Sigils and Other Wankery

There are few sadder sights than seeing ones childhood home in ruins. One could, for example, find a dog clinging onto life, coughing out blood and trying to move its flattened body. A cherished (and deceased) member of the family could be discovered to have indulged themselves in a bit of pedophilia. Someone could have turned on the news to find that a school of children was shot up in a pizzeria because some nut job got it into his thick skull that there was a child trafficking ring in the (non-existent) basement based solely on the word of some conspiracy board. And that’s not even getting into the various, often times horrifying, stories that come out of the landmass once called Florida. A lot of sad things happen.

But seeing one’s childhood home replaced by something unrecognizable is a burden few will ever experience. A weightless sadness that feels like having one’s liver surgically removed without anesthesia. And it’s not even done by a bad surgeon. Indeed, it would be by one of the best surgeons in the world. Though that’s not the same as one of the best people in the world. For this surgeon cares not for people, merely sees them as a mechanic would a car with a busted muffler. When the patient looks at the doctor for some reassurances over them not being drugged, they find only the coldness of someone who has lost many a patient and knows what it is to suffer. He has hardened his heart to the suffering of others, which in some regards has improved his skills as a surgeon. But they have dulled his skills as a person. It is the pain of seeing those eyes as the knife begins to go into the flesh of the patient that Billy felt as he looked upon the remains of his home.

In truth, to call them “remains” is an inaccurate statement. It is true that Billy stood where his home once was and it is true that it is no longer hospitable. But to say that anything remained of the ruin he called a home would be wrong. What stood where his home once did was a monotonously dull grey cube, which contained a factory within it. There didn’t appear to be any doors within the building; only a hatch on the top where helicopters could dump more and more “human resources.” There weren’t even any windows in the building. One wondered how air got into that perfect cube. Must be some manufactured air that costs a lot more than it would to simply have a few windows in the buildings, Billy thought.

And yet, the building itself was covered in vines and foliage. Giant green fingers were slowly sliding around the humongous cube with the elegance of a fist tightening before the knock out punch. (Through the foliage, he could see some cracks just large enough to allow a person to barely squeeze out of. Indeed, it was recorded that nearly one in every four workers escaped through this means. The other three-fourths used the sewers.) There were murmurs on the street of plant life being capable of coming to life and slaughtering the living. Rumors that vines were seen strangling a group of children and roots upending roads, causing pursuers of what they called criminals to break their faces on concrete streets. I met “cynical” person once sometime after entering the City, and he thought it was a righteous act done solely because humanity deserved to die. Then again, that same person thought the only way to live was within the City and those who didn’t were “too cowardly to live in the real world instead of their safe space.” Not a pleasant person, to say the least.

But beyond the foliage, near the bottom of the building, Billy could see someone. He couldn’t quite make the shape of the person, but they appeared to be running away from the building. He could see more people running behind them. They appeared to be clumped together like a mob and following the lone runner as if he was the monster at the end of a black and white movie. As they moved closer, Billy could see the crowd was armed with batons of various thicknesses (though sadly, there was nary a torch or pitchfork in sight). A cruel sneer could be heard from the mob. The sneer of the powerless few who use what little power they have to beat up those even more powerless than them because the powerful said so. Unfortunately for Billy, the person being chased decided to run in his direction. Knowing full well what happens when one is in the path of an angry mob, Billy decided to join the fellow.

“Wonderful day for it, wouldn’t you say,” they said, though Billy wouldn’t say he’d agree. He tried to get a good look at them as they ran, but he could only get splashes at a time. They were dressed in a slick pair of leather pants that shouldn’t allow them the mobility they were currently enjoying. They had a rather unfortunate haircut that made it look like someone had shaven the word “facefuck” in the center and they were that desperate to shave it off without being bald. Or, at least, that’s what Billy hoped was the reasoning for such a dreadful haircut. No one could actually want to look like that. Then again, there was a sincerity to the design that implied otherwise. They were largely sunburnt with the exception of their left index finger, which had a pale ring around it. Upon closer examination, their pants weren’t so much leather as extremely dark and clean. They smelled like a magici-

But before Billy could make his next note, some asshole decided it would be a good idea to throw a fucking baton (which is a nice way of saying “not actually a baton”) at them.

“Wh- WHY,” said Billy in the tone of voice of someone discovering that people do in fact think it’s a good idea to hide a chainsaw down their pants.

“Must of run out of sticks,” said Billy’s running companion. “Alex, by the way.”

“Billy. Billy Bradshaw. Can’t imagine how they’d run out of them. Must be growing by the dozens given those vines.”

“Oh you saw them too,” said Alex in the droll tone of someone noting they’re breathing air, “why do you think that is?”

“What, the plants growing? Oh, I don’t know, maybe it’s because the deer told the plants to do that.”

“Oh come now,” said Alex acting as if they hadn’t seen deer order a plant to rip off the limbs of an ornery ex-Spider who thought it was a good idea to kick a puppy in front of a deer. In his defense (as slim as that might be), it was because his date ran off on him. Then again, having actually talked to the woman in question (who has asked to remain anonymous), she dumped him on the grounds that he spiked her drink. He tried to explain that it wasn’t roofies or anything, not realizing the problem was the whole “not telling her what she was drinking and having to have a complete stranger named Alex tell what her date had done before she drunk the drink” part of the affair. She was almost saddened to see the deer rip him to shreds. “That’s absurd.”

“Oh, then what the fuck do you think is going on,” Billy didn’t so much ask this as shout it quickly.

“Well-“ but before they could finish that lie, another baton was thrown at the pair. This time, it was a much further shave as the crowd was starting to lose their anger at what Alex did. Alex’s actions that afternoon were, to be quite blunt, extremely dull up to that point, best described in sentences such as “And then, they took another left turn,” “They stopped to take a wiz for a good half hour or so,” and “They spent nearly an hour trying to get a pebble out of their shoe.” (This is why a majority of travelogues tend to cut out the exact details of the journey in favor of more thematically interesting things.)

That isn’t to say that Alex’s journey was a dull one, nor that their reasoning was unworthy of being chased. Indeed, many a storyteller has made great art out of “I’m off to see grandmother.” But the devil, as they say, is in the details. Coincidentally, one of the reasons for Alex being there concerned their grandmother. Alex’s grandmother had been dead for their entire life. They were informed, while looking for a friend of theirs, that she was buried a mile or so outside of City limits. When they arrived to the location of the graveyard to pay respects, they discovered, to their unsurprised horror, that the graveyard was paved over and replaced with a parking lot for a factory. (Said parking lot was there more for aesthetics than utility.) They could hear their grandmother’s soul screaming from beneath the concrete in a choir of pain and anger. Her song was an apocalyptic track about the cleansing powers of fire. WHAT IS THERE TO DO, the dead woman sang perfectly in tune, WHEN EVERYTHING WE DOCTOR, WHEN EVERYTHING WE BUILD, IS STAINED BY OUR TOUCH? WHEN EVERYWHERE WE GO IS SOMEWHERE VISITED BY SOMEONE? THE MADNESS HERE IS CIRCULAR.

“The madness here is us,” Alex said to themself. They knew the implications and invocations of those words. Most magicians knew the dead always spoke in an iconography they understood… after a fashion. Haunted language is perhaps a befitting one for ghosts. All stories, in their own way, are haunted. There are influences one does not appreciate or even realize are influences until looked upon in the wider tapestry of the world. Take, for example, the song the soul sang: The Tower Through the Trees. It’s an apocalyptic song by The Seeming about the necessity of burning everything down to the ground, including all of humanity. “A protest song as imagined by a nihilist,” as one critic put it. The album as a whole (and indeed, the band’s later work) was less, for lack of a better phrase, pessimistic about humanity than such a statement would imply, ultimately aligning itself with the shift into a new form of being. A rejection of what we once called human in favor of a brave new world with such people in it (“We secede from wholeness, wholesomeness, holiness, and humankind. Evolve and become unrecognizable. Demand gills, antlers, ink sacs, fangs, talons, udders, spores, quills, a proboscis, and a bioluminescent thorax,” as a later song put it). Though we have not evolved to being unrecognizable from the humanity of my childhood, to say we are what we were back then would be a lie. Then again, is that not true of all generational shifts?

With this cryptic reference in mind, Alex walked up to the factory and, at the exact center of each side, made a sigil out of the vines and other natural things growing on the building. It was as if they were a canvas waiting to be used for this exact purpose. The sigils were all of identical shape, that of akin to an extremely thin person with no arms, a wide open smile, and a single square eye filled with lines crossing over one another to look like an asterisk with some T’s dangling off of it. Once each sigil was completed, Alex would do the necessary hand movements to launch them into the world, both forwards and backwards in time.

Alex knew the eventual consequences of the action. Indeed, all magicians knew that magical rituals of such a scale as to murder a City had blow back that would, to some degree, counter the goal of the sigil. To use one of the more famous examples, were someone to use the Whitechapel murders of the late 1800’s as a magical ritual to solidify the power and dominance of the patriarchy over the 20^th century, one must also contend with the rise of feminism as a prevailing force in the world. This is why the best magical spells are ones in the form of fictional texts as opposed to stereotypical rituals: with a book, the blow back is typically “people write angry reviews about the book and it’s message,” at best and “people scream about the ethics of video games journalism as a means to harass women off of the internet with pipe bombs” at worst. Rarely does a book bring about an entirely new school of thought to counter it (and even then, it’s not so much the book that’s being countered as the marginalized people reading it). But Alex performed the spell anyways. Unfortunately, what they hadn’t prepared for was for someone to notice and… let’s just say people who guard buildings for a living don’t take kindly to those who launch sigils on them and leave it at that. (In his defense, the factory had long since been abandoned once it stopped being cost effective. Those within were locked in, breaking apart and rebuilding products that would never see the light of day. They only thing keeping them going was the hope that someday, they would see the sun again. Even the ones who tried to escape from the cage didn’t know the outside world had forgotten them.)

When the pair were sure that they weren’t being chased anymore and, coincidentally, back in City limits, Alex asked, “So ]pant[ what were you ]pant[ doing there?”

“I…” said Billy with each pause containing a wheeze and cough, “was… seeing… my old home… town. You?”

“I ]pant[ wanted to see if my ]pant[ grandmother’s grave was still there.”

“Oh. Was it?”

“I don’t know. The building was covering up where ]pant[ the graves should be.”

“Ah.” There was a brief pause before Billy finally asked “So why were they chasing you?”

“Uhhhh…”

“Was it because of those shapes cut into the patchwork of vines that was eating the building?”

“Uuuuuuhhhhhhhh”

“Cause they looked kinda like sigils.”

“UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH”

“And you did smell like a magician who just launched a sigil. Plus that would explain why you were pulling up-“

“OK! YES, IS WAS USING THE FUCKING BUILDING TO LAUNCH SOME FUCKING SIGILS ONTO THE FUCKING PSYCHIC LANDSCAPE OF THIS FUCKING WORLD AND THE FUCKING GUARDS TOOK EXCEPTION TO THAT! ARE YOU HAPPY?”

“Well, with that tone, I’m not.” At which point the pair broke into a burst of laughter. They fell down onto the slightly grassy, but mostly concrete, ground and looked at one another as if they were friends.

“So,” Alex said when the laughter cooled, “how did you know that was a sigil?”

“Firstly, I’m a professional liar. I’m what you might call a Con Artist. Liars are pretty good at telling when someone knows something they don’t want to talk about. Second, friend of a friend explained it to me,” Billy lied. (The truth was that he actually read a book on making sigils when he was a kid. He stole it from a library and had to lie to his parents about it once the police started buckling down on the area shortly after he stole it, as if the two events were correlated. The last he saw of it was in his room an hour before the parents told the kids to play outside for an hour or so while they talked about some grownup things.)

“So…” asked Alex, “do you have plans for tonight?” There was a pause in the universe at that moment, one that magicians are adept to notice solely because they’re looking for such moments of narrative coalescence and thematic congruity all the time. It is said that magic is simply a form of art. That all a magic spell/work of art does is project the subconscious of the world as interpreted by the magician into the conscious world. Perhaps the idea was already within Billy before he said the words. Perhaps they were within him when he realized he was no longer with Cate or the last time he said “I love you” to his mom and dad or maybe they were in him when he was born and his whole life was a teleological ordained; the authorless wave of History itself controlling how his life would end.

Indeed, many a magician will claim that the world is preordained, that all actions are plotted out to fit within the schema of some occult being for their own purposes. Alex themself told me that he was the one who brought the City down. I doubt their story to that they were the author of these events as they were quite plastered when they told me this. The truth is the world is far too rudderless to ever be authored and controlled like characters in a work of fiction. Even the most intricate of designs fails to control the structure of life. For all the other intricate designs bungle over one another, as life tends to. As some magicians know deep down, all attempts at pure control end in failure. So perhaps it was the sigil, launched in time and space, which made Billy say these words. Or maybe it was Billy who said them because of the life he lived. Or maybe the words were his own spell of intent and meaning, one only subconsciously known. To be honest, the cause of the words holds little importance in the grand scheme of things.

Finally, Billy said in the calmest possible tone required to express the anger implicit within his words, “I think I’m gonna kill the CEO of the Fuzon Corporation.”

Support the blog on Patreon.

Graffiti on a Building Where Too Many People Died

They killed my friends.

Support the blog on Patreon.

Worst Man Rise

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

(Tangential History

TW: Police Brutality

When Billy was a child, he lived in the decline of a different city, one not too far from the City.  In some respects, it was this city that spelled the end of cities as anything other than a niche concept, the last gasp for future generations to think of them as an institution rather than to be looked back upon with bemused befuddlement. It wasn’t one of the major cities, or even a notable minor one, but it was his childhood hometown nonetheless. Billy recalled having a good childhood. But then again, there are things even the most observant of children wouldn’t see.

The living conditions, for example, were less than ideal. Indeed, most people in the city would consider it cruel to subject a child to live on the streets, begging for money to get food. Then again, those same people would blame the parents for being bad at parenting because they couldn’t find a job like the rest of them did. Better, such normal people thought, the child raised by the state, where they can be put to work for the benefit of society, than to be raised by such irresponsible parents. Many a child froze to death on those streets in the long winter nights while most normal people locked their doors to keep those people out.

The only reason Billy’s family was able to survive such nights was because they frequently broke the law by sleeping in abandoned apartment complexes, which were growing by the week. There were a few other families who lived in those complexes with Billy’s, so it wasn’t a completely familial affair. The oldest of the children was a girl named Cate, who was also 8 and had the smile of someone who should be on television. Billy would spend most of his time tied to her like a tattoo. They spent their time spreading rumors about gangs of storytellers and untold creatures lurking in the margins of the outside world. If she believed in the concept, Cate would have considered him her best friend. There were other kids who lived in the building and she got on with them just fine, but there was a sense in her that personal relationships were an ending concept and it would be best to keep those to as much of a minimum as possible.

One night, while the children played in the snow lit streets of the city, the adults had to deal with a pressing matter. It seemed that some police officers were in the area looking for trespassers “loitering on private property.” While it was true that none of the families paid a dime to live in those damp and dingy rooms, it’s also true that they had been abandoned for a good six months before any of them moved in. If anyone truly cared about them, wouldn’t they have done something to them, even if it were just merely tearing them down?

“We can’t stay here,” said Jim’s dad with the worried tone of an addict.

“Oh,” sneered Billy’s dad with the mocking tone of a pessimistic revolutionary, “and why not? ‘Cause the big bad government’ll kill us? They’re gonna kill us one by one just for the sport of it? Or maybe the landlords finally realized we’re here living in their buildings for free rather than on the streets dying for the same price, so they’re sicking the pigs on us, hmm?”

“YES!”

“They haven’t come for us before,” Lisa’s mom pointed out in desperation, “why would they come now?”

“Maybe,” hypothesized Cate’s uncle, “it has to do with that rumor I heard-“

“Oh please,” interrupted Frank’s sister while rolling her eyes, “if a corporation of that size was going to set up shop anywhere, surely they’d pick somewhere with more people.”

“They’d also pick somewhere with a lot of space,” continued Billy’s dad as if it was his idea. “Somewhere they could fit all the machinery required to do the job at hand. And frankly this city’s as tightly packed as a fist.”

“But what if it’s true?” said Lisa’s dad from a dark corner. He wasn’t one for talking; indeed most thought he was mute. But when those words came out of his cigarette stained voice, everyone turned towards him. “Regardless of the reason, be it to make way for “the future” or because they just want to kill us niggers, what if it’s true?” There was a bitter silence when he was done.

“Language aside,” Jim’s dad said to fill the void with a twinge of fear [it’s better than nothing, he thought], “he’s right. We can’t just expect the government to ignore us forever.”

“They’d ignore us if we just died on the streets like we’re supposed to,” murmured Luke’s dad to himself, pretending the others didn’t hear him.

“They were bound to notice us eventually,” Jim’s dad continued as if no one had spoken. “We have to face reality.”

“And what are we supposed to do,” Billy’s dad snapped like a bag of eggs pushed from a great height, “get a job that doesn’t exist?” The room was dead silent, more so than before. It was as silent as an abandoned morgue.

“…When was the last time you saw a job opening?” asked Frank’s sister, afraid of her own implications. “I was walking down Elm, and I saw a bunch of small businesses closing. Some of the cars on the streets were abandoned with luggage and dead pets inside. I even saw some of the shelters herd people onto busses. And all the TVs in the few remaining shop windows showed nothing but the static of a post apocalyptic station.”

“…What are you getting at?” asked Cate’s uncle, despite knowing the answer. They were all aware of what she was implying, but some part of their lizard brains needed her to say it so they could believe it. For the idea to be real.

“I think the Fuzon Corporation found a way to make some space.” As if to punctuate her theory, a gas grenade shattered its way through the window. Smoke burrowed through the room like a sewer pipeline through the ocean. They thought it was mere smoke at first, but then their vision started to collapse into liquids. The adults coughed and screamed for their children. They tried to find their way down the stairs and out of the building, but there were people coming up them… people with sticks, gas masks, and a desire to hit people for fun.

By the end of the night, with one exception, all the adults were either with their fellow homeless people or dead [Cate’s uncle, Jim’s dad, Billy’s mom, and Luke’s dad]. Most of the deaths were the result of the homeless daring to think being alive was justification enough to be treated like people as opposed to stolen property. [Some could say that might be a bit unfair. Typically, it’s preferred to return stolen property with as little damage as possible.] The parents would never see their children again. They were aware enough of what was happening to run as fast as they could the second they saw the police staking out the area as opposed to having a meeting as to discuss whether or not they should run away from the police.

The building was torn down a good month after the residents were evicted. Indeed, the whole of the city was torn down and replaced with a factory to build technology for citizens of the City. All the inadvertent and unintentional artwork that made the architectural theme of the city was destroyed and replaced the monolithic mundanity of the factory. Most of the technologies they were ordered to build consisted of computer circuit boards “too small” for machines to properly build. What the technology did in those machines was unknown to the workers. Most assumed it was to prevent robot revolutions, or something equally clichéd. The people were separated into different parts of the factory via an algorithm that determined which people where best combined to prevent uprisings. Between the factory opening and the City dying, there were 197 riots and 37 strikes [the longest being 12 consecutive days without labor].

The adults were branded with a bar code on the side of their arm and forever referred to by their serial number. None of them lived long enough to see the City die. Billy’s dad lived the longest despite being the most vocal of the group. The algorithm that determined how to deal with the uprisings when they occurred repeatedly spared him in the hopes that he would one day succeed. It was saddened on the day before the City died, when he died peacefully in his sleep. It took some comfort once it realized how the City had died. Or, at least, that’s the Historical record of things.

Jim had fled eastward, as he heard that he had family on that coast of America. He did not know that most of them had either died or had no idea he was related to them [his father was a black sheep of the family on account of being a gay man. Both facts enraged his family immensely]. It was irrelevant as Jim died before he could reach anyone due to falling into a ditch in the desert, suffering from an acute case of heat stroke and starvation. He lasted three weeks on his own. His last thoughts were one of his few good dreams where the vultures flew him out of the ditch and they had such merry adventures in the cloud kingdom.

Lisa nearly died several times while traveling north towards the remains of Canada. Once, she came across a bear cub and was barely able to out run his mother. Another time, she met with some unsavory people who tried to do nasty things to her. She doesn’t talk about that night. She had nightmares that made her never want to sleep again for a few years. She had a look in her eye of complete despair. One day, long after she crossed the “border,” when she was old enough to have lost a child, Lisa came across a great gorge. It seemed to be as deep as forever. She considered it for a good long while. Then, a lad of her age came up next to her. He had the look in his eyes of someone who had been falling off of a gorge for years, hoping that he’d be lucky enough to reach the bottom. They looked at each other for what seemed like forever…

Frank’s sister was lucky to escape from the complex owing to a large amount of dumb luck and clever movements. When they were younger, the siblings made a pact to meet up at the miserable tree just outside of the city, within the confines of a different City. It was an odd looking tree, shaped like what one would think a tree would look like after being tortured for a couple hours. Its bark was only there in patches. Its branches twisted towards itself like someone trying to put out their burning hair. The carved love notes on its flesh almost made it look like it was screaming. Frank’s sister was lucky that he was there waiting there for her. Another minute, and he would’ve left. They departed for a place they had never been before. The letter they sent me shortly after finding out that I was working on retelling these events claimed that they are happy where they are now.

Luke had the misfortune of being spotted by the police as he escaped. The chase was long, nearly lasting five hours, but it ended with Luke being captured. As the police were taking him to within City limits [where things worse than death were bound to occur], an odd rumbling came around them. The world began to shake as clopping of hooves approached the officers and their quarry. Luke never believed the stories Cate and Billy would tell of the supernatural infecting the world like dirt does to an open wound. And yet, before him was a herd of beings with the general outline of deer. Their alien beauty awed him. But that awe turned to horror as one of the officers did one of the stupidest things in his life and shot at the deer. When the officers were all dead, the deer led Luke to his new life.

Quinn, one of two kids who lived in the apartment complex without a parent or adult guardian, was alone in the dark. The adults did not have a plan for where Quinn would go should the complex be uninhabitable. Indeed, they never thought it would be. Life has a way of catching up to people who think things will never change. Desperate and cold, Quinn jumped at the first opportunity they could for even the barest amount of comfort. They walked for what seemed like an eternity [but was merely a few hours] until they came across something shaped like a slender man in a black suit. The main difference between the two is that men are typically known to have faces and not have tentacles sprouting from some unknown part of existence. Somehow, without a face, the shape smiled. Quinn didn’t survive a week under its care. In some regards, they were lucky.

Johnathan, the other kid without a parent, was found nearly starved by a troupe of roaming Spiders. He was cared for and loved even better than he knew when he had parents. Sometimes he would share too much about who he was before he met the Spiders. Of what his parents did to him… of what he did to them when given the chance. He never told a soul within the apartment complex what he did and he didn’t know why he felt comfortable telling the Spiders. He always feared that people would toss him out if he told them the truth. And yet, these people didn’t. They held him close like a parent does to their child. These Spiders believed reacting with violence to pain and suffering didn’t inherently make one a bad person. For the first time in Jonathan’s life, he knew love.

As for Cate and Billy... in truth, the story of the pair is a bit anticlimactic. No matter how much they would like to believe there was, there was no moment of rupture that broke their hearts and made them hate each other forever. No tragic event that killed Cate and made Billy swear vengeance upon the world, motivating him to do what he was going to do in those final days of the City. There wasn’t even some disagreement between the two that slightly fractured them. They simply drifted apart from one another as the years went on. They didn’t even realize it had happened until it was over, and even then their reaction to this was just to shrug at the loss of something they once thought was important. They saw each other from time to time in the City, but those were moments of strangers walking the same street or eating at the same restaurant. In truth, they would never know each other as friends until long after the City had died.)

Support the blog on Patreon.

A Very Poor Harper

TW: Suicide

[The following is an attempt to recreate the events of the night of the Spiders Performance at 12200 Art Sea Blvd. It was compiled out of witness testimony, surviving documentation, and interviews with those involved. The stories are probably not the ones told, as many conflict over who told which one.]

John did not know why they called themselves “Spiders.” Was it an invocation of a story long since forgotten? Was there some mystical symbolism that innately drew these storytellers to them? Was it because spiders weave webs in much the same way that the nomads weaved stories? Or was it just because the name sounded right? John considered these answers whenever he had the time, which was sadly growing more and more frequent. The City, unlike most other corners of the world he found, had no place for Spiders within it. It was a serious place on a serious world that had no need of fanciful stories. There were some pockets of people who knew the value of stories (mostly the dispossessed and a few people in power who’d much prefer people like John in a morgue), but not many.

But John was not thinking of the nature of Spiders at that moment. Nor was he thinking of the impending sense of dread oozing across the skyline of the City like the stench of a skunk in heat. Nor, for that matter, the disappearance of two of the other seven Spiders who inexplicably decided living in the City was good for their health (as opposed to the fifteen Spiders who had nowhere else to go, the four Spiders who lived there all their lives and didn’t want to leave, and the one Spider who was just passing though on his way to the ruins of Mexico).

No, what John was thinking in that moment was what story he was going to tell to his audience. It wasn’t that he was lacking in any ideas, his mind was brimming with ideas much in the same way the human body is brimming with blood. The problem with his ideas though was that they didn’t feel quite right for that day. This is not an uncommon occurrence with Spiders, as part of the art of good storytelling is being able to gauge a room to see which tale fits the mood. Most of his stories were optimistic fare with heroes overcoming great odds, wanderers discovering new territories and learning from those who lived there, and other such frivolities. But even the most jovial of the City’s residents wasn’t in the mood for such complex simplicity. They wanted something with a bit of… bite is perhaps the wrong word to use here, but it’s the closest to what they wanted.

John had one story that had that “bite” the City wanted. It wasn’t that good in his opinion. The characters were flat to the point of unlikability, the ending forced, and it was a bit too mean for his tastes. Indeed, the majority of Spiders John had told the story to outright refused to speak to him again for months afterwards. Even then, there was a glare of discomfort in their future encounters, as if John had sodomized their puppy in front of them. And yet, the people of the City who listened to tales of magic and wonder spun by the Spiders wanted such a tale. John could feel it in his bones. He spent the day working out the outline of the piece, each sentence a dagger to a different vital organ. (John never memorizes the outline; he just used the memory of writing it as a guide to tell his stories.)

When it was finally completed, John was completely drained. He felt like someone had striped him of all of his colors to the point where there wasn’t even an outline of the man, just a lurking presence with only the resemblance of sentience. It would take him months just to recover enough to say coherent sentences. Months he did not have, as the rent was due in a week and his landlord (a stout man with the grin of a shark and the hands of a butcher) was notorious for kicking an elderly woman out of her apartment just for being five minutes late with her rent. It’s said that she either died of cold on the streets of The City that very night or, more plausibly but less dramatically, she died a slow agonizing death in an “old folks home,” forgotten by even her closest relatives. And so, John pushed himself into the world and hoped he could tell the piece of shit trapped in his brain.

The venue of his performance was, once upon a time, a pizzeria, though you couldn’t tell from the look of it. The walls were bare and the tables had long since been discarded to the wastelands. It was rather small for such a restaurant; it only had room for 100 people. Not including John, there were only 75 people, a third of whom was there for John and all the other Spiders, a third needed a place to sleep, and the last third just wandered in there for no particular reason. They were mostly sitting on the floor while John stood precariously atop the last remaining counter, three inches away from where the sole cash register used to be. John didn’t even notice that he was rubbing the scab inflicted on his shoulder so many years ago. The anticipation wasn’t so much building in that moment as it was the doldrums of waiting for someone to get over their stage freight (most people were there more for comfort rather than inspiration). 

When John tried to tell his monstrous story, all that escaped his mouth was a gasp of hot air: a scream of incandescent implications, the howl that of the 21^st century. Something within him was forcing the story to the dark recesses of his mind. Be this John’s conscious or some alien force was neither here nor there. What mattered was that John was unable to tell the story. All things considered, it was a fine story (if one assumes ethics are not a part of aesthetics). But because of those ethical concerns (be it on John’s part or someone else’s), John was incapable of telling his tale. The audience wasn’t starting to get bored, but then one has to not be bored to start getting bored. Faced with this situation, he did what any sensible storyteller would do: adlib and hope for the best.

The Devil and The Last Man

There was a War in Utopia, John began with the camp of thunder, between the Gods of old and the Children of the future. It was a war for the future, be it an end in blood and death or one where Omelas births a new generation of children. It was a brutal war that seemed to never end, a war without even the most baseline meaning wars try to have. It was a time when life merely wished to see other lives burn, to die agonizingly in pain for the sole crime of existing. There was no hope in this time, less so than even now. It was a time of uncertainty and this went on for quite some time, long enough for John to actually craft a story. In this time, there was a young man in a small beach city. Perhaps “city” is the wrong word here, but that was what the area he lived in called itself. He was an unnaturally lean man with messy hair as brown as clay, a lazy eye blue with sadness drenched into its core, and hands built for a more peaceful time. For a while, the man was alone. Not by choice or by his demeanor. In many regards, he was a compassionate man who was always willing to lend an ear and a hand, should the need arise. But the people of his world were long gone; the man was alone. It was as if a piece of the world was... (John couldn’t think of the right word to use in this instance. He hoped no one noticed his missing word.) It had been years since the man had said a word to a fellow being, or at least it felt like it. Because of this, the man had completely forgotten his name. He wasn’t sure about the time either, not since the clocks stopped. Evidently, many clocks require electricity to function and sadly, the young man opted for the more “pragmatic” profession of banking. He passed the time, what little he had, wandering his small city. It was his by right after all, much in the same way a child belongs to their parents or a person can own the apartments they don’t live in. For a long-

(At this point, a “wealthy” landlord, who was there because his boyfriend was into this nonsense, threw a shoe at John. The shoe barely missed him. Spiders tend to have these moments in their stories to suss out rude people within their audience. The boyfriend knew this, and what his lover would do when such a moment arose. The landlord was found three months later in a ditch a block or so from the local jail by a drunk. The boyfriend was reported to have ended up with enough money to “leave” the City. The Fuzon Corporation bought the apartment complex for employee housing. It was expected that those who weren’t employees would forced to fend for themselves. Most were assumed not to be able to survive the year. Three other landlords were found that night.)

  [Clears throat] For a long time, the man thought he would never see anyone ever again. Then one day, the Devil walked into town to do the job all Devils do. The Devil had the shape of a man, indeed were it not for one small detail, the Devil would be indistinguishable from a man. But that one detail made all the difference. The man, having been alone for so long, welcomed the Devil in like an old friend. He was aware of why the Devil was there and concealed a knife accordingly. (The voice John used for the Devil had a harshness to it. Not the harshness of a stern parent or a fascist police officer, but the harshness of the voice in your head that claims existence would be better off without you.) “Hello,” said the Devil, “may I come in?” Having been alone for so long, the man let the Devil into his city. “Before we begin,” the Devil inquired, “I must ask… what year is it?” (For the man, John spoke with a forced Iambic Pentameter.) “The calendar on the wall,” said the man without even looking, “claims it’s December 1998.” “Then,” retorted the Devil, “it is December 1998. Tell me man, when was the last time you saw one of your fellows?” The man paused. “It was December 1998 some years back. I was but a child then. He was a lean man, blind and strong. His hair went white when he was too young to know the meaning of words like Love and Fellowship and Death. He held those words close to his being. He said that those were the words that made up humanity.” “Do you think those are the words of humanity?” “No. I don’t think there are words for humanity. Words are static by their nature. They can be interpreted in a multitude of ways, certainly. But those meanings are limited to the word’s definition. Humanity is limitless in what it can and cannot be.” The Devil sighed. “When was the last time you’ were out of this… city?” “Never.” “Never?” “Never.” “So then, you know nothing of the world outside?” “Oh, I know the world. How could I not? The world has been infecting the city for some time. Strange birds long thought to be myth fly across the broken buildings speaking in human tongues. Horses with horns on their head sneer with their snouts and trample with their legs. The flies of your world have grown a taste for blood. Why, just recently, the Devil walked into my home and asked me what year it was. (For a brief moment, John performed a bitter shit-eating grin.) I know of the world, and I wish no part in its monster factory.” (An old man in the crowd laughed in his mind and then grew nostalgic for his childhood whimsies before falling into an endless sleep. His dreams all had happy middles and nary an ending or beginning in sight.) The Devil ignored the explanation. “So you have nary a desire to leave?” “Correct,” said the man (in the tone of voice of someone who has been listening to their grandfather go on and on for five hours about an anecdote about his time in the war that isn’t going to go anywhere), “but what do you desire.” “What I desire? Only to provide what you don’t have. What you… want.” “Wants and needs are two different things.” “Yes, that’s true. But you need to want. Without desire, we are but mindless dullards walking our way towards oblivion. What is the point of being without wanting something we don’t have.” “I get by without “wanting.”” “Do you?” The Devil looked around the part of the city they were in. It was a house built for five, back when that meant twenty-five. The brickwork on the intrusive chimney had begun to crumble, the colors of the walls had long since died, and the bed the man slept on day in and day out was just a blanket covering a set of springs. There were children in this house once upon a time. Now there are only ghosts. “Tell me,” the Devil asked, “do you miss people?” There was a pause. It seemed to go on forever. “No.” (Another pause, this one on John’s part. Some of the audience thought this was the end and clapped out of what they called politeness rather than genuine enjoyment. John held his hand to the audience, and they stopped.) “People were always asking me to do things for them. Tell me what color the sky is. Can you fetch me my kid’s fish? Can’t we just cuddle? I grew weary of them as soon as December 1998, ten years ago. When they all left, I was thrilled. I love being able to walk the streets without nary a person in sight. I’m happy. I’m happy. I. Am. Happy.” The Devil smiled, knowing where to go next. “Then why did you let me in so easily? Surely you know who I am and what I want? Surely you know what these things mean.” The Devil pointed to his forehead. The man’s face shifted from mania to a resigned spitefulness. “Yes, I know what those things mean. I know what you can offer me,” The man said as he revealed his knife, “But what I want to know is… what don’t you want to offer me?” This wasn’t the first time the Devil had a knife pointed at him. It was part of the process of these things. The mortals would try to make a last ditch effort to kill the Devil out of religious fervor or want for power or something typically banal. The Devil assumed this to be no different and played along. This is how it’s always been and always will be, thought the Devil. In the end, the mortals would always say yes and he would be victorious. It was his game after all, the mortals just lost it. “There is nothing that I don’t want to give you.” “Nothing?” “Nothing but…” (John dramatically covered his mouth with both hands.) “But?” “Nothing.” The man looked at the Devil incredulously. “Well, there is one thing. But it’s not out of malice, nor out of deception. People don’t want it, and I don’t offer what people don’t want.” There was a smile in the Devil’s… “Soul” is most certainly the wrong word here, but it’s as close as I can make. On the surface, the Devil was stone. But within, he was giddy. The hooks were in the man’s chest, waiting to tear him apart. “What is it?” A smile appeared on the Devil’s face. “I have your name.” The man said nothing for a long time. Finally, a curt smile appeared on his face. He was looking directly into the Devil’s eyes. Did he understand in that moment? Could he understand the implications of what the man was about to do? Or was the Devil merely a lost soul, walking blindly through his role like everyone else. “I had a name,” quoted the man, “but nevermind.” The man then slit his wrists and bled for some time. When the bleeding stopped and the man was long since limp, the sun closed itself from the city. There was no moon either. All echoes of the War had grown silent. The smells of frightened dogs descented from their corpses. The corpses of humanity had been removed from the streets. Even the man’s corpse was nowhere to be found. Language was removing itself from existence, as time had long ago. Soon the stones and plants would remove themselves. The Devil was alone in the city. The world had moved on without him.

John snapped his fingers and ended the tale. If one assumes politics not to be part of a work’s aesthetics, then the tale John told was not as good as the one he went there to tell. Some members of the audience read the story as having the same message as his initial story and came out thinking humanity was incapable of changing anything, a typical centrist message for “realistic” times (in particular, a perpetually angry woman with pink hair sitting next to someone who seemed to John like he was willingly on the leash of someone else’s narrative). But there were many listening that night, mostly Spiders, who knew what John was actually saying. In truth, John would’ve loved to tell the story without the subterfuge, for everyone to hear his meanings and implications without the young thinking him a monster. But you can’t tell stories about escaping a cage in a place that doesn’t want to hear them. You have to pay the bills somehow.

[The identity of the woman was Lucile Fredrickson, who had recently escaped from the Fuzon Corporation’s factory. She was employee #212121. She had been living on the streets for the past week and had time and time again experienced black outs and periods of lost time. It has been said that when she murdered John, a fellow former “employee” of the Fuzon Corporation (#13428), she was not totally there, but rather working from instinct. The identity of the man next to her was evidentally Billy, who left the performance shortly after the murder, which occurred as the next story was told.]

It was on that day that Jane had realized that she was now older than her mother. Jane never knew her mother’s name. She had died in childbirth, so her father claimed. Her father, who was a stern man who didn’t like to “spoil the child” as the saying goes, said that she just lost the will to live. Jane wondered sometimes if the same would happen to her if she ever got pregnant. Does giving birth to children mean one has to give up their own life to create something new? The thoughts of a child, Jane realized later in life. And yet, creation does take something out of you. Even a storyteller must give up time to tell their story.

Jane was ten when she escaped from her father to live with the Spiders. She had been telling stories with them for a good ten years when she met John. He was a shy kid, didn’t say much. He had the potential to do something interesting, but he had the tendency of second guessing himself. She had found a piece of parchment on the floor by his bed one night, all covered in doodles and sketches of a fantasy realm built on the ruins of a cyberpunk world. She never got the chance to ask him what it was about.

What Keeps Mankind Alive?

I shall now tell you of the world that was. It was the world of my father and my mother. It was not my world. This is not the story of my father, for it happened before he was born. The year was ’13. The place has no name. His name was Frank Smart. He was 12 when he decided to run away from his family. They were a lovin’ family, but he wasn’ a lovin’ son. I suppose that’s why he left them a present of fire as he ran away. He fled on a train headin’ to a place without a name. When he arrived, he found there to be no one on the streets, which made sense since it was early in the mornin’ when the sun was a risin’ up and back then, people didn’t like to be up that early. But as the day went on, people still didn’ show. That suited Frank’s purposes just fine, as that made it easier for him to steal their valuables. The houses seemed abandoned, the stores unmanned, and the banks ripe for the takin’. But Frank didn’ start with the banks or the stores or even the houses. No, he started with the church. There was a sayin’ he made up in his youth: they’ll never suspect you if you steal from the church. The logic of that phrase, I’ll never understand. Perhaps he meant that those within the church are above reproach, as they are the ones most likely to steal from the church. Or maybe he meant that those who steal from the just are most likely to be forgiven and not punished. Or maybe Frank was a stupid bastard who thought it sounded clever. I do not know. Regardless, he went to the church. Only, the church looked as if it had already been ransacked. The cross had been torn down and shattered. The glass windows smashed. Even the alter had been burnt. Frank wondered, “Who would destroy such expensive things?” But before he could think of that any more, a cry came from the confessional. A woman’s cry. Frank opened the door to find a woman in black. A nun, he thought. Must’ve gotten attacked by whoever-

[Her story was interrupted by the sounds of Lucile Fredrickson murdering John. She had confronted John over her view of the quality, which, in her words, was a “SHIT FUCKING WASTE OF TIME!” John, rather than acting like a mature adult of 11 years (or, at least, acting like what children are told mature adults are supposed to act like), lunged at the adult woman of 13 years. He proceeded to slam the back her head on the floor while she jammed her thumb into his eye. They howled like starving dogs fighting over the last scrap of meat. People tried to get away from the fight, or at the very least stop it. But the best those closest to the fight could do was trip over the pair. The Spider tore out the woman’s short pink hair while she burrowed her foot into his ass. With each blow, the fight grew more and more brutal. Teeth were irreparably destroyed, flesh scared deeper than the reach of a suicidal person’s blade, the human canvas surrounding the fight became akin to a red Convergence ill begot of Pollack’s intent.  The sounds grew into a guttural choir of relief and were just as swiftly silenced by the inevitable conclusion of their conflict. The two were dead.

As the pair’s flesh cooled into nothingness, the crowd dispersed with a bit of thankfulness that would be forgotten by the next day. The Spiders looked at their fallen compatriot with dismay. He showed such promise, especially for a first timer.  A Spider, a young girl no older than six with brown eyes and blonde pigtails named Mary, went up to the pair of corpses and drew a spider into the void of blood. In the end, the people disengaged from the decaying conclusion and left the building. The Spiders too would leave, having the understandably wrong belief that the police would arrive to collect the bodies. As if the police cared. Eventually, all that was left of the people in the building was Billy. The reason why Billy remained in the building is unknown. Maybe he wanted to be sure of what he saw in the man’s eyes. Maybe even what he thought he heard in the woman’s voice. And so, like a vulture in the desert, Billy rummaged through their pockets. When he found what the pair shared, he understood far too well.

In the times to come, Billy would ponder the relationship of the pair. Initially, he believed them to be romantically involved: a suicide pact between lovers with the artifice of hatred. For they were smiling when they had their final look at each other. But what language and tone they shared with Billy as they died lacked the tone of love, not even the lack of love once held. Perhaps they were siblings. Despite their differing skin tones and lack of familial faces, it was possible that the two were adopted. No, thought Billy, they didn’t smile like siblings. Their final smile had an air of selfishness to it. Not a dual experience but a solitary one shared.

This became all too clear when he turned them to their side and saw what they really shared: both had a tattoo of a barcode on their shoulder: 212121 for the Spider and 13428 for the member of the audience. And then he remembered and, subsequently, understood the look of content on the woman with the barcode 7877 on her body. He walked out the building and headed for the last place anyone would willingly go.

I met with Jane on a summer evening. We were in her garden, which she started shortly after meeting her wife. Anne was a kind woman, by Jane’s own admission, kinder than she deserved. They had met shortly after the City died in an abandoned restaurant where Jane was looking for medical supplies for a Spider who had broken hir leg and Anne was looking for her canine companion, who had run int. Her smile felt like eating strawberries for the first time. Her naturally blue hair dazzled on the evening sky and complemented Jane’s fiery red hair. She wasn’t there with us at the time, busy working with a troupe of Spiders on a more collaborative piece for their anniversary. She hasn’t finished it at the time of my writings, but what I’ve seen of it looks interesting. But then, you can never love the parts outside of the whole.

I asked Jane what had happened in the rest of her story that night. She sadly told me that she didn’t remember. “Probably ended with my dad dyin’,” she guessed. “All my stories back then were about my dad dyin’ in some way. I was a bit obsessed with the bastard until I met Anne. Probably have one more story about him in me. Maybe if I ever see him again.”

“Do you want to,” I asked. She looked out at the setting sun.

“You’re wrong about John, you know.”

“I am?”

“Yeah. I looked into him a while back. After all of this started.” She wasn’t referring to her garden. She was looking at the garden that had birthed itself from the ruins of the City. Once the greenery was merely an intrusive force on the brutalism of the remains. Now the green was like a piece of skin, a thread in the tapestry of the world. “It turns out that he wasn’ some employee of the factory.”

“He wasn’t?”

“No. He was a foreman. John Callimanti the Fifth. He was worth somethin’ in the old world. Got broke in one of the crashes, but had some friends within Fuzon that he didn’ fall too far. Lucy must’ve figured that out and…” I didn’t say anything for a while.

“Not that many friends, I suppose.”

“Why are you suppose’n that?”

“He was barcoded. Everyone says so.”

“Heh. Well, just because everyone says somethin’, doesn’ mean it’s true.” We talked a bit more about unrelated things. I left Jane Smart on good terms, and we talk from time to time.]

Support the blog on Patreon.