Crescent Moon Seen through the Trees against a Tar Black Sky | Alexander T. Damle

            I’m walking through the darkened hallways of my house. I can’t sleep. I never can, so I just walk, sometimes grab a snack, read a book, but mostly I just walk, an endless circle, until I pass out from exhaustion. My uncle left me this house. He didn’t die, he just left. We didn’t really talk, but I’m not sure he talked to anyone. So I’m walking through this house - I guess it isn’t really mine, but it’s so big and old now, it can’t really belong to anyone. It has a mind of its own, because every night when I get home from work, it’s bigger and darker, and it seems less and less like a home. Fish bowl. Doll house. Jail cell.

            So I’m walking through this place, listening to the wind outside, my feet padding quietly on the hardwood floors that seem to cover this entire story - I don’t know which story. I think I know how to get to my bedroom from here, but that’s not much help. I was looking for the kitchen, but now I’m not. I’ll find it, or I’ll find another one, and the cupboards and the fridge will be fully stocked. I hope they have cake.

            I see something out of the corner of my vision, crouched in the frame of a door, sunspot eyes peering out at me, its features harsh, jagged, protruding at strange angles, and I feel its teeth through its closed lips. I turn to it, turn my flashlight. Always a flashlight. It’s too hard to find light switches when I come to new rooms, plus I’m always worried in the light I won’t like what I see. I turn to it and it isn’t there, but I decide to go into the room it was looking at me from anyway, and I find a kitchen. I open the fridge and see a large Black Forest Cake, raspberries and all, completely fresh. I find a knife, cut myself a slice, warm it in the microwave for thirty seconds - I always like my cake warm. When I take a bite, the jam oozes out and I see my face reflected through a window, the jam on my chin as blood, and I wipe it away with the back of my hand, wash it in the sink. My flashlight goes out, but the kitchen isn’t so dark for the moonlight pouring in. I turn to look for a lightswitch, and the creature is standing there in front of me, full height, easily six feet, and it opens its lips and its teeth are jagged and I’m paralyzed by fear.

            “I’m Gabriel. I’m not so bad. Don’t worry. Now the rest?” The thing’s voice is male, midwestern, 40s, 50s, calm.

            “The rest?” What else to say?

            “Oh, sure. Sorry, I have to go. You shouldn’t turn on the light though. You won’t like it.” My flashlight flickers back to life, and Gabriel is gone. As I prepare to leave the kitchen, I look again out the window, for I no longer feel the moon’s gaze on my back, and through it I see a spider the height of houses, but rather than the black eyes of a spider, it has the soft blue eyes of a girl I once knew. One of its long legs reaches out towards me, and as I see it hurtling towards the window, I see thousands of hairs, sharp as edges, broken mirrors. The leg rips a hole in the side of the house, and I feel a sharp pain in my gut, put my hand down, it comes away bloody. I fall to the floor, see my lower half, waist down, tossed off across the room, tendrils of gore, half my stomach, spilling out below me, intestines strung out between my torso and my legs, across broken glass and shattered brick. I close my eyes against the coming pain, stomach acid, bleach stained orange juice, slaughterhouse, guts.

            I wake up in bed, the sun filtering in through curtains a hundred years old, the flavor of tangerines, my alarm clock bleating away. I get out of bed, look out the window, see across the yard to another wing of the house, notice two dozen square feet of wall crashed inwards. After I shower and dress, I call a contractor and tell him he’ll just have to see it for himself.

            I find the kitchen with the hole in the wall, assess the damage. The fridge is still in tact, the cake still on the top shelf, now missing two slices. I cut a third, boil up some coffee, and eat a rather unhealthy breakfast while looking out at the vast and empty forest behind my house, think of the cake.

            The drive to work is cloaked by a low hanging mist, trees close in on the sides of the road, winding slowly without clear purpose down out of the mountains, towards where the city used to be, but now only emptiness and the factory seem to remain, as punishment for our ignorance.

            I’m the engineer, she’s the builder. The rest of them are gone. We can finish this without them. On the west wall, spelled out in sprawling pink, neon cursive, is “Kishi and Kurosawa Electronics.” The factory only has one room, exempting the bathroom and the basement, and it’s the size of a hangar for an AN-225. It used to be full of people, buzzing, pulsing. New designs, new prototypes, new ideas. When the basement opened up though, everyone kind of left. I don’t know why, but, like I said, we have this taken care of. Now, it’s just our two desks, and a table in between where we build and re-build, refine and begin again. It sits there, a black box, such perfect black that you can’t see it without the lights right on it, hooked up with a single braided cable into each of our computers. She arrived there before me. She’s an early riser.

            “So, what do you think?” She’s not one for pleasantries.

            “I think we’re almost there.”

            “Yeah?”

            “It almost works.”

            “What do you think will happen we turn this on?”

            “We’ll know.”

            “Know what?”

            “Whether He exists.”

            “He needs to. Without him, we’re done.”

            “What do you mean, done?”

            “Fucked, hosed, terminated, gone. They’ll close the factory, and then we won’t have anywhere else to go. None of us.”

            “The basement will still be there.”

            “Keep your damn basement.”

            “The basement is how we know He’s there.”

            “Why?”

            “Everything has an opposite.”

            We work through the morning largely in silence. I know we’re almost there this time. A couple days, two, three, tops. Then we’ll know. Really, the knowing doesn’t matter. If He doesn’t exist, then, as she would say, we’re fucked. If he won’t help us, then we’re fucked. If we can’t get the box to work, well then we’re just as fucked. But I know it will work, and I know He’s real, and I know He’ll help us. At 1pm, we take lunch. She eats outside, staring out at where the city used to be, and I eat in the basement.

            The basement is smaller than the factory, the size of a community pool. The walls are exposed concrete, and in the middle is a gaping hole, walled in what looks to me to be coagulated blood. A sweet, rotten stench wafts up from the hole in warm breaths of air, and occasionally the passage of it brings rippling, wavering sound, like a theremin played too close. One day I threw the core of an apple into the hole, and it spoke to me in a language not quite English. It asked why I threw just the core, and I said because I ate the rest, and it told me it liked the flesh, just like the rest of us, so the next morning I brought it an apple and it thanked me. We talk now. I once told it about the box but it got angry when I explained it. The walls started to rattle, then I realized it was the very earth shaking. I apologized, and told it the next morning I would bring it a tuna fish sandwich, and it apologized for getting angry.

            Today, after I finish my sandwich, I take out a tupperware with the rest of the cake, tip it down the hole.

            “I guess you two are close?”

            “I... I thought you didn’t want to hear about it?”

            “I’m curious. I like your sandwiches and I don’t want you to leave.”

            “Yeah, we’re close.”

            “You know, I was his favorite son once. I certainly hope he’s still there.”

            “He has to be. You are.”

            “And look at me now. Eating tuna fish sandwiches is the highlight of my day. The eternal torture of the damned isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

            “I imagine it would get dull.”

            “It’s not even that - I just wish once in a while someone would love me, you know?”

            “Awh, don’t say that. I love you, man.”

            “Thanks. It means a lot. Really.”

            Work that afternoon is slower, but still progressing, and that’s what matters. As long as we don’t stop. At the end of the day, as we’re going out to our cars, the sun just set over a still blood tinged horizon, I see something peering out from underneath my car, vicious claws wrapped up around the edge of the metal, and as I step closer it pulls itself out and stares at me. I look to her, but she doesn’t see it. The thing stares straight through me, and its eyes are deep and hazel and haunted, and I can see its been crying. Its arms hang down to its knees, and it’s desperately thin, drawn out fashion model, clothes to fit into, runway strut, and as I pull out of the parking lot, I see it turn to look at my car. Then it gets down on all fours, and it starts running towards me, its elbows snapping up above its back, moving fast, too fast, Veyron fast, cheetah fast, stage four, metastasized cancer fast, and I put my foot down, shoot off back into the forest.

            As I pull up in front of my house, the contractor is walking back to his truck, and I greet him.

            “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I’ll be able to fix that just yet.”

            “Why?”

            “You’re going to need an exterminator first. There are spider eggs all over that room.”

            “Oh.”

            “Yeah, it sucks, I know how that goes. I can give you a number for a guy I use if you want?”

            I take the number and leave it on the counter of another kitchen, promising myself that I’ll call in the morning. Now though, it’s getting late, and after last night, I don’t want to leave my room until day break. In the fridge I find some pasta. I stick it in the microwave and take it to my room to eat, but I can’t find my room, which is strange because I can always find my room. I start to eat the pasta out of the bowl as I walk because I don’t want it to get cold. I don’t know what I’ll do if I can’t find my room, there are no other beds in the house, just kitchens and bathrooms and drawing rooms and living rooms. Music rooms and libraries and home theaters. Rooms without a purpose. In the basement I once found a room nearly as big as the factory, but with a low ceiling and nothing in it, just cement walls and floor and ceiling. I’ve never found it again and I’m glad because it also had no door.

            I wander through the halls for what I know are hours. Every time I pass one of the big, gothic windows, moonlight cut in little shreds through trees, the lattices, I hurry past and avert my eyes. I know the spider is gone but there are far worse things in the night. Once, I pass the door to the kitchen from last night, and I think about going in and inspecting the eggs, but I worry I’ll let something out, and I don’t want that.

            The carpet in this hall is patterned with ornate roses, and in its center, away from all the windows, it is raised up in the shape of a man, and then he stands, and all the roses begin to bleed, and he walks towards me. His eyes are green and sad, and he looks as if he wants to scream, but he has no mouth. One of his carpet-patterned hands swipes out towards me, and I feel thorns rip through my skin. I turn to run, but I’m faced again before me with a creature that was once a man.

            Now, though, much of its bare flesh is covered in blood and pus and writhing maggots. Where once it had an eye, now it has a socket, and in the socket is a twisted together mass of worms, and I decide to take my chances with the walking carpet, but when I turn the carpet is gone. I run down the hallway as fast as I can, almost tripping over a giant tear in the center of the floor, but I make it through a door at the end.

            The room is completely dark but for the beam of my flashlight, despite the huge bay of windows along the wall I just came in. I scan around and I see dozens, hundreds of old pieces of furniture under throws. Couches, chairs, tables, some chandeliers rusting on the floor, rust spreading like a virus, a light dusting across the scarred hardwood floor. At the room’s center lies a grand queen bed. I check my watch and see that it’s already past three in the morning. After I pull the dust cover off the bed, find it fully made, pillows and all, I strip down to my boxers and fall asleep before my eyes shut.

            You wander through a forest, trees bearing down on you, watching you as a teacher watches a child in a nursery. You know it must end because all forests end, but the witch at the beginning of the place told you there was no end.

            When I awaken, I can hardly see but for the stars above me, and I find myself on a bed of pine needles rather than goose down. My boxers now bear the addition of a three piece suit. Trees all around me. I look about in fear, and as I do, one of the trees becomes an incredibly thin man, twenty feet tall. Spindly legs start to walk towards me, back held totally straight. I start to run, afraid of tripping over a branch or a rock, raising my legs high. In front of me through the trees I see a mansion, illuminated, atop a small hill, and I realize it’s my home.

            I break the tree line and begin a mad dash, for, when I turn around, the tall man is still following, loping, lagging gait. Through the windows I see lights, through all the windows and all the lights, people lit up, all dressed beautifully, old suits and gowns, dancing, laughing, singing.

            Through the front door I burst, and everyone stops moving and talking and looks at me with a bitter silence. Then, after a few moments of looking, they return to their dancing.

            Everyone lines up for a reel, and I’m compelled to join them. A five piece band plays an old dance tune that everyone here knows even me, but I know I’ve never heard it before. We dance like the devil is on our heels, and as we dance I see the tall man staring in through a window. When finally we stop, a man, short and handsome, gets up on stage and suggests we all sing an old song. Someone asks which one, and he just replies “The Oldest.”

The Oldest Song

Quick odyssey, don’t malign

The truth to a riddle you do not know

The philosophy of the yarn

The soothe to the end we must sow

Bloody monotony grand design.

We juggle and fight and in this we fly

Bodies quarrel with soul, naked and bloody 

Constant struggle reenacting the Marne

All morals obfuscated and muddy

Head guggled, and we fuck until my cock runs dry.

(Chorus) La... la la la la... ladiddy da... burn in hell... pay your dues... la la la la... diddly dee... From the knife... comes the stillborn fetus... la la la la... laddidy da...

We dress up the little old lady

A hen in virgin’s clothes, 

Then repossess the sky, the great bird comes

And then we all sing to the rose

Then transgress her away till she’s but a baby 

Then abet them out long  

Your childless gods

Voices sextet become the ancient drums  

Your violence and inhibitions naught but frauds

And let be heard the Oldest Song 

(Chorus) La... la la la la... ladiddy da... burn in hell... pay your dues... la la la la... diddly dee... From the knife... comes the stillborn fetus... la la la la... laddidy da...

And let be heard the Oldest Song

            Then everyone, all these guests, dozens, they all pull out knives and set upon each other, wolves on a child left alone to die in the woods. A beautiful redhead lunges towards me, but I start to run. As I make it to the top of the grand staircase, I turn to see the tall man come through the door, back bent almost perpendicular, and I start to run again. This time I find my room immediately and fall asleep, fully clothed, completely and totally beaten.

            In the morning all in the house is returned as it should be, no sign of last night’s horrors. Except, that is, for one thing. Instead of a shower, in my bathroom I now have a bath, but I can abide this, I suppose, as long as no one tries to kill me.

            I strip off my clothes and climb into the warm water. It occurs to me that the last time I actually took a bath, I wasn’t ten years old. I appreciate the relaxing warmth, the clarity, of the clear water. I close my eyes and lean my head back for a moment. When I open them, the redhead from last night is in the tub across from me, her body naked and perfect. On her face is a smile straight out of the movies, but her eyes are sad, a million miles away. She leans in close to me, and I feel her breasts brush my chest, then she kisses me and I feel my cock harden between my legs. I look down, and see blood pooling into the water. I look back to her and her face and chest are covered in deep knife wounds, flesh sagging under the weight of its own annihilation, blood seeping out, then a chunk of her forehead cracks and falls from her face, revealing brain beneath, wet and sticky, and her smile turns to a frown. I leap out of the tub.

            When I look back, the bathtub is a shower again, and when I look down at my body, my skin has been cleansed white as alabaster.

            On my drive into work, the skies, bright blue upon my awakening, quickly turn a claustrophobic grey, before descending from the heavens and socking my car in with a thick fog, such that I can barely see the trees on either side of the road, or indeed the asphalt a half dozen yards ahead of me, my headlights swallowed up into the blankets of low hung hyper-humidity, and I see the earth that we lost when the energy ran down in between that obfuscation, but also the promise of the future that we may build, if only we can get the box to work.

            We spend the morning working in silence because we both know that we are almost there, just a few more hours, and we’ll have something. And then we’ll know. And neither of us really wants to discuss what happens then.

            I take my lunch in the basement.

            “Let me ask you, my friend, why are you so insistent on contacting Him?”

            “Well, I guess it’s the only solution that I really see as being left.”

            “Since you ran out of energy.”

            “Yeah.”

            “Why do you need energy?”

            “Because without it, we’re all falling apart.”

            “How can you be falling apart if you can bring me tuna fish sandwiches every day?”

            “The seas will last beyond us.”

            “You don’t eat tuna, do you?”

            “No, not usually.”

            “You’re more of a BLT type, am I right?”

            “Yeah, definitely.”

            “The lettuce, the tomatoes, they will outlive you?”

            “Yes.”

            “And the pigs?”

            “Of course.”

            “Then why?”

            “I rather like existence.”

            “Oh, it isn’t so great. Plus, any answer He gives you, you aren’t going to like.”

            “I can’t just give up. I need to know.”

            “Yeah, I guess I get that. Say, you have any more of that cake?”

            In the afternoon, neither of us can be silent for the clinical air hung with nought but the memories of all those who built this place is becoming oppressive, as the fog. I shift through the lusts and fears of our quest towards creation, look for an end point beyond the dotted line to work us towards.

            “What do you think about the quantum cerebrex?”

            “That may be the root of our problem, we just need to fix the rambergetion synthesizer, rebuild our teflon connectors.”

            “Maybe if we speed up the audorino c-moss spinner, it will force the box to recompile the cleft configuration tables.”

            “That’s an idea, but what about the cherseslav capacitors? If we mess with the configuration tables again, they will not be happy.”

            “What do you mean they won’t be happy?”

            “You remember what happened last time, we blew a full set of capacitators, had to run on backup pcp-contin for like a month while we waited for a new shipment to come in.”

            “There isn’t going to be a new shipment this time, is there”

            “No. No, I suppose not.”

            “So what do you want to do?”

            “The epsilon coding, if we re-align it to more perfectly match the zanat chips, that might prevent a quertic redundancy, make the whole thing go through properly.”

            “And then we talk to God.”

            “And then we talk to God.”

            I design the re-alignment, she builds it into the box on the table. The sun is fast sinking in the sky, and in the dust I feel a hazy break, the snap crackle of autumn leaves under foot, but you’re the leaves. We agree to wait till the morning to test the thing, maybe both considering the grand wonder of one more night’s easy sleep before the truth betrays all that we have forgotten in the false dichotomy of a search for god in this world. In the parking lot as the sun falls the rest of the way behind the hills and the perfect dark of a starless sky takes hold, I ask her if she wants to grab a drink with me, but she makes her excuses and excuses build their own dream logic.

            When I arrive home, I think again of escaping the creeping horrors of my night-halls, and plan to go straight to bed, but first I must find something to eat, and the only kitchen I can find after what feels an hour’s wandering is the one with the broken wall and the spider eggs.

            I try to tip-toe around the spider eggs, through the tulips, daffodils, warm spring morning, but as I approach the fridge I feel a sickening squish beneath my foot, and I look down to see a broken egg, the size of my fist, and then around me all these white, sticky fists start to pop, on cupboards and walls and floor, pots and pans left out by someone not me, all over, and a smell rises like burning canola oil.

            Spiders swarm around me, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, a writhing, screeching mass, ebbing and flowing, trash on the surface of a pond, forming together and apart second by second, millions of skittering little feet, and I see some start to crawl up the legs of my jeans, and I break for the door. In the hall the spiders follow me, faster than I’ve ever seen a beast the size of a quarter move, even in the darkest depths of my waking nightmares in these halls.

            As I run towards what I hope is my room, the spiders still they follow, and then out of closed doors emerged cracked and broken figures, lips all split in Glasgow smiles, blood and pus seeping out of festering pores, maggots and flesh made as one. They reach for me, and I reach away. Then the spiders behind me move with a great motion, the sound of waves deep beneath the sea, and they are on the figures, swallowing them up in a mass of legs and eyes.

            In my heart is a great relief. In the spiders I have found the solace I’ve so long sought in my late night wanders. The next door I enter is a kitchen, whole, in its shining 2001 monolith refrigerator a grand steak, cooked medium rare, steam still rising in its heat, paired with a side of potatoes mashed, a reminder of a childhood in the summer sun. The next door I walk through is my bedroom and I sleep the best I have in time immemorial.

            My next morning is like all next mornings, a routine long and well practiced, a structured order from point A to B, bed to shower to clothes to breakfast to work, but today’s final point is different, for today we shall know, and as soon as we know, this all ends, and we shall have to begin again, in a world fundamentally made anew.

            Upon leaving my car in the parking lot, I make the same walk I make every day, the same footsteps upon hot asphalt, the same cracks and crevices, broken pieces of man-made stone. The same crystal blue sky under a hot beating sun. The same airplane hangar as my final destination for the same reasons and the same end goal, the same fundamental act of creation as an understanding of creation, a point among the void, a guide amongst the ether. Upon leaving my car my day is the same as so many days before, and yet it is not, for today we shall find the truth that man has sought since he climbed out of the sea, since he grew legs, and developed what we now call thought, since the first of us died for love, today we will know and, with the truth just around the next blind corner on a midnight highway through the mountains, I would rather not know, I would rather the mystery contained itself, kept itself to the dark void of death’s great unknowable, but still though I have to know because there are some things that once you see the door, you must open, and with this I open the front door to the place, feel the recycled blast of air conditioned oxygen, feel the compelling, intimidating suggestion at the impossible inherent in a place as endlessly vast as this. I feel it, and I see the black box sitting at room’s centre, and I know that, as Schrodinger’s Cat, I now know, and don’t know, god exists, and he is dead, we have a future, and we are damned. She’s already here and I smile at her as she watches me walk through the door, and she returns my smile with a reluctant grimace at the truth we must now confront.

            “Ready?”

            “No.” She looks down at her desk, now cleaner than I’ve ever seen it. I set my lunch on mine.

            “Do you want to do the honors?”

            “No.” She looks back up at me and her eyes are green where once I only saw in black and white.

            Once, a girl and a boy met on a bridge over a little brook in the springtime. The sun was shining, and behind the gentle babble of water on rock, birds croaked out on love, and the boy put his hand on the small of the girl’s back. Then they kissed. They spoke slowly to each other, words passing as the wind past their eyes. In the autumn the girl would go away, and the boy would be left behind. The next year he would go to that same bridge in the hopes of seeing her again, but he would never see her again, for indeed now the brook ran with flame, and where once the bridge was a polished stone, now it is a cracked and rotten wood. Where once there were birds, now there are only screams.

            I look to the box on the table and I fall into the black.

First there is nothing, then the universe folds out around you, flower petals a bright gold. It is nighttime in the desert. There are a million stars above you in a deep blue sky. The sands around you are the tone of young leather, a hundred miles in every direction rising up to meet the foothills of leviathanic mountains. In front of you is a road, perfect black tarmac, hot yellow line, and behind the road an old neon sign flickers out “24 Hour Diner” with no more creativity than that flat declaration, and behind the sign is a diner, formica and chrome and more neon, rounded edges, Happy Days reject. Inside an old guy with wrinkled, pockmarked skin cleans a glass. You walk up to him.

            “Can I get a chocolate milkshake and a cheeseburger?”

            “We’re closed.”

            “The sign says you’re open 24 hours.”

            “It’s the 25th hour.” You look at your watch, and indeed it is 25:32. Then I hit the power button.

            The box whirs to life with a gentle squeel, high pitched, destructive, theremin out of tune. I look at her, and she’s looking eyes stapled, box’s reflective surface, chrome counter top. Then a harsh crackle comes from the thing, and a voice, middle aged midwestern woman, chosen to be universal, speaks.

            “We’re sorry, the number you have dialed has been disconnected or is no longer in service. Please hang up and try your call again.” Then the box clicks and powers itself off and I know it will never power on again. She looks at me and there are tears in her eyes. Then I can’t look at her any more.

            In the basement I look for answers and he won’t even answer me, but I know he’s there because something has to be. I stumble back upstairs, empty space, light refracting in strangely through the skylight, rain storm on the edge of the desert, swirling clementine pallor. By the box her head lays on her desk, back of her skull blasted away, blood everywhere, smell already beginning to set, iron and sulphur mix with the buzz of flies settling in for what will be a long lunch. By her left hand is a big chrome gun, as the diner, and it reads “Desert Eagle .50,” old movie memories.

            I drive home fugue state, pine trees roadside glaring through windows of my car, highway patrol, abandoned stretch of interstate. It’s still not even lunch, and I feel the day ending with the year and the eon. Around a turn I see a deer fifty feet down the road. I slow down but it doesn’t move so I stop. We look at each other for half an hour.

            When I get home I know something is wrong, but I don’t know what till I walk through the door, and all is shrouded in spider webs, thick, clinging, hanging, holding, a cage from within. I touch one and my hand sticks and I have to work to pull it away. The house is totally dark, as pitch. I think it’s just the webs covering the windows. I work my way to a window, pull out my pocket knife, cut away some of the webs, and outside is the shade of death. Spiders skitter around on all sides of me, three dimensions, and I see more eggs tucked into corners, webs covering the furniture, every footstep an effort. I can’t see more than a few feet in front of me, and I know I must turn on the lights.

            I work my way to the basement, childhood furnace a monster clawing its way through my memories’ dark corners. I find the breaker box, and I throw the breaker. From the darkness I feel something surging through the house’s bowels, pushing, rushing, charging forth, demanding to set itself free. The single naked bulb of the basement clicks on, an anticlimax. I climb the stairs.

            At the top of the stairs I find myself on the house’s top floor. Then I hear a sucking, squelching sound, and something is melting through the spider webs, and in the house’s new found light, I look closer. Flesh, melted together, faces and eyes and hands all melded and moulded into one slithering mess of vomit. I feel the soles of my shoes melting into flesh, and I look down and sad and angry eyes look up at me. All at once the house begins to move, shift up towards the heavens, but not evenly, with the lumbering motions of a beast awoken after a long sleep.

            I look out a window and see below me that the entire house now stands on legs, chicken legs 200 feet high, and I feel queasy, lost, confused. Then all at once the faces in my walls and floor and ceiling begin to scream, an infanticide moan, and I feel my ears cry out for an end. There is a floor to ceiling gothic window on one side of the room, and I run at it best I can with the flesh of the floor holding me down. I feel my body crunch through the glass as a brick through the window of a police car, and I feel myself fall, a body from a burning building.

            When I feel myself hit the ground I know not even death can save me, and when I look up from wet grass I see the house settled back into it’s old position, looking at me like a dog looks at it’s master, hung himself from a crossbeam.

            I know I get in my car and I know I drive back to the office, but I don’t see it and I don’t feel it. All I remember is the carcass of the deer where I left it by the side of the road after I ended our morning staring contest.

            Through the empty space of the factory I rush, eyes shut against the truth, the very proposition of seeing the box again, of seeing her lying there in her own blood, but now I hear the flies above my own beating heart.

            Into the basement I rush. I stare at the pit.

            “I’m sorry I didn’t answer you earlier. I was occupied.”

            “How... how can you exist but not him?”

            “Tell me, are you such a fool as to believe in love?”
            “...No.”

            “I don’t suppose you brought me a tuna fish sandwich?” I look in my hand and see a brown paper bag. I take out two sandwiches, throw one to him, open the other, and begin to eat.

            “What do I do now?”

            “Well, only you can know that. But way I see it, you got two choices.” I finish eating my sandwich, then I walk over the edge, and I feel my body fall into the pit, more floating than truly falling, a freedom, an out. I hit the ground and my legs snap like twigs, and I feel a few inches of water, set heavy with mold, scent unknowable, all around me. It is black even though I only fell for a few seconds. I wonder at the light from the basement.

            “Hey.” The devil.

            “Is this hell?”

            “No. Sorry, I haven’t been completely honest with you. I’m not the devil. I’m Michael, the janitor from back when Kishi and Kurosawa was fully operational.”

            “What?”

            “Yeah, funny, right? And you know all those people from the company who disappeared? Well most of them had the same thought you did, after talking to me for a while. Jump in the pit, save yourself by going to hell. Hilarious, right? And every time they’d land, break their legs, I’d beat them over the head until they died. I’ve been surviving on their flesh. That, and your sandwiches.”
            “No...”

            “Oh, yeah. Don’t worry, my legs were broken too, healed up in the wrong direction, so now my foot is by my ass, but I can kind of shuffle around. Plus my eyes have gotten used to the dark.”

            “So there is no...?”

            “What do you think.”

            Then he won’t talk to me, and I can hear something pull its way through water thickened by blood and cast off flesh, and as it approaches me, I pull my arms ‘round myself. Then it’s a few inches from my face, and I see bright eyes glowing out from the darkness. It pushes me and I feel my head hit concrete, my mouth and nose are under water, I try to struggle but I don’t, I feel the air leaving me and with it the life. But then I get a hand on my attacker’s neck, and I push my way through, sharp fingernails, lazy, grab hold of what I find inside, pull it out, blood rushing to get through the hole. I hear the body tip backwards, fall into the water.

            That’s when I realized I’m trapped here, just the smell and the mold and the bodies. And then I see a figure with jagged lines and white eyes approaching me in the darkness.

Home | Theland E. Thomas

And then he goes home, but all the houses look the same, and he’s not sure if he’s arrived at the right one even when he settles into bed. He looks out the window at the leaves swaying in the gentle breeze, and he thinks maybe I should go out, I’ve been trapped inside all day, but then he wonders what he would even do out there, and he’s pretty tired anyway, so he rests his back against the wall. He’s gotta find something to do in the time between now and sleep, so he turns on the TV and flips through a few channels, and then he turns off the TV and tosses the remote away. Then he sits with his hands in his lap for a few seconds. Then he scrolls through a few contacts on his phone thinking there must be someone he can talk to or text, but there isn’t anyone, and that’s when the loneliness begins to set in. All of his friends have gone away and left him alone, and he decides this is not a healthy train of thought, so he goes for a walk to lift his spirits.

It’s too bright, so he wears sunglasses, and it’s too quiet, so he listens to music, and it’s too chilly so he wears a jacket and the sidewalk is lined with trees. He noticed a long time ago that the natural design of this neighborhood is just designed to look natural, and the trees are plotted precisely, and the path winds around and around in one big circle, the perfect length to get your mind off of things. But the music he plays is sad, and it stirs resigned loneliness - a kind of lamenting, languishing loneliness whose pressure compounds and breadth expands with each passing day. A kind that seeks no resolution, only perpetuation. He follows the path left and right, and when he comes home he doesn’t feel better, so he sits down and thinks there must be someone I can talk to, but no one will really understand what he’s saying, they’ll just impose their own reality on his or trivialize him with well worn wishes because they don’t know what to say or it’s the only thing they can say, and he doesn’t really understand what he’s saying or how to say it anyway, so it just remains undeveloped and festering.

He opens up an anonymous app on his phone and thinks about posting something, but no one cares that teen angst doesn’t end in your teens and anonymity is meaningless, and sometimes you’re anonymous even when they know your name. So, he sits thinking about choices, steps, missed opportunities, and missteps, and the girl he should have dated and the girl he shouldn’t have dated, and the girl who’s already dating someone else, and how everything ended with him here alone watching the light outside die again. And then he thinks, these choices don’t matter and maybe nothing matters, but then why does it all matter so damn much? And then he grits his teeth and squeezes his eyes to hold back the wave of feelings, and it works, but it leaves him feeling empty and suffocated.

The light is gone, and he curls into bed, and closes his eyes, but the darkness doesn’t bring sleep, instead it brings the void, so he opens his eyes, but it’s just as black out here, so he closes his eyes again. And he’s so lonely, he thinks he might pray, but God doesn’t hear him, and if he does, he’s not saying anything back, so he stops and stares toward the wall. At night, the other side of the world is awake while he lays still in bed. Night creatures and party animals creep and frolic while he lays still in bed. His phone restarts while he lays still in bed. And he doesn’t end up sleeping, and before the sun rises, he showers and gets dressed and goes to work and pretends to be alive for other people, and they don’t care, and he doesn’t care, and he just thinks about how many hours left until he gets to leave, and then he smiles and waves goodbye, and then he goes home.

Ramberget | Alexander T. Damle

            You lay in bed. Warm day, sun, blue sky. It crosses your mind that you should go outside, take advantage of it. You won’t. When you wake up, all you can think about is how much it hurts. It doesn’t matter why, it always does. So you just lay there for a while, try to work up the courage to do... something. You can’t. White bed sheets. You check your phone so see if - but no one did. You grab your headphones, put on music. That song. It doesn’t matter which one, there’s always that song. It exists and it is all that exists. At least for those few minutes. Then there is nothing. White bed sheets. Blue sky. Her face, her little laugh, all fever dreams, a headache, could have beens.

            You try to think back, what happened last night, try to remember if you at least enjoyed yourself, if maybe the immediate, driving emotions that drew you back from the veil of sleep were just your mind’s tricks, if maybe things are good, but things aren’t good, that’s not how it goes, not now, not ever.

            You lay in bed. Nurse opens the curtains. Tells you how beautiful it is out. Sunny. Blue sky. You can’t see. Your ears still work, and everyone tells you to see the beauty in the small things, her voice, young and pretty, like someone you once knew. You still have your hearing, and you still have your memory. Such a gift, a memory. Recollections of youth, a better time, a beautiful, grander, faster, more romantic time, before you got broken, before your hurts overwhelmed you, stole your soul. You see her face. You ask yourself why you didn’t get out of bed when you could, why you didn’t feel that sun beating down on your face when warmth still meant something.

            The nurse puts on the song for you. That song. It still doesn’t matter which one. Memory is suggestive. This song is years and years of the forgotten, her, so many hers, names and pretty faces, laughs, so many years. What you were supposed to be, what you were supposed to do with your life, left undone in a different fate, undone under the guise of sanity.

            Her voice speaks to you through the hours, one date, not much, nothing to really worry over, but you do. That day it was cold, raining, and you just talked, just talked for hours, long into the night, forgetting yourself, tick of the clock, darkness falls, finally you make your excuses, and you think maybe things are changing. Things don’t change, least of all people. You lay awake for hours and you think of her, you think of her and you think of other things, but mostly you think of how she could make you feel, things went a different way.

            The nurse used to ask you why you never had any visitors, but she’s learned to not bother. She’s done this job long enough to understand that some of us just don’t live the sort of lives to leave behind visitors. She hopes she’s not one of those, when she gets here someday, though, of course, she hopes she never gets here.

Long shift. The guy at the end of the hall finally cashed in. The one who always asks for that song is still hanging in though. He’s doing okay, you don’t quite know how anymore. You drive home and the city lights sparkle about you, and you drive into the suburbs, around a million others on the same trajectory. Pull into the driveway. Warm summer night, crickets, murky, humid air. You open your front door, your three year old runs up and hugs you, you kiss your husband on the cheek, he makes dinner, you eat outside like you did when you were small.

Lay in bed, machine ticks away your last heart beats, your grandkids hold your hands, one found God, and now he prays, and though you don’t believe, you don’t mind. You still have your sight and you look out the window to the blue sky and you take comfort in its existence. You remember a song from when you were young, but you know it wasn’t your song.

You get out of bed, get a cup of tea because you need something in your system, a replacement for the nothing, eating away. Blue sky. That song. It repeats, and you can’t make yourself change it, though with every chord it just cut deeper into your skin, unforgivable. A later you hears the heart rate monitor slow as the song goes again through the motions. You stir your tea as your heart tries to forget your hands, you drop the spoon on the floor and you leave it. She laughs, but this time she laughs at you.

You remember the title of that Philip K. Dick story, We Can Remember it for you Wholesale, and you question where the business really is in that. Now unremembering, that would be a trick, that would be something people might pay for. Gone loves and the love that never happened. The song repeats again, and it's beginning to grate on you.

You sit in her flat late at night, two, three in the morning. Buzz is beginning to wear thin. You talk to her flatmate about transhumanism and the passage of man and to most this would be a threat, a fear, but to you it’s a comfort, as, across the room, she falls in love with your best friend and you want to pull yourself into their conversation but you don’t. Her flatmate laughs at something you said and with weary eyes you smile at him. Outside, under the streetlights of the city, the trees are starting to bud with the processes of spring.

You sit in a bar and you drink your drink. The bartender, pretty enough, you tell her it’s your 47th birthday, and when she asks what you’re doing in this shithole you only laugh, Pavlov’s response. The two of you talk, and you think sure, she seems alright. It’s coming up on closing time and she doesn’t throw you out. That song comes through on the radio, some classics station, and you marvel at the beautiful collusion of time and circumstance. After she closes up, you go home together and you have sex, and in the morning she leaves and you never go back to that bar.

The nurse comes in and she turns on your song and this time it’s raining outside, but you knew before she said it because you can hear the sound of water falling on the roof. Wash away your regrets, but it doesn’t. The nurse says something about volunteers being here today with dogs, some people like the companionship, but you mutter that you’re not interested, always liked cats better anyway. You like dogs, but you don’t want to hear the volunteers, young voices.

You think about messaging your friend about the girl, think about it over and over and the thought consumes you. The song has stopped. Blue sky. Different song now, same point, it doesn’t matter the lyrics or chords. Words from last night come to you without sentence structure. They aren’t connected to anything that matters, but you don’t care. You wish it would all just stop, love. You wish you no longer had to care, but you do, because that’s what people do. It ends as it begins. A million faces all tried hard to be forgotten, but the voices are always the hard part, cute accent, lisp, slipped syllables, thoughts of old movie actresses, repeating themselves over and over, the noise of the song and the one playing replaces itself in your head with that one, as her face is replaced with another face, as time slips by and the trees are now of full leaf, and then it’s another face as again they are bare. Another spring, another voice, over again.

This morning the nurse comes in and puts on the song and you can hear it because of how you know it, but you can’t hear it today, and you can’t hear the weather report and you now are blind and nearly deaf, nearly for you can still vaguely hear the slowing of the heart rate monitor, and now you hear one flat, metallic, transhuman scream, and you know the nurse yells, doctor comes in, but they knew when they put you here how this would end, still the doctor comes in, but you have a do not resuscitate, and after a few moments, he calls it. 

Mother | Theland E. Thomas

Mother,

I sat down for hours and tried to write a poem, or an essay, or a

Letter,

Or anything to express how much I love you and how much I

Value you and how much I appreciate you, and

Everything I came up with was unworthy.

You have to realize that

Only a few clever sentences couldn’t possibly capture the strength, sacrifice, and love

Unconditional you’ve demonstrated for all these years.

And then Christ Stirs on his Cross | Alexander T. Damle

           The Preacher, his face shadowed under a wide brimmed cowboy hat, folds of his body obscured within the deep black of his cassock, rides a buggy pulled by a single horse through the empty streets of the place, paint stripped off the walls by the whipping force of sandstorms, the road covered up to his horse’s hooves in a perfect white sand, it pushed up in between the corners of buildings, swirling thick through the air, kept out of his eyes only by the hat’s brim. Every so often, limbs poke up through the sand, of trees and dogs and horses and men, signs of a time fast on its way out the door. Most of the shops lie empty, looted, burned, broken, forgotten like the old gods, forgotten in the face of the Desert.

            The Desert, huge and empty and vast, impossibly vast, sweeping in from the east and west and north and south at once, cutting off all lines of communication, all routes of escape. This used to be a land of great metal birds, man-made stars, towers to challenge the gods, now, though, now it is a place of war and oblivion in that little eye of the storm not yet claimed by the rising tides of sand that took this town not six months before. The Preacher finds himself in what was once a town square, children running free, young men and women looking furtively at one another, mothers and fathers bathing in the mid-afternoon sun, but today still there is but one, held up on a crucifix in the center of town, the Christ image no longer even a metaphor, instead the actuality of a society content to embrace old-world hell.

            And then Christ stirs on his cross.

            “Hello Father. Fine day today, isn’t it?”

            “This town cleared out months ago.”

            “Ah, well, that is simply the way of the Desert. What it takes away, it grants again to those willing to receive it.”

            “You’ve been up there for six months, no food, no water...?”

            “Of course. So what brings you this way Father?”

            “My congregation is lost to me, and my faith is in danger of following. I thought maybe, the Desert... it could offer something, some hint of God.”

            “Hah, well, Father, the Desert will offer something, but I’m not sure it could rightly be called God.”

            “Something is as much as I can hope for.

            “That’s the damn truth, I’ll tell you. You know, I got put up here for trying to tell them that the Desert would save them? That’s what I get for trying to help, I guess.”

            “Do you... do you want me to cut you down?”

            “No, no I don’t think so. Although... Father, do you have a gun?”

            “I... I do... in these times...”

            “No need to explain to me, Father. All I ask, though, is that you shoot me.”

            “What?”

            “It would be a great act of mercy. Immortality is not such a great thing in times such as these.”

            “I can’t do that.”

            “Why?”

            “I have my God to think of.” Then the man on the cross starts laughing, and, as the preacher rolls on down the road, out of earshot, the laughing just grows more impassioned.

            On the edge of what used to be the city is only the Desert, all the other cities that came before this one long ago swallowed totally by the sands, eaten up to the tops of their highest buildings, very steel warped by constant wind and sand. The Preacher looks out across the white sand, contrast under sapphire sky, not a cloud in sight, not in the million miles forward that the Preacher’s eyes, they still human, can see. With a flick of the reins, the horse begins a slow walk that shall mark a time immarkable, the man’s future and the future of the beast called God.

            That first day in the Desert lasts for years, not a sight on the horizon, not east nor south nor north, and, soon, too, the town behind to the west is gone to the faint summer breeze, its memory a blaze cut into the trunk of a tree. For years the sun moves not, and the horizon stays eternal, and though he knows time is passing the man feels not age nor thirst nor hunger, and he sees the faintest glimpse of what the man on the cross called immortality, but immortality is measured in a time longer than years, a time that years cannot themselves fathom, a time marked a million times over by the births and deaths of a billion stars, all existence began and start again, all in the confines of that first day in the desert.

            As time passes, in the shining white, the reflective blue, the Preacher begins to see what in the cities turned to burning hell he could not, images of beginnings and endings, mere snaps of the fingers, twists of the wrist, turns and turns of a coin spinning on a bar room table, a bullet burrowing into skull, over and over, beginning and ending, sand swirled up with breaths of wind, air dry as hell, and still yet the horse does not falter, and the man does not tire, because that then is the nature of eternity.

            The Desert is a place without motion, and in a place without motion, how can one have time? Where the sun no longer circles the earth, but remains hung eternal above the canvas white, individual granules of dead stars and blown up presidents, afterbirth of the big bang, glass and stone perfect, the man may move forward but if the sun does not, no way to count the days, then time is no more than a turn of a wagon wheel, and what then is that?

            Occasionally the man turns around in his seat to see the wagon tracks behind him, small ruts cut through hot snow, crescents of horseshoes, vanished again as the wind blows, in their brief existences the only signs of time in a place without interruption, of unbroken immovability.

            After a period that cannot be marked, the Preacher sees, far away, too far to reckon with the eye alone, but not so far as not to matter, a great white cloud blocking out the blue sky, and it moves faster than he can think after so much time of un-motion, and he realizes it is a sand storm, and, looking about at the flat white all around him, considers that he may be, already or finally, depending on the demarcation, well and truly fucked.

            Then, without warning, the sands are upon him, and in the same moment that his horse vanishes in front of him, his hands in front of his eyes are gone, and his flesh is cut by a thousand razor blades, and he throws himself down in the bed of his buggy, hoping for some salvation in a place where God has no jurisdiction, sheriff over the county line. His hat is held to his head by a thin leather cord, and it pulls at his neck, and he’s worried it’s going to snap, and, without it, he will be blinded, a thought absurd when, by all rights, he should now be dead. But the Desert does not will it, so he isn’t.

            Then he sees nothing, black velvet without end in all direction, then, from nothing, there is everything, all shapes and colors, first flat, an infinite pin head, then expanded out into three dimensions around him, a wash of red and blue and yellow and gold and orange and white, planets and stars hurtling about him with an impossible force, gravity itself F=m*a, but the mass so grand, so all encompassing, as to be nameless, and the speed itself, the very essence of motion, the very process of gravity rendered legion and nothing all at once.

            He sees men dying in great clouds of white, ripping through cities a mile high, skin peeled off faces by the sands, cars tipped over by sheer force, then the first men building up and up and up and up in the name of mounting a direct challenge to God, and blessed with the punishment of miscommunication in consequence, the genesis of every war, the flint to every burning love, all at once, and the great tower falls until it’s resurrected then the sands come to fell it again.

            The vision lasts for years, seconds, minutes, centuries, millennia, it matters not, for the motion is no more than illusion, a dream to keep him through, through the sandstorm. And then all at once, he’s laying in the bed of his buggy, and the horse is nuzzling in the sand. He sits up, gets back on the seat, takes the reigns, and, for the first time since he found his way to the desert, he sees something that’s not white or blue.

            As he approaches, what was a blur on the horizon takes form, old, wind burned steel, rising thirty stories into the sky, empty windows where glass once was. He reaches the base of the spire, and sees now that it is the forgotten crown on a great city, lost to the shifting sands, the swirling wrath of God, opposition to man’s arrogant optimism, punishment to generations of hate, lust, fear, pain.

            The Preacher leaves behind his horse and buggy, tying them off to a protruding piece of rebar, and steps through one of the empty windows. The room is full of sand halfway to the ceiling, and in his six and a half feet of height, the Preacher is forced to crouch. In the middle of the room, massive in its hollowness, sits a girl, no more than twenty years old, auburn hair once pretty now matted with sand, stuck to the side of her face in a bloody clump. He approaches her.

            “Father. Look then, at what your God has wrought.”

            “I see a room. A girl.”

            “Look again. See what I see. A people left to suffer and die in nothingness, tossed off as a joke, we but the left behind.”

            “We fall as Babel, for our arrogance.”

            “The people of Babel lost their ability to talk.”

            “Yes.”

            “We can no longer live.”

            “We live after a fashion.”

            “Only until the sands take the rest of us.”

            “They take not us.”

            “Because we see that which the rest cannot.”

            “Which is what?”

            “Only you know that.”

            “I see here only God.”

            “If you see God here, go upstairs, and know it is the same for 29 more floors.”
            So the Preacher does as the girl says, half crawling up the stairwell, choked as it is with sand. At the top of the stairs, thousands of bodies, all packed and piled together, ripped apart, men and women and children, some holding on to each other, many half eaten, the remnants of lives forsaken, left behind by God. He sees the bodies, and in the bodies he sees their final moments, their resting actions, pushed up and out of the city by the rising Desert, looking for the highest platform, some last pinnacle of human achievement to stand upon, in the hopes that, as the sands come, again they shall leave, but instead they find themselves trapped, first by the sandstorms, then by the very essence of time, all dying slowly of thirst and starvation, trying to gain some last essence of nutrition from the flesh of one another, some final hope of love clinging to each others’ bodies in their final moments, desperation that, if on earth they find hell, the place beyond can be only heaven. But, in seeing this, the grand achievement of God’s plan, the Preacher sees that there can be no heaven left, that whatever heaven they once had was what laid on the earth unmarred by the sands.

            He goes back down the steps. Looks to the girl.

            “You see then?”

            “I see... something. But I must ask - why do you stay here? ”

            “Where else should I go?”

            “Cross the Desert.”

            “There is nothing across the desert.”

            “There must be.”

            “No.”

            The Preacher un-hitches his buggy, and heads forward through the Desert, ever east, towards some alleged, dream-state salvation, an impossible escape from a land endless.

            White sand and blue sky, sun immobile, land unchanged. Little can be said to re-describe places such as these in any way of new worth. But still, the Preacher forges on, though the land shows no sign of his struggles, beyond the tracks behind him, and, as the sand grows more densely packed, even these fade into the deep wells of memory and circumstance.

            White. Blue. Nothing else. Even the occasional breezes are now something of an earlier time. The Preacher, then, is left only with those two colors, and the slightest squeak of the wheels of the buggy. Beating on, endless, forgotten, purposeless, forever. Images come to his head of the people of that great city, rising up through it’s tallest citadel for... for something. They knew that they would not be saved, even if they could escape the sands. No one has ever been saved from a place where the Desert has taken hold, and yet still, still they climbed and clambered and beat back against the assuredly millions of others who, they too, wished a space in those last free stories. The fear of death, or a lust for mortal life? They were a people who had long ago stopped believing in heaven, the Preacher a man long past his time.

            Beneath the sand, how many dead? How many bodies curled against one another for a last comfort, or thrown wild, in some final struggle for salvation, all monuments to God’s great distaste for his creation. In this thought, the Preacher finds again his faith. Nature is not vengeful, spiteful, it simply is. Forces colliding against forces, chance against happenstance. This, the Desert, it’s something more, something altogether more thought out, more sadistic and evil, inherently designed to undermine man and all his love and passion. In this thought the Preacher finds again his faith, and in the next he learns to hate God for all He has done to us, sands swallowing us whole, for no reason but that there is no reason. As in all things.

            In the time since the last town, an entire universe has lived and died, it and all the infinite life forms within it, but this is not something that could ever be known, understood. The human mind doesn’t do so well with time. It starts slipping past seventy, eighty years. How, then, can it even begin to comprehend an eon, a dozen eons. Especially in this motionless place. White. Blue. Again.

            And then the Preacher sees something on the horizon, and he thinks it is a dream for he has not seen anything since the spire, and even that is recessed long back into his memories, back behind the folded shrouds of the endless sands. The something is soon a mountain range, and with what feels a time impossibly fast, it is rising up above him, the period from blur to towering leviathans a period in the mind of the now immortal Preacher.

            As fast as the mountains came upon him, the sandstorm comes faster, and he is lost in it without warning or time to prepare. Choked back deep within him is the memory of the first sandstorm, and he knows he survived it, for here he is now, but he doesn’t remember how. As the sand cuts into his skin, through his clothes, he finds himself in a room. In the room, a man sits at a desk, typing impassionately away on a computer. Outside the room’s one window is a perfect dark, the kind of dark the earth never had. In the room, the Preacher sees god, and he is disappointed. Then he is in a city, a city he recognizes as the last city, and he sees the Desert folding in on all sides, people cowering together in the few square miles left, trying to hold each other close, love just a little more, even in the face of the Desert’s final judment, and he knows that they are all long dead.

            Then he’s back in the sandstorm, and it’s only getting worse. The horse is barely stumbling forward. But then, out of the swirling oblivion, the Preacher makes out a huge door, lit up with a single oil lamp, swaying with the wind, but sheltered from the sands by the door itself, a door that seems to lead underground, and without second thought as to the great cosmic strangeness of finding a door in a place such as this, the Preacher urges the horse on. The distance closes slowly, and he sees bits of blood fly up about him, from the back of the horse, his hands, chewn up by the sand, and he has a great wonder at this display of mortality. Upon reaching the door, it opens, seemingly on its own, but standing on the other side is a man, short, hairy, wearing loose fitting robes. The stranger helps the man and his horse inside, demonstrating an obvious relief at being able to close the door against the storm behind him.

            “Father, welcome.”

            “Where...?”

            “The last place.” The Preacher looks at the room he’s just entered, at the bottom of a small slope down from the doors, a vast space, nearly empty, occupied only by a large wagon, and a few horses who wander about freely. At the back of the room, stairs lead further down. “Follow me, your animal will be fine here.” The two head down the stairs.

            Tunnels, rocky, air thick with moisture, the very sensation of humidity foreign, alien to the Preacher. He feels he should be more shocked by his guide, another presence after so long alone, but, in the end, another after such a time alone is simply to give a body to the voice within your head.

            The two step through another door, and inside lays a desk and chairs, carved straight from the stone of the cave’s walls. They sit.

            “What is this place?”

            “End of the road. End of the Desert.”

            “Who are you?

            “Someone just like you, someone who saw the sands coming, collapsing in on us, and saw the Desert as my only chance.”

            “Why do you stop?”

            “When I saw the door, found the tunnels, I just wanted to get out of the sand, needed something... solid.. You probably don’t understand it, how long you were out there... it will take time. You will first have to relearn the very concept... but I found this place and decided I was done, and that I would stay here.”

            “The mountains...”

            “Others have passed through here, leaving to try to cross the mountain. None have returned. That is the way of the Desert. You cannot turn back.”

            “How can you know?”

            “Try it. You won’t make it ten minutes beyond that door, you will simply find yourself walking back towards it. The Desert does not like losing its prey.” The Preacher stares intently at the man.

            “What do you think it is?”

            “What?”

            “The Desert?”

            “I don’t know.”

            “You can’t stay here.”

            “Why?”

            “Because you can’t. This isn’t how man should die, living forever in tunnels beneath the shifting sands. Alone.”

            “What do you suggest then?”

            “Cross the mountains. You stand right at the end of the Desert, and yet you fear to press on. How many ages have passed since you set out, and yet here you stop, when you’re so close. The others... there must be others, if we just keep moving.”

            “It doesn’t end. The mountains are no different than the spire, no different than the door. They’re teases, hints that this place has an end, that things can change. This is eternal. I know not what lies on the other side of the mountains, but I do know that if ever we found another place with even a fraction of the comfort of this one, it would be after a time I can’t even consider.”

            “Then you are a fool.”

            “You don’t get it, not yet, just how long has passed. It may be you never will.”

            “Don’t worry, I know.”

            “What about you, then?”

            “What?”

            “What do you think the Desert is?” The Preacher smiles long at the man, and, truthfully, he no longer knows the words for what he knows in his heart, and finds in general that the gift of language is long departed, part of a world before the sands.

            “Were you ever a religious man?”

            “No father, I can’t say I was.”

            “Then I’m not sure I can answer your question in a way you will understand.”

            “You think this is the work of your God?”

            “Who else could it be, but He who allowed the Fall as punishment for curiosity, who smote so many innocent children for the sins of their fathers, who, most of all, bestowed us with love only so we could feel loss. In this I see only God, no man, no aspect of nature itself, was ever so hateful as my God. He gave us civilization so he could take it away, and he leaves us alive so we may suffer ultimately, the only comfort left to us the memories of our long dead loves. It’s a dark place, inside your own head.” The man is quiet for a while.

            “Why do you still seek to challenge Him, then, to cross the mountains?”

            “It’s not a challenge, it’s what he wants.”

            “How, then, can you still act as his servant, in the face of such evil?”

            “What choice do I have?”

            The Preacher and his horse set out again across the Desert, this time seemingly not so far to go. After eons of endless travel towards an empty horizon, the passage from the door to the foot of the mountains is short to the point of being almost unnoticed. The white sand and blue sky seem even purer with the slate greys of the mountains before the Preacher.

            A part of him had feared that, upon reaching the mountains, he would have to abandon his horse and buggy, but that fear should never have even struck him, for the Desert has provided in all else, so of course it provides in this. A well worn path winds up right from the end of the Preacher’s passage through the desert, straight up into the mountains.

            There are no trees, no grass or animals or signs of life, just stone, harsh, jutting stone, fractured and broken, all along its tension lines. The Preacher remembers that only the youngest mountains are so harsh, but he reckons that, whatever God is, He’s long past caring about the geology of the basic blueprints of his creation, content now to simply torture without remorse what little he has left upon the earth

            The road does not turn, and it has no switchbacks, even where the steepness of the slope may suggest that they are a necessity, but the horse does not seem to struggle despite. After the Desert’s flatness, the altitude makes the Preacher feel dizzy, but the upwards trek, especially on the timescale of recent events, is blissfully short.

            As the Preacher sees that he is beginning to approach the summit of the peak, a great fear develops in his heart, a fear that on the other side there will be... nothing. No salvation. He has convinced myself, at some deep level that on the other side of the mountains will lie an ocean, one of the oceans long since disappeared to the Desert, an ocean with thousands of people settled at its edge, living normal, happy lives, lives of distance, with a death as the great promise at their end, the motivator towards progress, development. But he knows there will be no ocean. After as long as he has traveled, he knows no sea can still sand, no earth as he ever understood it. He knows he exists in a state past time, when the very essence of existence has laid down and died, and the only ones who still stand are those too stubborn to recognize the essential failure of eternity. True sons of God.

            Then the Preacher reaches the summit of the mountain, and below, stretched away impossibly towards a vanished horizon, lies the Desert, the same in front of him as behind, beyond eternity.