The premise of this story comes from the current affair of world order. Thinking about the world ending is fun! and wise. That being said, this is the first draft and its reason for being published will be revealed in the future. I am not happy with this draft and work on the second one has begun with an entire rewrite. I found myself getting very very attached to the story to the point where writing it was a spiritual process. The second draft serves to do the essence of this story justice, for this first one does not. ENJOY this bare collection of components…

Chapter 1

The wind comes off Antarctica with nothing to slow it down, and a million penguins have returned to an island that feels like it belongs to them. The sun rises over the south Atlantic, Gods persistent, furious red-eyeball that saw Darwin’s Martillo through the same Beagle Channel a hundred and thirty years ago.

Marg’s fingers crossed her feathered necklace. Absurd little birds. She smiled. The team is still sleeping, it was an exhausting journey to the island, an exhaustion that couldn’t be contained in the same space as her excitement. She had been waiting.

Weeks after her twelfth birthday in 34, Marg’s father returned from Martillo Island with stories and a heap of feathers. Magallenic, he said with a hint of awe. He described them as little nickels and penneis, a creature of absolute routine who would dance every day if they knew how. They persisted on this island completley remote and isolated, free to romp and bump feathers, unbothered by humans for a hundred and thirty years.

The silent grey water washes the beach in the distance. She stares over the water, in the only direction of civilization, fifteen miles East and sitting on the channel. Her father told her the story. The prison at the bottom of the world. Ushuaia. A town built by prisoners, cells filled with the physically and ideologically violent. I’ll tell you I woulda studied that prison. If I’d ever wanted to go. Those guards treat each other the same, her fathers voice echoed. Guards and prisoners, isolated as an island of penguins, just less social... and hopefully less romping.

The Magallenic penguins didn’t only live on this island. They stayed, for a very long time. She walked to a mound by the camp and scanned past the shrubs to the moving flock of black dimes and pennies wiggling through the land on the same worn paths their ancestors carved over decades, single file, unhurried and absolute in their direction.

Since October, they’ve walked this way, the same way. And since before October, and likely since before Darwin. Always walking with the same purpose, Marg thought, the same way my father saw them. She looks down at her fathers field book. The wind, the humidity, already written when she put the time down. She flips earlier in the book, to data her father put in.

Feb 11. Overcast. NW, strong. Colony active since 0530 roughly. Chicks at burrows 3,7,12 growing noticeably. Parents alternating foraging runs every three to four hours. Female returned approx 0600. Chicks at burrow 7 particularly vocal.

At 5:43 AM, she checked her watch. The island was waking from the slow orange sun peering over the horizon. Penguins walked out from their burrows tucked into dents all over the isla, the adults collecting in a black mass not far from the water. As day would break over them, many of the adults would make way for the beaches, lining themselves up like bullets they sent into the waters. Often times, as they broke from their partners and chicks, when they left for the water the sun would hit them so gracefully Marg’s eyes watered as she got hit by the same awe for the delicate persistance, their instinctually habitual way of life with or without humans watching, as her father did. They didn’t know humans at all.

The sound of the island continued into its ritualistic display of life. The sun broke day over the island, the team chattering from the tents behind her opened as they readied. More penguins are seen fading from darkness, standing, shaking their heads, or staring forward into the distance. The chicks stayed behind making their hungry chirps. From a distance, only a bubbling grey mass in a nest, beaks pointed upward like little beasts screaming to God for causing their hunger. Faintly, she thought it could be heard.

From the tent comes her name being yelled by Jack.

“Coffee?”

She put her hand to her ear, repeated the question in her head, and responded to Jack with a thumbs up without turning around.

Marg turned and pointed her binnoculars to the grey beach. She saw thin black feets waddling with rocks between their stalks. In the distance, the perpetual grey clouds that loomed over the city of Ushaia. It were as if the city was being haunted by the land. The prison at the end of the world. If it were a label taken lightly it would seem bizzarre, but its notorious name was given for its impossibility to arrive. It took the team four days from Bueno Aires by boat. She couldn’t imagine coming to stay.

She scanned the beach for her burrows. A chick screaming with its neck in the air, a parent beside it waiting for it to stop. She lauged in her head, looking down to the neigboring penguins who were, briefly, staring at the same distance as she, over the ocean and past the channel between us and them. Tierra del fuego. She put the binoculars down, smiled, and walked to Jack who was preparing coffee.

Over the fire a tin was boiling with water. Jack was in his tent bending over his radio, messing with the wires in the back. The early morning mist intensified the burning smell of the fire, and the smoke carried itself endlessly into the air. Jack pulled away from his radio and let out a sigh.

“That should do.” He wipes his hands on his pants with an empty smile across his face, turning to Margaret after he bangs the radio with his fist and turns to clicks the power on. It doesn’t power on.

“That might be all for the radio.” he says flatly.

“And you tried messing with the cables?”

Jack shakes his head.

“Thank you for the advice” he says, “maybe I should try that again”

He bangs on the radio without taking his gaze off her. Elliot, still asleep, stirs over and groans.

“Rise and shine pumpkin!”

Elliot groans again from the bed.

“C’mon now” Jack says, “You dont have enough degrees to earn your credits in your sleep!”

Marg laughs.

“Aghh its still dark.” Elliot says, “Why are you beating the pan.”

Jack hit the radio again and its metal guts rattled distastfully.

“We’ll just have to trust the boat to come in on Wednesday. And if they don’t, we’ll all be back in Ushuaia eating penguins at the cafe.”

“Yuck.” says Marg. Elliot chuckled and flipped to his back, starting to roll himself out of his sleeping bag. Jack walks out of the tent laughing and takes the water off the fire. He pulls out two tin cups and opens a jar of Nescafe instant coffee, dropping a scoop into Marg’s cup, and two into his.

“Coffee anyone!?” he yells to Elliot.

“Yep!”

Marg walked out of the tent to squat beside Jack. She still hears the cries of the chicks coming from the beach, louder now that the sun is rising and the penguins are ready to swim. The air is cool and crisp, the soft shadows of early morning glow, contrasting with the suns gold on the islands sand.

Marg watches Jack pour coffee into the two tins and grabs a third for Elliot, whose shuffling in the tent. The steam rose sharply into the air, the comforting smell of coffee coming with it. Marg finds a silence in her head with the birds and the clanking of tins. Jack stirs the two cups and places one beside Marg. He starts on Elliots.

“And what if the boat won’t come on Wednesday?” Marg starts, “Or if theres an emergency. Is the radio really shot?”

Jack nods to himself as he thinks.

“As long as nobody steps on an arrowhead with their necks, we’ll be okay.” He pauses.

“We’ll take the trip to town if they don’t. But, seeing as nothings changed, we can expect them on Wednesday. Can tell them to come back with another radio. If we can pay them. Or better yet, Ill take it apart and find out whats broken. Might be some water snuck in during the dingy ride.”

Over the islands dunes, the snowcapped mountains shine with the coming sun. A few cormorants dive from the sky down into the water behind the dunes. The sun hits her face with a warmth the air couldn’t provide. She reaches for the feathered necklace around her neck and rubs her fingers against the silky texture.

“What are you having.” she says.

“Sardines.” replies Jack. “The best for first.”

She laughs and reaches for a sip of her coffee. Its steaming slightly, but she brings it up to her lips and lets it burn her anyways. She brings it back down quickly.

“I’ll take some porridge.”

“Mhm.” Jack replied as Elliot comes from the tent wiping his glasses with a cloth.

“What are you people having this fine, fine morning.” Elliot asks.

“Porridge.” Marg replies.

“Sardines”

“And porridge for me too. Say, why haven’t you woken Simione up yet?”

“Shes up.” Marg replies.

“Ah. Quicker than you, Marg.”

“Better be.” Marg says. “Shes here on business.”

The group laughs. The birds continue chirping, then suddenly stop. Chicks are still screaming from the beaches, less so now, and as Marg noticed the new silence, she quickly takes the field notebook and pencil from her jacket pocket and scans the sky. She spots it, an Andean condor passing overhead, gliding its enourmous wings patiently over the grey sky as a black dot. The penguins grow silent, Jack and Elliot as well, and the island is as close as it can be to silence. Watching in awe as it floats overhead, scanning the water in its glide West away from the sun, nobody dares break the delicate silence this bird is known to cause.

As it’s shadow departs from the island, the noise comes back to life and the penguins start their blurping and the hidden birds their chirping. Marg looks at her watch and scribbles the sighting in the field notebook. 0713. Andean condor, heading west. Likely coming from Isla Navarino, heading to Isla Gable. Previously sighting twelve days ago over Isla Gable. Marg holds her pencil steadily over the page, adding at the end: Penguins and birds went silent. They listen to the birds for a moment.

“I always find it so queer how everything shuts up to appreciate that pterodactyl.” Elliot says, “Even Jack.”

Jack stirs a tin cup and hands it to Elliot.

“Yea, well, I’m not here on business.” Jack replies, standing up.

“Just pleasure.” Marg says, smirking to herself as she takes another sip of her coffee.

Jack scoffs.

“If you call hanging with a bunch of bird nerds and eating fish from a tin a pleasure, than... well, actually, yes. It beats scooping fish from the sea and spitting them into each others mouths. Which im sure youd find a reason to justify in the name of biology.”

Elliot laughs heartily and spills some coffee.

“Oh give it up” Marg replies, “It was a JOKE!”

“One womans joke is anther mans demise.”

Marg rolls her eyes and tucks her notebook into her pocket. The smell of the ocean beats back the coffee and Jack shakes the tin of oats he grabbed from inside the tent.

“Breakfast.”

After breakfast the team went about their duties. Jack cleaned the mess and ended on his back outside the tent reading a paperback pulp, his coffee hot as he had just poured his second. Elliot and Marg were out looking for Simione, who they found quickly considering the small size of the island. Simione was sitting near the beach by burrow thirteen watching the penguins jump into the ocean.

“How nice it would be to take a swim, no?” she asked the team as she heard them approaching. “If only your father brought you back a penguin suit! Huh, Marg?”

“Imagine that.”

“Oh don’t be so obtuse.” replied Simione. “He would’ve brought you back a live penguin if he could, the way he wouldn’t stop talking about you!”

Marg stood silently as Elliot waited beside her. Simione still hadn’t turned around. Marg knew it best to let her talk herself out, when she was in the talking mood.

“I swear” she continued, “I might know more about you then you know about you! Say, has anyone told you that you walk like a Magallenic?”

Marg frowned.

“Has anyone told you you smell like a Magellanic?” she replied quickly. Elliot stayed silent.

“Oh? And you haven’t stepped a foot to me since Christmas. Nice bottle we had, no? Warm enough to pressure you to hug me. Ohh what a suprise for my weak old heart. Almost had a heart attack. In a good way, Marg! Of course a good way. Say, have I ever told you about the time your father ate a tin of sardines he let out and we had to go back to town for toilet tissue because a bird had eaten from it while he wasn’t looking? Kept him crouched by a hole I had him make across the isla because fooo! I’ll tell you, with these winds, it doesn’t matter where the hole is.”

Elliot caught himself from laughing and Marg looked down at her feet. Grey boots, laces tied loosley because they weren’t planning on being near the water.

“Yes yes, what a time your father and I had together. You know Martillo is his favorite. Went on and on about Darwin. Hell, maybe I know more about Darwin than about you. Could you believe it? That old fart. Evolution destroyed my faith, you know. How insensitive that Arthur was. Im sure he and Darwin are exchanging notes right now.”

“Jesus Simione you never stop talking do you.” Marg said curtly.

“Oh I’ll stop talking when I’m dead! I’ll have you know I’ll be telling stories from my casket.”

“If you had anyone left to buy you a casket.” Marg replied.

“Oh hush now child.” Simionne said, standing to turn and face the two. Her hair is grey and wavy from the salt, her glasses reflecting a twinkle from the late morning sun. She looked Marg in the eye and smiled blankly and turned around back to the water.

“I’m sure the university will treasure my body just fine. Especially with all the updates we’ve made. Who would’ve guessed so much could change since your father and I’s trip? Not I. As if all the penguins took some foul juju and now they’re gone. Can you believe their were ten thousands of birds on this island? Now theres barley a few thousand. I’ll say I’ll say, their must be something in this water now. Everythings heading west. I knew everything being dumped from that prison isn’t doing any good, I know. People always bring the dirty. Like your father after those sardines, foo!”

Elliot takes a seat where Simionne was, looking off over the water.

“Yea...” Elliot says, “Good thing they shut it down.”

“The prison was one, but look at the water!” Simionne replied quickly, “Can’t see anything. I swear, Marg, check your father notes. You could find seashells from the center of the Beagle. Now all we see is waves. People bring the dirty. If not the prison, then the people.”

“I think my father was looking at the life, not dazing into the water.” Says Marg sarcastically.

“Oh Marg silly girl, so much left to learn. Water IS life, not seperate. Together. Were you not paying attention? Intro to Biology? Hmm?”

“Did you see the condor?” asked Elliot.

“Condor? Hmm, no. But I did hear it. Everything went silent. Always the strangest occurence. Your father, Marg, thought it was a Yaghan curse the first time, coming to collect. Those Europeans, he would say, due for a curse.”

“He never told me that one.” Marg said.

“No? And why would he. Their history. Ten thousand years here, as many people as penguins. There were a hundred when we came. Probably nothing now. Theres a reason the beaches are so gray. All the ash from those fires, Tierra del fuego, all washing to the beach. Nothing left to talk about for a biologist. Anthropologist, maybe, but they can only study so much. I think theirs an expedition planned for this year. Professor Dawkin was trying to talk to me about it. People bring the dirty, I tell him.”

“Sensitive.” Marg replied.

“Yea yea. How is burrow seven? Oh how your father loved the burrow seven. Home to a funky little couple. They’d always steal from other burrows. Funkly little couple. Their chick would chirp like it was being eaten by a sea lion! Say, I haven’t seen any of those in a while.”

“The radios broken” Marg said. Simione spun around as Elliot turned his head to listen.

“Oh! And how we listen to the news?”

“You won’t. But, we’ll have to hope the boat comes in on Wednesday or we’ll have to pack up and head to Ushuaia.”

“Ah. And I’ll suppose we’ll be here without the news until Wednesday? No harm. Business as usual.”

“Yes.” Marg pauses to look at the water. “Burrow seven is good. The chicks at burrow three and six havent had their parents back since yesterday. They’re screaming at the sky.”

“Ah.” Simione pauses, “A few sea lions decimated some penguins yesterday at around 19:00. Could be those.”

“Good to know.” Marg said bluntly, her face growing red. “I’m going back to camp. Tell me next time that happens.”

“I’ll come too” Elliot said, getting ready to stand.

“Oh Marg, you knew thats the reality of this.” Simione said with the feigned compassion only a biologist could muster. “You should really watch it happen sometime. Will teach a thing.”

“Watch it happen?” Marg replied hottly, “Im here to watch life. Not fulfill some sick observant fantasy”

“Life?” Simione replied gaily. “Death and life are part of same coin! Nothing sick about nature. Much to learn, much to learn. I suppose I don’t teach the reality enough in class.”

Marg shook her head as she stormed off. The wind hit her hair and blew it in the wind. Elliot tagged behind her, the sand under his feet catching air.

Marg and Elliot walked the short walk back to camp witih few words. Elliot tried to break the tension but Marg was rolling with the image of bloody water and the fate of chicks without their parents. When they got back to camp, Jacks tin of coffee was spilt sideways over his paperback. Muffled static from inside the tent caught them by suprise. They looked to each other and ran to find Jack inside the tent scribbling furiously the fragmented voices over the radio.

“Its working?” Marg asked with confused enthusiasm.

“Shut up” said Jack.

“The hell?”

“I SAID SHUT UP” Jack yelled as he clicks a button and begins speaking into the radio.

“Hello? Hello!? This is --”

The voice over the radio continued as if nothing were reaching them.

“trajectory confirmed by... travelling...”

Marg looked to Elliot. She felt gravity pulling her face down. The voices from the radio cut back to static.

“Hello!?” Jack yelled into the radio before leaning back into the chair putting his hands over his head.

“This isn’t supposed to be happening” Jack said quickly.

Static.

“Theres a transmission coming in from where it shouldn’t be.”

“What does that mean?” Marg said, struggling to keep her composure.

“I don’t know I --”

Jack goes quiet as the radio voice came back. Everyone listened as Jack leaned in to start writing again.

“...impact Wednesday... four...”

“Good God.” he said.

“...anyone receiving please...”

Static.

“What the hell is going on?” Marg asked with an increasing urgency.

Her chest was sinking somewhere it hadn’t been since she learned about her father.

“...god...to anyone receiving,“

Static.

Jack pressed the button and tried speaking. Nothing. He stared at the crackling radio. Marg could see the white from his eyes split wide open. She saw his face growing red. Standing paralyzed, the air grew colder around them. The smell of the salt was the only anchor. Her heart was beating fast like the ocean during a storm. Jack stood up from his chair and faced the team with trembling eyes. He picked up his paper and read the top line over the static.

“Doctor. Broadcasting on emergency frequency. Calculations run mutliple times. Near earth object. Trajectory confirmation made. Impact wednesday.”

He dropped the paper on the ground and looked at them. The static was unbearable. Elliot was the first to speak.

“Holy, it’s happening?” He asked frantically, “They’re dropping the bomb!?”

“No.” Jack said with anger leaking from his eyes. “I have no idea what the fuck is on trajectory but it’s not fucking good, and it’s not meant for us. Its bad. Whatever the hell it is it is BAD. They’ve been broadcasting for two days and nobody responded to them. And it’s live. We might be the first person to hear them. They cant hear us.” Jack turns back to the radio putting his hands on his head again. “Its bad” he repeats, pacing around the small space in the tent.

“Whats bad!?” Marg asked.

Jack punches the radio off and only the small generator is heard under his voice.

“This! Is bad.” Jack said. “The antenna is fucked and I can’t tell if its us or them. Im trying to tune into the naval base but theres only static. That frequency is the only one I can hear, I have no idea where its coming from, and its URGENT! Whatever the hell is on trajectory they’re talking like its going to end the world. They’re telling us to contact the mainland. The mainland? We’re the only ones who can hear them and worse! We can’t even contact the mainland to save our lives. We have to go into town and tell them.”

“Tell who!?”

“TELL ANYONE” Screamed Jack. “Didn’t you hear me? Impact Wednesday? Dated today? WEDNESDAY IS IN TWO DAYS!”

“Calm the fuck down!” Marg screamed back. “If we’re going to mainland then get the shit together because we’re going now.”

Elliot shuffled in his place.

“What if its the bomb.” Elliot said.

“It can’t be the bomb” Jack said, calming down, “Else why the hell would it impact in two days?”

“And where is it coming from?” Marg asked.

“Good god” Jack said covering his head again, “I dont know and I dont care, but we got to go. Where the hell is Simione.”

“By burrow twelve.” Elliot said quickly. Marg stood staring at Jack.

“Jack.” She said, “What the hell could be impacting on Wednesday. That would affect us.”

“A bomb.” Elliot muttered.

“Good grief” Jack said. “Go get Simione.”

“Jack.” Marg replied firmly, “Why is this more important than what we’re doing.”

“What we’re doing?” Jack laughs maliciously, “And what the hell are we doing? If theres a radio signal drifting frequencies, coming into our broken radio over EMERGENCY broadcasting, and they’ve been doing it for two days, they are in TROUBLE.” He continues laughing to himself. “And whoever the hell is broadcasting doesn’t sound like THEY’RE in trouble, but that WE’RE in trouble.”

“I’ll get Simione” Elliot replies, turning and hastily running from camp.

The tent smells like stress and panic and salt. Marg is still in the same spot she was when Elliot left, listening to the static of the radio Jack decided to keep on while he packs everything into the tent. The air was colder than it was a moment earlier, the clouds in the sky rapidly moving in the distance as a large dark cloud rolled over the Andes.

“Do you plan on just standing there?” Jack said.

Marg doesn’t reply, instead, she turns around and walks towards burrow seven. The penguins are still chirping and the sun is dimming with the passing clouds. Groups of Magellanic penguins are huddled around speaking to each other, their ages apparent to Marg who had been studying them relentleslly for months. Shes always wondered if she met any of the penguins her father met.

She continued along the sand and past the brush and past the little burrows in the ground and huddled groups of penguins until she steps on the grey, gravel beach along the north shore of the island. She watches the dark cloud rolling over and shading the land in front of her. She watches the water beat gently against the shore of this tiny island, beating slower and slower until she sees the channel’s surface lose its motion and turn glossy like the eyes of a dying man, the wind slowing till everything is still except the masses of penguins shaking their head and the clouds still rolling over the sky.

The grey ocean reflects the sun, and the wind picks up first with a soft whistle and a falling breeze. The penguins around her go soft then drop to their bellies on the ground. Any birds in the sky start flying lower. She plants both feet in the gravel. The breeze turns violent, a williwaw wind drops down the mountain picking up speed and force and beating into her standing body. The skin on her face starts to twist in the wind and her balance shifts, the ground shakes and as she tries catching herself, stumbling and landing backwards on the gravel as the wind tries ripping the hair from her scalp and the bleating of penguins drown in the sound of a raging wind which cursed this land for millenia. She closed her eyes and clutched the rocks on the ground as a few pebbles pelted her legs. The wind drowned every sound she could hear, and again on the island, she is in the silence she wanted from the time her father told her of his first peace. Loud as an engine, and out of nowhere, everything bows to nature. Quiet.

As sudden as it came, the wind died down quickly and left. She lay on her back staring into the sky. A group of cormorants took to the sky in single file formation. She heard shouting coming from the direction of camp. She imagined Jacks paperback flying the wind and landing in the water. People bring the dirty, echoed in her head. She sighed, stood, and walked back to the shouting camp.

Marg walked back to camp in a silence that wasn’t uncanny to the island, but this time, the peace that came with the infreqeuent silences was gnawing. When Marg walked onto the scene of the camp, she didn’t find everyone running around to pick up the tins and books that went flying in the wind -- no, she found the camp in a silent mess scattered across the mass in her view -- her and Simiones tent poles bent in, pages and notebooks and tins floating across or face down in the sand. Everything was in ruin, apart from Jack and Elliots tent. As she got closer, the intermittent breaking of static and the same radio voice speaking in the same the shallow tone, was clearer now. She found Elliot, Jack, and Simione leaning over the radio and listening with a brutally undivided attention.

Nobody noticed her walking in, and when they did, they didn’t notice the gravel in her tangled hair or the voided expression under her eyes. Instead, she noticed the shameful silence of emotion, like a group of kids confronted for stealing cookies. Simione was the only one animated enough to be doing something. She was writing unhurried in her field notebook, scribbling and crossing out, ocassionally looking up to twist the radio knob. She was flat in the calculated sense. Marg sat on the ground behind Jack and listened. Without deciding, she took the field notebook from her pocket and rest it on her thigh. She reached for a pencil, and rubbed it as she searched for her feathered necklace. It wasn’t on her neck. The static broke and a familiar voice returned.

“This is...”

Simione turned the knob.

“...octor... our is 1723, February... n... 64... South Pole Stat...”

Static.

_”_Marg hun,” Simione said passively as she twisted the broken antenna, “write down every single number you --”

“...over emergency broadcasting.“ The sound was marginally clearer now.

“Listen.”

“Forty-seventh consecutive broadcast. Live because... what else.”

Jack shifted as he heard this. Marg wrote down the number 47 in her fathers field notebook, under the margins of a new page.

“On January 29th at 0217 hours GMT we identified a near earth object designated 1964 BA. First observation recorded at...”

Simione and Marg were writing.

“...magnitude 11.3. Angular velocity 2.3 arcseconds per minute. Declination minus 43 degrees 52 minutes 19 s..”

A gust of wind blew against the tent and the antenna bent and sent the radio back to static.

“Hell get it back on!” Elliot screamed.

“Shut up!” Jack yelled as Simione fiddled with the antenna. The radio came back on but as soon as Simione went to write it flicked to static.

“Jack, hold this like...” Simione bent the antenna again, “this.”

Jack stood and held the antenna with both hands to keep it steady.

“...minutes... Third observation same date 2011 hours GMT. Right ascension 14 hours 33 minutes 02 seconds. Apparent magnitude 10.1. Angular velocity 4.7 arcseconds per...”

Static.

“Hold it steady Jack” Simione continued writing through the static. “Hold it steady!”

“Im trying!” He said, moving the antenna around with the voice beating through too quickly to hear a word.

Static.

Elliot stood up quickly and walked out of the tent. Marg wrote down the last number she heard and turned to Elliot who was now walking straight away from the tent. The radio came back on.

“...increasing in apparent magnitude in all three observations... applied perturbation corrections for Jupiter and...”

Static. The team is silent. The radio comes back.

“...four times. The results do not change. Object 1964 BA will impact Earth. Projected coordinates 47 degrees 22 minutes south. 38 degrees 14 minutes west. South Atlantic Ocean. Projected impact Wednesday February 12th, 1964. 1833 GMT. Estimated object diameter eight to twelve kilometers. Impact energy in excess of one hundred teratons of TNT...”

The radio voice faded slowly into static, but not the same static as before, a lower one. A breath is heard, the voice continues from its pause.

“We have attempted contact with McMurdo Station, Palmer Station, Buenos Aires Nav...”

Jack is standing over the radio staring dazed into the metal box. Simione continues writing. The radio voice continues clearer than its ever been, droning as a priest drones at a funeral, repeating the facts of the demise.

“... primary transmitter received damage on February fourth. We are broadcasting on backup equipment. We do not know if we are being receive... frequency is 14.3 megahertz. This will be our forty eigth consecutive broadcast. If you are receiving this transmission please respond on this frequency.”

Simione stopped writing and stared at her paper. Marg continued, ignoring everything but what she had to do. She looked up when the voice said:

“We want someone to check our numbers. We want out numbers to be wrong...”

The low static of a pause came back, ending quickly.

“We are not wrong.”

Jack let out a whimper.

“If you are receiving this transmission and you are able to contact population centers please do so. People should be with the people they...”

Static.

Jack broke. “Good Lord almighty in the highest could this be a prank?” he said to himself.

“Lets find out.” Simione said matter of factly. It didn’t seem like she thought it was a prank.

“Give me your numbers.”

Marg handed over her paper without a word. She turned around and Elliot was nowhere in sight. She wanted to get up and find him but the voice came in again.

“We are at peace here. The work was good. The work was...”

Jack slammed the radio with his fist, exhaling, lifting his hand again and hammering it again violently until it made a squeak in the speaker and a dent in the shell and no static was heard.

“FUCK!” he yelled to himself.

“GET OUT!” Simione snarled aggressively without looking up from her paper. Jack looked at her and stormed out past Marg. She watched him go, her chest sinking deep, deeper than its ever been; somewhere below Earth bubbling and boiling and burning. Simione crossed a line with her pencil and kept writing.

Marg was scratching at her neck the entire time listening to the broadcast. She peeled skin from off her collar, picking at the feathered necklace that wasn’t there. Air felt like a tomb, suffocating and claustrophobic. The tent wasn’t making her feel better, much worse actually, but she couldn’t find a reason to get up and turn around and walk out. Jack and Elliot are already gone, and she too.

Simione finished writing. She stared at her notebook. She wrote down three letters and placed her pencil on the notebook and watched it roll off the side onto the ground. Marg watched it drop, Simiones expression staying the same, apart from a frequency of blinking that was too much for ordinary thought. Marg used her thumb to pick the skin from under her nail.

“Well!” Simione said casually. “Maybe the university won’t give me a nice funeral.”

Marg blinked at her.

“Turns out I don’t know anything about astronomy!”

Marg blinked again, not knowing how to respond.

“So. What were you doing then?”

“Oh, just remembering my Gauss!” she scratched her head, “But, I can’t make the same calculations they did. Im a biologist. This is not my expertise.”

Marg responded with silence. Her thoughts continued to consume her, and her nail continued picking at her no-longer necklace.

“But...” Simione continued, “you should keep this between you and me...”

Marg looked up though she didn’t want to. She found the sincerity behind Simiones glasses.

“The numbers check out...”

“They aren’t wrong.”

Chapter 2

Tuesday morning came as every other morning before. Minus the coffee. Marg was sitting near burrow seven, listening to the quiet chirping that precedes dawn in nearly every part of the living world. She was looking up at the stars. They twinkled, but none moved. She thought she saw a shooting star at some point in the night. She had been staring at it all night, letting bugs crawl over her. She may have slept. She was clutching a single stray feather from a magallenic that flew to her in the wind, rubbing it constantly. Her neck burned in the cool air.

Slowly, the sun crawled over the horizon she wasn’t looking at. The penguins came to life, the chicks were screaming. She heard burrow seven, she saw shadows turning into penguins. Birds stopped chirping and flew to life in the sky. The chicks continued screaming.

When day broke, she stared at the clouds floating overhead. The only motion to movement was her growling stomach. She didn’t want to eat, but what else.

Margarets body was sore when she stood up. She stretched. A penguin near her shook its head. She started walking in the direction of the camp. On her short walk, she saw some papers from the logbook floating in the wind. Dirty.

As she got closer, she saw the camp in the same disorder it was left in by yesterdays williwaw. Jack was on his back by the unlit Primus, a tin beside it. She couldn’t tell if he was sleeping until she got closer. He wasn’t. He was staring into the sky. She stood over him, looking at his eyes that he wouldn’t adjust to meet her. She sat beside him. She waited, then let her back hit the ground while she kept her legs in crisscross. They stared at the clouds together.

“Simione told you what the numbers meant?”

Jack didn’t reply. He waited for a cloud to disapear from the corner of his eye.

“No. And I don’t care to know.” He found a new cloud to track.

“What have numbers ever done but destort reality.”

Marg found a cloud that looked like a dolphin.

“What do you think the dimension of that fish cloud is?”

Jack laughed, then took a serious tone.

“What do the numbers mean.”

The cloud lost its shape.

“It means... it might not be worth telling anyone.” She paused, before adding: “According to Simione.”

Jack chuckled. He sat up and Marg could feel him looking at her.

“If its really the end.” he stopped.

“Maybe we could...” he stopped again. She turned to look at him and found him in deep contemplation.

“Yeah.” he said resoundly. “Lets get a quick shag in.”

Marg laughed wickedly from her gut. She realized he was sincere.

“Why not.”

Simione was awake under her and Marg’s battered tent. She didn’t expect Marg to come back for the night. She was right. She woke up and dressed herself the best she could under the torchlight and cleaned her glasses and laid back down on top of her sleeping bag and stared at the underside of the tent. She got out only when she heard laughing.

When she stepped out, she saw Jack and Marg laying on the ground and Elliot beside them surrounded by the disorder of the camp. She walked up to the unlit Primus and bent down to light it.

“Goood morning!” she said, lighting the fire on her first try. She poured water into the tin and set it over to boil. Only Elliot replied with a good morning.

When the water boiled, Simione asked Jack where he put the Nescafe. He told her it was taken during the williwaw.

“Ah.” she said. She turned the fire off and looked at the steam as it left the water.

“Haven’t you ever thought it odd how steam isn’t considered a cloud?”

Nobody responded. Elliot shuffled awkwardly. Marg broke the silence.

“Simione.” she said, something bubbling in her tone. Simione waited for her to continue. She did not. The group sat watching their clouds, until Simione got up and went shuffling inside Jacks tent. She came out with oats and poured all of them into the water. She stirred in sugar, set out four plates, and a minute later she was handing out plates of porridge to everyone.

Opening her notebook, she was the first to start eating while she went over her notes. Elliot was the next to move. Then Marg. Jack didn’t.

“What were you saying, Marg?”

The silence was unbearable. Elliot broke it by scraping the bottom of his plate. Marg is folding the oats over themselves.

“Tomorrow. The boatman is supposed to come. And if he doesn’t...”

“If he doesn’t” Simione interupts, “than what difference does it make?”

Marg looks over her bowl to Simione, still looking down at her notes.

“The difference is we have a responsibility to tell people.”

“We didn’t make the discovery.” replied Simione. “We just discovered the discovery. The world might already know, and it just so happened we found out with them.”

“And if they don’t know?” she replied hottly.

“And if they don’t know. All the better.”

Jack scoffed. He sat up, looked at the porridge plate beside him, and smacked it aside. Simione raised her eyes to watch the plate hit the ground, looked at Jack, and shook her head.

“All the better? Who the hell do you think you are.” Jack said furiosuly.

“I know,” she replied, “I’m not mankinds last hope.”

“Last hope!? HA!”

Jacks laugh trailed into silence. “No shit. Wheres the hope in numbers.”

“Well.” Simione said, “Lets have hope for human error.”

Elliot put his plate on the ground and thanked Simione for breakfast. He got up and walked towards the beach. Marg tracked him and Jack stared into the distance he was walking towards. Simione was looking at her notes without purpose. She scooped a spoon of pouridge into her mouth.

Jack was off on one of the corners of the island sitting on a rock and watching their boat rock along the channel. He left Marg and Simione at camp because, what else. He pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes from one of his jacket pockets and prayed his zippo still had fluid. It did. He lit the cigarette and watched the wooden boat sway in the water. The sound of penguins were a constant he could rarley get used to, today there wasnt a problem.

He took a long drag of the smoke and blew a cloud in the air. The sky was a soft blue only the southernmost skies could let themselves be seen as. He debated taking the dingy out to the boat. One final check up, because what else. He took another long drag. He was at the filter already. A group of penguins waddled off the beach and dove into the water. He laughed. The way they’re feet pointed when they dove never got old. He saw the vague blob of sealions on a distant shore.

He tossed his filter on the ground and lit another. He thought of his mother in Buenos Aires. He looked at the boat again. He stood up and brought the cigarette to his mouth. A quick prayer. Sitting back down he looked around the beach. A jar with a red label was sitting in the sand. He got up and walked to it, recognizing it immediatley, he took another smoke and dropped the lit cigarette on the ground. He walked back to camp, ignoring the sound of splashing watr behind him.

Marg and Simione were sitting in the same place on the ground. Not talking. Just sitting. Marg had left the plate of unfinished pouridge beside her as she continued looking at the sky. Her eyes hurt but it didn’t matter. Simione was sketching the landscape, adding the shading of the penguin silhouttes she memorized by the beach.

Jack appeared with an unlit cigarette in his mouth. He stood looking at the team. They didn’t look back. He could see Elliot standing somewhere in the distance, his silhoutte black. He sat himself next to the Primus, sparked it on, put the used tin of water and oats back on the fire, and found himself a tin to pour the Nescafe into. He put in four scoops, lit his cigarette, and fell back onto his back.

“Isn’t it odd how smoke isn’t considered a cloud.”

Simione chuckled.

Nobody refused the coffee. It didn’t matter that a few oats were floating in it. Marg let it burn her lips. Jack had gone off to do sprints. It was Marg and Simione again, alone, in the silence of the islands noise.

Simione sighed. She looked at Marg and thought about her father. They had done this trip together in 34. Groundbreaking, for the region. She put her notebook down and moved to sit next to Marg. She brought her coffee with her and raised it up. Marg looked at her and raised the glass without hesistation.

“Don’t think Christmas is the only time to celebrate.”

Simione reached into her pocket and pulled out a 750ml bottle of Cognac, half drunk. Marg laughed and shook her head.

“The work was good.” she said.

“It was.”

Simione poured a shot into her coffee. She poured two into Marg’s.

“Cheers.”

The sound of tins clinking was barley heard. They each took a sip.

Simione held the coffee with both hands.

“Are you still thinking about the boatman?”

“No.”

“Then, what?”

Marg looked at Simione.

“What else.”

Simione looked away and took a sip.

“True.” She laughed. Marg turned to her but she did not face her. She started rubbing her tin in a circular motion.

“You know. Your father and I came here thirty years ago.” she stopped. “I’ve met the same penguins, twice.”

Marg held her coffee and looked into the distance.

“And not once, not on any of the islands, did we stay on them thinking of home.” she retorted, “Sure, Arthur would talk about you alot. But he knew he was coming home. He told me something on the boat...”

Marg’s eyes lit up.

“He told me he thought these penguins were the bravest creature he knew... Not fierce brave, like a tiger. But commitment brave. Oh you should’ve seen him in September, before the summer started. He was constantly worried about there being no penguins. Come February, he wouldn’t have a doubt they’d be back next year. And the next. And the next...”

She continued.

“And he thought it was so brave, to come back every year to the same place. Because he was always worried that when he went home, it wouldn’t be the same. That it would be gone. It wasn’t gone. He brought you the necklace that he made. Spent a good long time making it...”

Simione laughed.

“Kept me up after dark... You’d think that seventeen hours of daylight was enough to do everything. Not him. There was always more to do.”

“What did he do?” Marg asked.

“Oh!” Simione said happily. “Everything. He was great. Always the first up and to make breakfast. And you know me. To be up before me...”

Marg rubbed the blister on her neck where the necklace used to be.

“He told me on the boat that he wanted to come here on vacation. Maybe bring you the next year. Always thinking back to you... At every conference after ‘34 he talked about you...” She laughed softly.

“And how hard I tried to hide my excitement when you came into my class. I saw your name and I almost burst.”

Simiones voice started to break. Marg turned to her and saw Simiones grey hair and her eyes pointed up to the sky.

“I never had a daughter, Marg. Or a son. Or a husband. Or anyone apart from my work. Hearing how he talked about you.” Simione choked on a tear. “Oh dear how he talked about you, it would make anyone fall in love with him.”

Marg’s eyes watered against her will and she faced the ocean as quickly as she could. She remembered how happy her father was to see her again, thirty years ago in March, telling her about every story, every penguin personality. About the couple at burrow seven. Simione continued.

“And he never told me he was dying. That bastard.” she laughed painfully. “He kept it from me, how he kept it from you, because how could I spend a day at a conference when he was fighting. And you. How could you think of anything else but that.”

Simione put her coffee down and pushed her eyes with her palms. She was holding back tears and couldn’t talk anymore. Marg leaned into her and hugged her from the side. Simione was shaking and sobbing quietly and pulling snot back into her nose. It was ugly, the sound too ugly to keep hearing. Marg got up with red eyes and left her coffee on the ground to get cold.

Marg walked to the same burrow she went to when she needed peace. Burrow seven. Elliot was nearby, sitting by burrows four and five scribbling onto a paper. She watched him for a moment. The boy was the only one selected from Simione’s class to come on the expedition. He had been writing multiple letters to home for a majority of their months their. Today, he was still writing letters. To whom, Marg could take a guess. All letters are going to the same people now.

Marg looked at burrow seven and watched as groups of penguins waddled into the water and a few adults stood around their chicks that would occasionally bend their necks and scream to the sky. She took in the familiar scent of salt and the feel of the cold air. She turned and walked to Elliot who was sitting on a rock, still writing. When she sat beside him, Elliot sighed and dropped his pencil on his paper and looked out over the water. Marg saw the top of the paper, it read:

“Dear home,”

Elliot spoke first.

“Do you think it’s real?” he asked without a hint of hope.

Marg thought about a world a many million years ago, when the fauna and flora and life was larger than life. The dinosaurs who looked up and saw the asteroid coming down and likely wondered, in whatever way they could wonder, what the hell it meant when the sky burned from the oridnary blue into an early orange sunset.

“It doesn’t really matter what I think.” Marg replied. “But, if it means anything... I. I think things will be okay. Back at home, that is.”

Elliot put his face into his palms and wiped the wet from his forehead into his brown hair.

“Okay? How is this okay?”

Marg sat with that question for a second.

“I mean. It has to be okay. Because maybe it isn’t okay, whats going to happen.” she paused.

“But we’re here now, and we’re still alive. And we’ll stay alive for the fireworks.”

Alive? I feel like I’m already dead.” Elliot stood.

“Hell, I feel like i’ve been dead my whole life. And I want to live” he looked out to the water before continuing.

“But when I want to live, Im stuck here. Between the rock of an island and the end of the god-damned world.”

Marg laughed at that.

“Funny how we’re all stuck between rocks.”

Elliot took a serious tone.

“At least you got to see the world.”

“I have?”

“Yes. You have. You got to live and watch people live, and grow up with people and feel the feelings of your parents being proud.” he continued, straightening himself out as he stood on the rocks, turning to look Marg in the eyes.

“You’ve got to do things... I’ve only prepared. And prepared for what?” he turned away from Marg, now shouting.

“Prepared for this? Prepared for everything to turn to nothing. Classes to learn about the world and never actually living in the world? I’ve wasted my entire life for an idea of a life, now that I’m facing it, now that it actually matters --” he took a breath.

“Now. I’m here, alone, with the news that I’m going to be alone forever, and when I actually want to do something, again. I’m powerless to do anything. Because everything is crashing down from the sky and I’m here doing what.”

He crutched the paper he was holding and spoke to it.

“I’m here. Alive. Already dead. Writing letters to people who will be dead.”

He crumpled the paper into a ball and squeezed it with force. His hand released it and the ball hit the rocks before the wind took it gently to the water. Elliot sat back down, resting his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands.

“At least your not crying.” she said to him.

“Crying? What would crying do for me?”

Marg looked at him, to the boy at the bottom of the world, dealing with the end.

“Ask that to your professor, whose weeping into her coffee. She lived her life already. She saw the world. And she’s still crying”

“Well she’s a woman.” Elliot said.

“Yea? Well your both human.”

“I’d rather be a penguin than a human.”

“Ha.”

They looked off together towards the water. Elliot let out a sigh.

“Why aren’t you crying?” he asked her seriously.

“Good question... I guess I have nothing to cry about.”

“Ha!” Elliot laughed, “You see? I told you. You’ve already lived your life.”

She saw a sparkle of light roll down his face. He never turned to face her.

“Or maybe, I’m still living it.”

The two sat, feeling the crisp air and breeze that rolled down from over the Andes, the bleating of penguins, the smell of salty air. Marg was rubbing the loose feather in her pocket. She got up and bent behind Elliot, who had his chin resting on his hands as he looked emptily into the distance. She rubbed his back and told him she was going back to camp.

The constant noise of the island was not uncanny. What was strange is how normal it was. How ordinary it was to never find silence until a Condor passes over or a williwaw sweeps across. Marg collected more loose feathers from the magallenic’s she was studying. Her jacket pocket nearly filled with them now, at least twenty of them, some assumed to be from the same family, or the same bird, that she collected by reaching into the shallow burrows scattered across the island. She became familiar with them on her frequent walks across the small island.

When Marg returned to camp, she found Jack talking to Simione as he plucked at the radio he banged open. Its wires were scattered like arteries in its metal body. She walked to the group and looked at Simione, who had stopped talking when she arrived. Marg took in her aged and wrinkled face and grey hair and scientific eyes behind the glasses and stepped up to hug her. Jack mocked them with an Awee, and they stepped apart as he continued smoking his marlboro cigarette, watching them.

“About time you guys got sentimental.” he said.

Simione laughed.

“Aging will do that to you.”

Marg walked away from Simione and over to Jack and the open radio. She studied the wires he was plucking out, not knowing what they did.

“What are you planning on doing with that thing.” she asked him.

“Ahhh” he started, “Nothing important. Just gonna wire it to fry and hook it up to the generator at night.”

“Oh?”

“Yep. Im hoping it’ll burn for a good long time. Pour some gasoline on it, seeing we might not need it anymore.”

“Well. Thats if we’re all going to die tomorrow.” she replied, hinting at the possibility they might not.

“Well, heres to hoping we do.” Jack said, pulling the cigarette to his mouth for a drag, studying Marg’s face for a reaction.

“If not, I don’t think anything will change. I’ve accepted it, and I’ll add, I kinda enjoy knowing the world will end tomorrow. Never felt so alive in my life.” He took an especially long and harsh drag of his cigarette, holding it in for an exagerated five seconds, and finally blowing out a transparent cloud into the cool, crisp air.

“Good...” Marg replied, watching him. “Me too.”

She bent over the radio and held one of the copper wires in her fingers. She asked him if she could have it.

“I won’t be needing it.” he said, ripping one of them out and handing it to her.

Simione watched the two of them in silence. She took out her notebook and sat to start writing. Marg took the wire and sat next to the unlit Primus, taking a single white-tipped, black-feather from her pocket. She rolled it around her fingers and let the sun illuminate it. She twisted it around the copper wire and held it up in the wind to see if it would hold. The breeze took it off instantly. She took another feather from her pocket tried again.

Elliot unfurled his crumpled paper and read it to himself.

Dear Home.

I miss you, more than I can help. Not much helping it. Mother, I think of you more than anyone. You always wanted me to know the world. Im getting to know it, better than I’ve wanted to. I hope your doing well, and I hope you got my letters over the months. We’re still on Isla Martillo. Still studying penguins. Professor Simione and Marg are teaching me more about field experience than any class, and Jack, the operator, I’d say he’s teaching me more about life than I could ever learn at home. Americans are a funny people. He smokes the red pack of cigarettes Dad brought back from New York.

We learned on monday that theres an asteroid hitting on wednesday. Tomorrow after noon. I’m not sure if its real. I pray its not. I hope your praying too. They always seem to work.

Elliot read the last line.

If you get to read this, know I love you now more than I ever had in my entire life.

He took his pencil and continued scribbling at the bottom. He grabbed another paper and continued writing. When he finished with a paper, he flipped it over to the back, continued writing, and folded it three times. When he ran out of paper, he opened his field notebook and continued. The sun continued moving westward. The penguins continued bleating, their chicks continued screaming.

Marg held up the u-shaped copper wire; the magallenic feathers clumped down in the center. She let the golden sun wash it, let the breeze blow it, let the salt stick to it like it stuck to her dry face. She brought it up around her neck and twisted the ends of the wire. She stood up and looked over the Beagle Channel to the Andes snowcapped mountains and the clouds rolling over the sky. She took a breath, listened to the penguins, and took the short walk away from Jack and Simione at camp to burrow seven.

When she got near the edge of the beach, she found Elliot wading in the cold ocean with penguins scattered around him. His boot were on the rocks, under them were a dozen folded papers with their creases flapping in the wind. She watched him step carefully around the grey gravel, penguins all around, and as penguins were coming to shore, he walked to them. They scattered. He walked past them, deeper into the water, the bottom of his pants being sucked in. He outstretched his arms like a great bird and fell down the water, floating face down. She knows that waters cold. She waits.

Elliot flaped his arms and shot his head out of the water, setting himself upright, hurrying back to land. His clothes were drenched and dark, and when he looked at her, he raised both hands and screamed the yell of a warrior. Marg laughed and walked down to the beach, where she met Elliot wearing a grand smile.

“I always wanted to do that.” he said, looking at his clothes “and, now that i’ve done it, I kind of regret it.”

He shivered and added at the end.

“You should try it anyway. A lifetime experience.”

Elliot and Marg walked back to camp as the sun slowly grew dim. Marg held Elliots letters as they walked. Jack was in the near distance, piling up dry-wood and brush on the closest thing the island had to a hill. Elliot started jogging to him, his dark wet clothes visibly bouncing. He ran past Simione still at camp, using the Primus to heat up a tin of water. He made it to Jack and she saw the two of them talking; Jack’s shoulders bounced like he was laughing. He reached into his jacket and handed something to Elliot, who leaned in as a spark was lit, then quickly went out.

Marg stopped at camp to leave Elliots letters in the tent. Simione looked up at her and back down to continue writing.

“Hows the boy.”

Marg looked at the men’s silhouttes as tiny clouds left their mouths and disapeared into the air

“He’s good. Starting to live a little.”

“Good. It’ll do him good.”

Marg studied Simione as she wrote. If she wasn’t talking, drinking, or staring into the distance, she was writing.

“What have you been writing.” Marg asked candidly.

“Good question.” Simione replied, as if she didn’t know. “I suppose im writing in a field I don’t know. Psychology.”

“Thats unlike you.”

“How so?”

“People have never been your strong suit.”

“Never to late too learn.”

Marg couldn’t help but laugh. Simione didn’t respond.

“I do admire your ability to care. Sometimes.”

“Sometimes, it’s good. To care.” she added: “But not often.”

“No. Not often.”

In the distance, a small orange light began to glow. Marg saw the silhouttes crouching around it, smoke rising more obviously, the small light growing. A silhoutte moved away from the fire and came back to throw some brush into into it. It grew slowly into a bold orange that contrasted the blue sky. The smoke rose into clouds.

As the twilight of Tuesday came, the team found themselves together, gathered around a small bonfire on the edge of Isla Martillo looking over the Beagle Channel. Over the months, they had seen the remnants of fires many times larger than their own, left from a people who gave the land it’s name. Jack had the broken radio beside him and Elliot was pressed as close to the fire as he could and the two were talking about God knows what. Something about TNT. Simione and Marg were staring into the glowing fire, letting the sky grow dark and the air colder.

Marg spoke over the crackling of the fire.

“Do you have any more stories about my father.”

“No. Nothing you don’t know already.”

Simione smiled at the fire.

“Say, have I ever told you about the time your father left his sardines out and --”

Marg cut her off instantly with her laughing.

“No. Tell it to me.”

Simione continued.

Over their laughing, Jack stood up and proposed a toast. He nodded at Simione, who smiled and took what was left of her Cognac from her pocket. The team looked up to the man glowing with shadows around his body and the orange glow of a land on fire. Jack took the Cognac and opened it and raised it to the sky.

“For the sky that falls, the fires in our hearts, the fire by our feet, the Land of Fire!” he paused, looked around and said spookily: “And, the largest fire to come!”

“Hurrah!” shouted Elliot immediatley.

“Cheers” said Simione shaking her head.

Jack took a swig from the Cognac, wiped his lip and passed the bottle to Elliot who held it for a second, then taking a swig and passing it along. Jack hoisted the radio on the ground, lifted it above his head, brought it close to the fire and dropped it on top with the crashing metal scattering the glowing embers. The fire came up and went down.

Simione wiped her lip and handed the bottle to Marg. She took it, raised it to her lips, and stood up.

“For the fire to come, and the fires already gone.”

She poured a shot over the embers and it hissed as the fire sprung to take a sip and crackled and sat back down. The metal of the radio was charring, and Jack made a sound of praise as he threw some more brush into the fire. Jack took out his pack of Marlboro reds and handed one to Elliot and one to Simione, who hesitated before she grabbed it, and grabbed one for himself, taking out the last one to hand to Marg. He brought his zippo up to his mouth and it did not spark.

“About time it died.” he said.

“You can say that again.” said Simione who tossed her cigarette into the fire.

Jack tracked the cigarette into the fire and watched it dissolve into smoke. He bent down near an ember, putting the cigarette into his mouth and bringing the tip of it to heat up. He got up, inhaled hard, again, and blew out a puff of smoke before coughing. He gestured vaguely to Elliot who put the cigarette into his mouth. Jack leaned in, put the tip of his lit cigarette onto Elliot’s, and puffed. When he pulled away, the shock on Elliots face was worth the gesture.

“Queer.” he said, as he puffed his cigarette.

“What isn’t.” Jack added, turning to Marg to do the same.

He bent down in front of her, raised his eyebrows, and leaned in as if he were about to kiss her. Marg smiled with the cigarette between her lips and leaned in. Tip to tip, her cigarette was lit. Jack stayed right there for as long as he could, the group watching them in astonished silence. Marg reached over and scrunched Jacks blonde hair behind his ear. His eyes widened and he backed up.

“Queer.” he said with a laugh.

Marg smiled as Jack sat down next to her. As she turned to look at him, she saw Simione and Elliot staring. Jack blew out smoke and brought the cigarette away from his lips, looking at noone in particular.

“One last night.” he said.

“Anyone thinking what I’m thinking?”

The tone he took made Simione welch and Elliot gasp. Marg laughed, and Jack followed with a hearty laugh from his gut and a deep exhale at the end.

“You guys are some of the good ones.” he said, turning away from the fire to face the indigo sky.

The fire burns lower, its crackling the only sound apart from the washing of the ocean against the beach. The slimmer of light during the islands summer twilight kept the sky a soft indigo and the silhouttes of the Andes apparent in the distance. Elliot was asleep by the fire clutching his boots like a teddy bear. Simione had moved away from Jack and Marg who were holding hands watching the embers turn from day to night. No words were spoken. No embers were wasted.

Chapter 3

Wednesday morning came. The biological alarms rang. Marg woke up beside Jack at the crack of dawn with the birds early chriping. She looked at Jack, sat up, brushed her arms from the sand and dust and looked at the remnants of the fire. The sounds of penguins started to stir. She got up and left Jack and Elliot sleeping by the dead fire and started her walk.

She walked past burrow three and six in the dark. She walked with a peace in her heart that she didn’t notice. The peace disapeared when she stepped on something soft and a penguin screamed at her and flapped violently and she screamed in return and covered her mouth. She was about to bend down to console the creature as if it were a puppy whose paw she stepped on, but the penguin was not having it and starting flapping towards her. Marg jogged away as the penguin waddled and bleated behind her. She started giggling as she heard the penguin growing quieter as she left it behind her, the feathered necklace bouncing against her collar and the cool air carrying her across the island.

She didn’t stop jogging. She jogged right through camp where Simione was shuffling somewhere inside her battered tent. She jogged to the south side of the island where she paused on the beach by burrow sixteen, took a deep breath and continued jogging along the beach, the gravel shifting under her feet. She ran past penguins as they shook their heads and parents who were warming their chicks, she ran past chicks who were screaming to the sky and groups waddling into the water. She thanked the penguins who were in the middle of their yearly molt for their feathers, and she thanked the sun for always coming on time.

She praised the wind for running beside her, and she laughed at the idea of an angry penguin pecking Jack awake. She ran along the beach tasting the salty air in her sinus’s and the dryness in her mouth. She made it all the way back to the fire where Jack was laying up on his elbows. She waved to him and ran past Elliot who was still sleeping covered in sand and still clutching his boots. She ran along the coast of the entire island until she ended on the Eastern shore where burrows four and five were. She paused at the limp bodies of two chicks and frowned. Then she started laughing. She left the bodies there and ran back to camp, her clothes collecting sweat.

Back at camp Marg found Simione boiling water, dressed in the same heavy olive green jacket she wore each day and on every island. She jogged to Simione and took a seat next to her to collect her breath.

“Good morning?”

“So far.” Marg said between breaths.

“Good.” Simione smiled.

Marg took a deep inhale through her nostrils and held it, releasing it with a deep sigh from her mouth. Simione took the steaming water off the fire and turned off the Primus. She took two spoons of Nescafe and dropped it at the bottom of her tin, filling it up with the boiling water and using the spoon to stir it.

“You think the boats coming?” Marg asked excitedly.

Simione put the spoon down.

“Well, there’s no telling without the radio.”

“Right.” said Marg, slowing her breathing. “I do hope so. Say, is the money still on our boat?”

“What do you need money for?”

“It’s to tip the boatman.” Marg smiled, “If he’s still coming.”

“No no,” Simione said, “It should be in the locker in Jacks tent.”

“Great thanks” Marg said standing up.

She went into the tent and moved the dingy aside to crack open the metal box. She took out ten 500 peso bills, folding them neatly and tucking them in her inner jacket pocket. She walked out of the tent as Simione was scooping coffee into another cup and she looked up at the sky and a feeling of great anguish came over her. The penguins bleated everywhere and the sun was rising from the East and in her chest returned the deep feeling of an empty void. She ignored it and sat next to Simione, who was stirring a tin of coffee for her.

Simione and Marg sat with their coffees talking about nothing important. Jack and Elliot wandered into camp and the group talked about music they’d love to hear again and everyone was shocked when they learned Simione owned every Elvis album on vinyl.

“What!” Simione laughed at their astonishment. “Nothing shameful about shaking a pelvis!”

Marg laughed and looked into her cup. Jack started talking ironically about morals as Elliot told him he’s nothing but a hound dog. The surface of the black coffee glossed in the sunlight and she could make out a faint reflection in the dark tint. She brought her nose close and smelt it deeply and smiled. Elliot had started spinning in circles waving his hand around him like he was a cowboy rangling cattle. She cackled at the idea of Elliot without his glasses and jacket and saw his sand covered pants turning into the Levi’s blue-jeans of American ranchers.

The bleating of penguins were reaching their climax when they suddenly faded to silence and the only sound she heard was Elliot and Jack laughing as Simione defended her vinyl collection. She turned her head upwards and saw the shadow of a Condor gliding over the island.

“Condor!”

The team stopped talking and collectively turned upwards to trace the condor’s gargantuate wings against the sky and floating like a distant ship into the horizon. The bleating of penguins did not pick up, and a low humming was heard in the distance. Marg shot up, her coffee spilling on her hand and she listened for the sound of a diesel engine. It was the boatman.

The condor passed overhead and the penguins started bleating again, softly at first, then into the drowning ambience she was accustomed to.

“What is it Marg?”

“I hear the boat.”

Everyone stood up and looked at each other with a mix of worry and excitement.

“Im suprised they came.” Elliot said gently.

“Im glad he came. Im starting to miss the world.” Simione said solemnly, adding ironically at the end: “But not that much.”

Marg could see the blue hull in her mind and she felt the turmoil in her chest folding over on itself. She thought about the money in her pocket.

“Lets go.” she said, starting in a run to the remnants of last nights fire that overlooked the Beagle Channel.

Marg arrived first at the miniature overlook and saw the blue hull cutting through the waterline. She jumped up with both fists pointing to the sky, again and again. The boat blew its horn. Jack arrived and looked at the boat and cheered with her and hugged her. The boat blew its horn again.

“By Gosh by golly, I’m praying he has more reds.”

Marg smiled at the crusing boat, watching with fervor and fear and the turmoil in her chest that would not cease to exist, but she did not mind it. She knew she was feeling because she was alive.

Simione was the last to arrive at the overlook and she only looked. Elliot and Jack were dancing with their arms interlocked and Elliot screamed out in his spinning:

“God bless the day!”

The boatman appeared on the deck. He dropped anchor a few hundred feet away from the teams boat and threw the dingy overboard. He jumped in and paddled to shore, close enough to keep his pants from getting too wet. The team watched him tie his dingy to a rock and Jack was the first to greet him with a handshake.

“Jonny” he laughed, “Good grief am I happy to see you. The old one threw my last cigarette into the fire, with the radio too.”

Jonny met Jacks hand with a smile and told him that was hard to believe.

“And good morning to you too” he added.

Jack laughed heartily and helped the boatman pull his dingy to shore. Simione was watching and Elliot had ran to camp and back to the shore with a pouch of letters he was going to mail. Marg saw Elliot with his pouch and remembered the dead chicks of burrow four and five.

Jonny unloaded the first metal box from the dingy onto the beach and crouched to open it with Jack over his shoulder. It looked like they were opening chest of burried treasure. Jack smiled when he saw six packets of Marlboro reds and the iconic red label of a Nescafe jar.

“Good grief, the lengths you’ll go for for an American.” Jack said, “Shoot, I forgot the money, I’ll be right back.”

As Jack turned to sprint to camp, Marg told him she had it. When Jack stopped, Jonny yelled and told him it was on the house.

“On the house?” Jack said puzzled.

“On the house.” Jonny confirmed.

“No, no. That won’t do. Marg,” he yelled, “You said you got it?”

“I insist. You wouldn’t insult my generosity, would you?” said Jonny.

“Allright Jonny. If you insist. But I just feel awful making you go through those lengths for a pack of Americans. Let me atleast buy the rest of the them off you.”

“This box is for you.” the boatman said.

“What!?” Jack nearly yelled. He looked at Jonny who was smiling gracefully at him.

“Jonny, If you were a woman I’d kiss you right now.”

“Relajate.”

“Im only kidding but, I dont know what to say.”

“Dont mention it. I got two more boxes with,” Jonny turned to the dingy and lifted out a wooden chest, “with the rest of your food.”

“You said you lost your radio?” Jonny added.

“Thats right.” Jack paused. “But we’re making do.”

“No worries. I’ll be back manana with a new one. That one you will have to pay for, so save your money.”

Marg thought about the five-thousand pesos in her pocket.

“What a fellow you are, Jonny!” Jack said.

“If only tomorrow...” he added, as if speaking to himself.

Jonny raised an eyebrow, something festering behind his eyes as he thought about Jacks remark.

“Yep. Manana. Here, help me unload the rest of these chests.”

“I gotcha. In a rush, Jonny?”

“Nope. Just the quicker we do the work, the quicker we can finish talking.”

Jack laughed awkwardly at himself.

“I gotcha.”

When Jack and Jon finished unloading the dingy, Elliot went up to Jonny and told him he had some letters to send home. Jonny laughed and told Elliot they’ll get to where they’re going. Elliot hesitated before handing over the letters, placing the strap of the pouch into Jonnys outstretched hand. He tossed the pouch into the dingy and looked at Elliot. Elliot thanked him and walked away.

Jon sighed and wiped the salt from his hands onto his shirt. He said hello to Simione and Simone replied with a good morning. Jonny faced Marg and Marg took in his tan and weathered face and saw what years of working in salt air does to the skin.

“How are the penguins?”

Marg opened her mouth and stuttered on the first word.

“Th’ They’re good. Mostly.” her words came out quicker than she could think. “Some chicks had their parents eaten by sea lions. They died of starvation. Or cold.”

“Thats not good.” the boatman said to her with his eyes stuck on her face.

“No.” she said.

“Say, Jonny. What are your planning on doing tonight?”

Marg felt the weight of everyones attention on her.

“What im doing tonight...” Jonny repeated. “After this, I’m docking. Then I’ll go look for a radio. And spend the night with my wife and child.”

“Th’” Marg caught herself stuttering, repeating herself.

“Thats very nice. Here, I have this for you. For the radio. Or, for yourself actually. To take the night off.”

She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a folded wad of 500 peso bills, pushing them to Jonny. Raising her eyes from the bills she saw the boatmans face go solemn and empty, then he took the bills and rubbed them with his thumb.

“For me?”

“Yes. For you.” she confirmed. “To spend time with your family. We all need to spend time more time with family.”

Jack and Elliot and Simione were all watching the interaction with great interest and a simultanious grief washed over them.

“Gracias.” he said nodding, putting the bills into his pocket without a second look.

“You’re all very kind. You make me very grateful to be working where I am.”

Marg teared up with a smile and bobbed her head at him. Jonny couldn’t bring his eyes up from the ground. Elliot left the beach before anyone could see his eyes start to water. Jack and Simione stood side by side and watched Jonny look at Marg and hesistate before stepping in slowly for an awkward hug. They broke off and Marg turned around to hide her face.

“It’s just.” she said between tears, “The penguins.” she let out a strange laugh.

“I know.” Jonny said. “I know.”

Jack shook the boatmans hand firmly and nodded at him. Marg smiled at him with wet eyes. He untied his dingy and pushed it into water, jumping in without getting his boots wet. He sat himself right, put the oars into the water, and started rowing to his ship.

“Hasta Manana!” he yelled. The team waves goodbye.

The three of them watch him off, following him as he spins around Isla Martillo and back up the beagle channel. The penguins did not stop bleating. The chicks did not stop screaming. The boat disapeared into the distance up the channel. The team returned to camp. Jack found a bottle of Liquer hidden under the cigarettes in the metal chest. Simione laughed at this harder than anyone had ever heard her laugh. Elliot found them passing a bottle around and laughing or crying or expressing whatever emotion they had left. He walked up to them and choked back a tears, and bowed down deeply with an arm outstretched, like he had just finished a grand show. Much to the teams amusement. Elliot took a seat and smiled.

Jack tried telling a story and Simione kept interupting with some nonsense that was very unlike her. Elliot found this hysterical and even Jack couldn’t stop from laughing between each word.

“God this taste like someone fucked a raspberry.” Simione announced.

Elliot burst and Jack paused with a completely sincere look of shock on his face. Simione saw this and would not stop laughing. The penguins did not stop bleating. The chicks did not stop screaming.

Marg’s hands were folded on her lap when she decided to get up. She started walking to the beach. Nobody asked her where she was going, but they followed behind her without hesistation and with laughs. She walked slowly, feeling each step through her boot, through her sock, to the skin on her soles. She breathed slower, each inhale cleared her mind and lifted it to the sky. She walked to burrow seven and watched a parent waddle up to its chick, stretch its neck over its mouth, and regurgitate a mass of flesh and meat into the chicks mouth, bulging in its throat until it was swallowed and the chick screamed for more, and the parent gave it more. She sat down in the gravel, put her hand around the feathered necklace, and watched.

The boatman returned to the dock and got off his boat and tied the knot he ties in his sleep. He steps off the boat ties another knot before unloading. He is used to the salt smell and the crisp air and the sun today is especially bright and pleasant. He leaves his belongings in the boat and walks. His wife and his daughter Maria are waiting for him at the end of the dock. He scoops her up and kisses her cheeks and pulls his wife in with his other arm and holds them.

“How are they.” his wife asks.

The boatman squeezes his daughter and places her on her feet. They start walking along the grey beach.

“They asked me what I was doing when I got back to the mainland.”

“Oh?”

The boatman kept walking. Maria stopped to pick up a seashell. He continued.

“Yeah. They seemed to know something was different.” he paused.

“The four of them. The main one told me there were a few chicks had there parents eaten by sealions. Seemed pretty distraught.”

“Thats not bad.” said his wife.

“No.”

Maria ran in front of her parents and started scooping sand into a large shell. They both stopped to watch her. The boatman smiled.

“Lucky them.” he said.

“Peaceful.” replied his wife.

The boatman wrapped his arm around his wife and his daughter ran off in front of them. He watched her bend over, scooping sand with one shell and pouring it into another. He could smell the wet sand and salty air he had ignored for forty years, but today, this specific Wednesday, he smelt it all. He heard the wind carrying itself over the ocean, felt it. He let the sun beat the side of his face as it always had. He reached into his coat pocket and rubbed the wad of 500 peso bills. He turned to the distant horizon over the South Atlantic, squeezing his wife and watched as the sky sparked into an orange red unlike anything in an ordinary life.

Thank you for reading.

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Spaces are great.

Faces on my calendar,
not duties nor days
but spaces 
which should've been filled
and great. 

Motionless

Woah Greatness!
You may have saved me,
though you hath not,
and not for much
stopped myself 
from beginning a day
which should've ended
yesterday...

Writing to explore the world

Wild ravens not departing, simply put on page,
as gravestone hedges 
in May's bipolar crash,
the pen which steals itself
a mind racing 
with new running starts,
through a dozen bullets grazing 
two jays with dots
as he too would pass 
the high life,
much higher than mine, o'
with its writing so serialized, o'
without passion being 
jeopardized
O' what a thing to write 
such a magnificent
story line.

Ode to Pessoa.

On this page that lay in my face
a living word and breathing disgrace
a written man without taste for love
a working soul which know no dove 
the pseudonym which hold the fate
of an author who will not mistake
the million names not to be unmade
that fill his life and disguise his face. 

Drive

A quiet town pierced a mind which only wished to forget.

Pierced. Even years after he left for good. Visions of a house that still creaks when the dry, October wind hits its wooden walls and frame.

There, in the south of Massachusetts, between forests and fields, a town named Monson sticks to his tongue like spectral dryness.

With it, a house that feels sharp. Like a tiny piece of glass in the tip of his finger. It pricks. Size doesn’t matter when it comes to pain.

His unconscious clawed: I need a sip.

He left Connecticut that moment and began his drive up north.

Two hours.

Through cities.

Then towns.

Fields of corn turned to mazes and barns with chipping paint. October is in session, and spirits couldn’t scream any louder. The roads are empty as the fields.

A tree, an old oak probably, first stole his attention. A sentinel at the top of an overgrown hill. Its contorted limbs and branches reach to the sky like it wants to give the clouds a lashing. It has no leaves and its bark is nearly black. Like it was struck by lightning.

In the center, a crevice the size of an infant stares like a void, an opening like the devils mouth.

He drives past without any attention on the road, staring deep into the void of the crevice, listening for the reasons that drove him from Monson the first time.

The heavy air around that lone tree was intoxicating. Invisibly intoxicating. Like carbon-monoxide during a dream.

Slowing down wasn’t an option. Stopping was.

When the speedometer hit zero, the car was well beyond the tree. Its crevice turned to an angle he hadn’t seen before.

The treeline — a colored forest that wouldn’t dare get near that blasted tree — stands watching his next move. Judging.

He gets out of his car and walks to the wooden fence guarding the field. Or protecting the road.

He looks out to the lonely tree. A wind whips his hair and forces his cheeks to squeeze. The branches of the tree do not move or wave in the wind. They stand stiff. Dead. Like a statuette.

But the crevice gapes, gapes like it inhaled the wind, or like it just blew out the breeze. He is certain he saw it. It’s the only movement beside the tall, waving, yellow grass.

The wind falters and dies. He stares into the crevice, not breaking contact for a moment. A light humming enters his ears. The crevice doesn’t move. The humming turns a buzzing, a buzzing, buzzing into his brain. It won’t get out. The crevice doesn’t speak. Where is the buzz?

Down the empty road that leads through the final stretch into Monson, his eyes catch a lonely grey pickup truck. An old ford. Its engine is the loudest thing since he got off the highway. He watches as it rumbles up the road and gets closer.

The nearer it got, the heavier he became. The louder became the buzzing.

He paid a quick glance to the tree, almost like he were suspicious. Checking if it was still there.

The buzzing truck blew a breeze past him just as he turned back. Came all the way up the hill in that moment he used to turn his head. He barely caught a glimpse of the driver. From the back: a slim figure with long, straight black hair.

He watched the pickup truck drive down the road and disappear behind the forest’s protective shield. It was time to do the same.

The tree will not need a goodbye, but in that final look he gave it, the quick check before turning to his car, he felt a pull into its heavy air.

A heavy air that sunk into his skin.

A feeling he could only describe as guilt.

Long Road

He steps into his idling car and continues to where he was going. Wherever that was.

The forest opens and swallows the road. Colored leaves drop as if to say, welcome — or goodbye.

He speeds a little more than usual. As if escaping something that he wasn’t certain was chasing him. But he speeds anyway.

Through the empty forest, past the whips of wind that rip colored leaves from their branches. New England is beautiful in October, he thinks.

On the empty road, he takes any moment he can to stare into the belly of the forest. Through the trees and leaves. He’s searching for something. Whether it’s there or not, he cannot remember, but he searches for the sign that’ll tell him, this is it.

The road winds and his engine rumbles. No birds in the forest. No squirrels on the trees. He’s in the in-between of emptiness and loneliness.

He drives without the radio because, even if the signal reached, it would only distract him. Make him forget even more.

Between the trees and fauna of the forest, he thinks he sees what he’s looking for. Brown wood stripped of its bark. Cut down into panels and turned to the walls of a house. So familiar.

He sees it through the forest, but he doesn’t know how to get there.

Continuing down the long road, he spies on the house. Waiting for it to form into something real.

Like a daydream turning to reality, he hopes the forest might break into a driveway. But the house does not become anything more than slits of brown wood between birch trees and colored leaves that he flies past in his drive.

He does not slow down.

Eventually the road turns in the direction of the house. Straight into its direction. Yet the house does not manifest. It remains like the surface of water in the sun, a set of moving reflections that do not sit still.

Straight ahead of him, nothing but more paved road cutting through the stomach of forest between the farms of countryside and the lonely town of Monson.

He eyes between the trees. Searching for the brown paneling and dusty windows.

All he sees is dead leaves and drying bark.

The house he thought he saw is not in front of him. Which is where it should be. But he looks to the forest through his passenger side window and sees again that moving reflection.

Iridescent paneling; brown from the wood, blackening from the years. Oh how it’s been a-many years…

BUMP, the car jumps, smacking something on the road.

His heart beats and he checks the rear-view.

A tangled black mess twitching on the road. Twitching like it wants the twitching to stop. He hit something living.

He pulls over quickly and runs out. Car idling. Checking on the dying creature.

When he steps out, the twitching black mass slides slowly across the road leaving a trail of dark, slime like trail in its absence.

An unholy movement.

A sliding like a snake from a creature with its limbs twitching and twisting in the air; sliding on its back like its being carried by ants, moving smoother than any creature on this earth, smoother than a snake, in a straight line, with an iridescent shine in the trail it left on the road behind.

It disappears into the ditch before he could make sense of it.

He wants to step closer, but cannot. Not out of fear, but disbelief.

He rubs his eyes and stares into that ditch.

The black trail slowly fades to an oil black in his peripheral, then fades back into road when he looks to it. As if nothing was really there.

Above the ditch and beyond the trees, he sees again that moving reflection: brown paneling infested with moss; dusty windows darker than night; tiles on the roof covered in dead leaves.

Nothing but dead leaves leading up to it.

That house is it.

He debates running straight through the woods to get there.

He turns to the sound of his rumbling car, engine in idle, then looks back to the house.

Nothing but dying bark and dead leaves.

Monson

The brown paneling of that reflective house sits in his mind.

He gets off the road and back into his car, putting it in drive and speeding down the long road.

Fast enough to make his tires hold onto the asphalt for dear life.

Colored leaves fall into his path. Falling like teeth from a rotten mouth.

Nothing moves in his mind apart from the moving reflection of that rotting house.

Entering Monson, MA

Est 1715

Population: 8,150

The road continues until the forest scatters.

Civilization enters.

Long driveways break through the trees. Grass greener than a dollar reminding him that life exists below dead leaves. As long as someone’s there to rake it up.

He drives until he hits the downtown. Cars start appearing on the road and he recognizes a familiar white church resting on a hill.

Familiar, why? He cannot say.

Though it stands as the tallest structure, commanding an air of respect and stability.

His road splits into two ways: up, past the church; down through the center.

He doesn’t know where to go.

Nor, did he have any idea of where to go to begin with.

Part of him wants to turn back onto that long road, back into the forest and walk into depths where nobody will find him.

Or over the fence of that field and into the crevice of that tree.

He would, if he could. Though he chooses the road past the church.

Cars pass him by and their headlights stare like shining eyes.

He slows past the church and stops in front of it. He takes a look into its tall wooden doors. Beyond the doors, closed as they are, he sees through them and to the wooden pews facing an altar stained in blood, or wine. Its white cloth drapes over the wood.

He squeezes his eyes hard and opens them again.

Read more

Before I knew about his parents, there was never a question as to where he came from. For all I was concerned, kids just popped up out of the blue. He was one of those deliveries that came from a stork, or rose from the dirt like a plant. I didn’t know about bumping uglies or genetics or anything of the sort.

He was my brother, and my parents were his parents. My name is Saul, his name is Paul. I figured it was that way on purpose. His features looked like mine, brown eyes and dark hair – though mine became long and wavy, and his stayed short and straight. We walked in a similar way, a bit of a bounce and with quick strides. Over the years the distinctions became more apparent.

In the summer before the new school year, he turned thirteen and hit a growth spurt. He was taller than me. I was jealous and agreed that he could walk himself to school; it was the first day of his last year at middle school. Taller than me, I thought, a middle schooler.

Before then, he never walked alone – not without my company. I’d get used to being dragged along for his adventures, or bringing him on mine. We enjoyed them. It was me who guided him, who treated him like the child who needed guidance. It was important to me to be able to teach him what I knew. Our parents loved it.

That summer, we spent most of the days walking up the street to the soccer field by the reservoir. It had trails that went into the woods. We’d stay for hours, exploring and adventuring. I would take any moment to teach him what I thought was important for him to know. We squished beetles and I told him the insides were how they made jelly and paint –that, if we had to, we could eat them to survive. I would point to oak leaves or grass and tell him that’s where salad came from. He found everything I said as valuable, always believing me – and I believed me too. He didn’t have a reason not to. He knew I looked out for him. Mostly.

On that first day of school, I got up early and left my bed as soon as I heard my parents leave. We only owned one car and they left even earlier than us to get as much work done before the sun was up. Landscaping. They usually left enough money on the table for us to buy lunch, and that was the routine. They didn’t tell me explicitly, but I knew they wanted me to walk Paul to school; I also knew that the walk wasn’t far for him – just up the hill and around the corner. It was my second year in high school, and his last year in middle school. He knew how to get there. My walk was a long one. I was teaching him independence. Those were my excuses. I left Paul a note, a mission, telling him that it’s time for him to walk alone, to lock the door, and don’t mess up or he’ll be in big trouble! I made my way to school.

It was a few minutes into third period on that first day, when the dean interrupted my class as the teacher was going over the syllabus. He said I was being dismissed. Thinking I was in trouble, the room fell quiet as I stood from my desk and walked out. In the hallway, she asked me if I knew where my brother was. I said I thought he was in school. She nodded, and that was the only question she asked. We walked silently to the principles office.

When we arrived, the principle was standing next to a police officer with his thumbs around his gear belts. I noticed the gun in the holster. The handcuffs. They both turned to me with a strange look on their face. The officer asked me the same question about my brother.

“Is he not in school?” I ask.

The exact words the officer gave me didn’t matter as much as what was implied. My heart dropped when I put the pieces together.

“I’m bringing you home,” he says with a huff, “your parents are already on their way.”

I sat silently and thoughtlessly in the passenger seat, looking out the window as we drove past the streets I walked just a few hours earlier. It was less than a ten-minute drive, but it felt like an eternity.

We got home and he pulled into the driveway. Our pickup truck was haphazardly parked next to another police cruiser. The front door was open. Rushing out of the car before the officer could say a word, I ran into the open house. My mom was sitting on the couch, her head shaking in her hands as she repeated something in a low murmur. Dad was standing with an arm crossed over his chest, holding an elbow while his hand covered his mouth. An officer stood in our living room speaking to them. There was something heavy in the air.

I remained at the foot of the door, motionless and momentarily unnoticed, startled by the words I heard, “…searching, until we find him.”

“Find him?” I asked.

The house turns to me like I had just spoken a curse. From behind, heavy footsteps of the officer and his jingling belt come up the steps and into our home.

“Oh SAUL” my mother screams, leaping from her seat to rush over.

“My baby” she says as she hugs me briefly, quickly moving her hands to my shoulders, her eyes widening into mine – “where’s your brother!?” she asks.

I do not respond. I try, but I know he’s not at school. That’s the only place I can think of. I look into my mother’s red eyes with shame and fear.

“Saul.” My dad starts. I turn to face him.

“When you dropped Paul off, did you see him walk through the doors?”

My heart beats and my eyes move to the floor. I can’t bear to speak the truth. It felt like I’d die.

“…no” I say slowly, my voice cracking.

“Oh, oh god” my mother says, taking her hands from my shoulders to cover her eyes. She backs up and faces the couch, “where can he be” she asks, speaking to nobody in particular.

The officer in the living room speaks up.

“Listen, he can’t be that far… we’ll find him. Do you have any idea where he’d run off to?”

A moment passes without response, and it hits me slowly, “… the woods?” I suggest.

It took less than ten minutes of searching before we found him a little ways off one of the trails. It was a terrifying sight. Kneeled over, digging a hole with his bare hands, nobody noticed what was beside him until my mother frantically ran over to get him. She called out his name, then stopping in her tracks to let out a gut-wrenching shriek. As Paul turned around, bloody stains glowed on his light blue t-shirt as we recognized the wrecked brown corpse of one of the neighborhoods pitbulls. I stopped moving as soon as I noticed it.

“Mom!” Paul yelled.

I felt nothing but fear as I tried racking my mind for answers. For that moment, nobody knew what to think.

He quickly explained himself – that he was walking to school and watched a car hit the dog and just proceeded to drive off. Running to the dog, he watched it suffer and die in his arms. He wanted to bury it. We were relieved, but still didn’t know what to think.

When the officers asked about the car, he said he couldn’t remember anything other than that it was a white pickup truck. They said they’ll do what they can.

It wasn’t until we got home that our parents found the note I left for Paul about walking to school alone. I got chewed out that day, and I walked him to school every day until the school year ended. Things were still pretty normal then; he would tell me about his favorite stories from English class. I loved hearing them. I suggested he start writing down his favorite quotes — to remember them better.

Nobody brought up the event after the fact, but every time I saw that baby blue t-shirt, I swear I could still see the dark stains on it. Glowing. I don’t know how they cleaned it – or why they did – but that shirt to me is where it started.

When the school year ended, the summer came, and Paul suggested we go to the woods. I agreed but couldn’t help thinking back to that day last year. I didn’t bring it up, but maybe I should have. By this time, he had a mini weapons collection of pocket-knives and slingshots. I had gotten into bird watching and brought my binoculars. We were sitting by the reservoir; my binoculars were strapped around my neck and Paul was carving his name into a tree. Over and past the water, a large bird swoops down and perches atop a dead tree. Bringing my binoculars to my eyes, adjusting the focus and homing in on the tree, I watch a falcon as it scans the area. Paul makes a remark about scavenging for rocks, and I casually acknowledge it, trying not to lose my focus. I hear him walking away.

The falcon falls and soars into the sky. In awe I watch, losing him and bringing my binoculars back down. I look around for Paul and notice he’s not anywhere close by. From the trees above, a whistling chirping draws my attention. A common grackle, a small bird with an iridescent neck, yellow eyes, and a black tail. It’s close, but I turn around and bring my binoculars up to see it anyways – it’s a favorite of mine, a New-England classic. The grackle darts its head, puffs its chest and lets out another whistling chirp. Before I could muster a thought of appreciation, it smacks out of focus and falls off the branch – I snap my neck from the binoculars and watch it fall to the ground, twitching and twitching on the dirt. I’m shocked to hear Paul’s voice from the trees edge exclaiming “I got it! I got it!”

“PAUL” I shout to him, standing in fury as I ask him why the HELL he would do that.

He looks at me with confusion, asking me innocently, “well, don’t you want to see whats inside it?”

My stomach turns at the thought. I’m furious and shocked, unable to say a thing in my thoughtless stare, watching as he slips his slingshot into his pocket.

“Well? Dont’cha?”

I told him we were going home, and he looked disappointed. At the time I didn’t know what to tell our parents. Or if I was going to tell them. He asked if I was watching the bird, and if I thought it was a good shot. Truthfully, it was a good shot. And that thought scared me. I walked home silently, my mind racing as he skipped behind me, unable to process if I was overreacting or if he was completely insensitive. I shut myself in my room that night, and when my parents asked if everything was alright, I told them what happened.

The day after, they confiscated his weapons and said he couldn’t get them back until next year. I’m sure that blue t-shirt had been leaking in their mind like how it was in mine. I couldn’t look at him the same after, but he reacted even worse. He started arguments and would frequently run out of the house when he was told to go to his room. It got so bad, so quickly, that a few weeks into summer, they sent him to a camp. It was basically a summer boarding school. When the summer had ended and it was time to get ready for high school, he came back like a stranger in a haze.

He wouldn’t respond to anyone with anything more than a few words. He refused to go shopping for school supplies and would stay up real late into the night. Since his room was next to mine, I would be falling asleep and hear through the wall what sounded like scratching and flicking. Turns out, he stole a kitchen knife and started carving gibberish into his desk. It was quotes from his textbooks, Shakespeare or whatever, or verses from the bible. We didn’t find out until the first day of school — that, and much more.

That day, our parents stayed home from work to make sure we both made it into school. He was still sleeping when we were having breakfast, and so my dad went up to get him. They found him passed out on his desk, an open book and the kitchen knife lying beside his head.

That morning was a nightmare. Mom rushed upstairs, and when she got back down, she told me to get into the car. It was all just screaming from upstairs.

The car ride was long and when I asked what happened, she didn’t say anything. She was looking for something to see on the road, and I didn’t ask again.

It was second period when I heard my name called over the intercom. I was to go to the office. Remembering what happened last year, I was terrified. The teacher gave me a confused look after hearing it and wrote me a hall pass. Walking through those halls I knew there was something wrong, very wrong. I could feel it my bones.

I turned the corner the office and there were three police officers waiting for me. They told me they were taking me to the station. I wanted to ask why, so I did, but they said they couldn’t tell me until later — but I wasn’t in trouble. By this point, all I had were questions and worries, and fears, and fears. Paralyzing fears. I got into the car nearly trembling and they brought me to the station.

Walking in, I remember the smell of products from the janitor cleaning the floor. I found my mother in the back, hysterically crying and clinging onto who I thought was the police chief. Immediately, I felt a swelling in my heart and rushed to cling onto her, nearly toppling them both over as I did. She turned around and choked out the words, “my boy, my boy,” repeatedly as she squeezed me tighter and tighter. I held her up as best as I could, but I felt her falling over me, “my boy, my boy” still choking out of her. In my mind were racing questions and questions; I had to ask, I knew I had to ask, but I couldn’t. Part of me knew I wouldn’t have to. I was happy not knowing until I had to.

When my father went upstairs, he found Paul passed out and drooling over the book, Macbeth, with a black powder and rolling papers beside the kitchen knife. He was furious and shook Paul awake in his shouting. That was when my mother ran up. She saw the knife, the powder, the lazy eyes of Paul staring at my father, and she ran down to tell me to get into the car. She heard my dad screaming at Paul and a banging on the wall, she got the keys and drove me to school without even closing the door.

When she got home, the front door was still open. She said she felt it before she even knew it. Slowly she walked inside. She described the house as haunted and pale, something in the air heavier than lead and even more toxic. There was only one sound echoing between the passing cars from outside and her slow footsteps up the stairs – giggling, a low and distant giggling that covered the sound of our creaking staircase. When she made it up the stairs, an odor emerged. Sulfur, and iron.

She paused at the top, unable to make the decision to go back down or to turn into Paul’s room. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath of the stench, and stepped forward just enough to peek her head around the corner of the door-frame.

What she saw sent her into hysteria. Paul was kneeling with his back to the door, sitting on his calves, his forearms drenched in inky blood and his hands smothering my fathers filleted intestines over his face, wrapping them around his neck, rubbing them against his cheek before turning around slowly with wide, red eyes and revealing his closed smile that sent needles through her pupils and nearly killed her on the spot. They made eye contact, briefly, and he turned back around as she stood unable to even scream. She could only move when he paused, sat up straight, and prepared to stand. Rushing downstairs, she dialed 911 before dropping the phone at the sound of footsteps from above, sprinting through the front door and back into the truck.

When she got into her car, the empty door frame at the front was replaced with Paul’s red figure; red from his fingers to his elbows, a crimson face paint and eyes that blended with it. She put the car in reverse, and Paul stepped forward revealing the kitchen knife from behind his back. He positioned it under his chest, pointing it into his diaphragm before falling over the staircase and onto the blade. He laid limply, and that’s how she left him.

We slept in the station that night. They didn’t tell me what happened until the next day. I could’ve gone not knowing. Over the next couple days, the police helped my mother reach out to Paul’s biological parents. Drug addicts unfit for raising a kid. They blamed my mother for what happened.

We moved from friend’s house to friend’s house, staying away from home until the date of the funeral nearly a month later. Father needed a closed casket, but they asked if we wanted Paul’s to be open. We did. We went home for the first time since that day. It was to get Paul’s suit from his first communion. Mom broke down when we got to the driveway; she asked me to go inside for the suit. It was in his closet, she said.

When I turned the key to the front door, it opened exactly as it always had. When I stepped in, it was just as I left it. There was a faint smell of cleaning products and lemon. I walked up the stairs and stood at the top, convincing myself there was nothing in that room. I face the door, twist the knob, and open it. The scent of bleach still strong.

I made my way past his bed and past his desk, trying not to look at anything for too long. I open the closet door and Paul’s clothing falls onto me; the blue T-shirt falling to the ground. I kick it away as soon as I see it. I sort through the clothes and find his suit. Hanging it around my arm, I turn to leave. On the bookshelf above the desk, a book glows perfectly in a slice of the suns rays. Shakespeare’s MacBeth. Below it, light stains of scratched and scribbled words litter the woods surface. The largest of those etchings lay in the middle, four words, reaching to me, reading loudly in my ears:

“Blood will have blood”

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The Sun sets slowly behind clouds on the Andes mountainside. Past the mountain terrain, veering onto gravel, the hum of a grey jeep fills an empty lot. The endless road meets its destination. The humming turns off. Silence twists to a gust of lonely wind.

His boots crunch a space in the gravel, a sigh releasing from his stomach. The old restaurant is empty, abandoned by the world. Wooden panels tear from the posts that once held them, exposed and rusty nails striking the eyes like daggers. Chairs line up across the tables. The air smells dry and cool as clouds push over the unlit city.

Crunching steps bring the wanderer to the wooden porch. An inhaling passes breath of workers and travelers, of locals and cooks, to the man stepping up — an unfamiliar wooden panel creaks in its greeting. Shattered glass from the lights in the ceiling are the only remaining resident. Not even bugs remain as a patron. He smells the lonely odor of vacancy. Home for the night.

He pushes through the only door he sees. The kitchen. Grill tops stained with grease and meat, a fridge that does not hum. He finds a miniature pueblo home on the countertop beside the sink. Casita.

Unlocking the hatch of the freezer door, he pulls it open. Moist, hot air escapes into the growing night. The scent of moldy water through his nostrils. Inside the unpowered, unlit metal box, are empty racks over empty racks. What once held food for travellers from city to mountainside are empty of any clues of the life before. He drops his bag onto the ground and pulls a sleeping bag through the string on his pack, dropping it on the ground and turning to face the coming night.

He squeezes his eyes with the acceptance of darkness. Finally breaking from the tired black and starless nights through the back window of his jeep, the beating wind stealing peace from the heavy silence that consumed the world, the lack of winds brings back the frozen silence to sink deeply back into his mind. He takes the copper bottle his pack and exits the kitchen. The outside air grows thinner with the cold. It smells of vacancy.

He makes way past turned tables and the dustless corners of the open porch. Spiderwebs are empty of predator and prey. The deadly silence quickens his pace. Moving into the center of the dining room he stands in observation and lays his eyes on a window. An unlit gift shop blinks beside the oversized playroom and bright plastic slides untainted by the time. The shop is untouched.

Stepping to the door, he presses his face between his hands and against the dirty glass. His breath fogs the lower half of his view. Untouched bottles of aguardiente, candies and black cigars, chocolates on the wall beside plastic toys and wood carvings of elephants and snakes. An unpowered drink cooler beside the register. Snacks under the glass of the counter.

He shakes the handle with force. The door does not open. Looking around he spots the gravel beyond the plants by the porch. He walks to a rough, grey rock that fits snug into his palm and returns. The remnants of daylight dimly show his reflection in the glass. An untrimmed beard.

He places his copper bottle on the ground behind him. Stepping back, his reflection grows smaller. His jacket is filled and puffy. Pulling his arm back he hurls the gravel rock through the glass with a shattering crash. It land on the floor of the gift shop. Picking up his bottle and getting closer to the door, he butts the copper against the remaining glass and slips his arm behind the open frame to unlock the door.

He pushes it open. The scent of aged wood and old sweets wrap his face with the memories he doesn’t have. He steps into the shop dancing between broken glass and to the back behind the counter. Glass colas, plastic water, he opens the hot air cooler and grabs two cokes. The aluminum cap of the glass cola meets with force the left side of his mouth, hissing open with its own breath as he pries it open. A glug, and a glug, and a satisfied exhale. He puts the bottle on the counter.

He slides open the door hiding snacks. Plantain chips. He grabs as many as he can between his arms, walking back to the kitchen. The sun has vanished from red into grey.

He notices the casita sitting on the countertop. Pristine. Questionably untouched in an otherwise empty room. He lays his snacks beside it. He returns to the gift shop and grabs his copper bottle and takes a heavy swig of his cola. Grabbing two bottles of aguardiente, he brings them to the kitchen and places them beside the casitas, turning them slightly so the logo faces the door. He returns again to the shop to grab his cola.

In the dying light of the wooden shop, a gust of wind sneaks in from the porch and rattles the wooden miniatures dangling on the wall. The metal of their key-chains ding, dang, ding, into his ears. A rustling in the gravel outside. Everything stops in the twilight.

From the shop his eyes scan the window. His jeep stands alone in the gravel like a misplaced tombstone. The wind howls. When the wind howls, the only noise is its howling. The grey and empty sky is dead of any creature that is supposed to make nosie.

He stands stiff with the glass bottle of cola in his hand. Hairs on the back of his neck rise when the wind dies down. He listens to the stillness of the air. The beating of his own breath. Another gust of wind enters the gift shop. Ding. Jing. His eyes move to the dangling miniatures on the wall. Red, yellow, blue — Colombia! Ding. Jing. Jing. He watches the open and broken glass door slowly creeping, crawling back to a close. Its latch gently pressing the frame but never closing with a click.

He sees the scattered shards on the floor in the reflection on the doors bottom half of its unbroken glass. He picks up a large shard by his foot. It is cold to the touch, its edges crisp and sharp.

His next step is carefully placed. His eyes aim at the door. The shard is cold and sharp. He pulls the door with two fingers. It opens without a creak. The cold of open air catches in his beard. The wind sends him a silent gust. His jeep is nearly swallowed in darkness, tires pressed into the gravel, its windows still dusty and missing the rain.

He turns into the heart of the restaurant. Glass cola and broken shard both cold on his skin. He listens to ever footstep breaking silence, seeing every shadow of any object still strong enough to hold the light. Napkin holders and salt shakers, where he left them. Pictures of horses and luscious landscapes, trees he hadn’t seen before, and never will. Casitas line the walls to the bathrooms hall. He imagines a small world where those small houses make a home in. He walks to the first door in the hall. There is no light reaching the end.

A swig of cola and he places it on the ground with a clink. He pushes this door open and enters into darkness. Odorless and dark. He struggles to undo his belt without cutting himself with the glass. A beastly wind beats against the walls of the restaurant. With pants around his hips, he releases onto the floor. Odorless. Splashing. Another common sound. He finishes and gets ready to exit. The wind returns for another beating.

Exiting the bathroom and entering into a melodic wind, the darkness is total and he walks his way back. The wind. He listens. The toe of his boot smacks a bottle on the ground CLINK CLINK, an echoing clink and wind filling the hollow restaurant. Everything stops in that darkness. The clink fades slowly, meticulously, back to near silence. The wind continues in a ferocious howl that flows along the wooden walls. The sound of liquid pouring onto the ground. A deep breath to try and ease his heart.

He makes way past the casitas on the wall and towards the kitchen. Turning the corner away from the dining room, gravity gets heavy — behind him — a drop and blasting shatter of glass spinning him toward the sound with wide eyes, wind flows against his back, his motionless body waiting for a sound, his heart screaming but his silent mind waiting behind his white eyes. Waiting. Squeezing the shard nearly breaking the skin a heavy air descends into his lungs, a cough forming to kick it out but it doesn’t come. On the wall around the corner, the wall covered in casitas, his ears pick up faintly the scratching of wood upon wood, rough and dry — nails maybe — but he hears it. Sound is all he knows.

In the wind, soft strings pluck with callused fingers, a song in the night, spoken, resembling a lullaby in a distant childhood dream, a melodic ambience, the life in its spirit, sweet smells of sugarcane and salted and cooked meat — an echo of his own voice candidly heard since it was first unheard in this solitary travel. SMACK — a dropping and breaking only feet around the corner, wood upon wood, a shadow of a small tiled roof on the floor in front of him. Waiting.

He closes his eyes for a second and opens them again. An orange tiled roof, smaller than his hand, on the floor in front of him, detached from its walls. Inhaling without release, he moves his foot forward, raising the glass shard, turning the corner wide, a crunch beneath his boot, darkness, and broken glass, and four broken walls on the floor. Empty. He swallows his spit and exhales slowly, eyes still wide, waiting for a shadow to emerge from a shadow, knowing fully well that nothing can, and nothing will.

He lifts his boot and looks to the ground. Shattered and scattered, sticking to his boot, an orange tiled roof, crumbling to the ground. He raises his eyes to the dark hall, two white lights, smaller than his palm, pressed against the furthest door on the wall, shining, dimly, like a reflection, looking into him. The nozzle of the cola bottle, sideways and intact on the floor; sharp where its belly used to be, beside newly shattered crumbs of glass, its gravity weighing as the two lights, shining dim, fade backwards into the black shadows at the end of the hall. A darkness surrounds the door.

His steps become louder with the tiled roof in his boot. He inches towards the hall, towards the only white light he had seen. Closing darkness and reflected lights, staring in a vision from the end of the hall — he steps past the four broken walls, past the shattered glass — the shard in his hand inscribing itself to his skin, a warm liquid dripping with his life, his heart beat rising to his ears. The pores of the walls let out short sighs, his own unknown and labored breathing, unknown whether it’s the walls or him making noise. He moves past the broken glass, stepping over it carefully, his movement growing ever softer as the crumbs of roof leave his boots, until he arrives at the door at the end of the hall. Open. Wind behind him, the soft ringing strings of an instrument, far, far away carried long upon that wind. He places his hand on the door to guide him, slow steps, seeing the white light in every direction, turning into the office and its darkness blacker than the starless, moonless, empty nights. The door bangs gently against the wall.

Standing under the frame, he reaches into his pocket. Listening to the silence, waiting for a change, his fingers wrap around cardboard. The last box of matches. He does his best to open it with one hand, pulling out the small phosphorus tipped wood, closing the box and moving it to his other hand, finally releasing his grip of the glass, with a small drip of blood, to strike the match alight. The orange hisses and blinds him for nearly a moment. The dark room flickers in the light. An old computer on a wooden desk, papers on the ground, a broken light-bulb hanging from the ceiling. A guitar resting on the chair. The smell of burning wood and phosphorus. A windless silence.

He takes a breath, breathing through his nose the smoke rising from his horizontal match. Stepping into the flickering room, the air is soft and warm. The small windows touching the ceiling are shrouded with black curtains. On the walls, bulletin boards pinned with papers of schedules and prices. The floor is made of cement. A string hanging from the ceiling light brushes against his hair as he walks to the desk. He drops the glass and it hits the ground, its sharp sound ignored. He listens to the clicking keyboard as he runs his fingers across its buttons. He stops and looks at the guitar. The silence of the room is as heavy as the air. Six strings. Begging.

The heat of the flame nears his fingertips. He picks the guitar by its neck, careful to not disturb a single string, and quickly leaves the room — not shutting the door behind him. He walks through the dark hall, past the broken glass and fallen walls, through the crumbled roof and back to the porch beside the kitchen. He glances at the open door of the gift shop, the glass sitting on the ground. The air still without the wind.

He enters the kitchen, closing the door behind him. He makes out the form of the casita, his snacks, his bottles. He replaces the glass in his hand with the heavy, square bottle of aguardiente, moving closer to his sleeping bag beside the open freezer door. Sitting on the polyester bag, he puts the guitar beside him with a soft thud, still careful not to disturb the strings, and opens the bottle of aguardiente. He puts the mouth to his nose, smelling it, then lifts the bottle above his head, chugging as much as he can and howling when he stops. The bottle hits the ground. He picks the guitar and places it on his lap. The wind returns, entering through the open space in the wall where food used sit. His fingers press on frets into the shape of a chord, the string reverberates softly into the only beautiful sound he can remember.

The wind blows through the wall. He strums, softly, the sound of an untuned C, letting its vibrations fall to the wind. He removes his fingers and strums again, twice. He tunes the guitar as best he can without plucking a single string. His fingers return to the shape of a C, and he strums. The sound floats around the room and into the freezer behind him, bouncing off the walls and into his ears. He plays another chord. Back and forth. Closing his eyes, he lets the soft strings vibrate into the wind, carrying far, far away, into the darkness of the night, from silence into solitude, the only life he had lived.

Disclaimer: This story may contain elements that some readers find disturbing, including religious desecration, violence against animals, and self harm.

From beside the fire came an insatiable ringing, a parasitic raddling creeping through my brain to my eyes, through the air like a draft from an unknown window. It led my sight to the a series of shifting shadows in their ninety degree homes, hiding in corners to twist sharp and obnoxiously, insidiously into my thoughts of every direction, leaving no room for the casual lack of thinking I’ve accustomed myself to with my wakings. In any degree, the shadows of fire speak with personality, but these shadows are unlike any castings from a fire light of the ordinary. Their shapes speak despicably in a bloodwine frame of a bottle I wouldn’t care to try nor try to care about, for I’ve never seen this bottle on my arm chair until now, and I am beyond apathetic towards it. It glows against the dying firelight.

Drifting back into light sleep, the bottle appears behind my twitching eyelids, at first an image obnoxiously apparent. Then blindingly. Sitting on a bookshelf that held anything but books: statues, glasses, skulls of small critters hunted by that wretched owner; every object, every room, its peculiar set of characteristics unique to no place or period as if the house itself was ripped from space and placed precisely where it lay. The house is familiar, but the type of familiar that a place becomes when you’ve seen it within a dream. The reason I was there is most apparent, as my work brings me to many, many extravagant houses. This one, however, was the most extraordinary. Its repossession was big. Everyone had heard the rumors and wanted to see inside. I was the first outsider within those walls in many, many years.

The bottle was nothing to the shelf it was on, a shrine of wickedness to any holy spirit. Gems of every stone ordaining skulls of unrecognizable creatures; bugs either rotting or lifelessly preserved in jars beside black flowers; organs floating in cloudy liquids as if brains and hearts are an appetizer to the main display far worse than any imagination from the outside could conjure. The curdling, defiling monstrosity of taxidermized mice and shrews and birds, nailed in crucifixion to handmade wooden crosses, stained with the dry blood of an owner banging tiny nails through tiny limbs is the scorching memory I cannot forget. Hopefully they were dead already. All of them sat below a carving of the Christ himself, made crudely from the femur of some mammalian species I could almost recognize. The bottle, that wonderful green bottle, sat directly below him.

I took only that bottle, despite all the riches I could’ve hid without second thought, as that bottle was the only thing I needed, and really needed. I toured through the rest of the home in a daze. Numerous jewels sat uncounted, shining, on tables with emeralds green as leaves and ruby dark as blood, the taxidermied deaths of bears or reindeer or jackrabbits with eyes open in a ghastly gaze, mouths agape in a painful scream captured for the eyes of the owner of that cursed house alone. A giant tortoise with cracks in its shells and a neck twisting too obviously in pain is the only true memory of my tour of the house. The wine had blinded me with its dissonance, that opaque, green, unopened bottle glowing with a pulsing liquid both bright and dark, opaque and transparent, as if cosmically gifted with the dueling fluorescence of contradiction which seized every sense from my self.

A sleepwalk took me out of that house, finally, after I had seen everything. Everything. Collected in that so called home. A totem to everything taboo and hidden from common eye, from common mind, so much so that I remember their existence only in the form of a liquid memory, a dream in the sleepwalk of changing scenery that my own conscious repressed as if repelling the contents of the house to save my mind from madness, a madness in my own buzzing joy during that tour so foreign to me in even my daily life, that every sense of danger or hazard normally occupying my behavior as ration or dread should do, was dispelled in that sleepy daze. My inspection must have been crude, as my sight understood nothing in that house except my own imagination and my duty to tell the city the house is ready for repossession, that nobody lives there. I had been ensnared by that wine. Ensnared enough to remain intact until I arrived home with the bottle and left it on the arm chair.

Now I stare at that green bottle with a bubbling fury in my heart. The fire shouts with illuminating shadows on the peeling label and the writing upon it — an inked set of letters, an archaic Hebrew wrapping around the bottle, now crinkling dry as dust, peeling as if the air is corrosive or if the light of fire is enough to wrinkle it into oblivion. The liquid within the glass remains the same as I thought I could remember, a revolting darkness, a squirming and wriggling beast with a body of its own, banging banging against the glass, begging to be released with this incessant ringing and ringing and ringing —

OPEN THE DAMNED BOTTLE!

Springing from stillness on my chair I sprint to the bottle across from me and grab it by the neck, swinging it up and smashing it against the ground and twisting the neck up and down to pour the wine or glass into my mouth, dropping the split bottle to return hands and knees on the floor, soaking up liquid and shards into my palms and licking the soul of my saviors blood with a holy ecstasy to rush in spilling blood tongue a splitting tongue of blood with carved palms on the floor of broken salvation, begging to be broken myself into the revelation of return for the saviors first opening in two thousand years reveling in holy ecstasy and the sweet pangs of slow death!

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This story is inspired by Lovecrafts eight page short, The Hound.

If you enjoyed it, check out my other short stories.

An Easter Carol

Inspired by resurrection, a return to the people, and new life.

Enjoy.

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Under the cover of dawn’s darkness, Gradius draws his shortsword and presses it against the bowels in his stomach.

He pushes the sword through his tight abdomen ignoring the pain, pushing deeper till it stops. He prays to the patriarch of death and falls on his side into the dirt, falling towards a transitioning darkness.

Awakening in the embers of red he finds himself scorching to life as crimson lava burns through his lungs, his arms outstretched above him, fingers clawing towards the surface of Tartarus. The fresh adrenaline of a painful death pulls his nostrils towards the dry under-surface air and lifts his eyes to the stars falling from a crimson night above him.

His head sticks above the lava-sea facing the formed, distant land of scarred and scarlet rocks amongst many other black and squirming dots in the same scorching pain, kicking and pulling as he is to a burnt, not burning, fate to come.

Gradius finds himself on the scarred, scarlet land, taking a breath and feeling the suffocation of no air entering. A void opens from below and swallows him whole, the darkness consuming all sight. What follows is a bright light burning through the cover over his eyes, melting them into their sockets. The light returns back to the empty, consuming darkness, a void of sensation for a moment stretching into eternity. Timeless and untracked.

The end begins with the rising sun. Gradius has his sight returned into the buzzing transparency of the overworld. Below his feet, a faint and glowing opaque dot reminding of the pit from whence he clawed out, the dim green of the Earthen grass transparent as stained glass in the temples memories of his young self remade familiar.

He steps across the land floating, returning home as if he had simply been lost on a journey and suddenly found his way back.

Arriving at the window of the family clay home, he peers in through the open hole and finds a people weeping and rolling in grief. His body lay pale across the wooden table in the center of the room, the chairs they’ve sat in for every breakfast and supper scattered throughout. His sister weeps beside a chair on her knees as his mother argues to herself, pacing in hysterics, his father standing stonelike next to his brother before a body fouled and disemboweled.

Gradius stares through the room before his people. No trouble, no disgrace, just instinctual observance of a passing tragedy, the turmoil which always finds its end. He thought:

His sister throws herself to the floor and mother collapses to console her. The dinner table is staining by the minute. Gradius closes his eyes and returns to the consuming darkness, hollow and cold.

He knows his way home.

On the eve of his birthday, Gradius returns again to white light before his transparent home. A stick fence in the backyard surrounding goats and chickens signal the family’s rising prosperity. He sees his mother through the walls washing vegetables from their dirt, his father rubbing salt on two naked chickens beside her.

His siblings are kicking rocks between a dog running in the yard. He floats to them. His presence radiates and the children stop. Gradius watches them from the house.

His sister Kolea the first to see him, staring back, frozen and slack jawed, followed by his brother, Turth, turning to face him. The two stare in star struck awe as Gradius feels a new, foreign warmth blanketing and funneling into his hollow body.

The warmth covers his skin but leaves through his abdomen. He looks away from his siblings and towards his stomach, drenched and dripping fresh from the piercing shortsword meant to bring his glory. He wretches. Clutching his gut, he looks back to his siblings begging without words as he is struck by a coughing fit that seizes him and forces a drop to his knees. His mother rushes outside with father and Kolea and the family stare in unison into the transparent space like owls towards the night sky.

Kolea is the first to run to Gradius in his coughing fit blood gurgling out his mouth. She drops to embrace him and falls through his matter-less bone onto the dirt below. Gradius, with open eyes, sees his sister scrawling her hands on the ground and in the air searching for a part of him to embrace. The family runs to a drop beside her, his mother staring at where Gradius’s bloodshot eyes would be, seeing through his sockets and to the blue sky behind. She shouts in Latin.

A fury overcomes the choking and coughing fit of Gradius. He returns to the timeless darkness.

The following day Gradius appears in the transparent world for the third and final time. The opaque underworld, the Tartarus inferno glowing under the dawning sun of his birth’s anniversary.

He looks through the clay home to his family shuffling awake. They spend the day quietly absorbed in their duties and by suppertime, they are all together at the table. The wood is noticeably stained darker.

In front of the seat in which Gradius sat for fifteen years lay a stale piece of bread. On the table are two chickens, a boiled stew with vegetables from the garden, fresh bread, and a cheese he’s never seen before.

One by one the family picks apart the meal and lay it on the piece on the bread before his seat. They don’t stop putting food on until there’s barely scraps left. Kolea is holding back tears and his father looks the empty space without movement.

Gradius floats through the wall and appears behind his seat. A paused moment passes and each member pushes their chairs aside in a haste to stand, some falling to the ground with muted thuds. They speak to him in voices filled with passionate emotion though empty of all words. He tries to sit on his chair but he falls through into a squat. The family rush around the table to see their squatting loved one peering back with transparent eyes and a gut drenched and dripping from fresh blood. His mother weeps but no soul dare look away.

Gradius returns to his feet and stands before them. He outstretches his arms as if trying to hold the world in his chest, his family rushing to hug him but missing any part they could hold; instead falling into each others grasp around and inside his empty body.

Where Gradius would like to cry, instead he coughs and gasps and begs through his hollow mind for air — a body, a part of his spirit able to feel the world again. He is seized by tremors and drops to his knees, choking; transparent blood spills from his open mouth and disappears into the dirt floor.

He closes his eyes but still, he sees, his family clutching the air to grab him, their words meaningless and their emotions potently holding him like the embraces he gave away for the peace of darkness.

He chokes and falls to his side inside his home, the family dropping to claw into the dirt as his body floats down into the glowing underworld only he can see.
Descending for a part of eternity, he returns clutching and coughing to the scarred, scarlet nether of Tartarus, laying on his side trying to squeeze the tears from his melted eyes. He only feels the drips of falling stars burning across his cheeks.

Awakening on the floor of his clay home, a dreamlike haze brings the dark winter dawn into his eyes. He stands and spins and turns and sees the shadows of his sleeping family. Rushing to his parents laying on their blanket on the ground, his sister and brother between the two, he jumps and crushes them with the weight of his body, waking them in hysterics.

His father wrestles Gradius off of them and sees tears rolling from his sons eyes, the manic explanation of some dream burning off his tongue like prophecy. Gradius leaps again at his father and clutches him with the strength of a lion, refusing to be parted more than an atoms space from his beating heart.

The family sits up and questions him each in their own startled confusion. Kolea begins to laugh. She’s never seen her brother with emotion, nor any man for that matter. Gradius leaps and hugs his sister and brother and mother in one swoop of his arm and holds them with tears flooding, speaking of a death he did not prepare for.

When the war came, he carried the vision with him through deserts and dirt, through work and blood spilled for his people. The short sword given to him becomes the monument to his glory, hanging over the hearth. The gold that rushed after the war brings his family’s home the wooden fence and goat and many chickens he saw that faithful night.

For nearly every night that followed, Gradius made habit to cover his eyes with cloth to re-envision the transparent; the crimson night where stars fell down to Earth. Each time, he felt the stroke of a tear creeping down his cheek, but never could he feel it with his touch.

On the anniversary of his birth, the family celebrated with a small feast of chicken and goats cheese and fresh bread and a stew of vegetables he pulled from the garden. Before they eat, Gradius stands. He looks over his family, speaking:

*** ***

END

*** ***

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Excel outline and first draft below my previous story and chat:

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An Easter Carol one day drafting process.

The short came to me in a moment I was imagining eternity, joyfully weeping before the cross at church on Easter Sunday. After that I thought, if Christmas has a carol, so should Easter. I never read Dickens’ original, but I knew it involved ghosts and new life following a new, given perspective. I know its a Christmas Carol, but i never read it, so to me, it also sounds like an Easter story. At least, from tonight’s Palm Sunday point of view.

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**

**

**

The outline and drafting process

The outlining plotgrid inspired by Claire Fraises near final development of her plot grid,
originally based on JK Rowlings plot grid who I, at this moment, genuinely forgot what she wrote but Im pretty sure its harry potter adjacent.

The chart began like this:

Refined into this:

And Morphed into this:

Starting off with that blank template, I had no idea where to start, where to place it, how to move it along. I laid my head on the desk in a feeling near exhaustion, and an rolls in. Based on my experience at church and my toilet reading of Sapiens. I labeled the columns first and left space for 0 so i could freeball some ideas to the wind.

The chart developed from these columns. throwing anything at the wall to a loose outline. I moved along row 0 along the columns to fill in as much as i could archetypally before setting up a time and place and mission.

I had no care for the finer details. That comes after the vision.

That vision started rolling in after I named the character Gradius.
The environment came right after.
For the plot and major themes, I filled them quickly as I thought and started developing subplots to give myself more ways to move the main plot.

Everything remained flexible along these stages, and I knew anything can be added later. New rows opened up, their colors changed based on my emotion, and the first outline was ready for me to use when I started the first draft.

After dinner I read some more Sapiens and got the idea stuck in my head of old, old places and simple people and war and then I got to drafting. I leaned into the roman sounding name of Gladius. All the imagining of Christ rolling back a stone in the desert left my brain stuck seeing ancient Israel.

After the environment came, the story came.

A tragedy, followed by a comedy.

I heard at church. “Why are you weeping” told to Mary Magdalene two or three times before she comically realizes Jesus is not a gardener who took the body but the resurrected body. She throws away her plague of sorrow and rejoices.

Tragedy followed by comedy.

That is the main plot.

To begin the story

I just used the idea of a dream because I had some real bad dreams that teach real good lessons about the psyche if you know how to look at them. This started not with a dream, per say, because im not sure why i dont see this like a dream but a return. Or an intervention. Still, the dreamlike start came visually sharp and in passionate speed.

Not strictly following my plot grid, I created a world in my head where the story took life of its own.

Ran myself in hour long fragments, simple breaks between, getting it done in a few hours. Not much space for thinking, but the Art of the Draft is the first one being flexible.

To end the story

It stayed going the same direction as the outline but ending in a different location. Location, because I wouldnt say the story arrived at its destination, but somewhere looking over it.

To end this, I left it as mythical bones. A symbolic reminder for how I can add more. It still needs a destination.

After the first draft comes the Art of the Edit: cutting heavily and adding gracefully.

I edited right in the substack editor. Changes there feel like the final draft.
Editing for me is the re-collecting plot points based on the new flow; removing everything that impedes the flow; and emphasizing the tone of what the story is saying.

When it comes to dialogue, I find the substack pull-quoting to be my favorite way of expressing dialogue. Especially after writing that dialogue heavy hardboiled bar scene. All the pull quotes makes me feel like im reading a silent movie.

In this story, An Easter Carol, i focused on making it without much dialogue. The weight of raw sensation is much heavier for the mind.

Thank you for reading.

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For making it this far, salut.

Raymond Chandler had this script he rewrote drunk cause the navy said the original wasn’t good for morale. The Blue Dahlia, 1946. Noir. This has nothing to do with that, other than maybe being the inspiration.

*Rockbody Pub and Bistro

*Enter Bridgette

The smell of alcohol rising with the sound of nobodies talking. She feels right at home through that open door. No sound more peaceful than the sounds of people talking to anybody but her. Bridget sits at the barstool in the far corner away from anyone but the bartenders line of sight.

He comes over and takes her drink. Extra dirty martini. The sound of drunken laughter behind her comes when the tall glass lands in front of her.

She hands him a card. Taking the first sip a somebody comes up to her.

The smell of flavored vodka. She turns to it.

Toothy smile. Doesn’t show much in the light.

She sips her drink and looks at the portrait on the wall.

She replies with dead eyes.

His face burns up.

She pictures him.

She takes another sip and looks away. The guy stands up and walks to his group.

Fourteen nights in a row. There’s always somebody thinking that bein alone is an accident.

*Enter Cronk

The man opens the door to the blue-light bar stepping in with a half-bitten smile. He squeezes between two barstools ignoring the people sitting on them and gets the bartender to make him his usual. Jameson on the rocks. A double.

He leans an arm on the bar scanning the surroundings. Women in groups lips loud as hyenas. College grads standin by the tables slurring bad jokes they’ve been slinging since junior year.

His eyes land on a fresh brunette staring at the bottles behind the bar sitting lone except for her dirty martini. The tender drops his drink on the bar drink and he leaves a twenty in return.

He grabs his drink and takes a sip. Making way over to the lady he sees a baseball cap take the empty stool next to her. He leans on the bar then drinks then watches.

She’s sitting there cool as cucumber.

The baseball cap spins the brim 180 degrees and leans into her hand over his mouth elbow on the bar and started whispering like he was spilling beans on underground midget wrestling.

The boy’s friends are all watching laughing from the table and when he comes back to the group they put their arms around him and laugh harder.

Cronk takes another sip and gets walking to her again when another somebody breaks off from the group and goes talking to the lady, his striped shirt glowing in the dark-blue neon-light.

She looks at the somebody and looks away without a second glance, taking a sip from her drink. His shoulders move as he talks and even quicker than the baseball cap, the striped shirt turns and walks back to the group with a flat smile pressing his cheeks.

Cronk laughs and shakes his glass as he walks over to Bridgette. He pulls out a chair and smiles when she turns to him with a look of uninterested boredom. He smiles as she looks him over.

She takes another sip of her martini, the glass half fogged from every sip. Her purple lipstick stuck on the wide rim of the glass.

She picks up her drink and puts it down without a sip.

He smiles.

With a raise of her unimpressed eyebrow without looking she grabs her three olives on a skewer and eats one.

She smiles while chewing.

Cronk smiles, wipes the lipstick from her rim and swipes it on his cheek. Bridgette’s eyes follow his finger — her mouth her mind stopping — her eyes lighting red. First color anyone’s seen in two weeks. She drops her olives on the bar and grabs her purse. Cronk laughs and grabs the two olives left on the skewer.

He turns the skewer sideways and slides the olives off with his teeth. Raising his eyebrows at her back in return.

Bridgette puts the purse over her shoulder and stabds in smoky rush but not before two somebodies come up to them.

They laugh to each other. Bridgettes face goes pink as Cronk gets up from his stool.

Bridgette looks to Cronk with a face telling him to shut the fuck up and says those exact words to the boys in the baseball cap and striped shirt. As she makes her way to the door the bartender comes over with her card and asks her to sign.

She looks at him curtly swipes the card and keeps walking.

She heads to the door. Before she can make it past the bar three of the four boys are hollering at her.

They look like sturges. Stupid as stone.

Cronk gets up from against the bar and chest checks the baseball cap into the striped shirt from the side. He grunts at them and leans back on the bar. People stop talking only the sound of squeaking chairs against the floor is heard above the music.

Striped shirt gets on his feet and up to cronk.

Cronk takes a big swig of his Jameson and sets it on the bar. He rolls his sleeves up.

The bartender slams his shaker on the bar like a gavel.

The baseball cap comes from the side of the striped shirt and hits Cronk square in the jaw. Cronk bends down holding his jaw. The striped shirt hits him in the ribs. Cronk backs up and looks through his eyebrows to the four boys gathering in front of him.

The bartender is slamming two metal shakercups against the bar shouting over and over:

Bridgette is stopped at the door.

Cronk straightens up and as the baseball cap steps up and swings, he steps back and returns with a hook to the side of the head. Baseball cap falls and the head drops with a plop.

Shouting ensues in the rest of the group.

Cronk is crouched and swings another hook to a boys liver and the boy yelps and drops clutching his side. Cronk shoves the striped shirt into the other boy and as they’re getting back up he elbows a boy in the chin and watches him drop. The striped shirt is breathing through his nose and steps slowly around the boys on the ground. He stares at Cronk with furrowed brows.

Cronk smiles and lets his hands rest by his side. He turns around completely facing Bridgette.

You gonna finish your martini? He says tilting his head with a crooked smile. Her eyes widen.

The striped boy hits Cronk in the back of the head and he falls on one knee. He puts both hands on the ground and kicks the striped shirt square in the belly with the heel of his boot and spins up to face him. The striped shirt exhales and straightens out backing up from Cronk who’s stepping up to him and swinging at his face. Cronk steps in closer and wraps his hands around the striped shirt by the ears headbutting him and shoving him to the ground. He groans.

Cronk quickly staggers up to his drink on the bar and finishes it. Everyone is silent apart from the smooth jazz playing overhead. He grabs the dirty martini delicately by the stem and walks it over to Bridgette whose frozen staring at him. He stops in front of her.

Still frozen, thawing slowly, she grabs her drink. Cronk pours a smug look down his face.

He turns to the bartender.

The bartender turns.

The bartender shakes his head and grabs his shaker cup.

Cronk walks back and sits next to the stool in the corner. He hears Bridgette walking and she sits down next to him.

Cronk turns to Bridgette. Shes got a damn grimace on her face. He laughs.

She replies with a laugh hiding in her guts since the ice age. Cronk persists with a grin.

He looks to the group of boys rolling on the ground.

Jackson drops both drinks on the bar. Bridgette shrugs then turns to the boys on the ground. Cronk picks up his drink and starts chugging it. He finishes the drink and burps, spinning his cup of ice around.

Cronk stares at her with a crooked smile.

Her eyes narrow. She reaches into her purse.

She opens her lipstick and spreads it on her lips. Purple. She puts the lipstick away and leans in. Cronk leans in and reaches for her martini. She brings her lips to him but they miss and kiss the side of his face.

As she pulls away Cronk brings the martini glass up to her lips and looks her in the eyes. Bridgette raises an eyebrow and moves her lips to take a sip. Cronk pulls the glass away and starts chugging it firmly holding the skewer of olives in place; firm in his eye contact with her even through the glass.

She puts her three olives in his empty glass and grabs the stem of her martini. She starts drinking it. Cronk picks up his olives. The bartender has a funny look on his face and Cronk and him make eye contact.

Bridgette leans over her drink and puts it down. She turns to him with a glare, a smile behind her squeezed cheeks hiding under pursed lips.

Picking up her drink a smile appears and she takes a sip, looking into the mirror behind the bottles. Cronk looks at her in the mirror, then to him. He sees a mark of purple lipstick on his face. He laughs. Jackson returns the card and two receipts and Bridgette sips her drink slowly.

The striped shirt stands up and makes eye contact with Cronk in the mirror.

Jackson drops a third Jameson on the bar and Cronk winks at the striped shirt. He picks up his drink and takes a sip as the boy disappears from the mirror. The rest of the boys get up and between the chattering of their recollection, Bridgette chuckles and Cronk smiles at himself in the mirror.

END

After reading The Blue Dahlia i read Blood Meridian and hell i’ll tell you that shit is some read. This piece was the most fun i had writing in a while, thanks to the influence of those two books. And forcing myself to draft this all in an hour. ONE HOUR SHORT STORY CHALLENGE. Hell i edited it for two but im glad drafting didn’t take forever. Drafting shouldn’t take forever.

I had lots of trouble writing dialogue before. Seeing it layed out with names in the screenplay and made reading Cormac McCarthy make much more sense. The hardboiled diagologue from the 40s and 80s is damn fun to read and thats what made this easy. No quotation marks. They’ve distracted me. Pull quotes feel like the perfect medium since I edit them in the end.

More headless scenes to come.

A series of old, old poems…

Read more

Lets run away

Lets run away
you and I
far from this empty place,
where mountains roar
with fire bellies
and trees still scraped the sky,
when concrete was the distant rock
before our epoch found a name.

Lets believe the stars 
when they tell us 
about fate
& run from god 
when he shrinks 
to shame us
of all our earthly ways..

Lets tell the grass
about destiny, 
and the animals 
how to paint.

Lets go to the place where
Kubla Kahn decreed 
in ice caves with water streams,
through the dens where coleridge lies
struck breathing smoking dreams.

Lets go away, far 
from the empty place
where people only act,
back to a world without it's cloth
never thinking back,
before a body learned its taint,
before a soul would learn its pain,
back to the empty world 
of an empty place 
before Adam placed his name. 
  

When i started writing on substack i could handle a void in attention but not a void in presence. Originally the intention was to write a book and print it on pages i could cut out and sew up in some leather. Having an original physical copy of one of my manuscripts would allow me to simply dry up like a dropped fig and melt back into the dirt satisfied feeling completed in some early cycle for my souls work.

On the last day of 2025 i compiled my early substack posts into a poem collection and released it under the name Between an End and a Beginning. A month later I would gather all my love poems and release them as a collection titled: An Anatomically Accurate Heart. Both were posted on amazon so i could buy my own copies for about three dollars each and distribute them myself.

Finally as a published author, albeit self published, i crumpled into a ball and died. Metaphorically, kinda. The second book was damn exhausting and i was running on the high of the first one and gave my heart some real damage pounding it with sleepless nights caffeine mg in the hundreds enough whiskey and mezcal to allow myself the title alcoholic and the isolation of winter that kept me curled with tobacco smoke and fire away from people and places.

The first book my earliest poems i stole the title from my fourth poem i posted called Between an End and a Beginning released Nov 6 ‘24 during the last month of a three month break from a now ex lover. i realized all my early posts were about moving on from that.

That first poetry collection came about as natural as sunrise or the sinking tide after a city flood it was the origin story of an evolution in myself sparked by the evolution every writer finds themself in as they continue waking up deciding they have a story worth telling.
Even if nobody listens or remembers it, the writing makes it real history.
A primary source.

Literally following the span of those three moths a year later i’d categorize those poems into their epochs and dedicate it to a past sparked present by every woman who breathed existence into me and taught me life by living it. Between an End a Beginning is the origin, born at the end of a relationship and at the beginning of a new me, that transition was everything.

The photo of roses on the cover I took during a walk before my bartending shift in a rich and small connecticut port town that i used as my publication cover because roses are the only cliche i dont mind continually pricking my finger on to muse over the blood drip. Reckless love was a calling. There was a bee on the flowers posing nonchalently acting like he was collecting pollen not minding the colossal peering in extracting aesthetic value from its existence. Another day smelling the roses for him.

Still one of my favorite photos to date. Had to learn photo editing to make it into a cover. very rewarding skill for artists.

On December 31st ‘25 I published the first collection and my family and friends ate it up. When i realized theres no going back from the vulnerable outer existence created by sharing emotional inner thoughts in writing, i shut my mouth as to what it was about. The second collection was even worse, love poems.

Leading up to valentines day the idea of what an anatomically accurate heart means symbolically ate up my reality. The idea that created the title came in the gift of a paper heart dipped in tea and dyed near purple with rose petals. She gave it to me with a love poem the day after Christmas and we cut contact a month later when I decided to [redacted] somebody else. I was used to heartbreaks but not heartaches and this one ached especially with dull pains that never quite severed.

Pushing forward the idea of an anatomically accurate heart i submerged into the symbolism of love and pain, and the maxim that replayed in my head “to love is to delay heartbreak” which struck me long ago as formless wisdom on what it means to be mortal in the presence of an immortal feeling. Its been stuck in me for years as the writing on the wall by people who lived and died a million times thinking what they had was certain as cement but even cement crumbles with time and anything built is doomed to fall because housing the immortal in humanity pays its rent with time and all things end in time if they’ve ever cared to begin in the first place.

I commissioned my new girlfriend to do the cover and she gave me a sketch of something i was damn impressed with. She lay working on it on the floor during those sleepless nights i filled with caffeine and edits and cigarettes and revisions. I didn’t dare show her what the contents of the book were, but im sure she knew, though she has yet to open her copy. Even worse her family bought a copy and i didnt hesitate when they asked nor did i care to explain what it was about. Nothing personal. Just respect for the contents.

Contained in that heartful paperback are all the love stained poems i wrote drunkenly depressed or high on loves ecstasy and anything in between. Told through the system of the hearts function. Naivety. Impulse. Instincts. Confessions and myth. All that love was and is. Anatomically Accurate. Pain death and possible resurrection included.

When I published the book it took another week of revisions to get it up to publishing qualities and I got my copies two weeks later on the first of March. The whole project felt like a literal labor of love and took a lot out of me. No energy to promote it on my publication instagram or publish on substack and instead it became a momento on my bookshelf and a talking point for people who wanted to figure out where i’ve been hiding when the sun went out. I couldnt explain much, good thing too, apart from telling them i had books for ten dollars.

Those first hundred dollars i made from my writing didn’t hit me like i thought they would, no rejoicing in making a hobby turned passion into a potential career. Instead i learned something stupid about book publishing and taking the time to make something work up to OCD standards: I don’t really care for it. At least, i dont care for it in the same way i care about turning my experience pain lessons and life into poetry. Or art. It feels like the work i need to do to give my experience the respect it deserves.

I do romantacize it, however, that labor of love. Me and my thoughts. Though, i realize the calling isnt the same as it was with my career in psychology. Psycotherapy and psychedelics and all. I realize maybe i shouldve gone to school so i can use my psychology on other people instead of picking apart my brain like a surgeon over an open ribcage.

Today when the sun returned and my vitamin-d came back and all the stolen dopamine from new-england winter nights returned and the cold air pulling life from out my skin had vanished into sunlight and breezes and chirping birds I realized I survived the winter and these books are the memoir of a cold period in my life, as the scorching era of those books had to cool before i could hold them up and see them for what it really was.

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Anyways. The second book is out on amazon and available to book stores and i still dont feel very happy with it. I liked my first one, but this second put a bad taste in my mouth all the stressing over the art and shit its not my style of doing. I prefer being raw and honest on a page or taking my drugs to do the work positively associated with alcohol and tobacco. whatever. My public presence has changed very little since the books came out and i could really care less.

The books feel like the type of work i had to do because i kept so many poems locked inside a substack that nobody reads. Whatever, nobody reads it thats cool. The point is something else. Having a physical books makes my name a physical name, one that people can hold on paper and feel their fingers flip through it or one i can rub my arrogant fingers alllll over.

That was the first book. Roses. They’d had always been a muse of mine. Amusing to me. I like how theyre symbology is so on point for love and what love is or feels like. Too many metaphores that i wont repeat for a millionth time. These past two poem books have been all about love and im tired of it.
At the end of the first book and with me through the second is the new lady giving me a new experience of love. She made the cover for me and im grateful for her ability. A wonderful thing. My photos are wonderful, but to have art made specifically for the cover is another wonder.

For my next book, im thinking of using my photography in the pages as a non-black and white poem collection. I feel the photos i take are tied with my poems, though not all, most have significance and is why i enjoy the multimedia substack as much as i do. Poetry and photography.

In the first book, the photos were made to order. IE, they were made on the fly to fill blank pages. The first book gave me a template i used for the second, changed to fit the structure. The second book followed that. Blank pages that needed to be filled. Some of them, however, were not blank pages but pages made specifically to add drawings accompany the words beside it. Examples: Anatomically Accurate, A Rose For The Reader, and Meteors. These three are my favorites in the whole book.

Thats the big thing of the second book. Using structure in the system i created to tell the story of love. The way a heart moves to sort my poems into a story. The anatomy of a heart. from the inhale, to the exhale, back to the inhale again. Hypoxia is one of the stronger sections, facing the threat of a starving heart. Sparks is another, the resuscitation after death. Electric.

The back section is one of my favorites. Meteors. A small poem as an epilogue. I’ll tell you what, this is my best book and rightly so since its most gruelling of the two. Sheesh, i want to take a break from that. What im working on now are short stories. I read my first pulp fiction from 1940 last week, The Blue Dahlia, and im going to try my hand at throwaway stories on woodpulp. Purely for the aesthetic.

Until then. Hope you enjoy the books.

You are half, and half 
for a reason,
like a serpent’s tongue
split into two:
half
the spit of a rhyme
spilling line and line
of lie and lie;
half, 
which burns and stings of truth,
smelling sweetest 
to the nose smoke of youth.
In a half you will find your pain,
and in whole, pangs of salvation
mixed together to mold uniquely you
a taste of tart, sweet, and savory, 
a taste of red-blue violet anomalies,
a soul betwixt nostalgia resentment and grief
to find betwixt the only enemy. 

Nothing rises from a pot that doesn’t boil

Make sense?
sense is for the broken.
Sense is for the weakest link 
who think perception is a fact 
not a chain. 
Sense, is not for the thinking man. 
Feelings, are not the wisest out of touch.
You may feel and you may sense
in all the off directions,
yet if you want to know
why your heart holds no lesson,
you must first learn 
how the lessons are
the message. 

Wood Pecker Thoughts

Woodpecker thoughts. 
Sleep deprived .
Bop Bop Bop 
Bop Bop Bop
Does it rhyme? 
Bop Bop 
Sounds like gunshots. 
In the woods 
Bop Bop 
Is not a crime. 
Animals
Bop Bop Bop 
Getting by 
and 
Bop
Passing time

Lines that always rhyme

Must poetry rhyme
For it to be a poem?
Will the words still flow
If the words don't sound the same?
In my head the answer shakes:
No the poem needn't rhyme,
But the way my thoughts go
Regularly jumping rhymes...
Can I not just write 
and call it prose,
to type and speak,
and let form go?
May I try writing lines,
Of poems
that do-not rhyme?
In my head, the answer shakes:
No, I cannot write 
Without rhymes
To line my mind...

Broom

Blooming City 
                Breathing
                   People
Brooding 
Brewing 
              Habits
Bleeding 
                Time

Architecture blocked by stoplights.

Marvel
at what hands can build
and hearts 
will let be killed. 

I? In this wretched Life?

Could I have died, even? Beside my time? High Tides come by. Oh, High tides come by..

Goodbye sandcastles. falling statue.
sand made capsule of
the faded jaded tide.
feelings gone. my loves beyond
failing eyes. for my failing time.

Oh so sad I’m dead oh well what a miss. Haven’t I been dead before. So what about it? You’ve died too. Maybe thrice. Its comin anyways. Though, I’m upset I missed the rapture. Oh! To look all those familiar faces struck in despair. Stuck down on the ground as we watch people float away. and meeting the eyes of the people we thought would go but didn’t. Silly. How that would be. but certainly amusing.

All things go away and turn to dust nothing special about that. All things leave and theres no beauty in whats leaving. Whats leaving gets succeeded. and when it isn’t, well, maybe theres beauty in there. when last is final.
But what if its all gone. And id ask what it’d mean if we all died at the same time.
If you died, and i died, and we all died at the same time.

Would there be a story if nobodies telling it?
A life if nobodies living it?
Well, can there be a someone if theres no one?

Yes. Someone must know there’s no one and thats
You. Your dead life between the walls is eyes for someone.
Oh Joy! Someone to watch the performance,
Though, that someone is you. Watching and performing.
Will I ever be a poet then?
Woe.
Oh-so sad thoughts sedate me again.

666

Damn! Emotion is strong!
That roaring animal.
Breaking from its bullpen.

Poem:

bar night no bar fights 
extravagent lights old life old hinges 
old derby bridge older water tides. 

Poem:

in this rainy dream i think of you. rainy, ion a day that shone like a golden charriot and i think of you. because you were the life of rain to me. you were the humid air that made me grateful to be breathing at his time now at the endo f a pens grip. thinking of you in he scattered, autumn rain.’

Poem: 2/7/26

Love me
like rain loves a 
windows hold.

see through.
we're drops of a world old. 

poem:

smashed windows in the bottom pot of a cycle. 
rolling rolling rolling like a lover at the bottoms cascadeing cycle.
rolling rolling like ineed a coffee in me. 
rolling rolling like my head s gone sped in me
love you and i love you like no other hand will hld me . 
period to the minutes tic a cloc will rule me.
a clock will rule me a clock will rule me. a clock will rule me a clock will rule me will rule me.
a minute tics by a moment missed by happened accident. a moment passed drunk message in the morning. a stream of conscious a gleaming fleeing flow. capture it.
capture it ill say, this morning violent streak ths missing flickers gleam. 
there youll eat there youll eat. the lieing tock the clik the rock the lying clickers game. 
there yol eat there yol eat tehres the homeless man who speaks. 

Me. the homeless man who speaks. 

Poem:

I urk in desire to tear my teeth into your soul to shed my skin with you to accept your hand in mnie. to accept your fate in mine. i went to tear you apart gently, keep you in my grin and stare into your eyes like i stare into a soul. i can love you.i can kill you. i dont need you. but i choose you.

Poem:

god spoke into the eys of fate at his world by asking me if im his novel.

Poem:

Woe to the man who eats the plastic berry, for his appetite will turn to falsehood woe is the fate that lay well illuminated, by knowing the destination will corrupt the journey. 

woe to the man who speaks like he knows eternity, for any temporal burn and fall to ash at his feat. 

Poem:

Love will drag me through white rivers withotu  a raft so i can feel the worth  of working towards something. love will break man to his atoms so he knows hhe is small compared to these forces. love will make a man kiss and cusrse God, both for taking away hsi chains and bring him the dpeths of neccessary pain, because one cannot love oneself more than they cna love another, without some special disease. less every person would live intheir comfort of self love, instead of alling into the cetainty that to love is to delay heartbreak, and how i hate how deep i can love, btu pain is what ilive for. 

Poem:

 love will make a man surrender his will. 
love will make a man weak. 
love will beat the heart south in the wrong direction.love when i finally meet it will bring me to my knees.
love will make me surrender. 
love will make me weak.

Poem:

I love how your hans find mine.. they weaken the irons of my will. I love the wy you smile. i cnat get over your mind
your love makes me wnat to rip my beating heart. so i can give it to you, and be done with this beating breathing night. 

Poem:

I hate how i lose myself in you. 

love will make me weak. 

icant help it i cant i surrender to you.

i surrender to you.

but i cannot surrender myself to you.

not without you surrendering too. 

Poem:

I wish to rot in this spiral of empty love, floating up like cigarette smoke. i'll tell myself its bad for me, like the cancer in the toke,
but ill smoke it anyways
like the spirits i smoke away.

Poems:

knowing whats good for me and avoiding it like its poison. maybe ill love you, just for an hour, but in that hour ill love you more than a star in all its life, if only i can burn out and let you keep my warmth as my love. 

Poem:

love is not the warmth of a dying star, its all the warmth its worth. 
love is not the heartbreak that will come, but all the heart worth breaking. 

Poem:

lets run away, you and i, far, far from this empty place.
lets go where mountains roar with fire bellies, where trees stand taller than skyscrapers, lets believe the stars when they tell us of fate, and run from God whn he tries to chase us.\Lets go to the place where kubla-kahn decreed, in ice caves with water streams; lets go to the dens where coleridge lies and breaths his smoking dreams, lets go away, from the empty places where people know how to act. i want to see you without cloth on a skin and lay with you never looking back.

Poem:

Solemn , I will live in a life not meant for “I’s”. 
Verily  i will reap the rewards at the end of my eyes, for no man can eat without knowing hunger, Eupeating to taste like without ever knowing starvation. though h e will seek salvation, and speak of heavens coming, but little will he care nad never will he know the lights of burning flags. 

Poem:

Day by day i try to escape the mediocrity of my fate;
rimed down procrastination and empty words of salvation that turn me to bird of prey. stalking myself, live learned how easy it must be to simply fade and fall away, but as a bird of prey to the sky i pray to fuel me for a hunt, that one day will feed a pack if we ever learn to double down.

you were not meant to read hthese.

you were meant to read these:/

This song is not about my soul crushing. Its an ode to something crushing in my soul. What that is, I do not yet know. It’s not a person. It’s not a thing. But still its an ode. I think its a feeling. Its my future maybe. Soul crushing future? Soul crushing is just pressure then. Maybe its destiny squeezing me. Squeezing me like a camel squeezes into the eye of a needle. That would be a tight squeeze. But destiny squeezes all of us. Do we squeeze back is the question. Do we tell destiny that its ours? Or do we surrender to it.

Lyrics

Misty eyes I miss your eyes
raindrops of mine 
clouds above my mind
oh i rained, so I thought
how I've been is not on your mind

Where you go 
is where the leaves blow on
Where i left is you is where 
i cannot walk beyond
You say you need 
what i cant have
You act like I'm so mad

Don't say you want me back if 
you're not ready
This love is not had
if you are not mad with me
We love we cry we fall out from skies
like angels of dark

Mad with a pride that only 
love could provide
How i've been oh so open before
Oh i-i-i wish i didn't have to repent

Confession to the father

O' Father. You may kill me now. 
Take suffering by taking me
fore I go on in cause to waste my gift
for I'll go on with cause to waste my gift...
O' Father, how I know you'll see
all knowing and truthfully;
will you see the way pain takes my face 
fore I go on n' become your biggest disgrace?
O' Father, how I've wished 
oh wished you'd gone away
so I could live with or without you
just the same..
I never prayed, the way I don't pray now,
clasping my hands in silent sounds
with evil all around as vile stains
in sheets where I stay to pray 
oh pray to you
O' Father,
you may think of these cries in vain
but i mean them oh i mean them i beg you
don't let me stay. 
Father, O' Father in the highest, 
strike me down, strike me now
here where I stand, here and now
high up in the heavens,
standing saints giving testament
deliver me from a life 
which serves you dully,
serve beauty in death 
served in your duty,
deliver me O' Father, please
deliver me from the lies, 
divide my tongue, for serpents on
my lips soon slither my spine.
O' Father O' Father,
let me die.
I have wasted,
will waste, all 
my precious,
our precious,
time...

Response to the sinner

My son
worry not of whats to come
 Thy heart will heal
Thy soul will kneel
 and again will rise the sun
Light will know
 darkest hours
I will not depart
 for suffering is ours
and I too have my part
 but if thy soul wish to die
mercy is no longer mine
 for it is I
solely I
who cries for you and dies

Bwr
Bware
Beware
Bware

Bwrrrrrrrrrrrr

The hum of the fan spurs my conscious awake. Dazzed, but awake. My eyelids are all I can see. My bed sheets are cold. Cold. I’ve been laying in them all night.

The hum of the fan is melodic. It’s on strong and I don’t know why. I’d open my eyes if I knew how to close them. If my eyelids won’t open, its because I won’t close them. I want to sleep, I tell myself. But the hum of the fan won’t let me.

Slowly, pixels of vision come phasing in from the darkness. My bedroom illuminates in the darkness.
No light, no sun, no red blinks from my TV telling me its on. Still, my bedroom slowly fades into view. My door is open. It’s never open. I try to turn my head. My head is stuck facing forward. Shadows into shadows, darkness over darkness. I see despite no lights.

Sleep. I want to. Every night I want to. But I won’t. The shadows in my corner are strange: black blobs of ink that shake like static, flowing like they’re made of living atoms, floating like gravity wont work on them. They grow and shrink with my breathing, breathing what I breath out. Breathing. Creeping closer, creeping on the walls, crawling on the walls. Crawling.

The hum of the fan is hypnotic. I taste the cold of my bed sheets through the hairs on my skin. I feel the shadows leaving through the exhales of my nose. I feel the weight of black iron sitting heavy on my chest. It pushes my breath. Pushing the air out quicker than it can bring back in. I try to take a breath, but it wont.

A shadow by my door opens and closes. It sneaks into the room without a step. Closer, and closer it gets. I stir in my bed, so I thought, again trying to turn my head, I’m stuck, the iron on my chest, the iron on my chest wont let off. The shadows drop, the shadow stops to suck itself to the floor.
All I can see are my eyelids. I try to open them, and I think I do, but black and black is all I see… not even a red blink lets off from the TV.

My room appears again, fading in like pixels of a dream. First, the fan appears, unmoving despite the hum with blades that do not spin; then, the door is there, still open, I think, with the drawer beside it devoid of edges and fine lines, looking like blots of black paint dabbed on and layered heavy with dripping spills of an oil lake...
Finally, rising from the ground like thick smoke carrying soot, a figure appears and stares with white pupils through my soul — it eats my breath, eats my breath, and takes back the little vision I have left. Iron, the iron on my chest, weighs heavy, heavy, heavy, then spreads through every bone and scatters in my body. The shadows ooze, despite my inability to see, and I feel the cold beneath me start to warm as I breath…

My sight returns, still a darkness behind my eyes…
I stare back to the black and start to open them, and the red light from my TV blinks.

His senses return and, again, he finds himself on his hands and knees, staring into the photograph.

The man looking back fills him with heavy emotion. Not hatred, like last time — but a dread so deep it brings with it a disgust and a desire to rip his eyes out to never see a thing again: to never know this man again.

Though, he doesn’t dare — nor could he dare — to take his eyes off the man.

He knows the man; and he knows he knows the man.

Though nothing about him is familiar.

Nothing without the other half of the photo.

A footstep steals his attention and he quickly looks up into the hallway.

The open door is empty of any translucence and the door-frame glows with whats beyond.

Nothing can be made out with certainty, but he stares through the empty door-frame into what he imagines is a bedroom — glowing orange and yellow and flickering as if in candlelight. He gets up to his feet and walks into the room in front of him.

Any dread he had felt vanishes as he enters under the door-frame.

Dread has turned into pure, unadulterated helplessness, like he’s watching himself from behind his eyes, unable to do anything but observe and scan the glowing bedroom, ignoring everything but the five burning candles arranged in a circle on the floor.

The light is steady, but somehow flickering.

In the center of these candles, he sees a broken hand-mirror surrounded by glass, half a photograph, and a small, dry and pointy branch from a tree arranged as if a sacrifice.

The candles have their wax dripping like sweat and pouring right into the floorboards. Between them. They’ve been lit for a long time.

He feels a pull towards the circle, and steps to it. He first looks to the photograph. A washing sensation comes over him as he recognizes the other half.

The woman he loves: the translucent woman, now in flesh, with an arm around her waist and a smile bright as two suns squeezing her eyes. In her arms, an infant wrapped in a blanket. Newborn, no hair. Small head. Small eyes.

The urge to cry wells up in his chest as he drops to pick up the picture, ignoring the wet, dark-red lines forming some intentional geometry between, and connecting, each of the five candles.

He removes her photo from the circle and pulls it to his heart, hugging and loving what he can only know as an unforgettable love. A distant time when his heart was warm and satisfied. His heart beats blood through his skin as he kneels to the ground with closed eyes, holding the memory, loving the memory. A tear breaks free from his eyelids and his body quivers in near spasms.

He holds the photo to his chest, and forgets what was on it.

The sweetness fades, and his gratitude mixes with remorse. His soul drinks a cocktail of sweet, aromatic grief.

He opens his wet eyes only when he notices the cold gust rising from the floorboards.

Three of the five candles have gone out and leaves him in nearly complete darkness. The empty glow of the room has transformed the outline of a bed into a coffin, and the dressers mirror into a guillotine. The shadows start to betray him.

He reaches for the closest lit candle. The wax dripping around the sides burns his palm as he grips it; not enough for him to let go. He rips the candle off the floorboard and holds it up. The room illuminates. He takes it in:

A bed. Neatly done. Facing a dresser with a large mirror. A closed door beside it. On the dresser, an assortment of objects. Matches. Unused candles. Bundles of herbs. In the corner, on the side of the dresser opposite of the door, a shadow and a chair.

A shadow on a chair.

His heart drops to the floor as the shadow moves. Adjusts. Turns. Then stands. Her face lights up in the flickering candle light. Beautiful. Black hair and a skin smooth, untouched by even the winds. Young as a maid. Staring at the man with fury in her only visible eye.

He does not move, simply stares back, questioning his senses. Always, questioning his senses.

She takes a step closer, muttering something as she does.

He feels the weight in the floor shifting. The air in the room changing.

He had seen a translucent woman, but the reality of this one shakes his soul.

He is frozen, but does not know it.

She steps closer, directly in front of the dresser mirror, straightens out her back and begins speaking. The light shines on her entirely, illuminating her form; she wears a rose colored dress, much too large for her body. Her face is filled with emotion. Obvious anger, but something else — something buried too deep for anybody to pry out.

He wants to step back but is struck by the woman’s features. The girls features.

The resemblance is uncanny.

He wants to speak, but he can only let her take another step towards him.

He notices in her hand a metal reflecting in the low light.

The Words He Had To Hear

The woman stands and continues speaking. Passionate, though drawn out and slow. Thoughtful. Each syllable leaving her lips beautifully, like shes casting a spell with her intonation.

He now notices in her flickering eyes an ocean of emotion pouring from her face.

Familiar emotion.

The ones that stop you from thinking anything other than what you feel. As it so often does to him.

Her lips move quicker.

The small space between them, split only by the candle light in his hand, is charged like a magnet, pulling him and repelling him in a strange ripping of the space-time.

Neither of them can breath freely.

Both of them are stuck in a spell.

The mans eyes do not move from her. Her moving lips.

Her eyes are dimly lit, but reflecting green. That familiar green.

In her black hair, he sees a dark flower. Red, maybe.

He notices it too much. The familiarity compels him to rip space.

He stumbles back, almost falling, nearly blowing the candle out and causing the light to stagger; causing her to raise her voice and speak a collection of words that he could only understand in fragments: ‘and you... thought. Thought wrong. And here. Know. Just why. I am. You Are.’

He stands with the same look in front of her. Looking at her black hair and trembling eyes.

She fights tears as she continues speaking. Her voice trembling but rising with force.

Each word replays like a broken record in his head like a broken record in his head.

A broken record, has become his head.

The words distinguish and start to hit him like knives. He gets dizzy and cant help but stumble back, falling over onto the bed.

He drops the candle onto the sheets.

The girl steps a foot away from him with death in her eyes as she stares into his soul, telling him exactly what he had forgotten.

“Father.” she says, choking as if were the final thing she was going to say, then spitefully continuing:

“Every time I come back to this house I want to burn it down. Every time I look at your face in a picture I want to rip my eyes out and return to mother, but even when i close my eyes your face is etched into my eyelids and wont leave even in my heaviest sleep” she pauses to put a twisted grin on her face.

“I haven’t felt warmth since I was less than a child. Every night I’ve wanted to run to Mother and slice myself but I hold back. Because of you. Because I’ve been raised by witches and cold instead of love and warmth. Because you traded my peace for your own. My Life for your own. Everything I could have known, for anything you didn’t.”

Her face turns pale and blue and she stops breathing, then gasps heavily and holds it in with a twitch, slowly letting out the words in an exhale under her breath:

“I hate how you’ll see her. before me.”

She quickly lunges towards his sad, sitting body, sitting helpless on the bed.

He doesn’t react.

She plunges a knife into his shoulder, missing his neck and pushing him over onto the bed.

The candle which he dropped has caught light on the bed-sheets. The shadows on the wall shows a struggle that’s been playing out for sixteen years.

Sixteen years, these shadows have been waiting.

Pain enters through the collarbone. His senses return in the pain.

He groans she pulls the knife out, then smacking her hand out of the way before she could bring it down again.

He smacks her across the face and stuns her enough to bring his grasp onto her neck, shooting to his feet and driving her back into the dresser and nearly breaking her as he does.

Adrenaline flows through his fingers and into his grip as he pushes the scratching girl to the end of his grip. She reaches around his arms and starts scratching at his eyes and face, all the while her face grows pink without breath.

He pushes her back harder onto the dresser and stares into her light green eyes — almost blue, he thinks, as they fill with fight.

She presses onto the dresser and kicks him with sixteen years of pain, into his shins and thighs as her eyes glow red with fury.

His grip tightens and her face slowly puffs. Her kicking weakens and her scratching stops as she wraps her hands around his wrist. He stares into her eyes, she stares back, Her gaze retires from fury to sadness, to defeat, and finally into what he could only see as a pleading, a begging for mercy.

His hands remain firm for a minute after her body goes limp and her eyes bloat without life.

Finally, he lets go completely. She slides limply off the dresser and onto the ground.

He looks at her without emotion.

His eyes float upwards. Towards the mirror.

He fills with rage.

The man, the man that took her, looks back.

Brown eyes, staring into his eyes, whatever color they happen to be, he doesn’t know. But that man is staring back. Filling him with rage.

He looks down to the limp, pink and bruised body. Rage.

He looks back to the mirror and inhales deeply. Rage.

A fire cracks in the reflection behind him. Rage.

He punches the mirror straight into the ugly mug. Again.

His knuckles bleed and again. Again.

The mirror is shattered and his fist pulses with blood and a pain in the bones. Again.

Until the mirror is red and black with cracks and the man no longer stares back.

His heart beats at an excess. His lungs don’t feel the air.

He crouches and picks up the girl without a thought.

Throwing her limp body onto his shoulder, he steps on the broken hand mirror and cracks it even more as he walks out to the flickering light of the fire on the bed.

He reaches the top of the stairs and looks out to the black night.

The moon is full and illuminates the yard. He sees the tree. He remembers. He knows.

Remorse

With her body over his shoulder, he makes way slowly down the stairs, creaking.

At the bottom, he cannot see but he turns and walks past the den.

He knows the layout

As he walks, he makes out the outline of an open door which was closed when he first saw it. He looks into it as he passes by.

Descent, and darkness.

He enters the entry room with ceramic or glass cracking underfoot.

The front door is open, just as he left it.

He moves around the table and exits, stepping into the night with his body.

The moonlight illuminates his car and the pickup truck.

He ignores both and makes his way around the side of the house. He moves through the tall grass and past the dirty windows of closed rooms and the shabby, moss covered and brown wooden paneling running along the side of the house.

He turns into the backyard.

An opening.

Barren, apart from the faint, moonlit outlines of tall grass and a black tree with limbs that grab at the stars. A small black void in its center opens and closes, like a breathing mouth.

He walks towards the tree like he’s done it before. Without a thought or drop of hesitation.

Through the tall grass and into the small clearing around the tree, he stands face to face with the black crevice in its center. He watches the hole twist and widen, then shrink and spin. A void black enough to reflect his own eyes. Staring back with the same rage he looks into it with; that same, empty rage that stops him from feeling.

Not even a body weighing on his bleeding shoulder can make him feel.

The eyes of the void. Taking away his feelings.

Gently, the man crouches and releases the body onto the ground, then turns and marches towards a small structure at the edge of the nights darkness.

Arriving at a closed shed, he opens the door and enters. The smell brings back a sinister memory. Hanging on clips, he grabs a rope and exits the shed.

Walking back towards the tree, he sees the back of the house.

The same house he saw on his drive.

Dusty windows, darker than night. Moss infested, brown wooden paneling.

He continues.

The rope he grabbed is old and worn. It scratches at his hands in the unknown strength he uses to grip it.

Arriving at the tree, he crouches to the body and gently wraps the rope around her neck. He pulls an end through a loop, twists, twists, and twists again, leaving a noose around her neck. He unravels the rope and grips the end, then looking up to the tree and its black, contorted branches, he throws the end of the rope over the largest branch and grabs it at the bottom.

He pulls the rope with all his aching strength as it slides down the branch and nuzzles with the tree.

Her body gets dragged across the grass and is lifted into the air.

He looks around, spotting the stake in the ground he planted all that time ago, and he tries to walk towards it.

An aching from his wound rises in the nerves through his neck and he groans and releases the rope, dropping the girl and barley grabbing the rope before it flies away.

He bites his tongue, grips the rope and drags it towards the rusted metal stake, pulling despite the pain, pulling without a thought in his mind until he can wrap the rope around the stake.

He wraps it three times over and then pulling the rope high enough to leave her dangling feet a few feet off the ground.

He loops the rope through a hoop and pulls it tight.

His hands are scratched and his face is scorching.

He is satisfied.

Looking to the dangling body, he watches it float left. To right. Left, to right. Slowly losing speed.

He watches all the way till she’s barley moving.

The air is cold, and he stares at her pink dress.

Slightly more pink from the spilled blood.

He noticed cuts on her arms when he threw her on his shoulder.

Suddenly, he remembered the eyes: the skin of that translucent blue woman at the door and her frozen eyelids, emerald green eyes behind them and an opaque black hair.

Translucent everywhere but her eyes.

He fully notices the dangling girl.

Her neck is being stretched by the rope and she faces the ground.

He stares at where her eyes would be, thinking of that woman.

Her skin glows blue.

Her flesh start to fade away from its opaquity.

The girl looks more like the woman.

White spheres appear slowly turning through her scalp, spinning upwards and meeting his gaze with an iris: a green eyed stare, emerald green discs on white spheres, appearing just beyond the traces of white between the black hair of her translucent scalp.

Her legs dangle.

Her body begs for the ground but the rope refuses.

Her eyes stare at him until the dizziness returns and his knees crack him to the floor, dropping his face into his hands and forcing his eyes to cry.

Without reason.

Return

His hands swell up with tears and his body shakes in spasms.

His shoulder aches and he sobs along to the sound of cracking wood.

Crackling wood.

The rose colored dress grows more red with a hue warmer than the moonlight. He only notices when he looks up to try and remember why he’s crying.

The rose colored dress is more red than ever, dangling like a golden pendulum.

His eyes are wet. The air grows slowly less cold.

He stares past the girls swinging legs and back to the crevice of the tree. A void as deep as him. Sucking him into the world. A world. Or away from it.

He turns away from the girl after a fight with his senses. He readies to walk along the outer-side of the house, but the house glows an unfamiliar glow.

Red as a devil.

A warm, wine red glow, flickering like a candle.

The candle must have caught,

he thinks.

He makes his way around the house, appreciating the new lighting that illuminates the dull, autumn leaves.

Beautiful reds, yellows, oranges, surviving the October moonlight.

The sweet hue of white.

Walking past the silver pickup truck, he stops to face its tinted glass.

In its reflection, the man looks back.

He knows.

He’s always known.

Couldn’t accept it.

The man stands and stares.

The orange-red from the house flickers harder.

The moon does not tremble with its light, but the void eats around it.

The last crumbs of memory burn away.

He steps away from the old, worn, leaf covered pickup truck. He unlocks his car door and starts the car.

Staring into the light of the burning house, he wishes he could stay, but he’s never liked going to places he doesn’t belong; nor, going into places he’s never gone.

Read Again.

BOOK ONE:

BOOK TWO:

The warning signs are merely decoration.

The same ones, repeating over and over. No attention is paid to them.

The wood in the back of that speeding pickup truck bumps and bounces.

His car pushes sixty on a windy road just to keep up.

Evening has begun. He still does not know why he drives. Why he’s back in Monson.

He follows the silver pickup truck in a daze.

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On the road in front of the truck he sees a shabby chain-link fence.

A sign reads with red lettering a sentence he cant quite make out.

He expects the truck to slow, but it only speeds up.

With a CRASH it breaks the chain-link fence and barrels up the blocked road.

The fence is pressed and bent into the ground.

Shocked, he slows and hesitates, almost returning to his senses.

He reads the red letters on the sign:

NO TRESPASSING

As if that mattered.

He picks up speed and continues over the chain-link fence, his car bumping more violently than the truck that broke it.

Strange, he thinks.

Entering into the forbidden, he continues to the only place he can go. Up the road.

He doesn’t wonder why she’s going this way.

He only knows to follow.

So follow, follow he does. Up the hill and through the dust left by the pickup.

He isn’t far behind it, but the dust piles in a cloud on the road and settles in the air.

It doesn’t move; a clay colored fog. The truck disappears inside it.

Ripping through the dusty fog, a hole in the ground the size of a dog forces him to swerve out of the way.

It brings him back to his senses. Making him worry.

Worry. About what, he does not know, but he feels more dread now than he did in the face of that cursed tree he found on the way.

Cursed? — why? he does not know, but he curses that tree and dreads the rest of his path up.

Still, he continues.

The dust of the road settles in the air and moves very slowly, if at all, acting the opposite as it should.

For a brief moment, he feels the same — that is, acting the opposite as he should —driving two hours North to a town without reason, then following a car into a place he shouldn’t go.

Shouldn’t be going, but he goes anyways. At least, that what he feels the signs are saying, what his bits of ration are saying he should be thinking.

But that is not the truth.

He reaches the end of his dirt road and finds the pickup parked in a clearing between trees with an old, brown house just behind it. The truck looks like its been sitting their for years. Covered in dead leaves with wooden planks from the house fallen on top of it.

Since he lost the truck, he questions if this is the same one.

He turns his car off and looks at the house.

Brown paneling. Dusty windows. Overgrown, tan grass all around.

The front door is open, wide like a mouth that wants to speak, but wont.

The wind picks up in a whistle that calls to the woods. Piercing, in a way that isn’t heard with familiarity... it rips through the air like a warning shot. Tears through the air.

He steps out of his car and wanders to the open door. The brown wood paneling and the moss on the roof glows to him, glowing like old bruises that wont leave. He pays little attention to anything but the creaking door, a mist flowing out that he confuses for the fog of the twilight... if twilight ever had a fog.

Stepping up to the door, he sees the darkness beyond it. He twists the handle just to hear it squeak, and pushes it all the way open — despite the door having enough space for him to squeeze in.

He takes two steps inside.

Rustic as a brick fireplace, the inside is visibly dusty but untouched; dusty for the reason of being untouched. As if its collecting dust like a tax for being forgotten.

He feels a creeping guilt in his chest as he looks around. Like he’s the reason the house is dusty; the reason the house is abandoned.

He takes a step in and smells fire.

Not the fire of destruction, the fire of warmth and familiarity. Like he stepped into his childhood home in the winter and his parents had lit a fire, ready to spill a story from a book he couldn’t yet read. He feels warm kisses on his cold lips, hot as fresh burns; the type of burn so hot, it take a second for the nerves to feel anything but cold, but the nerves know what’s coming.

He too knew something was coming, though he couldn’t place what or where.

Or Why.

He steps deeper inside. Feeling more as the wooden floor creaks a familiar creek.

He knows this place.

This place knows him.

Reminiscence and Reminder

Without trespass, he steps harder on the creaking floor to hear it creak more.

Shes home, and he knows it; and she knows he knows it, he can taste it in the air.

As if for the first time, he notices the outline of the rooms.

He stands in an entryway, connected to the kitchen and to a hall. Its wall are wooden and covered with uninteresting pictures of people and paintings, of anything to fill the otherwise empty space.

From floor to ceiling, their was something in a frame, or nothing in a frame, all with the purpose to hide the empty wooden wall behind it. He noticed how bare the space between them was; the wooden walls, how thin they were. Its a miracle people can survive here in the winter.

The photos on the wall, however, he could pay no mind. None of his business, perhaps. Or, maybe, he already knew them.

Stepping further into the first room, furnished with a bench and table like like a mix of an entryway and a dining room, he sees the stock of the kitchen as if its been freshly placed. The sink by the window without a dish, the stove-top without stain, the cupboards closed as if someone were keeping clean. The countertop held its array of wooden spoons and spatulas that are laid out like a harvest; half of them with tips charred black from cooking, the other half fresh as if store bought.

Hanging by the window is a wooden rosary. Fitting, he thinks, ignoring the whole rest of the kitchen and stepping to the hall like it knows his footsteps.

Then looking around, as if for the first time, he spots an opening past a set of closed doors on either side of the hall. An opening into a wide room.

He walks to the center of the opening, discovering the source the smokey smell in a den as he stands staring face to face with the mouth of a decrepit fireplace.

Hanging above it, a modest and faded portrait of a lady in a flattering, soft-pink dress with a flower in her hair matching the blush of roses on her cheeks.

She sits elegantly in front of a man with his arm wrapped around her, who stands in a brown suit and, evident to anybody, appears far less attractive than the mistress he wraps his arm around. Though, he stands confident and, unlike the lady, looks away and off into whatever distance the background was made up of, before the portrait became so distressed and its edges blackened into nothing.

He steps up to the portrait, lead by a permissive feeling of familiarity that first gave him the confidence to browse the place as if invited.

A moment of staring into the faces above the dead fireplace, he is hit by a mortality that strikes him unlike anything before.

He questions; thoughts coming to him with no apparent source or rhyme, flowing with symbols, ideas, and pure feelings rather than words. If they were verbalized, it would seem something like a question of phenomenon: a possession with so much potency, even after death, to warn a stranger and make them quake in its presence, as if they’ve spoken a curse against them.

How is it that one can feel so much, despite nothing concrete to urk his memory, nothing to remind him of why he’s feeling, apart from his own wretched suspicions.

He stares into the portrait, finally paying attention to the scene:

Two lovers, locked arm in arm, staring deep into the painter’s brush; deep enough as if staring into him — and he is the one staring back.

The painting has life.

The two of them fill the room with presence; a presence stronger than his own, making him feel, again, heavy. Heavy like damp air in the morning. His feet cling to the floor and his eyes cannot move.

Staring deep into the two — a two who he wishes to recognize — empty memories churn and float away like smoke; some memories of which he cannot distinguish between true memory or a dream.

The woman looks familiar: European and fair-skinned with deep slits of bone cutting through her cheeks, hazel eyes and dark brows framed by the black hair that falls deeper than the portrait can capture, into the black vignette touching the frame.

Her man, an intellectual no doubt, is held up by a brazen brown suit, darker than his brown hair and brown eyes; a fierceness in his chin reminding the visitor of a time when he used to speak openly and without care, as if the speaking was what gave him life and not the breath that carried it.

Wrapped into locked observation of the two, he feels a presence radiating from the floor and into the entirety of the home. A heat that makes this trespassing man tremble within his gut.

Guilty, he was, before a home that still lived.

Abandoned, as it may be, this room ignites a presence that feels more alive than anything since he started his drive.

Immediately after noticing this presence, he feels a boil of something sinister rising in his stomach.

At that moment, a creak of the floorboard and a crack of glass falling above him shakes his spine back to reality.

He forgot he came into a house.

Her house.

Now, he knows it all too well.

The Crevice

The sound of shattering glass shatters the soul of the trespassing man, who so suddenly realized himself a trespasser when he heard the noise above.

Fear sparks his action.

A black iron rod glows beside the fireplace and he grabs it.

He turns to face the empty door-frame like he was expecting somebody to walk through.

He waits, rod in hand, scanning the hallway, where again so suddenly, he feels a change coming over him.

The house — which was a dimly lit gold in the suns falling rays — has fallen to a twilight and grows greyer with each breath.

The door-frame, so empty, has become filled with webs or a dust so thick it glistens in the lack of light.

Outside in the hallway, the hinges of a closed door suddenly squeak. His breath hardens, and he listens without moving.

Standing in the center of the room with his back to the fireplace, his bones freeze and stiffen. A cold breath rips the warmth from his spine as it enters in a gust from down the chimney.

Twitching, he turns around.

Fighting his two trembling eyes, he stares into the fireplace.

Black charcoal. Grey ash. A photograph.

He stares into the photograph.

A poloroid with black sharpie on the bottom of its border. A date he cannot make out.

Curiosity momentarily seizes him, breaking him from his frozen bones.

He crouches to pick up the photo.

His fingers move through the ash, and the ash sticks to his fingers.

The doorway behind him fills, and he does not see it.

He brings the photograph to his face, releasing the rod from his fingers.

His eyes pulse. A step falls on the floorboard.

He scans every bone and crease in the poloroid skin, each lock and line of hair in its image.

Finally the limbs form into people and his eyes widen with an explosive realization.

He is here for that woman.

As if in-response, the house violently shakes like the basement just detonated; its foundation quakes and anything standing upright is upright no longer. Anything that could be felt or sensed shatters with such fervor and momentum, his vision shakes and turns the room blurry and fat, his skin feeling like its been dropped into jello and his brain dropped off fifty flights into free-fall. The ground moves like a ship on open water.

His ears are then shredded by a crashing of glass and ceramics as every hanging frame on the walls of the house fall in a symphony of screeching and crying. The portrait of the two lovers above the fireplace jiggles off its nail and lands directly on the head of the crouched man — who was too confused to cover his head — then smacking the floor beside him.

Along with the quake, the smack drops him to his hands and knees and he feels the photograph crunching under his palm. Frantically, he scrambles to regain his balance.

The first thing he does is not question such a force, no, that to him seemed normal; first, he straightens out the photograph because it is that, that does not make sense.

Now holding the photo in two hands, an anger rises like black smoke.

The photograph was split into two.

He stares into the face of a man who stands, looking into the camera with his resting right arm ripped off with the rest of the photo. Any panic he should have felt turns into an intense anger as he stares at this man. Fury crawls out from inside him, and hatred burns and boils in his his skin.

His thoughts do not straighten out, but he knows, this is a man who took his woman.

A man he recognizes, so well, but does not know from anywhere.

Hatred burns as memory runs.

The other half of the photograph is nowhere to be seen.

Into the Upstairs

Kneeling on the hardwood floor, clutching the ripped photograph with shaking hands like it was a parasite he just pulled from his gut, an anger so alien to him steals his mind and forces him to stand without another thought.

He turns, and walks towards the hallway.

One of the closed doors he had passed earlier is now open, but he ignores it and heads to the stairs in the other direction.

At the bottom of the staircase, he looks out the window facing into the back yard.

The twilight outside is dimming, and he cannot see well, but he makes out the twisting limbs of a thick and barren tree. He notes its significance, but turns to the staircase.

Looking up, the top of the stairs are black, nearly pitch black. He walks up anyways.

Each creak up the stairs echo in his memory.

Deja-vu.

His heart beats strangely against the reasons it should be; not from anger or fear, no, but from memory.

Haunting memories.

He knows he’s been here, walking up these stairs, his weight creaking on the wood with such familiarity.

Dread creeps up with every creak, twisting his thoughtless rage into thoughtful hesitation.

He stops at the top of the last stair.

A window facing the same backyard allows the final specks of twilight to illuminate the upstairs hallway.

He sees a picture in front of him. A landscape, a flowery and grassy meadow from the perspective of a treeline. Painted in oil. Or maybe the acrylic is aged. Its colors are dull. But they’re still there. Twinging in the twilight.

He steps up the last step, refusing to turn and look down the hallway despite the nagging pull in his heart.

Instead he turn in the opposite direction to look out the window.

He sees the same yard. The same, twisted, barren, black tree that he saw on his drive.

In its center, a gaping black-hole, its void now darker, more consuming, in the growing grey of dusk’s final minute.

The window sucks his attention. He stares for a moment too long.

Behind him, the sound of two footsteps planting into the floor loud enough to be heard, but soft enough for him to second guess his senses.

He pauses to trace his memory and in that moment before he turns, he feels an overwhelming sense of ease and at peace. Like he finally reached what he came there for.

Turning around and facing the hallway, he stares through a reflection of a woman he loves but does not remember, seeing her and seeing through her. Eyes jumping onto everything.

The open door behind her frames her blue body; her pale translucent skin blends and separates from shadows like oil on the surface of water; her opaque, black hair stays motionless, absolutely motionless, from the top of her scalp down past her bruised neck and stiff shoulders. His heart sinks at her bruised neck.

He moves his eyes to where hers would be. He looks into her eyelids: closed, peacefully shut and firmly held.

Her face is everything he recognized; familiar and warm. Homely. But its nothing as he remembered. Pale. Stiff. Motionless... so motionless that he doesn’t dare to blink as if that would disturb this reflection.

For those moments, staring into her familiar face — scorching his memory for something — time freezes and the air freezes with it, emptying his breath and making his eyes dizzy as oxygen departs.

He wants to take a breath, but cannot.

The photograph slips from his fingers and floats onto the ground.

His eyes stay fixed onto her eyelids, staring so hard to the point that he sees through them: a pair of green eyes staring back; staring so intently that he feels his bones shatter like glass and it slams him onto his knees.

His palms press onto a rug on the floor.

The ripped photograph of a man he hates stares from in front of him.

Mocking him.

Reminding him.

BOOK THREE:

BOOK ONE: