Being Spoken For.

The volume turns up, and you're a million miles away from home. You knew you were, and you've been so for a while, but you didn't realize how far away you were until this night when the blood was pumping in both sides of your neck and the wind is blowing loud and the volume just keeps turning up. The sound is in another language, but it's a familiar pattern, so you pretend not to pay attention because it's the polite thing to do, right? Even though you're being spoken for.

Somewhere a million miles away is the underground where you can just tell the void has started shrinking, even though you're not there. It's closing up and you imagine how much easier it will be to get to the bathroom. There's paste all over the ground there where there's oil here.

The volume keeps turning up, so you decide to lay back and listen to your own blood. It has a nicer rhythm, anyway.

Paper Cut

Hahahaha

You can feel yourself shrinking

Your whole body

It's shrinking

It's getting smaller

And your bones feel like paper tubes

Tightly rolled up and stuck together with tack

And it's still getting pumped into your head for hours at a time as your body gets smaller and smaller. But you don't mind. The sparks are going off in your brain.

Void

There you are, going about your business in the underground--not hurting anyone not even the purpley bugs that keep trying to remind you they were here first--a massive hole just opens up in the ground, right in your home! It opened up and now it's just there, hanging out, taking up most of the floor. Damn thing isn't very considerate.

So you try to do what you normally do on normal days but of course it's not normal anymore because there's a giant fucking hole in the middle of the floor so now all that you normally do on normal days involves a lot more edging and dancing around on your tiptoes. Try to get some food, gotta walk around the hole first. Need to meed your bathroom needs, make sure you're on the side of the room where the bathroom connects or else you won't make it there. And you don't even think about meeting your bathroom needs in the hole because that's just plain unsanitary.

You stare at it and it stares at you. Of course it wins every time because isn't a pupil a hole anyway? That makes your wonder if maybe all this edging and dancing around on your tiptoes that you've been doing has been on one huge iris around one huge pupil. In any case, it's hard to avoid the hole and you worry occasionally that you'll edge and dance right into the hole itself if you don't concentrate enough. Suddenly being holed up in the underground became significantly less relaxing. Too bad it's already nightfall outside and everyone knows that there are strange predatory things out there where it's more cold than hot and the closest train tracks are high above the ground and don't host crazy siamese boxcars. None that you've seen, anyway.

Next Time

It stabs into your brain, and all you can see is sparks.

Over and over, like it's probing for something, like you could have hidden something in there one purpose just to spite it, but it's still poking around so you don't know what the fuck.

I mean, you broke your head open last night, and something fell out and splat on the ground, so wasn't that it? It keeps stabbing, trying to find whatever you might have hidden from it. Because apparently you're trying to hide something from an inanimate probe.

Before you know it, you're hundreds of miles away, and the train tracks and siamese boxcars and appendages are nowhere in sight. The heat of the ground long dissipated, though once you lived in the sky you now call underground your home. Too bad the bugs got there first because now they won't leave you alone, not even long enough to make a sandwich. You try to get rid of them but they leave a bright purple stain in the wall so you never forget that they were there first.

An avalanche could start at any moment because you won't bother to clear the rocks. You waited too long and now one has gone through your head. Guess how it found its way in?

All the while you emerge from underground occasionally but don't bother trying to fight its gravitational field. Too bad it will inevitably seal you in when the ground turns to ice and all you can see are tiny little points that stick together one on top of the other until all you can see are the insides of your own eyeballs. Try living with that.

And it continues to drill.

Melt

It's done. The coal cars are gone. The siamese boxcar has moved on from your apartment complex, sloughing off the appendage and letting it rot into nothing before you knew it. It fluttered a little but left after a while. The coal cars haven't come back but now the wooden bridge that smells like tar groans from the weight of the siamese boxcar. But it just sits there like it has been, all through the heat and cold and rain and snow and heat. It just sits there and you keep walking like you do every day. All the while red clay mixes with brown grit and nothing's moving but things are changing. They are changing and you can feel it.

The sun will be gone by the time you pass the train tracks tonight. The coal cars are gone and the siamese boxcar is gone and the snow has long melted away but still waits to slip you up on the sidewalk if you're not careful--even if you are careful. You hear a train coming but never see it pass.