
White City Wordsmiths

Volume IV

WHITE CITY WORDSMITHS: VOLUME IV  
The Fourth Anthology of Prose and Poetry

Anthology © 2018

All rights reserved in all media. All of the works in this anthology belong to the respective artists, who are the copyright holders for their individual works.

No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any form or by any means, including but not limited to scanning, photocopy, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without written permission of the copyright holder, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews, and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

This is an anthology of several pieces of fiction. All names, characters, locales, and incidents are products of several authors' imaginations and any resemblance to actual people, places or events is coincidental or fictionalized.

This work is non-profit.

This anthology is a product of the White City Wordsmiths creative writing workshop, an initiative of the Balkan Writers Project.

Contact: contact@balkanwritersproject.com

_Workshop leader:_  
Jelena Petrović

_Editorial team coordinator_ _:_  
Irena Raičević

_Editorial team:_  
Isidora Alimpić

Katie Higgins

Maša Ivanović

Dejan Kojić

Vera Novković

Uroš Stanimirović

Anđela Vidojević

_Book design by_ :  
Katarina Šotić

_Cover design by:_ _  
_Ana Nikolić

_Print and bind:_  
Grafički atelje Sanja, Beograd

White City  
Wordsmiths Volume IV

THE FOURTH ANTHOLOGY  
OF PROSE AND POETRY

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Jelena Petrović: Foreword

Luka Novković: Suzanne7

Ana Nikolić: Last One

The Veiled Virgin

In the Court of the Queen

Maša Ivanović: Dingo

Uroš Stanimirović: Crimson Lullaby41

In Your Lips I Lose Myself43

Toybox44

Raining Gold46

Vera Novković: Constance49

Isidora Alimpić: Crescendo59

Bi-rational63

Katarina Šotić: Dinner & Time, Act Three69

Marija Mrvošević: About...81

Triptych86

Milica Joksimović: The End of the World as I Know It89

Tijana Damjanović Gertner: The Goldstone95

Ranko Radojević: Creation's Ode (My Eyes in Yours Lie)103

The Epitome of a Star105

A Bit of Perpetual Grayness107

Topsy-turviness109

Katie Higgins: Christina113

Dejan Kojić: A Single Vessel121

The Wordsmiths: Acknowledgements

# FOREWORD

When we announced the start of our creative writing workshop for the fourth time, I have to admit I was a lot less anxious about the whole process than last year; nevertheless, the fear of not living up to everyone's expectations was still there.

As we welcomed our WCW IV members into the classrooms of Professional English educational center in Belgrade, I found myself not afraid, but amazed at what lay in store for all of us. Just like last year, yet completely different – some new faces, eager to hop on board, beaming with determination and excitement, and some old faces, skilled at what we've been doing, but equally enthusiastic about the work ahead – we all got to be each other's guides in this creative process.

Still clinging to our beginnings, the driving force of which still resonates with all of us, it being the love we bear for writing, we embarked on the fourth amazing journey which led to the book you're holding in your hands. The journey consisted of the meetings held in the aforementioned Professional English educational center in Belgrade every other Sunday, from March to May 2018, where each participant presented their writing and gave constructive feedback to others. Arranging a slightly different schedule than before, I organized the meetings in such a way that, aside from presenting their works and giving feedback to their colleagues, the participants were instructed to complete various writing prompts that served as an additional source of inspiration and were part of the creative writing course, addressing different styles of writing and helping with potential problems that any writer could encounter.

Apart from the meetings, as before, we would all go for coffee after hours, summarizing everything that we'd done on the meetings and successfully interweaving the faces we knew with the ones we were so eager to familiarize with.

It is our fourth anthology you now hold in your hands and we all hope that it will find its way into your hearts as well.

Jelena Petrović

White City Wordsmiths Project Leader

(Belgrade, 2018)

# Suzanne

DAY 1

THE DOOR YAWNS OPEN and Marianne steps into the gloom of the apartment. Marianne is hungry, and sweaty, and tired. She hasn't had a good night's sleep in three days. She shuts the door, then pushes it a bit harder until the lock clicks into place, and then turns the key. She leans her back against the door, takes off her glasses, closes her eyes and breathes a deep, ragged sigh. Inch by inch, she slides to the floor, the heels of her sensible black shoes crumpling up the carpet. Fingers give up her purse and move to her face.

"Look at you, trying to keep the world outside."

Marianne's eyes snap open, hunting in the darkness. They find a familiar silhouette standing in the living room. She closes her eyes again and a word crawls out of her throat.

"Sofie."

"That's not my name, Marianne."

Marianne doesn't answer.

"Why would you call me Sofie? That's not even what she would call me. She would call me Tristie, or something like that."

Marianne's eyelids rise slowly. The silhouette has crossed the distance between them, and she can now smell her sweet perfume.

"Does it matter?" she asks.

Sofie hesitates before answering.

"I suppose it doesn't. She is gone, and I'm here for you now. Let's get you up. No point in spending your day like that."

Marianne wearily rises to her feet, straightens out the carpet and goes to the fridge. There's some acaraje with vatapa there, so she puts it in the microwave and sets the table for two while the food is heating up. Two plates. Two spoons, to the right. Two salad bowls, to the left. Two glasses, to the right again. Two napkins, to the left. Two tiny winefall splashes, the first one into her glass, then into the other. Two salad rustles. It's only when she goes to get the meal and notices Sofie's arched eyebrow that she realizes her mistake, and her face crumbles.

"It's a habit..."

"It's alright," says Sofie as she settles in the opposite chair. "I don't mind."

Marianne nods, sighs and sits down. Then she starts wolfing down the food without really tasting it. The meal passes in silence as Marianne studies the other woman. She hasn't seen her in a long time, but Sofie hasn't changed a bit. Maybe her temples have a few more gray hairs than they did last time, and her face a couple more creases, but that's it. It's the same old, gaunt Sofie, with her soft fingers and her grating voice.

Marianne washes the dishes and goes to the bathroom where she sits in the tub, draws her knees to her chin, flicks the tap on and listens to the hot water pouring in. She is shaken from her reverie upon realizing that Sofie is sitting on the lowered toilet seat.

"You should really take your clothes off," the woman says, and Marianne notices that her shoes, socks and black dress are all soaked. Her lip trembles as she stands up. In a second, her shoes clatter in the sink, followed by the socks, the dress and the underwear. She lays back and feels the scalding water wash over her.

"That's better, isn't it?"

Half an hour later, she enters the living room, Sofie in tow. They occupy the couch, Marianne takes her glasses and turns on the TV. She's listening to the news, but doesn't understand why any of it is important. She changes the channel and is greeted by an action flick. A muscular man is jumping over some chasm in a jungle. _Click_. A classical concert. The violinist seems very excited. _Click_. A soap opera. The protagonist leans into a kiss— _Click_. A long-haired kid screaming into the mic— _Click_. A political debate. _Click. Click. Clickclickclick..._ She turns off the TV, and they wait for the sun to set. Breathing is the only sound in the room.

She brushes her teeth, puts her pajamas on and goes to the bedroom, but Sofie is already there, on the other half of the queen-size bed.

"That's her side of the bed," Marianne says.

"And now it's mine."

Marianne doesn't have the strength to argue. She lies on her back and closes her eyes. She can smell Sofie's sweet, sharp scent, like winter mornings back in New York. A cold hand touches her shoulder, then glides across her chest, and then it _clenches_ , just like she knew it would. She can barely breathe. She twists and turns, but those soft fingers and skinny arms hold her tighter than a vice. She tries to speak, but nothing leaves her mouth except dry gasps. For hours, she struggles against the other woman, and all the while, Sofie murmurs in her ear.

"This is what I do."

Until Marianne falls asleep from sheer exhaustion.

DAY 2

She spends the whole day inside the apartment. The phone rings once, but she doesn't answer. Sofie doesn't seem pleased by that, but she says nothing.

She nearly strangles Marianne that night.

DAY 3

Marianne goes to work. It's a bad day. The stew she had made was overcooked, and she could hear the customers complain. She sees the look in her boss' eyes, but he doesn't say anything. She hates him for it.

She comes home and tries to drown in coffee and cheap brigadeiro cookies. She always thought they were the best thing about Brazil. Except, of course...

Hot coffee splashes all over her shirt, and the apartment starts echoing with her swearing.

"It's just coffee," Sofie says.

"Shut. Up."

"It'll wash away."

"You should wash away!" Marianne's scream is followed by the crash of porcelain as the cup meets the wall.

Sofie looks to the brown stain running for the floor some half a meter left of her head.

"You always were a terrible shot."

Marianne flies at her, but her arms are stopped mid-air by the skinny woman's hands. She flails desperately, but those cold spidery limbs are immovable. Watery gray eyes meet her own.

"This won't help you, Marianne."

"I. Don't. Want. Your. Help!" Every word is punctuated with a grunt as she tries to overpower Sofie.

"You need me. This is what I do."

"I don't need you! I need _her_!"

"She left you. I'm here instead."

"I hate you, Sofie!"

"That is not my name. Why do you call me that?"

The fight drains out of Marianne and she nearly collapses. The other woman helps her to the couch.

Before going to bed, Marianne takes a pill. It helps her escape Sofie's embrace sooner.

DAY 7

The door bangs open around midnight. Drunken laughter spreads through the rooms. Marianne and a man stumble into the hallway, her hand scrambling for the light switch. He's trying to look around, take in his surroundings, but she doesn't let him. She presses him against the wall, her kisses feverish, hands gripping him like she's holding on for dear life, then letting go just to pin his own, which are trying to push her away. He laughs nervously, and Marianne despises that laughter. She laughed differently, belting out peals of joy, like bells on Christmas. So Marianne shuts his mouth with her tongue and drags him to the bedroom.

Several sweaty, uncomfortable, grunt-filled minutes later, he collapses on top of her, panting and mumbling words of praise in her ear, before he rolls off onto the sheets and his whispers slip into snores. She stares up into the ray of light coming from the hallway, and something starts burrowing through her gut. It's growing and hurting, until she feels nothing except numb pain. A shadow swims into the beam of light, and she follows it to find Sofie in the bedroom doorway. She hoped that the gray woman would have had the decency to leave her be. Marianne doesn't blame her, though. Not more than usual. Sofie knows why Marianne did this. She knows that this was nothing but a futile gesture of spite. There is no one left but Sofie. Marianne left her friends back in New York. Marianne's family left her long before that. And all because of...

She wakes the man up. His bleary eyes squint in the light as he hears that he must go. After weak protests, he fumbles with his clothes, looks around trying to find his shoes, and then passes Sofie on his way to the door. She wrinkles her nose as the aroma of sweat, cheap alcohol and cheaper deodorant follows in his footsteps. The lock clicks, water splashes into a glass, a couple of gulps follow the pill tumbling down a dry throat, and the bed creaks under a woman's weight. And then again as she makes room for another to curl around her. For a blessed moment, the cold, dry embrace feels good on her skin. And then it tightens again.

Luckily, the pill does its job quickly.

DAY 16

Marianne has an idea.

It wormed its way into her brain several days ago, made its lair there, and fed, and grew. And now it's big, and strong, and unafraid to make its presence known. It made her look up some articles on the internet and make several hasty calculations. It goaded her into talking to her colleague with whom she had only exchanged a couple of sentences before.

That evening, Sofie tortures her especially hard, as if sensing Marianne's hidden plans and the danger they pose to her.

DAY 19

It was a good day. She finally gave up the black and wore her blue dress with tiny parrots on the collar. She smiled to everyone at work. Everything she cooked was perfect, even the caldeirada, which had always troubled her before. Her boss winked at her and promised her a raise if she kept it up like that. After work, she went downtown to see a movie, and her return home was announced with a staccato of brand new heels.

She turns on the radio and finds her favorite station. A languid guitar melody fills the small apartment. A voice sings about summer evenings in Portuguese. Sofie comes out of the bedroom and says:

"I know what you're trying to do."

Marianne pours herself a glass of wine and opens her purse. She opens a small bottle that her colleague's sister stole from the hospital and empties it on the table.

"That is not the right way, Marianne."

"It is the _only_ way."

Those gray eyes meet Marianne's. Steely gray. Like clouds on a morning when you have nothing to wake up for.

"It's not. This is you giving up."

One pill, two pills.

"This is me making my choice."

Three pills, four pills. Four should be enough.

"This is giving up from having a choice ever again. You know there's nothing after you drink those."

Five pills, six pills. Best to be sure.

"Nothing is better than this. Besides, she believed..."

" _She_ was not _you_ , Marianne. _She_ is not here. _She_ is gone."

"I want to be gone too."

_Plink_. Like a pebble in a pond. _Plink. Plinkplinkplink. Plink._

"She would not want this, Marianne."

"She is gone. You said so yourself."

"That's not the..."

"Besides, this is rich coming from you. You caused all this."

"No. I'm trying to keep you from doing this. I'm a reminder. I'm..."

"And what the hell are you supposed to remind me of? That I'm in pain? Every day? Every hour?"

"Yes. I'm to remind you that you can feel."

"I don't want to feel pain!"

Marianne's lip is trembling. Her jaw is shaking, like a dam about to burst. She feels something uncoil in her chest, and starting to pound, wanting to get out.

"I know you don't love me."

"I fucking hate you! Every time you torture me, you choke me, you... you..."

"It's what I do, Marianne. I don't enjoy it."

"Well, it sure doesn't look like that to me! You never hurt me like this before, you never..."

"You never loved anyone like you did her."

"I... I... There's nothing left."

"There are memories. Your memories." There are cracks in the dam. "Nobody will remember her like you did. I'm here for you, but I'm here because of her."

The dam breaks and she collapses to the floor with a wail. Hot streaks burn across her cheeks. For a while, the Portuguese voice is drowned out by long, shuddering sobs. Cold dry arms wrap around Marianne as she cries for the first time since the funeral.

DAY 35

She's looking through a photo album. There are two pictures there, side by side. On the left is a blonde in a blue dress holding a camera to her face with the lens turned to the photographer, surrounded by people dressed for a carnival. They are yelling and waving at something. On the right is a dark-haired woman with a camera also pointed at the photographer. There is another photo beneath this one. The dark-haired woman has lowered her camera and is now waving to the photographer.

"That's how we met."

"I know," says Sofie.

DAY 36

Sofie has left. Marianne knows she'll probably be back, some day.

DAY 40

It is a quiet, perfect dawn. Marianne can actually hear the rustle of leaves on the chestnut tree growing just outside her window. Their shadows dance across the bedroom walls in the gentle morning light. The rich scent of Sadie's hair and sweat overwhelms Marianne. She smells just like...

Sadie raises her head and dark curly hair tickles Marianne's naked skin. She smiles her huge smile and leans in to plant a single soft kiss on Marianne's forehead. Then she gets up and leaves the room. The color of the morning seems to leave with her.

DAY 44

A cheetah is running through the tall, dry, yellow grass. Its prey, a frightened gazelle, is trying to escape, frantically looking back in vain hope that the predator has given up. The cheetah leaps— _Click_. A man is talking about yesterday's elections. There is a colorful graph behind him— _Click_. A beautiful woman carrying a pastel turquoise thermos is climbing a narrow set of stairs. Marianne knows that the thermos is filled with rice. Her finger hovers above the button on the remote. The woman is met by a man in a suit, and they exchange smiles as they let each other pass.

Marianne looks to the left, where Sadie, completely engrossed in the meeting happening on the screen, starts whistling along with the soundtrack. Sadie's feet are on the sofa, her hands are wrapped around her legs, and her chin is resting on her knees. After a couple of seconds, she senses that she is being watched and turns her head to find Marianne's eyes glinting in the dark.

"It's your favorite movie." Marianne's voice trembles slightly.

"No, it's _her_ favorite movie," Sadie says gently. She unfurls her limbs and lies next to Marianne, placing her head in the other woman's lap. She merely blinks when a couple of warm drops land on her cheek.

"You look just like her."

"I know."

"She would also put her head in my lap just like that."

"I know. This is what I do, Marianne. You know this."

"I do. You just... looked different before. When dad died, you looked like—"

"Of course I did. Because you needed to say your goodbyes to him, in your own time. Now, shhhh, you love this movie, too."

The corners of Marianne's shivering lips curve upward and she lets the music engulf her.

DAY 56

Marianne's fingers enjoy the warmth of Sadie's skin. They haven't felt it for some time. They missed it. They missed the small moles that they now dance around. One on the hip, one near the belly button, one on her neck, just where... They stop. They feel the gentle ebb and flow of Sadie's breathing.

"I thought it was her," says Marianne.

"No. Just me," answers Sadie.

"Just a memory."

"Just that."

Marianne turns to the other side and wraps the thin blanket around herself.

DAY 76

She meets her neighbor on her way to the market, and he tells a dirty joke he's just heard. She merely grins, but Sadie bursts into laughter at her side. The neighbor smiles and goes on his way. Sadie's chuckle follows Marianne all the way to the stalls, like a bell ringing in the distance.

DAY 103

The carpet rustles faintly as the door opens and Marianne enters the apartment. She turns the key, takes off her glasses, then her shoes, and pads to the bathroom. Water splashes in the sink. She goes to the kitchen, and the dishes clatter as she's warming up her meal and setting the table. One bowl. One spoon. One glass. One napkin. As she's pouring wine, she notices the figure by the window and freezes. It's when the wine starts dripping on her feet that she moves again. She sets the bottle on the table.

"Sadie?" she calls out. "Sofie?" she asks, quietly.

"My sisters have done their part," she hears the figure whispering. "And now it's time for me to do mine."

"Who are you?"

"I've come to set a twisted thing straight," the figure says and turns to face her. Marianne finds her glasses, and the blurry silhouette resolves itself into a woman.

"I don't know you," she says, but the woman just extends her arm in response. Her palm opens, and there's a flower in it. Small and fragile, and the color of flame. She moves closer and puts the flower on Marianne's chest.

"I've come to lighten this dark heart," she says as her other hand takes Marianne's and their fingers intertwine. Her face is next to Marianne's. Blue eyes looking into blue eyes through two pairs of glasses.

"What should I call you?" asks Marianne.

Her reflection smiles.

"Solidão. And this is what I do," it says as it steps into Marianne.

She remains standing for a couple of seconds, staring into the distance.

Then she sighs and sits down to eat.

# Last One

You slept on my hip night after night

waited for me to spend you

I left your sisters to rot and

walking towards

our spot

turned you into ashes

you quivered as you touched the ground

and quietly died in the snow.

# The Veiled Virgin

When they brought her inside

she was cold to the touch—

body blue-veined and covered in dew,

he wrapped her in canvas

and left her to slumber,

letting the night air brighten her hue.

He saw through to her core,

shape soft under his touch

he hummed, carving her delicate skin.

Now freed from stone prison

she will remain his still

constantly looked at, yet hidden within.

#   
In the Court of the Queen

Crouching, fingers entangled in red twine

you feel the fury rise;

your offerings, their throats spilt like thick wine

watch, dumb, with empty eyes.

She descends, riding a wicked nightmare,

drawing near in seconds.

Cloaked in yellow, she smiles, and in despair

you weep, as she beckons.

With myriad eyes, her terrible gaze

**Has tur** ned itself on you

and in them, winding, an infinite maze

with one exit; and through,

you see twin suns set upwards, never

reaching the horizon.

Black stars sing and capture you forever,

their voice mesmerising.

Through a hole in the sky, in her embrace

you rush towards the fall,

as far beneath you, reaching for her grace,

her zealots writhe and crawl—

_Carcosa!_ Hyades drone, as you cross

a pitch-black, yawning stream

when, back home, all you leave behind is loss

and echoes of a scream.

# Dingo

DINGO COCKED HIS COWBOY HAT to the side and picked up his suitcase, still staring at the spot the bus had occupied minutes before. The air was humid and hot, and a bead of sweat trickled down his neck. His hat was doing a lousy job of protecting him from sunlight. He hated the sun.

He lit a cigarette and looked around. The bus stop was deserted, save for a stray dog sniffing around a trash can. Alone. That's how he liked it, anyway. The bus stop was on the edge of town, and he could see no one around. Was everyone avoiding him? Did they know?

Dingo shook his head, attempting to clear his thoughts. Squinting at the sun, he turned and began walking towards his childhood home _._ He hadn't seen it in nine years. He'd had so many plans back then. He'd wanted to see the world. Now he was back, and he was old, and everything was strange.

_36._ He was thirty-six years old. Nine years, a quarter of his life, spent in prison. What went on while he was gone? He'd been so young. Had his whole life ahead of him. _Stupid._

His parents weren't expecting him. Did they even know he was out? He remembered their faces in the courtroom, so long ago. His father had looked like a statue, cold and unmoving. He hated Dingo, though not more than Dingo hated himself. His mother had cried, and cried, and cried. When he last saw her face, it was red and puffy and she was screaming for him. She didn't hate him, but maybe she should have.

They had never visited him. His sister came to see him once, four years ago. She spent ten minutes with him, told him she'd only come to see if he was still alive. She had gotten married and was pregnant. _27._

Would he see his sister again? She'd be thirty-two now. _32_. Was it a son or a daughter? Has she had more kids?

He shook his head again. Maybe his parents would still want to see him, even though he was a disgrace.

His straw blond hair clung to his forehead, drenched in sweat. He took off his hat and fanned his face.

The town was no different than he remembered. There was Bob's Ice Cream Parlor, where he used to go with friends after school. The post office still needed a new coat of paint. Mike's bar had closed down years before he left, but the building still stood tall.

His suitcase wasn't too heavy, but he hated having to drag it along. It was filled mostly with clothes. All he'd ever wanted was to see the world.

Dingo entered his parents' street. It hasn't changed at all. The same dusty brown road, the same dull row of houses with gardenias planted outside. Old and boring. His old friend's house stood at the beginning of the street, and Dingo wondered if Jimmy was home. Did he know? _Everyone probably knows_.

As he approached the porch to Jimmy's house, he saw that someone was sitting outside. Before he had the chance to walk away, the man stood up. Startled, Dingo realized it was Jimmy, though he looked much older. _35._

"Dingo?" Jimmy said, throwing a cigarette on the ground and stomping on it. "Is that you?"

Jimmy had grown a beard, just like Dingo, only his was dark brown. There was a bald spot on the top of his head.

"Yeah," Dingo said, before clearing his throat. He hadn't spoken much over the past few years. "Hey, Jimmy."

He lowered his suitcase. Jimmy made his way to the street, jumping down the stairs of his porch.

"I didn't know you were back!" He grinned at Dingo and pulled him into a hug.

Dingo didn't know how to respond. He hasn't been hugged in years. He awkwardly hugged back. Did Jimmy not know?

"Yep," he said, his voice still coarse, "I'm back."

Jimmy kept grinning, his white teeth gleaming in the sun. He clapped Dingo on the back, almost knocking him over.

"Your folks said you moved to Argentina, and I was really happy for you, man. I know you always wanted to go."

Argentina? That was true; he _had_ always wanted to go _._ It never happened, though. Did _anyone_ know?

"Yeah." He paused. "Argentina."

"I'm guessing you're off to say 'hey' to your folks, but call me, okay? We can grab a drink and you can tell me all about the Argentinian ladies."

Ladies, women, girls. I went to Argentina.

"Yeah." Dingo hesitated. "Yeah, sure."

When Jimmy left, Dingo felt the need to puke. _Does anyone vomit from relief?_ Did the others know? Maybe Jimmy was the only one who didn't. His parents' house loomed over him, dark and foreboding. Like a distant memory, like a dream. Should he knock? He knocked.

His mother answered the door and gasped, making him wince.

"Trevor!" she said, once she got over her shock. She was paler than he remembered. _62._

"Hey, Ma," he responded, smiling weakly. "I'm out."

His mother started to cry.

***

An hour later, he was sitting in the dining room, in a chair he'd once called his own. His mother busied herself in the kitchen, occasionally taking sips of tea. He wondered whether there was rum in it.

"Your father will be home any minute," she said without looking at him.

Dingo remembered his father's look in the courtroom.

"I didn't know where else to go," he said.

His mother smiled at him and, for a moment, he felt like a kid again.

"How's Sally?" he asked.

She hesitated before replying.

"Your sister's all right," she said, pouring another cup of tea. "She lives in Columbus now, with her husband Eric and little Tommy. They come visit once every few months."

That was nice. He was happy for her. It was a boy after all. _4._ He wondered what the husband was like.

"That's nice," he said.

They sat in silence for a bit. His mother fussed over something in the kitchen. It smelled really good, but Dingo knew he wouldn't be invited.

The door opened, and his father entered the house. _67._ His wispy hair was gray now, his skin wrinkled. When he caught sight of Dingo, he didn't look surprised.

"Got a call from the prison yesterday. They asked if we were gonna give you a ride," he said, his voice raspy. "I said you could take the bus."

"Why didn't you tell me?" his mother asked. "You didn't say anything."

His father looked at her the way he always did when he didn't want her talking.

"I didn't think he'd be dumb enough to come here." He took off his jacket, put it on a chair and stood in front of Dingo. "Get the fuck out of my house."

Dingo had expected that. He took one last look at his mother. Though she looked pained, she didn't meet his eyes.

"Why'd you tell people I was in Argentina?" he asked.

His father gave him a hard look.

"What were we supposed to tell them?"

Dingo nodded once, before walking out of his parents' house, possibly for good. He thought he heard his mother sob, but he wasn't sure.

Where could he go? None of them knew. He could go anywhere, but he had no money. He spent all he had on the bus ticket from prison, and there was nothing left. Should he go back and ask for money?

At that moment, his mother ran out of the house. She came up to him, gave him a quick hug and put several crumpled bills in his hand. Her eyes were red, but her face was expressionless.

"Goodbye, Trevor," she said, and he wondered whether it was forever.

"Bye, Ma." He watched her leave.

He put the money in his pocket and started walking. His arm was starting to hurt from carrying the suitcase around. Where would he go? Maybe he could ask Jimmy for help.

Jimmy's house was the largest on the street because his parents had always had more money than their neighbors. Jimmy never acted like he was better than the others, though. He always made Dingo feel like he was the best friend a guy could have. Had Dingo let him down?

He knocked on the door, wiping sweat off his brow. Jimmy had a sister. Would she open the door? How old was she now? _38, 39, 40?_ Dingo had once had a crush on her, but he never really spoke to her. He'd never learned how to talk to women.

The door opened, and he was greeted by the sight of his oldest friend for the second time today.

"Shit, Dingo, didn't expect you to come so soon," Jimmy said with a grin. He moved to the side to let him in.

They sat in the living room, and Jimmy didn't ask about the suitcase, only poured them whiskey.

"Don't they have phones in Argentina? It's been ten years, man."

Nine years, two months and three weeks.

They did have phones where he had been, but it's not like anyone wanted to talk to him anyway. Even his lawyer didn't like him much.

"Sorry, Jimmy."

"I go by Jim now," Jimmy said, grinning widely. "Jimmy's a bit childish, I guess. How are you, man?"

"You know how it is," Dingo said. "You married?"

There were pictures all over the living room of Jimmy and a woman Dingo didn't know. They had a baby with them in some of the photos. Dingo felt a sense of dread.

"Divorced, actually," Jimmy said, downing his drink in one gulp. "Got married six years ago, divorced two years later. I've got a daughter, but they live in Iowa, so I only see her once a month."

"Sorry."

"Not your fault," Jimmy replied, shrugging. "I'm gonna pour myself another one. You mind?"

Dingo eyed his drink. He wasn't really supposed to do anything that might lower his inhibitions. He took a careful sip.

"No," he said. One glass wouldn't hurt him, and his probation officer couldn't really see him either way.

The drink was bitter, but he liked the taste. He looked around – the house was almost exactly the same as when he'd last been there. Nothing had changed, except it seemed like Jimmy lived alone.

"Where're your folks?" he asked.

"My old man died some four years ago, Mom's in the old folks' home. Dementia."

"Sorry."

"Stop apologizing for things that aren't your fault. How're your parents?"

"I got into a fight with Pa," he said. "I didn't call them much either, and he's pretty pissed. You mind if I stay with you for a couple of days?"

Jimmy smiled and got up to pour them both another drink.

***

He settled in Jimmy's sister's old room. It was pink and filled with girly toys. How old was she when she had last slept there? Did Jimmy's daughter also sleep there when she came to visit?

Later, Dingo went out for a walk. He didn't want to be a bother, so he decided to get his own groceries with the money Ma had given him. Even though a Wal-Mart had recently been built nearby, Dingo remembered that there used to be a small grocery store in the town center. It was then owned by Old Man Jones, whom Dingo and some other boys would make fun of because he needed large, thick glasses to see anything. _Old._

Walking across town, he ran into several other people he knew. _No one knows._ Everyone thought he'd been in Argentina. He ran into a girl he'd liked in middle school. She was fat and old and ugly now.

He was happy to see that the Jones shop was still standing. It looked as run-down as it had when he'd last seen it, all those years ago. He wondered if there was anything he'd actually missed.

The only person inside was a girl sitting by the counter, reading a magazine. She had blond hair, wore long socks and couldn't have been older than twelve, maybe thirteen. _13._ When she saw him enter, she got up quickly, a wide smile plastered on her face.

"Good morning!" she said. "How can I help you?"

Dingo looked around. There was no one else in the store. He turned back to the girl.

"Hey," he said, his voice rough. Why did he sound so old? "Aren't you a bit too young to be working in a store?"

The girl rolled her eyes slightly, like someone who was used to hearing that sort of thing all the time.

"Yes, sir, but I'm not working. I'm only keeping it safe for my folks. My dad is the owner."

Dingo cocked his head. She was far too young to be Old Man Jones' kid.

He cleared his throat. "Who's your dad?" he asked, grabbing a pack of gum and putting it on the counter.

"Why, John Jones, of course," the girl said, smiling again. "I'm Ruby Jones. Are you new in town?"

Dingo remembered now. John 'JJ' Jones was Old Man Jones' son and Dingo's football coach at school. When his daughter was born, JJ threw a party and invited everyone in town. He was thirty-seven at the time, Dingo twenty-three.

"I'm not new," he said. "I'm old. I used to live here. I remember when you were born."

Ruby's eyes widened, and her mouth dropped open.

"You're Trevor Carter!" She blushed. "Sorry, it's just, everyone always talks about you. How you used to be our best football player, and how everyone thought you'd go pro, but you left for Argentina to become a cowboy."

Dingo laughed. He hadn't laughed in a while. _No one knows._

"How's your dad?" he asked, walking around the store and picking things off the shelves. It was a strange feeling, being able to choose your own food again.

"He's okay, I guess," Ruby replied, following him around the store. "He always says you're the best player he has ever coached."

"That's real nice of him," Dingo said, piling up his groceries on the counter. "How'd you get your name?"

Ruby smiled. Her teeth were very white.

"I like to tell people it's because I've got very red lips, see?"

She puckered her lips. It was true, they were very red. _Like blood._

"But, actually, it's because I had really red cheeks when I was born and I blush a lot. Mom wanted to name me Rose, but Dad decided on Ruby. It's a more grown-up name anyway."

Dingo took his groceries.

"I like your name a lot. It suits you." _Stupid._

"Thanks. You have a funny nickname, though. My dad said they called you Dingo because you were real scrawny and there was already another kid they called Coyote."

"That's right." He'd almost forgotten how he got that name. "I guess it sort of stuck."

Ruby grinned at him, and he tipped his hat and left the store.

***

A week later, Dingo woke up with a fever. He'd been having a bad, _bad_ dream. He hated those dreams. Once, he'd decided to stop sleeping forever. He'd fainted on the fourth day and slept for thirty-six hours straight. Hadn't dreamed, though.

Jimmy called a doctor, and the doctor told them that he had food poisoning. Not surprising. Prison food was bland and boring. The food he had got from Ruby Jones was new and fresh and tasty.

"I've been wondering," Jimmy said that morning, while sitting next to his bed, "my sister's coming for dinner in a couple of days, and she asked if she could bring a friend over."

Dingo was sweating like a pig and the sheets around him smelled like alcohol. He didn't understand. Why couldn't Jimmy leave him alone? Was he trying to make him leave?

"She thought she could set me up with her friend, but to be honest, I'm not really up for it," Jimmy continued. "I thought you might be, though. She's a real nice gal; I thought maybe you two would hit it off. If you're feeling better by then, of course."

_A date?_ Was that what Jimmy was offering? Dingo didn't remember saying yes, but he must have, because Jimmy left his room looking satisfied.

Dingo had another _bad, bad_ dream that day. He took the medicine the doctor gave him, and fell asleep and dreamed he was an actual dingo, one of those scrawny, yellow ones that lived in Australia. The ones that ate babies.

When Jimmy's sister and her friend arrived two days later, Dingo was dressed in his best clothes, though he could barely remember how he got there. His fever was almost gone.

Jimmy's sister was older than him, but looked younger. She was thirty-nine now. _39._ Her friend was younger than Dingo. _33_. She had wrinkles on her forehead, though. Dingo kept touching his own head. It wasn't smooth. He'd been somewhat handsome when he was young, but they broke his nose twice in prison, and his ribs three times, among other things. It made it harder to breathe.

They sat to have dinner, and Dingo kept quiet. They didn't know. But he didn't know how to talk, he could never talk to women. He couldn't, they were smarter and more experienced. Dingo was no one, he could only ever talk to other no ones.

"So, Trevor, what do you do?" 33 asked him. Was she pretty? He didn't really know.

"I'm a cowboy," he said, remembering how funny that was, "in Argentina."

33 looked confused, and Dingo smiled. The fever was gone, but Dingo's brain never changed. His dad had once said that there was no point in trying because he couldn't be fixed. _No._

"Oh, be serious, Dingo," Jimmy's sister 39 said. _What was her name?_ "You're not really a cowboy, are you?"

He could've been. He could've been a real, live cowboy.

"No," he heard himself say. "No, I'm not."

He was many things. They'd called him so many things these past nine years, words hissed, spat out at him. And before too, but only in his head, only the secret things he'd called himself during those days when he was brave enough to look in the mirror.

Jimmy's sister's friend looked at him and he looked at her. She had blue eyes. He liked blue eyes. But she had wrinkles around them. _33._

He realized they were talking to him.

"You okay, buddy?" Jimmy asked. _36_. Jimmy was a good man. "Dingo?"

Dingo nodded. He was not okay. _No._

"I'm okay," he said. "I'm okay."

They sat in the living room after that. Jimmy and his sister talked about her family. _39, 42, 7, 9._ She had a happy family. Dingo had been part of a happy family once. 33 kept talking to him and touching his hand. She had large, coarse hands, like so many women who lived in small towns.

Dingo stared at her. He knew she was probably pretty. He had to know that. He thought about kissing her. How red were her lips? Were they soft? When was the last time he'd kissed someone?

He didn't kiss her. His thoughts spiraled inside his head like they always did when he remembered. The hole in his chest grew larger with every breath. _What if there's no point in fighting it?_

Later that night, he sat with Jimmy on the porch, sweating. Was his fever back? No, it was the sickness, the other sickness, the one that made him want to crawl out of his skin, rip his heart out.

"Jimmy," he rasped out, "can I borrow your car?"

Jimmy looked confused.

"Sure." He replied, handing him the car keys. "But you look a bit tired. You sure you're feeling all right?"

Dingo nodded, trying to smile. He grabbed the keys and left without saying goodbye. _Stupid_.

It was all their fault. His parents told them he'd been to Argentina. They didn't know, they didn't know, but he knew and it was all their fault. They could've stopped him, if only they knew, if only he could tell them, he wouldn't have to do it anymore. Why did his parents lie to everyone?

He drove around town. The silence kept drumming in his head. He parked in front of the Jones store and stuck his head out of the window. Ruby Jones was locking the door, and she smiled when she saw him. _13._

"Hi, Mr. Carter. How are you?"

"You can call me Dingo," he said. "Everyone does. Why are you out here all alone? It's dark."

Ruby smiled, her red lips glistening in the moonlight.

"I'm just locking up. My dad went home to feed my little brother. And don't worry, Mr. Car— _Dingo_ , there's nothing dangerous around here."

Nothing? Was there not a beast right in front of her?

Stupid, stupid, disgusting, perverted, sick.

"You want a ride?" he asked, feeling his heartbeat thumping in his head. "I don't think you should walk home alone at night."

For a moment, she hesitated, and he felt relieved. _Stupid, stupid, bad, badbadbad._

But then, Ruby grinned. "Sure, that'd be great!"

He smiled sadly at her.

# Crimson Lullaby

"Hush, dear child, do not fear – do not fret,"

murmured a loving mother, her hands soaked with sweat.

"A gift I bestowed upon you, I realize now,

was but a curse I never wished to endow;

an infant's life should brim with divine love most pure

and not be burdened with hatred and suffering to endure.

In your mother's bosom you should find sanctuary

and not a one-way ticket for the Styx ferry.

The time is nigh for you to go back to sleep;

the children are screaming – I can hear our neighbors weep."

They are coming – she took her son and grabbed a shiv;

under the bed is not where real monsters live.

Tears trickled down her cheeks as she held his little head,

to perform the duty of Atropos filled the mother with dread.

She tried to whisper her farewells just before she made the cut;

her lips shuddered, but the words never left her gut.

"You'll be saved from this world of filth, violence, and sin"

– a red stream started flowing under her son's chin.

She closed his eyes and kissed him goodbye

while humming the sweet melody of this crimson lullaby.

# In Your Lips I Lose Myself

In your lips I lose myself,

crashing down, I fall from grace.

It's every man for himself

in such a damp and dark place.

This murky, bottomless pit

bewitchingly draws me in.

Tonight I'll be the culprit

and indulge in primal sin.

This decision might seem snap –

there's no time to take it slow.

I fell victim to your trap

and there's nowhere left to go.

# Toybox

Rumors fly around of a lady most fair,

a lovely maiden of beautiful blond hair.

Though many a man this dame wanted to wed,

not one could handle what hid under her bed.

She kept it secret, away from prying eyes,

a lavish toybox of quite surprising size.

In hours of play she indulges each day,

with fiery passion that scares suitors away.

Those cowards who fled, unfit to be her groom,

ran away headfirst when faced with her playroom.

Even though she's apt at playing on her own,

it's needless to say – she hates being alone.

She yearns for a man with whom she'll live in bliss,

and in her long quest no chance will she dismiss.

Everyone implies that she's the one to blame –

she should know better than to tarnish her name.

She herself wonders if her yearnings are wrong,

sometimes for hours and sometimes all night long.

Many have urged her to try and change her ways

so she isn't lonely for the rest of her days.

Yet firm is her will and her intent to wait

for a right fellow to whom she can relate.

# Raining Gold

It's a fantasy of every girl and boy,

a dream of ultimate happiness and joy,

to live a life on extravagance hell-bent,

instead of always struggling to pay the rent.

All you need do is look for someone above;

nothing more is asked than all your bosom's love.

Most people would say it's a rather fine deal;

now hurry to bed and don't forget to kneel.

Raise your arms to the heavens and open wide,

someone will always be there and will provide.

If you've been compliant and not at all bold,

you shall be rewarded – now it's raining gold.

It's but a warm welcome to your new life grand,

one entirely driven by King Midas' hand.

Nothing will ever again be out of reach

for venomous lips with such alluring speech.

Your mission will be complete once the bell sounds

as a witness to true love that knows no bounds.

Just remember to fasten that ball and chain

so you never stop living in the fast lane.

Raise your arms to the heavens and open wide,

someone will always be there and will provide.

If you've been as shrewd and swift as it was told,

you shall be rewarded with more raining gold.

This future awaits only a chosen few;

waiting is most foolish – lengthy is the queue.

If you've been unfortunate and were left dry,

just think of all the things that money can't buy.

These are few in number, it is sad, but true;

it all makes perfect sense when you think it through.

Not all are equal at the end of the day,

so all we can do is be patient and pray.

Raise your arms to the heavens and open wide,

someone will always be there and will provide.

Even us poor souls that were left in the cold

shall be rewarded with a shower of gold.

# Constance

CONSTANCE IS FAT. It's just one of the facts of life; the sun rises in the east, it sets in the west, and Constance is fat. It's – and there's always a giggle at this – _constant_. It's also so low effort, in Constance's opinion. There are _much_ better puns than that out there. And some of them are not even insulting. But she hardly hears it when they say it anymore.

Her childhood was a blur of baggy sweaters, roomy dresses and track bottoms, always in muted colors, always a size too small. It was also a blur of various snacks hidden in various pockets of said garments, to be eaten whenever no one was looking, and sometimes, in moments of true desperation, when _everyone_ was looking. Reese's, Doritos, M&Ms, Lays, Twizzlers, you name it. Because she would. Pringles, Oreos, Pop-Tarts, Tootsie Rolls, Hershey's (although Constance didn't really like Hershey's – they tasted like vomit sometimes, but she was also very hungry sometimes); she would stuff it all, first into her pockets and then into her mouth. And each bite made her so happy and so miserable at the same time and she would vow, after every single chew, that this was the last time. And that tomorrow, she wouldn't eat. At all. Or maybe just one Oreo, instead of oatmeal or whatever else normal people ate for breakfast. This promise was another constant thing in Constance's life, and she found it comforting. She could always decide to do better. And she could always start her new life, right after she finished that packet of Skittles. And then that box of Pop-Tarts.

_Tomorrow is a new day_.

Rory walks home from school every day, because his parents can't afford to buy him a bike, and the bus smells like old people. So Rory walks. He doesn't always pick the same route, and the weather sometimes takes a dump on his plans. When that happens, he tries to air the _eau de gériatrie_ out of his windbreaker, but it never works, so everyone at school asks him if he washes with sauerkraut instead of soap.

He always says 'yes' and that's usually when the first stone hits him in the head.

But when the weather does comply, Rory likes crossing the river on foot, even though the concrete on the bridge is cracked and his shoes are kind of old and more than kind of threadbare, which does not help the situation at all. But it's still nice. No one crosses that bridge anymore, anyway, because there's a new one barely a mile away. So Rory likes to think of _this_ bridge as _his_ bridge, Rory's domain, his private little piece of freedom and solitude.

Except today, it wasn't, because _she_ was there.

At first, he thought it was a bird or a rat or something, crunching and rustling in the trash under the bridge. But when he got close enough to see, it turned out to be _that girl_. Rory was not much loved, but she was _wildly_ unpopular. No one talked to her at school, except to let her know that they noticed, yet again, that she was fat. And that they still hated her for it. Rory never saw her outside of school, though, and he wasn't completely sure of her name, either. It was something old-fashioned, like Cornelia, or Colette or... or _Corpulentina._

Rory sniggered. That was funny. He was sort of proud. But it still didn't explain what she was doing under _his_ bridge, with her bag of colorful bags filled with colorful sweets. Rory wondered where she got the money for all of them. _Maybe she stole them from the supermarket?_ He tried to imagine her in a thief's getup, sneaking her way through the aisles, filling her bag with sweets of all sorts.

Needless to say, it was ridiculous. Mostly because she probably just shoplifted, and that's kind of hard to do when you're dressed completely in black and looking generally suspicious. Rory knew. He'd tried.

Maybe her parents were loaded? But then, why wouldn't she go to a private school, where they could at least pay people off not to point out the obvious? Must be shoplifting, after all. He could understand that.

What he _couldn't_ understand was why in the world she had to choose _his_ place to eat. And the worst part was that he couldn't really shoo her away. She was twice his size. If he tried to kick her, she probably wouldn't even feel it, but if she fell on him, he'd probably never feel anything again.

_Ugh_.

She saw him before he heard her, but even if she'd tried to move out of his way, Constance was sure he'd have had to comment. That's the sort of person she was – the kind that people _had to_ comment on. And she just couldn't bear to hear it. Not when she'd just opened a wonderful packet of Halloween Oreos, with _orange cream filling_. Such happiness shouldn't be spoiled by crude words. In fact, one of the fantastical cookies was on its way to her mouth when she'd noticed Rory. She knew his name, because Constance remembered everyone's name. And also because he'd never called her by her own name, but he'd never called her anything else either. That was something, at least.

So she just sat there, the bag in her hands rustling inexplicably, even though Constance was sure she was being completely still. But, as Rory looked up to see her, it turned out not be so inexplicable after all. It was just her usual trembling when faced with human contact, something she hadn't had for _so long._

She had kind of hoped it would be longer, though.

Constance watched anxiously as his expression turned from confused brow-furrowing to something that was an obviously angry frown, and his mouth twisted, in an emotion all too familiar to Constance. Her heart sank. Surely Rory was at least as disgusting in the eyes of the world as she was? Or was she destined to always be a peg below everyone else, even if everyone else smelled like an old person and you could see the soles of their feet through the soles of their shoes?

With a kind of strangled gasp she hadn't expected to release at all, Constance clutched her bag of preciousness closer to her soft, heaving chest and got up to leave. Or rather, she tried, but the anxiety and confusion and her _stupid body, why is it always so heavy,_ got tangled up in itself and she only managed to sort of roll on her side and land on her hands. Orange goo erupted between her fingers and she couldn't remember if blood was ever supposed to be orange, before realizing it was just the Oreo, gone forever, crushed beneath her weight.

Does the five-second rule apply if you lick it off the ground quick enough?

Rory wondered if he should help her. She looked like she needed it, but he wasn't sure if he wanted to. It seemed like she hadn't wanted him to, either, what with the way she'd tried to escape. But her complete lack of agility obviously killed off his cat-burglar theory about the source of her sweets and he was kind of angry about that. So why should he help her?

He'd already stopped in his tracks, though, and she was still right where he'd left her, and there was no way to just 'go over her'. If it was him, he wouldn't want himself to just go over _him_ and go away and leave himself all alone again.

For one of the first and probably last times in his life, Rory wished an adult was around. Adults knew what to do. And even if they didn't, they usually knew what they _should_ do and were just too ashamed to do what they really wanted, so they probably wouldn't just leave the giant girl cowering under the bridge, like Rory _really really_ wanted to. They'd probably approach her warily, like they would a wild animal – Rory knew, because that's how adults usually approached him. They would mutter ridiculous phrases in what they imagined to be a soothing voice, as if anything could be solved just by saying that it would be at some point. What use was that _now_? Now, when everything was horrible, and nothing was right, so obviously the things you were saying weren't going to be right, either?

The awkwardness of it all bore down on Rory with a crushing weight, and he started moving, forward or somewhere in that vicinity, closer to the hulking girl and further away from anywhere he would feel safe. His feet slipped a bit on the sloping ground as he descended towards the bridge's underside, his arms sort of flailing weirdly at his sides in an attempt to stabilize his small body, but Rory managed to get to the bottom of the shallow channel intact enough. Only now he had to think about what to do again, and he'd realized earlier that thinking was dangerous in these situations, because thinking was what got him there in the first place. So he moved.

_Moving is better_.

There was nowhere to run now. Constance would never be fast enough. But she couldn't turn to face him as he approached, and she was petrified anyway, imagining all the ways he must have been planning to torture her as soon as he was near enough. He'd probably kick her. And then he'd say it was just like kicking a pillow, so she can't have felt anything, anyway, right? They should test the theory again. So here comes another kick. And another. And maybe a punch, too, just to change things up a bit. Next he'd pull her hair, then laugh at her because he couldn't pick her up. And why would that be? Oh, right, because she's so _fat_. Fatso. Sometimes Constance wished they could pick her up and throw her against the floor or the wall, just to prove them and their horrible expectations wrong. But it never happened. So they tore away at her, making her smaller, but never small enough.

She'd expected the first blow to land by now. Constance's arms were straining to hold her body up, and the tremble only exacerbated the whole thing; her breathing shallow, Constance pushed away from the ground, but the Oreo filling, so delightful a second ago, had cruelly melted under the warmth of her sweaty, greedy palms and she slipped on it, losing what little traction she'd managed to scrounge up. There was barely enough time to blink before she collapsed to the sticky ground, her cheek bearing the brunt of impact, the rest of her body flopping stupidly, like some odd bloated fish, unlikely to be found under bridges in her small town. She could only find herself, wherever she looked, embarrassing and lumbering, taking up _so much space_.

And then she heard the snort. The mocking, ridiculing, all-too-familiar snort, followed by a hand on her shoulder, adding insult to injury.

Can't you just leave me alone?

She'd actually managed to fall again. Rory could barely believe it. It was so funny and so sad at the same time, the way she was so beyond help that even when she tried to do something, she would only run into herself.

Unfortunately, Rory was pretty sure that she wouldn't be able to get out of this mess alone. Which meant that all his worst fears had come true, and he would have to be the one to help her. The whole way down and over, he'd hoped against hope that she'd do exactly what she'd attempted to do, get up and run away from him, so he wouldn't have to help her do it.

Carefully, he covered the tiny distance separating them and reached over, when she tried to move her leg under herself and it made the rest of her sort of heave up and down, like an enormous caterpillar moving. It was the stupidest thing he'd ever seen. Laughter bubbled up sneakily from his chest, too quickly for him to do anything about it, so he snorted. Loudly. And it sounded just like every other terrible bully's snort he'd heard so many times before.

But he could fix it. He would help her up and explain and apologize and she would be okay, and maybe then _he_ could finally be okay for just a minute. So he reached down to grab her by the shoulder, the only jutting part of her overall roundness, his fingers fastening like a vice.

_Heave-ho_.

Constance felt herself being pulled back and around, Rory's face emerging over the horizon of her arm, his brows furrowed, cheeks puffy and nose scrunched up. Scrunched up in that same expression he'd had when he'd first spotted her. Turning her over just seemed so excessive. Did he want to slap her? Was kicking her in the back not good enough, or did he have to mess up her face, too?

She wouldn't have it. Not this time.

Constance used the momentum of his mocking aid to prop herself up to her knees. Her other arm suddenly free, and her hugeness now an advantage, she swung it to hit the hand holding her hostage. It landed heavily, and there was a sinister crunch in Rory's wrist. It was oddly reminiscent of the Oreo crunching under her hand just a moment ago. The sound was much sweeter this time, though.

"Get away from me," she screeched at him, her voice so loud in her ears. Constance didn't know she could be this loud. "You stinky piece of shit, just _go_ _away_!"

Before he could have a chance to react, Constance finally got up and whirled around, suddenly afraid again. She had never done anything like this before, but she knew what happened when you tried to fight back.

You just got beaten harder.

_Run_.

His wrist felt like someone had set it on fire, but also like it wasn't really his wrist anymore. His hand hung limply at the end of his arm, and he could only stare at it dejectedly as his attacker spun away, still much slower than anyone else would probably be, but too quick for him to react right now, anyway. She started running, feet flailing wildly in effort they probably rarely exerted, expanding the distance from Rory, and Rory realized he only felt grateful.

As if in slow motion, the fat girl grew smaller and smaller, further and further away. Rory looked down and snorted again.

She'd forgotten her bag.

_Sweet_.

# Crescendo

Could you loosen your grip?

I can't catch my breath;

it hurts to breathe,

as though I'm trying to inhale

lumps of heated coal.

I hear screaming, screeching

coming from inside of me.

Yet, I remain silent.

Tears, I can produce,

but their taste...

I know it as vile.

Far from strangers;

they've painted my cheeks

with burning streams,

one desolate moment

ticking away endlessly

after another.

The hectic pumping,

ripping through my chest,

serves to remind me

that soon, in a second or six,

none of it will matter.

Though it may be close,

I catch a glimpse of red.

A dim wet color

nested beneath my fingernails,

as they claw their way down

and deeper into my flesh.

I grasp for this sliver,

for this sign of existence,

but there's nothing to be felt.

I watch as the liquid pools

into a ghoulish image,

staring back at me.

"Have a peak,

look around,

I can't promise

that there's much

to be found."

This is what I dream of,

what my waking mind stores

in the corners of my sanity.

I set it aside day after day,

treasuring it wrapped in

lasting layers of hate and hope.

Once it unravels,

spreading rapidly with hunger,

seeking my faint answer,

my response to those hands

that chain my neck,

I shall have to choose,

or have it chosen.

My rusty and cracked

gears have been laid bare –

that which hasn't been

swallowed up by

the creatures of the dark.

Their teeth tear at my body,

scraping away fleshy chunks,

turning my lungs into

a revolting mess of

undiluted agony and relief.

With exhausted fingertips,

I cling to it, yearningly.

From inside my hollow mind,

a cluster of words echoes faintly:

This is how it all ends,

not with a bang, but

a deafening silence.

In restless anticipation, I feel

a mortifyingly unexpected

gush of air filling my chest.

There's more.

# Bi-rational

I'VE OFTEN WONDERED if my life is just a really long dream. I wished it were. It didn't help that, for years now, I've been incapable of staying asleep longer than three to four hours per sleep session. 233, 234, 235; 233, 234, 235; 233, 234, 235; I closed the book, got up, got ready, did my routines, and just as I was about to finish locking the door, I heard him.

"Stop tugging at it, it's so annoying."

I ignored him until I was done. He stayed quiet, eerily so, as though he had muffled his existence in those few moments when my eyes hadn't been on him. I hated that.

"What's it to you how I lock my door?" I said as I turned to face his condescending smirk.

"I comment because I care."

"Since when?"

His reply was a sharp laugh showing off his almost perfect teeth – they were wolf-like, too sharp to be... normal, but then again, who was I to speak?

We walked side by side, with him just half a step in front of me, as we always did. What was at first a conscious effort on my part had turned into a habit over the years.

"Feeling exceptionally anxious today?"

I knew he'd notice, he always did. How could he not, considering how meticulously he followed my every move. It used to send shivers down my spine, but I'd managed to overcome it. I had to. He was the only one that stuck around, even when I didn't want him to. At first, the mere fact that I wasn't completely alone gave me comfort, but as time passed, I started to realize that there were worse things.

We walked to the store where I lugged boxes all day, and he, well, he walked around with his clipboard, jotting things down. If anyone had ever bothered to direct a few words my way and ask me if I knew what hid behind that board, I would've had to stay true to my reputation as a provider of perpetual disappointment.

The day had passed as they all did, with me stacking boxes in the back of the store while everyone else did their best to try and avoid me. Everyone but him, that is. As comforting as it may have been several years ago, it had turned into everything but _that_. Knowing that he was always somewhere near, creeping in the back, had gradually turned from gratitude to aggravation, and I had come to realize that was his intention. He found it amusing.

An ordinary, no, a _sane_ person might've grown suspicious of such behavior, but such a person could afford it, whereas I could not, or at least that's what I had always told myself. _Something was better than nothing_.

"You're taking those again? Didn't you say you disliked how numb they made you feel?" he said, as we slowly made our way back to my street, trying hard to seem as nonchalant as possible.

"Yeah, thought I'd try them again. Besides, numb doesn't always have to be a bad thing."

"You know I disagree with that."

"You made that extremely clear the last time."

"Then don't..."

Just as he was about to grab my arm, his sentence was cut short by a couple of kids that tried to run straight through us. I couldn't react fast enough, so the taller one slammed right into me, yet he managed to avoid the collision with the slightest of motions – it was almost as if the kid _did_ pass _through_ him. Almost. I envied him for that. No one ever so much as grazed his shoulder; he was far too agile for that.

"As I was saying, you shouldn't be taking them," he continued in a stern tone, making the statement sound more like an order than a caring suggestion.

We had reached my building and I was about to go in, thinking I could end the conversation with a simple nod of my head, when he grabbed my shoulder and whispered: "Your actions will have consequences." I turned around in order to tell him how annoying he was, but my words remained stuck in my throat at the sight of his glaring eyes. For the first time in his presence, I felt undiluted fear coursing through me. Having seen my reaction, his eyes softened and the corners of his lips turned up. He took the bottle of pills from my hand and said: "Go home, relax, and we will see each other tomorrow, as always."

For hours after that, I couldn't get that moment to stop replaying itself in my head. I'd felt unsafe around him before, he was simply that kind of guy, the kind of guy you wouldn't want walking behind you in a dark ally, but I'd never felt that scared, that terrified. I couldn't get his expression out of my head. Not the one with the glaring eyes, but the second one, the one with the smile. It made my blood freeze.

My fear turned to anger, and I decided to take the pills just to spite him. I pulled the drawer of my nightstand open and took out a second bottle of those same pills. He didn't have the right to tell me what I could or couldn't do. As I lifted my head, I saw him, standing in my doorway.

The entrance door to my apartment was locked, I knew it was, I always checked.

"Yes, you did check, you pressed the door handle three times, like always," he said as though he was echoing my thoughts.

He started walking around my bedroom as if he felt perfectly comfortable exactly where he was, as though he had already been here many times before.

"Get out!"

"That is just not going to happen," he replied calmly while opening a window.

"Yes, it is, you obviously know where the door is! Go away!"

"Yeah, but I don't want to."

He ended his stroll inches away from me, and despite it being quite dark, I could see that chilling smile growing across his face.

I finally realized.

"You aren't real."

"You sure about that?" he asked, a second before he pushed me out the window.

# Dinner & Time, Act Three

FADE IN:

INT. FLAT – DAY

Open to a wide living room, empty of furniture. A couple of boxes are stacked to the side, in the corner. Slow pan from window to open door, clockwise to--

THE KITCHEN

Long and cramped with polished pans and utensils under a single ceiling light [LED]; a table under a huge window unfolds next to a stove with a touchpad. A left hand presses the ON button. Hum of stove heating up.

WIDE SHOT: MAN, he is slightly bent over.

MAN turns to bagged groceries on the counter and starts to sort them: a packet of spaghetti; a block of cheese; minced meat; two tomatoes and an onion; a stick of celery; a small bottle of spices.

MAN reaches into another plastic bag and pulls out a small jar of olives. He frowns.

MAN  
( _yelling_ )  
I thought we said no olives tonight?

Faint sounds from the other part of the apartment: scraping. MAN continues to sort food, throws the bag away. Shot of a flapping bin lid.

OFFSCREEN SOUND: a yelp

MAN#2  
( _distant_ )  
Fucking hell!

WOMAN

Fourth time today already.

MAN#2  
( _still distant_ )  
Well I keep banging my toes on  
all this _shit_.

WOMAN

Don't cuss.

MAN#2

He should just throw it away.

WOMAN appears in the kitchen doorway; she has her hands on her hips. She steps inside and leans on the table, taking the jar of olives off it.

CLOSE VIEW of polished nails.

WOMAN  
( _undertone_ )  
Had a craving, that's all.

She looks straight at MAN#1. He takes the jar and slams it into the fridge, just as MAN#2 shows up at the door. He is limping.

MAN#2

I think I finally broke them.

MAN#2 bends and looks at his toes, then glares at MAN#1.

MAN#2 (CONT'D)

And it's all your fault.

MAN#1

I'll pay for the damages.  
( _pause_ )  
Stay at the door, there's barely  
enough room for me here.

WOMAN hops onto the table, swings her legs.

WOMAN

Here you go!

WIDE SHOT: MAN#1 on the right, next to the stove; WOMAN perched on the edge of table, in the middle; MAN#2 standing next to her, pan to left. Framed in the window is the city's skyline.

The sun is setting.

Silence.

MAN#1 starts to cup up the vegetables, as MAN#2 crosses his arms and leans against the doorframe. CLOSE VIEW of WOMAN looking outside the window – her POV, busy city street: slow and heavy traffic, sweltering mist above the pavement, people going home from work.

WOMAN

Wanna talk about it?

MAN#1

Nothing to talk about.

MAN#2  
( _sarcastically_ )  
Oh, _sure_.

WOMAN

Then let's talk about _nothing_.

MAN#2

That's just boring.

MAN#1  
( _sighs_ )  
And boring conversations are not  
your thing?

MAN#2

Well, not with _you_.

MAN#1 turns away from both WOMAN and MAN#2 and starts to clean up the countertop, laying out a plate with assorted vegetables.

WOMAN

_ I_ don't mind them really.  
( _pause_ )  
But it's alright, if you think so.  
This could be just a meaningless  
exchange of words that can  
put us to sleep.

MAN#1

You really think such conversations  
are worth having?

WOMAN  
( _rolls her eyes_ )  
Of course.

MAN#1

Just talking? Without a particular  
topic? So that nothing is ever  
actually said?

MAN#2

Ah, but that's where you're wrong –  
there _is_ a topic: it's _nothing_.

WOMAN

And you always tend to make  
something out of nothing.

MAN#1

Not if it's pointless babble.  
If there's no conclusion it's just--

MAN#2  
( _scoffs_ )  
Like we could ever reach the same  
conclusion.

MAN#1

Do you always have to be like this?

MAN#2

Oh, I don't know, do _you_?

WOMAN

_ Actually_ _,_ I meant something like  
small-talk.  
( _falsetto_ )  
_Did you have a nice day?_  
( _pause_ )  
You know, a friends-talk.

MAN#1  
( _muttering_ )  
We're not friends.

MAN#1 glances at WOMAN. She is looking directly at him. He looks away immediately and turns the sink's faucet to maximum. CLOSE VIEW: eyes of MAN#2.

MAN#2

You can put it that way.

MAN#1

Maybe I don't want it any  
other way.

WOMAN

We can change that.

Silence.

MAN#2 nudges WOMAN, who points to a single unopened bag left on the counter. He pulls a bottle of wine from it and then looks back at WOMAN, one eyebrow raised.

WOMAN

Third cupboard on the right.

MAN#2 walks to the other side of the kitchen. He sidesteps MAN#1 and reaches for the cupboard door. He leans heavily on MAN#1. Shot of hand on hip, sound of bowls clinking.

MAN#1 turns off the faucet.

MAN#1  
( _low_ )  
Don't open it now.

MAN#2 and WOMAN laugh. MAN#2 is struggling with a bottle-opener. Twisting and turning the bottle, he glances at MAN#1 – their eyes meet.

MAN#2

It ain't overflowing...  
Yet.

MAN#1 turns away, presses the touchpad and throws the spaghetti in.

MAN#2 (CONT'D)

It's just wine, you know.

MAN#1 pulls up his sleeves, turns to a bowl and starts grating the cheese. MAN#2 gives one glass to WOMAN and settles opposite her. WOMAN holds the glass and looks through it at the street.

Shot of red-tinted street, the lights starting to turn on, blurred and soft orbs. WOMAN sips the wine and then sets it down, directly on the window ledge.

WOMAN

Another week down.

WIDE SHOT: sun has set; all three look through the window.

MAN#2

Cheers! I'll drink to that.

MAN#2 downs half his glass and then grimaces. CLOSE VIEW of lips which are now stained. WOMAN slowly gazes at him; their eyes meet. MAN#1 shoves away the bowl filled up with cheese. He leans heavily on the counter.

MAN#1  
( _slowly_ )  
I don't think...  
( _sighs and turns towards the other two_ )  
You shouldn't drink to anything.

MAN#2

Well, if I don't drink, I'll think.

WOMAN

If you don't think, you don't exist,  
you know.

MAN#1  
( _off-hand_ )  
That'd be nice.

MAN#2

What, for _me_ not to exist?

WOMAN

Oh, you know what he meant. Always  
about _himself._

MAN#2  
( _slowly_ )  
Well then... There's an idea.

Silence.

MAN#1

_ Seriously_?

WOMAN

We have a perfectly good window  
right here.

MAN#2

Might be a bit too low, though.

MAN#1  
( _irate_ )  
And would the roof be high enough?!

WOMAN

No need for such _theatrics_.

MAN#1

Doesn't sound like it to me!!  
Both of you just waltzing in here,  
showing off--

MAN#2

Well, we _were_ invited.

WOMAN  
( _undertone_ )  
Oh, _honestly_.

MAN#1

To have dinner and to--to talk  
things over! Not to--not to _say  
___ these _things_ like you--

MAN#2

Saying things _is_ talking.

WOMAN

Though talking doesn't mean we're  
communicating, you know.

MAN#1

I know full well what you're  
_communicating_ here, and--

MAN#2  
( _mocking_ )  
"Doesn't sound like it to me."

MAN#1  
( _heavily_ )  
Will you, for once in your life--

WOMAN

No, I don't think he will. After all,  
he never _does_.

MAN#2

I learnt not to. If I _had_ listened  
to half the stupid shit you--

WOMAN  
( _cutting_ )  
Truthfully, it took us both a while.

MAN#1

Well, it took _me_ more to realise  
how you--

WOMAN  
( _sharp_ )  
It took you _nothing_.

Silence.

WOMAN (CONT'D)

_ You _took _everything_.

MAN#2

From both of us.

WOMAN  
( _slow_ )  
You _don't_ want us to run out  
of patience.

MAN#2  
( _smirking_ )  
Or to run out to the roof.

MAN#1  
( _loudly_ )  
We can take this to the roof,  
if you want!

MAN#2

I'd rather we take it to the  
bedroom.

He looks directly at MAN#1, who turns his back to them. WOMAN slides down from the table.

WOMAN

If you want.

MAN#1

I--

OFFSCREEN SOUND: loud beeping

MAN#1 turns to the stove and removes the pot that's almost boiling over. The spaghetti is soggy and clinging to the strainer.

Silence.

WOMAN takes the last glass of wine and sips slowly from it. CLOSE VIEW of her smile. MAN#2 taps his foot and takes the glass from her. He drinks a little and then brings the glass up for MAN#1.

CLOSE VIEW of his eyes as he leans into MAN#1.

MAN#2

Come on, drink up... Friend.

WOMAN

And don't choke on it.  
( _pause_ )  
Not yet.

\-----------------------------------------------------CUT TO BLACK----------

# About...

ONCE, THERE WAS A GROUP of friends that held a workshop twice a week. Then, one day, they became much more. No one knew how, but all of a sudden, they were able to produce magic. One of them could spit fire, which, when you think about it, is not at all pleasant, although it did keep them warm in times of need, and there were many of those.

For instance, one of the friends could open portals, but exclusively to other continents. They visited deserts, oceans, volcanoes – those kinds of fun places.

This one time, they got stuck – their travelling friend had fainted from using too much magic – another friend had to fly them home. The problem was she could only carry one person at a time.

Their trip back was similar to one of those brain teasers where a fisherman can only take either the wolf, or the cabbage, or the sheep alone, onto the other side of the river, and make sure to transport them all in the right order, as if that could really prevent the wolf from eating the sheep. Actually, the wolf would probably just eat them all.

But this was different. It took way longer and contained fewer animals. Perhaps they wouldn't have been so hungry if they had at least some. That was when Anek lost the lower half of his leg going through the portal, because the travelling friend had woken up to find that only the two of them remained, so they thought 'eh, what the heck'. However, Oogor was too tired and half-juiced. The portal didn't stay open long enough for both of them to go through. Of course, Anek forgave him, but everyone knew Oogor had never forgiven himself. Everything would have been fine if Anek could have grown another limb, but he couldn't. At least not yet. The only thing that came out was a weirdly shaped bone – thick and strong. So he covered it with cow skin.

Then there was Mokana. The special one. And she... oh, she was special alright. Not because she had an amazing power – all she could do was move objects with her mind when there were no other people in a two-kilometre radius. What made her so special was her ability to annoy the hell out of everyone else. Everyone except Oogor. But then again, he liked her.

She had a phase when the only thing she would say to people – if she found that their words, nay, their _existence_ , differed from her own – was a stern and loud 'wrong'. On one occasion, Lit went up in flames. Literally. So Oogor gave himself the task of calming things down by going from person to person saying: "I actually think you are correct," "You know, it's one of those days...", and "Who cares what she says, you do you." That did not help much, other than making Mokana switch from 'wrong' to 'no'.

The only one left was Kanar. He didn't have any powers, but he tried not to let that get to him. After all, he took their little workshop seriously and actually wanted to do something else with his life other than 'mindless magicking'.

***

They were sitting in a small, warm room. Lit had spat some fire into a barrel to keep them warm, and to give them light since all the electricity was gone now. Oogor had consumed it all for the portals. It didn't help that they hadn't paid the bills in over three months. There's no money in doing magic tricks all day. Kanar's weird mohawk was slumped to the side, and bobbing all around. His arms were shaking, making the papers in his hands rustle.

"I can't. It has to be done. This is crazy!"

"Please, Kanar. Calm down..." said Lit, her voice harsh.

"All you people do all fucking day is magic! I have a job, and I have to finish school. I also lead this god-forsaken workshop. This can't go on. I feel like shit."

"Okay. Alright. It's fine. Look, man, we'll stop. Deal?" Anek nodded towards the others.

They gave him a blank look. Famona sneezed and flew a little.

"I am the only one... Okay? The only fucking one," Kanar's face turned bright red. He didn't swear often.

"Well... Actually..." Oogor began.

"Don't." Lit's voice sounded even more threatening, all coarse and raspy.

"It's not fair. He's our friend. Look at him!" Famona almost cried. She loved Kanar – he made her laugh and levitate. She often pictured them having sex. In the air.

"Oh, come on. You just wanna f—" Lit started.

"Don't you pity me." It wasn't loud, but it was determined. Kanar got up, holding his papers so firmly they'd crumpled and mushed together.

They stared at him. It could have been because they were frightened, but also because Lit threw a lil' somethin' into the fire-can. Almost all of them were hungover, so the herb helped relieve the headache; she also did it for Famona, since her gaseous state often caused nose troubles for others.

"Why don't you just write yourself in?" asked Mokana, the only sane one, as it seemed.

"That's not how the story works. It cannot be changed now. But if I destroy it, no one will have powers, and we can all just go back to living our old lives."

"Like anyone wants that..." said Oogor.

"How about writing another one?" asked Mokana again.

"It won't work!" Kanar wanted to yell. But it was like his voice was unable to produce a sound louder than a gruff whisper.

"Oh, for crying out loud, just fucking tell him!" Famona cried, then adjusted herself in a more comfortable position on a large pillow she had been sharing with Lit.

"Come." Oogor pointed towards a pillow in the middle of the room, inviting Kanar to join.

He reluctantly sat down.

"You wrote the story, right?" Oogor said, nodding. "And, afterwards... _right_?"

Silence filled the room. If you had been there for some reason, you could have only heard Lit chewing some charcoal. "It's good for the teeth," she'd say. Someone could have mistaken that for the sound of Kanar's mind trying to figure out this conundrum, but you are lucky you have me.

"Oh, my..." Kanar whispered. "It was me, wasn't it?" He almost shed a tear. But he composed himself, took the practically torn papers and carefully sorted them.

"I created magic."

"Well..." Lit began.

"I mean..." Mokana followed.

"Kind of..." Famona added.

"It was about damn time." Anek was looking down.

Instead of cow, there was actual human skin there. His leg finally grew back.

"Thank you!" Kanar thought about kissing Anek's newly grown leg, but decided to slightly pat him on the head instead. That caused Kanar to almost fall in an awkward way, landing straight into Famona's lap, which made her face glow with hope. But that only lasted for a few seconds.

Kanar looked at the papers in his hands. Still wrinkled, but lasting.

Once upon a time, there was a story. It was a different kind of story than the ones people are used to. About a paper, and a hand, and a pen, and it was magical.

"That's what I'll call the story – **...Damn Thyme**."

# Triptych

a single branch

moonlit branch creaks, tears in the air;

dressed in crystalline rime; sings kisses,

dreams the return of the Sun; serenades of the Night

fake honey smile prompts

the passer-by the Moon with its voice,

in a frosty canvas forms heavenly sonata;

summons, as if it threatens with needles;

can't see how in the eyes, a shudder

that spine-shock permeates and

electrifies feels

what we dreamed of —white surfaces?

frozen above Belgrade— fear; yes, the first breeze is

the hardest dark; and after His promise; You know—

gliding across the veins, melodies, words,

fluttery breaths you hear

a song of Nature

it will come on its own, when you believe,

countless times, when you wish,

step into the sunlight, try;

catch the whiff known to your heart

soft to the thought a Task

# The End of the World as I Know It

OVER THE PAST TWO WEEKS, ever since the news of the first bodies had spread, I have looked at the sky every night wondering if I could see the place they came from, or rather the star their home orbited around. I've been imagining what they might look like; the rest of the world may have seen that for themselves, but we aren't even allowed to look at the photos of their corpses that, I guess, the newspapers are full of. I bet that all the sci-fi movies and TV shows are very wrong, though. I bet they don't look anything like humans imagined they would. I wonder if they, too, have any idea of what we look like and if _they_ are as wrong as I believe _we_ are. Maybe our planet is so wildly different from what they expected that it's actually shock that killed them? But I suppose it's just the fact that their lungs weren't adapted to our atmosphere, or something like that.

But why take the risk? Why travel such an incomprehensibly long distance not knowing if you could survive arriving to your destination? Mary calls these thoughts blasphemous (which makes me start humming _Blasphemous Rumors_ ), but she says she won't tell anyone about them – as if that would make any difference. We'll be dead in less than an hour anyway, and I'll never get to hear Depeche Mode live, and if John even has a punishment planned for those who share these blasphemous thoughts, it hardly matters at this point.

When I joined the community, I was a bit jealous of Mary, having seen how proud her parents were because John chose her as his assistant (though I suspect they weren't aware of all her duties). Mary was the designated weirdo in our high school. She wasn't bullied, not really; people actually invited her to hang out when she first moved to our neighborhood. And she always accepted the invitations, although she stopped getting them very soon. The other kids found her religious fanaticism somewhat fun at first, but when they realized how serious she was, most of them decided to just ignore her. A lot of folks were surprised Mary Johnson and her family had joined the cult so readily, considering how different their beliefs were from what John was preaching. I think people such as the Johnsons aren't really picky when it comes to what they will dedicate their time to, as long as there's something to be fanatic about.

If I disregard the fact that he's leading more than a hundred people to death, John is a lot like my mother, really. Unwilling to explain much of what's going on, using 'because I said so' as an argument – treating us like children. And there are people here who are older than him! Thinking of Mom, I childishly wonder if she's blaming herself. I once came very close to faking my suicide just to see her reaction, but gave up when I vomited in the bath full of fake blood that looked too real. I almost laugh out loud remembering this, but then I hear her constantly disappointed voice in my head saying how I can't even commit suicide on my own. Would she really say something like that, though?

The preparations for tonight started hours ago, and now the main room is empty but for a big white square table on which there are exactly 122 plastic cups that, for now, contain only water. The number bothers me because there's that one cup that disturbs the perfect square of 121 cups, eleven rows with eleven cups in each row. I am aware of how ridiculous it is to think about something like that right now, but it's easier than wondering what the poison will taste like or whether it will have any taste at all, which I'll find out soon enough anyway. It's also easier to be angry at a plastic cup than yourself, especially when there's no going back from the situation that causes the anger.

When the photos of the first UFO appeared, no one thought much of them; we were kind of used to fake news by then. But as time passed, more and more pictures were shared and it seemed to be getting closer. A lot of people started getting worried; cults began forming. Most people stayed in denial, though. Didn't it occur to them that, if it was a prank, it was lasting just a little too long? I was still at home at that time, and mom kept saying how ridiculous it all was. Even if there was something in the sky, she believed it was just an asteroid or a meteor (not much difference to her) that would fall down or fly past like these things always did. Just like she believed I would simply stop being sad if only I tried hard enough.

I can see that Mary's entered the room now, carrying a small transparent plastic bottle, half-filled with white powder. In her other hand is a small plastic spoon that she uses to scoop out the deadly substance which she then puts in the cups. When it dissolves in the water, you can't really see the difference, and I suppose it doesn't smell different either. But if anyone doubts the cups contain poison, they'll get all the evidence they need pretty soon. Mary is done turning the unassuming plastic cups into deadly weapons, and now we are all lining up, everyone standing in an individual square drawn on the floor with their name written in it. One hundred and twenty-one squares, eleven rows with eleven squares in each row. John will give the poisonous drink to everyone, and I cannot help but wonder if maybe, when he is done with all of us, he will decide not to drink from the last cup after all. I guess Mary would call this a very blasphemous thought, but she'll never know about it (except I'm not sure she isn't thinking the same; in fact, it would not surprise me if the thought crossed everyone's mind).

We're supposed to wait until everyone gets their cup before we drink from them, and making someone hold something they know will kill them in a couple of minutes is, in my opinion, an indicator of a sadistic personality. Then again, it's not like I didn't have plenty of other indicators of John's insanity. John lifts his left arm and that's the sign that we are finally supposed to raise the cups to our lips and drink what still looks like water. Funny how I thought this moment would be very dramatic, but instead, I just want to get it over with, so I swallow it all at once, and the last thing I remember is my legs shaking, and then falling to the ground.

And then, after the blackness, everything is red, but only for a second or two before I open my eyes. I can see my right arm pinned beneath my hip, but I can't feel it because I've been lying on it for God knows how long. I realize it's daytime and slowly get up to see 121 people lying around me. Ten rows with eleven people in each row, one row with ten of them and John in front of all of us, as dead as I assume the others are. Their faces are as pale as the dresses they're wearing, and, as seconds pass, I'm becoming sure no one else will wake up. I can hear the sirens in the distance, uncertain if it's the police or an ambulance, and I wonder how is it that they knew they're supposed to be here. I can also hear another car – it's very close – and seconds or minutes later, the door bursts open and I see my mother – she's running and crying and I like to think that her tears become tears of joy.

# The Goldstone

AMONG MILLIONS OF STARS, in an infinite universe, there are billions of possibilities. When something is limitless, everything is bound to happen somewhere. In one distant corner of an unexplored universe, within a cloud of stardust, everything is happening right now.

If you enter that thick cloud of stardust, you will notice the figure of a woman floating in its center. A necklace rests around her neck, its pendant in her cupped hands. Her celestial eyes are focused on that small pendant, her favorite creation.

At first glance, this pendant looks like a simple black goldstone, but our Lady isn't staring this intently into an ordinary pebble. The tiny sparkles within this stone move, each little light flowing in a slow eternal dance of its own. An entire universe is resting within it, but our Lady's gaze is focused on a single sparkling dot in there. Actually, on a planet that is circling that dot. This is where her creation went wrong. Went dark.

And now, she has to see what will happen next.

***

He felt trapped. He couldn't run anymore. He couldn't find an exit, and the bloody castle was under a mountain, so he wasn't even able to tell how long he had been in there. He could hear something behind him, but he couldn't go on anymore; he had to stop and rest for a moment.

***

Yael opened his eyes. He was in his bed.

He got up, exercised, showered, answered a few texts, had breakfast, said good morning to his parents who were sitting in front of the telly, and headed out to fetch some cigarettes. Everything was fine.

On his way to the store, he pondered for God knows which time why he still hadn't quit that nasty habit. _But it was hard, and he had no other vices, so why on Earth would he deny himself this one little thing?_

The moment he reached the store, Yael realized two things. One – the streets were even emptier than usual, and two – his parents had never answered!

"Damn it! They never answered!"

Yael ran as if a horde of hungry Stainers was after him, ran back home in hope that he had misunderstood that silence. Ran like there was hope in spite of knowing there was none.

When he threw the house door open, he saw what he had so casually failed to notice that morning. His parents were looking at the TV with dead eyes on blackened faces, their arms and legs already significantly shortened. The Stain had already started taking over. His eyes welled up with tears, but this wasn't his fault. He had told them not to get the treatment. Yael knew what he had to do before the process was complete. He had to burn them.

When he returned from the garage with a bucket of gasoline and a lighter, those black unblinking eyes were turned to face him. It was starting, but...

"They're my parents, for fuck's sake!"

***

Yael woke up. His sheets were all wet from the nightmare, but he realized that's all it was – a creepy, bloody nightmare that had taken him too far. He could still smell the gasoline, his heart was still pumping like he'd run a marathon, but at least he knew he was awake now.

It was Vaccination Day. According to the FDA, this new Life Expectancy Improvement vaccine (or LEI, how people had already started referring to it) was now completely safe, and according to the government, it was also completely free and mandatory. Everybody went freely and happily to the nurse's office to get their treatment. Yael wasn't so sure it was entirely safe, so he had told his folks to wait a bit and see if their neighbors had any side effects.

Of course, he was late, and he could already hear the chatter of his friends through his door as they returned to the house.

He got up, took a shower, did some light exercises, got dressed and left his room at last. He knew he would probably be too late to get the shot at the campus, but it was okay; he'd just visit the nearby hospital.

Halfway down the stairs, he realized that a lot of the usual hubbub was missing. It was like when you've lived in a city, and suddenly move to the countryside – you are shocked by the lack of noise. And he wasn't certain if the noise had just disappeared a moment ago, or if it had happened at some point while he was getting ready. He walked down the stairs, worried that this would be another prank, but it wasn't. His frat brothers were scattered on the floor like slaughtered lambs. He stepped into the bloody mush, slipped and fell.

When he came to, men in yellow jumpsuits were carrying pieces of his friends out of the house, while others were attempting to restrain a huge guy with a black stain covering his eye, cheek and most of his neck. The guy was behaving like an animal, making strange noises and knocking down the men who were trying to overpower him. Yael wasn't certain they'd be able to hold him, so he reached for the first weapon at hand, a fireplace poker, and walked backwards into one of the rooms. He closed the door and took a deep breath. Then, he noticed a yellow glow in the room.

On the floor, there was an orange amber-like substance that carried a dark, stained, moving cadaver in it. A cadaver whose face he knew he should have been able to recognize. As he stared at it, the substance started calling to him, and the dark cadaver slowly began sprouting tentacles, reaching for Yael. He tightened his grasp on the poker, but he knew he wouldn't use it. There was a man in there. When they touched him, the tentacles burned like fire, and yet, something kept inviting him in...

"NO!"

***

Yael woke up. He was terrified to the bone, and he could not be certain waking up was real this time. Each time he had a dream like this, he was terrified he wouldn't be able to run away before something killed him in there. He couldn't wake up, he couldn't run away, and everything would feel as real as if it were happening to him right there and then.

He got up, still thinking about the last nightmare, and went to take a shower.

All of these grown-up nightmares he'd been having – Mom and Dad were calling them night terrors. But he knew they were there because of the procedure. They kept taking him to that doctor every six months to have their biggest shame cut off – their son's mutation.

He could hear the doctor's footsteps echoing down the hall again – that man was coming for Yael once more. He didn't want that damned, horrible, painful, shameful procedure again! He just didn't! He was old enough to decide for himself. After all, he was twelve already; they couldn't make him.

That's why Yael decided to sneak out of his room. He entered the supply closet and waited for his doctor to pass by, looking for him, calling him. He wouldn't get caught. He grabbed a pair of sharp scissors he had found among the supplies and put them in his pocket. After the doctor passed him by, Yael ran out of the supply closet and into the patient wardrobe. He took some random jeans in his size, a shirt and a cap, and started looking for a way out of the building. He had seen this in a movie, so it had to work.

Except... well, this building was like a labyrinth from that ancient David Bowie movie. Scary things all around, people crying, wheezing, coughing, and that overpowering smell of drugs and disinfectant that he hated so much.

Yael was in a dark hallway when he suddenly heard a man yelling behind his back: "There you are, you little freak!" Yael thought about the scissors, gripping them tighter, but there was no need to hurt a man who still hadn't done him any harm.

A man in a trench coat and a wide-brimmed hat was standing at the other end of the dark hallway. His voice was golden brown, and even though Yael should have felt offended, he felt drawn to this man. He walked towards him in spite of the darkness in the hallway, in spite of the fact that he didn't recognize this man's voice, even though he couldn't see his face from beneath the brim of the hat. After all, he was probably just some security guy who liked scaring kids.

Yael realized his mistake a moment too late. As he made those final few steps, he came close enough to see the man's face. Except it wasn't there. Instead of a face, there was nothing but a huge black stain – no eyes, no nose, no ears, just a red toothless grin that was expanding to engulf him.

***

This one was really close. Yael woke up, and this time, he wouldn't leave anything to chance. He pinched himself – he felt it. He bit himself; he definitely felt that. He checked himself.

"I'm Yael. I'm 24 years old. I live in what's left of Indianapolis. I used to go to the Indiana University in Bloomington before the Stain took it over. I was born with a deformity no one knew about, but that might probably, possibly be the only reason why I'm managing to run away.

Each time I emerge from the amber cadaver phase, I feel a bit different. But it's OK; I'm still not one of them. The dreams make it seem like killing is my only option to survive, but I know there must be something else out there."

After all, if he didn't have hope, he'd be long gone into the black, screaming, poisonous eternity that the Stain offers in his dreams.

***

The Lady of Creation looks up from her pendant and out into the endless universe. A glimmer of hope exists, then. She still holds the Goldstone universe with her left hand, but her right is clutching her thigh where there's a small dark hole that looks a lot like a stain on her body made of light.

Now, for the first time ever, a goddess prays to the humankind.

# Creation's Ode (My Eyes in Yours Lie)

My eyes from yours have been made,

Although my form is by your hand

Wrought into being, on paper laid,

Your sea's waters to my shore's sand.

From your essence I outwards flow,

Into the wider world from that of your own.

I am your messenger, and I can grow

Into a value, a meaning, a symbol you've sown.

I sprout from within, a depth known or not,

Expressing your being, an art, piece by piece.

Crafted by you, as you dreamt and thought,

I come from your passion, and I go with peace.

(With you I was born, but with you I won't cease.)

In my entirety, I stem from a spark,

Caught in your mind, seen in your eyes,

And being created, I leave a lasting mark,

Upon your great heart, where all your art lies.

# The Epitome of a Star

With feet caressing the fleeting Earth

And mind adoring the endless expanse,

Perpetually lead by a concept, a notion,

A shiny one sails through the starry ocean.

She is a daughter of eternal wonder,

Present wherever her mind wanders,

Painting across the celestial dome

An image of warmth that feels like home.

The epitome of a star, a nurturing flame,

Burning throughout and renewing itself,

Shining for all who would have the sight

To see the true depths of her freeing light.

An ideal brave, and very aware

Of questions and answers without seeming end,

She is the symbol for which I care

And wish beyond all to take her hand.

# A Bit of Perpetual Grayness

Catching a scent of a dim, rainy dusk

Brings in a bit of perpetual grayness.

Her warmth, though brusque,

Offers hope to the aimless.

Possibly warm in all her coldness,

Plausibly close in all her farness,

She wears a veiling, an ethereal gown,

And duality is the jewel of her crown.

She seems to release the material harness

Of those who grace her with deep, longing gazes

As she favors them with her freeing hazes,

Becoming personified in front of their faces.

Darkness and brightness in their ceaseless races

Leave in their wake the great, neutral grayness.

Entangled with each of them, in essence,

She comes from both gloom and luminescence.

# Topsy-turviness

Among the topsy-turviness

And life in disarray,

Chaos can offer happiness,

A brightness on the gray.

No matter of the current form,

An inner force will shine.

As in the eye of the fiercest storm,

The brightness can align.

We come from the nest of creation

Which threads of essence weave,

Building upon the timeless foundation,

It changes, but never leaves.

Disregard the cold, recurring mist

Simply by observing blooming fields,

Where equally life is kissed

By unending rays the sun yields.

# Christina

PERHAPS IT IS NOT POSSIBLE to transcend the anxiety that blooms out of a life half-lived.

"Everything is hard for you," he says. _Isn't it?_

What she wants to say is that she doesn't understand how anyone can live without fear, or reservation, or consequence. She is openly disdainful towards people who choose to identify as daredevils, or thrill-seekers. She can no longer relate to carelessness in any form: an easy, one-shouldered shrug, a lazy, loose-hipped walk, a laugh with the head tilted back, throat exposed. She winds her scarf further around her neck, around the tender flesh, knowing that she will lie in bed later that evening, alone and therefore safe, and feel with her fingers, searching for the place where the skin becomes thin and vulnerable as it stretches over bone. Sometimes there are bruises in the morning. People have started to notice them – the ones that are blooming along her jawline, her collarbone – and she wonders if they think that her life is tragic and broken. She supposes that it is, but not in the way that they assume.

Everything is hard for her, isn't it? His voice is flat, and she is reminded of her father. She is not interesting enough for him to muster up contempt or any vague pretence of emotion that could be mistaken for it. He prefers them young, she thinks, much younger than her, and damaged but malleable. How did she grow into this life? When she was younger, she never believed that she would live long enough to learn how to stop hurting herself. She is still not sure that she has achieved this. Her body is a testament to all the ways in which a person can be harmed or can cause harm. Her body is a wreckage that has never felt like home. She looks at the man, his face her father's face, and is disappointed that he does not seem to have acknowledged the severity of her situation. It is so heavy, she wants to say. _I am so heavy. Here. Won't someone carry this weight?_

She leaves the appointment with a generic prescription for some type of drug that she cannot pronounce the name of. The man would have liked her when she was younger, she thinks. She was softer then, and often experienced a strange, sickening guilt about inconsequential events, such as pronouncing a word wrong or selecting one item over another at the local market _. I'm sorry_ , she would think, as she ran her hands over each object. _Oh god, I'm so sorry_. Her favourite stall at the market sold silk scarves that reminded her of liquid gold. Once, she bought one and tied it up in her hair – "Like a bag lady!" her mother would later exclaim – and when she walked past the department store with floor-to-ceiling windows, she caught her reflection and failed to recognise herself. The level of dissociation that she experienced, as she acknowledged both the person she saw and the person she really was, both terrified and thrilled her. She liked to believe that she was a practical woman, someone who favoured logic and facts over half-imagined dreams. It seemed more admirable, somehow. However, looking at her reflection that day, she couldn't help but feel that, in a past life, she had been beautiful. Maybe she had even been great. She ran her fingers over the smooth silk of the scarf, watching her hands flutter in the mirror. They did not look like her hands. She wondered if one day, in a future life, she might think of this one as beautiful; maybe it might even be great.

When she returned home, her mother pulled the scarf from her hair, rolling her eyes. Her mother's name was Rita – the patron saint of impossible causes, her father used to say – and she was halfway through dressing for work. The pins in her hair shook loose, the bra hook buried itself in her back. The flesh there was not delicate. "Christina, the people who won't love you just won't love you." Her mother's voice. Her mother, long dead. Does she miss her? Christina doesn't think so. When she thinks of her mother, it is worry rather than sadness that settles in her stomach. It feels like she's still watching her somehow, still criticizing her, brow furrowed, hands on hips. Christina often thinks of her mother's heart, even though she imagines that by now it is preserved, or rotten, or buried. Her mother had said, again and again, that it belonged to her father. Sometimes Christina would lie with her ear pressed against it and hear it skitter and leap and thump. It didn't sound like something that ought to be owned. It sounded like something that ought to be free. She thinks of her dead mother, her probably dead father, those ghosts she will never lay to rest. She thinks of her own heart, and her last visit to the doctor. He had let her listen to it through the stethoscope, like a child, and she was surprised by the strong, brave beat of it. It sounded like it ought to belong to someone else.

Christina knows that no one will ever lay claim to her heart in the obsessive, all-encompassing way that her father claimed her mother's. Rita met him in an alehouse just before her nineteenth birthday. It was New Year's Eve, and Christina's mother was working behind the bar, dressed as one half of Laurel and Hardy. The adhesive moustache that she had applied to her upper lip kept slipping down. It was unseasonably warm, and she was dressed in a heavy suit that restricted her movements. In a fit of something approaching rage, she ripped the moustache from her lip and wiped away the sweat that had beaded there with the back of her hand. Christina's father was approaching the bar and something about the swiftness of her movement, the seamless transition between the removal of the moustache and the removal of the sweat, struck him dumb. It wasn't just an action, he used to say to them, before he left. It wasn't just a motion, or a simple movement – it was poetry. He wanted the woman behind the bar, but it was a form of desire that was unfamiliar to him. He wanted to lick the sweat that was once again beading upon her upper lip. He wanted to lie front to back, with her spine nestling into his stomach. He wanted to wake in the morning with fine strands of her hair in his mouth.

Christina had only been in love once, and it was a long time ago. Since a very young age, she has felt peculiarly devoid of passion, of what her father referred to as 'fire in the belly'. It isn't that she lacks these qualities – she knows that they are nestled inside of her somewhere, like a menagerie of animals – it's more that she does not want to free them. Sometimes she feels them stirring, and it unsettles her. Her skin trembles and crawls, and she wakes up with marks she cannot explain, blood under her fingernails. She will not allow herself to give life to these creatures. For Christina, there is weakness in passion, weakness in the vulnerability that accompanies loving without reservation or consequence. Christina's first and only love was a girl she attended school with. She remembers insignificant things about her, like the way she looked in blue jeans, causing Christina to finally understand why people so often talked about the way in which clothing could hug particular parts of the body. How her shirt lifted at the back as she raised her arm during class, revealing a thin strip of skin that made Christina think of more than just the muscles and bones that were housed inside of her. How her teeth were too big for her mouth, but Christina only wanted to kiss each one. To travel the unknown landscape of her tongue, to be the insides of her cheeks, rough and bitten. Christina wanted to rest as easily on her breath as a sigh, sleep in the soft bed of her gums during the night.

Christina's true love abandoned her within a few months to attend a more prestigious school near the coast. After momentary heartbreak, Christina tried to forget about her, but something had taken root. She could not shake constant feelings of weariness, of lethargy, of embarrassment. This embarrassment was not caused by her love leaving her without warning. It was not caused by the unexpected strength of her emotions considering how little they had talked... how little they had touched. Christina could not differentiate between whether she truly wanted her classmate or only wanted to _be_ her; the latter being more forgivable, because wanting someone else was only ever a gross projection of what one believed one deserved. Christina believed that to strive for perfection was beautiful and admirable and ultimately stupid, but the desire to _own_ perfection was a particular kind of cruelty not dissimilar to the hand that pins the butterfly to the board. Isn't every prisoner ashamed of their chains? The love that Christina felt was hot in her hands, but she could not put it down. It took up so much room.

Christina, the patron saint of insanity. Her father used to address her as such. She would adequately arrange her face until it looked like she wasn't feeling anything, but at night, she would lie in bed shaking. She would think of her grandmother biting at her own hands, the girl at school who slit her wrists in the bathtub, and then the thoughts that sometimes entered her mind without permission, dark and far away and not entirely her own. Years later, she discovered that Christina was the patron saint against insanity, the patron saint of healing. Her father would not have noticed or cared about this difference; for Christina, it tilted the entire axis upon which her world was balanced. It did not bring her pleasure. She was used to deliberately placing herself in harm's way, to quietly enduring destruction. During the rare times that she lacked the self-discipline to adequately harm herself, she always managed to find somebody else who was capable of doing so. Now she was expected to save herself, too. Christina held no illusions about her predicament, nor her abilities. Once, she attended a therapy class. It was either that or the asylum, again, and Christina found the company there excruciatingly dull, the food indigestible. The therapist had asked each member of the group to cradle their inner child in their arms. Their inner children were represented by unattractive cloth dolls with button eyes, and as Christina held the doll and thought about herself, she felt nothing but a cruel, cold contempt. She resented her brain and she resented her body, something she had to drag around each day, something that was definitive and devastating proof that she existed. It would always leave a mark. Her hands shook with anger. She twisted the button eyes off of the doll and was quietly asked to leave the group. As she gathered her things, Christina saw the other patients crying, clutching their dolls to their chests, petting their heads, holding them lovingly, delicately. It turned her stomach to think of showing any part of herself, real or metaphorical, that much kindness. She left quickly and vomited on the pavement outside.

Christina had a real child once, and she loved him very much, but she was incapable of demonstrating this to him. Her mother tutted and scolded her for wanting to carry on their ruined genes. "Are you that selfish, Christina? Do you need to see even more of yourself in this world?" Christina thinks that people who don't believe in ghosts have never met her mother. Her voice is as clear and as sharply accented right now in Christina's head as it ever was in real life; sometimes Christina wonders if her mother had inhabited her after her death. She saw her mother's body, she remembers her scars. The same imprints now exist on her own flesh. Could she ever have lived another life but this one? Christina's mother with her impossible daughter, her absent husband, her wild heart. Christina with her absent son, her impossible mother, her heavy heart. Christina's mother in her woolen winter coat, her deep pockets filled with stones, her last walk to the river. Christina in her tiny bathtub, the water going cold, her stomach partway full of pills, her hand delicately counting out the remainder. The dart of her small pink tongue, the dry swallow that comes afterwards.

Christina leaves the bathtub before she falls asleep, feeling a strange tug of tenderness towards her body. This is where the trajectory of her life will separate from her mother's. She doesn't want to be found bloated and grey. As much as she has loathed it, she knows that any other body would not have suited her – any other life would not have suited her – and therefore her last action towards it is one of protection. She slowly picks her way across the flat and enters her bedroom. It is small. Her life is so small. She thinks of her son, now a grown man with a family, and she wants to tell him something about the children and their roses, but she cannot remember how the story goes. She wonders if everything is working as she planned it to, because suddenly she feels very distant. Her eyelids are heavy. She has already lived for so long. The key in the envelope, the letter on the table. Did she ever say she was sorry? Christina thinks an apology would be the appropriate gesture here.

She lies down on the centre of her bed. She brings her hands together neatly on top of her stomach, then returns them to her sides. _Life has never been beautiful._ She has dressed herself in her favourite white nightgown, adorned herself with her favourite jewellery. Her wrists are turned upwards, like Millais' Ophelia; drowned, but forgiven, finally, and quietly waiting for whatever comes next.

# A Single Vessel

A STRAY VESSEL had dispatched back to Earth a sensor report about a vast field of metallic debris floating in a star system at the edge of explored space. Being the preeminent xeno-archaeologist, the government had picked her to lead a research mission to examine whether the fragments had indeed been relics of another intelligent species. Now, after months of preparation and travel, she could finally send probes to gather some samples and bring them inside the ship she commanded to be inspected. The first pieces confirmed the alien hypothesis, and for days she could barely maintain her composure in front of her colleagues. After all those years of studying and writing speculative papers on what an advanced extraterrestrial civilisation would look like, she was finally on the frontlines, making First Contact. However, when the probes brought even more debris, her professional side regained full control. There was a mystery about these artefacts, and it was her job to unravel it.

It was undeniable that hundreds of vessels had been destroyed there. The issue was who had done it and why – especially after composition analysis of the collected pieces showed that every single one had been manufactured using the same processes. Her colleagues advocated different theories, but she found one particular hypothesis a bit silly and straight out of a cheap sci-fi novel. This guy – _what a character_ – proposed that the Aliens – they decided to refer to them as such until they found out what they called themselves – had clashed with another space-faring civilisation which had annihilated them thanks to its superior technology. She could not believe the Aliens, who seemed to have assembled in one spot a force capable of sterilising all ten fully inhabited human solar systems, had been utterly incapable of causing any damage at all to their opponents. As the fragments kept piling up and their composition remained the same, she grew surer that the only logical explanation was that the Aliens had fought not some other extraterrestrials, but each other. Civil war was not unimaginable, after all.

That was where it all could have ended. Months passed and the expedition gained no new insights. The government would have cancelled the mission, and she would have returned to Earth to take back the boring job of a university professor, had it not been for a probe malfunctioning and wandering far enough to force them to send a shuttle to retrieve it. Approaching the probe, the spacecraft's sensors picked up an anomaly on a nearby asteroid – an escape pod, mostly undamaged. The transmission of the discovery made her grin like a child receiving a long-desired toy. This adventure was not over yet.

Inside the pod, they found the mummified remains of an Alien. He – having found no uterus-analogue, they decided it would be a _he_ – was humanoid, but there was some weirdness to him that made him an actual alien – three additional fingers on each hand, a tail which could have served as an extra arm or leg, and a pill-shaped cranium with tiny horns lining his forehead. The pod had lost power and he had run out of air, but the cold had preserved him for one hundred thousand years, dating revealed.

The pod's interface was barely useful. At first, they could not access it, but even when they did, most of the data was too corrupted to be retrieved. However, they found that the Alien had sent a message into interstellar space; she was certain that he had asked for help. The government ordered for the mummy to be sent back to the Sol system for further study, while they went to find out where the Alien had sent his SOS to. She was reluctant to part with him, but she had to hand him over to the government – they were her bosses, after all. On the departure day, while she was overseeing the transfer of the body to another ship, one of her colleagues said they should give him a name, as had been the case with some fossils of primitive human ancestors. It took her some time to figure out what to call him – her decision would go down in history, so it had to be appropriate. She decided that Lucius would be the perfect solution – an homage to the _Australopithecus_ Lucy.

The search for the destination of Lucius' signal brought them to a nearby star, and a barren world which reminded her of pictures of the old, pre-settled Mars. There they found an abandoned mining base. Its tunnels stretched almost eight kilometres through the crust, and they had been collapsed intentionally – drones found marks of a series of coordinated low-yield detonations. Scans indicated the mine was not exhausted of valuable minerals, while residual organic material near the surface revealed that it had been destroyed approximately at the time of Lucius' death. Her colleagues jumped to the conclusion that one of the factions in the Alien Civil War had been in control of the planet and about to lose it, and that they had employed some scorched-earth tactics – blowing up the mine to deny their opponents access to its wealth, while evacuating the planet. The discovery, in deep tunnel chambers, of groups of hundreds of fossilised Aliens which were also one hundred millennia old, led many to the conclusion that not everyone had succeeded in evacuating in time, or perhaps that not everyone had been meant to leave. What bothered _her_ was the extent of the mine's destruction. In its current state, it would have been far cheaper and safer to drill new tunnels. She considered it more logical to make the mine temporarily inoperable by laying traps. That way, the occupiers would have had to waste resources cleaning up the mine, while the retreating faction could have just deactivated the traps upon their return. But some of her colleagues speculated that the defenders could have been severely outgunned, and that they hadn't believed they would be capable of reclaiming the planet quickly.

After they had searched everything they could, they left the site to another team while they went looking for signs of the Alien presence in other places.

Their next discovery took place above a purplish gas giant, where they came upon a five-kilometre long station which had been incapacitated in a collision with another large object. What astounded them about this dig was that the large portion of the station had been devoted to entertainment, specifically to terminals where the Aliens could plug themselves into some sort of virtual reality roleplaying game. They soon discovered they could not run them on themselves because the human nervous system was incompatible with the plug-in contraptions, but they managed to access some gameplay recordings. They revealed that, like humans, the Aliens also had an affinity for adventure: some settings were fantastic, featuring magic and creatures that defied the laws of nature, while others resembled stories about superheroes. There were even some more realistic games, like one which seemed to focus on space exploration. She had to hand it to the Aliens – the simulated realities possessed enough depth and consistency to pass as real universes. However, the true value of the station was that it had provided first insights into the Alien language.

Structurally, it resembled agglutinating human languages, although, when succinctness was required, it was possible to get rid of all grammatical complexity and reduce every word to its root. Therefore, the only trouble they had with decrypting it was figuring out the meaning of individual words and grammatical morphemes. Their linguistic software managed to unscramble a significant portion of this puzzle, but there hadn't been enough input to provide definitive understanding of the Alien language – they needed more samples.

The next stop was an outpost on a small moon. They found evidence of severe radiation leakage from its reactor, which appeared to have been sabotaged. The timing of the incident coincided with the hypothesised civil war. Her colleagues suspected that one of the belligerent parties had committed a war crime, since the station had been a medical facility – one where patients with neurological issues had been treated, the recovered data showed. Some had let their fancy run wild and suggested that this sanatorium could have actually been a weapons test site, posing as a clinic, which would have made it a legitimate war target. However, the data they had accessed, though corrupt, contained no evidence of anything nefarious. It was mostly a collection of supply lists and, surprisingly, patients' diaries. They were full of illogical statements and incomplete utterances. One such oddity that intrigued her was a diary whose entries consisted solely of the sentence 'Separate and obtain the true existence' repeated countless times.

The next piece of the puzzle was a lush planet colony consisting of a single town which the Aliens had built from disassembled parts of the ship they had landed in. It could not have housed more than five hundred individuals. The dating showed that the colony had been established somewhere around the time of the civil war and that it had maybe lasted a century or less. Some voices explained the colonists' demise as a consequence of the civil war. With the Alien civilisation collapsing due to infighting, the colonists may have found themselves disconnected and forgotten. Without outside assistance, they could not survive long. This explanation had merit, but it didn't account for clear signs of technological regression. All the housing units that had not been breached by the environment over the millennia contained rich collections of pottery and primitive stone and metal tools, while every piece of tech that remained had been damaged in a manner which seemed purposeful. Months of further exploration of the planet revealed that no intelligent species had arisen and used the Alien settlement for themselves in the time span following the last Alien's death. Something had led them to abandon technology and embrace the Iron Age lifestyle. One of the leading propositions circulating among the crew on the ship was that this group had been a sect of some sort which had rejected technological progress and decided to separate from the rest of their species.

At this point, there were dozens of missions scouring the regions of space suspected of having once been part of the Alien empire for more artefacts. One of them chanced upon something unexpected, and she was called to lend her expertise. It was the first time they found a large Alien settlement – a completely demolished megalopolis, spanning the warm equatorial region of a Venus-sized planet locked in an ice age.

She was needed here because her team had the most experience with bypassing firewalls which prevented immediate access to Alien machines, and it just so happened that some weather tracking satellites in the planet's orbit had survived and were putting up strong resistance. The team which had discovered the planet speculated that the satellites could have had video recordings of the city's final hours. After several unsuccessful attempts to crack the protective codes, one satellite finally relented and confirmed the other team's assumption.

The planet had been frozen even at the time when the Alien civilisation had still existed, and that was the reason why the megalopolis had spread along the equator. At the height of its glory, one hundred thousand years ago, it could have housed half a billion individuals. All that remained were ruins.

The cracked satellite had been on the planet's dark side when the destruction had taken place. Apart from the snowstorms in the planet's far north and south, everything was calm. The city glared with such intensity that distinguishing the relief features close to its edges required only the naked eye. The habitats, satellites, and several hundred ships parked in orbit glinted occasionally when hit by a stray beam of light. And then, without warning, all kinds of things happened simultaneously. A flash came from the base of a fifty-kilometre tall space lift and as it cut through the occasional clouds, her throat began constricting. For a moment, she was there, on the ground, waiting helplessly for all that steel to turn her into a pulp. At other spots, bursts of light spread in circular fashion, so intense that she had to squint. And in orbit, everything that had an engine started moving towards the city at an alarming speed. The atmosphere burned red where they hurtled towards the ground. Afterwards, the entire equator was ablaze, but the satellite had captured the firestorms only in their infancy, before a veil of ash and earth ejected into the atmosphere obscured the face of the entire planet. Only when they forwarded the video some one hundred years could they see the surface once again. The ring of the city was replaced by a chain of uneven craters filled with rubble.

Her civil war theory collapsed with this discovery. The planet had not been attacked after all – there were no recordings of an invading fleet. Things just started blowing up, and without any external agency present, it seemed that the inhabitants of the planet had orchestrated everything themselves. A colleague of hers, who seemed to have been born with a glitch in his brain, stupidly suggested that this was another instance of scorched earth tactics. Another said that one of the factions in the war had been on the brink of winning, and so genocidal that the other had decided it was better for its members to kill themselves to avoid torture and execution. She reallocated them both to other projects for spewing useless fantasies, but first she reminded them that they hadn't found any evidence of the other faction acting in that way – that actually, so far they hadn't found anything belonging to it. If they had been so powerful and terrifying, they would have won the war and rebuilt the Alien civilisation in their own image. But there were no indicators of any empire inhabiting this region of space in the post-civil war period.

But beside a civil war, what else could explain all this killing – all this self-killing? She wondered about this for a long time. Surely, only individuals with serious emotional issues, suffering from severe mental problems could do this. But they could not have all been insane. Unless something had made them so. A contagious disease that had ruined their brains. She immediately sent a request for the re-examination of Lucius' body, the brain in particular, with specific instructions to focus on anything that might indicate pathogen activity.

While they waited for the results, they sent probes to the planet to collect samples and explore the ruins. One found a lift shaft leading to a concert-hall-sized chamber, approximately one kilometre below the surface, which had miraculously remained undamaged. It contained the remains of what must have been hundreds of Aliens. They must have got trapped when the surface had been obliterated. It seemed that they had been attending a gathering. The chamber could have been an artist's studio or a gallery, with its walls covered with pale residues of frescoes depicting Aliens in various poses – the most prevalent one being that of sleepers – while the floor seemed to have been a mosaic of a scanned Alien brain.

The results of Lucius' examination came a month later. Searching for the pathogen, a team of medical specialists had taken Lucius' brain apart to single neurons, and then they had cut the cells themselves. No evidence of pathogen activity was found. But then, Lucius was the only specimen they had – they did not actually know whether he or his brain were the healthy representatives of his species.

She was stuck. No explanation made sense, and those that did were not supported by concrete evidence. When she went to the gallery herself, it occurred to her that the Aliens' mass insanity could have been caused by something other than a nasty parasite. She looked at the faint outlines of the sleeping figures on the walls and then at the pictures of the trapped Aliens. Their bodies had been too neatly arrayed when they had found them, as if they had been arranged this way. No evidence of panic or anyone looking for an exit during the cataclysm. Just absolute order. For centuries, back on Earth, the faithful would line up in temples to pray to gods depicted in stone, on paintings and frescoes. What if the underground chamber was actually a place of worship? The excitement made her thoughts stumble over each other. What if it had been used by some religious fanatics who believed that this life was a false reality? That it was all a dream? That would explain the strange obsession the artist had with sleeping bodies. What if these Aliens had believed that the fastest way to wake up from this dream and reach some sort of heaven was through mass suicide? What if these fanatics had actually gained traction and achieved a universal acclaim among the Aliens? What if they had decided to implement their religion's main teaching on a grand scale?

The fleet, whose remains they had found, may have been destroyed by the crews agreeing to simultaneously start shooting at each other, or simply blow up their reactors. The fossilised miners had buried themselves. The sanatorium had actually been a place where these ideas, which initially had to have been perceived as crazy, were to be treated. However, the patients had risen against their caretakers and sabotaged the station's power source. The megalopolis dwellers, being so numerous, had decided that total mayhem would be the only way to make sure they all died. The only group that didn't make sense were the colonists who had abandoned technology – but they had also committed suicide in some manner by surrendering to the natural whims of their new home. They may have actually been too cowardly to pull the trigger themselves.

She was invigorated again. Her theory was not perfect, but it was something. She felt she was on the right track, that the answer would soon be in her grasp.

She and her team left the megalopolis planet and went to other systems. They found remnants of a spherical habitat a hundred kilometres in radius, crashed into the surface of a moon. A data storage unit of one of its main computers had been preserved. However, it had been wiped clean before the crash, except for a single phrase: "We obtain the true existence." She had read once something similar, she was sure of it. It took her some time to go through the data about the mission. She found it in a diary from the sanatorium. The exact words were: "Separate and obtain the true existence." That could not have been a mere coincidence. She was onto something. Could the sentence have been some sort of a slogan, or even a prayer or a mantra in this potential suicide religion? If the religion had had a prayer, then it could have also had a holy book, which, if found, would neatly explain the exact reasons that had led to the Aliens' demise.

But that text, which she imagined looking like a Medieval manuscript – remained elusive. Instead, they discovered more destroyed colonies and abandoned installations. They even stumbled upon a pleasure planet – its surface completely devoid of any structures devoted to industrial production or any other utilitarian activity. The Alien society had obviously been opulent enough for many of its members to be able to bear the costs of interstellar travel simply for the sake of enjoyment. Vast sports arenas, thousand-kilometre long beaches covered with artificial snow-soft sand, and spas nestled atop arrow-sharp peaks stood at the guests' disposal. They could even embark on hike tours through volcanic interiors or, if reality had not been to their taste, immerse themselves into one of the hundreds of worlds simulated in VR compounds similar to the incapacitated station she and her crew had found not long after the mine expedition. But it was all rendered inaccessible with a chemical agent that had transformed the atmosphere into a bane of all organic life.

Over the years, archaeological missions like her own had explored around fifty systems. On one occasion, while looking at star charts trying to decide where to head to next, the shape these systems formed attracted her attention. She asked the chart software to display the positions of these stars one hundred thousand years ago. The edges of the new shape which corresponded to the border of the Alien empire were rounded. Asking the software to make some additional calculations, she discovered that these fifty systems could form a slice of a sphere. There was a theory that an FTL-capable civilisation would try to spread in all directions at the same time, attempting to seize as much galactic real estate as possible, both valuable and worthless, and thus create a massive buffer zone around its home planet. Such an expansion scheme would lead to that civilisation's territory resembling a ball, with the capital system somewhere in its centre. Tired of inconclusive evidence, she decided to head to this sphere's heart, even though it involved passing through yet unexplored regions of Alien space.

Months later, they found their holy grail. The Alien home world was similar to Earth in size and it also had a moon companion. A blast of intense heat had blown away its atmosphere and left the surface blackened. Some ruined cities, near the poles, and an extensive system of tunnels which spanned the entire planet – a sort of a global metro – remained, but everything else was flattened. The Aliens had tampered with their star, and signs of scorching also existed on other worlds in its orbit.

If so far she had been curious about the exact reasons the Aliens had used to justify their own extermination, she was now desperate to unravel them. How could a species so advanced just decide to give up on life and exterminate itself? No society, especially one which numbered dozens of billions of individuals, could be so unanimous, particularly when it comes to an issue with such terrible consequences. Was this somehow humanity's destiny as well? Deep down they were all still dumb apes. Would they, too, decide to obliterate themselves one day? Was this why they hadn't yet encountered any other space-faring civilisations? Was it in the nature of intelligent life to wipe itself out?

As before, she dispatched probes to start poking through the tomb the Aliens had built for themselves. They found nothing useful. At first, she felt just numb and dizzy. Despite so much invested effort, answers still eluded her. As if something was purposefully preventing her from finding anything conclusive. She had always been an atheist, but in this moment, she imagined herself as a plaything of cruel gods. Sitting on their celestial thrones, they'd amuse themselves by providing her with morsels to follow, and then, just as she was about to stumble upon a definitive proof of anything, they would take it away. She wanted to physically hurt someone – those gods preferably, but all she did was bury her fist into a screen, or at least tried to. The glass remained intact, while she received a zap of pain. She should have hit something living, something soft that could have felt her rage.

She was recovering from her injury when an aide rushed into her quarters to tell her that a drone had found a metal structure buried deep within the crust of the planet's moon. It seemed like the gods had finally showed her some mercy. The metallic structure was a small habitat and its computer's logs were preserved.

The habitat turned out to have been a refuge for several members of the Alien species who had rejected the mass suicide doctrine. As they had been so few in number, they knew they would not be able to survive and revive their species. Their sole purpose in hiding in these tunnels had been to record the calamity their sisters and brothers had decided to bring upon themselves, in case other species rose to prominence after them and discovered their ruins.

She had been right when she had guessed that the root of the Alien demise lay in the belief that this reality was a false one. But she had been wrong about why they had thought this.

The answer should have occurred to her much earlier. The evidence had been right in front of her nose, on multiple worlds she had visited. How could she have been so blind?

The Aliens had fallen prey to escapism. Technological progress had made their society affluent enough that only a minority of them had to actually work to maintain its integrity. The rest spent their time entertaining themselves, mostly in VR facilities, such as the incapacitated space station they had found after the mine expedition, or installations on the pleasure planet, where they immersed themselves into countless imaginary worlds. Over time, many had begun to exhibit the inability to distinguish between virtual worlds and the real one. This problem had become so prevalent that many had started believing that their entire existence was fictional, that they were actually part of some simulated reality, characters in some higher being's computer game. This belief attained a status similar to a religion, and it was proposed that to escape the virtual prison, the Aliens had to do something radical, something traumatic, something which would force the machines they had been trapped in to react. They had decided the most radical thing that could spark that was death. When the convincing was done and the date set, they commenced their own annihilation.

In retrospect, she saw that even some of the things that initially hadn't fit well with the suicide theory could be easily explained – most notably, the 500 colonists. Seeing what dependence on technology had done to their species, they may have concluded that they could find salvation only by rejecting it. It hadn't been particularly obvious, so she could forgive herself this lapse in thinking. However, something else would have spared her all the misery she had gone through if she had done her job more thoroughly. It had practically screamed at her, and she had failed to see it. It was the parole "Separate and obtain the true existence," which she had mistranslated. How pathetic! The alien word for _separate_ was versatile in its use. It could also mean _disconnect_ , as in from a computer.

She was reading the explanation for the tenth time, all the while trying to prevent herself from tearing her hair out at the absurdity of the tragedy, when a sound resembling a train station announcement system spread through the Alien compound, followed by a woman's voice:

"DEAR USER, YOUR TIME IS UP. PREPARE TO BE DISCONNECTED IN 5, 4, 3..."

She roared in protest as the Alien text began to fade. She wanted to read it one more time. A force was pulling her away from the readout console and she flailed her hands, trying to grab onto it. Then, darkness embraced her. She felt pressure on her temples. Blood had rushed into her head, creating lightning flashes in her vision. Something cold was spreading through her spine, and when it reached her brain, the shifting between darkness and light ended. She opened her eyes and found herself beneath a low glass ceiling.

A face hovered beyond it. Hands fumbled with the glass for several moments and then removed it.

"Ms Aris, are you all right? We registered some abnormalities and had to disconnect you sooner than intended," a man said worryingly.

'Who?' she wanted to ask as she tried to get up. The man helped her out of the strange, egg-shaped bed she had been lying on. Her head began throbbing and she wanted to retch. The man reacted quickly and escaped a rendezvous with the contents of her stomach. She wanted to stop vomiting, but the acrid smell of the khaki puddle on the floor and the acidic taste in her mouth urged her to keep it up. She continued to heave even when there was nothing left.

After that, everything was blurry. People in white took her through white corridors. They looked at her and opened their mouths, but she could only hear monotonous high pitched ringing. They made her sit, and then something stung her arm. It was some time later, she could not tell when, that she regained her vision and hearing. She turned to the right, following the scent of linden on the breeze. She looked through an open window and saw some trees and grey skyscrapers further behind them. Somehow, she was back on a human planet.

"Ms Aris, can you hear me?" a woman's voice said. She turned her head towards it. The woman was sitting exactly opposite her, less than a metre away. How had she not seen her?

"Who are you talking...?" she began, but the woman, who wore a red shirt and a white jacket over it, interrupted her.

"Your name is Stell Aris. You've been playing a VR RPG called Voyager 3. You've had a difficult immersion disconnection. You forgot your real personality and embraced the one of the character whose role in the game you had assumed." The woman paused for a moment. "Some space archaeologist."

She blinked. What was this woman saying?

"Your records say that this had never happened to you before. The first time is the most difficult. We had to tamper with the gameplay towards the end to break you out before your session was officially over. The scanners showed that you were experiencing serious stress levels."

"Ms Aris? Stell?" the woman said those words again.

Aris? Stell? Stell? Aris? Stell Aris?

"Stell Aris," she said, feeling nauseous.

Suddenly, she was looking at beige tiles. She saw her hands and knees on the floor and then lifted her head. The woman in the white jacket was also on the floor, crouching, and she helped her get back on her feet.

"I remember now," Stell said.

An hour later, after a long talk at the doctor's office, she could go home. She decided to walk. Her legs were weak, but she wanted to be in open air.

She still couldn't quite comprehend that she had lost awareness of her identity. These things happened to other people, but not her. She had always been rational and possessed self-control. How could she have lost herself?

Thinking back, she remembered that there were some things which should have told her that the world around her was not real, like the stupidity of some of her colleagues, or some situations that defied the laws of physics.

She had truly thought that she was a xeno-archaeologist chasing after the remnants of extinct ETs. She did not know whether to be frightened, or amused. She had never believed that virtual reality could become indistinguishable from the material world.

"Indistinguishable," she said aloud as she remembered that the Aliens in the game had experienced the same confusion about the nature of reality. And on some level, they had been right. They were indeed trapped in a higher being's simulation of life.

She laughed aloud and people turned to look at her. She had always pitied those lunatics who believed in all kinds of tinfoil theories, but now a thought occurred to her. Was somebody sending her a message, or had she perhaps experienced some glitch? Could she, like Lucius and his people, also be trapped in a computer game? She had been tricked once, and what guaranteed that she was out right now?

# ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

White City Wordsmiths would like to thank everyone who has made the realization of this project possible.

We are grateful to the American Embassy in Belgrade for their support and encouragement. A big thank you to Jelena Silajdžić and the educational center Professional English for allowing us to use their premises for our creative writing workshop sessions, and American Corner in Belgrade for providing the space for the book promotion.

White City Wordsmiths also want to thank: our workshop leader Jelena Petrović, whose experience and careful guidance made it all possible; Irena Raičević, the Balkan Writers Project manager and coordinator, who kept a watchful eye over the whole endeavor; our talented designers Katarina Šotić and Ana Nikolić, who did a beautiful and thorough job on the book, and our editing team, for their strenuous efforts and commitment.

Special thanks to Nathan William Meyer, who started the initiative four years ago, and, of course, the writers themselves, whose enthusiasm made this journey delightful and rewarding.

Thank you all.

# About the Workshop Leader

**Jelena Petrović** was born in Belgrade in December 1992. She finished the Philological High School in Belgrade (English as her first language and French as her second) in 2011 and graduated from the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade in 2017, obtaining a BA in English language, literature and culture; she is currently undertaking her master's degree at the same faculty. She attended an English language course at The Institute for Foreign Languages from 1999 to 2007 and a French language course at The French Institute from 2008 to 2010. She has translated several literary and non-literary texts and has been giving private English lessons for the past four years, as well as working as a substitute English teacher in an elementary school in Belgrade. She has been a part of every White City Wordsmiths workshop – first as a member, then as the leader – and has been involved in numerous other Balkan Writers Project creative initiatives.
