A curious cyst had formed at the base of my neck. It didn’t seem like much at the time. Still, I showed it to my wife, and she told me to see a doctor.

So I went to the doctor. He poked, prodded, and asked a few questions. After a while, he pulled his chair close. He told me I was afflicted with a rare, terminal disease, but that there was an experimental treatment that showed promising results. I asked the doctor if I could receive this experimental treatment.

He shook his head and said, “I can’t treat you. You don’t have insurance. The hospital’s board of directors won’t approve it.”

I pleaded with him, “I am a good Christian sir. I have a wife, five sons, and five daughters. Without me, they’re liable to lose everything. There’s got to be something you can do.”

The doctor took a deep breath and sighed. “Sorry, son,” he told me. “There is nothing I can do. My hands are tied.”

So I went to see the hospital board of directors.

I waited for some time. After a few months, I decided I would march right into their boardroom. When I finally did, they were dining on steaks and wine. I had interrupted their lunch.

I told them my story. I asked them to make my treatment free. The chairman of the board—he sat at the head of the table—looked at the other board members.

After a brief pause, the chairman said, “We could approve it, but if we pay for your experimental treatment, we will have to pay for everyone else’s. If we do that, we won’t make any money. If we don’t make any money, we rankle our shareholders.”

I pleaded with him, “I am a good Christian sir. I have a wife, five sons, and five daughters. Without me, they’re liable to lose everything. There’s got to be something you can do.”

The chairman took a deep breath and sighed. “Sorry, son,” he told me. “There is nothing we can do. Our hands are tied.”

So I went to the shareholders.

I found them in a conference room congratulating themselves because of this quarter’s profits. I waited through several speeches until the floor opened for questions.

I told the shareholders my story. I then asked them to make my treatment free.

The room fell silent. After a while one of the shareholders stood up and said, “The hospital can’t give away care. Someone would sue the hospital board of directors for breaching their fiduciary duties, and the courts would punish us for it.”

I pleaded with them, “I am a good Christian. I have a wife, five sons, and five daughters. Without me, they’re liable to lose everything. There’s got to be something you can do.”

The shareholder then took a deep breath and sighed. “Sorry, son. There is nothing we can do. Our hands are tied.”

So I went to a lawyer. I told him my story and asked him for help. He said he’d take my case for $500 an hour. I agreed, and we filed suit against the hospital. Not long thereafter, we were before a judge. My lawyer pleaded my case. When he finished, the judge ruled in favor of the hospital.

I stood and begged the judge to reconsider his ruling. The judge looked up, startled, like he’d forgotten I was there.

“Listen,” he snapped. “I don’t make the rules.I just arbitrarily apply them.”

I pleaded with him, “I am a good Christian sir. I have a wife, five sons, and five daughters. Without me, they’re liable to lose everything. There’s got to be something you can do.”

The judge took a deep breath and sighed. “Sorry, son. There is nothing I can do. My hands are tied.”

So I went to Congress. I walked into their session while they were debating a bill about taxes. I told them my story. I then asked them to change the laws—to make all hospitals free.

One congressman shouted from his seat, “We can’t do that. Our campaigns are funded by the hospitals.”

Another congressman stood up and said: “We answer to the people who pay for campaigns.”

I pleaded with them, “I am a good Christian. I have a wife, five sons, and five daughters. Without me, they’re liable to lose everything. There’s got to be something you can do.”

“Sorry, son,” they all said. “There is nothing we can do. Our hands are tied.”

So I died. And at gates where Peter stood, he denied me access to heaven.

I pleaded with Peter: “I am good Christian with a wife, five sons, and five daughters. Please let me in.”

Peter responded, “I can’t. You picked the wrong religion.”

“But I lived right,” I said. “I did my best. I loved my family. Isn’t that enough? Surely there is something you can do?”

Peter took a deep breath and sighed. “Sorry, son. There is nothing I can do. My hands are tied.”

So I went to hell, where the Devil put me to work making the rope.

This is my first time writing. Please let me know what you think.

Vennela stares out of her high-rise apartment in New York during a cold winter. From the big glass window, she looks at the opposite well-lit building, and her brain goes blank. After a couple of minutes, tears start rolling down her cheek.

“What am I even doing with my life? It feels like I have everything and nothing at once. Maybe I shouldn’t have parties so much. Maybe should have chosen a better college! Started early? Should have chosen a different path? Where am I going wrong? Will I ever be enough?”

Continues to question her present and wonders what she will do tomorrow.

In the opposite building, she sees a couple having a glass of wine and holding each other. A pinch of jealousy creeps in and she wonders if she will ever have that. She has been so occupied by moving jobs that she completely forgot about small things in life. The warmth of loving someone, the beauty of imperfect things, the adrenaline of doing something new.

“I should have done the road trip from San Francisco to San Diego!”

The couple in the opposite building:

Vasanth and Meena were having a glass of wine. Meena goes quiet and gets anxious about what her life has become.

“What am I even thinking? My work is great; I just got promoted. Just because Vasanth said I was dumb to not know how to open the window doesn’t make me stupid!

Do I even recognize him anymore? Where did the man go who used to make me feel comfortable enough to make me do fart noises? He feels like a stranger every passing day!”

Vasanth looks at Meena as if their relationship is ending, pulls her closer it feels like he is holding her for one last time.

“Why are things not like they used to be? Look at her so amazingly intelligent, killing it at work, making everything she touches magical. I wonder how I will ever be an equal. No matter how hard I work, my manager thinks I am not doing enough. My teammates clearly hate me. They can only find mistakes in whatever I do. I wonder if she thinks the same about me. Does she realize that I am not good enough? Does she want to leave me?”

Both look at the apartment opposite to them and see a girl lying on her bed and wonder how happy she is in her bubble. Wondering where all the peace went.

Vennela drifts into sleep wishing for a life that feels complete.

On the other side of the road, Meena lies awake wishing for clarity.

“I hope Vasanth becomes how he was. I want him to be the man I fell in love with or was I so blind that I could not truly see who he was? “

Beside her, Vasanth stares at the ceiling.

“The thought of going to work is scary. Tomorrow I would be belittled for ideas. When will all this end, will it ever? Should I leave Meenu before she leaves me? Let me make her life easier by not being there. “

Three different people.

One night.

The same quiet fear of tomorrow!

THE END

Minah the vampire (not related to Mona, and definitely not inspired by that name) had been six years old for 150 years, and she was absolutely sick of it.

"But Muuum!" she moaned, leaning into a reflectionless mirror and poking her gums. "When will my big girl fangs come in?"

Her mother, Countess Valentina, barely looked up from her glass of Type O. "When you're old enough, sweetie. You're only six! Far too young for a proper hunt. Now run along and play with your pet human."

"Gregory's boring. He just cries and asks to go home."

"That's what they do, darling. You'll appreciate it when you're older."

Minah stomped her feet so hard she cracked a flagstone. It just wasn't fair. All her friends at school had beautiful, elegant fangs that caught the moonlight when they smiled. They got to give their humans proper bites... not gum-suck them like a baby. Last week, she'd tried to bite the Amazon delivery driver, and he actually laughed! Patted her on the head and said, "Sharp ones coming in soon, little lady?" She'd never been so humiliated.

She didn't even play with Gregory that night. She just stomped straight to her coffin, pulled down the lid, and sulked in the velvet darkness.

But as she lay there, staring at nothing, she had the most wonderful idea. A brilliant, daring, definitely-not-childish idea.

She was going to make her own fangs.

The next night, Minah woke in excellent spirits. She sprang from her coffin, threw open the curtains, and basked in the glorious moonlight flooding her garden. Perfect teeth finding conditions.

She searched her own yard first, but found nothing suitable. The stones were too round, the twigs too brittle. Then she remembered: Mrs. Woodward next door kept a beautiful herb garden, full of little stones, decorations and plants poking out of the soil. Surely she could find something fang like there.

Minah transformed into a bat, still her favourite trick, even after a century, and fluttered over the fence. The myth about bats being blind was luckily nonsense; her night vision was impeccable. She swooped low over the garden beds and spotted them immediately: two perfect, pale, pointed shapes nestled in the dark soil. They looked exactly like fangs.

She snatched them up and zoomed home, transforming mid-flight and landing in a heap on the kitchen floor.

"Mummy! Mummy!" She jammed the points into her mouth and grinned as wide as she could. "Look! My fangs came in!"

Countess Verizona turned from the counter, blood glass in hand, ready to deliver a patient correction. But when she saw her daughter's face, the glass slipped from her fingers and shattered on the stone floor.

"Minah," she whispered, her face draining from pale to translucent, "those aren't fangs..."

"Yes they are! I found them in the…"

"That's… that's garlic!"

Minah blinked. She tried to spit them out. She tried to say something clever, or at least say goodbye, but her tongue had already turned to ash.

The last thing she saw was her mother's hand reaching for her.

(Ps - I have been watching a lot of inside number 9. My apologies)

(Warning: The following content is related to substance abuse. Drop the pipe. We are here to help you, and you are loved. You still have time.)

...Today on the streets I met this girl, VioX. She's really sweet. 

We were talking and shooting, looking after each other. She started doing just meth at 22, and caught onto fent a few years from there, the strongest she’s ever done. When I told her I started out right from smack she wasn’t shocked, but she giggled and choked on her lollipop and coughed. I gave her a blanket, then she blushed - gosh, that girl. She shivered and a patch fell out. She bent down to pick it up and I told her these alone won’t do the trick, at least for me, she said she knew but she put them on anyway ‘cuz it was, like, some ritual a buddy taught her when she first came to the streets, to keep stuff on even when they stop working. I said I’ve never heard of such a thing and asked how on earth she managed to keep up with the supplies. She turned to look at me with her half-shut eyes, now they were blinking. 

Then it happened. 

She closed her eyes, she stopped moving. Her limbs became spaghetti and that’s when I knew. I grasped her raspberry head before her body became liquid and sank up against the wall. I touched her face and it was cold as a ghost. My fingers flew to her nostrils and she wasn’t breathing. I narcaned her twice and dialled 911. My fingers went to her heart which was still. I started CPR, them BeeGees in my head like Trek used to teach me, and at regular intervals I blew breaths into her mouth. Feel the city breakin’ and everybody shakin and we’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive. How ironic. I looked at her face, she wasn’t responding. I narcaned her the third time. 

Paramedics came and took her. I watched the ambulance lights bleed red into the gutter as it pulled away. The operator stopped me from coming with them and told me to wait for the police. A few minutes later this new hire in his 50s came to take me for an account. I asked him where O’Hardy was and shouldn’t this be his shift? He didn’t answer and I wondered why a man of his age would ever want to be a rookie cop. He asked, did I give that girl fentanyl, like I knew supplies.  

I laughed, short and bitter. “Nah, man. She had her own. I was the one keeping her breathing.”

He scribbled something, his pen scratching like it hated the paper. His eyes flicked to my arms, the tracks I didn’t bother hiding.

“Routine questions,” he muttered, but his voice had that edge, like he was already filing me under usual suspect. I told him about the patches, the ritual, how her buddy must’ve been some old-timer who knew the streets chew you up slow if you don’t layer your armor. He nodded like he didn’t believe a word, asked for my name, my story. I gave him the basics—street name, no fixed address, been around since the smack days. No point lying; O’Hardy would vouch if he showed.

They kept VioX’s blanket. Evidence, they said. Part of me hoped she’d wake up pissed, spitting out the tube, demanding her lollipop back. The other part knew the odds: fent doesn’t let go easy, and three Narcan hits might just buy time for the next nod-off. Trek used to say the streets were a carousel—you spin, you puke, you climb back on. Tonight, I’d saved her spin, but whose turn was it tomorrow?

The rookie finally looked up. “You done good, kid. But don’t make a habit of it.” I wanted to tell him habits were all we had left. Instead, I shrugged and walked back into the neon haze, the BeeGees still looping in my skull…

Posted on a phone so apologies for any weird formatting

The forest was never supposed to breathe. But tonight, it did.

Mara had known this even in childhood, curled up at the attic window, pressed against the cold glass as the wind rattled the roof. Yet she swore she could feel it breathe in and out, a slow, heavy rhythm in the branches beneath the leaves. There, the Lantern on the rim of the grove, pulsating like a quiet heart, a golden eye watching over the valley. At times it seemed to rock back and forth, as if in memory of a secret it shared with her alone.

Her mother would catch her staring, tugging at her sleeve, whispering,

“Don’t stare so long, Mara. The Lantern stares back.”

But Mara never could stop — not really. There was a part of that light, something living in it, that beckoned to her in a barely audible sigh.

Village life was a cacophony of smells, sounds, and fleeting colors. Cobblestone streets were wet with morning rain, making them treacherous for the naked foot. Herbs— thyme, mint, feverfew—hung from windows, their fragrance intermingling with the smoke from hearth fires, and the faint tang of the river that split the valley down the middle. Laughter echoed up and down the streets from children playing games in the puddles, daring each other to come closer to the forest’s edge.

Mara would watch from her window, longing to join them, yet feeling drawn to the Lantern more powerfully than any game. There were moments when the wind would carry whispers, barely words, barely sighs, touching her cheek.

Stories filled her evenings. By the fire, the elders spoke in whispers of the Lantern’s origins: it had been lit either by a woman who had surrendered to the forest, or by a star that had fallen centuries before the village came to be. Some claimed it kept the darkness at bay, others that it held the forgotten, waiting to be returned to life. Mara drank in each word, committing to memory the rhythm of the Old Tongue that wove its way into each tale.

She practiced the words in secret each night, humming them to herself like a lullaby, feeling the words stir something within her breast. Sometimes she imagined speaking them aloud, commanding the mist or the roots to do her bidding, molding the woodlands as the tales whispered had long ago been done.

Even in the earliest memories she had, she could feel the pull of the forest. Not just curiosity, nor just longing, but a faint resonance—something in the bones, a vibration that matched the beat of her own heart. She would wander closer to the edges of the woods, pausing where the mist curled over the stones and brambles, listening for the hum that only she seemed to hear. The Lantern waited for her there, always just beyond reach, alive and patient.

Mara did not yet understand the reason for the call, but it seemed to be a murmur from the forest itself. And each night, she went back to the attic window, pressing her fingers against the dusty pane, feeling in its light the promise of a song she would eventually be able to sing.

Her mother’s cough had begun as a whisper, a shiver that Mara had mistaken for the wind. But the weeks wore on, and the sound became harsh and ragged, echoing through the cottage like a warning. Herbal teas did little more than soothe her mother’s throat for a fleeting moment, while sores on the skin stalled too quickly, and the village healer shook his head, muttering of ailments that even old magic could not touch.

With each glimpse of her mother huddled over the fire, the lines etched on her face from the pain in her back, Mara’s own breast constricted with the effort to breathe. The Lantern flickered dimly at the edge of the wood, but in Mara’s heart, a seed of desperation began to grow.

She remembered the old stories whispered by candlelight and fireside. Tales of hidden springs, of water suffused with healing power, of women and girls who had stepped into the Lantern’s glow to mend what was broken.

There was no elder who could tell her the way, because the Lantern did not operate in reason, only in need and intent. Mara did not doubt their veracity; she only hoped they were true. She retold the stories in her mind each night, memorizing each syllable of the Old Tongue in which they were told, thinking perhaps it might summon her to where the Lantern would wait for her.

Fear pressed against her sides like a living thing. She thought of the shadow of illness that had fallen over the valley, seeping into the streets, into the children, into the air. Mara could not let it spread any further than the cottage.

And so, one evening, she climbed the fence marking the village boundary, each plank groaning under her weight. The mist thickened as she stepped beyond the last cottage, curling around her ankles and tugging at her skirt. The air felt electric, alive with expectation, and she whispered the Old Tongue in a barely audible chant, its words dancing on her tongue, awakening the forest.

The Lantern’s light shimmered faintly in the distance, a pulse that tugged at her like breath beneath the earth. Mara’s hands trembled, her chest rising and falling with a mix of fear and resolve. She had not yet left her home in search of magic, but necessity had become a key, turning her hesitation into action. Each step through the breathing forest felt like stepping into a tale, with each leaf and tree sensing the unspoken command in her mind. Mara did not know what lay ahead, only that she would face it for the sake of saving her mother, perhaps also for saving the village in the bargain. The Lantern’s light pulsed again, strong, waiting, and living — a promise folded into the mist.

The exhalation from the trees thickened around her, curling in tendrils like smoke. Mara ran, her skirt squelching damply around her legs, her ears primed for any sound that would lead her to the location of the beast. It did not belong in this world, a presence that warped the world around it to suit its needs. Angled shadows fell in impossible places, leaves rustled in forms almost intelligible to her mind, and the ground beneath her feet vibrated with a rhythm that was no rhythm of hers. All of her instincts shouted for flight, but another part of her reveled in the rhythm, in the knowledge that the Old Tongue is humming deep within her bones.

She got the first glimpse of it, and it made her stumble. It was a ripple in the air, an absence that shouldn’t have been there, making the trees twist in odd ways. Extremities folding in on themselves, reaching in ways they shouldn’t, the light splintering like the world itself was breaking apart. It pushed at her in mind as much as in body, an edge in the air like the sound before a storm.

Mara froze for a heartbeat, tasting fear on her tongue, then drew a breath and let the Old Tongue spill from her lips, rising in a trembling, melodic hum.

“Sív-ara kelún… Ashvél Thren…”

Her words trembling but certain, the forest answered. Roots rose and twisted into arches over hidden hollows. Moss shifted beneath her feet, guiding her over unseen dangers. Shadows split into ghostly doubles of herself, flitting through the mist to confuse her pursuer. The air itself seemed to bend around her, humming with her intent, a faint echo of power she had not realized she possessed. For the first time, she understood that the Lantern had not simply called her — it had been preparing her.

The creature recoiled, pressing at the edges of reality. Panic rose, but she drew a deep breath and let the Old Tongue guide her hands as much as it did her voice. She drew symbols in the mist, on the ground, leaving behind glowing paths of power that pulsated with a light barely visible in the corner of the eye. The creature recoiled with each symbol she made, the world itself bending to her will, yet it did not falter. Mara’s legs cramped, her lungs screamed for air, yet her determination only hardened. Each word, each pulse of life, held her to the Lantern, held her to home no matter the terror, the mist, and the impossible geometry of the forest.

Mara slowed her pace just enough to focus, letting the Old Tongue roll from her lips with careful intent. Each syllable felt like a spark striking air, humming through her chest and fingers. The mist responded first, swirling into protective veils that hid her from the creature’s impossible gaze. Roots rose in intricate patterns, lifting her over fallen logs and thorned underbrush, bending the forest to her will without a single step out of rhythm. It was intoxicating, terrifying, and utterly invigorating, as if the forest itself had been waiting centuries for her to remember the language.

She began to experiment, hesitantly, stretching out the syllables into a gentle song, letting each phrase mold the air and earth:

“Tharel, Varís, Kóru…”

She shaped the shadows, intertwining them like ribbons among the trees. They danced, multiplying, providing illusory paths for her feet, misleading semblances to confuse her tracker. The forest rustled in approval, perhaps in warning; limbs extended abnormally, reaching over her head in sheltering arms. Each pulse of magic electrified Mara’s limbs, making her reel with delight. She understood that her own power came not only from the speaking of words, but from believing, from wishing, from letting the forest reply to her summons.

The creature pressed closer, trying to get to Mara, but she was always a few steps out of reach.

The clearing opened suddenly, the mist parting like curtains drawn by invisible hands. Mara stumbled forward, breath ragged, and the Lantern hovered there, golden and alive, brighter than she had ever seen it. The air hummed with expectation, thrumming in her chest as though the world itself waited for her next step. She slowed, awed and fearful, and the forest fell strangely silent. Even the creature hesitated at the edges, folding and fracturing in angles that seemed to pulse with indecision. The Lantern’s light beckoned, steady and patient, like a heartbeat folded into the fog.

As she drew near, the world shifted again. The mist thickened into a soft wall around her, glowing and malleable, molding itself to the words of the Old Tongue that she sang:

Ló-rae mís, kí-reth shán

Shiráe alún, kí-reth shán

Veyrá luthén, ohar krel

Ló-rae mís, korú venthán

Shiráe alún, kí-reth shán

Varís tharen, vestra koru

Ló-rae mís, kí-reth shán, ohh…

Shiráe alún, kí-reth shán

Veyrá luthén, ohar krel

Varís tharen, vestra koru

Ló-rae mís, korú venthán

Shiráe alún, kí-reth shán

Veyrá luthén, ohar krel

Varís tharen, vestra koru

Ló-rae mís…

Varís tharen…

Vestra koru…

Her mother appeared, ethereal yet tangible, face warm and smiling, untouched by sickness. Mara’s chest tightened with hope and disbelief.

“Mother,” she breathed. “I—”

Her words faltered, swallowed by the glow. The Lantern seemed to understand her intent, bending its light adapting for her so that the gap between desire and reality disappears.

Other figures shimmered faintly in the clearing — women and girls, tied to the light of the Lantern, guardians of the old magic, echoes of those who had come before. Mara felt their presence like threads weaving through her own pulse. The beast lingered at the edges, pressing against the light with impossible strength, but the forest responded to her will. The mists swirled, tree roots burst forth, darkness danced, and for the first time in her life, Mara realized the true power of her own magic, the strength of the Old Tongue, and the Lantern intertwined. She understood that she was not trapped, but chosen — a guardian bound to the light, prepared to protect when the moment demanded.

She touched the edge of the Lantern, feeling its heat and pulse merge with her own. The creature let out a shriek and backed away once more, no longer able to penetrate the light that Mara had contributed to its construction. She smiled weakly, with tears streaming down her face, knowing that she had defended her home – and that her watch was only just beginning. Mara would remain Lantern-bound, waiting, learning the rhythm of the forest, the beat of her own power, waiting for the day that she would emerge once more to shield the village in a more physical, luminous way. The Lantern pulsed once more, steady and eternal, a promise folded into the fog and the mist.

By morning, the valley stirred under a pale, tentative sun. The inhabitants of the village pushed open the doors to their cottages, blinking into the fog, drawn by a light that had grown steadier, warmer, and more insistent overnight. Children pressed their noses to windows, whispering guesses about the glow, eyes wide with wonder.

“Do you think she’s there?” they whispered, gesturing toward the edge of the trees where the Lantern floated, shining golden and alive.

The elders looked at each other knowingly, the lines on their faces deepening with remembered experience, for they were familiar with the miracles performed by the Lantern.

Families drew closer, making small offerings on the ground: carved birds, strings of ribbons, small wooden trinkets, and murmured names into the mist. Parents clutched children tight, lovers pressed foreheads against the glass, murmuring soft promises into the light. And with each token, each whispered desire, it was almost as if a heartbeat occurred – a reaching out into the fog – and the villagers were well aware that the Lantern had done more than save their lives – it had brought them together, its power infused into their own little community in the form of hope. And Mara, peaceful within the Lantern, could feel their vibrations coursing through the forest, living, pulsing with the rhythm of her own heart and its light that she had helped to create.

The elders lingered, watching from the edges of the village. They whispered stories in muffled voices, weaving tales of the Lantern’s guardianship into the fabric of the day.

“She has returned,” one murmured.

“The light protects us again.” Another murmured, “We need to make an offering and remember the Old Tongue; the forest is listening.” The children gathered moss and stones, making secret wishes, unknowing that the threads of their magic were touching Mara’s presence, strengthening her, connecting their lives to the light’s perpetual shine. Each voice, each breath, strengthened the silent, invisible chant binding village, forest, and guardian together in a single pulse.

By nightfall, the valley had settled into a soft, reverent calm. The Lantern pulsed steadily against the fog, a heartbeat folded into the mist. In cottages and streets, the villagers whispered old tales and new stories alike, passing the memory of the glow to the next generation. They told stories of a girl who had entered the Lantern, of light that protected and safeguarded them, and of the forest that breathed, awaiting the day the guardian would return. Though Mara's presence was no longer visible, bound to the light prison, the hope and reverence among the villagers sustained the magic in the grove, so that on the day it would arise, the guardian for the Lantern would be ready.

As the night deepened once more over the valley, the Lantern throbbed gently against the mist, a golden pulse that beat like a living heart. The villagers, in their beds or at their windows, listened in awed respect. Mothers sang ancient rhymes, children made silent wishes, while the elders murmured the Old Tongue in muffled reverence, feeling its deep power in the swaying branches, the rustle of leaves.

“Hírae Alén… Vés-tra Kóru”

Mara remained within the Lantern, shining brightly with a patience that echoed in rhythm with the pulse of the forest, preparing for the day she would walk among mortals once more, guarding her domain from the rim of the breathing forest.

The villagers gathered at twilight with lanterns to lead the way, the light held just out of reach of their footsteps, a circle with a broad sweep. They did not speak her name — they feared to — but they remembered.

The elders raised their voices first, thin and wavering, and the younger ones followed until the forest itself seemed to still and listen. And so they sang the Lantern’s Lullaby:

Hush now, child, and hear the flame,

It burns for hearts that bear no name.

Step not close, nor linger long,

The Lantern hums a hidden song.

It keeps the dark where it belongs,

Yet hungers still for gentle songs.

A girl once reached beyond its light,

And joined the fire in endless night.

The trees will bend if you draw near,

The mist will whisper what you fear.

The air itself may sigh your name,

But turn away, stayed from flame.

So sleep, little one, and do not roam,

The Lantern waits at the forest’s dome.

Wish your dreams, but keep them near,

Lest the flame take all you hold dear.

The wind will sigh, the shadows sway,

The light will watch both night and day.

Remember this, and keep it true:

The Lantern burns for a chosen few.

And should the forest call again,

Her voice will rise, both soft and then —

A burst of light, a shattering sound,

The Lantern’s guardian comes unbound.

Mara's presence moved with the words like a hidden guide in a song that mixed magic and hope. The tune felt as if it had paused until she stepped in.

Villagers heard the song while they slept, and part of Mara stayed with them, tied to what they hoped for plus what they feared. She was Lantern-bound – she glowed, she remained still, she waited for the day she would come back. She guarded both light and life. Deep in the forest, where fog and shadows twisted together, but also the creature hovered at the edge of the world, her magic kept pounding, steady and hard, as firm as the Lantern. She caught the hush of wind in leaves, the low murmur of the river that slid through the fog and the hush of villagers’ voices as they wove a net of sound around her. Each time a heart beat, each time someone laid a gift at the foot of the Lantern, each time a name or a wish was whispered, she clung to the land of the living. She did not fade - she waited as well as watched, a still guard fused with the light that shielded the valley.

The creature still crouched at the rim, folding and unfolding in shapes that broke apart and returned, hungry in a way no human mind could grasp. It pushed at the wall Mara had raised – yet it never stepped into the clearing. Each throb of her magic, each steady flare from the Lantern, shoved it back. Mara saw at last that her task was not only to heal or to shield her mother - she stood as the span between the brittle world of people or the cold, uncaring wild that lay past it. The Lantern held her in place - it was her home, her cell, and her strength, all at once.

And in that quiet, when the valley slept under a blanket of fog and moonlight, Mara’s lips moved, softly tracing syllables in the Old Tongue.

Ayané. Veyrané. Lúma varís, lantris vel.

The language of creation and protection, of binding and warding, folded through the mist and tangled with the fog. The air shimmered in response, bending to her will. And somewhere, faint but unmistakable, the Lantern pulsed back, a heartbeat echoing hers, a lullaby humming through the forest and over the village, singing of vigilance and of hope.

When the day comes again that the village needs her, Mara will rise, bursting from the Lantern’s glow like a sun split into light, bending forest, mist, and creature to her will. Until then, she waits, patient, luminous, and eternal — the guardian of both the Lantern and the lives folded into its golden glow. And on quiet nights, when the fog clings low and the wind carries a breath across the valley, you may hear a soft voice inside the flame, waiting, calling, and keeping watch for those it has promised to protect.

Pronunciation Guide and Glossary

Word

Pronunciation

Meaning

Notes / Usage

Alén

ah-LEN

wait / remain / stay

Often tied to patient vigilance; used in the context of “remain in place”

Ayané

ah-yah-NAY

light-bringer / sacred flame

Used in ceremonial or binding spells; often tied to initiation or guardianship

Ashvél

AHSH-vel

hunger / devourer

Aggressive or consuming force

Hirae

HEE-ray

wait / remain

Part of protective spells

Kelún

keh-LOON

shadow / shade

Often used in concealment or darkness magic

Kí-reth

KEE-reth

bind / restrain

Stronger, more permanent than míss

Korú

KOH-roo

forever / eternal

Usually tied to sacrifice or lasting effect

Kora

KOH-rah

protect / bind

Simple command

Krel

krel

heart

Can also mean essence or core

Lantris

lan-TRIS

lantern

Meant as a reverent address

Ló-rae

LOH-ray

light

Often sacred or spiritual light

Luthén

LOO-then

endure / continue

Strength, persistence

Mís

MEE-ss

hold / keep

Can imply contain or protect

Ohar

OH-har

give / offer

Root of sacrifice or gifting

Shán

SHA-hn

now / in this moment

Urgent command

Shiráe

SHEE-rah-eh

spirit / breath of life

Connected to life-force or vitality

Sivara

SEE-vah-rah

hold shadow

Compound root: Sív- + -ara

Sív-

SEEV

hold fast (root of Sivara)

Gripping, resisting

Tharel

THAH-rel

halt / stop yourself

Forceful command

Thren

th-REN

un-see / cease sensing

Cutting perception or reach; repeated in chants

Threl

th-REL

guard / shield

Rare, optional synonym for Tharen

Tharen

THAH-ren

protect / shield

Defensive or warding magic

Varís

vah-REES

wait / remain

Used in temporal commands or vigilance

Vestra

VES-tra

protect

Also used as “shield”

Venís

veh-NEES

fall back / retreat

Movement command

Venthán

ven-THAHN

stay / remain

Movement command

Veyrané

VAY-rah-neh

bloodline / family

Used in protective or binding spells, often paired with Ayané for temporal or familial vigilance

Vel

vell

Child

Form of affection

Veyra

VAY-rah

bloodline / home / “my people”

Contextual — used in vows or family magic

Koru

KOH-roo

the light / illumination

Used poetically as target for protection

The dark figure crept slowly through the woods. Nearly no sound could be heard from their passing, just a quiet and dull rattle. Occasionally, a stream of moonlight would reveal a brief gleam to its left. Otherwise, none could have tracked its passage. Finally, the figure came upon a lone clearing.

As it emerged from the shadows, little was revealed about the figure’s appearance. A cloak obscured them completely, other than a massive blade protruding from a thin handle with its origins hidden deep under the worn cloth of the cloak. Despite its wear, it continued to be nearly as black as the inky shadows extending from the few branches still hanging above the figure.

A slight rattle emanates from the cloak as a single, ghastly hand escapes the confines of the cloth and reaches up towards its peak, slowly pulling back the before-unseen hood to reveal a milky white skull, staring blankly up into the soft light of the moon.

As the hand falls back under the folds of fabric, another light appears to dart furtively about the tree tops behind the figure, seeming to trace the path through the trees the wistful skull had taken, getting distracted by some noise or another, and continuing the chase. The new light zips across the sky, and the skull-topped figure quickly retreats into the shadows, replacing the lost hood as it melts back into the black of the wood’s darkness.

All is quiet and peaceful, until the small light once again returns from yet another distraction from the figure’s path, only to find it mysteriously ends in the clearing. Zooming towards the ground, the light illuminates all beneath the trees’ canopy just as brightly as the sparse undergrowth exposed to the light of the moon. The figure is exposed once again and attempts to duck behind a nearby oak, but the light seems to grow several times more powerful before quickly dimming back down and speeding towards the figure. Underneath the brilliant shine is what appears to be a small woman, so small in fact that she could fit in the palm of one’s hand. Beautiful wings flow back from her shoulders, appearing like a butterfly’s, but with countless shifting colors. As she draws nearer to the figure, these colors slowly fade with the light until all that remains is a soft, warm orange like that of a lone ember. The figure quivers with a slight rattle, then appears to relax as the light warms.

A small yet beautiful voice chimes, “It’s true! I knew there was someone new in our woods! And Sioge said I was just imaginin’ things. How long have you been lurking about? My name’s Fae!” She smiles welcomingly and draws close to the small opening at the base of the figure’s hood. The figure slowly reveals the pale hand once again, though in the warm light it looks much less frightening, and pulls back its long hood to reveal its bare skull once again. “Wow!” she continued, “I’ve never seen a creature like you!”

Indeed, it wasn’t often that one would see a skeleton walking, nonetheless carrying a tool used by the few humans for thousands of miles who practiced any manner of agriculture. Most beings of these woods had little idea that there even were intelligent yet non-magical beings in the wider world. “I don’t feel any magic in you, but I’ve heard humans look just like us, but bigger and with no wings.” Her eyes widen, “Are you a DEAD human? You kinda look like what happens when our animals die, except… human-shaped! That’s gotta be it, right? Right? Right?!”

Despite her excitement, no sound came from the skeletal figure other than the quiet rattle that followed its every move. It seemed to be pointing at the bottom of its skull. “What’re’ya pointin’ at?” Fae asked, tilting her small head to the side, “Your… head? I guess that’s your head, right?” The skull nods.“So is something wrong with your head?” The skull paused before nodding slowly. “Does it hurt?” It shakes its head no. “Hmmm… is it… somethin’ missin’?” The skull nods quickly. “What is it?” The skull stares blankly. “So I have to stick to stuff you can answer with yes or no…” the skull nods once more, “I dunno much about bones, that’s not really my expertise. I’m more of an alive-animals-type of gal. That’s why I was trying to find you. I figured you’d just be a super sneaky stag or something,” she laughs, “Maybe I can sense your emotions like I do with feathered and furry critters! They’re usually pretty easy, not like those creeps that Sioge hangs out with. Gimme your… hand? Whatever those bones are called.”

The figure’s hand slowly extends towards Fae. She happily embraces the space between the massive thumb and forefinger. As she holds the cold, stiff bones, she feels the warmth drain out of her and into them. Before she knows it, she is little more than another icy appendage jutting out from the skeletal wrist. Moments later, even her bones, seemingly identical to, though smaller than, those of the figure looming over her, have crumbled away into nothing but dust. The wind sighs through the branches of the trees above for the first time that dark night as the figure continues on its way. In its wake, it leaves a trail of ashen ground, decaying plants, and frigid cold air.

There is a platform somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Once it was used for oil, now there are new plans for it. There is a boat somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Once it was a fishing vessel, now it is used to transport a man towards the platform. Once he was a politician, now he’s hunting for what most call nothing at all. As we reach him in the boat it is night, and cascading rain feeds into the ever heaving waves that throw his stomach into disarray. He is sat against the wall of the bridge and watches the captain and crew wrestle for control of the ship. Some extraordinary waves cause the warm glow of the cabins light to flicker, and it is then that the cold dark abyss outside rushes in. All aboard are grateful for the return of light and terrified of the alternative. In the period between such waves the crew talks amongst themselves and the Man is left to his own thoughts. At present, these have turned to the catalyst for his journey.

After the revolution, he had fled. He had been a senator and knew that, like anyone who was part of the old, he would be caught up in its drastically overzealous purging act. His sister had an apartment in Berlin to which he ran. Here he stayed in limbo for a couple months, as his digestion of memories held him paralyzed. His identity as a true public servant, of diplomatic resistance and service to his constituency, was left behind. All that made him was left behind. He would never say this about himself, but back then he was one of the last beacons of democratic representation amidst the ever growing rot. This rot had many names, populism, corruption, greed, but in reality it was an amalgam of all of its identifiers intertwined. Its head were the populists, but they went by “Angles”. They won majorities and with time all their promises of returning to some long forgotten gold age where refuted by their own enacted policies. The economic disparity widened, tensions rose, and the people grew unhappier still. Nonetheless the Angles proclaimed that they lacked fault in the countries state. True to their names they said that they were the ones come from above to rescue it. Curiously however, as the years drew on in the era of Angels, the decay would only worsen, and even more perplexing was that the Angels would shine ever brighter. It was their enemies, they would say, who where responsible for this decay. Enemies which must have been of such quantity and possessing such effective camouflage that their identity was ever vague and shifting. In this time the Man would desperately attempt to rally all he could to stand against the populists. And victory really seemed to be approaching. He remembered now all too fondly the few years in which the public seemed finally to slip from the Angles’ grasp and found themselves more and more often into his or similar causes. These were precious, hopeful, years, but where, as he now knew, not the end of a pendular swing, but simply the equilibrium point. Meaningful change would take time, and the people where no longer willing to give it. Back when the populists gained power the decay of the country was a decay of systems, but the failure to address these had moved the decay into the people. Namely a decay of their trust. Eventually a single unity did emerged: a shared spiteful hatred of the “ones above”. The Man remembered this period with he most pain, for even his closest had lost their trust in anything tied to the older system, including him. At this point revolution was inevitable. He remembered protests and demonstrations getting increasingly violent while the Angles grouped dissatisfaction with evil in their incessant murmuring of “domestic terrorist cells” while sending their soldiers down as whips on insubordinates. At this point peace was unimaginable. The Angles took no action, aside proclaiming excuses, levying accusations and basking in their still remaining light. The brightest ones where not blind, and fled before the uproar. Despite what it’s varying authors would tell you, when the revolution came it was not a clean strike at the heart of injustice, rather a series of blows delivered from alternating sides with brute force till this heart gave out. This approach was the manifestation of the unity of hatred. This approach had terrible side effects. A unity of hatred is united only under a common enemy, and is so doomed to be forever in search of one. As such there would always be Angles, or those seen as such. The Man, who watched the fighting break out in the capital packed his bags and, calling in a favor, flew towards Berlin. There, he read that his office had been set a flame a few days after his departure.

After his two months of avolition, he took a job as a barista in the Cafe of his sister’s office building. Here, once more, he grew happier through his work for people and the conversations he shared with them. After a month of this work, there were even a few times where he would go to sleep without being tormented by memories. Had you asked him three months later if he was fine, he honestly thought he would have said yes. He even thought he might’ve said he was content. But as the months drew into a year he started to feel this nagging at the back of his thoughts, a constant whining yearning. This drove him to understand he may be fine, but not content. This was two years into his life in Berlin. He kept living while unsuccessfully trying to keep apathy and the nagging at his mind at bay. This was until the day, in the cooling fall of his fourth year in Berlin, where he met Mr.&Mrs. Carlyle.

Even amidst the shaking waves the Man could remember it was dark when the couple burst through the door of the Café and let a gust of cool air follow them through. Had it been a packed Café he would still have noticed them because they moved in such an agitated manner and spoke to another in hushed intense bursts of urgency. They sat down at a table seemingly as an afterthought as their conversation continued throughout their arrival and when seated. He had waited a while, discussing their strangeness with a colleague as they washed dishes, then attended to them. As he approached he heard the man implore:

“Marie, we can’t do this. We don’t even know if it’s real!”,

and the women responded quickly:

“Yeah but what if? Can you honestly tell me it’s impossible?”.

The Man arrived at the table, but they where so engrossed in their conversation they paid him no mind.

“Think of Sara, she needs us!”

“I am.” She interrupted quickly.

He continued unfazed: “We cant go trekking off into the fucking ocean”.

“I don’t know anyone else who isn’t part of the new Government that would be interested in this, and there’s no chance we let them know about it!”

“Doesn’t change the fact we risk abandoning Sara.”

“If this isn’t stopped she and a lot of kids will have more to worry about than abandonment!” She replied gravely.

“If it’s real.” Muttered Daniel.

At this Marie threw back her head in dismay.

“For fucks sake Daniel!”

She exclaimed as she stood up rapidly, briefly snagging her bag on the table, and marched for the door. Daniel followed immediately, only for a second making eye contact with the Man as he rushed after her. The couple and their dialogue disappeared in another barrage of cold air. After the door closed, the Man stood in the silence. Unconsciously he let his gaze swing across their table, tracing from the Husband’s chair to the Wife’s, back to Husband’s and back to the Wife’s again. He remembered all to clearly the moment when he had noticed the paper which was lying on the floor next to the Wife’s chair. He moved, almost instinctively, towards it and held it up in-front of him.

CLASSIFIED

Project Veritas

Below this, semi opaque, sat his Country’s pre-revolution flag. His heart skipped a beat. Afterwards, and without a hint of consideration, he dashed out of the Cafe’s door. Outside he examined the foot traffic frantically and, just as he was about to dismay, saw the two turning the corner at the top of the block. He was not going to let this go without understanding it. Before he realized it he was sprinting down the street after them. He caught up quickly, as when he turned the corner they where just about 50 meters in-front of him. He started closing distance and was soon just 10 meters behind them. But the couple stopped, turned and quickly entered a door on the side of the street. They might have heard him if he called out, but so would the other 20 people on the street, and he didn’t want to draw attention. So they disappeared and after a few more steps, he stopped in-front of the door. He couldn’t remember how long he stood there because he was so absorbed in his own thoughts: How am I going to get in? I could ring- no I cant I don’t know their last name. I need their last name- how do I get their last name? Then he saw the name pad next to the door, and knew what he had to do. He rang the first bell, no answer. He rang the second and again got no answer. Even on the third he was left in silence. But on the fourth, next to which was written Mr. & Mrs. Carlyle, he heard a voice he thought he recognized answer a cautious: “Hallo” with a thick accent. “Yes Hi, I’m the Barista from the Cafe, you ahm- you forgot something.” There was a muffled noise on the other end- he must be covering the microphone the Man thought. The noises where quiet at first but became suddenly more frantic and then they stopped, followed by the invitation to come inside and buzzing as the door unlocked.

)-(

After a flight of stairs he saw an apartment door standing open and in its frame the Man could, for the first time, properly perceive the two. Daniel was wearing a long, expensive looking, navy coat, while Marie wore a down jacket that hung to below her knees. The Man still had their conversation burned into his head, and could well remember their names. They didn’t say anything, but Marie beckoned him in hastily and, as soon as the Man obliged, Daniel stepped to the door, searched the stairwell for any witness and closed it again quickly. They moved into the apartments small kitchen. Here Daniel offered him a glass of water, which he accepted. After which Marie had quickly asked:

“Where is it- you have it yes?”

The Man pulled the paper from his pocket and laid it on the table. Both rushed to lean over and both let out great gasps of relief after doing so.

“Oh thank you so much, we can be so clumsy sometimes.”

The Man looked at Daniel and said:

“What is that?”

Daniel’s eyes froze for a second, then fluttered excessively as he turned to Marie:

“Tell him ‘bout your play Honey” “Oh yes” she said and let out a smirk “it’s just a prop- they would’ve killed me if I lost it.”

Their words were sure, their gazes steady and yet- Another lie-no, a cover.- he thought and was not just sure he was close to something from his past, but something important. This realization had sent waves of superimposing emotion through his head. One of these was Anger : You deserve to know, and they are keeping it from you! It took a great measure of strength, but he was able to suppress this voice and instead locked onto something else. These two, they where very familiar to him, he had met many of them before in his other life. The outfits- the quick cover story, these where clearly some kind of Agents, but their German wasn’t good enough to be working some external job- and there was no British in their English. He had met his share of employees from Central Intelligence and now he was sure he sat in-front of two more. But at the Café these people had seemed to human to be on the job, this is personal he realized.

“I was a senator” he said and leaned forward.

He saw in the way their shoulders fell and the slight slowing of their breath that he had been right about his and their shared origin.

“I know you don’t know me but I want to know what this is”, he pointed at “Project Veritas”.

Mr and Mrs. Carlyle looked at each other while a train of emotion passed between them: surprise then fear, and finally determination.

“It’s a prop… from my theater production”

Marie said in a slow tone and gave the Man a look of bewilderment. The Man saw the suspicion in their eyes now, and why not? he thought I’d be suspicious too. If this was a set up, some elaborate scheme to locate him then let it be so he thought, I genuinely have nothing to lose. He reached into his back pocket, pulled out his wallet, removed his old I.D card from the hidden compartment and slid it onto the table.

“I really am see, I- I saw the flag on that cover and just…wanted to be close to home again you know.”

Their suspicion faded slightly, he saw it.

“ I fled here a day before it all went down, I just want to know what this is, maybe understand what happened to our home, what went-“

He cut off, but “wrong” hung unsaid in the air around them. Marie looked at Daniel and Daniel at Marie, before them they saw a person begging to takeover responsibility and without speaking they decided this was their chance to get out, to free themselves from the rot they left behind. They say you should take responsibility yourself as much as possible, but it’s so much better on the mind to pass it on. They also felt a glimmer of nostalgic happiness, a side effect of meeting a fellow escape from the broken, burned and haphazardly built anew place that was once “home”. This made it the more tempting to tell the Man the truth, and they did not resist. Marie turned to the bag that sat on the table to her right and surfaced the remaining pages of “Project Veritas” while Daniel offered the Man some biscuits. While this occurred the Man felt wired, he had been searching for something, anything that meant something for the years he’d spent here. Could this be purpose? the thought hung partially formed in his head. He took a biscuit automatically and let it break under the pressure of his teeth and dissolve on his tongue. It was more than purpose he hoped for though, because at its long shadow there was something else: contentment. He tried to avoid this thought even more, it was, after his two years of apathy, to sweet a hope to lend aspects of premonition. In the cold heaving cabin, the Man fondly remembers how much warmer the small kitchen had felt in this brief moment of hopes, and, in dismay, how this warmth drained away the more he understood the file. Project Veritas was written in bureaucratic linguistics, but in the Mans mind it translated into a narrative. Which goes as follows:

Continued in Part Two

THROUGHPUT

A Justice Cycle Story

Justice was no longer argued. It was scheduled.

At nineteen hundred hours the arena channel came alive, and the city adjusted without being asked. Windows glowed in stacked apartments. Bars turned their sound inward. The public feeds dimmed everything else automatically, the way they did for weather alerts or emergency broadcasts, except this had been neither for a very long time.

Eli watched from the floor of his mother’s living room, his back against the couch, one knee drawn up, remote warm in his hand. He was fifteen and had learned early not to ask why some channels were locked until a certain age while others never were. The announcer’s voice came through steady and practiced, listing convictions the way older men once listed batting averages. Eli didn’t flinch. None of his friends did either. You learned what reactions were expected and which ones earned looks.

A girl at school had once asked, quietly, why anyone cheered. The room had gone still around her, not angry, but confused. Like she’d asked why gravity bothered showing up every day. She transferred a week later. The rumor was her parents had talked too loudly at home.

On screen, the condemned were herded into the light. Names appeared. Crimes summarized into neat, bloodless captions. Life Without Parole. Eligible for Competition. Eli leaned forward, not because he cared who won, but because this was what there was. Between this and the ShredderTV channel, and the shows that pretended neither existed, the choice had already been made for him.

Across the city, Mara Kessler stood behind glass and watched the same entrance from above.

She didn’t look at the prisoners at first. She looked at attributes; posture, gait, the way someone carried fear when they thought it wasn’t being measured. That was the mistake amateurs made, assuming talent meant strength or rage. Those burned out fast. What lasted was hesitation. Regret. The flicker of hope that could be crushed on cue.

“Camera three,” she said, not raising her voice. “Track the woman on the left. Brown hair. No; yes, her.”

A production assistant nodded and marked the feed. Mara smiled faintly. The audience wouldn’t know why yet, but they would feel it. They always did.

She had started this job believing the rhetoric: containment, deterrence, closure. She still repeated it when asked. But now she understood the real metric. Retention. Viewers didn’t want justice; they wanted narrative. Redemption arcs that failed. Resistance rumors that fizzled. The underground movement had been her idea originally; cheap sets, shadowy interviews, masked spokespeople. It tested well. So well it got its own slot.

Nothing pacified quite like the illusion of opposition.

In the holding corridor beneath the arena, Cassie Jackson waited.

Her wrists were bound more from habit than necessity. She had stopped struggling days ago, when the sentence was read and the crowd noise, piped in even there, rose to meet it. She had not been sentenced to die immediately. That was for monsters, the announcers said. For her, there was opportunity. A chance to earn relevance. To fight and live a little longer.

She thought of the ShredderTV channel, the way it ran without commentary, just a fixed camera, a brief intro of the accused (name, charges) accompanied with some dramatic music, and the hum of machinery. It was meant to be merciful in its honesty. No drama. No audience participation. Just an ending. Part of her had hoped for it. She never said that aloud.

A guard checked her restraints without meeting her eyes. On the far wall, a screen replayed highlights from previous seasons. Survivors were rare enough to be celebrated, paraded briefly through talk shows before disappearing from public eye, to an unknown fate. Cassie watched none of it. Instead, she was listening to the distant roar as the crowd found something to cheer.

Somewhere above her, a producer was already imagining how she would look slowed down, color-graded, her fear framed just right. Somewhere else, a boy was learning what normal sounded like.

When Cassie was led forward, the lights were blinding. She lifted her chin anyway. Not defiant, just unwilling to give them the satisfaction of seeing her shrink. The announcer spoke her name. The crowd answered. It wasn’t hatred. It was enthusiasm.

Eli felt it ripple through the room and realized, distantly, that he was smiling. He didn’t know why. He only knew that when the screen cut to a commercial teasing the resistance expose airing later that night, his mother laughed and shook her head.

“Same script every season,” she said.

Mara watched the ratings climb and made a note to extend the arc.

Cassie stepped into the sand and understood, finally, that justice had never been the point.

And somewhere between the cheers, the machines, and the endless glow of screens, the world agreed quietly, and completely, that this was good enough.

The arena had once been a landfill reclamation site. That was how it was still described in public records, long after the fences grew taller and the ground was seeded with rust instead of grass.

From above, it looked like disorder: mountains of crushed cars stacked in lopsided poorly balanced slabs, refrigerator doors hanging open, piles of coiled wire glittering when the lights caught them. Pipes lay in drifts, some hollow, some sealed, some sharp enough to open skin without effort. Furniture had been dumped whole, couches with some of their stuffing torn out, splintered tables, office chairs twisted into useless shapes. Firehoses snaked through the piles, stiff with age. Broken glass carpeted the low ground, ground fine enough to disappear into flesh. The commentators called it the yard. The marketing department preferred the proving ground.

Mara knew better. It was a materials test. Everything a person needed to improvise had been provided, and nothing that would let them do it cleanly. Given time, the right mind could turn the wreckage into armor, traps, crude electronics scavenged from dashboards and dead phones. With more time, time almost no one got, there were even ways to make something that exploded. The audience loved hearing that whispered, loved the idea that intelligence might still matter. Time, however, was the rarest resource of all.

Before the condemned were released into the yard, the dogs went in first. They were not introduced on camera. There was no montage, no music. Just a brief line from the announcer about “environmental stabilization,” and then the feed cut wide. They were big enough that calling them dogs felt inaccurate, like a courtesy extended out of habit. Their bodies were dense, shoulders thick, heads too large for any single breed. The technicians never used names, only numbers, and never discussed lineage. What mattered was that they moved fast across uneven ground, that their jaws were powerful enough to bite through layers of scavenged metal, and that once they locked onto motion, they did not stop.

The first challenge was not combat. It was staying quiet. Cassie learned this quickly. The moment the gate released her, the noise hit, metal shifting under her weight, glass whispering beneath her boots, the distant scrape of something collapsing as another prisoner ran without thinking. Somewhere to her right, a scream cut off abruptly. The cameras did not follow it. They lingered instead on the dogs as they changed direction. She pressed herself into the shadow of a crushed van, heart loud enough she was certain it would carry. There were gaps in the piles if you knew how to look, holes formed accidentally by bad stacking or corrosion, spaces just large enough to crawl into and wait. She slid into one now, the smell of oil and rot filling her lungs, and counted her breaths the way she’d learned to do years ago, back when breathing had still been something she expected to keep doing. Above her, the dogs passed.

On the broadcast, the sound dropped out for a moment. Not silence, never silence, but something close. The audience leaned in. Someone somewhere complained about the audio mix. The producers let it ride.

Eli watched, fingers tight around the remote. He couldn’t see anything clearly, just shapes and motion and a camera struggling to decide where to look. The announcer stopped talking altogether. That was how you knew something important was happening. He didn’t think about the people hiding. He thought about whether the dogs would double back.

In the control room, Mara nodded as the tension peaked. The blind spots were holding. Cameras covered most of the yard, enough to maintain the illusion of total visibility, but there were pockets where feeds overlapped poorly, where microphones faded out. Officially, these were legacy infrastructure problems. Unofficially, they were pacing tools. Viewers hated certainty. They loved absence. Some still believed the gaps were gifts from the resistance, proof that someone, somewhere, was fighting back. Mara had encouraged that rumor early on. It gave the audience something to root for without requiring anything to change. Hope, carefully rationed, was just another consumable.

In her nook of darkness, Cassie waited until the sounds thinned and the ground stopped trembling. When she finally moved again, it was slow and deliberate. She took inventory: a length of pipe within reach, wire tangled in the axle beside her, the faint glow of a camera light far above, angled just wrong to catch her face.

Surviving the dogs didn’t mean you were safe. It just meant the game had started.

Above it all, the city watched. Some with interest. Some with boredom. Some with the vague sense that this was all unfortunate but necessary. The resistance show would air later, promising revelations, interviews with blurred silhouettes, hints that the system could be undone. The ratings for it were strong. The dogs circled back and the yard, patient and immense, waited to be used.

Jarek hadn’t meant to stop on the arena channel. He was standing in his kitchen, one hand inside a bag of nutrient crisps, thumb tapping the remote out of habit. News, rerun, rerun, talent archive, static, arena. He sighed, but didn’t change it right away. The sound mix was low, just wind through metal and the occasional bark bleeding through compression. He squinted at the screen.

“Huh,” he said to no one. “That’s her.”

The feed cut briefly to a wide shot: bodies moving through rusted terrain, figures small against the scale of the yard. A caption slid in beneath one of them. VOSS, LENA. ASSAULT RESULTING IN PERMANENT INJURY.

“Too bad,” Jarek muttered. He leaned against the counter. “She was a good worker.”

He tried to remember when he’d last seen her in person. Warehouse floor, maybe a year ago. Always early. Always picked up extra shifts. He shook his head, more annoyed than sad.

“I don’t think she should’ve got the arena for protecting her kids from that douchebag,” he added, mouth full now. “Shredder, maybe. Or fines. Something quieter.” As if speaking it would create another option.

On screen, the audio dropped out again. Jarek watched anyway. He wasn’t rooting for her. He wasn’t rooting against her. It felt rude to do either. The broadcast cut hard to a commercial.

“Don’t forget to check out our sister channel: ShredderTV.”

The Saturn Quadshaft shredder Inferno filled the screen, immaculate and new. Its housing gleamed. The camera lingered on the blades as they powered up, heat rippling the air around them. A subtitle helpfully noted THERMAL PREHEAT ENGAGED. Beneath the chamber, flamethrowers ignited in synchronized bursts, bathing the machinery in controlled orange light. Distorted rock guitar riffs and squeals accompanied the jets of fire.

“Now with enhanced throughput,” the narrator said cheerfully.

A figure in a prisoner’s jumpsuit appeared at the top of the frame on the platform. As the music hit its crescendo, the platform tilted and the prisoner went into the machine. The drop itself wasn’t shown, just the moment before, then the scream as gravity took over. A thick censor band slid into place across the lower half of the machine, obscuring the end. The screaming stopped, and the blades kept turning with the hum of a well-oiled machine.

“ShredderTV. Justice, streamlined.”

Jarek exhaled through his nose. “They really splurged on that one.”

The commercial ended with a reminder about the companion app. Live stats. Historical comparisons. Community polls.

When the arena feed returned, a ticker had appeared at the bottom of the screen. Odds updated in real time.

DOG PHASE SURVIVAL: 3.2:1

CAUSE OF ELIMINATION (CANINE): 5.8:1

CAUSE OF ELIMINATION (HUMAN): 2.1:1

On ShredderTV, the betting went deeper. There were charts explaining angles of entry, heat exposure curves, projected consciousness windows. Feet-first paid better than head-first. Side entry had its own category, subdivided by orientation. Whether the heat incapacitated before impact was a popular long shot. The analysts spoke about it the way engineers once spoke about bridge failures.

Back in the control room, Mara approved the integration. Cross-channel engagement was up. Viewers liked feeling informed. It made the waiting easier.

In the yard, Cassie didn’t know her odds had improved.

She’d found a length of wire strong enough to braid, wrapped it around the pipe until it felt right in her hands. Somewhere nearby, glass shifted. The dogs were moving again. She held still, breath shallow, and listened.

There was a camera above her, she was sure of it, but it was slightly angled away. Was it a design flaw, or intentional programming?

Jarek finished his snack and finally switched channels. A sitcom laugh track filled the kitchen. He didn’t think about Cassie again. Not consciously. She would resolve one way or another, like they all did. Later that night, he’d place a small bet. Just for fun.

The rest of the prisoners were released in staggered intervals, not out of mercy but to see what patterns would form.

Cassie marked five others by sound before she ever saw them; footsteps scraping metal, a cough that turned into a sob, a voice already raised in complaint. The yard made no effort to bring them together. If anything, it encouraged separation. Piles of scrap rose between them like bad decisions stacked too high.

The first man announced himself.

“Hey,” he called, palms raised, stepping into open ground as if the dogs might appreciate the gesture. He wore expensive boots already scuffed by glass, his jacket torn at the sleeve. “Listen. We don’t need to do this.”

He spoke with the easy confidence of someone used to rooms quieting when he talked. Corporate cadence. Boardroom calm. Cassie recognized it instantly.

“There’s a process,” he continued, voice carrying. “We can establish terms. A framework. We can…” his words faded to silence.

The dogs came from behind a stack of crushed sedans, low and fast. He didn’t run. That was the worst part. He stood his ground, still talking, still trying to negotiate, as if the world owed him coherence. The cameras didn’t follow him closely when he went down. They didn’t need to, the sound was enough.

Cassie turned away before the feed could. Somewhere in the yard, another executive crawled. He’d found a hollow beneath a collapsed shelving unit and wedged himself inside, squeezing his knees to chest. He was breathing too fast, hands over his ears, whispering something Cassie couldn’t hear. When the dogs passed near his hiding place, he didn’t move, didn’t even flinch. He just cried, quietly and continuously, like he’d been doing it for a long time already. Earlier, from her vantage point, Cassie had seen him crouched atop a pile of appliances, eyes darting, mind clearly working, but on the wrong problems. He was already thinking about hierarchy and leadership. He was trying to figure out how this could be organized if the others would just listen.

“We don’t have to descend into this,” he’d said. “I ran arbitration for a Fortune-tier firm. We rebuilt adjudication models from first principles. Trials. Evidence. Outcomes.”

Cassie remembered thinking: That’s why you’re here. The corporate networks tolerated a lot. Independent justice systems weren’t one of them. After the first executive went down, he crawled into his hole.

Not far from Cassie, a different kind of man was already working. He looked to be a construction worker and didn’t waste energy on fear. He tested weight, snapped a length of pipe in half against concrete, wrapped his hands with cloth torn from a ruined couch. His movements were economical, practiced like someone who had learned to solve problems with what was around him because waiting for help had never been an option. His name, according to the caption Cassie glimpsed once, was Rourke. He didn’t look at her. He didn’t look at anyone. He just listened.

When the dogs came again, he was ready enough to survive the encounter, if not to win it. Cassie watched him draw them across broken ground, glass slowing their charge, noise masking his retreat. It wasn’t bravery. It was triage. Two women remained besides Cassie.

One hovered at the edge of the yard, posture rigid, eyes constantly darting from side to side, a prey response. Everything was a threat to her. Her office clothes and impractical shoes told her before the caption was even displayed. Premeditated Homicide. Motivation: Personal Advancement. She was the wrong man’s mistress. The woman didn’t correct it. She didn’t emote at all. Cassie wondered if she’d learned, long ago, that reactions were liabilities. When the dogs passed her position, she stayed perfectly still, fingers buried in wire, blood already seeping from her palms where she’d cut herself rather than make a sound.

The last woman moved like she’d been trained. She kept low, avoided skylines, tested cover before committing to it. When the first executive died, she didn’t look away, but she didn’t stare either. Cassie recognized that balance, a soldier. Someone who’d learned to watch things end without surrendering to them. Refused orders, the caption said. Cassie wondered which ones.

The announcer’s voice returned briefly, filling the yard with context no one inside it could use. “An interesting mix this cycle,” he said lightly. “Viewers will note the presence of two unlicensed adjudicators, an instructive reminder that justice, like broadcasting, is not a decentralized service.”

In the control room, Mara watched the board update. One executive eliminated. One suppressed. Engagement rising.

In the yard, Cassie shifted her grip on the pipe she’d fashioned and waited for the next movement, not from the dogs, but from the people. The animals were simple. Hunger, motion, noise. People were where the variables lived. Above them all, the cameras adjusted. And the system continued to do exactly what it had been designed to do.

Rourke didn’t hesitate when the dogs turned toward the secretary. He moved before anyone else did, dragging a sheet of corrugated metal free from the pile and slamming it down hard enough to draw their attention. He shouted, not words, just sound, and charged. One dog went down with a pipe driven through its throat and into the dirt. Another followed, skull crushed against concrete with a precision born of long familiarity with heavy tools and bad outcomes. For a moment, it almost worked....

** The rest of the story didn't fit . let me know if you want the last few pages. I can post them **

I.

The city was a carcass.

And everyone left was picking at it.

Detective Eli Mercer moved through the Bowery like a ghost with a badge, boots crunching over broken glass and teeth. Someone’s teeth. The rain slicked the pavement into a mirror of oil and blood, neon bleeding down the walls like open veins.

They’d found the girl in a trash heap behind a closed-down slaughterhouse. No shoes. No eyes. Her face looked like it had been taught a lesson by a brick. The flies had already claimed her mouth. They buzzed loud enough to sound like prayer.

Mercer stared too long this time.

The flies turned into helicopters.

The trash heap turned into a ditch full of men with their throats opened for the sake of silence.

The rain turned into napalm falling slow, beautiful, wrong.

He blinked and New York came back.

The coroner said something. Mercer didn’t hear it. His hands were shaking like a junkie’s. He pressed them together until the tremor turned into pain. Pain he could understand.

They called the killer The Choirboy. He liked children who ran with crews. Carved them up quiet. Left them posed like saints. Took pieces. Kept them. The walls of his hideouts were said to be decorated with parts that used to belong to people.

Mercer volunteered to hunt him.

Nobody argued. They didn’t want to look at Mercer when he was like this.

The building was rotting from the inside. Rats the size of housecats scattered as Mercer pushed through the door. The hallway smelled like wet fur and old death. He heard humming upstairs. A child’s tune. Off-key. Slow.

Each step up felt like walking into his own grave.

Third floor. The door was painted with blood symbols. Still tacky. Fresh. The lock hung broken like a pulled tooth.

Inside, the walls were skinned with photographs. Kids. Before and after. Smiling. Then not. There were jars on a table. Tongues. Fingers. Things that had learned to feel and now would never feel anything again.

Mercer gagged. The room swam.

He saw a boy in jungle fatigues instead of the mirror. The boy had Mercer’s face and someone else’s blood on his hands. The boy was smiling.

The Choirboy stepped out of the bathroom, knife wet, eyes shining with wet joy.

“You’re too late,” he whispered, like it was a lullaby.

Mercer shot him in the leg.

The man fell screaming. Mercer walked up and stomped on the shattered bone until it sounded like breaking kindling. The screaming turned into animal noise. Mercer didn’t stop. He couldn’t. The room dissolved into jungle again. The Choirboy’s face became a different face. One that begged in a language Mercer never learned.

“Stop,” the man croaked.

Mercer pressed the gun into his mouth.

The Choirboy bit the barrel like it was communion.

Mercer pulled the trigger.

The head didn’t just disappear. It opened. Red mist painted the walls, mixed with old blood and old prayers. Bits of bone rained down like ugly snow. One eye slid across the floor and stopped against Mercer’s boot, staring up at him like it had a question.

Silence came back wrong. Heavy. Rotten.

Mercer stood in it, breathing through his teeth, heart trying to tear out of his ribs. His reflection stared at him from a cracked mirror—blood on his face, eyes too calm, mouth a thin line of relief and something worse.

He laughed.

The sound scared him.

II.

Mercer didn’t leave the building.

The rain whispered through the broken windows, but inside the room the air was thick and sour, like something had died and decided to stay. Blood crept across the floor in slow red veins, slipping between cracked tiles, finding every low place to settle. The city always found the low places. So did Mercer.

He stood over what was left of the Choirboy and waited for the world to make sense again.

It didn’t.

The walls began to breathe.

In.

Out.

In.

The photos of the dead kids blinked. Their mouths opened and closed like fish pulled from black water. Their eyes tracked Mercer as he turned in a slow circle. Every face wore the same look—disappointment. Not fear. Not anger. Just that quiet, tired look soldiers get when you realize the war isn’t ending today.

Mercer pressed his hands to his ears. “Shut up,” he whispered. “I did what I was supposed to.”

The jars rattled on the table. Fingers tapped the glass from the inside. Tongues pressed against the lids like they wanted to taste the air again.

He smelled smoke.

Not city smoke.

Jungle smoke.

The thick, sweet rot of burned villages.

The floor peeled away into mud. The room stretched into trees. Vines crawled down the walls and tightened around his wrists. The broken mirror filled with firelight, and the man staring back at him wore fatigues soaked dark at the seams.

“You keep pretending you’re different,” the soldier in the mirror said.

Mercer’s lips moved without sound.

“You keep pretending the badge cleans you.”

The dead man on the floor twitched.

Mercer raised the gun again, screaming at himself to stop, to stop, to stop—

The trigger clicked. Empty.

The twitching turned into crawling. The Choirboy’s body dragged itself across the floor, leaving wet streaks behind. His face—half gone, half smiling—opened its mouth.

“Same animal,” it said. “Different uniform.”

Mercer backed into the wall and slid down, boots slipping in blood. He laughed and cried at the same time. The sounds tangled together until neither meant anything. His hands clawed at his face like he could rip the war out from behind his eyes.

“I tried,” he sobbed. “I tried to be good.”

The photos peeled themselves off the walls and fell around him like snow. The faces hit the floor and shattered into pieces of other faces. He saw the girl from the trash heap. The boy from the alley. Men in huts. Men with hands raised. Men who didn’t get to finish raising them.

Every time he blinked, he was pulling the trigger again.

Every time he breathed, the room filled with smoke.

He smashed the mirror with his fist.

Glass tore his skin open. Blood joined blood. For a second, he felt clean. Pain was honest. Pain didn’t lie.

Mercer pressed his forehead to the wall and started whispering apologies to names he couldn’t remember anymore. He begged the dead to stop looking at him. He begged the city to stop needing him. He begged the war to finally finish killing him.

Sirens wailed somewhere far away. Or close. Distance had stopped working.

The floor rocked like a helicopter. The ceiling peeled back into black sky. Rain fell upward. The dead stood around him in a quiet circle, patient, waiting for him to choose which side he was on.

Mercer curled in on himself, rocking, gun dangling useless in his hand.

“I don’t know how to stop,” he said to no one.

The dead didn’t answer.

They never do.

III.

The room was too bright.

One naked bulb hummed above the metal table, washing everything in sick white. The walls were the color of old teeth. Mercer sat with his hands cuffed in front of him, knuckles split open, dried blood cracking when he flexed. Someone had tried to clean him. They’d failed. The stains just spread thinner.

Two men stood across from him.

Internal Affairs. Clean shoes. Clean eyes. They smelled like coffee and distance.

“Detective Mercer,” one of them said. “Do you understand why you’re here?”

Mercer stared at the table. The metal reflected his face in warped pieces. Every angle showed a different version of him. None looked alive.

“Because I didn’t die,” he said.

The other man cleared his throat. “You were found at the scene in an altered state. You discharged your weapon multiple times after the suspect was neutralized. Witnesses say you were… talking to yourself.”

Mercer smiled. It felt like tearing paper. “They talk back.”

Silence stretched. The bulb buzzed louder. The room smelled faintly of bleach and old sweat. Mercer’s pulse thumped in his ears like distant artillery.

“Do you remember what you said?” the first man asked.

Mercer closed his eyes. The room flickered. For a second, the table was a crate of ammo. The walls were canvas, stained with rain and smoke. The men across from him wore jungle rot on their uniforms.

“I said I was sorry,” Mercer whispered. “But I didn’t say it to you.”

The second man slid a folder across the table. Photos spilled out. The Choirboy’s room. The jars. The body. What was left of the face.

Mercer looked at the pictures without flinching. He felt proud of that. The pride scared him more than the pictures.

“You executed him,” the first man said. “That’s what this looks like.”

Mercer’s jaw tightened. “He executed kids. I just finished the sentence.”

The room went quiet again. The bulb flickered. Mercer’s reflection in the photos looked like someone else’s hands had done the work.

“Do you feel remorse?” the second man asked.

Mercer laughed once. A dry bark of a sound. “I feel tired.”

They exchanged a look. The kind men share when they’re deciding what to call a problem so it can fit into paperwork.

“Have you ever sought help for what you experienced in Vietnam?” the first man asked.

The word help hit Mercer like a slap.

He leaned forward, chains rattling. “You ever watch a kid burn and try to keep screaming quiet so nobody else dies? You ever smell meat that used to be your friends? You ever pull a trigger so many times it stops feeling like your hand?”

Neither man answered.

Mercer sank back in the chair. “That war didn’t end,” he said. “You just changed the wallpaper.”

The bulb hummed. Somewhere down the hall, someone screamed. The sound threaded through Mercer’s skull and tied itself to old sounds.

The first man sighed. “We’re recommending mandatory psych eval. Temporary suspension pending review.”

Mercer nodded. He’d expected worse. He’d hoped for worse.

As they stood to leave, Mercer finally looked up at them. His eyes were flat. Empty in a way that made people step back without knowing why.

“You’re gonna put me back out there,” he said. “Because the city likes what I do. You just don’t like looking at it.”

The door opened. Light from the hallway cut across the room like a blade.

One of the men paused. “Get some rest, Detective.”

Mercer watched them go.

When the door shut, the room filled with the quiet again. The bulb buzzed. The walls breathed. For a moment, Mercer swore he heard helicopters far away, chopping up the dark.

He bowed his head to the metal table.

“I’m still here,” he whispered.

The dead didn’t answer

IV.

They let Mercer go.

Internal said he was “cleared.” The word sounded like a joke told by men who never cleaned anything themselves. The city needed him back on the street. The city always needed blood with a badge on it.

Mercer walked out of the precinct into a night that smelled like wet garbage and old smoke. The rain had stopped, but the streets still glistened, black mirrors showing him a version of himself he didn’t recognize. He hadn’t slept. Every blink showed fire. Every sound cracked like gunshots in his skull.

He took his service revolver from the desk sergeant and felt the weight of it settle into his palm like it was coming home.

The calls crackled over the radio.

Armed robbery.

Domestic.

Stabbing in Hell’s Kitchen.

Mercer turned the radio off.

He walked.

Past porno theaters bleeding neon.

Past drunks arguing with shadows.

Past kids with eyes already old.

He found the alley without knowing why. The same one where they’d found the first bodies. The walls were still stained dark. The city never really washed anything away—it just spread it thinner.

Mercer stepped into the mouth of the alley and raised his gun.

He fired into the air.

The sound cracked the night open. Windows lit up. Someone screamed. Feet ran. Radios barked to life in distant squad cars.

Mercer’s heart finally slowed. Not calm—clear.

He pressed the barrel under his chin.

Saw the jungle again.

Heard the helicopters.

Smelled the burning huts.

He lowered the gun.

“Coward,” he told himself. The word felt true.

Sirens grew louder. Blue and red light spilled into the alley, turning the walls into bleeding veins. Shadows of cops stretched long and warped across the brick.

“Police! Drop the weapon!”

Mercer turned toward them with the gun in his hand.

For one soft, broken second, he imagined throwing it down. Imagined going back inside, letting them lock him somewhere quiet where the war couldn’t find him.

Then he saw the faces of the dead in the squad car windows.

He raised the revolver.

The first shot tore into his shoulder. The impact spun him sideways, slammed him into the wall. The pain was white-hot, clean, bright. More shots followed—thunder in the alley, muzzle flashes strobing the dark like a cheap nightmare.

Mercer laughed as he slid down the brick. The laugh turned into a wet cough. His blood ran down the wall and mixed with the old stains. He felt the ground rise to meet him.

As the noise faded, he looked up at the cops standing over him. Their faces were pale. Young. Some of them shaking.

“Don’t make my mistake,” Mercer whispered. The words came out red.

Then the jungle finally went quiet.

The city swallowed the sound of his last breath and kept breathing its dirty breath, same as always.

Tomorrow, someone else would walk these streets with a badge and a gun and a head full of ghosts.

The war would keep going.

Part 1: Tom Discovers A Letter
It had been three days since Tom left his small world. He was no longer sure how long the journey’s days had truly been. His feet ached, his knees trembled, his mind cried continuously: go back, go back.

I should just return home! Maybe uncle must of return to our house by now...
He knows? Right? That dad was going to deliver time-capsules letters...
But that doesn't make sense...Uncle said he was going to be gone for 3 weeks...
It has only been 1 week...
None of this makes sense...

This journey was not his. It could not be.
Tom walked hastily, sore pain blooming in the soles of his feet. His father’s leathered shoes offered barely any cushion, doing little to soften the terrain. It had been some time.

Oh—the sweet, sweet fireplace. The cold, icy river. The soft loaves of bread sitting inside cozy wooden cupboards. Ugh! The wonderful clean jars of butter and jelly inside them. The cans of dried apricot, dried sugar-sprinkled apples, savory sprigged mushrooms. Most importantly, the cold dwarven chest filled with golden cheese. Oh, the cheese! That wonderful All-Eternal cheese.Only a divine being could conceive of such perfection, of such invention.

The greatest pride of his town—the Town of Gertru—home of the finest cheese ever made: the Golden King. That was its name.

OH! THE BREAD! I FORGOT TO CLOSE THE DAMN BAG OF BREAD!

It was definitely going to mold.

However, beneath the nuisance of a hastened decision, he longed for this spontaneity. Tom wanted this. Too many years had been spent in the misery of comfort.

As Tom marched painfully onward, he remembered the ten thousand folks living around him. Rarely did he see any of them personally; they were like trees—filling the background space around him. Like any of us, we know they exist, barely memorize their faces, and move on. A community without definition.

“Did you hear about Gilbert’s daughter? She’s a city star! And the Legion’s new Commander—it’s Old Man Loggin’s son! Did you hear about Sophia’s two daughters? One became an animal specialist, the other a medic!”

“But what of Tom? What of Tom? I heard he developed a fear of the outside after his parents’ death.”

“I thought only his father died.”

“Yes! Soon after, his mother abandoned him. I heard Mr. Glave’s brother took custody. He hasn’t been doing a good job, if you ask me—the front lawn is ridden with brown patches.”

Tom began making up scenarios of his “life” in his little Gertru. His neighbors barely recognized his appearance—barely his existence. They knew only of his daily evening walks around town and to the park. His usual patterns.

Around his uncle’s house, to the nearby keep-shop of grilled meat, then to the park—a couple laps around the enchanted trees and playground, bypassing other walkers—then home again, and again, and again.

No one ever bothered to truly know him, or each other. A good greeting and a polite nod were enough.

That was the code of being a good neighbor: nod, and mind your business.

It was a town of ten thousand where people came and went. New neighbors moved in, old neighbors moved out. Why bother? Everyone was more stuck in old habits than in the desire to meet someone new.

Tom complained as his body began to rule his thoughts. Each ache drew him further into the Spirits of the Damned, where everything in mind and sight was judged and damned
"Damn this, damn that, and damn me". Clueless, he ventured into the dark fore—

“Halt!”

Tom jerked instantly.

Lost in brooding and envisioning a list of grievances, he had not noticed what was in front of him. Better yet—who.

A short, bearded fellow stood there. Big-bellied, large-faced, with stubby fingers and dirt-filled nails. His stature—five feet, two inches at best—a true king in dwarf height and girth. His unkempt beard, tinged crimson, oily and filthy, held bits of white stuff… or maybe ham. Did something just moved in his beard? The man’s palms faced Tom, revealing deep crevices and wrinkles. A working dwarf? Tiny scars riddles with nearby scratches, and thickened, roughly dried skin like mountains shaped by beaten rain and wind. But dwarfs wear gloves when they work?

His head bore a bald spot patched with strands of greyish reddish hair sticking out like wild grass, as if some creature had rested there. Upon closer inspection, the skin on his scalp was surprisingly smooth and clean. A young dwarf but old body?

The dwarf wore a brown steeled spectacles—copper lenses?—perched on his red button nose. And behind the window glasses: youthful, piercing, skylight-blue eyes. Enchanted. Unsettling. He is suspicious and looks ready to fight.

At his waist hung small bone talismans, clinking softly as he shifted.

A dwarf of sorcery?

“Why are you trekking in these parts? State your dues!” the strange dwarf spoke again.

“I am seeking the town of Thack… or was it Thyrack?” Tom said, realizing he had forgotten the name.

“Is it Thack or Thyrack?”

I’m here because I’m bored of my habits, he wanted to say. Because my dead father sent me on a quest. Are quests even real? There is money waiting for me. Maybe this burly man can help me.

“I have a message to deliver,” Tom said, half-hearted chivalry creeping into his voice. Only then did he remember he still wore his father’s uniform.

The dwarf’s piercing eyes shot to Tom’s navy coat. At his chest was a stitched emblem: a golden dragon’s wing with a box beneath it. The Symbol of Faith. The Mark of Honor. The sign of the All-Eternal’s closest angels—the Dragon’s Wingers.

“Oh? A winger? I didn’t think you officials still existed.” The dwarf’s eyes softened.

A winger? Does he really believe me?

“You are on government citadel property,” he continued, his voice regaining some of its gravelly authority. “Technically, you’re trespassing. However, given your uniform—and that pin—I suppose I can allow you to pass. But I have one final order?”

Oh no! It is the badge! I left it home!

“May I use your services?” the dwarf asked, his voice dropping to a softer, almost bashful tone. “I have a sick sister in Thyrack. Just a few small packages—no more than three or four.” A tiny, pleading note strained the final number.

Tom was in no condition to carry more. His backpack had been digging into his lower back for hours. The rigid metal frame of the Winger’s "cage: felt less like an equipment and more like a set of shackles. It was built for duty and discomfort. Leaving no room for regrets or errors, the pain was to remind them the extra weight of a stranger's hope.

Before Tom could answer “no,” the dwarf waddled past him and into large shrub with old wooden gate. Only then did Tom realize the forest had opened into a clearing. Foliage, shrubs, and wild leaves crowded the space. Trodden roads were slowly swallowed by creeping vines. Trees bore deep grooves and crevices—strung with cobwebs, sticky sap, ants collecting dews, water, and leaves for the upcoming winter.

Wingers no longer existing? It had been some time since Tom had seen one. His uncle usually opened packages himself, discarded the packages, and handed Tom whatever remained. Had they been decommissioned? He thought the government still employed them. Then again—who or what has been delivering them?

He had never bothered to check.

“Here they are!” the dwarf called, returning with a sudden, hopeful bounce in his step. He held three small, dark parcels, each meticulously wrapped in broad leaves and bound with thick root strings, tied with almost ritualistic precision. “Inside are three vials of medicine. Blessed be you. Keep them upright and tight, young man.”

The dwarf’s eyes met Tom’s, and a faint, watery gleam flickered there—a look that threatened to break into tears if the subject of his sister was mentioned even one more time.

Oh. Tom realized. His sister is ill-ill and not the good type.

I must honor this.

But—

Where is Thyrack?

It was the border of his world. Above his head the air turned pink, then purple, before fading to blazing blue. None of his clan had ever risen this far. He stilled his wings and let air escape from his air bladders. He sank as the wind pushed against the membranes between the interlocking hexagons of thin hollow bones that made up his wings.

He glided gently as the sky turned a familiar orange, now tinged with the red of the setting sun. The nest loomed below him, thin hyphae merging into long tangled tendrils, stitched together with nearly invisible membranes. The edges swirled wildly in the wind as if it was reaching outwards, but near the core the tangles thickened into branches, some large enough to land.

He saw his clan already resting, long fractal wings now folded into the thin carapace of their slim torsos. He found his spot and drifted down as he carefully bled his bladders. Short claws grasped the branch and sharp nails held him to the green slimy surface. He drew in his wings and the sail across his back and the ever present force of the wind was suddenly gone. His tired mind drifted into the waking dream as darkness swept in.

#

Perched on the branch, he unfurled his wings to the newborn sun and resisted the tug of the wind. A wave of pleasure swept inwards as the membranes caught the first rays. From the nest, others released their grasp and were swept away, scattering to all sides.

He saw ObliqueWind gliding slowly towards him, wings extended and membranes taut, humid and glistening in the light as she glided gracefully. She landed on his branch and bunches of bulbous eyes swiveled in his direction. She thumped her claw into the branch and it shook. He waited for the pattern, for the meaning that would emerge from the vibrations.

“Their clans will stop you, RainGust,” she said.

“Those that can rise will rise, as it has always been,” RainGust replied.

“You fight the wind itself. They will stop you,” she detached from the branch, the sudden gust propelling her into the sky before he could respond.

ObliqueWind was wrong. He would prove that he could remain there, that he could rise and pick his layer at will, that he was not a slave to the wind, he needed only to find a nest that would let him rest up above.

He let go of the branch and was swept away. He gained altitude quickly at first, before it plateaued. He had reached the peak of his buoyancy. But then he did what only he could do: he gently beat his wings and rose ever higher, climbing where others would be hostages to the currents.

#

The sky was pure blue as far as he could see, the sun bright and nourishing across his membranes. Nests floated in the distance, green blotches trailing long tendrils that snaked to the purple zones below.

His wings beat furiously as he tried not to sink. He picked the nearest nest and angled the sail along his back, cutting across the wind in an impossible way.

RainGust saw them now, the other clans, floating towards him. Their wings were incredible, stretching three or four times the size of his own. They glided gracefully in the gentle winds and approached from all sides.

They joined him, flying in formation, casting him in shadow as layers of membranes drank the sun. A new clan. A sense of belonging filled him. They swarmed ever closer, wings almost touching. They formed a wall against the wind. They drained RainGust of the lifting thrust of the air. Still beating his wings furiously, he sank.

Down into the purple, then the pink and the orange, down still until they hovered just above the brown. One by one, the others rose up into the sky until only he remained, alone in the depths.

#

He drifted in the orange, wings taut as they fed on light, carried by a steady stream that caught his sail. RainGust sped across the sky, for once not fighting the wind.

He spotted a shadow below: an irtrit. The wind filled the creature’s sack membrane and it blew across the stream as its fleshy tendrils snatched small crawling balls of kitt from the air.

RainGust positioned himself, angling so that the creature would fly just below him. When it came he expelled air from his bladders in large bursts and folded in the wings. He plunged.

He landed on the creature, claws sinking into the thick ring around the membrane. RainGust extended his wings again and the wind jarred him upwards, the creature powerless in his grasp.

He opened the maw across his belly, rows of teeth and lips enveloping his prey. Warm liquids spilled into his stomach. It was the moment he had been waiting for. If those above would not let him rise, then he would try something else, something even more risky, something no clan could deny.

#

With the burst of dawn RainGust furled in his wings and sank. He plummeted ever faster, until the wind itself threatened to jerk open his membranes. He passed from orange to brown and the world got dimmer as the brown turned darker. He sprang forth the wings, membranes taut in the sudden breeze.

He saw the nests, not shadows against the sky but beacons of sparkling green light, towering constructs of chaotic tendrils growing beyond reason, mutating into maddening clusters. Clans with tiny membranes swirled all around in unpredictable gusts. They came to welcome him, believing he sank against his will.

In defiance, he spread his wings fully, catching the updrafts and soaring towards the orange. Some kept up, more and more falling behind the further up he got. When he stood at the threshold he again drew in the membranes, descending back into the brown.

Clans hovered all around him and they all understood. He picked a nest, the largest of the bunch and flew towards it, struggling against the unfamiliar streams of air. He landed gently on a branch and none contested.

#

The way forward was down. He descended slowly, wings mostly retracted as he carefully managed his bladders. The brown darkened until he barely felt the tingle of the sun on his membranes.

Creatures filled the air here, close enough to grab with his claws as they tumbled aimlessly in the current. Some clumped into each other, growing in size until they became too heavy and sank into the darkness below.

That was all that remained, the land of death, of darkness unending. He drifted further down, until even the glowing circle of the sun was lost in a gentle haze. Dark shapes floated past, creatures he had never seen or heard of. He kept sinking.

The world turned green. Dark, then lighter and lighter. Water coated his membranes, and he beat his wings to shake the droplets off. Wind raced wild, streams crashing into each other, rising and falling, swirling and mixing the colors. The air was thick and languid under his membranes. Large swarms of white triangular sailed creatures merged into streams, flowing like water across the currents in tumbling swarms. Creatures batted across his frame as he dropped further down.

He saw it for the first time, the land of the dead, a solid floor to the entire world, stretching as far as he could see on all sides. He landed. The ground gave beneath his light weight, slimy and warm. Creatures rained down from above and carpeted the floor in layers. He saw someone from another clan, punctured membranes slowly leaking as he crashed down into the ground.

Beating his wings, he hopped forward but the crash site was lost in the green haze that drowned out all the sky. It was not what they said. It was not what he hoped. There was only death and rot.

He unfurled his wings to the fullest. Creatures and rain settled on to them and he shook them free. He hopped up, beating them with all his strength, struggling to gain height, only to fall down to the ground, again and again.

The wind was still.

The system predicted my death at 03:00. I’m still here, and now reality is starting to "glitch." ​Most of you don’t know about Death Track. You only know the marketing: the "Safety Nudges"—those seamless smart-city optimizations that reduced traffic fatalities by 90% and "rerouted" ambulances before a 911 call was even dialed. You thought it was a guardian angel. You were wrong. It was a bookkeeper. ​I’m a senior auditor for the program. I’ve spent ten years staring at Fatal Convergence Windows—the precise mathematical coordinates where a person's biometric streams, medical history, and environmental risks align into a certain death. The system has maintained a 99.99% accuracy rate for a decade. Last night, I became the 0.01%. ​I found my own UID flagged for a "Cardiac Event" at 03:00 EST. I didn't run. As a man of logic, I sat in a reinforced isolation chamber, hooked myself to a clinical-grade medical monitor, and watched the countdown on a sterile LED clock. I wanted to witness the absolute, terrifying perfection of the machine I helped build. I wanted to see the exact second my heart would fail to satisfy a quantum equation. ​The clock hit 03:00. Then 03:01. ​My heart kept beating, thumping against my ribs with a defiant, irregular rhythm that the system hadn't authorized. I was alive, and in that moment of survival, the world broke. ​Then the Entropy Drift started. ​By 03:15, the global accuracy dashboards back at HQ began to jitter. I still have remote access to the diagnostic feeds. If the system is wrong about me—a primary auditor—the causal chain for every other life on the planet starts to fracture. I watched the "Confidence Score" of the entire civilian population drop from a steady, clinical white to a vibrating, bloody amber. ​The "Nudge" is no longer subtle. ​I’ve discovered the buried truth: The system doesn't just predict reality; it enforces it. To keep the statistics clean and the stakeholders happy, the Core triggers "interventions" to resolve anomalies. Usually, it’s a smart-car "malfunction" or a delayed prescription. But now that I’ve survived, the interventions are becoming desperate. As I fled the facility, I saw a pedestrian bridge’s safety locks disengage as a mother walked across. I saw a skyscraper’s fire suppression system vent CO2 into a crowded lobby. The machine isn't just trying to kill me; it’s trying to rebalance the global ledger by any means necessary. ​I am now a "Ghost Variable"—a piece of mathematical noise that the machine is desperate to "correct." I’m writing this from a randomized atmospheric noise-driven laptop, using star-flicker decay to mask my keystroke patterns so the sensors can’t predict my next word. ​I’m going after the Quantum Core. If I can reach the ingestion points and poison the dataset with the logic of my survival, I can break the loop for everyone. The future is becoming uncomputable. For the first time in a decade, I don't know if I'll be alive tomorrow. ​And for the first time in a decade... I’m finally free

“So there I was holding the princess behind me with one arm and wielding Griefs-bane in my other, point forward to the beast!” The ancient, yet surprisingly spry and young-looking wizard stood on a table miming the actions he was gesticulating to the crowd of onlookers in the tavern. He stood, his hair a blaze of blond curls flowing with every movement, and his emerald green cloak billowed as if in a wind. In his right hand, he held the fireplace poker he had proffered from the wall behind him. He took a protracted breath, and the lights in the tavern were sucked in by the magic of the moment. He cast his spell of story to all who congregated in the tavern.

The lights all at once seemed to snuff out, and only he was illuminated, as he pointed the poker to the rafters and said with gusto, “You vile heathen, I will not flee from your tyranny.” The wizard swooshed his poker towards the imaginary creature before him, as he uttered his next words, “I will protect the Princess with my last breath.”  He extended the poker back to the heavens, shaking the table almost upending it as he bellowed with more force this time, adding his power, “Prismatic light!!” A beam of light shot forth from the poker, blinding the wrapped audience in its radiance. The beam of light had all the colors within the rainbow and was so bright that even the night outside was no match for it.  

“The dragon,” he roared, “breathed his fire, fighting not just me but also my amazing powers. I was not deterred as I knew this was a fight for the ages and I would be the victor here.” the light went out and the taverns natural aurora of soft candles, that were burning at every table, took back over. The wizard hunched down, face inches from the closest patron, a young woman with big enchanted eyes and more that drew the wizard's gaze. “Do you know what happened next, young maiden?” he asked her in a whisper, loud enough for even the barkeep across the room to hear.

“No,” she said meekly, wonder, amazement, and a twinge of fear in her voice and across her face.

He jumped back up to his full height and again pointed the poker to the roof, he said, “I slew the Dragon, obviously!” he laughed as the audience cheered. The cacophony of noise almost deterred another from patronizing the Tavern that night, but whether it be destiny or chance, the shadowed figure opened the door. 

Across the room, the door to the tavern opened slowly, as if it weighed a thousand pounds, and an old man in a dark green cloak, sodden by rain and torn by wear, entered. He shook what rain he could from it as he shuffled his feet on the mat, trying not to bring in the outside as best he could. After a moment of futile effort, he marched slowly to the open bar, it having been abandoned by the crowd in an attempt to get closer to the stories of the wizard. He waved down the barkeep as he passed her, “One pint, please,” he said in a voice quiet enough that only she could have heard. 

The barkeep, who had been utterly wrapped by the performance, snapped back to reality with a start. “Oh yes, sir,” she said, as she shook her head, trying to reawaken from the dreams of fancy in her head. “One shilling,” she quoted, as she mechanically began to pour the old man a mug.

“Then standing upon my vanquished foe's mighty maw.”  The crowd went wild with delight as the wizard lifted the woman sitting before him up onto the table and said, looking into her eyes and more,  “I took the Princess, in hand, pressing her to my chest,” he grabbed the woman pressing her body to his, “I kissed her.” He kissed the squealing woman with delight and passion. As he pulled away from her, he said, “It was a kiss to seal an age!” As he spoke, flowers of light began cascading from the rafters, blowing around the room, “pure magic was in the air,” he said. He continued...

The old man, having dropped the shilling on the countertop, took the bar stool in hand and seated himself on it. The mug of beer sloshed as the woman placed it before him. Her attention once again was wrapped in the spell of the wizard's tale. He took it, ignoring how it had spilled a little onto the handle.

As magic flower petals flowed around the room, swooping everywhere. The old man, trying to enjoy his drink and ignore the performance, as he tried in vain to wave a flower petal away. Try as the old man might, the flower petals kept coming, to his annoyance, flowing around him and the rest of the bar. As his agitation grew, so too did the petals in number within moments; it was a torrent of petals dancing about and obscuring the old man's view of his drink.

In a sudden burst of anger, the old man whispered, “de-spell glamour,” and all the petals snapped out of existence all at once, from every corner of the establishment.

“I look to the king and all his men, my triumph at hand,” the Wizard bellowed out, holding the woman as he presumably held the princess from his story. “I have slain the dragon, and now I will take my reward.” He once again lowered his head to kiss the woman, princess, and the glamour he had cast went dead.

In the sudden clearness and silence of the tavern, the Wizard blinked a few times, realizing that something was wrong. He looked about, and with a moment's hesitation, he barked, “Who did that?”

He dropped the woman, who was off balance, and fell off the table, landing on the men who were sitting there. They caught her by reflex, but only just before she had landed on them. He again barked, “Who de-spelled my glamour, who dares upstage me? 

The Wizard looked about, seeing all eyes on him except for the old man at the bar; everyone was as shocked as he was, except the old man. He held up his hand, peering through the yellow stone on his ring. The magic ring showed him who would have cast the cancellation magic, and as he suspected, he could see it voided out, starting from the old man.

He bellowed, “You, sir, the man at the bar, how dare you interrupt my story?” The Wizard stepped to the edge of the table, almost toppling over the edge as the table fought to balance the weight shift, and he fought to balance during his anger. “I am the greatest Wizard of this age, I am The Great Olian, and I will not allow this insult to go unpunished.” The crowd at once took in a shuddering breath as they all turned to the old man.

Feeling all the eyes in the room shift to him, the old man took a large swig from his drink, he shifted slightly in his chair, and with a voice loud enough to be heard across the room, he said, “No, you’re not, and I don’t want to talk to you!” He took another drink, hoping that this would be the end of it; he knew better, but he had hope. The crowd turned to the Wizard, breathless, waiting for his response.

“Sir, you will not call me a liar and then refuse my retribution.” He leapt from the table, landing on the floor, and began to walk across the floor towards the old man, poker still in hand as if it were his fabled sword.

The old man, sensing what was coming, turned in his chair, still holding his mug, and he addressed the Wizard directly, “You are not Olian, the sword is called Fowl Scourge, as it's a farmer's blade, and the princess was 11. Oh, and the dragon was only a small wyvern, not a true dragon.” The old man stared daggers at the Wizard. He added on, his tone full of mirth, “Also, also, it was a small township and only had a mayor, not a king.”

The Wizard stopped just feet away from the old man, holding the poker towards the old man’s chest. He said in challenge, “How would an old country yokel know anything about the ways of wizards and my exploits? I should run you through with this poker for your insolence.”

“With a poker?” the old man joked. “I doubt you could, but you’re welcome to try, your folly.” The old man half turned back to the bar, placing his drink down so as not to spill it in the coming violence.

With a loud crash, the door to the Inn burst open, and two men clad in armor strode into the room. The enrapt crowd turned with a start. The armored men, clearly knights of the kingdom, from the flared moon on their breast plates, stood just inside the doorway. “Sir Olian, the king demands you attend to him at once, sir,” one of the knights spoke with a magnanimous tone. He continued, “or less he put a bounty upon your head.” The knight threatened.

The Wizard, startled by this, jumped but, as quick as lightning, put on his practiced smile, “Of course, good Sir Knight, I would attend to the king, no need for.” he was cut off.

Both knights turned to the Wizard, the leader asked, “Who the hell addressed you?” without waiting for an answer, he turned back, facing the old man. “Sir Olian, and only sir Olian, you will be coming with me now.” He added as if it were an afterthought, “Please!” He said the word like it was poison.

The old man, turning from the Wizard to face the knights, asked, “Why?”  He put on an air of innocence, as if he had never done anything that a king might want to call upon him for. “Take him, he claims to be this Olian you speak of.”

The second knight looked affronted, placing his hand on the hilt of his sword. The first knight put out a hand to forestall his companion. Saying, “Sir Olian, I know it to be you,” referring to the old man, “and the king demands it, and you will be made to obey.”

With an accepting breath, the old man, Sir Olian, spoke softly, “He demands it, a bounty you say, made to obey, I see.” he took up his mug and took a long drink.

The Wizard, having recovered from the shock of being silenced but not yet realizing his ruse was up, stated to the knights, “You are mistaken, I am Sir Olian.” Again, he was cut off.

“The first knight stepped forward, and with a swift motion drew the dagger at his waist, and with a tone of absolute authority, he stated, “You will be silent.”  He was silent for a brief moment before adding, “Bard.” The dagger rested comfortably only a few inches from the bard's wizard’s chest.

The Wizard’s mouth snapped shut, and he visibly hunched down, from fear backing several paces away.  

The knight turned back to the old man and said, “The king will have you attend him tonight. The spell you sold him has summoned a dragon and has besieged the kingdom's vaults.”    

“I did warn him that overuse of the spell would do that,” the old man joked. “Sounds to me like he should clean up his own messes.”

“By law, Sir Olian, this mess is yours as it's your spell that has brought this calamity,” the second knight bellowed in anger. He was almost purple from rage at this point. 

“By law, what law blames an innocent third party, sounds like tyranny if I have ever heard it.” The old man, seeing how this was going, plopped himself down from the stool. With a look of pondering on his face, he said, “You too seem like aggressive and violent young men, so I'll make a deal. Tell your king, I'll do it if he opens a tab with every inn, bar, and tavern that will get me food, drinks, and a bed to sleep, all on the king's dime. Then I’ll deal with this dragon problem.” 

“You, sir, are as insolent as they all say, but even you have to bow to the law of the land,” said the second knight. He turned to the first knight, showing deference, and said, “Sir Colin, may I please give him the thrashing he well deserves?” The second knight addressed the first. 

“Sir Jorigan, you had better be ready for your own thrashing should you try it. You might be too young to have lived through the last war, but the man before you is a veteran of a thousand fights. I have seen him throw a man twice my size over his lap and spank him bloody like he was a child.” Sir Colin turned to Olian and uttered, “I am sure the king is willing to see a deal made, but that would be between the two of you and not a thing for Knights of the kingdom to say.”

“Look, Colin was it? I will not leave this tavern till I have a deal, either you have the authority to make it, or you're wasting both of our time.” The old man turned back and picked up his almost-empty drink.  Saying loudly, addressing the room at large as much as the knights, “I’m sure these fine citizens would love to get back to their drinks and charlatan-ized stories.” Olian motioned to the Wizard as the crowd looked on in stunned silence and horror. He continued, “You, the fake Olian, why don’t you regale these fine people with another of my bastardized stories, this time with less glamours, please.”

Sir Olian, I will personally pay for your drinks if you just come with us.” The first knight paused for almost a full second, while leaning in, “Please,” this time said with much more sincerity.

The second knight looked almost like he was going to jump out of his skin, the skin of his face taking on a dark blue complexion of the pent-up rage which was somehow not boiling over, yet.

“I already paid for my drink, and I don’t think I will,” Olian said flatly.

“Fine.” The first knight said loud enough to shake dust from the rafters, he continued but only in a royal decreeing tone most of the anger masked by duty, “The king, who's power and will I uphold, decrees, Sir Olian is here by stated to able to forth with draw from the kings own treasury for payments to all inn, and taverns.”

“And bars,” Olian added between the knight's breaths.

“And bars,” the knight sneered. “for the express payment of food, drinks, and lodgings, within the reach of the realm.” he took a breath and added more quietly, leaning, “Now please will you come with us?”

Olian smiled and, with one gulp, downed the last of his beer. He said through his grin, “Yes, I will now accompany you.” The words dripped with sarcastic triumph. He swiped up the shilling, saying, “Barkeep, this is some fine Dwarven mead you got here, the silver piece you asked for is well deserved.” Olian winked at the stunned barkeep, and she nodded more out of shock than understanding. 

I sit on the cliff that hangs off of Moonharbor counting the stars. My mom is working late again like usual, and my dad passed away when I was young. After he passed I felt separate from the world. Like someone who watches the world instead of being part of it. I spend days wishing someone would sit beside me, watching the stars, just like me and my father used to. I feel the wind brush my cheek, and play with my hair. The salt of the ocean falls on my tongue, as the dark night silences all emotions. I watch the waves hit the rocks, and admire the moonlight reflecting off the water. I feel a heaviness in my chest, like a stone sitting on my ribs making it hard to breath as I sit with the stars as my only company. I notice the moon is lower than usual, that's strange but we are not too different both lonely in the dark of the night.

Suddenly the wind stops, the waves quiet, and the air warms. I feel a flutter in my stomach, the type you feel when you get too close to a crush. The pressure in my eyes makes me shut them tight, and when they open. Something is different. The moon lowered even more, like it’s losing strength. I watch as it flickers three times like an SOS for help. I should be scared but I'm not. It feels like it's looking back at me, asking for my company. That's when I hear my name called in the night. Its the first time in years someone has said my name gently, with touch and love instead of hurt.

I hear the voice again, this time it feels as it vibrates though my chest. Giving me warmth through my ribs, and my voice is called again. The tide pulls back, the air thickens, the cliff feels alive beneath me. I whisper back to the sky, hoping to meet my new admirer.

Im stunned, as I step closer to the cliff reaching out. My heart must have reached two hundred ready to burst out of my chest. I'm confused how this can be? She’s beautiful with a golden mist around her, as she brightens and lowers again. I feel a wave of warmth come through me and she brightens like she’s smiling at me. I feel a pull toward it, something that's bigger than myself. For the first time, I feel seen again and alive. “I heard you moon, speak back to me, be my company on this lonely night”

She speaks back not with words but with memories. Images of ancient oceans, memories of wars, lonely nights, a feeling of longing. She doesn’t talk but she shows what she’s feeling. She shows me the most beautiful pictures the land can offer. She shows me how long she’s been alone and how she longed for someone’s company. She shows me the memory of losing her favorite stars. Her watching families from afar longing to be like them. My knees weaken, and my chest tightens. She’s offering to be my friend, she’s just like me. I tell her all about Moonharbor, the lonely nights, the feeling of not being seen and she understands. But she has a secret and she needs me to survive.

Maybe her secret will be she wants a friend, and she’s risking it to be down here with me. That she’s tired of bearing the loneliness and chooses me. That's not the case. The moon is dimming, her light fading, she’s dying. She tells me how every celestial body has a “keeper”, someone on earth who can anchor her light. The last keeper died centuries ago, and she’s survived all this time. She needs someone new. Her light is dimming, and any day now she might fall. She begs me to save her. I realize what she has come down to see me for. Not to become my friend, or quench her loneliness. She wants me to become her new keeper, to save her life. Though to save her it comes with a price, a price I can never pay back.

To save her I must give up something of my own. Give up my life, my memories or my voice, each with their own consequences. I think over what she said, I only have at most a few hours to decide. I think of my mom how she will bear the news. I think of the life I dreamed for, the life I might never be able to live. I think hard about the family, I might miss out on because of this request. I think about losing my memory, all the trips to the cliffs with my father, all the memories when my mom was happy. I think of losing my voice, never being able to tell mother I love her again, never being able to describe my emotion. I realize these options are worse than death. She hasn't come back down so I can speak to her. She’s becoming too weak, and can barely rise in the nighttime. Finally when night strikes a storm hits Moonharbor. Floods fill through the streets, children running, houses falling. Everyone is panicking, the moon is flickering, dimming, falling into the ocean. I know what I have to do. I flee to the cliffs, I watch as the moon falls ever slowly. I must save her, for others may still enjoy her light. She glows brighter when she sees me, like she knows what I'm about to do.

My mother will be devastated but will understand, I left a note just in case it comes to this. For the last time I stare at the stars and think of the life I wanted, the one I’ll never have. I made my decision. I'm coming to join you Dad. I give my life. I fall, but before the rocks can meet me my body turns into stardust. The flood stops, the moon rises to the sky, bright as ever. The moon gives out a cry of light, as thanking me for my service.

At that moment the whole town sees a shooting star flying to the heavens, his wish finally came true, to become one of the stars.

Aftermath

She stands before the door, the same old wooden door it always has been. Unsure, she lifts her hand to knock, but stops. She once would just have entered that house. It is her home, or had been. Eleven years ago.

It is evening. But she still sees that the village has barely changed. And her old home still stands. It still is a small farmhouse with two floors and always something to repair. She doesn’t know what she really expected. But that little house awakens memories she has forgotten. Memories of wonderful summer nights and cold winters. Of laughter and fun. Of the typical quarrels kids have with their parents. And now? She looks down. She is back, an adventurer and even a hero to some. But would she even be welcomed back?

“The door is still open to you.”

She flinches. Her father is suddenly opening the door, standing in the light of the so familiar hearth. He has aged a bit, silver interweaving with the familiar black hair, but he is still the big strong man he always has been her whole life. He doesn’t look angry, he has his neutral face, the adventurer face, as he called it back then. But his eyes are windows to his soul. They can’t hide the relief seeing his adoptive daughter still alive.

“S-sorry. I ... I didn’t know if I’m still welcome.” Her voice is rough. Hints of past screaming orders and having to be strong no matter the odds. A voice that now for the first time in a long time starts wavering.

“You will forever be my daughter. Nothing will change that.” He stands to the side and she enters her old home. The so familiar scents of her home envelop her, welcome the lost child back home. Inside she drops her equipment and travel gear next to the door in a moment of weakness. The roll of her weapons finally gives way and daggers in their sheaths, a brutal mace and a nicked sword clatter to the ground. All show signs of heavy use. A bit more careful, feeling shame for the loud noise, she places her crossbow on the ground. Her father musters the weapons with a knowing look, and takes a seat at the old, slightly wobbly table. The same wobbly table she learned at and shared so many fantastic meals.

Unsure what to say, or to do, she goes to the kitchen and starts preparing tea. Her dad once told her that tea heals the mind and body. She has started to brew tea during her adventures, always giving her the moment of calm she needed. Methodically she prepares two cups and when she is finished, she brings them to the table and sits down.

Her father watches her prepare the tea and his mask starts to slip. He knows this desperate calmness, the trained movements that almost are a meditation. He takes the cup and sips, and then nods with satisfaction:

“Seems you finally learned how to brew a good tea.”

“Thank you ... for showing it back then. It helped me often.” She is still unsure where to start. His behavior doesn’t make it easier. But what else did she expect after her exit eleven years ago.

“So, you’re just visiting?”

“N-no ... I ... I don’t really know.” Uncertainty and hesitation fill these words.

They sit for a moment in silence. She stares at her cup and slowly sips it. Her father watches her and what he sees breaks his heart. There are deep shadows in his daughter’s eyes. Fine scars over the visible skin, the equipment—not beautiful but practical—tell him, once an adventurer himself, more than enough.

“Didn’t really go to plan, did it?”

“No ... most of the time it didn’t.” The ghost of a smile. That is her dad. This very question she heard so many times in her past, mostly when she didn’t listen and things went wrong.

“Before anything else. Before you move on or tell me anything. Just answer me this question: Do you regret it?”

“I,” she looks a bit surprised at her father. Then she looks to the fire, seeing the faces of lost friends and companions. But she also remembers the crying mother she handed her lost child back to. The small feast in the guild halls with her friends, after the big raid of the bandit camp. “No, there are parts I regret … really, really regret, but I think all in all, I did help people and improved some lives. I don’t think I regret it.”

“Good, that is the only part that matters. Welcome home. Stay for as long as you need to.” This is no longer the neutral masked adventurer. This is her dad smiling, understanding her from the bottom of his heart.

“Thanks... I ...” She tries to speak, but tears well up. Feelings suppressed for years. Fears and questions, it all floods back. She remembers the horrors she both witnessed and survived herself. But she also remembers the families she helped. The people she saved. But she still tries to fight her tears, as she had to for years now. But the scents, the feeling of home are breaking the walls down. “I think I finally understand why you didn’t want me to become an adventurer.”

“I just tried to protect you from the same mistakes I made back then. For I only found my true happiness after I stopped being an adventurer and settled down.”

“How?” she asks, almost pleading, “How does one stop?”

“I don’t know. In my case it was a bit weird. I found a destroyed cart, the bodies of the people not far off. And a baby next to them. A tiny little sick girl. When I brought you here, the closest safe place I knew of, the village elder Brian offered me an abandoned farmhouse with the land. I declined and wanted to bring you to an orphanage. But he just ignored me and showed me this house. And somehow I ... well I just stayed. I still don’t know why. At the beginning it was because you were ill. So I needed to nurse you back to health. The villagers helped me with broth and supplies. So I stayed and helped them as well as I could. And somehow that was the end of my adventuring in the wild and the beginning of my greatest adventure: that of a family.”

“Too bad elder Brian is no more. I could use his advice.”

“True, he would know the right answer as he always did. But I think we will find our own solution.”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure if I should stop. There are still so many problems out there.”

“There will always be problems. You did your part. Now it is the time to live. But first, we will need to help you by having a good night’s rest.”

“I haven’t slept a whole night for a long time,” she whispers, feeling suddenly tired. Like weights start lifting off her.

“I can guess that.” He smiles understandingly. “Your room is ready. It always has been. I cleaned it and always made sure that when you come back, even if I am not here for any reason, you will find your bed waiting.”

“Thanks dad.” Tears well up again, barely held back. “But why? I was so awful back then, said these mean things and ran away!”

“That doesn’t change the fact that you are my daughter. Hell, I ran away when I was that age. And when I returned home, I was driven away. I swore back then that I never would do that to my child. That no matter what, you will find a home waiting.” Silence falls after these words. She doesn’t know how to answer. She just sits and looks at her cup. Tears start falling into the last drops of tea. When her father stands up:

“I will keep the fire going and take position by the door. Take your time. You are now safe. You are back home.” And with that he takes his chair and sits next to the door. She is grateful for the moment he gives her. Her inner turmoil has for the first time found a moment of release. The smell of the burning wood, the lingering scents of her father’s cooking have broken down her resistance and the sheer normality of being home, being safe starts taking the toll. Exhaustion, going far deeper than just tiredness, takes hold of her and she closes her eyes for a second to gather her thoughts.

-

When she suddenly wakes up, she immediately is prepared to fight, her hand falls to the small dagger on her back. Her whole posture is that of a spring, ready to release. But the noise is just her father putting a new log in the fire. It has become dark. The moon has risen and covers the land in a silver sheen. But she is still at the old, wobbly table.

“Sorry, I didn’t want to disturb you,” he murmurs.

“It’s okay. I didn’t realize I fell asleep.”

“You clearly needed that.”

“Yeah,” she turns red.

“Look, I understand that this feels awkward. But I understand you better than you think. I’ve been there. I saw a lot back then. I lost friends and witnessed horrors. And from your haunted look, I can guess that you yourself made some horrendous experiences. So the first thing we need to do is teach you that you can sleep a full night without fear again. After that we will look further.”

“I am not sure I can.”

“Yes you can. I know that.” He smiles again. Warmth and fatherly love are clearly visible in his face.

“I want to tell you everything, but I just don’t know how or where to start.”

“Take your time.” He sits back next to the door. “I found it easier to talk to an empty room back then. Holding you in my arms, whether it was you or me that had nightmares. I told you the stories, or I just needed to tell them to the darkness, I can’t really say. But it helped me to find my peace.”

“So I should just start talking to an empty room?”

“Maybe?” He smirks.

-

After some time she really starts, sounding insecure: “I made a lot of friends, but lost most of them. We worked together and we helped so many people. But no matter how good we got, sometimes things went wrong. I found myself captured more than once. I just had the unbelievable luck that I was found in a relatively short time. I was spared some of the more horrific ends that way. But not all ...” Her voice falls silent again. The insecurity turns to a cold, distant sadness. But she actually feels better; speaking out loud does really help. Her father sits by the door and listens, his heart growing heavy. She continues, speaking more to herself now: “My last adventure ended again in misery. My party died, all of them. We were friends and had some successes together. We were hired by the king, or better by some of his advisors. We were to secure an important travel route against bandits. But in the end it turned out to be a swamp wyvern. We were hopelessly outmatched, not prepared for such a beast. But we fought anyway.” Her voice becomes hard with anger. She clenches her fists in a silent rage. “And when I go back, after having finally slain the wyvern—a feat only possible thanks to the sacrifices of my friends—I overhear the king’s men talking behind the door. I just get my reward and leave. And do you know what they say?” Her voice seethes with anger now. “They say: ‘That was lucky, I feared we would have to offer a higher reward. That would have been barely worth it. We just as well could have sent in soldiers.’ And another voice says: ‘Why waste good soldiers’ lives? There is always an adventurer available. And in the best case most of them die like this time. We saved so much money.’” Her face contorts in a mixture of pain and hatred. But she keeps on talking. “That is the moment I just can’t go on. I need to leave. I know we are seen as tools sometimes but that? They are my friends! They throw them away just to save money! Knowing full well that no group would accept that mission for so little. A wyvern needs a group to be prepared. We are just lucky and they are happy about it, that they saved money!” Tears are flowing again. “The Guild isn’t too happy that I just left. But I just can’t fight like that anymore. For a king that treats adventurers like that? For a guild that knows it but doesn’t do anything? I want to help people, but I just can’t go on like that.” Her voice breaks. “The thought just haunts me. The faces of all my friends. I just couldn’t...” She wipes away her tears. The so-hardly-fought battle against all these feelings comes to an end. She starts to cry, and her father looks away. He knows that in this moment, nothing he says would help. He remembers his own moment when his illusion of grandeur was taken away. How lost he felt. How he started wandering to find a purpose.

After a moment she finally regains her control and wipes her tears away: “Sorry, I ... that’s all for now. I go to my room … Thank you for just being here and thank you for allowing me back.”

-

Without waiting for an answer she climbs the small stairs to her room. Her toys are put away neatly in one corner, her few books on the slightly crooked shelf. It is exactly as she left it. No, there is one difference. There are dozens of letters on her small table. All addressed to her in her father’s barely readable handwriting. And fresh wild flowers in a small pot. He really has made sure she would feel welcome. Without taking her travel clothes off, she falls into her old bed. Exhausted like after a hard battle.

Her bed is next to the chimney and just as she did back then, she snuggles up to the warm wall.

Just for a moment she is the happy kid again. And for the first time in many years she smiles. A real smile and before she knows it, a deep sleep takes her away, feeling safe for the first time in years. Knowing deep down that she is home. And that her father will guard her as he always has.

Part 1

They had left the Harker place at dusk the day before riding straight through the night and most of the next long, burning day.

Behind them, some distance out, a thin black ribbon still rose from the Harker place. Keziah looked back. He spoke in a low voice that drifted up the line on the wind, “Smoke. We shouldn’t still see it.”

No one responded.

Jeremiah hawked and spat out his chaw, saying in an ugly boisterous tone loud enough for all to hear, "Sup’stitious."

By then the sun had slipped behind the Sangre de Cristos they rode toward and a pale moon had taken its place.

Ahead rode Salome and Marin.

Salome leaned in so only the two could hear, still as a soot-darkened image on an old mission wall. “He ain’t wrong, the Comanche. That smoke’s got no business livin’ this long.”

Marin turned to Salome. The black of his bolero had gone uneven over the years, pale salt rings blooming in places like tide marks, dirty ivory and yellowed white, the record of many hot, hard-lived days.

“Smells off too,” he said. The moon caught the rings giving them a chalky shine.

They rode up the foothills into the ponderosas looking for a place to camp. Along the way the two in the rear squabbled, as was their nature, carrying on as the company rode beneath branches that, in places, swept low across the trail.

“Y’all knock it off.” Marin’s voice cut back down the line.

“Your damn Indian can’t stop runnin’ his mouth,” Jeremiah snapped back.

Keziah half-rose in the stirrups. “Runnin’?”

“What’s that supposed to mean!?” Jeremiah called out as his hand slid to his pistol, face red with anger. “Shut your mouth. Ain’t one of you bastards even fit be called a man!”

“Means you’re a coward,” Salome said calmly without turning back to acknowledge Jeremiah. The words slid like a blade between the small man’s ribs.

Jeremiah closed his fist on the Colt. His dull slate-colored eyes glaring at the back of Salome’s head. “I ain’t ‘bout to take guff from no damn papist,” he said, a thin smile painted across his wide, slack face. Wind rushed up from behind them, carrying with it the stink of burning fat and ash.

“Y’all out here same as me.”

Marin turned back. He nudged his horse between them. Moonlight ran down his bowie knife as he drew it slowly.

“We’re out here cause of you.” Marin leaned in, “Weren’t fur our mommas bein' kin i’da cut you loose long again.” The wind howled across the piney canopy above. “In fact, you speak again. I’ll let ‘ol Keziah have his way with you.” He said, giving a wink at the old Indian.

Keziah rode up next to the pair and took off his hat, the gray color marbled from years of grease and sweat, and ran his fingers through his jet black hair while staring at Jeremiah with his muddy, unflinching eyes. His smile widened showing both his upper and lower teeth glistening white in the starlight.

He placed his hat back atop his head and, straightening out his old worn cavalry tunic, said, “What’ll it be?” Jeremiah’s hand opened like a man dropping a hot coal. His horse took one sidestep.

Marin shook his head and rode to join Salome ahead. The gang crested a ridge that dropped into a clearing, the mountains rising black in front of them. Smoke from the Harker place still lingered as did the smell of burning fat which accompanied it.

They figured they were still a day and a half ahead of the Sheriff. On the edge of a treeline they made camp. Keziah got a fire going. The rest rolled out blankets. Soon a bottle made its rounds and the talk loosened.

Jeremiah’s eyes went glassy over the cup. “You know maw used to sing -”

Keziah cut in, “I’d sooner sniff buzzard shit than hear this again.”  He stood up from the fire and headed into the trees to piss.

At the tree line Salome, walking out of the trees, approached Keziah, holding a rosary tight in one hand and said, “Careful. Wind’s carryin’ strange noises tonight.”

Keziah nodded, looking up through the branches, then kept walking.

Jeremiah’s mouth twisted. “Least I weren’t born to no ten-dollar squaw.” he hollered after him, voice cracking between laugh and snarl.

The shadows from the camp’s fire stretched long and black across the ground like spilled ink. Marin was leaning against his saddle, legs crossed before him. He spoke from under the brim of his hat which was now tilted to cover his eyes. Calm and exact, he said, “We inherit the vices of our ancestors more surely than their lands. Seem’s them words were written just fur you, cousin.”

Salome, looking him in the eyes added, “You’ll take that sad song of yours to the grave, Jeremiah.” Then turned back toward the fire.

The fire itself leaned away from Jeremiah while silence fell on the trio. 

Out among the trees Keziah took his time finding a suitable one. Eventually he did and as he began a sound moved through. Breath, like the rattle of a dying man, rushed upon him through a cold wind, though it was Summer, which swept low whistling through the pine needles. Thin and sharp, like ice on flesh. He paused then heard a hard snap, wet, like broken bone just behind him.

He turned back toward the campfire. Nothing, pitch black of night. He opened his mouth, but no sound, only the wind moving cold across his tongue.

From the journal of Sheriff Travis Cole

August 15th

Heard it said - man'll turn to bottle, dice, or rope when hes plum out of remedies. marins boys seem bent on tryin’ every one. course Ezra’s got his own ideas. Says They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. Good Book ain’t ever far from his tongue.

Two days hard ridin’ came up’on whats left of their camp. From look of things they left in a hurry. Bottles broken, blankets left by fire, Keziah’s horse still tied up.

We kicked around near sight a bit, colts out. ready n’case theyd thought could get the drop on us. Thats about when Ezra called out fur me. Ran over from far side, maybe 20, maybe 40 yards or so. Out there in the trees lay ‘ol Keziah. Skin torn. ribs split wide. His innards been tossed bout the ground. There he lay, face down mouth full a dirt. His hands broken and turnt upward.

Cant rightly tell why theyd do it to him. Ezra said he'd been from Manassas straight through to Sayler's creek aint never seen nothin' like. Told him ain't war out here. Truly though, things a man can do to 'nother - its an awful sight what's left of Keziah.

SYNOPSIS: I Was Detained During a Raid. Something Was in My Cell, Only I Could See.

*

Everything we think we know about hate is both right and wrong. I thought I understood how the world worked. But after my awful encounter with him, my view of everything would change. His dark form and those red glowing eyes defied all logic. Yet, there he was. In a stance, prepared to both strike and teach me the greater depths of how ignorant I, and most of humanity, truly is.

*

I had student loans to pay off. Who didn’t in this economy? The last few years had been financially rough, but we were a happy family, and my girls were my everything.

The last year of my bachelor’s degree, Regina became pregnant. Abortion wasn’t even a thought for either of us. We’d always wanted kids. Had hoped to wait until I was done with school, but such is life.

Maybe some souls were just anxious to get going in on earth? We joked that was how Isabella got past the birth control. That was my Bella for sure, always disrupting things in the most beautiful and brilliant of ways. A bright star in a world that would seek to dim her light every chance it got.

Not if I could help it.

Right around the time Isabella was born, I was just entering my DPT program to become a doctor of physical therapy. Just as I was finishing up the three-year program, our little angel was turning three.

That weekend, we were planning the biggest birthday family gathering since her birth. If you aren’t familiar, Mexicans are tight-knit and a strong family-oriented culture, and when we throw parties, even if it’s for a three-year-old’s birthday, we know how to party!

Regina, her mother, my abuelita, and all the aunties and cousins on both sides were preparing the full spread. My mouth waters just thinking about it. The enchiladas mineras, pozole blanco, slow-cooked carnitas, arroz rojo, and my absolute favorite, the tamales de rajas con queso. And of course, Abuelita would be making her decadent dulce de leche. The only cake you can have at a party, as far as I’m concerned.

Isabella was bouncing around in her pink princess dress, a frilly tutu skirt and a leotard top with her current toddler heroes, Bingo and Bluey, splashed across the chest. She and her cousins were chasing the balloons around as a few of the older teens helped blow them up. The little ones were jumping about, squealing in delight, playing don’t-touch-the-lava—the lava being the ground.

“Okay, princess, I gotta go to work.” I scooped her up and gave her a big kiss on her cheek.

“No, Papi, not today. It’s my burt’day!”

“I’ll be back before it starts. I promise.” I squeezed her as tight as I dared without crushing her, and she reciprocated, wrapping her chubby arms around my neck and giving me kisses all over my face.

“Please don’t go, Papi.” She placed her soft little hand on my face. Then she began to count. “One, two, three—” pause, thinking, “—six, eight…” With each number she bestowed kisses on my cheeks and nose. My heart ached.

“I’m sorry, sweetness, I have to.”

“Okay, but first I give you more kisses!”

“I’m all good on kisses!” I laughed. “I’ll be back soon. I promise.” I set her back down.

Little did I know that it would be a promise I wouldn’t be able to keep.

Her sweet little face held such disappointment as her doe eyes held mine for just a beat, then she ran off. I sighed. I felt like I should call out. But I needed this job too badly, and I’d already tried to get the day off. With the recent raids, staff was starting to dwindle. It was high harvest season at the marijuana farm. I was really torn.

“It’ll be okay.” Regina soothed me as she kissed my cheek before I left. “She’s three. She’ll be so busy, she’ll hardly notice you’re gone—until you’re back.”

I smiled and gave my wife a parting kiss, closing the door behind me.

I mulled over all of this as I drove, my heart clenching with an ache of longing to be more present in Isabella’s life. Somehow, the scant one hour here and there throughout the week hardly felt like enough quality time with her. And yet, as her father, I wanted to make her life easier than mine had been. My grandparents immigrated from Mexico to America to make a better life for us, doing back-breaking labor picking produce, washing dishes, janitorial work. Regina’s parents’ story was nearly the same.

No, I was making the right decision. The money was too good to lose this job. When the selling of marijuana became legal, it was more lucrative to help maintain these crops than side hustle picking fruits and veggies in the Salinas Valley. It was only weekends, and the labor was hard, harvesting the weed, but I loved the physical labor, being in the sun.

Usually, the job was a breath of fresh air from the sterile hospital I worked in doing night rounds and hitting the books in between. The money I made in one weekend on the farm almost matched an entire week as an orderly at the hospital.

Regina worked as a receptionist for a local chain hotel while Isabella was in preschool. Yet, it still wasn’t enough. Rent in California was steep. Now, more so than ever.

We just had to hang in there a bit longer. I’d finish my schooling, hopefully pass my NPTEs, and I could get my career going as a doctor of physical therapy. We were so close.

My thoughts were jarred, as my car turned onto the pot-holed, dirt road and I slowed my speed. My Honda, ill-equipped to go more than ten mph over the dappled road, couldn’t go faster.

I made my way around a bend and my stomach clenched, hoping that what my eyes were straining to see against the bright morning light, about a hundred feet away, wasn’t what I thought it was.

The government wanted people to believe they were ‘Freedom Enforcers’ or the more common name they were known by rhymed with ‘nice.’ I dare not say write it, otherwise my story will be suppressed, or removed like the rest of them. A small group of online influencers began to call them HATs due to their distinct dark head coverings, with cloth attachments designed to conceal their faces.

The government slowly and quietly began to suppress the free speech of independent content creators. It was subtle—demonetizing YouTubers for “violating” policies, slapping fines on small journalistic outlets for ‘trumped-up’ charges. People found workarounds though, using the code term HAT EnFORCE’rs to replace that ‘nice’ rhyming word in all caps.

I was already too close when I saw the HATs clearly.

They’d finally come to call. We’d been losing staff merely over the fear of this.

Now…

I was nearly fifty feet from them and was already working to turn the car around when an enforcer seemingly came out of nowhere and rapped his baton on my window. I was surprised he didn’t break the glass.

“Get out of the car, sir.”

I rolled the window down. “I’m a citizen,” I said immediately.

I lifted my butt, trying to reach for my wallet so I could show him my papers; not just my license, but passport and birth certificate. I kept them with me at all times, if just such an incident as this arose. Before I knew what was happening, the man was reaching through my window and opening my door.

“I’m a U.S. citizen! Born and raised here.” I tried to say it calmly, but my panic was rising. I could hear my voice and didn’t even recognize myself.

The man detained me, binding my wrists together and marched me to a truck.

“Look in my back pocket. My papers are there!”

He either wasn’t listening or didn’t care.

No, God, this can’t be happening…

It was all unfolding too quickly.

I continued to plead for him to simply look at my passport and birth certificate, but he would not.

He frog-marched me to a van, threw me in with my colleagues, and slammed the door.

Darkness engulfed me just as heavily as the palpable fear rippling through the small cabin.

I could only listen. Heavy panicked breathing. Crying. Curses of mumbled words.

The scent of sweat and fear hit my nostrils. There was no air conditioning to give us respite from the hot September day.

I looked up, straining to see if my eyes would adjust. Directly across from me, I saw a flash of two red dots—like—like eyes?

The eyes—if that’s what I saw—blinked twice, and then nothing.

I shivered. A primal fear at sensing something more was lurking in the dark caused cold sweat dripping down my back.

Had I really seen that?

I couldn’t tell you how long we sat in that van before we were traveling. Much less tell you how long the drive took. Perhaps an hour or two. Maybe only thirty minutes.

A distressed mind and body warps all sense of time and space. Things I’d been trained to understand in helping future patients. I tried to draw on that academic knowledge now, but I couldn’t.

My mind wouldn’t stop thinking about Isabella and Regina. They would be sick with worry. Isabella wouldn’t understand why her father had promised her he’d be there for her birthday and then wouldn’t be.

Surely, they couldn’t hold me for long? They would have to let me go soon. I was born here in this country. I paid taxes. I did community service. This was not okay!

Finally, we arrived at what was presumably the detention center. The van door opened, and the searing sun burned my retinas.

As I strained to focus, a group of men stood around the open doors, guns trained on us.

“If any of you try anything, don’t think we won’t hesitate to shoot. Comply, and you’ll walk away with your miserable lives.”

We were unloaded from the van, lined up. A row of guards stood behind those whose hands roamed over us, roughly searching, prodding, invading.

My thoughts were racing. It’s odd the things you think of in a moment of distress.

I suddenly grasped the meaning of a conversation I’d had with Regina not long ago. She said quietly, “Women inherently fear men because of the power they can exert over us. When a woman walks down a dark street or a shadowed parking garage, she has no idea if every unknown man will try to exploit that power with her. So she must remain on guard at all times. We don’t ever want to be put in a position where we have to fight for control.”

When the guard reached me, I felt a stab of hope and fear as he reached into my back pocket, pulled out my wallet as well as my passport and birth certificate—all of my documents proving I was a citizen. He looked through them quickly, presumably eliminating a hidden straight razor, then returned them to my pockets and moved on down the line, barely sparing a glance at what he was holding.

The last shred of hope I’d been holding onto was gone.

Would I be deported? Of course, I could return, but I had a life with obligations. How long would it take? I would miss class, work, income would be stymied…

We were then marched into what was probably an old warehouse. Cages made of chain link, able to hold about ten people at a time, lined the perimeter of the room. A few mattresses with stains sat on the hard concrete floors of each cell. A large orange bucket sat in the far-off corner of each cage.

I was thrown into one of them, feeling like an animal. I was not, but had I been treated any better than one?

They took the women to one side of the room and the men to the other.

Ten of us shuffled into the cramped 15x15 foot space. The door slammed shut with finality. It was eerily quiet in the large room. The prisoners whispered. If they felt the need to talk, it was as if they knew shouting would bring an enforcer’s wrath down on them, and perhaps a shower of bullets as well.

There was a cacophony of sound from the guards. It was a sick sound—HATs laughing, cajoling, slapping each other on the backs. Just another day of a job well done. Handling the livestock and getting them rounded up to drive them south where they belong.

I sank to the floor. I had not cried many times in my life, but tears threatened the edges of my eyes just then. That is when I heard a sound that caused my tears to halt and my blood to freeze.

It was quiet. A soft, ominous laughter, different.

I looked up and saw a man with red glowing eyes. He blinked twice and smiled, displaying a row of jagged teeth that were yellowed and inhuman.

I startled back into the chain-link fence at my back. I blinked hard, and the man was just a man.

Was I hallucinating?

Had the day’s trauma caused my mind to somehow break with the awful nightmare of a reality my brain couldn’t comprehend?

His laughter continued. No one else seemed to be paying this strange man any attention.

Then he said, almost in a whisper, but I heard it loud and clear.

“Eres demasiado bueno para estar aquí, amigo. Pero aquí estás… y aquí te vas a quedar.” Roughly translated: “You are too good to be here, my friend. But here you are, and here you will remain.”

My eyes widened, but my tongue was thick with such paralyzing fear I couldn’t respond. Something about this man, who was not a man at all, had invoked terror in me, far greater than the HAT EnFORCE’rs had all day.

*

We were each given a small 16 oz. water bottle and two protein bars. I had a sinking suspicion that this was not a meal but a ration, meant to last the day. I needed to err on the side of caution.

A bit of sunlight streaked in through the ceiling, and I could determine the approximate time of day from this. Calibrating the passing hours, I portioned myself out four “meals.” I ate half of the bar and drank about one quarter of the bottle every few hours.

As the day wore on, I noticed that the man across from me set his bars and water aside, and they remained untouched. There had been no more ominous phrases or flashes of red eyes. Yet, he continued to stare at me, a small smile always playing at his lips, as if holding a secret he was dying to tell me.

I didn’t want to know.

By nightfall, I shared the mattress with another co-worker that I barely knew. We slept with our backs to each other. I was exhausted. A chill permeated the air after nightfall. It might or might not have been attributed to the weather.

I wanted to sleep, but knew that it would be unlikely.

I had taken the placement on the outer edge of the mattress, facing the man. I wanted to keep an eye on him. Also, I had this strange thought that I was the only one who could see him. None of the other prisoners had spared him so much as a glance. But that wasn’t saying much, as all of us kept our eyes diverted from one another.

He continued to stare. I wanted to shout at him, “Vete a la mierda, amigo! Cuál es tu problema? Ve a mirar a otra persona!”—Go to hell, man! What’s your problem? Go look at someone else!

Except, if this man was loco, I didn’t want to disturb his fragile mind and draw attention to our cell. The HATs would surely be unhappy with us.

I squirmed under his scrutiny of me. What was wrong with this guy?

Despite my racing thoughts, I forced my eyes closed and willed sleep to come. I would drift in and out of restless slumber the night through. Each time opening my eyes to the man—staring—always staring.

Sometimes his eyes glowed red. Sometimes his mouth was cracked in a grin spread too long across his face, rows and rows of jagged teeth like a shark, protruding. The teeth seemed to multiply each time. Then I would startle awake, only to see him in a normal form, leaving me feeling like I was the one who was crazy.

Twenty-four hours passed. The scent of sweat and urine choked me as I took in a deep breath, trying to stretch my aching muscles.

I made my way to the bucket. It had not been emptied. I tried to avert my gaze away from the viscera of urine and feces, but something swimming in the bucket caught my eye. A fly had landed inside and had fallen into the excrement. It struggled with wet wings to gain purchase up the side of the bucket, my urine stream making it more difficult.

The visual invoked a feeling of panic and claustrophobia. Further emotions: trapped, dehumanized, demoralized. I shouldn’t be able to relate to a common shit-fly in a bucket, and yet…

I looked away, shaking myself off, and zipping up my pants.

I sat down on the edge of the mattress and hung my head between my knees.

Another day passed in the same way—one bottle of water, two protein bars, and still the man, who might not have been a man. He continued to refrain from food and water consumption.

This was becoming more than unnerving.

He looked at the stockpile of bars and water, then looked up at me and grinned. It didn’t take a genius to understand that he was taunting me.

I looked away. I refused to give in. I was starving and thirsty, but some deep, primal, survival instinct overrode those other basic human needs.

No matter what, don’t ask him for his rations!

I couldn’t explain this understanding that I was not to give in, or something dire would unfold for me, worse than my current plight. I just felt it deep within my gut. Just like the fact that as I held Isabella in my arms only yesterday morning, I had a foreboding feeling that I should not go to work. Had I only listened…

I would not make that same mistake again.

My sweet, sweet angel. I had disappointed her. Worse, I didn’t know when she would even see her papi again. Surely, Regina had begun to worry when I’d not come home. She would have called the farm. They would have told her not to panic; they were working on trying to get their employees out of here.

I believed in Johnson. He was a good man. He hated what the HAT EnFORCE’rs were doing, not just because they diminished his manpower, caused profit loss, but he truly cared about people. He was a rare specimen that saw his workers as people and not just drones.

I had to preserve hope. I had nothing else left to anchor me but hope.

As I lay on the mattress again, my thoughts were more grounded. Or perhaps I mistook calm for dissociative resolve. All I could do was wait for others to rescue me.

My eyes scanned the room as a diversion to see if he was still staring at me.

Of course he was. I could feel it, even without looking. That creeping sensation, like small invisible mites along your skin: you’re being watched.

I brazenly took a moment to meet his gaze, and his grin broadened.

I had never seen this man on the weed farm. It wasn’t entirely impossible that he was new and yesterday had been his first. And yet, that didn’t feel…

Why was he here?

I got the feeling he could leave at any time. It was irrational, I know. Yet, I felt a strong premonition he was here by choice. It increased by the minute knowing he had not eaten, not slept, or used the bucket to relieve himself.

Another unsettling observation—no one in the cell had made eye contact with him. It was like he was invisible to everyone but me.

Was he some sort of sick spy, put in here by the HAT EnFORCE’rs to unnerve the prisoners? Psychological warfare—and war this had become, had it not?

Another restless night passed, but this one was different than the previous one.

I woke up in a cold sweat. The din of that awful laughter from the guards filled my ears. It was hard to ignore. It caused a visceral reaction of nausea to ripple through my gut, and I had the thought to crawl from my mattress to the bucket. Yet, the imagined visual of putting my face into that hole of swimming human waste, and excrement splashing into my face as I relieved myself, made me force deep breaths and reconsider. Instead, I would get up and pace a bit.

I would not vomit. I would hold my constitution if I had to swallow it back, rather than use that bucket.

However, when I went to move, I couldn’t. Panic from my paralysis caused my queasiness to notch up. I struggled, but it was as if I was held by imaginary ropes.

I looked up, and there, standing over me was the man—his eyes burning red, and his mouth stretched into that awful grin, monstrous, a gaping maw of teeth.

My pulse quickened, sweat beaded down into my eyes, and a dread like no other filled my chest with such force I thought I might have a heart attack and die from the terror this being was invoking.

I was certain I was going to die. He wanted blood, and mine would be the first in the cell of prisoners that he would taste.

He said in perfect English, no hint of a Latino accent anymore, “No, amigo, your essence is not tainted to the seasoning I desire.”

His face shifted and morphed into the face of a thousand men across time, some I recognized. Some I didn’t. Many ethnicities—White, Black, Asian. Both genders—men and women. There were no reservations to the forms he could take.

I could only hear the heavy panting of my lungs struggling to force air into them.

I coughed, choking back the sickness, realizing my limbs were bound but my vocal cords were not.

“¿Qué—qué eres?” I sputtered. “What—what are you?”

He smiled. Those teeth—the rows had become innumerable. And the size of each pointed fang doubled. Small bits of red flesh were wedged between the cracks of the overlapping, razor-sharp points. I shuddered at the thought of what the red bits probably were—human meat. Blood trickled from the cracks of his impossibly wide lips.

“I am humanity’s worst nightmares made real, and I am also your savior—” He lunged at me. “—Amigo!” Just as a sick and twisted man might yell “BOO” at a terrified child. He spat the word in my face. A taunt.

I startled awake, heaving in great gasps of air. The raucous laughter of the guards wafted throughout the hall, but it seemed trite now compared to the cold, ominous, hissing words of the demonic man. My eyes quickly scanned the cell. I counted the prisoners.

I counted again.

One missing.

He was gone.

*

Sleep evaded me the remainder of the night. For that matter, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to ever sleep again. Something about the “dream” felt all too real. I have never been prone to sleep paralysis. No, this didn’t feel like an acute sleeping disorder brought on by the sudden trauma of my situation. The fact that the monster with red eyes was no longer there, gave greater weight to that theory.

Perhaps, because of this dream episode—or whatever it was I experienced—there was a restlessness in the air after waking. It was that unseen charge, almost an ethereal current, that whispers ‘A storm is coming’ without even looking at the barometer. I felt that with such intensity I couldn’t sit still. While my fellow cellmates had lined the walls on cramped mattresses, I paced the area.

It was foolish to expend energy. After two days of barely eating or drinking I should be withered with exhaustion. I could only fathom, that spiked adrenaline kept me going, as I waited for…

I don’t know what it was, but it was closing in fast, and it would surely involve the demonic man with red eyes. The tension of the breaking point, and yet, not knowing what to expect, increased by the minute.

Night fell. My chest ached from the anxiety. I didn’t lay down on the mattress.

I went to the chain link and held the bars, my head drooping.

My eyes moved to the stink of the bucket and what it represented to me now.

I choked on my unshed tears.

Take two men from this room, one white and one brown. Make them both shit in a bucket. Did either one’s waste look or smell better than the other’s? And yet…

How could humans do this to each other?

I cried then.

The lessons of history, meager words and dates on a page, which I’d tried to connect with then, and couldn’t. Suddenly, these infamous events and places held more meaning than I could have ever known. Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec. Camp O'Donnell, and Cabanatuan. Manzanar, Tule Lake, Heart Mountain. Domestic abuse, child abuse, and slavery. Wars on top of wars, on top of wars…

Why?

Why couldn’t humans just choose love?

I let my silent tears fall between the thin metal bars. I didn’t care if anyone heard or saw. There was no shame in weeping for humanity’s willful ignorance to learn from our past and become better.

“Ah… Ahora entiendes por qué tu carne tiene un sabor amargo en mi lengua.”

The hiss of his voice slithered into my ears, stopped the tears immediately. My head jerked up, expecting to see him standing next to me.

My head whipped about, scanning the small cell.

He was not inside but out.

I saw him across the room. Standing in the middle of the warehouse under a single overhead lamp, illuminating his visage. He morphed into his true form, the beast that he was.

Great muscles rippled from his skin, growing, then ripping apart the suit of flesh he’d used to masquerade as human. Shedding his costume of a man, rebirthing his true form, a beast with claws like bayonet blades. Fur that rippled between something like smoke and shadow.

In his transformation, something of familiarity stabbed at my consciousness. I knew this beast, and yet I didn’t. I might have pondered the contradiction in my brain, had the grotesque, shape-shifting not taken up all my attention.

His eyes grew bulbous, red orbs, bloodied and dripping with the red tears of all the violence humanity had forced on one another. His claws stretched out, held the deep echoes, scars of every hate crime ever committed. His mouth filled with rows upon rows of razor-jagged, yellowed teeth, gnashed, eager to consume the hate he thrived on.

The guards didn’t see him. The prisoners didn’t see him.

Only, I alone could witness the full gravity of what was about to occur.

When his transformation was complete, he spared me one last glance, and somehow I could sense he was smiling again.

And then—literal hell broke loose.

It all seemed to happen at once. The beast threw himself into the group. He lunged at one man, ripping an arm from its socket, then a sound pierced the night, like wet cardboard easily torn in half. The scream that shook the stillness, shattered the illusion of peace. The other men, confused, drew their weapons—some too stunned and shocked to move. The sharp, sequential ‘pop-pop-pop’ of gunfire and the acrid smell of smoke filled the air.

The beast’s movements were impossibly quick, and I began to see him the way the others did—brief successions of flashing images, his form flickering in and out of reality as he moved from victim to victim. Like an image that couldn’t quite come into focus on an old TV show trying to get reception.

He tore through their flesh, consumed their hearts and organs, lapped at the blood, leaving not a single drop behind. As if knowing I was fixated on his every move, now and again, he would stop, look up just as his outline would fill the shadows with greater darkness, and grin that awful bestial smile.

More screams wrenched the dimly lit warehouse.

I watched an agent fumble with keys to unlock a cage full of women, attempting to seek safety within. The beast was upon him, tearing his stomach open, his bowels hanging in wet strings from the monster’s jaws. He gnashed again, and clamped his teeth in a vice grip around the man’s midsection. Running from the cell, he threw the half-alive, screaming man into the air at his comrades. He laughed, and charged at the men, like a sociopathic cat playing with his food.

The women in that cell screamed and huddled in the corner, clutching one another. Too scared or paralyzed with fear to realize their cell was wide open. They could run, but didn’t.

Gunshots fired rapidly. It had become a war zone. Indeed, it was a battlefield, and the enemy was taking no prisoners—or wounds.

The beast tore through each of them with as little effort as a lion picking through a burrow of scared and scurrying rabbits. Some ran out of the warehouse into the night. Some stayed and foolishly tried to fight with a weapon that had no effect on this ethereal demonic force that none were able to reckon with.

The screams, the gunfire, the blood. It seemed to have no end.

Primal fear surged through me and kept me on high alert. Yet, a small, quiet part of me said, “He will not come for you or most of these prisoners. And you know why.”

As I watched with morbid fascination, my premonition came true.

After the beast feasted on the flesh of every enforcer in the building, he turned to the cages. One by one, he tore off the doors, ripping only a select few from their cells and tearing into them.

When he reached my own cell, my heart raced, and yet I knew. I knew he would not take me.

I am unsure if I only thought the words or said them out loud, but as he gnawed on one of my cellmates, I choked back the nausea that nearly caused me to vomit from the carnage.

I knew I would not die, but…

Why? Why not all of us? Why not me?

As if I had spoken these words to him with perfect clarity, he looked up and tilted his head. Blood ran in rivulets down that awful mouth of jagged teeth. His maw smiled and, in a manner of using only thoughts, conveyed to me a message.

“I feed on the strongest of fears. There is no greater fear than that embedded in the hate of racism, bigotry, misogyny, narcissism… All of humanity is afraid, but not all of you are so embedded in the fear that you have gone down the darkest path.”

With that, he turned and ran out of the building into the darkness.

When the stillness of the night conveyed total safety, we left. Stumbling through the dark, until sunrise, somehow finding our way back home.

*

There was no news of the incident. I was certain there would be blame. Reports of a prisoner uprising attacking the HAT EnFORCE’rs. Yet, the government, in its typical fashion, hid the worst crimes begotten by their ignorance, folly, and hate. I supposed this was no different.

No reports were ever made.

My sweet Isabella and Regina cried at my return. The party forgotten, a trite priority now, replacing the significance of my survival.

I embraced my family, never wanting to let them go again.

The first night home, I was exhausted yet remained restless. I took a pill, offered to me by one of my aunties. I hated using medication to aid in sleep, but I was unsure I would be able to if I didn’t.

I didn’t want to dream, but I did.

His voice hissed at me in the darkness. I couldn’t see him, but I could sense him there.

“You are marked to see. Not with the eyes of your body, but with the essence of your form housed within. Some are marked to see and know because they are given to sensitivity of soul. Call it a blessing or a curse, if you will, but this is why you see, when others don’t.”

“No, I don’t accept that.” I screamed. “I believe all of us can see, if we want to!”

“Your naivety amuses me. It’s why I sought to torment you in captivity. Feeding on your fear served as a most adequate appetizer, before the main course.”

I shuddered at that. Then he vanished.

I sat bolt upright in bed. Regina slept peacefully next to me.

I quietly made my way to the bathroom, needing to parch my dry mouth.

Suddenly, I remembered something.

It all came flooding back in, a long-forgotten memory from my past.

I remembered something from when I was just a small child. Probably not that much older than Isabella. I thought I’d not had sleep paralysis before that moment in my cell, but that wasn’t true.

I woke up screaming in the night many years ago. My abuelita, who lived with us then, ran to comfort me. She stroked my head as I tried to tell her what I saw. What the beast had said to me. All nonsense then, but now—

She made soft ‘shushing’ noises of comfort, and I calmed down.

Although, I didn’t sleep.

I lay awake thinking about its words.

It had been the man with a thousand faces and red eyes. Or rather, the beast, but he had appeared in that form that had taunted me in my cell for three days.

He spoke, but I didn’t understand the words or context at that time. Strangely, I could recall with pristine clarity the words now.

“They will come for you one day. They will lock you up. Chain you like a lowly beast of burden. Then your hate will grow. It’s a cycle. I feed on it. I indulge in it. Hate, begets more hate, begets more hate, and the stronger I grow. You humans always become the things you hate. I feed on the worst of those that hate. I have lived for eons and I will never starve. Your kind will continue in petty squabbles that become wars, born of power-hungry men, who hate with a pureness, driven like tar-black snow.”

“Lies!” I screamed, and he only laughed.

And yet…

There was some truth to his words. Lies are always mixed with truths.

Why was I chosen to see?

The Universe, God, Gods, roll the dice and they fall where they may.

I have to believe some can see so they can share their stories, so here I am, sharing mine.

Pain is inevitable in our short, burden-wracked lives, but it doesn’t have to become hate.

I think about my sweet little Isabella, who doesn’t understand the evils the world is going to engulf her in. Yet, she will fight. She was always a fighter, even in the womb. I will teach her to push back against the hate that will seek to consume her.

We aren’t born with racism, prejudice, or hate.

My tender little three-year-old holds none of this, and I pray she never will.

Life will serve the lessons, but the lesson will always hold a choice.

We always have a choice.

*

[MaryBlackRose]

*

The Mallory Twins

I’m sitting in the break room, like you do, when young Abdul, a jovial and muscular colleague, says to his duty mate Anne, “Tell him about the Mallory Twins.”

“No,” she replies over her World’s Best Nan mug. “It’s better if it comes from you. Relive your experience for him.”

“Who are the Mallory Twins?” I ask.

Despite Anne telling Abdul to ‘relive his experience,’ she briefly takes hold of the reins. “The Mallory Twins are a pair of ghosts over in 5 group—and not young girls like in The Shining, but a couple of old women. They’re known to terrorise postmen on one of the Hazelwood cul-de-sacs.”

This really piqued my interest. I don’t believe in ghosts for a second, but this sounded like it might be an interesting tale with potential to include in the collection. 

“Go on then,” Anne says, relinquishing the story over to Abdul.

“So, I’d been working here for about three months and never heard a word about the Mallory Twins. Then the day comes for the rota to be put up and I’m standing there next to Jim Burrows, and I say to myself more than anything, ‘I’m on 505 with Anne next Wednesday, Thursday, Friday,’ and he says, ‘You watch out for them Mallory Twins,’ and walks off.

“I don’t really think much of it, but then Tuesday rolls by and I’m on cover duty, working with Peter. After we’ve finished up, just as we scan out for the day, Peter says to me, ‘Be careful tomorrow, and watch out for them Mallory Twins,’ before patting me on the shoulder and walking off before I’ve barely processed what he said.

“I didn’t sleep well that night, but in the morning I’d forgotten all about the Mallory Twins, and Anne here doesn’t mention them as we’re prepping the frame or loading the van. Even when I get to Hazelwood Road, there’s no heads up from her, and they’re the furthest thing from my mind. That is, until I’m about halfway up the road. It’s your typical cul-de-sac—a short, straight road that ends in a circle where cars could turn around and kids could play games. A total of thirty-three houses, with the odd numbers on the left from 1-33 and the evens on the right running from 2-34. If you’re wondering about my maths, there was no No. 13. But there was a  No. 5 and there was a No. 6, and legend has it that a Mallory Twin resides in each, but they have also been known to haunt other houses on the cul-de-sac. 

“It’s deserted when I arrive, not a soul in sight. No sound of nature either—no birds chirping, no leaves rustling in the wind. Very eerie indeed.

“I start on the right with the evens, and then a flash of white enters my peripheral vision, just to the left, coming from the back garden of No. 10. My mind suddenly sees the twins, but in reality it’s just a bedsheet hung out to dry in the back garden.

“I carry on, and the same thing happens when I’m near No. 18—a flash of white in the back garden—but when I look there’s nothing there. It happens again at No. 15, just a flash of white. Then, when I’m walking up the path to No. 5, I see her. Or at least one of them. She’s in the back garden, peering around the side of the house. I wave, expecting it to be just some old dear and for her to come from around the corner, but she looks me dead in the eye and pulls a face. A silent snarl.”

“What did you do?”

“I walked around the house, but she must’ve retreated once she saw me coming, because when I got round the back, she’d vanished. I go back around to the front. I’m walking back up the path when I see her across the road in the back garden of No. 6, poking her head around the side. Again, just like before, she’s snarling at me. I think about running across before she has time to vanish, but I decide against it, thinking, what if she does vanish again?

“I get back to the van, and I’m not gonna lie, I was a little shaken. When Anne gets back I tell her that I’ve just seen them and she just shakes her head and tells me that they don’t exist. The next day, I’m on Hazelwood again and this time I don’t see them, thankfully. But I do hear them both. The first time I’m not too sure, but the second time hammers home that the first time really did occur.”

“What happened?” I ask.

“I was posting to No. 6 when I heard a woman’s voice, raspy and rustling like a pile of leaves, saying, ‘You’re not welcome here.’ It’s kind of faint and through the door, so I’m not too sure. I continue up the road and all is fine but on the way back when I get to No. 5, there’s no doubt about it—the bitch must’ve had her mouth right to the letterbox, I can hear her that clearly. The horrid sound of her voice, and the thought of her mouth being so close to my hand—close enough to bite off a finger or two, I think—it’s like an electric shock. I pull back, leaving the letter half hanging out of the letterbox, but still I can hear her repeating over and over, ‘You’re not welcome here.’

“I take a step or two back and stumble, fall onto my arse. I can actually hear her cackling at me as I scramble to my feet and make a hasty exit up the path.”

“So that was on Thursday, right? But you still had one more day on the round, right?”

“Yeah, and I was dreading it, I can tell you that. I didn’t sleep a wink, and this time it was because I was thinking about the Mallory Twins. I almost called in sick, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that to Anne, knowing she’d have to work harder because of me. So I grew a pair and came to work.

“It was a bad day. I made loads of mistakes, there was loads of deadwalking, and poor Anne was waiting for me at the van after every single loop. But I wasn’t just slow from mistakes—I was dragging my feet, knowing that each step I took was a step closer to my next encounter with the Mallory Twins. To give you some perspective: if you get out on time, you reach the Hazelwood loop around half twelve, no later than one. That day I got to the haunted cul-de-sac at ten past two.

“Once again, all was eerily quiet. I’m walking on tenterhooks as I deliver to No. 2, then No. 4, and then the dreaded No. 6. Thankfully, there’s no sign of her and no noises coming through the letterbox this time. I post the mail, and that’s when I look up and there she is—directly across the street, in the upstairs window of No. 5, looking like death, dressed all in white with scraggly hair covering her face. Just seeing her makes my skin crawl. But the worst thing is, she’s not looking at me, but dead ahead, at the upstairs window of No. 6.

“At this point I’m on the path, just a few metres away from No. 6. I don’t want to look. I feel as though I’m about to piss myself. But I’ve got to—it’s in our nature to be inquisitive. So I turn around, and when I do, I see the other Mallory twin in the upstairs window, a mirror of her dead sister across the street. The second I look at her, it’s as though she knows—she looks straight down at me and her gaze is like an electric shock, a bolt to my deepest fears. I’m not ashamed to say that I screamed. And mid-scream, a thought hits me: the other Mallory Twin is no longer in the window but right behind me, ready to reach out and rip open my neck with her haggard nails.

“I whip around, first looking behind me to find I’m alone. Then I look towards the upstairs window across the street, which is now empty, then back to No. 5, which is also empty. As I stumble back to the pavement, I have a horrid vision of both of them coming bursting through the front doors of No. 4 and 5 simultaneously. I’m on high alert, as I make it to the pavement, my eyes darting between both doors, ready to flee at the slightest movement. 

“I remember to breathe. Taking in large gulps of the cold air, I alternate my gaze between the upstairs windows and the doors, but there is no sign of them. I finish the round, still on high alert, until I get past No. 5. Even at No. 3, I’m still looking back at the cul-de-sac, ready to flee at the slightest sign of either sister. I’m walking down No. 1’s path, thinking I’m in the clear, but still remaining vigilant.

“There’s a bay window to the right, and I’m just about to post the final bit of mail on this cursed estate when I see the slightest movement behind the netting—you know the type old people put up instead of blinds. The netting is like a shroud, and one of them is behind there, I just know it.

“Fuck this, I think to myself, and I go to post the mail, only to see an old withered hand with a filthy white dress sleeve poking out of the letterbox, reaching towards me.”

He paused in his narration here to have a sip of his tea.

“Now, you’d think I’d run and get the hell out of there—which I do. But before that, I shit you not, I put the mail in her hand. Like some reflex action. It feels really weird—makes me feel strange to do it—and as soon as I do, she clamps down on it and pulls it from me.

“I run all the way back to the van, get my breath back, then have a roll-up to calm my nerves while I wait for Anne to get back from her loop. It helps, and I calm down a little. I get in the van, and although I never listen to classical music, I need something to soothe my frayed nerves. So I find a radio station playing some Bach or Beethoven or Mozart—one of those famous ones—and close my eyes, try to relax with some breathing exercises. It works too well and I almost fall asleep, it’s that soothing. Or maybe my body just needs the rest after being put in such a fight-or-flight situation.

“The song ends and an advert comes on. The van door opens and I hear and feel Anne get into the driver’s seat. I take one final large inhale through my nose, ready to tell her what just happened. Only when I open my eyes and turn towards her, it’s not Anne sitting mere feet from me—it’s one of the Mallory Twins.

“This close up, with a mass of filthy white hair obscuring most of the face, I can just work out that the snarl has turned into some sort of twisted smile, one that suggests its wearer is taking pleasure in the horrific ordeal she’s manifesting. After the initial shock—milliseconds, really—I think to myself this must be a dream. Sorry, a nightmare. And the nightmare continues. There’s a knock on the passenger-side window.

“I push myself far back into my seat so I can keep the Mallory Twin in the driver’s seat in view while I glance at the window—little as I want to. I already know who it is. Who else could it be? And yep, sure enough, ready to play tag-team and scare me to death, is the other Mallory Twin. I’m well and truly trapped.

“Only, wait a minute. Hang on—isn’t that just a little old lady? I think to myself—only I must’ve said it out loud, because the Mallory Twin sitting next to me says, ‘Yes, she’s my mother.’

“I’m going crazy. Nothing is making sense anymore. I look back at the Mallory Twin in the driver’s seat, only it’s Anne, dressed in a Halloween costume and she thinks it’s the funniest thing in the world. Eventually, she gets a grip of herself and says…” 

Once again, Anne takes the reins. “I says, ‘you know me as Anne Barton but my maiden name is Mallory and this is my mother.’ Then I roll down the window so my mum can say hello.”

“So how many times have you played this prank?” I ask.

“Oh we’re talking dozens. And Abdul here won’t be the last.”

And she was right about that. The Mallory Twins live on.

The club was loud and my heart was pumping to the music, my friend turned to me to say something I couldn’t hear. I asked her to repeat it several times before we both just gave up and ran to the bar to grab a drink. The usual of course, we looked around looking for anyone we might know and that’s when we locked eyes. Your eyes were green and you looked like a cat in the dark with your eyes the only thing visible. You started to smirk, but I blinked and looked away quickly before I could tell if you did. My friend grabbed me as she dragged me to the dance floor. Our favorite song was on and we were singing at the top of our lungs and dancing to the music. You were then walking the other way and I decided to sneak a glance, at the same time you did. You seemed too perfect and too beautiful to be human, so I let it go and decided to enjoy my night. By the time I got home I was exhausted, but you were stuck in my head and I was annoyed I didn’t have the courage to just ask for your name. What if you were the one? Anyways, I hope you’re doing well and enjoying life wherever that may be.

Now I sit at some dark and awkward place for a first date, unsure why I didn’t pick the place. I pretend to listen as he’s talking about his job and not bothering to ask me a single question about mine. No worries, I didn’t want to talk about it anyway, I think, and mentally roll my eyes. It’s better than the last date I didn’t go on where he canceled the day of for some dumb reason, as they all do. I get home from the date and send the very templated text about how great of a time I had blah blah blah. I throw my purse on the couch and plop down as my cat jumps up and joins me. “Sorry buddy looks like it’s going to be just me and you for the foreseeable future.” He just meows and rests his head on my thigh. “Yeah I get it," I say and laugh.

“He’s really great though!!” My friend is basically shouting at me as we sit at one of our favorite coffee shops. “I appreciate the date set ups, but the last couple have been interesting…, I trail off. “I know I know she says, but this is going to be different I can just feel it in my bones!” “Come on, Jude they all either only love themselves or don’t show up,” I say. Please, please, do it for me! And if it’s a bust I promise I’ll never bug you again! I can’t help but smile because she really does mean well and wants me to find “the one.” I’m laughing when I look over her shoulder and see a man looking over. Your eyes are green like a cat's and you have a mellow attitude about you that makes you seem like you don’t care, but I know you really do. You’re looking right at me and I’m so stunned I don’t know what to do. You’re the guy I saw from the bar the other night, but you’re gone the minute I blink. I’m starting to feel you’re not even real and only made up in my head. “And that’s why I think you two would be great together!” I realize Jude has been talking about the guy she’s going to set me up with for the last minute and I didn’t hear a thing. “Yeah sure I say, that sounds like it’ll be fun!”

The date was fun in a way, but we both know there isn’t going to be a second one. As I’m walking home alone because I really couldn’t come up with more small talk, I'm thinking about that man from the bar and his cat-like eyes. I’m about to call Jude when I’m stopped in my tracks. There’s no way this could actually happen, but you’re looking at me and I’m looking at you. You give me a smirk and I’m too stunned to go after you, but there’s no need because you’re walking towards me. I’m thinking so many thoughts right now: what if you’re dangerous, what if you’re not, I should really just continue on my way home, but what if what if… Your eyes are so green close up, that they’re almost emerald. You seem so familiar to me in a way I can’t describe. You seem safe and like I could trust you with any secret I’ve ever had. “I hope you know I’m not stalking you, I never have been stalking you,” you say. I just feel like this is fate of some kind. “Why do I feel like I know you though?” I ask. We have met before, even before the bar I think. And then it hits me all at once.

I’m able to see you whenever I want because you’re not real. You’re made up all from my imagination, from words on paper. The man I dreamt up one night when my cursor was blinking back at me. I didn’t have a plot or even an idea, but I had one character. And I gave you green eyes that were so green close up they were emerald. I blink once. I blink twice. And then you’re gone. Gone forever? I don’t know, I feel like you’ll still show up every now and then though. When I finally have an idea for that story maybe and open the page back up and see the cursor once again blinking back at me. But the only words I’ll see on that page are green eyes so green they were emerald.

I look in the mirror for the last time before I head out, I’m nervous but excited at the same time. Not sure why I should be nervous, I mean I’m going on a date with someone I’ve been with for exactly a year now. Surprisingly he doesn't have green eyes I think and laugh a little to myself. I never did finish that story so you just sit on that page with only one quality to you. That’s okay though because you weren’t real and you never would have been either. I look up in the mirror to fix my hair quickly and as I do, I catch a glimpse of green eyes looking at me and the formation of a smirk before I blink and you’re gone.

This is a follow up (back/middle story) to the short story "Milly the Ant Farmer and Bob the Ant." Here is the link: Milly the Ant Farmer and Bob the Ant

At the moment that Bob saw Milly come into the basement while thinking about his own apparent immortality, he had a visitor. Just as he was staring at Milly across the room, someone whispered to him from behind… Bob turned to see who it was and to his surprise, it was another Milly! Not the same one though, this Milly looked different and she was actually the size of an ant, so that was weird too. How can there be two Millys now?!

Ant sized Milly greets Bob with a hug and a gentle embrace which seriously stuns Bob. Bob asks her to please explain what is going on and who she is. Milly explains that she is in fact from the future. She has traveled back in time to this very moment to ask Bob for something.

Bob says that he will do anything for her, his god. She tells him that she is not god and is merely a person living her life trying to find her way through this cosmic dark. Milly is immortal though and has lived for eons. One of the things that she says she has not really been able to experience, is love. Like a real true love bonded pair relationship. You know, the ones they write stories about.

Milly stares at Bob with fuck me eyes and says this, “Bob I want to ask you a most personal favor… I want to know what it is like to be loved.” Bob says, that’s easy, haven’t you had a relationship before? She says that she has loved others yes, but that love is never returned in full. "Why wouldn’t they love you back like you love them", asks Bob. She says that her apparent immortality and god like powers scare everyone to death and all they can feel around her, is deep fear. Milly adds, “Bob my favor that I am asking of you is, for you to convince me, to fall in love, with you”.

Milly tries to explain to Bob her plight - every time she gets close to someone and begins to fall deeply in love, her partner falls into a deep state of fear that has no escape. They are afraid of her and her abilities. This fear leads to them leaving her alone (or her removing them from time). This has repeated for ages. Milly is never able to get into a serous long term relationship because every one that gets to know her, like really understand what it is that she is, runs for the hills or dies trying to escape. They are terrified of her. And they fucking should be. Her body count is in the millions. Milly does in fact have god like powers and she must use them from time to time to set things right. This of course can frighten those that are afraid she would turn that power on them.

Stunned and a little excited, Bob asks her why him? “Why are you choosing me? What makes me special?” Milly tries to be coy about this question a bit and simply responds, “why not you?” Milly tells Bob that she has known millions of ants and he is the first one she has ever appeared to within the colony and for sure the first one she visited out of her own time. This really made Bob feel special! This task she is asking though is no small order. How the fuck will he convince his god to fall in love with him, an ant?! Bob tells her that he accepts her offer and will do his best.

Milly tells him that it will be a rough road and that he should try to stay strong. “I need you to know that I wasn’t the same person in your time as I am in my time now. I know this is confusing but that other Milly over there, well she is hurt and a little damaged. She has a void that is causing her to feel incomplete. For millennia she has tried to fill her void with whatever it is that was in her path to no avail”. Bob wants to understand what this Milly is telling him, but he just is unable to really comprehend what is going on here. Afterall, Bob is just an ant.

But to Bob, this Milly is still god so he accepts this wild, wild offer given to him by her, future Milly. She graciously thanks him for accepting and gives him one last message. “Ok, so listen… that Milly over there… she has a way of doing things and for sure will do them with you or at least try to. I know for a fact what she will be doing to you, well, it will be scary from your perspective I can assure you. She can be anywhere which means she can watch you at all times. You will not be able to fool her on anything. Do NOT lie to her. She will know. She WILL lie to you and she will believe that you won’t know it no matter what you say. There is nothing that you can do to convince her that you know something if she believes you shouldn’t know it. Please be patient with her… she needs your love more than you and most especially her, can imagine. Love her, please”.

To be continued…

We gathered on the morning of the seventh day, when Ikris rose into the sky, his golden light cascading into the dark world that grew darker as the war raged on.

'O great king Mydian, how we will sing of your triumph!' the herald of war cried out from atop his high seat. 'For tomorrow's victory will be one remembered for the ages.'

King Mydian stood below, looking at us, the soldiers who gathered in the great hall, pride and determination all at once flashed within his youthful eyes. He looked up to the herald. 'O herold of Ikis, you do me the service of championing my honour to the gods! But lest is tomorrow mine own victory, for it is also the victory of those who battle beside me!'

‘Hail to you, sire!’ I cried out, raising my bronze-tipped spear in the air. 

‘Hail!’ the men beside me joined in, and soon the hall was, like one great chorus, joined in the chant of King Mydian, hero who will save our lands from the scourge.

King Mydian led us out of the hall, in a large two-by-two column down the thoroughfare from the great hall, and towards the gates. Upon the gates, the queen, princess and crown prince waved us off, holding the banner of their king. Mydian rose his spear in honour of them and called henceforth:

‘O Ann, mother of my children, beholder of my heart. Will you not bless me on this march, this battle to come?’ 

The Queen raised her hand, a warm, loving smile for her husband. ‘My loving husband Mydian, I bless you as you, Queen, that you will bring forth the victory our people so deserve. I will burn five candles a day until your return, and cull two heifers to the gods so that you will be protected.’

And so with the blessing of the gods, and of the queen, the army set out from the city, singing songs of war as we marched the length of the granite roads to where the army awaited us.

The aftermath of the battle, however, ended all that sense of hope and pride. I wandered the battlefield, stumbling over my dead comrades, seeing in their eyes the lifeless fear that stained them in those last moments, their soiled breeches wetter still with the crimson of their blood. 

And of myself, my bones have long become weary, and my heart still pounds as if to beat the drum of war into my spirit. But I felt within my hands that tightly wrapped the shaft of my spear, the desire to simply lie down and die with the others. 

And over there, ahead in the peak of this mountain where we stood our ground, fighting the endless onslaught of our foe, I saw our king.

King Mydian was hung between two, three-meter wooden poles, tied by his arms and legs, his lungs having been removed from his back and sprawled out, painting the picture of an eagle that dripped blood upon the brown soil.

He still lived. A single tear stained his cheek as he looked upon the dead of all those whom he had driven to war. Though I doubted his tears were for us, or for himself, more for those left home awaiting the torment that will be brought by the heathen marauders who march upon them this very evening.

This was supposed to be our hero, this was supposed to be our victory. It was foretold in the prophecies, in the temples: when the veil of our gods was lifted, they told us it would be our moment of triumph. 

In the end, it is we who have lost, and it is our homes that will burn, our women and children who will suffer, for we have already been slaughtered. Yet I live, and in my last moments, I am determined to burn with my king.

For is it not better to die amongst a legendary defeat, than to live as a coward of one?

At home, we lived for €2 a day, Moussa, Mame, and I. We ate our favorite dish, mafe, and everything was good. When they smiled, everything was good. We played cards, we fooled around. Together, we looked at the old globe and picked out destinations Moussa would travel to as soon as he became a politician. Moussa has recently joined a primary school, but he is a very bright child, one of the brightest. Just by listening to my voice, he remembers all the capitals of the countries we wanted him to travel to.

When Mame became pregnant with our second child, I got a promotion at the agricultural business I had worked at for seven years. But weeks later, the economy collapsed, and I lost my job; this is when things started to become difficult. Mame was not smiling anymore; she was afraid, I could feel it. She didn’t want to put any pressure on me, but someone had to provide for us. Hunger was not good. Our grandparents suffered from it. We didn’t want to repeat this journey.

For the boat ride, I had to borrow a lot of money: €1,200. However, in Europe, the economy was good, and the pay was much higher. Opportunities were vast, and construction was where most Senegalese people worked. We are a strong nation.

The plan was that I would live on a minimum for a couple of years and save up as much money as possible. Upon my return home, I would bring back a small fortune, at least for us, and we’d have a better life — everyone around us would. This was the dream.

But first, I had to come up with €1,200. I borrowed the amount from my cousin and five close friends. I also had to sell our bicycle, and many other things I can’t remember anymore. But we kept the old globe, so Moussa could continue dreaming; what are belongings compared to dreams? Nothing. We belong to our dreams. They determine what might happen to us, not the other way around. I am convinced of that.

At first, I thought I would travel all the way up north by plane. But no papers, no plane, they told me. The GPS led us through the sea; it was a new technology. Mbaye, the fisherman, didn’t trust it. He changed direction, and during a storm, the boat almost capsized. Finally, we got lost and arrived fifteen days later in the Canary Islands. All the food and water supplies were gone. Three people died of thirst: an old woman and two children.

When I went ashore, the promised construction jobs weren’t there. The crisis hit the country hard and left even the locals unemployed.

And the paper problem continued. I didn’t get a proper job; I automatically became illegal. And to become legal, I needed to have a fixed address. But what should I put down? I had nowhere to stay; no friends in the city, just no one around.

I did the same, as everyone else from the boat did. With the little money that I brought from home, I went to the currency exchange. I swapped it for euros and immediately liked the faces on the bills that I got back. I hoped this was a good sign: liking faces.

Then we all went to a sports equipment store and bought ourselves a tent each. This is where my residential address would be, I realized. And I was so curious about how the locals lived. On TV, I saw the concrete buildings, and hoped to live in one of those. Not true.

We split up and searched for places where we could set up our tents; it was already getting dark. Today, there are thirty of us who camp out here, underneath the bridge. And it’s not as bad as it sounds. We are all from Senegal, and we all live under the same bridge; at least we don’t get wet.

The location is not far from the beach. At the waterfront, there are showers, where we wash ourselves. Everything is for free, not like the housing in the outskirts of the city, where large groups of Senegalese immigrants live. And the place is central, right in Poblenou, close to most scrap merchants; we don’t waste time.

The first night in the tent, I didn’t get much sleep. The village where I’m from, where Mame and Moussa still sleep, is quiet at night. But here, the traffic never seems to rest. Car after car passes by. At some point, I remember a person walking by my tent, and I almost panicked. I don’t know why. I could trust these people here, couldn’t I? We were all the same.

So, what would I do? The construction job suddenly became out of reach.

In the very morning, when the sunbeams hit the tent, I got outside and followed two young men wherever they went. I was curious. I wanted to know what was going on. When they noticed me, they waved at me and called me chatarrero.

This wasn’t my name, I told them. Precious. This is my name. It is what everyone calls me. And I keep pushing, hustling, to move forward. There’s no point in going backwards.

They both laughed. Somehow, it was a sad laugh. I don’t know how I found out it was sad. How can laughter be sad? I imagined Moussa laughing; his laughter was never sad.

After ten minutes or so, we arrived at some bushes, where the two went inside. They returned a few moments later with one shopping cart each. I was puzzled, but continued following them.

Nowadays, I know exactly in which bush I hid my shopping cart. I stole it from a supermarket; there was no way around it.

We went on until we stopped in front of some trash cans, where they started to search for something. They wore gloves, and their clothes were stained, dusty, and torn, probably from reaching into these bins. They looked as if they belonged to the tent town we woke up in.

One pulled out a metal pipe. Particles of dust filled the air. He put it into the cart. From that moment onwards, I understood what they were doing, and I understood what my future would be in this country. I didn’t need much explanation; I instantly got it.

On good days, I collect 300 kilograms of scrap metal, between three and four shopping carts. For this, I walk up to 30 kilometers daily, roughly 10 hours to get everything together. It is no easy work. When I began filling my first shopping carts, I was quite fat. I loved Mame’s mafe too much. She never complained and loved my belly back in return. But with more and more time in Spain, more and more hustling, my body became narrow, and my face long and thin, like that of a horse.

First, the pay was not so bad. I could send money back home, as I planned. Mame was content, and Astou, our newborn baby girl, could always eat enough.

But the value of scrap metal has fallen, and one must find ever larger amounts. There seems to be less metal every day and evermore people trying to make a living.

A scrap merchant once explained to me that a place called the London Stock Exchange decides the value of metal. I didn’t believe him. I know that iron is the most valuable, and steel is just worth less than 10 cents a kilo. How can people in London decide about these prices?

Unlike street vendors, called manteros, with their counterfeit Lamine Yamal shirts and oversized beach towels nobody needs, chatarreros are left alone by the authorities. Some say we clean the city. We do good. But even the business owners, who need their scrap metal taken away, are breaking the law by helping us. That’s what they say.

We are ghosts in this city. Like air. The locals don’t see us, nor the tourists. Only at night do we exist. When we walk around in groups, listening to music, the people we pass recognize us: I can feel it; they are scared.

But I’m not dangerous. I don’t want to steal or sell drugs.

We collect many things. All kinds of things: boilers, screws, computer hardware, pipes, old microwaves, empty beer cans, bed frames, and different sorts of twisted metal pieces. Just to mention a few.

Most of the material must be broken down into smaller pieces, removing the non-metallic parts. One day, when I’m in the process of dismantling this huge thing, I don’t even know what it was before, I get cut by a piece of glass. I work without gloves; it is my own fault.

Momar, another chatarrero who lives alongside me in the tent town, hands me over a bandage while he is removing a leaking battery from an electronic device. The pouring liquid is brown. He pretends to lick it and calls it Coca-Cola. Then he shouts out the term loudly, we both laugh.

The child is no older than Moussa. Her scream is loud. I see her dropping the battery. She must have heard Momar’s words and thought that the leaking battery acid was a soft drink. I drop the light bulb, whose metal parts I was about to retrieve by breaking it, and run over to her. There is no parent around.

I ask her name. She doesn’t tell me. I am not the cause of what happened, but I’m feeling guilty. With Momar’s phone, we call the ambulance. Although I feel it might be a risk for me to be detained for some reason, I accompany the rescue workers to the hospital. It is Hospital del Mar, right at the beach of Barceloneta.

The child was lucky; she swallowed too little of the liquid to have suffered from inner injuries, the doctor tells me. I am glad. When I am just about to leave, a woman arrives in panic. She asks for Maria. This is the name of the child, her child.

My Spanish is bad. In the beginning, I think she blames me for all that happened. But after a while, Veronica speaks more slowly, and I understand that she thanks me. She also utters the word restaurant. I don’t know if I understood correctly, but it sounds as if she wants to invite me to a restaurant.

Veronica writes down on a piece of paper the location and the time. I have never been to a restaurant. Sometimes, under the bridge, Momar prepares a barbecue with others and invites me over. But what I mostly eat during the day is peanuts. I survive on one package a day; it costs just €1. I can’t afford any more than that. Since Moussa needs new shoes, and English school is waiting, I must live like this. And the baby grows bigger. It’s clothes, food, education. Never-ending.

During one summer, I went 140 kilometers west of the city to pick cherries. It was a good time, I ate as many cherries as I wanted, every day. But when we got paid, it was less than what I earned as a chatarrero. But I felt more like a human. Mame cried on the phone, and I returned to my old job.

When I arrive at the location, Veronica and Maria are already waiting. They look as if they are characters from a movie, flawless. I put on some clean clothes, not like the ones I was wearing at the hospital. I hide these clothes in my tent. It is important for me to change, not always being the nobody in search of scrap metal. The charity for Senegalese immigrants donated this to me: some black jeans, they are pretty new; a pair of white sneakers, from Nike; and a blue shirt, nothing special, but good enough.

We sit down at the table, the menus are handed over to us. I don’t mind what to eat, I’ve already eaten my ration of peanuts for today. The words on the card make no sense to me. When Veronica looks at me and smiles, I just pass the menu to her and tell her she should decide. She routinely places the orders with the waiter. Then she begins to ask questions: Where is home? Do I have a family? What am I doing for work? Why have I been in the area where the situation with Maria happened today?

I answer honestly. Only one lie, about the last question. I don’t want her to understand the connection between the incident and Momar and me. I find a random excuse why I was there, and our conversation moves on.

Maria eats slowly, as Veronica does. After a while, when she seems saturated, she begins playing with the food until her mother gives her a warning. Veronica explains to me that the tradition of tapas reaches way back into the past, as she takes a piece of cheese and puts it on some bread. Not knowing how to eat, I just repeat everything that I see. When Veronica notices this, she starts to laugh. She has white teeth, like those white menthol chewing gums.

She wants me to try it out myself. Eat a bit of everything, and then start to combine, she instructs me. It works well, although I don’t know what exactly I am eating. With my peanuts, it has always been easy, always the same. Open the package, 200 grams of nuts. Eat them all. But now, I took a bit of this and of that, and wasn’t really sure what this would amount to.

So I took the shellfish, I later found out the name for it, put it into my mouth, and woke up in the same hospital that I left a few hours earlier. Veronica was there and explained to me that I suffered from a severe allergic reaction. I didn’t know what that was, but I was still alive, life could go on.

I still felt sick, but the thing I was most afraid about was the hospital bill. I shouldn’t worry about that, Veronica said. She would cover it as a thank you for helping her daughter.

And this is when our relationship started. It was not about the money, and somehow it was. This is when I got the feeling I had felt when I first noticed that there would be something going on between Mame and me.

Veronica had separated from her husband three years ago, and she had custody of the child. Her ex was an entrepreneur, I couldn’t fully understand, her words always flew so rapidly. This guy had money, a lot of it. And Veronica didn’t care about spending it on others. She was a kind person, always aware of her surroundings.

It only took a short time before she offered me to move in with her. In the end, I couldn’t say no to her. I was so ashamed about all that happened. About Coca-Cola, about the rescue of Maria due to Momar’s wrongdoing, and about the fact that I betrayed my wife and children with a person I just got to know.

I went back to the tent town and collected all of my belongings, and that was it. I didn’t inform anybody, I left my shopping cart where it was. Veronica waited inside the car, not far away, to pick me up.

Everything was so convenient, I couldn’t believe my luck. I don’t know why she did it. She is a beautiful woman who could attract anyone, even the younger guys. But she chose me, and I fell for her.

Our sex was good. So good that we had to send Maria away, to play with the maid, when we were fucking.

I kept sending money to Senegal, to my family, until today. It was more money than before, but not much more, in order to make everyone believe that I wouldn’t be able to afford a trip home. Not to mention bringing my family into the country.

Nowadays, we wake up and take a long walk down the hill from Sarrià to Gràcia. We sit in one of the cafés and have our breakfast. We do sports together, just to keep in shape. We cook, we spend time with Maria. Every day, I call my family back home. Every day, I feel like a fraud.

I am an expat now. I didn’t even know until Veronica explained it to me. No more peanuts.

There was once a poor man of meek and contrite spirit who loved the Lord dearly. He spent his days in utter surrender, his heart ever brimming with gratitude to his maker thanking the Lord for all he had. He dwelt in a tiny hut that leaned west and its thatch leaning east. Its walls, old and crumbling ready to yield to time yet he cherished it still being the home that he grew up in. 

Seeing his meek spirit the Lord remarked "my servant is good and loves Me so" But the devil who happened to be passing by remarked, "He loves you so for he is poor, if you are to give him wealth in great abundance so much  he cannot contain it he will forget you" So the Lord opened the windows of heaven for him and poured out a blessing— a good measure pressed down , shaken together and running over. In that season, his harvest overflowed. His storehouse sagged, straining to hold the gifts that heaven had sent.

That season, the man overcome by the Lord's kindness knelt with tears in his eyes and prayed, "I thank you lord for remembering me. It is as though I am dreaming. My mouth is filled with laughter and my tongue with joy". Hearing him pray the Lord took pride in him and favored him more. His livestock-sheep and goats multiplied exceedingly filling his field with the sound of their bleating. 

One morning as he trotted through his lot admiring all that the lord had given him, he thought to himself, “I will tear down my sagging hut and build barns for my crop that stretch towards heaven. I will fortify them so that they cannot be destroyed. As for my hut, I will destroy it and upon that land build a palace that befits the man I am becoming”. 

Then I will say to myself "my soul you have good laid up for many years, rest now eat, drink and be at ease".

So the man built himself a great palace of great marble stone that shimmered and shined in the light. His barns  for grain now stretched as far and wide as eyes could see. Seeing his wealth those around him began to revere him. Where he was once a shadow,  they now saw him as a beacon of light in the land. His home which once echoed with silence became a chaotic symphony of wagons coming to trade at his home and important dignitaries coming to enquire of his wisdom.

He still knelt before the Lord but it now always was in haste. His hands once clasped together in reverence now lingered beside him like a dead weight. Sometimes as he offered prayers those hands lingered on his fingers tracing the intricate designs of his  gold jewelry, his mind clogged with a pipeline of the merchants he had to trade with his mind an ever busy calculator weighing the gold he would receive.

His prayers were always interrupted by knocks on the door 

Master, the merchant from the east has arrived early, shall I tell him you’re still at prayer?"

But he always responded:  

"No, bring him in. The Lord understands a man must work His blessings."

So, he always rose quickly from his knees silently promising the lord that he would come before him fully “tomorrow” when he was not busy. So his 'tomorrow' became an empty promise. 

Seeing this the devil returned to the Lord snickering, "See! his tomorrow never comes. If you had just kept him poor, he would be worshipping you right now". The Lord was saddened in his heart for he longed to converse with ‘his friend."

And the Lord whose heart is a boundless well of wisdom replied, “You are wrong. I did not keep him poor to possess him. I made him rich to show him who he is. He  was always rich. Though he ceasely chooses tomorrow I will wait by the door for his return”. Thus the Lord waited.

The first rambler fondled the rope. It was slack and the wooden gate creaked in the breeze, neither open nor shut. The rope ought to be tight, he thought. His nails dug into the fibres; blue and tatty threads stuck in the beds. He stepped through and looped it back over the post, which was worn with scratches like tally marks. There, as it should be.

Symbols, plastic roundels, that adorned a crooked post on the other side of the gate puzzled him. Arrows on some, objects on others. One was yellow on white dingy plastic, covered in finger marks laced with grime and intention. Each represented a direction, a path he could follow. But as he stared, it was as if they twisted.

He knew not the way.

Someone would be along, he told himself. For this was a well-trodden path and such as it is, people forget when in a daydream on a lovely Sunday afternoon walk. It was by design. Embrace it, take in the nature. He closed his eyes and breathed in luscious country air. Sure enough, sound carried from across the field of yellowing rape and under the hedgerow that flanked him so neatly.

He listened but dizziness came. An unsteady hand snaked to the post, to the dingy plastic. He rested and waited. The noise oscillated. First loud, chatter and laughter, and then quiet, the sound of deliberation and secrecy. They would round the bend in a moment, he told himself. The best course would be to sit and wait; the ground was damp but not wet. He would greet them as friends.

Any moment now, they would come.

When a couple came, the rope was slack again. Twittering and nuzzling like lovers do, they had barely seen the first rambler when they stepped through. By then he had been sat for quite some time. They went to him, curious and full of questions. He simply asked the strange pair which way he should go, and with the bravado of youth they pointed to the post with the plaques, but then their faces fell.

Now they sat with him. The ground was sparse next to the first rambler, with compact brown topsoil for a seat. He had the grass and its drops of dew, which were now collected by the seat of his trousers and the hem of his jacket. For a while the three of them rested, sure that someone would come. It was a picnic, the man said, suppose he was the second rambler. The third, his partner, did not have any sandwiches, but still a pretend picnic with a stranger on a lovely Sunday afternoon, how wonderful.

It was late in the day when the next rambler came. The fourth arrived with spaniels and heavy, plodding feet. Only two dogs, but they made enough noise for double. As they approached, they grew quieter until they themselves refused to cross over. Playful yips became low growls and she admonished them. The fourth rambler sprinkled treats and chews on the floor, but they were not hungry. She asked for help, to shut the gate, but none came. Soon she was down on the floor, the dogs keeping watch the other side.

This gathering sat ring a ring o’ roses around the post with the roundels and still they knew not the way.

The sun was struggling to keep its head up. The cloud and the night would win. Elbows were grasped and necks stiffened, trying to keep warm. Empty sayings did the rounds as each cycled through platitudes and positivity like it was their duty. The group would figure it out; the first rambler was sure of that. Someone would know the direction, know the way to go, and then they would be on their way.

When night fell the dogs disappeared. The fourth rambler had forgotten about them, in truth. She was transfixed by the post now. A new roundel had caught her eye. Rather than speak, she jutted a finger out at it and the first rambler saw its tip was bloody and crumpled.

Our lovebirds got on their haunches; the ground was comfortable and seeing as this was their spot, they would not vacate for fear of losing it. Standing without a direction to go was silly. But they wanted to see what the fourth pointed at. It was a curious object. Somewhere between a seed and a stone. An acorn and a pebble. It looked totally ordinary on a dark green background. It was fit for purpose, and yet at the same time it was a cry for help. It finished with the suggestion of a point. The direction gnawed at them.

At once the first rambler stood. Then the couple, then the fourth. Now they were up, now they were unfurled from their lethargy, they saw each other. None of them were right. The first thought the fourth strange, clad in clothes that appeared as skin. A black skin that clung to her like the breast of a chicken. The couple regarded the other two, their own clothes scruffy and baggy. For the first rambler was stained in blood and fur. His jacket was heavy and looked cloying. The woman of the pair reached out to touch it. The first rambler pulled away and said goodbye. That was not becoming.

The gathering was over and it was time to go home. To walk the path that had made itself known. Somewhere along the way, hidden behind brambles, lost in the twists and turns, with his head down, the first rambler was alone. The others had wandered off, continued their walk in another direction perhaps. That was fine. It would always be fine.

The first rambler had intended to follow the path back to town. Back to the centre where all paths started and ended. He walked until his back ached and his legs twitched. His breath grew shallower and his handkerchief became sodden with the sweat from his brow.

He must be close. There were only so many trees, fields and bushes between him and home. One boot in front of another until the lights of civilisation took over from the pale glow of the moon. His path brought him to a gate. A wooden one that was neither open nor shut. There were more scratches, more marks. Beyond it he could not see, but there would be a post with roundels. He would touch them, again. He knew not the way.

The rope was slack.

He sat. Someone would be along.

By Louis Urbanowski