"It's Made Of Hells"

Freestyles regarding curiosities.

[madeofhells]

Hiatus

You can probably figure it out by now but this blog is on a bit of a hiatus. It's owing to my personal schedule and a bunch of other shit, as well as the fact that I hit a bit of a creative wall with these. It seems like people are "liking" the recent ones less and less so it makes sense to take a break for awhile until I can make them good again. Before I check out, I'm gonna go back and rework the ending to the last Mixtape. I haven't been happy with that for awhile now.

My main site is http://www.milliondollarcuffs.com . There you can find the other writing projects I have done, including another long-form Tumblr piece and a free ebook, similar in style and tone to MoH.

I intend to come back to this at some point, but I'm going to start a new fiction project soon so if you wanna check that out and bide your time with other content, go to Million Dollar Cuffs.

Until then, thanks for all the support and positive feedback.

[madeofhells]

Very

Battery Boy wakes up in the world tree.

I need to express this urgently so let’s just go ahead with it. Sit there and look straight forward. Now imagine a thin halo all around you but shifted vertical like you’re sitting on the rim of a sideways bottle, right where the cap would be secured. You’re balanced on this ring. You see in cones, like both eyeballs are combined into one flashlight, right. It makes you painfully aware of the balancing act you now have to do to stay focused on anything. On this hoop and with this fucked up vision, you’re looking out into the undulating, damningly lateral birthing of a quasar. Dangling there as if from a great height, you kick your legs freely. You don't feel anything pulling at them to give the necessary and erotic sensation of adrenaline, but let's pretend for a moment that it does because I need to illustrate this point on the quickness. The thighs are two columns of either dark matter or wavy hell eggs. In your peripherals you can see the image repeated in fractals you get the feeling have been transplanted there.

The ring is a branch though, so imagine a branch and imagine it as a circle. Battery boy has a tall cylinder for a head and he is sitting in a tree made of happy starts. He is the one and only space celebrity.

Let’s take it back to the peripherals though, the fractals and the fear. What do you see in those blurry alien zones? The Neverending Wisdom of Space would tell you that exploded memories inhabit your peripheral vision.

The Neverending Wisdom of Space would tell you that it is millions of individuals that can fit split seconds into that area.

The Neverending Wisdom of Space would tell you that no patterns are discernible, and to concentrate on either side would result in at least wasted time at most wasted lives.

You’re not Battery Boy so you don’t have these problems. There is a cosmic birth before you and you are sidetracked by this shit.

Vivid and luminescent rockets streak across the sky, leaving faint comma halved pinwheels in their wake, and then explode. He needs to almost roll his eyes into the back of his head to see these. The sky is defined by the place opposite his feet. At first it was dozens, but the mind so casually loses track of dozens until it becomes hundreds, then thousands. Before long the above is overcome with destroyed aircraft and blossoming clouds of shrapnel. Maybe they were waiting for him to look. The only thing he understands is maybe.

The dead are grey flecks of herbs coughed randomly amid the wreckage. Something draws them towards the down, towards Batter Boy’s feet. Something is pulling them towards the cone of the witness.

He follows the ambitious ones, and we follow with him. They slowly streak downwards towards the crowning kaleidoscope, but slow to a hover. The cones smoothly focus like opening your eyes underwater. Along the hips of the task at hand is a landscape of exaggerated anthills. Naturally the ants emerge from the mounds. Naturally they are there to greet the dead bodies. Mandibles of blinding light that pale in comparison to the doubly blinding light of the connected life forms absorb them. They only slightly come together to signal absorption. A twitch so slight it might as well never have happened at all.

You can only estimate the distance, but an uneducated guess would put them at the size of either a small planet or a large asteroid. They devour the humanoids in swarms. Those ships must have been of equal size.

Facts like this are accompanied by tremors.

I wish he could understand how it used to be.

I wish I could explain to him how simple the stories were, the stories of the dead he envies.Those stories are over. Those stores have mutated. Later he’ll be able to bathe himself in the horrific aftermath maybe.

[madeofhells]

Fault

It’s a story of you might.

Radio signals can travel further through space if they are sent by someone wearing chains and smoking cigarettes.

This one passes through untouched, unabsorbed, unfiltered for as long as it can. To receive it would require sensitive technology that might not exist based on simple necessity, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be heard; to the flexing go the spoils.

You might be floating there with no sense of motion like a fulcrum on a sinking ship. Your body long ago lost sensation and you are simply a recording device for subjective awareness. You’re traveling through space and your eyes barely work. Or you might be half smashed on a meteor. You might be a head a wandering poltergeist possessed. All of these things tumblring through space, all of these things encased.

You will last longer than the signals your people have sent into space. Send a text from an island to a poor house with no cell reception that speaks a different language. You get it now. Nobody’s listening to your fucking morning zoo on another planet. Some things are broadcast out there, though; things that dissolve parallel to our haunted dead.

You might have someone else’s memories clouding your judgment. We became conjoined in the last days, the dualities of love and hate becoming conduits for enemies to become friends. Someone’s shame playing shit piano as you sit at the back of the room. A white person gets a blackface tattoo and keeps getting punched in the head by millionaires.

Your thoughts might come sporadically.

A radio signal is disappearing beside you. You’re leaving our solar system. It’s a recording of an exchange between two people. You can hear the steady breathing of the third person. Androgynous.

A woman is speaking with a man. A commotion can be heard in the background. A car crashes, someone is screaming, panicked footsteps are everywhere. If you listen close you can hear concrete trembling.

She is pleading with the man; her voice is cracked and wobbly. He is standing just outside a downtown skyscraper holding the door for nobody. A metal bar secured to plate glass, probably bulletproof. A stainless steel awning shields him from an unfriendly sky. But not her.

Everyone has long since left the building; everyone who wanted to leave. He isn’t looking at her. She moved from behind him to a few feet before him. Through him you can see her blue skirt. Through her you can see his grey slacks. His eyes are then locked on the door frame. He won’t move.

There’s a comet heading towards them. They don’t know that especially, but they can see it in the sky and they know society is falling apart all around them. Everything they trained themselves to do, all the systems that reinforced their behavior, all of them were jettisoned. You weren’t the woman and you weren’t the man she was screaming at. You can see the both of them acting this out like you’re watching a movie. It fades from recollection before you know it. You might be traveling so fast.

The hand what threw the comet will come into view before long. You’re not going to die, so don’t worry. Your only concern is keeping your mind stable for the journey. This is solitary confinement. You might discover that your fingertips can wiggle as the slivered membranes of your eyeballs drift away from you.

Thank your lucky stars you’re haunted.

The rumbling of casual fuckery will keep you sane out here.

You like stories, right?

[madeofhells]

Dip

You don’t need to know any of this.

Mars is the fourth planet from the sun and it’s been dipped too long in a plume of chainlike vexations. It's got alien storms now. Its orbit's changed, its experiencing new everything. It's become home to other peoples narratives.

To observe the horizon is to observe a cycle of grand recycling dervishes transplanted from another dimension.

It’s new.

This is the story of Mike Busy who lived in a barn and is also dead now.

The barn was originally green but had been painted over red with no planning. The red was chipping away and to behold it then was a good way to tell the rest of your week to go fuck itself.

Mike Busy who lived in the barn.

There’s a videocassette on the Martian surface that depicts exactly what happened. It’s wedged between two rocks.

In all likelihood it’s been damaged beyond repair, and the harsh Mars landscape has not been kind to it, but if you were to watch it here’s what you would see: the last moments of Mike Busy through the POV of some harasser.

A basket of intestines is sitting on a table beside a manual canning machine. The location of the table indiscernible, due in part to the quality of the film, and the rest being that it’s executed with extreme close ups.  The basket is made of wicker and looks like it’s been pulled from the sandswept ruins of a razed outpost. It’s general guts; stomach wetwork, fat and gristle, slimy parts that sound like a blowjob when they’re picked up. The sound doesn’t work properly but you can hear muffled voices like maybe someone dropped the camera. 

The camera follows a sparsely feathered hand – a crow splintered by a bladed whisk – as it sweeps across the table and grabs some of that meat. It slaps the stuff into a can and beats it down until the raw edges have crudely severed the excess. Gristle flies out like curves on chandeliers.

The feathers flake off and stick to the excess fluids on the table. The can is then put into the machine and a lid is pressed tightly over the top. The camera follows the can as it is picked up and placed gently on the floor. At the beginning of the tape there are three rows of them with roughly ten in each row running back into the darkness of the room. The process is repeated three more times before the scene abruptly ends.

The next shot is the cans coming to life. The cameraperson is circling around the rows and stepping between them, playing with the zoom like it’s their first day. One can starts tipping to one side, then the other, then trembling. Something is struggling to break free. An indeterminate amount of time has passed between the last shot and this one. One after the next they all come to life and the camera pulls back to prove it. It zooms in again on a random one and after a few minutes you see the lid pop off. The meat has fused together and is generating enough heat to cause steam to puff out once it gets unlidded. Tendrils of red and white flesh slither out and it stands up like a crab. Before long they’re all standing and learning how to find their footing. The camera swings back to the table and the most we ever get to see of one of the culprits is a split second of a black feathered trash person. The sum total of one hundred years of roadkill being tossed into dumpsters.

The dreams of dead things kept ignored by lids.

The third scene begins with Mike Busy being shepherded out of the barn, laying on his back upon an unbroken line of the can crabs. The cameraperson catches the moonlit shadow of The Other One occasionally, cast long like a warped cathedral, trailing at the back of the line. But we’re here to see Mike. His eyes are closed and his breathing is shallow. A treeline of barren trunks in the background makes the action pop.

The line of things climbs the side of a low stone well and creep down the other side. Grey stone, not much wider than a chair. Mike is carried along with them, kept in place by the arms that glisten like fresh sausage, and dropped in head first. The cameraperson follows and we get to see exactly what it is like to fall into a night well. The water is black like oil.

The camera cuts back on and we are in an underground cavern. The space is expansive; the roof as high as a stadium, the walls a highway apart. Every inch of the walls looks to be covered in paint crafted from red dust and natural oils, thick and tactile. It’s lit up by some pulsating power source just around the bend, past a pool of water that is still rippling from their entrance.

The unbroken chain of creatures is carrying Mike once more; Mike who sleeps soundly. He's wearing a red t-shirt that's clinging to his pudgy frame.

Around that corner is another tall dumpster bird like the first, still black feathers, taller than the first. It’s hunched over a table and turns around once the camera focuses. Without a pause in movement it storms towards the camera and fills the room with conflict. It swats the camera away and it bounces on the floor.

We see the thing pursue the camerawoman. She’s crab walking away and screaming. She’s not like them. Something has gone wrong for her.

Mike Busy is being taken to a workstation. The light source is a pixellated tesseract vibrating from the beams of bright yellow that trace every edge.

One day someone’s going to find that cassette and devise a way to view its contents.

Whoever sees it is going to think we were so interesting.

[madeofhells]

Bring your Bars To Market Part 2: Gamble The Stars

"Shake it off, we’re just getting started / Can we break for a moment of silence for the departed? / Can we take just a moment of violence to bash me? / So motherfuckers got something new to pound in the streets / You can die if you want it / Suicide / While others doing everything in their power to survive / But that’s another side of the spectrum, another horror story for the ones that collect them / But that’s the other side of the spectrum, another horror story for the ones that collect them"

It’s the static.

Lil Al Calypso wrapped his war calloused hands around my limpdick fingers and pulled me outta there. He had new scars and hurricaned clothes. Echoes of reluctant ecstasy faded all around me and reality flooded in. Bitch flood. Through the crowds, through the sweat, through the seething eyestalkings that condemned me for abandoning my post as king of the hopeless survivors. A tumultuous road. Sweat and cum and blood despite their good intentions, their best wishes, their most base desires, all inseparable. Centipedes fled my asshole and spores cascaded from every crevice. The king is dead. Long live subjective cruelty.

Standing at the edge of careless life. Through my bugsketched eyes he was race and gender neutral. I learned through the static that he had lost his family and he was involved in some nanotechnology scandal. He was enveloped in his own story and none of us could touch him. We were watching a movie. Beyond hygiene, beyond hunger, beyond fatigue. Maybe he was the robot one. I wasn’t listening right. A big fuckin fashioned eye swooped past and was gone. The pupil dilated for a split second. A few moment later, it was further back, connected to a colossal mess of tendrils and explosions and pure sexual darkness. Stipple caverns that made fucking, then death, then expanded into birth. Repeat.

He assumed the stance of a daredevil. He was on some “let my people go” shit. I had listened enough to know that this whole debacle was a vie for independence, the story of fractured humanity (the definition of humanity.) Broken, filthy, robbed, furious, hopeful… We elected him as our representative by either death or disinterest. His hat was spotless. Carry that fact for as long as you are able.

The monster was as broken, but did not understand the fetish of defeat; that concept we inherited from it, that pleasure from the knowledge that stronger futures come from surviving a loss. It looked upon our person with fear. I watched from a corner, crumpled and diseased. Spiders fought to get into my skull. A snake chewed its way through my ribcage. Please let me survive this. Please let me make this slavery mean something. Undeniable slavery.

The universe sped toward us like the most ovulating vertex. Every manner of horror came to stake a claim as our pimp – maybe the only one that was willing to nurture this shit planet to self-awareness, maybe the only one who was weak enough to find this place attractive – began to quake with fear. The nanobots that stood abandoned in orbit around Earth acted as conduits for the message. They translated the tremors. It’s the static.

“You will die without me.” Solid. The agent responded. “We know enough about death. Try again.” Silence for a while. He drew his pistol. Polished and inscribed with otherworldly runes. Familiar warred hands that had dragged me from heaven, but livened by the humanity I had cast away. | Pull the trigger,  half stop. Nobody seemed to care. It said. “I own your future.”

"What if every drop of rain's a letter from the sky / And they each concealed a message if you read it you could fly / Who would send it would you bet that it was god / Cause it doesn't really matter if it's met with an applause / It's a testament of flaws i'll sit and face the skies now / Empathize with rain to anticipate the ride down / To find out how they dance between the paper stars / To embrace the dark before they inundate the night's clouds / Now that's an optimistic view / I can script a musical while options are reviewed / Pieces of me tend to die but I can miss the funeral / I fall into the view that my life is simply beautiful"

 “I’ve seen the future. It’s made of hells.”

Full stop.

[madeofhells]

Bring your Bars To Market Part 1: Chains for Daddy

It’s greetings from the bottom of the world, and what up your parents are here too.

I don’t know how long I’ve been down here. People would trickle in, and there were three surges that brought hundreds and some were trampled to death. Maybe it’s been months. I don’t need to tell you the nature of the world or how everything I was ever told was a lie. I’ve told you that before. I told you how I got here, I told you how I got myself into the sticky situation, and this is the first time I’ve been able to collect my thoughts. This is as good a place as any to die.

I no longer fear death.

I fear the gamble afterward. Through scarves of molested time wrapped around me I have seen the futures of released souls. I talk like a king now by the way.

I lit the torches along every wall with my zippo and ascended the copper staircase up into a throne that jumpstarted bright the moment I sat down. Every step birthed an echo. Every glance birthed violent hieroglyphs. The throne was warm and infected my peripheral vision with every dream I had ever experienced. It revealed that many of the memories I had were dreams, and brought into focus how much of my life I had invented.

Suede Legs curated the whole thing, dancing around the outermost edge of my scopes, spreading wide at the farthest point. Velvet scissors trimming the things she didn't find interesting, sending it back into my mind to harass me in the moments before I pass out. That was all she wanted, I guess; she wanted the dreams to pop out, flexing with alien electromagnetism. I feel into a trance for days. My body was eating itself and I was so dehydrated I couldn’t breathe properly. Passive mummification. I snapped out of it because a woman was pissing in my mouth; standing on the arm rests and mock-straddling my face, her urine had a bloody twist to it and I was desperate enough to wipe every last drop from my chin and lick it. Her husband was there and he seemed pleased about it. A grin so wide it flirted with a smile, displaying sparse rotted teeth. The journey was long. Her legs were covered in cuts and bruises, her skirt was teared and reeking.

Fuck it. I’m the king. It was what I demanded. AHEM. They walked down the steps – them livened by crystals that hung above the ground like spores – and started fucking in the dusty stone clearing. More came after them, couples and singles, then groups lead by probably goblins that dared not enter. They were the first to look away when our eyes met. I looked similar to them. Goblin King of the Horny Dead. It was the same routine, the pissing in my mouth. Running down my chin and onto my poplockin’ ribcage. I had lost close to 80 pounds by this point and my muscles were starting to atrophy. I stood up three times and collapsed to the floor 100% of the time. My bones felt irradiated; cracked but filled in with ridged alcoholic pulp.

The dancefloor was live with the churning hash of orgy. Filthy limbs were writhing all over the place, the narrow openings between the pressed flesh made the image of an exploding skull in my admittedly inattentive field of vision.  I would snap out of it every once in a while and scan the crowd for anyone I knew. Everyone I knew was probably dead. I had once believed that the conspiracy that hijacked my life would at the very least support me. Sensual overdrive, total comfort, no dangers on the horizon. This is what heaven must be like

Lil Al Calypso returned from his sabbatical. Lil Al Calypso was a permanent sabbatical. He was the one who brought me there. He was dragging a chain ornamented with yellowed skulls. The sexdisgrace parted for him.

At the bottom of the staircase he shouted that the chain was one kilometer long. It was muffled. With every step, he gave me some new information, the content increasing in severity the closer he got. Failed revolutions. Then rewritten history. Then heroes with good ideas and how they can’t be trusted. Then how the world is full of new elements, and how we should go into business together and make billions. One moment friends, then partners, then enemies. Every few steps was a new relationship. I was buying everything he was selling.

I missed the conspiracy.

When he grabbed me by the hand, suede legs quivered like a tragic orgasm. Everything was gone. I snapped back to reality, my body aching in a way I had never thought possible. He slapped me across the face and white powder flew everywhere. One hundred and fifty hornets flew out of my mouth. Sobriety flushed all the creatures out of me, expelled from every orifice.

“Leave ‘em here. We gotta get to work.”

[madeofhells]

Watch Me Add

While the world’s villains gathered whatever they had learned to be antiheroes, the world’s fables were getting hungry like some #based headphones eating themselves.

He followed them until he was at a clearing bothered by animals behaving out of character. Wolves, bears, raccoons, birds, etc. All of them standing at attention and perplexed by a common vertex. Him and the lot were looking towards a lonely cabin. Wood and bolts, like an imagined memory or a movie. He walked between the rows and they didn’t seem to notice he was there. His former life - the folks - phased through the walls of the cabin and that was it. He circled around the cabin and surveyed every direction - looking for their exit - then he froze as well, for a few minutes. The minutes turned to hours after he drew his rifle and settled in. He trained his sights on the windows and tried to see movement through the grime. Humidity and dirt. The synchronized breathing of the creatures around him lulled him into a trance and pulled him out of it just the same.  The knees were half as numb as the face quarter as numb as the brain. The sky was mired by war.

He had heard tell that the gods were displeased in the sky. The higher altitude granted him enough subjectivity to know the truth. There were no gods – fucking gods – shit asshole gods – up there. It was ships as large as billion dollar islands skirmishing. Demonized crescent moons and dipping parabolae with scattered basket bottoms. Slow lasers that cut across the sky like arrowheaded fog that repel the clouds. Sharp green knifelines that such them in. A disked, upside down city obscured by its own reflection casts javelins that go nowhere. Words that fail to capture confusion. Nobody is winning but those below are losing.

It doesn’t take long for the displaced weather patterns to form tornadoes and hurricanes as they spread out, the same way floods and tidal waves were epidemic. The mainland and the coastline got it equal; the mainland suffered the raining dead while the coastland suffered the surfacing dead that experienced second life. Let’s call it a day and say the coasts got it the worst. A veined and yawning, rotting ship stalks the uncertain tide. Filled with the soaked comma ancient dead.

Jesper finally gets some cause for the rigidness; that movement. He spinals his weapon and approaches the house, the army of woodland creatures frozen on either side. He hasn’t felt sensation in days, and believe it when I say his body is eating itself.  Nobody eats food anymore.

He unpants a revolver from his crotch and steadily opens the front door. It’s louder than he expects; every inch is like a more pained crawing. Fuck being secret, do your job. Severed heads scatter from the entrance. Some of them leap into the closet, others double back and go to the living room. They are wet, exposed, and mutated. Guts springing from the orifices have gathered into sharpened points and carry the hosts like evil legs. Legs to dig, legs to cut. Ten heads. His gun is bounding around the room. Twenty heads. He looks up, nearly 2 more (shots semicolon some licked off as the humanity,) thirty. Maybe a million; there are pincers slashing from underneath the oven elements and vents, flinging ooze all around. Chaotic, exposed flesh.

A *regular* man steps out from the living room, grinning like a gold chain. He is pristine, like some kinda as if snatched out of the days of id. His Russian accent precedes him,

“It’s room."

[madeofhells]

Big Rude Jake (feat. Eyedea and Bizarre) - Fuck the Pariah's Throat

Serengeti pink and Prussian blue Rembrandt reds and amber honey golds And Garden greens and deadly sharkskin grays As the mob thickens, the mystery unfolds

Ever since I was a kid, I had a violent past / Whooped a nurse's ass for touching my diaper rash / And I ain't gonna work / I'm a lazy shit / That's why I live in Warren / With a fat white bitch  / She's 36 and keep a gun full of arsenal / Her son's 13, and loves to listen to Marshall (Slim Shady!) / But I whoop his ass, and send him to school / And let him know, that taking drugs is cool / See I'm on some dumb shit / Don't know right from wrong / All up in Murder Inc, trying to get Ja Rule on a song / And I used to be a virgin / Grown ass man / Until I took a trip up to Neverland / Mike gave me milk and cookies, showed me his room / Bent his ass over / I fucked him with a broom

And the city steams and rides a steelyard fulcrum It teeters and sways in the sundown light. I hold my breath and I hang in the balance Of a city that reels between despair and delight.

Oh how easily they forget; no anchor to the past / Cut the blood supply and hope the heart beats itself to death / My ribcage is now my own, still feels like your arms /  Net clothed in salt / How'd I let it go this far? / It happens faster than you could ever think / From always and forever to never again in less than a blink / The river runs until it's dry, but I / Die spittin' my last drip into its mouth to keep it alive / Long drives, wide eyes, and your smilin' face / You dance I drink; let's waste the night away / They say you always know right away / But you can't foresee the sand being pulled into the sea under a tidal wave / Secrets sneak out when you're asleep / Comin' from a queen's mouth, talk isn't all that cheap / I'm now a lone flame searching for a purpose / Setting fires everywhere I go, can't avoid the burns

And I am not your judge, I am not your Champion I won’t stray the road for some new messiah I am a boulevard dog in the concrete corridor I am compelled by a mystery I am the Blue Pariah

[madeofhells]

Spinning Blocks

Wherein we discuss the Jupiter Troll, arguably the first infamous predator of a sarcastically defended Earth.

Long tin bones constructed from billions of smashed and frosted ribcages. The space along its back was wavy like leaking butane; trapezoids of dim, whiplike lasers snapped all around them.

It no longer shielded itself behind Jupiter. Its dances were arrogant flexes. An army summoned form the vast European oceans beneath smashed ice, all staring Earthward.

Millions of black silhouettes that spoke the common tongue of the universe.

They spoke radiation.

It sat on the precipice of the colonization; the night where all the stars were revealed to have earth-smashing creatures lurking behind them, their awakening somehow cued to occur in unison across billions of light years. Galactic octopi made of brilliant light and spread out like symbols.

The Jupiter Troll sent some shitty Jesus – the Radiation Man - to Earth for no discernible reason. He survived the mass extinction but learned enough from us to crave answers. He learned that like right away. What answers he had were apparently found to be lacking.

Clothed in a giant coat patched together from old rags and leather and burlap. An old hat found in a creek. Wrinkled and salted leather gloves. He used to stalk in the background of photographs in a vain attempt to emulate our behaviour. He found himself near the summit of a mountain.

Some televisions still had electricity; some energy sources were still operational, and hospitals had yet to exhaust their generators. Purse Boy was broadcast on every channel. Fucking blood clot eyes. Fucking smile that seemed to hover just above his face and moved a split second behind the rest of his body. Fucking haircut. Fucking everything.

He was staring through the screen, jumping up slightly every few moments like he had the hiccups. In a hospital somewhere, a full body cast filled with crude oil is staring back.  

Radiation Man had been there looking for witnesses.

He found snapped wet cigarettes where people once lived.

Surely that kid was to blame.

The marketplace of the new world was the sky. Anything important happening had something to do with the sky, and it was reasonable to think that knowledge of new configurations could save your life. Clouds told the story of intense battles. Plumes of alien bacteria merged with grey cumulonimbus banks filled with acid rain that suffocated all life as they slowly descended.

The Jupiter Troll was trading high, off in the mountains.

Spread out in a mock crucifix, its disjointed fingers wriggling, the alien propulsion system splitting the encircling clouds into threads.

It’s a story of witnesses, the only story that seems to exist anymore.

A perverted and retarded rendition of the hero’s journey experienced by any survivor that had even a passing familiarity with the old world.

Radiation Man siphoned maps and tricks from whatever he could find before the ascent, and sued the frozen corpses of fallen travellers as benchmarks for the journey. Neither the climate nor the depleting oxygen affected him. He was restricted only by physical barriers, the verticals, and the snows. His entire being was nearly frozen solid, but a strangely fascist will kept his joints snapping the tension and moving onward comma upward.

He ascended up to the peak before long, high enough to catch the clearest glimpse of his overlord. Above the clouds, the Jupiter Trolls rose with him. Guarded by thick, grey clouds teeming with re-appropriated nanobots, their exchange was kept secret.

It was an exchange of presences. He no longer spoke in cosmic radiation, but Mandarin, English, and some Spanish. Welcome Back, I Am Chief Cuckold Surrogate.

When it came to Purse Boy, nobody thought it could be even remotely possible that he was in charge. He was using magic, most definitely, or some sort of horror-logic where he was living inside the televisions. Something beyond the layperson’s understanding.

Nobody expected that he had just taken control of available technology, amalgamated what transmitters he could, and build the last stand for human telecommunications. It was the Alamo with nuclear armed drones. He was an IT kid.

He had access to the last remaining technology in North America. Satellites, as well, the few that remained. Most hat been batted away carelessly, but a few remained in unstable orbits. Some had become self-aware, and they provided the closest thing to entertainment as they clumsily figured out the mindset of the madmen that designed them.

He watched the exchange longer than he had watched anything in the preceding months.

There was some important shit going down. Poster your flaccid declaration of hate upon his body and realize you feel like a monster. The genius of it.

He had seen the protagonist’s story enough times to give up, locked away there in some underground bunker, waiting for cables to be severed by some malicious tectonic shift and maybe crushed. A heavy metal door bolted from the inside, barricaded by a ritualistic semicircle of yellowing paper. The Russians played ball until they were flameblasted. South Africa had open communication channels before half the continent was dragged underwater as foretold by a lightningstorm of dreams that swept the planet one time.

He mediated on what he saw.

The outsider electing itself as the superior representative of the threatened collective.

The Purse Boy had killed so many people in the doe-eyed days of sustainability. It was expected of him. The world demanded that it be subjected to all manner of horror, terror, and surprise. Not a day was permitted to pass where mortality wasn’t harshly established.

But external threats trigger an appreciation of home and family despite whatever history may exist.

He was, for the time, the only one trying talk. There were no employers anymore. Nobody was nodding in approval at anything and there was no familiar system feeding on blood. Murder seemed so juvenile. Some immature vaudeville performed for deranged pinheads prior to the puberty of dread.

The Alien and the Freak Demon aligned to form the same reticule. It was enough of a pause to add enough vibration to signal the end of the end of days. Thoughts of the future were permitted. At least two minds could wander.  Whatever imaginings.

[madeofhells]

Cradle of Filth (feat. Grieves and Atmosphere) - Mama's Catapults in Violent Overture

Nights came trailing ghost concertos Heartstrings a score of skeletal reaper bows Playing torture chamber music allegretto Conducting over throes trashed to crescendo Skinless the dark shall scream Hoarse Her symphonies

An emanation of phantom madness The Countess beheld in shroud By girls bereft of future vows Soon to wed in white the frosted ground Burning like a brand on the countenance of god A yearning took Her hand to His Seraphim, bound Deep red hissed the cat whips On the whim of ill-will Whilst she entranced, nonchalant, abliss Flayed further songs of overkill

Say out loud / We must network  / Should have been / More specific / Now have this / Daily pressure / Some of them / Just don't get it / Leave me at / The beginning  / Start over and do it well / Shut my trap / Stop complaining  / Stay sober and step on shells  / My oh my, yours oh yours / And when it snows it pours  / And when I'm running out of fire I just open the doors  / And go sit on the porch and watch the neighborhood wars / But I've got the sun, and I've got my son  / And I've got my will to run until I'm dead and done  / And this is for the love we found and the love we lost / Mama had a baby and his head popped off

In a crescent-whime cellar of crushed roses Pooled blood and broken dolls A torchlit shadow theater souled With the echoed cries of lives She stole Killing time, she struck the hours dead in her control Thus menopaused, her clock of hacked out cunts began to toll

How sleep the pure Desire in violent overture

[madeofhells]

Devil Breath

“storytelling is the currency of the new world rigor mortis” – Sleeping Prophet

You find yourself in the softly glowing ruins of  CA-4710. Canada has been reduced to in size by one third due to flooding, explosions, and a golden fog that might as well be a portal to a dicey puppet heaven. Everytime you find yourself at a shore, you follow it until you find yourself at a canyon stuffed with unimaginable things. Then you follow that ridge. Some towns you can pass through undetected because you have learned to differentiate true silence from trap silence. Following a desolate highway you step lively through a parking lot where one hundred people are frozen in place. Their eyes follow you as you move past them and some of them fall out of their skulls.

But you’re in CA-4710, which is a name you find spraypainted on the hood of a truck as you enter. How anyone found time to accurately categorize the aftermath is unimaginable, but you’re an occam’s razor sort of cat. Someone was probably making it up as they went along. 4710 sounds like some random shit doesn’t it?

There’s the true silence. Wash your back with it.

You are drawn to a crane with a chain descending into a hole in the ground. You tug on it but it is pulled taught. The hole is big enough for you to fit through and ride the chain down, but you’re smart enough to do away with those thoughts. That moonfaced titheaded idea. Thick chain, thick as a manleg.

Not far from the chain, sitting atop a pile of dirt, is a leatherbound book. That seems safe enough. Leaf through that and tell me what you see. It claims to be written by a blind prophet, and it explains in detail that it is blind in the literal sense: this man has no eyesight. He writes in cursive. Fuck him, right?

The book is full of stories; the first story being a point-form summary of terms and circumstances that claims the world is flat and hollow and hell exists not far beneath the crust. It speaks of a conspiracy of miners across the entire globe and mentions a place north of hell called Goblin Town. You had heard of this before, but you hotly anticipate a proper timeline and perhaps maps.

It ends with detailing a war between Illuminati and Freemasons but the letters begin to smear and give way to a avalanche of shapes and indecipherable runes.

The book’s spine cracks as you spread it open. Loose papers fall out, and upon inspection they are personal anecdotes that don’t fit in with the straight gravy.

He is the World’s Only Storyteller. You handle them with care. We may need these dead flies to repopulate the secret bio-dome someone has surely constructed to save you.

The pages are thick and heavy and strain your forearms as you balance each even half and start midway through. You’re in the thick of it, scanning a story about wooden goblin submarines. You skip backwards a few pages to be sure there is still a war on land between all the secret human societies. There is. This will inform how you react to what follows.

There were hypnotized people making their way across the sea floor to the deepest depths of the ocean, being beckoned by some far off sound or voice. They were constructing cities down there, and train tracks and other construction yards for ornamental purposes. They kept going deeper and deeper, the intense pressure and corrosive water warping their bodies but being stabilized by some unquestioned internal gravity. They ran afoul of the goblins, who had their ships patrolling an emergency inlet to their underground world. Slow, awkward, wooden submarines reinforced by weird shit they mined down there. That’s where the book ends. The rest of it is empty. You’ve been hoodwinked.

The last line says “Find The Gibraltar Whale For Book 2.”

The true silence is broken by the sounds of a wheezing, struggling male.

You walk past the crane and come across a clearing. Three other cranes are there, each fixed to a point on a huge decaying whale, suspending it slightly off the ground. A place where bacteria are holding their breath, the process of decay takes a lot longer. You slowly wave through pools of slimified tissue and stare up into the collapsed belly of the thing. You can reach your hand inside, but not far. You do it without thinking, your doubt merging with the insecure microscopic ecosystem you have breached. It feels neutral, like cotton soaked in old soup. You pull out a second leatherbound book and peel it open sloppy, smacking sounds.

It says “We Found The Devil” over and over. Writ large, writ small, writ every kind of way. You let it fall from your hands and submerge in the goo like wet snow. You follow your instincts and head towards the sounds of struggling man. You are staring at the blind prophet, buried up to his waist in the dirt and drawing pictures on the ground. Runes and symbols like the introduction to the first book. He won't acknowledge your presence. His eye sockets are hollow. Behind him you ca see a graveyard of penetrated wooden submarines, the only likely candidates being the goblins. Beyond the wreckage are hundreds of short, gnarled, crucified bodies stuck to inverted crosses. Their legs spread, their wrists pinned together, heads hung and long dead.

The prophet has seen it all and he still has stories to tell. He is drawing his story in front of him, from right to left, in a loose crescent shape. Whenever he is about to finish it, a sharp gust of wind blows it all away and he starts all over again. You watch this cycle three times before you feel comfortable sitting beside him. You hear him muttering to himself, and he becomes clearer the closer you lean in, making sure not to obstruct his work.

He tells you an anecdote not fit for the straight gravy. The devil fucked the submarines and ejaculated boiling hot semen, scalding the goblins alive. He came alive for the celebration of the paradigm shift. Much of Goblin Town was raped to death in a bubbling orgy of suffering, with refugees going deeper. They told their stories as they died on the wood salvaged from their submarines. It dried their bodies into position, and they had to be cracked to be crucified. Many of them fell apart. He goes on for awhile about how many fell apart like burnt toast. The devil had done it. He had been there. Another sudden wind erases the desperate conclusion. You look towards the direction it is coming from. "Shhhhh. He is sleeping."

[madeofhells]

Dog Fashion Disco (feat. DMX, Crooked I, and Joe Budden) - Vertigo Won't Stop the Rain Drops

[madeofhells]

Ice In Retrospect

There’s a red brick apartment building that is bursting at the seams, flexing uncontrollably from the hot peoples crammed inside of it. Giant insects approach it from across the city, eventually growing disinterested but never straying too far. There’s grasshoppers laced with chainlink, waterfalls of frothy blood pouring from their backs. There’s lowhugging roaches that weave between the bloody hopperfalls, coated in the discarded clothes of the dead that they are known to roll through, pasted snugly to their glossy hides. There are others too. Ones that fly that are made entirely out of legs and whiskers. There are 2 parts to this.

1). The building.

Here we have the beginnings of an urban legend in the new world. The owners of the building, purveyors and distributors of snuff films and miscellaneous threatening media, lived in the basement. Down there with the laundry machines and maintenance rooms. Mummy clones. Locked in a small windowless room, they began to replicate. They did it when nobody was looking, but nobody was watching them. If starving, they would each other, and film it. When they needed to pass their friends, they would kill another, empty it out, use it as a toilet, and film it. They would watch it, film themselves watching it, and sell it. They had dedicated employees and ran a tight ship, until one of them left as, just like everything else they touched, the situation began to eat and film itself. He found himself the protagonist in the story of his torture, and his flight was everyone’s favourite part.

The windows were boarded up from the outside, but they were barred from the inside. Containment was the only option, and no expense could be spared. Short of putting a Chernobyl Dome over it, there is only so much you can do to an old building before you rip it down, and that would have freed them. Kids would make a habit of peeking between the boards on the lower levels to see the wet mannequin people that they were told lived in there. They mostly came out at night, walking between rooms. Setting up shop behind closed doors and filling them within weeks. The sweat and grotesque bodily fluids moistened the wall and let the occasional arm or leg puncture through. A hundred dogs stuffed into a telephone booth.

They worked their way up from the basement until they filled every floor. The one of the last things they filled was the stairwell. The globe was under attack before they could spill into the hallways and lobby, but if the street was quiet enough you could hear the horrifying sound of thousands of silent freaks rubbing their bodies against each other in silence. There the building stood, despite the fire and invaders and mutated ecosystems. Nobody wanted to destroy it or eat it or fuck it. By the time the giant bugs came in the wake of the last mass slaughter, it had proven itself to be a curiosity common to all races, species, and tiers of intelligence. It was hot and throbbing and loud.

2). The Insects

the insects are just the way it sounds. the mantises are twelve stories tall, the roaches are three. the flies are the size of a bus. there are spiders curled up into balls sleeping inside cracked open fallen over exploded building husks. no spider has moved since it got there and they are clearly waiting for the other shoe to drop. every single one of them has pressed something to the apartment complex, but they knew better than to break it open. mannequin clones one day and flaking mummies the next, one day a cannibal, the next day a latrine. the life cycles occurred quicker and quicker. it must have been the other shoe the spiders were waiting for.

most lifeforms settle the ground the land on, but the planet is full of mutants that never stay. it is their duty to wander and compare to how it used to be. the first thing the humans did was kick their feet up at the bottom of the totem pole. the first thing the bugs and bears and whales and birds did was a). die b). mutate and die c). mutate and run amok. they wanted to use urban wastelands as their crowns, but every so often there was something that reminded them that the previous owners were out of their fucking minds.

we will never see a colossal, deformed mantis frightened in this life. one day a clone leaked out from one of the windows. only one arm was still glistening in afterbirth. the rest was falling away like medical gauze. it had the blood of its family all over its face, but it had already been partially hollowed out and filled with piss and shit. it came into this world pressed against a wall and its legs didn't work. it crawled across the street towards nothing in particular. its bones creaked with every inch of ground gained. the wind blew muddy papers over it. the wind blew tiny fingernails over it. a tyrant mantis shivered.

[madeofhells]

Gwar (feat. Brother Ali and RZA) - Mourning the Decay of the Pencil

Lights fade, all is shade Zombies stalk the promenade This is promise of eternity Piles of dead, impaled head Steaming peat is wretched red They say history is written in such ways

Master the millipede / You try to end the sea / Your body being found in the neighbor yard artillery / A black blind governor, a rich white mayor / Man, this whole city ain't got a prayer / Bobby has invaded, now the whole town's slated / Your decapitated head is being tooken' out and paraded / Up and down the avenue, I drive a shatterproof / Benz, and all my men's are tattle proof / My mic is a dyke, my life is a light / A Day to God is a Thousand Years, how long is a night?

Some say that we’ve lost our reason Some say that we’ve lost our minds Spinning in the blackest wisdom Coveting the darkest wine I say have your host amongst us They tarry for a time All your virtue shall desert you Decay of grandeur Box of pine

[madeofhells]

Familiar Powers Prevail

“Every single day in every single way the war is being won.”

In the beginning, man created god, and it was terrible.

Human beings have been amazing at taking from their surroundings and interpreting them into something great. The curious fact is that the mythology isn’t far off from the truth. We can’t imagine new colours. More drearily acute minds have referred to it as the World Pimp. The cosmic entity we ideabirthed into something we could control. The blueprints for god we dug out of the DNA of our collective consciousness. The one responsible for all the bullshit. The mass of stained glass maggots that we stuck a mask on and imagined that imagined us. Imagined it could help if it wanted to. Imagined that it wanted to. The one responsible. The one that some of us destroyed the world to spite. The ones who laughed. In the end, god abandoned man, and it was good. Exterior. Antarctica. Day.

Satellites have been knocked out of orbit, and the ones that haven’t been smashed or flung out into space maintain unpredictable forecasts. Graveyars sprang up everywhere and vanished out of sight. The ones that remain, they can still be contacted, and can still transmit information, but time and energy is at a premium and some days are worse than others. Luck is the only religion in the frontier.

The last research post left standing in Antarctica has access to a satellite, and they have distantly glimpsed upon the thing they can freely see from their current position. The second angle helps, but it is more of the same sinking of chestplates. Every day sees a new army splintering through the ice, as if lying dormant just below the surface. Entire civilizations emerging like the water descending and revealing centuries of shipwrecks. The smoke demon, as it is colloquially referred to as, is vacuuming everything that isn’t grounded. An inverted funnel is stamped onto the ice, kicking up ice and dust and everything reliquified. It’s like a riptide; even when they’re walking away from it, they’re getting closer and closer to oblivion. Assumed oblivion. The surface of the ground bares such a variety of clawmarks and talongouges. The satellite shows them being cast out into space, but who says they need air? Nobody is saying anything.

Nobody is coming.

Let Them Know.

Lindsey X is the one at the controls every minute of every day, dictating everything she sees to the rest of the crew. Hourly radio updates, any images she snags on her phone (or descriptions from memory, which are much more frequent,) and some of the books she is reading; the passages that seem relate-able to their situation. Lord of the Flies is at the bottom of the pile.

She is the one constantly sending out messages and attempting to make use of the fractured infrastructures that they relied on in other parts of the world. What is going on at your end? Here’s what’s going on at ours. Chipper headlines into the hostile static. Every day is Little Boy. She used precious energy from the generators to power her phone to take a photo of one of the brief glimpses of the entity hovering just outside of Earth’s atmosphere. The Big Daddy. The one who is consistently saving their lives and disposing of the waves of nightmares that inexplicably emerge. One day they’ll run out of ice. One day it will suck all of the air off the planet. It has to. In a world of nonlogic, depressing logic will do. To be grounded in reality is to be grounded to technology. Elements will surprise you and the terrain will betray you. We pledge allegiance to our creations.

One Day They Will Know Our Story.

Joseph Grundy lost his fingers when he opened the door to feel the fresh air on his face. Something sprayed in through the crack, and it taught them all that there was some invisible shit lurking around every entrance. Maybe lurking around the entire perimeter. Live a long life and assume the worst. He spends his days writing down everything Lindsey X says, in addition to his own notes and thoughts on what is going on. His contribution to the crowdsourced story is a narrator, and when her dictations are influenced by the group around her, that makes it into the final draft. He controls the final draft, for better or worse. The story he tells – catches – is not one of hope. In absence of hope, he turns to comedy. He started laughing every time something slammed against the walls of the building. Infectious, it caught on. Laugh everytime a transmission creeps through the static and it is in some otherworldly language. Laugh at the invasion. It becomes their invasion. That would be the last line of his book.

I Want To Go Home

The team used to be 30 strong. By the time they settled into the post-apocalypse configuration, they were down to seven. Suicide and foolish escape stole away most of the rest. Foolish life ensnared even less. Corey Piano wasn’t in a good way, but he made it through those first few hurdles. He was resigned to life, but he interpreted it differently. Despite being employed by humour, he did not employ it himself. He was writing his own book, pacing the halls and scribbling madly against walls and surfaces that wouldn’t occur to the rest of us. His book started off as a diary of death. Someone opened the door and was struck by a bolt of red lightning that turned them into a flayed bat. It hiccupped towards him, eyes locked, the wings clots of sick purple veins. He was forced to stomp it out after it leapt up and devoured Timmy K by latching onto his crotch and chattering its teeth until he was sprayed out like bloody woodchips. It sunk its teeth into his boot and he smashed it against the wall. It came apart like a plastic grocery bag filled with old pork.

His girlfriend was sucked into a wall and he listened her commit suicide as she, in acute detail, described her own death. She was being given dreams and she did not like them. He believed her at the time. He believed her because she wanted him to. He told her it was for the best. Ever since then, he has been pursued by an orgasmic giggling. What a prank. It has convinced him that his every action is part of the prank. The only way to step outside of the comedy is to work. Work isn’t funny. Many of the pages are repeated words or lazy doodles. His whole life has been a comedy. There is a punchline coming. He can’t tell the rest of them. They wouldn’t get it.

They have all seen the exact same things, but each of them secretly resents the other for not agreeing with them. This is as simply as it could possibly be explained. Each one of them sensed that they were destined for greater things, and the moment their window was apparent, they could spring into action and save the world. Each one of them was privy to an angle the other wasn't, but they would drag them along fore the ride, and they would eventually be praised by their 2 other peers. They would reluctantly accept, of course, as long as it was with humility. It was all just a matter of time.

Corey Piano filled seven pages with the same phrase:

 “Every single day in every single way the war is being won.”

[madeofhells]

Flogging Molly (feat. Everlast and Beastie Boys) – 2 Pieces A Mile From Ryall

Dust falls on the empty halls of my old school Where the memories fade like the casualty, a forgotten fool Now the wide-eyed has become the blind of spoken rule As equal only deep is now the word The lesson's not the answer you once heard

Oh worry, oh my worry has it been that long? The whistle keeps on blowing but the chills all gone His empty frame cannot explain, there's nothing left inside So sing to me a song from yesterday When laughter filled the tears that we now make

He drinks / Where he lies / He's covered /  with flies / He's got the hand me down / Pumas /  And the tie dyes / Well, go upstate and get your head together / Thunderbird is the word, and you're light as a feather / Detox at the flop house / No booze allowed / Remember the good old days with the rockabilly crowd / Memphis is where he's from (in Tennessee) / He lives in the street but he's no bum / He’s a rockabilly star from the days of old / He used to have teeth all filled with gold / He’s got a platinum voice / Oh, but only gold records / On the bass / Was boots / And on the drums / Was checkers / Luis Vuitton with the Gucci guitar / Johnny Ryall / Who do you think you are?

So sing to me, sing me a song, a song from yesterday And when the laughter turned these tears before the promises, then they'll slip away Don't turn your back on me, don't turn your back on me, don't ever let me down Don't turn your back on me, don't turn your back on me, don't ever let me down We are within a mile, we are within a mile, within a mile of home

[madeofhells]

Button's Branches.

The former Toronto Stock Exchange building had seen better days. The streets were empty and every wall throughout the city had birds pinned to them with long, rusted spikes. Through the necks and wings, feathers matted to the bricks to erupted blood. Each and every manhole cover had been popped with a sliver of space opening into the underground crusted with dried flesh and bits of bone and collected fat deposits. Someone had been there and evacuated with all life in its pocket.

The space before him is littered with wrecks from every size-class and make. Whoever has been doing it refuses to leave their perch atop a nearby building, where it had constructed a giant slingshot and was determined to either force him to flee or bring down the building around him. It was old polished oak and leather. He could see it reflecting the sun when he crept out to dig in a smashed vending machine. He was running out of chips. He required more armageddon chips.

The monster's name was Gift Dog. The monster named Gift Dog has three heads, but tww of them are dead, draping its shoulders like wilted flower petals. Its necks are long and the faces are covered in enough stitches to obscure the faces. Necrosis has set in, spreading from the outlines of the weird string they strung its indistinguishable openings with. The rest of the body was unremarkable. Big arms, though. He is so good at this craft that the cars are slicing through the entrance and coasting over his head. He scales back and slams them before him, though. Right through the entrance, right through the lower third of his eye globes. To let him know who is in charge. Shave a scalp and shoot a shoe.

The night is dominated by that licking I mentioned, but dusk is owned by a different freakshow. As the sun sets, a flood of blood washes through the street, careening through the street in front of the man and ironing the nose. Any the noses. A tidal wave; rich, frothing, carried by a carpet of thunder. The blood suspends a ship made of bones - the girders - and held together with the frozen clinical representations of pulses. You know what I'm talking about. Sudden green mountain ranges. Line, jagged tips, line. I'm not a professional. Once it passes, give it a minute, then the streets are dry like it never happened. Like a hologram. Blood clings to nothing.

The heads of billions of ghosts, constantly aware of every action, and under constant protest from recoiled shoulderblades, thrust forward in horror.

He has seen the ship past twenty times before. When it crossed his path, it slowed to a crawl. The tips of splashing blood pushed and beckoned like passive-aggressive spider legs. The bones were scraped clean; white, but not preserved. From the hull of the thing he could hear a thousand hollow tubes whispering his name, each fighting to be the loudest. The resonation coupled with his title made it unearthly. Shrill and fluid, synthetic. He used to be hypnotized by it. He pressed his hands to his ears and tried to get to sleep. It got slower every time. He reassured himself that it was trying to get him. But what if it wasn't? What if he wasn't the focus of that story?

A car came in through the frontway of the structure. It was red and dusty; ashy. A finger was wedged in the wind held wiper. Long purple fingernail. A person climbed from the driver's side a few minutes after it landed. Our hero came down and tried to bring it to its feet, although it cold not stand. Its legs and arms were punched by star-shaped knives, filling with blood and scabbing over. Its brain was revealed, the skull sliced off cleanly. It was scratched and burned and licked by agonizing scythes. A pelvis rendered pathetic. No hair, no words, boy girl. He looks down, notices its hand. Look back up, its head is missing. A neck that was amputated years ago, twitching like an aggravated sea cucumber. He looks down again, drawn to the street. Back again, no neck, no shoulders, it's ribs then cauterized stump. It is becoming less energetic. His horror is tethered to its survival.

He took the sunglasses that it had clutched firmly in its left hand. There was some resistance. The fingered pulled away, they had been dug into before hand. He looked away; the thing fell to the floor and was motionless. A cut up mission. He put the sunglasses on, then he looked towards Gift Dog, because what else is a man supposed to do?

The curtains pull back. Gift Dog, in the new light - revealed - is seven children tied together with thick ship rope. Tied together in the loose formation of a humanoid, screaming and struggling against their binding. Greasy hair and filthy clothing, sullied by human waste in real time. Malnourishment makes their valiant struggle depressing. Bookending the damndable comma blurry pentagram of the slowly extinguishing were two burly arms, hanging there in space, each arm the size of a full grown man. Long nails, red veins, success writ large with bulges. They threw the cars. They built the slingshot. They were doing it. They were responsible. Flexing.

It wasn't yet night, where the maddening licking would start, falling down like new snow. It was dusk, and he could hear the tide of todaycut blood crashing from the right. It would turn a corner and wash across the street soon enough. He was out of government armageddon chips anyway. One undeniable truth about the human race is that sunglasses make a hero out of anyone. He stepped out into the street and sprinted across as those tubes flung nests into his ears. Toronto needed a hero. Toronto needed sunglasses.