

A note found on the roof of an apartment building







So I said OBLACK and she gasped ,

So I asked OBLACK?







I didn’t install the game then.




Those colors set me free.





I ate myself up.




The Smog

On Wednesday she nuzzled me awake, like a puppy might,

I had rented for ourselves.
We checked the time too late on our phone,
Suggested 6 AM.
The haze outside had fooled us.
So we were both late for work,
I could not see through,
Disappointing; I had only just downloaded new music to try.

I had a headache till lunch.
Someone said: “It might rain soon.”

Someone else said: “No that’s just pollution.”




“Apparently there is a genocide going on.”








And I wondered what the news will say tomorrow.

Flash fiction: Anxiety’s a bitch

Anxiety’s a bitch








I tell her to “Fuck off.”

Her eyes are filled with concern.


It’s true.

I try to cheat on her all the time.


Of making up jokes together and moving away from Her.



“Till death do we part.”

Spoken word: Werewolves










“Okay, just could you cut your nails?”

Couldn’t, they were claws.


Never stayed the same shape.



I got bitter.



“You’re invincible.” They’d say.


The number one cause of death of werewolves are werewolves.



“Learn to control it!” They’d say.

“We can!”

It was a revelation.




The number one cause of death of werewolves are werewolves.


But are like themselves.



It’s a good thing therefore that werewolves don’t exist.


Flash Fiction: Time Displaced

What’s wrong, she asked, when I went soft as pudding. Now usually I’m kinky enough that all the previous orgasms, guys or girls, adds up. Hum around my head. So it feels like an orgy with ghosts. But there where her head lay I could feel the tears she’d spread. Rising up out of her pillow. I had to go. This is the problem with my condition, being time displaced.
I was not born time displaced. And contrary to what Reddit says, it is not contagious either. You cannot get Deja Vous from someone else. What you are feeling is akin to when a depressed person walks into a room, and brings everyone else down with them.
Instead I was told it was a bad drug interaction. Between LSD, the antibiotics, and that ginseng extract bullshit Aunty Vie sent me again.
Since then I get horny in the weirdest places; library corners, certain alleys. The worst was my parent’s apartment’s balcony. I cannot go clubbing anymore. Or at least before one; I need the place full, I need everyone drunk- or they’ll see me stumble in during the day whilst it’s empty and all the combined sadness, desperation, euphoria and release, drives me crazy. I once had to walk in to use the toilet. By the time I got out my friend accused me of being an alcoholic.
The pretentious call it ‘psychic energy’. A measurement of the events that have taken place there. An attuned, temporally displaced observer does not only see the moment in front of them, but all the moments that have been there. So that is why I did not take the house tour. Because bedrooms are rather potent. And now I never go over. Because homes are filled with them. I suspect some artists might have been afflicted, which is why they kept writing about forests and paths. those places are silent, peaceful, even after we’ve sheared them away. They stay, pockets in time, hedges that cushion the present, stretch away like a white margin, pristine. I once hung around a mall being built, pile drivers thundering, curses flung past knocked hard hats. And sighed. It was amazing. So quiet. Between the sweat and the precision there was the past.
I have heard that the severity of the emotions, the distance away in time,
the sheer number of experiences; all of these contribute proportionally to the emotional response of the observer. I have heard that ghosts can be explained by this. That when people die they die forever, but their actions ripple, drops falling. Again and again and again.
I like window shopping. The dopamine surge of satisfied shoppers. Stadiums are dangerous. Full of hate and rage. And once I went back to France, had a panic attack as we went past an empty field. A desperate fear I only saw again in the eyes of a homeless man.
There are certain places on this earth I can never visit. And the thing is, I may not care as much about the tears you cry, I cannot help it. I know it will pass. And I’m telling you that if one of my kind starts to feel rather terrified, Ill or disturbed by a place with no negative history, no heartbreak, then one should be concerned about the future.
They say space is silent. The vacuum up there. But none of my kind have become astronauts yet. There is almost no place on this planet I have been that isn’t covered with the sweat of pain. Except on tall hills. Vast, empty fields. Deserts. And certain beaches, and only when I am lying down, staring up.
I used to think it were lovers that made beaches so great. But that isn’t what I’ve found with hotels. Except once lying down, I saw a clear, starry night and realized what I’d felt was hope. Some of it on the floor, below, where others had looked up. Most of it like rain. Traveling down from the future. From the sky. Onto us.

Short Story: The Wave

The problem with doing this 1k thing is it’s a real bitch to edit it. I really ought to though. Not editing something that is potentially good is akin to wasting most of the time spent writing it. Also it is good practice, improves the skill in editing. I want to write more from Children Of The Pantheon because I got a lot of likes, which makes me so happy. But today I was feeling something and that something might be in this story.
The Wave
Jon played the Louisiana blues and once and awhile the percussion of construction drills matched the rhythm rather than interrupt it. That black man somewhere else, somewhere far away in space and time, got drowned by Jon’s neighbor’s redecorating.
They’d saved up for it. Made sacrifices, like holidays, potential visitations to other countries where great memories could have been formed for them, and their kids, instead of this, this permanence; entire decades maybe with a minimalist kitchen, a partition that separates that made the living room and bar seem roomier, like in that movie Heat that Julie once saw. 
Kara knew, it was obvious, why mum and dad hadn’t let her buy those concert tickets. She didn’t believe Mom’s insinuations about drugs and booze and boys like Jules; they trusted her or they wouldn’t have let her stay a week in Nigeria, before the killings started. She didn’t cry because she couldn’t go, no, that would be petty. She didn’t cry when the trading of shouts, between mum and her, got so loud that Dad intervened, and swung like a pendulum between the two sides, settled on making it three. She didn’t cry when he told Mum not to treat her like their step son, who was gone. She cried because she’d realized, immediately, the way she understood with stark, sudden clarity a mathematical concept, an economic lesson in school, that she’d been a fool, that if Jules really cared he’d have never asked her if she could afford it, if he really cared he’d have said to do something else, if it was going to have been a date instead of some random, late, confluence of events then it wouldn’t have mattered whether or not she could go and that truth fell across her fifteen year old heart, the first of several blows, a chiseling that would sculpt a cold, statuesque reservation that kept her from something another woman might call true love, twice in a row.
Sol first saw Kara on the subway, towering over the locals in her commanding heels, a small blonde head above a sea of bobbing scalps. She was a whole carriage away but he stared anyway, thankful for the distance, confident that she could not tell he was looking at her. He waited for the crowd to dissipate, to uncloak her body so he could see her in full, for her to leave maybe, to abandon him and his lofty fantasy. He missed his stop and berated himself, and at the next, where the best cinemas were, the crowd on the train dispersed like a flock of pigeons, leaving the space between them mostly empty, and her revealed, resplendent in a summer dress, her face sad. More than what he had hoped for, enough it hurt because he knew he would never talk to her. She left, dressed rarely like that, for another of her best friend’s weddings. Kara collected best friends like her step brother had collected types of crisp packets, never opened, never enjoyed. The variety and promise printed upon them the sum of it. She had crushed them, cruelly, one after another, when she found them in a moving box after the first time she left Malcolm, She crushed them just to see if she would feel anything and she didn’t, not till later when the guilt finally arrived. A tear crept down one eye, she let it, thinking that no one will see and if they do see then maybe that was okay. Sol didn’t, he was too far away. When she left the carriage Sol subtly took his fist, and smacked it in slow, point blank movements against his head. He had missed his stop, he had missed her, and by imperceptible degrees he was getting more sick.
Marcie was the only one at the party who knew the extent of Sol’s illness. Being married she was only allowed to care a certain amount, that past some wavering line it was inappropriate, despite how desperately afraid he could get when they went to the park, how he let him put his head on her shoulder, held his hand, how that felt warmer than the mostly cold bed. She hadn’t seen him barrel towards her like that before, spilling wine with mad abandon. He arrived and asked her how it was going, his habit, to always start with pleasentries before he conspiratorially asked who She was, pointing towards a tall woman, blonde, who slumped in a chair, head forward, posture broken, a pint of beer clasped in both hands. Marcie knew someone that knew Kara, pointed Sol towards her and reveled at the smile on his face. He went and she watched, watched Kara laugh, then texted Mike, and left. Went home and refused to let Sam sleep, kept him up all night with a desperate passion that he hadn’t seen for two years, It brought them back together, and when she cried at the end it did not matter.
On a beach in Indonesia Sam stood, watching his wife from a distance, measuring her against the other tanned bodies and nodding in satisfaction. He struck up a conversation with a bartender, the shadow of a net falling over them both, draping their features in cross-hatches. Eventually he got to say- that’s her, over there, in the pink bikini, and they shared a moment as he whistled and nodded appreciatively. Sam’s phone vibrated and he cursed, went up towards their sea view room to call his brother when with head down he staggered into someone behind a trolley, knocked him over, realized how old the man was and apologized profusely. Sam helped him up, brought him inside his room then noticed the cut. He cleaned it up, added a band aid to the old man’s face. The old man, his face and hands gnarled, dark and lined as treebark danced over the chess set Sam and Marcie kept on their bed. They said nothing to one another and afterwards Sam stared at the chess set and almost asked the old man for a game. The moment passed and they parted.
Tirto always smoked during the sunset, from the vantage point of the hotel roof. He saw the orang putih, along with his wife, could trace their tiny movements across the sand. He liked to think they were happy, invented a story about how he was a doctor, and she a nurse, that they met in a hospital when an old man died. Someone kind perhaps. He told himself the story in his head whilst the cigarette burned down, then afterwards considered lighting another. He held the cigarette between two fingers, heard the siren and did not believe. His eyes drifted towards a horizon that seemed to be speeding towards the beach. The tourists did not know what the siren meant. Too few of the locals stayed to explain. When the tsunami came it swallowed most of them. Tirto watched the entirety of it, for hours he watched. He never did not find his doctor and nurse. Prayed for them at home. Wept for them alone. The only solace he could take from that wave was that he did not lament he would die anymore. It was a better death than those short-lived others. Months later in the hospital he realized that wave had begun far off the coast, during an earthquake but also, far before the earthquake, that wave began underneath the earth, had traveled for years across the ground, underneath, had begun a billion years ago just to obliterate all those lives. Tirto counted the waves that led them to that beach to die. The wave was a story no one could tell. There was no God in that wave. That wave itself was a spirit, one of the spirits of his grandfather that Tirto never understood till now. Tirto wondered at the waves that allowed him to arrive all the way here, on this bed, and how far back in time that wave had begun. He wanted to write this all down, wanted to tell someone the story, to make it whole and spread out, all it’s constituent parts like the sand on that beach he had spent so many hours writing on. But his throat betrayed him, his hands were weak. He died draped in the tears of those who would miss him, his last words a gurgle. 
The others, they carried on.

Flashfiction for Scifriday: Alone

What follows is a 100 word piece of flash/micro fiction for SCIFRIDAY! From the following blog:


I hope more people take a shot at this!

Picture below was inspiration, and then the story follows. I went over a little (112 words), alas. 



In ancient times it was called a railway, a sort of mass transit system. Now it was a strip of verdant beauty, a green path stretching forward. Luke took off his smart-boots, and for the first time, felt grass between his toes.

“Follow at 3 meters.”

“Okay Luke.” Came the voice, programmed to sound just like Julienne had.

It still caused Luke’s pulse to skip, her voice that followed him across such a gulf of space, and time.

Here, on Terra, alone on this graveyard of a world, Luke would spend the rest of his days. To dwell on loss, of his home in her, and all their homes that once were here.