She told me that she loved me. She did it with this very pretty hammer that she kept around for special occasions. She imbedded the words, two inches deep, across my forehead. 

That’s how her company felt. 

Her absence was like… well, I didn’t like to be without her. If she was more than ten feet away from me I tended to get the shakes, like I was going into heroin withdrawal. I killed a man for stepping between us in a very large shopping mall.

I think it was a shopping mall. It might have been a grocery store. Which have little trees that burn real fast? 

I have to admit. I haven’t been sleeping. Or whatever. Or anything. I’ve been eating nothing but this stolen candy we found in these boxes which had been stamped “TAINTED” in large red letters. My fucking teeth fell out, but that’s okay. The damn things were killing me. All I really wanted was a kick to the teeth. Or a hug.

I threw myself into my job, searching for relief, or the key to the next level. I sharpened up my karma and prepared to stab some fucker in the neck with that unwieldy thing. 

I’m glad that people are digging on my videos. I like making them. They make me feel like Christian Slater in Pump Up The Volume, mixed with one of those crazy pirate broadcasts that warn you about the secret alien invasion. 

I’m behind in my writing, or that’s how I always feel. I’m ahead on my National Novel Writing Month novel, and I think it’s “not a piece of shit”, so that’s cool. Dunno how long it’ll be. I think I’ll try to get it published when it’s done. It feels goodish. 

I’m sort of abstracted right now. Work has gotten incredibly busy, ‘cause of the shopping season, and I’m really burnt out all the time. It’s always dark. 

The crows are super-friendly though, and keep me company so long as its daylight out. If I wasn’t novel-writing, I’d go out to see them in the morning. I really should do that; I never seem to write anything useful for the first hour anyway, I just dick around and squint at the screen. 

I’m feeling a little boring. A little distracted. I’ll probably just go play video games for a while, once I’ve eaten something. I’m really hungry. 

Deep in the park, in the morning, as the is still rising and the air is still cool, I can feel something chasing me. Something almost invisible, something hateful and fast. A hunting thing, with fangs and claws and a empty space in its belly where I could be. 

I keep my head down, and I keep moving. My breath is heavy in my lungs, and thick too. My breath feels like chunks of metal rasping in my lungs. The air is like a knife, cutting down inside my throat.

Within my chest, my heart thumps like a drum, or a bomb, escalating to go off. My veins are highways of blurry motion. My brain feels like a traffic accident; bent metal with flammable chemical spilt all over. Just waiting for a spark.

Something in the half-dark of the dawn, in the cold air that turns to sticky hotness as it reaches my lips, something is moving after me. Hunting me. Tracking me. I try to push on, but I can feel it, so close behind me.

I shutter. Gravel gives way under my feet, and I wait for its breath to heat my side, for its mouth to dip down into my flesh. It’ll tear me apart. It’ll ravage me, savage me to bits and pieces on the ground. It’ll eat the best bits of me, and leave the rest of me to bleed out, alone on the ground, so early in the morning. 

The cry that leaves me will be a whisper. I’ll have no breath to shout or scream. My blood will be soaked up by the soil, and I’ll die, I’ll die, I’ll die. Alone in the woods. Torn apart by some unthinking thing that just wanted to see my skin ripped off from my bones.

I wait for the end to come. But until then, I keep moving. 

“I was hoping you’d still be here when I woke up,” I said to myself, coming to in the big bed all alone. 

I woke up, with all my keys twisted into knots. All my coins folded into little bent bits of meaninglessness. I’d written a book of love-letters, but they all blew away in the breeze, and got carried off to snotty pretty teenagers who’ll never appreciate something like love until they’re too old be beautiful anymore. 

My best friend was John, the Locked door that lived across the hall. 

“You want to understand it?”

I’m imagining the sky caving in. I’m imagine if all that blue just collapsed down upon us, like a bunch of cement stones that could no longer be held aloft by pencil-tracings of belief. 

“You want to understand me?”

I’m flicking lighters, trying to light fires. 
If you cut my veins, I’d bleed black flames.

She’s somewhere else, waiting tables or waiting on me to suddenly appear. She’s sleeping in other beds and answering to other names. She wears make-up like seven different masks, which can only be peeled off underwater. 

She wants to be taken underwater. She wants to be held under. She wants to lose her breath. She wants to be breathless, so I hold my hand over her nose and mouth while we make love, and even when she thrashes I hold it there, and even when there’s panic in her eyes, I hold it there, and when I release it, she cries for three hours, and then tells me she loves me, pays, and leaves. 

If she was ever there at all. I notice things showing up in these hotel mirrors; fake lives and faux lovers that just whistle through the empty space like a masturbator’s conversation with the unknown.

She breathes easier when she knows I’m okay. 
So I lie to her.
Because she doesn’t understand how I get off on my own pain.
She doesn’t understand how much I love my stupidity.  

This thing you call “cosplay”… 
I’ve been doing it every day of my life since I was five.
Of course I always emulate my heroes. What kind of a life are you trying to live?

She put her hands on my heart and said, “Here now, let me fix you.” And then she tore it from my chest.

The thing she put back in its place was like a crudely hateful robot spider; too many limbs, too much hunger and distaste for the living. It wove a web of barbed-wire, strung about the empty chasm of my chest, where my heart had been.

Outside my window, babies are crying and small dogs are barking all day. It’s like a symphony of disharmony. It’s like an unending world of brutal distaste. I have these fantasies about walking out there, and facing them all down. I’ll kill that neighbour’s dog. I’ll tell the parents what shitty human beings they are. Shame. Shame, and death. 

Yeah, she put a big animatronic arachnid inside of me, and it’s eating away at my guts. It’s shitting harsh oils into my bloodstream. It’s laying its eggs up inside my skull, squeezing out any room for my thoughts, for my mind. The eggs are angry, twisting masses of rotting matter that stink of a combination of organic death and new car smell. 

She lays me down like a lover, and stitches me up like a surgeon with alcohol poisoning. She cements my mouth shut, and she fills my ears with songs about lies. 

She was my teenage girlfriend. Big eyes, like flying saucers, crashing down out of the sun. Big, sad eyes, like silver flying saucers falling down in flames, falling out of the sky.

“I don’t know if I’m falling love,” she admitted, taking my hand in her own, “or if I’m just falling.” 

Falling forever. That’s the best way to fall. Never hit the bottom. It’s just like flying. Falling’s just like flying, if you never come all the way down. Failure’s just flying, if you never quite make it down. 

“I haven’t done anything useful in weeks,” I said in that hollow voice I use when I have to tell her something honest about myself. “I’ve been listening to music and thinking about girls I’m attracted to.”

She smiles, that sort of sad distant smile, like when your last man dies and you realize that you’re out of quarters and it’s really just time to go home now. 

She was my teenage girlfriend. She was better than me at video games, and she owned her own double-edged sword. Her battle-cry was the chorus of some pop song by some young-kids band that I’d never really got around to listening to. 

She wore purple eye shadow, and she cried all the time, in big muddy streaks down the sides of her face. And she laughed sometimes, too. Her laugher was the sound of loose change in an otherwise empty pocket, or a pair of keys that couldn’t unlock anything. A pair of keys with nothing to unlock anymore; that was us.

We went out at night, robbing candy stores and kissing strangers.

Writing is easy. Living is hard.

Living with people, living through people, living as people. It’s all hard. People are hard. Hard to kill, hard to swallow. People are roughly people-sized, and people-shaped, and many of them want to have sex with you, but even more of them would rather be left alone; if you’re very, very lucky, you might be able to tell the difference after you’ve been living together for about sixty or so years. 

Making friends is hard. Keeping friends is hard, unless you have the cages for it. Unless you chop off their legs and hands, and just feed them through the bars. Friends are pointless, shallow creatures, who eat your foods and break your hearts. 

Lovers are impossibilities imposed by the wrath of want. Lovers are knots you tie yourself into. Lies you tell to yourself. “Strip down naked and tell me something honest,” you seem to scream with your hands, your eyes, your quiet voice. But you’re still alone in the room.

Writing is something I do every day.

Living is something I do every once in a while. 

She was in my mind like a tumour. She’d found a way into my heart, just like a bullet cloaked in silver or gold. She made me think these real specific thoughts; I hummed her pulse and I understand the gradients in the colours of her hair. 

She held my hand, and she said, “I want to be the knife-point of the universe. I want to shatter atoms with the power of my mind, like a living nuclear bomb. Split an atom, or spit an atom, across the room.” Moving at speeds unrespected by modern science. 

I don’t know. If I was some sort of strange alien vampire monster, I’d eat your eyes first, because they’re the prettiest, pettiest part of you. And once you were blind, I could show you my true face? Don’cha wanna see my true face?

“I love you, I love you, I love you, I do,” I said.

She punctured each one of my phrases with a bullet to the gut. I sucked up lead in my midsection and spurted blood across the parking lot like a sprinkler trying to grow grass. 

“I want to be yours forever,” I explained, as she put the blade in between my ribs, tickling my heart with the tip of the knife. Yeah, she tickles my heart like I’m falling for her, like I’m falling and falling and falling.

Head over her heals; she wears those big long jagged things; they’re decorated with the hearts and minds of all the other men she had to step over and through to get to me.

If I could be anything, I’d be dead in your arms.
I’d be dead-on accurate. 
I’d be dead on arrival.  
Dead on impact.

The trick, with smoking pot, as with loving lovers, is to remember to hold it all in for as long as you can.

It’s morning, so down the street, the employees of Monkey Taco are sobering up, and preparing the monkey meat for the city’s daily dose of tacos; first the workers have to get some ladders so as to get the monkeys out of the awnings and crawl-spaces, and then butchering begins. It sounds cruel, and it is, but the only other alternative is to let the monkeys roam free, and the last time that was done, they formed their own parliamentary system and raised taxes for most of the country.

My squirrel-friend is still asleep on the couch. Two months ago she was my girlfriend, but twenty-thousand dollars of genetic augmentation later, and she’s honestly more rodent than human. Her brain is smaller, her claws sharper, her senses more finely attuned. She can climb like you wouldn’t believe, but she still poops on the floor sometimes.

And me? I’m just sitting here, my stomach aching from candy consumption; we were up all night eating living gummy-worms; parasitic leaches chemically altered to look and taste like gelatinous sugar treats.  They wiggle all the way down, looking a place to sink in their suctions and start stealing blood. I eat them by the wriggly bag, forcing handfuls into my mouth at a time.

I don’t want to save the world; I just want to change it, like changing a channel. I want to give the world a different soundtrack, and maybe alter the cast a little.

I stare at my hands; the numb paws of some pointless beast.

I want to do something; that matters. 

She said she was going to write me a song, but instead she came over and bashed my teeth in with a pipe-wrench.

You know, one those big fucking metal bastards that you alway see thugs carrying in movies. Well, this time the movie was my life, and she was the thug. She was the thug who set upon me, claiming that her attempts to bloodily remove my teeth were some strange sick form of affection.

I laughed at first, gagging on the red as it went down my throat. 

I said something like, “It’s nice to see you,” but my mouth was full of broken bits that were coated in a thick, heavy liquid. I said something like, “you look really nice,” and then I felt the bite of the pipe as it dug out a fist-sized chunk of bone from my right kneecap. 

I screamed, and sat down hard. Really, what can you do.

And then she came for me. At me. It was like, y’know, falling in love with that beautiful girl with those tattoos, except, except, except, 
When it all went dark again, there was no waking up.

She put to away like a toy she was done with.

Somebody get me out of this situation, get me out of this head. Change my clothes, my hair, help me get some dishes done, somebody remind me that this garbage needs to go out; it’s starting to stink like spoiled little dreams of better foods.

My heart’s a tin-can on a string, connected to the footfall of every goddamn girl out there that I’ve had the misfortune of meeting. How many times can I fall in love in a day? How come I can’t just turn off and sing? Just turn myself off, and sing.

But my pipe’s empty and my mind’s devoid of all thoughts except for, you know, getting you back in my bed. I’m looking for an excuse to go back to sleep, I’m looking for somebody to take me by the hand and lead me into a most lovely mistake. No excuses, just lots of handholding, and sloppy little mistakes. 

Yeah, she could do. She could do for tonight, for now. She could do me, do me over, do me but good with both hands tied behind her back. Yeah, a girl like that, she could kill me dead with both hands tied behind her back. She could get me off, she could get me off her back and halfway across town before I’d even realized I was following one more doomed cunt around, dragging me around my loneliness like it was a leash or a long line of cock she could just wrap her hands around and pull me about thereby. 

If I could apologize, if they gave me the option,
if I could take the chance,
I still wouldn’t. 

I’d still just be here, making my moves on her and hoping it all works out. 

“This was just not your day,” she says, riding her eighteen-ton robot dinosaur directly through my heart. “You think you could just be who you are, do what you do, and get away with it?”

I spasm blood out the hole in my chest like a volcano standing sideways. I vomit stardust and cry sulphuric acid down my cheeks. “When I invited you over,” I try to explain, “I thought there’d be enough cake for everybody.”

“Well there wasn’t,” she says, and she pins me to the earth with a deadly look and she pierces my psyche with her scathing judgement of my personality, and she kicks me in the balls with the toe of her shoe. 

“And I hate you,” she adds, and then her and her great robotic dinosaur ride off into the distance, it’s great metal lizard-tail swishing back and forth like a lone windshield wiper dancing all by itself. 

I turned on the radio.

“I am in love with you, in love with you, in love with you, and it hurts.”

These aren’t real songs; it’s not even plugged in. The airwaves are silent, out here by the sea. Big clouds eat radiowaves before they broadcast anything that’d take away from the isolation you feel out here.

Or maybe that feeling of isolation is just me. Maybe I like being this way. 

I turned on the radio like I was arousing a strange and fretful robot lover. Some sort of mechanized mistress who’d kiss my cuts and tuck me into bed before she blew my mind with her oral sex algorhythms. 

“And when I say you sucked my brains out,
The English translation is,
I am in love with you,
And it is no fun.”

Those were real lyrics, from a real song. Real feeling too.

I wonder what it’d be like to have real feelings, instead of words on a page.
But I don’t wonder very loudly.  

“Why are you still somewhere I’m not?” 

I find the note written in purple lipstick on a napkin from one of those ice cream parlours where all the sexual perverts work. Most of the frozen stuff’s safe, but don’t ever try the double-dip, and lets just leave it at that for now.

This girl I’m falling in love with, she’s got big, beautiful eyes. She popped them out of the skull of a sex-doll; she used a screwdriver more like a weapon than a tool. The girl I’m in love with, she’s got a soundtrack playing just behind her head, it sounds like, y’know, blood and vengeance and people fucking. 

Outside, children are playing in the ashes of the fallen sun. Outside, up above our heads, the sky is rust-red iron, and rushing down to meet the ground. Outside everything is crushed under numb metal forever and ever and ever. Smashed little children playing amongst the rubble and ruin. 

Me, I just about forgot my own name for a day or two. I found my directions scribbled down backwards against the grain of my skin on the back of my hand.