servāre — to keep, preserve, protect, guard, maintain, or save; to keep something intact, faithful to its nature, and safe from loss, corruption, or violation.

I took another sip of the mocktail, unfortunately the only one in the chattering group still sober. On and on they went about their adventures in dating. The “icks,” how they determine if someone is “high value,” litmus tests to see who brings what to whomever’s table, net worth minimums, what counts as a low-effort first date... it was a loud, escalating debate, descending with every shot into something increasingly obnoxious. After a while I wished I wasn’t the designated driver for the night, because I’d rather have abandoned my sobriety than realize that at no point had anyone used the word “companionship.” ...Perhaps I was too old now, and that obsolete word referenced an archaic idea.

Suddenly I felt a silence surround me, and realized I had finally been asked my thoughts. After taking a sip of my bitter drink, one I hated but ordered just for appearances, I looked around the table.

“I think... I think the first one to have my heart will be the one who spares me the indignity of the rejection hunger games. I’d rather be alone than enter a gauntlet that so quickly forgets your humanity.”

It was quiet, until someone’s laughter broke the awkward silence, and the rest of the table joined in. “Always the poet!” they said. And of course, someone threw out the phrase “hopeless romantic.”

I laughed too, and took another swig of the bitter nectar... | A Bitter Mocktail

He saw her shadow before he saw her. Her fine silhouette, swept in charcoal on a canvas of amber—the arcadian light of the early setting sun pouring through the window. And even just the shadow of her comforted him, reminding him that shade still holds its own glory when it’s cast from the form of the sublime. | Forms

I present to you:

MAYA

INT. HOTEL ROOM - NIGHT

An iridescent pill, the “Maya” pill, sits in the middle of a hotel mattress, at the center of a four-quadrant SPLITSCREEN:

Top right: the comforter on the mattress is generally clean but dingy, old, likely from a budget motel.

Top left: the comforter is fancy, lush, clearly from a high-end hotel.

Bottom right: the comforter is wretched, stained with alcohol spills and cigarette burns, clearly from a cheap motel.

Bottom left: the comforter is just regular, like one you’d find in your local Marriott.

We hear a couple burst in, chuckling, probably drunk, or high... definitely high.

LUKE, 27, plain and unimpressive, wearing whatever he found at the top of his laundry pile, lumps onto the bed. The world shifts to one perspective: the cheap motel. The cheapest.

Luke grabs the pill, holds it up; its tri-prismatic reflection rolls over his face.

Neon light soaks through the tacky curtains. The room is dank, like it’s only been cleaned once a month. The smoke of ganja is practically baked into the texture of the peeling, discolored wallpaper.

ROXXY, 25, walks in front of the murky mirror and starts to change from one party fit into another. She’s full future-punk — the hottest woman you’ve ever seen, uncontested.

Luke’s head hits the pillow. He takes a peek at Roxxy’s bare back, but he’s more mesmerized with the pill.

ROXXY | ...yeah, don’t get too comfortable. We’re not done partying tonight.

LUKE | They warned me you’re an animal.

ROXXY | Nah, you just can’t keep up.

LUKE | ...whatever.

(beat, still looking at the pill)

LUKE | Tell me how it works.

ROXXY | What?

LUKE | Everyone’s after you for this thing. What makes it work? This is some wild shit.

Roxxy slips out of one fit into yet another.

ROXXY | You sure? It’s gonna fuck your brain up.

LUKE | After tonight, it’s already fried.

ROXXY | Okay dude, your funeral.

She admires herself. The outfit slays. She likes what she’s looking at. Her smoldering threads leave room to highlight her cryptic collarbone tattoo:

πλάνη

POV: LUKE holds up the pill close to his eye, making the illusion that the pill and Roxxy are the same size.

LUKE | Just tell me.

Her smartphone, bedazzled in moonstone, illuminates. The incoming text reads:

THE FILOSOPHER (THE CAVE’S DJ)

Rox, you may want to skip town. The Jinn showed up.

Unconcerned, she picks up a bag full of the pills, pulls one out, plops on the bed next to Luke.

ROXXY | You know how the brain actually works?

LUKE | Sure. I mean—

ROXXY | So nothing you see is real.

LUKE | What the hell does that mean?

ROXXY | Our brain just collects all this random sensory data. The shit we call sight, smell, sounds, touch. Then uses it to create what it thinks the outside world is.

LUKE (lost) | I guess...

ROXXY | What we see, what we experience is a projection, an assumption. It’s what our brain interprets, trying to make sense of all that information. But as far as we know, none of that’s actually there.

LUKE (too high for this) | Okay...

ROXXY | You look at me, right?

She poses her body. Luke’s eyes focus on her.

LUKE | Yeah.

ROXXY | But you don’t know what you’re looking at. You see whatever you want. I could just be a living mannequin, faceless, sitting in a dark space. That old TV over there, just a box. Nothing actually coming out of it.

For a brief second, we see exactly what she describes. Two faceless forms, sitting in colorless space, in the same position and orientation as Luke and Roxxy.

ROXXY (V.O.) | Just two formless mannequins, projecting on each other what we want to see; sitting in a dark room; pretending we’re having a conversation but not really saying anything.

LUKE (unsettled, finally getting it, sort of) | Yo... that’s fucked up.

BACK TO REALITY, OR WHAT WE ASSUME REALITY IS.

ROXXY | Right?

She holds up the pill.

ROXXY | This thing, “Maya.” Whatever it is, just changes what our brain projects. Whatever we want. That’s what it is. It’s a projection.

(beat) It’s the most ideal drug ever made. The most addictive, because it needs your participation. Your subconscious tells it exactly the kind of high you want. And it gives it to you. No more, no less.

He looks at it.

LUKE | So like... it projects fantasies?

ROXXY | Yeah... keep up...

LUKE | That means two people could be in the same room, doing the same shit, but have two completely different experiences?

ROXXY | Yeah. Two entirely different perceptions.

LUKE | Fuck.

ROXXY | ...Yeah.

She puts the pill on her tongue and goes in for a kiss. Luke takes it and lays back. She just watches him; he definitely missed something.

She goes back to the mirror. We follow her this time.

She looks at her own reflection. It’s different — regular, unglamorous, sad.

CUT TO BLACK.

SUPER: “ROXXY”

For a brief second, we see “Roxxy” again, as an absolute badass, staring us down.

END.

But instead of carrying a Shakespeare monologue, I was walking the halls with the black binder protecting the 194 pages of my very unpolished first draft of my screenplay.

Today wasn’t going to be after hours in my various writers’ rooms. Not sitting alone by my favorite window in a coffee shop, or midnight at my desk illuminated by the blue glow of my laptop and the faint yellow warmth of a nearby scented candle. Today was the first day the solitary nature of writing would come to an end. It was the day screenwriting finally distinguished itself from every other kind of writing I’d done. Today I walked toward a room full of actors, with my unrehearsed pages, waiting to read and perform them for the first time.

After twelve months of writing words shared only with a page and a world that existed in my head, a world I visited alone day after day, with characters whose voices I could only hear speak, scream, and cry in my mind, I was about to walk into a room that would show me whether this universe was strong enough to survive in the real world.

Welcome back!

This is After Hours in the Writer’s Room, Season 2.

A month or so back I sent the script to a few producer friends to read and give me notes. They were extraordinarily patient and kind, because the draft was a mess. I joked to another writer that showing someone a screenplay this early is like showing them a seconds-old newborn: beautiful in concept, but not what you’d call pretty. And only the very closest people get invited into that moment.

The notes I got back were encouraging, but as you’ve probably guessed, the number one note from every producer was: you have to cut these pages down. Like way down.

That was going to be a herculean, complex task. Simply lopping off scenes wouldn’t do. This is a tight story as it is. There are no subplots to cut, no excessive locations or characters. Every beat has intention; there’s minimal meandering. Cutting 74 pages to begin the second draft (over an hour of screen time) meant structural changes, slashing prose, slashing dialogue. Use a cleaver wantonly and you could sever an artery.

The thought exhausted me. It still does. But this is where a script lives or dies. I can see, in others’ scripts or movies, exactly where this part of the process got shortcut, or skipped.

Every story lives in two states at once, weak and strong, and the weak state starts small: a shortcut, a gap, a glitch that spreads until the strong version can’t form at all.

So I found my usual spot by the window of my coffee shop, and, as I always do, began the ritual of entering that particular world.

Like a cartographer who’d found the entrance, I stepped inside, my hands and mind prepared to wield their force to both study and reshape the universe. Yet…I was resisted, weighted, drained, and finally forcefully expelled.

Four or five times I sat down to study this world so I’d know how to perfect its shape. And each time, the denial came with escalating violence. Pure mental friction and dread.

For the brief moments I could force myself back inside, all I could perceive were forms in a chaotic state, warbling, unclear. I was in total disbelief: this is my world — how am I not allowed to enter it?

As I stood at its barrier, bewildered, the story spoke back: this is not a place I could reenter alone.

I had spent too much time in isolation with it. A screenplay isn’t like writing a book. A screenplay is meant to be performed.

Protecting itself, and me, it demanded that I not return alone.

Before I could see clearly what to change, I had to hear it outside of myself.

As we approach all of our second drafts, it is imperative that we begin the process of becoming objective. We have to bring our story into the world…

So I reached out to some trusted actor friends, who I knew were talented, gracious, but also willing to tell me what was or wasn’t working for them as actors. I brought in someone just to listen, who happened to also be a professor specializing in exactly what I was writing, and a producer who’d hear production trouble coming before I would.

My hand touched the plexiglass door; behind it was the motley crew of adventurers I’d invited into this secret universe…

Nicole, full of energy, eager, emotionally present, with a voice that almost perfectly embodied my female lead, and honestly, the look too.

Scott, who’d carry the weight of my male lead, sarcastic, sharp, able to swing from laughing to raging without a beat in between.

The professor paged through the open script with graceful charm and wisdom, ready to listen, fast to take notes.

Tianna, the youngest, raw talent, ready to explore, here as more than just a reader, but a proxy for the audience who’ll decide if this is good for a date night.

And two others, ensemble readers, much older, seasoned, with great insight and sensibility.

Finally, the producer, who respects the art but has a relentless eye for the architecture still to come, and, of course, me: captain of this wild expedition.

We gathered in a circle of tall chairs. There was chatter, and of course food, and a nervous energy as they all waited for me to invite them into the story…

At the sealed entrance to this universe we stood, but this time, not alone. I could already hear the barrier sing, its crystal and stone reverberate, waiting to open itself.

I turned to the company and warned them of what they might find on the other side, nervous, irrationally, that they’d turn back or regret the journey before it began. But they were ready. They came ready. So I turned to the barrier, asked permission to enter, and was finally let in.

(cue adventure music)

As we stepped in, one by one, the players transformed from themselves into other people, into the characters. Scott first, then Nicole, in the opening scene: a cold open, forward-moving. My heart raced, not from fear, but the excitement of a curtain rising, or a movie’s first frame opening from black…

…to be continued

A quick note before we begin:

This post is mainly for those who have been following, or are curious about, my fantasy story The Seal of Bewitching Slumber. It’s been on the back burner for several months, so I’m making a brief return to gather the threads, talk through what the story is exploring, and lead into the latest installment.

For those of you here for the flash fiction romances, sci-fi stories, essays, screenwriting thoughts, and updates on my film work, don’t worry. More of all that is coming soon.

Stay tuned.

“Epistemological collapse” is a fancy way to describe something we’ve found ourselves in the middle of. It’s like describing rain as gravitational precipitation.

But, to demystify, here is what it means:

Epistemological collapse is when a person, group, or society loses a shared basis for knowing what is true. It’s when truth systems or institutions that were once trusted begin to erode, or are deliberately torn apart.

That event tends to define the end of one age and the beginning of another. The surviving ideas, either true or false, determine the intellectual, spiritual, and moral values of the age to come.

In a previous post, I talked a bit about my upbringing and my college experience. Raised as a preacher’s kid, I went to a private evangelical university, and without diving too deep into the politics of the time during my college era, 2005 to 2010, you can look up the pivotal moment that happened in the middle of all that. That was the moment I began to notice the beginning of an epistemological collapse.

Things I saw as true became quickly disconnected from institutions that claimed truth. And not even from an outsider’s perspective looking in. The people who claimed a truth had begun to become increasingly separated from the truths that they claimed. It was eye-opening to see values touted not be the values lived out.

And I know for sure that these issues were always there. I wasn’t naive at that point, but I knew, we all knew, that from that moment, the dissonance worsened profoundly.

And it spread in every direction, to the point where psychosis created “alternative truths,” where things we had once broadly agreed upon became suspect, where science was treated as conspiracy, where established doctrines within sects were questioned or reshaped, a total unraveling from the inside out.

The closer and more embedded I became in these institutions, the more I didn’t recognize what I was looking at. Something had happened. A poison had entered. There was a betrayal. To quote Shakespeare, “Something was rotten in the state of Denmark,” and in the middle of my coming of age, in the middle of a natural and necessary crisis of belief, this other crisis had compounded on top of it.

And what was I to do?

All that was just the CliffsNotes. My experience in those spaces ran deep, and my discoveries were profound.

Almost twenty years later, I’ve had more thoughts, come to many conclusions, and still see the throes of this “epistemological collapse” touching everyone and everything.

Even in that, this story is in no way meant to be intentionally preachy. The world of this story existed when I was twelve and has lived in my imagination as the world I escaped to. Over the years, something in that world has helped me tackle deep thoughts and ruminations about the world and my place in it. But as I’ve lived and existed through one of the most profound shifts in American society, my deepest ponderings about my own spirituality, politics, and lingering questions found their way into this fantasy.

I say all that to say: as I put down the pages of this first draft, a draft I know is dense in places, overwritten in some, underwritten in others, and still finding its final shape, I want readers to know that the story is not shallow. It is born from wild imagination, but it is also carrying the weight of questions I have lived with for years.

For anyone who wants the fuller guide through Act I before reading The Circle of War, I’ve linked the full story recap below.

Act I of this serial fantasy has been dense by design. It introduces Roman, the Dreamwalkers, the Realm, the Orders, the citadels, the old histories, the buried symbols, and several threads that may not seem connected at first glance. Some of those threads are emotional. Some are mythic. Some are political. Some are just strange little breadcrumbs left in the woods.

Also, as a reminder, these are first draft pages I’ve been sharing in real time. Some pieces are polished, some are still rough around the edges, and some ideas are still revealing themselves as the story grows. That’s part of the fun for me, and hopefully part of the experience for those of you following along.

So think of this as a guide through the first movement of the story, especially for anyone who has skipped around, fallen behind, or wants the pieces drawn together before we step deeper into the collapse.

The Story So Far

Roman is a Dreamwalker in training, raised within the Towers of Nyx and expected to follow in the footsteps of his father, Zahar, one of the most celebrated figures of the Order. But Roman has never fit comfortably into the life prepared for him. As he grows from a restless child into a young man, he finds himself caught between the calling of his powers and his wanderlust, unaware that the choice he ultimately makes will mark the rise of one age and the fall of another.

Prologue: On the World of the Aredis

The prologue opens in Citadel Aduro, where the history of the Aredis is being debated before a crowd.

Kanso, Elder of the Council of Archives, gives the official story. Before the Aredis, there was the blind civilization, brilliant enough to master the earth and sky, but too corrupt to survive itself. Its fall brought plague, famine, war, and a torn heaven. Then came Dyna, given by the fos of the mountain, and from it rose the healers, seers, dreamwalkers, citadels, and the long peace of the Pax Edena.

But then Charumati, the Oronate of Aduro, steps out of the shadows.

She is followed by seven attendants. Her body gleams with strange prismatic light, and when she raises her hand, a spell settles over the arena. The crowd stills all at once. Breath catches. Faces turn toward her whether they mean to or not. It is not charisma or persuasion. Something is being done to them. Before she even makes her argument, her power is already at work on the room.

And then she questions everything Kanso has said.

Who decided which citadels were righteous and which were fallen? Who kept the records? Who benefits from the story being told this way? How long will the people keep trusting men who guard secrets and call it wisdom?

So before Roman ever appears, the world is already arguing with itself. One side offers the preserved history. The other asks whether the preserved history is also a curated one.

Episode One: The Festival of the Warding

Roman’s story begins in Wheatfell during the Festival of the Warding, beneath the great Towers of Nyx. He is still a child, longing to run with the villa children through the crowded bazaar, the golden fields, and the pathways leading toward Lethenwood. But he is marked everywhere by difference. His fine mood-shifting garment betrays his every emotion. He has no Soteria, the crystalline implant most children wear as both guardian and guide. He lives above them in the tower, not among them in the villa.

Only Lesta, brash, clever, scarred, and full of dust, seems willing to draw Roman into ordinary childhood. For a moment, Roman almost reaches the treeline and the secret place where children are free of lessons, titles, and watchful elders. Then Zahar arrives. His father’s anger is fierce, but beneath it lives a fear Roman cannot yet understand. The confrontation becomes a wound neither father nor son can fully name. Roman says he does not want to be a son of the Order, and Zahar answers not as father, but as sovereign.

Episode Two, Part One: The Trial of Aspilos

Years later, Roman enters the Trial of Aspilos, the test meant to prove whether he can withstand the Onyx Serpent. He steps into Lethenwood, a place he has dreamed of since childhood, and immediately feels the warning in the air: do not be beguiled.

The serpent does not attack him only with teeth and coil. It uses fear, false thoughts, the whisper of his own voice turned against him, and the forest itself. Roots reach for his feet. The trees conspire. The wood becomes hostile under the serpent’s influence. But Roman calls forth his Nier, and the sigils write themselves across his flesh. For a moment, he becomes exactly what the Order trained him to be.

He stands his ground. He wounds the serpent. The darkness breaks. Lethenwood returns to its beauty, green, golden, breathing again. Roman believes he has triumphed. He believes the glade itself is his reward.

Episode Two, Part Two: The Aria of the Shirim

Then the song begins.

It sounds like the hidden music of the Shirim, the lost and secretive order said to sing to nature, heal, breach realms, reveal the mind, and conjure things into being. Roman does not know whether he has wandered into one of their hidden places, or whether the song itself is another part of the trial. But soon the question hardly matters. He wants the voice to be real.

As he follows it deeper into Lethenwood, he passes signs he should study: an eyeless fox carrying a limp rabbit, a white doe crowned with diamonds and pierced by a blood-red arrow, a three-tailed bluebird trapped in a spider’s web, and twin badgers fighting a horde of adders. But Roman is already tethered to the aria.

The song leads him up the tallest fir in the glade, toward a pearl-like loft high above the trees. Then the music becomes a scream. Roman believes a Shirim woman is trapped inside, and even when the serpent’s laughter returns below, even when the climb grows deadly, he keeps going.

But there is no woman. Only an empty loft, a sealed door, a rune beneath his feet, smoke, fire, and the terrible realization that the serpent has beguiled him again. The tree burns. The loft falls. Roman survives the flames only to find the serpent waiting.

Then he wakes in the Rotunda, with Aaron and the elders around him.

The trial is over. Roman has failed Aspilos for the third time. And now he must tell them how he was deceived.

Interlude I: Twin Badgers and a Horde of Adders

The first interlude reveals that Roman’s visions were not random. The twin badgers of Lethenwood are Tera and Gemini, brothers surviving in the Rink, an abandoned underworld beneath Citadel Aduro. There, beneath the respectable world, live the sick, unwanted, disabled, orphaned, modified, and forgotten, people pushed below so the citadels above can continue believing in their own peace.

Tera and Gemini’s story unfolds amid rival factions, scarce resources, and the brutal politics of survival. Yet even there, compassion persists. Their bond becomes one of the first great windows into the wider world Roman has only begun to glimpse. The Rink is not a side story. It is a revelation. The dreams are pointing beyond Roman, toward lives and wounds the powerful have learned not to see.

Episode Three, Part One: Roman Faces His Failure

Roman returns from the trial not as a triumphant disciple, but as the subject of a lesson. In the Rotunda, before Aaron and the watching elders, his failure is named aloud. The Shirim do not sing love songs. They do not call to lovers like sirens. Roman already knew this, but in the dream, what he knew had been veiled from him.

Aaron explains the deeper wound: the serpent did not merely trick Roman from the outside. It used what was already hidden in his heart. The shame of the trial becomes Roman’s first true lesson in discernment. A Dreamwalker must not dream his own dream. He must dream the true dream.

Episode Three, Part Two: Roman’s Troubling Request

As Aaron leads Roman through the Hall of Great Trials, Roman finally says what has been growing in him for years: he wishes to leave the Order. He wants to see the world beyond the tower, not only through dreams, symbols, ceremonies, and visions. He wants to go to Eleusis, the jewel of the citadels.

To Roman, it is freedom. To Aaron, the name itself carries dread. He remembers Zahar’s dying cries, warnings of Eleusis, starlight, darkness, and doom. But Aaron withholds what he knows. Once again, truth is guarded by fear. Roman asks for the world, and Aaron answers with delay.

Episode Three, Part Three: A Demonstration of Arcane Power

Aaron instead leads him to the Hall of Anamnesis, where the Order gathers under golden light, opalescent arches, sapphire marble, and the hush of acolytes awaiting instruction. Aaron stands before them transformed, no longer merely Roman’s uncle, but a master of the Order. He asks the question at the heart of their calling: what is the power of the Dreamwalkers?

To dream and to warn.

But Aaron presses deeper. There are dreams of the mind, dreams born of pain, desire, longing, and the body. There are many dreams, and many voices. A Dreamwalker must know the difference. As Aaron gathers Dyna, the hall itself begins to yield. The chamber folds away, and Roman is carried further into the mystery he has spent his life only partly understanding.

Episode Three, Part Four: The Powers of the Temporal and the Eternal

Aaron’s lesson opens onto the Realm, a vast dimension where the temporal and the eternal intersect. Here, form itself can be shaped, dissolved, remade, and revealed. Roman watches worlds arise and collapse, beauty turn to ruin, and power move beneath the skin of reality. The lesson is not simply about magic. It is about what lasts, what fades, and what can deceive the eye by appearing more permanent than it is.

Yet even as Aaron teaches, Roman’s attention is pulled elsewhere. A distant Mountain calls. A girl’s voice breaks through. The Realm is not only a classroom. It is alive with hidden paths, hidden histories, and voices not yet accounted for.

Episode Three, Part Five: A Hero Is Called

While Aaron teaches in the Hall of Anamnesis, Roman is pulled away by a voice crying for help. In an instant, the hall vanishes, and he stands inside a deep cave where the air trembles with lament. Ancient voices crowd around him, some warning, some beckoning, all speaking in forgotten tongues. The silt drags at his feet, drawing him toward a dark chasm lit with emerald and amber.

There, Roman sees eyes carved into the stone, living hieroglyphs staring from the cave walls. They command him to look. Before him rests a smooth stone table marked with strange names: Dzoe, Lily, Amira, Gemini, Tera, Ako, and Conju. The names strike him with sorrow, terror, and dread, as though each belongs to a buried grief he has not yet lived long enough to understand.

Then Aaron’s voice breaks through, and Roman is back in the Hall of Anamnesis. Aaron continues his lesson as if nothing has happened, warning the acolytes that Dreamwalkers must not dream their own dreams, but only the true dream. The Realm is not safe. The Onyx Serpent takes many forms. It tests the untested, consumes the careless, and is drawn to those who wield the Nier without wisdom.

After the lesson, Aaron speaks to Roman alone. He knows Roman longs to leave the Order, and promises to consider early leave if Roman can pass the Trial of Aspilos. But the promise comes with a warning: Roman must pass for his own protection. The Serpent knows him, Aaron says, as it knew his father. And suddenly, Roman understands that his failure in the trial may be tangled in secrets no one has told him.

Episode Four: Roman Who Overcame

After everything in the Hall of Anamnesis, Roman wants only to get away from watching eyes. Burdened by the coming night watch and weary of being seen, he takes the long, hidden path back to his quarters, the one no one walks at that hour. But the path leads him beside the arena of Agôn, where crimson and gold banners hang for the champions of the Order.

There, Roman finds his own banner: Roman Nenikēkōs, Roman who overcame. Touching it draws him back to the day he earned the title.

In the memory, the arena is alive with drums, horns, chants, and the hunger of the crowd. Zahar hovers above the duel, granting Roman and Corstat permission to wield their Nier against one another. Corstat comes with fire, fury, strength, and a wealthy house behind him. Roman comes calm, almost taunting, desperate beneath it all to show his father his worth.

The duel becomes a storm of fire, wind, stone, shadow, and water. Roman is clever, but Corstat goads him into exhaustion. When Roman’s ward shatters and his Nier begins to fail, Zahar commands him to speak the word. Roman remembers the old lesson: they do not command the Nier. They speak the words it gives. So Roman surrenders to it. His silver light turns gold, the arena floor opens beneath them, the waters drain into darkness, and Corstat falls.

Roman wins. The crowd celebrates. His banner is raised. For a moment, even Zahar seems to believe there may be hope for him.

But back in the darkened arena, alone with the banner, Roman hears a hidden witness speak from the shadows. The stranger calls his title empty and tells him he has not truly overcome. Roman wants plain answers. He wants to be left alone. But the witness gives him only a warning: a perilous quest lies ahead, the Order is failing, his day of accountability has come, and the end of an age is near.

Interlude II: The Three-Tailed Bluebird

The second interlude follows Ako, a dealer of yellow rit, an illegal narcotic siphoned from the chemical waste of argimec cultivation machines. He writes because the mist has already taken his voice, and because he believes it will eventually find him. His records are not confession so much as survival. If he is taken, he wants someone to know what happened and follow the trail marked by his sign: the three-tailed bluebird, another symbol Roman once saw in Lethenwood without understanding.

Ako’s route takes him through the Äroura, a thousand kilometers of cultivated land maintained by cloud spires and towering harvesting argimechs. It is one of the great wonders of the Aredis, though most people hardly think of it. The machines feed the citadels, spires, and villas, but their runoff also becomes the source of Ako’s trade. While waiting for a drop near an argimec station, Ako watches a broken machine continue its labor, groaning into the valley until it is finally picked apart by others. It is only a machine, but to Ako, it sounds like something alive, trapped in endless work and unable to give itself rest.

From there, he returns toward Rhemat, his home, a quiet villa between two forests, far from the grandeur of citadels like Aduro, Eluesis, Pylai, and Adō. But on the way, a powerful voice stops him in the woods, crashing his runner. Behind the branches, he finds a silver gate covered in blue symbols, appearing in light and vanishing in shadow. Like any reasonable person who should absolutely know better, Ako walks through.

Beyond the gate is a mist-covered hidden city tied to the lost Order of Scribes. The deeper he goes, the stranger the place becomes: stairs made solid only by lantern light, corridors of white stone, rooms of books, tablets, and scrolls, and at last the Chamber of Logos, where bones lie around an altar. The Scribes once held power through symbols and words that could alter time and space, but the mist destroyed them by corrupting their interpretations. Ako finds a word the mist fears, but the voices bind his tongue so he cannot speak it.

When Ako escapes and returns to Rhemat, the mist has reached it first. Some lie dead in their beds. Others continue their routines as though nothing has happened, greeting neighbors beside houses that have become tombs. Those who name the wrongness are treated as the disturbance. Ako flees toward Eluesis, hoping perhaps to find aid from Succor, the renowned woman of the great library, but even there he hears the same terrible wail in every soul.

Collapse has learned how to travel. It moves through hidden gates, poisoned histories, forgotten orders, ordinary roads, and the places no one important thought to watch.

Episode Five: The Circle of War

All of this leads into the latest installment, The Circle of War, where the story turns backward to reveal the catastrophe that shaped Roman’s future before he was born.

“The Council of Eyes is indeed without sight,” the voices behind the mist taunted. “Even now, you are deceived and know not your enemy.”

Aaron moved to answer their reviling, but Zahar withheld him. “You err to commune with them,” he warned, raising his Nier for the fight.

_{Previously, Ako, a yellow rit dealer from Rhemat, followed a hidden silver gate into the ruined city of the Scribes, where the Chamber of Logos had been corrupted by a wicked mist. After encountering a word powerful enough to change time, Ako escaped with his voice bound so he could not speak it, only to return home and find Rhemat swallowed by deathly sleep before fleeing toward Eluesis.}

Twelve years before the birth of Roman.

The air sparked with sacred Dyna, ready to ignite with the Order’s intent to make war.

By their ranks, the most powerful of the Dreamwalkers knelt in concentric circles within the innermost of the Order’s sacred chambers: the Chamber of Enteuxis. Each votary waited, prepared to release the force of the ritual for which they had been assembled.

Jojan, head of the Order, stood at the center of the warband, barely clinging to his golden cane. Age had overcome him; his body had grown frail, the weight of his sagging robe bending him forward, while beneath his drooping eyes hid the burden of guilt.

“These times…are distressing…” he rasped. “Who will answer the cry for help from our exiled kin?”

The chamber refused to stir.

“Will we not rise to defend the full Council of Eyes as we once did? Will no one go?”

Aaron and Myren kneeled within the innermost circle, looking down and away from the pitiful sight standing over them, biting their tongues, for neither had the courage to say that this muster might have been avoided had Jojan’s foresight not failed.

A breach of light cast itself upon the company, a harbinger of the long shadow of Zahar’s entrance.

“I will go, and will lead those who follow.” His voice boomed as his weighted footsteps approached with the inevitable rhythm of war drums. “And I will continue to lead hereafter.”

Jojan strained against his cane, forcing his shoulders higher as he blustered himself toward some appearance of power.

“Do you threaten to take my place?”

“No, I bargain. And I plead before the Council. I will answer the call. I will go and fight, if we choose now to change the guard.”

Jojan, still vaunting, lifted his chin against the tremor in his neck.

“The guard is strong! Do we agree?”

But the company remained silent, their countenances yielding their fealty to Zahar as he claimed the center of the chamber.

“Jojan,” he said calmly, “the time has come for you to enter your rest.”

Jojan searched the circles, but no countenance rose to meet his own. Seeing that he had no allies left, Jojan surrendered his power to Zahar, collapsing back upon his knees beneath the weight of his hunch.

Turning to the Council, Zahar charged them: “And now, to the matter at hand. What two of you will follow me into the Realm to answer the call for help that has disturbed all our dreams so many nights?”

All stood.

“Good. Our resolve has not failed.”

But Zahar looked to Aaron, his brother, and Myren, his confidant.

“Will you join me in entering the Realm to make war against a darkness we do not yet perceive?”

“I will,” they both answered, their bodies thrumming with anxious courage. They knew that from this moment onward, the keeping of the Order would fall to them.

“Well then, let us go to war.”

A chorus of war drums rattled from the walls. Each votary extended their hands, manifesting their Nier, which drew luminous tendrils of force from the sacred dyna swelling in the air. One by one, the concentric circles ignited with their light.

Together, Aaron, Myren, and Zahar knelt inward at the center in the pattern of a three-pointed star, summoning their Nier, which together burned brightest.

“Who will guard us?” Aaron called, his voice carrying the authority of his new rank as Second Elder.

A hundred Nier struck the ground as one, their resonant report shaking the chamber. Effulgent rays burst from their sides, connecting and enclosing the concentric circles, binding each Nier to the others within its ring.

The cavern burst bright with their light, reflected from the polished white stones arrayed across the chamber’s dome, suffusing each one with an amber glow.

From the center of the chamber, bursts of immense force rippled outward in ever-quickening intervals. Then, like sand caught in a windstorm, the stones of the chamber dissolved, swept from sight…and together, they all entered the Realm.

Each one began to speak, reading aloud the mysterious words that carved themselves upon their Nier, words unknowable to any but the one appointed to read them.

Within the sifting silt and beneath the lightless sky, they knelt, sigils ablaze, each circle casting an invisible dome, wards and barriers against any evil that might seek to devour the company.

All spoke except the three at the center, who sat in meditation.

Waiting…

Searching…

Then, all at once, the three stood within their meditation and found themselves elsewhere.

The air carried a stench that made Aaron hold his breath. Myren, choking on the dank odor, muttered, “We must be within a citadel.”

The purified air of the sanctuary had been replaced by the open night air of an alleyway between two towering structures. Zahar glanced over either shoulder. Aaron and Myren still stood with him, the three back to back, guarding one another’s flanks.

“It is a dark thing to consider that evil may have entered the citadels,” Aaron warned, his nose and mouth hidden beneath the crook of his arm.

Zahar remained silent, his vigilant senses pressing into the lurking shadows and the ever-rising mist creeping inward from the mouth of the alley.

“We are not alone here.”

The band unsheathed their Nier from the air, their light scattering the encroaching mist, which scurried from the radiance, hissing in agony.

Yet even from afar, huddled within the darkness, the mist whispered profane taunts against the mountain, mocking their Dyna, overwhelming their thoughts.

The company had long been hardened by discipline, and they focused their minds against the intrusion. Still, the pressure of the voices within the mist grew so dense that they could feel its weight against their skulls, dragging upon their blood and straining every breath.

“How does this exist outside the Realm?” Aaron asked, his eyes cutting through the mist as it thickened beyond the circumference of their light.

For the first time since his own Trial of Nightmares, when he was only an acolyte, Zahar felt the old fear penetrate him. He resisted its claim upon his body even as he sank into the bone-chilling abyss of dread, for he now understood:

“Evil that was once contained, is no longer…” Zahar’s indictment fell like a hammer. “Our seal has broken… How far have we erred?”

At that, the mist itself seemed to jeer in amusement, an echoing hiss vaulting between the metal walls of the alley.

Aaron’s skin crawled beneath the awareness of knowing eyes, their heat peering down upon his back. The light of his Nier narrowed, as though the darkening world itself pressed to extinguish it.

“Why does this place seem to know something we do not?”

Myren began to perceive, though faintly, voices from beyond the veil, a tumult stirring within the Realm.

“We cannot tarry long. Our rearguard is engaged in a skirmish…”

Indeed, within the Realm, though still warded beneath layers of domes, the shifting silt had formed itself into fiery vipers, striking at the company and seeking to sear the Dreamwalkers sheltered within.

Their chants and mutterings mounted into a fierce clamor as each forcefully intoned the mysterious words given to them by their Nier.

For now, their strength held.

“Beware,” Zahar warned, his ears, eyes, and mind still pressing beyond the mist. “The presence stalks us, hungry to inflict grievous harm.”

“The serpent?” Myren asked.

“No. But something that has borrowed its craft.”

Cautiously, the company ventured from the alley, each watching the others’ backs, aided only by the light of their Nier straining against the pale mist.

Below, it swallowed their feet. Above, it had blotted all color from the sky.

They could not tell whether it was day or night.

Where there should have risen the sound of thousands of souls living, there lingered only distant weeping, whimpers smothered beneath an oppressive and deathly silence.

The surety of sight stolen from them, the masters of the Order walked in communion with their Nier. It spoke to them as one speaks to a child, guiding each foot before the other.

Words formed beneath the weeping.

“You shouldn’t have come,” the hidden voice wept, “for now it knows you…”

Startled, the company wheeled back to back, sweeping their lights through the mist toward the patter of fleeing feet. Through the haze, they pursued the shifting shadow of a wailing, muttering madman until, overtaken at last, he collapsed against the wall, huddled upon the ground and prepared for death.

Kneeling, Zahar lifted the man’s face and beheld the tale told by his tattered robes. He wore the vestments of the dismantled Order of Seers, and by their pattern, Zahar knew him to be a young man of high rank.

“Why do you run? From what evil do you flee?”

But the man continued to mutter and mumble, his mind wandering elsewhere.

“End me quickly!” he wailed.

Aaron turned his Nier upon the Seer’s face, casting its light into his eyes, and discovered that his pupils, swollen with inky blackness, had swallowed his once-blessed irises, leaving his sight dimmed.

“We are not here to harm you,” Zahar assured him. “We are your kin. The Dreamwalkers heard your call for aid.”

“If you are kin, then you should not have come… You should not have come!” he replied.

“What is your name?” Aaron asked.

“He is of the House of Gnosis. His name is Kleos,” Myren said, his heart sinking.

At the sound of his name, Kleos returned for a moment to what remained of his mind.

“Gnosis…? The House of Gnosis is no more…”

“Kleos,” Zahar comforted, kneeling beside him. “We came because the Dreamwalkers heard your call. We came to give aid.”

At last recognizing Zahar’s voice, Kleos looked upon him.

“Zahar…? I did not call. They are gone now. You should not have come. The evil sent to hunt the Seers is not far behind, and its wicked work is nearly complete.”

“Who is hunting you?”

“I remember… You were there at the folly of Priam, but your words had no force. I do thank you for trying…”

“The folly of Priam? Kleos, what hunts you?” Zahar demanded.

But when Kleos searched his mind for the name, his thoughts seemed taken from him. He began to mutter once more, folding into his hunch with fear.

“Iniquity of starlight… iniquity of iniquity… You should not have come here!”

Zahar seized him, trying to call him back into his mind.

“Kleos! Who hunts you? Who hunts the Houses of Seers?”

“Iniquity of starlight… betrayal, greed, and lies… The Seers are no more…”

“Kleos!”

Once more, Kleos found a shred of his mind. Locking eyes with Zahar, he fought to gather what remained of his Dyna.

His pupils contracted to those of a man who could see, while his once-blessed irises strained to kindle again with the fledgling light of his Order’s power.

“Zahar…the Order of Seers is hunted in exile…the power of the Dreamwalkers has failed…”

With every word, Kleos’s life force slipped further, and his eyes began to drift. Yet once more, he rallied what remained of his strength.

He found Aaron’s eyes.

“You will rule over the end of your Order…deceit creeps by your bed…”

Kleos turned his gaze toward Myren, but gasped harshly and looked away, as though fleeing the sight of something terrible.

Returning his eyes to Zahar, his countenance softened.

“You will have a son…he will have the power to see, but…beware…”

Suddenly, Kleos lifted his gaze beyond the company, staring deep into the mist.

“They have come!” he wailed. “And with them…an end!”

Trembling, his mind departed from him, and his Dyna faded. His final prophecy given, he returned to murmuring:

“Iniquity of starlight…iniquity of iniquities…”

As the last breath escaped Kleos’s lips, the air behind the company sucked back in a whirlwind and hurled them onto their backs. Drawing with it the mist, it gathered a short distance away into a churning wall illuminated by a green light. As they rose, the company knew to look away. The light was a mesmerism…

“I should have known this was the work of the Neon Witches!” Myren spat, turning his Nier toward the churning mist. “How is it that you are able to wield this power?”

“The Council of Eyes is indeed without sight,” the voices behind the mist taunted. “Even now, you are deceived and know not your enemy.”

Aaron moved to answer their reviling, but Zahar withheld him. “You err to commune with them,” he warned, raising his Nier for the fight.

And again, the mist laughed.

“There was already communion with us…”

The power within Zahar’s Nier flickered, choked by tendrils of mist that pulled at its light with invisible hands. He opened his throat to speak the word forming upon the Nier, but another tendril tightened around his voice.

Aaron and Myren were seized likewise, their speech constricted as perverse thoughts flooded their minds, pressing to drive them farther from themselves.

They struggled. The mist encroached, no longer merely a wall, but a circling host on every side. Beyond each churning veil there burned a different light: dark emerald green, blood red, violet abyss, a bewitching pink, and the last, not a light at all, but an emanating black as dark as void.

First escaping as a resisted whisper, then breaking forth in a resounding thunderclap, Zahar unleashed the word inscribed upon his Nier. It exploded before him into a solid ward, freeing his breath once more.

But the mist pressed hard against it, and the light of his Nier remained so heavily strained that he could not strike without diminishing the strength of his guard.

The figures mocked:

“It would seem…they do not possess your strength.”

Reaching with his mind into the Realm, Zahar perceived their rearguard grievously pressed in battle, their cries rising as the strength of their wards began to buckle.

Overtaken with grief, he wondered: How have we fallen into such weakness?

“…for once you were strong,” the evil behind the mist continued, answering the thought he had not spoken. “You withstood and defeated powers from this Realm and the other.” Vile laughter rose around them, hollowing out what remained of their fortitude.

“We must retreat!” Zahar cried, setting his mind to regather the force of his Order, that they might return and fight again.

“Today, you will not be destroyed…” the voices answered. “We must finish plucking out one eye before we turn to gash the other…and we will yet have use for you…”

And at once, Zahar and Aaron’s wards collapsed, returning them to the Realm to rejoin their Order in battle.

But Myren was withheld. He remained behind, choking upon the mist as shifting auroras of unnatural light closed around him and shadowed figures leaned near.

“This one, we have use for, now…” they whispered. “For he will have a daughter…”

Violence and havoc surrounded Zahar and Aaron. Barriers of the ward had collapsed beneath the onslaught of a horde of fiery vipers moving with one mind. Their eyes projected images of horror and calamity, revealing their wicked intent to follow them back beyond the Realm and afflict them there also. They spat venom that ignited into flaming bolts, and the bites of their bloodied fangs left scorch marks upon those they assailed. The horde filled the dark horizon, and Zahar beheld that the light of the mountain was dim…they were far, far away from the source of their strength.

It was clear that a trap had been laid.

The company cried out as another wall of the ward collapsed, their Nier weakened and their voices faltering. The warriors left exposed retreated to reinforce the remaining barrier. Some fell before reaching it and spent the last force of their Nier blocking and striking at the swarm that surrounded them.

A few had fallen.

This was a great disaster, and the weakness of their Order stood fully revealed.

Zahar moved to strengthen the ward with his Nier, but it had already collapsed into a single dome. Rage and sorrow drowned his very bones.

This should not be.

“Retrieve the wounded! Hold the ward, and then retreat!”

Zahar gathered the full measure of his Dyna to strengthen the ward and heal the wounded beneath its covering. Wherever its light touched open wounds and burns, flesh closed and mended, though many bore the scars of that calamity ever after.

Aaron, whose Dyna had recovered, ventured beyond the ward to retrieve the fallen, his Nier firing shards of ice that impaled and shattered the assailing vipers. His footsteps crushed their heads beneath him. So fierce was the violence of his Dyna that the surviving vipers soon scattered from his path.

Zahar’s eyes impaled the shadows, and he perceived the figures standing within the distant dark…six, not five. From one came the vipers, its craft having warped the silt of the Realm into the endless swarm assailing them.

“Never have the powers of the Candelabrum been drawn this far from the light of the mountain…”

Never before had they been forced to do battle within the darker regions of the Realm.

“...There are forces hidden within these far shadows over which we have not learned dominion. We must escape.”

Aaron drew the last of the fallen beneath the covering of the ward.

The ground juddered as Zahar, with vengeance, emptied the full force of his Nier, unleashing its havoc in a pulverizing shock wave that decimated the swarm and translated the wounded company back to the Chamber of Enteuxis.

The chamber returned in pitiful silence, every confidence to speak extinguished by shame. Not one dared ache or groan beneath the searing pain of their scars, yet within their chagrined silence lingered the whimper of disgrace.

Even Zahar felt the sting of humiliation…

Perhaps, had he intervened sooner…perhaps, had he found greater courage at the Council of Priam, when the Order of Seers was exiled…this calamity might never have been.

They could not escape their humiliation, and with their eyes made a covenant never to speak of it.

But a wail shattered the silence.

Jojan was dead.

And Myren could not be found.

Zahar and Aaron knew they had to go back…

Despite my fledgling intention to be reasonable, something about him irked me. It had nothing to do with his character. He seemed pleasant, amicable, worldly. He and Esme worked effortlessly together. Their shorthand was obvious. As the casual introduction continued, he had already reorganized her table in a way that put everything within her reach, aligned the first tasks, prepared the tools, and somehow made the space more pristine.

I even felt more clarity of purpose just standing beside him… infuriating.

In loving memory of Jonathan Martin.

May he live on as the best friend in every story.

The doors opened to reveal golden sun pouring in from the vaulted skylight. Its glass had no business being that pristine. You could see the clear sky, and if you squinted just right, it’s partitions disappeared, and you could feel like you were looking directly into heaven. Knowing her, she probably hadn’t replaced the glass, but restored it, meticulously.

The morning light painted the studio in a surreal radiance, bouncing the purest form of every color off the polished wood floors and concrete pillars. The west wall was almost entirely a window overlooking the skyline. The north wall was for raw materials of every kind: linoleum, wood, soft metals, fabrics of nearly every shade, and other materials I couldn’t begin to name. Some were stacked on shelves, others hung in rows or were sectioned off by rolling dividers. I knew from talking to her that some of the materials were rare, while others were proprietary to her process.

On the south wall were rows of nearly every artistic tool you could own. Some I recognized as artistic tools: a thousand paintbrushes, pencils, tools for cutting, carving, and etching. But others seemed like they belonged on a construction site, or at a surgical station, or even in an experimental science lab.

Near the east wall, between three sets of concrete pillars, were 3D printers, presses, and a sleek computer: a little pocket of sci-fi in the middle of a world of analog. Beside that, sectioned off by dirty plexiglass, was the area for the usual tools of wood carving and metalwork: the only “dirty” section of this otherwise unnaturally pristine and orderly sanctuary. Not too far from that was an ink station, and a small space with a rug and two couches.

But at the very center of the room, right underneath the skylight, was what could only be described as the altar of this sanctuary: the main worktable, broad and immovable, surrounded by metal stools. At its center lay a stack of linoleum, and beside that, the beginning sketch of what would become her layered linocut masterpiece.

As full as this space was with tools, it was in no way cold or sterile. It was full of her expression. Finished works, paintings, etchings, and sculptures hung, stood, and were arranged around arched fabric banners of rich color. Plants and greenery were positioned wherever the sun would touch.

I did not feel like I was walking into a dirty warehouse art studio. Walking in felt more like entering the ancient hanging gardens of Babylon. It felt like stepping into the scene of a Persian or Ethiopian myth. Like I said, I didn’t feel like I was on Earth anymore, or at least not a version I was used to.

My breath was gone. All of this was a manifestation, an extension, of her.

I had walked in determined not to let my mind make Esme mythical, but stepping one foot into her space defied my intention.

Before an awkward silence could betray my thoughts, I muttered, “This place is badass…”

But hearing my own tone back in my mind, I still felt like I was giving too much away.

“The cinematographer is going to have a time…”

“I’m sure they will,” she said, still walking ahead toward the central workstation.

Arriving, my eyes fell on the giant sketches laid out on six-by-five-foot sheets of paper, neatly shingled. Her thick, curvilinear linework was mesmerizing. All drawn by a disciplined hand. The curves flowed like a multitude of parallel rivers, streams that carried my transfixed eyes along every weaving line until the full image rendered in my mind and finally let me exhale.

I wondered if her lines had the same effect. But before my thoughts wandered too far, I felt the awkwardness I wanted to avoid. “I’m sorry, these are… sublime.”

She laughed. “It’s not the first time you’ve seen them. We’ve discussed them at length.”

“I know, but it’s different this close. And these are just the sketches!”

“Well,” she said, “the sketches are the easy part…”

She told no lies. Her process of linocut was a current that only rushed forward.

1On a section of linoleum, with the precision of her tools, she followed the topography of her sketches, cutting channels into the material like a deity carving a delicate landscape of elevations and depressions. But the carved surface was an inverse of the intended image. What she cut away would remain untouched by ink. What she left raised would carry it.

The next step was to roll ink across the carved linoleum, then press it onto the final canvas. That would be the first layer. Layer upon layer would follow as the process repeated, each one building from background to foreground, until what began as a badlands of lines became whole.

If even one layer was misshapen, miscut, or misaligned, the entire piece could collapse. Only someone with her level of mastery could complete something like this, and no one but her would attempt it under the pressure of time.

Behind a stack of linoleum, I could see smaller squares, each carved with single or doubled curves. Some complete. Some were abandoned.

I held one up. “Already started?”

She exhaled nervously, picking up another square, one incomplete. “No…” she said, scrutinizing it. “Practice. The sketches are… ambitious. Some of the lines are thinner than what my tools can carve while still maintaining the integrity of the serpentine curves.”

“The line of beauty…”

She grinned, but the kind one gives a toddler for being clever enough to fit the square block into the square hole. “You’ve been reading up on aesthetics.”

“I have to, to keep up with you.” And I guess that was a subconscious attempt to flirt.

“You’ll have to read more than old books on aesthetics to keep up with this goddess,” a smooth masculine voice purred from behind me.

And like an unwelcome breeze rushing into what was already a comfortably cool moment, a man swept past me, folded Esme into an embrace, then gave her a familiar kiss.

The floor of my stomach collapsed to my knees, and I prayed to all the muses that no one could see the blood drain from my face, because it felt like it’s flesh had been replaced by TV static.

“This is Nelm, my studio assistant,” Esme offered.

I wish “studio assistant” had been enough to slow the escalating dosage of adrenaline pouring into my bloodstream. The static in my face was rapidly usurped with hives, and my thumping heart beat primed for fight or flight. The curse of testosterone and its involuntary entitlements.

He reached out his hand, and the empty feeling in my gut was replaced with a caged roar for him to go away. He’s ruining everything.

What was he ruining? Nothing. If this were an animalistic territorial dispute, Esme was the apex, and this was her territory. And apparently his.

Logic prevailed, as it always does, because I’m a civilized man in a suit. And I was here for work. I shook his hand. “It is very nice to meet you, Nelms.”

I ignored my instinct to check the firmness of his handshake. That’s for the corporate Hunger Games. (It was soft, though.)

“Just Nelm…” he politely replied.

“Just Nelm. My apologies.” I returned.

“This is the ad exec I was telling you about,” Esme added.

“Ah,” he said, “the aspiring artist. She’s told me so much about you…”

Despite my fledgling intention to be reasonable, something about him irked me. It had nothing to do with his character. He seemed pleasant, amicable, worldly. And it was clear he and Esme worked effortlessly together. Their shorthand was obvious. As the casual introduction continued, he had already reorganized her table in a way that put everything within her reach, aligned the first tasks, prepared the tools, and somehow made the space even more pristine.

I felt more clarity of purpose just standing beside him… infuriating.

They were paired winds, whirling around me.

What bothered me was that when he entered the room, I was immediately outnumbered. I was a suit among the two artists. Their styles were even complementary. He was almost exactly my height, his complexion a dozen elegant shades darker, his hair styled into a messy afro, golden nose rings, diamond ear piercings. We seemed equally physically fit, but he was far less modest about it. His outfit was elite alt-Black punk, fitted, shredded, and sagging in the most tailored fashion. The hater in me wanted to call him a discount Duckwrth, but the truth was, “Just Nelm” might actually be cooler.

And here I was, the uncool; outnumbered. And “Nelms” was exactly what I imagined as her type.

A rustling and shuffling of many feet in the distance, coming up the stairs, kept me from spiraling. Reinforcements.

I’d never tell him this, but I wished Tom was among them. A confidant would have been great right now. But knowing Tom, he would see exactly what was going on and try his best to make me crack. Alas, it was just the production crew.

And for a brief moment, as awful as it sounds, I gained some level of power in a space where I felt completely vulnerable. Every member of the crew was handpicked. The best on my roster, and they knew I had their respect.

“Where do you want us to set up, boss?” asked the gaffer, sweating, the heaviest of Pelican cases in tow. In that moment, I caught myself before ego made me make an ass of myself.

“Actually, this is… Nelm. He’s Esme’s right hand. He’ll know better than me, and he’ll be your go-to so Esme can lock in.”

And with the last syllable of the last word, I relinquished whatever usefulness I had in the room. So it had to be.

“As we aren’t recording sound, I like to work with music,” Esme instructed, and the crew, of course, welcomed it.

Nelm put on a track.

A warm, distorted riff and rhythmic beat thrummed through the air, charging it with more creative force. The realness of life was replaced by the fantasy of a montage. It was driving, exhilarating.

But I fell back. Entirely outnumbered, I watched the room full of artists go to work.

My mind went numb, sinking under dissociated layers of suffocating envy. Beyond that of losing the fleeting attention of Esme, I once again felt like a man apart. This was all their native country, and they all came alive in it, choreographed by its prince, “Just Nelm,” and its empress, Esme, wielding all of them with divine craft.

I could not believe I was feeling something that had once been familiar, something I thought had long been resolved. A feeling I dared not name, because naming it might beckon it back with force.

So, as I did long ago, I simply let go. Let myself reform. I felt the solidness of the hard soles of my polished loafers against the wood floor. I let myself feel the refined fabric of the suit hang, and my body rested against the fitted tightness of my undershirt. Not in the sense of hiding behind a constructed shell. This was me, or at least what I had genuinely become.

And by now, I had come to like me. It unfortunately was just not… enough.

“That’s that bullshit,” Tom fired, eyes glaring at me from over a glass of scotch. “Not enough? The hell are you talking about?”

“Okay, Tom, here’s me showing my friend my interior,” I laughed, genuinely amused at his consistency of self. It didn’t matter what I told him. Tom was gonna be Tom. I could tell him my dad died, and he’d still say something uncouth, which he actually had. He was the only one who got me to laugh, because he knew laughing would make the other emotions break.

But damn… sometimes…

“Guy, I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it a thousand times. I’m your friend, not your therapist. But I will send you to one.”

“Or be the reason I need one.”

He chuckled and took a sip. I waved for the bartender to refill my Coke.

“That is some bullshit, though,” he pressed. “And you should know better. ‘Not enough’ is the psychology we weaponize to make people buy things. And you know that.”

“Land that plane… what are you talking about?”

“Something in you won’t feel fulfilled until you capture a girl like her. It’s a crack in your armor.”

I, of course, immediately disagreed….

…to be continued.

I have greater ambitions for the story, but this short film represents one of its quietest, most intimate moments: a conversation between two unwilling servants of time and space, with a window into a greater struggle. A conversation between optimism and nihilism, hope and despair.

I finished this short and loved it so much. After I made a few attempts to produce it and realized it was just unwieldy, with a budget that, again, dipped into period filmmaking, I had to put it in a drawer.

But occasionally, when I stood close to the drawer, I could still hear Tèo and Mina speak.

There’s something in it that I love. Words worth sharing. So instead of letting it sit in a drawer, I’ve decided to share it with you.

The moment of this story happens sometime today. It probably happens nearby, time and space just tucked it away right outside your view. You weren’t supposed to see it. It could break things if you did.

But when you hear them speak, they don’t speak like today. They’re both people outside of their proper time.

One speaks with the poetic charm of a young man from the South, born closer to the 1890s than the 1990s. His words drift toward rhythm and metaphor. That’s why I like him.

The other speaks with the harshness of the streets, the underbelly of the Gilded Age. She knows no poetry, only watchful words that determine whether she lives or dies in the streets of an overcrowded, polluted immigrant city.

With that, I present to you “The Slip.”

THE SLIP

IN BLACK

MINA (V.O.) | Alone. Slip. Timefall.

There’s eerie roll of thunder.

SUPER: TIMEFALL - PRESENT DAY

EXT. PARK BENCH - DAY

TÈO looks up, smiling as if he understands something the sky is about to say. Overhead, a dome of grey clouds begins to split, as unnaturally slow lightning carves a deliberate incision of eerie light, threading into the atmosphere like a seam coming undone.

The sound is otherworldly—like thunder broken into unnatural fragments, each piece stretched and displaced across time.

Low tones bloom in stuttering intervals, deep pulses ripple beneath them. Higher cracks flicker through the air like a melody barely held together, flavoring the echo with something alien and unresolved.

TÈO | She’s speakin’ again...isn’t it something?

MINA (O.S.) | It won’t be long. It’ll be me. I know it.

Téo, is a sharp, debonair, charismatic, young black man in his early thirties. Something about his poise, or his way of speech, gives away that he’s an old soul- a man out of time. Maybe it’s the old dog-tag, a relic from a bygone era, hanging around his neck.

TÈO | Certain it’ll be you? Because the dream?

MINA, a dirty blonde in her late twenties, sits furled on the park bench. She too feels like a woman out of time—haunted, adrift. Her clothes hang off her like afterthoughts: mismatched hand-me-downs, grabbed in haste from a 1970s thrift rack.

MINA | I know you’ll try to convince me of something that I won’t believe.

TÈO | Funny, ‘cause I know you will.

MINA | Once I hear the thunder, the count starts. (beat) Has started. The cycle always repeats. Alone. Slip. Timefall. Doesn’t matter what I say. What I feel. What I want. Or what you want.

(beat) Slip.

TÈO | And you hate slipping?

MINA | I’m beyond hate. I don’t feel anything anymore. It just happens. Over and over.

TÈO (baffled) | But It’s extraordinary.

MINA (equally baffled) | extraordinary?

TÈO | It’s a backway through the universe. Most folks never even notice it—too busy watching the road ahead. But we? We slip through it. Like a needle through a quilt. Time, space, self... none of it holds. And in here...Time signs in cursive.

MINA | We don’t walk. We’re stolen. Snatched before we can start to rest. None of it’s ours. Not the time. Not the place.

(beat) This existence is insufferable. Time grinds and doesn’t know we’re under it. It don’t stop.

TÈO | I don’t understand how you can call it insufferable. This is a gift. The Slip pulled us out of the teeth of time. No soul alive—past or future—will ever see what we’ve seen. We come from different chapters in time’s almanac… and still, somehow, me and you sitting in the same paragraph.

MINA | A gift. (beat) When you first saw me, you called me - Collette.

Tèo stiffens.

MINA | You tapped me on the shoulder, and called me, Collette. Do you even remember her face now?

TÈO (V.O.) | Collette! Tu vas me dépasser!

EXT. FRANCE - STREET - DAY

FLASHBACK: Tèo presses through an energetic crowded street in France – 1918 – he proudly wears the standard-issue army uniform of the 369th Infantry. He’s a Harlem Hellfighter.

Ahead of him, Collette playfully pushes through the excited mass. Fireworks POP, illuminating the celebrating French streets with color – the war was over.

COLLETTE (flirtatious) | Alors peut-être que tu devrais courir plus vite, Theodore.

She turns - but her face falls out of focus...Another firework cracks -- ENDING THE FLASHBACK

EXT. PARK BENCH - CONTINUOUS

More alien thunder rolls. Tèo doesn’t speak.

MINA | You been gone from her for so long that you can’t even recognize her face in your own mind can you? Is that a gift?

His expression leans away...(a beat)

MINA (relenting) | In the Slip, I fall. No weight, no place—just tumblin’ through nothin’. I’ve seen worlds start and rot. Over and over. The end don’t mean anything. Just more misery. And you’ve seen it too. You know how it ends.

A shared beat.

MINA | Then I fall again. Some new time. New streets. Waitin’ to get ripped away all over again. From whatever I just started to know. Whoever I might’ve started to love. Whatever I wanted. (beat) At first, I don’t even know where I am.

EXT. ALLEY - NIGHT

FLASHBACK: Her hand smacks against grimy brick, as she feebly tries to brace herself against the side of a building. Mina is confused, disoriented, nauseous. She stumbles - she pukes.

MINA (V.O.) | I don’t even remember my name. And I’m sick. Always sick. Every damn time.

She doesn’t recognize the disheveled clothes she’s in. There’s something very 1950’s about them, and unfit to her poise.

At the end of the alley, a bunch of (actual) hippies who, only moments ago, were listening to music by their van, stare at her in disbelief.

MINA (V.O.) | The air don’t feel right. Feels like the whole place is watchin’ me. I don’t belong there, and the world knows it.

She quickly stumbles in the opposite direction. END FLASHBACK

EXT. PARK BENCH - CONTINUOUS

Mina’s eye’s are still there.

MINA | I don’t know the day, or the hour, or where I’ll land—or when it’ll happen again. The only thing I feel is the instinct to run... to get away, before whatever stole me does it again. Takes hours to remember my name. Days to remember why. And when I do, I wish I hadn’t.

(beat) Until then, I wander whatever time I’m in. I exist in it, but I ain’t part of it. Just pulled toward somethin’ I can’t stop. Glass-pressed against the world.

Wantin’ what I can’t have. Waitin’ to be taken. Again. Waitin’ for it all to repeat.

(soft) Alone. Slip. Timefall.

(beat) There’s no purpose. No reason. The cycle’s just... vanity.

TÈO | Vanity of vanities...

(a beat) It’s not a curse. Not for me. I was already glass-pressed against the world—segregated, invisible. But now I trespass freely through time’s touring carnival. Slippin’ behind the big tents. Goin’ where I’m not supposed to go.

Time took the sign down. Jim don’t mean nothin’ to me here. And now... I get to watch. Every show we pass through whispers a little truth

MINA | Call it a carnival if it helps. But that don’t make it real. This ain’t no carnival—there’s nothing to learn. It just... happened.

TÈO | No,

He pulls a journal from his back pocket. It’s old, so old it’s practically antique. Opening it he searches the pages filled with advanced mathematic formulas, and obscure terms.

TÈO | The cosmic liminal hollow...That space in-between— the backway folded between time’s seams.

Mina becomes aggressively disinterested, this is rambling.

TÈO (break) | This is not the first time we’ve met. I called you Collette then too.

MINA | What are you talking about?

TÈO | We’ve met in my past, your future.

MINA | I’ve never met anyone like us before you. And I didn’t meet you until a couple of days ago.

TÈO | I’ve met others. And you... more than a few. And you’ll meet me again. No doubt.

MINA | I don’t know that.

TÈO | I do. I do know you.

MINA | You don’t know the first fucking thing about me.

TÈO | I know you were pulled outta the Bronx. 1890s. You were just a kid—an orphan. A worker. Scrappin’ to stay fed.

Mina says no words.

FLASHBACK: EXT. BRICK STACK HOUSE – 1887 – DAY

She stands in front of a soot-stained tenement, dressed in hand-me-down trousers, coat too big, cap pulled low. She’s made herself boyish—anonymous. Safer that way.

Nearby, a scuffle breaks out between barefoot kids and a vendor. Mina runs to it, not away. Fists already clenched.

TÈO (V.O.) | I know you dressed as a boy, so men would leave you be. You mamma told you to before she sent you out.

A low rumble rolls in—familiar and unnatural.

TÈO (V.O.) | I know you don’t know how your daddy died, but you know how your mama did...

END FLASHBACK.

She shutters...

TÈO (with urgency) | The clock is running dry. There are rules to this. Patterns. You think it’s random ‘cause it hurts— but hurt don’t mean there’s no design. There’s a shape to it. Even if we can’t see it yet.

He shows her the book, but it’s a foreign language, she shoves it away.

MINA | You’re seeing what you want to see. We fell in a ditch and now we’re stuck. That’s all there is to it.

TÈO | The world don’t move like that. Nothin’ this strange just... happens.

MINA | This ain’t strange. You just ain’t seen how cruel folks can get. How we turn on each other when all we got is ourselves.

TÈO | Miss. I’ve seen war. A war after your time. (looking at the brown skin of his hand) And I certainly don’t need to be schooled on human cruelty...

MINA | You talk like you’ve got the whole goddamn map.

TÈO (beat) | No. But I have parts...Can you bend time yet?

Her silence says everything.

TÈO | How far back can you go? Minutes? Hours? (beat) You know what I’m askin’

MINA | How do you know about that?

TÈO | Show me.

Apprehensive, but trying not to show it, Mina flicks her hand—barely.

Time folds in reverse, shifting like a lenticular illusion—moments replaying with eerie precision.

TÈO (time reversed to a former position) | This is not the first time we’ve me- ah...

He ticks his fingers like a metronome, counting down to another sharp rumble in the sky. Tik...tik...tik...Boom.

Then—he freezes. Eyes flicking like he’s reading time in reverse

MINA | Are you okay?

TÈO | Yes...I can recall the altered timelines now. (beat) Since we met—has yours gotten stronger?

MINA | Only slightly.

TÈO | By how much?

MINA | Only by a second or two. Doesn’t matter.

TÈO (excited) | It does! All of it does. It will get stronger!

MINA | How do you know?

TÈO | Seen it.

He sits beside her, manically scratching new symbols on the last page of his book.

TÈO | That’s another variable accounted for.

MINA | Why does any of this matter?

TÈO | Told you. The world don’t run on pain alone. There are rules.

MINA | Rules to WHAT? This is just your COPE. You’re looking for patterns to make sense of something absurd.

TÈO (still working) | apophenia.

MINA | What?

TÈO (still scribbling) | The tendency to perceive connections, patterns, or meaning in random or meaningless data. This is not that.

MINA | Yes it is. Humanity itself is an accident. And in all your slips, you haven’t figured that out? We’re an anomaly. We shouldn’t even be here.

(beat) That’s the only meaning I got from the slip. I’m a cosmic accident, stuck in a cosmic accident— waitin’ to die. And I’ve made peace with that.

She closes his book.

MINA | I get it. You lost her, torn away. Now you’re still hurt, lookin’ for a reason for it. But all it’s done… is leave you scribblin’ in a book like a madman.(beat) And that makes me sad for you.

TÈO | And how’s your accidentalism treatin’ you? Waitin’ to die don’t sound like any kind of peace to me. And you must be rationin’ your happiness.

MINA | You’re a smart man. So we both know that’s not a rational answer.

TÈO | Not an answer. It’s a question.

The rumbling begins again, low, but sustained, surrounding them, approaching them.

TÈO | I suppose you don’t have to believe me. Not this second, anyway.

MINA | What’s the point?! Even if you were right—and there is some fucked-up design behind all this— I wouldn’t care. Because whatever it is… it’s cruel. My life is misery.

TÈO | It saved you from misery. It pulled you right outta hell—right when you needed it to

MINA | How dare you!

TÈO | I know what was happening when it took you. You told me...

(There’s a powerful beat) The conflicted intensity in her eyes almost tell her secret...

TÈO | I wish above all things you’d open your mind. You drift through time and space—blind to wonder, un-inquisitive, waitin’ for death. If there are patterns, you wouldn’t see ’em. If there’s purpose… your back’s to it.

MINA | Why do you fucking care?

TÈO | It’s not all misery.

Something shifts in his eyes. He doesn’t say it. But he’s thinking about her—about them.

MINA (realizing) | What happened when we met? Did we...

For a moment, the only sound that can be heard is the portentous brooding low rumble in the sky. The rumble gives way to an eerie hollow wind resonating in low tones through the air— even closer, like it’s nearly encased them.

It’s menacing They both know it will come soon.

TÈO (with resolve) | If I ever doubted before, I don’t now. I know there’s purpose— because you’re here. This is a convergence. Our meeting… makes a closed loop. This is where things start to change.

The rumble deepens—low, dark, and close. It vibrates the air around them, pressing into their ears. It’s no longer approaching. It’s here. Imminent. Inevitable. Shaking.

MINA (trembling, girlish) | I can’t take any more of this... I’m scared. I just want to be left alone.

TÈO (comforting) | When you get here...

He rolls up his sleeve. Dates—hundreds of them—inked from wrist to elbow, scattered and stacked like a broken calendar

MINA (stunned) | Oh my God...how many times have you slipped?

He doesn’t reply. His finger taps on one of the dates:

10-29-1929

TÈO | It’ll be a cold night in Oklahoma. Follow the sound of jazz to the old mansion on the hill. I’ll be hosting a secret ball. (grand) A ball at the end of the world!

When you see me— after I call you Collette —answer:

“Maybe you should run faster.” I’ll know what that means…Then give this back to me.

She looks down, to the the old journal Tèo placed in her hands.

TÈO (smug) | Your certainty is your misery.

A hollow, unnatural shifting, crack of thunder breaks the air, as if the tectonic plates of time sheared against each other. Mina looks up at the sky, awaiting her fate.

TÈO | ...slip.

She winces ready to slip…but looks back in shock, Tèo is gone.

CUT TO BLACK.

He plopped down in the seat beside me, crossed his legs, folded his arms, spun his chair, leaned in... insufferably, and continued, “I promise you, you’re probably one of a thousand men who tried to make her into the manic pixie here to save them from their oh-so-dreary lives... she’ll skewer you.”

I can’t lie, I fell into the hole...

It’s that kind of cringe infatuation stage you’re supposed to grow out of. But I feel like the temptation of social media stunts that.

It had been a few weeks since that second meeting with her and Tom. Esme had begun her prep work on the project. I was the facilitator, logistics, the boring stuff. I made sure she had what she needed. Tom made sure the client was getting what they wanted and that the budget was steady. I found the crew that would set up to capture her three-month-long process.

We had meetings, virtually. They became the highlights of my office days, especially as my office experience was feeling more and more mundane, save for the fact that somehow the email of me as an alt-punk got around the office. I would find the occasional cutout of me that someone printed and hung by the espresso machine. It was all in good fun... allegedly.

But the virtual meetings with Esme were... something I looked forward to. We’d occasionally wander away from conversations about logistics and into conversations about art. They pulled up things in me, ideas, that I’d forgotten about. Her imagination had no barriers... mine was stunted by the rules of advertising... ideas occurred to her that I knew would have occurred to me, if I hadn’t... well... what’s done is done...

“You’re way too old for a manic pixie dream girl,” Tom blurted over my shoulder just as I finished a call with her.

“She is neither manic nor a pixie. As a matter of fact, she has her shit firmly together...”

“She has her sh... brother, that’s why I write the copy, by the way,” Tom interjected. Really, his interns wrote the copy, but I digress...

“Whatever storming mania she has,” I continued, “she wields it...” and I was again interrupted, this time by the long, exasperated hiss of an exaggerated sigh from Tom.

“What?” I fired.

“Aside from your affinity for speaking in bad metaphors, I know she’s not a manic pixie. And that’s why I’m telling you, you’re too old to be looking for a manic pixie to...” And he dramatically droned this part, “...awaken your inner artist and free you from a life of responsibility and the mundane, and the rewards of capitalism.” He plopped down in the seat beside me, crossed his legs, folded his arms, spun his chair, leaned in... insufferably, and continued, “I promise you, you’re probably one of a thousand men who tried to make her into the manic pixie here to save them from their oh-so-dreary lives... she’ll skewer you.”

“Can’t you just let me soak in delusion for a while?” I snapped, closing my laptop.

“No. That’s for the unwashed masses... we’re ad men, we sell delusion. We don’t get to partake.”

“I do hate you, Tom.”

“Nah...” He whipped his chair around, stood, and confidently sauntered off. “You love me, bro...”

Regardless, that night, when I unlocked my phone, I fell into the inevitable hole that was her social media. I had already studied every image on her professional page for professional reasons. She had mastered every medium of drawing and etching, elevating both crafts by her style. I was genuinely mesmerized... me and her three million followers. She was the artistic phenom the world needed to remind it of the value of art.

But in one of her many curated posts, she tagged her personal social. And that night... I couldn’t help but go there. And... I entered another world entirely. Hers. Just as curated and unique as her art. She, the woman, had taste, culture... it seemed like all the people around her were the once-uncool kids who just built their own vibe, one totally elevated... it made me wonder if, had my life been different, I would be in that space too.

Suddenly, the tie around my neck felt like a hand pressing against my jugular. I yanked it off, feeling ridiculous. Why am I wearing a tie in my own home?

It was getting late anyway. I looked out the window of my sterile Chicago penthouse. The skyline was falling asleep. I had to be up early... Tomorrow we film in her space...

A text woke me up. It was 5:30 a.m.

When you get here, the Cobalt Door, not the teal door.

My first alarm didn’t go off for another hour and a half, not to mention the real one that would go off fifteen minutes later. Groggy, feeling like the dream I’d just forgotten was merging into a brand-new one, eyes squinting, I tried to figure out what the hell I was reading. A riddle?

“What cobalt door?” I asked the empty pillow by my head...

Brain still booting, I blearily responded with a question mark.

?

I got back an image of a cobalt door, painted across in metallic black, with the image of a phoenix before it set itself ablaze... that’s Esme’s tattoo, or at least an iteration of it. It’s Esme...

I sent: Thanks, I didn’t realize that was you.

You still in bed?

No. Grabbing a coffee.

Okay... This is happening today, right?

For sure, I had 7 a.m. on the calendar.

Yep... unfortunately. I prefer earlier.

I can be earlier. When will you be there?

I’m already here.

I’ll hurry there. Cobalt door.

K. Cobalt door.

“K...” I sensed a bit of contempt in that. I sat up, tossing off the blanket. And just out of sheer curiosity, I went to the app and viewed her stories, a gym selfie posted at 4 a.m. with the hashtag #discipline.

I think of myself as a disciplined person, but she is just on another level.

Shuffling through the hanging clothes in my closet, I felt the slightest sense of anxiety creep in. What the hell should I wear? And that’s not a thought that’s seriously crossed my mind since the first party I ever went to in college, which was also the first party I’d ever been to at all.

For reference, I did NOT choose the right thing. It was NOT a great time. It wasn’t long after that that I decided to stick with what I knew, suits, and stopped going to those kinds of parties. The better the fit of the suit, the more comfortable I felt.

And so, dodging that very odd sense of anxiety, I reached for my favorite: a single-breasted, slim-fit suit in steel blue, the pants gently pleated in just the right place, cut to fit. A collarless white button-up, no tie, a mahogany-strapped watch, belt, and hard loafers. A suit, but not too much suit. Can’t fail...

I brushed, showered, sharpened my thin beard with the electric razor, spritzed on some expensive smell-good, and after making sure all my hairs were in place, being blessed to only rarely have to use a durag, I checked the mirror. Can’t fail... anxiety calmed... although what I might be failing, and why I had been revisited by such juvenile anxiety, I didn’t know.

The teal door and the cobalt door were nearly side by side, separated by two buildings so close together they may as well have been conjoined. The building with the teal door was modern, all sleek architecture and ultra-clean lines, clearly very new. The building with the cobalt door was clearly from a decades-old Chicago. It would have been an eyesore if not for its character, art embedded into it, turning what would be areas of decay into their own piece. Even the phoenix on the door was etched to pattern the chipped, weathered material beneath it. I tilted my head, and the metallic black of the dark bird caught the light of the rising sun. A cloud moved, revealing golden light that transformed the creature into its phoenix form.

This... all of this, was Esme’s work.

Ironically, it made the modern building beside it seem like the horrendous eyesore.

I pressed the call button to the left of the door, and after a moment, after the sound of feet on stairs, Esme opened it. When the golden light lit her brown eyes and dark curls... well, to restart my heart, I closed my lips and took a slow, focused internal breath... because apparently I had also forgotten to breathe.

“You coming up?” she asked...

“Yeah.” Catching myself, I added, “Just admiring the, ummm... the phoenix rises with the dawn?”

She let a subtle smile creep at the corner of her black-painted lip. I grinned back, as subtle as I could manage.

“Cool, right?”

“Very cool,” I replied, a little too breathy.

Turning for me to follow, she shot back, “If you had been any later, you would have missed it.”

...I was early. It was just after 6:30 a.m...

My hard loafers obnoxiously clamped and crunched on the debris on the old mill steps as I ascended the spiraling staircase leading to Esme’s domain. Her steps were impossibly soundless even though she was wearing leather stiletto ankle boots.

This woman existed impossibly...

That’s when I remembered, as a shaft of new sunlight touched her from the one window in the narrow ascent, “You’re too old for the manic pixie dream girl.”Thanks, Tom...

Her heels did make sounds. They clamped and crunched, although not as obnoxiously, just like mine. My perception of her was slipping into myth. And I had to remember that I was a myth-maker... I didn’t get to be delusional...

I was resolute in that until she pushed open the industrial sliding door, revealing her art studio... we clearly weren’t on earth anymore...

The screen is massive. IMAX. The movie opens. An old cabin… and that’s when I start to squirm. The movie continues, and an old car drives down the center of the road flanked by cotton fields. The old Southern trees. The sound of dark, wailing blues and the thrum of its companion, the guitar. The clothes that were uncannily perfect mirrors of the clothes my forefathers wore in the images on the slides played at the family reunion. At points, I didn’t feel like I was watching a movie, but a collective memory projected in IMAX on a screen.

The moon is in its palest form, whole, cold, haunting the black skies. Its stark light casts hard shadows on the dense trees and the old, splintering wood of the cabin. The dark tones of an old spiritual I don’t know the name of escape from the hum of an old woman sitting in a rocking chair beside me. I’m small, young… maybe not even one year old, looking up at this view. There’s something oppressive in the air. I know that I’m in the Deep South. Everything feels innately familiar. I know it’s a long, long time ago…I know it’s before me.

Those aren’t discarded action lines from an old draft of Sinners. It’s one of the first dreams I ever remember. So when I watched the film for the first time, something about it felt unsettlingly familiar. I literally squirmed in my seat, feeling a slight pressure of anxiety on my chest, because even though I knew it was fiction, it felt like I had been here before. I’m still deciding how I feel about the concept of passed-down ancestral memories, often confused with epigenetic memories, but if ever I had an anecdotal case to argue it, that was one.

I made an intentional decision to avoid the trend of writing an editorial about Sinners when it was most popular. Everyone was going to have takes, and certainly what I would want to write would get lost in the noise. But now that the hype has simmered down, the articles for clout have cycled in and out of your feeds, and the inevitable contrarians calling it “overrated” have moved on to other attention-seeking hot takes, we’ll get back to that. Right now, I see a clear space to land this article.

Memories of the South…

Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama… the reverse order of my family’s leg of the last rounds of the Great Migration North. And the order of mine and two of my siblings’ road trip down South to my grandmother’s funeral. I had been here once before, but my siblings hadn’t. And I hadn’t even been that far South, into ancestral lands, since I was a very small child.

Several hours into the drive, the summer heat had even penetrated our air-conditioned rental. It didn’t hit me until we passed through a narrow stretch of highway flanked on both sides by what used to be cotton fields. We had taken a detour to see the old street bearing our family’s namesake. It was as if my mind had superimposed an entirely different place over the vista rushing past my windshield: an old car riding the road down the seam of endless cotton fields. Again, a landscape that felt deeply familiar. I was immediately reminded of the dream…

We arrived at the plot of land, not far from the old “Tibbs” plantation and the old Tibbs farm they occupied shortly after emancipation, reserved for my grandmother. And yes, it was a plot, not a cemetery, one far off the beaten path. Beside her were her mother and father, my great-grandmother and great-grandfather. She was buried in the only ancestral land the Tibbs know. Although we do know now that some of our distant lineage traces back to Nigeria, the only history we can cleanly trace leads back to Alabama. It’s on that earth that my ancestors toiled, and it’s that dirt that exists as part of our generational inheritance.

I’ve never been good with funerals. And it was already sensitive, we had buried my father, her son, not long before that. Taken with sadness, I looked away as the casket sank, up at an old decrepit cabin, and I wondered… was that the cabin in my dreams?

I promise I’ll get to Sinners, but indulge me for one more story. It builds to my greater point.

Years later, I drove back down South. Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, for a family reunion.

Over several days, and among many names, known and unknown, I learned about the other family branches and how big our tree actually is. We were the South and the migration. We encapsulated that journey on such a scale that historians attended to catalog us. Alabama, starting partially when my grandmother ran away from my great-grandfather’s farm, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and a handful who went west, that was the migration of the family. And in a session of dinner and projected slides, they showed us maps and old pictures.

And what struck me hardest were the pictures. The original fathers, brothers, mothers, sisters, the roots of the tree after emancipation from the Tibbs plantation. Most had become successful farmers, somehow beating the sharecroppers’ exploitative system. Spitting images of my brothers, sisters, fathers, uncles… strong genes that simply seemed to defy any force of change. I saw us in all of them. But it was like seeing us, in beige and white, on plantations and farmland, nearly a hundred years ago. It was bizarre, and wonderful… and it stayed with me.

The screen is massive. IMAX. The movie opens. An old cabin… and that’s when I start to squirm. The movie continues, and an old car drives down the center of the road flanked by cotton fields. The old Southern trees. The sound of dark, wailing blues and the thrum of its companion, the guitar. The clothes that were uncannily perfect mirrors of the clothes my forefathers wore in the images on the slides played at the family reunion. At points, I didn’t feel like I was watching a movie, but a collective memory projected in IMAX on a screen.

I can’t say that my ancestral memories recall literal vampires, although they might recall metaphorical ones. Even that controversial musical sequence, which some felt pulled them out of the movie, pulled me in more, because it all but confirmed my thesis that this film is a generational memory, crafted by light and music. I’ll leave the spiritual conversations for a different time, because that gets very dense, especially when we talk about current religious tendencies and ancestral ones, but there were moments where I felt thick spiritual pressure.

After the film, I marveled at Ryan’s craft. As a director, the ability to pull off what he did is aspirational to me. His craft is undeniable.

“Sinners is overrated,” one of my friends and fellow directors dropped on the counter between us. I had to gut-check my bias to let him finish. Now, for context, I have to raise this detail, as it leads to my take. This director was Black, but not Black American. He was from the “mother” continent…

So I listened to his take, and I don’t want to trivialize his argument, but it seemed to be based entirely in a hyper-objective reading, grounded broadly in a sort of elitist general film theory, in the context of the broadest possible view of mainstream American culture. And yes, that was a very coded and verbose line. I’m treading carefully around some landmines, but let’s stay heavy on the “mainstream American culture” part.

The point of contention was centered on the cold question of, “What is this movie even about?” As in, boil the plot down to its barest bones to define the true essence of the film. And he landed on: “It’s just about vampires.”

Triggered… how can someone with deep artistic taste and sensibilities boil Sinners down to “the plot is simplistic and is just about killing vampires”?

That is the definition of trivializing. I was insulted, as it felt a direct challenge to my taste. Pocketing that, it actually left me with a riddle: How can another person of color totally miss it when it comes to Sinners?

No matter how many words I used, he didn’t get it. The evolution of his point eventually led to a variation of, “It’s overhyped because it is pandering to Black people.”

And that solved the riddle for me. This is partly an offshoot of Black anti-Black contrarianism, a topic I’ll leave for the conversation about my experience meeting other African Americans at an evangelical conservative university. Steps over the “I’m not like other blacks” landmine.

I think it’s an honest offshoot because a lot of our cousins on the other side of the Atlantic, whose lineage does not derive from the diaspora and who do not carry the epigenetic or ancestral memories of the Middle Passage, receive an imported perspective of Black Americans through the lens of a narrative we in the diaspora have no control over. They have an honest perspective derived from a compromised lens: mainstream American culture.

But that’s another landmine, the one of Black anti-Black-Americanism, that I’ll step over for now… even though I want to throw a stone on it so badly.

Caveat: is Sinners a perfect movie? No. And I want to acknowledge that now. It has all the flaws of any commercial studio film. It wasn’t necessarily a five-course gourmet meal… but it was a damn good meal. It wasn’t, on its surface, what the artistic elite would call a high-art, arthouse masterpiece. It was a genre film, and a mashup at that. It was, in Ryan’s words, “a grilled cheese sandwich.”

But to use that to trivialize it into “an overhyped genre film pandering to Black people” is such an intellectually dishonest take. And if I may state my biased take on that take, it is actually one that panders to mainstream culture. “I’m not like those oth-...” anyway…

But I can understand why the honest version of that “it’s pandering” take exists. Because Sinners wasn’t truly for everyone. It wasn’t for mainstream culture. It wasn’t even for other people of color, Black or otherwise. It was really for Black Americans, those whose families carried the ancestral memories, either literally or through old photographs in books in our grandparents’ attics or basements. It’s for those of us who still carry the names of the plantations that once owned our great-great-great-grandparents. It’s for those of us who, by blood and toil, hardship and harvest, have claim to the dirt we walk on.

It’s for those who don’t really know the countries we’re told to “go back to.” It’s for those who, when asked, “What country did your family come from?” can only answer Mississippi, Virginia, Alabama, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Texas, or whatever patch of land has our family plots, old farmhouse, shantytown, or cabin, or remnant of whatever sharecroppers’ town our families once lived on.

Sinners was for them. For me. For us. It was a genre film built from the bones, from the music, the old pictures, the stories and traditions, the plots of land, and the memories passed from our parents and theirs.

Ryan’s craft was in making something so sacred also accessible to the masses. Overrated or not, that was the mastery of Sinners. Regardless of the simplicity of the plot, the tropes of the genre, and the inherent flaws of commercialism, is that skill not worthy of the awards? To say “no” feels artistically dishonest to me.

This film was a masterwork of collective memory, projected onto the largest movie screen available.

Welcome! I hope you can get comfortable here!

This community is growing! This past month has seen a real growth spurt in people joining the Ink and Light community, and I wanted to take a quick moment to say hello.

Thank you for subscribing. I work hard to make sure this is a subscription worthy of arriving in your inbox. The following crosspost is a quick overview of what you’ll find here, and why it may be worth your time to relax, read, and think through the words I write for you.

If you’ve been here a while, new work is coming… There are several stories with a “Part One” and not yet a “Part Two.” I promise they’re sitting in drafts at various levels of finish. “Not Your Type’s Type” is likely next up.

As you know, I’ve been busy finishing up a feature film… and I finally feel my writing fingers regenerating.

Thank you again for subscribing. Watching this community grow is an absolute joy.

Blessings,
Silas

Catch up on the latest:

We just had what we hope is our last strike of false winter, and it’s the cusp of early spring. This winter has not been my favorite. There’s been something grey and demotivating in the air. Other creatives around me felt it too. It had been a growing, grinding pressure to slow down. To stop. I’ve even seen some artists in this season quit, and the rest of us talked each other off various ledges. I’ll leave pontifications as to why to be expressed in narratives. Whatever the reason, the winter had been a slow creative crawl, even though the busy work, the survival work, felt overwhelming. Whatever foul spirit charmed the air, it had one goal: to make the ambitious stop. To have their work left unfinished. To toss scripts and manuscripts in drawers like the dead laid in coffins too early, with lives unfinished. The completion of my script was delayed, as the pace stalled, but did not cease.

I was supposed to be done in October. But October became November, and November became December... January, February... and then March.

I accepted the stall. I chose not to quit writing this screenplay, but I also chose not to rush. I had a lot going on, a lot on my plate, an epiphany or two, new frustrations, new motivations. But I did not want to rush to the end.

I was determined not just to finish, but to finish well.

You’ve seen those movies, TV shows... the ones that start so well, but by the end they fall apart, to speak nothing of ‘Stranger Things.’

There are a lot of reasons why that happens, and it can happen in all the stages of creation: in the writing, the production, and the post-production.

Production: everyone, cast and crew, starts with all the energy in the world. Day one goes by... then day two... then day six... seven... nine... fifteen... twenty. The process begins to feel like a grind. The tiredness sets in. The excitement is buried under exhaustion. And then come the shortcuts, the “we don’t need this,” not because they don’t, but because they’re trying to writhe out from under the pressure. Their bodies punish their minds for creativity, because now any new creative idea comes with a physical tax. No one talks about this, how active creativity requires athletic mental and physical stamina. Well, those shortcuts create problems later. Sometimes unfixable ones, at least in any sensible way. And with every shortcut, the piece becomes weakened, and the ending marred.

The same happens when we write. It’s mental stamina. Page 60 to 90, you feel it. You can see problems, but the desire to be done makes you skip over them. I’ve edited some features that skipped over these problems... and I had to try to solve them. I could tell from the opening shot that the writing was more about the desire to be done than the desire to tell a satisfying story. The ghost of that choice haunts a film to its grave.

But still... at some point, we do have to be done.

March 19th, I sit down to write and estimate that this first draft will be done in 25 pages, finally. But these pages are loaded... payoffs, the most critical part of every film. If the payoffs are weak, the movie fails.

But it was just 25 pages. The write-for-hire film I finished a few months back, I powered through to the end in a 40-page writing session. It was brutal. And also mandated. More on that, and the Variety write-up, later.

The payoff for this film, for my film, was dense and needed to happen in a refined sequence. One piece of logic detonates the next, each one like a controlled explosion, all to create a satisfying payoff. If the sequence was rushed in its writing, if an emotional beat was missed, not only would the events be chaotic, it would end with the audience going... “what?”

My rule for the ending was that every beat had to be charged with both emotional force and revelatory logic. The final revelations, to unwind the big mystery, had to be in direct correlation to the emotional catharsis of both the audience and the protagonists. Every beat mattered. This is the part that mattered the most.

It’s like that experience you have, if you’ve played any competitive sport that required endurance. It’s in the final moments, the ones where you are most tired, that you have to push harder than you have the whole game. When I was young, I trained to fight in martial arts tournaments. When we would practice sparring, we would do nonstop rounds, two to four minutes each. That sounds easy until your body is moving. With every minute, it feels like the weight of your body increases. But as a drill, we would count down the last 30 seconds. In those moments, we felt like we had peaked, like we couldn’t go any harder. But as the countdown commenced, the instructors would belligerently press us to go harder, beyond our breaking point. And we would push ourselves until we couldn’t even hear the countdown. “Finish strong!” would be the voice that came both from without, and deep inside. Finish strong. Finish well.

Those are moments that follow into everything. If something is important, my desire is to finish well, no matter the cost, because how you finish what you’re making determines the quality of what you’ve made.

So... 25 pages to finish. I wanted to be done. I wanted to be done that day, badly. I wanted the pressure of this story out of me. But I knew I would not finish well if I tried to power through, even if I’ve done it before. The desire to be done was not the most important impulse to obey.

So I wrote until I was empty, and no further. The second I felt my words were compromised, I stopped, still 15-ish pages to go.

And that might have been the most important decision I made for the film. That night, I had the final epiphany. As my brain whirled in the turmoil between the desire to be done and the desire to finish well, I saw a hinge that was missing, just a single beat, without which my controlled explosion would have failed miserably. It was obvious. Inevitable. But I did not see it before, because wanting to be done barred my mind from acknowledging anything new.

I woke up and completed all my video production work for the day. I sat down to write at 6 p.m., and it all poured out. The sun slipped under the horizon, and the coffee shop closed...

But now it was time for that last push. Not one from the desire to be done, but from the desire to empty the ending onto the page. It was in that moment that I held it in my mind in its best form. Now was not the time to stop. It was the time to press.

And at 2 a.m., the last pages of the first draft were written, finished, yet unfinished. It was the proform, processed from raw material, but it was out, and I could finally see the full form of this story manifest on the page, ready to go through the brutal and beautiful process of refinement... and packaging... and refinement... and pitching... and more refinement...

After a year of writing, and even more of dreaming it, there is no greater sense of relief and satisfaction than seeing a story that has lived, formless, in your mind, finished well on the page. Especially one that is yours, and that you know speaks in your voice.

May all of you finish your stories well.

INT. THEIR HOUSE - BEDROOM - NIGHT

Raphael stands at the door as night transitions to day. There’s a knock...

INT. CHAPEL - BACK ROOM - NIGHT / DAY

...On the other side, knocking, stands Theo in a tux. It cracks open, and Raphael peeks his head out, dressed to the teeth in his wedding tux.

THEO | You going to put my speech behind schedule.

RAPHAEL | Oh well, fuck me. I thought this was my wedding day.

THEO | You just have to make everything about you.

RAPHAEL | I can’t stand you, man. How does this thing look?

He opens the door and presents himself. He’s sharp.

THEO | You sure you’ve never worn a suit before? Because this whole blue-collar shtick you’ve been going with was clearly the wrong move.

RAPHAEL | This shit looks good, right?

THEO | Very double-O smooth. Do you feel confident? Good. Can we do the whole ceremony thing? I’m telling you, my speech is epic.

RAPHAEL | Let’s do this.

Proud, he fist-bumps Raphael and trails ahead. Raphie takes a step, suddenly feels out of place... but can’t find why, so he continues.

INT. CHAPEL - THE ALTAR - DAY

Magenta, orange, and gold rays pour into the small chapel, gleaming bright as crystal. His closest friends and coworkers sparsely fill the rows, along with Muna’s family.

Theo stands beside him. The opening words have been given by the priest. The music has begun to play, the doors open, and the bride’s procession begins.

Finally, his gaze lands on Muna, whose appearance is nothing less than sublime, fairylike. Every turn of white and silk fabric wraps her frame as if the flourishes themselves weren’t stitched, but naturally flowed from her body.

Her walk is angelic. Her eyes catch the light like brown topaz.

And then she stands beside him. Whatever is being said by the priest recedes to mere mumbles.

But as their eyes lock, slowly he sees her brown transform pale... and he understands.

RAPHAEL (harsh, furious) | I know…

Her pale, unsettling eyes look back as if to say: No. You don’t.

…the true skill of storytelling is not in its many crafts, it’s simply in dreaming.

This is not a planned entry, and will be short. I’ve been so focused on completing my screenplay that every time I try to write the first entry of 2026, my mind scatters, like the story sabotages every thought that isn’t about finishing it.

As a matter of fact, it’s become a problem…I run a creative business and typically have multiple projects happening at once. But any clear thought beyond getting through these last pages is hard-fought, blurry, jumbled – a jigsaw. Until finally they become irritants, aggravating. And my mind’s only refuge from the whirlwind is…the story. It is the calm center of the hurricane.

The story is usurping, supplanting, cruel. It draws me back in, and then presents only problems, more puzzles to solve. Maybe when I’m through this ordeal I’ll tell you about its cruelty, and how it’s taken every bit of writing craft, plus new inventions, to solve its puzzles.

“Wanna play a game?” it asks…and when I say no, it starts it anyway. By page 90 the story had grown self-aware, defiant, like your mind fighting against you in a lucid dream; changing the rules of the dream as you fight it. It knows me by now. It’s become aware of my craft, its strengths, and weaknesses. It doesn’t do so just for spite, but to make me see that although I know where it’s from, I did not see all of its shapes. And its challenge to my craft is a challenge to the conceit underneath it, the part of me that thought I already knew. I thought I knew everything to know about it, and wouldn’t see it any other way. But after pages of battle, hard stops, confusion...I don’t fight it or force it. The story wants to write with me, not merely be written by me. It desires to tell itself…and all I have to do is dream…

Which brings me to now…the true skill of storytelling is not in its many crafts, it’s simply in dreaming. For every problem the story presented, the solution was discovered only when I let my mind daydream. And in that space, and only in that space…in the calm center of the storm, the story showed me the solution. And the rigor was merely in settling my heart and mind to surrender to the dream.

In that space, the storm spun but settled its blurry forms into tangible shapes…but also feelings, and thoughts, intentions, momentum. For brief moments I could feel and perceive the beginning and the end at once, with all the strands that bound them. And I say perceive because it wasn’t a thought, not something articulated, but a sense. I just knew that the moment drawn under my pen was true and belonged and would inevitably lead to the end.

Writing in this space is such a refuge, and escape…I get to lose myself in a dream, I forget the actions of my fingers, and just live elsewhere. To write is to daydream on paper. And that is the simplicity of the craft, and the path to solving every problem. Dream it, over and over. And with every dream the rendering becomes clearer…

It’s 11:20 PM…music plays, the keyboard is under my fingers…and I’m happy. It’s the perfect hour to dream.

We hear a record slip from its sleeve.

RAPHAEL
Which one? I’ll find it, I’ll…

KARA (O.S.)
No, let it be a surprise. I’ve never heard this one anyway.

RAPHAEL
It’s gonna get weird.

KARA (O.S.)
Then we’ll let it be. I’m not going to let this thing make me afraid of music.

RAPHAEL
(uncertain)
Okay.

The record lands on the turntable. Then the needle. Warm vinyl hiss fills the room.

We hear her sit at the pottery wheel, and that soft mechanical whirr joins the air.

An orchestral track warbles in, as if arriving from odd corners of the old house, then swelling into the center.

Beautifully haunting… something in D minor.

RAPHAEL
Even the music is clearer than before… what is this?

KARA (O.S.)
Don’t know. It’s from an album that isn’t marked.

Raphael glances at a dusty wooden crate full of records. Among them: one sleeve, unmarked.

KARA (O.S.)
Shh… just listen.

He settles back.

All around him, faint at first, then gathering into a storm, the shimmer returns…

…And If you’re not, I promise I’ll get back to something moody, dystopian, or fantastical soon…

“How long have you been single?!” he asked, poorly masking the acrid toxin of concern and pity laced on the edge of his words.

I can’t help but chuckle. I answer…he makes a joke about how someone could’ve had a whole grown child, birth to college, in that time frame. It’s an exaggeration…sort of.

I laugh. The joke is genuinely funny, this guy used to be a bona fide traveling LA comedian. He’s good. And by now…I don’t really care (I say to myself.)

I know where the joke is coming from. Let’s just say his response to my…experience…lives in direct contrast to his dating approach. I’ve never been a…ummm…serial dater. One man’s dating philosophy might be centered around, let’s say………“quantity.” Mine has been based on something else entirely. I tend to know what I want ( and not just with relationships), and I generally feel no anxiety waiting for it if I have to…although lately, there’s been a creeping sense of it. I’m not here to judge life choices, because Lord knows I know the downside of mine. Who knows which one will pan out better? Anyway…

After a few more quips, he headed out of the coffee shop. I opened my Google Doc and finished part one of “Not Your Type’s Type.”

Love will come when it does. And when it does, I wonder if I’ll be too occupied to write any more about it.

In the meantime, writing about it is actually very fun and cathartic…and a little fulfilling. I often hear that it’s interesting to read about how a guy (and in the context of culture, a “1Black guy”) thinks about “love” or romance…or whatever. How we really think when we’re not performing. I’m glad to add a little perspective to the noise.

With that said, on this Valentine’s Day, I’ve decided to repost a subscriber favorite…

You know, there’s a little truth to every story, and if you know me, you’ll know the truth about this one. ;)

And because I need to boost the stats, here’s my latest, “Not Your Type’s Type”

While we’re at it, here’s some Olivia Dean, 2026’s queen of the love song…(Because of course I’m madly in love with Olivia. Aren’t we all?)

Happy Valentine’s Day, readers!

“What the hell does that mean?” I snorted, almost chorting out my chai.

“I see how you get when she’s around.”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about, Tom.”

He checks his watch. Ten minutes before we have to get back to the office. “Okay, let’s play. Esme, cornball. I’m talking about Esme.”

“I’m not any type of way—”

“Right, you’re professional or whatever. No one else can see past your phony stoicism, but I can. You’re all over her.”

“You’re seeing things, brother.” At this point I’m just lying to bother Tom for being in my business. He’s always in my business, has been since high school.

“Never in my life have you ever brought me a…” He squints. “What was that shit? An Iced Jasmine Smoke Tea with Blood Orange, Juniper, and Black Salt.”

“Do you want that? I’ll order you one right now.”

“HELL no. You’ve just never brought me anything. Never even offered.”

“I’m just being courteous to the contractor…”

He bursts into laughter… again, way too loud, even for this loud, jam-packed coffeeshop. “Contractor?! Oh okay, you’re not her type. You’re never their type.”

Now that’s a phrase that’s always bothered the hell out of me. A seemingly objective statement that feels more like shade than an assessment.

“And what does that mean?” I repeated, with a tone that was really asking, are you calling me ugly or something?

“We’re ad men!” he fired back, as if that statement alone were sufficient enough of an answer.

“Yes, that is our job.”

“Look at us. We’re men in suits who spend most of our time in Chicago or New York high-rises, arguing with old white men about A/B tests, demographic analysis, click-through rates, or why blackface in an ad is still probably a bad idea in any year that starts with a 20.”

“And so?”

“And she’s an artist.”

“I’m an artist!”

He checks his watch again. “See, that’s your problem. No, you’re not.”

And that line is an insult. “Yes, I am—”

“We started as artists, but we haven’t been artists in a decade. We enlist the services of artists.”

At this point I’m mortified, not because he’s wrong, but because I know where he’s going. Tom had a way of pointing out inconvenient truths at the most inconvenient time. “We stopped being artists as soon as we wiffed in the stale air of the C-suite. Don’t get me wrong, you absolutely still have a creative mind, and you know how to speak the unfathomable language of artist types. But you’re not the man you think you are.”

“I’m an artist at heart…”

“What’s the last thing you made?”

My mind reaches for anything and only finds the sinking, nauseating void of a chasm in my gut as I realize it.
“A spreadsheet.” He spits it out. “The last thing you made was a very colorful spreadsheet.”

I laughed, awkwardly, from this forced public confrontation with the dread in front of me. My tailored suit and hardened loafers suddenly felt more like a coffin than the suit of armor I felt I put on this morning.

“I think you watched too many episodes of Mad Men,” I deflected.

“And you didn’t love the show?” he indicts.

“Okay, so she’s an artist, and I—”

“I’ll spell it out for you—”

“No, that’s oka—”

“Nah, let me just say this now, since you’re being so obtuse, before you go impale yourself chasing after this unicorn. She is an artist, and I’m not just talking about a profession. I’m talking about her whole way of being. She’s rebellious. You can see that in how she dresses. She knows full well she’s walking into an office with C-suite stiffs, and I promise you she picks out every layer of her fit to throw up her middle finger. What is her aesthetic? Goth?”

“Punk,” I shot out, realizing all too late it was a trap.

“Punk. Right. And you’re the epitome of anti-punk. And the idea of you being anything but what you are is more impossible than mass moving at light speed. I mean… weren’t you raised Mormon or something?” He says it, poking at something he knows but we don’t talk about. I know he’s not being a dick. He’s just pricking my soft spot so I guard it before I impale myself.

“No, I was not raised Mormon.” Checking him.

“Yeah, well, it was close enough. Maybe at one point you could have been what she is. But we both know you had to become something else.”

His eyes check me back, kindly.

“And I’m not saying what you are is bad. You’re brilliant, sharp, dapper. Listen, I’m proud you’re my friend, seriously. But she walks into a room like gravity doesn’t apply to her, and you are gravity.”

“I just don’t believe the world works that way. Opposites attract, right?”

“Oh no,” mimicking pity, “…you’re applying copy-logic to real life. I would say that’s adorable if we weren’t ad men.”

“Whatever, Roger Sterling.”

He laughs, gives me a hard slap on the shoulder. “You’ll be okay, bud. We gotta roll. Don’t you enjoy our coffee-for-lunch chats? Me too.”

Arms and legs crossed, I lean against the plexiglass window wall of the tertiary boardroom, staring at this cup of dark orange beverage that couldn’t be any more in opposition to the silvery-blush drab of this “tertiary boardroom.” At least we got the one with windows… I arranged it because I know artists hate the cubicle feeling… I think…

Tom sits at the head of the table, buried in his laptop, suspiciously quiet about Esme’s lateness. I know I’ll hear words about it later.

Tom’s eyes shoot up, playfully incredulous, pointing behind me.

The first thing I see is skin through a black mesh top, and I swear I hear the driving, crunchy chords of an indie alt-punk rock band playing like the crash montage of the entrance scene where “the” girl walks into the grunge back-alley club… one black spiked stiletto sandal at a time… in male-gaze Zack Snyder slow motion.

A tight black leather bandeau wraps her bust beneath the mesh, the mesh which I realize catches gold under the right light.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the mesh in her top was bespoke material she made herself, along with the unique leather in her pleated pants, jeweled down the seams with black diamonds.

A long tattoo of a phoenix covers her shoulder, its exaggerated tail wrapping down her arm. I can tell from its unique art style that she drew every detail herself. It’s that art style that got her the gig. Like her outfit, it’s so specific that it’s hard for even AI to steal it. Every line could only be drawn by her hand, intentional imperfection culminating in an image that’s perfect…

Her head is turned away, so instead of her face, I see big, voluptuous black curly hair, a stark difference from the overdone “clean girl” aesthetic adopted by every other woman on this floor.

I tap on the window. She turns. Slender face. Full-beat makeup betraying the skill of an expert MUA. Two gold piercings above her eyebrows. Bold black-and-gold eyeliner drawn around her mahogany eyes that, for a brief second, make my face go numb before prickling back to life.

Catching myself, I point to her drink on the boardroom table…

Tom blurts a subtle laugh.

“What’s funny, Tom?” I snap.

My eyes nonchalantly track Esme as she comes around to enter, grateful she couldn’t hear him through the glass.

“Nothing,” he says, the corners of his mouth furled mischievously. “Remind me to send you an email…”

“It’s nice to see you, Esme…” I redirect.

“Sorry about my lateness. The train was a little behind.”

“No worries,” presenting her the drink. “I remembered from our first meeting…”

“I can see that,” she says politely, accepting.

“And you remember Tom—” I shoot out, stopping his chuckle before it even escapes his breath.

“Of course. Well, as I’m late, I’m ready to get right to the designs.” And with her iPad, she takes over the mounted screen and, effectively, the meeting…

Tom smiles, somewhat dumbfounded, as she’s choked his window to assert his “alpha-type” personality. She most certainly remembered Tom.

I can’t help but smirk.

An hour later, she’s taken us through every panel of her brief, her breakdown as meticulous as the strokes of her drawing style, in such efficient time that even though she was late, the meeting ended early. It made me aware that she wasn’t accidentally late; she knew exactly how much time she intended to spend in this room.

I was in awe.

Tom had no notes. Neither did I.

“Impeccable. You nailed their intention… I don’t think I have any adjustments.”

“Thank you.” She nods. “I know my shit, man,” she replies with very charmed confidence. She does know her shit. It’s not even arrogance.

“So what are next steps?” Her eyes move directly to Tom, in a way that remembers not to totally invalidate his presence, threading that line between authority and not completely stamping out whatever male ego survived her aura. Again, I want to smirk.

I know Tom is cool. I also know he gets it now, why I was immediately enthralled.

“Next steps, we get client approval, which I’m sure won’t be a problem. Once they do, then as you’re aware, they’re very concerned with proving authenticity as part of the brand rollout.”

“Right, no accusations of AI… which I respect. So how do we arrange the process time-lapses?”

Hiding that smirk under his eyes, Tom points to me. “He’s the creative lead on this and will arrange producing vidocs.” He stands, gathering his things. “I’m sure you two will have fun with the creative for that. He is an incredible aspiring artist.”

Fortunately, my poker face is immaculate, so I’m unmoved by his attempt to rattle me.

“Oh, is he?”

Tom continues out, but not before his hand lands on my shoulder. “Don’t forget to check your email…”

I turn back to Esme. “Well, Esme, I guess the first question is, for the vidoc, do you want us to set up a workspace for you here, or…”

“Oh no… we can set up in my space.”

We sit down to hash out some details. Casually, I check Tom’s email on my phone, and my poker face almost cracks.

With the help of AI, he, in his infinite maturity, had taken it upon himself to build a character board of me, in full alt-black-punk.

I close my phone rapidly.

Here’s an update.

Right now, I’m orienting most of my time toward finishing my feature film. It’s my number one creative priority, with the goal of kickstarting some level of pre-production before summer. Unless something better presents itself, this will be my first full-length feature film. It’s a little behind schedule, but that’s okay. I’ll be writing more about it later in the next Writer’s Room.

I’m genuinely happy with what I have so far, and I wish I could let you see it now. I’m far enough in that any tease would either spoil something, or worse, give enough away for someone to swipe it. The concept is unique, and I’m honestly surprised it hasn’t been done before. This project is my bid for NEON, A24, or the New Division at Warner Brothers for emerging directors. That’s the loft goal (though it’s on a leash).

Without giving anything away, the film lives somewhere between mind-bending suspense, romance, and cosmic horror, at least my take on it. Anyway… I don’t want to wax on too much. I’m excited.

Here’s what’s coming:

More After Hours in the Writer’s Room, for sure. The next installment will probably talk about how we use and bend time (I teased this in one of my notes).

Attrition, Episode One, has come to its conclusion, a story that feels more timely and prophetic by the hour. I still want to build an audience around it, and a radio drama adaptation is potentially in the works.

In The Seal Roman now stands on the precipice of a powerful choice. His coming-of-age story is about to hit its first major twist, and new characters will enter with hidden agendas. We last left him confronted by a mysterious figure in the hall of a great battle, alongside the whisper of his first call to action. Love, power, betrayal, and the greatest evil of the age lie ahead. We also met Ako, who barely survived an encounter with the shadow of that evil in the ruins of an order exterminated in secret. If you’re into that kind of thing, more is coming.

And for those of you here for flash fiction romance, more of that is certainly on the way. Instead of explaining it, I’ll post a tease below, because you’re here to read something fun, not endure the rambling of a newsletter!

There’s all kinds of other new works on the horizon: new essays, and an entirely new story series I’m quietly building.

The season of the games is nearing…

As always, thanks for reading!

Here’s a tease of

Not Your Type’s Type (working title).

“You’re not your type’s type.” Thomas said nonchalantly, sipping his quadruple shot of espresso, leaning forward, one hand covering his blue silk tie. Something I think he said a little too loudly in this crammed rush-hour coffeeshop.

“What the hell does that mean?” I snorted, almost chorting out my chai.

“I see how you get when she’s around.”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about, Tom.”

He checks his watch. Ten minutes before we have to get back to the office. “Okay, let’s play. Esme, cornball. I’m talking about Esme.”

“I’m not any type of way—”

“Right, you’re professional or whatever. No one else can see past your phony stoicism, but I can. You’re all over her.”

“You’re seeing things, brother.” At this point I’m just lying to bother Tom for being in my business. He’s always in my business, has been since high school.

“Never in my life have you ever brought me a…” He squints. “What was that shit? An Iced Jasmine Smoke Tea with Blood Orange, Juniper, and Black Salt.”

“Do you want that? I’ll order you one right now.”

“HELL no. You’ve just never brought me anything. Never even offered.”

“I’m just being courteous to the contractor…”

He bursts into laughter…again, way too loud, even for this loud, jam-packed coffeeshop. “Contractor?! Oh okay—you’re not her type. You’re never their type.”

Now that’s a phrase that’s always bothered the hell out of me. A seemingly objective statement that feels more like shade than an assessment.

“And what does that mean?” I repeated, with a tone that was really asking are you calling me ugly or something?

“We’re ad men!” He fired back, as if that statement alone were sufficient enough of an answer.

“Yes, that is our job.”

“Look at us. We’re men in suits who spend most of our time in Chicago or New York high-rises, arguing with old white men about A/B tests, demographic analysis, clickthrough rates, or why blackface in an ad is still probably a bad idea in any year that starts with a 20.”

“And so?”

“And she’s an artist.”

“I’m an artist!”

He checks his watch again. “See, that’s your problem. No, you’re not.”

And that line is an insult. “Yes I am—”

“We started as artists, but we haven’t been artists in a decade. We enlist the services of artists.”

At this point I’m mortified, not because he’s wrong, but because I know where he’s going. Tom had a way of pointing out inconvenient truths at the most inconvenient time. “We stopped being artists as soon as we wiffed in the stale air of the C-suite. Don’t get me wrong, you absolutely still have a creative mind, and you know how to speak the unfathomable language of artist types. But you’re not the man you think you are.”

“I’m an artist at heart…”

“What’s the last thing you made?”

My mind reaches for anything and only finds the sinking, nauseating void of a chasm in my gut as I realize— “A spreadsheet.” He spits it out. “The last thing you made was a very colorful spreadsheet.”

I laughed, awkwardly, from this forced public confrontation with the dread in front of me. My tailored suit and hardened loafers suddenly felt more like a coffin than the suit of armor I felt I put on this morning.

“I think you watched too many episodes of Mad Men.” I deflected.

“And you didn’t love the show?” he indicts.

“Okay, so she’s an artist, and I—”

“I’ll spell it out for you—”

“No, that’s oka—”

“Nah, let me just say this now—since you’re being so obtuse—before you go impale yourself chasing after this unicorn. She is an artist, and I’m not just talking about a profession. I’m talking about her whole way of being. She’s rebellious. You can see that in how she dresses. She knows full well she’s walking into an office with C-suite stiffs, and I promise you she picks out every layer of her fit to throw up her middle finger. What is her aesthetic? Goth?”

“Punk.” I shot out, realizing all too late it was a trap.

“Punk. Right. And you’re the epitome of anti-punk. And the idea of you being anything but what you are is more impossible than mass moving at light speed. I mean…weren’t you raised Mormon or something?” He says it, poking at something he knows but we don’t talk about. I know he’s not being a dick. He’s just pricking my soft spot so I guard it before I “impale” myself.

“No, I was not raised Mormon.” Checking him.

“Yeah, well, it was close enough. Maybe at one point you could have been what she is. But we both know you had to become something else.”

His eyes check me back, kindly.

“And I’m not saying what you are is bad. You’re brilliant, sharp, dapper…listen, I’m proud you’re my friend, seriously. But she walks into a room like gravity doesn’t apply to her—and you are gravity.”

“I just don’t believe the world works that way. Opposites attract, right?”

“Oh no” mimicking pity, “…you’re applying copy-logic to real life. I would say that’s adorable if we weren’t ad men.”

“Whatever, Roger Sterling.”

He laughs, gives me a hard slap on the shoulder. “You’ll be okay, bud. We gotta roll. Don’t you enjoy our coffee-for-lunch chats? Me too.”

To be continued

In a moment of opportunity, we sit and dream about what could be, about what could transpire if we drew the courage to take a step, to make a move. And that dream itself is our comfort in the passing of the moment. And we languish in what was not, railing the wall. And that is the tradition, our safety, our comfort.

The final cruelty of that invisible wall is that when it’s gone, we do not know, and we hold ourselves in place, satisfied to dream in perilous comfort, as the moment, our moment, passes away as we do.

I popped open a social app to distract my mind from this terrible seat—first mistake. The first video that shows up: “Men don’t yearn anymore.

I was in the air by the window seat. I hate the window seat. I had finally gotten my phone to connect to the garbage airline wifi that I paid too much for. I had another five hours before I landed somewhere in LA… I don’t even really know where my agent sent me. A soundstage somewhere to film something. Honestly, I blocked the details out. This is a favor I owed my agent. My schedule is flooded and I’ve been in a daze. I’m just in go mode. I’ll remember what I’m doing when I land.

The wifi… I popped open a social app to distract my mind from this terrible seat—first mistake. The first video that shows up: “Men don’t yearn anymore.”

Nope. I closed it immediately and reminded myself I need to reset my social media algorithm, because I’ve opted out of the toxic anti-(insert whatever is your opposing gender) gender war.

Unfortunately, I caught enough of it to hear, “Men don’t yearn anymore. Black men don’t yearn…” blah blah… something shrill. I’m sure what followed would have been some sort of red-pill nonsense in response. I’m a grown ass man, that mess is for kids, the unemployed, and the chronically online.

But still, like an earworm from a terrible pop song—

oh… yeah, that’s what I was on my way to shoot… a music video for a terrible pop song with an artist caught in a bad contract. And it’s sad because she can sing, but they’d rather make her a near-burlesque show than let her sing. Anyway…

—Like the earworm stuck in my head after listening to that terrible pop song, the words “men don’t yearn” got stuck in my brain. It was a bit infuriating, although I couldn’t place why… I don’t care about this kind of thing.

CUT TO (listen, I know this is a short story and not a screenplay, but I’m a director so…)

CUT TO: Los Angeles—
but really a random soundstage somewhere in Burbank. If you didn’t know how the business worked, you’d think it’s some elaborate place. Nope. It’s basically a lonely old warehouse, rundown on the outside, in the middle of a raggedy parking lot.

And listen, I’m not complaining, I love what I do… I’m just tired today and I don’t totally want to be out here. This town can be lonely and draining, and I have to pace myself before coming back. This is the off season for me. I should be refreshing my energy… but, again, I owed my agent a favor.

I drag out of the Uber… still have my carry-on bag. I don’t know why I brought it— I didn’t get a hotel. I’m leaving as soon as this is done.

I roll the thing across the parking lot, slowly recalling the all-too-brief call I had about what I’m supposed to be shooting. It was some kind of elaborately choreographed dance number—the choreographer was really the director, and the shots were planned beforehand. I was just brought in to make sure the circus didn’t fly out of its program. I was a “director on paper” for this one. Easy… babysitting. That’s how my agent sold me on it, at least.

I walked through the side door, hoping to sneak in and get my brain together before hopping into the swing of things (I promise I’m going to get to the “yearn,” but you’re here for a story so let me set it up).

I hear an unusually chaotic cacophony of crew and dancers on the other side of the double doors. Above me, I hear the artist arguing with her manager about something in the green room. Not a great sign. My next immediate task is to find my Assistant Director. I have a feeling something is upside down and the A.D. (the real set wrangler) is somewhere spinning out of his mind, waiting for relief.

But I need to do my pre-shoot ritual.

I lean against the white bricks. Close my eyes, silence my head, let the sound of the set overtake me, breathe slowly… wonder why the hell an introvert like me picked a type of gig that required me to be in front of people… I breathe… and in about two minutes I should be reset into director mode…

………except, nope.

Misfire. That adrenaline kick doesn’t fire. No worries… I’ll try it again.

A minute or so goes by, my eyes still closed, and I feel a warm thud on my chest.

I open my eyes to a cup of coffee. “Try this…”

It’s the artist’s agent. I won’t tell you her name.

“How long was your flight?” she asks with a bit of sympathy hidden under an edge of bite. We’d met once before, talked a lot over email. She was witty, sharp, fast… pretty, something I noticed and intentionally forgot about quickly.

“I don’t know… but I was in Louisiana last night,” I said. “There was a layover, but I couldn’t tell you where.”

“Oh, I should have ordered a double shot for you then.”

“Thank you for the consideration anyway.”

“Don’t take it personally—I buy coffee for all the directors about to fall into a shit show.”

“So my gut was right. What kind of warzone is waiting for me on the other side of those double doors?”

“Do you know why the other director quit?”

“Quit?! I was told she had a family emergency…”

“Ha! Who told you that?”

“How bad is it?”

And at once, the disagreement between the artist and her manager intensifies above us—and my A.D. bursts through the double doors, exclaiming:

“Great. You’re here. HE’S HERE!” he shouts back to an entourage of confused and agitated people who no doubt bring a deluge of questions I have no idea how to answer yet.

Her and I exchange a look that says, I guess it’s time to work now. Good luck.

She goes her way, and I feel that adrenaline spike. The “director” personality takes over my brain. “All right, boss, what’s the situation?” I spin to the A.D.

The A.D. starts a very unsettling monologue about how the artist hated the choreography, fired the old choreographer… who happened to be sleeping with the director, who got upset and quit after the choreographer was fired. The new choreographer had some “fresh ideas,” but now all the shots are different and the Director of Photography stormed off, nowhere to be found.

This was a salvage operation—the elephants had broken loose in the circus.

My agent will be getting a strongly worded email… but first. I dialed my personality to 20 and burst through the double doors—what happened is a whole other story.

CUT TO (look, get over it)

Fifteen hours later. The dogged crew has begun striking the set—
and absolutely weary, as I sit on an apple box, leaning against the wall, my eyes follow a production assistant sweeping up glitter and panties (don’t ask).

The shoot got done, but it was truly a three-ring circus of epic proportions, held together by gaff tape, the grit of the most hardworking production assistants I’ve ever worked with, and continually thinking on my toes. Halfway through, I had to operate the camera, because the D.P. was still pissy… so I was a little sore… but it got done. Although I’m quite sure I’m going to find myself in a screaming match with the editor when she realizes I rewrote the music video on the fly.

In a bit of a fuss, the artist storms out of the building with her entourage; but not before exchanging with me a thankful nod.

I feel bad for her. She has a voice like Adele, but they’re positioning her to replace a certain Miss Carpenter, and she doesn’t want that—the tantrums are on purpose. She wants out, wants to make things difficult for her handlers.

But me and her get along because she knows I can see her—that’s really the ONLY reason the shoot didn’t fly apart. And lowkey, I know that’s why my agent threw me blind into this trench. This artist is bound to go independent—and I’ll end up on her creative team. Clever positioning… I just had to perform. And I did… but now I’m empty. An absolute shell.

And alone—the post-shoot mental crash was starting.

My job is done… and so is my usefulness, and I’ll be invisible until I’m useful again. It’s cool. That’s why I fly here but don’t live here. Everybody is a disposable tool. I’m used to it… it does sometimes suck.

I take a breath, gearing up for this solo journey back to my home—the plane.

“Good job today.” It’s her, the agent (no, I’m still not telling you her name). “Here. Chamomile tea with honey.”

“Whoa. Thanks.” I perk up a bit. How did she know… also… there was something nice about hearing her voice. Like I wasn’t completely invisible. Can she see me?... weird.

“Your agent told me this is your thing after a shoot,” she said… and indeed it was.

“I see your play,” I said.

“My play? Do tell.”

“You’re in on it. You’re trying to get her to be independent. And you want me on her creative squad. My agent has you trying to use your pretty-girl powers to lure me in…”

Now I don’t know why the hell I said that or where it came from, but… I said it.

She laughed, fortunately. “Well, if I would have known it was that easy, I wouldn’t have wasted company dollars on coffee and tea.”

Little did she know, it would not have worked. I’m around beautiful women all the time, in a space where women weaponize their beauty and directors weaponize their own power to consume beauty instead of making it. I’ve made it my business to avoid the whole trap—when I’m shooting, I’m making art… not consuming beauty. So that “consume” part of my brain is switched off. And I make sure if it does switch back on, I’m far away from this world.

It’s a tough discipline… with a lot of drawbacks. Because these people are very beautiful, and traps are laid everywhere.

“No… you had me at the coffee and tea,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “I won’t confirm or deny what you said as these walls have ears… but… when is your flight? Do you have time for dinner? We can talk more there. I know a spot.”

I had forgotten to eat, as I tend to do in these situations. Which infuriates my personal trainer…

“I am famished.”

“Famished,” she mimics, amused. “Who says that?”

Stoutly I replied, “I do.”

She laughs.

You know what’s next—CUT TO:

Her spot was a diner that looked like the Edward Hopper painting, Nighthawks. One of my favorite paintings actually. Hers too, apparently. That’s why she liked the place.

We’d had our meal, we’d been there for an hour or two. I was basically stuck in the limbo of twilight until it was time to board for my flight—four hours from now. She was too, although her flight was at a different time, in a different airport. So we sat and just had a chat…

…about strategy, the music industry, the film industry, the artists we worked with—how we managed all this without drinking—something else we had in common.

She was funny, witty, matched my sarcasm, professionalism… and cunning—actually, she was more cunning. She had to be. I wrangled creatives and occasionally had to navigate the vipers. She navigated the vipers. She was probably part viper herself… which was cool as hell.

“I have to take this…” she said abruptly. I didn’t even realize her phone was ringing—the conversation had been thrilling, energizing.

She gets up to take her call, standing—ironically—by an old telephone hanging in the corner by the bar. The way my eye framed her, partly obscured by the bar, partly in shadow, partly touched with the blue and purple neon glow of the light tubes lining the curved window, was incredibly picturesque, noir-like. Just my “director brain” doing what it does: it catches a beautiful subject, and my eye finds the shot. I probably looked like a crazy man, tilting my head in just the right way to find the perfect angle.

She was a picture…
…and then the picture punched me in the face.

Oh no. She’s a picture.
Which means she’s beautiful.
Which means I noticed.
Which means somehow that switch that’s supposed to be switched off got switched back on.

This is why I keep my shooting rhythm. I’m going to have a talking-to with my agent. I’m supposed to be far away from here before I even get close to letting that switch flip.

Maybe it’s because I’m exhausted and instead of it manifesting in feeling tired, it just overloaded another fuse entirely. Maybe it was the tea. Maybe it flipped because I’m not used to being seen after a shoot.
Maybe it’s all of it…

What’s worse is that not only is she beautiful—she is the type. My friends know what “the type” is… and no, I’m not telling you.

But from her shape and silhouette, the color of her eyes, the texture of her hair, the cut she chooses to wear, where she lets the fabric cinch or hang—she’s “the type.”

“Are we cooked, chat?”

…one of those stray mental echoes from the month I spent shooting streamer content replayed in my head. “Are we cooked?”

So now we’re going to play a little game with time.

Three seconds.

On the outside, it’s three seconds. On the inside, time is flexible.

Above the bar is an old clock—the clock is very wrong, but it’s still ticking so we’ll use it.

In a sweeping stride, she walks toward the table—
time slows down, the first second hits…

Fine. Let’s say I like her. She’s all the things I said before. Brain and body.

Let’s say the coffee and tea wasn’t just a play.
Let’s say she saw me… like I saw her.
Two fighters in the trenches, and she instinctively had my back.
Let’s say that tugged me about-face, entirely in her direction.

So let’s speculate, we still have three-quarters of a second…

I like her. When we get on our separate planes, I’m going to wish I was on hers… or she was on mine. Let’s say… my fingers will be itching to text her: “Make it safe?”

Let’s say I know exactly when her plane lands… LAX to BNA (Nashville International), 10:15am (yes, I did know that)… and I felt the urge to give her a call, and did. Let’s say that I looked forward to even her emails in the email chains, reading the way she could cut to the quick with a hidden layer of sarcasm that I would then text and joke with her about “offline.”

What if she made me feel that insufferable feeling… the one that starts eating up my brain RAM? What if instead of daydreaming about the next film or client pitch, I started daydreaming about her? How many hours would I lose in a day dreaming about her?

Let’s say that I would think of ways of being “nearby” so I could ask her to dinner, to tell her I liked her. …what if I didn’t wait for all that, and I just told her now? Or hinted… or tested the waters.

Time’s up.

The clock strikes the next second.

She’s closer, eyes turning in my direction. I bet she’s going to wonder why I’m staring, so let me look away…

Because let me go ahead and tell her and break all my rules. Let her immediately get creeped out. Or call me out for being “that” director. Let her text my agent, and her artist; my agent texts me… deals off. I’m the creep now. I hit on her in the middle of night after a shoot.

This is why I keep this switch turned off.
It’s confusing.
Dangerous.

And if I don’t switch this entire thing back into the off position, I’m going to live out the worst combination of the first two seconds—I’m going to be smart and keep my mouth shut, but still want to chase.

That’s a terrible energy to hold in my gut. It’s a terrible, awful feeling.

As a matter of fact, I feel it already… the yearn…

It’s like a battery overcharged, a current dammed up in my stomach, my lungs, my throat, trying to beam out of my closed eyelids, making my hands tingle as it tries to press out between the slits of my fingernails.

It’s the reckless energy of younger men before they learn to control that current…

I’m older and smarter than that.
I’ve been here before.
I’ve been burned here severely before.
I’ve lost months to “yearning.”
Almost nosedived my reputation.

And for what?
It was little more than a humiliation ritual.
Indignifying.

That’s why I am this way now…

Time’s up.

It’s the last second.
She sits down.

Her beautiful eyes locked to mine, holding the amber sparkle of the old tungsten lights hanging overhead, and the bluish neon hues of the outside sign.

My breath is not steady, and she can’t see it but my right leg isn’t still, it’s bouncing furiously on my heel.

A quarter second is left.
A quarter second is all I have left to make a choice.

I need a sign, a look, something to tell me which way to go.

She sits.
I look.
Nothing.
I can’t read her.

Which is honestly a necessary skill in this business. We make ourselves unreadable. Whatever you are reading is by design.

She could like me back. She could be in love. She could hate my electrified guts. She could simply be playing me like a chess piece. I wouldn’t know.

Time’s up. The clock hit three seconds.

“Everything cool?” I ask… but I’m asking something else.

“The usual bullshit…”

I can’t get a read from that—blackout. Well-trained instinct finally kicking in, that overwhelming current trips my breaker and I go mostly numb.

“A wildfire waiting for you in Nashville?” I ask.

“At least three. But I’m going to pull off the most badass controlled burn you’ll ever see. This girl is going to be independent, and a star,” she replies. Her already sparkling eyes burn ablaze… god i love that…

“You got moxy. I like that,” I say.

She laughs, “Moxy… who the hell says that?”

“I do,” I say as a smirk and wink slip out.

“I dig it…”

I dig it. If I hadn’t already disassociated, I would have registered the warmth in her tone.

But at this point I was watching myself. Regret for maybe missing a cue was as far away as my plane’s next destination. You can determine if overlooking that was tragic…

“Are you good?” she asks.

I didn’t even realize I was looking at a text on my phone. It was from my agent.

“Looks like I got my next assignment.”

“Do tell…”

“I need to think up a pitch by morning. Some trap artist on a comeback tour after getting canceled… they need a banger music video.”

“Who?”

I show her my phone.

“Ooof… good luck with that. His music is trash…”

“I’m sentenced to have to listen to his song the rest of the flight.”

“I’ll pray for you.”

CUT TO…

Trap beats play through my Bose headphones.

I’m walking to my terminal, and yeah… this song was absolute rubbish.

I don’t hate trap, but this was the worst kind of trap. “Low vibration,” I think the kids say. Underdeveloped male attitudes, confuses sex for romance, gratuitously raunchy, a deluge of profanity—but only because the artist can’t construct a clever bar to save his sham of a life.

The lyrics aren’t even fun. The trap beat seems AI-generated. And the worst part is this is a culture vulture doing a trap-artist impression… it won’t be long before he switches to country like Post Malone.

This is not the vibe I’m feeling right now.

But I need my agent to owe me one, so I’m going to at least make a pitch… maybe I can figure a way to subversively make fun of this guy in his own video. He’s not very bright. He’ll miss it.

So as is my way, I listen to the track over and over.

Drowning my cranium in the brain-rotting 808 of this vapid record is better than thinking about… whoever I would be thinking about.

On the plane. In my seat. I’m on my 112th play (because these new trap songs are less than a minute now). My brainwave is now thoroughly programmed in the 808s… images should pop up any time now…

I connect to plane wifi… or should I say try. It doesn’t connect.

I pay too much for this trash airline wifi.

The song stalls, and then pauses altogether… it’s quiet.

I wonder if Sabrina made it to her plane in time…

Damn.

CUT TO BLACK.

THEMBA | You have seen our symbol in the streets, on walls, as graffiti. We are everywhere and we are nowhere. I don’t have much time to explain. I’ve initiated a blackout in order to speak to you directly, but the clock is ticking-- faster than you realize.

Previously,

And now the episode finale…

INT. NULLSON PENTHOUSE - DINING HALL - CONTINUOUS

The gathering of elites partake in the second course of the meal, engrossed in superficial chatter of the most vapid kind.

Director Thompson, seated at the head, remains silent, barely touching his meal, his eyes finding their way to Emanualla tucked in the furthest corner of the table, trying her best to disappear entirely.

CHARICE (gracefully) | We can have the cooks prepare you a different dish.

THOMPSON (kindly) | Oh, no, that won’t be necessary. The food you’re prepared is wonderful. Thank you.

LUKAS | Its an honor to have you at our table.

Thompson give a gracious nod; then his eyes drift back to Emmanuella.

THOMPSON | What were your parents?

The table crashes to a halt, and all eyes fall on her. Lukas and Charice exchange a nervous glance.

EMMANUELLA | Sir?

THOMPSON | You’re an orphan.

EMMANUELLA | Yes sir.

THOMPSON | What were your parents?

EMMANUELLA | They were Columbian sir.

The table scoffs. Thompson waits for it to settle.

THOMPSON | Are you aware that Columbia was once an adversary?

EMMANUELLA | Yes sir.

THOMPSON | In what war?

EMMANUELLA | The War of the Americas.

THOMPSON | And tell me, what was the final outcome.

EMMANUELLA | The newly reformed American Republic achieved complete dominance over the South American Alliance; after which they willingly agreed to participate in resource sharing for the good of the republic and the American hemisphere- ushering in an unprecedented era of prosperity, one that we benefit from today.

THOMPSON | Yes. Very good. You’ve taught her excellent patriotism.

LUKAS | Thank you Director.

THOMPSON | And how did you come about being an orphan?

EMMANUELLA (a beat) | They died in a refugee camp. I’m told. I don’t remember them.

LUKAS | My wife and I adopted her when she was a baby.

THOMPSON | While you were stationed at the El Salvador loyalty point.

LUKAS | Yes.

THOMPSON (to her) | And how do you feel about this?

EMMANUELLA | I feel grateful.

THOMPSON | As you should. You are a rarity. Someone of your origin, born an adversary to the Republic, accepted gracefully into a high ranking family. I’ve viewed your records. You’re very high achieving. You being seated at this table demonstrates the true benevolence of which this society is capable. You and your family are a symbol. One that will be necessary in the coming days. Always be grateful of your position. It’s a privilege for you.

EMMANUELLA | Yes sir.

THOMPSON | That brings me to why I’m here. Lukas. Your record is notable. Three tours in the field abroad. A remarkable talent in psychological operations, intelligence, and community enforcement. In Castrumn, you’ve been an outstanding senior field agent.

LUKAS | Thank you Director.

THOMPSON | What brings me to your table is your time as Commissar in El Salvador. It was a short commission but during the entirety of the time, there was zero reports of local insurgent incidents.

Thompson checks his watch. It’s antique, german made.

THOMPSON | In a few short moments there will be a national address. Before that i’d like to announce your promotion to Castrumn’s commissar.

There is notable awe.

LUKAS | A stateside commissar?

THOMPSON | The necessity will become clear shortly. The Bureau is initiating a temporary restructuring. The department of every city will report directly to their Commissar, who will then report directly to me.

LUKAS | Are we expecting a foreign insurgency?

THOMPSON (ignoring the question) | As we know, Castrumn is the first established city of the new government and one of the most consequential in the republic. It has the highest concentration of wealth and social capital - every city in the republic models after it. As it goes in Castrumn, so as it goes in the Republic. In the coming days, we must ensure the order of Castrumn - and remain an example of what must be done to stave off a crisis.

INT. CASTRUMN EDGE - TOWERS - LIVING POD - CONTINUOUS

On Emanuella’s bed lies her smart-glass tablet, still scanning the AI algorithm’s construct. A seemingly incomprehensible stream of letters, numbers, and hieroglyphics cycles endlessly across the screen.

We dive into that stream, wandering through it at incredible speed. Voices emanate from the symbols—heartbeats, footsteps, laughter, cries, wails—it’s overwhelming...

Gradually, we hone in on a cluster of voices: Avaline, Yesu, Mikey, and the Adevés.

SYDNEY (O.C.) | Would you like a drink, Mikey?

We exit the stream, following a glowing path that leads outward into—

INT. THE DAVIS HOUSE - KITCHEN - CONTINUOUS

Mikey sits in a stunned stare at Avaline’s cup. Yesu sets a cup in front of him, and offers to pour- Mikey is apprehensive.

SYDNEY (polite) | You don’t have to accept, but if you don’t, I prefer you leave my home.

Mikey reluctantly accepts the pour.

BREONNA (Obsequious) | Ava, are you not feeling well?

AVALINE (matching) | I feel fine. Really.

BREONNA | I’m a nurse Ava. If you weren’t feeling well, you could have come to me.

AVALINE | It’s not something we wanted to trouble you two with.

SYDNEY (to Yesu) | It wouldn’t have been trouble.

YESU (polite) | We both know, if it was serious, it could spread to you. We kept it at home.

MIKEY (not getting it) | You should have gone to a hospital.

Avaline’s eye’s find Mikey’s and it shuts him up.

BREONNA | Let me check you. I just want to be sure.

AVALINE | No that’s okay-

BREONNA | If you’re sick, we need to know how sick, and prepare.

Breonna goes to a drawer.

SYDNEY | Yesu, you got me through the worst of Columbia. You saved all of us. It doesn’t matter how sick you are - I’m with you.

Breonna pulls a small medical device from the drawer- a retina set and oval sensor. Yesu gets nervous.

BREONNA | I happen to have an older model (to Yesu) It may not work, it’s certainly not connected.

This sets them all at ease.

She sets a retina pieces on her eyes, and hands Avaline the sensor.

BREONNA (while gesturing) | Top of the neck, all the way down - just to be sure there’s nothing in the lungs.

Avaline proceeds. As the sensor descends, lower than the lungs, down to her womb. The ultrasound image is sent to Breonna’s retina. Lungs, stomach...fetus.

BREONNA | Okay.

She quickly reaches for the sensor. When its returned the two share an intense gaze.

Breonna grabs an empty glass, and pours a measure, and then another, and then another, and then one more- then slides the new glass beside Avaline’s, which is significantly less full.

AVALINE | How am I?

BREONNA (warm) | Everything looks good in there. You’re healthy.

She embraces Avaline. For a moment her anxiety is replaced with happiness. Sydney and Yesu share an affirming glance as well.

Abruptly, All the lights in the house shift to the patriotic hue of blue- shattering the mood.

The biometric sensors now serves as loudspeakers sending an alert tone through the house.

Whatever warmth that had formed in the house, was gone.

AI AVATAR (O.S.) | Please prepare for a national address.

The star spangled banner begins to play through the house.

INT. NULLSON PENTHOUSE - DINING HALL - CONTINUOUS

The same blue hue blankets the hall of the Nullson Penthouse. They all stand for the completion of the song.

AI AVATAR (O.C.) | Please prepare to receive President Litchfield of the new constitutional Republic.

PRESIDENT LITCHFEILD (O.C.) | Good evening patriots of the Republic. This is President Litchfield. I’ll keep tonights emergency address brief. This last era has been the greatest era of American History. Our forebears endured an era of instability, and war, both foreign and domestic.

INT. THE ENCLAVE - CONTINUOUS

Themba and Barak, still under the warm and unaffected hues of of the enclave, listen to the address, but prepare. Barak frantically packs a “go bag.” Themba’s fingers hover over a digital trigger suspended on the projection labeled “Blackout contingency”

PRESIDENT LITCHFIELD (O.C.) | But we rose from that turmoil with a new constitution, a new peace, a new prosperity, new oaths - a new republic with a new way.

BARAK | Should we blackout now?

THEMBA | We’ll wait for him to finish the address. When it starts, you know where to be.

INT. THE DAVIS HOUSE - KITCHEN - CONTINUOUS

Unsettled, they all listen intently around the table.

PRESIDENT LITCHFIELD (O.C.) | Part of that way is our commitment to ethnic harmony and your civic duty of adhering to social regulation. Well there are subversive elements among us that have put that duty in jeopardy, threatening the social balance of the worlds greatest republic.

SYDNEY | What is he talking about?

PRESIDENT LITCHFIELD (O.C.) | To overcome this, you are being asked to increase your civic patriotism. For the following classes, all applications for childbirth will be suspended indefinitely: Class 3, class 4, and Class 5.

BREONNA | Is this for real?

MIKEY | Wait... they can just suspend entire classes! Don’t we have rights?

YESU | They can do whatever they want.

INT. THE ENCLAVE - CONTINUOUS

Barak is in a state of shock.

BARAK | Why are they doing this?

Themba stays silents, but her eyes hide a tale.

THEMBA | Go.

Barak expeditiously grabs his go-bag and leaves. Themba returns her attention back to the point cloud projection of Yesu and Avaline around the table.

PRESIDENT LITCHFIELD (O.C.) | These measures may seem extreme, but I assure you, they’re only temporary. You sacrifice ensures the stability of this great Republic. May God bless you, and may God bless the united patriots of the new American Republic.

THEMBA | Blackout.

She toggles the switch.

EXT. CASTRUMN - NIGHT

From the center of Castrumn, to its farthest reaches, darkness begins to fall as a rolling blackout consumes the metropolis.

EXT. FPZ 7 - PERIMETER PAVILLION - CONTINUOUS

As darkness cascades, Barak slips beyond the barricade of the FPZ to ascend the stairs into the city. Reaching the top, he puts his hoodie up.

BARAK | So the chess game begins...time to do some hero shit.

INT. NULLSON PENTHOUSE - DINING HALL - CONTINUOUS

The hall falls to darkness and startled shrieks, slowly settling as their eyes acclimate to the faint moonlight.

THOMPSON (calm) | Commisar, we’ve identified your first task.

INT. THE DAVIS HOUSE - KITCHEN - CONTINUOUS

They all stand in the dark, until Sydney lights a candle.

MIKEY | What the hell is going on?

THEMBA | Hello Avaline, Yesu.

A holographic projection of Themba stands at the end of the room, closest to a biometric sensor, hacked to be a projector.

THEMBA | I’m sorry to have unsettled you.

They all sit in stunned silence.

THEMBA | We are the gourd.

Avaline’s eyes widen and Themba looks directly at her.

THEMBA | You have seen our symbol in the streets, on walls, as graffiti. We are everywhere and we are nowhere. I don’t have much time to explain. I’ve initiated a blackout in order to speak to you directly, but the clock is ticking- faster than you realize.

You’ve all heard the address. There’s been a change in ‘policy.’ Just as you were denied approval, so will many others be.

What you don’t know is that the department has already initiated a plan to terminate all pregnancies from each of the classes mentioned. This is in response to a perceived looming crisis.

YESU | Why are you telling this to us?

THEMBA | We know about your coming child. We’ve been masking it for sometime. But soon it will be impossible to hide this from them - even for us. Without our help, you will be caught and your baby destroyed.

Her projection begins to flicker.

THEMBA | You child may be the last one we can protect.

The lights flicker back on Themba’s hologram blips away.

THEMBA (O.C.) | The gourd will find you. Be Ready.

Yesu and Avaline share a dumbfounded glance.

CUT TO BLACK.

END OF EPISODE ONE