#thefinishpiece

[thefinishpiece]

Stitches In Space

I am the threads of a stitch sailing across an open wound, when I make breaking wave on the shore of splintered flesh, do they sing of travels deep or do they whisper their traumas to sleep?

Lullabies for sailors of the skin, no stars to guide us just sores and scabs slabs of skeletal stone; When I look out onto the veins endless, interconnected membranes, nerves I see an inner galaxy and I weep for all those lost in the blood-soaked void of space.

[thefinishpiece]

Memories Of Self

Memories unsung, glitters in glass refracting from a point of nothing; Moments unstuck from their specialness each and every unique part of erased.

Memories blown to shape sparks of sound glistening and grayish— already fading already being made unreal, even in the exact moment they are made.

What do I remember of rain, sunshine? Days on lakes, nights under fireflies? Of faces I once recognized voices I once trusted, persons depersonalized places displaced; What do I remember of Space? Touch? If I could only feel it again I’d know for sure if it was ever real.

A figure in the mirage gazing back at me, a silhouette scene haze is all that remains of my memories; Gas and pain fragments of my life stains on a translucent frame waiting to evaporate.

What do I remember of myself? A frightened doll unsewn without a master to make me act—to make me real

In a storm the sky cleans itself— no more memories no more doubts holding it down, but the sky forgets who it is and the rain repeats all over again all over me, in retrospective shame.

But I can’t remember how to cry or how to sing.

Who I am cannot last.

[a poem by dilon zeres]

[thefinishpiece]

Make My Mind Up

|I|

What doesn’t kill you makes you wish you had been killed.

Even her hair was wincing as she spoke that. But her listeners were unaware. There was a sound elsewhere, a transient siren wailing in and out of audible seesaw. And then she laughed at the irony, her cigarette failing to stay in her lips, falling to the ground in carelessness.

Her friends were plastic but they were still friends—and in the eyes of the public, who could really cite the difference?

The unannotated life is not worth living.

Something her professor said once—or many times. She could not remember, at least not in that moment. She was too distracted by a scent of burning brick. There was a building nearby, ablaze in the autumn sun. It was an ironic cruelty to her. If only the building had held on for just a couple more months, when the heat of air would have frozen shut, it might have survived.

But spring rain was far gone and distance between seasons immeasurable to sitting brick. Theory versus Praxis. Concept of a building versus an Actual building burning down. Who has more merit?

“They build them too big these days. Too many people trying to live here. Too easy for everything to catch fire.”

Her friend said this without looking up from her screen, which seethed at her, while she adjusted the frolics of her hair and buttered her cheeks in fake blush. It was quite a talent to conversate and remodel yourself at the same time, all for the sake of advancing both your physical life and your digital one. Electricity crackling in identity-indemnity.

Another one of the friends scowled, “No, it’s the air. The planet is warming up. This is just the new reality.”

Same as the old one, Effy thought. But fake concern is fashionable these days, so she nodded, wondering where her cigarette had gone. Did it disappear? Burn out from ash to vapor?

Such a quandary to befall Effy, she secretly wished her philosophy professor was here to help, despite his arrogance and inappropriateness. But she scoffed. She already knew what he would say.

Who got off first? The Thumb or the Cigarette Lighter?

Detach all the parts and reassemble them. Not totally dissimilar to the process required to go through to rebuild that tower of dust next door. Effy sighed. They had been waiting in line forever.

The sky was so still and soothing. It should have been hot. Nay a cloud in sight yet the sun was not visible, and nothing was scalding in horrid heat. It was as though the day had taken the day off and let a cardboard cut-out of itself stand in its place.

Effy nodded. Yes, it was exactly like that—a diorama day.

“I’ll ask what the meaning to life is. Because that’s what everybody asks.”

Hen announced this to useless fanfare, an unresponsive audience hideously indifferent. Even her own friends, Effy and the other one, were totally nonchalant and undisturbed to craft a response.

You see, Hen had always been the boring friend, the mild one, never really understanding anything they went through, being so gullible and terrifically malleable, Effy and Foneface could have their way with her as a neat sycophant without worrying about upsetting whatever imaginary balance of power assembled between them. But unbeknownst to them, Hen was a kind and sorry person. She would never hurt anyone. Is it so wrong to be weak?

Weakness is in the eye of the beholder.

Vulnerability to one predator is poisonous skin to another. Tiny frog can kill giant snake—if the timing is right. Not to refer to Hen as a noxious creature. She was quite the opposite. Phonie could be very mean and viscous toward her sometimes. Effy was never like that. She did her best to stick up for her oily-fleshed friend, even if sometimes she became annoyed and fanged herself.

“Was that a joke?” Phonie snickered. “Hen, darling, if you ask anything you’ll bore the poor thing to tears.”

One time they were out in the night, in the guts of metropolis, all puffed up and skinned, searching for adventure in the form of partying, only to find a rather dead scene. So they decided upon going to an arthouse theater to get high and watch an opaque treat. The decision was between two particular film choices, which Effy and Phonie disagreed on. So, it was Hen assigned to the role of ultimate arbiter.

Both sides attempted to persuade the jury to their view. Phonie offered to assist Hen with her godawful bangs in exchange for a vote. To this, Hen grasped the tendrils of her hair, sheepishly, asking if they thought her hair was actually awful. I…I thought it looked fine. The person who cut it said it looked fine.

Phonie laughed at her. But Effy was stoic. She explained how Hen’s hair was neat as it is and how she did not have to worry about how she looked. That none of that matters anyway, unless you let it matter.

Then Effy wrapped her arm around Hen’s shoulder like a python gripping a branch, and inquired what deep in her heart was her true intent—which facetiously profound, pretentious film did she herself fancy to view. Hen, in pre-sob stage, sniffling and everything, quit clutching her hair and told Effy she would see whatever she wanted to see. Phonie rolled her plastic eyes. You always take her side.

And that is how it has always been. A battle between two superior extroverts, and their subterfuge against one another to manipulate their less inclined best friend to support either of their claims to power. Of course, just as Phonie claimed, Hen did have a tradition of legitimizing Effy’s crown more often than not—except in those times when Phonie managed to scare Hen in to servitude.

“Okie. Something decent then. What is the difference between ‘in to’ and ‘into’? I’ve always wondered that.” Hen queried.

“Is it ‘in to’ or ‘into’?! Does it matter? Why does intent and implication mean anything to you? Can’t things just be things and happen because they happen?” Phonie barked at her.

Effy grinned, something Phonie could not see because she was locked on that crystal ball in her hands, which she plodded her fingers upon precipitously. So Effy turned to Hen, and they both smiled at each other and silently giggled. Despite her aptitude for submissiveness, it was not as if Hen was not capable of inflicting grievance in subtle and sardonic ways. After all—how did they become friends?

The line moved forward like a lazy caterpillar. Sirens still blared in the background. Effy took out another cigarette. It had been an hour—or more.

An hour is nothing when you think about it. Evolution took millions of years to mold man from ooze—though it should have stopped at woman. The universe took billions of years to spark the first atoms and elements, with a few billion more to shape them into anything remarkable.

In a day there are twenty-four hours; in a year there are three-hundred-and-sixty-five days. Everything that is everything is nearly a trillion years aged. So equate that wine and when you realize how deep the red goes, you may find yourself wary of expecting longitude from an hour. Time only works when there is a lot of it.

But an hour waiting in line, doing nothing, among strangers you do not care about or maybe even despise, while the sky is blank, air stale, buildings burning, sirens crying, with friends like these—well, Effy was prepared to blast her brains out on the sidewalk, coloring drab gray in gorgeous gore.

And if love of self proved to be too overwhelming, then Effy considered at least blowing Phonie to pieces.

It is healthy to think about homicide every day.

Her professor joked about this once. Half the class got it. The other half was appalled. But that is what you get for taking things so seriously, opening yourself up to abhorrence and outrage. Not to say these feelings did not come from an authentic place—Effy learned from a former student that Professor had twice attempted to take his own life. Once before he met his wife—again after she left him. Maybe there was a third time, even, which is why his wife abandoned him. Is our marriage not good enough to keep you alive? Why did she not say love?

Effy knew a secret. Something no one else in class knew. Discovered when she came in during off-hours to discuss a missing essay. Her professor showed her the gun he kept in his desk. His face pretended to be humored and casual, but his neck was trembling, and she knew it was the real thing. He told her that every single day he came in to class, he thought about taking the gun out and shooting all these complacent, ignorant fools right in the head—a shepherd come to lay his flock to rest. But then Effy would walk in, and he immediately regretted even thinking it. If you missed just one class, Effy, I—I don’t know what I’d do.

Was that guilt or shame or longing? Effy could not discern the difference. It was a toxic abomination of everything wrong and sublime. Nobody had ever cared so much about her. She related perfectly to his sentiment. Her whole life, she had been waiting for someone to say how she felt—to speak a mind of amoral violence and a disappointment at how society has become. She comforted him. And that is when he kissed her.

Then she pushed him away, embarrassed, thinking she had found a companion in mind, but he was only disgusted flesh, still trying to express itself the only way it knew how.

As Effy thought about this, she felt a nudge on her shoulder. Hen reminded her to take a step, for the long procession of bodies had propelled itself forward for a split-second, only to halt its progress and seethe in its banality.

I wait; therefore I can’t go.

|II|

Smoke strung above. Lengthy laps of bubbling smolder carried with them a dissolved grave of brick and molding. We build and build and build, only to leave ruin and ash.

Her professor resigned the semester after their encounter. For inappropriate physical conduct regarding a female student. Then he killed himself.

Effy wondered if the student had wandered into the same web she had, only instead of escaping, she tore herself out completely. Quite the contradiction it all seemed to be. All these situations never quite as clear as clarity. Effy disliked her professor for that. But it is not like she could criticize his pain—only the method through which he consoled it.

All great pains must first don venomous and suicidal masks before they may have empathy from humanity.

A stellar argument to be made, Effy considered. If evolution transformed the prey into predator, then what transformed the victim into victimizer? Effy recalled her obsession with serial killers during her youth. How mesmerizing they were to her, these persons who consciously chose to torment and murder other people. What a level of disdain one must have. Effy did not think of them as psychotic freaks. Maybe they were hateful, or apathetic, but never freakish. People who let ‘God’ touch them are the true freaks.

God isn’t dead—but He’s getting there.

God is genderless. God is plural. God is everything and nothing and anything we want it to be. God just is. For Effy, damnation was real. Internally. Once you have damned yourself, you may as well be damned by all. But God is fictitious. Only so far as to assume we could ever conceive of God, and then further assume we could have adequate ways of worshiping God. But thank God for God, Effy figured, because without anything above us, we might assume we were God. As if we did not already fight each other over our egos.

Professor had an appreciation for spirituality. One session, he deemed it necessary to educate the class on reincarnation and karma and mediation. One of the students pronounced himself an atheist, arguing ceaselessly against Buddha and Jesus and Peace and Chaos, until finally leaving class cursing and yelling. Professor just chuckled.

Thought experiment: what caused the creation of the universe? Answers? Guess what—nobody knows. No one on the entire spectrum of this molten beach can provide an explanation on how it happened. And this is what Professor proposed to the class: if anyone can say to me with any sort of certainty that there is something to believe, then they automatically pass and do not have to attend class for the remainder of the semester. Many came forth with their own ideas, but they all had their doubts. Effy didn’t even try.

There is no possible certainty in anything we believe and certainly this is true.

Professor must have been quite amused then. When the god-hating student returned the following class, everyone ridiculed him. Except for Effy. Ignorance is its own cross to bear—but vain ignorance is casting the first stone. All you do is set yourself up for failure and invite the possibility of resurrection.

Effy coughed. Smoke got her. She glared at her cigarette, but it was not lit. No, this was vaporous decomposition from the smoldering building around the corner, which looked upon the sky and sought to replace nonexistent clouds with itself. The whole line was coughing, but these toxic fumes did not deter anyone from changing their position. The opportunity here outweighed anything nature could shove at them.

“Is it okay to feel nothing at all?” Hen pondered aloud.

Her friends were caught in their own mental comas, but she had no such entertainment. Phonie ignored her. Effy acted as if she mulled it over, then told Hen, “That’s an alright question. I think the answer is feel how you want to feel. Maybe it’s something to save for another time, you know what I mean?”

Hen nodded, defeated. Without missing a chance for insult, Phonie interposed, “You should ask how to properly wash your skin. They might think I brought my pet toad with me.”

Phonie snapped a portrait of herself snickering, sunglasses hovering in reflected smoke, while Hen bit her lip, staring at her feet sullenly. Effy should have said something, but she was lost again in memory and rhetoric.

Her Professor left behind no suicide note. They say everybody does, but Effy was skeptical of that claim. There was no disbelief, although they say this is a sign of grief. There was no grief. Not for Effy. Probably not for his wife.

It was in the Spring. When life was blooming and being reborn. His class supposedly waited twenty minutes for him to arrive, before they finally just left. Then he was absent a second time. And a third. Counting all the time that must have passed until somebody was concerned enough to notice…

The story goes it was two weeks gone, then at last a student emailed Professor asking what gives. But Effy can tell you what takes. Not God. Not Death. But Choice. Consequence. Chance. What are the chances anybody would have guessed that their caustically sarcastic philosophy Professor would kill himself? Not a high enough amount to care, apparently.

He had contacted Effy over break, around Christmas. When the world stung with cold, bitter spite. He was lonely, spending the holidays all alone. Effy could relate. She chose not to go back home, staying at school instead. She dreaded her family. Like she ever asked to be born. Never.

She fed them some bullshit excuse about an internship and they sent holiday money which she promptly spent on drugs and clothes—because you should look nice in your misery. And feel nice, too.

Professor invited Effy out for a frosty beverage—as if coldness meant nothing to them. Hindsight, so they say, is a twenty divided over another, which in regular sight is one.

How is “one” so supremely wise? The problem was never just one. It was when one was joined by another one. Then these two ones were interrupted by a new one, and this third one hatched the serpentine conspiracy that would undo all of them. Apologies for repeating such a recurrent refrain.

One thing Effy should have done was decline. But she was lonely. She was spending the holidays all alone. Professor could relate. His wife was not there. His dog had passed away. His family condemned him for his menial career choice—besides, he loathed his family. Like he ever asked to be born. Ever.

They met at a collegiate bar, a hole where sometimes other professors watered their snouts. But not this time, especially fortunate since Professor did not deign for others to see him drinking with a former student. He had been exposed before. Nearly plunged into a forceful resignation.

“Fuck them, who cares!” Effy slashed words with her throat. “Why do math professors need to drink? Or engineering ones? Their lives are fine, their students’ lives are fine. Everything up-to-date and paid-for, nothing left behind, no lingering questions, no insurmountable weight surrounding a desire to ask why to everything?”

Effy considered herself to have a point. They never bother asking why. They just learn how to build and then they built. Even while everything burned down eventually.

Professor sipped his beer, smiling like a talking pig. “You’re passionate about this.”

Effy nodded, gulping her beer, hoping to impress with her blasé consumption. Secretly, she thought beer tasted like fetid piss.

Professor shrugged. “Some of our most famous and profound philosophers were mathematicians and engineers themselves. They fancied those things. Math and Science comes from philosophy; those are their roots. The ancients desired to understand the natural wor—”

“I know all this, so what?” She interrupted him. “We’re not talking about the ancients here. We’re talking about 21st-Century Society, a place where everyone is just endlessly complacent and empty-head. Fuck! They don’t care where their roots come from—they don’t even eat the plant anymore!”

They both laughed. He knew what she meant; she knew what he had meant. Then Effy’s mood grew pensive.

“Sometimes… I feel like I’m Angry Adorno. Screaming at everybody to shut the fuck up about superheroes and celebrities already. Mass Culture is fascist poison. All it does is make me furious at Mass Society. I just wish… I just wish that some people would, at least, agree with me.”

Effy finished her beer, its rotten spell swirling around her.

Professor, calmly and comfortably, responded, “Well, sometimes I feel like Regretful Hitler. Which is to say: sometimes the last thing you want is people agreeing with you.”

Effy giggled. A sudden warmness overtook her. They clinked the tip of their bottles together, salutation to their own rightness. Effy pretended there was still a sip left, drinking void. Professor ordered another beer for himself, then asked Effy what she preferred. “I know you don’t like beer. You’re not as good an actress as you think.”

She requested a gin and tonic instead. “Am I a good philosopher at least?”

Some unrecognizable tune fell in the background. He stared at her, silent. Until they uneasily chuckled. Then he asked, “What do you want to do with your life?”

He seemed semi-serious, as if he had doubted his own student. Effy was taken aback, believing he would have been on her side. “Uh, what do you mean? I want to study philosophy. I want to be a thinker. I want to ask the great questions.”

Professor shook his head. “It’s not too late to save yourself.”

Effy insisted. “I enjoy knowing things. But more than that, I enjoy not knowing. I’ll be fine. I won’t be around forever anyway. Probably a shorter time than you think…”

She mumbled the last part while guzzling her gin and tonic, hiding her true intentions. But he knew what she was implying. In a dark and miserable empathy, he approved of it. He accepted it. This is why she was so fond of him. There was no judgment. No pleading out of ignorance. No guilt.

“Alright then, Effy. I believe that’s what you want. Here’s to a life of financial failure and societal mockery—cheers!”

They clunk their glasses once again, contented knowing their only reward in life being what they know. With this difficult topic removed, Effy became more playful.

“If you met God—assuming God exists—what would you ask him?”

Effy posed the question. She was curious to pick the brain of her preferred professor.

“Nothing. I don’t have anything to say to that asshole.”

Effy laughed, genuinely and sweetly. Professor had a smile, too, but it was hung-up, rather than natural.

“What would you ask, Effy?”

“Umm…” She did not know what to say.

She thought about all the possible question, subtracting cliché and obvious queries, configuring together a question of riddle and wit, almost as if she was trying to outsmart a genie rather than god.

After a minute, her Professor egged her on. “Come on, Effy, master philosopher. What are you going to ask?”

“Fuck, I don’t know! I can’t make my mind up!.”

“What kind of philosopher can’t make up their mind?” Professor retorted.

Effy, her nerves loose and whittling at the same time, realized it was not God she was trying to outwit, but her professor.

“Don’t all philosophers essentially ‘make up their minds’?” Effy answered.

Her Professor laughed, the first time he had truly done it sincerely, his usual morbidity bled away in a hurdle of humor. After that, there was no more conversation of philosophy. They spoke about music, art, politics, lost loves, new crushes, poor students and even poorer convictions.

Every time a holiday song appeared in the bar, they would boo at unseen speakers. They rejoiced in each other’s company, without feeling remorse or contempt about separating themselves from their family. They were two cynical and jaded ones, spit upon by life and society, crushed by their knowledge of knowledge, their ability to know better than to think they know anything at all. But then, they must have known that?

They applauded senseless argument and welcomed paradox. They so desperately wanted someone to come by and tell them both they were wrong just so they could agree with it. So they could watch the look of this someone’s face as they muddled an appropriate response to a situation where they were expecting conflict. Effy and Professor both got a wicked joy from defusing the fuse, then igniting it again.

None of that ever happened.

There was no ‘someone’. Effy and Professor intoxicated themselves with toxic liquids and pessimism. By a certain point, Effy was joyously presenting her scars of previous pains as trophies inscribed in her flesh.

“These are my trophy scars,” she proudly proclaimed.

Professor examined them, not an ounce of antipathy visible in his eyes. “Those are dandy but check this ugliness out.”

He pulled his collared shirt away from his neck, revealing a line of bundled flesh across it. Effy gasped. For all her seditious attitude, she still expressed sympathy when she witnessed this.

“Is it from your first time or the second?” she asked.

“How did you know it was two times?”

Effy’s face bellied-up in blush, revealing the only card she had to keep hidden. But Professor was amiable about it, smiling at her, saying it was alright, he knows people talk about him—oh, and by the way, it was both times.

“How about you?” Professor waved for a whiskey.

Effy nibbled on her lip, nervous. “Not yet—but someday soon.”

Suddenly, the scent of smoke.

By now, this linear assembly of people, seemed to have not grown nor wither at all. It was purgatorial—not enough people cared to wait in line to make it longer and yet the people who had been were too many people to be waiting behind in line.

Phonie puckered her lips, then muttered, “Asking questions is arbitrary—when I finally get in there, I’m just going to say, ‘fuck off’ and leave.”

Hen did not appreciate the sentiment, but Effy mumbled a derisive amen and flicked her lighter. Another cigarette is just what she needed.

Hen peered down the street, catching no glimpse of fire, but a cauldron of black air. A sigh sung from her mouth, almost delicately, somewhat rhythmically remorseful. “Why do we have to suffer? Maybe I’ll ask that question.”

Effy sneered at her cigarette.

Man suffers only because he has to.

For all the bluster blowing from that building, Effy thought it bizarre she heard no screaming. No weeping. No torment. None of it. Either they were all dying in silence or Effy was blessed by deafness. Ambulances came and went, inspiring confidence in passersby, but no sirens, while Effy visualized a mental image of charred and scorched corpses stuffed in the back, with those alive churning out organs and blood and skin all over the walls and attendants, and the driver somehow must keep a straight face during all this agony and anguish. Ambulances must be a special kind of hell.

Damnation.

Lying is a sin. At least, Effy recalled it as such. She has had her share of spewing lies and fantasy. When her professor asked her what she wanted to do in life, she imagined she spun a sarcastic joke to him. Truth is, when he asked her this humiliating question, she did not say anything. Effy did not know what she wanted—she still doesn’t. Or she wants everything and anything and nothing. And how can you want that?

Salvation.

Not peace but peace of mind. As if that will ever happen...

Three things are necessary for the absolution of Man: man, men, and Man.

A hulking behemoth of ruby-scorched metal and lucid flash hunkered beside the sidewalk. Not just one either, but multiples, multiplying to a web, almost entrapping all the little flies within their line. Giant chimps in helmets and rubber gowns winded between them, passing out facemasks and cool air.

One of them glared at Effy as her cigarette twinkled beneath smoky sky. “Oh, you don’t know?” She snorted. “We’re all saved now!”

They moved on and so did the line, but Effy was still stuck, the glue of the past enveloping her prescient feet. Everybody else was coughing. Lungs weakening, sweet oxygen stiffened by putrid perfume, tasting like hollowed-out chocolate cooked in a kiva of dust.

“For your dissertation—can I steal a cigarette from you?” Professor asked, back outside the bar.

His breath, diluted by alcohol, lacked a visible exhaust in the frigid moon, instead appearing as normal, which is to say not appearing at all. Still, ice crept everywhere with snow trampling down. Effy stumbled with her carton, its riddling lid unsolvable and beyond her simple skills, confounding her for some time until she accidentally dropped it. With fragile cigarettes drenched in snow, Effy and Professor both cried out, searing the streetlights with their special brand of agnostic sorrow.

“To what God shall we pray?” Professor asked. “The only one that exists!”

He had a charming sort of laugh. It was mischievous but rare. And it involved only his head—his neck remained motionless. What meant most to Effy, however, was the way he looked directly in to her eyes when he did it, sharing and wanting.

Effy knew she probably should not have done what she did—oh, it must be holiday and reverence causing such moments to miraculously sprout into being. Or gin and beer. Both?

Effy thought about her apartment. Nobody was there. Nobody was coming over. Then she thought about friends and family and lovers and suddenly, there was a blank space in her mind where these sort of memories should be, proceeding to an epiphany of the kind only Christmas lights and child-prophets could make you feel.

Her face curdled. “Are we alone in this world?”

Professor shoveled her face from the pavement, coiling his arm around her shoulder, her cynical charm and laissez-faire attitude dissipated to unaffected fear, soon replaced by effectual sorrow.

“Maybe we are, but that’s what makes having each other so wonderful.”

Her tears sloshed down her cheeks. She smashed them in shame, mortified to show emotion, of all things, especially in front of her Professor and philosophical peer. She shook her head, calling herself a baby, a witless loser. Professor waved those aspersions aside, assuring her there was nothing wrong with feeling anything. Rationality is not the only trait that defines human; feelings were as important as rhetoric and logic. Because otherwise, what would we be? Empty machines?

It was placating then, but that shallow sentiment has since soured. Effy meditated on herself. Still empty. Still worthless. Still slithering through life like a worm wearing a corpse.

As affectionate as it was, reason has its regrets.

|III|

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be thinking it instead

Planets spinning while their moons loop around them, stars dancing in place, a constant array, unchanged for eons—thousands of years before, the same constellations hung in their window as in ours. Yet, we think of ours as being so much clearer.

There is no sky anymore. Just a cauldron of black. Some have given up hope and abandoned their gravities. We may move further than ever, but it is still in the same direction, a linear certitude reminding us how lesser our dimension truly is. Oh, there’s something: truth.

Hen has that look on her face again—she’s about to ask a hideously insipid question.

“What if it knows the future? Should I ask if I’ll ever find love? Or if I’ll be successful?”

It isn’t necessary to peer at Phonie because we know already she is going to say something scathing—probably without diverting attention from her precious electric-obelisk.

“It’s not a damn crystal-ball, Hen! God, you can be so obnoxious sometimes!”

When Hen is ashamed, her right arm grasps her left, curling inward, as if trying to make herself smaller, to minimize her disgrace to a reduced surface area. Guilt as gravity.

Not that she has ever done anything wrong. It is the way she does it—so vapid and cloying. A teenager intently acting like a child to appear more innocent and guileless, but they know what they did wrong. She should have learned by now, but perhaps she still behaves in this manner just to infuriate Phonie.

How close are they?

Smoke distorts the view, muddles distance. They must be closer, though, considering it has been hours, they must have gotten somewhere by now.

So it is almost a surprise when Effy sees the roped gates and hanging shrouds of an entrance, or what appears to be an entrance, and the line of people in front of her becomes black bound void. Behind it is the long dark outline of a building, or some supernal structure, holding this abyss contained within, the noise and smoke and pallor of this world seemingly dissipating around it. And it seems to have come out of nowhere, and as she looks around it, she cannot recall what building it is. Had they passed such a building to get here?

Suddenly, Effy’s chest is wringing. No question. No question. Shit, she hasn’t prepared a question yet. What has she been doing this whole damn time?

Phonie struts in front of them. “I’ll go first, it makes the most sense.”

Whatever, that gives Effy ample appendage to fumble something out of the nothingness of her mind. The doormen let Phonie in, their eyes hidden by sunglasses.

It was a surprising lack of security for something so monumental. When it had first arrived from space, the entire world was abrupt. Celebrations, curses, ceremonies. Pacts were forged or reinstated, alliances drawn, supply lines slowed then sped up. For a second, and it was only a second, it seemed as if the human race had finally come to know peace. But eventually the novelty wore off. Countries went back to their places. All the wars and famines and economies continued on. Still, though, it was a nice thing to have, and a nice post on social media to say you had gone and been, spoken to it directly, asked it the one question it promised all people.

That, of course, was the bargain. Every individual was permitted one question to ask. That was it. Many kept secret what they asked. Others bragged. It was like a bunch of apes stuck in this contest of proving shadows to one another.

Effy sighs. She still can’t think of what to ask. And isn’t this just her whole fucking problem?

What would her Professor have asked? Probably nothing. He was too cynical for that. What was Phonie’s question then? Something about how to be more popular, how to gain more followers, how to reap clout? Perhaps the perfect makeup routine? Then there was Hen, oh, cute little Hen, her mind like a roving egg—what could she possibly ask? Does God exist? Is evolution real? What really came first—the chicken or the egg?

Does it even matter? Effy cannot figure this out. She is still going to be Effy after this. She is not going to be richer nor wiser nor prettier. Even if this thing can divine the secret of immortality to her, is Effy capable of executing it? Does she want to live forever? Does she want to see so many winters come to pass, so many summers come to harvest, so much time that time becomes little, to the point that an hour feels like a breath, a year like a splash of water, and her whole life moving through chrysalis and entropy and regeneration so many times that it starts to feel like dressing herself—like life is just another thing to do in the morning before going out.

Funny then that Effy sees time pass her by here. Suddenly, Hen is gone. Effy assumes she’s gone in. Now she’s next in line. The sun is setting while smoke raises it up. The fire is dying down but maybe that’s wishful thinking.

“You’re next,” one of the guards say. “Hey—are you there?”

Effy snaps back. She apologizes. They open the entrance and wave her through. Finally, she’s here. The proverbial line has ended.

As she walks, she feels numb. Almost like she’s forgotten how to walk. She stumbles a bit, smiles, tries to seem as normal as possible out of fear they may consider her out of order and remove her when she’s come so close. But the guards aren’t even paying attention, and Effy is going through a hallway as freely and dumbly as she pleases.

No furniture. No carpet. There are lanterns hanging on the wall, glowing crimson and emerald. A door is at the end—the only door there, with a knob of ebon glass, etched in nothing, with no discernible material on the door itself, leaving wonder if it is made of wood or plastic or whatever carbon manifest it is.

Effy approaches. She holds up her hand but pauses—no, Effy, this is it. You cannot stop now. You need to quit being a frightened little bitch about this. Your whole life you’ve been running—sorry, that’s cliché. My whole life I have been ignoring this thing inside me. I must ask it, ask anything, anything at all. This is it…

Effy opens the door and enters.

In the room is a translucent chair and nothing else. Its back is facing the door, so Effy assumes it’s meant for her. As soon as she sits, the Inquisitor appears.

“Hello to you,” the Inquisitor says.

Its voice is low, cold, like a wind, without any of the attachments or forces. A wind that does not blow or move or carry, but still heard and felt.

Effy shivers, then says hello. She’s nervous yet relieved that the Inquisitor looks like nothing. She was expecting some monstrous alien spectacle, but instead they appear as a spectral shroud, no face or body visible, just waves of a shadow.

“Your name is Effy?” the Inquisitor asks.

“Yes. Do you, uh—do you have name?” Effy replies.

“I have told the people to call me Inquisitor. It is simpler that way. I understand names are a significant symbolic gesture, so I appease that. I am the symbol. You are the guest.”

“Yes, a guest. Thank you for having me.”

Effy bites her lip. She doesn’t want to say the wrong thing. The Inquisitor doesn’t seem bothered by small talk.

“How is your day, Effy?” the Inquisitor asks.

“Oh,” Effy says, surprised. “It’s not bad. A bit rough outside and boring to wait, but—uh, how is your day?”

“Same as every day. And if that day should be different, I shall cease to be useful.”

Effy nods. The two of them stare at each other for a few moments. Are they intrigued? Curious? What is going through either mind at this moment? Certainly questions, or maybe not, something more like feeding, eating the air around each other, placing the crumbs of their lives in comparison to try and make sense of a thing that no longer exists. How else can you assess the past? Whether it be a day or a lifetime.

Effy decides to break the silence, “You’re a lot taller than I thought you’d be.”

The Inquisitor laughs, then says, “Only because you are sitting. So, Effy, as I told everyone else—you can ask me one question and only one, and I shall answer it. I have traversed this universe an infinite times over, seen all things and dreamt all others. I know all that is and all that will ever be. What is your question?”

Effy ponders and ponders. Her thoughts dangle on the edge of her mind, forever out of reach, threatening to cut imaginary flesh and rend her incompletely torn. By now, she should have thought of something. After how many years—after how many books? After all that she had been through and said and done and been and—yet things cannot come together. Yet thoughts are random and distant and inconclusive. Has she failed? Has an ideology never formed? Is hers a system that cannot function to finish even its most fundamental task?

That to have a mind is to think. And to think is to ask questions. To wonder and expand beyond the shroud of primal shadows. Overcoming that abyss and casting ignorant nature to ruin beneath you.

But Effy has never thought about it. All the great questions have been asked. Some of them answered. And here, Effy realizes, is the problem—she doesn’t actually care. Even if the Inquisitor can explain to her the meaning of life, it wouldn’t make her life any more meaningful. She’d still be Effy. She’d still be smoking cigarettes on the sidewalk with her friends. They’d still be Phonie and Hen. Phonie would still be self-absorbed while Hen would remain as delicately obtuse as ever. And, so too, would Effy still be lingering, thinking about her Professor, who is now dead and may never know the meaning of it.

She’s shaking, trying to hide it. But eventually, she decides to tell the truth.

“I can’t make up my mind,” Effy rubs her head in frustration. “What question should I ask you?”

“Ask me why you cannot make up your mind.”

“Why can’t I make up my mind?”

“To answer that, you will have to get back in line and ask again.”

Effy scoffs, then protests, “That’s not an answer.”

“The rules are you only get to ask one question. If you want another, you will have to wait in line again. Please make way for the next guest.”

“No, that’s fucked! You lied. You’re supposed to answer my question. Give me the goddamn truth for once—”

The Inquisitor interrupts her, “I promise you, Effy, I already did.”

And with that, the Inquisitor vanishes.

All that remains is Effy, sitting in a chair, tears going down her cheeks. All that stumbling and stewing and studying, gone to waste in an effusive moment, remaining only an effigy of reason, this thinker’s chair, emptying and lonely.

After a few minutes she sighs, then gets up and leaves the way she came.

All that is real is ridiculous, and all that is ridiculous is real.

Outside Effy returns, the night taking on its appearances while the smoke dissipates. No sirens blare, no people argue. Just the languishing line and its many disciples, coated in dusk, streetlight smog, storefronts gazing in neon eyes and appetites shadowing a taste.

In the distance, Effy thinks she sees snow falling, but that wouldn’t be right. She looks for Phonie and Hen but they’re nowhere to be found—until they find her, through the phone, a message explaining they had gone for bubble tea down the street. They didn’t wait for her.

Effy sighs. She wanders along the sidewalk, not sure where to go. No sense waiting for them or waiting for the line again. Just no sense, nonsense, all senses deprived and spread thin across void until they are no longer alive, no longer being at all.

Effy pinches her skin, trying to stretch it that way, spread it out. But it just hurts, snaps back to place. Then she laughs, truly and genuinely, like she hasn’t in such a long time, no longer waiting for a joke, no longer searching for the punchline. Because it has to be that way, that cycle of nil, that constant draining of things into other things, until the original is indistinguishable from its copy.

And then—only then—can you know what is true.

[thefinishpiece]

Remember The Rain

The lawn has gone again.

Memories of rain torn apart by thunder. Faces faded, nearly disappearing, forgotten to be full. And lullabies wading through storm, as if softness could overpower colossus.

Driving on a street, splashed in misplaced sea, wondering if we should count the lines or the shrimp. But it wasn’t a Friday, it was someday, somewhere, a place I must have been, to be here drenching my mind.

Hopelessly nostalgic. Maybe it is all display. Some theatrical thought for me to replay over and over, hypnotizing myself to believe in its own certainty. Life happened here—it cannot be erased.

And yet, where is it?

Down waterslides and carpools it must have been slithering there, through all these things, wet and lurking. Too young to be independent but old enough to feel like that’s what you wanted.

Drowning in a lunchroom, tables and chairs upturned in the flood, clouds of mustard and soggy biscuits floating the airwaves beside my face.

I am barely there. Hovering. My legs swirl in the deep so my body stays unsubmerged, but I can barely breathe. I see bodies like lily-pads—motionless, complacent. They have all perished but I remain. Just a remainder.

All this talk of I—memory can be so narcissistic. Spaces which you cling to specialness, all for yourself, as if they had been spaces designed just so you could occupy them. Holy relics. Sacred secrets. They told you something they told no one else.

But that must be wrong. Because these spaces go on without me. But they are impressions, furious and sensual in my mind, touching me and cooling me off. Maybe I’m the only one who thinks they’re special—that’s why they let me remember them.

And yet, where are they?

Integration is a slow process. One mired by mires of placement. If I could classify every object I ever felt, every feeling I ever expressed, every motion I ever carried, would I come any closer to being fulfilled by leaving it all behind?

Maybe the weight would disintegrate. All the things which shaped me and defined me would be conditionally completed, and I could be reborn in layers of new and future me. Like the only thing holding me back this whole time were the times before this. But—they appear as fantasy now.

You cannot be stymied by imaginary obstacles. Especially those you made yourself.

But I am so sure my memories are real—they must be real, or else what good is the rest of me? What definition can I chain around my neck and submit to? Do I bathe in clarity or despair?

Liquids inside me turn more murkier by the minute. Until I am a swamp walking upright; a swamp thing being upstanding. Until I am the steps of a temple becoming reef, stone becoming coral, flesh becoming seaweed.

Still I hang my head. Forget the rain falling in my eyes. I was blind once—never again.

And yet, here I am.

[thefinishpiece]

Adam’s Reprise

If I could, I would build Eden for you.

Not the one with the fancy ribs, but that bone-maiden, wrenched from hideous immobility to beautiful movement by a spare set of spears—maybe this is all too much?

The music is higher, in the corners of the ceiling, hovering just above everybody else, their scalps itched by it, ears puffing in opposite direction to concentrate on the conversations: up and down, through and through, all around, innocent or guilty, granite or marble. How about neither?

Can we ask to be nothing but spare moments waiting for anything to happen?

A fire. A flood. A meteor slamming the Earth astride. So we roam without reason through an infinite black, until we all freeze to death—or worse, until we all bore to death. Some things never change. God learned that the hard way.

Give her a rib, she will thank you for a day; give her an apple, she will disregard you for an eternity. Minus the snake. Figure that equation. Your fallen angel making a fool of you in front of your own created guests. And now you have to ask: whose party is it anyway?

If I should—I should put on a party for you. Invite all our friends and family. Somewhere beyond the curling noise of every little thing wrong, which seems to be going wrong all at once, all the time, never ceasing to be a troublesome tick on your temper.

Perhaps she ate the apple out of tantrum?

There would be nice champagne, bubbly and golden like liquid Olympus siphoned in to a bottle. Those tiny glasses with the stirring stems, almost like a wisp between your fingers, between the middle of something more than ethereal—but we are all living in ephemeral glasses. Oh, they may say there is Optimism or Pessimism or Compromise, but truly we are phantom cases holding recycled soul, waiting for our chance to spill and feel something real. Ground has never been so appealing.

Make me clap. Make me applaud you as you walk on by. Hold the whole kingdom for ransom unless they bow and cry while you wander the crowd. I could make all the sense in the world for you and it still would not be enough. Nothing ever will be.

Do you not get it?

She was not deceived by the serpent; she was received by it. She was once nothing before being forcibly ripped to life, out of someone else’s body no less. Then she was forbidden to ever feast on the answer of how it was done. Of why all this beauty existed and why she could feel it and love everything. It was unfair to her. All God could muster in rebuttal was to say, Trust me.

But that answer did not satiate her appetite. She longed for a better meal. When the scaly-demon arrived, it did not even have to convince her—her fingers were already naked on the scarlet-skin surface. If there was even a nibbling of hesitation, it was gone after seeing those fangs and hearing those magic words… Do what thou want.

And then came the bite which sealed the world within its own bubble forever.

[thefinishpiece]

Dance Of Exploding Eggs

The dead do not wash their feet.

Neither does not Nadia. She was still alive, still staring at the marks of peckish dirt encasing her feet like a spotted glaze. Yet, less appetizing.

Instead, she was reviled to find where her veins strutted up to form long, sinewy ridges—her usually clear complexion blemished in wildfires of tawny gunk.

Even her tiny hairs, which she regularly shaved, were now trees bristling in leaves of muddied bluster. In the clefts between her toes, little clans of grungy warriors built camps and lit fires, letting their filth fly freely, while fending off the fungal barbarians sure to be surrounding them any second now.

Her toenails fared no better, each one piling unto itself as a layered cake of dead cells. Hardened, deadened, sharp—soot-stricken orphans seeking shelter beneath the curves, shivering yet ordained by structure to never clog or obstruct the construction of new nail, which constantly builds outward as a bridge of flattened crystal-flesh. Until gravity clutches it and pulls it down, looping back into the very toe it tried to escape from, almost like a parasite that can’t quite leave the taste of its host behind.

And the stench from all this—pervading passed all bounds of invisible air, leaping up so fast and flourishing, by the time it reaches the nose it is a blossoming fist of smell, punching nostrils closed, knocking out any other aroma present.

How could any conscious being permit such an expanse of putridness to grow on itself?

Nadia did not have to ponder for long because she blamed herself supremely and solely. Just as well, since she blamed herself often and deeply.

“I have to wash my feet...” she muttered to herself. “A good soak is all they need.”

In her quiet inspection, she lamented the dead. For as they were, being deceased, their feet could deteriorate and decay all they like, because at six-feet-under earthly crust, no one can smell them or complain about them, and they themselves could not openly accuse themselves of being the opposite of hygienic and failing to hide natural odor from their own judgmental eyes. Because despite how natural the growth of dirtiness on feet seemed to be, it was still considered hideous to everyone—especially Nadia—and frowned upon by many in circles high above the very ground upon which these very feet walked on.

“There is fungus growing on these, I just know it.” Nadia assured herself.

But as she did, pinching the derelict spots in quiet contempt, her companion muddled platitudes of support, remarking how happy he would be to scrape off all those mushrooms on her feet and cook a nice dish with them—maybe a soup or pasta or something.

“Wild shrooms like that always have such an earthly taste you can’t find anywhere else!”

“Here then, have a taste yourself!” Nadia sneered, shoving her foot right into her companion’s face, her wilderness-blessed toes tapping classical melodies on his face.

He playfully grabbed her ankle and kissed her toes all over, licking his lips, wearing a face like a golden-tongued chef being asked by the gods to decide whose confection was best—was it the lemon-frosted cream-cake by Hekate, or perhaps the pineapple-pudding pie which Hermes made?

Nadia giggled, curling her toes, still concerned by her bothersome feet, but quite content to have someone overcome it for the sake of amusing her. And he did amuse her—in all ways. It is the only reason she even agreed to go on this trip—especially after what happened so long ago.

Otherwise, she would have stayed at home, soaking her feet to a wrinkled gleam.

And as she removed her foot from his face, returning her leg to a proper position, she was appropriately careful not to disturb the eggs on the dashboard, which were bundled together in a basket, with blots of cotton mixed in to keep them buoyant and prevent unintentional collision.

As they both quit laughing—his attention focusing in on the road ahead and Nadia suddenly forgetful of the plague wreaking havoc on her feet—the quiet hiss of the eggs could be heard. Whatever it was developing within them, it emitted this sullen spitting, penetrating through its shell at a volume just loud enough to hear in silence, but just silent enough to be swallowed by any mention of another sound (any other mention of sound).

Nadia gazed at the eggs, listening to them curse and whine, wondering if it was pain or hate that compelled them to make such sour tones.

“These things are so foul.” Nadia noted. Her companion nodded without looking. “Sure, but so are your feet.”

A smirk bit his face, and Nadia just shook her head smiling. At least she had him here. These eggs seemed rather harmless with him here.

|1|

The shells were golden, as if molded after myth and greed.

But why did they have to stay in the bathroom? On the sink, where they paired with their reflection to ensure a double flood of grotesque gold every time Nadia must floss her teeth or comb her hair? Why could they not be hidden somewhere out of sight—especially somewhere insulated so their acidic whispers could not be audible to anyone?

Especially to Nadia, who was in here simply to clean her feet, not hear the hissing of eggs she only agreed to transport because he had asked. No one else could have convinced her.

Her hope was that the droning drops of the bath faucet would wrestle the background noise to a comfortable hum, a soothing sensory song of automated splash and meditative whirl. Her plan functioned the way she intended—as soon as the metallic mouth started spraying its aquatic continuum, the noise of the eggs suddenly dispersed.

But they remained problematic in sight—they clung to her peripheral vision, a visual squid stretching its tentacles all around her attention.

Nadia prepared herself in front of the toilet rather than the mirror, quite resistant to being in the same reflection as these hideous eggs. Her companion rested in the adjacent room, a reasonably upheld hotel room which was lighted in decorative wallpapers depicting seashells and seahorses—a recently refurbished décor which imitated the appearance of something fancier than the price indicated.

But in spite of such comfortable accommodations, a thorn continued to reside in Nadia’s proverbial sides.

Those eggs, which strung such horrible tunes in the air and were plunged in equally offensive hue—a gold of unnatural paleness, something not gifted from heaven but from some otherworldly dimension where an affectionate spectrum does not exist, thus having to translate its previous color into one compatible with this reality, but without an actual frame of reference to consummate the translation. There was no color in this place that could suffice for these eggs. And the gold that they finally settled on was not even really matched to any credible source—it may have been a color you could recognize and possibly categorize, but only in a dissimilar demeanor, such as comparing the tides of ocean to the tides of flame.

These eggs had chosen a color that only pretended to be a color.

This imitative impression disgusted every sensibility Nadia possessed. But for whatever morbid condition ailing her, she could not bring herself to look away. And this only further repulsed her.

So, in response, she swathed a towel over the eggs, concealing them from view, then proceeded to peel herself bare and bathe. However, every once in a while, she still glanced at that mound of cerulean-cloth, knowing in her mind’s eye exactly what lay beneath, even though it had been deafened and buried. It was the power of a thought over a reality.

Nadia sighed. She desperately desired to change the course of her thoughts. She sunk into the porcelain tub, at first cold and crippling, awaiting its eventual completion.

The faucet drummed, and waves formed floor after floor of boiling bubbles, swirling in suds, molten layers of cleansing water swaying over her to and fro, steady and unhurried. The coldness was removed, replaced by rippling heat, almost as if blankets of temper were tenderly placed over her body, one after the other, building a tomb of liquid steam around her.

It was a reverse evaporation—the atmosphere condensation upon her, the dissolved now soluble again. Once free particles of hotness pinched from the sky and folded into pockets of wetness, spraying on Nadia’s body in a measured massage.

Finally, she was relaxing.

Her mind receded to memories—as a wandering mind is known to do. Instances made of time and place, proportioned to emotional heights, to moody lows, to kinetic propulsion of person and thing, interacting in a dream, where motion is unclear, and the most prominent aspect is how far away something so superbly significant can feel. That paradox of memory.

In hers, there was a beach.

On a day of stormy composition. Yet rain had held back, and a warm breeze flew swanlike across the scene. Deep hues of sapphire magma spiraling against the shore, not in rage but in prance.

How strange to see it cascading in the horizon, colliding with a sky of dreary steel, specks of blackened rust puncturing the clouds—much akin to dirt on feet. But it is not dark. Even through stormy screens, sunlight performs its duty and the world is visible in leaden beauty.

Nadia is there, in a dress.

A thing of red-clay converted to silk, with threaded jewels of turquoise. She is spinning in an unseen weaver’s wheel, their fingers rolling her around. But she is not dancing alone. For there is another, a man, joining her and twirling with her. His unbuttoned shirt is flurrying as he moves. Until at last, they spin into one another, joyous. They both laugh and tremble, collapsing onto the sand, their arms stuck together in a knot. And they lay there, tied together, unflinching, undisturbed—as if being made into a knot was their one true intention all along.

And these two human strings admire each other. So much so that when rain oscillates upon them, they do not even notice. In drenched, clustering sand, they reciprocate affection, lips lancing against each other, bodies tying together, their knot tightening ever more and more, until one has to wonder if you could ever untie them apart.

Nadia giggles. She remembers how unconcerned they were with ruining their respective garments. The clumps of damp sand encrusting both of their backs like the shells on a tortoise. But their torsos were untouched—so concerned with being wrapped so close to each other, no open space was possible. And the feeling of wet lips, uncaring to rain and sand, compressing themselves dry in the heat of faucet-fusion.

Then the deluge pours over, erupting across the smooth-sides, and Nadia jumps, startling herself.

In her delighted daydream, she had let the bath overfill, now overflowing onto bathroom tile. She leaps for the octagonal handle, carved of candied glass, halting the water and ending the storm.

Now she is alone again.

Except for that faint fuse, with its spark flickering forever. Though it never reaches its destination—it only barks continually, that sound of sparkling dust. Then Nadia’s state of dazed grace concludes abruptly, as she understands there is no dynamite-stick, but a collection of disgraceful eggs, unmuted. She wishes so much she could just boil them, get it over with.

Nadia loosens the drain, ignoring the eggs, her peaceful spa now tainted and confused.

Upset, she watches the water vanish piece by piece, until all that is, is a remainder of puddled past—a shallow spit of soap caught on the edge of indented drain. Reminiscent of gunk beneath toenails. Reminding her of scattered sand memories.

And those blasted eggs, hissing and hissing and hissing…

A space Nadia must escape.

She leaves the bathroom, still drenched but entombed by a bathrobe. She strides passed the bed where her companion remains asleep, his own body beneath a crypt of blankets and sheets, resting in infinite dreams in some unhurried afterlife. Snores ensuing.

Nadia has never quite contoured to his awful snoring, so steady and surly. She assumed after a certain period of time her ears would be accustomed to it, that she would barely notice his nasal belches as if they were blank booms. But this threshold proved unreachable, and every time Nadia hears it, she can never concentrate nor slumber.

Rain casts against the window. A shame because Nadia desires to peek outside, absorb the bounty of the natural world, refreshing and ravaging all at once. Storms have an unusual pull on the heart, which in turn, has an unusual way of peeling the body—unable to hide oneself anymore, becoming a spark of nude thunder.

Replacing one insensitive sound for another, Nadia crumbles in indolence, retreating to the bathroom, considering that she cannot smother her companion with a towel to stop his bleating, but she can at least inter the eggs to divisible hum. And from there, all she has to do is plead ignorance. So, back to the bathroom.

|2|

Back in the bathroom, Nadia is given a dress.

Even though she is still wet from the rain, she cannot reject such a gracious gesture, so she glues it to her skin to prevent it from slipping off. Then she is asked to dance.

“Are you sure? I don’t think I’m any good.” Nadia blushes. But it insists. “Okay—but only if you dance with me.”

Nadia extends her hand. She is taken by a presence and together they twirl and taper across the slippery tile. At first, they are sloppy, awkwardly jutting into corners or stepping over each other’s path. But eventually they adapt, they crease together, a makeshift rhythm developing between them, motion now momentum—bodies now ballet.

They dance ellipticals across the room, channeling each other’s orbits, certain not to collide, and certainly not to disrupt the beautiful gravity they have plumed. But Nadia, without intention or reason, happens to witness her feet, and by their gross gravitas, she plummets to the floor.

No more dancing.

Nadia sighs. All the vapors have disappeared. The bathroom is cold again. Shivering, she looks around for a towel. But the only one is placed over the dreadful eggs she despises so much. It seems as if Nadia has condemned herself to a fate of lying naked on the floor forever.

“I hate these eggs!” Nadia shouts.

Nobody is disturbed. Not even her companion, who continues his hibernation uninterrupted. It is just Nadia, alone, with that menacing mumble, ceaseless yet contained, the eggs still whining even under their threaded prison.

She accepts her misfortune and adjusts her position to sitting on the toilet lid, her bottom crippling from the icy white, but she seems unbothered.

Nadia angles her legs up, her feet poised on the bathtub ledge. She grabs a complimentary sponge and starts scrubbing her feet, up and down every crevice and crack, across entire soles and ankles and toe-folds. Precise, she does not move too rapidly—she takes the time to ensure perfection on her mission of erasing every negative note from her two feet.

The procedure has become habit, and habit lends itself to repetition becoming daydream. Daydream which lends itself to becoming habit, and habit which turns into the rituals of reality that bind us to corporeal certainty, whether consciously or not.

And isn’t that such a curious thing how the brain tricks you into believing what it wants you to believe, what it thinks is best, what it thinks is real—strangely contradicting what your conscious view sees? What you truly want?

Nadia never quite comprehended how her mind could repel in two alternate directions, as if the thing inside her skull was nothing more than a mere magnet, positive and negative pulses, rippling against each other, stuck in marrow-molded bondage, forced to reconcile petty differences and levitate in static vibration; a feigned vibrancy where thought and imagination and curiosity can pretend to be things of their own, when truly they are products of electrical folly. Nervousness.

And she absolutely did not comprehend the track of time either, which seemed to have evaporated, along with a patch of her skin, as suddenly she was stabbed by a searing sensation on her foot.

Wincing, she examined the cause, seeing that in her furious daze she had rubbed too heavily with the sponge, scraping off a small surface of her foot, now catalyzed in blood. It did not bleed in a traditional way, but due to the nature of the wound, seeped out of the area in knitted dots, scarlet-putty pushing through a weave.

Nadia grabbed the towel and padded her foot, but in doing so, permitted those dastardly eggs to breathe once more, and their breaths were just as constant and corrosive as ever. All they did was hiss, hiss, hiss…

Waves.

From sound and light. Sneaking up Nadia’s skin like little spiders of clustered vibration.

Into the green she goes.

Eaten up by trees, her hair yearning to be a leaf on her head, vibrant and veiny, waving and curling in verdant wind. Along a road she goes, feet swimming across the mud, her body moving like a tidal wave against a shoreless beach. Escape.

At the zenith of her path—an overlook, decorated in tufts of earthy hair and nails, with strewn logs and sharp boulders. A view of the remaining wood, its belly lunging up and down in tectonic reflux, aligned with pine and bark and brush, each ridge and valley adorning itself in its own personal collection of green.

Nadia approaches the edge of this cliff, which oversees the forest it is a part of as if separate from it.

A table is set, draped in a pretend-petal curtain, where anxious porcelain cups hold its quiet magma, blessed of roots stripped and shaken and seared. Her companion is there, holding a bouquet, so full of rainbow passion, an assortment of flowery praise that only Aphrodite could deserve—yet it is for Nadia, of all things!

A surprise picnic at the end of the world.

Her companion offers her a seat, which she does not refuse. The sky is elaborate in shades of violet and azure, a strange suffusion of dark and bright—a peripheral sunrise stuck in perpetual sunset. But it is not a fiery sun so much as it is a sun of shadows; yet everything under it is visible and vibrant. Only in a dream.

But Nadia does not listen to such negative inclinations, her attention purely focused on her companion, who sits beside her, his arm nestling against her shoulders, warm and safe. They both grab a cup of tea, ascend to touch and tip their fortunes to each other, then lifting to their lips to swallow it to oblivion—how odd to have stomachs, our own personal abyss within our body.

It tastes like angel-bath, sweet and mentholating, warm and exasperate in faith—the faith that this feeling would last forever.

For Nadia, it might as well, because every other moment after was nothing but pale failure.

And, especially, when her companion gazes into her eyes, without breaking away, with an amount of longing and affection so deep and infusive, she finds herself trembling, even though sight is only sight.

But she stares back at him, his face crinkling together almost like a cone, pointed directly at her, as if no surrounding sensation could deter him from this view. Not the mountains; not the sky; not the dream of universe complete. Only her—Nadia—and her face, however dirty or seemingly normal it may seem to her, is a boundless source of inspiration to him. And she feels enslaved by it, put in a bondage that is pleasantly accepted—a surrender, a submission.

Then the purples fade.

And light of fairy-blood returns, swirling and maddening.

Suddenly, trees are bleeding viridian, and their natural hue strolls unto review. Back into the green again, as Nadia feels a kiss, and disappears forever in trees of passion pleased.

But something is sour.

She does not remember his kiss being so acerbic, cutting her, leaving her in bled-refrain. What sort of perverted spring is this?

It stings. She wipes his saliva from her lips, but it bubbles on her fingertips, to the point of boiling. She grimaces, wondering why there is pain. She looks up to see her lover’s eyes vanished, and alone on this precipice. Her entire jaw is sliced away, sliver by sliver, her bones crackling, her muscles spoiling. Her face falls like rotten fruit from its frame, the heaviness of mold and rot too much for romantic gravity to bear. So it drops her all the way to a tomb of disgrace. Buried beneath the earth, there is Nadia’s love—a displaced view.

Nadia awakes. Returned from the green.

She is holding one of the eggs to her lips, kissing it.

In her trance, her mind had found folly in trying to replace the imaginary with an effigy of the real. Disgusted, she flings the egg away from her face, splattering it on the bathroom mirror, its sizzling insides leaving a repulsive stain. So bitter.

Nadia immediately invokes the sink, splashing water onto her face, trying to remove the taint from her mouth, still smoldering in a sourness of demonic proportions. As she spits, there is blood—not fantastical illusion or fanciful daydream, but actual, fetid blood.

“I hate these fucking eggs!” Nadia screams, her throat convulsing in rage.

Nobody responds. Except, of course, the eggs, which hissed and hissed and hissed…

|3|

There once was a time when Nadia was loved.

The way a person should be loved. The way a foot is loved by the hand that cleans it. So thoroughly and carefully, so unpretentiously unconditional—just doing what it needs to do to make everything clear and happy again.

Whatever it takes, Nadia used to think. For the sake of clean feet.

Nadia snickered. That was not at all what she used to think. How could one remember so far away?

Those distant shores of memory, where every cleft of sand looks the same as every buried barnacle. Where is the savior ship come to rescue us from pity and pernicious regret?

Marooned on a beach of unused life, wallowing through our scorn like gulls picking through twigs, snapping and scuttling over branch and jewel, trying to find our prize, our possession of perfect scene and elation. That moment when our lives essentially defined themselves, and everything after relegated to the fade— our true revelation of this story we continue to scribe.

But Nadia, no matter how much she scoured, could not find this missing trinket, of which she thought for sure would finally unravel the mystery of Nadia.

Was it the first day of school when she threw up on the classroom floor, a nervous bile overtaking her when the teacher asked her to introduce herself?

It should have been a simple, ‘Hello, my name is Nadia.’

But instead, it was a terrible mosaic of gulp and gruel. So embarrassing.

No, surely, it was in her feet. The mark of her miraculous moment. When they were still young paws, so fresh from hatching they still had webbing on them...

Nadia wanted to be a ballerina.

One of those composed and captured creatures, ignoring the chaos of the world around them, performing a movement of perfected grace and graceful ritual. Every step a note on the composition’s line, leading a symphony of shape and swerve, never letting itself become consumed by any emotion or nonsense which would disrupt its willful path.

An offering to the gods of geometry, aligning your feet in a poise more perfect than constellation, moving in the same seasonal march of ebb and flow—repeating, repeating, repeating. This is the dance of no-dance. A motion of purpose.

Until it is over.

Until a cormorant appears, and Nadia, too far gone in her ellipsis, trips right over the flurried thing, spiraling through the air, over the side of edible stage. Now, she is drifting into the black, gravity’s charms dispersed, composer’s graciousness displeased.

Until suddenly, she emerges from the black unto the blue—a crystal shore she has seen before, the only sound being that of pant and wave. And there is the feathered imp, whose beak is whistling to her demise, as she pours onto the beach.

“If only you could fly...” the cormorant says.

Nadia scoops herself up from the sand, wincing. “Must be nice.”

The cormorant fluffs its wings then takes to flight, soaring high above the earth it mocks.

Nadia’s foot vibrates in pain, every muscle and tendon and ligament ringing a rapacious storm of ache. Before she can soothe her pain, however, Nadia’s mother comes and grabs her hand, leading her away.

Nadia cringes with every step, her left foot refusing to touch ground, her right one barely stable and straining as it is dragged along.

“Your father’s gone—not that he was ever here...”

Nadia’s mother puffs a cigarette. There are no other kids in the hospital room. Only passed and broken people. Corpses.

Nadia rubs her toes, trying to allay the bristling numbness in them. She thinks perhaps her mother should be holding her in her arms or something, nestling her into motherly bosom, patting her on the head with lips and whispering how everything will be alright and the pain will go away.

But Nadia looks up and sees her mother puffing a cigarette, watching the wall, complaining how much of a waste of time it is they have to be here. Then she looks at Nadia, scowling.

“This all your fault. You should have been paying attention—you’re never paying enough attention, Nadia!”

And maybe she was right—because Nadia suddenly realized she had been standing on the bathroom tile for far too long.

The inner scars of her feet began to flare up again, so she took a seat on the toilet and lifted her left leg, her hands desperately massaging her flesh, trying to ameliorate an old wound. The eggs watched her, and she despised how they lay witness to her weakness. Now they knew her fiercest flaw. They would probably use it against her—if they could.

But they were just eggs, right? Just eggs that only hiss and hiss and—

Nadia called for her companion but there was no response. She desired to deign him to fetch a bucket of ice for her from down the hall. Was he still sleeping?

Nadia shouted again. And again, he did not reply.

The eggs grew louder, as if trying to answer in his place, and Nadia spat at them out of spite. Then she gripped onto the sink and raised herself up, limping out into the room. But it was empty.

“Where the hell did he go?” Nadia muttered aloud. Then she sighed.

There was once a time when Nadia was loved.

When he cared enough to always be called. To be there for whatever she needed.

During a period of a particularly grisly flare-up, he would rub cooling ointment on her feet every night, his fingers unafraid to peel into every hidden spot, pushing her bones and blood to comfortable stasis. He always knew how to subside her pain—he never protested to coddling her feet either.

After he left, Nadia had to mend her own feet. Her youthful damage both unforgiving and never forgetful. No agony was greater than when her companion departed, however. A cut on the physical self is nothing compared to a rending of the heart—the unseen epicenter of all feeling and worth.

With him, she had felt like she had value. Without him, she was nothing but dirty feet. How hard it was to have herself be heartbroken by him. To find him the way he was—she stopped herself.

Nadia did not want to return to this feeling. Now that he was returned, she would do anything to keep it that way. Even if meant dealing with those ghastly eggs—that’s why she had said yes.

And Nadia exceptionally loathed those damned eggs.

She staggered through the door into a hallway, which peeked both ways in endless doors and floor, none of them unique, enslaved by pattern. She was concerned where he had gone, but she also knew her primary focus was to end the unease throbbing in her left hoof.

Nadia peered right, assuming the ice-machine was down there, because she recalled that is where the elevator had been, so other amenities must be nearby.

She leaned against the wall, wobbling along, careful not to bang into someone else’s door, for fear they would wake, that they would appear and harass her in marvelous temper. But she also took care not to apply pressure to her left foot, where the injury was sourced and had been most severe.

Her right was still strong in many ways, although its largest toe had been shattered then in her youth as well. So now she walked awkwardly so as not to upset it and reawaken its hindered might.

Altogether, Nadia looked like quite the circus clown stumbling down the hallway. Almost falling on herself every other hinge, wafting through diluted air like a dumb cloud, constantly astray. How did it come to this?

There was a time once when Nadia was loved.

When she did not have to wrestle with hallways. When the earth did not stifle beneath her feet. When lovers brought ice—when she had a lover at all. She stops, leaning against the wall with one arm. Panting. Suddenly, a familiar sound—though not a friendly one. A stretching sound. Sinister and expanding. Slithering between her legs and beneath her body. On and on until the entire hallway is swimming in it. Nadia, fearful, almost falls down. It feels like walls around her are shivering, a stinging chill. Viscous vibrations inundate her. Even the waves in the air become feverish. And then there it is—hallways hissing. Nadia, totally shattered, but saved by a flight of energy, lets her pain sprout into wings and compel her forward on its frenetic wind. She begins scrambling, wobbling in a frenzy, arm rowing against the wall and her one good leg hopping heavy steps. Edges of light behind can be seen scattering in its shadows ahead of her, silhouetted in the form of an unfathomable thing, a body of a beast so terrifying just its reflection pierces Nadia’s heart every step forward she takes. What horrible thing has hatched in this place? Suddenly, another familiar sound—the mellow notes of an ancient folk song, which Nadia happens to know the melody of. Like it is playing just for her. But the rest of the memory still clouded. She recognizes it; quickens her pace toward it. Anything to deafen out that hiss of eternal doom. That splintering of soul that follows her everywhere she goes, enveloping itself in her flesh, in her very being, until she is shrouded by it. A cloak of gore. Dissolution. There it is—that open door, pink and blue light casting out from it in the ever darker and blurrier hallway. Just like she remembers. Into it she goes—into an underworld of nostalgic void. Standing in the doorway entrance, now entered, she closes the door to the hallway. No more hissing. That gentle folk vocal weaves in. Those sweet strums of mountain love and lake calm. A natural hymn. Alluring. Nadia gazes at the pink and blue light now painting her body. Both familiar shades. She looks up to see the pane of a room, and a shadowed corner blocking her vision. Next to her, a dark and empty bathroom. This hotel room—I remember this room, Nadia thinks. Curiously wistful. The pain her foot still retaining, but fainter. She lags closer, every inch expanding her view of the room and diminishing the shadow of the corner of the wall. An oak table, three used glasses full of wine stains, beside a half-bled bottle. A chair with a cushion, assorted strips of clothing strewn about it. Then the corners of a bed, sheets sundering. Nadia inches nearer and nearer, breath draining into back of her throat as if preparing a gasp in anticipation. So, for what? Finally, she turns around the corner, and sees her horror. There he is—her loving, devoted companion—slathering over another woman, angel-faced demon of blonde desire, the both of them naked and engaged in erotic trance. Nadia screams. Her companion does not notice her, his head buried in the other woman’s tomb—but she looks up, stares at Nadia and smiles, blows a kiss while winking. Then she returns to moaning and fawning all over him, like a deer trapped underneath a boulder. A spider weaving its prey in sweaty web. Hissing in his ear. Nadia runs out of the room. Back into the hallway, ambushed by an eruption of hissing, those damn eggs blistering into her mind in inescapable flashes. She clasps her head with her hands, frantically stumbling toward her room, all her previous pain nullified by needles of adrenaline. Turning her head inside out. She can’t even hear her own screaming over the sound of this hissing. Nadia collapses into her room, shattering into the bathroom, seeing those dreadful eggs sitting there in punishing flames. Despite all the rippling nerves in her body, she grabs the basket of eggs, takes it out into the bedroom, and slings them out the bedroom window, letting gravity grasp them and crush them far down upon its immediate earth. Destroyed forever. Exploding on the concrete in a dance of denouement. Nadia unleashes the cry of a bat, shrieking. Then she falls onto the bed, whole body entangled by pain, her foot so swollen its bubbling and bursting in blood. Crying. Over now. Nothing hisses. Only the sound of her sobbing. Of heartbeat in crescendo, then descending to crippling silence. And it languishes on, for what seems like hours but is only fragments of a little time, not quite mature enough to constitute a length of being. There is Nadia—just Nadia. Breathing. Emptied of tears. Aftershocks of pain dragging but dwindling. But she doesn’t stay alone forever. After this while, she realized her mistake. What will he say when he comes back—when he sees I got rid of the eggs? How could she ever explain herself? Would he understand and forgive her? Her mind was controlled by these thoughts—panic, paranoia compulsive loathing. She had to assure herself what she just saw was only an illusion—a product of those damned eggs. He would never do that again—her companion had repented, and she had forgiven him. Devotion was all she could see! She’d do whatever it takes she told herself. Whatever he wanted—forget what she wanted. She’d give up being Nadia. There was once a time when Nadia had desires of her own, but the loneliness had scared that out of her a long time ago. And the brokenness had cursed her to obey only doom. She would never make another mistake again—he’d never have another reason to leave again. Not like last time. He could put a blade in her hand and push it up to her throat, tell her to pull it at the snap of his fingers, and she’d do that magic trick a million times over if she could. Anything to keep away the hissing. Anything to be loved. Anything to have him hold her up again, carry her every limb if he has to, and dance with her one last time—forever.

[thefinishpiece]

Ladybug’s Philosophy

We are losing sight of seeing.

Seeing the clear, the streakless. The constant stars in the sky, their pure patterns moving in the same direction to the same placement—every hour, every year, forever. For all the ends time brings, it is dubiously obsessed with perpetuation.

But how could you see?

Hours as trails of glowing dust, leaking across space, dabbing the horizon in splotches of once was and had been—what was it? Maybe nothing. Dressed in costume and consumed by parade, the way an empty vessel still whistles in the wind, or how a hole in the ground feeds home to rain.

Without seeing above its rim, how can you say for sure it is truly empty?

Here on this muddy planet, we see only our surroundings, but when we look up, there is an endless void of air we can never touch or sense. Yet we assure ourselves we are not vacant—that this stone-casted orb is full of life and love and water. Of all things, water.

Surely, they must be laughing at us. Who? Those gargoyles of mockery, who seethe upon their stoop an attitude of candid contempt, thrusting us into a world of game and trickery, which we experience as pain and misery, and then they expect us to laugh with them. But we only weep. They must enjoy seeing that.

There is not a one discernible, indivisible force behind all this—we see this because the only difference between one and two is reflection. Add another mirror, suddenly you have three. Repeat this symmetrical discourse to infinite bounds, suddenly you have a universe.

Why is it true and false?

We are sparkling in wonder. But in the black void of time, I imagine we are barely noticed. If the only difference between light and dark is off and on, then the only similarity between truth and lie is everything in between. Shadows of shadows of shadows.

Venus sighed.

When Mars only died.

Though we fight the war, we return to barren lives. Even galaxies slaughter each other. Gigantic rips in space and time, swelling up in to cosmic scabs, burying everything around it in feverish oblivion, until by its own scope it falls apart and twists an entire spectrum of reality into nothing more than a spiraling oddity—of which we, vases of water, observe safely through our telescopes, inventions of scaled sight. We have seen galaxies brought to ruin. But we still forget our anniversaries and our gifts.

Soaring above us all, those divine demons, whom separated the unifying particle into infinite pieces, the pie that gave birth to this delicious creation; and I am sure they tasted each of their slices with an appetite unmeasured. But we choke on crumbs. Just leave us alone. Yet we are not blind.

You are so close, however.

Your view is quivering like ladybugs on a leaf in a rainstorm, each drop flinging her carapace up and down, straining the veiny-hand which binds her to meaningful position, until at last it snaps, and she plunges to the nonsense of gravity. Wait. She has wings!

They explode from her delicate shell and she hovers across an unseeable grid, a line through X and Y and Z, which appears to us not as mathematics but as magic, as miracle—the sterilized of us define it as nature, while the gods claim it as fortune. Either way, she does what she does, born to do it, dead without it, and thank all the fake heavens she has it!

You think your vision is permanently fading.

It will never completely disappear, but instead, it will remain forever smeared in obscurity. A continuous phase of detachment. An enchantment whose words never finish, they just linger on in vocal venality, waiting to be bought by a final period and ended by mistaken identity—the method of replacing one letter with another, without changing the meaning, as if truth could be writ the same as lie.

But our watchers know this is the language of the stars, and I doubt anyone will tell time any differently.

An hour is still an hour, as far as we can see.

[thefinishpiece]

World Of Wheels

Her lips were unstuck.

Suddenly alphabets and polygons were spilling from her mouth—sounds molded to shapes, hovering above her neck in cloud-imitation before dissipating to the floor, a puddle of language.

All around her were phantom frames, set to resemble meaningless grids, of which various vortices were marked with sheen to signify a constellation, which represented everything from a scorpion in mid-sting to a huntress half-strung; a bow shooting comets across graphic space; cherubs and bulls and typhoons swirling in their own little dances.

And above all these celestial fragments, a wide ocean foaming with glimmering holes, as if Poseidon had his fingers trapped in subterranean cages, coral and fish sidewinding to aquatic windows in perennial circulation around a gasping tower of air.

Yet, their form remained, the critters and conceptions themselves adapting to a new vessel much like water itself.

Permanently permeable.

Below her was a den of mutilated moles—not dirt-eating creatures but quantities of matter—assembled together in fractured displays, almost like kaleidoscopic storm, full of rainbow ambition and ravenous mass.

Upon their measuring scales, a deaf goddess and her blind counterpart are contested against each other, in vain desire to determine the weightier subject.

But to the aside, all by herself, the mute goddess, unable to speak, finds herself a deeper sorrow of inconvenience and temptation that no broken plunge could ever elucidate.

Does anyone care if she weeps? None.

And reeling back the scope, our phonetic princess suddenly closes her clamp, silence returning to a plane of perception, and all the remainder of things and objects shutting their respective doors to an opening of quiet resonance—because what pain it is to reflect on why we are in place and position.

She sighs, her lips stuck in reluctance, as a world of wheels spins around her unhinged, undisturbed, uninterested, unnerved.

Forever forgoing.

[thefinishpiece]

Garden In An Hourglass

Mina forgets why she came here.

Something about flowers in rain. Gardens a circus of mist. Clouds hanging on every leaf of every plant. All edges terraced in heavenly gust.

How long had I been gone?

These petals are shades unfamiliar. These green-blades cut in different directions. The maze has shifted somewhere else, its corridors now alternate, its architecture obliterate.

Mina missteps once or twice.

It still smells the same.

Perfumes of nature sprinkling in the air, honed to velvet-scent by the sky’s endless tears. Aroma of raw soil, damp and twisting, blending its earthly flavor with cool-crystal vines of fauna and flora, braided in boundless growth. Fumes of nature, expressed.

So many years since she has seen this place.

Approaching her—a skeleton drenched in veil, blackened to obscure wrath, the whites of bone amplified in the stormy scene. It looks at her, both of its eyes a drained sink, and it stands solid in the grove, replacing gargoyles for this scenery myth.

“You must be who I think you are.” It echoes.

Mina nods, nostrils cleansed.

Everything is hazy and toned. An ephemeral wistfulness surrounds her, with a glaze of nostalgia, the bright smoke of this place cornering her view. She always adored days when it rained.

She make excuses. “I am so awful at keeping track of time. How long have I been gone?”

A reluctant question, certainly—for to be certain of anything relating to Time is to forgo the conclusions of it. Time, the ceaseless glue of space, ripping through dimensions like light through glass. Filtering and untouchable.

It cannot answer. But this does not concern the ghost.

“You always did lose it all the time.” It echoes.

It grins, a pernicious crescent, while she watches every plate of its marrow-shell grind and gyrate on its face, from cranial-cap to cheek-plates to bending-chin. All this clockwork of its frame necessary to perform one single action—something so arbitrary when concealed by flesh.

Mina almost wants to smile herself and see if she can notice the parts in her face moving too, or if her brain only accepts the sequence as a solitary motion. The wonders of face.

Out of a stony path, they emerge to obsidian gates, dazzling in their sharpness, pointed and polished. Roots reviling, afraid to grasp the lifeless metal, avoiding its attractive poles for lesser stones and bricks, defeated by a net of spears.

But the skeleton touches it without recourse, crackling, halting only to brush residue from the shoulder of its ebony-dress. It is dressed for some occasion, but she never bothers to learn the names of such temporal fancies. One occasion for another—they are all strands of grass in a field of roving hours.

Inside, a breath of hotness—of humid contrast between earth’s spit and artifice’s sinew. Air, swollen in plastic pride, hovering behind walls from the pit it was borne, to linger in suffuse misery. A trap.

“Do you happen to know the time?” Mina asks, softly.

Her voice is still liquid from the outside waves. As soon as she says these sounds, she regrets it. Certainty is a vanishing art.

“I have not met it personally, but I hear good things.” It jokes—ha, the skeleton tells jokes!

Mina looks around at glass walls, suffocating in growth. Too many plants; too many plans. No horizon. Back to the garden, they rewind themselves.

“How long has it been?” someone shouts.

There he is, the Gardener. Dressed in dark dream. A fancy suit that appears like frozen lava. No hair, but a nice ash head. Like a pollup of crusty snow.

Tonally, his skin is quite grim. Like a raven plucked of its feathers. So pale, unhuman—a cadaver pulled from space, bleached by the shrillest fear.

The Gardener is a poor gust of gloom. He has time in a basket and all the space to spare. He asks Mina how long it has been since when they never met. She dares not tell him her name, but he figures it out anyway. Eating hours and drinking histories.

“We have been waiting,” the Gardener groans.

Mina shrugs. “Yes, we have.”

They float down a river of sand. Around and around. Come and go. Flurry and dissipate. They only go so far, until their container sends them back to recite and repeat the same motions over and over again.

Though the Gardener and his skeletal companion are unaffected by this place, Mina feels every loop and round.

She grows thirsty. Like a seedling sprouting early, desperate to taste the rain. And though they are in a garden, time’s lashes affect her body more like a desert. Dry seconds.

“Is it time for tea?” she asks, politely.

“It is always time for tea!” the Gardener screams.

They stop their ride. Then they take their positions at the tea-table, a thing overwrought in silver strings attached to a diamond-dazed puck. Porcelain and pleasantries await them. Conversations about the lengths of letters.

The tea is hot—it’s always hot. Mina stares at some blossoms behind her. They are perpetually beautiful. But the Gardener demands her attention; he is a fiery, unforgiving conversant.

“If time is a circle, then what is a square?”

The Gardener is gleeful as he poses his question—he desires to have her answer wrongly. But she does not have time for his ghoulish games.

Without looking at him directly, Mina casually declares, “Circle takes the square.”

He is dumbfounded. Not that anything they have ever discussed has been anything else than nonsense—this whole garden is a monument to nonsense! Fair points decay like unpollinated wombs.

The Gardener turns to his skeletal servant, bewildered. But the Skeleton is picking maggots out of its holes, not actually listening. Yet, it is obedient, and still responds in reverberate tone, “How long is a circle?”

The Gardener shrieks and points at Mina. “Ha! Can you count? Do you know how long a circle is?”

Why is he always trying to prove her wrong? Why can’t they just talk about flowers or something?

While rubbing sweat on her neck, she sweats. “Is the temperature in here bothering anyone else?”

What was once tepid is now arid. Mina almost coughs from the heat. Seconds burned to hours. Burned to days. Burning for years. Epochs.

An endless fire of eternal scorching. Castigating flames casting her in hardened plaster, body melting within like a stew of organs and soul. Hardening—time sharpening the time sharpening the time sharpens the time. Agony.

Dead alive. Forcibly awake.

How long has it been—how long was I gone?

“Such a pain—I am a black-hole burnt piece of toast.” Mina says.

Surprised she suddenly speaks, the Gardener gasps. “It has been a long time...”

“When was the last time someone spoke?”the Skeleton shatters. “When was the last time we had been here...?”

After an intermediate silence, Mina laughs.

The Gardener stares at her, nearly drooling for her to offer just a scrap of something happening. But it isn’t much.

“Nothing too funny, just—” she yawns, dumbly. “I forgot why I came here.”

[thefinishpiece]

Paris From Space

|Prélude|

All the universe is breathless abandon.

Atoms entangling in a game of paradox—ceaseless here-and-there playfulness.

You see the skies soggy with storm, their careful cracks of vaporous ash across dark marsh.

You hear the pulse of pressure manifested, crushing and resonant. The dogs tremble and bark. The birds dangle in mid-flight, hanging on an unseen grid.

You smell the moisture—refreshing, cold. Sometimes you forget the world is water. Rain is a decent reminder.

You taste the mellow dread of waning nostalgia. Every passing day is further from a memory you once considered real.

But in hindsight, the fringes fading from view, the minced details of sensory lushness peeling away one by one—first, you forget the scent of it; then the flavors; then the sounds; then the appearances.

Someday you may even forget the feeling—the inextricable meaning of an experience that reasoned the memory extant in the first place.

You touch the surface of everything. A nervous glaze. The stitching of molecules costumed by your fragile perception, vainly convincing itself of every object’s difference and every texture subjective.

The truth—hidden as it always is—behind a curtain of illusion, saving your conscious fragility from being frightened by the position of matter in these rules of reality.

As you look on and wonder:

If everything is everything else, then what am I?

A composed ape. Poised against the frigid metal-legs of a balcony. Posing in a slumped grace, posturing yourself unconsciously to the gravity of detached comfort. Legs bent. Arms slung. Back sloped. If a raindrop fell on you at this current moment, you might collapse.

A loosely-lit cigarette between your lips. The tip of heat wavering on-and-off, totally uncaring if its trail of crumbling conflagration ever reaches its end. A stained sleeveless-shirt, crinkle-cut by use. Undergarments slacking, spotted, indented by under-sweat. Quite the sloppy ape you are.

You flick the unfinished cigarette. An indifferent attitude. Does this bundle of moody fluids have a name? Do you have a name? It is customary for you apes to award each other names. Such superficial symbols permit you to feign definition.

Emilia.

Emilia is done observing these constellations of atoms we refer to as life. She swallows one last gulp of drenched oxygen, then retreats from the patio-wilderness back into her modernist cave. The ape must sleep. And forget how all the universe is breathless abandon.

|Act Une|

Emilia nearly choked on her croissant.

“You killed yourself? How?” she garbled, removing rogue flakes from her mouth with a napkin.

Her friend initiated conversation in a peculiar way, explaining she had killed herself the night before, only to awake in the morning alive and disappointed.

“I took the pills Jamer gave me, settled myself in a nice bath, then drank a pinot all the way through, waiting.”

Her friend sipped an exotic tea. Emilia drowned the remaining flakes, stuck in her teeth like fleas on a dog, with a whip of bitter coffee. Her throat convulsed from the heat.

“And nothing happened?” she asked, politely.

Her friend shook her head, annoyed—not at Emilia, but at her situation.

“I remember a sudden nausea. Then I started vomiting blood and pastry, the pain in my stomach so strong. It was like being grinded alive. I thought it was it for me—I remember thinking it was the end. I made my peace with the universe and all that, but then… I wake up the next morning. No blood. No vomit. No pain. Even the bathtub had been drained!”

Emilia expressed awe at her friend’s predicament.

“So strange.” she mused.

“So strange!” Her friend parroted.

It was still gloomy weather and the café was hushed in midday reverence.

Emilia and her friend cooled in silence. Until a coddled boom whimpered through the streets. Followed by a glimpse of glow. The storm was barely holding it together. But the sun stood no chance as the clouds formed a fortress, a last-ditch effort to reclaim their tempest-might.

“Did you tell Jamer?” Emilia inquired.

Her friend sighed. “No, and I’m not going to bother. Fuck Jamer, he sold me a trick instead of a death.”

Emilia agreed. She struck a mental note of never buying toxins from Jamer again. Then her attention diverted to the concrete floor, where a party of ants convened upon a parcel of croissant Emilia had spat out after noticing a corner of it was burnt. Her discretion did not extend to the searing temperature of the coffee, however, which she drank freely despite the lesions forming in her throat. Her friend sighed again.

“I’ll try again tonight. I’ll do something else this time. If only I could get a gun.”

Wasps invaded the arthropod gathering, their bulbous black-yellow behinds sweeping through the tiny ants, rolling the little troopers over like butter on toast. It made Emilia sick to watch.

Her stomach roiled and fussed.

“Oh dear, sorry to intrude on your complaints Lulu, but I feel quite nauseous suddenly.” She pinched the sides of her fatty glands in disgust and boredom.

Lulu nodded, a friend quite understanding. “Shall we take a walk? Refresh ourselves?”

Emilia and Lulu left the café and followed the Parisian street.

A peculiar aether presented itself. Oxygen was languorous. Mist curled between the cement and plastic altars of commerce, down alleyways to hideaways, elapsing the vestibules of vanity where so many spend so much to hide themselves away in cosmetic disguises and fabricated costumes. Their artifice exhibited in the store-windows on mannequins that appear more real and fashionable than them themselves.

Emilia thought it was amusing how new things pretended to be while erected upon the platforms of old. Shops stood where castles once did. Cafés in the place of cathedrals. Roads once medieval morphed modern, the only remnants of design in the curving sewer crates and occasional decorative gargoyle, perched upon a prosthetic height like skeletons bolted by metal supports in a museum. Alive in false motion. The pretense of being displayed.

Emilia, curiously, swayed down the sidewalk, her steps careful and airy. It was the respectful thing to do, she considered, for how else is one supposed to walk through a graveyard? If not avoidant of others’ peaceful beds and nostalgic crypts.

She looked up at a street-sign, which was welded unto a steel-beam older than anything else on the street, and she smiled at how it could still find usefulness even in the ages after its inception.

“We walk the same place as they did three-hundred years ago.” Emilia mentioned. But Lulu ignored it, fascinated by the passing montage of jewelry and clothing. “No, you’re right. We don’t. This is only a replica city.” Emilia muttered, defeated.

“I’m thinking—should I just jump off a roof somewhere? Perhaps a church or skyscraper. Maybe I’ll climb to the top of Eiffel and leap—no, no, they have gates for that, don’t they? Of course, I’m sure I’m not the first to think of it.”

Lulu mused on. Emilia encouraged her friend, examining the merits of her plan.

“I don’t know how effective that would be. What if, after jumping off, you suddenly grow wings and take flight? Then you’ll feel foolish.”

Her friend snickered, “Then I’ll crash myself to the ground! Or maybe I’ll fly higher, to that level where the atmosphere folds unto itself, and let myself be crushed by a blanket of gravity.”

“A remarkable idea! But now where do you get wings?” Emilia wondered.

Her friend sighed, adjusting the grief on her face. “All of this talk of failure is ruining my mood. Sorry to disparage you today. I should be more grateful to have a friend like you, Emilia!”

Lulu embraced Emilia. Her friend’s hair was scented in tones of tangerine, flecking through bits and pieces of minted beach. Emilia sniffed deeply—she wished to never end the cuddle, so she could sniff this citrus dream forever. But Lulu, first to grip, was also the first to pull back. They continued on.

Along their path, a carious fiend, whom could barely speak, adorned in leftovers.

“Spare a penny? Just a penny!” he beseeched any who would listen.

Passersby passed by, either deaf or deferent. But when Emilia and her friend came by his way, he bowed, tingling from starvation.

“Excuse me Misses, but I must say you are both the most beautiful angels I’ve ever seen in this godforsaken city. Please tell me—I’ve heard rumors—I’ve heard we are on Mars now? Is it true? Did mankind send some of its own to claim the red oasis as ours? Oh, I’ve tried to see them. I look up at it every night, hoping to see. Tell me what I see is what it be?”

Emilia and Lulu both stared at the sky, then each other, then the fiend, who was gazing upward, a wistfulness dripping from his eye, plopping to the ground in weak rain.

“I imagine them up there, looking back at us. I bet they don’t cry; they don’t miss us. They look back at this garbage mess of hideous rock and wicked ocean, thinking we deserve to be left behind. They probably look out to the cosmic horizon, where our galaxy holds hands with God, and thinks the summation of Mankind is calculated in the stars and the stars alone.”

Emilia quivered. The beggar fiend was beginning to affect her.

His face collapsed. He heaved in. Let it out. “I don’t think we were born here. I think we plummeted here from somewhere beyond. This is not our planet. This is not our destiny.”

Emilia fumbled through her pockets and scrounged up some meager change. It wasn’t enough for her, but it was enough for him. When she handed it to him, she spoke, “We’re there. Those who are, I hear they’re preparing everything for us. We won’t be left behind, I promise. They’re coming back for the rest of us.”

The beggar grinned and thanked her, quaking in appreciation. “Oh, you’re so kind! You wondrous angel! So kind. God crafted you especially, I can tell. I’d like to believe you, too. But angel, you know how we humans are. We’ll sooner see the child of God return than for those who’ve left us to come back for us.”

Emilia saddened. The beggar disappeared, a puff of lost hope.

Lulu nudged her. “Come on, just down over here is Saladin’s place. He may be able to help me.”

Her friend strolled forward. Emilia took her arm and dabbed herself dry, taking one last peek toward the sky, in vain vehemence. If only he knew it was all still the same, even up there. Still just as boring, but more red.

On the stoop, a figure in prescience rose to greet them. He had a habit of always looking around, as if always being watched, or suspecting someone of always trying to catch him.

“Salaam. Salaam. You here for the Wise?” he greeted Emilia and Lulu individually. He recognized Lulu.

Emilia was intrigued. She heard her friend speak of Saladin before, many times, but had never met him. Lulu was comfortable, if not a smidge annoyed, rushing through pleasantries to get straight to business. The weight of life was one she was done carrying.

“Omar, I wish to speak to Saladin. Is he here?”

She pointed at the building behind Omar, a destitute stack of rooms, hidden in sharpened architecture and a sallow-salmon shade. Omar replied, “Yes he is. He has time for you. What is your friend’s name?”

Omar motioned toward Emilia. How bizarre it was to be referred to as the friend for once. Emilia perked up, saying her name for the inquirer. Omar dugs his fists in to the pockets of his footie-jacket and told the duo to accompany him up the stairs.

Emilia hurried through a cigarette as they walked, the stairs sidewinding through an elevated terrace stuffed with nature’s contraptions of petal-jaws and coiling-brush.

All Emilia seemed occupied with, however, was the beggar. And she, too, became obsessed with the rumors of Mankind’s ascent—blissfully disregarding the reality she knew that nobody was going anywhere special.

And just like that, she was finished with her cigarette.

|Act Deux|

A room with a plastic aroma.

Blood-boiled bulbs bleed unto the scene. Strobes of smoke and scarlet sound.

Sandcastles painted on the walls; behind them the mystic beaches of space. Built from magenta-dust or emerald-gore, standing upon the corners of unknown planets, these sandcastles holding a trillion pieces together through sheer gravity and will.

On the floor, decorative and intricate rugs sprawling across, reminiscent of Persian palaces.

In the middle, an oval-cut booth, dressed in maroon leather, tussles of gold fluff along the precipices. Rising from this lavish throne, a figure of regard and wisdom, moving like a demigod in repose, raising a cup of champagne.

“To all my friends—time makes the blade forget!”

Everybody cheers. Electronic trumpets blare. Maidens dance; jesters spin. A decadence infused with grim detachment. They lack the music of olden whimsy—instead moving mechanically, like robotic replicas imitating a scene from context rather than reality. But this bothers them none.

And so here we are—the sound of shells snapping back to reality.

“Salaam! I am Saladin the Wise. Welcome to my harem of knowledge!”

Saladin clapped.

Emilia and Lulu were offered drinks, then introduced to a circle of sole seats beside the circular cathedra, with a nest of tobacco temples, fur-fringed pumps snaking around their bases and heads.

Aside from Saladin, there was Omar looming in the corner, vigilant.

And there was Soelle, sitting next to Saladin, ignoring the visitors, much keener to blow the mold from her knife-nails, which lunged like claws from her fingertips, stained in hot-pink blood. Smoke looped through the diamond hoops hanging from her ears. She had the appearance and the attitude of a queen.

Saladin’s smile was a huge jumble, twinkling under his round-nose and frizzy hair, and he looked more like a buffoon than a wiseman.

“Lulu, my darling swan! Why have you come to me today? What wisdom do you seek?” Saladin proclaimed.

Lulu sipped her champagne, then spoke, “I seek your guidance on a problem I can’t seem to solve.”

Saladin nodded, then his face sunk in contemplation. Then he asked, “Who is your friend? She is a gorgeous swan!”

Emilia perked up. She had been distracted, admiring the sandcastles, all their detail, from their towers to their gates to their moats.

“Emilia. It is a pleasure.”

Saladin clapped again, enthusiastic.

“Emilia! A perfect name for the perfect portrait. Come, you must indulge in my delicacies. It is only right you have pleasure in the House of Saladin!”

Saladin snapped.

From nowhere, another person emerged with trays of treats, placing them on the tiny stone-surface which stood between the cancerous contraptions, drenched in their smoke, glazed in crimson cream. Then she returned to nowhere.

Saladin gestured for Emilia and Lulu. Emilia looked at her friend, seeking a sign of procedure. Lulu flicked her eyeballs, obviously annoyed, intending Emilia to eat one of Saladin’s offerings. She stared down at the silver-tray, which held a bowl of glass candy and strips of peppered seaweed.

Lulu grabbed one of the strips and chewed it happily. Emilia hesitated. Her stomach was still disturbed from her earlier caffeine, and she really didn’t feel like munching on strange snacks. But Lulu nudged her, implying that Emilia shouldn’t be rude and accept at least one bite of whatever weird gift this wise fellow was giving her.

So she picked one of the glass candies, which felt cold in her hands. It was translucent, spherical, with two symmetrical stripes of blue sugar stretching around it. Her teeth preemptively winced, anticipating what it would feel like to chomp glass.

But she tucked it in, swiftly, then ate her worries away when the unbelievable sweetness dissolved in her mouth. Her entire throat and tongue and jaw were tingling in sensation. Her body warmed. Everything became so wet and hot and sugary. Her limbs shivered. Her torso became mush. It was the most deliciously saccharine thing she had ever tasted.

“Thank you, Saladin. I appreciate your kindness.” Emilia mumbled, still licking residue from her lips. Saladin chuckled warmly.

“You are my valuable guests. All your whims are of value to me. Come, you must try this delicate smoke. It is imported from the land of ancient time—the place where all mankind comes from. Please, you must try this.”

Saladin snapped.

Omar brought hot coals and placed them on the podium of one of the plant-vaporizers, which bubbled and brewed in delight. On the base, letters of languages unspoken for millennia, etched in gold and glue. Omar lifted one of the hairy hoses, handing it to Emilia first.

“You are a new guest in the House of Saladin. It is tradition you smoke first as well.” Omar explained.

Emilia took the tube, no questions, and sucked it with all her force.

The smoke broke upon her lungs like dolphins crashing upon waves. It soothed her welts. It was smooth as serpent-skin, slithering down into her belly, flushes of peppermint and tangerine and baked-bark, peeling the crust from her inner organs, renewing her breathe, rejuvenating her blood and sweat.

The smoke seeped through every vein, pulsating every cell along the way, orgasmic needles pricking every last cent of her body. It crawled like vines upon stone, outward in labyrinthine motion, weaving a web of sylvan silk, cradling its host in tendril embrace. Emilia was paralyzed. Yet, she was not uncomfortable.

As the smoke dissipated, her body reverted to its natural state, which felt unnatural compared to what it had just experienced. By the time she had feeling and movement again, Emilia was disappointed, drained, drowned. She had preferred being paralytic. She had preferred the smoke wearing her carcass like a costume. It was a feeling beyond human hue.

“You like it, yes? It is exquisite! Saladin only provides the best for his companions!” Saladin inhaled from his own pump, expelling the smoke in a bluster of gust, shaped exactly like a sandcastle.

And just like a sandcastle in rising tides, it was only a temporary moment until it evaporated into nothingness.

“It is the divine will that has brought you to me. Do you believe this?” Saladin inquired.

Emilia was still recovering. Lulu poked her cheek, reminding her of the material realm.

“Excuse my friend, she is overwhelmed by your luscious smoke. She is a true Frenchwoman—she’s only smoked cigarettes, never any hookahs.” Emilia blushed, then apologized.

Saladin repeated his question.

Emilia thought about it, then answered, “I believe in a cosmic will, yes. In something greater than ourselves. I believe in a higher power.” She swallowed.

“I don’t mean to offend anyone, but I don’t believe in a He or a She or a master plan or anything like that. I think it’s more like, well, there are cells, and something tells them they need to be cells and act like cells and do cell things. And then the cells do as they’re told, and everything else just sort of happens because of it.”

Saladin hunched over, contemplating. Emilia hoped she hadn’t offended him by morphing his definition of divine will into a different idea.

Arisen from his meditation, however, Saladin still smiled, still laughed in heart, and responded to Emilia, “You are wiser than you know, my friend. It is divine will that seeds grow to trees; that eggs hatch to fly; that earth rotates and sun shines. The matter of the universe is planned in advance. Even chaos is a device of this design. Even randomness and nothingness serve a purpose.”

Saladin gulped another drag from his pump, spewing smoke out in the form of sparkling stars, which levitated to the heavens, out of mortal sight.

“This higher power you speak of—it is not a singular entity. It is embedded in everything. The divine will is us. We are the higher power.”

Emilia pondered this apparent truth. Saladin, humbled, clasped his hands together, closed his eyes, and bent his head backward, praying to the spectacle of everything around him.

“So, if what you say is true, then it was us that brought ourselves here. And this is true, we did choose to come here. But why is there a here or an us in the first place?” Emilia asked.

Saladin nodded, then spoke, “You ask the right questions. Curiosity is infinitely more powerful than wisdom. If the moment ever comes when you know everything, then truly you know nothing. Let me see, for you my friend, what it is you seek.”

Saladin meditated.

Emilia waited, her eyes leering over to the wall, those sandcastles still standing. Saladin whispered, under his breath, as if communing with an apparition from beyond, his voice hushed in spiritual reverence.

Emilia looked beside him, at his companion. Soelle was puffing smoke from her pump, glaring at the corner, uninterested in the conversation. Her long lashes flared with every cuff of smoke that rose through them. Emilia wondered why she was there. What insight did Soelle deliver to Saladin? What insight could he impart on her? Maybe it was a matter of yin and yang—the fountain of wisdom contrasted against an abyss of thoughtlessness. A necessary paradox, perhaps, to ensure the full spectrum of possibility, from positive to negative, whole to empty.

Emilia looked at her friend. She was sitting there, fidgeting, probably thinking about how terribly long today has been and how she wasn’t even supposed to be alive for it. Emilia almost laughed, but annulled the action because it was inappropriate, and her friend had been through enough trouble for one day.

Saladin finally sighed. Then he glistened, speaking, “My friend, you have taught me something today. You asked why the divine will is, and I have contemplated the reason, diving deep within myself for a proper view, only to realize I should have been looking outward!”

Saladin slapped his forehead. “You see, we already know the answer. We are here, are we not? So, this is why. By virtue of being at all, this is why we be. There is something because without something, nothing is undefined. Nothing requires something so it can be nothing. Its definition is dependent upon its opposite.”

Emilia and Lulu both looked at each other, confused. Saladin recognized their confusion, and insisted, “I know it seems insensible. But why are we here? We are here because if we weren’t here, we would be nowhere. And if we were nowhere, then we wouldn’t be at all—and there wouldn’t be a nowhere for us to be if we weren’t being at all. You have proven to me a wisdom I did not have before. That the question of why is answered by itself—why is why is why!”

Saladin roared with laughter, tears parading down his face.

His euphoria was infectious, and soon Emilia was laughing uncontrollably too, with Lulu following, and eventually even Soelle beheld them, diverting her attention away from her nails to watch the primates around her self-destruct in absurd relief. Though she did not partake herself, the fact she became intrigued at all was a testament to the dreadful delirium unfolding.

It wasn’t the truth Emilia had been seeking—it was so much more dooming. The truth of no truth. How haunting.

After everybody calmed, Saladin summoned a graveness to his demeanor, addressing Lulu directly, “My darling swan, it was you that desired most to come here. It is you that has a problem you cannot solve. Tell me, my friend, what is it that ails you? What wisdom do you seek?”

“I want to kill myself. I keep trying, but it’s impossible. It’s almost like I can’t die.” Lulu explicated to Saladin.

His Wiseness spoke, “Impermanence is impossible. Everything must come to an end. My darling swan, shall I guide you to what you seek?”

Lulu rubbed her chin, thinking. Then she said, “Yes, that is what I really want. I came to you for help because I knew you were the only one who could help. Your wisdom saves us all.”

Saladin bowed, humbling, “I am no wiser than a discarded shell on the beach. No wiser than a speck of dust on a shelf. You will see. I shall guide you to what you seek, but you must walk the path alone.”

Lulu nodded. “That’s fine. I have no qualms walking whatever path by myself.”

She got up from her seat, expecting to go somewhere.

Saladin smiled. “You will always find what you seek in the House of Saladin! May divine wisdom bless you, as you begin the journey toward your desire. Come, let us find what you seek…”

Saladin snapped.

A blast splattered her head all over the floor.

Emilia flinched, startled by the sudden boom. She reveled in horror as her friend stood motionless, her face missing, replaced by a hole of dangling strands, tentacles of gut and blood sprouting from a crater, her brain shattered to shreds, coils of it unraveled and stuck to her remaining bone like confetti. Her stance didn’t remain forever, and her body finally fell to the ground in a splashing thud.

Omar, who was behind her, cleaned his gun out of respect and concealed it away to its resting spot once more.

Emilia gasped in shock. She couldn’t say anything. The nausea that had been plaguing her since morning reached its breaking point, the contents of her stomach erupting from her mouth. Saladin winced, mourning the demise of his luxurious carpet.

With her insides cleared, Emilia screamed.

Soelle seemed amused. “Your friend is fine now. The best death is a surprise.”

That was all she had to say, redirecting her devotion back to her nails.

Saladin comforted Emilia, “My darling swan, she dives to her peace now! You must understand, I did only what she wanted me to do. Are you upset, my friend?”

He waited for Emilia’s composure to regain.

Once it did, Emilia, panting, spoke, “Y-Yes. Yes. I understand. Thank you. You are…” Emilia choked, chunks of vomit still clogging her throat. “You are most wise.”

Emilia rose, wobbling. Omar grasped her arms, assisting her in stabilizing. She strained her eyes as far from her friend’s corpse as she could, focusing intently on the sandcastles.

Saladin stepped beside her, observing them himself.

“Castles made of sand always fall in to the sea eventually…”

The sound of waves whispering.

Emilia, leaving, shut her eyes, the last image seen an impression of a sandcastle, as Omar and Saladin gripped her and led her outside.

|Act Trois|

I was alone again.

On the porch, overlooking a street steeped in drowsy dusk. The lamplights glowed fuzzy, balls of shiny fur humming in the surrounding night. Along the shadows, everything swirled like an abstract painting.

I looked for the painter’s brush, following the strokes, that every bit of dark which seemed out of place or smeared on. But I couldn’t find the fingers, folded on a stick, illustrating a new reality in the material of crushed powder and melted glass. I couldn’t find anyone

I sighed. Where had I been? What was I doing? Who have I become? Then I snickered. Like I ever knew who I was in the first place, let alone who I had transformed in to. Leave me alone. I didn’t want to be bothered by thoughts like that, empty and unhelpful as they are.

I was Emilia. And I needed a cigarette.

The sounds of sirens singing in delight burrowed its way through the drowsiness. I walked away from the place I had been, in to the path beside the street, joined by sleepy lamplights and intoxicated fireflies.

There were random strangers without faces. They weren’t walking anywhere; they just hung in the deeper portions of sight, clinging to darkness as if they were afraid of revealing their hideousness. I knew how that felt. I knew what it meant to hide myself away. Fuck, I needed a cigarette.

Bodyguards of the state were patrolling their areas, probably frustrated to be spending a perfectly lazy night exacting the neurotic policy of lords living in homes far away from such concerns. They carried their phallic extensions, loaded in harmful ornaments, always prepared for when the mood should sour suddenly, and chaos become comfortable in its own skin.

“Could I bother you for a smoke?” I asked one of the brutes.

Like a sulking gargoyle he gazed at me, in controlled ire, then faced away to watch other things. What a sullen loaf. No matter. I wandered further down the paved path, popping in and out of lamplights, each one more dazed than the last. It amazed me they even had any spark left. On a night like this?

Everything was so diffused. Quietness was quaking. Silence had violence. The moon, half-lit, smoked its own cigarette, a dreary squiggle of haze floating away from it, into the utter blackness of space.

The surface of the waves from a nearby riverway couldn’t even bother to reflect in a symmetrical, instead coloring the moon and stars onto its shady-sapphire surface in crayons and hatchets. The waves barely made any movement at all, tingling into triangular splash only when a duck paddled its way through. And even the ducks had their beaks at half-tilt, beady-eyes closed, feathers snoozing as they bumped off brick wall to brick wall, letting liquid inertia drag them by, slower than trees. And the trees even! Their leaves droopy, their branches sighing—the bark across their faces slung to the side in uninspired sadness. How blasé!

I wanted to shout, “Wake up!” to every passing thing, but I decided it wasn’t worth my time or energy. Then I embarrassed myself, realizing I was as allergic to effort as everything else had been on this night. At least we shared something in common.

“Do you have a cigarette I could borrow?” I queried one of the ducks while standing over a railing. His beak-snout didn’t even perk up in my direction, but he still quacked a negating quack, and drifted on from my dreams. What vermin.

Sometimes this city is a slumbering wasteland.

I dallied onward. Until I didn't recognize where I was anymore. Not that it looked any different. Just the same metropolitan mecca, intertwined by the same endless street with the same banal bazaars.

Napoleon must have lost his mind commuting across this city—no wonder he sought other shores. Such is the plight of conquerors I suppose. You wouldn't become a conqueror if you were content staying where you are.

Approaching through the veil, I spied a foggy fire. As I neared it, I kept the same pace, casual and observant. The source of conflagration was a vehicle, smashed upon by a fist of flames. How eerie. The car was doused in blaze, burning from the interior out. Its windows had been shattered, so the smoldering gift could swell instead of suffocate. And as I passed this burning car, I noticed nobody around. It was an elysian flame. The only soul was this fire, engaged by this metallic machine, which held it like a goblet, letting its insides crumple to ash and smoke without a single regard for itself.

The ethereal combustion, eternal in force.

I exited the area, leaving behind the effigy of rage and rebellion. Up ahead, a curious and callous sound—the sound of people. The sound of a crowd gathering, the hiccups, elbow-bumps, muted coughs, uncareful gossip. There was anticipation for something.

As I neared the end of the street, I scanned through the midnight mist to see the tower of Eiffel, erect in fireworks and lanterns. A bustle of randomly dressed persons were shuffled into lines, at the base of an enormous metal claw; within its palms a golden shuttle, mounted with silver wings and boosters.

On a platform overhanging the spectacle, two astronauts stood alongside a speaker, who announced in tremendous tone the events unfolding.

I roamed into the lagoon, slicing my way through dazed onlookers, through wondrous children, through trapped gazers. Up to the front, where I snuck under the velvet rope—when no one was looking, which was easy since most everyone stared at the spacecraft—and I tiptoed into my place in the front of the line. One of the pilots was down there, greeting people half-heartedly, as if the excitement of spaceflight had waned from him quite some time ago.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

Without looking at me, he said, “Somewhere far away, I hope. You mean to fly with us?”

“You’d really let me go with you? In to space?” I said, eyes deepening.

He waved me by, exclaiming, “Sure. Why not. You seem like you want to go. Why should I stop you from what you want?”

I giggled in glee, my face pelted by internal rain, frothing down my cheeks in a most unkept way. But I wasn’t embarrassed.

The pilot lifted the rope and allowed me to pass. I ambled down the railed path, up flights of stairs, winding steel grates, until I reached the entrance of the rocketship and was bestowed with my very own spacesuit and a bouquet of flowers. A French model kissed each of us as we passed through the door, in to a chamber of glittery buttons and deafening silicon-fences, supported in circular fashion around the whole corridor.

A fellow astronaut showed me to my seat, then strapped me in, whistling an old tune that soldiers used to whistle during the old war—the great one. None of them were great.

Even inside, I could still hear outside people shouting. They hollered farewells and “c’est la vie”, glad that they themselves didn’t have to ruin routine by hopping on an interstellar locomotion to nowhere. They were content to return to their lives, wandering from café to store to park, astonished by every new cage, yet unconcerned with doing anything about them. To walk among the ancient streets where knights and kings once galloped—now occupied by troopers and beggars. To ignore the refuge and embrace the resonant. To be vapid, empty ghosts, haunting a place that was happy when no one was there.

The disgruntled pilot entered, situating himself beside me. As he buckled in, he glanced at me, his face stone and sour, but encumbered with surprise. “I’ve never seen someone so happy to go into space before.”

I wiped my face dry as best I could, trying to feign my smile to death, but I couldn’t.

“I don’t know if it’s so much so going into space,” I said. “As it is a last-minute effort to forget I was never there to begin with.”

The pilot chuckled, then commanded his attention forward, to the great steering mechanisms, wheels of blasted fury. They sealed the door shut. This was it. I could feel the rumbling below me, bubbling up like a feverish nausea all its own, the ship rattling in unsettling pangs.

I reclaimed my composure, being as mature and disconnected as I could be about such a thing as what was happening. As if it was passé to be spacebound.

The countdown initiated. The two astronauts ahead of us clicked the ignition, tapped their knobs and buttons and googly gadgets. They acted as if it was simulation. As if it was vexation. As if it was something they just had to get through; a gallery or museum they hurry through, disregarding the depth of present art, eliminating the exposure to the past some revere—revere enough to have tombs built to honor these objects and their articulators.

“Have you ever seen a quasar before?” I burst out.

The pilot scratched his nose. “Only the kind I spread on my toast.”

They engaged the thrusting emotions, stirring up those memories of fuel and fusion. The resulting concoction was a nostalgic spark, a wistful thunderbolt to the cold heart of rocketship.

I turned to the other patrons beside myself, but I found them unrelatable. They all had tattered faces, worn with beaten expressions, speaking in a language I did not understand. I smiled at them though, and they smiled back, all of us connected by our collective odyssey. And the pilot, even, revealed a bar of chocolate candy from his sleeve like some kind of magician, passing it along to the younger ones next to me.

He also offered me a piece, expressing to me an amiable resentment, “It’s still a mystery to me why people want to follow the stars. They don’t go anywhere.”

I agreed with him, nibbling the sweet cocoa paste. A rapturous jubilance captured me, an overwhelming pulse of sincerity and sensation. It was like marinating in morphine.

“Prepare for ascent…” a robotic voice spoke.

I gripped the creases of my spacesuit, my stomach a cauldron of nervousness and neurosis. I was sweating. My anxiety had become palpable. The pilot noticed, nurturing his hand upon my shoulder, quite familiar with this situation, as if everyone got nervous every time they had to do this sort of thing.

“Don’t you worry,” he smirked. “Because we’re almost done.”

The pilot assured me so well that by the time he removed his hand, we had already speared through orbit. At last, we abandoned those apes. And now we were crawling through the muck of space.

Oxygen flickers on…

But I am breathless.

[thefinishpiece]

Queen of Meadow

Climbing her dark hair. Every step a setting sun.

Through shadowed vines, along crimson-dipped thorns, tangling on the forest floor—her flesh of forest breath, blooming. Her skin splintering in emerald edibility, shimmering in the gloom. Her fingers swelling in tussling roots, spilling from her fingers like sparkling magic faltering along the beacon of a wand. Her legs, prickling, growing heavy in hushed wood and imitate ram. On her chest, a triad of bristling breasts with nipples poking out like stems, splitting at the tip to two strands, its inside passion twirling out—a ballerina of waking petals, dazed but graceful, languid yet sanguine.

Until the dance is complete and precious perfume is puffing from nectar-spoons of twin gorgeously-peacocked blossoms, cherry-glazed with coral-edges bleeding into blushing white.

Her hair is lush and dark, the deepest roots, curling branches lifting flaps of its tail up, spreading them out and ornamenting them as if arachnid-webs were woven from each shroud of hair. On her face, cheeks willowed, chin waning to meadowed neck; her lips pinched by horned plants, peeling from her mouth in winged thrust. Petals popping from every chafed-crack, lulling, quivering chalk-dust from their plated-surface, growing to lurid yellows and reds and blues, a different shade for each petal, crawling over her face, even concealing her pale eyes, which seep away in gaseous scent, their sight unplanted and free to roam the wavering air.

Now her body is a fascination of flora given fertile health. The inner light of growth—of life.

And climbing her dark hair, every step is a waning sliver.

Queen of the Meadow. A Throne of Garden. A Crown of Flowers. Mother of All.

Her body sacrificed to the earth, so she could give life to life—an offering.

Her sacrifice will bring rebirth.

Her beauty makes nature strong—they feed from her. Blood to blood. Energy to energy. The cycle of growth and decay. Consumption and depletion. Cells take form in her expiration, forming into trees and bees and deer and wolf. They feed on her form until there is nothing remaining. And then they lament to the sky the plight of being earth.

A floating rock of self-cannibalization. Devouring itself away, until only a single strand of her dark hair remains, plunging to abyss as slow as a feather, reaping the nostalgic glow of the world it bore.

One last pall of light—until the dark hair cannot be unseen from the basking black behind it.

Her scene has died.

[thefinishpiece]

Sick Of Sisters

There once were three sisters.

All spiteful of each other, despite being born together. All conniving and callous toward each other. Constantly scheming the demise of their least favorite sister—which changed seemingly every day, dependent upon chance and temper.

To them, the other was a cancer inflicted upon their life, wreaking the sort of disruptive trouble a cancer normally causes. Draining all the energy and health of the sisters, whom were caught in this atrophic web, incapable of escaping except through death or feigned tolerance. Relationship as existential prison.

This is where the morphine came in.

At first, it was pragmatic precedent. The eldest sister—Marilee—had hurt herself in a horrible home accident. She was curling her hair in to impossible strides in a venal attempt to seduce a car salesman into selling a car without insurance, when she slipped on the bathroom tile, clobbering her neck on the ridge of the toilet, knocking her collar-bone out of tune, and slopping the heated curler onto her belly.

Momentarily immobilized from her snapped stabilizer, she was unable to remove the curler for quite some time, until the youngest sister—Marin—discovered her writhing in agony on the floor, saving her from further damage with a swift swatting of the curler, maiming her own hand in the process. But not before the imprint of the curler was seared onto the stomach-flesh like a sloppy cattle-prod, spurts of blood peaking under crusted scab.

The Good Doctor— all doctors are good, are they not? —prescribed a profound amount of medication to ease Marilee’s pain, providing her a nightly nectar of morphine upon which two of the sisters are now addicted.

The first one to consider abusing the substance was the middle sister—Marlo—who had always been envious of her other two sisters, concealing her envy behind a curtain of false confidence and sensual swagger, often pretending she was “too cool” to be bothered by anything concerning her “mules of sisters”—even though she was prone to copying them at every turn, whether in fashion item or darling desire or turn-of-phrase, stealing from them every parcel of her identity. So it seemed only inevitable she eventually stole the medicative goo when no one was noticing, installing in in her veins like caustic wires, until she was dazed and dwindling in an oozing circus of her own.

The other sisters, to no avail, could never make fun of their middle sister for anything she did, because although she was an actress of appropriation, she had always been the most attractive and popular to the opposite sex—a trait of being that the eldest sister measured with worth, and that the youngest obsessed over only if to impress her fellow sisters and not be outcast by their inclinations of how a female should conduct herself and value her abilities. The ability to persuade male mates into misuse and mischief was a value most regarded in this home of three sisters, none of whom had ever been married.

So when Marlo, in her devil-may-care attitude, took to the morphine like mosquitos to electric maidens, Marilee soon followed, claiming her rightful spot as the original recipient of the tonic, complaining of increasingly discomforting pain to the Good Doctor, who continued to prescribe higher and higher dosages. And on a certain level, it appeared as though the Good Doctor himself had no real condolements for the sisters, as they could be bothersome in viscous sums, so he waivered practical dignity and supplemented them with joyful juice out of hope they would leave him alone—and possibly someday die.

What the Good Doctor failed to apply in his summation was the wickedness of Marilee and Marlo, which included their exasperating aptitude for withstanding tremendous levels of punishment. And so, the morphine binge marched on, much to concern of the innocent and confused Marin.

“You will never find a man,” Marilee was quoted as muttering frequently to her poor sister, “if you continue to act like a field mouse!”

Then Marilee would hawk something at Marin; some type of nearby object, anything from an empty beer can to a holiday ornament to a raggedy shoe—anything within reach. Marin never fought back, unfortunately, mitigating the aches and sores with the assurance that her sisters loved her, and that she, too, should always love her sisters. And could you blame her?

The maleficent mother of these three sisters died while Marin was only three months living, crushed to crumbs in an intoxicated crash of which she perpetuated, driving the wrong way on a road through the wrong intersection, at just the right time to be plowed by an oncoming supply-truck—which of all things good-timing, had its brakes sputter out in that exact moment. It was almost divine in its machination.

So, Marin was raised by Marilee and Marlo, who never appreciated having another sister— one younger and infinitely more adorable in infancy than they ever were. And they detested being imposed upon by the chore of nurturing her from nakedness to nuisance.

Their father, a gambler with a penchant for gore, would stop by on occasion to check-in, bringing fortunes and gifts for his girls, staying for about a week or so, then slipping away back to his precious casinos. Marin enjoyed these visits the most—the other sisters couldn’t be bothered to display any sort of affection or gratitude—and as such, she received the grandest gifts, becoming her father’s favorite, vexing her sisters to tease and taunt and torment her after father left.

Marin accepted it, however, because they were the only family she knew, and they’d habitually remind her of that terrible fact whenever she made a mistake. Whether it was metal in the microwave or buying the wrong flavor soda-pop from the convenience store; plucking weeds not deep enough, or not cooking their meals to meet “standards and decency”. And even though the sisters poured all means of errands and petty tasks on her, Marin, from the moment she could walk, did all of them with a grace unfounded in children, and a starvation of sense in understanding how her sisters could treat her this way yet still love her.

They reminded her, with clops on the head every so often, while she was on her knees scrubbing gunk from the kitchen tiles or washing the aerial defecation from on top the roof in boiling sunshine, nipping the side of her ear with their counterfeit nails, spewing some nonsense like, “Remember how much we loved you? We took care of you when no one else would! And this is how you repay us? By missing spots? To hell with you, mouse!”

Another nip. She didn’t like being called “mouse”, so she worked harder and holier each time. Until her tiny paws were quivering from fatigue.

By the time Marin was eleven years, her ears were adorned with porous marks, leftover scars from every time she had missed a spot or performed inadequately. Which in hindsight was all the time without any discretion, seemingly at the whims of her sisters, who spent leisure fantasizing about suitors and sulfurous insults, nicking her as they passed in meditative waltz.

Marin kept on cleaning and cooking for her sisters, dreaming someday they’d reward her by showing her how to grow her nails long and cruel, with all the shades of a rainbow; or maybe how to puff up her lips and brows with cosmetic witchery, making herself look like a famous face, finally free to attract the whole world to her porch. She’d be just like them. But this dream never came true.

And now she was twenty-two years, never spoke to a man let alone been with one, never worn makeup or dresses, never been outside her home except on trips for groceries, most of her experiences and memories from the visible pane of floor and corner, a sponge in her hand, her life soaked in suds and sorrys, spurned by her sisters.

The three of them shoulder to shoulder in spite.

||

“Marin! The heat! Open a damn window!” Marilee hollered.

Marin sighed. It was snowing outside. But she did as she was commanded, for fear of reprisal from her overlord, pushing glass aside so flurried air could shoot its frosty venom in.

Marin shivered, ice-flecked fangs nearly cutting the freckles from her face. Luckily, she avoided this loss—she was the only sister with freckles, a special trait the others disdained. Marlo even went so far as to pencil-in artificial freckles of her own, acting as if they were contagious.

“Marin! The cold! Close the damn window!” Marilee shouted.

Marin sighed. She gripped the bandages on her right hand, trembling in overuse. The Good Doctor explained very clearly that Marin should evade any sign of pressure or purpose on her bad hand, for worry of straining the wounded areas apart. It burned in fizzy agony whenever she went against the Good Doctor’s orders, straight to the marrow, but nobody else was going to do her chores and keep this home from shambling.

Marin was most disappointed by the notion she would no longer be capable of clutching a knife, which she kept burrowed in her tomato garden. She found it in a dumpster she had been rummaging through after Marlo “accidentally” tossed Marin’s stuffed-moose—Marley—a gift from their late father that Marin had sanctified in her youth. Her incapacity for stabbing foiled her plan temporarily, upsetting her. The upset was worse than any physical ailment could be.

After finishing the recent demands of Marilee’s mood, Marin shrouded herself in a tattered-fleece and sallow-scarf, the freckles on her face dissipating in pallor complexion. In careful tact, she maneuvered gloves onto her paws, a mission made simpler by the many holes and frays. Her sisters updated their wardrobes every season, discarding previous incarnations to the garbage in disgust, lest worn clothing despoil their entire soul of spirit.

Marin meanwhile had the same set of garments that had lasted her for a decade, and being that she was petite and pure, she never much grew out-of-focus for these childish threads to fit her. Though they had scars of their own, Marin never protested. She was grateful to have anything at all.

Outside, away from the clatter and carrion, Marin wept.

There had been an awful, wintry storm going on for quite some time, encasing everything in a crypt of ice and frost. A haze had turned black and green and orange, waste and trash fusing with dead air, puncturing the adjacent woods, and the gutted entrance across the lot, where Marin often had to pass through to walk the road to the convenience store, which sold almost everything they ever needed except for companionship and morphine.

What a trial it was to do, carrying plastic bags brimming in useless toiletries and rotting fruits, through hail and heat and gusts. Marin’s arms felt disjointed from their slots every time she had to walk the groceries back, and it was too many times where the plastic containers stretched beyond belief and ripped open, tumbling its treasures to the ground and forcing Marin to make-do with whatever she happened to have on her.

Once, under spears of sleet, Marin had to remove her coat and wrap it up like a bucket, placing all her groceries in it and dragging them the remainder of the way home, flogged by freezing air the whole way. Because if she hadn’t, her sisters would have scolded her. They would have slashed her. Flicked her face and ears with those carved-claws of theirs, slicing her skin, leaving behind traces of whatever hue they were wearing that week, from furious fuchsia to jolly jade. “You stupid mouse! How could you forget everything? We sent you out there—it isn’t even that far!”

Their voices punctuated her every thought. Marin did nothing of her own volition. Every move and mile were made only in regard to how her sisters may react. And she was sick of it. Sick of them. Sick of herself for letting them sicken her. Sick of everything.

Marin grumbled, her stomach jangling in pain. As a child, she was always having spells of random nausea. It’s why her father only ever took her somewhere on a few occasions—her favorite place being the museum, where she awed at dinosaur frames and star-maps and mummified pharaohs, absolutely adoring these relics of time. The dinosaurs were her favored exhibit, inspiring such wonder in her to see these prehistoric titans, once rulers of the same ground she now walked on, still standing resilient, even if they were now nothing but bones. She wondered if after she was gone, if anybody would hang her bones up and be awestruck by this mouse that once existed and still does.

Of course, she vomited on the way there. And on the way back. But her father insisted she survive the trip. He explained to her that the world was a wonderful place, endless in its miracles, ceaseless in its reverent history. It was his duty to at least show her its wonders—if only for one time—so that she would have these murmurs of imagination to leech off for the duration of her life. Because, in his heart of hearts, he knew his time was nearing an end. And he knew the malice of his own daughters. But Marin was supposed to be different.

And here she was, hiding outside in the snow, shivering and shamed and soured.

Her tears were a gas in the frigid afternoon. And her memories were a bullet to her brain, shooting through her entire body in prickly misery.

Marin stepped close to the edge of their lot, looking back at their trailer-home, covered in grime, practically glowing in the darkness; then stared longingly into the woods, as far as permitted by the storm, through naked trees and pined ones, standing in diametric dalliance, stripped of their color but standing the same way they always stand, unmoved by any force. She watched for signs of life. Sometimes she’d see a fox wandering through. Maybe a deer, if it had been quiet. And yes, even mice, scuttling from root to root, swifter than she could ever be.

She didn’t feel like a mouse. She had never understood why her sisters referred to her as one.

Marin examined her paws, shaking in the cold. Half of her fingers were bent, joints bristling away. Her nails were fractured, chipped in at random junctions, dirt and gunk rolled in them as if rolled in blankets, sleeping. The filth seemed comfortable there. Her right hand was stitched in bandages, spotted and soiled; their ends taped on after falling apart.

But Marilee was given new wrappings every day, and Marin had to traverse to the convenience store and back to bring her sister clean and sterile padding. But she herself wore the same saggy rags, every day.

Her paws were not nimble; they shuddered. Her paws were not swift; they lagged in lethargic weakness. She had freckles instead of whiskers. A bony-butt instead of a tail. She had no fur but skinny strands of hair, not even layering her whole body, which was brittle and bare anyway. Her teeth were crooked and putrefied, preventing her from biting most foods, which was just as well since all her sisters ever fed her was soup and mush. When they gave her the list for groceries, it was only ever enough for two. And the money was only ever enough for what was on the list.

Marilee, as much of a scoundrel as she was, always cooped up in the house, always irritated, seething at Marlo for always being out on dates and dinners, living the life of lies she once lived, when she was younger and prettier and her crabbiness was manageable and somewhat buttery—even in all her sullen squalor, Marilee had a precise mind, a tactical thinking, and it served her well in doling out only the bare minimum necessary tasks and necessary payment for Marin to deal with. Only the necessary amount for two sisters instead of three.

But there were three of them.

All harboring in that shackled abode of theirs. Passing seasons in continuous strife. Bickering—they loved bickering.

Marilee and Marlo engaged in contests of yelping and critical strikes almost daily. Marilee thought it disrespectful Marlo was always stealing—"borrowing”—her dresses, jewelry, makeup. Marlo thought it distasteful that such pleasant garments and ornaments should go to waste on such a petty, poisonous tree as her sister. And then there was Marin, meshed in the barbs between them, agent to them both, bandaging the wounds of their relationship while mitigating the worst injuries.

Because no matter how fiery Marilee and Marlo became toward each other, the consequent combustion always seemed to have a way of spilling over unto Marin, until finally Marilee and Marlo were both quite certain it was Marin whom they had been fighting against all along.

But outside, in the lonesome cold, the musty frigidness of a world decaying in tune, nobody blamed Marin for anything. Nobody could claim she did a poor job or that she lacked courage or that she was nothing but a squabbling mouse scrambling for crumbs. Out here, she was as uninteresting and unnoticed as a branch. Just another limb on the body of nature. It was calming, meditative. Marin took time with her breathing out here, inhaling so deep through her nose and mouth sometimes she would accidentally snort or hiccup.

So, she clung there, wading around the mounds of trash and piles of discarded vehicle gears. When suddenly, something scraped against her nostrils. A hideous smell—caustic and mushy. Marin winced, forming a shield around her nose with her little paws, trying to replace this odorous odor with one of her own flayed skin. Underneath the bandages, even under the scabs, her sores still danced with the pungent aroma of old blood and burnt skin. Anything was superior to this other scent, however—one of revolting ruin, of putrid pall.

Marin peered from one corner of the clearing to the other, when she realized the origin of the smell. Despite the ugliness of it, she sucked up personal disgust and peeled only two slight fingers apart into a slit, sniffing the source of the smell, following its rotting chain to its forsaken soul.

Over by the edge of the makeshift lawn, there was a metal bin, meant for industrial junk, but which the sisters had become accustomed to dumping all manner of trash in, especially liquor bottles and lipstick containers and ointment rags and leftover food they had let rot over for too long, either forgetting to eat it or just refusing to bother with them. Instead of sharing with Marin—as was typical—they would dump it in the barrel and send her to the convenience store to pick up more for supper. “Why are you begging for this filth? Huh. Just like a mouse, all you ever want to eat are scraps!”

When Marin was younger and weaker, she had a habit of sneaking out late at night, to fish out remains, picking at the parts still edible and least likely to sicken her. But what was there now seemed too sickening.

Approaching the tin bin, Marin was cautious not to let slip her mask of fingers, for fear she might suffocate from the smog. Her eyes began to sweat. If only she had more paws—a normal mouse has four.

Marin, with the wariness of a spider snatching eggs from a bird nest, leaned over and looked in. Abomination.

On the bottom rung, a smoldering cluster of shredded flesh and coiling bone, rusted, ravaged. The cavity of its chest hollowed-out, the bite-marks of fanged feasters and mauling maggots, halted halfway, as if the hoary night had frozen their procession in place. Its surrounding body remained in remains, skin shrunken so as to appear sinking between bones, its fur whittled away, spoiling in some spots and moldy in others, drained to a gross paleness, almost grayish-green, like swamp-muck turned to stone.

Marin could recognize it had been an animal at some point, observing its four legs now bent inward, wilting. And it had a tail, which was now a patched effort, skinny and sallow, craters of flies and worms still reminiscent on it.

Then she examined its head, whose covering had shriveled so much, it was more like a pastel skull, cheekbones and maw-ridges and sunken sockets, fleeced by a thin-layer of skin so emaciated and tarnished, it was impossible to imagine it had ever been a face.

To Marin, it reminded her of the skeletal mannequins she once admired at the museum. Unable to determine what kind of animal it was, she thought maybe it was a dinosaur. A long-lost primal beast, reduced to worthless size by time and commotion, the world a mess of monkeys and mice, vying for the same room. This was something that belonged in a museum.

Marin was so mesmerized, she removed her hand, and for a splitting moment the smell ceased to be smelt. She was entranced by this faded form, which had withered to its internal frame while still wearing the cloak of its dermal costume, like a ghost clinging to its corpse, even though the soul was now detached from the body and there was no coming back—no reattaching. She looked down at her own fleece, which she had outgrown, which was battered by tears and frays and splotches of obliterated dye. Then she gazed at her hands, beneath the gauze and speckled sound, how close her bones had come to the surface, her joints and appendages now more visible than her actual skin. And this haunted her—her own form fading.

Marin nearly disintegrated into the snowy ground, this disparaging despair causing a dissolution of herself. She cramped over, her stomach bubbling, sitting in the snow among trash and ash and mud. But she had no concerns about being damp or dirty or cold. She stared, at no particular direction or object—just staring because she wasn’t sure what else to do with her eyes. But she couldn’t close them; they were swollen from the sting.

Her fingers trembled, as they were prone to doing, but this time it was different—this time it was a body-quake, shaking and cracking her open. Marin huddled in the snow-stained dirt, her spirit in shambles. The little mouse had tripped herself.

She burped. Gases were mingling deep inside her. A nervous existentialism swirling in her stomach. And a sickening radiance overtook her—some hideous light, rays convulsing deep within her.

She expelled everything.

It spouted out from her mouth, thickening through her body as if a tree was sprouting from her intestines to her nose, filling her with heavy boughs, replacing veins with branches. She couldn’t breathe. And straight onto snowy surface, a splattering flurry of pungent-chunks and noxious-slime—a mess of eaten nature rebounded to its breeze.

Marin kneeled over her bodily puddle, writhing in strangely warm numbness. She finished, heaving every last drop of poison from inside her, her chest frozen in aching shock, barely able to find her first breath before gulping it down and choking on it again, broken on all-fours in remarkable ruin. Only moments after it was all done, did Marin lean over, panting; all the pain and displeasure expunged from her, feeling somewhat normal again, as if nothing had happened, just slivers of it in the way every breath still seemed desperate.

Marin recovered from her shock, as if it didn’t even happen, in the same way the earth pretends it wasn’t once swarming in terrible lizards and giant sharks. As if fossils were manufactured in a factory somewhere, for the sole purpose of populating museums to entertain people who take for granted how short their time on this planet really is. And Marin considered this thought, luring herself into the dark depths of doubt.

But she stopped, rescuing herself from further discourse, assuring herself there were most certainly dinosaurs roaming the earth, and most certain of all that things deceased are not simply forgotten. Because at the nougat of Marin’s anxiety was worry that she herself would be forgotten. Even after all the struggle and pain she wallowed through, thinking eventually some culmination of compensation would present itself, that to think everything in her past was actually fleeting and futile, that it was not in fact a crescendo but rather a flat-note existence—this most of all frightened her. The broken never being repaired. The servant never being rewarded.

The mouse never being given its cheese.

“Marin! Marin, where you are? Where have you gone little mouse?” Marilee shouted.

Marin perked up. Her sister came dashing out of the house, leaping from the porch barefoot, unchained from coldness. Her face was pallid and dripping, bland saliva painted onto her chin, eyes stretched by tentacles of blood, nostrils peeling snot-icicles at whim. She looked like a moving statue, tense and torpid. How she always looks these days.

But Marin limbered up. Something was different.

“Marin, call the Good Doctor. I don’t feel right—goddammit, I don’t feel right at all!” She shrilly muttered.

Yet, she was still caked in cosmetic frosting, appearing like a decorative tree whose branches and bark are spoiled and rotten behind a façade of kitchen-kitsch ornaments. Marlo often referred to her as a clown, runaway from the circus. This is how most of their arguments began.

“Listen you rodent, I—” Her scaly claws dug into Marin’s arms, pinching her already frail skin to the limit of perforation. Marin winced. Her sister’s eyes swallowed behind their icky ink, suddenly buried in a moldy-white. Then she collapsed to the ground.

Marin gasped, scurrying to the aid of her sister. Black-brine leaked from her lips, with a fuming foam seeping from her nostrils, her body so depleted of normal nutrients, which had been eroded away in her all-morphine diet, any fluid dripping from her lacked blood or color. She was bleeding residual leftovers. Her eyes were dead and drained.

Marin whimpered, a sea of veiled blood swarming around her freckles. She wasn’t sure what to do.

“Sister? Sister? Should I call…?” Marin whimpered, half-legible as her throat swelled and heart stampeded. As she held her sister, something peculiar happened. Marilee’s mouth curved into a serpent grin, and through her last gull of breath, she mumbled to Marin, “Don’t you worry, sister. We’re finally done.”

Marilee chuckled like a goblin, her fangs shimmering in the holiday stream, a rainbow of dim reds and greens and yellows and blues.

“Sister. Sorry. I love you.” Marin assured her that she loved her sister, not just because she was her sister, but because she was compassionate and caring and concerned.

And dead.

Marin remained there, shuddering in solemn scum. No heartbeat. Marin wept for her fallen sister; a piece of genetic memorabilia wiped from the scrapbook of living. The feeling of a corpse—it hurt Marin more than any punishment or wound she ever endured. She staggered up again, dragging Marilee’s body back into their house. Then Marin sunk onto the floor, fatigued by fate, by fear, by finality.

All Marin could think about is what her sister’s skeleton would be like displayed in an exhibit. What would they call her? The Serpent? Marin refuted this conception. Her sister did not have the cunning of a snake, even if she thought so. No, if they were to put Marilee on display, it would be as a vulture—a vulture chasing a mouse.

Dreary lights pierced through the shadowed room. Marlo had arrived home, presumably dropped by whatever new beau she had been entertaining for the night. Marin panicked. How could she explain such a fantastical occurrence?

Not that she had done anything wrong, but, well, Marin had a habit of being the subject of trouble and always assumed to have done the wrong thing when anything else would have sufficed. Maybe that was just the opinion of her sisters. Marin didn’t think about that now, however. Her blood and flesh had just left life in her own paws. The worthless mouse couldn’t salvage anything.

Marlo entered, swooning over her date. A spinster no more, perhaps? So, what a sight it was to see Marin huddled on the floor, quivering like a scared child, Marilee’s body flung across the room, limbs jaggedly sprawled and bitterly dark froth collecting around her head. Marlo screamed.

“What…? What did you do? Marin!” Marlo shrieked her sister’s name. Marin flinched. “What the hell did you do?!”

Marin, sniveling, couldn’t say a thing, rendered a mute by a flood of panic. Marlo rushed to her, her pincers clamping on Marin’s left ear, to which she finally found sound and released a tremendous whine.

“Please, please, please, it hurts!” Marin pleaded. Marlo hung Marin to her feet, a faint murmur of blood whistling across her nail and down her finger.

“What happened here, little mouse? Tell me the truth or God help me!” Marlo commanded.

Marin winced, her ear a trapeze of pain. She couldn’t explain—she herself didn’t even know what happened. Marlo’s patience burned to its final wick, however, and she shoved Marin down on the couch, a violent glare, then she examined Marilee’s body.

After, she sighed. And Marlo took a seat beside Marin, her emotional state transmuted to something entirely different, her anger and sullenness washed over by shades of volatile disappointment and uncomfortable relief.

“It’s not your fault,” Marlo murmured, staring at Marilee, while Marin rubbed her cut. “It is nobody’s fault.”

Nobody said anything. It was the first time this house had ever experienced such fractured silence.

Nauseous anxiety buoyed in Marin’s tummy. She closed her eyes, erasing the image of her sister’s deceased silhouette; she ignored the throbbing pain of her bleeding ear; she focused on a shard of memory, a vision from a time so long ago she doubted whether she had actually lived it at all.

In the museum. Her least favorite part. A section that wrapped around tubular barricades, static aquariums of plastic prehistoric fish and fauna carved into the cement walls, lights dimmed and receded, a sparse dark. At the end of this aquatic tunnel was a gigantic wall, enshrined with the molding of an ancient leviathan, behind it glistening vertical strains of deep ocean, partial artificial sunlight painted on, dropping to unfading black. And Marin standing there, a small mouse, directly in front of these behemoth jaws, slabs of unchipped gray, surrounding a gargantuan hole of darkness darker than the deepest elegies of space.

If there were eyes, they were meaningless lamplights compared to the sheer earth-swallowing pit of nothingness that was its mouth. It was the only part of the exhibit she was truly frightened of—the thought of being mindlessly swallowed up by this monstrous thing, without even being bit or chewed, without even having a chance to swim away. And she resented this memory, because she remembers when she was standing there, lost in the gape, so afraid, she soiled herself, and all the other passersby pointed and giggled and laughed at her.

This was when her father came and knocked one of the other fathers in the nose and there was shouting everywhere. That’s when she had to ride home in the back of a police vehicle. It’s when someone actually gave a damn enough to protect her.

As Marin opened her eyes, Marlo sobbing in her lap, embracing her sister, Marin had the most curious instinct of latching her arms around her sister in an affectionate—rather than hateful—manner. There was no more trouble.

Marin wanted to ask Marlo if she would ever let her slip away. Into the fade. Or if she’d have the decency of contributing her fossil to a museum. So she could live on forever—not as a monument to fear and darkness, but as a reminder of life and love, even in the corners of something as quiet and little as a mouse. But then Marin began crying fabulously furious tears, thinking to herself, Who would ever want to look at the skeleton of a mouse?

“Don’t cry, Marin. Save your energy. I still need you to clean up this mess.” Marlo disappeared into the kitchen, scrambling to find whatever remained of the morphine.

There were three sisters. Now there were none.

[old story, circa 2017]

[thefinishpiece]

A Balcony View

The perverted moonlight is mooning her again.

A bare, naked glow, cast across city-seas aside a bellamy of dark. Melissa sees every path of pavement glittering in obsidian tease, stripped to porous black by objects of misplaced machinery, artificial trees, and hazed streetlights, from this view appearing as distant dandelions.

Melissa sees every shrine of poison, each bestowed a crown of lights, electricity fizzling to flickering dust, and crowds of monstrous goo pouring in and out like sewage. They should have smiles on their faces, but from this distance, every expression is the same meaningless blur. And it is a special irony that they continue the farce, if only because in closeness, intimacy fools them in to believing anything they feel is somehow real or relevant.

Melissa seems lucky to be here, high above, with a view that separates the language of intent from its miasmic meaning. And yet, she is envious of them.

What it must be like to be down there—among the grimy towers and horrid herds, being caught in a penetrable flood of flesh, of stench, of saliva, of bodies against bodies against bodies. Her own body, as sensitive as it is, being pushed sideways by the human tides, with the glistered hope that nobody will notice her, and she can be washed away by their collective light.

You cannot see, but Melissa is sighing.

Because all of it is nonsense.

She will never venture down there. It is too comfortable up here—too safe. Up here, where noises of the city are nothing but mere rumble in an undergrowth of flowering sound, strung up in levels upon categories of height, from sewer-trench to celestial-tears. It is a lurid silence where she is, one composed of impressionistic syllables and severe smallness. On the streets, whatever shouting or scorning may occur sounds like curls of static up here, where the thickness of its sound is chafed away in its climb.

But when her tea-kettle fumes, it is a thunderbolt to her ears—an impossibly dense and physical presence that slices through the room, threatening to carve it in half and collapse the whole structure to below underworld ruin. Even so, the room remains the same.

As shaken as Melissa is she does not flinch. She absorbs the pain as plants drink the sun. And she wonders what it is like to be in a place where every noise is loud and violent and intrusive—how do those people down there listen to each other?

Or maybe they do not.

Maybe this is why they flock through the organs of the city—so they may grind together in to oozing deafness. An incapable bliss.

Looking out at them, she feels empty.

Until the phase changes once again, and the nude moon, dragging with it the aspirations of years, turns its bosom to her. And air becomes pungent in the lethargy of hours—now dead or dying.

A perfume of inconsolable rot.

Then everybody, all at once, suddenly disappears, and the city is in retreat.

Now the loudest sound is Melissa’s own breath, cold and caring, yet proud to be heard in the wake of night’s littleness. Away from this scene, her sight is lured upward, observing the constant astronomy of sky, with its nominable idols and blushing spheres, reduced to prickling points.

From this view even her eyes are bigger than the stars.

[thefinishpiece]

Aspects Of Character

Justine just couldn’t go on.

There was something about the wind—unfriendly, unraveling—motions of the earth unbraided from momentum’s frame. She worried if anything ever tilted the wrong way, she’d go plummeting off the surface of the world, plunging to a deep dark where nobody ever spoke music or played poetry.

In the bedside of her worry, there was also panic—vital as a venomous fang—debilitating her, reducing a once bright and effusive joy to weakened form. And yes, it is true that Justine was once a child of devouring curiosity, with an appetite for experience that led her to corners and cracks of rooms nobody ever bothered looking in or acknowledging as even being there.

And what did she find?

She found that caterpillars enjoy fingers, crawling over them in fuzzy parade, celebrating flesh as one and the same across all dimensions, whether human or millipede*.

She also discovered the delights of pineapples and peppers on pizza—her preferred choice—much to the dismay of any accompanying party, who’d rather a plain or pepperoni because they were boring and inconsolably useless. But she loved her flavors, something about sweet and spicy and the marvelous colors of contrast.

Or the dusty, forgotten music-box, which when winded-up and opened, displayed a robotic ballerina, spinning in mechanical ritual, a circular refrain to match lullaby riffs of dreary noise, luring young Justine to sleep, the act of voyeurism now chemically real and participant.

But Justine couldn’t go on—not in the same way she had been going—not anymore.

It had been a while since she was that sculpture of youth. That doe-eyed cherub, rolling blithely through every scene of life, never appreciating the moment because at the time it felt only like the beginning, and she could save her memory’s space for other tomorrows. It is only now she realizes her foolishness in believing she had yet to truly begin, when in actuality she had already finished. And that dazed nostalgia which plagues one in the end…

Justine thought it was a good thing she never took her memories so seriously—she might have missed out on enjoying them presciently, concerned too much with how they’d shape up in the future rather than how they felt right then and there.

Her bruises were unseen. However, she grappled with herself to conceal them anyway. But the wind curled such veils into revealing hooks, and they caught her by the lip and dragged her to regret’s wake, where she was dissolved wave by wave.

Nothing could make Justine go on.

She blamed herself, though she shouldn’t have. It wasn’t her fault that time does not adore permanence.

All Justine ever wanted was to do-over everything she had ever done—and change everything she had ever wanted. And as she looked down on her scars, each one a unique trophy of past fury, both victories and defeats, she wondered why her story had been told.

No clear resolution could be gleaned from her messy narrative, which sidewinded across ups-and-downs, never settling on a definitive point. Never addressing missing arcs. Never fixing leaking holes. Never admitting failure on its part to provide closure and serenity for its protagonist.

Justine, now owing authorship to herself, trying her best to revise history in a way that makes her appear like someone who did not waste every opportunity given to her.

In her careful penmanship, she traced the grace of a girl who did exactly what she was supposed to do and was met with success and love and accomplishment and—most significantly of all—closure.

But Justine knew she wasn’t going to get any of that.

There was no conclusive point for someone attending their first school dance, all alone, floating in the corner where light could not reach, watching everyone else laugh and move and play. She was afraid then. Even when a pleasant boy emerged from the crowd, assaulted by his bangs, crooked in his posture, but his face a nice shape and smile a welcoming symbol, asking Justine if she wanted to dance. But all she could do was tremble her throat, then shake her head. The boy’s smile retreated into his hole, and with hands in pockets, he walked away, disappointment hanging over him as if he’d been waiting all year to ask Justine for a dance—and she had been waiting too.

Or when she matured, a newly-minted visage, and seemed unable to garner attention from anyone no matter what she did. She’d cut her hair in fanciful strands, dye it neon-stains, pluck unnecessary hair from her limbs and center, shove crushed-clay on her lips and puff up like a needle-fish—yet nobody noticed her.

And so—where was the closure when she started avoiding meals and vomiting into toilets? Was the climax supposed to be the moment she took too many diet pills and began heaving blood and rot from her body, nearly choking to death? Was it epilogue when she woke up the following morning laying in a hospital bed, sterile bulbs stinging her eyes with plastic-bright, tubes pricked into her veins, turning her into nothing more than an unpretty puppet?

Possibly the true height of her story came after she failed out of school, letting her parents and relatives and friends all down—letting herself down. That ever-elusive piece of paper marking her as a capable adult and productive participant in society, now torched to ash and smoke, as immaterial to her now as it was before.

But it was a flaw of her character, right? It was she who refused to participate, to focus, to do what she needed to do to succeed. Instead, she wasted her time on pointless distractions and tangential plot-breaks involving parties and depressive power-naps.

In her final act, she never returned to the original outline, abandoning her play, running off-stage in temper and tears.

And now she has become a paradox—unfinished yet totally over.

If only she could have had the control—she could have written her story the way she wanted. But she never knew what she wanted. She always assumed life would disclose her desires for her. That she’d know it when she’d seen it.

If only she could start over—a new draft. Forget edits, forget revision, forget notes—a blank slate, a fresh and empty page. An entirely new story with a completely new character. Just so long as it was someone else—someone besides Justine. Otherwise, our new story would be just as doomed.

The problem was not the plot. It was not the themes. It was not the style. It was her—it was that this character of Justine had irredeemable flaws and a startling lack of personality.

The worst of it, though, was that she despised herself. How can a character possibly function properly if it despises itself? How can a character exist if it always wishes itself out of existence?

There was no answer that could keep Justine continuing this charade.

She doubted whether her memories meant anything to her or to whatever audience it was she seemed to be entertaining. How did they feel watching her grow up? How did they react when she went from combing the hair of her dolls to leaping face-first in to a toilet, over and over again, until she was a mannequin, carved in porcelain-bone, removed of meaningful flesh, appearing more like a blueprint of a human rather than the actual thing?

Maybe they grimaced—just like her—and begged their omniscient writer to choose a different subject and write about someone—nay, anyone—else.

Justine sighed.

Why was she so boring? So ugly? Why did she care so much about physical appearance? Why did she care so much about doing nothing with herself? Why did she both crave and loathe the attention of others? Why did she ever think any explanation or expression of herself would even matter?

“I just want to be Justine, but I don’t know who Justine is...”

No response. Did they think she was in a monologue?

So, like any predictable outcome, you can probably guess what she did next. Because she decided to just end it all. All stories end—hers did not have the strength to be any different.

No more going on. No more being here. No more—wait, what was her name again?

[thefinishpiece]

Looking Over A Bridge

Jude needed some air.

Standing on the edge of the bridge, there was a mist of memory—cool and rolling, revitalizing to the lungs, as if experiencing your first breath again and again.

She had herself a cigarette. She was steeped against the railing, nearly falling over, trying to get the freshness she desperately desired.

There were birds swimming. There were fish flying. Children were laughing somewhere.

Jude took it all in. Her private respite.

She let the rain kiss her while she kissed her cigarette. She smothered it, gulping the smoke, feasting on its leafy-innards and crinkling shell. It shriveled as it smoked, each one of her vampiric bites sucking another bit of life and fullness from the thing.

For a moment, she seemed content.

A child approached her, from behind, barefoot and wet. Jude smiled and asked why the child did not have any shoes on. The child was a little girl, clenching her lips. She seemed afraid to speak.

“Are you alright?” Jude asked.

The child walked to the railing beside Jude, gripping it incompletely with her tiny fingers. She stepped up on a beam, elevating herself from the damp pavement. She wore a flower dress that was drenched, craft-colors straining, petal dyes bleeding down her legs in a chromatic flood.

Jude finished her feast and flicked the remains across the gorge. The child was unconcerned with Jude’s questions, staring over the edge into the waves beneath, quite entranced with the depths.

“What is your name?” Jude asked.

The child was rather delicate and attractive. She was so small, it seemed a miracle that the rain did not peck through her like water through paper. She had long, fine hair, the darkest, roped behind her, exposing rather articulate ears, and a tender face, sharp and boned, with a finely-shaped nose, lush brows, and deeply moving amber eyes.

Jude thought that if she ever had a child, she’d hope it’d be as beautiful as this one.

Without interrupting her stare, the child answered.

“I can’t say.”

Jude snickered. She did not worry, for she did not suspect the child to be in any sort of trouble.

“Why can’t you say your name?”

The child ignored her. Jude sighed. She took out another cigarette and burnt it up. What a strange child, Jude thought.

As she smoked, the child climbed. She was leaning on the third rail now, half her body hanging out. Jude, with reasonable concern, recommended that the child cease.

“Be careful. You don’t want to fall over, do you?”

Jude flinched as the child finally broke her gaze, suddenly looking in Jude’s direction, an emotionless expression on her face. Then, she returned, examining the reaches under the bridge.

Jude became quite concerned. She motioned toward the child, but at a deliberate pace, so as not to frighten or provoke.

Jude asked one more time, “Hey, it’s okay. I just wanted to know your name. You seem like such a sweet girl. Do you have such a sweet name?”

“My name is Jude.”

The girl spoke. And she did have such a sweet voice—a tone gentler than honey and snow and dreams. It inspired life and love and joy. But also, a reserved sorrow.

Jude was quite taken aback but kept on a smile.

“Oh, that is a nice name. You probably won’t believe me, but I happen to have the same name.”

The child reached the fourth and final railing. Jude lunged for her, panicking. Should I help her down? Jude pondered. Would she be okay if I grabbed her like that?

The child, still staring, spoke again, only this time there was a sharper tinge of sullenness.

“We don’t have the same name.”

Jude had crept close to the child now, her arm aching in position to reach for the child. If it has to come to that, Jude thought to herself.

“Okay, doll, let’s be careful.”

Jude pleaded as pleasantly as possible. If she could get the child to trust her, maybe she would listen to her and be safe.

“I am not a doll,” the child pronounced.

“Of course not—I’m sorry. Jude, I’d like to ask that you please step down from the ledge. It is quite dangerous. I just don’t want you hurting yourself, Jude.”

Jude carefully placed her hand on the child’s shoulder, as motherly as she could, caressing her and keeping her there. Surprisingly, the child did not react.

“It’s a nice view, but we don’t have to get so close...” Jude explained.

“Don’t touch me like a doll. I said I am not a doll...” the child muttered.

Jude repealed her hand, as per her wish, but did not move away. Something was upsetting this child. And it’s not me, Jude thought. Did someone hurt her?

“Are you here alone?” Jude asked.

“We both are.” The child replied.

Jude realized she was going nowhere with this child. It pained her to see such a small thing in so much distress.

“Why are you here? Do you like the bridge?”

Jude folded her arms, resting against the railing casually. She tried so very hard to seem casual.

“I needed some air.”

The child responded, still lost in the abyss.

Jude smirked, “So did I.”

They both paused speaking and took some time observing their respective viewpoints. The storm had collapsed into a parade of various clouds. The rain had become thicker and stronger. The waters were steaming.

They listened to rain for a while.

Much to Jude’s astonishment, it was the child who eventually disturbed the silence, posing an odd question, “Do you believe we are free?”

Jude snickered. It was an odd question for a little girl to ask. Jude was unsure how to go about answering it.

“Well, we’d have to be free, wouldn’t we? I believe we are as free as we let ourselves be.”

For the first time since the conversation initiated, the child expressed an emotion: laughter.

Jude was startled, dropping her cigarette. She looked over at the child, who erupted in to a tantrum of laughter. It was a child’s laughter—so pure, so unbounded, so unrestrained. Her face swelled in to a rosy ocean, blush waves splashing across the cliffs of her nose and ears and eyes.

It would have been delightful considering different circumstances.

Jude tried to play along, feigning a laughter herself. But she was confused, eventually asking, “W-What’s so funny?”

The child stopped. Blank again. She looked Jude intensely in the eyes.

“You said a joke.”

Then she jumped.

Jude screamed, then angled over the railing, helplessly watching the little girl plunged to her death.

Her little body hit the swirling mass of the sea, tidal blades slashing through her template like fruits in a blender. It was all so sudden, so small, Jude didn’t even realize when it was over.

She just stared, her mouth agape, at the endless dark, this child erased from existence in a single moment.

And she stayed like that for quite a while.

By now, Jude was soaked. Rainfall had consumed the earth.

But she stood there, on that bridge, looking over and down, seeing if there was still something there.

Until she had resolved the situation—coming to terms with its gravity, finally looking up again, and having herself another cigarette, shaking, cold.

Then she laughed, genuinely this time. Just laughed and laughed.

For a moment, she seemed content.

[thefinishpiece]

A Noir Scene

Jude needed some air. The kind that brings you a certain kind of relief. Like a kiss from the night—but maybe not this night. Maybe not any night. Jude thought sore of the subject, returning her attention to the storm. And what a storm it was.

The rain seemed to clear everything up. It made crystals of the various fractals in the world—brick, glass, garbage, flies, smoke, flashes, people—spring in the city was always so pleasant. Jude couldn’t remember the last time she’d been in such a big city—probably never.

Hopefully we won’t have to say goodbye too soon, Jude thought. I’ve always been so sore on goodbyes.

It was classic noir—or some such imitation—reflecting in the window glass. Jude had been peering outside, in hopes of capturing that strange, cosmic dream. The rain always did seem to clear her out. Too bad, too. She really could’ve used some clarity.

“I-Isn’t this how most of your clients behave?” She whispered, her tongue slipping from nervousness.

He heard her, responding softly, “They’re usually all nervous wrecks. But you seem cool as a cucumber.”

Jude had an urge to grin, but she kept it away. Instead, she kept puffing on her cigarette.

The Man dressed himself for the weather outside, then put his hat on. “But then again, most of my clients don’t exactly have the problem you’re having. A very curious thing—a missing soul? I don’t know how we’ll find it. But you bet I’ll try my damndest.”

Jude turned, gazing at the floor, while speaking to him.

“What sort of problem do I have, sir—” Jude looked up, her eyes shimmering in the light of some phantom lamp. “But a problem of finding something I already have?”

The Man stepped nearer, leaning on his desk, casual.

“You see, ma’am, it’s not a matter of what you have, but a matter of what you won’t give up. There’s something you’re not telling me. I never could work with dames like you!”

Jude gasped, exasperated. “Dames like me? And what exactly does that mean?”

The Man edged closer to Jude, so close that she could feel his warm, whiskey-soaked breath on her lips. His arm croached around her. “It means you’re beautiful, darling.”

She pushed him away, unable to grasp herself. She was letting herself get too deep—she couldn’t have happen what happened last time. She promised herself she’d fix it.

The Man grabbed her shoulder and spun her around, planting a kiss directly on her lips, tending to the garden of her mouth. She gripped his arms, plenty in her hands. She thought to herself, I guess I never did fix it.

She never did.

Outside, they walked along an icy-black street.

The rain had glazed the pavement, making it look like pure glass. A road of obsidian scales. The rain was still pouring, basking the world in its cool glow. Neon images passed by above, obscured by the mist.

The silence that was previously there was being subdued by some rising noise. The subtle tones of brass horns blowing against the leather-hide of a drum snare. Some smoky song, being sung by some soothing siren. The crowd grew larger and larger. Jude caught herself panting, getting caught up in the whirl. I’m a nervous wreck, she thought. Just keep going, Jude.

She breathed in the night. Everything was okay, it seemed. After all, Jude said she needed some air.

“You ever been to The Electric Serpent? It’s a night club.” The Man asked, casually.

“I can’t say I’ve ever even heard of it, let alone have been there. Is it nice?” Jude replied, nibbling on her lips.

The Man coiled her in his arms as they strolled. “Baby, it’s more than nice—it’s a dream.”

A noir dream—blinding rays, shadowy deep, façade, disguise. A puff of light, gone in slashy smoke. But Jude’s dream was changing. Something in her was deeply afraid—deeply concerned. Lost in thoughts that weren’t her own.

The static ladies were all laughing, glowing. Everything was electricity.

“This is a night club?” Jude asked, her voice drowning in the circus. “It seems to have too many lights to be night.”

A long, dark night.

The Man motioned her to a booth, where two empty martini glasses were waiting. Some spooky jazz was playing. A waiter in a waiter’s outfit approached the table, pouring a martini shaker into the glasses.

“Here are your drinks, monsieur,” the waiter reached into a small, refrigerated bucket, filled with ice. He pulled out two olives and skewed them with toothpicks, then placed them delicately on the edge of each drink. “And now, anything else for the Man?”

The Man rubbed his chin, pretending to think. As he did this, his other arm slithered around Jude, as close as he could get. He tickled her ribs as he talked. “A Rueben for me. Another drink for the lady.”

“What kind?”

Jude exhaled. What? She thought to herself. Did someone ask me a question?

The waiter stared. “Madam, what will you drink?”

“Oh, sorry. I’ll have a Manhattan on the rocks, please.”

She stumbled. On the rocks? Who’s ever heard of a Manhattan on the rocks? Oh, you dolt!

“Of course.”

The waiter departed.

Jude relaxed. There was no animus in this place—only congeniality. Only comfort. Or so it seemed. But Jude had learned never to be too trustworthy. Her farmhouse growing up was none too comforting and her father would always—wait, why did she remember that? Jude had thought she’d forgotten all memories of her father. But she supposed, I guess one of them just clung on.

The Man leaned into Jude’s neck, then floundered to her ear. “My goodness, doll, you look so appetizing in that get-up. Like a real woman. I could almost eat you, you’re so real—argh!”

He seized a bite out of Jude’s nape. She flinched. He nibbled on her lope. She shoved him off.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing there?”

“Oh, darling, I’m just kidding, come on. It’s a dream, remember? It’s all a dream—I just can’t believe you’re real. Someone as beautiful as you.”

The waiter struck a glass. “Here’s your drink, madam.”

“Thank you.”

“No,” the waiter snickered. “Thank you.”

The waiter disappeared again.

Jude sipped her drink. It tasted weird. Not like any Manhattan on the rocks she had ever had.

In the center of this abyss, a curtain opened. An electric sun shone through. Everybody in the room suddenly became quiet. Rainbow-tinged vines pulsated back and forth. A drum roll began.

The Man gulped his martini, then casually said, “It’s time for the show, doll.”

On stage, several costumed dancers gathered. Behind them were a band. They played sweetly. A Magician walked out on stage. He clapped his hands together while the audience applauded. Then he bowed. And bowed again.

The Magician finally gestured for one of his assistants. She was wearing some cheap cocktail dress—poor thing probably doesn’t enjoy being up on that stage, Jude thought. But she clung to a smile anyway.

The assistant brought him a cartoonish top-hat, upside down, which he lifted for everybody to see. Then he shooed his assistant to the side.

The Magician twinkled his fingers, the audience moaning. Then he proceeded to push his whole fist into the hole of the hat, thrashing about in there for some object. The audience gasped.

From the darkness of the hat, miraculously, The Magician pulled out the tip of the tail of a snake.

Then he dropped the whole backside to the stage floor, revealing a thick trunk of scaly meat. The snake must have been some kind of glorious python—some dazzling spectacle of killing and death like only the devil’s earth could conjure.

As it sunk to the ground, more and more of its glorious body slunk out. It seemed endless.

The Magician let gravity work as he tipped over the hat, stream after stream of giant snake pouring forth. It began to pile up on the floor. His assistants hurried a ladder to him, then The Magician climbed the wooden steps to follow this behemoth beast to its very end. However, the snake was still coming out when the Magician reached the final step.

“Not to fear,” he announced, flicking his finger. “I’ve done this before!”

Somehow, the Magician stepped onto air. Jude sprung forward. The Magician’s foot appeared to be hanging flat on the space in front of the ladder. Then he bent his other knee and did what many might think impossible—he took another step.

The Magician was now floating in the middle of the air, standing on some kind of invisible platform. And it was on these empty steps that The Magician followed an entire unseen staircase to the very height of the stage. And the leviathan serpent was still ceaselessly folding its flesh all about the stage, threatening to consume everything. And it did.

The snake flooded over the edges of the stage, its massive body swelling on the floor beneath. Tables, chairs, glasses, drinks—all flung in every direction. People stood up aghast, but unable to move; they were each, one by one, sucked into the foils of the snake’s entangling body. The reptile crept onto the entire wall across from Jude, swallowing the entire scene within its canvas.

Jude wanted to run, but she was stuck. She couldn’t move. Her bottom was melted into the seat. Jude panicked. She turned to The Man, angling for advice. But his entire frame had been transformed in to ribbons of smoke—though still clinging to the shape of a person.

The Vaporous Man puffed an imaginary cigarette and told Jude not to worry.

“It won’t hurt, doll, it’ll just pinch. And then you’ll be gone. No more trouble from this world. No more mortal string to pluck at.”

Jude exhaled.

It won’t hurt, doll, Jude thought. It’s just a pinch. And then I’ll be gone.

And so she was.