Windowpains

The finger smeared window that sits right beside my easy chair is a constant source of uneasiness for me.  Every single nightmare I’ve ever had was because of the thin yellowing cheap glass that separates me from the deserted parking lot that stretches out over the horizon. It seems that every single time I drift off to sleep, I’m greeted with a transparent square hovering directly in front of my face.  It is the window, stained and slightly cracked just like the one that welcomes the faint moonlight into my room.  In the dreams the crack gradually spreads and reaches all corners of the window like the narrow legs of some horrific insect.  Then the dream really begins. 
But you cannot know what happens yet.

Let me explain why - a couple of nights ago I experienced a major life shift that was initiated by a man I ignored at the gas station.  It was past midnight, and I stopped by my local 24 hour mart to grab a couple of salty snacks.  I was severely craving a crunch, an the only thing that would satisfy me is those tooth-destroying Corn Nuts.  I wanted a crunch that could be heard for miles.  I’m talking about crunching that echoes in a mile-deep empty cavern.  I wanted people to cover their ears when they heard me crunch.  I wanted to spit out teeth like a shattered mint.  By the way my name is “Crunchy Bunchy Bosco.” 

On my way in the mini-mart, a jolly older man in a weathered baseball camp leaped up from a bench and held the door for me.  I thanked him and ventured inside to satisfy dat crunch.  When I got over to the crispy station I found rows and rows of Corn Nuts lined up like deep fried troops ready to be consumed by the opposing army that is my bicuspids.  I grabbed two bags, checked out, and plodded down the cobblestone steps to the front door of the 24 hour mini mart I was currently leaving.
Right as I approach the door, the exact same jolly old man with the snow white hair that reminded me of the iconic Jack Frost, the living snowman oft referenced to in legends of old, opened the door for me once again.

“Thanks snowman,” I said, nodding at him.  He then violently grabbed my shoulder and nearly and nearly pulled me off my feet.

“Now that I’ve done something for you, what are you going to do for me?” he nearly shouted directly in my ear.  My eardrum waved and wobbled like a sheet of tissue paper deep within my ear or a drum head yeah you get it.  Any way I replied with “Ok what do you want ice-hair man?”

“Let me look at the windows in your home lil dude.”  My blood ran ice cold, just as cold as the wispy wafting frozen winds that breeze through the town of Jack Frost.

So I took him to my apartment and showed him where the windows were.  He looked at them and started screaming at them which was really creepy!  But honestly it didn’t really matter, because as he was screaming himself hoarse at my window, I was opening the foil bag of the Corn Nuts I bought.
Boy oh boy howdy how I crunched on them.  Talkin’ smackin’ and chewing on the crispy crunchitity nuts and eating my snack.  As I ate each one, I wanted to eat another one so I would!

Wait what was I talking about?

Weird Mystery Water

10/11/15

I've been noticing it a lot more recently. Grumbles. A lot of odd, distant, grumbly sounds. I thought I'd mention it because it became very pronounced last night.

I really enjoy when I wake up early and I don't feel like crud. I get started on all my tasks and assignments. I pour myself a gallon of coffee, haha, and just take the world on! I'm a fierce tiger, I'm a gamma ray, I'm a

Uh.

There it goes again..

It's coming from the backyard. I think I'll check it out...

I didn't see anything, lol, but it's probably nothing. It's a lot more odd and almost scary at night. Heh. I should get my breakfast started! It's fun to get an early start on my journal, but more important to eat, Though.


Ugh. I ended up just eating toast. Not a very fulfilling start but it's fine. I couldn't really cook much else because all of the dishes I was planning on using were in the dishwasher. And something is really wrong with the dishwasher. All of the pots and pans were in there, despite their irregular shape and stuff. Well yeah, all of the water in my dishwasher has gone done, toast, I say, toast black! A weird, stand-offish, odd goopy type issue. Oh, the dread.

So I just had toast... #lame

Anyway, back to me...

Love is awesome. It's astonishing that I'm genuinely, 100% getting married, for sure, soon.

Ok

I think I have an issue with my dishwasher.... BRB guys.

AHHHH! I opened up the dishwasher and now I'm being chased! Ahhh! A weird, sketchy, gross creature is chasing me in my marital home! Help me! #lame #lame!!! Ok, so I opened up my dishwasher once more and I looked deep inside to see the cause of this weird musty ass stank water and it was gross! I put in a scrubby cloth and my hand was nearly ripped and shellacked to pieces! In fact, most of my arm is red, and barren! It only got the cloth, but it jumped from the darkness and pounced upon my person! I got from beneath the gross beast and ran and sprinted!

Now I'm being chased! Ahhhhhh! It's getting closer to me! Ah! I really hope I don't die haha! AHHHHHHHHHHHH

AHHHHH
AH
heh
AHHHHHHHHHH

Help me!
I'm getting married!
Now I'm dying! I'm dying because the monster got me!


This blog post was found on the computer screen of Yelmac Tobias on the afternoon of 10/10/15.
He and fiance were found decimated, beheaded, and scrapped in the living room. They died together, and were bloody.

Gary's Trial

     The cup left a ring of condensed water on the tabletop. This ring had been corrupted by the minuscule collapse of a vacuum, caused by the disengagement of the liquid seal gathered at the base of the fast-food cup when it was snatched upwards and dashed against a nearby cinder block wall. This had caused some of the water in the ring itself to streak inwards and conglomerate into dots and curved lines. The unfortunate aftermath of this minute opera of physics was that a highly detailed face with three eyes, a sturdy Roman nose, and a deeply cleft chin had been born and began to stare up from near the napkin dispenser.

     "It sure doesn't sound like a joke to me," Janet Cund said, "and, by the way, I'm not laughing!"

     "That's pretty much alright, though. Humor is subjective. There are different schools within the pantheon of comedy. All it needs in order to be classified as a gag is my intent. I intended for it to be a joke; therefore, it is a joke."

     "I can't believe you've been this type of person all along."

     "What? Funny?" Gary Leqat asked.

     "I'm staying at my mom's tonight," said Janet.

     She rose from the table. Her forearm was striped with narrow caramel-colored tracks from the cola she had launched across the back corner of the food court. There were deep lines carving shadows in twin arcs from her nostrils to the down-turned corners of her mouth. Gary stared in the direction of her heels as she maneuvered her hips through the jagged labyrinth of tables and chairs. She had some sort of green juice stained on the back of her white canvas sneakers.

     It took Gary about five minutes to contemplate the fact that he was now alone. Not alone in the grander sense--hardly worth a thought--but alone with a sudden sensation of physical isolation, fostered by the sea of fake marbled formica tabletops, which glared under a buzzing grid of fluorescent bulbs, suspended in cylindrical aluminum housings thirty feet above him. The food court was vast, its entrance terminating a quarter-mile away in a palisade of waist-high cement nodes that had been painted yellow.

     Suddenly there was someone sitting in his vicinity who hadn't been there before. The man sat dead in the center of  the thronging tables. Before him was a blue plastic tray, upon which four juicy burgers spun threads of water vapor into the air from under their artisan buns. This man ignored his cooling food as he stabbed at the screen of his smart phone with nimble hyper-extended thumbs. He had short patchy hair; hair archipelagos drifted across his light-bulb pate. A cyst protruded from the folds in his forehead, pregnant with old fluids.

     Gary was hungry, looking at the newcomer's burgers. He stood halfway up and felt for his wallet in his back pocket. The pocket was empty. Janet had offered to hold the wallet in her purse earlier while he had fumbled with a jumble of dollar bills in order to purchase her wasted soda.

     He sat back down. There had been no cashiers standing at the registers in the dug-out restaurant cubicles in any case. An hour before, sunlight had rushed in from slanted windows in the roof above the mall's atrium, just beyond the handrail across from the food court entrance. The sun had set.

     Gary bowed his head and clenched his hair in his fists. When he noticed the three-eyed face peering up at him from the table, he released a staccato yelp. The man in the center of the food court laughed without looking away from his phone screen.

     Then Gary's thigh began to buzz. He took his phone out of his pocket and drew a virtual geometric glyph onto a matrix of white dots in order to unlock it. There was a text from Janet:

     "I'm sorry I overreacted, but I am still upset by the joke you made. We can talk about it later. I'll be home tonight."

     This was followed by a .gif of Bill Cosby eating a spoonful of gooey pudding that had been photoshopped to look like corn-encrusted feces. His face the color of slate, Gary sent "lol, hun" as a reply.

     He was about to shove the phone back into his pocket and leave the mall when the phone vibrated again. On the top border of the home screen was a lowercase "g" in sans-serif font. He swiped down to expand his notifications. Someone had mentioned him in a massive post on his Gendo page.

     "I really hope that Gary Leqat manages to find his way out of the Groever County Mall! :P"

     Gary sat still and made a point of keeping his face trained on his screen. With his free hand, he shielded his eyes from the rest of the room. In doing this, he unknowingly struck a line through the gaping face on the table. He didn't recognize the person who had posted the message on his wall. From the thumbnail, the poster's face was hard to see. It was as if the picture had been taken of someone or something else while this person had been in the far background, and he had later appropriated the photo and cut everything out but his face before blowing it up by several orders of magnitude. The artifacts in the image all but scrambled its particulars. But one detail sent a jolt of panic through Gary's wrist, nearly causing him to drop the phone. In the center of this distorted face's forehead was something round and red.

     He almost looked up then, but a messenger notification popped up in the top corner of the screen. He tapped it, unleashing a jiggling square frame containing an ongoing conversation with his friend, Martin Neubauten. The latest message had reached his inbox less than a second ago:

     "There's someone messaging me who keeps saying he's a good friend of yours, heh. He says he's hanging out with you or something. I don't know who he his. What's going on, bud? Is this another one of your Gendo stunts?"

     Before he could reply, another message came in from Janet. It was a picture of Gary, sitting at his table in the food court with a tray in front of him, loaded with burgers. Below this, she had typed, "Who are you hanging out with and why did they buy all of those cheeseburgers for you? Should I throw dinner away?"

     Gary felt the burgers before he saw them. His hand had fallen from his forehead on seeing the image in Janet's message and had landed upon the seedy terrain of the upper bun. He screamed for three seconds straight with his eyes closed. Once he had opened them, he found the burgers were quite there. They were so very there that a pinkish admixture of ketchup and mayonnaise had been squeezed out under the pressure of his hand and had dripped onto his pinky nail. The face on the table was still there as well. A large swath of its incidental features had been earlier rubbed away by the nub of Gary's elbow, giving it a mutant-like visage.

     Looking up from this small gruesome scene, he immediately encountered another. He was now sitting in the middle of the food court. A damp brown soda stain was drying on a wall in the far corner over a hundred meters away. Gary scanned the food court for the other man who had been sitting at this table. He was gone.

     Gary stood up and carried the tray, full of mountainous burgers, to a nearby trash receptacle. Before lifting the swinging door and sliding them into the shiny fetid abyss within, he took one of the burgers for himself and set off for the mall entrance in mid-bite.

     At the head of the staircase leading down into the atrium, he had a better view of the glass panes set at impractical angles in the ceiling. He could see stars and a fat sickle of moon. On his way down to the first floor, he glanced at a standing brass clock surrounded by purple-veined plants. It was getting close to eleven o'clock. No one was in the mall.

     He sprinted down the corridor, keeping to the shadows provided by the walkways jutting out of the walls above him. None of the stores he passed had been barricaded. All of the lights were on. The merchandise was still on display. He took another nervous bite out of his burger while bounding toward the glass-enclosed vestibule leading out into the parking lot. Marbled smudges of red, white, and yellow glistened at the border of his bloodless lips.

     He made short work of exiting the building. The doors weren't locked and opened automatically once he had entered the field of the motion sensors. Outside, the crisp air draped itself around his hot neck. He trotted over to a nearby glass and metal enclosure where, luckily, the Groever Transit Authority would be stopping every twenty minutes until half past midnight. The dim orange lamps above the central column of the parking lot (still packed with empty cars) hardly illuminated the area of sidewalk, into which the small structure of the bus stop had been bolted.

     Seven minutes later, a glowing bus pulled up to the curb. Gary embarked, rubbing his eyes, and paid his fare. He took a seat near the back of the bus. As the driver wrestled with the steering wheel in order to navigate a complicated serpentine of narrow one-lane turns, Gary looked through the yawning windowpanes into the gloom of the parking lot. The mall was nearly 500 meters away now, looking like a blind elemental, half-exhumed from the fathomless depths of asphalt and concrete surrounding it for miles in every direction.

     Closer by, someone was suddenly standing under one of the streetlamps. The onlooker watched the bus depart, his face illumined in a cone of lamplight, haloed by gnats. It was the man that Gary had observed earlier in the food court. His nose was missing, as well as a diagonal wedge from his mouth and the outer curve of his right eye, all of which had been replaced by a plain flat band of skin. In his forehead, the cyst was moving.

       Or perhaps, more accurately, the cyst was blinking. Maybe. As the bus hauled Gary onto the highway, he couldn't be entirely sure.

Dead Center

It's not very neat

It is all very new

Who am I to judge?

A brand new set of arms.

 

There is a human skeleton displayed in the center of the Groever Plaza shopping center. People from the area are decades deep in lethargy as far as the shock factor goes. Every once in a while, though, denizens like myself are kind of taken aback at just the mildly morbid concept of its regal display. I know, there's skeletons all around us and that's fine but there is practically no way that the people who put this market place together knew what they were doing when they propped this lifeless frame in the direct middle of such a vital and lively area.

 

In my first month here, I never really needed to shop for anything other than groceries. You could make the argument that I'm somewhat of a big catalog boy. There's something deeply gratifying about leafing through a twenty-page reader, judging and price comparing such colorful and ultimately useless items. The shops in the Groever district are mainly for practically the same kinds of items: suits, household appliances, totes, containers, and bins. I really had never a reason to visit this area until an associate of mine, who calls himself Gorlop, asked me to scout the location for any oddities or vintage collectible sundries. There was no rush to do so, especially since I only talk to Gorlop about once a month, until one day I was strangely compelled to check that shit out.

 

 

I can breathe

I can read

How much for a towel rack?

My feet lead the way.

 

It was just recently that this all went down. There I was, headed to this average sized outdoor mall for reasons I had become less comfortable with. At first, I just kind of kept my head down. I was reluctant to make any acquaintances on that particular day. The entire place was a series of buildings, some conjoined by a disappointingly cute pathway that was covered by some dumb arbor wrapped in a nest-like twiggy mass, speckled with LED lights. I'm sure they would look more appropriate later in the year. The first few shops I checked out were fairly mundane. I bought a package of incense sticks to prove that I wasn't stealing anything. Really, the most interesting thing on this first wing of the plaza was this place called Uncle Groanwald's Ice Cream. Obviously there was tons of great, over-priced ice cream but they also had several shelves of small, molded vinyl figurines, like green army men and orange native Americans. That was by far my favorite part. I think it's because that's the last positive thing that I remember seeing before I saw that damned skeleton.

 

I was two shops deep in the middle section of the strip when I actually kind of looked up and saw it. My eyes widened but I didn't scream yet. I was panicking but I had not yet decided how to feel about it because there are so many other people going about their regular day. I paced around for a moment and then walked into a coffee shop that I was mentally neglecting. Inside, I saw my friend Pete and gave him a thousand dollars because he is a really great guy. I sat down with my coffee to debate on what I was actually going to do if I had to walk past the skeleton to get back to my car. After about half an hour I came up with, simply: "do not shout".

 

 

I should not fall

I should not reach

Where is the iron

I will walk away.

 

My heart was no longer pounding, I was cool. Still, in my cautious state, I couldn't help but to talk to the cashier next door. She was clearly recently out of high school because she was fake nice in our conversation. I asked her about the skeleton, and she just kind of replied, "skeleton?" and halfway peered out the window to look, just to say "I guess I didn't really notice. It's neat, Though". This made me feel worse for a moment but then I let it go. I didn't fully plan on asking anyone else about it after that little nightmare but I was still curious. I walked outside and stood in front of the building and basically just spaced out, looking in the direction of that dry, off-white figure of bones. I was staring at the skeleton. Somebody, of any description, walked by and I just kind of mentioned, "Heh. Skeleton". They looked up, smiled, and said "yep. spooky." and continued walking. Give me a break, you know?

 

I was basically ready to go home. I had enough. Still, I was dreading the confrontation. Obviously I wasn't going to go back out the way I came in, at this point. I plodded down the cobblestone pathway toward the center of the shopping center, gaining nervousness. There it was. The framework of a dead human body. There were people taking pictures in front of it. Then basically I realized that they must have just put the skeleton there because Halloween is coming up, haha.

The Demon Cloud

Martin was a simple man with a simple shopping list.  You could even argue that it was TOO simple, but we won't bother having that argument right now.  His shopping list contained only six items, and they were all basic household needs.  In case you're curious enough, I'll let you read them here:

White bread
2% Milk
honey baked ham
BBQ chips
paper towels
coffee

See?  Simple and boring.  He even wrote "simple and boring" at the top of the list but even he's not sure why he bothered to do that.  In short, the words "simple" and "boring" described Martin perfectly.  Which is what makes the events on the afternoon of October 3rd so damn interesting.

Martin stepped out of his home and locked the deadbolt door behind.  The grocery store was just a short walk away.  He plodded down the 3 cobblestone steps to his small front yard and strolled down the path to the street.  He passed the colorful stone swans decorating his front yard, making the small plot look even more cramped.  It was a pretty hideous sight honestly.  I mean the guy clearly had no taste and you could see it from all the way down the street.  Ugh.

He walked with his hands in his pockets and eyes fixated on the sidewalk.  It had been brutally hot for the past few weeks and the cool breeze that drifted through the trees was extremely calming.  The entire day was cast in shadow but didn't seem dark at all.  In a way everything seemed to glow in a faint orange tint that reminded the world fall was coming.  His eyes remained fixed on the ground.

Every step the breeze seems to grow more forceful, pushing back on him, almost telling him to go home.  If only he had looked up he would have seen why.  He pulled out his neatly folded shopping list from his back pocket, re-reading it a few times admiring his own handwriting.
"God I can't wait to chow down on some honey baked ham," he nearly shouted.  The words echoed off nearby houses and scuttled down alleys and driveways like an army of small but surprisingly hive minded crickets.

He unfolded his shopping list yet again to make sure he included the honey baked ham but before he could even BEGIN to read the first item he heard a booming thunderclap directly overhead.

He looked up at the sky and saw a gigantic glowing red cloud.  It was unreasonably bright and the hellish red light made the back of his eyes sting.
"Holy shit," he said, eyes transfixed on the morphing cloud.  A sweet old woman happened to walk by at the exact moment he yelled the word "shit" and the crass word severly offended her gentle sensibilities.  Once the vile language entered her ear, she gasped and began to wobble at the knees.  She nearly stumbled over into a rose bush.  Luckily she regained her balance, and just glared sternly at Martin, but honestly he didn't see because he was so focused on the cloud.  It was a pretty embarassing moment and he was just blissfully unaware.

He couldn't stop looking at the cloud.  It was enormous, and changed from orange to red like a pulsating heart.  What really shocked Martin's boring brain was how extremely tall it was.  He thought of it as a fluffy red Tower of Babel, reaching far into the atmosphere.

But it was not a tower.
'Twas a cloud.
A Demon Cloud.

There was no mistaking it, this was a demonic puff of sky.  It bellowed and moaned loudly like a dying elephant, and shook the entire earth below his feet with a delayed invisible impact.
He went "Woah!" and almost fell but he didn't so it was fine.  Like I said he was very uninteresting but he just happened to have the best view of this incredible phenomenon. 
"That is crazy!" he yelled in a pretty high pitched voice.  If you hadn't been looking at him you would've thought it was an 8th grader shouting, but nope it was a 32 year old man named Martin.  He sucks.  I fucking hate him.

The trembling soon stopped, and the autumn afternoon was once again still.  Martin gazed upward in utter disbelief.  His ears were still ringing from the unearthly noises that suddenly fell silent.

Then it began.

The bottom of the cloud opened up and hundreds of thousands of demons poured out like rain.  Demons of all shapes and sizes dropped from the sky with their pointed tails draped behind them.  Some fell with their red horns pointed downward while others threw steaming hot pitchforks down on the horrified townsfolk.  There was even one riding on an evil looking motorcycle and it actually was pretty cool.

The deafening thunder was replaced by a symphony of high pitched cackling.  Laughing Spectres, giggling Spooks, and chuckling Goblins were falling all over the county.  These demons were jubilant.  Every soul in the town began screaming like hogs before the slaughter.

Everyone except Martin.  He had an idea.

He quickly opened up his shopping list.  His eyes frantically searched the page for the desired words.  There were only six things on there but it still took him about 17 seconds to find what he was looking for.
"This has to work!" he said, pointing his finger directly in the middle of the page.  The movement was so quick and reckless that it ripped clean through the sheet of loose leaf paper.  There was no need to be so brutish with the paper, I mean what would that accomplish?  God.  Sorry everything he does irritates me.

The old woman behind him that we all forgot about until now asked "What is your plan young man?  How are you gonna stop all these red hot demons up in that sky up there?"
Martin jolted around in absolute shock.  He never even knew she was there in the first place, and was frankly far more frightened by this kind, sweet old woman than any of the screamin' demons raining from the Demon Cloud.
"Well," Martin coyly sighed, "I'm gonna feed those demons a harty meal of honey baked ham."
The woman's eyes blinked behind her thick horn rimmed glasses.
"Honey baked ha-" she tried to respond but Martin quickly screamed "YES!  Honeybaked ham!  I must run to the grocery store!"
He sped off down the street, disappearing in the red glow of the cloud.  The woman was once again knocked down but this time it was because Martin carelessly clobbered the old woman with his sweaty elbow, catapaulting her into a dried up thorny rose bush.  What a clumsy asshole.

Martin ran through town, faster than ever before.  He weaved in & out of alleyways, dashing accross sidewalks and leaping over cars.  He was focused on one goal: buying his groceries. 

He was nearing his destination, but just as the grocery store came into view, the demons began landing on the ground.  It was sheer calamity.  The goat-men began decapitating townspeople left & right.  Bodies exploded like balloons filled with freshly cooked spaghetti.

A demon landed directly in Martin's path.  It opened it's mighty jaws and laughed, preparing to consume his soul.  Martin didn't slow down, but instead ran faster and slid between the demon's gross legs like a baseball player.

"Safe!" The demon yelped. 

Martin ran through the automic doors of the grocery store.  He knew what he had to do.  The checkout girl screamed when he bolted directly for her, doing yet another baseball slide straight into the counter. 

"Get out!"  She demanded.
"No, it's 'you're out!' heh heh" Martin grinned in response.
"No, dickhead get out of here you're being even more obnoxious than Satan's Army outside."
"Oh," he whispered and slowly stood up.  He then slapped his credit card on the counter and calmly said, "I'll take 50 pounds of honey baked ham please, and make it snappy."

Fifteen minutes later Martin is standing outside the grocery store with a shopping cart overflowing with honey baked ham.  He stands confidently with a pink ham tucked under one arm.  His eyes are skyward, staring at the Demon Cloud.

He raises the ham over his head and shouts "Attention all ye demons!  Pray give me thine attention, for I am to oppose thee with mine hams of honey baked!"
Every demon stopped what it's doing and glares back at him.  No one knew what he meant.
"Uh," Martin stammers "I mean, ya'll better get back in that cloud or I'm gonna start throwing these hams at you!"
The demons gasp, and step back in fear.  A few demons even fly back toward the cloud, fearing the worst.

A tall, dark red demon steps forth and looks Martin square in the eye.  He blows out hot steam from his nostrils, and strokes his long, thin goatee. 
"You wouldn't," he chuckles.
"I'll do it man," Martin retorts.
Silence falls on the street.  No one knows what's going to happen next.
Martin reaches both hands in to his shopping cart and pulls out two sealed packages of honey baked ham lunch meat.  He throws both packages of meat directly at the demon and they second they touch his sulfur laden flesh, he vanishes in a puff of red smoke.

Everyone screams.  Every demon that fell from the sky hastily flies back toward the cloud.
Martin begins unloading his shopping cart, throwing ham after ham at every demon in range.  Dozens of Beelzebub's soldiers perish in a smokey puff of demon dust. 
Soon every demon flees back into the safety of the cloud or dies a honey baked death.

The cloud itself races for the horizon, never to be seen again.

Everyone on the street is completely silent.  No one can believe what they just witnessed.  They just saw a weird guy defeat hundreds of demons with honey baked ham.  A small boy emerges from the crowd and approaches Martin, who stands solitary outside the grocery store.  He's panting like a maniac and wiping sweat from his brow.  He is a hero in everyone's mind.

The boy tugs on Martin's tattered sleeve and quietly asks, "How did you know mister?  How could you have possibly known that the demons' weakness was honey baked ham?"
"Huh?" Martin asked, shaking his head trying to understand the question.

"Oh," he says regaining his composure, "Well I mean, honey baked ham is disgusting."

Swilled

     She extends a fluorescent yellow frisbee across the low chain-link barrier. The frisbee is filthy, like it might have come from the tarmac of a gas station near a busy interstate exit ramp. Pat stands behind her, smiling with his puffy malformed eyes.

     "You toss the frisbee from your side and the other player tries to swat it into his can. If he succeeds, you lose your soul. But you get a free ice-cold beer."

     Daquiri stands firm on the other side of the barrier. He holds the handle of his briefcase in both hands. His thumbs are losing blood circulation, pressed against his belt buckle.

     "I'm not so sure. I've never been into cult sports. I like going straight home and reading until my mind short-circuits and plunges me into a deathlike slumber."

     Becks turns around and seems to stare at Pat for three seconds. There's no way we can ever be sure what she is communicating to him. Behind the two of them looms a piecemeal obelisk assembled from various deposits of bedrock from around the region. On either side of the obelisk are two black metal barrels, canted at worrying angles due to the uneven slope of the lawn.

     "You'll like it once you get started," Pat says. "Once you get your fingers under the rim and start practicing the ideal extension of your arm in the first release, it's like, you're in heaven."

     "I haven't seen a blood relative in almost three years because I haven't been able to stop," Becks says.

     She is pressed up against the barrier now. Her loose maroon dress swells out through the diamond-shaped openings created by the aluminum wires. She tries to undo one of the latches on Daquiri's briefcase.

     "You're obviously not a mechanical engineer; you're pressing the catch in the wrong direction."

     She doesn't stop smiling altogether, but something about the histrionic joy described by her crateresque dimples has diminished.

     "We're actually electrical engineers."

     "Oh, then that makes sense," says Daquiri. He has seen past a teenaged oak tree and found that the sign on the building behind the obelisk and the cultists does not begin with the word, "mechanical," as he had initially assumed.

     "Come on. One throw, and the rest of the Friday is yours to do with as you please," says Pat.

     "Fine. I'm a little bit interested now, anyway." And a little bit remorseful at his engineering faux pas. Daquiri will punish himself later for it.

     He swings a leg over the railing and pinions his nuts on it for a moment, then releases a subtle yelp that makes him sound like an aggressive muskrat. Neither of the cult members notices. He stands behind his can and Becks is handing the frisbee over to him. He catches a whiff of something wallowing below him.

     "That smells like gas-oh-leee--"

     Within the hull of the can, shrunken humanoid forms bathe in a turgid bath of brown liquid with whirling atolls of white foam clinging to their outlines.

     "Fuck."

     Pat is standing behind the opposing barrel. He smiles with such ferocity that his eyes are nearly shut under the pressure of his crenelated cheek flesh. Becks is standing just to the right of Daquiri, who is still holding his briefcase in one hand. I'm not sure, but I think she's caressing his wrist, and then toying with the latch again.

     "Why don't you put that thing down? You won't be able to throw for anything if you're holding it like that."

     "I can't put it down. We would all be in danger if I did that."

     "What do you have in there?"

     "A couple of books. Some forms. A manifesto. Pair of nail clippers."

     "Put it down. Get into this, man," Pat says.

     "No, I'll pass."

     Daquiri jabs Becks in the hip with his elbow and bends his knees. He extends his arm several times. Each time, the frisbee passes over his own barrel and he can hear screams like steel wool being squeezed in a vice grip, reflected off of the concave dish in its underside.

     He lets it fly.

     As he watches it hover over the leaf-strewn grass, he begins to think he can hear someone frying eggs on the fourth floor of a long brick building at his back. The oily popping noise reverberates between the hard bare walls of the room in which this hypothetical feast is being prepared before dancing through an open window and reaching his pierced ears. He slaps the back of his neck, thinking he has been scalded.

     Then the frisbee is over Pat's barrel. Pat swats it in, his hand drooping from the juncture of his wrist, without even having paid attention. I can hear the plastic plane of the frisbee splash through the surface of the brackish grog from where I am sitting, 500 miles away.

     "Alright, so do you win, or?"

     "You win. You successfully lost your soul."

     "I guess I wasn't sure of what you guys were talking about. You don't really have your shit together with this stupid-ass frisbee game."

     "Yeah, exactly. So do you want your free beer?"

     "When am I going to notice that my soul is gone?"

     "You like IPAs right?"

     "Pat, you've got to stop doing this. Nobody likes talking about their beer preferences in real life," Becks says.

Blood On Da Wallz

My God... I...

Let me at least say I'm sorry, baby, please. Don't... don't go.
Oh that's right.
You can't.
But hear me out at least.
I'm fascinated by your patience, even after what I've done here. Please don't interrupt. Where was I? Oh yes!
The knife worked splendidly, you have to admit. It was like cutting butter. Even the knife tricks I performed beforehand added to the atmosphere. Theatrics are important to me.
So yeah, how did it feel? The murder, I mean. Did it hurt? Did it go on too long? Are you angry at me?
No, of course not.
Look at that smile.
Pinned up on the ambrosian wall.
That wall.
My pin-up girl.
On the wall.
The wall with all the blood.