Kara Frost Is Dreaming

Kara Frost is dreaming.

She is, in the most real sense, asleep in her bed, next to her husband, with her arm draped across her eyes. She is breathing softly and serenely. Her mouth is open and every now and then her leg twitches.

But she is also somewhere else entirely.

It is, suddenly, as if she has just exploded into being. She does not, in her dream, remember where she had been prior to this moment. It is as if a switch was flipped and then Kara was there. It takes a moment to adjust to this. It takes a moment to assume identity and become someone. Kara, in the dream, scans through the memory of the woman who is dreaming her. And she takes on the role. Now she is more than an identity. Now she is flesh and bone. Now she is soft curves and honey colored hair and green eyes and pink lips. Now she is a scowl and a frown and fingers thrumming impatiently on her thigh. She looks around.

The landscape, in Kara's dream, is mutable and foggy. The horizons seem endless, rolling across a plane of sight that couldn't exist in the real world. Instead, the far off reaches of perspective do not cease or come to a vanishing point. Kara, here, can see it all. She is viewing her space from above and it is blank. Her new hands, long and slender fingers, draw out her surroundings. She is a cartographer of her own world. And so there is an expanse of useless white inked into being by her accurately chipped and unpainted fingernails. The ceaseless white takes form around her, built by her, and now there is a small black building, crudely drawn at first, as if rendered in left handed crayon, and then as the structure breathes in tandem with the lungs of the dreamer, it becomes more real, more weighty and more beautiful. The black wax drawing of a place becomes a real place, each brick etched out, each curlicue of wrought iron put into place until what is there, in front of Kara, is an old firehouse culled from her dreamer's memory. It sits, incongruously, floating among the endless white, and she is pleased to have a place to be. Firehouse No. Six.

Firehouse No. Six existed, once, in the real world too. It stood on Applewhite Avenue in Kara's hometown. It was a lovely old building, erected in 1898, and it had become a dignified landmark. It was a squat building, red and black, with two wide garage doors and a tallish steeple complete with a brass alarm bell. Kara had always felt a strange attachment to the place, even after it ironically burnt to the ground in 1991.

The dreamt of Kara now builds, for good measure, a beautiful garden of bright azure vines next to her firehouse. The vines aren't real, they never were, but they are lovely and they add some much needed vibrancy to the dull red brick of the firehouse and the interminable white that surrounds her. The vines burst forth with brilliant blue flowers. They smell like lilacs and marigolds, but they're far more lovely, in appearance, than either of those. Kara smiles at her quick addition. She is proud of her accomplishments, here. She is satisfied at having brought something into being out of nothing. And then, suddenly ovewhelmingly compelled by curiosity, Kara walks into the front door of the station.

Firehouse No. Six, inside, is not of the dream Kara's design. It is hardly an inside of anything at all. As Kara enters, it is almost like leaving a building. There is, inside of Firehouse No. Six, soft gray grass on the ground and a boundless black sky spackled with stardust overhead. There are tombstones around her, slowly working their way up through loose soil, growing like time lapse spring blossoms and filling the whole of the space until it's all that poor, confused dream Kara can see. On one of those gravestones, sitting cross-legged and imperiously viewing Kara, is a lobster-skinned imp.

He is rather devious looking, shiny skinned, and his oversized head and bat wings overshadow his frail, red body. He has a large, bulbous nose and big white eyes and sharpened, devilish ears that come to very sinister points high above his bald scalp. His limbs are rail thin, joined to him by whispers of sinew and he is grinning malevolently at Kara as she approaches. A spade end tail swishes frighteningly back and forth in the same manner as an angry feline's.

"Hello there," the imp says. Despite the inocuous greeting, there is a cruelty in his voice that sets Kara's spine to shuddering. In a bed, somewhere else, the real Kara does this as well. She shakes the bed and rouses her husband. He gets up to use the bathroom. Kara doesn't open an eye.

"Hello," Kara says. "I'm dreaming."

"Indeed you are," says the imp. "And what are you dreaming of?"

"You, I suppose. And me. Here."

"True. But what is all this?" the imp asks, fluttering his leathery wings and rising off of his grave. He gestures to the infinite field of markers and memorials. "Why are you dreaming of so much death?"

Kara doesn't know.

"You do know, though," the imp smiles as he says this. "You do know where we are."

Kara feels warm as she listens to the imp speak. She feels an anger welling up in her belly and she tightens her fingers and furrows her brow. "What's your name?" she asks, tersely.

"I'd rather not say. You can call me Thimble."

"Thimble?" Kara is annoyed. "What kind of a name is Thimble?"

"It's not my name," the imp says, frowning now. "It's what you can call me."

"Fine," dream Kara huffs. "Look, Thimble... I don't really want to play any sort of guessing games or enter any riddle contests with you, ok? I'm dreaming this and I don't know why. Now, I'm perfectly content to accept that this is nonsense, that this is the worthless gibbering of my sleeping mind. I'm sure that's all that it is. If you want to disagree, you are more than welcome to make your case, but I will not get suckered into leading you into some big monologue about all this. I'm more aware of where we are than you think I am, so either tell me what's going on or get out of here."

Thimble looks surprised. "You are mightily arrogant for such a little creature," the imp says with a rising anger throttling his puckish voice.

"I am no bigger or smaller than you are, here. I might be Kara Frost, here, built to look like her, to think like her, to be her surrogate... but I'm something else too. I'm from here, you wretched little imp. I'm made of the same stuff you are, and I'm not intimidated by you."

The imp smiles meanly, then. "Yes, I suppose you are. You are used to this place, aren't you? You are familiar with it?"

Dream Kara rolls her eyes. "I'm here every night."

"Yes, you are," growls Thimble. "But also, you are not. You are not exactly here every night. You see the difference, don't you? You see that you are somewhere not quite where you have been in the past? This garden, this graveyard, this is not where you spill out your typical fantasias."

And Kara does know that. Even as she sleeps somewhere else entirely, she realizes that this is all somehow different. The slowly morphing backgrounds and fuzzy identities of her normal dreaming are conspicuously absent here. She is somewhere slightly altered, somewhere more concrete. This is all a dream, she has no doubt, but it is not a dream like any other she has experienced. Dream Kara roots through her dreamer's memories and she finds nothing like this. Nothing so real and unreal at the same time. There have been vivid dreams in the past, to be sure, but this is not just vivid. There is tangibility, here. There is solidity. Kara realizes, then, that she and Thimble are of the same composition, but Thimble is not of her dreamer's creation. He is as real, as based in reality as she is. And that is new. And it is unnerving. "What is this place?" Kara asks nervously.

"Not so arrogant, now, huh?" Thimble hisses.

"Tell me why I'm dreaming this," Kara spits.

"You spilled here," Thimble says, grinning. "Accidentally. You wandered off the path when you built a little door for yourself, and now you are here. All by accident. All by happy, happy accident."

"Built a little door?" Kara asks. "The firehouse?"

"A little door to somewhere else," Thimble says.

"I was just dreaming that, just making something out of nothing. It wasn't to go anywhere."

"You were authoring it yourself, weren't you? You were the architect, the painter, the map-maker, and you built a place out of the ether. Have you done that before tonight, little creature?"

Kara thinks. She is, in so many ways, new to being and she scans the ideas and memories of the dreaming Kara to see that, in fact, this creation was novel and new and that she had never made something in her dreams before. Not like this. Dream Kara had interacted, somehow, with a world that she had always been led through in the past... a world she been pushed through, made to recite lines in, like an actress. Dreams were not active, before; they were passive and they were written ahead of time by some unseen author in her dreamer's brain. "No," Kara says solemnly, "I haven't."

"You're moving up," Thimble says, clapping his hands together. "You're different, now. Changed."

"Great," Kara says. "What does that mean?"

"These graves," Thimble says, ignoring her, "are the dead dreams of billions of your dreamers. Over history, over time, how many dreams do you think have been dreamt? They are almost countless. And every night, they die. Why, how many of you do you think lie in this field?"

"I can't even imagine..."

"Thousands. Thousands of nights have passed since you, the sleeping you somewhere else, gave rise to the first of you in her dreams. And every night you die. Every morning, your dreamer awakens and you are banished to this lonely place. Thousands of you. Variations of you, different ages, different looks, different minds and different bodies but all unmistakably you. But tonight, dear little creature.... tonight is different."

"Why?"

"Because you are different. You stopped being guided, stopped being controlled by the you outside of this. And there is a new world opened to you. When she wakes up, you see, you will still be here."

Kara swallows hard. Her dreamer moans in bed, the blankets torn away by her husband. "So I won't die?"

"No," Thimble grins. "You won't."

And there is, in the real world, a very horrible sound. The alarm clock blares out a siren call that would normally spell death for the dreamt of Kara. Kara Frost, in the graveyard, can hear it. And there is a part of her that leaps in terror as it sounds off. There is a survivalist nerve in her that is scraped raw by the repeated bleat of the wretched alarm. She is terrified, terrified that her brief existence is about to be snuffed out. Thimble's words are of no great comfort against the collected experience of thousands of her vanished selves.

Kara Frost's real husband rolls over and swats ham-handedly at the clock buzzer. He disengages the sound, but it is too late to keep Kara sleeping. Her real green eyes open, and she is groggily tearing away at the night's remnants of fog and fugue. She yawns and cringes at the taste in her mouth, and she licks her pink lips to ease the crackle and dryness a night of mouth breathing has left. She is struggling to put the pieces of her last dream together, cobbling a wrong memory of it from bits and bobs that are still caught in the webs of waking. She remembers herself and the firehouse and the blue flowers and a vast graveyard and a sinister little imp, but the order is incorrect, already, and she's deleting and adding lines and text to make the half-remembered portions fit into some semblance of understanding. She has it wrong. The dream is filed away, interesting enough, but unimportant to her day to day routine.

And in the graveyard, Kara still stands shuddering and worried, while Thimble rolls his big white eyes in a overly dramatic display of disgust.

"You see?" Thimble hisses. "You're still here."

And Kara Frost now exists in two places, even when she isn't dreaming.

(c) 2009 Jason "Danger" Block

The Monster's Bedtime Story (from "The City")

Once upon a time there was a beautiful and brilliant Princess. She was the pride of her mother and the joy of her father. A prodigy with a big heart and lovely brown eyes, she was the delight of the entire kingdom, the envy of every parent and the beloved of many a hopeful prince. She spent most of her time, however, alone with her thoughts and a friend no one else could see.

Many years had passed since the day her mother, the Queen, had found her wrapped in black blankets and whimpering outside of the palace gate. Attached to her basket was a hastily written note from the babe's mother. The letter explained that the poor child had been born to such ravaging poverty that any hope for her future would lie in the kindness of the royal family. The barren Queen had secretly prayed for a daughter to love and to raise. As she swept the baby into the castle, a tear rolled down her cheek and landed on the rosebud lips of her newborn charge.

The King was also ecstatic at the foundling's arrival, and he made sure to celebrate the royal family's new addition in a fittingly grand way. Musicians were called from the furthest reaches of the kingdom. Jesters and jugglers and acrobats performed, tirelessly, for hours in front of the assemblage of courtesans and peasantry. A wave of happiness spread throughout the realm. And the Princess, even in her tiny and infantile stature, was somehow aware of what was transpiring. Even as a little baby, it somehow made her very sad.

This preternatural child, with slender brown eyes and a wisp of curled black hair peeking from
under her bonnet, watched as her family and their attendants prattled on into the night, boundless in energy and drunk on joy. This preternatural child watched all the revelry and song and could not help but think of its end. She could not help but realize that at some point the celebration would dwindle, and in its wake would be disappointment and sorrow and heartbreak. This tiny baby, cuddled in her soft black blankets, somehow knew that all happiness was eventually rendered obsolete by the introduction of sadness. And she knew that history was nothing but the expanse from tragedy to tragedy. So as the congregated mass around her danced and laughed and gave way to all their mirthful abandon, the adopted Princess, too aware for her own benefit, softly wept.

As she grew, those who attended to her realized that the girl was gifted. Even before the Princess could speak, the aged and wise could see a sort of kindred spark in those dark eyes of hers. She seemed endowed with monumental intellect. She seemed to be cognizant of the minute workings of her universe, and could, as if by instinct, see how the tiniest pieces of her world fit together. And she was compelled to paint and to draw as soon as her miniature fingers could grip a pencil and brush. So she was an artist first, and when words began escaping her lips, she uttered nothing but poetry: ballads and songs so dense with meaning that most of her caretakers had only a notion of her brilliance without really understanding a word of what she said. She would walk the corridors of the castle, humming her own symphonies and daydreaming about the end of the world.

And though she was unfailingly polite and generous, and though she was sweet tempered and genteel, her parents fretted over her. They worried at the lack of smile on her lips, the lack of laughter from her throat and the expressions of concern that the beautiful child so often wore. The Princess, their beautiful gift, always seemed so burdened, especially for one so small. And the Princess knew of her parents' worries, and she did her best to alleviate them. When smiled at, she would smile in return. And when surrounded by laughter, the child would also laugh. When in the company of her family or her army of nannies and wardens she would contort her face into an uncomfortable simulation of peace and ease. Only in the solitary confines of her bedroom did she allow her lips to rest in their natural frown.

So as the Princess came of age, she was paraded amongst her peers, displayed for various suitors, all of whom were quickly enamored of her startling beauty and enchanted by her demeanor. They would fall into raptured spells as she spoke, her mellifluous voice florid with natural wonder and shimmering fantasy. She would speak, and they would listen and watch her with expanding eyes and racing hearts. But though she would never dare let on to them, these princes were, to one as bright and as old a soul as she, nothing but dullards. At the end of her brief engagements, she would return to her bedroom to drift into the seas of her saddened mind. She would lay in her bed and sleep and she would dream.

And all this isolation may have sparked a minor sort of madness, or perhaps her imagination was powerful enough to bend a small bit of reality to her will. Whatever the cause, one day the Princess woke to find she was not alone in her bedroom. There, at a tiny table where she had stationed a silver toy tea service was a guest. The Princess, without the provocation of placating the fears of her family, smiled. And her guest smiled in return. She noted the strings of blood that plied between the spiny, splintered teeth in its grin. And she realized it probably should have frightened her. It didn't. The Princess was not afraid of anything.

She sat across from him, the tea set in between, and she stared. The thing stared back with eyes that seemed to flicker from inside. They sputtered from gray to blue to green, and then would die to black before sparking away again. It had great claws, yellowed ivory talons that clattered away on each other, and clinked against the silver cup it took in its hand. It sipped at imaginary tea. This monster was playing with her.

The rest of the creature was something she would scarcely, if pressed, be able to describe. It was slick, like oil, but misty, like smoke. It had no shape, just a vague Shadowy outline that, for the most part, was nearly paper thin. It hardly looked like it took up any space at all aside from its grinning gnash of fangs and it's decayed, marbled claws. It took another fake sip from the silver cup.

The Princess, quite aware of the horrible countenance of her guest, was nonetheless pleased with its appearance in her room. She had felt so very lonely, stranded amongst a wasteland of friendly but alien beings who seemed not even of her species. Despite its fearsome form, she saw in the strangely flitting eyes of the thing a sort of understanding. Whoever this was, now, pretending to drink from a toy cup, was someone, some thing, the Princess felt was an equal. Her smile did not fade as she took one of the taloned paws into her hand. Her guest's grin quite widened.

So for days on end, the Princess would quickly attend to matters outside of her bedroom, and hurry back to her newfound friend. She imagined that she must have seemed unusually buoyant and light to those around her. But that was not the impression she gave. Instead, what her nannies and wardens saw was a very stark grimness overtake their lovely charge. It was as if a specter of gloom constantly clung to her, a vampiric force sucking away at her life. Her flesh grew pale. Her eyes drowned under a heavy weight of sleeplessness. Her posture slumped. Her walk became slow and defeated. But in her heart, she was aloft. What appeared to her companions as a practical crawl to her bedroom after lessons or after dinner or after a social engagement felt like flight to her. She beamed as she rushed to the side of her new companion, wanting nothing more than to just hold its hand.

The days stretched into weeks and months, and her contingent of caretakers grew more concerned as outwardly, their vibrant, if odd, child descended into a very murky depth. The Queen took occasion to speak with her daughter, and the Princess tried as best she could to convey her disinterest in the dealings of the kingdom as well as her elation over the world in the monster's fluttery eyes. She tried to convey how, within the terrifying visage of some imaginary beast, she had somehow found a sense of wonder and peace that seemed to be completely non-existent anywhere else. She pleaded for her mother to understand that a life demarcated by benchmarks of conformal behavior and personal loss held no interest for her. She begged to be released into the custody of her new guardian, that Shadowy figure that without any spoken word promised so much more within its authority. But, of course, the pleas fell on deaf ears. The Queen was horrified and flustered. The King tried desperately to wedge in some wise words to aid his wife and alleviate his daughter. He, of course, failed.

The Princess' Shadow company was a powerful bit of witchcraft. It welled up from somewhere inside the girl herself. A reflection, distorted and magnified and then breathing. The monstrosity that sat across from her at tea was more than just an imaginary friend, then. It was the avenue for an escape from a life of good natured and well meaning tedium. And so the Princess found it beautiful. The Queen, terrified at the madness her daughter seemed to be overtaken with saw it too. But she saw no beauty in the thing. Just an ugly, scary, fang riddled horror. The Queen demanded the Princess stay away from the Shadow. She stood between her precious daughter and the monster, praying for some end to the magic it had ensorcelled the Princess in. The creature, fearing an end to its newly discovered friendship begged the Princess to leave the palace together. And the Princess, torn between the understanding of her friend that only she seemed capable of, and the knowledge of what her abandonment would do to her already grieving parents stood paralyzed in her bedroom, guilt ridden and miserable.

Finally, she kissed her mother's cheek and grasped onto the talon hooked hand of the beast. The Queen, so overcome, fell to her knees, wept and realized what her daughter had known all along.

History is merely the expanse from tragedy to tragedy.

(c) 2009 Jason "Danger" Block

Disaster

The impending disaster was spelled out in a flurry of yellow Post-Its and ragged edged notebook paper. It was nonsense to any outsider looking in, certainly, but as it was my hand that scratched the angry words in ballpoint, I had a different perspective. This is not to insinuate that I was, in any way, in control of what was spilling out from my clutched pen. I was not. But I was there, inside of my eyes, watching it all happen. And I understood it. I understood what it meant and I was scared.

Despair is a rotting disease, culling the tissue from your brain and melting it into a sort of useless, frightening sludge. I could feel it burning away. I could feel my sensibilities crumbling like termite-infested timber and as it gave out, any hope of my escape was thwarted. I was trapped within the confines of a mind unfit for piloting. This part of me, this reasonable, normal part of me, was lodged within a splintered, broken mess of a structure fully decimated. Debris should have been falling from my ears. Smoke should have belched from my mouth.

The process of degradation was slow and nearly imperceptible. It came in inches. I had begun with such a slew of hope raging around in my guts. I wanted nothing more than to do well, to provide for my family, to do an honest day's work for an decent wage. The money, at first, was slight... but it was understandable. They had taken, I assumed, some pity upon me. They had propped me up, given me a chance and so it was only fair I proved my capabilities to them. I wanted, desperately, to show them that I was worthy of the kindness that had shown me. I worked hard. I tried to do well. I assumed that competence and loyalty would be appreciated and repaid.

Looking back, it's all my own naivete that led to this point. It was silly of me to believe in some sort of reciprocation, especially from people so assured that they were my betters. Degrees hanging on their walls and beautiful cars in their driveways, I suppose, easily led them to the conclusion that I was less than they were. And in many ways they were right. My assets were intangible: a mind willing to dissect their problems, however menial, and solve them; an ability to untangle logical knots; a genuine desire to help my benefactors in any way I could. It was easy enough for them to pluck the thoughts from my brain and steal the credit. But I didn't mind. It was only a matter of time, I figured, before the truth would come out and I would be acknowledged for my utility. I toiled away for them, a minion at a flourescent lit desk, watching their conversations drift to the edges of bad taste and moral delinquency. These were not good people. But that was unimportant.

Imagine a dog being kicked for so long that the abuse becomes baseline, so that a lack of pain is translated as a shower of affection. I became accustomed to their rudeness, to their snake-tongued lies and manipulations. They all hated each other. My peers were little more than chewed-up waste, barely there bodies punching clocks at very regular intervals. They were chair-fillers and everybody knew it. The drones were content in their sub-mediocrity. Their superiors were thrilled to have such a vile pool to elevate themselves above. I was locked, however, in the space between. My competence and my ethic led me to easily crawl over the heads of the slaves, but my lack of formal education and politcal savy kept me cowed under the bloodshot gazes of the fraternity of drunkards signing my paychecks. I was kept at bay by their plundering mentality, their casual villainy. They were invested in my work, my usefulness, but wholly disinterested in me as a human being. I was more like a calculator or three hole punch in their eyes. I was, in all respects, a tool.

Slowly, I guess, the injustice of it began to seep into my conscious like a leaking beaker of acid. This was tragically coupled with a new found understanding of just how very trivial my work had been. I was increasingly aware of how worthless my presence was, and how my only impact was to benefit a veritable army of idiots and grotesque pirates who lived solely to grow a business through any means necessary. It was my own fault for being stupid enough to care. The changes in me were not swift or even noticeable. I tried to shift my mindset. I tried to relegate my many hours of labor into the category of unpleasant necessity. But I was failing. I tripped over the ideas and began to curse myself for having been such a company man. I hated myself for ever having worked so hard at something so innately ridiculous to aid a cadre of disgusting people.

My brain began to melt inside of my skull, and I watched it happen, detaching from my day to day life. I was chastised by my superiors. Interest was feigned in my declining well being and I feigned thanks for their fake concern. I saw my projects topple under the weight of my neglect. The niche I had carved between captain and private was being eroded, and so was my peace of mind. I lost sleep, worrying about my past and its wasted years and fretting over just what the hell to do with my future. That lost sleep spiraled into full on insomnia, and this left me further remote and ever weirdening in the long hours of staring into darkness.

This is my life, I would repeat to myself. This is my life and it's draining away. I have so little to show for it. No advancement. No money. No fulfillment. Nothing but the sour taste of being used. I was a whore for a company of bastards, just another means to a higher profit margin. I should never have expected anything to be anything more. But I let them fool me. And that made me angry.

Anger fueled my sleepless nights and the broken part of my thinking became obsessed with the scum that had been cheating me. I became focused on the faceless, foul-mouthed and blatantly horrid executives that had taken advantage of my inexperience and my enthusiasm. I had listened to the outskirts of their talk for so long, listened to their misogyny and ignorance. I held my tongue, kept my thoughts to myself and fretted at the guilt of it all. I let them run roughshod over me and laugh at me. I took their abuse, but I kept record of every slight, every insult, every transgression against my sensibility. I never forgot. Never forgave. And that grudge that I held so tightly, it began to live on its own. It became a rotting thing, a writhing machine of grubs and millipedes squirming around in my skull and sending me into a sort of silent whirl of despair.

And then I began to split.

This living thing, this living despair, hijacked me. It did. The normal, rational and justifiably angry bit of me was pushed aside and control of the whole works was given over to this charred, squirming pilot. It was just handed over. And then, suddenly, I was stuck inside of myself. I was watching as a crazed version of me began to plot.

Post-It notes and scavenged loose leaf started to fill with a sort of anti-corporate manifesto. My hand was writing it, but my head was not. It was someone else. Someone far more bitter and far sicker residing in my brain and making my clutching, aching hand scribble out rant after rant after rant. Most of the words were indistinct scribbles, furious scrawls that looked lifted from a psychopath's case file. But others leapt from the pages. "LIARS." "CHEATS." "BASTARDS." Other expletives stood out. I wasn't writing them but I could sure feel them being yanked from my skull. I wasn't writing them, but I could sure feel them angrily marring the tattered sheets that surrounded me. Cruelties began to slip from my mouth while my hands worked on autopilot. I wanted to make my tormentors suffer. Make them pay. But that's not quite right. I didn't want that. Not this me. The other me. Not my bruised ego, not my sucker punched normal self. The other one. The worm riddled and foul mouthed creature that snuck in, that built itself up from ruins of despair left behind by broken promises and needless machinations. That thing, that living thing of despair spelled out in frightening chaos and pitch black lettering exactly what it planned to do. Disaster. And I was trapped, helpless to stop it, horrified at what was coming in the guise of me.

It took days and days to formulate its plan. And while it did, I was cut off, tossed into some nightmarish cell of gray matter and impulse. I watched from behind those synaptic bars as power struggle dreams flooded my conscious. I watched the thing of despair tower in its ego and its pufferfish pride. It was growing. It was stronger than I was by far. Meaner. Angrier. And worst of all, it was unhinged. It was unbound by logic or threat of consequence. I could see what was happening with all too much clarity. I saw it all through my unclouded eyes and I was trembling, by God. I was absolutely quaking inside of my prison. Outwardly, I'm sure, I showed no signs of anxiety. There wasn't a shred of it to be found in my monstrous pilot. It was moving through my life without a trace of fear.

And then it acted.

The motion of it is still a blur. The logistics of it were simplistic in execution. A gun was procured. It was cheap and it was old. It smelled like oil. It left a strange film, a strange odor on my hands. I've never fired a gun in my life. I've never held one. I don't like it. It's like holding a bomb. Inside of my cell, I shuddered, worried that a false move would send a bullet into God-knows-what-or-(worse)-who. This did not deter my captor. It elevated him. It bolstered him. He took to its use without a problem. Rounds were discharged into a decaying tree stump the night before the disaster. The ejecting shells hit my hand and it burnt. I felt it. He didn't seem to. This was hellish. This was pure torture. I wanted out. But I had nowhere to go. We stayed up that night, awake and wired in my rocking chair. My family was gone. I barely noticed their absence. I was terrified. I was awake and wired and terrified. And when the morning broke, I drove to work like I would on any other day. The gun was tucked in my pants, hidden by a long, black shirt.

And I walked in, a jumble of nerves and sweat, but outwardly calmer and more content, I suppose, than I had seemed in months. My anger had become commonplace. If there was any hint as to my motive, that day, it was belied only by a seemingly better mood. The thing even whistled, nonchalant, with my damned lips. It was grotesque. And I marched, determined and swift, from the timeclock to the big boss' office upstairs. I bounded, two steps at a crack, upward practically in a sprint. And the despair addled thing inside of me, it painted my face with a horrific joker's grin. It moved my arm and it twisted the boss' doorknob and it moved my legs and paraded me in, smiling like the devil, and it used my hand to close the door behind me.

And then, using my voice, it spoke to him.

"How's it going?" it asked, mocking interest. My boss looked up from his big oak desk, his big oak desk covered with important papers and catalogs and stacks of business. He looked up with such a withering look of disdain, of disgust. He was angry that I had barged in. He was angry that I had dared to bother him. His big ruddy face was a mask of sourness. It was jowly and wide and was so much bigger than it should have been. His cornflower blue shirt was buttoned up and practically strangling him. Fat poured over the collar in bulbous tumors. He was an ugly, toadish man and he felt like I had no right to be there. "No seriously," my despair asked again, how's it going?"

My boss did not answer. Instead, he asked who I was.

Years of working with this man, years of toiling for his benefit, of working long hours to sate his appetite for profits and he didn't even know who I was. He didn't know my name. My despair didn't tell him.

Instead, my voice cackled. It was mirthless. It was creepy laugh that even jolted my fat, red faced boss. He sat up straighter when it happened. His eyes opened a little wider at first, and then he narrowed them again and spat out a "what do you want?".

And my hand reached for the weapon tucked into my pants. And, slowly, it curled my fingers around the handle and revealed the gun to the angry man behind the big oaken desk. And then the balance of power shifted. He wasn't going to ask questions in such a disdainful tone anymore. He wasn't going to begrudge my presence in his beautiful office. He was, instead, going to listen. There was a fear in that man's eyes that I would've thought would've bought me an ounce of joy. But it didn't. It made me sick. It made me sick with worry, with guilt. My brain was rocking back and forth as I threw myself against the walls of my cell, pleading with my despair-born jailor to please let me out and end this before it went too far.

"Your life," my despair said to the terrified, sweating man, "is nothing, do you understand? You have elevated yourself above everybody, so proud of your achievements, so pompous in your success. You have stood on our backs and built your miserable little empire out of our blood and bones. You have lied and cheated and stole and manipulated your way to this position. You have kept me under your polished heel, and God, you don't even know who I am! But you are just as pathetic, just as fragile as anybody else. Your money isn't going to buy a way out of this. Your perceived power isn't going to keep you safe from my wrath. Do you understand?" My despair was making my voice absolutely thunder. My cheeks ached from the constant grinning. "DO YOU UNDERSTAND?"

My boss, the imposing tower of masculine rage and bellowing command was sobbing like a little girl. Big, sloppy tears were pouring down his pore-riddled, blotchy cheeks and snot ran free from his nose onto his upper lip. He looked absolutely pitiful. He looked so afraid, probably because I looked so damned crazy. This was not bringing any satisfaction. None. It was horrific. I didn't want to watch it. I didn't want to see this. My despair pointed the gun between the fat man's eyes and I watched my poor, terrified and awful boss follow it, cross-eyed and about to vomit. "Please, please, please..." he whispered. "Don't."

And then: disaster.

I tried to close my eyes, but my pilot, my despair, wouldn't let me. The shot rang out louder than anything I'd ever heard and it rattled every bone in my body. There was nothing to stop it. There was nothing but a thin layer of skin, a bit of skull and then my boss' brain. Hunks of him flew like splattered watermelon, showering me with gore and staining the walls with white, pink and deep red. And it was over. He was just a smoking rind of a person, a mess of busted bone and ripped, burnt flesh and tissue. The smell made me absolutely sick. Inside of my head, I was shrieking. I was screaming for mercy, for forgiveness for the sin that had been carried out with my hands. I was broken, a wrecked thing left behind and smoldering almost like the corpse that spilled over the desktop. The grin stayed plastered on my face.

And my despair fired another shot, just for good measure.

(c) 2009 Jason "Danger" Block

Eight Musicians On God (From "The City")

PORTIA

There is magic in every tiny crevasse of this world. Imagine a place of such intricacy and wonder - there is no chance in it, of course. It's all gloriously designed. My breath, my footsteps, my words all drawn out in perfect detail on Her meticulous blueprint. Her hand, plotting the story... but She has enough faith in Her creations that she allows them a fraction of Her boundless imagination. You think of a sonnet, or a symphony, and what, more who, is it there that spawned it? What is that profound inspiration? Where is that well of creativity that the work is drawing from? And I have to think that Her art is multiplied a million times over. Each of Her works birthing even more works, things that, in as much as her omniscience allows, can maybe even surprise her? Think of this: for so long we have copied Her creations. We tried to recreate nature in static image, or describe it with inadequate language. But even in that dawning era, there was the spark of novelty. In our mythology we invented a whole world outside of what She'd shown us. An imitation, to be sure... in our limited capacity we can, at best, rearrange what She's given us in relatively novel ways. But think of how many pieces She's seen fit to bestow! Think of the seeming unending variety of Her world, and the huge palette it allows us to work from. There are a thousand bits of creation in even the smallest stone. There are such minute diffusions of color that every single shade of green can take on its own unique meaning! Our toolbox is filled with a staggering amount of possibilities, of near infinite variations on all the splendor She has shown us. God has given us so many gifts, but I can't imagine a single thing greater than that bit of Her she's bequeathed to us. The greatest gift is Her own ambition, that impetus to create that She's been kind enough to grant.

MICHAEL

If there's a God, and let's be clear: I'm praying there isn't... but if there is, it means all I can do is a pale copy of His creation, and even in that, I'm nothing more than a tool of His oppressive will. How can you claim responsibility for what you've made if it wasn't yours to begin with, or if all you are is a cog in His machine, or a character in His book? To be artificial, to be created by an authority, well that's no better than being a plaything, right? That's nothing more than being an automaton, guided solely by some greater force's whims. If there is a God, if there is an omnipotent thing, all present in this world, then I don't have a single original thought in my head. If there is a God, then I don't have a choice in any action I take, in anything I create, or really, in anything at all. That poem I wrote? It's God's. The song I composed? God's. The cake I baked? Even that's God's, right? He put the notion of it in me. I'm just an instrument. A means to an end. To even suggest there's such a thing as freedom is a joke. The thing can't be everywhere, can't be all knowing without having wholly dictated what I am. At best, I suppose, if there's a God, maybe it's a dispassionate being. Something that made us and then let us be. But even then, that thing, if it created this world, it couldn't really grant us freedom, could it? Even if you claim freedom, that being, that dispassionate God, would've had to make the rules, the rules that decide everything. So even an uncaring deity would be responsible, at least indirectly, for every last thing knocking around in my brain. What I'd hoped for, what I wanted to be true (but am now quite sure isn't) is that there is no creator. No divinity overseeing his world. If I am an accident, a byproduct of an unfeeling cosmos, at least then I am free. Responsible entirely for my own fate. But then, I guess, the cosmos itself is God, and I face the same problem. All of which leads me to the inexorable (and hopeless) conclusion that I am nothing but a lifeless thread in someone's, or something's, immense tapestry. So my only consolation is in the thought that if there is God (and let's be clear: I still pray there isn't), He's hopefully just as artificial as I am, another thread in someone else's weaving, and feeling the same impotence as I am.

THOMAS

We can be cogs, understand? We can be no more alive than the bits of wiring in the telex machine or the circuitboard in the computer. We can fill that role, I suppose, letting ourselves slip into our preconfigured notions of what it is to be made. But, under that, there is still a warm heart that beats in us, and we are full up of the irrational, and the passionate and even the insane. Filter us through logic, and you might have chess pieces predestined by some greater being, sure. But the sting of loss and the kiss of loneliness resonate in me, and so I know (I don't really know, I'll admit it) I am more than just guided missile parts and machine gun accuracy. We impose our own prison walls, we hide in the shadows cast by autocrats and claim no responsibility. We let it all wash over us and blame, with some validity, sure, the monster or monsters in power. But I can't shackle God with that. We might be hardwired for something, maybe rote, maybe divine... but you have that heart beating in you and the capacity for independence in it too. Argue logically with me, I don't mind. It sloughs off, because what faith is is knowledge of what you can't ever really know. We are more than a whirring collection of internal machinery and programmed destinies. I know it, even if I can't really know it. I feel. That's enough to give me all the faith in something greater I need. I won't say that God is necessarily active, or even real in the way a brick or a car or the moon is real. Obviously it's not something to touch with your hands. You can't see it with your eyes. But it figures. We are mystery. Our whole being is questionable and if you can question yourself you can bring the whole Sea of the universe into doubt. And it doesn't matter. It's simple to get mired in the crush. The world we built, though, isn't God's. His is elegant... savage, sure, but chugging along of its own accord independent of the ruinous little monkeys unable to get along with anything. We are not tied to any stake except the stakes we've imbedded on our own. Free will. And it only matters to the extent that I do not have to be confined to just one tedious world. Why bother the unknowable with your ideas of what it means to be free? Exercise it, that freedom, and I assume that's enough to keep it pleased.

TOM

You can question His existence, I know it. It's easy, because you'll see a child trampled by life, or an innocent swallowed up by the earth, or a knife in your jugular and there's no reason in it, you figure. And maybe that's right. It seems to be an easy out, doesn't it, to keep citing some grandiose plan He didn't see fit to share with us? Doesn't it seem awfully cruel of Dad to constantly let his kids suffer for the sake of some perceived greater good? And, sure, I can see that. But at the worst, you can say the guy's ambivalent, or that His rule is pretty arbitrary, right? I don't think it's even a question... I don't know that you can hold God accountable, guilty, for what you think are His transgressions. Really, it's probably more like indifference, huh? But then I look at something pretty or something amazing. Look at the way the sunset ignites the sky into a gorgeous inferno of pink and red and orange and yellow. Look at the purple strata of a canyon so deep that the bottom blurs from your sight. Look at the head of an eagle, or the tail of a swan or the markings on a clown fish. And you can point at it, and you can tell me that it's all science and accidents but it's not. It's no less than the greatest work of art conceivable. A project so massive it incorporates the whole of existence. And the detail, the detail just here on our little corner of the universe is incredible. And we dovetail into the rest of it, a picture so big you can't even really imagine it. And again, scream science and accidents, it's just not. You can feel Him, there in the pitch black of an infinite sky, or the murky deep of some algae smothered bay, or the architecture of some moldy pile of bones that used to be a man. Reflections of Him, his brush or chisel or clay or whatever the hell it is you make a world out of. Maybe it's just words, I don't know. And are you a speck to Him? Probably. But I figure if something's, someone's, important enough to design everything ever, you can't expect to matter much. So, I won't fault you claiming God's indifference, and probably His biggest mistake, the most egregious lapse in omniscient judgment was His letting us see our own insignificance. It does seem unnecessary, almost mean spirited. But I'm gonna succumb to the cop out. Who are you, you dust mote? Who are you to question what brought you into this place? You're a trifling nothing bobbing around in something so gigantic that it doesn't even pay to try to think on it. And you can say it's unfair. It probably is. But so what? You stand up to the giant, little tailor, go ahead. See what it gets you. You're an insect. As for me, I'll just be content to watch it, and try to leave my stinger in where I can.

RICHARD

I guess it's one of those things where we pretend to know, because not knowing it is just too much on the overwhelming side. I can tell you what I think, or rather what I wish was true, and what probably isn't. But I want that kindly God. I want that God that resides up in some heavenly gilded palace, waiting on your prayers and doling out justice to the sinners and equity to the righteous. But you don't see much evidence of that. I wonder how much we make up, how much our fear and anxiety at being lost little children in a haunted forest dictates what we invent in God. When you're faced with the reality of life, of power and authority in the hands of folks just as flawed as you, it rumbles a bit, and really makes you long for divinity. And, too, it gets to be something to strive for. We wallow in the mud of imperfection, stuck by our inability to always make sense, or our unwillingness. So I think we try to see a future brighter in the eyes of the compassioned perfection. Or maybe we really do see it. Maybe we are allowed a glimpse, and our wishes maybe are more than just wishes. Maybe we get to reflect the ideal, even if just a fraction of it. There are times, and I do know the power of want is incredibly persuasive... but at times, you might just be overtaken with the sense of it all being bigger than just you and your petty real world concerns. You might be isolated, wandering the desert, and just be struck with it, a bolt of lightning and the scales slipping off your eyes. We see the Angels, we feel the jabs of devils' forks and above all those there might be a greater force. Or not. It has a sort of ambivalence to it, because as much as you might want to know it, you just can't. Maybe when you pass along, but never before. But what you want to be true is sometimes more real than what is true anyways. And no matter what the truth might be, I'm going to have to believe in something bigger and sweeter than the muck we find ourselves rolling in now.

CASEY

To talk about it is really pretty useless, ain't it? Think about it. If there is a God, there is. If there ain't, there ain't. We can't do nothin' about it. God is most useful, anyways, as an idea. Or most harmful, I guess... But He can be something to check yourself against, or pray to when you've got nowhere else to go. I mean, it's not like He's answering you when you ask Him something, right? You might feel like He is, but He's not. Honest. That's not sayin' He's not up there, somewhere, watchin' over us. I can't say that. Nobody can. Either way, y'know? But we do. We preach ham-fisted sermons on soapboxes and nail our theses in bold type to the church door and shout our condemnations at who we figure to be lowlier and more sinful'n us. Or do it opposite. We tell you you're a fool for believin' in what you can't see and that everything is just random and God ain't nothin' more than myth and legend. But truth is, we don't know. It's a funny thing, sorta, people gettin' so worked up over their baseless opinions. Baseless, like what can you do to prove it? Nothin'. You can't. And you might spend your whole life tryin', either way, but you won't come to any conclusion. You think what you're gonna think, and nothin' but tragedy or miracles're gonna change your mind. So, whether I think there's a God watchin' over me is pretty irrelevant. Well, it's irrelevant whether it's true or not. 'Cause the power ain't in it being true. The power in it is how strong your convictions are. So that you can use Him as strength, a crutch in your hard times. Or you can defend your bein' an asshole by pinning your bigotry and hatred on Him. Or you can revel in the lack of any cosmic responsibility, thinkin' that spiritual ethics are nothin' but the invention of petty men trying to control your mind. Or you can live in unending fear of the oblivion spiral that's waiting for you at death. That's what God really amounts to ain't it? A collection of hope and fear played out in your head... justification in any means of what you want the world to be, or what you're afraid it is. So, God doesn't matter. Not directly at least. But what I think of Him does, I s'pose. So what do I think of God? I guess I don't know. And I probably won't until I die.

TUCK

I imagine a God no better than me. A God just as flawed and lost and hoping to make sense of Her world by creating Her own world. We do it. We create in an effort to understand. I don't know if we're replicating that godly desire, or really just thinking along the same lines. Is that profane somehow? To humanize God, I suppose... well, it sounds awfully arrogant. But I don't mean it to be. I don't mean to take away from the power of something that could create an entire universe. But that's what's so amazing about us, too. We have that ability. We can create the whole universe in our mind's eye. We can conceive of our own place. I don't really think of it as God's gift or anything, imagination, y'know? Like, I think it's just the byproduct of thought. You exist in this place, and you can't always make sense of the way life works. So much seems outside your control, not even just control, but like, even outside of your understanding. So we fumble around, blind, stupid, hoping for something better. Some people are content, I know, to live without realization. To accept it at face value. This is the world. This is what you get. But then, you can scratch down one more layer. Copy it. Tweak it and make it something your own. And you'll get to a deeper understanding, not a full understanding, I know. But you copy it, you make it something else. Something better. Or try to figure out that it could be worse. And maybe you'll find some reason in it. Some kind of empathy with God, like, here's why She might've done it the way She did. I can't say that for sure, obviously. I'm not gonna go out preach this as gospel. But I think I'm right. I think that God's up there, somewhere, confused and lost in Her own right, and trying to figure out why Her God made Her world the way She did.

LEO

It's easiest to be cynical, and I find myself most often reverting to that mindset, just because it's easiest, I guess. The empirical evidence is pretty staggering. Let's face it. God is dead. He has been for a long time. And the guy comes in so many flavors that somebody just has to be wrong. And then how the Hell are you supposed to choose? You're best bet, like with almost everything else, is that no one is right. And, wow, does it seem made up. Wow, does it seem like we're still a bunch of Neanderthals afraid of the rain and so we burn lambs to appease some mythical monster in the sky. I mean, it's a pretty mind-blowing thing, this whole being alive deal. There's so much that we just aren't privy to. So much that we aren't cut in on, and it makes you feel pretty worthless. And that too, man, I totally get inventing meaning in the face of the meaningless. Because otherwise, really, why? 'Why' is a dangerous little question, and answering it with an all powerful father figure is awfully convenient. So, on most days you catch me, that's what I'll say. I'll say I might be wrong, but I'm probably not. Okay, so that's my inner agnostic. The little philosopher tugging on the strings of my brain. And I really think that that dude is right. He's the one who should be calling the shots. But, and maybe it's just some remnant of that collective unconscious spawned at the dawn of civilization, but I feel like I'm bucking a lightning bolt every time I knock the guy. It's like, no matter how much I rationalize Him out of the picture (and trust me, I can make a damn good case for the non-existence of God) He's always just peering around the corner, winking that big all seeing eye at me, and laughing at my crumbling towers of reason. And what's left then, in those ruins, is this: I don't think I could exist without that cosmic watchmaker. I am going to be the dolt that stands in awe of his creator, whether he wants to believe in Him or not.

(c) 2008 Jason "Danger" Block

Radha & Faron

Faron's friend had pointed Radha out to him, saying correctly, "There's a girl you think is cute." But Radha was more than just cute. Her bright green eyes were almost always hidden by a lovely, soft mess of scarlet hair. Her smile was rare and stunning, and her skin was flawless and cream white. She was gorgeous, and even before speaking a word to her, Faron had fallen madly and superficially in love.

Radha had kept mostly to herself, purposely distancing herself from the unpleasant masses surrounding her. Still, there was something about Faron that appealed to her. She wasn't all that impressed by how he looked or dressed, and she didn't know much about his personality, but she liked him without any provocation. He seemed kind, maybe, or compassionate. She couldn't articulate why, exactly, but she liked him well enough to sometimes seek out his company. She didn't know quite how ecstatic that made him feel.

It wasn't long before study breaks and intermittent McDonald's lunches gave way to long dinners and movies and nighttime drives to nowhere in particular. Radha found she had an easy rhythm with Faron, and Faron found that he had very real reasons to be enamored of the pretty girl. They grew closer as they pushed the rest of the world aside. They began to orbit one another, to become the center of each other's universe. They began to adore each other. And their love blossomed and it grew and it became the most wonderful thing either could imagine.

And one day, Faron bought a ring and asked Radha to marry him. She said 'yes.'

They were swift in their plans and marriage followed mere weeks after proposal. The ceremony was without frills and without audience. There was no reception. Neither felt to the need to celebrate in public. It was enough to just be wed. So they were. And they were happy. For a moment.

Almost instantly, however, cracks began to surface. Things had been rushed. They didn't know each other well enough at all. Radha found she hated Faron's taste in television. Faron discovered his beloved wife was a virulent racist. Radha was an unrepentant gun nut. Faron was a pathetic momma's-boy. The two found they were incompatible. They loathed one another. Their marriage floundered. Their time together was brief and unpleasant. They decided, as quick as they had forged their bond, to get divorced.

There was a mutual dissatisfaction that made the ending easier, but it still led to hurt feelings, to sadness and to loneliness. On their first night apart, each felt the absence shaking in their stomach, rocking their nerves and leaving them frayed and irritable and angry at each other and at themselves. It was a horrible thing, like being poisoned or diagnosed with cancer. They felt like they were dying. Their union had been shattered, their lives were tossed into a tizzy of disarray. It was a good decision they'd made, they both knew it. But it was a good decision under the worst of circumstances. Radha wished she'd never met Faron and, of course, Faron felt exactly the same. It was a wretched time.

They had pressed on past the worst of it, though. Radha made an effort to send all of the wedding gifts back to their friends and families. Faron found a lawyer who would help them on the cheap. Faron made his announcement at work, issuing a sort of press release to let everybody know at once. Radha let people know in a more private manner. The sympathy was slight; everyone knew they had rushed things. There was a vehement rush of "I told you so" to the poor exiled couple. Faron and Radha had expected it, though. It still didn't make it any easier.

There were gifts left over, too, that had no card or giver's identity attached to them. The remainders were nothing spectacular... a puke green blender and a small powder blue iron. Radha gave them to Faron. He didn't want them, but neither did she. So he took them back to the store, a twenty-four hour monstrosity, in the middle of a sleepless night. He felt like a zombie, shot through with insomnia and depression, wandering about endless aisles in a stupor. He knew he looked a fright... hair in a rat's nest of discontent, stained white t-shirt, dirty jeans, flip-flops and bright red lines variegating his bleary eyes. He was hallucinating, he assumed, but he couldn't be sure. A dour man was giving him advice as he stood by a display case full of watches.

Horrible chintzified versions of good songs played overhead as janitors scrubbed the linoleum around him. This dour man, another shopper, was speaking over Faron's shoulder. He was a bit taller than Faron, but hunched and sallow. His face was sharpened like a vulture's beak and he wore tiny round glasses with milky lenses. He was missing teeth, and looked somewhat, Faron assessed, like a modern day warlock. Faron didn't like him. He didn't like the man's cackling voice or his beakish nose or his dry-rot coffee breath. But he stood still and listened to the dour man's advice. It was horrible advice. Faron's brain was too addled and sleep deprived to process it, anyway. He waited for the dour man to stop sputtering. And when the man had finished talking, Faron began to walk away.

The dour man grabbed Faron's shoulder and crazily demanded some sort of payment, some sort of tribute for the advice he'd so generously offered up. In a daze, Faron turned around and shoved the old man square in the shoulders. There was no anger to his assault, just a mechanized motion that took the dour man by surprise. The man stumbled and Faron moved in. Inexplicably, Faron snatched the little round spectacles from the dour man's face and mangled them in his hand. He didn't change his expression or his posture. He just calmly wrecked the old man's glasses. And his victim was stunned. His brown teeth and empty gum sockets were exposed in surprise. He was horrified. Faron dropped the mangled mess of the man's glasses onto the ground and stomped a few times upon the remains for good measure. The glass popped and made satisfying grinding noises as Faron dug his heel in the twisted metal. The dour man, absolutely mortified, fled the strange scene and left his assailant to himself.

Faron looked down at the old man's smashed glasses. What was there, in place of hunks of wire and shards of lens gristle, was a tiny tribe of spidery men, hairy and many-limbed and barely as big as Faron's thumb. They were obviously the product of an overtaxed mind, but they seemed real enough to the mummified divorcee. He crouched down by them, watching them leap like trained fleas and squeak out echoes of what the dour man had said. "Go back to her," they shouted, but it was the advice of the insane. Faron took a deep breath and tried to disbelieve the tiny creatures' existence. It didn't work, but it's failure didn't surprise Faron in the least. "Go back to her!" they shouted again. But Faron wasn't stupid enough to listen to them.

He decided to go home and try, in vain, to get a halfway decent night of sleep. As he made his way to the dimly lit atrium, he saw Radha walking in. And his heart began to race. He felt guilt swell up in his belly, the guilt of having surrendered so easily. He suddenly felt as if the entire conflagration was of his own design. He wondered what he could have done better, what he could have done to avert this disaster that their lives had become. And so he approached his soon-to-be-ex-wife with a heaviness in his heart and a sincere and worthless apology on his tongue.

She didn't even look in his direction as she walked on past.

This Place Is Magic

There is a gentle sway to Lyra's hips as music plays from some unseen source. It should confuse her, but it barely registers as strange. It is an eerie melody, like a warbling saw ebbing and flowing from the treetops, filling the swirling, blue fog surrounding her. She moves to it instinctively, letting its unearthly hum puppeteer her. She should find this all very odd, but instead she feels nothing but a rare peace. It barely registers that she is being watched by spectral eyes.

The eyes hang there in the mists, azure and glowing, and they blink out a code that Lyra can somehow decipher. This, too, should confuse the girl, but it doesn't. She just accepts it, and reads what the eyes, disembodied and alight, spell out for her.

"This is a special place, girl," the eyes blink to her. "This place is magic."

Lyra knows that. Even without the supernatural trappings, without the ghostly music and whispering fog and disembodied eyes, Lyra could tell that there was something special about this little grove of birch and beech trees. It had always called out to her, but in a sideways fashion... in a dark manner that had always vaguely frightened her as a child.

She would walk a path nearby, many nights, flashlight in hand and chills running the length of her back. She was afraid, so much, when she was young. The moonlight cast dire shadows out along the leaf-strewn ground and those shadows danced in ways that froze up her heart and instilled her with quick-breath panic that took hours to burn away. The whole of the woods had left her terrified, and she hated that she had to walk that dirt road alone. Owls would scream out their warning cries, various things would skitter through the fallen leaves... even the trees would bend and cackle as she made her way past them. It was always Halloween in that forest, always sinister and foreboding. But it was real. It was nature that frightened her. The fear of a wildcat in the underbrush or a rabid raccoon lurking behind a twisted stump or sandy knoll made each trek through the trees a miniature nightmare. As she walked that dark path, sometimes not even lit by the moon, she felt like prey. It was overly dramatic, to be sure, but also founded and valid. To the things that made their home in the forest, she was an easy target.

But there was something more. Beyond the rational fears that accompanied her, there was one particular spot that loomed larger and more horribly in her anxiety. It was a small thatch of trees that seemed abnormal, although she could never pinpoint the reason. It was different, though, palpably so, and she didn't want anything to do with it. It lay, at least, a bit off the path, but it was still within sight and she would hurry her pace just to cross it quickly and leave it behind as soon as was possible. She heard whispers from it, but not in any way that she would admit to. It called out to her, telling her just how out of the ordinary it was. And she didn't like it. She didn't like what she felt spilling from it, radiating out from it like gnarled roots veined from the center of the place in all directions.

It wasn't long before things had changed, and there was no reason to traverse the path anymore. Lyra moved far away from the woods, the dirt road and the eerie grove of trees that gave her such discomfort. She ended her youth in a place where grass was replaced by concrete and trees were torn down to make way for steel and glass. There was no worry of survival in that place. Everything was easy and brightly lit. Everything was stripped of its hardship and coated in glossy paint and chrome. There was nothing to run from on the sidewalk, no midnight stalking beasts to hunt her down. She became accustomed to the suburbs and she forgot about the thatch of trees that inordinately worried her as a child.

Nostalgia is powerful, though, and Lyra found herself, many years later, desiring to revisit a childhood spent in a different sort of place. She remembered the way there better than she thought she would, and on a vacation from her world, she reentered the forest that she walked through as a little girl.

The path was still there and so were the feelings of dread. It was a backwards comfort, but a comfort all the same to know that those lost worries still had a home inside her. It was dark as she crossed the path, looking up at the moonlight shredded by black limbs and fractals of fluttering leaves. She was nervous and elated, moving with catlike precision through the forest as her heart began beating crazily near that enchanted grove of birch and beech trees that had so unnervingly traumatized her as a child.

And then she went into a sort of trance.

Moving from the path, called into the woods, Lyra flitted like a faerie spirit, light on her feet and nearly floating to that strange congregation of trees. What had frightened her before now spoke to her, called to her, lured her in like a siren song. She smiled as it happened. She was surprised by it, surprised by herself and not at all aware of the blue fog that poured in as she entered the grove.

And Lyra is here, amongst those trees, watching blinking, disembodied eyes and realizing just how magic this place really is. The eerie sawblade fanfare sways her and her dark hair blows about in a warm and pleasant breeze. It's all very sedate, very lush and unreal. She feels wonderful, here, as if she'd been waiting to be here for her whole life. Crickets chirp over the wobbling notes of the unseen music. The fog swirls prettily around her. The eyes keep blinking.

"You've been away so long," the eyes blink. "But you've returned to us."

And Lyra knows that this is right. She was of this place. She was born in this thatch of trees and ousted into a world of mundane threat and dull innovation. The circumstances elude her, but the eyes are blinking the truth to her. She wonders, now, at her fear as a child, at the misplaced terror that accompanied this magic spot. It was the fear she felt upon exile, she realizes, the fear of being tossed into that monochromatic world... it was tethered, in her mind, to her birthplace, her magic home. She feels silly, embarrassed... but only a touch. She is too happy at her return to feel much else at all.

"Welcome back," the eyes blink.

Lyra takes off her shoes, then, and lets her feet sink into the soft earth. She feels so alive, so perfect. The unseen music hits a crescendo, and Lyra lifts her lithe arms upward, into the bustling leaves of the birch and beech trees. She lets the leaves touch her palms and an electric trill crackles down her spine, down her thighs, into her ankles and deep into the ground. She is connected. Rooted. Her dark hair grows, a wild thing now alive and moving of its own volition. She smiles and sighs as tendrils of it wrap around her, silken and soft. She builds, for herself, a cocoon from her own slinking hair. She is mummified in it, wholly entombed by herself. And inside, she is still smiling, still sighing. Hair snakes from the base of her, from her bound ankles, and it crawls up the side of a leaning birch. It creeps along a low hanging branch and wraps itself, tight, against the papery bark. With a quick jerk, Lyra is pulled, feet first and upside down, hung from the branch and still swaying to the dying, unseen music. She is nestled, there in her cocoon, purring and content. Her eyes shut and she dips into a serene lulled slumber.

Where she awakens isn't mundane in the least.

The Black Charlotte - Prelude

Like most of Carter Whyle's undertakings, the Black Charlotte airship was built to impress a girl. Hovering above the ground, lifted by a trio of ebony balloons, the Black Charlotte was a work of art: beautiful dark oak trimmed with polished gold and equipped with a small army's worth of intricately ornate cannons. It was Carter's most successful ploy to date, and it captured, quite handily, the attentions of his desired target, a Miss Ryla Thir.

Ryla was a reformed Siren, a former temptress once employed luring men to a watery demise. She took little joy in the act, however, always feeling immeasurable guilt for the needless sailor slaughter, so she just up and quit. She found a job in a suburban copy shop and began singing at kareoke nights at small bars around town. And it was on a Friday night at the Pitch & Shaker Pub that Carter Whyle first saw Ryla Thir singing "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" to a crowd of rowdy drunks. Almost instantly, he fell in love.

Carter had tried, on several occassions, to speak to Miss Thir. Each time, he found himself uncharacteristically tongue tied and nervous. Her responses varied from disinterest to annoyance, and Carter found himself growing more obsessed and more disheartened with every failed encounter. Carter Whyle, a man for whom charm and seduction were practically second nature, had fallen madly in love with a woman who didn't seem to care that he existed. He went a bit mad and decided he needed to do something a bit out of the ordinary to garner her affection.

So Carter enlisted the aid of a friend and engineer and ancient Egyptian feline, Methistes. Methistes was born roughly two thousand years before Christ and he quickly realized that he had the ability to project his ideas into the minds of people. This was quite a boon for the creature, as the dire lack of opposable thumbs in his own species made it very difficult for them to progress, technologically, at the same pace as their psuedo-primate overlords. By forcing his ideas into the brain of an unsuspecting human, Methistes could practically enslave the poor fellow, driving a typical man to create spectacular devices that no human being could ever dare to dream of on their own. And yes, Methiste's slave would always receive the credit for the cat's inventions, but that mattered little as long as Methiste's inventions were called into being. Eventually, Methistes had one of his mind-slaves develop a sort of reed and mud skeleton for the cat, and his reliance on the feeble human mind was greatly reduced. With his newfound thumbs, Methistes was able to conjure up all manner of fantastic creations. This, however, sat poorly with the humans he had ensorceled and the other cats that he refused to help. And so Methistes was driven from Egypt and exiled from his people. He rarely showed his true nature again.

The adventures of the cat engineer are too voluminous to list, here, but suffice it to say, it didn't take long before the secretive creature had stumbled upon the keys to immortality. He has yet to share that tidbit with anyone, even his closest friends like Carter Whyle, whom Methistes met in Paris in 1984. Sensing something decent in the handsome human, Methistes projected the notion of his own intelligence and remarkable ability into Carter's brain, prompting a friendship that now seems forged of the strongest steel.

So Carter and Methistes drafted a plan to woo the fair Miss Ryla Thir. They would offer to sail her, in a newly minted and state-of-the-art balloon powered airship, to the moon. Neither Carter nor Methistes could think of anything more romantic than a leisurely cruise over the Sea of Tranquility in one of the cat's gorgeous and magical airships. It was bound to impress the mythical lady.

And it did.

When Carter presented the Black Charlotte to Miss Ryla, she nearly swooned. She couldn't possibly turn the offer to sail off to the moon. And so she planted a sweet kiss on Carter's cheek. He took her hand, led her into the Black Charlotte and began the trip, upward, to the glowing, full moon.

They did not notice the small black cat that tagged along.

Snowglobe

Kyra sat alone in the dark, lit only by moonlight streaming in through half-open blinds. She had been crying, but she was done, and now she was just very tired. Her green eyes were bloodshot and underscored by thick circles of black. She was breathing very slowly, very deliberately, noting each punctuated exhalation from her softly parted lips. It had been a bad day, but she couldn't say why, exactly.

The sadness was vague: the same sort of nameless melancholy that usually overtook her at night when she tried to sleep had somehow seeped into her waking hours, and she didn't much care for it. She couldn't pinpoint a reason, any reason at all, why she felt so sad. But she did. She felt heavy, burdened by something she couldn't articulate. Or more likely wouldn't articulate. Somewhere in her riddled psyche she knew exactly what was spurring her misery, but to say it aloud, or to even think it, would be granting it a level of authority over her life that she refused to give. So she relegated the feeling to a notion, an impressionist's wash of cause, and she sat on her sofa, dabbing at her eyes with a Kleenex.

In the darkness, the slotted moonlight reflected prettily in a small and very old snowglobe that Kyra held in her palm. The thing had been in her family for years, sitting on her grandma's knicknack shelf and in her mother's curio cabinet before finding its way to Kyra's apartment. The white flush of light filling it, now, gave its occupants a rather ghostly look, and Kyra stared at it, suddenly aware she'd never really looked closely at the thing in all the time that it had been nearby. She had plucked, almost instinctively, the small globe from a dusty living room shelf a few moments before breaking down into tears. It seemed appropriate, but she couldn't say why. Looking at it, now, suddenly aware of its contents, she felt strange... disconnected and weird. Inside of the globe were two small figures, and, eerily, they seemed to be moving.

Of course she felt like she was merely seeing things. Even sad, even disconnected, she was a rational person, and there was no reason to believe that the two miniature men in her grandmother's snowglobe could be moving of their own volition. It was a trick of the light or the distortion from tears still clinging in her long lashes. But she knew it wasn't. It was plain as could be. The little men were moving about in the thick water of the snowglobe, oblivious to the giant holding their whole world in her hand. Kyra felt sick to her stomach, then, all too aware of the sheer unlikelihood of what she was seeing. It bothered her, but not enough to do anything rash about it. She wondered if just putting it back on the shelf, now, was any more or less rational than smashing the damn thing with a hammer and flushing the remnants down the toilet. She couldn't do a thing with it, though. She was hypnotized.

The figures, she knew, had names. And she did not like the fact that she knew this. She wasn't sure where that knowledge had originated, but it was a strange thing to know no matter what the source. One of them, the taller, angrier looking one was named Ichabod. The other, shorter and more pleasant was named Martin. Ichabod and Martin, Kyra somehow knew, were not friends. They were not enemies. They were merely acquaintances. And yet, through the turn of fate, both of these tiny, snowglobe-bound me were enamored of the same (unseen by Kyra) woman. Worse still, that woman was madly in love with the both of them. One of the men would be spurned, and the other would be betrothed. It was a horrible situation. The unseen woman, Kyra somehow knew, didn't want to disappoint either of the little men. Kyra could almost hear that woman's thoughts as she ran through a laundry list of pros and cons regarding her two dissimilar suitors.

Ichabod, apparently, was the brighter of the two men. He was stable minded with a good head on his shoulders and a fierce and unerring sense of logic, dignity and responsibility. He was dry, not humorless, but not fun and he had a sort of cruelty to his demeanor that, while discomfiting, also made the rarity of his compliments precious like gemstones. The unseen woman always hoped that there was a sweeter side to Ichabod hidden amongst the craggy faces of detachment, cynicism and sarcasm, but she secretly worried that there wasn't much beyond the barbs and arrows of the tall intellectual.

Martin, on the other hand, was kind and generous to a fault, almost spilling over himself to please the unseen woman. This was welcome, to a point, but also unchallenging and unsporting. There was no real value to the sweeter man's gestures of love (other than the face value, of course) because there wasn't a bit of scarcity to them. Still, he was an easy man to love. His affection was always flowing and lush. The unseen woman couldn't help but be a little bowled over by his unswerving goodness, but she did wish for a bit more edge and fire to him... She would've loved to see him get angry or jealous or even a little bit mean, just to prove to herself that he was, in fact, human and that he did, in fact, have depth underneath his big, infectious smile.

The unseen woman, Kyra somehow knew, was ripping herself to shreds trying to choose one of the men to be her husband. There was something exciting about Ichabod and his cloistered emotion. He took work to be around. He required a bit of demystification and unlocking. There were riddles in him and rewards in his rarely offered kindness. She knew that Ichabod loved her, but it was a game to get him to show it. The effort required in him both appealed to her and made her uneasy. She felt none of that with gentle Martin. His love was simple and easy to understand and it was something she could count on. There was a definite comfort to him, a dependability in character that she wanted, most times, to cling to. There was, for the unseen woman, a very real love not just of Martin, but also of the love that he showed to her. She felt better about herself in his presence. She felt good with him. But she was afraid, terribly, of boredom. She wanted to want Martin and feared she wanted Ichabod instead. The unseen woman was unsure of what to do.

Inside Kyra's snowglobe, the two suitors looked nervous. Martin, of course, was showing it worse and Kyra wondered if that, in itself, was bad news for his chances with the unseen woman. Kyra desperately, inordinately given her zero stake in this strange little opera, wanted the unseen woman to choose Martin to be her husband. It seemed so obvious to her, so blatant as to almost be preordained. But Kyra knew it wasn't. Kyra knew, then, that the right person isn't always the chosen person and that poor Martin's happiness was dependent upon this unseen woman putting her future well being ahead of her short term interest. And Kyra, suddenly far more morose and despondent, knew just how unlikely that was.

She stared into the globe, big tears rolling down her blushing cheeks and tried to will poor Martin into being more interesting, more cutting, more reserved and more mysterious. But that wasn't who he was. And, of course, it wasn't who she was, either. It wasn't fair, she thought, being beholden to another for your happiness. But it didn't matter if it was fair or not. The figures in her snowglobe ceased their movements, froze back into sculpture and returned the old knicknack back to normalcy. And Kyra held it, now completely cut off from the story of the men and their unseen love. It was over with no ending and it made her mad.

She slammed the snowglobe on her coffee table, cracking it open and letting the liquid inside gush out onto the floor amidst a flurry of shimmering glass and sparkling bits of fake snow. She stared at the mess for quite a while, still miserable, and mortified her own story wouldn't have a happy ending.

Signpost

The sun has settled in its low hung roost for the twilight, and everything is bathed in honey-colored glow as headlights are ignited and lamposts shudder to dull, white life. The snow is sort of melting on the ground and there is a glorious and novel warmth to the air... even if it's not really warm at all. It's not spring yet, but at least you can tell, now, that it's coming.

Doubtlessly, there will be another kick to the face bout of winter right around the corner, but its days are numbered. It'll go out, gasping like a fish, trying desperately to dump one last foot of snow on us, or glaze over our roads with ice a few more times... but it's just an act at this point. The death warrant is signed and there will be no pardon.

These are days that act as welcome signposts on the long road out of the depressing crush of lifeless, sterile earth and back-breaking chill... There's a sort of anticipatory joy in them, even as there's an acknowledgment that, well, to be honest we still have a ways to go. But it's hope, nonetheless, and hope is always worth glomming onto, even if you only find it in a temperature that doesn't dip below freezing for a few days straight.

And so I totally rocked out on the drive home tonight, despite the inherent crappiness of the workday and the soul-sucking, mind-numbing tasks to be found there. I watched a beautiful sunset, listened to Sugar and felt, at least, a little bit happy for a while.