New Friends

The dead have strange imaginations, thought the little dog as he regarded the phantom bird. If you could call it a bird. The ugly flightless thing resembling a plucked chicken that a child had attempted to re-feather with elmer's glue. It spoke constantly of heaven, of the kingdom awaiting him in all its glory following the little dog through the streets on his daily search for food. "If you could only see the eyes of the maker, you would be at peace, my small friend," He would garble out as he scurried to keep up. "There is a warmth in all that is living and all that is dead. There is shinning ghost. There is is holy spirit to nourish us. He is the bread of life... or the something of life. Anyway, the toil we find here is but a moment and then our reward is eternal." The little dog was busy exploring an over turned garbage can. This seemed to annoy the bird. "Any moment now I might ascended into his glory, little one. You out to pay more attention. The word I bring is THE word." The dog emerged with a bit of chicken which seemed only to add to the phantom dodo's agitation. It clawed at the ground and looked at the sky in anticipation. "Any moment now, my friend. Pie in the sky, as they say. Any moment now." Nothing happened and the bird look around bewildered. "Well, I must still be here for some reason. The master must have some use for my soul here on this earthly plane. Some task... some..." The Christian dodo trailed off as if distracted by something. A wind blistered itself against the little beagle, lifting his floppy ears as it passed. Down the ally the sounds of large men shouting to each other echoed back and forth then floated out into the world. The dog attended to his bone. The dodo to his soul side by side in the the city as it emptied itself of men.

Away

It was a kind of winter but one without cold, or ice, or snow. It was an indistinct winter, impossible to demarcate form the preceeding fall or coming spring. There was only the rain, the constant rain that arrive at the end of a drought that had lasted all of that previous season and most of the summer before. For Jeremy the winter of that year began with the first rain that anyone had seen in a long time. He had been standing outside of a corporate coffee shop in the early morning. The sun was shining, a man crossed the road with a yappie little dog that kept looking back at something then up toward the sky. He felt a drop on his hand and looked up. Nothing. Through the columns of concrete only blue and the old sunlight of dawn, fake old movie sepia. Then another and then the rain. Not a downpour and not a drizzle, it was the slow seduction of an old lover. The rain slipped into the world again as though it had never left, without announcing its return it closed the door. It hung up its hat. Shit, thought Jeremy. No fucking umbrella.

Decided

There was nothing left to decide. It had all been taken care of already. Plans had been made, dates set, money had changed hands. Certain events had set all of this in motion, certain unrelated appointments, crossings of paths, misunderstandings in the middle of the drunken night. But now the rest was inevitable. Someone would walk down the street for the last time. Some else would pause at a fountain, a small toy dragon sleeping at the bottom, the sound of falling water and the world would go black. Two people who did not know each other never would "get" to know each other. These things would happen. These things had to happen... now. Jeremy shifted his weight to his left foot and bounced a little against the cold. The train was nowhere to be seen. How stupid people could be, how careless with everything they had been given. Wandering around in their idiotic houses oblivious to it all, to the odious rank liver stank that oozed out of them all the while, all their shiny fucking lives, the slime and stench from which they had crawled out of the damn fucking ocean still reeking inside them, inside their golden tits and silken cocks, inside their mauve marc jacobs matching set and Spartan audi hygiene, inside of their clean and glistening moments of warm dark whatever, beneath the winter garden of all of it... that stench. So fucking oblivous. How could they not smell it? But he could smell it and he could do something about it. He could hold his nose and walk among them. He could monitor and record, could understand. Jeremy could undo the highest latch on the door and slip away unnoticed. He was good at that sort of thing. These were his talents, his glorious way of unseeing. Things had been decided. Jeremy held his nose and stepped onto the train.

Away

He had gotten away from earth awhile and could not tell what he missed or if he missed anything. Somehow he thought that he ought to feel differently, more lonely at having left everyone, the girls, parents, dogs, friends, all the people who had surrounded him for 23 years. He ought to feel a tearing, that is what, or a longing, an ache somewhere. But nothing seemed out of the ordinary. This is just what has happened. This is just where he is: on the planet beside an ephemerally colored ocean in the viscous blue flamed fog and soundless tide. There is a warmth to it all, a kind of singing sleep. It is a happy drowsy world. He thinks that last night there were stars, but can't remember. When it gets dark sometimes the ocean fills with glowing creatures pulsing on and off like Vaseline drowned Christmas lights. He is not sure if he sleeps, and that if he sleeps that he dreams. But nothing is pulling him home. He does not feel like he should.

The Last Clock On Earth

Rapidly, instinctively, he stuffed his few supplies into his pack and floated through the dark hallways to the stairs listening for anything that could indicate the presence of the intruder. Nothing. Only the wind and the rain covering what ever warning he might have been able to decipher. He managed his way in the black not from memory, but from something older and was 10 flights down before he thought the better of it. Up instead... 30 flights up... the roof, a rifle in the rain... more waiting. He covered himself in a slicker and stared through the sight waiting for the dot to disappear.

Sheets of rain seemed continuous papering him like a soggy tissue gapped only by the stronger gusts of wind then everything stopped. Everything dripped and the sun seemed to be rising but wasn't. It was as if there were light but there was none. The dark glowed. The red dot on the door blinked. He fired and something screamed then whimpered away. Another shot but not his own, a streak of glimmering heat not yet pain awoke in him and took aim. He ran toward something he had not seen but knew would be standing their waiting to disappear.

The man sensed his approach the way he sensed everything as an annoyance, a yellow stain on a white shirt, a smudge of grease on the perfect glass, as something that should not be there. He sensed the gun pointed at his skull and simply slipped away to nurse his wound, and to descend a thousand stairs, vanish again. Today was not the day after all. There would be others. There always were. People get tired. People forget things. Lanterns are left on, shadows are cast. Even prayers can be whispered too loudly. life itself gives the living away. In this world breathing can be a bad idea.

The Last Clock On Earth

Water rang through the city in the wavering tone of a vanishing ghost. The night continued and the lights shone out their last dim charges of collected sun. Skyscrapers crowded together for warmth shedding the flood from their slate gray and dusty clear selfs. Streets rivered and receded, sewers swelled. Things functioned according to their form nearly unobserved. In some far corner in some small room a lean little man squatted in the dark and watched. He scanned the fading outlines of the city for an irregularity, for a blip in the regulated sheen, for a warning of life.

The Room

"There is someone here", said the little girl to the dark and open room. It's newly plastered walls glared back across the emptiness. "I am sure there is someone here," she said again, this time a little more hopeful than confident. There was a dimness that made the contours of the room visible but she could not determine its source. It was as if the room itself exuded only the slightest pale glow, an umber blue cushioning the black. In the center of the room a long rectangular shadow hovered a few feet from the ground. Slowly she made her way toward it. "I don't mean to intrude. Normally, I am a very polite little girl. It's just that I don't know where I am right now... I don't know where it is that I am or where it is that I've come to... I mean, how it is that I arrived here... in this room... with you. So if you could just say something. I mean, tell me where I am or how I might have arrived and thereby how I might return the same way back to where it was that I was. Then you could go right back to what you were..." She bumped into the soft cottony shape at the room's center and nearly screamed.

From all around her there came a long hissing sigh. It surrounded and enveloped her and seemed to come from both without and within her simultaneously. The pitch modulated from high to low then high again and it faded in and out like gusts of wind through a long tunnel. Hundreds of different voices seemed to be speaking independently of each other from within the sigh one becoming distinct only to spill into another. All of them in languages so foreign to the little girl they could have come from creatures of another sun and another time.

The whole of everything grew louder until it seemed that everything, the room, the dark and the little girl would be shattered into a thousand pieces by the screaming wind when all became quiet and the last of the blue dim was crushed by the heavy dark.

"Hello, little girl," came a voice not unlike a human voice, not unlike a little boy's voice, but with a strangeness like touching a metal toothpaste tube with your tung. Even a friendly metal is to be feared. "I am here," and the room was blinked a blinding white by unseen fingers and an unseen switch and before her eyes could adjust to the small figure staring suspended from the ceiling above there was dark again and the camera flash of the room laid upon it from the back of her aching eyes.

"Is your name Amelia?" said the voice as the girl rubbed her eyes in the dark.

"Pardon me," replied the girl.

"Is your name Amelia? Is that what people call you when they say something to you and no one else... when they wish to address you?"

"No... my name is..."

"That's a shame," the voice interrupted. "I have always wanted to meet a girl named Amelia."

The room blinked a blinding white again and directly before her was the upside-down face of a little boy with enormous glistening eyes and a terribly long face like that of a baby horse. The little girl swallowed the terror in her that would not scream at the site of the face blurring into focus a few inches in front of her. At least he looked "like" a little boy. His skin was pale cream under which pulsed tiny blue estuaries. For a moment she was sure she heard the rapid, hungry beat of a digital heart but could not be sure if it came from inside him or inside her. The whole of him was rather tiny, with skinny bird arms and bony knees above chicken legs.

She stepped back and saw the the boy was floating upside-down as though suspended by tiny invisible wires. He had his legs crossed indian style like you sit when you sit on the floor of the school gymnasium. As she backed away he drifted toward her keeping his face only a few inches from hers so that when she stopped suddenly their heads nearly collided. He backed away a bit.

"Who are you," she said.

He closed his eyes slowly then just as slowly opened them while his gaze remained constant despite the lidded vail of flesh: through her, into her, toward something she contained. For a moment there was an underwater stillness. The blueness returned and softened the astonishing white then pulsed away again like a wind blown smoke. The little boy's large snout sniffed hungrily at the air. Something open and something closed in another room. They stared at each other for a long while without speaking. The little girl could not move. Everything was new and as it had been. Everything was awash in a still born light.

"Excuse me, little boy," she said, waking suddenly. "Do you know how it is that I... I mean where is this place... where am I?."

The little boy blinked his long egg shaped eyes and yawned, revealing a mouth that seemed to grow vastly larger as it opened. It was filled with row upon row of small fangs cushioned in the softest and slightest pink flesh. They filled the whole of it and each of the thousand appeared to be moving independently of each other, reaching out, searching, straining towards her eventually in a momentary and unified motion like the feigned bow of a merchant dignitary. A thousand kneeling teeth. And although the little girl knew that she should be afraid she was not. She stretched out her hand to touch them. As she did so the boy snapped his mouth shut, not in response to her gesture but automatically as though some clock had reached the moment of the closing of mouths. His look was still on her like the gaze of a bird, a pure optic transmitting without comprehending, a television lens broadcasting her into the air of an unknown audience.

"Amelia," said the boy, his voice different now... older and younger, dissolving back into a sigh.

"What," said the little girl.

The room went black again.

"Amelia," said the hissing. "Amelia of the unseen hand."