I guess you could say that my life started revolving around mental health in the fifth grade. And I think that's true, it's just that most of my family members have a mental illness. My first experience with suicide came in second grade, when a far off cousin took too many pain killers. Three years later my brother was diagnosed with all kinds of big words. In the sixth, he was hospitalized. That same year I was diagnosed as a capital F faker. My new found therapist decided that I was mimicking the emotions I heard my brother express, in order to get much needed attention. She even compared me to a monkey. "There was this experiment done, where they found that if one monkey does a cartwheel and is rewarded, all the other monkeys will try and do cartwheels." I understood that, but I just didn't think the slits in my wrist were comparable to cartwheels. . . Okay so this is my story so far. Please let me know what you think. I know it's really short but I'm new at this.


Elodie's house was filled with shadows. A city of intricate spider webs gleamed in the darkness like a necklace strung with tiny pearls. The creak of every floorboard whispered ̈ abandoned ̈ with each step. there was a hole in the ceiling with mismatched buckets clustered underneath, a lonely raindrop drip-drip-dripping into one. Mia’s mother assured her this was just an example of Elodie's senility, something made on urge- a final gasp of air inflamed by broken memories and the fear of being forgotten. She can remember the last time she was at Elodie's house by herself, a week before her thirteenth birthday. She lied on a mattress, underneath the newly cut out ceiling hole, wrapped in a blanket Elodie made- one riddled with blues and greens and inky blackness, the softest thing she had ever felt. It was a clear night, and the stars burned into the night sky the way they only could in the countryside. Mia felt so close to them. Elodie would have hated the way she looked in the coffin. Her curls were were lush and sleek. She had on more makeup then Mia had ever seen her. She was perfected there: vague and generic and pretty and dead. She looked as if she could be anyone's grandmother. But she wasn't- she was Elodie! ̈ I made the hole so I could see the stars ̈ Elodie, the Elodie that was always outside, writing poetry and making raspberry tea, and the Elodie that never wanted you to call her grandma, only Elodie. The only adult Mia truly considered her friend. After the funeral, Mia sat in a long row of people, listening to a man read the will in a painfully monotone voice. The sky was getting darker, and the air was growing colder, and she sat in a long row of family members in ill-fitting suits and dresses she dug out of her closet- each as black as obsidian. She sat sandwiched between her great uncle- a lofty man with silver hair and a real-life monocle, and her cousin, a 19- year woman old with short red hair and a constellation of freckles, who had shot up in height since the last time Mia had seen her years ago. Everyone sat around picnic tables littered on the edge of a field that seemed to go on forever, hearing the cars speed by as the man mentioned every last bit of Elodie’s property. ̈ And Finally, for Elodie Mathew’s home, who she grants to her granddaughter Mia. She is allowed to use it for what purposes she feel are fit, as long as it is well cared for. That concludes the will reading. There were a few beats of silence, then the redhead woman shot Mia an astonished grin. ̈ You’re so lucky ! ̈ She gushed. Who would want a small, derelict old house in the countryside with a hole in the roof and scarce furniture? Mia stared up at the stars drowsily, feeling dazed. She did. A lone silver streak drifted across the night sky. Mia smiled up at her newfound cousin. ̈ Yes, I am. ̈ I can’t believe the stars have chosen me. 1 month later The smell of fast food grew almost sickly, sealed in the car is it sped across the highway. The sky was as black as a chalkboard. Mia looked sideways at her mom, who stared ahead at the road blazing with the taillights of cars. Everything in the labyrinth of highway was dreamless and godless and starless- black sky and artificial lights blazing forever, a scene viewed from the inside of a car throwing itself down the highway, far above the speed limit as was the way of Mia’s mom. Both of them knew her mom was avoiding the topic of Elodie’s house, and both knew Mia desperately wanted to go. Mia looked back at her mother, whose face was twisted into a frown. ̈ So..when can I go to Elodie’s house? ̈ She offered, twisting a string of her hair. Her mom stared ahead. ̈ Mia, I already told you we can go in summer when I get time off. ̈ Mia’s mom was a third grade teacher. Mia frowned. ̈ I can drive there myself. ̈ The sixteen- year old objected. Mia’s mom tipped her head back and laughed. It was difficult to tell if it was bitter or if she actually found her funny. Finally, she said: ̈ Mia, you got your license two weeks ago. Forget going on this highway and countless others. Not going to happen. ̈ Elodie turned to look at the window, streaks of color speeding past. ̈ At least I know what a speed limit is. ̈ She muttered. ̈ Didn’t you fail your driving test fourteen times? ̈ Her mom’s head turned from the wheel to glare at Elodie as she fumbled for the window lowering button. ̈ Excuse me, young lady, that isn’t- ̈ Elodie lunged for the wheel, saving them as a tipsy car skidded ahead of them, centimeters away. Elodie kept her hand on the steering wheel, her mom looking at her blankly. Finally, her mom’s hands returned to the wheel. ̈ Oh, wasn’t it 12 times? ̈ Her mom stared at the road ahead with hollow eyes. ̈ Uh-huh. ̈ And now here she was, standing in a small, scarce house in the middle of nowhere. Mia wasn’t sure what she had expected to feel. Comforted? Instead, she just felt hollow. She was a ghost, drifting across the floors of a house just as dead as she was, the only sign of her human-ness the familiar creaking of the floorboards under her feet. In some ways, nothing had changed since the last time she had been there. The clock still kept a quiet, steady beat. Pearly Spiderwebs grew intricate cities suspended on the ceiling, although Elodie never seemed to mind those. The house still smelled faintly of raspberry tea. And- she noticed once she entered the living room- a raindrop still fell into a bucket from the ceiling, into a faded blue bucket that was now overflowing. But everything was different, because Elodie wasn’t there. She would never be there again. Mia felt her eyes get hot, but she had promised herself she wouldn’t. It took a narrowly avoided car accident to bring her here, after all. That night After lugging a spare mattress out of one of Elodie’s closets, carefully moving the family of buckets to the sides of the room, and lying down underneath the ceiling hole, Elodie couldn't fall asleep. The last time she was here, Elodie was right behind her, on the couch. The clock was ticking back than, too, and the house smelled the same. But Elodie wasn’t here. Mia tried not to cry, but hot tears leaked out of her eyes. She stared up at the starless, tar-colored sky through the hole in the ceiling, feeling hopeless. The hole in the ceiling looked just like she felt. Gaping. An open wound. Tears kept falling. Why couldn’t she see Elodie just one more time? They could read poetry in the field where she had attended her funeral and- and drink tea, and everything would be okay. The thought only made her cry harder. For hours, Mia tossed and turned on the mattress, Elodie’s absence making it impossible for her to fall into blissful sleep. This continued into she reached the other side of the night. With bleary, hot eyes, she stared up at the clock and saw the hands reach 3 a.m. She stared blankly at it, unable to move or wipe her tears or do anything other than stare up at the ceiling, eyes glazed. Then something began to happen. Streaks of light began to dance in the corners of the room. Slowly, the angelic beams moved closer and closer to her. They danced like fairies, engulfing her in pure light, wrapping her in blissful comfort. Mia knew exactly who the light was. It was Elodie. She felt herself being lifted up, up, until she drifted up out of the hole cut through the ceiling and landed softly on the roof. She gazed up at the sky and noticed something- It was filled with stars.


We have plenty of time. I turned away from him as he carried a basket load of laundry up the stairs. His heavy feet stomping each stair as though he was climbing the dark side of a mountain into battle. I sighed and fought the thoughts that hoped he missed a step. Those words made my blood boil! In his world time waits for him, and in reality, time screws us over again and again and like idiots, we repeat the same patterns. Him, rolling his eyes and insisting that time is his mistress, and me in the corner agreeing through gritted teeth and silent smiles. He reached the top of the stairs safely and smiled back at me, his smile was always so warm and kind. Like a portal, always throws me back in time, stuck in memories thinking of the days gone by, the days when he was- well he wasn’t much different than he is today. He still kisses me when he wakes up in the morning, he still makes breakfast and falls asleep on my breasts. He is still him, so maybe it’s me. I nod and smile and continue packing up the last few boxes for the moving van. In a few minutes, the truck will arrive and go before us to a land flowing with milk and honey. Well, maybe not so, but it better be for I am moving my whole life in search of something new, something exciting, something absolutely life-changing. That’s what I tell myself, but in truth, we’re moving to the other side of the country because he got a nice new job and what better way to celebrate ten years of marriage than to wrap up the past, pack up the present, and thrust into the future! His words, not mine. In a few hours, we will be aboard a sixteen-hour flight and so this new land must have milk, honey and everything nice- my life depends on it. They have come and gone. As the driver carried the last box out of the house, I closed the door behind him and turned back to see the empty beige coloured walls of the house. Without furniture and paintings and bookshelves and everything that made this a home, it looks like the inside of an eggshell. Standing there, I remember those words again and my feet could no longer carry me, so I let myself fall to the ground, staring at what was once a room of many colours. I realised how much I hate these beige walls, I remember when we first viewed it, I loved the space but wanted to change the colours, I wanted each room to be its own unique space, I wanted to make this palace my playground. ‘There’s plenty of time to do that', he said. Five years down the line, here I am staring at the same ugly beige walls. This opened the floodgates of every time I heard those words. When our friends travelled the world during our college days, ‘We have plenty of time’, he said. Yet this trip to our Neverland is the farthest I’ve been from home. When we had dated for 4 years, and we began to speak of marriage, ‘We have plenty of time’, he said. My father died long before I walked down the aisle 3 years later. When I thought about having kids, ‘We have plenty of time’, he said. And now- well time may be his mistress but she has been ever so cruel to me. I could feel the tears burn and fill my eyes, tilting my head up I held them there, there’s no time for tears, not here, not now. I held my eyes shut, holding them until the tears returned to where they came from. He was standing before me when I opened them, ‘I’m ready', he said with a grin, stretching his hand out to lift me off the floor. Moments later, the doorbell rang, it was the taxi driver. It would be the last time I would hear that melody, the last time I would see these walls. There I was, leaving just as I had arrived, with nothing- if not less. He led me out the door and into the car. Waiting in the back seat, I watched as he lifted our boxes and loaded them up into the trunk. The way his muscles flexed beneath his shirt, the way his body moved. I closed my eyes at the familiar sight, smiling and remembering every time my hands rubbed against those arms, every time my body leaned into his allowing him to lift me into himself. Interrupted by the driver’s voice, I opened my eyes. It was time to wrap up the past and sit in my present. Two hours late for a six-hour ride. I lost the first couple of hours. I can’t for the life of me remember what I was thinking of as I stared blankly out the windows. I remember thinking about how fast the trees were moving, and how it made me feel like I was going back in time but nothing past that. The sound of his voice brought me back to him. He held my hand and repeated what he said but still, I could not quite understand. I looked up and caught the driver’s eye in the mirror. He was looking at me, also waiting for a response. ‘You are going to love our new home’, he said for the last time. ‘Yes, yes. I will’, I said and smiled squeezing the hand that was holding mine. He turned away immediately, satisfied with my response. I looked up and again staring into the driver’s eyes, he saw my smile fall and fade away almost as quickly as it appeared. I returned my gaze to its safe space, staring out the window, and I thought? Where is home? The house I grew up in? The house we shared as roommates in college? The house where we said our vows? The house we lost time in? Or the one with the ugly beige walls? I wonder where home was to him. The one where his mother died, the one where he broke my heart? The one where we are going to? Or the one with the ugly beige walls? What if I remove myself from the narrative, what if I didn’t make it to this new house with him, will it still be home? If the walls were beige as before, and all our old furniture and pictures were put up. If all was the same but for the postcode, would it still be home? Where is home? Where is his home, if not with me? I wish I didn't know the answer to this, but like all things, time revealed this to me. Two hours to our final destination, the driver asked a question. In hindsight, this was an absolute point. ‘Sir, shall we keep to the highway? I looked at him, also waiting for his response. He went on about how the inner roads were smaller and darker but everyone avoided them and so should be faster. Then he looked at me and said, ‘We have plenty of time- we’ll make it’. About an hour later, there was a loud bang, and then the car began to crawl and finally it came to a stop. In the middle of this lonely inner road, the worst had happened. A flat tyre. We got out of the car and waited and watched as the driver scrambled to fix his spare tyre as quickly as he could. We both walked a few yards from the car and I let out a deep sigh. ‘It’s not my fault’, he said quietly. ‘I didn’t say it was’, I replied, rolling my eyes, avoiding his gaze. ‘But you think it is, don't you? ‘You have no idea what I think. Drop it’, I said sternly. ‘Because you never speak to me! We have spent the last 5 hours in silence!’ I looked at him, ‘Yes, this is your fault?’ And honestly, I was fine until he raised his voice and I just lost it. I could no longer hear every word that he said but I was determined for my voice to be louder. I didn’t even notice the driver who had fixed his tyre and was now staring at us in shock. ‘If you didn’t waste all that time-’ I didn’t let the words drop out of his mouth. I had heard enough. ‘If I had not wasted time?! We had no time! I didn’t waste any time, you wasted our entire lives!’, I shouted back at him. He was dumbstruck. I could see in his warm eyes that my words hurt, and I would have taken it back if it wasn’t the truth. ‘You wasted your life’, he said quietly and returned to the car. For a moment, I could not lift my feet to move from the spot where I stood. Finally, I walked to the car in silence. Raising my head up, holding those tears in because this was not the time or place. Again in silence, we finished our trip, arriving at the airport just as our plane took off. Standing outside the airport, surrounded by a crowd, I felt so small, so alone, so broken. I stood still as he rolled his box forward into the building. He took a few steps before he realised that I wasn’t next to him. When he did notice, he stopped and looked back, he stared at me, for the first time, knowing my thoughts without hearing my words, for the first time, seeing the tears that formed in my eyes roll down my cheeks. I smiled silently as I often did. He did nothing, allowing his tears to fall too. I turned back taking nothing, as I came with nothing, and entered the car that brought us. I sat in and could not take my eyes away from its safe space, out the window, looking at my husband, my home. Where is home, if not with him? As we drove out of sight, the driver said, ‘I’m sorry you missed your flight’. In tears, with a broken heart, I said, ‘We were never going to make it’.


A nation's Intelligence Agency released a 140 page report detailing the lack of food and water for the planet's growing population, the inevitability of climate change to keep elevating dangerous weather conditions, and the destined collapse of the current monetary system. The whole nation was already full of unhappy people, a generation that had been fed the lie that if they worked hard they would eventually be prosperous and happy, were unemployed or held dead-end jobs where they were constrained, bored, underpaid and unappreciated. They were furious at being mislead. A generation of baby-boomers before them had stolen all of the prosperity from the nation and left a dying planet behind as their inheritance. The nation’s news-media grew increasingly cynical, morbid and depressing every day. Networks were purely out to make money and the dying nation, which felt helpless to help itself, ate up these stories and wallowed in its unhappiness. As a result those with mental disorders such as antisocial personality disorder, psychopathy and narcissistic personality disorder, began to believe that they were in fact part of the majority, as people had forgotten long ago that TV was not a true representation of reality. Such individuals became so convinced of their normalcy that they never sought out the mental counseling they so desperately needed, and as their self-assurance grew so did their boldness. A few started openly killing innocents, and once made famous by the greed of the media, more joined in. Soon even innocent children were not safe from the crossfire. With every disaster that befell the nation its people, scared and delusional, gave up one civil liberty after another until the freedom the nation once held proudly over the heads of the rest of the world was nothing more than a distant memory. Its citizens grew divided between the five stages of grief; denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance as though each stage were in fact an ideology to live by. Only a small percentage of the population had made it to the final stage and the deniers were so desperate to believe that everything would be OK that they turned their back completely on science and reason, the two things that human beings prided themselves on the most. The desperate actively ignored the evidence that came to light more and more every day, and lashed out at those who sought to end their ignorance. These people controlled vital aspects of the government, and so the nation was locked in a terrible stand still, completely unable to deal with the current problems and imminent dangers of the future. Only one solution seemed to remain; revolution. A total revision of government and civilization. But revolution was never to happen, too much of the nation had become convinced that they were completely helpless to influence the world, and reverted to total depression, complete apathy or a mix of the two. Each time an uprising started it was never able to gain enough momentum to stop the government from quelling it, through military and police action, and more powerfully through clever manipulation of the press and propaganda. People came to fear conflict more than anything, especially amongst themselves and so they created societal restrictions on which words they could say and which situations they could show in movies and on TV. In this stifling environment people became unable to think for themselves, and creativity and originality were snuffed out. Suicides, murders and sickness grew. Some began openly hoping for the end of their world. Nature began lashing out in its death throes as the misery of money continued to strangle it. Floods, droughts, blizzards, and terrible storms wreaked havoc across the planet. Wars over resources broke out around the globe, and finally the government took total control of the nation through military and police supervision. Each and every citizen was now a ward of the state, but even with strict laws in place limiting the production of more children the population had already grown too large to sustain. Soon governments around the world began to consider something once thought to be unthinkable-nuclear war. All it took was one missile, and all pandemonium broke out. No one can remember who made the first move, but it hardly mattered once a nuclear winter, an event which scientists had been warning about for decades, consumed the planet. The access to food and water, already scarce, became virtually non-existent and the starving population bottlenecked. The humans, plants and animals that managed to survive were plagued with genetic mutations and disease. Extinctions on a massive scale ravaged the land and sea. Eventually only a small niche of organic life remained, breeding and evolving over many thousands of years to create a new era. Although some mutated form of the human genome survived, the human race is never again at the top of the food chain. All information that humans had gathered and analyzed over the centuries was lost forever, for you see, the human race had been so distracted by war and money that they had never mastered space travel. When the sun eventually went supernova, any existence of life on the planet Earth and possibly in the entire known universe was completely eliminated. Doomed to revert to the stardust which had originally allowed for its creation. The end. This is my first time writing anything other than a research paper really, so I'm curious as to how other people view the style, and what you all generally think.


When I look in a mirror, I see through myself. I have no reflection. I can see and touch my own body, and other people see me without any problems, but for years I was unable to see my own face. I don’t show up in photos or on video. Until I was eleven years old, I knew what my face looked like only from how it felt under my fingertips, how other people described it to me, and from the portraits my parents paid people to draw. But even the portraits were temporary. They faded within minutes. And if you write a sentence about how I look, the nouns and adjectives evaporate. *I have a r and ye .* It’s strange knowing such a unique part of your body--of yourself and your identity--solely through words and pictures, as if you were a character in a story or comic book. As if you weren’t real. And most people aren’t even very good at describing things beyond the most basic and obvious. The video my parents took of my birth is actually pretty bizarre, because it looks like someone filmed the whole thing, then digitally erased the baby. *Something* is born. *Something* is held in its mother’s arms. *Something* is loved. *Something* goes to school. *Something* likes to play with his dog. It was bad enough everyone knew what I looked like, but worse I could see what they looked like. I get that if I was born blind, I wouldn’t know what I looked like either, so I should be thankful for being able to see, but there’s something especially cruel about the *seeing everything but yourself* aspect. It’s like in the Bible, when Adam and Eve could eat everything except the fruit of one fucking tree. I am my own forbidden knowledge. How fucked is that! Or rather I *was* my own forbidden knowledge. Because when *something* was eleven, *something* and his friends ignored their parents’ rules and went to play in the abandoned gas station outside of town, where the junkies shoot up, truckers get laid, and God knows what else goes on. That day there was dying going on. Some emaciated wreck of a human was babbling his last nonsense words as a stream of bloody fluids that escaped him through where his teeth should have been, ran down his neck and over his sunken, scabby chest before gathering in a pool on the cement beside him. *Something*’s friends were all gone by then, rightly freaked the fuck out. But *something* was staring-- *Spellbound.* Not by the dying but by the blood itself, so deeply, darkly red *and so perfectly reflective*. It was in that mirror-blood I first saw myself. In the filth of that derelict gas station, in the company of that drooling corpse, I realized that I *could* see myself--**in blood!** And what stared back at me was nothing like the portraits. Or words. I remember sirens and flashing lights and realizing my friends must have called the police. I don’t know how long I spent crouched there, staring at the blood, but when the cops arrived I knew immediately they couldn’t see the body. *It was right there* yet they walked past it. “Is this some kind of fucking joke?” one of them said to me. But before I could answer, his tone softened and he asked, “Are you OK, son?” “Yes, sir,” I said. The cops and my friends loitered like drunks around the gas station for at least a quarter of an hour, acting as if they didn’t know why they were there but didn’t want to admit it, then in a mutual but silent embarrassment started leaving. “It’s boring here. Let’s go to my place,” said one of my friends. Still the body was right there. The gaping, toothless mouth, the greenish-yellow stains. I went with them. On the way back, I asked my friends whether they had called the police after seeing the dying man. “Police?” “Saw somebody dying?” They had no idea what I was talking about. A few days later, I got up at night, took a knife from the kitchen and cut myself on purpose, squeezing out enough blood so that it formed a crimson globule on the countertop, then put my face against it so that my eyeball was almost touching the blood. Slowly, I pulled my face away--a slow zooming out--struggling to focus, but I did not see myself. The globule merely reflected in red a distended, empty kitchen. Animal blood also didn’t work. Neither did my friend’s blood after I punched him in the nose. By then it became apparent to me that somehow death must be involved. I yearned to see myself once more but took solace in the fact that no one else could see the *real* me. They could not see what I saw, what I knew I was. They saw merely a false projection of their own humanity. My chance finally came several years later, after my mom had dragged me to her brother’s cottage. My uncle was using a chainsaw to cut firewood, when the chainsaw slipped and he carved a nasty wound into his leg. He screamed and all of us came running. Despite the pressure he kept applying to the wound, his blood poured out of him, through his fingers and down onto the grass and dirt. Under the pretext of trying to help him slow the bleeding, I pressed my hand against his leg, gathering the hot blood in my palm. When I had enough, I stepped suddenly away--They all stared at me.--and, trembling, held out my hand beneath the dirty evening sunlight and gazed upon my own reflection for the second time. Time again seemed to flow past me, but I recall vaguely, as through a wall of styrofoam, their screams and panic fading fluently away. Like a forest stream whose source has been shut off. Until it was quiet, and although I could see my uncle’s body lying on the ground, they one-by-one seemed to lose all interest in it. Eventually they all went back to whatever trivial thing they’d been doing before, and when I asked my mom what happened to my uncle, she said, “Who?” and laughed and said, “But I’ve never had a brother,” and when I later checked her phone and photo albums, sure enough he was not there, and I realized the power of my gaze. *I am the antonym of being.* More than non-being: dread-form of never-was. To see myself, I must stare into the blood of the dying or the dead. In doing so, I disengender them. To catch a glimpse of my own visage I must erase them from time itself. I am not a human. *I am negation.* Since that evening at the cottage, I have haunted the places all normal people fear. I track death’s cold footsteps to where the threads of life are finest, and wait for them to fray--to snap. Sometimes I aid in their undoing. Because as long as I draw blood, I can kill without earthly consequence. My reflection is the erasure of crime, for how can one kill what has never existed? Every time I see myself reflected, my desire grows. I am beginning to love myself. Perhaps I have become enamoured of my own image, but even so my narcissism is of the most unique kind. For now, I prey only on the weakest among you, those who would not survive long anyway, and in my actions I become their angel: of death / of mercy / of forgetful self-reflection.


I’ve only made one promise in my entire life. As time seamlessly goes by, the day and night losing their separation, dates evoking no emergency within me, and life slowly becoming devoid of any true meaning, I continue on because for some reason my soul feels obligated to uphold this promise. Pride doesn’t dictate how I operate and shame puts no fear in my heart. So why I’m inclined to remain true to my word is beyond me and it’s bothering me that I can’t get to the bottom of it. It snowed six inches two days ago. Being that it’s the middle of autumn in New England should cause some concern but nobody’s going to truly care about climate change until it’s irreversible. However, the clashing of seasons was an enamoring site to see. The way the white crystals were gracefully gliding through the rainbow-colored trees was a common showcase of nature strutting its elegance. It’s seventy degrees today and most of the snow has melted leaving a shiny gloss on the leaves that’ve gone back to their roots. I figured today was as good as any to rake them up. I didn’t own a rake, a leaf blower, or any device that could be used to either gather or disperse leaves. It’s one of those things I’ve never felt the need to do until this very moment. I live in a three-family apartment. I assume that someone has to have one, yet, it feels like I’d be a burden if I was to ask to use theirs. I’ve never interacted with either of my neighbors before. It’ll be weird if I go from never speaking to either of them to asking for something. ‘Hey I know we never talk but would you mind if I take advantage of your resources for nothing in return?’ See how awkward that is? Instead, I’ll just loan it from one of them without their knowing. Thankfully they both work day shifts so that gives me enough time to do what needs to be done without either of them knowing how it precisely got done. I went towards the upstairs apartment first, that way if she doesn’t have one I can walk down the steps in disappointment rather than annoyingly trudging up three flights of stairs. The door was locked. Why had I expected anything different? I have no clue. I tried my keys in the lock. Didn’t work. Why had I expected that to work? Again, I have no clue. Now, I could’ve just breached the door since this entire complex is made of bare minimum material but I thought it was excessive to break into her house for a rake. Especially for a rake I’m not sure is there. Downstairs I went and his door was unlocked. The unfamiliar smell of his apartment tickled my nose. It wasn’t musty by any means but it wasn’t pleasant. It was a strong, unidentifiable aroma that made the air feel thick as if it was telling me that I was an unwanted guest. The nerve of this apartment. The rake was by the door. I thought about roaming through the area to see the pieces of personality that one decorates their space of living with. Then I thought about finding something I had no business discovering in the first place, grabbed the rake, and left. A gust of wind knocked droplets onto my shoulders once I stepped on the porch. The fresh air made the inside of my body float with each inhale. The sun was smiling at everything it touched. A flock of birds temporarily painted the sky with their unique formations. I would’ve shed a tear at the scenery if I wasn’t accustomed to suppressing my emotions. Typically when I’ve witnessed people rake their yards they’ll put all the loose leaves in a trash bag. That makes no sense to me. Nature shouldn’t be thrown away. What I planned on doing was raking them toward a tree and forming a neat ring of fiery colors. Just as I was about to begin, a sudden gray wave overcame me. The urge to complete this simple task was dwindling. I looked towards the sun and it seemed dim. My breathing was happening in unnaturally slow increments. I closed my eyes and remembered the one life-binding promise I made and it was as if those previous moments were erased. The sun was again jubilant and the air tasted refreshing. As a kid, every chore felt unnecessary and exhausting. Now, at my grown age, chores are meditative. Somehow organizing is calming when you do it on a whim. The soft metal of the rake massaging the leaves gave me a sense of nostalgia. I can hear pancakes sizzling on a stove. Graham crackers being scrunched up. Orange juice being poured...maybe I was feeling more hungry than nostalgic. As I was having a fantasy of breakfast to come, the rake got stuck on a bundle of leaves. I kept trying to force them to move, thinking they might’ve been frozen together and stubborn, but they wouldn’t budge. When I went to move the bunch by hand, something was glistening a few feet away. Hoping it’d be gold or a time capsule I walked over to the mystery. It was a spoon. Not just any spoon though. It was a silver spoon. You know that same silver spoon used as an analogy for people that allegedly had an easy upbringing. Also, the same spoon that feels the cold rush of milk on many mornings. The same spoon that is at times used as a drumstick on an anonymous surface. Not lost jewelry or recovered artifacts from the past. It was a spoon. I laughed a little because just like life, you can expect something grandiose from the unknown only to be given something so simple like a spoon. I put it in my pocket and continued raking. The one promise I made was to myself. After failing at so many of my aspirations, I wanted to give up on life. It’s mentally draining to continuously be unable to grasp your desires. I felt worthless. Happiness became more elusive. Smiling always felt forced. It reached the point where I’d sit in darkness for hours on end, forcing the inner monologue of my mind to be silent. Then one day, when I was on my way to the kitchen, I heard a commotion outside. I went to the window to see what was happening. A wolf was mauling a rabbit...Nah I’m just kidding. It was actually a bear...again, just kidding. A kid kept falling off of his skateboard and not just small falls, they were skin-harming kinds of falls. He just kept getting on and trying whatever trick he was trying to accomplish. I watched him fail dozens of times, one because I was bored and to see if he’d give up but he never did. How could a kid have more perseverance than me? I was jealous. So I promised myself to never allow my pessimism to dictate my life. I’ll never be able to completely eliminate those intrusive thoughts or that dark feeling that sometimes washes over me. However, I have enough willpower to stop it from totally encapsulating me. Still, it never made sense as to why a kid falling off of a skateboard was the catalyst for this promise. How could something so simple have that much of an impact on me? It doesn’t make sense. Life doesn’t make sense. These leaves don’t make any sense. I’ve been doing too much thinking and not enough raking. “Is that my rake?” I looked up from the colors of autumn to a familiar face of a stranger. “I don’t know too many people with a light blue rake so I just thought it might be mine.” “It is...” I didn’t know what else to say. “Did I leave it out?” “No. Your door was unlocked.” “...” “...” I didn’t know how to casually say I snuck into his house to borrow his rake. I knew this would be a weird conversation. “I was going to bring it back. I just didn’t have one and thought...you know...one of my neighbors must have one...so...” “So you stole one out of my house?” “Borrowed.” “I always thought you were a little strange but I can’t argue with logic.” “Logic?” “Yea, what you did makes sense. I’d prefer if you didn’t do it again,” he laughed “but I’m not upset. Maybe next time you can ask me to use it.” “Right.” “Also maybe you can stick around and chat for a bit. This isn’t exactly how most first conversations go.” “Right.” I failed at doing a light laugh and made a weird noise instead. “Okay then. Just bring it back whenever you’re finished.” He went off into the apartment. That went better than I expected. I reached into my pocket to check what time it was because he shouldn’t have gotten home this early. The spoon was gone.


One hand to the mirror, as if placating the glass for the intrusion, you carefully prod the bruise on your cheek. Briefly, you wonder if you can truly cover it up with a mere smattering of Foundation. Your hand pauses, gently probing the purpled skin. It is a Coat of Arms, you realise. A Crest. A Crest crafted of darkened lilac hues, blooming like an oxbow lake over your freckles. Perhaps your freckles are the reason he did this. After all, you’ve never liked them either. The mirror offers you a skeleton girl with sunken cheekbones crowned by sallow hair. Dishwater red, if you’re not mistaken. As if someone has poured raspberry jelly down the sink. Looking down, you spit blood into a tissue which rests atop the toilet seat. It isn’t so bad, you tell yourself. The bruise is your symbol. Your badge of honour. No, you realise as you hear him storming through the kitchen, screaming your name. It is evidence. It is a reminder, the click of your phone as it tells you to visit a friend, an enemy, your Mother, anyone. Anyone at all. Ducking your head, you reach for the hoodie which hangs in spectral blue on the back of the bathroom door. You slip it over your head. There is no honour in this. No medal will be given if you make it through the next ten years. You cannot dodge. You cannot move. You tiptoe over the carpet, as if treading on blown glass. Most days, you barely have the time to speak, let alone breathe. Your thoughts bunch like an over-crowded locomotive at a living museum. You smile. The Black Country Museum. The day when he took your hand and led you around each wonder, a smile on his face. A smile wide enough to match the new cut on your neck from where the plate smashed the night before. Now, it is covered with a butterfly plaster. Somehow, you can still see it. Peeling back the collar of your blouse, as if trying to wave. He’s moving downstairs. You hear him, each step like a rogue pendulum swinging into the side of your skull. Inside, your organs shiver, seem to rattle your bones. Your entire body is a sheet on the washing line, torn by the wind. Eagerly, you prod the bruise again. Pain flushes up into your forehead. A reminder. A stark, bright purple and black reminder. You think of your wardrobe, where your clothes are ripped at the seams. Where your summer dress is scrunched at the back, resting languidly on a coat hanger. It is still splattered with mud from where you fell. Where he pushed you. You can’t remove it yet, can’t put it in the wash. You can’t. But there is something you can do. At first, you balk at the prospect. You stare at the ghoul in the mirror, wishing your reflection would reach out its hand and pull you into the glass. The bruise on your cheek rears it head. You know what you must do. “Where the hell is dinner? Is the oven on? Get me a beer!” You hear him shrieking from the kitchen table. You wait. Only for a few seconds. But you wait them out. “Forget it. I’m heading out. Useless,” he’s shouting. A moment later, the door slams. You are alone. In front of you, the mirror flashes, illuminating your purpled cheeks. His hand, behind you. His skin smacking against your jaw. No, you realise. You are never alone. Half-stumbling, you fumble for the bathroom door. Emerge onto the landing, where the salted caramel carpet is almost slippery beneath your toes. You manage to make it to the wardrobe, where you yank out a suitcase. You packed it two months ago, the third time you decided you wanted to leave. It has remained packed ever since, sitting in the dark. Waiting to be used. Slowly, you lift it out of the blackness. It is surprisingly light, and it is Atlantic blue - almost anthracite. Plain, no stickers. Your sister is the one who loves coating objects in geographically themed posters. The wheels are cleaned; it has never been used before. Snagging a coat from the edge of the bed, you begin to lug the suitcase downstairs. Your heart jostles against your lungs, your ribcage, waiting for him to return with his face flushed from beer and his fists hungry for your skin. When the kitchen remains a cemetery of empty corkboard, you rush to the back door. You do not bother to close it behind you. The outdoors hits you like a feather - soft but crammed with textures. The summer breeze seems to whistle through your ears. A ring of bells, trying to blind you. You stagger away from the semi-detached, taking the back roads through the park to the train station. The suitcase drags behind you like an anchor, pulling you all the way back, back to the house. Back to him. A lump in your throat, you keep walking. Sliding your hand into you coat pocket, you yank out the address. The paper is gnarled, almost crusty from the time you threw it out into the rain. But the address remains readable. She told you to visit, but you kept making excuses. Reasons why you wanted to avoid stepping back into her life. Why else had you traded her love for something which was meant to be akin to love but became twisted and wrong? The train station is an angular rectangle constructed of red metal beams coveting glass walls. The doors are automatic, swallowing you as you drag your suitcase onto the tiles. You do your best to hide your face in your coat collar, but the ticket officers still offer you odd stares as you shuffle through to the platform. Your train is on Platform Six, right at the bottom of the staircase, next to a sandwich shop. Your stomach rumbles, but you ignore it. You don’t have time. Besides, you know if you eat now, the food won’t remain in your stomach for long. The train arrives late, so you know that this time, leaving isn’t a dream. Dragging your suitcase onto the nearest carriage winds you instantly and you flounder like a fish in a desert before rushing for a chair. The seats are hard, not plush. The cushions seem to dig into your spine. You look around, wide eyed. Expect to see him coursing through the aisle, hands crushing the foldable arm rests in his wake. Even the Conductor’s voice seems to scream for you to return home. You try to close your eyes, to sleep the journey away. After half an hour of unfit full shuffling, you remain awake, staring at the countryside as it flashes by in tufts of green. Little lambs, bouncing away, unaware of the horrors which will befall their brothers and sisters. Breathing hard, you return to the past. To your destination - the little redbrick house on the street corner, near the bookshop where you grew up, a little girl with pigtails, jumping in puddles on a drizzly April afternoon. It isn’t raining when the train stops. Instead, the sun remains pulsing like a heartbeat in the sky. Perhaps it’s yours. You always wondered where that pesky organ went. Carefully, you manage to stand for long enough to lug the suitcase out onto the platform. This station seems plastic, as if it’s made of Lego. You stumble to a bench and sit for a few minutes to watch the train leave. It slithers out of the station in snake-like serpentine. Twenty minutes later, your drag your suitcase up the steps, keeping to the left as the yellow lines dictate. Soon enough, you emerge into the spitting smog. Cars line each side of the pavement outside the station - red Ford Fiesta’s, black Skoda’s, orange Kia’s. The houses are a mixture of bungalows with manicured gardens, crowned with detached terraces, some sporting cherubs spouting fountain water. You know the address off by heart by the time you pull the suitcase across the road to the main street. You head up a set of stone steps, the case a led weight on your arm. Around a corner, you nearly stumble over the pavement. Around another corner and it’s there. A small semi-detached, the one near the bookstore. The driveway has been partially eaten by succulents. You knock on the door and step back. For a moment, you hear scuffling through the letterbox. The door is opened by a small woman who should not be your Mother. She is almost weightless, with hollowed cheekbones. She is not your Mother. A ghost of your Mother, perhaps. But her skin is peppered with bruises. “Who the hell is that at the door?” You jump, and a large man with a scruffy beard emerges from the darkened hallway. Your Mother seems to shrink when he appears. “Hello,” you manage to grind out of your throat. The man sneers, using the entirety of his upper lip, like a horse. He touches your Mother’s arm, which is bruised beneath her semi-transparent blouse. Your Mother flinches. Your eyes widen and you understand. Folie à deux, you think. A madness shared by two. After all, bruises are the Family Crest. “Sorry,” you say. “Wrong address”. You turn from the door without making eye-contact. Your Mother doesn’t speak and the man only spits at your back, muttering something under his breath. Suitcase in hand, you return to the station.


It was the largest bank on the outskirts of Nashville, TN, a man was standing just inside the men’s room; he was thinking about what he had to do in the next few hours as he took a deep breath and stepped out into the wide hallway. He needed to get in and out as quickly as possible, and thought to himself, this was one town he certainly was not going to miss! The past decade had not been kind to him, he had been unemployed for years and was still in mourning, even though it had happened seven and a half years ago, it felt like he had lost the one person he loved the most in this world, just yesterday. He wore a very broad, ragged, floor length brown coat that was too big and outdated for him, but he didn’t care, it felt good and it was perfect for what he had to do that day. People on the street stared and looked down on him, they found his coat ugly and they pitied him for being poor and plainly destitute. But for those who criticized and made fun of him, mostly during his adolescence and school aged years, they would have been astonished to realize he was a kind, giving and gentle person. He had deliberately chosen this coat because of its large deep pockets, there was a hole in the left pocket, and so he kept his notepad and pencil neatly tucked away in the pocket on his right side. He noticed a small stuffed teddy bear lounging lazily on a settee in the sitting area as he walked slowly through the lobby, and randomly thought how odd it looked, so forlorn and in want of its owner who must have left it unknowingly behind; he silently reprimanded himself to remain focused as he walked up to the first available teller in the bank lobby. He was met by a woman whose nametag beamed in bright yellow letters, ‘Hi! My name is Mary, How can I help you?’ which he thought was the perfect name and tag color for her as he thought she looked just like a sunflower in full bloom, as he handed her the note he had written earlier that morning. As she read his note, her eyes grew wide as she looked from the note back to the man standing in front of her and then back to the note again. While trying to decipher it, Mary slowly became aware of a faint hissing sound, she looked around to see where it was coming from, and she noticed the air conditioning vent just behind her station was emitting something quite out of the ordinary. The smoke slowly drifted out in tiny little swirls, it was so faint, she nearly missed it, she could hardly make out what it was at first, then realized in horror as a pungent odor began to spread throughout the room. The man, seemingly unaware of her distress, motioned for his note back; it was at that moment he noticed the look of denial or could it be recognition on her face and for a brief moment, he showed his first sign of genuine concern. As quickly as it had appeared, it vanished and he looked back at Mary, his face stoic once again. The alarm was now going off, it was like a coarse, shredded needle raking over a vinyl ‘spinning out of control’ record, making it sound like skewered animals being charred alive, over an open fire pit; this is how the radio newscast would word it later on, as the man was oblivious to the deafening shrill noise, he was patiently waiting for Mary to hand him back his note. As people started running and screaming in every direction around him, he didn’t move. He didn’t seem to care, all he wanted to do was keep staring at Mary; she was yelling at him, or so he thought, or was she warning him? He wasn’t sure, as his vision was slowly fading, there was no noise at all, and everything was going black as he fought to stay conscious, he slid in slow motion down the counter into a small bundled heap within his very large coat. His head hit the marble floor with a crack and his eyes flew open, this time he was going to watch ... He could see the fear reaching the eyes of patrons and bank workers nearby, they knew something terrible was happening as they started running for the exit door. A woman stopped and blood was oozing from her mouth as she fell face first down that perfectly manicured marble staircase he had admired when he entered the building over two hours ago. People who were running began passing out all around him, some even falling on him. Men and women alike were vomiting everywhere; others were turning black with blood pouring out of their ears and noses, dying right in front of him. His last recollection was someone running towards him with a club in hand, it was the guard he had seen earlier when he entered the bank that morning. He whimpered and tried to move out of the way as the guard raised the club over him. This enraged the guard and he winced as the club struck him hard, he tried to scream, but nothing came out, he was unable to get away from this man. The beating continued and through a deep haze, he thought he imagined Mary running up behind the guard as she tried to stop him, but as the last strike came to his head, the man blacked out. He awoke one last time to an old radio newscast talking about the bank ordeal and announcing that no one had made it out of the bank alive that day, included in the fatalities was a bank-teller who left behind a husband and infant son, his heart wrenched and he screamed from the depths of his soul. Then he faded for the last time into a welcomed darkness. ... The boy was jostled awake as he bounced off the back seat where he had been fast asleep, landing onto the floor of the old 1984 Chevrolet Caprice Station Wagon that his dad was driving and he bolted straight up! He looked around frantically and slithered back into his seat, his thoughts on that same nightmare he had again. He remembered the bank, the bank-teller, her trying to save him and wondered what happened to the note and to the guard that had been beating him and pretty much wondered what it all meant? Somewhere deep inside of him, he recalled hearing the hazy radio announcement, his vision instantly blurring due to the huge teardrops that had rimmed around his tired eyes, eventually burning down his cheeks; here he was, alive and breathing! It was just he and his dad now; he had just turned 8 years old and was way too young to be having these awful nightmares. The car was packed with the little bit of belongings they owned and they were moving out of Tennessee and heading to Arkansas to live with his grandparents until his dad was able to find a job and get back on his feet. He didn’t know how long they’d been driving on this long lonely road, but he was really sore and his head ached with a familiar bludgeoning pain. When they stopped for the night, he pulled out his ratty garbage bag that he kept what little clothes he owned in, as he untied the knots and opened it up, an old brown coat fell to the ground. He peered into the left pocket where he faintly remembered a hole but the hole was not there and was utterly shocked at what he found. The pocket was lined with twenty, fifty and one hundred dollar bills, which he added up later, totaling to almost one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, he was simply and soundly stunned! When he looked in the right pocket, he found an old notepad and pencil, then felt another bulge, he couldn’t imagine what it could be. He felt along the seams and deep within the pocket he pulled out an antiquated stuffed teddy bear, it stared back at him and he could of sworn he saw a tug of a smile within that furry part of his mouth and that knowing look, like he had been waiting a very long time to be found. That’s when it all came rushing back to him... The boy smiled in faint recognition. Epilogue He was in the backseat again, they were driving west on Interstate 40, with Nashville miles behind them now. His dad looked back and motioned to his son in sign language to see if he was okay, and he motioned back, “Yes, I’m fine, dad”.


KEYNOTE CATASTROPHE J.D. McDonald Shortly after I published my book on raising quail, I was invited to be the keynote speaker at a Bird Club. The event took place in a town located four hours' drive from my home. Since we were unfamiliar with the city, Karen, the club's representative, suggested we meet early at a local restaurant near the main highway. She invited us to grab dinner there and then follow her to the event. Karen said that the club would cover the cost of dinner for my husband and me before the meeting. Because Karen was in the process of moving to a new home, she told us to scan the parking lot when we arrived and look for a white pickup truck loaded with various household items. She also mentioned that if we ran late, she might go into the restaurant and secure a table for us. In that case, we should look for a "Mutt and Jeff" pair, explaining that she is very short and would be with another club member, Jane, who is exceptionally tall and walks with a cane. Finding them sounded simple. Since it was a long trip and we weren't sure of the exact location of the restaurant, we left earlier than necessary. As it turned out, we needn't have worried; the restaurant was easy to find. We arrived at 5 p.m., leaving us thirty minutes before our 5:30 p.m. meeting. At 5:15 p.m., we noticed a tall, solitary woman using a cane making her way toward the restaurant door. It seemed like she was looking for someone, so we quickly got out of the car and hurried toward her. Excited and a bit anxious, we asked, "Are you Jane?" She matter-of-factly told us she wasn't Jane. Apparently, our sudden, unexpected approach panicked her a bit because she lifted her cane slightly off the ground in a defensive manner. We apologized and returned to our vehicle. We sat there, craning our necks in all directions, searching for our hostess, until finally, at six o'clock, a white pickup truck struggling under the weight of what seemed to be an entire household of boxes and furniture raced wildly into the parking lot. A short woman burst from the driver's side and ran toward the restaurant. Catching up to her, we confirmed it was Karen The other club member, Jane, the tall lady with the cane, was a no-show. We enjoyed a nice dinner, although it was rushed due to our late start. After dessert and coffee, Karen handed the waiter a credit card to pay the bill. Unfortunately, the waiter informed her that the restaurant didn't accept that card. Since it was Karen's only card and we wanted to avoid washing dishes to pay for our meal, we used our credit card instead. Karen was upset but mentioned that the club would send us a reimbursement check in a few days. As we stepped outside, Karen told us to follow her to the community center where the bird club was meeting for my speech. Despite the debit card glitch and the late start, we remained optimistic. However, that feeling waned when Karen drove out of the parking lot at mach-one speed, leaving us struggling to follow her through the dark streets of an unfamiliar city. Karen, an experienced rush hour driver, expertly navigated through traffic, weaving in and out of lanes and driving like the Tasmanian Devil. Her taillights blended in with the others, so we could only follow by catching occasional glimpses of her massive load of belongings. Unfortunately, we lost sight of her when a large truck cut us off, and we were lost. After twisting through a maze of random turns and doubling back several times, we found the community center by sheer luck. We rushed through the door in a frenzy at 7:15, just fifteen minutes before my talk was scheduled to begin. Surprisingly, Karen appeared unfazed by losing us in traffic. She was sipping coffee and calmly chatting with club members. On the other hand, my husband and I felt like we had just taken part in a high-speed car chase. Karen smiled warmly when she saw us arrive and introduced us to the club president and secretary. They informed us that the D.V.D. Player I would be using for my presentation was not working. However, they assured me they had called for a backup unit, which would arrive in time for my talk. Karen then took the D.V.D. I brought and placed it on the old player. It contained a slide show of the quail I would be discussing. By 8:00 p.m., the backup unit had yet to arrive, and people were restless. Maybe it was my nerves, but I sensed a massive walk-out was about to happen. Even though I was discussing quail, the theme for that night's meeting was "Bring your Parrot." Every member had their parrot with them, so there was an overwhelming crescendo of parrot caws and screeches followed by flapping wings and loose flying feathers. Occasionally, a rebellious parrot would leave its owner's shoulder and fly crazily about the room. The commotion caused by the flying birds and the overwhelming din of the club members as they chatted with each other and with their birds was unsettling. The player had not arrived by 8:15, so the club president decided to start the scheduled raffle. This caught the club members attention for a while, but I grew increasingly apprehensive and nervous with each passing minute. The new equipment finally arrived at 8:30 p.m. It was delivered by the club president's son, who seemed to be in his early twenties. He quickly dropped it off and left without setting it up. The arrival of the equipment briefly relieved some of my stress. I wanted to give my talk and go home. I'd had enough chaos for one evening. But there was yet another delay. As the minutes ticked by, it became increasingly clear that no one was familiar with the new equipment. I watched as several people attempted to connect various cables, none of which fit. At this point, I had a pounding headache and a dry mouth; the precursor to a migraine. Amidst this chaos, the president took the stage, praising my expertise with quail. It was clear he was stalling. Then, a voice from the crowd announced that the projector was finally ready. The president thrust the microphone into my hand, and I was on stage. Weak applause went up from the weary and restless group, and I thanked them for asking me to participate in their club meeting. For my introduction, a photo from my D.V.D. showing a basket of baby quail was supposed to appear on the large screen behind me; it didn't. Instead, a loud scream from the speakers filled the room, and scenes of a gruesome horror movie appeared. It was more than I could handle. All the blood rushed to my head, and I had to grasp the podium to keep my legs from buckling. I croaked, "That's not my D.V.D.! It's not mine!" Could anything else go wrong? Of course, it could. The man operating the machine couldn't figure out how to shut it off until it was too late--much, much too late. The club members saw about two minutes of the grotesque show , that to me felt a lifetime. The young man who delivered the projector must have been watching that movie when asked to deliver the equipment to the club. Either he forgot to remove it, or it was his way of getting back at them for making him give up his evening's entertainment. I suspect the latter; that would explain his leaving in a hurry and not setting it up. Before the clamoring stopped, someone crept on stage and whispered, "I know we scheduled you for an hour, but can you cut it to thirty minutes or less?" I wanted to make it a lot less. I wanted to leave right then, but I tried to be stoic. As if all that had gone wrong that evening wasn't enough, the stress and my allergy to parrot dander triggered a minor asthma attack, and I could barely breathe, let alone talk. My voice vibrated so badly that it sounded like I was trying to speak while roller skating over a washboard sidewalk. Someone handed me a tiny paper cup of water, which, with my shaking hand, I managed to spill over my notes, rendering them useless. Looking back, I'm still unsure what I said during the talk; it felt like I was babbling and rambling. I stumbled through it without the aid of the slide show presentation and rushed off the stage in less than fifteen minutes. A few days later, I received an email from the club apologizing for the chaos and inviting me to speak again in two months. Unfortunately, I am busy that night, whatever night it might be. My days of public speaking are over for good.


I Fall With the Rain (gamma) (Intercepted Communique routed to Colonel Herbert Rhodes, Third Fleet) It’s from the edges of things I think. Yeats said the center is where it falls apart, but I disagree to a point. I think the center is where the rot begins. The center loses cohesion sure, but generations of aging infrastructure can hold the shape of the ancient heart long after that heart has died. People carry on carrying on in the center, sometimes unaware that they live their lives in the ventricles of a vast dying (or already dead) organ. Maybe on some level they are aware, some nagging doubt hanging on the periphery of their consciousness; on the edge of their awareness. The edge of awareness. Taking the analogy forward, when the body begins to die, it conserves it’s resources in the core, the trunk. Blood flow, oxygen, heat is retained as long as possible in the core, and the periphery is starved. The fingers, the toes, and eventually closer and closer towards this core resources are starved as this body mercilessly casts off every unnecessary attachment in a desperate stalling tactic of what may be inevitable. The body conserves what it can in the core, the heart and mind, in hopes that it will survive. There may be loss of those distant limbs, but the being will survive. But when the core is already dead. Dead isn’t the right word, rotten isn’t either. Here is where the metaphor collapses. Dead is dead, there is nothing for this core to salvage. This hypothetical creature has nothing to save. What of madness, then? What if the intellect of this living being is fundamentally insane? What if the mind is chemically alive, but consciously (as far as we can understand the conscious) has flat-lined? The infrastructure remains and the commuters commute and the consumers consume as they have for generations unaware (except from the edge of their awareness perhaps?) that the heart or the mind has long since ceased to be a properly functioning center of order and progression. What of the periphery? The peripheral fingers and toes. What of the edges of things? Does the disparate realms of the edges continue on unaware that the core has collapsed into madness? The blood remains flowing, the oxygen content remains as rich as ever, do these extremities carry on unaffected? I can only assume that the fingers remained well nourished as the mind drove them to write the same five words on a wall of a distant lunar mining station over and over with no readily apparent sense. But proof that the fingers are sometimes consumed stood before me today as I surveyed the cell where the second set of five words were written thousands of times. We ascend with the light. I fall with the rain, we ascend with the light. A cyclical process. These ten words seem to encapsulate the simple to understand water cycle. Condensation, precipitation, evaporation, condensation, ad infinitum. The cool air causes the water vapor to form into larger molecules of water, eventually falling to the surface as rain. The rain forms rivulets that feed into streams that feed into rivers that feed into oceans. The surface of the ocean is heated by the dissipation of the clouds and the exposure to the sun, to the light. The water is heated to the point of evaporation, the vapor rises into the sky. The process repeats. The process unending. We ascend with the light. It was what had been written in his cell. These five words written over and over again with the rubbery digital crayon, (at least to begin with) that he had been given to occupy what remained of his mind here at the institute. The words had begun on the sheets of data flimsy provided, but once those were covered, they had moved on to the floor, the walls, the edges of the sleeping palette and portions of the ceiling that I assume was as far as he could reach. He was dedicated to his craft and to his message. The crayon had provided enough of a tool to provide for his creative endeavor, for a while. What remained of the inmate’s fingers evidenced the fact that the crayon hadn’t kept up with the needs of his driven mind. The core, in it’s madness, sometimes destroys the peripheral limbs, the edges of it’s being to provide whatever sustenance the diseased mind is demanding. The edges begin to crumble, and are worn away. The edges begin to die. Maybe the edges always eventually die whether the end comes from within or from without. Frostbite cause the body to conserve the core, and starving the limbs. Madness consumes the mind, leaving the limbs, and eventually the body in it’s entirety, driven to destruction as they are fed into this internal consumption. Maybe it’s late. Maybe I need to take a stress pill and get some sleep. I’m worried though, Colonel. I’m not one typically prone to see dire visions in my synthetea or throw salt over my shoulder should I spill a few grains, but something about these words leave me feeling cold. Look at how I’ve waxed on about collapsing societies and dying processes! What for God’s sake makes that come to mind as I’m standing in an inmate’s cell, rich with the coppery smell of drying blood and corruption? Corruption and obfuscation. What has caused that report from that stringer pilot to be buried? Given this second line, coupled with what was written on the walls of Tlalocan, what was broadcast to the fleet ships, seems to be a simple explanation of a simple hydrologic process. What does the water cycle have to do with death and the dying process and the mechanics of madness? The mechanics of madness. I think after I wrap the autopsy files and the official report of the inmate up and process it into the core data banks, (and I think I’ll delete record of this file in all other databases; I don’t know why, but that feels prudent at this juncture), I’m going to step outside and have a smoke. It’s raining, but I can deal with that; I brought my jacket to the office today. - Dr.


“At the roundabout, take the second exit.” “Shut the fuck up Siri!” He screamed. “You’ve been driving us around in circles through this shit hole of a town for the last twenty minutes, for Christ sake!” He continued. I have never really seen him this angry, this upset. Usually he’s the cool, calm and collected head and I’m always the worry-wart. But today, today he’s just... off. Off more than one would expect to be off on a day like today. “Turn left down Macquarie lane and then make a U-turn” Siri blurts out smugly. “Jesus H Fucking Christ” he muttered under his breath. “This bitch, I thought computers are smart.” “It’s ok Duncan. Don’t rush, we will get there when we get there.” I replied, trying my best to calm him down with a soft tone. “Matilda, we only have one chance for this. And these constant misdirections and mixed with all the fucking traffic. It’s doing my head in, love” he retorted, trying his best to stay calm. But I can sense the frustration. He wants to scream. “Continue along Macquarie lane 800 meters, then turn left down Yakabindi Drive.” “I hate this city. I hate this fucking place so much.” He sulked. The fiery red anger and frustration in his voice now doused out, turning blue, I swear he could burst into tears at any moment. “It will be ok darling. We have plenty of time still. We will get there in-time. Try not to stress too much.” My words go in one ear and out the other. He just nods and replies “yes dear. Yes dear”. I know it has been, it still is, a stressful day. But I don’t like seeing him like this. I never see him like this. Today, of all days, has broken him. Of any day for him to be like this, this would have to be the worst one to choose. I just wanted to spend the day with my husband, my high school sweetheart. I wanted today, more so than any other other day we’ve had together, to be just us, just good. Just perfect. “Slow down baby, there’s no need to drive so quick.” I pleaded with him after I feel the car speeding faster and faster. “We can’t be late Matilda. And the police aren’t going to do anything today. We will be fine as long as all these stupid shit heads stay out of the way.” He snarled back. “Baby please, I don’t like this, please slow down” I begged once more, but it seemed to fall on deaf ears, as he now swerved recklessly around caravans and other SUVs travelling to slow for his liking. I gripped the seat tighter and push my feet against the footwell, as if I’ve magically got a second break peddle on my side of the car, ready to slam down at the first sign sign of trouble. We seem to have left the suburbs now, no longer are there black roofed houses with empty carports and wide open front doors, but large pine forests now zooming past. “Finally, the open road sweetheart. We should be able to make it as long as every other idiot is behind us. Next stop Mt Eliza, and back to lake Nunnabindi. It will be perfect babe. I promise”. I faked a smile but kept hold of the seat firmly. We were both faking it really, in our own way. As nothing about today was perfect. How could it be? We would have driven another hour, maybe two, but time honestly doesn’t matter anymore so I can’t be sure. Duncan seems to have calmed down now. His fingers no longer white knuckled gripping the wheel. I also calmed, no longer were my feet pushed to the end of the floor well, my hand now gently resting on his forearm. I had time to watch the scenery rush past. The pine forest is truly a beautiful place. Fresh, clean. Hours passed by, only the hum of the engine and the occasional sigh or yawn from Duncan broke the silence. I watched him, as he concentrated on the road, as his mind raced with thoughts I could only guess. I saw the man I married ten years ago. I saw the cheeky teen I met in high school. He may have greying hair and a few wrinkles. But I saw him. I smiled. He remained blissfully unaware of my gaze. But that just made me smile more. “Duncan, baby” I said softly. “Yeah, Tilly” he smiled back at me, his eyes never once leaving the road “I love you” I whispered. “I love you too, baby”. I unbuckled my seatbelt, it was always getting jammed, so I could lean over and give him a peck on the cheek. He smiled and turned his head to me. “I’m sorry baby. I’m sorry about how I acted earlier. I love you” I could hear the hurt in his voice. I know him, I know that’s not who he is. I know it’s a sincere apology. The car jolted violently as I was leaning over the Centre console. It swerved violently to the right. “Oh fuck!” We both screamed. A few seconds of hard bumps, a loud bang and crash and suddenly my world spin upside down. Thrown from the vehicle, with a stabbing pain in my shoulder. My body tumbled across a grass field until coming to a painful stop. Dazed I turned my head from left to right, searching for Duncan. I struggled to move. My arms in searing pain, my legs unable to move. To the left I could see our car, wrapped around a tree, I shot out of the front windscreen and flew at least 10..20 meters? I have no idea. “DUNCAN” I croaked. My voice course and low. “DUNCAN”, tears streaming down my cheeks. I got no reply. All I could hear were the cicadas. And an occasional gust of wind. “DUNCAN, BABY. Please” I bellowed one last time. And again, no answer. I turned my head once more. I gazed up. Directly up, to what we have all been avoiding for the last few days. The bright blue summer sky transformed into a terrifying canvas of chaos. As if the devil was inspired by Claude Monet himself, but needed to one-up him to prove a point. The blue replaced by dazzling reds, yellows and orange. A blazing, crackling tail left in its wake. It was just now I noticed the eerie, ominous glow that has overtaken the ground. It was closer than we realised. My heart cried out to me “find Duncan”. But I lay there helpless. Frightened and alone. Transfix by the spectacle above, I couldn’t tell if it was paralysis or some primal fear keeping me from standing up and finding my husband. But either way, I couldn’t move. “Duncan” I croaked once more. I realised as I lay on the grass, and with my gaze fixed firmly on the horrifying spectacle above. I was never going to see Duncan again. And as tears mingled with the dust on my cheeks, I whisper his name one last time, a desperate plea lost in the chaos of the devil above. The hand never to be held again. The final kiss we will never have. One last embrace, That last day that never came.


It was a normal day at Apple Wood High, the football team was practicing, the cheerleaders were cheering, the mean girls were gossiping and Josh was talking away like he always did. “Derek, are you listening to me,” he says. I nod, all I can think of is the long jump team. No one knows that I want to be an olympic long jumper, My parents want me to be some world’s best doctor. They put me in a junior doctors camp until I was in the seventh grade. I secretly wanted to be a long jumper since I was a little boy. I knew if I became a long jumper my parents would be disappointed. Josh was still talking about his own problems but I had a big problem coming, this year was the year we had to pick our career choice. Josh wants to be a dancer and has set everything to be one but now I am in trouble. We have to figure out where we are headed in less than six months. Im am a very good long jumper, I learned from school, my parents never put me in any sports so this was my only option. My friend Delilah is a long jumper, and is on the jr.long jumping team, and after school I stay and practice with her and her team . It is not like I am on the team or anything it is just so I can see if this is what I want to do. The problem here is that I want to be a professional long jumper, when you run so fast before jumping with that fierce determination and jump like it is life or death. The refreshment you breathe in that fresh skt air for a split second, then you charge full speed towards the other side of the sand pit. The adrenaline running through your body, your feet launching up, your arms flailing in the wind. After that, the make or break landing at the end, that is what I want to do. By this time I somehow managed to get to math class, Mrs.Smith looked mad, but I wasn’t late. I was actually a minute early. I sat down, most of the class was here except for Hanna, the suck up. I barely made it through math, the picking between long jumping or being a doctor was bugging me too much. I knew the only way was if I got the best of both worlds. That meant I was going to volunteer at the hospital as a doctor's assistant and see how the doctors worked, and I would sign up for the long jumping team. This is the only way that I could see which one I liked better. My heart beating so fast I was afraid others could hear it, I went to the sign-up sheet for the long jumping team tryouts. With shaking hands I wrote my name, “Derek Thomas”. Then I went to the hospital to see if they were hiring volunteers. I got lucky because there was one spot available. I took it and this plan was in action. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Today was my first day at the hospital. My straight blond hair was pulled back and smoothed, my blue eyes sparkled, my slim body looked good in the scrubs. Inside though I was empty, this wasn’t what I wanted to be, right when I was thinking that my mom walks in. “oh you look so handsome, you were meant to be a doctor,” she says. I smile, but inside I want to tell her that I am just doing this for her and that I don't want to do this. The day goes by awful, being a doctor is busy and stressful and chaotic and a complete mess. I don’t want to come next week but I have to and four more times after that. I force myself to think that it will be fine and maybe it will get better. Even though I know it won’t be “better”. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In two minutes I have my first practice with the team. I get ready in the change room, my blond hair is messy, my uniform makes me look a little chubby, my eyes don’t sparkle, they are ready and focused. Inside though I am feeling the best, I feel like I fit in. Josh walks in. “good luck, you will do great!” he says. I punched him on the arm lightly and said thanks. I told Josh about what I was doing the day before, my terrible day at the hospital. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Four dreadful weeks volunteering at the hospital, I knew I didn't want to become a doctor. It isn’t that easy, I have to tell my mom and dad that their son, who was raised to be a doctor, does not want to be one. My mom is an extraordinary surgeon, she is the sweetest person I know, she believes in me the most and she wanted me to follow in her footsteps but that dream will only be a dream. My dad is a plastic surgeon who is ranked in the “Top 5 extraordinary plastic surgeons.” There is another problem that Josh reminds me of while he rambles on. I have a long jump contest next Saturday and I need parents' consent to go. When I reach the door of my house, I take a deep breath and open the door. My mom and dad both don’t have work today. I go inside to clean up and sit down in the living room with my parents. I say “ I know you guys want me to be a doctor and you know I have been volunteering at the hospital.” “Yes sweetheart we know this, what is wrong,” my mom says. “I don’t want to be a doctor!” I blurted out. My mom and dad gasp. They look like I told them Someone died. They look upset, sad, frustrated, angry, shocked, and disappointed. Oh why did I blurt that out, oh why, I think to myself. My mom ignores what I say and says “ dinners ready.” We all get up and go to the dinner table. I set the table and we start to eat, it is dead silent. That is when I blurt out, “ I want to be a long jumper, I have been training at school and I have a contest next Saturday. I need you to sign a permission slip.” My dad stared at me and said “okay, after dinner I will sign it.” I smile and say “ Thank you so much. You can come if you want.” I look at my mom who is silently eating, looking down on her plate. I sigh and put my plate in the sink and go up to my room. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It is saturday morning and I am headed for practice before the competition. Practice was tiring and very long. I got a new uniform for the competition, I put it on, it was fitting, the colours made my eyes stand out. I got to the competition. I knew Josh was going to come and I also knew my parents wouldn’t show, but that was okay. I got warmed up and got ready to start. I was ready to start running, when I took a glance at the audience and I saw my parents, I smiled and sprinted. I ran so fast that my legs burned, and then I jumped so high that I could almost see the birds eyes. I failed my arms and then landed,I looked up at the scoreboard, while catching my breath and I had won, I had won. I looked at the audience, my mom and dad were cheering for me. I got home and my parents were waiting for me. They gave me a big hug and said “we are very, very proud of you.” They also said that they are going to support me. I was so happy, I smiled then said “Thank you.” I was happy and grateful. Now I am a world class long jumper, and I am headed to the Olympics.


So, Neomi. What can you tell us about the voyage? It was nothing special. Just a week aboard a transport vessel. I think we where shipping cardiac bulbs, but i don't know for sure. The crisis... Now that i said it out loud i realize how prophetic that names is. Anyway, the crisis was an old junky, but it was still pretty reliable. The AI running the ship was an old Atalanta that loved dad jokes. Yeah, that serious, no nonsense attitude of most AI is just in the newer software. The crew considered of myself, the technician, the amazing captain Wannerham and a cranky pitface called Sulfur Mckaline. And how did it begin? With a voice in our heads. A strange, calm voice. "System error detected, please run diagnostics" There is only one thing that talks in your head. The warp drive. F*cking magic. Of course everyone looked at me, so i floated over to the engine room. The... Most people have never seen a prometheus alcubierre drive before. Could you discribe it? I'm an engineer, not a wizard. I, sorry, now one knows how those deathtraps work. That's true, but can you discribe what it looked like. I'll try. It's basically a big, black ball. In front of it, there are these glowing, flying lines that form statistics, pie charts and numbers. No idea what any of them mean. Around the ball there are also these wheels with glowing edges. That's how I saw something was wrong What was wrong? The top right wheel was shacking. Now, normally you can just look at the perfect satisfying motions, but this was going back and forth and wiggling. Amongst the holograms, there was also a small flashing pink light with some scribbles underneath. I just did what the voice had asked me and pushed the big holographic button that said "run system diagnostics" Suddenly, everything was flashing pink and droning sirens filled my ears, but only for a moment. And then? :( What? That's what the drive showed me. Al the holograms where gone, except for a big pink :( . In my mind i heard the voice again. Still completely calm. "Your machine has ran into a problem and needs to be repaired. We're collecting some error info, then we'll repair it for you. A technician is on there way" And how did you feel? Nervous. I moved like everything was made of nitroglycerin. From down the hall came the voice of the captain. "Everything still in one piece?" "No idea" i yelled back. I thought I would explode or something. Well... I didn't know what would happen. After a minute of just staying still there, i slowly moved to the bridge. At least I intended to, but i noticed something strange. The leak, right? I guess it was. I didn't look like a conventional leak though. The wheel that had been wiggling was now twitching. Faster than it could feasible move on It's own. Then it started growing and shrinking. Pulsating. Like it was breather or something. I don't have a better analog. If you've never seen what dark matter does... The pulsing spread to the other parts of the warp drive. That horrible sound began What sound? Like spacetime ripping at the seems. Like an organic version of radio noise. Like thousands of cthulhu hornets stuck in a jar. Like... The air shivered, rived and twitched. Everything shivered, rived and twitched. And you just stayed there? Oh no, that all happened in a split second. When it finally registered in my brain, i started booking it down the corridor, but that was hard. The corridor expanded and twisted and tumbled and went mad. Or i went mad. Who knows. When I finally made it out of that hellhole, i saw the captain, trying to figure out what was wrong. I just rounded the corner as a burst of quickly expanding, writhing shit was thrown out of the latch a had come from. Wannerham was a great captain, but only for simple travel. Not emergencies. He froze. I tried to drag him with me, but he wouldn't let go of the grip. (Long pause) Should we continue this another time? No... No, i want to get it out of my system. I eventually gave up. I know it's heartless, but i just didn't know what to do. So i left him there and draged myself to the cafeteria. Before I left, i just saw his limp body being torn apart. Now he was a part of the exploding and reassembling mess that was once the bowels of the ship. And what did you do then? I was afraid the oxygen might start leaking into outer space, so i grabbed a space suite and put it on. Stupidity kept me sane. "I was in control" I was never in controle of that situation. The engine room was at the bottom of the ships ass, so i went to the exact opposite room, the cockpit. And Sulfur and Atalanta? Atalanta was offline. As for Sulfur. No idea. Probably already dead. I wasn't going to check. As i floated into the big glass room, i could hear something exploding. It came sweaping through the halls. A bright burning. Right as the color shifting, twitching, tongues of flame shot out if the doorway, I heard the voice again, with the words that probably saved my life. "Temporal safe switch activated" i had no idea what it meant and prepared for the explosion. I opened my eyes and there it was, bright as the sun. Yet you survived. How? You see. The explosion never came. I'm losing you. It was there, but didn't come closer. It still moved, sure, but very, very slowly. Like those slow motion cameras. I couldn't believe it. I waited for my life to flash before my eyes... But nothing came. I couldn't move. Well, i could, just very very slowly. The only thing that happened fast was my mind. It must have been 5, 10 maybe 20 minutes, but it felt like an eternity. Just floating there. On one side, an eldritch abomination of flame and twitching rubble. On the other, a pane of glass shielding me from The horror of deep space. And how did you end up docking at the phobos space elevator? This isn't the ended of the insiedent. Oh no, far from it. Phobos was still 3 hours away, and the ship wasn't moving anymore. I couldn't do anything but wait. But i had forgotten about the technician. Wasn't that you? No, the other technician. Remember the pink screen of death. The voice had said "A technician is on their way" i think they arrived. I saw something coming through the flames. When the flames had consumed about half the room, i suddenly saw a white face, looking back at me. Then, at regular speed, the black cloud the head was attached to truw some black powder at the flames, which started retracting. It dove back into them, leaving a seemingly solid tunnel trough the fire. Then thousands of thin strings appeared between the lose parts of the ship. The thing came back and solidified a black, human arm, gave me a thumbs up, saluted me and disappeared. Disappeared? Yeah. I blinked and they where gone. And then? Time starded passing like usual again. The flames quickly retracted into the hallway. Then it was quiet. I managed to get Atalanta back online. Don't ask me how. She immediately scanned me and tried to liven the mood a little with a stupid pun. I don't even remember it. I was in shock. Catatonic maybe. I just got her to take me to the nearest colony. And you made it out unscathed. Mostly unscathed. (Neomi takes of her boot and puts her foot on the table) Oh god It's not as bad as it looks. For all you shittertens who are only listening, get a tv. But also, my foot and a bit of my leg is narld and warped like the smudge tool in photoshop. I can still walk on it, and it's working as intended. Just a friendly reminder of that one time i almost exploded. This story is from a worldbuilding project on r/operationbeagle.