Dragons

The silence sometimes, is deafening, and in it Chester Linch waits for the morning to arrive, when the cacophony of voices returns, because they die at night, the way the world dies at night, and he is left without the masked choir in his head, shrieking out the refrains of the origins of the universe. At night, it falls apart, crumbling like the ruins of some ancient amphitheater. In the silence he thinks he is going mad.

The television is on, but it's silenced, and throwing pitches of white static across the room, flashing like lightning and casting everything in the blue-white glow of optic noise. The snow falls outside and Chester wonders if he will ever know the calmness at the center of it. His counterpart in the world of mankind, the real world, the world of money and endeavor, is a proponent of meditation. But Chester cannot clear his mind that way, and so it fills his eyes with the static of white noise and he sits, in silence and noise, staring up into the ever darkening folds of the ceiling above him.

The shrieking is all independent. Saxophones blare in the corner, where red eyes watch from inky shadows that blur and blend into grease pens and worry. The worry hits him like a Devil, a Devil, breaking the bones and all of it falls into the vast chasm of worry. Of worry. Of worry. Chester holds himself, braces himself, in the silence and the white noise and he opens his eyes wide and the shock of the white hits his eyes like a desert wind and blasts him with sand, Sandman sand, Sandman's dust that spews from the tornado of worry. Worry. Worry. He waits for something, leather wings fluttering in the black overhead. Leather wings. Leather wings, miniature claws, growling little mouth, sniveling little mouth and she wonders overhead, like a thought balloon, like a worrisome little ghost with wings overhead and Chester worries and he worries and he worries.

The history of it, of the world, of life, of Genesis, of the Gospels, runs deep into the canyons of his brain. Horrible brains, horrible life, horrible genesis that breeds everything horrible past; a darkness and the explosion, the unbelievable rapid expanse into somethinghood, into somethingness, the rapid expanse into the void; And there was gaseous matter, ether that glowed with the voices of a million gods. Gods who coalesced from the nothing and appeared in the heavens, brilliant blue stars and brilliant red stars, and white specks of light that made belts and eyes and axes and men, a whole universe of gods. And from the gods, there was life; there was the chain of everything, hammered into place by gods, beautiful glowing gods that spent their lives so far away from everything; and there was suddenly deserts, and there were people in them, bronzed people making cities in the mountains, huge cities of clay and dust in the side of the mountains; and those people were transfixed, bronze men and women, transfixed by the crucible of dragons that roamed the planet, dragons, giant lizards, giant creatures of fire and ice, horrid things that roamed the planet and menaced each and every bronze man and woman.

Abbatoire

Horrible things that drift in and out of the brain...
We open on a cat in a golden room, diamonds glitter in its mouth; there are fangs in every mouth, a gross set of fangs in every mouth. I speak to it, in a language only we understand, and I tell it about insurmountable sadness, about the great peak that lies above us, hovering over us, a floating mountain of black charred bloody knuckles; I speak to it about the rain soaked streets in cities that I will never see, and I wonder if, from some high view, I will ever see it... wrought iron and cobbles slick with the sweat of some unseen god, and the cat and I wonder aloud if we will ever know what lies underneath those streets;
-the cat sings out a song and the notes stretch on to infinity, and I cling to each one. read each one like a book. I look into each note for a sign from the abyss or the heavens to dictate the next motion, the next electrical impulse that moves my hand from one place to the next, waving or clawing at the white sand of some never ending beach. The world in each and every note, I try to make sense of it, but there is no sense in it and logic spills out of my mouth in broken silver teeth. I want, somehow, to codify all of it, to bring all of it together into one place. Darger and Wilson and Jordan, my Triumvirate who see past the delicate layers of reality and see the pink threads binding it all together, like the Captain's brother from another universe, another universe altogether and I breathe on it, like an iron lung, Thomas sings the same song as the cats and I want to tie it all together, to bring it all together in a small pocket of my own.
The blackness that begins in it, by She, by Alice, by the Queen of This World, who will go by Maria; Maria Callow, eyes of shocking green, the white skin of a white sun and she sleeps and she dreams; While I sit in whitewashed nostalgia, decades past and worrying about the footsteps in each moment of two decades gone by, Maria Callow exists somewhere and she dreams somewhere and that perpetual ache is so degrading, so crippling that I cannot express it, I cannot begin to express it, the loss and the shift and how I killed so much of me just to survive, like cutting off gangrenous skin to survive and I let it slough off, dead and charred like the mountain that hovers over the cat and me. The Mountain of Bloody Knuckles.
-So Maria Callow dreams and I dream and one night, one fair night, when there is a horrid full moon, a horrid full moon that lights up the dreams and one by one the threads of both dreams are stitched together until I am standing there with Maria Callow, the non-existent existent Queen of This World and she has that look in her green eyes, still, and I tremble at it, I tremble at the loss, at the missing, at the sheer agony that's still left behind, and I have nowhere to go, nothing to say, no way to articulate it and so I just stand, waiting for the numbness of sleep and it never comes. There are claws on Maria Callow's hands, but she wields those hands with such surgical precision, I hoped to feel nothing.

There is a Pantheon, of course, And by necessity and reality, Isobel stands at the pinnacle, at the top of some ethereal steeple, and she stands on the bones of the goddesses that came before. But those bones dream like people dream, and there is blood and life in those bones, in Athena and in Maria and in Minerva and the sunburst form of all them, the fawn and the silvermoon and the doll and the doll and every sacred inch of white skin that stretched across the sky, blocking the sun and casting it all in the dull haze of almost winter, that morning of gray that holds every breath in our hearts - like her voice, like all voices, wrapped in mummy gauze; Cleopatra, Cleopatra, for one night she held the world in her hands; and then she died; horrible horrible asp. I cannot tell you how to believe in things, that things will be okay, because they never are. All of them, everything clad in skin will die and so the vines will rise up over stone after stone, like they did over the tomb of Cleopatra, of the giant, the white feathered angel who was no angel, and the Tempest, the ash-fueled Tempest,

Beginnings Of Thunder

1. There was a TERRIBLE boom, like thunder, and it woke me from a dreamless sleep 2. I looked into the black of the sky waiting for some sign 3. and there was amongst the sky a cloud in the shape of the Lord, and another cloud in the shape of the Lord's Lord; 4. THE sky unleashed a torrent of rain, of ice and it fell like blood into my eyes. 5. And in the eyes of blood, there was a vision of the space that exists between the Lord and the Lord of the Lord 6. And they spoke of the things that make up a soul, and in my agony, in my bloody eyed agony, I heard their voices thunder through the black sky and into head and I listened. 7. And the Lord of the Lord spoke first, and he recited the numbers that composite a soul; 8. And the numbers were jumbled, so that in the order in which he spoke them, 3, 7, 8, 1, 2, 3, 6 they made no sense. 9. But when written in the pattern, the Pattern; 3-7-8-1-2-3-6 becomes the foundation of a soul, the crystalline core at the center of consciousness. And it is thus: 3: because Faith, Hope and Love which should form the core of a soul, are laid down first, like cinder blocks. Imagine three cinder blocks, one of red, which is Love and one of Yellow, which is Hope and one of Blue which is Faith. 10. And the Lord of the Lord said thusly, that Hope is the most important, although his grandson disagrees. 11. Hope is the foundation of the soul, but it is the easiest block to crumble and the first block to crumble, but it is the cornerstone of the whole soul. 12. Faith is second and it is misrepresented. There is faith, the small version, which is the belief in lies, or the belief in tales, and this is the lesser faith, a faith that is useless and held in high esteem by small people. Faith in the context of the soul is the ability to accept the terms of existence as they are presented; because it is impossible without a sense of Faith, a Faith that the world exists in a way that can be represented by the senses; 13. Love is the least of the cinder blocks, but interlocks the other pieces together. 14. And it is thus: 7: because there are seven gods in the dreams, the lesser gods, the gods who dwell beneath the Lord; 15: Say Athena: Pallas Athena, the goddess of wisdom, also Sophia who is sometimes called an Angel. 16. Say Abraxas: The King of Balance; white and black, Yin & Yang, in equality, Equus, or something in between; 17. Say Eloa who is born of blood and tears, and grows from the blood shed from every righteous sacrifice, or from in modern times the tears of a modern sacrifice; she is also called Emily she is also called the Rook 18. Say Metatron; the King of Angels, of the lesser gods, in green and in sapphire; 19. Say Elizabeth, who is Minerva, who is Jovia, who is the stability of the earth, or the illusion of it; 20. Say Isobelle, Belle, Violet; 21. Mars, the god of War, who is also of the Heavens, and will be Vulcan, Haephestus, the Smith, the Born; 22. And it is thus 8; The Infinite;

Also Scanned

It is worth noting, too, from "Scanned," the presence of the rampaging elephant through the protagonist's thought minefield and the chorus of the jaundiced children, lips pulled wholly over their faces and muffling and distorting their words.

Scanned

There is, one might say, an instructional video on the true nature of the universe: a film made purportedly by a madman, but a madman driven insane by the fundamental truth of what he knew. His name is Chester Linch, and the construct of "David Lynch," the renowned filmmaker, is an homage to the man whose work most people will never see. In the film "Scanned," (released 1973), for example, Carter shows us the dichotomy of the world's makers in the forms of two nameless horrors. The creature on the left is the older of the two, the maker of the metaphysical forms of the universe. It is, of course, imperceptible, but to mortal eyes it appears as a gray-blue member of an alien race, the First Race, taller and lankier than a human being and grotesquely proportioned; the alien body has been taken over by the metaphysical creator and turned inside out, to reveal its distance from physicality. Even as the creature's organs pump a slick blue oil through its exposed veins and arteries, it survives, chained up like a great star on a hulk of a contraption of steel. The contraption was crafted in all likelihood by the metaphysical creator's younger companion, the physical creator. It is as we see him, a mechanical man, a traded collection of rusty parts that mimic or predate our own flesh and blood. Set atop this wide array of pistons and gears and motors is a horribly wide and cartoonish human skull. The physical creator has a sense of humor that its companion does not, and partakes in human endeavors to show this. It will periodically take a drag from a cigarette to relate to its creations' creation. They are shown in wordless dialog, presumably giving the secrets of the universe to whomever can decipher their silence. Human beings, asleep in the room with the creatures, start to crust over with a sparkling coral like substance until they are cocooned in a shimmering shroud of extraterrestrial life. And then the horror of the great blue void appears, a thunderous voice amidst a swirling visual cacophony of white lightning: and it tells us, in no uncertain terms, that our brains are like metaphysical lint traps, holding back the worst of the universe from our consciousness and allowing us to toil like ants on some penitentiary world, like Earth. "There is no escape except deeper into thought," the voice warns us, and most likely, it is correct.

The Death Of Prysius

Genesi, alive and real on the great stone of Prymia was suddenly full of the realization of her solitude. And Genesi grew lonely, still full of the visions of Maria, still full of Maria’s dreams. And from those dreams, Genesi imagined a Companion. And so, from the center of the stone of Prymia, Genesi carved and crafted the Colossus, the colossal dream of Maria, and Genesi named the Colossus Prysius, which would mean many things, such as “Of Prymia,” “The First Man,” and “The Mountain.” And Prysius was of the some white stone of Prymia, the same white stone of the bones of Genesi. Prysius stood tall as a mountain. Genesi was hardly a speck to the Colossus; she was but as tall as one of the carved stone eyelashes of Prysius. And as she crafted and carved the Colossus, Genesi scaled its mountainous bulk, and when at last her carving and crafting was complete, Genesi stood atop the scalp of the great Colossus. And Prysius stood at the center of Prymia, motionless and statuesque, and Genesi stood at the summit of Prysius and she surveyed the Void upon which Prymia had been hung by the Dreamer Maria. And still Genesi felt solitary and alone, for Prysius had the appearance of a man, but did not have the breath of life or the spark of will. And Genesi called upon her knowledge, upon the visions and the dreams of her mother-self, Maria, and Genesi kissed the stone scalp of Prysius and with that kiss imbued the Colossus with the breath of life and the spark of will. And with that kiss, great Prysius was alive and Genesi had created the First Companion.

But Genesi’s kiss was insufficient, Genesi did not have the full knowledge of life and of will, and so Prysius was incomplete. And with Prysius’ awakening came a great suffering, a horrible suffering, because the soul of Prysius, the life of the great Colossus, was incomplete. And there was, from the Colossus, a great wail of anguish, an anguish so great that it tore into the soul of Genesi and filled her with remorse and with pity. And she lamented her creation and she tried in vain to comfort Prysius. But Prysius could not be comforted.

And so in the same swiftness by which the kiss of Genesi had brought life into Prysius, the anguish of living laid the Colossus down, and the life and the will of the Colossus escaped and Prysius died. And the death of Prysius was agonizing. With Genesi still atop the scalp of the Colossus, Prysius slumped to his knees and died in pain. And the death rattle of Prysius was so immense that it created seven great fissures in the stone of Prymia. And with the death of Prysius, with the collapse of the Colossus, the body of the Colossus split and crumbled and from its giant veins unleashed a torrent of blue-white blood across Prymia, and the blood spilled and flowed into the seven great fissures, and so the Rivers of Prysius were formed. And the Rivers radiated from the crumbled form of Prysius, from the center of Prymia, and what had been the Colossus was now the ruins of a man, a great mountain at the center of Prymia.

And Genesi felt a great sadness at the death of Prysius, at the death of her creation, and she stood atop the mountain of the remains of the Colossus and she thought of the mountain as The Spine of Prysius and the Memory of Prysius and the Corpse of Prysius. And the mountain was called Corpuspire. And the mountain at the center of Prymia would become the lair of the Executrix, the lair of Genesi. And for a great while, Genesi reflected upon the creation and the death of Prysius, and she wept over the death of her First Companion.

The Birth Of Genesi

Before there was anything, there was another something, a Great Elsewhere that cannot be perceived, that cannot be properly understood. And in that Great Elsewhere, there were beings, being that likewise cannot be perceived, that likewise cannot be properly understood. These beings have names like all things have names, but only the name of one of these beings is known, and the name of that being comes down to us as Maria. And Maria, the unknowable being of the Great Elsewhere, dreamt like all things dreamt.

There was, in the unknowable mind of Maria, a black Void, an empty space, a canvas upon which the being could paint her dreams, and in the unknowable sleep of Maria, a great white stone disc appeared, hung from the black Void, solid and real. And in her dream, Maria named the stone disc ‘Prymia,’ which, in her unknowable mind, would mean many things, such as “The First Place,” or “The Beginning,” or “The Stage.” And Prymia, then, existed, somehow tied to the mind of Maria and somehow separate and real in the Void in her mind that existed, somehow, outside of the Great Elsewhere.

And before Maria awoke in the Great Elsewhere, she dreamt a dream of herself, first as a collection of stone white bones cut from Prymia, a collection of bones that Maria animated with her thought, brought together by the will of Maria, each of the bones carved from the white stone and fitted together and strung with nerve and muscle and then sheathed in a snow white flesh that matched the white stone of Prymia. And the silent form of the dream of Maria laid upon the carved rock of Prymia, an idol, a doll, until Maria dreamt a pair of emerald eyes and the breath of life and the spark of will into the white form. And suddenly beset with emerald eyes and the breath of life and the spark of will, the dream of Maria sat upright on the stone surface of Prymia, and now independent from the Dreamer, from Maria, she stood, imbued with the thought and the impulse of the Dreamer, but wholly separate from her.

And on the white stone, the dream of Maria, the independent dream of Maria renamed herself Genesi, which, in the unknowable mind of Maria, would mean many things, such as “The First One,” “The Executrix,” or “The Queen.” And Genesi was full of the impulse of the Dreamer, tasked in the Dream to build the world as imagined by Maria, as imagined by the Dreamer sleeping a deep sleep in the Great Elsewhere. And Genesi, the white dream of Maria, was given all the power of the Dreamer, and the plans of the Dreamer, of the Architect Maria, bloomed in the new mind of Genesi.

Answer

I drew the pitch from the sky, sucked it out of the night sky, and I let the black pitch of the night run, thick and heavy, down the walls of my throat and I drained the black into deep blue. And from a great yawn I released, the sun spooled from my mouth, a flaming shriek that boiled into the heavens, blistering the blue of the sky, smoldering like diamonds, and dripping from the sky. Liquid white metal fell to the sun baked ground, and is it fell, it formed crystalline bones, bones that moved with an eerie harmony. The bones heard the voice from the sky. Each of them dreaming a dream inside of its marrow. And they fell, loathsome and cruel and base, a bloodied drift that became a riot of doom and red sky bleeding; the child of the sky burning aside, raging aside, the star drift of a million days that fell into the mourning chasm of the end of the universe. The eyes that spilled forth from it dried into a million bloodied flakes that rained through the heavens like crimson snow. Harmonics sound like the royal dream, the royal dream of black... black... black... what I long for is the profundity that is granted to the strangest amongst us, a sort of knowledge that I cannot begin to fathom in the current state of lucidity. In the twilight between dream and wakefulness I can sometimes feel it, sometimes it crosses over from the chasms I want to map and describe. There should be some museum to it, some museum in the corners of my brain, all the knowledge of the earth and the second earth is that there is SOME purpose to it. Some belief that transcends the cold logic of fact and breeds into a world of chocolate doves and rain that burns through the metals and woods and concrete and shale of a world ruled by numbers and cold physics. And deep in those secret moments, etched into the sidelines of the universe, the secret names of the black, the secret names of the void, I will find the scraps and clues that are stitched into something approaching genius, something approaching profundity. I CRAVE ANSWERS. Like a sickness or a hunger laced with the yellow jaundice of worry and anxiety, I let it crawl into me, a crawling thing, a crawling thing of yellow fingers and thick yellow nails. There is an answer. There is an answer. There is an answer. Amongst the differences and variations in things like tone and grass and lightning, I can see them, the stitchwork holding the various bits and scraps of the universe together; and the backwards eyes and ears of nothing scream those answers into my ears. I will find them. There is an answer. There is an answer. There is an answer.

Train Noise

Holding my head in the mists of twilight I feel the walls of masonry rise up around me, cold, gray and wet with the fog. And there are lights overhead, the fearsome lights of a million dead worlds all converging like ancient space faring vessels, all converging overhead and shining down beams of blue-white luminescence that run across my face like sun rays. I bleed from my ankles and wrists. There are words built into the blood, drunken words that spill out in drunken rambles, and I curse them, I curse the rambling, I curse the words tumbling from my wounds. There is the sound of freight trains in the back ground, a horrid whistle that signals the great motion of the bulky machine. It moves closer and the ground under me shakes. The walls rise up around me, sheltering me from the sound, from the movement of the train. The world gives way under me, and I drop, as if into a great shaft in the earth. And in that chasm all the faceless members of the human race stumble in the darkness, their chalk white skin crackling with blue lines, with throbbing blue lines of fear and worry, and I am afraid of them. High above, the spacecraft still hover and the train still runs, an infinite extension of rolling steel off into the abyss of an endless horizon. I can still feel its motion down in this pit, down in this pit of faceless men, and I hold my breath and I see them change in the pulsing lights coming down from above. They melt, their white skin sloughs off from their frames as the train whistle blows. And the melting, faceless men line up in front of me, orderly, in rows of fours, and they link their melting arms as the slowly boil into bleached skeletons with grinning death's head skulls. Beneath the faceless, taut white skin, is a face of cavities and teeth, a skull face unseen through the white flesh now melting from the men in the elevator shaft. In their ruled lines of fours, the men, now a chorus of skeletal wraiths, all solemnly dance in unison. Their is a xylophone quality to their steps, an echoing steel sound that mixes with the train noise so far above us and creates a symphony of the empty industries. The skeleton men dance so solemnly that it whispers away and sense of joy in the movement. In their teeth, tiny diamonds shine, and in their eyes, diamond pupils sit so deep that they are only visible in brief reflective moments as the lights from above shine down. And the rows of four surround me in my cavernous tomb, still in eerie time with the train noise above us. It seems endless. The lights are hypnotic. The walls begin to turn to dry plaster and the cracks echo the drunken sounds from my wrists and ankles. Further below, there is an old library, a library of dusty periodicals and sepia toned funny books. I will find those librarians and I will make them read every word they've curated. I will not stand for anything less.

Ashes

And in the morning I woke to mist, and from the center of it appeared a great face, a face of brilliant blue pouring from the steam and glowing like the center of the sun. And about it there was a halo of death, of dead children, a ring of mummified remains in orbit around the great face. And the great face opened its mouth, a giant mouth, and it summoned me inside. And in the mouth of the great face there stood the expanse of a forest, a forest of the tallest pines reaching up to a sky of molding yellow. In the spires of pine, at the tip of each colossal tree, a halo of fire burned, and the whole of them together formed a web of fire in the sky. And as I stared into the web of fire burning into the hazy yellow sky, filling the hazy yellow sky with the thick inky smoke of ink diffused in dirty water. And the web of fire burnt out, slowly and the ashes that rained down from the sky filled my lungs. And those ashes were alive with some otherworldly spirit, some animating spirit and from the inside of my lungs the ashes, full of diminutive mouths, devoured me from the inside out. And as those living ashes, the ashes rained down from the sky's web of fire, my flesh began to gray and shrivel on my bones, and I was filled with all the terror of dying. And in the dying, I saw a ring of flowered eyes lord over my spirit, and I was afraid, for each eye was transparent like glass and filled with blood like a crystal of wine. And I whispered my fears to each eye, my secret fears, and each eye was imbued with the word of one fear. And from that word, each eye grew tendrils like an octopus or squid and those tendrils from each fear-instilled eye wrapped the last moments of my beating heart.

The Black Sky

The Black Sky goes by a hundred names. To begin with, we list them, in order of their relevance, in order of their power; when the Black Sky can hide from us, during the morning of Oros we can call to it with its Great Names, the first ten names, the Great Names. During the great night, the night of Aura, we can call to it with the last ninety names, names that were written in the Dream of Mariacallow. The Great Names were the first on her tongue, the tongue that spoke in the Dream and informed the mind of Genevieve, the tongue that spoke out the Plans of Mariacallow to the mind and the hand of Genevieve. And before Genevieve had built the lights of Oros and Aura, before there was day and night, there was the Black Sky, the First Night, the Long Night of Beginnings, the Open Sky, the Primal Sky, the Genesis Sky, the Void, the Starless Night, the Night Before Nights, the Secret Night. And those were the Great Names for the Black Sky; firstly "Black Sky," but "Black Sky" is not the proper name, but it is the Common name, and the name that Mariacallow herself would name it. She would say it, over and over again, in the Dream and she would know it, if she would speak it, as The Black Sky. It is the tongue of Mariacallow that breathes out the first ten names, the Great Names: The Black Sky, The First Night, The Long Night Of Beginnings, The Open Sky, The Primal Sky, The Genesis Sky, The Void, The Starless Night, The Night Before Nights, The Secret Night. These are the names by which you can call the Black Sky during the daylight, during the morning of Oros. You will call it, try to call it, and you must say each of the Great Names, in order, to call down the spirit of it. The spirit of it, the blackness of it, is not that of a man or a woman, but of space. It is darkness and space and it breathes and it thinks like a man or a woman. In the night time, in the night of Aura, there is an ease in the Black Sky, but it does not respond to the Great Names; it will ignore them in the darkness of Aura's dim light. And so to call it, you must call it by the Lesser Names; the Ninety Names. They are, in order, 11. Ira, 12. Iras, 13. Ita, 14. Itas, 15. Irasita, 16. Irasitas, 17. The Bell, 18. Oroauranox, 19. Noroauranox, 20. Belistas, 21. The Silence, 22. The Silencis, 23. The Silent Bell, 24. Hora, 25. Horanox, 26. Belis, 27. Iranox, 28. Expis, 29. Maria's Worry, 30. Maria's Dread, 31. Maria's Canvas, 32. The Heavy, 33. The Silent Scream, 34. The Colorless, 35. The Expanse, 36. Isora, 37. Isoras, 38. Isorata, 39. Isoratas, 40. Goldenleaven, 41. The Ebon, 42. The Waste, 43. The Beginnings, 44. The Chapter, 45. Cora, 46. Coras, 47. Corali, 48. Coralis, 49. Sitro, 50. Sitros, 51. The X, 52. The Loop, 53. The Empty, 54. The Great Empty, 55. The First Empty, 56. Orosnox, 57. Auranox, 58. Orosnoxaura, 59. The Shrill, 60. The Dreamscape, 61. The Dreaming, 62. The Dreamt, 63. The Dreamer's Panel, 64. The Dreamer's Canvas, 65. Nothing, 66. Notori, 67. Nortis, 68. Nortoris, 69. The Dreamer's End, 70. The Dreamer's Begin, 71. The Grand Begin, 72. The Grand March Empty, 73. The Grand March Beyond, 74. The Beyond, 75. The Black Elsewhere, 76. The Black Elsewhen, 77. The Black, 78. The Great Elsewhere's Beginning, 79. The Great Elsewhere's End, 80. The Great Elsewhere's Closet, 81. The Great Elsewhere's Stop, 82. Irifis, 83. Irifist, 84. The Unspoke, 85. The Silent Carol, 86. The Elsedark, 87. The Elseblack, 88. The Drift, 89. All In All.

Stuck On You

It is Sunday night, two nights after Sean met Athena, and the encounter has stuck in his playing, playing over and over again like a skipping record. He has never experienced such a tangible memory. It's a drug. He is addicted to the memory of her. He is addicted to the vision of her in the smoke filled room, bathed in the effervescent green and red and purple light of the concert hall. Every detail is stitched into his brain. The way her shirt hung off of her porcelain shoulders and dipped, low-cut and perfect, in the front. He remembers the brown thread stitched delicately around the collar and the wide bell cuffs. He remembers the natural frowning shape of her mouth, the glossless pink of her lips, the smattering of light machine gun freckles near her nose, the gorgeous length and blackness of the lashes surrounding her shock green eyes. He remembers the complex highlights and shadows in her hair, the way it hung over her ears and parted over her forehead and how a rogue wisp of it fell across her eye. He remembers her shape, her almost criminally curvaceous figure, her lack of height, and the defensive stance she had when he introduced himself. He remembers the inadvertent flinch she gave, the surprise of being approached and the wariness that crept into her initial smile. He remembers her so vividly. He remembers the sharpness of her chin, the breadth of her face, the slight rose in her cheeks and the almost unearthliness paleness of her white skin. He remembers her voice, especially, how it was the perfect complement to her, how she was the form he'd envision if he'd only heard her speak on the phone or the radio. He remembers the slight crookedness of her teeth, the dissatisfied calmness of her demeanor, and the cool economy of her language. She wasn't wordy. She answered his small handful of questions in a way that was efficient without being terse.

Athena lived nearby and she was a year younger than Sean. She worked as a receptionist at a high school, which is she loathed, but she was putting herself back through college after having dropped out a semester prior to getting a degree in graphic design. She was single and hadn't had a boyfriend in a while. And, yes, she would be interested in having dinner with Sean some night.

She didn't have any paper with her because she never took her purse to concerts. Sean had accidentally left his phone at home. He did have a silver Sharpie, however, and Athena scrawled out her number on the palm of Sean's hand. The silver was barely legible on against his own white skin, so she wrote the number, again, on his forearm. Sean was embarrassed by the way the sensation of her hand on his arm shocked him, and how the force of it fanned out like downed wire electricity through every nerve in his body. It was at that moment he sadly took note of how long it had been since any girl had touched him.

She was very explicit in her instructions. He was to call her on Monday, because to do so earlier would make both of them feel very desperate. And then she left. She didn't stay at the concert. She didn't hang out with Sean after their brief, wonderful little meeting. She just disappeared. It was probably for the best, because it allowed time for Sean to reboot. The anxiety of the moment had pretty much caused every major system in his body to up and shut down. Sean didn't mind, though. The silver permanent ink on his hand and arm more than made up for the cardiac arrest.

And now it is Sunday and he is waiting. The ink is still clinging, stubbornly, to his skin, but he has transferred her number to multiple sources in a prudent act of safe keeping. He is laying on his bed, listening to songs shuffle on his laptop. Every song seems to be about love, and it is torturous. He has spent the last two days fabricating his first date with Athena, mapping out potential sites, creating mental flowcharts of potential disasters and missteps. He is excited to find out who she is. His gut is telling him that she is amazing, that she is brilliant and as dispassionately interested in everything as he is. His gut is telling him that she is cutely misanthropic and that she has great taste in music and movies and books. His gut is telling him that she hates all the same things he hates. His gut, he knows, could be dead wrong, but he can't wait to find out. He contemplates breaking her rule and calling tonight. He wonders if she would find that annoying or endearing.

Somehow he knows that she would find it annoying. And he loves that. He has been a model of self-control for years, now. He can wait another day, even if that waiting leaves him feeling twitchy and pathetic.

As song after song relays the horrors and divinities inherent in loving another person, Sean realizes how long it's been since he's looked forward to anything. Nearly every aspect of his life had been something to endure, something to slog through on the slow march to death. He didn't tell people that very often, as they tended to take a dim view of him and his dreary outlook, but it really was how he felt. Usually. But he was actually longing to call Athena. He wasn't looking past his dinner with her to the point when it was over and he could return to the solitary lair of his apartment. In fact, the time approaching his call was interminable. He felt as if it had been weeks since they'd met. He wanted so badly to be sitting across from her, talking to her, getting to know her. He forgot what anticipation was really like... before Athena, it had all but been replaced with dread.

He was worried, of course, about the impression he'd make on her... about the impression he'd already made, but it wasn't the crippling anxiety to which he was accustomed. Instead, it was the sort of thrilling worry that goes along with a roller coaster ride or a good scary movie. He was ready to be scared.

The vision of her was still there, and he tried to shake it. He didn't want to obsess or deify her. Although, with a name like Athena, it might be completely warranted.

Hey Pretty

It's loud, even away from the speakers, and there's a non-stop parade of sweat soaked drunks winding through the maze halls that flank the stage. There is revelry and joy and music and Sean is irritated by it all. He knows he is a curmudgeon, and he hates that about himself, but as another plastic cup of beer slops onto his sneakers, he realizes he is overly tired and just wants to leave. But he's stuck. His ride, Glen, is chatting with a girl, and so he has to listen to another song. He hovers at the periphery of the crowd, cringing at the feedback and the tin squeal of the guitar, but otherwise nearly enjoying the moment. A teenager careens into his back and Sean loses his footing and bounces into a leather-clad man mountain in front of him. He gets a glare and backs up. The teenager is laughing. The band, at least, is pretty good.

The whole of the room is slightly, but blandly, disorientating. The twisting colored lights blazing along rafters in the ceiling play out weird kaleidoscope effects on the dark walls, but the effect is more cheap than trippy. The noise is overwhelming, and each drum kick reverberates through the wood of the converted gymnasium floorboards and rattles through Sean's shins and all the way up to his chest. It's incredibly hot. Sean worries that he smells, but decides it wouldn't be detectable in this odious pit. There is cigarette and pot smoke everywhere, and he can feel it clinging to the fibers of his overpriced t-shirt and infusing into his jeans. He catches snippets of inane conversation, the pseudo-philosophical ramblings of the intoxicated fans, and he sneers. And this is the most fun he's had in weeks.

He sees people enjoying themselves, dancing, moshing, singing along with the slightly banal lyrics of a decent group well beyond its prime, and he wonders if he's even capable of joining along. He feels silly giving himself up to a moment of abandon, but he's not exactly sure why. A little ways away, a high school girl disperses the crowd with a seemingly ceaseless stream of foamy vomit. She falls on her ass and starts to sob. Nobody helps her up. She just sits there, dangerously close to the colossal milky puddle on the ground and cries her eyes out. And Sean wants to help her. She looks so sad and frail and stupid, and he feels bad for her. But he worries that he'll seem like some old pervert trying to take advantage of this poor, blitzed little girl. So he just watches to make sure nobody else messes with her. For now, at least, she seems ok. Sort of.

Glen is still chatting, saying God knows what, to the girl who goes to the nearby college. She seems kind of ditzy, but it's a snap judgment made from a few overheard sentences. Sean chastises himself for being overly critical, but then gives himself a pass since his criticisms are usually spot on. He knows, too, it doesn't matter to Glen if this girl is smart or interesting. All that matters is that she's willing to converse, and a lack of explicit rejection is all Glen really needs to strike up a short term relationship. Sean sometimes envies that ability, but, far more often, he finds it repulsive. And while he's had weak moments, Sean would say that he was not willing to trade loneliness for meaninglessness. If he's going to devote his time to someone, that someone better be worth the time devoted. A warm body and lowered expectations are not enough.

Glen tells Sean all the time that Sean is too picky, too rigid in his demands. But Sean is fine with that. He doesn't need anybody. He doesn't require a companion. He's had girlfriends in the past (four, to be exact) and he enjoyed being with them, but his lived fine without them, too. He's good at being alone. Glen is terrible at being alone. There's nothing wrong with that, Sean would say, condescendingly, but there's nothing wrong with solitude, either. Not that it doesn't sting, sometimes, to see loving couples holding hands or putting their arms around one another or making out. And not that it hasn't been rough to spend two and a half years alone in bed. But it's better than settling. It's better than passing time with anybody who's available. Glen and college girl don't have a commonality amongst them. There's nothing tying them together besides loneliness and desperation. Sean would rather be alone than tethered to some fellow desperate anchor.

The opening band leaves the stage and a smattering of applause goes up from the crowd. It is a weak thank you to a group that most of the kids in the audience have never heard before. There is a window of noise reduction, then, as the clamor of electric instruments dies and the muffled roar of a hundred conversations buzzes over the smoke haze like the thrum songs of locusts in the summer. It is a sort of relief, like when aspirin finally starts eating away at a headache. The lights come up for a bit, revealing the wilds and chaos of the room. There is trash everywhere. Fliers, cups, random bits of detritus from who-knows-where coat the floor in a layer of filth and sediment. It makes Sean sad, but he would not be able to accurately describe why. The puking high school girl is back on her feet, now, and she seems all right. She looks tired and embarrassed. She'll probably be sicker in the morning. She's with a large group of friends, but nobody bothered to help her when it was needed. Now that she's fine, she's been adopted back into the fold. That makes Sean angry and he wonders if it's just a byproduct of youth or if her friends will grow up and carry that indifference into adulthood. He wants to believe the former, but thinks the latter is probably true.

After a while, the lights go down again, and a roar goes up from the crowd. The stage is still dark when a crackle spits out of the amplifiers and something like music spills out of randomly strummed guitar strings. The audience intensifies their commotion and suddenly spotlights blaze from a balcony and illuminate the rock goddess on stage. And she begins to play a song called "Hey Pretty." It's one that everybody in the room knows. Shouts and whistles shriek out of hundreds of mouths and, almost as quickly as it began, the cacophony dies down as the song kicks into gear.

Sean does not believe in fate. He believes fate is the name given to coincidence that is neither unpleasant nor inconsequential, a way to elevate happenstance to something that infuses it with a deeper meaning than it deserves. However, as the chorus of the song rings out, "Hey pretty... don't you wanna take a ride with me," Sean makes eye contact with a girl who happens to be quite pretty herself. And he is stunned. It's not the prettiness that stuns him. There is no shortage of beautiful women at the concert. He is stunned by how taken he is with this particular girl for no reason that he can logically discern. He feels an immediate need to connect with her, a driving impulse to tell her who he is. And he doesn't know why. He doesn't know a thing about her, except that she has big green eyes and long, dusty brown hair and she is short and wearing a white top that looks like it is made of crepe paper. But there is something about her face, or more accurately, her expression, that seems to spell out her entire personality. The chorus hits again, and Sean, surprising himself with his decision to act on impulse, walks with purpose toward the green eyed girl.

And he tells her his name. And she smiles. And she tells him that her name is Athena.

Kyle & Jasmine

Kyle and Jasmine have a wall between them. There is a wide gulf that separates them despite their physical proximity in the small automobile that Kyle is maneuvering slowly and precisely through red-tinged mountains. Each of them, Kyle and Jasmine, loves the other, but they are unable to say it. Each of them, Kyle and Jasmine, is unable to actually spit out the words. Kyle is afraid that Jasmine has forever placed him in her in the sheer-walled confines of her friend bucket, a fate few men are ever able to escape. Jasmine is afraid that Kyle must have issued his affection to someone else and has taken his utter lack of forwardness to be an obvious sign of disinterest. Kyle knows that Jasmine is the perfect girl for him and Jasmine is well aware of the rarity of the chemistry they share. There is an undeniable bond between them, but the rift that drives them apart seems wholly insurmountable. As the car radio plays softly and the sun sets behind them, Kyle and Jasmine are both experiencing the same confounding mixture of contentment and lightning fork agony.

There have been few words spoken on this trip, but it hasn't been an uncomfortable silence. The space is filled, instead, with the flutter of Jasmine's eyelashes or the quiet serenades that Kyle has hummed along with every appropriately longing song. Every now and then their eyes will meet and each of them, Kyle and Jasmine, thinks they feel something spark, but then it's quickly dismissed as a product of their own desperation and the spark is extinguished and the hollowness of their mutual supposed unrequited love rushes back in to fill the void. Kyle and Jasmine are writhing inside, dying to spill their guts and gush over this person next to them, the boy or girl that they adore so very much. The drive is killing them. Neither of them ever wants it to end.

The mountains, now, are stained violently crimson and indigo by the spectacular sunset flowering behind them. There is an aura of magic enveloping the world, the sort of mystic glow that comes from a scarlet dusk, the sort that wildly intensifies the romantic tension that is driving Kyle and Jasmine straight out of their minds. Jasmine's lovely profile is lit up by the dying sun and she looks more perfect, more divine than anything Kyle could ever imagine. Kyle looks distant and lost as he thinks of her, and Jasmine is drawn to his distance, imaging levels of depth dwelling in her friend that she has barely begun to plumb. And it is absolutely maddening. The red mountains are fading behind them. Kyle and Jasmine have descended from the craggy heights and are driving along a winding, whispering path in the middle of a desert wasteland. The purple sky will soon be bleeding stars. If this magical dusk has been difficult, then the night will be practically unbearable.

The universe is shuddering around them. There is a sickening fluidity to it, a dreamy quality that the two of them, Kyle and Jasmine, take in amazing stride. Their preoccupation with each other has left insensate to anything outside of their hermetic mobile world. The desert is resculpting itself around them. The red baked clay of the earth is rising up in twisting, finger-like spirals, wrapping around themselves before dissipating and falling to the ground like cinder-block meteors. Pyramids shake themselves loose from the dirt, and great, steaming fissures open up along the roadside. Kyle and Jasmine do not notice the changes. Kyle is hoping to hear Jasmine laugh and Jasmine is drunk on Kyle's eyes. Pale green and bright blue moons fill the darkening sky, maybe a hundred or more, and they detonate spectacularly and ceaselessly, brilliant celestial fireworks overhead. This does not phase Kyle or Jasmine in the least.

The road scuttles beneath their car like a treadmill and soon they aren't going anywhere at all. Gas is burning, exhaust is spewing and Kyle's foot is held fast on the accelerator, but there is no forward motion, no progression. Kyle and Jasmine are so lost in thought, though, that neither notices or cares about their stagnation. As the hours pass, however, they do begin to grow weary and as they yawn, the ground does too, and the earth spits up a little white building made especially for them. It is squat and its walls are windows and it glows from within with a sort of pale ivory that makes it stand out like a beacon in the bloomed darkness of the desert. The building is nondescript and utilitarian and it has a parking lot and a blank marquee sign standing tall at the road's edge. Kyle and Jasmine give a passing inquiry to what, exactly, the little place might be. They agree, then, that it is enough that it is a shelter and they'll stay there for the night. In any other circumstance, settling in a strange, solitary building would be illogical. But they are both so tired and the building is right there. They haven't seen another structure for hours after all. Kyle parks the car. They go in.

Inside, the place is bigger than it should be. It is immense. Cavernous. An echoing giant chamber that could have been a church or a wedding hall or the hollowed out remains of some uncomfortably baroque and ornate theater. But to Kyle and Jasmine, it doesn’t seem to be anything at all. It is a room, an empty room, with its glass window walls and worn cream carpet. The ceiling seems to lower as they delve deeper in. The floor seems to likewise drop beneath them, as if they’re now half underground. It is cool in the building, pleasantly cool, and softly lit in a way that could be thought of as eerie or comforting dependent wholly on one’s particular point of view. The darkness creeps in through the window walls and Kyle and Jasmine eventually find themselves walking in the black beneath a dim spotlight. It follows them through the emptiness. They’re blind to everything outside of it, and the wide open building suddenly seems very small and cramped. They huddle together, as if being outside of the light could somehow do them harm. They move closer and brush against one another. Each feels a sputter-shock run roughshod through their nervous systems. It is infuriating and exciting.

The spotlight comes to rest upon a small lacquered wooden bench in the center of the mysterious building. They can’t see a thing beyond it, beyond the little bench that will barely seat them both. They exchange a weary look. Both of them are so tired, so spent, that they instinctively collapse, in tandem, into a heap on the little wooden bench. Their backs meet at the shoulder blades, and they sit still for a moment, propped one against the other, breathing in the antiseptic air of the building. It is embarrassingly thrilling, this basic, gentle touch. There is sort of pulse numbing pause to the moment, a hard stop on the careening vault of time, and the two of them, Kyle and Jasmine, hold their breath and try to make this tiny porcelain moment last forever. But, of course, the clock eventually unspools again and they're forced to come up gasping for air and the bit of crepe that tied the whole of it together has been ripped. Minutes tick on and there is the shrill worry of ending looming over them. Still, there is something so sweet and so utterly unspoiled about this miniscule connection that they each give in, grave and cautiously, to the idea that things between them may have, just maybe, slightly possibly changed. In the lock of the moment, there is a significant boost in ego, in confidence and in passion. And it's Jasmine that takes advantage of that shift in the pair's demeanor.

Jasmine unlocks her position on the bench, twisting herself forward, and moving Kyle like an interfaced sprocket as she does. They are both facing front, now, and Kyle is surprised and a bit unnerved by the change. Jasmine acts quickly to capitalize on this novel orientation, and she softly lays her head on Kyle's shoulder. The effect is immediate and it is explosive and it is indescribably wonderful. Rockets fire between his temples and Kyle is close enough to her now to feel the oceanic tidal rhythm of her breathing. He matches his lungs' cadence to hers after letting out a long, whalesong breath to denote the inimitable pleasure of her present company. Emboldened by her act of affection, Kyle wraps an arm snugly around Jasmine's waist, and he pulls her, subtly, slowly and assuredly closer. She smiles and she lets out a half whispered sigh and he just melts. Exhausted, she shifts again, this time sliding herself down, stretching upon the wooden bench and laying her weary head in his lap. He moves a hand toward her hair and runs his fingers between her locks as her cheek heats up his thigh. It's more calming, this new intimacy, than the hope of any prescription pill or silvery meditations. There is a tenuous, nervous and overly glass-like happiness shared between them; a quiet and luscious release that would verge on catharsis if it weren't still bottled up and in danger of shattering them both from the inside out. They still want to say it. More so, now, than ever before. The two of them, Kyle and Jasmine, still desperately want to tell each other, to vent it, to whisper it lovingly and frighteningly into the other's ears. But the wall is still there. It is crumbling, brick by brick and slowly, but it is still there.

The bench changes. It softens and it widens and becomes a davenport while she lays and he sits and there is a plushness to it that lets her body sink into a cloudy abandon. Her tired bones and muscles float on a sea of luxury and the comfort of it flows through her while her mind unhinges from conscious thought and loses itself in a vivid morass of lovelorn dreaming. And Kyle watches her drift off and he smiles. She looks so perfect and so peaceful that he cannot help but love her. He adores her. He feels her every tiny movement rack through his body and the soft tone of her sleepy murmur cuts into him like a knife. His heart balloons with want, but what he wants is here, next to him, and he is terrified at his current surfeit of satisfaction. He is afraid of losing it, and so he tries to etch the feeling into his brain, like a treasure map, so he can find this memory again when things have spun out of control and gone horribly, horribly awry. It'll happen. Somewhere beyond this beautiful night is a future of sickness or hardship or loss or fear. And when he is lost in something bigger and more wretched than his meager faculties can handle, he will find himself, he knows it, right here.

As he tries to pull it all in, he too succumbs to the new softness of the bench turned couch. He gently moves her warm body and slides himself between Jasmine and the sofa's back. He nestles up next to her, wraps his arms around her and squeezes tightly. He plants a quiet, hushed kiss on the back of her neck and he falls asleep.

The two of them, Kyle and Jasmine, dream of each other as they slowly turn to ash and crumble away, now commingled in dust forever.

Woodbridge's

It should have been a typical evening… after running a few errands, I expected to come home, heat up some leftover pizza and watch television until bed time. Nothing special, nothing exciting. Just a dull, flavorless evening. Destiny, though, can have different plans, and I suppose I found myself on the butt end of fate that night. From the moment I walked into that store, I should have known something was awry. It’s not often that one gets to wonder just how markedly different their life would have been if they hadn’t desperately needed to pick up detergent on their way home from work one Wednesday.

Our local department store chain is called Woodbridge’s. It’s small and its selection is paltry, but it’s directly between my job and my apartment. The Target is almost ten minutes out of my way, and the Wal-Mart is awfully run down these days. So unless I need something fairly obscure, I always stop at Woodbridge’s. I’m quite familiar with it, which is probably why I could tell something was off from the moment I walked in. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what the issue was, but it was definitely different. Maybe it was the lighting, or the smell of the place. I’m not sure. But it was off. I didn’t realize how far off until later.

The store was nearly abandoned that night. Now, this isn’t uncommon, especially on a weeknight (how, exactly, Woodbridge’s stays in business has always slightly confounded me), but it seemed exceptionally empty. Usually there’s a few stray shoppers, younger men, mostly, plodding over the dingy linoleum and looking pale under the buzzing fluorescent lights. But that night, I can’t remember seeing another soul between the front doors and the cleaning supplies. Every now and then, maybe, as I passed an aisle, a shadowy flash might skitter past, but I assumed it was just the tail end of a fellow shopper briskly moving in the opposite direction. I will admit that I didn’t really notice anything substantially odd at all until I picked my bottle of Gain off the shelf. There certainly had never been a stream running through the house wares department before.

I was dumbfounded, really. It was so nonsensical. But it was real. Only a few feet away from the fabric softeners and dryer sheets was a shallow brook dug into the white and blue Woodbridge’s tiles. The water was clear and running at a pretty fast clip, and there were little frogs and salamanders dotting the course of it. It looked freakishly natural, as if the store had just assembled itself around a creek... that is to say, there was no indication that the stream had been built into the store. Now, having stood in that exact spot countless times prior, I knew that that was not the case. The stream was obviously an addition. But the effort that had gone into making the storebound stream seem like a natural occurrence was staggering. It bothered me in a vague sort of way… I couldn’t fathom the purpose behind so much seemingly pointless work.

I set my detergent back on the shelf, bent down and cupped my hand into the water. It was cold. A tiny swarm of tadpoles darted away from my fingers as I broke the babbling surface. There was silt and a smattering of pebbles on the bed of the creek. I moved them around, kicking up a small storm of dirty plumes into the water. It felt so real. It was real, I suppose, but it didn’t seem any different than any brook you’d stumble across out in the woods. I stood up, flicked the excess water off my hand and dried it against my pants legs. Then I looked up and saw someone standing across the stream, just staring at me. He startled me so much that I nearly fell over.

There was a man across the stream. He was tall and lanky, dressed all in faded blue denim. I always hate how it looks when someone wears the same color pants and shirt. I’m not sure why, and given the fact that the man was tapping the blunt edge of a large butcher’s knife into his palm, I probably should have been thinking about something else. But I wasn’t. I was thinking about how stupid his faded blue shirt looked with his faded blue jeans. It didn’t take long, though, before I noticed the lunatic smile on the man’s narrow, craggy face. He had longish yellow-gray hair, the color of curdled cigarette smoke, and his lips were obnoxiously red. His teeth were certainly nicer than the teeth you’d expect a knife wielding lunatic to have, but his skin was almost stony in texture. All in all, he looked quite crazy and I wasn’t at all thrilled to see him. Helpfully, however, he had a nametag on his shirt. Unfortunately, his name was “T. Devil.”

We stood there, parted by the stream, and staring at each other for some time. Eventually, unsure of what to do, I sputtered, “What does the ‘T’ stand…”

He cut me off and said, “’The.’ It stands for ‘The.’”

“’The Devil,’” I replied. “I see.”

“It’s not my given name,” he clarified.

“Ah,” I said, wondering if should just run the hell away as fast as I could. But I didn’t. I stood where I was, conversing with a crazy man named The Devil while an inexplicable river ran between us. It was a bad decision, I will admit it, but it was the decision I made. I can’t adequately say why. I just stood there, almost transfixed by the man, or by the situation. After a brief silence, I decided to speak again. “Stream’s new,” I said.

“Nah,” The Devil said, never losing that horrifying smile. “It’s always been there.”

It hadn’t. I know it hadn’t. But I decided not to press the issue. “Oh,” I said.

“You just couldn’t see it before,” The Devil explained. “But it’s always been there.”

A brief silence passed again with The Devil and me just blinking at each other. Then, suddenly and chillingly, I realized that The Devil wanted to kill me. It just made sense given his demeanor and bladed accessory, but the reality of it sunk in at that very moment. My throat went dry with fear and I began to perspire from pretty much every pore. It struck me, then, that I should get a confirmation from the predator, and so I asked, “You’re here to murder me, aren’t you?”

The Devil nodded an affirmation.

The fear that overtook me was not the fear that I expected. It was not panic. It was anxiety, like the anxiety that comes along with being ill-prepared for a test, or the anxiety that accompanies a first date. I was nervous. I was nervous I would fail somehow and this crazed man would succeed in his endeavor to murder me. But despite the anxiety, I had no doubt I could keep him at bay if I just managed to focus. By no means was my situation hopeless. Something, already, was keeping him confined to his side of the creek. I began to formulate hypotheses. Perhaps it was the creek itself that was keeping The Devil from reaching me. I decided to ask him if that was the case. He had been unfailingly helpful so far, after all.

He nodded again and I breathed a sigh of relief. I would be fine. He was trapped in sporting goods and I was free to just leave the store with my life intact. A close call, certainly, but no harm done. I backed up, slowly distancing myself from The Devil and my protective creek. I kept my eyes on the lunatic the whole time, worried that, somehow, the status quo might up and change on me. He kept smiling. “I’m going to leave, now,” I told him. “I hope that’s ok?” I didn’t think I really needed his permission, but it seemed like the polite thing to do.

This time, The Devil shook his head. I didn’t like that. Not even a little. I decided to increase my back-up speed, hoping to make my way to the store's foyer a bit quicker. Instead, I tripped over myself and fell onto my rear end, landing with an echoing thump on the pockmarked tiling. All the while, The Devil continued staring at me, still grinning maniacally and still tapping his knife into his palm.

I was a bit shaken by my fall and growing more and more unnerved as moments passed that did not lead to my exit of the store. Sitting on the ground, amidst the surprising amount of dirt and detritus that had probably accumulated over the course of a single shopping day, I felt my limbs and my body become very heavy. Each finger felt like tiny weights had been tied to them. My bones felt leaden and dense. A soreness rippled across the muscles in my back and I felt ridiculously exhausted. I stifled a yawn, trying to keep a direct focus on my would-be killer, before noticeably wincing from my heaviness. I struggled to stand, but I overcame gravity and lifted myself from the ground. As I did, my armor creek shifted, changing course by making an L-like bend into the main aisle, veering sharply right through home goods and resuming course by cutting back through the row of plastic garbage cans and Rubbermaid totes. The creek was now running behind me. Without changing my position at all I was suddenly standing on the same side of the brook as The Devil. And, of course, that brook was the only thing keeping him from killing me.

My heart began to race. My nervousness escalated into a full blown panic. I no longer had any delusion that things were going to be just fine. Because a murderer was moving toward me. He was slow and deliberate, but he was moving toward me and he was going to plunge his butcher's knife directly into my heart. I knew it. I could feel it. I tried to back away, but now I felt trapped by the very same running water that had protected me mere moments before. I couldn't move. I was held fast by some sort of force, a compulsion I couldn't explain. I shut my eyes tightly and envisioned a place where I wasn't about to become the victim of a gory assault. But even with my eyes closed, all I could imagine was The Devil a few footsteps away readying a sharp object to pierce my skin over and over and over again. I wanted to scream out something, a demand for The Devil to stop, to leave me alone, to drop the knife, walk away and never return. But I couldn't make a sound. Nothing came from my throat but a sickly little gurgle. I was about to die and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Time seemed to freeze, and the agony of anticipation just hovered over me, heavy and thick like dripping molasses slowed by the cold. I was dying a hundred times between each heartbeat. I was ready, but I wasn't ready at all.

And then my brain created its own reality. Still in my mind's eye, still with my real eyes clamped tightly shut, I pictured the ground moving. I pictured space coming between The Devil and me, as if the store was growing from its middle, pushing us outwards and away from each other. New ground just rose up out of nothingness and took its place, seamless, in the new gap that separated us. I moved one direction without taking a step, and he was carried the opposite way. The world just filled in between us and I was safe and he was far away. It was a wonderful little fantasy, a glimmer of stupid hope to break up the tedium of my panic.

But when I opened my eyes, it had happened. Suddenly, I was standing at the edge of a huge gulf of new space. The world had moved us. I had moved us... with my mind. I don't know how, exactly, but my vision was absolutely accurate. The Devil had been pushed so far away that he was no longer visible. Instead, there was a wide expanse of empty store, just floor and walls and ceiling with exposed rafters and buzzing fluorescent lights high overhead. The aisle, the one where the creek had once flowed, the aisle that had separated The Devil and me had become miles wide. I couldn't see the other end of it. The horizon faded with emptiness. For all I knew, that space went on forever. Had it not just saved my life, I imagine I would have found the event wholly disconcerting. As it was, I found it to be an almost mystical experience.

Having successfully dispatched The Devil, I decided to return to my initial task of buying detergent. It seemed rather hollow, though, considering everything I had just experienced. Somehow, getting my whites their whitest paled in comparison to the power I had exerted with my mind. I wondered if my abilities extended beyond self-preservation. I decided to try a new trick.

I stood very still, shut my eyes tightly again, and envisioned grass growing beneath my feet. I imagined trees in time-lapse growth springing up from the ground, gaining heft and dominating the landscape. I imagined my creek changing directions again to flow through my new little patch of nature. Woodbridge's store would still contain it, but the new growth would be a tiny refuge of natural beauty in a sea of poorly lit artifice. I imagined dandelions growing between blades of grass, and mosses bedding down on the roots of the gnarled maples and oaks that stood in rapt attention on the banks of the babbling stream. I imagined birds nesting in the branches and singing out beautiful, spring-time hymns through green and red leaves that fluttered in an air conditioned, industrial fan generated breeze. I imagined grasshoppers leaping through the new lawn, munching on all this novel greenery, while worms and ants dug tunnels below the surface. Surrounded by aisles of cribs and baby clothes and displays of bargain priced DVD's, I tried to create life.

And I did. I opened my eyes and my park was there, just as I envisioned it. Just as I had done with The Devil, I had transmuted space, changed reality to my own accord. It was lovely. It was amazing. My attention to detail was incredible. I had made something beautiful spring from the recesses of my mind, and now it existed. I ran my hand over the soft grasses that had risen up from the shattered blue and white tile and I was amazed by how legitimate it felt brushing against my skin. The bark of the trees split and splintered in convincing jags and patterns. The leaves were variegated correctly. I caught a grasshopper and marveled at each little exoskeleton plate. It was all as real as anything made by God, but it was there because of my will. You can see how this could inflate an ego.

I worried very much for my sanity and doubted my ability to use these new powers in only a constructive manner. I worried that any stray thought, now, would suddenly be made real. As if on cue, horrible things started entering my mind without any provocation from my consciousness. I was hit with the notion of my family perishing. I fretted, now, that it had happened. It struck across my thoughts like lightning... my childhood home, up on an abandoned hill in the wilderness, still populated with my parents and siblings and pets, lit up with squares of yellow light as twilight spilled out around the countryside. It was so peaceful for one moment. But my brain conjured up a terrible event. An airplane overhead, a giant jet aircraft, stalling like an old car on a winter morning. The engines just sputter out dead and the tons of steel and plastic and glass fall like a stone from the sky. And the plummeting craft, of course, is headed directly for my house, for my family. I can't stop the train of images. My family is inside of their house. They hear the cacophony above, but they don't know what it is. It's getting louder. They don't have a clue. Before they can even guess that the thundering rumble is dangerous, the jet crushes their house in a fury of gravity and fire and apocalyptic destruction. And because this has come into my brain, I am terrified that it has happened.

More stray thoughts come and go. They vary in complexity and in malevolence. Some are almost benign, others are horrific. The United States capital building is now made of croutons. Every home in a nearby neighborhood is ransacked by ghostly marauders riding ebony, skeletal horses. Knives grow in the bellies of my former classmates, slicing them open from the inside out. Thriving metropolises are reduced to flaming planks and cinders. Trees morph into giant men who spend their time meditating by the shores of the oceans. Frogs rise up from the swamp on two legs and begin a conquest of all mammalian life. I am wreaking havoc with my mind. I can feel it. Every stupid thought breed something terrible, something nonsensical, something deadly. How many people are suffering for my ability? How many people are dying because of some new trick that I've discovered.

The exhilaration of what I can do has drained from me. It's too much to control.

I decide, perhaps, that I should bring The Devil back.