Writer's Journal

The boy, a young man of maybe sixteen, was strapped down on the table, his eyes taped open.  The room was fairly dark, but there was a faint glow from a projection screen.

A sequence of sounds:  Click.  Hiss.  Ash…

“We don’t have much time,” a gravelly voice said.

“Who are you?” the boy asked.

“I’m you.  I’m from the future,” the voice said, “I’ve only got half-an-hour, now.  You should’ve gone limp on the first hit.  I hope I didn’t do any permanent damage.”

The boy made a confused-sounding noise in his throat.

“Just listen.  My life is shit.  I paid $250,000 to come back here and instruct you how not to screw up your life.”

“Hmm?”

“Let’s begin.”

On the left side of the screen was a restaurant, on the right was a bookstore.  A date in next april was underneath the bookstore.

“Don’t apply at the restaurant.  Apply at the bookstore on this date.  Walk over there on that day, and ask if you can get a job.  Repeat it to me.”

“April 13th, go over to the bookstore, and ask for a job.”

“Good.  I’m leaving a notebook full of these for you.  Keep it in mind.  Now.”

The screen changed.  Full view of a woman; she was pretty, but had tired eyes.

“This woman.  Avoid her like the plague.  Trust me.  It’s like God designed someone for the sole purpose of ruining your life.  Don’t get involved.”

“Do I get a name?”

“Not even a name.  You see her, you walk the other way.”

“…Understood.”

The screen changed again, and showed a copy of the ACT.

“This is the exact test you’ll get.  I’m going to leave the actual answers for you.  Memorize them.  Apply to any school other than those on the list I provide you.”

“…okay,” the boy said, a little more enthused.

“After that point, your life will be so different that my instructions won’t have any effect.  Have fun.”

The man stubbed out his cigarette, untaped the boy’s eyes, and stuffed the notebook into the boy’s pocket.  He released the restraints, and struck the button on the belt unit he had been wearing, thinking:

“Maybe it’ll work, this time…”

(anyone understand the title, without Wikipedia or Google?)

Naomi Arnold was roughly midway through her life, when she realized that she was actually dead, simultaneously, she realized that she was not really a woman named “Naomi Watts.” This flash of insight came as she sat in the laundromat, and watched her whites swirl around inside the machine.

This moment of intuition revealed to her that she was actually a hallucination. The mind hallucinating Naomi Watts belonged to an elderly man named Phillip Colonomos, who, grieving over his wife’s death, had taken a fifth of bourbon and a bottle of sleeping pills. As Phillip lay on his bed, waiting for death to come, his eyes defocused, and he had visions of things that had been and things that might have been.

Naomi was also aware of one of the “had-beens” that Phillip discovered: In truth, he was a figment of a car crash victim, who lie mangled in the street. Her name was Mary Hansen, and she was barely twenty-five years old. She had left her car in the bar parking lot, and begun walking home. One of the less intelligent patrons hadn’t followed her example.

As Mary shuddered, cooling, she hallucinated Phillip into existence, but also became aware that she was in fact a—

The buzzer on the washing machine went off.

Naomi/Phillip/Mary stood up, emptied it out, and moved the contents to the drier before returning to her magazine.

(this one is almost three times longer than my normal length.  It’s something that I really needed to get out, and I hope you all don’t mind reading it.  In fact, as a writer, I want you to…if only because I’m a little ashamed of it, as a person.)

It is a half-hour after, and I’m walking around the block, with a length of canvass in my hands, like so many times before.

March twenty-fifth is bright and cold. It began rainy, but turned sunlit, later on. As I trace the familiar circuit of four blocks, my mind wanders.

—

It is a spring-like day in October, and Athena is coming to live with us. It has been almost five years since Buddy died—I remember crying my eyes out all day, after that—and this tiny black animal that one of my father’s coworkers found needs a home.

She isn’t “Athena,” yet. She’s just “the dog.” She’ll become Athena maybe three weeks later, on my sister’s insistence. For now, though, she’s my brother’s birthday present. But that doesn’t matter, I feel her to be my responsibility. This small thing that converts food and water into mess and noise.

She bites, and even when she’s affectionate, red welts appear where she licks my hand.  I suspect I’m allergic, but, soon enough, it doesn’t matter.

—

It is a dreary day in September, the day after my birthday, in my freshman year of high school. Athena ran away some time ago, and I feel like it’s my fault, somehow.

We’d always managed to catch her when she escaped before. This time, we didn’t.

I’m sitting in Spanish class, all of us—including Technico McElduff—are watching as the towers fall. When I get home that evening, there is no Athena, we have essentially become reconciled that she would never come home, and perhaps we were never meant to have a dog. I wait until my mother turns off the news, and put in the VHS tape of Neon Genesis Evangelion I received in the mail today from eBay.

They arrived achronologically, the tape holds the last two episodes. With no context, they make no sense. I had been hoping for an escape from reality, but I am left with a feeling that I have trouble articulating, at fifteen: that acute but vague sense of anxiety that comes from realizing that you don’t know anything.

My father finds Athena several weeks later. She had been hit by a car, and comes home three days later. She has a giant, conical collar on, and will always walk with a limp.

I’m incredibly happy, but don’t really know how to show it.

—

It’s a spring morning before school. My brother and I are eating breakfast, as we wait for our ride to high school, to grind through another day, to work our ways another day closer to the weekend, to the summer, to graduation.

Athena is scratching at the storm door, trying to get in and sit by us, in the hope that we will drop food to her.

We don’t open the door, and she continues pounding on it, headbutting and scratching.

Metal screeches, the door, which is meant to swing outward, folds inward, and she moves through the aluminum wreckage that had been the door.

My mother shrieks: “What? No! No! Stop it!”

For some reason, she thinks the dog speaks English, and will politely acquiesce to her demands.

Athena looks up at me, hopefully.

“Sit,” I command, in a forceful voice.

After a moment, I growl:

“Sit.”

Athena sits, and looks hopefully at the piece of crust I’m holding in my hand. Without thinking, I toss it to her.

In the first two years we had her, Athena grows a great deal, and makes many attempts to escape. All told, we install a little over sixty square feet of chicken wire over the back wall, five pitons to hold down the chain-length fence, a sheet of plywood covering a hole in the picket fence, and a short length of heavy wire through the latch on the gate, to keep her in our back yard.

—

It is summertime, and my father and I are taking Athena on a walk for the first time. Despite her injured leg, she is effectively stronger than either of us.

We loop a chain around her neck, and tie it around my midsection, so my hands don’t get torn up pulling on it, and my father holds the leash.

As she will many times in the future, Athena bites the leash, and drags him along, almost sawing me in half in the process.

We go around one block.

This process will be repeated several times, until she calms down enough for one of us to handle her.

Eventually, taking her for walks becomes one of the favored responsibilities for me and my father. We rarely do it together, but when we do, I learn the history of the neighborhood piecemeal, and he learns how school is going, and what is contained in higher-level English subjects.

“Do you know the story about this house?” he would ask me.

I shake my head.

“Well, Dave and Martha live there. He’s got a dog—Kiki—and there was also a cat. One day, the cat ran off, and Dave searched everywhere for it. Martha was so distraught. So, a week later, he sits down on their back porch with his dog, ready to give up. He turns to his dog and says ‘Kiki, we’ve got to find Martha’s cat.’”

My father is suppressing a smile.

“So Kiki walks out into the yard, and stands by a hole in the ground, barking. Dave goes and looks…and inside the hole are these two eyes looking up at him.”

He laughs, and looks down at Athena

“They know. They always know.”

—

It is august, and my father is working from home. My brother has gone off to school in Chicago, and I’m uncertain about my own future. He reports, upon my return from school, that he saw Athena leap into the air and catch a bird in mid-flight.

We don’t let her lick us for a while after that.

—

It is another august, and I moving into the dormitories at Rockhurst. I kissed the dog on the crown of her head, and left. She knew I was going, and barely barked at all, as she watched me leave.

I return on Fridays, and say goodbyes on Sundays.

“She really perks up when you’re around,” my father says.

But I can’t tell: obviously, I only see her when I’m around.

The Freshman year of college fills me with that same feeling I discovered that night back in high school.

I’m back over the summers, and I walk my dog.

Sophomore year. Normal. I visit my brother up in Chicago over spring break. I start writing a novel. I fall in love with a girl who didn’t seem to know that I existed (is that love? Most likely not.)

One night, when I’m at home, I kiss the dog on the crown of her skull, and she looks up at me and groans.

“You’re the only girl that loves me, aren’t you?”

She licks my face, leaving a red welt across my cheek.

—

That summer, I start to smoke. At first, she’s the only one that knows. I smoke in the kitchen, and scratch her behind the ears. And I smoke in the bathroom while bathing.

I start work, not a thousand feet from our front door. For the three years I work there, just about every time I go, Athena escorts me.

Late in the summer, I’m minding the house. I have friends over, and we drink and smoke cigarettes. After they leave, I get the leash, and I take Athena around the block. I’m drunk, and happy to have spent time with friends.

She wanted to go out, and we hadn’t been on a walk in a while.

Stumbling, I circled the block with her, and we paused as long as she wanted.

It took us an hour to get home.

—

It is two hours after, and I am eating lunch with Adam. We’re at an Indian restaurant, eating from a buffet, and asking the good-looking waitress to leave the pitcher of water for us.

He tells me that his dog is doing better:

“But it’s only a matter of time,” he notes, sadly.

We talk of other things.

“You’re going somewhere in a bit, right? Well, is there a record store around here?”

I walk with him over to Prospero’s. I have one of my last cigarettes, and we talk about a variety of things.

After browsing through records and books, we have one last smoke, and I go onward.

—

It is my Junior year. I move into a house just off campus with two other guys. We drink and smoke. We make poor decisions.

I don’t go home as often, but walk the dog when I can. Athena is my dog, after all. The result: I’m torn between two impulses, as I have been for a long time. Do I remain the dutiful family member? Do I take care of the dog, of my parents, of the home? Or do I become a new person? Do I accomplish things on my own?

Like an idiot, I try to strike a balance. Classic blunder, I choose not to choose, and have to live with the results.

I fall into I-think-I’m-in-love. The woman notices, and rebuffs me. Painful, but I get a chance to choose again.  I try to be my own person. By doing essentially nothing differently.

“You’re the only girl that loves me, aren’t you?”

Athena licks my face, leaving a red welt across my cheek.

That summer, I work constantly, throwing myself into the low-level job I’ve got. I become a manager, and that means I get nothing special, but get yelled at when others mess up. So it goes.

I ask other women out, but none of it works out, and Athena licks my face, leaving a red welt across my cheek.

Senior year of college. I try to keep up my job and get things done, but it drags. That feeling—vague but acute, anxious, but directionless—returns, and bears down on my harder than ever. It fills up my skull with static.

But I ignore it as best I can.

This is my work. I will finish it.

This is my dog. I will take care of her.

And when the time comes…

shut your mouth.

I look forward to graduate school, because I don’t think I ever really enjoy where I am.

But I am here, with Athena, and that is all I want. My father and I take her for walks.

“She talks to me, you know?” my father claims.

“Oh, yeah?” I said, incredulous, “I taught her left and right.”

“You did not.”

“Athena! Left Side!”

She trots over onto the left side of the sidewalk, glancing back at me.

We go on for a moment.

“Right side!”

She shifts over to the right, and I smirk at my father. He swats me on the shoulder. She never does it for him, because he never realizes I was tugging subtly on the leash.

—

It is thirty-five minutes after, and I look down at the limp length of canvas in my hand, with Athena’s dog tags hanging from them. Neither of them even have her name stamped into the metal, and they’re greasy from her fur.

I put a cigarette in my mouth, and light it.

“Sh—”

—

It is five hours after, and I’m drinking coffee with Sara.

We talk, and commiserate.

This year hasn’t been good for anyone.

“This is damn good coffee,” she notes.

I nod. I owed her that much, and she takes my mind off of what happened that morning.

I light my third-to-last cigarette.

“Fine weather, though.”

She arches an eyebrow, as the wind comes, and chills us. We both shiver, but I’m not sure she saw me.

Is there a way out? God, I hope so.

—

It is the day before, and I’m drinking coffee with Alex.

“2010 would have to work real fucking hard to be as shitty as 2009 or 2008,” he says.

—

I head off to graduate school after senior year. I’m surrounded by strangers, and the static in my skull grows louder. I watch dramas unfold in their lives, and I’m sympathetic, but I don’t really feel involved.

Is it strange that I felt uninvolved, but I felt bad about feeling that way? It seems like I could save a lot of headaches if I just cared more.

Before I left, I told Athena:

“You have to last until I move home. Or at least until summer. You’re not allowed to be sick. You have to stay well, okay, Athena-girl?”

She looked up at me, and wheezed.

—

It is two hours before. I’m about to go buy what I intend to be my last pack of cigarettes. My father is waiting in the living room, with a small ziggurat of cigarette butts in the ash tray before him. His eyes are ringed with dark circles.

“I’m doing it today,” he tells me.

“I’m coming with you.”

“Take your time.”

I leave, walk to the store, and try to decide whether to quit or not. I barely have time to focus, and I’m trying to adjust my diet in particular ways. Can I really give up all that unhealthy shit, and also the poison I put in my lungs on an hourly basis?

I decide to try.

I come back home, and smoke out front for a bit. I hadn’t been smoking inside, because of Athena’s condition.

My father opens the door, but stays inside.

For an hour, we mill around the living room. Neither of us goes into the kitchen to check on Athena.

We wait for the weather to improve. No one should have to die without sunlight.

—

It is the day after, and I am boarding the train to go down to New Mexico.

Back to studying, back to grading, back to politics, back to my monkish lifestyle. It’s not a bad place, but I never really enjoy where I am, I think.

I feel alone, and the static in my skull almost drowns out my parent’s goodbyes. I kissed both parents on the cheek, and gave them both a hug.

On the way down, I get behind a slow-moving group, and plod toward the train.

When I get inside, there are no outlets, and I have to share the seat.

Just a psychological paper cut, really.

I never really enjoy where I am.

—

I take her on my last walk with her in January. It’s warmed up, and I’m determined to take my dog for a walk at least once before heading back to New Mexico, before the daunting task that is teaching.

She wheezes, and I slip several times. We go around one block, and I leave a trail of cigarette butts.

The snow is difficult going, and she labors to get through. But she smiles the whole way.

—

We drive Athena to the vet, two blocks away. I try to maintain a stoic face, but I still cry. She can barely walk, and wheezes when she moves. I hole the leash.

When we lift her, we can feel the cancer under her skin. She leaks urine.

The nurses and vet are understanding, and they give me a box of tissues. I thank them.

They run us through the procedure, and I ignore them, trying to get Athena to sit on the rug they left out for her. I kneel down, then sit cross-legged, and she finally settles in front of me.

From this point forward, I’m scratching her behind her ears the whole time.

They give her the injection, and she settles down, lowering her head. She was ready, and the vet confirmed it.

Athena’s heart stopped almost immediately.

I take her tags, which don’t even have her name, and offer to drive home. My father insists on doing it.

I reset my watch, which had stopped running, to 11:30 AM, where it still remains.

—

It is forty minutes after, and I stop in front of the house where I grew up, and toss the cigarette butt into the street.

I’ll probably backslide. I don’t want to: we killed my dog by smoking around her. But the damage is done, and I have to live with the fact that I had a hand in her demise.

Taking a deep breath, I look to the west.

I remembered the Wasteland, which I had talked about in a hotel room not a week before. I remembered how it ended, the way a prayer ended, and I closed my eyes.

I fingered the dog tags, and spoke:

“Shanti, Shanti, Shanti.”

And for a moment, for a brief, brief moment, the static went away.

(This came out a little Schmaltzy, but it’s what I’ve got for today.)

The man walked up the steps, and rang a doorbell. He looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties, but his thoughts were those of an old man, dwelling on the changing face of the neighborhood.

He reached out one hand, drew it back slight, then pressed the doorbell. After a silent moment, an aging woman answered the door. She was in her sixties, but still recognizable.

“Jacob,” she said, her eyes wide, “c…come in.”

They entered and sat. The two of them framed the fireplace in silent tableau, not even looking at one another.

“It’s been a long time,” she said.

“Has it?” Jacob asked, “my perception of time’s been f…off, lately.”

She smiled sadly.

“I won’t ask if you waited, Emma,” he said, “I saw the picture on the way in. foolish of me to think so.”

He got up, smiled, and left.

As he went down the walk toward the street, he saw a young woman with strawberry blond hair and blue eyes walk up to the house, carrying a backpack on one shoulder. She was reading something on a white tablet.

“Excuse me,” he said.

She looked up at him, with a startled expression.

“Yes?”

“I was just speaking with Emma in there, are you her daughter?” he asked.

“Yeah…” she said, her manner both uncertain and suspicious.

“Her eldest?”

The girl nodded.

“Thank you. Good to know.”

So he left again, rising from the pale-blue-and-dark-green sphere of the Earth to the Giordano Bruno, waiting above. When the crew was full, they left again.

They returned fifty years later.

The houses were replaced with apartment buildings, and all the squirrels were gone. Geckos sunned themselves on the sidewalk. She had always liked the neighborhood, and she was going to be moving out of it soon. No hope for recovery, just for comfort.

He didn’t knock, he walked in.

The daughter was there, her face lined by years he would never know, her reddish hair faded, and turning from copper to iron.

He said nothing, walked over to the bed, and held Emma’s hand. She stared up at him, he was maybe a few years older, by his estimation, than on their first date.

“Where’s your father?” he asked, considering the graying, wrinkled person laying on the bed.

“Dead,” the daughter answered, a slight rasp to her voice, “brain cancer.”

“It’s a shame,” Jacob said, “I would’ve liked to have met the man.”

“I know who you are,” the daughter said.

“You have me at a disadvantage,” he said, not looking away from Emma, “though I know your family. Good people, your family.”

“Jacob Straub, the astronaut.”

“Yes.”

“Are you leaving again?”

“No reason to stay.”

“My grandson’s wife is pregnant. She intends to name the child ‘Helen,’ if it’s a girl.”

Jacob’s brow furrowed, and his gaze turned flat.

“Are you trying to set me up with an unborn child while your mother dies in the same room?”

“She’s already dead,” the daughter said, “the pill was fast-acting, and her timing was perfect.”

“She committed suicide?”

“She wanted you here for it.”

The Giordano Bruno left, on a journey that took it far from home, through the inky black void between stars, empty of even gasses that would rob them of heat.  They returned thirty years later.

Jacob gave it some thought, and descended from Earth, a page of folded up directions tucked in his pocket.

The kerberos ambled down the street, its head wagging from side to side, casting its reproachful gaze wherever it went.  Deep in the armored hump on its back, an augmented dog brain floated in a vat of oxygenated nutrients, connected to the visual module that allowed it to see like a man, and the sniffers which allowed it to smell like never before.

It passed a man, coming up to the bottom of his sternum; the man shrank back, placing a hand over his heart, drawing breath in.  But he immediately sighed in relief:  He would not have known the kerberos was looking for him; seeing it was probably the best sign he had.  The metal dog walked on; a radio built into its back signaled its pack; nothing.

Once the kerberos has been a flesh-and-blood dog, a family pet named “Lefty.”  Then the car accident happened, and things went dark.  When he woke up, his body had been peeled away, and his brain had been left, and he started to know things.

(”It’s impossible to create consciousness in a mechanical, electrical, or quantum medium,” the scientists said, long ago, “we can do everything but create that kernel of awareness that sits enshrined in the middle.  Augmentation, however, is easy.  Easy as pie.”)

The metal dog turned down an alleyway, sniffing the air, identifying every molecule, translating it into familiar scents:  Tomcat.  Garbage.  Decay.  Fear-Sweat.

Fear-Sweat?

The Kerberos crouched lower, and analyzed the scent.  Was it his quarry?

It shot forward, tackling the man, and pinning him down.  Stainless steel jaws parted and played a sound that had been tailored to produce a debilitating fear-reaction.

It sniffed again, as its other senses took over, identifying the man, reading his fingerprints, testing the DNA in the fine cloud of hair and dead skin cells around him.  Reading him.

Something in the Kerberos’s brain insistently pressed against its trained core of consciousness, and presented it with a memory of a boy who had snuck it bacon under the table, and taken it for walks, who had grown older, but still scratched him behind the ears, who’d been there when the car accident happened.

(And cried when the brain had been sold to the arms manufacturer.)

The Kerberos printed a strip of Kevlar with an embedded RFID, and secured it around its quarry’s wrists, and another around his ankles.  It stood there standing guard over the criminal, waiting for the police.

The man–the criminal–the quarry–looked up at the kerberos, and moaned, before saying something about “Lefty” and drifting off.

the Grand Central Station from the floor of the sea, down to the anthill-bedrock of failed pumps and access tunnels beneath it.  He was a celebrity of sorts, and waved to the crowd on his way to work every day.

The reclamationists sawed through the girders of the building from top-to-bottom.  It had lain fallow for fifty years, that meant it was just so much unused raw material.

First, the reclamationists removed the windows, descending on platforms not unlike those used by window-washers, pulling the windows from their mountings and securing them in the bin on the underside of their trollies.  The building took on a sunken-eyed look, as it swayed and whistled in the wind.

The men in yellow Hazard Gear removed planks of wood carefully; everything that couldn’t be melted down had to be treated with utmost care, lest it could be reused.  But everything was brought down eventually, loaded into trucks and carted off.

With the wood gone, they opened up the walls and pulled out the wiring and cables, the electricity vessels that fed that great body.  The wiring was stripped and wound into spools, the rubber covering for it carefully collected, to be melted down for other purposes.

Concrete was cut in huge, cubical blocks, and lowered from the thirtieth story down to the ground, a crew of fifty men, working hand-over-hand in unison.  Don’t want to drop it.  Don’t want to hurt nobody.  Don’t want to break the block.  Their cohorts on the ground would roll the block from its resting place and the first group would raise the net up.

Over time, the building’s flesh melted away, leaving just its steel bones.  Still the reclamationists worked;  They pulled the rivets from the girders, and lowered them by crane to the ground, The steel was trucked away, to be remade into new buildings, tools, and all sort of other things.

Still they worked, digging down into the foundations, pulling up concrete and wiring from the basements and sub-basements.  They plunged right down to the building’s roots, installing plastic connections in the water pipes and sewage lines beneath the building.  Then, they filled in the gaping hole of the building’s absence with sand, soil, and stone, laying down sod over the spot where it had been.

And around it, unused buildings groaned and shifted in the wind, with signs up indicating when the buildings could come down, releasing the precious resources locked up inside of them, things that could no longer be gotten from nature:  2318; 2299; 2312; 2300; 2299; 2298…

“This last one’s only got another month left,” one of the men commented, “convenient.”

When the Visitors came, it was the best of all possible worlds.

They descended from the skies in silvery ships, and settled over every major city (as well as a small patch of ice in Antarctica before disappointedly moving on,) broadcasting a message of peace, first in Dravidian and ancient Egyptian, then in an archaic form of greek, finally, they puzzled out Cantonese and Portuguese, and a dialogue began.

They didn’t want our water or minerals, or anything of the sort; such things could more easily be found elsewhere.  Instead, they came for our literature, our television, our music, and our philosophy.  For copies of books, they traded wonders: medical technology, computers, and energy sources to solve all our problems.

In return, they just wanted our culture.  Some of them, members of all races, sat in on college classrooms.  At Duke University, a twelve-foot tall creature with fins and scales listened to lectures on Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, cooing and laughing at odd points in time.  The undergraduates didn’t look at him, just staring ahead with slightly uncomfortable faces and unblinking eyes.

In Oxford, an octopus-like creature with blue skin and twelve arms floated near the ceiling, listening to lectures on Orwell.  The students even managed to convince it to participate in a rugby game, in which it scored thrice; in no small part because the opposing team had no idea how to tackle a flying squid.

The best of all possible worlds, just as we’d hoped.

Then, one day some six years later, the visitors’ ships had ascended into the sky, leaving none of their number behind.

“Thank you for your culture,” they signalled, “we’ll be back in another six thousand years, after we’ve made the rounds again.  Maybe next time, you’ll be ready for membership.”

With that, an electromagnetic pulse passed through the planet, interfering with the world’s magnetic field and all of the electronic devices within.  Our computers died; then the bombs came, levelling every city with more than a million people.

And then: silence.  The survivors knew then what Atlantis and Troy had known, what the pre-dynastic egyptians had learned, what the ancient Dravidians understood.  The harvest had come, and the crops had been taken to market; then the used-up plants had been gathered and thrown to the fire, the ashes used to fertilize the fields.

And in several millenia, maybe we would no longer trust the rugby-playing squid from the skies.

There’s a ghost following me.  I know, because I’m the only one who can see it; I say “it” because I can’t tell whether it was a man or a woman: it’s six feet tall, and wears a shroud and a mask.  It might be less than six feet; it could be floating under the shroud.

I noticed it one day, while I was at a water fountain: I bent down for a sip of water, and when I stood up, it was there, not quite two full paces away, looking at me.  No one else responded to it, and I had a bit of a headache, so I did my best to act natural:  I walked past it, heading back to my office.  It followed me, but the worst part was the breathing; you’d expect that dead things don’t need to breathe, but this Ghost was determined to do so.  From the sound, I suppose it’s forgotten how to:  I’ve never heard anyone use consonants while breathing.

When I get back to my office, I close my door and sit at my desk.  The ghost stood in the corner of the room, wheezing and watching me; as I soon discovered, this made it impossible to get any work done.  I tried to shoo it out the window, but it wouldn’t go.  It just stood there, looking at me.  Wheezing.

When I left for work, it planted itself in the back seat of my car, on the passenger side.  It didn’t bother to open the door, just sort of passing through it and sitting down.  Driving home was a nightmare.  When I accelerated, it would slide back into the seat, and it would move forward when I braked, moving as far forward as the front seat.

It followed me into my house, and when I finally went to sleep, it stood in the corner of my bedroom.

The next day, as it was watching me eat breakfast and read the newspaper, I saw that someone had died in my building, yesterday.

“So that explains you,” I said to the ghost.

“Hakk bhurr,” the ghost wheezed.

“Lovely.”

We drove back to work, and went in the elevator, the ghost sharing a spot with a somewhat heavyset woman in her forties.  Its head stuck up from the middle of her, and glanced around, momentarily.

“Feel like someone walked across my grave,” the woman muttered.

When we got out, I walked toward my office, and stopped, looking down the hallway.

The drinking fountain was there, but was cordoned off by yellow police tape.

“OUT OF SERVICE DUE TO UNEXPLAINED TOXICITY” a sign read.

“Hurr Hurr Hurr,” the ghost chuckled, looking at me.  I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable.

(This is probably the product of reading way too much criticism on a particular author, lately.  Not going to go into who; some of you will be able to figure it out despite the text, the rest of you might be unfamiliar.)

I stand and watch the living thunderhead rise from the blackened, broken earth, seeping out of the cracks like oil.

Progenetoi. Something in the root of my mind screamed the name to me. One of Blake’s “giants who formed this world into sensuous existence” I knew it as.

The iron-black anvil-cloud stretches out an arm that reaches to the horizon. Another joins it in the opposite direction. I see it straining to pull free of its prison of stone and soil.

Countless eyes open, and a mouth gapes, its teeth like skyscrapers.

Progenetoi. Progenitors. Why do I name it thus?

My feet are rooted to the ground; what use is running from something that stands at the center of the world? That reaches to the edge of it?

I call it a thunderhead, but it is not insubstantial like the clouds that part around its great and shapeless head. Its shadow is heavy like lead, and the thing that casts it is more real than I.

The Giant stretched upward, planting one deceptively slender leg, so thin that it should not be able to stand.

Logic fails. The ground stands firm.

Each breath it draws is like a thunderclap, an earthquake, a hurricane-gust.

Yet, I can hear hooves.

Turning, I see a column of figures, lead by knights in armor; they are insubstantial, like mist in the morning sun.

Behind them, I see Shakespeare’s fairy host, and Marlowe’s demon horde; the gunslingers and Indian braves of American folklore; the citizen-soldiers and identical idealized workers of Soviet Agitprop; Zulu warriors with their spears gleaming in the sunlight, and countless others.

They march along the blacktop road, riding into a fateful, hopeless battle. The dreams of humankind streaming down the road towards the most material of enemies.

Unable to join them, I lay down in the dust by the side of the street, and close my eyes. I have a duty of my own, and in dreams begin all responsibility.

“If you go outside of town, up on the big hill, and stand on the black stone…” she began, “Face North…if you can talk to the thing that made the world.  You’ll have his ears, and he’ll hear you.”
I don’t know if I believed that, but I walked up the hill, towards the old burned-out house.
There’s a circle of black stone there, reflective like glass, with two indentations in it, about shoulder-width apart.
I stepped onto the stone, fitting my feet into the indentations.
“I don’t know if I really believe this,” I mumbled.
“It’s getting harder and harder for me to believe anything.  I think it’s probably the result of watching the news.  Half of it is lies, and the other half is just reports of terrible, terrible things.”
I took a deep breath.
“But, you know, I’m really disappointed with how thing’s’ve turned out.  Everyone’s got their own idea for how things are supposed to be, but it just doesn’t work.  It’s funny.  Aren’t you supposed to answer prayers, and shit?  Then fix it.  Fix the world.”
I stood for a moment, and nothing happened.
Walking down the hill, I decided that she might’ve been right–just because the creator of the world could hear you doesn’t mean he’d be able or desirous to answer your questions.