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1200

A pale fog covered the ocean. New ice blistered the salty water that once boiled skin. Cloaked behind the snow, massive black curtains rose to defend Anna Marie Hospital. Typically, the barrier would only rise with hurricanes, but tonight the ocean was still.

The synths and screams of The Locker faded as I walked the empty city. Window shops slammed shut with every step, and cocaine fell on empty markets. Mansions on the shoreline collapsed into piles of rotten wood and brick. The stray cats raced from the rooftops into the sewers, desperate for any warmth that could come their way. I could hear a lone kitten behind the rest. More of a screech than a meow, crying from the old homes. I stumbled toward the sound until I found its source. A little black cat, only slightly larger than my hand. It was trapped under a fallen plank of wood like a prisoner of war. I had to save it, the cat would die without me. So, I pressed my fingers under the wood and pulled it toward me. It was a struggle, and I could feel the splinters digging into my palms, but I got it up and leaned it on a wall. The cat sat in place, terrified of the cold. I reached out to pet it, but it hissed at me and swatted me. I didn’t listen to the protests, and I picked it up. Moments later, it went limp in my arms, the cat accepted its place. Cold fur rustled against my hands.

After a few steps, I knew I couldn’t carry it any longer. I found a safe place where the kitten could find solace, and I placed it there. A frail little tree away from the water. It took a minute for the cat to collect itself. Licking its fur and scratching its neck. It stopped for a moment to look at me, and we kept eye contact. The cat twisted its head for some reason, but when I crawled towards it, seeking one last goodbye, the cat sprinted away into the fog. I continued walking on, now just trying to get home.

 With a bottle of pills in hand, I yelled for Charlotte. The only response I got was from above. Voices in the sky shouted with the sirens, demanding all humans find the nearest shelter and insisting the storm would pass by midnight. Questions battered my sober mind. Why humans go inside. Not citizens. Not people. Not you. A little voice whispered in my ear. Another voice joined. Then another. Different voices and accents, relentlessly piling on each other to get a word in, like every pill was a person battering my mind. I begged them to shut up, walking and stumbling through the road, but they only got louder. They only went quiet when I shoved the pills in my pocket. There was no time to let myself lose to them. My fingers were going black, and I had a bottle of pills to protect.

Abandoned cars littered the highway over the ocean, their engines still singing. Powdered snow traced footsteps stumbling incongruently. I pulled the handle of a small red SUV’s door that still had power. It was unlocked. The door screeched open to greet me, and my unfeeling fingers clutched the leather seat. I twisted the AC to the hottest it could be and tore my jacket off, placing my back on the sticky leather seat. I really hope Charlotte is okay. She’s never been good at dealing with death. Even her uncle’s death drove her to a state of near psychosis. At least her uncle is a good guy, though. I pray mine has already succumbed to the cold. Surely, if he could survive the snow, he wouldn’t have had to escape.

I put the bottle in my pocket and rummaged to find anything else that could be useful. There was only the queen of spades card gifted by my dream and th—the invitation. That can’t be right. I threw it in the trash! But there it was. Perfectly unwrinkled, with the same crude smile as before. I pulled it out of my pocket and held the sheet to the heater and just stared at it. I turned the invitation over, the same wine label as before. The invitation was completely unworn, as if someone performed surgery to remove the label from the bottle. It wrinkled and peeled as I dissected each syllable. My piercing eyes magnified the heat of the car until the invitation burned away, staying only in my mind.

Before the cold turned warm, I was sweating. The temperature of the car embraced a burning heat. Rivers poured from my scalp and my pits onto my shirt. If I tried to go out there now, I would freeze to death. I tried looking out the window, but an icy shell concealed the outside world.

Ambient snow rocked the car. For a moment, I could hear three rhyming knocks on the window. I stared into the mirror, searching for any potential stalker in the back seat, but there was nobody. Just my red eyes staring at the mascara running down my cheeks. Slowly, I pulled the window down. Freezing winds above a flat ocean were the only greeters, followed by the kisses of snowflakes across my salty flesh. For a moment, though, I could see that girl. Clothed in a long white dress, blending with the pale fog. She said nothing to me and drifted away. Mumbling to myself, I let my voice close the window as one closes their lips. I sobbed miserably for a moment, but then there was another knock. This time, from what sounded like the trunk. Bumping. It was slow and inconsistent, but with faint patterns. Like some kind of code. I shrugged my jacket on. I reached down to the floor and flicked open the trunk. A click whispered from the back of the car. I looked behind me to see if anything got out, but I couldn’t see anything due to the snow. I reached for the door handle and pulled it closed.

The moment the door cracked, all the warm air that festered was torn from the car. Gusts of freezing wind blasted my body with every push to get the door open. I forced myself through a crack once the door was open enough. A wall of snow collapsed onto my legs. White bricks fell from my feet when I stood up. The cars surrounding me were tattered in rust, suffocating in snow, while the once-singing engines were fast asleep.

Slowly, I trudged through the pale sand to get closer to the open trunk. The sound of scratching got louder.

I now stood behind the car, my fingers ready to open the trunk. I gently pushed the button in, and the scratching got louder. I pulled the trunk open, and inside there was nothing but a single tuft of black hair and a small crown made of paper. I played with the crown in my hands before placing it in my pocket. Just as I was about to turn the corner, a blurry voice yelled to me.

“Franny? Is that you?”

“Who are you?” I yelled to the voice.

“It’s Lukas! Have you seen Charlotte?” I couldn’t see his face, but I could hear the rickety horns of his “boat” blaring from the dock.

Firstly, I would like to thank for his incredible and continuous help with the editing of this act. Without him, it would likely be far less impressive than it is now. I would also like to thank for giving the act in its entirety a read through and sharing his thoughts.

Secondly, this is a sneak peek to the first entry for the rest of Act 2. Part 3. Act 2 Part 3 is not yet finished and is only now in the latter stages of editing. What you are reading here is only a draft.

When we are finished, it is unlikely that the remainder will be available on Substack. I will announce the specific means that this will be released going forward, but I find the direction An Actors Illness is heading in to be incompatible with the Substack algorithm, both in terms of length, density, and subject matter. You will be able to read it, but exactly how will be announced another day.

Peace out and let this be a mantra of excitement!

Cure (1997).

The Shining (1980).

Lost Highway (1997).

The Lighthouse (2019).

Eraserhead (1977).

Jacob’s Ladder (1990).

Antichrist (2009).

Smile 2 (2024).

Hour of the Wolf (1968).

Magic (1978).

The Empty Man (2020).

Sinners (2025).

Hagazussa (2017).

[REC] (2007).

Gojiam: Haunted Asylum (2018).

Hereditary (2018).

Videodrome (1983).

The Thing (1982).

Evil Dead 2 (1987).

The Haunting of Hill House (2018).

Lake Mungo (2008).

Possession (1981).

I Saw The TV Glow (2018).

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974).

The Descent (2005).

Midsommar (2019). (NOTE: Watch the directors cut, not the theatrical release)

Barbarian (2022).

Weapons (2025).

Tales From The Hood (1995).

A Page of Madness (1926).

Society (1989).

Eyes Without a Face (1960).

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920).

Perfect Blue (1997).

The Blob (1958).

Obsession (2025).

Backrooms (2026).

Kwaidan (1964).

Oddity (2024).

Nosferatu (2024).

The House That Jack Built (2018).

Onibaba (1964).

Dead Ringers (1988).

The Silence of the Lambs (1991).

House (1977).

The Stuff (1985).

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975).

Possessor (2020).

Suspiria (1977).

Suspiria (2018).

American Psycho (2000).

Audition (1999).

The Endless (2017).

The Exorcist (1973).

Misery (1990).

Opera (1987).

Angst (1983).

Climax (2018).

November (2017).

The Wailing 2016).

Night of the Living Dead (1968).

Mad God (2021).

Eden Lake (2008).

NOTE: if I didn’t list a movie you thought should be on here, comment and let your comment add onto this list. This list is only a handful of the amazing horror filmmaking out there. You can also find the list here on my Letterboxd.

https://boxd.it/VNwUC

Idk I just wanted to shoutout a bunch of movies good or bad, basic or niche, scary or comedic, intellectual or campy, etc. All of these films to me are excellent portrayals of the unlimited variety found in horror as a medium.

I was also in the mood to post a little extra after the GAS experimental poem I just dropped, as well as to get some more traction and readership for my novella An Actors Illness.

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“From the royal corpse propped up on its stones under its red parapet in Eynan, still ruling its Natufian villages in the hallucinations of its subjects, to the mighty beings that cause thunder and create worlds and finally disappear into heavens, the gods were at the same time a mere side effect of language evolution and the most remarkable feature of the evolution of life since the development of the Homo sapiens himself. I do not mean this simply as poetry. The gods were in no sense ‘figments of his imagination’ if anyone. They were man’s volition. They occupied his nervous system, probably his right hemisphere, and from stores of admonitory and perceptive experience, transmuted this experience into articulated speech which then ‘told’ the man what to do. That such internally heard speech often needs to be primed with the props of the dead corpse of a chieftain or the golden body of a jewel-eyed statue in its holy house […]. It too requires an explanation.”

-

Julian Jaynes.

I:

E stepped through the angular bore, and spectated the windows.

Sunflowers

                    Grazing

                                   On rusted chains

                                                                   Climbing

                                                       Down

                                               The

                                          Pyramid

                                 WITH GOLDEN FIRE

                        King R spoke through the door

                 Asking for the echoes of rotting slaves

My lord

There are

No

Strings

Have

Fallen

Down

The

Well

We

Tried to

Cool

The sand

Scratching past our leper arms

But the rake

has lost its

fingers

Grant us

Empathy

                                    E sought what hid behind the

               penrose temple. Vaster than the ocean, it

               bends the fading firmament. The flowers

               inch for the surface, clinging to the stone

               corpses of ancient factories, built before

               the sphere was home.

                                                       The many-angled

                                        Dragon

                                                     Sought refuge deep

                                                                 Below.

E continued through the lined hallway to the tables. He caressed the floor and placed himself beside carpet hallucinations. M and R were beside him. They shook their heads up and rattled their electric minds awake.

                           There are many

Who sleep                                             Today

                   We have

                   Seen

                                                   Them

                                                      All

M spake

wE are much alike

Full of RED oceans

Only I am squared

And you are formless

Composed of the ashes

                                          Of a burning bush

                                                 We drank our saka and opened the veils. 3 moons echoed in our prison.

The

      Spiraling

                      Bleeding red rock

                                                       sank into the

                                                                            Faded

                                      360 Angled                 Skies

                     Its eyes        Dead     Wings      FEAR

             Into    Thorny     EYES     Flew       Of a red

            Looked   The      EYES   Down      Negation

                       And     To     Below   Quivered spirits

                                E spilled his saka on the ground

  The spiral moon

Bent to bronze salutes

Tried to blot the sun away

But could not hide

The fusion of

                      XXXXX

              XXXXXXXXXXX

       XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXANXECLIPSEXXXXXX

      XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

             XXXXXXXXXXXX

                      XXXXX

                               Coating

                                The sea

                                 Sleeping above the factories

The next moon a tesseract

9 spheres

Descending to new ice

I placed my feet

Drank the souls in wind

And descended

Their brains sank in sync when

                The door

Opened

In the

Other

Space

He wore a golden mask

With brilliant flaming hues

A shining grin

And iron shoes

Clanking with his prance

He asked M of his dreams

Without lifting his lips

R confessed all sin

He smiled without thought

The sun raced across his golden spikes

His blue eyes like sapphire racing past

Their sanguine sins

He told them not to fear angular dragons

Or factories clothed in stone

They had died long ago

And could not shake the hand

They tried to repent of lies

But He floated to the 9th

M opened his eyes

And R alongside

E had vanished

In the sunflower fields

They looked beyond

Plucking every petal

Leaving No flower with hair

Only

A

Little sunflower

wearing a

Thorny

Crown

Watched with eyes

Below the pyramids

Staring into R

As sphere wings flew down

And smog awoke in the clouds

II:

I am

An infinite wretch

A rotting Möbius

Stripping in the sand

They

         Like

                 To Watch me

Play.                             On the rubber coated chains           

          Rejoicing in the

          Ecstasy of pouring rain

                                                Weighting for lightning

Within the midnight sky

Coated in three moons

The golden mask sat by my side

And giggled in his swing

He weighted my little hands

And told me of factories

Full of little dumbbells made of sand

That could scratch the sin away

Where my eyes could burn with gold

And my burdens melt on shore

He pulled my milken bones away

Flayed my skin

And plucked my hair

He loves me

Like a flower

Grazed by a brazen bull

                                                 Weeping a golden fire

Lying with the armless whores

With the carpenter on the grass

Licking his yellow painted mask

He beckons me

to sway in the

                   broken

wind

I thought you were wild

That night you swallowed the trees

I thought you were mine

-

I saw you there singing

Down in the black mud

Squirming like an insect

And praying in the drain

-

We made love below oil wells

Hanging in the night sky

And you saw me there burning

In my malfunctioning skin

-

I thought you were stupid

I thought you would cry

For everything that you saw there

And what hangs around me

-

You saw my failed legs

My broken fingers

You choked me from inside

Your hairs filled my throat

-
I thought you would leave me

I thought you would run

So I dragged you down screaming

And pumped you with love

-

Now you’ll see everything

My Adam and his Apple

But you fell into my lungs

And drank of my cancer

-

I thought you could suffer

Just take it and leave

Now you’ll rot here forever

Inside amygdalan daydreams

Special thanks to the goat and my perfect girlfriend for their roles in editing this story, as well as for alpha-reading this piece and giving powerful input that helped shape it. All godlike writers in their own right. This story would not be the same without this collection of brilliant people, and their support has elevated this story massively.

“Never speak to that wood-skinned hag. Her barbed tongue turns souls to smoke. Hear not her echoed song. Only one's deceitful vision satisfies her hunger.”

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CONSUME

YOU HAVE YOUR TICKET

ENJOY THE RIDE

0600

I found myself drowning in a black box. I was trapped; the black liquid around me held me in place and made me invisible to myself. The cold liquid night was completely silent, vast as the ocean, and pressed against me like a tight dress. I tried to swim up, but was turned to stone by the ivory water. The pressure held me still. I couldn’t move my arms or legs. I couldn’t even move my neck to see what was behind me. It pressed my skin and crept into my fingernails, trying to peel me open. I used all of my strength to swim upward, but all that spoke to me was the loud thud of metal. I forced my eyes open and screamed. The oil gushed into my lungs and flowed down to my legs, pulling me open with a tight tug. The strings in my ligaments were beginning to loosen and break. They snapped with my bones, and the tar tugged at my eyes and my teeth.

Before it could finish, the quick release of fire pulled it all away, and what felt like tearing became burning. The endless tar pit I was trapped in began to gain depth and texture, and I could now see my arms, now melting from the heat, bubbling chunks of flesh pooling throughout my body. The crushing void I swam through burned to nothing, revealing red carpets and poker tables. Soft jazz music faintly hummed in the silence, reacting to my movements. I could finally scream, but my voice was broken. Any attempt at sound came out as the crackling of a broken television. The music got quiet when I tried to scream, and louder when I was silent. I vomited out the tar, now mixed with my blood. I trudged through the spotty tar, now disintegrating from the shapes of perfect circles and revealing reality underneath, all to a staircase that ran away from me.

My legs collapsed into rectangles as I found stable ground, and I leaned on a poker table. I used my bones to sit myself up, patches of liquid flesh falling on the ground, and I looked around at the countless unlit hallways. The main hall was empty of people and had no clocks. The tables repeated endlessly, and the walls seemed to stretch around me. I looked to my side, searching for any sign of life. Right beside me sat a strange man. He looked just like my father, in his favorite outfit. The sole difference was the man’s perfect teeth, which seemed to glow and reflect off my eyes. He gave me a card. It was a queen of spades. On one half of the card, I could see myself sitting with him, staring into the card. On the other half of the queen, I saw my bedroom. A bird’s-eye view of the entire room, myself in the center. Crying on the floor with a thousand pictures on the ground. I put the card in my pocket and was overjoyed by the matted carpet pressed against my face. I threw the picture into my closet. Then I looked around my bedroom. My door was slightly open. I looked at my arms. My skin was back to normal, scars and all. I looked in my pocket. The card was still there, now an ordinary queen of spades.

0700

I pushed my door open and stumbled my way to the restroom. I had a splitting headache, and every time I moved my head, the walls stretched and blended into each other like clay. I opened the bathroom door and flipped the toilet seat, nauseous beyond belief. Like a dog, I put my head in the toilet and exorcized myself of last night’s sins. I looked right into my own eyes and down at the lines on my arms, flowing like waves, thin as strings. I snatched my pill bottle and popped the cap. Nothing. I flipped the container on its head, praying for the tablets to pour onto the ground like hail, but there was nothing. I slammed the bottle on the counter. Surely Charlotte has some. I’ll have to ask. When I looked over my shoulder, I could see Mom staring right into my eyes from the stairway, with a look of empty, wide-eyed horror on her face. I turned around, hoping to confront her, but she ran down the stairs with footsteps loud as drums.

I slammed the door shut and tried to find something pretty about myself. After several minutes, I remembered my lovely hair, now greasy and tangled from last night. Mom hates the layers, but I think they’re cute. The red and pink suit my natural blondeness. I undressed myself and stared at my ribs. They were dying to break free and protruded so much that my breasts went inward. After another few minutes of self-worship, I took two flickering steps into the shower.

The water ran down my body, struggling to climb over the scars on my arms. I looked down at the shower drain. Hair and mold slithered into the drain like snakes, and the drain gurgled with foul breath. I bent down to remove the cover and poured the gunk down the hole. Out of pure curiosity, I got my phone out and turned my flashlight on to see how deep the hole was. I could not see the bottom; only the bumpy, white, fleshlike walls of the pipes could be seen. The pustules of the pipes seemed to breathe and cry as the shower water raced down into their stomachs. Out of pity, I finished my shower quickly and wrapped myself up.

I went to my room and got dressed. I put on my tank top with a hoodie over it, designed with cobwebs along the shoulders, around the zipper, and on the back. I slipped on my fishnets and skirt, put on my boots, and walked out of my room into the hallway. Mom’s room was empty. So was the stairway. She must be waiting downstairs.

I crept down the stairs to avoid making any noise. They elongated and bent so much I could no longer see them. I slipped and hit my head on a step. Nobody came to help, but I could manage.

I entered the kitchen, and I could hear Mom singing in the living room. I made myself some cereal. I poured the milk into the bowl, and she stopped singing. I could hear her get up from the recliner and could hear her footsteps getting closer. When I sat down, she came in. Her hair was a mess, and she seemed distraught.

“What were you singing?” I asked. “You’ve never done that before.” I began to eat.

“Oh, it’s nothing.” She stopped for a brief moment, and I looked at her with a sarcastic scowl. “A girl in our… group said maybe it could help. She’s always handled hardship very well, and I figured what harm is there in trying something new?”

“And did it work?” I said, with a mouthful of cereal.

“For a moment, it felt like everything went away and I could be free, and then it came back.” She smiled at me and then turned away to make herself eggs. We sat and stood in distant silence, trying to find something to say. I unsheathed my mouth and asked the question.

“So… Tim?”

Mom put everything down and looked out the window at Anna Marie. “They—”

“Who is ‘they’?” I snapped.

Mom coughed and covered her mouth with her hands. “They—the authorities found him in his restroom. Your uncle was… bleeding. Everywhere. They rushed him to the emergency room. It took them a good few hours, but they did well. I went last night to see him. He wasn’t himself. He was screaming gibberish, and his arms were in stubby casts. I couldn’t even recognize him. The doctors said when the police found him…” She was sniffling. “His arms were… Strings…” That was the last word she said before the subject went deaf to her. I asked repeatedly, but she just stood still with liquid eyes. Her eggs blackened to coal in the pan, and all she could do was stare at the hospital. I continued eating and thought about the night and what she meant by “strings,” but by the time I was done eating, Mom finished cooking and asked why I was eating so much. I grabbed my backpack and left the house to see Charlotte, hoping to fill myself with pills.

0800

“I don’t have any left.” Charlotte sighed. “That night, Lukas overdosed, and we had to give him Narcan. He swallowed the whole fucking bottle that night. You remember, right? Bled all over the bathtub from where he split open his face and neck.” We sat on lobster cages under the bridge, the whole city thriving above us with billboards lowered to conceal us. When I looked up, trying to catch a glimpse of it, it faded and shimmered, like the bending flags of memory. Above us sat a ceiling of graffiti, trying to tell me the past from the confines of red spray paint.

I took a breath, trying to seem like I remembered everything like some subconscious photo, but I couldn’t. Luckily, she figured as much and reminded me. His mom caught him sleeping with Charlotte and hit him with a belt, screaming at him and temporarily banning him from seeing her. He tried to OD that night, figuring that a life without Charlotte wasn’t a life worth living. What made it more stupid was that he was a month from eighteen. If he had just taken it as a standard grounding, he could have moved in with Charlotte. Now he has to deal with that huge scar and monthly rehab.

When she finished her flashback, I grabbed her hand and held her as her eyes got watery, and I became more desperate. After a while, she pulled herself together and slapped my hands away, now embarrassed and upset about something. She asked if I remembered that party from months ago, and this time I did remember.

“Don’t worry, he doesn’t know.” That was all I could say. If I told her the truth, she would absolutely not give me anything from her father’s practice. She said nothing, just came up to me and tugged at my arms before hugging me. She then sat herself down in the wet sand and brushed away my cover.

“Don’t worry, I know he does. You just want some pills. I’m sorry, I don’t have any to offer. I know it’s a stretch, but have you thought about—no, can’t say that.”

I snapped like the strings of a violin, “Say what? What? Say it! Come on, I’m ready for the lecture!” I already knew exactly what she was trying to say, and she already knew my answer.

“Let’s just go to The Locker. Maybe you’ll even find what you’re looking for. After all, there are a lot of businesses out there that you simply don’t hear about until they come to you.” She complied with my demand, and we got up to begin our walk. Charlotte and I stared into the water. The graffiti on the bridge’s underbelly cast hieroglyphics of pills and protest onto the water before quietly fading with the waves. We looked up to see if they were still there, but there wasn’t so much as a scratch above us. Our hands clasped tiny rocks as we crawled under the billboards and up the sandy hills to get to the sidewalk. Looking behind at the billboard, Captain Ivory smiled at me. On top of his plaster world, a parrot flew down, jellyfish in its mouth, and the strings below the translucent puppet cloaked the pirate in a rainbow window.

“Whatcha lookin’ at, Franny?” Charlotte grabbed my arm and pulled me closer.

“Looks just like my dad’s old parrot,” was all I could muster up.

“Your dad had a parrot? That’s so cool! Dude, if I had a parrot, I wouldn’t use a phone again! I’d just tell it whatever I wanted someone to hear and fly it over! Why did he have a parrot?”

“No clue,” was all I knew to say.

Charlotte went quiet as we walked to the club. A pale man with greasy long hair and a stained white suit walked behind us, always a handful of people away, never looking directly at me, only faintly glimpsing my hair every few steps.

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0900

Charlotte pranced on wooden pillars jutting from the water. The crystal water glistened, fragmenting her reflection. A light flickered below the water, reminding her to get on stable ground. I walked beside her in the grass, peering down at the quiet light. One plank shifted below, and Charlotte barely stopped herself from drowning at sea. I grabbed her hands and pulled her to the coast. Charlotte said nothing for the rest of the walk. Our stringy hair didn’t even blow in the wind, and my pits felt like sponges.

We traversed a part of town where homes were ruins abandoned by the royalty, terrified of the annual storms and never to return. Red brick castles lay with fish and kelp decorating the once-proud estates, like some suburban Atlantis risen to the surface. Their pointed tile roofs and broken balconies were the gills of land. The passing crowds smelled of sewage and cheap cologne. We were guiding ourselves through a current of businessmen, all guided by their ties.

When I turned the corner and arrived in the alleys, I could briefly see that pale man in his white suit, standing by a palm tree. He stood idly with his hands to his hips and his long black hair masking his face, as he just stared at the sky. I looked up to see through his eyes. The sun dimmed itself in the cloudless, birdless sky: nothing but a white dot in a muted turquoise sky. At least there was a sky. I looked to where that man was. He was gone.

“We’re here,” Charlotte calmly remarked, pointing at a cellar door. Charlotte tapped my shoulders and whispered, “Don’t tell Lukas where we are. I just turned my location off. He hates when I party without him,” into my ear. I nodded in agreement.

Charlotte put her mouth to the hatch and whispered. She put her back to the wall, and the hatch opened for us. Drums and synths whispered below. The steps were thinner than my arms. Every step I took was on my tiptoes. At the bottom was a shiny hallway with two metal doors at the end, held together by a pirate hook. No bouncer stood in wait, and the pale man was nowhere behind us. We must have lost him. The closer we got to the doors, the louder the wailing got. Choirs of autotune sang from the other side. Bouncing red lights glimmered from the cracks in the door. Drumming. Chanting. Synths. A new universe danced behind those doors; all we had to do was remove the hook. Charlotte slid the hook from the handles and masked her hands with it. She took a step back, and I pulled the doors open. Together, Charlotte and I cut through the crossroad into The Locker.

1000

Industrial lights seized the eyes with their strobing rhythm. Red and blue light revealed the shadows hiding in their faces. Dancers in latex wore rabbit heads as they danced on poles, holding their asses out in hopes they would catch a dollar bill. As Charlotte and I traversed the pulsing, sweaty bodies, a young girl bumped into us. She was barely our height, wearing a skirt below the knees and a backpack on her shoulders. By looks alone, she was probably fresh out of middle school. What was she doing at a place like this? Who let her in? Charlotte clawed her way through rubber skin to talk to the girl.

“You need any help?” Charlotte yelled to her, trying to overthrow the synths. Charlotte placed a hand on the girl’s shoulder. The girl looked around, her eyes wide with terror, and opened her mouth. I couldn’t hear what the girl said, but Charlotte just walked back to me and left the girl alone.

“What was it? That girl looks barely eighteen, if that. What the fuck is she doing here?” I yelled to Charlotte. Charlotte and I walked to the bar in silence; she looked at the ground the entire time and consistently looked behind herself. The girl was just stumbling around the rave, bumbling into dominatrixes and men in chastity belts with obliviousness. When we sat down, Charlotte finally blurted it out.

“She asked me where the snow was.” Charlotte just looked at my eyes, trying to keep her head from turning.

“That’s not—what? That’s stupid. It hasn’t snowed ever. Has she even been outside today? Has she ever been outside? Are you sure that’s what she said?” I pushed my hair out of my face and just stared at Charlotte, looking for any cracks in her porcelain face.

“That’s—that’s what she said! No doubt. That’s what she said. Not a joke or anything, she was completely serious.” Charlotte was gluing herself in place, trying not to panic. “You don’t believe me? Why don’t you ask? Yeah, why don’t you?” Charlotte’s eyes were crazed, like some mad puppet. She didn’t even look human.

“I’m not gonna ask,” I said. “She didn’t say anything about why she was down here or anything.” The music was getting louder and increasingly static. I looked to the far end of the counter and caught the bartender cleaning up some white powder. I was about to call him, but Charlotte grabbed my shoulders and forced our eyes together.

“Nothing. Just where the snow was,” Charlotte said. “Where is the snow, though? Wait, when is the last time it snowed?”

“Charlotte,” I told her softly, “it’s never snowed here.”

“No. Where is the snow? Where is it?” She finally cracked; you could see the wires in her cheeks pulling them apart. I reached my arm out to her, but she snapped it away, jumped out of her seat, and bolted to the restroom. She was sobbing on the way out, and I couldn’t figure out why. There I sat alone, waiting for her return. I waved to the bartender and asked him if he had any drugs. The bartender wore a noh mask and sluggishly stepped toward me.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” was all he could muster up.

I pushed him some more. “Oh come on, every girl here gets roofied. I already know you spiked that kid’s drink. Just let me tap into it and get my head straight. The day has been so blurry, and my friend just ditched me over that kid’s schizo delusion. Don’t act like there’s some rule about only getting girls high non-consensually.”

The bartender stared at me through the expressionless, wooden mask. The narrow eyes stabbed mine. He leaned over on the counter, pulled his mask close, and asked with an unmoving mouth, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Oh come on, Davy Jones, I saw you cleaning that shit. The dust is all over the counter. Must have spilled it the first time around.” I pointed to the far end of the counter. “All I want is one pill, and I won’t say anything.”

He looked annoyed, but he conceded and whispered to me my biggest fear: “Look, I just wasted the last bit. Tried giving it to a girl from college, but that child came up and drank the whole thing instead. It doesn’t seem like she’s had a reaction, though. She’s been quiet this entire time. I would if I could, but there’s nothing left. Everything else just vanished.”

“Damn it, damn it, damn it.” I slammed my fists on the counter and sat myself in a booth. Didn’t want to hear another word I said. I got my phone out and texted Charlotte.

                                                                                    Almost done in there?

No response. I flipped it shut, putting it back in my pocket. I watched the dancers and the robed men chant in fervor to the synths, now accompanied by the sounds of steam exhausts and collapsing pipes. They synchronized as if they were one unconscious being, just existing via responses to drumming and howling machinery. Then the music stopped. The room went white, and everybody was exposed. No shadows, no color, and no sound to drown your shame with. The crowd looked at each other with distance and took a fat hit of hatred. Some screamed like death whistles and ran up the stairs, while some joined the dancers. The music came back, and the lights turned off. A red spotlight suddenly awoke and opened my vision to the dancers. They were now dressed like pirates and moved as if they lacked bones. They were erratic and flopped around the dance floor like dying fish bearing swords. They began to fight, slashing their guts and their arms with swords, spraying strings of blood across the room. They smashed together and molded each other in blood and skin, transforming into a synchronized human flower. Their arms shook erratically in place, holding each other’s hands. The frozen eyes stared into mine unblinkingly, and their mouths opened wide, revealing rotten, disfigured tusks. The young girl briefly blocked my view. She stumbled along and tripped on the metal floor before crawling out of the light into the darkness. All at once, their hands and arms were pulled outward by thin white lights, and the pale man bloomed from the dancers. The ceiling lights came back, bursting with colors I’ve never seen. Throbbing music screamed and scratched the walls. I was held in place by strings and looked to the bartender for help, but he was gone. The pale man stomped to my booth, the lights changing color with each boot slammed to the ground. He now looked just like Uncle Tim, but not quite.

1100

I hugged my head and sat it down on the table. I hoped I could simply dream him away. He stood at my booth without moving. Through the crevices of my elbows, I could see his black leather gloves contrasting with his white suit. His hands dangled from his arms like a pendulum hangs from a clock. He lifted his arms and flopped his fingertips on the table, straightening his arm to prevent collapse. May I sit down?

The words tumbled from his mouth and collapsed on the table, waiting to be heard. I kept my head down and tightened my grip, pushing my palms against my ears. My ears rejected the words and turned them into letters. “May” became a month, “sit” became a command, and “down” became his drooping hands against my scalp. His fingers lacked the solidity of bone; they mushed and gurgled under the leather as he caressed my hair, gliding his fingers to my shoulders. Slowly, Tim guided his hand to my breast. I released myself and slapped his hands before shoving myself into the wall.

I’ll take that as a yes. He lifted his arms and placed himself in front of me. I could finally see him up close. His pale skin was powdery and smudged. The face was outlined by black, faded lines, serrated by his hair, and you could see no reflection in his eyes. They were large and flat without any liquid texture, closer to painted ping-pong balls than eyes. He raised his arm out and shook it, the white fabric graying in the shadows. A cigarette box greeted me from his sleeve. It was moldy and damp, with a faceless pirate on the cover. Need a light?

“I’ll be just fine,” I told the man, still holding myself.

Suit yourself. Can’t find shit today. Had to swim with the manatees to get myself so much as a cigarette. Think you could light it for me? He spoke plainly above the screaming music and clinking chains; somehow, his voice was the loudest thing here. He dropped the case on the table and leaned over to me.

“Why can’t you do it yourself?”

Still shaky from the drugs they gave me. It was my whole body for a while, now it’s just the hands. Down at Anna Marie, you’re just a lab rat. They’ll give you oxy for a headache.

“Sounds like a dream to me.” I moved myself to the center of the booth.

Amen to that. Too bad it’s not that Hollywood shit. Down in the city, even the worst coke will give you God’s eyes. He chuckled to himself and bared a smile at me. The man’s teeth were black as obsidian and reflected the white light in the room. You know, nobody here respects the art I’ve made. Look at all these degenerates wearing their cuck belts and bunny ears. I’m doing real shit. Making real art. I’m all over the billboards and the city, and how do they respond? They don’t. They don’t even know I’m in this room. Tim looked over the seats, darting his eyes back and forth between people. That’s my uncle, alright. Delusional monologues and all.

“So how did they let you out?” I laid my arms on the table and leaned toward him, trying to pick apart what he was.

They didn’t. I escaped. Jumped out the window as soon as I could bend my legs. Ran here to tell you.

“Tell me what?” I leaned over and squinted at him. Tim looked around the room with a paranoid expression, then snapped out of himself. Tim dropped his arms in his lap and sat perfectly still and straight. I leaned over, trying to crack my uncle’s mind like an egg, but his eyes were unmoving, just staring at my mouth. Like a fortune-teller robot, he lifted his hands and opened his palms. Inside was the bottle of pills I lost. I lunged forward and snatched the bottle from him, pulling myself away with it. He chuckled and put his hands in his pockets.

They fell out of your pocket during your visit. Figured you would like them back.

I put the pills in my pocket and asked with my eyes wide, “What are you talking about? Where did you get these?”

Oh come on, silly! The man laughed. When you came down to the Anonymous Casino. Sadly, I missed you. My brother claims you were quite awful to him and didn’t even say goodbye. He took a napkin from his pocket and wiped his face, but stopped almost immediately after he began. He held the napkin in place and flicked his head away from me. I couldn’t see what happened.

I retreated into the corner, and he chuckled. If you would, your dad would really like to see you. Says he can’t visit anymore for whatever reason. Plus, the casino owns the whole factory. You’d never deal with sobriety again, whether it be from your dad or your sins!

“No” was the only thought I had at that moment. The lights went out. Nothing was safe. The man I thought was my uncle dug his hands into the table and flailed his face back to me, staring directly at me with his false eyes the whole way. He had accidentally smeared his skin with the napkin. It was now gray, with a hideous, tar-like black underneath. He dragged himself away from the booth in complete silence, slammed open the doors, and left the room.

Like a bad memory, I forgot there were other people here. There was too much happening to articulate, only that Charlotte was back and leaning over on the ground. She was pressing on something, lifting her mouth, and shoving her hands into the ground. I ran to Charlotte to see what she was doing. It was that little girl. She was frothing at the mouth and convulsing. Her body shook, and every push felt like an exorcism. Her eyes flooded her skull, and the froth became red. I called for anybody to help, but no one did. Everybody just danced to the silence. Her shakes slowed, and Charlotte kept pushing her chest. I pulled her away; compressions would only make it worse. Charlotte tore herself out of my arms and got on her knees, continuing to press her body. I tried to call the police, but there was no service. Then the room went completely red. We were on emergency power. I bore witness to my surroundings, hoping anybody could or would respond to our cries and our anger, but they could only dance with their whips. Not an eye could be spared. I looked back down, and the little girl lay stiff on the ground. Her little hands were cold, and her skirt was ripped. The girl stared thoughtlessly at the door. Charlotte was running away.

I kissed the girl’s pale, little forehead and picked her up. I cried myself forward through the flood of pirate dancers and flashing lights. The party was back on. Did it even stop? Webs of black rope pulled and twisted in the red lights. The dancers had tied themselves together. Hung in a black web, tangled like a rat king, singing beneath blindfolds. As long as they couldn’t see each other’s mysterious skin, they were lovers.

I pushed open the doors with my shoulders and walked up the narrow stairs, forcing the trapdoor open. An icy breeze slapped my face. I placed the girl on the ground and pulled myself out of The Locker. The palm trees were drooping with white, and petals of snow fell on my red face. My frozen tears pulled my face down. I wanted to see the body, but it had vanished. No footsteps or drag path to be found. Just a snow angel where a life should be.

CONSUME ACT 1 BEFORE READING THIS.

CONSUME

YOU HAVE YOUR TICKET.

ENJOY THE RIDE.

0000

My father’s ghost walked me down the aisle. I looked down at the black flowers scattered across the tiled floor, and up at the industrial lights on the ceiling. Dad’s pale, sickly hands held my arms as I scanned the shelves for cigarettes. I could not feel his fingers, but his blackened eyes bound me to strings. Every day, I could feel them tug: the itch, the need for more. I was a marionette for addiction, whether to smokes or paternity. I turned around, terrified to see, but he was gone.

The only pack I could find was underneath a bottle of moonshine. The label was blotched with ink; the only readable lines were:

Courtesy of the Anonymous Casino, where fate plays for you, not against you.

The bottle had no price tag, and seeing that the cashier was clearly high, I put it in my jacket pocket.

I picked up the cigarette pack. It was bent from the pressure of the bottle and was not wrapped in plastic. I turned it over to see the price: fifteen dollars and thirty-five cents. Above the price tag was a minstrel actor in a pirate costume, smiling with rotten teeth.

            Favorite of Captain Ivory, the greatest pirate in-

The rest of the subtitle was scratched off, revealing moldy paper underneath the paint. I walked to the cashier, leaning on the wall. Patches of hair fell off his head and onto the ground like leaves. He noticed me, slipped on his shoes, and leaned over the counter.

“Cigs? You’re too cute for those.”

“Why is this pack so expensive?” I slid it to him, and one of the cigarettes fell out of the case. The man picked it up and looked at the pack as if he were looking for gold.

“They’ve always been like that. Been sittin’ there since my mommy died.” He then yawned loudly and blew a breath of ammonia at my face.

“Can I get them for cheaper?” I said. The junkie cashier squinted at me like he didn’t even hear what I said.

“The price is the price. I can’t change it. I would take you to the manager, but he’s off tonight. It’s a real shame he isn’t here; he’d love to see a beauty like you in person.” His voice slurred confidently as he spoke, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was staring at the mirror. He bent to itch his back. Then he looked up at the ceiling and collapsed. He lay down on the floor in a trance, mumbling about the jellyfish and his master.

Captain Ivory stared at me from the cigarette case, and I could feel my father pushing my hands toward them. I grabbed the pack of cigarettes, waited to see if he would get up, and stole $200 from the register. The feeling was gone.

I walked away from the ruined register. The cashier’s rambles echoed through the walls, and I exited the gas station. The night was blue, and the moon fragmented above the world. A skyscraper-sized sign bearing the letters TC stood atop the derelict building. I began to walk on the pier, the ghost of my father peering down at me from the ocean sky.

0100

Across the river from me stood Anna Marie Hospital. It was an enormous building, towering like a mountain above the rest of our little town. Distantly, it watched over the city, gazing at little stars that blinked from windows and streetlights. Dad said it’s a journey through the underworld to get there. He stopped for a brief moment, looked out the window at the giant being, and told me there are no roads to Anna Marie. The only way to get in or out is a one-way tunnel from the canal. They check you for any metal, and if there’s as much as a graft on your boat, they put you on a waiting list and send you on your way. I looked out the window. The sound of clapping water rang through the house, the lights blacked out, and I was back on the pier.

The waves of the canal smashed the pier and rose above me. They ran up the wood, flew above me, and darkened my jeans. I pushed myself away from the ledge and off the pier. The pier stretched behind me. By the time I got off, the gas station doors were boarded up.

I shuffled down the sidewalk. Static water sat paused beside my feet. Unlit roads tied to a single home stared at me across the canal. A shadow hung above the neighborhood and draped the homes. I lifted my head, searching for the rafters that held them, but there was nothing. Not even the moon sat above to greet me. The sky was just too far away.

The sky dragged me farther down the sidewalk. Nobody could see; nobody was here. I walked down the road alone. There weren’t even boats in the stream. That changed when a small ripple shifted the canal. Suddenly, the canal was skinny, and the pier was almost a bridge. The ripples became waves, and straddling the edge was a large metal hull. A hatch opened from the hull, and fog flowed out. A booming light shone through the door. A shadow emerged from the light, coughing. Charlotte slipped on the floor and smiled at me. Lukas sat at the wheel, smoke in hand. Charlotte came to hug me, and Lukas shouted at me. “Franny, get in! We’re heading to the old theater! They’re showing Colonel Steel! It’s old and kinda outdated, but it will be so fun high!”

Charlotte looked at me, her eyes as red as her hair. “Come on, Franny. What are you doing out this late anyway? Come on before some weird freak finds you.”

“I’ll do just fine. Thank you.” I moaned, now walking away.

“Come on, please.” Charlotte took my hand, and I relented. There’s no reason for me not to go, plus there’s an easy ride home.

“Okayyy, fine. I’ll come with.” I moaned. Charlotte was ecstatic, clapping her hands and running inside the boat. I entered, and I could feel Dad’s anger welling up, but the doors were closed, and his strings were cut.

0200

Lukas and Charlotte took shots up front. I sat on a table in the corner, slouching to avoid hitting my head on the roof. The cabin was tiny. You could reach your hands forward and touch the wall in front of you. A perfect square with Lukas in the middle, piloting us to the theater. Protruding from his lips was a massive cigar, his sour smoke poured on the floor. He blazed through the canal so fast the outside world blurred away. The song of scraping metal whistled against the walls as the ship clawed its way through to the theater. I tried to light a cigarette, but something hot snapped my back. I dropped the cigarette and looked behind me. The metal walls lay orange and molten, with tiny holes bulging through. Lukas tightened his grip on the wheel.

“Hey, Charlotte, tell your dad not to call me that ever again.”

Charlotte put her head to the wall and looked at the ceiling. She complained.

“You know I can’t control him.”

“Well it would be nice if you tried. Don’t just sit there silent.”

I burst in.

“Can we slow down? Your fucking boat’s melting.”

“Whatever. It's fine, look, we’re almost there!” Lukas and Charlotte sat in silence as we continued driving. They kept looking at each other, trying not to argue in front of their friend. I pulled out a smoke and offered some up. Charlotte declined, but Lukas took it from me. Charlotte’s dad’s never been fond of black guys.

I took a look out the round window up front, and there it was: a massive dock, larger than the entire canal. It was like we teleported. We found a place to park and exited the vehicle.

Subscribe

0300

We exited the hull and pulled ourselves up to the dock. Lukas’s boat lowered in the water and lay like a dead fish. The dock was dingy, and crabs crawled up and down the pillars, drowning themselves in fear of us. Lukas picked Charlotte up, and they kissed sloppily. I stood at a distance, my eyes concerned with the sky. Dad stared from above, watching them kiss, angry that I got in the boat. He zoomed in on my jacket, noticed the bulge, and crawled down from the moon to grab the wine. What is this? He unbuttoned my jacket and uncorked the bottle. Who told you this was allowed? You know what your mother would think. I was a kid too, ya know. I drank a lot. My very first time was drunk. Woke up in my friend’s bed with his girlfriend. She looked at me, kissed me, and ran away crying. That girl was your mother. He threw the cork at Lukas, frozen in place with Charlotte in his arms. Drowning himself in the bottle, he handed it to me, but I declined. I tried to light a smoke, but my shaky hands dropped the case on the floor. The pirate smiled at me as he fell into the water. I reached down to grab them, but the pirate and his swords had gone down to the locker. I looked up, looking everywhere for my father, but he had vanished. The bottle was now in my hand, half empty. I could see blurred letters under the label. They were completely unintelligible, but stared at me like I needed to read them.

“Franny, are you okay?” Charlotte ran to me and picked me up. I threw up all over her dress. She wiped it off and carried me off the dock.

Lukas ran to Charlotte's side. “What happened? Is she okay?”

“Look at her, does she seem okay?” Charlotte snapped. He stepped back and let Charlotte do the work, almost tripping over himself.

“I’m okay. Fell through the cracks is all. I’m so sorry about that.”

Charlotte frowned and held my fingers. “It’s okay, honey. It’s nothing I can’t clean easily. What do you mean you fell through the cracks? Talk to me.”

“Not me, my cigarettes,” I replied, now cracking up.

Lukas revealed a napkin in his shirt pocket and cleaned Charlotte up. Sanguine stained her shirt, the smell of metal oozing from her top.

“Show me the bottle,” Lukas slurred, his legs wobbling like bubbles. I held the bottle out to him, confused but too embarrassed to argue. He took a brief look at the label and asked about it.

“Anonymous Casino?” He looked closer and then away. “Never heard of it. Strange for a casino to make wine.” He clotted the neck of the bottle with napkins and handed it back to me. I put it back in my pocket, and we started walking to the theater.

The sidewalks were hazy. I could see the booming music echo through alleyways, bashing me like gusts of wind. Charlotte and Lukas walked behind me, making sure I didn’t fall. I looked into windows at effigies of jellyfish strung above the corridors, latching their tentacles to the head of any passerby. They flowed through the corridors, their strings passing through the streetlights and reaching for the future. They were my only guide to the theater. I looked above me and smiled. The sky was still far away, but now it was closer.

Charlotte remarked at a poster, worn down and broken. The name and face were invisible to me. Only his white suit and long black hair were noticeable. The strings tugged me away from further inquiry. We were at the theater.

Upon entering, we all coughed as one. The white dust on the ground coated my black jacket and covered the wine on Charlotte's shirt. We were greeted by a waiter.

“Three tickets to Colonel Steel, please.”

“How wonderful. You’re the first on this side of town to care for such great art. Follow me.” He looked at the bottle silhouette in my pocket, smiled with his gray teeth, and walked us to the screening in a single motion, standing directly behind me, staring at the bottle in my jacket.

0400

The hall was dirty and hollow. Nobody walked to or from the other auditoriums, and not a soul traveled behind us. The carpet below our feet was a faded red, and you could hear my boots beating the hollow floor below like drums, flowing through the beige walls. Our waiter opened the door for us, allowing Charlotte and Lukas to enter without struggle. I tried to follow them, but the waiter lowered his arms and blocked the door.

“Don’t be so hasty, Francesca. You’re expected on the balcony. We can’t have you mistaken for the common rabble now, can we?” He stared at me blankly, his wrinkles now sinking through his face. How did he know my name?

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I replied. “Just two hours ago, I didn’t even know this place existed.” I tried to go under his arms, but he gently pulled my hand back, forcing me still.

“Your father is expecting you,” he said without emotion or expression. I froze, my hands pulled themselves down, and without resistance, I followed the waiter up the stairs, the doors leading to Charlotte and Lukas closing behind us. The dusty stairs lifted me to the second floor, where the theater was perfectly clean. There was no dust; the red carpets flowed like a snake to the balcony. The waiter opened the door for me, now smiling, with tears in his eyes.

I was the only one there. The surrounding seats sat dead as the doors closed behind me. I looked down at Lukas, Charlotte, and all the people below me. Seated beside Charlotte, there I was: a perfect copy of me, sitting still, looking at nothing. I leaned over the bars and yelled, but nobody could hear me. Charlotte paid no mind to the copy. It was now smiling as the curtains opened, and the projector was crackling. I ran to the doors behind me, but they were locked. Finally, I sat down and watched Colonel Steel.

The projector buzzed, and trumpets sang in broken verses. A tar-faced puppet danced around and sang in his pirate costume, his exaggerated lips and white eyelids opened wide as a pair of perfect, glowing teeth shone to me. They blasted me alone like a spotlight, and everybody below, including Charlotte and Lukas, moved their heads in unison and stared blankly in my direction. I waved my arms to get their attention, but they were still. My copy was staring at the screen, and when the pirate closed his mouth, their eyes went back to the screen.

“I’m Captain Ivory!” sang the puppet. “Greatest negro on the seven seas! Together we shall slay the whites and take, take, take everything for me!” The puppet lifted his sword from his sheath and almost dropped it. He lifted it to his face and bit the tip with his bright white teeth. He then lifted it out and danced. He stopped in his tracks. A white-haired, white-skinned puppet was dragged onto the screen, dressed in uniform; the only colors of the film were his blue eyes.

“Captain Ivory, your foul breath and hate shall never destroy a great America!” Captain Steel shouted, joyous trumpets sang on cue.

“You ain’t never heard no good soul then, no good rhythms. All y’all whites have is sexy women.” Captain Ivory laughed loudly and slapped his knees before performing a crude rap while making a stroking motion toward his crotch.

“Please, your culture, if you can even call it that, is no match for ours. And neither is your combat ability, for I, Colonel Steel, shall put you down.” Colonel Steel quickly unsheathed his pistol and shot Captain Ivory three times in the chest. The gunshots snapped through the auditorium and could be heard even after they were fired. Nobody below flinched, but blood dripped from their ears. Captain Ivory fell to the ground, blood dripping out of the puppet’s mouth and lines. The puppet reached for Colonel Steel’s white robes with its wooden hands, and Colonel Steel held them to his mouth, picked him up, and leaned him against a tree. He walked away to retrieve something. Ivory couldn’t move, and the strings on the puppet were dancing to make his disconnected body convulse. Steel returned with a rope and hung Ivory’s body in the tree. Ivory was convulsing and reached for the rope, but could never grab it fully. Blood dripped from his mouth and the holes in his body like strings, slowly losing power, until finally going limp. His hands and legs glided through the air like tentacles. A strange body hanging with the apples. A snake fell from a hole in the body’s torso, shook on the ground, flicked its head upward, and swayed to the audience. My copy got up and walked to the screen, turning gray as it entered the film. She walked with the snake, reached for the body, and the film faded.

The theater erupted with clapping, with no discourse and no moving hands. The audience sat idly, not moving an inch from their seats. I ran to the door, still locked. I paced back and forth, trying to figure out what to do, when I felt a vibration from my phone. It was from my mom.

They found Tim.

The entire theater laughed in unison, and for the first time since I got up here, everybody was moving, and my copy was gone. Charlotte and Lukas were talking to each other, and rushed out of the room. I went to the door. It was now unlocked.

I ran down the stairs and reunited with my friends. Charlotte was confused and asked where I had gone. I told them what happened. They both looked concerned, and Lukas came up to me.

“What do you mean? You were there for the whole thing, and even let us have some of the wine you got. Good stuff, but when the movie was over, you went to the restroom and never came back. We were waiting for, like, 30 minutes.” He put his hand to his ears and rubbed off the blood.

I turned around and almost threw up. “There’s no way. That’s not at all what happened. He led me upstairs. You need to believe me. They shone that whole spotlight on me, come on, please.”

Lukas joked.” Let’s get you back home. Next time, maybe don’t take me to a minstrel film.” Charlotte hit him. We began walking, and I checked my pocket to see the wine bottle, but it was empty. When we exited the building, the name Tim left our mouths like a final breath.

0500

I was finally away from Charlotte and Lukas and now stood in front of my home, alone. The second-story bedroom light was on; the rest of the windows lay in a cold darkness. The driveway stretched long, and I turned the knob of the back door leading to the garage. I stepped over boxes of pictures and rusty bicycles. When I went up the steps, I looked back at the cluttered garage without a car. In the corner lay a box with his name, and I was pulled to it like a puppet. The name “Mickey” sang to me with a broken kick. I picked up the heavy box and took it to my room. The television was on in the living room, replaying memories I don’t remember. Nobody was in the living room. I stood in place, watching him bear witness to my birth, singing to me as I clapped without touching my hands. He looked into the screen, and everything else around him wasn’t real, like it was some puppet show performed by a jellyfish, unaware of its own existence.

I walked up the wailing stairs and looked into Mom’s room. She was asleep on the bed and lay fetal, hugging a pillow. The lights in the room were on, and the prints of heels and broken glass tracked into the room. I stalked my way through the halls to avoid making a sound and opened my door. I heard a creak and looked over my shoulder. She had switched sides of the bed.

When I entered my room, I removed my jacket and threw it on the floor. A loud thud came when it hit the ground, and I could see the empty wine bottle. I snatched it from my pocket and went to my trash can, but stopped. A hidden message stared at me from inside the label. I got the knife from my restroom and cut the label off. The back read:

“FRANCESCA FREGOLI, WE ARE EXCITED TO SEE YOU AT THE ANONYMOUS CASINO! REMEMBER, 7 PM TONIGHT. DON’T BE LATE :)”

My heart stopped, and I immediately threw it away and looked out the window to make sure I was not being watched. A billboard for Captain Ivory’s lynching was the only thing I could see staring from the shadows. I closed my blinds, locked my door and all of my windows, checked my closet and all of my cabinets, and checked under my bed. Nothing stared back at me, minus my dad’s old ventriloquist dummy, which I proceeded to throw out of the room and down the stairs, locking the door again as I closed it. Only once I was sure I was not being watched did I finally open the cardboard box. Every photo was facing down except for one. They were in what appeared to be the interior of the Anonymous Casino. He smiled at the camera with his gray teeth and curly hair, wearing his signature green turtleneck and jeans, which he always wore when he sought to make an impression. Something was wrong with that picture, though. I went through the downward pictures to make sure I wasn’t going crazy, but they were all the same. I ran to my door, unlocked it to check if it was locked, then locked it again, just to be sure. I slammed the frame down and sobbed myself to sleep when I saw what stood at his side: a disgusting pirate in black tar makeup, exaggerated lips, smiling with glowing white teeth so bright they illuminated my fingers. Behind them ran the exact same waiter who guided me through the theater.

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The smell of frozen smog told me piracy was dead. I got out of bed, and it was already half past three. I took a right from my bedroom to the restroom, stared at the picture of Captain Ivory over the toilet, and pissed on it. The man in the poster, now stained yellow, pointed behind me to the hallway, his eyes the same as mine. The narrow door opened almost directly into a wall, and closed behind me as I passed through into the kitchen. The hallway was long and empty, except for a framed autograph returned by a fan. I looked behind me at the rusty skyscrapers in the window and continued through the hall.

On top of the counter was my cracked television, and it told me that this morning, at 5:30, they found the girl. I tried to go to the next channel, but the touchscreen was broken. After much frustration, I decided I might as well make breakfast. I got out the milk and quickly put it away after seeing it was already chunky. My cat lay still on the couch beside me. It made no sound and did not move or purr, even after being petted. My remote was on the ground in the kitchen, and one of my old movies came on the TV out of nowhere, so I ran to grab the remote and turn it off. After clicking it several times, its brain turned off and I placed the remote on the table. I walked through my empty hallway to the freezer to get some waffles, but they were brittle and collapsed in my hands. Before I could devour the crumbs, a loud thud hit the door.

It was my landlord, Lukas Xandalier. He was a very tall black man with the fat of a sumo wrestler and a scar running from his forehead to his collarbone. He had short dark hair, and wore a Hawaiian shirt, buttons half undone to expose his chest hair. He turned himself sideways and leaned down to get himself through the doorway, reaching forward to put his hat on my coat rack. He could barely fit in the hallway, and he pushed himself so close to me I thought I would be crushed.

“Hello, Mr. Xandalier. Funny seeing you today. Can I get you anything?” All I could see was his chest. I took a few steps back and almost tripped on my chair.

“Coffee is all. Thank you, Mr. Cape.” He stared down at me before looking over my shoulder and silently looking for any damage I’d done to the place.

“With pleasure, Mr. Xandalier, with pleasure. Please do sit down. You’re a busy man, and I would hate to see you just standing there.” I was now far enough from him to make eye contact. His eyes looked into mine until I couldn’t look anymore. I ran to the kitchen, and he walked slowly to sit on my couch, the floorboards creaking with every step, my fear that he would fall through the floor growing every time the floor cried out.

“Mr. Cape, you have not paid a dime of what we agreed on. We agreed on six months free, then you’d pay me sixfold. That was our deal, and seeing how you live right now, I can infer you do not intend on following up on your half.

I put the brewing machine down and felt heavier than the man before me. “Mr. Xandalier, if you could please give me another six months, I promise you’ll get a year's worth of rent.”

“You’ve been living here rent-free for six months and haven’t made enough money for even 50%? And to think you were a celebrity. All you are is a baby with a beard.” He stared at me so intensely I thought it would break the mug.

“Lukas, you can’t be serious. You know I don’t live that life anymore. I got sold out years ago. Plus, we’re all struggling here, I know you are too. Shouldn’t we downtrodden folks help each other out? I can run a few gigs on your behalf, and you give me a place to live.”

“You are funny to think you can convince me of anything, and funnier still to think you relate to us. We have lived in this our whole lives, and you only got here once minstrelsy got unpopular. Let me tell you something, I cannot help you. If I helped you, I would be running into a wall. You think I can afford to share? Throwing money to your ‘friends’ was your privilege before you blew your stale, bigoted act. Your arrogance is enough reason for me to evict you at this very moment. Pick up your essentials and leave before I do.”

“You can’t be serious...”

“I am very serious.” He slammed his fist on the table, and the legs broke.

                                ___

I quickly put my white suit on, grabbed my knife from atop the TV, and ran out of the building, abandoning my temporary residency. My skin quickly bled from the intense cold. I began to head toward the market district. It was already midnight, after all. My breath clouded the sky in front of me. My face was red, and small icicles grew on my eyebrows.

Posters covered every window, showing the face of a young girl. She stood in the frame, smirking in her cobwebbed jacket, oblivious to her fate. Standing behind her, the mother stared distantly at the red and pink layers in her daughter’s blonde wolf cut. This girl had gone missing weeks ago and was found dead in an oil tank last night, with no visible signs of decomposition. They said she ran away with a boyfriend in the dead of night, and the rest is history. There were so many drugs in her system that a vampire would overdose. Chatter in the street insisted she was a junkie herself and that she deserved it; others screeched and claimed she was the victim of an evil spirit; others just ignored it and moved through their days. I don’t care too much, but every poster seemed to stare at me accusingly.

People pulled me aside as I tried to wiggle my way out of the markets. Their sooty hands stained my white shirt black as they reached for me to buy their wares, insisting I was a millionaire. As I kept walking, they all fell back into hell like the backwash of society.

My socks got sloppy. It was that time of day again, when the septic system was released into the water supply. I began to run as the sewage reached my heels and fell into my shoes, utterly ruined now. Upon getting to higher ground, I took them off and went inside a tiny wood shack with a skyscraper built on top, where I bought some slip-ons for $15.35. Their soles were flat as wood and had a small hole in them. The owner’s rotten breath and collapsing hair were enough to make me rush out of the building, grabbing my change out of the register before he could.

As I began to rush out of the derelict shack, I found $200 in my pocket, and the casino was only a few blocks down. Why shouldn’t I risk it all on poker? Hold ’em and life are the same, after all. If you can hide yourself, you may as well be God, and I am the greatest lie I’ve ever told.

I bumped into hanging effigies of jellyfish, all rubbing against my suit. The air hummed with gasoline and pop music. The speakers on billboards screamed to create waves that, for a moment, relieved the senses before inhaling and stealing silence again.

As I walked through the zombified city, I finally found my church: Anonymous Casino. A massive black cathedral shaped like a pirate ship, held by invisible wires and only connected to society by a pillar at the rudder. The lights surrounding the ship’s silhouette changed colors indecisively, and this monetary castle was a favorite of the desperate and wealthy. Beneath the hull were beggars kept hostage by armed men ready to shoot them unless they could beg their losses back. I walked to the heel until one of the beggars came to me and reached for my hands. He claimed he was a prophet and that the casino was home to devils unknown to even God himself, and that I should give my burdens to him, the only man capable of enduring the burden of Sisyphus. I tried to push him away from me, but he reached into my pockets before being shot in the head by one of the men. The man’s blood covered my face and ruined my favorite shirt. As I screamed in horror, one of the soldiers came up to me with a rag, doused it in fire, and lightly patted me, burning off the blood and soot. My clothes remained unburdened by the burns, and I felt Black Jack himself come to baptize me.

_____

When I entered the heel cap, the guard came to me and took all my money for a handful of chips. I took the elevator up the pole and into the ship, and as the door opened, I smelled fate herself lending a hand to guide me.

As my clairvoyant high led me to Texas, I realized I had left my watch at home. There were absolutely no clocks in the building, and without them, there was no way to find out where I was in time. I was incredibly frustrated and began yelling in anger. Guards started running to me, likely to trap me with the rabble, not knowing who I was. Before I could be escorted out, a man came up to me, and the guards began to walk away as if I was never there. He was a very short man with fine posture and always stood on his tiptoes. He had the white skin of a plantation owner. His eyes had shiny black holes comparable to pupils and short, well-groomed curly hair. He wore a green turtleneck and jeans that looked like they were torn from an ad. He wore no belt and no shoes either, and his teeth were perfect and glowed as bright as the sun. The man reached for my hands and excitedly said, “Hey, you, aren’t you Captain Ivory?”

“No,” I replied, frustrated with the man's enthusiasm. I am not Captain Ivory.

The man raised his eyebrows. “Well, of course you are, I mean, you have the hair, the facial structure, the scars. If you aren’t Captain Ivory, then I must be the devil.”

“I am not Captain Ivory. I am Tim Cape.” I began to walk away from the man, but he ran up to me and insisted we had something to talk about.

“Wait, wait, wait, wait. I’m sorry we got off on the wrong tail, Tim. It’s just that my kids love those movies, and I know they would love to see their father standing next to the coolest pirate ever! So, what do you say? Care to take a picture?”

 I hesitated at first, but I conceded and took the picture. My cooperation made the little man ecstatic. He pulled out a large box camera from his shirt pocket, and we posed as one. He smiled with extreme enthusiasm, his perfect teeth shining so brightly that the reflection from the lens blinded me. I stared blankly into the camera with my eyes closed, and Captain Ivory stared back.

“Thank you so much. The kids will love it, it’ll just take a while to develop. Look, I’m a busy guy, but could you spare some more of your time? My wife’s sick, and she would be so happy for some big movie star like yourself to come make her life a movie, if you get what I’m saying. She’s just down the road at Anna Marie. I swear it won’t take a minute of your totally busy morning.”

I was confused and slightly aggravated, seeing as I was in “early retirement,” but there was no reason not to go with him. After all, if I didn’t go with him, I would likely just be walking around anyway, staring at products I won’t buy and trying to find the sun. But there was one thing I needed to do before we left.

“Just let me win a round real quick, then we can be on our way.”

“With pleasure,” the man replied with joy, “we have plenty of time on our hands.”

The man and I walked to the poker table, and the guards greeted us on the way before walking backward to their barracks. When we got to the table, the man asked to be included. The dealer agreed and kissed the man’s hands with reverence. We sat down, and the man began to smile with his mouth closed and pulled his sleeves up. The dealer threw our cards with elegance, and a single tear ran down his cheek. I lifted my cards with confidence and grace, and I had the 3 of spades and the 5 of clubs.

We placed our bets, and the dealer revealed the first three in the community: the queen of spades, the ace of hearts, and the 2 of hearts. All I need is a four, and I have a wheel.

The man then proceeded to call, and after more betting, the next card was drawn: the ace of diamonds that glistened in my eyes. I looked over to the man, and he was staring at the dealer with a look of fury, as the dealer began to break down in tears, quivering his lips and gripping his fists. Upon noticing me, the man burst into laughter, and the dealer wiped his eyes and called again. I bet, and the man matched me with rage in his eyes. We both called, and the dealer took the card off the top of the deck before his shaking hands dropped it on the floor. He panicked and drew a different card instead. The card he put on the table was the four of spades.

I was ecstatic and went all in. The man exhaled a sigh and then smiled, matching my bet. When he unveiled his cards, the man had an ace of spades and a five of diamonds: three of a kind. I won with a wheel straight. The man began to chuckle before letting me have my money and walking to the exit. He insisted we begin our walk to Anna Marie, and I rubbed his loss in his face, but he just chuckled and insisted he had more than enough. The dealer ran off into the restroom with tears in his eyes and his left leg frozen in place like a bugged video game, and he forgot to put away the deck in full. I looked on the floor and saw that the card he had dropped was the 5 of hearts.

_____

We walked out of the casino on the way to Anna Marie, and as the high began to fade, so did my patience. My poor man's shoes paddled the ground, and the arch of my foot throbbed as if every step were on rusty nails. It was impossible to ignore the pollution. The skyscrapers and smokestacks were so tall and dark you couldn’t even see the sky, and the water was quite literally sewage. I don’t even know why you would shower here. Sweat is better for the skin.

We were still walking to Anna Marie. The posters of the girl seemed to stare at the little man now. His short stature made his surroundings stretch like rubber. Street poles became skyscrapers when I looked down at him. He walked with grace and confidence through this pit some call a metropolis, always looking down at nothing, yet always knowing where to turn. Behind us was a group of men following us, but the man told me he didn’t know them. Occasionally, he would glance at me and insist we were almost there. It went like this until the sun went down, before he glanced at me and asked...

“So, what’s your real name?”

“What?”

“Like your real name, you aren’t just Captain Ivory, are you?”

I stopped in my tracks as he kept walking. I fell silent before charging at him and gnashing:

“You mean to tell me you took me all this way and don’t know my name? I’m god damn Tim Cape. I’m a fucking star, and you don’t know me? You ever been to Hollywood and see that sign? That’s me, I am Hollywood.”

“Chill out, dude, take a deep breath. Everything’s gonna be okay. Just because I don’t know your name doesn’t mean I don’t know you, goddamn.”

“I don’t actually control minds and swordfight on large boats.” I’m trying to keep up, but the wall of cars always blocks my path. The man seems to glide through the traffic with ease, as if there were no cars in the road.

“But clearly that’s all you do. I mean, shit, who wouldn’t want to be a pirate? Then again, it would be very uncomfortable to keep your teeth dirty like that.” The man then flashed his perfect teeth again, stopping me in my tracks and turning the city into a self-contained disco ball. He closed his mouth and continued walking until he was almost hit by a car. It came out of nowhere, but he narrowly dodged it. Only the tie holding his tux together flew away like a black hole chose it instead. The man paid no mind and did not even flinch or try to grab his tie.

_____

The man took us on a detour through a narrow alleyway, telling me it would be quicker than the sidewalk. The tight walkway was pulsing as merchants in the windows reached out their hands. They were selling a variety of odd goods: in one window would be moonshine with a label drowned in ink, the next a ventriloquist dummy dressed in a vomit-stained tuxedo. The most consistent merchandise was always sandbags.

Crackling from a radio on a trash can was the disembodied voice of Captain Ivory. He cackled and gave fatal words of wisdom: “Ye mateys, beware the clan. They’re an awful breed, always coming to hunt pirates like me.” In one of the windows was a child playing with dolls of Ivory villains while his mom slept on the couch, beer in hand. I could not remember the names of the captain’s pursuers, but I am sure the child did, even through their white masks.

The man continued walking and looked up at the windows to see what was for sale. Upon seeing a window selling ancient pirate artifacts allegedly sourced from the lost pirate city of Libertalia, he knew that was his target. The man was too short to reach the window, so I watched as he searched through the flooded pipes and long-abandoned ground-floor apartments for a ladder or any kind of large object he could stand upon. He found a ladder hidden under a couch alongside the legless body of a rat. He came out the door and went to the window, ladder in hand, but the store was closed.

Deeply frustrated by this revelation of pointlessness, he decided to go back into the musty apartment and retrieve the dead rat. I could not stomach the stench of it, but his anger concealed that foul smell. I tried to convince him to give it up, but he would not do so and merely shoved me into the wall, where I gave up arguing with him and asked him what his name was. He slicked back his hair, sighed, and looked down at his feet.

“I have no name. Shit, I don’t even know my parents' names. They threw me off the plank and into a dump before I was even born, and nobody went diving for me. I lived in alleys like this my whole life, all alone, until I met my wife, who told me I don’t need a name. She was the first person I ever met, and the only person I pay any mind to.”

“What about me, or your kids?”

“Kids? That doesn’t sound right. But you, I already told you what I want from you. My wife likes you. She has always been a fan of the great actor Tim Cape and would pay a fortune to meet him in person before she dies.”

The man took the rat by the tail and threw it at the window, but the window did not break; it bent inward and then fell out, bouncing on the ground. The man caught the rat and threw it into the sewers, where the smell followed it, and he took the ladder once again, placed it against the wall, and climbed it to get his booty.

He was in the building for what felt like a whole day. There was complete silence, save for a very loud thud. He returned with the only object he claimed was worth anything, a pirate hook the size of a football. It contrasted brilliantly with his orange skin. We continued walking in silence after that before he insulted me for having only ever been a pirate.

“I’ve been a superhero pirate, sure, but I’ve also been a gangster, a poet, a vet, and an author. I'm my own coolest character.”

“Clearly not cool enough,” he said as he tried to grab me with his hook hand.

                                                                   ___

We were no longer in the city, since you could see the constellations and the crescent moon. The city was like a snow globe, designed to prevent the moon and stars from impacting man. The glowing dots raced across the sky and were never still. The sky was made a bloody zebra from the endless battle between the stars and space. Realizing how long we had been walking, the man tried to crack some small talk:

“Why would you look at that? Infinity racing infinity. Flushing the sky red like royalty. Entirely unrelated, but you ever climbed Everest? The kids loved it.”

“Yes, I’ve climbed Everest, and I have sailed the seven seas. Why doesn’t anybody see me here? Oh God, I—”

“Quiet, you're a drag, and if they know it, I know it. Shouldn’t have even asked.” As he said this, the man looked to his left and smirked at nobody.

“No, goddammit, I’m not one of those stupid method actors who choose to eat live rats and live in canoes because of some stupid vision. I’m a hardworking American. My grandparents fled the Nazis to make me a success, and all I’ve proven is that I’m a fucking failure.” I looked up at the full moon and was ready to howl.

“Thing is, nobody recognizes you until you are the Captain. If you can believe it, my listening to you is a performance worthy of an Oscar.”

“Shut up.” I reached to see if my knife was with me, but it was not. I must have left it with my watch.

_____

The new barren desert we walked through lacked experience. There were no cacti, no buttes, no canyons, no animals. The ground had the texture of skin and was as pale as my father. We would see ponds in the distance, but they would vanish as we approached. Every step I took with my wooden shoes flaked the skin off my feet. I looked into the distance, and many people were watching us. The same as the ones before. They stood close together without expression. Four children of the same complexion and expression, the Anonymous dealer standing at their side.

A storm began to brew in the distance, a flood of blood and light that broke from the sky. The man did not seem concerned, but he was clearly looking for a retreat. We each looked into the distance, and I saw a cabin. We scurried toward the cabin, and as the red water poured on the ground, we rushed up the stairs and narrowly avoided drowning. The cabin was highly unstable, but it could survive the storm.

I rushed inside and slammed the door. I collapsed on the sofa and stretched my legs. When I took my shoes off, I could feel the skin flaking from my feet. The man stayed outside to try to rescue our stalkers from the storm. I could hear their long-winded paddling on the stairway, and as the man walked in they all followed in a single-file line. The anonymous dealer stared at me with a look of pure rage, but the others barely even noticed me.

I put my bags on the ground, and the man started opening things. He scrounged in cabinets for matches until finding a matchbox under the bed, then walked to the fireplace and set the charcoal ablaze. We all swarmed around it to avoid the cold. The man spoke to them as if he had known them for years and asked if one of them would like to introduce themselves to us.

From this crowd, a figure broke the glass. He was a very tall man, but not as tall as the one I was accustomed to. His hair was buzzed, but you could see the brown color it should be. He moved idly, walking like a doll with an invisible person guiding his movements. When the man came up to him, he asked him his name. He said his name was Mickey, and from there he recited his entire life story. Though you wouldn’t think he was alive, given his pale green skin and how he and everybody with him were dressed like pirates.

“So, what is the best quote you can give our protagonist here?” the man asked Mickey as if he were prompting a machine.

“Acting is a career everybody has, and only the bad ones succeed in it.”

“Thank you, Mickey. Your son would be most pleased with your answer. You won't see him anytime soon, but maybe someday!” The man replied with glee. “Now, continue your story after death.”

He told us it all as if he were reading lines from an invisible script. He told us that his spirit was swallowed up and absorbed by his five children in some ritual. They crushed his ashes into a dark wine and drank it, absorbing his wisdom and endurance. He controls them like puppets, convinced they have no master, as they make delusions about his purity. When he finished, the man sent him on his way, and Mickey walked backward and lay with the crowd of dispassionate observers.

“Who is the fifth child?” I asked Mickey. He stared blankly into the fire and said:
“I forgot her name a long time ago.” He put his fingers to the flame and pulled himself closer before the man placed his arm on Mickey’s wrist and stopped him.

 We all slept on the floor except the man and me. I slept on the sofa, and he on the bed. As I faded to sleep, the shadow of a young girl stared at me through the window.

                            ____

We woke up from our slumber. The clocks in this house were all broken, but the man insisted we had slept for two days. I looked outside, and the storm was still going, noticeably calmer than before. The group of stalkers from before were nowhere to be seen. We got our things together and opened the door, where I could see the stalkers as small as ants in the distance, still staring at us.

We continued walking through the desert storm, waiting for them to look away, but they never did. The long hair of the man was the only curtain that blocked the view of our observers, yet they could still see through the grease that glossed our skin.

We began to reflect on what our goal was, and the man insisted that we were going to see his wife, but I lashed out at him.

“No, we are not. Stop giving me this crap, there isn’t gonna be a hospital in the middle of the fucking desert. You’re lying to me, and I know it. What is this nonsense about?”

“What is so complicated about the idea of a hospital in the desert? I mean, y'all Hollywood folks make Westerns over here all the time. Shouldn’t there be a hospital in case you shoot your co-stars?”

“Not how it works, we have cars for a reason.”

“If we did, why are we walking?” The man chuckled and looked away from me.

“What?” I stopped and clenched my fists so tight they could break diamonds.

“Why are we even walking? I’m sure if we drove, we would be there by now.” The man bit his lip and closed his eyes as if he knew he had made a stupid call and was simply trying to conceal his anger with a smile. He took a deep breath and then exhaled, now laughing so hard he fell to the ground. I began to trip on the wind trying to keep up.

“Yeah, why are we walking? Shit, I coulda just gone right on back home the second that store closed, but I stuck around because I knew you were gonna get your ass killed if I weren’t there, and besides, maybe your wife really does need me, and I can meet my first fan besides your dumbass.” The man then pointed up at the sky. Our observers were circling us in the air like vultures, but the man waved his finger in the air and we continued.

“I wish we could be like them, but unfortunately, we’re bound to the land, and your lard ass is too broke for a car, and I left mine at the house. I know you are lying, by the way. You trusted me because you couldn’t help it. I’m a charismatic guy, after all,” he said as he wrapped his lanky arms around me, now serious in his tone. “But that doesn’t matter now. I said the hospital was nearby. Clearly, you weren’t listening.”

“Shut up! You’re as dead as your wife.” I reached for my knife again.

“Yay, there we go. Sounded just like Captain Ivory there. You even unsheathed your famous swor—oh wait.” Shortly after saying this, he pulled my knife out of his pocket.

“I have your sword now. Can I keep it? It’s a real beauty, I’m more of a fork guy, but this blade is real nice.”

Seeing this sudden impossibility, I tore the man’s arm off of me and lunged at him, but the man flicked Tim’s chest and kept walking. The man grunted, wiped some sweat off his forehead, and straightened his white tuxedo. He looked back at Tim, squinted, and walked away. He crushed the now wheezing and coughing Earth, whose hairs raised themselves upward, and whose goosebumps formed mountains, some of which erupted like volcano pimples. Yellow pus flowed like lava to create a world unknown. This once barren waste was now a jungle.

The man’s lean and muscular body stood above it all, despite being on even ground. His suit fell to the ground, and he looked out at the horizon and raised his arms to a T, unfolded his palms as if waiting for nails, and then put his left hand straight in the air and his right to his face, revealing his eye from the crevices of his fingers. His hair flowed in the air, its blond color reflecting glowing shades of pink and red over the earth’s flesh. The man rose in the air, still in position, and flexed his chest. The rusty crust on his back flaked away like ashes, revealing glistening translucent flesh underneath. The wind howled the rest away in one brush and revealed the man’s new skin. It shone as brightly as his teeth, and the city, now but a speck of light, reflected the light onto Tim alone, revealing to the man his own purpose. Tim could see none of this; he was shaking and struggling to breathe, curling on the ground like a centipede in defense.

_____

“Tim, Tim, TIM!” The man had clearly been trying to wake him up for a while. “It’s been months. I’ve been wandering around trying to get the cops, but it doesn’t seem like they come out around this jungle. Come on, though. We’re almost at Anna Marie. Just a few steps away.” He then slowly unfolded his arms and pointed at the sun.

As Tim stood up, he looked at the man and then the sun, where the words “ANNA MARIE HOSPITAL” were engraved in black.

“What are you?” Tim asked the man, blocking the sun with his hands.

“I am,” the man replied with an uncertain tone.

As Tim walked to the hospital, his legs wobbled like toothpicks holding a whale, and his feet slammed against the ground, his shoes finally ground to dust. The hospital fell from the sky. It was a gigantic being not unlike the man he was with. It was inconceivable, as its speed blurred the clouds and froze the blazing stars. Tim stared in awe of this falling god as the man floated like a jellyfish behind him. Their stalkers now stood still in the air and simply watched as the building sank. The hospital’s landing cracked the ground like glass and blew the flying out of the air, now lying beaten on the ground, clapping and cheering for Tim. The hospital was still blurry, and for a moment Tim could hear the girl from the posters whispering to him. Tim took two steps on the stairs that rose from the ground and walked to the door as the translucent man stared at him, smiling and holding the door open for Tim to enter. His glowing teeth blinded Tim as the man leaned down and smiled so Tim could see those pearly whites for himself. He stepped inside, and there was nobody to recognize him.

CONSUME ACT 2 PART 1

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What’s the problem?

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There’s a lump in my back

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I walked her to the bench and ripped her dress

-

Little moving hairs sprouted from her spine

-

I pushed my knife into her back, and cracked her open

-

The wires raced through her body

-

I peeled them with my fingers

-

Snapped her ribs to kill the root

-

She groaned

-

Her blood pooled on the ground

-

I stitched her back together

-

And placed her on her feet

-

Thank You

-

I left

Ft an unrelated collage by me: The Revolution is Impossible

Patter naked glass

On the distant walls

-

He sits on the ground

Tuning the voices in his neck

Echoing endlessly

-

His moldy feet smother the floor

Reaching for the heat

It crackles in the other room

Deep below the wood

-

He lifts his milky skull

Peels awake his teeth

Harmonizing with stale air

Dancing on his tongue

-

He vocalizes

To fill his lungs

And remove his soaken wraps

He turns his oily sweat to ice

Pulls it from his skin

-

Frozen between broken fingers

Plucking at the strands

Etching maps into the strings of his guitar

Of places he can never know

collage:

I am sure you already know who I am by now. There is a… reputation around our company that has not gone unseen.

If you do not know who I am, I will not bother to explain. Just look out the window. In those two seconds, an entire world has developed around my name: Ashton Clark. No smoke and mirrors here like the other guys. It is all out there.

What you are reading here is not an apology or a response or anything of the sort. It is an explanation. Any apology I could give would never be enough to compensate for what I did. Your families, friends, and colleagues… I can do nothing to make it up to them.

There is nothing I can say to accurately portray what is happening, as I am not a scientist. The ones that could have explained it are all gone now. I am going to try my best to capture it for all of you reading this.

To begin, we must establish some background information and some of the brave men and women who assisted us. Contrary to the delusions advertised by contemporary society, there are still reliable prophets today. The Nostradamuses and Siddharthas of today never fizzled because of God’s insistence on giving us autonomy. Truthfully, we never had autonomy. No, the new prophets were employed. Employed by companies like ours. We had access to their visions and thoughts, and in return, they would help us predict the risings and inevitable collapses of governments and companies. This is common practice in our world, the business world. A member of your family may have had visions, and you would never know. If they were to tell, they would be dealt with in time.

For reasons of personal respect and morality, I will not give any information relating to our “prophet,” other than what is immediately relevant to the situation at hand. They will not be listed among the names I am about to provide, nor will any relation to other employees be established outside the immediate situation at hand. I respect them enough to recognize them now.

As for the others involved, here are their first names. May they be remembered not as harbringers of evil, but as brave seekers of truth in a world of lies.

Mary

Jeremiah

Simon

Patricia

Pauline

John

And Roberto

These were not just scientists. They were geniuses, even if they were taken away.

On April Third, three years ago today, our prophet reported from the ISS that there was to be a partial lunar eclipse on that day, turning the sky a blood red. This was of mild interest, the only abnormality here was the suddenness of its arrival, but all of the calculations lined up on further inspection. We thought it must have just gone over our heads.

We went about that night as normal. The abnormalities only occurred when Pauline reported that, upon waking up late at night to use the restroom, she looked in the mirror and saw my face. We responded according to company policy and gave her 2 weeks PTO to see a psychiatrist, and to come back when the doctor had a word. We never heard back from her.

A month later, Jeremiah reported the same thing. He came home from work after a 72-hour shift and saw a man matching my description staring from the window. Long hair, patchy beard, frail and thin, it was me. Naturally, we did not want to lose our most valuable employee. With his consent, we kept him under supervision for 3 weeks and gave him bi-daily doses of anti-psychotics, making sure he did not have schizophrenia. None of the drugs had any effect, and the day we released him, he committed suicide.

The night Jeremiah took his life, I personally called the prophet. She was still in the ISS, currently floating over China. I told her about everything. Pauline's disappearance and Jeremiah’s suicide. She was confused, insisting I was being erratic. She told me I had already called her 3 days ago, rambling about the same thing. I had no clue what she was talking about. I hadn't spoken to her since the blood moon. When I tried to probe her more, she could only muster up this vague poem. It has been ingrained in my mind since it was spoken to me.

The world is my throat.

Sing in the bleeding temple.

My lungs are now yours.

Those words follow me every step I take. Singing to me like an unclaimed fountain. Some holy grail. But that is off topic. This is already getting too long. By the time I’m done, this will be the last fragment of the old world left.

Things went back to relative normality for the next year. Everybody was acting normal. Everybody was safe. That was until Patricia attacked Simon. One night in the office, the cameras briefly flashed to her strangling Simon and digging into his stomach. I personally stepped in to interfere and deal with Patricia. I took her to the hallway, quietly informing our prophet up above to call the police as med staff rushed him upstairs to receive proper treatment. She was screaming and howling to get away, but all it took was the press of a button to shut us into the room. I demanded she inform me why she did that, and she couldn’t say. Her voice was croaky and her words incoherent. She tried to tell me what she was saying, but couldn’t. All she could do was point to the door. I lifted the barriers and held her in my arms. We walked to her desk, and she pushed me to Simon's desk instead. There was a picture, slid just underneath his keyboard. It was a painting of Napoleon, with my face and body elegantly in the great emperor's place. Even the horse was made to seem taller to reflect my own height. Like Napoleon was always me. When Patricia was finally able to get her words out, her voice sounded exactly like my own.

“That.”

Patricia and I sat together in silence, waiting for the police to come, but they never did.

I wish I could say that was the end of it, but it wasn’t. In fact, it only sped up. Luckily, it did not spread to the outside world. That meant we could contain it. We kept the remaining employees separated in distinct offices and never let them leave, creating elaborate sets of their former homes to prevent insanity. That did not stop insanity, though. They were all like me, though. Every frame became thin, and all of my employees grew their hair out. It was like a private reality, desperate to be like me. Any time I walked inside to check on them, they kept their heads on their desk, terrified of my eyes. We had John and Roberto analyze their blood to verify any biological change. Both of them had AB+ blood, the same as mine. Roberto came to me that same night and gave me $100 as a thank you note. I don’t think I can use this, though, I’m not George Washington.

Mary was the next to go. She was furious that she could not look like me, even when her body changed, and her body grew to be like mine, her face always struggled to capture mine. She was only happy when she had a piece of paper stapled to her face, desperate to have mine. She behaved like this every day until the building ran out of paper. She never went to work then, always staying in her little hut. She cried every night then, painting herself over to look like me. One day, when I came in, she lunged at me with a box cutter. Mary put it to my hairline and whispered nonsense in my ear, but I quickly shot her and helped myself up.

It was like this until last week. The day the ISS called. Our prophet had killed herself. She left thousands of documents behind, documents that were quickly stolen from my database by an unknown figure. The following night, April 1st, I was in my limo, cruising the streets of Singapore, and sirens howled. Cars, ambulances, and even helicopters are rushing in the same direction. As soon as I turned around, my phone began to vibrate. I picked it up, and I whispered those words to myself.

Our lungs are now yours.

That day, I became the prime minister, the emperor of Rome, and now I am you. Or going to be you, or you will be me. Truthfully, I cant explain it. This is just my best attempt at explaining this. I tried to get in contact with the prophet, but she never responded. I just hope I know that I tried to stop this, but I know it’s a ruse. I am you. The world is me. I am writing this to myself, in hopes that I can understand myself, and I can’t. I don’t know what the blood moon or Ashton (our prophet) had to do with anything, just that they correlate somehow, and I will never know how, as every scientist or philosopher or prophet capable of figuring it out is now me, and therefore limited by my scientific ignorance.

I only wonder, if I end it all, will they? There is no way to find out. Everything will end no matter what. Even the trees are beginning to look like Ashton Clark.

STOP STOP STOP STOP PLEASE PLEASE STOP MEEEEEEEEHGHFHGHDHDHFHHHDHHDHUCBSOBRBEgpeb-[‘’[;;;..----====--=_=+$%@&*()_///………………………………………………………………..………………………………………………………………….……………………

Nihil.

We’ll play pretend

And dance on painted clocks

We’ll hold a candle tight

And place it on the dead

We’ll lock a broken hand in place

Preserve it in the water

We’ll stare at the dying snails

And rejoice in a spiral

We’ll ride infinite rainbow crosses

To times gilded ending

A distant cool blaze

We’ll block the gates with fingers

And drown the night in color

We’ll kiss our arms with teeth

And stretch our mouths wide

We’ll fit shoulder in mouth

And drain the flesh

We’ll wear our bones like gowns

And shape them to numbers

We’ll squeeze everything

Into our mouths

Until we are nothing

We’ll sit on the edge of time

Pretending to fiddle

Making the motions

Without any feeling

We look at each other

And throw ourselves off

And land on the past

Back on the clock

We’ll play pretend

Until time makes us real

We’ll wear our mythic masks

Until they wear our spirit

We’ll bow to the audience

Until they can’t see us

We’ll ignore our future

Until there is no past

We’ll be circular bodies

Sleeping on the clocks

Pretending to dance

With face in hand

Searching for digested arms

2: Untitled

Dance within the blue eclipse

Where wooden labyrinths burn

There is a cloudy ocean within the skull

Erase it with the clay

3: Rusty Iron Door

There was a bronze door

In the lions jaw

I peeled the nails from its hands                                      

And twisted the spiral knobs

The door opened forever

Infinitely unraveling

I reached out

Hoping you’d kiss my little straw hands

But my wooden nose

Could not take the lies

And kept XXXXXX

Behind the

rusty iron door.

Chained to

WALL

The

                                                              Scalp

               Serpents

                                                               Slither

                                      Betwixt

                                       Her

                                       Crimson

                                       Fingers LEGS

                                                                                               Tangled in the iron vines

                                                                                               She squeals for her beloved

                                                                                               No Adam comes

                                                                                               To grant

                                                                                                A

                                                                                                                  Poison apple

The wires of her brain wrap each other

Like presents

Mating in each others cover

Discovering warmth in cold-blooded

Scales

                                                                                  Medusa dreams of

                                                                                  Cold nights

                                                                                  By the fire

                                                      She sees

                                                       HIM

                                                      Sleeping

                                                      In

                                                      The doorway

                                                                                                                                        Lying as a frozen stone

                                                                                                                                       Medusa reaches for

                                                                                                                                       The grapes of Dionysus

                                                                                                                                        Festering in the lungs

                                                                                                                                       Red wine flowed from

                                                                                                                                       A stone cavity

                                                                                                                                      Medusa could not reach

        His glass eyes creased

      Petty skies

   Medusa saw no Athena

 Reflected in the marble spheres

She wept

As a tree

Weeps away

The rain

                    From the doors of Atlantis

HEAVEN

                    The flaming swords whispered

                    Crackling like a fireplace

                    Reflecting mirrored memories

                    They preached of our eternity

                    And peeled Medusa's head from

                    The body

                                                                                            Blood

                                                                                              Spilling

                                                                                                From

                                                                                                      A gaping wound

The rattling of her tongue, now gashed by fangs, Awoke the many minds of her hair. When her eyes opened, she could see Gabriel's delusion, slithering from her bleeding brain. Her breasts and arms lie in the other room. Pools of sanguine wine poured from her neck and her flower, as millions of snakes swam from the scalp, and devoured Poseidon’s purple baby between her legs. Medusa looked down to her ring finger. There were no diamonds or sapphires. Only a metal snake, consuming itself.

                                                             Meet Bethany

You may see her more often

Depending on how I feel.

                                                                                              Blinking

White

                                                                                                               Inferno

                                                                                                                               Ripple

                                                                                                                                                The

                                                                                                                                                        Firmament.

                                                                                                BaYOU sirens

                                                                                 trudging through the mud.

Who are we

To disturb strings.

Hands climb the rainbow water. Smearing oil on the effluent. Fingers clutch the muddy sticks, demanding the swamp vomit. Bubbling mud pumped bodies and bicycles on wet

grass. The newborn corpse wrestled itself,

                         snapping its roots.      

                                 The sap of a stumbling tree drips down its nail.    

Extending its branches, it lunges for the bike.

Peeling the wheel, mauling the strings.

SNAP

Haze pours from the wires, drowning the string within.

           The newborn plunges itself in the oil, yearning to breathe.

 Drowning never works.

                                                The newborn inflated and popped from the water, bearing

                                                                                                                                                                         His

                                                                                                                                                                         Fathers

                                                                                                                                                                         Design.              

The beating of wet boots drums through the bog. The baYOU smells the fruit. Charcoal

                                                                                                                 Magnolias

Crackling within the steel evergreen.

The newborns tender skin is melting. Weeping could be seen from above. Reaching down to the reptile, slumbering below the waste. The newborn stands, but cannot move. Its legs are melting in place, with tunnels formed through the knees. Wax drips down the eyes, burning sap suffocates the leaves on his nose. He tries to howl for his father, but his wooden teeth grew their roots, wiring him shut. The caretaker steps out—a siren, cloaked in black, without face.

the lizard broke the womb

 It stretched its shapeless body, igniting the string in his mind. Rainbow wildfire sizzles down the candled corpse. Its dripping skin protruded the nails, digging roots deep below the mud. Chaining the reptile in death.

Struggling

Dropping

It let go

Surrendering

                 The

                         Banjo

                                      Below

                                                      The

                                                                   Rock.

AUTHORS NOTE:

Figured I’d treat yall to a spontaneous post before me and beat you to death soon. Enjoy 

we tried to cross the wall. A temporary blurry guard of moving metal. Surely, we cannot cross the sea, perhaps we can dig underground. We have tried that. Beneath us is the same hard surface as the beach. Gray and impenetrable. We heard my brother crossed the sea. And did he ever come back? No, but somebody watched him get to the other side, told him he’d come to us with a flying army. Why would he ever come back here? Maybe the wall will catch up to him, it gets wider every day.

We tried the next night.

Read more

Melancholy Mimics

Read more

SHE floated down in the air, trying to fly with four arms, before drowning in the air and sinking to the surface. I tried to catch her, but SHE fell through my hands. SHE SHE SHE SHE SHE landed splat on the ground, her legs cut up in strings, her flesh a brush to paint the sidewalk in mold. The EMTs rushed pranced over on foot and dragged her through the road, their limbs stiff as wood. They could barely keep moving and eventually dropped her in a turn lane. The horseriders were furious. They took to their printers and posted a ticket on her head booked to their bodies, and shook her.

There SHE lay, nailed to the ground. All four arms stretched outward, finally still shaking violently, folding into an X, with shredded legs like tentacles. I led them around her and finally sat by her side. Her husband stood at the window, faceless, and blinked away.

I turned to look at her, still dead. I held two of her hands and lifted them. Beneath her hands, I saw a small city. Limitless eyes just like mine, peeping into a window, desperate for their own reality. Peeping into the window, I saw Beth walk down to her apartment, float up to the eighth floor, and turn the radio on.

figured I’d treat yall to smth light before I continue on with Act II of An Actors Illness, and when my collab with Guerilla Literature releases on MAY 5TH.

My backpack broke

Wandering the sidewalk.                    

Where we live, Hell’s only a few blocks from heaven

Homework scattered through the roots

I couldn’t see it in the night.

The men in the cars stare at me

Haunted, excited

Like I was a ghost with a cute ass.

I walked past one of the dirty kids

He walked over to the lake

Tents lying in wait

I hope he was camping.                             

A spill of hot oil fell from the trees

Screams came from the metal fences

I pulled myself away from the fence,

and slipped into a ditch.

My skin burned from the flaming steel spoons.

Bubbling underneath the spoons

BLACK TAR SNAKES DROWNING ME

I cried in pain and pulled myself up

They stuck to me and swam to my veins

A demon rose from the slithering oil

Tall and skinny, with terrible yellow eyes

His teeth were as black as the tar he rose from

Spoons stuck to him like armor

He cackled and bubbled and walked to me

Fire coming from his nostrils

The deman reached to grab me.

I cried and cried and reached and reached until finally

 I pulled myself from the spoons.

I ran away

 The man cried for me and sank into the tar like an alligator.

I ran faster than darkness and found my way to moms car.

She was not in it, so I could not open the doors, but she would be here soon.

You could tell by the glowing golden hair from the curtains of the beaten home.

When she opened the door,

her green scrubs shone like Christ himself.

She put me in the car, and I asked what she did.

                                      I helped someone

And did you save them?

                                       In the only way possible.

We drove away, the sun now rising into broken windows

Women walked home from their jobs, beaten and broken

They fell to the ground                               Desperate and hungry

Kids just like me walked to school with black tar backpacks

And I went home to picket fences.