The implosion of guarded nerves.

There she was not two feet from me. Femnavi with the fertile hills of Dryad blood and the devilish mischief of a Satyr, the absurd tragedy of humans. Multicolored, flecked eyes the colors of summer sighing into fall, eyes that I had to admit against that sweet rancor of unclasped hands and the sour silence after angry calls, were pretty. In the short circuiting inside my conya of what to do or say she filled the void.

“Hey.”

“Hey yourself.” Vinny and Mr. Bullcagg blocking the door, lolling captors. Caught. Ensnared. A deep breath to regain some of my cordial mask. “You look...” I didn't want to be misinterpreted. “Like you're doing well.” A silent nod. “You still working at...”

“No. I'm at the library right now.” She fingered her sweater sleeve. “While I finish school.”

“Oh. Yeah. Did you end up doing the movie thing?”

“No. I'm getting into lore management. Might work for the state. Not sure.”

“Oh.” My eyebrows rose. Her minotaur friend stepped over and put an arm around her. “Well. It's good to see you’re, you know—you always have something going for you.” The bull friend’s eyes studied me with a glazed, frivolous friendliness, the rims of his nostrils shiny and moist. “Always something new.”

She nodded. I walked out the door.

A few steps onto the parking lot’s fractured asphalt, onto the shadows cast by its corrugated metal canopies, and Vinny's voice called “Teek!” and I glanced back to see him standing stark against the light of his doorway, brown hair burnished to gold in a spot, but I didn't stop walking, only raised a hand in farewell.

Rushed pacing on pavement behind me.

As I stabbed my key into my car door, he caught up to me. “Where ya going? You just got here.”

“You had to invite her.”

“What? You're both amigos...”

“Amigos? You know what she did to me.”

“I thought that was ancient history.”

“Yeah. It is. But a party isn’t time for archeology.” His upper body slowly bloomed searching for what to say. “Look, I’m not trying to get you down. You're right. It's history. So forget it. Really. I gotta go anyhow. You know, this job. For our masseuse lady. Gotta get ready for it.”

“Sure. I get it. Well come by tomorrow. No fems just us mals. We'll do something. Go break some bottles. Order some Kobold food.”

I sidestepped into my Stallion, pine deodorant tainting its sweet mildewy smell, a streak on the windshield, vexing, tiny breadcrumbs in the groove of the parking break, squirmed into the pealing leather seat, twisted the ignition and felt its rumble through the seat, and rolled the window down. “Hey, seriously, I'm glad you're doing so good. USP. The Gold Jaws... All right, I’ll see ya.” I backed the car up and he started walking away but as my Stallion’s thick tires looped I passed near him again and he smiled and pointed:

“Put in a good word for me! I gotta at least meet the Lady!”

“Right. Yeah.” I closed the window. The engine kicked and flared.

Useless. The Orcs. Vinny. Useless. What good would it have done to stay anyway? A party filled with half plebs and half juicers. Egh. An hour more of standing around drinking and smiling like schmols? Flesh masks obfuscating eyes that stare at one another as if at a zoo, as if at an auction, blind psyche mouths groping for something to suckle in the tempest seas of entropy, silently howling at one another in primate languages they themselves do not understand. Fah. Nooo. No. You can't always count on help. Never more like it. Ehhhh... Gang, what can I say? I can be dramatic—I’m a bard for Mog’s sake. Still, even so, I also say, echoing every mal who’s been in a ticking bomb pinch:

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The asphalt with its faded white stripes washed by twin lights, endless roll of white hyphens unfurling. Tree smoke caressing the worn leather seats of my Stallion. The marine fog coming down heavy, making bridge underpasses look like cave mouths, street lanterns like crucified will-o-wisps.

We live in a great fog, don't we gang? You blast your foglights and somehow it only makes it worse. Your windshield is just as clouded. And suddenly the road veers and your arms shake trying to hold the aim steady, but you’ve never driven this stretch before, and so you plunge blind, and you wish you had a map, a compass but there is none, and so trust that some invisible luck, some blessed uniqueness coursing in your veins will magnetize your arms to match the destined road. And so... you plunge. You wish you had your north star to hold onto, to steer you true, but once you've lived high enough everything else is burnt rope, chipped glass, everything else is south for you. You plunge into a darkness yawning below, a fall into a concrete iron matrix, a solitary, colorless-food hole that seems to never end. Then, finally, it does. The void steel handcuffs come off, the ensorceled iron bars open, the poison-wire-crown gates slide apart, striped jumpsuit stripped in jubilation, face to the parting cloud sky... only for you to step into the greatest dungeon of all: the world. You plunge.

The neon pharmacy sign looms over me, the music-drenched faces from Vinny’s party still pebbling the lake of my mind.

I walk along the white tile of this capitalist outpost of civilization cocooning its antiseptic geometry against the natural cycles of the hybrid earth, aisles so quiet that you can hear a hand moving a carton of cotton balls in the back, the hum of the store lights interrogating me from above.

Some nights I yearned for someone to hate. At least it would root me, give me something I could water day by day, watch it blossom into beautiful thorns that would stab the life back into me. But who could I hate?

The single bulb dangling from my apartment kitchen ceiling makes the ironwood table look like an embalming slab in a morgue. A book thuds onto its scratched surface: Tharazor’s Mundane Alchemy. It’s thick as a cinder block. My finger runs across its pages like a seismographic needle, eyes straining with concentration.

Hate. The elf scion. No. The crooked father. No. Faceless suits in crystal citadels? No. And certainly not Beryl. Sweet childe. After all those years locked up in the dungeon, she had been an oasis in the desert, flowers her eyes, water her lips, in the end a mirage. She had opened my eyes. People are all just visiting one another, suitcases at the ready. The drop of a hat and they’re gone. The trap of love, failed.

I didn't blame them. If they were passing visitors, I was a thief in the night.

The contents of the pharmacy's paper bag spill onto the table. Fresh clean consumer packaging (bright red letters atop a detailed bottle illustration, consumer family friendly faces locked in cheer), its aesthetic cuts stark against the grimy bygone fashions of my kitchen. To an untrained eye the kaleidoscope of jars in the cupboards (dead oozes, prismatic elixirs, a preserved toad...), the soap-scummy flasks on the counter, the crusty bunsen burner, would give this kitchen the hue of deranged, oxidizing addiction. My hand unscrews the lid off a glass bottle, shakes a white powder into a metal jar. Fingers pry open ten pills and spill their contents into it. Another bottle, this one filled with metal shavings, is emptied into the same jar. My fingers slide a fuse into it, cover it with a bird-cagged brick I pried from a dilapidating building two blocks down.

Still the pain came. Not the jilted cat rakes. The pain of understanding.

All our visits are silent. It's not until all the visitors are ghosts that you realize there was one who was different. Alive. More so, awake, suntouched, true. No mercenary, no tourist, no dilettante, no gawker. A companion who would join you on your infinite march, a dirge a ballad the same, climb stairs made of angel feathers and gnashing teeth all the same. And she was now obscured by the fog. Along with me. Me. Who I was. And meant to be. Snuffed out, now no more than alive, a cold stone noosed around me, already sinking, could barely survive. In a word: branded.

All that was left was to reignite the wick that had once been the central pillar of life: me burning, burning as an effigy, an offering to a slumbering dream whose murmurs had played the piano lattice of my thoughts from day one. Fire, sweet fire that knew neither good nor evil, that burned the living and the dead alike, to burn with it once more—ah what I would do, brethren! What I would do!

My hand flicks my cig lighter and a quivering flame kisses the fuse.