masquerade

One at a time the masks come over my face. The outsides are beautiful, ridges and smooth planes of blue and red and summer green sprinkled heavily with motes of lambent gold. There are feathers and heavy drapes and winking amber eyes. Gorgeous. All I see of each is the smooth white plaster of the backside, the inverted face, then I am looking through the cut out eyes, becoming it through the looking and it becoming me.

Electric shocks. One, two, three. My finger is glued to the button and I don’t want to take it off anyways. In the next room a woman is screaming. Her screams are dark pleasure and I relish in them, swimming, drowning in the rich pain. She can’t see who I am. She sees a red and black unsmiling mouth framed in ostrich feathers.

I parade through these rooms in lynchings and orgies. Little by little I’m slipping away, leaving a piece of myself caught in the stiff, unmoving lips of each mask. I can feel it being torn away and am helpless to do anything but put on the next mask to ice away the throbbing pain.

Until at last I have torn away all my flesh and all that remains is a mass of pink muscle, chicken-wire nerves and maps of blue and red blood vessels. I am torn down to the barest body and open for anyone to glue a new face on me.

I hope it is as beautiful as my others.

why the church was abandoned

One day Jenny found a white, sealed envelope on the ground. She picked it up and opened it.

“To whomever finds this letter: I will wait for you every day by the abandoned church at noon, when the light shines through the caved-in roof and onto the altar. You will find me praying. I am lonely, and I want someone to talk to.”

Jenny went to the church the next day at eleven thirty. She sat in one of the broken pews to wait, trying not to fidget as splinters dug into her back.

At five minutes to noon the altar, a pure white marble slab untouched by years of grime, blazed as if set on fire.

At one minute to noon, the side door swung open. A dark-robed figure appeared  and walked towards the altar without any sign that he had noticed her. He knelt and began praying.

Heart hammering, Jenny stood and walked over. “Hello?” she said tentatively.

He turned and smiled at her, a smile caked with old malice and new blood, and Jenny felt a crippling fear. And now she knew why the church was abandoned.

But the knowledge never left the church.

a true fairytale

Once upon a time, there was a princess who lived in a castle far, far away. She was a lovely girl and had many suitors, all kings and princes who wished to marry her. They came from far and they came from near, bearing fine silks and gold and all sorts of gifts.

But to all this the princess turned up her nose, sniffing. “None of you please me,” she proclaimed. “I won’t marry until I have found a man who is six feet tall, who can slay a dragon with his bare hands and bring me back water from the well of youth.

Many brave knights attempted this, but none succeeded. At last, an untried youth from the country came forward. Many laughed at him, but he ignored them and set out to see the princess. “I will perform these tasks,” he declared, “and win your hand in marriage.”

But when he went to fight the dragon, the mighty beast breathed fire from both nostrils and set the boy on fire. He died in pain.

And the princess died alone.

death of religion

And God said, “I charge thee to seek out Lucifer, Satan in the flesh, and strike him thus that he shall nevermore be found in the hearts of men.”

Thus spake God to Gabriel, last man of the earth. Gabriel fell to his knees. “My Lord, I will do as You command.”

He armed himself with the weapons his Lord provided, and blessed steel and flesh and mind. Thus prepared, he rose from his devotions to seek out the devil.

Soon enough Satan was found, and Gabriel fell on him, smiting him with furious blows. But however hard he fought, however deep the cuts hewed into the devil’s flesh, no damage was done. The devil laughed and laughed and would not die.

In despair, Gabriel fell to his knees. “Oh God,” he cried, “wouldst thou send me again thy adversary so weak, so impotent, that not a single blow I land can harm him?”

To which Satan replied, “If thou wouldst wish to vanquish me, then search inside thyself for the strength to do it.”

And Gabriel found, within himself, the devil. For though God had created man in His image, man had embraced the devil in his heart. For as long as man lived, the devil would not die.

Anguished, Gabriel spoke a prayer to his Lord. “Our father who art in heaven, blessed be thy name. Commend my soul to your service, thy most humble servant, and deliver him from his sins.”

With that, Gabriel plunged his sword into his heart and fell to earth, dead.

And thus Satan died.

But not long after, so did God.

night lover

It’s on soft nights like these, when spring sighs through the air and sakura drift down like snow, that she thinks of the dead and feels guilty for being alive.

You are unhappy.

She smiles, blinking away the tears that cling to her lashes. “Oh, of course not. How could I be? But you know, I am wistful.”

Why would you be wistful? You have everything you could want now.

“Yes.” How beautiful the sakura. They fall on her face so soft she has to imagine she feels them to believe they are there at all. “But I can’t help remember…”

Remember what?

“Sometimes I wish you were still with me.”

I am in your thoughts. I touch your dreams, and I whisper counsel in your ears. My fingers roam your mind and your fingers roam over mine, and there is nothing we do not know of each other. What greater love is there than that?

“Nothing.” She hugged her empty arms around herself. “Forgive me, I am being foolish. Yes, there is nothing more I should want.”

Then let us forget these fancies and enjoy the sakura. Are they not beautiful tonight?

Later that night, she sat alone in her room and wept for the company of a man. She cried long and soft, and then there was a hesitant tapping on the door.

“My lady? Are you unwell?”

It was the night porter. She rose, pale and willowy and beautiful and naked in the moonlight. She came towards him with her arms spread out like a goddess.

“Heal me,” she whispered.

robot love

The Emotions Police knocked down the door to MS391’s house and stormed in, waving his psychiatric reports like guns. “Citizen MS391! Your last routine checkup turned up trace amounts of emotion in your system. We are here to take you away for further processing.”

MS391 looked up from Shakespeare and Milton, Swanwick and Rochester, and smiled vaguely. “No.”

“We have a court order for your incarceration.”

“Oh, I would gladly go if I thought it would be effective. But how can you treat something you don’t understand? If you would give me your Influential Determinator for a few moments, I could show you how to better understand emotions.”

He considered it for a moment. “I don’t see how it would not be beneficial,” he said, and gave MS391 the gun.

It took MS391 all of ten minutes to remove the inhibitor chip and rewire the gun’s fiber optics nervous system. He inverted the electromagnetic field generator, upped it to a higher frequency, and leveled the gun.

His companions found him later that day when he failed to file his hourly report for five hours in a row, curled up alone on the floor of MS391’s house, weeping and laughing and screaming all at once. He had to be dragged away and shut in the state facility, where the psychiatrists deemed him incurable. He was later euthanized out of mercy, and his body recycled into the earth.

The Influential Determinator was never found.

fire and wind

I’ve got five pounds of steel plate in one hand and a length of steel blade in the other, and when I put the two together they scrape and squeal with the most awful noise I’ve ever heard.

Fire up ahead, he says.

They come running out of the flames–sylphs and salamanders alike–and I charge towards them screaming, steel ringing.

We clash. We fight. Bodies paper the ground. The ones of flesh and blood melt into the earth, sigh into vapors, burst into heat, crumble to ashes.

I hack and hack until my arms grow too tired to lift steel again. And still I fight.

Fire, he howls. Fire and wind, death to fire and wind!

We fight until at last they turn to flee, the last of the sylphs and salamanders, and we chase after them. We run them down and hack them to pieces and then crow our victory aloud to the skies.

And then we are blown away on plumes of hot wind.

left 4 dead

His feet slap concrete as he runs, runs, runs, breath like short bursts of pain in his lungs, head pounding in time with his frantic pace. Bullets clip the pavement around his feet, throwing up cinder-shards of gray concrete. With an almighty leap, he dives, rolls, and slams his side up against a car.

Almost at once he is on his feet again. There they are: four of them, armed to the teeth with shotguns, rifles, and Molotov cocktails. Exterminators. Feared and hated. Whoever brings them down is a hero.

“Reloading!” one of them yells–the old one, with a white beard. He tenses. And then, with a burst of motion, he launches himself over the hood of the car and at them.

The old one goes down, and he slashes and bites, knocking the gun from unresisting fingers. Shrieks rend the air. Bloodlust pulses within him, a roaring and pounding and screaming that floods his veins with adrenaline. Dimly, he registers slugs slapping into his flesh. But are light and negligible as mosquito bites.

Until one tears through his neck. From the girl, he notes vaguely, and then he falls to one side, gasping, blood leaking from his ruptured esophagus.

The old one stands, dusting his pants off. “That was a close one. Thanks, Zoey.” He retrieves his gun and replaces the empty clip. “Come on. We’ve got to get to Mercy Hospital in time.”

They leave a massacre in their wake.

broken

I broke my face the other day. I don’t know how it happened. I hung it up by my bathroom mirror like always–turned away, of course, so I don’t have to stare at myself–and then the next thing I knew, I was coming home again and standing in the middle of a pile of shattered ceramic.

I fit the jigsaw together and tried superglue. New cracks appeared, and it broke again. I tried tape. The tape fell off. At last I took it to a repair shop. The man quoted me an outrageous sum and offered to let me pay in three easy installments and one hard one. I took my face home and vowed to fix it myself.

My face is still broken to this day.

friends

There is a cup of something hot bubbling at her elbow and an excess of crumbs scattered across the table. There are dirty clothes draped over the armchairs and rain drooling down the window.

Typical Monday morning.

The crumbs hop onto the floor when she glares at them, then skitter across linoleum and hide under the mothering sleeves or arm-empty jackets. The rain leers from outside, wishing it could join in.

She stands to open a window. Raindrops fly in and huddle with the crumbs. They all look so friendly together, rain and crumbs and sleeves, that she smiles. Would her drink like to join as well? Yes, it would very much.

She pours the hot liquid over the clothes and smiles again to see how eagerly they bond.

“What are you doing?” Emma swoops into the room, gathers up the friends, and flings them into the washing machine. “And why are the windows open? Look at this, mother, she’s made a mess of things again. I told you she needs to be watched all the time. The doctor said not to leave her alone.”

She listens to Emma and mother tsking and thinks of how much fun the new friends will have riding their rollercoaster.