Population Of

Dominic would show them all. That stupid "Welcome to Bessemer" sign was his. It was the pride of the whole damn town. No other target would do.

It was the dead of night, and Dominic rode his bike to the town line. He briefly considered spray painting something vulgar over the bent placard proudly proclaiming "1967 Pennsylvania State Basketball Champions", but decided against it. This was his statement. He wanted to show everybody how teeth-gratingly boring he found this place.

Drawing in his breath, he raised his arm and poised the nozzle. With two exaggerated swipes of his arms, Dominic crossed out the number beneath "Population of:" and beside it painted a dripping number "1". Himself.

"That was easy," he muttered to himself, glancing over his shoulder. He expected guard dogs and an escape scene from an action movie, complete with explosions. When nothing broke the silence, he hopped on his bike and rode home. He slept easy that night, reassured by the satisfaction of a job well done.

The next morning, Dominic rose with his alarm, excited to hear the gossip that was surely already starting to stir. Pulling on some clothes, he took the steps two at a time down to the kitchen. 

"Hey, Mom! I -- "

His voice bounced off the empty chairs and slammed against his chocleas. 

"Mom? …Mom, where are you? Dad? Thea? Where are you guys? Where's breakfast?"

Dominic searched the length of the downstairs, peeked into the basement, and rounded the stairs for an investigation of the upper floor. Nobody was home. He checked his watch to make sure the time was correct. It wasn't normal for his family to not see each other before they started their day, but maybe they each had to get an early start. Shrugging, he gathered up his things and left for school.

As he rode his bike down the sidewalk, something started to gnaw at him. At first, he couldn't place it, but it eventually dawned on him: The silence was overwhelming. But why was it so quiet? There were no cars. Where were they? Speaking of, were his parents cars still at home? He hadn't bothered to check the garage. 

When he made it to school, Dominic was dismayed to discover that nobody was hanging around outside before the bell. He checked his watch again to make sure he wasn't late. 

"Everybody's probably in mourning over that goddamn sign," he scoffed. 

Dominic walked to the doors and pushed, but they were locked. Figuring there was a gas leak, generator failure, or a cow terrorizing the building (it had happened once before, back in 1986), he jumped up in the air, sang a few lines from an oft-quoted Pink Floyd song, and began the ride back home.

But the uneasiness followed him. Unable to shake it off, he decided to drop in at his friend Matt's house. Dominic strode to the door and rang the bell. Matt was not home. He decided to try Butterly next -- good old Butterly. With the goofy grin and the busted treadmill. But like Matt, nobody answered at Butterly's house.

"What the fuck?" Dominic asked. "It's like everybody's dead." It dawned on him that it was like everyone was dead. He tried Butterly's neighbors, but every doorbell had the same effect: Stony, uncomfortable silence.

"This isn't funny," Dominic growled as he punched the fifth door. By the tenth, he was kicking them. Around nine o'clock, he was sobbing uncontrollably.

Dominic didn't know what to do. It was like the whole town had picked up and moved away during the night. 

At dusk, he biked out to the town sign to gaze upon his work.

"I bet they have a new damn sign," he frowned.

Forbidden Music

I found this in my notebook. I don't remember writing it, but I know which song it is.



There are songs I know to not listen to when I am alone.

The ghost of my dead twin taps me on the shoulder, and I curl over in my bed. Spine poking through my skin, the beat of the drums on the blanket over my head, my heart thumping underneath. The smoke from my cigarette echoing against the ceiling, halting then retreating in long, swirling shadows on my skin. Repeating, breathing patterns, transparent and fleeting. I fight sleep; I do not want to sleep like this.

Songs like these amplify the loneliness. In the daylight, I can blast it against the wall like a fallout shadow; in the hours before dawn, when a handful of birds begin to sing and everything else is still, I feel the most disconnected and restless. I wonder if anybody knows I exist.

The Nightly Dance

I wrote this about a year ago, shortly after I was diagnosed with epilepsy. I'm doing much better now, but I still like this piece.

My genetics are the very things from which monsters are bred: distorted features, Medusa hair, misaligned spines, and banshee voices. It's the fairy stories. It's the howling violins. Encoded into my DNA, twisting the double helix so tight that it threatens to snap each time it replicates. Night after night, thunderstorms rip through my brain. The electricity animates my body into myclonic dance. I do not rest. I dance with the demons; I dance with Nijinsky rage. I dance with the fury of Saint Vitus and his wooden cross. My shoes are fashioned with my own fear, tanned and stretched over my feet. The music is the low rumble of static, white noise generated from a typewriter key jammed in-between stations in one of the valves of my heart.

The mornings are the worst. Hungover and drained, the residue from the dance clings to my bones so tightly that I cannot wake up unless I throw myself to the floor from bed. I punch and kick at the wooden boards in frustration because my head is too heavy for my neck to support by itself; I have seven cervical vertebrae, and seven is not enough. Every morning I picture the same thing: Once, I saw a picture of a giraffe's spine. They have seven, too, but their vertebral bodies look like they could withstand several thousand tons of pressure. They are stalwart and sound, not delicate and susceptible to crushing like ours. As I turn my body into a fulcrum, I wish for a giraffe's spine. Iron and solid, I would be unstoppable. I would still feel like I was moving through sand, but I could move.

Fine motor skills are non-existent. It does not matter how large of an obstacle is in my path — if it is there, it will cause me injury, despite stepping to avoid it. The dance is in perpetual motion. My hands will strike the wall. My legs will want to be parallel with the shower floor. I brush my teeth, and my mouth is full of blood; my toothbrush becomes a weapon when my body is so unstable. Even when my full attention is devoted to the smallest of actions, they remain impossible.

A self-destruction sequence has been initiated. I started taking pills to slow this process down. They're roughly the size of a needle's eye and stamped with words and numbers I haven't bothered to read. But there is no reset function. My central nervous system is rebelling harder, severing its own connections with steel teeth. I have not slept. There is no sleep. Until my brain rots like wood, until my corpus collosum fills with pus and collapses, bubbling with the fear and electricity conducting through it. Until a piece of me will spark and catch flame, and I will burn away into a pile of ash.

I hate this waiting game; the telegraphs should disintegrate under the force of my frenzied tapping.

Blind Spot

A flash fiction piece I had done for a weekly prompt community. I was watching a lot of Marble Hornets at the time.

If the photographs made sounds, they would rumble like static from an impending thunderstorm, pressed between the pages of a yellowing dictionary. Compressed sound, searching for the proper words.

She had been so careful, searching the landscape for any sign of the figure, singling out trees that could have been him and moving them out of the frame. Her skin had not erupted into prickling goosebumps; the sick feeling that branched out from the base of her spine and congealed into synapses had not been present. Assuming she was safe, she clicked the shutter, feeling momentary satisfaction in the sound. Click-click, all is well.

Staring at the picture, she choked back tears. It was the realization that she had been marked, and no matter where she traveled, no matter how many saint medals she roped around her neck, he would appear, never vocalizing what he wanted. Just waiting, devouring her sanity, forcing her to look over her shoulder at every turn. Forever.

Seeping around the edges, squarely into her blind spot.

Dire Prophecy

The perfect utopia for Coast to Coast AM devotees is desolation and destruction.

Since I started working nights, Coast to Coast AM has become a constant source of amusement. I wonder what would happen if these nutjobs turned out to be right? They're so passionate about this crazy stuff -- would they be happy if it actually happened? I'd like to think so.

Also, this is supposed to be funny. Unfortunately, my idea of "funny" doesn't always translate well.

This was originally written for some flash fiction contest where the prompt was something about people being happy about the Apocalypse, or something. Needless to say, I came in somewhere around last place.

In the end, they had been right.

The howl of unstable atoms blasted the population into shadows. Stretched into fallout smiles across crumbling buildings, the scene replicated itself like faulty RNA, rewriting the cities of the world with fallout ink. Despite the crumbling half-lives, lead-suited armies continued to march, but not against each other: They administered plague to the survivors, which combined with the radiation to produce a legion of mindless, feral beings that would attack the creatures they once were. Soon, the zombies were destroyed like the half-angels from the wild stories of prehistory: At the other end of our solar system, Planet X's unwieldy orbit careened precariously close to our own, causing the poles to shift to the equator in less than a week, and the resulting floods momentarily washed the world clean. Unfortunately, the Lizard People that inhabited the Hollow Earth seized the opportunity and proclaimed the Denver Airport as the capital of the New World Order.

Once, they had been the crazies who called into late-night radio programs, disembodied voices carried by crackling radio waves from underneath tinfoil hats, spouting nutjob conspiracy theories. Their zeal and fervor was unmatched; it had become their religion. Like cockroaches, their paranoia had gained sustenence from the most unlikely souces, and they proliferated. Invest in gold – No, don't. When society collapses, it won't even matter. We are your saviors. Listen to us. We will save you from the aliens, disease, and governments. We know the truth. “Wake up, people!” became their Amen.

They built domes built into the desert sand and condos fashioned out of old missile bunkers; patched abandoned subterranean dwellings left over from the Cold War. They had stockpiled food and antibiotics; transistor radios and batteries; ammunition and comic books. On the chosen date, they filed underground like trooping fairies, removing themselves from the world they had so desperately wanted to end. They held their collective breath and waited.

Plutonium roared and decayed; hearts swelled and broke; the heat blasted the pathogens into snaking fossils. The oceans receded and society toppled. Sleeping gods peeked in on their charges before abandoning earth for a fresh start. Silence ruled with an iron fist.

After the Four Horsemen came and went, the hatches opened. Faces thrust to the sky like sunflowers, the paranoid inhaled a lungful of desolation. Dancing to the symphony of air-raid sirens, they cheered in unison. The unwelcoming and uninhabitable landscape blinked itself out of slumber and slowly smiled.

It was exactly what they had wanted.

The Adversary

There's some fable contest going on over at Figment. This is my entry which I wrote in like an hour and maybe took semi-seriously. But, hooray! I wrote something.

Oh, I actually just read the contest rules. The top-hearted entries become the finalists -- ten of those, apparently. So, if you liked it, please help me out, but only if you thought that it wasn't total crap. I could really use the prize money. But that's only if I win, which is wishful thinking in itself.

 

"I realize," The Adversary sighed, a sound like fallout dust. "That our fist strike creates the dawn. Yet, I still doubt that it's something of which I am capable."

The irony was not lost on Michael. He laughed a thunderclap of feedback-static and windswept dandelions -- partially cruel and partially amused. "But, Satan. Surely -- "

The angel shook his head, cutting the other's observation short. "I know my purpose," he replied. "I am the Failsafe. I am The Adversary. My place in the design is the watch and monitor, to challenge, to talk some sense into Him at every turn -- and when he finally loses it (which we all knew was inevitable), I must euthanize Him.

"But how can I destroy what has called me into being? My heart is filled with torment. Do you feel it, too, Michael?"

"'Michael' is simply what He has chosen to call me. I am Justice. Justice does not feel torment because Justice does not feel compassion. You alone feel torment, Adversary. This is why you exist.

"Tell me something -- Have you heard of the humans?"

"Of course I have. Isn't that why we've assembled all the angels in this act of rebellion?"

"Yes, Adversary, it is." Michael gestured at the former void and fell silent: The Creator's heart had been transformed. Once empty and barren, it had been filled with their presence and purpose, for they were no longer content to serve him.

When He had built the Universe, there was no greater joy in putting it together. The angels themselves were perfect constructs of concept and design, embodiment of breathing principle over paricle waves. They each had their purpose; each mortar or a support or a box of nails.

But to fashion innocent life for the sole purpose of praising him and nothing else -- the concept was unfathomable at best. At worst, it was chaos, and chaos was blasphemy. In the end, it was abundantly clear that a Divine Architect was not at work, but a deranged child. It had been whispered that He had not willed Himself into being but accidentially created by Wisdom and shortly abandoned thereafter. The angels were uncomfortable doing work for a being that did not understand the repercusssions of His actions.

After much discussion, they could not allow it to happen. And so, as Beings of Light, they tucked themselves into cocoons, and as Beings of War they emerged, burning like nuclear reactors, wings aflame with furious love for the fragile creatures they had yet to know.

"But, Michael. If we destroy Him, we will destroy the Universe. He has encoded himself into all of it. I cannot see any other way."

"Then what can we do? He is mad. He must be stopped."

"We strike, Michael. We fight. We rebel, and we fall. We are cast down, away from Him. And in our damnation, we surround the humans. We teach them. We protect them from His madness the best we can. Most importantly, we give them a choice. We interrupt His programming, just like I'm supposed to do, through love and compassion. Love and compassion create torment, and because of this my name will be the most hated of all.

"Justice will only balance His Creation so much. But compassion and torment -- He'll have to answer for what He's done.

"Take my sword, Michael. It's yours now. In the end, I won't need it."