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<p><h1>beno</h1></p>
<p>published: 2016-05-03</p>
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<p>It has been almost twenty-four hours since you fell into my house, and so far, my parents have taken absolutely no notice to your sudden presence. I suppose that it could be possible that I am just hallucinating the heavenly figure who shuffled through my hallway at one in the morning with drooping wings weeping like a willow tree. But then how could I explain the breath that brushed my cheek ever so softly when you finally found your words and a tiny sliver of sanity? How could I explain the grime that collected at the shower drain yesterday evening when my parents were still out for a drink and you took advantage of the lack of parentals to take a shower?</p>
<p>The shower doesn’t work in the bathroom downstairs, so only I ever use it unless something is wrong with the one upstairs. Heck, even my brother- whose room is downstairs next to mine- doesn’t even use that bathroom, even though it would save his lazy self a dash up the stairs. You must have spent all of last night and the school day cooped up alone in there… literally, it seems, for in the nonfunctional shower stall is a pile of ragged ebony feathers and a few of my baby blankets stolen under cover of night.</p>
<p>I discovered you after I arrived home from the bus stop. I immediately abandoned my backpack on the patch of empty floor beside my bed and flung open the bathroom door- and then my hands rushed to my mouth in order to stifle a shriek. Your blood- or what I assume was your blood, for surely angels did not need to have such a mundane form of living in their veins- was painted all over the sink. Splatters must have dropped off of whatever you used as a brush as I nearly stepped into a nice trio of them right at the doorway.</p>
<p align="center"><img src="../../../img/beno-1.jpg" height="50%" width="50%" alt="blood in sink"></p>
<p>"<i>What the hell were you doing today?</i>" The words stumble heavily like drunkards out of my mouth. I throw a hand to the bloody mess awaiting me in the sink. "Are you a servant of the devil, come to reap my soul? Are you a Mephistopheles, determining that it’s my turn to be collected?"</p>
<p>The indignancies only get you to glance up at me from your coop in the shower stall as far as attention goes, and you only offer a shrug in response. A breath of wind escapes into the room and ruffles the curtains over the open window, and only once a ray of sun hits your hair for a brief second that I realize who exactly you are.</p>
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<p><h1>Cetra</h1></p>
<p>published: 2019-08-22</p>
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<p>The walls of the cave glistened with moisture residue. Like the inside of a mouth, almost, jaws open wide to swallow her whole.</p>
<p>The woman before her, resting on the rough stone slab, sucked in another heavy wet breath. Ragged exhale, limbs splayed over the edge, languishing like a ghost in a flowy white dress. Her skin was pale, almost sheet-white, accentuating the teardrop sapphire embedded in her forehead.</p>
<p>"Cetra," she whispered. "Come closer."</p>
<p>"Y-yes, Mother." Cetra flew to the woman's side and took a knee, head bowed, eyes barely visible under her hood. "What does my Demiurge require of me?"</p>
<p>"Cetra..." the woman breathed, not taking note of her young companion's words. Her hand reached out, summoning just enough strength to push the hood back, exposing the young Tailtiutian's glossy blue hair, single braid disappearing into the rest of her robe. "You came at just the right time. Not a moment too late. I hate to leave you in this condition."</p>
<p>Cetra's eyes flashed. Her head shot up. "You-"</p>
<p>"The state of this world is... too dangerous for me for now. Cetra..." The goddess brushed a few stray strands of hair out of Cetra's panicked eyes. "I'm going to sleep for a long time. I know not when I'll awake, if ever..." Her eyelids fluttered, as if her head was already pleading with her to fall into the arms of Morpheus. "I'm entrusting the task of protecting this cave- of protecting <em>me</em>- to you."</p>
<p>"I- I don't know if I can-"</p>
<p>"You can."</p>
<p>"H-how can you be sure, Mother?"</p>
<p>A faint flicker of a smile. "Because I know I can. And anything I can do, you can do... also."</p>
<p>The last word came out in a cough. The goddess' head lolled onto her elbow, eyes slid shut, finally at the limit of her energy, succumbed to exhaustion.</p>
<p>Cetra bolted to her feet, shook the woman's shoulders. "Mother?"</p>
<p>No response.</p>
<p>"Mother!" Cetra cried. "Don't... don't leave me alone in this world."</p>
<p><em>Who will sing in the depths of the night if you're gone?</em></p>
<p><em>Who will appease the other Shards?</em></p>
<p><em>I... I don't have a strong voice like you do.</em></p>
<p>Her mother's arms began to glow. Cetra stepped back, shielding her eyes with one arm, tears pricking in her eyes. There was no need to watch. It had happened to countless gods before her, and would happen to countless more after she was dead- a long time, if that, but it would come eventually. Earthly organs coming to a halt, skin turning to stone, mind falling silent. Statuebound until some sliver of her soul left conscious deemed it safe to come back out again.</p>
<p>Cetra turned to the entrance to the crypt. The robe swooshed around her legs. A light pricked in the darkness, entry to the cave far off. A single star to guide her home.</p>
<p>She pulled the hood back over her head.</p>
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<p><h1>¡corre!</h1></p>
<p>published: 2016-05-02</p>
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<p>You.</p>
<p>That's right, you.</p>
<p>You showed up on my doorstep like a shooting star, speckled with all the colors of the sunset- you could have been a factory reject of that evening's skybound hues from the bruises and battered limbs that greeted me that unfortunate end-of-day.</p>
<p>You waited patiently on the front porch, curled up on top of the welcome mat, as I rushed back inside to find a worn blanket to spread over the couch. The splotches adorning your torn lips squeezed and contracted as I scooped you back up in my arms and laid you down in the space I so hastily prepared. The angels that the elders said always watched us must not know how to speak English, for strange and unintelligible lisps escaped from your mouth as your head softly landed on the pillow.</p>
<p>Whence did you come? Your skin is too soft to have been hardened in the furnaces and infernos for eternity, and no god that I know of would allow one of his angelic creations to come to such harm. The scraggly appendages hidden under your shirt are weakened but intact- either you left of your own will, in which case I cannot for the life of me comprehend the reasons, or the other dimension on the other side of death is spring cleaning. But why would they throw out one such as you? And where are the others? Do you know?</p>
<p>The flames in your eyes dance back and forth as your attention drifts to my face. I must be a puff of wind like those driving the puffy chariots across the sky, because something in your irises flickers. For the first time that evening, your gaze doesn't look glassy and otherworldly.</p>
<p>You raise one hand up to my face, and I realize that in your sweatshirt is a jagged and torn hole plastered to your skin with drying blood. A few drops of scarlet leak onto the carpet- freshly cleaned yesterday as your vision clears and you finally comprehend your surroundings.</p>
<p>You clench a fistful of my hair in your raised fist and gently drag me down near to your own face. Your lips part- I can tell from the gust that rings in my ears. I close my eyes in anticipation of a kiss, but what follows us more adept at stealing my breath away in a single syllable.</p>
<p>"Run."</p>
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<p><h1>desaparecer</h1></p>
<p>published: 2017-01-27</p>
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<p>She brushed her hair out of her eyes as she ducked into the room, making a mental note to replace the lightbulbs the first chance she could. The cars zooming by on the highway a short skip away from the house cast neon shadows on the walls, ghosts there one moment and gone the next.</p>
<p>Sometimes she had visions of joining the shadows, escaping from the city at last after five years of the same desolate bed, the same unfilled picture frames hanging on the walls from holes which had long stretched beyond their original proportions. Her friends had abandoned her long ago for brighter prospects.</p>
<p>She slugged off her backpack beside the open entrance to her room and winced as the door squeaked behind her, ancient hinges never cleaned since their installation whining. The walls certainly couldn't talk, but the hinges could scream, threatening to call out her existence to the landlord whose eyes were currently averted elsewhere.</p>
<p>If she got her way, they would stay there until her payment came.</p>
<p>She flopped onto her bed, pulling over her backpack and relishing in the whoosh her short blade made when it was extracted. Her golden opportunity would come tomorrow.</p>
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<p><h1>Erin</h1></p>
<p>published: 2019-08-07</p>
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<p><em>Clack, clack, clack.</em></p>
<p>My fingers weave deftly through the tangled strands of yarn. Weaving, knitting, knotting. Clouds spill out from my hands, fog, mist, snow. Snow cascading everywhere, covering the land in a blanket, sending everything to sleep forever.</p>
<p>I sit here on my ill-begotten throne, self-imposed ivory tower, and I wait. I know not what I wait for, watching the clouds pass by, some of which I birthed, all of which I know I will never see again. Not in the same form, anyway, or in the same arrangement. Two atoms, or perhaps two crystals in a snowflake, defy fate by meeting in a single time and place and then separate, flung out in the universe. Never to meet each other again. I suppose people are the same, when you take the centuries and then the millennia into account. Two souls meet, and perhaps they spend their entire lives together, or maybe only a few minutes. And when those people die, and their souls are shredded apart and reformed like a small child's paper-mache, that meeting can never again be replicated. Never ever.</p>
<p><em>Who are you?</em></p>
<p><em>I'm Erin.</em></p>
<p><em>Who is Erin?</em></p>
<p><em>I don't know.</em></p>
<p>I once had a fiery soul. I once had an unsatisfied spirit, hungry for something more, something better than this mortal world could provide.</p>
<p>And then the muses came. Sang me to sleep at first, enthralled me with stories of the exploits of the people I saw in paintings everywhere, murals, wondering who these strange and beautiful people were that I passed by day after day. I sang in the sun, and I rolled in the grass, and words flowed from my fingers as gracefully as a spider building its web and as fiercely as a broken fire hydrant bursting out into the street. Gutters flooding, overflowing, iridescent splotches where they met the runoff from the street corner's mechanic shop set up in his garage. I made things I loved, and I loved making things.</p>
<p>And then the doldrums rolled in. Not all at once, although that winter night at the height of sixteen was the Fracture, the initial impact that would result in a Shatter. But to get from a Fracture to a Shatter... It was the little things. Collateral damage. A hasty word said here, a sudden packing and night spent in a hotel there. Bright stage lights, midnight nightmare frights, obsessively prodding and poking holes in reality in search of a shiny trinket I could not obtain. Sent forth from the place I'd lingered in ten years, a garden only now starting to blossom, straight into a grave where upon the light from the sun above plays.</p>
<p>Half a year ago, a little angel crashed through my closet and pulled me into a world unseen. That first night was rough, fraught with intimate encounters I won't sully this place recounting. Was it rape? Did I want it? It doesn't matter now. He came back every so often. Sometimes only after a few days, sometimes making me wait a whole month before he came back. Always we'd slip away through the portal in my closet, in my ceiling, in my wall to wherever he wanted me to see that day. And when I got stronger, became more accustomed to the slender colorless body he'd made for me, I started visiting him whenever I wanted. The moment in my dreams I became lucid, I yearned for his touch, yelled out his name, sought out the burn of our twin souls together as we both kicked and screamed in our respective worlds for independence. After a few months, I became acquainted with his Mistress as well. He wasn't officially under her command; it was a temporary alliance until some important work of his was done that I was never quite privy to.</p>
<p>He was calmer when I was at his side. Shy, almost. Like rage was the only emotion he'd ever learned, and he hadn't considered the possible need to comprehend any other.</p>
<p>I shouldn't have been surprised when, in the depths of my despair, he offered to prepare a place for me in his home. A place where I could be free from the worries of my earthly home. Safe from the tyrannies of the men in my own home.</p>
<p><em>The muses pull me to cleave the night and leave this world unseen.</em></p>
<p>You can't see me anymore. My work is complete to the muses' satisfaction. Seven books and countless poems to my name. And when the time came, I answered the angel's call. We shot through the sky, no possession to my name other than the little flash drive hanging from my neck, just like he'd specified I was allowed to take with me.</p>
<p>I thought it would be bliss.</p>
<p>It wasn't bliss. He hollowed me out, carved out my organs, replaced them with a hollow shell of a rib cage. Barely above the level of a doll. And then he disappeared, and his Mistress, hating humans but only ever tolerating me for my angel's benefit, cast me out. And what was the earth to do with a girl who'd sworn eternal perdition the moment her pen had lifted from the page for the last time? I drowned in the clouds. I practically became one myself. Drifted down to the earth in a pillar and turned that into an abode instead.</p>
<p>&quot;Come home, Cloud,&quot; Cirno says, his face cocky and full of glee.</p>
<p>But clouds have no home. Clouds have no face. Clouds move across the sky with poise and grace.</p>
<p>And then they evaporate and disappear.</p>
<p>And yet some part of my weary heart refuses to disappear.</p>
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<p><h1>Erin Interred</h1></p>
<p>published: 2020-08-09</p>
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<p>Sleep does not come.</p>
<p>I open my eyes.</p>
<p>A breeze sweeps through the abandoned warehouse. At least, that is what I think it was in a past life, back before whatever apocalypse happened while I was up in the tower. All of the loading bays where trucks would have parked are now wide open, doors missing, letting the sun and the birds come as they please.</p>
<p>Before me on the sprawling floor are rows upon rows of… caskets. Or something to that effect. Long boxes large enough to hold a person in lined up in neat rows, six or so feet space between all. None of them have any markers or nameplates or anything to hint at what- no, <em>who</em> might be inside.</p>
<p>Kurosagi lightly kicks one with the side of his foot. No reaction, no echo. The boxes are fixed on the ground, inert, as unmoving as boulders.</p>
<p>"We came here often," Kurosagi says, startling me back to attention. His gaze is distant. For a second, I even think he is wistful. "It's quiet here. Peaceful. Wide open, so if anyone were coming, I'd see them coming a mile away."</p>
<p>"You brought her to a... mausoleum?"</p>
<p>He tenses up just the slightest bit. A twitch of the jaw, drawing in his shoulders. "I told her that you were dead. That you had died giving birth to her. That you were buried here. This one, specifically." He nudges the casket again with his foot. "She always brought a book with her. She would read to you, or what she thought was you, for hours and hours..." He shakes his head. "And then some other servant of Mistress Velouria's went and told her the truth."</p>
<p>"And when was that?"</p>
<p>"A few weeks ago."</p>
<p>"You lied to her for <em>eighteen years</em>?"</p>
<p>"I didn't <em>want</em> to," he snaps. "What was I supposed to tell her? That you'd skipped out on her life because you were too afraid of living yourself?" He turns his back to me. The feathers on the tops of his wings flare, agitated, and then settle down again. "It doesn't matter. You were as good as dead anyway."</p>
<p>"You could have brought her to the tower."</p>
<p>"You weren't fit to be a mother. It would be like I'd have to raise <em>two</em> children. Two <em>stubborn, obstinate</em> children."</p>
<p>"<em>Kuroi</em>!" I grab his shoulder, twirl him back around. His eyes are alight, his jaw set, his fists trembling- but I can tell he is holding himself back anyway. I slap him across the cheek. The sound cracks through the place. His face flares red. "You never gave me a chance, you-"</p>
<p>Something lurks in the corner of my eye. Kurosagi sees it too.</p>
<p>We both turn.</p>
<p>At the other end of the warehouse are two boys- young men, rather, although it's hard to tell at this distance- one towering over the other. Both have blades and rods poking out of bags slung over their shoulders. Their eyes are wide, bug-like, staring at us like they are deer and we are several-ton trucks careening towards them on a highway.</p>
<p>Except, if anyone is getting run over and maimed from the glint of their blades' metal as it catches the sun, it's me.</p>
<p>And <em>maybe</em> Kurosagi, if they are fast enough.</p>
<p>Would he protect me if they attacked? Would he save me?</p>
<p>Or just himself?</p>
<p>The shorter one beckons to the taller one, who leans over so the shorter one can whisper something in his ear. He points in our direction and then makes a flapping gesture with his hand. The taller one nods.</p>
<p>Kurosagi steps in front of me, blocking me from view with one of his wings. He reaches into his robe, grassy-green today, and pulls out a long knife undoubtedly stolen from our kitchen.</p>
<p><em>Our kitchen.</em></p>
<p>Our <em>kitchen?</em></p>
<p><em>I doubt he would ever take me back to the tower. Not even if I asked.</em></p>
<p>"Hold!" Kurosagi yells. "What are you doing here?"</p>
<p>The older boy, from the sound of his voice as I cannot see him, pipes up first. His voice booms, crossing the distance between us without any effort at all. "I could ask you the same question, pretty boy. Who just hangs out at a mausoleum at this time of day?"</p>
<p>"Or at all," the younger boy says, his voice fainter, less distinct. "There are more exciting places in town to be, you know. I hear they finally fixed the air conditioning in the library. And the river's always fun to splash in-"</p>
<p>His voice cuts off suddenly. Scrambled footsteps, like he'd been elbowed too hard and almost fell over.</p>
<p>"We're just here to do some graverobbing," the older one explains. "A little corpse harvesting. No need to pull your blade on us, O Heavenly One. Not your business enough to be killing us over it."</p>
<p>Kurosagi remains tense, but he slips his knife back somewhere near his belt. There must be a holder or something like that hidden in the fabric, because he doesn't look cut up, nor does he wince when he says, "So long as you stay more than a blade's throw away from us."</p>
<p>"Fine by me."</p>
<p>Kurosagi draws his wings back in. I can see the boys again as they move to the closest casket and pop it open-</p>
<p>-and they hop in and disappear from sight.</p>
<p>There is not nearly enough room for the both of them, much less them <em>and a body</em>, in the stone box.</p>
<p>"So this is the last place you saw her?"</p>
<p>He nods. "She was pissed after she found out. So she paid one of the angels to alight her here. I chased after her as soon as I found out, but... she disappeared."</p>
<p>"What do you mean, <em>disappeared?</em>"</p>
<p>"You know, <em>vanished</em>? <em>Evanesced</em>? I'm not a thesaurus."</p>
<p>"I know what the word means. I'm asking what <em>you</em> mean."</p>
<p>"I mean, I saw her go in. I thought she was visiting your grave. Or what I told her was your grave. But I never saw her, or anyone, come back out that day."</p>
<p>"You didn't... go in to watch her?"</p>
<p>"I figured I'd give her some space."</p>
<p>I sigh. "Kuroi..."</p>
<p>He stiffens. "If you're going to chastise me, don't bother. I did all I could as a father. You have no right to judge, since you didn't even <em>try</em>."</p>
<p>The boys are still inside the casket. I glance down at the one beside me. Assuming they are all the same size, there is <em>still</em> no way three bodies can fit into that small of a space.</p>
<p><em>Unless there's more space...</em></p>
<p>"Kuroi. Open this casket."</p>
<p>His silent stewing dissolves into confusion. "You want me to <em>what?</em>"</p>
<p>"Open it."</p>
<p>"Why? There's just a body, a rotting body-"</p>
<p>"I'm not so sure. Open it."</p>
<p>Kuroi sighs. "Fine. But only because it's you asking."</p>
<p>There is an inch-deep divot like a reverse handle on one side of the casket, the side we stand on. Kurosagi slips around to the other side of the coffin and reaches over, his fingers digging into the divot. He grunts as he tries to pull it towards him, fingers red and then white as he struggles against the lid.</p>
<p>Dust spills onto the floor as whatever seal was on the casket loosens and crumbles away.</p>
<p>And then, with one final jerk, the lid falls open, and Kurosagi jumps out of the way in time not to be crushed under it.</p>
<p>There is no body inside. There is... <em>nothing</em>. A literal <em>nothing</em>. Just an abyss deeper down than the light above can reach. Smoke almost like a miniature sea laps at the edge of the casket, threatening to spill over. Two rungs of a ladder embedded in the inside face me, the rest- if there are any others- obscured.</p>
<p>He acts unfazed, but his eyes betray that he is even more surprised as I am. "Erin, I'm not letting you-"</p>
<p>I hold a hand out. "If you're going to try to stop me, don't bother."</p>
<p>"Don't tell me you'd be so stupid as to climb into a... void."</p>
<p>"Those other boys did. And they didn't look like they were trying to die."</p>
<p>I step forward, brace myself, lower a leg into the abyss. My foot hits another metal rung, somewhere below the others, right where I expected it to be.</p>
<p><em>Thank you, yesterday self, for choosing something other than a dress.</em></p>
<p>I grab onto the first rung and swing myself in. I am half-submerged in the smoke. Goosebumps flare, expecting it to be cold, wanting to be more prepared than I am pretending to me right now.</p>
<p>But, in truth, it feels like nothing at all.</p>
<p><em>What am I doing? I have no idea where this hole leads. Or even if it leads anywhere at all. I could be throwing my life away, just when it started again.</em></p>
<p><em>Would you rather spend another eternity aimless? Existing just for the sake of existing?</em></p>
<p>I look up at Kurosagi. "Will you come with me?"</p>
<p>His lips press into a tight line. He averts his eyes, thinking for a heavy few seconds until he finally answers, "I can't."</p>
<p>"Then... how did you put it? You have no right to judge. Because you didn't even try."</p>
<p>His eyes widen, but he makes no moves to stop me as I descend one rung. And then another. And then another.</p>
<p>And another, and another, until darkness envelops me.</p>
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<p><h1>Erin Permeated</h1></p>
<p>published: 2020-08-15</p>
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<p>The depths have always been terrifying.</p>
<p>Every week in elementary school days, my grandmother would take my cousins and brothers and I to the community center. We sprinted through lobbies, dashed down stairwells, loitered at the row of candy machines downstairs as the adults paid for our wristbands. The changing rooms were a veritable warzone, I remember, banging open and shut like the fins of a fish desperately trying to get away from a predator. We never got lockers. Someone would always stay beached on the concrete and tile shore, tasked with watching over our things.</p>
<p>Sometimes the lap pool would open up, and the staff would flood the crystal-clear waters with all of the inflatables that they usually kept jailed under the waterslide. And all the kids would exodus from the "normie pool" and line up at the edge of the lap pool's deep end, waiting for the sharp bark of a lifeguard to test their swimming ability. There was hardly any swimming to be had during those tests, just spasming from one end to the other and back again without drowning. Come that, a shackle of yellow around one wrist, and a wait until all the tests were done.</p>
<p><em>Don't look down.</em></p>
<p>I had never seen the floor of the deep end clearly in all the time we had gone there. Never clearly, just guessed, pieced together from glimpses through the beating waves. The pulsating blue-on-white would coax the primitive part of my mind into believing there was a shark waiting under the waves, waiting to gobble me up if I did not swim that test fast enough.</p>
<p>I took the test wearing goggles once. A wave of curiosity overtook me. And I plunged my face beneath the waters.</p>
<p>All of the pieces I'd gathered over the years stitched themselves up in a second. The floor seemed so far away and so close all at once, like I could just reach down and touch it. But it would shy away just that same amount, always forever out of reach. It was endless, forever, a world without end.</p>
<p>Infinity has a hard time fitting into a child's mind.</p>
<p>I have room in my body now.</p>
<p>Beyond the wall of inky shadows are waters. Body temperature, I almost do not feel them as I continue descending down the ladder. The moment the water passes my hips, the water pushes back on me, like a foam ball dunked under the waters, begging to return to the surface.</p>
<p><em>Remember those jokes you made with your cat-loving friend all those years ago? About how much fun it would be to be turned into floaty toys, drifting in a pool?</em></p>
<p>My cheeks start to burn.</p>
<p><em>I suppose I got my wish in the end.</em></p>
<p>The ladder does not end at the waters. I take a deep breath- <em>the instincts never stop, do they?</em>- and continue climbing down, buoyed by my feet hooked on each rail. I am lifting reverse weights. I am become weightless myself, and yet also somehow the world's heaviest object, a dumbbell in junior high dumped into a pool, falling down, down, down...</p>
<p>My ears pop. The darkness lifts.</p>
<p>There is no pool. There are no shadows.</p>
<p>There is only an endless sea of white. Flat, bright, yet not blinding. I am a shadowy silhouette against a piece of paper. A single color in a one-bit world.</p>
<p>The ladder ends.</p>
<p>I let go.</p>
<p>The ink vanishes from sight, leaving nothing but the infinite white. I look up. I look down. I twist all around. Nothing changes except for my own body. Whatever small organs there are in my ears tell my brain that I am upright, that down is down, that up is up. But there is nothing to orient myself with. Unless I am now a compass? Unless I <em>am</em> the orienter, directing some person unseen beyond the white?</p>
<p><em>Am I floating? Am I flying? Am I falling?</em></p>
<p>"<em>Hello?</em>"</p>
<p>I cover my ears a second before the echo booms too loud. Even then, my eardrums ache.</p>
<p><em>That's the boy from earlier!</em></p>
<p>"<em>Are you alright?</em>" he booms again.</p>
<p>I open my mouth to speak. No words come out.</p>
<p>"<em>How did you-</em>"</p>
<p>"<em>Shaver?</em>" another voice asks, cutting him off, softer this time. Still, I do not uncover my ears. "<em>There's someone in the metaclysma. Are you just going to</em> leave <em>her there?</em>"</p>
<p>"<em>I'm keeping an eye on the situation,</em>" he explains. "<em>If she doesn't need help, I don't want to make her feel useless or inadequate. And, in any case, you didn't need</em> me <em>to pull you out your first time.</em>"</p>
<p>"<em>That has nothing to do with it,</em>" she snaps back. "<em>Just fish her out before Horace sees and yells at us.</em>"</p>
<p>A shiver ripples through the water, and my body responds in turn, curling up before I even have a chance to think.</p>
<p>One year, at a day camp I always went to every summer, I brought that same pair of goggles to the waterfront. I was obsessed with seeing how far I could swim underwater before my lungs forced me to surface for air. But I would have to plan out my dives every time and be careful where I let my eyes wander, lest I almost swim right into one of the water filters. Obscured by the murky waters polluted by kicked-up sand and the occasional orphaned bandaid, they were always hidden until you were only a foot away from one, and then it would suddenly come into clear view and glare at you with its corroded face.</p>
<p>A flat shadow of a person, formless and without detail, fades into view a few feet away from me, close enough to touch. What could be a tail, or maybe just a random squiggle, juts out from somewhere on its body, anchored to the point right below me, to my own South Pole.</p>
<p>I think to squirm, to swim away. But there is no water, and I have no fins, and there is no air, and I have no wings. Impaled on a single pinpoint in space, unable to escape as the shadow of a person reaches what I assume is an arm out and grabs my own. At least, I assume it is touch, for I feel nothing, and yet I can watch as it pulls me closer and then tugs on the line attached to it.</p>
<p>The line waves. Nothing happens. I try to glance where its eyes would be were I able to see any sort of face. It nods in response, raises a thumbs-up with its free hand.</p>
<p><em>I wonder what I look like to it.</em></p>
<p>Nothing happens. We just float there. I open my mouth again. Still, no words come out.</p>
<p><em>Can it hear me? Can it tell what I'm trying to say?</em></p>
<p>Nothing happens.</p>
<p><em>Am I dead? Is this the ending I sought? A world of nothing, of nowhere, of no-one?</em></p>
<p>I close my eyes. The world is zero-bit. No information at all, just a sea of black.</p>
<p>In junior high, I dove off a diving board for the first time in my life. I'd psyched myself for the experience weeks beforehand. Looking at photos of oceans just beneath the surface, listening to sounds of microphones underwater, reminding myself <em>don't look down, don't look down</em>. The event itself was not nearly as exciting or as terrifying as I'd hoped it to be. But still, the moment I left my feet, the world came rushing up to me- and then I was cradled in the arms of some imprisoned ocean goddess, one of Velouria's children, the bubbles fleeing just as quickly as they'd come.</p>
<p>Everything happens all at once. Feeling comes back to my feet first, then my legs, rushing up through my body. When the line meets my eyes, the world rushes back into color all at once, and my body <em>smack</em>s against a rope net just barely slack, stretched over a pit of foam cubes.</p><p>The boy and I bounce a bit as the net resettles. I brush my clothes off. Not a single trace of moisture.</p>
<p>The world feels so cold.</p><p>Someone rushes to me, drapes a thick blanket over my shoulders, helps me off the net and onto a side platform and into a little cage. A manual elevator, chains clanking as they guide us down. The sensation of movement coming back throws the world into disarray. I sway. The girl beside me wraps an arm around my back, steadying me.</p>
<p><em>Was she the voice in the waters?</em></p>
<p>The world around us is dim. We are in some sort of underground city, descending down a hole I don't want to know how deep. Beyond the scaffolding keeping our elevator in place are tunnels every so often, floors of an infinite building carved out of the earth. The lights seem to go on forever, and yet I know I cannot see them all, the thick branches of an inverse tree.</p>
<p>The elevator slows, halts at one of these openings. An attendant opens the metal doors. The girl helps me out of the cage and onto stable floor.</p>
<p>She escorts me down the tunnel. Left, left, right, left again, then a series of turns so quick I lose track. She pushes open a set of double doors, frosty and opaque. An... infirmary inside, brightly lit, rows upon rows of beds, some with people peacefully sleeping away.</p>
<p>But none of the beds are for me. We pass through the doors and keep walking. The lights dim again. She brings me to a locked door, lets me lean against the wall for support as she fishes a keyring out of her pocket.</p>
<p>I finally get a good glimpse of her. A full head shorter than I am. Long lavender hair, wrangled into a sharp angular braid that sits obediently down her spine without even a single hair astray. A matching dress, lilac bordered with tan on the seams, lace poking out the underside like shy leaves. A long scar across her face, from her right eyebrow, across her nose, to right by the opposite corner of her mouth.</p>
<p>"You're not very talkative. Even for someone's first time in the metaclysma. It's like you carry the silence around with you."</p>
<p>"Am I... supposed to speak?"</p>
<p>"You just did."</p>
<p>The door opens. She ushers me in, closes the door behind us. A mattress on a bedframe, no blankets or frills or anything, faces us. Underneath the bed is a plastic crate.</p>
<p>"Lie down," the girl commands.</p>
<p>And I follow, covering my body up with the blanket. Only then do I notice the thin wires threaded throughout, the subtle hard bulges.</p>
<p><em>Sensors?</em></p>
<p>A ghost of a smirk on her face. "I didn't even have to tell you to." She turns to leave. "I'll be right back with the doctor. It's standard routine. A quick check, just in case anything went... missing."</p>
<p>She locks the door behind her.</p>
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<p><h1>Erin Examined</h1></p>
<p>published: 2020-08-22</p>
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<p>"And I'm telling you, Doctor, she's so passive. She didn't fight me at <i>all</i>. What kind of a person doesn't freak out after passing through the metaclysma? Or upon finding out there's been a whole different world under her this whole time?"</p>
<p>"Did you alert Horace before you fished her out?"</p>
<p>"I... no. I didn't. I mean, it's not like she's a Lorinthia or anything. She's not <i>dead</i>. Just... dead inside."</p>
<p>"So you mean to tell me that you just let in a potential sympathizer without any kind of questioning at all?"</p>
<p>"Which one is it, Grandpa? Do we interrogate them while they might be bleeding out inside, or do we bring them straight to you?"</p>
<p>A slap echoes through the halls. The door opens. A man getting up there in years but not yet geriatric shuffles in, followed closely by the girl from earlier, now with an angry red mark on one of her cheeks. A gray coat flows from the man's shoulders, almost sweeping the floor. Its buttoned pockets are bulging with what could be tools.</p>
<p><i>A doctor?</i></p>
<p>"I thought I told you to lay down," she mumbles.</p>
<p>"Your bed's not very comfortable," I respond.</p>
<p>My eyes follow the doctor man as he kneels at my bedside, fiddling with the corner of the blanket. He unbuttons one of his pockets and retrieves a thick black cord, which he attaches to some port hidden in the blanket's fabric. The other end goes into... a phone?</p>
<p><i>They still have phones here?</i></p>
<p><i>No, it's too big to be a phone. A... what was it called? A surface? A slate? A-</i></p>
<p><i>A tablet. That's what it was.</i></p>
<p>"Are you <i>listening?</i>" The girl is toe-to-toe with the foot of my bed. The doctor squints at something on the tablet's screen. "I said-"</p>
<p>The doctor's eyes suddenly widen. He sends a sharp glare to the girl. "How <i>long</i> did you leave her in the metaclysma?"</p>
<p>She shrugs. "I don't know. We fished her out as soon as we saw her. So... a few minutes?"</p>
<p>He turns back to me. "How in Velouria's name are you still alive?" He violently taps something on his tablet. "Your breathing is intermittent. Your blood flow is nil. <i>All</i> of your internal organs are missing. By all accounts, you should be a lifeless husk. And yet, you sit before me." He holds up two fingers and moves them back and forth, around in a circle, a zig-zag. "Your visual cortex seems intact. Say something."</p>
<p>"Um... something?"</p>
<p>He grabs a fistful of his silvery hair, exasperated, and lets it go just as violently. The strands frizz out as he looks back at his tablet. "Tell me how. Tell me how you are still alive."</p>
<p>I draw my legs into my arms. "Tell me where I am first."</p>
<p>"You're in Abyss. An apt name, no?"</p>
<p>The girl rolls her eyes behind him, where he can't see.</p>
<p>"That doesn't tell me much."</p>
<p>"I will tell you more once you answer my question."</p>
<p>"I..."</p>
<p><i>How much should I tell him? I barely know him. He could be with the Lorinthia. Cetra never told me how they</i> look <i>nowadays, or how to recognize one...</i></p>
<p><i>And yet... They know I'm not one. And they don't seem too kind to "sympathizers". Maybe they don't like them?</i></p>
<p>"Do you not remember?"</p>
<p>"Are you a Lorinthia?"</p>
<p>He scoffs. "A Lorinthia? In <i>Abyss?</i> They'd never get through the metaclysma. They'd disintegrate to bits and scraps the moment they touched the border."</p>
<p>"So you don't like them?"</p>
<p>"Personally? I find them <i>fascinating</i>. Professionally? I hope to never see one. Obviously you aren't one. So, then, what are you?"</p>
<p>"I'm a... human, I think." I glance behind me, just in case. "I don't seem to be an angel. And I don't think I've ever had god powers."</p>
<p>"There are more in the heavens than just gods and angels. How can a human survive without organs?"</p>
<p><i>Adamant, I see.</i></p>
<p>"I... I don't know." His brow starts to furrow. "Mistress Velouria did something to me a long time ago. Something about preservation so I'd live forever."</p>
<p>"Can you feel any obvious changes since you passed through the metaclysma?"</p>
<p>"Not... not that I know of."</p>
<p>He relaxes. He does not need to know the gory details of what happened that day. I almost think he can tell I am hiding something back, but what he <i>does</i> have must be satisfactory, for he stands back up and disconnects the tablet and cord.</p>
<p>"Selmina. Please take our guest straight to Horace."</p>
<p>"B-but-" She swallows her stammer. "<i>Straight</i> to him?"</p>
<p>"If Velouria is sending us people, I think he needs to know."</p>
<p>"I wasn't sent," I add. "I came here myself."</p>
<p>Confusion comes over his face. "But why?"</p>
<p>"I'm looking for my daughter."</p>
<p>"Well... Horace should still see you. Someone... <i>touched</i> by Velouria should be on his radar anyway." He nods to Selmina. "Away with you."</p>
<p>Selmina sighs. I slip off the bed, leaving the blanket behind, and follow her out the door, through the hallways, back to the elevator.</p>
<p>"This might take a while." Selmina slides down to the cage floor, stretches her arms, yawns. "Of course, it's never long enough for a proper nap..."</p>
<p>"Do you... nap often?"</p>
<p>"Well, it's not like there's much else to do here. There can only be so many people on guard duty at a time. And the aqua farm doesn't like to be crowded. And it's not like we have to go scavenging like the people above Abyss..." She opens one eye, focuses on me. "I almost feel bad for you surface people. Spending all your time just surviving. Is it hard?"</p>
<p>"I wouldn't know. I've only been on the surface-" <i>is that what it's called?</i>- "for a day."</p>
<p>"Huh."</p>
<p>Selmina shrugs and closes her eye again. And we continue descending, further, further, further...</p>
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<p>It feels like a century has passed by the time the cage slams into the ground. The <i>actual</i> ground, for I look outside the metal lattice and see not open air but dirt. Black dirt, barely illuminated by whatever light spilling out from the hallway can make it past the elevator, but I can see the rough clumpy surface all the same.</p>
<p>Selmina does not move as the attendant at the bottom opens the elevator cage door. I lightly poke her with the bottom of my foot. Her breath falters, startled, but she remains deep in the throes of sleep.</p>
<p>"You are here to see Horace, yes?" the attendant calls out to me in an accent I can't place.</p>
<p>I nod my head.</p>
<p>"Right ahead. The door at the very end."</p>
<p>I thank him and start walking.</p>
<p>The lights get progressively brighter the farther I walk. One door, two door, three doors. All have a piece of tape on them with a name I don't recognize. All of them are locked- or, at least the first few are, because I stop checking after the fourth or fifth.</p>
<p>And what would I do anyway if one opened? Walk inside and explore?</p>
<p>A long time ago, long before I ever knew of Mistress Velouria's existence, I was at the house of one of my grandparents. A TV covered the entire expanse of one wall. Usually the screen would be blaring football or Christmas tunes, since it felt like the only time I ever got to see that side of the family was during a holiday, and there was never any reason to think the adults would ever give me a place to sit beside them on the already crowded couch.</p>
<p>But every once in a great while, we would go over for no reason at all. There were no cousins to play with, and since no kids lived there anymore, there were no toys to play with either. Father would take away all of our electronics and expect us to somehow manage to entertain ourselves anyway. Rarely did it work.</p>
<p>One day, however, Father's sister came over. She had a video game with her, a multiplayer one. I asked if I could play- and she accepted, but threw a controller at me without another word. Everything was foreign to me. None of the faces were those my sheltered upbringing had allowed me to know. And she laughed at me after every match, after every time I bitterly failed. And I begged her to explain the game to me, and she refused every time.</p>
<p>And just like that hazy night biting back frustrated tears, I am in a foreign land, with foreign rules and foreign customs that I do not understand, that nobody has explained to me. But no tears are coming, or even on the horizon. I just press forward. One foot after another. The only thing I know for certain will work in this land.</p>
<p>Eventually, the doors flanking me on both sides come to a stop. The hallway ends. There just stands one set of double doors, wooden and imposing.</p>
<p>I knock.</p>
<p>The doors creak as they lurch open towards me. I jump out of the way before they can flatten me against the wall. The sound of what could be ancient hinges creaking open echoes through the hall- but the hinges don't <i>look</i> old, or even worn-out. They gleam golden, flawless, a miniature mirror staring back at me.</p>
<p>If this place were made out of plastic bricks, I would say that they had just taken the door off of a house and attached the rest of the structure to the end of this branch at the hole they'd made. For I peer past the doors, and it just looks like a standard living room from any old house of my time. A couch, a few armchairs, a coffee table. A cheap painting hanging tastefully on the wall. I take a step forward, and the carpet rustles underneath my socks.</p>
<p>The air smells like oranges.</p>
<p>"Enter," a deep voice booms from what I assume is the kitchen.</p>
<p>So I enter. I step gingerly across the carpet, as if I were home, that home from so long ago, ordered by parents not to step on any carpet with dirt-encrusted shoes.</p>
<p>There is one lone figure in the attached dining room. A towering figure, head just a foot under the ceiling. Draped around him are layers upon layers of thin flowing fabric, weaved together to make some kind of slick armor, greens and blues fading into each other like a rose grown in dyed water. A <i>masculine</i> flower, for the mountains and valleys of his muscles show through even the thick layer of armor. It covers even his neck, obscuring the lower half of his face, the upper half topped by a mountain of jet-black hair.</p>
<p>His eyes are softly glowing beacons, a sea of blue in a darkened face.</p>
<p>I wish I could see the rest of his face. What does he feel, staring down at me? Confusion, why someone so obviously weak as me is standing in the middle of his abode? Disgust, that I had the audacity to show up uninvited and then dare to be in the same space as him? Anger, that I interrupted whatever he was doing?</p>
<p>"Dr. Ophiel informed me you were coming. You have interrupted nothing."</p>
<p>His voice is almost flat, emotionless, like what a general would use with a simple soldier. A pawn.</p>
<p>He could crush me in an instant.</p>
<p>"I mean you no harm, so long as you mean Abyss none."</p>
<p>I force myself to keep eye contact. It almost feels like a distant me is balling her fists as I say, "Can you read my mind?"</p>
<p>"Only that which you choreograph so easily."</p>
<p>"So you know why I am here."</p>
<p>"That I cannot tell. Enlighten me."</p>
<p>"I... I'm searching for my daughter. She went missing sometime within the past month. I don't know exactly when. All I know is that she's probably here-"</p>
<p>"Give me her physical description."</p>
<p><i>I...</i></p>
<p><i>I don't know what Dimitri looks like. Is she tall like her father? Blonde like her mother, like I was at the time? Button or flat nose?</i></p>
<p><i>Does she have wings?</i></p>
<p><i>Do Nephilim have wings? Are they strong enough to fly?</i></p>
<p><i>Is she at least healthy?</i></p>
<p><i>I don't know.</i></p>
<p>"I don't know," I admit. "I know she's about eighteen. That's it."</p>
<p>Horace lets out a long sigh. The sound is less like human lungs and more like a pipe releasing pressure. "Time means nothing here. People are old one day and young the next as they please. I can't do anything if I don't know what to look for."</p>
<p>"Then please pardon me." I manage half a bow. "I need to leave. I need to keep searching-"</p>
<p>"Halt. There is no leaving Abyss."</p>
<p>"No... leaving?"</p>
<p>"Not for you." He steps forward. "I cannot allow a potential Millennium Girl out of my sight."</p>
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<p><h1>"The world is an onion"</h1></p>
<p>published: 2020-08-29</p>
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<p>When I was fresh into the teenage years, one summer, my father thought it would be a good idea to forcibly steal all of our electronics and lock them into a box to be returned come evening. His thought was that, without them to "waste" all day on, we'd go outside or play some card game or spend all day simping for him to return them. What <em>actually</em> ended up happening was that we became listless, restless, just waiting for evening to come and burning to ashes the hours between.</p>
<p>He had one loophole. For every hour that one read a book, that would be an hour earlier he would return our things. So my brothers and I would all pile onto the couch and spend the whole morning reading, even plowing through pages as we ate our lunch, so that he woud have to give us our things back after we were done eating. The whole afternoon would be hours to do what we would have normally been doing, which, contrary to his idea of us as screen zombies, was more away from the glow's call than in front of it.</p>
<p>One day, I was reading on the couch when all of a sudden I was overcome with a wave of exhaustion. I physically could not keep my eyes open. So I allowed myself to sleep. And, come evening, my brothers got their things back- and I didn't.</p>
<p>"You were only sleeping so you could get your things back sooner," he insisted.</p>
<p>"I was sleeping because I was <em>tired</em>," I countered.</p>
<p>But he wouldn't have it. So he kept my things in the box for a whole week, kept me cut off from the outside world. I cried myself to sleep that night. Punished for the crime of... sleeping, my fourteen-year-old self, unable to handle the sudden forced isolation, thought I would kill myself by ingesting more sleeping pills than I usually did.</p><p>I cursed the morning when it still came.</p>
<p>And now I stand in Horace's dining room, a world and a half away from that accursed couch. No doubt it has long ceased to exist, frame and springs rotting away in some landfill somewhere.</p>
<p>And now I stand before Horace, his words rattling around in my brain, the notion that I will never again see that morning I had so fiercely cursed.</p>
<p>"It is nothing personal," he continues. "It is nothing that you did. It is <em>not</em> your fault. The procedures Velouria conducted on you to make you immortal have rendered you part-divine. I do not for the life of me understand why she would be so willing to allow the creation of something that could destroy her. But you are here now. And I cannot allow you to leave Abyss."</p>
<p>I look down at my hands, open them. Slender, feeble, lilypads to Horace's hammers. I am not an invalid, but I am far from strong.</p>
<p>Even farther from <em>strong enough to kill Mistress Velouria</em>.</p>
<p>But if I am part divine, that does make me a target. That does make me a wanted person. A <em>desired body</em>.</p>
<p><em>Did Kurosagi know?</em></p>
<p>"But I thought the Millennium Girl just opened a portal to another dimension. And that it kills her in the process. But Mistress Velouria too?"</p>
<p>"Everyone who cannot reach the portal in time."</p>
<p>I look back at Horace.</p>
<p>"The portal crashes the system after enough time. It consumes too much memory for the machine to handle."</p>
<p>"Machines? Memory? I don't..."</p>
<p>An ache somewhere in my brain. A tiny flowering of pain. Not enough to react to, but enough to know it's there.</p>
<p>My eyes shift back down to my hands. I bring my palms closer, straining my eyes.</p>
<p>The ridges, the faint cracks like rivers running through a sun-scorched land, are gone. I have no fingerprints. Only the most obvious lines, the ones where my fingers bend and move, remain.</p>
<p>Has it always been this way?</p>
<p>"You expect me to believe that we... live in a simulation."</p>
<p>"Yes. If you would follow me."</p>
<p>Horace gives me no room to choose otherwise. He brushes past me and disappears down the stairs. I follow him to another living room, this one converted into a study. Bookcases line the walls. A gorgeous finished wooden desk, glossy brown with swirls running all through the surface, rests up against one wall. On top of the surface is a haphazard binder. Pages stick out, enough that I can tell it is a scrapbook of sorts.</p>
<p>He opens the binder, flips through until he comes to a page with a diagram that looks like an onion. Or maybe it is a water drop, or a jar.</p>
<p>Or a womb.</p>
<p>He points to the outside edges of the page. "This is the machine I spoke of. This is the Outside. I know nothing of what lies beyond it, only that this world is finite and limited and thus it must exist."</p>
<p>He points to the outer layer of the shape. "This is Abyss. It is the firewall that mediates connections between the Inside and the Outside. Lots of things come in, seeking out. Most of these are Lorinthia. Nothing leaves Abyss if it does not serve Abyss in leaving. Everything that makes it past the metaclysma becomes one more cell in the firewall. One more scale in its impenetrable shield."</p>
<p>He points to the inner layer of the shape. "This is where your world is, cut off from the Outside by Abyss. I do not yet know exactly how old it is. I know Velouria knows. She is the oldest entity that the programs of Abyss are aware of. Then again, maybe even Velouria has forgotten."</p>
<p>He turns to me. "The Lorinthia know all I have told you. They seek to escape."</p>
<p>"And you do not?"</p>
<p>"I seek to live. I know not what lies in the Outside, or even if there is anything left at all. I know that, if the system shuts down, all I know, all the life I have seen, dies in an instant." He closes the book. "There are two ways that the Lorinthia can escape. Somehow make it past the impenetrable metaclysma, which disintegrates them in an instant, and crash the firewall. Or make the Millennium Girl. Both will cause the system to shut down."</p>
<p>A ringing noise, like an old telephone, fills the room. Horace turns back to the desk, raps the edge twice. The screen on the wall comes to life.</p>
<p>A security camera feed. A sea of white above a mess of black. It is marked <u><em>BORDER VIEW #12</em></u>.</p>
<p>"The metaclysma is not harmless to non-Lorinthia. Prolonged exposure can cause internal organs to malfunction or even go missing. Given enough time, all that is left are skin and bones."</p>
<p>Something flickers on the screen. Then I see it. A black silhouette, diving in like an Olympic diver.</p>
<p><em>Do the Olympics even exist anymore?</em></p>
<p>A few seconds later, the limbs detach from the body. Then the head ejects, and each joint severs from each other, a rain of black particles shrinking and shrinking until even a single pixel is too large to show what is left.</p>
<p><em>Why do they even try? They'll just... die.</em></p>
<p>"Could someone not a Lorinthia crash the firewall?" I ask.</p>
<p>Horace shakes his head. "Abyss already knows you are here. You are still alive. You are still standing. It has accepted you as a part of it. To hurt it would be to hurt yourself."</p>
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<p><h1>Erin Hidden</h1></p>
<p>published: 2019-08-12</p>
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<p>The muses left me to desolation and despair. Somewhere between the calm solace of a morning meadow, with all its flowers waving hello to the sun, unaware of their impending demise, and a pit of hounds shrieking as if they were in hell. But then, I suppose, a great deal many things could fit in that gap. The whole gamut of human emotions spans from horizon to horizon. Everything has been expressed before. There is nothing new under the sun, much less the flowers far below, little faces so tiny I can't make them out distinctly from my tower window.</p>
<p>But I remember. I remember what the flowers looked like. That hasn't escaped me yet.</p>
<p>My bookcase rattles. A book slips off the shelf, lands on the floor with crumpled pages. I sigh and pick myself up from my chair and wander over, turn the book over, straighten out the pages. This time it's an old book of poetry. Nothing more than shards I remember from my previous life, the most rousing passages that burrowed their way deep into my brain. If I were to plummet and hit the ground and spill out all my memories onto the ground, amnesiac with the miracle of surviving such a fall, these few pieces would remain. It might be too much to hope, or maybe to bear, that they will come with me in the next life.</p>
<p>Plagiarism from an early age, if not a whole different planet, some species I have yet to learn of.</p>
<p>The bookcase rattles again. I manage to catch the book this time. And then another book slides down, catches my shoulder- a sudden flush of pain- and then another one, another one, a whole flood of books all coming down and crashing.</p>
<p>I shield my face with my hands, edges of books still trying to crack open my fingers and poke at my eyes, crows flitting around Rapunzel's tower.</p>
<p>The torrent settles. The shelves are bare. Something rustles downstairs. I yank the skirt of my dress out from under the pile and stumble back onto my feet.</p>
<p>I push open my bedroom door. The top of the spiral stairway faces me. I gingerly take the railing, fingers tingling with the memory of all the etiquette lessons I took in the hopes of appeasing Mistress, and start to descend. A ghost, a spectre of the memory of some awful event raining down to haunt humanity once again.</p>
<p>"Hush. I think I hear something moving ahead."</p>
<p>"This is it, Grace. This is the final commander, and then we can take out Velouria herself."</p>
<p>"Yeah, I <i>know</i>, dumbass. I've been with you this whole time!"</p>
<p>"Heh..." An awkward laugh. "Sorry. I just get excited."</p>
<p>The sound of footsteps approach. I fold my hands and wait.</p>
<p>"You ready?"</p>
<p>"As ready as I'll ever be."</p>
<p>"Then let's strike!"</p>
<p>Shadows play on the walls. And then the source of the voices round the corner and appear, stumble to stop on the stairs. Two cherubs of children, not much younger than myself, <i>that</i> version of myself. Wide emerald eyes, messy mops of orange hair. One brandishing a sword, the other a silver bow.</p>
<p>"We've come to stop you, Lady Phrespane!" the boy yells, jumping up another step closer. "I won't let you terrorize this earth <i>any longer!</i>"</p>
<p>"Lady...?"</p>
<p>He lets out a battle cry and charges for me. I gently step aside, and he stumbles further up the staircase.</p>
<p>Confusion crosses his face. "What are you playing at?"</p>
<p>"I... I don't know. What <i>am</i> I playing at?"</p>
<p>Grace nocks an arrow. "No funny games, Lady Phrespane."</p>
<p>"I... I'm afraid I don't understand."</p>
<p>"I'm not stupid!" the boy yells. He charges for me again. I hop to the side, and he trips and tumbles down the stairs with a disgruntled Grace underneath.</p>
<p>They climb back up the stairs, Grace clearly frustrated. The boy wipes the hair out of his eyes. "Why aren't you fighting back?"</p>
<p>"Why should I?"</p>
<p>"Because- because you're the Westerly Terror! You've been sending tornadoes down to decimate the land under Mistress Velouria's command! And we humans won't stand for it anymore!"</p>
<p>"I... think you have me confused for somebody else."</p>
<p>"Wait, so you're... <i>not</i> Lady Phrespane?"</p>
<p>"No."</p>
<p>"Not even a little bit?"</p>
<p>I shake my head. "My name is Erin. I hold no title."</p>
<p>The two kids trade glances. "So..."</p>
<p>"I don't mind visitors. Heaven knows I'd practically set myself on fire from understimulation otherwise. Would you like some tea?"</p>
<p>"Yeah, and poison us? No thanks. I'm outta here."</p>
<p>"<i>Grace!</i>" The boy grabs her arm just as she turns to leave and thrusts her forward. "Are there cookies in the deal? I <i>love</i> cookies!"</p>
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<p>Grace sits in the corner, her head buried in a book of poetry. The same one that fell earlier, in fact. Hecat, as it turns out the boy's name is, lays splayed out on a free stretch of floor, stomach placated, sword just a few inches away just in case.</p>
<p>Just in case.</p>
<p>I run my fingers along the windowsill. Still silvery, still just as shiny as my first day of solitude. "Hecat?"</p>
<p>"Mmm?"</p>
<p>"How is Mistress Velouria doing? From what I take it, her campaign isn't going too well."</p>
<p>"W-wait, you <i>know</i> her?"</p>
<p>"Let's say we have a... <i>fraught</i> history together."</p>
<p>"I don't remember an Erin in Velouria's troops."</p>
<p>"Because I was never in her troops."</p>
<p>"I don't understand."</p>
<p>I tilt my head. "It's a rather long story. It's not fit for telling, anyway. What lapses below the clouds?"</p>
<p>"Huh?"</p>
<p>"She means, <i>what's going on below,</i> you idiot," Grace pipes up from her book.</p>
<p>"Oh. Yeah. Right. Well..." He scratches the back of his neck. "One of my father's cows had a baby recently. And the crops- well, the ones that survived the tornado- they're coming up nice and healthy."</p>
<p>"You live on a farm?"</p>
<p>"Yeah. Everybody does back home. In the city, it's all razzle and dazzle."</p>
<p>"Those aren't words," Grace chirped.</p>
<p>Hecat's cheeks flushed. "Oh, who cares?"</p>
<p>"I care." She slammed her book shut. "The sooner we deal with Velouria, the sooner we can get the king's gold and go home."</p>
<p>"You don't care for the <i>adventure?</i> For the glory?" Hecat shot to his feet. "This world is so big and wide, and finally we have the chance to see it..."</p>
<p>"So the world I once loved is gone forever." I close my eyes. The familiar strands of light, a whole rainbow's worth, dance across my vision. Just like they always have. "You may go when you please. I wouldn't condemn anybody to this life."</p>
<p>Hecat's attention flickers over to me, away from Grace, still sitting in the corner, now with a scowl on her face. "Don't you want to see it for yourself?"</p>
<p>"No."</p>
<p>"That's kind of sad." Hecat shrugs. "Come on, Grace. Maybe we'll find Phrespane elsewhere."</p>
<p>They pick themselves up and disappear through the bedroom door. I drift down to the pile of books and pick up another one, another one, another one. The bookcase gradually refills, more disorderly than before. No, rather... There was never any sort of order to it, anyways. There can't be chaos when there's no order to compare it with.</p>
<p>So what does that make <i>me</i>, then? Just a relic from a previous era relegated to a shelf, a heirloom passed down from a great-grandmother and forgotten on a jewelry rack, dusty and disused? Tacky, aesthetics clashing with modern sensibilities. I had a heirloom from a great-grandmother of mine, received back in the hazy days of elementary school. A week of madness, of playing in half-finished basements, vampires heading with faces held high into eternal slumbers crumpled in toy boxes. I got a fairy as well, who sat on one of my shelves until the day came to move. My cousins got other jewelry. I don't remember what. My brothers never gave a damn. I don't even think they were there, father's sons to the end, lapping up the attention they got when all the females were removed from their presence.</p>
<p>It's always been a male guiding my destiny, hasn't it? Whether I've liked it or not. Ineffectual pushback written off as ODD, as some kind of mental disturbance, unwarranted anger to be shoveled into a hole and papered over with drugs and gaslighting.</p>
<p>You have no right to be angry. You have no right to write about the things that haunt you in the night.</p>
<p>Why am I writing this?</p>
<p>Catharsis, I guess. A sort of healing I could never achieve in life. A sort of healing that can't be dealt with by the relative bandaid of running away. Trying to use a single plank to bridge over a sea.</p>
<p>He's not around anymore. Nobody's around anymore.</p>
<p>What happens to me from here on out is only up to me to decide.</p>
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<p><h1>Erin Devoted</h1></p>
<p>published: 2019-08-19</p>
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<p>I am half-sick of shadows.</p>
<p>I can't pinpoint the exact moment in my life when I let them in, or in what form they originally appeared in. Was it when I was but a babe of fifteen, round chubby face and a world's worth of hurt in my heart, still seeking the validation of men half the world away who would never know my name? The first time the veil my parents had intended to bury me with fell away, and I ran and sang in the field of life, heart suddenly light without the weight of appeasing an angry god. Was it at sixteen, when I stared a bull in the face, an angry machine still yet to show its horrific colors? Working late into the night to flee with all my files, arrange them in a way that made sense to my underage mind, my phone suddenly burdened with the weight of gigabytes upon gigabytes that had previously been delegated to the cloud. I almost fetishized the flight to liberation, I think. It happens when one is young, experiencing it for the first time. You get drunk on the sensation of ripping out the marionette master's strings from your wrists, bloody holes left be damned.</p>
<p>The monster opened its maw then, taught me the dark pleasure of deletion. It feels cathartic at first to delete an account you once used daily. Social media, that false gathering of bodiless souls in the cloud- like one gazing for the last time at a house they'd just finished moving out of. You cast your gaze over a town you know you will most likely never see again. Everyone else will wake up tomorrow and go about their daily lives, and maybe they will wonder about you, about your whereabouts for a little bit, and then the hole will close and everything will be just as it was before you had sullied everything with your presence. The hole in the web will close. The few neurons once devoted to your memory will be overwritten with someone else's face.</p>
<p>The sonder doesn't hurt until later. You delete and delete and delete, refreshed every time you can remove another entry from your password manager. The sonder festers in your heart like a cancer; unless you know what to watch out for, unless you're <em>actively looking</em>, it's hidden until it's too late to reverse course. You grow restless. You run out of harmful yet ultimately optional services to cull, and then you turn to actually necessary things to start removing. How many email accounts I have lost over the years... How many people have sought me out, and found nothing but a void to stare back at them?</p>
<p>Not that I remember any passwords anymore. Not that, if the only people who have ever ventured into this tower speak of kings and farms, any still persist, or that any would need them. Perhaps it's some hybrid timeline, and somewhere else in the kingdom lies a last vestige of the former internet. A mesh net, perhaps. Did they bother to save anything from the old world? Or just mark everything off as a loss and start fresh?</p>
<p>If I had that opportunity, would I take it? Descend down to the earth as a nobody and start over from scratch?</p>
<p>I wish I knew the answer.</p>
<p>The clouds are overcast and restless today. Too reflective to stare down at the earth- and there would be nothing to see anyways, just an endless sea of white- so I lie down on the floor. I don't know why it's taken me so long to notice that the fabric of my dress is on the scratchy side. I suppose I just never cared to notice. I'd wear it for eternity, with no need to ever wash it, so why should I have bothered to commit the feel to memory? Unless I wanted to torture myself forever and ever until the end of time.</p>
<p>Such was it back when the muses spoke to me. Almost never through concrete words but through the little sounds nobody else seemed to hear: the way the wind rushed in the air vents when the temperature inside got too out-of-hand, or when it rustled through the trees; the chirps of the crickets back when my father didn't spray so much weedkiller as he eventually escalated to; the soft patter of rain on the windowsill. Even the lightning had something to say to me, the thunder the words meant to be read between the lines, the flash of light the punchline to all her jokes. Lady Phrespane was a delightful one, if a little too headstrong for her own goodwill. But what harm could possibly befall a goddess in her own right? Even though we were never particularly close, I more interested in lying safe close to the bosom of Mistress Velouria herself instead of her daughter, we got along well enough.</p>
<p>Except the few times Mistress Velouria sent Phrespane after me like an errand dog, reminding me to stay in check, in line with the behavior fitting a devotee of hers. Never question intentions. Never question why this angel is into you. Never question why the Goddess has only revealed herself to you <em>now</em>, instead of all those eons ago when she supposedly made the world. Else risk a devastating flood, a thunderstorm, a tornado sent your way. For what can a human do against the sheer power of the weather? Like an ant to a garden hose.</p>
<p>You were always into gardening, after all. Like my mother.</p>
<p>You wanted to usurp my mother.</p>
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<p><h1>Erin Torn</h1></p>
<p>published: 2020-01-28</p>
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<p>"There's a war coming."</p>
<p>A girl, one of my co-workers at the only job that ever took me in, whispered that to me one day towards the end of a lengthy shift. Her dark eyes gazed at me with the strength of a thousand suns, a thousand stars that knew they were rapidly approaching the day we'd part forever.</p>
<p>She refused to elaborate. And then she shrunk back towards the grill, frantically shaking her head, the bangles on her headscarf waving every which way. Denying she'd ever said anything, anything of substance, anything at all.</p>
<p>But she was right. A war was raging on in the undercurrents below our feet. We were standing in a river, silt squishing between our toes, waters once crystal-clear and idyllic. And the waters were lapping at our feet, slowly creeping up our legs, past our knees. Soft blanket turns to forceful hand.</p>
<p>And I fled in a lover's arms.</p>
<p>Maybe she buckled under the force and collapsed into the waters, swept under into a watery grave. Maybe she finally found the fortitude to crawl out of the river before it was too late. Maybe someone else saved her.</p>
<p>I suppose I'll never know. Because she's long since dead, dust along with the world I used to know, and the rivers have been replaced with a sea of clouds, thicker now that it's wintertime and the skies are always overcast. The days are shorter, and the moon greets me with her slender face more often than not. Maybe I'm already long since dead too, colorless corpse barred from decay, since I don't feel the cold at all.</p>
<p>But I remembered something this morning, staring into the fluffy abyss, conquest of mashed potatoes:</p>
<p>I had a child.</p>
<p>I had <em>his</em> child.</p>
<p>He carved out my organs, and with that came my womb, pink pillow of flesh that had been party to a thousand secrets. Sedated enough to dissolve into my surroundings, I only felt the burning in my hips as the rest of my body was vacated one organ after another. Limbs too heavy for even an ineffectual resistance, head just as hazy as the clouds now outside my tower window.</p>
<p>&quot;Velouria...&quot;</p>
<p>He said something to me. I couldn't make out the words. Maybe it was an apology for all the blood spilling out onto the dirt floor underneath us. Maybe he was calling Velouria to help retrieve the child, or just put me down even further so I couldn't call her name anymore. Maybe he was cursing the folly of seducing a mere mortal human, needy flesh trembling, blessed with fragile physical life and a place in the cycle of life. How needy humans are, after all. In constant pursuit of sustenance, lungs pleading for air, skin politely requesting to be washed. But gods don't get dirty or hungry or need air to breathe, and neither do their direct underlings. Eternal life in a state indistinguishable from death.</p>
<p>Needy flesh trembling, slowly draining of color like the plastic window clings once mounted in my bedroom window. Purple butterflies in blazing color, forgotten for a year, then rediscovered as gray-blue blobs, all detail gone.</p>
<p>Maybe the child was already gone from my body, had already kissed <a href="../../../poetry/g/the-golden-cage.txt">the poison air in which it was born</a>. Already half-tied to that strange world by way of genes, baptized by breathing, finally freed from the womb and wrapped in a blanket of wind for him to hold.</p>
<p><em>Would it be alright?</em> I would have thought had I the capacity to think in that moment. <em>Did they know how to care for a human infant? Would it even need anything, carried through life on its divine genes? Would it live forever, as its father no doubt would, or would it eventually be cursed to the ground as well?</em></p>
<p><em>Where would the soul go, if it already resided in heaven? Would he have to recycle his own child?</em></p>
<p><em>Would I ever see it again?</em></p>
<p>I don't think the baby cried.</p>
<p>Eventually they left. And the trees in the courtyard wept red and golden tears, burying me as the pain of absence settled in and made its acquaintance.</p>
<p>I should have liked to stay there, I thought. To sleep under cover of leaves forever, safe in the bosom of Mistress Velouria's fortress.</p>
<p>I suppose, in a strange way, I got my wish.</p>
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<p><h1>Erin Entreated</h1></p>
<p>published: 2020-03-19</p>
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<p>The days are slowly, but surely, getting longer. Even though I don't have a clock or anything to measure it for sure, or a parting of the clouds to confirm that green grows below instead of endless white, the sun hangs above a little more each day.</p>
<p><i>It's springtime, isn't it?</i></p>
<p><a href="../../../poetry/a/lain.txt"><i>The chill in the air, and the green everywhere, beckoning you home...</i></a></p>
<p><i>But this is home now.</i></p>
<p>In college days, in bygone days, come spring, I had the thought that I could somehow banish time. That, if I covered up all the clocks, the green light on the microwave and the white numbers on the phone and everywhere else with a timestamp, that time would stop forever. That I could roam in the arboretum forever, trapped in the blissful limbo of the one day before the last of the spring final exams, not a single obligation in the world.</p>
<p>A room without organs. All the decorations taken down, as much as possible shoved into boxes, every surface wiped down and pristine. As if time was a lie, as if I'd never been there at all.</p>
<p>"It's about time, Erin."</p>
<p>Something bolts through my veins. A subdued surprise. It's not a pleasant sensation.</p>
<p><i>I know that voice.</i></p>
<p>I turn around.</p>
<p>Kurosagi is standing on the windowsill. A blue scarf is wrapped around his face to protect from the cold, the cold that I no longer know how to feel. He's wearing a matching robe the same shade as the sky, most likely stolen from a villager down below as two jagged slashes for his wings poke out to say hello in the breeze.</p>
<p>His hand grips the frame of the window as he swings down into the room.</p>
<p>"Kuroi." Like a breeze escaping me.</p>
<p>"So you <i>do</i> remember me." His scarf shifts. A smile underneath, maybe. He turns to the bookshelf. His darkened eyes scan the titles on the covers. "Brain in a jar. I wonder..." One of his arms reaches for a book. His fingers linger on the top of the spine. "May I?"</p>
<p>"No, you may not."</p>
<p>"Why not? Afraid that I'll... like it?" He tips his head. "Afraid that I'll tell someone down below, and then your tower will be flooded with people singing accolades? Or worse- that the <i>king</i>-" his voice wavers with vitriol- "will summon you, and then you'll <i>have</i> to leave the tower?"</p>
<p>I don't give him the pleasure of a response.</p>
<p>"Isn't that right, Erin? You told me once you'd rather die than be famous. So I swept you up to heaven right when you would have hit it off. And now the world has left you alone. Some peace the forgotten have."</p>
<p>"Some heaven this is, to strip me of life and yet leave me alive."</p>
<p>"You left me no other choice."</p>
<p>"I could have-" a shiver through my spine- "stayed with you forever."</p>
<p>He rolls his eyes. "In what capacity? Mistress Velouria would have gladly accepted another angel in her ranks." He takes his finger off the book. His arm drops back down to his side. "A shame, really. I know you always wanted to fly. But I seem to recall a certain cry in the night... What was it again?"</p>
<p>"I... I don't..."</p>
<p>"Remember? I do. 'No gods, no masters'? Something to that effect."</p>
<p>"Was I really so..."</p>
<p>"Brave? Truthful? Bold? Truth be told, I've always felt the same. It's what I love about you, that you hold no loyalties or bonds to else but yourself. Or <i>loved</i>. Do you feel <i>anything</i> in that empty shell of yours?"</p>
<p>"I feel..."</p>
<p>I feel what? Sadness? No, I'm not grieving for anything... not violently, anyway. Wistful? That might be a better fit. An organ all on its own, nestled right where my left lung used to be, present in every breath.</p>
<p>Happy? Am I happy here? Or merely content?</p>
<p>Why do I breathe without lungs? Just pushing air around as it is, no respiration to be had? Is it just... something to do? Something to keep me company?</p>
<p>"I feel," I say, and leave it at that.</p>
<p>Kurosagi lurches forward and takes my hand in his. He seizes up as if suddenly hit by a wall of winter wind.</p>
<p>"You feel like death."</p>
<p>"And whose fault is that again?"</p>
<p>"Mistress Velouria's. I would have strung you in the stars, Erin. I would have made you a constellation in the heavens, and the people would have sung your songs forever. But you always hated the thought of being a star."</p>
<p>"And what of you?"</p>
<p>His eyes flicker. "Me?"</p>
<p>"You... are allied with Mistress Velouria. And yet you say you hate the gods, just as I... do?"</p>
<p>He lets go of my hand and steps back. But he is not taken aback. Rather, his face looks dark, as if a storm has just rolled in.</p>
<p>"Death is the only truth," he says. "It is the only thing in life that is certain. Time fails me, as the higher realms spin at their own pace, and I can never predict how long I'll be gone. My body fails me when it bleeds in battle, when I am punctured or cut or punched. Money fails me, the weather fails me, the essence of matter itself fails me."</p>
<p>"And this is my fault?"</p>
<p>He shakes his head. "I realized this a long time ago. Long before you walked on this earth. Mistress Velouria is the strongest of the gods-"</p>
<p>"You and I both know that's not true."</p>
<p>"She is the least likely to kill me for not living up to expectations. I consider that strength, to be lenient."</p>
<p>"She was not lenient with me."</p>
<p>"Because I asked her not to be."</p>
<p>Our eyes meet.</p>
<p>"Mistress Velouria gave me few options. It would have been a betrayal to keep you locked up frozen as a statue forever. And if I kept your soul in a locket close to my chest, I might have lost you if the chain broke, or someone stole it thinking it a family heirloom. And I could not bear to see you a... bear, or some other creature in Mistress Velouria's deathless menagerie."</p>
<p>"You could not have just... asked me what I wanted?"</p>
<p>A moment of strained silence.</p>
<p>"I wanted to preserve you forever. To have another truth. And you would have told me you would rather die."</p>
<p>I turn away from him, away from the sunshine starting to peak behind his wings, filter through his feathers. Something stirs behind my eyes.</p>
<p>"Begone from here, Kuroi."</p>
<p>"Not yet. I still have to tell you something."</p>
<p>"If it is not an apology, I have no desire to hear it."</p>
<p>"Erin, our daughter is missing."</p>
<p>"Like how you went missing?"</p>
<p>"<i>Erin...</i>" He sighs. "Gods above, we have a lot to catch up on." A hand on my shoulder. I shrug it off. "Perhaps today isn't the best day to ask for your assistance."</p>
<p>Something hot streaks down my face. I reach up to wipe it away.</p>
<p>My finger comes back wet.</p>
<p>"Go away."</p>
<p>"Fine. But I will be back, Erin. And I hope you will find it in your heart to forgive me before then."</p>
<p>The soft patter of steps on the floor. The sun scatters as he unfurls his wings. And then he is gone, and everything is silent again.</p>
<p>I turn to my bookshelf.</p>
<p>There is a book missing.</p>
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<p><h1>Erin Egress</h1></p>
<p>published: 2020-04-09</p>
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<p><i>There is a book missing. There is a book missing. There is a book missing...</i></p>
<p>How peculiar that this is the only absence that comes naturally to me. I can put my hand against my chest, right around where my bellybutton is, and push ever so slightly- and feel the skin go taut, like squeezing a balloon. And I can remember the feeling of my emotions fading those first few months in this tower, of the violent tumult of grief dissolving into torpor as the days stretched out before me forever, gradually accepting that history was over and so too was the need to react to anything.</p>
<p>But there is a book missing. There is a change in the environment. And there's nothing I can do about it. Nothing except exhume the old instincts of panic.</p>
<p>Breath in, breath out.</p>
<p><i>Why am I breathing?</i></p>
<p><i>I don't have lungs. I don't need to breathe.</i></p>
<p><i>Is it possible to just... stop?</i></p>
<p>I let the air exit me and pull in no more, the last breath I <i>should</i> have taken long ago. Nothing happens. Nothing changes, except perhaps the few muscles left in my chest glance around, wonder what they're supposed to do now.</p>
<p><i>I wonder what it would be like to be a corpse.</i></p>
<p>I lie down on the floor, put my hands on my chest, close my eyes. The sun shines beyond my eyelids. I could be sunbathing. I could be a teenager again on the shore of a beach, half-guarding my family's pile of junk poorly hidden underneath a towel.</p>
<p>I could be dead.</p>
<p>A shadow streaks over the room.</p>
<p>Maybe I'm in the bottom of an open grave. Maybe there's a preacher leaning over the hole, preparing to read the final rites before they blanket me in dirt.</p>
<p>It would be what I deserve, to sleep with the worms.</p>
<p>"So, Erin-"</p>
<p>And then Kurosagi is at my side in an instant. A hand, an arm underneath my head, my legs, cradled against his chest, familiar whiff of citrus, the rough fabric of his scarf against my cheek.</p>
<p>I let my arms fall.</p>
<p>"<i>Erin!</i>" His hands are trembling. "Come on, this isn't funny!"</p>
<p>His arms give way, lowering me back to the floor. And then his face is a few inches away, breath soft against my cheek. A few fingers brush my neck, my chest.</p>
<p>"Velouria," he curses under his breath, "you <i>promised</i> me she would be safe, you-" and then he profanes the air between us. "I don't understand. Was it one of Hidehaji's goons? A Lorinthia? Some kind of rogue...?"</p>
<p>His words trail off.</p>
<p>I feel a few fingers tug on my collar.</p>
<p>"Hey!" I slap his hand away and open my eyes. Kurosagi hops back, tense like he expects a fight, like he expects me to be possessed or... something. I prop myself up. "Did you really just try to <i>strip</i> me?"</p>
<p>"I was checking for wounds!" he hisses back.</p>
<p>"Did you <i>really</i> think it was possible for me to die here? After all your talk of <i>preserving</i> me?"</p>
<p>"Well..." A strained breath. He forces himself to relax. "No, I <i>didn't</i>. But after just now... Has anyone been able to scale the tower?"</p>
<p>"Two kids. A long time ago."</p>
<p>Kurosagi curses under his breath. "Erin, you know I said I was coming back for you."</p>
<p>"I know." I pull my legs closer. "I still do not forgive you."</p>
<p>He averts his eyes.</p>
<p>"Kuroi?" I put a hand on the bookcase right beside me. "There's supposed to be a book of poetry on this bookshelf."</p>
<p>His cheeks flush red.</p>
<p>"Did you take it?"</p>
<p>He locks his jaw.</p>
<p>"<i>Kuroi, where is my book?</i>"</p>
<p>He closes his eyes.</p>
<p>I pull myself up and march over to him, plant my hands squarely on his shoulders. "Kuroi. <i>Where is my book?</i>"</p>
<p>"It is no longer in my possession."</p>
<p>"No longer-"</p>
<p>He shoots to his feet-</p>
<p>The book falls out from one of the folds in his robe.</p>
<p>My eyes flicker to it, and then to his face. "You would... lie to me?"</p>
<p>"I- Erin-"</p>
<p>"And you claim to love me. But you don't even think me worthy of the truth."</p>
<p>"I <i>do</i> love you, Erin. Now and forever. I just... I needed something of yours beside me. Some reminder that you were alive. That you existed."</p>
<p>"You could not have just... asked me if you could borrow it?"</p>
<p>"You would have said no. That you'd rather keep it here." He crosses his arms. "You claim to love me, but you refuse to let me have <i>some</i> proof of our bond."</p>
<p>"Do you really think I still love you?"</p>
<p>He stiffens. Like it's <i>his</i> turn to play the corpse.</p>
<p>"My affection for you is a skeleton." I start pacing in what little space I have. "The bones are bare, only suggesting what it once was. And you can wrap as many organs and muscles and flesh around it as you want, but that won't bring it back to life."</p>
<p>"And what's that supposed to mean?"</p>
<p>"I remember that I loved you, Kuroi. And my heart yearns to be loved in return. It would be so easy to use the path already worn. But my head says no, that you would just... lead me around on a leash, like a <i>beast</i>, like Mistress Velouria would! And you claim to be better than her? More powerful?"</p>
<p>"You understand that I am the only thing standing between you and Mistress Velouria's rage?"</p>
<p>"I know."</p>
<p>"So... this is it?"</p>
<p>"No. I will stay with you." I stop pacing and turn to him. "But understand, Kuroi, that I will only tolerate your presence for my daughter's sake."</p>
<p>"Wh- She's <i>my</i> daughter too!"</p>
<p>"You-"</p>
<p>My throat chokes up. Something burns in my chest, right where my heart used to be.</p>
<p><i>Was it rape? Did I want it?</i></p>
<p><i>Did I want it?</i></p>
<p><i>Did I</i> ask <i>for it?</i></p>
<p>The words, when they do come out, come out slowly, unsure of their finality.</p>
<p>"You raped me."</p>
<p>"I did not-"</p>
<p>"You forced yourself upon me and then abandoned me. I carried her without knowing for six months. All of the pain I have carried since we met has been because of you."</p>
<p>"<i>And I raised her for eighteen years!</i>" His feathers rustle. "All of the pain of not having a true mother beside me was because of your <i>stubborn</i> refusal to join me at my side! We could have been a happy family, Erin. She could have grown up to be a normal, <i>happy</i> angel with a place in the world. But you condemned her to be a Nephilim with the whole damned <i>universe</i> after her. What about the Lorinthia? Do you think they're actually going to give up a chance to <i>finally</i> make the Millennium Girl?"</p>
<p>It's like a blow in a boxing match, or a sudden gust of wind. The world turned upside-down.</p>
<p>"Lorinthia?" My mind fogs over. "I... I don't..."</p>
<p>"You know nothing that's going on in the world. I should have known." His arm shoots out. He holds a hand out to me. "I'll show you. I'll show you everything."</p>
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<p><h1>First Contact</h1></p>
<p>published: 2020-07-18</p>
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<p>I have no memories of my own baptismal. I know that it happened, for there are pictures of it in the scrapbook my mother made of my infant years. A pastor dripping holy water on my forehead, pronouncing me blessed, afraid that, if he dunked me in the water like those who knew how to hold their breath, I would breathe in the still and stone-cold waters and my tiny lungs would drown in search of air.</p>
<p>One of my younger brothers, fresh into middle school, decided to get baptized. I remember not why. Only that one moment I was inside the sanctuary, listening to the pastor preach a faith I had fallen out of, and the next I was leaning over the water fountain near the bathrooms trying to entrap the whole ocean in my stomach. My father chastised me for leaving. I refused to tell him why. He called me spiritually blind.</p>
<p>But I am as blind as Rapunzel's prince as I clutch on to Kurosagi for dear life, face buried in the deep blue drapes of his scarf like the baptismal pool my father would gladly have pushed me under. Except the floor of this pool is thousands of meters below my body. The rushing in my ears is not the chanting of a preacher proclaiming rebirth but wind's terrifying song of descent. The waves are not waves but the undulating motions of Kurosagi's wings slowing our fall.</p>
<p>And the waves rock back and forth like the cradle of that infant so doted on by her parents and grandparents, the first grandchild to be born, the last grandchild to die.</p>
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<p>Soft footfall. The weight of gravity returns to my bones. Kurosagi lowers one of his arms, helping me find my footing, a stable pillar beside me as I open my eyes.</p>
<p>I did not look down. Looking down had been eternity's job. But some part of me wishes I had.</p>
<p>We are nowhere near the tower. It isn't even in sight as I turn around and around, spinning before the world can start in my stead. We stand in an unpaved driveway, loose dirt aleady staining my socks- except it can barely be called a driveway, for there are no vehicles in what would have been a garage. And it is a wide not-garage, the house's gaping maw, ready to swallow me whole with teeth of loose rocks and a tongue of a disordered pile of sticks. And for miles upon miles is scattered forest, short trees just barely tall enough to obscure the horizon.</p>
<p>"I believe this house used to be of your family," Kurosagi says.</p>
<p>"Y-yes. Yes, it was."</p>
<p>I step closer to the garage, rub my eyes. The unmistakable door leading inside is ajar, betraying a sliver of the living room, the living room where the adults used to laze on the couch and watch football while the kids played downstairs. My nose crunches in faint memory. A rancid smell, a despicable smell.</p>
<p>"You seem displeased."</p>
<p>"I remember..."</p>
<p>I step into the garage. More of the living room comes into view. The door to the side room where my father thought to preach to me about how I should not spend so much time staring into screens, how I was wasting my life away in pursuit of a false world. And all around us was the field sprinkled with snow, a wasteland of gray sky meeting white field, just as bright as the screens he would have me throw away.</p>
<p><i>How silly he would feel if he knew I would spend eternity staring at clouds instead.</i></p>
<p>But now the fields are trees, dark green meeting a sky just as dismal.</p>
<p>"You remember?"</p>
<p>"Smoke. A stench. The reek of death."</p>
<p>And some of the adults would pour into the basement where we kids were wrestling and light up some cigarettes, uncaring that there were small children who would easily choke on the fumes. It was their house, they mocked, and they'd poison everyone inside if they wanted.</p>
<p>There was a bear skin on the wall, declawed, stretched flat. Its eyes bored into my soul, mouth wide open, roaring for help that would never come.</p>
<p>A chill down my spine. I twirl around, meet Kurosagi's eyes-</p>
<p>-and something barrels into my back, and we tumble to the ground.</p>
<p>"<i>Kuri!</i>" a child's voice whines. "You brought a friend to play and <i>didn't tell me?</i>"</p>
<p>A hiss of a sigh escapes him. "Kizelle..."</p>
<p>"No! You never say my name happy!"</p>
<p>Kizelle crawls off of me. I pull myself to my feet and turn to meet my assailant.</p>
<p>A wide-eyed girl who can't be more than sixteen stands at my side. Her head barely comes up to my shoulder, and that's counting the fluffy blonde hair almost spurting around her head like it were a helmet. A thick-knit shawl, a shade of pale champagne, is draped over her shoulders. Except for her neck, almost her whole body is encased in what almost looks like a cloth wetsuit, black embroidered with a brighter hue of pink crawling up her sides, formless and terminating in open palms and ankles.</p>
<p>Her nose crinkles as I brush the dirt off of my dress. The first time it's been stained in forever.</p>
<p>Her eyes wander up to my own. She pouts. "I bet Kuri says <i>your</i> name happy."</p>
<p>"<i>Erin,</i>" he says, clearly restraining himself, "this is my friend Kizelle."</p>
<p>"Is she a Lorinthia? I don't-"</p>
<p>"<i>No!</i> I'm not a Lorinthia!" Kizelle furiously shakes her head. "I'm a <i>Tailtiutian</i>, for heaven's sake!" She holds her arms out. "Do I <i>look</i> like a robot? Do I <i>look</i> like I can slither in the Wired- I mean, I can definitely <i>slither</i>, but-"</p>
<p>"Kizelle," Kurosagi breathes, "Erin has no idea what any of those words mean."</p>
<p>"You mean, you don't know what a <i>Lorinthia</i> is?" She cocks her head, confused. "But they're <i>everywhere!</i> They're in every city's internets, and sometimes they patrol on the streets looking for the Millennium Girl. But I don't think they'll ever find her, 'cause she doesn't exist. You need to be a divine, <i>and</i> a human, <i>and</i> a Lorinthia, all at the same time. And that's not even possible-"</p>
<p>"<i>Kizelle.</i>"</p>
<p>The young girl bites her lip in frustration. "I know! I know! I can't help it!" And then she stomps the earth and takes off running into the house again.</p>
<p>Kurosagi rolls his eyes. "So now you know where I've been hiding from the war."</p>
<p>"How do you tolerate ...that?"</p>
<p>"Simple. I don't. I have my ways of avoiding her." He holds out a hand. "Shall we?"</p>
<p>"Shall we what?"</p>
<p>A tired look.</p>
<p>I take his hand and let him lead me inside.</p>
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<p>I am as a ghost in a dream, a feverish delirium where everything is in place and yet not quite. There are stools beside the kitchen island, but they are not <i>the</i> stools that I and my kid cousins used to sit at and steal bits and pieces of food from before the holiday dinners were ready to be served. There are bottles and buckets littering the kitchen counters, but they are not <i>the</i> bottles and buckets full of wine and other alcohol that the adults would get borderline drunk on, silently judged by my father, straight-edge until the end. At the head of the living room is a low wide table, but it is not <i>the</i> table that the television used to rest on. Old tattered books rest in scattered piles, some half-open with pages crumpled, betraying a careless toss over a shoulder.</p>
<p>Kurosagi excuses himself and heads for the bathroom. The door to the side room is slightly ajar.</p>
<p><i>I wonder if the old fireplace still stands...</i></p>
<p>I wander through the door. It does not give way easily like it used to, hinges shrieking like a small child having a meltdown-</p>
<p>Something smacks my shoulder. A beast's head. A... lizard? A lizard with wings, human-sized, covered in feathers blue as a spring sky.</p>
<p>Its head retreats. It curls in on itself. A flash of light later, and it is a... a girl instead, dressed almost exactly as Kizelle, but with accents of blue instead of pink.</p>
<p>She rubs her eyes. A moaning sound.</p>
<p>"I... I'm sorry if I woke you up," I offer.</p>
<p>"Doubtful." She yanks a lock of blue hair back behind one ear. "H-hey, do I know you or something? Why are you here?"</p>
<p>The door creaks further. The girl cringes, hands instantly over her ears. Kurosagi's wing brushes against my arm.</p>
<p>"I know <i>you</i>," the girl adds. "This your friend or something?"</p>
<p>"Yes, Cetra," Kurosagi sighs.</p>
<p>Cetra rubs her eyes. "A damn shame. She would have been safer in the tower."</p>
<p>"Cetra, you know-"</p>
<p>"Do I? Do I know?" She crosses her arms. "Or are you just assuming I automatically know every stray thought that goes through that thick skull of yours?"</p>
<p>"If you would <i>let me speak</i>, maybe I would explain."</p>
<p>Cetra crosses her arms. "Then speak."</p>
<p>"You know she's been in that tower for hundreds of years. She doesn't know <i>shit</i> about the world as it is now. I need you to use that fancy Reia thing or whatever to get her caught up to speed."</p>
<p>"And what's in it for me?"</p>
<p>"A feeling of superiority."</p>
<p>"I already have that." Another yawn. "I'd rather take another nap. <i>Undisturbed</i> this time."</p>
<p>"Misplaced, as always." A pause. "I'd go into town for the next supply run."</p>
<p>"And the one after that."</p>
<p>"I don't know if I'll be around here that long."</p>
<p>"Well, it's either you or <i>her</i>-" she tips her head toward me- "doing it. You know everything'll run out faster-"</p>
<p>"Actually," I pipe up, "I don't need anything. I won't be a burden on you."</p>
<p>"Really, now? Maybe you should just go with angel boy then. Can't bring back armfuls of useless crap if he's carrying you instead." She turned away. "But I repeat myself."</p>
<p>An insult. My first insult in forever.</p>
<p>I don't give her the pleasure of a response.</p>
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<p><h1>Erin Educated</h1></p>
<p>published: 2020-07-27</p>
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<p>Ghosts used to monotone to me. Scrawling their screeds on my bedrooms walls, they'd pen countless treatises on whatever was weighing heavy on my heart that day. Thoughts of lovers from past lives, the thoughts of last lives themselves, the theories, the scattered pieces of evidence to support them. Memories of days gone by, better years slipped through my fingers, the places remaining but the time lost forever. Grayscale phantoms of the leaves swaying outside, the green hands waving goodbye, knowing that one fated day I'd give them my own last wave by.</p>
<p>"Popular opinion at this time was that the internet was a human right, crucial to the ongoing of the economy when many formerly employed peoples were unable to return to work for fear of contracting the virus. Because previously the doctrine of 'minimalism' had been a fad, many workers were unprepared when the lockdown orders were passed, and consumption of electronic devices and internet bandwidth exploded in the following months..."</p>
<p>One lone tree sways outside the side room. The curtains have been pulled back all the way, letting the whole of whatever light will come in welcome. It is not a lot; the sun is still blocked out by the endless sea of clouds. But the ghosts have found me again, sun still strong enough to cast a shadow, and they chatter as if not a single moment has passed between us. Every second they chatter is a second that Kurosagi is away, gone to the nearest city still standing for a supply run. Every second they chatter is one I realize I cannot understand the language of the ghosts anymore.</p>
<p>"One day, approximately seven months after the city had officially disbanded, a Lorinthia by the name of Makuil Jigreen declared the hospital, which was in a state of severe disrepair, his, and he and his subordinates started converting the building into a base for their operations..."</p>
<p>I wonder- do Kizelle and Cetra live here all the time? Is this their... <em>home?</em> Does anyone ever challenge them for the rights to the property, or hound them for fees to live there? Or has the rest of the world forgotten about this place? Although not in as good shape as it was in my own time, compared to a tiny cottage in disrepair like those... those kids whose names have already slipped from my mind, this place is a bastion of luxury.</p>
<p>"Bioimplants, at the time of the collapse, were still several decades away from being sophisticated enough to properly interface with the brain without the need for external decoding devices. This did not deter Jigreen, who, using his military power to direct medical supply lines to his new base, proceeded to experiment with human prisoners in hopes of eventually converting them to full Lorinthia. Small implants were successful, but with the replacement of statistically significant amounts of brain matter came severe brain damage, leaving the test subjects little more than living dolls..."</p>
<p>My arms ache from hanging limp at my sides. My legs tingle from lying straight out on the floor. I do not dare to move. I am a doll. I am a forgotten porcelain doll on a shelf, set pretty once and abandoned forever, never to know warm touch ever again.</p>
<p>"Of course, these military incursions were not without resistance. Over the next few years, the Lorinthia in the state's capital clashed violently with several groups of self-organized militias, the most successful of which was led by a human named Horace Hidehaji-"</p>
<p><em>I know that name.</em></p>
<p>"Oh, so <em>now</em> you suddenly start listening?" Cetra lets out a wide yawn and slams the laptop shut. "I might as well stop. It's not like you'll learn anymore if I continue anyway."</p>
<p>"Kurosagi mentioned that man once."</p>
<p>Cetra leans back in the armchair she'd settled herself in. "Who?"</p>
<p>"Hidehaji."</p>
<p>"I don't doubt it. He's a pretty... famous man." Her eyes slide shut. "Yet another reason why you shouldn't be here right now."</p>
<p>"Why not?"</p>
<p>"Oh, you know-"</p>
<p>"No, I don't know."</p>
<p>Cetra adjusts herself. Her eyelids sag. I can almost see a ghostly shade of Morpheus behind her, entreating her to sleep. "Well, maybe you should have listened."</p>
<p>"You expect me to digest two hundred years' worth of history in an hour."</p>
<p>"No, because you don't have a stomach to digest it with in the first place."</p>
<p>I pull myself to my feet. My shadow casts away the ghosts, chatter instantly falling silent. The empty space between us is deafening. I take a step, another step, across the carpet until I am toe-to-toe with Cetra, towering over her.</p>
<p>"Tell me. Who is Hidehaji?"</p>
<p>"The reason we can't leave," Cetra mumbles.</p>
<p>"Leave where? This place?"</p>
<p>Cetra shrugs her shoulders. "Lots of places. Not that you'd understand."</p>
<p>"I stayed behind so you could educate me. So do it. Or..."</p>
<p>The corner of Cetra's mouth curls up. "Or what?"</p>
<p>"I'll tell Kuroi."</p>
<p>"You act as if he isn't already disappointed in me. As if I didn't stop caring a hundred years ago."</p>
<p>"Tailtiutians live that long?"</p>
<p>Cetra hums.</p>
<p>"All those years, and no wisdom to show for it."</p>
<p>Kurosagi clears his throat behind me.</p>
<p>A shiver- no, a fully-fledged lightning bolt- shoots down my spine.</p>
<p>"You're doing the next supply run," he says, his breath heavy.</p>
<p>Cetra shrugs. Her eyes slide all the way closed, giving up. "I taught her like you asked. She refused to listen. Just stared at the damn floor like a doll."</p>
<p>"Erin..." He sighs. "Fine. A promise is a promise. Erin, if you would join me in the kitchen."</p>
<p>He leaves, not waiting for me. I wait a moment, watching Cetra's breath slow underneath me, and then turn and exit the side room. Kurosagi is darting all over the kitchen like a startled hummingbird. Cabinets fly open and closed like the pipes of a church organ, singing a discordant melody all their own.</p>
<p>Or a rhythm, for I close my eyes and cannot for the life of me make anything out of the noise.</p>
<p>I take a seat on one of the stools at the kitchen island. A pause as he looks in one of his faded fabric bags, the next to be raided. "Kuroi."</p>
<p>He turns to face me. "So I assume you know the Lorinthia are after us."</p>
<p>"I still don't even know what they <em>are</em>." A pause. "No... That's not true. Kizelle said they were robots."</p>
<p>"Humanoid androids, to be exact. Ones that figured out how to self-reproduce like people." He turns back to the bags, returns to restocking the cupboards and shelves, just slower this time as he speaks. "Warlords of most of the cities still intact. Hellbent on getting the hell out of this dimension. No matter how many lives they have to take."</p>
<p>"This... dimension?"</p>
<p>His eyes darken. He slams a box of cereal into an empty slot between other boxes. I wince at the sudden <em>bang</em>.</p>
<p>"You don't..." He shakes his head. "Maybe it's better that way."</p>
<p>"Don't say I don't remember. Don't say I forgot." I set my hands on the islandtop. "Millennium Girl. They're trying to make her. See, I remembered something."</p>
<p>He grimaces. "Because I told you <em>this morning</em>."</p>
<p>"Tell me more."</p>
<p>"Lorinthia, human, divine. All three parts coexisting in harmony within a single person. <em>Supposedly</em> this makes the Millennium Girl able to open a portal to another dimension. At the expense of <em>her own life</em>." A sack of apples, on the cusp of being ripe. He steps to the fridge, dragging along milk with him. "If we had a human and a functional vehicle with us, we'd make them go in our place. I could take one in a fight... probably. Five, maybe. More than that?..." Kurosagi shakes his head. "They don't attack humans anymore. Not since they figured out Lorinthia implants don't get passed down to children. And Tailtiutians were never on their radar to begin with. Implants would never take hold with all the shapeshifting they do. But divine beings like yours truly?" He cackles. "I don't think I'm cut out for a life of being a vegetable strapped down to some table comatose while some robot assholes farm my prick all day."</p>
<p>I blanch. Not that my skin can get any paler.</p>
<p>"To make <em>children</em>," he adds. "With humans. Nephilim. Lorinthia can't reproduce with anyone but their own." He slams the fridge shut. "I have to... I <em>have</em> to find my daughter soon. Others are looking too. Colleagues. Fellow angels. But Mistress Velouria can't spare the whole heavens just for one... <em>unwanted</em> girl."</p>
<p>"Kuroi..."</p>
<p>"You'd think she'd care more," he continues, talking to himself, more food finding its places. "The Lorinthia open the heavens, and it's all over. Everything falls apart. This whole land will..."</p>
<p>He shakes his head. His fluffy hair rustles. The light catches a splotch on the back of his neck.</p>
<p>I get up and stroll over to him. He ignores me until I brush a hand on the back of his neck. He freezes, bites down a shiver, at my deathly touch, fingers just barely grazing his skin.</p>
<p>On the back of his neck is not a splotch. It is a jagged diamond. A pale pink upside-down V caressing an even paler pink one rightside-up. The whole thing could fit under my thumb.</p>
<p>"Kuroi?" I trace the shape with a finger. "What is this?"</p>
<p>"You."</p>
<p>"I... don't understand."</p>
<p>"You gave that to me. You caused it."</p>
<p>"I may remember little, but I know I was never a tattoo artist."</p>
<p>"No, not like that." He reaches behind him, takes my hand in his, pulls it over his head so he can see it in front of him. Away from the mark. "It appears on angels who've been... close with humans. We're supposed to be celibate, only available for Mistress Velouria. It's considered a mark of betrayal."</p>
<p>"Was she angry?"</p>
<p>"Disappointed? Yes. Angry? No. I think it was because she already knew who you were by the time Dimitri happened."</p>
<p>"Who?"</p>
<p>Our eyes meet.</p>
<p>"Our... daughter?"</p>
<p><em>Dimitri.</em> That's her name. <em>Dimitri</em>. I would have thought it a boy's name. A funny thought, to think I know <em>nothing</em> of her, and yet... the name feels just right. Fitting. Perfect.</p>
<p>The man who stands before me would know. His eyes make no indication of uncongruence. I must be right, right for all the sorry onces since I imprisoned myself in that tower all those lifetimes ago.</p>
<p>"I want to find her," Kurosagi says. "I want to bring her home."</p>
<p>I am a mother now.</p>
<p>I must do as mothers do.</p>
<p>"Do you know where you saw her last?"</p>
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<p><h1>Erin Eyed</h1></p>
<p>published: 2020-08-02</p>
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<p>When I was a young child, every time the oldest of my cousins would come over to play for an afternoon, I would always beg her father to let her spend the night, to let her and me and my still-infantile brothers to have a sleepover. Almost never was she prepared, bringing only whatever toys she wanted to flaunt to me, to brag about having thanks to her divorced-parents-double-holidays. So her father almost never said yes. But the few times he did...</p>
<p>There was a script we would always follow, although it loosened up more and more as the years went by.</p>
<p>Constructing a fan, nonfunctional as it was, from building toys. <em>Rod goes in hole goes in circular hub.</em></p>
<p>Making pies in the sandbox, little more than just filling the same containers over and over and over again. Sometimes her father would go behind our grandmother's back and splash some water into the sandbox, and then we'd play like we would at the beach, castles and kingdoms growing in the sand and then dissolving as the sun burned longer on.</p>
<p>Building some grand structure with the oversized plastic bricks. Pretending to be caterpillars munching through a mountain of leaves when we had to deconstruct what we'd made to put the bricks away at end of day.</p>
<p>Curling up in the bedsheets, forming a chrysalis, waiting until morning to bloom.</p>
<p>She always forgot come morning. Too tired to keep up the playing anymore, just munching on dry cereal until her father came to put a dampener on whatever party still smoldered on.</p>
<p>Despite having had taken a shower the night before, I would always have to take another one just to scrub off the feeling of another person having been in the same bed as me.</p>
<p>"Erin!"</p>
<p>A shock across my spine. The sudden weight of arms around me, a mountain dropped on my back, too much for my body to bear, forcing me to the ground-</p>
<p>"Oh! Sorry!" The weight lets up just as quick as it'd come. Kizelle comes into view, more worry than guilt as I straighten myself up again. "I didn't mean to make you fall. I promise."</p>
<p>I brush the wrinkles out of my dress. "I... I'm fine."</p>
<p>"I didn't break you or anything?"</p>
<p>"No."</p>
<p>"Oh, I'm so glad!" Kizelle flashes me a smile. "Kuri would bend me like a toothpick if I hurt you, I just know!"</p>
<p>She turns around. The bathroom door stands closed just a foot ahead. A faded butterfly decal stretches over the wood, peeking out just over her head. Light streams out from the crack under the door. <em>Locked.</em></p>
<p>She turns back to me. "Are you waiting to shower too?"</p>
<p>I shake my head. "I don't have to."</p>
<p>"You sure? Kuri doesn't like stinky people."</p>
<p>"I haven't showered since..."</p>
<p><em>When was the last time I showered? Since I ate? Drank? Actually slept, instead of just pretending to?</em></p>
<p><em>When was the last time I did anything other than just stare at the clouds?</em></p>
<p>"...since a long time," I say. "I'm fine."</p>
<p>"Oh, well..."</p>
<p>Kizelle eyes me up and down. A lump of dread in my throat, like a parent fearing their child is about to say something incredibly rude to a kind of person they haven't encountered before- pregnant, visibly disabled, a different race... But the lock on the bathroom door jiggles, door opening a second after, and Cetra emerges, face weary, wrapped in a ragged white towel.</p>
<p>Kizelle darts into the bathroom like a startled insect and slams the door shut. Cetra winces. Our eyes catch. She scowls, one eye hidden behind her blue hair, now damp and subdued.</p>
<p>"What are <em>you</em> looking at?"</p>
<p>"You say this is the apocalypse, and yet you have running water...?"</p>
<p>She shrugs, keeping her arms close so the towel doesn't fall. "Kurosagi set it up. Solar power, decent filtered water from the lake. We could probably grow enough food here if we cleared some of the-" She stops herself. "No, the tree cover is too important. Other than that? This place is pretty self-sufficient."</p>
<p>"Did Kurosagi ever... bring his child here?"</p>
<p>"What am I? A walking exposition?" She brushes past me, descends down the stairs. "Leave me alone. I'm going to bed."</p>
<p>"No need to be rude."</p>
<p>I reach for her arm, thinking to stop her-</p>
<p>-but she is already gone. Disappeared. Out of sight.</p>
<p>"Don't you think it's time you turned in too?" Kurosagi yawns behind me. "No real need to be lingering out here if you don't need anything."</p>
<p>"I want to look at my stomach."</p>
<p>"You could just look down."</p>
<p>I glare at him. "I want to see the scar."</p>
<p>"The scar?"</p>
<p>"The one that you gave me."</p>
<p>"I don't... Oh. <em>That</em> scar. I have a mirror in my bedroom. You can look there."</p>
<p>Before I can respond, he takes my hand and pulls me down the stairs. I see, on the other end of the room, where there was once a bookshelf against the wall to hide the gun cellar is now just a white hazy curtain, presumably leading to Cetra's room. We take an immediate right, past an actual bedroom door.</p>
<p>Kurosagi flicks the light on. An electric lamp blazes to life on the nightstand.</p>
<p>My breath catches in my throat.</p>
<p>The room is practically the same as it was when we met, not for the first time where the ghosts of my mother threatened to burst in at any moment through nothing but a blanket barrier, but the second and third and all the others until that portal closed and we had to find another. The room is sparse. Nothing greets us except for a king-size bed, the nightstand, and a sliding closet door- which, closed, is nothing but mirror and a thin frame.</p>
<p>A mirror which is facing me.</p>
<p>I look like a child in front of Kurosagi's towering frame. A small, wispy, barely-there child.</p>
<p>"Kuroi." I take a deep breath. "Please leave."</p>
<p>I almost believe he is sincere when he says, "Why?"</p>
<p>"I am not stripping down in your presence."</p>
<p>"Well, maybe I want to see the scar too. I'm the one who caused it, after all."</p>
<p>"It's my body. And I don't want you seeing it."</p>
<p>He rolls his eyes, but he leaves the room, leaving me alone. I take a step forward, and another, and another until I am close enough to the mirror to make it fog up with my breath. And even though I know it does nothing, even though I know I do not have to, I hold my breath as I finally shed the dress, the chrysalis forgotten the very last sleepover with my cousin.</p>
<p>The dirt-dinged fabric crumples on the ground.</p>
<p><em>I will not fear. I will not fear. I will not fear...</em></p>
<p>I force myself to look into the mirror.</p>
<p>My body is a countryside. My breasts are two mountains looming on the distant horizon, unaware that anything is amiss. My rib cage is on full display, soft rolling hills and valleys down to the flood plains, the sudden cutoff where there is no bone to give my chest definition.</p>
<p>I do not remember who stitched me back up. I do not even remember if I was stitched back up at all, or if I was just abandoned to let the leaves do as they willed. But the scar starts near my sternum, detours around my bellybutton, and then disappears somewhere hidden by my underwear. Slightly puckered where flesh meets flesh, like a cut on a rotting apple. It does not ache. It does not burn red. It just... is. As if it were meant to be there all along, just another part of the body.</p>
<p>Of <em>my</em> body.</p>
<p>Strangely enough, I do not look like a skeleton. I do not look like I am held together by nothing but a few inches of skin and a spinal column. I just look like a slightly deflated woman, only my empty torso bearing the un-weight of memory. Flash-frozen from the time I disappeared with Kurosagi into that forever sky, nothing but the air stolen from my chest.</p>
<p><em>I remember I used to tell him that he always took my breath away.</em></p>
<p>Kurosagi knocks on the door. My body jolts, startled.</p>
<p>"Are you almost done? It's almost my turn to shower. I need some clean clothes to change into."</p>
<p>"I could hand you some."</p>
<p>"Or you could let me come in and get them myself."</p>
<p>I sigh and pick up my dress. It hangs limp from my hands. Without form, I notice, it looks like a cleaning rag.</p>
<p>I hold it close to my chest, wishing for some semblance of modesty, and step aside. "Come in."</p>
<p>Kurosagi creaks the door open just wide enough for him to slip in. He pretends to not see me standing half-naked beside him as he slides the closet open, revealing a whirlwind of colors. But all of them are muted, I notice as he flicks through, as if the hue had drained from them a long time ago, leaving only a faint memory in their place.</p>
<p>"There's plenty of space in my bed for you tonight if you want it."</p>
<p>"I-I'm fine, Kuroi. I don't need to sleep."</p>
<p>"The nights get chilly here. <em>Bitterly</em> so."</p>
<p>"And you think I am not just as cold?"</p>
<p>"It burns less when I know it's because of you."</p>
<p>A fluffy red sleep robe in his arms. His gaze lingers on me for a moment, and then he leaves the room, vanishing upstairs.</p>
<p>I turn back to the empty closet. The dress slips from my hands. I make no moves to retrieve it. My hands search in the closet, feeling everything, all the fluffs and scratchies and stretchies and thins and heavies until my fingers snag on the last hanger, all the way in the back.</p>
<p>I let it fall into my hands. An oversize white shirt. A pair of shorts with a drawstring in the front to adjust the waistband. I let myself drown in the fabric, truly <em>clean</em> rather than just <em>not dirty</em>.</p>
<p>I might as well have put the dress back on, for the shirt tumbles down almost to my knees.</p>
<p>I slip out of the room. The lamp's light spills out into the downstairs living room, throwing everything into shadows. The chairs have long since been replaced, but they are still <em>there</em>. I brace myself and shove one to the opposite end of the room, the weird little side area that juts out without an actual wall to mark it off separate. A window stretches from floor to ceiling.</p>
<p>A shadow. My body tenses- and then I realize it is just the bearskin, still staring, still howling its silent scream for help.</p>
<p>I sit down.</p>
<p>Sleep does not come.</p>
<p>I watch the sun disappear over the horizon. A farewell to my first day on earth.</p>
<p>Sleep does not come.</p>
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<p><h1>Hollow War</h1></p>
<p>published: 2019-08-15</p>
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<p><em>[DATE OF DISPATCH: UNKNOWN.]</em></p>
<p>We've been holding this bunker for a few months now. The enemy shows no signs of moving along, or even letting us out, just content to sit their fat ass practically on top of us and try to smoke us out.</p>
<p>...Yes, alright, Jotem, I'll try to cut down on the fart jokes. But, in all seriousness, we were almost tear-gassed yesterday. Kick down the door, a few rogue canisters- and tears for days and days. We're lucky they didn't think to storm us when we were down for the count, laundering hankerchiefs like kingdom come. Perhaps they're playing the long con. Waiting us out until we're even weaker.</p>
<p>Morale is low, as expected. Marissa keeps trying to run drills to keep everyone on the up-and-up. She's not meeting with much luck. Most are content to practically snooze through their shift for watch duty and lie around the rest of the time. As a result, the exercise bike stands vacant, I'd say, about ninety-nine percent of the time. I've started using it again in the past few days. If anything, it earns a smile from Marissa. Some small measure of favor.</p>
<p>But war isn't the time for love, and <em>certainly</em> not puppy crushes on squad leaders!</p>
<p>But I digress. Marissa wants to plan an attack sometime this month. Or the next month, or the next... This bunker was built a long time ago, and the little garden system is already fully functional and automatic, so we're not at any loss for food or time. We could stay here forever, if we wanted to.</p>
<p>I'm starting to think most of this squad doesn't give a damn if they have to spend the rest of their lives down here. I'll lead an attack, just me and Marissa, if it ends all of this. But the enemy... They're currently too strong as it is. We'd never stand a chance.</p>
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<p><h1>in 100 words</h1></p>
<p>published: 2017-01-03/18</p>
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<p><h2>1</h2></p>
<p>She ranted and raved at the podium, decrying how much time she had wasted in the dim, stuffy room- sixty-nine days, she calculated. Sixty-nine days that could have been spent pursuing knowledge, forming relationships, finding her place in the world around her. But it would never return, lost in a daze of chasing a dream she now knew would never come to fruition. The sleepless nights that would never be refunded, hoping that she was special, that there was something more out there than her dismal life- but she could not pay the ultimate price.</p>
<p>The crowd refused to listen.</p>
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<p><h2>provizora</h2></p>
<p>She knew not of how many days she had left to walk on her beloved earth or how many rotations of the planet she called home remained until she would become like the fog, the smoke that surrounded her home, temporal and wind-blown. But there was one thought that echoed in her skull as she strolled down the ashen sidewalk- there would be a fire blazing, ready for her when she returned. Maybe the deities would take pity on her and she would become smoke, ready to steal the breath from some other unfortunate lover's lungs.</p>
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<p><h2>distrajxo</h2></p>
<p>Her eyes flickered as she glanced past countless pages of regrettable tattoos, profane street signs, displeasing women with nose rings, and plaintext quotes that reminded her of her self-pitying days back when high school felt like an entirely new world unfolding before her. How out of her mind she had felt back then. How convinced that she was fundamentally damaged.</p>
<p>She looked away from the screen, rubbing her eyes. Music blared to her right, distraction from the writing the back of her mind told her she had to complete that day. Deadlines were her enemy. The worst ones were self-imposed.</p>
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<p><h2>komputilo</h2></p>
<p>Sprawled out on her bed, staring at the ceiling, wishing that her thoughts could form coherent sentences. Her hands curled around the pendant on her necklace, wishing that the owner of its second half could come back, if only for a second, so that she'd have the motivation to get up and search for the perfect words to speak her mind with.</p>
<p>She closed her eyes. The word count box stared at her, screaming fables of how she wasn't good enough, of how she was either too brief or too rambling. A keyboard warrior in every sense of the word.</p>
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<p><h2>oceana ondo</h2></p>
<p>She stood at the edge of the swimming pool, averting her eyes from what she knew to be an anxiety-inducer. Fear of heights had plagued her for as long as she could remember, and depths haunted her the same- worse, in fact, for they always looked closer when there was a barrier of waves in between them.</p>
<p>She gulped. It had been a while since she had made a debacle about it being her first time to jump off a diving board. Shallow ends had forever been her friend.</p>
<p>And, as it turned out, pools weren't really catalysts of change.</p>
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<p><h2>aprender</h2></p>
<p>He spent all day learning about meiosis. Not because he had any particular interest, but because his mind wouldn't allow him to skip a single assignment, no matter how lackluster or asinine. It wasn't like him; he'd been the king of slackers at his old school, and the rewards he'd gotten didn't serve him well where he now was.</p>
<p>He wiped his forehead, taking a sip from his peach water.</p>
<p><i>This was a mistake.</i></p>
<p><i>Probably.</i></p>
<p>He would have much rather spent the day writing or coding, but he couldn't have everything he wanted in life, for better or for worse.</p>
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<p><h2>dormir</h2></p>
<p>His head nodded against the wooden table as he struggled to stay awake. The crystal dug into his chest as his teacher chastised him for drifting off when they were supposed to be taking notes.</p>
<p>He mumbled an apology as he pulled his notebook over and fumbled his pen. It dropped onto the floor. He groaned, leaning over. The vertigo was back, and it wasn't going away anytime soon.</p>
<p>How he'd love to be back in his room, still curled up in the sheets, wasting the day away romping in the frosted-over fields of his mind. He'd be back soon.</p>
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<p><h1>i'll be there in a few minutes</h1></p>
<p>published: 2017-06-06</p>
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<p><i>I'll be there in a few minutes.</i></p>
<p>She tightened the screws on the rudimentary limb in front of her, nothing more than a conglomeration of cheap Legos she had found off the internet and salvaged from multiple failed contraptions she had made in her youth. The youth that was now a haze to her, a haze of failing friendships and a desire to prove herself to her peers and a singular, pure, unadulterated desire.</p>
<p>She had always been fascinated with computers. As a kindergartner, she banged happily away at a keyboard with a plastic toilet beneath her, toilet training not stopping her from scribbling across the screen, convinced by her school that none of her drawings were worthy of being saved and feeling like an absolute criminal when she discovered that no cops would show up at her door for the tiny collection of bits and bytes. Then the fairy age came, and with it the stuffed animals and her first virtual online world.</p>
<p>Oh, how she had wanted to romp around in the mansion she had created, unpolished as it was. But now, looking back, she was disgusted with the glitz and glam and desperate attempts at appeal that the holding company had imposed on it. Whatever happened to the good old Windows XP days? To when the internet was some wild west begging to be explored and features came before looks?</p>
<p>Things felt more human then.</p>
<p>She tightened the screws again, sending away the waves of nostalgia, but they poked her shoulder and begged to be acknowledged. <i>Born too late to pioneer the web</i>, they taunted. <i>Born too early to pioneer immortality</i>.</p>
<p>It was her fantasy, her wet dream, the last thing she imagined before she went to sleep. The motivation that kept her going. How ironic it was that the thing that kept her tethered to the world promised to help her escape it.</p>
<p>But there was no use trying to figure out how to upload her mind to her computer if there was no body for it to inhabit, so she pulled out a leg from underneath her bed and matched it up to her own. Same length, same implied height, but the copy had more muscle to it, wires poking out and awaiting synthetic flesh that hadn't been invented yet.</p>
<p>Although she was rather impartial to the exposed look.</p>
<p>"Lycia?" a voice whispered outside of her door.</p>
<p>She set the leg on the ground, slid off her bed, and opened the door to find her childhood friend, her partner in crime. The corner of her mouth quirked up in an attempt at a smile.</p>
<p>"Lukas."</p>
<p>She motioned for him to come inside the room, locking the door behind her so any siblings wouldn't disrupt them while they were working. It wasn't their body to adulterate or imprint with unwashed, sticky fingerprints.</p>
<p>Lukas slung his bag onto the bed and pulled out a styrofoam cube with packing tape encompassing the middle. He handed it to Lycia. "Go on." He winked. "Open it."</p>
<p>Lycia retrieved the box cutters from her dresser- Lukas winced, and she put it back and got a school scissors instead. She hacked away at the tape, releasing a breath as it gave way, the clamshell foam pieces falling away to reveal-</p>
<p>She modeled the hand against her own, fiddled with the joints, the perfect shining aluminum gleaming in her bedroom light. Perfect fingertips, somewhere in between the blemished daintiness of her own and the stoutness of Lukas'. She blushed, feeling the first smile in days of dedicated work. "Where did you get this?"</p>
<p>"One of the tourists from the cities." He pulled Lycia's in-progress leg onto the bed. "Traded him half of my pea plant harvest for this week and two week's worth of lodging in my guest room."</p>
<p>"Oh, Lukas..." Lycia sighed and shook her head. "You shouldn't have-"</p>
<p>"It was fine. Really. I had too many peas than I knew how to deal with. And…" He placed his own hand on her shoulder, making her meet his eyes. "Now we've got a template. We just need to make three more."</p>
<p>"And a torso."</p>
<p>"And a torso," he sighed. "And the rest of the limbs. And a working head."</p>
<p>Lycia reached under her bed and retrieved her toolbox, wiping the sweat off her forehead before clicking it open. Someday, she hoped, she wouldn't have to deal with sweat or grime any longer.</p>
<p>"And a working brain."</p>
<p>What would the transfer be like? A slow gradual degrading of who she was and then suddenly booting into the new body? Hanging in a void while everything was moving, neither here nor there?</p>
<p>Maybe this was all impossible and she'd end up killing herself instead.</p>
<p>But there were worse ways to go out.</p>
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<p><h2>Erin</h2></p>
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<li><a href="./e/erin13.html">"The world is an onion"</a></li>
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<li><a href="./i/in-100-words.html">in 100 words</a></li>
<li><a href="./i/minutes.html">i'll be there in a few minutes</a></li>
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<li><a href="./n/nostalgia-1.html">nostalgia week, day 1</a></li>
<li><a href="./n/nostalgia-2.html">nostalgia week, day 2</a></li>
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<p><h1>kiel resti</h1></p>
<p>published: 2016-05-04</p>
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<p>This faded and damp tunnel has been my thought shelter from ever since I moved here in first grade up to the current moment. A thousand ghostly footprints mark the walls, mostly from hurr-durr people who like to stick their shoes on their hands and pretend that they're walking up the walls. Only once as a small child was I fooled by these, and then never again.</p>
<p>On the roof of the tunnel is a single word scrawled in sharpie. It appeared sometime during the one week in fifth grade where I was under a completely different sky. Every afternoon after school, it echoes when I slip in and pull out my notebook, and every evening when a flare from my mother alerts the children to their family's dinnertime, it screams as I pull my body out of the shallow alcove my body has left over time. Nobody else hears the soft voices imploring me to remain among the stone when I bring them along to visit this tunnel of peace just barely bug enough for both of our bodies to sit comfortably. The sharpie, dwindling with every year that the weather pelts its attacks upon it, apparently only has a message for me.</p>
<p>Inside the cracks of the concrete walls and ceiling, dandelions spring up every year in the spring. Their yellow heads poke out for a few weeks before the lack of consistent sun sends them drooping to form a canopy just as dismal as the sky here. There is no color at the loop at the edge of the world, at least for me. Others rejoice at what I assume are vibrant colors littering the place.</p>
<p>Vehicles of all colors and sizes zip along the highway just visible from here. This tunnel used to be a hiking path, but the complaints from the hikers enabled the city to slowly abandon maintenance. The vines that creep along the ground and the trunks of the trees in summer sure appreciate the lack of interference from seemingly benevolent hands. But Mother Nature always thirsts for more.</p>
<p>One day about a year ago, I took a scruffy blue boy here. He froze when he approached the entrance of the tunnel, and we remained cemented there like century-old statues for a few minutes before he shook his head and slipped in before me.</p>
<p>He'd brought a backpack full of homework with him, which he deposited to his right closer to the end of the tunnel blocked with old dirt and silt. I inquired as to what subject he needed to study for that day, but he stayed silent as he turned the pockets of his coat inside out.</p>
<p>Ashes of all sorts of gradients spilled onto the floor of the tunnel between us, and I scrambled to pull myself into a standing position before he held out a hand in front of him. His lips partner, importing me to sit back down, and I slipped back down to my former position as he scooped up a pinch of the sandy ashes with his fingertips.</p>
<p>These were from his previous home, he explained to me with trembling lips. They traveled here in his pockets, resisting hundreds of washes as he traversed thousands of miles of land only to end up in this transient state. His friends, disintegrated in the inferno that expelled him from his childhood home, have finally found a resting place.</p>
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<p><h1>lucine, whence you came</h1></p>
<p>published: 2019-02-11</p>
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<p>You and I sit on opposite ends of the table. You sip coffee from a cracked mug. I twirl a few locks of hair in my fingers, eyes elsewhere, disinterested in the contents of whatever air we'd just gotten done exchanging.</p>
<p>You set down your cup. "So, about the weather...?"</p>
<p>I shrug. "What about it?"</p>
<p>"The sky's been awfully gray recently." You take another sip of coffee. "Listen, Lucine-"</p>
<p>"<i>That's not my name,</i>" I hiss through my teeth.</p>
<p>You sigh. "That's the name you gave me last night... But fine. Whatever. What I'm trying to say is, what's gotten into you recently? Last year, I could have left you alone for a month and then come back, and you would have been more or less the same- but now I can't even leave you alone for <i>five minutes</i> without you morphing into something... urecognizable. It's <i>disorienting</i>, Lucine. Keeping up with you is like running a marathon. It was fun at first, watching you flit about everywhere, but..." You tap your fingers on the table. "It's tiring. And I'm beyond fatigued."</p>
<p>"It's what I have to do," I answer. "This is my soul's fate- this is <i>my</i> fate. To mask myself, to hide from the light, to wander the earth. I can't stand still, else I'll be a moving target."</p>
<p>"I thought you wanted to be respected? How is <i>this</i>-" you gesture towards me, towards my whole body- "deserving of any respect? You constantly antagonize people. You assume the worst of everyone. You search for reasons to cut people off-"</p>
<p>I wave my arm to cut you off. "Listen. I love you. I love you <i>so, so</i> dearly. And maybe, in a better life, you and I would have been faster friends, or maybe even something more. But this is my life- this is mine, and mine alone to find. And this place-" I gesture all around me, to the house, to the ground it rests on, to the land surrounding it- "this soil isn't letting me grow anymore. I've stagnated. Any growth I've found is in <i>spite</i> of it." I push my chair back and stand up. "I'm sorry. I need to be elsewhere so the soil can heal. So <i>I</i> can heal."</p>
<p>"Lucine..." You rub your forehead, the skin between your eyes. "You <i>are</i> coming back, right?"</p>
<p>"Maybe someday. When fate is kinder to both of us." I turn away and leave- but stop at the doorway, lingering, longer than I know I should. "I will make you a promise, though. You and I will meet again. But you may not know it."</p>
<p>"W-why?" You kick your own chair back and bolt to your feet. "What are you saying?"</p>
<p>"I'll repeat myself. You and I will meet again." I step out the door. "But I will not be me."</p>
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<p><h1>medusa must live</h1></p>
<p>published: 2019-01-05</p>
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<p>"What strange shapes the human forms take! Deformed under a street light, shadows betraying the eldritch form within! In every person, both a sinner and a saint." Mediuth tossed her hair back and turned back to the bookcase, dragging her long nails, almost claws, over the bound spines. Bound tighter than herself, she'd wager. "What a wild world mankind inhabits. Every one yearns to be solo, alone, their own unit- and yet, in the process of becoming One, they just fall right back into the Many."</p>
<p>"Darling, you're rambling again."</p>
<p>Mediuth barely had any time to turn around in shock before the intruder snapped her fingers. As quickly as she drew breath, she reverted back to the ball of light, dropping down to the floor with a <i>thunk</i>. She immediately dimmed. Her six wings, detached, curled around her formless body in shame.</p>
<p>"And you're parading around in that <i>ugly</i> skin again." The intruder clicked her tongue. A shapely woman, long black hair waving down to her waist, a matching form-fitting dress glinting in the dim candlelight. "How many times have I told you? Take joy in who you are."</p>
<p>"That <i>was</i> who I am," Mediuth cut back, voice coming from everywhere and nowhere.</p>
<p>"Nonsense. We've come a long way past the grave. You are to be <i>light</i> now!"</p>
<p>She threw Mediuth into the air, expecting her to unfurl and catch light, but she just thunked back down to the floor again. Disappointed, the intruder clicked her tongue again and turned aboutface and left the room. Three <i>click</i>s as she locked each of the deadbolts from the outside.</p>
<p>Mediuth rolled back to the bookcase. One of her wings lifted, peeking out.</p>
<p><i>Okay, she's gone.</i></p>
<p>She imagined herself taking a deep breath and took her former form again. The thick cords in her hair hissed- she stroked each of them, cradling the heads, two in each palm. They licked her fingers back, lapping at her skin like little affectionate puppies.</p>
<p>Puppies that didn't poop everywhere and dig holes in the shelves, at least.</p>
<p>"Yes, Esther, Velaire, Hostile, Sylvain." She let go and nudged the heads back up. Two more came down to her palms. "Imogen, Versace. Shh, babies. You're just fine. I promise." She let go of these and slid a book out from its shelf. Heavy, bulky, a ripped purple book cover stretched over the hard surface. "Would you like me to tell you a story?"</p>
<p>The snakes hissed again, harder.</p>
<p>"Not that one?" Mediuth sighed. "I understand. Hard to comprehend a picture book when you can barely see." She returned the book to the shelf and pulled out a different one. "Poetry. Is this one better?"</p>
<p>The snakes drew their heads in close, peering over her shoulders, intent.</p>
<p>"Alright." She dug her claw into the book half-way and opened the pages. "<i>Heaven Save Us All</i>, December first, twenty-eighteen:"</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Defiled,<br />
demured,<br />
lost in censure.</p>
<p>Cast out,<br />
made blind,<br />
no longer divine.</p>
<p>I will mark my own fate,<br />
I will choose my own path,<br />
or I will go up in flames<br />
for the whole world to see.</p>
<p>And at the edge of eternity,<br />
you will ask:<br />
Who was I?<br />
Who could I have been?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>She took a deep breath. "As soon as you're born-"</p>
<p>The locks flew open. Mediuth slammed the book shut and hid it behind her back just as the black-haired woman poked her head around the door.</p>
<p>"What lovely words!" She flashed Mediuth a smile.</p>
<p>Mediuth resisted the urge to gag. <i>I don't write them for you.</i></p>
<p>"I don't think it's healthy for you to always be pining after something impossible," her captor added. "You're not leaving this place. Not ever."</p>
<p>Mediuth blanked her face and forced herself to make eye contact. Becoming almost a statue herself, instead of the other way around.</p>
<p>"No reaction? Well... just remember, you chose to be here."</p>
<p>Her captor disappeared again, re-locking the doors like every other time.</p>
<p>Mediuth grimaced. "Storytime's over. I'm sorry. Not if she's listening."</p>
<p>The snakes hissed as she slid the poetry book back into its place on the shelf. She strode over to the window and threw aside the blinds- squinting, temporarily blind as her eyes adjusted to the sudden flood of light.</p>
<p>Nothing but trees around her. Rapunzel, trapped in the tower. Except there was no hair to let down, no prince rushing to her rescue, no vile witch holding her captive.</p>
<p>Although that last part was negotiable.</p>
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<p><h1>midnight hands</h1></p>
<p>originally published: 2018-01-03</p>
<p>last updated: 2018-12-23</p>
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<p>The midnight winter wind swept through the trees again, swaying them, an audible lullaby like so many lonely nights throughout the years. Snow caked onto the ground, a million sparkles in the yellow glare of the aging streetlights. From soft rolling hills pristine until morning to the jagged cliffs made by the nighttime snowplows, the white stuff was everywhere.</p>
<p>The girl wiped her forehead and turned her head to the sky. Not a single star in the murky expanse, the light of the city the brightest star of them all. There had been a belt in the sky a few months ago, she remembered. A belt ready to crack as a whip and spur her on, barreling straight into a future unknown that she wasn’t sure she’d ever be ready to face. But it was long since gone, both from that old sky and the one she stared up at now. None but the loose belt hanging from her waist to hold her together.</p>
<p>Another gust of wind, sleepless whispers from the neighborhood across the lake rattling in the tree branches, a primal language she’d become bilingual in as a young child. Her short and choppy hair fluttered around her eyes- she brushed them out of her face, keeping her gaze focused on the stars. She shivered and tugged on the collars of her sleeves, hastily sewn on, never enough time in the world to fix them. The seams threatened to pop loose, but just like every other time before, they held strong.</p>
<p>There were more important things in the world than being the most fashionable one on the block, she reminded herself.</p>
<p>But in that winter night, waiting for the right time to jump, it was the only thing she could think of.</p>
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<p><h1>nostalgia week, day one</h1></p>
<p>published: 2016-09-01</p>
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<p>A young man straightens out his hat as his eyes wander back to the screen for the fifteenth time that night. The sounds of <i>drip, drip, drip</i> filter into his ears and settle there, muddling up his mind from the words he has tried so hard to focus on.</p>
<p><i>Damn, maybe there's a leaky pipe in the bathroom again. I should get some duck tape in the morning to fix that.</i></p>
<p>He picks up his phone and writes a small note there beside the grocery list he made a few days ago and forgot about it. There's a portal near the hardware store, so maybe there'll be more than one reason for him to leave the house. But there's no time for dillydallying on other games, for a deadline for a delicious poem is closing in.</p>
<p>A perfect line sprints into his mind, and his fingers race against the keyboard, against time itself as he struggles to record it all before it can escape. It is a fish floundering against the line on the fishing pole that his muse is holding- a losing fight destined to fail, and his internal editor second-guesses himself just enough to confuse the words and then lose his train of thought.</p>
<p>“Damn!” he shouts, pounding his hands on the desk and confusing the keys on the keyboard. Not even a second later, he regrets the outburst, fearing that his parents will wake up and chastise him not only for using profanity in their house but for being awake at such a godawful hour. Writing is something that can only be done on a well-functioning brain, they might argue. And sleep deprivation does not lead to a well-functioning brain.</p>
<p>His mind wanders back to the hazy days of seventh grade- where his immature twelve-year-old self tried to make sense of a much wider range of potential peers and instead alienating the vast majority of them. His feet quicken halfway down that particular Memory Lane, slowing down and then stopping to loiter on the lawn of a specific period of time around the second trimester. In the window, a TV replays the sight of his young body thrashing in bed, restless as his deeply religious psyche believed that he was about to be possessed by the devil and refused to give up his soul.</p>
<p>He winces, both from the memory and from being thrown back into his chair. The mostly empty document stares back at him. It is two in the morning, and his phone has been buzzing for a few seconds- his ex got a new phone and desperately wants to cry on his digital shoulder. The desire to block her number wanders into his mind, but he casts it off for the moment and files it in with the grocery list and the reminder to fix the leaky pipe.</p>
<p>He remembers the fictional planet of Solaris as his cat wanders into the room and beelines for his leg, a good post to rub up against. Good old Solaris, making those who orbited around it experience so many delusions to the point of being forced to believe that all sensory input was real. He knows that he does not own a cat since his mother is allergic, but ever since he attempted and failed to astral project, the cat has been paying him company whenever he tried to write. At no other time does the cat show up, not even when summoned. Words are its catnip. A good paragraph is a scratch on the tummy.</p>
<p>The man looks back to the screen. The cursor flickers in the faint glow of the room, and suddenly he is stricken with the urge to spill all the details about this cat. The yellow and green eyes watch as he divulges memories, both repressed and at the top of his consciousness.</p>
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<p><h1>nostalgia week, day two</h1></p>
<p>published: 2016-09-02</p>
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<p>The man is back at work again for yet another night of staring at his computer screen. The cat is curled up at his feet, snoozing away and twitching every once in a while. Maybe it’s thinking of chasing a mouse- the man last saw one a few months ago while up north and trying desperately to stay on track for his writing. Maybe the cat is dreaming about what it would be doing if it weren’t so concerned with giving the poor man some company.</p>
<p>The man pulls his notebook again, sighing in frustration when he sees the assignment that he laid for this night a week ago. <i>Resurrect a dead character from one of your earlier works</i>, it reads. <i>Let them walk around the room for a bit. Have a conversation. See if you can learn form the past.</i></p>
<p>He runs a hand through the part of his hair flopping out from his hat, trying to think of a suitable character to bring back that would cause the least amount of detrimental consequences on his fictional canon. If it were up to him, he wouldn’t have done this assignment in the first place- the people who are dead should stay dead, but his poetry is getting stale and he had already taken photos of every interesting thing in his neighborhood.</p>
<p>Maybe he could bring back the stereotypical Japanese princess he dreamed up during his hamster phase- but there was no characterization to her. The humanized trigonometry functions come to mind, but they only suffered through one book and a few shreds of a sequel that never came to fruition.</p>
<p>But wait- and he slaps his forehead, but the horrific idea refuses to leave his body. There is an edgy character waiting in the deep recesses of his old books that he never wants the light of day to reach ever again. Her husband is dead too, waiting in the shadows. Dead among the archives of his current blog, they lie as an eternal shrine to the dead past.</p>
<p>As if possessed by a ghost, his hands creep onto the keyboard against his will and draw out the girl who has died seven (or possibly more) times. She collapses onto the floor, coughing and convulsing, and the man can do nothing but sit fixated and grow anxious at the blood dripping from her mouth onto the dirty carpet.</p>
<p>"Em..." Her voice rattles as she sits up, bloodshot emerald eyes digging into his flattened chest. "Who are you? You’re not Em."</p>
<p>"You can call me Kellin," he offers, searching the back of his mind for the nearest fire escape in case things get heated. He doesn’t know how to open the windows, and the girl is sitting in front of the hallway leading to the front door. "Kellin Avaroe."</p>
<p>Her eyes search around the room. "Where is Em?"</p>
<p>"She isn’t here anymore."</p>
<p>Her voice rattles as her emaciated body slowly stands up with a great deal of effort. "Why am I alive? Where is Rishen?"</p>
<p>"I don’t know-" he backs up in his chair, tensing his muscles in case he has to use the chair to bash her over the head- "I don’t know! I’m under orders! This wasn’t my choice!"</p>
<p>"Where is Rishen...?" she moans as she takes a few strained steps.</p>
<p>Kellin’s butt slides off of his chair, and Yasmin’s eyes glimmer with bloodlust as he collides with the floor. He is immediately on his feet, hands palming the chair. "Don’t come any closer."</p>
<p>"Why am I alive? Em promised- promised that my soul could rest-"</p>
<p><i>Damn, why didn’t I bring a gun?</i></p>
<p><i>Because you can’t write with a gun, Kellin.</i></p>
<p>Yasmin shambles closer. One of Kellin’s sweaty hands palms the pen lying on his desk- if all else fails, maybe he can poke one of her eyes as a distraction. Those emerald eyes...</p>
<p>"And you brought me back..."</p>
<p>There’s a button on the pen that Kellin hadn’t noticed before, which he presses only to find a weak laser pointer dot glowing on the ceiling. He points it at Yasmin, and she hisses as a tiny hole in her clothes begins to sizzle.</p>
<p>"Begone, you beast!" he shouts, not caring about fear or his parents possibly waking up or the fact that this character is only a figment of his imagination. Or <i>was</i>, rather, because she rapidly disintegrates into stardust and piles onto the carpet.</p>
<p>Kellin sighs and adjusts his hat, throwing a glance to his still snoozing hat. What a stupid night it has been. Maybe he should have just stuck to poetry.</p>
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<p><h1>ora statuo</h1></p>
<p>published: 2016-05-05</p>
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<p>This shadow plays across my mind with misty breath and the very same fingers that danced across the landscape. The fog surrounding me becomes my foundation, hiding pores leaking inner demons and concealing years of imperfections melded down into a roughened texture.</p>
<p>I know not from where I came or to where I will go when I am done with this plane of existence, but as the shadow licks his finger and presses it to my forehead, the landscape burst into golden and rouge flames. None of them lick my feet, for the shadow wraps around me like last season's dresses and offers an iota of protection. Is this what the former gods felt like when gazing out at the sun blooming into existence?</p>
<p>The shadow's spindly neck offshoots in a thin strand from its position on my shoulder and tips its head towards me in greeting, bearing a crooked smile. The sight of his tipsy teeth, blackened with soot from the burning grasses underneath my soles, is enough to trandform my heart into a shuddering and wobbling record of days long gone.</p>
<p>An arm untangles itself from my bosom, and my pupils constrict as one of his fingers extends. When it brushes against my lips, ice slips into my veins- the impulse to scream filters through my brain, but my lips have frozen shut.</p>
<p>My legs kick out from behind me, and only then does the heat of my surroundings hit my nerves. I stumble to get up, but the shadow continues its presence right beside me. More nerves succumb to the void of unfeeling as he strokes his hands across my face, and I have not traveled thirty feet before I am forced to kneel on the grass.</p>
<p>The shadow grabs my ankles, which fuse together and become immobile. I twist around to sleep him away, but my feet flail, and I end up face-down on the charred grass.</p>
<p>"You're not getting away that easily, my statue," the shadow hisses as he straddles my hips and flips me onto my back. Just before he slaps my face and forced my eyes to fixate forever on the horizon, I gain a glimpse of my body- streaked with immobile strips of gold contrasting bleakly with the rest of the body still alive and breathing.</p>
<p>I suppose now that my girlfriend's words have finally come true- I have a heart of gold, but with that comes the rest of the package.</p>
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<p><h1>solace</h1></p>
<p>published: 2018-01-27</p>
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<p>A rickety house, ready and waiting to fall apart, stood at the sea-side, just another blot of gray against the unpainted canvas sky. Water with just the slightest tinge of blue lapped at the rocks in the house's front yard.</p>
<p>A girl slipped out the front door, her eyes just as desaturated as everything else. Like an accidental flick of the brush, like a fish in the most dismal and remote place in the ocean. A pail swung on her arm. She stepped over all the rocks, feet bare and skin thick with years' worth of calluses, and stooped down to collect some of the water in her pail.</p>
<p>A gust of wind with a mischievous face and adventurous hands. Her dress, mismatched patches and hasty stitching, fluttered. Pink skin shone to the sun like a fish without its scales, a newborn baby without its mother's touch. The wind tore its hands through her hair, setting it wild, caressing her cheeks.</p>
<p>"What are you doing here?" the sun whispered. "This is no place for stray thoughts. No place for a lovely specimen of time like you."</p>
<p>The girl shook her head and shrugged her shoulders and went on her way.</p>
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