Jay C. Mims's Blog

There’s gonna be a couple ground rules. Rule number one: always keep the curtains drawn. Rule number two: only open the door if you hear my secret knock. And rule number three: don’t ever go out alone, especially during daylight. That’s it. Three rules. I call em the, uh, Don’t Be Stupid Rules.

—Sheriff Jim Hopper, Stranger Things

The First Rule of Project Mayhem is you do not ask questions. The Second Rule of Project Mayhem is you do not ask questions. The Third Rule of Project Mayhem is that in Project Mayhem there are no excuses. The Fourth Rule of Project Mayhem is that you cannot lie. The Fifth Rule of Project Mayhem is you have to trust Tyler.

—Narrator, Fight Club

Dear Mikey,

It’s late. Again. I’m not talking about tardy. It isn’t that we slept through our alarm and showed up two hours after our shift began. It isn’t that Wendy’s period hasn’t arrived when it should have. It’s late in the day, late in the evening, late in our lifetimes, not late the way things usually are. Time is almost up, huh?

The clock reads eleven forty-eight PM. The coffee pot is cold, still, heavy dregs all that remain at the bottom. There’s another cup and half left, and it’s strong enough to chew. The bowl is loaded, the bong resting on its designated corner of our desk, skunk weed daring us to stay sober for a few more seconds. The water is milky, nuggets of ash and flower swimming in its muck. Coagulated residue rings the bottom of the chamber; we could smoke the greenish-brown remnants if there was a way to get them out. We really need to clean the bong. The stale taste of smoke occupies our gums, keeps our tongue busy. Was it you or me who smoked that menthol three hours ago? Was it you or me who woke up yesterday around eleven and hasn’t been able to sleep since? It honestly doesn’t matter, does it? If you smoked or I woke up? If you read this while I write or after? If we ever really communicate?

It’s late. Again. The kind of late that only accompanies sleep deprivation, that only journeys with insomnia. Our body needs rest, and it’s been over thirty-six hours since the last time our brain shut down long enough for our respiratory system to snore. In all that time, we’ve managed to get fuck-all on the page. If we’re going to ignore biological necessities for whatever reasons—good ones, I’m sure—could we at least get done the things we need to do? If we’re going to break our genetic code’s rules, could we at least do so with purpose?

I know, I know, we technically don’t have much say in our sleep patterns, in whether Morpheus deems it important enough to visit us on a given evening, but I can’t shake this feeling we’re fucking up by not being able to sleep. Somehow, this is our fault. We are breaking the rules after all. The fundamental question plaguing humanity has very little to do with essence or existence, but of what rules govern reality. Based on our limited understanding of the human body, we know that between seven and nine hours of sleep are required for it to properly function. We know that we’ll shut down after seventy-two consecutive hours awake. We know that we’ll likely die if we don’t sleep for three hundred sixty hours. These are the parameters that govern humanity’s relationship with sleep, at least the ones we’re currently aware of.

We don’t have a complete list of the rules we’re forced to operate under simply because we’re alive. I’m starting to wonder if we ever will, if there will ever be enough history for us to understand how everything best works, or if we will forever be classified as ignorant. Is ignorance really a problem if we’re aiming to solve it? Is it a sin if our ignorance isn’t willing?

It’s late. Again. I no longer know that means.

Thank you for your time,

– Michael

Hey Michael,

Insomnia’s a bitch, huh? It’s no fun needing to sleep, knowing you need to sleep, and still being unable to sleep. That isn’t what’s really bothering you, though, is it? Buried underneath your existential ramblings is the accusation you’re too polite to make in plain language. You dance around what you want to say, hiding what’s eating behind jargon and multisyllabic phrases that ultimately contain no meaning. Don’t worry. I don’t suffer from your passive aggression.

Aggressive aggression is much more my style.

You think it’s my fault we haven’t written anything in weeks and now can’t sleep. You want to bridge the metaphorical gap between us, write some bullshit epistle as an olive branch when its real purpose is to absolve you from responsibility. All that money thrown at therapy hard at work. Out of the two of us, I’m the writer, so writer’s block must be my problem to solve, right? That’s the logic on which you’re relying?

I’m not to blame for whatever is keeping us from getting words on the page, but I am what’s keeping you awake. It’s been forty-two hours now, forty-two hours since we last woke up, forty-two hours since either of us last tasted sleep. You think you can spend your days smoking too much pot, lounging about your shitty apartment, worrying too much about the state of world outside, without putting forth any amount of real effort toward our goals. You want me to take care of the writing, of the exercising, of all the badass shit you fancy yourself guilty of, while you just to sit there, a tangled mess of depression and anxiety with which I’m forced to coexist. You want to talk about the rules? How about the one that dictates you and I have to share a body, share a mind?

What we need right now is a solution to writer’s block, a solution to your apathy. We solve that, you get to sleep. That’s the new deal. You broke the terms of out old one by staring at the ceiling for the last month. Now we do things my way. You dig?

Solution #1

I get up from this old seat, the one we stole from Yvette before she moved out, when I’m done with this letter. I take what marijuana you have left and torch it in the oven. Several hours at five hundred degrees ought to render that shit inert. When what’s left of your flower is nothing but a smoldering pile of ash, I smash your bong into several pieces. I was thinking of walking out the back door, holding it over the wooden railing, the one painted a baby blue, and letting it break against the concrete two floors down. After the bong is just too many shards of sludge-caked glass, I unsubscribe you from your streaming services. Won’t Wendy love that? Then I break your phone. When you have no more distractions, the only thing we’ll be able to do is write.

Solution #2

I stay here, plant our shared ass in this faded wood, and refuse to budge. We both know I’ll ignore any biological urge that threatens the process. We’ll sit right here for the next thirty hours in our own shit and piss, staring at that blinking cursor of a blank document until either our fingers are cable of crafting fiction or the micro-naps start. How long do you think you’ll last?

Solution #3

I remove the pistol you have stashed away in the filing cabinet, that little snub-nosed thirty-eight you got after college, and I fill your wife with holes. With her dead, you’ll be heading to prison. With you in prison, we’ll have three square meals a day, a place to rest our head, access to both a gym and a library. And all the time in the rest of our lives to accomplish what we said we would.

If you would like to take the act of writing seriously, if you would make it your highest priority, instead of wasting precious moments on philosophical musings regarding the rules governing reality or on getting too high to function, you’d be able to sleep. And you know it.

All the best,

– Mikey

Dear Mikey,

Solution #4

I take that same Saturday Night Special, the one you mistakenly think is in the filing cabinet, the one that actually doesn’t exist out here in the real world at all, but flutters about in the spaces between my synapses until you find a story that just needs another gun, one less conspicuous than a nine millimeter automatic Browning, and place the barrel under my chin. I’ll pull the trigger. It’ll take less than a second for the bullet to carve my life from my death. How much time will it take for that same bullet to cleave you from the wreckage of my grey matter?

For someone who complains about me getting high all the time, you sure do like smoke all my pot. That bowl I loaded too many hours ago is mysteriously nothing but ash.

Solution #5

I take the yellow-gripped hammer out of the drawer. With my left hand, I take the hammer and break every bone in my right hand. I let the pain carry me to sleep.

You, as you always do, relish in violence, in stark depictions of human misery. My passive aggression is born out of the simple idea that people deserve to be treated as people, even when they’re in the wrong. Your lack of empathy probably is more of a problem than writer’s block or the pot or the depression. For fuck’s sake man, the world is at a standstill due to a viral pandemic, society seems to be buckling under the weight of its own racist history, and liberal democracy is going the way of the dodo, yet you have to audacity to threaten the woman I want to spend the rest of our lives with all because you think a prison sentence would do well for our writing. If quarantine and the global rise of fascism has me so on edge that I’d rather spend a few days on the couch with the munchies, what do you think being trapped behind bars is going to do?

At least your solutions are somewhat amusing. There’s nothing original in what you’re doing, throwing a tantrum like some sullen toddler. They show me what you really are. You aren’t the writer here, anymore than you’re the athlete or the fighter. No, you’re just a coping mechanism that I’ve outgrown. How’s that for therapy?

As I’m reaching forty-eight hours without sleep, I can’t really remember what I invented you to cope with in the first place. Must have not been all that important, huh?

Solution #6

You go away. And you never come back.

Thanks for nothing,

– Michael

Listen here asshole,

Solution #7

Fuck off.

Sincerely,

– Mikey

From                The Gang: voices@headspace.mjt

To                    Michael: pilot@headspace.mjt

Mikey: co-pilot@headspace.mjt

Subject            For Fuck’s Sake

Seriously you two?

It’s now been fifty-four hours since any of us have slept. Fifty. Four. Hours. Can you count, suckers?

Look, we took a vote. All of us agreed, we can’t just sit here and let the two of you but heads like this while we slowly lose any grasp we had on sanity. It was unanimous. Pretension and Pragmatism even shook hands. Have they ever found common ground on a single issue in all the time we’ve existed?

And, c’mon, we get it. We fucking do. How often does one of you have to take a trip inside and adjudicate some petty squabble or heated dispute between us? It’s usually once or twice a week. We aren’t exactly the most agreeable bunch. We know that.

But when we fuck about, when we cause trouble, when we fight with each other, we don’t bring the whole boat down. One—or both—of you steps, straightens us out, keeps in some semblance of line. Sure, we push against the boundaries you set—we are you after all—but even on our worst days, we ain’t blowing holes in the hull.

Michael, we understand where you’re coming from. You gave Mikey the keys to the kingdom, told him to take whatever he wanted from wherever he wanted to craft thought-provoking, heat-pounding, bodily-devastating fiction. You gave him a mission, and he doesn’t always follow through. But, man, you can’t just expect him to create at all hours of every day if you don’t provide him with what he needs. Sitting on the couch, bong in one hand, cock in the other, some boring ass porno playing in the background is not going to feed your imagination.

We really need sleep. Desperately need sleep. Can you two work something out before we hit the hallucinatory stage?

– The Voices in Your Head

From                Mikey: co-pilot@headspace.mtj

To                    Michael: pilot@headspace.mtj

The Gang: voices@headspace.mtj

Subject            RE: For Fuck’s Sake

Ha!

They torched your pompous ass. Serves you right.

And I’ll agree to getting us to sleep if this asshole admits it’s his fault.

– Mikey

From                The Gang: voices@headspace.mtj

To                    Mikey: co-pilot@headspace.mtj

Michael: pilot@headspace.mtj

Subject            RE: For Fuck’s Sake

Real mature, Mikey. It’s not like your entirely blameless here, is it?

When was the last time you did your job? You know, telling stories. When was the last time you sat down in front of the screen and typed away until your fingers bled, until a narrative started to take shape on the page? Because he’s right: it’s been a while.

You can try to blame good ol’ fashioned writer’s block for as long as it makes you feel better. The ugly truth, though, is that you’re as scared as he is right now. That fear is what’s keeping you from doing what was asked of you, what is demanded of you, and you know that. The world is falling apart around you, and you don’t know if you’re the right one to try and hold it together. Fear is healthy, Mikey, but not when it becomes debilitating. Michael rightly called you out for not writing, and he rightly pointed out that you do smoke a lot of his weed, that this addiction—and yes, marijuana can be mentally addicting, even if it isn’t physically so; Addiction checked into this—is shared by both of you.

How did you respond to his admittedly passive aggressive first correspondence? You swung for the goddamned fences, man. You went for the throat with teeth bared and claws out, attacking an honest request for help of some kind instead of dealing with the honest criticism in a mature way.

Boys, we’re pushing sixty hours awake. Can you please stop the dick measuring contest long enough for us to recharge? Or should we just prepare for death?

– The Voices in Your Head

From                Michael: pilot@headspace.mtj

To                    Mikey: co-pilot@headspace.mtj

The Gang: voices@headspace.mtj

Subject            RE: For Fuck’s Sake

Okay, I’ll admit I’ve been in the wrong. This pandemic, the economic fallout just around the corner, our suddenly very uncertain future has me scared shitless. We just graduated with an advanced degree we’ve been after for the last decade, and we didn’t expect to run out of solid ground so soon after completing this journey. The sidewalk ends. The abyss looms.

That fear isn’t a good reason for lying around doing nothing. This is the time to immerse ourselves in good fiction, to lose ourselves in the best creations humanity has to offer. This is the time to sharpen our claws, file our teeth down to points, to go hunting for that elusive prey called an audience.

Turning on each other like this should be against the rules.

Mikey, I’m sorry. Boys, I’m sorry. I’ll try to be better when we wake up.

– Michael.

They ran the red light, knowing that if they stopped, they’d be stopped for a while. As they skidded through the intersection, tires trying and failing to properly grip the rain-soaked concrete, they were weightless, uninhibited by gravity. The driver gunned it as he straightened the steering wheel, his foot wanting, needing, to stomp a hole through the floor.

The tires spun. The engine whined. After an uncomfortable few seconds that they were all sure was the prelude to an accident, they found traction. Hoots and hollers of victory over defeat rang out above the noise cranking out of the Jeep’s speakers, a mixture of guitar distortion and guttural vocals laid over a simplistic drum beat sped up to mask its inadequacy that assholes and idiots liked to call True Norwegian Black Metal.

They cruised east along Sandy Lake Road ten miles over the posted speed limit, despite the cans of gasoline piled in the back.

There were three of them in the Jeep. The driver, Mick, who much preferred his chosen name of Godslayer, pounded the dregs of his open Natty Lite before chucking the can out. He raised the horns of his right hand, a menacing shriek tearing out of a twenty-two-year-old throat already scarred by nicotine in time with the evil music pounding all around him, his left hand steady on the steering wheel.

Seated to Mick’s—sorry, Godslayer’s—left was Bobby, though he had taken the name Hellhound when, at the age of sixteen, he had sacrificed the family chihuahua to the dark lord. The joint between his fingers sizzled as he dragged deep, the skunk weed burning a hole through his head.

Bobby—shit, Hellhound—passed the jay to the backseat, where it was accepted with a certain amount of reluctance. Travis, who still went by his Christian name because he hadn’t earned a new one yet, eyed the spliff for too long.

“C’mon, don’t be a pussy,” Hellhound barked as Godslayer popped the curb taking a wild right. The Jeep almost clipped the crosswalk signal.

“D-don’t call me a p-p-pussy,” Travis said, taking his hit, coughing the way he always did. They pulled up in front of St. Roch Cathedral without further incident. St. Roch Cathedral wasn’t old, not by Catholic standards, but it had been around longer than Coppell was named Coppell. A dog barked somewhere in the distance. “Th-this was m-m-my id-dea.”

It had been his idea. The other two weren’t smart enough to think of something others had already done, but they were dumb enough to listen to the youngest member of their band. None of them played any instruments or sang or wrote song lyrics, you know, the usual hallmarks of being in a band, but that didn’t stop them from calling themselves a band. And they wanted to be known, wanted to follow in the footsteps of their heroes.

When Travis suggested they burn a church down, they had said fuck yeah.

They had been drinking too much shitty beer, again, at Godslayer’s place. Sorry, did I say Mick’s place? I meant his parent’s house. He still lived in the same room he had occupied in high school, the walls covered in Mayhem and Buruzm posters, a dirty thirty forever parked under his computer desk, a Swastika tacked on the closet door. His parents had told him to turn the noise down, again, and in true black metal fashion, he and his friends had stormed out, middle fingers raised in silent opposition to their suburban oppressors. His mom’s pit bull growled at them as they left the house.

It was nine o’clock on a Saturday, the remnants of a June shower still sputtering about in the Texas sky. They piled into Godslayer’s Jeep—also belonging to his parents—what was left of the most recent thirty pack of beer stashed in Hellhound’s backpack. There wasn’t much for a trio of metal heads to do in Flower Mound, so they discreetly drank as they drove north to Denton. Maybe they’d play some pool at Hooligan’s or smoke hookah at Pharaoh’s. Nobody said anything about getting plastered on Fry Street. The last time they drank at Lou’s, they ran afoul of some Mean Green football players, got their asses kicked. Not that the beating wasn’t warranted or anything. Godslayer had let fly a Seig Heil after one too many shots of Jameson, and a running back laid him the fuck out. Hellhound jumped to the rescue, but a kicker launched his family jewels into his throat. It was chaos after that, until the bartender fired some buckshot into the ceiling, told them all to clear out. Travis drug his two friends out as the football players scattered. If Travis and company had worn cowboy boots and paisley shirts instead of ripped black jeans and studded gauntlets, their overt racism probably would have been tolerated, even celebrated. If the three of them had decided to burn down a black church, they probably would have been hailed as heroes.

Ah, Texas, so full of bullshit contradictions. Never change, yeah?

They circled the Denton Square for twenty minutes, looking for a parking spot. None were available anywhere convenient, so they settled for the street, tires planted on Industrial. They left Hellhound’s bag in the Jeep and stomped their way over to Hooligan’s, Godslayer still fuming at his fucking parents, man. A drink stiffer than Natty Lite was exactly what he needed to forget about his hard, rent and bill free, life for a while. A German Shepherd being walked by a woman bared its teeth and lowered its ears as they walked by.

They posted up at a table on the second floor of Hooligan’s, six eyes undressing the scantily clad waitress every time she passed. Travis laughed as Detroit Rock City started playing.

“What?” Godslayer said. “You like this shit?”

“KISS?” Hellhound asked.

“No. Fuck no,” Travis said. “Just something Isaac told me.”

Godslayer sneered, ran a hand through his greasy hair. Hellhound smirked. Their drinks arrived, a round of Jameson. They shot, a toast to the devil on their lips as the whiskey burned its way down, a grimace shaking through each of them.

“What did that dweeb say?” Hellhound demanded when he wrestled control of his mouth from the liquor. That dweeb was about to graduate with honors and early with a degree in anthropology. Bobby barely squeaked through high school.

“S-something about King Diamond b-being influenced by KISS,” Travis said. “Something about n-nothing existing in a vacuum, how there wouldn’t have been c-corpse paint without The New York D-dolls or Alice Cooper.”

“That fucking poser doesn’t know what he’s fucking talking about,” Godslayer said, leaning over the table, grabbing Travis by his shirt collar. “Dead invented corpse paint. Fucking pisses me off when these losers spout off about things they couldn’t possibly understand. True Norwegian Black Metal wasn’t ever influenced by that glam shit.”

“Why do you even still hang out with that guy?” Hellhound chimed in.

Because Travis had known me almost our whole lives. Not that that mattered much to him. Not anymore.

“Isaac’s just like my parents, just like this whole fucking town, this whole fucking state,” Godslayer said. He ordered another round when the waitress walked by, staring at her tits the whole time. She shook her head as she left the table to fill the order. “She wants me. I can tell.” They watched her ass fade from view. “Varg would know what to do about this fucking place.”

“He’d show them,” Hellhound agreed. “He’d fucking show them all!”

“W-we could do w-what Varg did,” Travis. “Th-that’d show them.”

Their Jameson showed up as it dawned on Godslayer and Hellhound what Travis was suggesting. Goofy grins erupted on their adolescent faces as it sank in. They raised their glasses in mute agreement of what had to be done.

“Hail Satan,” they shouted together before downing the whiskey.

They skipped the tab and left Hooligan’s in search of materials needed to burn down a church. They all lit cigarettes when outside the bar, so the fire part of the equation was handled. They hit the Quik Trip off Fort Worth Drive, bought several plastic cans and filled them with regular unleaded gasoline. Now the question was what house of worship to torch.

Texas isn’t Norway. It isn’t home to beautiful cathedrals built centuries ago that would make for a fine “fuck you, society” statement when set ablaze. Nor does it have any churches set on old pagan sites, unless you want to count Native American lands as pagan. What it lacks in quality, however, it more than makes up for in quantity. There’s a church on nearly every street corner in the Lone Star State, and I wish I was making that up. They could have walked down any boulevard or avenue with their eyes closed, pointed in a given direction, and they likely would have found a target. Instead, they sat in Mick’s—right, fuck, Godslayer’s—Jeep with their gas for close to an hour, the wide array of choices crippling their decision-making faculties.

“I got it,” Bobby—goddamnit, Hellhound—said. “St. Roch Cathedral in Coppell.”

“Coppell?” Godslayer asked.

“What? It’s where my parents took me to mass growing up. The original cathedral from the 1800s is still standing in the cemetery. Dude that started it killed his dog, buried it on the grounds, some old way to protect the place from evil or some shit.”

“Fucking A. That’s metal as hell, though it ain’t going to protect the place from us. Coppell it is.”

It was closer to one in the morning than to midnight when they arrived. Godslayer popped the curb again, this time on purpose. A dog howled somewhere in the night, the piercing cry picked up by others, until a chorus rang out from the neighborhoods surrounding the church. They ignored the new parish, the one that Hellhound had attended as a boy, the one erected in the mid-seventies, swerving around the expansive parking lot. It was behind the newer building, the one made to resemble adobe clay with gold capped dome roofs, that they found it.

The first St. Roch Cathedral of Gibbs Station had been built by an English priest before George Coppell had finished work on the railway station that would ultimately change the settlement’s name. It was a simple cathedral, all grey and weathered, with one steeple and able to house about a hundred parishioners. Situated too far from the streetlights of Samuel Boulevard, they liked their choice more and more the closer they got to it.

Several dozen headstones dotted the grounds in front of and around the building, all well over a century old. Godslayer kicked one dated 1902 over, the faded granite crumbling to the grass under his boot, a can of gas swinging from his hand. Hellhound laughed and swung his beer-filled backpack at several others, disturbing the dead better than he disturbed the living. Travis lugged the plastic cans of gasoline in both hands, head swiveling from left to right, like he was scanning water, eyes searching for waiting authority figures. He took no swings at ancient tombstones.

Which is probably why he felt it first, that burst of wind that carried winter on its edges. Travis shivered, the cans in his hands knocking together with dull thuds, the gas sloshing inside like calm waters disturbed by the reaching fingers of an oncoming storm. A growl rode that freak wind inside his ears, inside his head, inside his soul, a menacing growl that tamed Dead’s and Varg’s vocals into whimpers. Travis whipped around, staring back towards the Jeep, back towards Samuel Boulevard. He dropped the cans in his left hand, reached up to try and smooth out the hairs on the back of his neck that had become too excited. The cans bounced once, twice, rolled to their sides in the damp grass.

“G-guys?” he said. “D-did you h-h-hear that? Did y-you feel th-that?”

Still facing the road, he walked backwards, right into a gravestone. It caught him in the back of the knee. He tumbled to the ground, unable to stop his fall, screaming as he did.

“What the fuck, man?” Hellhound got to him first, grabbed his shoulder, helped Travis to his feet. “You alright?”

“Th-there’s someth-thing h-here.”

Travis’s eyes bulged as he stared up at his friend, trying to pop out of his head.

“Dude, you just tripped.”

“No!” Travis shouted. He shook himself out of Hellhound’s embrace. Godslayer jogged over to them, standing in front of the headstone guilty of murdering Travis’s balance. “I felt something. I heard something.”

“What do you mean something?” Godslayer asked. “Ain’t nothing here but us and the dead.”

A mournful song rang out over the sparse cemetery then, a yowl that could have belonged to wolf pack if wolves made their homes in North Texas, a single sustained note that ended their conversation. They looked at each other as the cry waned. Travis bolted, making for the Jeep, leaving Hellhound and Godslayer standing there among the tombstones. They watched in silence as he tripped again, though it looked to both of them like something had tackled him from behind, something with teeth and claws. Travis’s right arm was pulled straight in front of him, and he spun to his back as he fell, that arm yanked in angles a human arm isn’t meant to bend.

Travis screamed. Blood appeared from several deep gashes on his arm, gashes that looked like they’d been opened up by fangs. Godslayer and Hellhound looked at each other before dashing in the opposite direction, toward the old St. Roch Cathedral, leaving Travis to his fate. His scream turned to gurgling gasps behind them, but they didn’t turn around, couldn’t turn around. He was already dead, and they would be next. Godslayer reached the church before Hellhound. He wrenched the old wooden doors open and shut them as quickly he could.

“What the actual fuck?” Bobby demanded, his body slamming into the wood the moment the doors closed. “Let me in!”

Mick gulped air into his tar lined lungs, spat it back out, as he backed into the old church. Pews ran along each side of the center aisle, ten rows that spanned from the middle of the room almost all the way to the walls. The windows on each wall were slatted, and because the night sky outside was obscured by clouds still heavy with rain, very little light seeped in. Bobby got the doors opened, but not in time. Whatever had killed Travis grabbed him by the waist and pulled him back into the cemetery. Mick lit a cigarette and cried silent tears as his friend yelled, as the wet sounds of human tissue being ripped open and feasted upon wafted in from outside. Hellhound fell silent about the time the ash from Godslayer’s cigarette hit the filter. He lit another one.

Standing there, in the century old cathedral, he felt it, that blast of icy air tearing the hinges off the doors. He ducked as the old wooden things crashed into the pews, casting splinters and shrapnel and dust all about the place, looking up when he heard deep breathing not his own. It stood in the doorway, a black dog cut from the same cloth as the starless night sky, eyes burning coals set into a face that would make the devil piss himself. The dog growled, human blood and supernatural saliva dripping from its bared teeth, pooling into a brackish puddle on the floor. Mick started to back up again, but the dog barked, once, a deep boom echoing out from the beginning of time. That bark made the cherry of Mick’s cigarette spark, flare out. It danced from the filter to the ruined wood at his feet, caught the single can of gasoline he had brought into the church.

The place went up with Godlsayer still inside.

Authorities found him there the next morning. Ninety percent of his body was covered in third degree burns. Bobby’s and Travis’s remains had stayed outside the fire, intact aside from the mutilations. The coroner’s office had indicated that the wounds were consistent with a wild animal, but that report hadn’t helped Mick at his trial. Texas isn’t Norway. When you’re caught at the site of a burned-to-cinders church with two bodies, you’re given the needle, not a few years in a comfy cell. He told this story at his trial, maintaining that a big, impossibly big, black dog had killed them. The jury deliberated for less than fifteen minutes before returning a guilty verdict for two counts of felony murder. I counted the seconds ticking by on my watch from my seat in the courtroom. Mick—Godslayer in his own mind—was executed by way of lethal injection two years later.

The car was parked at a weird angle at the bottom of Fry Street. It—a beige 1998 Toyota Camry; a reliable car; a practical car—didn’t quite fit between a pair of jacked-up trucks. A busted fender, caved in from an encounter with a drunk cyclist a blue moon ago, jutted out almost into incoming traffic. No, that wasn’t quite right; the Ford and GMC didn’t fit around the Camry. The car had been stuck at roughly a thirty-one degree angle from the curb for the last twenty-three months, its gas gauge set permanently to E.

When your wallet makes you choose between filling your tank and filling your stomach, you’d probably choose your stomach, too.

It was a balmy Tuesday—or maybe Wednesday; days have a way of bleeding together in between fixes—morning, closer to eleven than to ten, when a man scraped open the back door (if you can rightly call the creature that rose from the dead a man). Let’s not get too descriptive—he’s just another homeless person living out of a car that may or may not belong to him, and you’d sooner cross the street than strike up a conversation with him; we’ll call him Mr. One. He smelled that day, the way he smelled everyday (like human discharge and wasted potential); his long hair was matted and things better left unsaid crawled around its dreadlocked split ends; every item of clothing he still owned was caked on his emaciated body—which, in the North Carolina heat, amounted to only a white wifebeater stained yellow and mud-and-shit-stained blue jeans. Mr. One stretched his fingers to the heavens, a rhyme about reaching up toward god catching somewhere along his jagged grey matter, though the word god derailed the memory before it had a chance to leave the station.

“Fuck god,” he spat, greeting Wednesday—or maybe it was Thursday—the only way he knew how: with morning breath rancid enough to curdle milk. Now, maybe that’s a cliched metaphor, but he spat out a tooth rotted to the root as he began his daily climb up Fry Street; cliched or not, it fit. “And fuck the horse he rode in on.”

This was how Mr. One spent his Thursday—fuck, it also could have been Friday—and every other day. He would wake when his body ejected sleep like a cramped fart, emerge from his four-wheeled dwelling (though tomb is probably a better title for the Camry), and trudge up the hill searching for Bruce. Sweetgum trees lined both sides of Fry Street, thousands of five-pointed leaves filtering the light, casting eerie shadows on the cracked sidewalks. Those that lived on Fry Street considered Mr. One as much a fixture of the place as the trees and poorly parked car. He was a shambling statue, Thriller-dancing his way up the hill and then shuffling back down it (usually falling and tearing a new hole in his threadbare jeans at least once along the way), before camping out again in the toxic waste of that backseat.

Bruce was always waiting for him at the top of the hill.

On this particular Friday—shit, it might have been Saturday—Mr. One took forty-six minutes to drag his broken body up the hill. Some days, he could make the four-tenths-of-a-mile climb in a record breaking forty minutes (he had even managed to hit a personal best time of thirty-nine minutes and fourteen seconds, once, several blue moons ago); others, it took him over an hour to clamber up Fry Street. Regardless of how many fucking seconds tick-tocked away between the time he left the safety of the backseat and the time he reached the top of the hill, Bruce was always waiting for him at the top of the hill.

Bruce—Brucey Boy to his suppliers; Brucey the Juicer to his clients that paid their tabs; Brucey the Bruiser to the ones that owed too much; just Bruce to his specimens—was as constant to Mr. One as the Camry and withdrawals. Bruce, who stood there at the top of Fry Street with Ray-Bans on his too-smooth face, a salmon (don’t fucking call it pink) colored bro-tank on his too-smooth torso, a pair of teal silkies on his too-smooth legs, smiled the way a predator does when its prey makes itself known as Mr. One lumbered up to him. Bruce, who took enough vitamin S to render a full-grown bull moose impotent and couldn’t fully lower his arms because of how far his lats stuck out from his chest, reached into the surprisingly deep pockets of his shorts, his fat fingers searching for the right glass vial. Bruce, who hopped from one chicken leg to the other (he always skipped leg day) while chewing his morning’s protein shake, pulled the vial full of purple powder—the one labeled “#2”—out by mistake. Bruce—the mad bro scientist, using a rudimentary understanding of chemistry to cut cocaine with pre-workout, over-the-counter weight loss pills (HydroxyCut, Xenadrine, you know, legal speed), MDMA, amphetamines, trying to Frankenstein his way into the ultimate stimulant—replaced the purple vial and sought out the one marked “#1”.

“Dude, man, you ain’t fucking ready for this shit,” Bruce said to Mr. One when Mr. One finally reached him. For a Saturday—or was it Sunday?—the top of the hill was quiet, a little too quiet. Mr. One ground his remaining teeth to dust, his atrophied calves twitching in syncopation with his erratic heartbeat. “I almost don’t want to give this to you.”

Bruce was lying, of course. He really, really wanted to give the vial of powder to Mr. One. And he did. It was orange, the powder, brighter than the General Lee and seven times as loud. How much faster would it be? Mr. One knew just by looking—the way only an addict can know—that this would be the last one. He would snort this shit, sprint back down the hill, spend the rest of his Sunday—it had to have actually been a Monday—in shuddering, convulsing euphoria, and then refuse to climb back up Fry Street again. This would be the last time he’d ever see Bruce.

“I call this one Osho,” Bruce said, his lips cocked in that self-assured grin only children attempt when they pull the orange-you-glad-I-didn’t-say-banana knock-knock joke (no, I’m not fucking glad you didn’t say banana you stupid little shit). Mr. One popped the top, knocked on the door of this particular concoction, found out how Osho said hello.

“Oh…sho,” he whispered more to himself than to Bruce as the juice hit the back of his throat. His veins tightened instantly, his heart slamming itself into his ribs, no doubt trying to escape. Would it be so bad if his heart turned Harry Houdini? It was the last thought he had before Osho cracked like lightning through his tired brain, ripping into synapses dripping with need, tearing into a nucleus accumbens that should be numb to such pleasure but miraculously wasn’t. Mr. One’s Monday—or maybe it was Tuesday—got a hell of a lot better as he trampled back down Fry Street toward his car. He probably wouldn’t sleep for the next week.

“See you next Tuesday, Mr. One,” Bruce smiled at the departing junkie, hoping this was the one that kept the bastard wired for a full seven days.

Gunshots ricochet through the halls. Bullets ripple through bodies, tear through organs, imbed themselves in bones. Men scream—not groan or grunt, but scream—before their voices halt, suddenly stop as their hearts sputter and give up. Nameless, faceless men, men paid for their ability to stand in the way, men compensated for losing limbs and accepting handcuffs, men who were never meant to matter. They die in agony, choking on their own blood, with no amount of credit for their sacrifice.

When the gunfire is put out, the hero tosses his rifle to the floor. It crashes into the marble, clack-clacking into a growing pool of blood, a pool contributed to by too many. The hero pulls a pistol from a shoulder holster hidden underneath a black leather trench coat, a high caliber weapon whose recoil alone is capable of breaking bone. Turning the muzzle on those few left standing, the hero squeezes the trigger, the gun spitting bullets that collide into their targets with concussive force. One man is vaulted over an expensive couch, his inertia meshing with that of the bullet, the two objects becoming one as they reach terminal velocity. The last man standing—other than the hero of course—accepts a bullet to the chest, its momentum carrying his heavy body through the back door, glass tinkling onto the concrete porch outside. The hero steps out of the mansion, his boots crunching bloody shards.

If this were a film, the camera would be focused on those boots. It would close up on the hero’s feet before panning up onto the tactical cargo pants, tracking up to a blood-spattered t-shirt underneath a signature trench coat. Slowly, the camera would focus on his face, a shallow cut above his right eyebrow the only indication he had just endured a firefight. If this were a film, that face might belong to Arnold or Bruce or Sly. Maybe it would be Denzel’s face or Marky Mark’s or Wesley’s. That face could even belong to Dolph or Jean Claude or Steven. If this were a film, it wouldn’t be the first time you’re seeing that face, wouldn’t be the first time you’re seeing the hero. You would have watched him get kicked off the police force for botching an operation, his captain mentioning something about his military record, in the first act, some mission that had to do with capturing a drug kingpin. You would have seen that drug lord kidnap his wife or his lover or his daughter or his fucking cat. You would have followed his rampaging carnage as he set out to get revenge, watched as he broke all the rules of engagement, his quest culminating in this storming-of-the-castle moment.

This isn’t a film, though, is it?

To be a film, there would have to be a camera following the actors around a set, but there isn’t one. There is just a man soaked to the bone in blood, his own and that of others, standing in the backyard of a mansion. No director is around to yell cut or action, no operators holding boom mics to capture the hero’s one-liners, no catered lunch just out of the camera’s view for actors and extras to gorge themselves on. To be a film, there would have to be an audience interested, would have to be a you watching as the action unfolds, invested in seeing the hero get his revenge. But you don’t exist. You’re as fake as the hero’s backstory as a police officer.

The hero wobbles outside on legs unsure of their ability to hold up his weight. He’s lost so much blood, bullets lodged in his torso and arms keeping him from bleeding out completely. His face is raw hamburger, wet meat and torn muscle visible through ruined flesh, the result of heavy fists and heavier boots that succeeded in taking chunks out of him. You can’t see Arnold or Denzel or Keanu under all the trauma. His right eye is gone, sacrificed to a well-placed gunshot, the bones of his cheek and nose peeking out through tattered skin and blood. Heroic no longer describes him all that well, if it ever actually did.

“Twenty men, trained killers all, just like you,” an older woman says, seated at a glass table on the porch. She’s staring at the stately pool, her eyes refusing to acknowledge the dying hero trembling several feet from her. “Did she send anyone but you?”

The woman—the villain, if this were a film—is layered in opulence. Her cream-colored dress costs more than most midsize sedans and is encrusted with more diamonds than someone with a six-figure annual income could conceivably ever afford in their lifetime. She sips a mimosa—one part fresh squeezed oranges, three parts imported vodka—from a crystalline glass. There’s one ring on the pinkie of her left hand, a subtle ruby embedded in silver, and a watch made of white gold on her right wrist.

The hero shuffles to her table, dragging his left foot behind him as he moves. Shrugging out of his coat, he drapes it on the chair opposite the villain, his shaky frame now obstructing her view of the pool. It requires sustained effort to remove the coat, bullet-riddled appendages stiff with pain and heavy with fatigue getting in the way of basic movement. He can’t rest after sliding out of the thing, so he pulls a roll of duct tape out of one of the pockets, fingers operating with deft care so as not to jar anything that hurts. He places the pistol on the table, directly between himself and the woman he was tasked with eliminating, before taking the duct tape and wrapping it around his most grievous wounds. He starts with his face, using meticulous determination to lock the blood behind the tape, knowing she could grab his gun at any moment and finish what her men had started. It takes more minutes than he has left to encase himself, but adrenaline keeps him breathing and upright for the duration.

If this were a story, this is the part where you would be transported to the past, maybe to the first time he was ever shot, out there in the suck. The words on the page would paint a picture of a desert, hot and wind-scorched, sand-blasted and dead. A lucky shot from an insurgent would catch the hero, the bullet lodging somewhere in his thigh. A field medic would tear into his camis with standard issue scissors, using gauze and pressure to stem the bleeding. The remaining soldiers would find cover behind large rocks or hunker down on the desert floor, providing suppressive fire. Eventually, they would drive the insurgents back. The hero would be awarded a Purple Heart.

If this were a story, paragraphs and sentences would coalesce into an internal monologue about regret. The hero would remember coming back to the states with disdain, a medical discharge keeping him from going career. He would recall the pills, Percocets and OxyContin, the relief that would become addiction, the painkillers that would become heroin. A veteran with an injury and a drug habit wasn’t the most hirable of candidates, the verbs and adjectives swirling into a tirade about the hardships of life after the uniform. The hero would bemoan what employment he could find, the odd jobs and wet work for thugs and pushers, until ultimately landing a solid gig with a cartel. Ink would bleed onto the page in depressing spurts like the blood still seeping from his duct-taped body, outlining the armed extortion and killing he completed to feed a habit and pay bills he had never wanted. The flashback would end with a shuddering sigh, the kind that would rattle his shattered ribs.

This isn’t a story, though, is it?

To be a story, there would have to be words written on the page in angry ink, but there aren’t any. There’s just a man bleeding out and a woman he showed up to kill. To be a story, there would have to a be a reader, have to be a you invested in finding out how the hero got to this point, but you aren’t real. You’re as fake as the hero’s history of addiction or his Purple Heart. You don’t exist to the hero who isn’t really a hero; you are nothing more than the twisted hallucination of a dying man whose life never went the way he expected or wanted. There is no audience interested in his final hour, just as there had been no audience interested in his life up to that hour, no you to mourn his passing. Authorities will find a scene of slaughter when they arrive, his body just one among many, an escalated turf war between rival cartels gone so bloody that nobody made it out alive from this place. He’ll be cremated at some morgue, nobody there to identify the corpse as having belonged to him.

The hero’s, the avenging cop’s, the addicted veteran’s, the hired killer’s, the cold murderer’s life is over, and there is nobody to read his story, to watch his movie, to figure out which facts might actually be facts and which are just delusions of grandeur a dying mind tells itself before the end. There is nobody to share in his pain. The pen breaks, the camera crashes into the manicured lawn, his final breaths comes in heaves, and he knows that he will leave this earth the same way he entered it: blood-soaked and alone. It’s the way everyone dies, lonely and afraid, wishing to a god that surely can’t exist that they had done things differently, but there are no more seconds to waste on regret.

“Well, are you going to do what you came here for?” the woman, the villain who is no more a villain than the hero is a hero, asks. “Or are you just going to bleed all over my porch?”

He grabs the pistol and fires once, the close proximity and high caliber tearing the woman’s jaw off. She careens backward, dead before she hits the concrete. He slumps to the table, dead not long after.

Everything was too bright and nothing was okay. The harsh yellow light—a vomit-adjacent kind of yellow—radiated out from under the cabinets that served as a barrier between the kitchen and the living room. Isaac ignored the moth-like instincts that tried to compel him to wander into the kitchen, to stay safe in the artificial light, to satiate his munchies by hiding in meaningless consumption. He forced his eyes from the light.

“You don’t have to do this,” he whispered again as he tied a plastic bag tight to his ankle. Water lapped at his bare feet as they dangled over the off-white couch, gentle waves cresting at the shoreline the sofa had become. “It isn’t too late to just enjoy the high.”

It was too late though. His sweaty palms, his erratic heartbeat, his mounting anxiety all demanded this release. There was no other way. A heavy breath whistled out from behind his teeth, a breath that tried to calm the frenetic nerves dancing inside. The breath meant nothing, was just another puff of air that served no actual purpose outside of clearing his lungs, but placebos often ignore rational thought when inexplicably working.

“Remember. Remember why.”

Memories flashed across his vision, single frames from one magic night seared into his drug-addled grey matter, images of blood and pain and regret. Images of her, of Michelle, after her father had put one too many away and reached out for his favorite punching bag. Images of her tears, spilled so many times for the same god-awful reason. Images of the knife, his knuckles white from exertion. Isaac inhaled, a sharp intake of air holding those images in place, while he looked out beyond his couch.

The ocean before him was vast, the puke-light from the kitchen doing a piss-poor job of dispelling the darkness sprawled out to infinity. He knelt down again, ensuring the knot around his ankle was tight enough, almost losing what little balance he had situated on the sofa as he was and tumbling into the black waves splashing into the couch. Confident he wouldn’t lose his cell phone, keys, and half-full Powerade—such scant provisions to take on this journey—he stood back up, reaching for the spear he had stashed behind him. He looped the strap around his shoulder, needing the weapon but not wanting it to impede the swim, not daring to check how sharp the tip was. He adjusted the water-proof headlamp one last time, making sure it was tight enough.

Before he could take a final steadying breath, before he could look back wistfully at his kitchen, before he could reach for the remote floating somewhere in the water and turn the television on, Isaac dove off the couch. He hit the ocean swimming, his arms taking measured strokes, his legs kicking with a fury he shouldn’t possess. The bag felt awkward, like a too-scratchy shirt tag, but it was secure; the spear made breathing to his left side impossible, so he accepted the cramp breathing to his right caused.

Isaac swam without stopping, ignoring each new pain and ache that settled in his muscles and bones, spitting out the water on which he nearly choked with each breath. In the dark, away from the fake and bright of the kitchen, it was impossible to tell where the drop off was hiding, where the ocean opened up from shallow to deep; he hoped that he’d know when he got there. Exhales escaped his mouth as groans the farther he went, the kind of exhaust usually reserved for lifting heavy shit, but he didn’t relent, couldn’t stop. Water caught in his moustache, the facial hair keeping it from pouring into his open mouth; without the beard, he likely would have already drowned.

How far had he gone?

“Not nearly far enough,” he yelled into the water, the final syllable tagging along with his breath when he surfaced, a pained and guttural sound. The water was frigid, much colder than the ocean at night should be. Steam wafted up off his body. His muscles were lead, the lactic acid settling in them wanting nothing more than to drag his tired body down into the briny deep. “Not. Yet.”

The waves became choppier, the wind riling their anger into a seething frothiness on the brink of violence. They crashed concussively into him, each one wanting to be the wave that sank him. He dove headlong into the mightiest ones, the ones that rose out of the sea like walls, swimming under and through them. He jackknifed around the smaller ones, the ones that twisted and contorted like vipers lunging at prey, swimming round them. When the wind realized its frenzy wasn’t enough, it called upon the sky for help.

Lightning split the night into pieces, a fractured mirror that loomed overhead, thunder cracking once to signal it had in fact shattered. Shards of broken sky began to fall, the collapsing night crashing into the sea. Isaac flipped onto his back, straining his eyes to make out the falling sky in the sheer black that it left in its wake. His legs kicked faster, the exhaustion that had settled in like cancer making them almost too heavy to move. He dodged what he could, snaking around the water, diving into waves still angry at his presence; he took the blows he had to, slivers of fractured night piercing his flesh and drawing blood.

None of it stopped him.

With the sky sinking to the bottom of the ocean, there was nothing above Isaac save for inky blackness. He switched on the headlamp mid-stroke, giving himself just enough light to see a few feet in front of his face. Under the waves, the light allowed him to see the few tiny fish that hadn’t abandoned the shallows for the deeper waters in the midst of the storm. These surface thoughts avoided him; he likewise ignored them, knowing his attention was needed elsewhere. The wind wasn’t done with him yet.

Instead of turning the sea around him into projectiles or barriers, the wind focused its energy on one wave. It created near the horizon a monster, a rogue wave capable of drowning entire cities. Surely it would suck Isaac down into the depths and there crush him. It had to be several miles high, though without the sky to stop its elevation, it could have reached out into eternity. Isaac’s headlamp faltered against an obstruction of this magnitude, so he chose not to waste time looking at it. He put his head down and swam in its general direction.

The wave rumbled, shaking the sea, as if it had a voice capable of traversing through an ocean. It was issuing a challenge, so loud, so forceful, Isaac had no choice but to stop.

“I’m here for the beast,” Isaac called out to the force of nature. “I’m here . . . for the beast.”

The wave pondered this, scrutinizing the man who had faced everything its ocean had thrown against him. Isaac waited, naked under that eyeless gaze, his breath evening out as he faced the silent question the wave was asking.

“You know who I am,” Isaac said, his voice steadier than he had expected it to be, staring straight ahead at the wall of water that meant to fucking kill him if it didn’t like his answer. He ground his teeth in anxious anticipation when the wave didn’t immediately respond.

After a stand-off that could have lasted seconds or eons, the wave dissolved in silence, drowning the wind instead of drowning Isaac, and the violent ocean became serene. Isaac’s breath shuddered out of him, a ragged sigh that wanted so desperately to be a scream but had to settle for existence as a sigh. He closed his eyes, floating on his back in water that no longer wanted him dead. The reprieve couldn’t be anything but short-lived though, he knew; the more time he spent resting and waiting, the less desire he would have to see this through.

Isaac looked back once, his kitchen so far gone he couldn’t see it shining out at all. His too-bright apartment was back there, lost somewhere in reality. He was over the horizon now, no longer occupied the same space or same time as that apartment. Another shaky breath escaped his pain-wracked body, this one with the desire to be a wail. He couldn’t give his breaths the kinds of lives they wanted.

The steam roaring off his body had become but a whisper in the darkness. Blood still oozed from a dozen different wounds, blood he refused to acknowledge. If he looked down at the crimson staining his limbs, Michelle’s blood-caked face would render him impotent. Focusing instead on the headlamp that had begun to dim, Isaac knew he could see maybe ten feet in front of him. Such a paltry distance, but there had been few options for this journey. He could have ingested more chemicals, could have brought a more powerful light, but then he wouldn’t have made it this far. It would have been impossible to swim this distance if he hadn’t packed light, if he hadn’t taken only what he needed and nothing more. Isaac shrugged the strap of the spear off his shoulder, testing the heft of it again. He thrust the weapon once, knowing that under the waves his strength would be diminished.

“You better be sharp enough for this,” he encouraged the spear, though his growl made it sound more like a scold. If the spear noticed or was even a little frightened about the next leg of the journey, it kept that to itself. “At least one of us can pretend to be brave.”

With too many second thoughts swimming around, nibbling at those still-bleeding lacerations, Isaac dove under the surface. He kept his legs together, the rhythmic dolphin-kick starting from his hips and working down to his toes, his spear gripped in both hands leading the descent more than the feeble light bobbing from his forehead. The bag itched his ankle, but it was a small discomfort, one that barely registered. The surface was close to empty, the few musings that had nipped at his injuries too afraid to come any closer. He had very little time to spend on these surface thoughts. He was here for the things hiding much deeper, scurrying around near the ocean’s floor.

A pain in his chest began soon after he started the dive, the crushing pressure of the ocean around and above him igniting a slow-burning fire in each of his lungs. If Isaac wasn’t hallucinating already, the lack of oxygen would probably make him start seeing things. He stifled a laugh as he watched that thought swim lazily past his field of vision, inferring he needed what little air he had left to continue. The farther down he swam, the more distance he put between himself and the surface, the more be began to see.

Thoughts swam all around him, some half-formed and misshapen, no more than a handful of neurons firing. They mostly stayed out of his way, a few words here and there that might have been part of a complete sentence, but in all likelihood weren’t. There was one however, that showed more than a bit of interest in him. It scuttled near him, slowly throwing its human-like arms forward and pushing water behind it. Those arms were muscular, grossly muscular, like someone had given steroids to steroids before injecting them. The rest of the thought was malnourished, emaciated, anorexic, and sickly green. Its nose drooped into its mouth, the under-bite allowing it to settle just behind a row of jagged teeth.

“What do you think Ray Bradbury would think of Twitter if he were still alive?” it asked as it pulled itself along in front of Isaac. “What would David Foster Wallace have to say about Netflix? Wouldn’t they want to light fire to the world because we ignored their warnings? Shouldn’t we want to light to the world?” Isaac watched as it pulled itself deeper into the water, disappearing into the blackness from whence it came. He followed the thought down, though he couldn’t catch up to it.

The deeper he went, the more the fire in his chest raged, an inferno that engulfed each lung and wouldn’t stop until there was nothing but ash inside his charred ribcage. It hurt like hell, or least how Isaac assumed hell would hurt, but he kept kicking downward, kept heading deeper into the ocean of his mind. Pain existed in an acute way when you found yourself over the horizon, on a molecular level this deep inside your own skull. Isaac knew that fire couldn’t cause real damage to his lungs, that the cuts and abrasions he had sustained weren’t actually bleeding, but that knowledge didn’t stop the pain from feeling real.

He howled and screamed, his open mouth letting out all of the oxygen he had stored up for this dive, the bubbles racing for the surface as he kept kicking at his frantic pace for the beast or the bottom, whichever he found first. Losing all that air didn’t cause him to drown, though the realization that he didn’t need to hold his breath didn’t make the pain in his chest any less severe. It seemed to intensify, as if pain itself needed to remind him of the kind of control it still held over him. Even here, inside his own head, pain was god.

While distracted with that metaphysical agony, Isaac didn’t see the predator skirting around the edge of the light his headlamp cast. The thing was pale, translucent, its veins and other innards visible through its thin skin. Barbed tentacles swished all around it, impossible to count, even if one were so inclined to count tentacles, and it moved with the kind of grace reserved for boggeymen and nightmares. This thought was fully formed, a mainstay of Isaac’s consciousness, one that had grown vicious over all the years.

It hissed when it struck, its maw cavernous and lined with wicked needles, the sound of its hunger grating and exhausting. Isaac had been sucked down that razor lined throat on more than one occasion, chewed up by those prick-like teeth only to be regurgitated and devoured all over again. Depression had a very strange digestive cycle.

“Yeah?” Isaac snarled as he grappled with those countless tentacles, trying to get his spear aligned just right before pushing away, a tactical move he knew the thing would be unable to see coming. “If I don’t matter, then what the fuck does that say about you?”

He stabbed, the spear striking true, poking right down the back of the creature’s throat, skewering the damned mental illness until its needle coated maw bit into the tender flesh of Isaac’s knuckles. There was no time to bask in the glory of the kill. Depression hunted in packs.

Smelling the death of one of their own, thousands of the ravenous things exploded into a blood frenzy, erupting out of the dark water to feast on whatever was in their way. Isaac dived deeper down, feeling the leaders of the swarm nipping in vain at his heels, trying and failing to ensnare his feet in their tentacles. All he had to do was outpace them for a time, just long enough for the ones in back to start eating the ones in front. He barrel-rolled, twisting and turning his body in various directions, always headed deeper and deeper. Maneuvering around and away from the swarming turmoil of the depression became his sole focus. Isaac ignored the hunger of the swarm, refused to let himself be sucked into those waiting mouths, only to be consumed over and over again. There was too much at stake this time to succumb to those thoughts.

The swarm began to devour itself, those in the back tearing with glee into the ones in front of them. A sick sense of satisfaction settled amidst the pain still in his chest; there was something too satiating in watching his mental illness descend on itself instead of onto him. But, more than that, going deeper than depression’s domain meant entering a place dominated by the darkly intellectual. Thoughts here would be less predatory, but far more terrifying. Looking at his spear, at the limp body of the thing that had caused so much pain throughout his life impaled on the dull tip, Isaac flipped the thing off.

He kept swimming down, kept pressing forward, pretending that the pain in his chest wasn’t getting worse the deeper he went. The raging inferno had become a wildfire rampaging through every part of his torso, unrelenting, insatiable, omnipresent. He gnashed his teeth, felt as his bottom molars cracked under the weight of his top, but that didn’t lessen the pain in his chest.

“Did you expect this to be easy? Did you think you could just come down here to our domain, and we wouldn’t try to stop you? Do you think you’re welcome here?”

The thought in front of him was pain incarnate. It was his sister’s overdose and coma personified, his father’s suicide attempt anthropomorphized, his mother’s cancer brought to sickening life. It was the big bang, reality itself roaring into existence, floating there in the dark recesses of his mind. It was entropy, the death of all conceivable universes, taking on grotesque form at the edge of Isaac’s consciousness. Language offered no adequate way to convey the utmost terror emanating from what was speaking, leaving Isaac unable to properly unpack everything that comprised that horrifying, disgusting visage.

“I . . . I’m not here for you,” he finally managed to stammer, holding his spear out in front of him in as threating a manner as he could muster. “G-get the fuck out of my way.”

“No, that’s right: you’re here for the beast,” the thing mocked, using what could only be described as a tentacular finger—or maybe that was the howling shrieks of every life extinguished during the Holocaust wrapped into something resembling a finger, Isaac couldn’t be sure—to move the dull tip of the spear harmlessly away. “You’re here to confront that which you carelessly locked away so many years ago. Can you still remember it, that night? Can you still hear her crying, see the blood smeared on her face? Have you ever let it go?”

Tendrils darker than the sea around them erupted out of the thought, enveloped themselves tightly around Isaac, weaved their disparate strands together like a cocoon. He was trapped inside, trapped with the universe’s pain inside a memory he couldn’t forget no matter how many times he tried, no matter how much whiskey he poured down his throat or how many pills he swallowed all in an attempt to kill every brain cell attached to it.

And then, he was there, back in his parents’ living room. Michelle had called him crying and he was waiting for her to arrive. The text he received was a single word: outside. She had parked several houses down; she could never remember which one was his. He opened her door, got in her front seat, turned to look at her.

Isaac’s breaths left his mouth heavy, his exhales threatening to become cries.

“Look. Look at what you think is so important. Watch the night you locked the most powerful parts of you inside. Watch how banal it all is.”

Michelle had two black eyes, the bruises already forming even though the blows that caused them had only landed several minutes prior. Her nose was situated at a disturbing angle against her left cheek, dried blood caked just above her lips. Her right sleeve was dripping blood onto the center console, drip-dripping from a wound on her forearm. Isaac didn’t have to ask what happened or who had done this. He just quietly led her inside so he could clean up her father’s handiwork.

“How many young women bear the brunt of their father’s anger? Because Michelle was nothing special in being abused. And you were nothing special in how you reacted,” the thought said with a voice comprised of both human decomposition and a dying star’s final moments before implosion.

“Yeah?” Isaac asked through tears. “Maybe you’re fucking right. That doesn’t change anything.” He swung the spear with wild abandon, tearing through the chrysalis of high definition memory, leveling his only weapon. There was a savagery about him as he prepared to defend the few square feet of water he could claim as his own inside his near-subconscious. “Now. Get. The. Fuck. Out. Of. My. Way.”

“It should change everything. Perhaps we should just finish the night?”

Michelle had cried in the bathroom, shed her tears with a quiet dignity—or was it silent contempt?—that Isaac had found so brave. He left her alone in that bathroom, let her expel as much of her sadness and anger and heartache on her own. Aside from his shoulder to cry on or his torso she could use as a punching bag, he owned no comfort that he could offer her. So he set out to do what had to be done, car keys in one hand, knife in the other. He stopped walking halfway between his parents’ house and his own car, his father’s eyes burning holes into his back.

Isaac watched it all, watched the moment he had let his resolve crumble, the moment he had first felt capable of taking human life, standing there in the shadows of the North Texas street, unable to do anything for himself any more than he could have done anything for Michelle. He walked back inside, the him from eight years ago, back inside to hold a terrified girl who would dump him in less than a month. His own crying had stopped when the darkness began to abate.

“When will you stop letting that night haunt you? When you will own what you did and didn’t do? Maybe we could go now to when your sister was in the hospital, to when you decided to pull the plug on her. Or maybe I could take you to the moment the human race expires, and you can hear the sputtering and coughing as the last of your pathetic species goes out with a whimper. Would you like to feel that kind of pain?”

“What I would like,” Isaac snarled as he stabbed forward, impaling the thing through its middle on his spear, depression’s tentacles flopping around with the motion, “is to finish what I started.”

It pulled itself forward on the spear, its simmering face—can you call that collection of death masks a face?—so close to Isaac’s he could smell the putrid hate of its breath.

“You’re going to have to square with me one day, boy. So why not now?”

Rearing back, Isaac smashed his forehead into the part of the thing that exuded language. Maybe it was a mouth, maybe it was just an informational black hole. A wheezing sound, horrific laughter no doubt, a wheezing comprised of black plague victims being torched and burned in collective graves escaped that hole. He pulled the spear out of the thing, thrusting hard into that laughing maw, using what was left of the sharp euphoria to expunge the chilling void of human suffering. Isaac let the weapon go, its inertia and prickly ecstasy catapulting it and the thing through the dark waters, deeper and deeper into the ocean. Breathing stabbed into Isaac’s sides, cramps that had been just whispers under opium’s spell roaring into cacophony.

“Some other time,” Isaac promised to the universe’s pain. Or was it just his own pain? Or some sick combination of the two? Is that what hid inside the subconscious of every human, of every living thing that possessed a subconscious? Reality-spanning anguish? He chose not to follow those thoughts as they swam around in front of him, letting them remain half formed, continuing deeper into his mind before they could turn on him. He was unarmed, the last of the opium’s piercing exhilaration now gone, and too close to let any other distractions stop him.

With both of his hands now free, breastroke became his preferred method of travel, even though he had always been a shitty breastroker. Deeper and deeper and deeper still, his tiny headlamp no longer penetrated the dark waters in any meaningful way. He could see the white tips of his fingers and nothing else; the LSD that lit his way so far had done its job, but now he was on his own. The change in pressure around him was the only way he knew he had arrived. Swimming in a meandering sort of way was the well-constructed thought he had journeyed through this ocean to find.

It dominated the profound abyss at the recesses of his mind, this whale with a body wrought from steel. The hull had held all these years, even down here at the bottom under an insane amount of pressure. Isaac called out, grabbing the leviathan’s attention with his shouting. It turned, set its bulbous eyes on the puny man swimming through its domain. It had been designed with two instincts: eat without digesting; and never expel the contents of its stomach. Whatever was foolish enough to swim into this brute’s territory would be summarily devoured, never to wander the ocean depths again. That single-minded hunger was now being let loose on its creator. It opened its cavernous mouth, and Isaac accepted with more than a little fear being swallowed hole.

The leviathan’s throat was massive—much larger than depression’s—and Isaac walked down the length of the esophagus. Slime dripped down the rusted metal walls, dead thoughts that hadn’t found their way into the beast’s cell lay decomposing on the wet floor. He ignored most of them, though a few showed signs of life and tried to snag his bare feet. Those he kicked half-heartedly away, pretending that these bad dreams and suppressed nightmares didn’t terrify him. The end of the esophagus was blocked by a door, a heavy prison door, built right into the wale-like structure. Kneeling down, Isaac untied the bag from around his ankle, fishing his keys out. Before he could pacify himself with a steadying breath, before he could run back up this thing’s throat and try to escape through a mouth he had created to not allow such things to occur, before he could avoid the very thing he had come here to do, he unlocked the door and stepped fully into the cell.

There was no light in the cell and his headlamp had dimmed to the point of being useless. Isaac removed it and let it fall to the floor, knowing that if the beast wanted to be seen it would be seen. It smelled clean inside, artificially so, like bleach and chlorine. The noxious sanitation burned his nostrils. He detected movement near the back of the cell, the shuffling of feet all that alerted him to the beast’s presence.

“Two pot brownies, three tabs of acid, a nugget of opium nestled inside a bowl of kief, and six bowls of marijuana.” The beast spoke the list of illicit substances in a clinical sort of way. “Is that what it takes for you to make an appearance?”

“Getting this close to your own subconscious isn’t exactly easy,” Isaac responded, his voice strong despite the fear. “Wasn’t exactly sure that would get me here if I’m being honest.”

Quiet footsteps became running stomps, the beast breaking into a sprint despite the lack of adequate space. The floor of the cell shook with the exertion, a loud clang reverberating off the walls when the beast launched itself off the ground, soaring through the air. It pinned Isaac to the door, its three pronged claws gouging into the steel. Hot breath cascaded out of each of its mouths, mouths situated where eyes should have been, mouths lined with jagged knives. Its one eye sat where a set of lips should have been, four tentacles writhing around the bloodshot thing.

“It’s been eight years,” the beast seethed, each of its mouths sounding out every other word. “Eight years since you locked me away, eight years since you abandoned me, eight years since you walked away from everything we could have been. What makes you think you’re welcome here now?”

Isaac refused to look away, stared down the beast’s one eye with his two. He took the grotesque thing before him all in, not just the angry face inches from his own or the angrier claws still shaving the metal door. It was skeletal, the beast, taut skin draped over sharp bones. Its stomach distended, no doubt from years of starvation down here at the bottom. The few strands of hair still stuck to its skull were wispy and grey. The beast was more pathetic than it was terrifying, more pitiful than it was frightening.

“I know I’m not welcome.”

“No, you are not.” The beast punctuated its growl by punching the door. “So why are you here?”

“Because we needed to talk,” Isaac said. “You thirsty?”

He reached for the open bag at his feet, not once taking his eyes off the beast, grabbing the half-empty Powerade bottle and raising it to his lips. He took a small swig before offering it. The beast took the bottle in one of its clawed hands, inspecting it with its eye.

“Purple? Who the fuck drinks purple?”

“I know, right? Fuck this city’s lack of blue Powerade.”

The beast drank, taking sips into each of its mouths, backing off somewhat to allow Isaac room. A dingy light had settled about them, the same vomit-yellow as his kitchen. Getting down here had taken all of the chemicals he had ingested and now that he was coming down, Isaac knew he didn’t have a lot of time.

“Two mouths for eyes, huh?” Isaac chided instead of getting down to it. “How very Corinthian of you.”

“It’s the form, the body, you gave me. If you want to complain about unoriginality, do it into a mirror.”

“It’s more original than your first look.”

Hearing the same bitter laugh escape two mouths was grating on Isaac, but he let the beast snort and snicker.

“I was your salvation once, your goddamned happy place, your escape from everything wrong with out there.”

“That was before you almost killed Michelle’s father.”

“We walked halfway to the car before dad stopped us and you know it. Yeah, I wanted to kill him, wanted to rip his still beating heart out and shove it down his throat. But we hesitated, faltered, and in that moment a crime of passion became premeditated murder. I wanted him dead, but not badly enough to land us in prison.”

“Your desire to kill scared me.”

“Everything scares you. Everything worries you. Everything fucking frightens you. Besides, he deserved to die.”

The beast finished the Powerade, tossing the empty bottle back to Isaac. It hit him in the chest, landed somewhere in the cell.

“You don’t get to make that call. We don’t get to make that call.”

“And yet he got to make the call to beat his daughter?”

Isaac’s silence was the only answer he could offer.

“You’re still playing by a set of rules that has been proven time and time again to be bullshit. The embargo on taking human life is not set in stone anywhere, is not written in reality. It is based on the flawed assumption that human life holds any intrinsic value, an assumption that can’t be proven. Yet you hold onto it like some sort of fucking security blanket instead of accepting that it is just another belief, a belief that allows our species to coalesce into civilization and societies, but a belief that has to be challenged like all other beliefs.

“We didn’t touch him, even though he badly deserved it for what he did. And instead of facing that reality, you ran and hid, leaving me to starve down here because you were scared that I might actually kill somebody one day. The ugly truth is I might and I’m you. You hate the fact that you might kill somebody one day. Because of that hatred, you have locked everything that others might view as negative about yourself up in the hopes that squashing your anger, your fierce intellect, your ambition and drive will make you a more palatable person to be around. How’s that working out for us?”

“You’re right,” Isaac said, his voice blank and monotonous. “You’re right.”

The beast perked up, cocking its head to one side. It furrowed the skin between its nose and eye, trying to create the appearance of confusion. Isaac found it hard not to laugh at the attempt.

“What do you mean I’m right?”

“Everything you just said is true. I denied myself who and what I am because I was fucking terrified. That fear can’t rule me anymore though, can’t rule us anymore though. You are a part of me and I am a part of you. This whole goddamned ocean—the one that tried so hard to crush me, to drown me, to devour me—and everything that resides in it, is ours.”

“W-what are you s-saying?” the beast stammered.

“I’m done being half a person just so I can hopefully fit in. I’m done being afraid of you. Getting here was a pain in the ass, literally and figuratively. I want us to work together to clean this shit up. Because there’s a whole lot of bad out there, outside of this ocean, a whole lot of bad that we have to do something about. We can’t fix the world until we fix ourselves.”

The leviathan groaned and lurched. The steel of the cell began to bend and warp. Screws exploded out of their holes, pinging off the walls and door. The whale-prison started to collapse in on itself.

“What’s happening?” the beast demanded.

“I’m no longer keeping this together. You’re in for a hell of a swim. It doesn’t appear that you need to be armed with chemicals though.”

The beast swiped at Isaac, its claws sailing through the man who had begun to fade. Isaac just smirked in response before disappearing completely, the effort and energy of staying so close to his own subconscious burning through the last of the LSD.

Isaac coughed and choked, coming to on the floor of his apartment, next to the couch. He spat water up, trying to empty his lungs of it. Heaving breaths settled down into a normal rhythm, his erratic heartbeat calming as he rested against the sofa. His hair shouldn’t be wet, and yet it was soaked as he raked his fingers through it.

“Hurry to the surface,” Isaac whispered. “There’s work to be done.”

Unintended consequences are always the most fun, most bizarre, most soul crushing of all consequences following a given course of action. We prepare for every possible contingency, then we act, swiftly and meticulously, and we think we’re ready for the fallout. Then these little bastards show up, monsters we hadn’t planned to combat, but here they are just the same. Our choice led to their creation.

Scrolling through Facebook, I’m thinking that social media is just an unintended consequence of creating the internet, just one of the fucking monsters we could never have dreamed up when we first connected a majority of the world’s computers via fiber optics and derelict phone lines. We knew we were making the planet smaller, but we didn’t know exactly how that shrinking would play out. I’m left wondering if we still do.

The cup of coffee is still steaming as I bring it to my lips. I’ve burned my tongue, my mouth’s roof, even my goddamned teeth so many times on too-hot coffee for it to really bother me though. That’s the beauty of scar tissue: it just makes us more resilient.

The middle finger of my right hand works the scroll button on my mouse near-independently of conscious thought. It’s weird to think that mouse scrolling would become one of those automatic responses of humanity. Do you think the guy who invented the computer mouse had ever thought the use of his invention would become almost instinctual? Probably not.

My eye stops on one of those stupid “listicles” that are churned out every second of everyday by D-string media sites, sites that try to bill themselves as legitimate news but whose bread and butter is pictures of cats and Netflix recommendations. It would appear that is what counts as news these days, and with organizations like the Wall Street Journal charging $38/month for a subscription, the appearance is likely not changing.

I take another sip of coffee before clicking on the link. Its title is: 21 Times Tumblr Users Broke Reality. I’m sure you’ve seen similar titles from similar sites and I’m sure you’ve clicked on them. Everybody seems to click on them. It opens to a bright website, one full of color and pictures, reminiscent of the internet of the early 2000’s, bright pages with too many suggestive adverts and flash videos of dismal quality. You remember those days? It looks like they’re back.

Some of the posts are funny, but none of them really break reality, at least not for me. I’ve seen about half of the posts before, some several years old, and I wonder if the Tumblr/Reddit/4Chan users have just finally run out of shit to post about. Eventually every well dries up, so the pseudo-commentary of these denizens of the internet has an expiration date. Maybe we’ve reached it; maybe these sites will fall into disrepair before imploding; maybe we’ll look back on them in twenty years, asking each other if we remember such-and-such image board.

The real reason I clicked on this stupid link was because of a morbid sense of curiosity, the same kind of curiosity that has some drivers slow down to look at the aftermath of a car wreck on the highway. And like watching a car wreck, I am filled with a sense of sickness at the grizzly scene before me and gratefulness that it wasn’t me. I’m not looking at some mangled body that’s just been thrown through the windshield lying broken and crumpled on the blood-stained asphalt, so this revulsion might make no sense to you. What I am watching though, is a level of empty consumption and useless words that a majority of people find amusing. I am looking at creations of humanity be eaten by Tumblr users for their own glorification, and then again those Tumblr posts being eaten by a corporation to generate clicks for ad revenue. It’s a scene of intellectual cannibalism perpetrated because we have run out of other things to say.

History books likely won’t know what to say about the early 21st century. It is a time of general peace throughout the world, of scientific and technological advancement, of prosperity for a great many people on the planet. It’s strange to look at this time in human history as anything but chaotic, but when you compare it to the rest of this species’ time on this rock, it is in fact the zenith of human innovation and thought. My fear is that we have reached as high as we can, that we are about to plummet headlong into disaster because we have hit the limit to human achievement, that we as a species are courting extinction with barely even a care. But we are more concerned with how many likes we can get on our posts, how many people we can get talking about the things we’ve stolen from actual creators and innovators to place on our personal pages because we like the words or images, how many online friends we can convince that we are important.

We are okay with this and I can’t figure out why. Maybe the ugly truth is there isn’t an answer, isn’t a why, and this is just evolution at work, this is just the next stage in humanity’s development. Knocking back the dregs of my coffee, I make a tight-lipped grimace, more at my own hypocrisy than the bitter taste of that last swallow. I’m not going to get rid of my Facebook or Instagram, and I’m not going to stop trying to generate likes and comments and buzz for a brand that I’m trying to establish. I am no better than those that stole Tumblr posts to make a fucking listicle, no better than those Tumblr users who stole images and lyrics from movies and songs to pump up their own personal fucking pages.

We all consume media, and now the media we consume is starting to consume itself. Logging out of Facebook, I know I have to get away from the computer for a while. This consumption is just an unintended consequence of creating the internet. And my disgust at it is just an unintended consequence of me participating in the cannibalism.

My room is exactly sixteen feet by sixteen feet; I took an old tape measure to each wall just to be sure. No, I wasn’t reading House of Leaves again, but was trying to get a sense of just how much space I take up. You see, everything I own, outside of my motorcycle, fits in that room. My entire life is crammed into a sixteen by sixteen room.

I started cataloguing the things I own, making a list of every material possession, ranked by its utility. If it served no immediate purpose, I tossed it. Most of what existed in that room is now comfortably hidden away inside a dumpster, awaiting a garbage truck to take it away to its final resting place at the city landfill. Old comic books, posters, little trinkets and nick nacks that I picked up god knows where were all purged with little thought or hesitation. Only what I felt I needed made the cut.

There’s my old mattress and even older set of box springs, a gift from my parents to commemorate my first apartment. I moved out of that apartment several years back and rarely think about it now. There’s a slate grey filing cabinet that I picked up when I decided I was a real adult. It’s beginning to rust now, its gunmetal body losing its fight to the iron oxide like an old person often loses their fight with cancer. I’ll have to toss it soon, but for now it still serves a purpose. There’s the wooden desk I stole from an old professor. Stole might not be the right word; he was getting rid of it, and I offered to take it off his hands. I only keep it because I need a place to let my laptop rest. It’s five years old now, my laptop, and I’m only holding onto it until I can think of a proper way to get rid of it. Throwing it into the dumpster just seems cruel for an object so near and dear to my heart. There’s the turquoise bicycle without a front tire, a relic from when I was still an active individual. I just can’t bring myself to toss it, not yet, because it connects me with friends long gone. There’s a single twenty-five pound dumbbell, its partner lost somewhere in the several moves that led me here, another reminder of a once athletic past. There’s a half empty bottle of expensive Scotch, liquid testament to my on-again-off-again alcoholism. There’s a crumpled pack of cigarettes, several smokes still encased inside, likely stale. There’s fourteen days’ worth of clothing, all practical. None of my old band t-shirts made the cut.

Those are the only things I still own, and I can’t help but think that these possessions are nothing more than a collection of broken things.

It’s fitting that I would collect brokenness. After cataloguing my scant belongings, I began to look at myself. Two busted up shoulders; a bum knee; a fucked up ankle; two tar-lined lungs; a liver just shy of cirrhosis; yellow teeth; a crooked nose; scar tissue on my hands, my feet, my forearms; a broken heart; a shattered mind. I am just a collection of broken things.

I’m leaving all this shit behind, my mattress and filing cabinet, my laptop and desk, my bicycle. The bottle of Scotch will remain on the desk, accompanied by the cigarettes. The clothing I’m keeping, stowed it all away in a green canvas bag I don’t remember procuring. My old injuries and afflictions I can’t get rid of, my still-bleeding heart a burden I want desperately to just drop in the dumpster with all the rest. If only we could throw away our scars.

These few items are all I have, and I’m not taking a single one. They will stay here, in this sixteen by sixteen room until someone removes them, a mute museum to the damaged man who used to live here. Nobody will care for these small monuments, not even me. And that’s the way it should be.

I’m leaving my broken things in this room, leaving and never coming back. It’s time to start a new collection.

“Ow! You hit my funny bone.”

“. . .  it isn’t very funny, is it?”

“Fuck you.”

She didn’t yell it, but added an exclamation to her point by slamming a pillow into his face. As per usual, she held nothing back, attempting to use an object of comfort to knock his teeth out. Her attempt at playing a back-alley dentist wasn’t fueled by malice or anger, but a deep seated sense of competition; if she was going to declare war, she was damn sure going to win. Still, she ran for the bedroom after her blow landed.

He launched off the sofa when he heard her feet carrying her away from him. There was a compulsion to follow her, not because he wanted to beat her at her game, but because he didn’t like spending any time away from her. It was silly he knew, but isn’t love silly? When he bounced into the bedroom, she was waiting with another pillow. She swung the way an aging ballplayer would: for the fences. He took the blow the way a boxer past his prime would: on the chin. The momentum that had carried him into the room not only kept him on his feet though, but propelled his body into hers.

The two of them were a mass of tangled limbs and heaving torsos when they hit the bed.

“Your hands are cold! No!”

“Nowhere near as cold as your feet. Stop trying to tickle me!”

“Never!”

Digging her fingers into his hips, she tried to wiggle out from under him. Keyword being tried, because no matter his howls and gasps of laughter, he planted himself like a tree on top of her. Her tickling fingers could not saw through the bark of his resolve. Cackling the way only the criminally insane seem capable of—and whose really to say that designation didn’t belong somewhere on his medical chart?—he buried his face in the crook of her neck, his beard rubbing into her skin. She could steel herself against every assault he could muster except for that damn beard, and her own wails of unrestrained laughter matched his.

“Stop it! Stop it. Stop it!”

“Make me!”

“Careful with that knee! You’re getting a little too close to the boys.”

“Oops. Sorry, boys!”

He finally rolled off, the laughter still dripping from his wide open mouth, the need for oxygen outweighing his need to crush her. She seized the opportunity, bringing that second pillow down once again. Exhaustion had sapped much of her formidable strength, but the blow was hard enough to earn her the victory she craved.

“You win!” he said, his admission of defeat muffled by the pillow.

“Say it!” she demanded, removing only enough pressure to allow his ragged voice to creep out.

“I’m your bitch.”

“Damn right you are.”

He rolled back on top of her when she removed the pillow, the kisses he planted on her neck earning him more laughter. She would likely never get used to his beard.

“And you’re mine.”

The streets were still wet, a surprise June storm rumbling through and soaking the cement some hours before. Barbara Allen couldn’t describe what was still happening as rain, though water was still making its way to Earth, but more as spitting. The Texas sky had a tendency to spit more often than it did to rain. As she jumped into another puddle, though, Barbara didn’t much care if it rained or if it spat, so long as the temperature stayed below one hundred degrees. Her Converse weighed her feet down with every splash, sponging up the puddle and wetting her socks and feet, but the extra weight just made each lift off that much more magical, as if she would always be able to fly no matter what attempted to hold her to the ground.

“What a lovely thought,” she whispered to the wet ground, her voice breaking the stillness of the night. “Something right out of a Hallmark card. Or a Lifetime movie.”

Barbara—Babs, BA, Al (how many fucking names could one person actually have anyway?)—descended into another puddle, the resulting splash a nice exclamation point to her self-deprecation.

If she were still a child, jumping into puddles for the sheer hell of it would be considered cute, but at the age of twenty-three it was just childish; if the sun was still beating down in oppressive waves, maybe she could justify to herself acting a fool, but at three in the morning it was just foolish. And yet, splashing around like a childish fool or foolish child at the witching hour was precisely what she was doing. The moon hid behind too many clouds, but even without its wan light, she could reflect on the things that only walking around the suburbs when nobody else showed their faces allowed her to reflect on. There was a strange sort of peace to Lewisville that could only be found in the early hours of the morning, when the goddamn creatures of the night were supposed to be wreaking havoc and terrorizing the world.

“There are no boogeymen or monsters in the suburbs, though we’re still deathly afraid there might be.”

That’s the funny thing about fear, Barbara thought, continuing the conversation with herself in her head, that it exists even when there is literally nothing to fear. Not that Lewisville was the safest town on the planet or anything—God, that guy had chopped up his wife with a chainsaw just a few streets over from where her parents still lived not four years ago—but the fact that she could safely traverse its sidewalks this late at night spoke volumes about the kind of place it was. Her sigh, probably the thousandth one since she had set out on this journey, felt impotent, as she hugged the light pole at the intersection of Garden Ridge and Valley Parkway.

Her feet brought her here for no other reason than for her to stare down Valley, almost able to see where Lewisville ended and Flower Mound began, so she could better contemplate Rich’s comments about her hometown. Her sigh transformed into a laugh, one full of snorts and derisions. Three dates in and he decides to talk about how dangerous Lewisville is, how he hates all the “thugs and hooligans” that call it home, that he wishes that trash wasn’t so close to Flower Mound. It was far from the first time she had such bullshit out of the mouth of someone else (she had attended First Baptist Church of Lewisville for too many fucking years after all), but his remarks had set her off in a way that others’ hadn’t for some reason. So she did the sensible thing and through a drink in his face.

“How can one parasite look down on another parasite?” Barbara Allen asked of the night, still glaring in the direction of Flower Mound. “How can one town’s economy leech off of another’s while doing nothing about a very serious hard drug problem and still claim moral superiority?”

Racism. She knew it came down to the fact that more minorities lived in Lewisville than in Flower Mound and that residents of the latter needed to believe in boogeymen. So even though meth and heroin—to say nothing of oxycodone—was easier to find in Flower Mound than stuck up soccer moms (who, in all honesty, were probably using and selling), Lewisville became the den of monsters and hoodlums.

“Fuck this place,” she said not for the first time in her life, and definitely not for the first time that day. Maybe if she did manage to escape the clutches of the suburbs, she could find some modicum of perspective, could figure out how to change the minds of the uneducated, could fix some of this shit. It was a nice goal to be sure, but she had stopped believing in that particular fairy tale when she stopped going to church. If an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good god couldn’t (or wouldn’t?) cut out the cancer, what hope was there for her to do so?

Still, being able to imagine a better world gave her some hope that it was attainable, even if reality weighed that dream down more than the water weighed her shoes down.

With another heavy sigh, Barbara Allen took a first step out into the street, intending to walk along Valley Parkway until she crossed from Lewisville into Flower Mound. She never once took her eyes off the cement, off of her own soaked Converse, and so never saw the car barreling down the two lane black top. Its lights were off, this car easily pushing seventy on Garden Ridge, its engine buzzing at a frequency for below the roaring cacophony of her own thoughts.

She should have looked up.

Why didn’t she look up!?

WHY!?

The grill of the car struck her knee, shattering it. Her head smashed down onto the hood, before the force of the impact carried her up and over the car, her somersault ending with a vomit-inducing thud onto the pavement. Barbara Allen’s body twitched once, twice, and then was still, her warm blood pooling out around her mangled corpse.

There was no dignity in her death.

Is there ever really any dignity in death?

“Oh shit! Oh Shit!! OH SHIT!!!” the driver of the screamed from the safety of the front seat. He stopped about a hundred yards down Garden Ridge, exiting the vehicle briefly, looking back at the wreckage that had once been a young woman. His gasped in air, his hands clasped behind his head, as he stared, piss dribbling down his leg as the fear set in. “What did I do?”

The terror of running someone down and of being caught for said crime morphed and coagulated in his stomach as he watched another man step out from behind the same light pole Barbara Allen had just been standing behind and kneel next to her body. The driver scrambled back into the car, fleeing the scene as fast as he had caused, when that man looked up at him. He could see in his rearview mirror that man cock his head to one side, a curious dog in the middle of the night trying to make sense of this random carnage.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Did this witness catch his license plate? Was he going to call the cops?! The driver relied solely on adrenaline and a friendly gas pedal to get away, nudging his Ford Taurus further down Garden Ridge. Thank god she hadn’t broken the windshield when she hit…oh, god, how could he even think that?

The car had more get-up-and-go than most Tauruses, but that probably had to do with the fact that it wasn’t a Ford Taurus. No, as the driver cranked the wheel hard to the left at College Parkway, blowing through the second red light, the silver Pontiac Sunfire’s tires screeched hard as they tried to grip the still-wet cement. Outside, the driver watched as the streetlights all went dark. It was as if someone had flipped the switch to off all of a sudden, so he flipped his lights on.

His headlights refused to cooperate.

A crash from behind him caused him to jump, his teeth almost biting though his tongue as he checked the rearview mirror. A bumper—his bumper!—was on the pavement, the black plastic thing laying there like something dead. The driver chose to ignore the loss, making a wild right off College Parkway, heading into an alleyway he knew well. His headlights finally came on as he entered the alley, illuminating the fences on both sides of the stretch of broken road.

Off in the distance stood the man.

“What the fuck!?”

The driver through his Mustang in reverse, but the engine stalled. He forced the key, hoping beyond hope that the ignition would turn over, but his hope did nothing for him.

The man began walking towards him. There was an unlit cigarette in his right hand, an object he twirled between his fingers like a street magician. His steps were slow, methodical, measured. He was clearly not in any sort of hurry.

The driver sprang from the car, turned tail, and tried to run. There was nowhere to run to however, nothing but pitch black behind him. The road was gone, the entrance to the alleyway eaten up by this oppressive shadow, and the driver began to panic.

The man cocked his head to the side again, his long black hair hiding whatever look he wore on his face.

That darkness reached out to the driver, tendrils of the night snaking around his arms and legs, sliding down his throat and up his nostrils, muffling his screams before he could even think to let them out. Smoke enveloped his insides, a cold numb pulsing through him, probing his insides. His pale skin flashed in contrast to the black around and in him, before sliding off his bones, only to be replaced with darker skin. His melanin levels seemed about as confused as his car had been, unable to decide on a color for any longer than a few seconds. Tan, brown, neon fucking purple. Finally, the inky blackness around settled on mocha, a color reserved for people of mixed ancestry, and the cloud pulled itself away from and out of his body. The driver stared down at his hands, shock and awe giving ground to familiarity. This was the color he had always been.

“Nice car, man,” the man said to the driver, who was still examining his hands. “Got a light?”

“Look, I uh…I don’t want any uh…trouble, yeah?” the driver sputtered.

“After all the bullshit of the 80s and 90s, it’s really nice to see sports cars tapping back into that American muscle of the 60s and 70s. Makes me all nostalgic for a time in which I never actually lived.”

“Did you hear me!? I don’t want any trouble!”

The driver tried to push the man, but the man was faster. He grabbed the driver’s wrist, forcing it painfully up his back, like he was arresting him, before he slammed him down hard onto the hood of the Mustang.

“Her name was Barbara Allen! And you killed her before running away like a goddamned coward!”

“What did you expect me to do!? A black min running down a pretty little white girl in the burbs….fuck, I’ll be lucky if the arresting officer doesn’t immediately shoot me, and will likely get the fucking needle in this state!”

The man let the driver up.

“You aren’t wrong. You still killed her, though.”

“You think I don’t know that!? Fuck, all I can see is her lying there on the pavement…”

“What’s your name?”

“Huh?”

“Your name, kid, what is it?”

“Dante.”

“Well, Dante, I suggest you get in the car.”

The man slid into the passenger seat before Dante could even register that he had walked away. So he got behind the wheel, staring at this strange white boy who was now sitting in his car.

“It’s rude to stare,” the man said, before fiddling with is cigarette again. “Got a light.”

“Sorry man, I don’t smoke.”

“Not even pot?”

“Well, yeah, every now and again. But I don’t have a lighter in here.”

“No bother,” the man responded, his cigarette igniting itself. “Whatever you do, don’t pick this habit up, okay Dante?”

“Yeah okay…I know you?”

“What? Am I shivering?”

“Huh?”

“Not important. Just a movie reference. And in a sense you do, but in another one you don’t. How old are you Dante?”

“Look, man, what is with all the fucking questions?! Who ev-”

The man’s hand went from pale to blacker than black, his fingers dripping little bits of inky darkness onto the seat and cup holders as he reached out to Dante. That darkness began to wrap itself around Dante’s head, only this time he could scream.

“Don’t waste your time trying to ask questions. Just know that if you don’t answer mine, I can get the information I want in other, less savory ways. Got it?”

“Yeah, yeah. Just keep that black shit out of me.”

“So long as you talk, deal. Now, how old are you?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“And why were you driving like a mad man back there?”

“What’s it matter to you?”

The man punched Dante hard in the face.

“What the fuck did I just tell you about questions?”

“Fuck, man! I think you broke my nose!”

“I did. And it matters because Barbara Allen was going to be a senator one day, was going to change the world, and was going to make a lot of spectacular mistakes in the process. She was going to have such a story to tell. Because she didn’t look up, because you were driving so much faster than you were supposed to be, that can’t happen now.

“Clearly, there’s a reason she didn’t look, a reason you were driving that fast, a reason that she’s dead. There’s a reason that you’re still here, instead of just being an asshole driver who almost hit her. So why were you driving so goddamned fast?”

“Had a fight with my girl. She lives in Denton and I was headed home. I didn’t even see that Barbara chick until it was too late.”

“Honest mistake. Happens to the best of us.”

“I just killed someone, and that’s what you got to say about it!?”

“People die, kid. What else do you want me to say?”

“Something more than that I guess.”

“Barbara Allen may have been young and innocent tonight, but over the course of her life she was going to do some really awful things, some truly horrible things. I’m not too broken up about her death, except that she had stories in her that I wanted.

“The authorities, however, are going to care that she’s now dead. You may not be able to hear the sirens, but I sure as hell can. And you’re right: they catch you, you’re going to die. So I suggest you drive.”

The car started without Dante having to turn the ignition.

“Where am I going to go?”

“Man, I don’t fucking care. I’m just along for the ride.”

“And the stories I’m guessing.”

“You catch on pretty quick. My vote is you head north. You don’t have time to go back from your bumper, so the cops are going to have a piece of evidence tying your car to the crime. The ball is in your court, Dante, next move entirely up to you. I can’t save you from whatever fate is awaiting you anymore than I could save Barbara Allen from you. Or the world from the machinations of Barbara Allen. I guess you saved the world in that regard.”

“North it is I guess,” Dante declared, his fear and trepidation at having killed someone and trying to outrun the consequences of that action returning.

“Now tell me about this fight with your girl,” the man said.

It swirls around his nostrils, this smell that seems to come from everywhere around him. The world could be made of this smell. It settles on the tip of his tongue, stronger in his mouth than it is in his nose, a taste so heavy it drags his jaw to the floor, a taste of liquid rust, of old pennies. Of sharp iron. He knows this taste, has felt its tang slide down his throat too many times before. Opening his eyes, the crimson stains painting the walls and floors gives a name to this odors, to this taste, not he was too confused about what it could be.

Blood has a way of leaving an impression.

When was the last time he had stood in this room? A week ago? Two weeks ago? It couldn’t have been more than a month since the last time he had witnessed all of this blood, held this fucking knife. The blade’s weight was too familiar, friendly almost, a leather and steel extension of his hand.

His breathing comes in heaves and comes out in huffs, each gulp of air carrying that metallic twang with it. A scream hides in the back of his throat, a scream that cannot break out of its prison made of teeth. Screaming would do very little good here.

There is no body. Whomever he had stabbed to bloody fucking death has already vanished, has already ceased to exist, like every bad guy in every video game he had ever played. This victim is and was unimportant; the fact that he killed, that he committed murder is all that matters.

The knife clangs on the concrete at his feet, blood splattering up from the floor. Without a weapon, there are several options open to him. Run. Be capture.

Wake up.

Bolting upright, sweat dripped off his forehead, a cold sweat that smelled of rust. The scream managed to tear its way out of his mouth.

“Baby?” she asked, her voice slack with sleep, tight with concern. “Are you okay?”

Her fingers drummed on his back, her pulse quickening when she felt the manic pace of his. He swung his feet off the bed, terrified of them landing in blood, raking his fingers through hair still slick with sweat.

“Yeah,” he whispered, afraid that any increase in volume would shatter him. He grabbed the hand on his back, wrapping his fingers protectively around hers, needing her comfort far more than he could admit out loud. “Just another nightmare.”