Songs About Drifters

    From the window of an airliner, the clouds always look like palaces in the sky to me, where people could live eternally aetherial, changing forms but always made of the same matter. This was what was probably going through my head on the very long flight to Seoul, assuming I had the window open. I usually did if it was light out. The parabola of a trans-Pacific flight took us across the endless miles of tundra. It was hard not to imagine being stranded down there in the white, where a lifetime of walking would not take me to any place different even if I could stand the cold.
    I was on this flight as a way to escape from Chicago, and I guess I had been in Chicago as a way to escape from whatever came before that. There was an open apartment if I wanted it, and my unemployment checks could just barely cover the rent, if I sold a few of my CDs at the record store down the block. I holed up in there for a while. It was a city. A real city.
    We set off fireworks by dropping them from the rooftop on the fouth of july. Down into the alleyway, but there was a homeless guy down there sleeping, and when he woke up he and his friends yelled at us from the street. There was some sort of language barrier.
    I remember little of this time. I hung out with my roommate's cat, played video games, did other things, my god this is boring to write about.
    Chicago was a paradise of poverty. A panhandler in front of every bank, a Mexican restaurant on every corner, overpriced thrift shops and furniture stores alternating with the bars that both employed and serviced my generation - new ciders every week, and a free pizza with every beer. The El was convenient, comforting and filthy. Parades of underpasses and abandoned factories gave way for naked cyclists pedaling fiercely against the wind. When the blizzard hit, the streets were ours for a whole weekend. Tramping through the snow that shut down my street, the lights spun across my eyes and illuminated the concrete geometries that belonged to me at night, when the suits and cops had all gone home.

    He intentionally left the narrative behind for a time because it was as dull as dull could be. Endless parades of animals ran through his brain, and he could only speculate as to the reasons for them. When his cat disappeared and his other cat died, he imagined them frolicking through the sky together, laser beams firing from their eyes, annihilating the world below and leaving only the sky palaces where they might live forever.
    I used to stalk the streets of my campus in the small hours of the morning, drunk and smoking cigarettes, enjoying the lamplit fog, imagining for some reason bursts of flame and glass from the upper stories of the dormitories, I guess because it was something exciting, and everything was dull dull dull.
    I would go to parties at local bars and drink beer. I would sit on patios at restaurants and drink beer. I would send my job search reports to unemployment. I would occasionally go to parties because of my roommates. I would meet very few people, more when I began volunteering at a tutoring center.
    I can't say why we're talking about this now. I want to imagine a world below our own, where the corridors reshape themselves by the day so there is always something new to explore, traps and beasts and treasures, and waterfalls beneath the earth, and all the other beings sightless in the dark, from the dark, so they cannot see me crawling through the halls.
    If God were to exist, I would imagine him lurking in this place, on the lowest level, at the center of the Earth, making notes, flipping switches, fiddling with dials and levers that controlled sea levels and magma pressure, solving formulas in his head pertaining to how his adjustments might affect the insigificant but entertaining life on the surface, which he would monitor from a series of godly satellites connected by towers to wires that ran down beneath the surface into this megastructure, through switchboards manned by the gnomes whose daily activities really ran the universe, or at least the nuts and bolts parts of it that big idea men like God couldn't handle on their own.
    Is this what I thought about while sitting in that plane over the Pacific? Maybe, but maybe it was just about how I couldn't get any sleep for 40 hours straight, and how the food on international flights was actually pretty good. It wasn't my first overseas flight, but it would be my first in a long series, as flying back and forth over the Pacific became a regular fact of my life from then on. While travel became a more mundane activity, flying did not in the sense that I always expected to die on these flights, probably by being crushed when a seat in front of me came loose and took off my head as our fuselage crumbled to dust.
    More likely these were the thoughts I was having while sitting there buckled into that seat. Or imagining thrombosis in my legs while watching a movie on someone else's screen, trying with all my might not to touch the fat hairy arm next to me, or ignore the fat, hairy breathing from the fat, hairy man it was attached to. I drank and ate whatever was offered, and once or twice, I even tried ordering some alcohol. I was a drinker in those days, would be even more of one in the days to come, as that was what people did in Seoul, especially people like me. But there on the flight, drink just made things worse. Being confined to my seat made it no fun, and only exacerbated the sleep loss into something sublime and eldritch whose tentacles reached from my brain into my lungs and spine, taking over my body and turning it into something that no longer required sleep or even food, but ran on pain instead.
    That's how I was still awake when we landed and I hopped in a van to my new apartment, passing from the airport toward the city along a thin peninsula where towering tombstones disappeared into the mist. We ventured into the mountains beyond and into the countless streets, where the van broke down on a steep incline, and we had to get out and push. This sent the van rushing downhill where it plowed directly into a parked car. At this point I had ceased to particularly care about anything other than sleep loss. I scratched my head and had no thoughts or feelings about the van shattering the headlights of the car down the street, or the fact that it was November and I was cold and wet. Another car picked us up, and then I found myself in an empty apartment with no heat.
    Before that, though, it was probably Friday night in this place that  I now was, now that time existed again, and my coworkers were going out on the town. I was so far from sleep that it no longer existed and so I went with them, ate meat and drank as much as I could put down. We drank from shallow cups of milky liquid and shouted in our two languages which combined into wordlessness. I was asleep, had been asleep, had never slept. Then I was home, and there was nothing to do, not even shower or change clothes. There was no heat and no clothes, because my luggage was missing. I put socks on my hands and held them over the electric stove, wearing everything that I owned.
    I used to drink when I wrote, or rather write when I drank, and the results were jazzier. Not much jazz in this. I've replaced it with caffeine, and I don't know what that does other than give me pains in my chest and stomach.
    I'll keep going because the music is still playing, but I'm starting to get tired of this. My brain wants to change the channel. My attention span is 15 to 30 minutes, maybe less depending on the day. Go man, go.
    Never once in my life had I the courage to sit down and tell the truth, but I could lie endlessly in this format. I had a hamster once, when I was a child, and a bad person. I would hold his front paws in the air and watch him dance. I would scare him with my toy cobra. I'd like to think that he tolerated it, but I have no idea what really went throug his hamster brain. One day, he began to fart a lot, and another day he died, then I think he was buried somewhere.
    I didn't know how to speak Korean or the bus schedule, which was how I ended up miles from my apartment, not only in a different neighborhood, but far enough from the city that I could see its lights and towers on the horizon, drowning out everything else until the space around me was only ground and darkness. I remember walking against the wind down a highway, holding my jacket close in the November cold. I remember stopping in a convenience store and trying to borrow a cell phone from a man who just shrugged repeatedly at me until I left. I eventually found a taxi. The end.
    Talking of the day in and day out realities that followed may prove difficult. It was very normal. The heater was one day fixed, and then the floor was toasty, and I could finally take the socks off my hands. I laid down on the floor after coming in from the cold. I dried my clean clothes on the floor because the heat dried them faster, and the air did not dry them at all. But I had a sizeable space and a flat screen TV and a bed with a heavy blanket. My CRT was back home in a garage or a storage space, along with the furniture I would later sell because I had no more use for furniture in my life after Chicago. Itinerants do not carry furniture on their backs. I lived with what I could carry on my back, and whatever televisions happened to be at my destination, which was none after this single flat screen monitor.
    The city did not sleep, so neither did I. The high school students went home from cram school at 10 pm, and we went "home" after that, by which I mean to the club. Or a club. Any club. There were so many. We drank and ate and drank and danced and drank, and then I would fall asleep at 5:30 in the morning then wake up at 3 pm to go back to work. Have a little narrative summary, because my memories beyond that are too frazzled and fragmented for more. Sometimes I'm amazed I remember anything at all.
    Unbeknownst to me, I had decided to fall in love with two women that year, rather than the usual one. One was short and stocky but _sculpted_, in that she looked as if she had chiseled herself out of clay in front of the mirror every morning, crafting her own jawline, nose, and bust from scratch each day to perfectly suit her. The other was a reedy, pasty manic pixie dream girl, but the real kind, the kind that sometimes drinks too much wine and barfs in your lap, or changes attitudes at the drop of the proverbial hat.
    In the dark nights of prepubescence, I listened endlessly to Robert Plant sing about wandering to find his lost love. The Tolkien references were lost on me at the time, but I did envision a land of green spaces and distant mountains, mysterious cabins deep in the woods, and across them all a wandering, tragic figure hiking, following a shadow across my eyelids. An old casette tape single had a water-damaged cover of a bearded, cloaked man with a bundle of sticks on his back. Was this a fellow wayfarer, someone met on the road, even the man himself? It didn't matter, because the horizon was waiting in the background.
    If I was searching for anything, it was probably the same thing that fellow in the song was. I dreamed about a girl that was far away, who changed with the years to fit my own circumstances. Sometimes she had brown hair, sometimes red, sometimes green eyes or light blue or brown. Sometimes she was far to the West, sometimes to the East, but always beyond sight, beyond the road, the sun, in the sky.
    November rains were cold and fierce, and flooded the alleyways of downtown, running into the soles of my sneakers, flushing dead rats from the gutters, kept away in plastic tents where the smells of fish broth and smoke predominated. I met my friends in front of the convenice store by the train station, just down the hill from the ancient palace whose wall still ran along the edge of the neighborhood, shorter than it once was when it probably repelled or fell to invading armies. I don't know, I didn't retain much history of the place.
    I had thought I would be a musician in between writing sessions, but finding groups of like-minded artists becomes more difficult out in the real world of work. I switched from so many hours high and drunk playing every note I could think of with any drummer who would sit down behind the kit, to playing the notes in my room for myself, plugged out or plugged into my own headphones, listening only to my own sounds and regressing as an artist as a result. Instead I watched every season of The Office, staying up until well past sunrise, then staying up some more.
    There was a man who would fight you for a dollar, which really meant he would bob and weave while you tried to land a drunken punch, because those were the kind of people who wanted to fight someone so much they would pay for it. Or you could find a streetside arcade with a boxing machine, pads that would register your hits and give you back a score. There were motorcycles everywhere, veering over the sidewalks and around the crowds. The lights made the nights brighter than the day, which was perfect for me because I had never adjusted to the hues of the sun. They hurt my eyes and made me tired. They were the hues of work and serious business. Night was the time that I owned, and that others in the city owned with me, because cities were built for the night, when the colored bulbs and neon could decorate and disguise the ugly, grey facades and turn them into magic.
    There was a neighborhood made of trash. The train stop was still intact, but all of the other buildings had been condemned, and so they were filled with trash, and were themselves trash. The place fascinated me. A trash neighborhood is a place where anything could exist, because a non-trash neighborhood can only produce things of market value, or things that do not offend by their appearance or smell. Trash buildings could contain anything, and all of it could be up for grabs if you just hop the fence. I dream that one day the Pacific trash will form solid islands with their own unique ecosystems: creatures and plants and spores all adapted to the detritus of humanity. I will be there in my gas mask and trash gown spearing three-armed fish and collecting mushrooms to take my back to my trash igloo and my trash-powered stove. My life will be short, because what ruining the environment really means is that we've ruined it for ourselves, but the spores will be fine. You cannot kill the environment, it will environ no matter what you do.
    The old district around the ancient palace even had its own trash piles, at the back of traditional houses,where stray kittens played and whined and hissed at each other atop the mounds of garbage.

Unimagined

 
    Unfortunate ladies in the sky sprouting metal wings that cut clouds into tiny, bite-size pieces which you might taste like marshmallows drifting down your gullet, finding their way between your ribs as one might the rafters of an old unused attic, there to bloom forever as spiritual second and third hearts that keep you forever dreaming, forever light and airy and asleep, and wishing for something else so hard that you drift between cities and countries searching for it.
    This was I suppose how you became who you are, an event that took place before the advent of conscious thought, reinforced over time by your deep dives into this or that universe, the realms of countless other dreamers expressed on pages and screens and through sound waves. You listened and read and watched and then saw your room lift itself off the ground and grow legs and run you down the street, straight through a plate glass mirror beyond which were realms unimagined by the unimaginative.
    And so you lurk now in the places between these realms, peering in, dipping your toes in, wading up to the waist, but always leaving to stand outside watching from Elsewhere. Elsewhere, where the rainbows glow and the nights are as deep as the ocean. Elsewhere, where sheep bounce over the meadows hunting wolves, and candy is poisonous and mushrooms taste like candy. Elsewhere, where a loaded gun is always handy but never necessary.
    Your name is Gherritt. You stand beyond the mirrors in your sleep. Lifting weightless weights, planning, plotting, waiting for the day you might wake and cease to be Gherritt, to become someone else.
    The city is a series of sewers. Sew enough buildings together and what you have is one big burrow, housing all that is human in its spiritless halls, where sewage flows ever downward, but is ever produced anew. You are somewhere in this endless building, still sleeping beyond the mirror.
    You have a six-legged cow named Bertha. You keep a box of mints in your pocket, something that you think of as mints because they taste nice, but they also make your brain explode with every bite.
    Over the hills, grasses wave as tall as treetops hiding gods.
    I fiddle with dials on your bed, keeping you alive and kicking. You kick aginst the mirrors, but they are made of material harder than stone.

    The sensation of floating is real. This is your actual physical state. What is not real is your sense of control over it. The sense of floating where you like rather than in one specific spot.
    Beyond the stone mirrors there is only glass, if you could just reach beyond them with the ball of your foot and shatter it, the dreams might flow out into a putrid puddle on the floor and leave you there gasping air and feeling for the gun that was always handy, but is now absent and necessary. You do these things and then there are shouts in the hallway. through the blur in your eyes, you see that the hills do not exist, there is only the corridor. You have arrived in one specific place at last and no longer have the ability to leave and go elsewhere. Perhaps you are awake, and perhaps you are just having a nightmare, one that you cannot immediately exit from.
    Outside this room is a train station in the dead of night, a switchyard enclosed in a series of tunnels, darkness out beyond the platforms twitching with unease, uncomfortably aware of its own endlessness. Cold breath drifts in out of the nothingness, drying out your skin so that it feels too tight. You flex your fingers expecting your knuckles to split open like sausage casings.
    Somewhere in this building is a city, but for now it is only the station and the sewers, bereft of any life except for the uniformed men who search for you with their flashlights cutting the dark of the many outcrops and unused gantries of this place.
    You reach into your pocket and find something round and squishy, studded with probosci. When you squeeze it, it squeaks like a chew toy. The noise attracts the flashlights and so you place it back in your pocket and huddle, draw the darkness around you until the lights go away. The shouting voices fade with them, and then you are alone, far from the rainbows and the sheep, alone with your squeaky toy and the clothes you are wearing, which you have never seen before but must belong to you.

the Plains of the Other

 who are these blank-faced
    dolls marching in an out of officetels
    and boutiques
    in their catalogue clothing
    and purchased hair?
    how many times can i
    eat a hamburger before
    i wish to die

    we build a series of cages
    and tell ourselves
    this is all we are
    and nothing else
    
    where am i
    in this mess
    can i call myself
    my self?

    Lift me out of this morass in a tin spaceship,
    to a dark sky where the dark ones live.
    Place me in the eye of Jupiter
    where my flesh is stripped by the wind
    
    I am a blood storm now
    sailing where i wish
    tell me, oh dark ones
    of the great Plains of the Other
    where I can rain on the endless hills
    and suck the xeno-cattle into my eye
    to be turned also to blood
    none of them wear clothes or talk about the weather
    no
    they range and devour and fuck and die
    they are stupid and mad with brain disease
    they see the red world pass by their eyes
    no home to keep, no appointments
    unscheduled days of stripping the hills
    of all they create
    in a world that renews and destroys
    that fertilizes itself with their
    desperate entrails
    while I feed the flowers from my blood storm
    drinking every last drop
    they grow teeth and desires
    they eat the cattle who eat them back
    both are enraged, engorged, filled to bursting
    with hate and love for the other
    the colors of these feelings
    fill the air, and i dispel them with my own
    even as they leak into me

    even as they crystallize into forests
    that cannot be cut down
    that will colonize with their creepers
    the bones of the cattle I leave behind
    forming morbid hives towering above the hills
    home to hornets of bad intent
    with fire in their bellies and sex in their hearts
    they dream naught of peace and comfort but only struggle
    they are choked by the vines and storms of blood
    but they asphyxiate vibrating, bearing erections for the ages
    voluminous, cavernous, harboring mysteries
    deep within their swollen labyrinths
    where Theseus weeps
    at the unsurpassing beauty
    of the Minotaur

A burst of spring

 A burst of spring
    recalls the endless time lost
    between moments of years that leave no imprint
    on the mind's eye
    drifting beyond the veil of consciousness
    without so much as a whisper
    to my elder self

    who sits drying out in his chair
    probably clutching at the arm rests
    with arthritic fingers
    longing for the days
    when he could grip instead of clutch
    longing for the phantasmic colors
    remembering they existed
    but unable to recall
    a hue or shade to his mind
    which looks like
    the deserts dreamt
    in younger days
    like portents of the empty hours to come
    as the sand buries all things
    so too would time erase even the sand from his dreams

    Visually, in terms of color composition, I prefer the jungle.
    Thematically, spiritually, I prefer the desert.
    It calls to me, like the hearth of home in the depths of winter.
    If only it would rain, it would be perfect.
    Rain on the dessicated earth.
    The soil so packed that every droplet can be heard
    on impact

    I could drink every last ounce
    the sky could produce
    and still be desolate
    impenetrable

In the Bones of Giants

---
Jinn's Tale

    She had always led a quiet life. She had managed this for many years and saw no reason why anything should change. Each part of her life was crafted for stability. She lived in the very center of a large village. The village was surrounded by farmland. If there was a bad harvest, the hunters could still provide enough for everyone. If the hunters failed, she had her own garden, which she worked to keep consistent in its output. Her husband's trade was safe and reliable - making tools for the hunters. Her children were afraid of the outside world. She had instilled them with enough fear to keep them in line and close to home. The climate was harsh but consistent, and she had it all figured out.
    As happens, a day arrived when all of this changed. It arrives for everyone, except those for whom it does not. It was still early in the morning. She had risen to look at herself in the mirror next to the bed. It was an antique, certainly, as no mirrors were made in the village. Her own father had bought it from a merchant a lifetime ago. She had looked in it every day since, measuring the gap between the top of her head and the top of the mirror, making sure to always stand at the same distance from it in order to get an accurate reading. When her mother had placed a rug beneath it, she moved the mirror herself and flipped the rug out from under it to make sure its height remained the same. Of course, she had reached her tallest height years ago, still inches from the top of the mirror, but the ritual remained. In the past ten years, she had switched from measuring her progress toward being a woman to admiring the woman she had turned into. Her face was full and round like the rest of her. She still had some of the weight of her last pregnancy on her, the product of which began to wake at that moment. This is how the day began, as innocuous as all other days, to be quickly sent awry without even giving her the courtesy of time to reflect on these changes.
    The first sign was the cry of a horn in the distance, echoed by two others from two other directions. She left her bedroom and continued out the front door and through the garden, listening. The cries of horns became the cries of her people, also from three directions. This was the second sign that something was not as usual, and more troubling than the first. The third turned visible just as the cries rose in volume, a tree of black smoke to the North. This was worrying, because she had no contingency in mind for it. She had taught her famiy how to respond to a fire, but she sensed that this was something else. In fact, what she felt was an overwhelming wind that rushed from behind her, the same feeling one gets as the waters are pulled back from the ocean's edge to form the wave rising above. Beneath her feet, through the air, in the sky, and all around her there was a tide of history rising to submerge all her plans. Her youngest son approached and stood beside her. She put her hand on his head, felt his hair beneath the tide, felt that he was about to die.
    The cries followed the black smoke, fading in the East and South, but still approaching from the North. Her husband appeared, jogging up the lane to stop before the garden where she stood. "We need to run," he said. "All of us."
    She nodded, but said, "We can't run."
    He looked her in the eyes with fear. "We must."
    So she did. She ran back inside and shouted, not sure what she was saying, only calling to her family. All of them knew how to run but the newborn. She ran back into the room and grabbed her out of the crib next to the mirror, took one final look at herself and the quiet life she had built, then ran out the front door.
    When she did, they were already there. The cries, the smoke, and those who inspired both, on horseback galloping up and down the street, the cries emanating from those they dragged behind. She could not take her eyes from one of these, could not stop trying to recognize it; its snarling face, its teeth drawn too far back, looking as inhuman to her as the armored horsemen. One of these galloped from the opposite direction, slicing her along the neck as he went.
    She fell still watching the creature being dragged, still clutching the infant to her chest. The child began to cry, its cries lost in the torrent of sound that washed over the village from North to South. Then later it began to sleep. When Mabibwi arrived from the day's hunt, Jinn and everyone else was dead. Yet still she saw. She could not remember his name, but recognized him as human and knew his face. He carried a giant egg in his backpack. She tried to lift her arms to hand him the child as it woke, but they would not move. She tried to move her lips to speak the child's name, but no breath passed between them. Everything was quiet, had been quiet for so long. She wanted only for sound to break forth from the world, to break from her into the world. As she still struggled, she watched Mabibwi reach down and close her eyes with his fingers, felt the infant being lifted from her grasp while she spoke its name only to herself. While she spoke her own name to anyone who could listen. Jinn.   

---
Mabibwi's Tale

    Mabibwi trudged, the child slept or cried from its sling across his chest. When the winds died, the temperature cooled. This brought the familiar sigh of evening. Beyond the village, the sun began to melt. Its color cooled with the air as dark set in. He began later than he should have to look for a place to camp. It was then that he came upon a spot hidden on three sides by weathered stone. He approached it from the open side, which faced toward the setting sun, and found that it was occupied by a man who was a lizard. This lizard man watched him silently with his head turned to the side. Mabibwi raised a hand in greeting, both of his hands in fact, to show that they were empty. The lizard man flicked its tongue and copied the gesture, whether in mockery or not. Regardless, he sat down across from the stranger, a pile of bones between them where a campfire should have been.
    The lizard man turned its head from side to side and watched him, then spoke. "What is that?"
    "What?"
    "That." It pointed to the baby slung over his chest.
    "Oh. That's a baby."
    "Where is the mother?"
    "She's dead."
    It studied him. "Did you kill her?"
    He shook his head. "She was already dead."
    "My condolences," the lizard man said.
    "It's okay. It's not my baby."
    It studied him again. "Are you going to eat it?"
    "Eat what?"
    "That." It pointed to the baby again.
    "Um. No."
    "Then why do you carry it with you?"
    "To care for it, I guess."
    "No offense..." It turned its head and flicked its tongue before continuing. "But if a mother asked me to care for her baby, I would eat it."
    "None taken." Mabibwi could think of nothing else to add. It occurred to him that it was quite impressive that the lizard man could speak a human language when its lips and mouth were so poorly suited to the task. "She did not ask me."
    "Just the same. What will you feed it? I've been told that human children feed on their mothers."
    "I'm not sure." Mabibwi put his finger in the baby's mouth to check something. "It has no teeth."
    "Would you like me to eat it for you?"
    "The baby?" Mabibwi thought for a moment. "No."
    "Suit yourself. It is yours. Where will you go?"
    "What do you mean?"
    "You must go somewhere, yes?"
    "I suppose I must."
    "Then where are you going?"
    "I don't know." He shrugged. "I know of no place but the place I came from, and I cannot go there."
    The lizard scratched his chin with a claw and made a face. Mabibwi could not tell what it was meant to express. "There is a city to the East. A long walk for a human, but perhaps you could make it."
    "That sounds good."
    The two of them sat for a bit. The lizard man did not offer him food, and had clearly already eaten its own supper. It seemed to be turning its head to bask in the setting sun, and made no motions that Mabibwi interpreted as hostile. They struck up stilted conversation throughout the evening, during which Mabibwi learned that the lizards were solitary creatures. Upon maturation, a lizard man (or woman, Mabibwi assumed, though the speaker made no distinction) would leave his nest and travel. If he found a suitable place in the world that no living lizard had claimed, he would settle. It could be an empty plot of land, or the former home of a lizard now deceased. He would hunt, improve the land, and live out his days there. They joined together only for reproduction and funerals, at which each attendee would devour a piece of their dead relative, and then go their separate ways.
    Mabibwi thought it seemed a lonely life, though his companion did not seem troubled by it. It explained that it was now in this wandering stage, searching for a home. It explained that it was on its way to the coast, to find a human ship of suitable size. It would then eat the crew and take over the ship, setting sail for uncharted waters. This was the first Mabibwi had heard of lizard pirates.
    When the sun had set, he found himself uneasy about sleeping near this creature, though it had assured him it would not eat him or the baby while they slept. All things considered, though, he was too tired to think of any alternatives, or to care much what happened to himself or his charge. He fell asleep, still crouched by the bone pile.

    He dreamt he was in a city. He had never seen a city, yet it was vivid. Sprawling onion domes twisted into the clouds. Market stalls seemed to grow from the walls. The sky was full of bridges. As he walked down the middle of the street, people burst into flame. Their eyes and then skin would glow like hot coals, sparks would shoot from their mouths, the hair fizzle away like a dynamite fuze. They would dance and scream. Colored lights flickered in the windows from which the music flowed. Ecstasy was welling out from the deepest part of his brain. It filled the channels and buoyed his skull till he was just a balloon trailing legs and arms, drifting on the breeze through the onion domes.
    It was all gone when he woke. So was the lizard man. The baby was still there, strapped to his chest.


    On the second day, it began to cry constantly, no doubt hungry. He tried his best to ignore the sound, but there wasn't much to hold his attention. The ground was flat and featureless, barring a few plateaus on the horizon and the occasional pile of carrion. Mabibwi laughed at their situation. On his back was a meal large enough to feed several families. On his front was a creature unable to chew or digest that meal. He had no way to prepare it, anyway. The further he went, the more they strayed from the old hunting grounds and into the heart of the desert. He wondered allowed if he perhaps should have stayed at home. But how could one man bury a whole village? Or fend off the scavengers if he did not.

    On the second night, he met a man wearing armor like none he had ever seen, neither the man nor the armor. He was pale with a long, white mustache. The helmet sitting next to him reflected the glow of the campfire.  
    The fellow stared in the direction of the child. "I saw a man eat an infant much like that one only a few days gone."
    "What is it with you people and eating children?" By reflex, he held his arms around it, in case the stranger thought to skewer it with his longsword.
    The other man shook his head. "Not my taste, I assure you. I could not stomach it in any sense." He paused and fidgeted. His hands shook on the hilt of his sword, which he held with its point to the ground like a walking stick. "Tell me about your gods, stranger."
    "Gods?" Mabibwi wondered at the purpose behind this line of questioning.
    "You have gods, do you not?"
    "Many of them."
    "My god offers eternal life to the man who wars against the infidels. What do your gods offer?"
    "They offer us nothing, only strike us dead from the sky or devour us beneath the Earth." He paused to search for the right words to express something he had always taken for granted. "Death is our rest, as Father would have said."
    "A grim philosophy. Tell me about one of your gods."
    Mabibwi picked the one closest to the top of his mind. "Watanga. The beast of the Underhells."
    "Watanga." The man seemed to be testing the name, riffling through the sounds it made. "What is the Underhell?"
    "Underhells. There are many. Together they are the world below our hell."
    "Our hell?"
    "Yes." Mabibwi waved his hand at the desert.
    "Do you mean....we're in hell now?"
    He scratched his head. "Of course."
    Roland shuddered and twitched the bars of his mustache. "Tell me about this Watanga."
    "It is unsafe to describe him beyond the name, even in dreams."
    But the stranger was interested now. "Tell me about him, and I promise not to kill you." He flexed his fingers on the sword hilt before him. The blade was the shiniest thing Mabibwi had ever seen, seeming to be made of the same fire that burned between them.
    Mabibwi had not considered himself in danger before. But he needed no additional convincing. It seemed like a fair deal. "Watanga is a great beast of many legs. He stalks the halls of the Underhells, feeding on those who venture too deep."
    "Why would anyone do that?"
    "The Underhells are filled with treasure. And Watanga grants wishes for a price."
    "What price?"
    Mabibwi shrugged. "I don't know. A price you shouldn't wish to pay, I suppose." There was a pause. The knight seemed to be mulling over this new information. "What are your gods like?"
    He lowered his eyes from the sky. "There is but one god, named God. He controls and is all things. When we die (if we prove worthy), we become one with him to live eternally, as masters of the universe."
    "What is your home like?"
    "My home?" He searched the fire for his memories. "I come from a great city called The Mausoleum. Crumbling spires surround us on all sides, spanning both sides of the river mouth. The ground is made of stone, the streets lined with travellers from all lands. At night, the forge fires keep the darkness at bay." Other memories came to him, but did not make it to his tongue. He went silent.
    Mabibwi cleared his throat. "No, I meant....what is the weather like? The world."
    "The world? The weather? Much like this, I suppose. But cooler."


    The third day was so much like the second that he forgot it was the third. By the time he saw a silhouette shaped like a house on the horizon, he assumed he was hallucinating. Smoke drifted from what was either a chimney or a geyser. The house or geyser stood atop a shallow hill that ran for a mile in every direction, textured with evenly spaced shadows that he took to be plants. If this was a hunger dream, it was an elaborate one. As he moved up the path, the house was unobscured by the hill on which it stood, revealing lantern light in a window. Night arrived in force as he examined the scene, his head tilted to one side as if we were musing or mulling. But no thoughts accompanied the gesture. He only looked at the house and the backdrop of stars that was forming behind it, slowly rotating as if the house were the axis of the world.
    He shook himself and did have a thought then. He wondered how to approach a strange home all alone in the countryside, himself a stranger. Not approaching was out of the question. He saw no movement but the stars and the sway of food plants in the breeze. He considered calling out from a distance, but announcing himself when he was still under cover of darkness seemed a method for the guilty. There was nothing for it but to knock on the door. He resolved to make sufficient noise as he approached up the path, careful not to stomp, but scraping the dust and stones with his feet loud enough to present audible footsteps. This he did, then knocked on the door, too quietly at first, then louder. The door opened immediately, the light that spilled out framing a man of beastly proportions. "Speak, stranger," he said.
    Mabibwi began to, and instead toppled forward across the threshold, either fainting or falling asleep on the spot.

    He awoke to laughter, rotund and jovial. He awoke to firelight bouncing off the sandstone interior of the house. He felt at peace, considered shutting his eyes again to stay in that feeling. He knew nothing of his host, or what they might do when he woke. But the room was warm, and he ached. It was the return of hunger that convinced him to open his eyes and sit up.
    "THERE he is," said the same voice as before, still with the same laugh in its tone. A hand clapped him on his back before he even saw the speaker. He turned his head to the left to see him, still of the same proportions but no longer beastly. He was clean-shaven, even his hair cut short. Mabibwi's first thought was that the man's skull was enormous, and closer to the surface of his face than normal. He was quite handsome in spite of or because of this. "Glad you're not dead, or planning to sleep through your stay. Eat, my friend." The fellow removed his hand from Mabibwi's back and reached out to pull a table toward them, where they sat on a small bench. Mabibwi looked at the table, or at the food on the table. It was a feast, far too much for one man. Numerous dishes in concentric circles, some half-empty; what was left after a meal. Still enough for three or four Mabibwis.
    The dishes were only half-visible in the firelight, chunks of what could be meat or fruits or vegetables in dark sauces. He ate from all of them without distinguishing anything from anything else. Rainbows burst in his mind and he held back tears as he ate. When his eyes could focus beyond the table, he examined the rest of the room. Before the fireplace across from them, a woman, smaller but also of similar stature to the man, sat in a rocking chair nursing an infant. The firelight danced on her bare chest, her neck, thighs, the left side of her face. Her eyes were dark and half-hidden in shadow. Unable to do otherwise, he took in every part of her and was instantly aroused. He looked away and focused on the food. There was a bowl of fruit that suddenly looked round and supple, feminine, as if her shapes had been transferred onto it, and he had to look away from that, too.
    "Thank you," he stammered. He breathed and took control of himself. "I've never tasted any meal to compare with this."
    "You're welcome." Her voice suited her. He resolved to reflect on why this was so. He did not look up, but felt her examining him.
    "I'm not surprised," said the man. "You look as if you haven't eaten for weeks."
    He continued to eat between responses. "Days, not weeks. But I am starving."
    The man laughed again. "Well. Perhaps someone was underfeeding you before then. Eat all you like, and there is more to be had if needed."
    He bent over the dishes on the table, but could not stop his eyes from drifting back to the woman before the fireplace. He watched her nursing for what could've been a fraction of a second, but felt like far too much time to him. Then he realized something, felt at his own chest by reflex. "Thank you," he said again, this time addressing her directly, and he pointed to the infant nestled against her chest. It was his. Well, not his, but he thought of no other way to refer to it.
    She nodded, still inspecting him. "You are welcome. She certainly needs it." She looked down at the child, smoothed what little hair was on its head.
    He looked away again. "It is a she?"
    "Yes. IT is a she. Is she not yours?"
    "Yes. I mean no. Our village was attacked. I found it. Found her lying there, crying." He felt defensive, for some reason. "I found no one else living. It seemed best to leave."
    "You're lucky to have found us when you did."
    He could not disagree with that. He nodded, still eating, finally beginning to taste the individual ingredients.
    The man cleared his throat, and his voice boomed with an energy like laughter. Mabibwi thought it must be how he always spoke. "Well, I think introductions are in order. I.…am Ketanka!" He snapped his hand across his face as if twitching a curtain aside. "This is my wife, Khalisi. The children are under strict orders to sleep, but you can meet them in the morning. What were you called at home, friend?"
    He stopped chewing long enough to speak. "Mabibwi. I do not know the child's name."
    "Mabibwi..." Ketanka said. "It has a ring to it." As if they were brainstorming names for him. "Perhaps you should name the child. Or I could name her if you like."
    "You," said Khalisi, "should not be allowed to name any child ever again."
    "Nonsense!" He lit his pipe for emphasis, and perhaps to avoid arguing with her.
    Mabibwi's furious dining had slowed to the point where he was able to examine his surroundings at the same time. The interior was smooth sandstone: floors, walls, and ceiling, though much of the floor was covered with rugs of varied patterns. The chimney was a hole in the ceiling above the open fireplace, which blazed with hot coals and provided much of the room's light. A few candles burned on shelf or table. These were the mundane backdrop for the dreams which decorated the walls, and every flat surface but the floor. Objects which he could not categorize or even recognize in many cases. A skull shaped like a horn that ended in a mouth full of fangs, covered in holes along its length; eyes, nostrils, something else, he could not tell. There was a box of some unknown material sat on a shelf, one side made of glass but not reflective enough for a mirror. A long contraption of wood had a spearhead on the end of it, but the rest was covered in metal parts that looked like they were meant to move. There was a dagger, but shaped like a flowing river. A human face peered down at him from the wall, too realistic to be artificial, too shiny to be natural. He shuddered.
    "That one bothers Khalisi, as well," said Ketanka, noting what he examined. "I can see why. But there is something about it I like. Something...ethereal."
    "What is all this?"
    Ketanka rose to his feet and stabbed the air with his pipestem. "The spoils of adventure, my friend! To the north of here lies an ancient city, long abandoned, most of it buried beneath the sands." He sat back down and grinned. "Most of it looted long ago, as well. But I've found a few corners that still hold something worth seeing. And some worth bringing back."
    "That place will be the death of you." Khalisi sounded angry but weary.
    "Death is the last stop on the road to legend, my dear!"
    "Just so," she said. "You will make a fine legend."
    He bowed in her direction, pipesmoke describing an arc to match, cleft in two by his own forehead. Then he sat and turned to Mabibwi. "And you, friend! You seem to be out on an adventure yourself."
    "I am?"
    "Of course! A lone wanderer, a mysterious infant, a whole village to avenge..."
    "I hadn't thought to avenge them."
    "She is just an orphan, not a mystery," Khalisi said, lowering her head to gaze at the mystery latched to her nipple, nearly asleep. Her curls fell across her face. Mabibwi stared a moment too long again.
    "Harrumph!" said Ketanka, twin streams of smoke curling from his nostrils. "Do not lack for the imagination to see your life as it is. Man is ever a story -- or Woman --" he gave his wife a nervous glance. "Every woman or man is a story to be told, lived from quiet hour to seconds of no consequence; but a teller makes it brilliant. You, however, will already shine brighter than most. I can tell these things."
    Mabibwi felt lighter for the words, though unsure if he believed them. He liked this strange, giant man. But he also watched the subtle expressions of Khalisi, whose thoughts he coveted, and noticed the twist of disapproval on her lips. He felt heavier. Belying her expression, her speech danced playfully across each syllable: "Do not project your delusions onto him, husband. He is just a man doing what must be done in the face of misfortune." He felt much, much lighter.
    Ketanka himself smiled at this, raising the caterpillars he used for eyebrows onto his massive forehead. "That is just it, my dear. That is exactly it." He leaned back where he sat, grinning with satisfaction, stretching his arms behind his head.
    The conversation continued in fits, synchronized with the slowing tempo at which he ate. He resolved to ask what he was eating if there was a next meal. And hoped dearly that there was for several reasons. Ketanka's rambling pronouncements began to rush by his mind unseen, though still heard and responded to when bidden. Exhaustion took hold of him, along with the most contented warmth he could remember. Anxiety drained and his head began to nod, still chewing, still listening, still talking, but also dreaming. A dream in which he was a wandering legend, broad-shouldered as Ketanka, stopping for an evening to rest by a stranger's fire. He was an infant clutching Khalisi's heroic breast in his arms; then he was her husband, the child between them through the night as they slept, his skull reaching toward the front of his face as if it wanted to merge with hers, directly in front of him. Her lashes parted, her eyes opened, and in them were ruined towers at midnight, sandswept, white as ivory in an ocean of ink. When he drifted from her eyes to half-awake, he was lying just where he had sat by the table, a leather blanket over him, the coals still glowing, crackling amid the silence of a warm place out of the wind. He shut his eyes and waited for his brain to tell him another story.

    In the morning, the children were up. Everyone was up, but the children made themselves known. They were screaming in the background, and in the foreground. He heard them before his eyes opened, saw his village under attack, every person open mouthed wailing including the invaders, who were all plastered with the faces of lizards, or white-mustached men in armor. Then he opened his eyes and the screams were laughter. The only ones not screaming were the three standing right in front of him, staring with blank expressions. Two almost identical girls, long of limb and hair, and a small boy with an oversized head. When he sat up, the boy shrieked and ran away. The two girls stood watching him as he watched back, challenging him to be the first to speak. Only when the silence stretched did they turn away as one and disappear toward the back of the house.
    When they moved, he could see Khalisi before the fire, preparing breakfast. It was then that he noticed the monstrous egg shell cast onto the floor at her side, split in two. An iron pan to match hung over the fire. The contents of the egg he had carried for so long filled the entire pan. She had not asked him, but he could think of no reason why she should have. His stomach rattled in its cave and he began to salivate. Hunger took him, and something else, called to the fore by seeing her standing in the light for the first time. He stomped whatever that was into the background and let his hunger take over, as it was the one he could do something about. He wished to see up close what she was doing to his egg, and this would require him to move up next to her.
    He did so. The egg white bubbled and shook like a cloud of lava. Dark brown oil curled up around its edges. She was pulling chunks of sausage out of a wooden bowl and tossing them into the pan. Peppers, leaves, and some unknown fruit were already sinking beneath the egg, along with pieces of a doughy flatbread. Spices assaulted him where he stood. Even so close to the fire, he felt that he could sense her body warmth, and the combination of it all made his head swim. "I've never seen an egg this size," she said.
    "They nest west of our village."
    "How do the birds taste? Or whatever lays something like this."
    "Birds. I don't know. We do not try to hunt them. Only the eggs, when the nests are unoccupied. That smells amazing."
    Ketanka stooped through the curtain and into the room, wearing fresh clothes and eyes. "Mabibwi! Sleep well? Join me in a wake up drink!" He took two cups from a shelf, and the gourd sitting next to them. "Do you like gilanthus wine?"
    "I've never had it."
    "Aha! Then you are in for a treat." With the cups and the gourd palmed in one hand, he picked up the dining table with the other and placed it next to the bench where Mabibwi had slept. They sat. "My dear, will you join us?"
    "No." She carried on.
    "Then we must drink her share as well. Cheers to that, and to welcoming a traveller into our home. It must be good to rest a bit, eh?"
    He could think of no way to describe just how true that was, so he said nothing, only bowed from his seat, tapped his cup on the table in imitation of Ketanka. The wine was sweet, so sweet he thought his tongue might shrivel and retreat down his throat. He coughed.
    "A devil's nectar, is it not? It's easier once it gets to your head. Drink up." He poured another for them both. "In honor of your stay, I have an idea."
    "An idea?"
    They tossed off another one. It was already proving easier. "That's right. You are going to tell us a story."
    The response from the children was instantaneous. "A story!?"
    "That's right," said Ketanka.
    "I'm not much of a speaker, let alone a narrator."
    "Then make it a long story, so we can see you improve as you go. Normally, I would tell a story in the morning, but this is a special occasion." He rapped his cup on the table again. A strand of liquid leapt out, curling in the air, then snapped back. "Drink up! And let the words flow like wine."
    Everyone watched him, including Khalisi. A radiance was leaking from his temples to the sides of his neck, across his shoulders and down his arms. "Should I tell MY story?"
    "It could be your story. It could be any story. Trust me, this is not a discerning lot." The two oldest girls frowned at him and he laughed. "Well, a couple of critics in the house, perhaps. But the rest will cheer you on."
    "A story, eh?" Mabibwi tried, subconsciously, to adapt a bit of Ketanka's manner. He needed some manner but his own, if he were to string so many words together. "Now let's see here..." He set about adapting the truth to their expectations.

---
Mabibwi's Tale (as told by Mabibwi)

    Once there was a man named...Mabibwi. Is that an okay beginning? Don't ask me, you're the story teller. Hmm. Once there was a man named Mabibwi. A young man named Mabibwi. He was returning from the hunt, prize in tow. Should this be in first person? It won't sound like a legend anymore, but there's something forceful in it that draws me onward. I was returning from the hunt, prize in tow. Lines in the soil led to the horizon, jagged with home, clouded with miasma leaking into the sky. I began to run, my burden weakening my knees until I thought they might buckle under the strain. Toes sinking into the soil with every stride. How often had I played amid the grain stalks when they still rose above my head? Now they were only to my waist, and a new world towered above, made of smoke. I ran to the center of the village as if something there might answer my questions. The signs lay all around. Dried blood, burst and scrambled people, the hum of kingflies feasting. Is this appropriate for children? Don't worry, they've heard worse. They are tough little warriors, all. Of course. I stalked the streets, examining the remaining faces one by one, searching for those I recognized. I saw none, and scrubbed them desperately from my memory. They were dolls cast aside, playthings of vengeful giants, the refuse of a festival in honor of someone else's god. I could find not one left alive. Except the child. Out of the chants of the kingflies rose a tiny, ragged voice down the street. I saw her right then, open mouthed and pointed to the sky. I ran. She was clutched in the arms of a young woman whom I wanted to lift off the ground and out of the road, but I feared she would fall apart in my arms. The infant was intact though, not leaking but for drool and tears. I took her from her mother's grasp, careful to be sure she would let go when I did, felt the first feeling but numbness. Panic. I had to do something. Had to help, had to go somewhere. Who had done this and why, and where were they? This is an awfully long story, isn't it? Not at all, we are just getting involved. From where I knelt I rose, stood over the remains of my beloved Kalini and swore vengeance unto my dying breath. Stormclouds joined the smoke and kingflies: wind and rain, a vortex that wiped what was left of home from the face of the Earth, even as I stepped from it into the wild, my two charges in tow. Little child, all that remains of my beloved, you are my divining rod now. Point me to the villains, that I might repay them.
    Even as the last blood of my kin was washed away in a tempest, the sun ahead bled onto Earth and softened it as I passed. We hadn't even a chance to name you, little one. Let us call you Ariala, then. Ariala of the Tempest. Ariala, baptized in blood. The heat beat down upon us as the day wore on, sands giving way to jagged spires and sudden rents in the landscape. Refusing to give up the prize of my hunt, I scrambled over the land and suffered for it. Bending my ankles on uneven soil, straining to clamber over the gaps in the path on which you led us.
    As the sun bled out, I happened upon a cove in that sea of spires. I rounded the edge of this rock formation in search of shelter, discovering a path that led downward into the Earth. The light faded but gave way to a ghostly glow ahead. There was a cave where the rock itself gave off light. And in the center, a burning pyre of human remains warmed a dragon.
    As I approached, weary and hoping to share the fire's warmth, he raised his head. "What do you carry, human?"
    "An orphaned child," I said, seating myself across the flames from him.
    He regarded me with one eye that glittered gold in the light. "Give her to me."
    "I will not."
    "Do you not wish to ease your burdens, weary traveler? Give her to me, worry not, and leave this cave with a light heart and an open future."
    I knew then that the beast could see into the darkest corners of my soul. "I will do no such thing. The burden is mine to bear, for some god wills it."
    On the side of his face turned toward me, the corner of his mouth cut up to his eye in a grin, revealing fangs with the gore of his last meal on them. He chuckled. The roof of the cavern shook. "There are no gods here, little man. There is only me. You may say what you wish, but that is all. If I want to take her from you I will do so, and you will be glad that I did in spite of yourself." With that, he sighed and placed his head atop his claws, still smiling. "Luckily for her, I have already eaten too much." A pillar of smoke exhumed itself from his nostril, glowing orange at its base. "Rest, human. I shall not eat you or your charge this night. But I suggest you be gone with the sunrise."
    In my current state, I had little choice but to do as he suggested. I slept lightly and fitfully, Ariala dozing against my chest in the sling I had fashioned for her. Dreams of waking in the dragon's jaws woke me each hour, and on the hour when the cave mouth was lit. I left as quietly as I could, leaving the beast still slumbering, not having moved from its position. Its snoring shook the walls, yet the same golden eye was still open all the while.
    When I returned to the surface, the storm had caught up with us. The rumble of a sleeping dragon gave way to thunder. The wind howled and picked up the sand, pushing me onward. Yet already, the sun began to warm my back from where it sat below the clouds, and I felt renewed despite the night's unsavory conditions...

    Mabibwi spun his tale through the morning, spurred by the wine and the wide eyes of the children. He came to his arrival at their house, and was relieved to fall silent at last. It was nearly lunch time. Then it would be time to move on, and Ariala with him. He was about to attempt to pawn the child off on Khalisi, but the disapproval in her eyes when he began to speak was more than he could bear.  

 
    On the third or fourth day, the wind brought him a memory. When he'd been a younger and more inquisitive man, a traveler had once stopped at the village. He was covered in robes and cloaks, each of them compensating for the parts missing from the others. A thick coating of grit clung to them and to his beard. He carried a walking stick about his own height and a collection of rusted canteens that must have travelled as far as he. Mabibwi had asked the man what sand was.
    "What is sand?" he said.
    "Sand," the old traveller said, "is the bones of a hundred million giants ground to dust beneath the weight of the world."
    He still remembered looking at his toes digging into the earth, then looking up into the stranger's eyes. They were sad. He asked a child's question. "Why?" The old man did not respond, but lowered his eyelids and went to sleep where he stood.

Nostrum

1 - The Mountaineer and the Witch

    It was early in the spring that Aleister Crowley put up his feet in the leather chair in my drawing room, still weighted heavily with the tools of his trade: a motley collection of ropes, hooks, ice picks, hand axes, regular axes, lanterns, pots, pans, and several of the beards one only obtains in the Wild Lands. I think he had been somewhere in the Indies, but I'd forgotten to ask. He was gaunt beneath his curly, sun-kissed hair and his skin appeared to be a single human-shaped callus.
    "How do you feel?" I said. The spring rain - still frozen - beat softly on my roof and leaked in through the casements.
    He puffed up and then exhaled. "At peace. You should go. Before you get too old."
    "Sure. But what about the apothecary?"
    He laughed. "Well, you'd have to close it, of course. Life calls, you know?"
    "Yes yes."
    "Surely you want something more than this." He waved at the room in an effeminate, dismissive way. I was uncertain whether to take offense at how easily he brushed off everything that defined my life.
    "I expect I do."
    "What is it you want, Gerald? ...If you didn't have the apothecary."
    "Honestly?"
    "It's me."
    "I'd kind of like to live forever."
    He cackled. "Most wouldn't say it's a calling, but I'll give it to you." He filled his pipe with a plant I'd never seen before and lit up. "Well, no time like the present to start working that out. You still have your health and most of your wits left. Not a bad vessel in which to set sail for eternity."
    "I suppose I do have a few wits left to expend." He passed me the pipe.
    It wasn't long before the bookshelves began to bend. Aleister launched into a lenghty recounting of his mountaineering escapades, of which I remember little. There were frozen limbs, natives amorous and vengeful by turns [Aleister has always inspired either love or hatred in everyone he meets. I was perhaps an exception to this rule.], betrayals, lost comrades, and anything else that might fit neatly in the pages of a romance. I listened with skepticism, yet knew that it was all true anyway.
    I admit to an acute sense of the smallness of my own life, trapped in my apartments with only the detritus of my studies and trade. Much as I preferred things this way, I told Al how I wished to expand into the universe, physically if possible. He was quite positive, of course. "What you want is transcendence, right? It comes in many forms, each with many avenues of pursuit."
    I knew well what he was trying to say, and I began to map them in my head. Circuits of passage were forming, transits around an across a great sea. I filed away certain items of my own collection to refer to later that very night. My gaze drifted down to the gloved fingers of my right hand. "Aleister..." I said. There was a silence while I searched for the words. "Do you remember the point in your life when you became who you were?"
    He scratched his cheek for a moment. "I...think I know what you mean." He attempted to fold his legs beneath him, realized they were too long for the chair, and simply leaned forward instead. "I do, in fact, remember the moment when I became myself."
    "When was it?"
    "When I realized that no one was going to help me get what I want." Beyond the windows, the rain intensified.
    I nodded. It was an answer I would have to process on my own.
    "That reminds me," he said. "I brought gifts!"
    "Gifts?"
    "Yes. Curios, souvenirs. Gifts." He removed a parcel from his pack and untied the twine. The cloth fell open. "This is a book."
    "I can see that."
    "I know how much you like books."
    "Everyone does."
    "This book....is said to be a thousand years old."
    He handed it to me. It was only just larger than my hand, bound in treated wood, with pages of animal hide. I opened it. Carefully, of course. "How did you come across such a thing?"
    "It was given to me by a Sumatran merchant."
    "Given to you? Just like that?"
    Aleister puffed on his pipe again and shrugged. "He said he wanted it out of his collection, and no one was interested in buying. I don't suppose he knew many collectors of old English works like yourself. I was able to bargain him down to the reasonable price of nothing."
    "Old Welsh. It looks fascinating. Thank you, Aleister."
    "Wait until you see the rest!" He held up a tooth longer than his own skeletal fingers.  "This comes from an aquatic animal of some sort."
    "Not a shark tooth?"
    "Definitely not a shark. This bastard reared up over the starboard railing right in the middle of a storm, and closed its jaws over the torso of the man next to me. I drove my cutlass straight into its writhing gums! All that did was drive it back into the sea, sailor in tow. It left a couple of teeth behind, though." I looked on with interest, still running my finger across a page of the open book.
    "This!" he said, picking up a glass case of herbs. "Is one of the finest plants ever to pass through my pipe. We're only smoking the second finest tonight. And I know you like plants."
    "Almost as much as books."
    "Quite right!" He set the case down and picked up a glass bead of a brilliant purple. "This one is....just a glass bead..."
    "I doubt it is just anything."
    "....given to me by Queen Supayalat."
    "As a keepsake, clearly. Perhaps you should keep it."
    He frowned and looked beyond his years for a moment. "You should take it." He handed it off to me immediately as if it were burning his fingers. I did not argue. It was unusual not to hear a story from Aleister when it was clear that one lurked within. This one was only for himself, apparently.
    With a blink, he covered his melancholy and was his outward self again. "Last one on the list! I've saved the best for last, though I sense that book may be your personal favorite."
    "You have my undivided attention," I said, the open book still in my lap.
    "This--" he paused longer than usual before holding up a chunk of crimson gemstone, "is a fragment of the Philosopher's Stone."
    I laughed. "How much did you pay for this nonsense?"
    He grinned right back. "Pay? Nothing. I stole it."
    I took it from him and held it up to the light. "Now this one, you will have to tell me."
    "But of course: At the center of the Karakum Desert, we happened upon a tribe of zealots who had taken up residence in an ancient temple...."
    I listened on into the night, my right hand still resting on the book.

    Aleister had left long after the midnight oil, when the weed and spirits were finally gone. I could not resist the urge to test out this supposed finest plant, and it seemed only right to include him. It did not disappoint. My friend's tales were told with contagious enthusiasm, not the least because I sensed in Aleister a deep affection for humankind; a passion which I myself lacked. He was a complement to my own personality in that I could latch on like a remora and appreciate the journey of those passions from a safe distance. What he got out of my friendship, I'll never know.
    Hours later, still awake and with no thoughts of sleep in my head, the rain reached my ears as a glittering static held at bay by the walls of my library. I sat amidst several stacks of alchemical treatises and volumes on Mediterranean history; yet two items were of the greatest concern. The book. As far as I had read at the time, it appeared to be the diary of a young woman; one whom I had already classified as a natural philosopher, based on the many drawings and diagrams contained within. [My heart jumped toward the volume on seeing an illustration of adenium obesum, beautifully rendered from taproot to petals.] The second item of concern, I had told no one about. I had taken to wearing gloves at all times to hide the streaks of black flesh that stretched out onto my right hand, swelling the skin around them. Whatever it was, the flesh glittered like scales in the lamplight, and sometimes I thought I could see it pulse out of the corner of my eye.
    Until well after sunrise, I tasked myself with translating the first section of the diary. I will include it here, in its heavily modified form. You will, I hope, forgive me any liberties I take with the prose. Though the point is moot, as none but me have access to the original text. Nevertheless, I will do my best to preserve her voice within my own, as much as any middle-aged, 19th century man can hope to imitate the style of a young woman of the 7th century.

The Diary of Gwen

    Gildas is an imbecile. A pious man; but a horrid, feckless bore. But things being as they are, he has managed to rile up the rest against me. Hardly a difficult task, when they listen to whoever speaks loudest. And that man is a fat, fleshy-legged war horn, braying about sin all night and day. I wish Maelgwn had the guts to shut him up for good.
    This is all because Bergam relapsed and, of course, blamed it on me. Same fever again, sames sores as before, but this time it was because I cursed him, not because he's a sickly bastard who can't remember to take his medicine. And somehow that creep got a look at the dark spots that have been spreading up my side these past weeks, that I keep covered at all times, and that have been seen on no one else and are clearly not contagious. So yesterday, there was a crowd gathered outside my door, Gildas at their head shouting as always. Calling me a witch, shouting that I was the lost child of black-faced Gwyn of the underworld, and whatever other streams of nonsense occurred to him. It's when he started talking about Mother that I almost cut his throat right in front of that crowd.
    Granted, I did put a hex on him, but it didn't seem to take, and no one's complaining about that. The man is constantly shedding what's left of his hair, so it was easy enough to pluck some from my own floor and boil it with a bit of rabbit intestine.
    I'm back, now that the crowd has disappeared, long enough to gather my things and be gone before they decide to hang me. There is little to take. I cannot just leave Mother here. I gathered a vial of dirt from her grave, right by the white brook of my namesake, possibly at the same exact spot where Father died.
    I must leave the flock. I can take one kid with me, but the rest will likely be eaten when the town finds me gone. I will disperse them into the woods as much as I can, and hope they can make it on their own. Perhaps my reputation will be enough to save them from slaughter. Cadfael will come with me. He is my favorite if I must choose. He can walk on his own, and is still small enough to sling over my back if necessary. His horns are just starting to come in. If I'm honest, he isn't much use to me. I have measured my own worth to my satisfaction, and concluded that I will die before eating him. But perhaps we can find a better place for him. I could do with a little company in the coming weeks.
    I am ready to leave this blighted home behind for good. And I already know where to go.
    I've spotted the spots on my arm, now. Not on my hand, so they are easy to hide, but up and down my forearm. I do not understand. I feel right as rain, and there is no pain or even irritation in their vicinity. Only in the past couple days have they begun to glitter like polished oyster shell turned to soft flesh. I almost feel that if I looked long enough I could see something within them, but then I must turn my eyes away in disgust. Best to forget about them for the time being. I am only reminded when I must bathe. Then, a vague fear grips me that they might burst open and bring something forth into the world, though they are clearly not blisters or anything of the sort.

---

    You can understand why this last bit grabbed me so. The description she gave of her affliction was all too familiar, and the coincidence struck me with the night's last peal of thunder. My mind sparked with anticipation even as my body finally drifted to sleep, still perched in an armchair. My dreams were seeded with the imagery Gwen had evoked, swirls of fog and howling faces escaping from the sores on my arm, seizing control of my fingers. A restless sleep, though none of the dreams woke me. They were also fascinating, regardless of their content. The personal fears of a stranger who had been dead for a thousand years had become my own dreams. Miraculous. As I woke, it was easy to believe what I had once been told by a wise (but quite rude) acquaintance; that language was the only true alchemy.
    The next morning, Crowley called early and found me as I was headed out the door. My mind was occupied with Gwen's diary and what I might glean from it. But there were other things that I had promised myself I would take care of. Best to get them out of the way early, and reserve more of my day for the important work (reading). In any case, it was easy to pass my errand off as a mundane house call, on which I was glad of Aleister's company. And having just returned home, he found himself idle. No doubt an alien feeling for one such as him, so used to being surrounded by whirlwinds of activity. We walked the streets slowly, and found ourselves discussing what we saw; myself as a long-term resident who lived in it, and he having just returned from foreign shores, and prone to fits of moral pontification and moral outrage. The streets of broken brick and puddles of mud. The worn or abandoned houses scattered among the rest. The degrading air quality. The number of sickly people in the streets, and the carriage drivers who cracked whips at their heads just as they would at a herd of cattle. All of which led inevitably to the society behind, above, or around them.
    "Real change will happen only when we reach a critical mass of dissatisfaction," he was saying. "Regardless of public opinion, there are too many of us who still sup at the teat of injustice. We will not risk losing that meal. It must be taken from us first."
    "I'm amazed at you, Aleister. How you can wine and dine with queens in one sentence, then sound as if you want their heads removed in the next?"
    "It is not the queens, or even the kings, my friend. They are people just like us. Not blind to injustice, like us. But also like us, they are beholden to the machine that feeds them. Only with a larger portion size."
    "From whence comes evil, then?"
    "From you, from me, from none of us. The evil is inherent, arriving from all sources yet embodied in none. No cognitive dissonance necessary."
    "That sounds…difficult to fight against."
    "It is that."
    "I notice you choose to include yourself in those who benefit from the state of things you wish to change."
    "Of course. If I'm to speak of it at all, I must include myself." His exhaustion disappeared for the second it took him to wink and doff his hat at a passing lady. "It's the only way I can get these fools to listen to me, instead of puffing up like roosters."
    I laughed aloud. "And just like that, the mask has slipped."
    "Only for you, my friend. Only for you."
    In this way, we arrived at the morning's call; a dwelling between a fishmonger and a pub that surely housed the used of society, not the users. It was a tall and gangly apartment building that looked to hold together because it could not be bothered to fall down. A trail of smoke, as wan as the building itself, twisted from the chimney, giving the impression of being an extension of the design; suggesting that the whole thing might be nothing but ash particulates, banding together and congealed into a familiar shape, by chance or malign purpose. Aside from ourselves, the one person I saw enter this trap was just as insubstantial. Part of the mirage, no doubt.
    I took a moment to explain my visit to Aleister, and that he might wish to stay out in the street. An elderly woman was quite ill and quite contagious. I myself donned a plague mask and already wore my gloves. He was amenable to the idea of not dying of a horrible disease. "That public house looks lively." He gestured to the building next to the house of smoke. "Find me there when you're finished."
    "It's a bit early. What is that, a morning cap?"
    "I've been in town nearly twelve hours without setting foot in one. Far too long, if you ask me."
    "I'll try to be quick, then."
    The interior hallways of the tenement were as dark and dreary as expected, though at least more substantial than the patient I was calling on. She looked as if the first draft to enter her room would disperse her like a cloud of dust. Fortunately, no air seemed to flow in or out of her apartment. I began to sweat beneath my mask almost immediately.
    I cannot now recall her name, only that she was old and widowed, and as sunny as one might expect. As I arrived, and as I departed, she sat in a chair by the only window as if waiting for something to occur. I examined the sores across her arms with as professional an air as I could muster; struck through as it was with a cringing sort of empathy that I struggled to keep from tipping into revulsion. Anyone in her situation could use a friendly presence, and I needed my bedside manner to make up for the countenance the mask presented. Bedside manners, or manners more generally, are not my strong suit.
    The truth was, neither of us expected anything good from this visit. It was a formality, but one I had kept up as the sickness had swept through the neighborhood over the preceding months. We both knew I could do nothing for her, yet we could believe that the practice would yield positive results in the future. Just not in her future...
    The other truth was that I had an ulterior, more personal reason to be there: the arm that I kept hidden. I needed to know what was happening to me. Though there were some similarities in the symptoms, and I could think of no point of comparison but the plague, there were too many differences. Other symptoms were lacking entirely. The sores were completely different, I felt none of the pain that the victims I interviewed complained about, and most died in a matter of weeks; whereas my own ailment had started months ago. Around the same time the pandemic had arrived in the city. And though I asked in roundabout ways, poked circuitously at the subject, none complained of nightmares that were out of the ordinary (for someone with a terminal illness).
    I could not say the same for myself. This was the note repeatedly scribbled in the margins of my other notes on every patient. I could not say the same for myself.

Hanna

    She took up smoking in an attempt to hurt herself, but her lungs would heal faster than she could damage them. She didn't buy that smoking was bad for her. Smoking was bad for some future self, some old her that wasn't her, who she could summon no interest in protecting. She saw herself as an old lady sitting at the bus stop, and sought to erase her. Nor was his own self to do with as he pleased, and though she hated the thought of him as an adult, she did not seek to destroy him in the same way, and so would not give him a cigarette when he asked. He would reach his tiny limbs up to try and pull it from her mouth, so she held her arm out straight against his forehead, watching him grasp at the air with a satisfaction reserved for elder sisters just out of a growth spurt, obsessed with her newfound power over the world. Nor really was a pathetic creature. He whined and flailed and she just stood there barely noticing him. She kept her breathing even, taking in the smoke and letting it out her nose without opening her mouth; kept it up until only the filter was left, then she spat it at Nor's head and sat down on the bench.
    "I know you have more! Gimme one!"
    "Shut up." He did. They sat in the mist, just on the edge of rain, waiting for the bus.
    She paid for them both when it arrived and Nor kept quiet among the strangers on board. They all smelled funny. The few that looked around did so without focusing their eyes. Except one fellow in a baseball cap, who leered at her for the whole bus ride. She pretended not to see him, instead watched the rain patterns on the window pane, splitting and reforming before running down to oblivion.
    The bus stop was down the street from home, and home was behind a wire fence behind the sidewalk, the grass growing tall until she was told to cut it. The entry hall let onto the den on the right, where Dad sat with the TV blaring. On the screen, a phalanx of police cars were resting on a curb, silent sirens flashing. "What happened?" she asked.
    Dad called from his chair without turning around. He was eating popcorn. "Shooting at the mall. Only a couple dead. They took him down fast this time." Nor raised his arms in his oversized coat and roared at the back of Dad's head like a dinosaur, but gave it up when no one acknowledged him, miming a tyrannical stomp toward the kitchen.
    Hanna left him to it and ascended to her room, locking the door for her recent after school ritual: stripping off her clothes and snapping a polaroid of herself, which she then tore into little pieces and flushed down the toilet. Then she changed and put her current favorite album on the stereo. It was a disc from Willow, the quietest friend, and thus keeper of the loudest music; the debut of local band The Blood Gutters. They weren't great, but they played with abandon, and abandon is what she wanted.


    The next day at school, she opened her locker to find Marie standing inside it.
    "I was waiting for you."
    "In there?"
    "In here."
    "Why?"
    "Helen is casting a spell today!" She attempted to blow a bubble with her chewing gum, but spat the whole chunk on the floor between them instead. "A spell."
    "Huh?"
    "That's right. We're all going to be there." Marie was diminutive, and looked as if she had been assembled from mismatched parts. Hanna still debated whether this impression was inherent to the flesh itself, or a property of the way she moved, as if her arms and legs were snapped on to her torso with ball sockets.
    "What is she trying to do?"
    "She wouldn't tell me. She won't tell anyone."
    "Where?"
    "In the library after school. She said she needs you to do something, though."
    "Me?" Hanna slammed her locker, then opened it again. "Can you get out of there?"
    Marie hopped out with a little flourish. "That's right. You. She wants you to get some fingernails."
    "Uhhh..."
    "They can be anyone's fingernails. But not yours. Or mine. Or any of us."
    "What about Nor? That's an easy one."
    At that moment, Nor was zooming down the hallway, still in the knit cap he had worn on the walk to school. His hands in front of him grabbed the yoke of an invisible fighter jet, as he blasted the delinquents still in the hallways during class. "Ratattatatatatat!" he said.
    Marie opened her eyes wide, to see her own thoughts before they escaped. "I don't think so. I think it needs to be someone from our grade."
    "Fine."
    "Whose you gonna get?"
    "I don't know yet."

    At lunch, Hanna ate six cookies from the commissary, then puked up three of them in the bathroom stall. With her arms still resting on the toilet seat, she looked up at the graffiti on the back wall. "Jesus is watching you right now," it said. She chuckled, then threw up two more cookies. She lit a cigarette before the last one could rise up and sat puffing away.
    A voice from the next stall. "Hanna?"
    "Helen?"
    "That's bad for your esophagus."
    She didn't respond, and they sat there in silence, clouds of smoke joining each other at the top of the wall. She could hear the quiet hiss when she drew in, until it was drowned out by someone screaming in the boy's bathroom. 

    In English class, she found herself drawing a picture. It appeared to be an old hag, perhaps from a nightmare she'd had and forgotten. It was emaciated, and wore a raggedy dress that left its shoulders exposed, and a witch's hat. Instead of a broom, there was a mop and bucket at its feet. The toenails were grown long enough to be claws. At the end of class, she examined the paper and thought it was probably the best thing she'd ever drawn. Why did it have to be of something so ugly?
    "If you forget to close your quotations, evil spirits will escape and haunt you for the rest of the year!" The teacher's default posture was to loom, owing to the way her shoulders curved forward. She stalked between the desks, and gestured as if sprinkling words onto the heads of her students.   
    "'Some can gaze and not be sick
        But I could never learn the trick.
        There's this to say for blood and breath;
        They give a man a taste for death.'"

    Hanna had no idea what she was talking about most of the time, but she enjoyed how the tide of language washed over her.
    
    In a secluded corner of the library after school, she found Helen alone, squatting on the tile floor, where she was drawing symbols in chalk. Helen had bright blonde hair which she kept in pigtails high up on her scalp, the only childish thing about her. Standing, she was taller than Hanna at her new height, and fully developed. Even her voice was the pitch of a grown woman. She looked up from the floor with jade eyes that were themselves an act of violence, committed and invited. Hanna had already admitted to herself that she was in love with Helen, and assumed that everyone else in the world felt the same way. There was a hum in her eardrums when Helen was near.

    They sat in the car at the gas station. Dad stood at the open door, Mom in the passenger seat. Nor had his cap pulled down over his eyes. He kicked his legs. "Did you know gas is made from dinosaurs!?" he said.
    "Is that true?" said Hanna.
    Mom didn't look back. "Maybe."
    "Mom, where does gas come from?" said Nor.
    "You just told us it comes from dinosaurs."
    "I know, but like, WHERE does it come from?"
    "Underground."
    "Underground WHERE?"
    "In other countries. And some places in this country."
    "Who takes it out of the ground?"
    "People who want to sell it."
    "But WHY!?"
    "That's a silly question, Nor."
    "Ptbtbttbbtbt!" he said.
    Hanna looked across him and out the window at the numbers ticking up on the pump display.
    
    The candles at the five points of the star had already burned halfway through their wicks. "Did you tell her?" said Marie, nodding from Helen to Hanna.
    "Tell me what?"
    "We're starting a gang," said Helen, sprinkling the nail clippings around the inside of the circle. "You're in it."
    "For protection," said Marie.
    Helen peeled back her lips and showed her teeth. "And for fun."
    Willow was hugging her legs, her head tilted downward so that her hair covered most of her face. "Will there be boys in it?"
    "I guess there could be," said Helen. Hanna felt a whine in her left ear.
    "What about initiations?" Little Marie punched her fist against her palm.
    "You're all in it already. But initiations for the new people."
    "What kind? Like a beating or something?"
    "Maybe. Or a piercing."
    Marie broke in. "What are we doing? What's the spell, what's the spell?"
    Helen shushed her. "We're cursing my dad. And maybe whoever owns these fingernails."

    She could recall the first time she saw a butterfly's body up close, and being disgusted by it. Sometimes when she looked in the mirror, she got the same sense of being made of squishy segments, and unable to view herself as a whole being; as if she would need the eyes of a stranger in order to be a coherent person instead of a mass of flesh. She could only assess the imperfections of each individual part of her. Some days, she could look at nothing but her own stomach, that she did not like the way it curved outward. She was aware enough to attempt to take this reasoning and apply it to someone else: she scrutinized Helen's stomach when she could do so unobserved (made easy by the tops Helen wore), and found that it curved outward in much the same way. Yet there was a key difference that prevented further comparison. Helen's tummy was a part of a whole, a whole that flowed from one bit to the next, a context in which that curvature seemed natural. And so, she would try to transfer this mode of sight to herself, perhaps by standing further back from the bathroom mirror, all the way into the shower if necessary. To no avail, as whether she was looking directly down at it, or at a reflection in a shop window across the street, she was only a disembodied stomach attached to a person.

    She stepped into the hall after school to see pillars of smoke on the TV screen. "What's happening?"
    "Bombing Baghdad. Old hat." He was eating a plate of nachos. "No death toll estimates."
    She went upstairs to her room. 

    Helen's house was like a ragged version of her own, scaled down slightly, and styled so that a shotgun blast through the front door would travel straight out the back. It sat on the corner of an intersection sporting a condemned stoplight which no one had bothered to take down. It still hung from its wire along with two pairs of old sneakers. Drivers stopped in confusion, waiting for something to happen before creeping onward. The rain was perpetual and light this season. It clung to the outer layer of her hair, to her clothes, to the palms of her hands. It traveled under and around every umbrella or coat.
    Helen rarely invited anyone to her house. When Hanna entered, she was greeted with the sight of Helen's father in a father chair much like the one at her own house, except that it looked off toward a blank wall instead of a television. Helen's father looked around with nearly the same eyes as his daughter. They were perhaps a brighter shade of green, and full of a violence that skewed in one direction. "Whozzat?" he said.
    "This is Hanna," said Helen.
    "Hey, Hanna. Make yourself at home."
    There was something old-fashioned in his carriage, in the set of his jaw. He looked like the author of a book from her English class. Like a man who could have been someone vastly better but for life, with a wide jaw that tapered to a point and a piercing gaze. He seemed aware of the effect it had on her, dropping his eyes after one searching glance in her direction, after which she was able to breathe again. She wished immediately to be elsewhere, and he seemed inclined to allow it. Even with his back turned and obscured by the armchair, a haze surrounded him, as if she were peering through the air over a gas stove. One hairy arm was still visible at the edge of the chair, reaching for a glass of whiskey with fingers that all looked like thumbs.
    Helen tugged her up the stairs.

    One day, she decided that she couldn't get out of bed. "Honey," said Mom. "It's 6 AM. Time to get ready."
    "Look outside, Mom. It's still night."
    "Get up, little girl."
    "I'm not a girl, I'm a plant now. Just stick me in the window and water me."
    "Hanna's a plant now!" shouted Nor. He jumped on the bed. She summoned enough energy to kick him off before retreating further into the blanket.
    "You're not a plant. You are a deadly apex predator. Now get up!"
    She still felt like a plant, like all of her strength was ebbing into an invisible system of roots.
    "Just water me."
    Mom came back with a glass of water and poured it on her head.


-- When I Think of You, I Think of Murder

    When it happened, she could think of nothing to say to Helen. So she said, "I'm proud of your dad." Her friend's eyes were surrounded with circles of red.
    "You know he took down three cops before--" Helen cut off and stared beyond her.
    "All my dad does is sit around watching TV."
    "Doesn't your dad have a job?"
    "Yeah, I guess."
    "Well, maybe Dad should've bought a TV," said Helen.

    Her sneakers seemed to her as if they must be where the majority of her soul resided, since blood must have a tendency to pool in her feet while she stood. She even imagined that she could hear it squishing as she walked, being pushed up into her legs or out from beneath her toenails. She looked back at the sidewalk behind her just to be sure that she wasn't leaving a trail that could be followed by whatever prowled the suburbs in the small hours of the morning.
    The tree branches crept over the street lamps, looking like gold and black fingers. It reminded her of the hag she had drawn in her notebook the other day. She had dreamed about her just that morning. Walking down this same street in the dark, like now, pursued by the hag. She had a moment of panic where she couldn't remember waking up that morning, or whether she was still in the dream now. She pinched her thigh and the moment passed. The sense of moving forward in accordance with the motion of her legs convinced her it was real, despite the morning fog drowning all but the surreal.
    The bus driver was, as always, a man with empty eyes, though not always the same man.
    Math class was a constant struggle to stay awake, being just after lunch, when the early morning had caught up with her and grabbed her brain in its malaise. Helen's presence two rows over was the thing that kept her awake.

    The wire fence in front of Helen's dad's house was wrapped in ivy. She couldn't help referring to the house that way, despite what had happened. She asked Helen, "How long are you going to stay here?"
    "As long as no one notices, I guess. Maybe it'll be our club house."
    Hanna pulled a leaf from the ivy and crumpled it in her fist. Part of the front door window pane was cracked, the wood at the bottom of the frame splintered. She tucked the remains of the leaf into the resulting gap as they entered the house. "What are we doing?" she said.
    "Snooping through Dad's stuff. Deciding what to loot, what to toss, what to burn."
    "By the way." They started down the steps to the basement. "You don't think our curse had anything to do with...?"
    "Go ahead, say it."
    "Never mind."
    "No. No, I don't. Bastard did what he wanted to do, like always."
    Hanna could only recall the one time she had met him, and attempt to reconcile that image with the monster locked in Helen's mind.
    The basement was colder than the rest of the house, though it was right next to the furnace; an old thing like a knight's helmet covered in ash. Through the bars, she could almost make out a desiccated, over-sized face.
    The far end of the room was stacked with wooden trunks and plastic tubs. Some were full of books, others kitchenware that had never seen use. One cardboard box was full of old letters and journals. Hanna avoided that one because it wasn't her business, Helen for reasons of her own. One box was full of ammunition. That one went into the burn pile. The last box they made it to was a worn trunk containing a single item. A sword in its sheathe, the length of Hanna's arm, slightly curved and beginning to show signs of rust along its edge. Helen drew it and held the blade beneath the ceiling light, both of them watching its reflection pass over the steel.
    
    Sometimes, Willow spoke up enough to remind her that she was a person and not a piece of sad furniture. "Hanna?" They sat in her room after school, the Blood Gutters on as always, the liner notes open on Willow's lap. "Do you try to shut out the consciousness of the people around you?"
    "Why, are you telepathic?"
    "No. But it feels like it. I don't know."
    "Well, what is everyone thinking?"
    "I can't tell. But I can feel that they ARE thinking, and it's so loud."
    "Can you shut it out?"
    "Sort of. If I think of them as objects instead of people. That one is a bench. That one is a lamp post. Especially if I can't see their eyes."
    "What object am I?"
    "Sometimes you're a cow."
    "A cow!?"
    "I guess. You're always chewing gum."



Marie: lemme tell you a ghost story
Marie: about Atlas the killer
Marie: who some say still haunts the halls of the courthouse to ths day
Helen: fuck you
Helen has left the chat.

    Helen placed 5 candle stubs at the points of the star. In the middle, she sprinkled some powdery substance that Hanna thought must be ash, along with the fingernails she had contributed. They belonged to a boy she'd had a class with the year before, who would do what she asked of him without question, and without spreading tales of it to anyone she knew. He presented them to her in the hallway outside the cafeteria as if handing off a ritual sacrifice. Which she supposed is what they were. Just for a different ritual than he imagined. There had certainly been a twinkle in his eye that he tried to hide. Helen poured the liquid wax from the candles onto the pile, then passed a flame over it. Not much happened in the visible world, but beneath it the spirits were roiling.
    "What would the devil want with a nerd's fingernails?" said Marie.
    "What do I know what the devil wants?" said Helen. "It's just a spell."
    Marie shrugged. "Did it work?"
    "We're not finished," said Willow. She produced four paper cups. Helen separated the mixture into four piles, one for each cardinal direction, producing a dissonance with the five points of the star; and separated out the fingernails. Willow looked up at her.
    "What? I'm not going to drink a boy's fingernails."
    "We have to DRINK that?" said Marie.
    "It's only a little bit." Willow peered around the library, then produced a bottle of wine she'd been hiding in the corner.
    "Where did you get that?"
    She let out a rare smile, mostly incisors, her eyes suddenly bright beneath dark bangs. For a moment, she looked like a completely different person. "Church." She poured enough in each cup of ashes to turn it from a sludge into a liquid. "Drink up." She hesitated. "But we really should include the nails."
    "I'm NOT doing that," said Helen.
    Willow shrugged and began whispering something under her breath as they each raised a cup...


--

    Where the sidewalk crumbled, the air smelled like a jackhammer. The telephone poles were covered in industrial staples, lost pet and child fliers, garage sales and expired coupons. Halfway up their length the rain-sodden papers continued, trailing off to expose split-wood towers lashed to the sky with wire and rubber. The rain brought an occasional spark where a cord's insulation had worn through.
    Hanna placed her hand against a pole's trunk as if it were a tree in the forest, feeling for some hint of life in the lumber, careful to avoid the petrified chewing gum and nails. An old concert flyer fluttered beneath her fingers, old enough that the people who stared out of it must've long ago discarded their instruments. She thought she almost recognized one face in the photo. Old colors leaked in the wet, from the page onto other pages, over her fingers and down into broken concrete and the soil that must still lie somewhere beneath it. If she rested her chin on the pole and looked up, it formed a crescent beneath a web of diverging phone calls zapping through the intersection and onward to their demise; her bangs at the top of her vision like giant raven feathers obscuring the clouds. On the far side of the pole, facing toward the street, several mushrooms had sprouted outward at about the height of a human head and the size of a human tongue, such that the pole seemed to be tasting the rain. She stuck out her own tongue to do the same, wondering how clean the rain was.
    Marie watched her and toyed with her arms, concentrating to see if she could turn them into cannons. "What are you doing?" she said.
    "I'm hugging this telephone pole," said Hanna.
    "I can see that."

    Hanna's room was attached to a bathroom she shared with Nor. Which was by far the worst thing about it. The lock on the door leading to his room was crucial, as he always tried to open it at the wrong time. She had developed a routine of taping a piece of construction paper over the keyhole when she used the toilet. In response, Nor had invented an unfolded paper clip which he used to puncture the paper. In response to this, Hanna had devised a system of threatening to beat him senseless if she caught him peeping. This in combination with the paper seemed to have worked so far.
    Her room had a single window that looked out onto the driveway, covered with a deep red curtain. With the sunlight filtered through it in the morning, it turned her entire room the color of heart's blood, the curtain fabric creating patterns that reminded her of the inside of an aquarium. Beneath the window, her stereo was covered in stacks of CDs, about half of which were bootlegs from Willow, labeled in her handwriting (severe and angular). Her carpeting was thick enough that she could run her fingers through it, soft enough that she often fell asleep on the floor after school. Her closet door refused to open, sealing away the remains of her childhood. Her dresser housed the clothes that fit her in her current form. She tossed her jacket on the bed and laid down on the floor, her cheek pressed against the carpet, hands at her sides. It was that limbo between afternoon and sunset, when the house and the neighborhood seemed to be holding their breath, except for Nor shrieking around downstairs like a pterodactyl. She considered putting on music or staring at her homework for an hour. Instead, she took a paperback from the floor within reach of her outstretched hand, and began to read, holding the book open with her chin.

    "Light spread across the valley as the Plains Drifter made his way through the tall grass. The child at his side asked him a question which he did not hear. A lion rested on a cloud in the sky. A herd of gazelle bounced over the hills."

    Hanna began to drool on the page, her body growing warmer as she drifted off. Her afternoon dreams were pleasant and bright, memorable but indescribable. She awoke gradually with an impression of years of sunlight having passed in a world where nothing was normal but all was right.
    Waking was becoming aware of the carpet pressed into her skin, the spit leaking from her mouth, and a sheen of sleepsweat that enveloped her. Night had fallen while she slumbered. The first sound to reach her was the whine of the ceiling fan, softly squealing, the flow of air beginning to sap the heat from her limbs. The next sound was a thud on the brick outside her window. She parted the curtains and raised it. Helen stood in the twilight driveway with a rock in her hand. "You awake?" she called. Marie was attempting to hide behind the mailbox.
    "Of course I'm awake. You know you can just ring the doorbell. It's only..." she glanced at her alarm clock, "...seven."
    "We know. This is more fun. Get your butt down here."


-- Phantom Steel

    That semester, she spent more time with Willow than anyone else. Not because they were better friends, but one or the other of them would end up at the other's house after school, lounging around listening to music. They shared the same bus stop, and thus without trying, the same walk home. The ritual did not teach her anything new about Willow. They barely talked, just sat and listened to the day fading away. Willow read song lyrics with her knobby legs crossed on the floor, pointing out the ones she liked, while Hanna smoked out the window or poked at her homework. No matter whose house they ended up at, it was an excuse to avoid Nor and her parents. The latter left them alone and the former was afraid of Willow, called her a scarecrow or a witch behind her back, but wouldn't say a word in her presence. For her part, Willow seemed content to say and do nothing, and her parents ignored everyone if they were home at all.  A sanctuary for Hanna, behind this bulwark that surrounded Willow wherever she went.
    Willow had eyes and teeth that dominated her face. She was gangly, and taller than Hanna. Her skin was pallid and pimpled. She looked like a much smaller girl piloting a much larger girl, and still learning the controls. She had long, delicate fingers, wider at the tips than at the base, and hands that were so flat they looked as if they could be folded up and put in your pocket if not for the bones and tendons maintaining their shape. She practiced her violin every day for her parents' sake, and seemed to take neither joy nor displeasure from it. She played scales and arpeggios and a couple of etudes, but never anything else. She would say, "I've got to practice my violin," then do so for exactly 45 minutes, then put it away and press play on the stereo again, singing along as if the song had been playing the whole time.
    Hanna did not set out to play favorites with her friends - aside from her burning crush on Helen - but she decided that she felt most comfortable around Willow. With Willow, she felt...unobserved. Her friend did not compliment or criticize her, or say much at all. She was off in her own little world while Hanna was in hers, and made no move to pull back the curtain between the two. With Willow nearby, she was free to exist without interference.
    Plus, she was good at getting them into concerts.
    Hanna yelled something at her parents, then tumbled out the front door into the evening. Marie had stopped hiding behind the mailbox and was now punching it instead. Helen gathered them all up as they set off down the street. Willow passed out the tickets.

    The parking lot was a mess of teens, scruffs and bums, exploded fireworks and cigarette butts. A bubble of sound bulged out the open door, drawing in all who ventured near. Inside was a world fashioned from the above elements; shredded, smelted, and molded into a space that was screaming at itself. On stage were the Blood Gutters. Unintelligible, out of tune, and bursting with viral confidence. Willow plopped down on a couch near the door and went into a trance, staring at the backs of the crowd. Marie seemed to vibrate and split into five versions of herself, each disappearing in a different direction. Helen began to push through the crowd toward the front. Hanna stayed close to her back, taking advantage of the wake she left. They reached the front and emerged onto a wall of flashing spotlights pointed directly into their eyes, stacks of speakers to either side cranked to disorient their victims. Between them, several people abused their guitars in unison, smudging the attacks of every beat until only an endless tide of noise remained. The drummer had a third arm whose only purpose was to twirl a stick over his head while the other two did the work. He had a sweatband across his forehead and one on each wrist, and two more around his neck, all of them sodden and flinging droplets on the crowd. He and the bass player to his left seemed to have developed their own dance routine, over the top enough to make up for the motionless rank of guitarists hanging from their own right arms.

    "Hanna..." Mr. Rollins folded one arm behind his back and carried his mug to the window. She recalled a persistent rumor that he only drank Irish coffee. "...do you think I enjoy this job?"
    "I dunno."
    His office was dutifully decorated, but she noticed a lack of motivational posters. "Do you think I find it fulfilling, preparing the next generation to fit into a society that I despise?" When she said nothing, he sighed and returned to his desk. "What grade do you think you deserve for the paper you wrote?"
    "I don't know."
    "Well, what grade would you have expected me to give you?"
    "Can I confess something to you?" she said.
    His eyes suddenly focused on her. She realized they had always been half-closed before. "Of course."
    "I don't remember what I wrote."
    He tapped his fingers for a moment, then slid the paper across to her. "Well, take it home and read it, then. Just bring it back and tell me what grade you want." He shrugged.
    "Mr. Rollins?" she said. "Are you okay?"
    He put his elbows on the desk and rubbed his eyes. They were half-closed again when he took his hands away. "No, Hanna. I'm sinking into the void on a ship full of morons. Don't tell anyone I said that."
    "Do you want a cigarette?"
    "You can't smoke in here. Or anywhere, for that matter. Please get out of my office."

    The night was a blur by the time she found herself surrounded by 3 to 5 shadows in a remote corner of the parking lot. One of them had a box cutter held against her belly. Another stood close enough to expel his breath on her cheek. He pulled the wallet from her pocket and they went away. She suddenly felt grimy. Sweaty. Drained. There were armed people everywhere. Knives for sure, but probably guns. Someone inside must have a gun. She watched the crowd through the open back door. Faces jumped out of the illuminated herd. It would be a boy, of course. It always was.
    That guy didn't look like he was having much fun. He was looking down at the floor with a gaunt face. She could just make out Willow somewhere behind him. What if he did something? What would she do? What could she do? He looked unhappy, she thought. Was that all it took? Every day she went home to see another city block cordoned off on TV, another dead-eyed mugshot. He looked like the type. She pushed through the crowd, feeling like a zeppelin anchored to her own body. She made herself put a hand on his shoulder. He looked up.
    "It's okay," she said. Then realized he couldn't hear her, or anything else. He smiled at her. She made a polite face and pushed right past him, grabbing Willow on the way to the front door, who asked what she was doing when they got outside.
    "I feel funny," she said.
    Marie was there. "You look weird."
    "I gave these guys my wallet."
    "What!?"
    "No. They took it." She pulled out a cigarette, noticed her hands were shaking. "They smelled bad."
    "Who!?" Marie stood up on the curb, glaring around, ready to leap on the first dude to make eye contact.
    "I don't know. They were saying stuff." She gave up on the cigarette and stuffed it in her pocket.
    "I'll get Helen." Willow disappeared inside.
    Hanna sat down on a parking block and realized she was crying. She wiped her whole face on her sleeve before anyone could see.


-- Beyond the Wall of Our Neighborhood

    Near the southwest corner of town was an abandoned building, supposedly a saw mill in its time, but degraded to the point where she wondered if it had ever been finished. Only the stone remained, foundations, supports holding up what was left of the second floor, and the staircase that led up to it. Rusted girders poked out where the stone had fallen away. Remnants of abandoned reconstruction littered the site: a partial roof of sheet metal, a power saw, a few piles of rubble. A cube the size of an outhouse was missing from the ground floor, leaving a pit of mud and debris, and whatever garbage people had thrown into it since. When it rained, as it did now, she could see earthworms rising from the dirt, probing the air, getting trapped between the rocks. A strand of ivy had succeeded in reaching the top of the pit, and the worms striving upward all looked to emulate it. She tossed a bottle in. Without thinking, she had aimed for a worm. He shattered between the bottle and the brick he sat on, spreading his guts across it. They glistened in the light.
    This was where they came to drink beer. Marie had a sister named Marianne who was already a senior in college, and bought them beer whenever they asked. "We're minors. Are you a bad person?" Marie would say to her.
    "Whatever," Marianne would reply, just before leaving for someplace else. She never asked for money and never stuck around.
    The sawmill was probably haunted. They made up stories about anything bad that might have happened there, which weren't hard to imagine. Willow filed them away and retold them, while Marie hunted for evidence of severed limbs. Once, they found half a box of shotgun shells, which prompted a new story, quickly added to the gospel.
    The building sat at the edge of town, in the divide between the familiar and the unknown, along a road that seemed to unravel into space. Everything beyond hummed with potential. It was only a theoretical world, accessed through TV and books and incapable of affecting the land northeast of the sawmill; which already existed in its current, unchangeable state.
    In the spring especially, spiders accumulated in the corners. She dreamed about them. Growing more and more numerous, growing fat and oversized off of the local wildlife. Spinning larger webs even as she and her friends sat there, building a cocoon that enveloped the entire structure, closing every exit, then slowly working their way toward the center where everyone but her remained oblivious. Sometimes, she had to crawl through a narrow gap in the webs to escape, spider legs larger than king crabs brushing her hair as she passed beneath them, a hissing sound just out of sight. Then the path in front of her would close, then the path behind. She grew tangled and woke up slapping her own hair to keep them off, then stayed awake until just before sunrise, when she would fall asleep just in time to get up and catch the bus to school.
    Her afternoon naps in math class were much more pleasant. In those, she only dreamed that she was sleeping through math class.    

    They now congregated at Helen's house. Hanna's parents knew what had happened, but everyone assumed things were being taken care of by someone else. So for the moment, at least, they had their own little kingdom in a house free of adults.
    Marie was caressing the sword scabbard. "What is it? Where'd it come from?"
    "Mr. Rollins said it's a dow." said Hanna.
    "I have no idea where it came from," said Helen.
    "Is Old Man Rollins a sword expert or something?"
    "He said his friend is."
    The house was quieter than ever before. Atlas, true to form, had left behind a heroic liquor collection that they dipped into almost every day. Today, they were drinking vodka-schnapps. Being slight and inexperienced, Hanna was still in that phase where it made her feel as if she'd just spun around ten times while listening to a funny joke. She felt like laughing and running and puking. She had yet to manage all three at once, but was making a valiant effort. Marie was a faster version of the same, until the drink that turned her angry (they all agreed it was the fourth). Willow recoiled into herself in terror, paying just enough attention to the external world to be sure that no one was addressing her directly. Helen did not seem to be affected. Hanna tried to point this out, but only managed to slide onto the floor while talking through a mouthful of phantom marshmallows.
    Marie had her arms extended above her head, and was sitting cross-legged while dancing. "I'm going to be a mariner when I grow up. It'll be a brutal life and I'll die at sea! What about you, Willow?"
    "I'll be the sea."
    "Haha. Then I'll be a sea monster." said Hanna. "What about Helen?" She pushed her friend on the shoulder.
    "Guess I'll follow in Dad's footsteps." That shut them up for a bit.


-- American Demons

    The shooting was awkward. They always were. There was security footage floating around the web. There was a lot of standing. A lot of silence. It was almost boring to watch, yet she couldn't look away.  Neither could she manage to put herself in the shoes of anyone in the tape. She thought about the box cutter pressed into her skin that night through a lens of lowered reality. She couldn't put herself in her own shoes, even while it was happening.
    Their bus stop was a bench and a sign. Nor was hyper in his raincoat. She held onto the back of his collar to keep him from dashing out into the street. The trash can was full of butts. She dropped another on top of the pile, watched it roll off onto the sidewalk. When she thought of the tape from the courthouse, she also thought of Atlas's eyes, that day in the den. His pupils were shaky. She felt them violate her and apologize for it in the same second. She wondered if Helen had felt that, too. She wanted to ask her why she hated him so much. There was no way to phrase that question that wouldn't hurt her.
    When she thought of Helen, she thought of strength. When she thought of Helen's thoughts for her father, she thought of weakness. And when she thought of Atlas himself, she sensed a strength corrupted by weakness.
    Nor looked up at her with a false grin. He'd lost a baby tooth to a football today. Blood stained his smile. She punched him on top of the head, which set him off crying. Immediately, she wanted to apologize but didn't.
    She came home to find her father watching a movie about a barrel-chested man snapping terrorist necks. She stood in the hallway to see if she could absorb any useful combat strategies, and gave up when she realized they all involved being a barrel-chested man. That wasn't really in the cards for her. There was a hissing sound off in the kitchen. She checked to make sure it was just Mom cooking pork chops and not one of the spiders from her dreams.
    At the bus stop, she stood back from the street, partly to avoid the waves of rainwater kicked up by passing car tires. Mostly to hear the crackle of the neon sign stuck to the restaurant front, that just said "DINE". It looked old and poorly connected, and she couldn't decide what color it was supposed to be. In its anemic state, she could reach out and absorb its power through her fingertips, transforming into a human voltaic cell. With proper training and meditation, perhaps even a dynamo. And the next time some grub threatened her at a concert, she'd ground herself and send a bolt up through his shoes, watch his skin light up and his head explode.
    The thought made her giggle. Nor looked up in response and went back to grinning, assuming she was laughing at him. She lowered her umbrella to feel the raindrops pelting her hair, making her scalp electric.

    "Mr. Rollins?" She was in his office after school again. He was still sipping from his mug, still disapproving of the air around him.
    "How can I help you today, Hanna?"
    She sat down in front of his desk. "What IS a dow?"
    "A dao? You're still thinking about that sword?"
    "Maybe."
    "Why is this so important? Where'd you even get a thing like that?"
    "It belonged to Helen's father."
    He slurped from his mug and studied her. "Helen? You mean Miss Roman?"
    "Yeah."
    He scratched at his chin beard. "How is she doing lately?"
    "Okay."
    "She's not okay, is she?"
    "Not really."
    He studied her again, then spun away in his chair, his face in profile backlit by the sun through the blinds. "It's a type of Chinese saber, so I've been told. Not sure why he would have one. Although..." He glanced at her again. The scrutiny made her fidget. "How much do you know about Mr. Roman?"
    "Nothing, really. He had green eyes, like Helen."
    He gave her a new kind of look. "Yes. Well. It's not really my place to tell stories about other people. Helen surely knows something of it herself." He spun back to his desk and picked up a pen, pretending to scrutinize the stack of papers in front of him. "Will that be all?"
    "Mr. Rollins?"
    "Erm. What?"
    She patted her jacket pocket. "Would you like a cigarette?"
    "...Get out of my office, Hanna."

    Marie had sandy hair and a plague of freckles around her nose and mouth. There was surely a darker-skinned Marie in the works who would soon burst out of her host's face.
    She was also the aspiring bully of the group, perhaps the reason she surrounded herself with tall friends. Though to date, Willow was the only recipient of Marie's wrath. She made for an unsatisfying target, as it had no effect on Willow's behavior. Trying to scar her emotionally was like trying to burn down a fire pit.
    Marie was picked up by her parents each day as soon as school ended, so Hanna could stop at her house on the way home and she would already be there. Invariably perched at her computer in an unused dining room, playing games Hanna had never heard of. "You should be like the chick in this game, Hanna."
    "What do you mean?"
    "She gets paid to murder demons."
    "I don't know any demons."
    "Well, I guess you gotta find somethin' else to murder then."
    "Of course." Hanna laid on the floor, one elbow propped on a couch cushion. She watched Marie crouching in her chair, shoes on, still in her school clothes, bouncing with each scream and spray of blood on screen. "Can I play?"
    "Innaminute." She scratched at her thighs and twitched before throwing her hands back onto the keyboard.
    "Why do you think Atlas did that?" said Hanna.
    "I dunno. He was probly fed up."
    "Fed up?"
    "Yeah, you know: fed up. Wanted to break out, wanted to take possession, wanted to lance out and be dangerous. Wanted to become an event."
    Hanna brushed the carpet as if it were a sick animal, feeling the words wash over her and leave something behind. "Are you fed up, Marie?"
    "Sometimes. Sometimes I feel like I'm just a potato, waiting for the harvest. But then I go splatter some demons." A menagerie of screams and a chainsaw roared from the speakers. "What about you?"
    "I'm not sure. I guess not."
    "Okay, your turn." Marie rearranged her skirt and hopped out of the chair. "You got two minutes, lady."
    
    She passed through the vestibule at home, as she did every day. On TV, a mob of sickly humans reached out to a man in aviators and police uniform, who was mowing them down with a gatling gun and an ecstatic smile. Limbs and guts went flying. Dad was eating a plate of nachos.
    

-- Where the Hooded Man Walks, Wild Things Grow

    Nor was talking. He was always talking, but it rarely got through her filters. Whoever sat at her mixing board was cranking up Nor's fader. "What's cryogenics? Hanna, what's cryogenix?"
    "I think it's when they freeze people or something."
    "Is it real?"
    "I don't think it works."
    "I know all about cryogenix. They pull out all your blood and replace it with chemicals and then later take the chemicals out and put your blood back and you're fine."
    "You're dead."
    "Nuh-uh."
    "Yuh-huh."
    "Nuh-uh."
    "No blood means dead, idiot. You'll be dead." She put him in a headlock to try and shut him up. He struggled free, screaming, now raging around the sidewalk, upsetting all the grownups at the bus stop. Some old lady clicked her tongue and shook her head at Hanna. She blew a cloud of smoke in the hag's direction and walked off, catching Nor with a smack on the head.
    "Waaaa, what's that for!?"
    "For being a shit. C'mon, we're walking home today."
    "Hanna said shit. Now I can say shit."
    "Say what you like."
    "Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit..." He danced a circle around her. She bopped him on the head one more time and he stopped.
    The way home went across the tracks. A couple of box cars still sat there, the same ones that were always there. They used to be red. They were shut tight and padlocked. To keep the homeless out, she guessed. The wind was turning cold today, drying out, taking the autumn away. She could feel it on her knees. Nor kept his hands in his pockets. The sidewalk was mangled into the street. The trees were almost barren, looking like the wings of a rotting bat.
    They passed a set of smokestacks surrounded by empty parking lots. The road seemed to rise upon itself at the intersection, as if a fault line had been paved over. Cars ramped over the resulting incline, almost destroying their tires in the process.
    She had a Blood Gutters song stuck in her head again. Willow played them constantly. It was bad and annoying, but it stuck. She liked the ones where they didn't sing about anything, just played. Those sounded like they were written by a different person.
    She realized Nor was still talking. "I'm going to be a cryogenix when I grow up. I'll freeze myself and wake up in the future when people live forever and keep aliens for pets."
    "They'll call you Mr. Popsicle," she said.
    "No!" he screamed, and took off down the street.
    "What the hell, Nor! Get back here!" She tossed what was left of her cigarette and ran after him.

Hanna: why would he do something like that
Willow: Who?
H: Helen's dad
W: Maybe he wanted a choice to make
H: what do you mean
W: don't you ever feel like their aren't any choices to make
W: like every choice is made for you
W: or needs to be approved by someone else
H: yeah
W: Maybe this was the only choice he could make alone.
H: but why this way
H: why involve other people
W: I dunno

    Hanna felt the gravel through her sneaker soles. Nor was inhumanly fast for some reason. She could just see him dart around a corner, half a block in front of her. The wind on her legs was frigid.
    She rounded the corner herself. And stopped. Nor had stopped himself and was staring toward the end of the alley. There, a man sat against the wall. He was pudgy, with thinning hair and a short beard. He reminded her of one of her teachers. At first, she thought he was just waking up. He looked in their direction, but his head lolled against his shoulder. He moved the hand that had been on his neck, uncovering a mass of red and purple skin, reaching the hand toward them. He was trying to speak, but no sound came out. A thick pair of glasses were broken on the ground next to him.
    Nor began to step forward. She grabbed him, held him back, and he didn't resist. The man was still trying to speak, to move. He slid down the brick wall onto his side, whimpering slightly. As he did, she could see the blood oozing from his neck, from a hole that pulsed and contorted as if breathing.
    When she could bring herself to move, she backed out of the alley as quickly as she could, pulling Nor along by the hand. He was trying to speak now, too, to ask her something, but couldn't formulate the words. The result sounded like an extension of the man's whimper projected from her brother's mouth. She kept moving down the street, craning her neck to look behind them (she could almost feel a wound there when she did), her heart beating too fast. There was only one other person on the street. A man with his hood up. She couldn't stop herself from glancing at him to see if he was watching her. It was too far to tell.
    "Gimme your lunch money," she said to Nor.
    The sun had almost set. The clouds near the horizon hung like shattered earthworms, turning from purple to black as the light faded.
    "Your change. Do you have change?" She stopped at the corner near a payphone. There was no one else visible but the one figure, about a block behind them on the opposite side of the street. Nor dug in his pockets, sniffling softly, producing a quarter and a handful of nickels. She stepped into the booth, pushing him in front of her and shutting the door. She put the coins in slowly, one at a time, afraid her fingers would fumble. They were cold, and more numb than they should be. The whole booth suddenly seemed made of ice. She shivered. As the phone rang, she looked around for a street sign, saw nothing. She looked back in the direction of the alley, the lone figure on her side of the street now. "Nor, do you see a street sign?" He pointed to a spot obscured by the phone. She leaned over to get a look while trying to look like she wasn't.
    A flat voice answered. "9-1-1."
    She choked.
    "9-1-1 emergency."
    "Someone's hurt. I saw him. I'm at 17th and Fink."
    "Can I have your name, please."
    "He's in an alley down the street."
    "Name, please."
    "I'm..." She hung up. She wanted her heart to stop beating so loud.
    "It's ringing," said Nor. The phone was ringing. She reached toward it but let her hand fall. When she turned, the man in the hoodie was there, just outside the door. She made eye contact with him before she could stop herself. He had blue eyes and a blonde mustache above his frown. He watched her for a moment, then moved off down the street. She had an overwhelming desire to be able to turn into a cloud of vapor, rather than having to leave the phone booth.
    "Come on, Nor." She grabbed his hand.

    He tried to ask her questions for the rest of the walk home. She had no answers for him. He ran up the stairs as soon as they got in the front door. Dad was watching the evening news, footage of tanks and bulldozers, flaming wreckage. She went up to her room, still trying not to think about neck wounds.
    Jim was asleep on her bed, his paws splayed in the air, his head tilted slightly, the beginnings of a dreaming smile on his face that left a fang visible on one side. She laid down next to him. His ears twitched and he continued to sleep. She scratched his belly, soft enough not to wake him, and thought that she never, ever wanted to see his blood.
    She still felt cold. Sweat began to push out through the pores on her forehead and soak into the pits of her t-shirt. A draft from somewhere in the house ran across her wet skin, carrying more heat away. Bits of glass were lodged in her mind. She could almost see them if she shut her eyes fast enough. Combined, they became the door of the phone booth, a pale palm pressed against it projected from the hooded man, who watched her with a box cutter in his other hand. Nor was there. As she tried to hold him back, he melted into a puddle and squeezed out through the crack beneath the door. The hinges began to move. She pushed on them to stop the door from opening, and when she did it began to fold open the other way.
    The fall of night woke her, still on her bed, Jim still nestled against her shoulder. Atlas stood in the middle of the room, watching her. Instinctively, she tightened her arms around Jim and pulled him close. He was still deep in sleep, breathing evenly. She waited, dreading what might happen, but Atlas just stood there, unblinking. The outlines of his face were clear, but the details were fuzzy in the darkness.
    She was compelled to speak to him. "I never felt that you were a bad person. I want you to know that." He said nothing, only faded away, still watching, leaving behind a shadow that crept out the door to her room.
    When she opened her eyes, Jim was lying against her face, his fur matted with her sweat. She got up slowly and put an extra shirt on against the cold.


---

    "Mr. Rollins? Why aren't you married?"
    "How do you know I'm not married?"
    She pointed. "You don't have a ring on your finger."
    "Oh." He touched the finger with his other thumb, scratching at it as if rotating an invisible ring. "Of course. Why should I be married?"
    "You seem old. I just thought you'd be married to someone by now."
    "Thanks, Hanna. I'm 32." He got up from his chair, sighed at the stack of papers on his desk, and stood at the window, still holding his mug, now massaging his ring finger with the thumb on the same hand. His voice drifted. "She had hair as black as pitch, and eyes of sea foam, as it gathers round the coral at dawn..."
    "Is this going to be a long story?"
    He turned then, uncomprehending, his gaze still off in the distance so that it swept across the entire room in the process. "A story? No....just thinking out loud."
    "Can you tell me the story next time?"
    He sat back in his chair and took up a pencil so that he could grind the point into his open notebook. "That's not a story I will ever tell again. Anyway, that's the prescriptive life. Perhaps prescripts are not for all of us."
    "Do you think you'd be happier if you followed the script?"
    "Maybe, Hanna. Maybe. You're a devil's advocate, you know that?"

    "My dad says you're an alcoholic."
    "I suppose he's not wrong about that. Not when I'm working, though." He took a sip of his coffee for emphasis. "Hanna, I've met your father, as you know. And I only tell you this because I think you already know it as well. Your father is a man who believes that intellectual currency and actual currency are equivalent."
    "What does that mean?"
    He leaned back and scratched his nose. "It means he comes from a society that rewards experience with money."
    "But don't you come from the same society?"
    "Well, sort of. We all do. But some of us find ourselves staring in through the laboratory glass, as it were. So where were we? Experience equals money. Now, what happens if we reverse that statement?"
    "Money equals experience?"
    "Exactly. See what I'm getting at?"
    "I think so. But I have experiences every day, and no one pays me for them."
    "Well, that's because your experiences are of no value."
    She continued to sit, existing. "But that's bullshit."
    He slapped his desk, lightly, as if he were restraining himself. "Yes it is! But understand what I'm saying. This isn't about money. This is about the value behind it. Concepts are conflated into a cloud. Experience is wisdom. Money is experience. Out of that cloud arises an implicit social hierarchy. Does this make any sense?"
    "I....think so."
    "Yeah."
    "You're saying my dad doesn't listen to you because you make less money than him."
    "Uh. I like how I put it better, but yes, that's the idea." He put his feet up on the desk and drained the last of his mug. A mask of gloom had lifted from his face, replaced with a pensive frown.
    Hanna unzipped her backpack. "Smoke?"
    "....Sure, Hanna."
    She pulled out two cigarettes.
    "Ah ah! Nope. Not for you. At least not until you're out of my sight."
    She shrugged and put one back, handed the other to him with a lighter and waited.
    He twirled the lighter between his fingers for a moment, then pushed it back across the desk. "Ehhhh. How about after you leave, okay?"
    She placed her fingers on the lighter. "Do you want to keep it?"
    "I have my own. See you tomorrow."
    She left the office feeling like she had scored a victory in the Generation War; not knowing that her teacher felt the same.

    "Please, Danny?" The most she ever had to do was say please. She found that she could mark out the boys who would do whatever she wanted. They gave off a particular scent.
    "Fine." Danny was a boy she had met during lunch break. He was a junior, but she still thought of him as a kid because he was over half a face shorter than her, and scrawny. He wore military jackets and played with his lighter behind the school. He also sold mushrooms. He handed her a rolled up sandwich bag with the goods inside. "Just take like half of one of these, then wait a couple hours."
    "These look like Wonderland mushrooms."
    "They are. I stole them from a talking caterpillar."
    "You're funny."
    "Don't take more than two. I can hang with you, and stay sober if you want."
    "I'll be okay."

    The skyscrapers in the faraway city lined up beside one another, and if she stood in the middle of her street, she could see them crowding around its vanishing point. Then to the north of them by about 15 degrees, the smokestacks poked over the rooftops, dwarfed by their own output - an ashen thunderhead shaped like the World Tree. Beneath its branches, rain fell as dripping cancer, while the sky above remained clear. Within that shadow, lights flickered and fought to proclaim themselves. Even from this distance, she could make out a flaming cross mocked up in hot pink and Christmas lights up the side of an office tower. She felt drawn to the tiny lights below it, wishing to be close enough to see what each one stood for (or against).
    The clouds bled in her direction, the red day exploded and became the blue night. She dug an old pair of roller skates out of the garage. These she placed on her feet after removing her shoes, and crouched in the road so she could push herself along. With enough speed, she began to raise her center until she felt that she was standing. She would fall if she tried to lower herself again, so instead she waited until the road had stolen her momentum, then crouched to push off again.
    In this manner she continued until she could bring herself to raise one foot enough to push off and speed the other along. She coasted down the center of the street, letting the drivers part around her, feeling the first raindrops pelt her cheeks.
    What she hadn't figured out how to do was turn or stop. So she let herself slow and cease when she approached the next cross street, then clomped over to the sidewalk for the journey home.

    By the start of summer vacation, the rats were out in force. Some blamed the homeless for leaving out food waste or dying in the streets. Hanna watched two of them - rats, not bums - fighting over a slice of cheese pizza lying face down on the sidewalk and surrounded by heat haze. She was out of school and leaning against a brick wall a few blocks from home, smoking. Why here, she didn't know. It seemed like a good place to lean. She blended into the old posters and graffiti that stretched up the block, watching the pedestrians stumble by, the drivers shout at them and each other.
    Her mind wandered as it often did. But these days it skipped over Helen and settled on Atlas. She wondered at his state of mind, then versus now, and if the dead possessed a mind. She wondered if there'd ever been a female active shooter. She wondered if holding a gun made you feel good. She thought about thieves with box cutters and grown men stabbed in alleys, and wondered if security was real, or just an emotion certain people were allowed to feel.
    And she wondered if she could ever get rid of the phantom sensation of sharpened steel pressing against her abdomen.
    She was wearing the roller skates again. She thought of them as hers now, though they must've been Mom's or Dad's at some point. Mom's probably. She pushed off the leaning wall and glided down the sidewalk, steering round the rats and cardboard hovels.

H: i want to help Helen
H: but i don't know how
H: she's like a wall
H: a sexy sexy wall
W: uh
W: anyway
W: I think you need to leave her alone. Helen is strong. Too strong to accept help.
W: My advice is just find something else to think about for a while.
H: Wise Willow


-- Sewer Rats
   Get Wet
   No Matter Where They Swim

    She started a journal that summer:

    The smell is always there but worse in the heat. It comes from underground. Some day I want to know what's down there. Shit and water and rats and what else. There could be a whole city down there. If you drop a used piece of gum down a sewer grate, it could land in someone's eye. They could be looking up my skirt from down there and I wouldn't know. Some day I'll get the gang together and we will take back the underworld. Me, Willow, Marie, and Helen if she ever stops being sad. We'll start by throwing Nor down a manhole as bait. Then when they gather round to eat him or adopt him, we drop a stick of dynamite on their heads and storm the place. Once we expel the natives, we can be queens of the secret world. Peering up skirts and hissing at the surface dwellers.
    I will build myself a throne of rodent skulls
    on which to lounge
    in my alligator skin gown
P.S. Willow is lovely. All my friends are lovely. When we stand together, the room catches fire.
P.P.S. When you were alive, I called you Helen's dad. Now I call you Atlas. I hope you're in Heaven. Or at least have your feet up in a chair with a nice drink in Hell.
    I believe you could find Heaven anywhere if you really wanted to. If you read this, please tell your daughter that. 


-- Our Chemical Retreat

    She thought they should trip at Helen's, with the justification that there was nowhere else to go. But Helen didn't want to be part of it, and Marie offered her house. "My parents won't even notice," she said. "We can stay in my room the whole time. I've got TV and games and a stereo in there." That hooked Willow immediately and Hanna couldn't think of any reasonable objections. So they set up shop in Marie's room just after lunch.
    Marie's parents were....different than what she was used to. They wore bright clothes that hurt Hanna's eyes. The dad wore sandals. They had a pool in the backyard which was becoming an algae farm that no sane person would dip their toe into, for fear of what might lurk beneath the surface. Most egregious of all in Hanna's eyes was that their house was so large that most of it went unused. The den just off the entry hall looked like no one had set foot there in generations.
    The dresser was smiling. The knobs were eyes and the lines between drawers bent upward in a friendly fashion. Contortions were going on elsewhere in the room. Lines that were meant to be straight were not. Right in front of her, there was an indentation in the carpet that had never been there. "What's this?" she asked, running her palm over it.
    "What's what?" said Marie.
    "I don't know. My bones are too sharp." This might be the real problem, she thought. Her skeleton seemed to be growing as the rest of her shrunk around it, as if it drew matter from her flesh. She watched her hand grow thinner and waited to see if her finger bones were going to burst forth from their casing.

    The corner store must have been someone's home in the past. It was house shaped. The siding had been painted blue by someone who cared what color it was, now faded and stripped. The roof was shingled, the windows homey. It was the same store where she bought her cigarettes, far enough from home for discretion and a shorter ways from Marie's house (from which they had just made their escape in the midst of the shroomstorm). It was across Sunny Boulevard, which Marie still referred to as The Bad Street out of habit, because it represented the border between income brackets which those to the east forbade their children from crossing.
    The store was bigger than it looked from the outside, and sported an arcade machine near the toilets. It was broken - had always been broken - but was covered in artwork that Hannah's high mind could lose itself in while her friends wandered up and down the aisles, boxes of mini-donuts tucked under their arms.
    The clerk at the counter seemed to be trying to watch all three of them at once without following them around the store. Hanna noticed this while still studying the side of the arcade cabinet, her palms pressed against it so she could lean forward. In the center of a city street where manhole covers spewed fog, a woman in a miniskirt was standing atop a pile of dead thugs. A bolt of lightning flashed behind her; muscles stood out on her bare arms. Hanna ran her finger up one of those arms to her shoulder and up the lightning to a clouded night sky where a chopper pilot fought his controls against a mighty gale.
    Marie went by on one of her circuits, snagging another bag of chips as she passed. Hanna pointed at the lightning chick. "That's me," she said.
    "Fuck yeah," said Marie around the powdered donut in her mouth.

    "This is an intervention," Marie said to her. Willow nodded assent, always happy to let someone else do her talking.
    "Weird time for it," said Hanna. Marie's dresser was no longer smiling, but something else was, if she could only find it.
    "What? Oh no, not like a drug intervention. We just want to make sure you're okay."
    "Why wouldn't I be?"
    When Marie frowned like she might get punchy, Willow chimed in. "That night at the concert..."
    "Oh."
    "...you told us you were robbed with a knife."
    "...box cutter..."
    "You don't talk about it." Willow looked Hanna in the eyes long enough to be sure she was seen doing it. Maybe longer than she'd ever made eye contact with anyone. "You can talk to us if you need. If you want to."
    Hanna said nothing, felt the muscles in her face moving beyond her control. When they stopped, she told them about the man in the alley, that day with Nor. The first time she'd spoken of it. Then she told them about being afraid to walk home from school. Then just kept on dragging things out into the open. She said she wanted to disappear beneath the city where no one could see her. She said she could still feel the blade on her stomach right now. She said she worried someone would break into her house and hurt her cat. She said she was afraid Dad would get up from in front of his TV and take a gun over to the courthouse and...
    The walls swaying like fields of wheat. The three of them sat at the points of a small triangle on the floor. Willow got up and hugged her, Marie wrapped her punchy little arms around the pair of them. The red day became the blue night.
    The trip got nicer.
    They were flipping through TV channels. At a much slower pace than normal. She looked down and saw that the remote was in her hand and her hand was pressing buttons. She flipped right past the news. It was footage of tanks rolling over houses, which was just more than she could take right then. She settled on a lesser violence: America's Funniest Home Videos. People slipping on ice and caving their skulls in, shattering their tailbones on the edges of trampolines, and other acts of brutality pointed and laughed at by the audience. "I can't take this anymore," she said. "Change the channel."
    "You've got the remote, honey," said Marie.
    "Oh yeah." She tuned it to an old cartoon only to find it filled with animals being squashed or pulverized. "Aaaaahh!" she said, leaning back on the floor and curling up.
    "Maybe you should give me that for a bit." Marie stole the remote and started channel surfing too fast for the eye to follow. 

    Hanna and Willow were in front of the TV still, with controllers in their hands, Hanna feeling like she was being entombed in her bean bag chair, and amazed with herself every time she made the character on the screen jump. Marie was squatting on her desk chair playing the same computer game as always.
    Hanna pushed the A button and the little character jumped again. What was it? It could be a badger or a raccoon or some other furry, tailed creature. When she pressed the B button, nothing happened. There was unrealized potential there. What fantastic new power might it contain? The B button became a puzzle box. She pushed it every 10 seconds to see if it would respond. She varied the intervals at which she pushed it by up to 5 seconds in either direction. She pushed it multiple times in succession, then held it down. When her badger avatar picked something up, she pushed it again. Still no response, but possibilities swam in all directions. Finally, she had to ask. "What does the B button do?"
    "Nothing," said Marie.
    She was crushed.
    "So are we a gang yet?" said Marie.
    "Sure we are."
    "We should go beat someone up. That's what gangsters do."
    "I think they sell drugs. That sounds easier. Even Hanna's little friend can do that." said Willow.
    "He's not my friend. Anyway, does being in a gang make us gangsters?"
    "Of course!" said Marie. "It's practically the same word."
    "I thought gangsters like...wore suits and carried machine guns."
    "Those are mobsters."
    "We at least least need a turf to be a gang."
    "Well, I'm not gonna be a sewer queen. That's your thing, lady."
    "We'll take over the high school." Marie paused her pixelated murderfest and spun around in her chair. "We're always there anyway," Willow continued. "And it's summer, so the teachers won't be around to stop us."
    "I think there are still some teachers there in the summer." said Hanna.
    "What, you mean your boyfriend, Mr. Rollins?" Marie did a boyfriend dance where she sat, which involved hugging herself and massaging her sides.
    "Definitely not."
    "Did you ever get a grade on that paper you wrote?"
    She smacked herself in the forehead and felt it reverberate through her skull and in a line that extended behind her and into the roots she'd laid through time. "I forgot to read it. I don't even know what it was about."
    "That's cause you wrote it drunk at Helen's house. D'you remember that part?"
    "No."

    She was sitting on a stool near the TV. Marie and Willow were stretched out on the bed, asleep. Everything was more normal than it had been all day, except that Helen's father sat in the desk chair. He looked just as she remembered him, but made of other things. His irises were uncut emeralds that caught the lamplight, surrounding obsidian pupils and surrounded by whites of crystal. His hair was made of marble. His clothes too - a button-up shirt tucked into jeans - seemed to have formed around him, every fold sculpted to remain as it was.
    "I've never heard of anyone seeing whole people on a trip. Am I dreaming?"
    He nodded. "Makes sense to me. Cigar?" He held out an exact copy of the cigar that was now in his ivory jaws, already lit. She reached out and took it from him, though the intervening space should have prevented it. It felt real. She took a quick test puff.
    "Eugh. This is gross. How do you smoke these?"
    "Just get used to it, I guess. Man up."
    "Well, I'm not a man, I'm a little girl." She tapped the cigar as if ashing it, and it became a cigarette. Then she could puff away while contemplating the figment before her. "Atlas..."
    "Yes?"
    "You already know what I'm going to ask, don't you?"
    "Of course. Let's get it over with."
    "Why did you kill those people?"
    He leaned back in the chair. "We all have our own demons to fight."
    "So you became one instead."
    He shrugged and let his broad shoulders slip down. It was like watching a refrigerator wilt. "I like the way I put it better."
    "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. That's the saying, right?"
    "Leave it be, Hanna." He did not move his hands, but they were suddenly holding a rifle. A painted black, venomous thing marked with ridges along its barrel and snakeskin on the grip. "Do you know what this is?"
    "It's a gun," she said.
    "An AR-15. Not the model that made me, but it feels similar. Had this one long enough." He balanced it on the floor. "Even now, I remember what it was like to hold, how the barrel tasted."
    "...How did it taste?"
    "Like blood."
    Hanna looked down at her right hand and saw that she was holding the Chinese saber before her as if to defend herself. She grounded its point on the floor in imitation of him. What had Mr. Rollins called it? A dao? "Where did you get this, anyway?"
    He gave off staring at his rifle long enough to glance at the sword hilt between her knees. "That old thing?" He let out a low, bitter chuckle. "As you said, I'm just a dream. If you want the real answer, ask my daughter. She knows enough of the story to tell you. If she feels like it." He set his cigar on Marie's desk next to the keyboard and stood up. "As for me, I've had enough honesty for one evening. Goodbye." He vanished with the rifle, sword, and cigar. Her own cigarette remained hanging between her lips. She stared at the chair he had vacated, then drew in a long breath and exhaled a cloud of smoke that dissolved the room.

    "Mr. Rollins?"
    "Love it when you drop by, Hanna. Don't you have some mischief to get up to?"
    "I'm up to it now." She grinned and continued to chew gum. "Don't you have a life outside this office?"
    "Honestly, no. Plus I have some prep work to do, and I figured you might drop by around this time." He pushed up his glasses and massaged the corners of his eyes. The skin around them sagged. "What's up?"
    "What's the meaning of the universe?"
    "Uh, okay. Sure. The universe is inert matter, Hanna. The meaning is in you."
    "But...didn't you just tell me the universe is meaningless?"
    "You're too bright to actually listen, aren't you? No, I didn't. What I mean is, you ARE the universe."
    "Then what are you?"
    "I'm also the universe. A different iteration, if you like."
    That night, she went home and watched the courthouse video again, saw a low resolution rendition of a double handful of universes being closed off to very little fanfare; just a pop or two.
    "Where does the world go when I close my eyes?"
    "Now that one, I don't have a clever answer for. Let me know if you think of one."


-- Super Electric Witch

    At the edge of her world, where the half-finished or over-finished building lived, there was an electrical box. A few feet from the large hole into which she tossed her empty beer bottles, it cropped up out of the land just off the edge of the concrete that made up the building's first floor. She stepped off into the grass and gave it a hug. It was a cube, all of green metal, about four feet tall. It had rounded edges. It was comfortable to lean up against. It hummed. When she wrapped her left arm around it, a spark drifted up and through her body. The vibration ceased in the vicinity of her chest. Then if she raised her right arm with a pointed index finger, she could fire a bolt of lightning. She mimed a gun with her fingers.
    "What are you doing?" asked Marie.
    "She's an electric witch," said Willow.
    "I'm a SUPER electric witch, bitch." She stored a charge in her heart for a special occasion, then slipped back and fell on her ass.
    "You're a drunk."
    "That too."

    The day after the day after her trip (the previous day had been spent on recovery and reflection) she found herself in Helen's living room. There was a fireplace in the far wall that had never been used. She had the real sword across her knees where she sat with her feet tucked under her on the carpet. "Where did this come from?" She tried to make it sound like a casual question. Like the answer didn't hold the keys to the universe.
    Helen was staring, plucking at carpet strands as if searching for something. "Dad was a vet."
    "A vet?"
    "Not the doctor kind. The war kind."
    She wanted more. Wanted to be told a story. But Helen wasn't in the mood. So she needed to change that mood. What her friend needed was a call to action. Any action. "So we've been talking about the gang..."
    "What about it?"
    "What we really need is a turf. Marie said no sewers. And Willow said it should be the school."
    "The school, huh? That's a contested zone. Plenty of others laying claim to it in the summer."
    "Yeah?"
    "We'll have to drive them out." Helen began to sketch a plan of attack on the carpet.


-- All She Wanted

    Everyone in the neighborhood, everyone in every neighborhood, had their own plot of land, more or less equally distributed, varying only between neighborhoods. It wasn't like that in the city, she thought, but the city seemed distant. Always visible, never real. Once, she had seen her father stand on the front stoop of their house, fists on hips as if surveying a kingdom. She expected him to raise Nor in his arms and wipe his palm across their front yard. "Everything that the light touches, my son..."
    But she didn't know how to want so little or so much. If she wanted anything - which was up for debate - she wanted everything. She imagined herself as queen of the sewers because it was a place that nobody who wanted things wanted, yet it would give her sway over the entire human world; an invisible network of inroads to every place from which she could spy and meddle and tinker. She wanted to own the world from beneath the world. The people would live their lives ignorant of her rule but still subject to it. A puppet master. Those whose power she disapproved of would disappear, dragged into their toilets by alligators. Those she liked would be sung lullabies by mice in their sleep: words of encouragement, subliminal commands, new legislation to be introduced. A holiday would be declared on which citizens would toast the Queen of the Underworld as a concept, unaware that she could hear them through their kitchen sinks.
    The final consolidation would arrive on the day her powers manifested, when she would send bolts of lightning up through the flowing water to electrocute all dissenters in their showers, leaving only those who cheered for The Unnamed Queen.

    The noise to signal ratio in her brain was too high. She couldn't listen to the Gutters since the concert. She'd flipped through the rest of Willow's hoard and settled on a band called Rat Attack. They were louder, angrier, and somehow colder than the Gutters. She played the album on repeat through her headphones, and still heard the energy of the noise when she took them off.
    As the summer dragged on, the neighborhoods grew angry. There was a buzz in the air, encroaching hornets or unrest depending on who you asked. She found herself soaking it in with the sunshine, ranging further afield, usually in the direction of downtown.
    It was out in the streets that she felt the most comfortable, that she was a part of this humming world. When she was shut up at home, the world was outside fighting to break down the door and invade. All the same, she couldn't help looking over her shoulder for the man with the blonde mustache. She practiced her skating, got good at keeping momentum, and stayed in the street so she could outpace anyone on foot.
    She explained all this to the clerk at the mini-mart one day.
    "You've got a better chance of being hit by a car than attacked by a stranger," he said.
    "Accidents don't scare me the same way. Accidents just happen. Crime watches you first, stalks you, imagines what it wants and how to get it."
    He produced a smile with a missing tooth in front. "Crime just happens, like everything else."
    She snagged her cigarettes from the counter and walked out, trying to feel in control of her world.

    On her way out of the house, she skated down the entry hall, past the den. She wasn't supposed to, but Mom was out and Dad wouldn't turn around from the TV. There was something burning on the screen, and for once it wasn't an oil well. "What's happening?" she said.
    "Riots downtown. Right here in our city. Can you imagine? Some people, I swear."
    "What are they mad about?"
    "Who knows? Some people were just born angry."

    Hanna is in the world and the world is in her, but each is something else within the other. Downtown grew closer by the day. She longed to see it wrapped in vines that towered into the clouds, lights flickering, clouds of static hovering in the air.
    She has a nose that is quite large for her face, but out in the world this nose does not exist. The eyes of the world see the bangs cut bowl-shaped across her forehead, see the outline of her face, the way her fangs are somewhat uneven, yet only she can see her nose. Once she pointed it out to Marie, who seemed not to know what she was talking about. Marie, who was never polite in her life except by accident. What is this battle of perception that muddles all to an incomprehensible state? Where lies a truth she can trust?
    She was beginning to feel that the problem might be sensory deprivation. There was nothing in her neighborhood for the eyes and mind to feast on. She felt weak, wan, malnourished as a result. Ravenous. She needed to eat. So she proposed a plan to the gang. They would trek across the 'burbs and dive into the real city, where so much light and so much darkness lived side by side. Perhaps they would learn something, but really all she wanted was the chance to drink in that chiaroscuro and feed on the energy it must contain. Before the summer ended. Just to get her through the next school year.

    When she finally corralled her friends and ventured into the city, she filed away the resulting imagery in no particular order. A man with only seven fingers seated next to a cafe door on the corner, holding a sign with some sort of catechism written on it. The bus ride where the shoulders of strangers both hugged and smothered her. The wall of a subway station made of silly putty, absorbing the dead skin of everyone who walked past, giving slightly when she pushed on it. Helen looking energized for the first time in weeks, bringing back that aura that Hanna was drawn to. A vegan cheese shop, called simply A Cheese Shoppe, with the words "Unnaturally Cheesy!" printed below in the middle of a golden sunburst. The sidewalk in front of the entrance was a galaxy of dried gum.
    It rained throughout the afternoon. They had one umbrella among the four of them, but Helen found another somewhere. The rising water flushed a dead rat from wherever it was hiding, out across the sidewalk. Or maybe it had drowned in the rain. It drifted out of an alley and down into the gutter. Marie squeaked when it passed her feet, and then began to dance as if it were the right thing to do. The raindrops made a mist around her shoes. 
    There was more, but not something she could attach an image to. When she was with her friends in the city, she felt....powerful. Like it all belonged to her. The jagged towers swept inward as she stretched out. They formed the points of the crown that might rest on her head.

    A dream that was always recurring seemed to be evolving as well. She would begin by skating down a familiar street. The street would give way to a tunnel descending into the earth. The interior walls rounded, turned fleshy. It was unclear if she was breathing air or water, but there was definitely a current to the substance that surrounded her. Glowing red globules flowed past, glomming to her arms and legs; then a steady rhythm that was all around, but distant. Sometimes she moved with the current, other times struggled against it. Branching paths curved forever around a center that she wanted more than anything to reach. When they separated, she had to choose one, yet had the sense that they all went in the same direction. No guarantee that it was the direction she wanted to go.

    Willow sat in the booth as if it were the desk in her office, back straight and hands clasped on the table, not touching her fries or the shake next to them. "So...What's everyone going to be when they grow up?"
    Helen gave off biting her nails and said, "I am what I am right now."
    "You yam what you yam!"
    "Shut up, Marie."
    "Damned if I will." She talked and chewed at the same time. "I'm going to be an A-10 Warthog when I grow up. Blasting Eye-rackees into red mist."
    "You mean a pilot?"
    "That's what I said, isn't it?"
    "It is not."
    Hanna stuck fries in her nose and left them there until grease burned the insides of her nostrils, then tilted her head back and shot them at Marie, who dodged one and got hit between the eyes by the other; then retaliated by catapulting ice cream into Hanna's hair with her plastic spoon. Hanna shrieked.

    The streets turned alive as the light faded, right when they had to go home. 

    "Aren't we supposed to talk about my future plans?"
    "What do you mean?"
    "Like, what I'm going to study, what I'm supposed to be when I grow up."
    "I'm not a guidance counselor, so no. Anyway, you're not _supposed_ to be anything."
    "But I'm supposed to have a plan."
    "Not for years yet. You can figure that out in college, if then."
    "Is that what your counselor told you, when you were my age?"
    "Ouch, Hanna. Ouch. Okay, you want some advice?"
    "If you have some."
    "You're not a good writer."
    "Ouch right back."
    "But you have a unique perspective, and you're still very young. I think it's something you should think about. If it's something you enjoy. That's all I have. And more than I get paid for."
    "Thanks."

    That night, they took the train home. Helen was sitting next to her. "Sometimes, I talk to him, you know," she said. "My dad. Just in my head. And he talks to me."
    Hanna avoided looking at her friend, staring at her own fingers instead. "What does he say?"
    "Whatever he's supposed to say. It's like...like the image of a person in your head understands you more than the real person ever could. Which means I don't know how much the image matches the real person. Which means maybe I didn't understand him, either. Did he have an image of me in his head? One that he could talk to, that actually understood him?"
    Hanna put her head on her friend's shoulder. The train shook, lights streaking by in the darkness. Some minutes passed before she said what she was thinking. "Do we even want to understand someone who would do that?"
    "Maybe if just one person had, he wouldn't have--" Helen shut her mouth to keep whatever was inside from escaping. They said nothing else.