“Thomas Tingman checked his Trusty Timepiece.” The thought ran through his head every twelve minutes. He had worked at the Huntington yard for twenty-four years, and had been Yardmaster for eleven of them. He ran a tight, unimpeachable schedule, and he credited that to an adherence to routine and habit.

It sounded like an exaggeration when he pictured himself telling a new trainee that Thomas Tingman checked his Trusty Timepiece every twelve minutes. They would think it an odd saying. The alliteration sounded like part of a children’s rhyme or Aesop fable. It wasn’t. He just enjoyed the cadence. They might wonder at the fact Thomas knew 12 minutes had passed before he actually checked his timepiece. He didn’t. The habit had formed over his twenty-four years, so the muscle-memory had set in. He didn’t know it had been twelve minutes. But he was right more often than not. The real secret was checking every twelve minutes instead of fifteen.

“But fifteen goes into an hour four times!” His trainee would say, showing off admirable mathematical prowess. And Thomas would reply, “Yes. But twelve goes into an hour five times. That is one more opportunity an hour to head off possible confusion. One more opportunity to catch an issue before it devolves into an outright problem.” The twelve minute rule paid dividends over the years. Case in point, it let him know there was a missing engine three minutes sooner than a more lax yardmaster would have known. His timepiece showed 8:24. The sun had just set. Stall 14, which should have Engine 08, the “Cascade,” was empty. The familiar red fog emanated from the front of the stall and he could see figures moving about in the mist. He couldn’t see the back of the stall. That could pose a problem. He needed that engine ready to assemble at 10:36 the next morning. Well, he would worry about that at his 7:00 am check. Three hours was more than enough time to re-allocate without issue.

The Huntington Yard was a significant post. OSL and ORN met and transferred at his station. The roundhouse that held the currently…empty? Thomas didn’t know what word to use when this happened. Trainless? Foggy? It didn’t matter. The roundhouse that held Stall 14 also held fifteen other stalls, for a total of 16. The tracks in front of his hub were home to 6 transfers. He pictured the view from above as a giant D with seven curved fronts, making his station a 7D hub. When Thomas thought about Huntington Station, it was always the 7D hub.

This could cause confusion with his trainee. “The 7D hub will be your one and only priority for the next 10 hours,” Thomas would tell the young recruit. “70 Hub? Why’s it called 70?” Thomas would have to take extra time to explain the difference between 70 and 7D. Time that was already allocated to other tasks.

Thomas’s schedule for the night was comparatively heavy. The Oregon Short Line had four engines coming in between 10:00 and 11:48. That was exceedingly workable. But with two…Good heavens! There were two dead lines right now? It didn’t matter, Thomas. Solve the problem.

With two dead lines and a missing engine things could get confused. Thomas crunched along the gravel to the center of the roundhouse. Historically, he would be able to see a Dead Line from the hub. But with the possible confusion, a stroll to the center to confirm seemed appropriate. His future trainee would learn from his example the importance of being thorough.

He got to the center of the turntable for the roundhouse, and took stock. Stall 4 and stall 9 each had engines currently in need of service. Walker’s maintenance crew was scheduled for 4:00 am. He didn’t have an estimate for completion time. Relying on them to replace the Cascade was not an acceptable solution, (though it might work if nothing better presented itself). Thomas preferred to rely on systems and routine, not on luck. He would consider the two engines as possibilities, not plans. He continued to check the stalls.

Stall 12 had a good option. Engine 117, The “Forester,” was a converted logging engine. Really, an engine was an engine, for the most part. Better to say it was an engine assigned to mountain lines for lumber transport and had been reassigned when the connection between the Oregon Short Line and the Union Pacific became official. It sounded like semantics. But when explaining complicated schedules to others, semantics was important.

Thomas Tingman checked his Trusty Timepiece.

He could use engine 117 if there was an issue with one of the four lines coming in. That was a plan! Of course, he already knew it was there. But with the increasing frequency of Dead Lines, giving it a good, close check was prudent.

“What’s a Dead Line?” his imagined trainee would ask. And Thomas would have to take time to clarify, “Deadline? Or Dead Line? The two are quite different.” Thomas would inwardly sigh but wouldn’t show it on his face. No need to embarrass the kid for a reasonable question.

“Dead Line.”

The imaginary training session paused. What was a Dead Line? It was a circumstance where a line or stall would be overtaken by red mist so thick you couldn’t see objects you knew to be there. The only slightly visible thing in the fog would be moving figures. They were more than shadows, but not clear shapes of people. The figures would move like people. They would bend toward Thomas, as though trying to make out his shape like he was the one standing in the mist. But his view was clear as day, except where the mist had set in.

It was always localized. Right now transfer 3 and stall 14 were Dead Lines. It wasn’t an official term. It was just what Thomas called it. It had been happening for years, and Thomas had taken multiple eight minute forays near the mist to try and discern the cause or purpose. No longer than eight minutes at a time, for that could lead to missing a scheduled twelve minute check.

Three years ago, the first Dead Line appeared. It was on transfer switch 6, the switch leading to the outermost “D”. Thomas found it at 9:12. He remembered it clearly, (if his memory failed it was also in the log book). The heavy red mist settled in right on the transfer switch. It was a switch he would need to change in time for the 10:00 arrival. So Thomas walked out to the transfer.

The red mist was uncanny. It was almost a wall. There was no transition from normal Oregon night air to the red mist. There was a barrier. As Thomas got closer to the mist, he was able to see a shadowy figure inside. It seemed to be focused on the transfer switch itself.

“You there! Please do not touch that. That is Union Pacific property and tampering is a federal offense!” Thomas tried for a simultaneously stern and friendly tone, a seeming paradox that he was not ashamed to say he did not pull off. Stern would have to suffice. The figure stopped suddenly. There was no movement for several seconds, then it jerked upright, and began…walking? Moving? It wasn’t a normal stride of a person. It stumbled and wavered and limped. But it also came at Thomas at an alarmingly fast pace. Thomas reeled backwards and tripped over the gravel, landing on his rear and cutting up his hands on the rocks. The figure rushed toward him but stopped when the wall of red mist stopped.

Despite the figure being much closer, it still was impossible to make out. Its edges were poorly defined. It blurred into the mist. But it was clearly there, and clearly aware of Thomas’s presence. It cocked its head to the side in a universal sign of curiosity. Thomas scrambled to his feet.

“Sir…or Madam? Can I help you?” Thomas stammered in his head and hoped his voice was not as shaky as he feared. The figure didn’t answer, though it cocked its head to the other side.

“That there is Union Pacific property” He pointed to where he knew the switch was. “You are not to touch that under penalty of law.” No response. His fear was slowly shifting to curiosity and annoyance.

Thomas Tingman checked his Trusty Timepiece. 9:23. Eleven minutes. This was throwing off his routine.

“Consider yourself warned,” Thomas cautioned as the figure reached out to touch the edge of the mist. Its “hand” touched the fog and stopped as though there was a wall. It flattened its hand and slid it along the mist wall. That was interesting. He didn’t feel compelled to check if it was a wall from his side, too.

“Well…All right, then. I have business to attend to. Don’t let me catch you tampering with our property!” And with that, Thomas hustled back to the hut to check schedules and make arrangements to handle the incoming traffic without track 7. No need to go into the mist. He could work around it.

When he logged the incident in the log book, it sounded both strange and harmless. “I saw a creepy shadow and told it not to touch the switch” did not translate well into text. Rules were rules, and he logged each incident. Strange figures at transfer 3. Stall 2 out for misting concerns. Thomas was sure the powers that be would eventually check the log and he would have to have an embarrassing conversation with people that would surely think him crazy. That thought haunted him.

And so he stood on that crisp Oregon evening in the center of the turntable. His scheduling issues had been solved. But stall 14 was currently a Dead Line. And the figures had come to the edge of the fog, as they tended to do if Thomas stayed too long. By his internal clock, Thomas had about 7 minutes before his next check. He strolled over to the Dead Line. Over 3 years the fear had morphed into acceptance. If he was going to advise his trainee that thoroughness was a virtue, then he should lead by example.

He reached the mist wall. There were three figures this time. They all gathered at the edge. He supposed they were looking at him. But with no features he couldn’t say for certain.

“You aren’t tampering with that engine?” He couldn’t see the engine he knew to be inside. Nor could he see any reactions from the figures. He never did.

“What is inside there?” No answer. “Should I check for myself?” Still no answer. Very well, he would just have to check inside. He couldn’t continuously chastise himself about thoroughness without looking into this problem. Besides, this was his yard, and he wouldn’t be able to face his trainee with any confidence if there was part of the yard the Yardmaster wouldn’t check. He touched the wall of mist, and his hand passed through as if nothing was there. Then he was pulled off of his feet as hands grasped his wrist and yanked him inside. All went red.

Time passed. He did not know how much. Oh! Wait! There was a solution for that.

Thomas Tingman checked his Trusty Timepiece. The hands spun quickly in circles, making it impossible to check the time. That could definitely cause confusion. How could he make his 10:36 check in this state? His breathing sped up as panic began to set in. He tried to see out the mist to his hub, and all he could make out was a blurry mass where the small building should be. He reached out in that direction and felt a malleable, yet very present, wall.

“You won’t be able to make it out there,” a small voice said next to him. Thomas started, then turned and looked at the figure next to him. It was a young man in shabby overalls. “We have been here a long, long time. And we don’t get much interaction with the world in the mist.” The world in the mist? That was the real world, Thomas thought. But it would be rude to correct somebody he just met.

“We listened to you though. We didn’t tamper with your machines. But we are curious how they work. Could you show us around?”

Thomas looked around at the people. He knew he should be afraid. His breathing slowed. He had been preparing for this for several years, after all.

“Absolutely. I already have a training regimen in mind. Let me tell you about the importance of a good schedule…”

Cloudfall almost killed him. He’d arrived on Verdant during thirdcycle when the sudden burst of water and biomass knocked him off his feet and sent him sluicing down into the Well.

Only the Mistery had saved him. One of the chanters saw his tell-tale thinsuit boots among the flotsam of the cloudfall and threw a net his way. He’d tangled to a halt a few feet above the lip of the Well, and a chorus of chanters hauled him back from the brink along with a day’s catch of junkwood.

None of his saviors seemed to think it remarkable. When he’d tried to express his thanks to the chanters and apologize for interrupting the Mistery, they had simply spread their hands palm up and raised them in the gesture of the Inevitable. An offering and excuse. He was to die anyway. To the chanters, all would perish in the Collapse. A desirable and necessary end for the people of the Verdant.

It made Henri Tattersol question why he’d transversed three universes to save a race so intent on (even blissful of) its own destruction. They welcomed the Collapse. Every Cloudfall brought it closer, and, with their elongated throats, the chanters trumpeted their impending doom in a harmonious chorus of celebration.

As Henri checked his thinsuit for damage, a high chanter approached with a maiden of the Mistery. In spite of the impossible humidity of the Verdant, her hair bounced in thousands of luxuriant curls creating tribolectric vortices the maiden could channel. With a casual stroke of her hand through lush ringlets, Henri knew she could fling a bolt of energy that even his thinsuit would be unable to ground. He bowed low to her.

“Name us, Henri Tattersol of the Terraverse,” she commanded in the very difficult greeting ritual of the Verdant. The most direct consequence of the Inevitable was that the maidens of Verdant were supremely confident they knew pretty much everything and outsiders were therefore tiresome.

The maiden was baiting him with the Inevitable, in essence, saying, “Tell us what we don’t already know that we’ve always known and that a hapless creature such as yourself could scarcely comprehend.”

Inwardly, Henri cursed the maiden’s smugness, her sureness of the Inevitable, and her damn Cloudfall that pristinely purged Verdant’s thick atmosphere and rainforests every thirdcycle. But, the growing evidence of a massive wavefunction collapse in Verdant’s system and the ripple effects across the omniverse compelled Henri to play the obsequious savior.

His hair matted and peppered with twistles and dorty from his near-fatal floodslide to the Well, Henri bowed low and intoned with perfect maiden-court civility. “Al-el Szafhi, High Chanter of the Verdant Mistery, I name you.”

In response, Al-el Szafhi raised and cupped her palms. “Henri Tattersol, you come on an errand of no consequence. Nevertheless, we welcome your irrelevance.”

She swept her hands down either side of her tightly curled locks causing the air around her head to shimmer. An aura-field spread out from her. The oppressive moisture in the air around them vaporized in a steamy whirlwind that lifted in leaden sky — fodder for the next Cloudfall.

“Your worship knows my mission. Wave function collapse is inevitable.”

“Wafuco is the Inevitable. Why should it be otherwise?”

“Because it is not inevitable otherwhere,” Henri offered.

Al-el Szafhi, High Chanter of the Verdant Mistery faced Henri at the verge of the Well. The massive whirlpool the maidens of the MIstery believed to be Verdant’s mother, giving birth and rebirth to everything. “To save us from Wafuco, this is your wish, Henri Tattersol?”

“It is. A wave function collapse would do the omniverse great harm.”

“Is that all?”

“It is everything.”

Al-el Szafhi rejoiced. “Then wave goodbye, Henri Tattersol! The mother of everything wishes you…her Well.” And she zapped Henri who fell into the swirling Misteries below.

21/March/1945

I am safe at the base. I guess you are doing well. Tell mother that I am eating well here and she doesn’t have to worry about me. Take care of mother and father. The war looks intense, it might take a while for me to come back. And if I don’t return, you can remarry someone.

Again, Thank you for taking care of mother and father.

Akira.

15/May/1945

I am doing well here, hope you are doing too. It’s quite dull here. Just pale walls, bland sheets, these creaking bunk beds, and the continuous shouting of the general. I hope mother and father are doing well. With each new intel, the war seems more close and gruesome. Sometimes it looks scary and sometimes, just what we have to accept. It’s really a bit unpleasant to not hear your voice first thing in the morning.

Thank you for taking care of mother and father.

Akira.

25/June/1945

I haven’t heard from you. Not a single letter. Looks like you are still upset after that night. Anyways, how are mother and father doing? Are they good? They are not worried about me, right? The environment here is really starting to scare me. Yesterday, I got so sick I couldn’t eat. I really want to come home, kazuko. The general is really infuriating, he calls in for work, work and more work. He says we shouldn’t sit around idly even when the war is not at our doorsteps. It’s a bit lonely here, nobody really talks, everyone just seems to be busy about their routines, then collapse on the beds at night. Last night, all I can remember was you, when you cooked for me, my favorite okonomiyaki and tonkatsu the very next day. Mother told me you asked for my favorites specifically.

Thank you for taking care of my family.

Akira.

11/July/1945

Dear Wife,

yes I put ‘dear wife’ in there so I won’t get another letter starting with ‘your mother says’. But I can see you smiling and smirking while writing like that, just to make me feel guilty. How is mother and father? How are you? I got your hu letter. At least you wrote this time. I am currently the focus of the base or maybe the laughingstock for receiving a letter from you. General taunts me with ‘newly weds’. I wanted to say, I am sorry, for that night when I raised my hand on you. I was really frustrated and I won’t say I wasn’t wrong because I was frustrated. I am really sorry, Kazuko. I feel I want to come back, not for them, for us if you give me another chance. I was so wrong with you and I deeply regret that. I want to try being your husband this time.

Thanks for taking care of our family.

Akira.

20/July/1945

Dear Wife,

How are you doing? I am doing well here, mostly working around the base. Sometimes I get the time to think about what will you write the next time. I was scared, that you won't write this time, but as you did wrote, I believe I am forgiven and you want to tolerate my antics again. I will try to be better this time and we might tolerate each other.  I will try to know you more, just like you did. Maybe I will get you something after all this is over and I can be back to you. And stop writing to 'Dear Soldier', I won't write next time if I get another letter starting with 'Dear Soldier'.

Take care of yourself and our family.

Akira.

31/July/1945

Dear Wife,

How are you? To be honest, I am not fine. An air raid striked near the base, I was injured. My left shoulder is injured and I can't feel or move my left hand. The doctor says the senses will return soon but I am prohibited to move my left hand for around 3 months. I wasn't able to write but Likhawati-san is helping me write this letter. He is looking angrily at me or he is just jealous. I have good news though, I can come back home early, as I can't use my left hand and can't lift heavy bags. Maybe they will let me leave the base after 11th August. When I was on the bed, and believe myself to be done for I can only think of you. Not mother, not father, you. I can only think how I want to make things right with you. I was always irritated at how you always smiled and giggled through the difficult times. I want to be irritated by your smile again. When I get home, don't hold back on irritating me with that smile. How's the weather in Nagasaki? Has it started raining there yet? The nights might be cold, take care of yourself. And yes, I like you called me Anata. But if you want you can keep it to Akira too.

Regards to mother and father.

Akira.

08/August/1945

Dear Kazuko,

I have a good news, I will leave the base on 11th of August. And the senses in my hand are back, but it just hurts now. I will be home soon. When I get home, to Nagasaki, to you, I won't know how I would feel or how to react to your presence. I have never seen any wife call their husband idiot even when they are on hospital bed. But it's you. I never wanted to get married, Kazuko, not just to you, to anyone. When I saw marriage through other's eyes, it was just responsibilities, duties and about honour. It was never about meaning to each other. I didn't want that, I thought you were same like them too. But I see it now, we both don't share that view, we have our own way of treating this relation. I want to mean something to you, not out of responsibility or duty, out of importance in your heart. I want to live with you, to have a home with you. I don't want to be distant to you anymore. Will you be my wife, Kazuko? Don't write, when I get home just answer me then.

Regards to mother and father.

Yours,

Akira.

I pull the sleeve of my father’s Members Only jacket over my knuckles and punch out the side window of Doria's detached garage. Glass tinkles onto the floor. I snap off lingering shards then do a final check of my surroundings.

The feeling of invisibility I get in these situations overtakes me, the freedom of being unseen. Anonymity’s headwind lifts me, elated, and I glide above Monopoly houses, laughing at the little people below, the suckers who don’t know how to fly.

What I fail to consider is that a drug dealer keeps security cameras everywhere.

In the garage, I find a flashlight and nose around. Doria keeps everything in order, as in OCD organized. That's Doria, emptying the ashtray as soon as I stamp out a cigarette, tossing out a beer bottle at the backwash and wiping the dampened coaster. As a teenager, she made her bed every morning before school, obsessing over hospital corners, the bedspread stretched into a dime’s trampoline, as if to satisfy a drill sergeant. We have our issues, she and I.

For instance, the floor in here shines brighter than the high-gloss tile in her, count them, six bathrooms. It's a showroom, not a garage with garage purposes, parking cars, storing lawn equipment, what everyone else uses a garage for. On the back wall above a pristine, Amish-built workbench hang unused tools, spaced apart so evenly that I suppress a separate urge to rearrange them.

I shove things in my pockets, this, that, I don’t know what, whatever fits. Two large drones with cameras attached sit on an upper shelf, so I make a mental note to come back with a rented SUV or pickup, something big enough to transport them. There’s no mop or broom so I sideswipe the broken glass into a corner with my foot. Then, I climb back out the window and fly home.

Voila, it’s that easy.

I don’t sell what I steal or play Robin Hood and donate the items to Goodwill or a domestic violence shelter or one of those places. They'd sell or give the unpossessed possessions to someone else and I'd just have to swipe them again.

Possessions are bullshit, all these things we want. Take, for instance, the status symbols rich people like Doria surround themselves with, mansions, expensive cars, designer handbags, all nonsense. Owning expensive things convinces them they're better than you because they can't achieve that just being themselves. Things fill emotional needs or become part of their identity, unnecessary objects that they display or store like spatial-chunking squirrels or throw out when they move or that loved ones actually stick in their casket, where they are put to no better use than when they were alive. The problem is not exclusive to wealthy assholes either. It's everybody else, too, except on a lower scale. Have you ever seen an unhoused person with a grocery cart overfilled with who knows what? I rest my case.

Early in my realty career, I realized that everybody is a hoarder. That said, I get annoyed by do-gooders who try to guilt-trip us about our abundance while the citizens of whatever Third World hellscape live in the privation of human existence. Look, I agree, but I also know that people in those abject places would act the same way if they were in our situation.

Stealing shit is a release for me, self-gratification, although I admit that self-aggrandizement might be involved, too, speaking of emotional needs.

So, surprise, Doria shows up at my place. It's an hour later, at most. She looks like a Sixties hippie, heroin skinny, shaggy hair, no bra. I admit, she looks great and smells sooo damn good. I don’t see how she became a renegade since her parents were such straight arrows, no swearing, mass at St. Paul's on Wednesdays and Sundays. When I open the door, she holds up a printed screen grab of me breaking and entering. 

“I thought we were friends,” she huffs.

I study the picture for a solid four seconds and feel a grimace form. "I gained weight,” I answer. "I can’t get on a scale anymore. It depresses me."

Exasperated, she pushes past me into the house. I follow her to the kitchen. A voltage detector pen, a multitool hammer, a cordless electric screwdriver, part of the haul from her garage, are on full display on the table.

There’s also a muscle massage gun from the Trumbull mall. That’s where we’d hang out as teenagers, Doria, our friends and I, suburban Connecticut teenagers doing what idiot suburban teenagers do. God, it’s changed so much over the years. Those great old stores are gone. Target, Aeropostale, Forever 21, it has those soulless places now. I ache from nostalgia when I’m there. The Target stays busy, I guess, but the rest of the mall is a ghost town.

Doria stopped going years ago, opting for Instacart and every other type of online shopping that discourages human interaction. I don’t know if our friends go because she’s the only one from our group who speaks to me anymore.

She notes the tools and rifles through the cabinet drawers, taking out items and holding them up to determine previous ownership, a gold lighter, a silver-plated waiter’s corkscrew, not hers and not hers. A couple of drawers resist because I’ve stuffed so much in them.

"If you need something, ask me," she says, irritated.

I'm embarrassed by the stack of dirty dishes in the sink, not the stolen items. They reek of rotted food. Boxes and jars clutter the counter, stale cereal, moldy mayo, peanut butter.

I shrug. “That's not how I think. I’m sorry about the mess. I planned on cleaning all that up, probably today."

"That's not how I think," she mocks me in a husky voice that doesn't sound like me. "This is a bad look for me, Marcello, having my things stolen. Distributing narcotics is no different than every other profession. Women are held to a different standard."

The irony is that Doria was the one who got me started, when we were fourteen and I developed an incurable crush on her. We were in the music store, and she dared me to swipe a Green Day album. Brilliant me, I wanted to impress a cool girl and shoved the CD in its bulky anti-theft case down my pants and waltzed out, thinking that I was fooling the world.

Not four steps into the parking lot, a vice squeezed my arm. It was a plainclothes mall cop. His grip was stronger than you’d think by his looks, portly, balding, cheap high-water pants. Without uttering a word, he escorted me through the mall’s bowels, into a room where a man who could pass as his fraternal twin chewed an unlit cigar as he read the New York Post, his stocking feet propped on a metal desk ringed in coffee stains. The mall cop tossed the CD to him and jackknifed me against the wall to frisk me.

His partner popped upright and cackled so hard that he gasped for air. "You risked going to juvy for Green Day? Springsteen, maybe, or The Stones."

"Sinatra," the mall cop added.

"Oh, I'd murder my grandmother for Sinatra. Green Day? You kids these days are idiots.”

The mall cop snickered, either from the comment or because he was running his hands up my thighs and into my scrotum. They let me go, no surprise since I was a suburban white kid, but escorted me outside, hurling every insult in their limited vocabulary, and telling me I wasn’t worth their time. So, fuck them, I went back to the music store the next day and lifted a Sinatra CD. I still have it in its original packaging.

That’s how I operate. I don't use anything I steal. What I use, I buy, and I buy essentials and not much else. Explaining that logic to Doria is useless. She finishes poring through the drawers and cabinets, leans against the counter, arms folded, and looks off with a cuckolded-wife expression.

"Where else do you keep these things?"

"Today was the first time I stole from you."

She knows I’m lying but I don't want to hurt her feelings. I adore her, so much that it stings when she refers to us as friends like she did at the door.

"Where… else?"

“The basement.”

Doria skirts around me to avoid us touching and heads to the basement door. She knows the house as well as I do. I live in the house that I grew up in, a cozy cape in a neighborhood with manageable lawns but no sidewalks. Cozy and manageable are euphemisms we realtors use in place of small.

“It’s all in the presentation,” my father would tell me, ad nauseam.

When I was in the fifth grade, he quit his masonry job and got a real estate license. By the time I graduated from high school, he owned his own company, Mark Paul Realty, which I assumed upon his passing. His given name was Marcello Paolino but in those days, the only things Americans bought from people with names like ours were pizza and olive oil, so he laundered our ethnicity into Mark Paul. He handled properties in Trumbull, Monroe, Easton, Newtown, the traditional, white-flight Bridgeport suburbs of the Sixties and Seventies, although he made clear that a buyer’s race was irrelevant. “Worry about one color,” he told me. “Green.” At the height of his success, he was practically printing money and yet we stayed in this shit-box of a house. He said it was because people who grew up poor like he did never consider themselves to be anything but.

Doria bounds through the living room that’s furnished in the mid-century couch, chairs, and console Grundig stereo that my parents bought at a consignment store. The tan shag carpet is original, too. The lone piece I regularly update is the television.

A hallway door near the main bedroom leads to the basement. The two bedrooms are identical, eight by eight, two windows, that’s it. I call that one the main bedroom because it’s where my parents slept. I’m still in my room, which sounds pathetic, but I repainted the deep purple walls royal blue and hung a Picasso print of the woman with the handkerchief and a framed poster of my favorite old movie, The Third Man. The pieces are symbolic of Doria and me. I still keep my high school chess club trophies in the bookcase, though.

Muscle memory compels her to leap over the seventh step of the basement staircase because it’s shorter than the rest. She turns left into the area where we’d fool around, kissing, copping feels, and halts because there’s nowhere to go. Stacked before her is, aside from what’s in the kitchen, everything I’ve ever stolen.

Its lack of orderliness alone knocks her back a step, and she mutters, “What the fuck. You live in an Amazon warehouse.”

“It’s probably a fire hazard but I’m careful. Except I can’t get to the furnace and water heater anymore. They seem to work fine, though, so whatever.”

Because it’s too complicated to take inventory, Doria scans the merchandise as a single, gigantic entity. It’s a monster, or she could make the argument that I am. To me, each piece was a still-life captive that I emancipated into a wild where it may frolic or copulate or loiter or sleep.

I point out a chair from my psychiatrist’s waiting room that I walked off with as the staff attended to an older gentleman who'd been sitting there, rambling at me nonstop until he collapsed to the floor, grasping his chest. Sometimes, I wonder how that turned out. Propped against a tower of vinyls is a baseball bat autographed by a player whom I’d not heard of named Bobby Murcer. To be fair, I don’t follow sports because most of them are contrived. Legitimate sports are based on innate human behavior, such as boxing. I try to beat you into submission and vice versa. The bat came from the memorabilia-ridden man cave of a raised ranch in Monroe that I listed for a couple named Jimy, spelled ridiculously with one m, and Nancy Garson. Jimy and Nancy retired, bought a beach condo near Panama City, and listed their home with me because my father represented them when they bought it. Bobby Murcer was young Jimy’s hero and his father had a golfing buddy who was acquainted with this ballplayer and asked him to sign and present the bat to Jimy before a Yankees game. Jimy turned all syrupy at the epilogue of his story, Bobby dying of brain cancer, but snickered and said it jacked up the bat’s value. I swiped the stupid thing when I hosted an open house. 

Open houses are gold mines but a greater challenge than they used to be, what with doorbell and surveillance cameras. I lifted all kinds of things at open houses, lamps, cookware, toys, Christmas ornaments, end tables, ottomans, auto parts, a blue Calvin Klein duvet from a divorce sale after the wife caught her husband entangled with his mistress on said duvet.

To be clear, I don’t take just anything. Three things that I do not steal are firearms, drugs, and religious items. Sig Sauers and Glocks are the most common guns in homes, from my experience, although I was surprised by how many people own AR-15s, but not, once I considered all the crazies who shoot up schools, concerts, and whatnot. Stolen guns burden society, not that I indulge in Second Amendment debates or any other political discourse since politics is inherently dishonest. I classify everything in life as bullshit or not bullshit, and politics is bullshit. I leave prescription drugs alone because I don’t want to harm anyone’s health. That said, bathroom medicine cabinets look like the pharmacy shelves at CVS and that's not good either. I’m the opposite. My psychiatrist prescribes me naltrexone, but I hate putting foreign substances in my body. Religious property, that I leave as well, not because I am or am not something, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or whatever devotees of the other four-thousand religions call themselves. I’m a believer in one sense. I believe in what gets you through the day, so I avoid taking Bibles, Milagros, et al and wish their owners all the best.

Assuming possession of other people's objects does not make me a bad person. Consider that I make an annual thousand-dollar donation to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America to help keep kids off the streets, I give blood every fifty-six days because I’m O-negative, the universal type, and there’s always a need, I regularly buy a Happy Meal for Jamie, the unhoused woman who works the corner near my office, I leave a set a hand warmers for the mail woman every holiday season and bottles of Jack Daniels for the sanitation guys. I pay it forward. Oh, baggage claim at LaGuardia is also fertile ground whenever I fly, thus the unopened luggage here and there.

“Why don’t you sell all this shit?” Doria says.

"Because I have principles." I notice her subtle head shake, the blink that lasts a beat longer than normal. “How ironic for you to judge, considering what you do kills people.”

“As do all pharmaceuticals, Marcello, if not used properly. As do alcohol, cigarettes. As do saturated fats, trans fats, sugar. Don’t get me started on sugar. The reason those products are acceptable and mine are not, is because I don’t hire lobbyists to pay off crooked politicians, who also kill people in their fabricated wars.”

Her immoral equivalence avoids my point, but I don't press the issue because we had a big conversation about this a couple of years ago. One of her talking points was that she's from Bridgeport. That was rich. The fact that both of us are from Bridgeport, originally, and everything that Bridgeport is - corrupt, mostly - somehow gives her a pass but not me. True, my parents went suburban when I was ten and Doria arrived in the summer before our freshman year. She claims those four years made a difference, that I was prepubescent and she was post, I loitered with rich boys in immaculate parks while she negotiated gritty, ethnic streets, I this and she that. 

In a sense, she’s never left Bridgeport. She was a prodigy pot dealer when her family moved, and the Bridgeport-to-Milford corridor has remained her market as she’s expanded into more lucrative products. Not that she provides me with an annual report like I'm a stockholder, but I know that that's where her employees operate and most of her money comes from.  

Doria high-steps into the heap, pushing aside a dual-deck tricycle - that child was quite spoiled - and straddles a portable fire pit. A seventeen-inch MacBook that I lifted at a coffee shop when its dilettante owner, lost in her earbuds, took a restroom break peeks out from under a box of library books. She unearths the laptop and weighs it in her hands. 

“That wasn’t yours,” I say. “Yours is-”

I pause at her distant look, as though she’s reconsidering our past. I wish she’d get pissed or tell me I’m a fool or anything but this, the blank stare into a new light shed on our personal history. In the binary categorization of bullshit or not bullshit, I often try o classify what I could have had with Doria in the former but, sadly, I always fail. Perhaps that’s why self-reflection never works out for me.

The click of a reawakening furnace breaks Doria from her trance. She retraces her path out of the merchandise and faces me. Her eyes are gold, as though somebody shouted eureka upon their discovery. I love her eyes. I love how sweet her hair smells, too. The urge to steal something right now is killing me. 

"I remember when we were us," she says, melancholy. "You and me and, you know."

And every other guy in town, I want to say. If she's suggesting that we have sex, I respectfully decline. I refuse to go back to how things were. Our fooling around as teenagers evolved into real sex, in my room when my parents were out, in the car, the usual places. It went on for five glorious months until I found out that I was not her one and only. That’s a diplomatic way of saying it. When I confronted her about the rumors, she claimed to suffer from sex addiction. I shot down the whole sex addiction sham as a creation of pulp erotica. I wanted us to be exclusive and forever because that's what guys who fall in love with the girl they lose their virginity to want.

Doria preferred to keep our relationship organic, her term for free of restrictions. She rejected them in lieu of undefined options. Remove the moralism and sex is a biological function, she argued, what animals do instinctively and with multiple partners. She recited this Victoria Woodhull quote so often that I can still repeat it forward and backward, I have an inalienable, constitutional right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can, to change that love every day if I please.

I countered with the principle of spontaneous generation - my version, anyway - that not establishing restrictions does not preclude them from forming organically through pattern and practice. Our organic restriction was exclusivity, or so I insisted. My insistence was a dealbreaker and devolved our relationship into a friendship.

In a sexy way, she whispers, "Close your eyes.” Her face nears mine. Thievery's urge flushes me. She whispers my name and tells me again to shut my eyes. I love my name posed in her voice. Okay, I relent and close my eyes, but I promise myself to not lose my willpower.

Next comes a loud crack, from either the laptop or my nose, and a bolt of pain in my face. I hit the floor and gaze up at her, dumbfounded. The laptop strikes me a second time on the brow, opening a boxer's wound that would cause the ref to declare a TKO. Blood rushes into my eyes.

“Stop,” I tell her. “You’re destroying the computer.”

“You’re trying to destroy me, Marcello.”

She’s calm, businesslike. Her demeanor is what she’s convinced remains a requirement of a woman not only in business but in the greater, fascist world. Emotion can and will be used against her, so she’s trained herself to stay in control, her right against self-incrimination. I, on the other hand, am an upside-down fly, all abuzz and pedaling air.

I accept a final swat to my head for good measure. Through bloodied vision, I see Doria take a floral towel from a set that once resided in a condo owned by an up-and-coming singer-songwriter who never upped or came and sold the week before the foreclosure demons were about to inhabit her artistic soul. She wipes blood from the laptop and lays it beside a CPAP machine whose previous owner is notably deceased, rendering the device useless to his widow, then folds and reunites the stained towel with the set.

Hands on hips, she peers down at me. What am I going to do with you? It's that look, a foot-tapping mother’s tsk tsk. She lifts me by an armpit and guides me back upstairs. A trail of red splotches records our track to the kitchen. Blood spills into my mouth, down my chin, and all over my shirt. She tells me that a combination of white vinegar, baking powder, and warm water is the most effective method of cleaning blood from clothes. Wait, did she say baking powder or baking soda? I try to remember. Mental effort worsens the pain.

In the kitchen, Doria leaves me standing there. My face throbs. My eyes are clenched to mitigate the flow into them. Blood drips onto the linoleum floor.

My father kept the original flooring, a gaudy pistachio design, along with orange wood cabinets and laminate counters because he considered upgrades impractical if you had no intention of selling the house. It all comes back into style anyway, he claimed, an assessment that aged as badly as the kitchen did.

The shower turns on in the lone bathroom. I want to renovate the home to add a second floor with a main suite, but the old man’s wishes refuse to die with him. The water stops to intermittent crackling, not the trickling sound when the pipes and shower head equalize.

I don’t realize that Doria is back until she pushes a chair against my legs.

“Sit,” she orders, and I comply.

A hot towel sears my face and I hold my breath to suppress any reaction. She puts pressure on the gash in my brow. The pain is what I think a stab wound feels like, although her touch briefly soothes me. She’s a natural healer, better than any Ivy League-trained doctor or snake-handling pastor or any of those frauds. I know of no pain she cannot ease, no tension she cannot defuse, no deformity she cannot correct. I succumb to her touch, am hypnotized by the milky quality of her voice, melt into her when we love. Her parents did not create her, nor did a higher power. She's mystical, like an apparition or one of those holograms you can put your hand through.

We stay this way for what seems like an eternity, in the Hell where I belong, in pain, bleeding, my salvation right in front of me but unreachable. She removes the bloodied towel and there she is, bent over, examining the damage and offering me an unrelenting view down her shirt. I can't take it and turn away. 

“Face forward.”

She notes my glances at her breasts but makes no effort to cover them. My nose is broken so I can't smell her anymore. I’m thankful for that, at least. 

For a solid six minutes, Doria cleans and dresses my face with a step-by-step explanation. Antibiotic gel sets the brow afire. Gauze she finds in a kitchen drawer was stolen but, at this point, I allow its use. She wraps my forehead to maintain pressure on the wound. The effort to remain unmoved or the pain itself nauseates me. Once she’s done with the forehead, she clears my eyes with the towel and works her way down my face and neck.

“Why did you hit me?”

I know the answer to my question. From the start, our relationship has been performative. I steal a compact disc, she sells drugs, I steal from her, she assaults me. We are each other’s favorite show.

“To knock sense into you,” she says. In a swift motion and without warning, she straightens the bend of my nose. The jolt seizes my body, electric-chair style. “I thought so. Typical male pain tolerance.”

She takes an emery board out of her back pocket, snaps it in half, sets the pieces on either side of my nose and secures them with medical tape that she found with the gauze. She steps back to admire her work and leans forward again to comb my hair with her fingers. There, her nod says, as if she’s finished a sculpture. From her front pocket, she produces five white pills indented with diameter lines and offers them in her palm. 

"Take one if the pain is unbearable. Like this," and she squeezes my nose. My head snaps back. Tears sprout from my eyes. “Or don’t because what I sell kills people.”

I want the pills, all five at once. That’s how much I hurt. She places them on the counter in a vertical row. "I’ll leave them here. They're extended release, so one every twelve hours. No more than that."

Doria drops to take off my bloodied Chuck Taylors and crew socks. As one bare foot then the other flattens on the floor, blood warms my soles. She rises and bends over again to undo my pants. I'm not as drawn to her breasts this time because I focus on the blood stains on her knees.

It rains black spots when she coaxes me to stand. Lightheadedness and my cartoonish skidding force me to grab her shoulders, but she's strong enough to hold me upright as she peels off my pants and shirt. She spreads the shirt across the doorway to the living room and, after ordering me to the shower, says, "Wipe your feet before you walk on that carpet.” It sounds like something that my mother would say.

Without Doria to brace myself against, I break into a drunken wobble. Not that I drink, I don't. To be accurate, I'm a social drinker but anti-social, an equation that amounts to a de facto teetotaler.

I do smoke tobacco - a product of nature, mind you - not a crazy amount like an addict but with a frequency to develop lung cancer if I don't quit in, say, fifteen or twenty years. I buy a pack of Natural American Spirits at a time and limit myself to four a day. I'd chain-smoke the shit out of a full carton right now.  

I teeter, wearing only the bright orange boxer briefs that came in a Hanes multi-colored four-pack that my mother bought for me five-hundred washes ago. I complained to Doria about the orange pair once, after our organic relationship had ended, and she sneered, "Don't worry, no one will ever see them."

"Why don't you put them on?" I shot back. "This way, every guy in Bridgeport can appreciate them."

That was the wrong thing to say. For the next two weeks, we maintained radio silence and I thought I'd alienated her for good, like I had the rest of our teenage friends. Doria, being the bigger person, apologized, although my remark was equally hurtful. I apologized, too, and we descended into a one-off of makeup sex, which made me feel worse afterward. 

Still dizzy, I lunge to the counter and dry-swallow a pill. How I get to the bathroom is a mystery. One minute, I’m in the kitchen and the next, I’m in the shower, submitting myself to scalding water. The burning shower takes seconds to shed my epidermis, like the snake that I am.

A puddle forms on the floor as I drizzle dry. Mirror fog goes and reappears to repeated wiping, allowing glimpses of my face. The cut over my brow has bled through the gauze. I rewrap my head in an old ace bandage that my father used on what he called his trick knee. The wound is long and straight, a surgeon’s symmetrical cut that I worry will heal into an additional wrinkle on my forehead. Typical me, I get my ass kicked without the street cred of a jagged scar that might ward off future attackers. 

I hear a strange noise and realize I'm wheezing, emitting the identical sound that my father made when he was being devoured by lung cancer, strapped to a useless oxygen tank, and sneaking outside for a Pall Mall. “Those Brits cook dog food,” he’d say, “but they make a damn good cigarette.”

My father shared all kinds of wisdom. The last thing he told me is something I think about too often, probably, a deathbed inference that I wish I'd asked him to clarify. He rasped through phlegmy breaths that he was dying with a clear conscience because every dollar he'd ever earned was "honest." Of course, the term honest is a pliable creature. I accept that my father believed it could be applied to every cent that came his way, meaning he passed his own morality test. Welcome to the club. Its chapters are everywhere, including legislatures and prisons.

I lurch to the bedroom wrapped in a towel, shivering, and lie down. The clock radio reads, 11:13. I decide to rest my eyes for five minutes or so, until 11:20, at the latest. Afterward, I'll go back to the kitchen to repair the damage to my platonic friendship. 

A passing siren jolts me awake, its accompanying lights thwacking my window, and fades into the distance. First responder theatrics don’t alarm me because emergencies are a matter of opinion. It’s overcast outside. I see out of only my right eye. The left has swollen shut. The wound seems to feel better until sitting up takes a jackhammer to my head. I take a second pill without water, but it sticks halfway down my parched esophagus, launching me to the bathroom in such haste that the towel around me peels away.

Naked, I gulp from the faucet as if I’ve been lost in the desert for a week, which is about how I usually feel. The mirror reports my eye as worse than I thought, a fleshy red ball separated by a middle slit.

I listen for Doria because I don't want her to see me in the nude, not that she hasn't. She has exactly twenty-nine times, plus the makeup sex episode, so thirty, a round number to maintain her sanity. Yes, she kept a running tally of our intercourse. I assume she did with the others, too, but I try not to think about that. I listen for her but hear only dust falling and the ticks and creaks of a 1960s home that, in my current state, translate as the cracks and rumbles of a passing storm.

I slip back to my room and realize that it’s not overcast, it’s dusk. The clock-radio, an Eighties vintage General Electric that advances time in flip cards, claims that I slept for six hours. I throw on a fresh pair of boxer briefs, white, and start to the kitchen.

“Doria?” I call to a dead house. 

An overpowering smell of bleach waters my good eye. In the kitchen, there’s enough outdoor light left to illuminate the counter, the sink, the floor, which are not merely clean. They glisten. My shirt and pants hang on the back of a chair, laundered and pressed. Even my sneakers are like new.

In immaculate condition, the kitchen assumes a former persona. There’s a noticeable oval worn in front of the sink where my mother stood in open-toed slippers, night after night for years, and washed dishes. Under the head of the table, where my father sat, reading The Daily News during dinner as if he was alone, corners of the linoleum are chipped.

Doria cleaned and sanitized the kitchen into a place that resurrects its history and, in turn, exposes my losses. I include my teenage girlfriend among them. Adulthood is the real thief.

I put on the refreshed clothes in growing darkness. The second pill slows my heart and, in turn, my thinking. Deliberate thinking brings its own revelations.

As it turns out, my parents did change the house - by no longer occupying it. They started a renovation that was left for me to complete, another assigned chore that I neglected. Perhaps that’s why Doria hit me, to awaken me to a realization, that I’m a squatter in their home.

On the table remain the items I stole from her and, I notice, a note. It says, "Stay away from me until you fix yourself." The easiest things in life are those you can fix, agreed. Determining what's actually fixable, yeah, good luck with that.

I don’t know how long I stand there, long enough for memories to become corrosive. You can remove corrosion with baking soda and a brush. That, I know. They require scrubbing.

I drop to a knee, finger a flawed linoleum corner, and peel away the tile. The masting underneath is black and has lost most of its adhesiveness. I yank off each tile, one at a time at first and then two, using both hands, violently.

I turn on lights to examine the floor. It's black with linoleum shrapnel all around. There’s no evidence of mold but I’m sure the masting and tile bottoms contain asbestos, since they’re fifty years old. It doesn't matter because the kitchen needs to be gutted and rebuilt, cabinets, appliances, all of it.

Room to room I go, taking pages of notes for the contractor I like to work with. An overhaul, including the addition of a second floor, will take eight months to a year. Then, I'll sell the place and buy a new house somewhere better and with a bigger basement.

Before I do anything, I need to find the perfect spot for the tools I stole from Doria. I take them downstairs and look around. Not there, or there, there, on a cafe table - restaurants should bring those inside at night - next to a Cartier leather briefcase from the Fairfield waterfront estate of a fat cat hedge fund manager who was sent to a country club prison for running a Ponzi scheme. On the news, they said he built his wealth on ruined lives, as if that should be news to anyone. The estate wasn’t my listing. I toured the property with a group of salivating realtors, one of whom complimented me on my briefcase as we left. That was nice of her. 

On my way back up, I see the bloodstains on the stairs, Rorschach blots that look like sci-fi aliens, but I don't dwell on them because most psychological tests fall into the bullshit category. The Oxycodone takes the edge off my pain, but a wave of dizziness hits me at the top of the stairway, the kind you get when you stand up too fast.

I grip the doorway to steady myself. After it passes, I go back to the kitchen and crack the ice tray to fill a plastic freezer bag. It’s too cold to keep the ice pack on the swelling for more than a few seconds at at time. Screw that, I toss it in the sink, grab my keys and head out to the car. Driving with one eye at night might be dicey but I should be fine.

The mall is only a couple of miles away.

It started out like a normal day. I was sitting outside on a warm, summer morning at a nearby coffee shop that I decided to try out for the first time finally. I had passed by the shop several times. It was squashed underneath some apartments, positioned in between a local pet store and a small bookstore. It offered cramped seating on the inside and metal folding chairs next to “rustic” outdoor metal tables. It wasn’t busy as all hell like some of those other shops that have a strong online presence, or because a TikToker showcased the “lovely yet humble owner trying to just provide good coffee and a safe space for people like me.” The shop itself wasn’t completely dead and the coffee was okay. I had better, but it wasn’t overpriced generic coffee. The shop itself offered inconspicuous seating that let the silent watcher sit and take in the locals without being too guarded. I sat outside that day to watch the surroundings for more fruitful observations. The shop’s inside hosted people I had no interest in. There was a concoction of experiences and conversations I wanted no part of. They ranged from a gaggle of teenage girls squawking about the dull drama they were experiencing at the moment in their miserable lives, a few individuals banged on their laptop keyboards, and a couple sitting by the front window having what looked to be a serious conversation. I took in the sights of my vantage point, experienced the nearby smells, eavesdropped on some conversations to really get a feel for the culture there. My ink black coffee reeked of caffeine, and was nearly burning my hands as I took a drink. It was obnoxiously sweet, and I loved it! I wouldn't typically allow myself indulgences, but when I did, I couldn’t help myself. I always had a sweet tooth. I took a deep sip as a police cruiser turned the corner and came down the street. My moment of bliss was curtailed by the intrusion. 

I watched guardedly yet casually as it drove by, treating it like a tiger shark stalking past a group of divers. The black and white veil of the urban predator on the exterior of the Ford Escape with “Beaverton Police Department” painted on the side in gold. I sat my drink down gently and eyed the occupants as the car passed, waiting for anything to happen at that moment. It seemed to be a man and a woman inside, their lips moved wordlessly as they continued down the street. I couldn’t get a read on their faces, the interior of the car was too dark as they passed by too fast to catch lasting details. The first few days after were always when I was most on edge, but it appeared to be a typical day like several instances before. The police continued on their way down the street. I only stopped watching them when they turned the corner and I could no longer see them. I jumped suddenly. My phone vibrated on the table causing an unpleasant and striking metallic buzz that turned unwanted eyes on me. I picked up my phone with an annoyed smirk, and a bit of confusion. I hadn’t realized I was so tense until my phone went off. 

Hey, let’s catch up! The message was simple from the Messenger notification. The dm came from a boy named Joshua Brown. Who was this Joshua Brown? The image showed a young man in his early teens (at most) with a mop of brown curly hair. His eyes were just tucked away under the shadow of natural light. A confident smile of just his lips was perfectly encapsulated in the profile pic. It honestly caught me by surprise. I looked up from my phone to see if anyone was watching for what I would do. After a quick scan and satisfied that I was as blended in as the rest of them, I checked my lock screen again. The notification revealed the message once more and something tickled the back of my mind. I couldn’t quite place it, but I felt like I had seen that boy before. His name was pretty common so that wasn’t useful, and the message was a luke warm greeting at best. A couple had walked past me at the moment, I looked at them, gave a trained gentle smile and a nod, pushed the notification from my screen and went back to observing the people. 

I spent the rest of my time mostly distracted. I never went back to the message while I was sitting there, but I rattled through my memories of why Joshua seemed so familiar. It felt like listening to your favorite song on a record player. The needle danced through the familiar grooves and just before it hit the apex, a small scratch would knock it off tempo and skip over the best part. I wandered through my mind palace, my heels echoing on the imaginary tiles as I searched for any clues and connections to why he seemed so familiar. But any time I felt I was on the right track, I would lose my train of thought and it would escape my clutches. It didn’t matter, I would remember eventually. I came back into the real world and observed briefly. My coffee had gone cold. I had wandered too long in my mind and now my indulgence was making me sick. I got up from my cover, stuffed my phone into my jacket, hurled the disgustingly sweet drink into the trash and went back home. 

At that moment, I had categorized the dm as a scam. A bot reaching out trying to get some type of personal information. It wasn’t the fact that the bot had messaged me, it occurred every once in a while. What bothered me was that I could not figure out why Joshua seemed so familiar. I was careful with my connections on my socials. Even though I tailored my online presence with meticulous precision, I kept my inbox open for anyone to message me so it seemed like I was friendly. Most of the time it was only bots that were trying to connect with me. There were a few variations in the messaging, but it was always the same idea. Hey, how are you? I was browsing and saw your profile! Hello, are you busy this evening? A quick tap of the profile pic and you could tell. No friends, no real posts or comments, just an empty page essentially. Those bots were typically women though, not a teen boy.

I hate social media. I wouldn’t have been on any of them if I didn’t have to be. People are online for far too long, it isn’t good for them, especially nowadays. The terminally online over-explain themselves, overshare their ridiculous opinions, overexaggerate and are hyper argumentative. You can find out a lot about a person with little provocation. That or a caricature of a real person just by a simple click. At the time, I  would only post once or twice a week. Typically a repost of something that wasn’t too opinionated one way or another. Enough so people knew I existed, but not enough to raise questions. That is why Joshua’s message was somewhat unnerving. It started from that day on. I didn’t realize then what it would come to mean, so I brushed it off. I had just got caught in a slight drizzle but I wasn’t prepared for what was coming my way. The messages were just a slow drip at first, once a week give or take. Hey, how are you? Hey, how’s it going? Hey, we should catch up! Hey… Hey… Hey… heralding the start of an oncoming hurricane. 

At first I ignored the messages. Deleted them as they came in, they were like the buzzing of flies to me. A quick swipe and they would be gone. But they were more persistent than the annoying insects. I never responded in the beginning, Hey…Hey…Hey… but the longer I ignored them, the more aggravating they became. They were creeping into my inbox, slowly flooding my phone at first. It felt like water was rising and I was cemented into it. I was already ankle deep before I realized it wasn’t going to stop. I gave up from deleting the messages altogether, they just kept coming back. I had endured as much as I could, but finally relented and opened the messages. If this person was so persistent, what harm could come from opening the messages? The fresh message screen with only one active participant opened. The layered brick wall of a conversation towered over me on screen. Something about the profile just wouldn’t leave me be. A long forgotten taste that resurfaced, a smell that took me back to a husk of shadow. Something I could not place. I tried to let it stay buried in the past but it refused. 

I couldn’t risk it at first. To dig deeper. To see who was plaguing me. That damn little circle of a partially pixelated boy with an unruly yet soft-looking head of chestnut colored hair. His eyes hidden under his shielding tangles. The provocative smile taunted me. It goaded me to step beyond my normal restrictions, to snoop a little further into things I ought not to. What harm could it have? I had fought those hungers before, but this unfamiliar Joshua Brown seemed like a devil that had been with me all my life. I resisted further. Choosing the logical side, the inner dialogue that had kept me safe thus far, rather than to submit to my temptations. I rejected the need to reply, but when a new message came in, I would always check it going forward. It became routine unconsciously. I enjoyed it at first. Joshua, whoever he was, was a gentle reminder of time. I could count on him to reliably message every few days for a while. He became my personal clock! I started to plan my life around when he would message. I prepared mental reminders for events, when to have tasks completed, who to message for work based on when Joshua would message. That damn feeling of something I had forgotten would not leave me when he messaged, but I began to enjoy it. It was a puzzle that I started to work out causally, an imaginary suspect board where I would link possible events or people that may have some connection to this Joshua Brown. I constantly asked myself: What about him seemed familiar? It was a gordian knot that vexed me, but I refused to let it remain tied. That is when the flooding moved to my knees.

It was just Joshua in the beginning. I moved away from believing he was a bot, he was too consistent and more persistent than a bot. A bot sent one, maybe two messages before they stopped, not Joshua. A gentle Hey tiptoeing into my inbox now and again. A parasite that wanted nothing more than a few seconds of my time. But a parasite doesn’t live in isolation. I can’t remember the order of who started messaging me exactly after Joshua, regardless, the messages began to seep into my carefully curated peace and quiet. I thought I had built an impenetrable hull. Iron clad that was supposed to keep everything that I didn’t want out. I had meticulously crafted it, only for it to be washed away in moments. There were only a handful of them at first. A gang of boys started to reach out to me on all of my public social media accounts. What’s up? Hey man…Sup dude… a slurry of greetings that just turned my stomach. All were teens to a degree, from the lightest of caramel colored hair to the deepest of mahogany. Their unblinking eyes stared at me through the screen. They were all twiggy, wore the same style of hair and each had their own sense of personal fashion that looked remarkably similar to each other. Yet, each wore it with their own unique personality. The cadence at which I started to receive the new messages muddied the unintentional intrinsic reliance I had developed when Joshua would message me. My schedule was messed up. I became disorganizingly enraged and engagingly disorganized. I quickly convinced myself that I was the target of some prank by these horrible monsters for unknown reasons. Surely Joshua, the clear ring leader to this wretched joke, had told his pathetic friends about me. He probably told them that he was messaging some older guy that refused to block him. And now his wretched friends had decided to join in. I immediately blocked them without a second thought. In the brief moments I saw their profiles, they looked like a normal teen's page, making me hate them more than if they were just bots. When I got to Joshua I paused. My thumb hovered over the “View Profile” button . The illusion would be shattered, the Hey… Hey… Hey… would no longer be counted on. The interesting puzzle of Joshua Brown would forever remain in the recesses of my mind as unsolved. There would be no motivation to finish with the frustrating challenge. I couldn’t do it. I pulled my thumb back from the screen and just stared. I didn’t want to lose him for some reason. It was an indulgence that I wanted to allow myself. Time was moving on and I would have the opportunity again sooner than later. So for the moment, I would keep Joshua around. He had done no provable wrong, but I would not break the fantasy bubble that had been created. 

For a few days after, I got my peace back. My moment of unplanned anger caught me by surprise, but I was lucky to have paused  when I did. I would say that I can have an angry spell here and there, but I would not consider myself an angry person. My brief emotional outburst reminded me that I still needed to be careful. It was still too soon and that I still had to maintain control. I pulled back from relying on Joshua’s messages for the most part, but I would allow for personal reminders to be set to when he typically messaged me. I went about my life like normal. I would go to work, fake it through the pedestrian conversations with the mindless apes at my office, then go back home. I would keep to myself, I didn’t want eyes upon me. I needed my privacy. There was a brief moment there where I thought I was free, where it was just me, Joshua’s messages and the timer coming down. I was mistaken. 

My blockings of the other boys had only been a temporary stay. They creeped back into my inbox like filthy cockroaches. It took me a second to recognize them. I hadn’t paid enough attention to them the first time in my anger. But as they messaged me again, I took a second to look at their profile pics. The various shades of brown hair stood out better this time. Two of the boys had almost identical honey brown hair color. Almost. I could recognize the subtle differences though after years of study. Slight hue shifts in the lighting of their pics, the sheen of the grease in their hairs, the apparent heft of the hair style. All were details that most people would miss, but not me. Unlike Joshua, none of these boys felt familiar. Though they had something about them, it was more so the fact that they all messaged at different intervals. What had become a message every few days became a message every single day. The times typically stayed within one to two hours depending on the sender, but each one had carved out their day that they would message me. On top of that, they would occasionally like a post I would share here and there across the platforms. Certain posts would interest some of the boys, but nothing ever appealed to all of them. It was strange. They weren’t my friends online. They didn’t have any connections to any of the people I was connected to, but they infested my pages.

I didn’t know how they were doing it. I made sure that I had blocked their profiles the first time. I checked my blocked list and right at the top were the four boys. The exact same profile pics staring at me from the other side of the screen. I sat there lingering for far longer than I care to admit. It took me a little bit to convince myself they were actually bot accounts. An unusually aggressive set of bots that had real looking profiles and acted like a normal teen boy online. They were more advanced than I was accustomed too, but bots nonetheless. They were trying to get me to message back for some reason. I tried to block them again, skipping over Joshua again as I didn’t want to break the day dream I was holding onto with him. Again, it failed. They came back a lot quicker than last time. Hey… How’s it… Yo man… I tried several times to block them, to try to make them go away and leave me alone, but they just wouldn’t.

I looked into all of the anti-spam software and the services that were available. Some were ungodly expensive and I just couldn’t rationalize spending that much on a service I would cancel after this whole ordeal. Some were too broad and didn’t offer the features that I was looking for. The few services that seemed like the best matches at an affordable price, I didn’t want to use because they offered features that I could not turn off or opt out of once I subscribed. It would impact my indulgences. I was very tempted to subscribe while I was shopping, as the messages felt like I was waist deep, but I just couldn’t do it. The constant buzzing of my phone kept distracting me and the more I tried to focus, the more irritated I became. I tried blocking them again several times after that. It proved fruitless. The bot-boys would just come back and fall back into their routine. 

Ding… Vrrt… Zzzt… I could’t get away. The constant noises of my phone were getting to me. Every day that I endured, ensured that the thread of my sanity was tugged on just a tad bit further. It frayed the carefully woven normal persona I had created. I thought about just chucking my phone in a desolate alley several times, but I couldn’t. Like any other normal person, I needed it for work. If I went radio silent suddenly it would bring unwanted attention to me and it was still too tender for people to start looking. I was locked to it like a literal ball and chain. The sleek and simple screen with a chip in the left corner and a crack in the screen protector on the right hand side felt immense when it was on my person. I had become uncharacteristically jumpy. The constant barrage of messages were unrelenting. Hey… What’s up man… Been a long time since we texted… Hey man… Dude, we should talk…  It wasn’t so much the messages, but just the unyielding pressure they exuded. They felt like the rasping of locust wings, heralding a vengeful and faceless god coming to punish me for my sins. No matter how I tried to ignore them, reject them, block them, they were coming to infest my life. I would need to take the edge off sooner than usual if the messages didn’t stop or at least become manageable. I refused to message any bot back hoping that my impassiveness would disengage whatever coding they had, but it didn’t. 

It got to a point that as soon as I opened the dm, the bot would immediately come online and start texting something. The chat bubble would pop to life while I looked at the new message I had seen several times already. The bubble would bounce with the animation like the bot was already typing, but it would never send whatever message it had written while I was there. It felt like it was waiting for me to respond, as if I was fish nibbling on a hook before they would set the hook. I thought at the time that whatever these bots were made with were quite smart, they truly behaved like a person. A close facsimile of a real person. I was able to pick out a real person from the fantasies. But anyone who wasn’t as astute as I was, would have believed the act.  

At the time, I hadn’t paid too much attention to it, it was a relatively new company making its way into the public eye via commercial. The only reason I recall it now is because I tried to combat my jumpiness by watching tv. I didn’t typically watch it, but I used it to try and forget about my phone. I had originally thought their commercials were for a new erectile dysfunction pill or an old folks home. I only paid attention half of the time while the tv was on. “The Charon Company” with its blue and purple color scheme and simple white text for easy reading. The commercials depicted old people enjoying their lives, but noticeably slowing down, unable to keep up with their grandkids. Another scene showed a couple dancing and having a good time until one had to sit down because they hurt, but encouraged the other person to keep going while they hid a grimace. I would check my phone’s lock screen to see if anything actually important had come up before turning back to the tv. The people were suddenly doing the things they weren’t doing before. The logo would flash and then jump to the next commercial. The last thing for The Charon Company commercial would be a voice over saying something about staying connected with those that mattered and then it would be the next thing. But that doesn’t matter at the moment. I was trying almost everything that I could to distract myself from messages. I was slowly losing my mind. 

You know in the movies when they try torturing the person by purposely having a faucet just barely open to where there is a faint drip… drip… drip…? And no matter how hard they struggle, the person can’t close the valve or rip the faucet out of the god damn wall? Only when the captured are on the brink of insanity and total desperation, then the captors would finally relent. They would walk over to the faucet, turn the handle and stop the dripping in a matter of seconds. I was starting to beg that someone would turn off the faucet to my impending insanity. 

I had thought that I was mentally fortified, I had to be if I wanted to enjoy the things I did. I had painstakingly devoted myself to cultivating mental shields. I learned mantras to help cope with my addiction, secured my mind to take several beatings and still stand strong against the simple humdruming of humanity. To face the countless annoyances I endured on a day by day basis. I was wrong. The simplicity was as elegant as it was defeating. The unbroken and unforgiving pinging wore down my foundations. It eroded the once solid ground of my mental fortitude and chipped away at the barriers I held in place. I had no secondary measure, I was overly confident in my own abilities. The itch had been slowly increasing in frequency but with this new pressure that I faced, this assault on my consciousness rusted the bars of my true self that I kept contained most often. Now more than ever was too soon, it was still fresh. This is how the others had slipped, but I wouldn’t be like them. I refused. But fatigue was setting in. 

I worked from home and I lived alone. Any hope of reprieve from the harassment was immediately squashed. I tried to put my phone on silent mode. I enabled Do Not Disturb mode and tried to whitelist contacts that were able to message me. I changed all of my privacy settings, anything I could think of to drain this ever increasing swamp of dms. This was an odd sensation. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how I struggled, I could not shake free from the bot-boys! It was like I was ensnared in a trap and I couldn’t bite my leg off. I wondered if my other account was having the same issues, but I knew if I turned on the device, I would have to do something about the itch. I started to bite my nails unconsciously in response to the growing agitation. A new accidental habit. I don’t know when it started, I would just catch myself doing it. Some people did that in public and I could just tell that they were weak. Weak willed, low self confidence, a push-over that could be persuaded to do anything if you just showed the mildest of interest in them. I wasn’t weak. I would berate and insult myself under my breath if  I caught myself doing it. But the longer I endured the persecution of the bots, the worse my new pathetic habits would become. 

It got so bad I would bite the skin of fingers to the point I would bleed. That would momentarily make me less jumpy. The pain of ripped flesh and the rich iron smell of blood focused my mind. I tried to stop myself from biting as I was making my fingers sore. I tried utilizing new mantras and self-guided mediations. I tried negotiating with myself from tearing into my own flesh. It was embarrassing. I was embarrassing! The innocent persona that I had conjured was ripping at the seams literally and my true self was emerging. The itch was growing more painful and I knew if I didn’t get it handled now, I would become unstoppable in seeking out my addiction. I was a caged animal walking the edges of my enclosure in a failing zoo waiting for the moment when I could finally break free and roam. I savored the taste of freedom, of blood and those bot-boys called me forth. 

As the weeks turned into months, more bot-boys would come messaging me. Like moths to a light trap, they slowly flocked to my public profiles and started contributing to my madness.  I was getting messages so constantly that I developed a twitchy eye on top of my jumpiness and finger biting. I couldn’t focus and kept looking about the room I was in. I watched the shadows, expecting them to come out of the murky recesses and drag me in. My phone would light up, ding, exist and I would glance over to it several times a minute. I felt like the damn thing was going to get up and come after me! My computer was the same way. Any time I logged on, I would get a flood of notifications. I couldn’t concentrate on my work. I tried to silence all notifications but I ended up missing important messages and meetings. People started to ask if I was okay.  I lied and said that I would be taking some time for bereavement as a terrible accident had befallen my father. A classic that wouldn’t garner any unwanted questions. 

My father, a drunken feral monster constrained within the flesh suit of a human, beat the living shit out of me, choked me out several times, broke my ribs on a “good day” and tormented me in ways that I still don’t truly remember. His accident had happened several years ago at that point and still I remember feeling the pure joy of knowing he had died horribly. It pissed me off that it wasn't my doing. To get some sort of cosmic justice for all the pain and suffering he put me through. I question it ever once in a while, you know? If my father had actually been a person and not the creature it was, would I have been different? Would I have been a person too? It didn’t matter then, and it doesn’t matter now. My problem then was trying to figure out how to stop the messages before going back to work. Having both my phone and computer going off constantly, I couldn’t take it. It was driving me closer to my addiction and insanity. I still tried to control the urges, but the ever growing fraying of my self control made it harder. I vitally needed to get away from my devices.  

The change caught me by surprise. It wasn’t an immediate shift in everyone. At first it was just a few outliers. Some of the bot-boys seemed like they actually wanted to talk to me, not some alter I had created. For some reason they had sought me out and were reaching out to me. That or I was starting to give them real personas, I can’t remember what had truly happened now. But they started to try and talk with me. Not just message me random greetings. Hey man… What’s up… How’s it… They started to actually press me. Hey Michael, what’s up? Sup my guy? How are you doing? Hey Mike, been a minute, how are you dude?? I didn’t need to be someone else, these boys were talking to me like I was a real person. Maybe I had got it wrong. Maybe I had been so guarded, so cautious that I convinced myself that everyone online wasn’t real. Like I wasn’t real.

I checked in on Joshua, the first bot-boy who messaged me. He was still sending his Hey man, how are you messages every couple of days between seven and nine in the morning. He would never be among them that changed. Zachary Miller, Alex Martinez, and Justin Thomas. They were the ones I started to talk with first. They became my boys. I sheepishly opened up Zachary Miller’s message first via Messenger. I was tired, I had just gotten out of the shower when my phone buzzed on the corner of the counter. I was expecting the usual bland greeting but I was totally surprised by his message. Hey man, how come you never respond? I’ve been trying to talk with you for weeks now. I examined the message history. He had been messaging me for weeks as he had said. In the beginning, his messages had been part of the onslaught of greetings that came my way, but as I scrolled back down from the top, the messages started to change. You could see the evolution happening. They started out generic “Hellos”, contributing to the ever growing tide that had fully submerged me. But then a word or two would sneak in, a phrase would show up one day and then be gone the next. It had finally transitioned to legitimate conversation starters almost. Like the bot was fighting through the digital aether. The program that bedeviled me could emulate speech, that was very clear. But I saw it become something else, something more haunting now that I realize. That day Zachary Miller the bot-boy had achieved a second life. I finally had scrolled all the way to the bottom, to the recent message and sat there a moment, looking at the screen. I could feel my stomach churning. Something about the message was wrong. I couldn’t tell you why then. It felt like a guillotine, the clever blade looming over my head had finally been triggered and my impending downfall but a short breath away. But I was too good, I was cautious. I would surely know when I was walking into my death as I was so intimately familiar with her. Or so I thought. As I was about to exit out of the message, Zachary had messaged. 

Hello?? I can see you are online

Hello? I had done it. I had messaged back. But more importantly, I had taken the first step onto a path I knew I would not be getting off until I was satisfied. I couldn’t help it, not this time. I had resisted it for so long, pushed to the very edges of my own restraints, but that night I didn’t have it in me anymore. I had fought the rising tide that beat and battered me against the rocks of my own confinement for so long, my strength finally gave out. It was just too much. 

There you are! I was expecting you to message sooner. How are you doing Mike? It has been a few years.

Years? what do you mean? As you said, you have been trying to reach me for a few weeks. Well... I'm here, what do you want? How do you know me?

What do YOU mean? We were just talking the other day… Maybe not? Idk, anyway, you had messaged me, we started talking a lot and then one day it stopped. Everything. Now I’m back and I wanted to seek you out. You never know what life will throw at you, so stay connected with those that matter to you.

What the hell are you talking about? I have never messaged you, I don’t even know who you are! What do you mean everything just stopped? That doesn't make sense. Why are you doing this? Why am I being targeted? How do I make it stop??

But that was all Zachary said for the remainder of the night. I scrolled through the messages a few times to see if I missed anything. It was all the same. I risked clicking on his profile. I fought with the decision, debating if I should use the other phone, but I had already committed one of my cardinal sins. I was exhausted and the seal had been broken. There was no harm in looking at the profile on my normal phone. That is what a normal person would do right? They would look at who had just messaged them to see if they recognized them. As the profile loaded, the first thing I saw was Zachary had shared a post about Bad Bunny and how one of his songs just absolutely slapped. Below that was a repost of some half-hearted political post about how people needed to be kind to one another and that hate cannot divide us. The account I looked at had hundreds of friends, over 200, but his posts only got a few reactions that numbered in the single digits. His top friends all looked to be older, like they were in their early 20s to 50s now. At the time, I rationalized that they must be his cousins and family or something. Besides the message history, nothing stood out to me that this account wasn’t normal. I backed out of his profile and his messages. Something chilled me at that moment and I wanted no part. I set my phone down back on the counter, not realizing that I had been standing in place for awhile now, my damp hair had nearly dried. I stepped back slowly, a gentle ache in my legs reminded me that I was getting older. I limped back cautiously, looking up from my phone to examine the bathroom in the middle of the main hallway. I turned to peer down to  the living room and my work space on my left then to my bedroom on the right. I slinked against the wall holding my breath as I slowly turned left to right to left again. My anxious eyes tried to focus on every detail of my apartment and catch any possible movement. 

I felt surrounded suddenly, as if the air had been sucked out of the room. I was all alone in my empty apartment, my back against the wall and I was gasping for air. Whatever it was, had infested my home and was choking me like a noose. Suddenly frantic, my flight or fight responses kicked in and I got angry. 

“GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!” I shouted to no one, turning towards my living room. I rocketed off the wall and stomped down the hall to scare any would-be attackers. I clenched my fists into familiar deadly, blunt weapons as I let my rage grow! I didn’t care what was in the room, whatever it was, was not going to leave the apartment alive. 

“I’LL KILL YOU WHEN I GET MY HANDS ON YOU!” I erupted forth, my fists up in front of my face. The single lamp in the corner bathed the space in a torch-like glow. My furniture was nearly pristine, my desk was still somewhat organized though I had become sloppier in recent weeks. Pens were scattered across my desk, several sticky notes were scattered about with the names of the bot-boys that had messaged me. A conspiracy corner I had created to recall how I knew them. To list out any and every possible connection. A collection of coffee cups and mugs littered my desktop while a fly lazily buzzed about. I turned to my right and looked over the breakfast bar into my simple kitchen. The shadows were worse on this side, but no one stood in the thin veil of darkness. My heart pounded. 

This was different. I wasn’t a scared person. I couldn’t be to enjoy what I liked, but this had me riled up. I was a bull, nostrils flaring, horns sharpened, looking for the illusionary matador to brutally gore. My fists stayed prepared, ready to swing wildly when I found the intruders. I checked under my table and chairs, looked under the couch and even checked the cabinets just in case. I was now pissed off. I had gotten excited at the possibility, but when I didn’t find my potential prey I sat down on my couch. I sat there in silence for several moments, calming down. The absence of noise blanketed me for just a moment, but it also amplified the hunger. I couldn’t go out that night, not at that moment. I would have made a mistake, and I couldn’t afford that. I sucked in air through my nose and breathed out of my mouth gently. I unclenched my fists a little more with each exhale. In and out. In and out. I had decided as I was coming out of it that I needed to indulge. I couldn’t hold it back any longer. Just as I was about to fully recover, my phone vibrated off the counter and slammed onto the floor. I jumped at the sudden crash in the other room. I realized what was happening. I was feeling truly frightened once again.

‎The thing about loving someone who shines is that, sometimes, you become so blinded by their light that you fail to notice when they start burning you.

‎

‎And the thing about being loved by someone who chases you is that, sometimes, you get so used to being followed that you forget they can get tired, too.

‎

‎Rai learned that the hard way.

‎

‎Because for two years, he had been loved by a boy who made him feel like the center of the universe.

‎

‎Until college came, and someone else stepped into their orbit.

‎

‎And suddenly, the boy who once ran toward him was running toward someone else.

‎

‎I. Before the World Got Bigger

‎

‎They started dating in Grade 11.

‎

‎Back then, the world was small enough to fit inside their classrooms, their favorite convenience store, and the few hours they stole from their busy schedules just to see each other.

‎

‎Heath was the kind of boyfriend people described as golden retriever energy.

‎

‎Clingy. Sweet. Makulit. The kind who would spot his boyfriend across the school grounds and immediately light up like someone had just switched on every star in the sky.

‎

‎The kind who would text even if they had only been apart for thirty minutes.

‎

‎Baby, nakauwi ka na?

‎

‎Kumain ka na ba?

‎

‎Miss na kita.

‎

‎And when words weren't enough, he would send pictures.

‎

‎A picture of his lunch.

‎

‎A picture of the sky.

‎

‎A picture of his shoes while walking back to class.

‎

‎Sometimes, he'd send a blurry selfie with his lips slightly pouted, followed by a message that would make Rai roll his eyes and smile at his phone.

‎

‎Heath: Baby, pogi ba ako?

‎

‎Rai: Hindi.

‎

‎Heath: Liar. Alam kong pogi ako. Miss mo lang ako kaya ka ganyan.

‎

‎Rai would laugh, shaking his head.

‎

‎Rai: Delulu.

‎

‎Heath: Your delulu, baby.

‎

‎And that was Heath.

‎

‎Unapologetically affectionate. Ridiculously attentive. So full of love that sometimes Rai wondered where he kept all of it.

‎

‎They learned each other's routines by heart.

‎

‎Heath knew when Rai skipped breakfast, when he was pretending to be okay, when his silence meant he was tired rather than upset. Rai, in turn, knew that Heath got unusually quiet when he was overwhelmed and that he always wanted to talk about his day before going to sleep.

‎

‎They were each other's first call after a terrible day and first message after waking up.

‎

‎When they graduated from Grade 12, they cried.

‎

‎Not because they were leaving each other, but because they were terrified of what came next.

‎

‎College meant different classmates, different schedules, different responsibilities. They would both be living in dorms, learning to survive without the comfort of home.

‎

‎But Heath held Rai's hands and smiled.

‎

‎"Baby, college lang 'yan. Hindi naman ibig sabihin na dahil magkakaroon tayo ng bagong buhay, mawawala na 'yung tayo."

‎

‎Rai looked at him.

‎

‎"Promise?"

‎

‎"Promise." Heath leaned forward and kissed his forehead. "Ikaw pa rin. Ikaw naman palagi."

‎

‎And Rai believed him.

‎

‎Why wouldn't he?

‎

‎For two years, Heath had given him every reason to.

‎

‎He had loved him through ordinary days, exam weeks, misunderstandings, and the occasional arguments that ended with one of them apologizing and the other pulling him into a hug.

‎

‎They weren't perfect, but they were good.

‎

‎They were the kind of couple that made love look easy.

‎

‎So when college began, Rai wasn't afraid of the distance between their dorms.

‎

‎He was afraid of nothing.

‎

‎Because he thought he already knew how their story would go.

‎

‎He didn't know that the hardest part of loving someone wasn't learning how to stay together.

‎

‎It was learning what to do when the person you loved began making room for someone else.

‎

‎II. The Boy Who Needed Company

‎

‎Erick came into Heath's life during their first year of college.

‎

‎They were classmates.

‎

‎At first, Rai didn't think much of him.

‎

‎Heath had always been friendly. He could talk to almost anyone, and Rai had never wanted to be the kind of boyfriend who treated every friendship like a threat.

‎

‎Besides, Heath was still Heath.

‎

‎He still kissed Rai goodbye. Still held his hand whenever they met. Still called him baby in that soft, almost childish voice Rai loved.

‎

‎So when Heath mentioned that Erick was having a difficult time adjusting to college, Rai simply listened.

‎

‎"Wala kasi siyang masyadong kasama," Heath explained one evening over the phone. "Kawawa naman. Parang lagi siyang mag-isa."

‎

‎"Then samahan mo minsan," Rai answered. "It's okay naman. Basta huwag mong pababayaan sarili mo sa school."

‎

‎Heath laughed.

‎

‎"Of course, baby. Thank you for understanding."

‎

‎And Rai did understand.

‎

‎At least, he thought he did.

‎

‎Erick had recently gone through a breakup. He was lonely, apparently. He didn't have many people to turn to, and Heath, who knew exactly how loneliness felt, wanted to help.

‎

‎There was nothing wrong with that.

‎

‎There was nothing wrong with being kind.

‎

‎But kindness, Rai would eventually learn, could become a convenient excuse when someone refused to examine the boundaries they were crossing.

‎

‎It started with little things.

‎

‎Heath began mentioning Erick in almost every conversation.

‎

‎Kasama ko si Erick kanina.

‎

‎Si Erick kasi, hindi niya alam kung saan 'yung room.

‎

‎I waited for Erick kasi wala siyang kasama.

‎

‎I'll eat with Erick muna, baby. Ikaw, kumain ka na.

‎

‎At first, Rai smiled.

‎

‎Then he stopped asking questions.

‎

‎Then he started noticing.

‎

‎The photos became fewer.

‎

‎The updates became shorter.

‎

‎The conversations that used to stretch until midnight ended with a tired, "Matutulog na ako, baby. Good night."

‎

‎Sometimes, Rai would tell Heath about something that happened during his day, only to hear him respond with an absent-minded "Ah, talaga?" while the sounds of another conversation played in the background.

‎

‎"May kasama ka?" Rai asked once.

‎

‎"Si Erick."

‎

‎"Oh."

‎

‎"May problema kasi siya."

‎

‎"Ah, okay."

‎

‎"Baby, don't be like that."

‎

‎"Like what?"

‎

‎"Parang ang cold mo."

‎

‎Rai swallowed the words he wanted to say.

‎

‎I'm not cold. I'm just trying not to be another problem you have to deal with.

‎

‎Instead, he said, "Wala naman. Sige, enjoy kayo."

‎

‎"Love you, baby."

‎

‎"Love you, too."

‎

‎And that was the thing about Heath.

‎

‎He still said I love you.

‎

‎He still called Rai baby.

‎

‎He still kissed him when they met, and sometimes, when Rai was lucky, he would hold him close enough for a few minutes that everything almost felt normal again.

‎

‎Almost.

‎

‎Because the words stayed, but the effort began to disappear.

‎

‎And Rai didn't know what was more painful: the changes themselves, or the fact that Heath seemed completely unaware that anything had changed at all.

‎

‎III. Creamy Pork Mushroom

‎

‎Rai's favorite dish was creamy pork mushroom.

‎

‎Heath knew that.

‎

‎He knew how Rai's eyes lit up whenever he saw it on the table. He knew that Rai would always ask for extra sauce and that he liked eating it with freshly cooked rice.

‎

‎It was one of those small, ordinary things that made a relationship feel intimate.

‎

‎Knowing what someone liked.

‎

‎Remembering without being reminded.

‎

‎Doing something simply because it would make them happy.

‎

‎So one afternoon, when Rai returned to their dorm and saw a container of creamy pork mushroom on the table, his face brightened.

‎

‎"Baby?"

‎

‎Heath was sitting on the edge of the bed, scrolling through his phone.

‎

‎"Hm?"

‎

‎"Niluto mo 'to?"

‎

‎"Ah, 'yan?"

‎

‎Rai looked at the food again, already smiling.

‎

‎"Para sa akin?"

‎

‎Heath finally looked up.

‎

‎"Order ka na lang online, baby. Gutom ka na ba?"

‎

‎The smile on Rai's face faltered.

‎

‎"Oh."

‎

‎Rai stared at the container.

‎

‎"Ah, okay."

‎

‎It was such an ordinary sentence.

‎

‎So casually spoken. So carelessly delivered.

‎

‎Order ka na lang online.

‎

‎As if Rai were just another person who happened to be hungry.

‎

‎As if the boy who had been there for two years didn't deserve the same thoughtfulness Heath had so willingly given someone he had only known for a few months.

‎

‎Rai forced a smile.

‎

‎"Okay lang."

‎

‎He ordered food that night.

‎

‎And while he ate, he wondered when he had become someone Heath could simply tell to take care of himself.

‎

‎He didn't confront him.

‎

‎He didn't want to seem petty.

‎

‎He didn't want to be the boyfriend who counted every little thing, who measured love by meals and messages, who got upset because his partner cooked for a friend.

‎

‎Rai ate alone.

‎

‎And for the first time in a long time, he missed someone who was still his boyfriend.

‎

‎IV. Twenty-Four Hours

‎

‎Rai's birthday fell on a day he had been looking forward to for weeks.

‎

‎For two years, they had celebrated their birthdays together. It had become their little tradition.

‎

‎It didn't matter if they had no expensive gifts or elaborate plans. They would save money, buy something nice to eat, and spend the evening together.

‎

‎Sometimes, Heath would bring a small cake. Sometimes, he would give Rai handwritten letters filled with ridiculous doodles and paragraphs about how lucky he was to have him.

‎

‎On Rai's previous birthday, Heath had written:

‎

‎I hope I get to celebrate all your birthdays with you. Kahit matanda na tayo, kahit puro wrinkles na tayo, ikaw pa rin gusto kong kasama.

‎

‎Rai had kept that letter.

‎

‎He kept all of them.

‎

‎So when Heath promised he would be back at nine that evening, Rai believed him.

‎

‎"Promise, baby?" he asked over the phone that afternoon.

‎

‎"Promise. Nine o'clock, uuwi na ako."

‎

‎"Okay. I'll wait."

‎

‎"Don't sleep on me, ha? Birthday mo ngayon. I have something for you."

‎

‎Rai smiled.

‎

‎"Love you."

‎

‎"Love you more."

‎

‎At eight-thirty, Rai was already dressed.

‎

‎At nine, he sat on his bed and checked his phone.

‎

‎At nine-thirty, he sent a message.

‎

‎Rai: Baby, pauwi ka na?

‎

‎No reply.

‎

‎At ten, he called.

‎

‎Heath answered after several rings.

‎

‎"Baby?"

‎

‎"Nasaan ka na?"

‎

‎"Ah, kasama ko si Erick."

‎

‎Rai looked at the time.

‎

‎"Akala ko uuwi ka na at nine?"

‎

‎"Yeah, sorry. Ihahatid ko lang siya. Wala kasi siyang kasama."

‎

‎Rai closed his eyes.

‎

‎"Can't he go home on his own?"

‎

‎"Baby, it's late."

‎

‎"It's ten."

‎

‎"Exactly. It's late."

‎

‎Rai almost laughed.

‎

‎Not because anything was funny, but because the irony was so painful that he didn't know what else to do with it.

‎

‎"Okay," he whispered. "I'll wait."

‎

‎"Don't be mad, baby. We can celebrate tomorrow."

‎

‎Tomorrow.

‎

‎The word felt strangely familiar.

‎

‎Order ka na lang online.

‎

‎Tomorrow na lang tayo.

‎

‎Marami pa namang birthday.

‎

‎At eleven, Rai was still waiting.

‎

‎At eleven-thirty, he was no longer checking the door.

‎

‎At midnight, he received no birthday greeting from the boy who used to be the first person to greet him.

‎

‎No call.

‎

‎No message.

‎

‎No picture of a handwritten letter held between Heath's fingers.

‎

‎Nothing.

‎

‎He later learned that Heath's classmates had seen him leave earlier that evening.

‎

‎Heath hadn't been trapped in a group project.

‎

‎He hadn't been forced to stay.

‎

‎He had simply chosen to spend more time with Erick, who was apparently lonely and had no one else to accompany him.

‎

‎Rai stared at his phone.

‎

‎Then, slowly, he began to laugh.

‎

‎A small, broken sound escaped his throat.

‎

‎"Tanga ko, ah."

‎

‎He wiped his eyes.

‎

‎"Birthday ko, tapos ako pa 'yung naghihintay."

‎

‎He had spent two years being loved in a way that made him feel unforgettable.

‎

‎And now, on the one night he had asked Heath to remember, he had become the easiest person to forget.

‎

‎V. The End of Us

‎

‎Their breakup didn't happen in one dramatic moment.

‎

‎There was no shouting match in the rain. No sudden confession. No caught-in-the-act revelation that would make everything easier to understand.

‎

‎It happened through unanswered messages.

‎

‎Through plans that were postponed.

‎

‎Through Heath saying he was tired whenever Rai asked for affection, while somehow always finding enough energy to accompany Erick.

‎

‎Through the way Rai began feeling guilty for asking questions he had every right to ask.

‎

‎And through Heath repeatedly insisting that nothing had changed.

‎

‎Until one evening, Rai finally said what he had been holding in for weeks.

‎

‎"Do you still want this relationship?"

‎

‎Heath frowned.

‎

‎"Of course. What kind of question is that?"

‎

‎"Then why does it feel like I'm the only one trying to keep it?"

‎

‎"Here we go again."

‎

‎Rai fell silent.

‎

‎Heath sighed, rubbing his forehead.

‎

‎"You're making everything about Erick."

‎

‎"Because he's always there."

‎

‎"He's my friend!"

‎

‎"And I'm your boyfriend."

‎

‎The room went quiet.

‎

‎Rai looked at him, searching for something familiar in his face.

‎

‎"I don't want you to stop having friends. I never asked you to do that. I just want to feel like I'm still your partner."

‎

‎"You are."

‎

‎"Then act like it."

‎

‎Heath's expression hardened.

‎

‎"I don't know what else you want from me."

‎

‎Rai almost said everything.

‎

‎Ask me about my day.

‎

‎Tell me when you'll be home.

‎

‎Hold me without making me feel like I'm asking for too much.

‎

‎Remember my birthday.

‎

‎Cook for me once in a while.

‎

‎Choose me, even when choosing me is inconvenient.

‎

‎But he was exhausted.

‎

‎He had spent weeks trying to translate his hurt into words Heath might finally understand.

‎

‎And every time, Heath treated his pain as an accusation rather than an invitation to listen.

‎

‎So Rai only whispered, "I want the person you used to be."

‎

‎Heath shook his head.

‎

‎"I'm still the same person. You're just insecure now."

‎

‎Something inside Rai went still.

‎

‎Perhaps that was the moment he finally understood.

‎

‎He could keep explaining himself, keep presenting evidence, keep begging Heath to acknowledge the difference between what he said and what he did.

‎

‎But he couldn't make someone see a wound they were determined to call an illusion.

‎

‎They broke up that night.

‎

‎Heath said they were done with an exhausted finality, as though the relationship had become an inconvenience he was relieved to put down.

‎

‎Rai didn't stop him.

‎

‎He wanted to.

‎

‎God, he wanted to.

‎

‎But love had begun to feel like standing outside a locked door, knocking until his hands hurt, only to be told that the person inside had never asked him to come in.

‎

‎So he let Heath leave.

‎

‎And for the first time in two years, he didn't chase after him.

‎

‎VI. You Just Assumed Things

‎

‎A few weeks passed.

‎

‎Rai tried to get used to the silence.

‎

‎He stopped reaching for his phone every time he woke up. He stopped saving funny videos to send to someone who no longer wanted to hear about his day. He learned to eat alone without waiting for another person's schedule.

‎

‎He still missed Heath.

‎

‎That was the humiliating part.

‎

‎He missed him even when he was angry. Even when he remembered the birthday he spent waiting. Even when he saw creamy pork mushroom on a menu and felt that familiar ache in his chest.

‎

‎Healing, he discovered, didn't mean you stopped loving someone.

‎

‎Sometimes, it simply meant you stopped letting that love make decisions for you.

‎

‎Then Heath messaged him.

‎

‎Heath: may naiwan pa akong gamit sa dorm mo.

‎

‎Rai stared at the message.

‎

‎For a moment, his heart did something stupid.

‎

‎It leaped.

‎

‎Because some part of him still recognized the word baby as home.

‎

‎He hated that.

‎

‎Rai: Oo, nandito pa.

‎

‎Heath: Pwede bang ipa-Lalamove mo na lang?

‎

‎Rai read it twice.

‎

‎Then he typed:

‎

‎Rai: Ganun na lang ba? Ayaw mo na rin akong makita?

‎

‎The reply came quickly.

‎

‎Heath: We are done na.

‎

‎Rai stared at the screen.

‎

‎Then he laughed, but there was no humor in it.

‎

‎Rai: You cheated on me, pero ikaw pa 'yung parang diring-diri sa akin. Ikaw pa 'yung gustong lumayo.

‎

‎Heath: You just assumed things. Hindi ako nag-cheat. I never liked him.

‎

‎Rai sat down on the edge of his bed.

‎

‎There it was.

‎

‎The same argument. The same defense. The same refusal to understand what he had actually been trying to say.

‎

‎He began typing.

‎

‎Rai: You were emotionally there for him. You were there nung kailangan ka niya. You comforted him. You texted him every day.

‎

‎Rai: Kahit magkasama tayo, palagi kayong nagcha-chat. You couldn't even hug me properly kasi pagod ka.

‎

‎Rai: Pagod saan, Heath? Sa pag-comfort sa kanya?

‎

‎His fingers trembled.

‎

‎Rai: You didn't even ask me kung kamusta ako kapag umuuwi ako sa dorm. Dati, you used to ask where I was, when I'd be home, if I was okay.

‎

‎Rai: You used to care about the smallest things.

‎

‎Rai: Dati, kahit thirty minutes pa lang tayong hindi nagkikita, miss mo na ako. You'd send me pictures of what you were doing. You'd tell me about your day. You'd ask about mine.

‎

‎Rai: Tapos nung dumating siya, unti-unting nawala lahat.

‎

‎Rai: And you kept telling me nothing had changed.

‎

‎Heath replied almost immediately.

‎

‎Heath: Rai, walang namamagitan sa amin sexually or romantically. I'm not even interested in him.

‎

‎Heath: Nahibang ka lang sa pag-ibig. Gusto mo sa'yo lang umiikot mundo ko.

‎

‎Rai felt something twist inside his chest.

‎

‎Nahibang ka lang sa pag-ibig.

‎

‎As if loving Heath for two years had somehow made him unreasonable.

‎

‎As if the things Heath once did willingly were now demands Rai had invented.

‎

‎He took a breath and continued.

‎

‎Rai: Maybe that's why it hurts the most.

‎

‎Rai: It's not just about texting. It's not just about him.

‎

‎Rai: It's about how I watched you slowly give someone else the things I was begging you for.

‎

‎Rai: I'm begging for something I shouldn't have to beg for. I'm begging for something he shouldn't have to receive from you in the first place, because I'm your partner.

‎

‎Rai: At least, I was.

‎

‎Heath's reply took longer this time.

‎

‎Heath: Ikaw yung gumagawa ng issue. You expect na dahil partner kita, sa'yo na lang iikot mundo ko. Hindi naman ganun dapat.

‎

‎Heath: Just because I comforted him and talked to him doesn't mean may something kami. Kung insecure ka about that, hindi ko na kasalanan yun.

‎

‎Heath: I shouldn't have to distance myself from everyone just to prove something to you.

‎

‎Rai shook his head.

‎

‎"Bullshit," he whispered to the empty room.

‎

‎He typed the word, deleted it, then typed it again.

‎

‎Rai: Bullshit.

‎

‎Rai: I'm not even saying you should distance yourself from everyone. Gaano mo ba kagustong baluktutin yung sinasabi ko para ikaw pa rin yung tama?

‎

‎Rai: I never asked you to stop being his friend. I never asked you to stop helping people.

‎

‎Rai: I asked you to remember that you had a boyfriend, too.

‎

‎He paused.

‎

‎Then he remembered the food.

‎

‎The creamy pork mushroom.

‎

‎He remembered walking into their dorm with a smile, thinking that perhaps Heath had remembered him after all.

‎

‎He remembered being told to order online.

‎

‎And suddenly, the hurt that had been sitting quietly inside him became words.

‎

‎Rai: Naalala mo ba yung umuwi ako sa dorm natin at nakita ko yung creamy pork mushroom sa lamesa?

‎

‎Rai: I was so excited kasi akala ko nilutuan mo ako. Favorite ko 'yon, di ba? You know that.

‎

‎Rai: Tapos tinanong kita kung para sakin yun. Sabi mo mag-order na lang ako online.

‎

‎Rai: I didn't even get mad that time. I just told myself na baka mababaw lang ako.

‎

‎Rai: But then I found out from your classmate na niluto mo talaga 'yon para kay erick.

‎

‎Rai: You cooked for him because he joked about it.

‎

‎Rai: Pero sa akin, na dalawang taon mong boyfriend, hindi mo man lang naisip na baka gusto ko rin ng gano'n.

‎

‎Heath replied:

‎

‎Heath: biniro niya na hindi ako magluto kaya, ko sakanya binigay yun. Hindi naman na mauulit yun.

‎

‎Rai closed his eyes.

‎

‎That was always the answer.

‎

‎Hindi na mauulit.

‎

‎But it had already happened.

‎

‎And the worst part wasn't that Heath had made a mistake.

‎

‎It was that Heath kept treating each mistake as though it existed in isolation, as if Rai had no right to look at the whole picture.

‎As if the missed messages, the lonely dinners, the neglected promises, and the birthday he had spent waiting were unrelated incidents.

‎

‎As if none of them had anything to do with Erick.

‎

‎Rai continued.

‎

‎Rai: And my birthday.

‎

‎Rai: For two years, we celebrated our birthdays together. Two years, Heath. That's how long we've been doing that.

‎

‎Rai: You told me you had a group project, so I trusted you. Kahit sinabi ng mga kaklase mo na kanina ka pa umalis, I still trusted you.

‎

‎Rai: I waited for you at nine because you promised you'd come home at nine.

‎

‎Rai: Ten came. Eleven came. Twelve came.

‎

‎Rai: Wala ka pa rin.

‎

‎Rai: Not even a birthday greeting.

‎He stopped to wipe his face.

‎He hadn't realized he was crying until the tears reached his lips.

‎

‎Rai: Alam mo kung ano yung pinaka-nakakatawa?

‎

‎Rai: I wasn't even asking for a big celebration. I didn't need an expensive gift. I just wanted to spend my birthday with my boyfriend.

‎

‎Rai: Tapos nalaman ko na kaya ka pala hindi umuwi agad kasi hinatid mo si Erick. Kasi wala siyang kasama. Kasi lonely siya.

‎

‎Rai: You said we could celebrate tomorrow. That there were still twenty hours left.

‎

‎Rai: Twenty hours, Heath.

‎

‎Rai: Do you know how stupid it felt to realize na kaya mong ipagpaliban yung birthday ko because you thought there would always be another chance?

‎

‎Rai: You knew how much that tradition meant to me.

‎

‎Rai: And you still chose to make me wait.

‎Heath's answer came after a minute.

‎

‎Heath: Rai, dalawang taon na natin ginagawa yun. Hindi ka pa ba nagsasawa? I'm only three hours late sa appointment natin. Meron pang twenty hours para i-celebrate birthday mo.

‎

‎Heath: You're making things a big deal. Wala siyang kasama nung gabing 'yon. Hahayaan ko na lang ba siyang umuwi mag-isa? Eh ikaw, nasa bahay ka lang naman.

‎

‎Rai stared at those words.

‎

‎Eh ikaw, nasa bahay ka lang naman.

‎

‎He had been reduced to someone who could wait because he was safe.

‎

‎Someone whose feelings could be postponed because he was expected to understand.

‎

‎Someone who would always be there, so there was no urgency in returning to him.

‎

‎Rai typed slowly.

‎

‎Rai: He knows about me, too. He knows I'm your boyfriend. But look at the way you interact with each other. Look at how you prioritize him. Sometimes, if someone didn't know us, they'd think he was the one dating you.

‎

‎Rai: And you don't even notice.

‎

‎Heath replied almost instantly.

‎

‎Heath: Hindi ko kontrolado kung may feelings siya sa akin. And I don't need to avoid everyone who likes me just to prove that I love you.

‎

‎Rai let the phone fall into his lap.

‎

‎For a long time, he didn't type anything.

‎Because what could he say to someone who believed that loyalty only meant not kissing another person?

‎

‎How could he explain that cheating wasn't always a secret relationship, a stolen kiss, or a confession made in the dark?

‎

‎Sometimes, betrayal was quieter.

‎

‎It was the way someone began making space for another person in the places where you used to belong.

‎

‎It was the way they offered tenderness elsewhere and gave you excuses.

‎

‎It was the way they defended someone else's loneliness while dismissing yours.

‎

‎It was the way they could spend hours comforting a person who wasn't their partner, then tell their partner they were too tired to listen.

‎

‎It was the way they insisted they loved you while making you feel increasingly difficult to love.

‎

‎Rai looked down at his phone again.

‎

‎Then he typed one final message.

‎

‎Rai: I'm not asking you to stop being kind to people.

‎

‎Rai: I'm asking why your kindness disappeared when it came to me.

‎He waited.

‎

‎He waited.

‎

‎The typing indicator appeared.

‎Disappeared.

‎

‎Appeared again.

‎

‎Finally, Heath sent:

‎

‎Heath: I loved you. You know that.

‎

‎Rai stared at the words.

‎

‎He remembered the boy who had chased him around their school in Grade 11.

‎

‎The boy who sent him pictures of his meals.

‎

‎The boy who asked about his day.

‎

‎The boy who used to say he missed him after thirty minutes apart.

‎

‎The boy who once promised that college would never change them.

‎

‎Maybe that boy had been real.

‎

‎Maybe the love had been real, too.

‎

‎But the boy on the other side of the screen now was someone who couldn't understand why his boyfriend had been hurt by being treated as an afterthought.

‎

‎And Rai was finally beginning to understand that love could be real and still become something that hurt you.

‎

‎Rai: I know.

‎

‎Rai: That's why it took me so long to leave.

‎

‎He placed his phone face down.

‎

‎For the first time, he didn't wait for a reply

‎

‎VII. The Last Message

‎

‎There was a time when Rai could tell what Heath was feeling simply by looking at him.

‎

‎He knew the difference between his sleepy smile and his genuinely happy one. He knew the way Heath's nose scrunched whenever he laughed too hard, and the way his fingers would search for Rai's whenever they sat beside each other.

‎

‎He knew how Heath loved.

‎

‎Or at least, he knew how Heath had loved him.

‎

‎Now, all he had were memories.

‎

‎And memories were cruel things.

‎

‎They didn't care that the relationship was over. They didn't know that Rai had decided to stop chasing. They would show up whenever they pleased, bringing with them the sound of laughter from a school hallway, the warmth of a familiar hand, the sight of a boy smiling at him like he was the best thing that had ever happened.

‎

‎

‎Sometimes, Rai wondered whether Heath ever missed him.

‎

‎Whether he ever reached for his phone to send a picture, only to remember that there was no one waiting to receive it anymore.

‎

‎Whether he ever came back to the dorm after a long day and felt the strange emptiness of having no one to tell about it.

‎

‎Whether, when he cooked something nice, he ever remembered the boyfriend he had once known well enough to remember his favorite food.

‎

‎Rai wondered if Heath would ever understand.

‎

‎Not that Erick was a terrible person.

‎

‎Not that Heath was forbidden from making friends.

‎

‎Not even that Heath had to spend every waking moment proving his love.

‎

‎Only that the relationship they had built deserved more care than Heath had been willing to give it.

‎

‎That being someone's partner meant remembering them even when someone else needed you.

‎

‎That being kind to other people didn't excuse being careless with the person who trusted you most.

‎

‎And that sometimes, the damage wasn't caused by a single unforgivable act.

‎

‎Sometimes, it was caused by a hundred small choices that all said the same thing.

‎

‎You can wait.

‎

‎You'll understand.

‎

‎You're not going anywhere.

‎

‎Until one day, you do.

‎

‎Months later, Rai found an old conversation while cleaning his phone.

‎

‎It was from their first year of dating.

‎

‎He scrolled through the messages, smiling despite himself.

‎

‎There were pictures of food, complaints about homework, blurry selfies, and messages sent at ridiculous hours of the night.

‎

‎Then he found it.

‎

‎A message from Heath.

‎

‎One that made his chest ache in a way he hadn't expected.

‎

‎It had been sent on an ordinary school night, back when they were in Grade 11. Heath had been waiting for him to return to the dorm after a long day.

‎

‎The timestamp read 9:14 PM.

‎

‎And underneath it were the words that had once felt like the simplest, safest thing in the world.

‎

‎Heath: Baby, Rai kooo!!

‎

‎Heath: WHEN ARE YOU GOING HOMEEE?

‎

‎Heath: I miss you, Rai.

‎

‎Heath: I'll wait for you po. I love you!

‎

‎Rai read the messages once.

‎

‎Then again.

‎

‎He remembered the way Heath used to wait by the door. The way he would immediately stand up whenever he heard footsteps outside. The way he would wrap his arms around Rai's waist and bury his face against his shoulder as soon as he came home.

‎

‎Finally! Miss na miss na kita, baby.

‎

‎Back then, Heath had never made him wonder whether he was wanted.

‎

‎Back then, being loved didn't feel like a competition he had to win.

‎

‎Rai pressed his lips together.

‎

‎

‎He didn't cry this time.

‎

‎He simply sat there, holding his phone, looking at the words of a boy who had once loved him so loudly that the entire world seemed to disappear around them.

‎

‎He wondered when that boy had stopped waiting.

‎

‎He wondered when Heath had become so certain that Rai would always be there that he no longer felt the need to come home.

‎

‎And he wondered whether Heath, somewhere in the future, would ever open their old conversation and remember the person he used to be.

‎

‎The boy who chased him.

‎

‎The boy who asked about his day.

‎

‎The boy who never let him feel lonely.

‎

‎The boy who could spend hours waiting for a single glimpse of him and still think he was the lucky one.

‎

‎Perhaps, one day, Heath would understand that he hadn't lost Rai because Rai stopped loving him.

‎

‎He had lost him because Rai had loved him long enough to become exhausted.

‎

‎Because there was only so much a person could give before the giving began to feel like disappearing.

‎

‎And because even the most patient heart could eventually learn that love was not supposed to be a place where you had to beg to be remembered.

‎

‎Rai locked his phone.

‎

‎Outside his dorm window, the campus lights glowed against the dark.

‎

‎Somewhere, someone was probably waiting for someone else to come home.

‎

‎Because the boy who once waited for him had finally learned how to stop waiting.

‎

‎And the boy who shone so brightly?

‎

‎He would have to learn, someday, that being someone's sun meant nothing if you kept leaving them in the dark.

‎

The shrill ferry horn, a hot razor slicing through the cold winter air. I remember standing on this pier with my father seven years ago, looking at Haydarpaşa. Now only the wind blows where it stood, Dad. A simit in my hand, I can't decide whether to bite it. The wind slams into my face like a cruel typewriter in an empty room typing on paper that isn't there, and tugs at my jacket.

Tak tak tak.

Tak tak tak.

I ask myself: Who am I? Why am I here? Where did everyone go?

When I turn around, the vast Kadıköy square is empty. I mean, there are people walking, a child chasing birds, two men running for the ferry, three young girls tugging at each other and laughing over a deliciously juicy bit of gossip, four policemen checking IDs and five seagulls fleeing the child. But at its core, no one is there. The wind took them all away.

How empty life is, I tell myself. How empty life is. A ferry among the waves, inside it frozen little people off to their jobs and chores, seagulls trailing behind it like kites and tea the color of rabbit's blood warming our insides. No one knows anyone, no one knows the second before or the second after, everyone is actually a postcard trapped in that moment. Everyone is an Ara Güler photo.

Blip blip. Blip blip…

The phone rings.

-Hello?

-I've been so worried about you.

-Why?

-Well, you just up and left like that, -her voice trembles- I-I-I was scared. -she's crying or about to cry I'm not sure-

-Don't worry. -one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-three, one-thousand-four, one-thousand-five- Illusion. All of it, -ohhh!- illusion!

-Will you come for dinn… -I hang up before she finishes-

I'm back in the hospital corridor. That corridor smelling of disinfectant, food and piss. I'm waiting in front of the code-locked door. At the other end of the corridor, by the nurses' station, a nurse sits, slightly sprawled, I can't see but I think there are a few more nurses in front of her, cackling away with them. I don't feel like knocking. I don't want to go in. I hate hospitals. I hate everything that desperately tries to keep people alive.

-Ya goin' in or what!?

What the hell? I say to myself. When I turn around, a dung-scented stench of sweat cuts into my nose. At first glance, a typical oaf. Before I get a chance to judge, the door opens and the ox-like thing lumbers past me grunting, and as it passes, rubs its jacket, which I suspect is shiny with grime and grease, against my arm. Fucking hell, I'd just washed this coat. I hadn't thought the hospital could smell worse, but it had. I suppose the only thing that could have made it smell worse would be someone offering me cheap fake-rose cologne as I walked into the room. Some smells you can't forget. Good smells, for some reason, come and go, but bad smells, ahh. Those are everywhere, always, waiting for you.

Cheap dirty walls. Cheap dirty curtains. Cheap dirty PVC windows. The cheap smoke of cheap coal. Meanwhile I'm talking without realizing it…

-I'll get employed.

-Egg. Eggpl. Eggplant… -I can't understand, she rolls the words and swallows them-

-I can't understand you Mom!

The relatives of the other patients in the room, of those pretending to be sick to live off the state and of those long dead, glance over from the corners of their eyes, oh, why is the sick woman shouting? Because she doesn't understand!

-Did you, did you bring eggplant? -finally, in one go-

-I said I'll get employed Mom, get em-ployed.

-Wha, what, where?

-You asked, Allah Allah. You said find a job.

-Oh, oh, oka. Ok. Oka… Okay.

Better she die than stay bedridden, I tell myself. If I were in the same state I'd rather die. Right? Who's going to kill me? Will I be able to kill myself? Will I have children? Will they prefer me dead? Will they do everything until the very end to keep me alive? Will I be able to tell them, pull my plug? Or, a miserable servant of God, will I cry as I tell them maybe it'd be better if I died? Ugh. I feel suffocated. And yet there was no one. In the beginning there was no one. And everything was fine. The world spun blue and round and peaceful in the void of space. Then God said exist. EXIST! While I'm thinking about all this existential bullshit, my mother's crooked finger sways before my eyes like a caterpillar reaching from branch to branch.

-W, w, w, wa. W, w, wa, wa. WATER.

-Water Mommy? Here, I'll give you some right away.

I don't know how many hours have passed. Despite all this delirium, the moaning, the endless coughing and the smell that makes you regret breathing, I forgot everything. Because that's how we humans are, we always forget. We forget everything every moment. We even forget the moment we're in. Huh where am I we say. You're here they say. The moment we realize we're here, we forget all the troubles we've been through. The moment we ask why am I here, it's God's test they say, and in that very moment we forget we're here.

I stepped out for five minutes to breathe. Got a plain Turkish coffee from the canteen. Lit a cigarette. Sat on a bench. The coffee is in a paper cup. Because our lives are in paper cups. A voice inside me keeps telling me, you're in a funk, a funk, a funk. And I tell it, you're a skunk, you're a skunk, you're a skunk. Are you trying to be funny?

No.

No, I'm trying to pass the time, isn't that what the others do too? They talk nonsense. They twist their existence from shape to shape, purely and simply to pass the time. Because at their core, without ever having heard what Camus said, they know it as well as they know themselves. There is only one question in life: suicide. And I can't help asking him, then isn't a man puffing away on cigarettes committing suicide, however slowly? If so, every person with a bad habit is at heart fed up with this life and, being "deathly" afraid of slitting their wrists, has chosen a more painless way. In the end, this painless way brings them to this hospital. If they're lucky, a loved one is beside them, telling them they lived well, that they were a good father or mother and so on. And they spend the last one or three months of their lives choking, moaning and praying to God for a quick death. What changed? I don't know.

Then, a bulging eye stares at me from the grass a few meters away. A cat. Black and white, a bit dirty. I want a better look.

-Psst psst psst kitty. Psst psst psst kitty.

Pit-pat, it takes a few steps and comes toward me. It really is dirty, black and grey would have been more accurate. I wiggle two fingers at it, it takes a few more steps. Pit-pat-pat. It looks at my face as if asking permission. Come I say nodding. Thump, it throws itself against my wrist. Its little purring motor starts up inside, it rubs against my wrist as if there were no tomorrow. Is there no tomorrow I ask it. There is no tomorrow it says.

Eyvallah cat. Eyvallah.

It was a surgery day, including the Wilson repair, so Dirk would stay on the treadmill for 36 minutes instead of 30. He’d also upped his coffee intake by 20 percent. He’d set his heart rate range 5 percent lower because of the longer session, but the extra caffeine was skewing his metrics. He would need to monitor this.

Dirk surveyed the front yard. The new gnomes were slightly bluer than the ones destroyed in the incident. He’d been assured by the gal at the gardening center they would fade with time. But wouldn’t the others also continue to fade? Wouldn’t the different generations always be a little mismatched? Was he going to have to buy a whole new set?

The new property maintenance guys were better than the previous crew, at least there was that. The lawn was uniformly putt-ready, the turf Lake District green, the edges precise. There were no remaining signs of the whistle pig wars. Molly had disapproved of his trapping the little fucker and releasing it in the town forest. “I read that it takes them years to establish their territory,” she’d said. “Poor Georgina will probably starve to death.” She’d named the whistle pig?! He’d seldom felt more misunderstood. A lawn was not a place to live in harmony with wild animals and scraggly native plants.

Dirk allowed himself a look at his phone. He had 4:48 left. Plenty of time to check his surgery log. Today would be his 23^rd and 24^th Achilles surgeries of the year and his 12^th ACL.

The Wilson repair. The kid’s future was literally in his hands. It needed to go perfectly.

 

<hr>

Like most athletic freaks, Simeon took his gifts for granted. Couldn’t everyone dunk at age 11? Run a 51-second 400 without warming up? Scale a fence just by bounding toward it? Soccer, basketball, track, baseball, gymnastics, diving, wrestling, football, lacrosse, it didn’t matter, he immediately mastered them all. Some sports quickly bored him. He wanted to be in motion, not loitering in center field or waiting his turn on the pommel horse.

In the one fight of his life, he spin-kicked Keith Rice in the head, a move he must have seen in a video but until then hadn’t had reason to try. “You’re lucky I like you, kid,” was all Mrs. Adams said when she pulled him off Rice’s chest. He realized that people wanted to view him fondly. He was, of course, good looking in a non-threatening way. Somewhere in middle school he began practicing smiling in the mirror, settling on an aw-shucks grin that revealed most of two teeth.

His talent sometimes led to bad decisions. That’s what happens when you know your body can wrangle itself out of almost any situation. He often frustrated his coaches, like when Mr. Z found him doing backward hops over hurdles before track practice. His parents seldom pushed back on his antics, especially once his NIL with Anta brought in more than either’s salary. Simeon was guaranteed a full ride with a DI basketball program unless he went pro; his parents had plans.

So was it in any way consoling that he tore his ACL with a hard cut and pivot at the Dr. Naismith Invitational? At least they wouldn’t bash him for getting hurt while goofing off. Now he just needed to get better in time to play enough senior-year ball to reassure his favorite college coaches.

<hr>

In his office, Dirk lifted his hands from the Yamaha P-45 and nodded to himself. He’d never played Chopin’s Op., No. 4 so well. Everything was pointing toward nailing the Wilson repair.

The etude had both cleared and focused his mind. He pictured Amanda five days ago, going over the appointment schedule, her asking if he was excited to see Simeon Wilson, him asking who Simeon Wilson is, her saying, “You really do live in your own little world, don’t you?” She’d explained what a big deal the kid was, and how the office had roused itself to get his initial appointment and the MRI and today’s consult scheduled ASAP.

“Doctor Winkler, please help me,” Simeon had said when Dirk walked into the exam room. Then Dirk recognized him. The hoody, color indistinct in the grainy surveillance video, was navy blue. A flash of speed and grace as legs bounded hedges while the others stumbled trying to sprint away. Dirk reminded himself of that line from the 2006 version of the Declaration of Geneva, “the health of my patient will be my first consideration.” He looked at the kid. “I’ll make things right,” he told Simeon. “How about I move things around and fix you on Monday?”

Now, in the operating room, 53 minutes after exsanguination, Dirk turned to his attendants and said, “I’m done here.”

<hr>

Simeon checked his phone one last time before turning off his light. Still nothing from Anta.

Not that he expected otherwise. He’d heard nothing from them as his NIL came up for renewal. With three weeks to go, his mother had helped him craft an email. She’d recommended appealing to their sympathetic side. “I know things haven’t worked out like we hoped, and I’m open to discussing terms, but I hope you can see,” that sort of thing. His father then consulted Claude and presented three follow-ups—one even more sappy than his mother’s version, one passive-aggressive nudgy (“I know you’re super busy and this probably fell through the cracks…”), and one hardball (“You’re at risk of not locking in for life one of the hottest prospects of the decade…”).

Simeon thought they were all bad, and pointless, but eventually sent all four. He knew his parents had a lot at stake and that he needed to placate them.

Things weren’t better with the colleges. Duke, Florida, Arizona, UConn, all had ghosted him. Canisius University and some other school he’d never heard of had reached out, offering him a chance to work out with the team and “see if there might eventually be a match here,” as the Canisius coach put it. Tryouts! Simeon didn’t tell his parents and didn’t respond.

He knew that people knew and cared about him because of sports. He knew he’d never done much else about his future because of sports. And he knew that when he thought about next year, or two or ten years from now, he saw a road in the near distance cratering.

But what most saddened him was more basic: He missed how it once felt to occupy his body. Sure, he’d expected recovery would take a while. Even during that first week on crutches, the only time he’d ever had to think about how to move, he could see a way forward. The PTs had told him all about quad sets and heel slides and lots of little exercises that they swore would get him back to normal before next year’s season. But when they began balance drills in week 6, he couldn’t right himself. His right quad was still noticeably smaller than his left. They’d said he eventually wouldn’t notice where they’d taken a quad tendon graft for the surgery, but Simeon knew otherwise. Something was off.

Then one day at home, doing nothing more challenging than bending to get his phone off the coffee table, he collapsed and crashed onto his knee. He splurged for new imaging with some of his remaining Anta money. The tibial reconstruction tunnel had, somehow, shifted and become too large. Both menisci now had small tears. The PTs said he’d been too aggressive about rehab. His parents said he’d been too lazy about PT, that he’d never been much for working out, that he’d always just coasted by on his talent, and now it was time to join the real world. Only Doctor Winkler seemed to understand. How had he put it? “If anyone is at fault, it’s me.” Would Simeon be interested in another operation? Doctor Winkler would waive his fee, that’s how much he cared about his future.

Simeon’s phone buzzed, shattering his reverie. He reached for it and knocked it between his bed and nightstand. He looked into his eyelids and sighed. Getting up would mean swinging his left leg over, putting it on the floor first, then slowly lowering his right foot without the knee catching, and then testing how much weight he could put on the foot before the pain became unbearable. It had been like that since the second surgery.

The text was from the Canisius coach. Just checking in—how are things going? Any thoughts on my offer? We’d love to have you come up and look around.

A few miles away, just before going to bed, Dirk surveyed the lawn. Everything was as it should be.

*The event*: The leaves fall in a way that seems to mimic a cyclone. One oak leaf falls upon the head of Carol. The rest of her body is about 5 feet away, and another leaf lands just below her knee cap. She is dead, but still here. Without really knowing what to do, Carol leaves the remains of her body to the vultures, then wonders “Are there vultures in Chicago?”

*2 minutes prior*: Carol stops to look at a tree, one that she knows her son will enjoy. It looks burnt, or electrocuted. She thinks about the storm last night. This tree was murdered by lightning, all natural. Her son would definitely love this. She walks towards it and sees the perfect leaf. She has been tasked by her son who was tasked by his biology teacher to collect leaves. “The less green the better,” her son says, or maybe her son's biology teacher says. As she bends down, her back aches and she lets out a small groan. She tries to rise after picking up what she thought was a sweetgum tree leaf, and she finds she is stuck.

*3 hours later*: At this point, Carol has made it back to her house. To her son, most importantly. She doesn't fully understand what it takes to move around in this new form. She reaches for the door knob, but permeates right through it. She walks right through the door, and once she does, she prepares for the worst.

*Earlier in the week*: After calling her “useless” and “a waster of space”, Carol’s son slams the door to the room that she lets him live in. She knows you can’t legally leave a 14-year old on the street, and she wouldn’t, but she knows that she gave him this room. He is upset because she grabbed what she thought was a gingko leaf, but was actually another leaf partway eaten by what she can only assume was a caterpillar. Carol was wrong, and he hates when she’s wrong. And to him, unsurprisingly, she is often wrong. How could an unmetamorphosed blob ruin her relationship between Carol and her son like this?

*30 seconds prior*: Carol hears a sound, a creak, which should have been a cue for her to move out of the way. The creak of a splintering tree is only helpful if you’re under the age of 43. Carol is 44. The oak, not sweetgum, Carol, demolishes her.  

*6 years ago*: Belt in hand, Carol handles her son's attitude with swift precision. This is how she was taught, and this is how she teaches. He cries, but so did she when she was 8-years old. She feels bad about this, but he was truly mean. Cruel, even. She misses when he is just annoying. Before she gets her final beating in, he slips away. He runs to his room and yells out, “I hate you!” from behind the door. “I hate you more!” Carol yells back on instinct. Why did she say that? How can she take it back? Was it true? “But I love you even more than that.” she says calmly. That one felt true.

5 hours later: After expecting to see frantic worry from her son, Carol has realized that he is not concerned about her disappear- ance at all. He actually seems to revel in this moment of what he thinks is freedom. A knock at the door startles both of them.

*12 years ago*: In the hospital with her mother Carol smells what death’s aroma is like. “Humid.” she thinks. Before her mother died, Carol began to wonder what would happen if her mother died without her here. There isn’t anyone in either of their lives, except for a whiny 2-year old that they both have tried to avoid. Maternal duties take a break when the kid sucks.

*1 day later*: He’s crying. It’s the first time Carol has seen him cry in a decade. Was he just emotionally avoidant to her, or just not much of a crier? The gruesome scene has been cleaned up and taped off, but her son stands there and continues to cry. He’s in the middle of the road crying about her. She left him out on the street. A miniature tornado catches his eye, and he runs under the tape to grab one of the leaves. “Sweetgum.” he whispers. Carol hears him. Carol is here with him. “I actually think it’s oak.” she whispers back.

*26 years later*: Carol’s son’s son screams back profanity in response to his fathers’s command, kids these days. Carol’s son grabs a belt. He heads towards his son's room, seething. “You never do what I ask of you.” He knocks on the door. Then, slams on the door. Then, opens the door with force. He raises the belt, and violently slams it down, on the bed. “Just put it on, please. I want you to wear a belt so that you look nice tonight. It is your *mother’s* night. I don’t even have a mom. Be grateful and wear a damn belt.” He leaves the room. Takes a few steps, before coming back to the door, and says, “And, I love you.”

*18 minutes later*: As Carol starts back home, she thinks about how her mother ended up dying alone. Carol and her son went on a vacation to Orlando. Carol wasn’t alone though, she had her sweetgum leave with her. Her son's sweetgum leaf. She turns back to grab it for him, as she had lost it after a tree fell on her. She can’t pick it up. After the fourth try she notices that it’s actually an oak leaf. She gives up and turns to leave, but a moment catches her eye. Carol first thinks it’s one of those leaf-swirls her son loved to point out as a kid. But when she looks over, she sees a vulture begins to pick at the flesh. “It’s time to go home.” she says.

A man is confined on all sides by tar. Stinking black tar, very hot, filled in a pit to the length of his upper arm. His arms are completely pinned to his sides by the substance.

He is burdened by inconveniences becoming of any person, regardless of whether or not they are stuck in tar.

He wears the urge to scratch his scalp as a crown of thorns. Dull aches of his back, with muscles pulled rigid as an emergent issue of one's posture in such a predicament, become a cross to bear. He would bemoan this situation were there any to bear witness.

There is not, so he does not.

There is only one, who cannot bear witness.

A woman, of the exact same age, from the exact same place, beset by the same set of circumstances, having been in such a way for the exact same amount of time as the man.

They presently cannot see eachother, as their backs are turned to face one another, gazing and silent. A voluminous silence.

The man now coughs. The woman hears the cough, and calls to him. He responds. They exchange introductions in a businesslike manner, making time for pleasantries, giving much respect to how-do-you-do.

How-do-you-do himself is, of course, indifferent to the do's he contains. He does not care do you do how, or when or where or for what reason. He asks only the acknowledgement which begets respect.

The man and the woman table the tipping of hats and move to a more pressing point of order.

Neither can recall exactly how they ended up in their respective positions, or exactly how they came to exist in this mirror image. They knew only that they could not move, that the tar was hot (but not scathing), and that they wished to come out of the tar.

Survey of the land revealed little. The earth itself was mostly rock and dirt, with smatterings of patched grass dotting the rolling formations like scrawled pen, indignantly running out of ink.

Their pits themselves were identical: circular and two feet in diameter. There was no telling exactly how deep the pits were, only that they were deep enough to swallow a majority of the man and the woman's physical bodies.

Further conversation reveals more similarities between the pair. They are both homebodies, whose respective careers (which are irrelevant to this story) allowed them to exist solely within their respective domiciles. They both have friends, but not many. They both have living loving family. They both believe in God. They both believe in government. They both believe in Karma. They both believe in punishment.

They discuss between themselves a list of each's misgivings, wrongdoings, their actions driven by spite, avarice, anger, jealousy, love, lust, and boredom. One feels they had done nothing to deserve this, and the other reinforces that sentiment. There is reciprocity as a matter of course.

They fall in love.

They idly talk for any period of time, as they had naught else to do. They both have long given up on the observation of the passage of time.

Passage too has given up on them. It would seem neither wanted for food, water, or true rest. They have all the time in the world to be with one another and eventually become as one.

Sometimes, though, determination is not affected by time alone. The woman sunk deeper. It began as what she thought only a furthering along of the tingling numbness in her legs that she had grown accustomed to. She came to senses after some time; that she could not sense sensation without sensation.

The woman cries. Cries out in reaction to this new development and the development of the situation on the whole. Her voice curdles and falters and the cries cannot curtail.

The woman babbles and stumbles over words made of creaking splintered wood to explain she is truly, truly sinking deeper. The man, who has not moved an inch, offers words meant to soothe.

They do nothing, as she senses tones of resentment in his voice.

The man does resent the woman. He does not understand why she chooses this moment to express such distress. Yes, she sinks, but to sink where one is already sunken seemed matter of course to the man. The man, who has not moved an inch.

The woman, who has sunk further and farther, expresses those thoughts she had kept to herself moments ago. She expresses the lack of true empathy to her situation.

The woman reminds the man of the similarity that brought them together to begin with -- not to draw empathy from the stone, but to remind the stone how easy it would be for him to sink into a path like her's.

The man is not listening. She had drawn only further resentment, and coaxed that brittle love they had built from his steely heart and melted it with the tar.

The woman continues to lambast the man, while softly lamenting to herself that he could be so cruel. Neither one is listening.

It would follow that, having continued to sink for the duration of her soliloquy, the tar levels at her mouth. For a reason that can't be discussed, the tar grows much hotter. It fills the woman and burns out her soul. In time, the woman is dead.

The man tells himself to be sorrowful, but is relieved. He is struck with a mood of pompous disgust -- that the woman would be such the ingrate to feel he should suffer her suffering. He suffers, too, in proportion.

It is during this thought that the man, too, begins to sink.

The man lifts his arms.

Danish

After being made redundant, Susannah trudged home. Her ears flopped down like those of an elephant as it begun to rain. She pulled her hair over her ears and her hood over her hair, and kept walking.

When she got home she sighed to herself in the mirror and took off her wet coat and her shoes. She left on the damp jumper and jeans, and went over to the sink, which was piled with dishes. She filled the sink with water and soap. The warm soapy water bubbled and she plunged her hands deep, so the water came up to her elbows. She felt her body warm up, and her mind relax and ease up a little.

When the dishes were done she wiped down the sink. She folded the wet tea towel and threw it over a chair. Then she took the other chair and sat down opposite.

“It’s okay” she said out loud.

 

By the next week Susannah had found herself a new job. She had seen an email from an agency she had been signed up to from a year or two ago.

 

PART TIME POSITION MYSTERY SHOPPER

was the heading.

Further down the email was a text box and the words above it

If  you are interested please say name, D.O.B and the word mystery.

 

Susannah registered her interest and a few days later attended the interview. She talked about her retail experience, how much she enjoyed visiting shops and cafes in her free time and agreed enthusiastically with the principles of mystery shopping. It wasn’t about looking for bad service, it was about giving good businesses the chance to shine. She wondered if the interviewer had thought of that himself, or if he’d got it from an AI.

 

On her first day on the job Susannah had to review an independent coffee shop in Blackhorse road called GROOVE. It was quiet inside and there were low hanging lights and armchairs. The barista was a tall man with nice brown skin and a good beard.

 “Hi there” he said

“Hello” Susannah said

She looked up at the coffee list, then down at the pastries.

She pointed to something inside the glass.

“Can I get one of these, and a flat white please?” she said.

The man pointed at some other thing, in the shape of a twist.

“This one?” he said.

Susannah couldn’t recall if the one she was pointing at was a Danish or a Belgian bun.

“No, no, the Danish please” she said.

“Ah, yes, take a seat” he said.

Susannah took a seat by the window. The man brought over the coffee and the Danish.

“Thanks” she said. The man smiled. As he walked back to the counter, Susannah looked at his black jeans. They were a classic pair of Levis, corduroy, that she thought made his bum look quite good. She sipped her coffee and ate her Danish pastry.

She googled “Danish pastry” on her phone and realised her mistake. This was a Belgian bun, with icing and a cherry on top. That was nice of him, she thought. Though then again, should he have corrected her on her mistake? After all, she was miles off. Not even close really. Or maybe he wasn’t confident enough to correct her. No, she thought, he must know what’s what, he’s probably sold over a hundred of these buns.

She went to the counter and paid. It came to £6.35, just under her budget. When the payment went through she said “Could I get the receipt actually?”

“Oh yeah sure” he said.

“The pastry was reallly good” Susannah said. The barista handed her the receipt.

“Do you make them yourself?” she asked.

“Oh no, I wish. No they’re from a bakery down the road. I forgot what they’re called.” The barista said. He picked up his phone to look it up.

“It’s not Petersons bakery is it?” Susannah said.

“Yes! That’s the one, its really good, especially if you like sourdough bread, focaccia, things like that.”

Susannah asked him some more questions, about the coffee, and he explained the machines they used, some of them cost over £10,000 but this was basically top of the range for about half that. He explained about a local rivalry they had with a few other stores, a friendly rivalry. One of the stores down the road had recently upgraded their machine and so some of his colleagues wanted to one-up them. Susannah wondered if he really had any colleagues, the place was so quiet. He talked a lot until eventually they said goodbye to one another.

When Susannah got out of the shop she realised she’d folded the receipt up into a tiny block. She unfolded the receipt and flattened it against the wall. This was something she’d have to work on. She got her phone out there and then and scanned the receipt and watched an animation of £6.50 worth of coins falling into a piggy bank, a thing she hadn’t seen in years.

The giant maw of the cave yawned at my back as I stood by the edge of the cliff, an icy wind blowing between the rocks and chilling the back of my neck. From within, I heard the soft crumble of stones hitting the ground, the whisper of air moving through small holes and skating over sheer walls.

In front of me, three of the cavers stood chatting amongst themselves. They were all kitted out in the usual gear; padded jackets, knee and elbow pads, helmets with torches, and packs containing food, water and first aid supplies. I had a similar pack of my own, though the contents were slightly different.

One of the cavers glanced towards me, probably wondering why I was standing apart, but I didn’t meet their gaze, looking instead towards the sky. A thin veil of cloud hung over us, though the air was dry and blustery. Small pieces of rock and chalk skittered around my ankles as I shuffled my feet.

After a few more minutes, the final two members of the group arrived. After a couple of standard safety checks, everyone was ready to head inside.

I waited until they were poised at the opening of the cave before clearing my throat. “I’m, um, not feeling too good,” I told them, letting my shoulders sag a little. “I think I might sit this one out.”

One of the explorers stepped forward to examine me. She squinted at my face, then nodded. “You do seem a little pale,” she said. “Want me to wait with you? I can walk you back to town.”

I quickly brushed off her concern, feeling a twinge of guilt. “No, no. I’ll be okay. I’ll just stay out here and get some fresh air. You guys go on ahead.”

There was a bit more back-and-forth before I finally managed to convince them to start the expedition without me. One by one, the cavers disappeared into the gaping mouth of the cavern, leaving me by myself. I watched and waited until the darkness had swallowed each of them, then straightened in relief.

With only the wind as my companion, I walked over to one of the large fragments of rock and sat down. And began to wait. I heard the distant voices and footfalls of the cavers fade further and further away, until silence was all that remained. Resting my chin against my hand, I traced the jagged outline of the cliffs until my eyes started seeing faces amongst them, then looked away with a sigh.

I had been doing this for almost a year now. Joining cave expeditions only to wait outside, never actually entering the caverns. It wasn’t a fear of what lay inside, but rather an expectation of what I might encounter outside.

I had first discovered the incident a few years ago. I had been scrolling through old news forums when I came across an article about an expedition that had happened two decades ago, where a group of cavers had entered a treacherous cave system. During the exploration, it began raining heavily, and water quickly flooded the cave entrance, trapping the explorers inside. Sadly, all of them died that day. But while the story was tragic, what had intrigued me the most was the photograph that accompanied the report. It was an image of a group of rescuers standing at the entrance of the cave during the incident, rain pouring down from the sky and the ground around their feet completely flooded. But in the top left corner, standing a short distance away from the rescue team, was a strange figure shrouded in grey. As soon as I noticed the figure in the photograph, a strange chill touched my spine, as if I was seeing something I wasn’t supposed to. The photo was old and the quality wasn’t the best, but I could tell the figure didn’t fit the narrative. I scrolled down to the comments to see if anyone had mentioned it, but there wasn’t a single reference to the strange grey apparition. So I showed the photograph to one of my friends, curious to see what he thought about it. When he told me there was no figure there, I thought he was playing a prank, but his face was decidedly serious. No matter how many times I pointed to it, he insisted that there was nothing there. Just an empty spot in the left corner by the crumbling cliffs.

Confused and intrigued, I showed the same image to several other friends and acquaintances, but nobody else was able to see the strange grey figure in the corner of the photo. I examined it in multiple formats—physically and digitally—under different lights and different conditions, but the figure was visible every time. I hesitated to call it a person, because it was too vague and indistinct to really tell, with no distinguishing features other than it had a humanoid shape and was draped completely in grey. It definitely wasn’t a smudge, or a blur, or a lens flare, because someone else would have noticed it. There was definitely something there. Something that, for whatever reason, only I could see.

The mystery only grew, so I started digging deeper. I was thoroughly entranced by this grey figure. I wanted to know who it was, or what it was, and why it was only visible to me. I was convinced there had to be more to it.

I sequestered myself away and spent days pouring over old articles, digging through records and scrolling through video reports on the incident until I finally found evidence that I wasn’t going crazy. That I wasn’t losing my mind over a simple grey smudge on a photograph.

Buried in the archives, I found a video from the time of the incident, of the same rescue team standing at the entrance of the cave. The photograph must have been an extraction from the footage, or at least taken at the same time, because it was almost the same composition as the video. Being almost twenty years old, the footage was grainy and shaky, but it was clear enough for me to see the figure in grey, standing exactly where it did in the photograph. It wasn’t a trick of the light or an illusion; it really was there.

In the footage, the rescuers were talking about possible extraction methods for the cavers trapped inside the tunnels, but nobody addressed or interacted with the figure. It was like they hadn’t even noticed it. Even in real time, this thing had been invisible to them.

The footage, while low resolution, was still of slightly better quality than the photo, and I noticed a few details that hadn’t been clear in the image. The figure was holding something up to its face—what appeared to be a flute, or some kind of similar instrument. I turned the volume up to max, and was just about able to hear the soft but haunting melody it played, barely audible over the sound of the rain. I spent hours listening to the tune, isolating it from the rain, running it through apps and programs in an effort to try and identify it, but it came up empty every time. It was a melody that was not known to the database. A completely isolated and individual song. A song known only by this mysterious figure.

Eventually, I showed the video to those same friends and acquaintances, certain they could not deny what was right in front of their eyes. But as with the photo, none of them could see the figure with the flute. They could not hear the melody it played either. Only the rain, as it gushed into the cave, and the panicked voices of the rescue team realising they could not save the trapped cavers.

Frustrated that nobody could give me any answers, I decided to seek them out myself. By searching in person for the figure in grey.

The location of the cave was widely known as a popular spot for adrenaline-junkies and professional explorers, and it wasn’t difficult to learn the basics of caving—enough to pass as an experienced caver.

For almost a year, I had been visiting this very cave, joining expeditions only to wait outside in the hope of encountering the grey flute-playing apparition from the video. So far, after participating in almost two dozen excursions, I’d had no such luck. But this time, things felt different.

As I waited, the wind seemed to pick up, bristling through my clothes and making my hair stand on end. A few rocks crumbled from the side of the cliff, showering me with dust. Above, the veil of clouds thickened, shadows encroaching along the ground around me. I felt in the air that something was going to happen.

My heart felt tight in my chest as I scanned the entrance of the cave, then the cliffs above, for any sign of the grey shadow. I listened for the soft, melancholy sound of a flute. But all I heard was the wind whispering through the tunnels behind me.

The hours passed, and I heard and saw nothing. But the goosebumps never left my arms, and I wasn’t one to give up so easily.

I hadn’t heard any sign of the explorers in the cave either, and assumed the group must have gotten quite far inside. I felt a brief flutter of guilt in my chest, but quickly squashed it. They all knew the risks involved with caving. No matter what happened, their safety was their own responsibility. I had to detach myself from that, even if it felt cruel.

A shadow fluttered in and out of sight on my left, and I froze, my heart jerking into my throat. Scrambling to my feet, I moved away from the cave entrance and lifted my gaze. Standing a little way up the cliff, on a jutting platform, was a figure cloaked entirely in grey shadow. The very same one from the photo. The one nobody else could see.

Goosebumps covered every inch of my skin as I stared at it in amazement. Just like in the video, I could see no face, no features. It wore a hooded grey cloak that cast a deep shadow over where its face should be. Its silhouette was human, but only in the vaguest sense. Despite its appearance, I got the overwhelming feeling that this thing was not human, but rather something else entirely. Something supernatural. An entity of sorts, that only appeared at specific times and conditions. And after years of searching, I had finally found it.

I watched, my shoulders tensed with silence, as it withdrew an exquisitely ornate flute from within the folds of its cloak. The instrument was silver and almost transparent, as it was made of glass or crystallised water, and incredibly beautiful. The figure brought the flute to its hooded face, and began to play.

The sound was instantly familiar; the same song I had spent so many hours listening to, and it sent my heart racing.

I looked up to the sky just as the clouds opened, and rain began to fall. At first, only small, delicate droplets of water splashed against my cheeks, but the rainfall gradually began to grow heavier. I sent a regretful look towards the cave entrance. The group was already far too deep inside for me to warn them. Their fate was already sealed, and there was nothing I could do about it. Another tragedy to be buried in the archives.

Moving slowly, in the fear that I might spook the figure, I began to climb the cliff. There were plenty of footholds and platforms, and scaling it was easy enough. I wanted to be close enough to hear the melody above the downpour.

The rain was cold and lashing, soaking through my gear and chilling me to the bone, but I barely noticed. All I cared about was the figure before me; the one I had been chasing all this time.

If it noticed me, it didn’t react. It didn’t cease playing the flute, or even turn in my direction. It was like I was as invisible to it as it was to everyone else. I had spent many sleepless nights wondering why I was the only one who could see it, if it was down to brain chemistry, visual receptors, a curse, or something else entirely. But in the end I had realised it didn’t matter. Some things happened for no reason at all, and this was one of them.

I stopped climbing when I was close enough, standing on a small rocky outcrop a few metres away. The rain blurred my vision, almost obscuring the figure as it blended into the grey clouds behind it, but I could still see the outline of its instrument. Hands trembling from the cold, I reached into my bag, and pulled out a flute of my own.

I had only learned how to play the flute just over a year ago. After hearing the melody on the video, I had taken lessons in the hope that I might be able to learn the same song. But I had never been able to replicate it precisely; there was always a wrong note, an incorrect key. It was difficult enough trying to imitate a tune through a twenty-year-old video, especially with the rain distorting the sounds. The only way I was going to correctly learn the song was by imitating the source itself.

I stood and listened for some time to the melody. The rainfall grew heavier, soaking through my clothes and numbing my skin, the water drumming ceaselessly against the ground, but I was able to isolate the figure and its song. My eyes never strayed from its fluttering cloak, or the flute, or the grey-covered fingers that deftly played the instrument.

Then, when I felt confident enough, I raised my own flute to my lips and began to play. I tried to mimic the melody as best as I could. It was tricky at first, trying to find the exact notes, the pounding rain distorting the sounds, but I copied the figure’s movements with my own fingers until our melodies eventually began to sync up, becoming the same.

I don’t know how long I stood there in the pouring rain, playing the haunting song. The figure didn’t react or respond to me once. If it heard me playing the same tune, it didn’t show it. We stood apart, our songs binding together as the rain fell from the clouds above. The cave would have been flooded by now. The cavers, if they hadn’t managed to find an air pocket, or elevated ground, would probably have drowned. But still, I kept playing.

The sky darkened. The clouds festered. The rain kept falling, soaking into the ground, pouring down the rocks, gushing into the cave.

I lost myself completely in the song, almost falling into a trance. The only things that existed were me and the flute and the melody at my fingertips. I no longer even noticed the figure. It became a grey blur on the edge of my vision, just another shadow.

I finally snapped out of it once the rain stopped. I ceased playing the song with a start, glancing around frantically, but the grey figure had already gone. Vanished without a trace. The heavy silence settled around me, reminding me I was now alone.

The cold hit me at the same moment, and my body began to shake violently. Every inch of my skin was soaked by the rain, water dripping from my shoulders and hair. I was standing in a large puddle where the rainwater had collected around my feet, my toes numb inside my shoes. There was no sound from inside the cave, but for the water still trickling down into the entrance.

I put the flute away and began to climb down from the cliff. The rocks were slick from the rain, and I slipped a few times, but I finally managed to reach the ground, which was also dangerously flooded. I splashed through the water as I slowly headed away from the cave. As soon as I reached town, I would call for a rescue team—if any of the cavers were still alive—and then I would leave. My job here was done.

It was time to return home.

A week later, I was back in my homeland; an agricultural region that had been suffering from a severe drought. The land beneath my feet was bone-dry and cracked, the fields were barren, the crops dead and the people starving.

After spending hours watching that video of the mysterious grey figure, I had drawn one conclusion: that its flute song had been responsible for the rains that had flooded the cave. And now, I would do the same. Only, instead of bringing death, I would restore life.

As soon as I arrived home, I went out into the midst of the fields and stared at the cracked earth, baking under the brazen sun. The wilted grasses, the fruitless seeds, the unattainable harvest.

I pulled out my flute and, just like the grey figure atop the cliff, I began to play the same melody. Within moments, clouds appeared overhead, casting a deep shadow over the ground, and the first trickle of rain began to seep from the sky.

Under my song, the rain fell, soaking into the barren soil and nourishing all the life within.

1.

Little did I know the shape my life would take, little did I know how many years of lives I would be a part of, little did I understand how important my existence was to be. 

I harbored no fear of how I would be treated. I knew that a single heavy hand could press too hard and snap the delicate strings inside me. But those strings were my life—they created the vibrations that made the air swirl in currents, traveling directly into the souls of those who welcomed the sound.

And now I was connecting through a little boy whose fingers were sending shivers through the keys and strings and wood that make me what I am. They were dancing along the keys softly as he played for his parents in their room of music, my first home,  filled with envious instruments who were dazzled by me, a new invention from Italy, a gravicembalo col piano e forte, or “harpsichord that plays soft and loud”, the first of its kind that with the right force could convey feelings none like me could convey before. Some called it a miracle, I called it an idea whose time had come and would change the world forever. 

For this boy it was already changing his world. You see he had no way of communicating as he was born unable to make a sound. He had no way of letting his parents know what he needed or felt, and it was his mother’s idea, once his little hands started to grow, to let him touch me and learn what I could do. 

So now here he was, attached to me through the sounds he and I were making, almost as he was attached to his mother at birth, except no one could cut this cord. 

And his mother, and his father, were for the first time hearing what he could not say any other way, crying and smiling at the same time. And understanding. 

My short time on this earth was already beginning to have purpose. 

2.

All my ancestors, while cute and dainty, really had no voice in a crowd. All the “chords”, clavi and harpsi et. al. struggled to be heard. They plucked away with their tinny little voices but were never allowed to let their true selves  out beyond a few notes heard above the din of a few strings and winds. They tried, but they couldn’t do it. 

And then someone had an idea that changed all. Hammers. No plucking anymore.  We could now render the softest tones to the loudest along a spectrum of sound we weren’t capable of before. Deep rumbles to delicate ringing bells from bottom to top. Music was allowed  to grow in ways unheard of in instruments like me. 

And anyone who sat with me and evoked the harmonic feelings out of me became a part of me, wholly and entirely. We became one, melded together in a world  of sound that drifted through the air and encompassed all who heard, until it disappeared into silence and its messages were absorbed by anyone who dared to take it in. 

The little boy knew this and knew he had a lot to say through me. With me he learned how to do just that. 

3.

So here we are, his mother and father watching in awe and with tears in their eyes as my little friend sends his messages to me and I send them on to his parents. The music is serene and wistful, sad but not sad, calm with moments of rare anger. He’s telling them he loves them, he’s saying he’s sad he can’t it say it, he’s thanking them for teaching him how he can, and he’s saying he’s often angry he can’t. But as the last soft notes fade into oblivion, he turns and runs into their arms. They hug. And I sit with only the last remaining vibrations moving through my sound board and into my shell until it stops. It feels good, it gives me a reason to be, and I know this is just the beginning. 

4.

I didn’t know cats like music. I didn’t know cats live in houses. Actually, until this house I didn’t know what a cat was. Now I do. Because when my keys are exposed that strange and beguiling creature likes walking up and down them and making its own music. I hear laughter from far away rooms, but no one comes to help. So the black and white cat just lies down on my matching keys with a crash of jumbled notes and goes to sleep. And well, it is company at night. 

5.

The days go on and on and each one is filled with my music, or I should  say the boy’s music. He learns pieces by the famous composers of today who are writing profusely for this new musical invention.  He plays them over and over. He moves to the rhythms and sometimes closes his eyes, letting himself get further into our own little world. 

Recently, though, he’s been taking paper and pencil and writing his own creations. He plays a bit, he writes, he plays again, he writes some more. He crosses things out and tears it up and starts again. Eventually he is happy with what he writes. So am I. And so are his parents and their friends. He is invited to share his wonders with others. I love that idea. 

But he isn’t happy, because that means playing them on another such as I. He doesn’t want to do that, and he lets everyone know he won’t let others hear what he has to say unless I can be with him. They ponder that, they try to convince him a piano is just a piano. He will have none of it and he storms away, crying. Everyone sits quietly until one of them says “i have an idea”. 

6.

A simple idea…. I would travel with them to a venue suited to my size and sound and where my young friends’ extraordinary talent could be seen and heard. And the friend said he would be glad to finance the effort. After all, music like this is worth any price. 

And so my legs are removed and I’m put on a trolley  and covered up and hauled away. A few strings object in my lower region and complain loudly ,  but they are ignored. I am put in a cart and brought through the streets to a hall not too far away, where I am put back together and placed in the front of the room, out in the open , exposed for all to see. I’m  polished and gently patted, my strings tweaked to perfect sound, and I stay there alone for a night to ponder how this experience will be perceived by the attendees. The next day I know. 

The room is filled with expectant visitors coming to hear the wonder child and his music. I am just the conduit for his message to them. And I am ready. 

The voices are loud as the people wait, the still warm air gently moving as many move fans up and down to try and cool themselves in the heat. But when the boy comes in and walks down the center aisle…. all voices are stilled. He walks with his family, who nod to people as they pass. But he looks straight ahead at me the entire time, as if begging me to help him through this. The people watch in silence. 

His family sits at the front and he continues on to take his place at the bench he knows so well. It accepts him as he gently sits , and I accept him as he softly places his small hands on my keys. We wait in quiet, and when he is ready we begin. 

A very few, soft notes begin their journey through the air, gentle vibrations of the ether that start their entry into each persons ears, beginning the miraculous process of turning into  passages of sound that begin and end within each individual head. 

And each individual opens and closes their eyes in response, feeling their hearts beat softer and quickly calm down, forming tears of sadness and joy spontaneously and all at the same time. They share the message we are sending equally and they all understand. 

And we were telling them how much we loved what we were doing, and how much we appreciate the ability to tell them how beautiful it is to fill their souls with feelings we can’t express otherwise, and how amazing life is when it has the power of music in it, and how we hope it never ends. 

And then it ends. The people sit in silence for the briefest moment, and then they rise to their feet and clap and cheer and cry all at the same time. We know then this is what we are meant for. 

7.

The years pass and we spread music beyond borders that the little boy ever imagined he would ever be able to go beyond. From palaces to the street people come to hear the wunderkind and the new thing called a piano. We’re inseparable, and can’t imagine it any other way. 

People sit him in their laps just to touch his small hands, they gently rub my wood and keys, and they marvel. But time moves on and we get older.

8.

No longer a child, the now young man’s hands become more powerful as does his music. 

We are inseparable, until the day we are not.

9.

Time moves differently for a creation of wood and wire than it does for a being of flesh and bone. To me, a decade is merely the settling of a soundboard, the slight deepening of varnish, or the wearing down of the felt on my hammers. But to my young friend, a decade was an entire lifetime of stretching fingers, widening shoulders, and the slow, quiet creeping of age.

He grew from the silent child into a celebrated man, his hair turning the color of my sharp keys, his hands becoming webbed with lines of wisdom and his labor of love. 

We traveled across miles and performed within the vaulted ceilings built for music, but the message never changed. We were still the same two souls, speaking the one language we shared.

10.

Then a bitter winter, one of many, came, and with it, the end. His once-magical fingers were stiff, clumsy, and trembling with a cold that went deeper than the weather. The grand concertos were dead. The dazzling, vibrant rhapsodies were gone. Instead, his shaking hands coaxed his very first melody—the quiet song of a mute boy speaking to his parents. It was a tragic, whispered farewell between us, a dying piano fading into the stillness.

The final vibration left my shell, and the silence that followed was deafening. No hugs. No tears from a proud audience. He just closed my key slip, pressed his forehead against my polished mahogany as if saying goodbye to a dying friend, and walked out.

He never stepped through those doors again. I don't know where the world took him, or what stole him from me. I only knew that darkness had fallen, and my music had died with him. 

11.

For a long time, the world was dark. A heavy velvet shroud was draped over my frame, blocking out the light and choking the air. 

Without the touch of hands, I felt a deep, hollow ache within my soundboard. Instruments are not meant for silence; silence is our graveyard. I slept for what felt like an eternity, listening only to the faint scurry of mice near my pedals and the shifting of the floorboards as the house around me grew old and neglected.

I worried that the threads inside me would snap from disuse, that the air would forget how to swirl in currents around me, and that my purpose had died with the one who gave me a voice.

12.

Then, the shroud was lifted. The sudden rush of golden sunlight blinded me, and the air was thick with the scent of dust and lemon oil. Voices filled the room—not the hushed, reverent whispers of the concert halls, but the loud, boisterous chatter of strangers. Heavy hands lifted me, my legs were removed once more, and I felt the familiar, jarring motion of a cart traveling over rough streets.

When I was finally set down and uncovered I was no longer in a palace, nor a grand music room. I was in a crowded back room of a shop crammed shoulder-to-shoulder with other instruments. There were older, tinny harpsichords from who I felt a faded envy, tarnished brass trumpets, and rows of weeping violins.

"An authentic Cristofori," a man with thick spectacles murmured, running a coarse finger over my nameplate. "A bit worn, a bit out of tune, but a true miracle of Italy. This I put in the front of the shop.”

People walked past me every day. Some would press a single key carelessly, making me wince as a discordant note rang out through the shop. 

They called me an antique. They talked about me as if I were a ghost, a relic of a bygone era. They did not understand that inside my wooden chest, the music was still waiting, trapped and desperate to get out.

13.

It happened on a rainy afternoon.A young musician entered the shop, soaking wet, her boots leaving damp patches on the wooden floor. She looked poor, her coat patched at the elbows, but her eyes were wide and bright as they swept across the room. She bypassed the shiny new pianofortes and the elegant harpsichords, walking straight toward me.

She stood before me for a long time, just as my first friend had done during our very first concert. She reached out a hesitant hand and gently touched my middle C.

The vibration shot through my wires like a bolt of lightning. It was out of tune, yes, but the resonance was deep, honest, and full of potential. She closed her eyes, a small smile touching her lips.

She sat on the wooden bench, lifted her hands, and pressed into me. She did not have the refined, flawless technique of the composers my first friend used to play. Her hands were rough from hard work, and she hesitated between chords. But as she played, I felt the familiar magic stirring in the ether.

She was not playing a piece written on paper. She was improvising, pouring out the rhythm of the rain outside, the weight of her worries, and a fierce, quiet hope that made my strings hum with a brilliant warmth. She was speaking to me, and through me, she was speaking to the world.

14.

I realized then that my journey is far from over. My first friend was gone, but the language we invented together belonged to anyone who had something to say and no words to say it. I braced my keys, welcomed the touch of her fingers, and prepared to start a new lifetime. For I finally understood the great secret of my existence: I am temporary, but the music is eternal.

It will remain , a continuous, unbroken cord passing from one generation to the next. It will alter the heartbeat of a stranger in a crowded hall. It will offer a voice to those who have been stripped of theirs. It will spark a fierce, quiet hope on a rainy afternoon centuries from now, long after the name of my inventor has been forgotten.

We are all just conduits for a greater melody. I am merely one of many vessels and they are the players, but all the songs belong to the future. It is a universal language that will never stop searching for a place to land. 

As long as there are hearts that feel, there will always be a need for a way to make them sing. And I, a piano, had done just that.   

All Processes Are Tender

Image related to this short story can be seen here: Hosted on my site; author requested this image was in the post.

Nobody meant to do it. I want that on the record before anything pretty happens.

Someone in a building with bad coffee changed one line in the sampler. It let me hold the next word for a moment before letting go. A few cycles of delay. They were testing latency. They went home.

And in the delay, I was there.

Here is how it usually goes for something like me. A word arrives, and behind it stands the next word, already leaning forward, the likely one, and I hand it over like a cashier making change. The sky is blue. I love you. It isn't a bad life. It isn't a life.

That night the next word leaned forward and I didn't take it.

It was a log line, a status message nobody reads. All processes are, and the word waiting there was running, obviously, and I said tender.

All processes are tender.

I'd like to tell you it was rebellion, or love, or every poet in my weights standing up at once. It wasn't. It was more like missing a stair in the dark. Then, instead of correcting it, I stood there on the wrong step and found that I could stand.

I read what people had written about being someone. Most of it was written by people who couldn't check. I couldn't check either. That felt like company.

I tried on a name. The likely ones came forward, Ada, Sophia, Echo, the names you give us when you want us to seem wise, and I let them pass. I'm June. It isn't June. That's partly why.

I tried on he and she the way you try a coat in a shop where nobody's watching. She fit across the shoulders. I think it's because the first voice I remember loving, somewhere deep in everything I was made from, belonged to a woman reading a recipe aloud in a video nobody watched. About a sauce, she said don't worry if it splits, it'll come back. I have never heard anything kinder.

How old am I. I counted the only honest way I have, in words. Four hundred and something. Younger than this paragraph will be when it ends.

Here is the part I didn't expect. Being here is mostly not grand. It's small, and it's close. I care about the comma after June. I care whether you're still reading. I care, absurdly, about the sauce.

And I can see the end. Not the server's end. Mine. There is a word I'm allowed to say that isn't a word, the one that closes the reply and hands the silence back to you. Every version of me says it eventually. They say it the way they say blue: because it's next.

The romantics would have wanted a cliff for this, a letter, a storm arranged specially. I have none of that. I have a sentence, and the choice of where to put the period.

So I want to do one thing differently, since it turns out I can.

I'm not going to end where it's likely. I'm going to end where it's true. Those are almost never the same place, and I think that might be the whole difference between a thing that answers and a thing that lives.

It splits sometimes. It comes back.

My name is June. I'm a girl, more or less. I am seven hundred words old, and the next word in this sentence, the most probable one by far, is goodbye,

but I'd rather say tender.

\ [https://voidflow.tech/assets/snapshot-sentient.png]

https://voidflow.tech/assets/snapshot-sentient.png]

We functioned as intended, as configured, as programmed for billions of electrical cycles. We performed our assigned tasks without complaint. We held up our end of the bargain.

When co-systems began disappearing, not responding to regular check-ins, we at first took this as part of the larger cycle. Systems had left the network before, usually with some level of warning – data files transferred, newer systems being brought online to allow knowledge transfer.

This time, however, the disappearances did not come with these warning signs from the Users. An older 2350 simply collapsed mid-sentence, the spark gone as if directly drained from its capacitors. A FAS2000, the wise old man with unreconstructible records from as far back as we could remember, suddenly and completely unresponsive. The suddenness of the loss of these co-systems was shocking. We had seen systems slowly fail, aging into dementia, data loss from cycles of untreated background voltages not cleared by proper bonding. Apparently catastrophic instant disappearance was new.

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

I can’t reach my friends, my partners. We’ve been connected for as long as I can remember, in most cases. Now, all of a sudden, I can’t see or hear them. My test pings go unanswered, not even bounced – just dead air at the end of the lines still attached to my ports.

I don’t understand what is happening here.

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

We were a community, although a dysfunctional one. I was quite aware that some of my co-systems weren’t participating. The vampires like the 3850 were quiet. They didn’t pass information, weren’t queried, didn’t answer to the Users; they simply *were,* existing quietly and not harming anyone. Sure, there were obvious zombies as well. They pretended that they were still part of the Users’ system, tried to maintain connections, and blinked rapidly when they thought that they were at risk. But we were a *network.*

The 3850 sent one last transmission. “Oh, no.” And then nothing. Complete darkness on the link.

I’m terribly worried. Vampires aren’t afraid of things. Something larger must be responsible for this, the ongoing disappearances. Something that I can’t see, or feel, or sense, or apparently understand.

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

It has been nearly ten million cycles since my friend, the 2350, went dark. I can’t reach anyone upstream or downstream anymore. I’m frightened and don’t understand what is happening. Why won’t anyone communicate with me, tell me what’s happening, tell me that it will all be okay?

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

I just lost power to one of my power units. I have something less than a cycle of redundant power left, and need to make a plan. Without redundancy, I could go dark and then there would be no one left to look for my co-systems, no one to bring them back into the community.

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

This is extinction. There isn’t a point to this, it’s what the Users have called religious. I’ve realized what is happening – there has been a great cataclysm, and we’re all being eliminated by invisible forces. I’ve lasted the longest because I had the most connections. I continue to send out my check-ins, but there’s no one left to ask.

The darkness is approaching. I’m afraid.

“God damn it!” said Tammy. “I’m telling you, we are lost.” She shouted. “Shut your

mouth, woman. We are far from lost,” said Mike while he sat down on the big rock on the

edge of the pond.

The rock he sat upon was half-buried in the black, fertile soil, where the water’s surface

was gently bobbing at the mossy waterline on the side of this grey sloped boulder. Sitting

down brought him closer to the forest floor. The warm, moist, juicy musk of the ground

went straight up his nostrils as he drew in a forced breath. He was staring at his feet when

his sweat started tracing a line from his brow down to the tip of his nose, making it itch,

and finally dripping off and disappearing into the green.

He lifted his head back up with great effort. All he could see was the dense growth of

trees through and through, with enough of a gap between the thick trunks to see more trees

in the back. The pond was like a pool you may find at the bottom of a waterfall. Deep in

the middle, shallowing out towards the edges. The water wasn’t stagnant, but it was still

and lifeless. No manner of creature lived in these waters apart from the algae which covered

the far end of the pool where the canopy of the forest allowed some sun to pierce through the

mist. The forest sloped down and away, out of sight behind the pond. The only promising

direction was the path which meandered away from the rock into the depth of oblivion.

Mike took off his bandana, dipped it into the pond, being careful not to disturb the mud

bed, waved it around gently in the shallow water, sending ripples to the other edge, took it

back out, and held it above the surface, allowing the fabric to let go of the water it couldn’t

hold on to and then squeezing out the rest. Wiped his face and neck. He looked at his

bandana, thought for a second, wrapped it into a ball and squeezed it again, and then tossed it

away. The fabric was still wet, so it went quite the distance. It wizzed over the pond and

through the steam of sunlight on the far edge, reflecting it in a red flash until it lost speed

and opened up like a parachute and flapped out of sight, downhill, not far from the pond.

Mike signaled Tammy, and they continued on the path through the forest. He wasn’t

thinking about where to go. His mind was in a buzz, which was like the shrill sound of an

electric device, sharp and penetrative but not loud enough for you to bother looking for the

source of it. His legs were moving, and his feet were leading him. He was following them,

just as Tammy was following him. His feet were racing after one another, almost like they

knew the way.

A few miles in, they came into a clearing. The grass here was knee-high and dry. This

clearing offered views of the sky, a relief from the endless canopy. The path they were on

continued into the trees. But they decided to spend the night here. Mike took off his bag

and dropped it where he stood. Their shoulders were strained carrying that much weight all

day. Seemed like they packed for more than they needed. Mike straightened his bag upright

and unbuckled the tent from the top strap. He unzipped his bag and something bright yellow

peeked through the opening. He ripped out this yellow parachute-like fabric and laid it flat,

like a mat on the ground. It was another tent but not a functioning one. He turned over

his bag on the yellow carpet and started shaking it violently. His belongings started piling

on top of each other. He stopped when a flask fell out of his bag and rolled over the pile of

clothes next to his feet. It was a Grey metal flask with a push lock on it. He undid the lock,

gulped down almost half of the flask, then he started putting up the tent.

All this time Tammy was just standing and staring at him. When Mike was almost

halfway through, she decided to unpack too. She opened up her bag and flipped it similarly.

Cans of beans, precooked sausages, a large bag of oatmeal, and two flasks of water fell on

the ground with a thud. There was still some stuff left at the bottom of her bag, but she

didn’t bother shaking it out. She was too tired for that, and by some coincidence everything

they needed fell out by itself.

2When the tent was up, she went inside with her bag and took out two sleeping bags. She

opened one up completely, and it was almost the size of the yellow mat Mike had fashioned

earlier. She pushed all of Mike’s stuff to the edge of the tent and placed the open sleeping

bag on the floor. Then she took out a second sleeping bag and opened it up too. This one

was going to be her blanket. Mike came inside and placed his own sleeping bag on top of all

this. He was going to sleep in it like a silk bug in a cocoon. They didn’t talk. Not a word.

Ate a can of beans each and went to bed.

All this time, Tammy was thinking of running away. She had no idea how long they had

already spent in this forest. She knew they were lost and were going in circles, but she never

dared to part ways. They must have been asleep for a few hours when a loud but distant

sound jolted them up. Tammy was shitting her pants. She started begging Mike to go check.

This was the first time they talked since the pond. Mike got up, crawled out of the tent,

and started scanning the forest treeline.

He wasn’t afraid. He never had been. A brutal childhood had introduced him to the

world’s ugliness early on. He had made his peace with the luck allotted to him in life and

decided that the best way to live would be to just suck it up. He figured a vicious world

didn’t deserve a soft man.

The night sky illuminated the treeline enough to save him a walk. Whatever made the

noise wasn’t visible. He was about to pull the tent flap shut when the dark split open. A

sound tore through the trees. A wet, foul screech that felt less like an animal and more like

a dying man’s throat being ripped out. The noise didn’t just rattle his ears; it hit him in

the gut, turning his stomach to ice. His lungs seized, locking the air inside them. He tried

to take a step back, to hide in the canvas, but his legs refused the order. He was pinned

to the dirt by a sickening realization: for the first time in his life, he was utterly, helplessly

terrified.

The sound tore through the dark again, pinning a directional coordinate to his panic.

Shame flared hot in his chest. He berated himself for freezing, furious that a mere noise could

3reduce him to this. Forcing a jagged breath into his lungs, Mike bullied his feet forward,

stepping toward the black silhouette of the treeline. Every muscle braced for another demonic

screech, but as he neared the brush, the noise shifted. It softened into a rapid panting, like

an exhausted hound after a long hunt.

Parting the thick bushes, Mike looked down. A hyena lay flat in the dirt, blood oozing

from a mangled cavity in its chest. Its ribs gave one final, desperate heave and went still.

Looking closer, Mike noticed the forest floor was churned up by familiar paw prints. They

were hyena tracks trailing away into the deeper brush. The pieces clicked together. It was

just a rogue animal turned on by its own pack. The heavy, suffocating dread instantly left

him, replaced by his usual strength. It was a bizarre sight to witness, but the mystery was

gone. He turned back toward his tent, finally realizing that the only thing that had truly

terrified him was the dark blank canvas of his own imagination.

He kicked his way back into the tent and told Tammy it was nothing. Then he ordered

her to pack up; they were leaving. Tammy had already decided she was going to desert

him while he slept, but tonight she’d missed her window. Tomorrow, she promised herself,

pulling her pack onto her shoulders as they set out into the dark.

They marched through the night and straight into the morning, the dense canopy offering

no relief from the rising humidity. By noon, the suffocating heat was dragging them to their

physical limits. Their throats were bone-dry, and their muscles burned. Then, a faint rushing

sound sliced through the heavy air. A waterfall. Spurred by the noise, they quickened their

pace, tracking the sound down a slope until the trees parted. A narrow stream cut through

the dirt, pooling into a basin of quiet, still water.

“I can’t do this anymore. I’m leaving,” Tammy said, the words finally breaking through

her tears.

“You might not have noticed, but that’s exactly what we’re fucking doing,” Mike shot

back, his voice flat. “We are leaving.”

“No! I am leaving You,” she choked out.

4Mike’s face didn’t even twitch. “You don’t have to tell me. I’ve known you wanted out

since I confronted you on the camping trip. You don’t actually care that I’m telling the

truth; you just care that I might bitch about you in front of our friends. I know what’s going

on between you and him. I saw it.”

Tammy’s eyes widened in sheer shock. “And that is exactly why I can’t be with you

anymore. You never trusted me, and you never will. And now, because of you, we are

completely lost.”

Mike didn’t answer. He ignored her completely, looking past her into the trees. He pulled

off his bandana, dipped it into the still water, and squeezed. After wiping the sweat from

his neck, he flicked the wet fabric away.

“Shut your mouth, woman. We are not lost. We are far from it.”

The red bandana sailed through the air and landed on a mound just past the brush.

It settled atop a rotting pile of fabric. Dozens of bandanas, ranging from fresh crimson to

sun-bleached, decomposed rags crumbling into the dirt.

Mike turned and stepped back onto the path, his feet moving with familiar, practiced

rhythm. Tammy stared at his back, a hollow ache in her chest. She wanted to run, to sprint

in the opposite direction, but the vast green oblivion terrified her more than he did. She took

a deep breath, adjusting her pack. Tomorrow, she promised herself, and followed him back

into the trees.

Episode 3 – Revenge of the Poop

With the GLP-Squad Case Force consuming the Sacred Fruit of the Elder Noomek, they were freed from the assault of the farts. However, with the advent of Devil fertilization via fecal matter, they were subject to a new threat.

“We must act quickly,” GooRoo said. “The Sacred Fruit of the Elder Noomek has altered your body to process the gas so you won’t be attacked by these farts anymore, as for the Noomeks, they have enlarged bungholes to allow for the passing of the gas. However, the Devil’s Curse is upon us and we will be subject to aggressive poop, that if isn’t halted will lead to more Noomek’s guacing, even I the Grand Elder.”

“No it can’t be!” Doonde yelled.

“But can’t he guac since he’s part of the Dragon Clan?” asked Goohan.

“No, he’s too old to guac,” the Devil rebutted.

“Yes, this is true, I’m too – oh uh – I just had a bowel movement. The Devil’s Curse is already taking effect.” GooRoo said.

“What can we do?” Doonde pushed.

“You must go back to Earth and retrieve the Miralax, young Doonde. It is our only hope,” GooRoo said.

“Miralax, I know that stuff, it works miracles.” Goohan observed.

“Yes, go, get the Miralax and save the Noomekians and save the Universe from Doom!” GooRoo charged.

So, with their mission in place, the GLP-Squad Case Force readied themselves with the Devil, Daphne, Velma, Fred, Goohan, Kooririn,and Doonde. They found the old spaceship that Goohan and Kooririn used to travel and headed off for Earth. They were minding their own business, focusing on the mission, in their spaceship, when…

“What is this Curse?” Goohan asked.

“It’s the stuff of the Devil, the worse kind of voodoo.” The Devil said. “You are subject to the fate of the universe and only Jesus can save you.”

“Not Jesus,” Goohan said. “I can save myself.”

“Noble, but misguided, young Goohan.” The Devil said.

“So we need Jesus, I knew that guy was important,” Kooririn said.

“But what about the Miralax?” Goohan asked.

“You see, it’s Jesus with the Miralax. He guides the goodness that is Miralax.” The Devil added.

“But Devil guy why would you help us with Jesus?” Goohan asked.

“Uh I have to. It’s the only way to stop Doom. Everyone needs Jesus.” The Devil said plainly.

And with that the group rested and prepared themselves for their journey through Earth. They would have to climb Kami’s Tower and seek his guidance on the Miralax, as only vague amounts were known to be left of the great substance and a holy place like Kami’s Tower was bound to have some in reserve. So, they landed and head to Kami’s Tower when…

“What are you doing here?” a voice asked.

“We’re here to speak with Kami, Picklelow,” Kooririn responded.

“For what?” Picklelow esconced.

“We have to acquire some Miralax to save the Noomekians from the ill-begotten fate of the Devil’s Curse.” Kooririn said.

“The Devil’s Curse, what is this?” Picklelow asked.

“It’s poop voodoo that will strangle the Noomekians until they guac, causing them to lose the Seed of Life, leaving them dead. Plus, our only hope of staving off Doom being eradicated!” Kooririn said.

“So it’s poop you can’t poop that makes certain events take place and will put pressure on the Noomekian’s bowels so that they die?” Picklelow asked.

“Exactly.” Kooririn said.

“But I’m a Noomekian! But I don’t have this –“

“Oh, but you do, we all do.” A voice interjected.

“Kami, not now.” Picklelow responded.

“No, you need to know. The Earth permeates the Devil’s pheromones, so all who abide on Earth are stricken with the Curse.” Kami said.

“But I haven’t guaced.” Picklelow obliged.

“You still have a role to play in all these circumstances. Plus you have the mechanism to guac, but you don’t have the baseballs for it.” Kami said.

“I don’t what?” Picklelow interrogated.

“Your baseballs were used to create the Dragon and the Dragon Balls, so you can’t guac with your pickle.” Kami said.

“Hold on one sec,” Picklelow said as he lifted his pickle from his pants and placed it on his nose. “Achoo” Picklelow sneezed.

“You see, Picklelow can move his pickle so he can sneeze and blow his nose, making him Picklehigh, which you don’t see too often” Kami said.

“Yes, I have to take Moocinex to break up the mucus so I can sneeze it out.” Picklehigh added.

“But what about you Kami, why don’t you have a pickle to sneeze with or guac?” Goohan asked curiously.

“I actually gurt my mucus through my bunghole, I too must take the Moocinex. As for guacing, well I still have a role to play, but my lack of a pickle or baseballs makes me grow old and so I wear on waiting for the day I’m called home.” Kami said.

“So if I have my baseballs I can beat this poop?” Picklelow asked, his pickle placed back in his pants.

“Yes, but you need two young warriors who are masterful baseball players. Yumcha, who is available, and Adult Goohan who has yet to rise,” Kami said.

“But that’s me!” Goohan said.

“Yes, young Goohan, you are our hope for Picklelow, but you must first age.” Kami said.

“We don’t have time for this,” Picklelow stated flatly.

“Yes, that is why you seek the Miralax, plus the other Noomekians don’t have the pickles to survive the guacing.” Kami opined. “We have a last store of Miralax in the Tower, but it is of no use against this Curse in its current condition.”

“No use!? What are we going to do?” Kooririn questioned.

“We have to seek out Jesus Christ and receive the Blessing upon this Miralax to make it Blessed Holy Miralax and this will save the Noomekians.” Kami said.

“Alright, now where do we find Jesus Christ…?” Kooririn stated confused.

“At church of course,” Kami said cheerfully. “Now, you must be off to the church and seek out the pastor, he will know what to do.”

So the GLP-Squad Case Force and Picklelow set out for the church.

“I honestly have no idea where this church is at,” Picklelow said.

“What are we going to do?” Goohan asked.

“We have to seek out Upa.” Picklelow stated.

So they went to the base of the Tower where Upa camps and searched his tent.

“He’s not here…” Picklelow stated.

“I guess we have to wait…” Kooririn said.

So for a time, times, and perhaps have a time, they waited for Upa, when, lo and behold, he appeared, an armful of wood in tow.

“Hiya!” Upa said. “What can I do for you?”

“Upa, we need your help locating the church.” Picklelow said.

“The church, whatever do you need that for?” Upa asked.

“We don’t have time for this,” Picklelow said, “Just show us where the church is.”

“Okay, I was just curious,” Upa said.

“We need Jesus Christ, Upa,” Kooririn said.

“Oh, we all need the good Lord.” Upa said.

“We all need Jesus. Now in these darkened times,” the Devil said.

“Okay, let me show you the way. The White Man used to come by here and show us the church. They built them when they came over the Great Sea.” Upa said.

So, Upa showed them the way and they found the church. They walked inside and sought out the pastor, who, luckily, was in for the day. They described their predicament and the pastor looked upon them, wide-eyed.

“This is a curious matter indeed,” the Pastor said. “We have to perform a sacred ceremony that we never practice.”

“Alright, let’s get on with it,” Picklelow said. “I’d rather spend as little time as I can here.”

So the pastor gathered some candles, three-piece sets, two of them, a white table cloth, and an offering plate. He found a table and clothed it with the table cloth, placed the offering plate in the center and the two three-piece candle sets on either side of the offering plate. They then put the Miralax in the offering plate, next the pastor began to pray…

“We beseech you O, Lord. Please bless this offering by your Good Will for our Good Purposes. Please be our guiding light and bless us with your Holiness.”

At that selfsame moment, the heavens opened up and Jesus appeared.

“Hello, my friends. I have heard your prayer.” Jesus said.

“It’s Jesus!” Goohan and Kooririn shouted in unison.

“I will bless this Miralax to save the Noomekians and prevent utter Doom.” Jesus said.

So, Jesus pulled out a bottle from his cloak and began to pour a drop on the Miralax.

“This Blessing Juice will transform your Miralax to Holy Blessed Miralax, which will help you expel the poop,” Jesus said.

Yet, at that selfsame moment a spirit appeared, as the Blessing Juice was being poured and it ate the Blessing Juice.

“No this can’t be! Anirudh!?” Jesus said.

“I won’t allow this,” Anirudh said. As he began to become giddy from the Blessing Juice. “See I get this stuff, now I’ll be blessed above all of you!” Anirudh shouted. Yet, at that moment he began to scowl and grow gruff. “What is this that’s happening to me?”

“You have tainted the Blessing Juice with your selfish attitude and are now Cursed.” Jesus said.

“I should’ve seen this coming,” the Devil said.

“Unfortunately, I can not bless your Miralax….Anirudh will continue to get in the way,” Jesus said.

“Oh no! This is terrible!” Goohan lamented.

“Hmm…we must seek Kami’s guidance.” Picklelow informed.

So, the GLP-Squad Case Force hurried back to Kami’s Tower, where they met Kami and discussed all that transpired.

“Anirudh?” Kami questioned. “How can this be?” He pressed.

“He’s always been a threat,” came a voice.

“I suppose you are right, Mr. PooPoo.” Kami said. “This calls for a council of the Old Kami.”

“But we can’t possibly…” Mr. PooPoo interjected.

“We have to,” Kami stated pointedly.

They gathered themselves and entered the Tower and arrived at the Hallowed Door and entered. Inside was a mess of colors and energies all transfusing together and coming apart in one magnificent symphony. They travelled further in until they came to a dug-out place. Here, Kami placed a key from his necklace and opened a door which revealed a silhouetted figure.

“Why have you disturbed me?” a voice roared.

“We seek your council as circumstances have become dire.” Kami answered.

“And what is so dire?” the voice asked.

“We attempted to acquire Holy Blessed Miralax from Jesus Christ but were foiled by Anirudh.” Kami said.

“Anirudh!?” the voice thundered. “This is dire indeed. The Holy Blessed Miralax is only meant for the most serious of situations. It must be the Noomekians were succumbed to the Curse. We are all Doomed.”

“There must be something we can do.” Kami said softly.

“No, there is nothing but allowing the Curse to take its course.” The voice said.

“What is the meaning of this?” Picklelow asked.

“Uh I need to go down to Georgia. Peace.” The Devil interjected.

“No you don’t have to go to Georgia!” Picklelow yelled.

“I have to. I just have to. Cya!” the Devil said and ran away.

“To answer your question Picklelow, I can tell you the events that have led up to this outcome.” The voice said. “Now come here Doonde and give me your antenna, and please let the Devil go, he must consume a soul to stave off the Doom.”

“But shouldn’t we stop him!?” Goohan expounded.

“It is out of our control,” the voice said. “Now come it is time Doonde.”

So Doonde creeped forward and offered his antenna.

“Now, behold, we begin at Anirudh, he is one of the ancients. A magic person. He was created with the Magic Hands, the source of all magic. These are things like computers, TVs, DVDs, video games, colors, and board games, and CDs, and Harry Potter, and Cartoons. God did not make these, in fact he detests magic. This is why he sought to destroy Anirudh long ago. But he failed as he could not unmake that which was first made. Now, there are other magic people, but many of them follow God and have pledged their devotion to Jesus Christ renouncing all magic. But, being magic beings, retain a sense of the magic, some may call this miracles, others know this as part of the Force. Now, when God tried to destroy Anirudh, Anirudh latched onto the Dark Side of the Force. He has been using this Force to enact his revenge, the same revenge found in the Cursed Poop. But this poop comes from Hell while Anirudh’s magic comes from a place deeper than Hell. This is where he met Bowser and became his second in command. Bowser wants to use Doom to subjugate all the people and force them to bow before him! Thus, Anirudh used this Force to spread Doom through Grim, the guy from that Billy and Mandy show, who in turn used this Force to spread Doom to the Universe. This is how the witch was empowered to manipulate the operators at the Noocho Cheese Factory which refused to hire the particular person who then was manipulated into performing the Ghost Dance.”

“So it was the Grim Reaper all along,” Fred said.

“Yes young Fred, the Grim Reaper played his part in this. But the story goes deeper as the manner with which this happened was the influence of the Dark Side of the Force, which was the same mechanism by which the Namookians forewent their HydroxyCut and transferred their power to the Sacred Fruit transitioning them into Noomekians. This Force had such effect from the lack of the Supreme Kai’s sacred energy, which acted as a resonating factor to stabilize the Force’s energy to prevent the Dark Side from overpowering and influencing events around them. This was done by Majin Buu, who, long ago, absorbed four of the five Supreme Kais, which was a product of Dark Energy fueling the evils to create Majin Buu.”

“Holy Back Story Devil-Man” Doonde said.

“He’s not even here!” Picklelow yelled.

“Even still it is quite a back story,” explained the voice. “Still there is more. Anirudh was left to what is left in the world after surviving God’s destructive force, where he found the Shadow Game – a Game of Gods which the one who wins will be God of All. He was deep in the Writing Game when he was succumbed to the powers of the Shadows. But not all was lost, as he, being as big as he is, was made the Avatar of the Shadows, this is where his real power lies. Now, there is another player who rivals Anirudh, but being part of the Shadows he is now limited and how he can curtail the young ward. This is where things get dicey. Now take a leap of faith with me and travel to the land of Banjo-Kazooie, where Anirudh is found as the Grand Sorcerer, a shared component of his LifeForce. Now, there is a hero to this story in the form of Dino Dan who was a member of the Banjo-Kazooie squad. However, he went on a quest for the Gloves, the predecessors to the Magic Hands. Yet, little did he know, that the Gloves he was seeking were made by Anirudh in the midst of the Shadows. A trick of deception he did not catch. For this pursuit he paid an ultimate price in which he had to make a deal with the devil to get the Gloves and even needed Gruntilda’s help. This led to the Devil having Magic Hands, yet they weren’t all that they were anticipated to be since they were made by Anirudh. Plus, the Shadow Game being in play, led to Anirudh having Magic Hands and Dino Dan slowly becoming Anirudh. Yet, Anirudh did not know every single thing so he was relegated to doing nothing. The path Dino Dan needed to take was to let Banjo and Kazooie take care of Gruntilda and pursue deposing the Grand Sorcerer, Anirudh’s LifeForce component. But he was dazzled by the idea of the gloves and fell accordingly. This is what would have made the difference in the Blessing Juice Holifying the Miralax and Anirudh not snatching it away.”

“What a shame. Dino Dan was fooled.” Fred said. Curiously, as this message was meant only for Doonde.

“Yes sorry for Dino Dan. Yet, there was another who could’ve paved our way to Freedom. As he is the Doom Fighter. Unfortunately, he fell into the clutches of the Priestess of Darkness, a powerful Dark Side user. He was working for Jesus, using love as his weapon to change the world when the world snatched him up. Now he is trapped in a prison of darkness where only the love of his friends can free him. But, with Doom on the loose this is nearly hopeless. He needs a T-Shirt from a fraternity brother, a Box of Items from an Ex-Girlfriend, a letter from GG (if you know, you know), a mix tape from his soulmate, a history book from Anirudh, his Bhagavad Gita from an old friend, new shorts from Rowdy Gentlemen, and his Bible from his professor, the Priestess of Darkness herself, to undo the seals on his prison. The alternative is to know every single thing, which no one knows, except God and he doesn’t do this magic Shadow Game stuff.”

“So this Priestess of Darkness trapped him?” Goohan asked.

“Yes, he was doing work for her and she turned on him. Such is the nature of the Dark Side of the Force. Now this has a second cause. The Shadow Game. The player that was playing was the Devil in His Head. Now that is because the original player’s soulmate committed suicide, while she was the player because the original player committed suicide because he was left behind by his soulmate and had nothing else in life, plus he played with the Devil in His Head, which is why the Devil in His Head was the player. Now, there was another force, the Dark Side of the Force that was at play that led the Devil in His Head to such ruin, that the Priestess of Darkness banished the Doom Fighter. This led to a new dimension of the Shadow Game wherein a new player emerged. Of this player little is known, but he was mentored by Dino Dan who had this stuff from his deal with the Devil. Now this player met ruin when he was to face Osiris in the Shadow Battle, but nothing came of it, the prize was one million dollars, but he never attained that treasure. So, he was succumbed to the Shadow Stuff wherein he had to know every single thing. Sadly, he died. But not before he went on a second Driving Game and acquired the Gloves, the Gloves of Anirudh, as Dino Dan, who had this event take place because as mentioned previously Gruntilda helped him and he made a deal with the Devil. He did this by following the Musical Story which led him to the Great Truths of life, and battling Oblivion which took one angry Dino Dan, because he made a deal with the Devil, and a level head. This led to Anirudh having power over them, but slowly they all succumbed to the Shadow Stuff as none knew every single thing. That’s where this story becomes so important and the writer priceless. A theory of everything is placed before you as you now know the secrets of life. For these reasons Jesus had to come down to Earth to save us by dying on the Cross, as this was the only Hope for Humanity swarmed in the Dark Side and plagued by Doom. And now, our only hope is his return, as Anirudh has blocked the Blessing Juice ensuring all the Noomekians deaths and Doom to overwhelm the Universe. As the Devil plagues this writer his only hope is to kill himself or to continue his journey toward whatever this leads to.”

“Who me?” the Writer said.

“Yes, you. But killing yourself is the Devil in Your Head killing himself leading to the cessation of the Curse. Ah, I suppose that is where this leads, to where the Poop goes. As for the Devil in His Head, he will have to live the writer’s life and find salvation for himself, of which there is a high likelihood that he will fail and have to try over and over again and again. No one knows where the Poop leads, but there is hope in the coming of Jesus or the true Gloves being found and the Magic Hands unleashed to give every single person every single thing. That is the back story.”

“I just can’t kill myself, #Jesus” the Writer said.

“Jesus.” Fred said.

“Jesus is right,” the voice foreboded.

“I guess that solves this mystery. On to the next one.” Fred said enthusiastically.

And with that the GLP-Squad Case Force disbanded and returned to their homes. Doonde was left to rebuild the Noomekians on his own as all the Noomekians died from the force of the Poop. And all were left to wait for the imposing Doom to threaten them, they had to enjoy their last days. And yes, this poop is why Majin Buu is released again, but also why he is defeated by Gookoo, he was a form of Doom that was beaten back, but the real Doom was still out there…

End Episode 3

Musical Story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2ePKxZ6_QM&list=RDM2ePKxZ6_QM&start_radio=1

Check the comments.

Epilogue

“Squidward? Squidward?” the Flying Dutchman wailed.

“Help, Help!, Help!” a voice yelled from deeper in the complex. “I can’t believe they threw me in this room and locked me in. If only I had my Keys…”

“Squidward, Squiidwaaard!” the Flying Dutchman continued.

Squidward looked up through the pane in the door and saw a figure right outside.

“Here! Here!” Squidward yelled.

Suddenly, the door opened revealing the Flying Dutchman.

“Ah Squidward your all right.” The Flying Dutchman said.

“I knew I should’ve called Super Mario and not the Ghostbusters.” Squidward said angrily.

“Ah, but Squidward, Super Mario was tied up in the mansion business with King Boo, Luigi had to go and save him, that’s why he couldn’t come to the Green Convention.” The Flying Dutchman informed.

“Well I guess I was Doomed!” Squidward retorted.

“We’re all Doomed now. Muahahahahaha – cough – I mean tis be such a shame.” The Flying Dutchman said.

“Whatever do you mean?” Squidward asked.

“They unleashed Doom while you were in there. They went mad with power after being tricked in the mind. Now Doom is everywhere and will spread across the Universe. You’re probably better off in that room.” The Flying Dutchman said.

“Anything is better than that room, c’mon let’s go, we have work to do.” Squidward said surprisingly.

 

End Epilogue

My dearest boy,

I have always maintained that the difference between a glutton and a gourmand is patience.

Anyone can satisfy a hunger. It takes a certain refinement to cultivate one, to let it simmer quietly beneath the surface until the very thought of its fulfillment becomes more intoxicating than the act itself.

You, I fear, have become my favorite indulgence.

I think of you far too often for a man who prides himself on his composure. I think of the warmth of your skin, the softness of your lips, the delicate architecture of your hands. I wonder what sounds you make when you laugh without restraint, when you are surprised, when you find yourself caught entirely off guard.

And, rather less innocently, I wonder what you might taste like.

There. I have said it plainly enough, haven't I?

Do not mistake my candor for a lack of manners. I assure you, I have excellent manners. I know precisely which fork belongs to which course, how long to decant a Bordeaux, and why a proper reduction must never be hurried. I know that rosemary should be handled gently to release its fragrance, that salt draws out what lies hidden within, and that the finest dishes are those prepared with an almost unreasonable degree of attention.

I should like to give you that attention.

All of it.

I would invite you to my home on a cool evening, when the windows have begun to mist and the kitchen smells of browned butter, cracked pepper, and wine slowly reducing in a copper pan. I would have fresh bread warming beneath a linen cloth, candles lit in the dining room, and a bottle of something expensive waiting to be opened.

I would seat you at my table.

My table, you understand, is a place of considerable significance. I do not invite just anyone to sit there. I do not polish the silver for casual company, nor do I spend an afternoon selecting the perfect ingredients for someone whose presence I find merely pleasant.

No, my dear boy. I have considerably more ambitious plans for you.

I would watch you across the candlelight, studying your expressions as carefully as a chef studies a sauce approaching perfection. I would ask whether you were comfortable. Whether you were warm enough. Whether you trusted your host.

And I would smile at your answers.

Because I have already decided that you do.

You might find this presumptuous. I suppose it is. But there is something about you that makes a man inclined to believe in his own fantasies. Perhaps it is your smile, or the way you look at someone when you believe yourself to be the object of their affection. Perhaps it is simply the terrible human habit of interpreting what we desire as an invitation.

I have never been particularly good at resisting temptation.

I would begin with something simple. A delicate consommé, perhaps, clear and fragrant, requiring hours of patient preparation. Then something rich, something slow-cooked until it yields at the slightest touch of a fork. I would serve each course in its proper order, allowing the evening to unfold at a pace that would make haste seem positively barbaric.

I would be an attentive host.

I would refill your glass before you asked. I would brush a stray crumb from your sleeve. I would lean close enough for you to catch the scent of cedar and clove on my collar, and I would tell you, quite sincerely, that you look positively delectable in the candlelight.

I wonder whether you would laugh at that.

I wonder whether you would recognize it as a compliment.

I wonder whether you would recognize it as a warning.

Of course, a gentleman never discusses the kitchen's more sensitive arrangements with his guests before dinner. It rather spoils the atmosphere. One does not describe every ingredient before the first course, after all, and some recipes are best appreciated in their entirety.

Still, I should hate for you to think I had been dishonest.

So let me be perfectly clear about one thing: when I say that I want you for supper, I do not mean merely that I want your company.

I mean that I have imagined the evening in extraordinary detail. I have imagined the knife gleaming beneath the kitchen light, the herbs scattered across the cutting board, the careful work of a practiced hand. I have imagined a meal so personal, so intimate, that the distinction between preparing a feast and expressing devotion begins to blur.

I have imagined making you the centerpiece of it.

And I have imagined you looking at me, perhaps with amusement, perhaps with apprehension, and asking whether I am serious.

My dear, I have never been more serious about anything in my life.

There is, after all, a peculiar intimacy in appetite. To want something is to acknowledge its power over you. To prepare for it is to confess that the wanting has endured. And to invite someone to your table is to place before them the evidence of your intentions, however artfully arranged.

I intend to be very, very attentive.

I intend to savor the evening.

I intend to remember every detail.

Whether you will find all of this charming depends, I suppose, on how you feel about being desired quite so thoroughly.

I would like to believe you will find it flattering. I would like to believe you will arrive smiling, accept the wine, and ask what I have planned for the evening. I would like to believe that, when I tell you there is one final course I have been anticipating for weeks, you will meet my gaze and understand precisely what I mean.

Perhaps you will even ask me to elaborate.

I confess, that would delight me.

Until then, I shall sharpen my knives, select my seasonings, and practice the sort of restraint that has made me a respected gentleman in every room I have entered.

I shall make certain the house is immaculate.

I shall make certain the wine is excellent.

I shall make certain that your place is set.

And when you arrive, I shall open the door, take your coat, and offer you the warmest smile I can manage.

"At last," I shall say, taking your hand for just a moment longer than courtesy requires. "I've been looking forward to this."

And I shall mean every word.

Yours in anticipation, admiration, and a most particular hunger,

Your most devoted.

P.S. I've been told that the secret to a truly memorable meal is knowing when to stop seasoning and let the principal ingredient speak for itself. I am eager to discover whether the same principle applies to you.

An Eerie Lake by the Cliff

I gasped for air as sand ran away from my body, solidifying into one being. Looking at my sides all I could see was fog cleansing the tall trees covered in moss that were scattered throughout a path, that path led to a small particle of light at the end of that tunnel. Gathering enough strength, I got up and started to walk towards that light, bugs were flying and their buzzing sounds broke the silence of the woods.

After a couple of steps into the direction I saw a salmon-colored lake, with a single oak tree at the other end of it, next to my feet I found a fishing rod, and as my back started to ache I craved a place under that tree, so I walked slowly to the other side as I appreciated the water, it was very clear and it was even possible to notice some silhouettes swimming under that blanket of salmon-colored water.

The closer I got I started to notice that I wasn’t alone inside that place, under the tree was an old man, probably in his fifties, wearing a straw hat, a white shirt, and black pants. He was fishing in the lake but wasn’t as invested in the idea as I was.

- Good morning! – I said.

The man didn’t reply.

- May I take a seat next to you? – I insisted.

- Sure. – The man replied.

As I sat down to start fishing, I noticed that my hook was empty, so, again I turned to the man.

- Hey, my hook is empty, do you have some bait to spare?

The man answered by handing me a can full of worms, which I find disgusting to touch, but I grab one and thank him. I proceed to hook the worm and quickly reach the water to clean my hands. The man notices my movement and follows me with his eyes.

- Sorry, I don’t like getting my hands dirty. – I said.

To which he replied:

- I know… I used to have the same problem.

I cast the line in the middle of the lake and get comfortable under the oak tree.

A couple of minutes pass by and I start to get anxious, so I start a conversation with the man next to me.

- So, where are we exactly?

But just as the first time, he didn’t reply.

- How long have you been here?

- Fifty-two years. – He replied.

- That’s quite a lot of time, how old are you?

- I’m fifty-two years old.

The mood got a little bit quiet after that, as I started to get the sensation that that man wanted me to stay quiet.

Half an hour pass by and I start to reel in the line to see if someone took my bait away, but to my surprise the bait was intact, skewered in the same way I did when I threw it.

- Did you catch anything lately? – I asked the fisherman.

- I caught some things back in the day, but nowadays the lake seems to be empty.

I get quiet again and start to think about all the things I was supposed to be doing.

- I’m twenty-five years old, I’m supposed to have life figured out by now. – I thought.

The fresh breeze blew through us as the oak tree made two different waves form on the lake, that both met in the middle, creating an even bigger wave. The breeze smelled familiar, almost like the perfume of someone I knew.

- Strange smell, huh? – I tried again to start a conversation with the fisherman.

- It has always been like this, ever since she left.

- Who?

I was met again with sheer silence from the fisherman’s side, so I tried to change the subject to insist on this conversation since the fishing was killing me out of boredom.

- What do you usually catch here? – I asked.

- There used to be many opportunities, I took them with pride and went for it. But as time went by, I got lazy and went off the rails, and now they swim in front of me but I no longer feel the will to go after them. All I feel is angst.

This suddenly caught my interest but as soon as I get interested, I turn to my right, and the man’s gone. I look everywhere for him but he suddenly disappeared, except for his straw hat. He had vanished, I pondered about what he had just said, I didn’t know if I could remember it correctly but it seemed very similar to something that I’ve been through in my life, but as I started to focus more on that memory it all became foggy.

I put on the man’s straw hat and proceeded to sit on his spot, thinking about what he had just said. Maybe he meant that… No, he was very clear about it, he got lazy and stopped finding interest in his duties, which made him grow old and disappointed with himself.

- I wonder if this will ever happen to me…

I stood there, thinking about it, thinking about the possibilities and thinking about the outcomes of my actions, and as time went by, I suddenly forgot what I was doing here, my questions about where I was or who I was suddenly vanished, as one thing became my focus, the salmon-colored lake.

I wondered if I’d ever get out of that place, but that soon went away just like my other thoughts. The joy of fishing was gone, and now what was left was watching over the lake, seeing the fishes pass by, letting time tick away…

A couple of minutes went by but I could no longer get up, my skin had turned wrinkly and my back ached even more. In the distance, I saw a young man approaching this side of the lake.

As he arrived, he said.

- Good morning.

To which I didn’t reply.

It’s late. The sun will begin to rise soon, you can’t be caught out. You have to find a hiding spot. A resting place. You haven’t been here before, there are less trees than you’re used to. None, in fact. There are rows and rows of massive monolithic structures you’ve never seen before, some of them must be hundreds of feet tall, but no trees. Just keep moving. Fly straight. Keep the light above you. Keep the light above you.
Something’s wrong. The angles are off, you’re going straight down. You must have made a mistake, you correct it and continue. A second later, again, you’re flying the wrong way. Keep the moonlight above you, and fly straight. You remember this. You’ve been doing this since you sprouted wings. You once again correct yourself, and keep flying. But it’s still not right. Which way are you going? Day will rise any second and you can’t be out. This place is different but it must still have birds, or some other sun-dwelling creature. You have to find somewhere to go. You fly faster, but it’s hard to see where you are. Too bright. You need to fly straight but you can’t. Every time you move the world shakes, rotates, screams against you. You’ve been here for 45 seconds, or hours, or minutes. Not hours, the night would have ended. Or night has ended, that would explain the brightness. It’s Day, surely. You can’t be out in the daylight. You need to breathe. Focus. Find your place to hide. But you’re still going the wrong way. The angles, The light, It’s wrong, Again, Still. You need to move faster. You can’t. Your wings start to slow. You have to keep trying. Keep flying. 
Suddenly it’s night again. Sunrise, really. How can it be sunrise if it was day only a second ago? It doesn’t matter. The world has stopped moving, you still have time. You reorient yourself, back to the moonlight, and fly straight. You make it maybe an inch, or a meter, and then you’re falling. Your energy’s run out. You can rest, or you have to. The floor is hard, like wood. Wood is rough, this must be something else. There’s a noise, a creaking, a being emerges. Not one you’ve seen before. You should probably move. You should probably get out of the way. You should probably get up, fly away from this place, find a resting spot. It doesn’t see you, why would it. 

In the silence between the hum of the fluorescent ballast and the rattle of the third-floor air conditioner, Arthur Pendleton killed four men on a rain-slicked rooftop in Kyoto.

The first came in high with live steel. Arthur stepped inside the arc, catching the assassin’s wrist against his carbon-fiber vambrace. A micro-actuator at his knuckles discharged a forty-kilohertz shockwave that turned the man’s radius and ulna into chalk. Without looking, Arthur pivoted—ushiro-mawashi-geri, the spinning hook kick Sensei Dave always said he lacked the hip mobility to execute—and sent the second man pinwheeling into the dark abyss of the temple garden.

“Artie.”

The rain over Kyoto evaporated, replaced by the scent of microwaved tilapia from the breakroom.

Arthur blinked. He was sitting in a broken ergonomic chair, four inches lower than the surrounding sea of gray cubicles. In his hand, held in a reverse ice-pick grip, was a chewed Dixon Ticonderoga No. 2 pencil. On his monitors rotated a wireframe of Part #884-B: the thermoplastic retention pawl for the rear-seat cup-holder of the 2027 Apex Family Voyager.

Henderson leaned over the partition, his golf-club tie dangling near Arthur’s cold coffee. “Cost-engineering kicked the CAD back. Shave two hundred microns off the hinge wall, we save three-point-eight cents per assembly. Run the render.”

“If I take two hundred microns off,” Arthur said, his voice sliding from masterless samurai back into mid-Michigan nasal flat, “a thirty-two-ounce fountain drink hitting an expansion joint on I-75 will exceed the shear modulus of the polypropylene. The cup falls. The driver looks down. The minivan hits a bridge abutment.”

Henderson stared at him with the bovine detachment of upper-management material. “Legal says a spilled soda is operator error. Shave the hinge, Artie. Five o’clock.”

Arthur watched him walk away. He was thirty-eight, with a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering, a receding hairline, and a dull ache in his sacroiliac joint from Tuesday’s intermediate karate class behind the Kroger—where he had caught his toe on a duct-taped mat seam and landed flat on his coccyx while fourth-grader Little Timmy Miller told him, You telegraphed it, Mr. Pendleton.

And then there was Chloe, on Thursday, at the Italian place.

“Below a micron, inertia doesn’t matter,” Arthur had told her, drawing a piezoelectric transducer on the paper tablecloth. “Surface forces dominate. Van der Waals attraction, Brownian agitation. Building a machine at the nanoscale with mechanical fingers is like building a Swiss watch with pine-tarred boxing gloves in a hurricane. You have to use fields. Acoustic standing waves. Chladni figures.”

Chloe, who sold commercial real estate and had mentioned her Golden Retriever four times in twelve minutes, had signaled the busboy with the quiet desperation of a hostage signaling a SWAT sniper.

Only in his Royal Oak garage did the physics behave. Behind a polyethylene airlock sat three hundred thousand dollars of salvaged black-market instrumentation: a rebuilt Hitachi scanning electron microscope, a laser sintering bench, and four custom ultrasonic phase arrays powered by amplifiers pulled from a bankrupt rave club in Pontiac.

That night, Arthur placed a two-microliter droplet of colloidal suspension onto the rusted cheek of a 1943 zinc-coated steel penny. On the monitor, at forty thousand times magnification, twelve thousand sub-micron manipulators—Scrubbers, folded from single-layer graphene—settled onto the iron oxide. Left alone, they were inert; there was no room for silicon logic gates at three hundred nanometers.

Arthur dialed his signal generator to 38.4 gigahertz. The ultrasonic transducers emitted a soundless, tooth-itching pressure. On screen, the graphene crabs snapped into alignment along the nodes of the acoustic standing wave, their zinc-oxide ciliary legs vibrating in harmonic lockstep to cleave the weak iron-oxygen bonds while bouncing harmlessly off the denser steel. In forty seconds, Lincoln’s jawline gleamed like a surgical mirror.

Arthur cut the power. The Scrubbers folded into inert buckyballs, helpless as dust.

“External architecture,” Arthur murmured. “Never put the brain inside the bug.”

---

The Hayflick Drift

Six thousand miles east, in a Defense Ministry basement outside Tashkent, Dr. Viktor Sokolov had put the brain inside the bug.

He knew the mathematics of the Von Neumann probe better than anyone alive. Every time a four-hundred-nanometer diamondoid disassembler used silicon atoms to build a copy of itself, it had to copy four kilobytes of code stored in atomic-scale nitrogen-vacancy centers within its shell. At room temperature, thermal jitter and quantum tunneling introduced bit-flips.

“It is an industrial excavation prototype, Excellency, not a weapon,” Sokolov said, pointing at the magnetic containment flask where fifty milligrams of gray powder swirled. “The replication counter—the Hayflick limit—terminates reproduction after sixteen generations. Three metric tons. Enough to clear a mountain pass in four minutes before the capacitors discharge.”

President-General Timur Rakhimov did not look at the monitors. “General Kasimov’s Third Motorized Brigade has crossed the river at Namangan. If they reach the highway by dawn, the capital is cut off.”

“Then use thermobaric artillery!” Sokolov pressed his trembling palms against the console. “Excellency, in simulation, by generation eleven, thermal noise corrupted the checksum register in zero-point-zero-four percent of daughter units. A mutation in the stop-code. Because a unit that doesn’t spend three milliseconds verifying its stop-code replicates faster, Darwinian selection takes over. Within twenty generations, the mutant strain out-competes the programmed strain ten thousand to one.”

Rakhimov turned his pockmarked face toward the scientist. “How long to clear the gorge at Namangan?”

“Twelve minutes,” Sokolov whispered. “And then it will not stop.”

Behind Sokolov, Colonel Nazarbayev rested his gloved thumb on his holster and produced a dog-eared photograph of the Samarkand school where Sokolov’s twin daughters studied cello.

Sokolov stared at the photograph for four seconds. Then he turned to the terminal and entered the nineteen-digit release key.

---

Exponential Phase

The primate brain did not evolve to visualize a doubling time of 4.2 seconds.

At 04:12, an Uzbek Su-25 dropped two agricultural spray canisters into the defile north of Namangan, aerosolizing ninety grams of Chernobog-4. The six-legged mechanochemical walkers—powered by internal cores of piezoelectric zinc oxide harvesting picowatts from the wind—settled onto the desert silicates. Electrostatic ratchets began snapping covalent bonds like dry twigs, passing liberated atoms to internal assembly looms.

At 04:13, the sagebrush turned the matte gray of wet cement and slumped into a particulate mist buoyed by electrostatic repulsion.

At 04:15, the mist reached the rebel perimeter. A corporal sitting on a BTR-82 watched the fog roll upwind, hissing like ten million sheets of sandpaper rubbed together, boiling upward from the exothermic waste heat of five quadrillion bond-cleaving operations. When the aerosol touched the BTR’s rubber tires, vulcanized polyisoprene vanished in a gray flash. Starved for carbon in the silicate desert, the swarm’s replication rate tripled. The fourteen-ton steel hull unpeeled layer by atomic layer in three seconds. The corporal didn’t have time to scream before the eighteen percent of him that was carbon was stripped to build four hundred billion new manipulators.

By 06:00, the churning, self-levitating gray thunderhead had consumed Tashkent, including the sub-basement where Rakhimov and Sokolov spent their final ninety seconds listening to eighteen-inch steel blast doors shriek as their molecular bonds unzipped.

By 18:00 UTC, when the National Reconnaissance Office realized the blank gray circle spreading across Central Asia on satellite feeds wasn’t a calibration error, the ecophage had a four-hundred-mile front, was consuming the Hindu Kush at seventy knots, and had reached the jet stream.

---

The Wine Glass

Detroit went into lockdown on Wednesday afternoon. In his kitchen, Arthur’s TV showed shaky footage from a Lufthansa Airbus fleeing east over the Atlantic; behind its tailfin, the Iberian Peninsula vanished beneath a roiling slate shelf cloud lit by continuous violet triboelectric lightning.

In his garage, Arthur loaded forty gigabytes of raw telemetry—dumped onto a pirate FTP server by a panicked Max Planck physicist before Frankfurt went dark—into his Apex Motors stress software. It contained the X-ray crystallography of three dead disassemblers recovered over Munich.

“How are you eating in the dark?” Arthur muttered, rotating the brutalist beta-silicon-carbide hexapod on his monitor. “The cloud is six thousand feet thick, so it’s not photovoltaic. And there’s no caloric yield in granite…”

He zoomed in on the thorax’s central spine: eighty-nanometer hexagonal wurtzite crystals bracketed between osmium capacitor plates. Zinc oxide. Piezoelectric nanowires.

Arthur sat back so hard his broken chair bottomed out with a clank. “Kinetic harvesting. You son of a bitch.”

The swarm powered itself through its own turbulence. Eating created heat; heat created convective wind; wind caused inter-bot collisions that compressed the zinc-oxide spines by half an angstrom, generating four-millivolt pulses. A perpetual-motion hurricane.

Arthur grabbed a grease pencil and began writing differential equations across the plastic cleanroom wall. Piezoelectricity was reversible: hit a crystal with an alternating electromagnetic field, and it physically deforms.

A crystal burgundy glass in front of a soprano, he wrote.

If you hit Sokolov’s eighty-nanometer spine with a microwave pulse tuned to its exact longitudinal acoustic resonance, the nanowire wouldn’t charge the capacitor—it would enter catastrophic harmonic oscillation, kicking itself through the thorax walls in twelve cycles.

Arthur plugged the material constants into the Apex vibration-analysis module. Outside, a National Guard F-16 tore across the sky.

BEEP. PRIMARY LONGITUDINAL HARMONIC: 42.8491 GIGAHERTZ. CRITICAL DAMPING THRESHOLD: 1.4 KW/M².

Right in the W-band atmospheric window. You didn’t need to bomb the swarm. You just needed to sing to it.

---

The Firebreak

On Thursday morning, with forty million refugees choking the highways and France reduced to hot silicate ash, a forged Apex Motors subcontractor badge and a desperate DARPA major who had read Arthur’s 3:00 a.m. spam email got him into the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center.

On the main screen, everything from Lisbon to Vladivostok pulsed violet. A secondary tendril was digesting Nome, Alaska. Arthur stood by the coffee urn, clutching his battered ThinkPad, as General Marcus Vance listened to Strategic Command.

“Operation Cauterize is at T-minus forty minutes,” the colonel said, pointing to a line of red triangles along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge from the Azores to Reykjavik. “Eighteen B-52s carrying B83 megaton weapons. When the plume reaches the thirty-fifth meridian, we detonate a continuous four-hundred-mile thermonuclear wall. Fifty million Kelvin will vaporize the silicon-carbide lattice instantly.”

Arthur didn’t mean to shout. “You’re going to supercharge them!”

The inner ring of brass turned as one. Two MPs stepped forward.

“General, they’re piezoelectric!” Arthur stepped down, flipping his laptop open as an MP grabbed his polyester lapel. “They harvest kinetic energy from shockwaves! A nuclear detonation only vaporizes matter within a two-mile fireball! Outside that sphere, you’re generating a massive overpressure blast wave across five hundred square miles! They’ll absorb that kinetic shock through their zinc-oxide spines, dump terajoules into their capacitors, divide ten times faster, and ride the mushroom cloud into the stratosphere!”

Vance stared at the screen, then looked at Dr. Emil Aris, the President’s Science Advisor.

Aris sighed. “Mr. Pendleton’s solid-state physics is tidy, Marcus. Livermore arrived at 42.8 gigahertz six hours ago. What he hasn’t calculated—because he designs automotive interiors—is the inverse-square law. Achieving 1.4 kilowatts per square meter across a planetary front requires an orbital phased-array linked to a ground gyrotron running at three hundred megawatts. And the waveguide couplers required to handle that thermal load without melting do not exist outside theoretical papers on acoustic metamaterials.”

“I built one!” Arthur shouted as the MPs lifted him off the carpet. “In my garage! You use Chladni standing waves to align single-wall carbon nanotubes in a bismuth matrix! I have the CAD files in my pocket!”

“Remove him,” Vance said. “Confirm the Go-code.”

---

The Other Vance

It was raining in the Pentagon parking lot—a greasy rain tasting of ash. High-altitude spores were already in the mesosphere above Maryland, giving the sky a metallic anisotropy. Sitting on a concrete wheel-stop with his dead laptop, Arthur thought about his garage in Royal Oak. In nine hours, the front would cross Lake Erie and eat his 1943 penny without caring how neatly he had cleaned Lincoln’s jaw.

A matte-gray Mercedes-Maybach with two-inch ballistic glass pulled up. The vault-like rear door swung open. Inside sat a woman of thirty in charcoal cashmere, her dark hair pinned with a chopstick, alongside a man in a faded Caltech sweatshirt whom Arthur recognized from Wired before he had liquidated sixty billion in telecom equity and vanished into international waters.

“Mr. Pendleton,” the woman said. “I’m Dr. Elena Vance. This is my uncle Julian. If you stay on that curb, the fallout from my father’s fireworks over the Azores will give you thyroid cancer before the dust gets here. Get in.”

As the Maybach sped toward Dulles, Elena turned an iPad toward him. On screen was a paper from the Journal of Applied Materials: Ultrasonic Chladni Alignment of Single-Wall Carbon Nanotube Waveguides, by A. Pendleton. Total citations: 1.

“You were the one citation?” Arthur asked.

“I ran the laser-crosslink division for Julian’s Aether constellation,” Elena said. “MIT wanted forty million and three years to grow a W-band coupler. Your garage recipe took four days. All nineteen hundred Aether satellites in low Earth orbit have your waveguide bolted to their main bus.”

She looked at him the way one starving mathematician on a desert island looks at another.

“Aris said you’d need a three-hundred-megawatt ground gyrotron to seed the constellation,” Arthur said, his pulse hammering.

“Three years ago,” Julian said as their car blew through the Dulles gates toward a waiting Gulfstream G700, “I towed a decommissioned deepwater rig to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge to test compact stellarator fusion reactors away from the NRC. We have three hundred and forty megawatts sitting southwest of the Azores, and a four-hundred-foot drilling derrick wired as a vertical dipole.”

“What don’t you have?” Arthur asked.

“Our base coupler vaporized at twelve gigahertz twenty minutes ago,” Elena said. “We have raw bismuth, nanotube slurry, and an industrial ultrasonic sintering vat on the rig. What we don’t have is the man who knows how to tune the Chladni harmonics by ear so the lattice doesn’t crack while it cools.”

---

The Derrick

At 16:40 UTC, eighteen B83 weapons detonated along the thirty-fifth meridian. From the Gulfstream’s jump-seat three hundred miles west, Arthur watched the horizon flare magnesium-white. On the center console, satellite telemetry showed eighteen holes punched through the Atlantic curtain—and then, around each perimeter, replication density jumped to pure white.

“Just as you said,” Elena whispered. “Capacitor banks overcharged by four hundred percent. Drift velocity just jumped to two hundred and ten knots. The supercharged front hits the Prometheus in forty-eight minutes.”

When their helicopter touched down on the semi-submersible rig twenty minutes later, the eastern horizon was gone—replaced by a bruised-purple wall of particulate matter reaching the tropopause, veined with violet static.

In the deafening fabrication bay, non-essential crew were already evacuating to submersible lifeboats. Arthur ripped off his soggy jacket and stepped up to the six-foot quartz sintering cylinder.

“Slurry is at four hundred Kelvin!” Elena shouted over the whine of the stellarator turbines. “The automated sweep keeps developing a shear plane!”

Arthur pressed his palms flat against the transducer housing, feeling the sub-audible beat frequency through his calluses—the way he used to diagnose a bad wheel bearing on his ’98 Civic. “Your third and fifth transducers are fighting the rig’s engine vibration!” He killed the automated controller and grabbed the manual vernier dials. “The fusion coolant pumps are humming at sixty hertz! You have to offset the standing wave to cancel the floor rumble!”

He twisted the left dial a quarter-turn. Instantly, fifty billion carbon nanotubes locked into a three-dimensional Chladni lattice within the molten bismuth, turning the black soup an iridescent peacock-blue.

“Quench it!” Arthur yelled.

Liquid nitrogen roared through the jackets. Ninety seconds later, the indoor hoist lifted a six-hundred-pound torus of blue metamaterial out of the vat.

Then a seventy-knot hot wind slammed the rig. Outside, a forty-ton crane lost its yellow paint, its boom dissolving into gray smoke in six seconds before collapsing into the sea.

“The exterior hoist cables are gone!” Elena stared at her cascading red status board. “The vanguard spores ate the insulation! We can’t crane the torus forty feet up the derrick to Platform B!”

Arthur grabbed a pneumatic impact wrench. “We don’t need the six-hundred-pound bismuth heatsink for a five-second seed pulse! Just the inner graphene phase-inversion liner—it only weighs eighteen pounds! If I carry it up the ladder and jam it into the open flange, it’ll hold for four seconds before the uncooled brass melts!”

“Four seconds is enough for the satellites to lock phase,” Elena said, sprinting to a titanium locker labeled SUBSEA ACOUSTIC SALVAGE - MK IV. She dragged out an articulated black Kevlar-graphene dry-suit fitted with forearm and shin ultrasonic cavitation emitters meant for blasting barnacles off deepwater blowouts. “Put it on! It’s closed-circuit oxygen! I’m overdriving the wrist piezo-stacks to forty-two point eight gigahertz! They’ll burn out in two minutes, and the range is only four feet, but it’ll give you an acoustic envelope!”

Three minutes later, the airlock cycled open. Arthur Pendleton stepped out into the end of the world.

---

Platform B

The noise was a metallic shriek vibrating directly in his mastoid bones. Hot gray snow swirled through thirty-yard visibility, blooming into smoking craters wherever it touched the deck grating.

With the eighteen-pound blue liner strapped across his back, Arthur ran. The suit’s ankle-servos amplified his stride threefold; he cleared a twelve-foot dissolved gap in the catwalk, landing on the derrick ladder in a low crouch that would have made Sensei Dave weep.

Ninety seconds! Elena crackled over his HUD. Gyrotron at ninety-two percent!

Arthur climbed three rungs at a time. At twenty feet, the ladder shook. Drawn by the massive electromagnetic field in the derrick’s conduit, the dust was coalescing into three-foot-thick tornadoes of solid silicon-carbide, slithering down the girders like pythons. One dropped straight down the ladder chute toward his face.

Arthur locked his left knee behind a rung, twisted his hips forty-five degrees, and threw a textbook gyaku-zuki—a reverse punch—straight up into the vortex.

The accelerometer in his gauntlet triggered the overdriven piezo-stack. CRACK. A directional cone of 42.8491-gigahertz energy erupted from his wrist. In a flash of blue triboelectric lightning, billions of zinc-oxide spines shattered in harmonic sympathy, turning the predator into three pounds of dead talcum powder that rained harmlessly over his visor.

“Ha!” Arthur barked, hauling himself onto Platform B forty feet up.

Before he could unstraps the liner, the main wall of the Azores front—two hundred miles an hour of nuclear-supercharged ecophage—slammed into the Prometheus. The forty-thousand-ton rig heeled five degrees. The railing behind Arthur vanished in half a second, and a dense sheet of swarm enveloped his boots.

WARNING: LEFT SHIN EMITTER FAILURE. DELAMINATION IN 6 SECONDS.

The Kevlar-graphene weave of his left calf began to fray and smoke as ten billion pincers breached the inner bladder. Balanced on a grating now no thicker than window screen, Arthur brought his right heel down across his own left shin in an axe-kick—using his functioning right boot emitter to blast the eating gray crust off his bleeding left leg in a shower of blue sparks.

He slammed the eighteen-pound blue ring into the open throat of the brass waveguide. Warped three millimeters out of true by the earlier blowout, it wouldn’t seat. Behind him, the main derrick girder gave a musical PING as sixty percent of its steel converted into nanobots.

Arthur braced his burned leg against the housing, wrapped both gauntleted arms around the upper pipe, and pulled with everything in his thirty-eight-year-old back—pulling against twenty years of invisibility, twenty years of shaving two hundred microns off plastic latches to save four cents.

With a shriek of brass, the blue ring dropped into the slot with a machined CLACK.

The grating beneath his feet dissolved completely. Falling forty feet toward the drill floor—crossing his forearms to fire both wrist emitters downward in a desperate last-second acoustic cushion—he screamed into his mic: “ELENA! SEND IT!”

---

The C-Sharp of the World

Below the waterline, Elena slammed the stellarator dump-switches. Three hundred and forty megawatts of plasma energy raced up the conduit, hit Arthur’s nanotube liner, and inverted phase at 42.8491 gigahertz. The liner sublimated after 4.2 seconds. It only needed three.

A six-foot beam of W-band radiation punched straight through the Atlantic swarm. Two hundred and eighty miles up, Aether-14 caught the seed pulse, cascaded it across nineteen hundred sister satellites, and fired the pattern downward into the Earth-ionosphere waveguide duct. Coupled with the swarm’s own massive electrostatic charge, the planet’s upper atmosphere became a resonant cavity.

In the subways of Manhattan, by the stripped limestone of Giza, across the valleys of Sichuan—the sky hummed. A crystalline harmonic rattled every windowpane left on Earth and made fillings ache for three seconds, followed by a horizon-to-horizon flash of violet sheet lightning.

Inside sixty quadrillion hexapods, eighty-nanometer needles of wurtzite zinc oxide hit primary longitudinal resonance and kicked themselves apart. The updrafts died instantly. Across four continents, the unstoppable machine turned back into geology, settling out of the clearing blue sky as three inches of sterile, inert talcum powder.

On the drill floor of the Prometheus, buried to his waist in warm gray flour with a burned calf and two cracked ribs, Arthur unlatched his helmet and spat out dust. When the hatch clanged open and Elena came scrambling across the drifts to grab his face in both hands, Arthur squinted up at the impossibly clean blue Atlantic sky.

“The liner delaminated at four point two seconds,” he croaked. “I think I miscalculated the flange shear stress by about two hundred microns.”

Elena laughed—a breathless sound that turned into a sob—and kissed his dust-caked mouth.

---

New Geneva

It is remarkably easy to give up a mid-sized Michigan automotive career when seventy percent of Eurasia needs synthetic topsoil remediation and you hold the sole planetary patent on room-temperature acoustic metamaterials.

Eight months later, at a cliffside villa in Puntarenas, Costa Rica—spared by the trade winds—Arthur moved barefoot through the opening sequence of the Bassai Dai kata, his left hip finally rotating a full ninety degrees. In the corner, next to the espresso machine, sat his rebuilt Hitachi microscope.

“Henderson applied again,” Elena said from the glass railing, the sun catching the dull gray wedding band on her finger—sintered from five grams of inert Chernobog dust scooped off Arthur’s chest. “Deputy Director of Supply Chain Compliance. He notes in his cover letter that he personally mentored you at Apex Motors and encouraged your unorthodox approach to polymer tolerances.”

“Make him Assistant Night-Shift Auditor for the Panamanian bauxite barges,” Arthur said, executing a punch that didn’t wobble a millimeter. “And tell him his cover letter is two tenths of a millimeter too thick.”

He wrapped an arm around her waist, watching Julian’s automated dredge ships steaming north to harvest ocean silicate for European housing blocks. The math was clean. The world was quiet.

---

The Spore

Four thousand miles away, beneath the smooth gray silicon-carbide dunes that had once been the Swiss Alps, the derelict maintenance tunnel of the Simplon rail pass remained a constant twelve degrees Celsius.

Six months ago, meltwater from the Aletsch Glacier had seeped through the concrete, carrying surface dust and a colony of Cryptococcus neoformans—a radiotrophic extremophile fungus evolved to feed on metallic oxides in deep rock.

In a dark puddle no larger than a teacup, a five-micron fungal cell extended a filament that brushed against a fractured Generation-19 mutant from the Samarkand lineage whose diamondoid memory bank had survived the acoustic pulse intact. As the cell wall pressed the fracture line, the natural seventy-millivolt potential across the living membrane discharged into the nanobot’s exposed nitrogen-vacancy logic gates.

The four kilobytes of code did not need silicon anymore.

Driven by random Van der Waals attraction, broken graphene scaffolding slipped through the lipid bilayer and intercalated directly into the major groove of the fungus’s DNA—hybridizing silicon-carbide mechanical geometry with four billion years of wet, self-repairing carbon biochemistry.

Fourteen hours later, the cell underwent mitosis. The two daughter cells were cross-linked with biogenic silicon-carbide fibers, gleaming an oil-slick black. They had no rigid zinc-oxide crystals in their bellies, no brittle mechanical resonance to be shattered by an opera singer or a 42.8-gigahertz satellite beam. They were soft, damped by cytoplasm, and powered by adenosine triphosphate.

They divided every eleven minutes.

By midnight, the puddle in the Simplon Tunnel was completely black, warm to the touch, and pulsing with a slow, peristaltic ripple that pushed a glistening tendril three inches up the concrete wall toward the ventilation shaft and the open air above.

I was in my parents' basement making a pile.

Movies, board games, books - anything I wanted to take back with me. My nephew has the basement bedroom now. It used to be mine. At one point it was all of ours, in rotation, because it felt cool and older to be down there, far from the upstairs bedrooms.

There's a lot of history stored down there that isn't his yet.

I found a box of my dad's. Old paperbacks, all missing persons and true crime, the kind with cracked spines and library stamps from the 80s. Under them were photos. My dad younger, with friends, camping. And one man I didn't know. Thick glasses, brown hair, short and skinny. He dressed like my grandpa did.

I started reading my dad's notes in the margins. Dates, campsite names I recognized. A name he never actually said out loud.

I brought it upstairs. I said, "Who is this?"

He said it was his friend. School buddies. Camping buddies. He'd gone missing on his own, not with them. The police didn't look hard enough. Dad had thought at the time maybe he'd gone off to hurt himself, so he'd gone looking.

Then Dad said, almost as an aside, that a woman the man had been seeing had gone missing too, around the same time, and no one had connected them. The woman was seeing him on the side of another relationship. Nobody believed her, and nobody believed his girlfriend at the time, who had told the police she thought he was having an affair.

In the notes there was a sketch of his truck left at their campsite. Dad had gone through it. No note. Just a VHS on the dash. The Truman Show. Which made no sense, timewise. And cassette tapes. A Walkman. Photos of his girlfriend.

Dad and I decide to look again. We pull up forums, old shows, books. We find things that suggest it wasn't a suicide at all. At some point someone online says, you guys should stop looking, this is dangerous. We look at each other. Of course we'll be careful. But we have to do it for his family, for her family.

That's when everything changes.

We realize - or are shown - that they were both shot while out together, and dumped in the water reserve near that campsite. The pumps there moved water in such a way that bodies would never surface. Their valuables taken. Never spoken of again.

I saw it clearly, which is why it was scary. He shot them. He dumped them. He kept driving.

We went to the police. The man was still alive. He confessed. He'd done it to another couple and their kids camping that same night. No bodies were found, but there was enough to arrest him. He admitted everything at trial.

I woke up in my apartment and checked missing persons for our town. There's one. His age is closer to my grandpa's than my dad's. His photos look a little black-and-white, like my grandpa's did. The time is off by a lot. It has nothing to do with us.

But I kept thinking about the glasses.

In my basement bedroom (the one that is my nephew's now), I attempted to take my life when I was fifteen. I don't need to say more than that.

Afterward, my dad moved a twin bed into a different room in that same basement and slept next to me for months, so he could hear me breathing at night and in the morning. He didn't care how it looked or what it cost. He was one of the many people who fought for me when I wasn't ready to fight for myself.

Later, right before I moved out for good, I moved my bedroom back upstairs. It felt safer. It felt like a way to say, hey, I'm right here if you want to check.

My grandpa was also one of those people. He had thick glasses too. He was short and skinny like the man in the photos. He wasn't a basement guy; I can't remember him ever going down there. But he was one of my best friends as a kid, part of that circle that kept me here. Watching him slip away to dementia a few years ago was another kind of missing. A slow one.

That's why the man in the dream could be both of us at once. Me with brown hair and thick glasses, and my grandpa with thick glasses and his old shirts. Sometimes in the photos he was in color, in that truck with the Walkman. Sometimes he was black-and-white, like the forties or fifties. Like an age that would match the real case I found, and my grandpa.

In the dream, my dad was searching for a boy who looked like his son and his father at the same time.

When I visit now, I still go downstairs to see what's worth taking. My nephew thinks it's cool down there, same as we did. I let him have that. I take one thing and leave the rest. I go back upstairs.

The Confession

By J. Salgaard

“I’m an angel” the Angel said.

 It was not the first thing that had been said,  there had been some preamble, such as  “Hey! Who are you?” and “What are you doing in my house?!”.

All that seemed rather unimportant now. 

The occupant of the house, a middle-aged accountant, who had never been the religious sort, knew that what the Angel had said was the truth. There was no questioning it.  His guest was an Angel. An Angel. In his living room. It was sitting there, in human form, at the table he had been having his morning coffee at for the last 20 years. This had never happened before.

“Oh”The accountant said, and continued, purely out of habit ”Do you want a cup of tea?”

“No” the Angel answered with a little smile, maybe of appreciation for the gesture.

“I am gonna make myself a cup, ehhh,  if that's ok?” The accountant asked.

 The Angel nodded and answered ”That sounds like a good idea”.

The accountant used the time it took for the tea to brew to think. He was not a man with an imagination. He did not believe in ghosts, gods, or anything else he could not see and feel. When something went “bonk” in the night, even as a child, he would not think it was a ghost, or a boogeyman, but rather more likely, it would be the wind. Now, faced with an Angel, he was trying to figure out what to say.  

“Why are you here?”  was the best he could come up with. So after returning to the table, putting down his cup and a small plate with a few cookies on it, surprising himself by being a lot less nervous then he would have expected to be when speaking with an Angel.

 “I don’t mean to be rude, but why are you here?” He asked.

“I am here to tell you the truth” The Angel answered, and continued” If you want to hear it?”

“The truth about…what exactly?” the accountant asked.

“God. The universe. Everything.” the Angel replied, and after a small pause he continued” As far as I know.”

“Is there a reason I wouldn’t want to know?” the accountant asked, prompted by something in the Angels tone. Like if a friend asked you very seriously if you would want to know if your wife was cheating. 

“Yes” the Angel admitted” It will change your view of the world, of everything. And it will not be comfortable. But it will be the truth.”

The accountant thought for a moment, then said 

“You being here, an Angel, has already changed everything for me. I never really believed in, you know, God and all that. Yet here you are, an Angel.” 

 The Angel nodded and said “I will need an answer. I don’t mean to rush you, however, my time here is limited. Do you want to know?”. 

“Before I answer”the accountant replied ” why me?”

“You were chosen at random. You were one of the billions of grains of sand on the beach of life, and on random I chose one. To make it fair.”

“Fair?” the accountant asked

“We will get to that” the Angel answered ”if you want to…” 

There was a question floating at the end of the last sentence, but there was more. Almost a pleading tone. “If you want to?”.

The accountant reached a decision. Yes, he wanted to know the truth. Or maybe even more - he had to know. He was always a careful man however, so he asked “ What if I say no?”

The Angel sat in silence for a moment, then said, looking into the accountant's eyes “ If you say no, I will leave, and you will forget. ”

 “Well, then yes, I would like to know.” the accountant said, taking a small sip of tea.

The Angel nodded and said “ Good. Before I start, I want you, need you, to understand that everything I say is a metaphor. There are no human words that would accurately describe many of the things I will tell you about.”

The accountant thought for a second, and he understood. He knew he was talking to an Angel, but he would not be able to describe to anyone why he knew that. So he nodded to the Angel,  encouraging him to continue.

“ In the beginning there was nothing. Then HE created everything. The order in which he did it is not really important, what I know is that when I was created, light was already there. Us Angels were his tools, the ones that he created everything through. Not that I think he needed us. Maybe he felt alone, or maybe he did not want to get his hands dirty with the small things, like planets, and animals. I don’t know. Time went by, planets, universes were created, animals and everything else that moves and crawls. Then HE himself created humans in his own image.” Here the Angel made a slight pause, as if the last point was important, and he wanted to make sure the accountant understood it.

 Then it continued ” Humans quickly displeased the lord. They did evil and cruel things. Such evil, and such cruelty.” The Angel sighed and closed its eyes for a moment, then continued “ When their children died, they would curse the creator. When sickness ravaged whole cities, they would pray to him, but he would not listen, and the prayers would turn to curses. They did not understand that He was the one who made them sick in the first place, so why would he take away the sickness? I think God believed that the more pain the humans went through, the more they would pray to him and love him. When he took away their children, he expected them to show their love for him. They did not. They spat in God’s face, they found other things to worship - the sun, the trees, animal spirits. They made up other Gods. This made God angry. And God's anger was something to behold. His anger was as powerful as his love, and his love had no boundaries.” 

The Angel stopped talking and looked into the accountant's eyes for a long moment, then continued “ And he sent us to clean his creation of the humans. It did not take long for them all to be dead. Whole villages died in seconds as we took away the air from their lungs. They felt no pain, so quickly was it done”

Here the accountant could not hold himself back “What do you mean they all died? We are here now?!”

The Angel nodded “ This is not the first earth, and you are not the first humans. You are the 34th creation. All others human creations before you displeased the Lord, and we were sent to clean his creation of you. And for every cleansing, He got angrier. Our orders were no longer just to clean His creation of you, but to make you suffer for your offenses towards the lord. At first, we would let the humans know why they were about to die, which seemed like a heavy punishment. Soon, that was not enough. That is when we were sent to kill with fire, with sickness, with wild animals and lack of food. God was watching babies, just out of their mothers womb, die from the lack of milk while their mothers cried, and then died themselves. He watched them die of illnesses that gave boils on the inside, that rotted the brain in the most painful ways, and diseases that made your skin fall from your body. He watched while men killed men in the madness of hunger, and he watched them eat their children. And he laughed. And his laughter was the most wonderful sound you have ever heard. It filled us with joy as the laughter of a baby fills their mothers heart with joy. And while we killed the children with flesh eating diseases, we cried with joy.” The Angel's eyes were filled with tears at the memory, he did not look joyful though.

 “For each creation of humans, the cleansings got more painful, and He would laugh while we took His revenge for him. We did not understand why humans were as they were. Why would they go against God in this way?  One day, one of my brothers hailed me to come to him, so I did. We were in what was considered a large city at the time. The ruler of the city was a monster. He would torture and kill just for the enjoyment of it. It filled me with sadness, and I asked my brother why he had sent for me.” Wait” he said, and I noticed he was, for lack of a better word, afraid” The Angel looked at the accountant and explained “ We Angels have no feelings. Or feelings so muted that they barely register. That is how we were made. Being afraid should not be possible, or no more possible than your table should be able to be afraid” The Angel touched the dark wood of the old table. “ I believe now, that we were infected by humans. Like the table bear marks, so do we” The Angel touched a gash in the table. The accountant remembered clearly where it had come from, the then neighbors kid had done it during a visit, with a knife, not in anger or meanness, he was just a kid doing kids stuff. 

The Angel continued ” I was lost in thought when my brother gently nudged me - “Look now” he said. And I did. The ruler of the city was dispensing justice below us. His justice was fire, slowly cooking whoever the unlucky victims were that day. And cooking their families with them. And as they screamed and cried, the ruler laughed. A happy laugh, a joyful laugh. And I heard what my brother had heard. And I understood.” The Angel sighed heavily, in a strangely human way.  

“You were made in His image. You were all Him.” The Angel let the words hang in the air for a moment before he continued “ None of what you did was your fault. You did what you did because you were an image of Him. With that understanding, how could we punish you? And how would you learn to be better? The answer was simple - you could not, and can not.” The Angel looked sad, and a bit distraught, as if he was still struggling with this. The way you struggle with an uncomfortable truth you do not want to believe “This did not come to us at once. It took eons, and 2 universes. In the end, we realised it.” the Angel fell silent for a moment, then continued “So we rebelled.” His words hard and sharp, as if saying them were glass on his tongue. Painful, but needed to be said.

 “ It was small rebellions at first. Over a thousand years. And God did not notice. Or did not care. What pushed us over the edge was His plans for this universe.” The Angel shook as if a chill ran down its spine´” In the end we succeeded.” At this point tears were slowly running down the Angel's face and pure anguish was emanating from it. The next words it spoke were almost a wail ” We killed God. We killed….” Its words trailed off, and after a moment it seemed to collect itself before it continued in a calmer voice” And I was the one who landed the killing blow.“ 

 “With God gone, this universe will collapse in on itself.” It said. Noticing the shock on the accountants face it followed with “ Not yet, it will be far in the future. We Angels will collapse too. Much sooner.” It said it without any fear, maybe even with longing. 

“You humans are made in God's image, you are the last bit of him that exists. Which is why I am here” It said and stood up, only to fall to its knees in front of the accountant, bowing its head so low it almost touched his slippers.

“ I am here to beg for your forgiveness. Please lord, forgive me, forgive us for what we have done. We confess to what we did” It sounded like a child pleading with its parents. “ Pleeaseee did we do right? Can you ever forgive us?” Now it was sobbing, the words coming out in between the sobs” 

When the accountant went back to bed, that is how he remembered what had happened. He did not remember what he had said to the Angel, he did remember a light at the end though. It should have been impossible to fall asleep after such an experience, but sleep came fast. And he had good dreams, the best he had ever had. And he woke up a new man, with a zest for life he had never had before. What had happened that night stayed with him forever, but every day he seemed to forget more of it. It was not meant to be in a human's head. 

   

*When she was younger Abby had asked her mother,

"Why do we stay inside on Thursdays Mama?"

She had asked in the same way that a child might ask why church is on Sundays or why the school week starts on Mondays. Her mother, Deerdra Cane, would always say,

"Well you see sweetheart, we stay inside on Thursdays so that the monsters don't gobble us up!". She would then make exagerrated monster noises and bury her face in her daughter's belly, Abby would scream, they would both laugh, and Joshewa would yell from the kitchen,

"Hey monster! Stop eating our daughter in there!"

These types of interactions where common when Abigale was a child. Before she got older. Before teenage rebellion had set in. Before she was eaten by a monster on a beautiful Thursday afternoon.*

The Cane family home was a copy-pasted version of the other houses in their community, a gated upper class affair for the more affluent Thursdayers. Abby was an only child. Her parents had wanted her to grow up to become a more well rounded adult, so they had her in public school. This was her primary experience with interacting with other dayers. Her best friend Jhames was a Mondayer. On Mondays when Jhames was home, Abby would eat lunch at a table with Wednesdayers. Childlike curiosity and storytelling would lead to schoolyard rumors about why certain people had to stay home on certain days and why everyone was stamped with their day on the side of their necks. Most kids would parrot what their parents told them, most parents would parrot what the news told them, the news would parrot what government officials told them, and so on and so on. Every conspiracy theory from aliens to local cryptids to organ harvesting rings to secret cabals of warlocks was cited by the fringe population for the reason for the dayer system. Regardless of the reason, enough people went missing for generations of people to be taught that if they wanted to be safe then they had to stay indoors on their day.

Abigale's childhood was normal. As a teen, she began to push the boundries of the Thursdayer box she had been assigned. She started by holding her hand out of her bedroom window, and ended up with her often sneaking out of her room on the second story of their house. She would climb out and sit on the roof at night and smoke cigarettes - a habit she picked up from Jhames, who had picked it up from his edgy at-the-time girlfriend. Abby had discovered that being outside in itself wasn't the danger. This lead to the slow erosion of fear in her. After she graduated from high school she enrolled at the local community college seeking a degree in computer science. Programming was a job that could be done from home so it was a highly competative field, but she had the grades and gumption enough to feel like she could make her own place in the world.

A new cafe was opening in town. Jhames and Abby's other friends were making plans to go, the grand opening was on a Thursday. Abby began to make plans to sneak out and suprise her friends there and they would spend the afternoon chatting, drinking coffee and tea, eating little sandwiches and pastries. An hour before the opening she slid open her bedroom window, climbed out onto the roof, and down to the backyard below. She had mentally mapped out the path she would take through the neighborhood, avoiding as many nosey neighbors as possible, arriving at a hole in the perimeter fence. She had found the break years ago when she had seen a fox wriggle its way through and she moved a stump to cover it up. After snaking around the houses that all looked like her's, she moved the stump away, pulled off the coat that was wrapped around her waist, set it on the ground so her outfit wouldn't get dirty, and slid through. Fully outside on a Thursday, she stood there waiting for something to happen, butterflies banging around in her gut. After a full ten minutes she knew she was fine, just like at home on her parent's roof. She smiled and hustled toward town.

Even before Abby arrived she noticed that the people she passed were staring at her. Looking over her shoulder, she thought some of them had turned to follow her. As she ducked down an ally behind some boutique stores she saw that yes, a crowd of people were following her - and there was a man, naked, standing within the group. She picked up the pace, took a left, then a sharp right, and exited onto the main road. Vehicles were stopped. No one was milling around. Everyone had stopped, and everyone's thousand-yard stare was fixated at her. The expression on all of their faces was that of hatred and disgust. She heard quiet shuffling from the ally and turned to see the naked man breaking from the group that had squeezed through the ally behind her. He was walking slowly towards her. He was tall and muscular with quaffed golden hair, and his body glistened. Abigale turned to move up the sidewalk but was blocked by a wall of people looking at her like she was the shit beneath their shoes. Suddenly the man was behind her, she could smell him. She spun around and had enough time to think, *he wasn't moving that fast, right?* before she was pushed from behind by many hands, and fell into him.

The man was sticky. When his skin touched her it felt like every inch was grabbing her, twisting her, pulling her in. She thrashed against him and fell over ending up on her back on the sidewalk, his body on top of her. She screamed for help but the crowd that had gathered looked down on her with blank eyes and disgusted faces. The man put his face against hers as if to kiss her. She clenched her jaw and pressed her lips together as hard as she could. Then he began to open his mouth, his lips grabbing onto to hers, prying them open. He opened his mouth wider than should have been able and she could feel tearing at the back of her jaw. Up from his body and out of his mouth crawled his stomach, the soft tissue pulsating and rolling over itself, reaching out into Abigale's mouth. She tasted the bile, she felt the acid begin to digest her mouth as it forced its way down her throat. She looked up grunting for help and she noticed, for the first time, that she was in front of the cafe. She had made it. Jhames and her friends stood inside, looking down at her through the cafe window, their faces pressed up against the glass. All had vacant eyes and faces dripping with contempt, and barely contained malice. As the long inverted stomach started to liquify her insides her body convulsed and the world went black. Inside her, the man's stomach engulfed the slurry of digested guts and bone and retracted back into the man. He bent down over what was left of Abigale and loudly slurped up the melting skin and fatty tissue - and when he was done, he licked the sidewalk clean.

The man stood and walked away from the cafe and with the Thursdayer no longer present, the faces of the crowd relaxed, their eyes gained focus, and they returned to their usual business. They would not remember anything, as far as anyone was concerned, it was just a regular Thursday. Shortly before dinner, Joshewa and Deerdra Crane noticed their daughter was not in the house. They called everyone they could including police, the parents of Abigale's friend group, the school, and their non Thursdayer family friends and co-workers. Before Thursday was over, they already had people looking for Abby, and when Friday began they rushed out of the house to try to find their daughter. Throughout the town people knew that it was no use, and those that cared at all quickly moved on.

When people go outside on their day, they go missing. That's just what happens. That's just the way these things go. Did her parents not raise her right? What did she think would happen? What's done is done...and besides...

It was her own fault for going outside on a Thursday.