On Captain America

As a kid, I was always into Batman. I never read any of the comics until I got older, but I remember watching the Animated Series and the Tim Burton movies. I loved the imagery and the stories and the villains, and more than anything, I adored how dark everything was. The world felt dangerous and slightly scary, and, to my young mind, that was the Coolest. As such, I never really understood the appeal of someone like Superman. Sure he was powerful and had basically any and every superpower, but he was boring. Why would you prefer someone that cookie cutter when you could have a hero who was The Night, who was part of the same grim world to which the villains belonged?

It was the mindset of a child, I now realize, the thoughts and beliefs of someone who had yet to fully experience life, the world, and the pain that some people cause for no other reason than “that person is different from me.”

As I got older, I began to experience more of life and the very real prejudice some people carry towards others. It was a gradual realization and one that was also far closer and more personal than I ever would have imagined as a kid. I thankfully grew up in a pretty accepting town, but nonetheless, I heard the occasional story from my brothers and parents about being picked on or discriminated against for being Hispanic, and eventually I started to have my own experiences in that regard. It’s an awful feeling being made to feel like less of a person simply for the color of your skin and it’s something I don’t think anyone could really understand unless it has happened to them directly or to someone they love. I can take a lot, and I dealt with some racial confrontations in high school, even once or twice when dealing with local police, but nothing ruffled my feathers more than hearing a story about some cops discriminating against my mother for simply driving her car. (Nothing happened, for the record, but it’s a story I took to heart and will never forget.)

It could have been easy for me to dive head first into the grim world of Gotham and take Bruce Wayne’s ethos to heart. Not to say I would have been one of those people who puts on a cape and mask and walks around town with a baseball bat claiming to be a crime fighter, but it would not have been hard to have a darker view of the world and its people. Batman does not work with others. He works alone, playing the role of both judge and jury before committing criminals to whatever sentence he deems necessary (usually beating them to a pulp before turning them in to the police). He does not trust. He does not love. He does not even particularly like people. Batman is a hero who fights to get revenge on the criminals who wronged him – and his parents – when he was a child. He is a hero predicated on being selfish and full of guilt, and he fights for no one but himself.

It wasn’t until I really started to think about what he represents as a character that I understood that – which was after I saw Captain America: The First Avenger.

I knew absolutely nothing about Captain America before sitting down for the film in 2011. I knew the basic imagery, sure, and thought his shield was kind of nifty, but he seemed the epitome of Corny, an All American Apple Pie Superhero for a bygone era. And yet, within 30 minutes, I was moved to tears. Steve Rogers makes it clear fairly early on what his ideals are and where he stands – we see him abandon a double date as he tries and fails to enlist for the US Army for his fifth time – but it is when he is approached about the Army’s experimental Super Soldier program where we get this exchange:

Dr. Erskine: Do you want to kill Nazis?
Rogers: I don’t want to kill anyone. I don’t like bullies. I don’t care where they come from.

That one exchange has stuck with me and perfectly captures why I now adore Captain America. Steve Rogers does not have a dark past. He is not riddled with guilt. He does not want revenge. Instead, what makes Captain America stand out is that he is simply driven by an unwavering moral compass. He fights for what is right and what is good. He stands up for the little guy. He does not like bullies. Unlike Batman who stands for nothing other than himself, Captain America stands for the people. He is the characterization of the best we can be, the American Ideal made real. And in our world, especially in our current political climate full of hatred and pain, he is something of a guiding light, a reminder of what it means to be strong and trustworthy and good.

As a child, I didn’t know what it meant to be truly good. But as an adult who knows how hard it can be to plant your feet and fight for what you believe in when people surround you, shouting that you are lesser and deserve to be put in your place, there is nothing I admire more than someone who will stand up to the bullies of the world and say, “No.”

My appreciation for these types of characters has only grown. Superman, Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, Black Panther – all of them are shining examples of heroes fighting in the face of adversity simply because it is the right thing to do. But it is Captain America who I will always turn to first and foremost. For more than what he does, it’s about what he inspires.

I have worn a Captain America watch every day for the last year and a half. The glass is scratched up. The bands are wearing. The battery is dead. But I’ll fix it up as necessary and continue to wear it for as long as possible. Because when I look down at my wrist and see Captain America’s insignia emblazoned across the watch face, it reminds me to be better, to do better, and to follow what I know is right.

Always, and Forever, Your Own

For as long as he could remember, he had been walking. The only items he carried were the tattered cloak draped over his shoulders, a withered and chipped double-headed axe slung on his back, and a small blade she had given him that had grown rusty with time. He had no destination in mind as he wandered between the trees. Not really. For the gate of hell is an elusive thing.

He couldn’t say for sure how long he had been in search of the gate. Years, decades, centuries, it didn’t matter. Time had lost all meaning to him. The sun rose and fell, seasons came and went, the stars danced across the sky in their endless pattern. He saw forests grow and mountains crumble. And yet his hair did not grey. His body did not wilt.

His memory was the one thing that was fading. He had always told her that her face had been etched into his mind for all eternity, that he would never forget her smile or the curve of her lips or the music in her voice. He believed it himself. Not one person had made as indelible a mark on his life as she had, and yet she became lost in the ghostly blur of time. He strained and he struggled to remember even her name (Was there an M… no… C, maybe?), but the fog had grown thick.

He remembered, of all things, a large heavy book with a pale blue cover he had as a boy. It was full of stories his father had compiled about giants and sea monsters and creatures with eyes that could turn you to stone with a single glance. He would linger over the details of the Minotaur’s hooves echoing through the labyrinth or the alluring songs of the siren drifting through the mist. As he read, he would run his fingers over the words, determined to commit them to memory. But the more he tried, the more his fingers slid over the pages and the stories were slowly rubbed away.

In his desperate attempt to retain her essence, her face had become a smudged blur. All he had left was the pain he felt as she was pulled away from him down the dark tunnel and the deafening rush in his ears as the gate to hell swallowed itself in front of him.

A harsh white light flooded into the cave entrance, pushing back the darkness. The smell of sulfur lingered in his nostrils and heat still emanated from the walls, but he was a few short steps away from freedom. He had done what no man could. He could not bear to wait a moment longer. In his excitement, he turned.

She stood inches from him. Her hair seemed to glow in the darkness and her perfume penetrated the acrid smell of death seeping from the bowels of the caves below. He could have touched her, grabbed her, held her if he had simply extended his fingers. For a single breath, he looked into her eyes and a strange expression of pain and love and forgiveness peered back. Her mouth opened, beginning to form a word he would never hear.

Jagged arms erupted from the walls around them and clutched her body, their cracked and broken claws digging into her soft flesh. Her eyes turned to anguish as they yanked her to the ground and dragged her away, but she made no sound. He stumbled back in astonishment, and in a rush of wind like a swift intake of breath, the gate was gone.

He felt the earth stumble beneath his feet as it had all those years before and grabbed a low hanging branch as his knees buckled. There was a time when he would have cursed the gods for abandoning his beloved bride, but his youthful arrogance in thinking he could defy their will had dissipated. They had given him one order: walk away and do not turn back until you meet daylight. The price of his foolishness gnawed at him, and he had been walking ever since – always forward, never turning back – in his quest for the gate. He searched in caves and around swamps, he traveled deserts and followed rivers, but he could not find a way to enter the one place every sad soul wanted to escape.

He took a few deep breaths, shook out his legs, and pressed forward, careful not to look back the way he had come.

The rusty blade bounced against his hip as he continued through the woods. He focused on its steady rhythm and placed his hand on the hilt, his fingers picking off dried blood from the old, cracked leather. His other hand went to his side where he had plunged the knife the night before. The skin was smooth and unharmed. He wasn’t sure why he had even bothered trying. He knew it wouldn’t work, just like every other time he had attempted to kill himself. Hanging, drowning, stabbing, every outcome was the same. His vision would blur, darkness would overtake him, and he would wake up in a puddle of salt water or covered in his own vomit or blood. His body did not ache; he bore no scars. Death had become as foreign to him as the gate itself.

He broke through some shrubs into a small clearing and immediately crouched down, steadying himself against a tree. A deer stood quietly opposite him, drinking from the nearby river and paying him no mind. The man’s eyes fixated on the animal, admiring its beauty and serenity. Lifetimes had passed since he had last seen another human being. He had learned to take comfort in the fleeting moments of connection he could find with wild animals. He didn’t need the meat. He had never felt a single pang of hunger since he had started walking. All he wanted was to run a single hand down the creature’s back, to feel the blood pumping beneath its skin. He stood up and took a hesitant step forward, wary not to make any noises or sudden movements.

In a flash, the deer was struggling for its life while a wolf’s jaws clamped down on its throat. The deer flailed and kicked at the air, but the wolf tightened its grip and flicked its head in a swift motion, snapping the deer’s neck. The deer became limp, and the wolf lowered it to the ground and tore into its fresh meal, its grey muzzle stained red.

The man never looked away during the quick battle. Instead, he studied the deer, watching the life slowly drain from its body as its blood flowed into the rushing water. And as the wolf tore flesh from bone, the man replayed the scene in his head over and over – the beautiful deer grazing in the sunshine, the crack of its neck landing with a dull thud in his ears – until the scarred and grizzled wolf ate its fill and trotted off.

The man approached the deer’s bloody carcass and knelt beside it. He ran his hand slowly along its back, the fur now thickly matted with blood and saliva, and stared at the ivory bones peeking out of its chest amongst the pool of crimson.

In all of the years he had been walking, he had chased hell and chased death. But maybe death cannot be chased, he thought as his fingers traced the frayed edges of the torn flesh. Maybe death cannot be met. Death comes so easily to the unsuspecting, to those who do not want it. As he stared into the now faded eyes of the poor animal at his knee, he realized that death must meet him.

He stroked the deer one last time between its ears, wiped his hands clean on the forest floor, and started up river.

He had never been one to live in the moment and he wasn’t sure he could remember how. Emptiness and loss had driven him since that day he couldn’t bear to remember or fail to forget. But as he walked beside the water, the grass cool beneath his feet, he felt a tinge of hope growing in his chest.

After a few miles, he came upon an area covered in reeds and brambles and broken, decaying trees. The sour smell of rotting fish clogged his nostrils and the air was dense with gnats and mosquitoes. But the sunshine perfectly streamed through the overhanging branches and the river was quiet and gentle. He unslung the axe from his shoulder, measured its weight in his hands, and began to chop.

Over several weeks he chopped down trees, fashioned windows, constructed a door. He used his knife to cut the reeds as they billowed in the soft breeze. He even carved himself a new lyre, a relic he had given up long ago. He fashioned it from the strongest, most beautiful tree he could find. At night, he played quietly to himself beneath the stars, singing old songs of love and passion. He was still mindful to never look behind him, never to turn around and retrace his steps; the ground was soon covered in intricate patterns of large, looping trails with no beginning and no end. But when he sat down and sang his ballads, the whole world seemed to listen. For those few moments every night, he felt peace.

Before long, the trees became a house and the house became a home. Slowly, the thought of his lost love and an unearthly gate left his mind, until all he was left with was nothing but the notion of the present.

He stood in front of his new home, the lyre replacing the axe on his back and his knife resting on a tree stump nearby, and he admired his work. It was rough – the walls were uneven, the door was crooked, and the roof hung a bit to the left – but he had come to love it, rotting fish smell and all.

Gnats droned lazily by his ear and he swatted them away. The buzz persisted and he shook his head and pawed at his ears, a cloud of small bugs scattering about. But the sound grew steadily louder and deeper, until his chest began to vibrate from the thundering roar. He pressed his hands to his ears and his whole body tightened. The sound lasted longer than anything he could remember, and for a brief moment, he couldn’t remember a life without it. His heart pounded and raced, feeling like it was going to explode, until–

It stopped. Silence engulfed him. The river did not babble, birds did not sing, the wind did not rustle the leaves. And then he heard something he had not heard in ages.

Her. Only it was different, strained, like her voice had been physically torn from her body. She was calling his name.

He stood still, afraid to move, afraid of what he would see. She called him again. And again. And again. He could not make himself turn around. It was another trick, he thought, another ruse to fool him into turning around, into losing her once again. He waited, his whole body stiff and unmoving, and, slowly, his name drifted into nothingness. His muscles began to relax as silence overtook him once more.

Her screaming voice echoed through the trees, ragged and guttural. His mind clicked and he abruptly turned, calling a name he had not uttered in centuries.

Flames licked his arms and legs as he looked out at a sea of people he knew and loved and people he had never seen in his life. He watched as they burned, as they had the flesh slowly peeled from their limbs, as they came back to life, and as they suffered again. Gurgles and shrieks far beyond human capacity rang through the chasm suddenly before him, and still her scream tore through to his ears.

His body trembled as he moved to follow the voice, to finally be by her side once more. But as a wave of heat rushed to his face, he hesitated, his right foot floating in midair. He pushed himself to move forward into the vast desolation he had sought for millennia, but his body resisted. He focused on her scream and pictured her face clearly for the first time since he lost her. It was pale and haggard and contorted in pain and anguish. He staggered and dropped his foot behind him.

In a flash, it was gone. The violence, the heat, the shrieks, all of it flickered out in an instant. The doorway had shut.

His breath caught in his throat as he fell to the grass, tears welling in his eyes. He tore off his cloak to wipe his face, but the strong smell of sulfur lingered in the fabric and he tossed it into the river. He wept onto the grass for some time until he could cry no more. And slowly he began to drag himself towards the river. He grabbed the knife she had given him from the stump, turned onto his back, and dangled his head over the rushing water.

As he plunged the rusty knife into his neck, sawing the blade through his throat, he stared into the blue, cloudy sky, wanting to do nothing but admire the beauty of the world around him. But her awful face was forever imprinted on his mind. He hacked and he sawed until his head floated quietly down the river, forever singing songs of mourning.

Wordplay

I could hear bass thumping from the small parking lot across the street, so I assumed I was in the right place. I had never been to an actual “art show” before, but already I felt out of my element. People were walking by in nice outfits – nicely pressed button-up shirts and khakis for guys, cute dresses and skirts for girls – and there I was in a pair of old jeans and a wrinkled button-up that I was too lazy to iron. Part of me knew it was a bad idea to even think of going to the show, what with the way things had ended between us, but another part of me wanted to see her, to say hi and extend an olive branch. I didn’t think anything romantic or sexual would spring up – nor did I particularly want that. But I liked the idea of talking to her. Maybe even being friends again.

I felt passersby staring at me as I leaned against my car in the dark parking lot – a sight I would no doubt be suspicious of myself if I were in their shoes – so I took a deep breath and made my way up the grassy slope towards the street.

The bass grew louder and more pronounced as I followed the modest stream of people across the now defunct railroad tracks. The steady pulse grew stronger and began to vibrate within my body. I softly groaned. We had never really traveled in the same circles. She was always a bit more pop-minded than me, more inclined to the vapid radio-friendly nonsense. I could deal with most of it. The tinkling acoustic guitars were fine and the cookie-cutter popstars were bearable, but the “dance” music where the only “dancing” people did was a poor excuse to dry hump in public was where I drew the line.

I quickly tried to find my happy place as the pounding began to extend to the back of my skull. But much to my surprise, the people in front of me took a sharp right turn away from the booming warehouse in front of us. Unaware of what was happening, I kept in step and followed them around a corner and towards the back of the parking lot. The steady beat grew quieter, my head stopped pounding, and I gave a sigh of relief as we all neared a warmly lit building. I stepped into the short line at the front door and looked around.

There were signs and banners on the walls of the building and beside the door displaying the art show’s logo, a large upside-down triangle teetering at the top of a mountain. It was an image that meant absolutely nothing other than a false sense of grandeur. I chuckled quietly to myself as I noticed the building’s permanent sign sporting the silhouette of a person kicking a board in half, the logo of the children’s martial arts dojo this was typically home to, peeking out behind the banner as it gently flapped in the breeze. I considered pointing this out to the person behind me, but I thought better of it. No sense in making myself feel like more of an outcast.

Small talk abounded. People were talking happily to friends and strangers alike about the show, the weather, or the easy talking points of what was going on in their life. They were the kinds of things someone could gently smile at and say, “Oh, that’s cool.” Or, “Good for you!” Or, “It is nice, isn’t it?” It was soul-crushingly mundane, but it was at least more inviting than the strobing lights and brain-rattling bass a hundred yards away.

As I neared the front of the line, I pulled out my wallet and showed the petite twenty-something woman guarding the entrance my ID. She glanced at it, handed it back, and stamped my hand. I tried to fathom what it would look like if she actually had to put her bouncer skills to the test. She wasn’t even up to my shoulder and looked as if a stiff breeze could blow her down. Then again, I was about to walk into a place where they attempted to make little death machines out of children. As she waved me through, I noticed her hands looked well-worn and callused. The exact type of hands that punch through hunks of wood and cinder blocks on the regular.

Yep. Ninja.

My head was swimming as soon I broke the threshold. It’s not that the music was loud. It just didn’t make any sense. Instruments were playing over each other, seemingly competing for the spotlight, like they were all having their own showstopping solo at the same time. I figured the cacophony was a sound check, but when I overheard someone say how much they were loving the music, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. Of course it was jazz. Once my eyes returned from their long journey, I beelined for the open bar in the corner of the room.

As I waited for my beer, I examined the large, overlit room. The walls were obviously dirty and the carpet clearly stained. It would have been an easy fix, had they wanted to actually hide everything and maybe make the room look mostly presentable. Of course, this being a local art show that strived to be something far fancier than it was, I imagined the conversation that no doubt occurred when deciding how to light the room, opting to highlight the room’s flaws with harsh white lights, rather than hide them. “It’s more earthy that way,” a young woman trying very hard to emulate the look of Audrey Hepburn no doubt said, having no idea what that even means.

I saw the young bartender heading my way with my beer in his hand and quickly pulled out my wallet. I thanked him, pulled out a couple wrinkled up ones, and held them out to him. He shook his head. “It’s an open bar, sir,” he told me.

My hand hung in the air with the crumpled singles. “I know. It’s a tip.”

He beamed at me, surprised about my slight generosity. “I’m not sure I can even take tips. No one has left one all night,” he said.

I gave a cursory glance down the length of the bar at the sport coats and the coifed hairdos and shook my head lightly. “That honestly doesn’t surprise me.” I placed the two dollars on the counter, opened up my wallet, and put down another five. I gave the bartender a smile and a nod as I grabbed my beer and turned to wind my way through the crowds of people.

They were all overdressed and huddled into groups. Some smiled, some laughed, and some looked entirely too serious, their brows furrowed and their hands waving in the air, while those they spoke to nodded along, as if their head was on a spring and someone gave it a solid tap. I thought it would be fun to play a game while I eavesdropped: whenever I heard the word “inspiration” or any variation thereof, I would take a drink. After five minutes, however, I realized I would probably have some sort of liver failure by the end of the night if I kept it up, and decided to pull back.

I scanned the faces around me as I walked the floor. There was no sign of her. Maybe she was in another room. Maybe this was the wrong show. Maybe I actually had seen her, but I just didn’t recognize her. After all, it had been almost a year since we last spoke and even longer since I had last seen her. Perhaps the face that was beginning to grow distant and hazy in my mind was no longer the face I should expect to see.

My drink was getting low and the jazz band was about to bring up a flute player, so I took that as my cue to head out. I threw back my last sip of free alcohol, tossed the can into a nearby wastebasket, and turned for the door. That was when I saw the girl. She blended in perfectly, but felt oddly out of place. Her hair was done up in a simple ponytail, her dress was modest, but still flattering, and her shoes looked to be a brand new pair of orange high tops. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary, but something seemed different. She floated through the room with a slight smile on her face, like she held the secrets to life and the universe. Or maybe she just found the whole affair as amusingly delusional as I did. It wasn’t until she was about ten feet away from me that I spotted the pencil behind her ear and the large black notebook in her hand. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen anybody with a pencil. Or a notebook, for that matter. I remembered seeing paper in some vintage store one time a few years before, but that was for show, a decoration that people would lay out in their homes to make themselves look sophisticated. I’d never seen it out in the wild. Never for actual use. I started to follow her when I heard a familiar voice from across the room.

“Holy shit. Monty?”

I winced and hesitantly turned towards the voice. “Hey, Victoria.”

“Oh my god! Monty!” I had a split second to register the same black, curly hair I had remembered so well before I found my face buried in it. She threw her whole body into me and I fumbled with my arms, unsure of how to hug her back. Before I even had a chance to mistakenly place my hand on her ass, she pulled away.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“Ah, you know. I saw you post the flyer online and I didn’t have anything going on, so I figured I’d support you and drop in and say hey, see how you’re doing.”

“That’s so sweet. Thank you so much.” She grabbed my hand. “That really means a lot.”

I stared at my hand in hers and immediately recognized the familiar comfort of her fingers intertwined in mine. I looked up into that same warm smile and recalled the quiet moments and the shared dreams and the stupid, hilarious inside jokes and for those few seconds I remembered what it felt like to be happy with her, with Victoria, and I longed for it. And then her friend called from the side of the room, “Hey, V!” And those memories of happiness melted into petty arguments and distant conversations and missed dates. That was when V had taken over.

I slid my hand out of hers as she turned back to her friends. “Give me a minute!” she yelled.

“No, we need you now!” I could see a small group of people posing for photos and doing a Q&A via 10-second video recordings.

Victoria groaned and rubbed her neck as she turned back to me. “Sorry. I have to do this. Are you going to be around?”

“Actually, I was just about to–“

“No! Just… a little while. Please?”

I sighed and looked around at the growing crowd and the flute player on stage doing her mic check. She was already playing flamboyant scales while the rest of the band behind her adjusted their fedoras and horn-rimmed glasses. Victoria must have noticed me grimacing. She crossed her arms and her tone became withdrawn and annoyed, the way it always would when I did something she did not approve of. “You know, there’s a lot of great art here if you’d just give it a chance,” she said.

“You mean this isn’t it? I thought it was some sort of ‘avant-garde’ thing where the lack of art was the art. Now I feel like a moron for staring at that white wall and talking to the guy next to me about how I ‘just couldn’t see it.’”

She reluctantly laughed and lightly nudged my shoulder. I always was able to make her smile when she least wanted to. She pointed behind me. “No, you goon, it’s over there.” There was a narrow doorway by the rear of the stage where people were slowly filtering in and out, careful to step over the band’s cases and extra equipment strewn about. Above the door was a sign sporting the same logo I had seen outside of an upside down pyramid precariously balanced atop a mountain with an arrow pointing down to the opening in the wall. The logo somehow made even less sense here, but I let it go and turned back to Victoria.

“Twenty minutes,” I said. “I have to work in the morning.”

“Perfect! That’s more than enough time. I’ll find you over there in a bit.” She gave me a quick hug and was off before I had time to react. I watched as she strode over to her friends and threw on the biggest, fakest smile I had ever seen her wear; V was back.

I shook my head and began absently walking in the direction of the stage. About halfway there, I noticed the guitar player staring right at me and I realized I had broken the threshold of art- and free beer-enthusiasts and had made my way onto the very empty dance floor. I almost felt bad seeing his face deflate as I quickly course corrected for the doorway to the actual art show, but the feeling quickly faded as the flute energetically screeched out its scales, which flowed directly into a cavalcade of noise as the rest of the band joined in. I quickly fished through my pockets for my emergency earbuds. A couple people shot dirty glances at me as I plugged them into my ears, so I showed them the biggest smile I could muster and yelled, “These are my hearing aids! It’s so good, I don’t want to miss any of it!” As soon as they heard “hearing aid,” they blushed and looked away. I hit a button on each earpiece, another button on my phone, and suddenly the bellowing instruments faded out and the soothing sound of punk rock filled my ears as I squeezed through the doorway and into the art room.

It was larger than I had anticipated. The walls were still blaringly white and overlit, and it was still noticeably a place where children go to practice kicking the air and chopping plywood in half, but it was impressive nonetheless. Paintings and photos lined the walls, sculptures dotted the floor, and people crowded around everything. They milled about in groups, surrounded each artist, and waved their arms in the air, clearly trying very hard to get their point across and look smarter while doing so. It looked legitimate, exactly the picture I always imagined of the events the most high-minded and elite must go to every week. My back immediately straightened, my head lifted, and my hands involuntarily ran down my shirt, the wrinkles defiantly springing back into place.

I wound through the crowd and stopped at the first display. There were two girls standing in front of the painting. One girl in a vintage dress roughly the color of sewage water spoke with vigor to her friend wearing a polka dot blouse and black slacks. Her head was shaking and nodding while her hands pushed and pulled and circulated the air around her, while the other shook her head disapprovingly. My earbuds had moved on to blaring classic rock into my ears, so all I could hear was falsetto vocals and a pounding piano, but their conversation looked interesting. I cautiously stepped around them to get a better look at the canvas hanging on the wall. On a plain white canvas was the word, “no,” stretched across it in black lower-case letters, and below it hung a plain black canvas with the word, “yes,” stretched across it in white lower-case letters. I stared at the moral argument splashed across the walls and nodded my head and rubbed my chin until I felt I had been there long enough to not look stupid in front of the two girls behind me.

The music in my ears faded out as I edged my way through the crowd. I caught a brief snippet of conversation between the two girls. “So I told her, ‘Mom, just stay out of my life! It has nothing to do with you!’ And do you know what she does? She tells me, ‘Helen, if you’re going to act this way you better think twice about your father and I paying for your–‘”

“ONETWOTHREEFOURONETWOTHREEFOUR” Chugging guitars, pounding drums, and a ragged, raspy voice drowned my ears. I looked back at the two girls as I walked away, the vintage dress still waving her arms in anger and the polka dots still shaking her head on a swivel. They were miles away, regardless of where they physically stood.

The next display was empty of people, save for the artist standing proudly next to his work. His hair was perfectly messy, his clothing ripped and torn. It must have cost him a fortune. He smiled at me as I approached and I nodded back quietly. I was careful not to make eye contact with him as I glanced over the words he had painted into the shape of a vagina. Words like “vote” and “hope” and “freedom” popped out at me amidst the mishmash of jumbled words, which suddenly made sense when I spotted the title card beneath the painting: “Cuntry.” I scoffed and was quick to move on for fear of looking like some sort of pervert for lingering too long.

I meandered along the perimeter of the room, passively glancing at the paintings and photos that lined the walls. There was more wordplay, something that looked like a dog had barfed up alphabet soup, and even a giant word search someone had made (which actually had no words to find, I realized after far too long).

One of the largest pieces on display was a sculpture entitled “Letter Opener,” consisting of a giant letter K that was placed on a gurney at the side of the room. Large halogen lights bore down on it. A tray table with rusty surgical tools lay haphazardly beside it. And down the length of the letter’s crooked arm was a large open wound, its insides disturbingly realistic with muscular tissue and spurts of blood. They encouraged patrons to grab a tool and poke around inside, eliciting quite a few people to nearly faint and me to giggle maniacally. The crowd was beginning to grow and I could feel people staring at me as I had far too much fun carving open the Letter of the Day, so I quietly put down the scalpel and walked off.

Twenty-five minutes had passed and there was still no sign of Victoria. I was growing restless and tired and chastised myself as I stepped out a side door to what I thought would be my escape route, but what actually looked to be a loading dock with even more art illuminated by a single lightbulb at the doorway. Some chicken wire fencing had been hastily erected, its sides drooping and propped up by cinderblocks. A few small pieces were displayed. There was nobody else outside except for those few artists, but they hardly even registered that I had entered their domain. They were congregated in a small circle, drinking beer and chatting. They knew they were quite literally the outsiders of the show and they couldn’t give less of a shit.

They were my kind of people.

I closed the door behind me and pulled out my earbuds. I always enjoyed the quiet sounds of a late evening. The soft rustling of wind through the trees, a single grasshopper slowly playing its music, the distant rush of traffic. It was soothing. It even made the dampened monstrosity of soft jazz emanating from the walls bearable.

I approached the open cooler of beer by the group of artists. “Do you mind if I…?” They all stopped mid-conversation, took one glance at me, and waved me away. I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, so I took a can and awkwardly walked along the fence while sipping my beer. The work was basically more of the same, if a little less refined, and I drifted along the paintings and photos without registering a single image.

I pulled out my phone and absently worked my way through social media. It wasn’t long before I stumbled upon a brief video clip of Victoria in a Q&A. I figured it was what she was called over for, so I hit play. She was standing in front of her piece, a sculpture of nothing in particular. She always loved abstract art. The idea of creating beauty out of nonsense attracted her. “It’s a reflection of the world,” she told the camera. “We put meaning in what we see. We make sense out of the nonsensical.” The sculpture she stood next to and proudly flaunted embodied that well enough. It was, essentially, a blob that seemed to be becoming sentient, rising from the ground and contorting itself into a vague shape, as if willing itself into being. It was no different from any other sculpture she had made.

But something was off. It was textured in a way her other sculptures weren’t. There were small black marks up and down, and edges and creases that made it resemble a cocoon. I paused the video and brought the phone closer to my eyes. I had never considered why she would be a part of that show. Her sculptures were good, but they were simply shapes. They had nothing to do with words. My stomach dropped when I realized what I was looking at. They were pages torn from a book. I don’t know what book. I don’t even know where Victoria would have gotten her hands on one. It didn’t matter. All I knew then was that I felt sick to my stomach.

I put my phone away and continued down the length of the fence, chugging my beer. I was done. The people, the art, the music, I was done with all of it. But as I neared the end of the fence, something caught my eye. There was a single paper in a plain black frame. It wasn’t an ad; there weren’t any images or logos on it. It didn’t even look to be typed up; the letters were crooked and uneven, sagging slightly at the end of each line. I peered at it closer, my nose nearly touching the glass. It was a short, handwritten poem. On paper. With a pencil. It reminded me of something lost, a vague recognition of a world long since past, and a hazy memory slowly rose to mind of my parents reading to me as a child. I remembered the weight of the book in my hands, the aroma of the pages as they turned, the sound of the words as they whispered from my parent’s mouths.

“Please don’t judge me based off of that.”

I jumped and nearly dropped my beer as I threw myself around and the girl in the orange high tops burst into laughter. She doubled over and covered her face.

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” she said through her cupped hands. “Are you okay?”

I struggled to gather myself together as quickly as possible, clearing my throat and trying, once again, to flatten down my shirt. “I’m… Yeah… Did you do this?”

Her laughter slowly faded. “Yes, sadly. It’s not my best work, okay?”

“No, no. It’s great. I love it, actually. It’s really–“

“Atrocious.”

“Are you kidding? I mean, I’ve never read poetry, but–“

“Exactly. You’ve never read poetry. This is junk, trust me.”

The girl slowly pushed me to the side and sat in the chair beside her poem.

“Well,” I said, “can I see something else?”

She shrugged and threw her hands in the air, motioning to the empty fence space around her. “It’s all I’ve got, I’m afraid.”

“Then why put it up?”

“It’s the shortest thing I could fit up here.” I raised an eyebrow and she rolled her eyes. “I don’t do poems. It’s not really my thing. Everything I usually do is a little more long form, you know? And that doesn’t really fly with this place. Or any place, really.” She crossed her legs and I tried not to look at the flash of thigh as her dress rode up her leg and she fought to pull it back down. “People don’t want stories, anymore. They want flashes, images, ideas. Something they can look at for a single second and say, ‘Yeah, that’s good, I like that.’” She shook her head. “This isn’t my art,” she said, pointing to the poem hanging behind her. She patted the black notebook resting on her knee. “This is.”

I nodded slowly and knowingly. “Can I see it?” I asked.

“No, you can’t see it! Jesus, the nerve of some people.”

“Look. I don’t exactly get this whole ‘Word Art’ thing, either. Some of it’s kind of cool, I guess. That ‘Letter Opener’ piece is pretty creative. But, honestly, I just really–”

“Yeah, but that’s also white noise. Look me in the eye and tell me what it means. Please. I am asking you to explain it to me, because I sure as hell don’t get anything from it other than a stomachache. Nothing in there means anything. Nobody in there thinks of what they are doing or the things they are saying or the culture they are completely tearing apart. Nobody in there even really looks at anything. They’re all too lost in their own lives to be aware of what is around them. Words are more than just symbols to be tinkered with. They carry a power, a weight, a meaning. They tell stories.”

I swallowed hard. “Then show me.”

She eyed me suspiciously, her breath slowing. We stayed like that for what felt like an hour, her eyes ripping through my flesh to the awkward, self-conscious little boy I never truly grew out of, until she slowly opened her notebook and began rifling through the pages. I sat down on the ground across from her and crossed my legs the way I remember doing so often in school to watch our daily lessons. Her hand plucked the pencil from behind her ear and scribbled out lines here and jotted down words there. I sat quietly and watched her softly gnaw on the eraser as she carefully thought and considered her decisions. Finally, she placed the pencil in its rightful place behind her ear, took a deep breath, and started reading.

Her story was a quiet one of loss and heartache. The characters had no impact on the world, the country, or even their own hometown. In the grand scheme of things, they meant nothing. But the decisions they made and the impact those had on their own lives meant everything. I lost myself in her imagery, her prose, her little tangents, and I remembered what it was like to hear stories as a kid, laying on my back as my mother’s voice carried my imagination off into other worlds. By the time she finished, my beer was sitting warm and forgotten by my feet and we were the only two people still outside.

She closed her notebook and hesitantly looked at me. “Well?”

I sat in silence for a few seconds, still awash in the sepia-toned, tattered images she created in my mind. I wanted to tell her what her story meant to me, what it shook up inside of me. Instead, I could only muster one thing. “What’s your name?” I asked.

She chuckled. “Rhys. A boy’s name, I know, but… it’s mine.”

“It’s nice,” I said. We sat in silence again and looked out at the night, comfortable in each other’s company. I wanted to ask her something, but I wasn’t exactly sure how. So, of course, I blurted it out.

“Can I buy it?” I asked.

Rhys stood from her chair and stretched her back. I grimaced as loud pops emanated from her spine. She let out a breath, relaxed, and looked down at me. “That’s the beauty of stories,” she said. “Once they’re out, you don’t own them, anymore.” I sighed and she rolled her eyes. “But…” She pulled her poem off of the chicken wire fence and handed it to me.

I scrambled to my feet excitedly. “How much?” I asked as I pulled out my wallet.

She shook her head and shoved the frame into my hands. “Keep it,” she said. “It’s junk, anyways. I keep telling you that.”

“That’s the beauty of stories,” I said. “You don’t get to choose.”

She laughed and knelt beside her chair. “You got me there,” she said. She started to rummage through a messenger bag laying on its side. I tried to peek over her shoulder, but the speed with which she tossed aside old receipts, food wrappers, and torn up bits of paper made it impossible to see anything, so I held back.

“My grandmother gave me my notebook when I was in high school,” Rhys said. “Real leather, hand crafted, absolutely perfect. I had never seen anything like it. It had already been years since I had seen a book, but a notebook this beautiful? Hell no. And she told me, ‘Every story starts with a good book.’” Rhys looked up from her bag and stared me dead in the eye. “She died the next day.”

“Oh god, I am so sorry. I didn’t know. I mean, of course I didn’t know, but had I known I wouldn’t have asked to see your notebook and–“

Rhys burst into laughter. “I’m kidding! She died years later in her sleep. You need to chill, man.”

I forced out some canned laughter while she proceeded to dig through her bag. “My point is,” she continued, “you can’t tell a story without the right tools.” She pulled a pen and a small brown notebook with a plastic cover from her bag and held them out to me.

I shook my head. “No, no, no. I can barely tell people what I did with my day, let alone make up a whole story.”

“Take it,” she demanded. Her eyes were beginning to shoot daggers at me again, so I took the notebook and awkwardly placed the pen behind my ear. “There you go. Now you look the part.”

“I don’t know what to say,” I told her.

“Don’t say anything. Believe me, it’s a cheap notebook and that pen will smear like no other.”

“Cheap?” I rifled through the notebook and admired the rough feel of the paper against my fingers. “Anything with real paper has to cost at least–“

“It’s fine. Now go.” She waved me away.

“What are you going to do?”

Rhys sat back down in her chair, crossed her legs, and opened her notebook to a blank page. “I have some ideas I want to jot down.”

I nodded. “Thank you.”

Her head was already down and her pencil scribbling away as she waved goodbye, her orange high tops kicking the air.

The band was busy tearing down their equipment as I walked back through the building. Artists were packing what didn’t sell and counting the money from what did. Groups of people still lingered and talked amongst themselves. I overheard passing conversations about their lives and the world and the government, and not once did anyone mention the art that surrounded them, the words that stared in at them. They were oblivious and it made me sad. Words, long ago, could inspire, could hurt, could topple regimes. Now they were simply placeholders and background noise, wallpaper in a room where people can get drunk and schmooze.

Victoria was in the same place I had left her. She stood proudly next to her sculpture, showing it off to the remaining few people in the room. I even noticed the bartender standing in front of her, nodding and scratching his head as he studied the giant wad of paper. Even from far away I could see the frayed edges where the paper was torn and the blackened corners where she had set them aflame, ever so quickly, to give them a charred, weathered look. I clutched the notebook and poem closer to my body as I left the building, V’s booming laugh following after me.

It took some time before I was comfortable enough to actually start writing in my new (old) notebook. Nothing ever seemed good enough or poignant enough to put on something as rare as paper. I slowly learned to let my mind wander, developing ideas and concepts in my mind. I would often jot down ideas on my phone or tablet before setting ink to paper, giving myself enough room to be sure that the idea deserved it. After enough time passed, I learned to simply write and let words flow. They were not always good and were often times bad, but they were mine.

I still wonder what happened to Rhys and her orange high tops. I imagine the places she’s been and the stories she’s told. But mostly I just think about her. In a world of flash and noise where people gnash and claw and howl to be noticed, she sits quietly in the corner, a notebook in hand, and shares her stories to the few who will listen.

In the Beginning

We are not deities, but we create. We create because we must. We create because it is in us, a not always pleasant part of us. We create because the stories, the paintings, the entire worlds within us screech and holler and pound until they are let out and made real.

We feed them whatever they desire, slowly and carefully. They must be strong before they are let out of their cages, they must be given time to grow and mature. Some – the nice ones – politely request a sunset, a stroll through the park, a loving hand to hold. Others leave a hand-written note at their door demanding silence and solitude and a window to look through on a rainy day; you know the type. And still others roar and slash and thirst for blood, despair, heartache, regret, throwing themselves at their cage until it is jagged and misshapen. And a select few – as there are always a select few – say no words and make no demands. They simply sit, stare, and wait patiently for the perfect meal to be placed at their feet. And when that oddly magical combination is finally figured out, they silently observe the banquet of joy and melancholy, pain and excitement laid before them, nod their head once, twice, and leave their home of stick and mud without a single glance behind them.

No one ever said creating was always satisfying. It can be, of course, and there is sometimes an overwhelming joy to seeing a creation leave and venture out into the world on its own; fully grown, even if not fully ready. But there is also a sadness, an emptiness, a sense that you are losing part of yourself. And you miss it once it is gone. Suddenly you have nothing to satiate, nothing to please, and your mind echoes with the shouts and the screams and the silence.

But we are creators, so we wander until we stumble upon a pale youngling on its own struggling to survive, or until a grand winged beast knocks us on our face and tears at our flesh, or until a kindly old gentleman invites us in for tea next to a fire he has built with logs that look strangely like children’s arms and legs. And we nurture whatever we find or whatever finds us. Because we must.

We are not deities. But we create.

Monoliths

Patrick was mindlessly sweeping the back office, humming a tune he couldn’t name, when he heard the tinkling bell at the front door signal an incoming patron. He let out a soft groan and threw the broom into the corner.

Sweeping was the one thing Patrick had that kept him sane. He wasn’t sure the sweeping actually did any good as far as cleanliness was concerned (he couldn’t recall a single day where he spotted even a mote of dust in this place), but the routine helped him maintain a sense of time – another thing this place lacked. After years (he assumed) of trial and error, he had finally timed it so perfectly that it took precisely 58.5 minutes to sweep the entire building, allotting himself a minute and a half to getting out and putting away his supplies. He would then use the rest of his time to daydream, stare into the void, lay flat on his face, or anything else that tickled his fancy, while humming approximately 391 songs to himself, which took up about 23 hours. And then it was time to sweep again. It was a comfortable routine made science, one that doubled both as a form of therapy and a built in calendar, and the only times Patrick broke from it was when he was working with a client – which, let’s face it, was few and far between these days – or, more often than not, when Jimmy decided to poke his round, punchable face inside and start poking around.

“I’m gonna kill him. It’s not like there will be any witnesses. It’s the perfect crime,” he muttered to himself. He stormed through the narrow hallway, his heavy footfalls echoing off of the hardwood floors.

“I swear on my grave, Jimmy, you cherubic sonofabitch, if you so much as breathe on one of my monoliths, I will wring your neck until you–“

Patrick stopped mid-stride when he didn’t see Jimmy and his chubby mitts pawing at his display, but rather a young woman standing at one of the shelves lining the walls, idly staring at a kabuki mask. She didn’t turn to look at him when she said, “Who’s Jimmy?”

“Oh, jeez. I am so sorry. It’s been a while since anyone has been in here, so I just assumed–” He moved towards her, winding his way through the low shelves in the center of the room. “Jimmy is… well, he’s an asshole, that’s about all there is to it.”

“Concise,” she said to the room. “This is a pretty cool place, Jimmy not withstanding. Very cozy, especially with the hardwood floors.”

“Thank you. There’s no way to actually get real wood here, so it took centuries to get it to look and sound just right. It’s still not great, but it’s not bad.“ He tapped the floor lightly with the heel of his boot.

“I think it’s lovely. Everywhere else was just pure white and clean and…”

“Sterile?”

The girl nodded. “I mean, I know it’s just giving people what they expect, but–“ She shivered. Her stare never left the shelves full of odds and ends, her eyes drifting from the kabuki mask to a toy car to a single bullet, every item separately displayed with a small placard baring a single name. “So I assume these are the monoliths, eh? I thought a monolith was some sort of giant rock or black brick thing from space or something.” She broke her stare and turned to face Patrick. “This just looks like junk.”

“You mean of all of the things you could choose to be, you wouldn’t want to be reincarnated as a knick-knack found in a garage sale? Tsk, tsk. You, my dear, have no taste.”

The young woman smiled and rolled her eyes. “Ha ha. Very funny. Seriously, what is this? I imagine these were all people. Are these my options?”

Patrick teetered his hand back and forth and grimaced. “Not really. These are more interpretations of their marks, of what they will become. I didn’t turn anybody into these items. These just represent what I saw and what I felt when I heard them.”

She stared at Patrick intently. “Heard them…?” She moved her hand in a circular motion, urging him to continue.

He laughed and said, “No, no. That was the end of that sentence.”

She raised an eyebrow and nodded in confusion. She meandered between the shelves, her eyes drifting over a small coffin, a burning tree, a portrait of a woman. Patrick lagged behind her, careful to give her plenty of space, until she finally stopped in front of what looked like a neon power tool covered in rhinestones.

“This is… interesting,” she said.

Patrick chuckled. “To say the least. That’s one of my favorites, actually. I like to call it ‘Candy-Covered Chainsaw.’ That person’s sound was sweet, but chaotic. Almost guttural, I guess you could say. It was not at all what I was expecting. He was so unassuming.”

“So you turn people into art? That’s kinda cool. I think I’d be pretty avant-garde, myself. Almost expressionistic, in a way.”

Patrick bit his lip. He was doing this all wrong. If he didn’t say something soon, he would lose another one.

He started, “That’s not really it either, to be honest. Like I said, this isn’t anybody. This is just how I remember them, how they came across in my mind.”

“So, what, you essentially make caricatures of people and make them disappear?”

“No, I–“

“Because that’s what it sounds like. In which case, why would I give you my essence for nothing in return, when I could just go down to the end of this road and step out into oblivion where I could also become nothing and leave it at that? It’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

“If you’d just give me a minute, I could–“

“Look, man, you’re not making this easy for me. Every other place was super clear and upfront. ‘Come through here and become an animal!’ ‘Enter here and become a flower!’ ‘Wait in this line for eternity and go back to being part of the world’s population problem!’ But all I’m getting from you is that you’ll listen to me and, I don’t know, have some arts and crafts time, I guess?”

“It’s more complicated than that. If you’ll just–“

“No. Tell me. Why should I trust you with the remainder of my existence?”

Patrick sighed and scratched his head. He always hated this part.

“I put a person’s essence into music.”

The young woman’s face went slack and her shoulders dropped. “That’s it?” She threw her arms up in the air. “Then just say that! The giant warehouse up the street does the same thing and they’re not all coy about it.”

“Song Styles of Beyond? No, they make a song out of you and then they inject it into some sorry sap on earth who has to belt it out and claim it as their own, for better or worse. And, believe me, it’s usually for worse. Occasionally someone will come out the other end a one-hit-wonder, but that place goes through so many beings that it’s all repetitive bullshit. Which says as much about the people they’re transferring as it does their industry, but–“ Patrick waved away his train of thought, took a breath, and continued. “I don’t make you into a song. I sort of make you part of one.”

The girl crossed her arms, leaned lightly against the shelf next to her, and slightly nodded: Proceed.

Patrick cleared his throat.

“Have you ever heard a song for the first time and you immediately knew you were in love with it? Where you couldn’t exactly place why, but you knew it spoke to you on an almost chemical level? To the point where you could just listen to it on repeat for hours?”

The girl nodded.

“Who hasn’t, right? Now I want you to take that one step further. In at least one of those songs, I can almost guarantee that you picked up on the slightest of flourishes that, in your mind, made the song ten times better. Be it a sudden key change, a guitar lick, a harmony, a turn of phrase, something. It was small. But it stood out. And it reminded you of something or someone or at least made you feel something… special.”

The girl nodded slowly. “You make people part of a song,” she said.

Patrick groaned and started walking backwards through the maze of shelves without ever breaking eye contact with his potential client. “This is where it gets complicated. One of the biggest problems with Song Styles of Beyond is that they let everyone dictate what type of song they want to be. They choose the genre, the instruments, the key, everything. That’s why you hear so many songs that not only sound the same, but also sound phony. There is no inspiration. It’s all forced. Which is exactly what I strive to not do.”

He stopped at a pedestal covered in a blanket and motioned the young woman over. She obliged, her face blank as she wound her way through the array of shelves, and stopped at Patrick’s side.

“This is what I do.” Patrick grabbed the corner of the blanket hanging by his hand and gently pulled.

As the veil slowly slid to the floor, the room illuminated with harsh white light. The young woman’s mouth dropped. “Yeah,” Patrick said, “I like it, too.”

Inside the glass case was a sun the size of a basketball, small clouds drifting and billowing around it. The girl shielded her eyes, but would not look away.

“If you work with me,” Patrick continued, “you won’t become a song. Hell, I won’t even make you into music. Instead, you will become inspiration for that small, profound moment found in the best of songs. That’s what’s on all of these shelves. The inspiration that creates the music.”

Patrick looked at the young woman’s face, searching for any hint of response, but after several minutes of her staring in silence, he gathered the blanket back into his arms and threw it over the case. The second the light was fully shielded, she turned to him.

“How does it work? What do you need? You said you listen, right?”

Her sudden enthusiasm caught Patrick off guard and he took an involuntary step back. “Yeah, but–“

“I’ll tell you everything. My name is Holly Parker. I’m 28 years old. Well, I was 28 years old. I grew up in Huntsville, Texas. I had three older brothers. My mom left when I was eight. I–“

“No, no, we just have to–“

“Do you need to know how I died? Here, I’ll show you.” Holly began pulling up her shirt and Patrick immediately yanked it back down.

“That’s not–,” he stammered. “I don’t–“

Patrick took a deep breath, grabbed Holly by the arms, and looked into her eyes. “I don’t need to know how it happened. It already bummed me out to see how young you were when I stormed in here like an idiot. I don’t need any of that, okay?”

Holly nodded and forced a smile. “Sorry, I just… got excited, I guess.”

“Which is amazing. You’re the first person to say that, to be honest. Just,” he motioned down the narrow hallway at the back of the room, “follow me.”

Their footsteps shrank from loud, echoing smacks, to dark, hollow thuds as they made their way further into the corridor and the light receded behind them. Patrick knew the whole building like the back of his mind. He ducked beneath fake cobwebs he hung from the ceiling, dodged loose, squeaky floorboards he planted decades before, and hugged tight corners that were completely unnecessary. He was moving at a brisk pace, happy to have his first someone new to work with in months. They walked on deeper than any building should have permitted, and for a brief moment, Patrick forgot how disorienting it would be to someone unfamiliar with the layout until he heard Holly breathing heavily as she rushed to keep up, her short legs moving at twice the pace. He shortened his step and they moved leisurely through the hall, Holly’s breath slowly evening out. They moved in silence until Holly’s voice emanated from behind Patrick.

“So why don’t more people come by here? It seems like a pretty awesome deal to me.”

He shrugged. “A myriad of reasons, I guess. People with any sort of strong belief about the afterlife automatically get thrown into whatever it is they’re expecting, which cuts out a sizable chunk of the population. That leaves people who don’t really know. They’re then put down a one-way road, which you’ve obviously seen, that gives them their options. The caveat is that they can’t turn back, which means if someone passes on something they sort of like to see the other options they have, they may very well be shooting themselves in the foot. And if they pass everything by, all that’s left is the void at the end of the road.”

“You can’t turn back?”

“Didn’t they tell you that? I thought the gatekeepers were supposed to tell everyone.”

“Well, excuse me for still being freaked out over the fact that I had quite recently kicked the bucket.”

Patrick chuckled. “People panic when they’re limited. They get scared when they’re given one choice and they’re afraid to miss out on something better. It’s why all of the big ones are at the beginning of the road. Human reincarnation, animal reincarnation, nature, space, all of it.”

They turned one final corner and stopped in front of a large wooden door. Patrick fumbled around in his pocket for the keys.

“This isn’t going to end up being some sort of kinky torture chamber where I’ll rot for the rest of eternity, is it?” Holly peaked back around the corner. “I mean, we did walk for an inordinate amount of time.”

Patrick finally pulled the keys from his pocket, grabbed a small key glowing neon green, and turned the lock on the door.

“We need the silence,” he said, turning the doorknob. “It’s easier to tap in.”

“To what?”

Patrick opened the door and walked into the pitch-black room. Holly lingered back. For the first time, she was afraid to follow. What if it really was some sort of torture chamber? What if this was actually the gateway to hell or purgatory? She couldn’t feel any heat emanating from the darkness or smell sulfur (she didn’t believe in hell, but she didn’t really believe in an afterlife, either, and here she was), but her hesitance remained. Sounds of Patrick mumbling to himself emanated from the darkness and Holly peeked back down the hallway. If she started now, she should be able to beat him back to the front door. His stride was twice as long as hers, but she could be fast when under pressure. A loud bang erupted from the darkness and Holly took a step back.

“Fuck!” Patrick shouted.

Holly edged towards the corner. If she could just make it around the bend, she knew she could make it. Her shoe followed the wall until it gave to open air. Her heart was racing. One quick move and she was gone.

There was one more loud bang, a whirring of what Holly assumed were motors (although she felt them more than heard them), and the hallway around her was bathed in a soft light. Patrick stepped out into the hall.

“Sorry. I really don’t know why I didn’t just put a light switch next to the door. I guess the kid in me always wanted one giant power switch that controlled everything.” He stepped to the side and extended an arm into the room. “Come in.”

Holly peered inside and her heart immediately eased. “Whoa,” she muttered.

She had never had the chance to enter a recording studio, but Holly had seen plenty of pictures and she had never seen anything like this. She doubted anything like it even existed on Earth.

The mixing console in the center of the room held the standard sliders, buttons, and switches Holly recognized, but there were also knobs, levers, dials, and cranks. And wires. So many wires. They connected pieces of hardware, ran to the enormous speakers lining the walls, disappeared into the floorboards. Some wires even just dangled with nowhere to go. It was a veritable mess, but Holly could tell it was a logical one, the kind that makes sense to the user, the person who sits in the worn leather chair at the center of everything.

She approached the console, but was careful to keep her hands at her sides.

“This is…” She trailed off, unable to find the words.

“Atrocious, I know,” Patrick said. “But it works. You, however, will be in there.”

Patrick quickly punched two small buttons and a large room illuminated behind a wall of glass in front of the console. At the side of the room, a door slowly opened. Sitting perfectly in the center was nothing but a single wooden stool.

“Shouldn’t there be a mic or something?” Holly asked.

“They’re built into the walls,” Patrick replied. “Go ahead.”

Holly slowly made her way through the side door and sat on the stool at the center of the room. She watched Patrick on the other side of the glass punch a button and the side door slowly closed, making a sound like it was being vacuum-sealed: shoompf. Holly fidgeted on the stool.

“Alright, this will probably take a couple minutes,” Patrick said over the intercom. “I just need to find the correct frequency and then we’ll get going.”

Holly nodded and watched as he played with knobs and dials. She could feel her nerves clenching and her stomach turning. Her mind was at a gallop, jumping from memory to memory, recalling the brief life she had and the people she loved.

“So how does this work exactly?” she asked. “You said I become inspiration and that inspiration becomes part of a song. Right?”

Patrick’s eyes never left the console as he replied, “Basically. Those walls are lined with super sensitive microphones that pick up on a very specific frequency you emit. Once I find it and tap into it, I listen, harness the energy, and put it into… whatever it is I feel or sense or see.”

“And then whoever is actually creating the music back on Earth finds that inspiration and puts it into a song?”

“A piece of a song, correct.”

Holly’s hand involuntarily went to her side and she could feel the wound, remembered the pain. “Will my family hear it? My loved ones?”

“Potentially, assuming they’re around when the song is.” Patrick fiddled with a large dial and stopped to look in at Holly. “Mostly it’ll be strangers. They’ll key in to something minor, something they can’t quite place, but they’ll know it’s special. That it means something.”

Holly dropped her hand from her side. “That’s beautiful. How do you not have a line of people winding around the building?”

Patrick guffawed and continued messing with the console, occasionally pausing to inspect his work. “This far down the road, most people aren’t interested in something as small as what I have to offer. Nobody wants to be something slight, but memorable. Lately it seems like all people want is the biggest, grandest showcase they could put on that proves they were not mundane, that their life meant something. Nobody wants a bit part. All anybody wants is their own shitty reality show.”

Holly shrugged. “I don’t know. Had I lived longer, maybe I would’ve wanted the same thing. But where I was at the time, my life was basically heading for something small, anyways. Which is what I wanted. I wanted a family, kids, a house. Maybe a dog, I don’t know. I get the appeal of having a grandiose monument stating that you were important, but maybe making any impact, no matter how small, is monument enough. It may not be as shiny or glamorous, but it’s more intimate, you know?” She felt herself calming down and rocked her dangling feet back and forth. “So do I get to hear it?”

“Hold on. I almost got it.” Patrick threw a couple switches, adjusted some sliders, and turned a dial just a hair. “There. What?”

“Do I get to hear it? The song?”

Patrick stared at her, sitting alone in a giant room, her feet slowly, gently kicking the air in front of her, and smiled. “Once. You ready?”

She nodded.

Patrick connected a dangling cord to the console, moved a slider up, and a low, pulsing synth slowly filled the silence. Holly’s face gradually lit up as a bass line came in, holding the rhythm alongside a drum machine, followed quickly by woozy harmonies and bleeps and bloops. It was unlike anything Patrick had ever heard and his mind was immediately awash in imagery.

“What is this?” Holly asked, her face breaking out into a huge grin.

He shushed her and they sat and listened as the lyrics came in. Patrick studied what was being sung, almost crooned. It was invariably a love song, but the accompanying music and the delivery of the lyrics were tinged with sadness, a longing for something just out of reach.

As the song broke into what was essentially a chorus with no lyrics, Patrick listened intently. He could feel the moment coming up, where the inspiration would strike. Behind the main synthesizer, the bass, and the drum machine, he picked up on a faint backing track, soft bloops accenting the melody. He waited, biting his lip, when he heard it. An even softer trill of synth accented the bloops and he had an unfathomably strong image in his mind of fingers intertwining for the first time, the rush of a heart skipping a beat, and the fear that it would not last.

“That was it, wasn’t it?” Holly asked. “I felt it! It was… warm.”

Patrick did not look up. Instead, he simply nodded and held a finger up to his lips. All that was left was to let the song play out. He committed every note, every line, and every intricacy to memory and stored it in his mind’s vault. He couldn’t tell how many of these he had done, but he knew this was one that would stick.

A soft, deep bell signaled the end of the song and Patrick looked up from his console into the now empty room in front of him. He punched a button to open the door and slowly made his way inside. Holly was gone and in her place on the stool was a single photograph of two hands almost touching. He picked it up, left the room, and shut it all down.

He made his way back to the shop front and stopped behind the counter. He picked up a pedestal and a gold placard that already had Holly’s name printed on it, and placed them both prominently on the counter in front of him. He had seen people leave statues, mountains, and whole planets (all miniaturized, mind you), artifacts that were truly monolithic. But sometimes the smallest thing left the biggest impact.

The song without a name he had just heard began to replay in his head. He hummed along as he stepped into the back room and grabbed his broom. He didn’t know how much time had passed, but he didn’t really care. Once again, it was time to start over.

Leap of Faith (Or Something of That Nature)

I stared out at the horizon. It evoked the kind of beauty that seemed all but lost and forgotten, the kind of place you only ever hear about or see in fairy tales. I marveled at the mountain peaks buried beneath the cloudy skies, the puffs of white and gray being carried briskly by the wind, and finally remembered to breathe.

She said there was magic in those mountains.

I didn’t understand what she meant by those words. Part of my mind wanted to simply look at it as the kind of frilly nonsense people say when they want to sound smart and sophisticated, but as I stood there on that cliff top, looking out at a landscape that had never been altered by human hands in millennia, it finally clicked. That place was otherworldly, like the stones, crags, and boulders held vast secrets no person had ever learned. Every plant, every stone, every crevice told a story long past that would go lost to the ages.

The cool wind whipped my hair into a frenzy of tangled curls and I did my best to keep it out of my eyes, from obstructing my view. I feared that if I stopped looking, even for a moment, the land would change and the magic would be gone, a casualty to the wind and the clouds and the drab, empty world around it. There was magic in those mountains.

What better place to die?

I looked down at the ground beneath my feet and slid my foot through the pebbles, mindlessly making a figure eight in the dirt.

I had known I was going to jump for a while. People always act like jumping to your death is some sort of spur of the moment flight of fancy, like you’re strolling down the street, come across a bridge, and think to yourself, “Gee, you know what sounds swell? Jumping to my death.” No. Nobody does that. Ever. This was a decision that took a lot of thought and time and effort. Once I made my decision, the question was never whether or not I would actually do it, but merely a matter of when and where I wanted my body to drop.

For months I had lain in a hospital bed and watched people walk in and out of my room at their own will. Doctors and nurses pushed buttons, took notes, poked my body, and asked me intrusive questions about my bowel movements. Friends and family members were largely the same, but I could at least feign sleep to make them go away. It was the one saving grace of wearing an assless hospital gown with no pants.

I’m deflecting, I know. Not to get all Psyche 101, but is it really that surprising? After hearing doctors (and, yes, I do mean plural) say they have no idea what is wrong with you and thus have nothing they can really do for you, deflecting becomes something of a necessity. It makes the confrontation with your own mortality a little more bearable.

They wanted to run every test under the sun. More and more doctors traipsed in and out of my room, throwing all kinds of big words and fancy names at me, more than half of which I’m convinced were made up on the spot. And, at first, I let them. It didn’t matter if it was experimental, obscure, theoretical, or even any of that homeopathic hippy nonsense; I was willing to try anything. But after so many failed attempts and unforeseen side effects and uncontrollable bowel movements, I finally made the decision to stop.

The doctors didn’t understand. My family didn’t understand. My friends were actually surprisingly supportive, but I think they just wanted to start grabbing at what little possessions I had as soon as possible. The truth is none of them were aware of just what I was dealing with. Not only was my body going through every conceivable hell imaginable as blood was drawn, scans were taken, and medications were changed faster than I change my underwear, but it got so there were so many wires, tubes, and machines around me, connected to me, and pumping me full of fluids that I started having recurring nightmares.

I would wake in my pitch-black hospital room and I could sense something hovering over me. I would strain my eyes, but they would never adjust to the inky black darkness. I could just feel something there, above me, watching me. A cold, smooth tentacle would slide against my face and I would immediately move to slap it away only to find all of my limbs paralyzed at my sides. All I could do was wait and listen. The tentacle would multiply into a mass of entrails as they slithered and glided from my face to my body, slowly enclosing me in their slick embrace. A loud rusty creak would fill the room and my heart would begin to race. I would struggle to breathe and I would try to convince myself that noises were not emanating from the darkness right in front of me, even as they grew louder. And just as I could feel my mind beginning to snap, as the thin, rubbery tentacles would lift me from my bed and the metallic shrieks of hell became deafening, moonlight would shine between the wooden slats covering the window and I would see a creature of rusty steel and IV tubes lifting me to a face of shattered and decimated computer monitors, its gaping, bottomless maw full of row upon row upon row of syringes dripping crimson. And I would wake screaming.

It was the same nightmare every night, but every time that beast of modern medicine would eat just a little bit more of me, slowly working its way up my arm, my calf, my torso, my neck. The scary part was that I could feel it, every last excruciating bite of countless rusty, cracked, and broken needles tearing through my flesh. And it savored it. It savored me.

Needless to say, I called off the tests before it worked its way through my beautiful face. Not that it stopped the son of a bitch immediately, but it slowed him down and I could gradually feel him recede back into the darkness. I may have been laying myself down on my own deathbed, but at least I wouldn’t go being devoured by the very thing that should have been saving my life.

I neared the edge of the cliff and peered down at the jagged rocks far below. They looked painful. But welcoming. I imagined what it would be like to watch the world rise to meet me, the still, cool air becoming a rush of wind as I tore through it like a train barreling down the tracks. What would I think about? What would I want my last thought to be?

A screech echoed through the canyons and valleys. I stepped back from the ledge and searched the grounds and the skies until I spotted a hawk soaring high above me, its powerful wings flapping gracefully and with purpose. It was circling. I looked back down to the ground below, scanning the open landscape for its prey, but couldn’t find anything amongst the foliage. There was another screech and I looked back up to the sky, catching the bird just as it began to dive. Its wings were pressed to its sides and its body was perpendicular to the ground, cutting through the atmosphere like a burning blade through fresh snow. My heart raced as it plummeted fearlessly towards the world below, its sharp beak leading the way, until it disappeared behind some scattered trees. For a split second I was convinced the bird had grossly miscalculated its trajectory and dove head first into the solid ground, and my heart dropped. But in an instant, the hawk soared above the trees and bushes, its wings outspread and a small rabbit dangling from its beak. I caught my breath.

Two things crossed my mind at that moment.

One: I had never seen anything like that happen in front of my eyes that was not pre-recorded and it surprised me how mixed I felt about it. On one hand, I felt incredibly sad for the rabbit, which, even if it was sick or injured, was trying to go about its rabbit-y day only to find itself suddenly yanked into the air to an untimely death. On the other hand, what that hawk did, the courage and strength and knowledge it needed and undoubtedly had in order to pull off that kind of maneuver, was nothing short of magnificent.

And two: at that moment, in my situation, I couldn’t tell if I was the rabbit or the hawk. Was I being yanked from my life to an untimely demise, or was I diving with intent and purpose?

I sighed and sat down on a nearby patch of grass and thought of the parade of people who came through my door after I made my decision to stop the meds. People I hardly talked to, family members I barely knew, even people I swear I had never even met. They were all just faces; faces who didn’t care about how I felt or what I was doing or why. They were just there to stare at me and make themselves feel good because, hey, they went and spent a few minutes with that dying guy and gave him company and made his day just a little bit brighter. But it didn’t help; it made me feel worse. What they failed to realize was that I didn’t want them there. Not because I was mean or anti-social or didn’t like them (although, to be fair, I could count on two hands and half a foot how many of them I actually did like), but because I didn’t want to feel like a sideshow, some freak people could pay to see and point at and passively ridicule. It’s why I’ve never understood not necessarily why people visit loved ones when they are in the hospital, but how they visit them. The way most people go about it, visiting someone in a hospital becomes an exhibitionist affair. They don’t talk or take something to occupy themselves and/or the person they’re visiting or really add anything to the general atmosphere of the room. Most people just sit in a chair quietly and watch their loved ones as they sleep or writhe or hurt or die. And all the sick people want is to be left alone. There is nothing more humiliating than being an open wound, than admitting that you’re hurting, that you’re in pain, that you need help. So why in the hell would someone confined to a hospital bed want a nonstop conveyor belt of people coming through to witness every single moment of it?

Of course, it slows down over time. As the news of visiting a dying acquaintance becomes less of a story to tell people, it becomes clear that actually sitting and watching a person slowly perish in front of your eyes becomes a bit of a bummer. Sunlight doesn’t romantically stream through the windows into a pure white room while everyone sits around and has heartfelt conversations with each other about life and love and how little you regret. People, instead, sit in a darkened, overcrowded room and struggle to make small talk while monitors and machines unendingly bleep and squawk over the stifled moans of a person whose body is shutting down. It’s an ugly realization, and the gears that once powered that conveyor belt of unwanted cargo gradually corrode and fail until they finally grind to a halt.

I honestly thought I would be happier when my room stopped feeling like a roadside attraction, when I wouldn’t have to smile politely and lie to people about how little pain I was in and how happy I was to see them. But dying has a weird tendency to weed out not only those you don’t care about, but even the ones you do. It’s sobering, to say the least. People you thought would be with you through everything suddenly disappear and people you never expected to stick around meet those expectations with flying colors (I at least applaud their consistency). And, to be honest, I can’t say I blame any of them. Hospitals are lonely. Not just for the patients, but also for the people who can do nothing but watch their loved ones suffer. So I can’t say I was surprised or angry when my sisters started making excuses about having “work functions” they couldn’t get out of or that they got “pregnant,” or when my dad explained to me that he couldn’t go through watching his son die, too, or when my friends just stopped talking to me altogether. It seemed like a natural course of action. And I’d say I handled it pretty well, considering. I only sobbed myself to sleep for three nights.

As much as I hated the fact that all of the people in my life were running away, I knew it was good for me. I needed the time to “get my affairs in order,” which in my case meant figuring out how to explain to everyone that my internet search history really was just for research. Besides, I wasn’t entirely alone. My hospital neighbors were all much older than me, so they always had older folk at their side, mostly husbands and wives, who would occasionally pop in to say hello. At first, I dreaded it. I had flashbacks to sitting in my grandma’s living room as she rattled on and on about how great my cousins were doing and how I should be more like them and “Oh, weren’t you in school? What ever happened with that?” But they never pried or tried to make small talk. They understood what it was like, what it meant, to be in a losing battle against your own body. So whenever I dodged a question or grew quiet or receded into my own mind, they would just smile, nod, and tell me stories about their lives, about what they had seen and what they had felt. It was only ever for minutes at a time, while they were passing through on their way to the cafeteria or the nurse’s station, but they were minutes I genuinely cherished.

I came to look forward to their bite-sized visits, craning my neck to see if they were coming or going and doing my best to make myself look a little less monstrous when I saw them shuffling down the long corridor. They unwittingly made me comfortable with my situation. But they also made me regret that I wouldn’t get to have all of the experiences they had – their love, their loss, their anger, their passion. Or maybe it’s just that they had gotten the time to reflect on their lives, to find meaning in the stupid mistakes and the happy accidents, the poor choices and the well thought out plans.

What good is a life without meaning?

But then, two weeks ago, I woke from another painful night of tossing and turning to what should have been an empty room. Instead, there was a woman slouching in the chair beside me, one leg crossed over the other and her face pressed behind a book. The front cover was adorned with finely ornate lettering. I couldn’t tell what language it was in. Italian? Spanish? It looked old, that much I could tell.

I cleared my throat. Her red hair continued swiveling left to right, completely unfazed. I cleared my throat again. She impatiently held up a finger and continued reading. Unsure of what to do, I just watched and waited, listening to the faint sounds of bleeps and coughs and moans emanating from behind the door. A few minutes passed and she finally looked up.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“Umm…” I stammered. “No? I don’t think so. I mean, I have no idea who you are or why you’re here and this is my room, so…”

She looked at me expectantly.

“Shouldn’t I be asking you that?”

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, carefully considering the question. “Well,” she started, “seeing as how you’re dying and you know very well that you could not, in any conceivable way, help me, no, you shouldn’t be asking me that.” She closed her book and set it on the table next to her. “Which is why I asked you.”

I stared at her, my mouth slightly agape. I knew I looked like an idiot. She told me as much.

“You look like an idiot,” she told me, “so I’ll ask it again.” She scooted her chair closer to my bed and sat forward, carefully enunciating each word. “Can I help you?”

My mind was a complete and total void. I tried forming thoughts, ideas, anything to try and figure out who this woman was and what she could possibly want from me, but all I could muster was the wimpiest groan I’ve ever heard come out of my mouth.

She stared at me, looked deep into my eyes, and I knew she could see the vast nothing that was my mind. Her hands clenched into fists, her lips tightened, and her breathing quickened.

“Come on, man!” she yelled. “It’s a simple yes or no question! This won’t work unless you agree to it!”

“Agree to what?”

“To me helping you.”

“With what?”

She threw her hands out to her sides. “I don’t know! That’s up to you, you moron!”

I stared at her, confused.

“You want sex? I’ll get you all the sex you could ever want. You want power? I’ll help you get more power than you would know what to do with. Fame? Talent? Love? I don’t fucking know. You have to tell me, you Neanderthal.”

“So…” I furrowed my brow as I tried to understand what she was telling me. “You can help me. With anything.”

She slowly nodded and spoke to me like I didn’t speak English. She opened her mouth wider than necessary and used exaggerated expressions. “But first I need your approval.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but hesitated. “But–“

“Just say yes, god damn it,” she blurted out.

I closed my mouth, took a breath, and considered my options. Here was a woman I had never seen before in my life angrily saying that she could help me (whatever that entailed) as long as I agreed to it. And she seemed serious about it. So I could either agree to whatever the hell it was she wanted to do, or I could call a nurse, have this lady dragged out of here by security, and live out the rest of my few remaining days in pain and agony, unendingly wondering just how she could have helped, another “What if?” to add to my roster.

I slowly let out my breath and nodded. She nodded back.

“Good,” she said quietly. “But I need it properly. So, for the last time, can I help you?”

“Yes.”

She clapped her hands together. “Alright!” She slapped me on the knee, grabbed a briefcase sitting next to her chair, and set it on her lap. “Let’s get started then. What do you want?”

For months I had known what I wanted. I had thought about, it fantasized about it, even made feeble attempts at it, but in that moment, I couldn’t speak it. I looked away from the redheaded woman sitting next to me and began to twiddle my thumbs. “Well… I just…”

Her eyes fixated on me and I could tell she was growing impatient again. She tapped her finger on her briefcase and her breathing grew heavy.

“I mean… I kinda…”

She sighed and cracked her neck. “Look. I’m sorry if I’m coming across like a hard ass or a bitch or whatever other name you want to call me. But if you really want my help, I need you to talk to me. This will not work unless you are open and honest.”

I looked out the window at the passing clouds and the swaying trees and thought of everything I was missing. The laughs. The smells. The people. It was a beautiful day and I was stuck in here. Alone.

“To die. I want to die.”

She nodded quietly and patted my arm. “Okay,” she said softly. “Not particularly new or interesting and I don’t really get it since you’re already well on your way down that road, but alright. Death it is.”

My eyes grew wide and I turned to stare at her as she flipped open her briefcase and began rifling through papers. “Excuse me? Who the fuck do you think you are to tell me that I’m not making sense? I’ve put a lot of time and thought into this! Fuck you, lady!”

She waved her hand absentmindedly to quiet me down, never once looking up from her briefcase.

“And I’m not signing any damn papers!”

“Oh, you don’t have to.” Her free hand disappeared into her coat and reemerged with a tape recorder in hand. She waved it defiantly. “You signed everything I needed right here.” She looked up just in time to see my “what the fuck is going on” face and rolled her eyes. “Oh, please. Don’t act so surprised. Besides,” she said, stuffing the tape recorder back into her coat pocket, “there are other ways to tell what you said. A couple spells and incantations and we would know everything you said in the last three years. Trust me, this is the easy way.”

My mind boggled and tried to understand what I was hearing. Spells? Incantations? What the hell was this? Was any of this even real? Was I losing my mind? I listened to the woman mutter nonsense under her breath as she flipped through the papers in her briefcase (“Wealth… Strength… Love… Didn’t I alphabetize this thing?”) and very slowly inched my hand towards the remote to call my nurse. I was almost there, a mere finger length away, when she flicked my knuckle with her pencil. I winced and recoiled in pain.

“Really? You were going to tell on me?” She shook her head and continued shuffling papers around. “Some people, man. All you do is try to help them and they have the audacity to– Ha! Found it!” She held up a paper triumphantly. “The Death form!” She began to read it over, occasionally looking up at me and nodding her head. But the further she got, the more her face scrunched up and her brow furrowed. She scratched her head and bit the end of the pencil in her hand. “No. No, this isn’t right.”

In a flash, the paper disappeared back into her briefcase and the rifling began anew. “Something is off about this,” she said. “I don’t know what it is, but you…” She shook her head. “You’re not telling me something. So we’re going to try something a little broader, a little more open-ended.” She pulled out another sheet of paper and slammed the briefcase shut. “A Release form.”

I shrugged. “If you say so.”

“I do say so. So let’s get started. Name. David Aarons. Date of birth.” I opened my mouth to tell her, but she barreled right on through me, writing the information down on the form in front of her. “September 17, 1984. Height.” She looked me up and down. “You’re what, about 5’11”?” Before I could even tell her that she was right, she turned back to the sheet and wrote it down. “Weight. Umm…” She sized me up, squinted, and shrugged. “162? That one really doesn’t matter, I don’t know why they put it on here.” She scribbled it onto the form.

She was exactly right. My mind reeled. “Did you read my chart or–?”

She ignored me. “Alright. Now the fun stuff. Friends and family. None.”

“That’s not true. I have friends and family.”

“Yes, but are they here?” She looked around the empty room and held her hands out to her sides, her lips pursed.

“I guess not.”

“You guess not.” She nodded and continued. “Client ostensibly wants: death. Reason: Is already dying, is in pain, and is alone.”

I flinched as she spoke that aloud. I knew why I had wanted to die, but to hear it summed up in three sentence fragments brought me crashing to earth. Was this really all my life came down to? I was lost in thought when I heard her clear her throat loudly and I reentered reality.

“You listening? This one is the most important, so I need you to be honest with me. Okay?”

I nodded slowly, my mind still bruised from the triviality of my death.

“How do you want to die?” she asked.

I cocked an eyebrow at her.

“Surely you’ve thought about it,” she said. “Everyone does.”

“Well, yeah, but what does it matter?”

She sighed and placed the briefcase and form on the floor beside her. “The way someone wants to go helps determine what it is they really want. Obviously a ton of factors come into play, but on a general level, look at it this way. Say someone wants to die by fire. You hear fiery, painful death, but I hear rebirth, a la the story of the phoenix. Or say someone wants to be frozen to death. Does that mean they want to die in solitude? No. It means they want to be remembered as they were in a very specific way. And so on and so forth. See what I’m saying?”

I shrugged. “I guess. But what does this have to do with me? I don’t want any of this other stuff. I just want to die.”

“And I don’t buy that.” She sat back in her chair and crossed her legs. “You may be telling me that you want to die. You may be telling yourself that you want to die. But I’m sitting here looking at you, who you are, where you’ve been, and what you have and I don’t see death on your mind. Not really.”

“No? Then what do you see?”

She paused and studied my face, analyzing every hair and wrinkle to try to get to the person beneath, and I stared back defiantly. She spoke slowly, choosing her words carefully. “You’re sad and depressed. That everyone left you. That you’re alone. That… well, that you’re dying. But you’re also relieved. It can finally be over.” She chuckled to herself quietly. “You want to jump. But not just anywhere. Typically when people want to jump, they want attention, which is why they do it in public places, on rooftops and bridges. But you… you want to go it alone. In solitude.” She nodded as if finally satisfied. “You don’t want to die. You want to be free.”

It wasn’t a question, but a statement. I let it hang in the air a moment as I struggled to come to terms with how right she was, how unbelievably on the nose her statements were. I had considered jumping off of a building at one point. I thought even jumping off of the top of this hospital would do the trick. Not only would it be effective, it would be downright poetic. But the thought of crowds and onlookers and more sirens kept me at bay. I wanted somewhere quiet, somewhere secluded, where I could leap in peace. She had me pegged. Except for one thing,

“Dying. Being set free.” I wiped my watering eye before it had a chance to reveal my weakness. “Is there even a difference?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “Let’s find out. I know just the place.”

And now here we are, at the top of these mountains, looking out at one of the most pristinely beautiful sights I have ever seen in my life. She came and sat down on a boulder next to me. “I told you there was magic out here.”

I looked up as the clouds began to break and sunlight streamed down through the cracks, illuminating the world around us in a soft yellow glow. “You weren’t lying.”

She kicked around the rocks at her feet. “So what now?”

I turned to face her. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” she stood up and motioned towards the cliff in front of us, “we’re here. Are you going to jump or what?”

I looked at her, dumbfounded, and she looked back, a cocky grin on her face. “Look, man. You wanted my help. So I figured out what you want, got you out of that hospital, drove us almost 500 miles to this place, and practically carried you up this damn mountain, so now it’s your turn. I can’t help you from here. This is all you, now.”

I rose to my feet and hesitantly walked towards the ledge, my motions jerky and unsure of themselves. I bit my lip, stopped halfway there, and turned back to look at her, staring at me, her head cocked to one side, simultaneously confused and amused. “Who are you?” I asked her. “Why did you help me?”

For a moment she looked away and stared far off into the distance, the gears in her head slowly working. “Something called me to you. Something… deep. And when I saw you lying there in that bed, I felt I had known you all my life and that I just… I had to help. Every fiber of my being told me that you, David Aarons, were my destiny.” Her gaze shifted to catch mine and a single tear rolled down her cheek.

I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t expecting anything so profound, so deep. All I could muster in reply was, “R-really?”

Her gaze never waivered and her bottom lip began to tremble. I scrambled to think of what to say, how to console her and explain to her that she was helping me more than anyone ever had. I imagined taking her into my arms and holding her as she sobbed into my chest and a warmth washed over me. I waited for the floodgates to open, for the tears to spring forth, when she finally opened her mouth and burst into laughter. She fanned herself off and wiped the tears from her eyes as she rolled off of the boulder and onto the rocky floor.

“No!” she shouted between heaving gasps of air. “Are you insane?”

Her shrieks of laughter ebbed into monstrous coughs eased into soft chuckles, and all the while I stood there, broken and dejected, kicking rocks over the edge to meet their brethren far below. Finally, her composure returned, she stood to her feet and walked up beside me clearing her throat.

“This is my job,” she said quietly. “People hire me to help them, their loved ones. It’s what I do.”

“So who hired you?”

“This time?” She gave a swift kick to a particularly large rock I had been nudging around and sent it flying over the cliff. “No one. That part wasn’t a lie.”

I shook my head. “What do you mean?”

“I mean a friend of a friend told me about you, I felt bad, and I thought I would try to help. It really was from the kindness of my heart.”

We stood in silence next to each other for a minute or two, the soft wind ringing in our ears and the warm sunlight on our skin. As stupid as it sounds, I didn’t want the moment to end.

But it had to.

“What’s going to happen?” I asked her.

She shook her head. “I really don’t know. You’re just going to have to find out. They don’t call it a leap of faith for nothing.”

I approached the ledge and looked down. “Leap of faith, huh?” I turned to look at her wavy red hair pulled back into a ponytail.

“Yeah, yeah. It’s a cliché, but it’s relevant. A little faith never hurt.”

I nodded and turned back to the cliff. I walked to the edge and looked down once more to the crags far below. I was ready. But there was one last thing I needed to know. I turned back to the redheaded beauty standing behind me and found her staring at her watch.

“Hey!” I called.

She looked up, startled, and let out a grunt of aggravation. “Jesus, would you jump already?”

“I just want to know one thing.”

She let out a sigh. “What?”

“Your name.”

Even from 50 feet away I could see her biting her lip, unsure of what she should do or say. “We’re not supposed to give out our names. Safety precaution.”

I nodded and quietly started turning back.

“But,” she started, “seeing as how I’m not technically on the clock and there’s no way you could ever be a potential threat… Annie. My name’s Annie.”

“Annie,” I said. I felt the name on my tongue and let it rest there comfortably. It was a name that seemed to be made to be there, that I had waited for. It felt right. “It was nice to have met you.” I gave her one last smile, put out my arms, and fell backwards over the edge.

As I plummeted to the earth below, my mind almost immediately started to panic and my heart began to race. I flailed my limbs wildly searching for anything to grab onto, but the whole world was a blur.

But then I heard it. A familiar sound that echoed all around me: the screech of a hawk. I pictured the hawk as it circled its prey and imagined it plummeting towards the earth, its wings pressed to its side, its beak leading the way, and in a flash I knew what to do. I held my arms to my sides, forced my legs closed, and pointed my nose towards the ground below, and in two seconds flat I was no longer falling, but diving.

Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad. At the very least, I wouldn’t die kicking and screaming. I would go with calm and grace and beauty.

As the earth rose to meet me, I thought of Annie and everything she had done for me. She was so odd and strange, but in the end, she was the only one who was there for me. But I couldn’t get past what she said: a leap of faith. What did that mean? There is a very clear line of thought when people use that term, usually implying that there is some sort of hope. But hope for what? Annie was too calculated and precise to misuse something as common as that. What did she mean?

I couldn’t let it bother me too much, however. The ground was quickly rising. The wind lashed my face and my eyes watered uncontrollably, but I kept them as open as I could to watch my shadow grow on the ground before me, the shape becoming clearer and more defined with each passing second.

I thought of my family and my friends and how they had all left me of their own accord. I thought of my mother and how she had left me against her will. And I thought of Annie and how I had left her in the cold, after everything she had done for me. I pictured her, standing there, her red hair blowing in the breeze as she bit her lip and told me her name. And for the first time in months, a wave of happiness washed over me. And I had faith.

I focused on my shadow as it grew larger and darker. The slim outline of my body heading straight for the earth looked all too familiar and I smiled at the sight of it. But something was happening. I felt a sharp pain on my back and heard my shirt tearing. I couldn’t tell if it was the wind or if the hawk had decided to claw at my back, thinking I was some sort of threat. It didn’t matter, to be honest. I simply winced and ignored it, watching the ground fall towards me. My breath quickened and a searing pain erupted from my back. I only had seconds to go. I couldn’t die before I actually hit the ground. I wouldn’t let myself. My shadow grew larger, I gritted my teeth for impact, and something sprang out of the sides of the shadow before me. The powerful beating of wings filled my ears and I blacked out.

I came to about 15 minutes later, according to Annie. She found me lying on the rocky ground, a little beaten and scraped up, but nothing that couldn’t be patched.

Oh, and I had wings, too. Let’s not forget about that.

“What the fuck happened? Am I dreaming? Am I dead?”

“Would you shut the hell up already?” Annie implored as she dabbed my face with rubbing alcohol. “You’re fine.”

“But,” I looked to the large protrusions sticking out from my sides and lightly stroked them, “wings. There are wings.”

“Yep, you grew wings. I’m as surprised as you are.”

“You mean you didn’t know this would happen?”

Annie put down the cotton swab and sighed. “No. That’s not how the job works. I don’t know what is going to happen; I just know something is going to happen. Or, at least, something should happen. It’s not always a guarantee.”

“What?!”

“Hey, I called it a leap of faith. You fucking heard me, so don’t try to pin anything on me, asshole. I’m just the observer, the person who has to watch over the client to make sure nothing goes haywire or out of control. And if it does, I’m there to take care of it.”

“I just…” I used muscles I don’t think I ever consciously used before to move the wings and maneuver them. It was clumsy, but it felt natural. “I was so sure I was going to die.”

“Yeah, well, that’s how hope and faith work. They intermingle with fear. Without that fear, without that uncertainty, hope and faith cannot exist. And without hope and faith, well, life is just plain old boring, isn’t it?”

“Am I still dying?”

She smirked and continued dabbing my face with the alcohol soaked cotton swab. “Nope, you are as healthy as ever. But those,” she motioned to my new limbs, “may make it a little difficult to walk around in public.”

I smiled. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet. What you do from here is up to you.” She tossed the cotton swab to the side and placed the bottle of rubbing alcohol into a med kit. We both got to our feet and stood face to face. “Don’t waste it.” I shook my head. She placed a hand to my face and smiled. We stood like that, her hand on my face, and for the second time in my life, I strained and wished and pled for the moment to linger, but like the best things in life, it was over too soon, and she strode to her old white SUV and drove off down the dirt path.

I never saw her again, but not a day goes by where I don’t think of her and the gift she gave me. And I don’t just mean my wings, my new life, my freedom. She gave me her heart for the briefest of moments just before she left that day and I will do everything in my power to give it back. So I soar from mountaintop to mountaintop, from city to city, searching for her. I know the odds are miniscule. But I have faith. What good is life without it?

Only the Worthy

For this story, I used the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur as a jumping off point. If you’d like, you can get a good feel of the original myth here or read a truncated version of the myth here.

He stared at the ruins of his life’s work. The chips and the cracks, the water stains, the wild, unkempt vines crawling up the sides; this was what his dreams, his goals, his purpose amounted to in this life.

Dix stepped closer to the wall and pressed his hand against it. Sturdy. They may not be the best groundskeepers, he thought, but those people knew how to build, he would give them that. He pulled at the vines, revealing fading graffiti beneath. Someone or something called “Kra-Z” had clearly been here. Chris and Monica would be “2-gether 4-ever.” Someone felt the need to simply write, “FUCK” – it was unclear to him if that was a statement or a demand. He looked down the length of the wall to his right. It curved and disappeared into the horizon, practically every inch of it covered in a mixture of vines, moss, and fading paint. He lightly shrugged. It was about what he expected.

He turned to his left and followed the wall with his eyes as it extended seemingly forever, disappearing in the moonlight. He touched his hand to the wall as he slowly walked by its side, running his hand along its cold stone surface, until he came upon an opening.

This was it: the doorway into his life’s work. The floor was littered with empty bottles and crushed cans, like sacrifices left in a drunken stupor. Skulls and crossbones were crudely drawn on either side of the doorway. A scribbled note above read, “Only the worthy shall escape.” He chuckled. Whatever keeps people interested, he thought.

He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He could feel a migraine coming on, but he had to do this. He’d waited 21 years since this was finally finished and opened to the public. For 21 years he had stayed away. And it would have been even longer were it not for that note he received in the mail a week ago.

Dix had returned home from walking his dog when he noticed something sticking out under his doormat. He opened his front door and unleashed his dog, leaving her to run inside freely, barking loudly as she ran from room to room. He pulled the white envelope out from beneath the welcome mat, confused. It was a plain white envelope with his name and address handwritten in black ink. No return address. Not even a stamp. Whoever wrote it had delivered it by hand, and fairly recently at that. He had only been gone for 15 minutes. On the back of the envelope was a small symbol that looked like a crescent moon, like God’s fingernail as he pointed down at the earth in accusation. He remembered seeing that symbol once before in a very specific place and quickly tore open the envelope right there on his doorstep. And the world began to spin.

Dix pulled the now well-worn note out of his coat pocket and re-examined it in the moonlight, his hand slightly shaking. Filling the entire page was the exact layout of the labyrinth he had designed and created, the labyrinth he now stood before. He knew that layout better than he knew his friends, his lovers, even himself. Every inch, every corner, every turn was his life. And here it was, a labyrinth designed to take days, perhaps months, possibly even years to navigate with no aid, hand-drawn on a single sheet of paper precisely to scale. And right in the center was a single word: “Come.”

A dull pain began to throb behind his eyes. He quickly folded the note and stuffed it into his pocket, pulling out two white pills in its place. He threw them in his mouth and swallowed them dry, grimacing at the bitterness. It would help with the nausea, at least.

He sighed and looked around. There was no one around for miles. No buildings, no lights, not even any paved roads. The only way to get to the labyrinth was by following a series of dirt trails for two hours. It was truly isolated. Only the bored and determined made it all the way out here. A chill ran down his spine as he turned back to the doorway.

The dark opening stared at him. He stared back, his heart beginning to race. Something about this seemed off. It shouldn’t. He knew the labyrinth better than anyone. He could probably walk straight to the center and back with his eyes closed if he wanted to prove that point. But still, he hesitated. His head dully throbbed as he stood in front of the gaping maw of his own creation and he massaged his temples. He shifted his gaze to the ground and studied the bottles at the base of the doorway. Vodka, tequila, whiskey; all of them were empty and all of them were cheap. And then he noticed, buried amongst the glass carcasses, a metal rod standing straight up amongst them.

He ran to his car and returned with a sewing kit in hand. He lightly kicked the bottles out of the way, careful not to break any glass, and grabbed the rod. It was buried deep in the earth, but he yanked it as hard as he could. It didn’t budge. Satisfied, he pulled out a spool of thread and tied one end to the rod. It was comforting. It wouldn’t be long enough to reach the center of the labyrinth, he knew, but he had extras. Tie them end-to-end and he would have more than enough. Besides, he knew the shortest route.

As he started to his feet, a smudge at the base of the door caught his eye. At least, it looked like a smudge. His brain tried to tell him that it was probably just graffiti or some sort of disgusting stain left by human excrement; it had to be. But it was too hidden to be a mistake. He rubbed his hand on the floor, clearing it of dust and debris. It wasn’t a smudge. It wasn’t a stain. It wasn’t even graffiti. It was the same crescent moon symbol from his letter.

Well, at least he knew they were here. Whatever that meant.

He got to his feet and took a deep a breath. Thread in hand, he took a step and broke the threshold.

The halls and corridors were covered with the long forgotten remains of late night raves and parties. Plastic cups, glow sticks, beads, and broken sunglasses adorned the floors; chunks of dried food and vomit painted the walls; he thought he even noticed a ratty banana costume scrunched up in a corner. But he didn’t care about any of it. As bittersweet as he knew this should be, he was simply amazed; this existed. It was built. Every turn, every corner, every angle, not a single detail was overlooked. This was his labyrinth. The one thing that concerned him was the height. He had always imagined the walls to be ten feet high at most: tall enough to conceal, but not enough to be intimidating. These walls, however, were 15, maybe 20 feet high. They were menacing, no doubt towering over the average person. These walls were not just built to create a sense of claustrophobia, these were meant to hide something.

He kept the thread firmly in hand as he slipped through the corridors. There were painted signs around every turn goading people in the wrong direction or trying to frighten them into leaving. Notes like “Lost yet?” and “Don’t look behind you” were crudely painted in peeling crimson. He ignored them. He absentmindedly took the path he knew was correct: always forward, never left or right (unless you reach a fork in the path. In which case, always right). It was a detail he had taken from the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. In fact, this whole thing was an idea because of Theseus and the Minotaur.

Dix had always enjoyed puzzles when he was a child. Word games, memory games, number games; if it involved a little bit of brainpower, he would do it. But if he ever had a choice, he would always choose a maze. He liked the solitude and the isolation mazes implied. He loved the feeling of triumph and pride he got from solving a particularly difficult maze. But most importantly, there was order in the twists and turns. Where life was a mess of random events that would jettison people in a smattering of different directions, mazes made sense. They not only had a fixed endpoint, but there was only ever a single, unbreakable path to get there. They were comforting. As he got older, he would look for patterns in the designs, rules that governed even the most complex layout. For days, he would draw his own mazes and hand them out to his classmates, suitably satisfied with how long it would take them to make it through.

By the time he was introduced to Greek mythology and Theseus and the Minotaur, the walls of his room were already plastered with mazes of his own design. But when he read of Daedalus the architect’s creation, of a labyrinth so sprawling that one could literally die trying to find their way out, his path became clear. He was going to design and create a labyrinth so complex that it would take days, maybe even weeks, months, years, even, to navigate. This was his purpose.

Immediately he set to work, drafting and scribbling and erasing. Everything had to be exact and perfect and to very detailed specifications. He couldn’t overlook a single corner. He closed himself off. He stopped talking to people. His grades faltered. His family and friends grew worried and tried to help, but he simply grew angry and violent. And word quickly spread around town: Dix was losing his mind. He didn’t care what they thought. What he was doing was something great, something beautiful. This wasn’t just a maze he was creating, it was a landmark, a monument, a human creation so significant that it would be mentioned in textbooks and TV shows alongside other great feats like the Leaning Tower, the Coliseum, and Stonehenge. He was making history.

Finally, years later, he was done. He was living in a crummy apartment the size of his parents’ broom closet, his family and friends had abandoned him, and he had almost no money to his name, but it was complete. The labyrinth finally existed. Now the only obstacle left was to get it built.

He shopped the design around to every company he could imagine. Artists, corporations, freelancers, no one was off limits. But none of them quite understood. He got some bites, even a couple companies that were willing to offer lots of money if he would design rides and attractions for them, but nobody wanted to build his labyrinth exactly the way it was. Family friendly versions, sure, but no one was thinking as big as he was.

Defeated, exhausted, and dirt poor, he had to give up. Maybe the world just wasn’t ready. Maybe it never would be. And then he got a call.

“Hello?”

“Yes, my name is Delilah, I work with the Minos Corporation. I’m calling to potentially set up an appointment to discuss your work.”

His eyes lit up. “You mean my labyrinth?”

“Yes, exactly. When are you free?”

“I mean, my schedule is completely open. Whenever is best for you, I guess.” He scratched his head. “Who did you say you work for?”

“Well, you see, our CEO is actually right around the corner of your home and would like to meet as soon as possible.”

“You mean right now?!” His eyes darted from his overflowing trashcan, to his pile of dirty dishes, to a mound of unwashed laundry. “Can’t it –“

“Mr. Minos does not like to wait. I would encourage you to agree.”

Dix dashed around his apartment, throwing dishes into cupboards and laundry into drawers. “I mean, I guess that’s fine? I’m not exactly –“

“Great. He’ll be there momentarily.”

Delilah hung up and Dix tossed his phone across the room. He threw the rest of his dirty dishes into the dishwasher and slammed it shut. He ran around frantically, throwing on a decent, if wrinkled, shirt and rearranging pillows, when there was a knock at the door.

“Just a minute!”

He ran through the kitchen and noticed the garbage can. He started to pull the bag out as fast as he could when there was another, more rapid knock.

“Fuck,” he whispered. “Coming!”

He let the bag fall back into the can, pushed everything down as hard as he could, and forced the lid back on. It threatened to burst open, but it would have to do.

Dix flattened his hair and shirt as he approached the door, his other hand reaching out for the knob, when it turned and opened from the outside. Suddenly he found another man’s hand in his palm instead of the metal knob he was expecting.

“Dix, how great to finally meet you!”

Dix scrambled for words. “Uh… yeah. Likewise. Did you pick my lock?”

The man shook Dix’s hand furiously and waltzed into his apartment. “Not a bad place you have here. It’s intimate. Home-y.”

Dix looked at the man in his perfectly pressed suit and slicked back hair standing in front of his small wooden table and lone chair in front of a tiny tube television. “Uhh… yeah.”

Dix studied the man in silence for a minute as he meandered around Dix’s apartment. He sounded proper and legitimate and he certainly looked the part. But he seemed slightly uncomfortable in his clothing, like it was completely new to him. The man kept pulling at the sleeves of his blazer and rubbing his shoulders. He clearly wasn’t used to wearing a suit, that much was certain.

He watched as the man walked over to Dix’s small bookshelf and studied his miniscule collection. “So did Delilah fill you in?”

“Sort of? Not really. I mean, I don’t even know who you guys are.”

“We’re the Minos Corporation. I’m sure she told you that.” The man turned back to Dix and flashed the biggest, fakest smile he had ever seen.

“Yeah, but…” Dix rubbed the back of his neck. “I’ve never even heard of you guys. What do you even do? More importantly, how the hell did you even find –?”

“Well, that’s not what’s really important now is it? What is important is that we love your work. And we want to make your labyrinth a physical reality.”

Dix chuckled. “Thank you, Mr. Minos, but –”

“Please.” He flashed that smile again. “Call me Andy.”

Dix paused. “Andy. Thank you, but this isn’t exactly the first time I’ve heard someone say that. There are always catches and loopholes and… nobody has been interested in really making my entire design. They just want a fraction. Or else a bastardized version of it.”

“Dix. Buddy.” He moved into the kitchen and grabbed Dix by the shoulders. “We love your design. All of it. It’s a masterpiece. And we want to buy it from you.”

“You mean…” Dix pulled out of Andy’s grasp. “You mean you want me to sell it. The whole thing. To you.”

“Exactly.”

“But it’s my design. My name –“

“Oh, your name will stay on it, don’t worry.”

“That’s fine, but how do I know you would stick to the design as it is? I don’t want my name on something I’m not proud of.”

“Already taken care of.” Andy pulled out a stack of papers from his blazer and handed it to Dix. “This contract guarantees that we will not stray from your design. If it’s clearly notated and indicated in your plans, it will be built to those exact specifications. We wouldn’t want to stray from them, anyways.”

Dix skimmed over the first page and began to absently flip through the rest of the tome-sized contract. “I don’t know. It’s an awful lot. I would need some time.”

“Time is exactly what we don’t have, Dix. We want to get this project moving as quickly as possible. This is now or never.”

Dix leaned against the countertop and rubbed the back of his neck. “I mean, it’s just –“

“Fifteen million. That’s your cut.”

Dix’s mouth slowly fell open. He dropped the contract in his stupor, the impact causing the trashcan to spew out its rotting contents.

“Shit!” Dix scrambled to pick up the mess, but Andy grabbed him by the shoulder.

“No, no, no. We have people for that.” He whistled and a servant rushed in through the front door. Andy snapped, pointed to the garbage on the floor, and the young man quickly began cleaning the mess. “You will have this, too, if you agree.”

Dix watched as the young man not only picked up his garbage, but began scrubbing the floor around the garbage can. Was this for real? Who were these people? Why did they want the labyrinth?

Andy cleared his throat and Dix snapped out of his stupor. His eyes darted up to find Andy holding the contract and a copper-plated pen out to him, but the only thing Dix could look at was a small tattoo on the man’s wrist of what looked like a crescent moon.

“So what do you say?” Andy asked, and flashed his big, toothy grin.

It was perhaps the one regret Dix had in his life. But how could he have refused? Not only was it fifteen million dollars, but he was also guaranteed that his masterpiece would be built to his exact specifications. Guaranteed. Contract and everything.

He signed it, there and then, and just like that, Mr. Minos took the contract, his servant, Dix’s designs, and was gone from Dix’s life forever. A week later Dix received a blank envelope in the mail. When he opened it, there was a check for $250,000 with a brief note that read, “Your first payment.” Dix shook his head. He had been duped. Some random had broken into his house, stolen his life’s work, and dashed. But the check looked oddly real. For kicks, he decided to take it to a bank, anyways, just to be sure. And sure enough, they took it, it went through, and he could suddenly afford to live like a normal human being.

Every month for five years he received a check for the same amount, and every time it went through with no issues. His life had turned around in an instant. He could afford good clothes, a nice house, great food. And all of a sudden, his family and friends returned. They claimed they had never actually left him, that they were just giving him his space. He knew what they were doing and as much as it pissed him off, he couldn’t blame them. He had been a terrible human being the last few years of his life. Had he been in their position, he would have left, too. He gave each of them money and made sure to take care of all of them. It was the least he could do. He was in a good place financially.

Psychologically, however, he was being torn apart. After the note that accompanied his first paycheck, Dix hadn’t heard a single word from the Minos Corporation. He knew nothing of where they were, whom they consisted of, or what they were doing with his designs. He tried tracing the phone call through phone logs, but nothing showed up. He hired private investigators to look into the name Andy Minos and the Minos Corporation, but there were no results. For all intents and purposes, these people did not exist. And his designs had disappeared along with them.

Heartbroken, Dix secluded himself in his home. He pushed his family and friends away, stopped going out, and did the only thing he could do: he started working on recreating his labyrinth. But no matter how hard he tried, no matter how much time and effort and lead and ink he put into it, it was never good enough. He had lost it. And the Minos Corporation had found it.

Dix got rid of everything. His sketches, his notes, his clothes, his home, anything that reminded him of his labyrinth or the invisible corporation who stole it from him had to go. He wanted nothing to do with any of it, anymore. Years of his life were gone in an instant and he had nothing to show for it. He had driven his family and friends and loved ones away, had destroyed everything that was good in his life. He wouldn’t do it again.

So he moved on. He had to. He bought a small house, decent clothes, a moderate car. None of it was fancy, but a simple, humble life was what he needed. He went to therapy, once more eased his friends and family back into his life, and even met a woman he came to deeply love and cherish. As time went by, he slowly let the idea of the labyrinth go. He could never forget it, but he could leave it be, a memory of true perfection.

It wasn’t until years later that he learned of the labyrinth’s existence. He had been sulking in a bar over a tiff he had with his longtime girlfriend, drowning his sorrows in the amber liquid of the gods, when he overheard some young twenty-somethings.

“Yeah, man, it’s like this giant maze out in the middle of nowhere. And I’m talking GIANT. Like, I have a friend who said that her best friend wandered in drunk and wasn’t found for three days. She had completely lost her mind by the time they found her, apparently.”

His girlfriend chimed in. “I heard that murderers wander around the corridors, waiting for idiots like you,” she jabbed her boyfriend in the chest, “to strut in trying to impress people.”

He laughed. “Hey, it worked, didn’t it?”

She punched him in the arm. “That’s not the point! People have gone in there and never come out! It’s fucking freaky.”

Dix didn’t need to hear anymore. He rushed straight home and jumped onto his laptop. After a solid three hours of digging through forums, blog posts, and Facebook photos of drunken idiots, he found what he was looking for. It had been nearly 21 years since his labyrinth was erected and opened to the public. No one knew who built it or where it came from. It simply appeared. He stared at the directions to his own personal Stonehenge and sighed. It was so close. He could stand in its presence. He could touch it. He could walk through it. His life could finally have closure. He ran his hands through his hair.

But he also knew what would happen. The moment he stepped foot into that labyrinth, his mind would be gone yet again. He would become entranced, overtaken, and wouldn’t be his own person, anymore. He would belong to the labyrinth.

He shut his laptop and walked away. He couldn’t do that. His relationship with his girlfriend was already on the rocks as it was. To go there would be to destroy it completely. She was too important to him. He was taking a stand, putting his foot down. He would push the labyrinth out of his mind.

Three weeks later he received the envelope.

As Dix walked under a large arch, he knew he was nearly at the center. He had been walking for almost two and a half hours and was down to his last spool of thread. It would be enough to get him there, he knew, he just wished he could be done with all of this.

The further into the labyrinth he got, the less cluttered and vandalized it became. The walls were almost entirely bare and there was hardly indication that anyone had passed through these halls in the last two years. Dix smiled in satisfaction. But he still had an uneasy feeling, like someone was following him. He was losing it, he knew. He was tired, his head hurt, and being in his life’s creation put him in a haze. Even if someone else was wandering around the corridors, the odds of running into him (or her, or even it) were miniscule. Just a few more turns and he would–

He heard a whisper. His brain tried to convince him that it was the wind, that there was nothing to be afraid of, but it was undeniably a whisper. Dix gripped the thread and looked around. His heart and his head both pounded.

“Minos! Is that you?”

Nothing.

“Andy? Come on, you son of a bitch. What do you want from me?”

He was met only by silence. He shook his head.

“Fuck this.”

He turned to follow the thread the way he had come when he heard the whispers again. Still indistinguishable, but they were louder. Closer. He stopped.

“This is not cool. Just… come on.”

He waited in the silence and rubbed the back of his neck. After several minutes, he sighed.

“Fine. You win. Let’s get this over with.”

Dix ran around the last few corners and found himself at the center of the labyrinth. It was a large, circular room with a single stone bench on either side. This was the only part of the labyrinth that had a roof, but there was a large opening in the middle, allowing moonlight to stream in, illuminating everything. All there was to keep him company was a lone bottle of vodka and a few discarded condom wrappers. He was alone.

“Well? Come on! What is this?”

He pulled the note out and threw it to the floor.

“Is this your idea of some kind of sick joke? I have a life now and a girlfriend I would do anything for. You already got what you wanted from me, what else is there? Just leave me be!”

His voice echoed off the walls, demanding he leave them be. He stood in the moonlight, waiting for an answer.

“I never should have come. I’m leaving. Have it your way.”

As he made for the door from which he had come, he noticed that same crescent moon symbol above it. He laughed as he stopped and pointed at it.

“And what the fuck even is that? It means nothing. It’s just–“

He stared at the symbol. It looked fresh, like it was just smeared above the door, and he finally realized what it was. It wasn’t a crescent moon. It was a set of horns. And it was painted in fresh crimson.

Dix felt the taut string in his hand go slack. He looked down as it slithered out of the door. His head started to pound as the whispering grew around him, louder and louder.

“What is this? What are you people doing?”

He frantically looked around the room, looking for the source of the voices, but he was still alone. They grew louder and louder still, chanting in some sort of Latin.

“Get the fuck out of my head!” He clawed at his temples and let out a blood-curdling scream.

The chants stopped. His head stopped pounding. Everything was still. He stared at the dark doorway and tried to even out his breathing. He had no idea what just happened, but it was done. He had never been happier for small miracles.

And then the sound of a heavy hoof striking the floor echoed through the chamber. Dix froze. He was alone. He was sure of it. There was only one doorway into this chamber and there was absolutely no one he could have missed when he walked in.

Another hoof strike echoed. Dix couldn’t move. His body was frozen in place. He couldn’t even let out a whimper as the sound of heavy hooves pounded closer and closer until they stopped just behind him.

He felt warm breath on his shoulder and listened as the scrape of a large metal blade lifted off of the stone floor, breaking the silence.

The enormous bellow of something that could only be described as half-man and half-bull filled the chamber. Dix’s brain cried out. This could not be real. There was no way this could exist. But he didn’t want to wait to find out. Dix did the only thing he knew he could do. He ran. And it followed.

Dix knew this place better than he knew his own mind and he sprinted down corridors and around corners, the beast’s heavy footfalls never far behind. He pushed himself harder than he ever had before, willing his body to put everything into getting as far away from those hooves as possible. He focused on his breathing, on staying the course he knew would get him out of the labyrinth as quickly as possible. The heavy beating of hooves was fading. His lungs were burning and his legs were growing weak, but he pushed them out of his mind and pressed on. He could do this.

He kept straight, rounded a corner, turned left, and found himself met by a wall. He shook his head. This wasn’t possible. A wall shouldn’t be here. He could hear the hooves fading slowly closer. He didn’t have time to sit and wonder. Maybe he just took a wrong turn. He doubled back the way he had come and turned right where he had turned left. This was better. He ran down the corridors confidently, keeping as straight as possible. He rounded a corner, anticipating the next few turns in his mind.

A dead-end.

He stared at the wall. This wasn’t right. His mind raced, trying to recall his design, trying to figure out where he made a wrong turn, when he noticed the walls. They were not as new as they had looked when he was making his way to the center of the labyrinth. The stone looked old and worn, as if it had been standing for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. His mind reeled and he rubbed the back of his neck. This wasn’t his labyrinth. Not anymore.

He turned to head back the way he had come when he heard heavy hooves right around the corner. There was nowhere to go. This was it. Tears welled up in Dix’s eyes as he shrunk into the corner, trying to make himself as small as possible. He stared at the opening in front of him and listened as metal scraped its way ever closer and the beast’s bellow echoed through the corridor.

Skin Deep

Heath could hardly hear her over the roaring din of the crowded street. “You… work… world.” He struggled to keep up with her, elbowing his way through throngs of the drunk and happy, a crowd that she seemed to slip through unnoticed. He kept his eyes on her dark red ponytail as it swung back and forth, and forced his way to her side.

“What?”

She didn’t acknowledge him.

“Abbie. Come on, what did you say?”

She kept looking ahead as she replied, “Have you even been listening to me?”

“Well, it’s kind of hard when you’re trying to talk to me while bulldozing through a crowd of drunk people on a Saturday night.”

She shook her head. “It’s just… complicated, okay?”

“Come on. It can’t be that — Holy shit!“ An empty bottle of beer soared through the air straight for them. Heath dove to the side instinctively, knocking someone and their beer over in the process. He gasped as the bottle dove straight for Abbie’s face. He gritted his teeth in anticipation of the crack of glass on bone and the flying spurt of crimson. But neither came. There was no crack, no blood. Abbie didn’t even flinch. As the bottle fell within inches of her eye, she simply tilted her head to the left, the bottle soaring past her head and thumping into a guy’s chest.

Heath kept at her heels, looking back as the bottle’s unfortunate victim keeled over in pain. Abbie continued to wind her way down the crowded street, unfazed. “How the hell did you–?”

“Why do you care so much, anyways?” she asked.

Heath shook his head and turned his attention back to Abbie. “Well… because I do. What kind of question is that?” The crowd began to thin as they got further down the road, away from the bars and the nightlife, and Heath leaned in front of her, trying to look into her eyes. “I mean, what do you want me to say?”

“Nothing. I just…” She rubbed her eyes and slowed to a walk. “What is this? What do you want from me?”

Heath stared at her, his mouth agape. “Why are you asking me this? You know how I feel about you. You know I care about you. This has nothing to do with me wanting anything.”

The street was nearly empty, but he looked from side to side, trying to find a quiet, private place for them to talk. He spotted a dimly lit alleyway and pulled her towards it. She didn’t hesitate or fight his grasp, allowing herself to be led into the dull orange corridor. She kept her head down as he pulled her in front of him.

“Look. There’s something there between us. Call it chemistry, call it a spark, call it a feeling, I don’t care. Hey. Look at me.” Abbie tried to turn away, but he gently lifted her chin until they were looking eye to eye. “We could work. You know we could.”

She sighed. “But you don’t even know me.”

Heath stared at her in silence, her strong gaze never leaving his. His eye slightly twitched.

—

Heath and his older brother had this argument when they were younger. They would constantly watch movies and TV shows together and Heath adored it. It was how they bonded, he and his brother, how the two of them connected; not through sports or girls, but through sharing stories. Heath was always careful never to annoy his brother; he feared that if he did, his brother would simply refuse to watch anything with him anymore. But whenever they watched a story where one character would tell the other, “You don’t even know me,” Heath couldn’t help himself. He would howl in frustration.

His brother would scramble to hide the remote as Heath screamed, “What does that even mean?!” To Heath’s delight, his brother never reacted poorly. In fact, he seemed to get a kick out of it. At every one of Heath’s outbursts, his brother would simply laugh, shake his head, and punch him in the arm, feeling that that was sufficient enough communication to make Heath shut up and watch the movie. Adamant to make his point, though, Heath would wrestle his brother for the remote, pause the movie (the one act that truly annoyed his brother greatly) and stand right in front of the TV. Heath’s brother would roll his eyes, his whole head rotating along with them. Heath was never sure if his brother was being dramatic or just couldn’t move his eyes separate from his skull.

“It’s bullshit! It doesn’t mean anything!”

“Yes. It does,” his brother would reply. “You’re just too dumb to understand because you haven’t dealt with that kind of situation before.”

His brother would snatch the remote from Heath’s hands, throw him the meanest glare he could muster, and rewind the movie or show. Defeated, and perhaps too scared to continue his tantrum any further, Heath would plop back down next to his brother on the couch as the guy or girl reiterated that the other character just didn’t know them while the other stared back in disbelief, unsure of how to respond. Heath would scoff and mutter under his breath, “Just once I wish it meant that they were an alien or something.”

This would happen at least once a week since Heath started junior high, and every time, it was the exact same. One character wouldn’t know the other, Heath would interrupt, his brother would give him a bruise, and both characters would inevitably wind up declaring their undying love for one another. It was what they did.

As Heath got older, that line always lingered in the back of his mind. As he navigated his way through friendships and relationships, he always waited for that phrase to arise, for those words to suddenly make sense. They came up here and there, as they inevitably do when dealing with people who have some sort of past they want to hide from plain sight or with people who have a flair for the dramatic, but they never felt real to Heath, like they actually meant anything. “You don’t even know me” began to feel like a canned response, a thinly veiled attempt to deflect emotion or run away from a potentially vulnerable or uncomfortable situation. Heath always hated looking back on how he reacted to that line in movies when he was with his brother, but he began to feel like maybe he was always right, like maybe his kid brain somehow tapped into a secret of the universe that no one else was aware of. “You don’t even know me” wasn’t a grand declaration or an admission of dark secrets; they were just empty words.

And then he met Abbie.

He hadn’t known her very long. A month and a half, maybe two months had passed since they met, but already he could tell just how special she was. She didn’t conform to most standards, the way a lot of women typically do. She had a fashion sense that was hip without being monotonous, different without being weird. She had a passion for art and music with a taste that was eclectic and diverse, but she never belittled anyone for liking what they liked. And she had a beautiful sense of humor that was as specific and deliberate as it was broad and silly. She was his dream girl.

But Abbie also frightened him. They had met at a mutual friend’s party. Heath had spotted her across the room, standing against the wall and people watching. He didn’t think anything of her, at first. After going through so many breakups and uncomfortable situations, he had simply become jaded and manifestly uninterested in pursuing a relationship with anyone. She was another pretty face, nothing more. But something drew him to Abbie, something off. She seemed above everything, like she was studying a lower life form, trying to understand why the creatures live by the patterns they create and the mistakes they repeat. But she did it with a distant smile on her face, like she cared for and loved these creatures, low as they may be. It scared Heath, but it was also alluring, like a child’s desire to touch the pretty rainbow shimmers on a burning hot iron. He forced himself to talk to her, willfully ignoring the otherworldly look on her face, and once he got through his usual stammering, they hit it off immediately, much to his surprise. She was more normal than he expected, albeit in an extraordinary way.

The more they got to know each other, Heath came to see Abbie for her flaws and issues, as well. She was stubborn and could sometimes have a bit of a temper, but none of it was anything Heath couldn’t handle. It was only in times where Abbie was alone or thought no one was watching her that she became the observer again, quietly studying those around her, and it was in those moments when Heath would pull away. What was she doing? Was this even real? Was he going crazy? He hesitantly tried asking her about it once, but it ended in a bitter argument where names were called, insults were thrown, and both parties stormed out of a crowded restaurant. Heath never brought it up again, but it ate at him.

But it never changed how he felt about her. The more time they spent together, the more he simply wanted to be with her. And any chance he got to spend time with her, whether that meant going to a coffee shop or simply sitting at one of their apartments watching a movie, he leapt at the opportunity. There may have been secrets that she wasn’t telling him, but he didn’t care. He loved her. And he knew that she loved him, even if she wasn’t willing to admit it. He knew she probably had her reasons, but he couldn’t go on pretending that there was nothing there. She probably wouldn’t take to the idea well, but he had to do it. Besides, he would plan the whole thing out. He would take her downtown on Saturday night for dinner and drinks at her favorite little bar and grill. And after a couple drinks, when both of them were loose enough to be straight with one another, he would open up and she would admit her mutual feelings and it would be perfect and amazing and they would be together forever.

What could possibly go wrong?

—

Abbie stared at Heath as she waited for a response. He sighed and ran his hands through his hair, his eyes never leaving hers.

“No. I don’t know you. Not fully. I know there are things you haven’t told me, things you maybe are ashamed of or don’t want to relive. I get that. But there’s also a whole lot of you I do know. Like how kind and loving you are to everyone around you. How sweet and funny you accidentally end up being. How stubborn and heated you can get.” Abbie chuckled, her eyes starting to well up. “I know there’s a lot of you I don’t know. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to know.”

Abbie sniffled and wiped her nose. “Really?”

“Of course. I want to know everything about you. Just give me the chance.”

Abbie looked deeply into Heath’s eyes for what seemed like hours and Heath stared back, unsure of what was about to happen. He waited for her hand to slap his face, or a wad of spit to fling from her mouth into his eyes, or, hell, even a gunshot to break the silence, a bullet entering and exiting his abdomen, but nothing happened until she finally broke eye contact and looked up and down the dim alleyway. Satisfied, she nodded, rolled her neck, and said, “Okay.”

She took a deep breath and in the dim light seemed to pinch something on her forehead at the base of her hairline. Heath thought maybe she was picking at a pimple, but his eyes grew wide as her pinched fingers continued in a straight line through her hair and down the back of her skull. She grabbed both sides of her scalp and pulled, her hair the color of cabernet gradually coming apart down the center. Heath’s breath quickened as her fair skin was discarded, revealing an opalescent skin beneath. His heart pounded as all of the human features in her face were lost, replaced by shapes and textures that made no sense. The light may have been dim, but he didn’t need light to know that what he was looking at was not human.

His mind raced and suddenly everything made sense. Her actions. Her personality. The way she studied people. It was all coming together the longer he stared at her face, or what he assumed was her face, if this thing was even a “her” at all. And the longer he stared, the more he could feel his mind start to crack. There was no context for what he was looking at. It was simply shapes and forms impossible to comprehend. He had made a mistake. He wished with all his might that he could take it back, that he hadn’t taken her down this alleyway, that he hadn’t told her how he felt, that he had never even spoken to her at that party. His mind was slipping and he knew what it meant to go insane.

And then she spoke.

“Well?”

He couldn’t tell where the voice came from, but he recognized it. It was undeniably Abbie, the same voice he fell in love with, the same voice he spent night after night thinking about. It rang through his ears as he stared at her new face (her old face?) and his heart slowed, his breathing normalized, and his fear subsided. He stared at what only seconds ago frightened him nearly to insanity and suddenly he could only see beauty. Suddenly he could only see her.

“Well?” she repeated.

Heath took a deep breath, grabbed her by the arms, and quietly spoke a single word, his eyes never leaving her face.

“Okay.”

Sincerely Yours

My Dearest Lizzy,

I hope you don’t mind that I call you Lizzy. You seem to grow visibly annoyed when people you don’t know or are not close to try to be chummy with your name, but I think my case may be an exception to your rule.

You don’t know me; at least, not formally. Your whole life, your mom and step dad told you stories about how I was never there and that I never would be. They tried to convince you that I didn’t exist. And you listened to them. I don’t blame you. After all, if a child can’t trust their parents, who can they trust?

But they were wrong. And I think, deep down, you knew they were wrong.

I’ve been watching you your whole life. Birthdays, heartbreaks, successes, failures, I’ve been there for all of it, watching from afar. I marveled as you took your first steps. I gasped when you broke your arm jumping off of that rusty swing set in the backyard when you were seven. I sighed as you lay on your bed for days on end when you were fifteen, depressed and hating the world and everyone in it. And my heart leapt when you showed everyone the ring on your finger when you were twenty-four, the biggest grin I had ever seen in my years and years and years on this earth splashed across your beautiful face.

How much you’ve changed in the twenty-six years since you’ve been born. I look at your now empty bedroom that you grew up in and I long for the days when it was painted a soft pink, with frills and small origami cranes lining your furniture and walls. When you would wear princess dresses and a king’s crown – not a queen’s, as you would so readily tell everyone – and you would hold royal court with your battalion of stuffed bears, giraffes, zebras, and elephants, planning to invade the next-door neighbor’s sandbox. You were so adorable then. So… delicate.

You fascinated me. You were so unlike all of the other little girls. You didn’t fawn over boys, but instead tried to put yourself above them, tried to get their respect. And don’t even get me started on your diary. When other girls your age were writing excruciating page after excruciating page of lust and longing, you were pondering your life and your future. Yes, as you got older you wrote about some sexual fantasies in more detail than I would have preferred – does a particular tree from a horror movie ring any bells? – but that’s only natural. The point is you changed me by simply being yourself. And after years of watching from your bedroom window, from behind your closet door, through the vent in your bedroom ceiling, I no longer wanted to kill you.

I wanted to take you.

So I decided to leave the comfort of your home and your bedroom and started following you to school. At a distance at first, but I slowly got braver and followed closer. Perhaps foolishly so. You began sensing something. You didn’t know what, but you started taking longer routes to school, your pace quickening and every so often you would glance behind your back, making sure nothing was there, that it was all in your mind. I knew then that I should pull back, that I was in danger of making myself known, but the urge to touch you, to breathe you, grew stronger by the day and I found myself breaking every rule just to get a little bit closer. I think you may have actually spotted me on more than one occasion; only ever at the corner of your eye as you stood waiting for the bus or for your friends, a dark shadow lurking on a street corner or beneath a tree, but you spotted me nonetheless, recalling vague childhood memories in your mind of staring into the darkest corners of your bedroom at night, so entirely convinced that some thing was staring back at you, its body covered in matted fur and its hideous yellow-brown fangs dripping a thick, mucousy saliva. I was mad at myself for those few times, but I was also proud. You always were a quick one.

But then came the day I most regret. The day I made my biggest mistake. You had been up all night studying which college to go to; either the local university just a twenty minute drive from home or else the out-of-state college, where you would get a better education, but at the price of leaving everything and everyone you loved. I sat idly by as you hunched over your desk, writing out the positives and negatives to either decision, and watched as the pencil in your hand slowly drifted as your breathing grew heavy and you fell asleep, the dulled pencil tip leaving a deep slash across the paper. I waited several minutes until I was sure you inhabited your dream world and I slipped out from behind your bookshelf. I crept over to your desk and read your notes. I was delighted to see the negatives were far outweighing the positives in terms of leaving home and I grunted in satisfaction. My gaze drifted over to your sleeping face and the urge to touch you was too much. My gnarled claws hovered above your head and my muzzle slowly got closer and closer to your soft cheeks and button nose, your scent filling my nostrils, my saliva starting to pool in my mouth. I simply had to grab you and you would be mine forever. I closed my eyes as I lost myself in thought and imagination.

And then I heard your gasp.

Oh, how I wish I had never closed my eyes or gotten within inches of your warm body or let my curiosity get the better of me, forcing me to look at where you would take your future. My eyes snapped open to find your eyes staring straight into mine, eyes full of horror and dread. You shrieked and I disappeared in a flash, rushing straight for the shadows of the attic. I heard your parents burst into your bedroom and run around the house frantically, trying to find the man-beast you were attempting to describe, your mind already obfuscating the details. After minutes that seemed like hours of searching the house, they assured you that there was nothing, that you must have been dreaming, that none of it really happened. But you knew. And an hour later, when I slipped through the air ducts to peer through the vent in your ceiling, there you were, sitting on your bed, a baseball bat in hand and a crazed, haggard look on your face.

The next day you were gone, your whole room packed up into cardboard boxes and strewn about the house. Your parents were sad to see you go, but they were mostly proud of you for making the hard decision and choosing your education over your friends. I wasn’t so easily fooled. You and I both know why you left. For one brief second, your childhood fears returned in the flesh. And that’s not something you can so easily forget.

I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t follow you to college. That’s not how this works. I may have followed you to your school down the road, but this was something else entirely. I’m bound to this house, to this family, to you, but only in private. That many people is a risk. So for years I sat in your room and stared at the ceiling or out the window. I would frighten the occasional young lookeyloo who would stare into windows as he passed by, or tease your mother as she was in the shower, allowing her to see my silhouette against the thin veneer of her shower curtain; I even almost gave your step dad a heart attack once by following him through the dark house on the night of a terrible storm and breathed in his ear. I amused myself. But mostly I sat in your bedroom. And waited.

And then came word. You were getting married. To whom I didn’t know and it didn’t matter, for a thought crossed my mind and my heart leapt. I would have to wait, but I was used to that. After all, marriage leads to one thing – a seed taking root until it slowly blossoms.

And now here we are, a new home, a new room, and a baby in your belly. I watch from beneath the floorboards as you and your loving husband build a crib, your frustration getting the best of both of you. I watch as you make love beneath an old, wooden mobile you picked up from a garage sale. I watch as you paint the room the very same shade of pink of your childhood bedroom. But mostly I wait. For a new life. A new chance. A chance for me to fix my mistakes. A chance for me to do things right. A chance for me to take what I always wanted.

Don’t worry. I’ll give you a handful of years to watch her grow, to see her become a person. But rest assured: she is mine. And one day, when you least expect it, I’ll lull her, your little girl, into the darkest corner of her bedroom. Not to kill her, no. It hasn’t been about that for years. But to share the darkness with her. To shape her and mold her into my very own.

How rude. I just now realized that I’ve gone this long without properly introducing myself. Maybe that’s a good thing, actually. My name has been lost through the ages. Those who spoke it I ripped to shreds and those who may still know it are too afraid to utter it. It’s a long, guttural name, anyways. Nowhere near as beautiful as Lizzy. For all intents and purposes, just refer to me as what you always have. I’m fond of it, anyways. It’s very… mysterious.

I would say you will see me soon, but we both know that would be a lie. Instead, I’ll be behind doors and furniture, in the ceiling and beneath the floorboards, in the shadows and in the void. Perhaps I already am. You may sense me occasionally, the hair on your porcelain neck standing upright or a black mass at the corner of your vision, but you will not see me. Not again.

In the meantime, I’ll be here. Waiting.

Sincerely Yours,

The Monster Under Your Bed

Splash of Color

This short story was inspired by the work of my best friend and amazing photographer, Arielle Lewis. In particular, these photos.

If you’re interested, you can see more of her work at http://www.ariellelewisphotography.com or find her at http://www.facebook.com/arlewis8.

—

It was a world of white.

As the girl awoke, a wave of confusion washed over her. Where was she? What happened to her? She struggled to her feet and squinted at the world around her. In every direction, there was nothing. The walls, the floors, the sky; the world was nothing but white. Blank. Empty.

She hesitantly took a single step, unsure if her foot would be met by solid ground, and let out a sigh of relief when she felt resistance. It wasn’t grass she felt beneath her foot. It wasn’t concrete, either. It wasn’t really anything. It was just… solid.

Confused, she looked down to examine the hard surface she was standing on. And she screamed.

Where there should be a foot, there was an empty space. No toes, no nails, no ankle, no shin; just white. She quickly threw her hands in front of her face, and panic began to overtake her when she saw the same nothing. She frantically ran her hands up and down her body to be sure that she was, indeed, a person, that she existed, that she was real. It was all there, exactly as she remembered it – her familiar curves, her scars, everything – the body she knew her whole life was still there. And she was still conscious. Her mind and thoughts were the same they had ever been, albeit a bit more scrambled than she preferred. She had the same memories, the same hopes, the same regrets. She was undeniably herself.

Then what was this place? This world?

She calmed herself, took several deep breaths, and, careful not to look down, slowly took another step. And another. And then another. One nothing foot in front of the other every time. As she became more comfortable walking along a ground she could not visualize, her pace quickened, her hesitant baby steps eventually turning into a brisk jog. She had no idea where she was going or if she was even actually moving – the lack of landmarks gave her the strange sensation of running in place – but she ran. It was all she knew.

After several minutes of running, she stopped, her chest heaving up and down. She always hated the gym. She bent over to catch her breath, her hands on her knees, and shut her eyes. She did not want to see nothing where she could feel her knees slightly shaking beneath her hands. She did not want to see emptiness trying to look at her chest, even though she could feel her lungs expanding and contracting. The darkness was more comforting than the light. At least then it was her own decision not to see anything rather than that of the world around her. She put a hand to her chest and felt her heartbeat, strong and rhythmic, the one constant thing in her life to ever keep her sane.

She heaved a final sigh, stood up straight, and opened her eyes to the vast nothingness surrounding her. She looked around in a hopeless attempt to find something, anything to break the white scenery. But the sky, the ground, everything was still… empty.

She rubbed her eyes. Maybe this was it. Maybe this was to be her existence for eternity, to inhabit an empty world of nothing. Maybe this was her punishment for the choices she made, the wrongs she committed, the people she hurt. She sighed and laid down on her back on the nothing’s solid embrace. It could be worse. At least she still had her thoughts. Not exactly entertaining, or even comforting, really, but it was something. Was this Purgatory, maybe? She considered this, but decided it was not. From what she remembered, Purgatory was supposed to have scholars and philosophers sitting around as they waited for eternity for nothing to happen. That would be okay. At least then she would have someone to talk to. No. This wasn’t Purgatory. This was worse.

She felt water welling up behind her eyes, but stopped herself, forcing the sobs back down. She’d been through worse. She sighed, turned on her side, and put her hand back to her chest. The familiar beating of her heart comforted her. As she studied the drum-like rhythm of her heart, she noticed something. She rubbed her eyes again and squinted. She looked slightly to the left and to the right of where it was, wanting to be sure it existed, that it wasn’t just in her mind. And there it stayed, in the periphery of her vision: a single dot, the size of a pen tip. It was impossible to tell how near or far it was with the lack of visual markers, but it was there and it was hers. It was hope.

She stood up and immediately started moving towards the dot, her eyes never leaving it. She was still exhausted, but she ran, her heart pounding in her ears. For a while, the dot never grew and her heart began to drop. But she kept running, and before long, the dot was the size of a drop of ink, and then a human eye, and then a budding rose. Slowly, slowly it grew, but she would not stop running. Her eyes watered, her chest was on fire, but she pressed on, the inexplicable dot gradually growing.

Only as she came up to the dot that was now the size of a large puddle did she slow to a walk, huffing, wheezing, and rubbing her sore throat. The puddle was unlike anything she had ever seen before. It seemed to incorporate every color imaginable in one swirling mess, like oil on water, but moving, flowing, in constant motion, as if it were a living being. She looked in every direction for some sort of indication of what this liquid was or where it might have come from, and was unsurprised to see nothing, not even a single drop outside of the puddle.

She knelt down next to the puddle for a closer look. The substance was thick and viscous like liquid magma, but beautiful and otherworldly. She hesitantly put out her hand to touch it, but quickly realized she couldn’t even tell how close her hand was and pulled back. She bit her lip, placed her hand flat on the ground next to her, and slowly began to slide her hand closer and closer to the liquid. Her heart thumped loudly in her chest, her hand getting invisibly closer to the pool of color. After a few moments, she began to think maybe this was all just an illusion, a trick of her mind. Her hand must have reached the pool by now. This was impossible. She began to pull her hand back when the tip of her middle finger grazed the cool edge of the pool, sending a fine ripple across the liquid. She gasped and yanked her hand away, shaking it as if burned.

But she wasn’t burned. She lifted her hand to her face and saw a warm yellow paint-like substance floating in mid-air. She waved her hand slowly in front of her face and wiggled her middle finger, and the yellow followed. She touched it to where her thumb should have been, bent her thumb a few times, and was satisfied to find that she now had her thumb back. She rubbed both hands together, the liquid substance quickly thinning, but she was euphoric with the result. When she pulled her hands apart, her hands were back. The lines, the cracks, the textures, they were just as she remembered, simply covered in what looked like barely enough yellow paint.

She plunged both hands into the pool at her feet and rubbed the liquid all over body. She laughed as her body was given new definition. Her legs, her stomach, her shoulders, her breasts; it was all there. But the scars were gone. Oh, well. They were hideous, anyways, ugly reminders of the poor choices she made in her past. She grinned.

But she was still alone. Alone in a world of white. Of nothing. Her laughter faded as she thought of her home, her family, and her friends. All of the loved ones that she ran from and left behind. She thought of her favorite coffee shop where she would go to work silently on her computer, of her favorite park where she would lay down in the grass and daydream for hours, of the crummy store where she worked. A tear rolled down her cheek before she had a chance to react and she felt it hit her foot. She wiped her eyes, ashamed of herself for letting her emotions get the best of her, and looked down at her feet.

That was when she noticed the mess she had made in her excitement. Colors were splattered everywhere, all over the floors and the walls. This would take forever to clean. She grunted at herself disapprovingly and started to wipe herself down and stopped abruptly. She followed the color splatters again with her eyes.

There were walls. Or, at least, it looked like it. Drops of bright green were hovering in mid-air, slowly rolling down a vertical surface. She studied the drops. She couldn’t be going crazy. This was happening. She took a deep breath and shoved her hand out in the middle of the mess and winced when her arm was stopped by a rough, solid surface. She rubbed her hand up and down the wall furiously, smearing blue and green everywhere.

This was a wall.

She rushed back to the puddle on the ground, formed a cup with her hands, and plunged them in. But her foot slipped in the excitement and she tumbled headfirst into the puddle. She found herself submerged in a rainbow of colors. She kicked frantically, fighting to find the surface. She didn’t have a chance to breathe before falling in and felt her chest tightening. She waved her arms wildly and for a brief second was sure that this would be the end. But her arms found a wall, she chose a direction, and hoped.

She reemerged on the surface, gasping for breath and dragged herself out of the pool, lying down on her back. Okay. So the puddle was bottomless. Good to know.

She staggered back to her feet, coughing up reds and oranges (Was that the mystery liquid or blood? It didn’t matter, she supposed.), and carefully scooped some liquid into her hands. She tossed it wildly at the wall and continued to smear it over as much of the surface as possible, returning to the puddle every so often to rejuvenate her supply. Before long the wall was completely covered and she realized what she was looking at.

This wasn’t just a wall. It was her home, her crummy little condo with cracked windowpanes and a backdoor that hung loosely on its hinges. It was a nasty amalgam of colors, that, when smeared together, made a putrid shade of brown, but it was her home, damn it, and it was the most beautiful thing she thought she would ever see in her life.

She walked up to the door, ran her hands along the hinges, and laughed. All she ever really had to do was straighten the door and tighten a couple screws. Why was she so lazy? She yanked the doorknob up with her left hand with ease, making the door nice and level, and rubbed the top hinge with her right hand. She knew she didn’t have the tools, but it felt good, it felt cathartic, to attempt to something, even if only symbolically. She sighed and let go of the doorknob, waiting for the door to thump back to the ground the way it always did. But the thump never came. She stood there confused for several seconds, not sure if maybe she couldn’t hear anything now either. But the dull drum of her heartbeat was still there in her ears, steady and ever present. She looked down at the base of the door and saw it was level. She cocked an eyebrow and looked up at the hinge. The paint was thick and smeared where she rubbed it, so she wiped off the excess, and where it once was broken it was now solid and new. She looked over at one of her cracked and splintered windowpanes and had an idea.

She rushed over to the pool, scooped up a handful of the liquid, and rubbed it vigorously over the cracks. She expected to feel the sharp pain of splinters entering her skin, but she felt nothing – only the smooth, silky texture of the rainbow liquid. When she felt satisfied, she violently shook her hands in the air to rid them of any surplus liquid, and rubbed the excess off of the windowpane. There were no cracks, no splinters, nothing. It looked brand new.

Overcome with a new sense of purpose and self-discovery, she quickly ran back to the pool and continued on with the rest of her home. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all. Maybe this was a second chance, a way for her to make things right, to fix her mistakes. Whatever this world was, it was a blank slate, a canvass. And she was going to paint all night.