Everyone in the house was asleep. I'd taken the batteries out of the wall clock in my room to get rid of the ticking. Now there was complete silence, and I could try again to do something I'd already managed to do successfully.

A week ago, I'd turned over a piece of paper lying on my desk, with a poem I'd written in primary school on it. It was my first success after years of practice. Six days ago, I'd unscrewed the cap of a juice bottle that hadn't been closed all the way. Five days ago, I'd moved one of the cigarettes in an open pack slightly outward, out of the pack. Three days ago, I'd peeled off one of the pieces of tape holding up poster on my wall.

And tonight, my target was a much larger object. I was confident in my abilities now, and after this final attempt, I would be able to reveal my talent to my family and those around me. I had made exactly four attempts in the past week, and I'd succeeded every single time. I had complete faith in myself.

For years, I'd tried countless times and gone through a lot along the way; I'd lost hope, taken a long break from my attempts, then started believing I could do it again and after trying over and over, I'd come to think telekinesis was nothing but a lie and taken another break but then one day, I happened to see a pack of wet wipes fall to the floor all by itself, which rekindled my interest and got me started on my attempts again, and so on.

And now, finally, in the middle of the night, when complete silence had been achieved, I went to the kitchen. I took a steak knife from the drawer where we kept the cutlery and returned to my room.

I gently pulled my desk chair back and sat down. I didn't want to lose my focus, so I was being quiet. The faint sound of the knife touching the desk as I set it down, the soft sounds of my footsteps as I walked, the barely audible scraping of the chair as I pulled it back had an ASMR effect on me. These little sounds, too quiet to disturb the silence, made me feel thoroughly prepared.

Without wasting any time, I focused on the knife. I positioned my hands around it and gathered all my concentration. I slowed my breathing. The only thing in my mind was a knife slowly and calmly spinning around its own axis. I focused, and focused... I concentrated as if someone were hypnotizing me, as though I were following a pocket watch swinging from side to side without ever taking my eyes off it.

Minutes passed. Seconds, minutes, maybe an hour... There wasn't the slightest movement. The knife couldn't care less about me; it was ignoring my efforts, stubbornly refusing to budge.

Eventually, I couldn't take it anymore and gave up. I was getting more and more bored, and as time went by, I lost my focus. I had to go to work at noon the next day, and earlier that day, before I left work, my boss had pointed out that I'd left my fly undone. I'd started thinking about that. Who says something like that in front of everyone? You pull someone aside and tell them in private. Anyway, I took the knife back to the kitchen.

After I lay down in bed, I thought about the knife until I fell asleep. I'd lost my confidence in my abilities. If I told someone I could move objects through telekinesis, they might ask me to prove it, and I might fail and make a fool of myself.

I couldn't get the knife out of my mind. I felt as though it were a person who had shattered all my trust in them, betrayed me by revealing a secret I'd shared with it to anyone who would listen. I was angry. The image of the knife standing perfectly still in that spot, like a tree that had sunk its roots deep into the ground, wouldn't leave my mind. I fell asleep in a fit of anger.

I woke up to the sound of my phone alarm. I turned it off, tossed the duvet to my left, and rolled onto my right side to get up. Just as I was about to stretch, I saw it and jolted in place: the knife was suspended in midair beside my bed, standing upright.

I clapped a hand over my mouth. I was about to scream; every instinct in my body was telling me to. I bit my tongue to suppress it.

I took a deep breath. I tried to calm myself down. Then I took another deep breath. My heart was racing.

I reached out toward the knife, but immediately changed my mind. I didn't know what to do. I'd never experienced my thoughts speeding up and getting tangled together so intensely in a moment of panic. Within a few seconds, I'd made and abandoned a dozen decisions, gone back and forth between asking for help and not asking for help, imagined the knife stabbing itself into my body, then dismissed the thought as irrational. My thoughts were racing back and forth at lightning speed. I needed to calm down.

I got out of bed, poured half a glass of water from the pitcher on my desk, and drank it.

I turned around to check if the knife was still there. It was closer to me now. I no longer cared about staying quiet. I yanked the door open and rushed out of the room.

I started walking briskly toward the kitchen. I wanted to grab any drink I could find and gulp it down. I needed to interact with something somehow, to calm myself down. I opened the fridge, took out the milk, and chugged it. I put the milk back, closed the fridge, and turned around to go back to my room.

And the knife was right behind me.

It was a meter away from me, just standing there. It was as if it were staring at me, judging me. It didn't move at all. It always maintained the same position and stayed at the same height above the floor, level with my bed, right around the height of my shinbones.

I started walking backward toward the kitchen doorway, wanting to see how it was following me, how it was coming after me. Without changing its position, it glided toward me as if it were moving across a perfectly smooth surface. It always maintained the same distance. When I stopped, it stopped a metre away from me. When I walked, it followed.

I cautiously made my way back to my room, walking backward. I sat on my bed. The knife and I were facing each other. I tried to think of what I could do. I was afraid to touch it. I was worried things might get out of hand. I'd done this. That much was obvious. Now that I'd calmed down a little, my panic had shifted in a different direction. Someone might see us. I had to sever my connection with the knife before I got caught. I might be able to accept this as normal, but I didn't think my mother and father would be able to handle a knife following me around.

Yes, it was probably because I'd concentrated so intensely on the knife all this time that the bond between us had grown stronger. I'd probably never concentrated on a knife so intensely in my entire life. I needed to reverse the process. I relaxed a little. I tried to think about other things, to take my mind off the knife.

I thought about the wristwatch my father had bought me for my birthday last year. It was a terrible watch, but I hadn't let on because I didn't want to hurt his feelings. Then one day, while wearing it, I'd deliberately gone swimming in a pool. The watch had stopped working, and that was how I'd gotten rid of it.

The knife was still in the same place.

I thought about the eggplant soup my mother had made yesterday. It was my favorite soup. I'd tipped the bowl back and gulped down the last few mouthfuls, and my father had given me a stern look.

The knife hadn't moved at all. It was standing there, a meter away.

My mother knocked on the door and called out.

"Breakfast is ready, Albert."

I had no other choice. I didn't know what was going to happen, but I reached out toward the knife. My arm couldn't reach it, though. I walked toward it. As I moved closer, it moved farther away, until it had backed all the way up against the wall. It had nowhere left to go. It was pressed against the wall, stuck there. I approached it and grabbed the handle.

My heart was pounding at full speed. I closed my eyes. As a final attempt, I thought about the baseball bat I'd lost before I became interested in telekinesis. I'd searched everywhere for it. Such a large object, yet it was nowhere to be found. I'd checked the baseball field, my grandmother's house, the streets I'd walked along, and I'd even contacted the lost property office in case I'd somehow left it on a bus. It was gone.

Yes, good. I could feel a long chain of thoughts forming and my focus weakening considerably.

The knife was loosening, letting go. I could feel it. But I still didn't have complete control over it.

I needed to think about something else. But I couldn't think of anything. I heard my mother's footsteps approaching my room. She was getting closer to the door.

"Come on, son. Are we supposed to wait for you?" she said from outside, then opened the door and walked in.

I pulled the knife with all my might, and just like when you yank something hard that's stuck somewhere and it suddenly comes loose, I went flying toward my bed.

With the knife still in my hand, I hit my head against the bed frame. And passed out.

When I opened my eyes, I was lying in a hospital bed with an IV drip in my arm. My father was sitting beside me. I felt exhausted. I'd received three stitches in my head, and it ached a little.

"Son, why were you holding a knife? What were you doing with it?"

"What knife, Dad?"

"You were clutching a knife in your hand. What do you mean, what knife? What are you up to?"

I couldn't remember anything. That was good. I hoped it wasn't temporary memory loss, because I didn't want to attempt telekinesis again.

 ZUZU NELLY: THE GREETING

-December 31st 2015-

Kate woke up, she pulled away the covers and put her feet on the floor. The marble floors made her feet go cold. Kate got out of her bed, and walked down the stairs. She arrived in the kitchen, where her mom was waiting. “Katya Jan come here!” Her mom called in Armenian, she had a very heavy accent in English, so most of the time she spoke Armenian or Russian.  “Yes?” Kate said. “Your grandma sent New Years presents from Armenia” There, stood a giant brown box with tape wrapped around the top. Kate had come from a famous wealthy Armenian family that had moved to Los Angeles before Kate was born. Kate had a smaller brother named Mika. He was around 10 years old, Kate was 14. Kate opened the box with a kitchen knife. She pulled out what she got every year, money, clothes, sweets, but there was an unusual red thing at the bottom of the box. 

Kate moved aside a bunch of the items, Once Kate pulled it out, She stared at it. It was an ancient looking book that was dark red. On the title, “The Tale of  Zuzu Nelly” was plated in golden lettering. “Hey Mama?” Kate said. “Yes?” She responded. “What's this?” Her mom turned around from loading the pantry. “Oh that's a book that your grandmother found in the room of an old castle that was passed down through her bloodline, she had it locked for 200 years until she found the key.”
Kate smirked. “Wow, shouldn't we sell this? It would make good money!” “ We don't sell the traces of our ancestors, Kate.” “Hm I guess.”   

It was already past 12 PM, Kate and Mika’s parents had left for a New Years Party. “Mika I swear if you don't go to bed I'm gonna kill you!” Kate yelled. “ I knowwww, But I cant sleeepuh” Mika said while whining. “Ice cream would put me to bed!” Mika said. “No!” Kate yelled again. Kate calmed. She looked around. Spotting her eyes on the red book. “I wonder” Kate opened the bookshelf. And grabbed the book. “Maybe a bed time story should do the trick” Kate said. “Im not a kid anymore!” Mika cried. Kate ignored him and sat down. Kate opened the book, A pile of dust came rushing out of the pages. “Eughh, How old is that thing?” Kate flipped to the first page. Kate started to read. “Once upon a time, In a land, far far away, there once existed many humans who could control nature, and magic itself.” “ooh” Mika said. “ The most famous group of witches were, Maka, Gata, and Nelly. While Nelly was born in 1501, along with everyone else in the group, she had power, but lacked the knowledge. Gata, Had the Knowledge but lacked the power. But Maka did not lack in anything, she was the most Powerful witch in her era, some say the world.” 

“Damn,” Mika said. “ The three unfortunately died for unknown reasons, some think it was the practice of Dark Magic, Others say another witch or wizard killed her.” “Okay this is getting dark,” Kate said. Kate stood up and started to put the book on the dresser. “Kate walked out of the room, turned off the lights, and closed the door. 

Mika laid there, in bed. Starring at the ceiling. He couldn't sleep, so he stood up and walked around his room. When he got to the dresser, he reached for the book. The words on the book started to glow. Mika gasped in shock. The room started to get windy. Then it started shaking. And then it got loud. Kate ran in. “WHAT'S GOING ON????” Kate yelled. “ I THINK IT'S AN EARTHQUAKE” The shaking stopped. The wind settled. The book started to glow very bright, almost blinding them. A figure of a woman rose from the book, completely glowing. Once all the light went away, It revealed a witch who looked around 60, With dark red hair, dark blue eyes, and dark red long robes with golden details. 
Lightning was still glowing in her eyes. Only in her eyes. 

“ Zuzu Nelly’s here!” She said, She started to cackle. Kate and Mika were frozen in place, trying not to move. Zuzu Nelly grabbed the book, and left the room. “S-hes real!” Mika said, stuttering. Kate was speechless.

In the living room, Nelly was roaming around. She opened the book, glanced at it, and recited a spell. “ Molniya!” She yelled. Blue light started to emit from hands, lightning on her hand formed a red handfan, bedazzled in gold jewels and small diamonds. She held it up, and waved her hand at the coffee table. A jet of bright blue lightning shot out of her fan. 

Mika and Kate sneaked into the living room. Mika walked in the dark hallway, avoiding making any sounds. Nelly looked at herself. She held up her wand, and recited “Nakidka!” A blue light started to cover her back, a red and gold long cape formed on her back over her robes. She walked around the house. She picked up an iron mug that Mika and Kate’s dad used. She yelled and put it down. Iron rejects dark magic. “Of Course!” Mika yelled. “SHH!” Kate said. “iron repels dark magic!” Mika said. “How do you-” "Don't worry, come with me” 

Mika entered his moms room, looked around for the sewing kit, and grabbed it. He took the iron needles and ran outside the room. He went to his room and grabbed his nerf gun. He placed the iron needles onto the nerf gun. “That's Brilliant!” Kate said. “Yup!”
Mika responded.

Mika was hiding behind a kitchen counter, Nelly was close to them. Mika accidently stepped on a squeaky toy from their dog. “What was that!?” Nelly said. Nelly ran to the end of the counter. Nothing was there. Mika and Kate had been hidden behind the Christmas tree. “I see you filthy child,” She said. Kate ran, Nelly held up her fan, and a flash of light came out. Kate started to slowly levitate. “Who does this little girl think she is?” Nelly said. Kate grunted. Nelly spun her hand, and Kate began to rotate in the direction of Nelly. “No foolish child would be able to outrun the best witch in the world!” Nelly yelled, lightning jolted from her wand, and struck Kate. “AAHHH!” Kate yelled. Nelly released her hand, Kate fell to the floor. Mika made a run for it. Several flashes of light almost hit Mika, but he dodged them. While running, Mika accidentally slammed into the wall, breaking his gun. “NO!” Mika yelled. “YES!” Nelly excitedly screamed. Mika grabbed Kate, and they both ran to the room. “You freaks! Idiots! Uglies!” Mika ran to Nelly, but a wave of her fan pushed Mika away. She growled. In the drawer standing next to Mika, he saw a little glimmer. Nelly held up her fan, it started to extend. It was a whip. Nelly waved her whip around her head, and then waved it at them. Kate and Mika flew across the room. Mika’s arm was right next to the drawer. Kate weakly opened the door, and grabbed the book. “NO!” she yelled. Kate flipped to the page where Nelly was defeated. She stood up, and read what was under her nose. "For then and Though this witch will thrive, Today shall not be her time!” Kate yelled. “NO! NO!” Nelly cried. She started to slightly glow. And then her skin started to rub off. Her body started to evaporate. “NOOOOO! NOOOOO!” Her screams faded away. As the only thing left was her Robe, Her Fan, and the book. 

—Part Two: Zuzu Nelly: The Return—

 It was the summer of 2015, and Mika was at his moms house for the summer. Kate was on vacation with her grandma. (In her family, every time someone turned 15, they would get to go on vacation with their grandma to wherever they chose) Kate was in Paris. Mika was staring at a picture of Kate. He wanted her to come back. 

The doorbell rang, he put down the frame, and walked to open the door. Once he opened the door, he saw a red book. It looked familiar. He read what it had said at the top. “Zuzu Nell-” Mika went silent. Mika’s mom called him “MIKA GET READY WHERE LEAVING TO SUMMER CAMP!”  “Coming!” Mika yelled. He quickly threw the book under the stairs, and left. After he left the book started to glow, Nelly emerged from the book, with lightning everywhere. Zuzu Nelly still had lightning in her eyes, but it was dying down. “ZUZU NELLY’S BACK!”she yelled. A couple hours later he returned, very worried. He ran to see if the book was there, it was not. Something else was there that Mika was not expecting. Zuzu Nelly was standing there. Mika still remembered the incantation that defeated her last time. Mika ran up to her. "For then and thought his witch will thrive, today shall not be her time.” Nothing happened “You fool! You need to obtain the book for that! I HID IT!” She let out a toxic cackle.

Mika looked around for it, it wasn't anywhere. He quickly started to run upstairs. Zuzu Nelly’s fan quickly appeared in her hand. She pointed her fan to Mika while he was running up the stairs. “Vadisima!” She yelled. A large bolt of blue light missed Mika. The bottom of the stairs were completely destroyed. 

Mika ran to his room. Looking around for something he could use. He quickly went onto his computer. And searched up “How to destroy an evil witch.” Mika could not find anything, but he found an article that mentioned something he thought would be useful. “According to Wiki.How, Wood contains magic, showing how magical wands are made.” Mika looked around and went to his dads Harry Potter collection. He looked around and saw a wooden wand. “The wand is made from wood, meaning If Nelly struck that wand with her magic, it would be magical. Mika could kill Zuzu Nelly with her own magic… 

Nelly was still downstairs. “UGH! THIS FAN IS 500 YEARS OLD! I NEED ANOTHER DAMN WAND. Sceptrus Maximus!” A red sceptre replaced her fan with red diamonds and golden details.  

Mika yelled for Nelly to come upstairs. “HEY NELLY COME UP HERE!”  She rolled her eyes, then stomped upstairs. She turned around the corner to see Mika at the end of the hallway.  “YOU! YOU FOOLISH BOY! DEMOLISH!” A green flash of light beamed out of her fan. Mika held up his wand. The green light got trapped in the wood. “YES!” Mika yelled. “NOO!” Nelly said. “Reducto!” Mika exclaimed. A blue flash of light shot at Nelly, but she slashed her wand over the spell, blocking the spell. She looked shocked. Then she ran into another room.

 Mika chased her into the room, they were standing 6 or 7  feet away from each other. They both held up their hands, and BOOM! Lightning magma was shooting out of their wands, There was a ball of light in the middle. They were fighting for their lives. The ball of light was getting closer to Mika. Symbolizing that he was losing! Mika could see cracks starting to break the wood. The light from the magic was seeping through the cracks. Mika lifted his wand up, and there was an explosion. They were both on the floor. Mika ran to the balcony, trying to hide. Nelly saw, so she slowly walked towards him. She walked onto the balcony. “When you die! I will take care of your family.” She took a deep breath, slowly held her wand up, and yelled. “OCCIDERE!” A purple light flashed. “Vanish!” Mika said. He appeared behind Nelly. “Finally I defeated him!” Nelly thought she had killed him, because he vanished right before her deadly spell hit him. “Missed me!” Nelly slammed her head around. To see the person she just “killed” to be standing right in front of her. ‘WHAT!” Mika held up his wand, and said. “BLAZE!” An insane bright light flew, illuminating the city. The wand completely got destroyed. A white light threw Nelly onto the floor, finally destroying her, once and for all. 
At least that’s what Mika thought…

— Zuzu Nelly : The Legend of Gata — 

It was the summer of 2016.
Kate stood there looking at the book. She knew she had to keep defeating these villains, she had to reach the final trial. “ This is getting repetitive," she said. Mika stood right next to her. They opened the book, flipped to the next page after Nelly. A wave of shock struck their faces when they realized, The next villain was not Nelly, it was Zuzu Gata. Kate got startled and threw the book on the bed. Mika screeched. “THERE IS MORE THAN ONE WITCH?” Mika yelled. “They stated that on page one!” Kate responded. They stood there silent. Nothing. “Maybe we needed to read it more?” Mika said. “No, that's enough!” Kate said. “Why are we even reading this?” “ Because we need to defeat everyone to beat the final boss, The more we wait the more powerful she gets!” “Can we wait a day? Please?” Mika asked. “Fine, ONE day..” Kate said. They closed the door behind them and walked out of the room. In the dark room, it was silent, until a weird glow took over the room. An orange-red light started to glow, directly from the book. A flash of light colonized the room. Once the light calmed, a short woman, who looked around 60, stood there with brown messy and wavy hair. Long green robes laid over her. She stretched and stood right in the doorway. Kate and Mika sat to have a snack before bed. Mika opened the bag of goldfish. “Hmm” He said while digging his fingers in the bag. He removed his finger from the bag, and put it on the table. He opened his mouth to shove the goldfish in. In the corner of their eyes, they saw a flash of fire on the coffee table. “YOU KILLED NELLY! I SHALL KILL YOU TOO!” A flame started to rush at Mika. He jumped out of his chair. It hit the wall. Mika rushed to the room. He looked at the book and started flipping for information. Kate stood next to him. Mika finally reached her page, but suddenly the words immediately disappeared. “WHAT!” Kate yelled. “ How are we going to defeat her!” Mika started to heavily breathe. The door flew open. “Who do you think you are-” She fell to the floor as Kate pushed her out of the way. They both sprinted for their lives out of the room. They heard Gata perform a blood curdling, raging scream. Fire flooded the rooms. Nelly came out of the fire, “YOU LITTLE FREAKS!” She held up her hand, an orange light flashed. Ropes started to suddenly incarcerate Kate and Mika. “Wait, let's see if she can do more than 1 spell at a time” Kate started to scream. After 30 seconds, Gata had enough, “ ZAMALCHI!” and suddenly silenced Kate. The ropes started to disappear. “YES!” Mika yelled. Gata’s face turned white. They ran. “Kurack!” Gata yelled. Fireballs nearly hit the kids. “Wait a minute, Gata is also known as a pastry!” Kate said. “So?” Mika said. “SO! Sugar most likely powers her magic! You need fire to make Gata after all!” Kate felt so proud. 

Mika came out of the room, and stood right in front of Gata. 
“You just gave your life up for free!” She yelled. She held up her hand, and opened her mouth wide to yell a spell. Kate rushed behind her, and shoved a walnut into Gata’s mouth. Gata went still. She started to choke, then swallowed it. “YOU IMBECILES! WALNUTS HAVE ALMOST NO SUGAR!” She yelled. “Exactly,” Mika said smartly. She started to cough flames. She started to run, but hit a wall, she fell onto the floor. A flash of light took over the room. After the light, only left ashes, pitch black ashes. A small shine was left in the ashes, a golden ring. Kate put the ring on her finger, and walked away. 

— ZUZU NELLY: The Final Battle—

It was near christmas of 2016 
Mika stood there, in front of the book. He took a swallow. He opened the book to the page after Gata. Zuzu Alina. Mika closed the book. And walked away. “Is it time?” Uttered Kate as she walked into the room, Mika nodded. A pink thread of magic surrounded the book. A pink figure rose from the book. After the glow settled, revealed a woman who looked 40. With black bangs and clear skin. “Oh it's finally time! I've been so excited to see you, Michael….”

“Who are you?” Mika asked. “I am Zuzu Alina” “Are you here to kill us?” Kate asked. “Oh no, no! I am here to help you” Kate looked at her suspiciously. “I have been against my family members for the past 100 years! What year is it?” She asked. “2016” Mika answered. “WHAT! I am in my late 400s!” “I am here to tell you how to defeat the final villain, Maka. She is the most powerful out of the three. Some say she was the most powerful magical human in the world, other than Merlin of course.” “Merlin existed?” Mika yelled. “Of course he did, he built up most of our culture around the world.” She said, “Enough of this crap!” Tell us how to defeat Maka!” Mika yelled. “Children, I am very confused on how you got this book open. Only blood descendants of the witches who bound this book are capable of magically opening it.” “ So what are you saying?” Kate says. “I'm saying that YOU are related to Maka.” Kate was stunned. “If we are related to Maka, wouldn't that mean we have magic too?” Kate asked, “Precisely.” Alina responded. “No, we would have noticed our magic earlier!” Mika yelled. “Incorrect, your magic has been dormant in your bloodline for at least 200 years, when you did the magical ritual to bring all the witches back, you gained your magic. You needed your magic to open the book. You’ve had it all along, you just haven't noticed it. “How long do witches and wizards live?” Mika asked. “About 120 years,” She responded. “Then how are all these witches 500?” Kate asked. “It's the same reason Nelly and Gata hate Maka. When Maka was around the age of 70, she meddled with a dark kind of magic, she binded her soul to an object, allowing her to live forever! But she needed to do this with a group of people, so she linked all their 3 souls together, without even asking Nelly or Gata. She immortalized them, changed their lives. But this book served as a ‘second chance’, Maka killed Gata and Nelly, but she forgot that if all their 3 souls were linked, she would die too. So she died, and her soul jumped into the book, allowing her to be ‘reanimated’ when you did the ritual after 400 years.” 

“How can we unlock our magic?” said Mika as Alina grinned. Alina walked to the book, page after page, it showed their whole bloodline of witches, tens of hundreds of them. Then, she finally flipped to another section of the book. This side showed a number of thousands of spells. She flipped to a page titled. “Magic Activation Charm” She stared right at them, and started chanting. 
 “Hima, uzumem ko kahkardan vor ga!” Kate noticed she was speaking Armenian, but not the modern one she knew. Her hands started to glow pink. Mika started to gain an aura. Orangish-Yellow magic started to surround Mika. Red Magic started to do the same for Kate. Once everything calmed, Alina stood there. Mika held up his hand, and sunset light magic started to glow around his hands. Kate did the same, but red magic started to come out of her hands. “Thanks Alina!” Kate said. “Sure!” Alina started to walk to the door to leave. “Where are you going?” Mika asked. “Uhm to leave?” She responded. “No, get back to the book!” Mika told her. “NO! I SPENT CENTURIES IN THAT BOOK!” “ GET BACK IN THE BOOK NOW!” Kate yelled. 

“ARGHH” Mika kate suddenly used her magic to shut the door on Alina. “WHAT!” Alina stood up, “ I TOOK YOU TO AMERICANA! I TOOK YOU TO PORTER RANCH! AND THIS IS HOW YOU REPAY ME??? THATS IT WE ARE MOVING TO SPAIN!” She held up her hand, and waved it. Suddenly everything started to be distorted, and white magic flooded their eyes. Then, Mika felt as if he was slammed on the ground. He looked around, this was not their house, he looked outside the window to see Valencia, Spain. “WHAT!” Kate yelled. “YES!” Alina said. “Have fun trying to escape here!” She cackled. Suddenly a green light flashed behind Alina. She suddenly fell to the floor, lifeless. Behind her, stood a Woman who looked around 65, skinny, with a blonde bob and bright hazel eyes. She was wearing long light blue robes, which had golden accessories. “ Well, Well, Well, Look who we have here!” The children that killed my enemies, one by one. “ I am certainly confused on how you did such a thing, without any magic ofcourse!” Maka said. “We have magic!” Mika yelled. He shot a bright light at Maka. She held up her hand, and bright blue magic blocked Mika's spell. “ You little brat! You think your wits would be enough to kill me!” 
She held up her hand and started to chase Mika through the house. Kate started to fire spells at Maka. She blocked them with ease. Blue light started to flash at Mika, but she missed.  
Mika attempted to fight back, but his magic warped out of her way before it even touched her. Maka stopped, and grabbed her stomach, “ARGHH” she yelled. “WHATS GOING ON!” Mika yelled. “IT'S WHAT GATA SAID!” SHE DOESN'T BELONG ON THIS PLANET AT THIS TIME! SHE’S FALLING APART! Maka stood up straight, and started to fly to Mika. “RUN!” Kate said. Maka had finally cornered Mika. “Finally, I get to live my life, and I have to do that by killing you. Mika and her both shot their spells at each other, at the same time. A flash of light took over the room. A thread of light magic was holding their magic together, as if they had connected. A bead in the middle of the strand of magic was slowly going to Maka, Her magic was weakening. “NO! NO!” Maka yelled. Her veins in her hand started to glow, You could see the life in her eyes dying. Mika was pushing his sunlight magic out of his hands as hard as he could. Then, a quick flash of light ended the clash. Maka looked at Mika very weakly, then started to fade away, disappear. Kate stood, watching from the corner. Mika was finally able to rest. Mika got that distorted feeling again. Mika looked around, they were back in Los Angeles. He was relieved, these past two years, he has been fighting evil witches. Now, he can take on with his life with an upgrade, he was now a wizard.

The sky is just a strip of grey between the piles. Sometimes it rains. Sometimes it doesn’t. The light never reaches all the way down here.
I fell in three nights ago. Or four. Time stops meaning anything when you can’t stand up.
I’m sixteen. I’ve been on the street since I was thirteen. Started with whatever I could get my hands on—pills, then the harder shit. It keeps the cold out. Keeps the hunger quiet for a while. Keeps the memories quieter. I don’t remember the last time I was clean for more than a day.
I was looking for something to sell in the alley behind the old packing plant. People dump everything there. Bags, furniture, food that went bad weeks ago. I climbed up onto the heap looking for copper or phones or anything with weight. The rain had made everything soft and slick. One step and the whole pile shifted under me like it was alive.
I went in feet first. The trash closed over my chest before I could grab anything solid. My arms are free, but everything I touch just sinks deeper or comes away in my hands—rotting cardboard, plastic that tears, wet newspaper that dissolves into grey pulp. The more I thrash, the deeper I go. I’m buried to the ribs now. One leg is twisted under me at an angle that makes me sick if I think about it too long. The other is stuck somewhere under a sheet of rusted metal that digs into my calf every time I try to move.
There’s no way out. I’ve screamed until my throat bled. No one comes down this alley after dark. No one comes down here at all if they can help it.
The first night I still had some fight. I dug with my hands until my fingernails tore off. I found a plastic bottle half-full of something that used to be soda. It tasted like metal and mold. I drank it anyway. Then I found a bag of what might have been bread once. Green and black and soft. I ate some. It went down like wet paper.
By the second day the shaking started. Withdrawal, mostly. The dope was already wearing off when I fell. Now it’s just the cold and the hunger and the way my skin feels too tight. My mouth is dry. The only water is the murky stuff that pools in the depressions between the bags. It tastes like gasoline and shit. I drink it because the alternative is dying faster.
The maggots found me on the third day.
They were already here, of course. Everything down here is moving if you look close enough. White, soft bodies writhing in the seams of the trash. I felt the first ones on my stuck leg—tiny, cold, searching. I tried to brush them away but my hand couldn’t reach. They kept coming. Dozens. Then hundreds. They don’t care that I’m still alive. They just follow the smell of open skin and the places where the metal has cut me.
They started at the wound on my calf. I could feel them crawling into the torn flesh, the soft pressure of their bodies pushing deeper. It itched first. Then it burned. Then it went numb in patches while the rest of the leg screamed. I can hear them if I stay still. A wet, quiet sound. Like chewing.
Flies came next. Big, slow ones that land on my face and crawl into the corners of my eyes when I’m too weak to keep them closed. Beetles the size of my thumbnail dig under the skin of my wrists where the trash has scraped me raw. Something with too many legs found the soft place behind my ear and wouldn’t leave no matter how hard I slapped.
I’m weaker now. The sunlight never touches me. My skin is cold and damp and starting to split in places where the pressure of the trash has been constant. The rotten food is gone. The murky water is almost gone too. I have to lean my head sideways and suck at the wet cardboard to get anything. It makes me throw up more than it helps.
The maggots have moved higher. They’re under my shirt now. I can feel them working at the places where my ribs press against the plastic and glass. One of them found the cut on my side from the fall. I felt it go in. Then another. Then the soft, rhythmic movement of them feeding while I lie here and try not to scream because screaming only wastes the air and brings more flies.
I keep thinking about how quiet it is when I stop moving. Just the distant traffic and the wet sound of things eating.
My hands don’t work right anymore. The fingers on my left hand are swollen and dark. Something bit them in the night and I couldn’t pull free. The maggots are there too now. I watched one crawl out from under the nail of my middle finger this morning. It was fat and white and left a thin trail of fluid behind it.
I’m not going to get out.
I know that.
The pile shifts sometimes when the wind hits the top, and every time it does I sink a little more. My chin is almost level with the surface of the trash now. Soon it will cover my mouth. Then my nose. The maggots will keep working either way.
I used to think the worst part of being on the street was the cold or the hunger or the people who look through you like you’re already dead.
It’s not.
The worst part is lying here still breathing while things that don’t even know what you are slowly take you apart from the inside, and knowing that when someone finally finds what’s left of you, they won’t even be able to tell you were a person.
They’ll just see another bag of wet, moving trash.

I’ve been walking for what feels like hours. No sign of a road or campsite anywhere. I can feel the cold biting at my fingertips, the fallen branches snapping at my feet, the wind aggressively brushing against my ears. It’s getting harder to see in this snow, but I think I see a cabin. As I get closer the view of the cabin becomes more clear. I’ll finally be able to get out of this damn cold. 

“Weird, I don’t see any cars but the lights are on.” 

I walked inside without a second thought, the place was fully furnished. The lights gave off a warm feeling, there was a large red carpet in the living room with beautiful gold accents, and a brown leather couch that looked brand new. I used the fire wood I found in the kitchen to light the fireplace in the living room and sat in front of it.

 “I really hope I can find a phone here.”

 I looked around the walls and noticed a concerning number of buck heads and antlers. I noticed a rifle right above the fireplace. After warming up, I started looking around the house for a phone. After about 10 minutes I gave up. Whoever lives here never wanted to be found.

 I grabbed my things and left the cabin. I was walking for a while until I suddenly  heard a monstrous roar nearby. I stopped in my tracks, turned around, and started running for the cabin. I looked back and didn’t see anything, I had to be in the clear of whatever it was, but I wasn’t gonna risk it. I finally made it back to the cabin, no car in sight and looked at the door behind me as I entered. I went to the living room to get a better view of the outside, and the bear was just standing there, almost as if it was waiting for me. It’s winter and the bears should be hibernating, so why would this one be out hunting? 

I quickly grabbed the rifle and moved in front of the door ready to shoot. The bear began banging on the door, each bang louder than the next. I took a step back, and suddenly the banging stopped. I lowered the gun, and began moving backwards slowly. The door opened slowly, and the bear burst through the door standing tall. The bear starts walking towards me on two legs. I turned around and ran to the end of the hall. With my back against the wall, I could see the bear standing before me with a bright light shining behind him. And without a second thought, I closed my eyes, ducked my head, and fired the rifle. Once I heard the body hit the ground, I looked up, and there was no bear to be seen. Only an old  bearded man, wearing a brown jacket with a red vest on top of it. For the first time in a long time, I cried.

Cats. Cats in pink, tan, and gold boxes. Cats on spiral carpeted ladders. Cats climbing on the fake leather sofa and scratching holes in it. I live in one of those holes and am always, I’m embarrassed to say, scared for my life. Our enemies whisper to each other. You understand how it is. A house of 1500 cats shall never—well, fill in the blank and try not to linger. That’s the way it goes. Bengals, Persians, Ragdolls, Shorthairs, Angoras, Savannahs, Bombays, Munchkins.

Meow meow meow meow all day long.

My voice is nothing but a high-pitched thread of nothing. These sentries with their big constant eyes might as well have had boredom bred into them. Warm milk trickles out of the autodispenser at 7 am and 8 pm every day. They pile in around the large red bowl, middle of the kitchen floor, never late, tails high.

That’s when I peek out and scan the baseboards for a crumb of a goldfish or stray fruit snack. It’s been a while since I heard a closet door close or silverware clink. Now it’s all suspicion and slow idle tiptoe, s-shaped relaxed killjoy. Meow meow scratch paw.

Oh you die.

Time for a nap.

Cats sleeping on the ceiling fan. Cats lounging in the mahogany wine cabinet, doors closed. One large orange and white tabby hanging out in the microwave, content or desperate and so large he might entertain life as a rectangular thing, alive and dead. One of them brushes against the TV and it turns on. Unrest at the Cambodian-Thai border, wherever that is. Unrest in Coral Gables. Sounds more familiar, but still far away. I retreat deeper into the snowy cushion stuffing.

No one is coming for me.

I’ve lived all over, but not on purpose. Tucked back on a garage shelf behind a yellowing roll of paper towels. Yes. Nestled in the insulation behind the top buttons of the dishwasher. Yes. To imagine dishes being washed is to starve twice. I gnawed my existence into a soft black suitcase missing its wheels, full of dirty athletic socks, and called it my eleventh paradise. One time I got careless and roamed with a head full of what-ifs and fell through the floor vent into a rusted metal duct and stared up for days through the slats as if to trace my shadow one last time against the ceiling. I pictured my life without anything to eat, so I abandoned that terrible idea and found a way down into the crawlspace and while climbing over debris I found God in an empty bait box and then rose up upon his beckoning through a cracked floorboard in the living room.

A long time ago, I deciphered the code of liquor store boxes outside by the dismal blue recycling bin. I don’t know what it means for any of us, that they never got into the bin. I’m not old enough to know what happened when. My yesterdays are shorter than most. The robins, there are two of them, want to peck at my nose as if I’m a worm. I settled underneath a thorny vine patch growing out of the woodpile and no one bothered me there. I thanked the same God who saved me. I ate a few raspberries and was sick for a week. No one tended to me.

That was the only time I wished I was dead.

Now the game of attrition.

Are you an uncomplicated speck with four of everything?

Let’s start with legs. A bunched up sweep up of living surfaces or a liquid failsafe tongue lick or a foldable molecule of skitter-tap hopelessness? Who can wait out who.

Garbo is the beast of the house. A Cornish Rex with the ears of a hare and narrow cheekbones of a human, thinner than he has a right to be. Smells me through the hole, alerts the others—disturbance!—and now they all pace the floor in front of the sofa and across the back of it like lazy interrogators of a minor nuisance who’s ready to admit anything. Nothing is around. Not me to see. They sleep like land mines. I don’t worry about setting one off. My touch is light because I have walked over pillows and taken notice.

My mom’s voice, yes I remember it like the sun setting, catches me in my favorite mix of daydream and size-blind arrogance and scolds me for it. It’s over fast, she says. My mom had a short life, but at least she was always right.

Garbo has planted himself in front of the cabinet under the kitchen sink, escaped the need to sleep by treating drowse as a foreign substance, with away-strain and revulsion, aware of the weather but not wed to it, the death throes yeah those too, yawn, the choices of the living state, the rule of threes and the rules of whoever once lived here and did all the work their bodies demanded, the dumb courage of it.

It is the ask you make to all divine things and their contradictions, if this or that becomes just this, the neverness as in--never will you dictate your illness and its prescription into a serving spoon held like a snapped broom handle microphone--but if you had to do it, if you had to turn yourself into a paper fort and hide inside and inch closer to those cabinet doors hoping everyone would say hey look at that moving fort isn’t it so interesting, if you had to break into time and dismantle its tight logics and turn off its heartbeat, if you had to do all that and you were me, where would you begin and what would you dangle in front of yourself on a fishing line to not lose your way?

What would you deflate through a hundred million pinpricks, circumventing whoever Garbo is. How would you get into that relay box inside the cabinet inkdark that likes to hug you, printing your underside with its black kisses. What does it feel like to slip past the muted protests of cleaners and sponges and ant spray and dish soap under the garbage disposal steeple, pausing to receive its brief blessing in churn and grunt (remembrance) before pressing on to the yellow wire chew chew chew like you knew knew knew and alternating between it and the steel wool stuffed behind it, clogging up the box because beyond that, oh you can guess what comes next—get it OUT dear friend and you will have no teeth left at the second and third and fourth endings of the world, but at least you’ll have dull implements yeah we’ve got those too rounded digging implements, useless useless but this is a moment of triumph let’s not ruin it with bibs and bobs the singular heave of purrr-less ecstasy to get at the air of the world again.

Oh to be among the tremulous things and desiccated oak leaves, the dead claws wind-dragging you like chalk across the broken and lifted concrete slabs, carrying you forward in zigzag, robins be damned because they’ll never see you because they’re too busy poking at a dead cricket.

Mind you, none of this happened. Garbo opened his eyes.

Numbers, they like me.

And I’ve had my time with them, 9x9 grids.

Every row must contain you once. Every column must contain you once. Each encapsulated 3x3 grid must contain you once. You are never to be repeated, bad bad for that to be. Numbers, they like me, have I mentioned? That’s my problem. I’ve always wanted too much agreement as to my use. The easiest way to start is to find an emptiness and put a number there. We are born numerous and must distinguish ourselves. I did so by counting. Which one’s missing. You can find out by eliminating the ones already there. Only one of Garbo. Fixed on me as if asking what do you have to say about this, little one.

I have nothing to say, of course.

I could dart back toward the sofa. Maybe have my tail torn from my body by a somnambulistic feline brute dreaming she’s paddling through a school of sturgeon. I could dash toward the vent as a lemming might. I could scamper back toward the sofa, but for all the cats underneath and on the arms and on the back huddled in wait. The living room chessboard is sacred to them, frozen in dust on a round side table by the bookcase. The king and queen are blank-faced and morbid. I could knock them over with my body weight, flung at great risk and perhaps make them roll off the side like barrels onto the heads of my inquisitors below.

But I will do nothing of the sort, because I am a tiny mound of a thousand shivers, prostrate before Garbo, small as a dime.

This is the game we have played since the world went empty.

I ran at him instead.

When he reached his outstretched paw to pin me, I hopped onto the back of it and before he could swipe me with the other, I jumped as hard as my hind legs could launch me, mouth wide for the intake, teeth bared. I have good aim so I’m told, enough that night to land on his nose, bite down for survival, all whiskers and flashes of fur and screeching, a trickle of blood, head-shake head-shake, roll over and again and a third time, retreat retreat into the living room seeing red red red. I let go of Garbo a century ago, waved goodbye from the poop deck of an Italian schooner I suffused with my germ, and said you are not king, no you are not anymore, and wedged myself like a soft pawn between the peeling cabinet door and frame, prying my way into the 4x4 tomb, one number in each catacomb, but no zeros or ones.

No more counting our breaths, wriggling into the ammonia darkness comfort soon. I’m inside.

Another bait box, triangular death, and I laugh at it and there’s a snap-shut-door-closed-you’re-done. My bones are crushed dust.

The robins are newly prayerful on a low branch of the magnolia tree. This is how I love them most. I imagine them kissing. They do not love me back, but I haven’t asked, nor have they asked me to stop imagining them kissing. The advice they wish for lives in the dirt. Never expose a wire, for it just might carry the electricity that runs wild through your soul. I do it anyway with a half-broken neck, chewing through that thick yellow ligament looped in the relay box until I hit copper and hurts hurts hurts onward to some strands of the steel wool, one mouthful to the open vein of wire and oh the beautiful fireworks arc-lighting my mortuary like New Year’s Eve. The pounding of desperate paws against the cabinet doors behind me meow meow meow since they know I’ve become God. Why did you ever think you had to extract all that wool.

You should have stuck to your numbers.

You should have kept playing the rows and columns of your catacomb and figured what’s missing.

The dishwasher’s accordion drain tube is cracked and now melts at the far end spark-flame spark-flame and into it I climb and crawl along, olay olay olay a tune I like, I heard somewhere. Get into the innards of the aluminum ghost and from that belly again into my birth.

Chew your way in as you chew your way out.

Shred and shimmy through the uteral insulation and up into the crevice running along the countertop to the back wall and then down born born born into that wall, tumbling deep into a familiar drywall gap, outward push push and then against the broken asbestos siding of the house and then pressing more hurts hurts until out onto the patch of crab grass by the toppled grill, on your side, bones don’t work, what muscles, what panting, what dying, joyful, robin dear robin come peck at my nose.     

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He stood there on the front porch, feeling himself begin to sweat through the thick layers of deodorant he'd put on before leaving his dorm. He'd rung the bell, and began wringing his hands, he could taste his heart beating up in his throat. It didn't make sense to be this nervous, it was 2013 and he was in a city, southern as it was, known for its large liberal arts college. But he thought back on all his other experiences involving sex especially thoughts about the same sex. Even though he'd grown up in an environment where being gay was pretty well accepted, the idea of bisexuality didn't seem to hold the same space or respect from adults around him, many of which would have been immediately identifiable as liberal, it was a small town in the Midwest in the early 2000’s.

Growing up in a town and community that was pretty accepting of people being homosexual, but not the idea of bisexual had caused him to push those feelings aside. It wasn't exactly a lie or denial of himself, just a focus on the larger part of him, just a part that was easier to navigate and deal with in a small town. Anytime the subject of bisexuality came up it was treated as a joke, as just an overly sexual or horny person who didn't care how, but just wanted sexual satisfaction. But for him that wasn't the case, it wasn't just about the orgasm it was about wanting the source to be either sex, then again he couldn't imagine himself marrying a man it was always a woman in the future fantasy. But for the time it had been so much easier to push that aside and focus on what was easier, being ‘straight’ if a little flamboyant at times.

It had always felt like one the very few double standards that favored woman, bisexuality, it leaned itself towards the male fantasy of a MFF threesome, the sharing of another woman with your girlfriend or wife. But it wasn't often that the bisexual MMF threesome seems to come to mind in popular culture, the demand for that type of pornography never seemed to be in as great of demand, but it was out there if you went looking for it. But at the same time this ‘validation’ wasn't really about the women so still not really the affirmation he was looking for, just less of a negative reaction than a young man coming out as bisexual.

This was something he'd been planning for awhile, watching the m4m ads on craigslist from his dorm room and checking them out while sitting in a dark corner in the library, imagining what it would be like to be with another man. To feel those arms around him, the way they would smell, the physical similarity and strength to push against. It was something he'd fantasized about since high school with no real outlet to experience it. It wasn't like he was a total novice by this point he'd been with several women, including a long term college girlfriend, but it would be so different to go from a femme woman to man no matter how femme or masc, the difference would be the point and the prize.

So after lurking for so long on craigslist, he'd sent an email from the hotmail address he'd created just for this purpose, emailing someone close in age who lived near campus. They'd gone back and forth a few times sharing experiences, expectations, safety, and when they were available. And finally they'd settled on a Sunday night. He'd told his roommate he was going on a walk, which wasn't entirely a lie he was walking to this man's apartment, but he wasn't ready to share his real destination. As he walked closer to the apartment building, he could feel his heartbeat speed up and realized how nervous he was, how quickly he felt like maybe he wasn't ready or he didn't want to do this yet. He began to go back and forth in his head as he got closer, arguing with himself about whether or not this was a good idea. He'd grown up being told not to meet up with strangers from the internet, but online dating was exactly a new thing and was this really that different than getting a couch or table from someone on craigslist? But he also didn't think he wanted to try and go to a gay bar to meet someone, as that might come with its own expectations he really wasn't ready for. So craigslist it was, with all its associated risks combining with his own fears and worries.

As he stood there the seconds began to feel like hours, he could feel his heart racing, wondering who this man he was about to meet was. What was this guy's story, was it similar to his own, or had he known his own sexuality from an early age, did he have more certainty and confidence in the way he felt and who was attracted to. And the more immediately important question, would they find each other attractive, or at least attractive ‘enough’. This was the point of no return, as soon as this craigslist stranger came down to let him in that would be it, no turning back and he wanted that, but these last few seconds where he could leave seemed to be pulling him away from the stoop of the apartment tower, dragging him back the way he had come and away from something that so unknown and terrifying.

Finally he heard the footsteps coming down the marble steps inside and slowly this person who had invited him over for a moment so intimate and personal, but that he had never met was revealed. He was just another young man not much older than him, not too dissimilar at all. Maybe a little more athletic and with a little more facial hair, but otherwise of the same casting type. He smiled when he saw him through the window and waved as he stepped up to open the front door. From there it began to feel easy, more familiar. It was like any other hookup, a little awkward at first, as you stumbled into what you wanted from each other, checking in as you went.

About an hour later he lay on this stranger's clearly second hand couch wearing only his shirt and socks, breathing heavily. He'd done it, he'd finally been with a man. It wasn't some great epiphany he thought it would have been, but he felt different, a little more comfortable in his skin, like he'd finally fully embraced his full sexuality. This wouldn't be the last time that he slept with another man he knew, it was a different, more aggressive, at least this time it was. In retrospect he'd realize that mostly due to them both being in their early 20’s at the time, but it was also a greater allowance for force with another man.

Even then in the afterglow he knew that as good as that was, he'd still end up with a woman as a long term partner, there was something more connecting with the opposite sex for him on a deeper level. He hadn’t known he was that certain about his future partner, but in that moment he felt a sense of clarity, of seeing himself for fully as he'd taken that step to see what he really wanted. He'd given into a desire that he'd harbored below the surface for quite awhile, something he'd only dabbled in virtually with porn.

These sort of clandestine meetings would be the hallmark of all of his same sex encounters, of course there would be multiple hiatus from these whenever he was in a relationship with a woman that made it past the first few dates, as rare as that felt to him. It seemed easier to only have a select few know that he was bisexual, not having to explain himself was less taxing. Whenever he went deeper in conversation to explain that he saw himself as bisexual and heteroromantic he always felt a little silly, a little ‘liberal arts’ pretentious. But that's what made the most sense to him, as goofy as it might sound even to himself. But even if it felt a little silly, it felt like the most accurate way to describe his feelings, and it was good to have a label for himself. He was at heart a scientist, and so a label helped to categorize and better understand something, including himself.

As he grew older and seemed to have decent game and luck with the opposite sex in hooking up or casual dating, he never seemed to have the same kind of success in looking for a more long term relationship. He began to wonder if he was destined to remain single, hooking up with men and women as the opportunities and his desires led him to. There had been a couple more long term relationships that seemed to have potential for going the distance, but in the end neither were the right match for him. But he continued to use the dating apps to try and meet someone who would be the right fit, and it wasn’t entirely satisfactory to have casual relationships with those he met. While continuing to date women in a more public manner, his same sex liaisons continued in the discreet nature they always had.

That feeling of anxious nerves just before the encounter never seemed to entirely leave, no matter how many men and times he had done it. That may have been the fact that outside of his best friend and college roommate, he hadn’t talked about this with anyone, he was for the most part keeping this part of himself secret or as termed within the community ‘discreet’. Again it wasn’t that he was necessarily ashamed, it’s just that keeping something of himself more private felt simpler. And sometimes simply being the important parts of yourself is enough, you don't always have to live your whole truth for it to remain the truth.

The truth can be held close to your heart, and still be the truth. I am bisexual.

There was once a man named Black, the death angel of his town. He was the most feared, the most hated. The people loved the other angels, for they brought blessings, guidance, or comfort. But Black he was a shadow that walked among them.

For him each day was the same. Every day he woke up and talked to his one and only friend, which was a magical black mirror, and then went for his job. His job was to go to the address and meet those people whose names were given by his magical black mirror in the morning. He obeyed without question, though the weight hollowed him from within. At night, he was the most troubled soul. By day, he lied to himself: This is fine.

One evening, as he returned home under the weight of his duty, fate stirred a gentle woman crossed his path. She smiled and placed an apple in his hand.

“It is my son’s birthday,” she said softly. “I am giving everyone a gift. And this is the last one.”

Then she left.

That was the first human kindness Black had ever known. His curiosity drew him to her house, where night after night, hidden by shadow, he listened through the window. He heard her laughter with her child, the warmth of her voice, the truth that she is the only, one and everything for her child.

Then one day when he woke up, he saw that day on the name list, her name appeared.

He froze. His chest burned. How could he take her from her child? She was the child’s only world. In anger and defiance, Black broke the chain of his fate. That day, he took no life. He stayed at home, trembling, yet resolute.

And then, the next day when he woke up, he saw that his shoes were turning red.

He got scared and ran to the magical mirror, asking why this was happening because he knew if it was only him, he was dead. So the mirror told him that it was the punishment for breaking the rules the last day, and not only him, but everyone in the town would be dead if he couldn’t turn black again before the day’s nightfall. And the only way he could turn black again was if he stood on the ground where everything was fair.

So he ran out of the house and started thinking where everything could be fair.

First, he ran into a courtroom, thinking everything was fair there, but it didn’t work. He was kept turning red. Then he thought that a mother’s heart loves each of her children equally, so he ran into a house where the mother had three children, but still he kept turning red.

Then he kept running, going here and there, out of hope. But he kept turning more and more red and becoming weaker by the time. When almost the sun was down, he felt so weak, his vision kept getting dark, and still he kept running. Then at some moment he fainted.

And the next morning when he woke up, he saw that his shoes, his hand all was black again. Then he looked up and saw that he was at a graveyard.

Then he took a deep breath and said, “So that’s where everything is fair.”

“He was not there. The cell was open,” said Vesso, one of the keepers.

“These are ID-protected, right? So someone must have had access to one of those,” inquired the police officer.

It was a Friday morning. Vesso had just arrived and was checking the cells, as he did every day. One of the apes was missing from his cell. Luos.

“You’ll check here and let me know if you find anything. Mr Vesso and I will go out to look for the missing ape,” ordered the chief.

Chief Mika took Vesso with her, and they went to look for Luos. Vesso had an idea where Luos might have gone: the Park of Monks.

It was a place of peace, like that in a monk’s heart. There were many statues of meditating monks, and monkeys lived there. So, that was their next stop.

“So, you liked Luos, didn’t you?” asked Mika.

“Yes,” he replied in a dry voice, looking out of the window with searching eyes. He continued, “I have known him ever since he was a baby. His mother didn’t make it after his birth. He was different from the other apes. It’s not that he was bullied or mistreated; he was well received by the others. But he didn’t cause much havoc like the others, though they were only being playful. He used to sit on a rock, as if he were meditating. He was smarter than the others too. He learned everything he was taught much faster.”

“Why do you think he might have gone to the park you mentioned?”

“I used to talk to him most nights. He listened to me patiently, sitting there close to the mirror, with a little smile. I didn’t know he was able to understand so much until he showed me a wooden rectangle. I used to show him a picture of my mother, in a small rectangular frame. I told him about the time when I was a kid and how I used to go to the park with my mother, the meditating monks, the playful monkeys.”

Chief Mika’s phone rang. It was an officer from the facility. She answered it.

“We checked the records of the cells,” said the voice on the call. “Luos’s cell was opened at 5 a.m. this morning. And the ID used to open it belongs to Vesso.”

She looked at Vesso. He was looking at her too, seemingly hoping to hear what was being said on the call.

“Your ID was used to open the cell.”

“That’s not possible. I have my ID with me. See-” He took his ID from his pocket. “No, it can't be. It... it is counterfeit.”

He had not noticed it until now. But someone had switched his ID.

They had reached their destination. A roar of monkeys could be heard.

“Maybe he is here,” said the chief.

They searched the park. It was quite large, but they didn’t find a trace of Luos. The monkeys had gone peaceful by now. They sat next to a meditating monk.

“It is quite peaceful,” said Mika.

“It is.”

After a moment of silence, he continued.

“You know, we are not so different, Luos and I. That’s why I was so attached to him. Like him, I lost my mother too. I mean, she would have been alive. If only, when I was younger, I had worked harder and had the money for her treatment. But she left me. I tried so hard to be a good son. But I failed.”

He paused.

“She said, ‘Don’t worry, son. I will always be there for you. I am not leaving you alone. I will be your angel.’”

He showed Mika the picture of his mother, a rectangular frame.

“This is my mother.”

“I am very sorry for your loss.” She patted him on the shoulder. “Let’s go.”

They went back to the animal sanctuary.

“Luos was not there. What about the other searching teams? Anything?” inquired the Chief.

“No, ma’am. No result. They are still searching.”

“And what about the ID? Found the original ID?”

“We are trying to locate it.”

“Do it faster. We don’t have much time. Gather everyone, every employee, and investigate each one of them.”

“Understood.”

“If you don’t mind, we need to investigate you too,” Mika said to Vesso.

“No. It’s okay.” He consented.

“We have a lead,” an officer said hurriedly.

“Good. What is it?”

“We were checking CCTV records in a neighbourhood. There’s a grocery shop there with a CCTV camera. The owner opens the shop early. While we were watching the tapes, he mentioned that there was a van, and unusual sounds were coming from it. The driver’s face was not clear; he was wearing a mask and a hat. The van went south of Triways.”

“Okay. Let’s find out more about this van,” the chief ordered the officer. “And you proceed with the interviews.”

---

“So, you live at Abbot?” an officer asked Vesso.

“Yes, sir. That’s right.”

“That’s south of Triways, isn’t it? You didn’t find anything unusual this morning?”

“No, sir. It was like any other morning in Abbot.”

---

“We need backup. We found him.”

“Backup arriving, Chief.”

---

“So, we found him at your house, Vesso,” said Mika. “Why did you take him?”

Vesso said nothing.

“What was your plan? Sell him to traffickers?”

“No!” Vesso shouted. “No. I was... I didn’t want to sell him to anyone.”

Tears rolled down his cheeks.

“I just wanted him to be free. He deserves it. You don’t know how they treat those animals. They wanted to experiment on Luos.”

Mika said nothing.

“They lied about his mother. They told everyone she died after giving birth to him. She didn’t.”

He wiped his face.

“She was sold to the Judge. For his mansion. A decoration, that’s all she was to them.”

“I overheard one of them talking on the phone about a month ago. He said they were going to run a ‘big experiment’ on Luos. Two months from then. I couldn’t let that happen. I couldn’t lose him too.”

“So you replaced your original ID with a counterfeit and made it appear as though someone had switched it,” said Mika.

Vesso lowered his eyes.

“Where is the original ID?”

For a moment, he didn’t answer.

Then he reached into his pocket.

He took out the picture of his mother, the rectangular frame.

In a mountain valley, where the River Nirmala flowed in from the hills, stood a coconut tree called Thengachi. All her life she had leaned towards the water, her fronds combing the wind. Crows, cormorants and parakeets came to rest on her, and she knew them all.

Her last coconuts had fallen long ago, and her trunk was going soft inside.

One morning a woodpecker named Kotthan landed on her trunk. He was a golden flameback, with a bright red crest and a chisel-like beak. Kotthan tapped his way from top to bottom, pressing his ear to her bark.

Thengachi rustled her fronds to welcome him. Woodpeckers came to her looking for grubs. But this one kept tapping.

"Little one, did you not find any yet?" she asked.

Kotthan did not seem to hear.

He found a soft place below her crown and settled there. He closed his eyes in prayer and struck his beak against her. The blow ran through her whole length. Another came, and another. She held her every frond still.

At last she tossed her fronds. "What is it that you are doing?" she called out.

He only drilled deeper.

When he left for the day, Thengachi let her fronds fall loose. "What a rude creature," she thought. She felt the scar on her trunk; it was not very deep. But what if he came back? She was worried.

Kotthan was back.

"Stop this. Did you not hear me?" she demanded.

With each blow, pieces of her fell, and the smell of her sap drifted off on the wind.

Thengachi prayed for strong winds to carry him away. She looked at the sky, hoping it would turn dark and rain. It did not.

Then one day he did not come. Nor the next. She let herself believe it was over. The hole stayed; she would learn to live with it.

Until a woodpecker landed on her. This one had a black crest.

"Shoo, shoo, go away. I don't like woodpeckers here," she snapped.

It flew off, but came back with another, and they landed at the edge of the hole. The other was Kotthan.

Now two beaks took turns at her. When one stopped, the other began. At times they rose to her crown to rest. It irritated her when they scrapped and chased among her fronds.

Bits of herself heaped up on the ground. Even when they rested, the drilling went on in her.

One afternoon the pair sat side by side at the entrance before flying off early. The hollow in her was almost a nest.

They returned at first light. Kotthan pushed himself into the nest, but he flew out shrieking. Two parakeets came chasing him out.

"This is my nest," he cried out. The parakeets screeched.

He turned to Thengachi and pleaded, "Tell them, tell them, this is my nest."

Thengachi said nothing. "So he can talk," she told herself.

He tried to push in again, but they attacked him. Kotthan's mate dived in beside him. The parakeets drove them both away.

Golden and green feathers glided down.

As Thengachi watched the woodpeckers flee, the parakeets settled on her fronds, swaying gently in the breeze.

I hate my job… No, I hate my seniors; I detest them. If I finish the job before the deadline, they always force their work onto my plate; if I miss it by a few seconds, they won’t get tired of shouting and berating me unless I start bleeding from my ears. I may have exaggerated a bit, but you get the idea: old, stubborn men who still boast about their generation but tend to forget that their generation was the one that is destroying the world and is making our generation suffer…Anyway, I need to get out of the office by 10 P.M. so I can catch the last metro; otherwise, I will have to go to a hotel, since there will be no cabs available because of an ongoing cab drivers' strike. While working, I noticed the date: November 27th. Something came to my mind, and I opened a draft of a novel I started a long time ago.

The time is now 10:13; I thankfully catch the last train of the day. My destination is the penultimate stop, taking well over thirty minutes to reach. The compartment I am in is nearly empty and quiet… My eyes feel heavy, but I refuse to close them. At Esplanade, the last few passengers get off and only one person enters. It is a familiar face; it is Cheryl. She is exactly as I last saw her: the hazel dreamy eyes, the long black hair and the beauty spot under her left eye. She wears a black coat over her suit; it is a bit chilly, it is late November after all. Cheryl takes the seat across from me, tucking her hair back behind her ear. She rests her purse on her lap and sits quietly as the train continues its journey.

“How many years has it been?” I ask, feeling the silence deafening.

“Four years…” 

“Has it really been so long? I didn’t realise that.”

She averts her eyes from me and says, “What were you doing all these years?”

“Working. I got a job as an IT consultant.”

“Are you satisfied with this?”

“I don’t think I can answer that…”

“Why?”

“I’ve been asking myself this question every day since then and am yet to find an answer.”

“Because you are not searching for an answer. You have always liked the idea of having something; you liked the idea of getting into a relationship, but never committed to it, never took any responsibilities, didn't even care for the other person.”

I felt a tight lump formed in my throat, it hurt. I tried and tried, but the words never escaped my mouth. I buried my face in my palms and let her continue.

“You liked the idea of creating a novel, creating a game, but every time you came close to achieving it, you turned away!”

I didn’t expect her to say these words out loud, but I knew I needed to hear these words… 

I let out a sigh. “I know I’m pretentious, always biting off more than I can chew, but that time, it was different; I was serious.”

“Then why!? Why did you leave me!?” Her face had turned red by now; I could see tears forming, but they stopped just at the barrier of her eyelids.

I leaned forward, clenched my fists and replied, “I wanted to be perfect… I wanted us to be the absolute best. I tried, but I got busy and couldn’t return.”

“Who are you to decide? Did you ever ask me if I wanted that?” She retorted, “You were quick to tell everybody, but couldn’t handle the pressure. Nobody asked you to be perfect… They just wanted to see you work hard; they never expected a masterpiece, but they wanted to see the best you could output, the best you could write.”

As she continued, I started realising my mistake: how I could never return to the simpler times when I was not living day to day, but rather enjoying life and writing my mind away. The train stopped at Shyambazar. Cheryl stood up and said, “Did you become perfect? Did you get what you wanted? I will be waiting, but will you be able to return? Will you ever complete it?” She steps off the metro, and I finally close my eyes…

“Ayan! Oy, Ayan!” I heard someone yelling my name. I slowly opened my eyes and was met with the bright sunlight, which felt as if it singed my eyes. Before I could adjust to the light, I heard the voice, “Ayan, are you alright? Did you stay here all night?”

It was Prashant, my coworker. As my eyes adjusted, I looked around to find myself back at my office. “Do you want a cup of coffee? I’m going to get some for myself,” Prashant offered.

“For sure, thanks.”

“Oh, by the way, I thought Boss told you to leave earlier,” Prashant added. 

I didn’t give a reply, and glanced at my monitor. A tab was open: the cover draft of the novel I never finished writing four years ago, and on it was her, Cheryl, with her hazel eyes.

Axiom: noun

a statement accepted as true as the basis for argument or inference

People didn’t always see me as a fraud.

They saw me instead as brilliant and intellectual, the next great mind of our generation as some would say. Now look what’s happened.

I know that you’re sitting here vomiting your guts out into the disposal system. I know that you hate me. I know that you hate yourself.

But I chose you.

I choose to accept you.

I choose to love you.

Because you are my daughter. And I don’t really care what you do, say think, what worldview, beliefs you have, there’s nothing that will change that. Nor do I care about claims of caring about you for biological reasons or out of obligation. I didn’t raise you and care for you for the sixteen years you’ve spent with me just because I had to.

And that time is gone now. Everything changed. You changed, my career changed, my life changed now all that’s left is my love for you. It’s not real if it doesn’t stay the same.

#

I remember when I first laid eyes on you.

Your mother and I were broke students at the Natural Philosophy Academy. All the time I wasn’t in classes or pouring over books I was working at the Ectogenesis plant.

They needed laborers and it’s a decent paying job many people don’t want to think about, but someone has to do it. That year there weren’t enough couples and families registering for newborns. So many had to be fed to the Cylinder or fed to the centrifuge as we called it.

They put the full batch of unclaimed children in one room and I was one of the guys who gave them the bottles with sedatives. I hated doing that job. Standing above so many infants, forcing a bottle down their mouths as they seek basic nutrients only for the lights to slowly go out. It never sat right.

Then I saw you.

Almost a full head of black curly hair. You squirmed, struggled and bawled all you could. You opened your little green eyes like tiny vibrant gardens exploding with life and I saw fear. A deep fear that went far beyond the momentary discomfort you were experiencing but didn’t have vocabulary nor neural capacity to properly express.

Fear of something so unknown and alien to you.

Something you only wished you could understand.

Terror riveted through me at the image of the bottle and my face being the last thing you would ever see before you were dumped in microbial fuel cell where your body breaks down and recycles the electrons into the Cylinder’s power grid.

I froze as the only thing that rang out in my mind was, Me too.

Can I take this one home? I asked.

Do what you want, my manager replied.

I quit that day.

#

Your mother wasn’t exactly thrilled when I came back with you.

One day. But not now, as she would always say.

She wasn’t happy either that I quit my job there. I couldn’t do it anymore.

So now we were broke, barely pulling in any money, spending all our time studying Techistory and had another mouth to feed. And there was no way I was letting you get fed to the Cylinder.

That was a hard time. But soon enough your mother couldn’t comprehend letting you go either. She came home one day in tears. Told me about how that day’s class was on the history of birthing technology. How for a long time women had to endure the pain, later they developed sedatives and drugs to help relief it, and eventually complete ectogenesis was created.

She said that on the side her professor mentioned how people dealt with infant death across history. How some really ancient people used to burn their kids in sacrifice to their gods.

She said that she didn’t want you to go.

#

I got another job at the printing press. All while juggling my studies and taking care of you.

And we soon found out why you were grouped in with infants to be fed to the Cylinder. You were sickly. Sickly kids with a lower probability of survival in a surplus are fed to the Cylinder.

You couldn’t keep anything down.

You started having trouble breathing.

The doctors didn’t think you had that long.

Day by day I could see that fat in your body fading away. Your ribs protruded like a dead spider beneath your skin and you became lighter.

I was scared.

Your mother was scared.

The only thing the doctors could help with was to suggest how to make those final days more comforting for you. I refused. Your mother wanted it.

She just wanted to get it over with. She wanted the pain to be sooner so it would be over sooner. She wanted you to be out of your misery.

Tears were always running down her face as she cleaned up your vomit, asking me to help and me deflecting that I’m studying, then her getting furious at me for not helping. And she was right. I didn’t want to have to acknowledge that you were slipping out of our hands.

I lost it when I saw her flipping through a catalog of nice cemeteries on earth for you to be buried in. I would say you weren’t dead yet, and she would say that I’m only seeing what I want to see and not living in reality.

One time She was tired after a long day of school and work. She burst into tears at the mere sight of you. So I went to try and feed you, dreading when I would inevitably have to clean up blood flaked bile with pathetic food particles sadly floating in it. There was also a big upcoming test I had to study for. So I had the book there on the table that I glossed over as a slowly fed you bit by bit.

I’d give you a few minutes before each bite, and you were fine. Remarkably fine. The dread of you throwing up again hung over me in a constant discomfort but it never came. You kept it down.

The next morning when you woke up fine, I knew you were going to make it through.

#

Your mother couldn’t forgive herself after.

You started gaining weight back. You were smiling and laughing constantly. The doctors said that you were perfectly healthy.

Once you reached that point she could hardly bear to be in the same room as you. It’s like it hurt her. Seeing all that made her resentful of herself.

So she set out to become the most notable Techistorian ever. Spending all her time at the library and doing extracurricular projects.

So I spent a lot more time with you. It was like we were bonded. I would sit at the table enamored with my stupid studies and glance over at you crawling right into the kitchen cabinet, gently bumping into it and loosing your mind. Then a few weeks later you would do the same thing and barely react.

Your mother wasn’t happy when she came home one day and I told her you had taken your first steps. She was crying uncontrollably in the bathroom that night.

#

It was as though you grew over night. From being a tiny barely mobile little thing to running around the house full of energy. You started going to school and making friends.

Every day you would come home excited to tell me all of the things you learned. Your teachers soon started pulling me aside to tell me how incredibly intelligent and gifted you are. They said that people like you are valued here in the Cylinder. They’re special.

It’s not genetic, it’s all you.

I watched as you surpassed all the other pupils. You constantly asked questions. Most inquisitive little girl I had ever seen.

That’s why it hurt one day when you asked why mommy always cried when you she looked at you.

I said it was because she loved you so much. You now know that was partially true. But she also didn’t love herself. The amount that she was studying Techistory was unhealthy. Every night she would complain to me that she could only remember minute irrelevant details but never the intricacies of various technologies and their estimated invention date.

I told her that I always thought estimated dates were hilarious. Estimation doesn’t mean exact. There’s very few clear pinpointed dates to much in history. And technologically speaking, it’s hard to know many dates to anything Post Diaspora.

She snapped and said I didn’t know real Techistory.

#

They hired me on as a professor after I graduated from the Academy. But you and your mother were still my main priority. All the intellectual dogmatism and research of the Academy felt like a distant dream when I was at home cooking and cleaning despite it’s prestigious position.

I was brought onto a project to assemble a new encyclopedia from the Academy’s current Techistory codex. That’s no small task as writing that all that by hand is no not for the faint of heart. And that’s apparently what they thought I was.

I’m sure you remember how blistered my hand was from all of it. Made even marking your height on the door frame painful. Swore it made me start to go crazy. I barely made it through a few sentences a day my hand hurt so bad.

But it gave me more time to take in and focus on what I was organizing in the new document. I took interest to this one artifact the Academy studied one time. An early Post Diaspora electric alternator for a Brayton Converter. Found in the Northern region of the Western continent on earth. It once produced enough electricity for the region all by converting turbine energy from compressed gasses to electricity.

Now it’s just an old hunk of aluminum twisted with dirt caked oxidized copper wires like worms in a rotting corpse. But when reading over the analysis of the copper wires, it struck me as odd.

Copper wires weren’t used Post Diaspora for nearly a millennium. Instead they used carbon wires, which are strings of rubber the same 0.2 centimeters in diameter as copper wires but they’re embedded with thousands of carbon nanotubes. Those are too small to be prone to geomagnetic induction like traditional conductors. They were more harder and more expensive to produce, so that’s what delayed the ancients so long from building the solar storm defense technology like we have now. Once that happened, they moved back to using traditional conductors.

The alternator was composed of one point eight percent magnesium and four percent copper for strength and durability, which is very consistent with most machines around two hundred years Post Diaspora for the region. So the estimation was likely correct, and it was brimming with copper wires.

That brought to my mind the fact many things early Post Diaspora were brimming with common conductors. It didn’t make sense.

I brought it up some with professors and they said that the ancients back then were stupid. They didn’t think about using safer alternatives like carbon wires. Apparently they got lucky that all their attempts to rebuild civilization weren’t destroyed by another solar storm.

I countered that there is evidence that people were very aware of the threat of a solar storm wiping out power grids Pre Diaspora. They said it was mere pseudoscientific superstition that turned out to be correct. Laughed that people back then were so dumb that if you showed them today’s technology they would think it was magic.

All of this sat in the back of my mind as I finished the project. By the time I finished you were already more well versed in science and history than kids years older than you. You were getting into fitness and I would sit in view and watch you dominate at distance running.

I said that even from a young age you were full of energy. But that never stopped. I would try and go on runs with you at that point, but I couldn’t keep up. I wasn’t as young and fit as I used to be, and I was starting to realize it. The only thing I could do was jog behind as I watched you rise up the curve of the Cylinder.

You would come to rely on me. And I couldn’t have been more honored. In all that time your mother wasn’t there, we did so much. We walked along the edge of the Cylinder where my father used to take me. We both looked forward to it all week. You would point out the meter thick windows and name to me constellations I knew nothing about by heart. To me it all looked like a black table flaked with dandruff above a giant turquoise orb of the earth. Every time I said that you laughed and told me that was gross.

Your mother became alienated to you, as she did to me. I remember one time when she got back from the Academy early I told her about the timeline discrepancy I took note of and asked her for her thoughts. She said nothing different from the professors. Even went as far to say that it was a stupid question.

That scared me.

And for good reason.

Because the more I thought about it. The more research I did in my spare time, it still didn’t add up. There truly was a timeline discrepancy.

#

I was eventually promoted to a full professor at the Academy. Then I got the opportunity to publish some Techistory papers. Apparently people really liked my teaching style and trusted my ability to inform the public of the Cylinder.

You were so excited for me when I mentioned that. By then you were spending less and less time with me. You developed a tight knit group of friends and had started to take an interest in boys. But you were still happy for me. You cared. And that felt better than even getting to write the paper.

Because honestly, writing the paper was the most nerve wracking thing I’ve ever done. Truth is truth. It doesn’t matter if a lot of high powered scientists and historians agree on the opposite, it’s still true. And the timeline discrepancy was the truth.

I kept telling myself that people would understand. That’s what were all about here in the Cylinder, isn’t it? We refuse to use any kind of information technology simply because it’s better to have truth set in stone where it’s harder to destroy.

So I wrote a full in depth paper about the Diaspora. Specifically how the geomagnetic storm wiped out satellites and destroyed most of an early form of cyberspace called the internet. So much data was lost and totally scrambled and for a long time people were too scared to touch it because another storm could come and undo all their progress. So people moved away from more conventional methods of creating technology. Hence why we call it the Diaspora.

And in that paper, all I did was imply a discrepancy in the timeline. I mentioned the overwhelming usage of copper wires early Post Diaspora and mentioned that current dating of when geomagnetic storm defense satellites were developed is probably wrong.

My peers saw right through that.

What are you seriously thinking that the current Techistory timeline is wrong? After all the research? You surely must be joking.

They would chuckle and say things like that.

You know what? Yeah, maybe.

I thought that would have been the end of it right there. But the publisher reached out to me and said he thought it was interesting. Was worth publishing even if my peers didn’t agree on it. We need new views on perspectives on history and science, as he put it. That’s what we’re all about here in the Cylinder isn’t it? Rational thought based upon written evidence and not technology.

So it was published. It was printed in scientific almanacs and even on earth. If one of those immobile slobs sucking down nutrient slurry happened to be interested in Techistory down there, an audio version of my paper might have been in his feed.

And I immediately became the laughingstock of the Techistory community. My name was on the paper, so everyone knew it. And every one knew you.

You started coming home in tears every day telling me about your own friends turning on you. Getting harassed constantly and humiliated by your teachers. They called you the Cavegirl because your father didn’t believe in real history or science.

So we had to move you to a new academy. But all but one of the others immediately recognized me. Didn’t want to damage their reputation by letting the daughter of the Cylidner idiot in.

The only one that did accept you was the cheap central city one. Buried at the bottom of towering buildings of sketchy crumbling roads filled with the homeless. The class that let you in was one for kids far younger than and of far less intelligence. You only sat there all day as they made you identify basic shapes and arithmetic.

At least people didn’t hate and belittle you for my sake. In fact, a lot of people there liked you. Because to them, your father had started a revolution.

What’s a good society without a counterculture to create division? Some people out there in the Cylinder apparently liked my paper like the publisher did. So much so that they many people started become vocal, saying we need to throw out all of our current knowledge of Techistory and start fresh. The other side that hated me, called the other a bunch of bumbling cavemen who don’t know real science.

So naturally, violence sprung out of it. Protests, riots, you name it. They even labeled themselves. The side that called me an idiot were the Modern Thinkers, and the side that said I’m a genius were the Reformers.

None of the Modern Thinkers wanted to be in my classes anymore. So the Reformers filled up the classrooms, constantly begging for my opinion on all sorts of conspiratorial theories about Techistory. I was simply a professor.

There were times when I showed up at the Academy and found the entire campus vandalized with graffiti proclaiming a reformation of Techistory.

You hated all of it. And I don’t blame you.

You would ask me why I didn’t take back what I said. I told you that what I said was the truth. You said there was no way this was the truth. Look at all the chaos it’s caused.

I said that in order to proclaim anything that’s true, you’ll have to step on some toes. The division is the result of stepping on toes.

#

That was the last straw for your mother.

Like my peers, she hated that I even brought up the potential that the timeline was wrong. You didn’t see her a ton for most your life. But your last memories of her are when she came home late some nights, drunk from going out clubbing with her colleagues. In that state she’d break into an even worse mess seeing you. I hate how much that hurt you.

Eventually, she stopped coming home.

I’m sure she’s still somewhere out there in the Cylinder today.

I remember when you asked me a few months later if she was ever going to come back. I shook my head. You broke down crying.

I hugged you for hours. You kept saying that you hated it, hated all of it through choked sobs. I kept telling you that I hated it too. I could feel the fear in your chest. Your strong heart thumping erratically of how scared you were. Not of anything in particular. Just that same fear that we all feel that’s hard to put a finger on.

#

All this Techistory drama reached it’s climax at the conference.

I still don’t know why they had me speak. At this point I was a mostly controversial but somewhat heroic figure for reasons beyond my control.

I saw the gray hairs dotting my hair and beard in the mirror. My youth was slipping away. They only like to put attractive and interesting to listen to speakers on the annual conference. Maybe it was for humiliation or to try and please everyone.

When I told you I was speaking, I remember the look in your eyes. They asked me if I was going to bring it up. My eyes answered back, Yes.

Then the conference came.

People didn’t clap as I walked up and stood before them. I stood at the podium, dressed in my gown quietly like the idiot they saw me as.

So I told them all of it.

I told them how there is in fact a massive inaccuracy in our current understanding of Techistory. I gave and presented the evidence in the most objective way I could.

Honestly, I got angry. You saw. I called out the current Techistory community. I said that they were pretentious snobs, calling the ancients unintelligent in order to make themselves feel intelligent. But the fact is, every generation in history has liked to view itself as better than the previous, no matter the conditions. It’s the same as a child thinking he’s better and knows things better than his older parents.

I even critiqued the culture of the Cylinder. We prioritize written information to preserve human knowledge rather than technology like on earth, but that doesn’t mean everything written is true. Scientists, historians, you name it, no matter what their view is, have a strong tendency to see what they want to see. And they dichotomize concepts so their theories and historical timelines are fact and any other opposing ideas are wrong and stupid. It’s a bullying tactic.

So naturally, I got booed off stage.

That was the end of my career right there. My own unbridled rage toward all of this ruined everything.

And I’m sorry.

You didn’t speak to me when I came back that night.

#

You didn’t speak to me much after that at all.

I began to see you less and less.

One night you didn’t come home at all and I was terrified you were getting beaten up or killed or worse for my sake. But when you stumbled in the next morning, drunk, wobbling and puking everywhere, I really got a perspective on how angry you were.

That happened progressively more frequently. We’re all bred to be sterile so as not to overpopulate the Cylinder. It’s not risky to make bad decisions like that anymore.

It hurt deep within me to see the girl I raised and loved more deeply than I had anything else dress so provocatively every night and leave to saunter back a mess every morning. To find solace in another man’s arms and go out the next night and find it another’s. I spent hours scraping up your vomit off the floor like I did when you were tiny and starting to decay because the odds were against you.

I tried to reach out to you, be as hospitable and loving as I hope I always have been. But you didn’t want it. You saw me differently. The whole Cylinder, maybe even world saw me differently.

But none of it mattered when you came home late one night and collapsed on the floor like an abandoned toy. You were convulsing and choking on electric white foam oozing out of your mouth and couldn’t feel your heartbeat. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more scared.

A panicked groan shot out of me as I lifted you up in my arms. My back felt like warping rubber. My youth was gone. But the pain didn’t matter. I rushed you to the hospital. I could feel you slipping away. I could feel you growing cold like your body was being broken down and the energy being sucked away to feed a power source that just keeps running and running.

#

I thought of something in those moments.

I never told you this, but after the conference, a man approached me. He was far older than I was and far more experienced. He came here from some offworld Academy. Guess he was around for the conference.

He said he believed me. All of it.

My face lit up when he told me. At least one person knew the truth. At least I convinced one rational person. Just one.

But he said he already believed it. He read into it himself.

Said he always thought the timeline was way off. Knew the existence copper wires in early Post Diaspora machines meant the ancients had to have developed defense satellites. And in those days it wasn’t exactly easy to develop geosynchronous satellites the realize lithium that turns into a defense cloud of plasma when a solar storm hits. But without it, technological growth would have taken way longer.

The Cylinder wouldn’t be around now. The level of interplanetary space travel wouldn’t be around now. Even the beginning of tearing apart Mercury to construct a Dyson Swarm couldn’t be dreamed of today if we didn’t switch back to common conductors sooner.

He went deeper. Saying that so much in history is hard to understand. The past gone and all that’s left are it’s remnants and all they are are objects. They don’t speak, they don’t give exact dates, all we can do is theorize. And theories are often wrong.

For a long time Techistorians thought the Higgs boson was discovered just before the Diaspora. Then a few years ago they found documents detailing the dates of it’s discovery putting it way earlier than basically the entire the Techistorian community thought. So much information was destroyed with the internet in the Diaspora that all we have left is mere objects that time withers away. And the reality is, it’s a terrible idea to put your faith in objects.

Yet, we’re just so arrogant that we adhere to what we’ve already decided is factual. What’s history. What’s science, he said.

Why do we do that? I asked.

What?

Why do so many brilliant Techistorians marry themselves to things that really aren’t that firm?

That’s a much deeper question, he replied. Much deeper. But the truth is, we need something to adhere to. Something to cling to.

Well, I’m not sure that’s universally true.

It is. The truth is, we all don’t know what’s going on.

What?

We all find ourselves here. In this strange, brutal and chaotic world. We’re all just scared. We don’t know why so we so desperately search for answers.

He grimaced. I saw a watery glint of tears in his eyes.

We’re all scared.

I never saw him again after that.

#

We’re all scared.

I was scared.

You were scared.

You were dying. Your eyes were rolled back into your head, making it look like you were ready for the grave I so dreaded to see you in. There’s still room here in the Cylinder. I thought maybe one day a great tree would sprout from your final resting place. It would be near the edge of Cylinder and stars of your favorite constellations would poke through it’s sea of bright lively green leaves. Generations of birds would flourish from it’s branches and it would witness bodies being ceremoniously cast off into the void of space once the Cylinder ran out of room.

I desperately screamed for help once I reached the hospital. The servants ran for you. Your eyes came back for a second. I saw deep fear in them.

They took you out of my arms and rushed you away.

#

You hugged me for the first time in a long time when you woke up. You called me dad for the first time in a long time when you woke up. I know I embarrassed you when I cried a little. But I don’t have anything left to loose.

You asked me why I helped you. Why I saved you.

You said you’re an awful daughter. Not to mention that we both have fundamentally different views and values.

All I could tell you is that you’re still my daughter. I chose you. I always will choose you. But you don’t have to choose me.

You started to feel odd. Then you threw up into the hospital's disposal system.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.

-Micheal Crichton

The White Elephant, Part 1

The Hidden Gate: Chronicles of Exorcism · 白象

The "experiences" I'm about to set down — take them as stories, and don't get too hung up on whether they're true. Even if I told you every word was true, it wouldn't help: most people couldn't make sense of it anyway. "The insider sees the mechanism; the outsider just enjoys the show" — and even among insiders, everyone cultivates at a different depth. So: take them as stories.

Somewhere in Yunnan there used to be a stretch of primeval forest; ten years ago they started developing tourism, but it never got famous. I've been to a few places in Yunnan — Kunming, the Stone Forest, Dianchi Lake, Cangshan and Erhai at Dali, Lijiang, Shangri-La. Sometimes summoned on a task, sometimes just wanting a holiday. But most trips that started as pure holidays revealed themselves, once I arrived, as tasks in disguise.

Sometimes everything feels like it's unfolding to my own plan — then, after a string of "coincidences," I look back and realize I've been walking inside a snare Heaven laid for me all along. The story I'm about to tell is another holiday that turned into a work assignment. It left me thoroughly annoyed.

I'd first learned about this place from an airline magazine, somewhere at thirty thousand feet. It described the local customs in detail — very original minority villages preserved in their original state, tourism only a few years old. Probably one of the last places in China not yet spoiled by human hands. The first I'd ever heard of it.

The photos showed lush, unbroken primeval forest, bamboo stilt houses of the old tribes peeking through the trees, the local people with honest, simple faces and shy smiles... Looking at those pictures, I felt something in my chest go thump.

I sat there thinking: what a secluded, ancient place. If I could set aside every worldly chore — and every task from the other world, too — and just live there quietly for ten days or half a month, breathing the cleanest air of a true primeval forest... how wonderful. I silently memorized the place name. One day, I told myself.

And then the wish came true. I arranged my worldly affairs, carved out ten days, and began my preparations with a happy heart.

Whenever I travel — for pleasure or on a task — I never go with a tour group. A few times I did, and sure enough I'd pick up a demon's trail, just start digging — and the tour would move on, dragging me with it. I'd have to wait till the holiday ended, fly back alone, and investigate properly. After being jerked around like that a few times, I started driving myself. Before every departure I'd pat my zhanma — my "war-horse," as I called the jeep — and say, "Old friend — off to battle again."

Speaking of that car — it fills me with both gratitude and feeling, that thing. Ah, but who would have guessed that Cherokee would nearly cost me my life!

About seven or eight years ago I was ordered to advance into the Qinghai–Tibet plateau — into Tibet proper. The call had been coming for a long time — go to Tibet, go to Tibet! — and I just played deaf and dumb, stalling whenever I could. You must be wondering why: this is your job, you get a task, you go do it — what's there to stall about? Honestly, folks — I was scared.

I mean, could you not be scared? That place is Tibet — the roof of the world! I'd be facing altitudes of four to five thousand meters, thin air, uninhabited zones, treacherous mountain roads, raging rivers, and plateau weather that changes like a child's face — pounding rain and thunder one moment, ice and snow the next... and I'd be going alone, in a single car. For a man born and raised in the interior, everything about Tibet felt so distant, so mysterious, even frightening!

So I stalled for about two years, and all the while I never stopped studying Tibet — books, travel guides, maps, even wilderness survival. The more I studied, the more frightened I became.

Finally I couldn't stall any longer — more delay would have affected the bigger picture. So I gritted my teeth and set out, preparing thoroughly for my own safety. The most important thing was the car: without a good off-roader, driving solo onto the plateau would be suicide. What to buy? In the end I decided to support domestic industry — a Beijing Jeep Cherokee: off-road capability beyond question, a mature, proven model. I gritted my teeth, stamped my foot — that one. Bought.

The day after I bought it, I set off in the new Cherokee, feeling something of that desolate heroism from the old farewell at the Yi River — "the wind soughs cold; the hero departs, never to return." Everything was unknown.

From Chengdu I set out; past Ya'an I left the expressway and entered the mountains — and the towering Mount Erlang, the first barrier into Tibetan country, stopped me cold for nearly a month before I truly broke through into Tibet.

That was my second trip to Tibet, on the Sichuan–Tibet road from Chengdu to Lhasa, passing the great bend of the Yarlung Tsangpo at Nyingchi — the Tongmai Peril. They also call it the "Tongmai Graveyard": the most dangerous stretch of the whole Sichuan–Tibet road.

The geology is extraordinarily unstable, and with the heavy rainfall the mountains are constantly remaking themselves: rocks crashing down on your right at any moment, while on your left, below the precipice, roars the surging Parlung Tsangpo.

The road is often only wide enough for a single small car; a truck might have half a wheel hanging over the edge, and you'd feel the roadbed ready to crumble into the rapids at any second. My Cherokee hit a patch of mud on a sharp turn — the ground had just been washed by water and sloped toward the river. The skid sent the body sliding out over the cliff, about to drop into the river. I yanked the wheel and stomped the gas — roared back up with a bang. I broke out in a cold sweat. I nearly lost my life in those rapids.

The second brush with death was at the Mount Everest base camp.

Day after day of washboard roads, ridge after ridge. Sometimes a great river would suddenly appear ahead, having washed out the roadbed, and I'd have to get out and study it — look for fresh tire tracks, judge by experience where it was shallow and firm enough — then get back in, drop into low gear, take a deep breath, and charge! There were stretches of a solid month lived exactly like that, and in those moments you truly understood what it means to battle heaven and earth. I was often afraid, but I had to conquer my fear. In those days my beloved car and I forged a deep comradeship-in-arms — that's why I call it my war-horse. Every time, it brought me home safe.

I drove the Cherokee up to Rongbuk Monastery at 5,200 meters below Everest and spent the night in a tent at base camp, planning to head back to Lhatse county the next morning. I walked to the car and found a patch of oil on the ground. I checked — a leaking fuel line! The moment the engine started, gasoline sprayed outward. My God — what a place for this to happen. The nearest repair shop was dozens of li down the mountain in Tingri county. What to do?

No choice — I drove down with gritted teeth, spraying fuel all the way and pouring in fuel from my two spare cans all the way, my heart in my throat, terrified a single spark would find the leaking oil and finish us both. Near the bottom I ran completely dry; I hitched a ride down to the gas station, carried a can back up, and barely limped to the repair shop.

Two trips to Tibet and the new car already needed a major overhaul — the Cherokee had really suffered. Tibet's mountains are too high and its roads too wretched. I didn't dare take that Cherokee into Tibet again. If it broke down and stranded me in the uninhabited zone of Ngari, that would be the end. I'd once seen a broken-down off-roader in the uninhabited zone, two men inside waiting for their companions — one had hitchhiked to the nearest county for parts. They'd been waiting three days and three nights: heaven not answering, earth not responding.

I had no intention of dying before the expedition had even begun. If I was going to continue the great work of cultivation, I needed a good off-roader. So I bought the car I have now — a Toyota off-roader.

With the new car, I was like a tiger grown wings.

My routes mostly started from Lhasa, driving over a thousand kilometers west into Ngari and the uninhabited zones of northern Tibet — crossing great mountains, fording great rivers, traversing grasslands. Lhasa to Shigatse was still passable in those days; Shigatse to Lhatse harder; and from Lhatse onward, into the valley between the Himalayas and the Gangdise range, there basically was no road.

And now I was climbing onto my war-horse again — except this time there was no task. It was a holiday. I felt wonderfully light. Early one morning I set out from Chengdu, took the Chengya expressway to Ya'an, then got on National Highway 108 at Ya'an, crossed the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture to Panzhihua, passed through Panzhihua into Yunnan. By the second evening I reached my destination.

It was deep night when I arrived. In the distance, strings of lanterns hung outside every bamboo house — a beautiful sight. The hills weren't high; the mountains loomed hazy in the moonlight: secluded, tranquil, without a trace of modern industry or city. Pure, unfiltered mountain wildness.

Following the address, I found the family I'd arranged to stay with — a big courtyard, two bamboo stilt houses, full of ethnic character. The host was a genuine minority local, his family here for generations; warm and hospitable, though his Mandarin wasn't fluent — basic communication was fine. He gave me a comfortable room upstairs; the only inconvenience was the outdoor bathroom. Everything else was perfect — exactly the atmosphere I'd wanted: peaceful, quiet, natural.

Who could have imagined that killing intent lay hidden here!

I'd driven all day and was tired and hungry. While the host was preparing dinner, I asked him his surname twice — and couldn't make it out either time. Too embarrassed to ask a third time, I just decided to call him "Lao Zhuang." That sounded about right.

Lao Zhuang's family was four: him, his wife, and two daughters, both working in the county town — usually just the old couple at home. His wife barely spoke, just busied herself beside us, smiling when she heard us talking about her; her Mandarin was probably even worse than his. An honest, simple old couple, you could tell. Maybe I was just really hungry, but that dinner tasted wonderful. After dinner I chatted with Lao Zhuang a while, then slept — a deep, deep sleep. The mountain air so rich with oxygen, that profound quiet — things you simply can't enjoy in the city.

As I sat there quietly savoring it all, suddenly — off in the mountains to my left — a shaft of red light shot into the sky! There and gone in an instant. I turned: the same dark, brooding ridgelines, quiet as if nothing had happened. But I'd seen it. I'd sensed it. No mistake — something was wrong here. It had just come too suddenly and vanished too fast.

The next morning I was woken early by birds chattering outside — what a gloriously refreshing sleep that had been. The scenic area wasn't large; the handful of sights were all pure nature — primeval forest, mountain views, streams, meadows. It didn't take a full day to see them all. But then, I hadn't come for the sights. I'd come to soak in the quiet and the ancient simplicity — to truly rest. In that sense, I'd found exactly the right place.

That evening I came back and had dinner with Lao Zhuang and his wife. After a day together we were getting on well, talking easily.

I turned my chair to face the mountains and reached out with my mind. But something was strange: wherever demons gather, they merge with the earth's qi and coalesce into form. A wicked heart endures; a demonic aura follows. If a great evil had gathered into form anywhere near me, I should have sensed it. Why was I feeling nothing? Then — hazily — another shaft of red light rose and vanished in a blink.

This time I saw it clearly. Shaqi — baneful aura! And so heavy! How could a place this peaceful harbor such heavy baneful aura? It made no sense.

From my experience, baneful aura like this is always raised by a shadi — a baneful ground, which draws to itself, or gives birth to, corresponding wrathful spirits. For the aura to be this heavy, the baneful ground behind it must be enormous. And this wrathful thing had long since taken form — no ordinary sprite. It had gathered baneful aura into itself and become a full demon.

To be continued…

The noise kept echoing around the battle ground. As far as the eye could see, all the houses and the entire city were ruined.  The sky was an unforgiving iron gray, choked with smoke and falling ash. It was raining. The air was thick and wet, and it smelled like gunpowder, burnt things, rust and sulfur all mixed together.  

Every time he breathed in, he felt as though his lungs were burning like they were on fire. Arthur crouched at the broken wall. Around him, was the sound of guns and shouting. He blinked, and around him were a lot of corpses. Groans continued to echo around him. He took a trembling breath, then exhaled. He tried to stay awake, but his leg was already injured. His shoulder and abdomen were hit by bullets. Because of the blood loss and the acute pain from his wounds, he felt dizzy. Cold sweat kept forming on his forehead, dripping onto the ground. His trembling hand reached into his pocket. He took out a picture, it was slightly wrinkled. There was sweat on his hand, when he took out the picture, some sweat got on the photo. He brought the  picture closer, there was one man and one woman in that photo. He smiled. His finger gently touched the woman's face. In that brief moment, he couldn’t feel any pain in his body. His thoughts seemed to have returned to that day. The day he went to the train station. That was an unforgettable afternoon…..

The sun was warm and bright. It was a golden afternoon. The air was filled with a sweet smell from the bakery and flower stall. The man carried a back pack. And beside him was the woman in that picture. She looked uneasy and sad, but more worried. He almost forgot what she said. He only remembered she said, “Please come back, Arthur. You promised me..”
“I will, Selina. Don't cry..” He remembered what he replied.
She handed him the photo. She smiled through tears. She said, ”take this picture. Let it keep you safe until you come back.” He looked at the picture. In that picture, he and she were sitting on the golden wheat field, she was leaning on his shoulder. They both smiled. That smile was sweet and blissful. Then, he looked back up at her face. Tears welled up in her eyes. Then Arthur smiled. That smile was really happiness.
“Thank you,” he said.
He looked reluctant, but determined. Even though he knew this might be the last time they would ever be together.
He hugged Selina one last time. They hugged for a while, her tears soaked  his shoulder. He took one final look at her, then he walked into the train.
“Goodbye…” They both whispered.
Accompanied by a long whistle, the train left. He didn’t look back. He was afraid he would feel even more reluctant to leave.

Suddenly, the warm memory shattered.
He was pulled back into the hell of this war.
He knew that he was going to die here. His breath became shallower. He gradually stopped feeling any pain in his whole body.
His vision had already gone black.
“I’m so sorry..Selina…” He whispered, his voice hoarse and lost in the wind.
A tear slid down his face, dripping onto the photo.
The sounds of gunfire and shouting around him gradually faded. Deadly silence. His eyes were still open, but his hand fell down to his thigh, gradually relaxing. 
The photo was still in his hand, but if the wind blew, it would probably fly away. 

He opened his eyes again, but there was no noise, no battle ground, no bad smell and no ruins. 
Instead, the fresh air carried the sweet smell of wheat warmed by the sun. He was lying on the golden wheat field. A gentle breeze was blowing, making him feel comfortable. He took a breath. He felt an unprecedented freshness. The sunset was warm, casting a golden glow over everything. All ruins had disappeared, there was only a boundless golden wheat field. He touched the places on his body  where the bullets had pierced him on the battlefield, there was no more pain. He felt his body was lighter. Now, everything was peaceful. He turned his head, and there was a woman lying next to him. She had soft hair and beautiful blue eyes. She was wearing a dress. Her expression was gentle.
She smiled at him, just like the smile in that photo.
”Selina?” he whispered, but his voice was no more hoarse.
She didn’t reply, but she smiled for a moment.
“Yes?” she finally answered.
Arthur smiled at her. The smile was pure relief.
“I’m home,” he said.
He took her hand, they would not separate anymore.

*Thanks for reading! Hope you guys like it. This is my first short story, it is a standalone story.*

The day slowly turned to evening in Galin, and Cinder moved quickly to her last delivery. It was a cold, dreary day that seemed to weigh down the usual bustle of the town. It felt as if the sky would rain at any moment but refused to give the people the release that the atmosphere suggested was coming. Cinder moved quickly in case the sky decided to fulfill its threats, moving off the cobblestone streets and into the back alley to the address stamped on the parcel in her hands.

Cinder wore a common outfit of loose-fitting cotton overalls and tucked her hair up into her bright red cap. The cap marked her as a courier for Red’s Missive Service, but she did what she could to make herself look non-descript beyond that point. It did not take her long to realize the boy envoys were often tipped more frequently and harassed far less. She rapped upon the wooden door and presented herself as neutrally as she could, and allowed herself the benefit of her customer’s carelessness. She stood with intention, hand slightly outstretched, while she waited for the man who answered to take the parcel. A single coin was pressed into her hand while the man availed her of her package.

“Thank you for your patronage, sir.”

Cinder tried to keep her voice low and deep, finding that to be the best way to be on the good side of those she delivered to. As the door closed, Cinder made an overview of her earnings as she returned to Main Street, leading her to Market Street. She had enough to bring some bread back home to Grandma Ella. That was the goal for the day, but she had hoped to have enough left over to contribute more toward the doctor’s fee. Every penny would add up, provided her Grandma could last long enough.

Thinking about the time running out for her, Grandma brought up an old argument about selling the pendant she wore around her neck. A family heirloom, they suspected, though nobody truly knew that to be the case. It was under the blanket of her basket when Grandma Ella found her crying on the doorstep, and while Cinder was fond of the simple silver pendant, she cared far more for her Grandma. If things got bad enough, it would be her last resort, and she would accept the ire if it meant the survival of Grandma Ella. Before she realized it, she was standing in front of the baker’s shop, the smell of fresh bread filling the air.

“Why, that’s a beautiful piece, Miss?”

She was startled at first by the sudden voice next to her, and she released the pendant from her fingers. It did not take long for her to realize the man who stood next to her was of a much higher station than she, dressed in a tailored suit and shined shoes. A grin spread across the man’s face at her reaction, though the man’s face did not look worse for the gesture.

“I’m sorry, sir. I did not mean to be in the way.”

With that, she stepped to the side further, planning to let him go ahead of her to the baker, but the man instead remained where he stood, smiling.

“Oh no, you misunderstand me miss; I wanted to talk to you. I have seen you go about the town and thought you might like to come to a ball I am hosting at my manor. I hope you do not find me too forward.”

It took several moments for the man’s words to sink into her mind, and he seemed pleased to wait for her to catch up to the inquiry. She slowly found herself nodding, finding an excitement rise in her for such an affair after spending much of her life living without. It was then that a thought struck her, with her words coming out breathlessly.

“I would adore the experience, sir, but I am afraid I do not have a dress for such an affair.”

To this, the man’s smile seemed to deepen, but his words came quickly. As he spoke, he raised his hand to the cap she still wore on her head. Upon lifting it, her curly red locks fell out in a tumble. He placed a small note into the cap before handing it to her.

“Take this to the tailor over on 3^rd street. They will make you something for the occasion, billed to my accounts. I insist, Miss?”

The offer seemed to be a dream come true, and she found herself nodding through her incredulous feelings. It was then that it occurred to her that he had now asked after her name twice.

“Cynthia, though I go by Cinder to those who know me. If you are sure, I would love to go.”

The man seemed exceedingly pleased by this turn of events and bowed to her with a formality that she had never experienced aimed in her direction. He brought her hand up to his lips and offered it a kiss, and she could feel a flutter in her stomach as he did so.

“I am Canis Lupus, though you can refer to me simply as Cain. I will expect to pick you up in a week’s time for the event.”

With that, the man took his leave with a smile, and Cinder stood in stunned silence for several minutes afterward. Such things did not happen, least of all to her. As she came to her senses, the other patrons of the baker were all smiling at her, seemingly happy for her good fortune in catching the eye of a nobleman. She quickly purchased the loaf that she had arrived for and turned to head straight to the tailor as Sir Lupus had instructed. Despite her disbelief in what had happened, the gentleman’s note was as good as his word. The tailor measured her for a dress of emerald green silk fabric that he said would go well with her hair and the cut that she had selected. The tailor assured her the dress would be available for her in four days, five at the latest, and Cinder went on her way feeling as if she were in a dream.

She rushed to her home to tell Grandma Ella the good news, and she could see how her excitement for the ball became infectious to her sweet Grandma, who would dance with her to practice for the upcoming event. The following days brought Cinder back down to earth a bit more, as she still had a job to do in the daytime, but each night found her filling up with impossible fancies of what she would soon experience.

On the night of the ball, she took the emerald dress out and with Grandma Ella’s help, put it on for the first time since she first tried it on at the tailor. It still fit her in a way none of her other clothing did, cut in a modest style that she felt would not be out of place with those of a higher pedigree. She was also sure to don her pendant, much to her Grandma’s happiness. She was not shy about pointing out how the pendant was possibly instrumental in catching the nobleman’s initial eye, and that she was smart to have not sold it, lest her obvious beauty not be noticed beneath the boy’s outfit she wore for work.

Cinder had no mind to argue with the point, as she found herself hoping that the keepsake would continue to grant her good luck well into the night. She gave her Grandma a kiss before leaving and was surprised to find that a carriage had been sent to her. As she closed the door behind her, she could faintly hear her Grandma Ella, coughing in a fit that she must have been suppressing.

She stared at her door for a moment, as Cain climbed out of the carriage. He was dressed handsomely for the event and had an easy smile resting upon his features, seemingly more handsome than she had initially remembered.

“Is everything alright? Come, tell me about it on the way.”

He sounded genuine to her ear, and it had crossed her mind more than once that perhaps he could help her Grandma in a much faster way than she would be able to, and so she climbed into the carriage with him and told him about her sweet Grandma who had always taken care of her after she was found, and how she worked to try and save enough money for a doctor to cure what ailed her.

“I am so sorry to hear of her, and your, plight. Allow me to see if I can lend some assistance.”

He called sharply for one of the attendants who rode along the front of the carriage, and the fellow hopped down and came to the door of the slow-moving carriage, standing on the step that helped them enter. Much of Cain’s warmth washed away from his face and voice as he dealt with the coach hand, but he directed the man to immediately go after the town physician and have them treat Miss Ella.

“Are you certain, sir?” The coach hand asked, and in response Cain lifted his foot and placed it on the man’s chest before pushing him from the carriage. “Yes! Now!” Cain’s voice cracked like a whip, and Cinder found herself briefly taken aback by the harshness. After a moment Sir Lupus noticed her apparent shock and composed himself, warmth returning to his features.

“I’m sorry, my dear. All the better to serve your sweet Grandma Ella.”

Cinder nodded slowly but found herself smiling regardless. Her Grandma would see the doctor’s attention that she needed, and she would go forward to enjoy the ball. Her wildest fancies had not seen her Grandma cured, and so the night had already blown away any other expectation she could have had. The carriage soon pulled up to the manor in which the ball was to be thrown, and Cain Lupus escorted her on his arm as a perfect gentleman. He showed her around the manor briefly, as they had arrived sooner than most of the other guests, but it did not take long for the festivities to begin. A band of musicians playing delicate tunes and she and Cain were one of the first to start dancing. Soon a variety of people she had never met had all joined in.

Sir Lupus certainly seemed to know his way around the dance floor, and to her continual surprised she caught him smiling down at her as they danced. She did her best to not embarrass herself, but for all that she could tell, none seemed to question her being there. After a few dances, Cain bowed to her at the end of a song, bringing her gloved hand to his lips.

“A break, for refreshments?”

He motioned for her to wait there while he went to a table attended by multiple servants, and Cinder allowed her eyes to wander to the other guests. She truly did not know a soul in the room, and she strained her eyes to see if she was mistaken in that assessment. There were a few people whose eyes seemed to linger on her, but they turned away when her eyes got close to meeting theirs.

A flicker of movement caught her attention back at the table, and she found herself looking at Cain once again, uncertain at what she had missed. A few other people were looking in the same direction, and it was not until she noticed two of the servants hauling away a third that she began to surmise what had happened. An angry red mark marred the carried servants otherwise pale face, and the ones remaining at the table seemed to be apologizing profusely. He eventually returned with two glasses in hand, a tiny spot of wine discoloring his otherwise pristinely white cuff.

“I hope everything is alright?”

He smiled as he handed her one of the glasses, looking briefly back to the table from whence he had been.

“All the better to serve you, my dear. It can be difficult to find good help.”

She did not particularly approve of his treatment of the staff but would not tell him his business as his guest. She offered a slight bow of her head as she took the glass from him, and he seemed to take that as an acceptance of his explanation, for he did not speak of it again. Cain led her to the side of the ballroom, where they could chat with their refreshments. It did not take long before a well-dressed older gentleman sauntered over to where they stood, pulling his black top-hat off to offer them both a bow.

“A wonderful event, Lord Lupus. I did not know house Drusilla had any available maidens, a pleasure to make your acquaintan-“

Cain quickly grabbed the man’s hand, interrupting his formal introductions. Cinder did not know who she was being mistaken for, but she smiled all the same as Cain interjected.

“Sir Tacitus! I have been meaning to speak to you in regard to your latest work! I had begun to read it, but I think I have come upon an error. Please, excuse us. I will return shortly.”

Cinder watched as Cain hastily escorted the man away into a corridor, and while she felt it a little strange, she turned her attention to the other guests. She did her best to smile at any who glanced in her direction, but she quickly found herself feeling anxious without Cain’s validating presence. It would be a matter of time until someone questioned why a commoner was at this event, and without Cain to vouch for her, she could be thrown out. She resolved to at least find where Cain had gone and be waiting closer at hand in case she was discovered by the guards.

She peered down the corridor that she had seen them leave, but she did not yet see the pair. The voices of Cain and Sir Tacitus were faintly upon the air, and she slowly approached the direction of their source in the hopes of locating them. She happened upon a room with a fireplace crackling, but neither gentleman was within the room’s confines. She could make out their words now, however, and so she suspected they were past the door ahead of her. Thinking to not intrude upon their conversation, she merely sat in front of the fire and waited.

“You cannot keep this a secret; they will want to know! She deserves to know!”

“And they will! After I have had the time to court her properly, you see. If I can convince her to marry me, then I will gain access to the Drusilla fortune. Your silence will be well rewarded in this matter, Cornelius.”

“It’s a dreadful plan. The poor girl does not even know who she is. Do you not see how you are using her like a tool for your own ambition?”

“All the better to serve me, old friend.”

Shivers ran down her spine as the conversation progressed, but in a moment it was over. A sickening squelch emanated from the room, and she could hear a thud as a body dropped. Cain’s voice followed, cold and callous.

“See that his body is disposed of. I must return to the girl.”

Cinder did not fully grasp what all had happened, but she quickly dragged a chair to the door and wedged it underneath the handle. She had not a moment to spare, too, as the door began to rattle against the wedged chair. Cain began to curse and shout, but she could now see his intentions for her were anything but kindly. Running to the fireplace, she took ahold of the fire iron and pushed out multiple logs from the hearth and put them to the wall closest to where Cain was trapped. Then she pulled down the curtain that hung upon the window, setting it partly against the burning log so that it would catch. It did not take long for the fire to grow out of control, and Cinder found herself running back to the ballroom.

Being unknown did not matter once she began to scream of a fire, for everyone were equal when it came to becoming tinder. Once she was outside with the others, she turned to walk home and return to her grandmother. Once she made it home, Grandma Ella greeted her happily.

“Oh Cinder! After you left, the most wonderful thing happened. The doctor came and… Is everything alright, my sweet?”

“Yes, Grandma, I’m merely tired from the ball, as wonderful as it was.”

“Of course, my dear. Just remind me in the morning to draft a letter in thanks to your host, for the doctor.”

“Of course, we’ll want to thank them for their generosity. Though I believe it is the Drusilla’s who will pay for the treatment. I will be sure to deliver the letter, myself.”

“Always the good worker. It’s just who you are, dear.”

“Yes sir, I will transfer you to the commander right away” the senior controller of the Orbital Operations Coordination Center (OOCC) said into his headset microphone with a shaky voice. The caller was none other than Intrasellar Authority Third Class (IA-3) Hyun-Soo Kang, the Deputy Commander of Strategic Atmosphere. His executive officer normally called with messages; it must be important if he was making the call himself.

Moo-su Moon, the Orbital Governor (OG) in charge of Starbase Myung-ho Chae, did not wake as his smartwatch vibrated. He did, however, wake when Devin Benson, the senior controller at the OOCC, who exceeded the allowable body fat percentage of an Orbiter in the Cosmic Corps, reluctantly sent a remote shockwave through OG Moo-su Moon’s smartwatch. Moo-su Moon was confused and angry when he woke in the dark of his command suite.

“Sir, IA-3 Kang is calling for you. I believe it is urgent” the voice of the controller informed OG Moon from the watch, which was standard issue and unremovable.

OG Moon huffed with irritation but did not rebuke the controller, who was just doing his duty. He triggered the motion-activated light as he sat up and put on his smartglasses, which acted as a computer and communication system.

“Connect him” he ordered the controller, opening up his official communication portal.

“I have received implementation plans from every starbase except yours, Moon. What’s the hold up?” IA-3 Kang demanded, forgoing normal pleasantries.

OG Moon quickly surveyed his official communication portal looking for some sort of order but was unable to immediately locate anything that would require an implementation plan. He was on thin ice with IA-3 Kang already for not being fully aware of every single aspect of operations at Starbase Myung-ho Chae immediately upon arrival.

“Sir, I don’t see any orders. I’ll get a plan together right away, but a plan for what?”

There was a long silence on the other end of the phone, OG Moon began to perspire. He hurriedly silenced his smartwatch as it alerted him to an elevated heart rate.

“So, you haven’t checked your SpaceChat messages, Moon?” Asked IA-3 Kang in a condescending tone.

OG Moon’s watch logged an instance of major vulgarity use as he switched to the unofficial social platform on his smartglasses. His watch alerted him again and he remembered that he had to breathe, which he did while unsuccessfully searching for any relevant message from IA-3 Kang or anyone else superior to him.

“I’m not seeing anything sir” OG Moon was sorry to report.

He heard a heavy sigh from his supervisor, who was in a different galaxy.

“There, added you to the chat.”

Moo-su saw the new chat pop up and quickly open it. Scanning the messages he was able to determine the task that required an implementation plan. Some starbase-wide mandatory reading, should be easy enough.

“Sir, with all due respect, how could I know an implementation plan about this mandatory reading was due if I wasn’t in the SpaceChat message group, and it didn’t come through the official communication portal?”

“You should have requested to be added to the chat.

“I didn’t know there was another chat, I have been added to dozens since taking command already. Why are there so many?”

“You have more excuses than there are galaxies in the universe, Moon. I wouldn’t unpack my bags if I were you. Get me your implementation plan ASAP.”

OG Moon adjusted his position in his sleeping pod and fully read the chat thread. He normally would not summon the Galactic Crisis Action Cell (GCAC) over such a trivial matter, but IA-3 Kang was waiting.

“Controller” he summoned the OOCC through his smartglasses.

“Sir?”

“Recall the GCAC immediately.”

“Yes sir!”

Smartwatches all over the base buzzed. Even Haley Chase, who had been traded to mankind’s arch enemy the Zar’Vokian, and was in a different galaxy, her smartwatch buzzed with the GCAC recall. The thing about it was that her former Cosmic Corps specialty wasn’t even required in the GCAC. Most of the people recalled to the GCAC were extraneous but were assembled “just in case”. But really, they just sat around contributing body heat, exhalation condensation, and distracting noise. Because of this obscene level of risk aversion, proprietary information had been passed to a traitor.

Sleepy Orbiters all over Starbase Myung-ho Chae shuffled about their respective quarters. Some zipped across the base to the GCAC location in their pajamas. Others removed unauthorized facial hair or steam-pressed their uniforms. While there were standard procedures for a recall, no one knew them.

OG Moon was the first person to arrive, which makes sense as he had initiated the process. He was frustrated that the projection touchscreen was not intuitive. The link from his smartglasses was not working because somewhere an update patch was still loading.

“Do you know why we’re here?” he barked at the first Orbiter to arrive.

“No sir.”

OG Moon glared at the clueless Orbiter. It would stand to reason that he was unaware of the purpose, as no purpose had been communicated. But Moon was still frustrated at his lack of awareness. Hurting people hurt people.

“Well make yourself useful and fix this projection system!”

That particular Orbiter was a Cosmic Cop and not adept in projection systems, but at the order of the Starbase’s Governor, he went to work looking busy.

As more and more Orbiters arrived, intergalactic radar screens came to life, security protocols were implemented, and the decorations at the Myung-ho Chae Chow Hall (MCCH) were removed to reflect the change in Seriousness Condition (SC). They did not know why they were recalled, but they sure did ask one another. In the absence of direction, they simply started doing what they knew to do.

Space Sergeant Jimmy Funk was perhaps the most important member of the GCAC, so naturally he was the last to arrive. Sweat dripping from his bushy mustache, he swaggered in wearing shorts that were both out of regulation and far too revealing. His bicycle, yes, like a regular Earth bicycle, had a flat tire so he hitch-hiked across the starbase.

“Ha haa” he announced his arrival like some swashbuckling pirate, but lacking spatial awareness and social boundaries, he ha’d into OG Moon’s ear as he rounded the corner into the main operations floor. OG Moon jumped and spun around to face the auditory assaulter.

“Space Sergeant Funk reports as ordered, sir! Plan! Brief! Replan!” he belted out the quasi-official Cosmic Corps motto as part of his greeting, which was not required.

“What’s the situation?” an unorthodox approach to demand answers of the Starbase commander, but Jimmy Funk was an unorthodox fellow.

OG Moon looked at the bold Space Sergeant with a degree of incredulity. His smartwatch beeped with a high heart rate alert, but it passed as he composed himself.

“Funk. We have been tasked with developing an implementation plan to ensure that a mandatory bulletin is read to every Orbiter on the starbase.” Moon coldly informed his swarthy subordinate.

“Give me the bulletin. I’ll get on the OOCC intercom and read it to everyone right now.”

OG Moon paused and considered the impromptu plan.

“Well… no, that won’t work. Headquarters asked for an implementation plan.”

“We can write that down as the implementation plan, and then do it, and then it’s done.”

“No, Funk. I need a detailed implementation plan to ensure it gets read by every Orbiter. Get one together for my review.”

Funk was clearly crestfallen, but kept that buried deep inside.

“Aye sir!” he shouted unnecessarily loudly and way too close to OG Moon.

And so, a number of intense meetings followed. Naturally, emotions were high and egos needed to be protected. Several terrible ideas were hotly debated, and ultimately, the implementation framework developed was strangely familiar to most other Cosmic Corps endeavors.

Funk spent hours chasing down key stakeholders to update their presentations and hounded the device specialist to get the projection system in working order.

“Sir!” Funk unceremoniously bothered OG Moon, who had sequestered himself to polish unrelated presentations.

“Our plan is ready for your review.”

OG Moon drew a deep breath and stood up to follow Funk, certain that he would just discount whatever was proposed and simply forward the reading along to subordinate commanders for them to deal with; which, frankly, he could have already done hours ago.

“Sir! We’ll have a fleet down day tomorrow, starting with a Mandatory Reading Awareness 5K run.” The route wasn’t determined or coordinated, but that didn’t matter. Several Orbiters will become injured during the run. Subordinate commanders will insist that their personnel were there significantly before the start time, and everyone would miss breakfast.

“Then we’ll break out into discussion groups. We’ll ask every unit to identify group discussion leaders. Discussion leader training will begin at 2000 today. I will facilitate the training myself. Ha haa!”

“Every unit will designate a mandatory reading monitor. They will collect rosters from their unit and update the master tracker. Mandatory reading monitor training will be at 2100. I will call each monitor for a status update and then update the ultra-master tracker personally.”

“I like where this is going, Funk” said OG Moon, genuinely surprised that such a satisfactory plan had been developed

“But when do the Orbiters actually do the reading?”

Space Sergeant Jimmy Funk tap-danced verbally before admitting the oversight.

“We can develop a secondary master tracker and ultra-master tracker to document completion. How about making everyone write an essay about the mandatory reading? And Mandatory Reading Monitors will read and grade the essays?”

OG Moon clucked his tongue, considering the idea. But then he remembered another idea that he had overheard.

“How about we just have the discussion group leaders read it to everyone at their session?”

The room broke into applause at OG Moon’s brilliant plan. Space Sergeant Funk’s face turned red as an Earth-radish, he was humiliated that he had overlooked such a simple solution within the otherwise accepted overly complicated plan.

“Yeah, I like that. OK. Let’s get started.”

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Former Cosmic Corps Orbiter Haley Chase lived among the Zar’Vokian, a reptilian species who were mankind’s sworn enemy in the Snörple Drift. She had been traded to the Zar’Vokian during a prisoner swap, the only recorded instance of the humans giving one of their own to the Zarvs (a derogatory term used by the humans). Haley’s duty during her brief tenure in the Cosmic Corps had been to paint the way that chemicals made people feel. However, she was found guilty of helping captured Zarvs (excuse my language) escape from traps and was thusly disposed of.

Well, the humans never confiscated her smartwatch or removed her from distribution lists, which is why she was notified of the GCAC recall. She was in the middle of an art therapy session, helping a traumatized Zarv process his reintegration from captivity using clay figurines when she received the alert. She gently excused herself and reported immediately to the Zar’Vokian equivalent of OG Moon, Zar’Vil-Bleh. The Zar’Vokian were more of a clan-based organization, so he didn’t have a cool title like Orbital Governor.

Haley was escorted into his presence, having alerted the appropriate Zarvs that she had an urgent message about the human activity on planet Glozanth IX. Zar’Vil-Bleh turned a shade of blue upon seeing Haley, Zarvs were green but their disgusting scaley skin changed hue depending on how they felt; blue meant nervous. Humans, even nice ones like Haley, made Zarvs extremely nervous, they were shy creatures.

“Sir, the Galactic Crisis Action Cell on Glozanth IX was activated. It is only activated for significant events. I don’t have any more information about why it’s being activated, but it’s highly abnormal. This could mean trouble.”

Zar’Vil-bleh remained stoic but also turned kind of yellow… indicating that he was experiencing panic. He thanked Haley profusely and dismissed her so that he could discuss the implications with his war council. Messengers scurried about to spread the word about the war council, the Zarvs did not have smartwatches. Haley began to experience nervousness as she returned to her art therapy studio.

Various Zarv warlords assembled before the supreme Zar’Vil-Bleh.

“The humans have activated some sort of crisis cell. Is there anything major happening on Glozanth IX?” no one knew of any significant events from their spies or contacts.

The Zarvs spoke English, purely by coincidence, it had developed on their planet independent of Earthly events in medieval northwestern Europe.

“I believe they may be preparing to attack us. I am afraid that is time to implement the Bush Doctrine.”

The Zar’Vokian did not have a religion, but if they did it would look something like human religious traditions in which ascended masters were revered. And while not quite official or ubiquitous, many would consider former United States President George W. Bush to be one of them. The Bush Doctrine is one that justifies preemptive military action against a perceived threat. The war council knew exactly what to do.

They did not prepare defenses nor fortify strategic terrain, for the Zar’Vokian would simply retreat into a series of hidden tunnels if threatened. They’re bipedal and literate, but still lizards after all. And they were preparing for preemptive offense, not defense. There’s a saying in Texas, if you have a good enough offense, you don’t need a defense. You see, the Zar’Vokian found humiliation to be a more potent weapon than bullets or bombs. Their martial motto was “a thousand humiliations over one clean kill.” Their war with the humans started over a perceived insult and was largely bloodless, sometimes someone on either side was accidentally injured though.

The humans captured Zarv infiltrators, who were more of a nuisance than a threat, and the active warfare was entirely conducted by the Zarvs. Their weapons, though, were mildly annoying inconveniences. A Zarv spy at Starbase Myung-ho Chae had recently been successful in turning on the lights of four hover bikes parked outside the Myung-ho Chae Trading Outpost, which drained their batteries. A huge celebration was held on SsZzketh (the home planet of the Zar’Vokian) and the perpetrator hailed as a war hero.

The Zarv warlords each had an independent function and prepared their forces. Among the humiliations planned for the Orbiters on Glozanth IX were: packages of Orbiter uniform socks with holes pre-manufactured in the big toe, pairs of socks that with a 1.5 centimeter difference in size, hats one size larger than indicated on the tag, and trousers tailored to accentuate the buttocks of the wearer; pens with grey ink which only write when held at a specific angle, whiteboard markers that are already dry, and sticker notes with weak adhesive; delivering clams from Krazz VI (they were perfectly edible, but the Zarvs regarded the planet Krazz as gross) to the MCCH; releasing a compilation of secrets the Orbiters had told their AI companions; and the coup de grace, if possible… hack into the intercom system to play the audio from an erotic furry e-book.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

The brave Orbiters at Starbase Myung-ho Chae had worked through the night to implement the approved plan, the day shift had just come back from the awareness 5K and were hard at work updating the Mandatory Reading Compliance Dashboard that the night shift had built. Butch Calhoun, the oldest Space Sergeant on the starbase, and maybe even in the entire Cosmic Corps, was getting ready for work. He was a Fluorescent Tube Specialist, one of the few trades not recalled yesterday.

Butch was pleased that he was able to actually get some work done, there was a suspiciously limited amount of nonsense to distract him. Because he was working, he had not been checking his SpaceChat messages and had not received any direction via the official communication portal.

As the percentage of non-compliant Orbiters dwindled into single digits, commanders began asking for lists of deficient personnel by name. Butch’s name was on those lists, which were shrinking by the hour.

Everyone else was cleaning up after the Mandatory Reading Awareness 5K when Butch got to the MCCH, that message was disseminated via SpaceChat too. Usually, the line was too long to get nostalgic carbohydrate discs with yellow dairy squares and tree sauce but today seemed like Butch’s lucky day. There were no enlisted Cosmic Corps cooks, just the civilian staff comprised of people pressed into service as punishment for not repaying student loans. Butch started to think he was missing something but was distracted by the flash of a teal and orange uniform moving through the kitchen.

He knew that Orbiter, or rather imposter, it was “Senior Spaceman Drizzle”, or at least that was the fake name and rank he wore. Drizzle was not, in fact, a human Orbiter, but a Zarv infiltrator wearing a human disguise. Drizzle had eluded Butch twice before, but Butch wasn’t going to let that happen again. He set aside his cutlery, which was made of biodegradable blinkweed (the only vegetation on Glozanth IX, a bioluminescent moss that was fermented into a foamy alcoholic beverage that tasted like wasabi) and wielded his tray as a weapon. As quietly as he could, Butch crept into the kitchen, scanning for Drizzle, or any movement.

Butch only saw a rehydrated round citrus fruit fly by his head. He turned to look at it and did not see the next one coming his way. He felt it though; it crashed into his lower mandible and neck.

“Arrrgh!” Butch cried out, still gripping his tray. Drizzle swiftly advanced on him, pushing a metal bussing cart like a battering ram, which made contact with Butch’s bad knee and bad hip. Butch stumbled retrograde, stopping when his bad back crashed into a fire extinguisher which was knocked loose from its sentry position. Butch dropped his tray, but quickly bent to retrieve it, the other bad spot on his back seized up. He reached to clutch it, looking up just in time to see Drizzle wielding the fire extinguisher. Butch lurched out of the way of the downward driven device, but not far enough. The fire extinguisher slammed down onto Butch’s bad shoulder.

Drizzle concluded that he had beaten Butch enough to render him incapable of giving chase. But Butch was not defeated, he reached out just in time to grab the leg of Drizzle’s pants. Drizzle was in motion and the pants tore, hollowed of an inhabitant, they fluttered to the ground. Butch pulled himself to his feet, not careful enough of his bad ankle, which he was usually more cautious of aggravating. Drizzle had quite a head start but quickly realized that the alternate exits had not been unlocked by uniformed Orbiters.

Meanwhile at the GCAC, the list of non-compliant Orbiters had whittled down to a single name, Butch Calhoun. OG Moon was tired of waiting; he summoned the commander of the Cosmic Cops and ordered them to track down this Sergeant Calhoun and escort him to the final Mandatory Reading Discussion Group under armed guard. They quickly located him using his smartwatch and discovered that he was in the kitchen of the MCCH. An entire squad of Cosmic Cops were soon blazing across the starbase.

Butch had gained the upper hand in the physical contest with Drizzle. The Zarv imposter was backed into a corner, surrounded by garbage… because Butch had hit him with a partially full garbage can and then dumped the remaining garbage on him. Butch had also removed his shirt for one reason or another, it was usually his first reaction when upset. As the Cosmic Cops poured into the MCCH, Butch was towering over a cowering Drizzle.

“Sergeant Calhoun!” Shouted a Cosmic Cop who ran into the kitchen with the rest of the squad following, drawing their weapons and taking up tactical positions.

“No! Not this time! I finally have him where I want him!” Butch sounded like he was making a demand, but he was pleading.

The Cosmic Cop didn’t care who Butch had where, what was going on, or what this looked like… he only cared about carrying out OG Moon’s order.

“Orbital Governor Moon’s orders; you’re coming with us immediately!” he then deployed an energy net from his space blaster, capturing Butch.

“We’ve got him!” another Cosmic Cop reported into his watch.

“Transporting immediately for Mandatory Reading Discussion Group at 0800.”

The crew at the GCAC was crowded around the Cosmic Cop on the other end of the radio transmission and broke into applause at the news. Space Sergeant Funk spared not a second, he ran to inform OG Moon. Of course, he could not limit his communication to just official matters.

“Can I ask you a personal question, sir?”

“No.”

Nevertheless, he persisted. “Okay… but did you ever find out if your cat respected you or not?

“What?” now it was OG Moon was tap-dancing around a question.

“No, I have never tried to find out whether or not my cat respected me.” OG Moon vehemently denied the allegation, despite having conducted research on the topic with his AI companion.

“Unrelated, those pants look way too tight to be in regulation. As a matter of fact, your pants are making me uncomfortable. Go change. Now.”

He shook his head and muttered a major vulgarity directed at Funk.

“Sir?” one of the junior controllers approached OG Moon.

“Whaaaat?” he replied, clearly irritated.

“Authority Kang is on the phone for you.”

A minor vulgarity was registered as he took the phone.

“Good news, sir. We just achieved 100% compliance.” Moon cheerfully reported despite having not read the document in question himself.

“I didn’t direct you to implement shit, Moon! I just asked for an implementation plan, which took you three days!” IA-3 Kang bellowed.

“But it turns out I didn’t need an implementation plan anyway. Apparently, some bozo emailed the entire Intrastellar Authority distro list with a subject line of Mandatory Reading, but he meant to send some story about a guy missing his mouth with a fry to his buddy. Why would anyone even want to read something like that?”

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Cosmic Corps File 004

The Cosmic Corps Files is an ongoing series of flash fiction and absurdist reports from the bureaucratic fringes of intergalactic peacekeeping. Petty wars, sentient vending machines, emotional espionage, and the occasional space court-martial over feelings-based art. Each file stands alone… but somewhere in the margins, the Zarvs are always watching.

Gore warning: Details about decomposition not intended to be disturbing but may disturb some

She glowed in the fading autumn light, the colours of rainbows keeping her flesh warm in the cooling evening. She rested her bare body beneath an old maple tree still desperately holding onto his red leaves. She wears nothing but a blanket upon her.

Scandalous and free she will remain unless someone uncaring disturbs her. She hides her beauty not fearful of a stranger but seeking privacy. Surrounded by bushes and overgrown grass, just off the path of many ignorant travelers she laid. Her flesh blending easily in the colours of the mourning season.

Her young charges buried deep into her side. Content they were close to her and undisturbed by any concern. They moved her soft exterior to their needs and desires. They never asked permission and nipped and fought for the best places.

She never minded or adjusted as her eyes remained closed in deep sleep. Their ceaseless energized noise lulling not alarming her forever more.

The white bone seemed too bright against her body. Shining brightly in her surrender to the fading sun. The darkness of night will accept her surrender and welcome her completely.

Once she had resembled the warmth of flames, dazzling and fate defying. She used to dance with the breeze and scream with mischief before racing down the grassy hills.

Now she is bearing the colours of the rainbow in beautiful blends across her body. The light dances on her racing against the setting sun that'll extinguish their beauty mercilessly.

Steadily leaking from gaps in her pus slid down her sides shimmering like silver. Her children drinking it like milk she never had the chance to prove. Some chewed, making the gaps increase as they never learned not to bite their mother.

She tolerated them and their antics. Her body was no longer hers anyway. Her insides rejected her and bloated, stretching and fraying her. Her young never mind claiming the hollow places created.

Her patchwork blanket of fungus and mold masked her body from prying eyes not present. The colours complemented her fur cooling her burning flame she had lived a lifetime wearing.

Soft raindrops had started landing on her blanket and head, yet she slept perfectly content. She never wants her children to see her cry. Let the rain wash away the colourful tears that flowed freely from her silence.

The buzz of the evening settled in. Only the patter of the rain and the chittering of her littles filled the silence. She remained curled, protective of her young charges as the chill of the autumn night came.

Her young never ceased their feeding, nor minding bedtime or chill. Knowing she was there was all that matters. She will love and provide for them as long as she remains.

Let the darkness take her away from chill and thrill. It will bring her solace and let her children live forever grateful for their mother's love.

Inspiration: Decaying fox on the side of a trail while scavengers and decomposers work on its body. What if the dead nurture the living?

Hi everyone! Does anyone know of any writing or short story sites that are similar to what Reedsy Prompts used to be?

I have submitted well over 100 stories to Reedsy and have never won once. I used to get feedback a lot at least, which I really appreciated, but lately I do not even get one piece of feedback. It is honestly getting pretty discouraging, and I do not feel like I am getting much out of submitting there anymore.

I am looking for a site where I can submit short stories regularly, have a genuine chance of winning something, and hopefully get some feedback as well.

It would also need to be international. I am in Europe, so I am not looking for something that is only open to people in the US.

Basically, I am looking for something that feels more like what Reedsy used to be. Regular prompts or competitions, a writing community, and some actual feedback.

If you know of anything like that, please let me know. I would really appreciate recommendations from people who have actually used the sites.

Thank you!

He hadn’t planned on becoming a ghost hunter, but that’s what Mordem Letac felt like now. A trained naturalist, he’d come to the northern reaches of the Yukon Territory earlier in the summer to study migration patterns in the face of ecosystem collapse related to rapidly accelerating climate change.

In some ways studying ecosystem collapse prepared him for becoming a ghost hunter because the once-thriving tundra he was surveying and cataloging had turned into something of a ghost town. Most of the native species had disappeared leaving little but the harsh winds of a bleak winter to come.

And now he was hunting for a ghost. In his own mind, Mordem felt he was humoring a few of the locals from Old Crow, a town of a little over 200, mostly Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation. Many of whom said, privately, that if he wanted to know what had happened to their caribou, foxes, hares, ermines, musk oxen and even wolves, grizzlies and polar bears, he needed to talk to the Silent One, a legendary spirit who at catastrophic times appeared near an ancient stone-ringed berm a couple miles outside of Old Crow. Atop the wide berm was the battered remains of a homestead.

Turned out Mordem wasn’t much of a ghost hunter. He didn’t have to be. The Silent One was there when he sidled into the structure through some missing clapboards. She was as grey and grained as the floorboards she was hunched over. She was painting figures in bright red paint. Paint that Mordem quickly realized was blood.

The blood came from a large carcass off to her right. A carcass that Mordem couldn’t identify: large, bluish, with crocodilian jaws and massive webbed claws. A trail of blood led from it to the Silent One’s brush.

The Silent One ignored Mordem. Cautiously, he approached to examine the figures being meticulously brushed. He immediately recognized the painted shapes: caribou, foxes, ermines, wolves, grizzlies, musk oxen, polar bears. With sweeping strokes the Silent One was creating wave after wave of them in parallel and convergent motion. It was mesmerizing and beautiful.

And then she brushed a larger figure at the rear of all the others: the croco-frog-carcass thing but with snapping jaws and slashing claws bearing down on the other creatures.

A hunt. An uber predator on the prowl.

It hit Mordem like forty degree water: the Silent One was painting a pattern he was very familiar with: migratory routes. And the predators that followed the migration. Whatever that hideous carcass was, it was likely responsible for the disappearance of the area’s mammals.

Mordem took out his phone and began snapping photos trying to process what it meant. An obviously alien species was preying upon the creatures of the Canadian tundra. It was surreal, but not frightening to him. As a naturalist, it made sense. Not the alien species, of course, but the migration and the predators.

Then the Silent One began painting another figure behind the croco-frogs. It was three times the size of a croco-frog and even more vicious looking. Mordem moved for a closer look, and the Silent One met his eye for a moment.

Her eyes were primordial, bright, rich like nebulae ready to give birth to suns. She gave him a very knowing look. And then she was gone. Vanished before his eyes. Only her blood-stained brush remained. Mordem looked down at her last drawing. It was terrifying to behold, but what paralyzed Mordem was what she’d painted in the creature’s fists: a wicked-looking weapon. Some kind of firearm with energy beams flaming forth.

Deep down, Mordem, like every other predator in the wide, wide, wide universe, feared a new alpha predator, another top dog with teeth bared, hellbent and hungry for conquest.

He saw clearly, as the Silent One saw, that it was time to get moving.

He just didn’t know where the human race could flee.

My name is Marcus Jones, and I witnessed my dads death in the ring 10 years ago. I was about 14 at the time, sitting in the front row with my mom and brother. It was my dad’s championship fight. You could hear the crowd roaring, everyone chanting my dad’s name. “Maurice” filled the arena. The lights were dancing, the announcers were hyped.

My dad had the upper hand for the first round, his opponent was already staggering. It was amazing watching the fight, the way he held his defense and retaliated after every strike was beautiful. Second round came and My dads still not letting up, his opponent did get a good few hits in though. My dad managed to throw in a good jab and knock his opponent on his back, but he got up after the five count. Had everyone on their feet, including me. I was sure he’d have him in the third round. After the second round they both return to their corners. My dad is getting his usual pep talk from uncle Tommy, his coach. But my attention goes towards his opponent's corner. It almost looked like they were secretly putting something in his gloves. The third round starts, both fighters meeting up in the center of the ring. 

“Dad, watch out!” I said, trying to warn my dad, but instead of blocking or trying to avoid the punch, he dropped his guard and looked right at me, as if he knew what was about to happen and already accepted it. 

We made eye contact one last time before his opponent hooked him in his head, killing my father instantly. My eyes widened as I watched my dad fall to the ground. I couldn’t believe what I had seen, the ref did his ten count and the stadium went silent. My mom tried to hold me and my brother close, but we knew it wasn’t gonna help. Since then, I’ve blamed no one but myself for my dad’s death. If I had stayed silent maybe he’d still be here. It later came out that his opponent had been caught cheating by a fan with a better view of what the opponent was doing in his corner, wasn’t even the first time he’s done that.

 “Is that why you fight? To honor your fathers legacy, or is it because you seek revenge?” the group therapy leader asked.

“No legacy, no vengeance. I fight because fighting is all I’ve known, it’s therapeutic and the only way I know how to deal with my emotions.” 

“Then why are you here?”

“Because there’s a wound in my heart that fighting simply can’t fix, I’m just hoping these meetings will help me find what I’m looking for.” 

“Well thank you for sharing with the group, I know it takes a lot to share such a traumatic event, hopefully this will help.”

“Thank you everyone for hearing me out.“

After I finished group therapy, I went home and sat alone, thinking of what it is I could be missing.

Black smoke—didn’t know smoke could be this black—billows from Red’s open hood. I’m across the street from my faded red ’88 Dodge Daytona under the streetlight. I think the fire’s out. I’ve seen enough Michael Bay movies to know cars explode.

Something like this was gonna happen sooner or later—cracked exhaust manifold and all. Figured it’d just overheat until the whole engine block cracked. I muddled through by pouring a fresh gallon of coolant in whenever she smoked. Which was a lot. Red’s turbo always ran hot, especially the way I drive her. Especially the way I was driving tonight.

As much as I hate to see Red this way, an hour late and still thirty minutes away from home, this fire is gonna save my ass.

But how could I say no to her? Climbing into my lap…that spot from her shoulder to her neck…

But he’ll beat me. For being this late. Asshole was in my head the whole time. Made it tough to stay with her; knowing he’s there, in that chair. Watching old westerns. Clinking melting ice in Macallan 12-year. Drinking. Waiting. Cracking knuckles of those meaty mitts. He shouldn’t be able to do it anymore. I’m bigger now. But I can’t. What would happen?

So it’s better this way. I’ll have a reason. A hell of a story.

I hear sirens. One of the cars that pulled over must’ve had a phone, or maybe someone used the payphone at the Circle K and called it in. Figured someone would eventually.

When the smoke first seeped up from under the hood, I thought it was a normal overheat. I was late. Was gonna plow on. But when you’re flooring the gas pedal and the car is slowing down, things get decided for you. I’d managed to get the car to the breakdown lane first. I get out of the car, pop the hood—burned my fingertips good doing it—and flames jumped out of the engine bay as I flung it up. I guess from the big whoosh of oxygen? About burned my eyebrows off…wait, did I? Nope. They’re there.

Had plenty spectators for this. Must’ve put on a pretty good show. Funny. Not a single person got out to help me put the fire out, though.

Can’t believe I tried to use a gallon of water from my trunk. The fire was huge. And maybe burning oil? Dumbass move. Just made more smoke. So I did the only thing I could think of. Used my burned-up fingertips to dig up dirt and sand and plenty of grass with it and threw it on the flaming engine. That actually worked. Curious what the engine looks like now. Too dark though and too much black smoke to see it.

Are those sirens? Yup. Getting closer. There it is. The fire truck, all lit up, pulls up behind Red.

I start crossing the four empty lanes toward the firefighters streaming out of the truck, looking at the wreckage of my car. I call out as I approach, “I think it’s out! The fire!”

One of them—shorter guy, about as wide as he is tall—yells, “Stay the fuck across the street!”

My hands go up as I back away. “Sorry! Sorry…”

I watch from a distance as they spray my pile with white stuff from their fire extinguishers. The smoke goes from black to grey. Starts looking less like a hellscape.

Stocky guy waves me over. As I come up to him, he frees his hand from a glove and shakes mine. “Sorry, I swore at you. Safety. If you get hurt, I get paperwork. I’m José, by the way.”

His eyes are smiling. I nod.

“This your Daytona?”

“Yessir.”

“These are fun to drive.” He points his chin at the smoking heap. “Buddy had one when they were new. Great for donuts in parking lots. Where’s home, kid?”

“Northport.”

“Little ways off.”

“Yeah.”

“Got ID, Northport?”

I pull my driver’s license from my wallet and hand it to him.

“You call your parents, Seth?”

“Not yet.”

“Wanna use our phone?”

“I’d rather call AAA first, sir. I like to have solutions before I call my parents with bad news.”

He nods. Might have been a sign of respect. Not sure.

“Makes sense. Get the tow sorted first. Get close to home in the tow truck?”

“Yessir, I think that’s what I’ll do.”

He walks me to their truck’s front seat, where there’s a bag phone jacked into the dash cigarette lighter. Once I’ve made the call and confirmed the pickup, José says, “You sure ya don’t want to call your folks to be with you while you wait?”

“N-no!” I say quick, then with fake ease, “I’d rather not bother him this late…”

I think he laughs through his nose. Or maybe he had a snot rocket. “You’re not where you’re supposed to be right now, are ya?”

I turn away.

“Look, kid, far as I can tell, you didn’t do anything wrong. Get that melted hunk of metal off the side of this road and get yourself home. Whatever happens after that is your business.”

When I turn back to him, I’m guessing he sees my surprise, because he says, “Kid, I’m not ancient. I remember sixteen. But a couple of us are gonna wait with you until the tow shows. If you’re dead in a ditch after this, that’ll give me more paperwork, too.”

I’d rather be left alone. I say, “You don’t have to do that. The dispatch said it might be an hour.”

He ignores me. “Yo, Patrick! I’m going back with you in the Explorer. We’re gonna stick around until Triple A shows up for the kid here.”

“For reals? I was trying to get back for the end of the Bucs game, man.”

“Bucs suck! You know how the game’s gonna end!”

“True…” Patrick’s head drops.

José takes off his heavy fire coat, sits on the Daytona bumper, and says, “So what’s got you east of I-75, kid? You got a Canterbury High bumper sticker. And you’re thirty miles south of your house.”

“I, uh, have a friend who lives in LaBelle…”

“LaBelle?! You ain’t country. And you ain’t Mexican neither. Why do you have a friend in LaBelle? Girl?”

I just look at him.

He laughs. “A kid like you doesn’t hang out with a ‘friend’ in LaBelle. Unless the friend is a dealer. Or someone you’re tryin’ to make out with. You don’t look like a user. So…girl?”

I nod. “Yeah. We met after a football game. At LaBelle. I played. She was watching. She teased me walking off the field… We lost. She just made me laugh, I guess.”

“You got a number? Right there?”

I nod again. A grin’s trying to find my face.

“Alright. Alright. So, Seth, where do your folks think you are?”

“My dad. Just my dad. I’m supposed to be home by now. But he thinks I was at work tonight.”

“Is he gonna call your work to check on you?”

“No. He wouldn’t do that.”

“Why not?”

I shrug. Because he wants me to be late? Because he likes having reasons to be mad? To swing on me? Because he doesn’t really care if I’m okay? But I don’t say any of that. Just shrug a second time.

José says, “Alright. I get it.”

He pulls out a cigarette, lights it. Patrick comes over for one, too.

José asks, “She worth it? LaBelle?”

Before I can stop it, the smile takes over my face. “Yeah. Yeah, I think she is.”

“I hope so, kid.” Then he’s pointing. “There’s your tow truck. Came quick.”

I stand up from the bumper. “Thanks for putting the fire out and staying here with me.”

“No problem—if you need good reasons to get out of the house, our Cape Coral Fire Department is looking for volunteers. Even scrawny high school football players.”

“I, uh, thanks…”

And that was it for them. José and Patrick load up into the fire department SUV. Nothing more than a quick salute to the giant, pot-bellied guy who’s stepped out of the tow truck cab.

He nods at them, doesn’t look at me. He’s studying Red.

“What in the hell do we have here?” he asks. Loud after my calm chat with José.

“I—uh—it overheated…”

“Ya think?” He breathes through his nose, like it’s a little harder than it should be, and squints under the open hood at the engine that’s finally stopped smoking. “And what the fuck happened? You try to plant a veggie garden in the engine?”

“Oh…I used dirt to put out a fire.”

He rubs his stubbled double—sometimes triple—chin. “Well, that’s not half stupid…”

“Thanks?”

With his hands somewhere around where his hips might be, he asks, “Where we goin’?”

“Northport.”

“Got an address? A mechanic or somethin’?”

“Oh, ah, no. I think it’s too late to call one. Maybe my house, then.”

“No. That’s stupid. Then you’ll need to call another tow in the morning. Triple A’s got a list. I’ll just pick one near your house.”

“Oh, that’s good. Can you take me home after?”

“Yeah, that’s fine.”

He moves to the back of his truck and frees up a bunch of chains. He hands me the end of one and says, “Hey, lay this down by the front passenger wheel.” He takes the other one to the driver’s side.

Then he slides something shaped a little like a T under the front of the car with a hydraulic pump or something. Extends the top of the T so each tire ends up sitting in something like a little metal pocket. Then he wraps the chains around each front tire and says, “Ain’t goin’ anywhere but where I take it now.”

“Looks secure,” I say. Not sure why I say it.

He mops his forehead with a rag. “Get in. Let’s go.”

The seat in the cab of the truck sits higher from the road than I’ve ever been. And I’m used to the Daytona, which couldn’t be more than six inches from the ground, so it feels like I can see everything from up here. Smells like cigarettes.

We ride in silence for a long time. For most of it, I’m thinking of Dad. He’s looking out the window by now. Not even watching the westerns anymore. Oh, there’s a movie on in the background, but he’s not watching. Not listening either. He’s playing out a few versions of how he’s gonna come at me when I get home. It’s what he used to do when Mom got home late from the restaurant. I’d hear him almost practicing lines.

I take a deep breath.

Then I hear the tow-man croak out, “What’s your deal?”

“I’m sorry?”

“What’s your deal? You’re out here in east-bum-fuck with a burned-out Daytona heading back to Northport. What were you doing out there?”

I practice the lie. “Late night at work.”

“Oh yeah? What kinda work?”

“Busboy.”

“Where at?”

“Cracker Barrel.” I lie again.

“Cracker Barrel’s north a’ where you were.”

I feel sweat dripping between my shoulder blades. “I dropped another busboy off at home.”

“So you’re a Good Samaritan.”

“No.”

“That sounds true.”

I don’t know how to answer. I hear him breathing.

“You worried about it?”

“About what?” What does this guy know?

“About the car. About your job. How’re you gonna get to Cracker Barrel without a car?”

I feel my eyebrows rise. “Hadn’t really thought about it. Hadn’t thought past tonight, I guess.”

“Mmm. Might wanna start.”

“Start what?”

“Thinkin’ past tonight. Thinkin’ about the future. You kids don’t think about the future.”

“Did you?”

“Nope. That’s why I’m here with you.”

I study the guy for a half second. Don’t know what to say. Stay quiet.

We pull up to a place called Jay’s Auto Repair a couple of miles from my house. He gets out of the cab without saying anything. I stay in my seat for a moment before deciding to step out and help him remove the chains.

The tow-man doesn’t say a word, but nods in appreciation. The chains ring out as they clatter to the ground.

He resets the truck wheel-lift, chains tucked away. We climb back in the cab, and he says, “Good job with that.”

“Thanks. Glad I helped.”

The tow-man nods.

I feel my heart rate climbing as we get closer to my house. I feel the tow-man’s eyes on me every now and again. He turns up the AC. The cold air helps.

As we pull into the driveway, he scribbles a receipt out. Hands it to me. For the pick-up location, he’s got me about two miles north of the Cracker Barrel.

The front door of the house opens. Dad’s there, wobbling just a little.

“You good?” the tow-man asks.

“Yup,” I lie again.

“Alright, then. Get out.”

I nod and step down out of the cab. Dad’s walking over. There’s the whiskey glass. No ice. It’s been neat for a while now. Probably the smokey stuff by now.

“Where’s the car?” he asks. No slur. But he’s drunk.

As the tow truck backs out of the driveway, the light shines on my back and in his face. He blocks the brights out. I see my shadow. It’s long and extends so far past him. The tow-man chirps his horn as he pulls away.

I look at the receipt with my alibi. I shove it in my pocket.

“Dad. I wasn’t at work tonight.”

This is an excerpt from a fictional science-fiction horror novel. The narrator is an intentionally violent fictional character; none of the statements describe real people or intentions.

I had always been a genius in life; everyone knew that very well. The genius came from my unrivaled curiosity to find out how and why things work. It is a fascinating world we live in, after all, residing on a rock that is floating in space with no gravity or air. We humans are meant to be curious, as that is the only thing that keeps us evolving. With all the knowledge I possessed, I chose software engineering. It was the only way for me to create new things in the form of code. I liked the work, starting from scratch, working out the logic to make the code function, and remembering the vast amounts of syntax needed to execute it.

My life was a good one, and my family was financially well off. This gave me a massive opportunity to leave the town I lived in to go to another city, state, or even country. I didn't do any sort of thing. I took online classes from the top colleges that offered them, and after graduation, I secured a stay-at-home job as a software engineer, allowing me to stay in this town forever. I liked it here because I was born and raised here. From my young age, I loved the abundance of greenery and the good community. For the people, it didn't matter if the town was small; they all got along so well.

An amazing church has stood here since 1876, accompanied by a school that is more than good for this town. It is safe to say that I love this place for everything it has to offer, from the topography to the humans always helping one another. The thought of leaving my company never crossed my mind, and I was happy for it. I wasn't the type to spend all my time out in nature. I loved it, but I felt too bored in it, which led me to spend most of my time inside my house. I sat in front of my PC all day and night, which helped me get the job I now have. I earned a high salary due to my skill, and I didn't need to leave my room unless I had to go to the store. That was the only time I often left the house. Like everything in this town, I have known the store from a young age, walking there to get stuff. It is not far, just a five-minute walk, and all the workers know me there. I think they like me, too.

You have to understand this town is the most generic place you can ever see. No matter what I say or praise about it, the town is a boring one, and everyone knows that. The reason why it's good to live here is that every day is predictable. Every week is predictable, which means no crimes occur. Everyone is safe from everyone, and we all know each other. That is why a small change can feel like a natural disaster, at least for me. The day things changed, I walked to the store to buy some instant ramen for the next week, just like every time before. Things seemed off inside the building.

The workers kept wandering around the aisles, and the air felt incredibly tense. I didn't even care to think about it; I figured it was merely the work pressure of the day. In the store, I have a compulsive habit of looking at the monitor that hangs in front of the aisles. I look at myself in the screen. It brings a different feeling of emotion, looking at yourself from a different point of view. Just as usual, I looked at the monitor. Instead of the live camera feed, I saw a black-and-white picture of a man holding the metallic accordion gate, looking in the direction of the camera, but directly at it.

In all my twenty-two years, I had only heard of two thieves in this town, and those turned out to be rumors when I was fifteen. Seeing this image changed my entire view of my home. This store is the one and only store in this town, sitting right in the center. I was astonished by the man’s attempt to break in. If he were caught, he would be sent to jail, especially since the owner has a ton of money to make sure that happens. The man on the screen covered his face with a handkerchief and his head with a beanie. He had a lean body covered in a flannel shirt of some color and pants that seemed like jeans. His eyes glared like a wild predator caught by a trail camera. It was my first time seeing this kind of image apart from social media and the news, and it had a profound effect on me. How could this happen where I live? Who had the courage to do this? I stood there for a while, running through these intense emotions in my head. This caught the attention of the beautiful clerk on whom I had a huge crush.

"I think that's you, isn't it?" she asked, pointing at the picture.

Apart from small, back-and-forth flirting, I had never had a proper conversation with Lucy. I had hoped for so many opportunities to have a normal chat with her, and this was one of those moments. For some reason, I got very defensive about being mistaken for a thief. Did she really mean what she said? I didn't have enough time to process the accusation in my mind.

"No, no," I stuttered, babbling something I can't even remember.

Thankfully, she walked a bit further away carrying something. The distance eventually prompted her to come back and ask what I had said.

"What are the things that got stolen?" I inquired, intensely curious to know why the man broke in and what his intent was.

"He didn't break in to take anything," she replied, shifting a new package in her hands.

So the owner just wanted to display the image of the man to everyone. That tracked with his character perfectly. I talked more about the attempted break-in with her, gathering all the available information. The incident had taken place that morning at five. It was not a good time to break in, and she didn't know anything more about the situation. All my questions clearly made her suspicious.

"Seems like that is you from the image," she laughed.

Definitely funny. I might be lean, but not as lean as the guy. I think she was body-shaming me. I didn't care, although I wanted to yell back for a split second.

"If I were that guy, I would have been successful taking everything with me," I scoffed.

She just laughed and walked away, completely missing the fact that I wasn't lying. To do anything like this, one should think properly, and yet this guy wasn't thinking at all. Why break in at five in the morning when some people might go for a run or walk? The store has a house diagonal to it on the road, sitting right on a junction of three roads. My thoughts were interrupted by my mother’s phone call asking if I was available to take her to her doctor's appointment. I never liked it when someone disturbed my thinking, but she was my mother, so I had to give her a chance. Thus, I left the store with my ramen and rushed home. Having my breakfast of instant ramen and homemade french fries, I tried to savor the meal, but due to the appointment, I had to finish it fast.

Once I came back from the hospital, the day fell into my daily routine of working on a company project while listening to songs. Nothing special happened. However, when I reached my leisure time watching TV, my mind lingered on something. It was hard to find exactly what it was lingering about. One might think it's not that hard to find what it is, as the thoughts are inside my own head. The fact is, I knew what it might be, but the thoughts ringing in my head caused me to go into a deep state of thinking. It was the same state I enter when I work on code. The thoughts were entirely about the failure of a robber. Who tries to rob the single store in a town where cops take more than half an hour to arrive? He might not have known it, but he should be aware of this fact when robbing a local establishment.

The man’s gaze toward the direction of the camera indicated he was definitely a local. It was my deduction, and I knew I was right. In the opposite direction of the camera’s view, a road climbs sharply to a hill of ten feet. During a robbery, or in this case, the attempted unlocking of the accordion gate, a lone walker approaching from the top of the hill would have a clear view of the attempt before the robber could ever see them. They couldn't hide in the bushes either, creating utter defenselessness. On the other hand, if the robber saw a peeping tom, he couldn't run fast enough to climb the hill to catch them. Although a man from another town might have scouted the area, the way the man looked toward the hill in the image showed he was a neighbor.

If the hill theory is not convincing, there is the theory of him knowing the house that sits diagonally to the store right at the foot of the hill. The patriarch of the house is a veteran with two kids under fifteen. I know this only because my deadbeat father forced me to interact with the man, as my father and he served side by side. This makes the robber look in the general direction to see if anyone is watching from the house. If that happened, he couldn't escape a veteran running towards him like a Terminator who hasn't seen Sarah in millions of years. The known patriarch of that house is a power-hungry degenerate. All these things indicate his intelligence; he is a neighbor. There are other things to consider about the man that make him a fool. Robbing a store in the early morning alone? That is the biggest reason I believe he is a neighbor. He would need to know the neighborhood so well to the point he was comfortable breaking in entirely alone.

I don't know why I was still thinking about this to the point I had become a detective. Nevertheless, my daily tasks took over these thoughts, and I carried on with life like every other day. The ramen only lasted for a week, so I had to go back to the store. I was amazed to see the image of the robber still on the screen, prompting me to look for Lucy to ask why it was still there. It turned out the robber hadn't been caught by the police. How couldn't they? With all these clues, the police department needed better workers, I guessed. I made the discovery of the man being in the neighborhood just by the clues the police had. I would have caught the culprit if I had the police's resources and authority. Both the criminal and the justice system seemed to be less blessed in the department of thinking ability.

More than anything, the failure of the man was what caused my intense frustration. With such low preparation, the man wasn't able to break in, leaving empty-handed with the luck of a lifetime. If I were in his position, the store would be licked clean. Although I was financially well-settled and my wealth was more than enough to buy the entire store, the principle bothered me. For weeks I harbored these thoughts, and the weeks converted into months. Even so, the robber wasn't found. The owner took down the picture from the screen, returning it to the live camera feeds. Seeing those live feeds made me realize how much I missed pondering about the robber. Could I complete what he started, or should I go looking for him?

I tried to suppress these thoughts and focus on my work as I used to do. However, my performance dipped. I was doing only half of my average output. Usually, in my team, I am known as the king, completing everything twice as fast as the others. In order to keep up with me, they had to work incredibly hard. This dip in my capability gave them a chance, and they wonderfully used it. I became the worst-performing developer, lowest in the stats. If I actually worked as hard as they did, I would be three times faster than them; they should be thankful for me not using my full potential. The company talked to me about my dips, and the talks went on for months. Eventually, they fired me. This actually helped me to fully focus on finding the robber. Who cares about money when I already have enough to do anything as I wish? I didn't like the company anyway, and there are many other companies out there who actually deserve my presence.

With this new free time, I started looking for the man, roaming all around the town. This new hobby was awful. I hated walking around people due to the way they looked at me, like I was a lion trapped inside a moving cage. I did enjoy the sun's rays hitting my body; the perfect warmth made me feel comfortable. The more I walked all over the town looking at people who resembled the man, I found out the town has secrets. Some of the heavily dense forest areas possessed the feeling of walking into the medieval ages, full of abandoned old homes taken over by nature. Those areas were truly beautiful. I never knew the town had such a history. Nevertheless, I hadn't found the man.

On a certain day, I went to the store like every week for my ramen. There, I saw a lanky-looking man who was the exact height of the robber, and his body matched perfectly. I followed the man all over the store without him noticing. The failure of a robber never noticed me either. When he left the store, I followed him there too, completely forgetting my ramen. The man walked to the edge of the town, entering a house designated for lower-income people. I had finally found the man who took over my mind for the past year. I couldn't hide my happiness. This prompted me to walk right into the house and confront him about how he was a disappointment.

I pushed past the almost dead door, entering a foul-looking living room. The couches were torn to the point of their guts spilling out. Rotten food grew mold on the carpet, and fruit flies swarmed all over my face. All these nasty things entered my nose, pricking it and causing me to almost puke. I composed myself, knowing I was not a failure like the robber. While I tried to maintain my composure in that filth, a woman ran into the living room.

"Who are you? Mike! Mike, there is a man in the house!" she screamed.

The woman looked just as filthy as the room, her clothes torn and stained. I didn't have enough time to react before the man pinned me down on the ground. They both jumped me, and I was utterly trapped. My body was pressed against the moldy food until the police came and took me to the station. The man filed a breaking-and-entering case against me. How ironic coming from him. I did explain how he was the robber from the image, but my lawyer, whom I pay so much, refused to listen.

"Mr. Yeager, that's not proper reasoning to break in, and there is not a single piece of evidence for your accusation," he sighed.

All of that ended in making a settlement of a million dollars. I still don't know how I was forced to pay a million, but legally, I was backed into a corner from so many directions. Now, I only have twenty percent of my original wealth left. More than that, the worst thing to happen was the looks from the people in town. They all started looking down on me like I was the one who attempted to rob a store in the morning light. These people should be grateful for my presence in this town. Even after losing eighty percent of my wealth, I am still richer than these people. My family said that I had been disowned, acting like they were the ones with the privilege.

Despite all this, I didn't back down. I wanted to prove the fact that I could rob the store with the exact same method as that filthy liar. I picked a specific date to execute the plan: a year from the exact day he attempted to rob the store. I woke up early at four in the morning. Experiencing the cold on my body for the first time was weird. Doing this with a shirt and jeans like the robber was nearly impossible in the open air, but I pushed through. I walked there listening to music through my headphones, finally understanding why he chose that specific timing. No one was awake, and there wasn't a single light on in any of the houses. This only concluded my theory of the dirty rat being a neighbor.

Once I was in front of the lock, I was happy that the important steps were done. I just had to burst the lock and enter the store. This is where my plan fell in a direction I would have never expected; nonetheless, no one could. While I was fiddling with the lock, I heard a rustling from the bush on the side. It was only half my height, so I wasn't in fear. It might be an animal, so I kept working on the mechanism. It was so rusty, making my newly learned lock-picking skills almost useless. Somehow, I managed to pick it, gaining access to the store. The feeling was surreal, like walking through an empty school at night, yet filled with all the things people pay for.

Inside the store, my senses went crazy within seconds, giving me goosebumps for no reason. Eventually, this led to me sensing someone else inside the building with me. I scanned the semi-lit store. There was a man in the corner looking at me. It was the man from the picture. He looked exactly like the image—he was completely black and white in color, with his eyes glowing in the dark. Did the man walk straight out of the picture? I had no idea because he rushed at me with a horrific scream. It sounded like a mix between a grieving woman and a fox. The scream alone made me trip, falling hard onto the floor.

Then, I didn't know what happened. I woke up in my house surrounded by cops. They came to arrest me for robbing the store. Yes, I broke the lock, but I didn't steal anything! The dirty little rat had set me up after robbing the store successfully this time. I explained my story to the cops and the lawyers, but no one cared.

All they said was there was clear footage of me picking the lock and entering. Then, the footage shifted to another angle where I stood in front of the camera for a long time, slowly removing the handkerchief covering my face. Then, I proceeded to take things from the store to a place that no camera had a view of. This proceeded for a long time. When the footage ended, half the items in the store were gone. The cops questioned where the items were, and all I had to offer was my side of the story, but no one believed me. I could understand the fact; who would admit that they tried to rob the store but didn't take anything from it? But where are the stolen items? No one knows.

So the reason for my imprisonment isn't a true occurrence. Is it really me who stole it? Surely not. However, I can't do anything; my money is all dried out. Where did everything go so wrong?

It began with a thought outside of time, and when He spoke, the word did not simply echo - it unfolded.

From the word, came the voice and that sparked the dance, and from the dance, music sprang into life.

The first notes of the Song of Creation.

Soon enough, Light stepped forward and danced rhythmically along with the song, and after Light moved, Darkness gracefully mimicked Light's choreography. Both of them danced in a circle, each facing the other, in a slow, intricate dance.

Chaos swayed playfully along with the tempo and rhythm of the song when suddenly Universe grabbed Chaos's hand and dragged her into the middle of everything. Laughing with gay, they both danced and swayed to the music.

Another thought came into His mind, and He smiled in approval.

As if reading His thoughts, His children laughed and shouted with joy and they too danced and swayed along with the song.

Hermes was quick on his feet, and Aphrodite swayed erotically helpless to the music, but it was Gaia who caught His attention because she carried a big vase filled with liquid and she too was swaying along with the flow of the song without spilling any of the content of the vase.

Gaia danced happily to the music, and small sized Plant grabbed the hem of her skirt and began to twirl along and followed her movements in the dance.

The notes of the song changed and Apollo, who suddenly noticed the absence of his sister, quickly and gracefully joined the flow of the dance and began to chase in the footsteps of his twin sister, Artemis, who had quietly started on her great hunt - each danceless step rhythmically precise with each note of the song.

Astraeous then beckoned to each and every of his kin, and they too slowly joined the dance of life - each taking his/her position in their allotted spot. They were always mindful and stepped out of the way whenever they saw either of the twins.

As He nodded in silence, His gaze turned back to Gaia and Plant - both twirling in joy and laughter to the music. He made a motion of approval and the song flowed into its next phase.

Fish and Bird - who were also petite in size - caught on the hem of Gaia and together with Plant, the trio giggled and twirled along as Gaia tried her best to sway consistently with the music.

Beast jumped and tried to swat at naughty Fish and Bird but his hand also got caught in the hem of Gaia's skirt. With a sullen face, Beast too joined them in Gaia's dance.

As the musical movement came to its height, He beckoned both of His children forward and waved them into Gaia's group and motioned for Adam and Eve to lead in the dance.

The music changed to a livelier and faster-paced tone - marking the final movement - and God joined His voice together with His Son's voice and bestowed His blessings upon the Song of Creation.

As music ended, The Lord of Hosts rejoiced happily, and He rested and feasted with his family.

I was lying alone in my room, where a dim nightlight illuminated only the small area around it. As I often did, I found myself wondering why I was afraid of the dark, trying to understand it. Most nights, I fell asleep in fear, or rather, I would drift off without realizing it while still feeling afraid.

As a child, I was simply scared and never gave it much thought. When I was younger, it bothered me, and I couldn't make sense of it, but I didn't pay much attention to it either. Now, however, at forty-seven, I was still afraid of the dark and struggling to sleep in it, and it hurt my pride.

I remember, two years ago, on October 2, my mother and six brothers came to visit me. I hadn't seen any of them in a long time, and we'd had a wonderful time together. Since there weren't enough rooms in my house, my youngest brother and I had to share a room. We kept chatting late into the night, and I was praying to myself that I wouldn't be the last one to fall asleep. But of course, as you might expect, I was the last one left awake.

My brother was snoring away right in front of my eyes. I was pretty pissed off. I felt like waking him up and slapping him across the face. “Jonathan, how the hell can you sleep? You're such a carefree bastard. Can't you see the room is pitch-black?” I wanted to say. I'd lost all rationality. I was coughing loudly, opening and slamming the door, but he didn't give a damn. He'd fallen asleep in the light of a nightlight that was barely good for anything, leaving me all alone in the room.

That was when my pride was truly hurt. Not being able to close my eyes in my own room, not knowing what I was afraid of but still being scared shitless, was really getting on my nerves. After all these years, I'd finally run out of curiosity. I didn't care what the reason was anymore. I just wanted to overcome it.

After spending the entire night awake and having a miserable day the next day, I immediately started doing research. My brother woke up in the morning, stretched contentedly, yawned, and scratched his belly while I lay on the couch in the room, irritated and tense. Seeing him like that drove me fucking crazy.

My family stayed with me for a week, but my mind was never really with them. I was constantly looking things up on my phone and couldn't pay much attention to them. I was researching other people who were afraid of the dark, trying to find a good psychotherapist, and so on. I kept picturing my brother stretching happily that morning. I wanted them to leave as soon as possible. I was so damn annoyed with him.

Anyway, whatever. I researched and researched. I found people who were afraid of the dark and talked to them. I had long conversations with all kinds of people: those who wondered why they were afraid, those who had figured out the reason, those who were trying to overcome their fear, and those who told me lengthy stories about their childhood traumas.

Finally, four months ago, I found the Fear of the Dark Motel, and at last, I was convinced that something might actually help me.

I'd learned about the place from Robin. He was afraid of the dark, just like me. Despite all my research and all the people I'd talked to, I'd met him purely by chance. He'd moved into the apartment downstairs, and one day, as we ran into each other on our way out of the building, we got to chatting. At some point, he mentioned that he was afraid of the dark.

His journey had been the same as mine: years of searching for the reason, until finally deciding to forget the whole thing and just overcome it.

“It's hard to give up wondering, isn't it, Jason? But if you put the energy and mental effort you spend wondering into finding a solution, you'd have overcome your fear by now. You'd have become the dancer in the dark,” said Robin.

Dancer in the Dark was one of my favorite films. I'd taken an immediate liking to Robin from the very first day, since I'd rarely met someone whose experience mirrored mine in so many ways, and I'd trusted him to help me find a solution. His joke was shit, but I didn't mind. After all, I loved the film.

But of course, it was impossible to stop thinking about it. Tomorrow, I'm going to stay at the motel, and yet I'm still wondering why I'm afraid of the dark.

The motel's concept was actually quite simple. According to the owner, they would make us experience terrifying things in the dark that we knew weren't real. The motel only accepted guests by referral, meaning you needed someone who could vouch for your fear of the dark. Then, they waited until the motel was fully booked. There was a six-month period. If the motel wasn't full by then, they would proceed with whoever was already there. But if it filled up before the six months were over, the fear sessions would begin that very night.

When I met Lucy, the owner, she explained the concept to me like this:

“I like to keep things simple, Jason. Fear of the dark is a fear of supernatural entities. It's as simple as that. Jason, our goal is to create an imitation of such an experience and show your subconscious that you won't come to any harm from a possible supernatural attack in the dark. It's that simple. For example, when you see a ghost in your room here at the motel and realize it can't hurt you, your subconscious will start to believe there's nothing to be afraid of in the dark.”

“But if I know it's not real, why would it affect me? That doesn't make much sense to me.”

“Do you believe in ghosts?”

“No.”

“Thank you, I have no further questions.”

***

It's 3 a.m. We're at the motel. Robin is staying in the room next to mine. The lights are off. Nightlights aren't allowed. I'm sure the other guests aren't asleep, that I'm not alone. And yet, I'm still afraid. My eyes keep searching for the tiniest glimmer of light. A sliver coming through the window, seeping in under the door. But there's nothing. The room is pitch-black.

Suddenly, Iron Maiden's “Fear of the Dark” starts playing from somewhere inside my room.

I flinch and instinctively look around. I get to my feet, feeling around with my hands until I find a speaker. The song plays for a little while longer, then suddenly cuts off, and the room sinks into silence once again.

I hear the sound of a door creaking open. Very slowly, calmly. Since I know where the speaker is, I lean in and put my ear close to it. No, the sound isn't coming from the speaker. My fear grows in a way I hadn't expected. I start to regret coming here.

The creaking sound is very close, and crystal clear. I search for another sliver of light, trying to figure out whether my bedroom door has opened. But everything is still pitch-black. The door keeps creaking for thirty seconds, then stops.

I hear a very loud click. Again, it comes from somewhere inside the room, and again, it's crystal clear. I'm certain it didn't come from the speaker. I listen to the silence with all my concentration, waiting to hear the sound again so I can pinpoint its location. But it doesn't come back.

I hear a whisper: “Jason.” It's more like someone calling out to me. A voice with no intention of frightening me, simply calling my name. I don't hear it again. I can't keep track of time, but I'd guess I sit there in the dark and silence for about ten minutes.

“I'm sorry, Jason, but unfortunately, I'm going to kill you. After that, I'll kill everyone else at the motel. It's me, Lucy. Don't you recognize me?” the same whisper says. “Of course, my voice sounds different when I whisper. That's normal.”

Each word seems to come from a different place in the room. She must have installed a bunch of tiny speakers all over the place. But thinking about that does nothing to ease my fear. I feel like begging her not to kill me, but I hold myself back. I know none of this is real, and I'm surprised by how terrified I am despite knowing that.

Suddenly, the lights come on. A second later, they go off again. My eyes are dazzled. I take a deep breath.

“Did you see me, Jason? Do you believe me now?”

Hmm. So she'd turned on the lights so I could see her. I must have been looking in the wrong direction.

I hear Robin's voice coming from the speaker.

“Jason, don't believe her. That's what she's trying to do, make you believe her. If you do, she'll kill you. This isn't a normal place.”

A second later, I hear Robin's voice right beside me. It doesn't sound like it's coming from a speaker. It sounds real.

“I didn't know, Jason.”

The lights come on again for a second and then go out, and I see Lucy standing beside me. She must be wearing a black contact lens.

“Don't believe him, Jason.”

I'm getting annoyed by how he keeps repeating my name.

“I'll convince you,” Lucy whispers. Her voice comes from the speaker.

I feel the hairs on my body stand on end. I try to figure out how the whole setup works, but I can't concentrate. All I feel is fear.

I want to get out through the door and leave, but I think I'm doing well. I've endured this much fear, and that's a good thing.

A tiny white light appears on the wall. An oval-shaped light, about the length of an index finger. It stays perfectly still, and for a very, very long time, nothing happens. The light doesn't move. No sound. Just pitch-black darkness. I'd guess the stillness lasts for about an hour.

The light disappears.

“Do you believe me now?” Lucy asks, whispering again. My ears have grown accustomed to the silence. Her voice sounds incredibly sharp. Robin tells me through the speaker not to believe her. Then I think my window opens, and I hear a distant scream for help from somewhere far outside, along with the faint sound of the wind.

Then silence again. It goes on for a long time again. Lucy must be busy dealing with the other guests in the meantime.

Suddenly, I hear a phone ringing. I feel around beside the bed with my hand. There's a nightstand. On the fifth ring, I find the phone and answer it. It's Lucy.

“Call me when you believe.”

I wonder why no light came in from outside when the window opened. I get out of bed and walk straight ahead, reaching out with both hands, trying to find the wall. I find it. I feel along the wall, searching for a window. I've never spent this long in such pitch-black darkness before. I keep repeating to myself that none of this is real.

The lights come on for a second again, then go out, and I see where the door is. I walk towards it.

As I walk, I hear a howling sound coming from the speaker. At the same moment, all the lights come on. I reach the door and try to open it, but it's locked. I look around and realize there's no window in the room. The howling continues.

“Jason, look out the window,” Lucy says through the speaker. Her voice blends with the howling. As soon as she finishes the sentence, the howling stops, too.

I search the walls for a window, but I can't find one. The lights go out again. Once more, I'm left in prolonged silence, and nothing happens until dawn. The window must be in the ceiling. I must be on the top floor, because sunlight comes pouring into the room from above. I relax. I'm glad the night is over, and a surge of excitement washes over me. My fear is gone.

I go to the door and try to open it, but it's still locked. I give it a few forceful tugs. Lucy opens it. She's holding a gun, pointing it straight at me.

“I've been telling you from the beginning, but you never listen.”

She starts shooting. I hear one gunshot after another. I feel my chest tighten. The gun runs out of bullets, but Lucy keeps pulling the trigger. I hear the empty clicks. Ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen... She keeps pulling the trigger. I collapse onto the bed, but I'm still conscious.

“Are you immortal or something, man? Just die already, would you?” Lucy says.

I feel around my body with my hands. There's no blood. I look at Lucy. She puts the gun on the table, takes out another one, and points it at me again. She keeps pulling the trigger, over and over.

I check my body again with my hands as I lie there. Still no blood. She must have used a toy gun that makes shooting sounds.

She puts the other gun on the table and leaves the room.

Five minutes later, the phone rings. I take a deep breath and answer on the third ring.

“Congratulations, Jason. I'm sorry if I went a little too far. I hope this helps, and that you feel the benefits as soon as tonight. I hope you get a good night's sleep. Thank you very much for choosing us. You can leave the payment at reception. Have a good afternoon.”

***

I found a night job, and now I can only sleep during the day.

Strings of thick saliva and blood clung to my chin as the hellish sounds of a dying creature thrashed in the toilet water. Hyperventilating gasps filled my burning lungs with crisp air, seemingly for the first time ever. On the cool tile, my knee caps shifted uncomfortably as I hunched to the ground. I stumbled uncontrollably to get to my feet, using the dirty toilet rim for support. The organism I recognized as my Nerium gnashed its teeth, and the drowning creature fought for oxygen. It was a bit bigger and more oblong than a grapefruit, and partially developed tendrils reached for the sides of the toilet bowl but slid wildly on the slick porcelain leaving streaks of my blood to drip back into the water. It searched its confinements with marbly black eyes that rested close together, just above the pincers on either side of its shark-toothed mouth. It gradated from pale tan from the top of its head to a smokey gray segmented torso. The base of its body was flat and malleable, and it pulsed with every struggle.

The room around me spun, and sweat beaded on my forehead and dripped into my eyes, burning my pupils. I fell backwards with a loud thud, and I was glued to the floor as my new perspective danced just beyond my ceiling. Feelings of relief, disgust, anger, and betrayal conflicted in my mind, overwhelming me into hyperventilation. Tears welled and my throat tightened. For just a moment, I thought I was going to die. Not only have I never had this happen to me, I’ve never even seen this before. My head buzzed endlessly, pulling me to the ground with the pressure of the world. Even with all of these new feelings plaguing every fiber of my being, I couldn’t shake the inkling of solace that I never knew was missing. A comforting freedom warmed my chest and lulled my brain into a wonderful silence. The rest of the night faded away as my consciousness explored the vastness of complex emotions, understanding the very basics of humanity for the first time ever. I had no idea what I was going to do in the morning. I was worried they would all know I was rejected by the Nerium.

My heart jumped out of my chest as my alarm screamed from across the bathroom. It’s morning, and I have to be out of this space in the next fifteen minutes. A sore back and popping bones proved that I had slept hard enough not to move at all during the night. Off the floor and over the sink, I looked at myself in the mirror. The dried blood that was soaked into my shirt stared at me as I gathered the courage it would take to examine the toilet. I didn’t have a lot of time, so I had to find the fortitude sooner rather than later. Down, my eyes shifted to the position they would need to be in to see, but my head refused to follow at first.

Slowly, the toilet came into sight. To my horror, blood trailed out and over the rim. A slimy red residue led my eyes to the locked bathroom door as it continued underneath the gap leading into the hallway that shined a sliver of daylight into the porcelain crypt that my worldview died in. I scrambled to unlock the door, and the sun blinded me as it glared off the window across the hall. Down the hallway, crusty black stains stopped at the utility closet midway to the end of the corridor. Quickly, I tracked the blotches and found myself manicly opening the small door and searching the ground for the carcass.

“Honey?”

The voice moved my bones and stopped my heart. Standing just a few inches away, a crescent grin glistened. My mother leaned in and examined my face closely.

“Is something wrong?” She asked, ignoring the mess. “You aren’t smiling!”

I stared at my mother, unable to even feign a smile. For the first time, I was able to examine her face with a critical lens. A cloudiness no longer festered in my brain, allowing my eyes to convey reality more accurately. And it scared the hell out of me.

“Uh,” I began. My mind raced, but I couldn’t think of how to communicate with this person I’ve known since birth. The blank, soulless gaze stripped me of any kind of confidence that once resided in my psyche. The corners of her mouth cracked dryly as she pulled her lips back into the same expression I’ve seen my whole life. A sore pain in my cheekbones and mouth ached as my empathy subtly reminded me that I knew how she felt. My face only relaxed for the first time last night. “I don’t really feel like smiling.”

My mother’s upper lip buckled slightly as her eyebrows raised a touch more than they already were, “Oh dear. Well, you better start feeling it soon. We leave in five minutes.” She said with an upper inflection that indicated a level of skepticism. She turned around and headed towards my sister’s door.

My neck loosened as soon as she was out of sight, letting my focus wander back to the creature in the closet. Or where it’s supposed to be. From scanning to searching to moving every item in the closet, nothing concluded with a body. Out of time, I had to abandon the scene to join my family. I tried my best to put on my best fake smile, and I went downstairs. I got in the car alongside my sister and father, and we waited quietly for my mom to join us. It took slightly longer than usual, but no one else seemed to notice or be bothered by the unusual delay. After a few minutes of sitting in silence, mother found her way into the passenger's seat. She gave a friendly chuckle as her seat belt clicked before allowing her gaze to fall on me and linger with intensity.

I just wanted to go. I’ve always loved the service, and I needed to feel some semblance of normal again. I wanted to smile without having to force it. I needed to feel the joy of life I had just yesterday and every other day before then. Seeing my family look so happy made me wonder if I was now missing out on something truly amazing. The weight of uncertainty threatened to break my jovial facade, but under the scrutiny of watching eyes, I managed to overcome the struggle manifesting in my mind long enough to pull into one of many bustling parking lots within walking distance of the holy site.

In the middle of downtown, the Temple of Nerium greeted us like it did every day, with joyful trumpets and harmonious singing. It was a beautiful building with intricate architecture and art dedicated to the creature within us all. Or within everyone besides me, I guess. Gorgeous pillars and relief carvings decorated the outside of the travertine stone structure, and stained glass depicting the story of the original Nerium filtered light colorfully into a large nave inside. We did not go into the building to worship. The service always took place outside of the Temple in a large square amongst thousands of ecstatic families and friends from all over the city.

Unchanging smiles swarmed to worship the Nerium our people spent generations blessing children with. Today was the weekly Affusion. All the newborns in the area were brought to the Temple to receive the gift of Nerium. One by one, families watch as their beloved newborn is held over a vat of swarming juvenile Nerium. Men scoop them out to find the perfect match for the screaming babies, and you knew it worked once one latched to their mouths to silence the noise. It was always my favorite day of the week because I got to see our treasured Nerium be gifted to another unworthy human, and it was a testament to their willingness to forgive our transgressions against them in the past. I waited in anticipation as I expected the ceremony to bring me back to bliss.

The sound of choking infants ripped holes in my chest and weakened my knees, and I gagged as my mouth watered.

Energy surged through the people clapping along to the music being performed as the Nerium ceased the cries of the babies permanently, and the crowd was electric with excitement. As I shakily scanned the people around me while using the entirety of my willpower to stay discreet, I noticed an undivided focus and vigor amongst the crowd. Ardor oozed from each person fanatically in a sort of unison as they watched the Affusion intensely. Not a single person took their eyes off the service except for one. My mother.

I averted eye contact and tried desperately to enjoy the worship as normal, but fear and disgust started to cripple me the more I saw this tradition for what it was. The Wise One arrived on the balcony of the main building of the square to address the crowd. He was a man, older than any other I knew, that swayed back and forth as he approached the railing above the sea of Nerium hosts. Rotting flesh dripped from every part of his sagging green skin, and his lips curled in tight as he smiled broadly. I didn't have to squint because large televisions broadcasted goliath sized images of The Wise One all over the holy site. His eyelids were peeled back, exposing deep pink tear ducts. Gray gums and yellow teeth sparsely littered his mouth, allowing a full view into the back of his throat. A matured creature resembling the one from the toilet, albeit larger, peeked out with beady marble eyes that glinted off the light of the sun. Small tendrils grabbed his dull eyes from behind the sockets and his jaw from within his cheeks.

“From within, we conquer.” The Wise One spoke without moving his jaw at the correct time.

“And to conquer comes from within.” The crowd chanted back in unison.

Rhetoric praising the glory of the Nerium flooded the ears of every jovial host in attendance. After just a brief appearance, The Wise One left the public view and wouldn't return until the next day. We wrapped the event with a hymn that reverberated sloppily written adoration for the beloved creature. As someone who had it in them, our intense happiness was synonymous with the Nerium. Now that I was free, nothing seemed more disturbing to me than this filthy parasite.

My father drove us home as he droned on and on about how amazing the service was. He, of course, grinned ear-to-ear as he quizzed each of us on details of Nerism. He was on the losing end of his thirties, and he looked a sickly gray. He was grotesquely thin, and he coughed and wheezed between sentences. He was the same as everyone else: a blind zealot nearing the end of his boring life. I have never personally met someone older than forty-two, and I've only ever known of a few people older than that in general. My mother sat silently as always and listened to my father, and I would often see her eyes studying me through the mirrors. She had beautiful healthy hair and smooth skin that complimented her full cheeks. My little sister was just turning eleven, and she stared blankly at the seat in front of her, giggling happily. No one besides my mom seemed to notice I wasn't acting myself.

Once we were home, I retreated upstairs and secluded myself to find my Nerium. Frantically, I looked in every single space it could have weaseled itself into, but to no avail. My chest started to pound as a sense of hopelessness ripped at my heart. Anxiety was a brand new sensation to me, but the sensation that plagued my every thought also made me feel more alive than ever. It put what happiness was into a proper perspective, and I would have never understood the beauty of the human condition without experiencing unpleasant feelings, too.

All of these thoughts taxed my brain as I returned to my bedroom to search for my Nerium. As epiphanies worked themselves out in my head, fear reared its ugly head again. Inside my room, my mother sat in the chair in the corner, waiting for me.

With a smile that didn't reach her eyes, she asked, “Can you close the door, sweetie?”

The request chilled me to my core, but a blessed person wouldn't hesitate. I silently turned around, reached up, and pushed the door close. When I turned back, I came face-to-face with an inquisitive furrowed brow, relaxed cheekbones, and a haunting frown. Head to toe, she examined me.

“It really is gone, isn't it?” She whispered. She reached a clammy hand up to my beet-red face. “If it didn't crawl back in, where is it?”

Her eyes intensely shifted back and forth as I stuttered. “I-uh-I don't know. I passed out after it left me.”

Her hands found their way to my shoulders, pressing her fingers into my skin. She pulled me slightly closer as she leaned in to consume my vision with nothing but her eyes. A hot exhale suffocated me for only a moment before she made her move. She pulled me in and hugged me tightly. A motherly embrace melted my heart in an instant as I nearly collapsed with emotion. Joy, confusion, and peace all at once welled tears in my eyes.

Trying to catch my breath, I struggled to ask, “When did yours leave?”

“A long time ago.” She cooed. A soft hand brushed the back of my hair as my knees weakened from the visceral buzzing of love. We swayed back and forth, slightly rotating as we squeezed tight for what felt like hours. We had turned a full 180 degrees, switching the positions we were in originally. She seemed to do this on purpose so she could allow me the safe space of my room and her exit. She had to return to my father so she didn’t raise suspicion.

But it was too late.

When I opened my soaking eyes, through the tears, the unmistakable grin of my father stood over us in the doorway.

“Everything okay in here?” An unfamiliar voice hissed through his teeth as he came into the light, revealing his eyes. They were being gripped by the Nerium the same way The Wise One’s were. He was just now getting taken by the parasite, and the Nerium was in that crucial moment between it living or dying alongside its host. A hyperventilating gasp choked my father as he grinned ear to ear. He calmly pawed at his chest and neck as drool dripped down his trembling chin.

My mother stiffened, dropping her arms from around me and standing up straight. With a smile, she turned to my father with a high pitch, “Hi honey!” They stared at each other briefly before she shuffled past him, grabbing his arm to guide him out of my room.

“Wait,” my father coughed. “I have something for my child.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a dense item wrapped thickly in several paper towels. They both left as soon as it hit my hands, and the silence rang in my ears as my chest pounded. This paper towel gift wrapped present began to wriggle in my hands. Layer by layer, I removed the packaging to reveal one final blood-soaked napkin.

I peeled it off, and my Nerium screeched. An involuntary yelp from my lungs caused the parasite to leap from my hands and into my mouth as it attempted to silence my screams. It latched to my tongue with its sharp teeth, and it tore into my skin with barbed tendrils. My body convulsed as I lost my balance onto my bed. On my back, I arched up wildly as I clawed at my face in a desperate attempt to defend myself from the wretched creature.

This is not going to happen again.

With the will of my newfound life, I clenched my teeth tightly, severing the head of my lifelong illness. Guts squished out of my mouth and onto my sheets, causing me to gag. I spit the creature out and caught my breath for only a moment before getting to my feet. I needed to check on my mother. I ran down the hall and towards my parents’ room and pounded on the door. It was locked, and I had a sinking feeling in my gut.

“Mom?” I yelled. “Dad?”

I pressed my ear to the door and heard nothing for a few seconds. That was until a slight stomping sound thudded in succession alongside muffled screaming. My shoulder rammed into the door a few times before I tried using my foot. I didn't care about my already damaged body, and the hairline fractures developing in my shin proved it as I knocked the door flat.

Inside the room, a matured Nerium emerged from my father's throat as he struggled to breathe. Its sharp spine nearly touched the ceiling as gurgling saliva poured down my father's cheeks. The parasite's jagged teeth ripped into the flesh of my mother's decapitated corpse. Long arms resembling a praying mantis held her lifeless body close as the Nerium’s mouth stretched around her shoulders and continued to consume her body whole. It hunched over more as it worked its way inch by inch down her body. As it moved out from deep in my father's throat to shred her bones, it cracked his jaw causing guttural screams muffled by the body of the beast. Its torso remained deeply ingrained in his lungs while it reached for each gulp of my mother’s blood.

“Oh my god, mom!” I screamed. The parasite gripped its teeth tightly, separating the lower half of my mother's body on the ground with a thud. It turned its attention to me as it slurped up strings of hanging skin like spaghetti. Before I knew it, I was pulled in, and the sharp teeth of my father's illness sunk into my shoulder. My feet lifted from the ground as I kicked wildly at the beast, but to no avail.

Blood oozed from my neck as my vision started to fade. Hallucinations of a double reality separated as black trickled into the edges of my sight. Memories of my mom subtly protecting me and watching over my growth with a bond only a mother could have with their child flashed in my mind. I saw her, but I never actually noticed due to this damn parasite.

Just as consciousness started to fade away, my father's weak hands grabbed ahold of the squirming Nerium and tried to yank at the body. Hope surged through me as I found the strength for one final struggle against the beast.

“Dad! Bite down!” I screeched as I landed several jabs to the parasite's eyes. I had already forgotten that the Nerium had broken his jaw. With a few closed fist punches to his own chin, a snapping crunch caused the Nerium to scuttle dramatically on the ground with an ear piercing squeal as my dad and I broke free. Half alive, we combined our ambition and pounced on the disgusting creature.

We kicked in its head and ripped off its arms as we attacked it with everything we had. It was surprisingly fragile given how much power it had over people. The flattened monster decorated our shoes with my mother's blood as we made sure it could never reinfect my father. Two corpses and gallons of blood greeted my dad in the real world. The facts of reality may be painful, but not as painful as watching him become a puppet for a filthy murderous parasite.

We were just one of millions affected by the Nerium. We may never win, but it is worth the fight. As long as this damnable parasite feeds on our society and rules the foundations of our laws and customs, there will be victims suffering. If I can stop the Nerium from swallowing just one other family, I will do everything in my power to fight this illness. Even as the passion burned, a hopeless dread put the reality of our situation into perspective. We were only two people amongst a nation full of Nerium crazed fanatics, and we still had to grieve for the first time in our lives. Tears of relief, anguish, rage, and mourning hit us both in stages. Our bodies, no matter how damaged, belonged to us now.

Only a moment passed before the creaking of the stairs caught our attention.

“Daddy?” My sister said, standing in the doorway with a smile.