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.

Ghost Town

Sirat, somehow, found herself lazily wandering through the dusty alleys of an old west ghost town. She didn’t remember what had brought her there, nor, she realized with a sort of panicky horror, anything prior to that. She felt blank, a simulation of someone else named Sirat, a pale imitation with just broad strokes to fill in the huge white expanse of identity. And she didn’t like that. Around her, a crop of empty husk, hastily constructed buildings stood sad and rotting as a dim-bulb yellow sun hung low in the sky, hovering over the horizon and flooding the blasted desert landscape with a chalky glow. She felt ill at ease, isolated and strange. Nothing seemed quite right, and while she was tempted to blame her hole-riddled memory, there was a nauseating impermanence to her surroundings and herself. She saw vultures overhead that seemed to blink in and out existence. Things seemed fuzzy on the periphery of the desert, as if the world just came to a stop. She looked at her hands and didn’t feel like they fit with the rest of her personage. They looked different, somehow. It was only a moment, however, before they seemed to change and conform to her specifications. She felt, maybe, like she and the world were being pieced together at the same time.

With little else to do, she began to silently explore her environs. There was a smell to the place, a kind of stench of antiquity, and it stung her nose and made her eyes water. Each whiff carried with it a collection of memories that raced through Sirat’s head in a way that made them feel important and frustratingly intangible. It didn’t take long to acclimate to it, to put it aside and ignore it, but every now and then, a whisper of it would find its way to her brain and restart the memory show. It was disconcerting, but at least it was interesting. At least she felt something other than abandonment and disorientation. The town was small and trite, more like a movie set version of the American west than anything real. There were typical buildings: a jailhouse, a brothel, a post office and a saloon. Hitching posts and water troughs lined the dirt main street. Sirat could picture men in ten gallon hats with holstered guns prowling the alleys, and ladies in their corsets and finery trying to woo them to bed. It seemed so silly in that context, the way real people and real events were distilled to some basic essence of their existence and then launched forward, forever, as a default representation, a perpetual archetype. It struck her then that she, here, was no different. She was an essential part of someone real, someone else who was, no doubt, slumbering peacefully in a bed far away while Sirat wandered through the ghost town. Sirat was suddenly aware that she was a dream, a bit of fluff given form and the semblance of someone else’s life and forced to interact with an imaginary world… she felt inconsequential, then, ashamed of her own lack of solidity. She was angry at having been called into being at all, and saddened that her existence would surely end the moment the real she woke up.

But the dream Sirat, solely through that realization had woken herself up and removed herself from the control of another Sirat’s dreaming mind. She was no longer tethered to the brain that had invented her. Her existence was her own. This was not a concept she readily understood. If there was a difference in her before her self-realization, it was too subtle to notice. So the dream Sirat still felt very limited even as she stepped out from her real self’s shadow to become something greater that the woman that had birthed her.

Sirat, strangely self-aware and anxious about her fate, struggled with meaning. She felt faced with an existential crisis, saddled with a condensed life that she felt needed some purpose, some goal, some form of achievement in order to validate its having happened at all. Lost amidst the ruins of a never-was town, however, she wasn’t sure what to do. She rushed from building to building, hoping that beyond each door there would be some sort of sign or direction. She flung open old doors to musty pantries, to outhouses, to bedrooms and to jail cells and found nothing but dust and dirt and ghostly white cobwebs strung between chipped paint and molding wood. With each failed door, she grew wearier, more frightened and more distraught. Her eyes began to feel heavy, her legs, leaden. She moved with slack muscles and pained joints and felt like collapsing. In the corner of the old saloon’s dining room, beyond a busted player piano, Sirat found a dirty blue mattress, stained with blood and bile and coated in a fine layer of deep gray dust. Depression and fear overtook her. There was no point to this brief exercise in existence, she told herself. There was no end goal, nothing to do, nothing to accomplish. Tears rolled down her cheeks and her whole body shook with heaving, anguished sobs. She was convinced her time was near an end and she had nothing to show for it. There had been nothing, here, in this dirty ghost town… nothing but empty rooms and debris.

Sirat took a deep breath and slumped herself, morose and worthless, into a heap on the mattress and fell into the dreamless sleep of a dream.

As Sirat slumbered, her mind set on pause, time, in its weird dreamy way, still flowed about her. Though she was no longer engaged, the world of dreams was still in motion, and a shadowy little creature, a shadowy little imp, had made her way into Sirat’s ghost town. Once, she had been the consort of a fellow imp, a dastardly little creep that demanded to be called “Thimble,” even though it wasn’t his name. Her name, however, was no secret. She was called Shair.

Shair, like Thimble, had been crafted by dreaming magicians, by men and women who dedicated themselves so wholly to the arcane arts that they practiced those arts even whilst asleep. Imps were the dream-toys of these magicians, built for purpose, to fetch and to test and to serve. Some imps fled their dreaming masters, some were emancipated upon their owners’ deaths. Others, like Thimble and Shair, had slain their magicians to gain freedom. Once, the two imps travelled the land of dreams together, side by side. Thimble, though, grew weary of their partnership and sought out the company of a newly wakened dream, a woman named Kara Frost. He abandoned her in a swirl of formless fog, and she hadn’t seen him since. Travelling alone, Shair would sometimes hear stories amongst Woken dreams, she would hear of how Kara Frost and Thimble had saved so many from the death of oblation. And so Shair, jealous Shair, dedicated herself to the opposite. She had slain her master with no remorse. Surely the destruction of those her former lover and his new escort had rescued would ease her suffering. She was pitiless in her hunt, tracking down those who bore the salvation offered by Kara and Thimble, obliterating their minds and their memories and taking their heads as trophies. In a black bag slung over her bruise blue shoulder, Shair carried the heads of a hundred dreams touched by the waking hand of Kara Frost. Even with so much death on her hands, however, she still felt the sorrow of abandonment.

Eventually, Shair began to wander, lost in confusion and sadness, and in those wanderings she stumble across the ghost town built by the dream of Sirat. Shair loved these places, these miniature hollows of human dreams. She loved exploring the streets and alleys, loved how they ranged from so simple to so convoluted. This one, however, seemed drearier and emptier than most. She was shocked that no one wandered the streets. She was amazed that the place was so lifeless. Like Sirat had, Shair walked amongst the buildings, opening doors and looking for a reason to be there. Eventually, she came across the slumbering form of Sirat on the mattress.

And Shair, then, saw a similar confusion and a similar sadness on the face of the woman lost in her dreamless sleep. She felt an inexplicable kinship with Sirat, a tether she hadn’t felt since walking with Thimble. She smiled for the first time in a long while, and she bent next to Sirat and kissed her softly on the cheek. Shair felt a shock go through her, a wave of cold as she appropriated the sadness of the woman. Shair ran her clawed hand through Sirat’s black tangle of hair. She drew in the dread and the gloom that had afflicted Sirat, and expelled it into the dreamscape as black crepe exploding from her talons. Sirat stirred, her weariness abated, her sadness expunged. The act, for Shair, was redeeming, powerful in its kindness, and Shair suddenly felt a profound hollowness that had come from slaying the dreams saved by Thimble. A heavy remorse set in, a sickness of consequence, and Shair was overtaken by the memories of those whose heads she carried in her bag. As Sirat woke, newly and confusingly content, Shair cowered back into another corner of the musty saloon. A floodgate of guilt had opened upon the poor imp.

Sirat, aware now that Shair had stolen her anguish, saw the imp cowering and felt a wave of sympathy. She could see the hurt in the poor creature’s black eyes, and she wanted, now, to help in any way she could. So she offered herself up to Shair, she offered her assistance as payment for the kindness Shair had extended to her. And Shair, then, knew how she could atone for her sins.

She asked Sirat to lay, again, on the mattress. Sirat complied, nervously, while Shair retrieved her bag of trophy heads. Shair asked Sirat not to move and Sirat didn’t, even as, one by one, Shair removed the heads of the slain dreams from her bag and cracked them, like fresh eggs, over Sirat’s body. She emptied the contents of each cracked head onto Sirat. From one, microscopic cities of glass fell like twinkling dust and dug into Sirat’s skin and eyes. Another produced liquid volumes of chromatic essence, which stained Sirat like a painter’s rag. Others released models of staircases, dollhouse furniture or tiny soldiers determined to die in some far off conflict. One merely produced the smell of French bread and cobblestones from a faux Parisian alley. All of these, the contents of all one hundred heads, were absorbed by Sirat and became part of her.

And Shair explained:

She had obliterated these dreams, destroyed their minds and befuddled their memories. But the essence of them, of who they had been and what they had created, still existed inside of their heads. By releasing them, Shair had given them to Sirat, breathed new life into them as a new life took them over. Sirat was a library, now, of these dead dreams, and Shair was convinced that they could remake them all, if only Sirat would accompany her to the places she had taken them from.

And Sirat smiled, broadly. She was suddenly full of purpose, full of meaning, and full of direction. With no reason to remain in the ghost town, Sirat and Shair set off to old parts of the dreamworld, intent on restoring what Shair had, in madness and in sorrow, so cruelly destroyed.

The ghost town crumbled behind them as they left.

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