[Found somewhere on Google images, B/W Photography, could not find the photographer for this excellent picture. If someone finds it let me know so, I can give the credit where it is due. Distorted by yours truly.]

Moving is bitch. What do I say about this prompt? Well, I am not giving it away. This is the return to the revisit death series with 3 more as the finale.

JLG Noga. First. Fuck you. Second. Thank you. This was incredibly challenging. It is exactly what I needed. This prompt forced me into narrative control, constant analysis, and brainstorming inside my brain. I had to sit the fuck down in my movie, stream of consciousness. Line by line writing. I did my best to make sure I didn’t contradict any of the concepts given, and had to write a man.

There was not a day that went by that I wasn’t thinking about THIS story. This is not a traditional neo noir which is typically plot driven, one could say this is process driven. At best it might be neo noir adjacent. Everything about this piece was a whole ass learning experience.

When I run my SOC workshops again this year, I will be sure to have JLG Noga giving away fuck you prompts to challenge us all. JLG Noga is a highly underrated excellent writer in the craft. When I read JLG Noga I feel like I have been slapped in the face with prose. Visual and cinematic. Appetizing. Yes, I know I need to catch the fuck up on his writing. It’s damn good. You get a meal in your mouth after reading it and he’s a writer I would call rising in fiction, because I know he’s going places.

Do read anything he writes. It will probably be in a comic or a film someday.

I would watch this on film. 10/10.

DARKLING

there is a man playing the violin, and the strings are the nerves in his own arm

Special thanks to Dylan Bosworth , Keith Long , Edward.Marlo.Ruiz , Mike Duffy , and MA Knight for beta-reading this story…

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6 months ago · 107 likes · 47 comments · JLG Noga

Overhead lights complete the stillness. Our world carves itself into shapes. CEOs. Tech giants. Six. Seven thousand suits. Soles drag the ground. It’s made unclean. Success. Mop dug deep in its bucket. Failure. Footprints are dust collected. Leftovers of the future. Its hunger lives on the trough of my tongue. Shared existence by shadows on the wall. My name is Ken Suba tonight. Ken cleanses the ground, where water doesn’t judge. Our ritual from corner to corner. The mop sheds the filth. Skin peeled back. Under the table. Cold cash. Survival. Water moves because it must, it matters not what it can’t. CEOs paint their faces bleach. White. Bone China. They turn, and see the windows before they recognize their own shadow.

I am the overhead light. A buzz in the ear. It burrows. A worm underneath the epidermis. It absorbs. A stranger living inside my skin. On the dot. Nine to three. Night shift. The first is not the last. Marble belongs to any place I touch. When the floor is dry, Ken will cease to exist.

The city carries its own poison, names slip through the cracks. Bottom feeders. Oceanic unseen. They own the janitor polycotton coveralls. Ken’s soul becomes the walls and the grain. The wig sweats into the back of my head, pomade bergamot and rosemary. Smells fight each other, a funeral bouquet of chemical fragrance. Its slime sticks the hair past the cap. It itches against the skin. Patched red abrasions, along the neck. Eczema for inhumanity. Its prison, a helmet pressed down. Degen beneath the top. My synthetic ruin. The job isn’t over. Every layer has a story. Its armor. A rage that’s become its own silent servant. Days pass. Rituals die in a millennium. Death and rebirth of each stroke, dissolves into synchronicity of my mop.

In the elevator of mirrors, I see my cosplay. Pockets of scars from cutting facial hair close. Ken’s glassy marbles show color, where our murk attempts to intertwine. Bodies walk through fire. Upside down, our parallels lift to the clouds. Growing bright, obsidian. My calloused hands, dry skin with craters to make room for the new. Is it me? Ken blinks. His breaths wheeze in and out until the air shuffles out the tightness in my chest.

Water. Its brine lives in my mouth. Ken pulls up his notepad.

We’re the unnamed water, we stay in places others despise.

The locker slams. A metal gunshot in the building’s ribs. Hollowed out. Ken sheds the polycotton skin of the janitor. Its damp weight of the mop bucket lingered on his rotator cuff. He rips off the wig with a sharp letter opener. Cigarette hung from his lips, ashes taste like butter on Sunday mornings. The grime pulls free from his hair. Head bent over the work sink. He lets his fractured mind dissolve. It doesn’t keep shape.

A NO SMOKING sign glares in red ink back at his face. Smoke curls up through his nose, burns his hair. Leaves it there. Acidic and earthy stale tobacco flavor. Stays unfiltered. Its pieces stick between the gaps of his teeth. Fine tooth comb. Slicks his hair back. Ken throws the wig in the trash. He has a replacement for every shift. Trash is covered with fast food bags, watered down French fries. It sticks to the bottom. Cheap vegetable oil.

Ken is convinced it has cancer in it. Keeps big pharma in business. CEOs considered humans expendable, their audacity was their privilege to exist. Water pools at his feet. It doesn’t stay.

Leather jacket on. The rest of the night until late morning, he’ll be Tommy Pham. The city tastes of old copper and the ozone dying in an air conditioner. He doesn’t look at the faces of who passes him by on either end. Vessels that belong to the city pour themselves into the dark. He’ll find his plug on the street. Same place. It’s clockwork. First initials only.

Without movement, Mr. C’s back hung forward. Spine curved scoliosis to replicate the city’s decay. Boots rooted in concrete. Our eyes meet once, before it returns to the floor. Mr. C has the medicine. Syringes covered in the rainbow beads. He calls it a self soothing prophecy, a sensory experience for the ages. Shame exists between us for the wrong reasons. Wrong owner. I am the empty, he is the fox.

“One coin for a traveler.” Mr. C speaks through his light blue eyes. Inside my coat jacket, I give him a coin. A different shape. Its words are lost to the art of men. Our fingers touch for brief comfort, a syringe slips into my pocket.

“Mr. T. Same place. Same time. Our ritual.”

“This is strictly business, Mr. C.”

“Business requires a transaction. A loss. A gain.”

Tommy sees himself in Mr. C if his body decided to fail him. Underneath cardboard boxes. A home. Its landing. He smells of wood pulp and old rain. His body is a doorway into the city. Where one day, he’ll return to the uncarved block.

Mr. C begins to nod off, and Tommy slips away from him. His words leave a bite on the tongue. For a moment in time, their words connect. No longer fleeting by the rhythm of the world. Mr. C’s lungs rattle with his breathing. His machine matches with sirens raging in the after hours. The sidewalk beneath his body begins to swallow Mr. C’s missing feet. Distant vibrations of the city ache in my ears. Its uncontrolled vacuum hisses into my veins.

The brothel stands alone in the alley like a chemical sunrise brushed with bright neon lighting. A needle thin promise, a plump lip, a fake orgasm. Echoes of voices demand allegiance, Tommy fills the rooms with his blood. Red welts at the nape of his neck, mapping his agitation. He hopes it’ll be released into exhaustion. Its braille is a fixture of suffering. Itching into my hair beds. A language no one touches. It fades by day and returns by night.

Belt loops disheveled, patrons stumble out into the neon smear of the alley. They carry the smell of four loko and sweat like a second skin. Our eyes never meet. I watch them from the shadow of the doorframe, a ghost in my own lobby. Tommy stares past them at the golden door handle. Its grooves are stabilized. Cold to touch. Weathered. Tommy’s fingernails scrape the golden sheen. Potato peels of color underneath the nails. The gold is a lie. Its thin skin of status flaking to the sheer of my boot.

Skin. Sudor glows on the dim lit stage. Roots drift, anchored in sweltering humidity. Midnight dancers. Incandescent. Mouths spread, spit gourmand falls to fingers in their seats. Men and women squander a glance for the service. A price paid. Expended. Tommy steps further into the room, scans the plasticity of their faces. Aperol cuts through champagne. Paraffin wax softening under heat. Men unable to walk leave their trace behind. Alone.

Flowers bent at the knee. Turned to stone. Full moons glide on the edge of dead air. I let my legs weaken, my head packed with cotton, stitched behind broken vows. Tommy’s fingers touch his lips, sucking in the saltwater. A brown haired buck. Three of Hearts carousels through the room. Lifts glasses from trays. Her hips seesaw, towers leaning, ready to fall. She clips a corner, skin splits. Red an entry, red an ending.

Three of Hearts’ eyes are windows. Her mouth, an invasion.

“Tommy. I need you in Room 103, tonight.”

“Same price.”

“As always. My favorite little cuck.”

Tongue at the edge of a blade, splits sideways when Three of Hearts speaks. Her words mold over my body, depleting across my skin. No patron follows my expression, just the cup of her ass. Dogs climb on their hands to lap at her air.

Stage set in breakfast pastel, Valentine’s candied hearts at the bottom of a drain. Colors sever. Shadow twins reflect their dogma. Mouths stretch wide, underwater between half choked moans.

Tommy’s finger slides across dusted tables. Cheap beer. Red color 40. Bodies without a name, without a place. They beg for a reality, a fantasy apart. Tyranny in lizard brain. Scales cover Benjamin’s. I step deeper toward the hallway, their faint expressions lost to the matrix. No one endures. Not me. Them.

No fixed self. Tommy pulls out his notepad, we take the shape of what surrounds us.

Room 103. The go sign is green. Metal ringlit cords twist, octopus limbs casting spotlights on inanimate objects. Heat burns through leather. The shadow won’t hold. Unstable. It shapeshifts. There is no choice. It waits for the body.

A spiral, how it descends. Destroys. One who steps into the shade becomes it.

Three of Hearts tilts her head back, her legs locked around a naked man. Black socks. Shoes still on. His face disappears beneath the Oni mask. Tattoos shift, mercurial in lamp light. He doesn’t speak. His body is weightless beneath her.

She points to the chair. Its position carries a burden, a gong ringing in my ear.

My feet plant down, rigid, stubborn. Noise of their gooseflesh. Squish where surfaces meet. Flesh losing its feathers. The shades around my body begin to blur. Buttons on my sleeve come undone. Careful. Lovers in periphery, pig mouths poetry.

My veins swell. I slap my forearm until I feel the sting. A rubber tourniquet tightens. Rainbow beads caress where others cannot penetrate. I succumb to nothing. On my way to oblivion to shut the door. Needles of meadow grass graze my open skin. Here, time is unbroken. A ventilation of cold rain.

Shades move where light doesn’t touch. There’s more bodies than I can count. My body drags inches behind itself. Tommy hangs his head over the headrest. Crown to the wall. Paper mouth. Bone dry. Jaw unhinged.

Warmth rushes to the skull. Something blooms. Invisible beetles crawl the crevices of my skin. Chicken feet—thin, hooked—burrow at my chest. Pull. Separate. Vein clusters split under their pressure. Tommy can’t fight it. It’s their home, they stay.

Chainsaw metal grinds in my ears. Louder. Breaths trapped undertow. No one hears me. Palms sweat above the armrests. Stuck here. Fixed.

The nothing sleeps in my head. It has a chokehold around my throat. Dysphagia. Esophageal obstruction. Tommy grabs his throat, strokes the Adam’s apple. Up and down its groove. Tender. Seamless. The swallow won’t come. A puppet twisted at the knees.

Three of Hearts laughs somewhere in a distant tunnel. Her voice, a sharp razor.

By the scuff of my neck, I pull myself to the floor. Viridescent motel moss in the swamp. Colors stamp my eyes. Faded viridian. Door hinges with peeled wood chips scrape my fingers as I pass.

Her voice howls, a wind advisory is a storm. My body sways. I grasp the sink. Fingers curled over cheap porcelain. Its station revealed its truth. Faucet runs cold. Bites my hands. Tommy slaps his face into the mirror. Cracks spread eagle eyed. Nothing left to hide. Nowhere to show what’s inside. Blood mixes with the water. Submerged. Stale sulfur coats my tongue.

Three of Hearts comes behind me, a wad of cash between her claws. She shoves Benjamin’s down my front pants. Tommy grunts and pulls out the soggy wad of cash.

Breadcrumbs feed its fledglings. Tommy shakily shoves the wad behind his coat pocket. No one’s face can be seen.

Nothing remains. Tommy scribbles in the notepad. Return to the root.

Black dye throbbed into my skin. Bandages cover my Eczema. Roasted under sunlight. Gray coveralls. Large pockets filled with tools. Sheltered from tomorrow. Gauze wrapped around my forearms, dusted with fresh soil. Leo Chan Chi-Yung takes his work gloves, wipes his forehead. Sweating blood. Nose to the grindstone, teeth clenched. His own canines have become animals.

Leo feels the gauze lift open. Wounded holes, inflamed. He digs his arms deeper. Covers them from prying eyes. Worms massage the drug induced cavities from last night. They move without asking. A language of flimsy mouths. No refusal. No correction.

This year is tulip season. A white sepulcher for this castle’s paper shield. Petals arranged like silence pressed into the ground. Measured beds. Obedient. Rows that pretend to be natural. Leo washes his hands with its flora.

The fool smiles on the grounds he earned by heritage. Shoes clean. Hands unmarked. He gestures as wars end from within. Ownership’s blooming rose. A black bird’s body politic. Its blue blood untainted.

Us keepers of his acreage are the midnight without stars.

Soil enters the bandage, settles where skin fails. Nothing rejects it. Lives in limbo. Leo presses his thumb into the dirt. His imprint, a map for the concealed. Leo yields to its moisture. The terrain incinerates beneath my name. The native boy, my own chestnut tree. Citrus zest on the tongue expands before it compresses. Leo feels the roots give before they should. He nods to its answer. The worms continue their work.

He presses his thumbs into the soil again. The dirt does not remember him.

Two pairs of bespoke boots. Four clean. Unblemished surfaces. One man twists his heel into the turf, a casual desecration of the work. Trousers pressed to the razor’s edge. Born with a golden spoon. He clicks his teeth with the hunger of a man who has never been full.

“The boy’s a mute.” Words casual against the toffee-nosed grain. “A real architectural landscaper. Strictly under the table. Wouldn’t know his worth if it bit him.”

“What do you call him? I could use a change of scenery at my place.”

“We don’t share over here. This one’s been mine. Dog loyal.”

Leo doesn’t flinch. His mind is an empty vessel. The garden’s uncrowded, without ego. My employer’s hollow excess is a bloated stronghold, a rigid thing making a rod for his own back. Stuffed shirt in a transparent cage. High-strung bow missing its strings, incapable of the music he demands. Songs feed the appetites for those who do not hunger. Burns the candle at both ends just to light a room that’s already barren. American made degeneracy. Rots without preservatives to keep it intact. Maims harmony. The wars he’s claimed to win.

The two pairs turn toward the path away from the tulips. Leo closes his eyes and finds himself in a row of workers. Faces distort under sunlight and sheen. He is a single pulse in a collective rhythm. Hot iron. Saline. Dripping into the groundwater. He breathes in. Holds it. The line doesn’t break. Hands move. No one speaks. Shoulders set. Jaw tight. Teeth grind against the shadow. Leo grasps the roots in his fingers. He sits where he’s placed. The rhythm does not change. Leo does not leave it.

He holds the root. He does not let go.

Leo stands in the break room. Converted barn. Cement floors. Its lukewarm colosseum. A public spectacle. Rustic. Pressed collars. They gather where the dirt doesn’t reach. Without growth. Behind glass. Claustrophobic. Tractor parts are fixed on the wall. Fluorescent buzz replaces wind. Labeled. Untouched. A never ending museum of unpaid labor.

He smokes a cigarette, looking through three rivets of a cut-rate locker.

Bodies speak in unison. Hearts dangled half-heartedly from their teeth. Sit. Stand. Incomplete. Whole wheat bread. Plant-based meat. Bell pepper on a stick. Call it art. Green energy. Save the planet. Placards in red, blue, yellow. Words about care. Bright signs. Community ribbons. Fixed pledges. They say it’s better now.

Ripples on a blank shore. Bittersweet distraction.

Leo doesn’t stir. The metal scuffs on the locker are his only friend. Faces muddle into a haze. The feeling of being caught on a train. Waiting on a platform. Sardines lined up in coffins. It dries out their skin. Metamorphosis under morgue blue light. Spinning plates from the highest peak, shatter. Unresolved. Taped together.

My employer approaches. No partner. Cash in an envelope. Red stamp.

Leo smokes at him. His body a metal colander. Smoke breathes through the holes. The man’s face glows red. Fumes cling to clothes. Residual ash takes form. Returns without asking.

Unbothered, Leo grabs the envelope.

Language is spoken. It doesn’t register. Words are noise. Eyes without a face. What was held. Left. Unable to look back.

The envelope slips into the pocket. Half in. Out. Hands reach for the notepad.

What is taken is never kept.

Michael Turner climbed the last step to the top. The notice was signed before he got there. Ink dried. Date stamped. Routine. He doesn’t like wasting his time for the walkthrough. Busy. One place to the next. Old paint smell in the hallway. Incense burns like campfire logs. The old building breathes with his legs. Heat trapped inside the walls.

The door loosens on the first turn. No resistance. Money for old rope.

Michael steps inside and stops when the door stops creaking like Mrs. Halloway’s back. Old bird. His feet felt wrong. Stopped past the threshold. Studio’s not sullied. Its stillness settles around his head. The place is waiting for him. An exhibit where he’s the only buyer.

Bed military tight. No ident on the mattress. Without drag marks. Without clothes to be sold.

He shuts the door behind him. Michael scratches his head. The name was there. It was on the notice. On the file with his secretary. He had it on his mouth climbing the stairs. The guy didn’t leave an impression.

When he speaks, he trips over his tongue. The name doesn’t find him. Silence meets him.

At the corner of his eye are three passports stacked. Dead center. Yellow. Dark green. Purple. He doesn’t touch them right away. When men leave a place, they take what matters. Papers first. Identity where it belongs.

Michael steps closer. Opens the yellow. Wrong guy. Early twenties. Not blurred. Not damaged. The face holds steady. Deer in headlights. Picture feels older than it should be. The pixel definition doesn’t match the age. Recognition flickers, then slips.

He flips to purple. Different face. Years further along. Time got ahead of itself without being bothered. The man appears ninety. Barely able to stand. Back slouched. A crime to live in the golden age. A body outliving its place.

Michael hesitates at the dark green. Stares longer this time. Jaw misaligned. Mouth set tight. A person you pass in the streets, twice. Strangers tear themselves apart in packs. Close enough to connect. Not enough to confirm.

He shuts it. Cursing underneath his breath. Ears feel clogged with water. Heart pounds in his chest. Old pops died this way. Heart attack. Freak accident. No warning.

All three passports sit there like they answer a question he didn’t ask. He presses his tongue against the back of his teeth. They’ll shake loose if he’s not careful. Three baptisms have made Michael strong. He braces himself on the corner. Not his desk. Never seen it.

There’s a notepad beside the passports. Creased spine. Water damage. Ink bled at the edges. Used.

Tosses it open. Pages of the same hand. Tight. Controlled. Broken English. Increasing how fast it writes by page. Disconnected. Unshackled loose. It slips away mid-line. Half thoughts trail off. Unwhole. A painted alibi.

One line is married to his mind. Michael closes it. Spooked himself.

Movement drifts at the corner of his eye. Chair near the wall. Someone’s there with him. Watches. Doesn’t speak. The shape in his peripheral matches a face. Shadows with weight. Michael prays to his higher power.

He turns. The chair is bare. Flat. No impression that he could see. Ain’t nothing in this place. Not a critter. Michael’s getting old. Fiddling with someone’s trash.

No sign of move-out. No sign of life.

Michael leaves behind the apartment. Door clicks shut behind him. Rips off the notice, expecting to see a name. The line is vacant.

He stands in the hallway. Michael forms a migraine. Forgets why he was there. The studio door feels foreign. His hand drops the notice to the floor.

Michael uses his mind like a mirror.

Nothing holds. It doesn’t stay.

Vinny Reads is a good dude, I look forward to his newsletters and what he’s reading. His Weekly Digest is refreshing during this crazy fucked up timeline. They’re relatable for most Americans attempting to decipher the madhouse or fall apart between dissociation and rage. If you want to connect to someone during these crazy times give those digests a read.

This prompt was challenging for me, because it was a random manic thought that I wrote in poetic metaphoric SOC prose and it got real. Gotta a lot of favorite lines in here, which is rare. Thank you Vinny Reads for being such a huge supporter of getting my family sheltered. If it wasn’t for this prompt, none of these words would have landed the way they did on the page.

[ Penny Dreadful, Season 1, 2014 - distorted by yours truly the character follows Vanessa Ives must watch with Eva Green. ]

SOC POV zero draft.

I am Eva—

Liquified sweat smolders my skin deep. Incandescence raw. Red abrasions slammed into my skin, hot. My veins pulsate, shivers throb with blood. Its essence doesn’t belong to me. Echoes of its home tremor through my body. Flesh stubborn, its body revolts against mine. Her laughter is squeamish with my desire. In my mouth, her skin harmonizes in its place, its home. Unbroken, tameless chimeras of deceit. Mirror panels fabricate my fairy tale, my screams escape my lips, drool wedged over her forehead. Legs buckled, our defiled legacy. The devil lives in me, and she has a name.

My flight of fancy. Candle lit tangerines. I am everyone, you are nothing. She drinks up my gasoline, sugar salt kerosene. Spirit gunk leaks from my eyelids. Thick dirty make up bathwater. Everything we beg to forget, we beg to come back. Her eyes a hazy blue porcelain, my laughter chirps and chatters onto the walls. In a room, high ceilings bounce, her body bone stiff. By daylight, you’ll be mine.

—Green

Part of our possession troubles for a lamb.

Cut roses start wilting within hours.

Every woman has a name, few demand a title.

My ghost face trades places with every person I meet. Traffics maps like clothes as seasons change. Burn victim. Charred skin burnt pizza layers. I wash in blood like a rumored Bathory. Consumerism is capitalism. Production factories scour the floor with lost souls. My industrial complex is a nightmare, my work is a dream.

In the mirror, I see my scarred skin welt B-side. Monsters soaked in blood. No names. We don’t say their names. It doesn’t have to be real.

Textile skin weaves over the body. Soft goods. Dry goods. Rotten drapery. Its linen weaves on my tongue. Synthetic varieties of magic. Gifts that don’t belong to me. Shared. Ambient laughter in the dark.

None of this is real. The devil tells me otherwise. Whispers overflown. We’re drowning. Mosquito lighting gone sour green. It buzzes at my hair. Flames jump on the center crown. I want to die, I don’t want the transition map. Its fat melts on my jowls.

Botox liposuction baby can’t save it. My inner bones crack into place. Twenty bodies make one whole Eva Green facial map. We don’t share memories. Wouldn’t know her life. Heard she was plain Jane. Her facial structure draws me inwards. The way an addict needs to feed.

The devil coaxes my cat like independence, unpredictability. Impulsive imposter. Says, the only way to transform is by giving her meat, bones and the parts that make the soul immortal. Says, it can’t be seen only felt.

The devil is charred burnt skin rubber like me. Talks like me, dresses carbon copy. Her prototype was made by others. Things she says, I’ll never meet. When we’re not canning for critters she tells me words I don’t understand. She pretends to be my lover. Her tongue tastes of bean soup and red wine reduced under low light.

Her eyes are buttons eclipsed from cut stones.

The devil says they call her Gwenofore, and I can call her Yenni.

In front of the mirror, I wait to go to the bar. Breathing exercises. Tongue at the roof of my mouth. My face shapeshifts to Eva. My skin sheds, flakey white to the sink. Dewy red pink blood. Fresh florals. Slimy aloe film spread over my face, moisturized. I don’t remember who I used to be when I was born. Who’s that woman?

In tandem my emotions drive through my brain, loud engine wheels churn the deeper cavernous parts of my psyche. It’s lost. I’m lost. I have no endings or beginnings. Meshed together like a bad ceramics class. Shades make shapes. Abstract and uncanny. There’s no guilt suture on my papillae. Virgin of love. Lady of the night, poison plasters my spine. Intention is betrayal. Intuition is fidelity. Thousands of songs, dolour behind my eyes.

My body is a boat at high tide, its vessel rocking to hymns chanted in the wind. Ropes and bells at the docks. Its funeral lives inside my ribcage, and for a glimpse I can taste what it means to be seen. The devil’s face dissolves beside me, and the unison of my flesh is born anew.

Invisibility no longer hidden by colors, how they would hallucinate around me, auras of my past life. Patches of lightning bolts, jarr my head. Trauma bruises deep purple and blues. My cerebrums wit breathes through its gills. Underwater, I drown.

Strained words jag my memory.

My soul skirmishes with the devil undertow.

One of us will win. One of us will have more to lose.

Her name was Ashes, burned before she was born. When I met her, my building was on fire. Her long legs scarred the ground when she walked. Demanded the room, like her presence was a charity. There’s one that separates the pack without needing an entrance. It’s in the air, her collision plays dead. Red soft velvety lungs. Free falling, I can’t say no to her.

Ribcages oppose each other, bruises form. String lights shimmer over our eyes. She says she knows me from somewhere. I pretend to acknowledge it, fingers underneath the ear lobes. Warmth at the tips. Her lips blueprint and match mine. I obey her rules, when her mouth opens. Exhalation on me. I wheeze when her nerves tingle my senses. Dark brown hair basked at first blush.

One weekend out of the month, she’s mine.

The devil says she wants her as the final sacrifice. In my dream, the devil replaces Ashes face. We live in a temporal lag, a long term error. Its sustainable deviation apart from this world.

The devil’s paradigm of love is only known by consumption. Undercooked meat, raw. Blood vessels pop like skins of raspberries burst in my mouth. Stains my lips, pomegranate. Our bedding is a disaster. Skin covered dolls sprawl across it, vinyl cool flesh. Limbs tangle when we sleep, there’s soft thuds when they slide and settle. Faceless eyes, pale and unblinking. Mirrors of their cornea reflect our movements. I feel them watch, still.

When it’s quiet, their sorrow sounds wretch into my belly. The devil says, I lose myself. The devil says many things it does not understand.

Ashes nails clench the back of my hair when she kisses me. Her thighs straddle me, cunt pressed deep into my knee bone. The bar is spinning, faster than I can catch my breath. My arms brace for death, holding onto her. Drunk on her spit.

Ashes tells me, when she stares into my eyes the world around her dies. Time stutters in slow motion love nostalgia. She sucks in all my air, and leaves me dry. Starved for more. My fingers twitch under her ribcage. Her tongue licks over my eyelids, and I want an infection.

Come back to my place this time. I don’t want to be interrupted.

Her fingers press on my throat blocking airwaves. She waits for me to gasp, before she tells me yes.

The dolls are waiting for their master.

Yenni told me once, humans taste better when the end is near.

Homelessness isn’t glamorous. Cigarette ashes blistered my mouth coarse. It was during a rain storm I found this place. Ripped up my socials number, shredded my ID cards. Named myself June. The in between month of all seasons. ‘Cause I figured, it would be a new leaf. Drifters, we travel through plane to planes of nonexistence. Belonging is for suckers, purified with their fake Gods. I had a box of picks, wandering in a half empty street. Abandoned houses galore. Could be infested with rodents or old folks isolated from reality. Anywhere is here right now.

Found an old farmhouse, looked like a half torn plantation home. Those places got an evil chew to the place. You can feel how wrong it is when you walk past them. Its the edge of despair. Long winding covered porches. The sticky hot hair sweeps up in your hair and through your skin. When it rains it’s warm enough to not feel the chill. How it would’ve stabbed your bad wounds in central standard.

Your body told you to carry on, but you couldn’t stop looking at it. Something was inside. A creator of violence. Without speech it felt deceitful. Dead gods. Something I am not supposed to see. I’d just take a peak. It was paranoia. Fantasies I’ve created on the road. The mind wanders when it wants to redeem itself from the lies.

Busted down the boarded window in the back with my boot. Expected a loaded shottie in my face. Met with cobwebs. What lived in here didn’t stir. It invited me inside. Floor covered with dirt and dust. It appeared to be some backwoods quarters, a fifties fridge sealed shut. Mold infested the counters, enough that when your fingers brushed against it particles flew in the air like smoke. Nothing had seen electricity or light for a while. Air was dense. Couldn’t even cut it with a lemon. I wrapped my wet clothes over my mouth and slapped my flashlight on.

Not that I would need it. Turned a sharp corner to find a feast with candelabra stands lit with pillared white wax. Turkey cooked with a sheer glaze, a bowl of fondue and a bouquet of crisp baguettes. Bottles of wine lined up uncorked. Chairs sat with fine china on either end. There were folded papers on the plates. Names written, just two. On my close side was Gwenofore and the other was June.

Fuck. I held my folded name in my hand. Didn’t talk to myself this time or talk myself out of it. Trapped, there was a woman standing at the end of the table. Air had gotten harsher. My lungs choked up. Don’t know where she came from, and I didn’t want to ask.

“Saw you from outside, you must be tired from your travels.”

“How the fuck do you know my name?”

She laughed, her teeth black. “I see everything, June.”

My brain left inside an echo, fumes plugged my head. She wasn’t wrong. Exhaustion wasn’t half of it. Crunched the paper between my fingers. This didn’t make sense. Places like this are supposed to be dead. Gwenofore looked alive. Her skin glowed, visitor elsewhere. The taint of this world censored from her body. Skin primed, remodelled.

“I have something you want, June.”

“You don’t know me. You’ll never know me.”

“You are my guest. Please sit down.”

My body couldn’t resist whatever pull Gwenofore had on me. I shut my eyes, I didn’t want to watch my body marionette its way through this performance. It felt as though a knife went through my back. Seduced by her tongue. A guest, a souvenir. There was no difference. I let my hand stab into the turkey, I couldn’t watch it happen. Afraid of what I might see.

Juicy, greased turkey meat wet my bottom lip with acid. It tasted gamey. Not real. Whatever inside wasn’t normal. My mouth sucked the fat between my teeth. Chunks rubbed the upper gums in a see saw motion. It felt alive, like larvae. Failed attempts at survival, them and I.

Courage didn’t come easily, my eyelids opened. Braced for impact. Welcomed by nothing at the table. Fork pointed to the ceiling. Bent its middle a bit. Cheap iron.

Gwenofore disappeared, the candelabras still burned. Dropped the fork. Fuck this. My legs unbuckled, shoved the chair to the floor with a crack. My feet tripped over air, and slammed right into an invisible wall where the open window and I saw each other. Arms bruised. Figures.

Dead Gods don’t let people waltz out of here. Never felt free to begin with. Country was plagued by oligarchies.

Time churned in my brain, melted its metal through my fluffy squished innards. Thought the upstairs might’ve meant a way out. This dead God wanted a piece of me. It couldn’t be bought or paid for with simplicities. I was nobody with a body.

Dropped to my knees at the top of the stairs. Adrenaline screamed into my chest, crunchy. A paper cut out human, I fell to hell.

Landed in a room of mirrors. Its whirlpool sucked me in. Must’ve fallen through a shaft. One moment you’re in a hallway. The next you’re at the willpower of your reflection. How I got locked in, I’ll never know. Up close, I could see all the scars I’ve peeled on my face. Broken nails nestled deep past the epidermis. Rivets, where nail beds began and settled. Tears make it less ill. Cadence seeps. Flashbacks and guarded memories.

Scalpels were a different kind of drug. A release. An exchange of give and take.

Whistles of another called the devil spoke to me. Couldn’t unhear its words. Its descent sank into my ear drums. Pierced my organs with fountains of needles. Bled orange cone lucid. Reminded me of my task. I left the world behind to die, to surrender.

My fingers could not stop peeling, plucked the layers of my face clean off. It didn’t hurt. Not here. Not in this place. Says, I am important. Loves me like a bedside table. Sounds of petals removed from a stem resurrect in my ear.

Restless, my legs clamp tight. Visuals of Eva Green reflect on my face, a stifled secret. I smile, her face isn’t mine. Panoramic. Her thorns show themselves to me. Finger on the cheekbone. Scarless. Screaming felt natural, powerful. It wanted me, it wanted this. I feel Gwenofore inside of me. Our faces shutter between each other.

The whispers tell me they’ll give me the truth.

The devil says she loves me when I rip off my skin. Says, it’s the price of beauty.

Yenni lights up the place when I bring meat home. Says, she makes the place lived in. It’ll feel more natural than a dump truck in a gas station. No messages. No late night calls from the telephone. Our home sucks up the signals. Radio silent chemistry.

The dolls don’t move, their hollowed out bodies hang forward. Clothes pinned up to dry. Spiders live there, orchestrate movement we cannot see.

Ashes digs her nails into the dip of my hip bones. Legs jolt liberated. Animated away from my body. Tongue pushes down my throat. It wiggles and teases with my uvula. Torrid gummy liquid flushes my viscera. Hatred for her is the denial of her power. Clothes rip where they don’t groove. My scars open to new viewers’ eyes.

Imperfect, our lips string up hints by the speckle of eyes. When they match and when they fight. Ashes uses my body to dust surfaces. She makes me fly, my wingspan—sixteenth feet. Lips punch upholstery needles omnipresent across my body. Pain and release.

Give in to the sound. She writes down my numbers, pages of body counts. Numbers that fill the jiggle of my thighs, the plump of my breasts. Words are blunt instructions. Our screams let it out.

Yenni watches behind the walls. Says, the only way to love is to rip it all off. In a heart shaped fountain of fame. The more they swallow, the more they need.

Ashes carries my wounded bird wings to the bed. She sits over my peak, rockaway beach. Milked labia, dreamwave honey. My x ray vision is perforations drenched in sweat. Eva replaces Ashes face, I am her pony ride. Smacks into my long lips, princess peach.

Losing control, out of my mind. Ashes, Eva, Ashes, Yenni, Eva. A clashing face for a hazy vibration. They blend like oil paintings in heat, under pressure. Suffocated for air, I don’t stir. Her nails peel my legs shredded spools of cassette reels. Pitches higher on the right, lower on the left. Body motions ricochet.

Dolls behind my head begin to twitch, unnatural. Ashes grabs my throat and forces my face to look at her. Fear consumes me, when I watch black oil pull into the holes of her body. Her holes, a vain economy, vacuums up our substances.

Ashes whispers about the dolls. No one loved them, but she did. She loved another. I stole from her.

Yenni is everywhere, she’s the moon, the sun.
Yenni lives in the particles we eat.
Yenni makes life and takes it away.

A hush composes between us, Yenni’s fingers slide along Ashes jaw deliberately. Thumbs brush and hinge where tension lives. Her palms cradle her cheeks, Ashes is expressionless, mouth spread. Candle wax burns the outer layers, exposing the muscles, meat underneath. The scent of burnt hair and smoke hugs my senses. Folds my body into a box, trapped with insomnia and cabin fever. Angel hair thin muscle ligaments detach and weave, threads without needles attached. Elegant asymmetry serpentine, Ashes arms rise above her head to make the sun.

Dolls surround our bodies, fingers pet our skin remains. Their heads twist wrong, cakeholes mouth devotion. Violet bone ash sprinkles near my head, its soup powders my face. Air begins to thin around me, chest tightens and clenches my heart. Its anthrax infection attempts to swallow me whole.

My reaction wanes with my weakness, I see Eva. I refuse to see anyone else. Slow motion car crash explodes in my head. Nothing connects to here. Degenerative, exploitative. Ashes face replicated like mine.

By blood loss, I day dream of Eva’s face manifested under a smoky light. Hands intertwined, Ashes and I. Cities faraway, June summer tastes of Ash. Pockets of the dream world burn like paper, Yenni’s face reminds me where I am. Made of glass, nothing lasts-s-s.

The devil steps into Ashes body, wears her snakeskin. Competing colors. Double vision, I pretend Eva is still here. She’s real. We’re real. Refuse to believe what’s in front of me. Kiss my middle finger and point it at the devil.

The Devil says, it’s time for the soul to evacuate. Says, there’s better sins.

Ashes pulls out a knife behind her, tongue stretched out.

“Your blood will fertilize the soil.”

[‘Carte Blanche’ Iris Van Herpen, Haute Couture, SS23]

Stream of Consciousness POV, Zero Draft

Parker Smith’s face flushed rose, a cardinal sin. Ping pong eyes darted across the room. I could hear his spit sloshing from the back of his throat and pushed into his teeth beds. Homes washed away from the disaster lived in his mouth. A storm fermenting at the top, drips down. He doesn’t seem one to restrain the balance of behavior. Every shudder of his body walked through my arms and legs. It’s how hunters treat their prey animals. Menkind who hunt without understanding their opposition are frauds. They revel in power plays they can never hold in their palms. It’ll slip out of their fingers, and yet they still believe it’s there.

Grifters. Every life has a few bunches of them. You’ll see them congregate in hyper specific locations. They think it’s their year, every year. Until they meet that woman who changes it all. Paper houses crumbling down.

“Parker Smith, Agent 306. What’s the matter? Never met a collector from the other side before?”

“I think you confuse me with someone else, Anisette.”

“Cut the formalities, I prefer Anise. This is to figure out if I kill you or not. I can be nice sometimes.”

“Kill me for what?”

“You broke an international agreement. There can’t just be dozens of your clones walking around as voiceless empty people. On top of it we have people living in a trash city who can barely afford to eat while you’re making toys. It’s fairly clear.”

“What are you, the morality police, Anise?”

I stand up, his eyes squint. This kind of exchange can change a person. It makes them feel small. You can tell, the delusions he believed were for the better of humanity. Before his body curls inwards, you want to touch him. Sap the possibilities. Tools for fools. Nails sliding on marble lets me see who he is, where he hides, where he belongs.

“No, Agent Parker. I am a collector. We’re professionals, the others, who are like me.”

“Say, I am an Agent. What would I be an agent of?”

My finger is already on his lips. “Do you hear it?”

He stutters. I feel his lips boil, wet steam underneath my flesh. Time caught up with Parker. Up close you can see the wrinkles form around his eyes, stressed over mortality. On the path of disillusionment, death is a dream.

“The sound of a liar.” My voice whispered around his ear, all six feet of nothing. I put my fingers on the bones of his jaw, “You’re going to tell me everything. I want to know why you felt this was the only option.”

“The city isn’t bound by taking care of the others on the outside. It’s not my responsibility if people die.”

“No one needs to hold you accountable for death. It’s not about that, Agent Parker. Think deeper even if it’s hard.”

Agent Parker takes my drink and uses it as mouthwash before he gulps it down, adam’s apple moves up and plummets. He’s stalling, he doesn’t want to talk about his failures. The wins were great for the city. People could be immortal, better than scriptures. New memories built and formed, without language models. Every lifetime in every alternative reality. Genetics changed by different experiments, different lovers, different dreams. He could jerk off to the parts removed from him, and still feel alive.

“There’s inequality in our international agreement, which has been ongoing for centuries, likely even before this society, Anise. I am aware, I just don’t care.”

“I suppose you won’t mind if I burn yours down. Don’t worry, I’ll put your story on the forefront. It’ll be my burning pedestal. Bet you didn’t read about our history. I hate avoidants.” I press my hands on his throat. “You pretend to be a tortured artist. This creativity which you believe is shared, is only used for your pleasure.”

“It’s true. I won’t deny you any of it, Anise. I hate the thought of it. What do you want from me if not money, the patent?”

Parker is incredibly dense about the cold war. No one can buy me. Must be way down the food chain. I pull out one of my vials of Alucard’s poisons. He’s watching my moves, I love when they do this. My mouth spits on the palm of his right hand, his breath on my neck. Pop its top off and dump the whole tincture in the middle.

He screams, the way a human should. Kicked him down. Felt his body through my heel. Tickled by his reaction, his expressions in flux of emotion within and without. Parker holds his hand, the skin peels back like a flower in bloom. Burns the crispy layers, charcoal. Spit salivates down his lips, words inedible, gargled in speech. Agent Parker finds himself with his humanity, his eyes feral. Unhinged in levels of pain that I can’t even begin to dismantle.

“Which level of pain are we experiencing? One to ten.”

“F—fuck you. Why me? I am lesser.”

“When your pain calibrates, to a numbing gnawing feeling you’ll give me real answers.”

Privileged life. He screams outward echoes into the high ceiling, thinking anyone might hear him. Curls in partial fetal, knees up to his stomach. Wiggles his body, in a rocking motion, air pushed outwards and in. Spit in globs. I can no longer see his eyes through the squinting motion.

I pull up a cigarette, and light it. Fuckers going to pass out soon. His eyes are peeling back.

“Don’t shit yourself before you pass out. I have real work to do, it’s not for children.”

Before he can respond he passes out from the pain, it doesn’t even take a few minutes for the paralysis to set in. The poison didn’t burn all the way through his hand. My calculations were off. There’s more about Alucard’s biology I am unaware of. I pull up his hand with a tug to unlock his paralysis, not a care in the world if I dislocate his shoulder in the process. Yes, it partially worked. Not a full copy of a copy, it needs more of Alucard’s bacteria laced spit.

I inspected his wound in silence, smoke blew out of my nose. Swallow its pain, and put out my cigarette on the wound. It doesn’t make a difference. Hands on his ankles, I drag his body to the bed. He’s weightless compared to the robots I have dislodged. His body makes squeaky wheels on the solid ground. Some type of the tile I’ve never seen. I rip off his clothes with a pair of sheers from my coat. Sewing scissors cut away the garments. All Agents have human lined coat jackets. They tan the flesh, making it seem closer to leather. It’s crinkled, not smooth. Feels timeworn. Under my breath, I curse and pray.

God’s have abandoned us for giving us menkind. Mutations deflated by ego.

Agent Parker has a bland black speedo thong on for his shapeless ass. Hog zip tied his wrists and ankles. Roped knots around his hands and ankles tight, there’s a little give in case I need to drag him anywhere. His expression is somber. Shoved one of the human skin pieces into his mouth. Where it belongs.

My hand slaps him across the face, nails dragging on his skin cut him. Hope it stings when it lands. Hope he feels it when he wakes up. Paralysis should be on the mend. This is the watered down version of aristocracy my people have to deal with on the reg. His collection had a flavor of kitsch, sworn an allegiance to this dying age.

A pair of slit eyes dazed into my view. One hard shake into realization. Brain waves tell you how you can’t escape. Muffled cries vibrate toward my lips. I can almost taste his fear. Legs and arms locked into position, if he moves it’s going to hurt real bad.

“Tell me when you’re done screaming. It’s going to get you nowhere.”

Agent Parker makes such a fuss. He won’t have to suffer long. Our little charade will open doors to reflection. Rumination is a genderless battle. People full of hot air believe in their lies. He’s buckling fast under pressure. Nod your head, yes good boy.

I pulled his gag, “There, now you’re going to tell me who owns this building and where to find them.”

“She’s at the top, her name is Domino. Is that all you needed? Now, let me go.”

“Cute. I will need to cut the power first. Where can I do that, Parker?”

“It’s weirdly built in the middle where the lab for the robots are charged. I don’t know why she made it that way.”

“Who is Domino to you?”

“I met her in college, she comes from old money. We all do. What does this have to do with the Agents? I honestly thought it was some secret society for rich people.”

“You can’t be this ignorant, Parker. You’re telling me you’re innocent of the damages?”

“People who are born into something can’t be expected to be more or different, Anise. You know how it is.”

“Were you born into this society?”

He stopped himself before he disagreed. It begins to manifest real slow. “They scouted me for my science. It’s a breakthrough.”

“How blasé.” My nails tap interchangeably on his knee. Sprigs of his coarse hair touch me. Shove the human skin tanned leather back into his mouth. It’s followed by more muffled noises. “I have plans for you. Be a good puppy and wait for me.”

It’s cruel to suggest more since he has nowhere else to go. He’ll suffer for me.

My new boyfriend Parker allowed me quick access into the database. The middle of the building was painless to reach. Between my drunken slurring I disassembled a few cores and stole a few without any damage. Worth a fortune, one swiped at my ribcage. Crunched a piece. Spittin’ blood, remnant clots feel like lost dip earthy dreck in the webs of my gums. The panels were behind a glass room without locks, a light push and they swung open. Reminded me of bar doors, how they used to swing back and forth. Six rows of military green towers with hundreds of switches. No idea how many of them were connected to this building or elsewhere.

Retracting my cane, a bat with spray painted reds and neon mustard over the barbed wire glittered underneath the big lights. Fuckers must live pain free lives. To release the pressure in my veins, I begin swinging the thing in the air. Correct weight in my hands, not heavy enough to tie me down. Move into the body.

Cracked into the levers. Every single one. Sparks flew past me, generators whirl in through the vents. A torrent of rage steps up to the beat to smash the levers into pieces.

I see ghosts of my past, we reflect within each other. Scream with me, breathe with me. Years have gone by, they’ve become strangers living in my skin. The wealth gap is unyielding, these towers fill the city. Sentient God’s all seeing eye.

Lights out.

We keep wondering when we’re going to feel real.

Found her staring out her window, part of the city was lit. Her expression was empty, void of feeling. I wanted her to be scared in her ivory tower. Her hand pressed on the window pane.

Naked bodies were moving in the shadows fucking, bodies meshed together in pain and sorrow. Three floors of whores collected, moaning their way through performance. One of them attempted to pull me down with them, desperation, distraction. Foot tilted, launched straight to the jaw. I felt the weight of their face liquify inwards. Must be clones. Soft dewy skin, poreless supremacy.

Do they age like we do? Do they fuck like we do?

Unlocking a few vials, I steadily pour gasoline onto their bodies. If they don’t die from the fire, they’ll die if they accidentally swallow it. Some of them begin to cough. Wonder how low their immunities must be. She has to be crazier than Parker if she fucks her own clones and someone else. A secret second thing doesn’t have her hair.

Domino’s hair is platinum white blonde. Sleek blue business coat, the warmth of another’s nameless skin lined underneath. I didn’t have a name for the discomfort I was feeling staring at her nude body covered in it. Her four inch heels clicked on the ground. Agents are in the age of gluttony.

Stopped at about five feet from her. Close range for my target. Bludgeoning her head would take less than three seconds. Domino was unarmed. Must be nice to be this complacent.

“We wondered who was pulling people off the streets and cannibalizing them.” Domino spoke, her eyes didn’t turn to reach mine.

“I am a vegetarian. Not inclined to eat my prey.”

“Do you know who is eating all the Agents in this city?”

“No idea. Sounds like a bad time for you.” Taunting her, I clicked my tongue. She turned to face me, tits sagged in either direction. I felt just as confused as they were at the moment. She wasn’t powerful, it was handed to her on a platter. Too calm for this conversation. Certainty. “You have my sympathies, Agent Domino.”

“Who the fuck are you? Why are you in my house?”

“My boyfriend Parker said you’re looking for a good time. I’ve come to provide.”

“Cut the bullshit.” Domino sneared. “I don’t fuck people I don’t know. Parker knows better than that.”

“Parker wanted to try something new. I can’t blame him. It gets real boring fuckin’ clones I’d imagine.”

I light my cigarette and flick a match behind me. Some of them begin to burn, there needs to be a flame brighter to warm my body.

Domino gets a body shot. Struck her across the face. My knuckles in rhythm dance with her flesh. Breath out. She is voiceless, airy light. Moves like she hasn’t tried or lifted a finger in her damn life.

Domino attempts to duck and slips backwards on the sleek ground. My left hand grabs her hair and shoves it forward, she falls. Pull the coat clean off her body, like a child who doesn’t know how to take it off. Yeah, this’ll do. Cover it in another vial of gasoline.

“You won’t be needing this, Domino.” Zippo in hand, it goes up fast like a Molotov cocktail igniting in an airless room.

None of them scream. This crosses out any of the might’ve been regular humans. Mouths wide open from the pain and burns collect raised bumps on their face, melts all the glitter and glamour. Paramours disfigured, blend to the ground forming new candle wax. “You know it’s not normal that none of them scream. I find it incredibly eerie, don’t you?”

“Is it money?”

“You should know better, collectors never come for money. Don’t tell me you’re as dense as that fuck boi downstairs.”

“Collectors. I’ve heard of your kind. The sect from the thousand year war. Still around?”

“It’s not religion, it won’t die out or change because some politician wants to change its face or message.”

“What do you want? I will give you anything for this conversation to be over.”

“I know you’re connected to a wire transfer in your sternum. Press it and send a message. All the bitches in their ivory tower has this body modification.”

“Why would you give them a bone?” Her fingers are shaking near her sternum. “That doesn’t make any sense. You’ll give yourself up.”

“You don’t know my name, Agent Domino. A sorry excuse for your kind. A plaything. This whole conversation, you’ve learned nothing. Gotta be a trust fund kid. Ain’t no way.”

She’s covering her tits, “Yeah, we were brought up this way.”

I lean in close to her face, “Press it.” Her fingers fumble to press a button down. Coughed blood and spit it on the ground. “Cities gonna burn. Welcome to your new age.”

Coms start funneling through her chest, I smack her hand out of the way. Words stringing stream of consciousness out of her. Voices talking over each other. Nothing is clear.

One of my throwaways clasped in my left hand. Stabbed into the machinery core in her sternum. Coms lost. Sparks zap me in collateral. Heard it riot, and collapse into her body. Could kill her or leave her, it wouldn’t make a difference. She’s going to die with that machinery in her body. Our bodies reject it. Candidates of the machine go through terrible trials to get their body to accept it in the first place. A lot of rich children die, she’s made it to something. Pores up close, all the foundation makes her appear more weathered. Leathery. Tanning beds cancer.

“Fuck, what the fuck.”

“Any last words?”

“Fuck you.”

Extracted out the throwaway, sliced her neck, her body bended with my blade. Cheesecake easy. She didn’t fight it. Domino fell to the floor choking and laughing as the blood drowned her under pressure.

Save a conversation for someone who has information that’s worth my time. In the Ivory tower there’s a button that begins to dismantle the whole building. It’s the name of the woman from games before the wars. Women up top all represent a piece.

Turn my body toward the bedroom. She didn’t have screens like Parker. Rested above the bed frame was a domino piece attached to the wall held by a robotic hand. Its emergency lights lit it up. Dumb idea. Pointer finger and thumb held it upright.

A token of gratitude. It’s the least she could offer.

My fingers attempt to grab it from the robot. Its automatic hand grabs my whole hand in a closing motion. Split second speed. Fingers make a fist and punch its palm. Got me. I am not your shackled bitch. Grunted guttural breaths, I curse. Robotic hand crushes my bones, its strength strips away at my connectors.

Twenty seven bones in the human hand.

Ambidextrous, I reach for the retractable cane in my coat pocket. Less than a minute to save face. I didn’t kill a bitch for jokes. One good shake and it slips out, bat with barbed wire. It won’t be easy.

One, two, three.

Bat overhead and slammed it diagonal. Barbed wire cuts up my fist. The robotic hand releases me. My hand is mangled and wet with blood. You take a pillowcase and wrap it, gonna sting for a few days. Blood loss feels a little euphoric. Grind your teeth together, relax the jaw and rewind.

Damn. They thought of everything.

Sirens go off, long echoes in a tunnel.

Twenty minutes to evacuate the building. Code Red.

Building is built for its own doomsday. My puppy is waiting for me. Better take him with me, I don’t leave my pets behind.

Sirens go off, its sound agitates the house.

Alucard is watching the clock. It’s twenty minutes until 1 AM. He was impatient and filled with bloodlust.

Where are you, Anise?

Pretended as if she was closer, and could hear him. Everything in the home felt hot. He didn’t like the concept of Anise getting killed because she had to take out an Agent. Her ripe fruit would fall to its death. Heartbeats bruised, her clock churning at the seams.

Alucard’s paper contract gave him the ability to kill her in any scenario, he was her senior.

It would be a hail mary. Bloodlust activated. This time, it felt different. Wrong. History documents said empires lasted every two hundred and fifty years, this one overstayed its flavor.

What if they perfected their art of war?

Brain split down the center, one was filled with meat desires. It lurked through his body and invigorated him with strange beads of joy. The other hoped he could watch Anise die naturally. Old age is what they call it.

He wanted to disappear into the wild. Hunting without orders.

There was doubt in him, that Anise would ever willingly kill him out of love. He might’ve been her puppy, but their relationship was strictly business. Partners, cohortssss.

If you don’t come home in five minutes, I am going to break the windows and find you.

Alucard shot his tongue out aggressively. Five minutes hasn’t passed, rules weren’t his memo. Hated to be bound by time. None of it applied to him in the first place. He whipped his tail at the window shattering it. Claws scattered the glass skeletons until they were dust.

Jumped out the window, a four foot drop.

Sirens were louder outside. No one warned him this would create anger in his soul.

Agent Parker was still gagged when I found him in the way I left him. He lived on the first floor, a convenient blessing. Sirens were harsher, grated against the eardrums. Hot sticky air cloaked the room, summer day in the morning. My ears started to ring to the tempo.

“Don’t worry my puppy, I am here for you. We’re gonna escape this place. Won’t let the beams above your head puncture your body. Gonna need you alive, fresh.”

My working hand grabbed the slack, lugged his body across the tile. His skin droned against it making strange noises as before, his muffled voice was distorted, spit dried all the way to his chin. A baby without his bib.

Kicking open the door, I feel the weight of our bodies shake on this whimsy balcony metal. We couldn’t stay on it long. On the ground, I pull a makeshift fireman carry to lift him on the edge of the rail. Throw him clean off the structure. Shouldn’t kill him, but it wouldn’t matter. Alucard would eat anything I give him.

Crack goes his bones. Body crunches on the ground, likely the spine. Muffled screams are followed by silence. Shock to the nerves.

My working hand balances my body on top of the rail to slide to the ground. Jump next to his frail body, see some bone. It can’t be good. Tears stream from the corner of his eyes, nose gooey mud. I ruffle his hair messy, the way you touch a puppy. This is our last time to play.

Hand on the slack, I haul his body. His skin divorces against the paved cement. Dewy new raw skin attaches to exposed aggregate concrete. His weeps play a song, a tune as we reach the middle of the street.

There’s no telling if the man will cease and desist at the center of our universe. He’s the first of many to fall.

Collapse of the building feels imminent. Its sounds crippled from an otherwise consistent gong. His breathing stiffens at the defeat of my movements, the drag, how it scrapes, how it deceives.

“You think Domino was your regional manager of this joint? Could be a good thing. New faces. She seemed ready to go. This generation of yours has gotten too soft for us old heads. Love that for you.”

No cars work past nightfall. Nobody will hit me, ‘cause the fuses don’t work unless the sun’s up. It won’t rise for another hour or two. Body wobbles in a state of delirium, we’ve only made it to a block away from the structure. Breath wheezes in unison of his weeps. Crickets scream over our voices, chirr with siren gongs.

“Got a friend who can’t wait to meet you. His names Alucard. He’s a real looker too. He’s definitely your type.”

Knees begin to lock, I squat. Fucker is heavy from behind. Use the slack of the rope to create leverage with my full body. Shoulders ache, veins tingle in my sciatica. Vision tunnels out, double, triple. Colors don’t match each other where they should. Logic defies me, no chemical cure.

Agent Parker’s body is a hefty obstacle. We reach the end of the street about a half mile, middle between his life and mine. Shift is swift, violent seizures flip his body and it bounces his back. Drop the rope in mid action, my fingers a fish out of water. Less than a minute, and a fresh carcass can explode its preserves. Tear out his gag, his mouth wet with cortisol. Rope against the jaw, teeth down. Hold his tongue. Use my bloody fist to level his head. Our eyes look at each other, no one is home.

We share fear for the wrong reasons, his helplessness wrecks my insides for a second of empathy.

Shrieks follow from a distance, the balconies around the skyscraper start to come unhinged. Alone, and awake the collapse begins. Large dust swells fall from its structure and you know it’s going to be bad. Your body hovers over Parker’s and you blockade his naked mole rat skinny body. Brace for the worst, hope for the best.

Alucard picks up speed when he sees dust swells down and a skyscraper in the distance explodes. Shrapnel from the building chuck itself into neighboring homes. Flames jump ship. The city begins to burn, slow. Sirens blaring, it vibrates the city. Cells in his body ignite, scream with rage.

An unfortunate soul stepped out and stared at the casualties. Alucard raised his jaws, and propelled his body toward it. Skin musk faded away at his touch. Teeth to jugular, claws behead it. The door behind the human slams and locks. His hind legs kick its body.

No time to savor it. No time to devour what should be mine.

Anise is somewhere in the city. She could be dead. Due to his size Alucard could pick up speed, a little under thirty miles per hour. Buildings zoomed past his peripheral, blended where lines became sounds, worlds pitch discomposure.

Scent picks up Anise, its faint, failing. Dust plumes cover part of her body. No desire to eat its grain. Where did it come from? What are the Agents trying to hide? Alucard thinks of sand beads near the edge of this city, its ocean. Wind travels and takes it with it. Thought tech was self cleaning, with hands no one can see.

Two bodies, in the middle of the street, hover. Dusted into near stone, they were. He can see part of Anise’s coat. Pivots around her and lifts the creature she protects with his mouth. Mouth doesn’t rip deep into the flesh. He can feel its decay. Anise hangs above, can’t see in front of him. Carries them away, they must go far.

Far away from here.

Lifelines held together by leylines. Our lifetimes glimmer fades in and out. My body drops in front of home, carried by the Alucard Taxi. He’s hissing in a steady tempo, rings in my ears. Waves in and out. Parker no longer has his gag, he whimpers. Chest decays from the bacteria spit in Alucard’s mouth.

Stupid, stupid girl. You could’ve left him behind. This was too risky. It wasn’t worth it. I know you can hear me, speak girl.

“It was a gift for you. I understand my actions were brash. They left the door open for me. I had to take the opportunity.”

Opportunity at getting yourself killed? Taking out the building was not the plan. You were supposed to scout them. In and out like a ghost. That’s our memo. Now everyone knows our faces.

“It was too easy, they had minimal security. I have cores for the takeover. We can leave when the dust settles. A new location, this is a good thing.”

Parker screams, believe the mixture of pain, delirium and Alucard’s voice translating on a speaker is driving him mad. Some sort of fucked up fairy tale. Tech was transcendent, and Alucard’s species had been extinct. Never seen one in his life. Never saw a picture from the past. They don’t teach the Agents in the ways of old.

Shut up, peasant. I’ll make it quick. Your time. Alucard points his large eyes toward Parker’s face. Isssss coming soon enough. The adults musssst speak.

“He was making clones and taking advantage of women. Clones meant the Agents could be immortal. They couldn’t talk. I don’t think their lifespans were very long. That’s the disgusting meat you ate earlier. This was a hub for it.”

I don’t care if he was making species of human look alikessss. You will suffer for this, Anise. They will come for all of us, now that the secret is out.

“I didn’t need you to save me. I would’ve come with him regardless.”

I can smell your blood all over you. You’re weak. It’ssss not your fault, your species is easy to kill. We will discuss more when we go dark. We don’t make decisions without each other Anise. Do you remember why?

“If I don’t abide by your rule of blood, it ends the contract and my life is yours.”

Yessss. Is this your sacrifice for your mistake?

“Alucard, this is Agent Parker Smith 306. He betrayed our international agreement. Under our law in the house, I give you a treaty arrangement for my mistake. His sacrifice will hold meaning for all the Agents who can listen. We will come for you in the age of gluttony.”

Alucard opens his jaws, spit drips onto Parker’s skin. Dragon body moves in slow motion, magnetic, my eyes follow. Flaccid brightness from the burning city warms my skin. Black smoke pulls up into the air. Carnage, humans’ wicked ruins live inside Alucard’s mouth. Screams distort into heated noises, Parker’s head string cheeses in his dissemblance. In the zero hour, this tinderbox crumbles. Audio displays of power fade away from reality. Bones swallowed like vultures, audiences to terminate DNA.

Alucard’s eyes look right through me. I crack a smile, my teeth stained red. Our war is a virtue unspoken. Head bounces on the cement, you’ll get everything you want.

Before the street cleaners come.

Before the meeting of the sun.

Pt 1 & Pt 2 will be staggered, tonight(leading into Monday AM) and tuesday.

Nick Winney gave me this prompt, he was one of my first avid fans. He went to every Stream of Consciousness POV workshop, I will run them again, I swear after we land stable housing. (Which is the whole thing behind this series. I have two more bylines, and then redacted people.)

Nick Winney is a mystical character on Substack, I am fairly certain. I don’t even know if he’s mortal. I would give him a prompt right now if he asked for one. I don’t know a prompt I have hated from Nick Winney. He has a wild imagination that I genuinely love the bones of. What I love about him, I can go as weird or different in any of pieces, and he will be supportive. Give Nick a read. Support your Indie Writers~

• If anyone guesses Anise’s star sign, I’ll let you give me a free prompt even if you already have a prompt. I gotta catch up though. [Vinny Reads & JLG Noga + 2 redacted, the math isn’t wrong people showed up later. ]

  

  [ Iris Van Herpen Haute Courte dress, “Crystallization” collection, model ~ Kyona Van Santen. Dutch fashion designer, cover photo of the book: Sculpting the Senses. One of the first fashion designers to print 3D dresses in static & flexible forms. She creates incredible imagery, her work is said to be shown in the Brooklyn Museum in 2026, it hasn’t been announced. You don’t want to miss anything she has in the states. ]

• I will be using Iris Van Herpen’s pieces to be displayed for the whole pt 1 & 2 for some reason I think of Scifi when I look at them. Distorted by yours truly, you can buy the book if you want to look at fascinating fashion, if you’re nowhere near Paris (FR) or Brooklyn. I am not sure if Paris is still displaying her work. Check out, if that’s your thing.

• If anyone knows her tell her not to sue me. I will remove her work. I am so broke I can barely buy food.

• Stream of Consciousness POV, zero draft.

Smoke filled the air, its plume forges distrust where the fog doesn’t creep. Sunsets, and electrified skyscrapers reach for the sun. Stairways to completion, to the man in the clouds. Pillars at inhuman height. In the winter, fog encases above our heads. Its thick quilted warmth, a mother’s lost touch.

I slip past the billionaire buildings, disappear in the insides of the outside. Its anatomical mouth swallows my form, every step is a surprise. Money, its copper taste stains the gums. Every step deserts my former self. Hands on the leash, pulled forward as my pet rubs against my side. Its meat burns the top layers of my skin, epidermis scraped off. Sandpaper raw.

Pet walks wavy, reptilian and strange. When no one’s listening you’ll talk about your puppy. When no one’s watching, they’ll never see it’s a costume. Sometimes, it’ll be a good night for Alucard and I.

Somebody’s not going to be careful. They’ll feed the prey drive. Sloppy, rotten fish.

Home is an antique shop. Home is a masquerade mask. Home lies to the public.

We share a few historical buildings on the block. Brick and mahogany wood. Intimate objects cherished thousands of years before you were birthed, maimed and postured for appearance. Every piece has a story, some you’ve thought up when time moves slowly. People pack themselves like sardines in towers, fester in juices and forget who they are. Wouldn’t bother with a mirror, they’d rather escape through designer drugs and coins. Fill up their laundry with an advertisement, body counts collected in cross bones.

Fur coats lined with human skin, body horror replaced by consumption. The world is desolate, rich in collectables. It resurfaces after they discard bits into the fields behind the cities, walls of trash. It all burns twenty four-seven, three-hundred sixty five days. Those on the other side never see the sun. Our piggy’s cannot imagine what all they leave behind. Piles and piles filled to the brim.

Instead of burial grounds everyone becomes repurposed, recycled into society and worn. Outsiders work underground where the soil is rich and they can still farm. They pick up side jobs as collectors, help repurpose the trash to see the light. Others aren’t as fortunate, and die underneath the weight. Its ecosystem is barely sustainable, we do what we can.

Alucard lets out a hiss, he pulls on the harness. Claws scratch and jerks up parts of the sidewalk. My ears sting when he does this, and I’ll never know if it’s out of spite. Pebbles of cement are adrift, grifting for a place in this world.

Alucard’s hisses are garbled cat chirps distorted from his belly when he’s excited. My arms tense up before the release. Pointer finger pulls the latch, I listen to the leash whip back into my clasp, its harpoon leveled to my chest. Cigarette on my lips suck in its poison. It tastes like the earth is fresh and this hell has burnt crisp.

Somebody got real careless. I see parts of a shadow that’s about to be nobody.

Alcuards jaw opens wide and shoots his bacteria laced spit. It eats away at the skin, melts the barriers to pink dewy muscle. My pet produces an astronomical amount of spit. His eternal body glides in ageless vitality.

My boots keep a distance from Alucard as he works. His serrated teeth pull at the surface of the human body. The body starts to squirm and make garbled speech. I can’t have any of that, noiseless is preferred.

Jolt to the skull, one clean kick right across their jaw. Bone structure felt strange, rubbery. I want to chalk it up to all the microplastics consumed, how it changes organic matter. Disinterested in their expression I shove my thirteen inch boot over their airways. Lean my chest and ribcage into the nose and mouth. It won’t take long, even if it feels ages as the pressure wanes.

A golden necklace lies over his neck with his ID card. I snatch it, its weak chain ripped into tinted scraps.

Surname Smith. No first name. No credentials.

His ashed blond hair dusted the sidewalk.

“How many times do I need to tell you? That’s not real fur Alucard. Let me strip the food.”

I slap a retractable cane in my coat and a spear forms at the bottom. Cut the clothes into debris and put them in my duffle bag. Not a care in the world if Alucard leaves anything behind. People talk less than a day before they forget what happened. Street cleaners come and wash away the carnage. Blame the people in the cities of trash, and praise Jezzus. Hopes and players. Competition lost.

Alucard sucks pieces of flesh into his mouth. Ripped, torn and shredded. Humans were scaled beyond the limits of his jaws. No snake constriction, no expansion. We’ve tried to genetically alter him in perilous ways for a smooth transition. Biology defies it.

The necklace around Alucard’s throat makes a noise, and begins to blink. My finger taps my earbud, and I hear a translation.

This is disgusting. Let’s go home.

My hand fumbles for the leash before I link it to his harness.

We leave the identification less carcass in the middle of the sidewalk. A heap of bones and flesh with holes. Face unrecognizable. It smells of bile and iron in the air. Sea salt from the fog washes away some of the thankless decayed flesh. Molted from Alcuard’s venom.

Victims get logged in a generation of people. This one forgot to identify themselves and recharge their ID before they went outside. Likely a pseudonym, to hide from their lover, their wife, their family life. They all become collectables regardless of the stakes.

Sardines without a master, without a home.

Alucard is the last dragon.

His whole species got decimated in the thousand year war. Heard from the Elders they were the larger version of Komodo dragons. They’re similar in size to tigers or would have been Russian war dogs. Evolution was swift, when the planet decided to go dormant. Species survived and evolved, or they couldn’t adapt.

For centuries the people in the cities of trash kept them alive, as a weapon until Agents of the Machine caught hold of their plans. Generation after generation, Alucard was genetically altered to exceed all life.

When he became the last dragon, the scientists had a breakthrough and devised a necklace to allow him to acquire language. His grief I imagine is replaced by bloodlust. Something in his biology that cannot be maintained or altered by us.

Alucard and I have a deal.

I destroy this city, and he eats whoever he wants as long as it’s through our rules of law. Alucard lets me pat him and rub his belly like a puppy. Elders have disguised him into large dog body structures and no one asks questions. I design hats in various colored ears over his head. He doesn’t seem to protest it. People in the city believe his tail is a prop. People believe he isn’t real.

Alucard has been around me since I was a child. He’s feral and sentient, terrifying at best. I am sure if given the opportunity he would rather have been human on any other day. Elders have the keys to his brain, how it functions, how it forms. I try not to prod him with questions beyond either of our wheelhouses. It’s a waste of time. This city’s gotta burn.

All the piggy’s think they’re the masters as Agents of the Machine.

Leaned back in my wheely chair in the lab. The ID was locked. Not your normal pick up. Smith was a pseudonym, now you’ll have to find out who the fuck they were. Normally when Alucard needs to feed it’ll be weeks at a time. In the present, his bloodlust has become insufferable. None of the meat satisfies his needs. More, every three days and for trade, I give him a rubber ducky to extract his venom.

I’m a collector of poisons and medicinal properties. Alucard respects it, because we trade flesh for venom. Our deadly exchange.

When we’re behind the doors I unzip his costume parts and let him roam free. I’ll find him sleeping in his bath hub which is a pool covered with inside ferns, maidenhair and lemon button. Assorted rocks glow luminescent neon rays, pink and hybrid blues. If Alucard was an immortal human, he would’ve been desperately involved in our dance scene.

There’s a tippy tap on the windowsill connected to the tunnels underground, broke my train of thought. My body scoots the chair to the other side of the window, pulled a lever and a pair of eyes match mine.

“I am here to see an update on identification for the Elders.”

“Yeah? You good at breaching security locks?”

A deep sigh pushes into the panel on the otherside. “What do you have for me?”

I move my body to the door that looks as if it might open a closet. Behind it are three steel chamber doors, and the third is a round wheel that has locks in place. Numbers click it open, 6-9-8-7-9-9-8-3. Before they pass through the other chambers, there’s a room to sterilize the bodies. Little tiny guns shoot substances thick see through goo that diffuses into rubbing alcoholic spicy air. It wipes on their skin and analyzes their data. There cannot be any cross contamination. That’d be dangerous, Agents would find our ruse. Nobody’s able to cross until the top light clicks bronze. No diseases, no problem.

I’m standing smoking watching the person through the cameras. They sent fuckin’ Liam. He’s a rising star apparently, all the underground loves him. Liam’s an incredibly fast courier, and also he loves tech shit. None of which interests me unless it’s poison related. If it’s a tool, I want it. If it’s a computer, make it accessible, or chuck the hardware out the damn window.

“Look who crawled out of a hole.”

“Pleasure to see you, Anise.”

My fingers on the ID card, I rub it with my thumb. “You don’t mean it.”

“I never do.” He holds out his palm. “What do you have for me?”

“It was Alucard’s feeding time. Random person on the street, the usual. Well, it wasn’t normal. People often scream. Fucker was mostly silent.”

“Smith, huh?”

“No first name, no regional location. Just a ghost in the system. There’s a strong lock it blocks his data chain. Redacted on purpose. Someone was smart about it. I can’t find it anywhere.”

“Move over, Anise. Let me see if I can hack it.”

He moves your body out of the way and places the chip into your makeshift reader on your computer. Data shows xxx, nothing. He pulls up the data generator, and begins to hack inside the Agent’s hub.

One of Alucard’s first kills was a top bitch had all kinds of devices we learned to make copies of copies. Access to every person in this forsaken city. If we don’t have a city, we can go state or national. Smith was an echo. No one in the city with the likeliness of him.

Somebody’s trying to hide their private life.

Liam’s top brow began to sweat, codes filling up the page looked foreign. Screen went black with zig zag lines across the laptop. The whole process gave me waves of anxiety watching it. Nothing was going to happen. He might as well just been free food for Alucard, which I suppose is fine. Nobody is nobody.

Liam smiled, “Don’t give up on me, Anise. I think I got it. Yeah, yeah.” He slipped his fingers across the keyboard, an orchestra played with his dexterity. “Yeah, there we go. Parker Smith Agent 306. Age zero. Not sure what the hell that means. No address. Owned by Company Silver. Worth looking into I’d say.”

“Never heard of it. Gotta be a shell.”

“You’re going to have to look into it since Alucard ate him. We can’t have the Agents on our back. It’s too risky.”

“Guess my weekend has suddenly opened up. They might be able to donate to my charity case.” I sucked in the cigarette and blew smoke in Liam’s face.

“If you keep doing that I’ll get cancer from second hand smoke.”

“It’d be a damn shame. Alucard doesn’t like nasty organs.”

“Alucard does have a mind of his own. He much prefers non-humans. Have you tried taking him out of the city to eat sheep or goat?”

“That’s expensive. We’d have to hunt in the wild. We have work to do, and he knows it. This isn’t a game, Liam. People’s lives are on the line. We cannot merge cities until the threat is neutralized. Say, we succeed. It’ll be much easier spreading it in other domains. A complete takeover.”

“We’re lucky, you know. The world stopped making bullets. We would’ve had far worse carnage.”

“Have you ever been punched by their robotic security men?”

“I can’t say that I have.”

I lean in real close to his face, “You can’t poison them because they’re not real. You gotta hit them with barbed wire bats to loosen up their mechs, or dissemble their core, if fortunes on your side. Should they get you, you’ll end up throwing up blood for weeks.”

Liam’s curly hair fell through my fingers, ringlets. Baby hairs. “It doesn’t kill them, nothing they can’t fix. They’re all programmed to believe they’re good. They don’t get it, lack of consciousness. Bullets would be faster.”

“If there were bullets we wouldn’t have a chance.”

“If there were bullets, all I would need is a team, out by a week. People don’t understand how combat changes a person. When you’re not worried about dying, your awareness drops to zero. It’s an easy kill.”

Liam smiled, it may have been the first time I saw his flawless engineered teeth. “You can’t poison mechs, how do you think we’ll get there?”

“No, but I can burn their hardware. Nothing like a little hydrofluoric acid and a bit of fire to do the trick. Inside, outside. Doesn’t matter.”

“You risk hydrogen fluoride gas, Anise. It’s dangerous.”

“Oh? You’re concerned I don’t know how to wear PPE? Come on Liam, stay being a bitch boy and leave the killing to the professionals.”

Liam laughed, “I plan to see my age well into an wrinkled old bastard. Happily, a bitch boy.”

Are you reading horoscopes, again?

“Yes, Alucard. You never know when you need to consult with the stars to make a decision.”

What do the prophecies tell you?

“I should stake the place out tomorrow, Wednesday. Avoid either end of the week at all costs. When was your birthday again?”

Who knows, Anise. You’re born, you eat, or be killed. It’s simple.

“One hell of a boring life. If we can find out how to transplant your brain into a body. I will be sure to put my name in for good luck.”

I would rather die.

“I thought you hated being a dog? Wouldn’t you like to have hands? You could pick up shit instead of wrecking it. I am going to say, you’re definitely a Scorpio.”

I am not sure what that means.

“It doesn’t matter, it’s the vibe I’m catching from you. Total Scorpio energy. It says you can’t go outside for a week.”

Does it say I am allowed any gluttony?

“Yes, I should probably bring a partial slab of someone’s body.”

Don’t cut off anyone’s dick, because you’re bored. I won’t eat that.

“I don’t want to get my delicate hands filthy. I much prefer to watch them suffer.”

What’s your star sign?

“You’d never believe it, even if I told you.”

Try me.

“I’m a mirror. I reveal everything. Rip out the uncomfortable reflection of the self. It’s beautiful Alucard. Menkind don’t have to acknowledge reality. What monsters they wish to create is plentiful. Many fail to escape themselves when they find awareness.”

This is a run around. Menkind are children. They only wish their ignorance could pacify them. When I learned the language, I thought it would be prophetic. Now, all I feel is disdain.
How many treats will you bring home for me?

“As many as I can carry. We’ll even try out your poison. I wonder which is stronger, yours or hydrofluoric acid?”

Don’t bring me any poisoned meat, it hurts my stomach. I trussst you. I would hate to eat you out of spite.

“There it is. The Scorpio. You’re a fuckin’ Scorpio.”

You know I won’t eat you. You’re too confident. If Liam comes back he could be collateral.

“No, Alucard. He’s the best the other side’s got. We taunt the baby hair bitch boy because he’s easy. Eating him isn’t an option. Humiliation is better, lasts longer. He’ll know it by name.”

Now, I’m hungry.

“We’ll hunt tonight. Somebody’s gonna follow me.”

Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Anise.

“If someone follows me, I’ll need them to fess up. I’ll need a code word to step away, Alucard.”

Scorpio.

In the afternoon with a cup of tea, earl grey stains the front enamel of your teeth. For all the wrong reasons, rumination hijacks your brain and lives right on the tongue. It swirls like a squiggly line sentient of its own thoughts. This is a hostage situation. Since you realized your own consciousness, there was the fantasy. The world without trash and death. It lived in the pigments of trees, the veins in the leaves, before poisons and disease. It’s hard to confiscate a brain like yours and throw away all of it wholesale. You’ll dance like the Agents to the right tune, if only for a moment and let life reveal itself.

Alucard expressed, the only way for a fresh start is to fight back. Burn it down. Leave behind the quiet luxuries and comfort of safety. Most of your life, you could hide behind the angled blade, labs filled with poison, as you climbed and assumed a position as a middle class collector. Pay in your year spot. Life’s transactional state.

Inside the layers that make up your existence, it’s hard to turn away. To hide, to store memories, to collect what wants to be forgotten.

Most of the wealthy women live in their ivory towers never to see the light of day. When the new world comes, women will be on the battlefield. All generations. Menkind cannot exist without the first woman.

All the poisons are hidden to the menkind?

Stored in vials behind coat pockets where it can’t be detected. “I’ll be fine, Alucard. I can pretend I am somebody’s girlfriend.”

Will they not see through you?

“Maybe, I doubt it will go as planned. I will die or go in.”

We don’t even know who runs the place.

“I like to come in hot. It helps me feign ignorance easier.”

Something doesn’t feel right.

“If I don’t come back by 1 AM, you know what to do.”

I call the Elders and escape through my door for the clean up crew to dissssmantle any resemblance of you.

“And how do you call the Elders?” My hands place a different retractable cane that opens up into a metal bat with barbed wire.

I press the prerecorded device in your bedroom with a dragon symbol. Are you even listening to me?

Teflon tubing hides the hydrofluoric acid in the event they have robots. Four throwaway knives for their core, if I can get close. There’s new tech every week on this side of the world. Newsletters come out in droves. Did you see it? The latest is bioengineering and cross breeding of species. They no longer have mutants that die. Did you want the bunny deer? Yes. Does it look cute until it opens its mouth? Yes. Alucard has only eaten a few of them. According to him they taste far better than the two legged creatures.

Hello? Don’t tell me you have a brain bleed.

“I am thinking.”

Are you? Because bitch boy doesn’t sound like he knows what he’s talking about.

“It’s going to be fine. Piece of cake.”

If you die I’ll eat the rest of your corpse.

“Promise?”

Folded the duffel bag four ways and slipped it into my zipper inner pocket. Alucard’s eyes collapse behind film, gooey, abalone texture. Spinning fast, it’s hard to read what he’s thinking. My nails glide over the glass pane, antiques glittering underneath the overhead lights. My hands pat the brim of his nose leading to his head. He doesn’t stir, statuesque. No reason to keep him in puppy form, I’ll be long gone.

My thankless, loveless life. I cannot feel it, the way I felt it back when.

Outside the sun is red, it doesn’t blind me.

I watch it stain the sidewalks with bright light, mercurial over my boots. The fog blotches the light. It’s still grey. Oh, the city speaks its truth. My heart goes out to the ones before me. Its sharp razor. I remember when the sidewalks had trees, old centuries old. Grandmother’s and grandfather’s of a different lifeline. Their roots tore up the streets, cement bumps and potholes.

No one walks on the streets after the dark hits. People stay in. Dog days fill up their comfort.

Libraries shutter, the quiet creeps in. Security guards stay outside, some real, some not real. Irregular movements fight with the shadows. I contour with the ground. Slip a syringe into my left hand press into the skin with a whisper. Two hours to find the antidote. Two hours to feel the heartburn create heart palpitations repeated in their chest.

No witnesses, no problems. Breadcrumbs for anyone searching. My kaleidoscope disaster.

The Company is about one mile away. Convenience is not a coincidence, Parker Smith. Agents know something is in their city, they don’t know what it is or who it is. It would take less than a minute to infiltrate my compound. Less than a minute for me to blow it all up with my body as collateral. Sacrifices aren’t my thing anymore. Ghost transactions is ideal.

Looked up the nefarious place. Some winding scantily lit staircase made of cheap black metal. Every window has a door attached that leads out. Wonder how many people get hung off, and see their piercing end. Rooms into their splattered remains, unable to escape fate. Hate heights. Vertigo. Not going to climb those things even if it’s easier access. Robots gotta be outside. No way there is a human meat shield.

Will have to switch it up. There’s one way without lighting them up with hydrofluoric acid. In the middle of the throat is a lever. Opens up after you twist their Adam’s apple. You don’t even have to peel back their slimy rubbery skin. It opens up, as it partially beheads them and you take their core. Hard drives are harder to crack. Costs a fortune to replace them. After we steal their data, we wipe it clean and powerhouse the underground. Trash city can burn righteous. People get electricity for years. It’s worth it, won’t be able to take any today.

Fuckers hit hard. Not looking forward to them getting tough with me. Best way to tell is at the nape of the neck. There’s a zipper. No way a human would get one for a body mod. Bloody infections. Fastest way to sepsis. Hospitals log you in a system to forget you.

Two security guards stand straight up, posture a line. Look at those unblinking bastards. Cameras in their eyes. Speakers to process data. Everybody’s got a code whether or not they realize it.

One of my syringes had two shots of whiskey. Shooted it straight into my mouth. Crunch it underneath my boot. Unkempt. Pyre in my loins. Take me to the chapel.

Skins cold to touch, my voice slurs. “Parker. He told me he works here. I want to see Parker.”

‘Parker who, miss?’

Never would know they were artificial unless you listened to their unnatural speech. I flick my nails on its zipper, stumbling on its rock hard body. Hand quickly fucks down the lever. His head was held together by sticky goo, applesauce spaghetti. I slide a knife into the center and trip its core.

Not even a second passes between the other one. Launch myself on its body.

“Parker. Parker Smith. What’s wrong with your friend? It’s toooooo early to be sleepin’.”

‘I will call him down, Miss.’

“Yes, I would very much like that, mister misery mister.”

Hand behind its neck flicking the zipper. “Where does it go?”

‘What go?’

“Your zipper. Where’s it go? Do you get to choose what skin suit you wear? Haha.”

Parker Smith, the man Alucard ate a few days ago, stood at the entryway confused. Oh, this is rich. Who the fuck are you? I stumbled into the robot. Stabbed into the robot’s core with a longer blade. Not enough to kill it. Trip the wires. No cameras.

“Can I help you?”

Yes, you can. I kick the robot down and swing up to the real Parker Smith. My hands are at war with the wind. Right hand on his throat, not enough pressure to choke him. Enough for him to feel it there.

“I fucked you, but you’re not you. Who the fuck is you?”

“It’s complicated.” He chokes up the words.

“Amnesia, love?”

“I can tell you’re upset. Why don’t we go inside and talk?”

Yes, tell me why there’s clones of you. Don’t ask about how those security robots were just chucked to the ground. Broken. Without fuses to hold them together.

He holds my hand, inside I shutter. Parker Smith has cologne thick enough you can drink it and it torches your nose like a bad cocaine habit. Cremates whatever color you had left inside this graveyard.

“We’re still working on the programming. I know it must feel jarring seeing another person who isn’t real.”

Casual, between friends. I relax when I see his big veins on his neck. Hungry, I imagine Alucard in heat, his blood filling our parched bone dry lips. Detach, and disorganized his human life. Bet, he secretly wants to be discarded. They all do. “It’s pretty fucking weird.”

“We’re scientists, with the birth rate declining we’re going to have to make the absolute human. Holy grail, eternal life. Or kidnap people off the streets in the outer cities.”

“Trash city is hardly a city. More like a compound to roll in their own feces.”

“It would be less than ideal considering our unspoken treaty.”

“Who cares about them if it means we exist though?”

He led me into a flat, a high ceiling luxury loft. In the middle was an obscenely large bed with about a dozen screens lit up on the wall. Monitoring. Recorded. One screen was completely static. Must have been Alucard’s kill.

He brings me to the bar and begins to pour me a drink.

“How much money do you want to stay quiet?”

“Not even going to ask my name?”

“You’re Anisette Green of the Otherworldly Antiquities. I looked you up, while you were accosting our guards. I could’ve sworn one of my clones must have seen you. It was you over him. What was it like? Fucking a clone?”

My face could not hide my disappointment. Menkind are a fuckin’ travesty. I slide the glass back into his hands.

“It wasn’t as impressive as I had thought. He didn’t make a noise, cold fish. After, he ghosted me. I have his ID card. Brought me here.”

I slap his ID card down. Data is mine. His face goes pale, “The thing is Parker. I love kinky sex. It turns out, the fake one couldn’t keep up. Somewhere during our tiny excursion, his ID card fell on my floor. Naturally, I needed questions. So, what’s your story?”

“It’s rare those things ever come undone.”

“You should probably microchip your pets.”

“That’s an idea. They still need an ID to pretend to be real.”

“You a kinky bastard too, aren’t you Parker? Bet you love to watch yourself fuck various women.”

“In a way, yeah. I want to see alternative timelines.”

“I am not judging you for your curiosity. It’s probably every man’s wet dream.”

“You want my story and you’ll leave?”

“Yes, I am an archivist. I can’t help it, if I want to know more.”

“Anisette, who are you?”

“I am not into credentialism. I am a collector, Agent Parker.”

The writer who gave it to me is someone I cherish deeply, her name is Kristin Peterson. I don’t know if she’s still posting but, I love her horror. The worlds she creates, and is an incredible human. I am blessed to call her someone close to family.

[Me, circa 2014, distorted by yours truly]
Stream of Consciousness POV, zero draft.

1. 2. 3.

Memories live beyond reflection. Its lipstick stains grew mold where moist mushrooms live inside. Fingers glide along the grooves, everything is hushed next to the wick. Behind me, is a shadow who knows my name. They’re disfigured flesh lost, rotten in their reign. Together, pigments of our skin have gone anemic. Guttural wheezed breaths drift in and out of sorrow and song. Dreams trapped in our throats through asphyxiation and bated breaths. Ski mask slides to the side. My shadows face exposed, shredded at the husk.

We share a story, in the wild, in the lush.

Words leave behind the pages torn, swim between my toes and finds crevices to live in secret. All connections remain unearthed. Unfettered by the outside. Hidden messages imprisoned between bones. A spectre of life, our ruined collection.

Love slips past my tongue, I am your burned victim. Garments are failures shielding our bodies. It breathes in passages of your orifices, seeming ordinary broken on the floor.

Behind every abandoned building is a garden where we live. Without agency, or autonomy to be authorized into existence. Public castration, eyes without a voice.

Felt my fingers in the soil, tear polluted wetness. The unseen takes what it must, it begins with the fingers. Paint brushes slick the mud, pockets of stained glass slashed our skin. Now we, glisten in the glitter, shiny bright. Geometric juxtaposition, wishes on a spike. Film flickers at the knuckles, its radiant song severed at the palm. Channels move into meaning gone hoarse. Swollen valves cuts through foam, slow and deep. My ritual is not quite complete.

Performance needs to focus, where the sun stays bright. Mornings melon in the darkest nights. Without moderation paradise lives in the galleries, impulsive halos tilted parallel. Choices in trade for posture. Emotion without intention, saturated our minds. Fools pretend to be suitable, lives imagined. In the colors of their stormy eyes is abysmal. We spin in a dance, their mouths unavailable without validation. We kiss eternal, flesh on flesh, bye bye.

In the wild, in the quiet, in the spit.

Fight or flight faints and breaks off. Bones of my wrist replica underneath, carpals become poetry. Copies made. Skin scent glands breathe their petals; we’re alive in decomposition, in the wild, in the lush. Without theory. We taste behind our bitter veils, stare into our nonselves. A different version of you exists for every lifetime, through others vying eyes. Blood blossoms in slit wrists, ghost static low. We speak in crisis hotlines. Sweat no longer salt, pollutes the wild with filthy snow.

In the wild, in the hunger, I yearn.

Soil encompasses my face, blanketed by the insects crawled into my space. They scrape threads of life, faceless gardeners. Invisibility dissembles my identity. Tell me, I am still alive.

In the wild, you’ll wrap my heart, so that I may never burn.

Burn.

3. 2. 1.

Blood pooled out of my mouth, born this way.

Strange energy filled down my legs, tiny little sparks pin prick the skin. On the corner of my ribcage, I lie. Uncertain if my captor is a lover or an enemy. The world could swallow me whole, if I let it. All that is alive moves around lethargic. Spliced imagery between here and now. Fingers crossed over my heart where it should live, pounding. Seeming human, as if it’ll be enough.

I crack my eyes, seeing an androgynous creature beside me. The creature’s eyes are relaxed, magnified by my movements. Wine on their lips. Tannins heavy, old world and new world interlaced. My lips are parched from the act, its renewal, the endless. The creature is my passenger, they put their long finger on my lips to press against mine. I let their sharp nail cut me, its pressure, a scentless finger.

“Water?” I mouth through the finger. Centuries have passed, and my decomposition meant nothing. The planet still breathes, I am still here in one way.

“How long have you been this way before I found you?”

“It depends on the year, does it matter?” My voice is hoarse, gravel grated against sheetrock.

“What are you?”

“What are you? You’re not human. You’re endless, like me.”

“We share similar specifics, but our needs are different.”

“Bold assumption for something you’ve never met.”

My passenger smiled, wine stained teeth.

“We’ve seen each other before; you don’t remember.”

The endless are invisible, their words don’t connect to me. They’ve become a phantom of my past. Fever dreams slip between reality and subconsciousness. Colors drain over my eyes, dripping into my eye sockets. Vibrations touch my innards and make them weep.

We’re not allowed coexistence in society. We cannot be more. They cannot be more to me. World’s suffer when they push their will into the dark to suffocate. Humanity is going to watch the stars burn out, and we’ll be here.

Ghosts have swallowed the corridors, names of endless are pages lost to only those who still remember. Why can’t I remember their face? I’ll never know the era by the candlelight. Torn by concept, by what I thought I knew.

The abandoned villa has been overtaken by plants where other parts have fallen apart, lost by time. My passenger’s face is expressionless, a blank slate. Destruction lives deep into my toes and I see the real when I take dried leaves and crumble it in their wine. They drink the leaves and crunch it between their teeth, petioles immersed.

My passengers eyes were the color of blood, hazy like an albino in heat. The way their mouth moved felt unnatural. Times chronos clock defeated by the apocalypse and this species. It defied mankind, I could close my eyes and feel it move, my words barely stay present. Tinkers with my insides, it does. Don’t know which way is up or down.

My eyes depart, shut down. I feel the passenger gnawing at my throat. Canines temptress tiger, ripped my veins webs clean off. My necks chunk disappears and reappears. Swims between pain and numbness. They smell of sulfur and gasoline when their lips touch mine. We trade messenger blood cells. Genetic vulnerability as we change. I’m their lab rat, they’re my eternal hunter.

One is one step above the other, the alternative let’s them devour them whole. Entangled, the world slows down for us. Ageless divergence. Uncovered mysteries without names. Devoid of placeholders, outside of lies.

We dream for the endless.

We only wish to burn.

[Photography distorted again by yours truly.]
Stream of Consciousness POV, Zero draft.
Thanks Drew for this incredible prompt.

She wore my Nick Cave shirt and boxer briefs, I wrapped her in one of my denim jackets, her fur went over it. Morgana promised she wouldn’t get cold because she hasn’t cum that good since her past life. She wanted to be worshipped, and I delivered.

While my heart was crushed about Ruby earlier, Morgana wiped that bitch off the face of the map. Operation she don’t exist no more. If anyone can kill a person in your head, it has to be Morgana. My hands picked up her lightweight body from ass to waist. She read the cue, legs wrapped around me like a snake strangling its prey. Carried her to the bar, her breath against my neck. Felt the tremble of her legs against my bones. Comfortably feral. I wasn’t going to make her walk on gravel. She deserved better.

Strip club smelled of dirty whiskey and cheap beer. Half of the men were zonked out with girls lazily dancing on their thighs not even making a real cash in. There were shadows of bodies in every corner, it was hard to see what was happening when you were razor focused on someone else. Gripped her ass into me tight. Colors were your typical neon pink hue and purple lighting with girls playing whatever set made the mood, ‘cause we were in bumfuck nowhere. Girls didn’t have to behave. All of them did whatever they wanted on the floor. Some were riding men reverse cowgirl right beneath the stage getting their tits stashed with bills. One could appreciate the anarchy of this place.

The bartender recognized Morgana and side eyed me. I held up our room card and flicked it into my back pocket.

“Double whiskey neat top shelf and whatever the lady wants.”

Morgana leans her body backwards over the bar landing and giggles, “Dirty dirty martini. So fuckin dirty.”

“Whose this good looking girl, Morgana?”

Morgana points her nails at me, “This is Glory. She’s a Queen bee. Where’s the other girly pops?”

“Hey Glory. Yeah, the girls. They missed your set and are rubbing off a few knobs before they rest for the day. You know how it is. Cream pies and iced tea.”

“How long do you think I have to wait for them?” Morgana pulled her body back into mine. Her legs riding on my hip bones. The movement barely bothered me, it was the warmth I wanted. Her scent filled me up, when the cup was already half empty.

“At least an hour. How about this? I get you two a lounge and y’all can have some drinks while you wait?”

I unzip one of my pockets and pull out a hundo. “Think this’ll cover drinks?”

“No change?”

Morgana pivots her body back into my lower waist and croons, “Glory hates change. You keep whatever’s left.”

Bartender grabs the hundred and slides it into their pocket. “Fine by me, you show her the way Morgana. Gonna have to walk. Can’t have any of the men thinking they can carry our girls around for extra cash.”

Morgana whimpers and uses my core to set herself down, “Fine, Shane. Have it your way.” Morgana grabs my hand and leads me through the thicket. It might as well have been a sex dungeon instead of a strip club. Bodies meshed together. It was hard to see who was who and what was what. Barely lit up, tongues and mouths sucking and squishing in the fray. Low barrel house music.

We landed at some empty stairs and a square leather lounge with a small table in the middle. She placed her cocktail in the center and climbed on all fours to get to the middle. I set my whiskey down and slid into the center, lips inches away from her cheekbone.

“We’ll have to stay real close if we want to hear each other over the music.”

“What’s your story Morgana? How the fuck did you end up out here?”

“There was this guy, he told me the only way to climb Hollywood was to become immortal.”

“So, a bunch of lies to get his dick wet.”

“Partially correct. It was a sex cult. His best friend genetically engineered these centipedes and if you swallowed them, after capturing so many souls, you would never die.”

“Bullshit. Centipedes? And then what? How do you collect souls?”

“You fuck people and transfer the parasite.”

“Do I have the parasite in me?” I didn’t believe her at this point. Immortal centipedes, no way California was down for some underground synthetic drug. It could explain why heroin chic was in again amongst the celebrities. Couldn’t pay me to be trapped with those lizard people.

Morgana laughed. “No, silly. There’s a ritual of the tongue. I actually like you and I don’t even know if it’ll work on you.”

“In theory, if it did what happens to the body?”

“It’s truly horrific, it just eats away at them and they go dormant forever. Similar to a coma, but they’re awake and unable to talk. Eventually the parasite gets real annoyed by their inability to cum and it starts to eat your flesh and your organs. That’s how people die. When they die, their body leaves little nuggets you have to eat.”

“I see, and that’s how you collect their souls.”

Morgana sips her martini, “I know you think I’m crazy but, I can show you tonight if you want.”

“How many souls do you need to collect until you’re immortal?”

“Only 15 now.”

“This man of yours, where is he now?”

Morgana smiled, “I ate him.”

Nonchalant, no eyes blinked in the exchange. Anybody in the universe is expecting a gotcha moment. Laughter fills the room, a sick sitcom. I can hear the spit behind her teeth, her smile is still there.

My hand goes into my beanie. Rubbed my hair. Come to think of it, Ruby wasn’t the worst even if she was a cunt. I close my eyes and try to count to ten before I answer. It’s weighing me down, cannibalistic bug eating sex immortal cult. What the hell are they putting in the water in Hollywood? Jesus fuck.

“Why?” Perfectly normal answer. There’s no telling how these conspiracy theories work in the first place.

“The genetically made centipede chooses your mate for you. In all honesty, it has to do with love or the closest thing to it.”

“You let everyone fuck you before you tell them your last name?”

Morgana puts her hand over mine, and I shudder. “No, you’re special, Glory. I think you’ll make it.”

Tombstone dead serious eyes staring at my face. Well, it’s new. It’s better than whatever Pizzagate was supposed to be. Still, I didn’t understand the purpose of that one. I scratch the top of my head.

“Wild.” I grab my drink slurp down half. Suicide doesn’t sound half bad anymore. Grippy sock lands need to come collect this Hollywood chick and set her ass free. I lean my head into the leather. Can’t leave her hanging with that. Just go along enough before you leave again, no note, no thank you card. Bitter cold silence. She’s the pale on pale bitch from nowhere.

“I am willing to try it out. There’s gotta be some girls you hate in here. We can tag team them or whatever. Get your bag.”

Morgana leans in real close to my face, “I want you to tell me your story before we decide to murder somebody.”

Fuck, I gotta talk about Ruby now. I put my hands over my eyes. Close them and let out a deep sigh. “I had a girl that was similar to a pseudo wifey. We lived together for about seven years, and I found her cheating on me today. Her GM. I reacted, set off the fire alarm and peaced out. Ghosted. No note. No goodbye. Just disappeared. Before I met you, I was going to drive until my car couldn’t make it and die somewhere.”

I put a cigarette into my mouth, fuck these people. “I am from the Pacific Northwest, Washington. Or we were at one point. My mom was a junkie, real into H. She fucked her way across country before we landed in the south. Seen enough cock to never want it let alone think about it. Loving cock is a fuckin’ choice. I can’t imagine wanting some sweaty ass half bent fuckhead and telling yourself, this is it. This is where my pussy goes to die.”

“Loving dick is not a choice the way you love pussy, Glory. I bet more than half of the girls in here would rather slit these throats.”

“Well, why don’t they? Women have more to give.”

Morgana squeezed my hand, “Have you thought of this girl since you got me to come?”

“Who Ruby? You wiped her off the map. It was a blessing in disguise.”

“How about this, we take the racist and the homophobe back to our room and I’ll show you the ritual. I know you think I’m crazy, and believe me it is. After all is said and done, you’ll have the opportunity to travel the world with me instead of dying somewhere cold and sad.”

“This parasite. How do I get it?”

“We can make out for a little and see if it triggers it.”

I put my hands on her crazy little fingers. “I want you to prove to me you want me. Not some rando who saved your ass in a weird situation. I am all for popping off on some white trash trads, but I want a bit more from you.” I lean in close enough to graze my lips on her breath. “Lesbians fuck better, show me what you can bring to the table.”

Morgana pulls out a centipede from her purse and drops it into her martini. It’s small, baby sized. Pinky sized. She takes the martini and chugs the whole thing. Morgana wipes her back hand across her lips, smearing it cheek to cheek. Perfect, almost as unseemly as this whole damn story.

Fight night. Round one, her hands shove me onto the couch. Struggled to unbuckle my jeans. I love seeing her shift her weight attempting to wiggle it free. My arms are up as I look beneath me. We might be more similar than we both let on. She pulls my pants and boxer briefs down to my boots. Gonna have to unlace those if she wants more. Morgana provides every intricate detail as she unties the boots with delicate care.

Boots off. Pants under the table. Something’s got to give. I watch the creature in her mouth flush around her gums, its body slides from left to right. Its impression left my insides feeling frightened. I won’t lie. Never a fan of the fuckin’ things.

Before, I can react she pushes her mouth into mine, opening my jaw unnaturally. Creepy crawler worked its way down my throat. Both tantalizing and daunting in its exhibition. Resistance is in my nature, and yet a scream never leaves my lips. Her tongue is doing powerful work, I don’t stop her. Morgana’s fingers twist to make a bread knot, jolts them into an angled claw up into my pussy. Petting my insides, muscles contract against her bones. Not enough to cum, not enough to rip off her clothes and ride her in this lounge. A taste, a tease. She pulls out my hot lava juice and shoves it into my mouth. I suck my layers, I know I taste good.

Escapism is a drug, they say. Damn right. Her fingers claw open my mouth, tongue out like a pet. She feeds me the warmth of the whiskey, I feel everything burn. Her tongue has razor ridges that cut me on impact. Something I’ve never experienced before now.

Out of focus, the air around me begins to distort. A fire within that expands into a calamity of my own doing. Morgana leans down underneath the table, her tongue moves into pointed jabs before she circles. Hot and heavy. I let her work for it, and god damn after the day I’ve had; I deserve a treat. I feel her mouth ache against mine, a hunger that needs to fill our emptiness.

Two fingers pressed deeper onto my clit, rubbed until I am sticky. I breathe out, not a moan. My whole face is flushed. Her eyes are on me. Strip club surrounding us, disappears into thin air. Nick Caves shirt with her sweat and my juices sticking to her breasts.

She bites my lobe and whispers, “Right about now, you would be in full paralysis from the centipede. It would seem the parasitic sentient creature has chosen you. I think we should continue in the bedroom. I don’t want people watching us.”

Her eyes darted. “They don’t deserve our audience.”

Edged. I grab her throat, half heartedly choke her. Uncertain, if she has an antidote or if I am fucked until I die. Uncontrolled. I release her throat, my hand caresses her face. A creature is living inside of me changing the wiring on how I feel.

“I think we should invite those bitches and buy a couple of bottles. I want to see somebody burn.” A voice comes out of my mouth, I don’t recognize. Is it mine? Is it the centipede?

Morgana smiles, the crazy bitch knows something I don’t. She smacks my clit hard, I bite my knuckles. Don’t hate it, completely. She falls backwards, as if it was her first time. Not long enough for a lesbian. It was fast like a loaded gun, and soft like an experiment.

I watch her slip out of the lounge, “I’ll be right back, love.”

Pulled on my pants, the walk of shame. Not what I had in mind. Tension builds up through my throat, it seared my veins. Swelters, and lingers in the stillness. Tied my boots tight, ‘cause at some point I am getting the fuck outta here. She-succubus wasn’t going to take me with her under her spell. Capt save a crazy hoe. Dying was the only option at this point.
Shane rolls around the corner, she has a glass of whisky filled to the brim.

“I’ve never seen Morgana with anyone. Where are you from?”

“Way out in the cuts.”

“Figures, all the good ones get trapped out there. So, what’s the secret? How did you land her?”

“Maybe, I am too damn polite.”

Shane laughed, “Haha. You don’t need to tell me. Drinks on me. Anything you need.”

“Yeah I am going to need bottles for the room. We’re going to have some guests.”

“Love it. Anything you want.”

I want to stick my head inside an oven.

Four hundred in Shane’s hand. She didn’t need to hear the rest. Her silhouette vanished underneath the neon lights. House transferred into shoegaze, a girl with fake angelic wings dances real slow on the stage. Glitter face dirty. Chubs honking their knobs. Everybody’s got a story, where lovers get lost.

Waited for her to whisk away and enjoyed myself, a cigarette. Asphyxiation in my throat as the smoke consumed every little bit of me and hoped to kill the creature nestled deep inside. Morgana has no last name, just Morgana. Hollywood girl. Royal out of her damn mind. I never said I was nice. I am polite.

Two girls are holding hands with Morgana, their disinterested faces disgust me. They won’t stop me from scattering my ashes on the table. I’ll make a mess. We’re all experiments, need a scientific retreat away from this hell hole. Girl number one breaks my train of thought, and I want to kill her.

“I don’t fuck bitches, only chads.” Girl number one speaks directly at me. It doesn’t make a difference. I wouldn’t touch her. Her filler lips and polyester skin already turned me off.

I sip my whiskey down an inch. “Is that right?”

“Who the fuck are you?” Girl number one pulls up her hands into fists. Oh? Gonna throw hands with some stranger. Went invisible my whole life, to this moment.

“Does it matter for one rack each?” They’ll die and we can get the cash back, I figure. Polyester skin stutters for a rebuttal.

The other snorted and melted whatever tooth enamel they had left. Crusty ass hoes. Polyester skin changed her tone fast, and it’s not like I had a gun to her head. Could cut off my hands before I fingered her. Bitches like me got standards. Not everyone can come to paradise.

“Well…”

“Listen, I don’t like girls without consent. It’s not right. We can all agree to that right?”

Both of them nod in unison. Speaker’s on the floor. All mum is the word.

“All I want is for you to cum. You can fuck us lazily for all I care. Can you attempt at something you never done with consent? I don’t want anything near me without a solid, yes.”

“What’s consent?” The quiet one behind Morgana said, this was the other with missing tooth enamel. She didn’t give up her name yet. She had wounded animals eyes. Girl number two had to be racist, because she wasn’t jaunty enough to say no plainly outright. Daft as a feather. Follows the leader, doesn’t know heads from tails.

Gotta be kidding me. Ain’t no way she lived this deep under a rock. “You have to be fuck yeah to the act. If it’s not fuck yeah, we’ll get someone else.”

The obvious homophobe was the first to cave, “I am into it. I don’t drink but, I got some MDMA. None of you are ugly. I’ll give you that. We ain’t filming are we?”

I would never want to remember. “No, what’s your name?”

“Amanda and behind me is Sally. She’s shy.”

“Sally, no pressure you can say no.”

“I do love the bright color of your skin but, I am not into Morgana. Can we pick which one?” Morgana is olive skinned tan, it wasn’t real. Bitch was white. Despairs horn blaring wildly. My fingers are over my lips, I want to laugh. It’s cruel of me to pity them. Deep inside my emotions at this point, I wanted to break some bottles over their heads. Annoyed was far beyond me.

A homophobe and a racist walks into a bar.

It might’ve been a backwoods place, but I expected better of them. This far into the night, I’d like to think the girls were good. This seemed to muddy the waters out here. Continued the endless cycle of wretched white pride. Confederate joystick ride. The eyes do not lie, they know exactly what they are and do not give two fucks if it hurts your feelings. Jury’s out. These bitches have got to go. Either by this transformation or a five second strangle into their gateway to heaven.

Inner voice, it isn’t me. There, right there. ‘Cause I don’t have anger problems. Used to keep it inside, and hurt myself. Does the centipede make others see red, too? ‘Cause I need to get off. Sally is blond hair blue eyes aryan off the streetside, the types where genetics hug each other a little too close. Fake knockers, slim waist, no ass to save her life. Too bad she’s never going to get a BBL.

Amanda, the homophobe starts to pet Hollywood Morgana. It’ll be good for her. MDMA is going to do all the work, fester in her insides. Make her feel more than she wants to as she’s caving into the worst of nightmares. Backwoods trad wife. ‘Cause Daddy pays her bills.

“I love vodka.” Sally speaks hardly a whisper, it’s eerie when she speaks. A ghost in a glass house.

“Yeah the thing about consent I said earlier still stands. Pick your partner. We’re going to Lucky 13.”

Both of their ears perked up. “That’s where the priest usually is but he’s not here this weekend. On some evangelical retreat.” Amanda laughed between her teeth. “His dick is huge.”

Unsolicited information. Definitely know the types.

Down the whiskey and click it between my teeth. “Now we’re done talking let’s get together. I want to actually sleep tonight.” I am not sleeping, they don’t need to know. My prey drive kicks in, all the attempts to slow roll the vibrations in my skin see themselves off the edge of a cliff. Morgana let’s the girls speak, she’s amused at how flustered I am.

“Right to business, I like you. I have a client after this too. I want to pay rent for the next three months.”

Damn, we’ll have to kill a trucker.

Shane shows up with bottles. I don’t have to hear these mouth breathers take up all the air. Right time. Right place. Standing, I knock the table to its side. Bulls in China shops. When I look in the mirror, I’ll hate what I see. Holding out my arm I motion Sally to grab it. Her fingers press into my coat. With the other I hold two bottle handles in my right. Save me, Shane. I can’t even save myself. Real drawn to the obsession of ovens and all they give to the world.

“Morgana, you’ll have to get the card out of my back pocket.” Don’t forget it, either. This is painful for me, as anyone might imagine.

“Yes, darling anything for you.” Her face is still smeared with lipstick. Trainwreck. Hollywood burnt out barbie.

Slide off my coat and give it to Sally. “You cold in the room?” One finger on the hilt of the collar.

She nods and puts it on looking to the floor, yeah brown 80’s carpet is a bitch on the soles. Led her to the leather chair. Part character, part sensation. Hope she memorializes this moment, as it’ll be her last. Sacrificial lambs out on the pasture for slaughter.

Pulled off my beanie, my shoulder length mullet scuffles out the back. My back is turned away from her. The bottles land on the side table. Opened the whiskey. This might’ve been the only time the burn felt necessary. Two seconds later, twisted off the Canadian vodka. My hyperfocus is on Sally. Forget about the other bitch causing a fuss in my peripheral. Smooth, all restaurants say. Anyone who said the quiet part outloud know girls with no taste love this shit. No longer interested in centipedes, Sally sits against the chair slow motion eyes on the homophobe.

Snap my fingers in front of her face, “Before we go straight for the bottle, tell me how you like it?”

“I am a pillow princess.”

My hands graze the prints of her skin where genetics touched her pretty face before it began to decay. Racists make people uglier, ages them bad. Shine loses fame. Misery loves company.

I hold the handle like it’s my cock, some vodka splashes on the ground. Don’t know what’s gotten into me. Move with it. MDMA Aman-duh is already naked tumbling with Morgana on the bed. Twistin’ like rope bunnies in silk.

Sally is going to feel this vacant need. “Drink, on your knees. Be a good girl.” It feels wrong, but, I let her slurp the vodka, motherlands pseudo milk.

After a few gulps she gasps for air. My hands remove the coat. Her skin is cool to touch. My left hand pulls her mouth open and I begin to splash more vodka down her throat. Distortion is friendly when the end is near. Sally’s in a hot red bikini. Throw the bottle to the ground and let vodka splatter and sterilize the ground. Canines have been razor sharp for as long as I can remember, sharpened it on plastic containers I tried to rip open as a child.

Sally has a scent like baby powder musk, ashes and death. This is a performance. She doesn’t get the real. Every part of her body is shaved like a naked mole rat. Pity, she might’ve had an opportunity if she got out of this place. And not her nearest ancestry.

“Sit on the chair and spread for me, baby.”

She sits on the chair, her flexibility demanded it with ease. Two cut peaches split down the middle. My finger wipes from the top of her mons to her hole, rested inside her labia. Sally doesn’t move, cold fish.

I’m on my own, drinking for you and me. My mouth sucks the labia into my mouth, tongue on the clit. My tongue is the circle pit, she just doesn’t know it yet. This is the first and last for her.

Sally doesn’t move an inch, Sally disassociated into the popcorn ceiling.

Morgana walked up to me, felt her breathing from a mile away. Her nails tap my shoulder. Tilt my head out of the pussy and see her mouth with the creepy crawler. This one is more active and ping pongs in either direction of her mouth. Good God, I’ll never get over this experience. I stand and raise, I want her taste what I’ve been eating. Her homophobe has to smell better. I pull open her mouth and cover her lips. Spiny little legs exit with our curled tongues.

“Don’t swallow give it to Sally.” She whispers in my ear. “I already got my bag.”

Of course, you did. Whatever. First roadshow. Bend over Sally’s face. Not sorry, not ever. I pry open her mouth, my tongue lets the fucker climb to the otherside. My tongue fights with her trying to choke it back up. Not my personal kink. Before she heaves forward, I have two in her cunt body pressed against the chair. Nobody moves, nobody gets hurt.

“We’re into freaky things. It’ll feel good baby. Just give in.”

She moans, and her voice turns into buzzing. Static in my ear. Sally sucks it down deeper. I watch its body press against her flesh wanting to escape all the way to the belly. I bite her bottom lip and let her bleed. Signed my name on her body as I stole her DNA, iron mouthwash.

Back to the knees, there is only the work. Her labia are coverin’ my mouth and slide against my teeth. Tongue doin’ laps around her insides. Tongue fuckin’ is the best part. Two minutes have passed and her breasts have disappeared in my hands. I feel a hard shell, that’s smooth in texture. All I can do is eat, eat, EAT.

Bite into bug spindles, and don’t realize where I am. Crab legs crushed and their meat slurpee for a full belly. Love it. Hate it. Spread her labia and begin four fingers deep into Sally. People change when they’re in the mood. It didn’t feel right, I mean, she didn’t feel like a person. Blamed it on the psychedelic centipedes, heads all fuzzy now. It’s a gamble, you live and you die. She squirts and screeches into my face, earthy funk, no salt.

My body maneuvers to see what’s wrong, and I lean my ass further on the carpet. One look. 'Cause why don’t I feel those plastic tits. Silicone sundays.

A human sized centipede with a fat pussy wiggles on the chair. Dark brown and chestnut undercurrent. It’s squealing like a pig in heat. No one prepares you for this moment. There’s a revolver in your car. Better off shooting it. Closed eyes, I count down from ten. Open. It’s still there.

My body moves to scream, my voice is hoarse. All I can whisper, FUCK. Head turns to see Hollywood, and she’s full throttle fingering her human sized centipede bug and getting it off. Partial human moans deform, disintegrate into bug buzzes coming out of their mouth feelers.

Chop off your hands. Cut off your head. My body crawls backwards, disinterested in performance. I feel ill. Stumblin’ to get the whiskey. Oh, fuck. What the hell am I looking at? Colors on the floor begin to change shape. My head’s not right. Urgent static fills my head, and I hate it here. Shoved a cigarette in my mouth to watch Sally fall onto the floor. Seizure flops. Any gasoline would do. I’d love to watch Sally and her holy ghost burn. There is nothing left in this world to trust. Not in my fuckin’ direct sight.

In my peripheral, I jump to movement coming from the heart bed. Morgana shoves her bug to the floor. Despite their large honkin’ bodies, she jabs it with her foot to guide it. Naked drop kicks. Noiseless movement, the homophobe centipede doesn’t react.

“Drag your bitch to mine.” Morgana huffs.

“Fuck you, I am not touching that thing, unless I get to shoot it.”

“They don’t die if we don’t do this part.”

Not even with a revolver? Covering my mouth, my hands lift up dead Sally, centipede Sally off the floor. Weightless, and sort of cute. If not for the human genitals staying intact. Fuck Hollywood. Couldn’t pay me to set foot in there. Threw Sally on Aman-duh. In horror, I watch them flog each other.

“It’s real.” Barely keeping the whiskey down, my face grimaces.

“It’s not done yet. Watch. This is the best part.”

What the fuck do you mean? You crazy bitch. This is enough for me to want to blow my brains to bits. I didn’t pay the girls yet, so I didn’t have to worry about my bills. Never needed to pay for the trauma, at least. Nobody’s sleepin’ tonight. My hands shake reaching for a cigarette, I bought a carton and there’s only three left. ‘Cause such is the way of my life.

The bugs squeal one last terrifying loud screech. Bodies begin to molt into their human form. White spider web covers their bodies clumpy. Abrasions form within seconds after, it’s the circle of life without a slow motion video. Emptied eyes, just sockets. Sucked my cigarette hard, my throat hurt. Morgana is enjoying the final act, and I want to puke in her mouth. Trembles work their way through my body, eyes half open. Collapse now, and it’s a definitive deathwish.

Morgana places her hand on my lower back. “It’s hard for everyone’s first time.”

Said the little psychopath behind me. Letting out a deep cough. “Now what?”

Morgana chuckles, “Wait, silly. They have to bud their gifts.”

In the center of their bodies, flowers sprouted up. Neon lotuses that revealed the nectar, the fruit of desire. A human soul. Golden nugget the shape of a berry. It was fuckin’ anticlimactic. Tension in my loins drop to zero. The only thing that is radioactive is my mate standing right next to me.

Morgana ignores my rolling panic, and walks over to the human souls. Plucks both of their golden nuggets from the stem. Body colors change to lava, steamin’ in a hot spring. Mottled spiderwebs change black, before the steam choo choo trains smoke to the ceiling.

My partner in crime, snaps her fingers three times, fast. Human, no more. Bodies warp by the sound of her fingers into white sand. No reminiscence of humanity left. White colored dust. Scentless.

New conspiracy theory, all the sand from the ocean comes from the centipede transformation. We just hit a new breakthrough.

My body moves away from Morgana, turned off was one of the words. I sit in the leather chair, and smoke furiously. Boots on the cherry hit the carpet. Morgana laughs in the background holding the golden nuggets.

“One for you, one for me.” Her sing song voice chimes, grated my ears.

Cranked open my mouth, and let her slide it down. What choice do I have now? ‘Cause this whole thing wasn’t supposed to be real. The only clarity I have is that it’s all over for now.

One soul, and now this little psychopath is mine.

“We’ll need to hitch the next train ride out of here in the morning.”

I chew the nugget, sweet and sour. Unripe. It burns my gums. There’s nothing to stop me because it makes me feel whole again. When the centipede is inside you, it takes the parts that make you human and washes it off wholesale. Ain’t it fun to die young? You don’t pity them, although you should. They were flesh and now they’re dust. Who are we to decide who lives or dies?

Morgana may be my lover for now, but this is one helluva a death spiral.

“I need a shower or a bath.” My mouth speaks, no charm in my voice.

Morgana strips my body and there isn’t a word for the vulnerability I feel in this moment. She puts me in a warm bath and begins to scrub my body. I feel nothing. Traumatized was a word, it wasn’t the word. I lean my head back over the rim of the bath. She does everything in her power to get me off. Eventually, I give in and instead of moaning. I just scream, the loudest I’ve ever felt. My voice has gone blank. We made a new genre in our vocalizations, abnormal and deranged.

No turning back, no way to run.

The only way to die is to do its bidding. Her purse is full of them. Bottomless magic.

Torched the Volvo the next day after we made it to the train station.

Without a trace. Ghosts on the map.

On the train ride, she has me in a three piece suit. Head shaved half cut with lightning designs. A pocket watch slung from my coat pocket. I am sitting against the windowpane looking out as the prairie hills transform into mountains on the way to Colorado. There’s a toothpick crunched between my molars.

“Thank you, Miss Security,” she says under her breath.

Morgana is on all fours getting fucked from behind. She has already fed him the centipede. It’s only a matter of time. Money in my pocket. I slap her face, open up.

Two fingers claw her mouth. Nails push on her teeth.
She loves me from here until the sun dies out.
Utopia. No Future.

Dialogue heavy, this is probably the heaviest dialogue piece I’ve ever written.

I met Drew Valdez and ( Edward prior I forgot to mention) on the Stream of Consciousness POV workshop I host for free for writers. Will probably have time to run it after we land a spot. Truth be told, I never read their work until the workshop. That was an incredible for shame moment for me. Drew Valdez does excellent bizarro horror and working on a fucking amazing collaboration with William Pauley III, called Endless Static. Can’t wait to see where that goes, looking forward to Dog boy.

If you like writing that makes you squirm and weird ideas, submit a story or read one.

[Random photography I found on the web, distorted by yours truly no photographer could be named, if you find it let me know.]
Stream of Consciousness POV, Zero Draft.

Drained my bank account. Seven thousand in 100s stashed in little zippers. Rabbit nests, treasure hunting for fools. My girl was fucking the general manager seven leagues deep into her pussy, I could barely recognize her face if it weren’t for her tramp stamp. She got it when she was sixteen. 27 club.

Cream, milky white dresses her lips and cheeks like a baby who needs to eat. I slipped behind a fake banana plant and watched them in the corner. I let her take my heart in her fingers, getting this outlier to cum and smash it six places sideways. She was named after a gem, Ruby.

“Ruby, you feel better than my man.” Outlier speaks.

Ruby pulls her head up from between her legs. “I’m your new man, now. Forget about him. You want the real thing, don’t ya darling?”

It’s all I needed to hear five, six, seven years down a drain. I slipped out the side hall and pulled the fire alarm. Walked out the exit that set off alarms. It was over.

I just left. Got all the things I needed and bounced out of this shit hole town. Friends fuck friends. Work wives become future dreams. And the real dream? Well, if you’re lucky. Infidelity isn’t an option.

My name’s cursed, my mother named me Glory. Not Gloria. Glory. As if I wasn’t already fighting for scraps my whole life. Breaking locks to dumpster dive because most food thrown away isn’t rotten. They’re edible. It’s free. Beats the lines that stretch for miles for SNAP.

Welcome to the American dream. Everyone dies, and they’ll die hungry.

70 miles out of the city and my Volvo made a noise hungry for its own juice. A dark lit gas station skated in my purview. Said fuck it. ‘Cause I had nowhere to be. I could side hustle in Vegas as a temp tattoo artist if I wanted. Everybody loves a tragic story that they can fuck.

Pull up and I see money slots because everything else is boarded up except for one circle behind bullet proof glass. Holes to speak. Some guy is reading a magazine and jerking off to it. Don’t even want to know what it was. Sounds of poppin’ his wang was enough for me to steer clear.

This was not a Love’s stop travel gas station. Neon lighting that used to be was all the way off. Pumps were on. Those kids on the West Coast don’t know what they’re missing.

Lit my cigarette before I pumped the gas. Needed a moment to collect myself. The imagery stained my brain with guilt. It wasn’t as if I wasn’t putting out, doing everything in my power to keep Ruby happy. How long was she using me?

My head turned toward the road and shivered, a slight breeze. Icy enough to burn your tongue. In the distance, the city looked like stars you can’t touch. Serves them right.

Outliers man’s gonna find out. Ruby will come home to the great empty. No notes. No cards. No one to save her.

I sucked the cigarette hard hoping that five thousand wrinkles would land on my pretty face, my insides replaced by the outside. My skeletons reach out from their closets and walk away from me. They gotta die on this road too, ‘cause a woman can’t grow until she burns.

The dollar bill taker ate my 100 dollar bill and I began pumping the Volvo. I am leaning in my Carhartt spray painted black and covered in patches. It wasn’t even six minutes of waiting until I saw a black BMW drive goin’ race car into the gas station. Fucker slammed on his breaks.

“Fuck you bitch! You’re not paying the rent anymore. I’ll find another hoe to serve me.”

“I’ll die out here! Please give me another chance!”

“Nobody gets two chances. Times up.”

A man’s foot kicked a woman dressed to the nines in black sequins and a fur coat. She landed directly on the gravel and dirt road until trap music cranked louder than the howls coming from the men. I could hear her whimpering through the low wind. Gotta be kidding me. I don’t want another problem.

She wailed louder, cocktail glass empty beside her. Not shattered as it should’ve. It glowed underneath the moonlight, hues of pink I’ve never seen.

I walked over to help her up. “You okay, lady?”

“Do I look okay to you?”

I bit my lip. It was a stupid question. “You got someone you can call?”

She breathed through her teeth. “No.”

You’ll have to sleep eventually. You can’t drive all night even if you wanted to. Maybe you can give her a night’s rest to cool her head. If you saw her, she was all of 140 lbs. You could throw her through a wall if she was high on ice.

“Give me a second.” You waltz up to the guy who finished jerkin’ his wang and pounded on the window. “Oi! Hey my man. You know of any hotels, motels around these parts? We need a safe place to sleep.”

His nose was pointed like Adrian Brody gone wrong. Someone made his nose bumpy and crooked on purpose. Had to hurt. He wasn’t a looker. Magazines were the only way for pleasure. Didn’t want to judge him for it. Some noses are hot when they’re all scarred up. If they’re on women.

“My cousin owns a cheap motel just up the way. I can call them? Room for 1?”

“For two. You see that girl behind me? I am not leaving her in bumfuck nowhere.”

“Smart. I wouldn’t. We got scavengers out these ways. They would rip her to pieces. I would hate to see another woman die.” He trailed off, but the last part seemed definitive. Crony knew something, but I didn’t have the patience in me to ask him what that meant.

He pulled up the old cord phone and rang his cousin, “Hey cous, you got a room for two? Some ladies got stranded out here.”

“Uh huh. Yeah I don’t know them.”

“Some rich BMW, probably one of the boys, dropped off one of their whores like they do every Tuesday.”

Tuesday is a cursed day, as bad as my name.

“Nah, I don’t recognize her. The whore.”

He pulls down the phone, “Look if you’re just looking to stay the night, they can give it to you for 80, out by noon. No trouble though. Some people live in these motels, you understand?”

“Just for the night, but if I need more, would they be fine for a few days until I figure out a safe spot for the lady?”

He pulls away from the window, “Would you catch a deal for a few nights to help the lady out? Seems high class.”

“Yeah. Uh huh. Sounds about right.”

“Listen. What’s your name?” Half unimpressed he turns to me, phone still strapped to his ear.

“Glory.”

“Right. Glory. If you can give them an answer by breakfast they can get you in for 280. For a few days. I don’t know if Frank can stretch it. The motels are connected to a strip club, so you know how things are. People want more than dancers, sometimes.”

“Tell Frank to wait for Glory. I will be there. How far is it again?”

I honestly don’t remember him saying shit.

“A few miles. It’s called the Pink Pony, has a neon girl with a cowboy hat on and pink tits you can’t miss it. All the big rigs will line up on the right. You can park your Volvo in front of your room whenever you get the card. Cous doesn’t mind if you hit up the club. You know those girls get real lonely. Could be nice to have some normies roll through, if you know what I mean?”

“If we get bored, we’ll drop on by.”

“Good girl.” He says it in a slimy way that sent shivers down my back. Pulled the phone up to his ear. “Yeah, they’re rolling through no promises for the girls, but if they do could let them know on a whim.”

“Yeah, yeah. It’s not the 80’s anymore, Frank.” He clicks the phone down.

“If I were you, Glory, I would collect your lady and get this show on the road. It gets real hairy out here past midnight. Better safe than sorry. Oh, and sorry about the dollar bill change. We don’t have real change out here. Just bills.”

“Yeah. Thanks man. We won’t stay here long.”

The girl is leaning next to my Volvo at the trunk weeping. Her makeup isn’t stained and you wonder if it’s glued onto her face. She looks like she doesn’t belong here unless there’s some secret team of photographers trying to capture the beauty in somewhere rustic. Rich people love dirty places they’ve never been, making them feel alive, ‘cause they already got the STDs to match it.

“Didn’t catch your name, lady.”

“It’s Morgana.”

I lean against the pump, “From what I gathered this is death row out here. I am going to hit up a motel with a smokers room if that’s alright with you. You’re welcome to join me. In fact I would rather you come with me. It sounds pretty scary out here.”

She’s still sniffling. “I can’t pay you.”

My face relaxes. “I don’t need your money. I just want you to be somewhere safe for a little while. Until you can figure out your next move. Does that sound fair?”

“I can get along with that. Hey. Did you notice the change is only in bills out here? It just keeps pumping money.”

“Ugh. Yeah he said so.” Frank and him has to have a deal to get people in the mood for midnight ballerinas. “If you wanna grab the dollar bills and sit in the passenger side, it’s unlocked.”

“What if I steal from you?”

“What all of thirty two dollars, what a fuckin thief.” My body grins, don’t know if she caught the snark on my lips. “I am not worried. It feels creepy staying here. I can feel people watching us. Take whatever you need.” Nobody gives a fuck about thirty two dollars when their head is on the line.

I wiggle the gas pump handle a bit, and put it back in its place. Pop its cover and turn to the driver’s side.

“Morgana, my name’s Glory. Our next stop is close by. Listen, I know it’s attached to a strip club, but don’t think I have any ill intentions. I am just trying to get the fuck out of here.”

Her voice is sultry and less shaken, “Oh, The Pink Pony? Those are some real nice girls.”

My eyes squinted in disbelief. Is this a set up? “So, you’re from around here?” I click on the car. My voice quieter, more cautious than I would like it to be.

“Oh, no. I am from LA. We can get into it when we go to the motel. I need a drink. It’s been a long day.”

“LA huh. Long way from home. Glad I ran into you. This place is a shithole.”

“It has some rustic charm. It’s the people that makes the place, right?”

It stung a little when she said people. Ruby was people. Now, Ruby is third wheeling her life between the legs of any girl who says please. I scratched underneath my beanie and popped a half smirk. Play it cool. Morgana was just in the wrong place. You can’t trust men from their boots to their throat if you want a real answer. Red flags everywhere these days. You might’ve been the only butch in that entire town. Everybody’s gotta eat.

“Right.” Stare at the yellow lines, pretend it’s just another Tuesday or Thursday. It’s hard to hate it completely. Morgana pulls up lipstick from her bag and smacks her lips.

Pink nipple neon signs, I’ll never forget them. Right tit sizzles on and off, as if the midnight ballerina is already riding the bull. You imagine it, your ears and throat feel raw, and wet. Tumbling together in some fucked up paradox. Volvo stops at the entrance, it screeches because they’re old wheels.

“I am going to grab our room. Two beds if they have it.”

“Good luck. This place is a fuck den. I will be waiting for you.”

It creeped me out a little when she said it, so sly to someone she met less than an hour ago. Her face is unfettered by the whole situation, not weeping. Not tense. Relaxed. A certain kind of somebody can do that, and wonder if it was me or the fact she wasn’t face planted in the gravel waiting for her executioner.

At the reception was a person with a half cut sitting on a chair with their high tops against the desk. Most of it was a mess. They had a lollipop in their mouth, cherry. Figures. The one medicine parents had to force down your throat like crazed animals rabid, and full of vermin.

“You must be Glory.” They smacked the lollipop. “Names Frank, I go by they/them but if you’re a trad mother fucker you can call me she.”

I put my hands up like they got a shottie in my face. “Theys fine. I just want a room for myself and this lady friend.”

“You’re really in luck, Glory. Our top client left for the weekend. It’s the only room I got open. Since he pays so well, got yourself a discount.”

“Thank the gentleman, it’s been one hell of a night.”

Frank leans over the desk, showing part of their ink. Under the damp limelight revealed skulls from their hands all the way up to their biceps. Purgatory of people screaming. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

“My partner of seven years cheated on me with her heffer GM and I set off the fire alarm.”

Frank leaned back smirking, holding their lollipop. “Well, serves her right. People want what they can’t have and after they get it— it’s nothing they’d expect. Something called limerence. I say it’s this social media. Everybody is trying to be somebody that ain’t themselves. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah, it still crushes me, but I am trying not to think about it.” My eyes dart to the floor, the ground is purple and green swirls, leftover bowling alley carpet. Felt it hadn’t been renewed since the 1970’s. It was worn thin. Barely even rug texture.

Frank snickers, “Don’t feel sad darlin’, you’re out here playing Capt save a hoe. Are you really going to try to save her?”

“Yeah, I think maybe at least two nights. I need a long sleep.”

I threw down three hundred. “It’s fine in case we need another day. Consider it a deposit.”

“No change, sugar?”

“I don’t plan on seeing this through to otherside, if you catch my drift.”

Frank pulls out a card with a red heart and slaps it down between their palm. “You’re pretty, don’t let stupid girls get in the way of what you’re trying to do.”

My hands touch the tip of the card. “Escapism is a drug on its own.”

Frank lifts their palm from the card. “Mmm. I like you. If you want to stay longer, stop on by and give me a kiss sweetie.”

“Yeah, if I’m feeling up to it. You’ll be my first.” I picked up the card, white background red heart. It reminded me of colors from Alice in Wonderland, as though the Queen of Hearts herself was going to strut out of that elevator and demand allegiance.

“Number 13, love. It’s on the first floor. Drive the car till you hit the corner to the left. The door is painted blue.”

“Cards red, why not make it blue?”

“I don’t make the rules, Glory. I just work here.”

Morgana was smoking one of my cigarettes staring outside. Lipstick smudged on the filter. Her face was Hollywood. There was something else in her too. I couldn’t make the shape of it. The way her hair hung down her shoulders, the color of her skin, the sweat rolling down her brows. She had secrets in her eyes.

“You find us a room, Glory?”

“Yeah, it was their last one. Hope it’s good.”

“What room is it?”

“Number 13, you know it?”

“That room is usually booked, damn. We’ll actually get to take a peek inside.”

“Now, I have nothing against midnight ballerinas, but what did you do here?”

“A little of this and that. I was also largely burlesque, hence the costume. I know most girls by name out here. Good girls. It’s where we’ll get our cocktails later.”

I bit my lip, “What makes you think we’re going to drink?”

Morgana laughs, “We’ll both need a drink after we get to know each other.”

My eyebrows raised, there was no denying the clusterfuck I just barely escaped. Morgana was easy to talk to all things considered and she wasn’t high on ice yapping my ears off.

I slide it into reverse, and right as rain yeah piles and piles of big rigs just coasting in the middle of the darkness. It must change people, you know. Total isolation from one wasteland to the other.

We make it to number 13, the door isn’t completely blue. There are emblems of gold engraved all along the sides. If I didn’t duck my head, I would’ve slapped my face into some handmade wooden windchimes. Step inside and flick a switch. It’s immediately clear what kind of place this is supposed to be.

One bed heart shaped, the ones with the white and red pleated sheets. In the corner there’s a Jacuzzi which can fit about four people on a good day. Shaped like a wave. Not sure how people fuck in it. Ocean wave. Whoever designed this place was thinking of home not no flatlands hate fuck.

On the wall before the hallway to the loo is whips, bondage, chains, paddles, dildos, and anything you could ask for and a crusty ass gag ball. Tape gets the job done if you want to have fun. That’s how Ruby liked it. She said if you can’t turn me red, you’ll never be mine. Fuckin’ liar.

“Not too shabby.” Morgana slips by my body and I side step where I don’t feel her body next to mine. Morgana is still a stranger. One finger on the lucky strike filter, ‘cause what the fuck is this place?

Morgana sits in a leather chair all sprawled out, “You got any clothes? This dress is killing me, Glory.”

Hands underneath my beanie, a nervous tic. “Uh. Yeah. You might swim in them though. We’re not the same size.”

“You’re so polite. I just want to wear pillowcases instead of itchy sequins, you feel me? Don’t worry, I won’t bite. Much.”

Turning away, I pretended I didn’t hear the last part. I walk to the trunk and pull out two duffles. Biting my lucky strike filter, my jaw tries not to rip it in half. The tension is palpable, it’s in the air when you’re around Morgana. There’s a part of you uncertain if you want to fuck her or hold her. Hand on your throat, you lodge off the sweat. People are watching you. Back turned, the feels of somewhere uncanny. The last thing you need is for someone out of the wood works to see you as prey. It’s the fastest way to meet your maker.

All my weapons are in the backpack and I didn’t need any ammunition for Morgana to slit my throat and steal my cash and car. I wanted at least one more day on this planet and before I fucked off this world. Fade to the quiet. No thoughts, and the spineless speakin’ prophecies. Silence, pale on pale.

Had to be somewhere rural, where it would take years to find me. Eat a note that says, Fuck you, Ruby and let my body digest it. Just me and spirits knowin’ what it meant driving her bat shit. The thing about Ruby, it didn’t matter what I said. Someway and somehow she would make it about her. She’s so self absorbed she could crack every statue in Paris.

I drop the duffles down and shut the door behind us.

“Pick whatever suits you. I don’t know shit about what feels comfortable for you.”

Morgana raises. She’s fuck you money tall with those pleasers. If she ever takes them off you’ll be able to witness her actual height. It feels weird to watch someone else rummage through my things, this isn’t some test. Lucky 13. Time to wander. If she needs help, I am one hundred percent certain she will ask for it.

The ground had business 80’s carpet, the brown ones. Not soft enough for feet but if you fell on it, you’d definitely get bruises, rug burn, and catch a disease. You touch the BDSM gear, all leather, all real. No fuckery fake shit in this joint. Turning to the right there’s a two person shower with hand cuffs one open linked to a rail and a toilet with a bidet. Better keep that asshole clean. Glass see through. Good way to catch a ride into somebody else’s skin.

Behind the bidet is a wide screen mirror, leanin’ on the counter you flip a switch. Bright LED lights. It immediately blinds your ass. Hospital fuck you, I can see every injury type lights. Should check myself into the asylum. Grippy socks land with no phone calls. Just me between insane people and psych doctors deciding if I want conversion therapy because half of this country is hell bent on praying the gay away. In the deep south no one cares about your name, you’re just another number for them to hide and throw away the key.

I hear Morgana make muffled yelps, and I dart towards her. She’s not in danger, is she?

No, she’s fiddlin’ with her zipper. Fingers slide up and down, struggling to find her place. Her eyes are bright and shiny when she mouths me to help her.

I hold her body weight with my right arm and with my left I zip it down to her hips and toward her ass cheeks. Hourglass with meat. Her rolls are perfectly shaped with two tiny dimples right underneath her hip bones. My hands are cold and I feel her pulsate. Goosebumps raise to the skin.

“Better now?” My voice is husky when I whisper it to her ear. I don’t let her fall. Not on my watch.

She falls into me, “I want you to undress me as though I am the only one in the room you can see.”

It breaks your heart, because you hear her voice go soft with uneasy vulnerability. The thing about people who’ve seen some shit is most of the time no one can see them as they are. That’s why we’re all cracked vases with shitty glue roped together, we hope we don’t leak out the sides.

Yet, it happens that way.

My hands feel like stone coming undone as I peel her dress down beneath her shoulders. She breathes light and slow. My right hand moves her arm with a ginger tug and it slips down. I am the first to notice she’s not wearing a bra. Morgana places my hands on her tits and they’re soft round plush toys. Lips to the nape of her neck, I kiss her. She gasps and my hands go deeper into her flesh, her scent vanilla and peaches in humidity rain.

“More.” She fights the words out of her mouth.

Morgana stands and lets the dress fall, her thong gripped by her ass cheeks. My mouth lets out a soft growl before I unleash my jaw into the lace. Cheap, plastic. Rip it straight off her body with my sharp canines. She’s naked besides her pleaser heels.

Morgana twists her body and climbs her pussy onto my lips. Ruby washes away from my brain for the rest of the night, as her meaty juices fill my entire mouth and thimble sized clit, its magic round ball engorged against the foundation of my tongue. She’s not moaning yet so I grab her legs and push her closer to me where her thighs clamp harder around my skull. Three fingers in and in motion, I pull in and out in tempo.

I begin counting time, as it becomes a marathon. Her sweet saline juices make me hungry for more as she squirts into my mouth within five minutes and I don’t even know her last name.

Her legs are trembling between my head. Pull my fingers out rolling her forward. Her eyes are closed mouth ajar. Know the ecstasy feelin’ when I see it. Euphoria peaks, bodies become movable dolls. We’re drifting out to sea together. Lost bottles. No notes left behind.

Morgana is an easy target, lifted her without strain. Flipped her joyride body stick on the stomach, ass out in the air. My knees move to spread her cheeks as I lick along her tight shiny hole. Fingers back from behind rubbing her cherry.

She moans, a voice I have never experienced in all of seven years. Not performative, a real lightning explosion as she releases into rapture. God rested her pretty little head as I felt her flush of hot sticky cream.

“I can’t handle you. You’re a monster.” She says between moans as she grinds her hips into my fingers.

“Tell me when to stop and I will.”

“I can’t. No. I love the feeling of your body inside of me.”

“What about those cocktails? Your story?”

She lets out one loud yelp and squeezes my fingers out of her pussy.

“Fuck, okay. I will tell you my story. If you stop.”

My head pulls out of her ass and flips her again. Rags to riches made all the wishes, effortless. From my jacket, I pull out two lucky strike reds and light them at the same time. Her mouth barely opens, I slip one in the center against her teeth. Lips unmovable. Sucks it deep, good girl.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Try me. We got the rest of our lives.”

Part 1 done, incoming Part two staggered tomorrow.

It’s a special one for me; one is a partial screenplay I wrote in 2014, parts of the imagery. The other is fiction/non fiction overlapped. This is my first attempt at trying out GIFs. (Won’t show up on mobile).

Thanks M.P. Fitzgerald for telling me where to go.

The writer, Ian Patterson, I have finally had the opportunity to read during the end of my semester. He writes full of visualizations that stop me like a western folk song. Ghosts have highways, his ghosts are alive.

I recommend anything he writes.

[Photography unknown, distorted by yours truly]
Stream of Consciousness POV, Zero Draft.
Screenplay from memories, lost that thing like a decade ago.

Bullets control the world. Bullets demand power.

Metal burns the inner linings of my gums, iron gone stale. Towers are coming down. Its spiral layers, artifacts brushed with imagination weaved in and out of my iris. Dust fills on the ledges and corners, strays have found their way into my home. Holes, I thought, I kept on the outside, come in. I wish I could quietly slip away, into anhedonia, into isolation where I feel safe. Walls begin to close in.

Bullet wants a mother. Bullet wants a direction. A reason to kill.

Seppuku Saturday comes around the bend. Nowhere to go. Mouth spreads. It feels phallic. It tastes like chewing on raw peppercorn. When the bite hits, you still hate men who want to control. You’ll close your eyes to smell the sweat on their fingers. Wounded animal dreams cross through us. Summer light inching closer each Spring. Obsession, my body loses the shield of autonomy. Wolves tear themselves apart in packs, and we’re just two people. Machines eat and breathe survival. Machines weep and breathe, unrequited love.

Happy birthday, number 22.

Bullet betrays all sentiment. Bullet is a psychopath. There’s not enough gauze to fill the wounds.

Traded my erasure for some quarters. Trained to kill the Witch. Time feels everlasting when pleasure peaks euphoria. You refuse an audience to witness Bullet’s final act.

Bullets wished he was alive, no one really is. Not even him.

Click. Click. Russian Roulette.

I am a woman, I am the Witch.

Ocean breeze sends ice chips across my face. Body adjusts and becomes armor. My bare feet and toes curl at the edge, unable to achieve vertigo. Sonoma coast, fog thick you can drink the sea water down your throat. Wolves pretend to live in the darkness, but their teeth aren’t sharp like mine. Lost one of my wings, our angels sigh. I’ve forgotten how to fly.

Behind me are bodies, golems of unrequited love touched by addiction. Everyone’s got an artifact. Some are bones, rope, and pens without ink. Admirers live inside various pools that aren’t supposed to exist here. Voices blur the lines when they speak. Admirers have built temples for their fetish. Cult followings live on the surface. Entourages shallow of thought. Aliases scribe joy without suffering.

In my mirror there’s a darkness, depth hidden behind the flesh.

It doesn’t take me long to turn my back to fall. They say before you die, life flashes before your eyes.

I want to try.

Flurries of water push up past my face, as the eyes of lovers begin to fade into a blemish. I pretend they don’t exist. Refuse to remember their hands on my skin. Searching for holy artifacts that never existed. Their masks are tightly knitted on their faces; all they can do is pretend. They don’t want me as much as I am. Pressure of unrealistic expectations is a poison. It dissolves pieces of your brain that’s supposed to be stronger. Weighs you down with anxiety. Pangs of the heart. Paranoid, they fiend for display. It honors the fetish, it strips the woman and gives her whalebones. Shoots right to pleasure, instead of the heart, their mouths and their words they barely connect.

Tongues tread the past, and trapped in heartless ignorance. Protection without growth. Generic. Sold on cold indifference. Slips through the wind, hopes held on time.

All the suicidal attempts are collected like trading cards. I am halfway through a tarot deck.

When trauma sculpts around your life, nothing can get in. Your life force is a bomb. It waits to explode with your blood vessels ruptured on the surface.

I feel the suds touch the back of my head, the screams of the ocean get louder than my own thoughts. I’ll die before I drown.

People I’ve loved with every shade, every color of their eyes live inside of me. Jawlines. Lip texture. Hair colors. All rainbows. Birds want to be held, they don’t want to be destroyed.

It all fades quickly. I no longer fear the darkness.

Bullet is still trying to pull the trigger. I look into his eyes and see swirling pools of black, an abyss of licorice and rot. Medicinal herbs begin to grow up from his neck, they’re bright lights without sound.

He held his hand away from the trigger, palm holding it upright, left my teeth to carry the weight. Attempts to fight the demons that only he can see.

My mouth aches around the barrel. You’ve always imagined Bullets would come after a whiskey and a smoke. His hands scratch at his throat, tear his skin, red beads leave a mark. Bullet’s friends whisper untruths into his ears, it pierces my body with rage. Feed the demon validation without truth. Boys love that, it’s all the rage.

Hands over Bullets skin is cold to touch. A ghost in shells. Not enough to be robotic. Not enough to be real. Fingers on fingers make a prayer.

Bystanders, sit inside the windows of your home holding their breaths. Mouths sewn shut. Bets have been made.

Happy birthday, 22.

Bullet wants to win against me. He demands control, his voice breaks.

His eyes are golden brown.

Climbed from the ocean, to the sand, to the soil of the forest. Not alone. There’s lanterns in a forest floating up to the ceiling of the sky. At the middle of the mountain are strange people dressed in white. Rituals of light.

Stumbling over your dress you see a clearing. Old world spirits dress your body bare. Hands take what is no longer mine. Hands of old hard working people lead me to the stone slab, voiceless. It doesn’t feel menacing to be here. It feels like a memorial. An honorable moment in time.

“I don’t deserve this justice.” I whisper, voice hoarse.

Nobody responds.

I don’t think they’re people. I think they’re spirits that prepare the future.

When they lie me down naked on the cold slab, I don’t feel the shiver. Only that it has a temperature. Something to acknowledge from my former lives.

Spirits have human hands smooth like fresh clay. It blends with firmer objects until its distorted of originality. Highways of thoughts begin to flood my brain. Spirits begin to place beads over my face until they move down my neck. Gems black obsidian. Gold shavings for shape.

A spiral grows right beneath my collar bone. It’s the same one I’ve seen in dreams. There are two wolves inside of me, one grey and one black. They come for every version where they are needed to show me memories I’ve forgotten. When they trot away, I’m expected to follow. I’ll find myself in a redwood grove, a mercurial spiral lives in its open tree body. When I place my hands inside I expect to go somewhere else. Instead whatever lives in the tree goes inside of me. When I feel its strange power come within me, my wolves howl and I am awoken.

The spiral reminds me of my wolves. Will the spirits take them too?

Spirits are preparing for my burial, on an island where no one knows my name. Fate restored every part of my body to be covered in beads. It doesn’t itch like sequins. I close my eyes and the spirits have torches with chains. Expect to burn. When I don’t feel. Clumps of sand hit my body. Stay still. My eyes slowly open, I can hardly see what’s happening through the beads. Too close to the flame. The spirits are heard and watched through the groves of the trees. Red and gold dust floats over my body before it lands. Sulfur and sweetness.

Prepared for my burial, the mania in my head gets louder as I breathe deeply. A spirit locks my head in place. She’s wearing a white mask where I can’t see who she used to be.

“If you close your eyes, it won’t matter. You’ll burn all the same.”

“What’s the purpose?”

“There’s a festival of spirits. It’s the only time you’ll be allowed to walk amongst the living. You’re lucky it came now.”

“I’m ready.”

Spirits with long chains hold up lantern torches, oil reaches my skin, soft grease. Fire starts to scorch my old body, it cleanses me and provides shelter. Into oblivion, they close the door of my former life.

Here, time is endless. Flames reach four feet high. It doesn’t hurt. Its warmth fuses me into the moment where I’m allowed to belong. I taste every morsel of life sucked out of my lips into the flames. I hear it crackle and pop. Incense burns of sandalwood and cedar. This is more clear than I’ve ever felt my whole life.

Beasts of the heart are a useless and troublesome thing. Thief of quota and peace of mind. Rapture takes over my emotions as the body becomes weightless. Covered in blackish oil, the next version is to peel the char above my flesh.

A dead tomb is mercy. It undoes the burden of identity.

After the last piece of char hits the floor, they dress me in a white kimono. My grey wolf finds me and jumps toward my solar plexus, instead of a kitsune mask, his head turns into a white fox. He growls for me to hold him upright.

The city of monks guard the forest from those like us. One black wing pushes out from behind my shoulder.

All along my living life, I’ve felt invisible. I am consumed, I consume with strangers of errant hearts. Nowhere I had to lay my head.

My face feels closer to who I am. More than I’ve ever been. The spirits wait for me to follow them. They’re dressed special to memorialize all who were lost in time.

I’ll be visible. Send my peace for those lost before me.

The spirits mourn.

About the story of the Gun Devil.

Bullet presses the trigger. I taste the gunpowder before the smoke hits my mouth. No one closes their eyes.

My eyes lock with his, Gun Devil drops into my body. Punishment is the contract for being on the other side.

Normal bullets don’t do the same.

A velocity and atrocity I have never felt between worlds. Radiation and its anchor explodes everything within me that was once real, now two worlds lie together meshed and combined. I let it broil my spirit.

In one place I am protected, in another I am prey.

He doesn’t stop staring at my face as strawberry chunks of brain matter splatter the walls of my childhood home.

Happy birthday, 22.

No one turns away, no one stops.
I hear the drums of the other world fill my head in the spirit world.
It calls me back.
I release the gun from my teeth. Head slumped over, slid to the side.
One black wing curled close to my heart.
Bullet makes a contract with the dead. Punishment for all the years that were lost.

We’re the villains in someone else’s story.

Everything was beautiful.
Everything was how it was supposed to be.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls
Original song for the Silent Film that never happened.

This prompt would be impossible to figure out, but I still welcome it regardless.

I will be honest the only sports I know a little bit about is martial arts, but regardless Matt Cyr is a nice guy who supports the lit fiction community. I do appreciate him taking the time to donate and support the cause outside of homelessness and fighting bullies. No one likes a bully. I apologize in advance to him if this work is too intense. I action packed it as densely as I could.

I can appreciate the psychology behind baseball. If sports is your thing, check out his work, and get a reader who will appreciate you as a human being. It’s the best any of us could ask for, truly.

Circa ME 10+ years ago/photography me. Heavily distorted to fit the story of the piece. Sort of works. I also, gave myself better eyebrows. True story, I don’t pluck my eyebrows.
Stream of Consciousness POV, zero draft.

I woke up with the power out. City neighborhoods black, animal noises crippling our ears. Cell Phone bars, gone. Light a candle for my lover and friends. Nobody’s cold, nobody’s warm. A stillness that lives inside your body. You’re going to puke, the sludge slinky chains up and down your throat. Everything feels intense, and it’s only morning. There is a chopstick on the marble counter for when your lover makes your tea. Swirled the honey thick on the bottom. Balance. Cultures talked about that as though you’ve got one. Just photographs of memories that were never yours.

Body’s not quite tuned to the quiet, everything has been bright lights and designer drugs. Drums so loud that vibrations electrify you throughout your body. Daily Routines, took their tails and ran. Off this map, off the grid. Electricity is a commodity in the modern age. Can we survive without it?

Bedhead cataclysms slip out of their beds, we hear chirping of some deranged birds. Gunshots and silence.

It stays with you. Shocks the fingertips and ear canals like a southern tongue. Heavy handed. Eerie, I grip the chopstick as if it can stabilize me. I feel the fire in my veins begin to build. Your body doesn’t move. Your eyes trail the gun blasts from nearby. It’s not dark enough to see the lights.

Before we take the rest of the drugs and drown in it. An escape plan. Our widescreen TV tries to communicate. I hear the buzzing behind the panel.

A crippled man, I barely recognize sits on the floor surrounded by masked men. His skin wrinkled with glitter and silver. It stabs the camera lens and you can see sun glow off the armor. Flat face mother fucker. It’s Grok Rush, not enough plastic surgery to make him beautiful. Barely human.

“Is that the pedo guy from back in the day? Shouldn’t he be dead?” My friend speaks to no one, we can’t hear her.

I slink my feet down into the couch pit cold tile biting my heels.

“Civilization zero. We have a new technology for all the rich. You’ll be hunted for fun, my treat.” He pauses, his face muscles don’t move. “There’s not enough competition for bottom feeders to live here too. The machine is GOD.”

He coughs blood stains on the camera lens. Why isn’t he dead yet? The masked men don’t move, and you hear them crank their heads. Metal clanked together. I press my finger up to my ears, it pierces them loud. Chirps of birds I’ve never heard in my life. A new species.

“The human experience will learn competition with my children. Not the live ones. They’re not real. Not anymore.”

I grab the controller and attempt to shut it off. Get me off this joyride. We’re in danger. Nothing happens. I press, jam it down until it’s stuck. Oblivion. I admire its sleek design. Real silver. A gift from the Company.

Slam it straight in the middle, oblong shape.

There’s nothing to believe in anymore. We’ll just seethe and be destroyed.

My friend takes a knife to her neck. “Fuckity this. Bye.”

I can’t stop anything from happening. We disassociate to protect ourselves. Our memories belong to us.

“May the best man live.” Rush speaks high pitched, hardly human vocals, felt forced. Rehearsed. Automated. Not enough pharma could hold his body together for his final moment.

He slumps forward on the floor, you watch the blood pour out of his body on the spliced television skin pixels at war with each other. His skin decays green and gray. He growls, inhuman.

Not real.

My heart aches for anyone listening.

←Day 30→

I can’t stop running. My legs intuitively move between bullets flying. Between the living and the dead. The people I love are all gone, I have a few members of the underground working with me.

My love. My ceremony. Sacrificed their body from all the cyborgs enclosed on our territory. The warmth of their skin, the blue of their eyes faded to exploding galaxies in my head. The sick part of me wanted to fuck their corpse as a ritualistic good bye.

Grief stretches your brain thin, you barely recognize what kind of human you’ll end up becoming in the end. One more time. In our story. The world will travel so quickly, it’ll leave us behind.

My fate has been rearranged by the insides of these parasitic zombie cyborgs. I can hear them counting our bodies like bitcoins. #STREETRATS, #$TR33TM3AT, #$$$BESTBOY.

My lover’s dead weight held by fingers, they told me to play dead and I carved myself inside their corpse living in the bacteria of humanity. The ribcage kept me warm. I took pieces of their bones and when no one was watching I whispered all the things we’ve never done, all our goals washed away by greed. Horns blow their battle songs of tragedy within me.

They’ve given me no mercy. Watched love gnaw at me forever. No drug could replace the escapism needed to understand this level of grief.

My new people collected me in fetal covered in days old blood. Such a lovely day for them to find me that way. My breaths feel small enough to barely make a mass amongst the silence. Weighted chambers crushed within. An eye glass to analyze my grief. We’ve never talked about it. Rituals. Daily Routines. The best way to stay alive is to not remember. Lie to yourself long enough and all your dreams become real.

I was their new babe. Carried out barely alive. Shaken with the cold barren hands of life. A small dog with brittle bones. Thought, I should’ve died that day. Thought they should’ve left me there. Would’ve been a better end. Bit my tongue, because I couldn’t face reality.

When we all line up in the underground all of us have a story. Our cities have become dunes and mud houses underneath the soil. No one asks how you got there. We have every person in the field collecting resources and digging tunnels. They dug miles with dead ends and death traps. The cyborgs can’t make it too far underground, their wifi craps out. First generation.

When we fight, we zero in on our targets. Everybody’s face of grief screams on the outside, hearts on their sleeves, madness. Blood engulfs our faces, our mud masks by design. Battle cries of every loved lost. It guts you from within and becomes poison. It keeps you alive when no one’s watching. Ugly pain, masks off.

Tormented inside, these cyborgs wander into our den, some carnal hunger they need to feed. We behead every classist and use the data to analyze their names. Some of them are prototypes. We don’t know the population in Civilization Zero. It’s only theoretical. On the field, we find a live human everyday. In the trenches, the cyborgs collapse against our weight. The wasp’s nest.

We know when they’re coming. Frequencies sound like a high pitched bird chirping. Its alien distorted noise. Experimental, their sunlight eyes. Bird’s with machines. I’m pearly like their whites when it fades. Between those things and I, we trade our roles. A different job for every hour.

Above ground, I don’t kill them immediately. I take them apart piece by piece until I get all their Intel. Until I’m satisfied which isn’t very often. I want them to be jealous of what they used to have, all mixed up in the wash. Wrung out until there is nothing left to drip.

Sure, they got their wish.

Men love it when I’m evil.

I’m not your girl. I’m not your toy.

I make them believe they got a chance.

Have a kiss.

Men who went to otherside. Got new parts.

Creatures want to be sucked into the sky. Everything’s gonna burn.

My new friends named me, The Sadist. I prefer the name Night. I got new numbers for different area codes. I’m waiting, I am waiting for you.

←Day 99→

Morning wakes up, miles away from night. It whistles stuttered horns and sloppy piano. My knife is so shiny, so bright. A rogues galley, bodies of my enemies dress my feet with blood. My cigarette hangs from my lips. I hear them screeching bird chirps trying to locate my body. When they die their body turns green, plant food.

A folk band no one’s heard of plays in my head. They stopped making albums almost 80 years ago. Found them in the archives. In the parties with the Company. Quick fingers. I’d whistle it, if it didn’t give up my location.

A human person screams and takes my attention away from sharpening my knife.

“Jesus Christ.”

I suck the tobacco until the smoke encases every part of my mouth. Blow it out of my nose until it leaks. There’s about four of those fucking things out there. I’m getting reckless. Tired, is a better word. They smell like shit piled on shit when they die.

Exhausted, I bend my knees and crawl until one is near my eyesight. At least there isn’t a jumpsuit. They’re still mildly human shaped. I float faster with my legs and feet barely touching the ground, like I’m a quarterback and they got something I want. I don’t have time to collect anything useful from them today.

I give them lyrics of songs from records that no longer exist. First one, their body is partially warm under the winter light. I feel their pulse underneath my fingers, in one clean swipe. Two seconds pass, vocal chords gutted. A butcher in his shop. This doesn’t take them out initially. You gotta dig into that jugular hard if you want them to drown.

“May you live everyday for the rest of your life.”

I hear it cough, choking in a delightful manner. This is a bloody bite of wagyu after you rummage the chef’s art meat steak. You gotta roll when their body starts to seize up, because the others are going to see these things lose their lifeline. Drops quickly. Its technology glasses with emptied batteries. They fuckin hate when they become zero. We’re citizen zero, public enemy number one.

Word from the underground said their stocks get sucked out of their life forms and sent somewhere else. Not everyone hunts. Some do it for the thrill. Cults love to throw stones at somebody when they’re already down. A specific kind of hatred. Ages them dirty, they have to keep pumping their body with filler. They’ll never get enough to stay in the real. Casino noises traded for flesh. Blink blink. Chirp. Rich people have always hated the poor.

My head slammed against the soil sliding as if hidden sleet graced my presence. I’ve always wanted to slash knee deep in an achilles tendon all the way up to the calf. The flop fall is both endearing and amusing. Imagine a giant person with tiny little legs. No balance, no bounce. Just crunched up cars the way they used to in those old car junkyards. Smash smash goes down number two. A quick femoral artery stab wound. It’s witchcraft. Glitches out their system. Mangled rabid machines.

Last two cyborgs have noticed me, I can sense the direction shift. I have to use shit skewer sleep stock as a body shield. Plant food is fermenting its raw rotten juices on the outside of their skin. It’s a clear muddy gooey liquid at first before it begins to disintegrate.

Bird chirps turn into screams, they’ve already forgotten the lady they were trying to hunt. I felt her shadow wisp past me toward the tunnels. My team is waiting for me, but they’ll find her instead. No one is ballsy to go up against two let alone four, so they know I’m real fuckin’ tired.

We call them death watches, you know. Everybody hits a stage where we want absolute darkness and the abyss to soul suck us off this joint. Not everyone is quick enough to do their part. Sometimes we lose one or a couple to straight suicidal ideation anarchy.

Cyborgs don’t look like birds the way we used to remember them. It’s not a bunch of people running around with bird heads gunning down kids. Rush wanted to drive capitalism home, every shield mask covers the top of their heads down to their chins. Stickers like sponsors backing them up for coins. Olympic dreams down the cash slot. Dense shields. You can’t throw a machete at it and expect it to crack the egg. You’d have to empty a full AK round to see the fucker behind it.

Unsurprising, it’s dudes pushing fifty, trust fund generational wealth bullshit. Yoked ass dudes with veiny limbs with no real combat skills. Appearances will deceive you, they’re never prepared for the art of war. If you’re lucky, they’ll be high on synthetic drugs and take a woman out on a date in these things. Explorer voyeuristic shit. When you see these women after the kill, it’s hard to decide if the liposuction must’ve taken the emotion out of their eyes. There’s no logic to their madness, they’re blind leading themselves to ditches. New mantra is genocide of their own people is the righteous path. Kill your neighbor, save your family.

Number two must’ve been a woman with the birth decline, women are pricy cattle, especially when you come from the Company. Women there are all about tradition and maintaining the cult. Not for survival, delusional beliefs of freedom to be soft girls without worries. We saw them all in those docuseries from the past. Psychosis miosis. She definitely hallucinated her God before her skin rotted to sludge. Some hallucinatory effect like how kids see butterfly people in Tornados before they die. These bastards are still screeching long enough to get my ears wet with blood. Never carry guns, which is a shame. I like to feel them real close to me before they go. I’m split down the middle on nurturing their sacrifice as a ritual that must be made, and a cancer I must abstract from the outside world. My knives are syringes of protection. After enough hits, prey drive kicks in.

Number three is getting real savvy popping off rounds into corpse number two. The bodies of these people when they go is some fucked up genetic nightmare. Bodies absorb everything, blobs that reach out for photosynthesis elsewhere; but it’s just garbage consumption. After a time the body lets go, sizzles out to moist green manure. It’s essential on the field to take pictures of their faces and log them. There is a four hour window of opportunity to capture their facial profile before it’s wiped off the map. One has to wonder if Rush was high on some ketamine trip. Had to be in this reality. No reason to desert your body to this feastless salvation.

In the distance of your brain you hear Rush’s volatile diatribe, “They’ll never find us if we dissemble identity! We heal the planet with our bodies! Green energy and Bitcoins is the new future to GOD!”

After number three emptied his magazine, I dug my fingers into number two’s body mass. It breaks apart like meatloaf, and I splatted corpse flesh on number three’s face shield. They didn’t get to the what if stage in the First Generation. They can’t defrost themselves out of it. The sludge is a beast of its own trying to propagate on your mask. Names become numbers, the species wants to multiply and evolve.

A moment of clarity is realizing the impossible. No one was coming for me now. No radiant save the day, I got your back dream team. All that was mine has gone radio silent. I jumped straight for number three, kangaroo cocaine spun my foot right into his chest. Rapid motion turns into a rampage and partial beheading right at the neck. Kicked him in the knee caps to keep him down. He was in my way.

Pivot the body to the left, and number four slams a sword straight into my solar plexus. In one last attempt of redemption, I got him under the collarbone subclavian vein. It had to hurt. Bird chirps go muted. We stand with each other slippery in time. He clicks the side of the helmet, and I watch the shield pull back to reveal his face. At first it felt too convenient for someone like me. I was a nobody, I couldn’t have deserved it.

I recognized his face immediately, “Well, well. If it isn’t the Company’s pres, you bastard.” I laugh, blood shining through my teeth.

“You—”

“I was your best PR, your best girl. Came up from the streets. I wasn’t going to be you.”

“You had—”

“The opportunity? Shut up. Stop talking. Listen to the world now, it’s quiet.”

Pain is swelling all around me. My face gets close to him. Breath on his face. He shutters in fear. No, he cannot survive. We recognize each other in silence, eyes dilated at the tip. I pinch his nose and cover his mouth.

“Birds flying high, you know how I feel. Sun in the sky, you know how I feel.” A whisper, a song, a warning. I didn’t want to taint our moment with blood regurgitating out of my throat. Not for us, not ever. Two sides of the opposite spectrum.

It happens. When life plucks you out of thin water. I watch his eyes go white shiny pearls. I want to pretend that the stench isn’t unbearable, as my body begins to shiver. Water drips on my temples. My bloodied smile, remembers all the lines.

Rituals. Daily Routines. The grind never lets you go.

And I’m feeling good.

This is the second piece after a lull from college, I am graduating with my associates this year; man it took forever. Transfering to Uni, it will be a long ride but, worth it in the end. Writing is the dream. Psychology is the advocacy; something deep within my bones. You’d have to kill me to take either from me.

I will be honest I didn’t read much of MA Knight until recently; but who doesn’t love LESBIAN WEREWOLVES; I mean everyone saw Ginger Snaps which had some softcore lesbian vibes in there. Is it just me? Maybe. I worship women, you’ll learn soon enough in my own writing.

Their series is FEVERCHAIN a contemporary horror romance in Pinetown NJ. If this is your jams. Check it out. It’s worth it.

[Photographer UNKNOWN circa 1970-1980s, Sukeban smoking a cigarette.] Edited by yours truly.
Stream of Consciousness POV, Zero draft.

                 [[[[ Lord, give me one more chance ]]]]

There’s a mirror, a reflection. It can’t be mine. Inside my eyes are hollow. Welts underneath my sleeves, the invisible. We travel along the sidewalks with unattainable dreams. Fantasies wretched into our brains. Swelling into balloons, childish toys, our aviators. Outsiders, the nameless. Take me anywhere, drop me anywhere, let me fall.

By land, by the city side train. Rage festers in my tongue every time my bat swings. I am sukeban, I belong to no one. When nightfalls, bones crack against my instruments. Any I can find. A scavenger, a rodent, no name. When they scream, it’s the only time I smile.

She kisses my bloody lips. I remember her face in fragments. Her skin snow white, moon flesh. Her tongue lathers a sip of rye down my throat. It burns smooth, devours my fears. She leaves tiny scars on my wrists when I’m not looking. Caught up in the moment. Her tongue, a thick tentacle searching for my source. Suction that gum smacks, pop. When I hit my cigarette, she disappears into the smoke. I wonder if she’s my future self, I am supposed to love. A feeling foreign, I’ll kill it slow.

I tie on my private school girl uniform, it’s my last year. Repeated. Coins and blessings, unholy. They don’t know me. They don’t see the real.

Plan is to make a deal to burn this city off the planet. High on adrenaline inside the train, I’ll finally have a name. They’ll remember me, their only monument to this ruined age.

“Hikari, you’re late again.” I hear a girl’s voice whisper behind my seat, scolding hot. I imagine her paddling my ass with each strike making the perfect match. I lean my hair back, partial wet, clumped mascara.

“I hope it pains you, forever.”

“This is why you don’t have any friends, Hikari.”

“Life isn’t as serious as you think. You’re so pent up, marrying you sounds like it’d be miserable, burikko.”

She jabs her pencil into the middle of my head as an act of courage. I didn’t take her wrists this time. I love to play dirty with Manami. She keeps all her expressions out in the open. Her family’s coffers are filled to the brim. It’ll be a loveless marriage, but she’ll never die.

The halls are dressed white, painted like a prison. I see my dreams when I wake up, they paint the walls when my eyes flutter. All the people here flock to their cliques, bodies traded for coin, they fade through every paper they consume and become another commodity. Magnates. In 33 seconds, all their love will die, dreams lost traded for gold.

I see the faces of my enemies in my waking life, they spread past my body in fear. I taste their agony on my tongue, bloodlines mix for a corporate exchange. When their mouths open, poison speaks. It’s distorted, under the water, where it becomes my shelter. In this hell, I am torn. Parts of my body react in rage while the internal organs melt in flux. The voices of my ancestors call me home.

On the lonely road, I’ve been here before; sometimes my body doesn’t feel like it’s mine. It belongs to another. It consumes my existence until I am exhausted. I lay outside in the grass smoking cigarettes when everyone runs track. I hear the drums of their feet smash against the sand. Heartbeats without power, dremels waiting to shine.

Don’t look at me. I am not here.
Don’t look at me. I am somewhere else.

The snow white girl from the train lies down next to my body and kisses my cheek. “Don’t worry. They cannot see me.”

I shove the cigarette into the grass and touch her breast. It felt real. The runners faces don’t acknowledge me. I sigh with relief as she climbs over my waist. Her face is relaxed, high cheek boned beauty. At least she wasn’t born a boy. Their faces are squished together, sandwiches left to rot. Boys are ugly, they pretend they’re better than us; and they never will be.

Her eyes turn in a circular motion between blackness and cherry red. Long fingernails caress the bone part of my hips and dig at the skin, I let her bleed me. The warmth leaving my body feels exhilarating. I push her thighs, so she can trap me further, she pulls her body back arched. She’s shadow and light, moving full circle.
“No one can see you either, Hikari.”
A smile forms on the corner of my lips, “I noticed. Who the fuck are you?”
She claws at my bottom flat lip and slices it. Her lips drip over mine, candied thick honey sticks to our breaths. She sucks on my blood, it strains from my skin. Eyes rolled back, I want a version of her where we can live forever.
“I am the curse you called in your dreams. You want to burn this city, don’t you?”
My fingers clasp between hers, she’s a wildcard. No name, just like me. “You’ll come with me when it’s over?”
She smiles, her fangs stick over her lips. “How long do you want me?” Yearning hides underneath my meat. This creature calms my nerves as she rubs me and places a cigarette in my mouth. I can’t tell if I am her pet or her master. There’s secrets in her eyes that cannot be found. When I suck in the smoke all my worries wash away, pouring rain.
“I want your name and then I’ll decide.”
She began to unbutton my shirt trying to derail the question. I watched her. I wouldn’t stop her. Fight and flight at war with each other. Girls, come and go. This felt different. If she was my curse, does that mean we already belong?
“Some called me Yuki-onna, but I like Yuki when it’s the right person. You feel right to me. You won’t betray me, will you Hikari?”
A contract. The ritual was in the blood. To forget you is to hide. Cities, change; but she knows what I want. I’ll give her everything to set myself free.

It’s been me, on my own for as long as I can remember. Ghosts that wish they had skin. Ghosts that wish they had a voice; loud enough to break past the barrier. I’ve been so downtrodden in my thoughts I didn’t notice her kimono covering my naked body. Blood rushes to the skull. I want to scream, but all I can do is whisper.
“Stay with me until my body is no longer, and when it’s no longer. Take me with you.”
Yuki leans down and kisses my lips. Sealed with a kiss.

When Yuki was no longer inside of me, my clothes remained intact as though the act was a fantasy. A dream within a dream. The cigarette ash stayed still, its tower hovered over my face. My loins hurt from all the scars she left behind. Abrasions have become gifts I have started to cherish. Yuki is a mystery to me. Wrath, my biggest challenge. A way to lose myself inside of, willing hunger. My disease, her disaster.

Yuki contaminates my body, she alleviates my loneliness. It’s a way of killing time. She disappears after a few drags of my third cigarette as if the curse isn’t strong enough to keep her here. I can still feel her presence somewhere lingered on my neck. Nails and goosebumps. Skin raised, never to deflate.

I am not jealous of this city and what they want to create, I just don’t think arranged marriages should be a bird cage. People become doormats of their pain they cannot comprehend. Their sacrifice is the only option. This is the last prefecture that holds allegiance to the old world. I couldn’t change even if it made them feel better. Born without importance, pieces of me missing from the fray. They’ll feel me, when they can fly.

Cold water touches my face, in the mirror Yuki blows kisses at me, her face is disfigured. I’d lick the wounds, and swim over her curves and dislodged bones. Yuki is beautiful, she teaches me how to tread water. She feels every part of me that still knows how to be me.
“Hikari, are you licking the mirror?” Manami interjects, my tongue slides down the dirty glass.
I smack my lips together, I don’t remember doing this. “What if I am? Are you turned on?”
Manami scoffs, “I don’t touch myself thinking of some scum sukeban.”
My body pivots, I turn and shove her against a wall, “But, you like the attention, Manami. Most popular girl, every person fawning over you.”
“Baka. I am not interested in your boyish nose and big boned boy body.”
“That’s very specific for someone who pretends not to notice me.” I breathe on her neck and I feel the warmth in her body flushing. Her veins, a river could run dry in there. “What if I told you, we’re all going to die?”
“I’d consider it a blessing in disguise. No, seriously, Hikari. You’ve changed. What’s going on?”
Manami my childhood friend, abandoned me at the first taste of fame. “I’ve been this way my whole life. You’ve just never paid any attention. It’s a joke. We all die in the end.” I push myself from her body, her cheeks flushed a pink rose. I hear Manami panting, and I like it. Still a virgin, holding out for marriage.
“Hikari, they’re going to ship you off to Paris. You should be proud. You get to see the world.” Manami tries to change the subject and touches my shoulder.
“See the world? Without a choice? I can’t wait.”
I can feel Yuki’s jealousy through the mirror.

“I want to kill Manami.” Yuki blurts out on the way home, my bat slugged on my shoulder.
"Leave Manami out of this. She’s a dumb girl from the past. I like to fuck with her, because she’s expressive. There’s no love for her.”
Yuki sneered in my direction, “Says the girl who still protects her. You want her more than me. I don’t want competition.”
Fair point. It’s not proper to keep Manami alive, while Yuki is teaching me how to curse and use manmade chemistry. Our trades are in sex and blood. “How about this Yuki. During the summer festival, we corner Manami. You can kill her. I’ll watch. And we burn this city down with her corpse as the sacrifice?”
“Now, you’re talking my language. This is the pedestal I crave.”
A couple of girls, other sukebans sat at the outskirts of town, never seen them on my side. One of them eyed me as if they were waiting for me to pass through.
My bat slides off my shoulder. Yuki disappears into my flesh. I let her take control. Swallowed my pride, and her body, my body moves in ways I can’t comprehend.
First girl gets beheaded, ripped off at the nerve. Blood tastes marmalade. My lips are all over the flesh wound. Can’t stop myself. There’s a window where my vision fades in and out. See through mesh curtains poked against my eyes. Honeycomb light. Yuki gives me anger, a taste. She takes my impurity within and we sin. She doesn’t say sorry as she empties their heads.

I couldn’t look away.
I couldn’t look away.
Yuki’s pure. Yuki’s pureblood rage.
Take me home.

Three months later.

My body’s become unrecognizable. Scar tissue has formed mountainous landscapes over my body. Burning feeling that won’t let go. I’m alive without a soul. Yuki has painted kanji curses with cloth from my ceiling onto the floor. She uses my blood to make them real. I start to cough up blood in bowls, she collects for later. My head is dizzy. Brains open wide, deserted barren equal to the loneliness of my life. When I touch her body, I feel nothing now. Flesh on flesh, my curse, our disease. We’ll never know if this was the right decision, we’re far past the exit line.

Yuki has replaced my body parts with her own and we’ve traded organs; so she can exist on this plane longer. My face is bruised and bleeding, covered in gauze except for my eyes and lips. She still needs to fuck those. It’s harder to have thoughts of my own anymore. Yuki penetrates my brain with poetry. Haunts me with her dreams. Her body keeps me warm, the summer festival is just hours away. I’ll need my family’s sword to use as a cane to prop me up.

Everything’s not alright anymore. I feel alone in my bed when she touches my body. I am damned for existence, she’s the damned that makes it real. Siamese twins separated at birth. We love to hate, and hate to love. Yuki fucks me, killing me and I am too weak to stop her. Soon enough, I’ll live in her realm. Where all the ghosts and vengeful spirits live.

In static, I suspend over the floor hunched, gauze wet with my blood. Yuki wraps my body with gauze and layers of regalia from her world. A kimono infused with speckles of gold. It’s red and black, scripture unknown. Ancient script, I can taste at the back of my throat. Yuki puts the sword in its sheath so I can grip its weight to balance myself. Fallen, and found. She kisses the nape of my neck for protection, it stings my scalp.

“It’s almost time, my love. I know it hurts. It won’t last long, Hikari.”
I bite my lip as the cloth wraps around me, you get what you deserve. You make the deal, and transfer your tragedy for curses you cannot lift. My fingers grip tighter, it feels as though tiny canveronous insects are crawling all over my body eating at what’s left of me. My body’s aflame, but god I like it.
“We deserve each other Yuki, my bride.”
“Don’t be so sad, I’ll give you a name. It’s all you’ve ever wanted.” She tightens the cloth, I spit blood on the floor, the rorschach painting looks back at me. A demon without eyes. No longer longing for the sun or the moon. The time when the feelings gone.
“I say it in jest. It’s hard to be this bad.” I laugh, my body barely able to stand up straight.
Yuki unwraps my face, and lets me see her transformation in the mirror, a pair of fangs over the lips like hers. She tells me I am beautiful, this strange feeling captures us. A still life portrait of our fate. Her hands move over my jawline, it’s sharp enough to cut. Still human with body modifications. I feel her essence take over my brain, her virus eating away at my sorrow. All I can feel is vengeance, and it will be mine.

Innocences last cry, dolls hair frayed, its touch and embrace. Long walks between my family and I, their shoes clanking against the wood on the outside. Before the birds woke up. It’s the ending of this plane, and soon begins another. Blossoms fall before my face, where Yuki is no longer, a girl just wanted to be loved. We’re the lost and found. I don’t want to close my eyes, I don’t want to forget the string of pearls and the sounds from the piano hollow my life out. It feels futile to grasp at what is already gone.

My parents corpses were left side by side in the grove, shame on your family, carved into their chests. Ethics for a new chapter. Our backyard is an oasis of overgrown blossoms. They didn’t have time to teach me how to fly; so I found another. Plucked at their life strings, feathers shed and never return.

Yuki has her arm wrapped around my left holding me up, my right is using the sword as a cane. I am unrecognizable, an omen. Degenerated girl, regenerated girl. My bride sucks in her breath as though she is orgasming every morsel of life we pass through. People begin to collapse, older folks frail of essence. I hear their wooden bodies fall, and shatter. Splinter without a sound. I can barely breathe, it’s torture. Old days, gone. Violence overshadows our eyes and we’re under her spell. In a lifetime, this city will be lifted from its roots and be remembered by a photograph. A polaroid with shadows of life.

I catch Manami’s glimpse at the corner of my eye. I hope she turns away and runs toward the flames. I hope she becomes dissected by her future husband and survives. Manami makes the mistake every human believes, demons cannot experience fundamental love. My transformation is not complete yet. In an act of protection, I shield Manami’s body over my Kimono on the floor where bodies have already lined up cold next to us. Yuki smacks, her lips. I don’t shutter.
“You have less than three seconds to run or I cannot save you.” My colorless words barely made it through, burning sounds had gotten louder from the end of the festival. Someone set the fireworks in mid collapse into a makeshift ramen shop. The invasion had already begun in minutes of our passing.
“I don’t know who you are. Why do you know my name?”
I laughed, blood splattering on her face. Of course, she forgot my name. I am no longer Hikari. I want to cry but there’s no water for my tear ducts. I cup her face, her eyes take breaths from my throat. People I used to cherish, call me crazy, but, I used to be a sentimental fuck. Manami is beginning to fall, but I grab her to me. It’s too late. My bloody lips caress her ears, soft melon peach. Yuki from behind, removed my sword, stabbed me straight through and into Manami’s body.
“I heard from Hikari, she traded with your family. You’re going to Paris instead. It’s where you wanted to be.”
Manami is dying, her white kimono expands vermillion.
“I didn’t know Hikari loved me to sacrifice herself for my dream.”
“Hikari is a little masquerade of happiness to know you’ll be free.”
Manami’s body becomes cold, I can’t keep it warm if I move her. Her beautiful brown eyes glass over grey and white film frozen in time. I wanted two more seconds with her. All that I love is, all that you were.
“Are you ready to transform, instead of swooning over your plaything?” Yuki spoke annoyed finger still on the sheath.
“She deserved lies because she never told me the truth. It’s fair to be merciful gods. Demons. Whatever we are. Yuki. I don’t want to watch my stomach collapse on her pretty white dress. Get this show on the road.”
“Did she ever give you mercy? Why did she deserve it?”
“Don’t be stupid Yuki, for as long as you’ve lived you know that some memories are untainted even if they happened long ago.”
“I asked you not to betray me.”
“I never betrayed you, my bride. We will complete the transformation. You will live with me for eternity. I will fight for you. I will kill for you. You’ll never be alone again.” I coughed, the blade stopped burning. “Manami is a pebble in my future. I will never see her again. I will make peace with that, can you?”
Yuki removed the blade and gutted my stomach over Manami. My double vision doubted her words. My hands are over Manami’s face, cupped my fingers from her drinking the poison that lives deep within me. As though this kind of betrayal would make a difference or change this night. Everytime I close my eyes, something within me dies. Disappears into the black.
“You’ll never sleep alone. You’ll never be on your own. Say, good night. Say sweet dreams, my love.”
Yuki torches the bottom of my kimono, and I feel my body burning, wax melting. A statue where I belong. Every nerve in my meat screams. Protection, a lie. A betrayal of the heart. I don’t stop cupping her mouth, as the flames rise up over my hair and singe my body into red gilded scars. There will be a time for everyone to know.
To say good bye. To say good bye.
Breath pushes out of my system as a rite of passage, the one last hurrah. My violence.
The city burns, and we will be free.
The city scorches the earth, and no one will remember why.

We arrived in a golden hearse covered in spirit houses of the dead, Yuki left behind in her rage. My betrayal allowed her to consume all the exhaustion in the air. Their soulless bodies scour the emptied fields and leveled homes, the signs of the city have lost its title as if a portal slabbed down in the middle and sucked it down its black hole. The whole country will create folklore, conspiracies of train stops of where it once was; but Yuki says the higher gods will overwrite it. The people will never know how in a blink of an eye in one timeline how nearly hundreds of thousands of people disappeared in one single summer.
We’re dressed like royalty, full hannya on my face, Yuki the beautiful snow white goddess squeezing my hand as we take the last train station off this plane. I am smoking a cigarette, there’s a sofa bed inside the hearse where we’re sitting upright. A limo. A hearse. A passenger carriage as we meet our end. I hear the bells, their rituals of songs for the dead. Well wishes, and the underworld waiting to greet us.

”They’ll welcome us home, Kijo.”

All the confusion and regret has left my body. I feel grounded in her embrace. We open our jaws and shove our tongues down each other’s throats in attempt to choke either party.

Ready able, willing to die.

This is the first piece in the series that will be public, if it gets too hairy I will put under lockdown. All my work is Stream of Consciousness, zero draft.

Edward Marlo Ruiz gave me this prompt, first in line, also another incredible writer check out his work.

[Original photography done by: Spain, Madrid, Lavapies - 1997. Photo by Cristina Garcia Rodero, Magnum Photos, Portrait of a Spanish Boy by Frank Scherschel ] & then distorted by yours truly.

Red is the color of love. Red is the color of iron webbed between my teeth. Its hungry slurp, aloe sponges the enamel. I’ve got a new pair of jaws. Hermanita told me it’s how, I’ll steal all the warmth from her eyes. When she looks at me, I see bodies made of steel without milk inside.

A pin prick on the skin. The smell of roses blossomed in sea salt. Her voice soft, shivers away from her disguise. Artemis with her spear. She calls me Eddie Orion, a nebula untouched. We chase the moon, starless twilight. I tell her, I’ll heal her behind the brown locks and balmy eyes. I place her arms in mine. In transit of change, her finger wedged into my gums.

Sandpaper tongues scratch the surface. They want to set me up. They want to catch me, everywhere. I see them behind the trees. Shrouded entities, without eyes or faces. I feel their skin sagging against my arms, puddy imprints the medullary rays.

Within me, mine, her apple. A downward spiral with imperfect lines.

The sun rose when I saw steam descending from her torn wilted clothes.

Dirty linen old folk gossip. Plunges into the back alley of our house. Old ghosts wish to make amends. I pretend they’re not real, their shadows want more of me. You belong here, Artemis. I rest my scalp inside your symphonies. My years got colors, years left until I’m broken. We live together dejected by sensation.

My head tilts to the left, my Tanjore doll head breaks past the parameters. I alter embryos for our shared fate. We’re part of the same closed circle.

My muzzle breaks loose when we’re out here. Weaves the night in, crept behind my chest and reaches inside. Touches the valves of my blood flow and snaps them shut. Seduced by an ocean of discontent. Primal in nature. Red.

She tastes like stone fruit in the summer, wet musk in the winter. Ferments underneath her fingernails. Her lips taste of righteous charades. Dry cracked lips, shattered glass on the floor. Her voice isn’t loud enough past the white walls. Contralto frequencies toil inside my ribcage. Expanding and retracting.

Hermanita told me, Artemis has arrows for every man. They stay dead with brutal penetration. Men are simple peasants who wish to be Gods. Countries made men impenetrable. Women made Artemis for protection. You’d only be lucky to be born under her spell.

Artemis has different colors for contrasting aeons. My fears have become phobias. There beyond the windowsill, hearts collect dust. She’s the thorn in my side, canvases collected, her hide shines under sunlight. When I escape, she leads me back here to disappear. Her infectious voice soothes my disease with ease. Convicted by her smile, my paradise is thousands of chimeras in flight.

Bricks of our tower are dislodged, her arms and legs live inside held by glue. She burns at the stake within me, oh, my love. Her honey lips part as they touch mine. Candied innocence shedded feral. Souls swab our tainted blight, heavenly tongues stained.

Delightful helms of a sailboat, waves crash at our sides. Exuberant destruction, limerence.

The apples grow each season, ripened with her sticks. I obsess over her spear, her puncture. Locked her up, where she sleeps. Film covers her eyes as she hides from time. My nebula never felt sharper.

Under the floorboard, the wood breathes.

Artemis mimics other faces and exalts, my sabreur. Her spear takes different shapes, my harvest lush and rich. Variance is my only burden.

I nip at the heels juices deep inside. Wrinkles on my face, it tethers and coils of old world ghosts. In despair, I am desperate to escape. Artemis lies beside me, her tortured artist. She promises to sing, La Cenerentola. She begs for sunken ships where stars become the light when we drown.

The crevices of her flesh unpeel, Red. I feel her within, too sweet to bite. Bubbles around the gums and lodged into my throat. Lambic filled to the brim. Amber is the color of her eyes. Muddled nerves, her song of thunder. Flesh one, never able to retreat. My lambs stay in their shelter. Flesh without a name, there is only Artemis.

A man does not conquer for control, they consume until all the air is gone. My sisters weep between the groves, a flock of crows at their side. Dressed in black, the end is on my mind. They take my hands with a quick pinch. They’ll leave my side. Hermanita’s face distorts into an old woman I’ve never met.

Artemis stands naked in the grove, the village moves daydreaming around her. She’s invisible with three arrows sliced through her heart. Her lips smell of sulfur and gasoline. Cigarette smoke perfumes into the air, a pyre yet to burn. She takes pieces of my garments and begins to eat my cotton in her mouth. A door is open no one would believe exists. Artemis has to make a gown or she’ll be late. She badgered my clock brain. Calls it sickness. She touches the number 12 and counts backwards in three.

The old ghosts begin to take the bones lodged in the tower. The lambs no longer belong with their shepherd. Her hands caress my temple down to my cheekbone. Expression shifts when the film lifts up over her eyes. Shutters open. She whispers, “I am you, I am we.”

My legs shake in the grove, villagers gone to nestle skin to skin, hides hung over the walls, to cover the curse of our bloodline. Families of flies live outside our homes. All the lost lambs climbed beyond the wood to reach the stars. There’s a spy in my house of thieves, they seek Orion in the promising land.

I am the one who cannot see. Artemis blocks my vision, she knows I can’t help myself. Body bags cover the corners, triumphant of their sacrifice. Antithesis to precision their bodies in motion. Artemis watches my expressions with curiosity as the trinkets disappear. The madness of the red is courtship laid to waste. My bowtie unravels to erase the difference. It undoes my burden, it sets me free.

Artemis holds out a red apple, “I am you with the red.”

Mouth open, every crunch rips at my gums. Unforgivable change. Juice rolls down my fat lips at the corners, thirst burns. The more I swallow, the more I need. It stains my lips, she tells me I am defected. Seeds live in the beds of my gums where my teeth used to be. Every seed for a lamb lost.

“Edward loves red apples.”

Stem stuck in the throat, punctures. It expands needle pointed, jagged little edges. Love is the color red, an arrow.

Artemis has two left.

Horror is political and these films embody the rage, the despair, the hopelessness, the collapsing beneath our heads. What motivates you, when your life has been a constant war?

For the second time, reporting safety issues resulted in the same outcome: no one will touch retaliation unless you’re in eviction court. In Missouri, there is a loophole so wide you could drive a U-Haul through it. If a tenant reports habitability violations, the landlord can simply refuse to renew the lease. No eviction. No hearing. No legal protection.

Retaliation becomes “invisible”. Agencies from city inspectors to state and federal channels won’t take the case. This is class warfare. Nothing spells an oligarchy harder than the pigs licking their lips and letting a motherfucker starve. Good intentions? They’re too busy with their legs propped up on your corpse sucking on champagne frozen in cubes with cheap fruit from their daddy’s wine cellar. Influencer culture runs the masses because hell was full.

I have gone through every resource, every advocate, every nonprofit in this city and I have been turned away by all of them. The official message is: “We can’t help unless you’re being evicted.” The unofficial truth is: you can be legally punished for asking for basic safety as long as the punishment arrives disguised as a non-renewal.

This isn’t just my story. It’s happening to people across St. Louis every day. Tenants living in mold, code violations, collapsing structures, and unlivable conditions, with absolutely no recourse unless they can afford a legal fight most of us never get. The system protects the people with the keys, not the people who sleep under the ceilings they fail to maintain.

We call them “bandos” they’re everywhere all over the city, and the problems just increases day by day. It’s worse in the winter. Fires to keep normal everyday people warm because the system failed them. They’ve become homeless. The city allows full control of landlords who cut corners to fill their coffers, it only increases, it only degrades. Historical buildings in shambles.

This map includes (follow the red markings)
→ Buildings officially marked as vacant, properties in the Vacant Building Registry, units flagged by Citizen Service Bureau, building inspectors/code enforcement: some departments doing the bare minimum for a paycheck, properties owned by the Land Reutilization Authority (LRA).

What we don’t get the full picture on:

• Some privately owned buildings marked as neglected, dangerous, or condemned

• Properties landlords haven’t officially registered as vacant

• Buildings that are occupied but severely deteriorated

• Informal/hidden abandonment (landlords refusing repairs, tenants forced to leave, but not reported)

• This is not new, we get headlines about this every year, sometimes a journalist will try to boost the situation, it gets shoddier the farther up the chain you go in the city. There’s a reason for that too, the Delmar Divide. False promises, year after year.

I’m in this system right now, as I will call it, “The great loophole and the greatest failure” for tenant protections. It’s in my blood, my late family member uncovered fraud in HUD, his name is scrubbed all over the internet for reasons.

My timeline ends on March 19th, 2026, officially on March 20th, 2026.

This house will be a ghost town with cutted corners paid for by certain city inspectors who perpetuate the corruption, on record.

They will do the bare minimum repairs, and I assure you the next person who moves in will watch the same problems just as the people before my family. For legal reasons, I cannot name who they are; but they’re the top of the crop.

Google search: How many abandoned buildings are in St. Louis? I dare you. The numbers will burn into your skin forming rage you cannot verbally express. Don’t get me started on the Delmar Divide. It’s wishful thinking this problem can be solved overnight. There’s centuries of strife.

If I don’t secure stable housing with my family by then, I risk losing everything I’ve worked toward including my transfer to university in Fall 2026 to complete my BS in Psychology to lead towards Clinical Psychology. I have two careers moving alongside me: Writing (the dream), Clinical Psychology (advocacy/help to communities who are overlooked and deserve more).

My goal is provide accessibility to people like me right now at low income costs because you take an oath; the oath relies on your ethics. I can’t help it half of the psychology industry is barren of ethics. Yes, I am looking at you, California. The data doesn’t lie. Systematic oppression comes in many forms, and Cerberus’ heads aren’t large enough to fill the damage.

My long term goal is to take this lived experience and turn it into something bigger: a watchdog project, a long form investigation, and eventually a dissertation on how Missouri’s landlord-tenant loopholes function as legalized retaliation.

• HUD and HUD(OIG) is on my radar.

If I get one advocacy watchdog branch, press, and other agencies involved, I suspect it will happen swiftly or anywhere between summer of 2027-2028.

I will take it to Washington DC, if I am allowed the audience. I have stage fright that will make me pass out, so hopefully, if I end up in DC you don’t watch me timber flat on face live on television. If it’s one thing I learned from the modeling industry, you get back up, bloody nose and all.

If anyone wants to help in this process for St. Louis, Missouri. These are the avenues we will be looking at long term. This will not happen overnight. I would expect a years long investigation.

Welcome to the escalation spiral. Places I have yet to hit. Ground running. Feet bloody. Fighting until I am alive or dead.

Federal oversight committees:

• House Committee on Financial Services, Senate Banking, Housing & Urban Affairs Committee:

• What they do→ Oversight committees investigate state retaliation loopholes, unsafe housing patterns, collapsed buildings, failures in code enforcement, and political obstruction of tenant rights.

National housing organizations:

• National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) → publish federal reports and influence HUD rules

• National Housing Law Project (NHLP)→ Specializes in retaliation loopholes and weak tenant states.

• ACLU Housing Project → Focus on civil rights impacts

• Human Rights Watch (HRW) → Documents abuses in states with inadequate tenant laws.

Do any of you know these Presses personally?

Get at me, we have enough documentation that the only leg work will be sorting it, I will happily assist those presses for free.

Presses of interest:

• ProPublica

• The Atlantic

• Washington Post

• The Intercept

• NPR

• Mother Jones

• Los Angeles Times (National desk)

• Any press who believes in helping ending the homeless epidemic, and fighting oversight in laws that increase homelessness.

Due to the nature of lip service by my senators who are happily sitting with cutting costs for corpses; they will be completely ignored in the process. There is no point arguing with senators who only want to fill their coffers while others go hungry and die.

I can’t do any of that if I’m on the street.

So here’s where I ask for help with something I can genuinely give back: my writing.

From December 6, 2025 → March 19, 2026, I am writing personalized, stream-of-consciousness, zero-draft stories to anyone who wants to support my relocation fund or just wants to middle finger the patriarchy.

When you donate, you give me a three word prompt:[ 1 noun, 1 verb, 1 adjective]

• I will have to incorporate all 3 into the story somehow, stream of consciousness, zero draft; just how I’ve always done it and how you see it here on this publication (besides very specific niche stories que in The Diary Entries)

• You have 2 options here: Be tagged with your publication as a personal anecdote, and I will write whatever it made me feel at the time, that will be completely public.

• If you decide to keep it private, I will email you a personalized note on how it made me feel, the post will still go public with your name as [REDACTED] and you will have an email link that connects to the title.

• All posts go public, all posts will be free to read.

• None of the posts will support bigotry, provide harmful phobics, and be anti anything I ethically stand for; if you give me money and expect me to write hateful diatribe, thanks for the free money, no returns for bigots! If it’s especially Nazi propaganda, my WW2 grandfather’s ghost is standing over you with a rifle to the head and my bloody knuckles aren’t bloody enough.

Tier Options:

• $20 → 400 words

• $30 → 600 words

• $50 → 1,000 words

• $75 → 1,500 words

• $100 → 2,000 words

• $100+ → No word limit + ultra-personal extras

• Any number you want where you have issues with systemic oppression and want to middle finger corruption is up to your discretion. The writing project is purely optional.

P.S. I might write over the cap limit no matter what you give me, if I absolutely love the prompt. These limits are for me personally to restrain myself, but I have no guarantees this can turn into a series in the future with just three words. If it becomes a book, you get the book for free with my signature, a note and acknowledgement if you allow me.

Once I’m safe and housed, the real work begins.

Right around my birthday—yes, a personal middle finger to the patriarchy and the system. I will hopefully be in transit on my birthday. It also happens to be International Women’s Day. It would do me justice knowing that any of you would honor women in your life with pride on its special day.

My quote every year, “I love my birthday because I get to share it with every badass woman on the planet.”

I intend to take this experience and militarize it academically, politically, and creatively.

I’ve studied politics, philosophy, law, and systems for most of my life as a hobby. I can read legalese better than most of the officials who’ve dismissed me. My plan is to build the kind of public pressure and written record that makes legislators, watchdog groups, and housing agencies take notice. If I can close this loophole, even a little, even for one future tenant, I’ll have done what I came here to do.

Hell hath no fury than a woman enraged at the oppression that attempts to dismantle her.

None of this will come to fruition, if I lose everything before I can begin.

WHY HELP?

• Because housing instability creates an infinite loop that no one can escape alone. People need a community and a village, and they need fighters who fight against the current class war we cannot escape.

• Because Missouri’s current system ensures landlords never need to face accountability; they can simply refuse to renew and wash their hands of responsibility.

• Because people like my family fall through the cracks every day, and the cracks are widening with inflation, unsafe housing, and an economy where even eggs have become a luxury for the rich.

Rich people’s nature is not created in the image of humankind’s compassion.

We fight because silence is cancer to the soul.

I’ve survived things people write movies about:

I’ve walked servers to their cars with an infantry marine knife strapped to my thigh, named, “The Ribsmasher” giving the ‘mom look’ for any drunk weirdo west county fucker who thought it would be their lucky day.

I’ve gotten out of Hollywood alive.

I’ve dodged bullets shot at me or my car for various reasons. Sometimes, for simply existing in the same place at the wrong time.

Judo threw nonconsensual SA creeps over bars in heels. Nobody likes a man who doesn’t understand consent, takes advantage, takes, takes and thinks the world is built around his DNA. A self righteous prick is still a self righteous prick, and in my world, they better meet their maker on that bar stool.

I’ve seen what happens when you drive full speed off an overpass into oncoming traffic on HWY 101.

I painted alleys, ran with underground artists, woke up in Compton making friends over vodka I hated, outran danger more times than I should have survived. I’d rather hang out with people in Compton than Long Beach. I know they will stand on business.

I taught UC Berkeley students during the Occupy Movement their rights; so they wouldn’t get arrested and kicked out of their college.

To name a few. I honestly did not think I would make it this far.

I’ve been homeless before, but the world is different now—more violent, more desperate, more dangerous.

I don’t want to lose everything I’ve built as an adult. I want to move forward. I want to finish my education. I want to write. I want to expose the loophole that harms thousands of tenants every year. I want to build community and something resembling a future where people are allowed to thrive.

HUMAN RIGHTS ARE CIVIL RIGHTS

I refuse to go back to survival tactics I outgrew. I refuse to let this system swallow me.

I’m asking for help because I have a plan and I will execute it with the same ferocity I’ve brought to every chapter of my life.

Phoenixes revisit death. We burn, transform, eat the catastrophes in our mouths and build a new version.

Let’s see what I create this time.

For email inquiries: bowedith1@gmail.com

Send Prompts or other donations to Venmo: @EtherDreams99

There may or may not be a Gofundme in the future, look for updates.

Thank you for everyone who took the time to read my goals, motivations & want to help the cause.

One day, we will return to some sense of normalcy in this chaos, you and I, my co-pilot in life, in eons, untold by time: , “The Unofficial Editor of Substack”, “The Editor”, my fiancée. It’s no coincidence we unintentionally used Ichi the Killer in both of our posts. We share distinct similarities and that’s what makes us powerful. I will support you in any adventure we undertake because our world isn’t conquered yet. Thank you for being patient with me as I attempted to decipher our next steps.

Share it with everyone you know, let’s show them how to fight.

If this is your first time here, turn back.
Diary Entries Vol.1: Start here
Diary Entries Vol.2: Vol. 2
Diary Entries Vol.3: Vol. 3
Diary Entries Vol.4: Vol. 4

Now you’re caught up.

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[If this is your first time here:
Diary Entries Vol 1.: Vol 1
Diary Entries Vol 2: Vol 2
Diary Entries Vol 3: Vol 3
And here we are at Vol 4. It will be split between Vol 4/Vol 4.5]

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[ Taschen, Benedikt, editor. The Complete Atlas of Human Anatomy and Surgery. Taschen, 2018. All these INCREDIBLE illustrations must be recognized, I love to throw them in the editor engine. I own th…

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[If you haven’t read Diary Entries Vol 1: Diary Entries Vol 1 read this first, this is a serial]

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Day 01.

She said, sorrie, without the why, the why meant too much deep inside of her chest; where it grew heavy the plant flesh covered with decay, its dead leaves smelled of dust left in empty rooms …

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A Lesson in Navigating Trauma, when dealing with an Narcissistic Mother: The interview no one asked for: A personal essay.

Note: Do not read this if you don't want a painful reality. There may be no …

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[Stream of Consciousness, free write, no prompt. This is unrelated to The Saint. Erotica rated XOXO. ]

Empty playgrounds are legs with disasters. Waters lukewarm. Betrayals are those who feel your pai…

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Trepidation, mingle, completion:

I listen to the cars zoom past my eyes, their shiny lights blow up bright neon and zig zags over my face they become sunglasses …

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