
FOUR HUMORS

A Collection

Revised Edition

* * * *

©2012 WPRP

Published by Asher Cantrell at SmashWords

All rights reserved. No portion of this book or any of its contents can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the express written permission of the copyright owner(s) except where permitted by law.

All works in this book are the property of their creator(s). All works reprinted with permission.

Cover illustration by Rhiannon Barnes, Ryan Gonzales, Mike Lamb, Ashley Neal

Cover design by Ashley Neal

Edited by Mark M.

Revised Edition by Asher Cantrell
Table of Contents

Title Page

Introduction - David Wong

Part One: Melancholic  
A Melancholy/Guardianship Paradox? - Adam Wears  
Exit - Kelly Cudby  
The Sentinel - Naim Kabir  
Dreams of the Dead - Dawn Morrow  
Waterlogged - Joseph Clift

Part Two: Choleric  
Choleric Means Never Having to Say "Please" - M. Asher Cantrell  
My Cellphone Rings - Asher Christian Minx  
Code - Claudia Toth  
Messenger - Matt Conrad  
Truth - Malini Vijaykumar

Part Three: Sanguine  
Sanguine/Artisan: An Abundance of Blood - C. Coville  
Mirage - M. Asher Cantrell  
Awry - Diana McCallum  
Reverse - Maximilian A. Chis  
Swordsman - Andrew Gordon

Part Four: Phlegmatic  
Phlegmatic/Rational: Ruined Art - Kathy Benjamin  
Mirror - Kathy Benjamin  
Beach World - S. Peter Davis  
Just Another January - Roth's Child  
One Day - John Sanders  
Drought - Sami Mansour

Contributors
A Note On This Edition

     In the Spring of 2011, more than 30 writers, editors, and artists got together, worked their asses off, and created a wholly independent book of short stories and original art called Four Humors. Like New York Times bestselling author David Wong says in this book's introduction, we wanted to create something where there was nothing before, and we accomplished that. We put our collective heads together and we made a book. For charity, no less.  
     But sometimes, pure creative energy is no match for reality. We made the book in 30 days, but we were also woefully unprepared for what came next. Someone had to take care of the money. Someone had to handle promotion. We needed more editors. We needed to be stricter on deadlines. We weren't business people. We were just some heads-in-the-clouds idealistic people who wanted to do something good.  
     Money didn't get paid out on time. Disagreements about the direction of the project sprang up. People got mad and quit. Harsh words were spoken. Wordplague, our clever name for the project, fell apart slowly, piece by piece. Eventually, no one wanted to do the work anymore and it died, like a dog no one bothered to feed.  
     The books we created together went out of print. Everyone went their separate ways. Don't feel bad for us, though. No one suffered at the death of Wordplague. In fact, we've all come out of it fairly well. We have all gone on to bigger and better things.  
     But the book we all worked on so hard was lost. Even if it were still available, the world of digital publishing has changed. Where we had focused on simple e-ink devices, the market is now filled with tablets of numerous sizes and resolutions. To kill two birds with one stone, I decided to undertake the task of rebuilding Four Humors from the ground up. Color images to replace the greyscale ones (mostly, some of the pieces were originally created in greyscale and have no color versions). Compatibility with modern tablets. And, finally, a chance to get the book in people's hands again.  
     There are, sadly, a few differences in this version. A small number of stories have not been reprinted by request. Although I wanted to keep this edition as close to the original as possible, it simply was not possible.  
     You may also notice that this book is being offered for free, as opposed to the original, which cost $2.99. The simple reason is because there's no one to count the money anymore and make sure it gets paid out. (Please note that the introduction still mentions the book's proceeds. You can rest assured that, as of this edition, those no longer exist.)  
     Instead, we're operating on the honor system. If you've downloaded this book, please find it in your heart to donate to Kiva Microloans, our charity of choice, or, if you'd prefer, any charity you want. You like dogs? Donate to animal shelters. Your aunt has breast cancer? Donate to women's health. As long as you think of us when you do it, it counts.

-M. Asher Cantrell, Revision Editor
Introduction

David Wong

Put a hundred emotionally unstable people together in one place long enough and you'll either get a riot or an orgy, depending on how many of them showed up nude. But on certain, magical occasions, something else will happen: they will work together to create something. Genius will emerge.

They won't ask to be paid. They may know that the thing they've built won't last - maybe they'll just sculpt a huge dick out of snow. It doesn't matter. What matters is that sometimes even the craziest of us will work in unison and at the end of our toil say, "Yesterday, there was nothing here. Today, there is something, created with our own minds and hands. It is a dick made out of snow."

You see, more than a decade ago I started an internet message board, at the honestly-named PointlessWasteofTime.com. I was a wannabe writer and on this message board grew a community of other wannabe writers. Frequently, without prompting or promise of reward, these strangers from all over the world would cooperate to spontaneously create things. Just for the hell of it. Comics and stories and drawings and essays and songs and videos.

The creative spirit of that community could not remain a secret and untapped resource forever, and in 2007 we were merged with comedy megasite Cracked.com. As of the time of this writing, it has become the single largest comedy website on planet Earth, serving between 150 and 200 million pageviews a month. As such, many of those PWoT members who were creating for fun in 2002 are now doing it for a living -- they have book deals and screenplays and their own websites. You've read some of their work, whether you know it or not.

But inside and under Cracked.com, there still beats the pure, creative heart that drove PWoT before all of the traffic and advertiser cash came along -- people who, to this day, create just for the pure, unadulterated hell of it. They answer to no one but the quiet yet persistent voice that speaks in the mind of every creative member of our species, the same voice that thousands of years ago urged homo sapiens to remake the world as they saw fit, to boldly kneel down in a white expanse and start patting together the two lumps that would form the testicles.

What they create is often nothing short of magical, and what follows is their work -- conceived, written, edited, formatted and published entirely on their own, without any interference from The Man. All proceeds from the sale of their work will go to a charity that PWoT has been supporting for years: the Kiva.org program to make microloans to entrepreneurs in the developing world. As these loans are repaid they are simply reloaned to other recipients, the money forever echoing through these communities in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Cambodia, Mongolia and dozens of others. As of this writing, the ragtag members of this message board have fired off around $50,000 in loans for this program.

What I'm trying to say is that it's a transaction in which everyone wins - you, the writers, and a guy trying to start a pharmacy in Peru. You don't have to think about that, it's just background. Just enjoy the stories.

-David Wong

A Melancholy/Guardianship Paradox?

Adam Wears

There's something to be said for the power of teamwork. John Lennon wouldn't be renowned today for completely changing the landscape of popular music without the help of his fellow Beatles; without the rest of the A Team, Mr T would just be a flamboyant gun-toting jewelry model rather than the biggest badass this side of Planet Mess-Your-Shit-Up; and don't tell anyone you heard this from us, but we have it on good authority that War (of Revelation 6:3-fame) is actually a yellow-bellied coward and fanatic cheerleader for Team Jacob.

Think of your favorite TV ensemble, be it Friends, the Scooby Gang, or the X-Men. Can you actually imagine the first day these guys met and found out they had to co-operate? We can guarantee it would have initially been a veritable smorgasbord of coffee, stakings, and claws through the face. Until the moment the Chandler's, the Buffy's, and the Professor X's came out and restored order. Hypothetically, the situation would have been the same the first day the four humors all met. The humor up for discussion now, Melancholy and Guardianship, is the force that unites the disparate talents of the other members of the group, the disciplinarian wrong-righter and rift-healer; the one ring to bind them all per se.

However, there's more than meets the eye to this humor. We're sure you're all aware of the fact that, when the theory of the four humors was developed by the Ancient Greeks, each of the humors was linked to a bodily fluid, which was said to be created when the humor in question was imbalanced. For guardianship, this was black bile, the literal translation of which in Greek means 'melan choly'. Knock the space out from in between those two words, and to be honest, you've got a word that doesn't conjure up images of caring, loyalty, and bravery, so much as an image of Superman lying in the Fortress of Solitude (the clue's even in the name, people!) watching endless re-runs of Donnie Darko and writing cutter poetry to the tunes of Slipknot.

Or at least that would be the case if we weren't looking at melancholy from the modern-day perspective of 'severe depression'. When it was defined in the past, melancholy was used to describe people who were creative, resourceful, self-reliant, and only really cracked out the worry-juice when faced with a situation in which someone might get hurt or disappointed. Their main hobby? Trying to solve the problem of evil within the world. Sub-hobby? Perfectionism. When you also consider that this humor was originally devised to be solely focused on melancholy (with the facet of guardianship only being attached in 1998 by David Keirsey), what we've basically got here is an Galen-esque retelling of Spider-Man, wherein Peter Parker spends his time worrying about evil for 1800 years, until he finally thinks "screw this", cracks out the lycra suit, and takes charge of shit.

This problem with the assumed definition of melancholy is so great that the original plan for this introduction involved a discussion of the personalities of various heroes within pop culture such as House and Tony Stark, who whilst being geniuses and guardians, were also depressives. It was meant to touch on the apparent connection with the dualistic nature of this humor, and conclude that heroes only felt this pain because they cared so much about everyone else. But, on reflection, that was a stupid argument. Who would you rather have rescue you from a burning building? Emo Superman? Or Genuinely-Happy Spider-Man? Thought so.

Kelly Cudby

"Right," she says, tapping her pen against the empty cup. I think it's a leftover from giving up smoking; she only quit three months ago, and still has all the mannerisms. She thinks, slowly inhaling between pursed lips with one eye squinted against non-existent smoke. She is still lovely.

"Right." She shifts in her seat, scattering her arms across the tabletop, bracelets tinkling gently on the leftovers from breakfast and lunch. She searches for a way to explain the thought so finely balanced on the pink tip of her tongue. And still, she is so lovely.

"Oh, God." She pushes her heavy hair away from her face, lifting it from her neck and letting it fall as her arms form an elegant arch above her head. She stills my heart.

I have loved her since forever. How much of my life has been spent like this? Sometimes it feels like all, sometimes not enough. Sitting with her, listening, talking, laughing, crying. She is so very lovely.

She is mine.

"I don't know what to say." She looks down at her bare foot, painted toenails splayed across the tiles.

"Say what's in your heart." I feel the cold begin to start. So lovely.

"There's nothing in there to say that you haven't put there." The cold covers me now, safe and warm. An old enemy, familiar and beloved. And, yet still, she is heart-caressingly lovely.

Through thin, numbed lips my voice becomes a stranger, "Your heart is your own."

"No." Finally, finely, she finds the words, the worlds I wish not to hear. "You gave me my heart, full-formed and beating. You filled it with your love and hope, and left me without space for my own. You gave without giving, without ceasing, and I am spent and empty because of it." She finally looks at me, and she is.

The chair scrapes back, the sound pushing me away as she gathers cups and crumbs.

And she is lovely.

Behind my eyes and beneath my tears, night after night, words without end, she is lovely.

She is mine.

Naim Kabir

I stand at the edge.

It is not the edge between thing and nothing, or between matter and emptiness. It is the edge between where you are and where you go. I am beyond what you can possibly see, and I am here to keep you from premature travel.

I have done this for eternity.

I was not born as you were. I am not limited in my depth through time. I extend through its entire length. Simultaneously at the birth of the Universe and at its bitter end, I watch the Gap.

It is ravenous.

The lake at the end of a starry river, the terminus of a super-galactic caravan, it devours. Look to your skies and you may see its dark flow take up distant light and make it disappear. Nothing is destroyed—there is only motion. A pilgrimage. This is the path all things take.

I oversee who walks here. I stand at the edge: the line between your space and this gaping maw. I keep the fabrics from ripping, and I slow the pace of your exodus. For, though this is the natural order—I enjoy your company, and wish to draw it out.

Your superluminal soul will arrive here soon enough, and I will be the last thing you see before you exit this place. I will grasp you by your bodiless body and fling you where you need to be, out to where I am not allowed to go. Out into that great mystery.

I do this until the day I die—I've seen that this is what happens. I never leave. I stand at the edge. There is no window into where you might be, and I cannot even smell you. By the time I have finished my work, I will be alone. I will die alone, and no one will grieve.

But this is the natural order of things.

I know this because I see it glittering before me, every instant in time arrayed like a line of dominoes. I see your blue planet. I see your yellow sun. I see the milky spiral in which you spin, the constellations in which you float. Beyond the intergalactic nothings and the circum-universal gas-clouds I see the lighted Giants, who hold up quasars like rounded shields. They glow brightly for you as they kneel—perhaps out of kindness. They are the first to leave, and I am here to guide them.

In each domino, I stand where I have always stood. I do not falter. I know I do not falter, and so I know I must not falter. What happens when choice interferes with what I see? How can I move from here when I know that, in all the billions of years I live, I don't?

I am still curious. What happens if I leave my post? What happens if the strings of space and time no longer tug at my fingers, or if the light of your entire world no longer burns at my skin? What happens to you when I step back into the Gap, and fall away from here?

I want to know. The source of this secrecy lies behind me, and it always has. I stand at the edge. I need only step backwards and let the Gap take me. In every second I can feel its warmth and taste its light, and every second is tortuous.

Move.

Your fine-constants fluctuate and the speed of light shifts as I lift my foot.

Should I?

Can I?

Gravity grows a bit stronger and the stars grow brighter. Lightning strikes your crust as I flex my shoulders.

What is the worst that can happen?

The sound of shrieking metal somehow fills empty space, and planets built of impossible particles pop in and out of being as my leg floats back into the void, back into the warmth and light and comfort—

And then I stop.

I cannot go. Who will be here to guide you on your way to Elsewhere? If I leave, this place will fill with ghosts.

I hate you for making me stay.

But I stay because I love you.

I stand at the edge.

Dawn Morrow

Eight years ago my grandmother died in her own home, surrounded by both family and a holy man. I was not there, but I was assured she went peacefully. This was the grandmother who taught me a piano song, one day. A day that my mother decided to drop me off. They were worried, I knew they were, and that was why I was there. She taught me her piano song and told me I could come visit her anytime I wanted to. Anytime there was trouble at home, anytime I was feeling down, anytime the crumbling marriage between my mother and my father was getting to me.

I never went back.

That doesn't mean I didn't love her, or didn't want to be taught piano songs, or have someone to talk to. I wanted those things.

I think.

And I respected her. She was an old war bride, one of those whose husbands had left to fight and didn't come back. She was strong, funny, caring. All those things that make up the very best kind of person.

I didn't come back and I didn't play a piano song at her funeral.

But a few days later, I stole into her home in a dream. I looked for her in every room. I knew she was there; I could feel her there, could hear her, could smell roses in the places she had been. But I never saw her. She knew I was there, too. And disdain and disappointment mingled with the roses.

The next day, the roses followed me. Everywhere I went, colleagues and friends and strangers complimented me on a perfume I was not wearing.

Five years ago, my supervisor died in her own home, surrounded by no one. She died at twenty-eight of a blood clot in her heart. She was someone who was simultaneously the nicest and most terrifying person I've ever known, with the ability to sweeten the whole room with a smile, and to turn my stomach at a single sour word.

She didn't like me, and I knew it. She tried to like me. But looking back on it now, there was this hesitation, this near-recognition, this tightness in the corners of her mouth when she'd turn that smile on me. This face, this expression, I've seen it more and more on the people around me as the years go by.

I found myself twisting uncomfortably in my seat when my boss told me, and told me that I had to be strong for the rest of the people in the company. I had to do and say the right things. I didn't know what those things were. When I went back to my job, it was hard to talk for a few minutes, but talk I did.

I stole into her feast day in a dream, sitting towards the end of the long table, eating quietly while she talked and laughed with her friends and family around her. Every so often a cool glance from her slid over me, as though she were too polite to ask me to leave. Nobody else seemed to know I was there.

Two years ago, my great-grandmother died, drowned in the open air by her own lungs. I never saw her but once through the months she struggled against the tendrils growing within her. Pale and unconscious and stuck full of tubes, it was awful, and I know, it was even more awful that I did not come back.

And yes, I stole into her home in a dream. She was laying on her couch, entertaining her visitors, those who were still living that would not see her again in life. I hid, watching my great grandmother smile and talk, and need, in that strange way dreams have of revealing to you what may burn beneath a calm.

When they left, that was the very last she could take. She couldn't move from her couch. She had nobody to talk to. She had nobody to connect to. There was this smile, this strange, open-mouthed smile, and looking at her was like looking at a constantly and desperately shifting Rubik's cube that had no solution.

I came out from my hiding spot, she saw me, reached for me. I woke up.

Of all my dreams of the dead, not one of them was happy to see me. And the one who would welcome my presence was mad.

I think this indicates something terrible about me.

I know what you're thinking. Everyone dreams of the dead. When someone we know passes into the Great Whatever, it saddens us, it scares us, it angers us, and so we dream. It's nothing special. These nothing specials are everywhere, if you look, if you know how to look.

But you know that already.

I think, when I run out of things to say, I'm going to end up in someone else's dreams.

I knew something was wrong with me. I think all of these people knew, too. Living and dead, they all know something about me I can't quite see. When I showed no signs of being upset over the splitting and fighting of my parents, when I never took the time to visit the dying, whenever I did whatever it is that I do to garner these tight faces from everyone I know, they knew. And I try, so hard, to make a normal face.

And you know. Don't you? You know even more than they do. You know what I do. That's why you're here. You stop people like me.

Then go on.

I have nothing more to say.

Joseph Clift

15th of May, 1891

To whomever finds this journal:

Back when I was an apprentice sailor, my fellow seamen and I would often talk about what it must feel like to live in the belly of a whale. Now I can honestly say it feels like being lodged in a pillow case filled with jelly.

I wish I could say my current situation was brought on by the dramatic adventures of a mad captain Ahab and a crew of pirates, but in reality I simply fell off the deck of the Star of the West merchant ship when we were hit by a heavy wave.

The vessel gave chase, and threw line after line into the sea. I grabbed one, tried to pull myself to safety, but to the whale I was just a worm on a string.

The crew fought to retrieve me. I could feel the rusted 150mm gun shake the water as I bypassed the beast's thousands of gnashing baleen teeth. The quiver of the mammal proved that at least one of the shots grazed it. His breathing is labored; as yet he still swims.

All outside noise stopped what feels like a quarter hour ago. I write this note in darkness, in my trusty pocket journal so someone may learn lessons from my hardships. Not that this situation is entirely unpleasant.

The feeling of sitting in a drenched sack of organic matter is not unlike being born again. I am soaked, bruised and fearful for my life, but beyond that I am comfortable. The blubber of the large mammal feels like the inside of a salted meat barrel on a boat's lower deck, warming me as the yellowish bile slowly eats through my clothes. Will I be preserved like a mummy or a piece of jerky or will I simply be ground up by the mammal's second stomach chamber; killed by tons of flesh squeezing me into oblivion?

I don't know.

My instincts convinced me to light a match before putting pen to paper, but the behemoth did not appreciate that. Its stomach convulsed. Its vocal chords activated, it roared. In the chaos, my foot was crushed like a barnacle against a dock.

I've moved little since.

To be completely honest, neither has the whale. Its heart beats like a steam engine on full tilt yet the animal's muscle movements have slowed by nearly half. Maybe it's because of my current close proximity, but I can sense its wound; it feels scared. Not that I'm concerned about this beast's well-being.

The whale approached the surface for a gasp of air moments ago. Its inhalation soaked me with vapor. I swear I could see a sliver of sunlight entering the chamber through its blowhole. It may have been my imagination, but I saw others just like me stuck in the walls of this prison of viscera. Skeletons of former sailors who died just trying to make a living surround me.

The light passed as quickly as it went. It's for the best. I find the unknown more comforting. They say darkness frightens man because he is unsure of what exists in the outside world. I am in the belly of an animal the size of a house. If anything, I'd love to forget my current situation.

If it weren't for the godawful stench of a thousand dead sea creatures, mixed with traces of my own fear induced urine, this whole experience would be like resting in a sleeping bag. A moving, pulsating sleeping bag...

I can sense the animal's sonar echo around me. The sound is difficult for my ears to discern, but the feeling, the vibration rumbles through my soul. It's calling out to something, for something. I once read that whales can become terrified when they are separated from their pride. If he IS injured, maybe he's just as scared as I am?

If I had the ability to call out, I would scream to my shipmates, to the world's navy, to the lord himself. I would trade a lifetime of indentured servitude for this.

Is that it?

Is this just one big test to prove my faith? Is this karma's way of getting back at me for my younger years spent as a whaler? Save for Jonas, no one else has had to experience this hardship, this agony and embarrassment.

How will my friends hear of this travesty? Will it all be a tall tale passed on among bored men of the sea? This can't be an honorable way to perish. I'd rather die by firing squad. At least that's proof of some accomplishment, no matter how grisly or abhorrent.

The whale has surfaced again. I can feel the warmth of the sun flow through its body. My skin has started itching from the digestive process. My vision is fading, but through the moment of light I was able to see my pale skin, growing lighter by the minute.

The whale cooed out. I can feel it being nudged by something, its comrades perhaps?

At least one of us is having a good life.

I haven't smiled since grade school. Granted, people have had more difficult goes of it. I was reasonably educated, born curious, but nothing ever turned out. My parents sent me to the best schools but through it all, I've yet to do anything worth celebrating. Maybe if I survive they'll name this whale species after me...

Who am I kidding? My looks are behind me. Forty years largely spent drinking and moving from job to job have not been kind to my body. With my bum leg and rotund frame, there's little for me on earth. If the most I'm good for is a meal for an ocean predator, so be it.

With the whale's next breath, I hope to leave this mortal coil.

\- James Abraham Blue

Choleric Means Never Having to Say "Please"

M. Asher Cantrell

Choleric, not to be confused with cholera, is the ambitious personality style. The leader, the decider. Meanwhile, cholera is a bacterial infection that makes your poo all gushy. Again, these things are not related to the best of my knowledge, and I know a whole lot about poop.

You may know famous pop culture cholerics like Captain America, Walter White, Gordon Gekko, Michael Corleone, and the protagonist in every Grand Theft Auto game to date. Notice that there's only one "good guy" in the list there. That's because the aspects of the choleric personality and good guy traits don't necessarily go hand-in-hand. The choleric person is passionate, a born leader, and will stop at nothing to achieve his or her goal. You think they have time for the law?

Generally speaking, without a strict sense of discipline and a strong moral code, cholerics just tend not to give a shit. That's why the most famous positive choleric characters tend to be either military-influenced or goody-two-shoes types. R. Lee Ermey's character just barely makes it due to this strict following of the military code. If not for that, though, he would probably be some varity of mass murderer.

That brings us to Batman, perhaps the greatest example of a choleric personality of them all. He's practically single-minded in his pursuit of justice. He operates outside of the law because they're not capable of doing what he does. In fact, his one and only boundary is his moral code that keeps him from killing. Nevermind how many lives would be saved if he hucked a sharpened batarang straight into the Joker's neck. That's where he draws the line, because if he didn't have that, he wouldn't be any better than those he's trying to stop.

Now think of The Punisher, who is basically Batman gone totally off-the-rails. He will kill, and doesn't hesitate to do so. And what's he? Just short of being a fucking psychopath, of course. The line between the bold leader and the raving lunatic is an awfully thin one. It just takes a little push for a choleric to decide that others are standing in the way of their goal, and those people usually end up either in chains (Gordon Gekko), dead (Michael Corleone), or at least completely alienated from everyone around themselves (Walter White).

And history shows, again and again, that this is true. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. That includes the power to get what you want through any means necessary, the power to rise above the law, and the power to exert your will on others. Almost every single character you see scrabble up from nothing to become feared and respected (basically, a classier form of fear, in this case) is essentially a little tin-pot dictator, abusing and destroying anything that stands between them and their goal, whether that's money, justice, or a complete collection of 1997-era NASCAR decorative plates. (Hey man, you don't know how far people will go for decorative plates.)

Asher Christian Minx

I'm standing on a street corner, hands in my jacket pockets. My jacket looks nice, clean. You see my jacket, and you don't think I'm about to start your daughter on the road to prostitution or transform your dad into a raging, TV-throwing spouse abuser. But it's not so nice that anyone actively wonders how I got the money to afford it. This is why I'm at the top. I know when to pull back, to quit laying cards on the table. I show this self-restraint in every facet of my job.

The districts I hustle are hard, and so are their inhabitants. So, I sell their inhabitants hard coping mechanisms: meth, rock, angel dust. If you're looking for the kind of stuff that'll make officers call for backup when they see your stash, well, you probably already know the drugs I just listed are some pretty weak shit.

Don't get me wrong, every product I sell has cost me customers: some of them done in by the law, locked in a pen, getting their emaciated asses ripped apart while you read this in your comfy ass-warm computer chair; others by the product itself. It's just that in my profession you come to expect such losses.

I'm something of an entrepreneur, you could say. I get offers all the time from jack-offs showing me what the next big thing is going to be. Telling me, Just a twelve thousand dollar advance, baby, and you got first dibs. You'll monopolize the industry! These guys seem to have a willful ignorance of the fact I've already monopolized the industry. I can invest twelve thousand dollars or I can invest twelve thousand cents. Or I can mail them my shit in an envelope. No matter what, they'll offer me their goods first because I have the smarts and the connections. And I'll get the word out.

I guess (I'll say this now), the notoriety also helps. Have you ever noticed how, when a writer talks about their success, now and then you get a story about them originally getting rejection letters for years and then - after they've finally managed to get a book deal - it's a sure thing, their book shows up on the New York Times Best-sellers list? All of a sudden Playboy, Penthouse, and every other pulp magazine in between are shitting themselves over any article the author sends them. Well, gentlemen, say hello to a cat with a similar story. I'm the Stephen King of peddling.

Pleased to meet you.

Anyway, those jerk-offs who always have something new to throw in my face? Like say, a new strain of acid, or maybe something pink and smelly and three times as addictive as crack? Well, most of the time they're just full of the most watery shit. You wouldn't believe it. Really. You'd just be blown away by how irresponsible they are. I have this lab, thirty of them in fact, and their sole purpose is to run tests on these people's drugs, find any defects. I'd estimate the average concoction I receive would kill about thirty to fifty percent of its buyers within the first year of use. Obviously anything like that would be stupid of me to sell.

You never want more than a twenty-five percent kill rate in the first year.

I'm standing on the corner with my hands in my pockets. I have nothing on me. If a cop asks me why I'm loitering around, I tell them I'm simply hanging out. Curtly. That's the thing with cops: you have to be curt. When you're conducting a highly illegal business, any prolonged conversation is a huge invitation for your body or voice to betray some sign of guilt. Even if you don't say something stupid, even if you're like me and are clever enough to not have anything on you in case of a pat-down, the cop remembers the way you kept breaking eye contact to look at something in the upper-right corner of the sky that was apparently really interesting. You're marked with big neon letters that spell "Suspicious character. Keep an eye on."

I'm always curt. And like I said, I have nothing on me. The actual product is held by a trusted associate in an alley that is close but not directly at my own location. I'm a very clever criminal.

My hands are in my pockets because it's cold outside. I exhale vapor smoke. A lot of people depend on me, I hate to tell you.

I spend thirty minutes like this and at last hear footsteps. Someone coming round the corner. Let's see, the time is... two AM. Regular Joes don't wander at these hours. I expect a customer, but right as the nearness of the steps tells me they're about to pass the edge of the 7-Eleven, right before they enter my line of sight, I already know it's Karen. I sigh. This makes, what, the tenth time she's shown up? Damned naive girl. She's going to get herself killed one day.

Karen? Karen's just this kid, nineteen or twenty. She has no idea what I do. When I first started working this area, she asked. I don't mind people outside my business, but the thing is, they're not dependent on my drugs or profits. They can't be trusted. So I lied through my crooked teeth and told Karen I was stargazing, praying. I conveyed through everything but my words that she needed to beat it. Karen though, she left for a while and returned with a foldaway lawn chair. I made her take it back, said I pray alone.

Flashback over. Here she is in the flesh. She waves to me, as if we're buddies. She waves as if she didn't miss getting gunned down by my supplier by forty-five minutes.

My hands are in my pockets because I don't want to wave back.

Karen slips in beside me and smiles, looks away. She reaches in her coat and pulls out a box with a ribbon on it. For a split-second, I think it contains narcotics and Karen is another dealer wanting to steal my corner and I'm the one who's been missing all the not-so-subtle hints. My heart pounds like a penis in the ass of a one hundred twenty-five pound crack addict in a state penitentiary.

"A Christmas present," she tells me. Christmas was two days ago, and I get the sense this is a charity case. I guess if I was her I wouldn't think I have many friends or family either. Actually, that's true; I have no friends and I'm estranged from my family. I take it. It says, "From: Karen. To: Robert." A few months ago I told her my name is Robert. It's actually Greg. I pull the ribbon loose.

I open the thing and there's a chain inside, silver crucifix attached. It's not much, she says, but she hopes I like it. To be honest, she says, she's not religious so she didn't know if this was the kind of thing my sect would approve of or not. Her and me both.

I don't like it. It's gaudy. And in a city like this it doubles the impression that I have gang affiliations. But I feel just the slightest bit uncomfortable not accepting Karen's gift. Okay, I like Karen. She's stupid, but she's nice.

I slide the chain over my head.

She says she wishes there were more people like me in the world, and inside I laugh. Stupid, stupid girl.

She says her brother just died in a shootout, and inside I go quiet.

Don't get me wrong, this isn't earth shattering news. Hell, under different circumstances I might've been the one to put a plug in the kid. It's just that she says this and she starts crying.

Karen is the most cheery person I've ever met. When she cries, it's bound to get me down. I mean, look: yesterday I held out on a methhead who was five dollars short, not because I didn't believe he'd pay me back or because I saw the damage he was doing to his body, but because I didn't want to make an exception and invite more deadbeats asking for favors. He shook and begged and screamed while I stood indifferent. I do the seedy shit this girl only reads about in newspapers and internet articles, so you might think I would be apathetic to her tears. To that I say...I have no idea.

Anyway, she gets into this thing about how there's so much crime now that it's destroying her family, yadda yadda. I don't want to get into it. But where it gets interesting is, she says I'm one of the few people who still give her hope. To see someone go out in the most dangerous part of the city at the most dangerous time of day and pray; that, she gushes to me, keeps her going.

I mumble some responses and she leaves a few minutes later. One more thing about curtness: It protects you from gushing like an idiot to a stranger.

A car with broken headlights drives by my street. Drives by, doesn't stop. The windows are tinted. If I threw a sledge hammer through those windows, whose brain matter would I see on the dashboard? Would it belong to a callous gang leader as deserving as myself, or just some soccer mom who doesn't feel safe, possibly because she lives around people who contemplate throwing sledge hammers at her?

My hands are in my pockets because I'm feeling kind of ashamed. Karen, for some stupid reason, gave me something to think about. All of a sudden, for a moment, I wonder what would happen if I did more than stop laying cards on the table. What if I ever fold and leave this game altogether? And this is when my cell phone rings. I pick it up and hear that particular tone of voice that can only come from a speaker who knows they've got you hooked by the balls.

"Yeah." I say.

"Not lately." I say.

"Detroit? Hm." I say, and I have to think. Then I remember there's nothing to think about.

"Okay. I'll pack up." Again, just me. I end the call without warning, before he can do the same.

The son of a bitch on the other line doesn't deserve a quotation. I hope he dies unremembered. No legacy whatsoever, like he was never even here.

When I first got involved in all this, I told myself I wouldn't fall in too deep, convinced myself I was a good guy among my wicked colleagues. Soon though, I had to start telling myself I was a good guy compared to my wicked colleagues. A few years ago I quit the bullshit and admitted my soul was just as heavy and perverted as my wicked colleagues. But this isn't true either.

I'm simply a coward.

I look for a long time at my present from Karen, noticing the way it shines, even in the dark. Gaudy. I tear it off, chunk it as hard as I can. It rebounds off a dumpster lid and lands inside with all the other trash.

A lot of people depend on me, I hate to tell you.

Claudia Toth

The sunlight poured into your bedroom. It was so much brighter than it ever should have been on a snowy January afternoon.

You didn't know me. You had no idea I would be there, standing in the middle of your room. You never knew I was there. But I was there. I was there because, ten minutes prior, your husband had needed to call an ambulance when he found you.

The call had been directed to me and the other EMTs as a "code" so we knew what we were in for. Getting dispatched to a code is the start of a situation that rarely ends well. A code means that someone's heart has stopped beating.

My heart was racing. I don't think anyone really gets used to this kind of situation. I'm not sure if you know this, but most calls for an ambulance are not like this. We're not always dealing with life or death situations. Most of the "emergencies" I get called to are pretty mundane. But this is different, and everyone's adrenaline runs high. This is a real emergency.

We rushed to the ambulance and sped to your house, lights flashing, sirens blaring.

Five minutes later, we turned the lights and sirens off as we pulled into your driveway. The door was already open, the police already there. They had also been dispatched, since they were closer to your house. There were children in the yard next door to yours, and they watched us as we walked to your door. They had probably never seen an ambulance go to somebody's house before, and it was fascinating to them.

We went upstairs to where you lay, but there was nothing to be done for you. The cops had discovered that there was no way to save you before we even arrived. When we got up there, into your room, you were on the floor. We all knew that you had died. The signs were all there, and to be honest, a dead body looks nothing like a living one. One of the officers lifted up the back of your shirt to show us that the blood had started to settle in your back. You had already been dead for an hour or more. After a person dies, their blood pools in whatever part of the body is closest to the ground. You had died in your sleep.

I looked around your room. The carpet was plush and white, the bedspread a rich navy blue. Everything looked so clean and orderly. It was clear that the bed had been perfectly made that morning.

I stood, trying to avoid leaning on the polished wooden bureau as one of the police officers explained to us what had happened:

"Well, her husband says she had come back in from shoveling the driveway at about noon. She was tired and her stomach was hurting – she thought it was just some muscle pain, so she came up here to lie down for a little while."

On your nightstand, there was a plate with two cookies on it. Next to that, there was a glass of water.

"She was up here for a long time, so her husband came up to check on her. That's when he found her. He pulled her out of the bed, called 911, and tried to do CPR."

We then had to tell your husband that there was nothing we could do for you.

As the paramedic, the other EMT, and I left your room, I saw the police officer get a body bag ready for you. We went downstairs to give your husband the news.

The paramedic and the other EMT took your husband aside to tell him what was going on. Tell him that you had died. Meanwhile, it was my job to sit with your son in the living room. He would have to hear about your death from his father.

I sat down on the couch next to your son. I tried to make small talk, but I doubted that it was helping anyone. I'm not very good with children. It didn't really matter, I guess. There is exactly nothing good to say in that kind of situation. There was nothing I could say that would have made any of this any better, so I decided not to say anything else. We sat in silence for a while. With everything that was going on, you wouldn't think it would be so quiet. But it was. Or maybe I just wasn't taking in anything that was going on. Either way, I just remember it being so goddamn quiet in that room. I should have been able to hear the commotion. It should have sounded like the world was crashing down around that couch on which I was sitting with your son. Instead, it just sounded like the world had stopped.

On the coffee table in front of me, there was a picture of you and your husband. A recent picture. The two of you were standing in front of a big Christmas tree. You both looked so happy. I tried not to consider it. Instead, I looked at the one other thing on the coffee table: a blue, scented candle, lit. As it burned, it filled the room with the gentle aroma of cotton, and I watched the flame flicker and sway.

That picture was probably taken this past Christmas Eve.

Two weeks ago.

Fuck.

I looked over at your son. I'm glad he didn't return my gaze. If he did, I would have felt compelled to try to talk to him again. I might have asked about the picture. I like to think I wouldn't have, because I know that would have made things worse. I was worried that your son would ask me what was going on. I hadn't thought about that when I volunteered to be the one to stay with him. It wasn't my job to tell him.

That picture was taken in the same living room in which I sat in with your son.

It wouldn't have been this silent two weeks ago.

The scene was shattered when your husband came back into the room. He held out his arms and your son ran and hugged him. I think your husband was under the impression that it was my job to tell the kid what happened. He thought that your son already knew. Even though I didn't tell him, I think he did.

The other EMTs and I gave our condolences as we left. It was then time for us to leave your family alone, and to go back outside where the world still turned, where the neighbor's children had already resumed playing in the snow.

Matt Conrad

Right off the bat, there's something that you should know. You'll be mad at me. Hell, you'll be furious. You're gonna want to stop reading, and God knows that you'd have every right to. I'm asking you to keep going, right to the end. This won't take too much time to explain. I owe you every second that I can spare. So I'm getting this out of the way first:

I did this. This was no accident. It was all my fault.

I am not sorry. It needed to happen.

* * * *

Jane drove up to the mailbox, careful not to scrape her window against it. God knows that would be the beginning of a fight she didn't need.

What struck her as odd was that the flag was up. She could've sworn that she didn't send anything out that morning. Her husband Steve wasn't the type to ever need to send anything out, and her son Kevin...well, postage was before his time.

Still, the mail-truck had been by nearly twelve hours ago. The only people who left their flags up at night were the elderly, fearful that their five-dollar birthday checks wouldn't be mailed the next morning.

Jane chuckled at the thought, though it didn't do much to comfort her. She probably forgot again. Long days at the hospital had that effect on her.

She put the flag down and sifted through the pile. It was mostly the usual: bills, pre-paid credit card solicitations, fliers for the local market. An envelope, rather thick, was among the day's delivery. Return address in the city. Probably her sister, writing about the usual family gossip. Jane never understood why she didn't just call.

There was no stamp. "Delivery guy's slipping again," she said to herself, rolling up the window.

* * * *

And, as long as I'm on the subject of fault here, I've got a few more things to tell you. A lot of this you probably already know, but I need to say it regardless.

I stole Doug Simpson's lawnmower four years ago. Charlie and I were trying to build a go-kart and needed an engine. So, no, Doug wasn't just making shit up again. Also, the go-kart didn't really work at all.

The graffiti that used to spring up around town...okay, some of that was me. None of the racist stuff, though. I made up my own cool little tag, got pretty good at it. Was thinking about tagging the clock-tower sometime, but that's hardly the matter right now.

We put that mattress in the pool downtown. No real reason behind that other than it was funny as hell. You even said so yourself.

The guys and I were also the ones who went around smashing mailboxes. Again, it was funny as hell. The only ones who got it were the people who we didn't like. You and I have a lot of overlap there. No real loss.

I DID NOT have anything to do with whoever killed those horses on Buck's Farm, although I have a good idea of who did it. We did some dumb shit, sure, but we never went that far.

Maybe knowing all this matters to you, maybe it doesn't. It makes me feel a bit better, though.

* * * *

The driveway proper began at the top of the hill, just beyond the mailbox, and descended down the steepest grade that Jane had ever seen. Steve had fallen in love with the house shortly after he married her. He had a great habit of saying that the city was too "goddamned cramped." Jane agreed with him, if only because she was tired of hearing it every day. In all honesty, though, she was glad to get out. The move didn't even really hamper her daily commute. It didn't hurt that the old Tudor was absolutely gorgeous, that made the decision to move a bit easier.

The driveway began to round out to the right about a quarter of the way down. Lucky for them, the winters never seemed to hit the area very hard. The tall, lush pines flanking the drive blocked most of the snow. Jane could never imagine having to contend with shoveling that monstrosity. Or, heaven-forbid, the ice.

A violent bump, a pothole out of nowhere. The left side of the car dipped down, jolting the vehicle and Jane alike.

"Goddamn driveway," she caught herself saying out loud. She had surprised even herself on that one, since she made a point never to swear. Nobody was around to hear it, so she let the twinge of guilt go. She was too shaken to care if anyone had heard, anyway.

That thought brought her back to the house. Living in an isolated little patch of wood and having no immediate neighbors was an aspect that appealed to both Jane and her husband. It let them hide that, no matter how many beers he would kill at the saloon after work, Steve would always return after Jane was already asleep. She always found it funny that he wound up taking that new office job right across the street from the saloon.

Of course, there were other benefits to living in such seclusion. Sure, it was lonely, you had that. It's much easier to be afraid, knowing that nobody's around to help you should anything go wrong.

On the other hand, your shame is much easier to hide. Your shortcomings don't have quite the same effect when nobody's around to notice them.

The curve straightened out, halfway down. The lights from the city beyond were trapped in the cloudy night, casting a reddish tint in the sky. Jane had always liked that. That's what had finally sold her on the house. The view was really worth it.

* * * *

One more thing.

I lied about Jimmy Ralston. I kept my mouth shut about that for a reason. He was wrong when he said it was an unprovoked attack. I couldn't bring myself to fight it.

That you might actually be surprised about. It was something he said. He said, "Ray got what he deserved." Didn't even use his real goddamn name.

If I'd had more than a pencil, I would've done much worse. Had he been anyone else's son, I would've spoken up a whole lot sooner. It would have made no difference, but still.

You needed to know that. I never told anyone. I kept that in for two years, all the way through all the hearings and all the bullshit. Nobody else but you needed to know my reasons and I couldn't even give you that. Not until now, I guess. You had a right to know all along, but I couldn't work up the nerve to tell you. Now's the time for nerve. I need it, and pretty soon so will you.

You should know enough to be disappointed in me already. I can handle that much, I guess, but you need to know why I did what I did.

* * * *

The move had been great for Kevin, at least on the surface. His father had died many years ago, had a heart attack on the street. Right in front of his son, no less. Thank God the paramedics had gotten there as fast as they did. Thanks to the damn traffic, Jane couldn't comfort her son for two hours.

Steve paid no real mind to the kid, for the most part. He had welcomed him almost as one of his own, had even put up with the normal adolescent drama that all kids seem to cause at a certain age. He'd never paid much real attention to Kevin, even at the worst times. When he turned 18, Kevin had become a nonentity. Jane was thankful for that much.

You try to do good things for your kids, she told herself. You marry a businessman who has a good head on his shoulders. You move out of the city to somewhere nicer, less urban. You learn that nobody's perfect. You contend with his temper. You tell yourself that everyone shouts once in a while, that everybody screams. You deal with the bad things, keep them to yourself. Sometimes people just can't cope. Everyone gets stressed. Everyone acts out once in a while. Sometimes these things can get a little out of hand. Sometimes you have to bear these things for the people that you love. Sometimes it's all worth it. Sometimes being asleep when he gets home is better for everyone. Sometimes-

The car was pointing dead-on towards the large maple tree at the bottom of the driveway. With a quick jolt of the wheel to the left and a hard brake, Jane was in front of the garage, uprooted from her daydream and planted firmly back into some semblance of reality. Time had seemed to crawl, those few seconds feeling like hours.

She put the car in park before another catastrophe could occur. She sat still for a moment, feeling that slight jolt of electricity just under her skin begin to dissipate. She was a nurse, and she knew the rush and the ways to calm it.

Deep breaths. Count to ten. Soothing words. White noise. Fresh air.

She rolled down the window. Warm summer air and a faint, smoky trace of a bonfire wafted into the sedan. Her pulse slowed steadily.

In this calm, she remembered the envelope without the stamp.

* * * *

You must think you're the world's greatest actor. I don't know who the hell you think you're kidding here. You think people don't know about the shouting? You don't realize that make-up only goes so far? You don't think that people get to talking?

The worst of it all, besides the completely goddamn obvious, is that you actually think he loves you.

This may seem grotesque and wrong, and everything about it might seem horrifying to you. But deep down, in your heart of hearts, you'll find your true voice telling you that this was the right thing. The only sensible thing.

Everybody talks, you know. Everyone can see, absolutely everyone. But nobody can seem to find the heart to do anything about it.

They think we're victims. That we're helpless, the object of their pity.

That's all we'll get from them. Their pity. In the end, some things need to be on our heads. We've only got ourselves.

* * * *

The smell of the bonfire was stronger now. It was pleasing. Jane took it in with deep breaths. It brought a memory back to the front of her mind. Probably the last time she had been truly happy.

The Fourth of July, the year Kevin had turned five. Her husband was cooking burgers and dogs on the grill in their small backyard. Fireworks erupted over the pier in every color of the spectrum. Kevin was wide-eyed with excitement as his dad showed him how to light sparklers all by himself.

It was a day where you couldn't help but smile. Smiling faces everywhere you looked. The whole family oblivious to the fact that a heart attack was looming just over the horizon, only a year away. Just when everything was starting to make sense again.

Her late husband, when you got down to it, was not a nice man. He was a thief, a person so feared and hated that he could only be referred to by a nickname. He'd made a great deal of enemies in the city, cops and criminals alike. The day Kevin was born, he gave it all up. "Never again," he'd said. From then on, he was polite, he was calm, he was generous. He was a great lover and an even better father. Kevin was too goddamn young. Her husband was too goddamn young.

Even still, all the bullshit was worth it. Her son was safe. Jane had taken the brunt of Steve's temper. As long as her child had a home she would have no shame. Like her mother had said, it really was all bullshit, after all. Everything was.

Maybe Kevin saw it like that. Maybe that's why he acted out the way he did. Maybe that's why he went through all that business with the cop's son. The same cop who'd arrested her husband and had moved out of the city as well. Small goddamn world.

Still, Kevin was doing much better. Time away from all the city's evils seemed to do him a world of good.

Jane grabbed the unstamped letter and opened it. The soft wind itself seemed to be burning, the smell was so strong.

* * * *

I did this for a reason.

You cannot stay here any longer. This was the only solution, the only wake-up call that could get through to you. Now that you know the stakes, you need to get out.

I've already collected all of the important things. Social Security cards, birth certificates, stuff like that, it's all taken care of. I dropped it off at Karen's. If you have the good sense to see it, we still have a few people we can trust.

Leave. Get out of there. The investigators won't be able to trace the source, not right away. A little bit of misdirection can go a long way. Doesn't matter, though.

None of that "apple doesn't fall far" bullshit, either.

This is it. You can be gone before he ever gets off shift. You can be in the next state in two hours and he would never know.

But you need to move.

* * * *

Jane stared into her garage from the mudroom. A faint, unfamiliar glow poured through the open front door. The smell of burning plastic, of oily fumes, cut through the night. It had engulfed a good part of the garage already. Her car started ringing. She'd left her keys in the ignition. She jumped.

Her legs were going to give way, right there in the driveway. She'd be found here, unconscious from the shock and the fumes. She saw police and fire engine lights in her thoughts and her stomach dropped.

From the foyer she could see that the dining room table was now a monolithic orange flare. Drapes melted over the windows. Sharp crackles every few seconds to note that a new area was being licked by flame and would be devoured entirely in due time.

It was horrifying. Yes, horrifying, that was certainly a word for it. It is terrifying to see whole years of your life being atomized before your eyes.

She could not bear to look away, though. It captivated her. It didn't smell like a bonfire, being so close to it as she was right now.

Horrifying. Yes, that was a word for it.

Not saddening, though Startling, yes, but not saddening. Surreality swept her and was the only thing keeping her afloat.

Her hands curled into fists. A crinkling of paper made her remember the note clutched in her right hand.

Jane felt something beyond herself. She could feel her husband's name was reaching through the years, through her own comatose memories, tickling the back of her throat and making her gasp. She couldn't explain it, though she did not dare fight it.

Raymond was telling her to move.

* * * *

This place is death. This house is poison, every piece of wood and stitch of fabric is toxic. These years were toxic. But they don't have to be, not anymore.

This needed to happen. This was no accident, it was necessary. Don't blame yourself. This wasn't your fault. This was inevitable.

No more hatred, no more pity, no more fear. We're beyond that. We need to act.

Pack nothing. Take nothing. I don't want this to look premeditated, at least not yet.

Please, get out of there. For me.

And get rid of the evidence.

I love you, Mom.

* * * *

A roar from the far side of the house. The structure was beginning to give a little.

Yes, it was the middle of nowhere. But they still had neighbors. People would see or hear or smell this eventually.

It had been dry lately. Things would catch very soon. Jane could not command her legs to move from the foyer.

The note in her hand was a lead weight, anchoring her to the spot, but paradoxically willing her to fly from all of this.

She didn't wait long to make a move.

The smoke was starting to fill the garage, hitting her hard from the doorway. No alarms. She'd been nagging Steve to change the smoke alarm batteries for weeks. Thank goodness for awful home-owning.

The shadows cast by the flames were the stuff of childhood nightmares. She paid them no heed. She would not be sticking around.

She balled the piece of paper up and threw it into the nearest flame, off to her right.

Jane was back in the car in five quick bounds.

She went to turn over the engine but it was already running. This was announced by a sharp, grating whine. She was shaking a bit, but not enough to cause concern. Just wired again, that was all. Harness it.

Jane closed the door, buckled up, and put the car in reverse.

She looked back on the house as she ramped up the drive. She took it much faster than usual.

The flames began to lick the windows on the second floor. Jane couldn't seem find an ounce of pity for the damned place. There wasn't anything there worth missing.

Malini Vijaykumar

As a child, I would watch my mother light the incense for evening prayer. She'd show it to the gods as the smoke drifted lazily upwards, before she waved the flame out and put it in the holder. Then she'd kneel for a moment in front of the altar, having her silent conversation with the potbellied elephant, the beautiful many-handed woman, and the black-faced man in gold jewelry, who gazed out from their pictures behind the lamp.

And then she'd turn to me and smile, almost dreamily, as if to say, "See, little one, this is love. This is only and always love."

I guess I'm about to test that now.

As a teenager, I would watch my best friend's rugby games, each and every one. He'd sprint as the other team came up to meet him, struggling to seize the ball. Then he'd somehow get his hands on the wayward thing and fly down the field, passing and weaving, and sometimes getting thrown into the dirt, finally scoring the precious point.

And then he'd take off his shirt in celebration and grin at me, almost lustfully, as if to say, "You're wrong. These strange wants are not going to go away."

I guess I'm about to prove that now.

As a young med student, I would watch my lover shift under the sheets of my dorm bed, breath warm on my pillow. He'd look up at me and raise a hand to my cheek, and I would hold it there until he drew me back down. Then he'd stop and ask me if I had told anyone about us, knowing the answer before I gave it, still hoping that it would be different this time.

And then he'd move away and smile at me, almost bitterly, as if to say, "You're only prolonging the inevitable, you know."

I guess I'm about to fix that now.

Now, I can see my hopeful bride, looking up at me from her father's lap. She's waiting for her groom to tie the first knot of the sacred thread around her neck. I take a deep breath and drop my hands instead, turning around to face the priest and crowd as the musicians falter.

I smile at them, almost apologetically, as if to say, "You may not like what I'm about to tell you."

Sanguine/Artisan: An Abundance of Blood

C. Coville

Sanguine/Artisan: Optimistic, impulsive, friendly, spontaneous, bold, action-oriented, competitive, hands-on. Motivated by action, fun and excitement.

Ladies and gentlemen, we present to you the double edged sword of sanguinity. (An action which in itself could also lead to sanguinity. Get it?) On the one hand, those with the sanguine temperament can at least be happy that they're named after the most socially acceptable of the bodily fluids. Sure, it's not exactly kosher to go up to someone and vomit blood all over them, as I learned after being banned from Burning Man that one time. But if the bloody opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan had been filmed using an abundance of any of the other humors, the movie probably would not have won all those Oscars. In fact, it probably would have killed Tom Hanks' career and spawned an era of movie critics referencing "that awful, awful movie with all the phlegm."

On the other hand, at the heart of the sanguine temperament lies a weird contradiction. How does this particular metaphorical imbalance of humors - an abundance of blood - cause a personality classified as friendly, bold and spontaneous? You'd think blood would lend itself more to one of the other temperaments: say, the blood that wells up when the stereotypical melancholic cuts himself, or the gory lab results of the choleric mad scientist. And then there's the question of how the artisan aspect is involved. A temperament known for being present-oriented and spontaneous would presumably have difficulty, say, skillfully crafting and plotting out a long novel. (Which obviously doesn't matter to the people who write those airport novels, amirite?)

Take a closer look at Keirsey's 'artisan' descriptions, though, and you'll notice that the definition is far wider than it first appears. Today, art might generally refer mostly to landscape paintings and ugly public sculptures, but in the past the word applied to much more: the performing arts, the art of business, the art of war. Huh, speaking of Saving Private Ryan...

Think about it: what really makes a good warrior? Bravery, sure. But there's more to it than that: it requires a degree of what can almost be described as poor future planning. Lack of fear, impulsivity, a desire for excitement that overpowers the usual human need for safety and stability. An abundance of blood. As GK Chesterton put it, survival on the battlefield requires love of life mixed with a supreme indifference to death. And indeed, legendary warrior races like the Vikings didn't even have a real death: they just kept fighting in the afterlife, a kind of eternal now. Eat, drink and be merry, guys, for yesterday we died.

Not that this interpretation of the sanguine must be limited to the battlefield. It might pop up in the local 'hero' who comes across a violent robbery in progress, beats the perpetrator to death, and then is concerned only about the fact that he got blood all over him. But tweak the circumstances just a little, and everyone knows that he could have been the guy receiving the beating. Risk-taking, impulsivity and a low tolerance for boredom are all symptoms both of a sanguine temperament and of psychopathy.

So how the hell does this all apply to art? It's not just that those of us with sanguine temperaments need to learn to put down the axe for a minute and consider whether the novels we're working on need some patient rewrites. No, the less sanguine-oriented wannabe artists need to learn to pick up the metaphorical axe as well. You need a bit of dumb bravery for this role: passionate zeal mixed in with indifference to your enemies, who are probably imagined but who nevertheless may rage against you with the fury of Youtube commenters. You must be ready to die a little bit, or you'll never make it to Valhalla. And I hear they have some awesome mead.

M. Asher Cantrell

As he crossed over another dune, he stumbled. He fell, and rolled onto his back with a grimace when he heard the abrupt crack! from his bag. He sat up and opened it, inspecting the damage. His dowsing rod was snapped like a wishbone. It had taken him days to find a yew branch that looked just right. Looks were important in this line of work. The look was what sold it.

When he first started, he was surprised to find that it wasn't that different from the stage performances he had been accustomed to. A lot of spark and bombast, a lot of keeping things hidden behind your back or under your cloak.

"Charlie," a fellow performer once said to him, "Magic is pretend for grownups," and that's exactly what it was: it was making up a fantasy and getting a room full of people to join you in it. A fantasy where you could saw a woman in half, or catch a bullet in your teeth. And, like many fantasies, it could all fall apart in a single, horrible moment that you could never prepare for.

Dowsing worked well as a substitute. People came and watched the magic show and played pretend for a while. Making them believe that he could find water was no different from making them believe that he could throw a pin into an apple from twenty yards.

"Water. The source of all life, the bringer of promise. Did you know that every major prosperous city in this great country of ours is built on a waterfront?"

He had no idea if that was true. It seemed that way, at least. He had done this speech a dozen times and no one had ever questioned him on it.

After he collected their money and well-wishes, he would set off with his terrain map. There was no real magic in dowsing, just like there was no real magic in magic. It was just a matter of becoming familiar with geological features that indicated water. He could have showed them on the map, right there in the middle of town, but going off with nothing but his bag was far more dramatic. It's what got him his reputation. He would come back a day later with a few likely spots, circled in grease pen, that might be good places to plant wells.

Once he got out of town, he'd walk until he couldn't see the buildings on the horizon. Then he'd put the forked rod away and pull out his flask. He'd wander on a bit longer, start a fire, make his marks on the map, and then start his trek back the next day.

And just like the fantasy of magic had ended abruptly, with a young girl's blood pooling on the stage, so too would this one, it seemed. He awoke to the smell of burning paper, and opened his eyes just in time to see his map crumble into ash. He had tried to guess his way back from the position of the sun, but directions were tricky in the middle of the desert. Sometimes he thought East seemed to be shifting on him, and as he began running out of water, it only got worse.

When he fell, his thought before he hit the ground wasn't surprise; it was this has been a long time coming.

He laid on the ground for an indeterminable length of time, trying to make himself content with the idea of death and finding himself unable. After a while, he thought he heard sobs. He waited, convinced that they were either his own, or perhaps some hallucination. He heard them again, louder. He swung himself to his feet, stumbled, regained his balance. Near where he had fallen, an old stone wall stood, the last remaining relic of a long-dead town. He leaned over it and looked on the other side.

A woman in rags, her face buried in her hands. He reached out to touch her shoulder, but something made him hesitate.

"Miss," he said. The woman started and turned to face him. He gasped and dropped his bag.

She could have been Belinda's twin. Beautiful Belinda, who had gotten the wire of her flying harness wrapped around her neck when the stagehand yanked up on it, ending his career and her life.

"Who are you?" she asked.

He did not answer.

"I'm lost," she said. "Are you?"

He tried to swallow, but his throat was dry. He nodded.

"My name is...I don't remember my name. I don't even remember how I got here. Did you bring me to this place?"

Suddenly, he found his voice and hearing it startled him. "Your name is Belinda. We are lovers."

"I can't remember anything. What are we doing out here?"

"We were exploring, doing some map-making. We got lost. You don't remember anything at all?"

What am I doing? Why am I lying to this girl?

For a second, he imagined that her rags looked like the clothes Belinda had been wearing the night she died. He had been attracted to her, yes, but they were far from lovers. She had had a husband, David, and he was a good man.

"No, all I remember is waking up here, beside this wall. I was terrified until you came along. Can we leave? I don't like it here. I want to go... home, I suppose. Wherever that is."

He held out his hand and she took it. His vision suddenly had new clarity. He stood atop the dune he had fallen down and looked out. He thought he saw the buildings of the town on the horizon.

"So we're mapmakers?"

"Yes," he said.

"Who would need to map a place like this?"

"People who want to build here. To start anew."

The clarity and drive didn't last long, and soon he felt harsh thirst again. The girl did not complain. She simply followed in his footsteps.

He could no longer see the buildings he thought he'd seen. "I'm going to sit down for a minute," he said. She didn't respond.

Before he even knew what had happened, he was waking up.

"Why did you let me fall asleep?"

"You looked peaceful."

The sun was still hot in the sky. He tried to stand, but his legs buckled and he fell face-first in the sand. She put her arm on his shoulder and rolled him over. His vision was alternating between blurred and dark. He felt nauseated.

"Belinda," he said. "I am so sorry for what happened to you."

"I know, Charlie. It wasn't your fault. It was never your fault."

She stood up and pulled him to his feet. He managed to stand. She grabbed his shoulders and turned him. The buildings were back. He could see them. He began walking toward them, and it was no mirage. The town got bigger and bigger, and suddenly he felt like running. Two men saw him and ran to his side. One had a jug of water.

"Just drink now," the man said, and Charlie did. When he finished, he looked around with the little strength he had. Only one set of footprints led to the town.

"Where's the girl?"

"What girl?"

Charlie's last thought before he collapsed was that when he thought about it, the girl, strangely, hadn't looked like Belinda at all. Not really.

Diana McCallum

"The best laid plans of mice and men [and Fate] go oft awry."

Fate has a plan. Not everyone likes it and some people deny it, and other people fight it with everything they have, but the plan is there nonetheless, guiding our steps through life. What most people don't realize is that like all plans, Fate's can be changed. Far from written in stone or even ink, Fate's plan is nothing more than a series of opportunities penciled into our lives at precise moments, with all outcomes hinged on the choices Fate has calculated we will make.

Fate will offer us things - a car, a house, a job, love, hate or pain – but it cannot make us accept them.

Fate has a plan, but the choices are still ours to make, and if you choose to royally fuck with Fate's plan, then that's your choice too but so are the consequences.

Like once upon a time when Fate chose a young man and woman to dote upon. He sat down to plan their futures and decided they were going to fall in love and their story would be Fate's masterpiece. He plotted out their lives in painstakingly beautiful detail, shaping great moments of life for them against many moments of simple, content existence to emphasize the contrast of truly living. Feeling oddly gracious he even reached into their dreams and copy/pasted entire sections into their lives to become a reality if all went according to plan. Finally he added just the right amount of imperfection and pain to make it perfect.

When the time was right Fate pulled just the right strings and presented the young man and woman with the opportunity to attend the same party. They showed up at separate times, strangers, dressed up, drinks in hand, minds content in their decisions as they followed Fate's path. The young man noticed the woman almost instantly and watched her from the corner of his eye most of the night. She saw him as well but every time she looked at him he turned away and their eyes never met and both pulsed with uncertainty.

When they were in the same room Fate offered a silence, an opportunity for them to speak. But she was beautiful and smiling and glowed with a promise the young man was afraid to approach and he remained silent. She tried to smile at him but saw his eyes shift away from her, almost a sure promise of rejection and she remained silent as well.

They both stayed at the party late, feeling as though something should have happened, had yet to happen, but still neither spoke. They had committed to their silence like strangers in an elevator.

She finally went home, smile no longer reaching her eyes. The young man nodded along with the conversation around him for two minutes before he slammed his drink down on the table, rushed out the door and down the stairs behind her. Panic had overtaken his fear as he felt something nameless yet utterly important slipping away that he desperately had to catch up to. He ran into the street just in time to see the bus turning around the corner and be alone to experience the terrible shifting sensation that churned in the pit of his stomach.

It was at this moment that Fate was forced to pick up his pencil, erase his masterpiece and hastily rewrite the stories of two people.

They were not nearly as elegant as the originals; they did not have the embellished flourishes, the dashes of brilliance, the staggering flashes of beauty or the cleansing moments of passionate despair, but they were rewritten, completely, for the most part. But a story written in haste, out of obligation, without love, is hardly worth reading, let alone living.

Their stories became the equivalent of Fate's late homework assignment, scribbled down for the sake of handing something in and bitingly mediocre.

The young man lived a life of painful regularity; he finished school, got a job, got a girlfriend, became a grown man, wore suits, lost his job, lost his girlfriend, got a new job, worked late, skied in the winter and went fishing at his parents' cottage every summer.

The young woman spent her life doing anything to break her apart from ordinary, working odd jobs and refusing to settle in any place that didn't have what she was looking for. On the weekend she mountain climbed, twice a week she took martial arts, she worked at a law firm to meet the rich, then she worked at a movie store to meet the poor and bohemian and yet nothing ever felt right. Every six months she would move to a different city, exploring what it had to offer, and yet she always ended up back where she started; back to the scene of the crime.

They were fine enough stories overall and you could almost believe they had been planned that way all along if it weren't for the smudges left behind in them where Fate hadn't pressed down its eraser hard enough, leaving faint lines underneath the story of the tale that was almost theirs.

At least once a day the man felt a scratch in the back of his mind, like a switch had been flipped and his soul knew it was on the wrong path and was trying to push him to go somewhere else, to get back to the great story it was meant for.

The woman would day dream, sometimes for hours, about an incredible life that seemed so painfully close she could almost touch it. At night she always wrote, scribbling conversations and experiences that were almost memories, mostly because her mind wouldn't let her sleep until she had found some way to experience the story she had been meant for.

Some days the rewrites were more obvious than others, like the day the man walked by the restaurant they were meant to have their first date and felt the strongest desire to go inside, even though he had already eaten and wasn't hungry. Instead he sat on a bench across the street, waiting.

Months later he drove by the pet shop where Fate had planned for them to buy their first dog. He went in and picked out a chocolate lab sitting alone in the corner of his pen and brought it home. His girlfriend of the time hated it. He watched her leave and kept the dog.

Two days after that the woman walked into the same pet store, wandered aimlessly and left, not able to find what had pulled her inside.

A year after that he was skiing with his friends down the advanced trails of the mountain and halfway through the day ventured to the beginner's hill instead. He had no one to teach but couldn't shake the feeling that he needed to be there, helping someone get safely back to their feet.

Six months after that she was on vacation with her girlfriends in Jamaica. A local man asked if they wanted to go out fishing. She had never done it and her friends weren't interested, so she went out alone, casting into the ocean and feeling that consistent thrumming of loss increase as she nearly pulled in a fish only to have it slip back into the water at the last second. When she wrote about her vacation later there was a man with her, guiding her arms to bring the fish safely onto the deck.

A year later the woman's sister read her stories and suggested she publish them.

Nine months after that the man walked into a bookstore and picked up a random soft cover from the new release shelf. He sat down to read that night and found he had purchased a story that began at a party and from there spiraled into an amazing life, with moments filled with beautiful honesty, true passion and love, unashamed, uncompromising love. With each word his soul ached as it recognized the life it had been denied, laid out in painful detail. The man knew each line before he read it, recognized each moment before it happened and experienced each second in such vivid detail that tears streamed down his face as he read long into the night.

The next day he packed a bag and drove out to his parents' cottage, his dog sitting happily in the passenger seat and the book tucked safely into the glove compartment. When he got to the beach he packed the book in his bag, slung it over his shoulder and walked down to the water, two fishing poles tapping against his leg as he walked for hours, never breaking stride or slowing as he headed for the horizon. He was running out of sunlight and beach by the time he finally stopped.

There was a woman sitting alone on the rocks ahead.

The woman was sitting alone on the rocks ahead. Her eyes were wrinkled with the years that had passed, but her smile reached her eyes as she stood up and their eyes met, twenty years late. But in that moment they experienced their entire lives together and the love they had been meant for. Each moment flashed before them and they felt both crushing sorrow and incredible joy as Fate revealed his masterpiece. Laughing in piles of snow, crying in huddled balls in each other's arms, gasping together, bodies mingled, the tiny fingers of a child, yelling, running, loving, smiling, laughing, cursing, loving. Loving.

The sun was setting when they finally spoke.

"Katie," she offered, her voice suddenly twenty years younger.

"I'm Travis."

He blinked and saw the wedding they were meant to share by the lake. She had a rose in her hair.

"I'm so sorry."

"For what?"

"For not saying it sooner."

She shrugged. It was done.

"We still have plenty of time."

They sat down, perfectly comfortable on the hard rocks. As the man shifted, the book fell out of his bag, landing open on the page he had dog-eared and highlighted the day before. One line that had corrected Fate's plan.

To my forever. I'll meet you on the shore, if the Fates allow.

Maximilian A. Chis

The world comes into focus. Smoke trails across his sight and disappears into the gray sky. Slowly he pulls himself to his feet. In the distance, smoke pours from the hood of a car which is rammed into the side of the concrete barrier. Police lights flash but he hears no sirens. A crowd has encircled him, looking at his feet. He looks down and sees his bloodied and mangled reflection. Gone.

Her. He looks past the crowd and down the highway. Her. He has to find her. Slowly, he walks to the edge of the crowd, passing through the bodies of unaware onlookers. Her. He has to find her.

He heard the roar of engines speeding by as he hid behind the concrete barrier. Taking a deep breath, he pulled himself over the barrier and into an oncoming car.

He drags his feet along the center of the highway. Cars speed by him without notice, and he continues on.

He stared up at the cloudy sky as he padded along the side of the highway. The needle slipped out of his hand. It didn't matter to him anymore. Nothing did.

He plods up the hill of the cemetery, passing countless gravestones until he finds a small slab in front of freshly planted grass.

He looked down at the grave that she lay beneath. Mist rolled across the distant hills. He tried not to cry, but it was so damn hard.

He walks along the street, pedestrians passing him without notice. He looks at the street sign. Just a few more blocks.

Tears streamed down his face as he plunged the needle into his arm, pumping the solution deep into his bloodstream. He hoped to God the dosage would kill him but knew it wouldn't. He'd lived on bigger shots than this.

He passes through the open doorway. His feet touch the tile floor as he navigates between cramped furniture, piles of paper, and discarded needles.

He screamed and fell to the floor as the bathroom door slowly swung open. She lay in the bathroom tub, eyes glazed, dried blood caked across her arms, gashes on her wrists.

He stares at the tub for a long time. Finally, he turns around and looks into the mirror, barely noticing that it's reflecting empty space.

Fuck her, he said, as he shoved the needle into his arm. Fuck her, he doesn't need her. He doesn't fucking need anyone.

He passes through the living room again and stares out the window, watching the cars navigate through the busy city streets.

She screamed and cried but he couldn't hear her over the sounds of his shouts. You don't fucking know what I'm going through, he screamed. You don't fucking know.

He walks across the now snow-choked roads. A lone bus slows to a stop and opens for a single passenger getting off. He walks on as the door slides closed behind him

They rode the bus home in silence. He refused to make eye contact, not knowing how she felt.

He looks up at the gray office building looming above him. He passes through the doors and goes up the stairs.

She tugged at his arm, begged him not to make a scene, but he wouldn't listen. His hand blindly searched through the desk, scattering used hypodermic needles. He found the stapler, and flung it at his former employer. Get the fuck out of here, his boss said. Security was coming but he was leaving anyway. He overturned the copier on his way out.

He sits at his old office chair. He runs his fingers along the keyboard but he can't feel the texture. He lifts his head and looks across the rows of empty cubicles.

He kissed her as he passed by her cubicle. She smiled and said good morning. He smiled back, hoping to God she wouldn't see the bulges in his overcoat.

He walks across the atrium which is bathed in the soft orange glow of the streetlamps. He passes through the doors and into the snowy streets.

He cried silently while she slept. He rubbed his arm as he placed the needle back into the trash can. He covered the needle with the condom so she wouldn't notice.

The moon hangs overhead as he sits on a park bench, watching the windswept trees shake the snow off their branches.

I promise, he said, and they kissed passionately. He tossed the needle into the trash can as she unhooked her bra. He'd do it. He'd do anything for her.

Brick walls rise up on either side of him as he navigates through the alleyways while the sky above begins to brighten.

She touched his arm but he couldn't bear to make eye contact. He knew something was wrong, but he was too afraid to admit it.

He watches the owner unlock the cinema door and follows him inside.

She laughed as they watch the movie, but he could tell something was on her mind. He could see it in her eyes in the rare moments she wasn't laughing.

He stares at the blank screen as the first customers file into the rows. The projection turns on and he rises to leave.

He came home with his first pay check in his hand. She squealed with glee as he wrapped her in his arms. Let's go see something, he says.

He stands outside the cinema. People walk by, bracing themselves against the cold.

He stared blankly at the computer monitor. Goddamn, it was so hard to focus. He lay his head in his arms. So goddamn hard. He took a deep breath, lifted his head back up, and kept typing. Do it, he told himself. Do it for her.

The midday sun casts a blinding light on the snow as he makes his way through the crowded streets.

He nervously clutched his résumé as he walked down the aisle. She looked up from her cubicle and gaped at him in surprise. He couldn't blame her. It was the first time either of them had seen him wearing a tie.

He stands in the center of the alleyway, watching the all-too-familiar face strike a deal with another customer. His eyes follow the needle as it passes between hands.

Wiping vomit from his mouth, he weakly pushed himself off the bathroom floor and looked at his reflection in the mirror. He hated himself. He hated every inch of himself.

The sky reddens and the familiar face leaves for parts unknown. He lingers a while longer, watching the place where he had stood so many times.

He frantically pawed through his belongings, looking for just one small dose, but he couldn't find it. Shaking, he searched the room, trying to contain his panic, but he still couldn't find anything. He was shivering like crazy; he felt like he was going to die. Then his eyes fell on her wallet, which was lying on the nightstand.

He steps out of the alleyway and watches the sun fall below the skyline.

He crumbled up the paper and tossed it into the wastebasket; he couldn't take it anymore. Hours upon hours and the words wouldn't come. He drew absent-minded circles along the edge of his stationery. In frustration, he reached for the needle.

Out of the corner of his eye he sees another bus turn a distant corner and disappear down the street. He slowly follows after it.

He laid his head between his knees. The mail was scattered around him: nothing but bills and advertisements. Not even a rejection slip. She put his arms around him. What are you going to do now, she asked. Try again, he replied.

The streetlights flick on as he walks across the road, casting no shadow.

She put the manuscript down. He wasn't sure, but he thought he saw a tear in her eye. It's beautiful, she said.

Apartment complexes give way to suburbs as he walks along the side of the road. He sees a deer cross the street and disappear into the forest.

You've been working so hard, she said as she gently stroked his hair. Just take an hour off. No, he said, rubbing sleep from his eyes. I'm so close, I can't stop now.

A bus passes him, speeding into the darkness. He's going the right way.

He stared out the window at the shining midday sun. He wondered when she would be back. He shot up before finishing the chapter.

A river begins to wind alongside the road. He follows them both until they cross at the bridge.

He opened up the envelope. Another fifty dollars and the story would show up in the magazine next week. It's good, he thought. But he could do so much more.

He pauses as he crosses the bridge. Leaning over the railing, he stares at the moon's reflection in the water.

He watched her as she slept. She's so beautiful.

He stays there for a long time, watching the moon warp and ripple on the river. Slowly, he pushes himself off the rail and continues walking.

He put down the last of the boxes and began to unpack. He was taking out the sheets when he heard her call to him from the bedroom. He dropped the sheets and went to her, making love on the bare mattress.

Snow begins to fall again as he walks along the side of the road, the suburbs becoming sparser.

He walked through the apartment with awe. A bedroom, a bathroom, even a kitchen. He turned to her. It's perfect, he said. She smiled. I know, she said.

He passes the last house as the suburbs give way to snow-covered fields. A lone light shines in a window, then goes off.

He shot up, but he wasn't satisfied. It's not enough, he thought. Make it last, he told himself. Make it last until the magazine gets back to you. Do it for her.

He sees the last of the road before the snow blankets it entirely. It is only by road signs that he knows he is still on the highway.

He wrote furiously into the night, and by morning he had four more finished stories. He copied them and sent them to every magazine he knew. Now all he had to do was wait.

The snow flurries settle, and in the distance he sees a white light. He's moving slower than ever, but still toward the light.

His heart skipped a beat as her words swirled in his brain. Together. Together. He looked into her eyes and they stared at each other for God knows how long. Finally, he kissed her. Yes, he said. Yes.

Slowly he sees buildings rise out of the horizon, and a metal fence gradually comes into view.

They snuggled together on her couch as he ran his hands through her hair. I love you, he heard. He looked down at her. What, he said. She looked up at him, and he began to cry. He held her tightly to his chest. I love you, he whispered. I love you.

His hands wrap around the chain links as he looks inside. Neat rows of buses stand illuminated by the white light.

He took the needle out of his arm. He put on his overcoat, picked up his rose, and walked out the door.

The gateway hung open only a few inches, but that was enough for him. He squeezes through into the depot.

She laid her head on his shoulder and he put his arm around her waist. All is right with the world.

He slows to almost to a stop as he approaches the rows of buses, but still he moves.

She leans in and kisses him. For a moment he's frozen. Then he returns the favor.

He walks beside the buses, looking at the numbers on the side, looking for the right one.

I'd like to see you again, she said.

B204. He stops and stares at it, almost expecting it to disappear before his eyes.

The phone picked up. He heard her voice on the other line. He tried to disguise the nervousness in his own.

He wedges his fingers in the door. He slowly pries it open.

He took a deep breath as the dosage coursed through his veins. As he closed his eyes, he saw her face.

He steps onto the bus. The first specks of gray dawn scatter across the snow-covered terrain and through the icy bus windows. He walks down the aisle, his arms dragging along the back of every seat. He reaches the end. He sits down, closes his eyes, and remembers.

Rain lashed against the pavement and flooded into the gutters as he held his arms up against the onslaught, splashing through the streets. In the distance, he saw a bus slowing to a stop. Wait, he cried out, sprinting towards the bus. The bus waited until he got on, and then rolled into motion down the street. Rain padded silently against the window as he slowly made his way to the back. Sitting down, he took off his coat and twisted out the water.

The bus slowed again to a stop. The door slid open and she stepped on. He watched her as she pulled her rain-drenched hair behind her and sat down in the first empty seat she could find.

His stop was coming up. The bus slowed down, waited, and then sped up again. He stood up and slowly walked down the aisle, his heart thumping like mad. He reached her seat, and she looked up at him. Hi, he said. She smiled. Hi.

No. A tear slides down his face. No. Don't let this happen to her. Please God, don't let this happen to her.

The bus slowed to a stop again, the door slid open, and she stepped on. He watched her as she pulled her rain-drenched hair behind her and sat down in the first empty seat she could find.

His stop was coming up. God, he's tired. The bus slowed down, he picked up his coat, and walked down the aisle. He brushed against her shoulder as he passed by. Sorry, they both said, and their eyes met for a moment. He looked away, and stepped off the bus. The door slid closed, and he watched as the bus sped away into the rain. Who was that girl, he wondered.

Andrew Gordon

"Who are you?"

"I am King Thula's Guardian."

The swordsman does not ask who King Thula is. This is fortunate, for I could not answer, even to tell what little I know. My memories of King Thula are almost as distant as those of my being a man in his service, of the time before he filled me with his magic. Before he set me here, in this dark place, to guard his great treasure: the Mirror Of Knowing. There was a time when Thula would come to look gaze at Mirror, to bathe in its spectral glow and see whatever he wished. He would not speak to me, of course, save to utter the command word which compelled me to stand aside; nevertheless, his company was a welcome break from the monotony of standing guard. Once he saw a great army, chanting and crashing their swords against their shields. There seemed no end to them. King Thula never returned after that. But, after infinities of silence, the treasure hunters came, probing the deep, dark places of Thula's kingdom for his legendary artifacts. Their bodies are strewn about me; fourteen of them, all dusty and rotted now.

"I seek the Mirror, Guardian." This newest swordsman raises his weapon, as if that will make me stand aside. He can clearly see the Mirror in the chamber behind me, giving off its faint, greenish glow. I have come to detest that glow.

"You may not take the Mirror," I reply. I am compelled to say this; the magic talks and fights, my body merely a vessel for it. I am eternally replenished by it, my armor eternally strong, my will eternally subjugated.

"You must," the magic continues through my mouth, "enter into combat with me, and either defeat me or break yourself."

As the magic talks, I am free to look around the cavern at the fourteen men who have heard me speak these words before. Some who thought they could defeat me. Some who thought the key lay in allowing me to break them. All wrong.

The swordsman considers what I have said, and slowly nods. Then, without warning, he lunges at me, his sword driving determinedly towards my heart. I parry with my own blade, though I do not wish to. I hope, desperately, for him to defeat me, and in so doing release me. Often have I recited King Thula's incantation myself, using the Mirror to see the world. The cities that bloomed after the destruction of Thula's castle. The great lakes gilded be the sunsets which turn their waters deep gold. The forests that wane as the cities grow. The visions brought joy for many centuries, but eventually began to taunt me. Dearly have I longed to walk in those forests, to feel the breezes I have seen shake the leaves. Oh, to be free of the Mirror! Maybe my eventual loss will free me, and I will finally be able to walk the world as a man. Or maybe I will be destroyed. Neither is an unpleasant prospect after such a stretch of time as I have endured.

The swordsman aims low. I counter him expertly, and just as expertly he dodges my attack. I have no say in any of this; had I, I would set down my blade. My body is not weary; it is eternally young and strong. Yet my mind aches. I silently urge him to win the day, as I have urged before.

The swordsman feints to the left, I move to counter. Swiftly, he leaps to the right, and flings his sword into the chamber behind me.

I hear the Mirror of Knowing shatter.

I feel the magic vanish in an instant. The faint green glow is gone. The shock sends me to my knees.

"None shall have my Mirror," I remember Thula saying, back when I was a man. "They shall be slain by my warrior, or they shall destroy their prize and live. None shall have it."

I hear laughter. I feel it. I am laughing. I control myself.

Freedom!

Phlegmatic/Rational: Ruined Art

Kathy Benjamin

Don't let the rational bit up there fool you. A quick Google search said that we phlegmatics are unemotional, passive-aggressive and lazy. This is probably why I'm writing this intro at the last minute. And probably why I got all my information from a two minute Google search. Apparently we don't like to tell people our true feelings because that could lead to an argument and someone getting hurt. It's much better for us all to be calm, slow moving, and stagnant just like the bodily fluid Hippocrates named us after. Thanks by the way, being associated with phlegm is in no way insulting, Mr. Ancient Doctor, sir.

We understand that a previous intro called the integrity of the phlegmatic humor into question. It may have accused us of being unable to effectively film Saving Private Ryan. That's cool though; other than that the Sanguine intro was really great, even if I did fall asleep reading it. But no, great job you crazy outgoing, spontaneous person. I bet you're really fun to hang out with for an hour or two before you become unbearable. Feel free to call us when there is an emergency you need help with.

See, the fact that we are so unmoved by exterior forces and emotional stimuli, that's why we phlegmatics make great soldiers and nurses and doctors and all the other people who will save your lives one day. We remain calm. Sure we might passive-aggressively insult you while shoving your intestines back in your body but really Sanguine, did you have to jump off that cliff into the ocean, "just to see what would happen"? We're the shrinks who keep the Melancholy stable; ingesting with our level minds their most horrific problems without even the twitch of an eyelid. And we're always there to punch the Idealists in the face when it is the only rational thing left to do to get them to just shut up.

My editors told me I am supposed to mention that the Hulk is the opposite of a phlegmatic. I didn't think that was such a great insight but it's cool, whatever, just doing what I am told. So yeah readers, large green men who smash things when they are angry are surprisingly not laid back and calm. Don't say this book didn't teach you anything.

One of the three websites I managed to look at before I stopped caring (you're here for the stories and the charity, not the bullshit intros. I know that, you know that, let's not insult one another) said, and I quote:

"The world may never know all the brilliant thoughts, great books, spectacular works of art, or wonderful ministries that have been buried with the Phlegmatic."

Basically we are really lazy. And that statement is certainly true in this case. You will never know how awesome the rest of this intro could have been. Our editors said they were supposed to be 600 words long but I'm pretty over it so I'm just going to

* * * *

Ed. Note: We apologize for the unprofessionalism of the author of this piece. She was reprimanded at length during which she started humming the theme from Cool Runnings and when we finished yelling told us that we "Looked a lot less fat" than the last time she had seen us.

Kathy Benjamin

She bit down on her lip, staring ahead in intense concentration. This was it. She needed to make absolutely sure she made the right choice. Anyone watching would assume that this was the most important decision that she had ever made in her life. And they would be right.

It was now or never. She took a deep breath and reached out in front of her. Hands full, she turned to the man beside her.

"Okay," she said, "These two."

"Honey," her father said patiently, "I said only one."

"No." The girl was insistent as only a toddler could be. "No. The horsey and the ducky. Horsey plays music!"

Her father sighed. "Fine, but only because we have to get back to the hospital and I don't have time to argue with you right now."

The girl smiled.

* * * *

At the hospital, her father led her down crowded corridors until they came to a big glass window. The girl was jumping up and down excitedly, the stuffed horse and duck grasped tightly in her tiny hands. Her father picked her up to show her the room on the other side.

"There she is, sweetie. There's your little sister."

The girl thrust the stuffed horse and duck up against the glass, proudly displaying her gifts to the baby that had occupied every thought and dominated every conversation for a third of her short life. Despite the girl's attempts to draw her attention, the baby remained selfishly asleep, uninterested in the toys that her big sister had so recently poured her heart and soul into selecting.

This was not the way that it was supposed to go. She scowled as her father put her down.

"Well, what do you think? Isn't she beautiful?"

"I don't like her."

"What, why not?"

"She won't wake up."

* * * *

"Oh my GOD, you are so annoying."

Upstairs, a door slammed shut before being quickly wrenched back open.

"SHUT UP. It's your fucking fault!"

"Girls!" The voice from below was both authoritative and very, very weary. "Stop it! Stop yelling right now!"

"But Mom, she-"

"I don't care. Both of you go to your rooms. Just go to bed. I am sick of your arguing."

The teenagers exchanged glares as they stalked to their respective bedrooms.

"I swear, sometimes I wish I were an only child."

"Oh, shut up bitch."

The elder girl closed the door behind her. She stomped loudly across the room to her bed and punched the pillow a few times for good measure. Throwing herself down on her back, she stared at the ceiling for what could have been minutes or hours. Finally, she rolled onto her side and closed her eyes.

Through the wall she heard the muffled strains of a cheap music box.

* * * *

"You are not bringing these."

The girl looked up from the box she was packing.

"Um, why not?"

"Look at them. They're gross. The duck is missing half its beak, the music box in the horse sounds like a dying cat, and no amount of washing will ever get them clean. Your roommate is going to wonder about you if you bring these."

The girl scowled, accentuating the uncanny resemblance to her older sister. As she opened her mouth to respond, her cellphone vibrated in her pocket. She flipped it open.

"What, I'm busy."

"Okay, fine, I won't wish you luck on your first day at college then."

"It's Fresher's Week. I hardly need luck."

"Loser. Try not to sleep with the whole football team, alright?"

"Oh, very funny. Dork."

"Okay, I have to run. Good luck and I love you."

"Love you, too. Bye."

She hung up the phone and turned to her mother.

"I'm taking them."

S Peter Davis

Bye bye baby, don't be long,

I worry about you, while you're gone

One time, when I was a little younger, I imagined being hungover on the day of Armageddon. Head throbbing with a pressure like my brain had swollen, mouth cotton-dry and eyes heavy, I would stare outside as the sky came over deep red, angels and beasts pouring forth with their trumpets and seals. I imagined thinking Man, I can't deal with this shit. Not today.

As it turns out, I was hungover in the end, but it didn't happen the way that I imagined it would. Things rarely do. And I still can't really say if this is the end or just something strange and new like a hidden track on a CD.

Yeah. That's a good one. Hidden-track-world, that's where we are. I'll tell Chantelle that one. She won't find it amusing.

We live on the beach now. I don't know why. Her idea. I guess we don't like the idea of living in buildings very much. Buildings are lonely places, solitary boxes standing around holding only the memory of habitation. That's not a memory we really want to hold onto. At least the beach seems alive. The rhythm of the tides continues, modestly, although the ocean doesn't churn anymore. I don't know why.

Okay. My name is Jacob Stack. I worked for the Suresafe company on the Gold Coast. Suresafe killed microbes. I worked in the advertising department that spread the word about Suresafe to tens of millions of homes across Australia. We did a good job. Chantelle was my boss' PA and I suppose she did a good job too. How amusing that we define ourselves by our occupations. How do we define ourselves now? I have no idea. We're unique, now, in a kind of way I never envisaged.

The world is covered in microbes. They are the true dominant life form, all five million trillion trillion of them. That's a statistic I heard once. I don't know what the statistic is now, but I have a feeling it's dramatically changed. The world is very difficult to describe now. I like to imagine that if you were a microbe you'd never feel alone, in fact loneliness is probably not a concept that you would be able to imagine because there are so many of you. If there were a hundred people living in your house, lying on the carpet, under the bed, in the closet, hanging off the couch, a constant flow of traffic down the hall, you wouldn't be able to imagine loneliness either.

I feel very alone now.

I've always felt very alone, though, and I think that's where the alcohol came into it. Alcohol and television, and I guess, cigarettes. The television because for some reason it gives you a sense of company, some sense of being in the world. When you're drunk, it's easier to believe the people in your television are in your world. Smoking is a social activity, and when you smoke, it's easier to believe that you're in their world. It's a collaboration of illusions that you build together. I heard that once.

The mornings are horrid, though. I think that's what got through to me in the end. You wake up hard, with a headache, trembles, eyes retreating in their sockets. Your throat is scrubbed raw by the hot smoke of the twenty cigarettes you sucked down. The television is dead after it woke you in the night and you angrily, and still half-drunk, flicked it off from the remote. So you're alone again in the heat of the Summer morning, or sometime in the afternoon if you didn't have an alarm on, and somehow you're hard alone, more alone than you can ever remember being, and all you want to do is flick that television on, crack open a beer, thumb-flick your lighter and ignite a smooth Winfield. Daytime television is worse, though. American talk shows aren't in your world as much as the familiar larrikin face of Rove or a local newsreader or the cast of Neighbours.

Jacob Stack's method of giving up alcohol and cigarettes and television. Patent pending. There's a complex interrelationship between the three. The cigarettes have to go first. You'd think it's the alcohol, but it isn't. The thing is, it's easy to stay sober for a few days at a time, it might even feel as though you've really kicked the grog. You think you're going to need the cigarettes to make it through. But the cigarettes make you idle. The cigarettes say downtime, they say television time, and so you sit in front of the television night after night with your cigarettes, tragically sober, and it isn't long before you start to think this would be more fun with some beer.

No. The cigarettes go first. That's very hard because the alcohol makes you really, really want to smoke. The television wants you to smoke. But without the smokes, it's easier to say no to the television. You can write again, or paint, or read. You can produce. That's what kills the alcohol. The loneliness, well, that comes back.

Obviously, there's no television in this world. Strangely, the alcohol and the cigarettes don't work anymore either. Oh yes, I have tried. There's plenty of beer lying around, but it's about as intoxicating as apple juice. The cigarettes don't burn properly, and what little comes out of them is too rancid to inhale. We're not supposed to be in this world, and I don't think the world wants us to try to be any more in it than we are.

Chantelle never liked me and doesn't like me still. That's the real kicker. It's not that I ever did anything to her, it's just that we're two very different people and under normal circumstances there wouldn't be any reason for us to have to try to get along. These aren't normal circumstances.

I never actually spoke to her at work and never heard her speak. I never saw her smile, either, and I used to refer to her as Sad-Girl. She was just sort of there, I'd pass her in the hall and sometimes I would smile at her. You know, that thing you do with strangers that isn't really a smile, you just kind of tighten your cheeks, because it would be weird to really smile but yet weirder to do nothing. Jokingly I call it the half-smile of mutual benevolence. She never did that. That was always strange. She'd just catch your eye and then look away and that was that. Sad-Girl, I decided, was a less inflammatory nickname to use than Bitch.

Chantelle wasn't a smoker and she wasn't a drinker, but I know now that she's a crier, and I see that she really was Sad-Girl all along, not really Bitch. She sobs a lot and I leave her alone because I know there's nobody in the world she's less interested in being stuck with. She could leave me any time she wants, though, and she never does. I don't think that's something either of us would ever be strong enough to do, to sever that one last connection to our species.

The night before this happened, I got drunk, in front of the television, with a pack of cigarettes. I don't know why I did it. I hadn't done that in about a year. I think it was Chantelle. We were waiting for a bus. We work different hours, so I never saw her outside of the office, but on this one solitary occasion, through whatever circumstances, I was there, and she was there, and we sat in silence next to each other for something like fifteen minutes. I suppose I could have struck up a conversation, but I just sat, and she did the same, and suddenly I felt absolutely furious with her. I could ignore my invisibility, you see, if I tried. People would smile and make small talk and I could pretend I mattered, but not now. Not with this girl sitting here in her own head. We were microbes. Her loneliness reflected my loneliness, and for fifteen minutes there was nothing more conspicuous.

On my way home, I picked up twelve full-strength beers and a pack of Winnie Reds. I used to need that many. That night, eight beers and ten smokes put me on my arse, and gave me the worst hangover I could ever remember. I guess I didn't realize how well the body adapts to poison, or how easily it forgets. The alarm was like a vice closing on my skull. The headache followed. The heaviness of it. When I stumbled into the shower it felt like a marathon. I was a dead man, and outside, the sky was as red as the world behind my eyelids.

I don't know if the dust storm had anything to do with what happened. It could just be a coincidence. They said it stirred up around Sydney and drifted north from there, some odd combination of winds that shaved the red topsoil off the parched outback and sent it airborne toward civilization. When I stumbled out into it I actually thought my session of vice had damaged me somehow, that I was bleeding into my retinas, or I'd scrambled my visual cortex or something. I don't know if that's possible. That's not what happened, though, as I realized when it assaulted my sense of smell with the same dry odor of a dusty bookshelf. Brisbane was under a cloud, and it only got thicker as the train rolled south and the buildings and people vanished into a blood haze.

I'd woken up with a song playing weakly in my head. I don't know where I'd heard it, but the lyrics dripped along as I half-slept in my seedy daze and watched the dust swallow the world. Bye bye baby, don't be long. I worry about you, while you're gone. My dry, contracted throat whistled as I breathed. Bye bye baby, don't be long.

The top floors of the Suresafe building had disappeared into the red cloud and it was strange to look up and see the sky dressed in a wooly blanket. Most of my colleagues were staring out the window when I arrived at the office, and the only thing they could see was an orange blot. I made myself a very strong coffee.

"Beautiful day," said Tom, our bald copyright lawyer, as I backed off from the espresso machine. Caffeine is a poor substitute for alcohol, but it does put you just a little bit back into the world, and you never hear of anyone dying from caffeinated-liver disease. I told Tom, yes, it was a beautiful day. Tom's was a joke, mine was sarcasm, but I hope indistinguishable. Tom left the break room, and he held the door open for Chantelle as she entered.

Sad-Girl didn't smile at me. I didn't smile at her. We were alone together again, as we would be forever, and I didn't know how to feel about it. This horrid non-interaction that had driven me back into the warm, choking arms of forgotten vices. I wasn't about to let that happen again, the hangover that still lingered reminded me of my folly. So I got the hell out of there, I just turned tail and walked away from her and her maddening silence, and everyone was gone. It was as simple as that.

At first, of course, I thought there was a meeting I'd forgotten. The office was as silent as a graveyard, like the early morning hours before anyone files in, and I hurried to the meeting room with my coffee in hand, hoping that I wouldn't conspicuously walk in during the manager's opening line.

The meeting room was empty too. And before I had time to arrange my thoughts, the lights blinked out around me, as though the power had failed, anticlimactically. There I stood, in the silence and the dark, like awakening sober from a lucid dream.

Not entirely alone, however. I heard Chantelle speak for the first time from the doorway to the

break room. Her voice was louder than I'd imagined it. I'd imagined a meek creature.

"What's happening?"

"I guess—" I began, and stopped. My head was spinning a little from the hangover and I had that sense of being just an inch outside of my body, but on top of my rationalizations I knew that there was something very wrong with this world, a world that hadn't been wrong just a moment ago. I think I was depressed even before the reality hit. I continued, "I guess there was an evacuation. Maybe the dust storm..."

"The dust storm," she replied, relieved as though this made any sense. But even the dust was wrong. I could see it now, the haze through the windows still obscured the view, but it was white as the driven snow. It was white as nothing.

"I didn't hear the alarm," Chantelle continued. She said it that way as though I had heard one. Of course, if I had, I wouldn't be standing there. But I think the mind has some kind of defense mechanism to guard us against reality; at least, when understanding of the world interferes with our ability to cope with it. I think there's a dissonance, a kind of buffer zone, between ourselves and our naked reality. You can hear the statistics about all those microbes crawling over every surface of the world like a living blanket, and you might not doubt the science, but even so, I don't think anyone really believes in it in the way that we believe in the bottle of beer in front of us or the cigarette pursed between our lips. Reality - true, bare reality - is really a kind of religion. You can believe in it or not, but you can't really see it. And if you saw it, if you saw that squirming sheet of microbes, I think you would go quite insane. That's why we invent a world for ourselves and spend our lives trying to crawl inside that world. And now, standing in that dark office with the wind and the white haze blowing outside, I started to think I had heard an alarm. Hadn't I? I might have even heard the shuffling sound of my colleagues filing out, might have seen the fire warden in her shiny hard-hat guiding everybody calmly through the written procedures.

Sure. That's what happened. She believed it, her mind had already done that dance, and her belief corroborated mine. I was hung over, the caffeine not yet working through my veins, and I don't think I could have managed the stress of any consideration greater than whether we should be using the elevators or the escape stairs.

The stairs, I supposed. That was procedure. That was orthodox.

Chantelle didn't interact with me again. Satisfied in her own way, she opened the exit door and disappeared down the stairwell. I followed. For thirteen floors our feet spoke together in a percussion symphony, her heels clicking and my leather shoes clopping. Clop(click)-clop-clop(click-click)-clop clop-(click). The sound, the chaotic rhythm of it, kept my focus away from the necessary wondering that the situation demanded of the rational mind – questions like why was this stairwell so empty? To evacuate a building of this size...

When I was a young boy, I can recall one morning when my single mother, hurried and preoccupied by the tasks of motherhood, misread the clock and prepared me for school a full hour early. Given the complete trust that children have for their parents, I didn't realize her mistake. We both thought that I was going to be late, so we threw my uniform together, packed my lunch, and barreled out the door.

When I arrived at school at what I thought was a quarter past eight, I naturally misinterpreted the silence of the playground to mean that I was late for class. I rushed past the empty grounds, the still swing set and silent slide, dead leaves blowing in the unhindered breeze, to find my classroom dark and empty. And the one beside that, and the one beside that.

The mind of a child, of course, is even less equipped to cope with the presence of unexplainable mystery. Children don't have the ability to rationalize away the unexplained with spurious answers. So I just walked around from room to room, building to building, expecting that eventually this mystery would answer itself as all mysteries do. And of course, given half an hour, when the first children began to arrive, the mystery did answer itself.

This time I'm not so lucky. I still reserve this lingering expectation, I suppose, that eventually this answer, too, will present itself. One day, the population of the world will just spring out from around a corner and their long absence will be explained in a way that is as obvious as misreading a clock. Chantelle, I think, is languishing in a later stage of acceptance. I can tell this because of how often she cries. I don't know what the stages are. I don't think that Hidden-track-world has a twelve step program.

Jacob Stack's method for dealing with the spontaneous disappearance of life from the surface of the Earth. Work in progress. First you have to remember how to live. You don't really appreciate how society coddles you, incubates you, until society is gone. You can't just dial for a pizza. It turns out that we're so dependent on our society that the most difficult thing is just figuring out which plants are edible and which aren't.

The fact that there are plants, oddly enough, is one of our mysteries. I've dedicated more thought to that problem than it deserves. Maybe it's because they're not conscious like we are, not autonomous, there's something that we feel that they don't. Maybe beneath their basic life functions they're just a little bit closer to the same kind of stuff as the rocks and the clouds. Or maybe this world just looks upon them as something more worthy to exist.

See, it isn't just the people who have gone away. This is no Eden, no paradise of nature untouched by the hand of Man. One of the first things I noticed when Chantelle and I stepped out of that building and onto the street was that the nature of that silence was unlike anything I'd ever heard. Behind the awareness of our conscious mind we take in the cacophony of the living world, the birds and the insects and the scurrying of tiny feet all around us. We don't really hear that until it falls silent, and then we hear it louder than anything we've ever heard. It's then that you have to speak just to make sure you haven't gone deaf.

"Where is everyone?"

I don't know why, but I expected Chantelle to answer that. I became close to furious when she didn't. My breath was shallow, ragged, and I thought for a few moments that I was going to belt her if she didn't tell me what the fuck happened. The Gold Coast was always a flurry of people and gliding seabirds squawking questions at each other. Now there was only this cloud of white dust, the only sign of life in this sleeping world. Like it had swallowed everything beyond merely obscuring it. The living universe, as we knew it, was gone. Bye bye baby, don't be long.

I can't remember if Sad-Girl said anything then. I think she might have. Maybe she just made a sound that, by coincidence or by intent, I didn't understand. My mind ached, stretched far and wide for a rational explanation that would encompass the enormity of this. I recalled government warnings about biological attacks out of the middle east, about duct tape and gas masks, and my heart retched and turned over. Everyone was dead, I thought, just like that. Everyone is dead, my parents are dead, my friends and colleagues are dead. It didn't occur to me to wonder why we were spared. It didn't occur to me that there were no bodies.

At a time like this - as though there are times like this, as though this is something that happens - you just walk. You go about your day, you basically throw the whole world into the Too Hard basket and wait frustratedly for this to pass. We didn't have anywhere to go and we didn't communicate this to each other. I still wasn't a part of Chantelle's world. This was a different occasion, though. We weren't just waiting for a late bus. I think that we shared this concept that to speak about the situation would make it real. That was the greatest taboo, right then.

I remember the moment that Chantelle decided to bring me into her world. She turned and looked at me with this horrific expression of despair, looked to me for answers I didn't have. There was realization there. But still she said nothing, I said nothing, and really, what is there to say? Where do we begin? Oddly enough, even the social convention of conversation seemed fickle now. Our shared experience was communication enough. Before speech, there was only expression, an understanding that existed almost on the level of the psychic. The vast masses tended to drown that out, but two is a magic number. Two is a powerful number. Lovers know that already.

I've never been socially competent. People confuse me, with their games. I don't know how to comfort Chantelle, I don't even know if I want to. She wouldn't do that for me and I don't blame her. She already comforts me, in some strange way. My comfort is in the knowledge that I'm finally in somebody's world, for better or for worse. Maybe that sounds parasitic.

We did work together, Sad-Girl and I, for those first few days. If only for our own survival. To see if there was any survival to be had. We even talked a little, for what that was worth. Small talk seems a lot more pointless, now. I mean, more than usual. In the movies, people just connect in these situations. In the movies, our ice would have melted. We'd have shared some deep and meaningful conversation, perhaps even fallen in love by now. I'd know about her family, her aspirations and failures. She'd know about mine. I wouldn't mind that. Anything but that ceaseless crying.

We looked for the missing world. We did. As though we expected to find it hiding in the supermarket. As though everyone had gone out to buy eggs. Why not? Occam's razor. The simplest explanation was the correct one. What's the simplest explanation this time? Some vast, coordinated vacation? We missed that memo, Sad-Girl and I. Bye bye baby, don't be long. We're getting very, very worried now.

Chantelle and I did not find the world in the supermarket aisles, but we did find food. Everything they left behind. The freezers were thawing, the refrigerators and hot bars dead and slowly returning to room temperature. Equilibrium. I didn't realize I was hungry until I saw the row of cooling meat pies lying dormant behind the bakery window. Funny how the residue of social contract lingered with me - I just stared at them, wishing for the attendant. It's not like I had some anguish about stealing. The thought simply didn't occur to me. It wasn't procedure. It wasn't orthodox. The pies were cold by the time I came back for them, seven hours later. Indeed, as the world faded, I knew they would never be warm again.

I don't think it would have made much difference, though. Cold or warm, they were completely hollow. Food doesn't have much of a taste anymore, we've found. It's not just the cigarettes that fail to satisfy. Even as the processed food spoiled (but it didn't rot, it never rots and it never smells) the fruit from the trees and the roots from the earth tasted empty, like they were molded by a forgetful god from vague and unsubstantial memories. We don't get to enjoy our time here in Hidden-track-world. That isn't part of the plan. The bounty of the earth is for those still in the world.

Still, the beach was ours. For what little it was worth, the tourist strip with its shops and cafes, the towering offices, and the most beautiful stretch of coastline in Australia, it was our playground. I'm sure many have dreamed about having this to themselves, wished that the whole rotten world would just fly away with all their greed and wars and opinions. I don't think anybody really knows what they ask. The dust storm cleared on the first day, with no wind to carry it. The waves roll, from the tides I suppose, but they do not churn. We sit and watch it sometimes, but the ocean doesn't say anything to us but shit, I dunno. I'm an ocean.

I really want a cigarette. If the people came back, I think I'd kill them again for some real tobacco. It would give the air some fucking sustenance. I know that's counter-intuitive. But the air here is like hospital air. Sterile, like you could choke to death in it.

I've lost count of the days but I think it was around the ninth day when Sad-Girl tried to leave me, and that was the first time in a while I've thought of her as Bitch. Usually we don't talk, not really, but we mutually exist like an old married couple after the fire has long died. We ration tasks. There aren't many. I gather food, she gathers food, I find water, she finds water. Water is easy, there are bottles of it all over the tourist strip, and though it tastes like the distilled water my mother used to pour into her steam iron, it never tasted of much to begin with, and it never spoils. Food is more difficult. Sometimes we eat the canned stuff, the long-life stuff, and sometimes we go au naturale and eat the fruit from the trees. I hesitate to say that it's fresh. I don't understand the meaning of that word anymore.

The ninth day, if that's what it was, was also the day of the crater. It was Chantelle's turn to find us some food, and she left, as usual, without fanfare. I didn't think at the time that there was anything unusual about her mood. It did occur to me that she was thinner. Shit, we both were. Running low on steam as we settled into the motions. It was taking its time to happen, but we're fading out of the world just as the afterimage from society's bustle faded. Equilibrium, I suppose. Bye bye baby.

She was gone for a long time. I didn't register exactly how long. I sat on the beach and wrote in a notebook I'd liberated from the newsagent. I write silly things, nonsense-things, anything to keep myself in the world, such as it was. It's funny, I always wanted to be a writer. The alcohol and the cigarettes and that infernal television put a stop to all that, and now the same event that took them away from me has rendered my hobby pointless. Chantelle won't read my work. I don't think I want her to. I'm writing for a void, now, for the God that abandoned us. Just as I'm writing this memoir—for you, oh non-existent world. I worry about you, while you're gone.

My hunger and the coldness of impending dusk finally snapped me back into awareness. It had been morning when she had left me. I felt that hard loneliness then, thick and heavy. Had she vanished too? Had the world stolen away my final connection to the memory of humanity? I had to know. Chantelle didn't like me (and I didn't like her much either while we're making confessions), but if she'd been swallowed by this infernal reality then I thought I would wade out into that dead ocean and just swim until it took me too. Just swim and swim.

I went to search for her, and that's when I found it. The crater. It took me out of my panic for a moment because it was different, it was new, it was change. It was the first thing that had changed since the world went away. The street buckled in an immense circular arc, from the entrance of the beach out to the train station, alongside the tourist strip and the beachfront properties along the northern shoreline. The land outside of it was untouched, but right there in an area of maybe a hundred meters from edge to edge, everything was flattened. The remains of what was once an abandoned car lay in the centre of the phenomenon, crushed into a pancake of metal like you see in a wrecking yard. Street signs were bent at the base and lay flat across the ground. Other things were unidentifiable, pounded into formless debris. As I ran my eyes over it, I realized I was scared of it. It was change, proof that the world might not be dead, and I was scared of it. Maybe I deserve to be here, if I can't accept life's small graces.

I walked the circumference as I attempted to make room in my mind for this. In my lunacy I wondered if I could make friends with it. A dead hole somehow alive by virtue of what it represented. I liked that part of this city had been smashed in the night. I wanted to smash it, too, if only to prove my body schema. If you're going to end humanity then do it right, finish the job, smash up these streets, topple these buildings, stamp it all into the ground it grew out of.

On the edge of the crater, the far side from the beach; I saw it then, the supermarket where Chantelle had gone for our food, but I knew she hadn't made it that far. Next door to it was a pharmacy, and the automatic doors that no longer worked had been forced open. I heard her crying. She always cried. But this was different, this was bawling, a newborn sadness. I went to her and I found her just inside, on her knees amidst a chaos of discarded packaging.

There were pills on the ground. I didn't know what they were, at first, and I thought they looked like those Styrofoam balls they use for delicate packaging. But then I saw the little cylindrical bottles with their sterile white labeling and I knew. I knew what she had done.

"What the fuck is wrong with you!?" I screamed, "You're going to do it like this? You're going to leave me here alone with this shit? Does it make you happy to think of me wandering around by myself out here, going slowly insane while you take the easy way out?"

"I don't care," she simply sobbed, "I can't do this anymore. This isn't living, anyway, don't you see that? We haven't been alive for a long time."

I didn't try to help Chantelle. I stood and judged her from the ajar doorway, but I did not take a step toward her. Intuitively I knew what she had come to learn. I'd been calling into the defunct bottle shops along the nightlife stretch, their floors were littered with the evidence of my visits. I'd taken their whiskey and rum and warm beer and wine, I'd guzzled it like water, held it down and pissed it out. Alcohol didn't work here. Cigarettes likewise. It didn't take much of a leap to realize that you could swallow every pill in this pharmacy, drink every bottle of cough medicine and tonic and hair dye. Close your eyes, bye bye baby, and you wouldn't feel a thing. We'd been taken to this world and in this world we would stay, all exits sealed.

We live on the beach and we wait. I don't know why we settled here, because on the beach it's impossible to pretend the world isn't large. We look out across the calm ocean, extended back to the horizon, and the view is clear. Without the light and the pollution of human society, we can see every inch of the vast cosmos above us. Galaxies in their billions glitter modest in their incomprehensible enormity. I used to wonder if they are every bit as dead as this world. I wondered if these two observers lying together in their beachworld were the only outpost of life in the universe.

I know otherwise now, but I don't think that we will have much time to carve ourselves a niche in this new order of things. I think this world intends to spit us out after all. I don't tell Chantelle about this because I don't know how she'll react. Between you and me, oh non-existent reader, I think she may be warming to me. Or perhaps that's my illusion.

She's losing weight, my Sad-Girl. She'd never been skinny, but her clothing hangs from her bones now like a human coat hanger. I'm looking no better. We're eating, you see, we eat more than we ever did in the living world. After all, there's a whole world supply of food out there, and the taboo of gluttony vanished with the people and the birds. Chantelle is going to work it out sooner or later, if she hasn't already. The booze and cigarettes don't work, nor the pills. Things won't rot. The world was food, you see, that's what motion is. That's what change is. This world is inert, and no matter how much we eat, I can't help but think there wasn't a lot of nutrition in that meal.

There's something else that I haven't told her. It happened last night while I lay in the sand with my notebook, staring up into that unfeeling void above us. I pictured myself swimming out into space and floating out there forever, with only the distant stars for company, knowing that I would never live to meet any of them. Chantelle was asleep beside me, I could hear her rhythmic breathing as Andromeda was eclipsed above me.

I turned my head and I saw it coming out of the city. Rather, the city lay impossibly tiny below its immense form, so small that it probably couldn't even be seen. Some dark beast, only a shadow in the moonlight, its immense proportions inconceivable to me. It slouched slowly on four great legs, each of them more massive than anything humanity had known. Its body was planetary. Its head, if it had one, seemed as far away and untouchable as the moon. There was no sound as it migrated across the dead landscape; I could hear only Chantelle's breathing amidst the motion of this thing below the chorus of the spheres. I knew then as I know now, it was no more aware of us than we were of the microbes that made their universe below our feet.

It ventured out into the ocean, made not so much as a splash, and hesitated not a moment in the cold and the damp. It just kept moving out, leaving the ruins of our world behind it, its benevolent, ignorant mass never turning, never slowing. I watched it all night as she slept. I watched it until it vanished over the horizon through the vastness of the Pacific, and as insane as it sounds, I think I spoke to it as it left us. Or perhaps I said nothing aloud, just sent a thought out lonely into space. Bye bye baby, don't be long, I worry about you, while you're gone.

Roth's Child

My eyes opened and my mouth closed. "I need some water," I coughed.

My bedside nurse hopped out of her chair and purposefully walked toward the sink. Pulling a paper cup off of the stack, she inquired about my state. I didn't say anything, instead fidgeting with the cheap blanket in which I was draped. "You know, you're lucky someone brought you in. I would thank God." I sat silent.

As she approached, she asked if I'd heard her. "I know I'm lucky. God can't take credit for luck, so I'll leave him out of it." She looked at me, vexed, but didn't respond.

I watched the snow laze toward the ground outside of the hospital window, taking sips from my paper cup. The nurse sat back down with her hands on her lap. When I was finished with the water I crumpled the cup and held it firmly in my hand, not wanting to let go. I was used to my time alone ever since the wife had passed away ten years ago. She had struggled with chemotherapy until her lungs were claimed and the cancer decided it was still hungry. It was the last month that I remembered feeling happy, even if I really wasn't all that happy.

I can remember each day of that December, waking and checking if my lovely Lenore had been taken from me in the night. Each day, the temperature of her body dropped a few more degrees and her veins grew more pronounced. I begged her to stop crying on those mornings. I wanted to remember our happy times together, not waiting for her body to strike midnight. "You're tearing up, sir, let me get a tissue." I wiped my cheek.

"I'm fine. Get this trash out of here." I threw the cup in her direction.

She huffed and placed the crumpled cup in the wastebasket next to me. "Do you feel like talking at all? You know, the police are interested in finding out-"

"The police are interested in a lot of things. I'm not talking."

"I don't understand your repeated refusal. All of us here just care."

"I'm not interested in your capacity to understand or care or anything else. Fuck off."

"Sir, it's just strange to find a man collapsed where we did... all beaten up and wounded. Don't you want to see justice?"

"Of course I do. I want justice for what happened to my wife years ago. The world took away the one love I've ever had. Yes, I want the world to suffer and burn for that one. Can you give me that justice? Will talking to the police give me the retribution I so desire? If that will bring back my wife, I'll do it. Otherwise, pound sand. You guys only give a fuck as far as it will get you a paycheck."

She stood up. I could tell I'd struck a nerve, and I smirked slightly. "You know what!? The world isn't here for you. Not everyone's here to serve or fuck you over, so get over yourself you old prick."

"I want more water. Go get it for me." Exasperated, she flung her hands in the air and walked away. "Good girl. See why I don't talk much?"

"I'm just collecting a paycheck, remember?"

"Oh, that's right." I snatched the water from her hands. "Now leave me alone for a few."

With a huff she left the room, slamming the door on her way out. I tried to think back to the day that landed me in this off-white cell. The beginning of winter, but after the first snowfall. I was walking by the bridge... No, on the bridge. There were still so many pieces missing. I remembered that I had something to do, but could not remember much beyond that. My last memory was the beauty of the view. The mist of the falls almost enveloped the bridge, yet I could see the niche in the rock where the water flowed. The river had no beginning and no end. The echo of the drops clashed with the stilled stream... the occasional car passed from behind.

That was all I could remember up until the moment I awoke here, my purpose forgotten. Ripped from one reality into the next. My head sank and I began to tear again. I was unable to hold my emotions this time. Lenore... Lenore can you hear me? I am nothing without you. I've been unable to manage anything in my life since you left. I died the moment you drew your last breath. I heard a rapping at the door. I looked over with my puffy, reddened eyes. "Just... just a moment!"

Murmuring spilled faintly into the room as I wiped away my tears, drawing deep breaths. Somewhat composed, I ordered my visitors to come in. The door opened and my nurse led a duo of police officers inside. "These men say that they've uncovered more evidence near where you were found."

"Right. I thought I told you guys I wasn't concerned with this anymore. Why must my wishes be rejected?"

"Well, sir, we normally wouldn't continue to bother you, but we have made an important discovery. We found a gun about ten yards from where we found your body." The silent officer summoned a revolver in a plastic bag from his coat. "It seems to be the same caliber as the wound in your shoulder." I was in a trance, examining the pistol. "We were hoping this would remind you of something that might help our investigation. This is not a civil matter... attempted murder is very serious to us."

"Ye-yeah... this is starting to refresh my mind a little. May I see it closer?"

The officers exchanged glances. "Yeah, but be careful, there's still ammunition inside. We're thinking the suspect ditched it after shooting you."

The gun was set in my lap and I stared silently. The memories rushed back to my brain like electricity at the moment an appliance is plugged in. I picked it up by the handle and rotated it, examining the dirt and snow. "You know, that night was ten years since my wife was killed by her body. The falls were where we shared our first kiss. That bridge is where I proposed to her and gave her ring. All tears in the storm."

I finished what I had set out to do and coated the cell with my brain.

John Sanders

The apartment was only up four flights of stairs, but it took half an hour for Kurt to get up there. The elevator was down, due to a recent blackout. Those were still somewhat common to that day in that city. It was 2011, and Kurt Schumann was in Baghdad, Iraq.

Kurt waited on the steps of the building's entrance, along with some photojournalist he had never met before. He had spent years trying to get here, poring over records and what little census data he could find, which was little help. Before Kurt and the rest of the Americans came, an Iraqi would either have been born on January 1st, or June 1st, since that's all that mattered to the army and its conscription. He gave up in 2007. He realized he could never find Imran Saddat, he would never be able to settle his mind. He had nothing left, so he leaned into it and let nothing take over his life.

He managed to coast by for the first years after he came back. He had debts to collect, couches to stay on, even rented a room from his brother for a few months. Work was inconsistent, but he didn't need much money. Friends were superficial and petty, to him anyways. His friends didn't have problems, they had artificial luxury, and they had no possible way of knowing what It was like. Kurt lost most of them very fast. Good riddance, he'd say. To him, it was.

Around the same time he ended his search—after learning of Hassa Sadat's name but finding no record of her parents—he quit moving around and took up his parents' basement, where he lived the rest of his life. It would be three years before his mother introduced him to Megan Barnett.

Megan was a journalist, working for some newspaper in some city named Corvallis, Oregon. Kurt's mom was the only one who up to that point knew that he was on some mission to find someone from his time in the war. Megan, apparently in need of a human interest story and apparently not yet sick of war stories, called him one night in 2010. She interviewed him briefly, his lack of will to delve into his experiences or his quest leaving it at just under three minutes. Kurt bored Megan, who found him gruff and unintelligent, and also self-centered, which is why this story is mostly about him, when it should be a story of Hassa Sadat. A little girl who lived in Fallujah.

Kurt brought up Fallujah, which was already more than he had told anyone else.

"There's this little girl, well this little girl's father. I need to find him. I have to speak to him. He's... an old friend," Kurt lied to Megan. "I used to look for him, but I gave up years ago. I've never felt like such a failure." At this point, Kurt shed two tears, and sniffled loudly. He was also somewhat drunk at the time, as drunk as he usually was, at any rate. Kurt knew that he had already said too much, so he stiffened his tears and begin to say his goodbyes and thank-yous, when she cut him off.

"I can help you."

And so, after deciding to trust her, Kurt told the honest story. He told of when he was in Fallujah, Iraq, and of Hassa Sadat. A little girl who lived there.

***

By 2004, the United States had already won the war against Iraq, but they still had some fight in them, so they went to war against Fallujah, a city within Iraq. Oorah!, Kurt yawped when he heard of the plan. Many of his fellow Marines yawped, oorah! It was an exciting plan, and "oorah" was what a Marine said when he or she was excited. Fallujians had, in a fit of rage, lynched several private American contractors. The armies stationed there, feeling it would be a fitting punishment, held their own fit of rage and attacked the city.

They were thought to be victorious, yet soon afterward it would become apparent that they lost, and so it was decided that they were to have an even bigger fit, and send in the Marines. They were also to send in other troops, even troops from other countries, but it was the United States Marine Corps that Kurt enticed. He finally had something to do, something he could take great pride in it. The chance to tell stories at bars, to woo over colleagues, win bets, and impress any future women he took romantic interest in, all by telling them that he was at a certain place at a certain time and did what he always does. He ended up never elling anyone this story until he met Megan, who rarely went to bars, was not wooed but harrowed, and who ended up being little more than a horrified patron of his story and a guide to help him end it.

It was dawn when he came across Hassa Sadat. It was chilly, but everyone in Kurt's platoon was warmed by the cars set ablaze by the rebels and the homes burned down by the planes. Lieutenant Palkowski raised his hand. They all stopped and crouched down. Kurt hid behind a couch left in the street. Lieutenant Palkowski opened up a map on the ground in front of Kurt. He pointed to a red X next to a freeway entrance only a block away from them.

"This here's objective Juliet, a gas station. Alpha will pin it down, Bravo will advance from this side. Oorah?"

"Oorah!" Kurt replied. "Oorah" was also both a question and an answer.

Kurt, being leader of team Bravo, stuck his hand in the air and waved it in a circle, which told his men to rally upon him. They went down the street, behind the rubble which secluded them from the view of the gas station, until they found an alleyway that was on the map. They went down, and at the other end, basking in the purple of morning light, was the fuel station. There were 8 Fallujians, some of them sleeping, two were doing morning stretches, and the rest were keeping guard. One of them spotted the men in the alley, but it took him 3 full seconds to register it in his head. By that time, Kurt had lifted his gun, which was at its core nothing but a mini hand-held cannon, and shot him straight in the chest. Then everyone started shooting. The Iraqis at objective Juliet were being killed, quickly. They realized they could not win, and in less than five minutes their war was over. Three of them ran away, holding onto their guns because they possessed nothing else, and would never posses anything else.

The Marines rushed the station. It was loud, due to the random gunfire which was still resonating from the fleeing men, and the screams coming from those who were injured but unlucky enough to remain living.

"Bravo, pursue retreating hostiles, before they get back to us!" Lieutenant Palkowski yelled out. As they were ordered, Kurt and his team ran after them, down a neighborhood that had long since been tarnished.

Kurt went past a leg that was shredded and removed from some unknown person days earlier. That was Fallujah.

He went past a mule cart filled with weapons. That was Iraq.

He ran to a home he saw the enemy run into and kicked the door down. That was war.

After finding no hostiles and leaving the house through the childrens' room, he saw an armed man raise his rifle and shot ten rounds at his direction. That was his instinct. He approached the lifeless corpse of a former man and noticed a family fleeing with its children while the mother bawled, looking at him. Sergeant Kurt Schumann, 2nd Battalion 1st Marines, looked at what the mother was crying over. A little girl who lived here.

This was Kurt.

***

It should be noted that, although he later became very exuberant in life, even getting engaged to a partner who made him very happy, Kurt died very early in life, in the summer of 2014, when he borrowed a friend's car and subsequently crashed it on the freeway. His last words were, "I love the fog." They were spoken to his mother. The patrons of his funeral were all very sad.

***

Megan could not be with Kurt during his meeting with Imran and Karida, parents of Hassa, due to issues with her visa. In her stead was some local friend of hers, Martin or some such. Kurt didn't much care for him, and when Imran answered the door, Kurt gestured him to stay put in the hallway.

"Hello," Kurt said in Arabic, which he learned partially in anticipation of this moment.

"Your home is quiet lovely."

"Thank you," said the man Imran. "Would you care any for tea?" Karida brought out their tea set, and they all enjoyed it. To Kurt, it was the worst tea he had ever had in his life.

"Imran... can I call you Imran?" he began.

Imran nodded.

"Years back, I was in Fallujah," Kurt said with tears falling down now. When recanting this story, he would lie and say that he never cried before that, and never cried after. And this story he did tell often.

"I was the one who took your daughter from you."

And so, just like that, his mind was settled. Even if he did end up staying in their home well into the evening—mostly crying, with interruptions of food or talking—and even if Megan Barnett's account of this story was only featured on page ten of the Wednesday paper, his mind was free of burden. He could now truly come home.

***

The last words that his mother recorded for the funeral, the words she said so honestly showcased his brevity and spirit, were not his true last words. They were, in actuality, "Thanks, man." This was said to the friend from whom he borrowed the car in which he died.

However, those at his funeral were sad—that part is true. Why? Perhaps they didn't really know Kurt after all.

Perhaps they did anyway.

Sami Mansour

The sky was a clear blue and the sun was shining through the world's vast, empty atmosphere. The patron star was white hot and coursing with flames, its heat immense for flora and fauna alike. The dust had been settled for many days and the ground was dry and cracked. Waves of heat swirled in the distance like barriers enclosing the temperate conditions. No wind blew. The people of that land were much like their environment, skin cracking with dehydration and strain, struggling to continue living. Usually at this time of year, vast herds of antelope would migrate through the village in search of water. It would normally be a prosperous time for the people, who would spear large numbers of the beasts and whisper sweet ritual hymns of death into their ears as they perished. This time the peaceful, nomadic creatures only came in trickles, their journey having taken an insurmountable toll, turning them into sustenance for predators or decaying carcasses. The children of that settlement grew hungry and the elderly wasted away. Deaths were frequent; many funerals were held in that time, although the ritual feasts which usually accompanied them were few and far between. The kin of the dead were left fearing that their loved ones would not arrive at Umbagi, the land where the ancestors dwell, for food was not consumed in their honor. If it did not arrive, the soul of the deceased would descend into another land, the forbidden land. Here Kujmanja would strip away the layers of the soul with his hideous claws until nothing was left. The drought threatened not only man's physical form but also his spiritual essence. It was all consuming.

The chief of that desperate lot encouraged every man, woman, and child to partake in ritual dances and sacrifices hoping to awaken Hujkiyan, lord of water, from his slumber. In spite of this not a single drop of water had spilt from that sky in many suns. Eventually the people gave up hope and submitted that the land was cursed and that this was the end of times. Their watering holes vanished and water became scarce. A few men did not give up: three of them left the village in the dark of morning, taking only necessities. Each had his own large vessel made of hide for storing the water they aimed to find, and all had a spear and bow for protecting himself against the hungry predators that lurked in that wasteland. One brought his craftsman's tools. They were encouraged by an old myth to embark on this final journey of survival. The ancient lore was normally withheld from the people of that land, but the chief disclosed a single story due to the magnitude of the situation at hand. The story described an elephant that was abandoned by its pack during a sand storm. This elephant travelled for great distances to the many landmarks its pack usually ventured, but there was no sign of its kind anywhere. Eventually a watchful vulture landed on the elephant's back and asked why it was all alone. The elephant explained why and, in reply, the vulture offered to search for the other elephants, for its sight was sharp and its wings were strong. The wily vulture had no intention of doing so; it wanted the elephant to linger so that he could feed on it after it starved to death. Hujkiyan intervened though, for the lord of water had a peculiar hatred for this putrid bird. The next day when the foul bird went to the elephant, it found a vast lake where before there had been only dirt. Hujkiyan had transformed the lost elephant into a serene body of water. The men set out to find this lake.

In the darkness of early morning the men left their homes and ventured into the empty void of wasteland. The people of the village bid them farewell but had little hope for their success. The group walked cautiously, watching the beasts of night which beckoned them closer with shining eyes. By sunrise they had trekked a great distance but noon's unbearable sun meant they could go no further that day. They rested in a small, shady ravine and all but the craftsman slept. Instead he busied himself with his art, fashioning figures out of dead wood in the likeness of local beasts. The others awoke at sunset and were each given a different handcrafted totem, each establishing a different set of characteristics in its owner. The men made a quick meal of their remaining food and left the alcove while the sun sank below the horizon. Shortly thereafter, the men encountered a small group of antelope comprised of three beasts of good size, all unaware of the men. One of the men motioned his way toward these creatures, his eyes focused and his ears listening sharply for any sudden movements. When he was close he straightened his back and raised his spear, throwing the weapon with tremendous force. It flew through the air and audibly struck the belly of one of the creatures. The other two antelope ran for their lives. The man ran too. He jumped onto his victim and, grasping its horns, wrestled it to the ground. He sat on its back as its heart began to slow, in one hand he held his totem which depicted an animal of the same kind, with the other he gently stroked beast while whispering peaceful words of death. The animal's heart faltered and stopped and it passed without complication. They gathered from it what meat they could and continued.

They travelled for two nights without impediment, walking across the cool desert earth in the moonlight and resting during the insufferable heat of day. They rationed the antelope meat and drank their remaining water slowly. During their resting periods the artisan slept little, instead continuing to work, and neither of the other men knew what he was making. On the fourth night they stopped in the dead of night. In the distance the men could hear the yipping of hyenas calling to each other in the darkness as they scavenged for food. The sounds were coming closer and the men halted, waiting for the inevitable attack. One man drew his bow and set an arrow in the draw string. He brought it back to full tension and leveled it in the direction of the hyenas, waiting for the right moment. He saw the eyes of one beast glisten in the moonlight, and released the string. It hit its mark and a hyena stopped its advance and dropped to the ground unmoving. The remaining hyenas let off a short howl and swiftly closed the distance between them and the collective. The bowman quickly leveled another arrow into his bow and let it fly, felling a second hyena. One of the beasts was close now; it dug its paws into the dirt and jumped at the bowman with sharp teeth dripping with spit. He pulled his string back one last time and the arrow cracked through the hyena's skull. With blood bubbling from its wound, the hyena hit the ground next to the bowman, twitched twice, and lay still. A number of the beasts remained but they ceased their approach as all three men raised their spears in anticipation. Stricken with fear, the animals slunk off into the night, no longer calling to one another. The bowman's totem hung about his neck and was now visible. It resembled an owl, bird of the night. They left the hyena carcasses to rot because eating them was taboo. Instead the souls of those snarling beasts would be torn to pieces and eaten by Kujmanja in the forbidden land where they belonged.

That day they finished the last of their food and water, they decided to travel during the day out of desperation. There were more animals in this area than the men had seen for the entirety of their journey, so they were getting close. Each man was fatigued; every step seemed a daunting task under the unforgiving heat of the sun. Eventually they stood at the base of a hill, and then slowly ascended with feet cracked and bloody from over exposure to the hard ground. After some time they stood at the top of the hill and, breathing heavily from over exertion, they looked across the land. Below them was a tremendous lake, sparkling with a silver sheen from the sun's reflected light. A plethora of animals lined the lake and drank with desperation. There stood flamingos and antelopes, hyenas and zebras, lions and elephants, all basking in that haven among the barren wasteland. Herbivores feasted on the plants that grew at the base of the hill and predators attacked beasts caught unaware. The men made their way towards the water and drank, their grueling journey finally fulfilled. Those with totems began filling their vessels with water, readying themselves for the journey back to the village and back to their loved ones. The artisan, however, stood away from the others and stared across the seemingly infinite expanse of water. He drew from his wares a figure made of glass, chipped and then smoothed. It shone in the sunlight and the other men turned at looked at it amazed. This totem was a figure flaked masterfully from dark obsidian. It was a likeness of an elephant. The artisan raised it to the sky, then roared 'Hujkiyan' as he cast it into the lake; it fell with a loud splash. Then all was silent. The sky suddenly became black, blotting out the sun and enveloping the ground in darkness. The animals in that place looked up in alarm as thunder cracked with an explosion of sound and light that could be heard worlds away. Then the rain came down. It poured in droplets that hit the ground as hard as small rocks dropped from the heavens. The cracked ground drank it up quickly, as if the earth had as great a thirst as any other being. Hujkiyan had awoken, the drought was over.
Contributor Biographies

Adam Wears (A Melancholy Guardian) Adam would like to apologise for ruining Ancient Greek philosophy by comparing its key aspects to characters from The A-Team, Scooby Doo, and Spider-Man. However, if you're into that sort of thing, you can visit his website and gaze upon his attempts to dissect the rest of the world using nothing more than convoluted metaphors.

Allison O'Toole (Copyeditor) Allison lives in the harsh wilderness of Canada where she almost has a degree in English. She is a part-time superhero, space bounty-hunter and crayon-colour-namer. She likes words, especially when spelled correctly.

Asher Christian Minx (My Cell Phone Rings) who goes by the handle of "Not A Spatula" on Cracked.com's Pointless Waste of Time, is a new author from Texas. He doesn't chew dip or wear spurred boots, so he's also probably a liar.

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Andrew Gordon (Swordsmen) was born in Glasgow in 1984, and lived in the UK until 2010, when he moved to North Carolina in order to marry a woman who lived there.  He is currently unemployed, and can usually be found in the immediate vicinity of an Xbox 360.

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Claudia Toth (Code) Claudia Toth is a writer and stage manager residing in the United States. She spends her free time being relieved that she can honestly tell people that she is a writer and stage manager, because that sounds way better than simply saying she is unemployed. The one thing she hates writing is these bios, which she finds herself having to do increasingly frequently. Oh, I mean, she hates writing bios, but she wrote this one for you. Just for you. Only you.

Dawn Morrow (Dreams of the Dead)  is an aspiring author, writing furiously when she's not punching criminals under cover of night.

Diana McCallum (Awry)  is a Canadian, a lover and a fighter who spends her  days writing and dreaming about battling something more substantial  than her sugar addiction.

Ian M. (Artist) Ian M. Is an all around chill guy. You can follow his quest to find awesomeness (among other things) at crazywickedawesome.com and on Twitter @artbyianm

John Sanders (One Day, Story Selector) John Sanders is currently a student, hoping to eventually become a filmmaker. In the meantime, he will be writing and searching for employment in local movies theaters.

Joseph Allan Clift (A Waterlogged Journal) A comedy writer and a proud member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe currently living in Inglewood, California.

Kathy Benjamin (Phlegmatic/Rational, Mirror) Kathy Benjamin is a freelance writer and a regular contributor to Mentalfloss.com. She has also written for Cracked.com, Pajiba.com, idontlikeyouinthatway.com, and Playboy's thesmokingjacket.com. She earned a BA in History and an MA in Medieval and Early Modern Studies. After living in New Jersey, California, and England she has settled in Austin, TX with her husband Simon and their rabbit, Sampras. She also has a book from Adams Media, Six Feet Blunder, available early 2013.

Kelly Cudby (Exit, Story Selector) What can I say?...No, really, what can I say? I had the usual young dreams of having my stories read and loved, but I allowed them to fade into the dust of being "grown up" and "responsible". Then I found out that it was a horrible trade. It wasn't until the relative internet anonymity of becoming stressbunny on Pointless Waste of Time that I found the courage to again put a dream to paper. And I am so very glad I did. Whoever you are, don't let even one dream fade. Oh, and I've been told I smell like cookies. Someplace I put words, sometimes: http://bunnybabble.tumblr.com. The worst thing I ever had to write: http://www.cracked.com/forums/topic/55536/a-terrible-thing.

**Kevin Axt** (Artist) Kevin Axt is a webcomic artist for Donuts for Sharks. He likes friendship. He tells poop jokes on the internet. He is bad at bios.

M. Asher Cantrell (Choleric Means Never Having to Say "Please", Mirage, Revision Editor) Ashe is a writer from Nashville, TN. You can read his work on Cracked.com, MentalFloss.com, and FilmSchoolRejects.com. His upcoming book, The Book of Word Records, will be available from Adams Media in summer 2013.

Malini Vijaykumar (Truth) is a Politics and Economics major who spends her days contemplating dick jokes, Canadian government, useless sci-fi minutiae, and whether Nathan Fillion would win in a naked mud wrestle with David Tennant (the answer is probably yes). You can find her at http://timeywimeydetector.blogspot.com. She's mostly harmless.

Mark M. (Editor in Chief) A semi professional writer, who made the regrettable yet understandable mistake of opening his mouth and saying "Let's do a charity book." When not writing for Cracked (http://www.cracked.com/members/yowhound/), editing books or giving relationship advice (http://www.guyspeak.com), he runs writing competitions, writes bad romances and slightly better novels.

Matt Conrad (The Messenger) Matthew Conrad moonlights as the elusive third member of Daft Punk, knows the secret to crafting the perfect chocolate-chip cookie, and is legally Batman in seven states. Witness his attempts at figuring out how words work on Twitter (http://twitter.com/KilledintheFace) and Tumblr (http://killedintheface.tumblr.com/).

Maximilian A. Chis (Reverse) Born November 13, 1993 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Began writing in fifth grade. Currently lives in Harmony, Pennsylvania with family. Is a Junior at Aquinas Academy Parochial School. He's usually found at his laptop, working, writing, and surfing the web. When alone, he can often be found talking to himself, yelling at inanimate objects, and occasionally spouting gibberish for no discernible reason.

Mike Lamb (Artist) Artist, writer, and a drunken lunatic prophet. <http://www.zazzle.com/dasempire>

Naim Kabir (Sentinel) is a pre-med student at the University of Pennsylvania. He's got a background in Bangladesh, Kuwait, and the United States of America - and while you'd think that would make him worldly, it actually only ranks him a bit above "an okay guy". Spare time is spent writing stories and bits of poetry. Most time is spent trying to go from "dumb" to "a little less dumb".

Naomi Braun (Artist) I don't understand bios. What is happening? What is this? Look at my art: http://www.flickr.com/photos/62761407@N03/ P.S. My name is Naomi.

Rani Bakr (Artist) Experimental musician/freelance writer/artist. Front-person for hacker-punk project Destroyed For Comfort. Moody political trans woman. Sometimes funny.

Rhiannon Barnes (Artist) Rhiannon Barnes is a curious young artist, who currently lives in the quiet town of Horsham. Come September, she will be studying for a BA Hons degree in Illustration to pursue her passion and addiction for drawing the world around her.

Roth's Child (Just Another January) Roth's Child is the biogenetically engineered writer-musician. Our new 2013 model specializes in mined gems and upgraded firmware. The Illuminatus (R) brand Roth's Child, Unit 23 (PLU #00010111) is the next step in innovation. Never before has Rothing been so easy! It slices! It dices! It writes reviews for Upstate Soundscape. Download the demo on RothsChildMusic.com. Available in Rochester, NY. Void where prohibited. (Warning: Roth's Child violates local and federal laws). Do not taunt Happy Fun Roth.

Ryan Gonzalez (Artist) On the low end of average in height with a sarcastic sense of humor. If I like you I will make fun of you to your face. <http://ryangonzalez.daportfolio.com/>

Sami Mansour (The Drought) Sami Mansour was born in Christchurch and currently resides in Auckland, New Zealand. He is of Egyptian and British descent and is presently studying for a degree in psychology and anthropology at the University of Auckland. His greatest passion is reading fictional and graphic novels, but he has only recently begun creative writing. His favorite authors are Neil Gaiman, Cormac McCarthy, Jack Kerouac and Vladimir Nabokov.

Savannah McLelland (Copy Editor) has, in the course of her life, been accused of Piracy, Editorial Brutality, and of having consumed the entire Dictionary as a small child; to set the record straight on these accusations: Savannah has never forcibly commandeered an oceangoing vessel of any kind (suspicious fencing interest notwithstanding), as a copy editor she is not brutal, but merely vicious, and she has never consumed an Encyclopedia (it was a Thesaurus).

S. Peter Davis (Beachworld) is a writer and editor from Brisbane, Australia. Along with this sort of thing, he composes a popular and educational YouTube series called Three Minute Philosophy. Soon he will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. You can find more of his work at http://www.othieves.com.

Stuart Stromberg (Copy Editor) lives in northern Idaho, splitting his time between pursuing a degree in International Studies and agonizing over the plight of the modern comma.

Zach Jacobs (Artist) Born at a young age, never stopped getting older from there.
