Self-Torture Is Your Favorite Sport | Theland E. Thomas

It’s almost 3 am, and you stare into the pitch darkness, eyelids heavy, but mind racing. It’s funny how your eyes play tricks on you in the dark. The longer you stare, the blacker it becomes. It starts from the edges and creeps into the middle until the entire room is five shades darker. Then, the edges grow darker again, blackness compounding upon blackness, darker until the sunrise.

You've been tossing and turning all night, trying to find comfort in the warmth of the sheets. Now, you roll from your side onto your back and stare up at the vacant ceiling. The darkness is malicious, and you’re afraid. It glares back at you, peering into you, or maybe just reflecting you. You shut your eyes, but the scenery is the same. And you can't escape these toxic thoughts.

Remember a few years ago when you met your best friend? It was by chance, which is pretty much how you meet all your favorite people. At first you were forced to spend time with each other, then you wanted to. You spent long afternoons and evenings sharing your passions, your secrets, your fears. You might know her better than anyone else. She definitely knows you.

Remember parking your car on that hill and talking until the sun came up? Looking back, that's probably when you started to fall for her. When you finally shared the part of yourself you hated the most, and she looked into your eyes and told you how special you were.

But fool, you couldn’t say the same to her. You tried, but your tongue twisted, and your mouth dried, and your words caught, so you just looked away and hoped she could somehow pick up what you were trying to say non-verbally.

You realized that you wanted to spend every second with her. Your days didn’t seem complete if she wasn’t involved. You found yourself volunteering to help her with things you hated, but they didn’t seem so bad with her by your side. You would spend all day and night laughing with her.

Remember when she shared with you that she couldn’t really handle romantic affection, and your blood ran cold, but you laughed and said, “Me neither, good thing we’re just friends, right?” And then you thought, damn, why did I just say that, and she was looking at you, but when you saw, she looked away.

Remember when she complained that she couldn’t find anyone who she really connected with, and you came that close to confessing your love to her, and you said her name so heavily, she snapped out of whatever she was thinking about and stared at you with wide, expectant eyes, but you just looked away and told her she’d find that special someone someday?

Remember all those times you laid awake in bed fantasizing about finally saying what had been on your mind for the longest time? It was real romantic in your head. In your fantasy, your fear dissolved, and you just dropped the bomb like, “I think I’m in love with you.” No, more nonchalant, like, “Hey, I love you, you know?” Actually, maybe you shouldn’t be so intense and you'd go with a, “Hey, I really like you.” And she would be like, “Like, like like me?” And you would be like - no wait, what is this, middle school? You would actually just say, “Hey, do you want to go on a real date with me sometime?” And you smiled when you thought of this one because you knew you wouldn’t be so suave in real life. And in your fantasy, she wouldn’t reject you. (And you thought what if she doesn’t reject me for fear of being the cause of what tips me over the edge but she doesn’t really want to go out with me, she just doesn't want to hurt my feelings? I would never want anyone to think that. [And then you thought how do you even think up these things?]). In your fantasy, she said something like, “Really?” And you said, “Yeah, I really like you.”

And then the fantasy you in your mind’s eye thought, what is this middle school, and said, “Actually, I think I’m in love with you.” Maybe she replied here. Maybe she said, “Wow, I love you too.” Maybe she said, “Well, that took long enough.” And maybe she didn’t say anything and you said,

“I’m sorry, but I can’t hold this in any longer. I love you because you’re such an amazing person. You see the world in a different way. You’re always ready for the next adventure, always looking toward the future. And you see the good in everyone. You saw the good in me when I couldn't see anything but darkness. I know you said you couldn’t really handle when guys are really in love with you, but maybe we can’t resist because you’re so radiant and we’re like moths flying in the dark without you.”

And, in the dark, you smiled so hard your face hurt. Could you get any cheesier? And then you laughed out loud because that’s how you actually felt.

(And in the back of your mind you were mad at yourself for allowing yourself to feel this way because you tried so hard not to develop these emotions because they always, always, always end in heartbreak. [And in the back of the back of your mind you remembered that by the time couples break up, they despise the very things they once loved about each other.])

Remember when you got up everyday for the next few months and still said nothing to her? And you watched with a gnawing feeling in your heart as she started to grow bored of you. And all of a sudden, she didn’t really want to hang out with you anymore. And you didn’t talk. And you missed her so bad. And you were desperate to have her back, and one day you finally asked her on that date, but it wasn’t anything like how you imagined you would say it. It was rushed, and you stumbled over your words, and she just looked really sad, and she said your name softly and said, “I really care about you, but I don’t like you like that.”

And you were kind of tearing up a little bit, but you didn’t want her to see even though you knew she knew, so you just looked away and said, “Oh, yeah, that’s fine.” And she reached out and touched your hand and asked, “Are you okay?” And even though you felt like your insides were being vacuumed into a void, and you were barely containing your tears, and the pain was plastered all over your face, you said, “Yeah, I’m fine.” You’d just ruined it. You’d ruined everything. But you still didn’t want to lose her, so you asked, “We can still be friends, right?” And she forced a smile and said, “Of course.” And then she let go of your hand and walked away.

Remember when you had to stand with your back to the wall while waiting for the train because you couldn’t escape the fantasy of jumping in front of the tracks and your body twisting and flailing between the car and the cement and your blood spraying and finally releasing years of pent-up anguish, but then you couldn’t do that because she would think it was her fault when really it was always all your fault, and you didn’t really want to die anyway, you just wanted the constant, dull, aching, pain to end?

Remember when thought you were over it, but then you saw her with her new boyfriend, and he was tall, dark, handsome, and strong - all the things you could never be - and you were so jealous, but you really just wanted her to be happy even if it was without you because you still loved her and you probably always would? You knew this would happen, but you couldn’t help yourself. Self-torture is your favorite sport.

Remember when you hung out with your friends, including her and her boyfriend, and you realized he’s actually a really cool dude, and he’s perfect for her and you made friends with him and even gave him relationship advice all the while stifling an enormous sadness?

Remember when you tried to drown your depression, and it worked for a little while, but then you realized that you could still feel the pain no matter how drunk you got, so you went to a club to dance it out, but you couldn't get out of your own head, and your feet were moving, but you were sinking in quicksand, and you somehow ended up dancing right next to her and her boyfriend (what are the odds?), and at least your usual suicide fantasy had morphed from jumping off a bridge to blowing out your brains right there and getting your guts all over his perfect outfit?

Remember when you asked her if she ever felt the same way about you, and her face fell, and she teared up a little bit and said, “Yes. But I didn’t think you did.”

You clench your teeth, open your eyes and turn to the other side. You curl up in a ball and hug yourself, but you can’t keep the tears in. Your nose stuffs, and the tears fall sideways over your face and soak into the pillow. And you gaze outside looking for a glimmer of light, but it’s still pitch black and the sun won’t rise for hours.

Beside a Lake in Winter | Alexander T. Damle

            Harv and I, it was just an ordinary Sunday, you know the kind, ordinary decent Sunday, sleepy and long, though the guts of it a little twisted, some knowledge in the back of your mind you just can’t quite tickle. Not to stop certain people from trying, of course, but people’ll do anything for a high, right? Anyway, Harv and I, ordinary Sunday. Or was it Danielle? Doesn’t matter probably. Well, either way, we were walking along by the edge of the river, watching the trash churn over and over itself, pulled in little gravitational whorls by the water as it wanders over the carcasses of bicycles and dogs just below the surface, when Jonathon walked up to us. We asked him if he got it, and he said nah, sorry guys, the market’s, like, all dried up this month, some guy down state got hit hard. Like, guns drawn, riot shields, tear gas grenades, bullet to the head (his own, on the floor of his bathroom, it turned out, when he heard knocking at his door. Turned out to be a couple mormons, proselytizing. Nevermore?) hit hard.

            But then he says he has something new, never even heard of it before. We ask him what it is, and he shrugs, pulls his jacket up his shoulders a little bit. Pretty sure he’s trying to kick something or another. Oxycontin? Hydrocodone? Just straight up heroin? Probably doesn’t matter. With Jonathon it’s always an opiate. Razor edges.

            And then he says it ain’t got a name yet, you know how this shit is. And Harv/Danielle looks at me, wary, eyebrows arched slightly, eyes a little wider than normal, mouth all twisted up. And then I turn back to Jonathon and ask him what it does, and he says it’s, like, a psychedelic. Probably. He thinks.

            And you know, we probably should have walked away there. We aren’t junkies. LSD isn’t addictive, no psychedelic is. I mean, you can get addicted to the experience, sure. I know people who are. But we aren’t. I know all this. But I still ask Jonathon how much, and he says a hundred fifty, and I think, that’s not bad for something new, I’ve spent a lot more for “something new”. So I say sure, and Harv/Danielle looks at me again.

            The sky looks like motor oil. Can taste the smog. Can’t really see across the river. That might just have been fog though. Or maybe we were by the ocean. Memory is all messed up in my head. But I know the sky looks like motor oil, and the clouds flow like satin, creeping down bare flesh, and the sun casts a weird ghostly pallor that makes the light flatten out real long and harsh, and reminds me of the look that daytime soaps get. Jonathon turns away from us to get something out of his bag, and when he does I get a glimpse of his face and I can’t tell if he’s smiling or frowning.

            He hands it to us, and it’s just two blank squares of paper in a dirty plastic bag. I look up at him as I hand him the money. He looks away. I see something get turned up in amongst the froth, and it looks like it had meant a lot to someone once. Somewhere nearby a train trundles down its track, and the sound of its horn pierces the muggy calm.

            So then Jonathon goes on his way, and so do we. Walking through the streets, everyone studies their shoes, and a taxi drives by too fast, hitting a puddle and splashing the gutter refuse, thick and inky, all over my torn jeans. Harv/Danielle looks at the jeans, then up at me, then back down at their shoes.

            We walk past a homeless woman, and she looks up at us, and she has the same eyes that a lamb gets when it’s about to get slaughtered. Her hair is thick like weeds by the edge of the river, and her skin is thick with ashen dirt, looks like the sky. She cradles something in her arms the shape of a child, but I can’t see its face, just a bundle of tattered rags.

            From somewhere a group of kids come running. Don’t know where they ever come from. More every day. Packs. Ferrel. Wild eyed. Never seem to see the rest of us, just push their way through like they’re the only beasts left on a dying earth. Anyway, the kids reach us, and one of them pushes in between me and the homeless woman and knocks over the battered old can where she’s trying to collect enough for dinner. The coins all start running and the woman runs after them. A few land with a plop the wrong tone in the gutter’s ooze, and she doesn’t even pause as she plunges her hand into them nether regions between street and sidewalk, and she puts her arm deeper and deeper and I briefly wonder about what happened to that infrastructure revitalization. She fishes around down there, and her hand comes back up the color of shit, and she looks like she’s going to break in half, so I give her a few bucks out of my wallet. Don’t like watching strangers cry.

            On the way back to my place, we stop in a little old diner, the sign half smothered, even as the walls are still chrome and the lights inside seem warm and friendly, calling to me out of some place in my past I feel very deeply but, for some reason, can’t quite lay my eyes on. Our waitress recognizes us and smiles (it must have been Danielle - I don’t think I ever went to the diner with Harv) and we both order our usual. It’s quiet. A guy in an expensive suit sits at the counter eating a hamburger and sipping a coke. A homeless man sits in a booth in the corner with his dog under the table. Illegal, of course, but the owner doesn’t really care. Decent enough sort of guy.

Outside it begins to rain, hard, and the dirt and smog choking the city begin to run in long streaks. Headlights flash past, searching, and occasionally the harsh yellow of a taxi is caught up in a splash of water and a weird miasma of street light and fog, pulling shadows like teeth. Down the block a neon advertisement warns of coming judgment and promises God in the colors of a strip club or bowling alley.

            I believed in God for a full five minutes once. But then my roommate interrupted me and I never believed in God again. Maybe I should go see what the sign is talking about. Maybe my God is neon.

            A woman walks by outside the window in a long red dress, stuck to her legs by the rain, her protracted auburn hair twisted like a rat’s tail about her face, her eyes scarlet. The chef sees this from behind the counter and she runs out with an umbrella. The woman turns to her and they exchange the briefest bursts of smiles, like flashbulbs on a bloody street, and this smallest gesture gives me this unbearable feeling of warmth somewhere deep inside me. Then the chef runs back in, and now her short blonde hair is stuck to her too, but she’s smiling a little bit. Our waitress smiles at her. I smile at Danielle. Danielle is looking at her food and didn’t see any of it.

            One afternoon in December I remember walking along the river, in a light like the whole world had collectively just dropped, air the sound of standing under a power line, light the smell of a dingy place thrown away in a back pocket of the world. And I remember watching them pull a body out of the water, and I remember looking at her face, crystalline and porous at once, socked in tight by months disappeared in amongst mud and reeds and old bicycles and human waste, a pallor of fresh fallen snow, her hands shriveled up like an old woman, balled into collapsing fists, and spiderwebs of something grown up her arms like frost on a window in the midst of a dead winter. She was beautiful once. Scared once. Alone once. In love once. High once, more than once. Always high more than once, if they pull them out of the river.

Why is it always raining in this city? And in the rain why do the streets expel big deep breaths of noxious steam that makes every woman look beautiful and every man look dangerous?

I held her, our bodies naked against each other like we were some trickling of stars out amongst the darkest edges of our universe, far enough out that time itself begins to dilate, and we were turning into one grand consciousness, and in some deeply weird and Cronenbergian way our flesh was fusing into one, the little patch of warmth and light on a dark night, and I didn’t feel alone. Then she left and I never saw her again.

But hey, so it goes, right?

As we walk out of the diner, Danielle turns her eyes up to me and I notice a little fleck of something gold in them, a raft lost at sea, storm clouds mounting on the horizon, sleepless. She tells me she doesn’t think she really wants to get high today, not with whatever we scored. I tell her sure and she says she has to go and I say okay. I watch her walk away down the street, men and women with heavy coats tied up about their shoulders and cheeks and walking in these little zagging running steps. The rain is coming down harder. I brush a drop out of my eye, as, all around me, the rain turns to tears.

But hey, so it goes, right?

In the windows of a skyscraper, I see streetlights reflect like memories out of time, pieces of a broken mirror, old cocaine, flesh occasionally casting up like spotlights, and her saying... but the windows of skyscrapers and the rain and the streetlights and an old man totters down the road, swaying like a kid coming out of a cheap nightclub (at the thought I feel something ancient welling up in me), a space forming around him, an airbag against his scent. I catch a glance of it and I stand transported, reminded of someone I once knew. The old man smiles at me toothless and upside down.

I remember playing in the surf at night, running just for the sake of it, the stars drowning in the sea, the E just kicking in, Harv taking off all his clothes and throwing them into the water, and us just looking at him and laughing. Later we will make a campfire and sit around it, Harv’s clothes long gone, the rest of us trying to dry off, huddled close, me holding her, him holding him, us all forging together, drifting into one great organism, cleaving a path into time, rushing for the future. Three of us OD’d in the next year. Then I left her on some great stretch of brilliance learned into me on shrooms. Harv’s still around, somewhere, at least until he’s the next body dredged up face crystalline.

Eventually I make it back to my apartment building, push open the front door, look down a stretched corridor, half the bulbs burned out, looking down dead over spattered concrete, freckled walls, doors of wood scarred like my first lover’s wrists. I remember kissing her scars like roses.

I wander in a daze up the stairs, pushing aside used needles with my feet, don’t like the sound they make when you step on them, blocking my nose against the smell of decay, as though the meat of the walls is coming apart slowly, some alien disease blowing out the cells all cancer like.

            When I reach my door I unlock it quickly and open it slowly, looking around for someone I forgot was crashing who is now sketching out. It’s happened far more often than I care to admit. This time rather than a half naked junkie running through the just-open door, out slips a cat like steam.. I briefly consider where it came from, but decide I don’t care. I step inside, still bracing slightly for someone left behind.

            A few years ago a friend whose name I’ve forgotten OD’d on my couch when I was out. When I got back and found him there, I dragged him out into the hallway for a neighbor to find. Ms. Bradise, I’m still very sorry you had to find Jimmy dead, nude, and rat eaten on the landing at 1am. I still also have no idea how he possibly could have gotten there.

            His veins looked like balloons three days after a party.

            His eyes claimed a rightful place on the mantlepiece of my soul, next to dead lovers and lovers best to think of as dead, my father burning alive in a car crash as all I could do was scream, and my sitting on a frozen lakeside in snow four inches thick, more coming down, my breaths showing like pubic hair, pondering the potentiality of my return to that party with the coke coming out and the girl I thought I loved about to leave with another guy and I think somehow that was my turning point in life, the last time I could have maybe been okay, if I’d just made my decisions differently, if I’d just followed the edge of the lake to the road, even as the snow grew thicker, and the road south, away from the city, find the little hamlet I remember spending Christmas in before my dad died, and maybe opening a little bookshop there with what was left of my inheritance, and going sober (just booze then, but, you know, that’s how it starts) and maybe just living. But instead I went back into the party and she indeed left with the guy and I took some E, then I snorted some coke for the first time and not long after I’d drop acid for the first time and the rest, is, as they say, history.

            My apartment is the city in synecdoche, a pastiche of the ugly and the beautiful, scar tissue worn on the face of an angel of marble. As soon as I’m through the door, I step on a used needle and swear. House guests, god knows whent. I wander about my apartment kind of floating, peering about for further signs of half life, smelling hard for urine (best way to get kicked out of my apartment - pee on my furniture). I step into the bathroom and turn on the light, which glows a dull hospital green. In the mirror I see my face. In my face I don’t see me.

Once I’m certain that the only forgotten house guest was feline, I collapse onto my couch, the stuffing oozing out like blood, mottled stains actually blood, and I feel a lump under the cushions, reach down to extricate it, and come back with a pair of clean, white, mens underwear. I throw them across the room vaguely in the direction of the trash. Then I take the plastic bag from my pocket. Then I look at the two tabs and consider the infinite potentiality of the unknown. Then I remember how scared I was the first time I took LSD. Then I briefly consider dosage, decide I don’t care, and put both tabs on my tongue at once. This is, as an English junkie once told me, entirely not cricket.

            And then I wait. And nothing happens. You never really know how these things are going to come on - sometimes the walls start crying thirty minutes after the tab hits your tongue. Sometimes two hours later you find yourself thinking it’s a bust, and you find yourself all two dimensional and you forget which way is up, or, for that matter, the entire concept of gravity. Really can’t know.

            After four hours though, with no effects, it occurs to me I might be out $150.

            And that’s when this sensation rushes through my head, tidal and bodily and just a bit squishy. Not from the drug, that’s not what I mean. Something deeper, stranger, realer, if you think that way. A desire, a burning passionate desire to escape this couch, this apartment, this city. And then the counter reaction just as strong that this place will be my tomb. So I sit here like that for a stretch, my mind in this helical spiral. I really wish I could’ve gotten acid. None of the rest of this would have happened.

            And that’s when it occurs to me, the natural point my last half decade has been building up to, that the city has me decaying down to. And that’s when I text my guy. And I am reminded of a phrase that has stuck with me for years, something out of an old TV show - “liquor before beer, don’t do heroin.” I always loved its causal efficiency. And my guy gets back to me faster than any dealer ever should and we agree on our usual spot out on a bridge near the edge of an industrial estate.

            And then I walk out my door, locking it behind me. And then I cross the stretched corridor. And then I drift out into the street.

            It has begun to snow, and the city has gone dead, shop windows shuttered, pedestrians seemingly invisible, what few left clutching to themselves like lovers, long jackets brimming up in the wind, snow drawn about in plumeing whorls. I watch a bus run a red (it turned pink with snow built up - how long was I inside?), and I watch the travellers, eyes tired and bloodshot, like ghosts, the city forgetting itself, time running through a sieve, a man in an expensive suit slipping on a patch of ice and ending up sliding on one foot, his arms up above him, a ballerina going in for a pirouette, his attache case flying open and spewing papers about the street, they lost immediately to the snows. Then the businessman reaches the edge of the sidewalk and slides off into a snow bank, where he falls and lands with a shower of sparks the colour of ivory. After a moment he stands, laughing, covered in snow.

            I get into a cab - too far to walk, and I fall asleep for a bit.

            And then on that bridge, it cushioned from the world in the snow, the river itself now frozen too, we exchange what needs to be exchanged, and my guy asks me if I’m sure, and I say, yeah, I am.

            And then the rest doesn’t really matter much. Heroin is heroin, a junkie is a junkie, we’ve all seen the movies. And then a few years down, a friend casts me out naked on his stairwell. And some old lady finds my corpse. And the cop looks at my broken body without pity, just a dull pang for someone he lost once. And the coroner says it was a shame.

            And that’s it.

Don't forget to change(?) Don't forget your change(!) or: Sorry, Exact Change Only(?)(!).

            Then he emerged into the light and... A great screaming came across the... He hadn’t seen a mammoth in... saw a valley stretched out green and pastoral till it came up against mountain’s feet some distance... sky, the plane dropping it’s passengers ever closer to God, the valley floor... months, and his family was starving. He knew they couldn’t last... off, though before it, a village, small, ringed by pasturelands, but they looked... looking to swallow them all up. The pilot searches desperately for a last reserve of hope, but he knows... the winter, probably couldn’t last the next few... all dead, struck down by some terrible blight. He was shocked to...

            Wait. Something isn’t right. Start again. From the beginning.

            Let there be...

            The torchlights burned overhead, phosphorescent, their shadows tickling the table below, laden with meat, braised and smoked and fried and boiled, delicate scents rising, calling (gaslighting, philosophizing). The villagers all sat around the table in the centre of the village. There were more of them then, enough to fill the table, though their clothes were already moth eaten. Susanna picked at a hole in her dress, and the light shone through it onto the ground and revealed a small puddle of blood, Susanna’s naked leg reflected in it. Susanna was young still, only 114. She was one of the oldest but she was still young and now I am old and now they are all old, except the man who came from within the rock, though, try as they might, the passage could not be rediscovered. They all filtered into the village square slowly, as the sun set over the mountains, the cries of birds in forest to the south, all light made as time before, from all, there was again none. And God said... With them all sat down round the table, mild chit chat, side conversations, something brushed his leg walking through the high grass. Then Joseph stood up at the head of the table, his old pilot’s uniform cut down to short sleeves.

            “While these times may all be turvy topsy, at least they know they are mostly together still, and that time shall some day rightwards its bow. But today, they have meat! So today, they feast!”

            Then Joseph sits down and the priest stands up.

            “I am the alpha and they must thank, forgive us for our contribution to our survival, her skin sloughing off, an eye for an eye, running down no one dies forever, so they took what they need to, and they feasted!”

            Then the priest sits down. The priest walks into the seminary for the first time, back straight, head... they begin to dig into the food, the feast before them, firelight dancing alien like when the forest will suddenly one day burn and all will be.

            The first night they chop down a tree for firewood but it won’t burn at this latitude, not with that pathetic little lighter. He will walk into the shop on Michigan Avenue and he will hand the man the last of his pocket money and the man will hand him the lighter, and during the first night, though many of them bled deeper than flesh, in the morning, they were all still alive, and their wounds were... stigmata upon the hands of...

            The neanderthal will walk through the valley prehistoric, and he will pursue quietly what will be the valley’s last mammoth and the town will sit empty, the fields consumed by blight, and the man from the cave will sit down hard and wonder at all the corpses, but his stomach is. He readies the spear and the mammoth will fall, but upon cutting into it he found that its belly flesh is rotting, but then he feeds it to his mate and their daughter anyway because their own bellies will ache.

            Joseph runs through the surf, head low, ears screaming, eyes chopped up with the brine. Ahead of him, he sees another man cut down. He fires wildly for a target and falls, slamming hard into the sand and water. He laid there for a long time.

            When cauterizing a wound, you must ensure that all of your instruments are completely sanitized, as the risk of infection is extremely high, and, as you well know, Doctor, we are presently experiencing an absolutely unprecedented outbreak of death that, if we do not curb, could disrupt afternoon tea next Wednesday.

            Where were we again?

            Were we in the dingy backroom of the butcher’s shop with an old woman hung by her feet from the ceiling, her blood draining out and intermixing with the sawdust on the floor, the concoction then flowing in between the floorboards, trickling slow, to soak into the earth below, and thus the cycle complete, blood subsumed by earth, while the woman above has her bones removed, her organs set aside, and her flesh made into meat?

            Or am I going too far?

            Were we watching the young man whose fate and the town’s would eventually become as the blood and sawdust is to the earth, purchase the ropes and pulleys and lights and helmet needed for his descent? Were we watching him wading through a river as a child? Were we watching him dream of adventure? Were we watching a pilot first earn his wings?

            Were we watching a group of thirty eat, ravenous, occasional bloody juices trickling from the edge of their lips?

            Were we watching a neanderthal cradle his infant child as she died of starvation in his arms?

            The young man slithers and shimmies his way through the cave, careful to avoid damaging structures grown up out of the rock over a millenia. Then he sees light where there should have been only darkness, and he heads for the light.

            A great beast stalks tall through the valley, sniffing out its prey, birds scattering. The blight is already within the beast, though she shall never know it.

            In the first years, they cannibalized the plane, for parts and materials and the luggage for clothes and the galley for whatever food did not perish in the rotation of the sun around the earth. From the plane they build the town. From the plane and the forest which burns high and bright, screaming so loud the air can’t hear itself breath. Michigan Avenue burns. The man who sells lighters is just a kid. The man who sells lighters is interred in the earth in a cemetery near Lincoln Park, and it rains, and his daughter cries. Cain picks up a rock. The last being, sentience only now, pure neural impulse, lie out long in the last light at the centre of the universe, as what remains of the universe collapses in on them, and no more shall there be light, and sentience is finally annihilated from existence. In a garage, a man builds a bomb. In a garage, a man repairs a car. In a garage a man builds a virus. In a garage, a man slowly dies of a blight festering in his heart. In a valley deep and primordial, the blight is first born.

            Do you ever get the feeling that time hasn’t been running quite right recently? It is a shame that all of our watchmakers now build bombs. Did you hear that just now, or was it just me? They aren’t hallucinations if you can connect a face to the voice. It’s not cannibalism if it’s for a good cause. It’s not charity if it’s not tax deductible.

            The man emerges from the rock, the man walked into the village, the people slowly and quietly will emerge from their homes. They look at the man. The man will look at them. They invited him to dinner. They will not have him for dinner. The torchlights burned over head. The torchlights will burn over head. The torchlights burn over head. They did not have him for dinner. They did have her for dinner. They eat vegetables and fruits grown in the fields around them for dinner. They sup on the good meat of the cattle, it grazing about them. The cow stumbles and cries in the night and the next morning it dies and its flesh rots by noontide and they will cut it open and its belly is full of a white mould and it gets into their lungs when they breath it and then they breathed it out and then they breath it in and then the old man is dying and none of them have ever died in the valley, not in a hundred years, and the crops are all gone, and they will cut open his lungs and they breath in the white mould and then they slit his throat and he hangs by his feet and his blood mixed with the sawdust and his blood and the sawdust mix with the earth and the earth seeps his blood and the sawdust into the river that runs out of the valley and the river that runs out of the valley runs into the sea and the sea is absorbed by the sun and the sun emits dark matter and the dark matter is absorbed by the universe’s fabric and then the universe’s fabric breathes out the white mould and then the universe breathes in the blight.

            Do you find yourself ever repeating the same actions repeatedly and the clock not moving, despite you repeating the same actions repeatedly? No? Just me? They tell me I’m not mad, just that I’m a little bit insane. Who are they? I asked them that once and they told me to be quiet and go to bed Alex, they have work in the morning.

            Did I ever tell you about that time the man who emerged from the rock went a little mad? Did I ever tell you that eating human brainmatter can make you go a little mad? It’s some chemical or something.

            It was raining in that night Paris, and the city looked like a snowglobe the man’s mother had when he was a child, kept always on top of her piano, but when she died the man accidentally dropped it and it shattered, and the snow globe shattered on the floor looked like Paris the next morning.

            Did I lose my place again?

            Did I get to the bit about the forest burning? Yes, but not really? I’ve been getting so confused recently. I hope it’s not catching. Occasionally when I cough, I cough up this white dust. Do you think that’s okay?

            The man set down to a meal at the centre of the town, though not before noticing as he was walking into the town that the fields were indeed all empty, just mud with weeds growing up occasionally from the mud, though even these coated thick with a white mould. In their midst were the bones of cattle and horses. And when the villagers greeted him, they all talked like they smoked unfiltered American Spirits. Occasionally, when they cough, the air before them is filled with snow.

            The man sits in a nightclub and the bulbs pulse electric in his temples, his ears ring and the sibilance is backed by a dull pulse. His face lights up pink. By his side is a beautiful woman and she wears a crop top and he wears an expensive leather jacket, and then he sneezes and the pile of blow before him becomes a pile of snow. The next day he decides to go south, because he can’t stay here any longer. All the snow was killing him.

            They sit down to dinner, and the man from the rock gets sat right to Joseph’s right side. The lantern light flickering above reminds him briefly of the nightclub, but the food before them is real, and it wrinkles out a scent that calls him back home on a summer night when he is 12 years old. He wishes he was 12 years old on a summer night again. They serve him a generous portion of the meat before him, and then the Priest says Grace, though the man is pretty convinced the priest will say it wrong.

            As the man saws into the meat, and as the man watched those around him saw into the meat, he saw a bit of bloody liquid dribble out, and sees that it is cooked to a perfect pinkish red, medium rare, and he thinks again of summer nights when he was 12. He is eleven years old now, and he thinks soon he will be 12, and he cannot wait to be 12, because as soon as he is 12, everything will be okay, and he wishes that he will be 12 forever and ever.

            He bites into the meat, and it is warm and juicy and good, and the texture is tender and smooth. He bit into the meat. They bit into the meat. They bite into the meat. Conjugated correlations. Contractions, no contractions, not since they came to the valley. But why replenish what never dies? But what if what never dies can be killed. And, after all, we all need to eat.

            The man asks what the meat is. Joseph says his name is/was/will always be Robert. The man says

“Oh.” Then Joseph says Robert tastes good, much better than Margaret last month. Then he explains that they are down to one a month, given the recent downwards trend in population.

Though they never die.

They must eat, because what else is there to do in a valley that cannot be escaped? And the blight has killed everything else that may be eaten, and while they eat the blight, it doesn’t kill them, at least not the way it kills the cattle.

So then the man says,

“Your village is dying out... because, even though you never die, you eat your own?” So then the narrator says,

“Do we really need to outline the central tenets of the plot in one simple sentence? Might as well just state the themes in detail with an attached bibliography. Jesus, some characters. Then the narrator gets in a rather vociferous argument with the man. The narrator’s wife asks him if he’s feeling alright and if he took his medication, and the narrator says yes.

But then this isn’t really a story about a far off mountain village in an unnamed country where the inhabitants eat each other because all the crops and livestock were killed by a blight, despite their being immortal.

This is a story about the blood that runs into the ground. And what is within the blood. And what the blood then transmits through an escalating chain out to the universe itself. This is not a story about what the blight is, this is simply a story stating, quite simply, that it exists.

There I go, explaining the themes.

They must eat.

The man asks.

The man sits.

The man crawls.

The man is born.

The man is an idea.

The man is an atom.

The man is the alpha.

The blight is the...

Wait, I feel like I lost time again. That keeps happening. When does this village exist anyway? How long have its residents really been there?

I stand in the corner of a room and I stare at the walls and they move.

I walk through a tunnel under the city, and even as I walk forwards, I seem to make no progress towards the light at the end of the tunnel.

It rains in Paris.

It is sunny in Shanghai.

It snows in Prague.

Rome is built, though not in a day.

Rome falls to a bomb built in a garage.

A man’s head is severed from his neck in the middle of a crowded square in Paris.

I don’t remember where I started.

I don’t know where I’m going.

Do you ever get the sense that the world is just running down? Or maybe it’s just me.

And at the end the universe collapses in on itself, and the last sentience in the universe is subsumed into the darkness at the end of the universe. But the blight is still there.

Today as I supped, I cut into my food and it was revealed to me to be consumed by the blight, but my wife tells me it’s just my mind playing tricks on me again. My wife asks me if I’ve taken my medication. I bash my wife’s head in with a stone bust of Adam Smith that rests on my mantlepiece. No, the choice of Adam Smith is not actually symbolic of anything. My wife asks me if I’ve taken my medication.

The man finds himself stuck in a tunnel beneath the mountain. He sees a light glowing off far ahead.

The man watches as the last surviving in the village, the final five, argue bitterly about who to eat last. And then it doesn’t really matter because they manage to kill each and every one of each other. And yet he remains untouched. And they bleed into the earth. And far off the man watches the forest at the end of the valley burn. The man watches a plane crest the mountains to the West of the valley and sprays down what he knows olfactorily is napalm.

A man sits in his garage and makes napalm. Then he watches it burn, but he decides it does not kill fast enough. A man sits in his garage and makes a bomb, but knows it can never be big enough. A man sits in his garage and makes a disease. But he knows it will just eat itself alive. The man’s lungs are filled with the blight.

And then, God said let there be light.

And then the universe went dark.

And then the man was born screaming.

And then I die crying.

And then the man finds the mouth of the cave from which he crawled into the valley.

And then the man walks out of the cave on the other side.

And then the man looks out unto the world.

And then the man realizes it is raining.

And then the man dies screaming.

And then I am born crying.

And then I walk into a room.

And the walls are white.

And the man walks into the village.

And the village stinks of iron.

And the men in the room wear white.

And the man sups on the flesh of the village’s last departed.

And the man does not go back through the cave.

And the man lives in the valley on the rotting corpses.

And the fruit of the burned out forest.

Did you hear that?

The Past Does Not Exist | Theland E. Thomas

We walked. We were two, connected by long ties of friendship like old ropes scraping the sea floor, decaying over time. After all this time, years apart, we’d found ourselves together again in the same old town we swore we’d escape from. We walked in a silence made more oppressive by the absence of life. No birds chirped from the dormant trees, no children played in the vacant streets. We only heard our feet scraping and our nostrils breathing the stale air.

Before us, rows of identical track houses perfectly plotted in numbers, previously manicured lawns in disrepair, dry weeds taking over, one bony tree in every yard. So different was the place I remembered. It seemed like we’d been walking for miles, but everything looked the same. I remembered evenings with kids playing in the street, playful shrieks and giddy laughs, parents chatting under the shade of rustling leaves, music pouring out of open garages. This neighborhood was a cold imitation of the one I knew. I stopped and turned in front of a driveway, and my friend came up behind me.

“I think this is it.”

Two story house, dead tree on the left, snaking weeds coming up from concrete cracks, faded, flaking paint, broken wind chime, smashed window, unhinged screen door banging with every slight breeze. I walked up the steps and rang the doorbell. Listening for movement inside, I rang again. Then I pulled back the screen door and knocked.

“Whatcha looking for?” A voice called behind me. I turned to see a woman dressed in an old bathrobe at the edge of the sidewalk across the street.

“My parents,” I said. “They live here.”

“Oh, they’re gone,” she said.

Slowly, I came to the sidewalk and stared over the crumbling asphalt. “Gone?” I asked. “Gone where?”

“They’re dead,” she said plainly, harshly.

My mouth dried as my eyes found the ground. I started across the street, but the woman took a step back, so I stood there. “How long?” I asked.

“Few years ago. Frankly, I didn’t know they had a kid.” She looked me up and down, scorn dripping from her scowl. Before she turned away, she said, “Obviously they didn’t have a good one.”

My friend met me in the street and put his hand on his shoulder. I felt it, but he felt far away. He said, “Come on, bud. There’s nothing for us here.”

I looked at him through watery eyes, hot tears and pressure distorting my mind as I nodded and we took off down the sidewalk.

After a dozen of long blocks, there was not a soul in sight. Our wandering led us to an overgrown park. We walked through it in silence. Vines twisted along the playground. I remembered blissful hours swinging there. I remembered birthday parties on the benches. I remembered hanging out in the grass after school with friends. I took my first love here. We carved our names in a tree, and I looked her in her hazel eyes and told her this would never end. Now, I traced that scar with my fingers. Half of the tree was dead now, and the other half would soon follow.

I spun around. “Hey remember when we--”

My friend stood at the edge of the park. I went over to him. He said, “Let’s get out of here.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I was just…”

“I mean, we should leave this town. There’s nothing left for us.” His eyes were hard and his mouth tightened in a small line.

“Yeah. There’s just one more thing.”

We left the park behind, but the memories clung on for miles as the sun sunk behind the hills and the night crept from the other side. A dull full moon hung in the sky, casting the world a pale grey with ghostly shadows stretching from every building and blade of grass.

My friend asked, “What are we still doing here? Haven’t you found what you were looking for yet?”

I didn’t respond. The answer was obvious, so we continued walking our footsteps in unison. He fell slightly behind me as we passed by darkened street lamps and empty houses. There was not a light on, not a car passing, no signs of life besides our own.

After a while, I stopped at another house. “This is it.” I turned to my friend, but he wasn’t with me anymore. I looked left and right and turned around, but he was nowhere to be seen. He’d gone away without saying anything, but worse yet, I didn’t know when he left.

Sighing, I turned back to the house. It looked like all the others. In a state of disrepair, but not quite falling apart yet. I walked up the steps and rang the doorbell. There, in the dark, I stood. Lifting a finger, I nearly tapped the doorbell, but decided not to ring again. Just when I was thinking of turning around and leaving, the door opened to a old man and woman. They looked like they’d aged together, wrinkles changing them both until they had identical faces.

“Why, hello, young man,” the father said. “How can I help you?”

“Hello,” I said. “I’m looking for your daughter actually.”

The man took a pair of glasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on. He smiled, “Oh, I think I remember you, son. Come on in.”

I followed him into the house. No lights were on, so I stumbled through the dark, following their faint outlines. He and his wife offered me a seat at the kitchen table where the moonlight poured in. Smiling inexplicably, the man stared intently at me. The old woman brought us water and sat next to him. Grey light illuminated half of their faces, leaving the other side obscured in shadow.

“It’s kinda dark in here,” I commented.

“You think so?” the old man said, making no effort to move.

His wife said, “It’s been so long since we’ve had any visitors.”

I gazed toward the stairs. “Is she home?”

“Hope?” The old man laughed. “No, no. She hasn’t been here for years. I wish she’d visit every once in awhile though.”

The old woman chimed in. “It’s just been so lonely here.”

I asked, “Well, where is she?”

“Who knows,” the man said. “She went to Miami, then to Toronto. Last we heard, she was in Seattle.” He leaned in, almost whispering, “She’s very successful you know.”

“Well, I’m looking for her, and I’m sure she’s around here somewhere.” I stood and headed down the dark hallway, and they followed me. When I came to the door, the old man opened it, but the old woman grabbed my hand looked me in the eye.

She said, “I know you two really loved each other, but…” she hesitated. “Don’t go looking for things you don’t really want to find.”

I stumbled back out to the street. Clouds covered the moon, blanketing the world in a cold pitch black, and a chilling breeze pushed me along. I walked endlessly through the night, passing row upon row of identical houses, rooftops like shadowy ghostly steeples for a dead church bleeding into the flat sky.

Finally, the first hint of sunlight appeared on the horizon, and a grey haze spilled across the sky. Up ahead, I saw a shadow I recognized. It was my first love, standing, waiting for me. I quickened my pace, but as I got closer, she danced away so she was always the same distance from me. She called my name, and I whispered hers as she led me out of the neighborhood and into a cool valley. I followed her shadow, trying to catch a glimpse of her face, to see a hint of her smile or her hazel eyes.

The pink and orange rays of the sun streamed before her, keeping her in silhouettes as she walked over a hill. There she stopped, and I could only see the shadow of her head and shoulders as I approached. I walked up the hill, joy making my steps weightless. I was ready to embrace her and watch the sunrise with her.

She didn’t move a muscle as I approached. And as I came closer, I realized what I thought were her head and shoulders must be something else. The dimensions distorted with every step, her shadow shrinking down. She wasn’t standing just on the other side of the hill’s peak. She wasn’t standing at all. The figure I’d been following was not my first love.

It was a tree stump.

I fell to my knees before it. I knew what was etched into the bark, but I didn’t want to look. Our initials scrawled in big, bold letters in a heart-shaped frame. Past the stump was a field of lilies, stretching as far as the eye could see, painted pink and orange by the sun's first warm rays.