Bliss of the Numb

"Bliss of the Numb"

a short story

Gary Baker, January and April 2016

"Look, kid, its like this," the man in white crossed his arms and leaned back, "whats in here" he hit his chest suddenly with a closed fist "aint nothin but sissy bullshit, and nothin more." The younger of the two perked his lips to one side and looked away quietly as the older man went on.

"See, some will tell you its natural to let go of this sissy shit where the world can see, you follow?" He took a drag of his coffee, black and thick as molasses, before leaning back once more to watch his companion from across the wire table. "I met writers who did that and you know what it got them besides weaknesses the world could see?" 

There was a long silence between them as the older man waited. Eventually the younger glanced back over and shrugged. "Does it even matter?"

"Ha!" The elder exclaimed. "Now you're getting it!" He followed the younger man's gaze out across the void and let his eyes also linger there. "Anyway, all I'm sayin is that what you're feelin right now? Don't even try to talk about it. Hold that shit in, kid. Ain't anyone want to hear about it, and thats for damn sure."

The younger man looked to his companion with a sudden scowl, "this is why there are alcoholics in the world. Because of people like you who think it helps to hide what we feel."

"You've got a point, kid," the old man grunted. "But I'd much rather be an alcoholic for life than a sissy bitch any day of the week."

The scowl turned to a glare, then to a look of a man unsure. He turned again to look away from his elder, his back to the other people who'd come out and about once more. He shrugged "it's your move."

Without looking, the man in white reached over and shifted a pawn to take the younger man's rook. From there he sat back and grunted. "Now whats on your mind, Echo?"

Echo, the younger of the two, shot the old man a wicked glance. "Nothing that concerns you, old man. I thought you made that clear already."

The old man smiled. "Now thats what I'm talking about. You jus' keep whats up here-" he pointed to his temple with one hand while drawing up his coffee with the other "-up here and nowhere else." He took a long drink from his steaming mug, then shrugged as he finally pulled it away, "any time you start to be a wuss-ass just tell yourself 'out of your head', now, hear?"

The old man had a point, or so Echo was starting to believe. For far too long he, himself, had been opening up his every daydream, fantasy, and all else to the only person in his life who would truly listen... even when she clearly shut her ears to it by her own annoyances personified. Echo knew what he had been telling her was wrong to say out loud, that every time he told her of some fanatical daydream involving just another pretty pair of eyes she had been thinking he wanted to leave her for something better, but that wasn't his intent at all.

"I just wanted her to know what was going on in my head," Echo sighed.

"Hey!" The old man shot, "Pansy!" Again he leaned over the chessboard and snapped his fingers, "Lookit me, you bitch-ass!" Finally Echo pulled out of his depressed space-out and looked to his angered companion. "What. Did I. Just say? Eh?"

Echo opened his mouth to respond and was shut down midway through his first syllable.

"No! I'm talkin', Wuss-Ass, don't interrupt. I said 'any time you start to be a-' what?" He paused for a moment, as though prompting the young man. "Start to be a what, kid?"

"A bitch," Echo answered.

"Very funny, but thats not what I said. I said 'any time you start to be a wuss-ass, you jus' tell yourself...?" Again he prompted his chess partner. "What?"

"Get out of my head!" Echo yelled.

Suddenly, blinking his eyes, Echo became all-too aware that he was sitting at a park bench alone, with people all around him. They watched him sit in the shade of the public park's namesake sycamore tree as though he were tricked out on drugs, as though he were more of a junkie than an emotional-wreck. Quickly he shot his hand to his bag sitting beside him, then threw himself into a brisk walk along the cobbled pathway leading back to the road.

Even as he practically tore out of earshot, Echo knew the moms who'd been staring at him while their kids played Pirates on the jungle-gym were already talking among themselves about how bad this side of town was getting these days. He knew they would point to the various political rifts in society and claim it was all to blame on this person or that policy. Who cared what they talked about, though? Why would Echo feel the need to seek understanding by them?

With his bag firmly thrown over his shoulder, the young man strode out to the edge of the parkway. It was high time he focused. It was high time he re-purposed this farce of a life he was living. Maybe the old man was right. Maybe Echo just needed to let the anger wash over him, to let the wuss-ass sadness be overcome by enraged alcoholism and stoicism. Life was nothing but suffering these days, but that didn't mean he had to bow down and accept the pain without agents to numb it.

Quintet

"Quintet"

an epilogue

Gary Baker, October 2013

(the ultimate end to my largest project?)

Roi gasped as air was choked from his lungs, the upright beast leader of the invading army holding ringed fingers firmly circumferential to the dangling human’s ever-closing airways. The creature clearly led by powerplay, it’s muscles strangled into bunched masses, tied here and there with metal chain-like cords that had been woven into the thick muscles themselves with weights hanging haphazardly as though at the end of fishing lines caught in the beasts arms. The armor was intense enough as is, without the gold and jade debris cinched deep into the tissues of exposed flesh.

Roi could see where chains had been torn free, whether from being caught by stray palms in fistfights or by being deliberately torn free by the beast who bore them, leaving gruesome scars behind that often came close to bisecting an entire limb. The invasion force, Roi thought, was far more primal than anything humanity had ever been. They had bred themselves this way, in as parallel a path in evolution as cognition was to humans.

Then the pain really hit home, knocking the wind remaining in Roi’s lungs into the back of his throat, only to be blocked by the pressure of the tense grip, which only caused an even worse need to expel that air and reciprocated until the man was sure he was going insane right then and there. The burning of his eyes grew hotter and worse yet, the evidence of his eyes bulging began to show even in his already hazy sightlines as the world picked up a fisheye lens effect, and his hearing all but turned to heavy lub-dubs as the blood in his ears threatened to break free at his eardrums.

The pain intensified, growing stronger while somehow -- astonishingly -- further away. It was as though he and the pain of his own undoing were standing on separate trains once side-by-side and now veering away from each other. The throb began to pulse in his eyes and lessened as much as his vision began to lighten into cloud white. The stammer in his chest beat a constant bulbous beat, but his skin was tingling enough that even deep inside he could feel almost nothing. The grip on his throat pushed closer to being just finger muscles touching messy finger muscles, but Roi was almost certain it wasn’t even his body part anymore.

The scream he heard through bleating eardrums should have been his, but the wind had long since turned to hot ash and therefore couldn’t possibly be coming from him. It must have been someone else, someone nearby.

In a flash of white, Roi and his other train-self were severed completely, on railside vehicle suddenly disappearing behind the stark white walls of endless light and undisturbed abyss. He felt his eyes flicker, then, and his fingers twitch. He heard the dull ache of a familiar voice nearby and turned what felt like well-oiled gears to find himself staring at none other than a smiling Agent Bond, in the artificial flesh.

Welcome back, Bond seemed to say, though no movement of the man’s lips were seen, I trust you come across well?

Roi stared, confused. What was this? Where was he? Had the others saved him and brought him to the hospital?

No, nothing like that, Bond replied, and still Roi gaped at how the man could communicate without moving his lips nor using any sort of speaker system. It was as though Bond were displaying his words directly into Roi’s brain. At that, the agent smiled wanly. Close enough.

Where am I? Roi tried to ask with vocal cords that seemed not to work.

Bond nodded and turned away and into the abyss, trailing his voice as he spoke, again without moving his lips. You are in a state of download, just now, Roi. Be patient. I know it’s a long time, but in merely point zero zero seven five microseconds everything will be as can be expected.

Download? The man stopped, unaware that he had even been moving in the first place. What do you mean, ‘download’?

The agent’s laugh was impenetrably awkward in the void of light, each echo made into endless miniature echoes until the whole of existence seemed to be made of them, the tiny echoes of a laugh made by a man who wasn’t even real. Let us be straight right now, Roi. You died.

I… I died?

Yes, and you don’t very well expect me to have lost such a mind, do you? Bond looked cross, blue eyes fixed on Roi in a hallucinatory, dark gaze. Just then the white started to fade ever darker, until Roi saw where he was, standing in the middle of the chamber Bond had asked him never to venture, a chamber that, until now it seemed, Roi had kept his word about. You see, Bond lifted eyebrows high in a world that seemed both static and slow in the same instant, I, alone, cannot traverse the galaxies with just one mind. I need others to take my place. In this case, I am called Omega, something you humans have gotten wrong for much too long, and you are now called Quintet, with just one other having been made between our creations.

I don’t get it.

Bond laughed, again making that tinny reverberant noise, like a mosquito caught at the point of a massive tin funnel. We never do in the first few microseconds. Let me say this much, though: you are the seventeenth player, and we have only a handful more before the game can begin anew.

Roi fanned out his thoughts, trying to comprehend, only finding empty space and endless facts and tidbits that he never knew could exist at so close a range to his thoughts. The further he reached, the wider Bond -- Omega’s smile went. And then he got it, understanding the whole of the universe faster than Neo had learned kung-fu.

This really was a game -- but it wasn’t between civilizations, per-se, but between the artificial minds behind those civilizations. Each time another race was added to the mix, another mind was captured and put to the test in an all-out game of intergalactic command, expand and conquer until all necessary players had been gathered.

Only afterward, however, could the real game begin; the game to be the last intelligence alive, surviving the downfall of other races and only capable of dying when one’s entire race had been eliminated.

Now do you understand?

All except for one thing, Roi tilted his head to the side in wonder.

Yes?

Why did you bring me into this? If playing the game means you die in the end if you don’t win, why add in other players that might become your downfall?

Omega lifted an eyebrow high as though mocking Quintet’s thought process and all the systematic hardware that enabled such mechanisms possible. Because playing with the same minds all the time tends to get very, incredibly boring more often than not. In fact I look forward to the day that another player may become my downfall, for that day, alone, would be something far newer than anything I could possibly imagine.

My Lurid Escape

“My Lurid Escape”

a short story

Gary Baker, August 2014

I remember the sun as it drew across the room, and how I wanted it to stop for one goddamn moment and how I needed the light. I remember the sweetly wafting tendrils of the whiskey beneath my nose, and the way it stung while it enticed. Then came the taste as I lifted the glass and brought some in for further inspection, and the way it was so wonderfully opposite to the scent. In this case, I needed the numbness.

Holding my arm tight, I brought the knife from the jar of rubbing alcohol and set down the tip on an incongruous point of my arm.  I put it where I would have no fear of arteries or the like, no fear of tendons that could be sawn in half, just muscle and a bit of fat with skin in the way. I had to hold a small tasting bottle of scotch with my arm just so it wouldn't twitch on me like a mad soldier under the knife back in the twenties, doing so also kept me focused on my task. I wasn't leaving this be until I'd seen blood.

One drop, I told myself. One drop and I'm done. No more.

So it began.

I pushed in and felt the electric sting, which prevented me from pushing further when it became strong enough to bring stars to my eyes. So I swashed the knife in the clear liquid again and brought it to the pinprick once more. This time I would do it. This time for sure.

Again I felt the sting, the jolt of helpless denial that my body seemed intent on screaming, as though it thought I were some killer from the movies all but unstoppably drawn by the busty blonde with the dagger in hand as he came for her. It seemed to think I could be stopped, though, just like how in those movies the killer can always be talked out of it, perhaps even delayed until some force of nature or police or something could intervene. But not me. Not this time.

I was only here for a drop, after all. No more.

What was the worst that could happen, I asked myself.

I pushed harder and was immobilized by pain, so instead chose to draw rather than push. I laid the blade down lengthwise along the point I'd made, and pulled ever so slightly. While this didn't bring the pain, it also didn't bring the desired gleam of crimson. So I did it again, pushing harder, drawing more forcefully, watching as hairs atop the skin were sliced and the skin broke free layer after layer.

For a moment there I became frustrated enough to saw at my arm. The drawing wasn't doing anything, and this was the sharpest blade I had in the house, sharper than any of the steak knives or such like that, and although they weren't exactly sharpened by a professional they could more than handle the tasks they were made for. Unlike me. Unlike this knife at that moment.

I cleaned the knife again in the alcohol and took a serious swig of the eighty-proof off to the side, downing it like floor cleaner. Delicious cinnamon burned from all angles, evaporating even as I swallowed, or so it felt like. What liquid made it down my throat was dry and searingly wonderful, and my soonest exhale brought gasps of intake as though I'd just swallowed a real fireball. My lips stung with the sweet burn and I allowed my arm the moment to relax as I enjoyed the taste once more, licking it off like a psychotic cannibal tasting flesh after years without.

Then, determined as the numbness moved across my cheeks and into my scalp, I retook the knife and shook the alcohol from it. I brought it to my arm again where that last drop splished on the skin. It was like a magnifying glass. Suddenly I could see into the wound I had made. And I could see quite easily how I still had yet to break the skin. My arm wasn't numb enough yet, I learned then. Haltingly, I retried the piercing method. This time it went in further, but felt no more like cutting a steak than it did like cutting sailcloth. I saw the tip pushed down into my arm, but there was no blood.

This angered me more than I can say. I became overwhelmed by this urge to push it in all the way, all three inches of steel, just to find out if I were even human. Already I had pushed it it more than a millimeter and I could see just where the skin ended, or so I thought, but still nothing so pink as the pastel blossom of a 'naked lady' could be seen. Instead all I was given was an ugly white-ish tone and the jawbreaker-like layers of my skin.

Another swig of whiskey, then.

This next time I knew I had already broken skin, so I chose not to redo the annoyingly tedious task, and instead began sawing at the end of the fissure already made. It worked for a moment, and then I hit something, something threadlike and tight which wouldn't let me cut further no matter how much I sawed at it. So, decidedly believing it to be a small capillary of sorts, I turned the knife around and pulled at the string from the other end. It took a moment to get down that far again, but when I did I knew I had something.

So I slid the blade along behind the thread from the more shallow of wounds and pushed away from myself with hardly enough force to cut into a fly. I wanted the blade to do the work for me, not the other way around. If I had to use brute tactics for this I may as well have tried doing so with a pencil or a pen, perhaps.

For some time the two objects just wouldn't part ways. I had the thread peeking close to the skin layer, stretched from it's depths in my fattier layers one millimeter deeper, with the alarmingly not-as-sharp-as-Id-thought blade tip. Then, as I pondered taking another swig big enough to fill my mouth, I felt a release, and my knife flew free with only enough momentum to jolt my hand.

At first nothing else happened. I grew angry for a moment, knowing I had snapped some thread within me, yet seeing not a hint of blood. After all the minor pain I had endured, I still hadn't gone deep enough. So I retook the blade after swashing it about again and settled myself to no more drinking until I'd seen a drop. This time it only took a second or two of dragging the tip through the opened crevice before I got something.

Deep, dark and nearly brown, I watched particles stream down from the alcohol filled wound opening. Odd, I thought, and cleared the fissure to allow more. When I did so, I pulled from it a mat of congealed brownness that looked more like mud residue than a scab. So I redipped the blade in the alcohol and once again slid along the bottom of the opening until I got what I was looking for.

Barely a single drop came bubbling out, then nothing, then one more and nothing shortly after. I just stared as it did this little routine until finally it clocked in me that this was from the pulsation of some vein inside my arm, near the surface, that was releasing blood with every beat of my heart.

By then the sun had moved across the table and no longer had me in its sights. I moved things on the table and shifted places then, so I could see, and watched as half-congealed blood was pushed through the cut into the real world little by little despite how deep it was I had dug. The fascination grew. I placed my arm atop a paper towel and rest it there while the blood barely dripped down. Every second or so I had to re-clear the wound so it could drip once more, but each time I did the numbness came and allowed me the act before coming again with the pulsation. By this time my arm had an ugly line moving to the towel, pocked with particulates and dried blood in the path of more coming down little by little.

I cleared the line again and felt the rocky roughness of the bottom, so I dug deeper, seeking more to this flow, and yet each time I pulled the knife away it seemed the wound had pressed itself into closure again and that the only way I could see more blood was by pulling one side from the other. So I did. I placed two fingers upon my arm, one to either side of the line, and pushed the lips of the wound away from the other. Blood would come for a moment, and then I had to clear the drying debris once more.

Finally I sat back, relieved somehow, feeling lighter, more real. Somehow the druggy sluggishness of my life had seeped just slightly further away, enough that I could see what the sluggishness was. I looked upon my act and smiled. This was all for that smile, I knew, for that sense of satisfaction for once and, knowing that it was small enough not to be questioned, I sighed with contentment.

No one would notice. No one would know.

Not even my girlfriend would ask me where I got it from, nor the more problematic questions of why I had done it. For once I had a dark secret to hide, and for some reason this made me giddy. I felt the queer throes of withheld laughter inside, threatening to come forth, and knew that this secret, while dangerous in the eyes of those in my life, may have just given me the escape that I needed. I knew then that this would be a return act, an addiction of my very own, could I only get over the nervous pain.

Perhaps, I thought musingly, next time I might try harder alcohol before digging in.

* * *

[NOTE FROM THE WRITER]

[August 31, 2014; 2:30 AM]

--> So I wanted to put this out there in the realm of the real, that this work is a piece of nonfiction, and that it was written in what I had thought my lowest point in mind.

Turns out that was anything but true.

I'd sworn it was a one-off deal, that that lone drop (or in all truth, that lone dripping run of quickly-dried crimson) would be the last. Yet such isn't so. I have drawn again. I have drawn my skin open again, to the point of several drops, each more red than the last.

They started out as a brownish hue, like dirt had been globbed in my veins and this was somehow releasing mud from within me. While it felt as if this were absolute truth, I know it was all psychological, and altogether with such knowledge I still cannot figure out what this is all for. I cannot say why I do this, nor what has brought me to it.

Sure I can point to the increasing mental stress lately, about the point at work where I simply broke and resigned despite numerous bills to pay and loans to make installments on. I can also point to those very bills for this. I can show many moments of doubt as deep as the neurons carrying these words to the fingers as they type away here for you all. I can convey so many moral wrongdoings in my world done unto others as well as myself, all focused upon this one lone life and how many it meets along the way to the final end. I can tell anyone who asks of the struggles I face each and every day and how anxiety meets stress so thick it drowns, and how when I actually open my fearful eyes I can see nothing to truly be afraid of, and how this then makes me feel so insignificant and small-minded that I just want to die to be over it all.

Yes, I am a horrible human being. Yes, I take things out on myself that should never have blame set upon anyone and, yes, I know these things to be fallacies in all truth, but that notion doesn't make them any less strong, any less wondrously vivid when push comes to shove. When I see these minuscule things emerge from behind the magnifying glass, like a cartoon bug walking on a scientists desk, instead of acting out against them to rid them of my life I take it out on myself in turn for ever having thought them large in the first place.

So for any out there who understand this... this piece is for you.

I have begun in earnest lately. I started with what turns out to have been a dull knife, that or just way too broad for the task. Now I yearn to distance myself from the razor removed from a box-cutter, cleaned and sanitized with high-grade rubbing alcohol. I found myself doing this even in plain view of Meaghan as she watched a show online earlier. When asked about it, I blame a cat, after having added so many others around the larger ones so as to appear so. Each burns, yes, but each also relieves some tension as I remember how the razor bypassed my sensory objection to pain and alleviated some in its place.

I still am not quite sure why I do this, however, even as I wonder where I should place the next one so its not obvious come daylight. I should admit now, though, that none of these go very deep other than that first time. With the razor in poised delicate-gripped fingertips I fear of going too far and not realizing it until its much too late. Thus I only go, so to speak, skin-deep. I go until I see a neat, crisp line of red, and then stop cutting deeper and focus on letting no scab appear. I scrape it away with the flat of the blade to allow the line to stay longer, to allow it that final course down my forearm and onto the paper towel lain beneath.

Now what was once a dream of mine, a worry without cause but a worry nonetheless, has now become much more tangible and real. I can now truly fear going too deep and doing something I can never do. It really isn't my intention, mind you, to end my life. Instead my intent is to focus on pain in place of mental worries, in place of things I can never truly change. Instead of absolute panic over not having an income just now, I am able to focus on my arm and how much I can take before adding the cleaning liquids and neaten it all up. Instead of fretting over a lack of fuel for a car I currently cannot make payments on, I can focus on how hard I press the blade and when I should begin drawing it along and how long to do this one and which direction and where to make the next one when the time comes and how to make them all look like cat scratches or the like to the untrained eye.

I know it's wrong, but then again this same pain would come from tattoos and a tattoo would last me my entire life... not just a week or so. I guess what I mean to say is that this is real. It doesn't get any more real than this. Yet truth be told too many people dismiss those in my state as small-minded and depressed and mentally unstable and fraught with a disease of the brain and so on, while not many tend to stand aside for a moment and ponder the implications. By cutting I am therefore an outcast among many, and yet by keeping it in and never doing anything physical to release it I slowly become a mass murderer or a depraved psychopath or a true suicidal being. No matter what malcontent it keeps from reaching me, if this act seems horrifying whilst keeping me alive, then I say let the blood come. I say keep this drawing act going...

and let the alcohol clean what ails me one drop at a time, from the internal in the form of drunken charades and from the external in the form of sanitation and fast-healing.

Derelicticus

"Derelicticus"

a prologue

Gary Baker, August 2014

(part of a lingering rage-based satire inspired by works of junkie-fiction)

Enter once, twice, three times, hit 'ctrl' and the letter 'A' as one, font select: scroll to Rosarivo, then hit twelve point size, justify margins, and finally one point five spacing. Done. Now the good stuff.

I see the needle coming and my muscles steel themselves from the stimulus. They know what’s coming; I know what’s coming. Hell, you’d think I’d have just gotten over it by now. But no. I won’t. I can’t. Each time is new and, as they say, improved. The bolt is rearing, the liquid viciously awaiting. Like the fluids in a viper’s maw, gunning for that bite, pining to draw blood, needing that orgasmic release of finality as fluids are shot deep into the flesh of another being.

But this isn't at all what my own body thinks of. As the impending prey all my molecules seem unable to justify it all. They think this the end. They think that death comes next. Does it? I ask myself, with none but an echo of thoughtlessness in response. I’m too fear-stricken to believe what lurks, to believe what comes, to understand in a comprehensive manner that which would soon pierce skin raw and delve into the sacredness of unbroken veins.

Alright thare, Mista Gunna, a voice from beyond my cerebral focus echoes in like the shimmering light seen through meters of ocean water. I feel like I’m drowning, like a songbird captured by an all-too-tall wave that should never have been, my feathers soaked and my scrawny pin-prick toes doing nothing to propel me to the surface. Thas ain’t goanna work, you bein so overwrought an all. Wae need to calm you daown.

Suddenly the dark humid room is gone, all the green walls vaporized by a quick burst of light from my peripherals and I feel weightless in a new sensory darkness. All I can think of is how they must have expelled me from my body somehow. Perhaps they yanked my cords a bit too fast, or maybe they just said ‘to hell with it’ in that godawful accent and slit my throat. But that wouldn't be right; they need me alive for the injection to work, for me to work.

Then a light snaps on ahead and I feel myself moved somehow until my eyes are able to focus through the haze of smoke and steam. What I see, then, stops my heart.

In the light, standing in such a way that it seems I view from a ceiling support beam, is this woman of unseemly features. Her hair is both light straw yellow and yet deep murky black, shifting from one to the other with unrealistic fluidity. Her skin transcending in both sandy pale ales and burnt ocher mahogany. I find myself lost for a moment in just that, in the way her tones ebb and flow and how this hair of hers curls about like waves locked in time as it all cascades upon her shoulders, where the collar of a long coat hides everything beneath her chin, all angled at a three-quarter tilt from above and behind.

Thas goode, naw, aint’t? The voice echoes again, suddenly reprimanded by another just at the cusp of audible range. Naw don’ yoo worry, Mista Gunna, yoo jus’ watch an fo’get about us. Jes relax them bones and we’ll all be best’a buds. I hear the bass of the other again and feel the first move away, though from where I cannot say. Then a muffled echo of a disk being dropped, and the first comes back again with a tap of what would be my own ankle if I had one anymore. Enjoy the show, naw, hear? ‘Specially cause yur in fer’a treat.

Suddenly there is movement ahead and my attention resets, brought back to the girl as she slowly lifts away the coat as though home for the evening. She lets it drop into the darkness by her unseen feet, instantly standing alone in the darkness in nothing but glossy obsidian small clothes over creamy light-latte skin. Her shoulders, now unheeded by the jacket, show a bit of sun damage from some foray outside, her freckles almost invisible through the healing tan, and her covered breasts seem curious as they peek just into visibility with the angle I view from. I try not to, but my eyes then move down, across the pocks in her back where her shoulder blades make shadows and across the indent where her spine recedes inward with it’s curve, and roam across her hips. It’s impossible not to admire whomever brought her into being, in that proportions had been painstakingly thought out, whether by genetics or DNA grafters putting her basest structures together molecule by electron-sized molecule. Her cheeks shift this way and that as she moves her upper body, doing something beyond my attention, and slowly the slight amount of clothing stretched out upon them shimmies into the verge between each side. It isn’t much fabric, to be honest, that moves into that line, that highway roaming deep across places that can only be dreamed of, but the elastic that runs the trail renounces complete coverage and leaves her cheeks all-too-nicely unveiled. In that moment her features stop shifting, her latte skin sinfully silky-smooth and her hair a glimmer of strawberry within a light caramel.  

A sudden gut-wrenching sensation hits my left arm and I try to move, try to shift my awareness, the woman fuzzing like static as I finally grasp my own arm from within and attempt to move it. More numbed slicing ensues into searing pain and I feel tendons snapping like cataclysmic rubber bands.

Well sun’offa gun, he mocks again, am I to baelieve yoo felt that? He chuckles an eerily cheerful laugh and I feel movement from my side again followed by what could only be a hand patting my lower thigh. ‘Is time I thaink we turn up the heat, eh, Mista Gunna? Give yoo summa that good ol’ fashion haspitalitay. On tha house, naw.

In an instant the pain was righteously gone, and my attention came to again with the woman turning my way with an unhooked bra held over her poised breasts by crossed wrists. Her verdant emerald eyes shone with something intangible to me until she dropped her hands to her hips and the bra slipped into the depths with her ankles.

Like before, I try not to look, but it’s just uncanny the way her breasts hang just enough with a youthful pugnacity, how they draw in the eye like the physical embodiment of a black hole in space instead placed mystically on the female form. Freckles span these, too, originating near the collar to dip down near the upper contours of her ribcage through a low valley of temptatious flesh. They seem to hang toward me, her form suddenly gravitating in my direction, and I find myself upon a sofa of sorts, this lioness stalking toward me with all but her vulva left visible. The tantalizing draw, the suppressed desire within then loosens and I feel her stepping closer, the by golly, I thaink’e likes this’n almost drowned out entirely as her lips part and reach to my own.

For a long moment I am lost again. I float in space, drifting, falling. The ground is gone entirely, replaced instead by the weightless awe of the woman’s mysterious purr. She then draws away with my upper lip caught between softly poised teeth leaving an urge I’d not felt for a long time in this society of repressed desires. In that moment I need her. Something within tells me not to, but I reach out and bring her close, cupping a shoulder blade with one hand and a handful of buttocks in the other.

She gasps and an accented chuckle reaches me from somewhere else. The wind of the open window playing tricks with the echoes. I feel her pulse quicken, then, and she pulls away just enough to stare longingly into my eyes, the need in her just as clear as my own. Passion moves into play and replaces the fear I can no longer understand as she traces my chest with faint trails of her fingers, ebbing slowly, tauntingly downward. Straddled, I can do nothing about the smallclothes of hers that remain between us, but that doesn’t stop me from trying.

She bites her lower lip on one side and again I see that need. I see her desire reflecting my own, driving me crazy, acting out the energies bottled up for far too long, now. Then her fingers reach my belt and before I can attempt to help it’s gone, tossed to the side. Lost forever.

Out in space something slices and I feel a release of pressure. A weight shifts in an impossible location. My eyes begin to wander, trailing away as though in extreme exhaustion.

At that moment she chooses to pull me out and press her palm, caressing fingers and all, into a sensation that brings me back.

“Don’t you go leaving me dry, boy,” she mocks while drawing the highway of obsidian elastic to the side. Eyes wide, I wonder what I was thinking. Why would I fall asleep now?

But then the slicing returns, like the vibration of a badly strung bow upon a tightly-wound violin.

Abruptly a hot anger burns in her eyes, those emeralds turn fierce with rage and she slams down over me. For a slight moment she holds there, eyes locked with mine as though demanding my complete arousal for the amount of time she requires. Again I wonder what could possibly distract me from this.

Then slowly, tantalizingly, she lifts away and sends shivers coursing up my spine. My heart kick-starts, gears within switch into drive, and I clench my fingers across her hips to pull her back down. The quivering then moves from me to her and I know it has begun in earnest this time.

The sofa shushes beneath us, drowned out by her pace-less, ragged breathing. Hair paints my nose when she drops her forehead down, her arms like pillars to either side of my neck as I drive onward with repetitive increased pounding. The ribbed sensation in my arm keeps on, but I ignore it now, too drawn into her rippling muscles to care about the curious phantom. When it increases in intensity I know she spots the distraction coming even as I do, and without loosing me from her hips she spins to lay with her back against my chest on the plush cushion. Her cheeks press emphatically over me, and she pulls me close once more to restart our routine.

“There,” she whispers after a few thrusts, and her eyes fight to stay open. When the slicing ensues again I pantingly open my eyes to find her laying over the tingling arm, shifting to the rhythm of my assault. It’s just the sofa. Why would I think it anything else? Then she turns her head to watch me from over her sunburned shoulder with an energetic gleam in her eyes and I wonder if the burn still hurts her or if perhaps the endorphins have numbed it. Again she bites her lip and releases a ragged breath.

This goes on for some time, though I would be lying if I said it went on forever. Ultimately, after some changes in position and pacing, I find myself being hugged between her skyward thighs as I push forth one last time, her hands grasped dangerously upon the contours of my hip bones. She releases a lasting shudder of withheld breath before collapsing into the cushion beneath me.

With my heart still racing I lay down half atop her, still poised between her knees, and bring my eyes to hers. The grin she dons, then, brings an ache to my heart, like warm steel suddenly coursing through my veins. She doesn’t even need to speak it, as I already understand, but she winces and seems saddened as she does so anyway. “You know we can never do this again.” Those emeralds turn bleak by comparison and she looks away, toward the sky. Opposite the direction of my now missing phantom slicing. “Try not to lose this, ‘kay?”

She sounds like a young girl trying to plea to her first love never to leave her, but why would I ever? Even had we not just consummated our passion together, I see no reason why I would ever forget her. Then her eyes turn upon me again and seem to scold, as though having just heard my thoughts.

“They will destroy you, Gunner,” she lectured. For some reason I feel fear building up again and my groin responds by shrinking away in cowardice. The intensity in her voice increases and she rolls her glorious body onto me and bores holes into me with that glare. “Do not let them do this, Gunner. You’re better than that.” She shakes her head angrily and shudders as the living room shifts with sudden static. “What we are, in this moment, should not exist. They think they have you, Gunner, that you have been completely taken over, but they’re wrong.”

She places a palm onto my chest and heaves herself into a seated position, and again the room buzzes with static snapping. Her eyes dart in every direction at once, fear building in her as well. Without warning her glare is back upon me and I am caught entranced by her severity. “What we are doing is against everything they plan. Yes, they uploaded me into your brain, but Gunner you have to understand that you subconsciously took control.”

The room cracks wildly, then, and she disappears for a brief moment into darkness. The room stutters like a corrupted data file and sounds about the same. Her voice lowers dramatically, awkwardly. Her eyes burst with light and her skin seems abuzz with hues of motion despite my feeling nothing of the sort. “I-” she attempts, “-built a-” again the room shutters viciously, threatening to break down into bleak oblivion, “-pocket-”

Then my world is void of everything.

All I can sense is the quickly-fading echo claiming “-to save you….”

The year back then was Twenty-seven thousand plus change. I haven’t aged a day since. Not really.