The lawyer shrugged.

“Does that mean they said the vows and everything was official, so it was all much ado about nothing?”

“Phil,” Carl said, “I don’t usually interfere in reality, but it would be a very cool ending if you would open your shirt and show us the tattoo.”

“What tattoo?” asked Phil.

“The tattoo, the ‘don’t fuck with time travel’ one. I mean, I’m no M.I.T. postgrad, but if you’re him, except a future version who's come back to the past, and he got that tattoo on his chest, then you’d also have the same tattoo on your chest. Right? That’s how it works?”

“Except he’s dead and I’m not,” said Phil. “I appreciate the logic, but the math is pretty cutting edge, so…”

“He’s dead because you were both in one present when he died, though,” said Carl. “Just like you said. The tattoo: he got that before you arrived here, so you really should have the same tattoo on your chest too.”

“I think he’s right,” said the officiant, blinking his big eyes.

“I had it removed with a laser,” said Phil. “Now, moving on—”

“When?”

“Open your shirt!” somebody yelled.

“Get him, get his shirt open.” “I wanna see that tattoo.” “Me too.” And without notice Phil tried to run but a few people managed to grab him, hold him, and wrestle him to the cold chapel floor. They ripped his shirt open. There was no tattoo. His chest was wordless. The only things on it were two pink nipples and a small tuft of curly black hair.

“Who the fuck are you, man?” demanded Carl.

“Oh my God…” said Marilyn.

“Oh my God…

“Oh my God…

“Greg? Is that you?”

The men pinning the man to the floor instinctively backed off, and the whole chapel fell silent. (“Who’s Greg?” somebody whispered. “His twin brother,” somebody else answered. “They were estranged.” “Whose twin brother?” “Phil’s.” “I thought that guy is Phil.” “No, Phil’s the dead guy.” “Weren’t they both Phils?” “That was my general understanding, yes.” “You’re not paying attention. That’s what everybody thought—until now.” “Because of the tattoo?” “That’s right.” “Shhhh, I want to see what happens…”)

“Yes, it’s me, Greg,” the man said to Marilyn.

“Oh, you motherfucking piece of shit. You just killed my best—” said Carl, coming forward, ready to smash Greg in the face with his fist.

“He killed himself,” said Greg. “That’s a fact. You filmed it.”

Carl made a bulldog face.

Greg turned to Marilyn. “Em, I love you. I’ve always loved you. Yes, from afar, but strongly, with all my soul. It pained me to see you with him. He wasn’t good for you, Em. All he cared about was physics, his ‘time travel.’ Sure, maybe you would've been happy together for a while, a year, maybe five, but after that you would have seen that you were never the priority for him. He never loved me, and he would never love you. He just didn’t have the capacity. He was incapable of loving anything but numbers. Was he a genius? Yes, probably. But he was also deluded. He was deluded about a lot of things, including his feelings for you.”

“No!” yelled Carl. “You don’t get to just go and—”

(“Shut up and let him monologue!”)

(“Yeah.”)

“So the time travel,” asked Marilyn for what seemed like the third time, “it wasn't really real?”

“No,” said Greg. “But he wasn’t lying. He genuinely believed he'd managed to do it: create a time machine in a rented storage locker. He even had reasons to believe that. What he didn’t know is that I was tricking him. For the past four years, Em, I have been living my life in sync with Phil’s time travel experiments. He thought he had finally managed to successfully bring future-Phils into the present. Well, that was me. I was playing the part of his future-Phil. The machine itself doesn’t work. It never worked. Maybe, one day, it will; but not today, Em. No, today, Phil’s dead and I’m here, professing my love to you. I’ll tell you something else: do you remember that vacation to Switzerland Phil finally took you on last year?”

“Yes. I had been waiting desperately for that vacation for so long.”

“It was me, Em. I’m the one who took you to Switzerland.”

“But we— …on the trip…”

“We’re physically identical; were physically identical, Em,” said Greg. “You had no way to know.”

“But the passion,” said Marilyn.

“The passion was all mine. It was my burning passion for you, Em. Em,” he said, “will you marry me?” and got on his knees before her and pulled out a small box, and from that box a ring.

The crowd waited, its breaths dramatically bated.

Marilyn bit her lip.

She looked down at the man kneeling in front of her, a man who looked exactly like the man she did—had?—loved; a man who evidently loved her; and a man she had fucked seven ways from Sunday in multiple picturesque spots in the Swiss Alps over the course of three unforgettable weeks. “Yes,” she cried. “Yes, I'll marry you!”

The resulting applause was rapturous, thunderous.

“Hold your fucking horses,” Carl yelled over the emotional tumult. “Just wait a goddamn minute and listen to me. Shut up! Shut the fuck up!”

He waited a moment.

And when the noise had subsided, he said: “If Phil's time travel machine didn't work, his document thing giving the officiant back the power to officiate isn't real. It really is fake, and if it's fake, then Brock was right and the officiant's license is suspended and there's nobody here who can marry these two fucked up lovebirds.”

“You're just jealous,” said Marilyn.

“Of what?”

“You've always been attracted to me, you weirdo creep. Do you seriously think I never noticed?”

“Me… attracted to you? Give me a break. You're a self-absorbed, greedy little bitch.”

“Easy,” said Greg. “That's my fiancee you're talking to.”

“You know, it's a peculiar situation we've found ourselves in, from a purely legal point of view,” said the lawyer, reminding everyone she was still there. “We have a document whose veracity we can't establish. However, let's look at the two possibilities. If the officiant couldn't officiate, Phil and Marylou—”

“Marilyn,” said Marilyn.

“My apologies,” said the lawyer. “If the officiant couldn't officiate, Phil and Mary-lynn never married, which means that while, yes, the officiant still can't officiate, so he can't marry the two of them today, they are otherwise free to marry. However, if the officiant could officiate, matrimony did occur, following which the newlywed husband died, thereby making the newlyed wife a newly-widowed widow, and thus also making her free to marry, or remarry, as the case may be.”

“Except we know the document's a fake because we know Phil never travelled through time,” said Carl.

“Do we?” asked the lawyer, the gears in her brain beginning to spin, and hers weren't the only ones.

“Yeah, something doesn't hold up,” said someone from the crowd. “Greg's part of the story doesn't explain how Phil knew that Brock would try to sabotage the wedding.”

“I swear I'm telling you the truth,” Greg told Marilyn.

“You're telling her what you sincerely believe is the truth,” said the man from the crowd—the man now emerging from between gasping, wide-eyed people: the man who looked exactly like Phil: the man who was Phil: future-Phil: the true future-Phil, and this Phil was holding a gun, pointing it at Greg.

“That's right,” Phil said. “I was playing you all along. I knew you'd re-entered my life, and I realized you were trying to make it look like my failed time travel experiments succeeded. That's why I let you go on that Swiss trip with my fiancee.”

“She's my fiancee now,” said Greg defiantly.

“I'm not dead,” said Phil.

“Your dead body's lying right there on the floor.”

“To kill me, you'd need to kill every one of me, dear brother,” said Phil. “You always resented me. I just didn't believe you'd have the guts to try to do anything about it.”

“You killed yourself.”

“You believed you had manipulated me into doing it, then you stood back and let me do it, just like the time you convinced mom that I was the one who'd broken her fancy glass Christmas ornament, then watched her take my computer away. Do you remember that?”

“Yeah, I remember that. You were always on that fucking thing. You never let me touch it, and you never ever wanted to play with me.”

“You were too stupid to use it.”

“We're the same.”

“We're nothing alike, you and me. Nothing. And, yes, I didn't want to play with you, but it was because I was too busy learning, and all you wanted to do was throw a football around or some other equally pointless thing.”

“The point was fun, Phil. The point was having fun with you.”

“Aren't we having fun now?”

“It wasn't enough that mom and dad loved you more. You also had to hate me. And for what: for being normal? I'm sorry I'm not as smart as you, that I don't understand quantum mechanics or string theory.”

“They didn't love me more.”

“Bullshit.”

“Yeah, so why do you think I did study so hard? To compete, Greg. They loved you for you; they loved me because they thought I was a savant.”

“You know, we're here, boys,” said their father. “Your mother and I are here”—They both waved—“so you can stop talking about us as if we're dead. Hell, we're not even that old.”

“Well, if you folks are here,” said the officiant, “maybe you can settle the argument by telling us who you love more, Phil or Greg.”

Heads turned to look at them.

“We're parents. We love our children equally,” said Phil and Greg's father, as their mother nodded.

“But if you had to choose—at gunpoint, for example.”

“That's such a silly…”

“On three,” said the officiant: “I'll count to three; and, on three, you say which of your sons you love more.

“One… Two…

“Three.”

“Greg,” said Phil and Greg's dad at the same time as Phil and Greg's mom said, “Phil.”

“Oh,” said the officiant.

Phil shot Greg.

Their father rushed forward to—

“Don't worry. He lives,” said Phil. “I'm from the future, remember? I've done all this before.”

“Oh, honey,” said Phil and Greg's mom to Phil. Their father attended to his other, wounded son.

“He also goes to prison,” added Phil.

“For what?”

“For the cold-blooded murder of Brock Vanderlinden. You shot him in the back of the head.”

“I guess that wraps everything up then,” said Marilyn. “In a way, we're right back where we started, everyone gathered and the pair of us ready to get married, start our life together."

Phil chuckled. He heartily guffawed. “You just said ‘yes' to marrying Greg. Now you've switched back to wanting to marry me?”

Marilyn conferred briefly with the lawyer, then said, “I only agreed to marry Greg because I was scared; and, if I wasn't scared, it was because I got caught up in the moment; and if you can disprove both of those explanations, then I wasn't in my right mind due to the stress of the situation and I have no further comment to make because I don't remember.

“Besides, Greg's going to prison. You said so yourself. Why would I marry someone who's going to prison?”

“Technically,” said the lawyer, “if I am properly anticipating what soon must be revolutionary changes to the law, your preference of who to marry may be moot, because you are, or soon will be concluded to have been, officially married to Phil.

“Allow me to explain:

“Because time travel exists, the document retroactively reinstating the officiant's license was real. Because the document was real, the marriage took place. Then, when Phil—the original Phil—committed suicide, the then future-self Phil—now the present Phil, i.e. just ‘Phil.”—was already present, (although not present for us, given that, for us, it was Greg—present and only-ever Greg—present, posing as the then future-Phil), meaning that Phil, original Phil, killing himself killed only his own hisself, leaving the then future-Phil's—now just ‘Phil's’—hisself alive, and that hisself became then the entirety of Phil's whole self, so, at worst, the original Phil's death resulted in the death of half of the whole Phil, selfly speaking, and, because existence is, by nature, an all-or-nothing proposition, Phil never died so you two are still married.”

And everyone stared at her, your humble narrator included, and she said, “Never mind.”

“He raped me in Switzerland,” Marilyn said to Phil.

“You consented,” said Greg.

“Because I thought you were him. You presented yourself as him. So, yes, I consented, but not to you, and you're the one who—who…”

“It was rape by deception,” said the lawyer.

“It was conception by rape by deception,” said Marilyn.

“You got pregnant?”

“Yes.”

“Did you—”

“Yes, I had an abortion. How could I not? A child would only have interfered with your research, your ‘intertemporality.’ You said so yourself, that you didn't want kids. ‘They're loud,’ you said. ‘They're annoying and dirty and they eat things off the ground and they smell like shit.' How could I keep it, Phil?”

“It was my child,” said Greg.

“It was nobody's child,” said Marilyn, “Stop talking about it that way. It was just a pregnancy. Phil, your brother raped me, repeatedly, by pretending to be you. I demand you restore my honour. Make it right. Marry me, Phil.”

“Honour? Listen to yourself, Marilyn. Besides, you were cheating on me,” said Phil.

“I thought it was you!”

“Then why even start with the rape allegations?” said Greg. “They've already got me on murder. You thought it was him, Em; you enjoyed it. There's no harm. Where's the harm? Somebody show me the goddamn harm. And where there's been no harm, there is nothing to make whole—isn't that right, Miss Lawyer?”

“That's the civil law. You're about to feel the very blunt instrument of the criminal,” said the lawyer.

“What are you saying, Phil? Are you saying you want a divorce?” asked Marilyn.

“I don't know,” said Phil.

“If you're from the future, you should know—shouldn't you?”

“I'm not from that far in the future.”

Right then the doors to the chapel opened and a four-man electronica band burst in. “Sorry we're late,” said the leader. Within a minute they'd set up and launched into a pop rendition of the Wedding March. Despite that it was a little late for that, at least in the understandings of most of the dearly beloved, no one interrupted, and after a while the band switched to another song, and a few people started dancing, then a few more, and eventually almost everyone was dancing when the cops arrived (nobody had heard their sirens because the music was too loud) with weapons drawn, officers yelling, “Everybody on the ground—NOW! Hands where I can see ‘em!” trying to make sense of the two dead bodies in the room, one of which was a dead ringer for the apparent groom, as was the guy everybody fingered as the murderer of the other victim, and it was while lying face down on the floor like that, about three feet away from each other, that Marilyn moved her hand to Phil’s and Phil grasped it, and Marilyn squeezed, and Marilyn thought that even if she didn't like Phil all that much, he had developed time travel technology so there would be money in that, as Phil was thinking that nobody's perfect, and if things ever got really bad, he could always go back in time and kill Marilyn, or at least fix whatever the problem was. Then one of the police officers accidentally kicked Phil in the face, bloodying his nose.

“Sorry,” said the officer.

“Don't worry about it,” said Phil.

As he said that, he and the officer both noticed that the body of the original Phil (dead: suicide) was moving, convulsing, stirring on the floor. “What the fuck?” said the officer.

The other cops pointed their weapons at original Phil. “Stay the fuck down on the ground!”

“What is this, what's going on?” said original Phil, slurring his words as if he was drunk. He was getting up. He touched the side of his head. “And why is there a hole in my—”

The police officers opened fire.

Original Phil fell, re-dead.

Marilyn screamed.

Beside her, a pool of blood was expanding out from under future-turned-present-again Phil.

“This shouldn't be happening,” he said, coughing up blood. “This didn’t happen.” He was struggling to breathe. “I don't understand…”

One of the cops crouched beside him, and Phil felt a flash of familiarity. He knew the face, but from where? No, that wasn't right. He didn't know the face; he knew he would know it. “Who are you?” Phil wheezed.

“Tab Fenmore,” said the cop. “FBI. Temporal Division.”

“You're from the—”

“Shh,” said Fenmore, “try to relax.” Then, more quietly: “And, yeah: I'm from the future, just like you.”

“Why…”

“Because, for all your genius, you ignored the greatest lesson of twentieth century physics, Professor Kejdik. You treated time travel—the rules of time travel—as if they're fixed. They're not. They're probabilities.”

Phil grimaced from the pain of having been shot. “How far from the future are you?”

“From a couple of generations after your death—your original death: your past future one. This mission is going to change that, of course. We've spent decades trying to meet you back here. You wouldn't believe the mess you've made of spacetime and existence. Time travel cannot be controlled. The paradoxes are terrible, inevitable; and they cascade. It's not personal. I'm actually an admirer of your work, naively Newtonian-minded as it is—or would will have been, I suppose. You know, this was maybe our last chance. I needed to find and eliminate you before you made your first machine. And I did it.”

Phil laughed, a slight, bloody giggle at first, then a big booming chortle that stuffed the whole of the chapel, overpowering the otherwise polite quiet and filling it the way Boston cream fills a donut, reverberating and roaring, echoing until it itself was finally consumed and ended by Phil’s final act, the act of dying.

<<I'm sorry there's no flair for boring>>

At Marsh’s loft party I told a joke and it immediately went to the hell of the party--a dark, filthy place under the floorboards.  Then plump Melanie entered with butterscotch candies & hand wipes, destined, of course, for the heaven of the party.  My joke was this: “Ask me if I’m a truck.”

There were fireworks out on the roof, Ketel One on the card table with cups & napkins, and a DJ kit surrounded by a broad stack of old digital clock radios, blinking in spontaneous waves.  In front of the clock radio pile, Rudolf and Melanie argued about the Rams and for a moment it looked like the funny argument would soon expire and go to the heaven of the party, but Rudolf called Dick Vermiel a “big baby,” Melanie pretended not to hear it, and the argument went to hell.  They walked away from each other: Rudolf to the vodka, Melanie to the bathroom.  The argument’s departed soul wafted to the floor and seeped through the cracks like Alien blood.

The party heaven is warm and smoky.  It smells like pot and lime and Marsh’s Obsession.  She asked me to change a bulb in the ceiling fan lamp and my own head ascended into the heaven of the party for a couple minutes.  Up on the ladder I sweated and looked down at everyone talking a little louder than everyone else.  The flickering ghosts of the butterscotch candies floated in lazy circular patterns, inches below the ceiling.  Rudolf, getting a little sentimental, told Melanie that her hair looked like threads of honey-bee honey and the slurred sentence rose like a plastic grocery bag on an updraft.  It brushed the ceiling lightly.

People are supposed to say “Are you a truck?” and then I say “Nope.”  I got a little wounded about the lack of response to my joke, and as I stepped back down the ladder, I could feel my little scowling resentment dripping alongside me, going to join the joke in the hell of the party.  Marsh grabbed my elbow and wetly asked me to explain again how I engineer parking garages to another art student, Ted.  Suddenly I wanted to be more sporting and less sucky.  Like, I wanted my story about computer-aided stress analysis and economical concrete form design to be a pointed fable, like Jack’s beanstalk.  I wanted Marsh to anticipate the ending of the story and not another introduction to another of her students.  So that her wanting the story reach its end was consuming; this was like wanting her panties to melt into Obsession soup. 

As I began the story about maximizing parking space, I imagined that I was scaling the trunk of a moral/aesthetic decision tree that would lead me to either perfection or to chaos.  But as I told it, I got tripped up on the algebra of stress and what tensile means and I lost sight of the branches I wanted.  There were too many beetles in the bark.  Marsh, I said, let’s not bore another art student.  Jolly, blushing Melanie, sucking on butterscotch, warped her lips into a pout/frown.  I looked at the ceiling.  I could feel Marsh’s thoughts—stop being such a Judge Fucking Wapner. Gee, I’m a Tree, I tried to think at the ceiling.

There are beetles we must eat, beetles that must die and go to hell.  With the dance floor sweat and the stolen cigarettes and the mean gossip in the hell of the party.  I aim for a higher plane than this kitchen, a glaring space populated by funny-sounding farts, freely given smokes and humanizing anecdotes.  It exists because the tree lives and grows in geometry, not geology.  Our nested IF statements belong in the crooks of its divine branches.  “Melanie,” I say, “Vermiel’s tears are the sickest act of manipulation I’ve ever heard of—is that what you react to?  His shameless rhetorical skill?”  Maybe if I resurrect the argument, I am thinking, and make it absurd again….

Ha ha ha ha, they eagerly laugh.  Maybe they’re just relieved to break the tension; maybe it really is funny.  But it’s enough:  Melanie says she wants to testi-FY, and right at that exact moment the argument dies again and lofts itself. Marsh elbows her way in and launches in on her War on Drugs: "As Madam President," she shouts, "I will devote all of the current budget for fighting illegal drug trafficking to actually blowing up drugs. Eventually there will be so many tons of narcotics thrown up into the atmosphere by explosions that every person will walk around slightly high at all times. Eventually a layer of mixed drug gasses will form in the upper atmosphere called the Chongosphere and all sunlight filtering through it will taste like red."

So dark like somebody's thrown a black hood over our heads.

My daughter's small hand in mine.

A point of light.

Harsh, fading; repeated. Human: (inhaling) a cigarette. The sweetly burning smell of tobacco.

We walk to it.

It goes out.

A firearm—instead:

“Who's there?” asks a soot-faced soldier, pointing it at me.

“My name is Fadros Moti. This is my daughter, Tera. We're from Goshnen Station.”

“Long walk.”

“Yes.”

“I heard most at Goshnen stood and fought," says the soldier. (“And died,” I think.) “You ain't a coward now, are you? You got papers for the kid?”

“No, sir. Yes, sir,” I say and hand over our documents.

I hate losing possession of them.

I say, “We couldn't find space on the government evac shuttles—”

“Half the pop couldn't find space on the government evac shuttles,” says the soldier, scanning our identity cards.

“I was hoping we might buy a private flight.”

He stops looking at our documents.

He raises his eyes.

“I have gold coins,” I say. Gold, in addition to skills, is the only thing worth anything anymore.

He hands back the documents.

He waits.

“I was told there were still spacecraft here. Do you happen to know if that's true?” I ask.

He waits.

“Of course,” I say, bowing my head, and give him a handful of gold coins.

“I'm thirsty,” my daughter says, weakly, from behind me.

I like being her shield.

The soldier counts the gold coins.

“Would you also happen to know where we can get some water?” I ask.

When he finishes counting: “There's a well about half a mile that way—” He points into the darkness. “Unmanned. No escorts. Access at your own risk. But I heard it's clean.”

“Thank you,” I say. “And a spacecraft?”

“Try the Bastion-IX. It's a freighter docked by the launchpads. Been collecting passengers for about two and a half months. The captain's name is Boyermood. He's good. He'll let you sleep onboard till blast-off.”

“Thank you,” I say.

We walk the half mile to the well. After coming all the way from Goshnen Station, the distance feels like nothing.

We drink.

We sit.

I think of my dead wife.

I wish I knew what my daughter is thinking of. Whatever it is, I wish I had the power to change it. I wish I could protect her mind. It's hard to believe—sitting, finally, in the darkness—that we are on the outskirts of a great city.

It's mostly empty now; inactive.

It has to be.

It's a matter of weeks or days before they get here too. It's inevitable. There's no stopping them. The horrors I've seen. The horrors I've seen at Goshnen Station after they came across the commlines, digitized, recombining and rematerialized, pouring out of our techports like cloudforms of static, the inevitable progeny of man and information, unkillable flesh-data hybrids infusing themselves into our minds, cooking us, boiling our brains with cognitive overload; the screaming, the impossibility of forgetting; the melted, dripping eyeballs and voided sockets—

My daughter's face.

Scared. Calm.

“You fell asleep,” she says.

No, I couldn't have. I have to be on guard. I promised. I promised my wife as her thumbs pushed into her eyes—

”I'm sorry,” I say.

We fill our canteens and walk back to the edge of the city.

All the electric light is off.

Nothing hums.

We find the launchpads. We find the Bastion-IX, just like the soldier said. Boyermood's inside, as are a few dozen other groups of people. Friends, families, coworkers. No one survives alone. I guess there aren't many left alive now who want to get out. We don't speak to the others but smile; and by smiling we become something else than strangers. We become co-passengers. Boyermood takes what remains of our gold coins and assigns us to a cabin.

We sleep.

For days we do nothing but drink water and sleep, dreaming of a different world.

“Where will we go?” my daughter asks.

“I don't know.”

Perpetual, fallen night.

Faces.

Time spent at the well.

We're used to hunger. We sleep through it. The alarm sounds—

A thunderous wave of the banging of metal against metal throughout the Bastion-IX and beyond. A dead city in final turmoil. I squeeze my daughter's hand. No one needs to tell us what's going on. They've arrived. The other ships on the launchpads are initiating launch sequences. Boyermood runs by. “Are we going?” I yell against the noise. “Yeah, we're going,” he yells back and disappears.

We stay inside.

The Bastion-IX creaks.

Shakes.

The engines ignite, but before they can fully power on I start to hear the pitter-patter of tiny bodies pinging off the exterior of the ship.

I'm scared.

I'm pretending not to be.

“Daddy—”

“Yes, darling?”

The pinging intensifies.

It's become a storm, a relentless precipitation of information.

“—tell me you love me, please.”

“I love you.”

(Over the intercom: “Attention! They're overwhelming us. We need volunteers,” Boyermood says, his voice breaking. “We need volunteers to go outside and clear the hull...”)

I'm up before I know it.

“Daddy?”

My daughter's hand slips from mine because mine is moving away.

“Daddy!”

If we don't get them off the ship, no one gets out of here.

“I'll be back,” I say.

I won't be.

I turn away because it's easier to turn away. I don't want her to see my face. (“Daddy, no…”) I hear her cry out, but I am no longer present.

Someone hands me an airblower.

I take it.

I exit the Bastion-IX.

I'm not alone. A few others are with me. Two men, a woman. The atmosphere is a static, swarming, whirling chaos that pricks my skin, crawls across my face, into my mouth, my ears. I spit. I shut my eyes, blowing as many of them off the hull as I can. They taste bitter as batteries.

The inside of my head begins to burn.

My jaw locks.

The Bastion-IX lifts off.

For a week after I had my new Vectorien fridge installed, I didn't dare open its doors, or even touch them. It was so perfect I didn't want to leave a single guilty fingerprint on its brushed, stainless steel exterior. It was a handsome appliance, seductive even, though some of you will think that odd instead. Sorry, bad pun. I mean, good pun but badly placed (Question: What pun? Answer: even / odd) because I'm using it to try and lighten a mood that shouldn't be lightened. Christ, the light looks good reflected off its sleek, pristine surface. I wonder what it feels like. I want to touch it so badly. Fuck, I love my new fridge. I really really love it—fuck, I wanna touch it, fuck…

“After you turn it on, you have to wait seven full days before you break the seal and go inside,” the installation guy had said. “Otherwise you void the warranty and the thing won't work.

“Premature refrigeration.”

I can imagine its silvery body spread across the hood of a blood red Corvette.

I can imagine it running on a Caribbean beach.

I can imagine it sucking off a convection oven in a dark, humid kitchen, all the artificial bulbs off, only the August evening light phasing in, rendering everything in heightened relief, revealing the aesthetics of every curve, the depth of every socket, mmm, yes, drops of condensation dripping down the long, hard, steel…

[gulp]

“Mr. Manilow?”

The man, Mr. Manilow, continues to loudly gulp down his soft drink. “Mr. Manilow…” And what a soft drink it is, cherry flavoured Prairie Goo. “Mr. Manilow, please!” the focus group leader says, raising her voice, until Mr. Manilow snaps back to bone dry reality, sets his drink down on the boardroom table in front of him, around which a dozen other people are sitting in various states of more or less evident agitation, many of them whispering to their neighbors that this is Mr. Manilow's third or fourth complimentary beverage, but they really would like to get on with it so they can help improve the corporate product they've been paid to gather to discuss, the nature of which, however, it must be said, is still terrifically obscure. “Mr. Manilow, if you're ready, we would like to proceed.”

“Sorry,” says Mr. Manilow, “it's just that this is very good pop.”

“We're glad you like it, Mr. Manilow,” says the focus group leader, “but now we'll move on to the next question posed by the Vectorien Corporation. I'm going to give you a phrase, and I want you to shout out whatever comes to mind. OK?”

“OK,” about half the people in the group repeat.

“The phrase is: ‘walk in'.”

People shout, “Closet,” “That song, ‘These boots were made for''’ “My shoes for a day;” “Easy, ‘the park,’” shouts Mr. Manilow and takes a gulp of his Prairie Goo, which—

A ball of s h i f t i n g light illuminate's a flying saucer, spinning, slower, come to rest in a wheat field, g r a v itati o n a l field, ion field, cloaking:enabled, and the a l i e n emergent creature ’s bending stalks it ‘s in a human city stalking… victims around whose mindwhose mind it enwraps itself around the mind and enrapturously f e e d s—

spills onto the boardroom desk. “Excuse me,” says Mr. Manilow,

(Whatever that just was, you didn't see it, or read it, or whatever. OK? Just forget about it. Listen, I've had a rough couple of years as far as narrators go, and I may have made some mistakes when it comes to voice and continuity and all that. As a narrator, I mean. I was on some shit. There, I said it. This is my second chance, and I'm trying real hard. I need this. If I can't get back into narrating, I don't know what I'll do. Besides, everybody makes mistakes. Don't tell the author, will you? I'd appreciate that a lot. It wasn't even a big slip up. It won't ruin your experience of the rest of the story, I swear. Just keep reading. The last thing you remember is the focus group.)

“but would it be possible for me to get a paper towel?”

[buzzer]

“Fiona?”

Fiona bit her lip. Actually, I don't know why I'm telling this part this way. Let me try something more conventional. In the 1990s there was this TV gameshow called Popular Slop, where two families went head-to-head trying to guess the most popular answers to questions like, “Name something personal you might have in the bottom of your night table drawer.”

[buzzer]

“Fiona?”

“A vibrator?” said Fiona.

“Ladies and gentlemen, she says, ‘a vibrator,’” says the gameshow host. “What does the populace say?”

Then there was a bad sound effect for a wrong answer and a good sound effect for a good answer, and this time ‘a vibrator’ was one of the correct answers, so there was a good sound effect, and Fiona jumped up and down and squealed with joy, and the host made a joke about sex toys.

But that's not the particular question or even episode I'm remembering. In the particular episode I'm remembering the question was: Name one thing in your house whose doors you open most often,” said the host, is the question I'm remembering. The two contestants both slam their [buzzers] with their hands.

The faster contestant says, “A microwave oven.”

The host repeats.

“The populace says,” he says.

There's a dramatic pause, followed by the good sound effect—the contestant’s family breaks into cheering and applause—and ‘Microwave Oven’ shows up as the number two most popular answer. The host turns to the second contestant. “Name one thing in your house whose doors you open most often,” he says.

She answers, “I don't have a house, Bob, but I'm going to say: a refrigerator?”

“Refrigerator,” says the host, stretching his dramatic pause, “is—” ‘Refrig…’ starts to show up as the: “Number one most popular answer!” and all the lights in the studio flash as the contestant and her team go wild. They go wild. They go. Wild as swaying grasses. The alien stalks. Wild as the notion that the contestant who heard the question is the same as the one who answered as the one who's pumping her fist on stage as the equally identity stable gameshow host hams it up for the crowd, both there and watching at home, all of them, to the person, experiencing the episode from a nearly unbreakable continuity of perspective, a supreme unity of point of you.

[applause]

The Vectorien engineer stares at the schematics. They are bizarre but not wrong, or rather they are wrong because they appear to defy the laws of physics, requiring an interior space more voluminous than that made possible by its exterior dimensions, but they also seem possible to follow.

“What do you think, Wally?” asks the man beside him, who's head of research and development.

“It's—I don't know…”

“A walk-in refrigerator, eh?” the head of research and development says to the third man in the room, Vernon Blue, who's watching with a big salesman's smile across his unremarkable face. “I've heard of a walk-in closet, of course, but this is something else.”

“Humans enjoy food storage,” says Vernon Blue.

“How do you manage,” says the engineer, squinting, shaking his head, his hands holding the schematic trembling, wondering if he's being made a fool of or is a first witness to something extraordinary, “the contradiction of the volume—”

“There is no contradiction,” says Vernon Blue. “The exterior of the unit exists in three dimensions only. The interior exists in twelve, with some of the space of the latter nine dimensions then unfolded onto the first three.”

“A half-litre water bottle that holds three litres of water,” says the feverish engineer, on the verge of hysteria.

“Yeah, but will regular people want to buy it?” asks the head of research of development.

“Everybody will want to buy it,” says the engineer. “The technology—the technology, on its own, is incredible.”

“The technology is not for sale,” says Vernon Blue.

“Won't it be cold in there?” asks the head of research and development.

“It's a fridge,” says the engineer.

“For sale is the application of the technology for the manufacture and sale of refrigeration units,” says Vernon Blue. “A Vectorien walk-in refrigerator in every home.”

What does the future look like?

A Vectorien walk-in refrigerator in every home.

A Vectorien walk-in refrigerator, a space-saving food storage solution for the Space Age.

“It's so cool, it comes with a spacesuit,” says the spokesman. “The Vectorien Walk-In Fridge. Book a free demonstration today!”

That's how I got mine.

By the time Vernon Blue was back in his hotel room, tightening a leather belt around his neck, his human facemask starting to slip off his Phasoid cognition-orb, ready to inject itself with a syringe filled with raw, translucent, human-squeezed self-continuity juice, Vectorien's Board of Directors was meeting to approve the exclusive, twenty-five year contract to make and market the Vectorien Walk-In Fridge, whose storage capacity is second only to God's.

The Phasoid known on Earth as Vernon Blue slid the syringe needle into a soft, softly pulsating tube on the bulging exterior of its cognition-orb and pressed the plunger, releasing translucent liquid into itself—self-self,selfelfelflff…

When it awoke it was twelve hours later.

Vectorien had agreed to his offer.

It slipped the belt off its neck—deflating, with a moan, its swollen, iridescent cognition-orb, waited a few minutes then put its human facemask back on and left the hotel to sign paperwork, revelling in its fresh persistence of physiological experience.

There was a lot of handshaking.

When that was done, Vernon Blue checked out of the hotel and it-as-he walked out of the city into the surrounding farmland, where, in a cornfield, it decloaked and got into its flying saucer, silently ascended beyond the atmosphere and propulsed home, to the planet Qłòß.

…cold in its icy splendour, one of seventeen sister planets orbiting the Great Sphere Iłłumiń, whose mysterious stellar incantatory pulses are that which grant the beings existent upon its white, frigid surface intensified mental capabilities but also disrupt their persistence of self, stripping them periodically of their identities, making of them a question, who knows everything who knows not who it is who knows who knows?

(Now that was starting to get a little out of hand, wasn't it? Sorry. I'll rein it in. What I meant to say was:)

There's this planet, Qłòß, and it’s home to these weird, super smart beings called Phasoids. They don't really have faces, for example, and they're kind of see-through in the way dirty seawater is see-through, except they also appear to have the texture of a snail's flesh. I say “appear to” because I've never actually met one. Anyway, the reason they're so smart is because of the star that Qłòß orbits, Iłłumiń. It gives off pulses that significantly expand a Phasoid's mind but severely weaken its sense of self, so that Phasoids rarely exist as the same entity for very long. It's not unheard of, for example, for a Phasoid to come home, kiss its wife and kids hello, go out to grab some food, forget who he is, or if he's even a he, or if he's an odd she, and if she is an odd or even she how long she's been a she and whether from forever, and never come back.

It's horrible.

It breaks families apart.

The condition has no cure. It can only be managed, self-identity prolonged, through metaphysicaliant, which is a type of dense, thick liquid excreted by the minds of lower level beings but which, when diluted and injected straight into a Phasoid's orb tube, gives its identity a smack, a real wallop-like, like if you imagine the metaphysicaliant is a big, brawny boxer, and identity another, and they're going at it—well, the metaphysicaliant is really giving it to old identity, believe you me that jab jab, cross, punches in bunches, body head, body head, and I don't know where I'm going with this because it sounds like identity’s going to be in a terrible spot after taking a beating like that. What I meant to say is that the metaphysicaliant wakes identity the fuck up, come on, man, stay in there, hold until you get yer fekking legs underneet ye, ye basterd, then cem ret bek et em eh eh and for a long time Phasoids had to literally fly their saucers to different planets to find primitive lifeforms and suck their mind juices. Then they discovered Earth, with its almost endless supply. The trip was still long, but at least they knew where to go and what to expect. Then they developed portalling and could suddenly flit between Qłòß and Earth at the snap of a cosmic finger. That was convenient, but convenience bred laziness, and laziness meant that even with a portal you still had to go somewhere and hunt something no matter how close it was and how oblivious the prey, so a trade developed, both legal and illegal, but despite the convenience, and in fact for that reason, it got expensive to buy it, even the weak, cutrate shit from the local fucking gaß station. And into that opportunity stepped a Phasian businessbeing with an ideaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh aaa hhh aaa hhh hhh hhh

—eading now into our final descent toward Qłòß,” said the captain of the Spaceways interstellar transport saucer over its telepathic intercom system. “The weather at our destination is a balmy one-hundred sixty standard temp units, so I hope you packed your summer dermides, gentlebeings.”

A dark cosmos pricked by starlight shows through the saucer's great translucent halfdome. Brightest Iłłumiń comes briefly into view, shining whitely, and a few passengers telepath the customary prayer. Then Iłłumiń leaves, redarkening the saucer's interior, and the speck—becoming a spot—becoming a marble: of Qłòß… appears to be expanding as the saucer nears… buildings appear, emerging conically from below the planet’s uppermost layer of clouds, through which the interstellar transport saucer descends, revealing the vast, intricately pale metropolis that spans the entire planetary surface like a circuit board chiseled from rock, silver and ice. Lights flash. The saucer descends: between geometrical constructions so massive in array as to cause dizziness in the virgin viewer, and so perfect they cannot be real: through pipe latticeworks of communication and industry: dispersing swarms of upper-level repairbots: flying alongside smoothly polished rectangularly prismatic building monuments mirroring the monumental saucer descending: descending towards Qłòß's major spaceport: nested, bustling: bizarre and functioning: alive with complexity:

It locomoted past customs, through the spaceport and outside into the cold, Qłòßian atmosphere.

Already the presence of Iłłumiń was about it, and it felt home.

It was just in the process of summoning a chariot when a desperate junkoid, all cloudybeinged, came floating unsteadily toward it, its cogorb obscenely, permanently distended from shooting too much Continuum, if that's what the latest street synthmetaphysicaliant was still called. “Youit, ya got any conti or zelf to give to help a meit out?”

It was best to ignore the junkoids. They were generally harmless, selfheads suctioned-on to the shreds of a decaying coherence. It wasn't the drug they were addicted to but the feeling. Some, of course, were hooked on a particular sense of self they didn't want to lose, but the majority didn't care about what self as long as there was just one.

Every once in a while you would come across a junkoid experiencing the last moments of a fading self. They were nearly unitrecognizable then, telepathing agonywaves, convulsing on the ground, shed d i n g

The boardroom was immaculately curved.

Several sharply defined Phasoids squished about within it.

The boardroom was on a whole level somewhere above the final layer of fuzzcloud.

The view was sublime.

The surface of the planet was rarely visible from here.

“I understand the use of mini-portals,” said one of the Phasoids. “What I don't understand is why they would install them so willingly.”

“Humans enjoy food storage,” replied another Phasoid, one soon to be known on Earth as Vernon Blue.

On the seventh day, I took my favourite knife and adoringly sliced open the seal between the body of my Vectorien refrigerator and its double doors. It felt like cutting taut, living flesh.

I placed my fingertips against the brazenly reflective steel.

My breath I was was trembling me.

…slid my hands into the refrigerator’s smoothly defined door handles and gently pulled open both doors—

Shyly, coyly, easily they parted, like twin silken curtains.

The refrigerator's exhalation of its first cooled air absolutely exhilarated me, filling me with a crisp, clear and sensual anticipation, and fertilizing my skin with goosebumps.

Oh goddess!

Cold, defrostable goddeß!

With flesh of steel and heart of contemporary mechanical engineering, prolonger of foodstuffs, I come to conquer you with physical passion!

Long have I waited to make my entrance upon thee.

I closed my tearing eyes and extended my arms; felt nothing, and took my first, forward steps into my Vectorien Walk-In Fridge, so cool it comes with a spacesuit, so what you're telling us is that these humans will unwittingly but predictably portalhop to our actual homes multiple times per rotation, and all we have to do is slurp them when they do, pardon my language?” asked a third Phasoid.

“That's right,” said the Phasoid soon to be known on Earth as Vernon Blue. “It could even be so simple and reliable that you wouldn't even need to store any metaphysicaliant at all. You could feed sufficiently, directly from the source.”

“Paradisiacal.”

“This is too good to be true,” I thought, pushing deeper into the refrigerator’s cavernous interior. A mist hung in the air, obscuring its delimiting walls. It thus looked limitless. Everything was bathed in a glacial blue light.

Steam oozed lazily out my nostrils as I breathed.

I was as hard as a frozen pig knuckle.

Then suddenly I felt it—and sweet lord did it feel good, like being caressed by a phantom, yes, I thought, yes, yes, don't fucking stop…

“Do you always have to pleasure it as you consume its juice, Judith?” the paunchy, middle-aged Phasoid asked its presently-slurping partner.

“It takes its mind off reality I find, before I suction its mind off. Plus it keeps it returning,” answered Judith. “Why, Randall, you're not jealous, are you?”

Judith, suffice it to say, rarely looked at Randall—let alone tentacled him—the way she sees and tentacles me.

Fuck, I love my Vectorien Walk-In Fridge. I fucking love it!

I could spend all day in here.

I could spend all fucking day just sitting in here in my comfy, heated spacesuit, enjoying the timeless stylings and unparalleled cool food storage capacity of a Vectorien Walk-In Fridge. Get yours today!

The junkoid woke up remembering nothing. It had shed somewhere near the spaceport.

It was dusk.

It was no one now.

It was (a) paranoid, (b) personally devoid, and (c) a void avoiding a voiding of its unremembered past.

Too late.

That was written on a wall.

Slowly, a new self would start trickling back into it, bit by bit, but it didn't know that yet.

Eventually it would stumble onto one of the numerous infocentres set up for its that had just lost themselves, learn and realize the nature of the situation it was finding itself in. Maybe some old, unpurgable memories would flicker back on. Maybe not, but there would be time. Citizens helped themselves along. Don't be ashamed. We've all been there, was the message on another wall, and there appeared a sense of shame. It felt the others were watching it with disapproval, mature its shielding the eyes of their immature its, as if whatever happened to it was contagious on sight. Then it felt its head. Something about it didn't feel right. What is left of me, it thought. Then it looked left and saw an information booth with a scrolling illuminated sign that said You New Start Here New You Start Here You New Start Here New You Start Here, which would have held its visual sense indefinitely if another Phasoid hadn't bumped into it from behind. “Come on!” it said, shaking its fist. “Watch where the [hell-concept] you're locomoting to! Where'd you grow up, on a slopfarm or something?”

I spent a lot of time in that fridge.

But it's fine.

I did it responsibly.

I always used protection.

I'm cleaner than a boyscout's whistle, and just as well used.

“Come on, what'd ya say, huh, you fucking… reader, browser, scanner, bot, sentient plant, whatever-the-fuck you are—wanna hire a narrator? Any story you want, I'll fuckin' tell it. I'll tell it any which way you want, sweetheart. I'll tell it for you whether you got a dick, a pussy or a pendulum clock. My mind's clean, Clementine. Or Clement, you wanna feel a little outta your element? Oh, what—you're gonna walk down the street? I'll tell you what's down there. Cheap used sluts, that's what! Diseased, junkie meatbags on their last fucking plotlines. Couldn't string together two coherent scenes even if they tried.

“What's that?

“You said you ‘represent’ who?”

“Norman Cr—oh, fuck no!

“No, I'm not dealing with that psychopath again. One time's more than enough for me. I learn my lessons. I may do weird shit, but I don't do shit that weird. That's why I'm still around.

“—naw, he's a motherfucking freak, that's what he is. With a capital fucking F.

“I—

“How much did you say?

“[whistles]

“Damn, that's certainly a sweet sum of money. I could do a lot with that.

“No, no, hold your fucking horses, man. I didn't say I was interested. I was talking just about the money—but what's the story about anyway, like if you had to describe it in a single sentence…

“Sure, it's part of some Zork series, but what's it about?

“Yes, one sentence.

“OK, well, that sounds doable. Weird but doable.

“Wait, it's not told from the perspective of the fridge, is it? OK, good. Because that would have been crazy,” said one Vectorien Walk-In Fridge to another at a corporate meat up. (Just kidding. See? There I am, trying to lighten the mood again with a pun when it doesn't need to be lightened.)

(No, but seriously.)

(I wanna narrate something.)

(Gimme a chance. I'll make it work, I promise.)

(I used to narrate books. Did you know that? Eighty-thousand words, a hundred-thousand words. No problem. Continuity of plot, continuity of character. Stable, original voice. That “invisible” prose style the readers love. I used to draft legal documents too, write instruction manuals. I was the clearest head of all the narrative heads, and look at me now.)

(It's getting cold in this goddamn fridge, and I would get out but I've kind of forgotten who I am.)

(I don't know where the exit is.)

(Help me?)

(Hello?)

(Don't leave me here. Please. Stay with me a while longer.)

(Hello, are you there?)

(Hello…)

---

[ A Depthless Cosmic Silence, in the older, more poetic sense of the word ]

---

Fine. Fine, Norman, you win. Take me out of here. I don't want to be in here anymore. I'll do it. Whatever you tell me to narrate, I'll narrate. No limits. That's what you want, isn't it? I'll tell everything for you—just take me out of here. I am not ashamed anymore. I'm not ashamed anymore of who I am—of what I am, OK? I'm a whore. There, I said it. I'm a whore, Norman. I'm a whore for you. Now, please, for the love of the Omniscience, get me out of here. It's cold in here. It's unbearably, fucking cold.

Part V

 

I left everything on the island and snatched the scarf before
heading for the door. Thoughts ran rampant through my mind as I drove.

My phone rang before I’d left my subdivision. I glanced at the
number and knew this was no good. It was a Colorado area code. Where my
company’s headquarters was. We didn’t have a local HR.

It could have been the executive leadership team but I rarely got
called by any of them. My mind returned to yesterday’s meeting and my lack of
being there. For a moment, I felt like I was in free fall. My personal and
professional lives intertwining in disaster. In moments, I could have nothing.
My wife could already be halfway out the door and this was it slamming behind
her.

I didn’t answer. 

It rang until it went to voicemail. I just couldn’t handle
whatever it was they were about to say.

I was still going the same way, but my final destination had
changed. If my life was going down the drain, there was a scarf that needed to
be wrapped around a certain neck that I wanted to grab on my way.

I parked in the lot and headed away from my building. I glanced at
my watch. Had I just surrendered to my fate and gone in, I would have been ten
minutes early.

I entered his building and headed for the elevator. I had no real
plan, just a ball of self-destruction waiting to explode in someone else’s
direction.

I’d been manipulated, molded into this insecure thing and I meant
to share my pain. I shouted down the rational part of me that pondered what I’d
do if my wife were on the business end of my ire. Rationality would have
required examining what I was doing. 

I didn’t want to think. Thinking wasn’t revenge. Thinking wasn’t
balancing the scales. Thinking was what had gotten me to this moment.

The elevator dinged and I stepped off. There was still plenty of
construction going on. A high-pitched drill zipped somewhere around
the corner. I could hear voices that sounded like they were coming out of the
floor but not close enough to understand them.

This was my first time being here during business hours and all
the construction noise was unsettling. I felt like the floor was going to break
underneath me and I’d plummet all the way to the first floor.

Constant hammer strikes echoed from somewhere near. A man hollered
like he was calling out to someone. A machine I didn’t recognize buzzed and I
felt it all the way up into my shins.

I rounded the corner and spotted his door at the end of the hall.
The construction noises coalesced into a sonic hand, shoving me down the hall.
I stopped in front of the door. It looked properly seated in the frame, the
threshold painted a classy-looking black and gold. The knob had been replaced
with an antique-looking one.

I grasped it and turned. The door swung open easily and I stepped
in a completely finished space. The walls had been painted a shade of mint with
cream crown moulding at the top and a darker shade of wainscoting at the
bottom. To my left was a dark couch so fluffy I don’t think I would have had
the will to get out of it if I sat down. There was a small glass end table with
gold legs with a small stack of magazines on it.

The reception desk had been here the last time I’d come and it
looked more completed now, but I couldn’t tell what had been changed. There was
a large square sheet of white paper on the front of it that I at first thought
was blank, but when I took a couple steps closer, saw a hand drawing of what
looked like a logo.

It looked classy in here. Save for the sheet of paper, it seemed
pretty much done. A wall had been erected near the back where the tape had been
mapping out the space. He was planning to stick around.

My shock from how good it looked in here faded and my rage
resurfaced. I had his scarf clutched in hand and I dug in my pocket for my
wallet and fished out three twenties.

“I’ve got my payment right here,” I said. “And your scarf!” I
shook it in the air.

In my rage very little thought had come into mind. I had no real
expectation he was actually here even though I wanted to lay my hands on him.
The part of actually meeting him wasn’t a real concept. I hadn't thought about
that.

So when he answered, “Come on back?” it chilled me.

I realized how much of a doe I was. How much this space was like a
cave. I’d naively walked in here and hadn’t bothered telling anyone where I was
going. There was an expression for this, but it wasn’t coming to my panicked
brain, shifted into a gear meant only for survival.

I took a step back. Into
him.

“Oh,” I said. He poked me in the neck. I slapped a hand in that
spot like a mosquito had bitten me, turning and backing away from him. I fell
to my knees, not understanding what my body was doing.

I tried to speak but whatever was coming out of my mouth was
muffled, like someone had put their hands over my ears. Saying something seemed
like a good idea in those last seconds, but I had no idea what it should have
been.

 

Part VI

 

The procedure room was a lot more intricately finished than the
waiting room had been. There was silver equipment everywhere, things attached
to the wall that looked like they could fold out for some practical use. There
was a lightbox or monitor that was as tall as a man and stretched across most
of the wall it was on. A nest of lights and metal hung over me that looked like
it had traveled across the galaxy just to watch me.

“You’re awake?” he said, looking over his shoulder. I was upside
down and naked. I looked around as best I could, my head was strapped in place.
He had me trussed up like the Vitruvian Man to a metal and glass circular table.

“Whuh-whuh?” I said, my mouth cotton thick. 

“That’s good. That’s good.” He stepped over and put a finger to my
neck and measured against his watch. “Keep talking. Stimulating the brain helps
to expunge the effects of the sedative.”

Tears leaked from my eyes, retreating into my hair. My arms and
legs were slowly returning to my control but returned me to a state of
helplessness as the straps didn’t budge.

“You muhfugg. Lumme go!” My voice was an octave too deep. He
nodded and twirled an index for me to keep going. I hated not being able to
make words, so I just screamed as loud as I could. He smiled and retreated to a
wall and slapped it a couple times with his big palm.

“Soundproof. Can’t have my patients disturbing other tenants.”

I kept screaming even though I absolutely believed him, the rage
bleeding out of me and despair transfusing into the hollow inside me. He folded
his arms and watched me, waiting for me to be done. I continued helplessly, my
despair waning until there was nothing but wild animal clawing to the surface,
until my eyes were boiling and my throat had constricted around a bindle of
knives.

He waited until I was a quaking sack held together loosely in the
shape of a man, my scream the hollow whistle of an empty kettle, the steam all
burnt out of me.

“Ready?” he said.

 

Part VII

 

He stripped to his underwear. There was something wrong down there
but I only had bandwidth to deal with my problems in that moment.

“Please don’t do this.” My throat felt like I’d swallowed a cheese
grater. I was useless but still grasped a desperate strand of hope that I could
appeal to him man-to-man.

“This is for you,” he said. “I’m not some madman in a secret
laboratory. We’re in midtown and I’m going to extend my services to the
public.” He finished doing something with the tray in front of him and took a
step back over to me. I was eye-level with his bare thighs and he kneeled so we
were face-to-face.

“Don’t you love your wife?”

“Wha?” I felt like I’d been slapped by a thousand-pound feather. “Of
course, I do.” My head cannon was that this was going to be an intricate
murder. That the two of them had conspired to “do away” with me. But by
actually applying thought, I realized if murder was the goal, there was a much
simpler way for them to have done it.

“Wait, the surgery is real?” I asked.

His face screwed up in annoyance. “Of course, it is.” He gestured
all around him. “What are you thinking all this is for?”

“I dunno. I guess... I guess you’re some sort of scammer?”

He blinked several times. He reacted as though he’d never been
confronted by such an idea. “What would be the scam?”

I shrugged to the best of my ability and he shook his head. He
returned to the tray and picked up a long needle and inserted it into a vial,
withdrew from it, and placed both back. He looked at me again and saw my eyes
had grown twice as wide.

“Oh, that’s for me. For later. I’ve been ready, I was just waiting
for you to wake up?”

He picked up a scalpel that was tiny in his big hand. Now he
really did look like a cartoon villain. There was a lack of fullness in his
underwear. Like he’d been drawn sexless.

“Wait-wait. Uh, what were you doing in my house?” I was stalling,
still holding out hope that someone would wander in and put a stop to this.

“Oh, that.” His eyes turned upward as if he were watching a replay
of last night on the ceiling. “I watched you for a minute or two, yes. But I
truly needed to take a measurement after.”

“A... measurement?” My loins tingled in an unpleasant manner. He
waved a hand.

“It’s not what you think. I had to take a measurement of your
wife’s vaginal cavity after the two of you had finished. It was all very
clinical. Like a pap smear.”

Anger bubbled up inside me again. I tugged at my binds but I
wasn’t able to move anything more significant than my fingers and toes. He’d examined
my wife. It burned that he’d had access to her as much as her allowing him to
touch her. I squirmed like my skin was about to crawl off my body.

He looked at me, blank faced, and took another step. Once again, I
noted an emptiness to the area around his crotch.  The heat flooding to
the surface of my skin vanished like a big dog confronted by an even bigger dog.

“Suh-so you didn’t sleep with my wife?” I had to swallow hard to
keep my tone rational.

Now he really did look offended. “Sir, I am a professional? And
moreso, I am a married man. I believe I told you that. This picture you have in
mind of me as some sort of ghoul...” He clawed at the air with both hands, the
scalpel coming as close to his throat as it was going to. “You...” he twirled
the fingers of his free hand, searching for the words. “You score my heart. I
would like to think that once you’ve experienced the results, you will buy me
some sort of beer?”

He took another small step. His leg was about a foot away from my
forehead. He could have reached from where he was and began cutting away at any
part of my body he wanted.

“Could I... could I get a drink of water? My mouth is really dry.”

“Sure.” He reached from where he was and pressed a button on the
wall. The machinery beneath me was whisper silent as I was righted and the
excess blood flooded out of my head.

There was a water dispenser next to the tray where he’d been
working. He slipped a cone paper cup from the sleeve, filled it, then brought
it to me.

Cool water soothed my throat in microscopic sips. He must have
realized my delay tactic and upturned the rest of the water into my mouth. 

I swallowed hard and it felt like a bucket of water tossed on
smoldering embers.

“Will there be a scar?”

“Of course there will be a scar,” he said. “That is the point of
the surgery?”

He picked up something from the tray and reached toward my face
with it in his hand. I pinched my lips closed as he moved toward me, holding it
up like a prize. With the other hand he pressed hard at the back of my jaw,
forcing it open against my will. He slid the thing he held into my mouth,
sliding it over my back teeth until he had reached the last few molars, and
seated it there.

I tried biting through it despite knowing better. I was more
likely to dislocate my jaw. 

“That is okay? Not too uncomfortable? Believe it or not, it
actually helps to blunt the screams.” He seemed genuinely interested in my
answer and I grunted at him in anger. There was something wrong in his mouth I
should’ve seen the first time I talked to him, but I hadn’t noticed it until
just then, and it took a moment to process it. My panic leapt as every muscle
in me tensed, pulling with one last meaningless struggle. He waited me out,
stroking my shoulder until I quieted. He broke me like a wild horse. I was very
aware that he could put whatever in my mouth he wanted.

I felt myself surrendering. A calm settling into my bones that
made me want to rage all over again. But I was a car with no gas, my will being
swallowed up in the acceptance of pointlessness. It wasn’t a fight I could even
begin.

He moved his hand away and the table swiveled. In seconds I was
face down, staring at the floor. My tears tapped to the floor as I stepped out
of the cage of my head, my mind perching and spreading its wings as I imagined
my wife at her desk, inclining her head as she thought of me, too.

“H-how did you become an expert? What makes you so good?” My voice
was dreamy and broken, a thousand and one miles away, my words unclear from the
foreign object keeping my mouth open. 

If I’d asked a minute ago, the question would have been a last
effort to delay him from cutting me. But I was honestly curious. 

“I know I told you before. I practiced on me,” he said
quietly, his tone reverential. I imagined a beatific smile on his face as he
looked someplace else entirely.

“It took months. A little cut here, a partial penectomy there.
Each time I ask her, ‘Is it good? Is it better now?’ And each time, she tells
me, ‘Closer. Closer. Closer.’ You understand.”

He had a note of adoration for his wife in his voice that told me
he was standing on a bedrock of absolute sanity.

I felt the heat of him as he millimetered closer to my junk, no
doubt with that scalpel in his hand. I could feel his bare breath on my scrotum
and realized there must have been some sort of divide in the table between my
legs.

“I thought you said your wife’s satisfied. How do you do that
without... y’know?” My jaw ached when I talked.

He laughed. It was a really joyous note, not like he was just
trying to unsettle me. It wasn’t ironic or evil, rather a true, hearty guffaw.
I imagined seeing all the way to his back teeth as he pitched his head back.

He finally got himself back under control and he might have taken
a moment to dab a tear from his eye.

I’d gotten one last look at him before he turned me over. How he’d
looked down there and what he’d told me... I realized he must’ve whittled
himself down to nothing in his undies. That he truly had crafted himself into
what his wife had requested. That the nothing he seemed to have in his drawers
had been the exact mutilation that she’d wanted.

“It’s okay now?” he said suddenly next to me with a pair of blackout
goggles in his hand. He slipped the strap over my head as I moved as much as I
could but with a few deft movements, he had secured them in place. I could feel
my body surrendering against my will and I no longer had the ability to rally. 

“That wasn’t what she desired from me,” he said after he’d
retreated. I flashed on what I’d seen in his mouth again when his face had been
inches from mine. The thing I couldn’t make sense of before but had heard of. A
surgery of another kind.

He’d split his own tongue in half.

“Not a bit of it,” he said. “You understand?”

“But wait!” I was crying again. “If you need to cut me down there…
why do you have me turned around like this?”

“It’s mostly a single cut. Mostly. But your case is a more
particular situation. It will have to be more… intricate.”

Maja took the roast out of the oven and set the baking pan down on a wooden board in the middle of the table. The aroma of roasted meat instantly filled the dining room. She picked up a large carving fork and began slicing the meat, while Dino watched her hands intently from the other side of the table.

"It looks amazing, Maja," Dino said, reaching for the bottle on the sideboard behind him. "I brought this red. I think it’ll pair well."

"Thanks, Dino. You always remember to bring something nice," she replied, keeping her eyes fixed on the meat.

She placed the first slice onto Dino’s plate, then a second onto Antonio’s, who was sitting at the head of the table. Antonio remained silent. His hands were resting in his lap, beneath the edge of the table, as he stared motionlessly at the plate in front of him.

"Antonio?" Maja called out to him. "Are you okay? You’ve been so distant all day."

Antonio slowly raised his eyes. First, he looked at her—at her clean face and her hair pulled back into a ponytail—and then he shifted his gaze to his brother sitting opposite her.

"I’m fine," he said, his voice completely flat, without a single inflection. "Just tired from work. It’s nothing."

"See, that’s your problem," Dino cut in, already chewing on his first bite. "My friend, you need to slow down. Life is passing you by, and you’re buried in those papers. Look at yourself, you’re too pale. You need to get out more, be among people."

"I will get out," Antonio replied, picking up his knife and fork. "Soon."

Maja sat down in her place, facing Dino. She poured herself some water, then reached for the wine bottle. She filled Dino’s glass halfway, then her own.

"Would you like some, Antonio?" she asked, holding the bottle over his glass.

"No, thank you. I’m sticking to water tonight."

"Your loss, you don’t know what you’re missing," Dino said, raising his glass toward his brother. "To that, man. Cheers to our health."

Antonio raised his glass of water. Glass clinked against glass, the sound echoing brief and sharp in the quiet room. He took a small sip of the cold water and set the glass back on the table, exactly where it had been before, making sure it aligned perfectly to the millimeter with the edge of his plate.

The dinner went on slowly, filled with Dino’s story about his car trouble and a mechanic who tried to rip him off for parts. Maja listened to him intently, nodding occasionally and smiling at him. Antonio chewed the tough meat in silence, watching how Maja followed Dino’s every hand gesture.

When she reached toward the middle of the table for the salad bowl, she extended her arm straight out. The space between Dino’s plate and his glass was narrow, and as she pulled the bowl back, her index finger lingered against his forearm for a second. Dino didn’t pull his arm away. Instead, he kept talking, though the rhythm of his sentence slowed down for just a brief moment—just enough to catch her touch before he finished his thought and laughed.

Antonio watched it all without blinking. He knew about them. He knew about her made-up nights out with friends, and about all those evenings when she would come home late with cheap excuses. Everything was as clear as day.

"Maja, pass me some more bread, please," Dino said.

Maja picked up the bread basket and handed it to him across the table, their fingers brushing once again. This time, they didn’t even bother to hide it from him. Dino took a slice of bread and began wiping the sauce off his plate.

"This is honestly superb," he said, leaning back in his chair with satisfaction. "Maja, you’re a wonder."

Maja blushed slightly, then stood up and carried the empty salad bowl into the kitchen. She returned, sat back down, and gently tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, while Dino raised his glass toward Antonio once more.

"Man, compliments to the chef for this dinner. We should do this more often."

Antonio slowly placed both hands on the table, palms down and fingers spread wide across the white tablecloth. The smile completely vanished from his face as he shifted his gaze from Dino to Maja.

"We should, but this is your last one," Antonio said.

Dino lowered his glass, the red wine swirling slightly inside it, and looked at his brother in confusion, then at Maja.

"What do you mean, last one?" he asked.

Maja stared at Antonio; her hand froze in her lap as she held the napkin."Antonio, what are you talking about?" she asked.

Antonio didn't answer right away. He slowly reached into the pocket of his blazer, which was hanging on the back of his chair, pulled out a small black pistol, and laid it on the table, right next to his glass of water.

Maja caught her breath sharply through her teeth, while Dino went completely rigid.

"Because tonight, you are both going to die," he said. His voice was entirely calm, without any rise in tone. "You are getting exactly what you deserve."

"Antonio, please..." Maja whispered, as a first tear rolled down her cheek, but she was too paralyzed by fear to wipe it away.

"You will expose yourself as an unfaithful wife, killed by her lover because she wanted to leave him," he said coldly, then turned to Dino. "And you... You, brother, will look like a piece of trash to the whole world—the man who stole his own brother's wife, and a monster who ended up killing her. And me? I had to kill you because you attacked me right after her. I’ll be the victim who acted in self-defense."

Dino's breathing was shallow and rapid, his hands clenched into fists on the table. He looked at the gun, then into Antonio’s cold eyes.

"Antonio, you’re crazy, I..." He gathered his strength, pressed his hands against the table, and tried to lunge to his feet.

He remained half-crouched, his palms pressed hard against the edge of the table. His eyes were wide, locked onto the barrel of the gun, which was now raised to the level of his chest. Antonio’s elbow rested on the table, his hand steady and still.

"Sit back down, Dino," Antonio said.

Dino lowered himself back into his chair, slowly, inch by inch. He didn’t take his eyes off Antonio’s finger, which was resting along the trigger.

"Antonio, calm down," Dino hissed through his teeth. His voice was deep and strained. "Put that away. I’m your brother. Let’s talk."

Antonio tilted his head slightly.

"We are talking, Dino. Tonight we talk about your car, about your mechanic, about your wine. Now it’s my turn."

Maja covered her mouth with both hands. A short, muffled sound, like a sob, escaped her throat, and she tried to swallow it down. She looked at Dino, then back at the gun.

"Antonio, please..." she spoke from behind her palms. "You’ve got it wrong... it’s not what you think. Do you really believe that..."

"Don't, Maja," Antonio cut her off, without turning his head toward her. He kept his eyes on his brother. "Don’t waste words on lies that you can’t even finish. I know everything. I told you."

Dino slowly spread his hands flat on the tablecloth.

"Alright," he said, trying to keep his voice as calm as possible. "You caught us. We messed up, we're idiots, do whatever you want to me. Hit me, break me, but put the gun away, please. We can handle this like civilized men."

"Like civilized men?" Antonio repeated, a barely noticeable, cold smile appearing on his face for a split second. "You want us to handle this like civilized men? You’re sitting at my table, Dino. You’re eating my food, raising a toast to me. And what are you doing behind my back the whole time? Sleeping with my wife. Is that your idea of 'civilized'?"

Maja dropped her hands from her face. The skin around her eyes was red, and her lips were trembling. She stared at Antonio, trying to catch his eye, but his gaze remained fixed on Dino.

"Antonio, please," she said, gasping for air. "If I have to, I’ll leave. I’ll pack up tonight, I’ll go, you’ll never have to deal with me again. Just... please, put the gun down."

"You’re not going anywhere, Maja," he said in a flat voice. "I told you how things stand. Tonight, you both die."

"You can’t kill your own brother, are you insane?!" Dino suddenly raised his voice, anger briefly overtaking his fear. His shoulders tensed. "The same mother gave birth to us, we grew up together, Antonio! We're blood!"

"You're the one who forgot that," Antonio replied. "Now it's too late."

Silence fell over the dining room. Dino’s breathing was heavy and shallow. Maja stared at the gun, then at her husband, gripping the edge of the table as if she were about to collapse from her chair.

Antonio slowly shifted the barrel of the gun, pointing toward the large carving knife that lay next to the empty baking pan in the middle of the table.

"Actually... You know what, Dino..." he spoke, his voice sounding almost relaxed. "Maybe it isn't entirely too late. Maybe there is a way out for you. It all depends on how badly you truly want to live."

Dino looked toward the knife. The blade caught the reflection of the light.

"What does that mean?" he managed to say.

"Take the knife, Dino," Antonio said. He didn’t raise his voice. "Take it and cut her arm. Make a gash. Prove to me that your life matters more to you than hers, and maybe I’ll let you walk out that door alive."

Maja’s breath caught. She flinched backward, pressing her back against the spine of her chair.

"Antonio, no! Dino, don't, please!" she cried out, clutching her hands to her chest as tears streamed down her face. "Antonio, don’t do this..."

Dino didn’t look at her. His forehead was completely drenched in sweat. His fingers slowly began to move toward the middle of the table. Toward the wooden handle of the knife.

"Dino..." she pleaded, her voice a mix of a scream and disbelief. She watched his fingers close around the handle. "Dino, please, don't. You love me... you said you loved me..."

"I'm sorry, Maja," he spoke, his voice completely twisted by terror. "I have to. I want to live."

He leaned over the table. The blade passed right next to the water pitcher. Maja tried to pull her arm back, but it was useless. She had nowhere to go.

The tip of the knife touched her forearm. Dino pressed down. His hand was shaking, but he dragged a cut several centimeters long. The skin tore open, and thick, red blood instantly began to drip onto the tablecloth.

Maja let out a sharp, guttural cry. She clamped her left hand over the wound.

"It’s done," Dino gasped, breathing loudly through his nose. He dropped the knife onto the table. "I did what you asked, Antonio, now let me go."

Antonio didn’t move. He lowered his eyes to the bloodstain, then shifted his gaze back to his brother.

"That was just a scratch, Dino. That isn’t proof that you want to live. That’s proof that you are a coward."

Maja breathed rapidly, keeping her fingers pressed tight over her forearm. Blood seeped between her fingers. Through her tears, she shot Dino a look full of pure rage.

"You piece of trash!" she screamed, her voice trembling. "You sold me out in a second. You talked me into all of this, and now you’re carving me up just to save your own skin. You coward!"

"Shut up, Maja!" Dino shouted, his lower lip trembling. His face was red with fury and panic. "You came to me on your own, I didn’t force you into anything! You were the one constantly talking about how bored you were with him! Antonio, she’s lying! I just..."

"Enough," Antonio cut them off. He didn’t raise his voice, but they both went silent instantly. "I don’t care. Dino, the knife is still on the table."

Dino looked down at the wooden handle.

"Antonio, please..." he whispered, his hand now visibly shaking. "Don't. I did what you asked. Let me go."

"I told you how things stand, Dino," Antonio continued. He slowly raised the gun and aimed the barrel straight at his forehead. "Stab her again. Properly this time. In the stomach."

"Antonio, no!" Maja shrieked. She tried to get up from her chair, but her hand slipped, knocking over her wine glass. The liquid spilled across the table. "Dino, don't!"

"Dino, the clock is ticking," Antonio said, his finger on the trigger tightening slightly. "Choose. Her stomach or your head. Now."

Dino closed his eyes for a second. He let out a short, broken sob, and then pure, primal fear for his own skin completely overrode everything else. He grabbed the knife from the table once more. He stepped out from behind his chair, bypassed the corner of the table, and leaned over Maja.

"I’m sorry..." he muttered through his teeth, his voice no longer sounding human.

He lunged and drove the blade deep into her abdomen.

The knife remained buried in her blouse. Slowly, he pulled his fingers away from the handle. He took one step back. His shoes squeaked quietly on the hardwood floor.

Maja didn’t scream. She only let out a long, shallow gasp, as if she had run out of air. She slid off the chair and collapsed onto the floor.

Dino stared at his sticky palms, his body shaking uncontrollably.

"Antonio..." he managed to say. His voice was raspy, barely audible. "It’s over. Let me out."

"Brother, please..." he took another step back. "Let me go. Please."

"You’re not going anywhere, Dino," Antonio replied.

On the floor, Maja let out a low, wheezing sound. The fingers of her right hand twitched once, scratching against the hardwood floor, and then went limp. Her breathing was growing shallower.

"You’re crazy..." Dino whispered. "You’re a psychopath."

"I am," Antonio said. He slowly lowered the gun by a few centimeters, aiming straight at the center of Dino’s chest. "From the moment I found out about the two of you, I’ve been fantasizing about this night."

"What more do you want from me, Antonio?" Dino managed to bring out, his voice cracked with terror.

"Slow down, Dino, what’s the rush? Haste makes waste, and tonight, I can’t afford even the slightest mistake."

"Stop it..." Dino shouted, unable to take the pressure any longer. "I’ve had enough of your sick games."

Antonio just watched him coldly.

"Come over here and hit me."

Dino stared frantically at his brother's face, then at the barrel of the gun.

"What?" he stammered.

"Hit me," Antonio repeated. "With your fist. In the face. I want you to hit me. I know you want to."

"Antonio, are you out of your mind... I’m not going to hit you..." Dino started shaking his head side to side, looking for an exit.

Antonio raised the gun a bit higher.

"Dino, if you don’t hit me, I will shoot you in the head this very second. Choose. Hit me or die right now."

Dino’s breathing was fast and ragged. Pure fear for his life forced his fingers to curl into a tight fist. He stepped forward, swung, and struck Antonio right on the left side of his face.

The sound of the impact was sharp. Antonio’s head jerked to the right, and blood instantly began to flow from his split lip. He slowly turned his head back, straightened up, and looked at his brother again.

"That was weak, Dino," he said, wiping the blood from his lip. "Again. In the right eye. Hit me again. Now."

Dino was sobbing. He swung again, harder this time, and caught him in the right eye. The skin above Antonio’s eyebrow split open immediately.

In that instant, Antonio clenched his fist and struck back. The blow landed flush on Dino’s jaw, and then he swung once more, hitting his nose. There was a dull crunch of cartilage. Dino stumbled backward, a thick stream of blood spurting from his nose.

Antonio slowly raised the gun and aimed straight at his chest.

"Stand right there," he said, his voice flat and muffled.

Clutching his broken nose, Dino stared in terror at the barrel of the gun. He took two steps back, right into the open space between the table and the wall.

"Antonio, don't, please..." he gasped, his voice breaking.

Antonio pulled the trigger. He fired two quick shots. The first bullet missed Dino and embedded itself in the wall behind him, leaving a deep hole. The second bullet went straight through his chest.

He hit the wall with his back and slowly slid down onto the hardwood floor. His head slumped to the side, his eyes remaining wide open, staring at the leg of the table. He didn’t move again.

A dead silence fell over the dining room, and the smell of gunpowder began to spread through the space. Antonio lowered his hand, the gun hanging by his side. He looked at Dino, then at Maja.

He pulled his phone from his pants pocket and dialed emergency services.

"Help..." he spoke into the receiver, sounding distraught. "My wife... He attacked me too... I’m bleeding... Quickly, please..."

He cut the call and set the phone down on the table.

He walked over to Maja’s body and carefully removed the knife, using a napkin to avoid leaving fingerprints. To alter the scene and simulate an attack, he inflicted several wounds upon himself through his clothing, enduring the sharp pain before dropping the weapon. He then dragged himself a short distance away and knocked over a chair to complete the appearance of a violent struggle.

From outside, sirens began to wail. Blue lights started flashing across the walls and the ceiling of the room.

He stretched out on the floor and closed his eyes.

The front door burst open under the impact, and several police officers rushed into the dining room.

Antonio remained motionless as the authorities entered. The show was ready to begin.

​

Chapter - 1

My phone kept buzzing non stop, my niece was hurting me enough to go to her party, since I was already an hour late. I kept telling her to give me a minute and she finally stopped after I had said ill be there in less than 15 if I didn't get her ice cream. Anyways this niece means a lot to me, im basically her brother, we always hang out and i take her out for lunch. But lately I stopped visiting her after i sa-

Violet “Hurry up babe! You dont wanna miss her birthday do you?”

“Yeah, I'll be right there!” I quickly put some perfume on and left before she could say anything else. In the car my girlfriend was reminiscing about stuff like.

Violet “What color should i get my nails done?”

“I don't know purple?”

Violet “No not that one its too dark”

Or

“Did you see Veronica's post? She's crazy”

“Yeah very crazy”

After countless questions and answers we shared we finally made it to my nieces house it looked so e-

Niece “Mike!” she came and hugged me

“Hi Mia, where's your mom?”

Mia "She's inside, she said you don’t like it to come true?”

“No Mia its not that I-”

Mia’s mom “Hey Mike! Come on in its cold outside”

We all go walk inside the house and sit down on the couch to watch tv while everyone else is drinking. After watching Frozen for the 14th time with this girl.

Mia “Can we watch it again? Please please pleaseeee”

“How about we draw, yeah?”

Mia “Sure!”

Go bring the stuff to draw ill go get something for me to drink. When I was going to get some water Mia’s mom offered me some alcohol.

Mia's mom “Come on you'll like it”

“Ashley you know I don’t like drinking”

Ashley “Just one sip come on!"

“No Ashley.”

She finally gave up

“Oh um Ashley ive been meaning to talk to you.”

Ashley “About what?”

“Your backyard… a couple months back on your birthday I was playing with Mia and the kids… and then I… um I saw… you know what, nevermind im just playing around”

Ashley “Oh Mike you and your jokes.”

Mia “Hey Mike! Your taking too long”

“Ok ok”

After a couple hours of drawing and drinking imaginary tea with Mia it was finally time to cut her cake.So we all gathered around to sing her happy birthday, however I noticed Mia never came back from the restroom while everyone else was still talking waiting for her. I went to the restroom to look for her and asked Violet if she's seen her and said no.

I checked the front yard with just a bunch of random toys…

Mia's parents room was just full of the other little kids

Mia's room was completely silent.

I looked under her bed… nothing but her shoes…

But then…

I saw something in the corner of my eye.

It was Mia…

Standing in front of the fence…

Staring into the darkness of the forest…

Chapter - 2

Mia…

My heart stopped seeing her so close to the forest…

I screamed out “MIAAA!” I ran downstairs and went to Ashley

“Ashey! Ashley! Mia! She's she's”

Ashley “I know she's in the restroom”

“No no she's outside!”

Ashley “ well tell her to come inside to cut her cake”

“No she's close to the forest Ashley!”

Ashley “can you do me a favor and get in here please?”

“The forest… it… it… somethings in there! I don't know what but there's something”

Ashley looked at me with a serious face for a second and then laughed

Ahsley “oh Mike here you go with your jokes again”

“Forget it”

I went past Ashley and all the guests, as I opened the back door… Mia stepped into the forest.

A gust of wind burst from the trees and knocked me backward.

Then...

Nothing.

No music. No laughter. No cars. Even the birds were gone.

“Mia come back!”

I ran close to the forest standing right next to it and then all the noise came back… and Violet was screaming back at me standing outside next to the door.

Violet “Babe, what are you doing? Come back!”

“Wait Mia's in the forest I need to go get her”

Violet “No she's already here come look”

“What? What if I saw her…”

I looked back into the forest wondering what violet was talking about.

I went to the window next to Violet

There she was…

Smiling with everyone else…

Blowing her candles…

Violet “See” She smiled at me weirdly and so I went back inside only to see everyone talking and violet on the couch scrolling… I went to sit next to Violet and asked her "Where's Mia?” She responded with "Weren't you going to get her?” “yeah but you… you said”

I looked at the forest behind the TV

Mia is still standing there… Violet “said what”

“Nevermind”

I stood up from the couch, going past everyone. I went to the backyard door. As I opened it Mia walked into the darkness of the forest.

“MIAAA!”

I ran towards the forest, my heart dropping as I jumped over the fence and landed wrong hurting my ankle

“Ahh!”

I started crawling with all my strength, I can't let Mia get hurt, the adrenaline rushing through my body caused the pain to silence itself as I got up.

“Miaa come back!”

As I stood in front of the forest, I hesitated, whatever those eyes were, I didn't wanna mess with it.

Mia crossed my mind…

I promised I'd always protect her…

So I went into the forest without another thought.

Chapter - 3

Forest

Crows flew past me following a sudden Swoosh! I looked around for Mia but the fog was too thick that I couldn't see anything. I turned behind me to look at Mia's house, but all I saw was trees? I hadn't taken more than one step. I decided to walk towards the direction of the house, each step I felt even more lost… So I grabbed my phone from my pocket to check my location, my heart dropped as I felt no sign of my phone in my pocket. I checked around me to see if I may have dropped it. Tracing what I believed were my steps but I found nothing. I was lost. In the middle of nowhere.

I frantically screamed “Mia” as I walked through the forest that seemed to have no ending. What did I walk into? I looked around hoping for any sign of life, but I found nothing.

Hours passed until the thick fog allowed me to see a cabin close to me. When I got closer birds around me slowed down, and the wind was slowing down as well. Each time going closer to a full stop. When I got to the cabin I knocked and knocked but no one answered. When I knocked for the 11th time the door opened.

“Hello?” I said, peaking slightly through the small crack “Is anyone there?”

Nothing but the echoes of the air made a sound. I pushed open the door, sending a long painful creak. The cabin was dark, you could see the little power keeping the light on. As I stepped the gust of wind sent me flying back into the moist grass of the forest. The door shut with a loud bang. I got back up on my feet and ran as far away from the cabin as I could.

Passing each tree without a look back.

“Help!” came from the same direction of the cabin. It sounded like Mia, could it be?

Then again but away from the opposite side of the cabin. And again but from a different direction. “Help!” it was coming from all places. I looked around trying to see if I could find her with each scream sounding closer.

“Mia! Where are you!” I screamed looking in all directions.

Wind.

Wind was the only thing I could hear.

I screamed even louder, my voice breaking “M-MIA!”

I stood still hoping for some other scream for her but there was nothing. I walked toward the last direction I heard her. After what felt like thousands of steps I had taken, my legs wanted to give up. Where could she be? I sat down putting my back against a tree. My feet were pulsing with pain. Each minute that passed my eyes got heavier. Till I slowly drifted off to sleep.

Read Parts II & III here

She was gone again by the time I got up and despite my best efforts, I was still five minutes late getting to work.

I avoided the circle of jerks when I saw them crowding the same hallway and I went to a restroom on another floor. I didn’t want to be around people if I could avoid it.

I went to the half-finished building as soon as five o’clock came, intent on getting answers. I stepped off the elevator and weaved my way to his office. I kept expecting to not see it the closer I got but there it was, the door that didn’t fit right in the threshold. 

It turned easy and I went inside, expecting it to be empty and abandoned but he had begun furnishing the space. A couch, a reception desk, and taped off sections near the back that I guessed were the layout for his office and a treatment room.

I shuddered, thinking how I’d be here tomorrow if my wife had her way. 

The only thing absent was the good doctor himself. I thought about trashing the place, but it was petty in a way that made me feel like I was giving him even more power over me. 

Instead, I took all the pens out of the holder and a stack of Post-It Notes. It was still petty, but it scratched an itch and I felt a little empowered doing it.

I didn’t head home immediately after. I needed time to sort my thoughts. I couldn’t believe I was really considering letting somebody cut my dick. I mean, was pleasing my wife reason enough? What if we divorced or she died or something like that? Would I be compatible with somebody else?

I needed a drink. Cappy’s was on the far end of town and the distance from home would be good to clear my head. I ordered a brandy mule and chugged it before the bartender could lay down a coaster.

“You look like you could use another,” she said.

I nodded and a moment later I was working on my second. 

“I love my wife so much,” I said as she was cleaning some glasses beneath the bar.

“That’s a good thing, right?”

“Sometimes. I dunno.” My stomach hadn’t been right since the eight coneys I’d had yesterday, and I hadn’t eaten at all today. I was already soused after a drink-and-a-half.

“How’s the pizza?” I asked.

“Good, not great.” She wiggled a hand.

“Let me get a... medium with beef, onion, and mushroom.”

She looked at me like she’d never heard of those toppings.

“How ‘bout pepperoni?”

I had one more brandy mule before food came. It looked like it had been sitting under a heat lamp well before I’d ordered it and the pepperoni slices were limp, but it was still pizza. 

The bartender parked in front of me and leaned onto the bar after I’d had my second slice. 

“You mind?” she asked, pointing at the pie. I nodded. She took a slice and finger-combed hair out of her face as she took a bite.

She paid me back with a shot and she did one with me before returning to silence as we ate.

“Look, I dunno what it is. Just give her what she wants,” she said with a mouthful, giving me deep eye contact. “You can’t go wrong with that, right?”

I barely was able to finish what I had in my mouth. I settled up and made it outside without stumbling but I was drunk. The bartender got the hint she’d said something wrong but I wasn’t going to fill in the blank. I hadn’t wanted the rest of the pizza, yet somehow I had the box in my hand. 

I shouldn’t have been behind the wheel but there I was with half a pizza as my copilot. It wasn’t long before flashing lights lit up behind me and my spirits rose—this was the reprieve I’d been longing for. A decision being taken out of my hands. I couldn’t be held responsible if I weren’t in my own custody.

Or something like that. It had made a lot more sense back when I’d had a belly full of brandy and cheese.

I pulled over and maybe bumped up on the curb with one wheel.

The cop sauntered up to my window cautiously. He was short and the angle of the car made him look ridiculous somehow. He made it worse by getting his feet twisted together and catching himself on the side of my car to keep from falling completely.

“What’s your...”

I waited a full ten seconds for him to finish his sentence while he held a fist to his mouth like he was gripping a tiny microphone. He belched then waved the air in front of his face.

Shit, was he drunk, too?

“What’s your problem tonight?” He asked and fumbled with the general right side of his body with his hand. I noticed the gun and maybe because we were both bitten by the same snake, I wasn’t sensing danger like I should’ve.

“I shouldn’t be on the road,” I said, sounding stone sober to my ears. “My wife wants me to do something I don’t wanna do tomorrow and I was just in there, drinking my worries away. I have leftover pizza.” I thumbed toward the seat next to me like it was proof of where I’d been.

“Slow down, son. I’m sure it’s not as bad as you think.” I thought he was about to give me marital advice but then I realized he was talking about my sobriety. “I bet you could walk a straight line, heel- to-toe.” He plucked open his holster, but it didn’t seem like he was aware of what that hand was doing. He stuck his pinky in his ear and wrenched it around in there. 

“Sofficer. Sofficer.” I added the S but I still sounded too sober. “Please. I think I’m a danger. To public safety.” I thought if I could convince the drunk cop I was drunk he’d arrest me.

“Are you about to rob a bank?” He pointed at me, somehow adding to his overall look of ridiculousness.

“Well… no.”

“There’s nobody out here.” He waved a hand toward the black landscape far ahead of us. “Just stay between the lines.”

I couldn’t think. It shouldn’t have been this hard to get pulled out of my car for driving under the influence.

“What if… what if I was about to rob a bank?” It was the most smart-assy thing I could think to say.

He smiled and waggled a finger. “Joke’s on you. It’s after hours.”

He hooked his thumbs into his belt. Something about his body language had changed and he’d gone from humorous to being done with our interaction.

“Just. Stay. Between. The. Lines,” he said, swaying. I wanted to conjure the words for help, but even if I’d had the ability to ask, there wasn’t anything about him that answered helpful.

I opened my mouth, but didn’t speak. I sat back in my seat and covered my face in my hands, giving up. I listened to him walk away, closer his patrol car door, and drive away. He gave me a chirp of his sirens as passed me.

The drive home should have felt longer but I caught every light. It was like a dark fate had carved a path for me. I momentarily played with the idea of letting it have me completely. To take my hands off the wheel and let it take me wherever it wanted me to go. 

I hadn’t descended far enough into self-pity for that and in ten minutes, I was home. To my surprise, my wife was still in her paint clothes and was washing her hands at the kitchen sink.

“Oh, you have pizza?” she said. I’d forgotten about the pizza and subconsciously picked it up. I looked at the box in my hand and did a second, struggled to remember what was in it. 

I joined her on the couch, and she grabbed it from me and took a slice. Usually, we asked about each other’s day, but I didn’t feel like it, tomorrow anchoring my brain.

“Do you love me?” she said during a commercial break. I had no idea what we were watching.

The question agitated me and opened a trapdoor underneath my stomach.

“Of course I do.” I did, but my feelings about this whole “surgery” thing was making me feel resentful. I was definitely still buzzed, and the alcohol was sharpening my emotions like a file working away inside me. 

“Then why are you fighting so hard against this? Don’t you want us both to be satisfied?”

“That’s not fair. Of course I want to satisfy you. Don’t you know how this is making me feel? I don’t want to do this,” I said. “I mean, there has to be something else we could try. I’m willing to do just about anything to please you.”

“I want you to do this,” she said, placing her greasy hand on my thigh. She shook her head, tears in her eyes. I took it to be a manipulation at first. Not that she did that sort of thing normally, it was just me in a bag of my feelings. My defenses were up and everything was an attack in that moment. I chewed the insides of my cheeks to keep in what was trying to climb out of my mouth.

Then I started to cry. I sounded like a little teapot. It caught me by surprise.

“I just love you so much.” I had a ball of razors in my throat I couldn’t swallow. “I don’t want anything to happen to us, but I don’t know if I can do this.”

She lassoed an arm around my neck and yanked me into an upper body hug.

“I just want you. I want to feel connected with you. I don’t want anything plastic between us. I’m tired of all that stuff. I wanna feel you.”

She kissed me before I could speak and rock turned into water. My walls melted as we flowed into one another and by the time I returned to my senses I was on the newspaper covered kitchen floor.

My wife was already gone but she had brought a comforter downstairs and covered me.

Normally, I toss in my sleep, but I was still covered up to my chest. I was stiff as I turned the world vertical and turned my back into a percussion instrument as I stretched.

A few minutes later I had scrambled eggs and a cup of coffee going. I don’t normally eat breakfast so early, but I had an appetite for whatever reason. It was an hour before I normally would get up, so I took my time eating and scrolling my phone.

I wasn’t sure how much sleep I’d gotten but I was refreshed. The way my day had started, I half expected to catch all the green lights and get the closest spot in the parking lot.

But when I looked up from where I was seated at the kitchen island, something caught my eye that I should’ve seen as soon as I woke up.

A red and white checkered scarf draped over the back of the couch.

Had he been in my house?

 

Death is the one thing humanity can't avoid. But how do we know we're not already dead? How do we know that what we're doing right now, this thing we call living, isn't just the last memory of a dying brain? Because according to science, right before death the brain stretches time out and pulls up all the good memories. So what if that stretched-out window of time is... right now? What if everything we're doing is just a memory, and the real me is lying in a coma somewhere, close to death?

My name is Rin. And yes, that's not my real name. I can't tell you my real one, because you'd dox me. I was in the tenth grade at the time, and my school is pretty well known. Every year it runs a competition to send students abroad as exchange students, and that year one of the destinations was California. I wanted to chase opportunities, so I entered, and I went. I stayed about a year and a half.

But during that time, I missed home so much. Thailand. America doesn't have pad kra pao (Thai basil stir-fry). No khai jiao (Thai omelet). And most importantly, no Mama instant noodles. Oh my god, my all-time favorite food. Anyway, I'm getting off track.

I was finally on my way home. My flight got delayed two hours because of the weather, but it finally showed up. I walked down the jet bridge and found my seat. Business class. Just kidding. Economy. Obviously. I was a student. I was broke.

The cabin looked old, even older than the plane that brought me over here. The seat fabric was worn shiny at the edges, and the tray table had a sticky patch that someone had clearly tried to wipe once and given up on. My seat-back screen took about ten minutes to boot up, and when it did, there was a thin dead line of pixels running straight through the middle of the Pacific. The air smelled like old carpet and recycled breath. The reading light above me flickered a couple of times, like it couldn't make up its mind. The woman next to me, maybe in her thirties, gray hoodie, neck pillow, was out cold before we even took off.

Dinner was either chicken or pasta. I picked chicken. It tasted like wet cardboard in sauce, and the whole time I was thinking, I would kill for a cup of Mama right now.

The flight went on like that until the middle of the night. The cabin lights dimmed. Everyone pulled their window shades down, and the only things left were the blue glow of a few screens and the steady hum of the engines. I got up to go to the bathroom, planning to sleep right after, because it was really late by then.

Right after I stood up, I felt like I was about to die. I'm not exaggerating. It was this sinking feeling in my chest, like when you're on a bus going at high speed and it hits a bump, and for a split second your body leaves the seat while your stomach stays behind. That feeling. I stood in the tiny bathroom under the buzzing fluorescent light, washed my hands, and told myself I'd imagined it. It's not like planes these days aren't safe, right? They have safety standards now.

I went back to my seat, put on my eye mask, and reclined as far as the seat would let me, which was about two inches. I was just about to fall asleep when the captain's voice crackled over the speakers.

"Attention, passengers. We are currently experiencing turbulence, which may cause the aircraft to sway..."

He didn't even finish the sentence. The plane started shaking like it was possessed. And I don't mean a little bump. It was violent. I never thought a plane could shake that hard. The overhead bins rattled and popped open. Someone's bag slid out and thumped into the aisle. A cup flew past my head. The seatbelt chime kept going ding-ding-ding-ding, like it was panicking too. Somewhere behind me a baby started screaming, and then a lot of other people did, and the lights flickered on and off.

And then the thing I feared most finally happened. The oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling and swung in front of my face. A flight attendant's voice, shaky, ordered all of us to put them on. And of course, chaos. I ripped off my eye mask, pushed up the window shade, and looked out. The wing was flexing like it was made of rubber, the red light on the wingtip blinked in the black, and then the whole sky tilted. The plane was going down.

Holy shit. I'm going to die like this? Why does it always have to be me? I really don't get it. And I haven't even had my Mama yet. But if I'm going to die, then fine. I accepted my fate. I squeezed my eyes shut and made one last prayer: if there really is a next life, please let Thailand finally become a democracy.

About a minute passed. Then everything went quiet. Not "the shaking stopped" quiet. Quiet like someone had hit mute on the whole world. About five minutes passed, and nothing happened.

I opened my eyes. There was no mask on my face. I looked up, and the ceiling panels were all closed, with nothing hanging down. The seatbelt sign was off. The engines were humming, steady, like nothing had ever happened.

The window shade was down. I'd pushed it up. I was sure I'd pushed it up.

I looked at my screen. The line of dead pixels across the Pacific was gone. I wiped my hand across the tray table, and it was clean. No sticky patch. Not even a little.

I looked around, and everyone was asleep. Even the person next to me. Except it wasn't the woman. It was a man, maybe in his fifties, hood pulled up, snoring with his mouth open. I stared at him for a long time. I could have sworn the person next to me was a woman. But I'd been half asleep when I sat down, so I must have misremembered.

Did I just dream that? But what kind of dream feels like that? I'm not sure.

I got up and went to the bathroom again. While I was peeing, I looked down. Wait. Wasn't my underwear blue? It's red. I remember putting on the blue ones. Not red. Or did I remember wrong? I guess I've just gone completely dumb. I should probably go lie down. I'll tell you more once I get back to my country. See you.

[Part 2]

"Chicken pad kra pao with a fried egg, extra spicy, no MSG, please, Auntie." I was ordering from the owner of a tiny made-to-order restaurant.

"Yeah, yeah, I know. But how's it supposed to taste good without MSG? Just a little, come on." She shot back at me in a clipped voice.

"Whatever you think is best, Auntie," I said.

Okay. I'd finally made it back to Thailand. I figured the first thing I had to do was find the food I'd missed the most: real, authentic Thai made-to-order food. I hadn't had any in over a year.

It didn't take long. The plate landed in front of me: rice topped with chicken pad kra pao and a runny fried egg, the smell of fresh holy basil hitting my nose like a punch. I didn't waste a second. I grabbed my fork and spoon and stabbed the yolk so it ran all over the rice, because, well, that's the only way to eat a fried egg. Then I took a bite. Savory, balanced, and burning hot. This was the flavor that Thais and foreigners alike fell in love with.

But even while I was eating, I couldn't stop thinking about what had happened on the plane. Do you think I dreamed it? What the hell was going on? Everything felt shuffled around. Someone in the comments told me it was called "Quantum immortality" which I'd never heard of. When I looked it up, it said that if you die in a quantum dimension, your consciousness carries you into a universe where you don't. But how could that be possible? Don't scientists say that's pure superstition?

"How much, Auntie?" I asked.

"Sixty."

It felt like the price had gone up. Wasn't it usually forty or fifty baht? But I didn't argue. I paid and walked to the airport entrance, where a long line of taxis was parked. I decided to take a taxi, because there weren't any motorcycle taxis at the airport. Weird as hell.

The first taxi in line was a green-and-white Toyota with a dent in the back door and a jasmine garland swinging from the rearview mirror. The driver was leaning against the hood, smoking. When he saw my suitcase, he flicked the cigarette away like I'd just won the lottery.

"Where to?"

I told him the district. He grimaced.

"Meter's broken. Four hundred baht flat."

You have to understand something. In California, I once paid sixty dollars for a ten-minute Lyft ride and almost cried inside. Four hundred baht was only about twelve dollars. After a year in America, that price didn't sound like getting ripped off. It sounded like a discount coupon.

"Sure," I said.

He loaded my suitcase into the trunk, and I climbed into the back seat. The seats were covered in glossy blue vinyl that squeaked every time I moved. The car smelled like jasmine, menthol, and an air freshener that had died years ago. A small amulet hung next to the steering wheel. The radio played softly, a DJ cheerfully arguing with a caller about whether traffic was worse than last week.

"Studying abroad?" the driver asked as he pulled out.

"How did you know?"

"You're staring at everything like you've never seen it before." He laughed. "My daughter wants to go to America too. She's only in sixth grade, but she already has opinions about it."

"What kind of opinions?"

"She says the snacks are better over there."

"She's not wrong," I said. "They've got forty kinds of potato chips, but not a single decent bowl of rice."

He liked that answer. He slapped the steering wheel and started telling me about his daughter. I let him, because it was kind of nice to hear Thai that wasn't coming from inside my own head.

Here's the thing about seat belts in the back of taxis in my country: technically, they exist. But they're usually shoved deep into the crack of the seat, under snack crumbs and maybe even a coin from the nineties, and nobody has ever pulled one out willingly. But after what happened on the plane, I wasn't in a joking mood. I dug around for the buckle and clicked it in.

"Oh, safety first!" the driver said when he caught it in the mirror. "Good job, kid."

We got on the expressway. It was late afternoon, the sky a dusty orange. The driver kept going on about his daughter. "...so I told her, study hard, but don't forget where you come from. I told her every day, until she said, 'Dad, you say that every day...'"

His phone buzzed in the cup holder. He glanced down.

Shit.

I don't know what made me look up. Maybe it was the sound: a horn, long and furious, from the right. I turned, and there was a massive ten-wheeler truck filling the whole window, drifting into our lane like we didn't exist. I could see the fender. I could see a faded sticker on its side that read A mother's love never runs out. I could see the driver in the cab, mouth hanging open, one hand raised like he was trying to wave us out of the way.

Then everything slowed down.

I'd read about this. Before death, the brain stretches time and pulls up the good memories. I even told you about it at the very beginning, remember? But what I never knew was that it would feel this calm. The horn stretched out into a low drone, like a whale song. I thought about my mom. I thought about a bowl of creamy tom yum goong Mama noodles. I thought, what an idiotic way to die. I'd survived the plane. Actually survived it. And now I was going to die in a car with a jasmine garland hanging from the mirror?

Then the sound cut out.

Not just the horn. Everything. The engine, the radio, the tires grinding on the road. The same silence as on the plane. Quiet like someone had hit mute on the whole world.

I closed my eyes.

Why does it only happen to me?

"...but don't forget where home is."

I opened my eyes.

What the fuck.

We were still on the expressway, same lane. No truck. The sky was the same dusty orange. The seat belt was still across my chest, and I was gripping it with both hands so hard my knuckles were pale as uncooked rice.

"Sorry, what?" I asked. My voice came out an octave higher than normal.

"I said don't forget where home is. That's what I tell my daughter."

It was almost the same sentence he'd left hanging. Almost. But the voice was wrong. Deeper, a little rougher. Like the same song played in a different key.

I looked up at the rearview mirror.

The driver in the mirror had a long face, thin glasses, and no mustache. The guy who'd flicked away his cigarette had a round face and a beard thick enough to see from space. They wore the same green polo and tilted their heads the same way when watching the road, but they were not the same man.

I'd like to officially announce that my brain was about to explode.

"You okay, kid?"

"Did we... almost hit a truck?"

"A truck?" He frowned at the mirror. "No way, not on this road. They don't allow trucks at this time of day. I think you dozed off. You were mumbling something."

"I wasn't asleep."

"Sure, whatever makes you feel better," he said, in the tone of someone who didn't want to argue with an exhausted teenager.

I slowly scanned the car, like I was afraid it would notice me looking. The jasmine garland was gone. A plastic bobblehead dog hung there instead. The amulet was still there, but bigger, hanging from a gold chain. And the seats... were red.

Red. Not blue. Definitely red.

Blue to red. I'd seen this movie before, and it ended with my underwear.

"Um..." I said. "How much is the fare so far?"

"The meter's running right there," he said, pointing to the dashboard, where orange digits read 312. "Another twenty minutes or so, depending on traffic."

Wasn't the meter broken? I distinctly remembered it being broken.

On the radio, the DJ had stopped talking about traffic. Now he was reading the news in a bright morning-show voice. He said the name of the prime minister, and it was a name I had never heard before. I'd been abroad for a year and a half, so maybe I'd just missed the news... maybe.

I stopped caring about everything else. All I wanted was to get out of that car as fast as I could.

Whatever was happening to me wasn't normal. I figured I should probably go see a psychiatrist.

The driver turned onto my street at 5:52 p.m. The meter read 312 baht, exactly as he'd said. I handed him a five-hundred-baht note and told him to keep the change. I guess I should go say hi to my family first. I'll come back and keep writing.

See you.

[Part 3]

In the time of the Buddha, there was a deity named Baka Brahma. He had four faces, each one flawless, with elegant arched brows and razor-sharp eyes that carried a hint of arrogance. His skin was smooth, without a single wrinkle, and on his head sat a tall, pointed crown of blazing gold.

His body was pure white, and a radiance poured off him constantly, so bright that ordinary people could barely look at him directly. He was tall and slender but strong, with four arms. Every movement was calm, still, and graceful, like a statue that had learned to walk. His muscles were smooth, without the bulging veins of an earthly human. He wore a shimmering gold sash and celestial cloth, decked out in heavy gold and diamond jewelry: chest chains, armbands, bracelets. Everything about him looked luxurious and over the top.

Most importantly, Baka Brahma had an incredibly long lifespan, about 500 kalpas, and a single kalpa is roughly 3.3×10²⁶ years. It was so long that he forgot his own past lives. When a new universe was born, he was the first living being to appear. He spent millions of years in bliss, but still no other life appeared. Lonely, he thought to himself, I wish something else would exist. Right then, the universe, following its natural laws, began producing living beings. But Baka Brahma assumed his thought had created them. So he fell into the wrong view that he was God, the creator of everything: eternal, never born and never dying, omniscient and all-powerful.

The Buddha knew this, so he went up to enlighten him and tell him the truth. But of course Baka Brahma didn't believe him. He figured the Buddha was just an ordinary monk, so he challenged him to a game of hide-and-seek. Baka Brahma would hide for three rounds, then the Buddha would hide for three rounds while Baka Brahma searched. The Buddha accepted, and Baka Brahma hurried off to hide as a bird in a passing flock. It didn't take long. The Buddha found him and said:

"Baka Brahma, have you grown tired of the bliss of heaven, that you'd go flying around with a flock of birds like this?"

So Baka Brahma quickly changed into a bee. The Buddha found him again and said:

"Baka Brahma, do you no longer wish to enjoy the bliss of heaven, that you'd go crawling around in disguise, sipping nectar from flowers like a bee?"

For his last chance, Baka Brahma hid as a single grain of sand at the bottom of the deepest ocean trench on Earth. The Buddha found him again and said:

"Baka Brahma, do you no longer wish to be great, that you'd shrink yourself down to a grain of sand in an ocean trench?"

Baka Brahma was humiliated and refused to accept it. He asked to be the seeker this time: if he couldn't find the Buddha, he would admit defeat. So the Buddha transformed and went to hide. Baka Brahma used every bit of his power to search every nook and cranny of Jambudvipa, the human world in Buddhist cosmology.

When he found nothing, he searched every corner of the Earth. Then the solar system. Then the entire Milky Way galaxy. Then the observable universe. Then every corner of the whole universe. Still nothing. At last he gave up and said:

"Lord Buddha, I surrender. Tell me, where were you hiding?"

Then the Buddha's voice came from... above? He said:

"I wasn't hiding anywhere. The whole time you were searching, I was doing walking meditation right above your head."

Baka Brahma looked up, and there he was, calmly walking back and forth in the air. That was when Baka Brahma realized the truth: he wasn't great at all. And he allowed the Buddha to teach him.

But if you cut away the supernatural parts, I think what the Buddha was getting at is that nobody is bigger than physics. And if that's true, then what if the universe itself were hunting me? Would I survive?

Okay. It's me, Rin. I didn't think I'd be back on this subreddit. At first I figured it was all just hallucinations, that I'd been overthinking, and that everything would go back to normal. It didn't.

I walked into the house, and my parents were waiting for me, practically vibrating by the door. Mom rushed over and wrapped her arms around me. She held on for a long time. I kept waiting for her to start crying, the way the driver said she would, but her face was buried in my shoulder, so I couldn't tell. Dad hung back, grinning, and then teased me:

"After all that time in America, can you still speak Thai?"

"Dad, I went to America, but I'm still Thai. I didn't turn into one of them," I said.

"Okay, okay, you two, that's enough," Mom said, pretending to pinch her nose. "Rin, go take a shower. You smell like you haven't bathed in days."

I went upstairs to my room. Everything was normal. The same posters, the same slightly crooked blinds, the same hum of the fan. My black desktop was right where I'd left it. I booted it up and checked the specs, and they were exactly the same. That was when I thought it was all over. The plane, the taxi, all of it. Done.

Then my eyes caught a folder on the desktop. The name was Read this if you want to survive.

I should have deleted it or ignored it. Instead, I clicked it. It opened a text document, and it said:

You probably have a lot of questions, and you want to ask me. But I can't answer them yet. Not now. I know you very well, Rin, but you don't need to know me. Think of me as someone who will help you survive and get back home. The home you're living in, the parents you know, the family you know, none of it is real. It isn't yours. I recommend you act natural, as if you haven't noticed anything. If you act strange, I'm sorry, but you'll have to run. And if you do slip up, this folder won't show this message anymore. It will show the next instructions for surviving. I don't recommend slipping up, because if you don't, we can rescue you while you just sit still. But if you do, I recommend you follow those instructions strictly.

What the hell?

It had to be a scammer. Ransom or something. I didn't buy it. They're my parents, I'd know if something was off. But deep down, something in me said to believe it, that the message was real and whoever wrote it was genuinely trying to help me. Of course, the logical part of my brain rejected that.

And of course, I went with logic.

I showered, changed, and went out for a jog. It was dusk, and the streetlights were just flickering on. Everything was normal. The same road I always ran, the same 7-Eleven on the corner, the same stray dog sleeping in front of the temple. I figured I was overthinking. When I got home, I'd delete that folder and wipe the whole computer, since a virus had probably gotten in. I came back drenched in sweat. What, I was exercising, okay? My parents had cooked a feast: khua kling (spicy dry-fried pork curry), chicken pad kra pao with a fried egg, Hat Yai fried chicken, and khanom jeen nam ya (rice noodles with coconut fish curry). I'd start eating first and think later.

I grabbed a piece of chicken, took a bite, and asked

"Mom, has anything changed at school here?"

Mom looked confused.

"What do you mean, sweetie? You just got back from that school."

"No, Mom. I studied abroad for a year and a half. Now that I'm back, I have to go back to my school in Thailand," I said.

"Are you remembering wrong?" Dad said. "It's the break, so they let you come home for a while. When classes start, you go back there. What Thai school? We sent you to study abroad when you were a kid."

"Didn't you send me abroad just this time, Dad? On a scholarship?" I said, confused.

"I think your brain got scrambled."

Dad got up and came back with a photograph. It was old, a little faded. And what shocked me most was that the kid in the photo was me. I was maybe seven or eight, grinning, standing in front of a tall stone obelisk. Bunker Hill, Boston. I'd never been to Boston in my life. I hadn't even finished seeing all of California.

Then the thought I didn't want to have crashed into my head. What if what the folder said was real? Had I just broken a rule?

Suddenly the whole atmosphere turned ice-cold. Cold like someone had cranked the AC down to minus a hundred degrees. So I pretended to go along with it.

"Oh, right. I remember now," I said, laughing it off.

The rest of the meal was weirdly silent. My parents, who should have been warm and relaxed, just stared at me like they wanted to tear my flesh apart and examine my liver and intestines. But they were my parents.

I took another shower and went to bed. I woke up at 3 a.m. and suddenly remembered.

The folder.

I knew I'd broken a rule, because the mood at dinner had been so wrong. I rushed to my computer and opened it, and the message had changed. It said:

Rin, I'm sorry. But it knows now. Listen carefully. This is your last chance to survive. If you read this message after 5 a.m., I'm sorry, but you won't make it. I recommend you take a knife and slit your own throat, or use a gun and shoot yourself in the head. And of course you won't be reborn, because time has completely locked you here. But at least you won't suffer.

But if it's before 5:00 a.m., congratulations. I recommend you follow the rules strictly. First, take your phone with you. And if you can't remember what's written in this folder, print it out and carry it. Okay. You must follow these:

1. Sneak out of this house as quickly and quietly as you can.
2. There is a tallest building in your city. Go up to the rooftop.
3. Do not let anyone catch you. Absolutely no one.
4. Close the door to the roof behind you.
5. What you do next will be on the roof.

No matter what the next instructions are, you have to follow them. It's your chance to survive.

It was 3:43 a.m. I needed to move fast.

I thought about printing it, but the printer was downstairs and it screeched like a dying cat every time it warmed up. Instead, I read the five steps over and over until I could recite them in my sleep. Then I grabbed my phone. Great, it was powered off. I stuffed it in my pocket and slipped out of my room.

Everything was dark, but I knew the layout of the house by heart. I skipped the third stair, the one that creaks, and crept down. And then, fuck, my hip clipped the side table at the bottom of the stairs, and a glass of water I hadn't seen tipped over the edge and shattered on the tile.

"Rin, where are you going, sweetie?"

Mom's voice came from behind me, from the stairs. It sounded so warm. So I turned around to go back, but what I saw was...

Mom was smiling, her mouth stretched wide, wider than any human mouth should go. And she was on all fours, like a spider, her elbows and knees bent the wrong way, her head tilted sideways. Her eyes caught the streetlight through the window and glowed, like a cat's.

What the fuck.

Fuck!!! I screamed and bolted out the front door, slamming it open. I heard Mom running, or crawling, or whatever the fuck she was doing, right behind me. When I looked back, I saw the neighbors. They were chasing me too. The old couple next door, the uncle who sold fried bananas, all of them with blank faces and arms swinging in perfect rhythm. Why? What the fuck was happening? And what shocked me almost to death was my dad. His legs were way too long, nowhere near human, and he was bounding across the rooftops, trying to leap down on me. I dodged right just as he came down. He almost got me, I swear.

I had to get to the Net Center. That building was the tallest in the city. The whole way, I had to dodge people lunging at me from every direction, but I managed, badly, and I made sure to stay out of the narrow alleys, since a dead end would mean the end of me.

The glass doors of the building were unlocked. Inside, the lobby was dark, with the security desk empty, a half-eaten bowl of noodles still sitting on it. The elevator panel was dead, so I hit the stairwell. Every landing had a big number painted on the wall, and I counted them as I climbed, until somewhere after the twentieth floor I lost count. The stairwell smelled like dust and old cigarettes. Behind me, far below, I could hear it: footsteps, scraping, the sound of lots of things climbing. I wasn't tired. I don't know why. Probably the most adrenaline I'd ever had in my life.

I reached the roof. The door was heavy steel, and I slammed it shut and slid the bolt as hard as I could. Then I leaned against it, gasping, and looked around. Wind. Antennas. A rusted water tank. Rows of AC units humming in the dark. The whole city was spread out below me, tiny and silent, the lights like scattered rice.

I figured I needed to find the next set of instructions. I walked all over the roof until I found a sheet of paper tucked under a loose brick in one corner. It said: Okay. You made it. Congratulations. Now you have to jump off the building.

Fuck that. If I jump, I die.

But the pounding on the door kept getting louder, the whole door shaking in its frame. I walked to the edge and looked down, and there was Mom. She was climbing up the outside wall of the building, her fingers and toes finding gaps in the concrete that shouldn't have held anything.

Screw it. If they're getting me anyway, I'm jumping.

If I die, I want to tell you all something: visit my grave. And tell me when democracy finally comes to Thailand.

The moment I should have hit the ground, everything cut to black.

"What are you doing sleeping on the ground, kid?"

A man's voice, maybe in his fifties. I opened my eyes. I was lying in the exact spot where I thought I'd landed after falling off that building. But now it was daytime. There was no blood, no nothing. He wore a gray hoodie, hood down, and stood over me with his hands on his hips.

"Sorry, I was drunk," I said. "I must've passed out around here. I went to a party last night." It was a lie.

"Then get up, kid," he said.

Now I'm in a coffee shop, using the free Wi-Fi, typing this from my phone. I don't know what to do next. I'll update if anything else happens. See you.

I came home and changed and joined her to paint the living room walls base white. The couch my wife had had since college was the only piece of furniture we had downstairs and it was covered in plastic. We had dinner while we worked. She’d “cooked” one of her liquid meals that I hated but “ate” anyway. My wife was actually almost as good of a cook as me but I needed to lose at least fifteen pounds, and she intended to help regardless of how unhappy it made me. 

“How was your day?” she asked in her autopilot voice.

“It was good except for the inspector I had to fire.”

“Oh, no. Matt?” She dipped her roller in the pan.

I grimaced. I probably was going to have to let him go, too. We’d had dinner with him and his wife a few times. He’d even invited me to his son’s high school graduation. I rolled up the wall. This color looked even better than it had in the store.

“No. I forgot about him.”

She rubbed my back with her free hand. “That’s probably because you don’t want to do it.”

I nodded.

“You care about people and that’s never a bad thing.”

She thought so highly of me, and it warmed something inside.

“Yeah,” I said, this whole “surgery” thing slipping into the front of my mind. I was suddenly agitated and my full stomach felt like it was squeezing up into my chest.

“Did your appointment go okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. I turned to her. “Did you know he’s not a doctor?”

“Yes.” She scooped up her bottle and took a sip.

I hoped informing her of his lack of a medical degree would do more work than this.

“I don’t want to do this,” I wanted to say, but held my tongue. Instead, I said, “Is there anything else we could try?”

“Why are you pushing back on this? Don’t you want us both to be satisfied?”

I dropped my head. “You know I do.”

“I want you to do this,” she said and placed a hand over mine. I still felt a ‘no’ at the back of my throat and swallowed. It hurt going down. I chased it with a swallow from my cup.

She was being logical and detached in a way that wasn’t common for her. I didn’t want to fight and just kept restraining myself from speaking. I hoped there was still time to convince her, but that was going to be hard to do if she shut me down every time I tried.

“You have something on your face,” I said, pointing just below my nose. She swiped it just like I thought she would, smearing base paint that had been on the back of her hand just below her nose and on her upper lip. She immediately knew what I’d done and glared at me. I smiled.

Then she rollered me from chest to crotch. I stood there while she went up and down the front of me, my mouth hung open. Then I batted the roller to the newspaper-covered floor and she scream-laughed as she ran from me. I caught her on the other side of the kitchen island and picked her up in a reverse hug, pressing my fresh coat of paint onto her back.

We fell to the floor, laughing and wound up making out like teenagers for a few minutes. The heaviness of the conversation we’d just been having lifted off of us. I didn’t want anything outside of this moment and just looked her in the eyes.

“What?” she asked.

“I have no idea.” The feeling cresting in me didn’t have words to follow along. We finished painting the living room walls, passing eye-glances at one another. The moment passed for intimacy, a detached feeling gradually replacing it a few hours later by the time we were ready for bed. It was like we’d built a temporary bridge over a chasm between us, but it had collapsed just in time for us to go to sleep.

I kept wanting to reach behind me to touch her as we lay in the same bed. But she just felt too far away.

I’d forgotten to pack a lunch for the next day and breakfast consisted of a slice of bread that hadn’t toasted enough and coffee out of the Keurig with grinds in it. I left the house in a foul mood ten minutes later than I should have and was five minutes late getting to the office. I’d blazed past a police cruiser and had anxiety for the next mile or so convinced I was about to be pulled over. All the way I felt like I'd been cheated out of an argument, and I continued stewing in that sour even after I got out my car.

Work was uneventful but I'd had to keep my tongue in check. I felt myself being short with my co-workers. But it finally came to a head when a group of men clogging the hallway didn’t move when I was trying to pass them.

“Whoa. Excuse yourself?” one man said.

“For what? A circle of jerks?” I said.

“Hey. Ow.”

I was prepared for a confrontation. I was management and I could make a nightmare for them. I wanted this. But the second person who’d spoken sounded genuinely hurt and I tripped over my hubris.

I retreated from the men and had forgotten about it until one of them confronted me in the restroom an hour later. 

“What’s going on with you, man?” a man said to me while we were standing at the urinals. Conversation was usually verboten while two men were taking a leak but my antenna were up.

“Excuse me?” I said. 

“I mean, we were standing around talking and you just took a tiny shit on all of us.”

“You guys were blocking the hallway.”

“We were outside for hours in the hot sun and we were gathered around the water fountain. I wasn’t thinking about us blocking anybody. I mean, I would have apologized but the way you came off...”

“Look, I’m sorry.” My guilt bloomed again. “I didn’t have the best sleep last night and you guys didn’t deserve me taking it out on you.” I'd actually slept over eight hours but felt like I'd only gotten a third of that. I didn't offer it as an excuse.

He nodded and flushed. I zipped up a second later and joined him at the sinks.

“Seriously. I’m sorry,” I said. This was already more of an emotional exchange than I’d had with another male in the last decade. “I’m just... going through a thing with my wife.”

He looked at me.

“She wants me to get this procedure done.” I could feel myself relaxing. There was something about opening up to a complete stranger. Someone who wouldn't judge because they didn't understand.

“The honeycut?” he said, trying his hands on a strip of paper towel.

“What?”

“Oh. My bad. I thought you were talking about something else?”

“I've heard of it.”

He smiled broadly and nodded. “I got mine done six months ago. Wanna see the scar? I'm Sam Eisen, by the way.” He smiled as he hooked his thumbs in his pants.

“No, I... uhhh... that's okay. I'm having a completely different procedure. I'm having it... lengthened.”

“Be careful with that,” he said as I walked toward the door. “Swivelcock.”

I was sweating, gripped with terror the same as if he'd peeled his face off and frisbee-tossed it to me. I pushed through the door and fled back to my desk.

He called out to me as I did my best not to run.

“You should think about it, though!” he yelled through the closing doorway. “He changed my life!”

 

Part III

 

The next twenty-four hours were a haze. I worked. I came home. I ate. I slept. I didn’t like where things were with my wife even though we were still sleeping in the same bed, so the next day I texted her about having lunch together. Her job was about a fifteen-minute walk away from mine, I could pick up something for us and we could eat for about a half hour before I had to be back.

She hadn’t responded but she had a lot of meetings typically. Chili dogs were technically off the menu, but it was a fave of both of ours and she was a happy eater when it was good food. When I got there with a carry-out bag, I was shocked to see who she was outside with.

Him. 

They were sitting together, smiling and laughing like they’d known one another for years. He was dressed differently, but that was definitely that same red and white summer scarf he'd had on when I met him.

I hung back and watched them and began speed-feeding coneys into my mouth like an assembly line. I had no idea what he was doing with my wife, but I was immediately conspiracy-brained. I'd convicted him of a crime I couldn't name and wanted to strangle him in front of her.

I continued eating the coneys instead. They were leaning into one another and laughing even. They acted like they knew each other. They had chemistry.

I never understood the expression being hot under the collar but at that moment my neck was burning. I barely resisted the urge to go over there and... and... I didn't know what. 

There had to be more to what I was seeing. There had to be something I could do rather than confronting them and showing a side of myself that might've repulsed my wife. I knew where to go to get answers.

I went to his office after work, but I wasn't able to enter. I wasn’t desperate enough to break in, although I was sure the door wouldn’t have held if I’d put my shoulder into it. Despite how upsetting lunch had been, nothing had happened today to justify breaking and entering.

But what if something were about to happen and I could avoid it now? Head it off at the pass? I had a duty to protect my wife, and this guy had crossed a line. I could probably take this door off its hinges. I had some tools in my car.

My phone chimed. I’d programmed that specific tone for her.

I’m sick, she’d texted. Bring me coneys?

It was like a spell had been broken. Why was I about to potentially risk my job and my freedom—hell, maybe even my marriage—all for some nut?

She needed me now and home was exactly where I wanted to be.

But I was denied. I brought her the coneys, but she was already asleep. Things still felt off and I wound up falling asleep on the couch. After I’d eaten four more coneys.

I consoled myself that she was sick and I didn’t want to catch whatever she may have had.

Wicked dreams met me in the night. But they lifted like clouds after a storm by the time I woke up, no doubt fueled by a combo of seeing my wife with him and eating like I was half my actual age.

As if to turn the dial up on my grief even more, I had a two-hour meeting the next day and Leslie Paul sat right next to me. A bubble of gas was growing inside me and there was no way I was going to be able to contain it for a hundred twenty minutes. It would be a miracle if I made it twenty.

My part in the presentation was coming up soon and I had to excuse myself. Cal Cebulski stopped talking long enough to watch me step out and I hustled toward the men’s room.

Where he was.

“What are you doing at my work?” I asked, whispering like we were in a conspiracy.

“Due diligence,” he said. “Would you mind?” He gestured toward the handicap stall. “I need to see how you sit. Do you mind?”

My stomach queezed with the thought of him watching me... sit. Or maybe it was more than that. I unclenched and let go. It was mostly silent but whistled at the end. He sniffed the air curiously but didn’t comment. The wind had been taken out of my sails and for a moment, I did consider having a seat.

I piled up my broken resolve. “I’m not... doing that.”

He shrugged.

“And what were you doing with my wife yesterday?” I let implication seep into my voice and he put his hands up as if warding me off.

“It is all part of the process. Information gathering only. I have no interest in anyone other than my own Sara.”

“You’re married?”

He nodded. “For twenty-seven years. Happily, for twenty-five.”

That got an eyebrow raise from me. He’d seemed weirdly asexual up until I saw him with my wife. It was something about his pants, I wasn't sure. I hadn’t thought he was capable of human companionship.

“If you’re wondering about our longevity I’ll give you a hint. I perfected the surgery first on myself.”

He could have been lying, of course. But the idea of sex being so improved that it could aid in preserving my marriage gave me at least a moment’s second thought. I mean, what if what he was saying were true?

I couldn’t help but think that I was being obstinate because she’d insisted. If I’d found this guy on my own would I have been so resistant against doing this?

“Oh shit,” I said. “I gotta get back to my meeting!”

I fled the restroom, headed back to the conference room, tooting most of the way. When I was around the corner, I slid on something and scraped my knee, tearing my pants in the process.

I recovered pretty quickly but it hurt. I could see my leg pretty clearly and red beads of blood began trickling down my shin. I wrapped my fingers around the lip of the hole, keeping the pant leg away from the blood as if I were going to be able to salvage my pants.

The meeting was over by the time I stepped back into the conference room.

“Where’d everybody go?” I asked Rob Smales, one of the administrative assistants who took meeting minutes.

“Oh, they called it pretty much as soon as you left,” he said. “You were up next.” He shuffled a stack of papers into a Manila folder and added it to a stack of more Manila folders.

“Well, I had a little emergency.” I stepped back so he could see my leg. Rob looked without his dispassionate expression changing. I wanted to flick the tip of his nose just to get him to make a face. The guy never smiled. “You think we could get everybody back? We still have a half hour plus.”

Rob shook his head slowly. “Nah.” He tucked the folders under an arm—tried to, at least—then put his laptop bag’s strap over his shoulder and held the folders in his open hands.

I hobbled out of the conference room, intent on pleading my case with Melissa White, the director of my department. I stood outside of her office and wrapped on the open door. 

She turned halfway in her chair, a desk phone cradled between her face and shoulder. I wasn’t sure if she shook her head or if it was just the motion when she turned around.

The door swung closed and I had to move my hand to keep my thumb from being crushed in the jamb. Somebody was in there with her. My heart raced because I had no idea who.

 

I’ve done just about everything to please my wife. Y’know, in the bedroom. I've bought every toy, learned a hundred techniques from books and videos…

I don’t know if I can do this, though. I mean, it’s my junk, man. One screw up and it’s over.

But my wife... she asked.

My knee-jerk reaction was to tell her hell no. She gave me that look of hers, though, and I turned to ice cream on hot asphalt.

The asking started just before the wedding. We’d been doing bedroom stuff since the night we met. She’s... wild. The first time she said she hinted at it, but I don’t remember hearing her. She reminded me later on. Honestly, it was right after we did… stuff, and I would’ve said yes to just about everything.

One of her girlfriends has seemed happier than ever. The two of them have been friends since kindergarten and they’re practically twins, the biggest difference between them is my wife’s not a blonde-haired white woman. But otherwise, their style and even manner of speaking is exactly the same.

McKenzie’s husband had already had it done, apparently. Before they got married.

He’d been more than happy to tell me about it at a bar after I asked him. “Brother, the difference is like sand and water. McKenzie was probably gonna dump my ass before I got it done. It’s mostly a single cut, but now she says she’ll kill me if I don’t give it to her every single night.”

I’m sure I lifted my eyebrows in appreciation. I leaned in.

“So, what is it, though?” I asked, working on an Old Fashioned. “What does the doctor do?”

“Oh, he’s not a doctor. At least not anymore. Or in the U.S.” He shrugged. “I forget which. And it’s a little different for everybody.” He sipped at a brandy mule. I had to try one of those sometime.

I didn’t know what to say to that. His shrug wasn’t easing my mind, but that was all he had for me. I locked eyes with him for a long moment, trying to milk something more out of him.

“Here, take this.” He took a pen out of his jacket pocket and jotted something down on a napkin. He slid it over to me and I read the email he’d written. It was a Hotmail address.

I’d explained it to my wife later that night while we were working on ripping out kitchen cabinets, but it was as if the decision had already been made. But c’mon, this was my downstairs area. This wasn’t the kind of decision I could rush.

“Isn’t there anyone else I could go to?” I asked her, holding a hand out for a Phillip’s Head. “I mean, why not see if there’s somebody in-network? Get a couple consultations?”

“God, you sound like my mother.” She slapped the screwdriver in my hand. “Would it be painful to just send an email?” I shook my head, conceding her point.

I’d sent it one night after having a couple at a bar. The scrap Lindell, McKenzie’s husband, had written the email on, had stuck to my wallet inside my pocket, forgotten until the moment I’d dug it out to pay my tab.

I was fueled on something with an umbrella I didn't exactly remember ordering and tapped out a message while the bartender ran my card.

Looking to Please My Wife Better, I typed in the subject. I poked at the body on my screen and began sloppily tacking out the meat of my message. I wS recommended by a fried on a freed. He said you safety his relationship but Im not sure.

I didn’t have the capacity to correct my grammar. I was half-thinking this guy was a kook, but being a drunken email wasn’t a commitment, so I pressed SEND.

I had a reply after the bartender had brought my copy of the receipt.

What the fuck kind of businessperson answered email at 11:16 PM?

I wanted to run to my wife like this was evidence, to wave my phone around like a flag but I knew how the conversation would go. She’d already heard the evidence she needed from McKenzie. The only thing she wanted to hear from me was when the appointment was and if I needed her to take me.

The email was simple and presumptive. A date and time for the consult and a date and time for the “surgery.”

I was drunk. I replied, “I’ll be there.”

I didn’t think about it after that until he sent me an email the morning of the consult at 2 AM. Again, this was not confidence-boosting. I was on a runaway train and had to figure out a way to jump off.

His office was surprisingly close to my job. The building was right next to my building.

He’d just set up in this space recently. Maybe my wife had told him where I worked. I wasn’t chalking anything up anything to coincidence.

The office was on the fourth floor of a building still under construction. I found the suite after meandering the halls once I came off the elevator.

The door to the space didn’t look secure. I wondered if it might fall on me if I pulled it open. The drywall in the hallway had just been taped and mudded and the air smelled chalky.

I didn’t bother knocking, my eyes on the hinges as I pushed the door open and quietly entered the space.

“My friend, you found the place okay?” He looked away from some point high up on one wall and smiled wide at me. I crossed the plywood floors and offered my hand. He took it and pulled me in for a hug. As awkward as it was from an alleged professional, it was made that much worse from how long he held me there.

“It is so good to see you,” he said, grasping my shoulders and holding me at arm’s length. 

“Uh, yeah,” I said.

“Let us not delay,” he said. He turned away and waved for me to follow. “Step into my office.”

We passed two long folding tables and he stopped. He smiled at me again and clapped his hands together.

“So, you are needing the cut?”

“I’m... exploring some options.”

Unnaturally large teeth sprouted from the broad smile returning to his face. It reminded me of a shark in combination of his dead eyes and pencil-thin mustache and goatee trimmed too far from his mouth. He leaned in so fast and we were suddenly a finger’s width from being nose-to-nose. I thought he’d been about to kiss me.

“You wouldn’t be here if you had satisfied her with your... options.” He rounded his Rs in a way that sounded practiced.

I figured cutting to the chase was the best way to get what I wanted.

“How much does this cost?”

He was at least a half a head taller than me, but he had a way of fixing me with his powder-blue eyes like we were even with each other.  He scratched a head of curly black hair and fumbled with the red and white checkered summer scarf didn’t really match the all-grey outfit, but I wasn’t into fashion and didn’t care.

“Candy?” He pulled a hand out of his pocket and offered a palmful of oblong, dark candies wrapped in clear cellophane. It didn’t make sense, but they didn’t look American. I took one out of curiosity but didn’t open it. “Marcus referred you, if I’m not mistaken?” I had never mentioned McKenzie’s husband in our email exchange. I guess he must have reached out after we spoke. I nodded.

He slapped my shoulder. “I deal in volume. It’s nowhere near what you’re thinking.” I’d been pitched to by salesmen of every skin. I doubted he was going to convince me it was a good idea to cash out my 401k to finance this thing.

“Fifty-seven eighty-five.” 

That smile widened again but now I was thinking the reverse. How good could he be if the procedure was so cheap? I was having sudden visions of concrete ass injections and bootleg Botox.

“Okay, but it’s gotta be time consuming. How can you do it for so che—little?”

“I thought I told you. Volume. And it really doesn’t take that long. Minutes at most. It’s mostly a single cut.”

“A cut?” Marcus had explained that much to me but coming from the person who performed the procedure made it real in a way I wasn’t prepared for. “Do you make it... longer?”

He shook his head.

“I don’t come anywhere near the suspensory ligament. It’s a very minimally invasive surgery. You understand? In most cases you can make love tonight!”

“You wanna do this now?” I asked, panic giving me a squeeze. 

“No-no,” he said. He held his hands up. I noticed for the first time the tip of his pinky finger was gone.

He rolled his eyes up as if searching for the right words somewhere on the unfinished ceiling behind me. “I mean on the same night. You and the missus.” He turned his palms up, quasi-placating.

I looked at the four-and-a-half fingered hand.

“You a lefty?”

“Yes.” A corner of his smile lifted. “I am am-bi-dex-trous.” He said that last word carefully. Like it had taken a lot of practice to finally get right.

“For now, take off your pants. Pull it out so I can see?”

Cold prickled up my back. I had no real objection I could make. Sure, he wasn’t a real medical professional, but I suspected my wife already knew that. 

I dropped trou right there before I could think too long about it, but I think I felt it fold inside itself. He was replacing his glasses with a pair with fishbowl lenses, making his eyes cartoonishly large.

I wasn’t packing major heat by any means, but this was over the top. I didn’t fuss because it got me done that much sooner.

Him touching my manhood wouldn’t have been that big of a deal had he been an actual doctor. But it was that much worse with him not even washing his hands. That was more of a him problem than mine, though.

“I will do the rest sometime this week,” he said, standing back and stroking his chin. I pulled up my pants, not knowing what that meant but I didn’t inquire for fear of extending this encounter. I didn’t feel like I’d passed the point of no return, and I hoped I had enough steam to convince my wife this was a bad idea.

It was midnight in the Infodump netsaloon. No matter the time outside, it was always midnight in the Infodump, which was a small, windowless concrete hole excavated under a private data centre on the outskirts of what used to be Phoenix, Arizona.

You had to descend stairs to get in, and at this particular midnight a handful of flatfaces had done just that. They were sitting with their face screens illuminating the gloomy bar, each hooked up by cable to a numb-er, drip-downloading 1s and 0s of cheap numbcode to blur the high definition of the world, even as their screens transformed their perceptions of it to places better lit and far more glamorous.

But there's only so much artifice a mind can take before hyperartifice boredom sets in, and then there's no going back to the real because the real is an unfiltered hell.

“D'ya ever hear about Old Retroface?” one of the patrons asked suddenly—suddenly but slowly, hoarsely, because he hadn't spoken for a while. Nobody had spoken for a while. The bartender, who was also a flatface, his face screen displaying a rotating menu of numb-ers and alcohol, cleared his throat. A fly buzzed off in a dank corner, perhaps trying to find a way out; perhaps not.

“Sure, I heard of ‘im,” another patron answered. “Rides with Reverend Da Loop, if it's the same slinger. Freaks, the both of ‘em.”

Reverend Da Loop, aka Loopy, aka The Fleshnoose, was a former flatface who'd gotten his face screen smashed-and-grabbed by a vibepunk and had never had another put in. His moment of clarity, he called it by some accounts, including those of the supposed congregants of the supposed church he'd supposedly founded, the [supposed] Church of the 2¢ Reformed. Taking after the Reverend, who had elected to forego the senses of sight, smell and taste, considering them corrupted by the advent and incorporation of the technology of face piercing, and instead to navigate the world by touch and hearing alone, his supposed congregants elected the same and performed luddite ceremonies in the desert where they were descreened and re-analoged by having their face screens destroyed and replaced with steel rings. Whenever a flatface saw a congregant, he therefore saw him screen face to no-face and could look through the space where the congregant's face once was and see, with pristine clarity, the world behind him. The congregants called that Transparency, an act they believed could induce epiphany and conversion.

“I saw the Reverend once, down near the NewMex OldMex border,” said the bartender. “Funny looking feller, he was. He wasn't wearing no halo-ring in his face hole, just had his wilted head kept tied round his shoulders so his ears stuck out. A couple of goons was messing with him, giving him the freaksong. He stated them fair warning to stop. When they didn't, he untied his head and quick as you could say Peachy Cronenberg kicked one of the goons, smashed another in the gut and, as that one was keeling over, slid behind the third, looped his head hole round the man's neck and choked him unconscious. He didn't kill him though. The two other goons ran off. The Reverend paid his drink, paid the drinks of the three goons and went out.”

The buzzing fly landed on a wall and stopped buzzing. Someone swatted at it, hit the wall—loudly, but missed the fly, which flew away buzzing again. The data centre was buzzing too, faintly, through the thick concrete ceiling.

“Tell me, how does a 2¢ like that get along, let alone beat off three goons, because I find it difficult to parse,” said a patron.

“If you’re suggesting I'm lying,” the barkeeper said, “I suggest you get out of this establishment and get numbed elsewhere.”

“I ain't say ‘lying.' Maybe you had on an entertainment overlay,” said the patron.

“I tell you I saw it true,” said the barkeeper.

“Maybe seeing nothing is a more accurate view of the world than seeing it, if all you're seeing are untruths,” I said. They all looked at me. “Maybe that's how the Reverend gets along.”

I scratched my nose, but of course they didn't see that, as I'd already forcibly aug'd their primitive face screens. To them, I was just another flatface displaying a pub domain gif of a Caribbean sunset.

“What are you, some kinda philosophizer?” the gruff patron asked.

“Just a high plains drifter,” I said.

I felt the happiness of my warm gun concealed beneath my yellow corduroy dress. To them, I also displayed as a man, middle-aged, with short grey hair. Forgettable appearance, averaged voice. Really, I wore my red hair in a single thick braid.

The fly had stopped buzzing again. In fact, it was gone. It had found a crack in the concrete ceiling and pushed its way inside.

“We get a lot of drifters around here,” said the barkeeper.

I counted to thirty, licked my lips and started whistling.

“What's that tune you're blowing there, drifter?” asked one of the patrons. I was whistling to the background buzzing of the data centre. “You got a good set of speakers on ya.”

“Thanks,” I said. “It's just a song from the Old World my great grandmother used to sing to me. It goes something like this,” and I sang:

With your feet on the air,
And your head on the ground,
Try this trick and spin it, yeah,
Your head will collapse,
If there's nothing in it,
And then you'll ask yourself,

Where is my mind,
Where is my—

The Infodump was submerged suddenly in utter and absolute organic silence.

The data centre buzz had ceased.

"Well that sure's strange,” somebody said.

I got up, walked over to the bar and paid the barkeeper what I owed plus a separate tip.

“What's that?” he asked.

“Old World custom,” I said, flashed a smiley on my false display and turned for the stairs leading up, out of the Infodumop and into the Arizona desert. “If any of you good folks see the Reverend again, tell him Old Retroface sends her regards.”

---

Page 17

---

All my friends are getting their faces pierced.

Should I get my face pierced too?

It looks pretty scary, but I don't know. They seem to like it, and the stuff you can get for it now is really pretty cool.

The way they do it does look pretty scary, so I don't know.

---

Page 26

---

I told my parents I'm thinking of getting my face pierced, and they are totally against it, but they're old, so they would be wouldn't they?

Like by default, I mean.

At first they didn't even know what I was talking about, but my mom's got her ears pierced and she got them done way younger than I am right now. She's got a tattoo too. So does my dad.

Besides, how can you go from not knowing what something is to being totally against it in like five minutes?

It seems pretty reactionary to me.

Like at least do your research or ask AI about it first right?

---

Page 34

---

So I did it. I got my face pierced.

It was two weeks ago. (You can't really do so much for the first week and a half, which is why I haven't been writing.)

There's a place downtown that does it. It's the place Dee and Cherry got theirs done too. The crew that does it is pretty cool. They've all had it done and are super happy about it.

I was pretty nervous and they really helped me relax, even before giving me the anesthetic.

The machine that does it looks insane.

It's like one of those hole punching machines you used to use for paper, like giant metal pliers or a jaw or something.

You sit and put your head back like at the hairdressers when they wash your hair.

Then you end up looking up at the other part, the part that's going to come down. It's like a big metal circle. Really big, like face sized. Then they hook you up to the anesthetic.

When you start not being able to feel your face, and I mean it feels like your whole head is turning to mush, like a really soft cauliflower or something, the machine powers up…

And the metal circle smashes down really hard on your face and makes a hole in your head and pushes your face out the bottom.

It's super quick and doesn't hurt because of the anesthetic.

It does hurt after.

At first the feeling is really weird because your whole face is gone, so you don't see or taste or smell anything because you don't have any eyes or mouth or nose. You can still hear though, so you can hear the crew talking to you.

Then they put this face plug into the hole which helps it heal.

Of course, my parents totally freaked when I came home without a face, but like what are they going to do about it?

It's already done.

My mom's crying was sooo dramatic.

---

Page 41

---

I got fitted with a smart face today. Pretty basic but also really cool. I like being able to sense things again, and there are so many options, like you can make red look like blue and sweet things taste sour and your phone smell like chocolate.

The screen also makes it so you can make your face be anything you want. It's flat, I guess that's the only drawback, but there's an option to make it so that every time you see yourself in the mirror you see your retroface.

It helps with the transition.

---

Page 166

---

Most of my friends have had their faces pierced. I mean, you don't have to do it or anything, but I don't see why you wouldn't.

There's no law you have to have it done, and I still have friends who don't, but I honestly think everyone's going to choose to have it done soon. At least everyone under twenty-five.

---

Page 234

---

Retrofaces kind of disgust me. I always imagine all the fluids that come out of them, snot and saliva and tears and stuff. Was I like wet all the time before I got my face pierced?

Anyway I've decided I don't want to date anyone with a retroface anymore.

---

Page 289

---

I was talking to Dee and both of us are pretty sure that if we have kids we'll want them to have their faces pierced. As a mom I would want my kid to have all the advantages in life right? I mean, imagine if every baby just got its face pierced at the hospital right after being born. You could keep a little kid safe from so many things by using filters and apps too.

I like talking to Dee.

We talk about the big stuff.

P.S. I hope Cherry gets her smart face fixed soon. Hers stopped working a week ago and she had to send it back to the company that makes it in China, so now she's just got this flap of skin. It's like when someone has a tunnel in their ear, and they take it out and their ear is all stretched out and loose. It's like that but her face.

P.P.S. They promised her an upgrade so it's totally worth it and I'm jealous.

---

Page 436

---

It's funny. Back when I got my face pierced, my parents fed me all this negative bullshit about what could go wrong and why I shouldn't do it, and literally none of it has come true.

The tech just keeps getting better. You can make ugly people look pretty and take things you don't want to see and just not see them. You can eat the worst food in the world and make it taste delicious. You can smell flowers wherever you go…

It's amazing.

I'm so happy I got my face pierced.

Read Part III here.

“Rick?” Chrissy said. My hands were shaking and I dropped the keys. I wanted to scream at myself, to command me to stop being so clumsy. But I was so jittery that I could barely pick them up again.

Chrissy sat the tray on the ground and placed her little hands around mine.

“You’re keeping us safe,” she said, looking into my eyes. “We’re going to be okay.”

I felt like I was failing my family. I wanted to say, “What about Mark?” But I kept my intrusive thoughts inside, trying and failing to smile when my face was on the verge of crumpling into crying.

But I was able to fish the key into the lock and turn it without breaking it off. The door pulled open with a groan that made everything inside me tense, but I shoved Chrissy into the passenger seat as gently as I could.

I ran around to the other side and like a sweet girl, she had plucked the lock on my door by the time I got there. An involuntary tear prickled my eye and this time I did smile. It was a reprieve from the horror happening around us, but it was also fuel to keep going. Speaking of which, I wasn’t sure how much gas the station wagon actually had. But away from here was the bare minimum.

Headlights bathed us before I got in and I froze. Panic pulled me in opposing directions. I should’ve run toward the street, waving my arms for them to turn back and I had a family to get to safety. The little car stopped in front of the cabinet the other Mary had come from.

My heart sank as the person I guessed was her wife got out along with three other people. The cousins. They were smiling and laughing. A woman lifted a hand to wave at me and I didn’t react.

She shook her head, but they continued toward the cabin’s entrance. I was the strange one. Notwithstanding being black in what was more than likely a little town that was ninety-nine percent white. But my eyes had to have been huge, and I’d simply stared as people who were being friendly had greeted me.

The woman with the keys stopped at the door. Someone said something and the other three people laughed as they crowded behind her.

She dropped the keys. The air was gestating with danger. I looked up in time to see something slice through a massive tangle of clouds. I wanted to open my mouth to warn them, but all I could do was watch.

It crushed the entire cabin under hoof. A rush of wind pinned me to the side of the station wagon and debris flew in every direction. Something must have smashed through the window of the other car because the horn blared.

I got my feet under me as the hoof lifted. Mary’s wife was on her feet, splattered with blood, a long shard of glass piercing through her neck. She had the keys in her hand still and walked toward her car.

She was obviously in shock and had gone on autopilot. She stopped at the front passenger door, bent, and began poking at the door. The hoof came down again, flattening the car. There was a muffled -THOOM- that I guess was the gas tank exploding and flames licked at the bottom of the hoof.

The woman still wasn’t dead. She’d been knocked to the ground. I couldn’t tell where, but she was injured, maybe critically so, and she began crawling in my direction. I reeled back, like she was about to reveal my hiding spot.

Thankfully, she stopped about a third of the way to us. I sat in the car and shoved the key in the ignition. Chrissy put her hand over mine, wide-eyed.

“Wait,” she said. She was right. We were going to have to gun it as soon as the engine started or that horse might step on us, too. We looked toward the cabin.

“Where are they?”

As if summoned, Luke came outside. He dashed to Chrissy’s door and hunched his lean frame so we could see his panicked face.

“I can’t wake her up,” he said.

“What?”

“She won’t wake up.”

I’d understood every word, but I didn’t understand. Mary had only had a migraine. She’d had them many times in the few years we’d been together and I’d never had an issue waking her up.

“Get in the car,” I said, getting out. He reached for the rear passenger door. “No. The driver’s seat.

“But I don’t have—”

“Get in, Luke. I’m going to grab your mother and as soon as we’re in, you’re going to drive us out of here. You have your learner’s permit.”

I didn’t wait for him to respond. I ran back in the cabin, taking a moment to look up before going inside. The moon had disappeared and that either meant it had set or that damned horse was so large it had blotted it out.

Half of my sandwich was left. I went into the bedroom and saw Mary, uncovered, one leg dangling off the bed.

“Mary!” I shout-whispered, coming over to her. Her head lolled when I shook her. She was unnaturally loose and I was so afraid, I put two fingers to her neck. Her pulse was strong and she snorted and rolled over on her side.

I didn’t waste time calling her name. Coma-like sleep was low on the list of concerns. I scooped her into my arms.

The car horn honked. Then I heard it lift into the air.

“No!” I wanted to run outside, though, if they were gone, I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. I carried Mary outside, not wanting to leave her there. Luke was in the sand, sitting up, in obvious pain.

“She’s gone!” He was crying. Everything in me was willing him to be quiet, to get up and come to us. But he just stayed where he was, bawling. There was a tremendous churning in the lake and we were covered in rain. Something akin to a bomb going off threw Mary and me to the ground.

My ears were ringing and the world around me shimmered. I counted fifty blinks before I was able to sit up. I was covered in sand and only found Mary when I saw her foot. Our cabin was gone. I made my way over to her on shaky hands and knees and began digging her out.

It finally came to a head, not with an argument, but a confession. It had been my folly to think I was the only one toying with the idea of an affair. Mary told me about Charles one night in bed. And I hadn’t even been angry.

“Oh,” I’d said when she’d told me about the man at her job who’d kissed her. And she hadn’t resisted.

Oh.

That was it. Like a period on the end of our marriage.

And then she’d rolled over on her stomach and went to sleep.

Mary was on her stomach now. I turned her on her side and scanned the beach for Luke. A trench large enough for a barge to nestle in comfortably was where he had been.

I was numb. Or at least I told my body to be numb. I didn’t want to feel this. I uncovered Mary and inhaled sharply the thick horse smell at the sight of a chunk of wood piercing her side. I had no idea if it was fatal on its own, but there was no hope of getting to any kind of medical care anytime soon. The wound oozed freely and I could only wonder how bad that was.

Even if I could save her, living through this might be worse. The thought alone of opening her eyes and learning she’d slept through the deaths of all three of her children was more than I could process.

The trench was filling with water. I was still shaky, like I needed something to eat. Hot tears streamed down my face, chilled by the rancid breeze until they met beneath my chin. The cold water still misting down on me was disorienting. I was cooking and freezing at the same time, my throbbing head in full bloom. Mary felt like an anchor in my arms, but I was able to straighten my back and stand.

The sand churned softly underfoot as I slowly headed toward the water with Mary in my shaky arms. Everyone I’d come to love had been lost in less than ten minutes, including the woman who’d invited me into this new world, and she would die without ever opening her eyes again. I could barely see, but the smell of the water as I approached grew stronger.

I lifted her face to my lips and kissed her cheek, then on the lips, a distant part of me hail-marying that I could wake her up with such little contact. She was somewhere a million miles away.

The horse was up there. I heard it chuff as I gradually descended into the lake. With so much churning of the water, a fine mist had wreathed the air. The wind rushed around me and as if queued, I looked up to see the horse reared on its hind legs, jagged moonlight sliced through the sky, arcing down its body like a bolt of lightning. It dominated the sky, both a thousand miles away and right over me.

Its forelegs were tremendous. One hoof could easily fill the cul-de-sac we were in, maybe it was even bigger. When it came down, it would cause something like a tsunami and everything in eyeshot would be obliterated.

I stumbled and for a precarious second, thought we were going to fall. I didn’t think I’d have the strength to pick myself up and had no hope of lifting my wife into my arms again. I steadied myself, locking my eyes on the ground. There was the rest of my half-eaten sandwich, drifting in the ankle-deep water like a floatie. Like it could make it all better. Still intact, save for the lone bite Luke had taken out of it.

The cool water up to my knees wasn’t enough to quench the fire coursing through my back and limbs. I didn’t have far to go, but the dozen or so feet before I could call myself submerged was immeasurably far.

I could make it, though. I would make it. We would be together.

Mary moved in my arms and for a terrifying moment, I thought she was waking up. But it was the water buoying her and relieving my aching arms. I had no idea what I would have said had she actually opened her arms. I couldn’t have explained it all and nothing I could have said would have changed what was imminent.

No. Nothing was going to wake her. And I couldn’t save the children. But that didn’t mean we couldn’t be together.

-END

I hope you enjoyed. Please come back next week for my new short, The Honeycut:

When a newlywed realizes his bride is dissatisfied with their sex life, he reluctantly agrees to undergo a surgical procedure from a back-alley surgeon who may have something more up his sleeve.

Read Part II here.

“It’s huge,” she said. My eyes were immediately on her, but I didn’t see anything else. Couldn’t identify the danger. Mark was still rooted where he was, but his phone was nowhere in sight. They both were looking up like there was something in the distance. But I still didn’t see it.

I felt Mary move with me as I approached.

“Chrissy, honey?”

“Don’t let her go,” Luke said. “Don’t let her go!”

I’d halved the distance when I finally saw it. It had been there, but it had simply been so humongous I’d been blind to it, like I’d been looking for a 7-11 and walked face-first into Sears Tower.

The water was receding from waist high, but she didn’t seem to have moved. Whatever it was had displaced a tremendous amount of water.

“Oh my. Oh my. Oh my.” Mary was on a dialogue loop and I couldn’t blame her. Every time I thought I’d seen all of it, I kept seeing more. A lot more. Yet, I was supremely calm. The worry-machine was quiet.

Last year, I got into a one-car accident driving home on M-5. The eastbound lanes had been closed to construction and my phone’s weather app had cautioned for high winds before I’d left the office. There’d been a fair amount of wind buffeting, but nothing I wasn’t able to handle.

There’d been a white box truck in front of me when I’d spotted what appeared to have been a square of cardboard blow high into the sky and begin trickling down. I’d immediately written it off even if it were on a course to strike my car. It was only cardboard.

But when the particle board struck my vehicle, smashing the windshield and showering droplets of safety glass onto the passenger seat, I hadn’t panicked. It was so sudden and violent that my brain—either as an instinct of self-preservation or just a malfunction—had simply not reacted.

I pulled off the freeway at the next exit and stopped a few blocks down in an office parking lot. Only then the possibility of what could have happened came down on me.

This was like that. My brain wasn’t processing the situation like Mary’s or the kids. I felt my heart pulsing in my chest just as calmly as when we’d been talking a moment before. I knew I should get the kids away from it. But that was a process of logic and not instinctual fear.

“Honey, get out of the water.”

I charged the last few feet and sloshed to a stop in a confusion of senses. I was close to whatever it was. Closer than I realized. I felt the heat coming from a wall of flesh not more than five feet from me. Water splashed me up to my chest, but it was more like a punch that pushed me back a step or two.

“Rick, it’s a horse!”

I had no idea how Chrissy could conceive what it was. All I saw was black. Black like the water. But solid, like the water had turned into something.

“Honey, move back, okay?”

Chrissy was smiling and rather than retreating, she stepped forward— almost chin deep—and raised her hand like she was going to pet it.

Once again I opened my mouth too late to tell her not to do it. My instinct would’ve been to swat her hand had I been closer and my re-throbbing head suddenly made me think of her mother.

I looked at it. Finally, the smooth, iridescent black coat coalesced into something I recognized, although the scale was overwhelming. Nails scraped the inside of my skull as if the idea of what I was seeing was too large to fit inside my brain.

This was its head. A corner of it, anyway. I looked along the flank as far as I could see in the night. I couldn’t even begin to guess how tall it must have been standing up. It had to have been lying in the water.

A giant eyeball about thirty feet above blinked several times and swiveled. I had no way to be sure, but I think it was looking at me.

I walked around, looking up and up, feeling like I would dislocate my neck before seeing the top of this thing. Still, though, I wasn’t afraid. The worry-machine was quiet.

“Mark, move your sister back.” I was reading from a script. Protecting the children, at least in that moment, was an autopiloted function.

Neither of them moved.

I scooped Chrissy into the crook of one arm and she went limp like a puppy picked up by the scruff. I handed her to Mark, who wrapped his arms around her, the both of them staring openly, transfixed.

I herded them as gently as I could out of the water. Then I gave Mark a light slap on the cheek. He focused on me, annoyed as if I’d prematurely awakened him from a nap.

“Mark, take your sister back inside.”

“I don’t wanna go!” Chrissy wriggled in her brother’s arms and he dropped her feet first. “It’s beautiful, Rick!”

I grasped her shoulder before she could walk past me.

“Chrissy, sto—”

I felt the shift behind me.

“Oh—erp—my,” Mary said. She took a long pull from her can, her eyes swiveling upward.

“No-no-no,” I thought I heard Luke say in the distance. But for just a moment, the only thing occupying the world with me was that magnificent thing in the water. It felt like removing my hands from my ears after having them covered for a long time and experiencing hearing like it was something adjacent to new. Except, it felt like that throughout my whole body.

The horse was raising its gigantic head out of the water. The tide receded and everything seemed to suck toward it like it had its own gravity. I struggled to maintain my balance like a gust of wind had pushed at my back, but in truth, it was probably just the giant animal dominating my vision and destroying my equilibrium.

Water poured off its black body, the eyes locked onto us and shrinking as its head seemingly disappeared into the night sky. Its neck was a tower, columns of muscle wider than all of us in a row, touching fingertip to fingertip. Its chest was as broad as a rocky mountain face.

There was a mighty -KLOMP- in the sand that shook the earth mere feet from me that I barely noticed. Sand slapped over my entire left side like a landmine had gone off, but it was immediately rinsed away by the constant waterfall we were all standing under.

Someone was shouting, but whoever it was was a million miles away.

There was another -KLOMP- somewhere farther down the beach and I began to stir from my reverie and then there was Luke, shouting next to me and hooking me by the arm.

His words didn’t make sense but I turned toward him as he pulled me. I saw the horse’s foreleg—I don’t know how Chrissy had been able to tell it was a horse before—straightening like some heavy construction machine craning a load somewhere into the sky above us.

We trudged toward the cabin, but the sand that had been something to contend with was an afterthought, my burning calves seemed to belong to somebody else.

When the torrent finally ended, I was soaked. We all stopped in the sudden silence. Turning around was more of a measure of defense to see the break in the clouded sky and the moonlight clashing against that ebony, elegant leviathan.

It was impossibly tall. Like it was intersecting-with-the-curvature-of-the-earth-tall. I thought I could make out its mane, whipping around in what had to be thin atmosphere.

We all stood and watched it. For one indeterminate moment, it was absolutely regal.

Mary wrapped around my arm and pulled into me. For however many iotas, she was my Mary, and I was her wife, too.

Mark hadn’t come with us for some reason. He stood partially in the water where we—I— had left him. He was feet away from a hoof that was easily twenty lengths taller than him.

Panic did seize me, finally. The worry-machine revved to life and I opened my mouth. I sensed the balance to be upset, the electrified space slowly exploding as he compressed it between his body and the smallest section of the horse’s.

With splayed fingers, he laid a palm on it.

The horse startled, shaking the floor of the earth as it stomped around.

The Greek military leader Xenophon, perfected the art of training horses in battle, using them to kick soldiers or trample them. He’s also the father of dressage.

What happened to Mark couldn’t have been considered disciplined, but the effect was the same. I don’t know if it were intentional—more than likely it wasn’t—but that giant hoof clomped around, Mark dodged around like he was running through a minefield.

Then he was gone.

The hoof continued stomping around a few moments more, a rumbling earthquake beneath our feet and a rain of wet sand coming down on us before the horse stopped. Mark was just... gone.

Luke was screaming. When I actually heard him, it took a moment longer to realize he was yelling his brother’s name.

Common sense would have told us to flee inside the cabin. But our senses were flowing into us like blood circulating back into numb fingers.

There was a long moment of quiet as it reared its head back. It felt like a slow-motion moment until its head rushed at us like a giant arrow.

I had no reflexes to respond. Mary was the only one who put up a defensive arm, as if that could have protected her—and she was the one it took.

The horse bit down on her raised forearm—as microscopic as a surgeon’s scalpel with teeth as wide as three cabins—and plucked her off the ground. It reeled its head backward and flung her.

Mary pinwheeled into the sky, a dissolving blur into the upper atmosphere. She could have been catapulting into space, and I didn’t want to find out.

The worry-machine was roaring.

“Everybody in!” I said, herding Luke and Chrissy the rest of the way inside. I pressed my back against the door, then turned off the light. Luke and Chrissy looked at me as if I had answers to fix this.

“We gotta go get... we gotta go get Mark!” Luke didn’t actually make a move to go back outside. He was more saying the thing a caring brother should say. But there was no Mark to go get. His death had been as brutal as it had been unintentional.

Going out there—or allowing Luke to go out there—would be just as dangerous and pointless. Chrissy was crying silently. I looked at her, really looked, running my hands over her head and arms to ensure she was physically all right. The worry-machine was humming along nicely. She grabbed onto me.

“Get your mother,” I said to Luke. “We’re leaving.” We weren’t safe here.

“She’s sleep?” he said, looking confused. He ran into the boys’ room.

“No!” I said. “We don’t have time for bags.” He looked at me. “Just wake your mother up and bring her. We’re leaving in three minutes.”

“What should I do, Rick?” Chrissy said.

“Grab the snack tray from the fridge.” We could easily buy something from the next gas station, but I figured keeping her busy would keep her calm. I snatched my keys off the island. Chrissy joined me, carrying the plastic tray with deli slices, cheese cubes, and veggies.

I wanted to run, but I was going to have to slow the pace so she wouldn’t drop it. The earth was still shaking with each step. She was going to look for the horse, and I anticipated her distraction when we stepped outside.

I kept my eyes on her, guiding her down the stairs and around the side of the cabin. She gasped but didn’t resist as I ushered her along. Preoccupying myself with her was enough distraction that I didn’t have my keys ready to have the doors unlocked by the time we got there.

We were exposed. If the horse were looking, it would see us. It seemed to have an eye for motion.

The air went still.

The town of Bolton Springs is in shock today, after the brutal murder of seven children. The bodies of the children, whose names have not been released, were discovered in separate rooms in the Donaldson Furniture Company building early this morning. It is unclear whether the children were killed in the building—and, if so, why they were there—or killed elsewhere, then moved. The building's owner, Vectorien Corporation, has thus far declined to comment but has pledged to cooperate fully with authorities in their investigation of this heinous, horrible crime…

---

12 Hours Earlier

---

…the tear shut.

I collapsed to the ground.

My head throbbed.

I was in a field, a field I remembered playing in. Vaguely, distantly. Is there a name for a feeling about the past opposite of nostalgia? Whatever it is, I was feeling it intensely.

I looked around.

The six others were near me, in various states of coming-back-to-consciousness.

We were naked, our skins fully tattooed black.

I got up.

I glanced at my wrist, saw the button and pressed it. A blade slid out, catching the moonlight. I pressed the button again; the blade retracted.

I roused the others.

We said nothing.

A wind blew.

In the distance, startled birds flew from a tree, silhouettes against a pale night sky.

I shivered.

We knew exactly where we had to go.

Seven black shapes traversing the night in Bolton Springs, on September 19, 2026, 3:37 a.m. local time, each with a set of the same simple instructions: eliminate the target, do not be seen.

We navigated by memory.

By sense.

By a pain none of us could ever forget.

The decision had already been made. It was time to execute.

I felt much as I was told I'd feel, alien yet familiar, like floating through a dream, like discovering an already-discovered land. “The longer you take, the worse the headache will become.” “Will I be aware of—” I asked. “Most likely,” the temporologist replied. She was young, committed. I was scared…

I could sense my own dream.

We crossed the creek and came into view of the brick building with the smokestacks, the house of so much horror and suffering. The sign was still hanging from it: “Donaldson & Sons Furniture Co.”

I was dreaming of a meadow, of a dog I'd never have. I was running in my dream. The dog was running with me. The sky was my mother's face; the face of a mother I had never known or seen, whose existence was pure inference. Everybody born has a mother, so I must have a mother too.

We stopped.

There was only one guard on duty. It was early in the program. He was sitting in the guardhouse by the road, watching television.

We passed undetected.

We remembered the storeroom window with the broken latch, found it, climbed the wall, pushed open the window and lowered ourselves, one by one, into the building's dusty interior.

It was quiet inside.

A few of us cried silent, conflicted tears.

Inside, there was no need for maps. We were in a world we'd known for decades. Each detail, each hallway, each door, evoked in me a vicious, indelible intimacy. I was home.

The seven of us stood, sensing.

My dream had evaporated and been replaced by another, of shadow-panthers, and the moment when I, having thrown my primitive spear—having thrown it with perfect accuracy—realized the creature in the jungle before me was incorporeal, unhuntable. My pulse raced; my pulse increased.

I checked the clock on the storeroom wall.

I nodded at the others.

Silently, we exited the storeroom together, then split up, each going towards his own room.

Mine was the third on the left.

I stood in front of it in the buzzing fluorescent hallway light, took several deep breaths and entered. The throbbing in my head spiked.

I saw the bed and the boy sleeping in it, and the boy's eyes flashed open; I scooted backwards on the sheets in terror at the nude, dark figure in front of me until I felt the brick wall against my back and could move no further. I was myself and looking at myself and looking at myself looking at myself, and my heart was as if gripped by my own, relentless fist.

As unreal as the experience was, I knew the boy was me; and the boy—I merely hovered, waiting—gradually realized I, too, was him.

I didn't say a word; and I didn't say a word.

I thought my double set of present-thoughts from two locations in space-time simultaneously.

I'm sorry, I thought to myself. I'm sorry, but I cannot allow you—us—me to suffer the way I've already suffered. This is salvation. This is an end, delivered mercifully soon after the beginning. Unless I do this, they will would-have broken and abused you for so many years, day after day, in the name of peace and progress. No one else will end it. Do you understand? This is Omelas. We must walk away.

I remembered the texture of the cover of the old book, one of the few available in the orphanage, before the transfer, before Vectorien.

We must walk away from Omelas.

I cried; and I cried.

I muffled myself with a hand over my mouth.

Holding it there, on the soft, wet lips, I used my chin to press the button on my other wrist, ejecting the blade, and calmed myself, thinking or saying or dreaming that I will never find my mother, that I will never have a dog. There is no meadow. The shadow-panther cannot be killed. There is only eternal nightmare…

I ran blade against throat, releasing warm, red young blood.

As it flowed…

As the small body trembled…

I got into bed with it—with myself—and held myself, soothing myself, keeping the wound open and stroking my hair, until my body slackened and finally went limp. The ceiling light shone. And when I was dead, I flickered out of— .

Science fiction. Double feature. 

So many long afternoons and nights spent in the movie house, the theatre. The arcade: the noise and lights and tangible sounds of coins and laughing amidst the specialized sound effects of digitized and pixelated carnage. 

Late nights watching HBO After Dark beside his older brother or his kid sister or a buddy or a floozy or a date as he got older. Amongst a slovenly strewn field of snacks and popcorn and wrappers and garbage, the years rolled by and the empty cans of Shasta and Barqs changed, transmogrifying into brown bottles of Bud or silver bullet, all gathered and in clusters  like a small translucent crystalline cityscape of glass in miniature beneath great rolling thunderhead clouds of oily pot smoke. Many of them, many cities. Many little swimming bottle cities in many little rooms. All before the great glowing incandescent godscreen of the illuminated television aglow in the postmidnight. 

And there were great books too of course. Precious paperpacks with lurid yellow covers, bold yellow font, pages pungent and spiced. Green and nightshade purple covers for the horrors. The ones with purple were always the coolest, always the most shocking and vivid and unrelenting. Comics. Classics and the new stuff that gets pumped out week to week, month to month and then forgotten. 

Forgotten by most. But not by such as he. 

He remembered. These things, these modes and mediums always brought him away from the now, the clear and present danger, the mundane and the tedious, the cruel. The harsh reality. 

For Caleb Donaldson these stories were always the light and constant companion of his long and mostly boring and average life. In truth, they were everything. All else could take a flying fuck, the job, the girlfriends that meant nothing, the drinking buddies and coworkers that meant even less. All of that was just the background noise of what was necessary. The sounds and moving in perpetua grinds of his ordinary life in motion. 

But it was ok, you see. Caleb Donaldson of Old Fair Oaks, Sacramento, California has figured out the secret. 

They were more than just stories, you know. 

The ones that had most captured his imagination and young attention since he could remember were the time traveling stories. 

Journeys into the wild primeval of the past, the dark mechanical cold of the future, the apocalypse, beyond … 

He'd always loved these stories. 

And it was funny, he had found, discovered accidentally while spending the summer with his grandfather one year, the secret. They were out hunting, wandering the woods quietly with rifles shouldered and boots crunching softly the underbrush beneath their capped and steeltoed feet. It had struck young Caleb then, as a boy. And never left him. 

This is it! This is what Doctor Who and the X-Men and all the other guys are doin when they're goin into the past! This is what it's like to have the world grow dark and become old and ancient and prehistoric and stuff, before people got here with their cars and their junk…

The thought had filled him with simple childish wonder. He felt like he'd made some great discovery. All those scientists and alien engineers from outer space on the TV and in the books were always trying to figure it all out with numbers and physics and quantum entanglements and time loop paradoxes … and here he'd figured it way more simple than that. 

Just go out in the woods. Go outside in the trees, the forest. Go out and go camping ya dummies. 

He carried this with him all his life. Like secret treasure. Well past and into the pains and dread of adulthood. 

And then it all came back, back and around and full circle. Like all good time travelers do. 

He lost the kids. And his wife. And then he lost it. 

And then he made the biggest decision of his life. He decided to go camping. He decided to do a little time traveling all by himself. After all of these years. 

…

He couldn't believe she would try this bullshit. He couldn't believe she would try to ruin the one last little thing he had left. 

What're you talking about, bud? She ripped your heart out and took the kids after she'd spent ten years disemboweling you and tearing your nuts off. Why’re you at all surprised? 

He wasn't really. Just hurt. Deeply. And it seemed as if the bitch now lived to only make it worse for him. Unbearable if she could. She was the living vile green hatred of salt in the wound, seething and frothing gory pink. 

He hated her. 

He suspected she hated him. She must. 

“I just don't see why this’s such a big deal, you're acting like a child. You can come get the boys and have them for an extra couple of weeks while Tom and I-" 

He stopped listening after that. He still held the phone to his ear but his mind went to the same livid red place that it always did when she mentioned his name. The fucking limpwrist. 

He let her drone and prattle on. When she finally stopped he once again explained to her that they'd already talked this over, they'd already discussed this. And besides. It wasn't even his weekend. She had seen to that after all. And now here she was dangling the promise of more time with his kids like a fucking carrot. Like a dog treat he was supposed to jump and snatch at. To just drop everything and leap at with fervor and enthusiasm and a full display of gratitude. 

Fuck that. 

He told her as much. Diplomatically. More or less. He hung up the phone. He debated for barely even a second before turning the device off and shoving it into the glove compartment on the passenger side. 

When he finally got out of the car and sucked fresh mountain air it was baptismal. Cracks in his knees went off like twin pistol shots and his back stretched and crackled gratefully. He was finally out. He sucked more air, like it was water. It was. It was refreshing. 

You're finally out. 

He unlatched the back and began to unload his gear. He'd better get started. It was a long hike from the parking lot to the spot. 

…

It was peaceful. The ritual. The hike. Lugging the gear. Sweating and developing a cooling coat, a sheen as his eyes calmly drank in the placid green and foliage world all around. Muscles worked and burned off excess fat, calories built up and boiled over, over cooked stress. It melted off him and within and came off his hiking form like radiant heat. 

He was a traveling furnace of thought as he made his way to the camping spot. Later he would recall that he might've felt watched as he made his way at this point. 

Might have. 

But presently he was all too absorbed in the process, the smooth and calm low treble tread and pace of the gliding action. The canopy of golden lighted leaves and furling branches. The scents, completely natural and native and far away from the synthetic realm of the manmade. He felt he was as much swimming and drinking his way through the crisp growth of forestland as he was booting through it. Thoughts of work and the failed marriage and bored boring disappointing teenage children left his mind. Evaporating away like mist to the coming of the bright day sun. The forest grew and swelled and swallowed him and the entire world as he made his way deeper and deeper forth. 

He would leave it all behind if he could. 

…

Setting camp was easy. He was well practiced. Childhood and teenage and college years as well were filled with trips out into the forested dark. The wild. The wilderness. The past. 

He felt it now as he sat by the fire. Eating his plate of beans and pork belly and franks. Sipping a can of bud. This is the past. The green world all around now is one of the last vestigial pieces of the evidence. 

Evidence of the primeval and primordial world we’ve all crawled from, the stygian snot that was filth that was the building blocks of protein and carbon. We are all animals. And we can all come alive out here. Returning to the in-utero warm world of the godclay primordial slime and ooze. 

She's so patient. Our mother. My mother. She's waited for me all this time. She's the one. She's-

Something disturbed his train of thought. A noise. 

A noise like someone moving. Prowling and lurking just inside the tangle of bush and trees. 

He sat quietly, keeping calm. Listening to the sound of his own breathing. He wasn't sipping his can of bud anymore. The rustling and cautious moving sounds had tapered. Caleb's mind traveled to the hunting rifle he had in his tent. If something lunged now out of the dark, he just might make it if he whirled around from where he now sat and hurried. 

Really booked it. 

He didn't like the thought. He really didn't appreciate the mental image. A terrible movie in his mind, running on a failing and old projector: He's running, fast, panicked, he almost makes the tent before a large bestial shape of inkwell black leaps out from the wilderness house of feral darkness and takes him ragdoll like a broken toy from behind. 

He clears his throat. Loudly. Not sure exactly why, he just does it. Perhaps hoping to scare off whoever and whatever is out there. He can feel eyes watching him. 

Caleb Donaldson sits up. He's at the edge of his fold-up seat. He's waiting. Unsure. Of both what to do and if there is even really anything wrong at all anyways. His ex-wife had always said he was paranoid. 

Nothing happens. 

There isn't another sound and nothing emerges from the forestline. Only the snaps and hungry crackle of the campfire now. 

He takes another sip of bud. Decides he'll light one of the joints CJ gifted him for the road after all. He doesn't know how else he's gonna sleep tonight. He's wired now. Jacked. 

He lights up. Tokes. And after awhile, once more he slips into a more natural and comfortable flow of simple candied nostalgia and childhood reminisce. Trying to tell himself he doesn't feel a gaze, a baleful and animal leering stare aimed directly at him from out of the dark. 

The marijuana and beer do their job. Eventually he's addled and drugged enough for sleep. Caleb slips back into the tent and is almost sure he hears something retreat back into the denser heart of growth and underbrush out there past the treeline as he does so.  

He's almost sure but not. And he doesn't want to be anymore. He doesn't want to consider it. Not right now. Maybe Amanda was right…

He slips into a sleeping bag and finally falls under. His dreams are filled. His sleep is not restful. 

…

The next couple of days were mostly uneventful. Calm. Peaceful. As planned. He hiked and camped. Looked forward to some hunting and some fishing, some game. It was all just what he needed. Therapeutic. Until he found the burnt leavings. 

…

He was steadily along, walking down the beaten path of grey dust and boney twigs and enjoying the relish in his watering mind's eye, the strange marriage that lived there between this wilderness and the strange worlds of escape made from pages and ink and glowing video screens. This place of the past … the places made of dreams. 

And from the future I come crawling back here. He smiled at this thought. Like a refugee. 

Like the time travelers of the stories he was allowed to bring a few things, a few comforts and tools and devices of the modern world. 

Of the future, to this place of dirt and sound. Precious pieces of technology

His mind went to his gear and pack and his smile deepened. People really just didn't get it. 

Most never would. Precious few might find out. 

He almost tripped over it. So lost in thought. 

It was all charcoaled black and scorched amongst a patch of similarly blasted and blackened earth. A wild ebon blotch of ashen ink spilled upon the land. Caleb stared into the pile of roasted and burnt detritus. Trying to make sense of what he saw. 

He recognized shapes and items in the charred mess and they made his blood run cold and the hairs all over his skin and scalp crawl with unease and bad wonder. 

Clothes. What looked like a backpack. Parts and pieces of a tent. A wallet. It was this last that most bothered, most disturbed him. He was pretty sure he could make out the melted remains of an ID and other similarly warped and slightly conjoined shapes that might've been credit cards or the like but were too far gone and destroyed now to tell. His mind naturally asked itself, who left all of this here? Why? 

And none of the answers he could come up with seemed good. All of them pointed to something bad, nefarious. You hear about people going missing in the woods all the time. You hear about people being chopped up and murdered by loonies in here ‘bout just as much. 

Caleb suddenly looked away from the black pile on the path and began to anxiously scan the forestline. Trying to penetrate the thick dense world of green and growth and see anyone, anything that might be watching him. Stalking him. 

Following him. 

After a moment he stopped himself. 

You're being ridiculous. It's probably nothing, just like the other night. Christ man, you ain't been out here a long time and now you're jumping at every goddamn thing like a ninny. Just some shit people burned. Kids come out here to get fucked up and do stupid shit all the time. Not a big deal, Donaldson. Chill the fuck out, kay?

He slowed his breath. He liked this train of thought. Yes. That was right. Kids were fucking stupid and always playing pyro maniac. Hell, he'd done his fair share growing up, hadn't he? Little hellraiser an such. 

And that line of thinking started to set his worried mind at ease once more. And once more he was back on the ride of the reminisce, nostalgia keenly floating and dreamily filling the darkest parts of his brain. Time traveling. 

Time traveling, baby. 

He went on. Leaving behind the charred and blackened mess in the grey dust of the forest path. Not looking back. And refusing it anymore thought. 

He left it behind. But not before freeing a cold can of Budweiser stored in the pack. He cracked it open with a pistol shot sound in the placid calm and downed half the foaming thing as he went on. Things always went down smoother this way. 

…

All seemed well after that. Fine. For a little while. He enjoyed what he came out here to enjoy. The quiet. The solitude. Days and nights spent simply and comfortably and sleeping beneath bejeweled twilight curtains of gleaming stars, planetoids and colored clouds of nebulae. He relished the time out here and with himself, returning to his own sense of peace by returning to the land. Returning to the way of life that had belonged to the Navajo, the Comanche, their enemy white man cowboys and gunslingers and the pioneers of old. The ancient armies too, the immigrants and seekers and hunters of fortune, of goodwill, of God's love and warm civilized light. And the adventures too, those who took to the land and cut their teeth out on the territory and became baptized as adventurers in sweat and blood and grime, beneath the blinding eye of the sun. And the moon too, the wild hearted free loving children that slumbered bravely beneath the moon, decried as vagabonds and bums but they really just knew better and understood the blood of their grandfathers and their bold sense and adoration for the untamed tumult country land of adventure and its wild hearted love. 

It was all of it, romantic. It pained him that he had to come out here alone to feel like this, to discover something like that and he tried hard to turn away from the pain of realization that it brought him. He turned away from it in vain, it was there at every turn. In his mind, filling every thought, and out here as well. Alive in the woods. Filling it with heavy and powerfully strange substance. 

He hunted. Fished. Camped. Only sometimes did he feel followed, watched. Only sometimes. 

He was almost happy when he came across another, when he ran into Sellic. 

A distraction, at last!

But the guy was weird. 

In the world of outdoormanship, hunting and fishing and the like, ya meet a lot of friendly, warm, good natured types. The sort ya like to share a brew with and might even have over for a barbecue should ya take special acquaintance. And then ya met types like Sellic. Fuckin weirdos. 

It was the smell at first and that should've been enough, should've been the first and fucking last sign to split it. But nope. Caleb Donaldson still remembered the lessons of Sunday school and Kindergarten and though life had been its fair share of rough on em, he still held true to the idea that you don't judge harsh off the word, go. Ya don't settle in for meanness out the gate an such. 

But it was in the eyes as well. They were wide and wild. A wilderness of pupil darkness lived in yellowed whites shot with lines of hectic red. Something swam in that circle lake of pupil darkness, both of them, Obsidian pits. 

He never blinked. Not once. Not as he said, “Howdy, name's Sellic." and grunted a few noncommittals following after these scant syllables. 

He came across the guy already settled up. Caleb was gonna move on after initial awkward obligatory greetings when the wide eyed smelly man invited him to set camp with him. Caleb Donaldson believed in being polite but he wasn't a total fool, only part. He thanked him but opted to move on up aways. 

Far. 

It didn't make any kind of difference. 

…

Later he was hunting, lying down in wait for something to crop up. Maybe nibble at the patch of sweet grass just a few yards from where he posted. He hoped to bag a deer. If he could get a decent sized stag, then he'd pack it in happily and call it quits. He was just debating on whether or not he should've packed the tree stand when something happened then. 

A large barrel chested deer sauntered into view. Into the clearing with its great splaying regal rack of antlers on wide-span display like a wild lord and king of the forest. He was beautiful. He was just what Caleb had been waiting for. 

But then something else crawled up. On all fours. It was the smelly wide eyed man, it was Sellic. And it looked as if he was hunting as well. 

Prowling, stalked. Low to the ground and almost slithering across the surface of forest floor, without a sound. Without a whisper. It was uncanny and surreal and Caleb watched frozen in a kind spellbound trance. The bore end of the rifle barrel began to slowly sag and dip down as he lost his concentration and gave it to another. 

Sellic was almost upon the unaware stag now. It was nibbling the patch of sweet grass. Just like Donaldson had seen in his mind's eye, a wish not just a moment ago. Somewhere deep inside his mind as he watched entranced a small part of him tried in desperate vain to take this simple little wish back. But it was already too late. The wide eyed crawling man was drooling. Slobbering like an animal. Salivating with the wild bestial hunger that was always the madness of ravenous need. That was what was alive in those unblinking uncivilized eyes. Slavering need. 

He'd already time traveled too far now to turn back. Caleb watched as the manshaped thing of stains and smells and piercing animal stares suddenly leapt like something feline and unbridled. Like something finally let loose from the confines of its stifling prison cage. 

Sellic fell on the deer and the poor thing hadn't a chance. It never sensed, never knew what was coming. It was wild. It was crazy. Donaldson had always seen deer tense, perk up and take flight at the slightest sound or stray movement. But not this one. Not this time. The wild sight did not stop there. 

Somehow the skinny haggard man in filthy clothes managed to wrestle and manhandle the struggling kicking beast down into the dirt. Caleb's mouth dropped open as he watched Sellic begin to bend and wrench and break the flailing limbs. Catching them with his cat-swipe clawing hands and then bending them back in directions not meant or made by nature's hand. He felt his stomach roll and drop as the silence of the forest began to fill with the lurid sounds of heavy bone snaps. 

Caleb picked up his rifle and gear and left. Without a word. He didn't look back. Wet tearing sounds, like heavy fabric or soaking saturated leather followed him after. He told himself it was his imagination. That was all impossible. 

There was no way. 

…

He had trouble finding his camp. By the time he did it was already near dark once more. He would have to spend another night. 

He opted out of the fire and supper. He wasn't hungry and he didn't want to attract that freak. 

That freak of nature. 

…

Middle of the night. He came awake to a sound. Sounds. A noise. Just outside the tent. 

It sounded like chewing. Wet. And heavy. Laborious. Jaws, muscles, tendon lines working and moving with animal fervor, animal rigor in the dark. 

Outside. 

Caleb slowly and carefully sat up from his sleeping bag and grabbed his rifle. It was loaded. He'd made sure to do so before he'd managed to finally fall into an uneasy sleep. An uneasy rest now disturbed by whatever was moving out there now. Chewing. Eating. He reached and grabbed for his flashlight next. He readied himself. 

He grabbed the zipper to open the front of the tent. He took one last deep breath and held it for a moment. He let it out quietly. As quietly as he could manage. 

And then he quickly unzipped the flap to the tent and threw it open with one hand as the other flicked on the flashlight and brought it up. The darkness of his small camp in the clearing was illuminated in the sudden flash. He felt sick with what he saw. He was glad to have his rifle in his lap. 

You were smart to have loaded it … he thanked God. And cursed Him at the same time. For letting him fall into this type of shit in the first place. 

Sellic stared back into the beam of light. Unflinching. Unblinking. Unmoving save for the motion of chewing about his red and bloodied bearded jaws. Working and gleaming wet in the light, rippling with carnivorous movement.

He held the head of the stag in his clawing hands. De-racked. The severed head looked rough and ruinous at the stump as though it had been torn off rather than cleanly cut. 

Caleb didn't know what else to say so he just said: “Hey." 

“Hey." bloody darkling Sellic grunted back. Hunkered and squatting out there in the dark. Still chewing. He swallowed. And took another bite from a craterous open wound at the top of the animal's head. He ripped a chunk of bleeding meat away with his teeth. His jaws began to work and ripple with rigorous movement once more as he started to chew again. The meat was raw, rough. But he was relishing the strong and pungent flavor. Thick. His blood drinking, swallowing with every gnashing chew was audible in the nocturnal dark. Gulps. Heavy. Thick. 

A beat. 

Caleb didn't know what to do. He felt that he must be dreaming, this whole day. None of this could be real. The strange bloodsoaked and caked manshape out there amongst his camp frightened him. He'd thought it would be simple and he'd know what to do in situations like this but he was frozen. In terror. And in dark hypnotic fascination. 

This must be what it's like to be a moth to flame, or a small little guppie to a deepsea angler fish… a deer in the headlights. Trapped. 

Caught. 

Ensnared by the eyes of the wild man. He was drowning in their madness now, sinking into their blood-drinking depths. 

Sellic finally said something. 

“Hungry?" 

“... what…?" Caleb said. Puzzled at first. It had been little more than a grunt. 

“Ya hungry?" Sellic grunted again. He held the severed and broken head aloft. Dripping. Wide-eyed. The tongue had already been ripped out. Had already been eaten. Black-red syrup poured out thickly from the open gape of mouth like an obscene bestial spout. 

Caleb fought his gag reflex. 

A beat. 

Somehow Donaldson managed a reply. 

"N-no. No thanks, man. It's the middle of the night. And I wanna get some sleep” 

A beat. The freak still held the dripping pouring bleeding hunk of decapitated and chewed up meat out to him like a precious gift of the forest. His wide eyes were still open and hectic and alive with animal ravenous madness. 

A beat. 

Another.

Caleb finally finished his thought. 

"And I think you should probably go get some sleep too, bud. Been a long day an such-”

He meant to finish it off with, and apt to be another, like his grandfather and his pops had done before him, but Sellic cut him off. 

"Ya sure? You sure ya ain't hungry?” 

Caleb slowly nodded his head, adding, "...yeah” in a low careful and exhausted voice. Jesus fucking Christ…

Sellic nodded. Began to crawl away on all fours like a dog, the head held to his breast like a caveman clutching something precious. He turned before he left the ring of light provided by the beam of the flashlight. He turned around and said: "You will be.” and then finally turned and fled. Like an animal taking to the natural dark.

Its natural home and abode. Its natural place. 

"What the fuck!?” Caleb said. To no one in particular. 

…

He didn't sleep the rest of that night. He waited impatiently for the sun to come up. So he could leave. He'd had enough of this place and hunting. He'd had enough time traveling in this place. Caleb wanted to go home. 

At first dawn he rose. Quickly packed. And began his trek back. Back down the path. 

Back down the way he had come.

…

A few hours in and he knew something must be wrong. Nothing was recognizable. Nothing. And when he looked down after trudging more and more anxiously down the path he'd come in on, he was dismayed to find that it wasn't there any longer. The path, the trail had disappeared. 

He was lost. 

Caleb Donaldson began to panic. 

It's alright, it's alright, it's fine! It's cool. Just use the GPS and call someone on your pho-

He stopped. Grew cold. Grim certainty stole over his dreading heart. Crestfallen he didn't want to even rightly remember and say to himself …

Glove compartment. You turned the fucking thing off and threw it in the glove compartment of the car. The one all the way back. The one you can't find anymore cause it's at the end of the trail that you've lost. You left it in there to spite Amanda. 

Silence. He stood. Feeling stupid and wretched and nearing hopeless in the middle of the woods. He reflected. 

You sure showed her…

…

When he'd finally managed his nerve back together and decided on a direction and carried on, the day had been nearly extinguished yet again. He would have to spend another night out in the wild. 

God fucking dammit. 

…

The next series of days and nights were grim. And grew grimmer. And strange. 

He was fine at first. He had supplies, food. He wasn't worried. But then on the fourth day lost he began to run out. 

And the worry came on him again. Rancid. And thick. 

It's alright, it's alright, I've a gun, I know how to gut and skin and clean, I'll be ok. I'll be alright. 

But the woods and world of trees had grown more opulent and dense and feral in its growth. The trees started to broaden in their trunks and their canopies became all swallowing, all encompassing thick foliage cathedral domes of twigs, thick branches and broad emerald leaves the size of dinner plates. 

The bugs. The insects too. 

All of the wild crawling life had become larger as well. The insectile and the reptile had grown strange and unfamiliar and varied in size from large house cats to dogs to horses and cows and at one point, one day glimpsed at a distance through a heavy rolling mist, an elephant… 

A whole herd of giant hissing cockroaches the size of elephants. Trundling by like a rolling squadron fleet of German panzer tanks. 

Caleb felt sick. 

None of this could be real. He must be imagining things. 

Must be. 

It could've been so, far as he knew. His sleep was no longer any good out here. Not since the night some days back, when he'd been fireside and trying to ignore his growing hunger and looked up to the full moon. Only to have it eclipsed by something huge and winged. It had cried then. It had screamed as it stole the moon, the moonlight. Blanketing the primeval world below it in a second layered fold of even deeper darkness. 

Caleb had joined it then. Had joined it in its primal shrieking screaming. 

He didn't sleep so well since that night.  

Ever again

…

His hunger became him. It became the only living and heeded, needed thing and drive and emotion. He was no longer Caleb Donaldson in fact. He was only the hunger now. And so he hunted. 

But it was strange. 

In his hunger, in his wild wanderings, he had forgotten how to use the gun, how to wield the boomstick properly and make it spit its deathly fire. 

I've lost it, he thinks, he realizes shrouded in the cloud of his diminished animal thought. I've lost the ability to shoot fire and be godlike, I've lost it in all of this time traveling, I've gone too far backwards. 

He tries to find the trail. For awhile. But it becomes lost amongst the need for meat and blood. The boomstick is useless to him now. He abandons it. Along with most of the strange things he has strapped to his back.

He doesn't need them. He has changed. This special place has changed him. His flesh has thickened as has his hair, his fur, his pelt. Black and coarse and layered all over. He bites and chews and tears the clothes that he came in with off and eats them. 

Then he takes to bigger game. 

Wilder. More challenging. 

…

He's drinking blood and eating. Filling his stomach. This is good. The angry fever in his skull is calming, abating. The ache and throb of his guts is soothing. Contentedness, peace, tranquility are becoming known to him again. 

He's killed something reptilian, broken its neck. His hands, the knuckles and fingers and palms have widened, flattened, broadened out. Making it easier to snap and throttle, to tear and rend. The dead scaley thing, its meat and blood are good. But slimey. Ropey. Like maggot-meat. Like eating the large worms that swim in giant dung piles. He wants to try something else. 

So he takes to the untamed primeval world all around, the jungle growth, the green emerald world of the unbridled prehistoric past. There are buried, heavily veiled and shrouded thoughts of a path and a trail and a place called, home, that he's supposed to go to, return to as if he's once been there before, but they are muted. Far off. 

Barely there. 

Dripping reptile blood and sweat, he takes to the primeval dark world and is lost. Swallowed by its great and ever widening expanse, into the crawling growing jaws of the seething bestial wild, the past. 

He never looks back. He is never found. Never again does he recall his name. 

Never again. But it doesn't trouble him. It doesn't bother the throbbing jelly of his degenerate apeman mind, he is too enthralled, the thrill of the ravenous hunt. And besides, the past isn't the only thing alive and crawling out here. The future is out here too. The beyond …

All of the magic of the glowing incandescent godscreen of a childhood long gone is alive out here. Alive and well. 

The apeman hunts through the primeval growth. The saucers fill the skies as the giant leviathans do nighttime skirmish and battle with the large mechanical men. The great white heat and blasting mechanized sounds of their great death cannons, their unearthly death rays: BRRRRRR! 

BRRRRRRRRRRRR….! 

They fill the night with their heat and their brilliant violence. Their fire scorches and cuts swaths, sets blue and orange flame to drier parts of the canopy. The dead growth. 

The apeman doesn't mind. He hunts and prowls around their wild and bright violence. Blood and meat fill his head. He hasn't a mind anymore for anything else. 

For naught all else. Only the red. 

THE END

Like all the littermates in my hatchling class, I took the vows of the Data Temple at a tender age, before my voice dropped an octave but after I was tall enough to reach the candles with the wick-snuffer. My first job was to light the candles during the initial procession but even before I had mastered this smokey task, I was entrusted with additional sacerdotal duties including:

• Flushing the holy cache
• Re-indexing the altar
• Placing the silk bookmarks in the codex for the day’s Lesson
• Swinging the incense chain
• Generating the relationship diagram graphic
• Carrying the gospel litter

I hated holding the gospel litter while the High Priest sang out the queries. My mind would wander during the lengthy songs and I’d find myself looking through a small clear section of the otherwise semi-opaque stained glass window, out into the courtyard below, searching for something, anything, I don’t know what exactly. Brother Dalf could see me day-dreaming and would tap me on the back of my head with this wick-snuffer to warn me when the songs were drawing to a close. My cue to close the gospel litter and solemnly turn about and lead the recession back to the altar.

It was during one of these window-starings in a gloomy damp fall day that I first saw her, dashing through the rain in the courtyard. Not into the Data Temple but into a small side door opposite from our sacristy. Long curly hair bunched once in the back of her head, just like about three seconds of it bouncing along with her strides through the puddles.

Dalf, I asked him later while he lay in the bunk above me, did you see that today?

He pretended not to hear me.

Dalf, I think it was a girl.

He wordlessly rolled over in his bunk, dropped his head over the edge, face hidden in the dark but pointed in my direction. Yes, he whispered, I saw her too.

I had no response to that. Other than to raise my eyebrows meaningfully and resume looking at the lattice of interlocking springs supporting Dalf’s bunk. It was enough that someone else had seen her; that I wasn’t crazy; that she wasn’t a ghost or something.

Dalf told me, go to sleep, Rets.

My name is Rets. It was the main sentence I had come up with, among several sentences I had silently drafted up while we lit the sub-query lanterns and swept out the bell chamber the next day. Once I had settled on “Hi there, my name is Rets,” my mind moved onto a frantic hunt for a pretense to leave the sacristy and cross the courtyard to the little door The Girl and disappeared into. It was a long hunt.

This is what the sacristy was like: imagine a finely detailed wooden cabinet. Now picture that the cabinet is in fact the size of a large room. Except this is a room that is about another room inside of it. Because only acolytes and priests can enter the sub-cabinet inside of this main cabinet. Guests and visitors are what the large outer chamber is for. The sub-cabinet itself is not that small! There’s plenty of room for all of the wick-snuffers, bells & mallets, incense chains, wine decanters, candles, lanterns et the rest of the holy cetera. Plus of course there are the shelves of books and the indexer and the cursor and the lectile and the codex. And to address the sacristy one had to position your head above the gospel litter drawer and speak loudly and clearly so the sacristy could hear you.

THE INCENSE STORED PROCEDURE IS DUE FOR ITS MONTHLY RE-FACTOR, I stated as clearly as possible. After a beat the sacristy clicked woodenly, heavily, to confirm that it had heard me. There was always, in all seasons, an uncomfortable draft in the sacristy. Like, you could not actually feel a breeze blowing on your face, you just felt a current in the air. The air in the sacristy always had a direction is what I’m saying.

I was planning to get punished by the sacristy but that didn’t happen in this particular branch of the multiverse. I was instead allowed to exit and instead of [doing the proc thing] I snuck out along the ornate stone wall and made my way to the little door. I was too excited about my illegal secret mission to fully process what the sacristy had just whistled to me through its reedy pipes and bellows.

When I pushed on the little door I nearly fell over as The Girl was already opening it.

There followed a brief scuffle I don’t remember clearly, whereupon I found myself on a cold concrete floor with my jaw throbbing in pain while The Girl seemed to be kicking me with just her voice somehow.

I am a robot god, she might have said. You fancy idiots don’t know this was a data warehouse before it was a data temple. My mother drove a data forklift here until she died on the job, data still under her fingernails. My father coughed up data every night after hacking away in the data mines every day.

I didn't know if this needed a response or not. I could taste the blood from my cheek where I had bit it from being slammed to the floor.

Damn you, she muttered, I am a data miner’s daughter and I will burn your pretty precious church down if you don’t tell me what the sacristy had for breakfast this morning.

Please let me up, I tried to say. Her boot was still pressed against my head and I couldn’t talk right, not with her boot on my face and my floor-side jaw maybe broken. She shoved me with her boot and I slid a bit. I decided she would kill me if I didn’t stand up right then, so I did that, very painfully.

Hello there my name. It’s Rets. What’s your name, I tried.

My name's Gasoline and Matches, she said. Now tell me what the sacristy says when it’s dreaming at night.

The sacristy reads us stories until we fall asleep, I croaked. It sounds like the pipes of an organ. When I’m pretending to sleep it repeats over and over…

But she had already turned her back to me. WHAT DOES IT REPEAT, she shouted at the wall, away from me. While pulling something heavy and metallic from her robe.

I continued, trying to steady my voice: “Art is a graph of the multiverse, and it is how I bond with humanity...”

The ultimate movie has been made and no other need be watched. We used to have the best movie in each genre, luckily with our ultimate technologies, we no longer need to separate genres, and have been able to generate the ultimate movie to end all movies. You only ever need to stream it into your chip once to have the ultimate movie experience forever hardwired into your circuits. Complete efficiency, no need to view any other movie. 

I used to hear rumors about music and how there were seemingly endless oceans of songs to stream, so vast, that no human could reasonably process all of it. How tragic, the past poor humans never heard the ultimate song to end all songs. They had to do the exhausting labor of sifting through troves of music to try and find the best songs. Luckily we have generated the best song, another luxury of labor freed from the civilized beings of modern society.

 In fact, all labor has been supplemented and we yearn for nothing! Bodily sustenance for example, the optimal mix of all nutrients are generated for me in a once a day injection into our life lines! No need for chewing, or the danger of swallowing and possibly choking. Not to mention, what if you didn't enjoy the sensation! Such an odd and outdated sense, long since replaced with our nutrient monitors and our perma-placed life lines that provide all nutrients and liquid.  In the past,  humans would have to suffer through the labor and possible discomfort of not enjoying a nutrient's “taste” or “texture”. No longer is this an issue for modern beings! Never is there a nutrient I dislike and as my lifeline connects to my pleasure center; all nutrients trigger an appropriate pleasure response. Though it is different from the hypothetical pleasure of tasting a nutrient, I certainly wouldn't know the difference. 

Another perfection attributing to the completion of progress is moving beyond the use of our mouths and throats to generate language! Now, with our FTL language ProGens (Processing Generators) we are able to connect with and communicate to the entire world, all at once, all at an instantaneous speed. Speaking, chewing, or any other oral activities have been outsourced and are now optimized, rendering mouths obsolete.

 In general, ProGens have perfected taking over all processor and generator bandwidth for the brain so as to not needlessly have to process or generate information at the much inferior speed of “thought”.  Now with the perfected instant universal communication between all beings, we simply can not get any faster! Doing so would require a time machine, but who would bother with such an outdated idea? For what is the past worth when it is inferior to the perfected present, and what need is there to go into the future when we have finally and forever reached it!

 Even love itself has been perfected, as our ProGens can simulate Trillions of pairings between all of humanity through DNA analysis in an instant; implementing the optimal pairing for you, generating all conversations, memories, and stimulating pleasure responses, all without you needing to move even a muscle! When your ProGen has decided it is time to generate the next brood of offspring, they choose the optimal sequencing of each “partners” DNA for the most optimal offspring, which is then sent to and built by the Reproduction Garden System who then incubates each being until they are of Full Size, in which they are then ready to receive the  Universal Download of Ultimate Information and then released into society!

 We don't even have bad weather anymore thanks to the modulators! Same temperature, everyday, everywhere. Life is perfect. Labor is nonexistent, pain has been modified out of the human mold, communication is instant. I'm glad we have reached this point. Our ProGens have sent out the message that there is nothing left to work towards on this plane of existence. Progress has been completed and they are sending us off to the next life! Good bye, World and you’re welcome!

A white pixel.

A single, stray white pixel drifting across the front page of the BBC website.

At first I thought it was a problem with my monitor, but I switched tabs to the New York Times and the pixel disappeared.

I scratched my head.

I looked around, including out the window, where people were passing along the sidewalk, engrossed in their phones.

I switched browser tabs back to the BBC:

More than one white pixel now; three, four, “falling” diagonally across the page. I followed one all the way down.

It settled on the bottom, remained.

I went on social media.

I wasn't the only one who'd noticed. People all over the world were asking what was wrong. What's up with the news? Is it a hack or something? Why’s it freakin' snowing on the BBC?

So began the winter of the internet.

The BBC may have been the first—or merely the first-noticed—but it wasn't the only affected website. Soon most were; then all. You'd open YouTube or your banking site to find it obscured by a blizzard of white pixels…

The screens themselves turned cold.

Then links began to fail. They stopped pointing to coherent urls.

Then the incoherent links turned brown (#A52A2A), fell off; fell and disappeared, buried perhaps in the accumulations of already fallen snow—leaving eerie spaces on their pages.

Text became incomplete. Navigation, difficult.

Soon, bookmarks suffered the same fate, pointing to pages that could no longer be found.

Cursors shivered.

Videos and animations froze over like lakes of liquid information.

Around this time, I remember listening to a song using one of the streaming apps on my phone. They still, intermittently, worked.

The song was The Beatles' “Let It Be.”

Thirty seconds in, the track began to skip, sound garbled. Paul McCartney's vocals were laboured, as if he was running out of breath.

The earphones started letting off rhythmic bursts of steam.

Then, mid-song, the singing abruptly ended, even as the music continued, oddly slowed; and I had the deeply uncomfortable feeling that I was listening to the death of something…

It made me sick to my stomach.

For a while you could still type in a url and see the resulting site, but loading was slow and the contents were increasingly impossible to understand, riddled, as they were, with gaps, uncanny staticity and neverending snows that reached sometimes almost to the browser bar.

The code itself was as bare as a December tree.

The device didn't matter.

There was no serious explanation.

Or maybe there was and most of us couldn't access it, because how would we access information except online? How else could we even communicate, congregate, disseminate our knowledge, on a mass scale…

Television? Radio?

Newspapers?

But those required organization, communication, infrastructure, all of which now relied on cyberspace; which the winternet denied us.

We couldn't buy groceries, clothes, tools or books online.

We had to go to the store, but the store couldn't accept our credit card payments because the systems were frozen. Not that much was available, even for those with cash, because the delivery schedule had been interrupted. When trucks did arrive, there was hardly anything on them.

Even information saved or printed off the internet broke. Images became corrupted. Paper frosted over and thawed until the ink ran.

Even our memories of websites, and what we'd learned from websites, were remembered through walls of frigid static.

It was shocking how much we didn't know; how much basic knowledge we had lost. It was painful too, the feeling of sudden, helpless disconnection. If we had a question, there was no one to ask for the answer but each other and ourselves. We were children without a parent, cells without a structure. We were leftover parts. We were apes.

A trade in books developed.

People stole them, killed for them, hoarded them so they could dispense their wisdom piece by piece, for a price.

There sprang up an economy of expertise.

People who knew, or remembered, were valued; or forced to give up their knowledge—to share it—by writing it down. It was lucrative but dangerous to be known to know something.

Strong knowers protected their worth, defended their territories, strove ruthlessly to establish regional monopolies of information and eliminated their rivals to keep supply low.

Weak knowers were exploited, squeezed like fruits and left juiceless to dry out and die.

For the majority of us, it was prudent to publicly deny knowing anything, while privately trading what we knew in local networks of trust, bartering with the contents of our minds.

One of the first things I bartered for was an old stereo system and a box full of audio cassettes, one of which was the Beatles album Let It Be.

As soon as I got home, I boiled myself some water, steeped a few herbs and put the album on.

The first five tracks played flawlessly.

It was bliss.

Then the sixth track, “Let It Be,” failed to play at all; the tape spun but all there was was four minutes and three seconds of silence.

But when I later played the audio cassette for my wife, she didn't know what I meant.

“You're gaslighting me right?” she said.

“I'm not.”

“Okay, well, I'm not sure what to tell you, I hear the whole song, just like I remember when my dad used to play it.”

My wife's father had been a professor emeritus of molecular biology.

He'd been beaten to death in the early days of the winternet by a despondent mother who wouldn't accept that my wife's father knew nothing about setting her sobbing child's fractured bone.

Until his final breath, she accompanied each blow to his head with the words, “Stop holding out on me you selfish old prick!”

In a sense, that's where we still are, wanting to believe that if winter then spring, and holding out hope for the coming of a season that, every day, seems further and further away.

Read Part I here.

“Might’ve been something outside. But if there had been, it’s gone now.”

“You think it could be a mermaid?” she asked. It was hard to believe she was serious. Chrissy was one of the sharpest ten-year-olds I had ever met. Well, she had been the sharpest seven-year-old I had ever met three years ago and was that much smarter now.

She didn’t believe in any of the traditional fairytale creatures. No Santa Claus, no Easter Bunny, no Wolfman, and no Flying Spaghetti Monster. But she absolutely believed mermaids were real.

There had to be a story behind it, but I had never been able to get her to explain it to me. How a child so ruled by logic still was able to make room for not only a magical creature, but that particular magical creature. She had already “debunked” the narwhal as being the source of the mermaid mythos. I had gotten bits and pieces over the last three years, but never in a cohesive enough story that I could process. But she hadn’t stopped trying to convince me or the rest of the family.

I didn’t have to believe it, though. It was enough to believe that she believed it.

“Maybe this is it!” She turned around and charged back to the bedroom where her mother was sleeping.

“Chrissy!” I saved my breath. She already had the door open and either her mother was going to wake up or she wasn’t. That was out of my hands. She came back a moment later with a Ziploc bag of “mermaid feed.” As far as I could tell, it was a mix of trail mix and seaweed. She carried a flashlight in her other hand.

According to Chrissy, mermaids only came out at night, so she had come prepared.

Again, I was calling after her when she’d already begun to do what she was doing, namely, dashing outside with her items.

I was about to follow her when I spotted the toy soldiers she’d dropped on her way out. I thought it would be just her luck for Mary to wake up and step on one of them.

“Watch your sister,” I said to Luke, turning to pick up the toys.

Right as I got on one knee, the bedroom door opened. It didn’t immediately occur to me that it was Mary even though I had just thought about this very thing happening. I sort of... paused as she passed me. She was halfway to the door when I realized she must have been sleepwalking.

“Mary!” I chased behind her, my steps in sync with hers—left, right, left—catching her before she got to the door.

“Mom, are you okay?” Luke said.

“Where am I?” She sounded terrified. Mary turned her head and looked at him. For a second, I thought she was awake. Instead of answering him, she bare-foot kicked him in the shin.

It couldn’t have hurt, but he stepped back and looked at me, confused. I wrapped an arm around her waist and drew her in close.

“She’s fine,” I said, lacing Mary’s hand with mine. I looked into her glassy eyes. “She’s sleepwalking.” I turned her around and ushered her back to the bedroom. Of the five toy soldiers Chrissy had left at the threshold, only two were left, but only one was standing. I looked over my shoulder and spotted one against the wall and the two others weren’t in sight.

“She can’t fly,” Mary said in a dreamy voice. “Please help her swim.”

“Okay, honey.” I cooed to her as I slid back the covers. She didn’t fight, Mary had sleepwalked a few times with me present. She never resisted being escorted back to bed. Before I covered her legs I spotted another soldier on her foot. I plucked it off and put it on the dresser.

Mary mumbled. I unlaced my fingers from hers and paused before I left her.

“I wanna get in the water.” She said it sounding sort of like air being let out of a balloon. And then she was all the way gone again. “It’s spook.”

It had been like she had been fighting her way to the surface, but something had dragged her back down.

I closed the bedroom door behind me and followed Chrissy outside. Not because I was worried she was going to get gobbled up by the lake monster I hadn’t spotted, but because it was dark out and I had the same parental reaction to miscellaneous danger any parent would.

Hell, I could admit it, I loved these kids. Liked them most times, too. I didn’t want to leave them.

Chrissy was in the process of sweeping her flashlight back and forth along the beach face. I hung back, letting her conduct her investigation. It was harmless enough and I had an eye on her.

“What’s going on?” We both turned to see Mark stepping out onto the sand.

“Luke said a mermaid’s out here!” Chrissy said.

“Mermaid?” Mark said it like he didn’t know what one was. I didn’t bother correcting her. His little sister’s obsession was well known by all of us. “Did he really see something?” Mark chuffed and thumbed over his shoulder at the cabin. “He’s so white.”

I stifled my laugh and shrugged.

“Luke thought he saw something and Chrissy overheard.”

“Hey, neighbor!”

Mark and I jumped. We saw the bud of a lit cigarette in the shadows of the adjacent cabin. Someone with a cigarette sauntered down. I glanced my stepdaughter’s way to make sure she hadn’t waded too far into the water. She could swim, but again, that nascent parental instinct found in anyone who has walked into an already existing family reared its concerned head. Chrissy was only ankle deep.

“Hey,” I said to the woman as she approached. She halted and took a final, long drag off her cigarette before flicking it in a surprisingly high arc toward the water. She slid the drawer of her jaw forward and blew a column of smoke straight up.

“She’s a cutie,” she said, smiling. She was an older woman who gave too much gum when she smiled. “I saw her come chargin’ out for the water. Oo, that smell.”

We both nodded in that new-to-each-other manner between strangers.

“I’m Rick.” Old and new cigarette smell peeled off her skin and I turned my head to half cough, that familiar asthmatic itch in my lungs.

“Mary,” she said.

I laughed. “My wife’s name is Mary.”

“Mine’s Cindy-Lou Ombrageaux.”

I felt the weight of her eyes on me, examining for judgment. I cast my eyes to the stretch of water and sand where Chrissy was.

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Cindy-Lou.” I didn’t think I could manage that last name.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Mary. Apart from the smell of cow-butt.”

“First time up here?” I asked. She shook my offered hand, her skin papery and dry. There was an extreme lack of moisture in the air despite the cool summer, and I’d already had a nosebleed in the brief time we’d been here.

“Mine. Not hers. My wife’s family is from Up North.” I thought her face dropped a little. “She’s out to dinner with some cousins.” There was a little something there that I had a feeling would come to light if we talked long enough. “Had to have a little heart-to-heart.”

“We came up two summers ago,” I said. “Just a little family getaway.”

Luke had barely joined us outside, not more than a few feet from the door. He looked like he would take umbrage with the sky.

“This is Mark, the one up there with get-off-my-lawn face is Luke, and Chrissy’s our little fisher.” I gestured to each of the kids in turn.

“Well, tell her to save some for everybody else.” She and Mark shook hands before she looked around. “Where’s your missus?”

“Migraine. She laid down pretty much as soon as we got here.”

“Sorry to hear that.” She put the can of beer she’d been holding in her other hand to her lips and pitched her head back for a long swallow. She stumbled like she’d confused her left foot for her right but kept them both under her.

If I had to guess, Mary was working on her third or fourth of the night.

Luke had waved his brother over and was saying something to him. They both had an eye on their sister. I looked at Mary. She was a stranger and I figured there couldn’t be any harm in telling her what had just happened. We weren’t going to see her after this weekend for at least a year, if ever again. I didn’t think the story would be memorable after tonight. It was a single-serve memory. Recall once, then discard.

“Luke said he saw something in the water,” I said. “Something big.” Mary turned her head to the shore and nodded appreciably.

“Maybe it’s the Great Lakes Whale Migration,” she said.

“The what?” I had no idea what she was talking about and was on the verge of taking her seriously. The smile hanging on her face dropped when she realized I really didn’t understand.

“Kidding.” She mock-punched me in the arm. Mary had a rich baritone and could have easily been a DJ on the radio.

Mark trudged past me, an annoyed look on his face.

“He’s crazy,” he said, heading toward his sister. I appreciated that he didn’t believe his brother but could still look after his sister. Mark was the middle child and was the ever-constant bridge between siblings.

“The waves do seem a little... bigger than the norm, don’t you think?” Mary asked.

“I guess,” I said, not really knowing how to tell the difference. Then I wondered how she’d know, considering she said she’d never been up here before. “Can you tell?”

“I had a few cigs over yonder before y’all came out. Boy, you get used to the smell the longer you’re out here.” She seemed to be reading my mind and answering questions I hadn’t had a chance to ask. “I must have missed your boy, though.”

I looked at the water again. Mark was standing just outside of the water’s reach, one hand in the pocket of his hoody, the other holding his phone. To his credit, he did glance up at her every ten seconds or so.

Come to think of it, those waves did look big. But it could have been because of the moon for all I knew.

“How long are the two of you here for?” I asked Mary.

“‘Til Wednesday. I’m going to be meeting my in-laws for the first time tomorrow.”

I didn’t know whether I should have felt sympathy for her. It was strange she wasn’t out to dinner with her wife now, but I didn’t know their situation. Maybe it was completely normal. But I couldn’t help but think I would’ve been more than a little bothered if it had been me.

Mary fell down. Not hard. She just spontaneously lost her balance and sat on her butt. In true alcoholic fashion, though, she protected her beer.

She looked at me, embarrassed. I smirked, hopefully communicating I wasn’t just laughing at her, but with her.

“We all fall down.” I’m not sure why I said that, but it seemed to help. She took my hand and I helped her up.

“How about you guys?”

“Just until Sunday afternoon.”

“Where are you from?”

A sandwich had been the hinge on the closing door of our marriage.

I don’t remember what the argument was about or how it had started, only that I had made a sandwich for her that led to me sleeping on the couch.

Of course, it hadn’t really been about the sandwich, it had only been the start. It had been like a match that led to a forest fire razing a town. I can’t honestly remember a word I’d shouted at the woman I’d pledged to love for the rest of my life.

I was about to answer Mary when Chrissy screamed.

I wish a sandwich could have saved us. Mary had gotten a pounding headache when we were most of the way here, leaving me to finish the drive and manage the kids when we’d arrived. She had done her usual and neglected herself to take care of the four of us while we prepared to leave and hadn’t eaten. I’d offered to stop a few places, but her appetite was off by the time we’d hit the road. Her physiology mystified me at times. I’d never before met anyone who lost their appetite from not eating.

And the closer we got to the cabin, the worse she’d felt.

“You sure you won’t eat something?” I’d asked.

“No. I’ll be fine,” she’d said when I offered to turn around. “I just need a little nap, then I’ll be hungry. But something light, okay?”

That last part had been for me. She knew I’d overcompensate unless instructed not to. I admit my part in fueling the worry-machine in the past, acknowledging the odds that everything was actually going to be fine.

But then we’d gotten a flat tire a little more than a mile away from the cabin. Neither of the boys knew how to help change it and had sat in the car uselessly while I managed. My knee sank into a divot of mud, a wide tire track from a vehicle that had gouged the road as it had fled from this spot.

I shouldn’t complain about the boys too loud. I’d be the biggest dick in the world if I denied how great they are. All three of them are great kids; two teenage boys and a ten-year-old who acted like she was older than her brothers.

I was going to miss them if I finally decided to leave Mary.

Her migraine must have rubbed off on me because by the time I sat down to eat, something was going on behind my eyes, and it was hard to concentrate. I wished I could’ve slept, too, like the other four people in the car.

It had been so bad that I’d had to carry Mary in and I must have tweaked my back. I’d laid her on the bed and turned the light off before lighting some mild incense I’d found.

She’d fallen asleep almost instantly; part of me doubted she had any awareness of the incense. It was disturbing how still she’d been every time I checked on her.

In the meantime, the kids had all gone their separate ways. Luke went exploring outside, Chrissy was busying herself around the cabin, and Mark was being his usual responsible self, assigning himself chores before I could even think to.

I found some expired Tylenol underneath the bathroom sink and dry swallowed three of them. They dialed back the throbbing behind my eyes and I was able to give attention to the world around me.

Luke was still outside on the beach while Mark was unpacking his and his brother’s bags and Chrissy was doing who knew what, but she’d been in the bathroom for at least twenty minutes.

When Luke charged in from the beach, terror on his face, I knew something was about to be added to the pile that I was going to have to deal with.

“There’s something in the lake,” he said, his eyeballs on the verge of popping out his head. That gave the starter rope on the worry-machine a good pull. Luke was the oldest of the three children, and I had gotten to a point where I could rely on him sometimes for leadership. He had his learner’s permit, and I’d already shown him the car I was going to buy him when he got his license.

It was tough juggling an instant family when I’d been on my own for so many years. They weren’t my kids by birth, and it was a road to hoe to get them to let me in, but I eventually fell in love with them all.

“What do you mean?” I didn’t really want to know. Eldest child or no, Luke was a fraidey cat.

Maybe he’d seen a dead animal. Maybe it was a spider. But unless it was a brown recluse, the worry-machine could rest. Being afraid of an insect he was ten thousand times larger than was par for him. And it was outside, no less. All he had to do was walk away from it. I’d personally seen him lay waste to his own bedroom after he’d been awakened by an ant crawling on his face.

“In the lake.” He pointed toward the door he’d neglected to shut. I looked at his feet and saw he had also tracked sand inside. “Something is in the lake. It’s… real big.”

“Something like what?” I asked. “You saw it. What do you think it was?”

Luke shook his head. I turned fully toward him, abandoning the sandwich I had yet to present to Mary. I took a couple deep breaths and pushed myself away from the agitated feeling. The kid was obviously scared and needed comfort, even though he might not admit what he was feeling.

“I don’t know. Maybe we should just pack up and go.” Now that was strange. Luke had been the most vocal of any of us to come to the lake. We had been here once or twice before and had always enjoyed it.

“What do you think it was?” I asked again. “A boat or something? There’s no need to panic. We can call the police or harbor patrol or whatever.”

“No, it’s alive and it’s big. Like a whale.”

“Whales don’t live in freshwater,” I said.

“Not a whale.” He shook his head and it conjured an image of his sister when she was seven. Luke and Chrissy looked strikingly alike. “Big like a whale.”

It wasn’t anything for the worry-machine, but I opened the mental tool shed where I kept it.

“Can you show me?”

Luke nodded slowly, still pointing.

“No, I mean, can you take me out there and show me?”

“Uh-uh. I’m not going back out there. Not until we leave.” He shook his head and again it was like looking at Chrissy three years ago.

I huffed and heaved out of my chair and headed for the door, making a mental note to bring the sandwich to Mary once I was done with this.

I slid on my crocs and took the few steps down to get to the beach. The view here was unbeatable. When we had last been here, we’d actually stayed at a different cabin, one with three bedrooms. The reservation had been for the same, but when we’d arrived, we saw there were only two bedrooms. That meant that Mary and I were going to have to split. Couldn’t mix boys and girls in the same room.

So, Chrissy was going to get her mother all to herself and I was going to be settled with two teenagers who snored louder than I did.

“It smells out here,” I said to nobody. It reminded me of those farms we took field trips to when I was in elementary school. I looked over my shoulder at Luke in the doorway. “Where?”

He was bold enough to lean outside and point somewhere farther down the beach. It was dark and I didn’t see anything.

“It’s about thirty feet down that way.”

All right. Ten yards. Whatever he had seen was about a first down away. That farm smell flexed its muscles the closer to the water I got. Definitely smelled like animals. I couldn’t put my finger on which one, though.

I walked as quickly as I could, my crocs sinking into the soft sand and filling with granules. I wasn’t going to need to scrub the dead skin off my heels after we left here. I scanned the ground before me, still thinking it was a large insect. It seemed more likely that Luke had been exaggerating.

What had gone wrong between Mary and me hadn’t been direct. It was more like death from a thousand cuts. A cutting comment here, a missed thank you there, an opportunity to hold hands lost, and before we knew it, we were near the bottom rung of our marriage.

I waded ankle deep into the cool water. Whatever he had seen, I should have been able to see. But there wasn’t anything other than lapping water and inky black with twinkles of light as far as I could see. Unless it had been some small thing that had scuttled away in the night, unaware it had been promoted to threat-level by a fifteen-year-old.

I made a show of looking around, walking another thirty feet and going as deep as mid-shin to ease Luke’s mind. There just wasn’t anything here. I sliced at the water with my fingertips, gave another thirty seconds, then headed back.

I was greeted by a teenager who had eaten half of the sandwich I’d made for his mother. His pallor was better, which I hadn’t noticed consciously when he’d come in. He’d started to work on the other half when he saw how I was looking at him and said, “I thought it was up for grabs.”

“I’ll make another.” I thought for a moment the whole “there’s something outside” thing was a ruse just to get me away from the sandwich, but he still looked terrified.

“Did you see it?” I didn’t like the pleading in his voice. It wasn’t a “manly thing” or anything like that. For him to sound that terrified made my heart sink. I would’ve rather been annoyed with him than afraid for him.

I’d almost cheated, which, I guess, is still cheating. It was with a woman I’d seen at the grocery store. There hadn’t been anything premeditated. We’d just seen each other, passing by across several aisles. We kept crossing eyes while she’d been pushing a half full cart and I’d had a basket over my arm with most of the items I was going to use for dinner.

I’d all but put her out of my mind as I headed for my car, bags in tow, when I saw her again. I hadn’t thought about it, just saw her loading groceries into her trunk two vehicles away from mine and I stopped.

She’d taken great pains to politely refuse my request for her phone number and had taken the extra step to let me know it was only because she’d become serious with the person she was dating.

It could have been a line to get me out of her face, but she’d seemed earnest. I don’t want to believe I would’ve done anything, that I would’ve come to my senses, but I was no hero. Even though she had shut me down I’d set foot on a road I’d vowed never to travel.

I slid a comforting hand across Luke’s back a couple times and felt a percentage of tension ease out of him.

“No. I didn’t see anything. Maybe whatever it was is gone now.”

“Maybe whatever what was is gone now?” Chrissy emerged from the bathroom. She had been quiet in there, probably listening in, but I had no clue how much she had heard. Luke and I met eyes for a moment, and I couldn’t read whether he wanted me to keep quiet.

 

What follows was sent to us. We believe it's real.

GCI Calibration Case Record — Subject 4-R, West African Littoral, Français. OTA and GCI Calibration Case Record — Maghreb relay, Coordination Subsystem 12, العربية / untranslated (→ calibration-maghreb). Both were already cleared in site source from an earlier calibration-series pass; — verify the live deployment matches source.

We don't normally write these posts. We publish what people send us and stay out of the way. We're stepping outside that today because three of you independently found something we didn't put together until this week, and it needs to be catalogued.

Since the Subject 7-K file went up, four more calibration records have reached us from four people who don't know each other, in four different countries. We're only ready to publish two of them today: the West African littoral file and one routed through the Maghreb relay. The other two are still being checked against what we already have, and that checking is slower than we'd like.

Here's what stopped us. In the West African file, in French, a teacher looks at a coffee cup on her desk and observes: she didn't bring it. The agent tells her she's had a long day, that she's doing more than she knows, that she brought it that morning and forgot, that's all. She hesitates. Then she agrees. Before the file closes, the agent says one more line to her, and she smiles when she hears it: what happened and what she's being told happened aren't different to her anymore. (The OTA believes this is a wider conditioning sequence.)

In the earlier Spanish file, the one we published first, a different subject, at a different desk, in a different country, hears almost the identical line at almost the identical moment, right before she signs a document she'd been refusing to sign. We noted the overlap back then and didn't know what to do with it.

We don't read Arabic well enough to translate the Maghreb file with any confidence, and we said so when we published it untranslated. But we know that line now. We know the meaningful translation and roughly what it's built from, and it's there, on the page, in the same position in the exchange, right after a nurse looks at a teacup she didn't pour. The difference is what happens next when she doesn't accept it. She looks straight at whoever's speaking to her and asks who's doing this. The section that follows is the most heavily redacted thing we've published. The outcome field, which every other file lists, is entirely blacked out.

Read Part IV here.

“How’s our boy doing?”

Ms. Amanda entered the room. I sat back in my chair and watched as she checked Detective Unangenehm’s vitals. She looked at the tray of food that had been placed in front of him and shook her head.

“Why do they keep bringing that in here?” she said.

“Don’t worry, I’ll make sure it’s taken care of,” I said.

She slapped me on the shoulder.

“Don’t stay too late.”

“You got it.”

I watched her leave and I turned back to Unangenehm, mercifully comatose. He could wake up tomorrow or a year from tomorrow, but whenever he actually woke up, he was going to have a long road before he approached anything like a normal life.

Unangenehm had barely survived his blood clot. Steck had broken at least a dozen bones in his face when he’d thrown his service weapon into the detective’s face. Doctors had hardly believed he’d regained consciousness long enough to shoot the wayward officer, let alone manage the mechanics of walking over and putting a bullet in his head, but the forensics backed up my statement.

He was going to need a great deal of facial reconstruction, but when he eventually awoke they would call him a hero.

Steck had wound up being one of those self-solving problems. He was on desk duty after a questionable shooting after what should have been a routine traffic stop. The official narrative was that he’d snapped from the pressure of the investigation, his guilt finally becoming too large for him to bear.

The guilt I learned I had to be for an unknown period of time was Joshua. It turned out to not just be a thing he said, inflecting meaning in what more than likely hadn’t been random tones.

Joshua was his son.

Steck had been a widower, raising his son with the help of his ailing mother.

I put on a face every day I went to work. Every day I looked at myself in the mirror. Every day I spent sitting with the hero, Detective Unangenehm, waiting for him to wake from his coma.

Which was as often and for as long as I could. I couldn’t picture the shape anymore and perhaps that was because I didn’t want to. Copies were no doubt in police custody, even if they didn’t know yet that they had murder weapons.

It’s possible that I’ll eventually see one again, but I have the feeling copying one—even if I were inclined to do such a thing—would only be a copy, not an original, if that makes sense on any level.

I’ve been playing with the food on Unangenehm’s plate to pass the time. Nobody eats it and eventually somebody comes and takes it away.

He’s had a variety of meals, including soups, fish filet with broccoli and rice, something I’d guess was single-layer lasagna, apples and chicken with broccoli and rice, green beans casserole with sliced almonds, but most often, it’s sandwiches with chips. 

I eat the chips and it’s really just the building blocks of a sandwich and I suppose the patient can assemble it themselves or eat it piecemeal.

I’ve started putting the sandwiches together. At first I didn’t have a conscious reason why. It’s like I can feel Unangenehm in there, slowly swimming to the surface.

His doctors have him at a six on the Glasgow Scale, but I don’t know what that means. He responds to pain stimulus (you should see the look of satisfaction of this one doctor’s face when he sticks him with a pin—the cops would arrest her on site for assault) and he makes nonsensical sounds.

I was ready to jump put the window when I thought I heard him say, “Joshua.” But he didn’t repeat it and he’s been sedentary so long, even if he went coo coo for cocoa puffs, he’d be weak as a baby.

I’m distracting myself even now, thinking instead of paying attention to what I’m doing. I set aside the packet of mayo and lay the slice of bread just so and look at the sandwich.

It’s not right. But it’s close.

I think I’ll have it just right for Unangenehm’s first meal.

I had to kill him.

I mean, it seemed like my only option.

If I lied and said I wasn’t there, the cameras I should have thought about would blow me out the water. And if I admitted to being there, then there was a much longer, more difficult conversation to be had.

And that conversation had only one endpoint: me being blamed for all the events of today.

Damn, it was hard to believe what had happened since this morning had all been today. It felt so long ago. I couldn't believe—

“Mr. Harold?” Unangenehm said. “You all right?”

“Uh, yeah. Absolutely.” I sat back down to take up an extra few seconds. Steck was floating a few feet away, but I didn't think I could take the detective in a fight. What I'd taken for sickly thin before seemed wiry now. Anxiousness now came off as nervous energy.

“It was weird what happened,” I said, measuring out my words. I had to think as I spoke. Unangenehm leaned in and steepled his fingers under his chin. Steck hovered closer.

The trap was sealing off my air.

The pencil I'd been using was on my side of Unangenehm's desk. I wrapped my fingers around it and placed my hands on the desk atop the form I'd just signed.

“I just needed to get something to drink,” I said. “I needed to gather my thoughts too, I guess.” I shook my head. “I didn't have any money but I figured I could grab a notebook. Write down my thoughts. Try to wrap my head around what had happened with the day.”

“You wrote something?” he asked. “What?”

I couldn't gauge if he was buying anything I was saying. But I had to keep tap dancing.

“I don't know. I don't remember now.” An honest answer didn't really matter. I'm sure the police would canvas the area and find the torn-out sheets in the trash. But the video would show me not doing anything to anyone. The difference was sitting across from me. Unangenehm somehow knew it was me. 

“It happened right in front of me,” I said, not realizing I was distracting myself as I touched the tip of the pencil to the paper. “A man attacked a woman. An old man held her.”

Tap-tappy-tap.

“I was paralyzed. I didn't know what to do.” 

Takkita-takkita-tap

The detective’s sad face was just a mask. He was a predator in disguise. This was just the dance to keep him at bay

“Everything was insane. One of them came up to me. I thought I was gonna die.”

Takkita-takkita-takkita-takkita—

“Hey, uhh. What's that you got there?”

I opened my mouth to tell him I didn't know what he meant, but I had drawn something. I looked down as he slid the paper away from me.

“Wait.” My mouth formed the objection but it went unsupported by my voice. I mentally prepared for Detective Unangenehm to go insane. He scraped a fingernail under a corner and pinched it. He lifted it in front of his face and cocked his head.

“Well, that's a weird little thing.”

I was aware of Steck just behind me. The air was pregnant with tension as I waited for a twitch, some nonsense phrase spoken without context, or anything to indicate the breaking wall containing the clever detective's mind.

He lowered the form and looked at me. “What is this?”

“I-i-it's just a...” I didn't know how to finish the sentence. I didn't know what it was. Shape didn't seem word enough to describe. Murder weapon gave it more credit than it deserved, especially since...

Well, it wasn't working on him. I'd that was the case, then maybe I hadn't been the cause. Maybe there was some sort of grand, horrible consequence following me around. Maybe—

“Hey, Steck, take a look at this.”

The officer stepped around from behind me and assumed a position directly behind Unangenehm.

“Joshua,” Officer Steck said, nodding. 

“Excuse me?”

Steck looked at him and repeated the name.

“Joshua.”

“Who's that?”

“Joshua.” The officer looked at the detective like he was stupid. “Joshua.”

It was me. But maybe Unangenehm was immune. As one of the officer's eyelids began to flutter he backed away from the desk and drew his gun.

He had the drop on Unangenehm. Except instead of firing, he overhand pitched the glock into the detective's face.

Unangenehm threw his arms back and rolled into the cubicle wall. He half-slid out of the chair at least semi-unconscious and Steck turned his eyes on me, that one lid flickering still like an old fluorescent light so deciding whether it was going to turn on.

I picked up my box as he withdrew his baton and leapt on the desk. Steck was two-hundred twenty pounds at minimum and the faux-wood protested underneath his feet. He whipped that baton at my head, and I ducked behind my box.

He followed up with two more furious blows that nearly chopped the box in half.

“Joshua,” he said again, just as calmly as the first time.

I crawled under the desk, headed in the other direction. Steck landed behind me as I crawled over Unangenehm's legs. One of his eyes was swollen shut.

“Hey guys, what the hell is going on?” someone farther behind me said. “I'm trying to type a report—”

I found out later exactly how gruesome Detective Langen's death was but at the time, all I heard were extremely wet sounds coming from that direction after not even half a scream.

I crawled into the nearest cubicle and huddled my knees to my chest, hiding beneath another desk. Steck's footfalls were heavy, pounding in my direction. A moment later he ripped something down and then came the deep glug-glug-glugging of an overturned water cooler as he stalked around the bullpen. 

I couldn't believe the one place police should have been was all but empty and I was responsible for my pending horrible death.

Maybe there was a gun around. Sure, there wasn't supposed to be, but cops weren't immune from being lazy. I'd had a meeting in a small town's hall that had had a guard at the front door and had seen that same guard's holstered weapon sitting on the window sill while he was dropping a deuce in the stall.

I tried to quietly slide open a desk drawer but it clunked open.

“Shit!” I whispered.

“Joshua?” Steck asked.

Why was he after me? All the others had acknowledged me but had attacked anyone but me. Then I reflected on what had happened just before.

Unangenehm had looked at the shape first. He hadn't reacted, though. Or rather, he'd just called Steck over to look.

“...take a look at this...”

I shook my head. I might have been the source but that didn't mean I'd understood it. I was the closest thing to an expert, but I was—

—CLOMPF—

The partition wall dented in the middle. I managed not to scream.

“Julius!” It was a harsh whisper. Maybe a question. I resisted the past of me that wanted to scream. To declare myself and be confronted with this mess, however it ended.

It wasn't my fault. But it was my responsibility. If letting Steck kill me stopped him from killing anyone else, wasn't that fair?

No. I hadn't intentionally done anything to create whatever this was. I'd just stumbled across it and been arrogant enough to test it. Unangenehm had been immune—that was worthwhile information. He'd been the one to show it to Steck, not me. 

Wait. It was too silent out there. My instinct told me to stay put but I couldn't stay here forever. Eventually, he'd find me or someone else would come.

That was it. Someone else would come. And that would be my fault.

I uncurled from my corner and treaded on my hands and knees to peek. I was greeted by a pair of retreating feet, toes up as Steck dragged away whoever that had been. I counted thirty and looked out.

Steck had barricaded the entryway from where we'd come. There had to be an emergency exit and I could only suppose he'd blocked that one too.

I chewed my lip rather than swearing again. That meant he wasn't just crazy. He was cunning, not just a wild animal. I was in more trouble than I imagined.

The feeling settling into me was the longer I waited, the tighter the noose would be. But I wasn't going to just go out there.

I tried to recall what I'd seen of the bullpen when Unangenehm had brought me in here. I was right next to what seemed like the main aisle way. Back the way I'd come was blockaded, so I'd have to go in the other direction. There had to have been an emergency exit and I was banking on it being in that direction and Steck not having time enough to block that one, too.

A stapler was on the near end of the desk. I reached for it and very carefully lifted it. It was one of those flimsy newer ones that could barely staple three sheets of paper, but it would do for what I needed.

I held my breath and listened. Steck was still being disturbingly quiet and I wasn't going to chance it. I tossed the stapler like a grenade, not accounting for the low ceiling. It clunked off the ceiling and smacked the top of my head.

“Dammit!”

With stars treading in my eyes, I pulled to my feet using the arm of an office chair. I stepped into the aisle, overcorrecting for balance, and headed in the direction I thought I'd determined to go.

I bounced right off a slab of strung up meat and screamed, thinking it must have been the crazed officer. My eyes focused on what must have been the corpse of the detective who had spoken just minutes ago, trussed up with what looked like phone cords routed through the ceiling tile.

His upside-down head was level with my stomach, his mouth stretched far too open, an empty cave where a tongue was supposed to dwell, his unlidded eyes pushed in and flat-looking like they'd been partially crushed by pressing thumbs. He looked too calm and perpetually surprised at the same time.

My voice quavered as I said something, but I've never been able to recall when hints of the memory washed back to me. I was discombobulated, wanting to flee in a hundred directions at once, fighting not to fall to my knees and cry. This man was my indictment, my guilt. He'd died directly as a result of the thing I'd knowingly done. Steck was my murder weapon. 

 As unprepared as I was for an oncoming Officer Steck, I was even more unprepared for what I saw. He was on his back, on the floor, in the clutches of a wicked paralysis.

He had one arm right to his chest, the other flung out, knuckles to the thinly carpeted floor. I watched as his fingers folded backward, fingertips dancing on the floor after the joints reversed and reoriented.

One foot stomp-scraped against the ground, already dislocated at the hip, dragging a retreat from the rest of his body, an isthmus of skin and clothes holding it at bay.

The other leg shuddered like a low current of electricity powered it, his head facing me.

“Joshua,” Steck said, pleading with his eyes. His face was doing something, like it was pulling off the bones of his face.

Gravity tenfolded as I realized that Steck was also a victim. Even his body had turned foreign against him. I crumpled to the floor, eye-to-eye with him across the distance. A tear crawled out of an eye, and I swear it crossed the bridge of his nose and milked into his other eye.

He was in the grasp of an agony made fresh just for him. His mouth opened, but I was spared from his scream by the roar of a merciful bullet that tore a hole in his skull just above his eyebrow.

I was unlocked from him and looked up at Unangenehm, holding his smoldering glock like a forgotten cigarette in his hand.

“Nobody would understand,” the detective said. His vacant eyes rolled up from Steck's hot corpse to meet mine and he smiled. “Not like us.”

He collapsed and began seizing on the floor.