Dust clings to walnut cabinets like a trillion little mites army crawling around on the skin—charging around the wooden battlefield, until a rag sweeps them away in a great tsunami.  A man with slicked back grey hair, wearing a fitted black suit with a velvet pocket square and a white cloth is the culprit. He shakes the rag, originally a slightly embroidered plush white hand towel, now mostly ash grey.

The color stained it like water used to wash away watercolors.

He tosses the rag into the trash. 

Beside him, he starts a record player, the vinyl spinning lackadaisical. A slow tune starts, discordant with the man’s movement. 

 “Click, Click, Click,” his heels tap up and down in military step, a second slower than his imaginary cadence. The melody of old days echoes in his ear drums, a call and response with a drill sergeant long dead, he cannot grasp another song. He marches past mementos and reminders, different solely in their connotation that even was eventually forgotten, only the objects remain, pulling on cut strings.

His movements are those of a puppet, one that dances to the strings of memory, which nudge him towards answering the door when a doorbell sounds, to eat three grimy meals a day, to march on weakened knees, instead of stroll. However, there is no person piloting the strings, no animal or instinct. 

“CRACK”

The strings twist harshly.

He dives, the well tailored suit crumpling and wrinkling as his stomach contorts inside and out, reaching for perceived cover. The movement is entirely unnatural to the formal man now crouching on the ground behind a couch, but alight in his eyes is a sudden trepidation, pupils glazed over.

“Who’s there!” He barks.

Peaking out above the fabric backing, his dilated eyes scan his own living room, a room over notes of soft sonatas glide to his ears, pairs of instruments slow dancing across the air, but they ignore his ears. His knees protest as he rises, both hands straining as veins pop out, hoisting himself like a beached whale into a standing position. The first few steps he takes are backing away exploratorily, head flicking around the room. 

He inevitably discovers nothing, and he sags as his simulacrum of terror-filled lucidity fades back to the cool embrace of fog and dusk’s haze. He shambles to the door, no exigence to his movement, just limbs pulled along like mutts on a leash. The man pulls himself through rooms of his house, lined with hardwood floors and unswept white tiles. Some rooms are clean and filled with walls of trophies. Others are covered in thick strata of dust and ash—his eyes barely even register those, eyes flickering from the floor to the ceiling and back again.  There is momentum to his motion, but no energy; he has started and with no fiction will not slow, but the fuel is dead, silenced. 

Part of his brain grasps, searching quietly for where he is, how he is, why he is; it locates a thousand memories, and cannot pick out which one has any substance. Some inspire terror, a jolting kind of fake clarity which is insidious and lies, it simply juxtaposes itself into the world from beyond the grave. Others are too boring to remember, yet the brain finds them anyway, hugs them and cries for them. A few coherent ones break out from beyond the curtain, they whisper of languishing around a house too big to care for, of propriety that serves no one, of habits beyond memory, the important ones forgotten and the useless ones ingrained in bone. 

The other part of the brain lives in the present, and it too claws around, searching. The brain forgets, but the body knows, it hears a sound, the natural reaction it must take is to investigate. 

It has already begun to, and lacks the energy to stop its inertia. 

His pace quickens, no longer shambling, back to military step, he doesn’t know why, doesn’t care, it simply is. 

Sunlight pours onto him, obscuring his vision like a dirty rag, the door remains open behind him bouncing around slightly from the energy transferred to it, as he steps outside his house. The man searches, unconsciously straightening his suit as he sees the neighbors watching. He doesn’t notice them, but his body does. A swing set stands monolithic in his backyard, the grass is brown in patches, lucious green in others, nature taking its own path. 

With the sunlight, and the dust free air, lucidity trickles in, it rushes against a closed valve, and the might of many transfers to a few drops osmosising in. He stares around in wonder, momentum gone and strings of life lax, watching the birds go overhead. There is no one else in his backyard, he is alone. The neighbors turn back to their porches and windows, smoking cigars and watching TV. The man does the same, returning inside.

The sound that startled him flows out of his memory, pouring into the garbage disposal of his brain, and he marches back to rooms filled with the essence of his memories, collapsing onto a recliner. 

And the first notes of the vinyl start again a sonata; violin sounds break the thin air, the tune slightly distorted by the playback, though the man does not notice, a different song plays in his head. A steady beat to a drum; a count of one, pause, two, pause, three, pause, four, pause, repeat, over and over again. His eyes stare unseeing into the ceiling fan hypnotically swirling, as memories twist and contort in the aged cauldron of his mind.   

The beats in his head forge a harmony, a backbone to the soft melody’s finger light touch, upholding it, allowing it to rise higher. 

“CRACK” 

The record player stops abruptly, as it reaches a scratched out part of the vinyl. 

He is jostled from his memories of times past, and rises to dust off another bookshelf, fishing the dirty rag from the trash, no different from any other container to him. 

And acts out the same memory to the tune in his head. 

As The World Is

I don’t think you understand

Hungry teeth and hungry hands

Hungry eyes with pupils slit

Hungry mind, I just can’t quit

Hunger’s chosen

Hunter’s heart

Placate prey with

Placid start

Heady flavor

On my tongue

“My true savior”

Gone unsung

God is fear and gone is light

Clever killer in the night

You are nothing I am now

Yet I’m still of you somehow

My hair is yours

My voice your like

Your very pores

This very fight

You tried your best

To raise me well

Yet still I rot

Here in this hell

Starving is the strangest death

I starve with every shaking breath

I only beg you let me feed

The starving stops when others bleed

Burning Around Me,

Horror and hell

In the cracks of my palms.

Poor bleeding angels

Screaming their psalms.

Fire in my eyes

And their blood on my tongue.

Breathe in the brimstone

Coating my lungs.

Called me a child

And said I was too weak.

Look at them now.

Blessed are the meek.

I am a god

And they raised me a lamb.

Look at my face!

Know Who I Am.

I Realize

The world makes much more sense cut open

Flayed by shining scalpel and gloved hands

Lungs stutter and strain beneath my fingers

Like the silken wings of some trapped bird

The bright lights overhead don’t strobe, they flicker

And yet my party pounds on blissfully within

Beauty in the glistening of gore against my blade

Perfect practiced logic of blood pumping through veins

No God Can

I was raised on human tongue

And taught by human lies.

Stuffed into a human skin

That never fit me right.

I am a god, yet you insist

Try to define me by my flesh.

When I finally rip free from this shell

There will be nothing left.

I’ll tear through the weak muscles 

that have only done me wrong.

And crush between my fingers

Lungs that never held my songs.

Glory in the crimson

That remains where I once stood.

Wonder in the rot

That ate through all that once was good.

Kill Me.

Throw me off a building

Bash my head into a spike

Choke me with your bare hands

Take me on a nighttime hike

Drown me in a river

Cram my organs in your mouth

Feed me only poison

Tie me bleeding to your couch

Cover me in leeches

Break my teeth out of my jaw

Feed me to wild lions

Shoot me like a rabid dog

Tear into the wretched flesh 

that binds my skin to bone

Kill me in a hundred ways

Just don’t leave me alone

I feed him. 

I feed him my soul.

I feed him my heart.

I feed him my body.

He ate.

He devoured my soul.

He ravaged my heart. 

He left my body. 

Just left to the four walls of this drawer.

Alone, 

Nameless. 

Eternity spent as a placeholder. 

Doomed to my fate.

Objectified by man, for the last time. 

Eroding away from this earth

Alyssa Smith

I sit at the station, the only sound a whisper of wind and a scuttle of leaves. My eyesight is hazy as I retreat from slumber. All is quiet; the passengers are gone, and not a single soul came to wake me. My bags lay beside me, filled to the brim with my dreams and prayers. They’re worn and battered from my trek through life. Everything is dim under the flickering lamp light, shadows dancing with uncertainty. I shudder from the chill of a cool October night, and I hear the blow of a whistle far, far away. A train of hope, of the future, and I fell asleep on this bench waiting for it. 

A figure comes to sit beside me, silently, gracefully. I hadn’t heard her approach, her footsteps as soft as a leaf floating on water. I glance over, captivated by her translucent form and pale, heavenly glow. The woman beside me was as close to a ghost as I could imagine. She folds her hands in her lap and looks straight ahead, but notices me staring.

“I missed it too.”

Her voice is just more than a whisper. It dawns on me that missing the train means I’m bound to the same fate as this woman, to be a ghost, but I am not afraid. The wind continues to dance around the station in an ever more passionate performance. More wispy passengers of all ages drift forward, carrying all sorts of ambitions. They do not talk, but in their silence I can hear their hope. Somehow the night grows warmer, and my shivers recede. Here we are, all wanting to get on with the future, but we fell asleep waiting for it. Here, we will wait a hundred years more, and dream a hundred more dreams.

You must get rather lonely,

Playing pretend as a god.

Cold and callous, a puppet master in your own right,

And no respect from the doll you manipulate.

Your lungs are stronger from the thin air atop your self-appointed title,

But your heart grows weaker from your distance.

You’re frustrated when my porcelain face remains static, unchanging,

Refusing to give any sliver of compassion to fill the void in you;

Why do you believe you deserve

What you’re incapable of feeling, of showing?

Soon the cords will snap, and you’ll be left to wonder why

I never followed your decree.

A cruel puppeteer, a miserable marionette,

And a poisonous entanglement,

Is all you and I ever were.

Sabrina Sweney

In a world where shadows softly play, 

And whispers of the night hold sway, 

A tapestry of dreams unfurls, 

In the quiet corners of our worlds. 

Stars above, like lanterns bright, 

Guide us through the velvet night.

Each twinkle tells a tale untold,

Of mysteries and wonders bold.

Beneath the moon's gentle embrace,

We find a tranquil, sacred space. 

Where hopes and fears entwine as one, 

And dawn awaits, a rising sun.

In this symphony of light and dark, 

We leave our mark, a fleeting spark. 

For life is but a transient rhyme, 

A precious gift, a dance through time.

I walk through the dead grass of the farmer’s field

Silent as the blazing sun overheard

Hearty cries leave my jaws of old teeth

Mats of fur cling to my thin skin

Eyes filled with the clouds of age

Six chickens pace beyond the iron wiring

Uncontrolled hunger stirs in my weathered bones

My brothers slide beneath the faulty barbs as I wait in silence

The old man races to meet us

He raises his staff of steel and sends out crackling stones

We flee with no feathers clinging to our lips

No hunger soothed or exhaustion erased

One by one we filter

Through trees of rotting oak

Past drooling hounds and shouting men

Three of us remain when we reach the other side

One fell from a deer’s kick to the head

Another from the jaws of a flat iron mouth

The last from the crackle of a hunter

I stand mere feet from the old man

Our aged eyes meet in the silence of the virgin day

My legs are weak and brittle

His hands are rough and wrinkled

I embrace him as cold metal presses against my chest

I live on even after the sun sets

My fur gifted to a craftsman

My meat given to the guardians of the livestock

My bones are buried with a prayer

And my soul rests among the old dead grass

My brothers walk along the barren world beside me

Yowls echo out from their jaws

Feathers drift down from the clouds

Sticking to our noses like cotton

The never-ending hunger is gone

The exhaustion has been ridden from our bones

Three sets of eyes glisten under the sun

As three mangy mutts are swept away from their homes