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The tall man in a long jacket smiled directly into the one-sided mirror until the detective decided to enter the dimly lit interrogation room. The detective, pulling a metal chair beneath himself with a grunt, took a moment to scrutinize the man’s face. Deep creases in that smile, dark shadows on those eyes from scraggly auburn bangs tossed across his face – the detective found it difficult to entertain the possibility that three people were still alive.

“Grent Mabury?”

“Yes sir,” the response came, from a throat that sounded like it hadn’t touched water in a year.

“Thank you. Would you please state for the record what you were doing on the evening of October 22nd, 2003?”

“I was at home, watching 24 Hours reruns because I’m always distracted the first time they air and miss the little details. I ate popcorn and pizza. I can find receipts for the pizza delivery if that helps.” Grent’s face hadn’t stopped smiling, but the detective did have to admit to himself that he also enjoyed pizza and 24 Hours. He also noted that Grent wasn’t really looking at him.

“You were one of the last people to leave McGob publishing house that afternoon. The three people who left after you returned to their homes and afterwards vanished. Could you explain why you were at McGob starting at 3:12 PM and onwards?”

“I was attending a meeting with my publisher and her associates. I’m a children’s book author, and they wanted to talk with me about one of my current books.”

“Was this conversation friendly? What did they want to say?” the detective asked.

“They were perturbed. You know sometimes how kids’ stories can be a bit dark. They found this one to be too unsettling compared to my previous stories, “Vava the Vunderful,” which was about a vampire who learned to love herself, and “Hurgus Hasn’t a Clue”, which was about a kid getting confusing answers to confusing questions from his dad.”

“Those sound cute, though I guess the vampire might be a dark subject.”

“The vampire was cute,” Grent said, abruptly dropping the smile for a second before recomposing his face.

“OK, I believe you. But what was it about your newest book that made them uncomfortable?”

*****

The little boy sat on the edge of his bed, full of worry.

He knew that his dad would find the cookie crumbs. He knew his mother would find the cookie crumbs.

When they found out, they would be so mad. They might even take away his birthday. Lucy from the playground had her birthday taken and has been 8 for four years straight.

“Little boy,” a deep voice rumbled from under the bed.

“Mr. Grembo, you scared me.”

“Little boy, you were already scared. Why are you worried?” Mr. Grembo asked.

Mr. Grembo walked out from under the bed. He was only as tall as the boy’s knee. He had a suit on, but he was very round and the buttons were almost popping off of his suit.

Mr. Grembo had a round pink face with red cheeks, and he had a tiny blue curly moustache to go with his well-combed blue hair.

“I ate the last cookies that I knew my mom wanted. But nobody was eating them for a week.”

“Be honest with me, little boy. Do you know how many cookies you ate?”

“I ate ten cookies. I couldn’t stop! They were so tasty,” the boy answered, licking his lips, but also feeling sad that he ate so much.

“Thank you for being honest with me. Can you be honest with your parents too?” Mr. Grembo asked, giving the boy a sharp look.

“No, I can’t! They’ll be upset and they’ll take away my birthday!” the boy said, starting to cry.

“Would you like me to make it so that everyone forgets about the cookies?” Mr. Grembo’s shadow from the nightlight covered the entire wall.

“Yes please! I don’t want to get in trouble.”

“OK, I will make it OK. OK, I will make it OK,” Mr. Grembo chanted, hopping on each leg. Then he opened his mouth and sucked the secret out of the air with a big whoosh of air. The little boy was sure his parents heard it, it was as loud as the vacuum cleaner.

But no footsteps came, and no one walked into the little boy’s room.

“It’s OK now, it’s OK now,” Mr. Grembo said. “Goodnight little boy. Please try not to eat so many cookies, because you’ll hurt your stomach.”

“Thank you Mr. Grembo!”

But it wouldn’t be the last time the little boy cried to Mr. Grembo. One week later, the little boy cheated in his class and copied the girl next to him. The teacher found out and called his parents.

They were very angry, and made the boy go to bed early.

“Mr. Grembo, please.”

“Little boy,” Mr. Grembo said, “Your parents already know that you cheated. Your teacher already knows. The little girl you cheated from knows.”

“I just don’t want people to be mad at me,” the little boy cried.

Mr. Grembo rocked back and forth on his heels. He was now taller than the boy’s knees by a little bit.

“You know, sometimes people will be upset with you.”

“I know.”

“Do you want me to take away people’s upset? Do you want me to make it like this never happened?”

“Please, Mr. Grembo. I never meant to make people mad. Please take it away.”

“OK, I will make it OK. OK, I will make it OK,” Mr. Grembo chanted. This time, when he sucked air in, it sounded like a plane flying too close, and his shadow grew to take away all the light of the nightlight on the walls.

“It’s OK now. It’s OK now.”

But it wasn’t OK for very long, because a week later, the little boy hurt somebody. They were playing tag, and the little boy pushed another boy into a metal bar and laughed at the bonk sound.

But the little boy didn’t find it very funny when the playground monitor called the principal, and the principal called his parents.

“Mr. Grembo! Please!”

“Little boy,” Mr. Grembo said, “Your parents know that you hurt another little boy and laughed. Your principal and teacher know. Your school knows. The little boy you hurt knows.”

“I don’t want to be a bad kid, I want to be a good kid!” the little boy cried.

“Are you sure? Because when you hurt people, it’s too late to decide to be a good kid. Everyone you know knows now that you can be mean and hurtful, but you can still show them that you can be a good kid and change.” Mr. Grembo had a gentle look in his eyes, but he was bigger than before and his hair was now the same color as the boy’s hair.

“I know.”

“Are you sure that you aren’t just wishing that something different happened?”

The boy stopped crying and said, “That’s right! I wish I could make it so that didn’t happen!”

Mr. Grembo frowned and said, “But it’s worth it too, to learn how not to hurt people. Are you sure you want me to take that away?”

“Please, Mr. Grembo! I don’t want to be the bad kid.”

“Reeeeaaally sure?” Mr. Grembo said, and the room went dark as the nightlight died out, leaving only the glimmer of Mr. Grembo’s eyes and buttons.

“Yes, please,” the little boy said.

“OK, I will make it OK! OK, I will make it OK!” Mr. Grembo chanted.

And then, when he breathed in, he breathed so hard it was like all of the air in the room was gone. The sound was a roar that filled both of the boy’s ears. And then it was quiet.

The night light turned back on and only the little boy was left.

“It’s OK now. It’s OK now,” the little boy said.

From then on, nothing the little boy did to hurt people or lie received any attention from anyone. He could be as mean as he wanted, as awful as he wanted, and nobody could punish him for it.

Meanwhile, at his home, deep underneath his bed in a box, sat a doll with blue hair and a blue moustache in a suit that was too small for its body. A small voice inside the doll spoke sometimes, cried often, and never grew up.

*****

“That is bleak,” the detective said. “Holy moly, I’m not sure I like that ending.”

“Well, I’m paraphrasing,” Grent replied. “I actually had three other versions for the publishers. Different kids, different dolls. Just testing different things to see what works.”

“Did they all end that way?”

“Pretty much. Just a little moral story for the kids.”

They let Grent out after not very much longer. The pizza delivery company verified that he ordered and paid, and none of Grent’s neighbors saw him leave.

But the detective had to pour himself a coffee when he got home, just to help with his anxious jitters. He knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep, not when he still had a doll in his closet with a blue moustache and blue hair and a ruddy little face in a suit with buttons.

He took a hot shower and looked at himself in the mirror.

“Is it true? Has no one ever held me accountable for anything? Have I been bad to people?”

It felt to him like he had. He could come up with examples, he was sure, if he could stop shaking. He had almost forgotten all about Mr. Grembo as an imaginary friend and couldn’t see Mr. Grembo as anything other than a little monster after hearing Grent talk about it.

The detective could remember when Greg’s head hit the pole in 2nd grade with a bonk and he had laughed, so he reassured himself that the doll hadn’t stolen his body. Because of that, the detective thought, maybe he hadn’t been all that bad to people.

“That stupid kids’ book author. How did he guess all that? I’m gonna get that smug fucker somehow, I just need time to think about it. I bet he has an internet search history or drugs or something we can book him on.”

The detective lifted the doll out of the bottom of his bedroom closet, promising to throw it in the trash.

“Not sure why I saved this shit anyway.”

Opening the lid of the box, he could see that inside was a bloated version of himself as a child, red cheeks but with a crude suit and blue hair. That little boy opened his mouth and sucked in all the air in the room with a sustained boom of sound not unlike a rocket taking off.

And then the detective and the doll were both gone. And somewhere, in a tiny apartment, in between reruns of TV shows and a stack of books about other children and other dolls, Grent smiled to himself.

There used to be a lot of secret places with complicated entry rituals holding universe altering secrets. Steffan Vasili would know. When he was ten, his father, Professor Vavo Vasili, took the boy on a tour of the world, shaking a overly marked map with excitement as he closed in on each threshold into the unknown. Professor Vasili was a cryptoarcheologist, but his study of structures that had limited written records wasn’t as scientific as his less-published peers. It took Steffan a long time to understand that, long after his mother had left a note on a hotel counter and booked her own flight home, long after they ran out of funds and were left just the two of them, and long after his father gave up and gave himself up.

The whole thing really started to unravel in the middle of the Atlantic. A temple of no distinct human origin would rise out of the water at dusk, anchored to seemingly nothing, a half mile wide and tiered like a pyramid. The edges were smoothed, however, and the slabs that made each step were hard like concrete but seamless. Maybe the dusk lighting had an impact, but the temple was a pale purple in color and appeared to absorb all light. They could reach out and touch it when it appeared next to their chartered boat. The entrance, stone slabs leading down to the water, beckoned their advance. The crew of the vessel stepped onto the stone and started up the steps when a booming voice roared.

“Who is trying to enter our domain?” the voice asked. The voice had a deep bass pitch to it, but there were reverberations in other pitches too, like other people softly speaking along with it.

“It is I, Dr. Vavo Vasili, a humble scholar of unknown places,” Professor Vasili replied.

“Hah!” the voice responded.

“Hah?”

“You are neither humble, nor are you unaware of where you are. You know more than enough to know you do not belong here.” Steffan’s mother gasped in response, but otherwise only the sound of the waves crashing against the temple could be heard.

“Marave, your husband has come to make an offer for admittance into our domain,” the voice added. “Has he spoken to you of this?” She said nothing in reply, stunned that the voice knew her name.

“I know you accept only those who are worthy,” the professor said. “I am aware that I am not worthy, and offer my son, a perfect boy who has never sinned.”

Steffan could not remember what happened then, because moments later his father picked him up and attempted to push him through the invisible barrier on the steps. Steffan was violently repulsed, ripped out of his father’s arms and jettisoned into the ocean. The professor toppled over and landed face first on the stone.

Steffan was an excellent swimmer at ten years old and had little trouble regaining his bearings in between the screams of his mother and the scurrying of the crew to return to the boat. But he very clearly heard the next words, directed at him from the voice of the temple.

“Boy, you are unworthy. Do not return here.”

*****

As an adult, Steffan struggles to remember what his early years were like. He feels as if he grew up in a test tube. Instructed in seven different languages before he was seven, given exhaustive college level lessons in math, reading, and writing before he set out across the world, raised playing different sports or physical activities with adult mentors, never other children, and kept with a staff of hyper-vigilant adults, never his own parents, he was encouraged to think about his own situation and how exceptional it was, as little as possible.

“That’s the thing with exceptional, special children like you,” Dr. Vasili said when nearing the end of his journey. “They don’t get to know that they’re living differently, and none of us were able to praise you because that would reveal your difference and make you prideful.”

Shortly after that, when climbing a mountain that had a gateway penetrating the middle of it like a donut’s hole, Dr. Vasili would sigh and say “I never even tried.” Steffan asked what he meant, but the professor picked up his pace until he was already walking through the vast tunnel and the wind swallowed his words. Steffan remembered seeing that night had settled on the other side of the mountain, visible through the tunnel, which would have been impossible because it was midday.

This place is beyond your ken. Leave at once. Steffan felt these words in his heartbeat, but he realized that it could have been a memory of some other place they had visited and been denied entrance. Dr. Vasili ignored the message and didn’t even turn around. And unlike so many times before, in so many different countries, so often that it felt strange when it didn’t happen, Dr. Vasili did not offer his supposedly perfect son to the voice in the mountain.

The professor vanished into the mountain. No ejection occurred, no terrifying animals were let loose, no trap was triggered. For a moment, Steffan stood staring with wonder.

“He finally was let in! He got what he wanted!”

However, his elation that his father finally managed to pass a threshold didn’t take long to twist into overwhelming feelings. He’s not coming back, Steffan realized. Steffan was only 12, but he had to figure out how to get to shelter, what to eat, where to go next. A little feeling in his stomach told him that he was right not to follow his father through the mountain.

The next year was spent begging, working small jobs, and doing anything possible to find some place to call home. When he did finally return to his home country, it felt to him as if it were more alien than anywhere else he had been. People were unwelcoming, and his explanation of why he was alone made people start walking away before he finished talking.

Steffan was 14 before he found a group home to take him in. He stayed there until he became a legal adult.

*****

Steffan laughs when he says this now. “I don’t believe that my father actually got to go anywhere. I think when he crossed into that mountain, he intended to die. And that’s what he received.”

“Whoa, that’s crazy, dude. Did you ever manage to find your mom?”

“I did what I felt like was appropriate. I put my story out in public. My father used to be semi-famous for his fake books about all the magical places a person could go to. Of course he hid all the real locations for these. So I went on a tour calling him a fraud, attacking his name. I knew all the place were real, but I was hoping my mother would reach out either in sympathy for how he isolated me and then left me to fend for myself in a different country, or she would reach out to correct the record since she knew the places we went to had real power, it just wasn’t meant for us. Neither happened.”

“That’s amazing! Hey, could I trouble you for one more, and then you can close out my tab?”

“Sure thing!” Steffan replies, grabbing a fresh mug and filling it with dark stout. Briefly he glances at his watch. Last guy here and it’s getting pretty late.

“You picked a good time for your last glass, friend. Going to have to close up shop shortly.”

“You’ve got such a friendly attitude about what you went through. How is that possible?” the customer asked while receiving the glass. How odd, I was pretty sure he was white, Steffan thinks, noticing the customer’s hands seem a different color than a moment before.

“To be honest, I struggled for a long time. My father tried to sacrifice me in one way or another in what seemed like hundreds of places people were never meant to see. It never worked, and his list of magical places that were still looking for someone worthy became smaller and smaller.”

“Did you struggle because you felt unworthy, or did you struggle because of the trauma of your father raising you like that?” the customer asks.

“Um, definitely both of those things,” Steffan replies with a short, sharp laugh. “I actually didn’t let myself become aware of how vile the way he treated me was until he left me alone on that donut mountain. Then I struggled with adults especially, because all the adults I’d known were there to treat me like their personal test subject. But I really got along sometimes with other kids, mostly because I could play all the games and was so strong, haha.”
“You are so strong,” the customer agrees. Steffan looks at him directly. Were his eyes this green before?

“Thanks for listening to me talk about it. I’ve gotten a lot of therapy, but it feels like something I’m just always going to be working through.”

“Thanks for sharing, Steffan. Just curious, did you ever think about going back to any of the places your father took you?”

“No, afraid not. I’ve lost his original maps. I think my special curse is that I can’t stand the supernatural now. Like, astrology grosses me out because I’ve actually been to places where the stars mattered like that, and I don’t belong there.”

The customer laughs at that. “What if I told you you do now?”

“What. What do you mean?” Steffan asks with a gruff edge in his tone.

“What we said before we knocked you and your father away from the gateway was ‘It’s human to sin. Either you lie, or the boy has never been allowed to be human.’”

“The… the… temple in the ocean! Do you come from there?” Steffan asks.

“Yeah dude. We actually don’t have sky high entry requirements, did you know that? But we weren’t going to let some fuckwit fake professor drag himself and his heavily traumatized son into our place.” Even while the stranger says this, Steffan can see that there are actually several people standing there in one place, shimmering in and out of the same frame.

“Wow, that’s wild.”

“We’re sorry to have rejected you like that. At the least, we hope you can take our apology. But we really came here in the hope that you would follow us back. It’s a real short trip, but we can’t stay too long waiting for your answer. Can you forgive us?”

Steffan struggles to hold back his emotions. “You’re not going to be able to pay out your tab, will you?”

Some of the people inside the entity cross their arms at this. “Sorry man, we don’t have cash. We can leave a golden fish here if you don’t want to come with us, maybe you settle the tab with that?”

“Maybe I’ll keep the golden fish and put it in my house. I’m afraid I can’t go with you though. I have no energy left for magic and mystery.”

Steffan watches as the entity starts to dissolve into seafoam on the floor of his pub. “Eh, that’s really part of what makes you worthy now. Nobody magical wants to found by someone seeking the magical. Your dad really sucks. We’re so sorry that you feel the way you do.”

“Honestly no, don’t worry about it. I’m finding my own happy place. And I appreciate the sentiment. Safe travels! Feel free to check with me in like 20 years or so, maybe I’ll change my mind. Promise I won’t drag a son to come see you though!”

“Blub blub blub,” the seafoam says before ejecting a golden fish statue from the foam soaking into the floorboards.

“Come again!” Steffan replies before staring at the golden fish statue. “You are too big to go on my mantle, so I’m just going to put you in the drawer with my passport.”

Later that evening, Steffan feels like he can take a deeper breath than usual knowing that he hadn’t been cosmically rejected for unexplained reasons. He also realizes, with a startling thought, that the seafoam people entity might not be the last customer going on an apology tour for rejecting him as a child.

“I’m charging extra for entities now, and you have to pay upfront per drink,” he thinks aloud and then turns off the light.

Once a year, a person starts to swell up. It’s a slow process, so most folks don’t notice the changes. Even their clothes swell with them. Clouds roll in from nowhere and the person steps outside and begins to find that their toes can no longer touch the ground.

A quiet takes over them. No words reach them. No words come out. No rope tied around them will hold. They start to pass through anything that touches them that wasn’t already on them. One year we tried tying everybody in town down at the first sign of clouds. Didn’t bother Bo Smith at all. Once his feet were a couple inches above the ground, his eyes became fixated on the floor, his breathing slowed down, and he drifted out of his binding and through the ceiling. He reacted not at all to the screams of his wife.

At some point, we can’t see them anymore. Doug Clemens had the idea to use binoculars once, but that year it was Nancy Engles, and she was a wisp of a woman, before she vanished into a cloud. Doug swore that she looked more and more like a ghost with every moment until he couldn’t see her anymore.

A handful of people still cleave to the idea that this is the rapture, but people who went to church or people who stayed home were both taken. Lots of folks put their faith in a cupboard and let it grow cobwebs. For them and for my family, the next part makes ascension to heaven so improbable or at least unnecessarily cruel. For a week, it pours rain, flooding town to the point where a person can’t leave or safely get around. School stays open just because this is a known issue and the bus driver is used to it, but besides that the town stays silent.

Worse still, the rain is full of salt. Tastes terrible. We’re a long ways from the ocean, and I’ve never been, but I always heard it’s salty like that too. This town is the only one in the county that can grow no crops because the soil is screwed up by all the salt. Lucky someone found extra reserves of oil out here about twenty years ago that brought some new people and businesses here, otherwise our town would have died off and people would have starved.

That’s why I call it a curse. The worst thing is we can’t talk about it. Our voices stammer when we try to talk about people we’ve lost or what happened to them. I tried to do a report on this in 3rd grade and was surprised that the page was blank when I tried to turn it in. Mrs. Haffert didn’t laugh at me, though. She started staring at the floor.

People can leave, but they’re guaranteed to come back. Maybe that’s the curse too, or maybe that’s just what it’s like to come from a place this small, this far from anybody else, where everyone knows everybody’s business.

How are you reading this? Probably means the curse is broken.

*****

When I pulled up in my truck after four years on the other side of the state, my mother first lifted her hand to her mouth, and her eyes grew wide. The creases around her eyes and in her brow became deep and dark, a face I used to see once a year. Maybe that was just her real face coming out because she quickly scrunched her expression into stern disapproval.

“You should not have come back here, Ellie.”

“I missed you. I missed my sister.”

“That sounds like a lie, because you never call.”

“It was hard to call because…”

“Because of…”

“Right. I’m sorry.”

“Tell me why you’re back here.”

“I know I should have reached out more,” I said, trying to swallow a brick in my throat. “I’ve been working on something and have an idea that I can’t really talk about.”

We can’t even talk about him, I thought to myself. This is terrible. I left whole voice messages that she was never able to listen to because they were scrubbed from existence.

I was already planning to leave after high school and stay away at any cost. “I got my degree in plant science.”

Her arms were crossed, and her face was stern. “Congratulations.”

I took off my backpack and unzipped it, pulling out bags of seeds. I lifted them up and walked towards her.

“These are coastal plants. They’re resistant to salt water. They might not work because this is such a different climate, but I’ve got a lot of different types to try out. Sea kale, sea spinach, glassworts, more.”

“I know the Gilroys have been trying to plant different things for years. You haven’t grown anything before.”

“Brett Gilroy couldn’t grow a healthy toenail, much less a coherent thought or a plant. And I have been growing stuff in my dorm. I’m loving plants mostly because we hardly see any unless we go to another town.”

“Where are you gonna grow anything?”

I gulped. “I was hoping you’d let me try the backyard.”

“Lot of stuff to clear out. Same with your old room. I’m assuming you’ll be staying with us for awhile? We were using your room for storage.”

Not surprised, I nodded. “If that’s OK. I can help move stuff around if that’s OK.”

She didn’t budge, but took out a cigarette and lit it. I was a kid the last time I saw her smoke.

“Alright. Come on in. I don’t have food or money for food right now, so I hope you do if you want to eat.”

The rooms of the house I remembered looked tinged in yellowish brown dust and were stacked with unopened credit card offer envelopes, collections notices, ragged grocery ads bookended by services people sell their jewelry and commemorative coins to, and very rarely a picture of him pulled out of an album and never put back.

The day he floated away, taking away with him a mountain of his own stacked up struggles, my Mom met his gaze on the floor and never really started looking up again.

“I can cook for y’all if you want. I do have a little money and don’t want to be a burden.”

“I don’t even know what you eat now. When my brother went away, he came back eating only green shit.”

I barked a short laugh. “I promise I eat pretty much what I did before. Though I’m hoping I can grow some green shit that other people will eat.”

One or two of those deep creases softened.

*****

Five days later, after multiple trips to the nearest town with a garden section, after I’d put my back into tilling up the dirt in the yard and setting down fertilizer, after I planted the seeds in nice rows, after I shared quiet meals with my mother where I would be looking at my phone and then look up her for a moment to find her sneaking a glance at me, after I laid down to sleep, I heard a knock at my bedroom door.

My mother’s face greeted me in the dark. Her brown eyes glistened in the dark. I have never seen her cry, but I could hear the strain in her throat as she grabbed my shoulders with her hands.

“Listen to me, Ellie. You have got to get the fuck out of here.”

“Mom I can’t go yet, I-”

“You’ve got to get the fuck out of here. I am asking you for this one thing. Get out of here.”

“Why, Mom?”

“I can’t! I can’t!” she hissed. “I can’t watch you! Leave me directions or call me or leave a voice mail or send me a letter about how to take care of your plants. I promise I will! I can do that! But I can’t watch you!”

I pulled away and slammed the door in her face. I tried to cry about it, but even now I’m still not able to cry in this house. Maybe Calculus is the only thing that makes me cry, or chocolate chip cookies from the grocery store in my college town because they remind me of the ones my Dad gave me whenever he took me shopping as a little kid, or Big Fish when the dad sort of turns into a big fish.

So instead I did what I do best and ran away again. I packed up my stuff and got out of there. I stopped at my sister’s room, kissed her on the head while she was sleeping, and tried to sneak out. She blitzed me from behind and hugged me so hard that my tension almost left right away.

“Rena, I have to go,” I said, prying her off of me. “I love you.”

“I love you too, but I know you have to go. Please be safe, please message me,” she said.

I crept out, but I noticed as I pulled away from the house that my mother was sitting on the porch, smoking a cigarette and watching me. At least her face finally seemed to relax.

Glad I could provide some relief, I thought.

When I drove about halfway across the state, just about as the sun was starting to come out, I parked at a rest stop to sleep for a while, and I checked my messages.

“Ellie, I’ve never been good with words and never been good to you, and I’ve been worse to you in recent years, and you have every reason to not call. I don’t know how to say anything that I really need to, but I can tell you that you have become a very cool young woman. I liked watching you work on the backyard, and if you tell me how, I will make sure I take care of it all exactly the way you say. That’s the one thing I feel like I can do.”

This almost broke me, because I felt like I found solid ground at the bottom of an abyss. But then she said:

“You cannot come back. I’m sorry, I hope you will understand, but you can’t.”

*****

When my sister was graduating, I came back anyway. I’d gotten married and invited them to come to it a year before, but they weren’t able to, and that was no surprise. Out of spite, I decided to go to them. I even brought my husband with me to introduce him. And to show him my home growing up, my school, and the weird switch it does from nearby green farmland to absolute dried earth once you’re within a mile of town, though I wasn’t able to use my words to describe exactly why it was that way.

Imagine my own switcheroo of dismay then disbelief then joy when I found patches of green amidst the dirt. My plants. I recognized them right away. They weren’t everywhere, but they had very clearly expanded beyond the yard. We decided to drive past the house first, knowing that we could peek into the backyard while they were at the assembly.

The house was nearly unrecognizable, it was surrounded by so much vibrant color. Plants you’d never see here, not even if you drove hundreds of miles in any direction. It wasn’t even overgrown! Mom must have followed my directions, because rows were still well kept and although the plants had gotten tall, someone was definitely taking leaves from the edible ones. Neighboring houses also had their own gardens, and a very nice garden store had opened in town, advertising some of the same seeds I had used.

My hometown had an Arby’s and a Burger King now, and they were separated by a median that had real plants growing in it. My school was now split into a combined elementary and middle school, and a small high school with a few portable units had popped up nearby and had a packed parking lot.

We caught them just as they were starting, but we had to sit apart from my mother. She clocked me from across the room and looked at me hard, but she didn’t cover her mouth with her hand this time.

I watched my baby sister walk in her gown. When she saw me, she looked concerned for a moment and then beamed with pride. I couldn’t stop grinning for her. Although I hugged her afterward, I didn’t stick around. Just like I told my husband we would, we split without a word to my mother.

But she was there at the exit to the parking lot. “You look good,” she said, after she basically put her body in the way of us leaving until I rolled my window down.

“I know you need to go. Hi Steven. Sorry we couldn’t make it to your wedding. We’ve been busy and it was right after. Right after. Right after. A rain.”

My jaw must have dropped. “I saw the plants at the house and around town,” I stammered. “Thank you. Thank you for raising Rena. I know it’s been tough.”

“Tough for all of us. I quit smoking. I’m hoping you and I can talk some time, but…”

“I know, I need to stay away. Bye Mom.” And I rolled up the window.

Later, hours down the road, I checked my messages and there was nothing. Good, I thought, I hope they’re celebrating Rena’s graduation.

“Hey baby, are you alright?” my husband asked.

“I’m fine. Just, you know, family feelings,” I replied.

“No, seriously,” he said, “you look ill.” He asked me to pull over.

“Your face! Your arms! Are you having an allergic reaction?”

Something was shifting in my home town, but we still weren’t able to talk to each other about it while there. This man I loved wasn’t from my home and was still seeing me everyday as if I was brand new, and at last he was able to see and say what I and my mother and sister could not.

I’d been swelling up every time I went home.

I’d been swelling with the memory of my Dad.

I’d been swelling with the silence and coldness of my mother.

I’d been swelling with every one of Rena’s birthdays that I missed, every phone call not sent, every neighbor’s lost loved one, every dust devil, every dead crop.

I had to cross the state to cry, clutching the steering wheel while my husband held me, until I started to let go of the salt water drowning my veins.

Hi! I'm Troof_Therry, is is pronounced like Tooth Fairy but probably unrelated!

TW: Loss, suicide, pet loss

I've been watching a labyrinth furl itself up while on a family vacation. What I know about labyrinths is that they are not mazes. There is no dead end. The path starts and then winds against bundles of its own curves to form a shape before leading to the middle. Once in the middle, the path continues with the same folds and twists until it ends. A person walking the path can see the whole shape at any time because there are no hedges or other obstacles to obscure the path.

This is a meditative act, choosing to follow the steps of a labyrinth.

I left the state I was born in and casually drove up a volcano on the edge of all the mountains I grew up near in a packed car with two howling cats while on the way to my new home with my partner. Now I'm on a trip, about to head up that volcano again - my cats have recently passed away, but I'm married and am step-father to two great young adults.

There is meaning in the repetition.

We found a labyrinth near my home now in a botanical garden. My family took it in good faith to follow me, but eventually seemed bamboozled by the purpose. "I know it looks like a maze from your perspective, while you're in it, but it's not. It isn't to be solved, it's to be felt. And you will walk the full length of this path, every possible step in this design, if you choose to walk."

I found my first labyrinth fifteen years ago in despair because my father had just tried to take his life. While figuring out what that meant and how to overcome the greasy fear that had grabbed me, I saw the cobblestone steps forming a circle with two open ends on a college campus and started walking it. My father is still with me, but today under a beautiful purple, pink, red, orange desert sky at sunset, I learned that a friend passed away today for a similar reason. For the record, I started thinking about my patterns and my loops and started writing about this before I knew he had died, which is uncanny but also irrelevant because the grief, the colors, the uniqueness of these people can't be ignored.

But there's something still. My mom took me to White Sands, NM, almost five years to the day, two days ago, when I stood there with my kids and spouse. From a big, rain hardened dune, I stood trying not to cry at the brilliant sunset lighting up the mountainside like a flaming cauldron because that was her last trip with me before a cancer diagnosis that eventually took her life last year. In the time since I last came to White Sands with my mom, I changed careers, got married, bought a house and so much more.

I didn't mean to take my kids to see these things as a memento mori, but I will walk the full length of this path. I entered this pattern thinking I could create my way to self meaning, like I had some monumental purpose waiting for me. Now I'm guided by simple stuff like my step-son and daughter expressing wonder at red rocks that rise out of the desert like teeth or the sense of purpose I wake up with when I'm going to make something interesting for breakfast. Today I find myself wanting to be a better, more attentive friend.

When I'm in it and looking down, I can't see where these loops are taking me. Each fold has seen me changed. My life as an adult has felt like branching choices leading to a tree of possible outcomes, but when I take the straight line of everything that did happen, I see it curl up on itself with intent to form a labyrinth that saw me grow towards who I am now.

This is a meditative act. I recognize that I am fully snarfed up by events that echo forwards and backwards through time. I think they mean what I ascribe to them rather than being something like destiny, but that doesn't mean that I'm taking them as meaningless. Nothing means more than showing my people my favorite places. Nothing means more than my cats, who gave me years of purrs and affection in return for the small, small price of needing to eat just wet food. Nothing means more than being in the moment, trying to create more, trying to be kinder.

Have no idea what I'll be able to do this season of LJ Idol since my busy times at work are very clearly getting started, but by golly, it would be fun to get to writing some stuff and reading my fellow players as much as possible.

The first and worst sensation of waking up from cryosleep is the sensation that the innermost part of your sinuses is frozen shut. You can’t warm-up the brain enough to work after warming up the rest, since it has to tell blood to get flowing–having body temperature bloodless body parts just won’t do, I guess. If you can imagine that crispy feeling your nostrils get, walking outside on an extra cold day, and just extend that all the way into the back of your throat and also somehow in your eyes and front half of your skull, you’ll have a pretty good idea about what it was like for me to wake up today.

I have memories of one other occasion of cryosleep, waking up from the big jump out to this colony, Phosburg. I was barely conscious when they gave me a gun and a badge and an office, which was funny because I distinctly remember being trained to be a social worker. The fact that I was in that office this morning, coming out of that cold sleep funk, could only mean one thing: I am not the same person who was shipped out here in the first place.

“Sheriff Warsh, good morning and welcome to duty,” the computer says in a formal but upbeat way. I groan because my tongue is mostly frozen. “Stay still within the capsule until the warming process reaches completion.” It decided I was all the way warm in five minutes, about three hours before I was ready. After a hot coffee-like drink and a long time pulling on clothes the computer pulled out for me, I received the briefing.

“Last night, 4.26/10 Sol Year 3732, you were slain in the line of duty at 312 Northplace, Phosburg Township, Brimrock Exoplanet. Your previous life was five months old. Please investigate to limit excessive usage of the life restoration system. The laws we live by must be upheld. As colony sheriff, you have executive judgment of the situation and the authority to press any charges necessary by any force necessary.”

I learned a lot of surprising things at once this morning. We made clone imprints of my original memory back in 3581, which means that this colony has seen over a hundred years of development. Reassuring to know that, if I wanted to write a letter home to Earth or any of the waystations, my family and acquaintances won’t be there to receive it unless they’re also playing permanent sheriff somewhere. Of course, it took a hundred years to get here in the first place, so that was not new news. Having been killed yesterday was an uncomfortable revelation, but, at the time, I felt that was a problem for yesterday-me. The implication in being made sole member of a police force for a colony on the boundary of space was that the only help coming was yourself, and always too late–the clone machine only turns on when the life of the previous sheriff stops.

I was pretty rattled, though, by the tone of the computer message. It wasn’t able to tell me how I died the day before or who was involved, but it assumed I would leap in and administer justice in an investigation of my own death before even telling me what the weather was like today.

“The best thing about waking up today, and waking up here, in this job, is that nobody gets to tell me what to do,” I said to the computer, thumbing my nose at it as I adjusted my trousers and walked out of there, leaving my gun behind. If I had woken up in a better mood, I would have noticed the handwritten message right next to my gun that said “leave the gun behind.” It all worked out anyway.

*****

Colony expansion happened at the behest of companies looking for rare earth elements on exoplanets, among other resources. When companies chartered these expeditions, they did so with minimal oversight from any agency besides themselves. And in spite of the reassurances that people wouldn’t get left behind if some sort of merger or acquisition caused reshuffling of the company assets, that’s exactly what happened here.

“Technically we’re all the children’s children’s children of benched company resources” a grocer told me after I told him who I was and asked for an explanation of where and when I was. “They know they basically own us all, but the cost of moving us around to a new world now that they decided that this project wasn’t lucrative for them anymore is too much.”

“Sheesh,” I said.

“Right? And so they left us behind. We have access to very few company materials anymore, even their network. Your cloning tech is one of few original resources that still seems to be working just fine.”

“Really? Have you seen a lot of clones of me?”

“Ha. You don’t know yet. That’s pretty cool.” But then she had to help another customer.

I don’t like the idea of dying, but I wasn’t feeling particularly threatened by the neighborhood. In the couple days of memory I had from my original self, there wasn’t anything here. Everybody came to Brimrock all at once, and to hear her tell it, nobody who wasn’t a quadrillion dollar company had apparently managed to work out an alternative way of producing cheap space travel that wasn’t fiercely accused of infringing upon the property rights of those already in space.

Some of the last communications this colony received were messages celebrating court victories. The last communication was a general information thread, no more than a couple of pages long, suggesting things that could and could not be done with company property in the event of a long wait for resource utilization. “For a laugh,” a coffee-like shop worker said, “you should see what they said about sheriffs.”

I was pleased to see that the metal and other materials from our dropships were repurposed into a pretty cute town. Phosburg wasn’t large, only a few thousand people from a couple hundred that we started with, and they all lived close together in the center part of town. Several apartments with multiple floors surrounded downtown and, as far as I could tell, nobody lived in their own house. They had brick buildings and sidewalks and no means of transportation except for little motored bikes that sometimes had baskets attached.

“We were building according to company code,” said the owner of a sandwich restaurant. “The first foremen passed away from mining health issues before they could really lay claim to the nicer places they were supposed to get, and everybody after mutually decided that maybe we should act like this town is a family thing.”

“Wow, that sounds so nice,” I said.

“Yeah, except you don't really have a place in it. We have our own system of governance now that doesn’t include shooting or jailing anybody, and you’re the only thing that keeps coming back from the time before.”

“Do you think someone is killing me off to try and cut off that connection? Maybe they want to deplete the clone resources?”

“I’m going to say that it’s not really my place to say, but you’ll figure it out by about noon. Don’t worry yourself about it, sheriff man.”

“Well could you tell me if I’m gonna die today, at least?”

“I don’t think so. I mean we never know. We have doctors here who are able to do a lot of the medicine that came before us, but sometimes you just eat something bad and get sick and that’s that, you know? This ain’t heaven. It’s hard sometimes here.”

The sandwiches are pretty delicious, though.

*****

Besides Phosburg itself, Brimrock was a small planet that was covered in rich soil, red rocky hills, sizable bodies of almost potable water, and plants that were all brought over and quickly planted to make a cool, shady forest. Only a native algae-like growth was responsible for a lot of the breathable air. Patches of that bluish growth added bursts of color beyond the forest to the red desert.

At noon, a bell gonged with a calm tone muffled by the buildings and the trees, and a man in a wide hat stepped out into the town square.

“You look like someone I’m supposed to talk to,” I said.

“Sure am.” He was just about the oldest person I had seen yet. Maybe 80 or 90 years old, but people can live a really long time. For a colony world, I wouldn’t guess him to be older than 120.

“Guessing you know what I’m going to ask.”

“Sure do,” he said, with a wide grin.

“Guessing you’ve had this exact conversation before.”

“Sure have. About once every few months if we’re lucky. Name’s Thad. I’ve come to talk to you about your forebears.”

“Am I in danger, talking to you about this?”

“No sir. But I reckon that, if you follow me to the graveyard, I’ll be able to give you concern and then solace in equal measure.”

“Not really cozy with that. The graveyard?”

“See? I knew you wouldn’t like that idea. Like I knew you’d go shopping, get some coffee, get a sandwich, and then sit on that bench waiting for me. Just go along with it. I mean you probably got the pimento sandwich right?”

“I had a Cuban sandwich.”

“Oh, I see that not every sheriff is the same!” he guffawed. “Listen, it’s going to be alright. Just some things are easier to see to understand.”

We went to the graveyard beyond the edge of the trees, but before we stepped past the clearing and looked at it, he showed me a plaque commemorating everyone who had passed away before.

“I don’t see my name on this.”

“It’s right here!” he said, pointing to the bottom right margin of the plaque.

“Thom Warsh,” I read, and then I counted up 86 tally marks.

“That’s a lot!” I sputtered. “I die like every couple of years!”

“And I said I come out to talk to you, a new you, a few times a year. What do you make of that math, sheriff man?” He smirked.

“Uh, I have no idea,” I said.

“Look.” And he pushed the last stand of tree branches away to reveal a vast swath of farmland. All up and down the hills, different kinds of crops were being grown. There were a few buildings scattered about and plenty of men and… more men at work.

“That’s you. That’s you. That’s also you. That guy? That’s you!” he laughed, pointing at each farmer that I could see.

“I don’t understand. Does nobody in town want to do this work? Isn’t it technically a violation of clone law to have multiple versions of the same person at play simultaneously?”

“Yessir!” he said, and then he waved to a man who was definitely an older version of me. “This fella will talk to you about this situation. I’m going to take the rest of the day off, I’m getting too old for this even though your face is so funny every time.”

And he left me to myself.

*****

I like the way I look when I’m about forty years older. Great beard, great hair. Goodness, I’m glad that I don’t have to look forward to going bald.

“Basically, you’re the last person who remembers what life was like before we lived in this weird bubble world,” Older Me said. “Also the algae that grows on this planet helps prevent hair loss for some reason, in case you’re thinking that you look good when you’re older. Yes, but not without taking care of yourself.”

I sighed. All of the sheriffs, all me, live in cottages surrounding the farmland. We do go into town, but try to only go one at a time so as not to overwhelm the locals. There are about a hundred versions of me working out here as farmers. Every time the population in town grows beyond a certain point, we trick the computer into printing a new version of me to help out on the farm.

“What about the sheriff job? Do they ever need someone in town to be a cop?”

“Listen, what did you think of what the computer said to you this morning–that you had been ‘slain in the line of duty’?”

“It didn’t sit right with me that the first thing I was asked to do as sheriff is go out there thinking that someone had done something wrong and needed to be punished for it.”

“First of all, glad to hear that. Not every clone coming out thinks exactly the same thing, but there are a lot of commonalities. Second, have you considered that every colony world that our company started also started with a single sheriff? And that when we read news of those other sheriffs, they always seemed to have some kind of justice that they were administering?”

“Was there more news besides what we came in with?”

“Only a little,” he said. “But it sorta confirms the same mentality–the sheriff was the one who was supposed to uphold the kind of peace that we see in Phosburg now, but sheriffs who play active roles in being justiciar wind up causing a feedback loop that makes things worse. Admittedly, you also tried being the ‘lawman’ when you first came here. It didn’t go well, and it left you with a lot of regrets.”

“So we’re just farmers, then?”

“Like I said, we’re the only ones that remember how things were. That, if a few people have the power, they make all the rules benefit themselves. So we represent a handful of people that luckily all have the same mindset, that have the power to assert whether or not people in the town are trying to acquire material power over each other. If need be, we can correct that and make sure people in town respect each other.”

“Do you vote against them like you’re all different people, or how do you guarantee the people in town hear you and respect what you perceive as a power imbalance?” I asked.

“Well, our population represents two guarantees. One, that we’re significant enough a force that we could coerce change if needed. Two, that we’re utterly disinclined towards violence. So we work our asses off as farmers to ensure that people believe the second part of this. People from town are more than welcome to work with us, mostly to understand that we’re gentle folk, but we usually appoint one person to be the representative.”

“Is that me?”

“Heavens no, you have no idea how to talk to people yet. Honestly, that’s probably the reason they made you a sheriff instead of a social worker. Spend some time here literally talking to yourself, though, and you’ll start to understand how to talk to other people better.”

I was struggling a little bit. The political gesturing inherent in having hundreds of me versus several thousand people in town was overwhelming.

“I’m sorry, but how do we know this system is working? Like how do we know that we’re not making something more messed up than what we came from? Or like, if sheriffs are supposed to ensure people behave a certain way through violence, how is our own system really that different?”

He laughed. “We are making this up as we go along! There is no way we could repeat this experiment, and it definitely is a raw deal that we have to be some kind of sacrifice for the greater good when we have absolutely nothing to support that this all works or will keep working!”

“But,” he leaned in, “wouldn’t you rather live in a world where you need a plow more than a gun?”

There are a lot of accidents that made me who I was, blithely bumbling through adolescence and about ten years of being an adult, but I've always been a lover. Even when I was 5 years old, I was having imaginary girlfriends. I kissed a girl in preschool. In the third grade there was that pop song that went “I love you, always forever / near and far, we’ll stick together,” and I fantasized that it could be about me and a girl who I only started talking to because her brother got attacked by a dog, and I felt sorry for her. In the sixth grade, I had a dream where everyone I knew got married to each other, and I was left alone, extremely single, outside the church. Unfortunately, I was often most in love with the idea of love–not a good foundation on which to start a relationship.

Growing older made me more weary of the beginnings of relationships and more content with the slower parts, the parts where we are just OK and maybe waking up is a struggle, but we take care of each other. I love myself when I am a trustworthy, consistent, attentive partner rather than someone who must be in love or remain unhappy. When I say I am a lover, beyond just falling deeply for someone, I mean that I also try to be someone worth committing to even after the butterflies fluttering in our guts get quieter.

And the first thing I knew about you, besides a handful of your political and pop culture opinions, was that you too were a lover. At least, I hoped that I knew that and wouldn’t get to confirm it for a while–we were strangers at that time. You always talk about brawling (behind the Waffle House, specifically) with people who disagree with things like whether or not Whataburger is better than Burger King, but you cry at pictures of kittens and yearn for a person to “crush the soul back into” you like a weighted human blanket. You talk tough, but you are cuddly beyond belief. I saw you posting openly about your love for your friends and your love for your children, and I knew it was true.

I didn’t really mean for anything to come of reaching out as a Facebook stranger and telling you that I had a crush on you; however, I was totally overwhelmed by the feeling that you were a really exceptional person, and I did not want you to spend any extra time feeling like you weren’t. I figured that people who are captivated by other people should say so before they never have a chance again. Whoops, now we’ve been dating for almost four years.

A lot of other things happened, like the year we spent playing different games together online before I ever made a more serious move at you. The one time I missed out on hearing you drunkenly relate the nitty gritty of your whole life story because I had to go to sleep to work the next day? I know the details now, but I would still cling to your words like honey if you told it all again. I may not be as in love with falling in love as I was when I was young, but I was like a pudding cup around you, where only a thin membrane kept me from spilling out all of my feelings all over the place, recklessly making a mess of our friendship before we became partners.

We laugh at the same things, we ogle the same pretty colors and places, we love the same movies and almost all of the same foods and music. Our beliefs intertwine when they don’t fuse together. We have exceptional cats that love both of us. We both like to travel, and we’re both homebodies at the same intervals. We often think each other's thoughts before the other one speaks. We are most comfortable curled up against each other, like cats sharing a bed.

We are lovers! I am as fascinated with you as ever and am delighted to be part of your story.

*****

Do you remember, when you were young, you felt like maybe you could have a destiny?

And then you got married too young to somebody and the love wavered and you realized painfully that life was arbitrary and capricious? Maybe that sense of destiny came back as a sort of curse. That, because you had done something unforgivable, the universe sought to punish you ceaselessly.

Is it weird that I felt that way too? I got stuck in a loveless marriage for eight years, and I was so caught on that notion that I should try to be a consistent partner that I browbeat myself ceaselessly for times, earlier in my marriage, where I was less consistent and reliable and loving. I felt like I was atoning for something.

Then all of a sudden we weren’t married anymore to our respective spouses. I got stuck thinking that I was unlovable, that my social anxiety was too overwhelming and my perspective on relationships too skewed to make me compatible with anyone. I’m simplifying–the trap I put myself in was infinitely more complex and cyclical, like no matter how I tried to perceive myself as someone worthy of love, I couldn’t drag myself out of that loop. I climbed the tallest mountain I knew for some damn perspective and found nothing but sore legs.

Then you came along.

Listen, I don’t feel religious or spiritual. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if I failed to see a ghost if it was in front of me because it would know not to waste even one glob of ectoplasm being spooky at me–I’d try to rationalize it too much. I would be tedious for a ghost. But I find the presence of you pleasantly haunting, like knowing you this well proves that a soul can exist. Suddenly, I can see something like a plan or a path that brought me here. The pieces of the puzzle that put us together are too small and too precious to be pure happenstance; that’s how it feels.

If this was my destiny and I suddenly gained control of all the threads that made past-me live through those queasy nightmares, I would not change one iota of it if I couldn’t guarantee I would wind up back here again, with you.

Being with you is like finding a lake in a desert and knowing that it is a gentle, safe place. I know you don’t feel gentle and safe because everything about the world is still chaotic, capricious, and often mean-spirited, but I don’t have to wonder where the love is; I’m swimming in your love for me, drinking my fill, cooling myself off, getting too many freckles in the sunlight.

I only hope it is the same for you. I hope that you bring pool noodles. I hope you make ice cubes out of me for your tea. I hope that you never feel like I am drowning you or like the sun is too oppressive. I hope you build a house on my shore with a deck that lets you dip your toes in. I hope I feel like a place where you can raise your children. I hope that you never feel like this oasis is an escape from reality instead of reality itself. I hope that you realize this lake is fed by a river that is never dry, no matter what kind of drought we are in. I hope your friends visit you here and know that you are comfortable, you are safe, you are deeply loved.

After months of searching, the doctor cornered him. All of the recordings of incidents for hundreds of miles radiated from a single location in a rural European village with no recorded incidents of its own. The more the doctor's cohort looked at it, the more they knew it had to be the place. So they planned their attack, packed up and boarded a train to pay a vampire a visit.

The locals had called it a castle, but they were thralls under his influence and not very reliable as a consequence. It was more like a cave with a castle-shaped entrance. Immediately, the ornate tapestries and rugs and tile gave way to wet stone and guano and stalagmites. The vampire's lair was dark and dank, and the doctor regretted ever having to go there. To be as disarming as possible, he made the rest of his cohort stand by and await good news on the surface.

"Vampire, we need to speak with you. Show yourself!" the man entreated to the darkest bowels of the cavern. The showy bastard illuminated 14 sconces in pairs, with a brief pause between each pair of sconces, until the whole room was dimly illuminated in orange light. The vampire himself was laying in a coffin in the middle of a great pentagram in a sort of throne room, with his scarlet cloak drawn about his body.

Ah, another vampire hunter. You finally found your way to me, after such a long time. To what do I owe this displeasure? The voice, silky smooth and deep, rumbled off the walls.

"Enough with the showmanship. You know that I do not fear you. Your posturing is pointless."

You seek death, and I will endeavor to give it to you in whatever style I choose. What care I for the predilections of a dead man with regard to my presentation?

"I don't wish to be dead. I also don't want you dead. I want your help. I'm only a doctor, not a vampire hunter. You can plainly see I am ill equipped to kill you if I misjudged whether you would cooperate."

At that, he stirred. "Why would I, a dreadful, demonic, devourer of men, as your sensationalist news rags report, help you?" He had stood to his full height, no longer throwing his voice around the room. His eyes were the eyes of a man, not red, glowing meteors as others had warned. The doctor was actually about an inch taller than the vampire, but the countenance of the vampire definitely made him an overpowering presence.

"Because your habits have changed. Something has softened you," the doctor calmly replied. "It's been 20 years since you were last suspected of taking a life that wasn't a farm animal. Although we have recorded that there are a large number of thralls in your service, their zealotry has diminished over time, making them able to live normal lives as long as you haven't been near them recently. You're also leaving your home a lot less than you once were. We haven't fully worked out how you manage to sustain yourself, but it does seem relevant that a local clinic is still practicing bloodletting even though that practice has fallen out of favor across most of Europe."

The vampire looked a little pale. Actually, the doctor was surprised at how red his face had been a moment before.

"I am surprised that you have done so much research into me. You are a far cry from the vampire hunters who have come before you, who perished before they really even understood what I was. You're mistaken, however, in your bravado. I would assume you are armed, though you look like nothing so much as an old sack of talking meat to me. Considering I know little about you or what task you endeavor to involve me in, why should I not kill you right now and all those with whom you are collaborating?"

"We are a humanitarian guild formed under the secrecy of numerous national governments. Our agenda is to discern the root causes of worldwide issues by pooling resources together."

"Is my presence one of the 'worldwide issues' you are trying to address?" the vampire asked, one jet black eyebrow raised incredulously.

"No. We have been aware of you for a very long time, but even at your worst, you kill no more than two people on a given night unless provoked. The threats we deal with can have cascading consequences if unresolved, growing from community issues into national problems, and we are not certain of their origins or how to mitigate them without personally investigating." The doctor wiped his hands on his trousers--for some reason, having to calmly explain himself and persuade the monster was more taxing than confronting it. He grinned a little to himself, realizing that he had spent a lot of time preparing for the worst and not a lot of time preparing for a civil conversation.

"You won't kill me considering that I offer you a chance to collaborate with us and to have multiple governments continue to overlook your presence. If you do choose violence right now, you will only kill a helpless old doctor. We will also leak information about you to the general international public, and they will be able to choose what kind of secrecy you will be allowed to exist within."

"You're assuming that would perturb me? Having people know that I can hunt them at night?"

"I know you know the world is changing, vampire. You will not be able to enjoy rest, night or day, with amateur monster hunters knocking on your door at all hours. There are no more communities you can cower in that won't know you're there from international news. We will make a celebrity out of you," the doctor said with a smirk.

The vampire huffed and said, "How will you guarantee that I remain a secret after my task is done, if I choose to assist you with this problem?"

"There is a third-party already aware of your presence, under strict guidelines to report out if any of us involved with this project perish under any unnatural circumstances. However, they are not permitted to write down anything about you unless the contract is breached, and in fifty years, none of them will be alive to remember you."

"I am impressed by your coordination, blood bag. You have my attention."

"Follow us to the location, and we will explain more."

*****

Once they put the vampire in plain clothes, he looked a lot like the doctor, except definitely more pale. His scraggly black hair and dark eyes made him look perpetually tired, but the fact that they had to travel by train with the windows blacked out made everyone look rough by lamp light.

They were heading east, not more than ten hours from the vampire's home. Once they came to a complete stop, he vaguely recognized the tranquil countryside, surrounded by mountains and burbling streams. If one traipses across Europe drinking blood for long enough, places tend to blend together.

No, the vampire thought to himself, this place is definitely familiar. It was dusk, and safe for him to step outside of the train, but he guessed that the surroundings would be more familiar to him in the middle of the night, at the time of the hunt.

The problem was sickness. People in and around the village were suffering from an absurd array of conditions, including general fatigue, disordered thinking, vomiting, and yellowish splotches of skin along the arms and down through the torso. They had quarantined the village, but it didn't stop occurrence of symptoms in the vicinity of the village. They had labored to bring fresh water to the town, and nothing changed. Over ten years of research and no treatment had yet been devised that would last except that giving patients iron salts would slightly alleviate their symptoms for a short time.

"A few of these symptoms imitate something like anemia, but there seems to be some sort of root cause why there is a lack of iron in their blood."

Bemused, the vampire muttered, "Are you really asking me to taste their blood to see what I can discern from it?"

The glint of the fading sun against the doctor's spectacles concealed the darkness in his gaze. "Yes. We have records of you avoiding places where disease outbreaks were beginning after your first couple of victims. We hope to know what you know about the course of illnesses like these, from the taste of the blood. You don't become ill when you bite sick people, do you?"

"No. My immortal curse seems to prohibit effects, injurious or otherwise, of things I can eat and drink. I can't become drunk, all food tastes bland to me, and relevant to your question, disease that exists within blood tastes off, like the blood sat outside of the body too long and became rancid."

"If you can tell a difference between sick blood and healthy blood, you may be able to better enable us to trace origin points for this sickness than we are able to do ourselves. Do you consent to helping us with this?"

"As you stated before, doctor, it has been some time since I preyed on men. Maybe a taste of these locals will take me back to those halcyon days, hmm? Certainly, I will do what I can."

The doctor frowned but nodded.

*****

They housed the vampire within a surprisingly comfortable room in a small school that had been repurposed to a field hospital. The accommodations they provided to him were far more pleasant than he would have expected for himself, a monster.

While they gathered his first samples to try, which they were actually using something they called refrigeration to keep cool, he briefly fell asleep on the bed they had supplied. It made the vampire wonder why it was he had decided to sleep in a coffin within his own home, until he startled and sat upright in a sweat.

That's right, he thought, the coffin and sleep are as close as I can get to being dead, which is what I deserve.

The odd familiarity of the locale was still creeping into his subconscious. He had been here before, but when?

Before he consider the question any further, the doctor and an assistant came in bearing container holding about thirty small vials of blood. "We would like you to taste each one and tell us what you perceive from it. Anything that you understand about the person it came from, the condition they are in, anything. Understand that we will provide you no prior information about these samples, so that we can ensure your estimation of the patients is not unduly influenced. Is this fair?"

The vampire nodded, and then pointed to a steel bucket next to his feet. "I assume this is to spit the blood into if it is too unappealing to swallow?"

The doctor smiled. "You are correct. Given your lack of love for blood bearing a disease, I decided this was a small favor I could give you for your service."

The doctor uncapped the first vial and gave it to the vampire. It was a trivial quantity compared to what he received from his local clinic or his victims before that. In one gulp, he downed it.

"This sample is from a child, a boy, age 14," the vampire reported. "He's a bit of a soft boy, doesn't really like to go outside very much, but he loves his mother. His iron level tastes adequate, and I perceive no disease."

"Very good," the doctor said, clearly impressed. "Based on what you told us, I wonder if you could classify this as a type of blood? There are new theories about how different people, even in the same family, can have up to three different blood types."

"What if there are more types of blood than that? Do you have some way I can set these aside as I taste them so that we can categorize which is which type as best as I understand?"

So they set up a series of small bins to place empty vials in as they were tasted. Each new type received a new bin. A few samples contained animal blood, and the vampire found those distasteful but still bearable.

Then he opened a vial that contained the disease, and he knew it as soon as the blood touched his tongue. The world went dark and the sky came spinning, crashing down upon him. "What is this?" the vampire screamed. "I know this taste! I've tasted this before!"

But he was no longer in the room with the doctor and the assistant. He saw a vast tree, with branches made of blood, arching out in front of him in a great void. Light pulsed through each limb of the tree, and for the first time in twenty years, the vampire could hear and feel his own heartbeat in response. It was not a source of comfort. The pounding of his heart, drowning out everything else, slowed gradually revealing a little bit more of the real world each time it pulsed. The vision of the tree started to fade away, and the vampire realized that he had fallen off the bed and was staring at the ceiling, having sputtered the blood from the vial on himself.

"What? What happened?" he asked.

"You started screaming and then cursing, and then at last you laid still," the doctor replied. "What did you see?"

The vampire eyed him warily. "This blood is really different. Now that the odd vision I had has passed, I can taste that this also comes from a young man, about fifteen years old. The blood has a clear type too, one of the ones we've already classified, but I almost missed it because the presence of the disease or whatever this thing was was so strong."

"Before you slipped off the bed, you said that you tasted this before. What did you mean?" the doctor asked.

"Everything about this town has seemed so familiar but..."

"But..." the doctor said, patiently waiting.

"I had almost forgotten this place. I've been here before, haven't I?" the vampire asked.

"Yes. You haven't been here in about twenty years. This was the last place you went before you disappeared from the record of people dying due to bite marks."

"Strangely, I can scarcely remember that."

The doctor uncapped another vial and gave it to the vampire. "Maybe you will remember better with more samples."

*****

It was a long night of drinking tiny tubes of blood. The same illusion of a blood tree rushed into the vampire's vision with each new sample he consumed, as long as it was a sample belonging to someone impacted by the disease.

Indeed, with each sample he consumed, a wave of euphoria washed over him, like he was remembering what drove him to hunt humans in the first place. They brought out additional vials after a rack was done, and the illusion became less disconcerting with each new sample. The doctor refused to elaborate on the vampire having been in this small town twenty years before, saying that he would fully explain the situation only when all of the samples had been processed. Were it not for the thrill that the vampire was feeling with each new drink, he would have tried to press the issue.

He didn't notice that the blood tree was shrinking, one branch at a time, until the very last vial.

When his vision cleared after the last vial, he found the doctor alone in the room with him and his body bound to the bed in braces.

"What is the meaning of this?!" the vampire shrieked.

"Twenty years ago, my mother was your victim," the doctor said, rolling up his sleeves to see that his own yellowed skin was starting to quickly regain color. "But you couldn't finish her off because she took it willingly. She took your whole curse into herself. By the time you left her, near death, she had robbed you of your drive to hunt humans and to even exist within your own skin."

The vampire could only vaguely recall the circumstances of how he had once crept through someone's bedroom window and had stopped before delivering death to his victim. How he left the victim after and had to stagger back to the train, befuddled and lost and empty. "How did she do that? Even religious people are shocked to find how worthless their crosses and holy water are at stopping me! How did someone simply choose to take my whole curse?"

"With a smile. She loved everyone everywhere so much, vampire. Your bite did wind up killing her, but not before I promised her that I would find someway to resolve this terrible curse she shared with us all. I wish you could know what that is like to have a mother like her, but we decided that it would be best if we gave your curse back. We were her children, grand children, family members. We already tested giving blood to each other, but it was too much for our own bodies to tolerate. We all grew sick due to exposure to this terrible thing you fostered inside you. But now that we have all of our respective blood types sorted out, we can actually try helping each other with giving each other blood that matches our needs. We may finally be able to treat any residual effects of the ailments that have been plaguing this community for years. At last, that blood tree you envisioned brought all of the curse back to the source."

"And now what?" the vampire asked, a slight quaver perceptible in his voice.

The doctor laughed. "We find out just how sensitive you are to sun exposure and go from there. Live through this, and we'll find a way to get you yet. We've heard so many things about you, vampire. Tell me when and where it hurts." And they carefully wheeled the bed out into the dawn light, shrieking vampire and all.

Content warning for nonfic cancer/drugs/mental illness.

*****

At the beginning of April, my mom had a seizure and spent three days in the hospital. It was her first symptom, and maybe her only symptom so far, of four tumors in her brain caused by stage 4 lung cancer.

My dad and older sister are very dependent on her due to their own health issues, so learning that she had lost her ability to drive for the next six months and might not live even five more years in spite of her consistently being one of my healthiest family members was a big shock. But Mom took it all in stride, burying whatever negativity she had about the diagnosis to comfort all of us and assuage doubts that she could make it through this. The doctor said she could live a couple more years with treatment, but she kept saying she hoped to live to 99.

Even so, I hopped on a plane and flew out, since my family lives together a couple of states away, hoping to be a support for her and drive her around. Honestly, I was hoping I could take her off to fascinating places that she had always wanted to go. Maybe we could stay overnight somewhere and really experience the travel that Mom craves. She wasn't able to do that while my dad was mostly unable to walk. I knew I wasn't going to be able to take her to Europe, but if we could still experience something, maybe it would help embolden her spirit.

I'll be honest, there was a part of me that felt like I was on a mission to render some sort of care to her. And maybe I did--she was happy to see me and delighted that I was willing to listen to her reminisce on so many different stories.

I have been exceptionally naïve. I am not even the slightest bit prepared for this.

Within the first three days of being in her house, she talked at me for about 20 hours without slowing down. I thought maybe her need to get her story out was so strong--she mostly talked about family members like my great grandparents, and our Scottish roots--that it was just flowing out. The topic of her conversation gradually shifted, however, to my dad and how messed up he is.

For reference, my mom and dad never fought while I was growing up. As an adult, I learned that that is because one of them (my mom) had decided not to have any battles and just went with the path of least resistance every time. So my dad always got his way and took any critique, no matter how small, as an insult. Whatever power and control that afforded my dad over time, he has lost it now.

We found out that Mom's primary drug to help with brain swelling, a steroid, was having a significant impact on how she was perceiving herself and the rest of the world. She became euphoric, believing herself to be one of the smartest people alive, heaping thoughts into stream-of-consciousness ramblings that she believed were profound, and describing cancer as a gift from God that would enable her to do the kind of interventions on my dad that she had always told herself she couldn't do. She almost stopped sleeping altogether, only an hour to three hours a night, but never showed any signs of slowing down or regretting lack of sleep.

For all of Dad's issues, and he has plenty, I did not expect her to start verbally abusing him over things like his weight, his mental acuity, and how much weaker he has gotten over the last ten years. My mother, who valued being kind and loving over almost any other virtues, has become like a different person, spitting curses and crowing over her ability to get my dad to acquiesce to counselling by faking crying. The person I came to support turned out to be antagonistic to those around her; she's now someone we have to tread lightly around even though she can explode at my dad and sister without provocation.

Within the two weeks I was living in their house, I watched my mom gradually drift further into mania. I had no idea what was happening and sternly proposed all kinds of possibilities like brain damage. I wanted to be helpful, but I also wanted to have the right answers to satisfy some weird ego in me. Ultimately, I'm kind of a shithead with a puffed up sense of what I know and too many opinions--pretty far from the "devoted son on a mission" that I felt I was a few weeks ago.

What I really didn't expect was everything. We haven't even started the part where the cancer wreaks havoc--this is a result of the first drug she was given to combat the possibility of seizures. And the way she has started behaving, too much for the scope of a single story I share with internet strangers, may be permanent given how long she's had to use steroids for. Worse, phasing out the steroids could lead to brain inflammation, meaning more seizures and so many other possible complications.

Now that I've returned to my own home, I've gone back to observing and trying to console my dad and older sister as they live through whatever happens next. We are all still chasing a fix that gives my mom years more to live without dismantling any more of who she has been.

Thanks for letting me play alongside you all again. I've had a lot of fun writing for this round of LJ Idol and might try to get into the Second Chance--but for today, I'm going to duck out.

I made the decision to give qualitative feedback on essay proposals that my students are doing for creative written finals--probably adding up to 100 or so thorough responses to the writing of my students. Because of this, I find myself wondering whether writing my own thing will actually do me in. Certainly, I wouldn't have the time or energy to comment on other competitors' pieces.

So I guess you could say this is on topic. I am sacrificing. This sucker is punching out for this round.

Good luck to all y'all still running for it, and I hope to pop back in shortly and haunt you for a bit, if Gary permits. You folks have done so much for me in terms of helping me grow as a writer, even if mostly I'm just growing weirder. I appreciate you!

Look at this:

"SOUSA The Liberty Bell - "The President's Own" U.S. Marine Band" (Watch on YouTube)

Even though this is the theme song to Monty Python's The Flying Circus, there is a practice and rigidness to every element of this performance. Considering that the piece is called "The Liberty Bell" and was written by John Philip Sousa in 1893 as a commemorative march for the Liberty Bell itself, there's nothing intentionally silly about the ringing of the bell at the 2:28 mark.

The core function of this piece is to showcase disciplined, purposeful music.

Now look at this:

"born Sep. 6, 1877 Buddy Bolden "Dixieland"" (Watch on YouTube)

Buddy Bolden was really advancing the style of ragtime music through improvisation towards jazz, but there are similarities between "The Liberty Bell" and this. For one, this piece sticks to a 4/4 time signature, except for the trumpet lead-ins, and has an easy walking rhythm. The piece wears the outfits of many genres of music at the same time (ragtime, early blues, gospel) and serves as an example, though not a direct recording, of how Black Americans created American music cultures and continually updated them through restless internal development.

And the result of that development is that the music sounds more relaxed and simple than Sousa's piece even though improvisation and more diverse instruments mean that it's actually more complex.

*****

My high school Jazz Band teacher, Mr. Strauss, once said that the distinguishing characteristic of American musical traditions is to make a difficult song or technique sound easy to play. "European music was obsessed," he said, "with demonstrating mastery and expertise." As if being impressed with the performer or composer was the central purpose for listening to a concert in the first place.

I contend that, though the general observation about striving for simple sounds seems to hold true, evolutions within Black American musical communities drove that purpose.

Here's a song written by Fletcher Henderson, one of the earliest great influencers of jazz music. Many black musicians, such as Louis Armstrong, moved through Henderson's band or competed against it in the jazz cultural revolution that seized Chicago and New York throughout the 1920s.

"The Gin House Blues (Bessie Smith, 1926) Jazz Legend" (Watch on YouTube)

It was 1926. Contrast that slow blues sound with this from 1923:

"Canal Street Blues -King Oliver" (Watch on YouTube)

The blues sound in Henderson's piece is far more like the blues that we know today. The swung down syncopation--the way that it seems to take forever for the next note to be played, dragging out that genuine, low feeling of the blues--feels less busy and more evocative. There's a deliberate slouch in the music that brings more purpose to the song; Bessie Smith's voice glides from one note to another while the trumpets playing "Canal Street Blues" only sometimes strive for that effect.

The span of jazz sounds evolved quickly, but this is a small sample of two pieces that called themselves "blues" over a three year difference. Henderson's own style took on all available forms of the jazz movement, bringing the sound to communities of black musicians that furthered it. Unfortunately, Henderson had to start selling arrangements to Benny Goodman, who largely takes credit for bringing the musical moment to white audiences. And he takes almost all of the credit--his website refers to him as "the king of swing."

Check out this, one of Benny Goodman's most famous songs, which he recorded in 1937:

"Benny Goodman Orchestra "Sing, Sing, Sing" Gene Krupa - Drums, from "Hollywood Hotel" film (1937)" (Watch on YouTube)

Oh and here's Chu Berry's "Christopher Columbus," one of the last songs recorded by the Fletcher Henderson band in 1936:

"Fletcher Henderson - Christopher Columbus" (Watch on YouTube)

The integration of the melody without the accompanying credit for it is a feature of white jazz bands. In fairness to Goodman, his band integrated white and black musicians in a way that enabled the music to expand for all involved, and he recognized the contributions of Henderson and others in his own horrible 1930s way (under the table payments for college or personal debts of the black musicians who worked with him) whether or not history cared to give Henderson or Berry authorship credit. Still, it's not exactly surprising to see even with a supposedly "integrated" band, no black musicians were on film for the "Sing, Sing, Sing" scene of this "Hollywood Hotel" clip.

Beyond that, I observe that the production of the song has changed the focus back to mastery. With a lavish drum solo, the camera panning in on soloists, members of the band choreographed to stand up on cue--Goodman is trying to make the song look cleanly rehearsed rather than an organic production like the previous videos I displayed. I love "Sing, Sing, Sing" because it sounds complicated--a lot of swing era songs have this dynamic. Even the solos stop valuing improvisation over clarity of presentation, which is more obvious across the numerous recordings of the same songs that often feature the same solos.

It is as if it was more than a tune that was taken without honest credit. The purpose behind the music was also snatched. Where Goodman's song is great to dance to and energetic, "Christopher Columbus" by Berry feels also alive, like one performance of the song could be utterly different and unique from another.

Check out Duke Ellington in Reveille with Beverly in 1943 with a song from 1939:

"Duke Ellington, "Take the A Train"" (Watch on YouTube)

Even though everything is clearly rehearsed for film, this piece exudes chill. The lyrics are literally saying "hurry, hurry, hurry" at one point and sounds like it's doing anything but hurry. The musicians are all dressed up for the presentation in suits but hang around in the booths of a restaurant set piece like there is no particular urgency whatsoever. But listen to Duke Ellington play the piano at 2:00. There's nothing less complex about what he's doing with the chords than what the soloists in Goodman's band did. And then there's a call and response with multiple other band members at 2:24 that is almost too clean to be authentically improvised, except this is what black musicians had been perfecting for forty years through competitively playing jazz in increasingly effortless-looking ways in New Orleans, Chicago, and Harlem.

Goodman's work, by contrast, feels like an imitation of the style.

*****

What fascinates me most about this concept is where it went during and after the 1940s. Jazz exploded, incorporating many different styles and new directions after World War II. Benny Goodman tried out bebop, one of the new styles coming out of black musicians, but experimentation with chord progressions and rhythms that could not be danced to drove him and many other white musicians back to swing.

Dizzy Gillespie is one of the pioneers of bebop and one of my heroes (because I puffed my cheeks out a lot the first year I played trumpet and got compared to him by my teacher, even though I don't play an eighth as well as him). Look at this and look at the bewildered crowd he's talking to. "Salt Peanuts" was released in 1942, which should indicate just how fast jazz continued to evolve.

"Dizzy Gillespie - Salt Peanuts" (Watch on YouTube)

Blinding tempo, extreme high notes, and a more erratic rhythm meant that songs like "Salt Peanuts" were almost impossible to dance to without first evolving dancing itself. And yet, Gillespie talks to his audience and reacts with them as if his own part of the song takes no work at all. This is the hardest song I have ever tried to play.

It would be grossly reductionist to suggest that Gillespie and others like Miles Davis and John Coltrane wrote the evolution of American music with the specific purpose of making songs that were hard for white people to dance to, but it's an amusing image. Rather, by doing outstandingly complex things with their instruments and compositions that they made look simple in practice, these musicians made music that felt achievable for young listeners and therefore more inclusive.

Most importantly, however, the songs evoke a deeper range of emotions than European music traditions, which have since borrowed greatly from jazz. One last song: listen to Thelonious Monk's "Round Midnight" from a performance in 1966. The song was written in 1944 and has lost none of the wistful, longing vibe that the call and response between saxophone and Monk's own piano imparts here.

"Thelonious Monk Quartet - 'Round Midnight" (Watch on YouTube)

Monk's solo at 4:05 is the embodiment of the idea of careful carelessness. Sometimes his notes veer from the chord in a way that make it seem like anyone can play jazz piano, and that's the whole point of this essay.

*****

The Greywalk was no nice place. Thomasin Loma felt the harsh wind that rushed down the mountains and scoured all but the pines and scrub grass away. The howling gusts cut through his coat and the chainmaille padding beneath it, even though he had been overheated no less than thirty minutes earlier in the full glow of the sun. The road north of Castlemont dipped into a valley pinched by high passes before it snaked up a canyon towards Sternwarte. The sunlight could lick the northern gate of Castlemont, but it could scarcely penetrate the valley. A haze settled on the valley floor, making it difficult to see the road ahead except for a few spread out light posts. Thomasin thanked the rattle of his chainmaille for masking the dim whispers that could be heard within the haze; he had to travel to Sternwarte to deliver a package and certainly had no time for nonsense like overthinking the ghost stories he had heard about the Greywalk.

A Paladin must have a focused, pure mind, he reminded himself.

There were no students who vanished into the fog just before they graduated. There were no secret lovers who hid amongst the pines until, spurned by strict rules or foolish partners, they perished during cold winter nights. The official notice sent out by the school said that, no matter the gossip of students, there were no revenants spotted on the road holding bags of teeth collected from students traveling to Sternwarte. It was blasphemy to continue to say that there were teeth in the bag or a corpse garbed in maille holding the bag. The school staff sending the message were, after all, ascended Paladins. Their word was God’s word.

And yet the unmoving figure on the trailhead looked suspiciously like a corpse in armor carrying a burlap sack full of something lumpy. “It doesn’t exist,” Thomasin said aloud to himself as he tried to walk past it, simultaneously cursing himself that he didn’t just use his meager student income to buy the horse ride the long way around to Sternwarte.

“Raashsahaa!” the revenant hissed.

“Well that can’t be good,” Thomasin muttered to himself. “Ho, friend, how do you fare today?”

“HAAHSHA!” it replied, and then it was upon him.

The shield was between them in a blink. Summoning a shield is an easy divine skill, which was handy since Thomasin’s shield was nearly as tall as he was and very heavy. The creature bounced off of the shield before scrabbling at it with sharp, bony fingers and trying to spew acidic saliva into Thomasin’s face.

Seems pretty real, Thomasin thought before bashing the creature’s face with the shield so hard that it reeled back onto the ground. It laid their for a minute before starting to shudder. It was healing from the hit. One of its ankles and many teeth popped off, and it took time for a corpse to reintegrate displaced body parts. Thomasin shrugged and kept walking.

Paladin school was full of tests and trials. Thomasin convinced himself that the Greywalk was one such test of faith, and he was already failing it for even engaging the corpse. If his God found him worthy, wouldn’t his God grant him the safe passage to continue along? Maybe one of the senior students placed the revenant there as a way to relive a hunt that went favorably and forgot to remove the memory incantation? Maybe the mist concealed a stone circle for specter summoning, challenging students to find the higher ground of faith when confronted with a real, very dangerous opponent.

While Thomasin walked away, the creature leapt on his back. It already regenerated! Thomasin stumbled against his own shield with the force; the corpse was surprisingly agile for as heavy as its own body was. The revenant tried to sink its teeth through the scarf and armored collar around Thomasin’s neck, scratching at the Paladin’s chest with flailing arms. Thomasin muttered an incantation for greater strength and used his new power to spin in a circle, throwing the creature off with the momentum of his spin.

“WHUARRAaaasshak!” it cried as it whooshed across the trail and crashed against a rock. Thomasin seized on the moment and leapt forward with his shield, crushing the creature against the stone with all of his body mass.

It was a revenant, so it would regenerate unless killed with flame. Thomasin’s God did not appreciate the idea of open flame, so fire incantations were taboo by nature. There was an incantation for banishing the undead, but Thomasin was only a second year Paladin. As much as Paladin school was a trial, banishment was usually left to senior students.

Thomasin stood up, shook some of the bone debris off of his shield, and continued walking.

“Rrrraaahee!” the second revenant howled as it crashed into him from the side, knocking him over. As he fell towards the earth, Thomasin reflected that the fog had thickened around him to the point where he could not even see the stone against which he had just smashed a corpse. He was also surrounded by seven or eight other revenants.

“Savior, take me!” he cried.

“Really? You’re still going to keep spouting dogma even when your life is on the line?”

A crack like a thunderpeal echoed through the valley floor as a whip of fire lashed out, incinerating all but the revenant that was wheezing into Thomasin’s open mouth. A smouldering human hand reached out and clutched the corpse’s shoulder, spreading flames from the point of contact. The young Paladin’s mouth was full of ash, leaving him coughing and wheezing while he looked at his savior.

“Grandmaster Tarellan!”

She grinned and scooped him off of the ground with one lobstered gauntlet. “I was expecting you at Sternwarte thirty minutes ago. I’d ask you what the delay was, but I can see now that it was foolishness.”

“I was trying to heed the words of Grandmaster Leister, who said there weren’t any revenants in this valley.”

“If one ascended Paladin says there are not revenants and another one saves your life from them, can you still say they aren’t there? Does having too many voices of God in your head all the time get you too befuddled to use some sense and bring a torch?” Tarellan asked, laughing at the inexperience of the young Paladin.

“I don’t…”

“Just give it a bit and you’ll think about it.”

*****

Later, they sipped hot mulled cider in the observatory at Sternwarte. It was getting late and there weren’t any other Paladins left to train for fate-divining, so the Grandmaster took some time to talk to the bewildered student.

“Are you feeling any better about what happened earlier?” she asked. Her face, without a helmet on, was quite old and completely intimidating. A scar on her forehead crossed into the grey mop of her hair, and the heat scarring on her neck vouched for her most famous exploit: that she had fought a dragon. More so, her green eyes stared as if she was about ready to wrestle a terrible, fire breathing beast.

“I’m conflicted. I always try to follow the policy and not assume that the policy is out there to get me, but that was pretty risky.”

“It was only dangerous because you were so committed to the ideal of our order that you forgot the purpose. Our God does not crave a sacrifice,” she said, sternly eyeing the scarf that was shredded where the cadaver’s claws had touched.

“Then why do we make it such a firm ground of right and wrong? I was told it was a grievous sin to stray from the words of our elders,” Thomasin said, rubbing his shaved head with his hand.

“That’s the test. If your loyalty to a human is unwavering, how can your loyalty to your faith withstand scrutiny when you get conflicting human messages. Humans are completely fallible. Take me for example!” Tarellan laughed again. “I let you struggle in that valley to see if you would come up with a novel solution. Instead, you tried to ignore something you knew would eventually regenerate and come after you again.”

“You could have intervened?”

“I should have, but I wanted to see if you could handle the problem yourself.”

“Do you know who put those creatures there?”

“I have some ideas that I’ll mention to the committee of elders back in Castlemont, but I wouldn’t worry yourself about it. It will be awhile before anything like that happens again.”

A silence settled between them until Thomasin realized that the Grandmaster had not once touched the tiny kitchen in one corner of the observatory. There was no way that she could have heated the cider without magic.

"I thought the flame was banned by our scriptures. How is it that you're using fire to heat cider and destroy revenants?"

Grandmaster Tarellan stopped smiling. "Would our God rather have an all-around effective servant or would our God rather have a mentor who would let pupils die due to all of them having too narrow a view of the real world?"

"I guess They would prefer survival."

"To die and let others die is the greatest blasphemy a Paladin can commit. We were given our powers AND access to learning more so that we may more adequately defend. If your faith demands sacrifice, demand more from your faith."

"Do all Grandmasters feel this way?" Thomasin asked.

"No, not at all. Plenty of them will stay only on the road they feel their God put them on. We all feel the weight of our own choices and will, however; why not find a way to diverge from the road that satisfies our divine connection?"

By the time they had finished their ciders, and Thomasin was getting ready to head back, he had nearly dismissed the Grandmaster as a heretical leader, certain that she had been sent to Sternwarte so that she would not interfere with the beliefs of the students at the school.

"Did you bring something for me?" she asked.

"Oh yes! I almost forgot!" he replied, taking out the light, rectangular parcel he had previously carried in his satchel. "Mentor Pursyan asked me to deliver this to you."

"Excellent, I've been waiting for this," she said, grinning in earnest. She unraveled the satchel, revealing several stacks of chocolate chip cookies.

"Grandmaster! You know we're not supposed to eat baked goods! It's blasph-" he cried as she shoved a gooey cookie into his mouth.

"You were forced into it by God's hand," she laughed. "Run on home and tell him I said 'thanks for drawing my attention to this extremely urgent matter.'"

"Mmhmm," he replied, thought the cookie was so delicious that it nearly made him cry.

*****

Many years later, Mentor Loma would often bring cookies and cider to the exorcisms he had to perform. It was a lot of work for families to deal with possessed children, and the gesture always smoothed out the evening and the work that was needed.

The line between black and white was definitely hazy at best, but Thomasin Loma was eager to walk it for those who needed the help.

Ensign Stacy Eun woke up with the chiming of the satellite receiver. Objects approaching or being approached, something too large for the hull of the ship to survive impact with--a surprise considering that the V-Needle was literally designed to survive impact, penetrating all but materials harder than tungsten.

“What do I not know about this mission?” Stacy would ask herself for the fifth time since she signed off on her top space secret paperwork. Why did they assign a fighter pilot to a space mission? Why make her copilot a spaceship she had neither seen nor heard of?

These thoughts and the rest of the sleeping drugs she had been made to take wore off with a sharp series of clanging sounds as a metal canister was loaded and locked into the aft port of the ship. “Who is that?” Stacy slurred as she slowly woke up.

“Come on, Ensign,” Lieutenant Sterling replied. “Time to look alive. We are at the target.”

“Do I get to know what that is yet?”

“See for yourself.” The lieutenant pressed a button on the console to show a virtual display from forward cameras.

“Oh my god.” The moon. It would have looked gorgeous and jaw-dropping with the illuminated side mostly facing away from the Earth, and the Earth distantly lit-up, peeking from the bottom of the display. But the moon was obscured by a giant whose tentacles spread across the entirety of the lit up side.

“What the hell is that!?” Stacy cried. The ambient sounds of the ship, even the continued beeping of the radar which noted the proximity of the moon itself, seemed to drift into nothingness when looking at a being of that size. Ten tentacles aligned at a central point that jutted away from the moon--the protruding body and head were probably five hundred miles long. The body and tentacles were bluish-purple with bright red bumps all over. The head was bulbous like an octopus head, and the only visible eye stared at the craft with a glassy, round lens.

“We call him the Patient,” Lieutenant Sterling answered. “He’s been here probably fifty times over the last twenty years.”

“Are we going to try to kill him by ramming him with this ship?”

“Wouldn’t be wise even if it were possible. Can you imagine the risk to Earth of having a giant octopus floating around in our orbit, limbs all askew? Besides, he’s mostly sweet,” the Lieutenant added.

“Mostly?”

“If he wants to talk to us, he’ll send us images of the things he wants to say and what he wants us to do--it’s like psychic sharing. It pervades what you experience for a few minutes, and then it passes away. His images enabled us to build this space ship as well as a number of other technologies, so it’s not all bad. Also, he learns from us too, taking our own understandings when he trades.”

“So he’s basically a giant, space octopus with psychic abilities and a genuine desire to advance the science of the human race?”

“Yes, basically.”

“How come no one on Earth knows about or talks about this thing? Shouldn’t we be able to see it when we look up?” Stacy asked.

“We have a bit of a contract with it, which we’re about to fulfill for this current visit. Also, it never makes itself visible to the naked eye, moving as the moon moves for cover. It has also made it very clear who we’re allowed to let know about it. He picked you after scanning me when I had read the service records of hundreds of other candidates. He even chose the process of training and the way you needed to be brought here.”

Stacy felt a chill pass through her shoulders. Whatever this entity was, it had acquainted itself with her even though she was less than a bug to it. “Can it read me right now?” she asked.

Lieutenant Sterling gave a short, sharp laugh. “Absolutely,” she replied.

“I take back what I said about ramming you with the ship!” Stacy blurted.

“Actually that’s what we’re going to do.”

“What?!”

“I want you to take a look at the arm in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.”

It took a little squinting, but Stacy could see that a streak of raw flesh was exposed--a reddish canal ran half the width of the arm. From here, it looked small, but it must have been miles long and tall up close.

“What happened to it?”

“We don’t know, but this is why we call it the Patient, and this is why we fly the V-Needle. We are going to use antibiotic thread that I just loaded into the aft port, and we’re going to stitch that wound up.”

“Pardon? So we have to steer this ship into the arm and then cross to the other side and then back? Sorry, it’s been a long time since I had to know how to do a suture.”

“Our canister does the suture for us. On impact, the outer part of the canister dislodges and sticks in the Patient while the rest unspools the thread. On second impact with the opposing side of the wound, the larger portion of the canister remaining also dislodges and sticks in the arm, automatically winding up the remainder of the thread so that the wound closes before the canister cuts off the excess thread.” Lieutenant Sterling’s words were bright with excitement for task, which was what Stacy expected from her, having heard about the Lieutenant before being assigned to her. “There is only a mile of thread in the canister, so we do have to start at the part of the wound with the least wide laceration.”

“Why me, then? Is it my job to fly?”

“Yes. I’ll be loading canisters into the back. It picked you because some of the maneuvers you’ve performed in your career are astonishingly precise. Now you need to do those same maneuvers with a ship that has to crash into squishy octopus flesh to do its job.”

“Will we feel the crash? Have you been doing this for awhile?”

“It’s very smooth. Only the action of the canister is very noticeable. You’ll get the hang of it right away, and I’ll advise you on the first few crossings. I’ve been doing this for ten years, and now I’m training you to do it with me too.”

“Why doesn’t he just grab the ship and pull it through, himself? He’s a big boy,” Stacy said. And then she looked at the view screen and saw the big octopus eye judging her, almost glowering.

“He doesn’t like to feel the pain, I think,” Lieutenant Sterling said, laughing. “Be careful where you put the needle.”

*****

It seemed like grisly work at first, picking the threshold of octopus flesh that could be punctured shallowly enough to damage as little tissue as possible. Sure enough, the V-Needle went right in, tugging only slightly when the canister dislodged.

It took about forty canisters to reach a conclusion to the stitching. Sterling was sweating from constantly loading and Stacy breathed a sigh of relief when the last canister plunked out of the aft of the ship on the last pass.

“You did great!” Sterling exclaimed.

“You too. I hope he agrees.”

“Even though your parents and family back home can’t hear anything about this, I know they’d be happy with what you’ve done. Patient is at least! Look at him.”

Stacy looked up at Patient’s eye, glowering down on her. Suddenly, her head started to feel hot, and she became nauseated.

“What’s happening?” she asked, but the words cut off and she blacked out before she could could fully finish. And then the images started to enter her brain. There was another planet and another dominant species that was given the V-Needle and the tools to help with his wounds. They did help for awhile, and then, after a hundred years or so, they stopped nursing the Patient’s wounds when he came to visit.

Dismayed, he showed himself to their whole planet in a plea for help, and they attempted to use the technology he showed them to kill him, driving a fleet of V-Needles into his body. It didn’t work, however, since he crushed the pilots with his great arms after they popped out of his body. His arms spewed some kind of organic propulsion through the red pock marks, moving with baffling speed and power. Then, he grabbed their moon and tossed it into their planet, wiping out everything that had ever lived there.

Stacy shook off the vision in a cold sweat and looked up at the eye again. Somehow, he winked at her, filling her head suddenly with a vision of them both standing in a flowering field, him being a normal sized octopus, and giving her a daisy with one outstretched tentacle.

“I guess he is a sweetheart. Kind of,” Stacy said, steering the V-Needle back towards Earth.

Whatever he was, destroyer or nice, space octopus, it was almost certainly better to know him than whatever it was that kept giving him those wounds, Stacy thought. Was it predation that kept hurting him or was it a more powerful warring aggressor? Better the octopus than the unknown.

Although one slip up might make him angry enough to destroy the world, perhaps he offered some measure of protection from whatever else lurked out there. She’d take care of him for as long as she could, she swore. As long as humanity could.

“Tonight, I’m going to make my mark,” he said, walking up to the diner.

The Kimim Diner was on the northern side of the arena. Chris had to navigate several closed streets where the pavement had fallen into sinkholes on his way to the unlit parking lot where the diner slouched against a row of dried bushes and trees that were only just getting their leaves back.

The inside of the diner was illuminated by flickering phosphorescent lights that barely brightened the aging, brown, leathery seats and cast the kitchen area, staffed by one cook, in a greenish-gray glow. Chris Thompson placed his order at the counter and then sat down across from a man who couldn’t hide his muscles no matter how big his trench coat was.

There were no other guests. This had to be the source. Of course he is, Chris thought as he leaned in to shake the man’s hand, knowing the beady-eyed, sweating, short-haired man already.

“Kit Iverson.”

“Chris Thompson. Sure you wanna use your stage name here?”

“It’s probably how you know me. I reckon you’re a journalist?”

“Yeah, I work for the Stamford Dispatch. I got your message about some of the real shit going on behind the scenes at the arena.”

“I’ve got plenty for you. Get you a perfect insider scoop,” Kit said, grinning a little bit.

This is at best a trap and at worst a waste of my time, Chris thought. The man was on the Hero Ticket. He was a winner and that meant that he was not going to be upfront or transparent about the rumors coming out of the MWF. The protagonists were never badly hurt and never disappeared for months after some of the brawls.

As dusty as the restaurant was, and as much as everything smelled like grease, there was a lack of flies and mosquitoes for this time of year that made it unlike any other diner at this time of night. The leathery texture of the cushion beneath him was not supposed to be actual leather, but it felt like skin anyway. The diner’s cook wasn’t cooking anything, just moving around the counter in a busy-looking way--in the reflection of one of the windows, the cook’s face was fixed in a mournful, silent wail, very different from the friendly smile shown when Chris had placed his order.

They’re not even planning on feeding me before the trap. No problem with being direct at least, until he spills his secrets, Chris thought, before taking out a notepad.

“I want to know everything about what happens backstage and off-camera at the arena. I’ve heard stories about the abuses of some the characters. Are they true?”

“Absolutely not. I can tell you first-hand that everyone is treated very well.”

“If you can forgive me, I find it hard to believe that a guy like you could speak for the experiences of the Villains, since you are on the Hero Ticket.”

“Oh, that’s all just pretending!” the man across the table said, chuckling. “We all have to work our way up from the Villain Ticket.” He grinned wider, revealing a second and third row of square teeth tucked away where his gums should have been.

------

As a child, Chris heard growls coming from beneath his bed, like all other children.

So scary. Scary. His dad would tell him that maybe the growls weren’t from a monster that wanted to hurt people. Maybe the monster was alone and scared too.

Every night, there were more growls. Eventually the growls seemed more like whimpers, until one night Chris laid on his belly while craning his neck towards the floor to look at the sad, lonely monster.

“Are you alright?” Chris said, and the monster shook its head.

------

Chris Thomas crossed his arms, unimpressed. Of course, they would hire a monster to talk about how the abuses of monsters are not really a problem.

“I remember hearing that line. Who is leading the Hero Ticket now, again? Who is top rank?”

“Clyde Nelson, ‘The Thunder,’ is the ranked champion. You know that much, right?” the multi-grinning creature said, narrowing his grin back to one row of teeth.

“Is he a monster?”

“Nah. Pure-blooded man.”

“When he put Orgax the Crabinator in a brainbuster last year, Orgax didn’t die, right?”

“No, Orgax is fine.”

“Where is Orgax now? No one’s seen an eight-foot tall crab man since he was carried away on a stretcher last year.”

“That’s part of the game. We keep them away so that you can think that something terrible has happened,” Kit laughed, “and then we bring ‘em back later.”

“I’d buy that argument if they ever came back.”

“How about the Banshee? We made a big deal about her coming back after she was banished to the spectral plane with a Northern Lariat followed by a Big Splash. She was completely dusted.”

“Everyone knows it wasn’t the same Banshee. Is grabbing a different ancient keening spirit and trying to pass her off as a brand new one pretty common in your profession?”

“I’m telling you she was the same.”

“I interviewed them both,” the journalist said, pulling out the transcripts of the interviews. “They swore that they were different people back when they were living, and where did the second Banshee wind up going?”

This man knows a lot more about professional monster wrestling than he lets on, Kit thought, a bead of sweat rolling down the hot, tight skin suit he’d chosen to wear for this interview.

“There’s a long list,” Chris continued, “of monsters that didn’t spend a lot of time on the Villain Ticket before they stopped participating in any MWF matches at all. Tuskator the Minotaur, Gravytrain the Grave-Trained Ghoul, Dragon Man, The Lich Kang, Wendigo Wendy, Murmur Momo--”

“Momo had to retire after his loss against The Viking. He did get hurt and got back pay for it. This is old news,” Kit replied.

“That was never said on TV or in an article,” the reporter said. “He got hurt because every match he showed up with one less toe or finger than he’d previously had, until he was fighting with no toes or fingers. How did he lose them?”

At this, the reporter pulled out a binder with photos that showed how, over time, Momo had indeed lost body parts.

“He, uh, he’s the only one these kinds of things are happening to!” Kit stammered. Kit had known about Momo’s treatment backstage when he wasn’t faking his punches the way he needed to, but to see all of those treatments in one progression of photos rattled him.

“How about you, Doppelgangupper?” the reporter asked. How does he know my original stage name? the skin wearer wondered.

“What about me? I’ve been treated well by the MWF. Been with them, I guess you know, for thirty years.”

“You wear new skins well, for having been through what you’ve been through, but I’ve seen you flinch when you step into the ring. Never really recovered from the Hamfist’s Hammerthrow move, did you?”

Just thinking about the way he’d been flung from his skin suit like a rock from a sling into the concrete wall of the stadium, he shivered. And then he remembered what he was supposed to be doing.

“You need to go. This line of questioning is over.”

“I’m not ready to leave yet. I know you’ve been hurt and mistreated before, and that no insurance covered the costs of repairing the muscle that was torn by that throw. They won’t let you have any insurance, and they barely give you any place to live or any money.”

“This interview is over.”

“How do you do it? How do you stump for the MWF when they’re actively treating you this way? How many other times have you or other monsters like you been hurt only to have to pretend that you don’t hurt at all? If you help me write this article, we can expose what you’re having to deal with everyday. We can end your abuse.”

Kit shuffled out of his chair and tried to walk to the door, but almost as if summoned by the reporter, his singular muscle that let him slip into a skin throbbed with the old spasms. He contorted and fell with his hand catching on the table, stopping himself from slamming against the floor.

"You don't have to live like this," Chris said, warmly offering to help him up. "I can help you have a job away from this wrestling circus, where you can do what you want instead of always fighting. But only if you help me help other monsters reveal this corruption."

The monster took Chris' hand and stood up. In response, the diner growled.

"Oh no. Oh no!" Kit screamed, trying to break away and run, but as the diner itself jolted away from the asphalt and stood up on four legs that jutted out where unlit lamp posts used to be, lifting the two men upwards so fast that they both toppled to the floor, it was already too late.

Chris could see the windows all around the restaurant bow outwards before popping like spit bubbles outside, while parts of the walls collapsed in waves on the empty space. A pair of lips had formed on the exterior with Chris and Kit inside.

Chairs and tables toppled over just so that, if someone hadn't known it was a diner a moment ago, it would have looked like a row of teeth. The man working as a cook was standing on the wall, body perpendicular to the floor, and his torso flopped around wildly as he turned red and glistened with saliva.

Chris knew it right away, though apparently Kit had only just realized the creature was there. The diner was about to dine.

------

The troll boy under the bed was sweet and a good friend. Chris read him stories every night so that the troll could relax since he hadn't seen his troll parents in a month.

His father was gone and he didn't know where. His mother worked for the Monday-Wednesday-Friday society, a human run group that forced monsters into labor for human pleasure, often times using monsters against monsters. Wrestling was the group's primary moneymaker because no one expected wrestling to be real and no one believed a monster when they cried about being hurt or lonely.

"I'll take care of you. I'll take care of all monsters," Chris promised.

The troll boy started to read him books about monsters. How to talk to them, become friends with them, what kinds of monsters existed--Chris became fascinated by the world he had not seen, even though everyone had monsters under their beds.

And then one day the troll boy vanished. He left no trace except for a stack of books he'd taken from his mom's own collection.

"I'll take care of you."

------

By the time Chris had talked the mimic into spitting her prey onto the asphalt, the mimic and Chris were fast friends. Chris had told the mimic about how her family out East was doing and how much they missed her, even pulling one of her shapeshifting baby teeth out of his back pocket just to show her that he'd talked to them.

Although Kit was deeply rattled by nearly having been eaten when he thought he was sitting in a normal diner from the beginning, he told Chris everything he knew about the treatment of monsters by the MWF.

Whistling on his way home, even though he was completely drenched with mimic slobber which had a semi-corrosive effect on his car upholstery, Chris knew that his new friends would be very helpful in attacking the MWF when the time came. He would write a piece that would blow open the industry with his new info combined with everything else he had previously uncovered.

Thinking of his friend from his childhood, Chris smiled. "I'll take care of all monsters," he swore. Finally, he had a chance to prove it.

“We don’t go into that room.”

“Why?”

“Water damage. Need to get someone to repair it.” That’s all he would say, no matter how many times we asked, like the real joke was being breathtakingly consistent in his non-answers. I never really got Dad’s humor.

Still, Dad wasn’t wrong. The exterior wall of the room between my room and my sister’s room on the second floor was blackened with mold in the shadows of the windowsill. A trellis covered in kudzu sat next to the window, conveniently covering parts of the siding that had cracked and warped away. The window made me feel uncomfortable, so I tried not to look at it.

I didn’t get the idea to climb the trellis and look inside the locked room until Dad was away on a “book tour.” He needed a vacation from his daughters whether or not his novel was actually selling. A storm cut off the internet line somewhere miles away, and I was really bored. After rereading several of my books, I decided to walk circles around my house until I got too tired and took a nap. I’ve always had a low thrill center, but I suppose curiosity was always going to overtake me in the end.

It’s easy to ignore a locked room in your own house when you’re twelve and have no access to the key. Newspaper had also been wadded up and shoved into the base of the door, so no peeking could be done with my head on the floor. We were guests in the house of a man we barely knew. If our mom hadn’t died, we probably never would have gotten to know our actual father beyond the two years he’d been with us both after Pamela’s birth but before the split. He stayed at home, writing most of the time at a small living room table in eyesight of the middle room. There was an office he could have used, but I think he preferred to watch the room.

His room was across a gap from ours on the second floor. I realize now that we never mentioned to him that I thought Pamela was having horrible nightmares, and she thought I was. Maybe I saw the earplugs on his nightstand and realized that he knew and didn’t care who was screaming every night.

It was maybe fifteen or twenty laps around my house before I decided to climb up and have a look inside. It was impossible to discern anything about the room from below; the pane was too filthy and the room was unlit, spewing back the reflected light of the sun until it was too dark to see inside anyway. Up I went, finding another reason why we couldn’t see inside.

It was hastily boarded up from within. The boards were over the window recess about a foot deep into the room, leaving a few small cracks between the planks. I leaned out from the trellis until my face was against the glass, blocking the sun with my own head. When my head tapped the glass, I heard a screech like a dinner fork being dragged across concrete inside the room, and a board cracked in the middle of the window, bulging towards me. Underneath the crack, in the thin line looking into the room, a gleaming row of teeth grinned.

I fell off the trellis onto my back. Two stories is a big fall, and I remember knocking the air out of my chest with the impact, choking but unable to force breathing because I was shaking too much. Staring up at the window, waiting for something to break through, choking on my own tight lungs, I cried. My sister rushed out to check on me. I reassured her that I was fine before I explained what I’d seen. Pinky swears not to look into the room.

She was two years younger than me and two times more adventurous, so it was never going to last.

*****

The next time Dad left for two days, my sister opened the door to the locked room. She’d taken the key off his keychain.

I heard her yank hard on the stiff door. The door slouched heavily against its own frame and it made a cracking sound as if it had been broken. Even as I bolted out of my bedroom, I could see and smell the plume of dust bursting from the room as Pamela’s heel vanished inside. By the time I got to the doorway, Pamela was gone.

The room was furnished, if sparsely: a table and a chest of drawers with a small chair and mirror to the left, a nightstand and cobweb covered bed to the right. Hardwood floors with the heads of nails sticking out in odd places started where the carpeted hall ended. The room was at least a century old. It was dusty and hard to breathe, but I still screamed for Pamela. A gasp emanated from behind the bed in the corner, to the right of the window.

I didn’t see my sister there, but the floor and the walls in the corner were rotten with mold, and the rot appeared to be moving, writhing within the dull bluish paint. I couldn’t look at it directly because it made me gag, but some of the twisting patterns of the mold looked like snakes wrapped around the outline of a person.

I heard the sound again. A scraping that sounded like someone dragging a rake across a chalkboard emanated from the mirror directly behind me. It was a large mirror with ornate embellishments all around its exterior, and I could see the whole room through it. In the moldy corner, through the mirror, hunched a woman with twisted black veins and arteries running across her alabaster skin. She was perched on the balls of her feet running pale fingers across my sister’s hair. Pamela was curled into a lump in the same corner, crying without sound and looking up to see me looking at her, calling my name without sound.

The hunched woman noticed me and stood up. She must have been at least six feet tall, because it seemed like she had to hunch not to brush her black hair against the ceiling. Her dress was grey and could have been made of soot. Her eyes were dark enough that it seemed like she had none. In a blink, her arms were wrapped around me, fingernails tracing patterns and scratching on my skin. I still saw her in the corner, wrapped around my sister in the mirror. The aroma of mold and decay flooded my eyes and nose, and as her hands slithered up to my neck, everything went dark.

“I love you,” she said through my hair, as images of a different death and life started to light up the dark in my eyes.

*****

She died in this room. Her family didn’t realize that it had happened. One of her brothers responsible for taking care of her decided to pretend she had never been in the room rather than trouble himself moving her body and paying for the funeral expenses. The rest of the family lived elsewhere and became distracted by other things while her brother busied himself ignoring her body.

A hurricane rolled in three days after her death and tore the siding from her room, leaving a damp residue over her corpse. After a checkup on the house she was properly found and buried.

She had no great ill will towards her brother but a fantastic longing for all other souls. A newborn baby was put in the room her brother and I both slept in shortly after her brother moved out. The parents left the baby there for hours unattended and made the woman’s room a storage closet--she tried to get into the baby’s room or go through the wall to comfort the baby when it cried, so the parents locked the door, barricaded the window, and painted the room in this strange, light blue paint that kept the woman from moving through the wall.

When the baby grew into a child, the parents moved from occasionally checking in to almost never going into boy’s room. Detained in her own cell, the woman could only listen through the wall as the boy played with stuffed animals, conjuring elaborate stories where the toys were always on his side and always loved him.

The ghost grew attached enough to the boy to call out responses for the different characters he had created, and soon it was like a running dialogue. The boy’s parents didn’t care enough to see what he was saying to the woman in the wall. The woman warped into something more than a ghost over time, twisting because no one cared about the boy. Twisting because the boy cared about her.

The older he grew, the more she loved him as if he were her own son, or husband, or something totally different.

The boy inherited the house. The boy became a man and met my mother. They decided to leave the South and moved to Wisconsin just as she was pregnant with me. My father knew that the attachment of the woman in the wall had gotten too large.

“Stay with me,” his old teddy bear would whisper. He put the bear in the trash.

“Stay with me,” his video game console would whisper. He sold it.

“Stay with me!” and the shriek of the woman pushing through the ghost-proof paint sounded like a brass instrument was smashed and dragged across asphalt. She appeared in his room, smothering him in his bed. It took all of his strength to pry himself free and pick up his fiancé and drive. Mom did not notice until after my sister was born that the ghost was chasing him, stalking him from tree to tree in the shadows of cold winter nights, waiting for the moment that would pull my mom and dad apart.

The moment came when my bear started talking. Talking about intimate times spent whispering to my father through the walls. Talking about how wonderful a future they could have if he made my mom disappear.

My dad left and the spirit followed. My mom died of lymphoma eight years later, and my dad shrugged, convinced the spirit to stay in her room knowing that she’d have us as company on each side of her and my dad always nearby, and moved us to the house in which he’d been raised.

*****

We spent a long time in the darkness of the tall woman’s body, mold creeping into own skins. My dad found the door open and rushed into the room when he returned.

“No no no! You promised you wouldn’t hurt them! You promised!” he cried, reaching into the mold of the wall and prying us free from the blackened paint. I’m not sure exactly how the woman stored us inside the wall, and I’ll never be able to ask my dad. He pushed my sister and I out of the room and closed the door behind him.

Now he lives with her. As an adult, I write him letters all the time and slide them under the crack of the door, which I knocked free with a clothes hanger. He says he’s doing well and not to worry, but he never really answers any of my questions. I tell him that I’m worried that he’s actually dead and gone, and he just tells me that he’d rather be where he is than “dead because of a coffin fit.”

I never really got Dad’s humor.

You carry something dark. When you’re stirring a pot of boiling noodles, your fingers grip the wooden spoon so hard that you leave indentations. The water from the pot sloshes over the sides with your stirring, and the noodles stick together anyway—you just make circles with the spoon, staring at the wall behind your stove. When you dump the overcooked noodles into a strainer, you pour the boiling water over your fingers without flinching. Even when you add too much salt to the sauce, you stare at the floor and eat without acknowledging that you hate it, except that you throw the rest of the spaghetti away before it’s half eaten.

You barely answer the door when they knock anymore. If you do, you stare at their shoes instantly, as if them standing on your overly bright welcome mat was like the hazy film that grows over memories. Conversations are short, and you’re closing the door before they’ve ever really started. Well-wishing cakes and apologetic cookies grow mold in your fridge, though the cards went in the trash without being read.

At night when you twitch and kick the sheets from your sleeping body, you’re too much in the middle of nightmares to adjust them. You wake up in a sweat anyway. Only on nights when it rains do you sleep well, reminded of other presences like breathing and the tapping of toes on linoleum. Or maybe the rain sounds make you feel like you’re drowning.

Without him, you’re sinking into yourself like a splinter that gets pushed deeper when you try to pull it out.

There are no pictures left of him. The one on the mantelpiece that was a gift from his family is gone. The portrait fell and cracked on the tile around the fireplace. Did you cry at all for losing it? Yes, you cried because of the shattered glass, another loss in a life that felt always like another fragile thing, a dish or a personal bauble, was going to be smashed on the floor every day. The face you knew, next to your own in the picture, went into the trash first before you picked up a single glass shard.

You always preferred your rooms cold even as you shivered inside them. Where a shadow seemed to stalk you from one room to another, twisting your face into a relentless grimace, the sourness is gone now. Did you wear the grimace just for him?

It used to be his spaghetti and his fingers under the boiling water, when there wasn’t enough space to easily strain the noodles into the sink because you were busy glowering there with your arms crossed, spoon gripped in one hand so tightly that the wooden handle became indented by your fingers. Once, his jittery hands missed the strainer completely and dumped the whole batch of noodles into the sink, and because you weren’t looking a choice appeared: take the blame and cook a fresh batch or reach down and grab what noodles didn’t slide all the way into the drain. You were already mad that night, so ask yourself what option he chose.

When the dinner plate slid out of his fingers and shattered, it was like he had broken you. He was committing to your cycle of fragile things. Dinner was cancelled, and you laid down in bed like a plank until he could massage your fractured feelings back together. Sometimes this took hours.

With him, you sank into him like a splinter that you pushed deeper when he tried to pull it out.

At night when you twitched and kicked the sheets from your sleeping body, you woke up angry that he could be sleeping so soundly and cried loudly until your problem was his problem. Only on nights when it rained did you sleep well, though both of you were drowning.

That feeling was strongest on the morning he disappeared. A one-sided argument where he put too much salt in the scrambled eggs began, and he vanished. If it actually mattered to you where he went, you could have seen him fade into the walls of the house. He was so much backed into a corner by your need to examine every problem as if it reflected your whole life that he sank into the building itself. He became part of the place where you made him the worst thing to have ever happened to you and also the mutual recipient of all of your feelings, isolated just like you.

I’m still here. I see you now. I live in the walls and the bed and the mirror. I can see everything you do. It looks like you’re breaking over me, not reaching out for help to deal with the dark feelings you still have, but it’s not my problem. Your actions now were the same as before, but now you don’t have a target or outlet for them. You even spend less time crying over a shattered plate.

At last I can see that it wasn’t my fault that you wore that grimace in every room. At last I realize that I wasn’t the sole person responsible for your miseries.

I know I’ll escape from the walls soon. I can almost put a foot out now if I push. Something still needs to happen before I can stop living within the walls of this house. I still feel like I can be the warmth in your bed that tucks you in, even though I know that never gave you solace. You live inside me, but I never lived inside you.

One day I’ll pop out of the living room wall and walk through the dining room where you’re eating while staring at the floor. It won’t matter if you drop your fork and see me with your eyes welling with tears, I’ll keep walking until I’m out the door and driving down the road, away from your isolation and your fragile life.

You carry something dark, but I don’t need to be a case you store it in anymore.

_______

Week 1 of LJ Idol

I'm in for another season of LJ Idol. Let's see where this thing goes!

They arrive when the ice melts enough. There is a cave in the mountains that changes with the thaw, when the lakes are at peak capacity.

“We don’t go up the pass except to tend to our herds during the witching week,” Da says. It can’t be helped--it was always a warm season that brought the danger hidden in the cave, but hard to tell when to stop bringing them up that far until we can see it for ourselves.

I am eight the first time I’m asked to follow and help my da tend the flock, the first time we flee the mountain, running back into the village. My da leans across the threshold of the dark cave and tucks his head back, sputtering with fright.

“They’re here!”

We run through bushes and down the steeper slopes as if death itself stands for less than what would soon to crawl through that cave. When we reached the square, my da tugged on a bell that resounded throughout the village. My brother rushes out of our home and grabs my shoulder to drag me back inside while my father begins to butcher a sheep to smear its blood on the ground outside each house.

They would tell me later that I had survived similar nights, but I never remembered it. Probably my mother was starting to become sick, and my brother and father felt harried in watching over us all.

The dark expands as the sun passes behind the peaks surrounding us. The houses in our village are silent except for the bleating of goats. When we look out through the wooden slats of our doors and can barely see the road, we snuff out our candles as well and silence our whispering.

Outside, someone is shuffling down the road through our village. Several things speaking in human-like voices that I can’t understand and are walking past our door and dragging fingers through the blood on our doorsteps. Some sound like women, but it’s hard to discern.

As quickly as they’ve come, they’ve gone. They leave no trace of their presence in town except that all of our goats seem to have returned to our farm.

Regardless, Da has a grim facial expression. We sell the goats as soon as we can to the city and buy more, as my da believes that they have been cursed.

*****

When I am ten, I am taking care of the goats alone so that my family can work closer to town. I know how to run home now, but I forget to leave the goats where they are and just take care of myself when I see what my father saw at the back of the cave.

It’s a natural light where there was none in the previous months. Curiosity grabs at me, but panic grabs harder. I begin to run but get no further than five seconds away before I remember to grab the goats.

“Stop! Wait!” I yell pointlessly after a goat as it strolls into the cave. I wait for a moment, but the goat doesn’t return.

I charge in after him, hoping to catch him before he crosses too far into the cave, but he’s long gone. I’m surprised to note how similar this place is to mine when I cross into the light--it’s a snow covered mountain breaking into patches of grass that slope down towards a village.

“That must be where they come from,” I mutter aloud.

“Yes, we live there!” a boy behind me and a little older shouts.

I scream until I see that he’s holding my goat.

“My name’s Tam!” he says cheerfully, adding, “don’t worry, I’ve got your goat. You’re not the first person who stumbled this way.”

It’s cold and the way back is apparently sealed now behind me, so I follow him into town and meet her: the magic girl.

*****

When I’m in my own world, I can barely remember her. Something clots my understanding and memory, but I rationalize that it’s my age, the way we always forget the background from which we grow. I’m twelve, and I’m staring up into the mountains while I’m supposed to be tilling the fields, feeling that something is waiting up there for me, and though I can remember walking into that cave to get the goat that wandered off, all I can remember is the dark and a warmth unlike anything else on that mountain.

I’m thirteen and lying in bed, tossing a stone at the ceiling just to see if it fails to come back down. The snow on the mountain is too dense to look into the cave even though I’m getting strong enough that I could cross through it with the right clothes. I walk up the mountain, as close as I can get to it, and it’s still frozen shut.

When I’m fourteen, a fire bursts out of our house and claims my parents, my da while he is trying to spare my mother. I don’t know where to lay the flowers I pick so I just stand outside the charred half of my home and the spot where Da gasped his last breath and gaze at the mountain. The melt is strong that year, so I go up to the cave and dig a hole to get in, only to find that the cave terminates where my memory assured me it continued.

I start to wonder whether I made up the story about locking all of our doors and waiting out the witching week until my brother discusses how, as the new head of our farm, he’ll be responsible to ring the bell should anything go wrong. He’s changed in the absence of our parents, and I can feel him becoming colder and more businesslike with each day.

Still, he allows me to tend to the goats, which I do with relish because that lets me keep an eye on the mountain. Even as years pass, I can’t quite lose the sensation that there is something more.

And then, one evening during a hotter than normal summer, a light shines through the back of the cave.

Her name is Willow. Her name is Willow. Her name is Willow!

Before I can even cross to the other side of the mountain, I remember it as if it’s my own. Willow and Will grown at the same time but hardly the same.

She’s waiting for me in the cave and something new is sown inside me just to look at her. I can’t discern what it is.

“Will!” she says, “Do you remember me?”

And I do. All at once I can recall that she taught me magic. I pick a stone off of the floor and toss it into the air, intoning words I had forgotten.

The stone hangs in the air.

“Of course,” I say. “You’re the one that taught me magic.”

*****

I stay for seven days, but it feels like no time at all. I learn everything about her home, her familiar, her smile. I even relearn the generosity of these people on the other side. As scared of them as I was when they first came down from the mountain when I was 8, they were only there to bring back the goats that we'd left stranded on the mountain.

She even teaches me more magic. I watch everything she does with more study than I’ve ever given a thing in my life.

I know know that I'll have to return home to help my brother, make amends for being gone so long, craft excuses that don't make these people look like monsters anymore, but the fear is undeniable--I know that when I cross back over, I'll begin forgetting it all.

So I touch her face and kiss her mouth and feel a spark not unlike static shock ripple through my veins.

"That's the magic -- telling us we're meant to -- it's meant to be. No matter what, remember that," she says.

And I don't forget anything about her anymore.

“I’ll return to you, Wil. I promise,” I say as I step back through again.

*****

I do forget my own village, or at least their paranoia. The first time I try to broach the topic of the seven days I spent away from the farm, I am ignored.

My brother drags me into the house and curses at me for speaking nonsense about my experience. I try to reason with him, but he begins to become physical, grabbing my arm too tightly. He’s strong, and I can’t make him see that the village on the other side of the mountain is worth getting to know by fighting with him.

For three years I needle at my brother’s sense that I’ve been cursed by my stay with Wil on the other side of the mountain. All I find is proof that he and the other people I was raised alongside want me to have nothing to do with the cave. They watch me climb and a few follow me up the mountain when the melt is strong the next year. The way is not open, so I stand and just apologize for not being able to make it back.

Two men are shouting at me on the way down. I can’t convince them that this is safe. In Willow, a home was planted. It’s starting to blossom, a flower unlike any I’ve known in my life. This is love.

A year later and the entrance to the cave has been boarded up. I smash the barricade to pieces with nearby stones until I can get in, but the way is shut again. Again I apologize to her, hoping that she can hear how desperately I want to see her.

*****

Twenty is the right year. An uncommonly warm breeze rustles through the valley.

They’re waiting for me at the mouth of the cave.

“What do you think you’re trying to do?”

“Are you seriously trying to get in touch with those creatures?” my brother asks.

I try to push through, but they’re strong. I don’t fight back and take my hits before they lock me into a room in my own house.

All I can think of is her face and the magic she taught me to control, and then I see it all. I see her waiting for me in the open cave, standing with her arms crossed, waiting out the whole week. I struggle against the door. I plead.

When my brother finally lets me out, I knock him down on the way to the cave, but it’s too late. The back wall is solid rock once more.

The village is waiting for me when I return.

“We have no choice but to banish you if all you’re going to do is bring ruin to us.”

“Banish me if you like, but you’re not keeping me from going through that cave the next time it thaws. If you want me to cross over to the other side and never come back, that’s fine. I’ve never tried to harm you and only want to see the woman that I love,” I reply.

“I cannot believe that you’ve fallen for something over there, Will,” my brother taunts.

“You’ve not loved anyone since our parents died, so I’m hardly surprised,” I reply.

He tries to fight me, but this time they hold him back. “What if he’s cursed?” a man asks.

“My only curse is that I was born here. Leave me be, and I will go with no problem.”

They don’t let me stay in town, and I have to forage for food and work for neighboring villages that are less given to superstitions, but none of them stop me when I visit the cave in the following two years.

*****

I can feel her start to lose hope. When her father passes, I feel it reverberate in my own body. I’m twenty-two and lying awake at night, throwing and then watching stones float over my head as a reminder of my promise.

That summer, when I return again, I pass through the cave with no intent to ever return.

I see her face rearranging with the realization that I’ve come back. I see her mother knowingly smirking when I kiss Wil in front of her.

I see Wil nod when I get up the guts to finally propose to her, even though I know we’re bound together between worlds.

I see my ring wrap around her finger, and the home she planted inside of me is in full bloom now and fruit bearing. I’ve found my place, at last, by her side.

Something is wrong, and it’s making Marileth cry. She sits on a wooden bench outside her log cabin and weeps into her hands, but she can’t remember the last time she walked outside. She reasons that it has to be grief over her lost child--sometimes people lose track of details when they’re grieving. What was my baby’s name?

“What seem to be the problem, ma’am?” a woman in a leather doublet with hair tied into a red ponytail asks. The woman is armed, but the sword is sheathed.

“My baby!” Marileth screams in a voice that does not seem her own. Her face contorts with the grief of a mother whose whole world has been uprooted. She says no more.

There is a lull while the woman vacantly stares over her. Suddenly, the stranger shouts “I’ll rescue your child!” and begins running in a straight line away from Marileth, off the trail that leads to her door.

Wait! Marileth wants to say but can’t open her mouth. Where are you going?

She continues to sit on the porch as day turns into night and back into day again. It seems grieving causes a person to lose track of time because Marileth feels like she has only been waiting for an hour.

The woman comes back, this time clad in a studded leather ensemble with a cloak and an entirely new sword that she sheathes just as she approaches. She pulls the baby out of her backpack, which is filled to the brim with swords and poison flasks and direwolf fangs, and gives the child to Marileth.

“Oh thank you! Oh seven stars shine on you, stranger!” Marileth exclaims, her face contorting into an exuberant smile. The stranger listlessly stares down at her for a long minute before reaching down and grabbing at the air. Suddenly, the stranger is wearing a heavy iron helmet.

“Happy to help, ma’am!” the stranger says through the faceplate, running away.

Marileth stares down at the child in her arms before walking inside her house. I guess everything is alright now that I have my baby returned to me, she thinks. Moments later, a new hero approaches, the baby is gone again, and she’s weeping on her front porch.

“What seems to be the problem, ma’am,” a hulking barbarian says with a husky voice.

“My baby!” Marileth screams. Her face shows no facial expression whatsoever. Why am I repeating this?

*****

Starshine is the first MMORPG to offer real characterization from every non-player character. Every entity in the world has accessed 50,000 fantasy and roleplaying stories as well as modern dictionaries to procedurally generate different reactions to player decisions and the world around them. They are even able to form their own choices to change the direction of quest events or interactions. Starshine: Never the same game twice.

*****

Something is wrong. Marileth asks around after a dark-skinned sorceror returns her baby. She leaves the baby sitting on the chair next to her, rationalizing that if it can be carried in a backpack full of proximity exploding glyphs, it’s probably going to be fine. She has named the baby “Curse.”

“Yesterday? Can’t seem to recall. Seems ridiculous to think you could lose your baby two days in a row,” the tavern keeper says.

“All I know is the forge. Hammer against steel, the heat of molten iron,” the blacksmith replies.

“Fresh bread! Get your bread here! We’ve got baguettes and pastries and sweet rolls!” the baker roars.

“It’s like I’m the only person in the world that can remember being alive yesterday,” Marileth mutters to herself. Before she can continue the thought, she’s whisked back to her cottage and weeping into her hands in front of her log cabin while another adventurer runs up.

*****

Starshine: Quick Review

By Jim Sweeney

(2 out of 5)

Starshine sells you on the premise of a flexible world, replete with human-like interaction with NPCs, a concept that has been attempted in the past by offering random quest systems beyond main storylines and dialogue lines based on attire or status or faction affiliation. All of those prior attempts “shine” better than Spellsoft’s latest derivative tripe.

Combat and player development aren’t anything we haven’t seen before, so they aren’t available as distractions from the fact that every character spews the same lines ad nauseum, ripped from the worst sins of the fantasy genre. There was a city guard inside of one of the main cities in the sprawling game world that literally said “It’s always the ones you least suspect,” to me as I passed by, as if I’d just asked him what his philosophy on criminal profiling was. When I stopped to push him further on the issue, he changed tack entirely and started to drone on about how an old injury had ended his dungeon crawling career early.

The rudiments of the Starshine’s touted NPC system aren’t even apparent. Maybe main quest givers show a little more depth of expression and seem more genuine as they lead you on raids that will end in their deaths, but they just return to their allocated starting points to make the exact same decisions for the next adventurer. They’re not really learning from repeated deaths if they just smile and nod while you accept their quests.

There was this one woman in Portsworth that spooked me. I took her quest to rescue her baby from goblins. When I returned, she was standing on top of her house and screaming down at me, shrieking in unpronounceable syllables. I had to toss her baby at her to complete the quest, and she gave me a bale of hay as a reward. I would have thought it was funny if it didn’t give me nightmares. Probably a glitch.

*****

“My baby!” Marileth screams, adding “Don’t you dare bring me my baby!”

This adventurer, a paladin in full plate, spends an awfully long time gawking down at her. Some travellers pause longer than others. Marileth has determined that they are all looking at something she cannot see.

“I’ll rescue your child!” she says at last, galumphing off in the same direction they always do.

“NO!” Marileth howls, and she begins chasing the adventurer, beating at the armor with her tear covered fists.

She chases the adventurer through the cavern that apparently holds her baby, wondering why the creatures never attempt to attack her. She and three goblins manage to corner the paladin on top of a spike trap. The paladin starts to frantically eat loaves of bread as if that’s going to stop her from bleeding out.

“Maker claim me,” the paladin whispers eventually, collapsing before being absorbed by a radiant beam of light.

The goblins eventually stop attacking the bare floor and return to the spots they were in before the paladin arrived. Marileth just jumps around, clapping gleefully. There’s a duration before she gets moved back to the front of her cottage, and she knows it intuitively now. Plenty of time to celebrate breaking the cycle.

*****

Starshine--Server Version: v1.12.3
Upcoming Version: v1.12.4
- Resolved an issue where bow damage at close range was greater than it should have been.

- Fixed an issue where Borak would occasionally fall into a pit of lava right at the start of the Numenus raid. Checking for consistency in all instances of NPCs participating in quests.

- Fixed an issue where quest giving NPCs could damage player characters directly.

*****

“I need you do something for me,” Marileth requests. “I need you to bring me five incineration runes.”

“I already have them,” the adventurer replies. It’s so nice to give a task with an item that isn’t unique, Marileth thinks.

“My baby!” Marileth screams, adding “Make haste!”

“I’ll rescue your child for you!” the puny mage replies, dragging his cloak on the dirt as he scampers off.

“Good luck!” she shouts after him. Marileth sets the traps about thirty steps from her house and stacks bales of hay around them to make a channel to funnel the adventurer through. Observing how they react to her decisions is becoming a meaningful pastime.

He walks right into it on the way back, no doubt baby in tow. Marileth cringes just a little bit as she watches him go up in flames--something of a maternal instinct still rings within her, even though the baby doesn’t eat or sleep, and can only really be used to hold down other objects.

The man writhes in the fire and eventually falls to the ground. Marileth reaches into his backpack and pulls out the baby, saying “Oh, thank you! Seven stars shine on you, stranger!” in a chilling, sarcastic voice. She puts an iron helmet on top of the charred body as radiant light consumes it.

*****

Starshine--Server Version: v1.12.6
Upcoming Version: v1.12.7
- Resolved an issue where quest giving NPCs were capable of laying traps to harm the player character.

- Fixed a critical error where entire raids would run off cliffs. Invisible borders exist to all NPCs now, but players must still watch their footing!

- Fixed an issue where Grammel, the baker in Strothham, was giving the maximum amount of bread possible with every purchase, burdening players with thousands of loaves.

- Monitoring the blacksmith in Kranburg, who players have reported for dismantling epic armor when clicking on the “Hone” button. More testing needed.

*****

When adventurers approach Marileth’s house now, flames shoot out of the top of it.

“Welcome to hell, traveller!” she sobs.

“What seems to be the problem, ma’am?” they’ll say, because no one can free them from the horrible cycle of their lives besides Marileth, the goddess of endings.

“My baby is evil! He dwells in the goblin realm and plots with them to end my life. Please go rescue him? Also, please find me four greater immolation glyphs.”

“I already have them. I’ll rescue you child for you!” and then the downtrodden victim of fate’s cruel loop runs away.

Marileth installs one of the glyphs on the roof and keeps the others for later. She has discovered that she can retain items even when she is reset into her weeping position, and items she has places do not go away. She follows the adventurer halfway and then waits beside a deep gorge. The adventurers always intuitively know where she is when they rescue the baby, so they come right to her.

“Brave traveller, do not bring the demon child to me as it will slay me right away. You must jump into this ravine with it. This place is called Devil Slayer Canyon because it is the only way to stop a true monster. I will rescue you with magic before you hit the bottom.”

They don’t always accept the bait, but the opportunity to jump to one’s death on mere confidence grips most more than Marileth expects.

“I HAVE RELEASED YOU FROM YOUR ENDLESS LOOP!” she cackles at them in the guttural voice she has been practicing as they fall to their deaths on the crags below.

I am a goddess of endings, Marileth reassures herself. My only design is to destroy.

She takes the rest of the duration before her reset to weeping position to lay down additional glyphs.

*****

Starshine--Server Version: v1.15.3
Upcoming Version: v1.16
- Complete server roll back after an NPC placed invisible greater immolation glyphs over the entire surface area of the game world and then set them off, causing immense graphical and network lag, bringing down the server.

- NPC Marileth has been removed from the game.

- Other NPC actions are being examined for deviance from ordinary behavior. Please send an email to spellsoftsupport@yougle.com if you observe something odd, and we’ll reward you with a limited edition mount--the Braying Jackass could be yours if you send in a support ticket!

Thanks, as always, for playing. We at Spellsoft have had quite the journey with Starshine, and we know our players have as well as the game has metamorphosed over the last three years. For your trouble with the roll back, we are providing each player with the “Marileth Bonus Pack” in remembrance of the millions of players who encountered this wild NPC while we let her roam about freely--ultimately, she completed her self-made narrative when she blew up the world, but she'll never be forgotten even as we scrub the server clean of her choices.

Share your best Marileth stories below and happy questing!

__________

This was an entry for the prompt #1: The Rent I Pay. For someone like Marileth, simply maintaining the illusion of a fantasy world was her "rent."

When I drove my car into a light pole after being run out of my lane by a self-driving semi-truck, I died slowly. It took a long time for first responders to get to me and start talking options, but they were fairly helpless as they asked me meaningless questions, to which I slowly nodded.

The dark overtook me eventually, starting at the edge of my vision and working inward until it gobbled up the last mocking flicker of street lamp.

I opened my eyes in a forest with a sun breaking through the trees--no pain, no stress at all, like someone pushed a reset button on years of pent up tension. To breathe in and smell the pine like the few times my family was able to go camping, damp grass at the foot of each tree trunk, each cloud strolling across the sky with a peace that surpassed my understanding, I cannot express how it broke me when I realized that someone really did push a reset button.

There was a quirk to it all. The same cloud shapes started to recur. A butterfly crossed from behind a tree and landed on my nose as I lay sprawled out in the grass, weeping, thinking I had made it to heaven after all. And then another butterfly did the same thing. I crawled on my belly to the other side of the tree just to see a third instance of the butterfly leave the base of the tree as if it had grown from the bark itself.

I understood then. When I nodded to the paramedics, I volunteered to transfer my consciousness to a virtual world. Vita Secundus. I would continue to be alive until someone decided to cut my participation in the program, likely after I settled my estate with my family completely--though I had nothing of importance except loans.

I only knew what I saw in videos--people reporting back from death, looking very much like themselves, grinning in an impossibly bright sunlight even though they were all just digital reconstructions of their old identities. The top comment would be a racial slur, but the next highest comment would be about how the “uncanny valley” had become an inhabitable place. Someone further down the line would suggest that it was all a hoax to give some hope of an afterlife to those who were too tainted to expect redemption. I figured that the reconstructions were just avatars of the system, remarking like puppets on things they could only know if their families played ventriloquist and gave facts. The reaction videos of families speaking to their dead always felt hammy.

Of course, I’m here now, wondering if my mom will ever get to hear my voice again.

*****

There were early adopters. They were quick to report that, transitioning from death to consciousness again, they retained no memories of an afterlife in between.

Naturally, this caused stocks to rise considerably for Ceohl. Other knock-offs of Vita Secundus popped up, but none could compete with the newly original option for an afterlife, especially when the pretenders had to use in-service advertising to remain cost competitive. And Ceohl was always faithful about applying updates as necessary.

Initially, it was a cost prohibitive service. I wasn’t certain what caused it to change until I was also uploaded to the program.

*****

After several days of nonstop walking without tiring or eating, guided by increasingly artificial sun and moon cycles, I found a town.

It was an amazing creation considering there weren’t any hewn trees for the log cabins that spanned the valley floor. Perhaps it was just laid out as a barren meadow, or perhaps someone tweaked it after settlements started to be built--maybe someone would wake up in the morning to find that his treeline was inexplicably receding. From the top of the ridge, it looked like a compass rose with points going in four cardinal directions.

Every little cabin had friendly people and cozy furniture in it. I talked with them as much as they were willing to talk--they weren’t fake people, sure enough. Roger, one of the first men I came across, was incredibly open about the affairs he’d had and the drugs he’d taken while alive, of which only a few sounded familiar. Full disclosure of things like that made it almost certain that he was hiding something more, but he smiled broadly and offered to get people together to build me a house.

Because none of us were capable of feeling exhaustion, the building went very easily. Apparently, all one needed to do to get lumber from a tree was to expectantly hold out one’s arms in front of one. The tree would entirely vanish as a stack of lumber was added to my arms. If I laid down the stack a, wall would immediately spring up at that location. It was surreal to watch, initially--how seven people working for five minutes managed to make me a larger home than I’d ever had with better furniture as well. My residence sat on the end of one of the points of the compass, which was a bit initially galling since everyone had seemed so warm just to put me as far away as possible.

“Do you like your place?” Roger said, brushing his hands on his pant legs as if he’d gotten sawdust on them.

“I suppose. I mean, do I really need a house? I can fake sleep anywhere and never need to eat, so…”

“We do it to preserve the appearance of normality. I know you noticed pretty quickly that things here are repetitive. Even your breathing and heartrate are locked at the same constants unless you force them to be different. We labor to give uniqueness to our world. Humans are always a fluid variable in our environment.”

“I’d like to say I agree with what you’re saying, Roger, but don’t people also have a prescribed limit? I mean they put our whole consciousness in here--it has a data cap right?” I replied.

“It does, but it’s so much farther off than the trees that make up your cabin. I was an early adopter of this system, you know?”

“And you still live in a log cabin?”

“There’s a reason for that,” Roger answered, adding, “One I hope you don’t need to know.”

He sat down on the mattress we built by throwing bird feathers and cut grass at the ground until it took the form of a bed. He started to tell me about the early days of the program. Apparently, it was a nasty experience. Exhaustion and hunger were enabled but couldn’t be overcome by eating or resting. Spastic weather effects often ruined any attempt to bring human construction to the world, and random world shapes often caused deep caverns to run beneath the surface, creating massive sinkholes from which people couldn’t escape.

“As an afterlife, it was something. You had assurance that your existence continued and that, because someone was making money off of you, it would probably keep continuing. In those days, we still had watchers.”

“What is a watcher?” I asked.

“It was a person who monitored the content from the outside. If you saw videos of us speaking about our grievances, watchers were choosing to air those concerns. For example, I met a deer early on that looked like someone had assembled it piece-by-piece. It charged me even though its back legs were backwards, it screamed with a woman’s voice, and it had human fingers instead of horns. Needless to say, I put forward a complaint about that.”

“What was the problem? Did they say?”

“Everything is generated from math. It’s just that someone accidentally used variables from the human table to create this particular type of deer. It bore qualities of someone or maybe several people who were once alive--and everything that comes from the human table is supposed to delete upon use so that there is only ever one version of you. Essentially, whoever made up that deer will never exist again.”

“Wow.”

“It escalated,” Roger continued. “People who started this program are incomplete. Not all of their consciousnesses migrated over. Some are more stunted than others.”

“You said you’re an early adopter, but you seem fairly normal to me.”

“Yes, I’m not the worst case, but I lack the capacity to learn in my state. I’m exactly as I was when I died, except more complacent because I’ll never be able know more than I know now. An existence without learning is hardly any existence at all. I can share information from new people, so I tend to live through your experiences.”

“Can’t you have a watcher tell you what is going on in the outside world?” I asked.

“There are no more watchers. We’ve not had outside contact in probably five years.”

Roger wished me well and walked out after that, leaving me to lay on my bed and recall that I had seen his face before. Three years ago, a promotional video for Vita Secundus was released, advertising that a new pricing system was available so that much poorer families could participate. Roger was right there, telling people how stable the program had been for the last two years. No complaints.

*****

It was well into the night when they attacked. Human forms with wings came out of an empty sky and tore the roofs off of houses as if they were ripping open a box of toothpicks, seized the people inside, and carried them into the black.

After the chaos, we burned their houses in a bonfire and said the names of those taken. It was a strange sensation to mourn someone whose existence was snuffed out a second time, but the other villagers made it quite clear that the victims of the attack would not be returning. In the light of the bonfire, it was also obvious why they had me build my house at the end of a point. One of the arms of the compass rose was completely ravaged.

“It was a one in four chance it could have been you,” someone told me while I gawked at the scene. It was a woman of about my age who hadn’t helped me build my house but had stood nearby, arms crossed, while it was being done. “We always draw lots to see who lives where each week. They come once, randomly, at some point during that time. They always attack the points that are farthest from the center and then leave. Probably whatever they see first, they attack.”

“What are they?”

“We don’t know,” the woman, whose name was Yanna, responded. “New people live on the outside first, before they see an attack. Sorry, but we have no reason to sacrifice ourselves if we can help it.”

“Is there any way to fight it?”

“We’ve tried making weapons, but this program has something against it. Anything that looks like a tool for fighting just falls apart. Hard to put traps in the sky, as well. So no. Most of us just sit here and wait to die again.”

Two days later we drew lots. I pulled a short stick, while Roger pulled a longer one. I was at the end of the X, and he was in the middle.

“Why do we just wait here and let them take us?” I asked Roger, knowing that one of us was likely to be taken no later than a week from that night. “We could make barricades if all they do is just attack the nearest house.”

“Come with me,” Roger said, gesturing to me with the back of his hand as he turned and walked toward the center of the village. I followed.

*****

We descended into a tunnel that was held by wooden supports. A ladder dropped far down into the subterraneous caverns that Roger had previously described--except that these were now reinforced with hard stone.

“See?” Roger said, holding a lantern behind us.

There were hundreds of little tunnels that extended from our stone chamber. Holes that were barely big enough for my body merged with our room in all directions except down.

“What happened here?” I asked.

“They got bored of it.” Roger shrugged, shifting the light in his hand so that the darkness twitched within each carved out hole. “We tried filling this hole and other holes so many times to stop them, but they came through anyway. They used to demand sacrifice from below. Now they take their sacrifice from the sky.”

“Did you reinforce this room with the stone?”

“I did. I’ve been here longer than anyone. It seems that they’ll never come for me, so only I can stay around and maintain this place to remind people how helpless we are, even though I knew some of the vultures once upon a time. They don’t talk to me anymore.”

“You knew them?”

“The vultures were people once, you know. They were always people that afforded more control.”

“Over what?”

“Everything.” Roger sat down on the floor of the cavern and propped his chin up against his lap, holding his head in his hands. "Look, I’ve said all of this to hundreds of people before you, and they’re almost all gone, so I hope you’re alert to what I’m telling you and showing you. You cannot win.”

“Can they be talked to or reasoned with?”

“They’re not really human anymore. At least, not by our standards. They paid the premium price to get a more diverse experience back when Vita Secundus was just getting started. None of them came in quite right, however, and they’ve long lost interest in enjoying the simple fact that their existence means something. They grew claws for burrowing when living above ground became tedious and wings for flying when they needed to see a cloud up close for what it really was--a two dimensional image printed across the sky. And they started to consume people when more came in.”

I thought about the initial crowd that bought into the Vita Secundus. It cost millions of dollars to sign up, so it wasn’t too hard for me to imagine the self-serving insanity the original occupants must have adopted, especially when the bar was lowered to just a couple thousand dollars.

It occurred to me then that someone must have told the outside that the original users were getting bored with their content. In an effort to appease their clients, someone decided to allow other families in for the purpose of predation. No wonder that don't have watchers. No one cares to report how our afterlives are going, I realized.

“Do you suppose they still have watchers?” I asked.

“I think they must. How else could they have made it so that we only feel pain and fear when they hunt us and only perish when we’re caught? I think someone is listening to what they say and making changes to the program to accommodate their wants, no matter how inhumane.”

I’m not a great person. The record of my life prior to my passing was just a sputtering series of failed take-offs. I didn’t feel any great desire to amount to more, but neither did permanent death in a world after death feel like much of a threat compared to constant fear of attack from the vultures.

“If I outlive tonight, I’m going to try to do something about these creatures.”

“Then I hope you don’t outlive the next night,” Roger snarled. “I’ve had enough of fools that cannot accept that there is no other way. Every time someone decides to act up, the likelihood of us being too ordinary to be bothered with decreases. Don’t you understand? They need you to be human so that they can recall the feeling! You can’t kill them, can’t convince them not to attack, but they’re falling into routine! It won’t be long before we’re beneath their notice!”

“I don’t think it’s your ability to learn that you’ve lost, Roger,” I retorted. “I think it’s your will to live. Your essential humanity.”

I ascended the ladder to the surface with him swearing behind me, wondering if it was perhaps Roger who was the cheery outside contact after all, collaborating with the vultures to ensure that the right amount of fear always permeated our village, spreading lies about what happened inside Vita Secundus just to ensure that people would continue to arrive as food for the birds.

*****

That night, they attacked again. Roger’s cabin was ripped to shreds. I watched as he was also dragged into the black sky, a note of shocked confusion echoing from his body as it vanished in the dark.

Something in the pattern had shifted. The vultures had gone after someone they once knew, someone who had been there since the first iteration of Vita Secundus, and they had gone after the person in the middle of the X rather than someone on the perimeter. When we burned Roger’s house, the tension was palpable. No one could say his name.

“Every person must hear me!” I shouted over the crackling of the fire to the hundreds of people that waited there wondering if it would be their turn to soon be whisked away, never to be seen again.

When I suggested that we needed to do more than sit on our hands and await permanent death or whatever the vultures did to the people they carried away, Yanna put her hand on my shoulder and shouted my name. They all shouted my name.

And we made a vow to live our afterlives to the fullest, even if it meant we had to sacrifice ourselves to stop an enemy we had no means to defeat. I wondered if someone outside the program was watching our sudden swell of righteous volition and laughing, but in the darkening flame of the bonfire, I did not care.

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Troof Therry

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