Today, they take me to my death. I am to be hung by the neck. I’ve had my last meal. I’ve said my last prayers. Now I walk.

I’ve killed men. I’ve killed boys. I’ve killed those who begged for mercy. I’ve killed those who stood their ground. I’ve killed while they slept; I’ve killed while they shat. I’ve killed for my country, and I’ve killed for my people.

My so-called crime has been just, and now I accept the disproportionate punishment. I am not afraid. Death comes for me. I shall not weep and beg. I will gladly give my life. They know better than to let me free, for I shall kill again and again. Until my people are safe and away from danger. My enemies won’t show me mercy, just as I have shown them none. So come, lead the way. I walk with pride. My final steps shall not be heavy. I yearn for that drop.

I see the gallows, I see my fellow soldiers hanging. I feel the ice on my spine. Is it fear? No! It’s my fate. Whispering in my ear, blowing on my nape, calling me like a lover to the place hereafter.

I climb the stairs. I see the crowd gathered to see me swing. I see the priest, and I see the people who had people taken from them. I see the man who will send me to the abyss. I see his eyes. Passionate. Full of rage.

Wait! This is not right. Isn’t justice delivered without dispassion in danger of not being justice?

I care not. They pull the noose around my neck. There it is again. The ice on my back. The shiver through my soul. Yes, Yes. It is not fear. It’s fate’s final call. I close my eyes.

I close my eyes, and I see the men I killed. The men I gutted. Then I see my wife. I see my son. Oh, my boy. How I wish I could see you grow into a man. See you fall in love. Oh wife, How I wish to embrace you again. To caress your long hair and to feel your gentle touch.

I see my mother, young and beautiful, again. Holding my hand and running through the wheat. I see my father carrying me on his shoulders. I see our farm. I see our cow. I wonder if it’s all still there. I see faces of people I thought I forgot. I see memories that define me. I would like to see them again.

What if there is nothing? What if I cease to exist, and that’s that? The world would carry on. I feel it again. The ice. On my back, in my legs, and in my knees. It was not fate. It was fear.

I don’t want to die. I want to see my son. I want to be with my wife. I want to live.

I open my eyes. I look at the executioner. I look at the crowd. I look at my fellows hanging from the post beside me. Tongues out and swollen. Faces purple. Eyes gone. Flies swirling around.

Priest: “Any Final words?”

Soldier: “NO, NO, NO Wait, wait, wait, No, Please.”

A sudden drop, a quick snap, and a slow stop.

The current was deeper and swifter than he could have imagined and it carried him too far, too fast. Justin knew he was in bad trouble. At first, he fought the current, struggling to return, but he was too small, not nearly strong enough. With this realization, he relaxed, trying to float in the turbulence.

He tumbled and spun, gasping for air, and then gasping at what he saw. The brightness, like a massive locomotive’s light barreling toward him filling his field of vision, then becoming a white hole, the sun at noon. He no longer struggled.

He fell.

And fell.

Justin heard his mother calling. Heard her sweet voice. “C’mon, sweetie. Come inside for a few minutes. Let’s trace your hand for Daddy, so he can see how big you’re getting. We’ll put it in the package for him.”

He followed her voice and saw his Dad, in uniform, holding the blue and white soccer ball he’d gotten for his seventh birthday. “You got enough for a game with your dad?”

Pulled along, Justin heard and saw Granpa Tatum, Aunt Josie, his cousins Felton and Maddie, Tony T, Mrs. Linehart. It was almost like a cartoon where every face and sound piled up around him.

And he wasn’t scared. There was a softness to the long fall, like he would land upon a pillow that would collapse around him in smothering warmth. There was a cleanness to it. An order. Everyone he loved and cared about was here with him. It was strange, yet easy to accept.

Then the falling became a rising. Justin didn’t know how he sensed this or even cared how he knew. There was only anticipation, an eagerness for what came next. The brightness around him darkened and narrowed to hazy murmuring, a whispering of his heartbeat and his lifeblood coursing through him and out some unknown passage.

He knew he would have to climb. He would have to struggle. Yet the call was strong. Beauty was up there. Comfort. Love. A forever place for him.

Deep within or behind came a scream and Justin shook. A terrible cry that shattered his peace and determination. It clawed at him, a beast dragging him back the way he’d come. He fought and resisted, but the grip was strong and took him back, not through light, but through darkness. There were no faces, no voices, no familiarity. Only pain.

A crushing iciness in his chest, a mighty glacier grating over and through each limb. Each breath a struggle. Choking. Coughing. Shaking.

“Let me go. Let me go,” he wailed.

There was sand and blue sky. The surf a few yards away. Dozens of faces. His mom and dad.

“He’s back,” someone cried.

“He’s safe,” called another.

Justin’s mind was a white hot sun and endless black hole.

On the other side, Canaella wept. After the consuming pain and exhaustion of delivery, she wept. For the promise not kept. For the price paid and the balance due. For the stillborn daughter she clasped to her trembling bosom. What kind of universe would take her daughter’s life at this moment? How could her vitality, her endless possibility, her future be snuffed like a holy candle on the most sacred altar? Who was responsible? Near birth, near death, where was justice?

The lighthouse's eye shone like God's first light in the world. As the wind whipped against the boy's cheeks, a large wave crashed over him, even though the heavy rain already drenched his clothes. Thunder roared in the distance, and sudden bursts of lightning lit up the otherwise pitch-black sky. The struggle of keeping the boat on course had left the boy’s body aching, yet the increasingly growing eye in front of him stirred enough hope for him not to surrender. The distance between the small motorboat and the lighthouse seemed infinite in the surrounding darkness, but after countless more waves, the islet rocks appeared. Though it wasn’t an easy task to get ashore as the sea struck against land, he managed to get close enough for a jump. With the boat line in a sturdy grip in his hand, the boy took a mighty leap from the bow and landed on all fours against the hard rock. In the same moment, his foot slipped on the wet seagrass covering the stone and ice-cold water reached up to his ankle. Frantically, his fingers grasped for somewhere to hold as he slowly slid down towards the abyss below. His knee scraped against barnacles, and although the boy bit his tongue in pain, it had enough friction for him to stop sliding. His eyes searched the dark stones for a hold of some sort, and right before a wave whipped at his back, he managed to fit his fist inside a crevice in the rocks, and he was able to hold on to the islet. After the water had washed over him, the boy began crawling away from the angered sea. When he felt safe standing up again, he turned around to try to spot his boat in the void in front of him. He began pulling at the slack line still in his hand, and after a few seconds, it tensed, and he felt the resistance from the waves not wanting to let it go. He was careful not to slip again, but after a bit of struggle, he figured trying to reel the boat back in and secure it wasn’t an option, so he reluctantly let go of the line and watched it slither its way into the darkness. He felt a sting of sorrow for losing his boat, but not for long, as he let his attention turn towards the large tower before him. The boy began making his way in the direction of the glowing eye in the sky, as it felt like the rain was biting at him. Finally, he reached the house connected to the tower, and after a bit of hesitation, he knocked on the door. The sound of it almost disappeared in the wind, and he was just about to raise his hand and try again when the door creaked open. Tired old eyes looked back at him, and he saw a mouth covered behind a thick white beard moving, but there was no sound.
“What!?” the boy shouted back and leaned closer to the man.
“What are you doing here?” the man answered, his voice a bit louder this time.
“I lost my boat!” He thought for a second and examined the old man before continuing, “Can I come in?”
The man's eyes travelled up and down as he carefully reviewed the boy. Then he gave a small nod and opened the door wider as a gesture for the boy to come in. With a sigh of relief and a smile, the boy gave a nod back and took a step inside. There wasn’t much to look at. A tiny kitchen to the right, two doors to the left and an old round table in front of him with a big oil lamp filling the room with a warm orange light. The interior was mostly made out of old wood, and it smelled of mold. But as the man closed the door behind him, it was like the storm had been shut off by a switch. The floor creaked as the man walked past him and sank down on one of the chairs by the table, and continued solving a crossword in the newspaper in front of him. Not a word was spoken between the two, and the boy began feeling awkward. It was like the old man had forgotten he let him in.
“Ehrm.. Thank you for letting me in,” he said uncertainly.
The man who had just taken a sip from a mug in front of him growled something that sounded like a “you’re welcome,” without looking at him. The silence returned, and the boy kept standing in the middle of the room, his clothes still drenched from the storm outside. For some reason, it felt wrong to move. Like, he didn’t have any right to make noise. But he figured he couldn't stand here all night, so he carefully made his way to the other chair opposite the man, trying to avoid making the floor creak. The boy sat down, and even though he tried not to look at the old man, he couldn't resist. He had a navy coat over a stained white buttoned shirt with beige stripes. His head was covered with curly white hair, the same as the rest of his face, except for the top, which had thinned over the years. And although it was well hidden behind his bushy beard and moustache, he had a weathered face with dark, tired eyes and a big, round nose in the middle. His figure was large but not fat, like a man who had had big muscles in the past but then forgot his diet as the years went by.
“I’ll just stay here til the storm has passed, if that’s okay? Then I’ll be on my way,” the boy said, wondering if there was a way home from here without the need of a boat.
The man only grunted something inaudible without looking up from his newspaper, but he interpreted it as an - “That’s alright.”
Once again, the silence returned, and the boy unknowingly started tapping his fingers against the table as he looked around the room for something to catch his interest when he felt the man staring at him. Confused, he met the old eyes before embarrassingly putting his hands on his knees and murmuring, “Oh, sorry”
He looked back down at the table for a second before suddenly looking back up and reaching his hand forward towards the man.
“I’m Dennis by the way,” he said with a try at an enthusiastic smile, “What’s your name?”
This time, the old man straightened up and stared right into Dennise’s eyes.
“Look lad, I’m not much for small talk, okay. I let you stay here from the storm, but that ain’t mean we’re friends, got it?”
The boy pulled his hand back as his smile faded, but the man kept talking, “I have no idea who you are and how you got here, and I’ve got no intention of asking, so just do whatever you want so long as you don’t bother me.”
His voice was deep and wheezy like he hadn’t used it in a while, and although his words weren’t kind, there was no hostility in the tone, only tiredness. Still, Dennis decided it was best not to make any sound at all, so he went back to staring down at the table, letting his eyes trace the wooden pattern. He didn’t know how long he sat there studying the table, but after what felt like hours, his eyes finally met a pile of folded newspapers next to the lamp he hadn’t noticed earlier. Slowly, so as not to bother the man, he reached his hand out for the top one and slid the paper towards him. Carefully, he flipped through the pages until he got to the crosswords and then began scanning the table for a pen of some sort and found a few lying behind the pile he had discovered. Dennis began filling in the missing words one after one, and soon enough, he had finished all the puzzles on the page. With a newfound burst of excitement, he began searching the pile after more undone ones, but to his disappointment, all the others were already filled in. With a sigh, the boy leaned back in his chair and started balancing the pen on top of his upper lip in boredom. But after he grew tired of that too, Dennis leaned forward again and started examining the one the old man was working with. It didn’t take long for him to figure out a word, and without further thought, the answer flew out of his mouth.
“Bygone.”
The old man looked up at him with a puzzled face, “What?”
“Number six. It’s bygone,” he explained, although he had already regretted saying it out loud.
The man’s eyes fell back down on the paper before writing bygone in the row.
“Thanks,” he said slowly with a voice mixed with confusion and surprise.
Dennis had prepared himself for something way worse, but his reaction gave him enough confidence to keep going.
“Forty-seven should be yore,” he continued.
Once again, the old man looked up at him, back down to the paper and this time he let out a small chuckle before filling in the word.
“Where did ya learn to do crosswords lad?,” he asked after laying down the pen and leaning back in the chair.
“My granddad liked them very much before he died,” Dennis answered, “I used to do them with him when I was a child.”
It had been a few years now since his grandfather had passed, and he felt sorrow when thinking about him.
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”
A few seconds of silence went by before the old man spoke again.
“Harold,” he said while reaching his hand towards the boy.
Dennis gave him a confused look before the man continued, “You asked for my name earlier. It’s Harold.”
“Good to meet you Harold,” he said as the tension loosened between them and he shook the man’s hand with a wide smile.
“Likewise.”
And for the first time, the boy was sure he saw a glimpse of something other than fatigue in the old eyes in front of him.
“I apologise, I don’t often get visitors around here, so I’m used to the silence,” Harold almost looked ashamed when he spoke.
“Oh, no reason to apologise sir, I understand. Can’t be easy living out here alone all the time.”
“Sir,” Harold chuckled, “There’s no need to call me sir. I haven’t done anything to deserve that title,” he continued as he waved his hand in front of his face like he was trying to get rid of the thought. 
“Sir is a title of respect, and I’m sure even a grumpy old lighthouse keeper like yourself has done some good things in this life.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I have, maybe I haven’t.”
The old man sighed, and his eyes travelled off somewhere else. Somewhere distant in the past.
Dennis hesitated,“You let me stay in here. If you weren’t a sir before this, you are now.”
“I guess so”, Harold answered as his thoughts returned to the room.
He examined the boy with a puzzled expression as if it was the first time he had seen him, before interrupting himself.
“Stay here, I’ll get you some dry clothes.”
He rose from the chair and waddled his way across the creaking floor towards one of the doors as he murmured, “Can’t sit here in those rags and freeze to death.”
His large figure vanished into the room, and Dennis heard him rummage around in drawers.
“You need some help?” he asked with a loud voice.
When he was met with silence, he stood up to offer his help, but before he could start walking towards the door, Harold came back out with a bundle of cloth in his hands.
“I told you to sit, didn't I?” he said, and Dennis could make out a small smile hidden behind the beard. “Yeah sorry, I just thought...”
“I’ve managed myself for some time now. No need for help here.”
He dropped the clothes on the table and took a step back.
“Try these. Might be a little big on you, but I bet they’re warmer than what you’re wearing now.”
Dennis gave the pile an uncertain look before starting to undress. His wet clothes were sticking everywhere, but with some struggle, he managed to get them off and started putting the old man’s clothes on. Soon enough, he realised that he had underestimated the size difference between them as he would be able to fit almost three of himself inside the pants, and the shirt hung around him like a blanket. Again, Dennis could spot a hint of a smile as he tried to keep his waist up with the belt.
“Funny now is it?” he asked sarcastically.
“Looks great on ya,” the man answered calmly as he sat back down in the chair.
The boy smiled to himself as he copied the man’s movement, and silence once again overtook the conversation.
“So...” Dennis cleared his throat, “What exactly do you do here? I didn’t even know lighthouse keepers still existed.”
“Well, you know,” the man began while looking around the room as if he would find the answer somewhere. “I make sure the lighthouse is working”. There was a pause, as if he was going to continue explaining, but ended up ending his sentence with a short, “Yeah, that’s about it”
The boy struggled to hide his disappointment with the answer and decided to change the subject instead. “You know, I have always wanted to run into an old man like this.”
Harold raised his eyebrows but didn’t interrupt.
“Yeah you know, it’s like something that you could see in a movie. A boy meeting an old man as he showers him with gathered wisdom and knowledge.”
The man looked at him like he had suddenly started speaking another language before Dennis asked him, “So, Harold, do you have any wisdom to lend the younger generation?”
It took some time, but after a while, he answered, “Well, I believe you’ve met the wrong old man. Sorry lad, but I ain’t got any smart words to share, I’m afraid.”
“Oh come on, there must be something.”
“Look, I’m strong, and I know how to do my job, but brains wasn’t ever my thing, y’know.”
Dennis looked down. Disappointed once again.
Harold watched the boy and suddenly murmured, “Well, okay, I can try at least, although I can’t guarantee it’ll be something useful.”
He shone up when he heard the man’s words and felt his chest fill up with excitement.
“Really?,” he asked without being able to hide his joy.
“Yeah sure,” Harold answered, struggling to conceal a smile, “what do you wanna know lad?”
The question staggered him. He hadn’t really thought about what exactly he wanted to know, so he ended up asking the first thing that came to his mind.
“What’s the meaning of life?”
At first, the old man didn’t answer. His eyes were yet again fixed on something in another room from another time. Dennis started wondering if the man had even heard the question, but then he opened his mouth.
“Well.. At first I’d say life’s about having fun,” his eyes still looking through the boy, “But since we’ll be here for a while, I’ll also say that’s only a part of it. Sure, having fun all the time would be nice, but I believe there is so much more to it.”
Dennis watched the man’s gaze, and at the time, he saw something new, something he hadn’t seen there before. There was a longing in his eyes. Like he was glancing back at distant memories he had forgotten were there.
“I’ve had my fair share of life, I’d say, and one thing I can take with me is that it moves past incredibly fast. Sometimes I look in the mirror and still expect a young handsome man looking back. I’m sure you’ve heard it plenty before, but if it's one thing I’ll tell you, it’s that.”
“Everyone always says that, but how? How do I savour it? How do I know if I’m enjoying it as much as I should?” he suddenly felt a lump in his throat that he wasn’t prepared for
This time, the man finally looked at him, his gaze shining like the lighthouse itself.
“That’s the worst part. You don’t. It doesn’t matter how much you live in the present or how much you think you’re savouring it. You will always wake up one morning, and all you’ll ask for is to go back.”
It felt like the words had stabbed him in the chest. His heart started beating faster as he almost shouted out - “But I don’t know what I wanna do with my life! There’s so much shit going on and too much to choose from. I don't know how to make that call.”
“Who are you Dennis?”, the man asked without averting his eyes. “What?”
“Who are you? Or should I say, who do you want to be?”
The boy didn’t know how to answer.
“I guess...” he thought really hard. Who did he want to be? “I guess I want to be someone kind. Someone that other people feel safe around and can count on.”
His words seemed to please the man as Harold’s eyes softened and a sense of pride appeared on his bushy face.
“Then be that.”
“But I still don’t know how. How do I make other people like or look up to me?”
“Ask yourself. Is it more important to you that you are kind, or that other people think that you are kind?”
Dennis opened his mouth to answer, only to realise that he didn’t really know what to say. What was more important? He hadn’t thought about it that way before and felt stupid for not knowing. Of course, the right choice was to say that in fact being kind was more important than just appearing that way, but for some reason, he couldn’t say that. He couldn't say that because deep down he knew that was wrong.
“I.. I.. I don’t know,” he lied
“Do you not know, or do you not want to realise what you in fact do know?”
The lump in his throat had grown, and he struggled to get any words out.
“Wanting to be wanted is not strange. Selfish? Maybe, but not necessarily wrong,” the old man continued after Dennis had failed to respond, “To be cherished by everyone is impossible and trying to be will only drain you.”
There was a moment of hesitation in the boy before he spoke, “But I want to be loved.”
“Of course, who doesn’t? But one thing you have to realise is that living to be loved is not the right way, nor is it a pleasant way. It’s a very difficult road that will most likely end up with you unloved by most.”
He thought about Harold’s words for a while until he asked, “So how do I live without seeking love?”
“Try to think about someone that you would love, and then be that person. Try to avoid caring how other people might see you and just live how you want to live. After all, your life belongs to only you and one morning you’ll wake up, realising that you’ve wasted your life living someone else’s.” Finally, the boy thought he understood the old man’s words, but he still had a question that had been nagging at him.
“Who are you? Harold.”
He could see the question had been unprepared for, but it didn’t take long for the man to reply.
“I’m afraid I’m someone who wishes he had heard these words a long time ago.”
Now it was Dennise’s turn to be stunned yet again. And even more at a loss for words was he when Harold reached for his inner pocket on his coat and pulled out an old wrinkled piece of paper. After unfolding it, the boy realised that it was a photograph. It was black and white, and in front of a large house was a young handsome man in a navy coat and beside him stood a beautiful girl with braided pigtails running down her shoulders and a rugged miss coloured apron over a white dress. It looked very old, he noticed, like it had been taken over a hundred years ago, but there was no doubt that the man in the picture was Harold, with almost the same clothes as he was wearing now.
“Who’s that?,” he asked carefully, pointing at the girl.
“Edith,” the man answered, looking down at the photograph with sorrowful eyes, “She was the love of my life and my only reason for living.”
“Where is she?”
Dennis knew the answer to his question already, but he didn’t know what else to say.
“She died a few years ago, before I started working here.” There was a deep sense of despair in his voice, but it remained steady.
“I’m.. Sorry to hear that.” The words rolled right out of him without thinking, “Did you have any kids?”
“No. She decided early on that she didn’t want any. And even though I’d always dreamt of being a father, I agreed.”
His eyes were trapped in the piece of paper in his hand like he couldn’t look away.
“I loved her. I really loved her. And all my life I spent trying to be the best husband and friend for her. It was the best years of my life, but what I realised when she was gone was that I had lived my entire life being someone else's. After she was gone, I realised that without her, I was no one.”
The boy struggled to come up with something to say, so he remained silent. Harold’s gaze suddenly lifted from the photograph, and his eyes met Dennis’s.
“Now I’m not saying that you shouldn’t love someone, quite the opposite. Love as much as you can, but don’t forget that the person you will be spending the most time with is yourself, so don’t forget to love him too.”
“Then how do I live my life and not someone else’s?”
“I don’t know. You’re asking someone who never did.”
At first, he felt confused. How could he be sure he was living his life? But then he thought about when he felt most alive, and suddenly he was very conscious of his surroundings. He heard the muffled sound of rain hitting the roof above him, felt the damp air inside the room, and smelt the mould and rotten wood combined into a sour odour in his nostrils. His eyes were directed towards the table in front of him, but his mind was searching for something inside his head. After a few seconds, the boy opened his mouth, pouring out his thoughts without thinking.
“I guess living your life could be to realise that you are alive and to appreciate the small things that you normally take for granted. Sooner or later, this time we’ve been given will end, and when that time comes, you might find comfort in the fact that you stopped and smelled the pine trees along the way, you know?”
This time Dennis raised his head and his eyes met Harold’s as he asked, “Are you afraid of death?” The old man turned his head to look into the black void outside the window as he replied, “I wouldn’t say afraid, more... disappointed.”
There was a long pause before he continued, “I often regret not having kids, y’know. Raising them would be like a chance to relive your youth once again. Seeing them grow up and experiencing life for the first time is something I’ll never get to do, and although I’ve tried to come to terms with that decision over the years, it still haunts me from time to time.”
That perspective had never crossed the boy’s mind before, and he was surprised by the softness in the old man’s voice as he spoke.
“I’ve never thought about it in that way before,” he said, trying to mimic the tone.
“I don’t think a lot of people do. I s’ppose it’s normal for people to miss their youth. Always looking back and wishing to be able to experience those years once again. But I think it’s important to know that longing for something that was, will never make it come back. The best thing you can do is to make sure the next generation shares the same adventures, and if you’re lucky, you might get to share their joy as well.”
A silence took place between them as Dennis tried processing Harold’s words, and after a little while, a grin cracked open on his face.
“And who said you weren’t wise, huh?”
From the side, he could see the corner of the old man’s mouth rise as he combed his beard with his strong hands in an attempt to hide the smile.
“I guess this old man still had some words left to share,” he answered, finally meeting the boy’s gaze as he was unable to contain the joy shining through his eyes, “I never thought I would have another conversation with someone, so thank you. Thank you Dennis, for wanting to talk with an old man like me.”
A warm feeling spread throughout Dennis’s body, and at the same time, he realised how tired he had gotten.
“Maybe it’s time we both get some sleep,” he said, containing the urge to yawn as he stood up and gave his body a stretch.
“I’m not feeling so tired,” Harold responded, “Besides, I gotta make sure the damn lighthouse still works through a storm like this.” He chuckled a bit before continuing, “But you can take my bed if you’d like. It’s the door to the right,” the man finished, pointing at the door where he had fetched the clothes Dennis had borrowed.
“Thank you Harold.” He waved as he started walking towards the room, “And good night, I’ll see you tomorrow before heading off.”
He didn’t wait for a response from the old man, and right after crashing down on the stained bed in the corner, he fell asleep.

The dawn's first light shone through the thin curtains of the bedroom and hit Dennis right in the eyes. He blinked a few times, recalling the memories from last night, before sitting up at the side of the mattress. Light rays lit up the quiet room as dust particles danced before him, and the sea outside the window was as still as ever and reflected the clear blue sky like a mirror. The boy rubbed his eyes before opening the door and stepping out to the room where he greeted Harold. Only that the old man wasn’t there. Dennis scanned the room with groggy eyes, but the lighthouse keeper was nowhere to be seen. He searched every corner of the house but to no avail, and after a while he started to think if it all had been a dream. But when he returned to the table they had sat at a few hours ago, he noticed the crossword in the newspaper he had helped Harold solve lying open. He started reading the puzzle, wondering if the old man had maybe left a note explaining where he had gone, only to realise all of the words filled in had almost faded out or been erased by time, like they had been written a very long time ago. All except for two words that looked new: bygone and yore. It almost seemed as if it had been years between the first words that had been filled in and the last ones. But that’s not possible, Dennis thought to himself. He had seen Harold write the other words last night with his own eyes. Or had he? He tried searching through his memories, and to his horror, he realised that he wasn’t sure he had actually seen him fill in any words except those two. Maybe it was just an old puzzle that he had given up on, he tried telling himself, but the time it would have taken the older words to become like that was not reasonable. Now that he thought about it, everything in the house looked extremely old and unused, almost as if it had been abandoned for quite some time. The idea came creeping up on him, but he shook his head, remembering the conversation he knew he had had. Surely he wasn’t so crazy as to imagine a whole other person, let alone talking with him. No. Harold had been real, he told himself, and he had probably only left the house for a quick errand somewhere, that’s all. Well, no reason to wait for him to get back, he thought as he changed back into his old clothes that had been lying in a damp pile on the floor before marching out the front door. The morning sun made him squint as he stepped out and began making his way down the somewhat defined path he had taken when he had arrived. Dennis reflected on the fact that the whole islet looked entirely different from when he had been here the first time. He glanced back and realised the lighthouse didn’t appear at all as intimidating as it had seemed before, and when he reached the top of a small rocky hill, he saw that the land was much bigger than he had initially thought, and the majority of it was covered with tall trees. Maybe there was a way home after all. The boy started strolling through the sparse forest, happy that his dream of listening to the wise words of an old man had finally come true as he smelled the pine trees along the way.

I descended the red carpeted staircase, grabbing the worn wooden handrails and

inhaling the building’s musty smell. Like so many in New York, its lifetime spanned

centuries, housing the inhabitants of each passing decade. Their hands, like mine, had

grazed the bannisters and walls, expectant of the lively Brooklyn neighborhood just a

door away. They were lucky. They’d never know how hope could congeal into horror.

Ever since it happened, everything had come to a grinding halt. The park at the end of

the block, once a hub of human and canine life, was a specter of its former self. The

trees stood in isolation—forcibly distanced by sensible planting. Their large branches

reached skyward, as if for answers. Nearby, swings in the gated playground remained

leaf-covered, small hands no longer there to cheerfully sweep them off before hopping

on.

It was three years ago now. What was presumed to be a brief interruption to regular city

life became an end. Living past it felt like being trapped in the leftover film from a movie

reel. Each day I ran out more of an endless blank tape.

That’s what made the package so odd. It punctuated a monotony I’d grown to count on.

Wrapped neatly and tightly in uniform brown paper, it looked like a Christmas present

from a matter-of-fact relative. “All you need is some string,” I said, surprising myself with

the utterance.

Against my better judgement, I decided to examine it. I was ravenous for intrigue. And

after all, it had the gall to block the whole doorway. Its presence was a brazen

declaration of unearned purpose.

I tried to lift it, and could do so just barely, stabilizing my back and bending my knees,

an instruction I remembered from a singular personal training session I took years ago. I

placed it out of the way and in front of the door of my neighbor’s abandoned apartment.

I’d let us have some time to decide the future of our relationship while I went for a stroll.

The air was crisp, slightly cooler than average for April fourth. I pulled my oversize

denim jacket closer to my body. The streets, which felt eerily desolate in the first

months, had adopted a calm normality. I started walking, as I usually did, down the two

obsolete yellow stripes, each foot on one line, balancing on flat ground.

Though it was chilly, I felt my face warmed by the sun and was grateful for it. The winter

had been particularly inhospitable, exacerbating the loneliness of it all. It had made my

weekly journeys to the Manhattan food markets feel long and trying. The markets

operated on a resurrected system of trading, which meant I was always lugging

something across the bridge.

As with every spring, renewal was in the air, welcome or not. I spied daffodil buds

emerging on the highway shoulder. I considered stopping to peer at their adolescence,

but decided they’d be better viewed in a few weeks. They’d be more beautiful as

teenagers.

I continued walking down the yellow lines, careful not to let a toe stray off, as if there

was some cosmic retribution left to ignite. As I came upon Fort Greene Park, I saw

another figure in the distance, sitting at a bench at the park entrance. I altered my route

to avoid them, politely performing a fear-born courtesy that had long replaced a wave.

I found the next entrance unencumbered by human life. I started on the path and began

to theorize on my mysterious visitor. Did the council discover I was living in a

long-condemned building? That couldn’t be. They were too afraid to enter the origin

zone, and the few of us left here kept to ourselves.

Then I considered a former lover. Perhaps Elliot was still alive. We’d separated just

before it happened. A phone call we planned for the following week was never to

be—the lines had all crashed by then. Could he still be thinking of me? Such hope was

embarrassing. And rooted in narcissism. Even if he’d survived, using whatever scant

resources he had to send a package to me, who was logically dead, would be foolish.

Elliot was smart. My vanity put a sour taste in my mouth, and I spit it out in the tall

grass.

I stopped next to a tree and sat beneath it. I picked a few green blades from the ground

and blew into them. I amused myself with their loud honks. The sound reminded me of

the ambulances that sped in and out of the parkside hospital in the early days. I wished

I hadn’t covered my ears each time they went by. I muffled their memory.

I looked for more childhood games. I took a stick and dug holes in the dirt, prying up the

grass by its roots and forming piles of it. The endeavor seemed more fruitful than

theorizing—at least I had evidence of what it created. Reason was no longer reliable. Only the

arrogant tried to predict. The wise knew to rely on the last bastion of humanity: intuition.

My feet began to fall asleep. I stood up and shook them out. They’d been falling asleep

more regularly lately, an annoying message from my body to avoid stillness. I got up

and began walking. There was no use in putting it off anymore.

I reached into my large coat pocket and pulled out a leather pouch of tobacco. It was a

luxury I didn’t take lightly. I’d traded Jesse a can of pinto beans for it. Scarcity had cured

my addiction, but my proclivity toward hedonism was terminal. I rolled the oaky brown

strings together in a paper, lit it, and inhaled deeply. I closed my eyes to savor the

pleasure.

Jesse and his boyfriend Seb lived in an abandoned penthouse on Mulberry Street.

They’d moved in right when the exodus started, but unlike others, they stayed. I

admired their enterprising spirit. I never thought about leaving my apartment. Its

smallness once felt stifling, but I grew to appreciate the closeness of the four walls, the

infrastructure unknowingly hugging me.

When I reached my stoop, I stopped in front of the first concrete step. What feet had

ascended them to bring it? Were they boots, big heavy black ones that could stomp

out a small creature with a modicum of force? Or were they worn sneakers, that moved

silently, as if on powdery snow? Perhaps there weren’t shoes at all, and one of the last

drones had dropped it from the sky.

I opened the door to face my aggressor. There it stood, unmoved from where I left it. Its

inertia was unsettling. I sat down across from it and contemplated my next move. There

were three obvious options: leave it at the bottom of the stairs, put it outside and kick it

down to the street, or, bring it to my apartment and see what lay inside.

My previous profession as a journalist had ingrained in me a sense of tiresome curiosity.

I knew that were I not to discover his entrails, it would madden me, and my current state

of sanity already lay dangerously on the brink.

I grabbed the bottom of the package with both hands, remembering what that personal

trainer, Chris I think his name was said, “Steady your back, and bend your knees, let

your legs be your anchor. That’s it!” Such encouraging words from another seemed as if

they were from a foreign language. I didn’t have the time or resources to deal with any

sort of injury, so I concentrated hard on those words as I went up the stairs.

Finally, after three flights, I reached my door and dropped the fucker down in front of it. I

twisted the key in the lock, opened it up and pushed it in with my foot. I went down to

my faded yellow couch and plopped myself down. I felt a few droplets of sweat move

down my face from my forehead. I couldn’t remember the last time I lifted something so

heavy, much less up three flights of stairs.

Now the battle was to begin: mano a mano. “Look at him, smug, just as perfectly

wrapped as he was when I found him while I’m over here dripping in sweat,” I brooded. I

lit a candle and opened one of the huge water bottles I got from the trade. I grasped it

with both hands. I drank thirstily and angrily.

I hadn’t felt such intense emotion, of any kind, in a long time. The initial weeks following

it had been the most harrowing. As the city residents fled to more isolated areas, I felt a

deeper and deeper sense of panic. Every day had been like a rollercoaster, but after a

while the ride must have gotten jammed, and I wasn’t able to feel in the same way I had

before. Survival and acceptance are colorless, and as they took over my brain made the

adjustment.

I had become a creature of habit, and this whole affair had put a spanner in the works.

My routine was upended and I felt I needed closure as to why. Yet since it I’d lost all

rosy ideations on fate and “everything happening for a reason,” a sense of fear began to

creep in. My mentality was that everything is entirely random—bland, blunt, and brutal. By that

logic the package was more likely to do harm than good, but the idea of leaving

it unopened was its own torture.

By even taking the time to consider opening the package, I knew I’d grown from my

previous self. In the first months and year since it happened, I’d adopted a particularly

heedless attitude, telling myself I didn’t care if I lived or died. Yet as the months waned

on, I began to develop an unexpected fortitude and will to survive. It became stronger

than anything I’d felt before, and like a wild animal, I was careful with my every move.

After approximately three hours of deliberation, I decided I had enough. I was going to

open it. I had reached an impasse, and the only way out was through. I got up from the

couch and went to the drawer for a pair of scissors. I grasped them in my hand firmly,

ready to cut into him. Slowly, I knelt down.

It was more satisfying than cutting the typical taped up package. It was free of the clear

masking tape once that made deliveries so irksome to open. The blade of the scissor

glided smoothly along the brown paper.

Skinned, an eggshell-colored box was revealed, and untaped, it opened on its own. I

peered inside. I nearly gasped but held the breath in my throat. Nestled on a meager

bed of packing peanuts, gingerly laid amongst them, was a white hand and forearm.

The arm stopped just before the elbow, in a clean break, likely done with a stonecutter.

The hand was large enough to have come from Michelangelo’s David. Cautiously, I

reached down to touch it.

It felt smooth and cold, definitely some sort of sandstone or marble. I carefully lifted it

from the box and placed it on the couch so I could examine it more thoroughly. It was

original, Promethean even. I found myself feeling reduced in its strange power.

I spent a good 20 minutes considering it, half waiting for it to grow the rest of its body.

The arm sat, unmoved, its hand in a relaxed, almost beckoning, position. It was the first

man’s hand that had been in my apartment in nearly three years, and it was made out of

stone. I thought of the irony, but wasn’t bothered by it. I’d long ago given up on the idea

of two-person sex; I relied on myself for everything.

It was getting late, and I knew I was near my self-imposed limit on candle usage. I

decided that whatever, or whoever, it was, would have to wait until morning. I’d have

more clarity on the whole thing with a fresh batch of sunlight.

I went to the bathroom and brushed my teeth and then washed my face with a bar of

soap. The space had become stark and utilitarian. I scoffed at my younger self, who

once had the skincare routine of a dermatologist. At 25, I’d been so obsessed with anti-

aging—which now seemed nothing but a brash frivolity. It seemed misanthropic to fight

the privilege of growing old.

Suitably clean for the evening, I got into bed. My head resting comfortably on my pillow,

I felt my eyelids grow heavy. Bed was no longer a place for comfortable postulating. It

was a vessel for sleep, nothing else.

Nearing the turning point of unconsciousness, I thought I heard something. The task of

opening my eyes seemed too great, and I chalked it up to rats. The noise came again,

this time louder, closer. A thud. I opened my eyes. Too late. The hand was right it front

of me. It grasped by face, the fingers closing around my mouth, their taste minerally and

gritty. The forearm pulsated like living muscle on my neck, choking me. Tighter and

tighter it went. I pulled and pried to no avail. I felt my nails bend backward into the

stone. It would be my last sensation. I went under, defeated. My own undoing.

There once was a lost voyageur. He wandered ten different rivers; fishing, gathering, and travelling. He was never home, but he was also never far from it. The fish would come feed him, the berries would give him energy, the leaves would keep him healthy, and the trees would keep him safe. He would learn lessons from the Peoples of the Rivers as well as the Peoples of the Road.

One morning, the voyageur woke in pain. He had become too comfortable with just his fishing, gathering, and wanderings. He found that the part of him from the Road had become complacent. Differently, the part of him from the Rivers had gone silent. 

The Voyageur knew that rivers here had always been gentle, though they clearly carved their own path that would change according to the land. It was far different than the crashing chaotic ocean his people had crossed. 

These Rivers rose and fell like the ocean. The voyageur knew it was not the River’s calling nor role to rise and fall; it is their calling and role to bend and change to the will of the land and sky.

This helped him navigate what he had awoken to.

The Voyageur opened his eyes to find that some of the Rivers he had once travelled had dried.

So, instead of following the Rivers, the Voyageur became lost in stony gulches without water, and choked upon dusty beaten roads that ran through the once rich wetlands.

Realizing his wanderings left him even more lost navigating this new maze of old Rivers and Roads, he began to think for all he had was his thoughts. Days without water passed and as he learned the maze, he found small trickles of water that would lead him forward. 

He wished to help others do the same. 

The Voyageur set out upon the dusty Road until
He found another small, trickling stream. It was fuller than the empty beds, and some life could be found near it. His eyes found those of lost children, others who had stopped when the Water ran dry. 

The Voyageur met with some of the Water’s people. Those that held the same values found him quickly. Though they were few, together they learned, taught, and healed; finding joy and hope for the new generation. 

Those that were not healing, decided to protect the trickle of Water. 

The Voyageur set back out with new teachings and knowledge that had been gifted to him. He spoke with the other lost ones as he passed; unable to help, but now able to offer some words and teachings.

He followed the stream until it met a wide muddy River. Three smaller lay separate; further to the south, which would then flow into the ocean. 

Upon meeting the Muddy he was quickly acquainted with it’s ways. He found a small River that flowed into the Muddy he did not recognize. It was gentle. Surrounded by unforgiving, dry Roads, the land itself leeched upon the River to survive. 

He felt welcomed by its People; those whom guarded their children, those who protected the Water would reluctantly offer welcome. The Voyageur was just one more parched mouth.

The Voyageur was, fed, taught, and told his purpose was valuable and his cause was of Creator… but never invited. 

They would sing and teach him the songs, they would show him how to heal in their ways, and speak with their voices. 

This is how they healed their children. 

The Voyageurs ways were first, of the People of the Road. He found he could bring new life to his own teachings by accepting the part of him that was from the River. A new way emerged in his heart and mind; one of River AND Road, not of River OR Road.

The People of the River had friends, family and neighbours in the People of the Road. Upon meeting, the Voyageur was welcomed by the People of the Road, upheld, given preference, and re-enforced in his ways; all with words like wildflowers. 

They spoke such similar words as the People of the River. The Voyageur could clearly see there was no Water for any canoes upon their dry dusty road. 

Time passed and the voyageur found that the People of the Road and the People of the River had come to an agreement of sort years back. A respect filled contract between kindred hearts and kindred hearts.

It was an agreement of respect, reciprocity, relevance, and responsibility built with warmth, care, and love by those that understood each other. 

The agreement remained between River and road, but the hearts that lead them there had long since moved on.

The People of the River spoke of betrayal by the People of the Road: backroom deals, and of false and different teachings. This created resentment as the People of the Road did not know who was to trust.

All the while the People of the Road would feign apologies, compromises, taking water from the Rivers with their left hand, and signing agreements “to protect” what remained with their right. 

There the Voyageur stood. There was bickering over the value of the dusty dry roads and the stagnant falling water; all the while those same voices now demanded the Voyageur heal their children and to nourish them with what little Water was given to him whilst the rest was fought over. 

Many from the River and the Road had long since given their hearts and broken their bodies to heal the children of the River and Road, and it seemed as if all but those few had forgotten that we were here to heal their children. 

Some of the River decided to protect those that took Water with their left, and gave droplets to them with their right as payment.

Each time the Voyageur spoke of what they had forgotten; healing the children, all agreed. 

However, those who were not serving quickly resumed quaffing down the Water from the River whilst the children; and those serving the children, drank dust, and ate stones. 

When those serving asked for more; hoping not to receive for themselves but for the children, those of the Road, and of the River who protect the Water, told them to use the Road’s ditch instead of the River. 

“For Water is Water, why does it matter where it should come from?”

The Voyageur had been welcomed, but the years had grown tiring. While the People of the River lived on their home, and the People of the Road warmed their castles; the Voyageur found refuge in a small, restful hole in the ground near the peak of a mountain. 

He ate sparingly from the land as the People of the Road drank most of the fish’s water, and all the soil and stones and trees had been used in their castles and roads and beautiful gardens. The only fruit the gardens offered were poisonous berries and thorns.

The People of the River stood guard over their trickling Water, whilst others would offer access to the tributaries to the people of the Road in exchange for castles and the same water they were leeching. 

The children lay empty upon the riverbank and the road. 

The voyageur could see all of this from his hole. The part of him that was the River understood.
The part of him that was the Road understood. 

We protect the River for our children, we build Roads and castles for our children. 

The children of the Road could swim and play in the River for their food came from the Road.

The People of the River “Received” what was left after all the Roads play for their food came from the River.

The People of the Road filled bottles of Water and thrived on the road.
The People of the River died on the road for their crystal streams had become toxic and dry.

The People of the River called out for Water.
The People of the Road told them “You came from this Water.”

The Children of the River and the Lost were made to portage with broken bones, and to canoe on dry creek beds. They would wander the dry Roads without Water. With warnings carved onto their skin they are told “You will die on the Road” and left to stitch themselves back together. 

Alone. 

The children who have been left on Roadsides and Riverbanks are told that they should bewalking the Road, not perishing on the side; they should be canoeing the River, not beswallowed by the mud. 

They are made to sit in a canoe on an empty riverbed to practice paddling, made to wander and walk without Water upon a long dry Toad that leads in circles. 

It cannot be Rivers or Roads. It must be both. And between Rivers and Roads there must be Bridges, not barricades.

A Bridge where the children of the road can watch and learn from the children of the river. 

A place where the needs of the Road are met, and built to protect the River. For our children to use them, the River and Road must exist.

Without healing the river, there can be no portaging, and no connection. Without healing the road, portaging the river becomes far more difficult and dangerous. Those who have portaged and maintained these waters will know where the Bridges should be.

But it seems that many of the River, and many of the Road have forgotten: Their children must be alive, and healthy to use them and eventually protect them for their own children one day.

I was completely focused, entirely cut off from the outside world. Things had finally reached the point I'd been waiting for in the film I'd been watching for a full hour, and I was at the height of my concentration. The detective, who had been tracking down the culprit for the past hour, was now very close to catching and exposing him, and I was incredibly curious. He was about to open the door, walk in, and discover the culprit's identity. I was moments away from finding out whether my suspect was right.

When we look at something, we also see what's to our left and right, albeit vaguely. While watching the television directly in front of us, we can perceive the fan a meter to its right swiveling from side to side. Other objects and movements become blurrier as they move farther away from the center of our field of vision. Everyone knows this and is usually aware of it. Even if your grandfather, sitting to your right at dinner, isn't looking at you, he'll notice if you secretly flip off your brother sitting across from you.

At that moment, the world was nothing more than a rectangle to me. My field of vision had no depth. Ten eagles could have been flying around the room, and I wouldn't have noticed them unless they passed in front of the screen. I had to find out who the culprit was.

Even if you bring your eyes into sharp focus, your ears can't do the same and remain even more open to the outside world than your eyes. When you listen to a song you love, your ears become fully absorbed in it, and your eyes join in, too. You drift away, and your field of vision narrows. But your ears can't join your eyes in doing the same.

“Albert, shut your laptop,” I heard a whisper just as the detective was about to open the door.

At first, I thought it had come from the film. There was no character named Albert in it, and the laptop had very little to do with the plot, but still, I didn't want to take my eyes off the screen before the detective opened that door. However, I'd started thinking by then. A new thought had formed in my mind, and it had weakened my focus. I would enjoy finding out who the culprit was a little less.

I paused the film. I was still looking at the screen, but my field of vision had widened and become rounded again.

I thought I saw a ripple on my right. A moving, blurry image, about a meter in size.

When I turned my head to look, there was nothing there. I looked back at the screen. I thought to myself that being this focused wasn't good either. It bothered me that I was experiencing a mental activity so intensely when the only reason for it was a film. Was finding out who the culprit was really that important? I never focused this intensely when writing my stories, working on a thesis I had to finish, or learning Spanish in the course I'd recently started. That was probably why I'd heard the whisper, too. It was a trick of my mind.

I turned back to the screen. My desire to find out had diminished. Reluctantly, I pressed play.

But then I saw that ripple again. A transparent, shapeless thing, moving randomly. Like a transparent fire, its movements resembled those of a burning flame. I pressed pause.

When I turned my head to the right, it wasn't there again.

A sense of unease had come over me. I stared at the spot where the blur had been. There was no movement at all. All the objects stood still, just as they were.

This time, I saw the same ripple on my left, right in front of the laptop on my lap. I sharply turned my eyes back to the screen. Nothing. The detective walking toward the door, the confident expression on his face. That was all.

I set the laptop aside. I threw off the blanket I'd pulled up to my chest, got out of bed, and sat down at my desk.

I picked up my Spanish dictionary and opened it to a random page to calm myself down a little. I read a few words. The ripple was above me. I looked up at the ceiling, and now it was on the left. I turned to the left, and it moved to the right. Its size changed every time. Sometimes it was a one-meter rectangle, sometimes a scattered circle ten centimeters in diameter, and sometimes a thick line stretching from the floor to the ceiling.

I left the room, and it was on my right, in the shape of a circle. I couldn't get rid of it. My palms were sweating. Now it was on my left. I kept turning my head from side to side, up and down. And I could never bring it into my vertical field of vision; it was always outside it.

I wiped my sweaty palms on my T-shirt. Now it was above me. I tried closing my eyes. But I couldn't. The moment I closed them, a sharp fear would immediately take hold of me, and I'd open them again before even two seconds had passed. My gaze had grown much faster now. Left, right, up, left, down, right, up. I was looking around like crazy. I was like a camera trying to bring an image into focus.

I finally ended up with a stiff neck after one wrong movement.

I could no longer turn my head to the left.

And the ripple was on my left.

I turned to the left with my whole body. It stayed on my left. I turned left once more. It slipped to my left again.

I had turned a full circle. Now it only appeared on my left. It seemed to have found my weak spot. Every time I turned, I instinctively turned my neck a little, too. You know what a stiff neck is like. It's quite painful and sudden. During the day, you forget that your neck is stiff, and if someone calls out to you from your left, you turn to look at them. You feel that sharp little ache.

So I stopped trying to catch it. It stayed on my left, rippling. Sometimes it stretched out, sometimes it shrank, and sometimes it disappeared quickly and reappeared. I moved my pupils as far to the left as I could. Yes, now it had moved to the right, because my field of vision on the left had been reduced to zero.

Now only my pupils were moving. But the image was even closer. And it was getting closer and closer.

Finally, while I was looking straight ahead, I saw it. It hadn't gone away. It's impossible to describe its shape.

“I'm x56 c 66 bmf 8 bmd 8 g 9 kdr 8 889 klkw 999 c 3 d 3 v 3 m 3 g 3 o 3 12345. Thank you for playing with me. By the way, the killer is Michael,” said a voice from very far away, heavily echoing and robotic, sounding a little like a creaking door.

Without knowing why, I tried to catch it with my hand. It was an arm's length away. I'd acted impulsively out of excitement. And it vanished instantly.

The quick, deep breath I drew through my nose passed through my nose hairs and rubbed against my completely dried-out nasopharynx, producing a sound that was a mixture of a faint snore and a low-pitched whistle. I held the breath in my lungs for a while, then slowly exhaled.

I went back into my room, sat down in the armchair, and for some reason, burst into tears. It was like a catharsis. I couldn't remember ever crying this intensely before. Or maybe I was simply crying out of fear, but I wasn't sure that fear could trigger such an intense crying response.

I wiped my eyes, and just as I was about to get up to wash my face, the ripple began speaking from the ceiling, right next to the lamp. It had watched me cry the whole time. Strange.

“If you want to play with me again, all you have to do is look in the mirror and say my name three times, and don't worry, your memory will be erased by tomorrow evening. You'll only remember my name. You'll try to figure out what the hell it was, whether it was your old Wi-Fi password or something. Anyway, Albert, I'm out of here. Take care. It was nice meeting you.”

Ruben Berteau has always been in love with his piano. It’s an emotional instrument and he’s an emotional man.

Sentimental. The sort of man who texts, “The Moon!” when there’s a full moon. Or an almost full moon. Or even sometimes when there’s no moon at all, but he’s just remembering a moon that really meant a lot to him.

You probably know his music. Not by name, but from hearing it at some point in the late 2000s. Maybe in a bookstore. Or a medical waiting room.

How I hated him.

His stupid earnestness. The little notebook he carried to write down lyrics. The way he was always marveling. It’s embarrassing. He should have been embarrassed, but he wasn’t—and that made me embarrassed, and then angry.

We were never lovers. I’m not sure he has lovers, other than the music. We weren’t even really friends, but I did once make him cry.

It was Paris. 1998. Study abroad. I was nineteen, there to learn French and drink wine, to see the Mona Lisa and to have sex with French people. There to live.

Except we didn’t. I shared, in the 5th arrondissement, a sixth-floor walk-up with Clara, who was also from Wisconsin. Our apartment was the size of one and a half Oshkosh walk-in closets. Our landlord was an elderly French woman who lived across the hall and hated us.

Ruben once said it would take a heroic effort to remain unmoved in Paris. Clara and I were those heroes.

We ate Velveeta. We watched TV. We spoke mostly to each other and mostly about boys, not French, but ones with names like Kyle, from other midwest colleges, who walked through Paris in baseball hats.

My single most transportive experience occurred at a bakery far from the tourist district, which I came to accidentally, and which refused me directions unless I bought something. And so I did: bread, which I ate alone, and which was so extraordinary—so soft and warm—that when I bit into it, eyes closed, standing on the sidewalk, I understood that everything I’d ever eaten in Winnebago County was wrong.

But, even this, I did not let stir me. I spoke of it to no one. Not Clara. And though for the rest of my life I would think, at times, about that bread and that morning—the sound of delivery trucks, Parisians bicycling past me in suits, smoking cigarettes on their way to work—I never returned to that bakery.

Ruben was our age. Also American. He was from New York City, but he wasn’t cool. We didn’t know that was possible.

He had big brown eyes, forever quivering. His hair rose from his head in a poof. He wore black with a red blazer, like a magician.

What we wanted, at that time, was for boys to be mean to us. Mysterious. Withholding. 

Ruben, on the other hand, would cry out, “My god!” whenever we saw a vista of Notre Dame. And then, practicing his French, “Mon Dieu!”

Because he was in the same program as me and Clara, and because we were not practicing our French, Ruben became, if not our friend, then someone often with us.

Mostly we ignored him. Waited out his little exclamations. Stood by while he spoke to us, sincerely, about his dreams.

Clara didn’t really mind him. She said once, “He’s actually pretty good,” after hearing him play on the electric keyboard he’d brought with him, at great inconvenience, to France.

I found Ruben’s sappiness not just cloying, but repulsive. Like his blood was so close to the surface he’d bruise if you squeezed him, which made me want to.

It was our last night. Clark (baseball hat) had somehow purchased a beer keg in Paris. He was having a party: the closing blowout, the final opportunity for unfinished romantic business. Clara was there already. I was on my way, late, walking rapidly along the Left Bank of the Seine, looking not at the Musée d’Orsay or the Eiffel Tower, but at my map, which I was struggling to orient.

Ruben had decided to join, and was at that moment trailing behind me, putting his hands on every building.

“Look at the rain on the church walls,” he said. “Look at the stones in the street.” I looked at my map.

He slowed, gazing at a fountain. He said, “Of course our last night would be the most sublime.” I said, “Yes, right. Very sublime.” Then, “I think it’s this way.”

He said, “Can a person feel nostalgia for a moment before it’s over?”

I pressed on. I said, “I think we might have passed it.”

He stopped entirely.

I turned, expecting he had paused to record some cloying insight, or to ask a French passerby, guilelessly, how it was that they could stand it, living amid such beauty. But he hadn’t.

He was standing in the lamplight, dumb little notebook in the crook of his arm. He was looking right at me, and then he said, “What’s wrong with you?”

It was a mean thing to say, but he didn’t say it mean. The look on his face was sad.

What I felt was angry. I was supposed to be sipping keg foam right at that moment with Clara and Clark and any number of fraternity brothers from various Big Ten colleges, not listening to the saccharine musings of Ruben Berteau.

“Enough!” I said. It felt good, grinding my heel into something soft. “We get it. It’s nice here. We’re leaving. That’s sad.” And then, “Ruben, we need to go.”

But Ruben did not grind. He just looked at me with the same sad expression on his face. Then he sat down, right there on the sidewalk, and put his head in his hands. He looked heartbroken, but not from pain or rejection.

He said, “How can you live like this?” his voice quiet with disbelief. And then I realized: This was not an attack. He meant it. Like he meant everything.

And then he began to cry, blubbering right there on the street corner. Fat, wet tears with no one to see them but me.

It was pity. Ruben Berteau pitied me.

It was a beautiful night. Achingly so. That night the moon hung in the sky so big you felt you could take it in your palm, like an orange. The river moved, slow and dark, carrying as it did the same drops of water that had cycled the Earth four billion years.

I looked at the sky, and then at the river, and then at Ruben, weeping on the ground because of my way of life. And then, after a while, at my watch, because I was still late. So finally, when his crying slowed, I said, in as convincing a tone as I could muster, “I’m sorry.”

He snuffled, then wiped his nose with the sleeve of his red blazer. Then he looked at me, and again at Paris. He said, “No, you’re not.”

[recently published here https://anotherchicagomagazine.net/2026/10/15/rubeninparis/\]

There had been a rumour that Roan’s bed moved in the night. That was all. Roan went to sleep to one side of his unclean and sort of dark and generally disagreeable bedroom and woke up on the other. Like, it was unmistakable. His bed had moved at least eight or ten feet to where it blocked his door, as if he’d barricaded himself in, and his nose was practically jammed up against the brass knob when his eyelids shot open that a.m. and it was just unmistakable. Roommates heard not a thing. That was all at first.

But Roan is a truthful person. To a depressing fault, you should know. Roan does not know how to invent whatsoever. I think if he tried, the effort would be transparent. But he’d never try. It’s unthinkable Roan could render that story, painting so earnestly, just, the abject horror of waking with his bed to the wrong unpleasant side of his sort of dim room and his nose being jammed up to brass, the smell of brass utterly suffusing his nostrils first thing as his eyelids flashed open and registered the inexplicable wrongness of his situation. For Roan to produce such a yarn would be more off in its own right than any nighttime bed-moving. So I heard Roan himself vouch for the rumour, and that was all for me. His word is golden. Besides, he was only the first.

Hallewell Academy is many great slabs of dreary stone. It is coated in ivy like rivulets defacing a huge plate of melting ice. The silver maples that line Hallewell’s imposing, north-facing front gates have a tendency to whisper at you from overhead in the fall and there is a sense of something namelessly old, and unfriendly, and possibly dangerous that hangs about the place and its narrow halls. The ceilings are too low. There is a sense of something clinging to your back as you walk. It rains or snows perpetually, like the sky is spitting on you for being here, and yet something abstract holds you in place, and the grounds have a harsh, uncommon beauty to them.

This is an academy where we ski. There are the alpine skiers and the Nordic skiers, very different camps forced into close proximity. Roan is a Nord. There is academics, too, of course, interspersed between athletics. I am also a Nord, but I was an Alp before and I don’t think that’s been well-received. Switching sides isn’t outright unheard of, but it’s very uncommon. Mostly it’s not a logical thing to do. It’s sort of an apparent step backwards any way you cut it, but if you want to know, I just found I liked the flats. I just developed a dramatic fear of falling down on an incline. Cold sweat kind of fear. I became emotionally affected by an incident involving my ski boot and a shoe horn decorated to approximate a mallard. It just got so fucking old sitting on the chairlift up Collingwood Mountain so many times each week and staring at, two thirds of the way up, the same rusty disfigured cedar tree I’d picked out to stare at, as a progress marker or something, and eventually I started dreaming about the cedar. Swear to God. But then the flats are really hellishly boring and I’m getting sick of them too. I’m definitely not fond of things moving inexplicably. I guess I’ll drop out of Hallewell before long.

The second incident was more dramatic. It eclipsed Roan’s bed-moving. It had to do with what they call the Top Shack, on Collingwood Mountain. The Top Shack is a sort of mildewy wooden structure next to the clearing on top of Collingwood where the main lift deposits skiers. Unpleasant things are known to be done there on nights off between Alps, events that cause the Faculty to purse its lips and disapprove without addressing anything too directly. I didn’t spend much time in the Top Shack but I was fond of it on a philosophical level: because it was pretty unhinged, and lawless.

On February 14, Valentine’s Day, last week, the Top Shack lost its floor. The event was unsettling and not at all romantic since it made the little space unlivable, practically. I.e. now clothing would be layered on rather than stripped off. The nasty cold frost-coated ground being right there, within immediate sight and reach and all.

I suppose the floor wasn’t lost so much as it was taken. That was a theory that caught on anyway. But actually no one could say where the floor went―when Jonathan Lockhart and Ben Almoznino were deposited first by the chairlift on the 14^th and wandered into the Top Shack probably to share a joint before plunging down the mountain, the floor was absent. Gone without a trace. In the next few days the questions being asked were, to my mind, not very interesting. People were concerned about the logistics of the stunt, as to how students could have pulled off something like that. I’ll admit it was unclear. Just the previous afternoon there had been people inside the Top Shack, people who confirmed vehemently and independently the presence of a floor. But I think what I wondered at was more fundamental. I wanted to know why.

The Faculty was all giddy over it: they declared the building’s structural integrity had been compromised and cordoned it off by noon. It was a Saturday, meaning it had been a Friday yesterday, presumably when the floor vanished, and also the 13^th day of the month. Which really gave people the willies.

I was talking with Mallory Goff last Tuesday. The two of us made up one of three groups remaining in the caf this late past one in the afternoon, the caf which was filled with dull wintry light that had arranged itself in oblong patterns across linoleum. Mallory is an Alp. “What will I talk to Mirrie about?” she pleaded with me, as if I were forcing her to interact with Mirrie. She made a gross face. “Pop culture?” The words practically dropped from her mouth to the floor like stones.

“Mirrie has the face of a stork,” I said, meanly. I have to be mean around Mallory Goff or she won’t take me seriously. I’m very conscious of these things. As it stands I am very mean and she takes me perhaps more seriously than anyone else.

Mallory giggled. She said, “Mirrie knows forty-seven words and has run out of possible arrangements for them. I heard her repeat the same sentence four times yesterday.”

I considered this seriously. I thought of which forty-seven words I might choose in the same case. The idea struck me as really alien. I asked, “If you only knew forty-seven words, which would you choose?”

Mallory scoffed. The question didn’t seem to interest her at all. “I wonder.” She sort of picked at the remains of her Greek salad. I mused on the consequences of choosing just four-syllable words, for instance, and the silence stretched out and started to get boring.

Eventually she asked me something almost offhand: “So what’s with the lower gym equipment?” But I didn’t know what she meant.

My not knowing seemed to trigger something in Mallory: the shift was immediate. Her eyes widened and became celestial. There was a new tension between us all at once. And I couldn’t tell what had produced it.

“You haven’t heard?”

I shrugged.

“The lower gym equipment.” Her eyelids lowered now to frame something like malice playing beneath them, but something innocent too, a medley of things in the careless blue eyes that Mallory Goff possesses without trying or working for it. “The treadmills and everything, not just the weights, it’s all in Boucher’s classroom. Like, stacked there. All of it. Someone moved everything up to Boucher’s classroom on the third floor. It must have taken hours. For no fucking reason at all.”

And I felt, very slightly, like shy hands in a classroom, the hairs on my arms rising.

I confirmed it later. Boucher, who taught French, had entered his classroom earlier that day to find the small world he presided over and controlled for so many of his daylight hours, upended. Formerly tidy rows of desks had been displaced and in their wake was equipment from the lower gym. The rowers and kettlebells and racks and cages, et cetera, the weight plates, everything, had been arranged into an utterly neat and interlocking spectacle that maximized use of space and demonstrated, it was thought, something obscure. It couldn’t quite be said what was being demonstrated, actually. But the event went beyond pure chaos. There was something being proclaimed here. The equipment arranged so delicately, balanced so deftly, nothing so much as scratched, the precision and utility of the act―it took hours to disassemble; how many to put together?―like a complex puzzle that had been expertly made up. The whole arrangement of it formed an almost perfect cube, I heard. Surely what Mallory had said was inaccurate. It was typical of her to think as much. But this wasn’t done for no reason.

The desks are gone. Yet to be found.

It was the next day that Hallewell was stormed on and I got caught in the snow walking home with Marlon Nabi from dryland training in the lower gym, which by then had regained most of its equipment. The flakes were so fat and fell so heavily that I was sure they’d overwhelmed me a little. I was no longer working through them; they worked through me. The snow was not an obstacle through which I had to make my way home. I was an obstacle to be struck down by the snow in its unvarying drive to the earth.

Marlon and I pushed ahead in silence, our labour focused and grim. I remember lifting my eyes briefly at front campus, glimpsing neo-gothic hints of the Hadfield building ahead, all frigid towers and its huge clock like an eye, its arches like raised eyebrows conveying judgement. I remember thinking how truly beautiful the fog of snow was. The silence it had bestowed.

And when I arrived to my dorm, wet and sullen, I found the first note. Slipped under my door. Without a name, paper with only three words scrawled childishly on it:

You’re like me.

This morning I am speaking with Marlon Nabi in the back of Calc I. We’re suppose to be learning to integrate but I’ve already written that off. I’ve asked every person I know over the age of thirty when he or she last integrated something manually, by hand, and not one of them could give me a date.

Marlon is back on about the lower gym equipment. The Faculty, tight-lipped as of yet, will finally face these strange happenings head-on: there will be an official address next period in the auditorium. Something has to be said. But I already know the line they’ll take: students are to blame. What else could they say? I hear Marlon mention something about Who do I think is behind it, just now. I grab him physically by the shoulders and shake him, and say, too loudly, “It’s not some prank. It’s more than that!”

I really believe that. Marlon is shocked for a moment, but then he breaks into a grin and takes it as a bit of theatrical hyperbole. He takes it as a joke. My being grandiose for his benefit. Parsons, our teacher, from the front, basically tells me to irreversibly sew my lips shut.

This is when things really start to fall apart.

After class we glide down long busy hallways to the auditorium and I watch my feet landing one at a time, again and again, on dull, speckled vinyl flooring designed for thousands of feet to trample it every day. I’ve decided after some thought to stay quiet about last night’s note, slipped under my door. I’d woken uneasily this morning, thrown on a black Cranberries t-shirt and jeans, slipped into the bathroom I share with three others. There I’d splashed water on and regarded my face in the mirror. A bit red-eyed. But at breakfast no one seemed to notice. I couldn’t bear to bring up the note, for whatever reason. 

As we walk the halls now as a class, I think of it again. You’re like me.

Then I am seated. The auditorium is large and cool and fills impassively, as with a tipped hourglass being fed sand. Students chatter in groups as they drift by. Nabi is to my left; to my right was an empty seat until just two moments ago when Mallory Goff spotted me and wound her way here to fill it. She’s chewing spearmint gum. “Zombie” has been going in my head all morning because of this tee that I’m by now wearing under my collared white shirt, covertly, because we can’t wear tees during school hours, we must all wear the same clothing, and I’m beginning to sweat a little, almost imperceptibly.

Then someone is addressing us, all 300 of us or nearly. It’s Larsen, an actual Norwegian who is hilariously (people agree) an Alp and not a Nord, and who is also vice president at Hallewell. Larsen is saying something but I can barely understand it. I have the strangest sense of lying underwater, in a shallow kind of pool and looking up toward the sun, someone standing before it, blocking it slightly and looking back down at me. A couple bubbles escape my mouth and fly zanily to the surface. I smell spearmint.

And then we are in Philosophy. An elective I took instead of something comparably generic. Benhabib is up front and facing us and is leaned back against her desk, providing a pretty casual air, but ultimately she retains the simple authority lent by a height advantage, her being upright and the rest of us seated in tidy rows facing her and looking, for the most part, up.

“Nietzsche used the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus to represent two halves of human nature. Anyone know what those halves might be?”

Benhabib points one lethargic digit in the direction of Tremblay, who blinks. He barely hesitates. He says, “Good and bad.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Like, innocence and evil.”

Benhabib wears what appears to be not one, but two cardigans, the one over the other, and is visibly perspiring. She says, straightening slightly, “Not really. Apollo represents rational thought. Lawfulness and order. Dionysus here is frenzy and ecstasy. An inability or an unwillingness to categorize and structure things. Sculpture is Apollonian. Music is Dionysian. Make sense, Tremblay?”

Tremblay gives an exaggerated shrug. He laughs a little under her continued gaze. “I guess.”

“I think we can all picture these personality types. But Nietzsche would argue that Apollo and Dionysus exist, both of them I mean, in each of us, and that both are necessary. Why do you think that is?”

There’s a drawn out silence and Benhabib says something like: Anyone?

Benhabib’s apparently voluntary decision to dress herself in multiple cardigans is baffling and climatically inappropriate. No one else seems to have noticed. She is looking right at me now; she says my name and I keep my composure. Although, I’m jiggling one leg and it’s causing my desk to vibrate―nervous habit. “What about you?” she says. “What do you think?”

I feel, very suddenly, a revulsion for my surroundings. Everything about the setting is all at once abhorrent to me; the order in every dimension. Us, an even twenty students, uniformed and hair combed, arranged so meticulously in four rows of five and Benhabib, perched on her desk now and facing us down with such flawless symmetry. That’s it maybe, the symmetry of the scene. I almost can’t take it. I want to pick the class up in its entirety and shake it, I want us to fly from wall to wall and sob and kick chairs aside and flip tables and kill that pulselessness. Manically, violently untuck our shirts. I want to smile like a shark.

The words seem to arrive fully formed. I don’t even have to create them; I’m not even sure of the question. What I say has always been there. It’s been waiting to propel itself from me.

I say: “Order is the opposite of humanity. Authority is against our nature. It murders anything human. It flays us and coats us in rubber. It makes me sick. It’s worse than evil. Evil is a facet of humanity. Would you choose to be evil, or inhuman?” People are looking, mildly interested. The tone of my voice, the word sick. I say: “I would rather be evil.”

At the back of the class, somebody giggles.

Later, I swallow cold water in huge gulps. I can’t recall the last time I had water; I just forget. I’m feeling very weird. I’m so horribly thirsty. I’m leaned against the raised wall panels of Gersham Residence’s west wing hallway, which are of oak and are stained dark old, wealthy shades. I can hear the polished and echoing click of someone’s shoes very far down the hall, but I can’t see anyone else. It’s curiously empty here. I’ve never seen it so empty.

There’s something I need to do. But I don’t know what.

I wake up the next morning on my hardwood floor and still in my jeans, with muddy boots by my bedroom door, under which the second note has been slipped. I’m wearing a Sonic Youth t-shirt. I sit up groggily and grind the palms of my hands into my eyes and retrieve the note. It’s a bare minimum thing once more: no address, no greeting, only a few words scrawled on a lined sheet of paper. The thing is folded in half diagonally. It’s very eerie, actually, that fold, because no one folds paper that way.

I read:

THIS PLACE IS DEAD AND SOMEONE MUST REVIVE IT.

As I fold the note back along its diagonal and stand, finally, I notice I am no longer myself. I am slightly removed from myself. Do you know the feeling of being beside yourself? That’s where I am, a little to the side, still tethered to my physical self in a funny way but no longer in total control of him. I’m sort of just a viewer. And it isn’t funny, really, it’s a little horrifying, because I know there will be repercussions for the actions of my body, surely there will be, but I no longer have any control over it.

I can hear excitement outside my door. Running, raised voices. Heavy steps flowing down my unit’s hallway, all in one direction, mad, weird scuffling. I hear someone yell in a tone I’ve never heard, something almost like joy and terror together, from someone still deciding which to choose, then they’ve run past my door too and their voice is lost. It sounds like bulls going by. A big herd.

I burst through my door―I see myself do it, from the side―and grab Roan by the shoulders, arrest his intense motion.

“Man, what is it?” I practically scream at him. Something is making me exceptionally nervous.

Roan is wild-eyed like I’ve never seen him. “Hadfield,” he says to me, and I know he’s incapable of lying, “it’s turned around!”

“What? Turned around?”

“You just― just come see it!”

I try to respond but then Roan has wriggled free and resumed his sprint, and there are others flying past me too, fully running.

I follow the crowd down this hallway, and then down two flights of stairs. I follow it through the reception of my residence, where the receptionist is absent although she’s never absent, and I feel the excitement of the others rushing past me and carrying me forward in huge waves, building my own anxiety until I think I might just disappear.

I am outside now. It’s late February and bitingly cold. I have no coat on, but nobody seems to. It’s as if everyone dropped what they were doing and ran at first word of this. But the cold isn’t important. My boots leave dirty imprints in the white below them.

Now down Moore Street and then onto College, and through Orleigh Park onto Back Campus, which looks ugly in this light, ravaged by three-hundred crisscrossing sets of tracks. Snow churned up. When I reach it Front Campus is worse. It looks like it’s been dug up. In fact, the snow is barely there, replaced by slushy mud, one grotesque brown pool. But that’s not what draws the eye.

It seems every student at Hallewell is here, standing in a loose ring around Front Campus, humming and arranging ourselves in mismatched, shambly groups. A few of us stand alone―I do. And in front of us is Hadfield building, only it’s facing the wrong way. Everything about it is normal, but it’s been turned 180 degrees. It’s exactly like Roan said. I can’t explain it.

It’s odd, as I stare, it’s like Hadfield is gazing back at me. 

There aren’t only students here; everyone is here. Teachers, custodians. The huge building’s arches of time-darkened stone are somehow more pointed now and somehow meaner than they ever were. I drop my eyes and gaze down to my boots, which are still caked with mud. Old mud, dried mud. From where?

There is someone beside me: Mallory Goff. She’s saying something to me. I make a concerted effort to hear her.

“What’s with your face?” is what she’s saying.

“My face?”

She gives me the strangest look and turns her eyes up to Hadfield. She seems subdued, timid, for once.

I press my hands to my face and feel it, and I can tell suddenly that I am smiling. Not only smiling: I’m grinning. My face is ecstatic, I can feel it, my cheeks taut, every tooth displayed. Utterly beaming. My eyes are dancing, I know it.

From beside me someone says, “Why would they do this? What’s the point?” and I’m laughing all at once and I say, “Why wouldn’t they do this?” I’m receiving some funny looks. But mostly everyone is riveted to the building, which looks so weird in this position.

Someone screeches, “They’ll have to re-landscape!”

“How will we get inside now?”

 This is like a seam in reality come undone. Hundreds of cheeks are pink from the wind. I’m no longer looking at the Hadfield like the others. I’m looking past it and to the sky and something serene is happening to me.

It’s just the sky is blue like I’ve never seen, and it’s crisp, like a sheet that’s been plucked from the line and spread deftly and tucked so evenly and severely, and I feel myself being dissolved into it. Like sugar into coffee. The chattering and hushed voices around me fall back: I’m on a conveyor sliding away from it all. I have a feeling like spring as I breath in and fill my lungs to their maximum and I almost can’t bear it. The cold is utterly absent. I feel, suddenly, the infinity of this single moment.

There’s so much time, still a world of time, and so much potential. For once I understand it. I can see the endless unlived threads of my life spread before me like spiders’ legs. And I almost go to pieces, with the ecstasy of it all. Just something about it.

—Luke, how are you today?

The room is lined with bookshelves, filling it with the smell of old paper. Vintage even, like an old car’s interior. The dark wooden table stands between Ms. Simpson and me. The wooden chairs we sit on seem comfortable, but their backs are at a weird 90-degree angle. On the table there are books, pens, pencils and stacks of paper. And Ms. Simpson’s notebook.

—Everything is fine, Ms. Simpson. But I wish I had one more cigarette this morning.

—Why?—she asks me, holding a pencil in her right hand. Her blonde hair rests on her shoulders.

—Ha-ha. You know…morning and all that stuff. Just…urges. Routine. Like coffee. So, uhm…I wanted one extra cigarette and that’s it. Do we need to over-analyze _everything?_

—Oh, no-no. Don’t worry, Luke. _You_ don’t need to. Well. Shall we continue where we left off?—she leans back, fixing her hair. Her cold, dark eyes look straight into my soul.

—I guess so. That’s why I applied, right?—I reply reluctantly.

—Very well. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. And start repeating the mantra in your head:

_“One mouse, two mice and a cheese. Two mice, three cats and a breeze. Three cats, four me and a peace. One mouse, two mice and a-”_

I am sitting before my piano during my piano classes. The morning sun gathers around the keys: black ones are especially glistening. The white curtains are put just right, open enough to let the sunlight in, but closed enough to keep the sunlight from blinding me. I feel the piano pedals on my feet, cold and hard. Both of my hands are on the keys.

Children are playing outside. I hear them laughing and running around. Birds are chirping and cars are driving around.

I look around the room—there isn't a soul in sight. I don’t remember this place. It feels familiar, but I can’t quite place it.

**Skrchhh**—I hear a very unpleasant scratching sound behind the piano. The lid covers exactly where a person making that sound would stand. I feel chills down my spine. I quickly stand up.

—Hello?

No response. I feel…not chills, but hands on my back! I fall. My head hits the keys. I come to.

—Huh?!

I am taken aback, drenched in cold sweat.

—What the fuck was that?!—I say, my voice trembling.

—Luke? What did you see?—she looks at me with a hint of curiosity, ready to note down whatever I describe.

—I…I was in my childhood piano class. But something was wrong…and... and… —I was lost for words, because it felt **so** real. Not like a dream. Not even like a nightmare.

—What happened there?—she keeps writing, checking her notes.

—Something pushed me from behind! I hit my head on the piano and woke up! Ms. Simpson…what is this therapy?

—Let’s not talk about the technicality. Based on how you look and feel, it seems to be working. All bad memories are coming out. Take another sip.

I look at the table. There's a cup of tea sitting there.

—What do you mean _another?_ I…I haven’t drunk that. I didn’t even notice it was there.

—There are many things in life we don’t notice, Mr. Luke.

I start frantically looking around the room, my eyes dart from one place to another. My face turns red. I am confused, my forehead starts burning.

—Something…doesn’t add up. I didn’t even have piano classes in my childhood!

—Did you? Hmm…that’s interesting. Mr. Luke, this is very important. It seems we're making progress, we shall not stop _now._ You need to be brave.

—What are you **even** talking about!?

—One mouse, two mice-

—Stop!

—-and a cheese.

My eyes start rolling back and my body feels numb.

—I don’t wanna…

—Two mice, three cats and a breeze…

Ms. Simpson’s voice starts echoing and fading in my head.

I am in the exact same room again. Everything is exactly the same as before. I suddenly stand up and run to check what’s behind the piano.

—Nothing… —I mumble to myself.

I hear children outside, the birds, the cars…but when I look out the window all I see is an empty playground. I rush to the door.

It wouldn’t budge. Locked.

—Hey, Mickeeeey~

A high-pitched voice echoes through the room behind me.

—My name is _Luke._

I’m afraid to turn around and see whatever is making that screeching voice.

—Don’t you remember me, Mickey?

I feel cold, damp fingers with long, pointed fingernails touch the skin of my neck.

—I’m the friend who lives under your bed! Teehee!~

I scream and try to force the door open. The nightmare suddenly bleeds into reality as I fall from my chair, screaming in the therapist’s office.

—Fuck! What the **FUCK!?**

I get up.

—**WHAT THE FUCK!?**

Ms. Simpson is gone. Did I hit my head too hard? I walk around the room, but I don’t go behind the desk where the therapist was sitting.

—Ms. Simpson!

I try to open the door, but it won’t budge.

—Ms **FUCKING** Simpson!

I look at the digital clock on the table. 4:35 P.M. The sun begins to set. I notice a torn piece of paper tucked under the clock.

_Mickey-Mickey-Mickey. Did you think you could escape?_

Blood starts slowly seeping just under the table towards me. I stumble back. It doesn’t smell.

I gather the courage and check what or **who** bleeds behind the desk.

To my horror, it’s a giant pile of rats with their eyes taken out. The pile of dead, butchered rats is bleeding onto the floor, forming a pool of blood. I feel sick to my stomach.

—Mr. Luke, do you suffer from sleepwalking?

I look at the chair. Ms. Simpson is sitting there. The clock says _2:25 P.M_.

—You just got up from your chair and started walking, mumbling to yourself. So I’ll ask you again: do you sleepwalk?

—Wait…what? Didn’t you see a pile of **dead** RATS?—I scream, feeling as though I’m losing my mind.

—Please, don’t do this to me **ever** again!—I pull at my hair, trying to contain myself.

—Mr. Luke, whatever happened in your head stays in your mind. It’s not real.

—But it felt real! Very-very real!

—Just take a sip of the tea. It will calm you down.

I grab the cup and throw it towards one of the bookshelf. The cup shatters releasing the liquid onto the books, dripping down. Sense of sorrow and regret fills me.

Ms. Simpson looks at me like a disappointed parent would at a misbehaving child.

—I…I’m sorry…I’ve lost control. It’s just…it’s Freddy Krueger-type shit! I saw a bunch of dead rats in this very room! Right under the chair you sit in! It…it was bleeding onto the floor, forming a pool of blood!

—Luke. Was someone else there with you?

—Yes! Something—I don’t even know what—was calling me _Mickey_!

—Interesting… —she writes something in her notebook.

—Do you know anyone named Mickey? Or Mike, Michael?—she doesn’t even look at me.

—No, I don’t!

She notes something down.

—Maybe you don’t remember him, but your subconscious _does._ You need to accept it. Otherwise the therapy won’t work.

—Did you hear a word of what I’ve just said?

—Yes, I did. A pile of rats. Creepy.

—Is that all you have to say? You know what? I’m outta here.

As I turn toward the door, I notice that the tea has spilled onto one particular book. I stop to read its title.“Memory injection therapy.”

—One mouse, two mice and a cheese.

I run towards the door and try opening it. My legs fall limp.

—Two mice, three cats and a breeze.

I start sobbing.

—Please, no…don’t!

—Three cats, four me and a peace.

I am sitting before the piano. All the same as before. I look around. Still empty.

Maybe Ms. Simpson is right? Maybe, I have to let go? To let _it_ in?

I’ve never played the piano in my life. But I’ll try. I place both hands in a basic A-position. I play a simple rhythm in 4/4 time, in A minor.

The piano’s melody fills the room. I play something very basic, completely at random. But I play whatever I think sounds lovely. It just comes to my mind like an endless stream of information. It seems to come from my heart. Like a bloodstream of ideas and sheer creativity.

Suddenly, something extremely cold touches my feet. Something grabs my ankles with its fingers and rises higher with each note I play. I should not stop playing and sit as if nothing’s happening. I don’t hesitate and let go. It’s not two hands but multiple. They are already at my hips, grabbing me and rising higher. Now they cover my chest. My neck. My face. I can no longer see. All I feel is extreme cold and tears running down my cheek. Suddenly the dark dissipates—there is a key to the door lying on the piano. I grab it and stand up, breathing heavily. I feel as if something has been taken away from me.

I put it into the keyhole and open the door. I walk out into a corridor. It all slowly surrenders to complete darkness, slowly thickening from the outside.

—You’re not from here. You are not Mickey…you are more delicious. You played well. I liked your melody. Your very last of when you were you. Now…we shall be whole.

**Five months later**

Luke sits on his sofa, mindlessly watching TV.

_Mysterious disappearances keep happening in the city of New Harlem. Two more young girls have gone missing. If you recognize either of them, call the number on your screen…_

Luke turns around and looks over his shoulder at the door, where a sticky note reads“Mickey.”

I, Kaiju

-

12 June

It was well into the evening when we first laid eyes upon the creature.

We had been making steady progress through open water when one of the hands called attention to something moving along the starboard side. At first, I took it for a disturbance in the water, perhaps a school of whales or some other great congregation of marine life. Such things are not uncommon at sea, and I thought little of it until the water began to rise and fall in great, unnatural swells.

Then we saw the arms.

I use the word arms in the absence of a better description, for I know of no creature that possesses appendages of such length or number. They rose from the depths in great coils, some stretching several yards above the surface before disappearing beneath it once more. The flesh was a sickly green, mottled and speckled here and there with darker patches that were difficult to distinguish against the evening sea.

The body itself remained hidden. I could not say how far beneath the surface it lay, nor how much of it we actually witnessed. What little we did see was sufficient to make our vessel appear as a mere child's toy upon the water.

The creature moved with a speed I would not have thought possible for an animal of its apparent size. Its many arms swept through the sea in great, coordinated motions, churning the water and sending a broad swell against our hull. The barge rolled hard enough to send loose equipment sliding across the deck, and for a moment we lost our heading.

There was no malice in the movement that I could discern. The thing seemed entirely unaware of us, or otherwise too indifferent to care.

The men stood watching in silence until it had passed beyond our immediate vicinity. Some found excitement at the sight, others were unsettled, and the rest seemed unable to make sense of what they had witnessed.

I must confess that I share the latter sentiment.

I have spent a considerable portion of my life upon the water, heard tales of the strange and otherworldly, and have even seen my share of unusual things. But I have never seen anything that would make me question the size of the sea itself.

I can only pray this was a chance encounter, and that we shall see no more of it.

13 June

The creature was sighted again shortly after sunrise.

We observed it from the port bow, some considerable distance away. The morning sun had only just begun to rise above the horizon, and the water remained dark beneath the shadow of the clouds. At first, we could make out little beyond a series of long, dark shapes moving beneath the surface.

Then, with great force, the water erupted.

A great whale, which I believe to have been either a humpback or a blue whale, broke the surface in a desperate attempt to escape. I could not determine whether it had been pursued for some time or had only just become aware of its assailant. Its movements were frantic, and the water around it churned violently.

The arms followed.

Over half a dozen seemed to rise from the depths and wrap themselves around the whale, while others appeared to reach for it from beneath. The creature drew its prey downward with such force that the whale vanished almost at once.

There was a brief commotion upon the surface, followed by a series of broad, dark swells.

Then nothing.

The entire affair lasted but a few minutes.

Several of the men expressed considerable excitement at having witnessed such a spectacle. One even declared it to be the most amazing thing he had ever seen, and another suggested that we might make a handsome account of the encounter upon our return.

I could not share their enthusiasm.

A whale is no small animal, and yet the creature had taken it with an ease that suggested we had witnessed nothing more than an ordinary meal. I found myself wondering what sort of strength would be required to restrain such an animal, and how much of that strength might be brought to bear against our own vessel.

The thought has occupied me for much of the day.

We have not seen the creature again since the feeding, though a few of the men claim to have observed disturbances in the water at a considerable distance. I cannot say whether these were related.

I am not a religious man by any means. Nevertheless, I find myself wishing I had paid greater attention to my mother's prayers.

15 June

I believe we are being followed.

At approximately ten o'clock this morning, one of the men monitoring our instruments reported an unusual return from the water behind us. At first, it was dismissed as interference, but the reading persisted. It appeared to indicate a sizable mass moving at a steady pace some distance astern.

We altered our course slightly to determine whether the reading was a consequence of our own movement. The return altered with us.

We then increased our speed for a short period. The mass remained behind us, though the distance between it and our vessel appeared to close ever so slightly.

I cannot say with certainty that it is the same creature we encountered on the previous two days. We have no means of positively identifying it beyond its apparent size and movements. Nevertheless, the possibility is difficult to ignore.

The captain has ordered the men to continue monitoring the instruments and to keep a sharp watch upon the surrounding water. No one has been instructed to discuss the matter unnecessarily, though there is little doubt that the entire crew is aware of what we suspect.

Whether the creature is curious about us or has mistaken our vessel for a potential meal remains unknown. I should prefer not to discover the answer.

We are armed and possess the means to defend ourselves against the ordinary dangers that might be encountered in these waters, be they pirates or a rogue barge. But against an animal capable of dragging a whale beneath the surface in a matter of moments, our equipment amounts to very little.

Our best hope is to make port at Shelby.

The captain believes we can reach it without difficulty if we maintain our present course and avoid unnecessary delays. I would like to share his confidence, though I cannot shake the feeling that we are placing too much faith in the distance between ourselves and the thing following us.

I have spent the better part of the evening watching the water behind the vessel.

There is nothing to see.

I find that more troubling than I care to admit.

17 June

The captain ordered an increase in speed shortly after dawn.

We have maintained our present heading throughout the day, making what progress we can toward Shelby. The engines have been running harder than usual, and I have been told that we cannot continue at this pace indefinitely without risking unnecessary strain upon the machinery.

For the moment, however, the captain considers it a reasonable precaution.

The instruments continue to register a sizable mass behind us. Its distance has varied somewhat, though not in any manner I can confidently attribute to its own movements. We have altered course twice since yesterday, once to the north and again toward the east, and on both occasions the return appeared to follow our change in direction.

I should like to believe that this is coincidence. Unfortunately though, I believe the captain has reached much the same conclusion as I have, though he has been reluctant to say so aloud.

The crew has become noticeably quieter. The men who were so eager to discuss the creature two days ago now have little to say about it. Some continue to watch the water, while others occupy themselves with work that might ordinarily be postponed until calmer conditions.

One of the hands suggested that the creature may simply be following a current or pursuing the same schools of fish that brought us into these waters. It is a reasonable explanation, and I would welcome it were there any evidence to support it.

There is none that I can see.

At approximately four o'clock this afternoon, the man stationed aft reported seeing a dark shape beneath the water. He described it as broad and elongated, moving parallel to the vessel before disappearing into the depths.

No one else witnessed it.

I have instructed myself not to give too much weight to a single observation, particularly under present circumstances. Men are prone to see things when they have been thinking about them for too long.

Still, I have taken to checking the water behind us whenever I have a spare moment.

I do not believe I am alone in this habit.

18 June

We saw it again today.

The creature surfaced off our starboard side shortly after midday, close enough that there could be no reasonable doubt as to its identity.

I was on deck when the first arm appeared. It rose from the water at a considerable distance, bending beneath its own weight before disappearing again. A second followed, then a third, each emerging at a different point along the creature's course.

The water between them was disturbed by something enormous moving just beneath the surface. A dark and clouded shadow that moved on its own accord.

For the briefest of moments, I could make out the outline of its body.

It was unlike any squid or octopus I have ever seen pictured or in person, and I can think of no known animal that would account for its size. The portion visible to us appeared broad and tapered, with a mass of limbs extending from its forward end. The flesh was the same sickly green we observed during our first encounter, though in the daylight I could see pale markings along its sides.

I could not tell whether these were natural patterns or scars.

One of the men estimated that a single arm was longer than our entire vessel. I cannot confirm his judgment, but I saw enough to believe he may not have been far wrong.

The creature moved alongside us for several minutes.

It did not attack. It did not even appear to acknowledge our presence. It simply continued along its course, its arms rising and falling in slow, deliberate movements.

I found myself wondering whether it was aware of us at all.

There was something deeply unsettling about watching an animal of such size behave with such apparent indifference to our own existence. We have spent the better part of three days worrying over its movements, changing our course, increasing our speed, and keeping watch for signs of its approach.

And yet it may have given us no more consideration than a whale gives a floating log.

The creature eventually submerged and disappeared from view.

The instruments continued to register a mass nearby for some time afterward, though its precise position was difficult to establish.

The captain has ordered that no one approach the rail without informing another member of the crew. He has also prohibited anyone from attempting to attract the creature's attention.

I cannot imagine what possessed him to believe such a warning necessary.

No one aboard has expressed any desire to do otherwise.

19 June

Something struck the hull during the night.

I was below deck when the first impact occurred. It was a deep, heavy sound, more a vibration than a crash, and it traveled through the vessel in a manner I can only describe as a great hammer striking against the underside of the floor.

Several of the men were awakened by it.

At first, we suspected that we had struck floating debris, though there was no indication that the vessel had suffered any damage. The captain ordered an inspection, and a few of us went topside to examine the water.

There was nothing to be seen.

The sea was dark and comparatively calm, with only a little movement beneath the full moonlight. We could hear the engines and the usual sounds of the vessel, but there was no sign of anything near enough to have caused the disturbance.

We had barely returned below when the second impact occurred.

This one was stronger.

The entire vessel shuddered, and I heard something heavy fall upon the deck above us. A few men rushed toward the stairs, while others remained where they were, apparently uncertain whether we were in danger of being struck again.

The captain ordered everyone to remain clear of the rails until we could establish what had happened.

There was no third impact.

By morning, many of the crew had settled upon their own explanations, none of which I find particularly convincing or reassuring. Some believe we struck a submerged object. Others suspect that a large animal brushed against the hull. One man insists that he heard something moving along the underside of the vessel before the second impact.

I did not hear such a thing myself.

I did, however, feel the second blow.

Whatever caused it was powerful enough to shake the vessel, and I can think of no ordinary animal that would have had reason to approach us in such a manner.

The captain has ordered the instruments monitored continuously, and we have maintained our increased speed throughout the morning.

The return remains behind us.

I had hoped that the creature's apparent indifference would prove reassuring. I am beginning to think otherwise.

An animal that ignores us is one thing.

An animal that approaches closely enough to strike our vessel, then disappears without a trace, is quite another.

I do not know whether the creature intended to strike us.

I am no longer certain that it matters.

20 June

One of the men claims to have seen it beneath the vessel.

The sighting occurred shortly before noon. He was working near the stern when he noticed a dark shape moving beneath the water. At first, he thought it was the shadow of the vessel itself, but the shape continued moving against the light and eventually extended beyond the limits of what he could see.

He described it as a mass of pale, twisting limbs surrounding a darker body.

He believes it was the creature.

The captain questioned him at some length, though I cannot say that the questioning produced anything useful. The man was plainly shaken by what he had seen, and his account changed in several minor respects as he attempted to explain it.

I do not hold this against him. It is difficult enough to describe something of that size under ordinary circumstances, much less when one is convinced it may be preparing to attack.

We have received no further reports of a sighting, though the instruments continue to register unusual activity in the water.

At approximately two o'clock this afternoon, the return disappeared altogether.

For quite some time, there was no indication of a sizable mass behind us.

The captain ordered the men to maintain their watch, and the vessel continued on its present course. A few of the crew expressed relief, believing that we had finally outpaced the creature or that it had lost interest in us.

I was not among them.

The water had grown too quiet.

I cannot explain why I found the absence of the reading more troubling than its presence. Perhaps I had grown accustomed to knowing where the creature was, even if that knowledge offered us little comfort.

At any rate, the return reappeared shortly before four o'clock.

It was no longer behind us.

It was ahead.

The instrument operator initially believed the reading to be an error. We checked the equipment and repeated the observation, but the result remained the same. A sizable mass was moving somewhere in the water ahead of our vessel.

The captain ordered a change of course.

We have not seen the creature since.

I have been unable to stop thinking about the possibility that it was never following us in the manner we supposed.

Perhaps it has been circling us all along.

21 June

We have altered our course and attempted to contact other vessels in the area.

The captain has been reluctant to discuss our circumstances openly over the radio. He believes that an account of an enormous unidentified animal following our vessel would be met with skepticism and even criticism for bringing it so close to shore, and he does not wish to cause unnecessary alarm without more definite evidence.

I suppose I cannot fault his reasoning.

Nevertheless, I would welcome the opportunity to speak with someone who has not spent the better part of a week watching the water for signs of an animal that may or may not be hunting us.

We have received a brief response from another vessel some distance away. Its crew reported no unusual sightings, though they agreed to remain alert and notify us of any disturbances in the surrounding waters.

We have heard nothing further from them.

The creature has not appeared on the surface today.

The instruments have been less consistent than before, and I have begun to wonder whether we are dealing with something that our equipment was never designed to detect. There are moments when the return appears close, followed by long intervals in which there is nothing at all.

The captain has ordered us to conserve fuel where possible. We cannot continue running at our present speed indefinitely, and the distance to Shelby remains considerable.

The crew has taken the news poorly.

There has been an argument between two of the hands, though I do not believe it amounted to much. One accused the other of exaggerating the danger, while the second insisted that we ought to abandon our present course and make for the nearest available port.

The captain heard the exchange and ordered them back to work.

No one has argued with him since.

I confess that I have begun to consider the possibility that he does not know what to do.

He has been calm throughout this affair, and I have tried to take some comfort in that fact. But I have also noticed that he spends an increasing amount of time examining the charts, checking our position, and consulting the instruments.

He has made no promises about our arrival at Shelby.

He has simply told us to continue working and remain alert.

I believe he is as frightened as the rest of us.

He is merely better at concealing it.

Shortly before sunset, I went topside to examine the sea.

There was nothing unusual to be seen. The water stretched away in every direction, broken only by the fading light and the wake behind us.

For a moment, I almost felt foolish for having spent so many days in fear of something I could not see.

Then the vessel rolled gently to port, though there was scarcely a swell to account for it.

I looked over the rail.

Something had disturbed the water beneath us.

I could not say what.

I did not remain there long enough to find out.

Our hopes of reaching Shelby are dwindling as we have ventured too far off our intended path. We can only hope to reach the nearest port before we run out of fuel.

22 June

The creature has made contact with the vessel.

I am writing this while the others attempt to determine the extent of the damage. My hands are unsteady, and I have had to stop several times to collect myself. I shall endeavor to transcribe what occurred as accurately as I can.

At approximately four o'clock this morning, we were awakened by a series of violent movements beneath the hull.

The vessel lurched so sharply that several men were thrown from their bunks. I heard the sound of equipment falling and breaking somewhere below, followed by shouting from the deck.

By the time I reached the stairs, the captain was already outside.

There was something in the water alongside us.

I could see its outline beneath the surface, a vast shadow that extended well beyond the length of the vessel. It moved slowly at first, passing beneath us from stern to bow. The water rose against the hull as it went, lifting the barge before allowing it to settle again.

Then one of its arms appeared.

It rose from the sea beside the vessel, the flesh glistening in the morning light. For a moment, it hung above the water, bending and twisting as though searching for something.

Then it came down against the hull.

The impact was tremendous.

The entire vessel shuddered, and I was thrown against the railing. Men shouted for the captain, while others rushed to secure the equipment that had come loose during the first impact.

The creature did not withdraw.

A second arm appeared on the opposite side of the vessel.

Then a third.

They moved with a terrible deliberation, sliding through the water and rising against the hull. One pressed against the side of the barge, forcing it to list, while another disappeared beneath the stern.

We were no longer merely in its vicinity.

It had us.

The captain ordered the engines pushed to their limit, and the vessel began to move forward. For a moment, I believed we might escape. The creature's arms slipped away from the hull, taking one of the crew along with it.

Then the water behind us erupted.

I saw the creature's body rise beneath the surface, displacing a great swell that overtook our ship in its wake. Its arms spread outward, and the vessel was lifted once more as something passed beneath us.

The engines continued running, but our progress was negligible.

I do not know whether the creature was attempting to seize us or merely investigating the vessel. I can only record what I witnessed. Its arms were strong enough to throw us about as though we were little more than driftwood, and there was nothing we could do to prevent it.

Our weapons have proved useless.

We have fired upon the creature, though I cannot say whether any of the shots struck it. There was no apparent change in its behavior. It continued moving alongside us, pressing against the vessel with a strength that makes a mockery of our efforts to resist it.

The captain has ordered everyone below deck.

There is shouting and I can hear the engines, the movement of the water, and the occasional impact against the hull.

I have no idea how long the vessel can withstand this.

I have spent much of my life upon the sea, and I have always considered it a place of considerable danger. Storms, rough water, mechanical failures, and the ordinary hazards of the trade are things a man learns to respect.

But I have never before felt so completely at the mercy of something else.

The creature has not roared. It has made no sound that I can identify. It has not behaved as though it were angry, nor can I say that it has behaved with any particular purpose.

It is simply there, and we are in its way.

I can hear the captain shouting again.

Something has struck the hull beneath my feet.

The engines are now dead, and our vessel is adrift at sea.

We need to conduct a head count of our remaining crew.

I must go.

As Glen planned his Camino, he ate up any information he could find on how to pack light— and there was no shortage of it. He got advice on how to find the lightest pack, and how to get by with the barest minimum of clothing and toiletries. 

As he got closer to leaving for Spain, he carefully measured all of his existing gear, only purchasing new gear that would meet his idealized and exacting standard of “ultralight”. He also trained so that his legs and back were strong enough to carry the weight and go the distance.

He was so focused on the physical stuff that he hadn’t factored in his psychic baggage. Glen had failed to account for the weight of his bitterness. 

He was angry. And three days ago, on a lonely stretch of trail, the anger broke him. 

Glen was recently divorced, and laid off from both his job and the circle of friends that he and his ex-wife had shared. He fancied himself unencumbered. He figured that he’d expend some of this newly found free time on a challenging physical adventure. And why not Spain? He’d walk, and eat, and see historic sites without having to fulfill any obligations to a demanding wife, boring job or uncaring friends.

So, he carefully loaded his backpack with the lightweight gear. But, like unwanted bed bugs, his anger hitched a ride as well.

First and foremost, Glen was angry at his ex-wife. From his point of view, she had simply up and left him. He’d thought things were fine…or fine enough. Until one day she simply wasn’t there. He blamed her entirely for the dissolution of their marriage. In truth, he hadn’t been listening to her for years. He didn’t hear her when she said she needed him to be more present. He didn’t hear her when she asked him to take more shared responsibility for the admin of their lives. And he certainly didn’t hear her when she asked for support after her father died. 

He hadn’t been there much for their friends either. It was always his ex-wife who made the friend dates and nurtured their circle. He’d show up for the barbecues and the game nights. But he wasn’t there for the cancer or the financial disaster. So, when the divorce happened and the assets were split, Glen’s ex got all the friends.

He was also angry about the layoff. He’d been at his job for many years and had once been a top performer. But the “had been” of his heyday was quite far in the rear view. When the fallout from the divorce left him distracted and irritable, his performance further suffered. So, when his company needed to shrink a bit, Glen’s job was the bit that shrank. 

As he set off on his Camino, he stewed about these perceived injustices. “How dare they” pulsed in his consciousness and flowed off of him like an angry wave. Other pilgrims felt that wave and many avoided him.

And then came that night in the albergue on the hill. As he brooded, he reconnected with Adriana, a Dutch woman that he’d met a few days back. She felt his bitter wave and heard his indignation but rather than shrink from it, she engaged him in conversation. After hearing him out, she simply suggested that he consider setting aside the anger and putting his focus on forgiveness. 

The next morning, he left the albergue in the dawn light and as he walked west, he considered her advice. Heeding it, he began to re-configure his well-worn narrative of a man done wrong. Then suddenly, on a lonely stretch of trail he had a flash of insight. Glen saw with a painful clarity that shame sat at the core of his bitterness. And he realized that he was the principal protagonist of his own calamity. 

He pulled up short, staggering under the sudden insight. He realized that he’d have to shed the weight of bitterness that he’d been directing at others. But what was he to do with his own culpability and how could he shape a new narrative? How indeed, as Adriana had suggested, could he begin to forgive himself? It would not be easily done, but Glen committed in that moment to work toward forgiveness, however long it took him. He shouldered his pack and faced the morning with a new resolve, feeling lighter than he had in many months.

Entry: Escape from the Red Queen of the Amazons

She will always be Red to me! As I watched her rise naked from bed, making her way to the refresher, I couldn't help but ache at the sight of her tight, sexy rear. She turned her head and smiled as she caught me watching her and began to walk with a swagger that she knew would inflame my passion. For a moment I almost decided to forgo what I was going to do. If she were a woman of the clan, a hundred young bravos would compete for her heart. The deeds that would be performed and the bride gifts laid at her feet would inspire tales that would be told among Clan's ships for generations. It would hurt not having her by my side.

But as she closed the door of the refresher unit, I found my resolve. Quickly, I got out of her bed and began donning my skein suit. As I got dressed, I began looking over my options for escape. I could just walk out the bedroom door right now, pass the score of Valkyries lounging in the room in this abandon tenement that they have made their clubhouse. That wouldn't be an option after I did what I had to do. No way could I fight my way through them. So that left the window. Doable; we were only one story up, all I had to do was land right and make my getaway.

As I finished putting on my boot, Red emerged from the refresher. She looked perplexed seeing me fully dressed; generally this would be the start of a night of wild lovemaking that would leave us both bruised and exhausted.

“Where you going, lover?” she asked with a voice that would be the envy of a space opera singer.

“Red, I have to tell you something. I know you're not going to be pleased with what I about to tell you, but baby, I am breaking up with you!”, I choked as the words came from my throat; my heart was breaking as I watched her.

“Why? What's the problem?” she asked as moisture began to mist over her eyes.

“Baby, it's just not going to work; you like hurting people,” I uttered, and she shook her head in disbelief.

“I don't understand; you hurt people all the time, Rod. Heck, didn't you just leave those young rich brats from the capital dome unconscious in the back alley of Feekur's Racing Bar after they assaulted Jenny.” She spat out her accusation of my double standard.

“The difference, my love, is that I do not enjoy it. Violence among the clans is a tool. We take no pleasure in it; we have a finely tuned sense of the surrender reflex. When we have to kill it with a heavy heart, my love, but you and your Valkyries have lost your way. True at one time you all were victims, but your revenge has morphed into some sick, sadistic lust that can never be filled.

I was so in love with you that it took me all this time to realize what was wrong, but if I stay any longer, what I feel for you will just turn sour. I am sorry.”

I watched as her face turned as red as her hair and as she lunged for the auto pistol in her dresser. She screamed, “I'll kill you, you sanctimonious bastard!” I was already crashing through the window.

She fired off a volley that zipped above my head as I was falling toward the pavement. I dropped and rolled when I hit the ground and caught off guard the one Valkyrie standing watch over their hover bikes. Springing to my feet, I leveled my gyro pistol at her, and she dived into the tenement hallway as I squeezed off a few shots. I limped over to Red's hover bike and took off, but not before I pulled out my pocket the ball of T19 that I prepared earlier. I hit the on switch of the timer and tossed it into the assembly of Valkyrie hover bikes.

I almost did not make it out of the blast radius as I felt the warmth of the explosion at my back. The sounds of the secondary explosions eased my worries of pursuit. So I made my way to Scooney's. The dinner crowd was already leaving, and I had to wrestle my way onto the lift to get to my apartment. The lift had barely begun to ascend when I heard the sound of Red's Hover bike taking off. Apparently, some resourceful fool had discovered that I had left the keys in the bike. I felt a sliver of regret over the thief's fate when the Valkyries tracked down the homing beacon on the bike, but it passed.

No one was home as I entered the apartment. So I settled down at the apartment's terminal to scan the daily want ads. Before today, I did not really think about the future or to say I did not think of one, without Red. As I scanned the ads, one sprang out:

“Have you seen this little girl? 10,000 Styrigi reward”

Maybe this was my way off this rock ?....

I’ve been dead for four days. I know the people around me don’t understand because my heart keeps beating out of sheer mechanical inertia, but the process is already over. There is no oxygen in what I breathe; only dry air goes in and out. My stomach stopped processing food on Tuesday, and the skin on my hands has lost its tone. When I move on the bed, I can’t feel the weight of my bones against the mattress. Lifeless flesh has no weight. It’s a simple biological matter: the organism shuts down, but some muscles take longer to catch on. I only go out into the street because dust gathers on my skin and being locked up in here only accelerates the stiffness.
I walked down the building corridor toward the exit. The landing lights were on, but the light brought no warmth to my face. When I reached the bottom, the ground-floor superintendent opened his door before I could touch the front door knob. He had a strange grimace on his face and was holding a yellow envelope.
“Joel,” he said, taking a step toward me. “I’ve been ringing your doorbell for two days. Your brother came by yesterday looking for you because you’re not answering your phone.”
I didn’t stop, but he placed a hand on my shoulder. The pressure of his fingers felt distant, as if he were touching me through a thick blanket.
“There’s nothing to talk about, Troy,” I replied without raising my voice. My voice sounded flat, scraped dry from disuse. “The phone no longer serves any purpose.”
“You’re pale, kid. You look like a rag. Your brother left this for you.”
He held out the yellow envelope. On the front, written in blue ballpoint pen in my brother’s hurried handwriting, it clearly read: For Joel Brennan. Troy waited for me to take it, but I left my hands hanging loose at my sides. Seeing that name on the paper did nothing to me. It was just a label stuck to a container that was already empty.
“Joel Brennan doesn’t live in this apartment anymore,” I said, looking at the wall behind him. “That name belonged to the person who occupied this body before Tuesday. What’s left here is just waiting for the process to finish.”
Troy took a small step back. His expression shifted from annoyance to a mix of confusion and alarm.
“What the fuck are you talking about, Joel? Stay right there, I’m calling your brother right now.”
I didn’t wait for him to pull out his phone. I pushed open the street door and stepped out onto the sidewalk.
The morning air hit my face head-on, but my skin didn’t react with its usual twitch. I walked slowly along the sidewalk, keeping a steady pace. Around me, people hurried off to their jobs, swerving past me. As they crossed my path, some discreetly averted their eyes and quickened their pace; others stared straight into my eyes with a mix of disgust and caution. I know perfectly well why they do it. A body entering the decomposition phase emits imperceptible signals that the instinct of the living detects immediately. They sense the lack of heat and the stench of stagnant matter coming off me, even if they can’t put it into words.
Halfway down the avenue, I went into the small corner grocery store. The place smelled of ripe fruit and dampness. At the back, behind the cash register, the owner was placing a row of cans on a metal shelf. Hearing the door chime, she turned to greet me, but froze as soon as she saw my face under the white fluorescent lights.
“Good morning...” she said slowly, lowering her arms little by little. “Mr. Brennan, are you feeling alright? You look terrible. Let me bring you a glass of water and a chair.”
Nobody wants to accept the evidence when it’s right in front of them. She spoke to me in that measured tone people reserve for the sick or the injured, expecting a coherent response that would fit into her framework of how things work. She doesn’t understand that there is no water or rest that can revive an organism whose primary systems have already stopped. They think it’s just dizziness, a drop in blood pressure, or a bad night’s sleep.
“I don’t need water,” I told her. My throat scraped as I spoke, dry like a pipe no longer in use. “I only came in to grab one thing.”
I walked over to the wooden counter where a broken fruit crate sat. Between the pine slats was a thick piece of glass, part of a broken green bottle that someone had left forgotten there. I picked it up with my right hand. The sharp edge sank slightly into my fingertips without causing me the slightest discomfort. The woman took a step back, her eyes wide open and her lips tightly pressed together.
“Please put that down on the counter,” she whispered, timidly stretching out her hand. “Don’t do anything strange.”
I held her gaze. I needed to end this misunderstanding once and for all.
I drove the piece of glass into my left palm until it touched the bone. The cut opened the skin into two thick flaps, but I felt absolutely nothing. There is no pain when the nerves have already rotted away. A thick, viscous stream began to flow from the gash, the stagnant residue left inside me. I stood there looking at my open hand, waiting for the tendon to give way completely to prove to the woman behind the counter that the body no longer responds. She began to scream hysterically, grabbed my wrist tightly, and pressed a white rag against the wound. The rag instantly soaked up the liquid dripping down my forearm, staining her fingers a bright red. She still doesn’t understand. She thinks she’s trying to save my life, but she’s just dirtying her hands with something that no longer works.

“God damn it!” said Tammy. “I’m telling you, we are lost.” She shouted.

“Shut your mouth, woman. We are far from lost,” said Mike while he sat down on the big rock on the edge of the pond.

The rock he sat upon was half-buried in the black, fertile soil, where the water’s surface was gently bobbing at the mossy waterline on the side of this grey sloped boulder. Sitting down brought him closer to the forest floor. The warm, moist, juicy musk of the ground went straight up his nostrils as he drew in a forced breath. He was staring at his feet when his sweat started tracing a line from his brow down to the tip of his nose, making it itch, and finally dripping off and disappearing into the green.

He lifted his head back up with great effort. All he could see was the dense growth of trees through and through, with enough of a gap between the thick trunks to see more trees in the back. The pond was like a pool you may find at the bottom of a waterfall. Deep in the middle, shallowing out towards the edges. The water wasn’t stagnant, but it was still and lifeless. No manner of creature lived in these waters apart from the algae which covered the far end of the pool where the canopy of the forest allowed some sun to pierce through the musk. The forest sloped down and away, out of sight behind the pond. The only promising direction was the path which meandered away from the rock into the depth of oblivion.

Mike took off his bandana, dipped it into the pond, being careful not to disturb the mud bed, waved it around gently in the shallow water, sending ripples to the other edge, took it back out, and held it above the surface, allowing the fabric to let go of the water it couldn’t hold on to and then squeezing out the rest. Wiped his face and neck. He looked at his bandana, thought for a second, wrapped it into a ball and squeezed it again, and then tossed it away. The fabric was still wet, so it went quite the distance. It wizzed over the pond and through the steam of sunlight on the far edge, reflecting it in a red flash until it lost speed and opened up like a parachute and flapped out of sight, downhill, not far from the pond.

Mike signaled Tammy, and they continued on the path through the forest. He wasn’t thinking about where to go. His mind was in a buzz, which was like the shrill sound of an electric device, sharp and penetrative but not loud enough for you to bother looking for the source of it. His legs were moving, and his feet were leading him. He was following them, just as Tammy was following him. His feet were racing after one another, almost like they knew the way.

A few miles in, they came into a clearing. The grass here was knee-high and dry. This clearing offered views of the sky, a relief from the endless canopy. The path they were on continued into the trees. But they decided to spend the night here. Mike took off his bag and dropped it where he stood. Their shoulders were strained carrying that much weight all day. Seemed like they packed for more than they needed. Mike straightened his bag upright and unbuckled the tent from the top strap. He unzipped his bag and something bright yellow peeked through the opening. He ripped out this yellow parachute-like fabric and laid it flat, like a mat on the ground. It was another tent but not a functioning one. He turned over his bag on the yellow carpet and started shaking it violently. His belongings started piling on top of each other. He stopped when a flask fell out of his bag and rolled over the pile of clothes next to his feet. It was a Grey metal flask with a push lock on it. He undid the lock, gulped down almost half of the flask, then he started putting up the tent.

All this time Tammy was just standing and staring at him. When Mike was almost halfway through, she decided to unpack too. She opened up her bag and flipped it similarly. Cans of beans, precooked sausages, a large bag of oatmeal, and two flasks of water fell on the ground with a thud. There was still some stuff left at the bottom of her bag, but she didn’t bother shaking it out. She was too tired for that, and by some coincidence everything they needed fell out by itself.

When the tent was up, she went inside with her bag and took out two sleeping bags. She opened one up completely, and it was almost the size of the yellow mat Mike had fashioned earlier. She pushed all of Mike’s stuff to the edge of the tent and placed the open sleeping bag on the floor. Then she took out a second sleeping bag and opened it up too. This one was going to be her blanket. Mike came inside and placed his own sleeping bag on top of all this. He was going to sleep in it like a silk bug in a cocoon. They didn’t talk. Not a word. Ate a can of beans each and went to bed.

Throughout, Tammy was thinking of running away. She had no idea how long they had already spent in this forest. She knew they were lost and were going in circles, but she never dared to part ways. They must have been asleep for a few hours when a loud but distant sound jolted them up. Tammy was shitting her pants. She started begging Mike to go check. This was the first time they talked since the pond. Mike got up, crawled out of the tent, and started scanning the forest treeline.

He wasn’t afraid. He never had been. A brutal childhood had introduced him to the world’s ugliness early on. He had made his peace with the luck allotted to him in life and decided that the best way to live would be to just suck it up. He figured a vicious world didn’t deserve a soft man.

The night sky illuminated the treeline enough to save him a walk. Whatever made the noise wasn’t visible. He was about to pull the tent flap shut when the dark split open. A sound tore through the trees. A wet, foul screech that felt less like an animal and more like a dying man’s throat being ripped out. The noise didn’t just rattle his ears; it hit him in the gut, turning his stomach to ice. His lungs seized, locking the air inside them. He tried to take a step back, to hide in the canvas, but his legs refused the order. He was pinned to the dirt by a sickening realization: for the first time in his life, he was utterly, helplessly terrified.

The sound tore through the dark again, pinning a directional coordinate to his panic. Shame flared hot in his chest. He berated himself for freezing, furious that a mere noise could reduce him to this. Forcing a jagged breath into his lungs, Mike bullied his feet forward, stepping toward the black silhouette of the treeline. Every muscle braced for another demonic screech, but as he neared the brush, the noise shifted. It softened into a rapid panting, like an exhausted hound after a long hunt.

Parting the thick bushes, Mike looked down. A hyena lay flat in the dirt, blood oozing from a mangled cavity in its chest. Its ribs gave one final, desperate heave and went still. Looking closer, Mike noticed the forest floor was churned up by familiar paw prints. They were hyena tracks trailing away into the deeper brush. The pieces clicked together. It was just a rogue animal turned on by its own pack. The heavy, suffocating dread instantly left him, replaced by his usual strength. It was a bizarre sight to witness, but the mystery was gone. He turned back toward his tent, finally realizing that the only thing that had truly terrified him was the dark blank canvas of his own imagination.

He kicked his way back into the tent and told Tammy it was nothing. Then he ordered her to pack up; they were leaving. Tammy had already decided she was going to desert him while he slept, but tonight she’d missed her window. Tomorrow, she promised herself, pulling her pack onto her shoulders as they set out into the dark.

They marched through the night and straight into the morning, the dense canopy offering no relief from the rising humidity. By noon, the suffocating heat was dragging them to their physical limits. Their throats were bone-dry, and their muscles burned. Then, a faint rushing sound sliced through the heavy air. A waterfall. Spurred by the noise, they quickened their pace, tracking the sound down a slope until the trees parted. A narrow stream cut through the dirt, pooling into a basin of quiet, still water.

“I can’t do this anymore. I’m leaving,” Tammy said, the words finally breaking through her tears.

“You might not have noticed, but that’s exactly what we’re fucking doing,” Mike shot back, his voice flat. “We are leaving.”

“No! I am leaving You,” she choked out.

Mike’s face didn’t even twitch. “You don’t have to tell me. I’ve known you wanted out since I confronted you on the camping trip. You don’t actually care that I’m telling the truth; you just care that I might bitch about you in front of our friends. I know what’s going on between you and him. I saw it.”

Tammy’s eyes widened in sheer shock. “And that is exactly why I can’t be with you anymore. You never trusted me, and you never will. And now, because of you, we are completely lost.”

Mike didn’t answer. He ignored her completely, looking past her into the trees. He pulled off his bandana, dipped it into the still water, and squeezed. After wiping the sweat from his neck, he flicked the wet fabric away.

“Shut your mouth, woman. We are not lost. We are far from it.”

The red bandana sailed through the air and landed on a mound just past the brush. It settled atop a rotting pile of fabric. Dozens of bandanas, ranging from fresh crimson to sun-bleached, decomposed rags crumbling into the dirt.

Mike turned and stepped back onto the path, his feet moving with familiar, practiced rhythm. Tammy stared at his back, a hollow ache in her chest. She wanted to run, to sprint in the opposite direction, but the vast green oblivion terrified her more than he did. She took a deep breath, adjusting her pack. Tomorrow, she promised herself, and followed him back into the trees.

Herbert the frog awoke to a chill in the air. He rose from his bed and stretched his arms as he yawned. He sleepily made his bed before slipping on his day shoes and shuffling down to the kitchen.

Herbert made oatmeal and ate at his small kitchen table. He looked out the window and watched as the wind rustled the trees around his home. He sighed quietly before finishing his breakfast and washing his bowl.

Herbert made some tea and sat in his comfy chair by the hearth. The wind rattled the chimney, resulting in a low clanking noise. Herbert looked out the window once more and noted how few leaves there were left on trees. He furrowed his brow. Autumn was almost over. That meant soon it would be winter. This made Herbert very unhappy.

Herbert loved spring and summer, and autumn was okay, but winter was the worst. As a frog, Herbert loved to play in his pond. But when winter rolled around, he no longer could because his pond would freeze over. The cold made the lily pads all hard and he could no longer watch the pretty fish. Herbert had put up with winter for years, but this year he decided things would be different.

Herbert had spoken with his neighbor, another frog named Mari, and she had said that there was someone who helped her with a similar problem. Apparently, Mari did not like how rainy spring was and how muddy her garden would get, so she went to an old toad who lived a few trees away and told him about her problem. He was said to be a magician or a wizard or something, so she thought she would give it a try. After she saw him, her garden was no longer muddy in the spring. There had to be something to it, Herbert thought.

Herbert finished his tea and got ready to go. He slipped on his little boots and wrapped a scarf around his neck before stepping outside his tree trunk home.

On his way, Herbert passed by Ronny the squirrel and Tati the chipmunk, who were both gathering up acorns for winter. Herbert hollered "hello" and carried on his way. As he went, he whistled a tune and watched the pretty leaves fly around him.

As he approached the old, gnarled stump where the toad was supposed to live, Herbert felt nervous. He wondered if this was a good idea. Or if he should just turn back. What if the toad simply laughed at him? What if there was nothing he could do and Herbert would just have to live with his cold, frozen pond? Herbert had already come this far, though, so there really was no turning back. He went up to the door and knocked.

There was shuffling beyond the door and a loud cough. A few moments later the door opened and there stood a large, brown toad. He was round and kind of lumpy. Beneath his chin grew a wispy white beard, and above his nose sat a pair of gold spectacles. He looked down at Herbert quizzically.

"May I help you with something?" the toad asked.

Herbert shuffled his feet, wondering what he should say.

"Do you need directions or something?"

"Um, no," Herbert said. "I came to ask for your help. Well, I think you're the person I'm looking for. You see, my friend told me about this old toad and--"

"OLD?" the toad exclaimed. Herbert's face flushed as he tried to sputter an apology. But the toad simply laughed.

"I suppose I am getting on in years, eh? Well, in any case, I do prefer to be called Roald. That is my name, anyway."

"Right," Herbert responded. "Well, Roald, my friend Mari told me about a toad who had helped her keep her garden from getting muddy during springtime. You see, my pond gets very icy and cold during winter and the lily pads get so hard and--"

Roald held up his hand and chuckled once again. "Come on now, come inside. Let me see what I can do."

Herbert followed Roald over the threshold and stepped into his home. Inside was cozy. There was a small sitting room with a fluffy looking chair and a grand fireplace. The walls were lined with books and knick-knacks. Herbert stood patiently, looking around the room, as Roald rummaged with something on a high shelf. Finally, he turned around and in his hand he held a large glass jar. He handed it to Herbert, who took it cautiously.

"That," said Roald, "Is the answer to your problem."

Roald sat in his fluffy chair, picked up his cup of tea and blew on it before taking a sip. Herbert looked at the jar, then at Roald, then back at the jar. He did not understand.

"Roald, I'm not sure--"

Roald interrupted. "You'll take the jar home. Then on the day of the first snow of winter, take the jar out to your pond. As the snow begins to fall, you're going to catch every snowflake that falls over your pond in that jar."

Herbert was still confused. He said, "So I catch the snow... in the jar? And that will keep my pond from freezing?"

Roald nodded his head and sipped his tea. Herbert was not sure what to do. Mari had told him that this toad knew what he was talking about. That it was some kind of magic. But this was just a plain jar. Roald had not said any kind of hocus pocus. But Mari's garden did keep from getting muddy in the spring. So maybe it was magic.

"Well," said Herbert, "I should be on my way then. Thanks, er, for your help. And for taking the time to talk to me today."

"It was nothing, really," Roald retorted, chortling. "Tell Mari I said 'hello'."

Herbert stepped outside, waving, and closed the door behind him. As he made his way back home, he wondered what he was going to do. He felt he should at least try the thing with the jar. It may not work, but what would it hurt to try?

That night as he drank his evening tea, Herbert thought about his pond. He thought about how nice it would be to have it warm and splashy all year long. Hopefully, he thought, that magic jar will do the trick. When he finished his tea, he went to bed.

-------------------------

One cold day in winter, Herbert awoke early. According to the weather owl, today was to be the first snow day. He jumped out of bed and sprang to the kitchen. He hurriedly ate his breakfast and drank his tea. In no time he was ready, dressed in a warm coat and boots, glass jar in hand. He walked to the front door and threw it open and stepped outside.

He walked to the edge of his pond. It was already getting icy from the chilly air. He sighed and looked to the sky. It was gray and cloudy. It sure looked like a sky for snow. Then it happened. The very first snowflake fluttered down. With a bounding leap, Herbert flew across the pond and caught the snowflake in the jar before landing on a lily pad. He held the jar up to his face and looked at the little snowflake whirling around inside. A moment later, Herbert saw another one, and another, and another. And so it began.

It snowed for about an hour. The whole time Herbert hopped and leaped across his pond, from lily pad to lily pad, catching snowflakes. As he did this, he noticed that each snowflake was different. Each one was its own pattern of ice crystals. They were quite pretty, he thought. They were not so bad, really.

Before long, Herbert had caught every snowflake that fell over his pond. When the last one fell, he let it land softly into the jar before closing the lid. He held his breath as he looked around at his pond. As he did this, the lily pads became soft and squishy, and the ice crystals around the edge of the water melted away. The pond was warm, though there was snow all around it. Herbert sighed in relief. He held the jar up to his face and looked inside at the whirling snowflakes. He smiled before hopping back to the edge of the pond and going inside.

As he slipped off his boots and coat, he kept staring at the jar. How could this have worked? Was it really magic? What else could it be, he thought. He went to the hearth and lit a small fire before getting the kettle to boil some water. Then he settled in his chair, holding the jar in his hands. The snowflakes really were something, he thought. They were beautiful and unique, each and every one. He set the jar aside and looked out the window. The ground around his pond was lightly dusted with snow. He thought about how I pretty it looked. Then he chuckled to himself softly and lifted the jar to his face once more. Perhaps winter was not so bad after all.

“This isn’t like that Twilight Zone episode where aliens come and turn our planet into a utopia and then invite earthlings to their planet, only for the humans to discover en route that the aliens intend to cook and eat them?”

“Could be. Though earth hasn’t become a utopia, and I don’t think you can consider the transmission we received an invitation.”

“What else would you call it?”

“A slap in the face.”

“Come again?”

“It feels a whole lot more like a galactic put down insinuating that we’ll never be as good as them. I mean, look at the opening of the transmission:

Greetings fellow sentients. We who send this missive wish you well. It is unlikely that time and space will align for us to meet, but we must tell you of us and our world. It is a world of peace and plenty, of wealth and well-being. We have blossomed as sentients and only seek to learn what there is to learn. All this we owe to our great and gracious Opinoko who has made our world a splendor unsurpassed. We sing the praises of Opinoko and wish the galaxy to know of the glory we have gained through Opinoko. Let us name these glories…

And then what follows is a long, long list of all the wonders Opinoko has brought them. It’s akin to sending us a sales brochure for an upscale and exclusive gated community we can’t possibly move into. Why send it?”

“Maybe they just want us to know they’re out there and that things can work out well for a planet.”

“I don’t know. It sounds like they’re thumbing their Opinoko noses at us—if they have noses. Instead of forwarding us a laundry list of their greatness, maybe they could have sent something practical like a process for cold fusion or a strategic plan for avoiding international conflict and war.”

“Could be they don’t want to bootstrap us. Maybe they want to encourage us to find our own way and not interfere with how we do it.”

“Ha! Just by sending the transmission, they’re interfering. I call it the Prester Effect.”

“Prester?”

“Prester John. A mysterious letter began circulating in the twelfth century from a so-called Prester John trumpeting the might and wealth of his kingdom located vaguely and variously in India, Asia and Africa. The letter spoke of wonders like the fountain of youth and paradise on earth. It got the medieval world worked up, jumpstarting a quest mentality. Many folks went blindly in search of Prester John’s kingdom. Though it was never officially found, it didn’t stop some nuts from claiming they discovered it.”

“So, you think this Opinoko transmission is a scam?”

“A clever one that’s got three quarters of earth believing it’s real. Ruse or not, there will be fools who’ll go in search of this alien Prester John.”

“It’s light years away.”

“Yup. Just like journeying from England to Africa in the Middle Ages. People went then. They’ll try now.”

“Why?”

“The grass is always greener.”

“Does that mean you wouldn’t go?”

“I told you. The transmission was a slap in the face.”

“Maybe it was to wake us up.”

“Or keep us down.”

“That’s hard to say.”

“Trust me. It’s a colossal waste of time.”

“But, not of the imagination.”

“Be sensible.”

“That will only get us so far.”

“Are you really planning to set out for the land of Opinoko?

“Already halfway there.”

“A typically rash and unreasoned human response.”

“Well, imagination has that effect.”

A Fear of Travel

The brakes screeched and hissed as the train slowed down to a halt in front of the platform. A man stood silently. Awaiting the doors to open as his grip around the briefcase tightened. The deafening wail from the horn made his heart skip a beat, but his startled reaction was nothing the outside world was shown. As the conductor stepped out to make his voice heard, the rumble of people began making their way onboard the carriages. Broad shoulders and luggages bumped him around the crowd, and although he didn’t make a scene of it, the thought of the train leaving him before he had time to embark, began creeping up his mind. The horn wailed once again and sweat began trailing down his lower back. 
“Excuse me,” he murmured, but the sound was barely heard and drowned as soon as it left its shore.  
He cleared his throat and tried again, “Excuse me, sorry.” 
He repeated the words silently, more for himself than for others, as the river of people rinsed him along inside the carriage. The inside was beautifully decorated with various shades of lacquered wood that framed the glass windows as well as the cream painted ceiling, and to his right, a narrow aisle presented itself along the carriage. On either side of the walkway, sets of two seats opposite each other were lined up along the walls, with a dark mahogany table in between, lacquered and shiny as the rest of the interior. Clumsily, the man began making his way down the aisle, casting quick glances to his sides hoping not to get any returned. He passed by families with parents desperately trying to console their small children who didn't seem at all interested in lowering their cries. Old women chattering and giggling amongst each other, possessing countless anecdotes from their long friendship together. A beautiful woman sitting alone in the corner seat, daydreaming as she admires the landscape outside the trainstation, turning her head just as he walks by. The man couldn’t react in time. Their eyes met for but a fraction of a second but to him, it felt like a lifetime. With neither a smile nor a nod, she let her glance turn down to the table as she straightened her posture. This was it, he had to act quickly. Do not dwell on the matter, ask if the seat in front of her was free. 
“Excuse me, is this seat taken?”
The words were clear and confident as he said them in his mind but to the man's disappointment, his tongue would not speak. Too much time had passed now since they exchanged glances, his window of opportunity had closed and with yet another silent glimpse of her rosy cheek, he continued past her. Three rows behind the woman, all four seats of a table were left untouched. The man put his briefcase on the luggage rack overhead, before sinking down onto the red velvet fabric with a sigh. Had he at least smiled at her? He couldn’t tell if it was subconscious or not, but he had taken the seat facing the direction that he had come from, granting his eyes the opportunity to wander off and examine the shining golden hair of the woman diagonally in front of him. Was she even that beautiful? He thought to himself as he could barely spot her left cheek, or was it just the event of a not so bad looking woman making eye contact with him that made it exciting? Was it the scenario of meeting the love of his life on a train like this that made his tongue bend backwards or was there something else? He forced his gaze off of her as he pushed up his glasses with his hands and massaged the tired eyes with his knuckles before letting them trail the platform outside his window. 
“Look again,” he heard a voice in his head tell him, “She might’ve turned around to look at you just now and you could miss it. A second chance to start a conversation.”
The man tried to silence the voice by leaning his cheek on his palm, creating a screen between the woman and his eyes. She wasn’t even that pretty and besides, the time was not right at the moment to meet someone, he thought to himself. But maybe a last look wouldn’t hurt, just to make sure? Slowly, as to not admit to himself what he was doing, he separated his fingers barely enough to make a peephole for his view. But just as he turned his eyes, the peephole darkened.
“Is this seat free?”
Startled by the deep voice, the man recoiled and let his hand fall down in his lap as if he had been caught stealing before looking up towards a stout man in a black suit pointing towards the seat in front of him.
“Ehhm, yeah s..” His voice broke. He gave away a light cough to reset his throat and repeated, “Yeah sure!” as he gestured with an open palm towards the opposite of the table. 
The man in the suit didn’t answer, just gave an unnoticeable nod before putting his leather briefcase on the luggage rack next to his and sat down. He carefully examined the man as the large figure scooched his rump towards the window seat before adjusting his suit and tie, wondering if it would be strange to greet him. Just as he was about to offer a handshake, the older man reached for a gold watch from inside his suit, opened it, and carefully inspected it. In a desperate attempt of an evasive maneuver, the young man changed the course of his hand and pulled out a tiny notebook from his breast pocket. He laid the pad open on the table and began scribbling nonsense as a third wail from the horn echoed along the platform and the train let out a loud hiss before the wheels began chugging. The led on the page began to take shape of transfigured faces and shapes inside the man’s notebook and from time to time, he would let his gaze wander off and grace the woman’s rosy cheek before returning down to his creations. Perhaps it’s best this way, he thought to himself as he let the pencil traverse the paper on its own, at least it’s easier. 
“What are you drawing son?”
The words took him by surprise.
“Oh this, ehhm…” He tilted his head slightly and raised his eyebrows as if it would give him a clearer picture of what he had made. “I.. don’t really know, just a way to clear my mind.” 
He closed the notebook in a hurry but let it lay on the table in front of him as he began fidgeting with the pencil between his fingers instead. 
“You got a lot to clear by the looks of it,” the man answered humorously with a nod towards the closed pad
“What?” He replied, despite having heard the comment, and continued to answer without waiting for the other man to repeat himself. “Oh, no this… This is just…” sweat began to stain his armpits as the pencils movement grew hastier in his hands, “Or well I guess you could say that.”
The man raised his bushy eyebrows alongside the corner of his mouth hidden underneath a large mustache in a way as if to say, “Don’t worry, take your time.”
The younger man’s gaze began to flicker around the carriage before ultimately returning back to the woman in the back who – as if to mock him – was talking with another young man in front of her.
“Is it a lady issue?” his moustache raising even higher.
“Sorry?” He shaked his head, eyes brought back to the man in front of him, “Not really. More so…”
The older man had no intention to interrupt as he studied the younger man's troubled face.
“More so…” but he couldn’t find the words, “I’m not quite sure.”
Slightly turning his head so that the broad man could view the woman behind him, he answered, “Such a shame, you had your chance.”
“My chance for what?”
He tried to play dumb but as the man turned back his head and caught his eyes with one eyebrow raised, he realised there was no reason to try.
“She’s not my type exactly, besides; I’m not in a good time at the moment to meet someone.”
The latter statement was indeed true to an extent, however by the look on his fellow passengers face, it didn’t seem all that convincing. 
“Not your.. type? You say huh,” pausing on the word as if it was foreign to him.
“You know…” the younger man began, hoping it would be enough to make the older one understand.
Judging by his unchanged facial expression, it was not. 
“I’m not interested, okay? That’s all.”
The man let his eyebrow sink down to its usual place but his posture indicated that he wasn’t yet satisfied by his answers. His gaze was burning as the stout man examined him, and even though his intuition told him to open up the notebook again, he did manage to halt the act as he deemed it too obvious of an escape. Instead he retreated his vision for the window again, tracing the distant mountains with his eyes as if he was painting them himself. 
“What’s your name son?” 
The question had a subtle touch of judgement that the younger man did not let go unnoticed, however he turned his head back towards the man and met his gaze as he answered.
“Jesse Howells,” he said, neither his tongue nor his throat failing him this time.
“Henry Craig.” He stuck out a burly hand, not necessarily fat, but strong, “Pleasure to meet you Jesse”
Jesse mirrored his action and a firm handshake was shared between them.
“Likewise.” An undertone of uncertainty lingering behind as he pulled his hand back.
Silence took its place over the table as the deafened chugging and puffing from the train outside accompanied the passengers through the beautiful valley. 
“It seems that you’ve cleared your mind,” Henry said, breaking the silence as he gestured towards the closed notebook on the table with his eyes. 
The younger man followed his gaze and answered with a small chuckle, “I must have.”
Silence fell again between them. The inevitable stage he always met when he practiced leaving the shore, he thought to himself. This was why it was easier to stay in the harbour. But the ropes were already loosened and with no way of turning this ship back around, he frantically began making up questions in his head. Questions that wouldn’t result in short boring replies and what topics those answers might result in. While his mind continued to tie knots on itself, he caught himself glancing over towards the woman’s golden hair again. The man she had been talking to was nowhere to be seen and a medley of relief and hope showered him. Why was that? Jesse knew himself well enough to know that he would make no attempt at talking to her either way so, why did he feel this way? 
“So tell me Jesse.” His focus shifted back towards their table, “Where are you going?”
“Where I’m going?” He repeated the question to stall for time as he wondered if he should tell the truth or lie. “I’m traveling"
“Alone?” The man looked surprised.
“Alone,” Jesse confirmed, managing not to avert his gaze away from the blue eyes. 
Henry examined him for a second before he continued, “Tell me Jesse. What is a handsome young man like you doing, traveling by himself? Do you not have any friends to accompany you?”
The question stung in his chest but he was quick to recover, “My own company has always favoured me the most.”
The words came out as sharp as they always did when he was asked that question. The same lie he always told when reality came too close. The same lie he had hid behind so many times that he was beginning to get fooled by it himself. He could see the older man get caught off guard by his well-formulated reply, but authority quickly took its place inside his deep eyes.
“Its not the first time you speak that line, is it?”
It was now Jesse's turn to get taken aback. How could he know that?
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that those words are rehearsed.”
He didn’t know what to answer at that. This man had just walked right through his shield.
“Please correct me if I’m wrong,” Henry continued when no reply was met, knowing fully that he had hit the nail on its head. 
There was no correction. How could he even begin to try when he had already gotten disarmed that easily?
“How… Did you know that?” His words were frail as his eyes subconsciously glanced over towards the woman yet again.
The older man didn’t answer, only examining the younger man's glimpse, before the corners of his mouth rose again.
“You stare an awful lot for someone that isn’t interested.”
“Sorry?” The change of both subject and tone in the older man’s voice made him instantly forget his shattered defense and the younger man felt his cheeks grow hotter.
“I said that you stare an awful lot for someone that isn't interested.”
“I’m not staring,” Jesse answered with a loud voice before he lowering it to barely a whisper, afraid that she might hear them, “I’m not staring”
If there had been traces of authority in the blue eyes before, it was nothing compared to what sparkled inside them now.
“What are you doing then?”
“I’m only…” halting himself from looking at her once more, desperately trying to come up with an excuse.
But there was nothing, his mind was completely blank. Nothing he could say or do would prove his innocence, because deep down he knew he was guilty. 
“That other fellow seems to have left,” Henry said after casting a quick glance towards her, “You might still have a chance”
“A chance of what?” the young man sighed, “A chance to make a fool out of myself?”
“A chance to grow, Jesse. To leave the shore and finally put a use to those beautiful sails you've been working so long to perfect.”
His words pierced his chest as if he had been made of sponge, and when he turned his gaze and met the older man’s blue eyes, the towering authority that had taken its rightful place there had been changed for gentleness. Almost melancholy gentleness. This man before him had without doubt in Jesse’s mind, struggled the same way as him once. 
“I… I can’t,” he managed to get out, “If she had been open to meeting someone here, that other guy wouldn't have left her,” unsure if he was trying to convince Henry or himself. “At least he had the courage to try.” But those last words never left his mouth.
Have you ever wondered how many experiences you have missed out on, polishing your hull by the docks, theorizing and pondering over all the possible outcomes and consequences? Trying to figure out your opponent's final move before you’ve even drawn your first, not realising that you’ve already started to make up excuses proving why it’s not even worth a try.”
The young man’s eyes widened after every word. All his life had been spent alone and safe, because that was the easiest way not to get hurt. But right now, this man in front of him was speaking his secrets as if he was reading them from a nursery book. 
“But I like it there,” he tried to counter, realising that he was only playing into the man’s card even more, “It’s familiar, it’s calm, and most of all I don’t run the risk of getting hurt.”
A compassionate expression spread across the older man’s face as he examined him.
“Have you already lied to yourself long enough that you actually believe what you’re saying, or is there still some part of you that recognizes that the shield you’ve built to protect, is actually constraining your sail to catch the wind?” 
He knew that, he thought to himself. A suppressed fact, buried deep beneath the castle of lies and excuses he had told. A fact he was too afraid to recognize since it would reveal that he wasn’t someone that favours his own company over others. He wasn’t someone that enjoyed eating alone at school, nor was he someone that never found women around him beautiful. He was a coward.
When no answer was met, Henry continued, “The familiar and calm essence of the harbour is what makes it so dangerous. It traps you there because why should you put your boat at risk of sinking when you can watch it slowly bob up and down under the glistening sun by the dock instead? But it is when thoughts like that keep whispering, that you have to remember; that is not why it was built.”
The man was right, maybe the time had come for him to finally put his sail and hull to use. With newfound courage emboldened by the words he had just received, and a firm gaze on the beautiful woman’s golden hair, shining in the sun as his unused sail had done for many years, he lifted himself off the seat just as a thought hit him.
“Where are you going, sir?” he said, lowering himself down on the fabric again.
She could wait a little longer for him. It would be rude to leave the man without asking about himself, especially after having granted him such wise words. Besides, it wouldn't take that long.
Henry sighed when the young man sat back down in front of him, and he couldn’t restrain himself from glancing out through the window. He was in no hurry to come up with an answer, as he watched towards the scenery outside, almost as if he was searching for it among the mountaintops. 
“I’m going to see my wife,” he finally said softly, eyes still focused on the landscape beyond. 
“Where is she?” 
Another long pause took its place between them,  “Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.” The words barely audible behind the rustling from the train.
Jesse staggered. Had he heard the man correctly? But as tired eyes filled with sorrow turned back from the window and met the younger man, he knew he had not misheard. And all of a sudden, as if it had been hidden beneath a jolly mask the stout man had worn, he noticed the grey hairs spread across the bushy mustache and eyebrows. He noticed the wrinkles around the man’s eyes and tiny razor-cuts on his chin, caused by aging trembling hands. This man was much older than he had originally thought Jesse realised.
“Is she sick?” he managed to stumble out, trying to figure out where to look.
“Turberculosis,” Henry answered shortly.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” His gaze finally landed on the woman in the front.
As if he didn’t even recognise his condolences, the old man continued, “I still remember the first day I saw her at our school. A girl, barely able to stay seated at her desk from the excitement of answering the teacher's questions correctly, looked back at me with large brown eyes, reassuring me that I was not invisible.” A distant chuckle left his stomach. “Every day I would sit and stare at the back of her head in class trying to muster up the courage to ask her out, but never gathering enough.”
His gaze had returned towards the window, however this time it was not mountains that his eyes traced, but memories. Memories of days turning to months, and those months turning to years as his love for the woman grew larger and larger. 
“When we finally graduated, I thought it would be the last time I saw her. I knew that if I let this moment slip away, I would regret it for the rest of my life. Still, my tongue failed me, and the last thing I told her that day was goodbye.”
There was a long pause after he had finished speaking. Two men sitting in front of each other, silently admiring a woman they wish they would have spoken to. 
“Just like you, I began building walls. Hiding behind lies I convinced myself to believe because the truth of what I was haunted me every day that went by. I would play that last day together in my head, time and time again, hating myself for not being braver. Wishing that I would have said this or done that instead, deep down knowing that if I could go back to that day again, the outcome would have been the same.”
As Henry kept reminiscing about his wife, Jesse began to understand how this man had been able to penetrate his shield so easily. They were the same, he thought. It felt like the old man was describing his own life as he monologued, seeing the whole picture clearer for every sentence. 
“However,” Henry continued, “Eight years ago. On a train similar to this one, a woman asked if the seat opposite of me was empty and when I raised my head to look at her, large brown eyes looked back. And although age had left its trail around her face, I instantly recognised her. Naturally I invited her to sit down and to my pleasant surprise, she remembered me too. We started talking and I soon realised that she had divorced a few years back, leaving my window of opportunity larger than I had dared hope. I realised that this second chance I had been granted could not be thrown away, so with the help of all the sailing practice I had done over the years, I asked her out on a date. She said yes and even revealed that she had had an interest for me before graduation and was disappointed in me never pursuing her. Two years later I proposed, and we got married.”
A platform appeared, swooshing past their window as the train slowed down to a halt beside it, horn wailing. 
“I’m getting off here,” Henry said as he stood up and reached for his luggage above them.
Jesse hadn’t even noticed the train’s change in haste nor the man’s announcement of departure. He wasn’t even sure he had heard the last words of his story, because as Henry’s anecdote had mentioned that the reunion of him and his wife had taken place onboard a train like this, he had not been able to take his mind off that girl. 
“Jesse.” 
The robust voice awakened him from his daydreams and the young man suddenly realised that people around them had begun making their way towards the doors of the carriage. His gaze rose and met the towering man above him, like they had done when first meeting each other. 
“I am forever grateful for the second chance I was granted to meet my wife,” he began, deep blue eyes staring through every wall the young man had ever built, reaching his very core, “Although a day never goes by where I don’t regret never having asked her the first time. It might seem calm and tempting at the harbour this evening, son. But when the fishermen come back from the open sea with both stories and fish, and you find your body too old to follow them on their next journey.” He turned around to look at the woman as Jesse's gaze followed, “Don’t you dare feeling envious when you chose to cast your chance away.”
At this, the old man bid the young one farewell before the horn wailed once again. And although he was unsure if he had even said something in return, as the train continued rolling towards its next destination, Jesse found an ace that he could keep in Henry’s final words. 

The large white sun had turned a burning orange as it began its descent behind the mountains, colouring the skye an eye-catching shade of red and magenta. But this time the young man’s eyes were not charmed by the reflections in the windows of the houses by the dock as they often were. Nor were they charmed by the inviting shine from the lanterns that had been lit throughout the harbour. Because after having heard the story of an old fisherman late on his departure for the sea, his attention could not be drawn from the golden waves shining at the horizon. Nor could it be drawn from the rosy clouds hovering above the vast, terrifying yet captivating waters as he awaited the seagulls' wails to set sail. When the next station appeared and the train came to a halt as the horn made itself heard once again, the woman in front of him stood up from her seat by the window and on the tip of her toes, she reached for her luggage above her. The young man mirrored her movement as his heart began beating faster, afraid that it would burst out of his chest. Silently he followed her light steps out the doors and on to the platform where she paused, only a large step in front of him. He cleared his throat, took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a second before opening them and finally casting off the ropes from the dock.
“E–”
The wail from the train horn echoed along the station, drowning every word or confession spoken on the platform. A sudden gust of wind had grabbed the sails as the small boat had disembarked, striking fear and uncertainty into the young man. But when the horn grew silent again, so did he. Defeated, he remained among the people, watching as the golden waves and rosy clouds walked away from him. The wind had calmed down now, nothing was stopping him from trying again for the horizon. But maybe the harbour wasn’t that bad after all.

Edward decided today would be the end months ago.

Since then, he had planned for this day meticulously.

October 15th, 1881.

The gun had been easy to get, easier than he initially thought it would be. Theo had pointed him in the direction of one of Whitechapel's shadier alleyways, where he said a man often sold the things he needed. By pure luck, the man, who needed a proper shower and a new set of teeth, had just acquired a dirty, beat-up Lancaster pistol, and was willing to sell it, for a pretty penny. It cost Edward an arm and a leg, but it was worth it.

And after he was done, he wouldn't need the money anymore.

He had never been inside of Parliament before. His mom had liked to frequent it when he was younger, searching for the father that failed to make himself known. She swore he was a prominent politician, swore he had said he would marry her, raise their child as a citizen of high-society London. Most never believed her. Edward hadn't for awhile either.

He had memorized the ornate patterns on the outside of the building, the skill and the craft that defined the fortress and the country. While his mother wailed outside the doors, he snuck across the street, roaming St. James, admiring the green that seemed to be absent from the rest of the city.

Green would forever be his favorite color because of it. As he grew up, he dreamed of one day owning his own palace, complete with a large garden. He would have gardeners form hedges in the shape of swans, their elegant necks bending over cobblestone pathways that disappeared into rose bushes. He would have parties for fancy ladies to swish their long gowns atop the dewy blades of grass, dancing to the beautiful sound of a band who played long and loud. Willow trees would drip down over lakes, the sweet sound of birdsong the only noise one can hear. In another life, this was who he was, if his father had delivered on his promise.

The normally grey sky of England was bright blue today. Edward starts his day as he usually does. He gets out of bed, trudges into the kitchen, pouring himself days old porridge that had long soured in taste. Normally, he would head to the factory, but not today. Today was something different.

In the tiny bedroom he shared with two others, he grabs his clothes. He trades his rotting, disgusting work clothes for the suit of a wealthy man. Wiping his face with a damp cloth and fixing his tie, he glances into the mirror. Even through the grime, he thought the outfit looked good on him. He stuffs the gun in his jacket pocket, and grabs a notebook, a book, and a pen. Finally, he grabs a small stack of folded paper, which he gingerly puts in the inside of his coat. When he's done, he pats the paper through the jacket for good measure.

He thought about saying goodbye to his flatmates before he left, but decides against him. To them, he was just another body.

Stepping out into the street, he is greeted by the hustle of early morning. People shout, fighting to be heard over the sounds of heavy machinery and horses moving on the cobblestone. A smell hangs in the air, death, decay, the stench of people forgotten.

As he starts his journey, he remembers the first time he saw his father. His mother had been growing ill, some disease seeping through their borough which had claimed most of their neighbors, and she was terrified of Edward coming down with it too. So, she trudged him back to the front of the ornate gold building, and she waited for him to leave. Maybe it was fate, maybe it was luck, or maybe it was just serendipitous, but he actually walked out the door while his mother was there that day.

If any of the doubters had taken one look at this man, then took a moment to look at Edward, there would be no doubt. They had the same face, the same ash blonde hair, the same cloudy grey eyes. For Edward, it was like looking into the future. This man's blood flowed through his veins. He realized his mother had always been right.

The man, Henry Altham, took one glance into his son's eyes, heard the pleas of his mother begging him to save their son, then looked away and kept walking.

Edward's mother died soon after. She had spent her funerary funds on food, and thus the Poor Union buried her in a small wooden box. Due to the lack of headstone, even Edward eventually forgot exactly where she was.

Edward refused to call himself an orphan. His father was still alive. However, in the eyes of everyone else, especially the government, his parents were dead.

He spent the rest of his childhood growing up in an orphanage, mere miles from his father's house.

The ground below him is full of broken cobblestone pieces. He kicks one as he walks, grimacing at the scraping sound. A woman carrying a crate sends him a dirty look. He doesn't spare her a second glance.

He tries to take in the sights and sounds around him, but they begin to overwhelm his senses. Years of living in Whitechapel had given him chronic lung issues, and he finds himself stifling sneezes as he moves through clouds of smoke. Desperate for something tangible to bring his senses back to normal, he pats his jacket, sighing in relief when he feels the weight of the gun under his hand. In the other pocket, he can feel the small, raised square where the papers sit. Everything is going as planned.

Fifteen years of anger becomes a disease. By year five, Edward hated to look at himself. His eyes weren't his own anymore, they were his father's. His features,, his sandy blonde hair, they were all remnants of a man who didn't even want him.

He couldn't fathom how he came from a man that cruel. Did that make him the same? Terror, fear of becoming something other than himself drove Edward into the corners of the orphanage, and pushed away anyone that seemed to care. If he was alone, he couldn't hurt anyone, couldn't be like his father.

That was until Kelly walked into his life. Irish like his mother, she refused to let him hide away from her. Full of life, breathtakingly gorgeous, and everything he was terrified to lose.

He's finally entering a nicer part of town. He walks by a bookstore, stopping for a moment to peer inside the window. He pulls a watch from his jacket pocket, noting the time. It's only 8:34. He has time.

In the window sits a display of books. His eyes pass over them lazily, more doing this to fill the time then for any personal interest. Then his eyes fall on the birding book. It's propped open, and inside beautiful water colored birds stare back at him.

For a short period of his short life, he forgot about Henry, forgot about the anger. It melted inside, replaced with plans for a future and, maybe for the first time, hope. Kelly would walk with him to St. James, joining him on his walks. She loved the birds, but knew none of them. An uneducated woman, no one had stopped to inform her about the small Goldfinch, nor the swimming coot, not even the Great tit, which she promptly declared her favorite. It became his favorite for as well.

He promised himself he'd save up to buy her a birding book of her own, maybe eventually teach her how to read it. Until then though, she'd be able to look through the illustrations of his beat up copy and match them as they walked.

Kelly was found dead on February 17th, 1881. The constables couldn't decide if it was a bad client or a mugging gone wrong. At the end of the day, they didn't really care. Scotland Yard didn't waste resources on the death of a prostitute.

He used his funerary funds to give her a proper burial, and she was buried in a beautiful Catholic Church, somewhere in the country. Too far for him to visit often, but what she deserved.

And what he couldn't give her in life, he would give her in death.

Glancing at the book, he pulls out his own copy. This one is rather marked up, with birds crossed out, dates scribbled next to them.

A bell chimes in the distance. Edward shakes the memories out of his head. He couldn't let them distract him now.

He turns away from the window, marching straight towards the center of town.

Making his way into the busy center of town, he refocuses on his goal. As he walks, he dodges carts, ducks under outstretched arms, and nearly trips on a group of kids running around. No one bears him any mind, and he likes it that way. It will be easier to do what he needs to do if he's a ghost.

The smell of smoked meat hits his nostrils. He'll miss that smell. He stops to give a fruit merchant the last of his money in return for what he's told is a guava. From somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. One bite and he wants to buy the cart load. Everyone eats better than the idiots who live on this island.

The busy merchant streets fade into quiet, polished stone ones, while the outfits change from worn dulling fabrics to bright, massive gowns and fancy suits. Dressed in his finest, Edward didn't stick out this time. No one knew there was an imposter among them.

His mother often told him he was lucky. He glanced around at their ramshackle tenement, noticing the cockroaches climbing on the walls, the broken window covered with half a sheet, the amount of people crowded in the small room. She told him to have love and to be loved was luck, that it was a gift from God and should be treated as such. He never much believed in God.

With Kelly, he believed his mother to be right. After she was stripped from this world so brutally he grew angry with the concept and forever swore it off. If love was a gift, then why did it have to be taken away? Gifts weren't borrowed, meant to be repaid or returned. If those who loved were lucky, then Kelly would still be alive, and his mother would have gotten them off the streets and into a safe home. Love wasn't a gift from God. Love had taken everything from him.

His father had no love. His life was based on false promises he never delivered on. His career was defined by telling the people he would make their lives better, when he only made them worse. Everything he did was for his own benefit. Edward had read about his divorce in the paper, read about the other spoiled children in his life that were married off and sent to live comfortable lives at the expense of everyone else. How could such a selfish and cruel man be given the life he was given? If love defined luck, then how did a loveless man get so lucky? Edward had been loved so genuinely, and here he was, penniless and dejected, about to do the unthinkable.

The gleaming walls of Parliament soon loom in front of him. Ten minutes before the 9 am session, the grounds team with life. Important men stride into the building in droves, laughing and gossiping over stuff Edward didn't care to know about.

In the crowd he caught sight of his father. Though his father was now in his 60's, he still had a youthful quality to him. His blonde hair had resisted grey, and his eyes shown with an energy not found in the men that surrounded him. Standing across the street, Edward was invisible to him. For a moment, Edward wants him to see him. He wants his father to read his mind, to hear everything he wanted to scream aloud. He wants his father to know what he was about to do and try to stop it, and fail trying. His father's eyes glanced his way, but drifted over Edward as if he was no one of consequence. How wrong would he be.

As soon as his father disappears into the halls of Parliament, Edward starts his walk over. Dodging carriages, he makes his way to the entrance.

Months of planning all led to this moment. He had spent many an afternoon befriending the staff, the people the government nobodies refused to address. On the off chance the Stranger's Gallery was cleared, Edward needed to be sure his plan wouldn't go awry. Many people allow those they befriend to do things they wouldn't let strangers do. Anonymity with the working class was his enemy here.

The staff knew him as Stephen Fitzroy, a aristocrat from the North. Befriending them didn't take long, and his friendships had gotten him everything from a front row seat to the very times his father passed through the hallways.

It was through them that he learned his father was making a speech today.

There was a bill passing through the House of the Lords, some bill regarding the protection of the Irish, and his father, well his father was speaking against it. Another spit on his Irish mother's grave.

As he passes through the archways, he nods towards William, one of the guards, who returns his nod with a large grin.

"Mr. Fitzroy, beautiful day isn't it?" Willy says, his voice gruff and deep.

Edward smiles back. "Always a beautiful day in London!"

"If you can see through the smog!"

Edward turns down the hallway, leaving Willy at his post. He joins the throngs of wealthy citizens as they step into the Stranger's Gallery. The House lay before them, full of uptight men in stuffy, expensive, clothing. Edward has always thought it garish how even in here, as they decide the fate of the country, they must spend money on things that do not matter to feel important. Should the role itself not be enough?

Edward finds his spot near the front. His eyes search the men below, eventually settling on the bright eyes of his father. He finds him in the third row, within eye sight of the gallery.

Perfect. He will see everything.

Edward wants everyone in that room to see him. There's no point in masking it.

About ten minutes pass, and the rest of the gallery enters the space. Minutes later, Parliament begins. Edward sits on the edge of his seat. They pass through different bills, ordinances, but his father remains seated.

About an hour in, a man preaches insistently about currency and giving money to the government, which is of no interest to Edward. However, as the man drones on and on, another gentleman, the one sitting next to his father, stands up.

"I spy a stranger!" His nasally voice echoes in the room. At once, the guards stationed in the gallery stand, ushering the Strangers out of the gallery. Edward's eyes go wide. He shakes his head, 'no,' he thinks, 'this can't be, I can't do it here, like this.' He tries to stand his ground, but a woman in a brilliant green dress smacks directly into him. She moves on without a care in the world. Edward rolls his eyes. Rich people.

He attempts to right his footing, but he is swept up in the stream and prevented from returning by a large guard.

Outside in the hallway, he stops himself from cursing. 'This can't, this can't be how it ends!'

He thinks back to the blueprints of the building that he kept on his wall, searches his brain for any other ledge or entrance overlooking the room he was just in.

A lightbulb goes off. Edward roams the halls, searching for the friendly guard. When he spots Willy, he tries to hide his stress.

"Willy!" The guard turns to look at him, "I need your assistance." He reaches him, "Are you willing to take this man on an adventure?"

"An adventure?"

"Certainly. They've kicked us from the Stranger's gallery, the bullocks. I needn't make this entire trip a waste." He sighs, "The wife has shared with me that apparently there is a way to access the roof."

"She has?"

"She has. Apparently, she says, the view of London is to simply die for. She wants me to see it so I can relay the image to our painter, who will paint it for us. Since we live out of the city, she says she misses it, but the heavens know she complained of the opposite when we lived here!" He chuckles, as does Willy. "If it's too much to ask -"

"No, no, certainly not. Come, quickly." Willy glances around, then ushers Edward down a hall. They stumble upon a door, which, when opened, leads to a metal staircase leading sharply up.

"After you." Edward gestures, and Willy starts the ascent. The stairs are windy and rather steep, the lack of windows creating stale air in the small space.

Eventually, they reach the top. Willy opens a trap door, and sunlight pours into the passage. Willy exits, followed by Edward.

The view truly is incredible. Edward wishes he did have a painter that could capture it.

"This is it!"

"Wow." Edward whispers. He notices some windows. Peering in, it becomes clear the space he was just kicked out of lies just below them. He turns to Willy, choosing his next words carefully. That man carries a gun, and could easily stop what he's about to do. He needs to be alone for this.

"Would it be any trouble if I spend some time crafting a sketch of the skyline?" He grabs a notebook from inside his jacket pocket, holding it up to the guard. "I shan't be long."

Willy looks between him and the stairwell door. His eyes weigh the pros and cons, and eventually, his misplaced trust in the man before him wins out. "I'll be at the bottom of the stairs, mustn't let the bosses know I've strayed too far!" He turns to leave, but hesitates, "don't take too long."

"Don't you worry, I'll be a mere five minutes." Edward gives Willy one of his most charming smiles, which finally results in the man leaving him alone.

It is incredible how much you can get away with by being nice to the right person.

He heads over to the windows. He gently pushes on one, noticing it opens to the rafters below. His father's booming voice echoes around him. He's speaking.

It is time.

Edward takes the gun out of his jacket pocket. Checking the barrel and sighing in relief when he sees the two bullets staring back at him. Kneeling down, he aims the pistol towards his father. Tucked behind the ornate features that hold up the ceiling, his weapon will be hidden from view by the very opulence that they have used to shield themselves with.

Even though his father is loud, the space around Edward feels silent. He can hear every breath he takes, loud as all else in his ears.

He flips the safety off. The barrel is on his chest. This is it, this is vengeance.

A creaking noise sounds from somewhere near him. For a moment, he sees a flash of color. 'Must be a bird,' he thinks to himself. He can't focus on it. The only thing that matters is this right here. This shot.

His fingers close on the trigger.

BAM!

His father drops to the ground, a clear shot to the head.

He's dead.

The room is thrown into chaos. Members of Parliament run out screaming.

Edward's finger loosens on his trigger, his eyes going wide with shock.

He flips the barrel open.

Two bullets.

He didn't shoot.

Edward glances around, looking for any trace of another assassin in the rafters. He has no idea where the other bullet came from.

This is not how it was supposed to go. He was supposed to kill that man. He was supposed to avenge his loved ones, granting them the justice they so rightfully deserved. Then he was going to free himself of the pain of it all. He can't do that now, he can't face his mother knowing he wasn't the won that atoned for his father's sins.

If someone did it politically, then his father would become a martyr. They would uphold him as a man who was murdered to prove a point, a man who's life was cut short by a monster. No, no if Edward had killed him, then it would have been just. When they found Edward's body, they would find the papers in his pocket. They would find this s father's one slip up. The letter he wrote to his mother during their time together, the one where he claimed he would care for their son as his own. Though the letter had fold marks, the handwriting was still as bold and visible as the day his father wrote it. He couldn't escape the truth. Not this time.

There would be no heroism, rather a just questioning of how much power his father had, and how much he abused it.

SLAM!

Somehow over the sound of the yelling in the room, he can still hear the stairway door burst open. A group of people rush around the space behind him.

Edward presses his gun into his jacket, and hides himself as best he can into the sides of the rafters. He holds his breath. He'd pray, but he doesn't think there's anything he can pray to.

"The window's open!" A slurry of sounds attacks his ears, and moments later, a cop peers in through the open window. He looks around, his eyes not focusing in the dark. He doesn't notice Edward. Moments pass, and the cop retracts his head.

"The shots most certainly came from up here." The cop says from outside, confusion lacing his voice.

Edward cocks his head. He didn't fire, and there was no one else up here with him. His eyes scan the room around him, noticing the other ledges and nooks the true killer could have made their hideout. These cops have the wrong window.

"There's nothing there, sir."

"Did you check everywhere?" A gruff voice sounds from outside. A moment later, another head peers in. This must be the owner of the gruff voice, thick mutton chops on a large square head. Edward can smell the smoke wafting on him from here.

The man's dark eyes pass through the space, studying it with precision not often found in officers. Observation skills more keen to an animal than a man, this is someone that doesn't tend to miss things.

That's why, when Edward feels his eyes rest on his hidden frame, he knows he's done for. He will hang for a crime he didn't commit. He debates leveling the gun at his neck, ending it all, just like he'd planned, but, he can't face his mother this way.

"There's nothing here, is there?"

Dearest Admir,

I have done it. I have crossed the threshold and found myself on that far and strange land. I know you must think me mad, but I have truly done it. You will see, Admir. You will see my works and you will finally believe. I have faith in you. I know we do not always agree, but you have a talent for the transmundane with which few of us can compare, even if you are not willing to recognize your own brilliance. I only wish you had not been afraid, perhaps I could have made this journey sooner. Perhaps we could have made it together.

The application of the sigil was the key, as we had always known. I was just so lost in the turns of its golden spirals. I was not ready to see it for what it truly is, so I was blind in the pursuit of it. It is a truth so beautiful and immense, it can scarcely be grasped at all by the unprepared mind. I had to let go of all my preconceived notions of metaphysical formulae to even scratch the surface. I had to dabble in spellcraft that any reasonable man would only ever deem as foolish. Yet it was the proper route. My notes, please read them when all is said and done.

I marked the circle there upon the floor with the sign. I imbibed on the ambrosia spoken of by the pallid ones. Recited the verbal components in that most alien of languages. The world became like a dream, yet I was awake! Well and truly awake, for the first time! This illusion fell away from me like a cloth over my eyes, and there appeared one from the winged race of the Hyades. It spoke to me in a strange way still, but I understood now. It was a song I have always heard. A song ever present in those fleeting moments of half-lidded dreams. I can not believe I had ever forgotten. May I never forget again.

They took me there, to the land beyond the moon. I do not know how we traveled so, but it seemed like the whole world vanished around us in a washing away of its colors and in its place was quickly painted that yellow horizon. The blazing suns hung over my head and crawling things writhed upon the ground. The towers of the city rose high, they could be seen from anywhere, dominating the landscape. I pray to the living god that you should get to see the majesty of this place, old friend. The city, it was greater than anything I had imagined, and I wandered toward it like a moth to the flame. Compulsion is the only way that I can describe it, though, I do not think it can truly be described. Not with mere words. A force acting upon senses hitherto unknown to me. An awakening in my heart of hearts.

I almost died of the heartbreak after Katarina left this world. I was inconsolable in my grief, and I blamed you. I know I never admitted it, I lied to you. I am sure you realized. I hated you, so much. So very much. I called you a coward. I cursed the ground you walked on. I spoke your name to myself like a demon in the night, words full of spite and ill omens. For that, I am sorry. Please believe me when I say that I never stopped loving you. Not once, even when my very soul brimmed with anger and hate. But I do not blame you anymore, for any of it. What final vestiges of that animosity that persisted have been burned away from me now.

I have abandoned those petty things, in the face of this new truth. All is well. My sense of love has changed, it is practically alien like those strange tongues of the Byakhee, but all the same it remains for you. I do not belong here. I do not think I have ever belonged here. Had I not said as much to you when we were young men? When your father denounced us? When Katarina died? This world has nothing for me anymore, save for you.

This will be my final letter, Admir. I will not be returning. I will face this new world with wide eyes and an open heart. Yet, I do not wish to face it alone. I long for your company still. Please, come to me. I will wait for you, my love. There, on the shores of Carcosa.

>A letter obtained from Magus Prefect Admir Didak, believed to be written shortly before the incident at the Chishik House. Didak admitted to offering his expertise to Rasmus Zolto in the earliest stages of the alchemist's research but claims to have promptly distanced himself from the project for fear of Zolto's developing madness. Several parts of the original letter were rendered illegible by rampant, overlapping scrawls across various portions of the page, while others were incoherent strings of gibberish and nonsensical glyphs. These sections have been omitted.

16 Inches

Eight days had passed since the deadline to take the fish houses off the lake. He watched them go, one by one, all week. With each morning, they went about the same methodical, inevitable ritual. They jacked up the shanties and winched them off, leaving only a clean rectangle, the impression of a presence. The warden had come and put a notice on his door. He read it once and left it.

In January, he received a cake and a calendar after forty years on the county road crew. They hung the calendar above his favourite chair. The following Monday, he drove his shack out onto the lake.

He’d drill a hole every morning before he did anything else. He leaned on the auger until it busted through, lowered his tape, and measured the ice. Sixteen inches. That was a good number.

His shack had no windows. When he shut the door, complete black consumed him until the green glow from the spearing hole shone through, lit from beneath by the daylight in the lake. He could see the weeds on the bottom, the small perch swimming among them, the grains of debris drifting through the light’s rays.

The only light in the shack came from the lake.

He let down the decoy, a wooden perch he had carved, its colours worn now. His spear hung above his door. Seven tines, with a rope on the handle tied to a cleat in the wall, so whatever he struck, he would not lose. Then he sat on his bench in wait.

The men at the bait shop had talked about an old pike for as long as he had been coming to the lake. She was female, larger than a grown man. She lived in the deep waters and came up to the shallows only in the last weeks of ice. Most of the men who had first told him about her were dead now. No one had ever seen her.

He had.

The winter of his son’s birth, a shadow passed through the hole from one end and kept coming until it filled the hole and ran past both edges. It hung there long enough for him to see its eye, then vanished before he thought to reach for his spear.

He told his wife, Ruth, he’d return when he caught her. He also told her he’d be back by the Sunday at the end of the month regardless, for his grandson’s baptism.

He sat with the green light reflecting across his boots. He was content. He hadn’t known a person could be so content, or that contentment, when it came at last, would feel so much like waiting.

15 Inches

The ice, once seamless, had begun to pull away from the shore as a band of open water now lay some yards across. He laid a plank over it and crossed over to the ice. His truck remained on land. He drilled his hole. Fifteen inches. Still a good number.

Ruth had driven down to the lake. He walked out to the edge of the ice sheet to meet her. They stood on opposite sides of the open water.

You promised by the end of the month.

I know.

It’s Sunday. It’s happening today.

I know what day it is.

He’s got your name. You should be there when they say it.

He tightened his lips and looked back at his shed.

Is it the fish? she asked.

I’ll come back when I get her.

What do I tell them?

That I’m fishing.

She stood a while longer, then returned to her car and drove away.

The lake began to speak that night. A sound like a great wire drawn tight. It was a familiar sound, but he always heard it whilst on land. The deep rumble began from the north shore, running toward him, then passing beneath him so that he felt it in his back and his teeth. Hearing it whilst lying on a cot in his dim shack was another thing.

Fifteen, he said.

He lay still until he was sure it wouldn’t come again.

15 Inches

The green beamed straight up through the hole. He had watched the decoy so long he no longer saw it. Then the green glow darkened, as if a cloud had passed over the sky beneath the lake; he looked, and a long shadow slid under the light. Flat and wide, her behemoth head emerged first, then her body slithered into view; dark olive, adorned with creamy spots, her scales firm and taut like chainmail, nearly shimmering in the green glow; it came on and on and on until it covered the hole from end to end. Then she stopped - suspended right under his decoy. He looked right into her eye.

He reached for his spear, moving slowly so as not to shake the ice, and held it with both hands just a foot above the water. It was a trivial throw. He had made a life for himself making much harder ones.

He would drag her in, and they would need to invent a scale large enough to weigh her. He would proudly pose beside her for a photo, and they would stick it on the wall. The men would hail him for completing what Ahab could not. Then there would be the day after that. And then the day after that. And then all of the other days on nothing but dry land. Days with nothing left beneath him to wait for.

He held the spear over the hole as she hung motionless in the green.

And then she left. She departed like light leaving the wall from the noon to evening, so unhurriedly that he could not say when she began to go, only that she was going, and now she was gone. The green glow gleamed back up the hole.

He hung the spear back up. He told himself he had not been quick enough. She was still down there. Tomorrow he could wait for her again, and the day after, and the day after.

The moon would descend, and the ice would rumble again.

14 Inches

The propane ran out. He awoke before dawn to the chill. He drilled his hole and read the tape. Fourteen inches. He loaded the empty cylinder onto his sled and ambled towards the shore.

The gap of water between the shore and the sheet of ice had doubled. His plank barely reached the edge, its far end resting on soft, grey ice. Once on shore, he looked back to his shack. It was the only thing that remained on the lake. Then he drove home.

Ruth was sitting at the dinner table when he arrived. On their fridge, there was a photograph of his grandchild. An infant in a white gown.

They poured it on him three times, Ruth said. He didn’t cry.

His eyes lingered on the photograph.

Did you get your fish?

No.

He went to his chair beneath the calendar and sat. Ruth came and stood by.

What are you doing? she said.

Nothing.

She went into the other room.

He meant to return to the lake by the afternoon. But the house was warm, and then the evening came. He slept in his own bed for the first time since January. He awoke after midnight. He heard the wind come around to the south, placed his hand on the window, and felt warmth in the glass.

Zero

At daybreak, the plank was gone. A channel hundreds of feet wide separated the ice sheet from the shore. Far out, his shack stood alone, slightly tipped over. He watched it from shore all morning. Toward noon, it listed even further. Its demise was gradual. It settled like an old animal in its final rest. The water consumed the shack, one end and then the other.

He thought of the spear on its hook, the decoy on its line, and the room filling with the same green light it had always looked down into. Then the roof went under.

In the evenings of that spring, he stood by the window over the sink and looked out at the lake. No more ice. He stood by the window anyway, for hours, the way he gazed into the green glow within his shack.

26

Matt felt most at home at two in the morning, when the city's outlines blurred into a soft mist. He lingered beneath the Nightbird’s awning. The whiskey still flowing warmly through his blood after the last call. He lit his cigarette. Hand curved around the flame despite the air’s stillness.

He imagined the photograph. Grainy, underexposed, and slightly out of focus. One that makes a man look burdened with the weight of the world.

Indeed, there was a sadness. Since fifteen, perhaps. He discovered it made for a good photograph, caught the light in a certain way. It looked good with whiskey. With cigarettes. With women who said they could tell he was somewhere else. Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, Cobain, Winehouse, all twenty-seven. It was supposed to be a short trip, and he packed appropriately. He left savings behind; those were for people with a future. He left the dentist six years ago. He left his job, a restaurant, quitting in the middle of a Saturday rush. Untied his apron, laid it on the steel like a man surrendering his sword. He had never felt so alive as he did on that walk home.

The warmth of burning a bridge. For a single night, it glows. It’s the warmest thing in the city. At twenty-six, how many bridges there still were!

His brother, Paul, called on Sundays. Paul was four years older. He had a family. A house and an infant daughter. He’d leave Matt voicemails about nothing. Matt never picked up, but some nights he played them and listened.

33

He shifted the date once, then again, and then again. Twenty-seven became thirty. Thirty became “soon”.

Lena made note of things in advance. She’d note a future doctor’s appointment, their anniversary in March, her sister’s wedding in April. She asked him to plan something nice for March.

I’ll take you some place special.

And where’s that?

Relax. You’ll know in March.

She knew then they would not make it to March.

He watched her pack her things. He hoped for tears. For anger. He hoped for a storm. To be the kind of man for whom storms came. Instead, she asked only if he’d like to keep the coasters.

He told the story at the Nightbird three times. The first time, she simply left. By the third, she delivered an impassioned eulogy. Ran out the door as he watched her taillights fade into the night. It was the kind of story that earned him drinks. On the walks home afterwards, he felt the old warmth flicker up.

Months later, she called. He watched it ring. Watched it stop. He tried hard enough. “Love just wasn’t meant for people like him.”

45

A bank had replaced the Nightbird. Now, he drank at Benny’s. It was a block away. The stools were harder, and the lights weren’t quite as moody. He had lost two molars. He could not afford a bridge, so he chewed on his right. His mornings arrived with an incessant cough. He told himself it was his voice was deepening with age.

One Friday, the bartender at Benny’s, a young man, set a glass of water before him without asking. “Let’s do a water, boss,” he said, as though speaking to someone’s feckless uncle.

Matt normally knew how to turn being thrown out into a story. However, this subdued sympathy left him uncertain. Uncomfortable. He drank the water, murmured a thanks, and stepped outside to smoke.

He repeated the ancient ritual and imagined the photograph, but as a chatty trio of college students neared, they fell silent, swerving toward the curb. Recovering their voices only once they had passed Matt by.

Matt promptly finished his cigarette.

61

Paul was asleep when his heart gave out. Matt prepared his words and mentally rehearsed them on the train ride over, watching his reflection in the window. He would be the soulful brother, the cowboy, the black sheep.

The event was packed with faces and voices Matt did not recognise. Paul’s daughter spoke of the early morning drives to school. His dutiful effort and care. And through it all, he uttered not a single complaint. She lamented that she did not understand her father’s service until she took up the mantle of parenthood herself.

Friends and colleagues shared words of commiseration and celebration. Paul was reliable. Paul was the one you called. Paul was a mover.

Nobody asked Matt to speak.

At the reception, a woman asked how he knew Paul.

I’m his brother.

Oh - I’m sorry. He never mentioned-

She walked away, thinking it strange. She sat amongst the others and forgot him.

Matt stood alone as it flickered through his mind like a match struck in the darkness. Two in the morning, pacing the hallway, rocking his infant daughter back to sleep. Birthday cakes from the grocery store. A call to his mother once a week. Thirty years of the same argument with his wife. A living room too small for all its guests, but warm and inviting all the same. A life immense and sublime.

Paul’s life.

Matt thought of the voicemails. He tried to recall when they stopped. He could not. They ended so quietly. So far back. His chest tightened.

He stepped out into the parking lot. Cupped his hand around the lighter. He leaned against the lamppost where those leaving would see him: the brother outside the funeral, solitary in the chill. It was a better photograph than the one inside. It was never a hard choice. It had never been a hard choice, not once.

He stayed until everyone left. Nobody came over.

68

At two in the morning, his smoke detector began to chirp. The detector hung from the ceiling of his dingy apartment, out of reach, and his knees could no longer bear the chair.

He scrolled through his phone, through names he hadn't spoken to in years. Paul’s daughter had sent a card the first Christmas after the funeral, but not another after. Matt reasoned it was foolish to call his niece at 2 AM about a detector battery. You don’t call anyone at 2 AM about a battery.

He thought about writing her a letter instead. He composed the first line in his head. It was a lovely line. He did not write it down.

He pulled the heater closer to the chair by his window. Once again, he curled his hand around the lighter.

The detector chirped again.

I came awake. Not all at once, more of a one sense at a time kind of thing. At first, I felt something in bed with me. Like when I’d been living at my old apartment with my old cat. He would always join me in bed sometime in the night and I would always wake up just enough to know he was there. Occasionally, I’d even roll on my side so he could snuggle up in my semi-circle. I guess he trained me to do that.

But this was different. Not because those tiny padding paws were doing anything Pedro hadn’t ten thousand times, or because I’d had to put the old guy down five years ago and hadn’t seen fit to replace him. It was like whatever it was in bed with me was trying to sneak.

My sleeping mind had been on the verge of declaring what was happening a dream anyway and putting that sense of touch back on “Ignore” before those tiny padding paws padded toward my face. Pedro had only done that a few times to my recollection; back when he still had a large amount of feral in him. Back when he never came out in the daytime and only investigated me when he knew I wasn’t awake.

I opened my eyes. Maybe it was a mix of poor vision and a mostly sleep-caked mind, but there was no panic in me. Whatever it was, was cat-sized and dark. Two blurry orbs recessed in what I assumed was its head, pointed in my direction. It stopped in its tracks for a moment before dipping its head and bringing those silvery eyes just about level with mine.

The only surprise in me was that I wasn’t panicking. I felt my breathing, still long and deep, like physiologically I was still asleep. My ears prickled as I strained to hear something to corroborate what my weak eyes were informing me was in front of me.

Perhaps, I could catch it. I felt the muscles of my arm and back tense before I’d made the conscious decision to move, to trap it. But that had been enough to make the cat-thing skittish, and it turned its head as quick as a laser, racing for the edge of the bed. I felt those padding paws trace down the inside of my thigh, the thought coming too belatedly to grab for it.

I never felt the cat-thing again. Saw or heard it, either. It was like it was a ghost or something that conjured from my dream. Except I was awake. And even though I didn’t know what it was, I knew something was in bed with me.

Before I could sit up, something pulled from my face. It didn’t hurt and there was no pressure as if something had been on my face and was then gone. It just felt like something had been there that I’d never felt and only from it being removed was I ever aware that it had been there at all. Kind of like that thin plastic layer on the screen of a cell phone that you could either peel off or leave on and the phone still worked perfectly fine.

I swung the covers off and swiveled on my butt to place my feet on the floor. Again, no panic that whatever that thing was was under the bed waiting to scratch me. I knew without knowing it was gone, like my body had a sense of how much air was supposed to be in the room and none of it had been displaced by a ten-pound animal waiting somewhere inside here with me.

Interesting that I’d thought “waiting” instead of “hiding.” But on the off chance my internal alarms weren’t working properly, I reached for the light switch over my nightstand. I expected to squint against the light, but my eyes were already adjusted. I got done on one knee and then all fours before peering beneath my bed. There were a couple pairs of slippers under there, two dumbbells, a composition notebook, and a box of tissue I must have forgotten about and kicked underneath without realizing. But no cat and nothing that looked roughly cat-like. Definitely, nothing alive.

I keep my bedroom door open, so it could have run out, but the head of my bed is by the door. The thing had run toward the foot. If it had come in that way, surely, it wouldn’t have forgotten and run the opposite way.

The door was the only way out, though. My only guess was it had found some spot in here to hide. I grabbed a pillow from the bed and pulled the case off. Odds were, I wouldn’t be able to catch it in here, but I’d rather have something I could use to protect my face in case I cornered it and it decided to attack.

My closet door was closed, so there wasn’t a need to check there and there was no room to hide underneath my dresser. It wasn’t flush against the wall on one side, so my guess was it was either there or hiding behind the television. I stood long enough to cautiously step close enough to see there was nothing behind the TV before getting into a crouch, stepping cautiously around my bed as I crept closer to my dresser.

I don’t know why there wasn’t anything in me like fear in those moments. The thing could have been rabid for all I know. Or it could have tried to eat my face. But just before peeking around the edge of the dresser, I realized either way it wouldn’t be something I couldn’t handle.

But whatever the animal had been, it wasn’t being now.

It was a relief, but not that much. I spent about five more minutes searching my room and then made a half-hearted sweep of the rest of my one-bedroom apartment. There wasn’t a lot of furniture and not any hidey-holes I could think of. Getting back to bed was more of a priority, so I called it quits.

I made a pit stop in the bathroom and as I washed my hands in the sink, I looked at my face. No sleep puffiness, no restless red eyes. It hadn’t scratched me and whatever had come off my face hadn’t left a mark. I splashed water on my face anyway and traced my fingers down my brow and over my eyes and cheeks before meeting at the point of my chin.

Some didn’t feel right.

I opened my eyes and stared at my reflection. Nothing looked off. I turned my head from side to side and didn’t see anything weird. But when I felt my face again—I couldn’t tell what—something was wrong. Very wrong.

There was a sample-size facial cleanser in the shower that I’d gotten from the dermatologist’s office. I splashed more water on my face and worked up a good lather in my hands and really worked my face over. After rinsing the soap off, I felt my face again, and dammit something was still wrong.

I looked at my hands. Maybe there was something wrong there and it only felt like it had been my face. Nothing looked wrong and when I felt each hand in turn, everything felt right to the touch. It was specifically my face.

I washed my face twice more for good measure before feeling like my senses returning to me. This was stupid. I’d just had a fright from an animal—hell, maybe a hallucination—waking me up in the middle of the night and my mind’s way of processing was probably sensing something else that wasn’t there.

Except I had never been afraid. And poor vision or not, I knew I’d seen something. Felt it, too.

Sleep was the priority, though. I’d been awake for maybe twenty minutes, and I had a meeting at 8:30. If I got up at eight on the nose, I’d have a little less than seven hours’ sleep. That is if I could conk myself out in the next five minutes.

I flipped the light off and got back under the covers. A little box-breathing slowed my heart rate and helped me clear my mind.

The quiet-empty of outside slipping in the room with me. In a few hours, passing vehicles and children between the ages of eight and sixteen would be one story down, just outside my bedroom window talking—all of which I’d slept through countless times. But right now that quiet-empty filled my bedroom. It expanded like a parade float, covering the air, settling over me, crushing the air out of my lungs and filling me back up with more quiet-empty—

“Stop it.” The sound of my voice chased the quiet-empty away. I could feel it at the corners of my room, waiting for me to relax so it could infiltrate again. I couldn’t stay vigilant all night. At some point, I had to get back to sleep.

But I continued flexing some foreign part of me, like I was trying to balance myself on a tightrope that ran the length of me. Like it was just under my bedsheets and if I teetered too far this way, I would fall.

Into what, I couldn’t imagine. As I lay there, though, helpless and sharp-minded, wary and exposed, a question became clear to me.

How the hell do I get back to sleep?

“Right, onto the next topic.” The man sitting at the head of the table set down his hefty stack of papers and raised his hand for attention. “Higher-ups say we need to provide a balance patch for the amphibian class, somehow, buff them up a bit so they stop drying out.” He rolled his eyes. “Apparently, having the sky dripping down on them is not enough. Greedy creatures, aren’t they.”

“It’s—” The woman sitting a few seats away coughed into her hand. “We’re calling it rain, Davis.

“Whatever.” Under his breath: “‘World-building’ is so lame.” He coughed. He crossed his arms and sat back. “Any ideas?”

The people sitting around the table all glanced around at each either, no one wanting to be the first to speak. 

Davis groaned. “We don’t have all day, people! Ideas!”

“What if we gave them some kind of buff?” one man suggested. “Right now, they’re just a little underwhelming.” Davis made considering sounds as he spoke, writing along on a sheet of scrap paper. “We could make them a little more… fearsome. Maybe a painful bite? Or I don’t know, claws. A sort of paralysing toxin would be cool..” Davis was nodding along, but he suddenly paused. He looked up.

“Not this again,” muttered the man beside him.

“And,” the first continued, “We could make them stronger. Like, just to make them more intimidating. We can give them spikes or something, and increase their aggression. These spikes could have some insane poison that kills anything it touches.”

He stared incredulously at the man. He didn’t look away, but he didn’t exactly meet his gaze. Davis lowered his pen, which had been scribbling a doodle of a horse.

“Also,” the man continued, “I suppose we would have to make them more common… being nocturnal would be cool—” He flinched as he was kicked from under the table. He turned to glare at the man next to him.

“Exactly how is that supposed to help, Tom?” the aggressor hissed, venom in his tone.

“Excuse me, John, what do you mean?” Tom hissed back. He gesticulated with wild, frantic motions as he attempted to convey the depths of his passion. “It’s—It’s sick!”

“Did you even look at the species overview on amphibians? They basically won’t be amphibians anymore!” John glared at him. 

“But it’s so cool!” Tom insisted.

John threw up his hands. “I know what you’re trying to do! You’re just salty that my team denied your latest organism proposal, right?!” Tom simmered, shooting daggers through the other man with his eyes. “Newsflash, we’re actually trying to make something coherent here! We can’t have like a bunch of creepy murderous nightmare creature… things crawling around everywhere terrorizing everyone. Stick to your horror novels!”

“I’ll get it approved one day, you’ll see,” Tom muttered darkly. “If you’re scared of ‘ants’ you should see my ‘spiders-’”

“You’re flying too close to the sun,” someone else chimed in with a bored tone. “I know how this goes. You keep nagging them with an overpowered design, and they’ll just hit you with a hard nerf.”

“Try me,” Tom declared. “The best they can do is shrink ‘em down, a little, but they’re never gonna be able to stop them from taking over the world–-”

“Guys,” Davis cut in. There was a pleading note in his voice.

There was a pause of silence.

Davis folded his hands together and stared at the table, wondering why in the world he agreed to head this meeting when it was absolutely time for him to head home. He could really use a paid vacation at the moment.

“Hey,” one man spoke, “We just need the amphibians to stop drying out, right? And rain isn't enough because it has to be timed? What if rain just formed lakes?”

There was a long pause of silence.

Someone released a suspiciously-laughter-like cough. The man looked around defensively.

Davis sighed. “Moving on-”

“No, hey,” the man protested, “Just think about it! The problem is that they’re drying up, so just add more water!”

Davis pressed his palm into his temple. “Look, Richard, if we did that, the entire Earth would be flooded in a matter of weeks,” he said, sounding irritated that he even had to explain it.

As he said that, a man sitting several seats away gasped. ‘Brilliant idea,’ the man mouthed, beginning to scribble notes down in a thick leather-bound book. Davis glanced over his direction with a slight frown, but quickly looked away while shaking his head. ‘Bible’ was written on the cover. Was the hell was that guy doing, wasting his time writing flash fiction when he could be contributing to the incredibly pressing work meeting? 

“It just needs tweaking!” Richard insisted.

“Way too much tweaking,” Davis complained, “How in the world did you even come up with something inane like that?” He stood half out of his seat to lean over; he managed to catch a glimpse of Richard’s screen and scattered papers even as he was attempting in vain to obscure them with his arms. He gasped out. “A—ha! Ducks! You don’t care about amphibians, you only want lakes for your—” He stopped. He squinted at him. “...Why are you pulling together a proposal? You already made ducks. I saw them. They’re down there right now, wandering around and frolicking in fields.”

Richard bristled. “There can be more!” he defended.

“A second kind of duck,” Davis deadpanned. “Okay. Okay, whatever.” He slumped back into his seat, mumbling, “Management will filter it out.” He crossed his arms. “I swear, if you people have no better ideas, this entire Earth project might be a lost cause.”

“That’s a bit unfair to say,” Richard said, but quickly shut up when a scowl was angled in his direction.

“Hey.” One woman raised her hand. “When he said lakes...”

“No. We are not proceeding with this line of conversation,” Davis muttered.

“No, really, he has a point, think about it,” she insisted, “The problem with his idea is flooding, right? We just need the bodies of water to timeout after a little bit.”
He gave pause. 

“Despawning lakes?!” Richard demanded. He rose half out of his seat and slammed his hands against the table. “That’s ridiculous!”

She turned on him, incredulous. “You suggested it!”

He fell back into his seat, grumbling.

“Wait,” Davis said contemplatively, “I actually do see what you mean. And if we just scale down those lakes a bit…”

“Down?” Richard almost screeched, affronted. The people closest to him leaned away at his sheer volume.

“Maybe by five thousand percent, as a base starting point…”

“That’s not enough to float in!” Richard threw up his arms.

“Make the ducks smaller,” a woman said to him.

He looked offended that she even thought of it. “They’re already small enough thanks to management,” he said sniffily, “You can’t make me make them smaller. They deserve to be seen.”

"Dude, come on, size doesn't matter."

“Ohh, let me guess,” someone else said under their breath, “You were going to make them Colossus creatures…”

He heard it anyway and turned red. “I don’t see why only the dragons get to be Colossal,” he said sulkily.

“Heard they’re binning the ‘dragon’ concept anyway. They were too ‘OP’ or whatever.”

“Hey, you—you guys shut up.” Davis eyed them. “We were actually making progress.”

“We would have made progress,” Tom grouched, “If you had listened to my idea about buffing the amphibians—”

John slammed the table with both palms, shooting up from his seat to face Tom. “Okay-”

“No, don’t start.” Davis held up a hand. “We’ve already established that you have nothing good to say. Moving on.” Tom was left gaping. Davis continued. “You know, this really is a great idea. Fixes the drying up problem very well.”

The woman who had suggested it nodded very sagely, looking proud.

“There’s just one thing.” Davis tipped back in his chair, peering thoughtfully at the ceiling. “If that ‘rain’ thing has to materialise on the ground, isn’t that too confusing? This whole sky falling thing is just really weird. It doesn’t even make any sense. I don’t get how it's supposed to be infinite.” He frowned. “Or are we just hand-waving the lore on that one?”

“It’s actually an incredibly complex process—” someone began, but they were quickly cut off by the woman across from them.

“You do know what rain is, right,” she asked Davis. Her eyes were squinted.

Davis eyed her. “Well. Yes?”

“Okay, how does it work?”

He coughed, looking away. “It, like. You know.” He waved a hand. “Falls. And there’s water.” 

“Our team spent months coming up with that world-building— Explain it, Davis. Actually explain it.”

Davis nodded slowly. He smiled. It took several long seconds before the next words came out. “...The sky is the progenitor lake?” 

The woman covered her face in her hands and burst into immediate tears.

Davis looked around defensively upon receiving multiple judging stares. “Isn’t it?” he demanded.

“Rain doesn’t come from the sky,” someone else chimed in. “It comes from clouds.”

Davis was still for a very long moment. When he finally spoke, he sounded very skeptical. “So rain falls from somewhere up there.” He made a vague gesture of something trickling downwards. “Up there, mind you, there’s only the sky, which is blue, and the clouds, which are white- And rain is water. Dare I ask, what color is water?”

“Blue,” someone said, at the same time someone else said, “Clear.”

Davis ignored the latter completely. “And you’re telling me that rain comes from clouds and not the sky?” He threw up his hands. He spluttered. He fell back against the backrest of his chair. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” 

“Actually,” someone else piped up, “We’re thinking about adding another thing in the sky–-”

“---Right, yeah, the ‘Sun,” it’s a giant glowing ball of light—”

“I’m done,” Davis said blankly. “I’m done. I don’t care. This meeting’s over, right? Because I need to go.” He pointed at a random person sitting somewhere adjacent to him. “You. You write the report for this.” 

They froze with their hands half-raised off of their keyboard. From their computer came a sad game-over noise. They slammed it closed hurriedly. “But we haven’t finalized anything,” they said. “What values do I even give them? What do I call them to differentiate them from lakes?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care. Randomize them.” Davis began rising out of his seat. “Are we done?”

“Would ‘puddle’, work for a name?”

Davis did not respond. He was too busy collecting and stowing away his stray papers, covered mostly in uncoordinated doodles, to be willing to.

“Hold on.” Richard waved his hand. “We’re still not done. We need to talk about the lakes.”

Davis groaned and buried his head into his hands. “Can you please just take your ridiculously ugly little ‘ducks’ and get out?”

"Ugly! Little! My ducks?!" Richard stood up in a huff and gathered his things, deeply offended. “How dare. You know what, I think I will,” he snapped. “I will not tolerate this slander towards my creations, I’m going straight to management and they’ll appreciate my genius.” He stormed out the door- he was barely out of it when he crashed into another body coming in. Both went tumbling to the ground, sending a spray of papers all over.

“I—Sorry—?” the other person managed, barely able to get a word out as Richard furiously scrounged his papers back up and speed walked away. She was left looking back as he disappeared rapidly around a corner. “Oh… well.”

“You good?” Davis called over.

“Yeah, I’m…” She paused, searching the scattered papers still remaining. “Oh. Hold on. This isn’t right.” Her mouth pressed into a thin line as she gathered them all into a neat stack. “I’m really sorry, I was supposed to deliver this briefing to you,” she said to Davis. “But it looks like it’s gotten a bit mixed up with whatever that man was holding. Not all of it is here, he must have some of mine, and I have…” She squinted down at them. “Oh, isn’t this a proposal sheet though? I thought these ‘ducks’ already went through…?”

Davis had made a face at the word ‘briefing’. “It’s whatever,” he said, clearing his throat, “And such an awful shame that the damage done to that briefing was completely and totally irreparable. Such a tragedy. Ruined.” He celebrated inwardly. He looked away when she began trying to hand him the partially complete briefing. Just for the formality, he asked, “What was supposed to be in that briefing, unfortunately unrecoverable as it is now?”

“Oh, you know, something about reptiles and mammals, something with beavers…” she shrugged.

Nothing too consequential, Davis figured, and it was good for him that they were lost, but he obviously didn’t say that out loud.

Well, what was the worst that could come of it?

------------------------------
"I have to say, Richard, congratulations!” A heavy hand clamped down onto Richard’s shoulder. He jumped. When he turned, he came face-to-face with the head of management. The man was beaming.

Oh no. Did they notice? They couldn't have noticed, could they? How could they have been able to tell that he'd submitted two similar species? Identical, really, but he would deny that if anyone asked. It was definitely against the rules. But it wasn't possible that they actually noticed, right? He'd changed the name and everything. “What do you mean?”

“Haven’t they told you?” He boomed with laughter. “You’ve won the first prize for the new contest we’ve been running! Most Creative Species!”

Richard went very pale. “What?” he spluttered. Creative?! They had to be playing some trick. He was getting fired at the end of this.

“A deserved victory, of course!” the man exclaimed. “I saw your creation. Such a fascinating creature. I hear it feeds its young through its fur, is that true—”

“What?” Richard repeated faintly. He was beginning to feel a bit like a broken radio. There had to be some misunderstanding. What was this man even talking about?

He slapped Richard on the back and almost shattered his spine. “I mean, really, who could have thought of something like this? You’re really some sick genius!” He laughed. The volume of it just about deafened everyone in the nearby vicinity. “A strange creature that took inspiration from reptiles, avians, and mammals all at once, and such a cute little bastard, too!”

Richard’s jaw opened. His jaw closed. His ears were still ringing from the man’s laughter. He said, “Hhghhn.”

“Oh, look!” The man turned, smiling broadly. He was looking at a poster on the wall, in front of which stood a glass case. As Richard squinted, he saw his own name on the poster, as well as a gold ribbon. “There it is.” The man pointed at the glass case, which on closer inspection seemed to have an animal in it. The little brownish creature in the glass case was meandering back and forth.

When Richard walked slowly over to stare down at it through the walls, it stopped. It seemed to look up at him.

He stared into the little beady eyes of his own creation, the 'platypus', with a rising sense of horror.