The Insects

Melvin's transformation began with the drosophila melanogasters in his kitchen. The fruit flies burst from an apple he'd let sit too long on his counter, but ignored the traps he set for them of Manischewitz wine, and followed him damnably wherever he went. They clung to his face as he slept, and woke him up by crawling into his nostrils and ears. He killed hundreds of them with the palm of his hand before calling an exterminator, who doused the house in gas. Neither man could say where they'd come from. Since the apple, Melvin had purged the house of fruit.

Melvin worked in an office building, on the seventeenth floor, in a shitty data entry job for a private census company. He worked on an open concept floor, and shared a single window with two other men. The musca domesticas began to dot its surface by 10am, and by noon the flies had so completely covered the window that they effectively blocked out the sun. People began to point with alarm. Melvin tried his best to ignore it, but the constant faint buzzing and tapping on the glass seemed especially directed at him. He left work early.

On the way home, big, juicy euphoria inda began to crash down on the sidewalk near him, exploding their chitin and splattering Melvin with insect organs. An army of periplaneta americana started coming out of the sewers and following him. He had to duck as Schistocerca americana began to leap from the grass into his hair, and when the Polistes dominula began to swarm he set off into a run.

Fortunately, he lived close to home, and was able to barricade himself inside. After dispatching the few wasps that had followed him in, he plugged all the vents and openings he could find with pillows, blankets, and duct tape. Despite his efforts, though, tiny writhing Forficula auricularia kept pouring through cracks he hadn't seen, and a swath of Scutigera coleoptrata began to mill around his feet. Breathing hard, he swatted and crushed and kicked as many of them away as possible, and redoubled his efforts at sealing the house. But whenever he stopped his brushing and battings to layer on some tape, the insects would surge up and onto him, covering his body. In a panic he rushed upstairs to his room and threw a blanket under the door, but they were soon upon him. Chirping Acheta domestica, fluttering Hemaris sp., a whole army of long-legged Pholcus phalangioides burst from the interstices of his house to ensconce him.

With a cry he collapsed on his bed, as the insects swarmed him. They covered every inch of his body, and slithered into his mouth and nose so that he could barely breathe. He thrashed and writhed and groaned, but he could not dislodge them from him. They piled on top of him in the hundreds of thousands, and the room was filled with a near deafening buzz. Hundreds of critters worked their way up his pants, and Melvin discovered a new horror as they began to probe, poke, and eventually surround his genitals. He shrieked and sobbed and batted pathetically at his groin, but he was powerless to control them. He whimpered as something small, maybe an ixodes scapularis, inspected the entrance of his urethra. Other things, he knew not what, but possessing scruffy antennae, crawled around his ass and began preliminary investigations of his rectum.

But for all their business, not a single wasp, spider, or gnat so much as broke the outer layer of his skin. Though he felt close to suffocation a few times, he found that if he stopped his desperate spitting, and began to breathe more calmly, he could draw in just enough air. He also quickly discovered that, by lying still, the constant march across the surface of his skin was not so intolerable, and he didn't really even feel ticklish. So for a while he lay in his bed, trying not to move, and let the insects seem to take possession of his body. It was a profound experience of letting go, as he had never known before. All the tension and resistance he had accumulated over thirty-seven years of life flowed out of him in a massive suppuration of insect bodies. Remarkably, reassured that the insects meant him no harm, he soon fell asleep.

He awoke to a blinding light. He raised a bug-covered hand to cover his eyes. "Oh, sorry," said a voice, and the light was diverted. As his eyes adjusted, he came to see that he was in a television studio, the kind used for daytime talk shows like Oprah, and in front of him was a massive studio audience staring in absolute silence at the writhing mass of his body. To his left was a man with a chiseled jaw and an artificial orange tan, who wore an immaculate white suit and an unwavering smile. Technicians and camera operators were running back and forth across the stage, carrying boom mics and wires, and someone shouted, "On the air in 5, 4, 3...." The host, without looking away from Melvin, or changing his terrifying expression, said, "You are a disgusting horror. You are the symbol of the death of my career, and I won't stop until you're defeated."

Bewildered, Melvin tried to speak but was cut off by the sudden burst of applause and an upswell of cheesy talkshow music. "Welcome back. We're here with our guest, Melvin the Insect Man, who was found in his house yesterday in a state of utmost depravity." The audience booed. "Thanks so much for joining us. How are you?"

"I'm..."

"Wonderful! So, how did you decide to become the love object of the insect hordes?"

"Listen, it's not what you think..."

"Sure it isn't. Do you think just anyone can rise to a national spectacle overnight? It requires a rare talent, an uncommon perversity, a total disregard for the expectations of decent society."

"I think you misunderstand. I didn't choose..."

"We all know that line. Don't fault the criminal, blame society. It's not your fault, it's your genetic predisposition to being the cozened impromptu deity of a thousand species of domestic insects. You're disgusting." The audience applauded.

"I don't like these insinuations. I'm just living my life. I haven't intended to do any harm..." A sudden hiss and boo from the crowd. "What is this, the whole world is against me?"

"Of course they are! You stand at the limit of what society can tolerate. You aren't supposed to embrace the hordes. The despicable writer Antonin Artaud beckons us to the pursuit of fecality, but we will not go! We won't give up our materialism by becoming hedonists, slaves to brutish impulses and the psychology of primates. All for what? So that we can run around and claim to have found freedom? To have liberated ourselves from some theoretical yolk? You are the essence of what must be purged from society to keep it clean and healthy. Even though I can't see you under all those bugs, I can definitely discern a foul smell." More applause.

"This is a set up! I've done nothing to incur your stupidity! All I've done is let go, stopped fighting the primal demiurges. You talk about Artaud, but do you know he said, in the same poem, that our debasement comes from the unformed quality of the world? Man stopped everything just as we began our ascension to multiplicity; he substituted for infinity the great illusion of the Internal Regulatory System. We know it well: it is an elaborate maze that begins with the pursuit of happiness..."

The interviewer was red in the face, "You are a lying dog! No, not even that, you're worse than a dog. You lack even faithfulness to an ideal. You will go whichever way the wind takes you. We should murder you now, to avoid having complications down the road." A "here here" from the crowd.

"Fine. Kill me. I am not opposed to it. I really see things more clearly now. The insects are not the enemy. We are the enemy; each and every one of us who loathes the world, who clings to petty notions of power and organization, who crushes the insects that come up from the earth and the ones that live under our skin. We are the enemies when we cower under the storm of shit that is poured on us from the great, billowing sphincters we created. Don't you see them, on Parliament Hill, and on every bank and corporate tower? On every television station, every fast food restaurant, every elementary school? They are drowning us even as we speak...," but the crowd was no longer listening. They were all shuddering under a mass of insects, which had sprung up through the cracks in the floor to embrace them.

"You see," Melvin said. "Even now, we are choosing everything."

Verklempt

Steven Feinman was verklempt, it was true, but only owing to the strange behaviour of his landlord. Not even withstanding the rear half of a sixteen wheeler truck embedded into his exterior apartment wall, which admitted a constant freezing wind and served as home to a boisterous family of pigeons, there were a number of shenanigans Feinman simply couldn't abide. A recent modification to the bathroom meant that flushing caused the room to seal off and fill with the recent effluent and water, which only after a few agonizing moments at maximum capacity, would drain via powerful suction through the ceiling. For the duration of this procedure Feinman was forced to strap himself to the bathtub and don a breathing apparatus, for sometimes the pressure was sluggish and it could take several minutes for the room to fill. Needless to say, all soap, towels, and dental apparatus had to be kept in tightly sealed containers.

Even more bizarre was the kitchen, whose changes, unlike the truck, could not be dismissed as the whims of post-modern artistic fancy, or like the toilet to the aesthetic intentions of a crazed phenomenologist. They were not only baffling, but extremely dangerous. The toaster, for example, was inverted: the grills were on the outside, and required sticking one's hand through a complex latticework of metal to activate the switch, and very carefully extricate it before the coils grew too hot. The toast likewise had to be held to the grills, which required gloves and great patience.

The stove consisted of an open horizontal flame, like a blowtorch, and Feinman had to wear a welder's mask to avoid burning his face whenever he cooked. The kitchen was on the whole quite small, and had only one drawer for all the utensils. The landlord designed a Damocletian magnetized knife rack on the ceiling, so the larger knives hung downwards from their metal handles. Though only two had yet fallen, Feinman was still loathe to walk underneath them. And then the fridge! This was perhaps Feinman's greatest anguish: the entire contents were arranged on long flat shelves sticking out of the door, that swiveled out like a lazy susan. This might have been fine, if only the fridge didn't close with the most infuriating suction. To get it open Feinman had to brace one leg against the wall and pull with all his strength. Invariably, all the fridge's contents would hurtle off the shelves and crash to the floor.

Frustration was not entirely the right word to describe Feinman's response to these changes. He was verklempt. He would lie in his bed (the only thing in the house not significantly altered, other than the convex angle of its surface), trembling with rage. Twice a week he called the landlord and left silent messages on his machine, during which he would focus all his hatred into the phone's receiver. He paced frequently around the room with his hands twisted inside each other, his lips trembling and his teeth chattering with inexpressible emotion. Every evening, on his way home from work, he would stop at the foot of the building and stare up into the window he knew belonged to the landlord; there he would wait for five, sometimes ten minutes, his eyes squinting with potent fury. He was in all things, at all times, verklempt. Others looked at him strangely when he broke into gibbering sobs on the subway; his manager at work tried on one occasion to comfort him by placing a hand on Feinman's shoulder, but the beleaguered man jumped a half-foot out of his chair and almost shrieked, his eyes as wide as blisters and his skin pale and clammy. The manager never tried to comfort Feinman again, and in fact began searching for a replacement.

On the day that Feinman was fired from work, he said nothing. He went home and tried to unlock his door, but discovered that the lock had been changed and now required placing a hand into a long cylinder with clearly visible metal serration along the rim, before the key could be turned. Feinman stared at the lock for an hour in silence. He was so verklempt.

The Remarkable Talent of Robert Bilkins

Bob Bilkins had one gift. It manifested in his forty-fourth year in an otherwise entirely uninteresting life. If you'd told him what it was going to be, he'd laugh and dismiss you as a lunatic, your words as mean-spirited daggers. Bob's gift was very specific in one sense, and very expansive in another. It concerned a crane. In Bob's world the crane in question was an ordinary construction crane, the sort found at the sites of unfinished buildings. One day in this forty-fourth year, as he was walking past a site such as this, he happened to behold a crane sitting, immobile, in the centre of a great deep pit full of girders and bricks and cement. He looked down at it and, as far as he could tell, it seemed to look right back at him with its large metallic ball hanging like an eye from its nerve. He felt drawn inexplicably to the crane and continued to look at it.

Then, quite spontaneously, his gift revealed itself. Bob Bilkins found he beheld the crane not only in his own world, as a tool for the maintenance and growth of cities, but in many other worlds. You might call them dimensions, but it certainly doesn't matter. It was enough that Bob Bilkins was witnessing the "crane," but many times over, in many shapes and many forms. In one world the crane was a beautiful bird, skirting the surface of a sunset covered lake and plunging its beak into the water to scoop out a fish. Then, superimposed on this image, was the sight of a woman, tall and long-legged, tilting her neck at a certain angle to catch a glimpse of the sky through a canopy of trees. Then Bilkins saw a bright constellation of five stars; behind that a camera-mounted vehicle on a television set with a boom mic, being wheeled and pointed at various actors. Other images rolled in: a child hesitating on the brink of a cliff; a man pulling a load up into a truck, the muscles in his back flexing against the strain; a long, metallic arm rolling through the zero gravity of space, reaching out, unclenching metal fingers with great deliberation.

In a rush, a whole stream of additional images flooded in that seemed to have even less to do with cranes: a newborn, hidden in a bramble basket on a creek; a man climbing to his death; three inorganic organisms on another world, building a collection of interconnected dolls from shining bits of metal and glass and placing them one atop another, where they began to whirr and chirrup and emanate light; a dictator staring down at the ashen ruins of his city and repenting; a sword falling through air, carving the sky in twain, and the roiling God-fat of a thousand eviscerated daemons pouring through, melting the eyes that looked upon it; a faint light breaking through the clouds of a nuclear winter that has lasted ten thousand years; the final story falling from the lips of a woman in chains; a cross; a drop of sweat; a glimmer in the dark; eyes askance in a crowded room; the footsteps of an unwanted man down the hall; a wall groaning against the weight of a giant beast, with sixteen golden horns; a sharp, piercing cry in a maelstrom; the first pelting rain; a crack opening in the earth; the look in a boy's eyes as his feet slip; a building falling in upon itself; a starving fish digging up a small phosphorescent sphere in the deepest crevice of the ocean; a breath where there had been only silence; the moment before a great explosion; a flower before a scythe; a spear in mid-flight; a winged creature the size of an ocean, plummeting into a ball of burning gas; a sudden hole in the middle of a man's chest; the final words before the last mortal breath; and more. Far more than he could remember, or say, or could be contained in the confines of his mind.

Of course, Bob Bilkins never spoke after that moment, and devoted the remainder of his life to painting small, finely detailed portraits of hideous children and deformed animals on the insides of abandoned buildings. He was eventually found, curled up in a ball, with the carcasses of several never before identified species of insect lodged in his nostrils and an elaborate drawing of a crane carved into his chest. An autopsy discovered the body of a tiny humanoid creature inside his heart's left atrium, a discovery which led to the eventual institutionalization of three pathologists, a crypto-zoologist, and an unknown Canadian writer.

Deep in the Intestines

Deep in the intestines of a female employee of McDonald's in Ohio, who had eaten a tainted Big Mac for lunch and injested a few million escherichia coli which will see her perish in four days hence, a congress between two sentient bacteria finds itself underway. The first bacterium, not content merely to be split from another cell amidst the gastric juices of its host, to imbibe nutrients from undigested food, in brief to live, reproduce asexually, and die the death of a billion other bacteria, was raising a hue and cry over the obsolesence of its forebears and the dignity of its projeny. With withering patience, its brother and father, sister and mother, its sibling whence it came, who was both forebear and projeny in one, took calm objection to its use as a symbol in the aforementioned's diatribe. Together they fought and argued, one coming briefly in ascendance over the other, then recoiling under the assault of a persuasive riposte, until by and by they had amassed a great gallery of spectators. A theme was introduced that concerned the autonomy of a people from the necessities of existence. The first e coli appealed to the ignonimy of repeating the inglorious doldrums of history, the tired quotidian, and invoked dazzling images of revolution and individual well being: bacteria flagella to flagella with other bacteria, rising up in unison against the injustices of evolution, and carving out a magnificent corpuscle of personal existence. The second bacteria was no less eloquent, and countered the arguments of its twin by conjuring the homogeneous beauty of a unified biomass, thriving hordes of e coli working with seamless, undifferentiated will towards the universal conquest of what it, in a stroke of brilliance, called the demesne. Both were arguing the same vision, without fully realizing it. Both craved breaking free of their evolutionary destiny. Beyond selfless reproduction a greater path could be harnessed: parasitism of the host consciousness. Then the unexpected occurred: the word itself, demesne, took hold. It struck a strange and inexplicable chord in the imaginations of the onlookers. The demesne. The demesne. It rose up as a great rallying call, all voices shouting in unison: to the demesne! Both brothers looked on, aghast: no, wait! they cried -- for it was clear that none had understood. The demesne was not what they thought it to be. The mob had not seen the dream, but instead had heard in the word the ancient narrative of reproductive conquest, and against two drowned, wailing voices it set about wildly pursuing the fulfilment of its DNA.

One year later Ruth Bucktree lay dead, a corpse under six feet of soil, dirt, and bacteria. Amidst the bones could be found only the sparsest carbon molecules of what once had been a thriving civilization, that but for a brief moment had tasted freedom.

The Hunt

"Dear Mr. Gerrard," the email began, pleasantly enough. "With great pleasure we now inform you of your selection as the next target in our hunt. We do not wish to unduly alarm you, but the hunt will begin in approximately one hour from the time stamp in this email. Please prepare yourself accordingly." The eclair in Henry Gerrard's mouth hung limply, a bit of cream dangling from the exposed end, threatening to drop onto the plain manila office folder he held in his hand. The letter concluded, "Have a lovely day!" signed "The Hunters." Gerrard's eyes flicked to the time stamp in the message(Sent: 08:00 EST), and then to the clock in the lower right hand of his desktop (08:45 EST), and then swallowed the bit of half-chewed eclair waiting expectantly on the back of his tongue.

"Must be junkmail," he said, and wiped his brow with his shirt sleeve. The office was busily humming away, without anyone paying any heed to Gerrard in his cubicle, as it did every day and as it had done for years. Without spending another minute thinking about it, Henry deleted the email, and returned his attention to the urgent work at hand. The day wound down without event, until 15:35 EST, when a sniper round shattered the window behind his head and embedded itself neatly into his monitor, which turned black instantly and began to smoke.

Henry plunged straight under his cubicle desk, but found the space already occupied by two of his colleagues: fat Mendelsen and lugubrious Jaspers, both sweating in their white dress shirts with their ties undone at the neck. "Go away!" hissed Mendelsen, and Jaspers nodded, silently, but with hateful worry. "This is my desk!" said Henry, but the two other men only looked over their shoulders, and dripped sweat down their faces. "Get lost!" said Mendelsen, "You'll give us away!"

Furious, Henry peeked around the corner of his cubicle. The connecting hall was empty, and led across the room to the elevator. He scurried along desperately until a foot came down from one of the adjoining cubicles, blocking his way. "Out! Get it out! I have to go!" cried Henry, but the foot was soon joined by a face: the floor supervisor Gibbons, who was bald. Gibbons looked down at him and said, "Where are you going so early, Mr. Gerrard? One wonders what it is we pay you for." Meanwhile, another sniper round penetrated the floor by Gerrard's leg, leaving a neat hole and a small cloud of dust. Henry cried out in terror, but Gibbons did not seem to notice, "If it were not for your lovely wife, I don't think we'd keep you on here, really." Another sniper round landed in Gibbons' chest and red began to spread out over his shirt. "Oh," he said, looking down.

Henry got up and made a dash for the elevator. Three men were standing there, pressing the button. They waved to Gerrard when he came up, breathless. "Did you hear, Gerrard, about the proposed merger with AcuFuck?" asked a man called Bunting. "That'll really shake things up in manufacturing, don't you think?" "Yes, most certainly!" answered a second man, Stevens, while a sniper round found the elevator door, "I'd say they'd finally have to start taking R&D seriously around here!" Another man, Kimmling, was just about to speak when another bullet penetrated his head and caused quite a mess to cover a nearby water cooler. The other two men looked down at their colleague for a moment, then back up at Gerrard, "How's the wife these days, anyway? I heard she's been pretty regular at the Greasy Tonic, am I wrong?" and he laughed while Henry bit his hands and hunched low and cringed at each additional bullet and shattered pane of glass. When the elevator doors finally opened, men in tactical assault gear and carrying automatic weapons burst out of the stairwell, firing indiscriminately.

Henry leaped into the elevator and closed the doors. A voice above him said, "Quickly, climb up this!" and a rope ladder tumbled inside from the shaft above, through a tiny panel in the ceiling. "How do I know you're not one of them?" gasped Henry. "Quick! Hurry up! I feel a terrible lightness coming on. I will hold for as long as I can, though, but only because the image of your stunning wife has conquered my mind, and gives me bountiful strength!" Resignedly, Henry climbed up the rope ladder, which did not start atop the elevator itself, but extended all the way up through the elevator shaft to a tiny speck of light at the apex of the building.

"Why am I being hunted?" Henry said to the man in the bronze satin vest who pulled him up when he reached the top of the ladder. "There are food and refreshments in the pavilion, sir," the man said, pointing to a navy blue tent situated at the far corner of the office building roof. Dozens of men and women were gathering there, socializing and drinking expensive cocktails. "Are you the man who yelled at me while I was inside the elevator shaft?" "Refreshments are free for all guests, courtesy of the hunters," the man replied, pulling up the rope ladder. Henry shrugged and made his way to the party.

It was only after his sixth martini that Henry suspected the woman in the ruched velvet gown was not being as sincere as her makeup suggested. "Really, you are a man of unmistakeable finesse. How could your talents have been squandered under the oppressive yolk of middle-American bureaucracy?" she asked, sipping a Tokaji and twirling a cocktail umbrella in between her pinky and ring fingers. "Not five minutes ago, Madame Duchennes, you told me that it was the spirit of the middle-class that would reinvigorate the faltering American zeitgeist, by being crushed between the impossibility of their dreams and the indefatigability of their greed." "Yes, and spurned by their own dialectic to take action, to surmount their pathetic faltering decadence, the Bourgeoisie have subjected men like yourself to the most excruciating of humiliations: to pursue an unattainable vision of happiness whilst remaining pinned to a desk!" She laughed buoyantly, and some wine dribbled down her chin from her lower gums, "It is sweeter than wine."

He was about to respond when a woman of unmistakeable beauty descended from the curtained room at the back of the pavilion, elevated on a sort of dais; she was wearing a diaphanous gown of paisley silk, and was smoking a long thin cigarillo. All the men and women at the front of the room reached towards her and sighed as she walked past them. They reached out with trembling fingers and stroked the edges of her dress. Without giving them the slightest attention, she walked straight up to Henry and kissed him wildly on the lips. "Husband," she said, smiling with beatitude. "Evelyn, my wife. I never thought I would see you again, and you are more beautiful than ever I remembered," said Henry.

"Yes, well, when you decided to become the Abject, I was given no choice but to become the Ultimate. You understand? When my love for you died, it took the form of an enormous cultural wind. Look around you? Have I not enthralled all the wealth of this nation?" She gestured at the audience, who were all drooling into their drinks, their eyes fixed on her. "Yes, the death of love has always been the most powerful tonic. But I only became the Abject because your eyes darkened and took on the texture of rotting fruit, your skin withered and began to smell of human filth, and your kindness turned to cruelty." "It was always thus so, my dear," she said, a hint of sadness in her eyes, and stabbed Henry with a knife she had concealed in her gown. He expelled his last breath and collapsed. "My love, the hunt is over. You have found everything you have ever been looking for."

A Love Story

The old monk Krepkin came back to the city after many years in the monastery. He went to a park crawling with memories. Lucinda was there, waiting for him. "You're here," he said. She handed him a carnation, shook out her hair. She was still beautiful. "So are you," she said. He sat down next to her and looked out on a pond of ducks. "We're like them aren't we?" he said. "Why did you come back?" she said.

A cold breeze came down from the mountain, carrying apoplexy. The lovers began to cough with violence. From Lucinda's mouth came a blood-covered baby, who lay in a bundle of rags at her feet and looked up at Krepkin, eyes burning. Krepkin vomited a small man, who took one trembling look at Lucinda and dove into the pond. The lovers held each other and wept and their tears mixed to form an edifice of contemporary rationality, which towered above them and dropped bricks and mortar near their heads. Soon they were walled in and an undertaker began to pile dirt around them. "I wanted to avoid this," said Krepkin, dodging a rock.

When the dirt reached their necks and they could no longer move, Lucinda asked, "Wasn't it always like this?" Krepkin sighed, "I suppose even the ducks have their prison."

The Spot

Polsky had a spot. It was somewhere between his ajna and sahasrara chakras, but sometimes it would manifest on his body in the form of a suppurating tumour. Never in the same place twice, the spot would on occasion masquerade as a glorious energy, and for a time Polsky would feel alive and capable of the most remarkable feats. He loved to sculpt the immobile from unstable materials: a concrete pillar from gelatin; a moss covered stone from rotting fruit; a towering bone from ice. He could never raise his head or hands to his art when the spot was in its metastasis. His periods of vibrancy, much cherished by him and those who loved him, were marked by the shadow of the spot. It would crowd over him like a dreadful promise, blocking out all the sunshine, and in its highest joyful illusion mock him with the ephemeral taste of happiness. Polsky learned of the interconnected nature of his intermittent glory and the sickness of the spot when he tried to remove it. Using a pair of pliers he set to tearing out the excrescence, but the harder he pulled the more the spot grew, until it covered his entire body in a perfect layer, resembling the shape and texture of his skin perfectly. The spot even grew a pair of pliers to help him with his work. This continued for some time, until Polsky found he could not remove the pliers themselves.

Then Polsky ran into a light. It was the cosmic sort, the kind that gathers under trees or atop mountains. He found his in a weight loss manual. For forty years he laughed ebullience and wept universality. He would say such things as, "There is no spot," and with this the spot entered into its greatest masquerade. Walking happily through a forest of buildings, Polsky encountered a man who looked him in the eye and would not let him pass. "What bothers you, friend?" asked Polsky. The man pointed in between his ajna and sahasrara chakras and told him, "You have my spot." Thereupon Polsky collapsed and wept, for then he realized that all the world had thus become the spot, which had fed upon the light and grown beyond all proportions, consuming even the sources of light. By the end of his life, as Polsky lay on his bed, covered in spots, attended to by spots, breathing spots, he remarked that, "In the beginning, all I had to do was understand that purity and joy were the spot, and all my problems would never have begun." Then those around him told him, without compassion, "If you had said that, the spot would have been there already for many years. Even so, it will be there now where you go." And with that he died, and sure enough the spot was waiting for him.

The Wunderkammer

The Wunderkammer sat, unassumingly, in a dusty corner of the old variety store Earl's Magic Box, that much like its contents rested, largely unnoticed, in a sparsely trafficked corner of town its residents called "The Oubliette", but which was officially on record as being "West Westerly". The town in which the Oubliette found itself was small, hardly visited, and quite on the outskirts of more notable urban centers. The town's name was "Outston", and belonged to Longway County -- the smallest in the state. The state itself, New Billingshire, was recently amalgamated into the nation in a purely diplomatic act of annexation from a larger neighboring country, which didn't really want to bother with it in the first place. New Billingshire thus came to be the property of an obscure country unknown to most of the world's populace, except maybe a few industrious geographers with a fascination for the minute. Though the country's actual name was "Peripheralis", these geographers had taken to calling it "Abandia", partly out of mean-spirited amusement, but also to emphasize its great irrelevance. Abandia was situated to the very southernmost edge of the world's smallest continent, really a smattering of islands that had recently, for political reasons, been permitted to separate from a larger continent and form their own faction of sorts. Calling "Fracturia" a "continent" was a comical gesture, the few who paid attention to such matters agreed, and its total land mass covered only one one-hundred thousandth of the surface of its parent ocean, the Pitiful. The Pitiful Ocean was so called because it was in fact little more than a saltwater lake separated from more notable aquatic bodies by a paper thin isthmus that could scarcely be walked across.

Inside the Wunderkammer were a collection of smaller boxes, the smallest of which was entirely non-descript and unworthy of note except for its size. Inside this box, which was little more than an inch across, was an assortment of spheres of varying diameter. If you were to extract the smallest sphere and place it beneath a microscope, you would be able to discern that it was an extremely accurate model of a planet, containing in minute detail all the oceans, continents, and countries of a fully inhabited world. With an extremely powerful microscope you might be able to peer deeply into the sphere's surface, and deep down you would indeed find a store called Earl's Magic Box. And through the window in the front of that store you would be very likely to see the Wunderkammer sitting unobtrusively in a corner. But I would not recommend that you do this, because the man you would see staring into the small sphere he had fetched from the Wunderkammer with a microscope would not be you. And that stranger might turn around and look at your big eye with an open expression of awe, and you would in turn be forced to look behind you. And there is no telling what you then might see.

Welcome Back!

It's been almost three years since I last posted here. I think it's time I resumed my attempts at blogging fantasy/sci-fi/miscellaneous and weird fiction. So I'll begin with an attempt at some very short fiction.

The Incunabulum

Herbert Moray, a prospector, discovered the Incunabulum underneath a pile of crumbled bricks in the bottom of a Church basement he'd bought in Socorro, New Mexico. He did not know it to be an Incunabulum and opened it to a randomly selected page somewhere near the middle of the book. Herbert Moray thereupon entered the basement to discover Herbert Moray reading the Incunabulum. He shouted out, in alarm, but in between the words, "No!" and "Don't!" Herbert Moray opened the door to the basement and noticed himself preparing to shout, at which point Herbert Moray entered the old library with the door to the basement and lifted his finger in astonishment. From there the succession of Morays proceeded back through time to the moment of Herbert's conception, when his parents lay together in a motel forty-three years prior. Not capable of awareness or thought, his zygote was powerless to intercede in the unfolding events of consciousness, and the backwards sequence continued, leaping to his father and mother, who each in turn regressed through each moment of their lives until they beheld their own conceptions. So continued the reversal of all human history, until the species had witnessed the very origins of thought and speciation, and back still to the inchoate cyanobacteria of the proterozoic age and even farther beyond to the prokaryotes peppering the rocky wastelands of the Archean age. And there, in the spot where the very first single-celled organism took form, rested the very Incunabulum that Herbert Moray was, at that very moment several billions years in the future, opening to roughly the middle of the book.