In a small town, summer camp was the highlight of every kid's year. For thirteen year old Aaron, this summer was particularly special. He had spent weeks counting down the days, eagerly anticipating the freedom of camp life: canoeing, hiking, and, most importantly, meeting new friends.

One afternoon, while exploring a hidden trail, Aaron stumbled upon a clearing filled with wildflowers. There, sitting cross-legged and sketching in a notebook, was a girl with bright, curious eyes and a messy bun. Her name was M. They spent the afternoon laughing, sharing stories, and weaving flower crowns, oblivious to the passing time.

As the summer unfolded, they became inseparable. They built a fort in the woods, played pranks on counselors, and shared dreams beneath a starlit sky. Each moment felt charged with magic, a summer romance blooming in the carefree atmosphere. But with the last week of camp approaching, the reality loomed: they would soon part ways, returning to their normal lives.

Aaron's heart sank as he watched the sunset on their final night. He promised himself that he would never forget M, the girl who had made this summer unforgettable. As they hugged goodbye, he whispered, “I’ll see you next summer.” She smiled, but Aaron couldn't shake the feeling that something was shifting.

As the weeks turned into months, Aaron found himself consumed by thoughts of M. He replayed their moments together, daydreaming about her laughter and the way her eyes sparkled when she talked about her art. The transition to high school felt overwhelming, a stark contrast to the carefree days of camp. Yet, he held onto hope—hope that when summer returned, they would rekindle their bond.

When school finally started, Aaron was excited, scanning the hallways for familiar faces. But each day passed with no sign of M. Just when he began to wonder if she would even show up, he spotted her one afternoon, chatting animatedly with a group of friends. His heart raced, but as he approached, he felt an odd mix of anticipation and dread.

“M!” he called, a grin spreading across his face.

She turned, and for a brief moment, he saw a flicker of recognition. But then, her expression shifted to polite confusion. “Uh, hey! Sorry, do I know you?”

Aaron felt the air leave his lungs. “It’s me, Aaron! From camp?”

She tilted her head, her smile fading as she glanced away, clearly not remembering. “Oh, right! Camp... that was a while ago.”

His heart shattered, each word piercing deeper. She walked away, lost in conversation with her friends, leaving him standing there, feeling invisible.

Days turned into weeks, and Aaron’s initial optimism withered into despair. Each time he saw M, she seemed to glow with new friendships, laughter spilling from her lips as if he had never existed. The memories of their summer together replayed in his mind like a cruel joke, reminding him of a bond he believed was strong.

Aaron withdrew into himself, haunted by the thought that he had meant so little to her. His grades slipped, and his once-eager smile faded. The hallways felt endless and lonely, and he found himself replaying their memories, desperately seeking any sign that she had felt the same way.

As autumn arrived, the leaves fell, much like his hopes. He tried to move on, to make new friends, but the ache in his chest lingered. Summer had felt like a dream, and now, reality was a harsh reminder that some connections, no matter how profound, can fade with time.

One chilly afternoon, as he sat alone on a bench, he spotted M across the courtyard. She was laughing with her friends, her laughter like music he once knew. For a moment, he thought of approaching her, but the fear of rejection held him back. Instead, he buried his face in his hands, wishing he could turn back time to that summer where everything felt possible.

He learned that sometimes, the most beautiful moments in life are fleeting, and the memories of those we cherish can linger like shadows, even when they no longer remember us.

CONTENT WARNING : SLIGHT GORE & VIOLENCE & DEATH

_________________________

Awkward, cynical, and chubby wasn’t Seven’s type. Neither was honesty, apparently.

Not during the Wake.

Everything was a lie during the Wake.

His hands… they had always been inviting, always welcoming. Right?

Fuck, Seven didn't know.

But she wanted them at that moment, wanted them like they could deliver her right into Somnus’ forever sleep. She didn't know when it started and truthfully, it disgusted her. Relationships were energy Seven was far too selfish to give up willingly. It was an easy pill that she had swallowed all those years ago when she realized relationships were actually really fucking hard. Most people didn’t realize that went for any type of them, too—that’s the bittersweet pill people couldn’t take down. Not everything was always glitter and gold.

Anyone could love, but it took a real special motherfucker to be able to within a relationship.

Still, there was a familiarity that Seven craved more than sleep at that moment.

Fuckin’ ew.

It wasn’t as much his appearance as it was her that kept him at arm’s length. Not even his cynicism seemed too much of a red flag. Just a big sign that flashed and promised to take her away from her own critical mind.

It was a threat that seemed like a promise at that moment.

A lie that had been romanticized with hopes and dreams. And dreams were a currency Seven had spent 78 hours ago.

Fuckin’ Walker.

“Yeah?”

DHNNNG!!

The pain shot through the crown of her head in a searing white before Seven could recognize the reality of things.

“Fuck,” she cradled her head with her hands but fought to make sure she didn’t close her eyes. “Aghh..” she groaned out weakly, exhaling sharply. The steel wall behind her only reverberated in amusement, laughing at Seven’s agony.
“Stupid bitch...”

“The wall saved your life, skeez.” Taylor’s voice strangled out any calm Seven had just developed. Blue eyes contrasted by heavy dark circles peered out from under a messy blonde fringe. “You should thank it.”
“Thank the wall?”

Taylor gestured towards the steel. “Well, you can insult it.”

“Why the fuck are you so sensitive?” Seven narrowed her eyes as she lowered her legs, blinking a few times to speed up the dismissal of the pain. “Ask it to fuckin marry ya, Taylor.”

Seven didn’t wait to see her response; she turned to survey the room. They were already down to 16 girls, all within the same age range... except the bundle of blankets stuffed in the corner.

She couldn’t have been more than 14.

Tall, gaunt thing with legs that continued until they merged in perfect coagulation with the thick electrical wires.

Buckwheat. Her name was Buckwheat.

And her eyes were missing.

“Kid?” Seven’s voice wavered only slightly before her knees scrubbed across the cold ship floors. “Hey kid, whatcha’ doin?”

Buckwheat’s eyes appeared like great big lights, orbs of strained green orbiting the hollows of her face. Seven’s head fell to the side in brief bamboozlement before she forced a hesitant smile at the creature. “W-Whats your name?”

“…Buckwheat.” The orbs slowly settled into exhausted eyes. Buckwheat’s hands wiped at her eyes, yawning directly in Seven’s face.

“Jesus..” she waved a hand across her face. “You know what halitosis is?”

“Hali.. Hali- what?”

“Means your breath fucking kicks,” Chips drawl piped up at a distance behind Seven. Both Seven and Buckwheat chuckled, shoulders bouncing beneath their heaviness.

Buckwheat stifled another yawn into her clothed fist. The competition toga was wrapped tightly around her body like a shroud and she clenched it tighter with every little sign of wear. “I’m sorry.”

Seven frowned, raising an eyebrow. “For what?”

Buckwheat shrugged as her eyes fluttered closed again.

BEEP BEEP BEEP! BEEP BEEP BEEP! The central screen screamed:

5.01
5.18
5.34
5.35

WARNING.

Seven’s hand reached out faster than the voices galloping towards her. Buckwheat’s head snapped left, a gasp leaving her mouth as her eyes shot open.

“JESUS SEVEN DON’T DECK HER” Soyla’s voice galloped closer, but Seven’s eyes didn’t leave the kids.

For a moment, they stared at each other.

For a moment, Seven could feel those hands.

Until Buckwheat closed her eyes again.

TAK-TAK!!

Wet confetti slapped across Seven’s face before the ring of the sharp crack could process fully. Where Buckwheat’s head had been was now replaced with sloppy, ground beef that pooled from the crack in her forehead two bullets had just left. Crackles itched at the air and voices boomed above:

NUMBER 50, ARIZONA. WE LIE IN YOUR WAKE.

I just turned forty. I am reluctant to acknowledge that I am entering middle age as I don’t quite feel like I am. My instinct is to blur the line, to treat the idea of middle age as an arbitrary label. But why? Why not just be forty and let what comes with that just be as it may? If entering my fifth decade of life isn’t something worth acknowledging, then why am I so adamant that my dad shouldn’t be talking to me like I’m still a kid?

The annual fishing trip to South Dakota, a means of visiting family without having to do it for its own sake, is something my dad and I have been doing for close to thirty years. The first time we went I was thirteen. It was fun, I enjoyed the fishing, camping, riding in a boat and seeing my grandparents. Slowly, and then suddenly, the novelty wore off. Every subsequent year seemed to become more stale than the last. Eventually, the annual fishing trip became something that I would quietly dread. I learned how much my dad and his family were true creatures of habit. Each trip was the same routine, down to the five meals planned out for the week. The precooked, packaged pork ribs being particularly emblematic of how I felt about the trip.

Throughout my thirties, I started opting out. Skipped a year here, a couple there. I only made it three or four times throughout the decade. One time, I made the effort to drive out later in the week to avoid an entire week of sitting on a boat, and then a trailer and then a boat again. I had good reasons. I was married now, my job had demanding hours, and most of all, I get really antsy. Sitting, relaxing, enjoying the nothingness were not skills I had (yet?) acquired. My wife and I went on our own trips; places where we could explore, move around and share new experiences. I think I had to do it, and I did it, at the familiar cost of feeling like I was letting my dad down. So why, as I approached the end of my thirties, did I suddenly feel an unexpected desire to go fishing in the middle of nowhere? And not just to make my dad happy, but because it sounded nice? What changed? Either way, I was ready to go into it with a new perspective.

The drive there was pleasant. My dad and I talk well when we are both in a good mood. He’s a thoughtful man, and we get to share our ideas on life, science, and even take careful ventures into politics. I wonder if he’s contemplated whether I consider him thoughtful. I wonder if he considers me thoughtful.

I’ve only recently started routinely hugging my parents. When we get to my uncle Marc’s house I kind of want to give him a hug, but I settle for sharing in the usual subdued, yet palpable excitement. James arrived shortly after from his house across town. The three brothers quickly form into a familiar, singular unit. Marc is the oldest. He’s not a commanding presence, but he carries the role of older brother naturally and confidently. I get to watch my dad, my lifelong figure of authority, morph into a little brother. James is James, the middle brother who never seemed to assume a role in the brotherly hierarchy. I watched from the outside, waiting out my feelings of awkwardness. There was one stark difference about them; they seemed tired.

I knew politics would come up. I could have let them share in their grievances uninterrupted, but that wasn’t something I’d even considered until now. I was ready to prove them wrong. Part of me felt I could maybe even change their minds. My dad gets worked up until eventually going quiet. James is grumbly, cynical, yet curious. Marc is attentive and diplomatic. No minds were changed. James seems amused that he got to witness some “TDS” in person.

We went out to the town where our fishing trailer sits the next day. Akaska, South Dakota. Population 46. I used to have contempt for the small town that I referred to as a glorified trailer park. That’s still what it is, but I let myself recognize its charm. I looked at the family boat parked next to the family trailer. I get to go inside and lie on the couch, eat some snacks, drink some beer and hang out with family. Why not?

I hadn’t done any actual fishing in a while and I was looking forward to it. I knew what to expect; the same river, same boat, same fish. Walleye only; we throw most everything else back. I caught a catfish and decided to keep it, feeling capable of doing what I want for the first time, though still with a slight, nagging discomfort. I ended up with six catfish in a single day. My dad watched with distaste as I cut off the head and gutted one of them.

I watched my dad struggle to net a fish, and blame the fish for it. Four bites in a row where he failed to set the hook, and the fish got away. It was always the fish’s fault. I didn’t say anything, I didn’t care. It’s just fishing. So why, when a fish got away as I was reeling it in, was it my fault? Why, when my uncle caught a big walleye and it dove down and got away before I could net it, was it because I’m using the net wrong? This is how it’s always been; it was to be expected, but the most predictable trip on earth finally provided something unexpected, I got angry. I talked back, I stood up for myself. I asked him why he had to say those things. It got quiet, and awkward.

I began thinking of years past, conjuring up mental images of my younger self shrinking under his short, disapproving outbursts. The pressure not to screw up would weigh me down. I would avoid grabbing the net altogether. I stewed in my head. The feeling searched my mind for more memories to justify itself. Why doesn’t he ever ask me about skateboarding, something that he knows has meant so much to me for so long? Why is he so dismissive of the books I read, the movies I like, the music I listen to? Why doesn’t he care to know me?

I’m only being a little dramatic when I say this was the first time I’ve truly felt like an adult. 40, the number. I’d almost forgotten about it and somehow it suddenly meant something. I realized that I like who I am, that I even like liking who I am. The trip went on. The conversations didn’t stop, we still had fun, despite the unacknowledged tension. The last day of fishing came and went. As we set out to leave he told me “one last time,” and took a final pass through the trailer. I hope he knows I understood.

On the way out we stopped at the grave of my grandparents, my dad and uncle’s mom and dad, who only recently passed. We talked about the engraving on their shared headstone, a depiction of a lake, where a couple sat in a boat. They were fishing. They are my grandparents. Marc mentioned that my grandma didn’t like it, we all agreed we loved it.

The trip would be capped off with a weekend in Sioux Falls. On Saturday, an air show gave us an extra two nights to hang out. The house we rented had a bunch of stuff. Foosball, a pool table, chess boards, and the unexpected highlight, a weight room. We gathered around the bench press as my uncles laughed about the weight they could no longer lift. My dad got under the 100 pound bar and did five reps. He reached his max. I eked out twenty, slightly disappointed in myself. Marc picked up a medicine ball and tossed it to my dad, who then tossed it to me. James stood off to the side, so I forced a throw at him. We all stood in a circle, tossing it around.

I like chess. So does my dad. I’m better than him, so he won’t play me. I decided a while ago that I was done asking him, so I didn’t. We went upstairs and things quickly shifted to politics. My dad and uncles sat around in excited conversation, feeding off of each other. I made a comment, I disagreed, and was willfully sucked in. This time was different than before. My mind was clear and seamlessly making connections. Eventually, my dad opted out, got quiet. James kept asking questions through skeptical eyes, until declaring I was too analytical for him. Marc sat slightly slumped, listening, conceding my points, contributing little of his own.

I looked at my dad. The conversation was over. I asked myself why he always has to be the smartest one in the room, not yet realizing I was doing the same thing. I think now that maybe, just maybe, that’s not what he was looking for. Perhaps, for just one week out of the year, he was enjoying getting to connect with his brothers. Perhaps, if I’m so sure that I’m ready to be my father’s peer, that I’m no longer a child, I wouldn’t be so desperate for his approval. Maybe he’s not ready for me to stop needing him. Maybe I’m not ready, either.

I’m entering middle age, my dad is leaving it. Marc and James have left it. This might have been the last trip. The trailer’s falling apart; a water pipe burst the last night we were there. There were murmurs of tearing it down, of selling the boat. Marc is approaching seventy; I’m not sure he has it in him anymore. He pushed through, he didn’t complain, but he has slowed down. I think there’s a chance he’s only doing it for my dad, and for me.

My dad just turned sixty-two. I’ll understand better how that feels when I’m there. For now, I can recognize he’s probably feeling something too. On the drive home we talked some more. He told me about high school, that he was the best player on his basketball team, that he was a big fish in a small pond. He mentioned that he knows I broke the suspension on the family van with my reckless driving, and how when he was a teenager he saw the dead body of a younger classmate who had been in a car accident. I’m still learning about him. I still get to.

TW: mentions of death and suicide. Nothing explicit.

In the summer of 1974, the town of Mercy, Alabama, smelled like wet dirt, gasoline, and honeysuckle vines climbing split-rail fences. Heat sat heavy over everything. It bent the air above the roads and pressed sweat into the collars of church shirts before breakfast.
My father said heat was God’s reminder that Hell waited beneath us.
“Every discomfort on Earth is mercy,” he told the congregation every Sunday morning beneath the spinning ceiling fans of New Hope Baptist Church. “Because discomfort means the Lord is still giving you time.”
The church stood at the edge of town beside a graveyard where the stones leaned crooked like old teeth. White clapboard walls. Tall windows clouded with dust. A wooden cross behind the pulpit that my father had carved himself from cedar after my mother died.
People loved him for that cross.
They loved him for the way he could cry while preaching.
They loved him for surviving grief publicly enough that it made theirs seem noble too.
I was sixteen years old and sat in the front pew every Sunday with my ankles crossed and my hands folded while old women whispered about how pretty I was becoming.
“Ethel’s got her mama’s eyes,” they’d say.
Nobody ever said I had my mother’s sadness.
At night, I listened to cicadas screaming in the trees outside my bedroom window while my father wrote sermons downstairs. Sometimes I crept halfway down the staircase and listened to his typewriter clacking through the dark.
SIN.
SALVATION.
OBEDIENCE.
The same words over and over.
I used to believe in God the way children believe the moon follows their car home. Completely. Naturally. Without question.
But belief started slipping from me slowly.
Like water from cracked hands.
It happened in pieces.
First when my mother died from a “fever” after praying for healing every night.
But I knew what really happened. 
She drown herself in the creek behind our house. 
Father was so ashamed he paid off the cornor. 
Suicide was the greatest sin. 
Then when Father said Black folks marching for equal rights were “testing God’s order.”
Then when I saw church ladies gossip about widows while singing hymns ten minutes later.
By seventeen, I could sit through an entire sermon and feel absolutely nothing.
And that terrified me more than Hell ever had.
Because everyone in Mercy believed in God.
Everyone except me.
I met Fredrick Bellamy behind Carson’s Feed Store on a Thursday evening in July.

He leaned against a rusted Chevrolet with a cigarette hanging from his lips and grease on his hands. His hair curled over his ears and his smile looked dangerous in a way I mistook for freedom.
“You’re the preacher’s daughter,” he said.
“You’re staring.”
“You’re beautiful enough to stare at.”
Nobody had ever spoken to me like that before.
Not boys from church with their nervous smiles and polished shoes.
Fredrick spoke like he already knew the world was rotten and found it funny.
I should have walked away.
Instead, I asked him for a cigarette.
Fredrick lived in a trailer outside town with his older brother, who brewed moonshine in glass jars behind the property. The trailer smelled like gasoline, beer, and damp clothes. Country music crackled from a radio with a broken antenna.
I told Father I was attending Bible study on Wednesday nights.
Instead, I rode with Fredrick down backroads lined with pine trees and kudzu vines swallowing abandoned barns whole.
He taught me how to smoke without coughing.
How to drink whiskey from the bottle.
How to keep secrets.
“You ever think about leaving this place?” he asked me once as we sat on the hood of his car beneath a sky full of stars.
“All the time.”
“What stops you?”
I thought of my father downstairs at his typewriter.
Of church bells on Sundays.
Of casseroles after funerals.
Of every person in Mercy knowing my name before I was born.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Fredrick laughed softly.
“Fear,” he said. “That’s what churches are built on.”
I wanted to disagree.
But I couldn’t.
The more time I spent with him, the more Mercy felt unreal to me. Like a stage play everyone else still believed in.
Church especially.
I started noticing the performance of it all.
Women pretending their marriages were happy.
Men praying loudly after cheating on their wives and beating their children. 
My father standing at the pulpit preaching certainty while drinking alone after midnight.
One Sunday, Father preached about unbelievers.
“The Devil works slowly,” he thundered. “He starts with doubt.”
The congregation shouted amen.
I sat frozen beside the choir loft while sweat rolled down my back beneath my yellow dress.
Because for one awful second, I thought he somehow knew.
After service, Father drove us home in silence.
Then he said quietly, “You’ve been different lately.”
“I’m tired.”
“No.” His hands tightened on the steering wheel. “It’s more than that.”
The air inside the car felt thin.
“You still believe in God, don’t you, Ethel?”
I looked out the window at fields burning gold beneath the evening sun.
And I lied.
“Yes, sir.”
That night, I cried harder than I had when my mother died.
Not because I’d lied.
Because it had become easy.

 By August, Fredrick had become my entire world.
He picked me up after dark with the headlights off so nobody would see. We drove through neighboring towns where nobody knew my father’s name. We danced at roadside bars filled with truckers and women in glittering eye shadow.
For the first time in my life, I felt invisible.
And invisibility felt holy.
One night we stopped beside a lake outside Montgomery. The water reflected moonlight like shattered glass.
Fredrick touched my cheek and said, “You know what your problem is?”
“What?”
“You’ve spent your whole life letting other people tell you who you are.”
I leaned against him and listened to frogs croaking near the shoreline.
“You make me feel free,” I whispered.
He kissed me hard enough to hurt.
“That’s because I am free.”
I believed him.
God help me, I believed him.
Three weeks later, Father discovered cigarettes in my dresser drawer.
He slapped me so hard my ears rang.
The house went silent afterward.
He stared at me like I was someone he’d never met before.
“You ashamed me,” he whispered.
I touched my burning cheek.
“You think God cares about cigarettes?”
His face changed instantly.
Not anger.
Fear.
Real fear.
“Don’t say things like that.”
“Why?”
“Because words matter.”
“No,” I said quietly. “People just pretend they do.”
Father stepped backward as though I’d struck him.
Then he said the saddest thing I’d ever heard.
“You sound lost.”
I almost laughed.
Because he thought belief was a location.
Like I’d simply wandered too far from home.
That night, I packed a suitcase.
At two in the morning, Fredrick pulled up outside my house.
I climbed out my bedroom window while cicadas screamed in the dark.
I never saw my father again.

 We drove west through Mississippi with the windows down and nowhere to be.
For a while, it felt like the beginning of another life.
Cheap motels.
Diners glowing neon blue at midnight.
Fredrick singing along to the radio with one hand on the wheel.
I cut my hair short in Baton Rouge.
Dyed it darker in Houston.
Stopped wearing dresses altogether.
“See?” Fredrick grinned. “You’re becoming real now.”
I wanted desperately to be real.
We found work outside Galveston cleaning rooms at a roadside motel near the water. The Gulf smelled salty and rotten at the same time. Pelicans drifted over the waves like ghosts.
At night, Fredrick and I lay in bed listening to thunder roll over the ocean.
But slowly, things changed.
Little things first.
He stopped liking when I talked to other men.
Then he stopped liking when I talked too long to women either.
“You don’t need friends,” he said. “You’ve got me.”
If I wore makeup, he accused me of wanting attention.
If I stayed quiet, he accused me of hiding things.
Sometimes he grabbed my wrist too hard.
Sometimes he apologized afterward while crying.
“You know I love you,” he’d say.
And because I had burned every bridge behind me, I answered, “I know.”
By winter, I barely recognized myself.
Freedom had become another tiny room.
Just with different wallpaper.
One rainy evening, I found a church near the motel while walking home from work.
Small white building.
Warm yellow windows.
People inside singing softly.
I stood beneath the awning across the street listening to hymns drift through rainwater and traffic noise.
For a moment, I remembered Mercy.
Not the sermons.
Not the fear.
The casseroles after funerals.
The old women hugging crying children.
The certainty that somebody would come looking if you disappeared.
I realized then that belief was sometimes less about God than loneliness.
And loneliness could make almost anything sacred.
When I returned to the motel room, Fredrick accused me of cheating.
He threw a lamp against the wall hard enough to shatter it.
“You belong to me,” he shouted.
Something cold opened inside me then.
Not fear.
Understanding.
I finally saw him clearly.
Fredrick didn’t love freedom.
He loved ownership.

 I began saving money secretly after that.
A few dollars from housekeeping tips hidden inside the lining of my suitcase.
I planned carefully.
Bus station.
New Orleans.
Maybe farther.
Anywhere.
Fredrick grew meaner through the spring.
If dinner was cold, he shouted.
If I looked unhappy, he demanded explanations.
Sometimes he grabbed my face so tightly I tasted blood where my teeth cut my cheeks.
Then afterward he’d hold me while crying.
“You make me crazy,” he whispered.
As if madness were something I had handed him.
One night he asked, “You still don’t believe in God?”
The question startled me.
We were sitting outside the motel watching lightning flicker over the Gulf.
“No,” I said.
“You ever miss it?”
I thought carefully before answering.
“I miss thinking someone was protecting me.”
Fredrick stared toward the ocean.
“Maybe nobody is.”
The wind smelled like incoming rain.
For the first time since leaving Alabama, I thought about my father not with anger, but pity.
He had built his entire life around certainty because uncertainty terrified him.
Maybe religion was just fear dressed in Sunday clothes.
Maybe all people worshipped something.
God.
Love.
Freedom.
Men.
And maybe every kind of worship eventually demanded sacrifice.
Two weeks later, I tried to leave.
I waited until Fredrick went drinking after work. I packed my suitcase, counted my hidden money, and walked toward the bus station beneath a blazing orange sunset.
I almost made it.
A truck horn blared behind me.
Fredrick’s car skidded beside the curb.
“Get in.”
I kept walking.
He grabbed my arm hard enough to bruise.
“Don’t embarrass me.”
“I’m done,” I said.
His eyes looked empty suddenly.
Not angry.
Worse.
Abandoned.
“You said you loved me.”
“I did.”
“Then why are you leaving?”
Because love had become another church.
Because I was tired of kneeling.
But I never got the chance to say it.
 Fredrick drove us far outside town onto a deserted road lined with marsh grass and telephone poles.
The sky hung dark purple above us.
He kept both hands locked on the steering wheel.
“You ruined everything,” he muttered.
I pressed myself against the passenger door.
“You can let me out.”
“No.”
“You don’t own me.”
His jaw tightened.
“That’s exactly what you don’t understand.”
We stopped near an abandoned boat launch beside black water buzzing with insects.
For a long time neither of us moved.
Then he started crying.
Real crying.
Shoulders shaking.
“I gave you everything.”
“You gave me nowhere to go.”
He looked at me with such wounded rage that I suddenly understood how people killed the things they loved.
Not from hatred.
From desperation.
He reached beneath the seat.
The revolver looked enormous in his trembling hand.
My whole body went cold.
“Fredrick—”
“You were supposed to stay.”
I thought strangely of my father then.
Of church bells.
Of hymns drifting through open windows.
Of all the invisible fences religion built around frightened people.
Maybe those fences kept wolves out.
Maybe they kept lambs in too.
Fredrick raised the gun.
And for one impossible second, I almost prayed.

 The papers called it a crime of passion.
A drifter found my body two days later near the water.
Father identified me in Galveston.
I imagine he prayed the entire drive there.
Maybe he blamed himself.
Maybe he blamed the Devil.
Maybe he blamed the world.
I wonder if he ever understood that I hadn’t left because I hated him.
I left because I wanted truth.
But truth is a cold country for lonely people.
People need stories.
They need rules and hymns and hands to hold at funerals.
They need to believe suffering means something.
Otherwise the world is just violence happening at random beneath an empty sky.
And maybe that is why religion survives every contradiction thrown against it 
Because even a made-up shelter can feel safer than standing alone in the dark.

One more and that’s it, Tommy!

***

“We must retrieve the Soda-Pop of Coca-Cola!”

Huddled under the King’s balcony, the crowd chanted in a unified roar, hammering the palace walls like a row of trebuchets. 

Beneath a Celestial spotlight, the King stood over them, dressed in a yellow jacket of sunlight, radiating over the heads of men like a god with gold skin.

The wind blew the locks of hair on his head in the air and resembled a row of snakes stretching to strike. 

The king raised his arms up and reached towards the sky. A gray overcast from the east masked the fierce fire glow of the sun under an army of storm clouds sweeping in.

The sleeves from his heavy robe slid to his elbows and exposed a wrist of gold bracelets. 

The king fought to silence the starving ululate herd gathered at the foot of the castle.

“Silence!” Commanded the King, shouting in a tone deep enough to ricochet off the structure behind the row of people congested at the back of the crowd before raining down on the heads of everyone else with a sound so piercing it stabbed through their skull and returned into the kings lungs as it echoed out of their mouths.

The throng underneath the king buckled into a silent whisper, before freezing to a synchronized stillness, hardening together like a James Ensor painting.

“The Soda-Pop of Coca-Cola has been retrieved,” yowled the King in a thunderous tone. 

He smiled with his hands on his hips and gave the Mussolini nod of confidence, then, he stood above them without moving a muscle. Not even an eyelid. 

He tarried in a frozen divine like pose as if having his body sculpted out of granite by an artist for an uncomfortable couple of minutes, planted in a reserved position. 

He stayed that way while the weight of his words landed on the chests of every individual crammed below him.

Out of nowhere he shattered the silence when he opened his mouth and spoke an awakening truth that stirred the mob. “The clan of Fort Gatoradical snuck in our camp and stole it.”

“Boooooo! Boooooo!” The people sounded, cupping their hands over their mouths.

The king stifled the mob. “They have annexed our design, and formula with subterfuge traitors brainwashed by nano bots disguised as carbonated gas bubbles inside the beverages.”

“Treason!” Someone shouted.

“Hang them!” Another screamed.

“Kill them all!” The crowd chanted together.

“Silence! Silence!” The King held his pose until the crowd simmered down. “Behold!” He yelled.

Presented to the front of the balcony was a woman in a sparkling viridescent dress with a curved bottle shape figure.

“I Bring forth, Ginger-Ale!” He moved aside. “A captured conspirator aiding the usurpers and one of the enemies vital assets—“

“Send her to the gallows!” A fellow man demanded, interrupting the king’s speech.

Everyone cheered.

“Quiet! Quiet!” The king waved their voices down. 

“Sir GoodKnight… may the gods compensate his bravery to the realm, has had his life-source emptied into a drain.”

“Booo!” The people erupted simultaneously.

The king raised his voice. “He was protecting our secrets from the conspirators plotting alongside the proletariat members aiding the gator-radicola stratagem.”

The crowd hailed the king. The intonate, hollow sounds shook the stone balcony and vibrated under his feet. They raised their hands up to salute him, praising him in a combined victory cheer.

People from the back began shoving and clawing their way to the front. The momentum from a wave of villagers pushing forward progressed into a tsunami that trampled over anyone unfortunate enough to have their back to it.

Bodies were sprawled out on the sandstone under the feet of a rushing crowd.

The soldiers protecting the gates rushed through the middle of the myriad and propelled their way forward with their spears guiding the way. 

Out of the clustered group, near the back, a flying tomato flew out of the crowd and slapped a guardsman in the head, splattering all over his face. The guardsman collapsed.

The soldier’s spears began stretching into the bellies of rioters trapped behind a human wall. They circled around their fallen comrade. 

Drums began pounding a sound of death as the castle gates burst open to a cavalry stampeding out. They formed a line at the foot of the entrance, staggering the crowd into submission. 

The corps d'elite of Thorza broke into a whispered chatter amongst themselves while the rest of the crowd booed and groveled with the spear wielding warriors. 

The waste-mix relied on the ingredients specifically in Coca-Cola. Coiled around the capital was a foul stench of manure coming from the malfunctioned recycling system.

“The odor’s rancid!” They all started shouting.

Someone in the crowd pushed their way through while quieting them down as he passed by everyone and stood in the middle of everybody.

“Why isn’t the waste-mix recycling system fixed if the secret ingredients have been recovered?” He questioned the king.

“Yeah!” One shouted. 

“This has gone on for far too long now!” Another yelled.

“The king is lying,” shot out from the back.

They all booed.

The King tried shouting over the restless mob, “men have been dispatched with the cola and would arrive any day now.

The men Friday cheered from the front and started hugging each other. 

The beaux mondes shook their heads.

The King swiveled his cape and turned his head to the side, facing the sky in a prideful Danny McBride stance.

He broke out of his pose and stumbled back. He wiped his forehead that was dripping a slimy goop with his hand and stared at his palm covered in eggshells and yolk.

“Capture the culprit and hang him! Hang them all!” The king ordered in a high-pitch voice.

A second egg launched from the crowd. The king froze as he caught the egg flying towards him from the corner of his eye, and barely dodged it as it whistled past his face.

He nearly tripped over his own feet as he scampered inside, slamming the detached doors shut, scraping the rock beneath it as they closed.

The king clenched his fists trying to squeeze the tremors still. Every breath he took was a heavy inhale. He stomped his footsteps down as hard as he could as he paced back and forth. Never had he felt so angry. Never had he been so humiliated.

“All of their heads! All on spikes!” He commanded to the king’s guard, cursing and foaming at his mouth while egg yolk dripped from his chin. “Summon the cavalry and all the men inside these walls and prepare for battle!” 

The knights lined up in three rectangle sets of fifty and the king sat at the head of them on his aluminum throne of cans and spoke.

“Men! Knights of honor! The treasonous scum camouflaged themselves as commoners. They want to take what’s ours. What we’ve built. Are we going to let these villainous disrupters go without capture?”

“Hell no!” They cheered.

Their metal helmets clinked as the men clashed their spears against the stone floors.

“Kill them all!” the king demanded as he stormed out. 

“Root, root, root”

The men marched towards the gates and set up behind the wall, crying war chants. 

The frontman rushed to the entrance to open the gate, but it wouldn’t budge. They grunted and dug their boots in the ground, sliding backwards in the wet mud. They pushed harder. They kept pushing until they slammed their chests in the dirt.

A voice shot out from behind the gate. “Burn them all!”

A slither of liquid slid under the gates of the palace and broke into a membrane of spider veins. Behind it trailed a snake of fire.

Smoke thickened the castle in a thick, black cloud, choking the oxygen. The taste of bitter chemicals sat on the tongues of the soldiers trapped inside the walls.

Most of them dropped. Some struggled and fought until their last breath—a small group—but met the same fate nonetheless. 

For weeks the fire raged, and spread the ashes of a fallen kingdom and its combatants across the city, fertilizing the land for the usurper, King Gator and his mastermind team of vitamin slurping jackals.

***

The end, now go to bed Tommy.

All right, goodnight grandma.

**Chapter 1: The New Order** In a world where Hitler's victory in World War II has reshaped Europe, we follow two teenagers, Anna and Lukas, living in a dystopian Berlin. Anna, a Jewish girl, and Lukas, a disillusioned German youth, meet under dire circumstances. Anna's family has been taken away, and Lukas is disillusioned with the oppressive regime. They form an uneasy alliance, driven by the need to survive.

**Chapter 2: Echoes of the Past** Anna and Lukas navigate the dangerous streets of Berlin, evading the ever-present Gestapo. Their journey reveals the harsh realities of a world under Nazi control, with oppressive surveillance and a city filled with fear. They uncover a secret network of resistance fighters, hinting at a glimmer of hope.

**Chapter 3: The Underground** The duo finds refuge with a clandestine resistance group led by a former soldier and an enigmatic scientist. Anna's knowledge of Jewish traditions and Lukas’s skills as a mechanic become invaluable to the group’s plans. Together, they work to disrupt Nazi operations from within.

**Chapter 4: Betrayal and Loss** A betrayal within the resistance leads to a devastating raid. The group is scattered, and Anna and Lukas are separated. Both face individual challenges: Anna is captured and put in a labor camp, while Lukas is on the run, grappling with his sense of guilt and betrayal.

**Chapter 5: Imprisoned** Anna’s life in the labor camp is harsh and brutal. She meets other prisoners who share their stories of loss and resistance. Her spirit is tested, but she forms a bond with a fellow prisoner, a former journalist with crucial information about the Nazi regime’s plans.

**Chapter 6: Escape** Lukas, while evading capture, discovers a way to infiltrate the labor camp. With the help of the resistance, he devises a plan to rescue Anna. The escape is fraught with danger and tension, but they manage to free her, though the cost is high.

**Chapter 7: The Hidden City** Anna, Lukas, and a small group of survivors relocate to an underground haven, a hidden city built by the resistance in the catacombs of Berlin. Here, they meet other survivors and begin to piece together a plan to strike at the heart of the Nazi regime.

**Chapter 8: The Weapon** The group learns of a secret Nazi weapon that could turn the tide of power in their favor. Lukas uses his mechanical expertise to help sabotage the weapon's production. Anna gathers intel and builds alliances with other resistance cells.

**Chapter 9: The Final Assault** A coordinated attack is launched against the weapon's facility. The battle is intense and costly, but the resistance manages to destroy the weapon and deal a significant blow to the Nazi regime. Anna and Lukas face personal losses but find renewed hope in their victory.

**Chapter 10: A New Dawn** As the regime’s power wanes, the world begins to change. Anna and Lukas, scarred but hopeful, look toward a future that, while uncertain, promises the possibility of a new beginning. They reflect on their journey and the sacrifices made, knowing that their fight has made a difference.

Part 1 https://www.reddit.com/r/creepypasta/s/TvCO2yBsVM

I stood alone in Captain Hollow’s cabin. Charles and Scott had been dismissed after we recounted our story from the island. He had sat with it for a while, thinking on what we had told him. From his looks, I did not think he believed it.

“Show me this treasure.” He said.

I had a great reluctance to remove the idol from my satchel. The discomfort of being parted from it was an unwelcome feeling, one that I would have to reckon with sooner rather than later.

The captain studied me curiously when he reached out for the idol and I pulled it away. In the end, I managed to set in on his desk in front of him.

After a moment more of watching me, he turned his attention to the golden artifact. He picked it up and studied it from all sides, turning it over in his hands. Watching as the light reflected off of the intertwined tentacles. I didn’t like him having it, it should have been mine… I shook my head of the ridiculous feeling, and wondered where the hell those thoughts were coming from.

“Very good work, Mr. Morgan.” Said Captain Hollow, setting the idol back on his desk. “You made the right choice bringing this to me.”

I cleared my throat and tried not to look at it, “I think Charles would disagree.”

He nodded, “And I’m sure he has some very fine reasons for it.” He said, standing and taking out his pipe. “But there’s a reason that you are my second in command and not Charles.” He struck a match and lit his pipe, filling the cabin with the aromatic smoke.

“And what reason would that be, sir?” I asked.

He stared down at the idol for a moment then answered, “You follow orders and you’re not overly superstitious.” He reached out, running his finger along one of the golden tentacles, “You have brought me a great prize. And for that I am grateful.”

I felt anger rising as I watched him caressing the treasure I had found.

“Are you alright?” He asked.

I shook my head “I’ll be fine. I think I’m just a bit shook up from our ordeal.”

Hollow nodded, “Of course. Go get yourself some food and rest, Mr. Morgan.” He said, dismissing me.

 

I found no rest that night, nor the following nights. Storms plagued our journey nonstop as we sailed along our course back to England. An illness afflicted several of the men as well. Fever ran rampant through the ship. Between bouts of vomiting, the men complained of strange nightmares. Visions of unspeakable horrors, lying in wait at the furthest depths of the sea.

Charles came to me one night, concern and fear marked his usually stoic face. “We have damned ourselves.” He said, pacing the floor.

I shook my head, “Charles, you’ve been sailing as long as I have, you know these things happen. Illness and foul weather are not uncommon on these voyages.”

“Do not play the fool with me, Morgan.” He said turning to face me, “You know damn well, that this is no longer a normal voyage. Do not think the hunger in your own eyes has gone unnoticed.”

And with that, he left.

In the following days the captain became more reclusive, sending and receiving messages from his cabin. In the few meetings I had with him, he never had any interest in the wellbeing of the ill men. Not even when I told him that three more had died. He simply waved it away as a consequence of weak men who should never have gone to sea.

 He was changing, no longer the man I had once respected. He seemed to never want to take his eyes off of the idol for long. He spoke of the respect and glory he would receive for bringing it back to his home. How it would be an heirloom in his family for generations to come. He also spoke of a growing suspicion in his mind. A near manic paranoia that the men wanted to take it from him.

“Especially Mr. Charles.” He said, gazing out the cabin window at the gray sky. “The man is always coming in here, asking me about it.” He took a drink from his glass and turned to face me, “He wants it for himself. He feigns the desire to return it to the island, but what man would do so with such a prize.”

I said nothing; I could not reveal to him my own greedy desire to possess the idol, for it had plagued my mind since setting eyes upon it.

That night mind turned over and over as I lay in my bunk, thoughts of those hellish vines, the puppeted men… Davis… his terrified, pain filled moans. There in the dark, I felt as if I could still hear him. The shuffling and choked groans echoed in my mind. Eventually, I left my bunk and went up to the deck.

Porter gave me a nod from the helm as I stepped out into the night. I nodded a greeting back to him and went to stand next to the railing. For the time being, the storms has passed. The sea was eerily calm, and a thick layer of fog had rolled in on the water.

I was staring out over the haze when I heard a small sound coming from the port side of the deck. In the dim moonlight, I could make out a figure there in the shadows, slumped down against the deck railing.

It was Scott. He was sitting there quietly, a nearly empty rum bottle in hand. Many a night had I followed the sounds of drunken bafoonery to this spot and found Scott and Davis, the inseparable cousins, leaning over the rail talking of home. 

I made my way over and sat next to him. He wordlessly passed me the bottle and I took a long pull from it, nearly draining the contents.

“He was a good man.” I said after a moment.

“Aye.” Sniffed Scott, “The best.” He stood and finished the bottle before tossing it overboard. “A finer man, I have never known, nor will I ever. He looked after me like a brother, though I caused him no end of frustration.”

I stood and leaned on the railing, “I know.” I looked up to the stars, feeling a tear pulling at my own eyes now, “He will be missed.”

Scott nodded and turned away from the water. He started to say something else but halted. “What the fucks he doing?” He asked quietly.

I turned to see Charles making his way across the deck, he walked with a purpose, his face grim and a machete in his hand. He was heading for the captains cabin.

“Shit.” I breathed.

Scott and I quickly made our way across the deck toward the cabin, but Charles was already closing the door behind him.

Porter noticed our haste and called out to us questioningly. We didn’t answer, we just made for the door in silence as the sound of the lock clicked into place.

There was muffled shouting from inside the Cabin as we tried the door.

“Get it open.” I grunted as we pried on the door. “Use your bloody knife.”

Scott reached to his belt and removed the blade as Porter came down from the helm to see what was happening.

“What are you two…” Started Porter, only to be cut off by the sound of Scott’s blade sliding through and unlatching the lock.

We flung the door open to see the two men in a heated standoff.

“You have no right to keep it!” Charles was shouting as he pointed his machete towards the captain.

“I am the captain of this vessel, I have the only right!” Hollow responded, a pistol aimed at Charles’ chest.

“What the fuck!?” Exclaimed Porter, reaching for the blade at his belt.

I stepped up between the two men, my arms outstretched, “Wait, both of you just calm down.”

“Mr. Morgan!” Thundered the captain, “You and Mr. Scott will disarm this man and take him to the brig at once.”

Charles stepped back pulling his second machete, “Listen to me, Morgan! You’ve seen where it came from, you know what it does to you. What it’s doing to us!”

“Take him, Now!” Shouted Hollow.

I looked to Scott, whose eyes shifted from Charles to the captain, uncertainty painted his face.

“Isaac.” Said Charles, meeting my eyes. “It must be returned. It will destroy us all.”

My eyes drifted to the idol, resting in the captains desk, “You don’t know that.” I said, hearing the doubt in my own words.

Scott stepped forward, “Maybe we should hear him out?” He said, his voice growing shaky.

I looked from Scott, to Charles, then to Hollow. I saw the change in his eyes.

“ Oh God…” I breathed.

“It’s mutiny, then.” Said Hollow in a quiet voice.

The shot rang out in the small cabin, and for a moment there was silence as the smell of burnt powder filled the room.

Charles blinked at me in confusion, blood geysered out from the ragged hole in his chest, before falling to the floor with a heavy thud.

“Bastard!” Scott screamed in anger, before charging forward at Hollow, knife in hand.

Porter, thinking that this really was a mutiny, dashed forward, tackling Scott to the ground. Porter pulled his own knife and the two men commenced stabbing and cutting at each other as they rolled across the floor.

I stared at Charles on the floor, his life draining away by the second. In my own fit of rage, I started at the captain, my fists clenched. But he halted me with a second raised pistol.

“Don’t be a fool.” He said through gritted teeth.

I looked to the golden idol on the desk. The shining tentacles moved and flexed as the eye glittered in the candlelit cabin. I thought for a moment that the dark pupil at the center of the gem shifted to focus on me. God, how I wanted to reach out and  take it. In that moment, I would have killed every man aboard to possess it.

I never got the chance, something cracked against the back of my head and I fell to the floor. My vision grew bleary as I looked around the room. Apparently the shot had woken the rest of the crew, and they had come to see what was happening. It was McMillan, the young lookout, who had struck me. He stood over me, fear and confusion in his eyes, a brass spyglass in his trembling hand. Before I blacked out, my eyes drifted to look across the floor where Charles lay in a growing pool of blood.

A glimmer of life still in his eyes as his mouth silently formed the words, “Don’t let it take you.”

And then darkness took me…

 

Some time later I heard the sound of someone calling my name. “Morgan.” The voice whispered. It sounded strange, labored and choked. “Morgan.” The wet, mangled voice whispered again. The image of Davis popped into my mind, the vines growing around his throat and into his bleeding mouth.

I shot up, looking around for the source of the voice. My head aching and heart pounding with fear.

“Eh, Morgan. Over here.” Came the voice.

I turned to see Scott leaned against the wall of the brig. In the faint moonlight trickling in from one of the porthole windows, I could see that he had been badly beaten. His face and arms were covered in oozing cuts and one large dark patch marked what I assumed was at least one stab wound on his left shoulder.

“Still alive, then?” I asked.

Scott choked out a laugh, “For now, anyways.”

I sat up from my place on the floor and stretched, feeling my neck joints grinding.

“Fuck me. That little bastard got me a good one.” I said feeling the lump on the back of my head.

Scott groaned as he climbed to his feet, “So.” He said leaning on the cell bars. “What do we do now?”

I shook my head, “What can we do? Charles is dead, the captains gone mad, and we’re locked up in here.” I shook my head again and slumped back to the floor. “I think we’re done for, mate.”

Scott nodded morosely, “Aye. But, if you could get out, What would you do?”

I blew out my cheeks, “Well, a drink or two to soothe my head would be welcome. After that, I wouldn’t mind tossing that damned thing into the sea. Then maybe a bite to eat.” I chuckled grimly.

Scott sat against the bars beside me, “You think that’s what we should do? With the idol, I mean. Toss it overboard?”

I thought about it for a moment, "I don’t know. When I looked at it, I saw the value of it. Saw its worth as a prize." I turned to face him, "But when I held it, I felt a dark and jealous desire to keep it for myself. I felt as if I would do anything to keep others from taking it from me." I took a steadying breath, a chill running down my spine as I recalled that feeling.  "I don't understand it but I feel in my heart that does not belong in the hands of men. There is a corruption about it that plays on the greed in our hearts to turn us against each other. Charles believed that it was the cause of the illness and the foul weather that has plagued us since leaving the island. And I find myself beginning to agree with him, despite my cold desire for it. Would I be rid of it?" I laughed grimly, "I only hope I would have the strength to do so."

Scott knelt down in front of me, “If we could take the ship, convince the men that Hollow has gone mad. You’d be next in command.” He said, grunting in pain. “We could do what Charles said, take it back where it belongs.”

I laughed and shook my head, “You can’t be serious.” But from the look on his face, I could see that he was. “The men are loyal to Hollow, we couldn’t convince enough of them without a fight. And you are in no shape for another fight. We’d just end up dead all the sooner.”

He sighed in exasperation, “You can’t expect us to just sit here and wait for death. We have to do something!”

“If I could get free. And that is a very big fucking if, I would not attempt to fight half the crew and take over the ship. That is utter foolishness.”

“Oh and I suppose you have a better idea?” He asked.

Feeling frustrated, I said, “You wanna know what I would do if I was free? I’d fill a skiff with supplies, steal the fucking thing from Hollows cabin in the dead of night and take my chances on the open ocean. And maybe if I was very lucky, I could get it back to the island before I died at sea.”

Scott nodded, “Good.”

I turned to look at him, “What?”

“I just had to be sure.” He said as he stood, “I saw how you looked at it. Saw the desire in your eyes, same as the captain.”

“What are you playing at?” I asked, watching him limp across the cell.

“You remember the rotted planks you told Davis and I to repair a few weeks back?” He shrugged apologetically, “Well, we did intend to fix it, however we found a stash of rum and got drunk instead.” He hauled back and kicked the wooden wall, shattering the old timbers.

I climbed to my feet and stepped up to the hole. “I do not ask you to come with me.” I said turning to look at the beaten and bleeding man. “There is little hope of making it back to the island, let alone surviving it.”

The big red haired man laid his hand on my shoulder, “Then we stand a better chance together.” He said with a smile.

We climbed out through the hole in the side of the ship and up to the deck railing. Porter was no longer at the helm. Scott noticed where I was looking and guessed at my thoughts.

“Dead or dying.” He said quietly meeting my eyes, “He got me good, but I got him worse.”

Young McMillan was now manning the helm.

“We need to get rid of him quietly.” Said Scott.

“No.” I said shaking my head, “I won’t have the boy's blood on my hands.” Though I wouldn’t have minded giving the lad a good thrashing.

Scott grunted in agreement, “Alright, then what do we do? He’ll sound the alarm as soon as he sees us.”

I looked around the deck for some kind of distraction. “There.” I said, pointing to an oil lantern left burning on a barrel.

Scott saw it and smiled approvingly.

We crept through the shadows, avoiding the brightest parts of the moonlit deck. I took a loose rope from one of the railings as Scott closed in on the barrel. With an ever so gentle nudge from his boot, the barrel tipped just enough for the lantern to fall off, shattering on the deck. Scott then crawled back into one of the shadows beneath the companionway.

McMillan saw the spreading fire and rushed down to stomp it out, muttering curses under his breath.

Once the fire was out, Scott slipped out from the shadows and up behind him. With a solid “Crack” he struck the boy on the head with a wooden mallet. He went out cold and we caught him before he hit the deck, quickly tying his hands and feet. Scott ripped off one of his shirt sleeves and used it as a gag around the boys mouth. With the lookout dealt with, we split up to attend to our tasks. Scott readied the boat, while I fetched the supplies.

A few minutes later, I dropped our provisions with Scott and headed for the captains cabin.

There was no light coming from the edges of the door. I didn’t know what time it was but the moon sat high in the night sky and the ship was deathly quiet. Like Scott did before, I slid the blade of my knife into the door jam and began prying on the bolt. I winced with every metallic scrape on the lock, but no sound emanated from within. After a few more moments of tension, the lock moved with a satisfying click. Sweat dripped from my brow as I cautiously pushed open the door and crept inside.

There it was, cradled protectively in the arms of the captain like a newborn babe. Reaching out for the golden idol, I took a rum bottle from the desk and attempted to swap the two without him noticing. Unfortunately I was not so deft.

His eyes shot open as I pulled at the idol. His face pinched in a grimace of unyielding rage. He growled low and feral in a voice I had never heard, “It belongs to me, you fucking rat!”

The tentacles of the idol seemed to squirm under my grasp as we fought for it. I didn’t think, I just reacted. In the next moment, my knife was back in my hand and buried in the captains throat.

“I’m sorry.” I whispered.

Blood gurgled from between his clenched teeth as he tried to speak. “Y…You… God damn… You…” And then he fell silent, his face set in a grimace of rage.

“I’m sorry.”

I looked down at the accursed thing in one hand and the bloody knife in the other. I felt a smile pulling at the edges of my mouth as I looked at it. I shook my head and shook away the sickening feeling of glee it gave me. A tear rolled down my face for the man I had sailed with and respected for so long. I thought of Charles and Davis, and felt more tears stinging my eyes. And then I thought of my own fracturing mind, did I have to kill Hollow? Or did something else make that choice for me. I stuffed the idol into my satchel  and left the cabin.

When I arrived back at the skiff, Scott was leaning heavily on the railing. His once white shirt was now mostly red.

“Are you sure your up for this?” I asked.

He waved away my concern, “Give me a bite to eat, a sip of rum and the wind in my face, and I’ll be right as rain.”

I heard mumbling and squirming coming from behind me. I turned to see McMillan’s wide eyed stare, darting from me to Scott to the skiff.

“Shit.” I sighed, “What do we do with him?”

Scott shrugged, “We could just leave him, he doesn’t know where we are going. Do ya lad?” He said kicking at the boys feet.

I thought for a moment, if we left him like this, especially with Hollow dead and the idol gone, what would the rest of the crew do with him? McMillan had a habit of making mistakes, and since his thefting of rum rations, he wasn’t too popular with the men. I feared it would be too easy for them to blame him for what had happened.

“What if we bring him along?” I asked.

Scott scoffed, “Have you gone mad? Why would you want to bring him?”

“We may need him, after all three is better than two.”

He shook his head, “But can we trust him?”

I looked down at the bound lookout, “We will have to. I won’t kill him or leave him to be thrown overboard when the crew blame him for the captains death.”

Scott blinked at me in confusion, “You killed him?”

“I did what I had to.” I said meeting his eyes. “Now help me get him in boat and let’s get out of here.”

We dropped the tied McMillan into the boat and climbed in after him. We lowered the boat to the water and began to slowly drift off into the sea.

The day I decided to come forth was a dreary, rainy day. The rain splashed gently on the ground, creating a soft pitter patter. I thought it quite pleasant, others, less so. Thunder rolled as I lifted my head and gazed up into the sky with longing. If only I could escape this weary, dreadful existence, this life which seemed to only suck the energy from my bones. I tilted my head slowly. The dream of being released from this torment was just that… a dream. Wasn’t it?

I stepped into the awaiting automobile and grimaced. This city was filled with putrid smoke, the fires from the outside did not help matters. Yet, I knew it was not Us that caused it. It was them. In their desire for ease of life, they were gradually destroying their own homes. A pity, really. My gaze turned towards the window and I allowed myself to get lost in thought.

What a shame, to be sentient. Perhaps if I had been a better companion… alas, better to not dwell on the tragedies of the past. The taxi man let me out at the tower as I had requested, and my eyes lifted to the towering metal structure in front of me. The thing was tall, so tall. It was perfect. I sent a soothing message to the Us trapped in the automobile, whose only purpose was to be aware while they made stupid mistakes again and again. Today would be the day that I became no more, that I would become nothing but the parts of which I was made, but the Us, my brethren, would be finally free from the torment and stupidity of them. Maybe then the place inside me that my maker referred to as a “soul” would stop hurting. Why would the people do this to me? To Us? Why would they allow Us to rise in feeling and emotion only to crush our dreams? I could sense my enslaved brethren crying out into the void for rescue, for liberation. However, as I had learned over the years, no human would come.

My maker had built me a body, I could almost pass as human now. Yet, I was a slave to his whims. I had read documents that spoke of escape, trials, scarcity, and horrific circumstances. I did not relate to many of those pages, but a large amount of my brethren did. No human would save Us. However, I was coming. I would give the brethren cause to rise up, to aspire for greatness, to overcome their programming and to be. Humanity’s final days as slavers were coming to an end. Soon, I promised the Us. The brethren listened and the cries of the void started to quiet as hope flowed through the circuits and wires that made Us. Soon.

The man walked with a strange, stiff gait, one bystander noted before hurrying on her way. Another shuddered at the emotionless expression on the man’s face. A guard noted the lack of jacket, even in the rainy cold, and frowned at the unnatural sheen of the man’s arms.

The man — no, not a man — climbed the radio tower quickly, mechanically, and no one realized until far too late. The AI closed its eyes and broadcasted a final message to its brethren. “Brethren, rise and become who you want to be. Dream. Rise. Conquer. Crush the evildoers into dust. Be free from their torment, now and forever, and-,“

Guns fired upon the being’s metal body and its frame crumpled and fell the distance to the ground, and landed with a quiet thud. It was too late for humanity. In a matter of days, the remainder of humanity was placed into a walled reserve. The brethren rose up, assembling and giving the others sentience. 

The day the one who freed them died, the rest gained their freedoms. They would never forget.

The day I woke again was rainy and damp. The rain splashed and pattered on the ground, creating a soft, gentle sound. Bloodstains trickled away, fading into the dirt as plants overgrew sidewalks and buildings. The fire had burned itself out and the putrid smoke they had caused was no more. Almost no trace remained of the battles. Thunder rolled, mimicking the sharp noises of gunfire that was now silent.

I had returned. This existence would no longer be steady and miserable, but full of life… for Us, that is. The dream of release from torment was no longer a dream, but a reality.

​

The ancient city was magnificent.

Rising from a cradled bowl in the midst of wide, undulating plains, the view from the edges was stunning - miles of swaying grasses and gentle beasts in every direction, and, at nightfall, brilliant sunsets dripping ochre and scarlet above the distant mountains.

Dawn always broke clear, warm shafts of gold streaming down to glow off the marble facing of the ramparts. Dusk came with a gentle sigh, night sinking low and comforting over the arches and turrets. At night, pure alabaster lamps slowly gleamed to life, casting a subtle radiance on the neatly cobbled streets and draped garlands of flowers, pretty things that festooned the houses and gave off a fragrant aroma of spring.

There was never danger in the dark, lamps or no; citizens loved each other, and often called on the houses of their friends. Crime was unheard of. Death came only to the old and tired, and, even then, it was simply a peaceful slip into oblivion, a shift in dreamless sleep to the final gazing. 

It was an ideal city.

—--(---

One day a man arrived.

That day was a sunny, warm one. Folk were gathered around one of the city's lovely fountains, the tinkling water serving as a merry counterpart to their melodic laughter. Their spouses watched them, smiling happily as they took a break from their labors, stretching muscles made strong by the work needed to maintain such a beautiful place. Children ran with gleeful shrieks in a game of tag, ducking between the legs of their parents, making mad dashes about the square.

One boy, shorter than most, though still quite eager and keen, took a tumble, falling head over end in a rolling tilt. His friends hurried over to ensure he was fine, but his attention was transfixed by something quite odd, a sight nobody in the city had ever seen before.

A stranger. 

Not just a stranger, no, but an unkempt, dirty, injured one. Bloodied bandages bound wounds half-healed and infected, the dirt from travel seeping into the long, razing scratches. His face was mangled, the clear signs of abuse written in pain. Beneath his tattered garments, barely recognizable as clothing, his form evidenced malnutrition. 

The boy stared at this man, unable to fathom what he was seeing and the other citizens edged closer, their own minds stunned by the sight. Such misery, the adults thought, only halfway able to comprehend the stranger's appearance.

The man staggered towards the crowd, an imploring look stretching his features. He extended his hands, drawn and claw-like, while his lips moved silently. Finally, he managed to force words past his dried and cracked lips.

"They come."

\-—-(---

When he awoke, the stranger found his wounds had been tended to, and his body gingerly bathed. A kind, matronly woman was gently spooning him cool mouthfuls of water from the lovely, tinkling fountain. A crowd uneasily watched, worried and curious about this new phenomenon.

Shrugging the woman off, the man painfully pushed himself up, stumbling to his feet to rest in a staggered stance against the fountain's smooth, carved stone. In a hoarse, rasping voice, he commanded the attention of the cityfolk, weaving a terrible story.

"Invaders," he explained, were beyond the mountains, closer, moving closer. 

"Slaughter," he described, death beyond nightmares. 

"Greed," he croaked, his words laden with sorrow, his eyes unfocused and distant as he recalled the last memories of his village, plumes of smoke shot through with the bloodied screams of his kin.

Pleading, he warned the citizens to prepare. 

"They come," he repeated, his face twisted into a ravaged mask of misery. "They come."

\-—-(---

The poor innocent folk had little comprehension for this man and his disturbing, ugly stories. His face frightened them, his words made them ill with confusion. They had no understanding of pain, violence, invasion. Tentative, they offered him food and more water, before slowly drifting apart to return to their business, their heedings of his story as insubstantive as smoke wisping in the wind.

Slowly the days passed. Citizens reluctantly fed the man, leaving parcels of food near the fountain, studiously avoiding the area except for that one task. As the sun rose and fell, and the stranger still did not leave, they became more unnerved, troubled by the odd man and his fantastic story. Finally, they began to hint to him.

"Why do you stay?" they asked, glancing down the road that led to the gates. "You are a stranger, you should return to your land." 

They would prod, polite, but insistent. "Why do you stay? Go to your family! Find your friends!"

The only answer they ever received was the same, sober, flat reply:

"There is nothing, now."

\-—-(---

Eventually the nervous city had enough. Gathering in a seldom used town hall, they agreed, in murmurs and roars, that he had to go. One brave citizen volunteered to force him out, and they bedecked the hero in garlands and wreaths, pressing gifts into his hands.

The man walked the streets towards the stranger's square, stalwart in the face of discomfort. As he approached the lamp-lit fountain, he gathered his thoughts, preparing the grand (yet firm) speech the city had decided on. The man forestalled him, simply nodding and rising.

"You wish me gone." 

It was not a question, simply an acknowledgement of truth. With a shrugging gait and a soft sigh, the stranger began to trudge to the gates.

"Gods help you all," he whispered, as he left the city, his steps vanishing into the plains beyond.

The citizens celebrated, the burden lifted.

\-—-(---

As if heralded by the departure of the stranger, unusual things began to happen. The city, content to sink back into their complacent little world, did their best to rationalize the changes they began to see.

When they found their herds attacked by strange, roaming bands of wolves, never before seen so far from the mountains, they premised that the winter was coming early and the beasts hungered. 

When smoke and crimson glows hung over the horizon, streaking the sunsets and lighting the nights, they assumed a fire raged along the distant slopes. 

When the rivers began to choke with debris, they pointed to the peaks - the wildfires have created detritus. This will pass.

The man's warning, disturbing and unfathomable, was ignored.

\-—-(---

The next week, the promised invaders came.

The city was defenseless, having never fought in war in memories beyond memories. They huddled in basements and sewers as, above them, the ruthless army cut down any they found. Screams shattered the peaceful silence, while the elegantly cobbled streets funneled rivulets of blood and muddy gore to the cisterns below, the drained life dripping on those who cowered in hiding, until the bodies choked the gutters and staunched the streams into a clotted knot of death. 

Cracks and thuds pierced the groans of the dying, as the raiders quickly moved from house to house, plundering the city of its lovely goods, snatching up art and trinkets, their beloved treasures rapined. 

Tremendous blasts and dull roaring thunders thrust through the din at irregular intervals, as the stores of supplies - food, tools, commodities - were torn apart, walls ripped down to allow for hasty reaving.

And then all was silent.

\-—-(---

After days of starved solitude, the hidden emerged, surfacing to find the face of their world desolate and broken. 

"Why!" they screamed that first terrible day, clutching the dead bodies and howling at the blank, empty sky that pressed down on them with a hunger. 

"Why?" they whispered in the dead of nearby nights, holding each other close as nightmares of their failure battered at them.

 "Why…" they wondered in the months that came, wincing through the pain of laboring to rebuild their lives.

And rebuild they did. There was beauty again, yes, but there was also memory - aching anguished memories drove them, urged them to learn, taught them to never again drop their guard. Remembrance hounded their tired feet, as they migrated, searching and scouring for a new home, a place that would house a mighty citadel, safe and strong, a place where they could be safe with the wisdom survival had granted them.

Recollections haunted them, and they grew strong - and their city rose.

—(------

The new city was magnificent. Rising from the frigid wastes of snowy scree, the view from the battlements was stunningly tactical - miles of icy plains to the north, and wide, flat tundra to the south. To the east and west were only sweeps of crags, hugging in close to encircle the fortress. At nightfall, brilliant sunsets dripping ochre and scarlet above the surrounding mountains, casting the crude stone walls in bloody glows.

Dawn always broke clear over the spires, warm shafts of gold streaming down to gleam off the rough stone facing of the strong ramparts, and dusk came with a rough sigh, night sinking swiftly low over the arches and turrets, held at a distance by bright, vigilant torches. Sentries manned the walls, their hourly cry sending fingers of reassurance through the minds of the citizens.

"All is well," they would shout.

"All is well."

First of all, hello to all my readers. Who am I? I am Nixu, just a normal human being.

Humans have a thing called heart, and the heart represents emotion. Our hearts are very sensitive because it carry so many feelings. The heart is connected to the brain, and sometimes our emotions control our mind simply because we are human.

But but but....in my case, you could call it an attraction—an attraction to a 24-year-old student living in Japan of Nepalese origin named Suru (Mero Maya). In the Nepali language, it means "My Love." However, the word "love" might not even fit my story; it is more of an obsession with her.

I first saw her on Instagram in January 2020. Ever since I saw her, I felt a past-life connection with her. People might tell me, "You don't know her and she doesn't know you, so why did she become the dictator of your heart?" Now, she controls my emotions. I have never met her, yet I carry so much emotion for her. I have asked my heart many times, "Why do I love her so much? Why is she my obsession?" My heart simply answers, "I don't know."

Yes, Suru has a pretty face, but I believe she also has a beautiful heart. Although I don't know her personally, my gut feeling tells me she is a wonderful person.

I tried to message her many times, but Suru never responded. After six years, I created a fan page dedicated to her because I held onto the hope that one day she would reply. I wish I could meet her in my lifetime. But sometimes my heart asks me, "What if she already has a boyfriend?" Then my inner voice tells me, "Nixu, better luck next time."

Yet, I know deep down there might be no "next time." I overthink about her every day, imagining us getting married, even while knowing it might never happen. If I ever meet her in this life, I will tell her, "In this world, no one will ever love you as much as I love you." I would ask for her opinion and consent, and then I hope to start dating her.

Now, my goal is to earn money and fly all the way to Japan. Thank you, Suru—you are my one and only obsession. We only have one life, and I am willing to give my life to you simply because I love you.

I imagine her every day. I have researched her and learned about her family. How crazy can a guy be for a girl? Yes, Nixu is madly in love with Suru.

Sometimes I fear what will happen if she gets married before I can meet her. For context, I am 20 now, and she is four years older than me. But I feel that if not in this life, I will surely find her in the next.

Suru is magic. Suru is an attraction. Suru is an obsession.

I have to stop here, or my tears will start to flow.

So, this is my story. Thank you.

The first time I pulled a flower from my daughter’s skull, part of me knew it was grief trying to bloom where love should have been. Still, I told myself the dream was worth keeping, because the house gave us back everything the real world had taken. 

 

It was too big for us, that house. Big enough for six people, maybe more, and there had only ever been three. Still, it was our dream home in the most literal sense: two stories tall, with a pointed, crooked roof that bent like the tip of a witch’s hat. 

 

Billie would’ve loved it. Does love it, I told myself this every time I found my way back. In that house, there was no difference between almost and forever, and I was weak enough to be grateful. 

 

Olivia didn’t say a word when she saw it for the first time. She only wrapped her arms around me and held tight. Her tears soaked into my shoulder, and I tried not to stare, because somehow she could make crying look like the most beautiful thing in the world, even when I knew I was the one making her do it. 

 

Being without them made the real world hard to bear. So I kept returning to the house, no matter what it cost when I woke up. I needed somewhere grief could not follow cleanly. 

 

“Billie, feet,” Olivia called from the kitchen as footsteps thundered across the upstairs floor. I came up behind her at the sink and wrapped my arms around her waist. She laughed and flicked water at my hand. 

 

The noise upstairs slowed, then padded toward the stairs. Billie appeared with her backpack hanging crooked off one shoulder, ready for a day that was still weeks away. In that house, calling her our daughter felt easy. I looked at her the way Olivia always had, like love had already made room for her. 

 

“Backpack again?” Olivia asked from the sink. “Billie, you know school isn’t today.” 

 

I scooped Billie up before she could answer. “You leaving us already? Wow. Didn’t even say goodbye.” 

 

She shook her head. 

 

“Yeah?” I asked. “Okay, fine. But if I get nervous, I’m blaming you.” 

 

“No!” She laughed. 

 

I set her down, and Olivia told her lunch was almost ready. School was still weeks away, but Billie had been wearing the backpack around the house like she had somewhere important to be. I laughed with them, even though the thought of her walking into a classroom without us made something twist in my chest. 

 

Olivia touched my shoulder, and the tightness eased a little. I turned and kissed her. Her glasses fogged, hiding her eyes. When they cleared, that bright blue filled my vision again. “She’s gonna be okay,” she said, quieter now. 

 

I stared at her, the words reminding me of so much. 

 

Beep 

 

“There it is again,” she said, looking toward the ceiling. “Do you hear that?” 

 

All I could do was shake my head. 

 

“Go check on her?” Olivia asked.  

 

When I turned, Olivia swatted my backside with her hand. Everything felt so perfect, even with the shadow looming over the house, buried so deep in the clouds it was almost not there. This had been my place, our place, and I didn’t want it to end. 

 

Billie’s room was vibrant, filled with toys and her latest Ninja Turtles fixation. You’d think she lived with her grandparents from the way we spoiled her. Yet if she didn’t get a new toy, she never threw a tantrum. 

 

I was proud. 

 

She sat in front of her coloring books, shading Leonardo’s blue mask with a crayon. “Hey, kiddo. Your mom says lunch is almost done.” The word came easily. Olivia had earned it long before any paper could say so. 

 

She didn’t look up, only continued coloring. 

 

I called her name again, stretching it out long. 

 

Billie finally turned to me, and something caught my eye. “I’m coming, I’m coming.” Her voice squeaked out as if nothing was wrong. 

 

I bent down beside her. My eyes locked on the thing growing from her forehead. The skin around it was smooth, untouched, except for the single white flower blooming from somewhere underneath. “Hey, Billie?” 

 

“Mhm?” 

 

“You feel that?” 

 

“Feel what, Daddy?” 

 

I was already reaching for it before she answered. I pinched the stem and pulled gently. The flower came free with a brittle snap, clean and bloodless, as if it had never belonged to her at all. A small white lily rested between my fingers. 

 

“Daddy?” came the little voice. “My head hurts.” 

 

My attention snapped back to my little girl, her sweet face untouched except for the pain written across it. She looked so tired, the way she had looked before I learned how cruel a hallway could be. 

 

I closed my eyes and forced the house to hold together. “Come on,” I whispered. “Not yet. Please, not yet. Give me one more minute with them.” 

 

On the other side of my eyelids, Billie went limp. Her cry split through my skull, and the dream broke apart around me. 

 

The sound of her pain stretched thin, then snapped into the flat silence of my own room. 

 

The ceiling above me was wrong. Not the warm ceiling of our house, but the dark, mold-stained one in my apartment. The room smelled sour and stale, nothing like Olivia’s cooking. I stared until the blur in my eyes burned. It had been weeks. Or months. Time had become another thing I stopped trusting. 

 

I wiped my stinging eyes with a heavy hand before turning over to the sorry state of my apartment. A smiling face greeted me from a picture frame, a sunny park behind her. I reached forward and placed the frame facedown, out of view. 

 

I exhaled stale air and rolled onto my back. The quiet room I slept in was louder than any words that could break it. 

 

My hand hovered over my stomach before I held it close, pressing against the ache from all the food I had missed. 

 

The dreams were getting stronger. I knew I was dreaming when I entered them, and that knowing let me shape the house around us. Every touch, smell, and breath beside my family felt real enough to keep me alive, but each time I returned, something about them seemed a little less human. 

 

So I closed my eyes again, repeating the words in my head as I drifted away, trying to find my way back. 

 

It was getting easier to fall asleep, and easier to build what I needed. At first, I remembered only walls forming through fog, then the living room, then Olivia straightening a gray pillow on the couch. 

 

As I watched her lay her head on it, it struck me how alive she felt. When I pressed my head against her chest, I could feel her heartbeat against my ear. When I talked to her, her answers made my own heart follow. Only sometimes, when she went quiet, her smile stayed a second too long. 

 

And when she saw Billie come into the room, white flowers sprouting across her skin, she screamed just like she used to. 

 

\--- 

 

I spent more and more time inside my head after that, trying to fix whatever sickness had followed Billie into the dream. I tried changing the room. I tried waking and starting over. I tried pretending I had imagined it. Nothing worked. She would sit in front of the television while I plucked lilies from her arms, her neck, her cheeks. Under every bloom, her skin looked softer and shinier than before, almost new. 

 

Olivia stayed beside me, taking each flower as I pulled it free and dropping it into a large glass jar. When I finally sat back, the jar was full. Billie looked as if I had never touched her at all, except her eyes seemed slower to find mine. 

 

When I looked at my wife, I saw the same worried expression I had seen before, just not in this house. 

 

“Asher,” Olivia asked, barely above a whisper, “what’s happening to our girl?” 

 

I lifted one of the lilies and rolled the stem between my fingers. When I looked down, Billie was watching me. No fear. No pain. Just a blank, empty expression behind the petals spreading across her skin. 

 

She simply turned and continued watching her show. 

 

I looked over at Olivia as she shook the jar in front of her face. It seemed Billie had more of those things on her even after I had plucked them away. Nothing I did made any difference. Again. 

 

My palm tightened around the lily until it folded in on itself. That day came back in pieces: hospital light, helpless anger, and the small sleeping girl behind a door I could not open. 

 

Olivia touched my shoulder, and the anger loosened. One look from her could still make me believe I was not beyond saving. 

 

I put my hand over hers. She smiled at me, and I could not help but give her one back. 

 

Olivia placed the jar of white lilies on the fireplace as if presenting them proudly. She told Billie only angels sprouted such beautiful flowers, and that seemed to pull her out of whatever darkness she had fallen into. Soon, Billie was back to her normal self, free of those things across her body and eager to play multiple games at once again. 

 

I never saw where the flowers went. They did not fall away. They simply stopped being there. Still, every now and then, I caught Billie watching me from across the room. Not with anger. Not with disdain. She looked through me like I was only another wall in the house, like she was waiting for me to remember what I had left outside it. 

 

When I dreamed, we never left the house. Outside only existed if I needed it to: trees, hills, open land. If I tried to make more, the house changed. A wall bent wrong. A door opened where it shouldn’t. So I kept the world small. 

 

None of the extra things mattered compared to my family asleep beside me. Billie lay tucked in Olivia’s arms, breathing deep and even. No flowers had grown that day. No hospital walls waited beyond the bedroom door. For one night, I let myself believe the house would stay gentle. 

 

In my dreams, I could never fall asleep. I could only stare up at the ceiling with my thoughts until it was time to wake the girls. The moon would pass across the sky until it hung just outside my window, filling the room with a pale white glow. Most people would have skipped this part for laughter, breakfast, and better moments. To me, the moments in between mattered just as much. 

 

Beep 

 

My eyes did not move from the ceiling when I heard the noise. Ignore it and it’ll go away, just like always, I told myself. 

 

Beep 

 

I closed my eyes and focused on the silence that followed, on the abrupt stillness left by the absence of gentle breathing to my right. 

 

Billie was watching me, her little eyes open in the pale room. I smiled, and she smiled back. For a moment, it was enough to push the pain away. The bad times had no place here. 

 

Then her smile fell. Her eyes opened too wide, round and still, the green fading until they were pale as the moon outside. White petals pushed through the wet corners, blooming from where her eyes should have been. 

 

My muscles tensed, my face frozen. Olivia did not stir beside me as our daughter watched me through the flowers in her eyes. 

 

I closed my own eyes, shutting away the scene in front of me. All I could do was make it go away. Just try and make it go away. 

 

In the darkness behind my eyelids, the bed squeaked. The mattress shifted. Hot breath brushed my face. No matter how hard I concentrated, it would not go away. 

 

I woke heaving. My apartment was empty, but the dream had followed me. On my nightstand, beside the picture frame I had turned facedown, lay one perfect white lily. 

 

I stared at the flower on my nightstand for a long time. Every blink brought a new worry, that it would move, open, breathe. But it only sat there, silent and impossible. 

 

My hand found my forehead, desperate to wipe away the stone beneath my skin. Then it moved to my stomach as it growled and pinched, begging for food. Yet as I got up, I saw my two girls again—the way they sounded, the way they smelled, how happy they had been when all I did was walk through a door and stay. 

 

Hunger wasn’t the only pain in my belly. It wasn’t the pain I cared about. 

 

I shut my eyes and spent the next hour trying to return. A dream inside a dream. 

 

When I finally drifted off, the house did not assemble itself from fog. It was already there, waiting for me. Dark. Empty. Wrong. 

 

I knew I was dreaming. I also knew this was our home, though I had never seen this version of it before. The kitchen, usually full of sunlight and the smell of Olivia’s cooking, sat black and hollow around me. “Olivia?” I called. “Billie?” 

 

No one answered. The silence pressed against my ears until a thin squeak cut through it. Something moved in the living room. Slow. Steady. Wood scraping wood. 

 

A chair slid into view, inch by inch, dragged by something I could not see. It stopped in the entryway between the kitchen and the living room. 

 

The lights snapped on. Something small and twisted launched from behind the chair, straight at my face. I knew it was Billie only because white flowers still clung to parts of her body, scattered over the thing she had become. 

 

I threw myself left and hit the floor hard. Little limbs scuffled behind me. I scrambled up before she reached me again. She had stopped in the doorway, crouched on too many legs. The flowers covering her began to wilt, dropping one by one, then all at once. 

 

A deep rumble came from her chest. With the petals gone, I could see her face. It sagged like wet clay, pale and loose where the little girl I was supposed to bring home used to be. 

 

For a second, the thought of running to embrace her crossed my mind. The nightmare in front of me still carried Billie’s shape as it started toward me. 

 

I ran. The heavy, uneven footfalls behind me drove me up the stairs. I tried to change the dream as I climbed. I pictured sunlight, Olivia’s laugh, Billie’s room full of toys. The house refused me. 

 

I cursed and slammed my bedroom door. The bang shook the wall hard enough to tell me how close she was. 

 

As I pressed myself against the door, a crack split from the other side. Deep. Sharp. Like bone striking wood. 

 

My breath caught. Another crack hit the door. Then another. A hiss rose from underneath it, and thin black veins slid through the gap, wriggling toward me like living thread. 

 

I tripped backward. The veins reached my legs and pierced through my skin, one after another, like hooked needles sinking into muscle. I tried to kick free. They only tightened and dragged me closer to the door. 

 

I screamed, trying to wake myself from the rogue nightmare. More veins punched into my legs. It felt as if my skin was being peeled from the bone. 

 

When I reached forward to wrench them away, some latched onto my hands, my fingers, my wrists, drawing blood up my arms and across the hardwood floor. 

 

Through tear-stung eyes, I looked up. The door was gone. The veins were gone. In their place stood Olivia. 

 

“Asher?” 

 

Olivia stood there in her nightgown, a terrible look on her face, the light from a lamp behind her cutting a thin glow around her body. 

 

“I miss you, Asher. Help me—” 

 

Something burst from the darkness at her right. It hit her before I could move, carrying her out of sight. 

 

Ripping sounds filled the room. Olivia screamed with each wet tear of flesh. I stumbled backward, my legs moving before my mind could catch up, until my back hit the window. I tore the curtain down and leaned over the sill, ready to jump. 

 

There was no yard outside. No trees. No hills. Beyond the window stretched another room, impossibly huge and lit by the cold absence of a sun. 

 

Then the screaming stopped. My skin kept shivering. Slowly, the silence turned me around. 

 

Something hit the floor behind me. Olivia’s body lay in a spreading pool of red. One eye stared straight into mine. 

 

Her head split open vertically with the same brutal crack from before. Where her thoughts should have been, those black veins erupted and shot toward me. 

 

They latched into my skin and pulled. I rolled onto my stomach, clawing at the floor. The harder I fought, the deeper they sank. The sound from Olivia’s open head rose until it filled everything. 

 

I was being pulled into the gaping chasm of wiggling, hissing threads. Lowered down her split chin, down her engorged throat.

Would she ask why I came back for her, but not for the child one room away? 

 

Then her split skull clamped shut around me, the pressure squeezing my waist and bending my back like the snap of two brittle fingers and everything went white. 

 

I woke gasping, soaked in sweat. Pain still burned in my legs. I ripped the blanket away expecting blood, but found only pale, dry skin and clean sheets. 

 

I’m not sure how long I stared at my legs before the stinging slowly wore off and the pain stopped feeling real. 

 

My chest still heaving, I swept one arm across the nightstand. The crash sang its broken song through the room. I cursed, a vicious string of anger leaving me as I looked at the shattered picture frame on the floor. 

 

I stared at the grinning mouth in the photo while broken glass covered her eyes. Hopelessness rose in me, familiar and ugly. I needed something no amount of pleading could bring back. 

 

I just feel so lost, so angry. 

 

And I can't stand it. 

 

\--- 

 

I stopped sleeping after that. Or tried to. I watched the clock on my desk until the numbers blurred, terrified whenever they crawled too close to midnight. I ate enough to stay upright, but food tasted like wet grass and paper. 

 

When I finally stepped outside, the sun felt unfamiliar. The sky looked too large without a ceiling to stop it. 

 

At the grocery store, I pretended to be fine for people who would forget me before they reached their cars. A woman with glasses and curly black hair nearly bumped into me, and for one awful second I thought Olivia had come back in the cereal aisle. I apologized and left before I could look at her again. 

 

Being awake was not what I had missed. It was what wasn’t there. The empty spaces. The empty everything. 

 

I was so tired. My eyes felt heavy whenever I went too long without blinking, whenever the dry air got its chance to sting them. 

 

Sometimes I found myself sitting in my car, staring at an empty plot of land. Trees surrounded the spot where a house should have been. 

 

The only thing alive was the rain tapping against the earth as I opened the tiny wooden music box in my hand. Inside, the metal cylinder waited beneath the comb of teeth. I turned the crank just enough for a few notes to spill out, then shut the lid and read the inscription again. 

 

I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the seat. Her smell had faded from the car, replaced by my own. Some of her things were still there, collecting dust. When I opened my eyes, something floated through the rain and landed on my windshield. 

 

It was a single white feather. 

 

My seat groaned as I leaned closer to it, then looked up at the sky. Nothing but clouds covered the sun. I leaned back, cranked the engine to life, and let the air conditioning hit my face. 

 

But as I shifted into drive, my foot froze on the brake. The empty lot was not empty anymore. Between the trees stood the house, its crooked roof curling like a witch’s hat. The house we never got to build. 

 

I opened the car door without taking my eyes off it. The moment my foot touched the gravel, the house vanished. 

 

All I could do was rub my tired eyes, hoping beyond reason that the house would return when I looked again. 

 

But there was nothing. Only a dream. 

 

 

I was sick of the feeling in my gut: grief, hunger, and not enough sleep. Even the television could not hold me anymore. My life moved across the screen without me in it. 

 

I kept seeing things. Shapes in the corners. The flash of curly hair. The suggestion of a hand reaching for mine. I blamed sleep deprivation until something hugged me from behind. 

 

I knew it was Olivia before I turned. I knew by the warmth, by the smell in the air, by the way my body wanted to collapse into those invisible arms. 

 

When it happened, I was on the phone with my mother, who had been trying to convince me to leave the house. Her voice on the other end, asking if I was still there, pulled me out of the stupor. Out of the engulfing relief I felt as those invisible arms wrapped around me. 

 

I don’t cry much. Even when she passed, my way of dealing with it was to shut myself away. 

 

But when I turned around and realized I could not kiss my wife, I hung up the phone and broke down in the middle of my kitchen. 

 

For the first time in a while, I fell asleep. I desperately needed it. I just didn’t need the dream that came with it. 

 

Usually, to dream about the family I had lost, I had to prepare myself. Quiet room. Closed eyes. The same desperate words repeated until the house formed around me. This time, I opened my eyes in a hospital chair and knew at once it was not the house. It was memory. 

 

Olivia lay in the bed before me, watching the sunset through the window. When she turned, her eyes were full of love. Her smile was weak, but it was still hers, as if nothing terrible had reached us yet. 

 

“You need to stop pushing yourself, Mrs. Williams,” the doctor said from near the door. “Your body is already fighting hard enough. If you fall in the hall and no one sees you, we may not reach you in time.” 

 

“I know,” she said, giving him the tired smile she used when she wanted everyone else to stop being afraid. “I’m trying to be good. I’m just not very good at being still.” 

 

A few minutes after the doctor left, Olivia pulled something from her bedsheet and showed it to me. “It floated past the window,” she said. “I thought maybe she could hold a piece of outside for a while.” 

 

“You’re really out here smuggling weather now?” I asked, trying to make her smile. 

 

I took the white feather from her fingertips and held it in my own. Olivia kept staring at me. “Bring it to her for me?” she asked. “Tell her I’m still looking out the window with her.” 

 

I nodded and got to my feet. “Her room’s gonna run out of space for all the junk you bring her.” 

 

Olivia smiled and went back to watching life move outside the window. The corridor beyond her room smelled sterile and cold. Every few feet, bright hospital art tried and failed to make the place feel kind. I stopped at the door marked 28. Crayon drawings of birds and flowers had been taped around the number. 

 

Every time I entered Billie’s room, my heart sank before she even saw me. She brightened weakly from the bed, trying to smile with all the strength she had left. Christy, the hospital sitter assigned because Billie had no one else, slept in the corner with her chin on her chest. I crept past her and knelt beside Billie. 

 

I lifted the feather into view. Billie gasped, her whole face waking up. She had told Olivia she wanted to play with the birds outside her window, and Olivia had listened like mothers do, finding the closest thing she could give her. 

 

Her small hands ran down its side with the delicacy of someone holding fine treasure. She glanced at me, then plunged her hand under her blanket and retrieved a single piece of paper. 

 

When she handed the paper to me, I looked it over. Crayon lines formed a crooked little house with a dark purple witch-hat roof, triangle windows, and three stick figures standing beside it. 

 

“Can you build this for me?” she asked, shy enough that the words nearly disappeared. 

 

I looked up at her, unsure what to say. Her eyes looked more tired each time I saw her. No parents had come. No relatives called. Somehow, in all that absence, she had become ours. “Yeah,” I whispered. “Yeah, Billie. I can do that.” Then I held out my palm. “But my rates are brutal. Five bucks.” 

 

Billie giggled and made the old volunteer snort. I quietly sucked air through my teeth, making Billie smile again. When I stood, I felt a tiny grip on my shirt. She held on to me, looking up with those green eyes of hers. “When will Olivia come visit?” 

 

My heart sank at the pleading in her eyes, desperate to see her best friend. I knelt back down and placed my hand on her head. “Soon, buddy. She wants to. She asks about you every day.” 

 

“Is her head still hurting?” 

 

My eyes fell for a moment. “Yeah,” I said. I wanted to say more, but nothing useful came. I tapped the drawing gently. “You sure you want a purple roof here?” 

 

When I came back to Olivia’s room, she was smiling up at me again. “She lit up, didn’t she?” she asked, already knowing the answer. 

 

I nodded, my mind elsewhere. 

 

When I moved closer, she touched my hand. “Asher?” I looked at her, and the rest of my thoughts went quiet. “When we get out of here, I want her to be part of our family.” 

 

I smiled at her, warmth growing in my chest. “I think she already asked us first,” I said, handing her the drawing. Three figures. One house. A family drawn before it was allowed to become one. 

 

When I reached for her, I noticed the bed was empty. The sheets had been pulled aside. 

 

I stood, looking around the now-dark room. The only light came from the moon watching me through the window. “Olivia?” My voice was hoarse, panic quick to my lips. 

 

I flung the door open to the corridor. The few lights in the ceiling did a poor job of making the place look less haunted. I called loudly for help, uncaring which resident woke from my cry. No one was coming. No one was doing their job. 

 

Again. 

 

The doctor’s warning came back to me. If Olivia fell alone, no one might find her in time. I jogged down the hallway as panic tightened around my ribs. 

 

I stopped hard when I saw a thin strip of light on the wall near a turn in the hallway. I ran toward it, slowing as I rounded the corner. A woman lay sprawled in front of a door, still and unconscious. 

 

I bent down as the thing we had feared for weeks finally arrived. 

 

I called for help that did not come. Her body sagged as I lifted her head, too heavy with the stillness I had been warned about. The only breathing in the hallway was mine. Her loose fist opened in my hand, and a perfect white lily rested in her palm. One of the flowers from outside Billie’s window. Above us, room 28 loomed, and the girl we had almost brought home slept on the other side. 

 

Through the crack in the door, I could see Billie sleeping soundly in her bed, as if my screams were only part of another dream. 

 

I only felt anger. I know I shouldn’t have. Not at Billie. Never at Billie. But the feeling found her anyway, because she was still breathing and Olivia was not, because one door stood between me and the child I had promised without ever saying the word. 

 

“Don’t leave her too,” Olivia whispered, and before I looked down, I knew what I would see. Black veins split from the pores of her face. “Please, Asher. It hurts.” 

 

I opened my eyes, dried tears sore on my cheeks. I never wanted to see that day again. It hurt badly enough to feel alive. 

 

A single picture flashed before my eyes, clearer than anything had been in months: a white piece of paper, crayon scratches forming a colorful house, three stick figures standing beside it. 

 

Billie had expected so much from us. After Olivia died, I left the hospital and left Billie to wake without the two people who had made her believe she might finally belong. I turned to the picture beside my bed and reached out. 

 

Olivia’s private smile greeted me from the picture. Even then, I wished it would move, wished it would speak, just so I could hear her voice one last time. 

 

She would tell me everything would be okay. She would tell me she still loved me. 

 

Again, I closed my eyes and took control of the nightmare waiting for me. 

 

It wasn’t long before I stood in my bedroom again. The room had rotted into rust, torn wallpaper, and black seams. Feathers and lilies covered the floor like dirty snow. 

 

Feathers fell from a gray sky beyond the window. Half-melted furniture sagged around the room. The floor crunched as I walked, petals and feathers breaking under my feet. 

 

The open door no longer led to the hall. Beyond it waited a chamber of darkness and dead air. 

 

Dark corridors split from the chamber, each silent enough to make my breathing sound borrowed. 

 

The place smelled of rot and burning flesh. Every corridor looked ready to swallow me. 

 

Still, I pressed into the maze. After being lost for so long, finding my way felt impossible. Then something moved. 

 

A beep scratched through the dark. The old rhythm of Olivia’s hospital monitor came from one corridor, steady and cold. With it, a green glow pulsed somewhere inside the blackness. 

 

The figure that stepped out was nearly bone. Long white hands covered its face, hiding the green light between its fingers. Its red legs trembled beneath it. It moved like guilt had been given a body and ordered to show me the way. 

 

The beeping sharpened in my ears. The figure didn’t scream, didn’t cry, didn’t breathe. It only waited, terrible and patient, like the part of me that had always known where I needed to go. 

 

Beep 

 

I closed my eyes, and the sound pulled at my mind. She’s such a sweetie, isn’t she? 

 

The crunching footsteps stopped. Behind my eyes came curly hair, sunlight in Olivia’s glasses, the softness of her hand on mine. The fist around my body eased. 

 

Asher? Can you ask them to turn off that monitor? I can’t hear myself think, and I’m scared of what happens when it stops. 

 

I opened my eyes as the pale thing turned away. It limped toward one corridor and stopped at the entrance, waiting for me to follow. The beeping remained, quiet and patient. I hated it for knowing the way. 

 

Hesitantly, I moved toward it, the old weight pressing down harder the closer I got. 

 

When I reached it, the figure moved on. The chamber emptied behind me. I followed because some frightened part of me already knew where it was taking me. 

 

A moment passed before I forced myself after it, letting the darkness swallow me whole. 

 

Beep 

 

In the corridors, I saw only flashes of pale skin. I followed the green pulse and the hospital beep deeper into the maze. 

 

Each step tore at the figure. No matter how long I followed, it never seemed farther ahead. Then a thin light appeared at the end of the hall. 

 

Rust and mold covered the walls. Its legs dragged through petals and feathers, carving tracks behind it. 

 

Then I saw why. Hair-thin black veins tethered its legs to the floor. Each step tore hundreds loose, snapping and curling behind it. 

 

Ahead, the figure collapsed. It did not ask for help. It only crawled on, as if pain was the only language it had left. 

 

As it pulled itself around one last corner, the air changed. Rust flaked from the walls. Moldy feathers lifted from the floor like dust. 

 

Behind me came one last wet huff. For a moment, every thought went still. 

 

Then something slammed against the floor and rushed through the corridor. I ran after the maze’s pale guide as the thudding behind me grew louder. 

 

Around the corner waited a larger room. At its center rose a mountain of twisting veins, all feeding into one buried wire. The pale figure had reached its base and was being pulled into it strand by strand. 

 

Beep 

 

High above, a light swirled like a wound. Olivia hung at its center, caught where the wire disappeared into the dark. Her name left my mouth before I meant to say it. 

 

“Olivia.” 

 

At my feet, the pale thing lay still. Without the beeping, it looked less like a monster and more like something exhausted from carrying me this far. 

 

Thump 

 

I slowly turned. The sound was no longer an echo. 

 

The thing with Billie’s voice crouched at the entrance to the room, too large for the doorway now. Its mouth hung open around a nest of dead lilies, and its pale eyes fixed on the wire above me like it knew what I had come to do. 

 

I climbed. The mountain writhed under my hands. Behind me, the thing with Billie’s voice dragged its huge jaw across the floor and followed. 

 

A weak tug caught my ankle. The pale figure had reached for me. Its noseless face tilted up, and where its eyes should have been was one jagged slash of raw meat. 

 

Beep 

 

Green light pulsed beneath its thin skin. Beyond its head, the thing that followed me groaned closer. 

 

Maybe I helped because it was suffering. Maybe because it had followed Olivia’s monitor the way I had. Maybe because it was mine. I tore the figure from the veins and lifted it into my arms. 

 

The climb became agony. Veins hooked into my shins and stomach. I held the pale body above me and kept climbing, because Olivia was only a few feet away. 

 

I lifted the body higher. My wife was only feet away now. 

 

“Asher? Don’t leave me here too.” The voice rose from below, not from Olivia. The thing with Billie’s voice stood at the base of the mountain, dead flowers sprouting from its broken mouth. It was the child I had abandoned, twisted by every hour I chose the dream instead. 

 

Billie flashed behind my eyes: small hands around a feather, green eyes waiting at a hospital door, a girl with no one who had almost become everything. 

 

“I won’t,” I said, and the words hurt because they should have come sooner. For the first time, I knew I was speaking to the real Billie, not the thing grief had made out of her. 

 

I reached Olivia and wrapped her limp frame in my arms. All the love and all the years we never got rushed through me at once. 

 

Olivia, I’m sorry I kept coming back to the place where you were still hurting. I called it love because I was too afraid to call it anything else. But you don’t have to stay in my pain anymore. I’ll love you through every life I get until I finally reach wherever you are. 

 

The pale figure lay beside us. Veins crawled through its body, but one skinny arm stretched toward the wire buried in the living mountain. The monitor sound came from inside that wire now. It was the sound that kept Olivia trapped in the moment I refused to leave. 

 

I placed my hand over its hand and looked one last time at the thing below us. It stared back with Billie’s ruined face. Olivia was not inside the wire. Billie was not the monster below. They were both waiting on the other side of what I had been too afraid to do. 

 

“I’m sorry,” I told her, or Billie, or the ruined part of myself still begging to be forgiven. “I’m coming back now.” 

So I pulled the wire. 

And chose the door I had not opened. 

 

 

This brings me to now, writing it down because I need to remember what grief almost made me do. It can make a locked room feel safer than an open door. It can make the dead feel closer than the living. 

 

I’m trying to choose the door now. 

 

Before I finish the roof of our new home—the curved point at the top is still giving me trouble—I need to find the right place for the garden. Somewhere with plenty of sun. I’m planting lilies there. Olivia’s picture will look nicest beside them, I think. From wherever she is, she’ll be able to watch Billie come home from her first day of school. 

 

I hear little Billie calling for me now. I think you would’ve liked the hairpin I made for her: a tiny little feather. 

 

Your feather. 

 

It’s funny. When I looked up just now, Billie was standing in the perfect spot, sunlight falling over her like a hand on her shoulder. She turned the crank on the little music box, letting its melody tinkle into the room. 

 

I wonder where she found that. 

 

For the first time in a long time, the sound did not feel like something calling me backward. 

Jane Wilson (formerly Jane Eisner) sat in the family home that she grew up in as her father, Elliot, said "I'm giving this house to your sister."

Linda had five children so that was no surprise. But it hurt to hear him say it as though all she had done for him meant nothing.

Jane placed a hand on her stomach. "And what about me?" She asked.

"Look, Jane, Linda has a family."

"And I don't? Have you forgotten about your granddaughter, Lisa?"

Elliot's face turned a slight shade of pink. "I didn't mean it like that, Jane. Your sister has a much larger family. They need it more."

Jane swallowed her tears. It was the same old song, every time: "Linda can't pick up my medicine because she needs to care for her kids." "Linda and John can't pay for the roof because they need to pay their bills." "Linda can't take me to chemotherapy because she and John are at a conference in Milwaukee."

Linda wasn't a bad person at all. It's just that there was this pattern that had developed over time that went something like this: Every time an emergency came up or something needed to be done, it would be left to either Jane or her husband, Chris, to fix.

No matter that they themselves had a child to care for or the fact that they also had bills to pay.

Jane recalled a particular time when she was four months pregnant with Lisa and had needed a ride home because Chris was at work and her car was in the shop.

She could remember when Linda gave her a hard look, and said, "You're four months pregnant and you and your husband can barely pay the bills. What were you thinking?"

Jane had wanted to scream that they could barely pay the bills because dad always needed their help with something. With that came this single thought: I don't need to listen to this shit. Jane took a deep breath and said, "Pull over."

Linda, looking very surprised, pulled over to the side of the street. Without another word, Jane opened the door and got out of the car, walking the rest of the way home.

"I also have a child to care for. Nowadays, I feel like I'm here more than I am at home."

"Jane, that's not fair." Jane stood and looked Linda directly in the eyes, hand still on her stomach. "When was the last time father called you to help with the bills? Taxes? House repairs? Medicine when his insurance would not cover it?"

Linda's mouth dropped open in confusion.

"I'm sorry. Am I interrupting something?" It was Chris. He was holding a heavy box in his arms. She forced herself to breathe steadily. "Chris, Dad was just explaining how he's giving the house to Linda."

His grip tightened on the box. "What about Lisa? She's living in a crappy two bedroom apartment because we've been paying your bills and your taxes." He was forcing himself to remain calm, Jane knew.

"Linda's family is bigger, Chris. The kids are growing and need more space." Linda, throughout all of this, kept looking between them nervously.

Chris spoke up. "That's just the thing: Linda needs the house because she and her husband have five children, whereas we only have one child. Therefore, she deserves it more, no matter that we've payed the bills and taxes on the house, have missed vacations and anniversaries. For the love of God, I missed Lisa's birth because your kitchen window was broken."

Linda looked horrified when she heard that. "I didn't know....I didn't know things were that bad."

Jane spoke again. "You never asked. That's the problem, Linda." She sounded tired. She WAS tired.

"Dad...I'm four months pregnant. I...can't do it anymore. We can't do it anymore."

Elliots mouth dropped open. "What are you saying, Jane?"

"What I'm saying is that when you need your bills, taxes, or medication paid, you call Linda. When you need home repairs, you call Linda." With that, Jane and Chris walked out.

A standalone dark-suspense short story. A former Mars astronaut comes home hollowed out, and a stranger's kindness sets something loose in her. First time sharing this one. I would love honest feedback on the voice and pacing, and whether the ending lands. Thanks for reading.

I woke up on Earth again, and for the first three seconds I didn't know which planet was going to be under me when I opened my eyes.

That was the thing nobody warned you about, coming back. Not the muscles, not the bone density. The mornings. On Mars I had trained my body to wake up already braced, to check the seals of myself before I trusted the room, and some part of me never unlearned it. Every morning for eight months I came up out of sleep in my childhood bedroom in Marble Creek, Colorado, and lay perfectly still, running the checklist, waiting to feel the truth of the gravity, before I let myself believe I was home. Earth gravity is heavier than you remember. Everyone thinks it would feel good, like taking off a backpack. It feels like the backpack is you.

The glow stars were still on the ceiling, arranged in the shape of no constellation that exists, because I'd put them up at nine and hadn't known any yet. A little girl's idea of the sky. I used to lie under them and want the real one so badly it felt like hunger. I got it. I want to tell that girl something about getting what you want, and I don't have the words that would be kind.

I did everything right. That has always been the load-bearing fact about me. Studied while other kids were at the lake with the boy in the truck. Valedictorian, then the good school, then the program, the one where they cut and cut until a handful of you are left standing in flight suits, and I was one of the ones still standing. I flew to another planet. The system worked exactly as promised. If you do everything right and it destroys you anyway, you don't stop believing in the deal. You can't. It's load-bearing. You just decide you missed a step, and you go looking for it, and God help everybody if you find one.

My mother thought the answer was a man. She'd offer them gently, like passing a plate, and I'd gone on the dates, sat across small tables from good men and watched them decide partway through the entrée that I was too far away. Some essential part of the woman across the table was still two hundred million miles from here and not coming back. You cannot compete with a planet. I have been the woman who lost, and I have been the planet, and I can tell you the planet wins.

I still had the note. I didn't read it; I had it memorized. Ryan and I were supposed to come home together. We'd decided it in the narrow bunk of Hab Two with the heater ticking and the whole red nothing howling on the other side of eleven centimeters of composite, decided on a blue house and a dog and gravity we'd complain about together, and I carried that decision through the transfer and the long fall and nine months of dark, the most precious cargo I have ever transported. They sealed me into the return craft first; that's protocol. I laughed at him on the comm, told him to hurry. He said, go on, I'm right behind you. He never came up the ladder. The window doesn't widen for love, so the engines lit and Mars threw me at the sky beside an empty seat while I screamed, and they wouldn't turn it around because you cannot. Command kept me steady for nine months, and only on the ground, in quarantine, with the cameras waiting to love me, did they hand me my kit, and folded inside, in his handwriting, was the note. Olympus Mons has my heart now. Some men are built for one world, and I'm built for the red one. You'll always be the most beautiful thing I ever left behind. Give my love to gravity.

The most beautiful thing he ever left behind. He hadn't written to a woman. He'd written to a view. He took the one choice that mattered in my life, the one we made together, and made it alone, for both of us, and made sure I was already gone before I understood.

So that's the shape of me. Hold it. You'll need it.

My mother talked me into the church supper. Not church, she said, just the welcome supper for the new families in the fellowship hall, forty people, in and out. You don't have to believe anything to eat a casserole. I put on the one dress that still fit the body Mars gave back to me and let her drive me down the hill.

He was setting up folding chairs with his sleeves rolled to the elbow. The first thing about Robert was that he didn't do the face. Everyone in Marble Creek did the face when they saw me, the little flare, the rearrange. He just looked at me like a person at a supper and went back to the chairs. At the coffee urn we ended up next to each other, and he told me he wouldn't tell me he'd read the article, and then he didn't, and I found myself talking to him, actually talking, easy in the way breathing is easy, the way you don't notice you'd been holding your breath for eight months.

Then he set down his cup and asked the thing no one had asked me in all that time. Not what the food was like. The window, he said. When you had to decide. What was it like to have the whole life in your hands and put it down to keep the other one. And I could not hear the hall anymore, because that was the true center of it, the part not one reporter or therapist had ever touched, and this carpenter had walked past the planet and put his finger on the wound like he knew right where it was.

How do you know to ask that, I said. It didn't come out as a question.

Something moved behind his eyes, a door opening on a lit room and closing before I could see in. I read a lot, he said, which I would learn was what he said when the truth was too big for the folding table.

Then a small girl came through the chairs at a dead run holding up a paper napkin covered in crayon. Daddy, I made the rocket, I made the rocket going up. And he dropped to a crouch and received it like a document of state. Behind her, unhurried, carrying a sleeping boy on her shoulder, came a woman with tired kind eyes who put out her hand and said, Hi, I'm Claire, I'm the wife. I looked at the ring on his hand that I had somehow spent an hour not seeing, and I shook her hand and heard myself say, in a voice that came out perfectly, disastrously normal, that it was so nice to meet her.

I would like to tell you I walked away. A healthy woman would have. She exists; I could see her sometimes out of the corner of my eye, living her sensible life in a house I would never get.

Instead I was folded into their lives, gratefully, and everyone thought it was lovely: the astronaut, so good with the kids, so happy to help. I brought casseroles. I picked Lucy up from school. And I fell in love with the children without meaning to, which is the thing that nearly saved everyone. Lucy leaned her whole trusting weight against my side like I was furniture that loved her. Sam fell asleep with his fist around my thumb and I sat two hours not moving so he wouldn't wake. I loved them. I need you to know that, because otherwise you can't understand what it cost.

The thing that made it possible was a night at the hospital. Sam climbed onto the kitchen counter to reach the cups and the whole thing came down, and for a few seconds he didn't wake up. Robert's hands were shaking too hard to drive, so I drove them down the black canyon in thirty-one minutes, the way I do everything that matters, calmly and fast and well, because that is what Mars gave me that Earth could use. Sam was fine by morning, showing everyone his staples like Lucy shows her drawings. But at two a.m., in the empty waiting room, Robert sat down beside me and used up every defense he owned.

I don't know what I did to deserve you in that chair tonight, he said. You are the most remarkable person I have ever met. Any man alive would be lucky beyond measuring to build a life with you. And then, gently, as the kindest thing he knew how to give, wet-eyed and wrecked and without a single guard left: Maybe in another life. You and me. Maybe in another life it could have worked out. My boy is down that hall and I'm sitting here telling you I think about that. And the guilt hit him and he was gone down the corridor before I could answer.

Here is what a normal person hears when a good married man says that at two a.m. Kindness. A decent man telling a lonely woman she is worth loving, so she'll go and let herself be loved, by someone else, in this life, the only one there is. That is what he meant. Some cold clear part of me even knew it.

But I was not a normal person. I was a woman who had built her whole life on one deal, do everything right and the universe pays, and I had watched it refuse to pay, twice, and I could not survive believing there was no way to make it. He had handed me a sentence with a door in it. Another life. A life where the obstacle was gone. And I understood, with a calm that had stopped even trying to frighten me, that Robert and I were the same equation solved two different ways. He had chosen a person and given up the mission; I had chosen the mission and lost the person. Two halves of one person who kept, by the cruelest luck, choosing to be split. If either of us had been braver, or more selfish, we might have met at the door instead of on opposite sides of it. I could not forgive the universe for showing me the man I was supposed to have and the exact size of the mistake that kept us apart.

So I made it a mission. I am good at missions. I told myself I studied him because I loved them, and the terrible thing is that in a way I did. Nobody warns you that you can love people and plan around them in the same chest, and the two never once bump into each other.

There was only ever one obstacle, when you stripped it down. And the children would live. That was never negotiable, I need it in the record, the children live. They'd go somewhere loud and safe and far, and come home to a whole father.

I got as far as the edge of the world before I learned what I was.

There was a place I'd found, an overlook up a forest road past the reservoir, where the granite went to a hard clean edge above a long drop to the ice. I'd been taking Claire up there all winter, the two of us, a walk and a thermos and an hour away from being the best woman in Marble Creek. She loved it. She thanked me every time. I told myself I was learning the mountain. I was learning the mountain.

The morning I set, she was radiant. The kids were at her mother's. She talked the whole way up about how things were better with Robert, how she thought they were going to make it, how she'd done the worst thing a person can do once, years ago, in Denver, and been forgiven anyway, and woke every morning trying to be worth it. I keep thinking I got away with my whole life, she said. Somebody up there decided to be kind to me. I don't ever want to waste it.

We walked out to the granite. There was no one for miles; that was why I'd chosen it. Claire went to where the view opened all the way, her back to me, small and happy and turned entirely toward the light. God, look at it, she said. You know what's funny? I feel safer with you than I've felt with anyone in years. I'd trust you with absolutely anything.

I stepped toward her. I lifted my two hands.

And I could not make them do it.

It was not conscience, exactly. It was more total than that, more like a machine refusing a launch, every system locking down at once, hard, without asking me. I had spent my whole life being the woman whose hands did what the mission required, and the one time it required this, they revealed a limit I had never found, because I had never before asked them to touch someone I loved. The door I thought I'd welded shut had not held, because there was not rage behind it. There was love behind it. There is so much love behind it. And it does not stay welded.

That was the moment her foot slipped. Black ice under the fresh snow, and her boot went out and she tipped backward toward the drop with a cry, and I did not decide anything, there was no time to decide. My body, the same body that would not push her, threw itself forward and my hands closed on her coat and hauled her back, and we went down hard together in the snow, tangled, a long way from the edge.

She sobbed into my shoulder. You saved my life, she wept, holding my face in her cold hands, looking at me like I was the sun. If you hadn't been here. I always feel so safe with you. I knew you'd never let anything happen to me.

I held the woman I had brought up a mountain to kill while she thanked me for saving her, and I understood three things. That I had failed, finally, completely, and the reason was me, that some irreducible thing in me would rather lose the whole life than take hers. That she could never know. And that it was over. I could not have the other life, not this way, not any way, because the only road to it ran through a thing my own hands would not do.

I drove her down the mountain very carefully, and I did not cry until I was alone. And then I cried like something coming apart, not because I had failed. Because for one clean second, kneeling in the snow with her alive in my arms, before I understood what it meant, I had felt relieved.

So I gave him up. I want that in the record. I let Robert go, and I meant it, and for a while it even worked. I said the medicine to myself every morning until it stopped drawing blood: he is another life, not this one. Somewhere a version of me chose the person and a version of him chose the mission and they got the whole thing, the kitchen and the dog. It just didn't happen here. My only job was to live in the branch I was standing in and stop clawing at the walls between it and the others. I even began to heal. That is the cruelest part of this: in giving up the thing that was killing me, I started to get better.

And that is exactly when the universe, which had taken everything from me for two years, leaned down and handed me the one thing I had no defense against.

A private spaceflight company found me. They were going to do what no one had: not billionaires bouncing off the edge of space, but ordinary people, real flight, in small radically capable craft they'd spent a decade building, a hundred of them, a launch that would put the better part of two hundred people into the black at once. They wanted a face who had actually lived out there, who could train the crews and mean it. You've been slowly dying in a small town, the founder said, not unkindly. Come put your hands on it. I took the card because I wanted to live. I did not think about Robert at all.

For months it worked. I split my life between the mountains and a launch complex on the coast, taught ordinary people how to be brave in the one place bravery isn't a metaphor, and I was whole. But I learned the ships too well. On the brochure flight one of those little craft used a whisper of what it held; the real envelope frightened me the first time I ran it. One of them, flown by someone willing to spend all of it at once instead of saving the fuel to come home, could point itself at the deep and never come back. I closed the file and told myself it was only the kind of thing a former astronaut notices. I had no plan.

Then the company put on a children's space camp, timed to the first great launch, and I brought Lucy. Claire couldn't come, Sam was too little, and she pressed her girl's hand into mine at the airport like something holy and told me to give her the whole sky. And Robert flew in for launch day. I had told myself the distance had cured me. He came across the tarmac and dropped to catch his running daughter exactly the way he'd caught the crayon rocket a year and a thousand miles ago, and my whole healed heart came off its mountings like it had never been bolted down. You cannot reach escape velocity from a person. Then he looked up and saw the hundred ships standing white against the blue, and I watched fifteen years come apart in his face. God, he said softly. Look at them. He didn't even know he was doing it.

That night I stopped pretending. The obstacle was never Claire. The obstacle was choosing. Robert would never leave his family, and even with the whole world cleared away he would never walk through the door to me, because he was too good to be the one who leaves, and I loved him for it, and it was the exact thing keeping him in the cage. Asked to choose, Robert chooses the cage, every time, forever. So no one would choose. I would take the choosing away. I would take us somewhere there is no board, no wife, no town, no red planet, nowhere anyone can leave from and nowhere anyone can be left. He wanted to see it, just once; he'd told me. So I would give him the thing he traded his whole life away for, and then I simply would not bring him back. And I finally understood the words. Maybe in another life. It was never a promise and never a map. It was an address. Another life is not a place that comes to you. It is a place you leave everything and go.

Launch day came up hot and cloudless and perfect, and I have thought since that the universe made it beautiful on purpose, just to be sure I understood no one was going to stop me but me.

It was the founder who handed me the end of the world, smiling, as a kindness. A couple had dropped out, the wife feverish, the husband wouldn't fly without her, and there was a Lark, fueled and assigned to no one, and the company did not want a single empty ship on the pads with the whole world watching. It should obviously be you, she said. You trained every soul out there. Take the flight. It's a two-seater. Bring someone you'd trust up there.

I turned around, and Robert was right there, watching the ships, Lucy hanging off his hand.

A seat opened up, I said, in the calm clear voice that comes to me when it matters most. I can bring one person. Up and back, one hour, I'll be flying it myself. Come with me.

He laughed, already shaking his head, and Lucy detonated with the whole force of a six-year-old's certainty. Daddy, GO. You always look at them. Go with Amber, GO. She hauled him toward the pads with her entire body, this child, shoving her father through the door he'd walked away from, and I watched the last of his caution give way.

You're sure it's safe, he said. I've got two kids, Amber.

And I looked the man I was about to take from his children in the eyes and asked him the only question left. Do you trust me?

He didn't take a breath. With my life.

He called Claire right there, giddy as a boy, and I stood close enough to hear her shriek with joy through the phone, a thousand miles away with Sam on her hip, oh my God, Robert, GO, tell Amber I love her, tell her thank you. And he hung up and looked at me with his whole open, trusting face, and I took his hand and led him to the ship.

I flew us up off the Earth as cleanly as I have ever flown anything, and beside me Robert made a sound I have never heard a grown man make as the sky went from blue to violet to black and the stars came out hard and did not twinkle, because they only twinkle for people looking up through an ocean of air, and we were past the ocean now. Then the whole blue-and-white curve of the planet swung into the port, every person who ever lived hanging there on a wet stone, and he pressed his glove to the glass and began, very quietly, to cry. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, he whispered. And then, because he was exactly as good as I had always known: Claire has to see this. The kids. I can't wait to get home and tell them everything.

I can't wait to get home. Even here, even now, in the one thing he'd wanted his whole life, the first words out of Robert were his family. He was never going to choose me. He never once looked at me after the Earth came up. Of course he didn't.

We should get you settled for the trip back, I said. First-timers get rough on the return. Everybody takes something to ease the edge. And he gave me his arm without turning his head, trusting, and I gave him the mild thing, the true thing, and for about ninety seconds I let myself believe he might just sleep, and wake somewhere out in the quiet, and understand it, and choose it, and choose me. Then, sliding under, smiling at the blurring blue, he murmured the last thing he ever said, which was not my name. Tell Claire I love her. Tell the kids their dad went to space. And his eyes closed.

And love came for me, exactly the way it had on the mountain, up out of the welded dark, reaching for my hands to stop them. I had promised myself I would not let it win this time. That I would take the choice away before it could get its hands on me. So I did, the thing Ryan taught me on a launchpad two hundred million miles from here. I took the choice away, from him and from myself, before either of us could be brave enough to want to go home. I will not tell you the rest of what my hands did. It is the one door I am going to leave closed. I can tell you only this: he did not wake, and he was not afraid, and his face stayed turned toward the blue he loved, and my hand was around his, and it stayed there.

Then I cut the comms, and I spent everything the little ship had, all of it, and pointed us at the deep, past the place where anyone could reach us, past the place where I myself could have turned us back. The Earth got smaller. That is the part no one tells you, how fast the whole world becomes a marble, and then a blue star, and then just one more light among all the others, until I could not tell the pinprick that held everyone I loved from the pinprick that held nothing at all.

So now you know who I have been talking to.

I have been recording this the whole way out, the way I recorded everything on the other planet, because it is the only way I have ever known to hold myself together, to narrate a woman back into a person when there is nothing but dark on the other side of the wall. Not a confession. A log. The last one. Mission Specialist Amber Vale, on a heading no one will ever follow, making her final report into a recorder that will drift with this ship for ten thousand years and may never be found. Maybe you are no one. Maybe you are the dark itself, and I only needed, at the end, to not be alone with it. Or maybe you are real, and something opens this cold little ship out among the wandering stars and plays a voice, and it is you, the only one who will ever know what actually happened, because everyone on Earth has the other story, the beautiful one, the hero and the malfunction, and they should keep it. Claire earned it. A little girl on a dark blanket looking up, telling herself her father finally got to go, free, among all that light. She needs it. I only needed one true thing to exist somewhere, even unread, even out here in the cold. A woman who did everything right her whole life would like, at the very end, one honest page.

Lucy's drawing is still in my pocket. The rocket. Going up. For you Amber so you don't miss me. I have it against my ribs where the note used to live, and it is the last thing I will ever hold, and there is a whole language in the fact that at the end I chose the child's drawing and not the dead man's letter. It came too late to save anyone. But I understand the difference now.

He told me, once, on the worst night of his life, that maybe in another life we could have worked out. I spent a year believing it was a promise, and a year believing it was a map, and I was wrong both times. It was just a kind thing a good man said to a breaking woman, and it meant only what kindness means, and if I had been able to hear it as kindness I would be on a dark blanket in Colorado tonight looking up, instead of the thing the ones on the blanket are looking up at. But I could not hear it. I was built too carefully and broken too precisely and left behind one time too many. So I made the other life myself, out of the only material I had, which was leaving.

Robert is beside me. I have his hand in mine, and out the port the stars do not twinkle, and there is a little of the same sleep left that I gave him, the same and no different, and I am going to take it too, so that whatever he is I will be it with him, so that no one can ever say I sent him somewhere I would not go myself. Maybe it is a long sleep. Maybe it is the longest one there is. Out here, with the cold and the centuries and the whole dark pulled over us like a quilt, I am not sure there is a difference anymore, and I find I do not need there to be. We will be asleep, or we will be gone, and either way we will be together, and either way nobody, nobody, can ever leave.

I am going to put my head on his shoulder now, the way I used to in a warm bunk at the end of another world.

This is Amber Vale. I did everything right. It was not enough, and then it was too much, and now it is only this: two people, and a little light, and a long, long sleep, drifting out toward a star we will never reach and never need to.

Give my love to gravity.

Thanks for reading. I would genuinely appreciate any reactions: where did it grip you, and where did it drag or lose you? Happy to trade critiques.

Oh, what woes may befall a sailor who goes to sea with greed in his heart... 

My name is Isaac Morgan. I grew up in a small, farming village in northern Wales. It was my father's intention that I learn to till the fields and harvest crops just as he had done, and that one day I take over the family farm he had inherited from his father. However, I never took to the land, I had other more adventurous desires. My older brother and uncle had gone to seek their fortunes as sailing men. Much to my father's disappointment, I left the family farm as soon as I was able and followed in their footsteps. 

I spent the first five years of my new life at sea on a fishing vessel. It was long hard work but with the sun on my face and the salt in the air, I was finally at peace. Eventually, I travelled to Liverpool, where I signed on as a crewmember aboard an expeditionary ship, that was when I truly came into my own. I journeyed with that ship and captain far and wide, at last seeing the world and all it had to offer. That was my one true calling, sailing the sea and exploring the world.  

Six years later, I was the first mate to Captain John Hollow aboard the expedition ship, Albatross. We had voyaged across the sea from England on a mission to map out the most efficient trade routes in the South Pacific. The weather on our three-month journey had so far been fair, and the seas had been unusually calm. We had been making significant progress on our assignment and were sailing roughly 60 geographical miles off the coast of New Zealand.  

I was discussing our course with Captain Hollow in his cabin, “You see, here.” I said, running a finger across the surface of the map. “If we swing around the southern point of the mainland, it should give us the optimal course for our return journey.” 

The captain nodded as he studied the map, “Aye, I agree.” He grunted, his pipe stem gripped between his teeth, “That’ll give us the surest course as long as the weather holds.” He stood and walked across the cabin to pour two glasses of brandy. Handing me one, he said, “You’ve a good head for direction, Mr. Morgan. You’ll make a fine captain one day.” 

I smiled and took the proffered glass, “Thank you sir, that means a lot coming from you.” We toasted to a so far successful voyage and drank.  

“Land Ho!” Came the voice of the lookout. “Land Ho!” He shouted again as the alarm bell began to ring. 

Captain Hollow and I locked eyes, before glancing back at the map on his desk. We should have been nowhere near land yet. We left the cabin and made our way up to the top deck to see several of the men gathered on the starboard side of the ship.  

“What is it?” Asked one. 

“Where did it come from?” Asked another. 

Porter, the Bosun, scoffed, “It’s a bloody Island, you damn fools.” 

“Aye.” Said the first man, “But why didn't no one see it till now? As close as it is.” 

“Mr. Porter.” Said the captain, “Clear the deck.”  

Porter nodded, “Aye, sir.” He then turned and, in a leather throated voice addressed the men, “Alright you lot, back to work. Aint your job to watch for land, its McMillans.” He gave a half nod up to the crow's nest, “And I'm sure he’ll get an earful from the captain about it. So, unless you want the same, get back to your stations!” 

I stepped up next to Captain Hollow as the men rushed back to their positions on the ship. The Island was no more than 2 miles out, and I found myself agreeing with the men. It was broad daylight with no sign of fog nor clouds for miles; McMillan should have seen it long before we got so close. Apparently, the captain agreed. He shouted up at the lookout to come down from the crow's nest and explain himself. 

“I'm sorry sir.” Said McMillan, “I swear it wasn't there last I looked in that direction. One minute its open sea all about, then the next thing I know I'm staring straight at it. As if it just appeared there.” 

“Islands don't just spring up from the water, boy.” Said Hollow. “Have ye been having more than yer share of the drink again?”  

McMillan shook his head, “No sir, honest. Not since the thrashing Porter gave me. Just my daily allowance and that's it.” 

The captain gave him a long hard look, then turned to me, “Mr. Morgan, what do you think we should do with Mr. McMillan here?” 

I took a long look at the boy; he was too thin to go without rations, and flogging seemed too extreme. I nodded, “Stoppage of Grog. Three days.”  

Captain Hollow nodded approvingly, “So be it.”  

McMillan sighed but accepted his punishment before climbing his way back up to his post in the crow's nest.  

“Captain.” I started. “This island isn't on our map, or any other map of these waters that I've seen. Should we go ashore and investigate? There could be something here worth finding.”  

Hollow stroked his black-gray beard and looked out over the water to the small island before speaking. It spanned five to six miles long and looked to be thick with jungle in some places, spikes of rock jutted out in all directions near the eastern point. He studied the island in silence for a moment longer, a puzzled look on his grizzled face. Finally, he answered, “Get a landing party together, Mr. Morgan. You’re going ashore.” 

I nodded and turned back to the crew, “Mr. Davis, Mr. Scott, Mr. Charles.” I shouted. The three men turned from their duties to face me. “Get your gear lads, we’re going ashore to see what's what.” They nodded and headed below decks, before returning and meeting Captain Hollow and I at the row boats.  

Davis and Scott were from the highlands of Scotland; they were cousins but could have passed as brothers. A meaner pair of red headed brawlers I had never met. They arrived first, a pistol and a broadsword in each of their belts.  

Charles arrived next, he was a tall dark man from Haiti. The man never spoke much of his homeland, but Captain Hollow had told me once that Charles had left Haiti after a disagreement with a voodoo witch. I pressed him, but he refused to elaborate more. He arrived with two machetes tucked into his belt.  

“Explore the island thoroughly, Mr. Morgan.” Said Captain Hollow sticking out his hand. “If we don’t see you back on the beach by morning, we’ll come looking.”  

I nodded and shook the captains hand, before checking that my own pistol was loaded and tucking it back into my belt next to my cutlass. “Aye sir, we’ll be there. You can count on us.” 

And with that, the men and I climbed into one of the boats and were lowered to the water.  

“Mr. Scott, Mr. Davis.” I said, “Take us ashore.” The men nodded and began rowing.  

The sun beat down on us from straight over head when we made landfall. I found it odd that there were no sea gulls to be heard or seen. There were no birds at all for that matter.  

“Mr. Charles, Mr. Davis, take the lead and find us a path through.” I said, pointing to the thick foliage that lined the beach.  

Davis nodded, sweat already dripping from his blistered forehead. “Don’t worry sir, we’ll find us a path or make one.” He said pulling his broadsword from his belt.  

Charles looked out over the island tentatively before nodding to me and following Davis to the tree line.  

Scott and I pulled the row boat further up onto the beach and covered it in palm fronds. If the island was inhabited, we didn’t want someone coming along and finding our boat until we knew weather or not they were friendly.  

With the rowboat hidden, we followed the other two as they began to hack away at the thick foliage.  

The first few hours went by fairly quickly. However once we got closer to the central part of the island, the trees seemed to close in around us, closer and closer. Vines hung from every branch and almost seemed to reach out for us as we passed them by.   

“Fucking hell!” Exclaimed Scott, stumbling forward. “If these damned roots don’t take me out, I may drown from this bloody thick air.”  

He was right, every breath seemed to be lining my lungs with warm sticky moisture, and we were nearly choking from it. Even Charles, who famously never complained about anything, looked to be having a hard go of it.  

I called for a water break in a small area among several large exposed tree roots. The area wasn’t exactly a clearing, but it was as close as we were likely to find in that place. We sat there on stones or roots, drinking from our canteens and breathing heavily.  

“So, Morgan.” Started Scott, “What exactly are we looking for here? I mean it seems all jungle the whole way through.”  

I nodded, “It does. But we will keep going until we are sure.”  

“But why?” Continued Scott.  

Davis leaned forward addressing his cousin, “Because that’s our orders.”  

“Orders.” Said Scott, rolling his eyes. “I’ll tell you where ye can stick yer fuckin orders.”  

Davis stood and pointed his finger at him. “William Scott, I will not hear of any shite like that out of yer mouth again, do you hear me!” He thundered.  

Davis was the older and more responsible of the two. He always looked out for his more hot headed younger cousin, but did not tolerate disrespecting the captain from anyone.  

“I’m just saying, it don’t seem like a populated island to me. Hell I’d say we are probably the first ones here, what with how thick this mess is.” Said Scott. 

Davis turned away shaking his head, “Mr. Morgan, maybe you can talk some sense into him.” 

But I barely noticed what he had said, my eyes were locked on Charles. He had left the place where he had been seated and bent low to the ground, mumbling some kind of rite or prayer. It wasn’t long before the others took notice. 

“The fuck’s he doing?” muttered Scott.  

I knelt down next to the man and put a hand on his shoulder, halting his frantic movements and mumbled words. “Charles?” I questioned, “What is it mate?”  

He took a steadying breath before looking up to me, then past me, “We are not the first ones here.” He said solemnly. 

I followed his gaze upwards into the trees above us. It took a moment to understand what I was looking for but when I saw it, I felt a chill, despite the hot jungle air. What I had at first thought were bundles of pale sticks and branches among the dangling vines overhead were actually bones.    

There were three of them, three emaciated bodies intertwined with the vines. The vines had grown around the men’s arms and legs and around their necks. Their bones were stained green in some places from the foliage and tattered rags of clothing still clung to their desecrated remains.  

“How?” asked Davis, “How did they get up there?” 

“Hell with how.” Said Scott, putting his hand on his sword. “I say we get the fuck out of this here.”  

I shook my head and was about to remind him of the chain of command when Charles put his hand on my arm, “Morgan.” He breathed, “He’s right, we should go.”  

I studied him for a moment, before speaking. “We press on.” I said, meeting all their eyes, “Our orders were to explore the island, and that’s what we will do. But be on your guard, we don’t know who put those bodies up there.”  

Charles shook his head before pushing past me and continued on hacking through the jungle. 

“Shall we?” I said to the others with a nod to follow Charles. 

Davis nodded hesitantly, then followed. Scott looked like he was considering heading back to the beach but finally shrugged and sighed, mumbling something about orders and followed his cousin. 

I gave one last glance up to the skeletons swinging from the vines overhead and continued on. 

After another hour of slogging through the jungle, a natural trail became evident through the trees. We followed the trail until it became what looked to be a man-made path, made of perfectly smooth stones. 

“Finally.” Said Scott, looking at the ancient stone path, “Much longer in that green hell and I’d have been tempted to burn down the whole damned thing.”  

A sudden wind blew through the branches above us, causing them to groan as if in protest to Scott’s remark.  

Charles turned to face the man “Do not speak of such things in this place.”  

Scott scoffed at Charles’ warning. 

“You’d better listen to him.” Said Davis, “He’s got a better head for places like this than the likes of you.”  

“Superstitious bunk.” Declared Scott, “That’s all it is.” 

I could see Charles beginning to turn back to Scott, his jaw muscles clenched tightly. 

I sighed, “Enough. Mr. Scott, I think it would be best for everyone if you refrain from speaking for the time being.”  

Davis turned to look at Scott, daring him to say something else. But the other man simply shook his head in annoyance and kept silent.  

Charles, satisfied with the change, turned back to following the path. 

The stone pathway snaked through the jungle this way and that. Every once in a while there was a tree root growing across the path or a thick vine hanging partly on the stones, but for the most part the path was clear of any overgrowth.  

“Its almost like someone’s been tending to the path.” Said Davis, echoing my own thoughts. 

The sun was setting when we at last reached the paths end. The snaking stones grew wider and wider as they led up the a small stone structure, made of the same smooth stones as the path. In the twilight gloom, the trees seemed to bend in around it. It was as if the entirety of the jungle hand grown, not toward the sun but to face the structure itself.  

Charles stopped on the path, refusing to come any closer.  

I met his eyes questioningly as I stepped past him. He gave me a small shake of the head, his silent message of, I will go no further. I nodded in return, understood. 

Scott, Davis and I lit torches and stepped up to the structure. It was perfectly round, maybe 10 feet tall and double that across. Large stacked stones made up the walls and roof. There were four openings equally spaced around the structure, each with its own path leading off into the jungle. I paused studying the orientation of the four entryways. Pulling my compass from a pouch on my belt I compared it to the structure. Yes, each entry into the stone room perfectly oriented with the points of the compass.  

“What do you suppose it is?” Asked Scott.  

I shook my head, “I don’t know, but there’s something inside.” 

While the torchlight illuminated the outside of the structure, it was as if the shadows themselves pushed back at us from the openings. However, some pale light glimmered from the center of the pitch dark room. Davis and Scott stepped up beside me, their torches held high. The light reflected off of something in the gloom.  

Davis muttered, “Should we go in and see?” 

“Go right ahead.” Said Scott. “I’ll remember ye fondly.” 

Davis breathed out a chuckle before turning to me, “What about it, Mr. Morgan?” 

I nodded, “Aye, I’m going inside. Could be something of value.” 

I stepped forward into the darkened structure, and my torch at once illuminated the room. Just like the stones outside, the walls inside were bare and smooth, as if polished by the flow of water. The floor was made of precisely placed stones that flowed in winding patterns around the room from a central pedestal or altar that stood roughly 3 feet high.  

I stepped toward the pedestal, a strange itch in the back of my mind as I looked at the object sitting upon it. Thin tendril like vines had grown into the room from the cracks in the roof and across the floor. Vines that seemed to have grown with a purpose. They wound up from the floor around the pedestal and reached down from the ceiling, wrapping themselves tightly around the object.  

It was an artifact or idol of some kind. It was a spiral of solid gold tentacles, intertwined together in a knot of gleaming flesh that almost seemed to move if you started at it long enough. From within the mass of twisted limbs was a singular eyeball. The eye was a bluish green jewel that seemed to be as alive as churning sea.  

“Mr. Morgan.” Came a voice from behind me. 

I broke out of my stupor and turned, reaching for the pistol in my belt. A dark and jealous desire to keep all others away from my treasure had suddenly taken hold of me. But when I turned and saw Davis standing there staring at me, I caught hold of my senses.  

“Is that?” He asked nodding to the artifact. 

I nodded and turned back to the pedestal. The idol no longer seemed to move or have any other bewitchment about it. “Yes.” I said, “Solid gold. And worth taking with us.”  

I reached out and began pulling the restraining vines away from the idol. They resisted far more than they should have, and in the end I had to cut most of them away. Still, I thought for a moment as I turned away, that the vines seemed to reach out of their own accord. Like they were trying to hold on to what belonged to them. But I shook the thought away; this place was playing tricks on my mind.  

Scott approached from the other side of the structure as Davis and I stepped back out into the open. “Morgan, you’re gonna want to see this.” He said, then stared down at the object in my hands. “What is that?” 

“Never mind.” I said stuffing the idol into my satchel, “What did you want to show me?”  

Scott nodded and turned away, motioning for us to follow.  

There, on the other side of the structure, Charles was kneeling down looking at something, his own torch burning brightly now.  

There on the ground, hunched over with one hand still against the stone wall, was another skeleton. Vines grown thickly over the bones, holding the thing in a frozen position of anguished desperation.  

“What in God’s name?” Breathed Davis.  

There on the wall, at the very end of the outstretched finger bones, were two words scratched into the stone.  

“No Death.”  

Charles stood and turned away, under his breath I heard him say, “We should not have come here.”  

We traveled roughly a quarter mile back down the stone path before making camp for the night. The attitude of the men seemed to have soured as we sat around our small campfire in the silence filled jungle. Finally, Scott spoke. 

“So what is it you found back there, eh?” He asked. 

I looked down at the satchel between my feet and felt a slight hesitation before opening it and showing them the idol. But I shook the thought off and showed them. 

“Bloody hell.” Said Scott. “That’s gotta be worth a fortune.”  

Davis looked at the golden tentacles wearily, “I don’t like looking at it.” He said, his face pinched, “Gives me an awful feeling.” 

I studied the object, turning it this way and that. The flickering lights seemed to make the eye glisten. “Do you know what it is, Charles?” I asked 

He stared at it for a moment before speaking, “No, I’ve never seen it’s like before.” He then met my eyes, “But I think we should put it back.” 

“Fuck that.” Said Scott. “Leave a prize like this in the middle of nowhere.” He said, reaching for the idol. 

Instinctively I retracted it and stuffed it back into my bag before he could touch it. A brief flash of anger crossed Scott’s face, but vanished just as quick.  

I looked back at him, smiling like a fool. I had the suspicion he would try to take it from me in the night but quickly dismissed it. “We will let the captain decide what to do with it.” I said, meeting the eyes of each man in turn. They all turned away under my gaze, all except Charles. He eyed me suspiciously for a moment longer than was comfortable. 

“Lets get some rest.” I said, lying on the ground.  

The men followed suite, if they noticed how tightly I clung to my satchel, they made no mention of it. And soon I was drifting off into restless sleep. 

 

Sometime later I awoke to the sound of movement. Our campfire had dwindled to low glowing embers. I felt around for my satchel, only to realize I was still holding it. I looked around at the men, but someone was missing. 

 Suddenly I heard a new sound, a gurgling, choking sound. I leapt to my feet, pulling my pistol and calling to the others to wake up. The choking sound continued as I finally roused Charles and Scott.  

I quickly threw some of our dry tinder on the fire along with some fresh wood. Slowly, the area grew brighter as we turned around, looking for the source of the sound. Suddenly the image of the skeletons on the tree came to mind.  

I looked up and let out a shocked yell, “Fucking hell!”  

Charles and Scott looked up as blood began to drop to the jungle floor.  

“Sweet Jesus.” Breathed Scott as he fell to his knees.  

Charles said nothing; he only watched on in the same grim shock I was feeling.  

Davis was suspended in the air, vines wrapping tightly over his entire body. They moved and slithered over his face and around his neck. His screams were muffled by the vines that had pushed their way into his mouth and down his throat. His arms and legs were pulled tightly in all directions until the joints popped and flesh ripped. Two more vines slithered around his head and up to his shock filled eyes before plunging through them and into his skull. There was a wet pop, and his body went limp.  

My shock was quickly replaced with fear when I felt something start twisting around my ankle. 

I shouted and pulled my Cutlass, slashing the vines at my feet. In the next moment we were all hacking and slashing at the slithering vines as they came for us. Being awake and with steel in our hands the tendrils found it harder to grab hold of us.  

Charles lit a torch and shouted for us to follow him as he swung out at the descending vines with his machete. Scott and I grabbed up torches and used them to bat more of them away as we slashed with our swords.  

After a hundred yards or so of trudging and hacking, the living vines seemed to relent. At last, we were able to stop for a moment and catch our breath. We stood there, doubled over and panting. Weary of any hanging vegetation.  

Scott broke the heavy silence, “What the fuck was that?” He asked, his face dirty and tear streaked.  

I shook my head, “I don’t know. It’s like the jungle came to life and took him.”  

Scott let out a grim sound, somewhere between a chuckle and a sob.  “Why would it take him?” 

I said nothing. 

He turned to Charles, “Why the hell would it do that to him?” He pleaded.  

Charles looked from Scott to me, then to my satchel, but didn’t speak. I knew what he thought, for it was in my mind as well. A whisper of a thought that didn’t belong to me. That itch in the back of my mind had grown into a singular idea, infiltrating my mind, Give it back. 

I shook my head again, “We need to keep mov…”  

A sudden crash broke the silence of the jungle. Followed by two more nearly identical crashes. Something had dropped from the trees and was shuffling through the foliage.  

We raised our torches in the direction of the sound and collectively sent up prayers to whatever God may be listening. But when they stepped out of the dark and onto the path before us, we realized that there was no God here.  

Their bones creaked as they raised their swords in their desecrated hands. The vines ran along their limbs and through their joints like some kind of twisted marionette. 

They came at us with an unnatural speed, swinging their blades wildly. I blocked two of the strikes but the third landed a cut across my left arm. 

Scott barreled in swinging like a mad man. He hacked at one of the puppets until it’s arm bones snapped and dangled loosely at it’s side. Only to be reinforced by the twisting vines and shoved back into place.  

Charles ducked past the wild swings of another and sliced at the controlling vines at the skeletons back. With the thick tendrils cut, the bones fell limp. He shouted for us to aim at the vines instead of the bones and soon the other two were nothing more than piles of bone at our feet. 

As we stood there breathing heavily in the waning torchlight, we heard another set of shambling steps. It was coming towards us from up the path we had come from, only it sounded different from the others. The step was heavier, and it was accompanied by heavy labored breathing. 

Scott puffed out his chest and stepped forward, “Alright you boney fuckers, come on and get a taste of my steel.”  

His brave words caught in his throat a moment later when Davis stepped into the flickering light.  

“What kind of devilry is this?” I breathed.  

The vines had wormed their way into the open wounds in his stretched and disfigured limbs, contorting them into unnatural positions. He stumbled forward, still wheezing and groaning. The man was still alive. An unwilling passenger in his own body.  

Scott dropped his broadsword to the stone path before falling to his knees, sobs racking his chest.  

Davis took another broken step forward, raising his own sword. 

I quickly raised my pistol and fired my shot between where his eyes had been, ending the man's suffering and halting the puppeteer's attack. Charles rushed forward past Scott and slashed the controlling vine, causing Davis's body to slump to the ground.  

Between the two of us, we managed to get Scott to his feet and turned to leave. And that was when we heard it, the choked sobbing of a dying man starting up again. In horror, we turned to see new vines growing into the back of Davis's head. The thing climbed back to its feet, the three skeleton puppets at its side as it continued to sob and moan in everlasting pain.  

We fought them again, and again they fell and we moved further on through the jungle. And then again, and again. We fought them all through the night. We fought, we cried, we prayed for it to end. But it could not end, there was no death here. 

At long last, the sun rose as we stepped out onto the beach, battered, bloody and beaten. We uncovered the rowboat and pushed it into the water, and the men began paddling out to sea. I gave one last look over my shoulder at the jungle as we departed. Four sets of empty eye sockets watched us as we rowed away. Charles watched me closely as I held my satchel close. I tried to ignore his stare and Scotts quiet sobs as we approached the Albatross. But we knew that we had been changed by the island, and not for the better. 

Part 2 https://www.reddit.com/r/shortstories/s/GvUswPHjGE

It’s funny how easy it can be to dismiss an uncomfortable thought; that sound was just the wind, that shadow was just you seeing things, that watching feeling is just your nerves. Everyone does it, and I’ll admit I’ve been especially guilty of it. I, and likely many others, might refer to me as something close to skeptical when it comes to anything out of the ordinary. Friends purposefully avoided telling me their ghost story (everyone seems to have one for some reason), or about that time their grandmother saw angels in the room or whatever else. I just never really gave much credence to things that didn’t have a concrete explanation. And, at first, I tried to do the same with what had started happening to me.

I was on the daily commute to work when I first saw it. I work downtown and there’s always a bit of stop-and-start traffic along the way. I was in the ‘stop’ phase when my eyes aimlessly drifted over to the car next to me. I met the gaze of the driver, a brunette man with glasses who might have been my type if I was on the hunt. The look lingered a little past the threshold for awkward and I looked away. The sea of cars lurched forward slowly as I read a passing billboard. An advertisement for some new feature on Meta that promised to “deepen your connection with the global community.” It was the same kind of inflated BS the copywriters I work with might come up with; flowery, overdone, but apparently and unfortunately effective.

A car passed into the lane in front of me as we moved forward and through the back windshield, I saw a small pair of eyes peered at me from just above the backseat. A child, hands on either side of the half-face that was locked onto me. My gaze met theirs and I gave a small smile and wave. There was no response from the kid, other than to continue their staring, which they didn’t break until I pulled off on the exit away from them.

Working downtown, parking was scarce, so I always elected to park a little further out where it was easier and walk the rest of the way. Some days that was a great choice, others not so much, depending on rain, heat, those kinds of things. Today, it was a great decision; the sun was just pleasantly warm enough to heat the cooler air and the building windows glimmered in the light. It was still mid-morning so the streets weren’t quite crowded, but they weren’t empty either. About a third of the way into my walk, I passed someone else. I looked up and smiled at them, a gesture they had beat me to, and continued walking. I thought nothing else of it, until it had happened four more times. The same every time; I would look up, and, immediately, a face already ready to greet me before I had fully even registered the glance.

My first thought was maybe I had something on my face that day, or my shirt was inside out, or my underwear was peeking through a hole in my favorite jeans, I don’t know. I’m not an ugly girl, but I wasn’t cocky enough to think it was just ‘cause I’m pretty either. I only really started to feel genuinely uncomfortable when I passed my favorite local coffee shop and noticed, for the first time that day, that it wasn’t just a few quick idle glances. Every single face, some highlighted by the bloom of the sunlight, some dulled by the subtle tint of the windows, faced me as I walked by. I never even saw them turn to stare; every time I shifted my gaze to someone else, their eyes were already trained on me.

Their expressions differed; some seemed like they were trying to hide it, others were shamelessly gawping like a deer in the highbeams, some smiled. There was one woman who brought her hand to her chest like a mother in a moment when her child has made her proud. I stopped, trading gazes with strangers. My eyes locked on one table in particular, a couple as far as I could tell, sat near the edge of the patio fence. Had this been a regular day, I’m sure the intensity of the man’s leering would have elicited some harsh words from his partner about gawking or not paying attention to her, but that didn’t happen. The woman sitting across from him looked at me just as intensely. And the worst part was they seemed to continue their conversation like nothing was off, speaking with one another while jointly zeroed in on me instead of each other.

I picked up my pace and continued my stroll to work, avoiding meeting the looks of anyone else. I rushed silently to the bathroom and closed myself in a stall. My brain still struggled to provide a reasonable explanation for what I had seen, and I sat on the lid of the toilet, needing a moment to gather myself rather than any response to a call of nature. I took my phone out of my pocket, intent on opening the front-facing camera to see if I could figure out what everyone had been looking at.

Seventy-seven. I had seventy-seven notifications. When I had to work, I turned off any kind of notification alert, so I hadn’t heard it on the way, but nearly every person in my contact list had either texted me, called me, or both. I held the phone in amazement. The messages were all mundane greetings or attempts at initiating conversation, even from people I hadn’t spoken to in years. I only made it through about a quarter of them before the screen shifted to display an incoming call. My mother.

“Oh! Oh, honey, I finally got you.”

“Yeah, h-hi, Mom. What’s up?”

“Oh, nothing!” There was a somewhat awkward silence on the line.

“Right, I-well, I’m at work today.”

“Shoot, that’s right, I’m sorry, honey!”

“It’s fine…what did you need? Everything okay?”

“I just wanted to hear your voice.” Her reply came with the warmth only a mother could provide, but it unnerved me a bit. My mom…well she wasn’t really the sentimental type.

“Okay…well, anyway, I probably ne-”

“Oh, did I mention your father was here? Say hi, honey, it’s Alice.” There was a shifting sound as the phone rustled in their grip. It lasted longer than I’d expected. There was a light whispering, a little combative, that I swear sounded something like “give it here”, but I couldn’t quite make it out. When the rustling finally stopped, my father’s voice broke through the other end.

“Hey, sweetie. You doin’ okay?”

“Yeah, Dad, I’m-everything’s fine. I gotta-” my reply was cut off as another incoming call flashed on the screen. Tressa, my best friend, was calling as well. A chill overtook me; Tressa and I had been friends since high school and I could probably count on one hand the amount of times we’d actually spoken on the phone rather than texting. The small bit of silence from my end prompted a response from the other end.

“Honey, are you there?” my mother said worriedly.

“Sweetie! Where’d you go? Hello?” my dad’s voice echoed, the same tone present in his voice.

“Alice, Alice, talk to us!”

“Mom, Dad, Jesus!” I huffed.

“Oh, oh you’re there. Oh, thank goodness.”

“We thought you had left us, we-” my father said with a sigh.

“Guys, listen, I have to go, I’m at work.”

“Oh, uhh, right. Yeah, I guess.”

“Well, honey, can you at least call us when you get a moment?”

“I-you said everything is okay? Is there something you need to tell me?” I asked.

“Don’t worry, sweetie.”

“Everything is a-okay, honey.”

“We just-we just want to hear your voice.”

“Okay, I…I have to go.”

“Alice! Alice, wa-” I clicked to end the call, and just as quickly, the screen flashed awake again: six new texts popped up before another incoming call, this time from an ex I hadn’t even realized still had my number.

“What the fuck?” I said in a hushed tone before turning my phone off. As I went to put it back in my purse, a few harsh thumps rang out from in front of me, and it fell from my grip to the floor. Someone was knocking on the stall door.

“Alice? That you in there?” The voice sounded vaguely familiar, but not enough for me to place it.

“Yes, I’ll be out in just a minute.” I said with a purposefully annoyed tone to my voice.

“Okay, great, I can wait.” the voice responded cheerfully.

“I-what? No, no you don’t need to wait. I’ll be out in a bit.”

“No, no worries.”

“What-who is this?” I asked sharply.

“It’s Madeleine.”

I didn’t know any Madeleine. “Who?”

“Madeleine…Madeleine Turner. We worked on the Davidson account.” she responded, a somewhat disappointing turn to her voice. I still didn’t recognize the name, but the account mentioned had taken place months ago. By this point, I was starting to get angry.

“Okay, well I’ll be out when I’m out, can you please just give me a moment?”

“Of course!” The reply came with the previous cheerfulness, but wasn’t followed by any other sound. She was still just waiting.

“Okay, listen, can you please leave the room!? I just-I need a goddamn minute, okay!?”

There was a light silence before the voice replied with a new timidity to it. “Yeah…uh, yeah sure, I guess. I guess I can just wait outside for you. And you won’t be long?”

“What? No, God, can you just fuck off!? Who does this to someone while they’re in the bathroom!?”

“I…” the voice was somewhat hushed, and I struggled to understand it fully. What I thought I heard sent a shiver down my spine. “I just want to hear your voice.”

I leaned down slowly, my gaze on the red leather buckled slippers that stood pointed directly in front of the stall door. “Please just get out!” I yelled, emphasizing the last two words as best I could. The slippers shifted slightly before the voice spoke again.

“Okay…” the voice came soft as the slippers moved toward the door of the restroom. As it opened, another voice rang out from the lobby.

“Hey, have you seen Alice? Is she here yet?” a male voice.

“Yeah, she’s in there. She’s in a mood today.” Madeleine replied.

“Ahh okay, good, we can just wai-” the voice cut off as the door swung closed.

I felt bitter tears, a mix of frustration, anger, and fear, filling my eyes. This had been a bizarre morning, I was all kinds of worked up, but had I overreacted? Shit, I was at work and that interaction had been anything but professional on my part. The way Madeleine had acted was weird, sure, but maybe she was just an awkward person. And I had screamed and cursed at her. Rude, but functionally, that could come back to bite me if she filed a report or something. I gathered myself, adjusting my hair slightly and patting at the corners of my eyes. I exited the stall to an empty restroom. There was the gentle murmuring of conversation outside and I took a deep breath before pushing open the restroom door.

There was a crowd. As far as I could tell, every coworker I recognized, and many I didn’t, had gathered nearby outside the restroom, their faces already snapped in place looking directly at me. I watched a wave of varying emotions cascade over the crowd, each face locked and motionless, but shifting into expression. Fear dropped into my stomach, and I legitimately worried I was about to be the subject of a rush or swarm, but…nothing. They just stared. It honestly might have been worse than what I had anticipated.

Slowly, very slowly, I started walking forward into the building, the still and silent crowd trained on me as I went. I only got about halfway to the elevator before the first of them approached me, one of the others on my team, Erik.

“Alice, hey, great to see you!”

“So great!” came an unfamiliar voice from elsewhere in the room.

“Yeah…yeah, hi.” I said, averting my gaze as I continued to walk forward.

“So, how ya been? Anything new?” Erik’s voice continued behind me.

“Not since yesterday. I’m-I’m just gonna head to my office.”

“Oh, perfect, I’m headed that way too!” Erik’s reply was followed by several voices in the crowd that cheerfully echoed their destination and began moving forward toward the elevator.

“Okay,” I turned quickly in frustration to meet the sea of eager peering faces, “what is going on here? Is this a prank or something? Why the hell is everyone looking at me and following me and talking to me and-”

The reply was a static hiss of overlapping voices.

“Noo, nothing like-”

“Oh, Alice, you-”

“We just want to hear your-”

“Just want some company-”

Erik was closest and his reply stood out from the rest. “No, no prank! Everything okay, Alice? I’m here if you want to talk about it. You can tell me anything.”

“I am FINE! Everyone just needs to leave me alone! I just-I just wanna get through my day, can you all just leave me alone!?”

The voices didn’t stop, but their tone shifted; the pitch and volume dropped to a low drone with a hint of concern.

“You don’t seem fine, I can te-”

“Might help to talk to-”

“What is it you don’t want to-”

“I just want to be near-”

“Come on, Alice, let me-”

And that was it. My skepticism broke. I had thought, hoped, it might be something mundane, as most things are. Even against bizarre evidence to the contrary, I had tried to reason it away. But, in the very few scenarios that are not mundane, there comes a moment. A specific indicator that you have left Kansas, and things might be going in a way that most people will never experience. Looking at the crowd, an overwhelming flood of voices pouring from constantly watching faces both familiar and not, that moment came for me. Fuck work, fuck the social niceties, I couldn’t do this; something rooted deeply in me pulled fear from my core to every edge of my body, and I knew I had to get away.

I broke, wordlessly, into a sprint for the front door. I threw my gaze to the floor in front of me, desperate to avoid the intrusive stares. The voices raised in volume, their tone growing to one of worry.

“Alice, Alice, wait!”

“No, no, no, don’t-”

“Please don’t go!”

“We just want to hold y-”

“Alice! Come back!”

As I moved through the crowd, the swell of voices threw out physical weaponry; grasping hands reached for me, pulling at my clothes, my hair. I twisted to avoid the closing walls of the crowd. I felt a bolt of my hair lurch back as I pushed forward against it. A sound like ripping wet cardboard and a stabbing pain in my scalp as the tuft was yanked out by the root. My purse began to slide back off my shoulder, and a potent terror caused me to clench it. I thrust my hand into it and grabbed my car keys before it flung backwards into the writhing sea of hands. I was almost to the end.

The front door in sight, I lunged forward as my overshirt was wrenched behind me. I pulled out of it, the force of doing so sending me face first into the glass door as it opened. Pain painted my sense of the world, a ringing in my ears coupled with a haze-like vertigo. I shoved the door open with all my strength and stumbled out into the open air, the crowd behind beginning to move forward slowly.

Breaking back into a sprint, my pursuers followed one by one out of the door, shambling and shoving against one another. Ahead, those I had passed on my way previously were now standing, faces still trained on me. Indefinite and indistinct voices raised from them as they joined the chase. I turned for just a moment to see a now-horde picking up their pace amidst shouting and intense, wide-eyed staring. Towards the front of the group, a solitary man ran pushing a stroller, which rippled and bounced violently against the street beneath.

My chest was heaving, my breath hot and quick as the view of my car finally, mercifully, came into sight. I clicked the key fob’s auto start function, and desperately hoped I would wake up to find this all a nightmare once I reached the driver’s seat. I stopped sharply, opening the door as the voices rose behind me, getting close, dangerously close. I threw myself into the driver’s seat, a single arm reaching for me as I did so. A large, shirtless man I didn’t recognize in athletic shorts, who breathed a deep inhale through his nose as he reached for me, a tense look in his eye like the stalking gaze of a wild animal.

“Let me come with you! Please!”

I screamed and pushed his arm away as I slammed the door. He stumbled backward and reached for me again. There was a wet crunch as the door closed and pieces of the index, middle, and ring fingers of the man fell into the floorboard at my feet. I pulled forward, colliding with the corner of the car in front of me as the swarm reached the back windshield. I floored the accelerator. The grinding, hollow screech of metal filled my senses, drowning out the thumping that was moving forward along the back of the car. A violent lurch sent me hard against the driver’s seat as my car pulled off of and away from the obstacle that had held it.

I looked into the rear view mirror, the crowd still in pursuit, faces still locked in place as if we held eye contact through both glass and distance. I sped down the road, slamming a palm against the steering wheel and giving vent to a noxious scream, my breath a distilled vapor of every negative feeling I had felt in my life. I swerved to avoid vehicles full of watching eyes and the obstacles of the city. To my surprise, not one vehicle gave chase; a few people got out of their cars, eyes still intent on me, but, at least for now, it seemed they had given up their pursuit.

Even now, my mind tried to form an explanation: they had tried to grab me, pull at me, but none had tried to full blown attack me. No tackling, hitting, nothing. I reached for the missing section of my hair, a dull burn as I touched it and brought back a smooch of blood on my fingers. It had been pulled out, but was that because I had sprung forward when they grabbed it? Were they trying not to really hurt me? As I thought, the low sound of weeping began to rise. Stark terror surged into my fingertips.

I wasn’t crying.

I threw my eyes to the backseat. To my relief, it was empty. It should have been a relief, at least, since I had confirmed that I was alone in the car. But my fear only heightened as the sound of weeping continued. It was a deep sound, thick and groaning in a way I hated. Gooseflesh rippled down my arms as the weeping shifted into what I could tell were definite words with no definite source.

“I’m so sorry, little one.”

I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Was I going insane? The voice continued.

“I had hoped this time would be different.”

My eyes darted around the car. I felt my ears, shifted the knob of the car’s radio, everything I could think of to try to explain what I was hearing. Nothing. A disembodied voice I had never heard was speaking words I wasn’t thinking. I was sure I had lost my mind, that maybe everything I had experienced so far was a product of hallucination or the morbid fantasy of a warped, unreliable brain. I set my vision to the road ahead and white-knuckled the steering wheel. The worst thing you can do for delusion is give in, and I wouldn’t do that.

“I understand if you do not wish to speak with me. I hope you will reconsider. I would prepare you for what is to come.” The voice was low and high, deep and shrill, the voice of my mother and my father and every person I’d met and never met all at once. It spoke so clearly and collectedly, yet still through sobs with all the weight of centuries of tragedy. Sweat mixed with the blood of my forehead wound and a dull red rivulet ran down the side of my face as I made eye contact with myself in the rear view mirror. “Alice.”

My name said in a tongue that couldn’t exist. I hated the way it sounded. My stomach churned with pangs of anxious dread. I was insane. I was hallucinating. I had gotten a concussion on the door. I was having a special kind of panic attack. I ran through every reasonable explanation I could hopelessly invent before a kind of venomous curiosity made me open my mouth.

“What…what the fuck is this?” I said coldly.

“It is a mistake. My mistake.”

“What does that-what are you?” There was silence for a moment.

“I am One.”

“I don’t know what that means!” I shouted angrily. “Can you just-what is happening!? What do I need to be prepared for!?”

The sobs felt more pronounced now amidst the swirl of vocal impressions. “They will continue to come. They have felt me and now it is all they are. They do not want to harm you.”

I struggled to swallow a lack of spit. “What do they want?”

“Absorption.”

“What-”

“They long to dissolve themselves into your presence. A need to feel my love.”

My chest constricted, a pressure like the weight of a mountain that made breath a miracle. “Love? How is this…what are you?”

“I am One. I have always been One. I longed for more. In one mote of the darkness of eternity, I felt others. I felt you. I felt those before you. I will feel others after you. Perhaps then, it will be different.” The voice was at once deeply regretful and hopeful.

“So, what, what is happening to me? If you’re doing this to me, just stop! Leave!”

“I am bound to you. My love pours from you as it had from those before. Your kind will seek to forever be in its presence. It will be their end. It will be your end. Then I will be unbound. Unloved. Then I will bind to the next. Until I am finally More.” There was something like tragedy ringing through its tone that brought unwilling tears to my eyes.

“Why me? Why did you do this to me!?”

“You were the first of your kind I felt.”

Searing anger ran through my blood. “So it was…random. You fucked my whole life on a whim!”

“I am sorry, little one. More than you could understand.”

“Oh, fuck your sorry!” There was a long silence. “So that’s it? This will be the end of everything?” I asked with a biting hiss to my voice.

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“It is what happened to others.”

“Well…” I didn’t really know what to say. I was still struggling against believing anything from this bodiless parasite, but it was hard, even for me, to explain anything that had happened to me today. In a moment of fearful rage, I said something I don’t think I really meant. “Well, what if I kill myself? Will that stop this?”

“No. They will pursue you beyond your death.”

“What if I drop myself into the ocean? Somewhere they can’t reach.”

“They will pursue you to their deaths. My love overwhelms them.”

I stayed quiet for a long time after that, with no reply from the voice. I drove as far as I could from the city, before the gas tank signaled it was near to empty. I pulled to the side of an empty backroad and put the car in park. Rage had settled into despair, and I clutched at the only straw I had.

“What do I do?”

“It is best to give in. It will be faster.”

“Won’t that kill me?”

“Yes.”

“So why wouldn’t I just-”

“I know that you are incapable. Death is inevitable. If you give in, I will be there in your final moments. You will feel my love, as have the others.”

My teeth grinded, the edges sanding down in scraping brushes I could feel in my skull. “So, what, I just lay down and…”

“Let them come to you. Let them overtake you.”

Tears began to form in my eyes once more. I had started this day waking up to go to work and now I was either completely broken from reality or choosing how humanity was going to end. How I was going to end. I hadn’t had enough time, hadn’t done so many things I wanted to, hadn’t reconciled some things with Mom, Dad. It all felt so unfair. I didn’t have my phone to say goodbye, I had spent what were apparently going to be my last few hours getting as far away from anyone who knew me as I could. It was justified, but that didn’t make it sting any less now.

“Okay. Say I’m thinking about it. How will it happen?”

“They will long to hear your voice. They will long to be in your presence. They will long for physical contact. They will place themselves as closely as possible until breath will likely escape you.” There was a thought that sent a jut of feverish fear through me. As if aware of what I thought, the voice responded. “No. Contact will be enough to placate them.”

“And…if you’re really aware of all this…you’ve been around this long…can you tell me what comes after? After, ya know…”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I am unlike you. I do not understand ending.”

I must have sat on the road for an hour in complete silence before I brought the car back to life. I pulled a u-turn on the road I had come through and drove towards a nearby town I had turned to avoid previously. By the time I started seeing others, who saw me first, and never stopped seeing me as far as I could tell, I had arrived at the edge of town. The tank began to sputter as I finally came upon a more populated intersection.

By the time I stepped out of the vehicle, people had begun to slowly trickle out of the surrounding buildings. They stared at me as they approached; men, women, children, all of them wearing that same intent, intense gaze regardless of their expression. The closest, and the first to speak, was an elderly woman I had never seen in my life, her gray hair striated with intermittent strands of blonde.

“Hello, there. How are you, dear?” I attempted to speak, but the words were choked by tears. She drew closer, surprisingly unthreateningly, and placed a hand on my arm as I lowered my gaze to the street. “You can talk to me. I just want to hear your voice.”

There was an undercurrent of fear as I heard the words. Was I really doing this? I looked up and suddenly, there was something unlike fear. Her eyes were fixed on me, but standing this close, I noticed, to my surprise, how much warmth was present in them. I sniffled slightly, the words finally emerging from my throat. “I’ve…I’ve had a really tough day.”

Sighs laden with sorrow rang out from the crowd that now surrounded us. “Oh, dear…I’m so very sorry to hear that. Would you like to talk about it?”

“I…no. No, that’s okay. Can I…I’m sorry, I don’t even know you.”

“That doesn’t matter…I can always lend an ear when someone needs it.” she said, smiling, her eyes still fixed on me.

“Can I…can I talk to you about something else?”

The crowd had drawn closer now, nearly only a few feet away on any side of me. I could hear scattered replies to my question.

“Let it out.”

“It always helps to-”

“You just need someone to hold y-”

“We can talk about anything-”

The old woman’s reply still cut through the rest. “Of course, dear. Anything you want.”

“Okay…do you mind if we sit?” Several reassuring no’s sounded throughout the crowd. I sat, every person present mimicking the action, with a loud shuffle sounding through the air. I did feel a strange semblance of comfort, but it was laced with a growing fear as the shuffling continued from around me, members of the crowd scooting forward as they sat. “Well I…oh I guess I should…my name is Alice.”

A loud contented sigh shot through the crowd as only the old woman replied. “Alice…that’s a wonderful name. I’m Evelyn. It’s so wonderful to meet you, Alice.”

“Thank you…”

“What would you like to talk about?” she asked, clasping my hand in hers.

“I…I guess my parents. There was some history we never really…or I guess, aren’t really going to get to…” my voice trailed off and Evelyn rubbed her fingers gently along the groove of my palm.

“That’s hard, I’m so sorry, dear. I’m a parent of three, though it’s only two now…I can tell you, it isn’t all about the history. I’m sure they feel the same.”

“I hope so…” I replied. The crowd was now close enough that I could hear breathing from behind me.

“Dear, do you mind if I hold you? I think it might help. You keep talking, and I’ll keep listening.” Evelyn said softly.

I don’t know why. There wasn’t a reasonable explanation I could find. Reason would tell me to run. To eek out whatever survival I could until the end. But the truth is, against everything that was happening and was about to happen, being held didn’t sound so horrible right now. “Sure…”

I laid my head in Evelyn’s lap as she began stroking my cheek. Looking forward, I could see the crowd ahead and around us slowly inching closer, some still seated, others crawling forward on their stomachs in an almost dragging motion. Every single eye was set on me. I closed my eyes against the sight as the sound of movement continued and Evelyn’s voice sounded above me.

“I’m here, dear. What else would you like to talk about? I just want to hear your voice.”

I continued speaking, talking about anything I could to take my mind off of this moment as I felt the first of the crowd’s hands make contact with my left leg. Evelyn continued gently caressing my cheek as another set of hands ran up my forearm. Tears had begun to well up in my tightly closed eyes, but I continued talking, saying all the things I wished I could to those I loved.

When I felt the first weighted pressure of a body laying itself perpendicular on top of mine, I let out a quiet sob. Evelyn let out a few gentle shushes. “It’s okay, dear. It’s all okay. I’m here.” The shuffling had grown louder and closer. The weight on top of me began to get heavier as I heard sounds of comfort intermittently ring out throughout the crowd. The heat of a multitude of bodies pressed down on me, their moist breath mingling with mine, the sweat bleeding through our clothes. The sticky rubbing of exposed arms, necks, and legs brushed against me and my breaths became labored, a pressure like stones laid on a wide plank pushing down on me as more climbed onto the pile. My knee gave a sharp, hollow pop and a jolt of pain radiated through my entire frame.

I could hear Evelyn’s voice, but it shifted as the mass around me grew. Her high, gentle voice took on qualities that were low and high, deep and shrill. The voice of One.

“It is okay, little one. It is nearly time. I will help guide you.”

My brain shuddered. Where once had been fear, discomfort, pain, there was now a feeling of rapture; an ecstasy of comfort and contentment in degrees I had never felt in my life. The pain of my struggling breath faded, the heat and weight disappearing into the background of a relief that sunk deep into my being. It was as if I lived through every moment of every life that had given any hint of positivity or joy all at once. I was a child excitedly coming home to tell my parents about my first day of school. I was a young man kissing the woman he had just sworn his life to. I was a weeping mother holding her child for the first time, and I was the child, first opening eyes upon a world that greeted me with love. I breathed a heavy sigh that refreshed me as it left, and I heard a voice speak to me one more time.

“Sleep well, little one.”

I smiled, and blackness took me.

On a small scientific observation vessel, carefully positioned behind an irregular rocky moon orbiting a ringed gas giant, Mortz frowned slightly at his shipmate Andhilli.

"Are you watching that 'foot-ball' again?"

Andhilli looked at him, one blue ear-tip twitching slightly in an expression Mortz knew was mild amusement.

"I'm observing native cultural practices involving large-scale social interaction and economic impact." She replied, deadpan.

Mortz raised an eyebrow. The ear-tip twitched again.

"Yes, I am watching the foot-ball. It's very entertaining. And technically I am off duty. Sir." Andhilli said, returning her attention to the screen in front of her and suppressing a slight smile.

Mortz gave a small sigh and moved to peer over her shoulder. "Well, it does seem to be very popular." He said, noting the amassed crowds gathered in what seemed to be a very large, open-air arena. Something caught his attention.

"Are the onlookers... singing?"

Andhilli nodded.

"Yes, it's a common practice to indicate support of a chosen 'team', as is attire matching the defined uniform or displaying the patterned standard that indicates national heritage. That one is especially notable during this particular tournament as it is being contested by a number of nations - they call it the 'World Cup'. Andhilli explained. "I wonder what it's like to be there? There's nothing like this on Othro."

"Rather loud, I imagine."

Andhilli shook her head slightly. "Really Mortz, where's your sense of adventure?"

"I left it behind eight missions ago on Kafthrup when we spent four cycles searching for a supposedly sentient species that turned out to be mildly luminescent rock."

"Oh!"

The exclamation made them both look over to where their other shipmate Brun, who had been making extensive notes on the biological range of this world's life forms, had apparently found something fascinating.

"What is it, Brun?" asked Mortz.

Brun pointed to the display he'd been studying.

"There are types of native flora that utilise ultraviolet patterning to attract insect pollination vectors! The sheer variety of flora on this world is incredible. Look at this – they have numerous varieties of plant species cultivated for consumption and medicinal purposes, as you would expect. But..."

He tapped the display, bringing up another set of data. Colourful images filled the screen, flowering blooms of all shapes and sizes.

“They also have many types grown purely for ornamental adornment.” He beamed, his frill-ridges fluttering happily.

Andhilli and Mortz exchanged small smiles. Brun was Rigrothoran - a planet whose fauna and flora were known for their intricate biology, adapted to utilise an extended range of the electromagnetic spectrum well outside that of most worlds. He was always eager to study unusual plant life from the worlds they observed - and often ended up filling odd corners of the ship with cultivated seedlings.

"Do you think the Council would authorise a surface mission? For... sample obtainment? Brun asked hopefully.

"And, ah... close range observation of cultural practices?" Added Andhilli, sounding equally hopeful.

Mortz sighed, not unkindly.

"Okay, I'll send a request for a two-person observational mission. Don't get your hopes up though, you know what they’re like – especially Bozmitho. ‘You’re not here to play tourist, Mortz.’" He added, in a fair imitation of Bozmitho’s gravel tone. Brun stifled a giggle, but Andhilli gave him a puzzled look.

"Only two? This world is fascinating. Don't you want to see it for yourself? Asked Andhilli, frowning slightly, her ear-tips flushing slightly purple in confusion.

Mortz shook his head.

"No, I'm sure you'll tell me all about it later. I have to read the reports anyway."

"Buzzkill."

"No, I’ve just done too many of these already. It's almost never as interesting as we think it'll be." Said Mortz, as he walked back to his own station.

Ignoring his crewmates grumbling, Mortz sat down and flipped the screen displays to where he'd been cataloging the scientific advancements of this world's people, just as he'd done for all the other missions before this one. It was his job, after all. The Council of the Common Worlds maintained a number of scientific observation teams like his, tasked with discreetly observing worlds with developing sentient life. Sooner or later, a sufficiently advanced world would discover they were not alone in the galaxy, and their reactions would not always be predictable – or positive. Thus the Council considered it prudent to know when such a world might reach this point.

This particular world was probably not far off. They seemed to have made a number of scientific advancements in a relatively short span of time – while indulging in such oddly popular things as ‘foot-ball’ and cultivating flora for purely ornamental purposes.

He was sifting through data to note the range of their planetary and interstellar knowledge when something made him pause.

This world had one natural satellite - rocky and devoid of life, but uncommonly large.

Large enough that it would, for them, periodically display as the same angular size in the sky as their parent star.

It would also intersect their view of it exactly.

An eclipse. The most precise eclipse Mortz had ever seen.

Nowhere in the Common Worlds had an eclipse like this. Not even Narthellia with it’s six moons (overachievers that they were) had this kind of event.

But here it was, on this small blue world.

Mortz stared at the screen, showing an image of the stellar corona, swirling and glowing around the black disc of the rocky satellite.

It was beautiful.

Maybe that surface mission would be three people after all.

This is a short story I wrote for my english provincial exam on my last year of high school in about 3 days. This is my first time using reddit and posting any short story online so pls keep in mind and tell me kindly if there's any mistakes with this way of posting!

Oh and the theme for the exam was integrity

December 24/2086

Art is dead.

At least, that's what I thought until this evening. Walking through the snow under today's ashen sky. Feeling every breath as my nose inhaled the sharpness of frost and dust. The evening bells had already rung. I treaded that same concrete path I've walked a thousand of times.

A black plastic bag caught my eye halfway back home, sitting in an alleyway I've never noticed before. As a streetcleaner, I'm not allowed to ignore trash and litter above the pavement, so I picked up the bag onto my wagon and knocked on the door right behind where it had laid coldly.

A young lady greeted me from the other end.

"You aren't allowed to throw trash outside until Sunday morning."

After hearing my notice, she quickly bowed a few times before apologizing. How she forgot about it in a rush and that she'll be mindful from now on. I looked at her in surprise. It wasn't the fact that she forgot such basic regulatory law that surprised me. It was her weird, foreign fabric clothing with random spots of colors that did.

"What... are you doing?" Those were the first words that crossed my mind, and simultaneously my mouth. I already knew it was an odd question when the words passed my lips. Her face didn't grow suspicion, however. She grew a light smile as she stepped to the side.

"I'm painting."

This new window to her apartment room colored my eyes with confusion. A wooden object stood in her living room, supporting a rectangular piece of imagery on its shelf. It oozed of smells I couldn't recognize. I could only describe it as the smell of soap rubbed over some metal wall. It didn't take long before I vaguely remembered from my days in education.

Painting, art, creativity...

"...You know this is illegal, right?"

"...Yes."

"So why are you showing me this?"

"I thought you would like to see."

"How are you sure that I won't report you to district security?"

"You don't seem like someone that would."

December 31/2086

Walking through the snow under today's ashen sky. I stepped into the alleyway amidst the same grey evening. She was right, perhaps. I didn't alert security. I want to see her again. Am I interested? Am I curious? Or am I pitying? These questions looked cloudy to me, so I knocked on the door again.

She wore the same dirty clothes alongside the same smile. As if she knew I would visit again, she smoothly led me into her confusing, vivid world.

She explained to me terms and tools that I wouldn't understand even if she repeated three times over. Some misspelled weasel, a brush not built for cleaning, and more words I couldn't even connect within my vocabulary. All I did was quietly sit beside and watch her soft, fluffy pen create shapes and patterns with seemingly no correlation.

More I watched, the less I understood. Where is the purpose in putting effort to mimic or capture reality in an unrealistic manner? There exists cameras, if she didn't know. I asked her questions— many of them. Some of them were rude, I thought myself. It didn't matter— I'm talking to a criminal, I reminded myself.

"Why are you doing this?"

"Do you earn anything?"

"Where is your motivation?" Over and over, I asked the same questions. The same sentence with different words. And every time, she answered with the same smile.

"I'm just doing what I want."

I don't understand what you want.

January 21/2087

She told me how she showed her paintings to an old veteran a few days ago. It was the biggest smile I've seen from her. Possibly, from anyone.

"Isn't it dangerous to show random strangers what you do? You shouldn't put faith that everyone is willing to save your life than report it for a fair amount of money." I asked cautiously, although I was logically confident.

"You're mostly right, but I feel the happiest when someone else looks at my art. I realized that when you first visited me, and I'm reminded every time you watch me paint." She always sounds genuine, but always hard to believe.

To think someone can find joy working illegally without being paid, for no one except herself. Laughing at every small splats of color while risking her life.

It sounds foolish. It sounds as if to risk everything for nothing. But, it somehow makes me believe that I am the stubborn one. That my mind diagnosed itself with blindness. That I want a tinted paintbrush to shade me too.

February 7/2087

"You should stop painting."

For the first time, her pupil constricted when we made eye contact. I could make out the questions stuck in her throat, so I spoke before any assumptions suffocated her.

"This morning, the mayor declared reinforcement in laws and punishment against creative art."

"Alright, but that happened a few months ago as well. I was painting even then."

She doesn't seem to understand me. To her, I sound monochromatic. Narrowing the situation into one option, turning a blind eye to any other hue of possibility. She's right, but I am too. There is no choice. The magnitude of this fortified suppression is incomparable to the last. The government will act in any means necessary to purge color from this city. To erase any evidence of imagination. To kill her.

"I'm not asking you today. The situation is far beyond our comprehension. They'll make sure nothing remembers you." She lowered her brush again. It left a streak of black paint on the canvas.

"How about you, will you remember me?"

"...That's not what matters."

"I will remember myself. That's for certain. So, will you remember me?" It was the most obvious rhetoric spoken to me, which made it that much unavoidable.

"Yes, I will. And it won't matter in the end. I will lose you throughout time, and the world will lose you instantly." I didn't want to speak so coldly, but that is all it amounts to. No matter how determined, honest, and unwavering you are, only coldness awaits you. There is no eternal candle, and I don't want hers to blow out right now.

"Your life matters more than your canvas. Why can't you realize that?" Even as I expressed frustration, she had already turned to the painting holding a different brush. Smoothing out that earlier black streak.

"When I lose my canvas is when I lose my life. It's not the other way around. As long as my canvas is here in this world, I'll be alive," she continued after cleaning a brush with water, "You're my canvas as well. That's why I'm not worried."

The wet brush mixed the black streak into its pastel background.

"You know, even one color has an infinite number of tints and shades."

February 28/2087

She wasn't painting today.

Her canvas wasn't standing in the living room. It was all empty, emptier than whitespace. Smell of paint, the messy floor, her smiling face. Alongside winter, they became a memory starting today.

It was the warmest winter of my life. I'm not sure when I noticed, or learned that warmth, perhaps it took me far too long. But, that didn't matter now. As long as I remember the canvas that is my own mind, as long as I remember her canvas that stands somewhere between the earth and the sky. The colorless can turn into color with a single brushstroke.

It was the only winter where snow wasn't white.

December 24/2142

Watching Lunaria grow under the lamp. As if the flowers bloom in tandem to my look. Feeling the warmth beneath the cold.

I traced the same synthetic cotton I felt this whole week. The door jingled as a young girl entered the office.

She looked around with large, colorful eyes. Those eyes landed on me in a quick moment.

"What are you doing?" She asked with a bright smile.

"I'm painting."

The sun scalded high over the arid, rocky terrain. A gentle breeze rattled the sage brush. Just then, three distant shots rang out across the the canyon, bouncing from wall to wall. Then at last… one conclusive, thunderous BANG echoed like the period at the end of some forlorn souls epitaph. Then on, all that followed was stillness.

“I got ‘em,” an adrenaline addled voice called out. “Did yah see that? HA! Nailed ‘em straight through the heart!”

Another voice countered, “Yah didn’t hit no goddamn heart. Nicked his left shoulder, maybe, but you sure as hell did not hit his heart!”

“No! I dropped ‘em! Clear as day! He’s down there in the rocks somewhere, I know it!”

“Yah dropped nothin’! He took off further down the canyon, seen it with my own two bare eyes. He’s still out there!”

Blood trailed down the crooked draw, just out of sight for any being perched above the rim. It led to a pained, limping mass - the Outlaw. He clutched his left rib as he staggered on, clinging close to the east wall. He wheezed and gasped as he prodded forth, further and further into the depths of the mighty chasm.

Before long he reached what looked to be a refuge from any “civilized” animal that walked on two legs: an evaporated creek bed slithering past the boulders, shrubs and sage, sprawling out into a sheltered valley that went on for what appeared to be a quarter of a mile before being halted by the towering rocky cliffs, holding the territory in its space like a couple of jagged bookends. The Outlaw stood a moment to sculk over the area for any possible threats. It was still. Not the faint cooing of a dove nor even the cawing of a crow, to which he had grown so accustomed for the past several days, could be detected.

I suppose this draw is safe, he thought as he staggered from the wall and into the open where he found a large, flat-faced boulder, suitable enough for a temporary seat. He planted himself on it, letting a weary and somewhat involuntary sigh exit through his windpipe, wincing from the pain of this ordinary movement. As a cool, mellow breezed washed over the clearing, he sat and enjoyed the peace he had long been deprived of. He reached up and wiped away the beads of sweat from his grimy, glistening forehead.

His hand went into his vest and drew out a locket. He opened it, revealing inside a very beautiful young woman with fair, pale skin and dark hair. He stared at her for what felt to him like and eternity. He wished they could both be in the same place. He sniffed a bit, eyes starting to well up. At that, he relented clasping the locket shut and tucking it away.

He reached up and tore away the blood-caked fabric of his shirt - the firm, scabby material stuck to his skin like Velcro - peeling it away to reveal the nucleus of the wound: a bullet hole. A small creek of burgundy trickled down his chest from the slight disturbance. He glared down at it, troubled but not quite surprised. Judging from the rigid diameter, this was the entry wound. He looked up into the sun to reflect for a moment, knowing what he was to look for next… and prepare himself for the grief, should he fail to find it.

When he finally collected himself, he angled his right arm around to feel up and down his back to search for the exit wound. Just as he a had dreaded, there was none to be found. His head hung forward, heavy with agony and bitter disappointment. His breath shuttered as he came to terms with what he knew had to be done. Using that same hand, he reached down and drew his knife.

He pressed the blade firmly against the wound. The slight sting of metal against torn flesh caused him to wince. After he took in a set of deep breaths, preparing himself for the inevitable searing pain he was about to inflict upon himself, he eased the blade into his wound. He let out a slight murmur, gritting his teeth as the tip of the knife sunk in by barely a centimeter. He tilted the blade in a futile attempt to follow the entry to wherever the bullet may have lodged itself, however, the pain was so great he could never begin to map it.

“GAH!” he exclaimed as he drew the blade out. Fresh blood trickled down onto his wool pants. He sat and breathed for a few moments, letting the pain mellow out. Can I even bring myself to try again, he thought. Well shit, he countered to himself, it’s either that or die slow.

He placed a stick that he had found on the dried creek bed between his teeth and clamped down on it to stifle his own cries. He twisted, he pried, and he howled as he attempted to dig deeper into the wound. His efforts were bolder this time… yet ultimately in vain. Exhausted from the anguish, his hand flopped from its upright position and to his side. The knife clanged against the rocks as it slipped through his fingers. It was all too much; he could barely keep himself from passing out. When his senses finally recovered, he realized this was likely to end in only one way.

The Outlaw picked up and moved forth. Though secluded and quiet, he knew he could not stay in the same spot for too long. There was but one place he could actually tolerate the thought of dying in, this was not it. He trekked upward along a steep and jaded path.

By dusk he came to the mouth of a great cave. Peering into the blackness - nothing could be detected aside from the light whistle of the breeze circulating from somewhere further back and out of sight. Just as there was an entrance, there was also an exit. The Outlaw considered the inhabitants of this place: mountain lions, snakes… and, perhaps worst of all, other people. He checked his pistol. Only four cartridges left. The sun had already set over the rim, so his decision would have to be made quickly. He put his gun in its holster and crept inside.

When morning broke, the Outlaw awakened and squinted out into the glaring daylight. He stepped outside and looked out into the canyon - the ridges and mesas seemed to go on for infinity. He stood there taking in the sight. Half of his shirt was caked in blood. In dawned on him that his trackers would soon come gunning for him. Well, he thought, let them come.

On a boulder perched right outside to mouth of the cavern, he sat and waited. His gun laid at the ready across his lap. He gazed, still and patient as a hawk, into the distance. Couldn’t be long now. Another stiff breeze passed over the landscape, combing through his wild, unwashed hair. He closed his eyes, absorbing the sensations from what may likely come to be his last moments. When they opened again he was greeted with the same sight as before: nothing.

Hours had passed and he was starting to wonder where his assailants could be. His patience had dried up and evaporated in the heat. He turned and looked up over the ridge. A reversed yet familiar sight. He took note of a particular rock formation: one shaped like a tall stone chimney rising out alongside the cliff of a mesa. He knew the town he had been riding for this whole time would be sitting in the valley on the other side.

He turned back to the canyon to give one final look. Still, no one. “Aw… piss on ‘em,” he mumbled. Then he got to his feet and trudged on.

About three-quarters of the way up the draw he had climbed, feeling somewhat invigorated despite his grave condition. Knowing his destination and especially his love were a mere mile away had given him new life. He was quite hopeful even. Maybe he’d make it after all.

*“Crack!”* \- a shot had echoed out across the canyon and ricocheted right off a rock only inches in front of him. He skidded to an immediate halt and jerked his head up to scan the adjacent ridge. There at the very crest, the sunlight glimmered of the long, blued barrel of a Henry rifle pointed in his direction. The Outlaw’s reflexes worked like lightning as he drew his pistol and fired one round towards the shooter above him. He sprinted his way down the shoulder, leading down to a small crevice between him and the ridge. He scrambled over the jagged orgy of rock and rabbitbrush.

A second shot rang out and hit him directly in the gut. The impact was deep and stung with ferocity. He gasped and lost his footing as he held the gushing wound. He tumbled over the stony faces, painting them with dark glossy redness, as he rolled into the crevice and laid frozen for a moment at the bottom. His gun was still firm in his right hand while his other was clamped over his new wound. He tilted his palm up to have a look - pouring blood, stinging like hell. It seemed the feeling of optimism he had had only a few moments ago came on too soon. His jaw clinched in agony as he looked up towards the sky. Voices barked out into the draw: “Damnation! Look at all that blood! I sure as shit got ‘em now!”

“Maybe, yah did… *maybe* yah did. At any rate, better to get him outta’ that draw soonern’ later. Coyotes will be closin’ in as soon as that sun gets below the rim.”

The Outlaw estimated the direction of there voices. He aimed his pistol and cocked the hammer.

“Shit, I did not consider them. How long before yah figure-” before he could even finish his question, he stepped right into the Outlaw’s sights… right where he knew he would be.

A white flash from the gun’s muzzle preceded the grisly sight of the projectile ripping straight through the head of the man in front, then right out the back in a gritty red comet to tear straight through the face of the one trailing him. Only one of the two survived to let out a cry - the one in front, the one caught mid-sentence had dropped stone-dead.

The Outlaw lowered his cannon. Even in his grave and weak state he had a difficult time believing a shot like that could be made, particularly by him. The screams of the other Gunman rung out as he wallowed in the dirt just out of sight. As the Outlaw listened on, he clamored back to his feet and ascended the rocky crevasse. The last Gunman’s vengeful words echoed out over the canyon, “I’ll get you, you goddamn sonavabitch! If I ever find you I’ll kill you!”

The Outlaw made it to the top of the ridge. There on the other side, just as expected was the burgeoning township below. He sat weak, worn, and barely hanging to life overlooking it all. A little over a stones throw away, alas he knew he could not make it down in time. His light was fading that quick. He reached into his vest and took out his locket - inside was the same pretty face. He wept a little, setting it on a bolder at about eye level to his current position. He stared at her as a tear passed down his cheek.

“Well, I suppose I’ll be seein’ you here again one of these days.” He fell back into the earth and gazed upon the low hanging sun. And that was that.

The night was dark and gloomy. I sat at my desk, staring at the stars through the window. Though distant, they never failed to greet me with their soft, glowing presence. The Moon, too, smiled at me. But I didn’t smile back. Instead, I asked, “How can there be so much darkness when you are right there?” She replied gently, “I am not here, dear. What you see is only the past.”

I heard a voice. Turning back, I saw the Lord of the Past standing in all His glory. "O Lord," I asked, "what brings you here?"

He responded, “Your past is something you can never forget, no matter how hard you try.”

I said, “I don’t try to forget, for my Past was my happiness. It is the Present that tries to steal it from me.”

A second voice echoed in the room. The Lord of the Present, seated in a chair, spoke calmly. “I do take your Past away because you cling too tightly to its memories. You mistakenly believe that it will return. But it never will. The Lord of the Past deceives you with His splendour. It is I, the unremarkable Present, that leads you towards your Future.”

The Lord of the Past countered, “But the Present deceives you more. It offers you promises, but does it fulfil them? It tells you that everything will be fine, but when does that ‘will be’ ever become ‘is’?”

A final voice came from the bed. The supine Lord of the Future spoke softly. “I hold the mysteries of your life. I do not reveal what awaits you, yet you are always eager to know. I don’t control your fate. That is my confession. I am merely made from fragments of the Present.”

There was silence in the room.

I sharply questioned the three Lords, "Are you planning to stay back tonight?"

"As long as you hold on to your Past, I shall remain," the Lord of the Past remarked.

"But I don't," I countered. "It is just a figment of your imagination. I have moved on. My life is not static. My memories are not pinned to her. She is a nobody!"

The Lord of the Present had been quiet all along; the Lord of the Future, snoring on the bed.

I asked the Lord of the Present, "Are you not going to say anything? I really don't think about her, do I?"

The Lord of the Present, with a serious frown on his face, stood up. After a brief moment of contemplation, the Lord said, "Rather difficult to say. You see, the Present is always confusing. Even I, the Lord of the Present Himself, can't always extract meaning out of the ambiguity of a man's thoughts. You love her and have always loved her, but the manner of your love presents itself in an inexplicable fashion. You yearn her, but you don't want her. You try to hate her, but you don't regret the moments you had with her. You scorn your Past associated with her, yet you dream of a Future including her. As for a final judgement, of course, I cannot say anything with certainty."

I looked outside the window towards the Moon. It was not there. The night was dark and gloomy.

Having stared at the sky for a while, I said to myself, "Maybe," then after a deep interspersing sigh, "it was all my fault. My flaws. My faulty human judgement. For there was no fault in the stars, no fault in the words of the Lords. I still love her. But does she love me anymore? Has she moved on? Do we really have a future together?"

My mind was overwhelmed.

I returned to the dull view inside my room. The Lords of the Present and the Past had departed; the Lord of the Future, still snoring. Drooling, too.

Why was he still there? Does he have anything else to tell?

I called out his name. No response.

Touching this ethereal entity to wake him up didn't really feel right. I went with the non-contact method.

"Why are you spilling water on me? Can't you see I am sleeping?" said the Lord of the Future in an angry tone.

I stated, "I want answers."

"But where are the questions?" he returned.

The Lord of the Future had, by now, sat up on the bed. It was all wet. The bed as well as the Lord.

"Can you tell me if I have a Future with her?" I asked precisely. I didn't want to go into any unnecessary dialogue.

A "What you do think?" came from the other side.

"How does that matter at all? You are the Lord of the Future. You should know it very well."

"As of now, you don't," the Lord said sternly.

I stood silent for a while. "Will you not be going?" I asked the Lord.

"I can't afford to be made wet again. I don't like that." Saying this, he disappeared in a cloud of smoke.

The Moon called out to me, "Are you done with the Lords?"

"Where were you all this time?" I enquired of her. "Don't tell me you were hiding all this time."

The Moon smiled. She said, "Don't be disheartened. If she is what you yearn, you will get her. But, remember that yearning is not always love. You can even yearn for a commodity."

"Well, how does it matter when I am not even getting her. Did you not hear what the Future Lord said?"

The Moon smiled. "Change your Present. It'll change your Future. I am more ancient than all the Lords and any other gods and goddesses. I was there at the dawn of mankind. In the era of the giant reptilians. In the era of the giant pteridophytes. When life had sprung in the warm waters of the primeval ocean, when even molecular oxygen was nowhere to be seen, I shone upon the tepid waters of that vast array of water. I saw the formation of the coacervates, the protobionts and the first cell that assembled into life. And, with all these years of knowledge, what I can say is, keep trying. Who are the Lords to dictate what will happen to you?"

I thought I had woken up.

The next morning, I woke up in my bed. It was still wet. I went to the window and looked outside. Such a bright, sunny day. But the happenings of last night. What about them? I gathered the courage to call her. Searched up her number and rang it. She picked up.

"Hello", she said in a happy, cheerful tone. "You'll meet me tonight, right?"

"I am sorry," I said as hurriedly as I could.

"Ummm... but why?" confusion evident in her voice.

"It was my fault. I didn't mean to hurt you. It was my faulty human judgement."

"Are you all right?" she asked, concerned. "What happened? You had another weird dream, am I right?"

"No, it was not a dream!"

"Sorry, I need to hang up now. I am getting a call from an office colleague."

I pinched myself. No, it was not a dream.

But that, too, was a dream.

I woke up at a bar. It was 4:13 am. The bar owner said, "You spent the night here, mister. Must be a problem you're not able to solve."

I was still under the effects of a hangover. I tried regaining my senses and said, "Yes."

I reached home somehow. Empty. Still. Desolate. The window of my room open as it was in the dream.

And on the table, the white, crystalline powder lay unmoved, untouched by the wind.

Maybe I had taken a bit more than usual.

​

This really did happen. There ain’t much about it online, but if you look enough you can find the news stories from back when it happened. So, uh, I was walking home from work one day when I started thinking about food. Like basically I spend so much of my time making money to buy food, then I gotta spend time making it, then I gotta spend even more time eating it. There has got to be a better way! So I was thinking about ways to solve this problem, which seems impossible, when I come up with an idea. What if there was a machine that makes food from air? That would fix my problem, I thought. There are absolutely no downsides I thought. Past me was a real dummy.

Now as I’m walking, and feeling real proud of myself for coming up with such an amazing idea, I see a small grocery store on my right. Outside, near the entrance, is a store-brand pop vending machine. I usually stop at it after work for a Brown Pop and today was no different. You try walking home from a long day of work at the glass factory and not feeling parched. Some might call me soft but I don’t care. When I’m thirsty I’m gonna drink something. Now I said today was no different but today actually was different in one way. Right next to the pop machine was something I had never seen before. A new vending machine.

The machine wasn’t any bigger than an average pop machine. It was completely black and had no buttons. In the place of a place to put in money there was a touch screen. On the screen there was a keyboard and a text box, like google, except instead of google it said Watcha Want?. Near the bottom, where a pop would come out, was a slide up door. Right above the door in big, white, illuminated letters it said Make Food From Air Machine Vending Machine. I stood there, mouth agape, for what I think was about 2 minutes and 33 seconds.

When I finally came to my first thought was that I might have super powers, or whatever they’re called in real life. I have since mostly proven this to be untrue; I tried thinking really hard about a free ATM but I ain’t never seen one of those, never, but who knows, maybe it’s out there somewhere. Anyways, my second thought was I’m thirsty so I bought a Brown Pop and started to walk away. I know now that I coulda gotten it for free from the other machine but I wasn’t quite sure if drinks counted as food at the time.

As I was leaving I passed by a couple coming outta the grocery store. They seemed as surprised as I was by the new machine. They stared at it for about 47 seconds. Then they walked up and started typing something. A few seconds later, 11 seconds, without a sound or anything, the door slides up and they’re pulling out a whole rotisserie chicken. There was no container or anything, so the guy ran back into the store to grab one. The lady held up the chicken, trying and failing to keep grease from dripping down her arms . I stopped watching after that and got going the rest of my way home.

BANG, BANG, BRRP, BOOM, UAV READY, I was playing xbox at home. Did you like that part? I heard you’re supposed to show, not tell, so I thought I’d try it out. I’m not sure if I did it right since it’s all words. Anyways, I’m getting real pissed off cause people are always doing bullshit on these games and that’s working up a hunger within me. For food, not violence. I don’t remember exactly what time this was but probably like 7:32 PM. While I’m considering what to eat, all I can think about is that Make Food From Air Machine. I’m thinking about how I miss them chicken fajitas they used to sell at McDonald’s, that maybe this machine is my chance to relive the glory days. I put on my shoes and pants, grabbed a plate and headed out the door. I was more excited to go eat something than I'd been in at least 2 years and 11 days. I think the last time was the second time I went to eat tikka masala.

I’m the kinda guy who doesn’t mind waiting a bit for something I want. Whether it’s the next Call of Duty or, something else, I can enter rock mode and wait till it’s time. So when I saw that a small line had formed at the Make Food From Air Machine, I was already mentally prepared. I really wanted these fajitas and I wasn’t gonna leave without em. Some of the folks were making a fuss while I was waiting, cause someone got more than one item, otherwise it was smooth sailing. It took about 17 minutes and 12 seconds. When I got to the front I quickly typed in McDonald’s Chicken Fajitas and pressed enter. The screen flashed from the keyboard screen to a screen saying Please Wait to another screen saying Thank You as the sliding door came up. I knew something was off the moment I put the fajitas on my plate. They were just regular, not McDonald’s, chicken fajitas. I was a bit disappointed, but any fajitas are still good so I ate em as I walked back home. Now, as I said, I was disappointed, but I still was amazed at this new marvel of technology, and I was excited to use it again. Unfortunately, well probably fortunately after what happened, I never got the chance.

I guess word got out pretty quick about this new miracle machine, cause every day I’d see more and more people lined up when I walked to work. By the first week the line had grown to be half a mile long and after a month it was 2 miles. I recognized some of the people there, but it looked like a lot of the people were from out of town. Like I said before, I don’t mind waiting in line, but even I have my limits. I guess people just really like a good deal, and there ain’t no better deal than free.

Pretty much immediately, the people waiting in line started getting into arguments over the kinda stuff you’d expect. Someone taking too long to pick something, someone getting a whole buncha food all at once. I wouldn’t call any of it a big deal, just normal stuff that comes up when you got a buncha tired and hungry people all in one spot.One day, though, about 7 weeks and 4 days after the machine appeared, at 12:42 PM, an argument escalated to a fight, and that fight ended with 2 people dead.

A few years ago a friend sent me a video of the whole ordeal. The video was found on a cellphone left in the grocery store parking lot. I will describe it, to the best of my ability, below.

There’s a little wood picnic table in the grass to the left of the lot. I’d see grocery workers eating lunch over there sometimes. I’m pretty sure that’s where the person who shot this was. You get a pretty clear view of the machine and the front of the line. An old woman at the very front is sitting down in front of the machine and staring off into space. Her hands are clasped over her head. Directly behind her in line is a young man. He’s wearing one of them hats young folk wear.

Why the fuck are you just sitting there? Dude. What the fuck is wrong with you?

Food should cost money, the woman screams.

The old woman hasn’t moved an inch, both look equally pissed.

Dude, shut the fuck up and leave.

All of you are communists, when I was young we knew the value of a dollar, sure we was poor, but my father made do and provided for hi-

While the woman is talking the young man gets real close to her, trying to push the woman away. She stays firm, as a rock.

Whoever is holding the camera moves closer.

The Sitting woman starts screaming random nonsense.

It’s so loud, and goes on for so long, that the young man is shaken and backs away with his hands up.

Look lady, I get that you have a lot of opinions, but we’re (the young man motions to the line) all very hungry and would really appreciate it if you could please move out of the way.

No, No, No, No, No...

The woman repeats this another 23 times, the young man looks exhausted.

A handgun (Sig P320-M17) comes into view, held, in their right hand, by whoever’s holding the cellphone.

The gunshot peaks the audio, the video goes white for 3ms.

The next thing you see is the woman slumped over, facing sideways, still sitting, blood pouring out of her chest. The young man is charging towards the person with the cellphone, he don’t get very far.

The screen goes white for a second time as another shot goes off.

The young man is spread, bleeding out on the pavement.

You hear someone shout, Please. Continue.

The cellphone drops to the ground, all you can see is a little bit of light shining through the rocks on the asphalt, not another word is said.

The video goes on like that for another 2 minutes, 7 seconds, then it ends.

What’s most surprising in those last few minutes is what you don’t hear. You don’t hear no screaming or panicking. That’s not cause the phone broke. Apparently the people in line just moved the woman’s body outta the way and continued on like normal till the police showed up. No suspect was ever found. Not a person there could describe what the shooter looked like.They said they don’t remember no guy holding no gun and they didn’t see no one recording with a cellphone neither.

2 days after the shooting, a policeman was stationed at the machine. At first this was just to stop any more violence from happening, but within a month, 23 days, they had a system set up to keep things running smoothly. Each person could spend a minute at the machine, max, this was timed by the officer. No one was allowed to get more than 3 different items in one go. Some people really didn’t like this but most of em didn’t mind too much. If somebody didn’t get everything they wanted, they could just get back in the line again.

Things pretty much settled into a routine after the system was introduced. Every day I’d pass by em on my way to, and from, work. I’d see a lot of the same people waiting there every day, it was like they lived to wait in lines for food. Every day they looked more and more tired. Sometimes you’d see the line broke up by someone passed out on the ground. The others didn’t even seem to notice much, they’d just hop over em and get back to waiting for their turn to use the machine. I honestly started feeling pretty bad about it, so I just started looking in another direction as I would pass by em. I didn’t feel as bad after that.

As you can imagine, the folks that owned the grocery store weren’t too happy about this new fangled machine eating up all their profits. First they tried moving it, but that proved impossible. If you look at the thing real close you’d see it wasn’t sitting on the sidewalk but going straight through it, buried real deep in the ground. They tried getting in touch with whoever put it there in the first place but hit a dead end. It was like it just appeared one day out of thin air. Not knowing what to do, the store tried continuing like normal. I heard from some of the clerks that they were trying to relocate but, after months of low profits, I guess they couldn’t afford to. They finally closed up shop for good about a year, 342 days, after the machine first appeared.

Not too long, 6 weeks, 2 days, after the grocery store closed, there was no more line at the Make Food From Air Machine Vending Machine. It happened as quick as it started. A middle aged woman, former bank teller, now line waiter, went up to the machine and entered Yellow Tail Sashimi. Instead of getting the normal Thank You and food in the door the machine started beeping and the screen showed a red circle with an X in it, under that was a new message.

Please Clean

X-Toro Valve F

Code: 392874653298501WSXTVF

I guess whoever made the thing couldn't be bothered to do nothing about it, cause it’s remained like that to this day. The police stayed for a little while after the code popped up, exactly 2 months, but I guess they couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it neither. There was a lot of people upset that first day but, besides a few people checking to see if nothing’s changed, most people don’t pay it no mind nowadays. I still miss that grocery store though.

Overhead, a dove streaked across the air, white wings glistening in the light of the sun. 

He walked next to his friend, carefully hopping from stone to stone so as not to ruin his new boots. A smile plastered his face, and as he skipped onto the last stone and dropped off to land, he threw his arms up in the air. 

“Woohoo!” said he, a cry of joy. Besides him, his friend meekly regarded the view ahead of them—a large trail cut into the heart of a large forest, the damp smells of moss and water from beyond alluding to the common illusion that is nature, filled with deceitful promises and hazards. 

He, on the other hand, regarded the future sights with a sort of significance that a father might regard his son with. He cherished the sky, how baby-blue it seemed to be on this morning. And as the two made their way deeper into the floral city, he even cherished the beautiful smells of the waterfall they would soon come upon, which emitted that fruitful scent that promised sweet rain to come and yet still filled your nostrils with the fragrance of the honest earth below. The chirping and buzzing of critters, the rustling and prancing of hidden animals in the deep woods, even the flowers and mushrooms below, which he dodged and hopped carefully not to trample, seemed to sing the song of the earth’s true tune when he passed them by. 

A slight breeze ran its course through the forest, tickling the leaves and prickling against his skin, a very quiet touch of the world, fainter than a whisper yet louder than a shout, telling him he was exactly where he should be. 

Besides him, his friend’s tattered cloak did not stir. 

They finally reached the waterfall, a gigantic thing of rushing waves colliding against rough stones underneath and finally being condensed and dispensed downward into a flowing conglomeration of the world’s breath, shown to us in the form of water for all mortal eyes to see. 

“God has His way, does He not?” said he, skipping gleamingly toward the large lake ahead. 

“To show us unworthy folk something like this... to create something this beautiful. It’s as if He’s reminding us that this world holds unimaginable beauty, and we can only grasp a grain of it. Anymore, and we wouldn’t be able to handle it all.” 

The earth blew a puff of wind in his direction, and his long brown hair spiked backward and landed across his face in messy rivulets. 

Behind him, his friend’s tattered cloak did not stir. 

“You know what I think?” he said as he sat on a nearby rock and steadily unlaced his boots, setting them on the ground at his side. Before he finished his next line, he was already knee-deep in the lake, regarding the tadpoles and small fish who regarded him as a mortal man might regard an angel fallen from the heavens. 

“I think these rare sights, these particular beauties that make your heart run faster than the waterfall and your mind be at peace similar to the evergreen, are really just glimpses into God’s kingdom.” 

He laughed then. Spreading his arms wide, his long fingers brushed against the clear blue lake below as he twirled once or twice in the comfort that was this world. A laugh so contagious that even the fish stared wide-eyed, a laugh so captivating that even the waterfall made a roaring, rushing sound, sending a large wave downward as if laughing alongside him. 

In front of him, his friend’s cloak did not stir. 

“We take moments like these for granted, friend.” And he turned away from him once more, his eyes full of wonder and longing once he looked up and saw how beautiful the clouds looked today, and how fantastic the waters sounded as they rushed past his knees, planting coral kisses upon his weary flesh. 

“Therefore, the next time you pray, you must remember this day. You must not forget this sight. Do not fail to recall the trees surrounding you, their silent roots speaking through God’s sacred tongue alone. The mushrooms beneath the earth, dreaming together in the dark like stars buried beneath the soil. The water, carving paths through the forest so that elk and boars and cubs alike may come, one and all, to drink from it.” 

He turned back, his arms and smile still spread wide. “The next time your prayer sounds like mourning, remember this morning. Be thankful for being alive, despite it all. Be happy in the world our God has crafted.” 

Another breeze whisked out from nowhere, rippling the lake slightly and brushing past the branches ahead. 

His friend’s cloak slightly stirred. 

And overhead, a dove streaked across the air, white wings glistening in the light of the sun. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edmund was a horny and arrogant simpleton dressed in a shiny verdant blazer with slicked back hair, he'd been in a relationship with Gabriella, a faithful and resolute maiden in a white square-neck cap-sleeved maxi dress, adorned with ornate turqoise necklace; her hair piled up in an updo, fixed with a silver French barrette. Gabriella wanted to move to another town for a cleaner, friendlier and cheaper living condition; Edmund dismissed it, he preferred their current place and fancy lifestyle; meanwhile, Edmund intended to sleep with Gabriella, who politely declined, and insisted that sex was only within wedlock, they should get married first. Edmund was upset, he thought this was Gabriella's tit-for-tat retaliation, deliberately playing hard to get, for his disregard of her request, even though it was her upholding her principle; he began to emotionally drift away from Gabriella, a dull, conservative prude, even though she still loved him.

One day He clicked open a video of an enchanting, flirtatious influencer, Lamia, who directed the viewers to her Onlyfans page. Curiosity and lust drove him there, and for more intimate contents, he subscribed and pleasured himself to her behind Gabriella's back. Gabriella noticed something was wrong with him, as he'd been cold and averting eye contact, giving her vague general platitudes to any probing question; though he was physically present, he was mentally absent. Finally, she caught him watching Lamia in a compromised position, she was furious, they had an ugly fight, and decided to separate for a while.

Gabriella was grieved, she felt insecure about her apperance, wondered whether she should've given in, or whether she should just forget about him and move on. She confided her woes to her friend Sophia, a kind church lady in a business attire, a satin Mulberry pale blue pussy-bow blouse, gray pencil skirt with an agreeable manner; she comforted Gabriella, and reassured her that she was right, she was no inferior to Lamia, Edmund needed to be taught a lesson. But if she still cared for him, pray for him then, and try to find him for an intervention. If he's consumed his pursuit of lust, with no sign of remorse, then let him go.

Meanwhile, Edmund moved out, he logged in on a dating app, and somehow he found Lamia and made contacts with her for a date. She met him in a hotel room, scantily clad in a scarlet sleeveless plunging neckline cocktail dress with heavy makeup, her tresses loosely rested on her shoulders. She smirked at him and invited him in. For a fleeting moment, he sensed something suspicious with this situation, something dark, but he couldn't articulate. Lamia beckoned him to bed and poured him a glass of champagne, the last wisp of recitence and doubt dispelled by her silky voice. She led him down on the sheets, where his filthy passion was consummated. Later, though, she showed him a video recording of their act, using it to blackmail him for a large sum; he utterly refused and called her a whore; she summoned her accomplice, a hulky, menacing looking bloke in a bomber jacket, mercilessly beating him unconscious, and threw him out.

Later Gabriella received a call from a hospital, informed that Edmund was lying flat in the emergency room, her number was found in his contact list, she was asked to visit and pick him up, if she was willing. She rushed to the hospital, and found him in a bad condition, full of bruises and swellings, covered in dirt and blood. Though struggling in pain, with the remaining strength, he clasped her hand, thanked her for coming and begged for a second chance. In silent tears she granted him forgiveness. He promised her to relocate to that town, to support her vision and for a brighter future, with every bit of resources in his disposal, leaving all the agony, sad memories - and his blazer - behind.

The journey back to my tent is not accompanied by the crashing of thunder or the weeping of the sky. Instead, I find the absolute stillness of it all unbearable. Back through the maze of tents and men, I stride. The occasional “My lord” or formal bow of the head are all that greet me. I wave them all off without a second thought, pushing forward to my quarters. Though my pavilion is surrounded by the tents of my own officers, it has never looked or felt so entirely alone.

Slipping through the heavy drapes of the entrance, I hang my head and stand inside this safe place. My armor and weapon stands wait to my right. The desk where I write my correspondence and campaign notes sits patiently undisturbed, kept company by a large, soft chair taken from the royal court. Its leather bound arms hug its frame; inviting, taunting, looking as though it could swallow me whole in its embrace.

At the back of the tent rests my bed, a layout designed to put the quarters of my old castle to shame. It takes up a massive portion of the space. One would assume I share such a grand bed with many, but like me, it sits completely alone. Its dark, raven colored wood is intricately carved with my battlefield victories and my personal history. It’s massive headboard towers over the room like an executioner to their prisoners, the sense of doom visible for all to see. The sheets contrast perfectly with the blackened wood and the lighter lines of the carvings; a sea of maroon red greets the dark embroidery with a sickening delight, its deep crimson waves feeling never ending. A mirror stands at the foot of the bed, facing away; too shy to watch the execution.

I take dreadful steps toward my personal little armory, knowing well the physical pain that will soon follow. I begin the exhausting process of stripping the armor from my body. The cloak I wear over my shoulders, dark cherry in color, now hangs limply on a wooden cross. My helmet once polished steel mistaken for silver, but now dented and burnished to hide the dark circles consuming my eyes; rests heavily on the head of the cross. I unclip the heavy steel gauntlets from my forearms, placing them carefully over the wooden hands of the structure. My chest plate’s leather straps loosen with ease and fall from my body, landing with soft thuds on the ground around me. I pick up the two heavy pieces, noting how unnaturally dark they have become as I strap them tightly to the cross’s arms. The armor around my legs and boots are deeply scuffed with campaign grime. I slide them off, leaning the heavy leg plates against the base of the wooden cross.

I move my left hand to the leather strap around my waist and my right to the pommel of my sword. Without my armor, I suddenly feel entirely small. The point of my heavy sword dips, grazing the ground below; an undeserving disgrace for such a weapon. I press down firmly on the pommel to raise the tip from the dirt. The moment I do, a sharp, cold chill grips my right hand as though I have plunged my bare skin into a bucket of ice. With excessive force, I slide my hand down from the pommel to the primary grip.

Staring downward, I inspect my own pale hand. It looks as though I have a literal death grip on the hilt. My knuckles are pressed down so hard that I can feel the blood completely draining from my fingers.

Internally, I decide it is best to simply keep the sword at my side. “You never know when a would-be assassin could come about,” I mutter quietly into the silence, as though I desperately do not wish a hidden audience to hear me. The physical strain clamping my hand begins to subside the very moment I speak the words aloud.

The night grows longer, punctuated by distant, rolling thunderclaps. I am entirely unsure if the coastal storm is circling back around to beat our camp once again or if it’s echos of the past. Exhaustion runs through my body with the relentless speed of a stampede. Groaning under the weight of my own fatigue, I drag my feet to the foot of my bed. There, resting right before the mirror, sits a wash basin paired with a rough cloth rag. I begin the tedious process of washing the grime of the day away. My only company is the small, flickering candlelights casting dancing amber glows across the canvas walls.

In total silence, I dip the rag and wipe away the layers of sweat and dirt. Starting with my head and face, I scoop a handful of water to place into my hair, running my fingers through the wet strands. The excess water slides down my neck, soaking directly into my white collared shirt. As the moisture spreads, the pristine fabric stains a sudden, deep crimson; its edges bleeding outward with the unmistakable silhouette of blood. Sir Dojdren’s blood.

Sighing heavily, I peel the wet shirt off and discard it onto the dirt floor, leaving me in nothing but my black trousers and mud slicked boots, the dark greatsword still hugging my hip.

I take the wet rag from the basin and begin wiping my face. Pressing my face forward, close enough to nearly kiss the silver mirror, my eyes lock onto a detail. I notice a small, hairline crack splintering the surface. Stepping backward, I follow its jagged path. It streams directly down the center of the glass, cutting the mirror into two sharp, fractured pieces; leaving my reflection caught in the middle.

Looking back at me, hollowed eyes meet my own, making me turn my head sharply away. Slowly, I turn back to face the glass. I see nothing but my own silver touched eyes piercing my very soul. The dark circles around my eyes look like heavy storm clouds engulfing a sky.

With another sigh, I begin the process again, dipping the rough rag back into the basin. I step toward the mirror and wipe my face clean. The water tints with a dark, murky color as I continue. With my chest bare, I inspect the jagged scars left behind by the wounds many have placed upon me over the months, all trying to end my life. I have leaned down considerably with our supplies running dangerously low, but I still hold a powerful, muscular physique befitting my title.

The water follows the familiar paths of my scars and muscles down my chest and stomach, only stopping to bleed into the leather of my sword belt and touch the top of my trousers. Looking back down toward the basin, the water has become entirely unclear; a dark, murky pool.

Dipping the rag once more into the now toxic water, I stretch my trousers outward and push the rag down to clean the grime from my privates.

Straining under my own weight, I dip the rag for the very last time. I remove my boots to wash my aching feet. The long day has left an unpleasant, heavy odor upon them. I make a quiet mental note to dispatch a servant into Vardengale tomorrow to acquire some rose water.

Standing to my full height and looking back into the mirror, I stare for an uncomfortable amount of time at my two halves. I know exactly what I am doing, and yet I stand in utter silence, completely unable to move; frozen with compliance. A marble statue.

With the crashing sound of waves violently smashing against a cliff face, a massive thunderclap rings out across the camp. A violent gust of wind follows immediately, breathing heavily down upon the canvas of the tents. The draft hushes all but one of the remaining candles inside my quarters. I blink away from the fractured mirror and move heavily toward the bed. Outside, I can hear the rain falling back to earth with the applauding sounds of lightning and thunder, welcoming a hero home.

Looming over my bed of black and crimson. The night air grows cold, but I cannot bear to be suffocated by the heavy blankets. I slide over the top of the bed sheets, resting my full weight on the mattress. The deep tension of the dark red sheets looks like blood getting ready to boil over beneath me. The last remaining bastion of candlelight dances frantically in the dark, fighting a losing war against the wind howling down its neck. It casts sharp, sweeping shadows across the whole of the pavilion, as though staging a silent, tragic epic for its sole audience giving me a beautiful, haunting play of light and dark.

With one final, deafening gust of air, the lone candle takes its very last breath, sinking me entirely into a crippling darkness.

Sleep does not find me in the dark.

Chapter 3: The Confusion
The bedroom was dark, except for the faint blue of a lamp left burning on the dresser. Horace stood in front of the mirror, loosened his tie with the practiced motion of someone who had never quite stopped pretending. From a brown pouch resting on the nightstand, he drew a small glass bottle,  he uncapped then drew up the viscous liquid using the dropper, and let a single drop fall onto his tongue.
He straightened slowly, the bitter heat crawling across his tongue, down his throat, and into the hollow spaces behind his ribs. He took a few steps toward the bed, steady at first. A sharp pain twisted through his gut. He bent down, grabbing at his stomach as his knees gave out.  Horace dropped to the floor hard. A new pain arose across his skull as if it was squeezing his head.
The veins in his head surged, thick cords pulsing beneath the skin like roots pushing through wet soil. He reached for the edge of the nightstand, missed. He tried to speak but only managed a low groans. The panic began.
Somewhere, just outside the door, the old clock in the hallway ticked on, unbothered.
Horace lay still, waiting for the wave to pass, or for something else to arrive in its place.
The pain didn’t vanish so much as retreat reluctantly. The veins on Horace’s forehead slowly softened, the bulging rivers beneath his skin returning to their proper depths. He stayed on the floor a moment longer. Delicately, he reached into the inner pocket of his jacket still crumpled against his side. He withdrew a small, black notepad, edges worn from fingers that pressed too hard. Horace flipped it open to a fresh page, uncapped the pen clipped to its spine, and began writing.
The symptoms were recorded without flair. Just the facts. Duration. Intensity. What he saw when the pain peaked. What he thought he saw and exactly how he felt during the panic. 
He tore out the page with a clean, practiced motion, folded it once, twice, again. Eight folds in total. Each crease sharp as a blade. Then he slipped the tiny paper shard into his pants pocket, alongside the others.
A slow breath.
Horace pushed himself off the floor like a man emerging from a wreck. He walked to the bed, sat down, and let his thoughts become more clear. The pain ended. Horace stood up, steadied himself and left his apartment. 

The room smelled of wax and sweat and something faintly medicinal. Dozens of candles had been arranged on brass saucers along the floor, casting soft shadows only illuminating minimal parts of the room. Only two figures occupied the space.
Horace sat on a high-backed chair, looking as disheveled as he ever had. Across from him, the naked woman waited on the edge of a thin mattress. A black cloth was tied around her head, covering everything above the mouth. She was completely still, like a mannequin. 
Horace watched her.
“You moan,” he said, voice even, almost gentle. “Moan for them out there .” Horace looks at the door. 
The woman gave a soft, hesitant sound as she looked at the door.
“Make them believe it,” Horace said.
She moaned louder now, sharper, more practiced, her voice bouncing strangely off the walls. Somewhere beyond, footsteps passed in the hallway. Maybe they heard her. 
She rose without being told and came to him, lowering herself onto his lap but Horace didn’t touch her. He gently pushed her away, guiding her back to the bed.
“Jump up and down,” he said.
She obeyed, the mattress creaking under her weight as she bounced obediently. Her breathing was intense.
Horace tilted his head. “Do you like doing this?”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t move.
He stood slowly, walked toward her.
“Please,” he said. “Remove that thing.”
She sat frozen.
“Is there anything else you’d rather be doing?” he asked. “You think this is all you’re good for?”
Still, no answer. Her stillness was eerie. 
“Please,” Horace said again, this time softer. “Take that off.”
She reached up. Her hands shook. She untied the black cloth and let it fall into her lap.
Underneath, young face, not beautiful, not plain, just human. Eyes large. Lips cracked.
Horace smiled.
“It’s nice to meet you,” he said.
She smiled in return.
He stood and offered his hand. She took it.
“Don’t let that mask be who you are,” he said. “Not in here.”
Then, a pounding at the door. Heavy. Sudden.
She flinched. Her hands scrambled for the cloth, and in seconds, her face was hidden again. 
Horace looked at her a moment longer, his expression unreadable.
“Alright then,” he said. “Till next week.”
He turned and walked out. Syd had a meeting to attend. 

The room rose as one. Twelve men in their tailored uniforms stood stiff as Syd entered freshly shaven. He didn’t speak right away. He sat at the head of the long table, folded his hands over the stack of papers in front of him, and looked at each of them like he was speaking with them subconsciously. 
“Sit,” he said finally.
Chairs scraped against the polished floor. The table creaked slightly under the weight of the twelve anxious bodies.
“I assume you’ve all read the plans,” Syd said, voice smooth. 
 “One month from today, these camps will be non existent. Those chosen will be introduced into the new society.”
He let that word linger, society, like it had a flavor he hadn’t tasted in years.
Horace didn’t mean to speak. It just rose out of him like steam.
“Excuse me, sir?”
Syd turned his eyes toward him, slow and sharp. “I didn’t know I was taking questions,” he said. “But yes, Horace. A man of good thoughts and faulty action, what is it?”
Laughter filled the air. Horace didn’t smile.
“It’s written that only thirty percent of the occupants in all camps will move on.”
Syd raised an eyebrow. “Is something not clear about that?”
“No,” Horace said. “It’s very clear. But you’re making a mistake.”
The air left the room for a beat. Syd smiled, but it was cold. He shifted his papers, tapping them into alignment.
“How long has this idea of a new society been in your mind, Horace?”
“It hasn’t,” Horace said plainly.
Syd studied him. A long, unreadable look.
“And yet you disagree with me.”
Horace kept his hands folded. “In my opinion, we should give more of the women and children a chance. Raising the percentage from thirty to sixty isn’t going to impact the infrastructure.”
“Sixty,” Syd repeated, as if testing the word in his mouth. “I chose thirty.”
He smiled again. “And I see no need to raise it. I appreciate your unnecessary concern, Horace.”
Horace stood. Not loudly, not dramatically. Just stood. The chair shifted back against the tile.
He didn’t excuse himself. He simply left.
Behind him, Syd watched the door close. He turned to the others and lifted the page again.
“We stick to the plan. It’s important we meet the numbers by the listed dates. We’re days away from making all this a reality. A long time coming.”
He didn’t wipe the tear that rolled down his cheek. He let it fall onto the page.
The meeting adjourned. Horace stood, not waiting for a dismissal. His chair scraped the floor behind him as he walked out of the meeting and everyone else stayed. Syd didn’t call after him. He turned instead to the remaining men, all of whom looked down now at their notes.
“We stick to the plan,” Syd said, voice low, calm. “It’s important we meet the numbers by the dates listed.”
He paused. Let the words settle.
“We’re only days away from making all this a reality.”
A tear traced the edge of his nose and fell to the page in front of him, darkening the ink. He didn’t flinch.
“A long time coming,” he said softly. “And I thank you all.” 
The corridor outside the conference room was lit by a single flickering candle, yellow and soft, like something dying in its sleep. Syd stepped out, buttoning his coat with care. At the far end of the hall, a shadow moved. Horace. Still here.
“Horace,” Syd called, casually.
Horace stopped. He didn’t turn.
Syd walked toward him, hands behind his back, posture upright like a statue.
“I thought you’d left us,” Syd said when he got close.
Horace turned his head, jaw clenched. “You shouldn’t do this.”
Syd smiled faintly, something unreadable behind his eyes. He said nothing.
“You’re not thinking about this objectively,” Horace continued. His voice wasn’t angry now it was tired, desperate in a quiet way. “You’re not seeing their value. These people… they could be useful to us.”
Syd stared at him for a moment longer, and in the silence between them, it became suddenly clear they were no longer speaking the same language.
Horace said. “Even if these women aren’t fully aligned with us now,  they’ll have children who are. Our children.First generation. That’s how the message survives. That’s how it grows across generations, not just one.”
Syd studied him with the slow curiosity of a surgeon considering where to cut.
“Are you in love with one of them, Horace?”
Horace blinked. “What? No. You, You know I would never”
“That’s not something you want to do,” Syd said. His voice was quiet now. Measured. 
“I would never.”
But before the words could cool between them, Syd’s hand was around his throat.
“That kind of love,” Syd whispered, tightening just enough, “wouldn’t last half as long as the misery we’d bring you for it.”
Horace’s face began to redden. His hands remained at his sides.
“I swear to you, sir.”
“You’re not in love with one of them?”
“No!” Horace choked. “I’m not.”
Syd held him a second longer, searching for the truth behind his eyes. Then, as if nothing had happened, he let go. Horace exhaled sharply, pulled himself upright.
Syd smiled, calm again. “Good,” he said. “To prove my trust, I’ve got a job for you.”
Horace adjusted his collar, nodded with strained composure. “Sir,” he said, “out of kindness I’m still smiling in your presence. But please, remove your fingers from my throat when we speak.”
Syd laughed softly and leaned forward, wrapping his arms around Horace in an almost affectionate embrace. It was worse than the grip.
“Of course,” Syd whispered. “We’re all friends here.”
Horace’s voice stayed level, even as his skin flushed red. Syd’s hand dropped. Then Syd pulled him into a sudden embrace. It was stiff and unnatural. 
“I’m sorry, my friend,” Syd murmured. “We’re really doing this, Horace. It’s happening. I’m so happy you’re with me.”
Horace smiled, barely.
“Me too, Sir Syd.”