It was built of lines, glowing trails like overstimulated retinas.  Rubberish blue-grey flesh, however, had begun to stretch between the violent shimmering edges of its unreality.

Eyes like floating abstractions were beginning to see. Impossible mouths were beginning to hunger.

How had we hoped to control that which we cannot comprehend?

It stirs and frets in vibrating fits even now...

tis the season

I think the tainted, tepid
consumerist thrusts
of unhappy women intent on savings
gave my soul a seeping rash

if not that then,
men with gray hair and
matte windbreakers in
faded hunter green,
crisp navy, or black
with disapproving
mustache

families in layers, and layers,
(cold from the bus?)
buying desperate necessaries,
in a tired, resignéd rush

one woman, at least, was very happy to pay more than $60
for a few pounds of formed plastic and polyester
not happy, relieved, I guess
the centerpiece of christmas, she called it

Was this who she was?

Why must the mountain loom, in the window of her room? Fore and aft in all her thoughts?

Sweet black tea and too much cream slid silken past pale, frowning lips and down her scratching throat. Smooth synthetic fabric tickled the tops of her pink knees.

Eventually Samantha realized how much she shook. The teenage girl sat heavily on the goldenrod folds of her unmade bed.

Cartoon bees traced elegant curlicues between daisies and daffodils on her rayon robe. Plastic vines and dim christmas lights hung in shallow waves, interconnecting the multitude of smiling photographs and sun faded posters.

Still there it stood, framed within her only window, that terrible cragged peak. Still there it lay, the odd poem in her tangerine glittering dream journal, written in crabbed script.

Colossus, north and west

Waiting beyond

patience, past, and rest.

Movement of fire,

slow. Breaking perception and scale.

Glacial, molten, motile, unchain’d.

Movement of fire,

ash and groaning stone.

Stone and glacial flame.

Sammie told Todd she was going out for some exercise. Short green cotton shorts and a faded gray sweatshirt quietly confirmed her lies.

“Call your mom if you’re gonna be late.” 

His words did not follow her out the door. Sammie’s phone was under an orange towel, dead on the bathroom counter anyway.

She did not remember how she came to be there as she started up a steep dirt road, far from home. Cold wind whipped across her long legs and stole the sweat from her brow. Soon enough the angry fire of her ascent washed the dry winds’ discomfort from Sammie’s surreal awareness.

The rest of the trek became little more than unpleasant flashes:

Taupe colored mud on her lips and gritty water in her mouth.

Sand colored stones slowly giving way to rust and black basalt.

Flora losing the green punctuation of juniper, turning to leafless gray scrub oak.

Branches scratching at her hands as she climbed ever higher.

Somehow it all intermingled with distant memories of Todd. Times he was drunk and they were alone.

He used to insist she sit on his lap:

Hot pressure in her neck when she relented.

The scared jittering in her ribs.

The terrible weight of his rough fingers lightly resting along her thighs.

And More:

A memory relived of Dan stealing a kiss Sammie did not wish to give.

The slap of Jenna’s fingers against her face in return.

The weeks of lonely lunches thereafter.

Sammie squatted with feral strength on the volcano’s naked southern face. Her skin was abraded and bleeding, blood becoming mud in the incessant scouring winds.

Deep with her aching bones, deep within the mountain’s ancient bowels, she felt slow crushing movement. She knew the insistent joy of glacial flames.

Sammie in futurity did see; the false town beneath her suffocated in caustic ash.

She smelled the brimstone caress of burning flesh. The dead-eyed smiles of cashiers choked away in sudden black skies. Church steeples burning unseen, dry distilled and rendered unto crumbling charcoal crosses. Fake laughter and undeserved apologies dying on ten thousand lips…

Sammie laughed through clenched teeth and tears. Stones jittered underneath her blistered feet.

                                                                                                                           

sugar of lead, in my tea

realgar red, crystals pressed

in talisman against my chest.

plutonic bronze,

the blade with which I shave,

so carefully, so rarely.

still though, thin skin, was bled.

a cold, grey ghost

in a cold grey room

not else

Your skin is formed from cells commiting suicide and in the process filling with keratin. The world would tear you apart if you weren't continously killing pieces of yourself.

imaginary lights

 I wanted to imagine, the lights flowing across these three faces in dark rooms held some significance.

Chet on sporting forums, bold blues and lost yellow draping languid against his skin. Ironic, this muddied against melanogenic responses to solar bombardment.

Cindy’s pale grey face lit with thin white text against black backgrounds. Distorted skeletons of poesy dance in teary eyes.

Across Carrol’s shining black eyebrows, green highlights flit. Rapid green text evolves against a black background.

But, I mean, really?

A kaleidoscope of vacillating colors vary across their faces and screens. Some come from the aesthetics of aquaintences, of strangers. Some are broadly constructed to sell objects and ideas. Some are simply the misbent accidents tired fingers.

The void is not infinite.

Possibility expands at the fastest possible speed. Functionally infinite, the cosmos will never grow beyond, cannot be unaccounted.

Vast potential, most of which remains, and ever more and more, is nothing.

Stillness and iterative possibility dance at a distance: like in junior high, and exactly as telling.

The void automatic devoided of meaning. It is all and every thing: mostly nothing though.

It is the absurdity of our lives on a hurtling rock headed nowhere. Trapped not just by the gravity-well, but we bedrape ourselves in chains, and a cumulative weight of empty smiles.

It is everything and nothing because nothing inherent holds importance. The incomprehensible vastness of all: hold commiserate the smallness of our existence.

The absurdity || and remarkableness thereof.

Nervously he straightened his long yellow tie. Dim comfort flushed in silk across his fingertips.

It wasn’t fair. He hated these things. He hated his mistress.

Larry hated the very notion that he might lose her. He owed her everything.

Fuck, fuck, FUCK!!

The word ranged across his mind; volume and mass oscillated, but the trend was upward.

It wouldn’t be long. He knew. All these loud men, that smorgasbord of grey and black suits, sooner or later they would do it.

“Well, WHIP ‘Em OUT! Come on boys!” yelled that soused shit-mouth, Greg Gibson.

Larry could not fucking stand Greg. He hated the loud fuck, no doubt. More than that though, Larry hated how beet red his face was getting.

Clarkson already had his monster out. The mass of the thing…

Soon, Larry was pressed on all sides. Tentacles and liquid shadows brushed against cold glowing chitinous exoskeletons, and so much more besides.

When the cages were torn wide open, when the slaves scattered across Mr. Callister’s garden, only then did Larry assume his immortal form.

Larry and his almost nice suit, his sagging skin, that ugly blob of a nose, immolated from within. In his place, floated a seahorse like creature built out of flame, shame, and self loathing.  

At least the slaughter was satisfying, sort of.

Rochelle and the Widow Mrs. Gardens

Another day, another dollar. Oh shit, overtime. Dollar and a half.

The rough bricks bite into my ass, but that hurts a lot less than my fucking feet. Smoke slips pointedly down my throat, relief.

I put the one-hitter away, and light an actual cigarette. Stupid fucking ruse has me smoking again. Oh well. It’s not forever. Fuck, I hope it’s not forever.

Try to remember, I try to remember… did I get to the peas or the green beans. Peas and it’s just two more shelves before I slide into the lazy half of the shift. Fucking green beans, 8 more shelves to stock and rotate.

Fuck I want this shift to be over.

Wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t have to walk. God I miss that car. Worth it, hard to remember, but it was worth it.

Oh no. Champaign fucking pink, goddamned auto-car. Mrs. Gardens! oh fuuuck. There goes my whole fucking day. There’s no fucking way she could get here alone without the fucking thing. I hate that fucking car. Haaaate.

God I miss mine. Riding dirty in the sunshine, careless and in between, safe and…

“Afternoon, Ralph,” she said shakily.

I bite back my tongue, and say, “No ma’am, Ralph’s not here anymore. I’m Rochelle. Remember?”

“Oh. Yes, of course. You look just like him, dear. That’s good. He was too pretty to be a boy.”

I die a little. My half cigarette falls amongst many others, plus that crushed purple bottle cap, and the dime some dick glued to the sidewalk.

Slowly, so slowly, we walk towards the sun washed automatic door. An air conditioned zephyr seems to revive her. She tells me, “It’s canned goods today.”

It usually is.

She has time to tell a cute story about her grandbabies. We walk. She has time to tell me a mildly racist story about her accountant at a cocktail party, again. 

This time, punctuated with a casual, “Oh, he died.”

Eventually, we make it to the canned goods aisle. And there it fucking sits:

my cart, stacked high with family sized cans of green beans

and my will to live pooling out onto the floor

“Oh no. Ralph, we forgot to get a basket!”

The dream wasn’t real. Was it?

It was just some new downer with a fun name, right? One of those “research” chemicals the DEA hasn’t gotten around to outlawing.

I want more. I need more. Worse, worse than the first time I tried cocaine. (Bought a gram. Blew through it in an hour or two. Fat eighties rails. Heh.)

Freebase. Caught the dragon. Slept for days.

The gardens, o fuck, the gardens were joy incarnate. Most of ‘em anyways.

Some were so sad but so beautiful. Fucking flowers spelled out a tragedy Shakespeare couldn’t have comprehended.

I mean, goddamn, I just don’t have the words.

And that cave, where the wind whispers Hypnos…

The waking world is all pain. Tight muscles. Desperate thirst. Twisting hunger.

I’m not sure I’d survive another dream like that.

I’m not sure I care.

- found written in an otherwise blank notebook at the saddest estate sale imaginable

mercy away

The tidal bore thrust us up and mercifully away from the thing rising up, through the ocean floor. We drowned, and were the first glorified by our destroyer. Broken, were we, even from pain. Even from fear. From longing. From torturous joy.

Calm caressed us, from then on, always. Vague contentment, soft and distant, enrobed us like a cloud.

We will find our un-severed brothers, that the destroyer might sever them twain. We seek or un-smothered sisters. The destroyer shall see them unmade.

We will find you. He will bleed you. We will lead you, to evenness soft-gladly.

so many memories of women close to death

at my dawn, in my youth, bony hands cold grip lingering scent

decay

not right away, but it snuck up on ya.

old potatoes mashed between dentures and gums

sometimes the smell of cheap brown gravy

all acrid salt pungent and prepackaged

their smiles are maybes half remembered

arise early, with a dusty night

some unused room, stiff scratchy sheets

against soft young skin

dim lit, every room

but by the best window they’d sit, and fret

cold hands bony grip, tight

everywhere else  --  has gone soft,

cold feet in thin slippers

they slip momently away

In the back of a van, in some rest area in Southern Washington, I come to understand that I am a woman. Sharaya is there, of course, and learns the news from my lips just as I understand it.

The same van, homeless again quite suddenly, I sit on the absence of a seat. Vibrations from an angry road play havoc on my aching spine.  Marketing copy on the back of a bag of off-brand crisped rice occupies my eyes and the forefront of my mind.

“If you haven’t tried the delicious taste of Crisped Rice, today is your day!”

In the back of a cop car, strangers tend terribly to our son; violent intent and authority still echo across my mind. Sweat and rage and impotence drench my every pore. I fracture wrists, just a bit, but cannot quite break the handcuffs.

That was my payment for questions asked of wicked men with badges and guns and dark needs to control. It would be an hour before anyone can tell me why I am arrested.

“Boy, I will knock the curls right oughta your hair,” said the worst of them even as I was put into handcuffs.

I was arrested because my hair was long, my shorts were short, and I don’t look enough like a woman for them. Clearly though, they know I am not a man.

I am berated and mocked, and when they transfer me to the county jail, the pigs haven’t even figured out what to charge me with.

I am in Western Oregon, asking about a bathroom, in the past, but after the first sentence.

His dead eyes look through me. I will die if I stick around. I’m too gimpy and unarmed. I didn’t see the southern swastika out front until we fled.

A few hours after I am jailed, but before I am actually booked in, I am informed by an official representative of the state of Arkansas that I should be hitting our child. She tells me it will be a year before we get him back. A year before our son will be returned.

A year of unimaginable pain for no actual reason at all. Somebody didn’t close the door. He walked outside and they stole him. The state of Arkansas stole our beautiful baby boy.

The county jail kept me off my medication for days, and I languished.

The folks in the cell with me are wonderful. Supportive and kind. I withdraw from them and find a golf pencil on the first night.

My eyes must’ve been wild. A trustee offered to sharpen our pencils. He paused forever before he accepted mine.

Sharp, but delicate, the lead breaks as I try to shove it into a vein. I reposition and try again. I imagine bleeding out will feel like coming home.

A kind soul noticed and quietly stopped me from dying.

I find out the next day, Olan is with Sharaya, returned to his loving mother, my wonderful wife.

I can only remember one phone number.

My soul broke, and I called my grandparents.

My grandfather answered, eventually.

“…Well, maybe jail is where you deserve to be…”

“…You still pretending to be a woman?...”

I take note of a twisted steel plate, rusting and flecked with ancient paint. Its corner sticks out from the wall, bent maybe 20 degrees. With enough force and determination, I decide it could slash my wrists.

I tried to kill myself before I called the people that raised me.

I was panicked about marching in a Cub Scout parade. Grandpa tried to force me into it. He will box my ears in scarce controlled rage before storming out of the house. I stood in the hallway unsure of what to do. Alone.

I am in front of a Cub Scout meeting sitting on pale leather seats. My smart mouth is closed. My eye has just been blackened by a ring with a mound of diamonds on it. This will be a funny story later.

I am in a courtroom. There is a man in a very nice suit.

He is there to support the police. He is there to make the pigs’ narrative official. His job has no relationship to justice. He is the status quo.

-- The cop that threatened me so cleverly, smiles. The woman that held our son against our will smiles with maliciousness extraordinary.

The man in the nice suit is a DA.

We plead down. For doing nothing wrong, we owe the county one thousand dollars. I don’t know that we will ever be able to pay it.

I found some nihilistic Zen, and pleasantly returned the pig’s grin just before we caved in.

No contest. Justice impossible.

-- After all that, that dumb, abusive fucker threatens to call the cops. They evict me officially, delivered by a county pig, after having offered us a home. They pretend Sharaya and the children have a home there still yet. We leave. Their idiot plan comes too close to working.

I am young. My mother was slammed into a ratty couch, a fist descends. I ran.

I am very young – in memory normally unattainable and kindly forgotten. A dick hovers in front of my face. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant. This will haunt me always.

I am a bit older, in a bully’s room (before he is a murderer). He suddenly strips down to his underwear and holds me against the floor. It is exciting. It is terrifying.

“What are you doing?”

“Fixin’ to fuck you silly!”

He doesn’t.

In a motel, in the snow, in Kansas, in the shower, I held a knife to my temple. I tried to find the wherewithal to press it into my skull or set the thing down. I am held forever in between until Sharaya took the knife away.

 “If you haven’t tried the delicious taste of Crisped Rice, today is your day!”

bravery is a dollar store razor

My femininity, well my conscious awareness thereof, began with a negative realization.

I am NOT a man.

Differentiation is the most basic of reasoning skills. (Though, I’m not sure how many trans women start from there.)

I’ve always wanted to be a girl.✮

♀ Most of my childhood crushes had odd aspects of jealousy attached to them.

♀ I remember telling my grandmother I wished I was a girl. She told me I didn’t. I guess she knew the yonic burden better than I.

♀ I got to dress up as a woman one Halloween. I got ma’am-ed all night long at the church function. It was wonderful. 

✮ I’ve always actually been a girl.

However, my body has been largely defined by testosterone. Most of my life was lived underneath that terrible masculine mask.

I don’t forget that. I won’t forget that. I can’t forget that.

So despite my sassy bitchery, I don’t quite look like your average woman. There is a prodigious amount of hair all over my body. That same body stores fat (ohhh, I gots plenty of that) in typically male patterns. Despite my infirment, I’ve still got most of the strength which testosterone made easy for me to come by…

With a 5 o’clock shadow and a huge gut, sometimes it was a bit hard for me to look in the mirror and see a woman.

Until I came to a new realization: I am an ogress, a sex ogress from fucking outer-space.

I take the hair off my face, because I don’t want it there. (The bushy ass beard I kept was a big part of my masculine mask.) I irregularly shave my tits because… well I want them to be the glorious tits they are… if sometimes slightly fuzzy. The rest of me stays as is…

…because I am an ogress, and I will punch your beauty standards in nonexistence.

I’ve always identified with monsters, anyways, so this is probably less self-deprecating than you might imagine. (Oh, sure, there is some of that in there, too.)

My gut, my body hair, my jawline all make sense. I am an ogress, a different example of femininity: a tough as nails vision of femininity. My very own way to be the woman, I always should have been.

I’m ready to fight. I'm ready to face it all, head-on, because I found my secret reality. 

I am a fairly hairy, not small, but very fuckable ogress from outer space. I’m not so bothered by it anymore.

I might have accidentally modeled my gender
after Amethyst and LSP. I like purple I guess.

Plus, shaving your legs is a real bitch.

WHY ARE THE TERRIBLE CULTISTS NECESSARY?

The Indigo Consumption spreads terrible wings.

[◙] Easy Mode – To appease the horrible thing from beyond with actions that are less terrible than destroying the entire planet. This leaves a great deal of wiggle room for some truly reprehensible rites.

{◙} Twist – It’s going to destroy the planet anyway when it feels like it. It doesn’t actually care what mortals are doing.

[◙] Medium Mode – There is a fragile ecosystem of souls in the afterlife. “Evil” souls are detrimental… but not to the degree that “good” souls positively impact the afterlife. (A crude but efficient way to explain it: think of good souls as vegetative producers, creating the energy that sustains whole heavens and entire hells. [Some “good” souls are still assholes, way too into punishment.] Wicked souls are bit like herbivores, playing a useful part but not so important. Then truly “evil” souls range from carnivores to terrible diseases in the ecosystem of beyond… It doesn’t work exactly that way, but, eh, close enough. )
So to keep the afterlife running smoothly, sacrifices must be made. A toddler is rarely wicked, an infant even less so…
Some don’t have the stomach for that so they instead hunt down wicked beings… before the cretins can become truly awful.

{◙} Twist – doesn’t really need a twist… other than to be true. The PCs might be horrified to realize that the baby eating cult they just murdered and the folks that hired them to bust up the local thieves guild are one in the same.

I’ll think up a Hard mode, later… maybe.