I failed

Events in my life have conspired to prevent me from completing the goal of fifty thousand words within a month’s time. I am loathe to set the blame on external circumstances, but it is true enough. This here is an excerpt from the CHESTER section, which concerns a zombie’s odyssey. He will interact with Vogina and Seamus, another character I have not (yet?) shown in this blog, though minutely, despite their convergence being of the utmost importance (to the plot, if I threaded it correctly). Chester remains largely unwritten and exists in the rough chunks of excerpts, so forgive any discontinuity. I just might finish this novel, for the hell of it, having just read it after a couple of weeks dusting. It’s not too bad. A bit weird, yes, but that’s the type of fiction I subscribe to. Well, happy readings, and do share your thoughts of Chester, if you managed to read through the entirety of this unusually long post, hell, even if you didn’t make it through.

Good luck.

Vogina: I’m only 10K. Is there hope still? (Been busy)

Vogina Vetter had an entourage like a wedding train trailing her tremendous buttocks the day she was shot. Her blood sprayed them with arterial force that was impressive for such a superficial wound. It was astounding that she was even shot at all, not because she was not the type to be shot at—she was, with a hefty inheritance tucked under her bodice and many to benefit from her death—but because a third-rate assassin was hired, the first and second bowing out owing to a vicious viral infestation, or perhaps, this being probably closer to the truth, playing hooky. The assassin on the rooftop, employed with paltry capital via dubious channels, was suffering a severe magnesium deficiency and during the calibration of his weapon an involuntary tic inveigled itself into his trigger finger, thus sending a bullet tracing a delicate path across the head of the notorious Miss Vogina Vetter, parting her scalp down the middle to expose the bone white skull underneath in a miniature parody of the biblical red sea. Blood, like a swarm of angry red bees, splashed from her expensive giant beehive ‘do onto her astonished sycophants, who at first dismissed it as one of their ward’s many eccentric whims until she started running in circles and collapsed in a dead faint.

The assassin, cursing himself, brought his gun to bear for a second, more intentional go, straining to center the crosshairs, but with all the people frantically hurling themselves in front of Vogina’s prone form, all he could target was her enormous haircut. He shot at random until he ran out of bullets and fled. He hit: a weaselly accountant in the bum, an hairdresser’s index finger (an accompaniment to the soprano of Vogina, who had just regained consciousness, she wailed in alto “My livelihood! Ruinnnnned!”), a bodyguard’s Kevlar boots to chink its immaculate shoeshine, the lipstick applicator in the ear, the coffee girl drenching herself with two armloads of piping hot java in the chaos, an unwitting window shopper who clutched his stomach before dropping dead, and finally, Dogrito, Vogina’s dear beloved Pampered Brand (trademarked) Chihuahua tucked and zippered in a custom made pink alligator skin purse carved and dried from the flesh of genetically modified alligators. This was the image news reporters, like flies to a corpse, captured and holovidded across the network, of Vogina pressing the headless purse to her ample breast and wailing like a banshee.

A few hours later the headlines, in great flashing letters, screamed THE DOG WAS NOT SHOT!, showing a holovid of Vogina waddling into her limousine with bits of matted fur amid a great red stain adhered between the cheeks of her buttocks. Vogina’s teams of lawyers futilely battled the newshounds for three days, and knowing the only paradigm was that crises create money, changed tactics despite their figurehead’s vociferous claims against, to capitalize on the tragedy and released a new clothing line, Doggone, under the already existing Vogina Vear brand name. Vogina coped with the emotional stress by having Dogrito cloned, and while waiting for CloneAPet Inc. to deliver the dog, she occupied herself with an electronic goldfish. It swam in lavender waters above a bed of pearly stones in a large circular tank recessed in the floor and attempted to escape the electronic moray eels a bored Vogina tossed in. Sparks escaped the fish tank. It was her twentieth fish.

“Congratulations on your pregnancy, Miss Vetter!” the newshound winked, lecherously fingering the brim of his fedora. “Who’s the lucky gent?”

As was usual when Vogina attempted to swallow indignity but spat it out instead, pandemonium slipped a foot into the door, beginning with a wide arc of her enormous arm, terminating with a custom made pink alligator skin purse carved and dried from the flesh of genetically modified alligators, intersecting with the insipid newshound’s pallid skull. Then chaos truly ensued, clamoring voices gibbering in a strange cadence that pulsed with the stroboscopic fervor of the paparazzi.

When she made sense of what she was hearing, she drew the purse to herself, eyes widening at the uneven stump, still flapping with torn fur and trickling indifferent gushes of what was left of inside its severed arteries, hugged it to her breast and wailed. Like an historical assassinated president’s wife, Vogina dropped to her knees, her fingers like fat worms leeching the ferrocrete for sustenance, rummaged frantically for the little head of her new dog. When a member of her entourage, a rogued and plumped doppelganger of Vogina herself, held up Nachochip’s head with a proud exclaim, Vogina keeled her over.

“This has to stop!” said Vogina’s public relations agent, Flashbulb B. Gettadonner. His lacquered, plasticized features scrunched in frustration as he contemplated the PR nightmare afoot. Resembling a gigolo android from some archaic movie, back in the day before holovids when moving images were projected through celluloid, he rendered an impressive figure as he paced around the heiress’ sleeping quarters. He kneeled at Vogina’s fat toes and traced a finger gently along a jellied forearm.

“Vogina, m’dear, I think it’s best you stay inside for now,” he said softly.
“But the business! What will they do without me?!” she screeched, sending small folds quaking to the ends of the couch. Flashbulb got on his feet and spread his hands wide.
“Don’t kid yourself, Vogina,” he said without rancor. “They don’t need you. You’re a stone you pushed down the hill and now that it’s rolling, it doesn’t need any more help from you.”
Vogina whimpered.
“That’s how it is, m’dear,” said Flashbulb. He circled Vogina, speaking placatingly. “Now you need to stay inside, and out of trouble for at least a month. Find something to keep yourself busy. Get a hobby. I hear worm-knitting’s quite the fad, or you could order in a sound recorder and collect stamps.”
He stamped his foot.
“I have to make my leave, my dear, and restore your public image to its formerly glistening facade. Now you relax. Rest. Things will get better. And… stop reading this drivel. It’s not good for your blood pressure. Now, ta-ta, m’dear!”
Vogina nodded dumbly, the pills her agent had brought finally taking effect.
Flashbulb B. Gettadonner left, trailing in tow a glossy with the screaming headline: VOGINA KILLS TWO! AND HER DOG… AGAIN!
“How can I be pregnant? I don’t even like men!” she muttered angrily, her plump fingers trailing typically during moments of extreme stress, towards the poodle she kept in the house always. She started pulling it towards her, letting the creature lap at her thighs as she absently stroked its abdomen. Her attendants, previously bustling to and fro, recognized the cues and swept out of the room, preparing to return in twenty minutes with trays laden with exquisite and obscure victuals encompassing mainly charred remains of the animal kingdom, with a dash of tubers and seed fruits.

7K Words, and Where Am I Going With This?

In the spaces between worlds, a great darkness stirs. Restless, febrile tendrils probe the pulse of cosmos and feel at the great warm swells of universes like a bandit in the night surveying with fleet fingers the apples of an orchard. They scuttle darkly with endless grace across the bubbles of reality, searching for an opening, a crack of light. Great yellow eyes with bitter ink daubed pupils stir in the darkness, and great hooked beaks gibber great dead sounds, the gongs of its great dread syllables rolling to reverberate through the spaces between the worlds: cthlhu, cthlhu, cthlhu, cthlhu…

In a cold land surveyed by a baleful moon’s glare an ancient ritual is being played from a frayed script: stone pillars as old as the ritual circle, a large slab of Elm hieroglyphed with runic script. On it is chained a howling and cursing maiden, an esteemed socialite formerly of a clean and piously polite disposition, and she is surrounded by a circle of brown cloaked figures who sway in the lit night with the elegance of oaks feeling the wind. Amid jazz hands, their voices are large and lusty:

Brushes of blood and fiery sigils!
Lushes of death and infernal vigils!
Getting together for a dark brew and the occasional virgin
Who might just be you! (intones the virgin chained to the wood)
Who might just be me… (moans the virgin chained to the wood)
Gambling souls like Faust to play at a bad surgeon
No hand unbloodied, no soul untarnished, the unholy few
Esteemed in all things dark and evil, we’re the Druidic Crew!
In our skulls echo occult dreams!
In your horrified pants you cream!
I haven’t any pants on! (weeps the virgin chained to the wood)
Brushes of blood and fiery sigils!
Lushes of death and infernal vigils!
No hand unbloodied, no soul untarnished, the unholy few
Esteemed in all things dark and evil, we’re the Druidic Crew!
The Druidic Crew!
Whoo! Yay! Yahoo!

In eddies of brown hooded cloaks there is a cavalcade of toe touches, spread eagles, front hurdles, pikes, double nines, and high fives. The Arch Druid tuts and the figures settle back into the circle. A solemn silence spreads itself about the circumference of quickly intertwined fingers.

The virgin wails.

A tortured language tears itself from the Arch Druid’s throat and sears the ears of all present. They bravely hold fast against the torrent of violent consonants, their fingers strong like the roots of the ash tree. Gelid vowels, high and cool, seem to encrust the very space within with translucent fairy wings of brittle ice.

Druidic chants in a stone circle painted with the blood of virgins and sketched with hissing green fire ideograms of unspeakable horror that flame from the ground in ghostly brimstone smells. The moon illuminates the guttural sounds of almost unspeakable horror and grants them rank orange smoke shapes with the tenacity of fog and the cruelty of thunderstorms to gather above the wooden slab centering the circle. The Arch Druid raises his arms, and the circle tightens. The ideograms, the code of some poison, half-forgotten magic rise their green smoke in shafts of unearthly light and merge with the floating word shapes.

A vortex swirls silently; the virgin has collapsed from fright.

The vortex spins madly in a retching combination of green and orange and flashes of yellow lightning, the silence broken with a horrendous tearing sound, like flesh rent apart, perhaps of the flesh of the world bulging outwards, opening against its own accord. A yellow light, of diseased skin, ancient evil parchments, a man’s fear, floods the circle, and is momentarily extinguished. It returns, an inky blackness lingering at its center.

Delicate black tentacles give life to the agonized hole’s edges, reminiscent of scurrying insects and reptiles, streaks towards the virgin. She awakes just as the appendages engulf her every orifice to muffle her cries, her farts of terror, groans mutely as they snake up her sexual canal, fills her lungs and stomach. She bursts in a ruddy smoke of an incandescent ecstasy only the freedom from great pain could offer. The circle wavers, gorges rising almost simultaneously into gullets suddenly comprehending the scope of horror they have played into. Few have success containing their meals. Some soil their robes.
“Yes. Yess,” The Arch Druid hisses. “Yesss!”

The smoke dissipates, drifting on the wind. The vortex shudders, the rent in space-time rapidly closing, and the beast, a sizable portion of its bulk already extruded, suffering for the first time in eons, responds mindlessly with lashes of its breadth onto the earth. Everything is uprooted, trees, the stone circle, the nearby mountain. Tremors race rolling crests across the countryside to throw towns as far as a hundred miles away high into the air.

“What? No!” cries the Arch Druid through the coppery taste of terror in his mouth. He has bitten off the inside of his cheek. He can feel it sloshing about against his tongue. He grabs a panicked minion, makes frantic queries.

“What? You said she was a virgin!”
“It was just a lark. We didn’t know it would be like this, boss!”
The Arch Druid angrily slaughters the fool with his sacrificial knife and turns his tattered larynx towards the beast. The dead language fills the air once more. In the howling maelstrom of failure, thirteen druids are plucked up by inky black tendrils and are crushed. A faint rendition of the Druidic Crew is heard thinly through the chaos. It is abruptly cut off, as is the Arch Druid’s incantations.

The hole stops shrinking, but remains lodged open, its circumference almost infinitesimal. The evil presence swells like a balloon, pushing itself painfully through, crushing everything within its bulk, growing, to eventually obstruct even the moonlight.

A Cinquain

Raw dust
Ravaging land
With stinging breath of earth
Tell me this world wasn’t always…
Desert.

The Burning City

The Time Traveller sat at the bar and watched the city burn through the plate glass window. The snooty establishment was empty, its occupants fled many days before. He had made a martini—shaken, not stirred—and lit up his favorite cheroot. A hard lifetime’s work was finally done, and he basked in the simple pleasures. The horizon swam with incandescent needles shedding great globules of burning steel in a dreamy haze. Infiltration, notoriety, fame, then betrayal. He held no qualms about what he did. He stared down the horror in their faces as the bombs fell and he walked from the city on a ruined road in his best suit. They came at him from the crumbled buildings and he shot them point-blank, with all the emotion of putting an animal to sleep. He was an agent of chaos, no hard feelings, baby. It had to be done. He stopped to smell the roses, even as they wilted from the hellfire at his back. Now, on his plush seat, he considered his options, fingering his white collar and spangled the red air with blue smoke rings.

Word Catalyst Workshop Prompt 1/2/08

Bebop

…orgone vapor streaming off hot flesh like heat haze world shot in jazz hues of cobalt gunmetal subdued saxophone glint pulse of trashcan rimshot crashing chocolate rollercoaster form swishing thin sheen silk skirt rump rumpus twisting fists threading smoke strata filtering cyanosing disco glints in thin mist of sweat rain from jogging chests to heliographing hips in whirlpool of whirring feet flashing lycaenid dream daze zombie thrust ultamarine jive glinting in open sagging mouths gold glistening teeth flared nostrils rounding wild eyes circling circling the sapphire twinkle flashing on that chocolate ear heavy tongue tracing snail trail of sweat down nappy nape the shag and the bop of soft womanly pressure rub rub rubbing his hard boy pressure in delicious friction grinding cold orgone vapor streaming off hot flesh like heat haze…

The Original Oyster House

The hobo sat shrouded in neon light like a dirty Buddha. As patrons entered or left the restaurant, the open door pushed out wafts of fish, clam chowder, and the stale tang of beer. His stomach growled. He watched the people chatter among themselves from his garbage can seat. The rain pelted his battered cap, beaded his beard like so many little pearls. It didn’t bother him. He was a spectator in a small constellation of dramas. Earlier he had observed a woman rushing silently out the door with her face in her hands, and through the plate glass he saw the man she came in with had with ordered a full bottle of whiskey. Children capered through the smell of seafood, rushing from the neon to the next visual delight to be sampled. A couple lost inside their reality bubble dawdled in the pounding precipitation, forgotten umbrella dangling at their side. It rained harder, the water sluicing against the curb to lap at the sidewalk like an exuberant puppy. More smells, more groans from his stomach. He fingered the makeshift fishing pole that leaned against the garbage. He would go to the Allegheny and try his luck, arsenic be damned.

In response to Word Catalyst Magazine‘s latest prompt.

Sasha

Sasha sat in the crèche, a sprawl of connectors snaking from her shorn head to an outlet in the wall. She wore mirrorglass lenses swarming with halogen text.  It was a code read-out of the future, specifically that of the SecResCorp Inc. grounds. The spatial-temporal dimensions belonged to an agent in deep cover. The identity of the field agent, codename Janus, was deeply classified. The length and breadth of experience in space-time within his proximity was fed backwards through time.

It was a power of godlike proportions. A complete three dimensional data capture of a single spatial-temporal slice unfolded in her mind. It was a security complex. The higher aboves wanted an article from the desk of office space 24D in Complex HAZK8. These slices of space-time could be put in a containment field, the electromagnetic equivalent of an ol’ mason jar, and using this method Sasha was able to investigate all the possibilities to ensure maximum survivability rate.  In rapid fire she undertook several scenarios. Virtually, she experienced each iteration, died and lived through each failure and success until the options towards the best possible course consolidated. Ghosts of pain tingled where limbs were scorched off, slashes gashed, internal punctures ruptured. She finished these sessions feeling like a patchwork woman.

She was an artist, dancer, philosophizer, warrior, architect, general, and a woman. Sasha applied herself to her bloody art with finesse, rough-hewed when necessary, and ultimately outputted a scenario that yielded an 100% success rate. She downloaded a copy onto a datachip. She grinned with satisfaction and swept the nodes from her skull. She had even accounted for Johnny Kester. Sasha headed for the mess hall, jiggling the datachip in a hand.

Johnny Kester was a pilot, and relatively new with the company. It would be his first time working with Sasha. His specialty was the Cricket, a small thopter, capable of flying with payloads under a thousand kilos. Any heavier, it would still fly short distances, hopping long parabolas from point to point. Johnny was supposedly the best. He probably was, Sasha surmised. The superiors never half-arsed on help and resources when it came to Sasha. She found him just leaving the mess hall. He stopped when he saw her.

“It’s just like a dance.” She pirouetted, tossing the chip to Johnny who caught it with the reflexes expected of a pilot. She grabbed him by the coat and slammed him against the wall. “Don’t fuck it up.” With slackjaw amazement he watched her ass recede down the hall.

Final Scenario:
She always felt alive in free fall. Clouds rushed past her. When she was a little girl she dreamed of angels, little plump baby cherubims flitting among the downy clouds. She would frolic with them, leaping from puff to puff, and they would have snowball wars. Snowballs like small comets shedding chlorofluorocarbons and ice in the thin cold reaches. She remembered catching God square in the face, his smile of shock. The wind tore the chuckle from her lips.

Ka-chump! Firing downwards the marshmallow canister, she tucked her knees and straightened into a dive. The canister impacted and exploded in a rapidly expanding bubble of translucent gelatin. She punched through and the gel absorbed her mass velocity, bulging, spreading it along its circumference. She tumbled slowly, turning to land in a crouch. She could see small impacts bursting small bubbles in the gel. They were shooting. Wait, wait, wait. The gel destructured and foamed to the ground. She slid, her guns haloing. In a smell of carbine smoke, she had dispatched an entire squad.

The layout burned bright in her mind as she unerringly traversed labyrinthe corridors, squeezing off bursts of her rifle with heavily rehearsed rote. She fired at empty doorways and danced past falling corpses whose rolling eyes showed they didn’t know they were dead. Running, wild and fast like in the green fields of her childhood where butterflies kept pace in a squall of grasshoppers and crickets, her trigger fingers blazed tracers of bullets thin and deadly. She dashed into a stairwell, shedding a mine as she ran steadily upstairs.

A miniature rocket launcher did the job, punching the door inward into a flurry of burning splinters. She ran into the smoke with her eyes closed, her trained legs flawlessly navigating every obstacle. At the desk, she stopped, knelt, and looked at the framed picture. The frame was brightly coloured, as if painted by a child’s hand. The picture showed a little girl with a beaming smile, tongue sticking through the gap where her baby teeth had fallen out. So the higher ups had a heart. Usually it was money or damaging information. Sasha brushed an unexpected tear from her eye, and grabbed the picture.

The thopter whirred into her line of vision. “Right on time. Not too bad of a chap, after all,” she said as she placed her foot on the edge of the roof and threw herself into eternity.

After the mission she took him in the locker room and fucked him until the cartoon sunshine of a thousand megatons filled her body with incandescent ecstasy. She dressed and left him in a gasping heap, smiling cruelly as she pushed out the locker room.

The Bitch Witch

She had many names, which was quite proper for somebody who had lived so long and moved on so often, but we will call her Mab for that is her name now in this particular time and age, Mab the bitch witch everyone loved to hate, the bitch witch everyone depended on for their sad secrets.

See Mab in the forest, in her shack. The shack is overgrown, wrought with morning glories and yagé, the twining vines of introspection, and a musk of cinnamon and jasmine and vanilla suffuses the wet air. Honeybees bumble about those flowers and parcel dizzying properties to their hives. Dilapidation reigns in the warped beams and crooked flue and the flapping eaves, but this is a ramshackle farce, for entering the house finds oneself in a cozy space, hearth warm in the winter, cool as stone in the hottest summer.

A cast iron pan hangs above the cast iron stove. Stainless steel kettle. Embroidered rug. A hempen hammock dangling from the rafters. Various herbs drying in bunches on the walls. Glass bottles of all sizes and colors on shelves along one wall, also hung on hooks and roped to the rafters. Mab herself is seated in a burnished rocking chair sipping tea from a finely rolled spliff. Through the artful smoke rings that litter her atmosphere, her hair is brown shot with gray, and she moves with slow lithe grace. She puts down the smoldering roach and putters about her abode. Now, Mab needs to go to the market.

As soon as she left her door she affected a humpbacked gait, held a cackle at the ready in her throat, and for measure, gave her eyes a good roll. It was a ways before she entered the perimeter of the town, marked by the rough translation of rutted dried mud to a relatively smooth pane of dusty road. She rolled her eyes at the beastly children who ran up to her to throw rocks and sometimes eggs. When Mab passed storefronts, the townspeople’s chatter ceased to stony silence, starting up when she was well behind them. Nevertheless, she had hawk ears and heard their prejudices from afar. The General Store lay ahead.

Cruel children hid and sniggered from the shadows of alleys, rags of light moving across their faces. She slipped into the stuffy heat of the General Store and ordered flour, eggs, nails, and dried fish strips. She paid, cackling and rolling her eyes, reveled in the alarm flashing under the shopkeeper’s bushy brows. That one, he had hives whenever he glimpsed women’s underclothings. He came to her one blustery night bloated with hives on his hives. He couldn’t see through one eye and his words were slurred. Apparently he had deviated with his proper and prim route and passed by the whorehouse. She had him kill a toad and smear its innards on his badonkadonk. It must have worked. The Madame was now part owner of his General Store.

The folk of this town feared her but that never stopped them from going up to Mab in the deep of night to knock tentatively at her splintery door, secrets of pains and curses heavy in their mouth spilling like blood from a pig’s slit neck. The cobbler beating at his leather averted his gaze, him she helped rid with a powder the sores inside his underwear. She cackled and rolled her eyes at him, saw he had blushed. The piemaker flashed her lashes with demure shame. Her husband was frigid so Mab showed her how to rub the button special to make her gush. She had concocted a bullshit potion for the Mayor’s wife who wanted to curse her husband for running around with his filly; it was bullshit in more ways than one for the mayor’s wife’s ill wishes were all it took for the filly to fall off her horse and break her back. It was sublime pleasure watching the high off noble borne quaff rancid steaming crap and daintily dabbing the corners of her lips with a kerchief, utterly trusting Mab. She had cackled high and long.

Mab walked through town without much trouble but for the infernal children. She shot a dart from her sleeve, small as a rose’s thorn, and it caught a red-haired brat in the neck. He slapped at it, probably thinking it was a skeeter. She cackled at them and they scattered like pestilent rats. The boy would have interesting dreams tonight. His mother would be stunned at the aftermath and burn the shamed boy’s sheets.

Mab had a bag stashed away with her essentials. If worse came to shove, as it often did with a constellation of burning torches in the night, she would small rose thorns dipped in quick acting hallucinogenics inside her sleeve spray, disappear in a swirl of purpleblack smoke and leave the cottage a night bloom of flame at her back. Once she had made the Slavs think her house run away on feet of chicken.

She cackled all the way to her rickety cabin.

Deus Ex Machina

She walked in the middle of the road, trying to know her own name.

Her world was slathered with broad strokes, with just enough detail to expose a bare minimum of information. She felt unfinished, like a badly developed photograph, as if, when her story ended, everything else would be sucked into her wake and just disappear.

She was a genie in a bottle.

A thunderstorm crashed the air above with alarming rapidity. Lightning flung their light among the green eaves of the oak-lined street. Hail raced across the asphalt. She turned and ran, determined not to scream like a  b-movie extra. The tattoo of her frantic steps led her up the drive of a house she knew to be hers. The world had melted into a strobe of shadows. She pushed through the front door and rushed into the livingroom and  threw herself onto the green velvet couch. Why wasn’t it so strange that the room and the house, but for the lamp on stand and the couch, was bare? She huddled in horror on the green leather couch. She imagined cackling deities straddling the electric arcs of thunderbolts swarming into her life like so many hornets. How wrong she was!

There was only one god and he watched her in his mind as he crafted her story. He hadn’t decided whether she would be a blonde or a brunette. She clutched at the cycling hues of her hair and sobbed, “What is happening?!” Perhaps it didn’t matter. Was she plump, or is anorexia her way of life? She knocked the lamp over in her panicked oscillations of mass. Haphazard silhouettes camped and leered across the livingroom wall in a precession of devils. She collapsed in a heap on the lush carpeting and, as soon she saw her skin shifting through the ethnicities, sobbed some more. She felt like a flesh-colored prism, no—did she really think that? “Stop it!” she screamed, knowing she wouldn’t be heard, but told. “Stop it…”

She slept the ragged sleep of exhaustion that those teetering at the brink of death or madness welcome. She awoke on a floor smooth as marble and lay for some time in a bare and cold cone of light. She could see nothing in the absolute darkness ahead. Tears sprang from her eyes and pooled on the floor. Her livingroom flickered into existence, then a local pub with regulars laughing through foam flecked lips, then the house of the parents escaping fluid memory, and it was quickly like a rolodex thumbed through at an incredible speed whirring through scenario after scenario until she started screaming.

A river of obscenities churned through her larynx like a niagara, pummeling her own eardrums. Did he want her to say that? Did he hate her—no, himself—so much? He felt uncanny pity for the figment. He soothed her tears, closed her eyes, and when she came to she was seated in front of a warm fire. A mug of hot chocolate steamed on the coffee table and a novel lay splayed on her lap.

“I must have fallen asleep,” she murmured to herself as she watched through a window the snow whitewash the land.

He smiled and clicked save. He would leave it at that.