“Under every scrap of confining skin is the potential for escape. When life grows from your husk, you, in turn, may be reborn.” -William James Lemaire: Seeding the Verdant World
It had been so, so long since my soulmate had felt anything resembling escape.
We sat and talked about the process that would surely end his life. Our Benefactor, William, had proposed this journey to us at our final meeting. William, who’d given so much of his time and energy to the wretched around him, was generous in imparting his wisdom. He believed my soulmate could be saved – but only if he gave his life to the Verdant World. I remember looking at the swaying trees and long grass around us – trees and grass seeded by the numberless Saved. It was a defining moment.
“Grow what we love in whom you love.” -William James Lemaire: Seeding the Verdant World
I kissed the lips of my soulmate before removing them. He didn’t move. Tears sprouted from the corners of his closed eyes. The sweet taste of his kiss lingered as I poured honey in and around his new mouth. The honey was from bees which had pollinated the flowers grown from other Saved. The cycle was continuing with us. We whirl the wheel. Continue reading “Escaphism”
True knowledge requires self destruction. I’d always preached it, but I’d never practiced it. Never, until this morning, when the red wire slipped into the black module and I moved while going nowhere. My consciousness – my essence – erupted from my body and left me standing in that busy room of machines and batteries and magic.
(Magic is nothing without machines and batteries.)
I left my body without looking back. The air was smoky and shimmering. The walls were porous. No sound met my earless nothingness. There was only sight. My third eye; my soul; my angel: my guide. My everything.
It’s almost impossible to sleep when there’s a cricket in your room. I know. I’ve tried. The constant chirping as the bug seeks out some nonexistent mate is enough to drive you crazy. And I’ll admit: for a time, I may have lapsed into a mental state that wasn’t the healthiest for me. It would happen to anyone under those conditions.
I went a good two weeks without sleeping more than 10 minutes a night. The sound was constant and inescapable. I did some searches online and was told I could buy a lizard who’d eat the thing and end my torment. I let three of them loose before I went to work and never saw them again. The chirping continued unabated. Continue reading “Endless Chirping”
Hello, readers! My name is Rudolph Baylor. I am composing and submitting this narrative of the other night’s events from my, and our, friend’s account for reasons I will momentarily reveal. For the sake of full disclosure, I must admit I am the man with whom he has been working. For those unfamiliar with our time together, please see the mildly-stylized narratives here and here.
Now that we are on the same page, I will provide a bit of personal backstory heretofore unknown to you all.
As I mentioned above, I am Rudolph Baylor. I’m 52 years old. In what now seems like a past life, I was a day-trader who made quite a bit of money in the forex markets during the early growing-pains of the Euro adoption. I’m by no means a King Midas, but I’ll just say I’ve been quite fortunate.
One of the problems with making enough money in a few years to last one’s lifetime is trying to fill the following years with purpose. I ended up doing what many, many people have done when searching for purpose: I trawled the Internet. Most of this trawling was to kill time. I make no effort to hide that fact. As a man uninterested in the hedonia that drives others to seek social and sexual interactions, I sought intellectual stimulation on the World Wide Web. Continue reading “I’m still traumatized by what happened when I answered that Craigslist ad, part 3”
I’m an administrator at a major hospital in the New York City area. I’m not supposed to talk about this, but it’s so disconcerting that I believe more people need to know about it. There’s been an unexpected and inexplicable rise in the stockpile of blood. It’s not only at our hospital, but in hospitals and blood banks all over the world.
No one knows where it’s coming from and no one can seem to explain how it gets there. All the routine tests say it’s perfectly good and free from any pathogens and impurities. But the fact remains: no one knows what’s going on.
You have to realize – hospitals and blood banks everywhere have always been low on blood. It’s why there are blood drives and calls for donations and all that. The last few weeks, though, there’s been so much that our hospital needed dispose of some because it expired before we had a chance to use it. As weird as this sounds, it gets worse.
This is the part I’m worried will come back and bite me in the ass if any of the other administrators discover who I am. I signed a NDA explicitly stating I wouldn’t talk about this. Still, I can’t keep this quiet. When we dispose of blood, we do it in the incinerator with all the other medical waste. The fire burns so hot, pretty much everything evaporates and all that’s left is inert ash. But this blood didn’t evaporate. It did something way different.
A hospital maintenance worker was on the roof doing some unrelated work when smoke from the incinerator began exiting through the chimney. It looked normal for a while, but then the smoke tapered off and flies started pouring out. He told us they flew straight up for nearly two full minutes and hung above the roof like a cloud. After another minute, they fell like rain and burst open, covering the roof and the maintenance worker with the same blood we’d tried to incinerate. We tried to incinerate more blood, this time with hospital administrators waiting on the roof. Same result.
Our administrators have spoken with the heads of other hospitals around the country. They’ve experienced similar issues. The blood banks are bursting with overstock and people everywhere are being given this blood that just appeared out of nowhere.
The last thing I’m going to mention is the patient we re-admitted last night. He’d been discharged a month ago following an operation which required multiple transfusions. Those transfusions were done with the mystery blood before anyone noticed its existence. His re-admission was due to a fire at his home. He came into the ER with 60% of his body covered in 3rd degree burns. While he was being worked on, flies erupted from underneath the burned flesh and dropped to the floor, exploding into thick droplets of blood.
The patient died soon after. The doctors and nurses were frightened and confused, but they don’t know the whole story. But I guess they will soon. Please help me tell more people about what’s going on. The blood just doesn’t stop coming.
It’s not easy to organize a marathon. You need to get permits to use the roads, you need to plot out a course, you need to find vendors and sponsors and volunteers and safety professionals and, above all, runners.
As shitty as it sounds, the bombing at the Boston marathon helped bring attention to road races. People want to run to show their solidarity. This is all over the Western world, mind you – not just in the US. That’s why my partner and I got the idea to put on this race in Belfast. He’s from there, I love the city, and hell, what better a location to conduct a marathon than a place with the word “fast” in its name? The marketing writes itself.
The Belfast city council approved the marathon pretty quickly. It didn’t conflict with any other road event and Belfast was doing some citywide “healthy living” campaign, so another road race only helped draw attention to it. Continue reading “Runners, part 1”
I hate hiking. I hate the outdoors. I hate being sweaty, dirty, bored, and nowhere near a good WiFi signal. Yet there we were. Hiking. And I was sweaty, dirty, bored, and nowhere near a good Wifi signal. Life was unpleasant.
Dad said it would be good for us to get out of the city for a while. He didn’t say why. It was obvious work was getting to him; stress always makes him want to run away from the situation until he can figure a way to manage it. I figured that’s what we were doing out in the woods. Running away – one sweaty step at a time. Continue reading “Far Too Many Legs”
