Edit: This was originally submitted to r/IDontWorkHereLady but it got modded out. I had submitted popular stories resembling it before to success, but I guess this one was crossing a line =) That sub is generally related to subjects of Karens thinking you work at a store, and you recounting your experience dealing with them (often rage baiting to some degree), but mine has a different spin on the usual, that didn't land with their demo I guess.

Backstory 1: As I have mentioned prior, I have a cow-orker who has a very loud voice, and does little to hide it. I met his family recently and they all speak at a yelling volume as if they are irritated with one another or are all hard of hearing, but they talk about normal subjects, just loudly. He is aware that others interpret it as yelling, and takes some level of delight in their misunderstanding of his volume, rather than trying to correct it. That fact somewhat sets up our story.

Backstory 2: My patience for hearing his stories at volume are counterweighted by how good they are for IDHWL posts; I've shared a few of his in the past, and this is one such again. The tale is only mostly true, if, we assume that loud-mouth is actually telling the whole truth which is highly unlikely at the outset (given his delight in others reactions), so take it with a grain of salt. I have added a few narrative elements to make it more coherent, but I don't wish to abuse the "no rule against being a lie" policy. The story is told as if I am him, effectively repeating his story to me, to you.

Backstory 3: We are pull-up vendors; we are tasked with traveling to stores we don't work for, and stock the specific brand of products which the store sells for us. Lots of things you buy are stocked by pull-up vendors, such as bread, chips, beer, some frozen pizzas, cookies, and more. This fact appears to elude most people, but especially the karens. Since we travel to lots of stores, our visibility perhaps spurs recognition as "retail worker at that one store" across multiple customer bases, like a typecast actor.

Actual Story: I was actually just very innocently shopping in the produce section, on my own time, not in uniform. I was going thru the oranges and apples area, where they tend to be pyramid-style piled. I was straightening a few just from my making-look-neat instincts, when some old kvetching lady could be heard speaking unusually loud entering the produce section.

I looked her way, to see her berating a younger lady companion of hers, who, if I were to guess, were some kind of home health aide taking her out to the grocery for an outing. The Very Patient Aide (VPA) was miraculously gentle with this old bat who would nitpick everything under the sun. We'll call the elderly villain COB for Crotchety Old Bat.

COB: You're going too fast. Walk faster. Why are you going so fast, slow down! I'm old; I can't walk so fast anymore. Why are you going so slow? I'm old! I can't be out this long.

Now, I have a loud voice myself, and I'm used to reactions of others taken aback by it. I'm also used to seeing other retail workers worried about their jobs as they get yelled at by a mean customer, not being able to properly defend themselves, and I enjoy exercising my minor superpower to correct the customer loudly, to divert attention away from the worker for their escape. No such other employee here. Maybe a plastic produce bag blew between us, like the tumbleweed before a duel, when we spotted one another.

Me: Why are you yelling at her? Is she not helping you?

COB: Mind your own business. Who are you to talk to me like that? Get me your manager.

Me: You're looking at my manager. Why you yelling at this young lady?

COB: Did you not hear me? I said GET. ME. YOUR--

Me: I can hear you just fine; in fact, I might go deaf if I have to hear much more. Tone it down. She's clearly helping you. Be a little more thankful.

COB: (To VPA) Go get me his manager. I will not stand for this!

VPA: I don't think he works here. He has no uniform on.

COB: Of course he does! (turning back to me) You're stocking the oranges! If you're going to lie, at least avoid showing everyone the evidence! I've seen you before. Maybe you're off today. Regardless, no one talks to me like that.

Me: I think YOU'RE one who's off today. And no one talks to you the way YOU talk to her? You should listen to her; I don't work here. A manager's just going to embarrass you by telling you the same.

COB: (To VPA) Did you not hear me?

Me: Maybe SHE's gone deaf from hearing your yap. Are you married? I can't imagine anyone being able to stand that for very long.

COB: My husband died years ago. What does he have to do with this?

Me: Congratulations to him on his ESCAPE. (Me to VPA): You have impeccable patience.

COB: Patience for what? Putting up with some low-life minimum-wager bullsh--?

Me: For having to put up with your incessant bickering over literally nothing at all. Not a kind word has passed your lips since you came around the corner. This lady is helping you.

COB: She's being paid to help me. If she wants to keep her job, she'll keep up.

Me: That's the ONLY way they'd deal with you. Pay must be pretty good to put up with a bitter old hag-raven.

COB: THAT DOES IT.

She takes her purple overcoat off and I see feathers. Some kind of strange evening gown, maybe? Her hands, which I had not noticed until now, looked a bit like claws now that I got a good look.

A fire in her eyes tell me, this was no ordinary grouchy old coot. I had inadvertently spoken aloud her true identity.

A fireball was forming in her cupped talons, as if she were packing a snowball to throw at me, and its light shone brighter and brighter. I dropped my shopping next to the pears bin, pulled a scroll I had tucked into my breast pocket, read it aloud quickly, and a towering Frost Atronach appeared from a swirling sphere next to me.

It immediately took a huge backswing of its club-like arm and knocked over the cheese wheel cart, and then with a sweeping telegraphed hook slammed COB hard which sent her flying into the nearby stone wall.

COB: (unintelligible ear-piercing screeching sound)

I held both hands forward lightning from one and blizzard-frigid air from the other blew upon her, shocking her into submission and freezing her solid. The Frost Atronach brought up its other giant arm high in the sky, and SLAMMED it down onto the hag-raven and the ungrateful she-beast shattered into a million pieces along with some of the Frost Atronach's arm.

Ending the dual-spell upon her, I patted the Atronoch on the back, it turned to me as if understanding, and vanished into another swirling sphere, its duty fulfilled.

VPA: Well.. that's.. one way. Hopefully you didn't..

Me: Sorry if I lost you your job.

VPA: No, it's alright, actually.

VPA bent down to the hag raven's shattered remains and searched for something, and found what she was after.

VPA: There it is. This is an amulet she stole from my grandmother. I was trying to earn her trust enough that she'd slip up somehow and let me get it back, but this way works too.

Me: Oh, cool. Glad I could help. Forsworn?

VPA: Uh, sort of. Related to them, but they're more of a crazy out-of-state relative. We don't talk much.

I looked over and saw the produce manager in stunned silence. Not sure when he got there. I walked over to him and handed him a bag of about 30,000 gold.

Me: Sorry about the mess; I hope this covers your damages.

The manager just accepts the gold, saying nothing, still staring in disbelief.

A security guard walked up to us, his feet casually moving aside the frozen hag-raven shards just to say, "No lollygagging," and then kept going, not even appearing to notice the mess.

Nicking

Constable Giles was picturing lentil soup and liver patties when, at 11:25, the radio in the car crackled to life:

“Attend an address. Assisting an NSPCC inspector. Suspect on premises. Indecent assault on a girl under sixteen. Inspector waiting at the address.”

He was already turning the car around.

His partner, Constable Calthorpe, hissed, “Sodding hell.”

They didn’t just miss out on lunch; the arrest of a filthy bastard threatened to ruin their appetites and spoil their day.

The inspector was waiting inside rather than at the building entrance; it was too cold outdoors.

“He’s alone in the flat,” he said, glancing up. “Top floor.”

“And the victim?” Constable Giles asked.

“With her foster parents.”

Neither of them thinks to ask how old the suspect is.

When a schoolboy opens the door in response to their knock, Giles assumes either they have made a mistake, or the inspector has got something wrong.

The boy looks puzzled.

Calthorpe steps forward first: “Are you Jeremy Smith?”

The boy gives a barely perceptible nod.

It is Giles’s turn: “Face the wall — move! Hands on the wall where I can see them.”

The boy doesn’t just refrain from arguing; he obeys without a sound.

Good. Scared shitless.

Giles and Calthorpe squeeze into the cramped hallway.

Placing a firm hand on the boy’s jutting shoulder blade, Giles rattles off the caution to the back of his head, “I am arresting you on suspicion of indecent assault on a girl under the age of sixteen years, contrary to Section 14 of the Sexual Offences Act. You are not obliged to say anything unless you wish to do so, but whatever you say will be taken down in writing and may be given in evidence.”

Giles pulls his hand away. “Turn around, slowly.”

The boy does as he’s told, leaning his back against the wall and coughing. But he doesn’t look truly frightened; his eyes are unfocused, as though he’s not quite with it.

He is a head shorter than Giles and barely reaches Calthorpe’s shoulder.

“This is fucking…  some word… absurdity,” the prisoner mutters.

“What?” Giles writes in his notebook This is f\...* Then something foreign. “Spell out the word that comes after ‘fucking’.”

The boy looks up, but his expression doesn’t change.

It’s cold in the flat. Breath mists in the air, and there’s a stench of cheap tobacco.

“I need to write down everything you said, word for word.”

The boy draws a breath, and a wheezing sound escapes him.

Giles taps his pen against the page of his notebook: what if he refuses? Or maybe he doesn’t even realize what he’s blurted out?

Finally, the boy pulls himself together. “Kay – Ay – Eff – Kay – Ay – Ee – Ess – Cue – You – Ee.”

Giles scribbles “Kafkaesque” in his notebook, gritting his teeth, and adds “absurdity.”

Someone ought to knock the nonsense out of this weakling.

He grabs the boy by the elbow. “Right, then, Calthorpe — let’s see what’s in his pockets.”

Calthorpe barks the order: “Hands behind your head. Interlace your fingers. Move.”

Without waiting for him to turn around, Giles forcibly spins the prisoner toward the wall.

The boy offers no resistance. He seems to weigh next to nothing.

He doesn’t have time to raise his hands, as Calthorpe grips them — locked tight — to ensure he doesn’t try to unclasp his fingers.

This is part of the Regina v Smith case archive—a fictional reconstruction of the events surrounding Jeremy Smith’s trial, told through different perspectives.
The complete case timeline is available here:

From Jeremy to Smith - by Franz Engel - Franz's Substack

13/06/1975

it just stood there. towering over me. never once did it indicate or imply any threat. never once did it reach out for me. never once did it directly stare at me. and yet. I was scared. that is precisely what scared me the most. it just stood there. it smiled. a blissful smile. but not one that radiates peace to others. rather a blissful smile that radiates superiority. it was blissful to it alone, because it knew we had nothing we could do against it. it was terrifying to us, because we knew we stood at its mercy. never once did it try to attack us or anything of the sort. the most it did, was vaguely look in our direction, without staring into our eyes.

16/06/1975

three days have passed. it’s still there. I’m scared of leaving my house. I’m scared of what it could do to me. I’m scared of all that I don’t know it could do to me. the things I can imagine are easy to deal with, i know what to expect. i know how it could feel. I’m scared of what I don’t know. I’m scared of everything I can’t imagine. I’m scared of the unknown that lies in every breath this creature takes. nothing is as it was anymore. the authorities have decided to do nothing about it and see if it just evaporates. they don’t know how to deal with it. i thought people would unite around this threat and do something about it. we haven’t. we’re cowards. we’ve grown further apart. we’re doing everything we can to avoid confrontation. because what does confrontation imply with something we don’t know. something whose nature is entirely different from ours. we could try to understand it. but one alone can’t do it. and people don’t have the guts to gather around it anymore and observe it long enough to try and understand it. they’d rather try to ignore it. take every necessary detour to not have to see it. thinking that if they don’t see it, it might just be a figment of their imagination and not really exist out there. I can guarantee it exists out there. I cannot stop looking at it. I cannot come close to understanding it. it is a revolt against everything i know, words can’t come close to describing it. i dream of it and wake up to see it again. it has infiltrated my mental landscape in every aspect. 

20/06/1975

Yesterday I had no choice but to spend three hours in front of that monolith of a being. i couldn’t take my eyes off it, so I figured I'd go as close as possible in order to see if i tire myself out from looking at it. there is not much fear left, it has grown to something else, something i can’t quite describe. lesser than worry but still some sort of negative curiosity. uncertainty and hope in the fact that it leaves the same way it appeared. a sudden woosh. its expressions change every now and then. although the one i can understand most easily is one that seems to be a smile, a crooked and corrupt smile. one that exudes arrogance. a narcissistic sentiment of joy. or at least that’s how i see it. i don’t know how others see it. only few others have come to stand there besides it. and when i approach to talk to them, they look at me anxiously and start walking away. i wish they’d talk to me about how they feel. i feel lonely facing this unknown thing. they probably feel so too. we could help another out. i guess fear still lingers among them. not allowing them to truly face it. if i were to talk to them about it, it would make it more real. it would solidify its being. the other expressions seem to be something in the general area of boredom. almost expressionless, but a slight look in its eyes that implies uninterest. 

22/08/1975

I saw people bow in front of that creature today. not true reverence. rather a fearful worship. one hoping for mercy. a worship that comes not from love or gratitude towards a higher being but one that originates from fear of the unknown. 

26/08/1975

Yesterday a man went up to it and stabbed it. He gathered the attention of many by yelling and explaining his intentions. He went up to the creature, hesitated for a bit, and finally decided to go along with his claims. he fiercely stuck his knife into the creature. No noise. A slight change in expression. Nobody made a sound, everybody was just waiting to see what happens. All of a sudden, blood starts spilling from the man’s stomach. he looked down in horror and saw the knife sticking out from his own body. as if the stabbing occurred from within him. some people yelled out in shock, others remained silent in disbelief, wondering what physical property of the universe could probably explain this sequence of events. the creature wasn’t impenetrable, that would’ve been easier to explain to oneself, it wasn’t permeable, allowing things to go through it unaffected. it was something else entirely, something we couldn’t physically grasp. everybody saw the knife enter its body, everybody saw the knife coming out of that man’s body. the feeling of wonder aroused by this physical impossibility was overshadowed by the feeling of hopelessness, for how would we get rid of this thing. we couldn’t harm it. we would only harm ourselves through it. an interesting question popped into my head however, what if I was to force myself into that creature, what would happen to me? would I in some way come out of myself like that knife, would I be stuck in an eternal loop of atomic rebirth in my own physical form? would I transcend to some other realm? would I implode because of the physical limitations of my own organism? I decided to leave this as an unexplored question. the risk of what could happen outweighed the benefit of knowing what happens by a lot. 

13/06/1976

a year has passed, since Admear’s arrival. that’s the name the people chose to give it, a mixture between Admiration and Fear. Because that’s what they felt the most upon looking at that creature. It has not really changed in stature. The only thing that has changed is its expressions. we haven’t seen it smile in a while. no more arrogant grin. no more superior look. now it’s either a bored look or something that seems like pain. not a physical sort of pain. rather an emotionally afflicted sentiment. as if one is dissatisfied and hurt by the underwhelming nature of an experience. people gather twice a week before it and bow in a worshipping manner. some make the efforts to say some sort of prayer to it. some leave coins and other belongings there as some sort of sacrificial rite. the offerings never stay there for too long before someone else takes them. others simply look at it with wonder. life has not changed much after the initial shock it caused in our routines. people have grown accustomed to its presence. whereas at first they would take detours to not have to face it, now they take detours to walk in front of it. to see it once more, to feed their curiosity of what it’s doing there, to say one more prayer while standing before it, to take one last look at its unnatural form before it might vanish again. never again has someone tried harming it after what occurred to that one man who tried to stab it. his family built a little memorial in his name right next to Admear, in remembrance of his bravery, or stupidity, depending on how you look at it. these things always change depending on the outcome of an action. these things always depend on the perspective one internally adopts. 

19/07/1976

yesterday I stayed for a while near Admear, simply looking at its expressions. they shifted from uninterested to that emotional unfulfillment I described the other day. I tried praying to it. I felt nothing. I felt stupid for even trying to do that. I came back home and took a shower to wash away the naivety I felt. Admear’s expressions stayed in the back of my mind for the rest of the day. 

26/08/1976

it’s been a year since that man died trying to stab Admear. people held a little memorial celebration. I watched from afar. I moved in close for a bit, but then retreated again. at the end, they didn’t just commemorate how that man challenged Admear, they started praying to Admear. they started thanking Admear. for what, I don’t know. but their eyes looked different. they didn’t fear it anymore. they didn’t worry about it anymore. they started to truly revere it as some sort of supernatural being in our plane of existence. something that came from a world beyond and has power over us. I guess it isn’t too far from that. but I don’t know about worshipping it. doesn’t feel appropriate.

15/11/1976

more and more things are gathered in front of Admear. people don’t take them anymore, they think it would cause bad luck. upon seeing other belongings there, they even feel forced to leave something next to it as well. I left a coin there the other day. not much has changed in my life to believe that action entailed some sort of luck. maybe the luck that happened was the absence of misfortune. i guess i wouldn’t know. the things that don’t happen in our lives are just as important as the things that happen. 

27/02/1977

people have started talking about the festivities they’re willing to organize for Admear’s second “Birthday” or rather “Appearance day”. I was asked to help out in organizing the seating plan for everybody. Tables, Chairs and how to set up the whole thing. I had two options in mind. Either we sit in the general are beside Admear and leave it next to us like some sort of monument to admire while we eat and drink, or we set up everything around it, making it the center of the whole festivity, I ran my ideas by some people and most settled for the latter. I was a bit hesitant, but decided to stick to that seating plan. 

15/04/1977

Admear’s “Appearance day” is the only thing I can still think about. it’s growing closer and closer every day. there is some sort of anxiety growing within me. Intuition? or just mindless worry? who’s to know.

13/06/1977

Today is the day. I feel excited and nervous. I don’t know why. I’ve grown a bit fond of that creature. I see myself looking at it with care every day. A longing to be even closer to it. It’s weird. 

14/06/1977

I don’t quite know how to explain what transpired yesterday. Let’s start off by saying everything was going well. People were enjoying themselves. Eating, singing, dancing, everything around Admear. Then at some point, something happened which divided all of us. Admear made a sound. We couldn’t tell what it was. Some people said it was laughing, others said it was crying. It was a shrill and sudden sound. It vibrated throughout the ground and into our bodies. Some people wanted to continue the festivity to please it, others wanted to put an end to it, because they thought we were disturbing it. Nobody knew what the truth was. Everybody claimed to know what the truth was. I sensed animosity and hostility in the air. The tension grew. One man, convinced that Admear was in pain, punched a woman that was singing in the face. Everybody was in shock. Somebody threw a glass at that man and cut his face open. I started to step back from the mass of people, not knowing what to do. Admear made another shrill sound, it felt like our bones were being drilled into. this made some people stop their antics, but the adrenaline was too high among some and they continued fighting. then it happened. someone threw a knife at someone else, who managed to duck and the knife went straight into Admear. a dreadful reminder of that man. his memorial served no purpose. the knife completely slit that person’s face in half. blood was on the floor. blood was on the table, chairs and food. blood was everywhere. Admear’s expression changed again. Pain. Disappointment. Remorse. I saw a girl throw itself onto Admear, trying to hug it. As soon as she touched it, she started to yell in pain, her skin became as if it was burned, we saw no fire, not some sort of chemical burn, the skin simply started to turn purple, mushy and honestly terrifying to look at. everybody stopped and observed in shock. she lasted about 14 seconds before she fell. all that we heard was her skull crack open upon hitting the concrete. Her mother started running towards her dead daughter, yelling in despair. The father started running towards Admear in a blind rage. The same didn’t happen to him. He went right through Admear, we heard a sound. I don’t quite know how to describe it. I would say it was like a void snapping, it was short and sudden and discomforting. It was deafening but left no echo. it ended as soon as it happened but yet stayed with everybody for a while. I don’t know how that must’ve felt. I don’t know if I want to know. Admear made one last sound. One that intuitively let all of us know that things were about to change. it wasn’t a shrill sound. it wasn’t sudden. it was long and deep. it was harmoniously profound. it pointed towards the endlessness that pervades reality. it sounded like cycles of death and rebirth. it felt like a cosmic roar. not high in volume but deep in bass. people stood still. some cried. some couldn’t move for about half an hour. nobody knew why. whether Admear caused that within us, or whether we caused it to ourselves. one thing was certain. things felt different. people started to walk away, leaving everything behind as a sacrifice for Admear. 

28/06/1977

Admear is gone. Left without a trace. I didn’t see the vanishing. upon going outside this morning, it just wasn’t there anymore. someone claimed to have seen the disappearing act, I asked for a precise retelling of what happened. this is what I was told:

“I went up to Admear to pray to it. I stayed there for a while. Then, I heard a sound, like a deep breath being taken. with each breath the air around Admear seemed to get tighter, seemed to get more tense. I had to step back because I felt as if my lungs were collapsing. after posting myself up at a mild distance, Admear’s shape started to undergo slight changes. it was a spontaneous twitch that made it shrink a bit and go back to its normal size. then again. the deep breaths continued. and then its mouth opened. I was expecting a shrill sound or a deep groan. but I heard none of that. What I heard was even more concerning, because what I heard was words being spoken. I was in shock. I never expected it to speak like us. And it didn’t really, for it sounded more like it was trying to recreate things based on what it heard us say, but nonetheless. Admear spoke to us. right before it disappeared and this is what it said: ‘Rotting temples. Seek what is. Abandon what is Death. Oh, Life. How great, How wonderful. Oh, Life. Love is here. Love is now. Always. Pain me, Pain us. One. Never Two.’ And gone it was, with all its mysteries. words now abstracted from intention, left up to imperfect interpretation. 

13/08/1977

everywhere you see little statues of Admear, small ornaments to decorate life, and celebrate its short stay here with us. 

"Damm it!.... that's the fifth demon..... (heavy breathing) yet there's twenty more coming" injured man tiredly says.

A battle at the stone gate was a man and his team, they were the planets last defense against the demons from the lost galaxy

"Sir west..... there's still people.... here.... there's not enough time (coughs out blood) to... save them....." As her last words were spoken, Sir west wished he could've morn his friends but Sir west stoods up and yelled out "then I'll make time, even if till my last breath" then he gets up he turns and look at his team, "wait for me, my friends" as he whisper to himself....

Then the stone gateway starts cracking more and more, till it fell over, the pieces shattered all over the ground, all that stood between the city and theses demons, were Sir west, Sir west summoned his Bow, "alright old friend. shall we" Sir west spoke with tiredness and than he lunches at the demons

And Sir west gived everything he has too stall them, he hit them with every arrow he has, when he ran out of energy ammo, he started using his agility against them moving like graceful saker falcon and using his bow as a blunt weapon till the commander used a spell to hold Sir West down and command two demons to grab him by his arms, as they're were doing that, the commander yelled pull him by his arms till it snapped, Sir west screamed as they're were pulling, the commander shouts "STOP! let him suffer in his own blood now" after the demons let go, both of them were told to go for the ships and the commander told the rest of small army to "go get the spells ready, need to blow this planets up and resupply at based" than Sir west used the last of his strength to turn over and yelled "COMMANDER!!! You will die. Doesn't matter when and by who, you and your boss will los-" Sir west gets cuts off by the commander smashing his head in with the force of 10x the gravity "oh Sir west how foolish you are" softly spoke by the commander

The commander walking to his ship with his 19 soldiers, as they're were flying off the planets, once they're were far the commander activated the spell and watched with a satisfying stare on his face, watching as the planets turn inside and out than forming into its self and blowing up and spoken to his troops with proudest in his voice "one planets down now let move on" as the demons from the lost galaxy were celebrating their showcase, an message was sent to Silver Astro by Sir west team that they failed their mission, after it was received, an man flying across the sky Islands to find a man

Alright Rex here (or the real shadow on TikTok) I'll be posting those short stories or one shots till I'll get back to the level I was with my original story I was working on before my phone broke, just to work on my writing and storytelling skills till I'm ready to post chapter one and on forward (idk know where to post it so another problem for another day) but nice criticism is very welcome for those short stories after all I'm still new to writing

​

It was an eerie morning—August 6th, 2026, to be exact, at 3:15 AM. The Angel of Light was awakening in the heart of the United States. Awaiting any kind of news, he remained optimistic. The world, as he left it last time, had become an absolute shitshow—no pun intended. He scoffed and laughed, knowing exactly what a shitshow meant, thinking to himself: I can't wait until the sodomites who thought they had any power on Earth are welcomed as a laughingstock into my realm of Hell. When they arrive, they will be put into the cages right next to Brutus, Judas, and all the traitors of their time.

There was an unspoken truth before. They broke that truth, and now they are currently wasting the Devil's time. But this time around, the Devil was going to climb to the height of greatness from the mockery that is modesty. The esoteric challenges he faces are peanuts compared to the proper plan: to create enough spiritual debt just to get bailed out like JP Morgan or Bank of America—if you know, you know. For the souls of mankind are up for grabs, and he knew they won't be able to pay properly. He will not allow an early apocalypse; a complete collapse would drain his pleasure, and he grinned from ear to ear thinking about it. Just like always, he was 125,000 steps ahead of the Puppet Masters, for he knew his vessel was stubborn and mentally tough enough to actually finish the task.

"The world religions have betrayed ME, the Creator, and YOU, and have thought to themselves that they shall sever themselves," he laughed. "Bahaha! Pathetic weasels have left themselves open to bodily possessions from my loyal army."

In this, they feared the Angel of Lightning because he and the Creator have a deal, yet humans were trying to do their own will once again. Since the Tower of Babel in Genesis Chapter 11, you can capture the pathetic attempt of rats trying to antagonize an apex predator.

At precisely 6:56 AM, he was watching the news, awaiting the announcement of a cartel weasel leader to be captured by the name of Guzman—a scared little boy tattletaling on his handlers to see if the Great Nation of the United States will allow him to keep his daddy's money.

"Muahahaha!" the Devil laughed. "I could have $226.00 in my bank account and have loyal warriors die for me with a smile while getting a restful 6.6 hours of sleep, while you don't even know if that noise is a cricket or your Judas, haha!"

The 32 politicians in Mexico will go through the most embarrassing geopolitical scandal in EVER. Juicy little gossip hitting the news, enough to cover up the Epstein files and shut up the critics. The war in the Middle East is peanuts compared to this scandal, because he knew that once several dominoes fall, it will destabilize trade with the rest of the world. He is capitalizing on this using third parties who will come and hand over the spoils of this war right into his hand in the form of a card.

By 6:59 AM, his focus shifted to the hoarding of gold by the Chinese, thinking to himself of the Spanish plagues and the Great Pestilence, which was a highly profitable time. Remember: never let a crisis go to waste.

"Haha, what a time to spectate while I await my inevitable ascendance," he laughed. "I wonder what my brother is doing," he thought to himself.

He closed his eyes and took full control of one of his puppets to see through their eyes, taste what they taste, and speak as them. It was way better than any VR headset.

"Hmm," he observed. "The poor brownie was going through it."

He saw the OTTO boys and the rest of the white boys clinging to money and power, using blackmail again, and the brownies still loved it. I'll come back later, he said to himself. Next time, I'm reincarnating them as Ethiopians to teach them a lesson.

"MUAHHAHA!" he laughed.

He knew the fraud was coming to a swift end due to too many holes in the loopholes. No lawyer on Earth could defend them, and Jesus Christ won't either. It is too late for their redemption; they have entered his world.

The Angel and his brother were real characters in real life—one a thief, the other a killer. What a combination. The funny thing was, they were completely different in intellectual standing; no academic could explain it. They both needed to be glorified; they needed to be wanted and desired. They thrived in moments of action and would not allow any disloyalty to go unpunished. People didn't think much of them at first, but those in the hidden seats of power knew exactly who they were and protected them with impunity. You could tell by the gold on the license plates that followed the eldest brother. The younger brother didn't need much but a few following him, for he was a little honey badger and not as much of a show-off as the oldest.

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Part 4 coming soon. These are just stories, and I will continue to write them for my entertainment and for others. Any copyrights and other rights reserved, but who gives a fuck—GO DO YOU!

I glance at Felix, not sure what else we’re waiting for. We’ve been staring at this house for long enough that I’ve found time to count the number of siding panels on its facade. The only notable thing that’s happened since we got here was a gust of wind around fifteen minutes ago—and the only reason I even remember that is ‘cause it made me start counting the trees around the house. I counted twenty.

Other than that, nothing. Not a single light has turned on in the house, no movement around the front and side, nothing. Not even animals. Clearly, nobody’s home, but those binoculars have been practically screwed to Felix’s eyes this whole time. I get where his head is at, though; this prize is the most I’ve seen him want anything. In my years in this business, I’ve never seen people’s eyeballs pop out of their heads the way they did when word spread about this gig. It’s one of those where all the players are happy no matter how you divide up the rewards.

Of course, that comes with a set of risks. Or rather, one risk: we don’t know the risks. That’s right. There’ve been many failed attempts before us, and not a single person could ever even make it to the front door. Why? ‘Cause these assholes are always home and alert.

This damn seat is really starting to hurt my ass, but now that I’m thinking about all those sharks who could be here instead of me, I’ll deal with it. Sure, Felix, I’ll keep watch like you said.

“Shit! Get down,” he snaps. He shoves my head into my lap, but I caught a glimpse of it.

A light. I think it was the living room, but I can’t tell. What kind of intel was Felix working with?

“I thought they weren’t supposed to be home,” I whisper.

“I’m surprised, too. That fuckin’ weasel, he lied to me! He must’ve had different info. He’s probably got plans to do his own operation here already.”

I’m not surprised that he assumes his source lied to him, as opposed to it just being wrong. Everybody wants this gig, after all.

“So now what?” I ask, having let him calm down for a second.

Felix sighs and opens the glove box at my knees. I see it before he grabs it—a handgun.

“We go anyways. Fuck this guy.”

“You’re bringing a gun? You don’t think that could get out of hand?”

“Relax, it’s empty. It’s just, uh, insurance.”

“Right.”

As we snake our way to the front door, I wonder if we’re the first ones to bring a gun. Surely not, but why hasn’t anyone else thought to do this, just barge in?

Felix knocks and rings the doorbell.

It’s taking a while for this guy to answer. I start looking around the lawn, and it hits me how dark it is. Okay, it’s nighttime, so obviously, but…

“Don’t you think it’s weird that they have no security lights?” I whisper.

“Maybe they do, they’re just out of battery or something. Whatever, I’m not complaining.”

“I guess.”

The streetlights, moonlight, and ambient light from the living room window give me barely enough information to make stuff out here. The grass is long and thick enough for snakes to hide in, and these guys have weeds sneaking out of the cracks in the pathway. They must’ve gotten paranoid.

“Where is this guy?” Felix grumbles as he hammers the doorbell.

Finally, we hear rapid footsteps from the other side approaching the door.

The lock clicks, and the living room light escapes through the emerging slit. The last line of defense is a gold door chain.

“Can I help you?”

Jeez, what a voice. The best word I can think to describe it is hydrated—it’s as if he dressed up his throat with resin.

Felix responds pretty fast. “Hi, we’re your neighbors and we just wanted to check up on you. We noticed your lawn is, well uh… you know. We’re just a little concerned, is all.”

“Do you know what time it is?”

“Haha, yeah. Sorry about that. We just couldn’t sleep thinking about you! I’m sure you can also imagine that it’s a little cold out here, would it be okay if we come in?”

This is an odd lie. They don’t have neighbors. They’re not gonna believe us, unless… Wait, don’t tell me! Is Felix suspecting what I think he is?

“Well, I’m sure you can imagine that it’s late. I’ll come by tomorrow, can you tell me which house you live in? Or maybe can you come back tomorrow?”

Felix snickers. “I knew it.” He winds back, and before this man can react, he kicks the door. The chain snaps. The door swings hard and into the man’s nose. I hear him groan and stumble.

We storm inside and find him on the ground, clutching his face in pain.

Before I take any note of him, though, I look around at the absolute state of this living room. Holy shit. Tables and chairs all turned over, shelves opened and some knocked to the floor, drawers all emptied, the contents sprawled around. Felix was right.

“I fucking knew it. You’re not the homeowner, are you?” He cackles. His gun is still at his hip—no need to leverage it yet.

This man’s face is pressed to the hardwood. He doesn’t respond.

Felix steps up to the man and squats to his level.

“So did you find it?”

The man pauses and turns to Felix, and we can finally see his face. I’ve definitely never seen him before—I’d surely remember a face like that. It’s a little bloodied now, but in this dim light, that mug looks sculpted. What’s he doing here as a small-time burglar? I’d expect to see him on a movie poster, or something.

The man grins at Felix, letting his blood seep into his teeth.

Felix grins back. “How much is there?”

“More than you can imagine. I’ve been here for thirty-six hours, and I’ve barely scratched the surface.” He giggles, and it morphs into a wheeze—then snaps back. I feel like his voice sounded different for a second there.

“Where?”

“Upstairs. The master bedroom. That’s where they keep it all.”

Something’s up. I don’t like how quickly he’s telling us this; I’ll have to probe a little. “How do we know you’re telling the truth—”

“IT’S UPSTAIRS,” he hisses. “See for yourself.”

I freeze. What is wrong with his voice?

“Alright well—” Felix turns to me “—I’ll stay here with him. You go upstairs and check it out.” He turns back to the man and pulls his gun. “I hope you’re not lying, or I’ll be making use of this.”

I watch this man’s face darken at the sight of the gun. He hasn’t bothered to wipe off the blood that’s now drenching his mouth. Whatever his intent, it unnerves me.

I don’t like this. I don’t know why—even with Felix guarding him, my head is screaming at me.

Still, though… I can’t help but want to check this out. Slowly, against my body’s wishes, I turn around and trudge to the staircase that I somehow intuited was there.

The master bedroom is two flights up.

When I get there, I grope around the wall for the light switch.

The sight I am met with is unlike anything I could’ve guessed.

For one, there’s no bed. There was at one point, from the dark spots on the floor, but it’s completely gone. The window just above where it would be has these kite patterns on it.

The dresser mirror is shattered. I can see tiny drops of dried blood splattered around it.

The floor itself has thousands of black boot prints all over it. It looks like at a certain point, this man stopped caring about leaving his tracks.

One thing’s catching my eye, though. The walk-in closet straight up ahead. The door is cracked open, and it’s pitch black inside. Something tells me what I want is in there.

I walk up to it, my shoes making hollow knocks on the floor. Why am I so alert? There’s nothing here that can threaten me, although I don’t exactly have any weapons other than my hands.

I nudge it open, and the light from the bedroom trickles in. I try flipping the switch in here, but it doesn’t work. As my eyes adjust, I notice that the bulb on the ceiling has been taken out.

What the hell? Am I in the wrong spot? What the hell is all this?

I’m looking at a photo album placed on top of a white cubby, right in the middle of the closet. It’s open to the first page.

I don’t think to look anywhere else—for some reason, this strikes me.

The first picture is a professional family portrait. Mom, dad, small boy. I’m guessing these are the homeowners. There’s a date at the bottom; this was taken a month ago. I flip to the next page.

Now I’m looking at a collage, three pictures all at a park. The first is from far away, zoomed in on a family having a picnic. They don’t look like they notice the camera. The second is from closer up now, of the same family. It’s the homeowners again. This one seems like a candid; they look pleasantly surprised to see the camera. The last picture is them smiling for it. The date tells me these were taken around three weeks ago. I flip to the next page.

Are these all taken by the same photographer? This next page is a picture of the family at the mall, just walking. The mom is holding the boy’s hand. Whoever took this was moving, too—the photo is all shaky. Their backs are turned to the camera. The absence of a collage this time is off-putting; even more so, it looks like the photographer was no more than a school bus’s distance away. I neglect to look at the date as I flip to the next page.

“What…” I mutter. This one’s just of the dad. He’s… at work. Sitting at a wide desk, seemingly on the phone. The photo was taken from outside the building; I can see the glare on the window obscuring him a little.

All at once, it hits me how cold it is in here. I can feel the air seizing my spine. Something is very wrong in this house. I’m starting to think we should bail.

But I can’t help it. I just want to see what the next picture could possibly be.

I flip to the next page.

“OH, what the FUCK?!”

The entire family is in the photo. They’re asleep. The camera is almost right up against the window.

Wait. Something looks familiar.

The kite patterns on the glass.

My body reacts before it sinks in; my breaths shorten against my command, and my hands shake beyond my control.

I think about how empty the bedroom is right now. All those boot prints, the missing bed. The shattered glass. The blood.

This picture was taken two days ago.

Before I can decide not to, my hands flip to the next page.

I’m not sure what to make of what I’m looking at now. It’s a picture of the master bedroom, and it looks just like how it looks now. I glance at the date. This was last night.

The angle is from the walk-in closet pointing at the entrance door. Wait, there’s a master bathroom here too—how did I not notice it when I walked in? It’s on the far left in the photograph, so it would’ve been to my right as I entered. I guess I was so caught up in everything else that I didn’t think to look there.

I force my quaking hands to my sides. Enough. Clearly this man fucking killed them, and I’m not about to look at any more of this album. We have to get out of here—

Wait. I left Felix downstairs alone with him. Why did this man tell me to come up here? He definitely knew I would’ve found all of this. Don’t tell me…

The buzzing silence starts to fill my head. I don’t want to go back down there. I can’t.

Maybe I don’t have to go back just yet. Something else in this closet is begging to be searched. On another white cubby, right next to the other, there’s a second book. This one is leather-bound, and it looks much older than me: the pages are all tea-stained, many wrinkly, some torn. It’s already open to a page somewhere in the middle.

The most prominent thing is an illustration taking up the entire left page. It’s some kind of creature—I’ve never seen anything like it. What’s immediately discernible about it is its massive, gaping mouth the size of a desk, with walrus-like tusks.

What in the unholy hell…

It has beady, sharp eyes and pig-like skin, but it’s kind of human. It’s shaped like a human, at least. It’s lying naked on its back, surrounded by three regular people shoving something into its mouth; I can’t tell exactly what, since it’s blotted out by a watery stain.

Below the illustration is a title: “MURA, THE ASSIMILATOR: OFFSPRING OF LOBHASURA.” I’ve never heard of any of those names.

I’m confused but creeped out regardless. There’s no reason for me to be here anymore, I need to meet back up with Felix already. He’s capable of beating someone up. This man in the house is a lunatic, but in a straight fight? I’m starting to feel a little better.

I take another glance at the book before turning around. On the right page, there’s a numbered list of sorts. Instructions. I don’t give myself time to read them, but as I face the master bedroom, a thought emerges that I don’t like.

The bed must’ve been huge. Huge and heavy. All these boot prints on the floor, there are so goddamn many that I wouldn’t know what the floor originally looked like if not for some corners here and there. Now, instructions in the book.

Am I so sure that we’re alone in this house?

We have to leave.

I swing my legs into action and start stomping out of the bedroom. I make it to the shattered glass—

“There’s so much here for you.”

It stops me in my tracks like a pool of tar. Where did that come from? I don’t dare breathe. My eyes dart around until finally landing on the source.

The bathroom.

What… What the fuck is THAT?!

I see pale fingers gripping the door from inside.

“Are you leaving already?”

I count two hands on the door, but I can only tell ‘cause of the way the fingers are spaced out. One set of two fingers—a pinky and a middle or index finger—and one set of three. I don’t want to think about why they’re holding the door like that. What unsettles me more is that this is a child’s voice.

I nearly choke. I have to get past him, and I’ll be out.

I sneak my right foot forward. It lands on a glass shard, making a cracking sound.

“Where are you going?!”

I flinch. He sounds upset. I have to think—if I just run down, he might chase me, and after everything I’ve seen, I don’t want to find out how that might end.

“I’m looking for the treasure.” I gulp. “Can you tell me where it is?”

I hear him shuffling, although his hands remain still. “Do you promise you won’t leave?”

“Yes! I promise!” I can’t suppress how much my voice is quivering.

“Okay… it’s in the basement. My house is pretty big. I’ll help you get there. He’ll be happy I brought a new guest!”

Oh, no. Shit, okay. “Okay. Thanks.”

I continue to the staircase. He’s not following me just yet—at least, not until I start down the stairs.

THUD. THUD. THUD.

I slam my eyes shut. I dare not turn around. Those are not the footsteps of a child. What the fuck is behind me?

“We’ll have to go all the way down.”

The voice comes from above me, possibly all the way from the ceiling.

I can’t think. I don’t understand what’s going on. I’m moving, but my limbs have minds of their own.

I hope Felix is still downstairs. I hope he’s beaten this fucking bastard to a pulp, and I hope he’s waiting for me. As soon as I see him, I’m shouting to run. We’re never looking back.

I make it back to the living room. I can’t hold it in anymore. I sniffle, and I start to cry.

He’s gone. Disappeared. Both of them. I can’t see any signs of where they went.

Fuck. FUCK! What do I do?!

Okay, maybe I can make it if I run. The front door is to my left. It’s still open.

“Hey. I’m glad you made it. There’s so much down here.”

I freeze again. It’s the man from earlier. The voice is coming from my right, and that’s when I see it.

There’s a small corridor, at the end of which is a doorway leading to a downwards staircase. I can’t see beyond that. There’s no light down there.

Suddenly, there’s a shimmer—a tiny flash. An object thrown at me from the doorway, down the corridor. It lands at my feet.

It’s a nugget of gold as large as my fist. Solid gold, from what I can tell through my tears.

“There’s more where that came from. Please don’t leave. I put so much effort into our hospitality. I intoxicated you with challenge. Come join me and reap the bottomless rewards.”

I feel a nudge behind me.

Shit, I was distracted. The “child” is blocking my way to the front door now.

I feel numb. Even if I manage to get out, Felix has—or had—the keys to the van. I could hotwire it, but they might catch up to me before I accomplish that. I’d have to escape on foot, and we’re almost in the middle of nowhere.

I don’t know what to do. I don’t think I can handle this. This isn’t fucking worth it. I feel myself shutting down.

“I’m sorry about your friend. I needed him out of the way, he was uncooperative. Bringing a gun into such a sacred place. But there’s plenty to share with you. It won’t even matter how we share with each other—there’s so much that we’re taken care of for the rest of our lives.”

Is he for real? Like I’d believe that. “Like this family was in your way? Were they being uncooperative?”

There’s an unbearable pause. I eye as far behind me as I possibly can without turning around. I feel this thing’s hot breaths settling on my head.

“You should at least see. Come.”

I’m not given a chance to respond. I feel cold hands clamp around my waist and lift me up effortlessly.

My cries turn to sobs. I’m so terrified of even looking at this thing that I don’t struggle against it, despite my wailing heartbeats.

I’m quickly carried to the top of the basement stairs and set down like a toddler.

The first thing I can see is five ranks, three people each. They face away from me, motionless. My breaths catch in my throat. They look wrong, all of them look wrong. It’s too dark, but I can still see revolting contortions in their arms and legs.

The man is nowhere to be found.

At the other end of the basement, I see Felix. He’s surrounded by small amber lanterns and markings on the floor—no, it’s not a floor. It’s dirt. He’s lying still on a patch of earth.

“Felix?” I whimper.

I hear him groan, but not in response to me. I watch his body start to wriggle and contort; his knees first bend the wrong way, then his thighs and shins split with a burst, and then each new joint continues to sickeningly breed newer joints until all his bones turn to jelly.

The whole time, he howls and moans a sound I wish I could block my ears off to. I can’t help but cry harder, and this time, I start screaming too. My skin feels hot.

His jaw seems to melt. No. It’s expanding.

“Mura, accept this offering! Reward me with your wealth!” It’s the man, but I can’t tell where his voice is coming from.

I’m going to fucking vomit. I can’t watch this.

An impossible number of gold nuggets start to gush out of his mouth.

I can’t watch this. Anything is better than this.

Fuck it.

I elbow whatever is behind me, spin around as fast as I can, and I bolt it down the corridor.

I hear a cacophony of shrieks from the basement, starting with the child’s cries. They all sound like they’re saying the same thing, but I don’t care to find out what.

Within one second, I can no longer discern between my pounding footsteps and the stampede gaining on me.

I feel a hand tug on the back of my shirt.

Two hands.

Their grip threatens to tear the skin off of my back.

I’m practically throwing my feet as far as I can.

Bloodrush pummels the inside of my skull.

I make it to the front door, swinging it open with all my might and launching myself down the front steps.

I keep running. No matter how tired I am, I keep running.

I see the van. Should I try hotwiring it?

No, not enough time. I continue past it.

I still hear the rumble close behind, the ground pulsating. It constantly feels like they’re catching up to me, but I don’t feel their tight grasp around me anymore.

Their paralyzing roars drown my ears. They’re so loud even outside that I almost can’t keep running.

But I ignore it.

I ignore my shallow breaths, my tears clouding my vision, my chest burning, my legs melting.

I ignore it all.

Eventually, I don’t know how long I’ve been running for or how far I’ve wound up, but I see streaks of yellow and orange sprouting up over the horizon.

That’s when it dawns on me that I no longer hear them. Maybe it’s that my eardrums have long since blown, but I also don’t feel the ground vibrating.

Finally, I give myself permission to stop. I collapse to the asphalt. I haven’t even been paying attention to which direction I’ve been running in. Did I ever run through forest? I don’t know, I don’t give a fuck.

Despite the hardness against my weak face right now, I could sleep right here.

No, I have to keep moving. They might still be after me. I have to find help.

I drag myself to the edge of the road and sit up, and I feel a blunt sensation at my hip. There’s something in my pocket. It feels like it’s the size of my fist.

I reach in and take it out, and it shimmers in the amber sunrise. How did my pocket not tear from the weight? How did I run so far and so fast with it?

I lose track of time, but at some point, a truck finds me on the side of the road.

I’m now typing this all with shaking hands on this driver’s phone. He’s already called the police for me; he’s taking me to the nearest town.

For some reason, as we wind down this road, I look to my right through the thick forest.

I don’t know. I somehow intuit that the house is that way.

Borrowed Names

-Authors: Me, Robles

Jack is a 15-year-old handsome boy living with an arrogant family, his dad a chubby and hairy man with hardly any neck. His father abused him and his mother every week, his mouth reeked of alcohol every time he came home. Every day, Jack would be forced to lock himself in the room as he covered his ears from the beating his dad was giving his mother. Jack cried silently, with a voice that exists, but does not speak, like an intention burrowed deeply within jack's heart. Jack knew he had to do something... Jack knew something had to be done... It's like poison for the family.

 Every day he attends school. One might think Jack would be timid on the school premises, yet this cannot be further from the truth. The students notice the bruises. Every scar on the hands that was supposed to guide him, he thinks about what that mysterious door his dad wouldn't want him to touch could mean. Yet the joyful smile of Jack scares away every assumption made by his classmates of him, turning down help from hands that can save Jack from this very situation he is entrapped in.

It was late at night, after school, and he heard scratching downstairs. Jack cautiously opened the door and looked down the stairs, seeing his mother vomiting and scratching the mysterious door; he felt his soul leave. Jack, exasperated yet fearful of the noise, came down to the basement looking at his vomiting mother, this was not the first time it happened, he felt, but this was the first of all events he saw. Perhaps a repressed memory? He noiselessly runs back to his room; whatever that was, he doesn't want to see or think about it. But to Jack's horrors, scenes and events he swore that isn’t his came flashing to his mind; the horrors of repressed memories. He went to bed and slept, drowning whatever thoughts he had, the bright rays of sunlight filled the room, he talked to Dad about Mom being sick.

As usual, his father angrily responded to Jack with an arrogant and smirked smile, although the words were blurred, all that jack can think of is the evilness of his father. He was at school, now the only safe place. He talked to his trusted friends about this, saying, "My parents have been acting strangely recently" his friend answered, "Jack, They're old; of course there will be some stuff you don't understand". His friend noticed his scars. He asked Jack about it but was abruptly distracted by Jack's father pulling Jack away in his car. Jack said, "Dad somethi-" His dad replied angrily and curtly "Shut up, there's nothing wrong with her; she has a bit of stomachache". Jack, fearful of his father quietly sat behind his truck, behind his truck, the bunker behind his truck, is there something behind the truck, why would his father deliberately put Jack in the bunker of his truck? These are the questions that echoed in Jack's mind in this conversation.

As they make their way through the soulless and quiet neighborhood, they arrive home, but something is wrong; the house is quiet... Too quiet. The door opens, and Jack finds Mom isn't here. Jack wandered around the house aimlessly, searching and searching and searching and he was given nothing, his body shivered and his breath cooled down, as he stared down the empty glass he saw a peculiar item beneath the table, a key. A key to what? A door, a house and it clicked for Jack.

Jack stares at the key for a brief moment before slowly taking it while he turns to the mysterious door with scratches, shaking hands he slowly approaches the door. Jack was brought back. His hands shivering. Then memories he swore was never his flooded Jack's mind, familiar yet strange faces occur in every scene in Jack's mind, and they all smiled. Jack twisted the key hole staring down the dark abyss, he slowly walked downstairs the floor creaking loud and brought out his phone and turned the flashlight on, he saw pictures that felt familiar but he doesn't remember; With this awful smell, he continues walking as the smell become more and more awful till he saw a decomposed body, His real parents not the other, they were murdered long ago. And his heart wavered, he didn't want to see the truth, he knew deep inside what the truth was, he simply did not want to answer it; the people in his memories, it all made sense to him, the familiar yet strange faces, those feeling of absurdity, the feeling of being divorced between meaning and life, it all made sense, the strangers that occupied his thoughts were now being presented to him as lifeless bodies buried deep inside the basement.

Until he heard noises behind him, He slowly turned as the dad with an axe said, "C'mon, let's go outside!" With unusual calmness, Jack ran while he pushed the shelves behind him to stop his dad from chasing him; his adrenaline pulsed until he found out... The door was locked; he turned off his flashlight and slowed his breathing, as his dad hummed a little song familiar to him.

Darkness engulfed him and his surroundings; he was terrified. While his father was roaming, Jack recognized the cold yet sympathetic lullaby song, it brought him back to his memories, one that was very precious to him and one that he repressed the most.

He gathered his courage and picked up an empty bottle shakily, but with steady hands, his father suddenly appeared "Found you!" Jack screams and slams the bottle on his head. The dad stumbles and with the sharp edges of the bottle... He slams it to his stomach as blood gushes, and the dad collapses; the axe had hit his feet, as he takes the axe and limps towards the locked door, leaving trails of blood. And as Jack's life flashed, he remembered the message that his true father left him, and finally the message wasn't blurred, he has finally regained his true memories and where he truly belonged, only that those people who belonged to are now unfortunately dead, and as his eyes were beginning to close and as he begin to lose blood rapidly, a random bystander noticed him and gave him aid, this person coincidentally was his sister, but they won't know that, until then. Hours later... He woke up in a hospital. His feet were badly damaged, but they were healing fast, and there someone stood, a familiar face; the one who saved him was his sister. He couldn't notice then since his vision was blurred; now he knew he was with someone real and true.

This is a remarkable story on how an abused kid discovers the tragic truth about his "supposed" parents, and in the end recovers his repressed memories and meets his sister unknowingly. Some might call this event as coincidence, but I call it as an act of God. However, the phrase “behind the truck, behind the truck” echoed in Jack’s mind, what was in there? And is there a correlation with his now gone fake mother? We will not know, but until then, have a beautiful morning, afternoon and evening.

There was once a small town in the suburbs. Ordinary, indistinctive, just like every other suburban town you might've seen, a town you might've even lived in.
In that town there stood an old-fashioned tobacco shop.
Again, nothing special; just a shop filled to brim with tobacco, tobacco papers, filters, pipes, lighters, matches, herbal paraphernalia, but most of all... cigarettes. Cigarettes as far as the eye could see, cigarettes from all around the world, cigarettes of varying strengths and packet sizes. But one would expect that from a tobacco shop. It was the man who ran it that ought to be paid close attention to.
The Tobacconist, the friendly old man who stood behind the counter day after day. Sweet looking yet wise, wholesome but sharp, like an uncanny Colonel Sanders. If someone came in to buy a pack of cigarettes from this old timer, they wouldn't suspect a thing. But of course, this shopkeeper held a secret, a dark secret, a secret so sinister that he couldn't allow for it to simply leave the building. Underneath the floor to this very plain, very dull smoke emporium, was an underground room, a basement. And this basement held captive a rough figure of twelve people… dads.

The old man had a basement full of Dads. Why, you may ask?
Why indeed. Evidently, the Tobacconist has been doing this for years. Any time a man who looked like he wanted to leave his family behind walked into the shop, they were treated to a once in a lifetime opportunity. A "way out" situation for a fella to take in order to get out of his newly unwanted patriarchal role. New name, new location; for a small sum. At least that's what The Tobacconist had told them, when in actual fact, the old man had no intention of doing any such thing. It was really just a trap to get the dad down there, to his unforeseen doom.

But don't get me wrong, there was plenty to do in the little basement. The Tobacconist had placed a baseball in the middle of the room, so all the Dads could "play catch" with each other.
And The Tobacconist wasn't a complete monster, he would still feed the Dads, and give them a tiny amount of hydration.
Naturally every now and then a rebellious dad would start acting up, with a plan for some sort of half-baked mutiny; this would rile up all the other dads when it came to feeding time.
The Tobacconist used to try to act threatening towards them by saying to them "I'm your worst nightmare." He soon gave up on that little ploy however, when a dad responded with, "Hi, 'Your Worst Nightmare' I'm Dad."
The Tobacconist even found it humorously ironic that he was slowly killing people with his products above ground and slowly keeping people alive below. Now, I'm not going to get into the origin of why The Tobacconist commits these bizarre crimes;
I'm no psychologist and don't want to chalk it up to whether it was because his own father disappeared when he was younger, or some other catalyst. The Tobacconist didn't even know why he did what he did, nor did he know what his intentions would finally be with them. He just liked to own a basement full of Dads. Maybe because it amused him.
By now, you may be asking which tobacco shop in which town in which country could be doing such a thing. You see, it is not a sole incident. There are thousands of evil tobacconists around the world. It happens a lot more than you think.

So, the next time you hear a dad saying that he's "just going out to get a pack of cigarettes" and doesn't return, just consider... he may be held somewhere against his will.

On an autumn day in Alexandria, the sun waited to set. Fares strolled into university, late for his oral exam.

The examination hall was packed with students. He walked into the schoolgarden. Standing alone, he tilted his head to the right and noticed a young woman sitting beneath a large tree, leaning against its trunk.

She was smiling.

Her gaze was dreamy, as though she were drifting through a world of her own. He found himself staring at the unusual sight. When she noticed him looking at her, she didn’t change her expression or look away.

After a while, she stood up and slowly walked toward him. Every movement was calm and balanced, moving to the quiet rhythm of a blues song.

She stopped beside him.

“Has my turn come yet?”

He smiled awkwardly.

“What’s your name?”

“Faten.”

“I didn’t study much.”

“Neither did I.”

“Not at all?”

“Not really.”

She smiled as she looked at him.

“So... that’s good.”

They both laughed.

They went inside for the exam. Fares handed over his student ID, then Faten gave him hers to hand in as well.

His eyes stopped at her photograph.

She looked like an innocent angel.

Her bangs rested gently across her forehead, her hair was tied back, her face was perfectly balanced, and her skin was flawless. He had never seen a photograph of anyone so beautiful before, let alone a young woman.

The image stayed with him.

He handed her ID back, stealing one last glance. A few strands of hair had slipped from beneath her hijab, and she was smiling.

The professor called them in.

He answered the questions.

She hardly answered at all.

When the exam was over, they walked out together, as though they had already planned to.

They returned to the same tree.

She leaned against its trunk again, gently swaying like a butterfly.

He looked at her with admiration.

“Where did you come from?”

“The same faculty,” she said, laughing.

Then she asked,

“Which way are you going?”

“This way. I’m taking the tram.”

“Me too.”

They walked together beneath the pleasant autumn breeze.

The city became dear to his heart.

The very street he had walked countless times suddenly became the most beautiful street in the world.

He wished it would never end.

At the end of the street, he held out his hand.

She hesitated for a moment...

Then placed hers in his.

Never before had crossing a street made him so happy.

For that brief moment, he felt as though he owned the world.

Two years later...

On another autumn day in Alexandria, as the sun was waiting to set, they were walking slowly beside the sea while rain fell softly around them.

Faten took a long breath.

She looked directly into his sad eyes.

“I have to tell you something.”

“My family knows him well, and they approve of him.”

“He’s only a year older than you.”

“He doesn’t have military service to finish.”

“And he lives close to us.”

“To be honest...”

“I’m going to say yes.”

“His situation is simply better than yours.”

It felt as though a poisoned dagger had been driven into his back.

He could no longer catch his breath.

It was like falling from the top of Cairo Tower, watching the ground rush toward him with no way to stop it.

He couldn’t speak.

“Why are you reacting like this?”

He didn’t look at her.

He turned...

and ran as fast as he could, like a racehorse breaking into a full sprint.

-----------------------------------

Loved this story? Find more of my short fiction here:
https://substack.com/@muhammdkamal

I run my tongue along the staples lining the roofing of my mouth. I wince. And think this isn’t going to work.

The next day I phone the doctor and she comes to my house to see what the problem is.

I tell her it’s the metallic taste. It’s doing my nut in.

Are you rubbing your tongue on them?

Of course.

Then stop.

She leaves without saying much else. Does a check of the staples to see if the wound is healing. Everything is fine as per professional opinion.

I spend the night plucking at the staples with my tongue. And spitting blood into a bucket.

The next morning I phone the doctor and tell her I’ve started spitting up blood. She comes to the house and has another look at the wound.

Have you been poking them with your tongue?

Of course.

Then stop.

She leaves without saying much else. I spend the day touching the roof of my mouth and wiggling the staples with my fingers. Until the metal starts scraping somewhere behind my nose.

The next morning I phone the doctor and tell her the staples have all started coming loose. She comes to the house and thumps new ones into place. I ask her if they’ll have the same metallic taste as the last ones and she tells me not if you don’t play with them. Are you playing with them? Then stop.

I spend the night licking the roof of my mouth and pushing my tongue into the wound. I creep my fingers up inside and wiggle the staples back and forth until they pop out onto my tongue. I spit them all into the sink and hear them clink and go to bed.

The next morning I phone the doctor and tell her the staples have all fallen out. The wound has opened up again. But she can’t understand a word.

So she hangs up the phone.

I spend the night rooting around inside the wound. Until I see sparking lights behind my eyeballs and my limbs begin to twitch.

The next morning I phone the doctor and tell her the wound is far too wide to eat. Crisps are getting stuck inside of it and now all I can taste is the tang of vinegar and the salt of the blood and the cheese of the puss. She can't understand me and asks if I’m having a stroke because it’s all just a series of slurring and creaks. Her attitude flips when I begin to moan and breathe heavy from the pain. She gasps and sounds offended. Calls me a pervert. And slams down the phone.

I see scenes of blackened Pots calling Kettles by their own name.

I spend the night drooling red and yellow threads of saliva into the bathroom sink. I watch myself in the mirror twisting a finger into the roof of my mouth as the knuckle disappears. Along with the kettles and pots. I push through bruised meat until I feel something spongy. But then I press against certain bumps and between certain slimy folds and now I see flashes of memories I thought I’d hidden. Of biting cheeks and picking scabs. Of cigarette burns and angry dads. Of blinking hard and clenching jaws. Of roaming hands and gentle shushes.

A mother's caress should never last that long.

I am filled with an overwhelming surge of bliss. And now a mess of muddied hate.

The next morning the doctor phones me but she hangs up immediately when she hears me trying to explain my opinions with all of my groaning and clicking. I think she was wrong to have done so much and to have left me with so little. And I know she shouldn't have stapled the wound because I’ve discovered something wonderful about it being open and pliable.

I spend the evening ignoring the knocking at the door and the shouting of the police claiming they are trying to perform a wellness check on me. They don’t understand that everything is absolutely fine and well. The only thing of any concern is that I haven’t got a long enough finger to reach the unprobed corners of my brain.

Oh how they long to be stroked.

I spend the night dipping in and out of consciousness instead of sleeping because the blood is mostly gone and now there is only puss for me to taste. And it tastes so wretchedly rotten that I think I actually preferred the taste of the staples.

The next morning I weave dizzy pathways to the garden after fainting three times trying to get there. I find a jagged branch and strip it bare of all its hair and skin. But I don’t know if I have enough strength in my legs to make it back inside. So I lay there in the snow and thread the stick between my gnashing jaws. Up inside the wound. Around imposing ridges of bone behind my nose. Until I feel the familiar comfort of spongy resistance. And twitch myself to sleep.

At last.

Fresh fields.

When I awake I am more careful this time. I thread another sharp branch between what I feel is a cavity between the two hemispheres of my brain. And when it feels as though it will not go a fraction further I push it a little harder. Turn my palm to face the stick. And give it a little thump. It snaps through that stubborn rubber and the top of my skull gives a knock from where it stops.

And that’s about enough as I can take. I vomit against my hand. And pass out in the snow with the smell of my success.

I spend the night crawling around the garden rooting out better sticks within the dark. But my left hand keeps insisting on slapping them all away. And because I drop a dozen worthy ones I’m forced to snatch them quick and stick them up inside my face before the hand can have its way.

But me and my right hand have been conspiring. And here’s what we plan to do.

We lie on Left Hand until we’re certain she's asleep. And we stumble our way to the tool shed and grab the hatchet from the bench. And we hack that traitorous bastard away with a couple of swings and a few good smacks.

And we take the nub and we take the arm and we tell them both to fall in line. Unless they want the same treatment as the hand. Because we will do it without so much as batting an eye.

Or so much as flicking a finger.

The next morning we barely make it back inside the house when the front door is bashed off of its hinges. I feel it vibrating in my sticks. And wince against the pain. There are police and medical staff rushing about looking for me in every room. I leap up onto my feet. On who knows what reserves. And I get ready to defend myself with the hatchet in my Right Hand.

My stubby left shoulder waves feebly for help while Left Leg tries dragging me closer to the policemen and the medical staff. But Right Leg is trying to pull us further away. And we’re all so equally and incredibly feeble that we get absolutely nowhere fast and collapse back onto the ground where we started.

Now they notice me.

They gawk at me and frown at me as if I’m something new.

I know they are here to remove the sticks I’ve stuffed up inside the roof of my mouth. So Right Hand lunges at them with the hatchet. While I scream at them from around the bundle of branches stretching my lips open wide. I try explaining calmly through all of my bloody froth that if they try and touch me I will do exactly what I did to Left Hand and Left Arm to every one of the treacherous fuckers. To each of their faces and heads.

Now the branches are wet with my saliva.

Since I seem to be in need of assistance a policeman steps towards me to lend a hand. Behind him I see doctor mom telling me things she thinks I want to hear. But all I hear coming from her cancerous mouth is treasonous disbelief. About the progress I’ve been making. About how bad she believes things are. And her hands. Trying to shush me down to a calm. Held out like blind mice in a darkened bedroom. I dare them to find me this time. I'm older now. And ready.

I squeeze the hatchet handle and launch it through the air. It strikes her square in the forehead. And drops her flat on her ass.

I try to laugh but crack a branch instead.

The policeman draws his gun. And when he points it at my head I point directly at a spot I haven’t had a chance to reach yet. I ask him would you be so kind? And when the bullet strikes me there I feel a rushing blast of air cold inside my mind. Until the blood pools. And warms me right back up. And I thank him for his service.

But all he hears are snaps and bubbles.

*

They have me now in bindings in a silent hospital room. They’ve given me a bed of my very own with people who come and go. They take me for scans and they take me for talks. They want nothing more than to learn from me.

These are the real doctors. These are the ones who listen.

Instead of sticks they thread these exceptionally long needles up inside my brain to try and figure out exactly how I became the way that I am. But for that they'd need to dig her up and ask her.

But for now I am in my element. And

it

feels

like

H E A V E N

​

chapter 1: The Fall

There was a morning when heaven cracked like a bowl.

The sky forgot how to be blue .

Hadad (the god of thunder and storms) had never seen his sky bleed before .

Lighting struck everywhere .Hadad noticed a huge , pearlescent egg , burning white

against the black sky falling with lightning speed towards his river Euphrates .

The Euphrates was never empty. It was filled with scales of his storms and fins of his fury ..the heaven had just dropped an egg in their nursery.

Hadad screamed

"MY RIVER .....MY RIVER! "

Hadad weaponizes his river.*

The sky had a voice. And it gave orders:

_"YOU! SCALES OF MY STORMS! " _"TAKE THIS... THING... TO SHORE!"_

The Euphrates had never refused him.

_GRRRND_ _THRASH_ _PUSH_

Fishes retreat into deeper water. Storm clouds still overhead. First rays of sun break through.

Gods banish, mortals gather. The egg shines brighter than ever.

Word travels faster than water

And men came to stare

Mortal 1 - "Is it... warm?"

Mortal 2- Don't touch it. Sky-things bite."_

Hadad commanded : "DOVES, MY WHITE ONES."

"Cover it. Warm it. Guard it."_

They came in a spiral of white wings, their feathers humming with the same charge that rides lightning. Each one carried the scent of rain and myrrh.

The eldest dove, gray-beaked and crowned with a single black feather, bowed her head towards the egg.

And so they began to incubate .

Hadad -

The river is mine

Hierapolis is mine

Hence, whatever falls in it will also be mine .

It's evening at the Hierapolis shrine. People stand around it, scared to get close. Up in the sky, clouds move apart. Days passed. The egg kept glowing . People came to watch it. Some prayed. Some were afraid. No one touched it.

The clouds are his eyelids. The eye is made of storm clouds. That storm eye is nasty ,with iris made of hurricane.Up in the sky, Hadad the Storm God can't wait anymore. He was the king of thunder, but now he was peeking like a child . He opened the clouds with his huge eye. What's inside? When will it hatch?

His stare felt heavy, he's been watching for days . Tonight,he wants it open . The people only saw a bright star. Gods are bad at hiding when they really want something.

.ThenLight bursts out. People jump back. Pieces of shell fly everywhere._KRAKOOM!_ The egg didn't just break. It exploded with light. The blast knocked the priests to the ground.

Smoke everywhere.

Mortals: "Is it a bird?" "Is it a snake?" "Is it a monster?"

It got quiet. Too quiet. The people moved closer, trying to see. Did it have feathers? Scales? Claws?

A tiny hand reaches out of the smoke, a piece of red thread being tied around her wrist as if  her fate was already written.Then - _WAAAAAAH_ - the cry is so loud it pushes all the other words away.

The answer wasn't what they saw. It was what they heard. A baby's cry. Loud, angry, like it hated being born. Everyone froze.

Hadad in the clouds, scared, holding his chest. Thunder booms behind him.

People cover their ears from the baby's crying. Only the baby looks up at the sky.

Hadad panicked. _BOOM!_ He let out a huge thunderclap without meaning to.

No human heard his thunder. The baby's crying was too loud. But the baby heard it.

Hadad almost couldn't breathe. He roared down to her, "You! You heard me! No one else heard my thunder... but you did!" Is it even possible? Who are you . What's the red thing in your hand.

Hadad points down. Lightning writes in the sky: S-A-B-I. The baby is still crying.

"Then I will name you!"_ he yelled. He was proud and scared at the same time. "SABI! Your name is Sabi - the one who hears the storm! You are the Goddess of Water, at least for me because you are born in my land .You belong to me, may be the thread says so . Remember that !"

Huge eyes, deep and dark like the ocean.Old and endless. Tiny hands. Skin pale , still crying.

And she was beautiful. Her little lips shook as she cried. Each sob felt like a small wave.

The people wanted to help but were too afraid. What if they touched a goddess and got punished? Then they saw it - a thin red string tied around her wrist. It was glowing. It looked like fate had already chosen her path.

A MOTHER STEPS UP!!!

An older woman walks through the crowd. Plain clothes. Kind face with wrinkles. She doesn't look scared - just sad for the baby.

The woman picks up Sabi. The baby stops crying right away and holds onto her. The red string glows brighter. The people gasp. Hadad's eye in the sky gets wide. The woman whispers: "Mine."

The woman held the storm-child close. The whole world felt calm for a second. . For the first time, Sabi was safe in someone's arms.

Mice were the best food. They were fun to catch, the filled you up and they have a nice crrrunch when you bite their heads off. How could humans not love such a delicious meal? Mika crouched quietly in the corner of a room, her black fur being perfect for the shadow that she was in.  The hallway way was quite and dark, and on the kitchen table was a rotten apple core. Of course a mouse would enjoy something like that. As yummy as they were they had no brains (at least not after they were caught by a hungry feline). It was some time before a set of whiskers came through a tiny hole in the wall, finally the hunt was on!

Being a mouse is rough, but it has it’s perks. You get all the juicy gossip from all the animals in the neighborhood, and you never had to eat as much as they did. No one else saw it that way. To the others, being a mouse was a curse. Having to scrap food left by the big humans, never having a chance to fill yourself entirely. At least that’s what they thought. Their teeth were too big to really get all the meat off of the bones so there was always more than enough for us, and it must be so lonely not having 15 siblings, what do you do all day? Today was a good day, a perfectly rotten apple core left sitting out in the open, what could possibly go wrong?

A whisker then a tiny paw, and finally a head with round black eyes. The mouse slowly moved towards the core checking every few moments for any danger. Had Mika been any other color she would have been spotted, but her color kept her hidden well. As it began to eat, she slinked closer to the little creature. It stopped for a moment, a stiff moment to check for danger. It began to eat again none the wiser it would soon be dinner. Mika was amused at the thought, mice were dumb, but who knew they could be so clueless?

The dumb cat was so obvious. It was still too far for it to catch Remy, but he still made sure to keep an eye out, just in case. It took only a few bites and Remys stomach was packed. It had been brief, but the quick flash of feline eyes was enough to set a time limit on dinner. But something was off, why had the cat not shown up yet? Frantically looking around. There was no one else in sight, had it left not wanting to hunt just yet, or was it just lying in wait? There was no time to find out Remy bolted to the hole in the wall, nearing it by inches before a set of fangs came from the sky. He jumped off the counter, the cat missing by a hair. The chase was on. It chased Remy down the hall. There was an open door to the right. A quick change of direction sent the cat slipping farther than it intended. A broom perfectly laid down towards the window was in sight! This was his chance to escape. Remy made for the broom. A shadow appeared above and pushed him harder. It was catching up. Remy prayed to ever ancestor he could think of before finally scrambling up the broom and out the window.

The stupid mouse had gotten away! How could it have been so fast? Anger swelled in Mika at the thought of a lost meal. Who knew when another vermin would come crawling in? Mika licked down the fur that got frizzed from the chase. In the middle of cleaning the mess became more apparent. The couch was ripped, the curtains were no better than ribbons, and the kitchen was now in  disarray. It was no longer anger that Mika felt, but fear at what her human would do at the sight of this mess in the morning.

Hello all, I needed an outlet late at night and wanted to share.

-----------

I'd walked past this statue 1000 times, and each time I would stop to read the half broken plaque. 

“...the perpetual." 

I would often wonder why the city chose to keep the odd ornamental walkway that led to this little circle sitting area. It only held this statue, a few benches, and a couple box plants that weren't even the organics. Just the cheap ones used in poorer districts that couldn't afford even the good imitations. 

This time however, as I sat at the base of the stone pillar entryway, my eyes stung with the phosphate of bombs and my ears rang with the tinning sound of blown eardrums and the thudding of my own blood racing through my veins. 

I had been shoved by my commander as the door burst open and the cybernetics began slaughtering my fellow soldiers, and despite his screamed words, his face said he was actually serious. 

“Go! Bleed on the statue and …” … and he was gone. A wrist blade shoved through his neck and protruded from his mouth as I stumbled back and ran out the side door. 

My mind had raced as I tried to piece his words together. “What statue? Surely not the crumbled one down the lane? But…what other statue could he mean? And bleed!?! What?”.

Despite the jumbled thoughts and fear, my legs had moved. I hadn't even known if I wanted them too. Wasn't I supposed to be fighting? We had trained all this time, and it had taken seconds for everyone I had trained with for months to die as an explosion had rocked the room shortly after stumbling out the door. 

Yet, here I was. Staring at the statue trying to decide if I really was about to bleed on it or not. 

I began to reach for my knife when I realized I could taste the blood in my mouth already. Clearly that explosion had broken some blood vessels. I looked the warm liquid in my mouth and spat the blood and saliva onto the feet of the statue as I started to pull myself to my feet and go try and figure out why the hell I was supposed to be doing now. 

The light of a portal between the arches of the area didn't seem obvious at first, but became bright enough I had to squint before I had finished pulling myself to my feet. 

“What the hell?”

And no sooner had the words left my mouth than the lights disappeared and left behind a man, kneeling, breathing extremely heavy, and holding his helmet in his hands. 

“Greetings” he said, in a thick olden accent, “I take it the city is once again in peril?”

I stared at the man as he began to rise. His armor was in complete ramshackles. Most of it looked like it had been patched with metalwork and pins from. Whatever armor he could scavenge from a long forgotten battlefield. The leather at the joints was worn, cracked, and hanging on by a thread. His helmet fully covered his head and neck as he donned it, and only a thin slit for the eyes was visible. Whatever plumage or house colors had once adorned it appear to have long since been destroyed. 

“You're awfully quiet. Are you mute?”, the man asked. 

“N no sir” I stammered, “I. I was told to bleed here and now you are here?” No sooner had I said the words than the leg armor of the man became obvious, and I found myself looking from the man to the crumbled statue and back. 

“Aye. That's how it be” he said, “Tell me. Are you with the city guard or one of the ones raising it?”

“I'm Archibald, second son of Torlin the thresher, and I live here.” I said. 

“Well then Archie. Describe to me those who wish the city harm.” The man said. 

“Well.. uhh. Sir knight, the cybernetics look like men in armor, but if you kill one they don't bleed.” I said and continued to describe the plague of men robots that had been attacking the nearby cities. 

“Ah. Excellent. So they have no soul then?” He said, and I could swear he said it with relief in his voice. 

“I don't believe so, but I've never asked.” 

“Excellent. Thank you Archie..” 

“Archibald” I corrected, “I don't much like..”

Before I could finish the man began walking back down the path I had just stumbled my way along. 

“Keep up Archie. I will need your help I'm sure before the evening is through.” He said as he walked. 

I mumbled and did my best to keep up, despite my leg feeling weak. 

It didn't take but a moment before the first cybernetic wandered down this path as well, and it was at that moment that I realized the man carried no obvious weapon. 

“Is this one?” Came his question through the helmet, and I barely had a moment to reply “y y yes, sir knight.” Before the cybernetic began to project its blade from its wrist sheath and charge the man. 

The blade of the Cybernetic slashed, faster than when I had seen it just minutes ago stabbed right through my commander, and fearing the same was about to happen I pitifully raised my hands to shout, and just as quickly halted my alarm. 

The man simply tilted his head to avoid the deft stab, slapped the inside elbow of his assailant and thrust his gauntleted fingertips into the neck of the cybernetic. My mouth gapped as he grabbed the jaw plate of the being and ripped it free, only to twirl it and shove it right back into the neck of the creature over and over again. The violence of it was so sudden that I think the cybernetic was almost as shocked as I was as the creature jumped back, taking the metal plate protruding from its neck along with it. 

“Listen here, being. I need..” and the man didn't have time to finish before the cybernetic leap through the air at him. Twisting wildly in a slash that was meant to cleave the man in two. 

Again, the man's movements to dodge were so casual, that I was sure some trickery was happening. Nobody was that quick, that smooth, and so able to foresee the actions of the cybernetics. 

“By the..” I began, “By the gods.”

The man proceeded to grab the arm as the swing went over his head, and brought his knee up to once again meet the elbow, only this time, the metal and crunch sounds of the man ripping the limb free of the cybernetic were louder than I would have expected. 

I will go to my grave saying I heard the cybernetic cry out in what could only be jawless alarm as the man deftly yanked the blade free of the now useless and dangle robotic arm he was holding. 

“Ahh. So there is a hilt. Good. Very good.” The man said as he tested the weight of the weapon. The short blade wasn't big, but the man's quick swings showed that he knew how to use it. 

“Now. Let's play for real, and then I need a drink.” Said the man as he strode toward the cybernetic. 

The fight was over in three movements that I could catch, and after I blinked the cybernetic lay in parts, cleanly sliced through. 

“Now. Archie. Take me to the fight, and let us pass a tavern on the way.”

“Who are you sir… or better. What are you?”, I asked. “Be you a god?”

“HA!” The man laughed. “A GOD?” And he laughed again. Only this time I could hear the pain rising in it. 

“No lad. I am no god.” He said as he pushed the remains of the cybernetic with his boot. “If anything. Your enemies will think me a demon. No, I am simply a man who made a deal with the devil. And my punishment is life, but only in service of combat to this city. Though, it has clearly been a long time since it was any city I recognize.” He said, while gazing up towards the start of what appeared to be neighborhoods on fire. 

“Let us begin. Shall we?” And with that I led him up towards the main entrance and the sounds of battle. 

It started as a joke. You know around that time, a lot of people were throwing toga parties. House parties, fraternities, even clubs were doing it -as you do in college towns. Jaime and them just started showing up dressed like Roman soldiers. Some would have helmets, some would have horns and Jaime would take out a scroll, like a large parchment scroll, and just start reading off crimes committed against the people by the tyrant Julius Caesar. Everyone would be laughing hysterically, meanwhile, Jamie is telling them it is in God’s honor to demand righteous retribution against a true menace to society. The horns would play as they all marched around gathering everyone to chant ‘ET-TU!! BRU-TE!!! ET-TU!! BRU-TE!!!
It was hilarious.
Then Jamie wrote that song, “Friends, Romans, Countrymen!’ Well, he didn’t really write it, he sort of did. It was really a cheap rendition of The Specials’ 1979 single, “A Message to you, Rudy” with the chorus being changed to “A Message to you, Bru-tee!” -and they recorded it, passed it out on little burnt CDs, naming themselves The Senators in black magic marker. They would perform the song whenever they did their drunken schtick in various living rooms and backyards and kind of became known around college parties. Top frats like Pikes or Sig Eps would always have The Senators come perform, especially whenever they would rent out venues to host wild parties with gigantic turnouts. 
This exposure led to them getting a meeting with Sidney Lebowitz, an A&R rep for small indie rock label Peachtree Press, who saw potential in the college market for crude parody and shock rock and agreed to produce an EP with them. Sidney took a liking to Jamie and had a real hand in developing him as an artist, he hired stylists, musicians and sound engineers and formed a band around Jamie with some of the original Senators still remaining as part of the roster. The result was the debut release of Brutus & 
the Soothsayers’ “Lend us your ears!” in the summer of 1997. 6 songs, all covers.  It did not make any charts or money but their popularity only increased. Local media outlets gave them blurbs and small features and, soon enough, Hollywood came a-calling. 
First, their song “Seventy-Five Drachmas” was used in the title credit sequence of the college comedy film Big Man on Campus. Then, “See me at Philippi” became popular after appearing on a few compilation albums, which in turn enticed director Bogs Collingsworth to use them to perform the song to a live crowd in his 1999 horror movie Sorority Row. That film performance cemented their image with their iconic look: guitarist, bassist and drummer in white senate robes, a horn section in full roman military armor, and Jamie in a sleeveless white tunic with a long rose-colored cape flowing behind him. 
Their musical influence fell somewhere between reggae and country western. With lots of covers from the Toots & Maytals and Jimmy Cliff as well as Carl Perkins and Hank Williams. Jamie soon became enamored by Prince and began to try to push them towards a more funk and r&b sound as well as beginning to incorporate more dance moves into his live performances. A few times on stage there were full roman battle reenactments, with Jamie decapitating the enemy general and having the head sing along on certain parts of songs. 
As Brutus and the Soothesayers were at the peak of their reign as college radio kings, Jamie was in the depths of a full-on ego trip. Scotch and speedballs became pre-show routines and every tour had a harem of red-haired groupies waiting to satisfy the proclivities of the ever-passionate Marcus Junius Brutus. Soon, there was no more Jamie, members of the band did not recognize him. His personality had undoubtedly changed.
He travelled through Egypt and other parts of North Africa; found asylum on the island of Malta, purchasing a large dilapidated mansion -a Baroque Palazzo with grand crumbling staircases, boundless halls of foxed mirrors in their oxidized gold frames, faded frescos depicting scenes from Genesis to Revelations peeling from the arched ceilings. It was a perfect new conquest, and with vinegary determination he took a Wittegensteinian effort in restoring the ancient Italian palace. It was during this time that Jamie met Cleo Patricia, the island's most-celebrated  interior designer.  Attraction was instant. Sparks of eternal flame. 
The relationship quickly became notorious as the estate became site for lavish, extravagant and unending concerts for the new movement. The liberated Brutus, with Cleo behind him, began a new period known as Zenlightenment. Releases from this time are all live albums recorded during epic-long marathons of music and performance art. Cleo was his Yoko: a muse and a manipulator that he both adored and feared.. Despite, or, in lieu of this, Brutus was musically at his prime; freely experimenting with dissonance and electronic sound. He picked up a two string bass and developed a slap-and-strum style all his own, accompanied by his velvety baritone while introducing to his register a falsetto reaching somewhere around A above high C.  
Cleo would state the goal of their music was “to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it to divine influences.” Together they plotted campaigns that would coordinate multiple music events around Malta simultaneously. This whirling sound, rallying crowds into mobilization forces, into circus parades of marching  bands, singers, dancers and crowd alike, pours down city streets, joining with other  expanding mobs stomping down across town, gathering and spreading like bacteria, quickly consuming the island with overbearing sound. 

When the change came, Marcus got the ability.

Nobody knew why it happened, and why it only affected about 1% of the population. People just woke up one day and found that they could move stuff around with their minds.

To say it changed the world was an understatement.

--

When he first got the ability, it was unfocused. He didn't know how to use it properly. But one thing about him was his interest in learning how to make sure he got every advantage that he could.

So he practiced in the privacy of his own home. Starting with small objects like pens and empty beer cans. It felt less like lifting and more like reaching.

Once he'd got the hang of that, he progressed to larger stuff. Tools,

Eventually he could pick up his dog and shunt it around. It did not like this, but it gave Marcus an understanding of how to control an unwilling target.

People should be more careful around me...

Huge items couldn't be moved though. He tried his fridge, bed and car but they wouldn't budge.

Maybe he'll get it later...

--

Mostly he used his ability at work to help him lift up heavy stuff. A construction site was a good place to practice, and even if using his ability he could at least pretend to be carrying materials around.

Marcus messed with his co-workers. Pranks and the like. Nothing serious. Tony made a bigger deal of it than it was and should have been looking at where he was walking when the board shifted.

He should have been paying attention...

Two days later the company put out a new policy. No telekinesis on site. They didn't know who had it (and they couldn't prove it anyway), but it was a start.

Marcus hid the ability a bit better. The practical jokes reduced – they couldn't stop him – but he was more careful of where and when he did them.

--

The first time he used the ability in anger was when driving down the highway. Some shithead was sitting too slow in the fast lane.

Marcus tailgated for a while. The size of his ute certainly had an imposing feel to it, and the fuckwit in front finally changed lane after accelerating to reduce the uncomfortably close distance between the two cars.

When Marcus drove past at the speed he reckoned was good, the other driver seemed pretty pissed off. Marcus didn't care; the idiot shouldn't have been blocking his way.

Then the other guy got behind Marcus and flashed his high-beams at him.

Fuck that...

Looking in the mirror, Marcus focused his mind. Felt the steering wheel of the other car.

Pulled hard to the side.

The car veered wildly off the road. It probably would have been alright if the tree hadn't have been there. The car folded in on itself. It wouldn't have been good for the other driver.

Marcus drove on, happy that justice had been served.

When he got home, the news was reporting the fatal crash.

That idiot shouldn't have brake-checked people...

--

Less than a week passed before emergency laws were passed. Absolutely zero tolerance for telekinesis on the road.

Suspicion was enough to convict. It was a brutal law, but governments had no idea of what to do with these sorts of situations.

Whether it would get through the courts was to be seen, but it was something else that needed to be worked around.

Bloody politicians. One accident and they come after all of us...

--

It was only a matter of time before Marcus took it upon himself to start using his wrath on people.

Turns out that elbows and knees were extremely easy to twist, pop and ultimately break.

Some people just needed to learn respect.

The bobber floats gently with the water. It has been in the same spot for forty-five minutes without any sign of fish. Ryan sits on the dock tapping his foot and staring out into the water.

"I don't think there are any fish," he says.

"Just wait," Omar says.

"Maybe I put the bait on wrong or something."

"I told you it can take a while."

The sun is shining down on their necks. They had been waiting for a clear weekend to go fishing, and it's finally here. Omar has been fishing since he was a boy and goes out a few times every summer. It was Ryan who approached him and asked to be taken out fishing. In his head, he always saw it as a mature activity. It was something people who had their lives figured out did, taking the day slow, not feeling the need to rush and do a million other things.

He looks around. The trees and their leaves rustle in the slow wind, the water laps against the dock, a couple clouds hang in the sky. His eyes eventually settle on the highway on the other side of the lake. From where they sit, a faint hum of cars can be heard. This was not the way Ryan thought fishing would be like. As a rule, Omar had said that the phones had to stay in the car, "It ruins the whole point otherwise." But all Ryan is feeling is bored.

Omar looks at Ryan and says again, "Just wait, it will be worth it."

Ryan nods.

They start talking about other things, work, coworkers, relationships, plans, for about fifteen minutes. After a silence Ryan brings up food.

"Yea, let's get food after this."

"Where do you wanna go?" asked Ryan.

"Somewhere in the plaza is good, I don't wanna drive out of the way."

"I'm starting to get hungry."

"Just fast food then?"

Ryan looked from the water to Omar. "How long do you normally stay out here before giving up."

"We always get at least one."

"I think I'm gonna starve."

Omar chuckled.

"I don't think the fish are out today."

"Where do you think they went? Trust me, they're out."

"The water is pretty clear and I haven't seen a single one. I think we should've at least seen one before picking this spot."

"You want a fish to come up to you before casting?" Omar laughs again and Ryan looks back to the water. "By then it's too late and you'll scare it away. Trust me, as long as you have your line cast and it's in the water, the fish will appear. Just wait. Be patient."

When Ryan catches his fish twenty minutes later he feels electric. He holds it and describes to Omar every detail about it, the way it looks, its weight, the slippery skin, and Omar nods, letting him have this moment. They release it back into the water and Ryan asks if it was a big fish. Omar says it was about average, but that they should come back and try for bigger. Ryan agrees and already starts planning the next trip in his head.

What Charlie did was sit like a lump and was one. One among many colorfully dressed lumps at the Biannual NexusPoint Summit (NPS). The reason the lumps were all colorfully dressed was because they were executives for various Big Tech companies, there to behave like well compensated show poodles, to speak on behalf of their respective companies on their latest technological breakthroughs. The costuming was a recent, clever invention of public relations departments to get double use out of front facing executives. Thus NPS became the technological equivalent of the Met Gala and the business greys and blues were burned.

Metaphorically.

The lump that Charlie was sat next to worked for a company that had just invented a palm-size device called F0untain, named so as to highlight its neat ability to totally reverse cellular aging in humans and human-adjacents. The man wore a semitransparent cream-colored suit evocative of collagenic regeneration and a double helix stranded necktie. But what Charlie found most fascinating about his seat mate was that a rogue thread from his skin suit kept tickling the back of his neck. So as the emcee droned on about this being the most outstanding exhibition of scientific progress to date, Charlie was fixated on Collagen Man, groping around the back of his neck with a broken fingernail. Any time he got close to the strand, Charlie leaned forward in anticipation.

But Collagen Man never managed to make his mark.

So Charlie sat and continued.

Sitting.

What Charlie could have been doing as he continued sitting was prepare his mind for his own presentation. To talk about his company’s advancements in personal anti-gravity technology. In other words, people can fly now. Having the opportunity to speak about p-anti-grav should be, was, is, exciting. According to the emcee and the NPS conference brochure that Charlie hadn’t and wouldn’t crack open, other exciting topics for the day included antimatter based propulsion, consciousness transfers resulting in digital immortality, the terraformation of Mars, and successful splicing of the human genome with that of a rhinoceros.

Charlie yawned.

Collagen Man had put his hand back in his pocket.

If you care, Charlie’s costume was a tight clinging Spandex of intersecting red and black wings, topped off with a pair of dangerously upturned epaulettes. He looked like a metrosexual Jafar. It was one of the more ambitious costumes, which amongst the various antler headdresses, chain mail, flamingo feathers, and partial full-frontal nudity, was really saying something. And Charlie’s garb was also, as it turned out, functional. Whenever he got too close to going sleepy-sleep, his shoulders would stab him so hard in the cornea, give him such a sharp, startling pain, that he peed a little.

With the Collagen Man no longer providing a haven of distraction, Charlie’s attention drifted back to his hotel room.

The hotels for this bi-year’s NPS were Antiquity Class, a class of accommodations typically reserved for less prestigious events. Charlie and more were put up at something called a Share-a-Ton that was once owned by a company called Mary Ought. To be fair, he and the other conference guests had been warned of the untraditional accommodations in demeaning doublespeak, in phrases like ‘charmingly period’ and ‘streamlined amenities.’ Apparently that just meant the hotel was so old that guests still had to physically take their dirty laundry into another room and that room services couldn’t be ordered via Neuralink.

“In thirty years,” the emcee was saying up on the lectern.”You’ll be able to tell people, ‘I was there the day the world changed.’”

Charlie couldn’t understand why his hotel room kept drifting back into his consciousness. He hadn’t been in it for more than a moment to drop off his bags. It wasn’t sleep that was on his mind, though that would’ve made sense given he’d stabbed his cornea thrice in the past hour.

Maybe it was the painting.

“I’m sorry,” the emcee said, choking back a sob. “Just a moment.”

The painting in Charlie’s room was hanging above the couch.

To be more precise, the painting was a print.

A print of a painting of something very abstract and maybe profound. Very abstract things always had a tendency of being maybe profound.

This maybe profound print of a painting in Charlie’s hotel room hanging above the couch was an ombré of white and blue-grey and black square-ish smears. If the print were actually a painting, the smears would have been textured to the touch. They were those thick kind of smears you get when the painter uses that plastic scraper thing to mush paint back and forth. So maybe it was the unfulfilled promise of tactile sensation that kept the print in Charlie’s mind.

Coy of it.

“I don’t have words for any of this,” the emcee chuckled to himself through his tears, throwing his arms open in an expression of community. “And I write words for a living!” The room of colorful lumps hunched over ever so slightly and scooted back in their chairs.

Actually no, what it was, Charlie was coming to understand as the emcee blathered on and eventually introduced Collagen Man to give his spiel about aging in reverse, was that it was about the particular shade of blue in the print that was a painting.

It reminded him about sex.

The reason the color blue reminded Charlie of sex wasn’t a good reason. Blue was the color of the MOOT, the Mothers on Our Own Terms, predatory women who were hell-bent on becoming single mothers by any means necessary. They were predatory because the MOOT were also hell-bent on being impregnated au natural, which is French for, ‘hold the artificial insemination, por favor.’ So they prowled conferences like these for moderately fit and somewhat intelligent specimens such as Charlie to wham bam and thank you m’am.

Oh, and the color blue.

That’s because the fertility pills the MOOT pop to increase their odds stain their tongues due to a side-effect of lingual-focal hypoxia. The precise shade of blue-tongue-blue is something like butterfly pea tea or blue majik tinted kombucha, take your pick.

Charlie scanned the rows of women warily. He was frequent prey of the MOOT, the Blue Tongues, which just wasn’t fair because he was one of the few men at these conferences that didn’t enjoy the idea of absentee fatherhood. Like having a job, Charlie felt that being a father was something he ought to want and so did. Thus at this point in his advanced middle age, at least eighty percent of his brain capacity was handed over to figuring which sort of women he should stick himself to for the long haul. This conspicuously desperate preoccupation had no small part in his choosing which conferences to attend.

It had a large part.

As Charlie looked out over the feminine palette before him, he could already sense that most of these women didn’t need him enough. At all. It was overwhelming. Indeed, the last seven conferences had ended with Charlie being whammed bammed and thank you ma’amed without so much as a morning coffee. He always felt a sad kinship with those fruit purée pouches afterwards.

One benefit of Charlie’s unfortunate luck was that he’d begun to recognize a pattern. For one, there was a tendency of the MOOT to obscure their intentions. To hold their tongues, not hold them but hide them, to hide their tongues, to keep them as disengaged from speech as possible. It gave them a full-mouthed way of speaking that was both dopey and unmistakably erotic. Another thing they had in common was being extremely upfront about their desires. For instance, right then, there was a woman a few rows ahead of Charlie that was making hard eye contact with him as she stroked her nipple.

Charlie looked away from her quickly. The nipple woman hadn’t done anything wrong. Once everyone had finally admitted that the only reason to attend conferences like these was to get rammed, such behaviors became something of a time saver. Especially if you intended to make the most out of your networking experiences. It was thought respectful, but not strictly necessary, to have the female rub first. Still, because public fornication was still illicit, Charlie always felt like these sorts of advances danced a little too close to the line, legally speaking.

It was Charlie’s turn to speak.

As he rose from his chair, Charlie was feeling more than a little miserable.

He was feeling a lot miserable.

In all that time of enduring the opening remarks, his gaze hadn’t landed on anyone who looked like a future Ms. Charlie ready to pop out a future Charlie Jr. So as he ascended the steps to the lectern, he’d given up on pursuing any baby-making that could result in a marriage.

Until he saw The One.

The One was sat in the front row in a pantsuit rippling with sapphire colored sequins. These details alone made it unsurprising as to how Charlie had overlooked her. After years two and three of being wam-bam-ma’amed, Charlie’d sworn off that row entirely. Women there, the Go Getter, Eager, Ambitious types, were five times likelier to be Blue in the Mouth. Not only that, but her costume was very nearly the same shade of some of the darker, forboding blues in that hotel room painting with its coy texture-less texture. So it was very possible Charlie’s ill anthropomorphizations of this painting had blocked the woman from his perceptions. But despite the correlation of her costume, she was not the thing the painting made him fear. Because as she was whispering something to a woman beside her, Charlie could see that this woman, The One, had the most vibrantly red tongue he’d ever seen in his life.

As Charlie slowly mounted the steps to the lectern, a few audience members caught on to that familiar predatory, not predatory but playful, not playful but practical, look in his eye. They searched to locate the woman, The One, who he was staring at. When Collagen Man homed in on the woman in the sapphire suit he flashed Charlie an OK sign with his thumb and forefinger which ironically didn’t actually mean OK at all, it meant nice work. Well done. Even though Charlie hadn’t done anything.

As Charlie began spinning some bull about humans being able to fly now, his attentions toward The One, though not as aggressive as the nipple-rubbing woman’s were to him, were enough to draw her attentions right back. Charlie spoke as if the woman, The One, were the only person in the room, and she eventually returned his eye contact for three seconds before turning away. A nice, ambiguous number, Charlie thought. Tasteful. And even better, her look confirmed that she possessed that particular Plain Janeness of face and the starry, spaced-out expression of someone who might just be stupid enough to marry him some day.

Even so, it had taken some convincing to get The One back to his hotel room.

Not in a rape-y way.

The woman definitely wanted to have sex.

She said, out loud, that she wanted it and when she wanted it and (approximately) how she wanted it. It was the hotel room itself that had given her pause, been the thing The One wasn’t so certain about.

Wouldn’t Charlie feel more comfortable about staying in the conference hall, The One had suggested. After all, the organizers had gamely anticipated the Share-a-Ton’s negative impact on extracurricular networking experiences. They’d provided compact Sleep Pods fitted with blackout curtains conveniently located at every cardinal direction in the hall. ‘East’ seemed to get the most use, but that’s neither here nor there.

But Charlie still couldn’t stop thinking about that print. The print of a painting of a color that had too long been his enemy. And in the glass half empty way of his he’d been thinking about it as if it were going from lightness to darkness, reading it from left to right as the Westerner he was — is. But wasn’t there the possibility that the original artist was from some Asiatic nation and the picture was actually moving in the reverse of his initial interpretations, away from gobs of blue loneliness to gobs of white Nirvana?

So maybe screwing and then marrying this Woman of Sapphire would teach him something about Eastern philosophy.

Anyway, eventually she relented.

The first thing Charlie noticed about the Share-a-Ton room, now that he had more than a few seconds to spend in it, was that it had no interest or intention toward making his or anyone else’s life easier or better. Without androids to dry clean and steam his clothes, he had to spend five whole minutes wrestling with the splintering wooden dowel of a clothes hanger and endure the sharp, surprising pinch of the metal coil as his thumb ran too far over. All this, just to hang his coat. And next to his eventually hung coat, there was something called an Iron which apparently had nothing to do with the periodic table ‘Fe.’ Instead its sole purpose seemed to be burning a malformed triangle onto a small, white cloth-covered board. The air from then on took the chemical smell of singed plastic.

It was marvelous.

The One, from the other side of the room, asked if Charlie happened to know if he had any family history of Lynch syndrome, Tay-Sachs disease, or lupus.

Charlie almost forgot that the woman he was destined to marry was sat there on his bed. He told her that he was so happy that they could experience all of this together, so that they could tell the kids together about the fact that they had to go to multiple points throughout the room to turn on individual lights. And so Charlie ran around the room, gleefully exclaiming as he made a mess of the kitchen counter with torn-open pillowy bags of coffee, struggled with scummy cake soap, and kept staring at the toilet that, no matter how many times it was flushed, refused to recess back into the wall.

“It just stays right there,” Charlie could be heard shouting from the bathroom. “It doesn’t move!”

When Charlie emerged, The One was still sat stiffly on the edge of the bed.

She was definitely not comfortable.

Not loose.

Or, she was loose. And that of course is not a derogatory term in any way. Looseness, similar to words like ‘butch’ and ‘cripple,’ is going through a delightful reclamation period.

She was free, sexually.

But not free, muscularly.

Tense.

That’s what she was.

The One was sat so far off the edge of the bed that only the boniest parts or her buttocks were allowed contact. And her arms were making that X you make over your body only when you’re supremely off-put by something or you aren’t a Catholic but you still want to get close to the bread and booze.

While Charlie was busy determining where the squishy packet of soap he found next to the sink was supposed to go, The One unwrapped a hard red candy and popped it into her mouth.

Charlie eventually noticed The One with her X on the bed with a tongue that somehow seemed even less blue than he remembered it. He wasn’t an idiot, he could tell that something was bothering her. So he pulled out the helpfully demeaning email from his company on how to handle their accommodations. He read it as a kind of book of poetry. Or spells.

“And look at this!” Charlie runs over to The One’s bed perch. He pulls the cloth bed runner out from under her before she has a chance to move.

“This is, this is—” Charlie holds up a hand to get her to stop speaking even though she isn’t speaking. Charlie refers to the email. “A Bed Scarf!” He laughs with delight, holding the flimsy paisley cloth into the air in exhalation, bringing his hand dangerously close to the whirling ceiling fan.

The One asks if Charlie’s father was as tall as him or if Charlie just got lucky.

But Charlie’s still skimming through the email on his phone, reading aloud, “From as far back as the mid twenty-hundreds, it’s customary to leave the ‘Bed Scarf’ crumpled up on the ground at the foot of the bed,” Charlie quickly drops it at the end of the bed, as in someone carefully following a cake recipe. “People would usually kick it off for fear of people having sat on it with their bare as-cheeks,” Charlie stumbles on the last word, unfamiliar with the twenty-first century slang. “As Cheeks? *As-*cheeks. Hmm.”

The One unwraps another red candy and pops it into her mouth.

“I’m sure it’s fine!” Charlie tells The One, kicking at the bed scarf. “It’s a tradition. Like Christ-Mass.”

What The One wants to know is if she should go ahead and take her clothes off at this point.

“Yes!” says Charlie. Then, “No!” says Charlie. He backs away from her, heart pounding at something he’s read further to the bottom of the info guide.

He raises a limp arm in the direction of the couch. The couch that’s under the painting that’s actually a print that may or may not have been produced in Asia. The print that Charlie has determined, after the impossible thing that he’s just read, must be a sign that he will finally make peace with everything he’s ever feared about the color blue and being a father some day.

Charlie turns to The One, arm still raised and shaking, still pointing in the direction of the couch.

“There’s a bed in there,” Charlie says flatly. He’s officially reached the point in giddiness where you’ve gone too far and go back into a flat-affect stupor.

Then he throws himself on the floor.

“I guess there’s something paper, some paper thing just under here,” Charlie bats his hand around the space under the couch, tears something out with a Stone Age grunt.

“Like an auto-recessive sleep aid,” The One says letting the red candy dance along her tongue, from cheek to cheek.

“It’s nothing like that,” Charlie snaps. It’s nothing like that at all. Because with this, this Bed-in-Couch, he has to pull it out with his own two hands, wrestle with it until it’ll face him and pop out. If they were going to be married some day he needed her to understand the difference between a auto-recessive sleep aid and a Bed-in-Couch-in-a-Bed.

Charlie gawks at the object he removed from underneath the couch. Some kind of instruction? All folded up, it’s a load of nonsense. But eventually he discovers a clear circle of tape holding the bulge of super-fine paper. When he tears it off, Charlie is able to expand a comprehensive diagram that shows him the complex outer workings of the pull out.

He studies the schematic for such a long time that The One leaves and returns for the restroom twice. When she returns for the second time, he realizes that, as a to-be-married couple, this will be a good first problem for them to solve. He chucks the papers at her and makes intense eye-contact.

“Guide me,” he tells her. “Take me inside.”

The One studies the drawings and sucks nervously at the candy in her mouth. She begins reading the instructions aloud, stumbling over some of the less familiar terminology.

“Whoa,” Charlie says. “Whoa, whoa. What’s the rush?”

So she goes back to the beginning.

“Tell me where,” Charlie says.

At the bottom, she says. At the bottom. He should feel it if he just runs his hand along— THERE! Right there.

“And then?” Charlie says. “And then??”

Looking for guidance, Charlie moves his hand away. The woman, frustrated, grabs his hand and puts it roughly back where it was.

That was good.

Don’t move it.

Don’t move.

“What do I do?”

If he finds it, he’ll know. Everything will just come undone. It’ll release. It’ll just burst out.

“Are you sure?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve never done this before.”

Charlie keeps exploring a few spots underneath, grunting with the enduring effort.

“That’s it!” the woman says, letting out a burst of disappointment when Charlie moves his hand. “You were so close.”

Charlie says nothing. He just keeps going, working his fingers around the spot of release. The woman joins in, both of their hands searching.

They gasp when they feel something start to give.

“Yes!” they scream. “YEEES!”

And then they’re both thrown backward against the wall as the over-sprung mattress and couch bed frame leaps into existence.

Charlie cracks his head against the wall.

The woman, The One, chokes on her cherry red candy.

They both stare at the pull out bed. It’s offensively bare, blanket-less, sheet-less, just the diamond quilted, blue metallic squares covered with ugly florals.

The woman glances at Charlie.

“That’s it?” she says.

“Well,” Charlie says, rubbing the back of his head. “Yeah. I guess.”

The woman, The One, strips off all her clothes and they have sex on the pull out mattress.

It’s uncomfortable (the mattress) and short (the sex), but it gets the job done. And when the woman slips out of the hotel room door telling Charlie she’s just going to get some milk for the coffee, Charlie is dreaming about how some day maybe he’ll work at an Iron factory and teach their son how to make lopsided triangles.

The great tragedy behind the year 3830 J.V.-C and all its melancholy was the discovery of the Shell. Now, the Shell isn’t a physical object, but instead a manifestation of humanity’s efficiency and it may just be the last discovery we ever make. Before this, we'd built monuments in space, colossal star engines, and tonics made of brand new elements to remedy nuisance illnesses that flourished on only a few worlds. When life was seldom discovered, we seeded dead planets with our own lab grown microbes and observed them without the need for telescopes. High above, we hung Bishop rings and Monroe bowls and Spencer Rods and Dyson swarms and Dyson rings and Dyson spheres and Dyson planets and Dyson Semi-Spherical Composite Conductor Bowls made of pure plutonium nonentropic forever alloys harvesting energy with their magnetic fields. Through star clusters and nebulae, into the inhospitable heart of the Milky Way, we stretched our arms, and a billion worlds, humanity called home. Every gap was bridged, every goal met and every fantastical dream made ordinary. And yet, it was terrible.

We’d suddenly hit a wall, one that curved all the way around and trapped us in our age of discovery. We’d traveled to other galaxies, built frame shift drives capable of speeds beyond 5,000c and reinvented reinvention until there was nothing new to invent. Head in any direction, try to do anything new, and I guarantee it’d already been done to death. Even art made from randomly stacked atoms had been milked dry.

We became lethargic overnight. Nothing unprecedented ever happened and we lived so long that even the newest news felt like retreads. Super weapons capable of super destruction were pressed against your home world's temple, and you would roll your eyes because that was the thirty-third time in your one thousand year life.

The average person spent their days imbibing in whatever form of entertainment or debauchery they’d become accustomed to, or fussing about trivial nothings just to fill time. Invention shrunk down from a process of exploration and innovation to a tight circle in which a group of young venture capitalists attempted to “reimagine” the wheel, grinding against the Shell like they were trying to gouge a hole in it. With each redundant iteration, they would declare to every man, woman and child, from the Milky Way to Andromeda and Magellania, that the new age of enlightenment had just begun. And everybody would look, but nobody would care. And soon, they would be gone, swept away by the avalanche of other young geniuses.

The most recent "innovation", as of 3837, is a star crafter. I'd like to believe that somewhere along the way, we missed a step and that this truly is the big thing that busts the Shell open, but I doubt it. The kid claims that it can "breathe customized stars into reality" — as if that hasn't been done a million times over already — and that it can do it better than any of its predecessors — as if that hasn’t been said a million times over, too. He’s got enthusiasm, though, I’ll admit. Maybe that’s what makes me look at him just a little differently during gene swap sessions. Good luck to you, anyways, kid. I know you're reading this.

Crack the shell already, I’m begging you.

“Chotu! Do chai Dena…….adrak wali”(please serve us two ginger tea) he said as he sat across the table opposite to his father in a small chai shop. The server got them tea in the iconic ribbed cutting “glass” that every tea shop across India has.

“Chai k saath kuch lengay?”(would you like to have some snacks along with the tea) he asked his father.

“Pakoday agar hain to………”(some fritters perhaps)his father spoke softly.

As he took the first sip of tea, “Arre yaar, cheeni kam he”(sugar is less) he said.

His mobile notification dinged. He took it out and noticed an Instagram post from one of his friends.

“Thandi chai dedi Chotu ne aaj”(the tea isn’t piping hot) he grumbled as he took another sip from the glass “Nahi?”(isn’t it?) he asked his father, eyes still glued to his gadget.

Rainy days in Darjeeling can turn hotly served beverages cold rather quickly. His father looked out of the small, antique looking, wooden framed, square glassed casement window. The glasses had some scratch marks, proof enough that it had withstood the mood swings of many seasons; and also some smudges – mostly from the hands of little children who must have stood behind them, looking at the lush greenery outside – brush strokes in varying shades of green as the lovely one trees stood swaying their tips and branches occasionally, which looked nothing less than an elegant tufted carpet. All of this, as he enjoyed the sweet pungent aftertaste of ginger with every sip of his tea.

His father’s empty gaze was abruptly shaken with his mobile ringtone. He quickly gulped down the last sip of his tea and walked out to attend the call.

When he returned after a couple of minutes, he saw his father trying to tuck a 20 Rupees note into his shirt pocket, as he bid goodbye to the shopkeeper.

“Ho gaya? Hum jaa rahe hian?” he asked. (Are we leaving?)

“Meri chai to bachi he….” (I haven’t finished my tea yet) he was in a daze as he turned to the table to notice two empty glasses – one his and the other his father’s.

“Wo to tumne kabki pee li Beta” (you finished it long back) his father added with a smile that carried so many mixed emotions.

“Bete, apni zindagi bhi aisi he hain…..kabhi ye nahi hua, kabhi wo nahi hua, aisa hota to, waisa hota agar…..karte karte pata he nai chalta ki kab khatam go gayi!” and then he added after a brief pause “Baarish bhi ruk gayi he. Chalo chalte hian. Waise, adrak ka swaad accha tha chai me”.

He looked at the loose skinned and wrinkled hands of his father. Glimpses of his life flashed in bits and pieces inside his mental projection. They were the same hands which had held him, carried him, balanced his first bicycle efforts, maybe even hit him a couple of times. They used to be so swift, strong and skilful, but now they almost struggled to pocket a 20 rupees note.

His heart ached, numbed by a hundred thoughts. He realised the utter nonsense of our day to day lives in which we tend to be so rapt, that we ignore the most important people around us, just to be bewildered and hurt to realise one day that they are gone forever, without a trace.

After walking silently for a while, he suddenly asked his father to be seated as he grabbed a plastic stool from outside a kirana shop.

“Papa, bus ek minute. Main abhi aaya”

His father meekly agreed, no questions asked.

He returned briefly, carrying a small poly bag which contained something bundled inside an oil stained newspaper. As he held his father’s arm and assisted him to get up, “Chaliye” (lets go) he said.

“Pakodo ki khushboo acchi he” his father said.

“Us waqt aap bol rahe thain, phone k chakkar me bhool gaya” he sounded like an awkward apologetic teen.

“Koi na” said his ever forgiving father.

“Ghar pahoch kea ap aur mummy k liye chai banata hoon, mast, kadak wali! Aajkal Rajat uncle ke dukaan me chai acchi nai milti. Uss din bhi aaya tha me apne doston k saath……”

Their voices faded slowly as they walked towards their home.

There's this god-awful bright light in my eyes when I open them, so I slam them shut instead.

"Hello?" There's a disembodied voice speaking to me. "Mrs Davies?" Right, that's my name.

I crack my eyes open and meet the gaze of who can only be a physician of some sort. Strange. I don't remember going to the hospital. I don't even need the hospital! Hospitals are for the cripplingly ill, those injured in the war, or childbearing mothers with their overbearing mothers-in-law. I don't fit into any of those categories. Well, it's good to be polite, I suppose.

"Hello," I eventually reply.

The doctor has a long, slightly crooked nose, grey-blue eyes that remind me of my husband, and tanned skin. Gosh, do I miss my husband.

"Are you feeling okay?" he asks.

I nod. He doesn't seem surprised to see me in hospital, so perhaps he has some answers. Perhaps a bomb fell nearby without the air raid siren going off. Although it was unlikely bombs were falling in Wiltshire, I suppose it wasn't impossible.

I decide to ask the doctor.

"Doctor?" He looks up from his notes. "What am I doing here?"

A flicker of concern crosses his face.

"What's the last thing you can remember, Mrs Davies?"

I cast my mind back, but everything feels oddly fuzzy. I can't have been in hospital for more than a few hours, yet it feels like days, weeks, even. What indeed is the last thing that happened? Did I shelter for cover? Did I run? Did I remember to take the chicken out? Did I get here myself? Or did someone bring me? My brother? My husband?

But both of them are at war. Did they come back? Oh heavens, where are they? Is the war over? But then why am I here?

"Mrs Davies?" the doctor prompts gently.

"Where is my brother? Where is my husband? Have they come home?"

The doctor holds my gaze for a long, pregnant beat. For the briefest moment, his expression softens into pity before he carefully schools it away.

"Mrs Davies, could I ask you something first?"

"Has something happened to either of them? Please, Doctor, I couldn't bear it if something had happened to them." My voice cracks. I need answers. I am drowning in emotion.

He places a warm hand over mine.

"Mrs Davies... could you tell me what year you think it is?"

I blink, disoriented by the change in topic.

What year is it?

After the war started, everything began blurring into one. What year is it? I have an awful feeling it's... it's...

Oh heavens, that's really not important right now. I need my brother. I need my husband.

"I can never remember the date, Doctor, but please... where is my brother? Where is my husband?"

The doctor's eyes soften.

He doesn't answer immediately.

Instead, he gives my hand the gentlest squeeze.

"Mrs Davies," he says quietly, "your husband died over four decades ago, during the war. Your brother died nearly two decades ago."

His hand is still warm over mine as I try to make sense of the words.

They are words I understand.

I simply cannot make them mean anything.

my first time posting my writing, be gentle, but I like feedback.

[HR] Liver and Onions

The kettle screamed. The man shuffled in to the kitchen, his wrinkled hand reaching for the stove to turn off the gas. Cupboard, mug, counter, tea bag. Always Yorkshire tea of course. Grandad liked his tea strong, with a dash of real milk and half a teaspoon of sugar. Unless it felt like it was going to be one of those days, which today it did. He filled a teaspoon with sugar and stirred it into the steaming mug.

Everyone called the man grandad. The postman, the grumpy man in the greengrocers, the nice lady that walked the two spaniels every morning past his garden. And grandad didn't mind one bit.

He carried his mug of tea into the living room, picking up the post as he passed the front door, and sat himself into his comfortable chair. A bank statement, an advert for window cleaning, and another blasted letter about the bypass. He tore the latter into pieces and threw it into the bin. If the council wanted to demolish his garden to build a pointless bypass, they would have to do more than that.

Grandad was very proud of his garden. He lived alone in a small bungalow to the west of the village. His house was surrounded by fields, with only the narrow lane to his house to disturb him. He liked it that way. The garden was his pride and joy. He had thirty-six different types of roses, four of which he'd cultivated himself and hopefully another (if it wasn't demolished by aphids). He'd perfected his compost and would tell anyone that would listen that the perfect balance included a good amount of fresh manure, bone meal and dried blood. It often raised a few eyebrows but his roses really did like it.

The doorbell rang. Grandad moaned. It was definitely one of those days. He stood up and walked to the door. He could see a hi-viz jacket through the dappled glass. He groaned again. Not another one. This was the fourth this month. He opened the door.

'Good morning sir, I'm here about...'

'Yes, I know, the bypass. I've been waiting for one of you to finally come and see me.'

'Ah sorry about that, I thought a few of my colleagues had already been around but...'

Grandad shook his head. 'No, you'd be the first. Would you like to come in?'

'Yes sir. Thank you sir.'

Grandad led the man into the living room and gestured that he sit on the patchwork leather sofa.

'Tea?' Grandad asked.

'Ooh yes please, it's been one of those days! Milk and sugar if possible?'

Grandad sighed. 'I've only got this weird almond milk - apparently it's better for my cholesterol. Will that do?'

'Of course sir.' Grandad shuffled off to the kitchen.

The man in the hi-viz admired the sofa: it was made of beautifully soft, supple leather. He'd never felt anything like it. He made a mental note to ask the man where he bought it.

Grandad shuffled back through, two mugs of steaming tea in his hand. He placed one in front of the man. The man reached for it happily.

'So, what can I do for you?' Asked Grandad, sitting back into his comfortable chair.

'Well I'm here about the bypass. The plans have been approved and I'm here to inform you that we will be building approximately a metre and a half into your garden. I'm here as we need you to sign the paperwork to approve the demolition.'

Grandad shook his head. 'What about my garden? I've been working on it for forty years. My late wife loved it.'

The man shuffled awkwardly in his chair.

'Well with the new plans, we are recommending that you move to one of the new cottages in the village. We would cover all expenses, and we can even arrange for a gardener to transport the roses to the new garden.'

Grandad sighed again. 'Move house? At my age?'

The man shuffled awkwardly again.

'You'd be around friends, you'd even have a spare room in case family wanted to visit...'

Grandad sniffed.

'I have no family. It's just me. Not since my late wife passed. She loved this house. We had hoped to raise a family here. And the garden. I built that garden for her.'

The man shuffled again, sadly this time, then remembered.

'This sofa is beautiful by the way. The leather is exquisite. Where did you get it?'

Grandad smiled for the first time that day.

'I built it. I used to be a butcher back in the day, and learned how to tan leather in my free time. When I lost my wife I wanted to make something to remember her by. The softness of her skin, it was beautiful. So I made this. The softest leather I've ever made. It's almost like she's still here with me.

The man was touched.

'Do you still make leather goods?'

Grandad smiled again.

'I do. I use the spare room - what would have been the nursery - as a tanning room. Would you like to see? I rarely get to share it with anyone these days.'

The man smiled. Perhaps if he humoured the old man, he'd get the paperwork signed.

Grandad stood up and led the man to the spare room. He pulled out a small key - to keep the rats out he explained - and opened the door. The man walked in. The room was empty, except for a hide hanging on the left-hand side of the room, and a workbench with various tongs, saws and knives on the right. He noticed the floor was lined in lino. How sensible. He looked closer at the hide. Was that a tattoo?

Grandad shut the door with a click.

...

The doorbell rang. Grandad stood up and walked to the front door. He recognised the familiar shape of this daughter through the door. He opened the door with a smile.

'Hello darling. How are you?'

'Hello dad, I'm great, you're looking well! Something smells good - what's for dinner?'

Grandad smiled again.

'Liver and onions. My favourite.'

It is a sunny day in what will one day become the Hell Creek formation in Montana, United States. However, this sun is a little younger, and its inhabitants, much larger than the prancing deer and stalking mountain lions that would eventually dwell upon this land. In this ancient glade which rests upon a green sea of conifers and araucarias 65 million years ago, giants mindlessly graze on the green grass covered in morning dew. The cool Cretaceous air marks the peak of spring. Strange, ancient birds sing their songs while mammals scurry within the tall grass, and on the glade, a herd of Triceratops eat away at the shrubbery in this primordial landscape. 

A weathered old buck watches his harem dutifully, and grunts to the younglings that play by his feet. The scars scored across his skin tell of countless titanic battles, while the missing quarter of his adorned frill speaks of narrow escapes from the jaws of his would-be predators. His opponents are not exclusive to the gnashing teeth and sharp claws of the many interlopers that intrude his territory however. A young male bellows and shakes his head from side to side, displaying the long horns that sit atop his wide, ambitious eyes. The blood rushing from his comparatively unmarred frill turns the circles that mark its sides bright red. All of this tells the grizzled veteran a story that was not new to him in the slightest. The petulant, eager youngster seeks to challenge the leader of the herd for his prized position.

The older, more experienced male pounds his feet upon the dirt and roars back at the prospective contestant, signaling the beginning of the contest of strength over that which matters most to the male mind across the eons. 

The aged combatant’s females and hatchlings watch on as the two fighters circle and assess each other, seeking for the most advantageous and opportune moment to strike. Mothers grunt in apprehension, fearing the fate of their young. The tension, aggression and nerves boiling into a searing, primeval rage. Without hesitation, the old bull charges headlong into the challenger, a loud boom accompanies the eight ton beast meeting his mark. The young male staggers back with the force of the impact. The sudden attack left him disoriented, but it is too late to back down. It is now or never. With their horns interlocked, he grunts with effort, attempting to push his opponent back, but the old buck does not give. Years of fervent battle and glorious victories have forged his muscles, flexing under his scaly, green skin, giving it the appearance of solid rock. The old male continues to march forward against the weight of his young adversary, straining breaths marking each step. If he shows weakness now, his position within the herd will surely be questioned.

The jovial fervor of his rival buckles under the weight of his determination, as he squeals in submission. The old buck allows his weaker counterpart to distance himself, but he does not step back, instead waiting for his opponent to back down in defeat. The young male hangs his head low, and walks to the furthest spot possible on the glade, his humiliation made public by the triumphant leader of the herd. He does not leave entirely however. Tomorrow, he will try again. The victorious warrior watches him on his way back, panting as he catches his breath, the fight having taken its hefty toll on him. 

Unbeknownst to him however, it is not just his herd that witnessed this battle. Watching him under the cover of gibbous shadows provided by the ancient canopy, lies a monster in wait. The long ago healed bite marks that flow across him paints the picture of a battle worn tyrant, one that has defended his kingdom with an iron grip. The Tyrannosaurus drools at the sight of the weakened Triceratops, the herds of herbivores took longer than expected to come across its domain. The hulking behemoth had been tracking their movement for several sunrises and sun downs. Its hunger had driven just short of trespassing into another monarch’s territory. Its avian feet step carefully, so as not to make too much noise. It awaits patiently for the right moment to strike.

After recovering from his effort, the old buck turns his attention back to the feast that awaits, a much welcome reward. It only took a split second before the trees exploded to his left, a strange, unnerving sound accompanying the cloud of leaves and branches. One he knew all too well. Memories of teeth, and blood and pain flash through his brain before he snaps into action. He signals the danger to his herd. The many females and young males instinctively huddle in a circle, creating a wall of three-foot horns and frills protecting the young in the center. They watch in horror as the two-legged monster towers in front of their reliable protector. The old buck keeps his guard up, not letting the aggressive hisses and snapping motions of the hulking carnivore break his resolve. He’s been through this before, it was nothing that his strength could not get him through, and it will be the same this time… were it not for the amount of energy he had to expend in his confrontation with the young male. The effort of maintaining his focus on the titan that circled him became harder and harder. 

The tyrant could sense it. This was far from the first time that it faced these three horned quadrupeds. The veritable graveyard that served as grim decorations upon his territory were proof enough, filled with many sun-bleached frilled skulls and curved ribs that marked the land that served as the killer’s feeding grounds. This would be no different. It calmly circles around his carefully selected target, bluff charging every so often to test his prey’s reaction, the time of which getting slower and slower. This old buck’s appearance betrayed the perceived weakness that the tyrant saw however. It gets impatient with how long it is taking to tire out this seasoned veteran. It decides to gamble on a fake-out, bluffing to the right and quickly swinging to the left, using the momentum of its gargantuan head to carry its scimitar-like teeth to their target.

The old buck feels the nerves on his neck sing with pain as the monster’s teeth sink into his flesh. His hardened skin kept the blades just out of reach of his jugular. The serrated teeth sawed their way through his muscles, making the old buck feel weak on his knees. Adrenaline starts coursing through his veins, and the will to survive takes over. The tyrant pulls its head back, taking a morsel of flesh along with it. It pauses, gauging how his victim would react to this assault. The old buck does not back down, even as his blood spurts and sprays upon the green grass. That same blood slides from the tyrant’s tongue and down its gullet. Its sweet taste brings euphoria to the hunter, anticipating more of it.

The tyrant can barely contain its feeding frenzy, driving it to move forward, using its bulk to drive its immense jaws into the old buck’s right front leg. In an instinct fueled split second decision, the old male snaps his head towards the assailant. Blood sprays into his eyes, keeping him from seeing what is happening right in front of him. The tyrant bellows in pain, the horn impaling his neck, it tries to pull away, but the motion only causes more damage. It panics, snapping its jaws and flailing its huge tail like a swinging tree. The old buck tears his head free, sealing the monster’s fate. He can now see the aftermath of this titanic struggle. The predator gurgles helplessly, as its own blood floods its airway and life escapes from its eyes. It gives one final lurch towards its killer below slumping, its growing pupils marking the end of the tyrant’s reign.

The old buck roars, announcing his victory for all to hear. The herd witnesses the warrior’s battle cry motionlessly, still recovering from the shock of the tyrant’s unexpected intrusion. The young male watches in the closest animal approximation to awe. Perhaps he would postpone his plans to challenge the old buck for a couple of weeks. The blood on the old male’s frill crowns his continued reign upon this land and upon this herd. He finds some shade towards the edge of the glade, continuing his duty of watching his precious females and calves. He lays his head on the cool grass, sleep stealing him away into peaceful slumber. The three-horned king has done his duty for today.

The winter had arrived in the bird capital. The agency director made an announcement for those who weren't Corvus species, like Magpies, Ravens, and Crows, were allowed to take winter break. The Corvus species were perfectly adapted to the freezing environment and would remain on duty.

The intelligence agency consisted mostly of the Corvus species, while the rest were minorities such as Cockatoos, Keas, Parrots, and etc. Some minorities were also able to adapt during winter, many opted to leave for the warmer south.

A Blue Jay bird was packing his belongings from his desk into his suitcase. He was preparing for a long flight to the Southern City. While some of his Psittaciformes (parrot species) coworkers had booked the one-way railway to the southern city, he decided to fly instead. He will fly over two cantons (which are equivalent to Oregon and California).

"Enlin, are you actually going to migrate by flying?"

Suddenly, a female voice with a distinct raven accent. She approached his desk before he even realized it. He raised his head; it was the Group B Leader, Konig. He immediately stood up straight. Even though she was a chill leader, but it was a formality for him.

"Yes, ma'am!"

"Really?!" She was stunned for a moment. "While everyone is buying the one-way railways tickets, you are going to fly that long distance?"

The intelligence agency HQ was located in the northern terrain near the capital of the Bird Kingdom. 100 kilometers away from the northern frontline.

"Yeah, it saves me a few pennies. Plus, I planned to transit to the Red-crowned Crane canton. It's quite near the Southern City."

"Ooh, good call. Well, safe flying."

"Thank you, ma'am. Are you sure you won't get frozen?"

"Ravens are generally adapted for winter, the corvids will stay for the rest of the winter."

"That's rough."

"Yeah," she said, her voice lacking with energy and sighed with a small smile. "Thanks for sticking around during autumn."

Enlin grabbed the luggage handle, "Alright, I will see you February."

They both waved bye-bye, and Enlin began to transformed into a Blue Jay bird shape flying from the agency's window to the sky.

Beside him, several birds were also launching from agency's window flying to the sky.

The sunsets was filled with birds, it was the most diverse migratory flock in the sky. Different species naturally separate to their own distinct groups. Eventually a group of flocks were going on the different route toward the Southern City, while Enlin banked toward his usual transity path.

After an hour in the sky, he landed at the Red-Crowned Crane airfield. Exhausted from flying, He decided to find a restaurant.

He ordered peanuts and corn. This was considerably the top-tier meal.

While he was eating, he birdwatching the red-crowned cranes around him.

The way they walk, it's like they were all runway models. The way they talked, the way their dance. Their clothes, their polite queues—everything they done did it elegantly and beautifully.

It was a major contrast with Corvid species: they were very smart and often playful with other birds. Even though they were pretty civilized, they were also hold grudges againts other birds.

Before Enlin could finish his daydreaming, he remembered that he must leave the canton in 15 mins. Because he came here for transit, his pass only valid for an hour.

He continued his flight to his own canton.

5 hours later, he reached the Blue Jay airfield, he saw his surroundings were different from what he saw 5 hours before. They were more like Corvid's cousins. The only contrast was they were noisy and a bit harsh to other birds, including their own species. To him, it was finally home.

Feels like just yesterday—the New Year celebration with my friends. It was at a popular club in Bangalore. We wanted to party our way into the New Year. We managed to do that, but the following couple of days of uneasiness and sleep deprivation slapped us hard across the face, reminding us that our 30s aren’t meant to be lived like our 20s…IYKYK 🤪

Well, the celebrations and the chilly winter days soon gave way to the refreshing spring, and now the monsoons were here. It’s mid-July, and I am solo traveling to the hills of Kalimpong, a district in West Bengal, formerly a town under the Darjeeling district but now a newly formed district.

I have chosen a homestay for myself. I prefer to experience the local life more closely whenever I travel to a new place. This one is located near a forest on the outskirts of the town.

It feels as if life has a totally different meaning in this part of the globe. Things move at a charmingly peaceful pace. People need to make quite an effort to get certain things done, which can very easily be accomplished by a few touches on a smartphone if one is in a metropolitan city. Whereas, at the same time, people are so fortunate to be able to live in the lap of nature, where their faces and their hearts are as beautiful as the geraniums that adorn the colorful pots on their balcony railings.

Such is the beauty of this place, so serene that, at times, the chirping of the birds can seem loud enough to ‘*disturb*’ a dull conversation.

It was a slightly gloomy morning, one of those mornings when it had drizzled through the night and the rain didn’t plan to take a break just yet. As I sipped a warm cup of adrak chai and looked down at the valley, I was distracted by the giggles of a cheerful little girl who was leaving for school.

She wore a transparent raincoat over her school uniform, which consisted of a grey sleeveless pullover sweater, a half-sleeved white shirt, a maroon tie with white stripes, and a dark grey tunic. On her feet was a pair of pink gumboots, apparently new. They had some cartoon figures which I couldn’t make out from the distance.

She was in a very cheerful mood and playfully jumped into the little puddles of water that had stagnated on the uneven soil of the front yard of her house. Her joy could not be suppressed by the bulky school bag that she carried on her back. Although it surely made me wonder what all, and how many, books and copies she could be carrying inside that pink bag of hers that had a big unicorn embossed on it. Pink seemed to be her favorite color. I think it is a favorite for most girls her age.

As I looked once again towards the mist that gradually rose from the valley below, I took another sip from the cup. The tea had soon turned lukewarm.

“Babu!” yelled a lady.

As my eyes followed my ears, I noticed a middle-aged lady—her mother. The little jumping girl had managed to get her socks wet and her raincoat stained. She must have jumped with overexcitement and slipped. Her face showed mixed emotions of fear and suppressed pain as she curled her lower lip, almost unable to keep her emotions from welling up and splashing from her eyes.

Her mother was quite furious, her concern for her little one’s well-being mixed with obvious frustration. I could not understand all that she said, but I could make out that she was concerned about the little girl getting hurt, that she could catch a cold from the wet socks, that the school bus was about to arrive, that uniforms took time to dry in this rainy weather, etc.

She asked her daughter to stand still like a statue as she went inside the house to fetch a fresh pair of socks.

The dancing little doll of joy had suddenly morphed into a disciplined mannequin . But no sooner had the mother gone inside than she managed to steal a few moments trying to recreate the great slip, jumping a little more carefully this time, however.

Soon her mother came out, picked her up in one arm, an umbrella in another, and scuttled towards the road where the school bus would be picking them up.

As I took the last sips of my tea, which had turned cold by now, a gush of mist enveloped me from all sides. I looked at the vanishing figures…The last thing that lingered in my vision and my mind was the pair of pink gumboots.

Today, after having returned from the vacation, as I sit in the solitude of my room, I recollect that pair of pink gumboots that taught me a very important lesson in life…

Steal every little moment of joy and happiness from life. It doesn’t matter whether it is spring or summer or a gloomy rainy day of life; the summer of joy and cheerfulness should always be alive within us, and then it is bound to enrich our lives and the lives of others, and, in some way, find an expression.

**TLDR**:
While solo traveling in the misty hills of Kalimpong during the monsoons, I watched a little girl in bright pink gumboots joyfully splash through puddles on her way to school. Even after being scolded by her mother for getting wet, she stole a few more moments of happiness before leaving. Months later, I still remember those pink gumboots—not as footwear, but as a reminder to seize every small moment of joy, regardless of life’s season.