Glimpses of Flickering Madness

"Glimpses of Flickering Madness"

A short story

Gary Baker, August 2016

We sat in the room on the side of thought, the cushions of the sofa like clouds as we listened to the pair in the other room. They were arguing again; as always.

“...and so you fucking dare to…”

I pulled a pillow to my face and pretended to suffocate myself with it. If I wasn’t so god damned high, it would have been like witnessing a murder in slow motion. Thankfully by then the pints had already begun to work with the smoke and… well things just got interestingly numb.

“...like I give a shit about your…”

The statue beside me, the girl made of stone and crisp linens, grated her cheeks to grace my eyes with her own. Should we leave? She mouthed. Colors swirled as I watched the television that had cut to static, where I swore I could see the pair in the other room glaring back through the fuzzy black and white ants.

“...oh, yeah, like that makes anything better…”

“...if you’d stop being such a bitch about…”

I shook my head and took another swig of the hard stuff, the burn no longer searing as much as it once had, the nausea no longer as fluid at my tonsils. By then I had simply become a pool of atoms and electrons vibrating along to the beat of distant stars. As I watched his eyes contort into a scowl on the static I felt my face begin to burn.

I heard a nasty slap and my eyes went wide. The statue beside me and I suddenly watched the atoms of air between ourselves and the far wall, facing perpendicular to the arguing going on just meters away. I cringed as tears reached out from my eyelids and traversed across the hilly expanses of my cheeks. I shook. My atoms shook. The sofa wilted beneath me and the flat plane of cushion beneath my hand curled into stone fingers overlapping my own as the statue surged with emotion that I could taste.

Now can we leave? She thought into my mind.

I could have wept again, the darkness in the other room tainting my own miasma until I could hardly decipher between the angry reds and the blooming pinks. Yet it was when the ceruleans and azures darkened to charcoals and oblivion that I shuddered and took her stony hand in my own. I nodded. Yes. We would leave soon.

“...how about I do it again, then? How about I give you something to…”

Thunder came again and a squeal came like a kitten whose claw had gotten stuck in the carpet as panic cut deep. A bustle came like the clatter of winds knocking furniture around in a man-size twister and the statue led the way through the door. I barely kept up, stumbling as I went to catch the key on the wall. I missed it and the crackle of steel hitting hardwood floor echoed out to me as though through a turbine engine fan.

“...you fucking like that?! You want some fucking more?!...”

We raced through tall grass with wispy tendrils of Earth’s awe becoming mist-like in our vibrations. Trees reached to hold us, to console us, to hide us from the anger that tore out after us as we ran into the oblivious darkness. I could feel the motherly love of the planet reaching out to help us, her roots shifting to trip the bastard as it’s radiating heat came for us.

Cool air clung to my skin and I swore I felt droplets of rain…

...until I realized that they were coming from the statue’s face ahead as she pulled me deeper into the brush, as we fled deeper and deeper into the hilly expanse of trees and saving wildlife. Brine soaked with incredible washes of sadness and anger and vibrations of hopelessness all imbued within tiny sparkling droplets of saline and water.

But still a torrent of rage came after us.

We rushed headlong into the abyss, just aware enough to keep from being pulled too closely by the friends of bark and sap, just aware enough to avoid being buried by soil that would have loved to embrace us six feet under with loving caresses to our lungs and veins and atomic resonations.

Why us? The wonderful figure of stone and life echoed into my thoughts. Why did they have to live with us?

I slowed and put a hand to my lips so I could think. It made a circuit which then allowed my thoughts to run as they should, as my heaving, thrumming muscles tried to focus on staying alive, as they tried to focus on anything but not simply dying. It was bad enough that I was on the verge of accepting the reality I had never known and letting the vibrations of distant stars wash me into ripples of universal energy again. All it would have taken was a simple accepting thought toward it.

What’s wrong? She asked. Is he still following us?

I blinked. He was following us? I swore it had only been the anger, I swore it had merely been the rage, the abuse, that had sought us out. I swore it had been echoes of reverberating fear which had wanted to sink it’s visceral teeth into our vibrations. I never would have guessed the human form of it all had been the beastial echo that kept our tails.

My throat seemed to shrink back, releasing itself from my control, and pressed my air out with vibrations I seemed to be creating. “I,” there was a moment where I lost myself in the woods overhead, where the dark branches seemed to create the very same appearance as neurons in the brain, and I was drawn to set myself in the soft, moist soil. “I forgot why we were running.”

She looked back the way we had come and seemed to think on things I could only wish to comprehend. Her eyes could have hidden the light of entire galaxies, and I couldn’t so much as pretend to feel her thoughts. So do you think we’re safe?

I rolled my face toward her and let an ant crawl along my forehead. “For now I think we are…” I blinked and tried to focus, my train of thought derailing as fast as it could get going again, “...going to be okay.”

With a nod, she set herself onto her knees beside me, her dress soaking up some of the mud beneath us as we fought to break reality and make things better again.

“...going to be okay…”

Tears welled up in her eyes and I winced. Where was the wonderful work of art that I had gotten to know over the last several years? Here sat the saddest statue of sandstone and stardust that had ever been formed from the clay of cosmic awe, and all I could do was lay on my back in the mud and watch as nausea returned.

God, you're high. Your eyes are bloodshot, she shook her head and sighed, so so bloodshot right now. Her lips moved, but I barely heard them as my head began to throb with renewed vigor. She watched me as I rolled away to finally let out the pent up alcohol, then reached forward to wipe my face with the sleeve of her sweater as I pulled forward onto my knees.

“What… what happened back there? For real?” I choked at last. The girl closed her eyes most of the way and watched me in curiously indecipherable expressions.

“You,” her voice struck my ears with the soft suddenness of a cello in the dark. Sadness threatened to overtake me by the tremors alone. “You mean you…?”

I sighed as the high finally seemed on the verge of ending. “Sort of. I was lucid enough to get the gist… but what caused it?”

Tears welled up in her eyes once more and she leaned forward to hold me as dearly as anyone had ever been held. Her arms were like extensions of the universe itself, as comforting as a mother and as wonderful as life itself usually was. “I wish I knew…” she moaned with new echoes of the chaos lain within, and her face pressed deeper into my shoulder, “they came home while we were already stoned off our asses and…” she shook violently, her stony figure becoming more and more human with every passing second.

I nodded and rest my cheek on the top of her head, “and he hit her...I remember that much.”

Suddenly her eyes sought my own and she held me in the most magnanimous glare that I could imagine possible. Cerulean disks seemed to hold the universe within their center, and somewhere within those lay our future together. “Can we go?” I knew what she meant, but I stammered too long for her to understand, “I want to move. Now. Let’s just take what we can and run. We don’t need much, I promise.”

With a grim sigh I reached out and took her hand in my own. She once was a statue as stoic as the cosmos, and yet just then I felt her form begin to crumble at the edges, her base shattered by what we had just escaped, by the chaos of what she wouldn’t soon forget. All I could say to her was “yes” as the moonlight traced our outlines in the woodland mud and soil. “Of course, dear.”

Interminable Discord

"Interminable Discord"

a short story

Gary Baker, July 2016

The news was too much. Nick thought he could handle it, but he couldn’t. Not this. Not now.

He ran out of the room, backside bare to the world and the tails of the ties moving as though in a rough breeze. Outside was a shock. The late night had turned sour, the sweltering heat still emanating from the pavement while the desert grasses and dunes seemed on the verge of a serious chill. Melissa Strauss came running out behind him with an intense worry plastered over her that he could see even without looking.

This wasn't happening. It couldn't be.

The moment was going on for far too long as she gave chase, having gone passed the end of the lot and into the island of desert brush that kept the sign company within mere heartbeats it seemed like. He took the only route he knew and bolted west along the highway, still wearing nothing but the plastic garment the doctors had given him.

"Mr. Valiant!" The woman screamed, swearing with each leap in her stride as she fought to catch up with the escaping patient. "Nick stop!"

But he couldn't. Not yet. He needed to get there... to that place he had in mind but could never seem to find. He still needed to find her. Glancing ahead told him that no cars were coming for miles, negating any means for taking this into the next town, so with the woman hot on his heels he took a sudden turn into across the highway and out into the unending desert night.

He leapt over fallen logs that once stood as telephone poles back before they'd been replaced by their aluminum successors, and slipped around thick arms of cacti that had grown in a forest-like density in this area. He felt the needles scraping him, tearing his skin raw and gaping wide for blood to emanate from. The pain was intense, but he kept going anyway. He had to get away. His feet had started throbbing only moments before but it was only as he vaulted over a low thicket of grass only to land right onto an unseen ball of wicked angry needles and torment that he came to recognize the implications of his flight. The lack of thinking ahead had been what had gotten him in this mess in the first place, and now here he was losing his ability to walk, losing his ability to keep on his quest.

He was losing his fight to seek her out while he still had time.

He fell hard, his foot torn wide and the blood suddenly washing over his leg when he screams of agony seemed to summon Melissa out of nowhere. She was kneeling at his side, pinning him with one hand while checking the damage with the other. He tried to roll away, tried to crawl back to his mangled feet, but her strength was greater than his by far. When he caught a glance of her face, she barely even looked winded even after all that running.

It took only a short moment for her to get him to lay still as she wrapped her white coat around his foot and cinched it tight with her belt. Once done, she glared hard under the vast starlit sky. "What the hell is wrong with you?" She began, her tirade bursting forth with the clarity of a broken damn. "I know the situation falls rightly in your favor, but what the fuck did you plan to do? Go running into some coyote den and end it on your own terms instead?"

He only wept in response. It was all he could do. The years came crashing down on him suddenly, so very suddenly, and he started to regret more than he ever thought he might have. How many near-misses had he come to in the decades, in the few short fragments of a century he'd been allotted? How many of those whom he'd had connections with might have remained with him had he only asked? How many could have become the companion he needed, the essence of life which he so dearly sought?

How many might have been the one?

He caught himself mumbling about love and never finding something, and shut himself up the instant that he realized. His eyes then drifted away, out into the surroundings where even in the most hellish of places life managed to survive and almost flourish. How dearly he needed that which he couldn't even put a name to just then, as the world moved on without him, as the world kept turning on it’s axis even while his own fell to shambles.

"Jesus, Mr. Valiant, this... this isn't just about the diagnosis, is it?" Her eyes glimmered in the corner of his vision, while the tears in his own reflected light from the hospital. Her voice softened too much, her touch suddenly too cautious. In a split second she had gone from enraged nurse to concerned companion without even thinking twice. "Nick... what's gotten into you all of a sudden?"

But how could he explain it? How could he describe his anguish? It wasn't exactly something he could just come out and say with the nonchalance of a man talking about the weather.

He let out a long sigh and watched the celestial mists of the Milky Way passing slowly overhead. "I..." he hesitated, looking for the words. Finally he settled on speaking the notions as he thought of them, perhaps maybe that way she might make sense of that which he could not. "There's no time, anymore. I-"

"No time? You've got over six months-"

"-just can't get passed that." Nick reached out with an absent hand and let a handful of fine sand and desert soil slowly crumble through to the ground again. "All I know is that all this time I've been searching-"

"Searching for what?"

"-for... I dont know, I guess."

An eyebrow raised in bewildered frustration. "You don't know what you're searching for and yet you continue to look for it? Is this some sort of philosophical crisis you're trying to explain to me?" She shook her head slowly. "Nick I want to help you, but I'm no good with psychology. It's why I became a nurse in the first place. Give me needle and a vial and I'll get your blood drawn like that... but ask me to help you through a breakdown...?" She held up her hands in defeat. "I'm sorry."

But he'd heard none of what she'd said. His momentum had been found and there was no turning back now. For all he knew he wasn't even talking to anyone but himself. "All I can think of is that I have been longing for something real all this time, for a life worth living, for a love worth devoting my whole life to." He pushed his hands back and rest his head on the sand as he lay down to look at the stars again. "She's out there still, you know... the woman I have always needed, the woman I have always known deep down that I would find and suddenly be free of all this chaos of depression and anxiety and all because I would have then found someone to take my attention off the small things and always keep me focused on her."

He sighed, suddenly self-conscious. "It's stupid, I know, but all this time I have felt so severely lonely and the only way that I could imagine my life being anything worthwhile would be to do so with the love of my life at my side...." He trailed off and let himself focus on the torment that was his bleeding leg, letting the pain bring him back to reality just enough. "But the worst part is that I don't think I've even met her yet, and now I know for sure that I don't even have enough time to actually find her anymore." Finally Nick looked Melissa right in the eye, the sorrow and humbling reality coming to a crescendo at last in that one look he gave her. "I no longer have anything to live for, coincidentally on the precipice of learning that I am bound to die lonely and alone... within this very year."

There were no words that she could bring herself to speak aloud, his anguish more resonatingly painful than anything she'd ever felt before. This was the main reason she'd never gone into psychology, she told herself, for she was far too much an empath to actually succeed in anything involving other people's emotions. Chemicals and elements, numbers and physics, all of that kept her solidly grounded, but emotions were where she too fell apart.

When she wiped the tears from her eyes she found that Nick had gone silent again, his vacant eyes traversing the galaxies far away from his terminal diagnosis. She only wished that there was something she could say to soothe his ache. She longed for something to ease his chaos. When no words came, she instead found herself reaching out to tenderly hold his hand. Maybe that would be enough. Maybe that would suffice for now.

But Nick's eyes never left the ripples of the stars. Had it not been for his fingers closing around hers with the tenderness of a man whose hopes had all gone, Melissa would have sworn he hadn’t even noticed her attempt to soothe him. Maybe that would suffice for now.

Impasse

“Impasse”

a short story

Gary Baker, March 2014

Two years back I was ready to jump ship. I was standing on the corner of Haight and Ashbury, looking at my feet, ready to take the plunge, and then I found God. I’d never bothered to call myself an atheist until that precise moment and, ever since then, I’ve never seen any reason to change that.

I remember the wind, the incessant tugging of air at my jacket like an unseen monstrous entity trying to throw me around. It was enough to boil the blood in my veins before I even looked down to see the bustling streets so very, incredibly far below. I inhaled deeply through my nose and held it for a second, awaiting the calming effect that it often gave, then slowly, so very slowly released it through pursed lips.

My breath quivered as it went, anxiety meshing with raw fear and a wish that it didn’t have to be this way. I opened my eyes, unaware that I had ever closed them in the first place, and looked once more upon the setting sun falling between skyscrapers. The world was coming to an end. Everything was crumbling and there was nothing I nor anyone else could do about it.

They say the ring of fire was on the verge of breaking itself, that the icecaps were gone completely and that the most recent hurricane in the Caribbean wasted it’s way all the way through to Moscow before finally petering itself out. Claims had been made that the moon was shifting in it’s orbit and that one more nudge in either direction and there would be two possible outcomes: A- it would fall toward us and be the last thing anyone ever saw, or B- it would drift away into space and would kill the cycle of weather and tides and so on. From there it was only a matter of time before the whole of human existence simply shut out like a dimming LED.

I wasn’t ready to face those consequences. My life had been perfect up until then. I had a wife, three loving children, and a career as a high market supervisor for a publishing firm at the dawn of an age when books -- real books -- had come back into style. These days everyone carried some literary document made of pulped wood and ink with them at all times. Some chose the age-old classics from the early twenty-one hundreds, with topics that bordered on the heretical dislike of technology, while others chose more modern titles spanning anything from the sciences to the dead religions that technology had slowly pushed out of society.

Yet it would all be gone in a mere echo of the dials upon a clock. Entropy had reached it’s end, and I wasn’t one to face things like that head on. What if the world burst into flames? How could my pale complexion face such a feat without hordes of pain lasting all-too long? Besides that, I hated pain. I still do.

So there I was, facing the sun for the last time with my buttoned jacket beating a quick rhythm against my throat as though drums beating out my lonesome dirge. A tear dripped down my cheek and fell from my chin. I watched it fall, eyeing the glint of refracted light as it pre-enacted what I was just about to do.

And, in the uncaring crowds below, I made eye-contact with God.

My heart skipped a beat. Maybe more than that. I just know it felt like forever that I was transfixed in those eyes. They seemed to hold everything, like miniature doorways to the whole universe with infinite stars and everything just a few cellular molecules apart. I couldn’t tell the gender from that height, but there was no mistaking who it was: all the dead religions boiled down to that one moment when what appeared to be a pitiful homeless vagrant caught the sight of a man about to end it with a half step into empty air.

Suddenly I slammed against the stone wall, my heels arching as I tried to get back to something stable. I was inside my office before I knew it and was racing lopsided to the elevator terminal even as I suddenly realized I’d lost a shoe. It didn’t matter, though, as I just had to get there. I had to meet him -- her -- it -- or whatever God claimed to be.

“Got a hot date?” Jennison Valdery mocked me as she calmly sipped her protein-infused mocha beside me. Her suit had been pressed and refitted just that morning, smoothing the edges of her elegant hips with swatches of silk-like carbon micromesh and an underlying leather-tan fabric. She eyed me with an arched painted eyebrow and eyelashes that extended all the way to her forehead as the latest fashions dictated.

“No,” I mumbled, loosening my tie awkwardly as we descended floor by floor.

She laughed that fake laugh of hers, a chuckle that was supposed to catch men off-guard. It didn’t work on me, not these days, not now that I had a purpose. We’d had an affair once or twice before, I will admit, having hit the red panel on the way down to indicate a corporate need to stop the elevator as would be done in a private meeting. It happened more than either of us wanted to admit, but I never had the heart to tell my wife.

“So then what’s the hurry?” She crossed her arms curiously and leaned against the polished steel panelling. “It’s not like the world is going to end any time soon is it?” She smirked with a wide grin of pearly teeth and deep green lips that also followed the latest styles. “Oh, wait -- I forgot: it is!” The doors opened and I began toward them. “Well, whatever,” she cooed as I passed, “the way I see it? Doesn’t mean a thing. It’ll all be dust in a few days anyways, eh?” She kept talking, but the doors had already started closing and I was well on my way through the foyer to the corner door that led outside to the unfabricated breezes and scents.

It took a second of looking anew from this alternate angle, but I found him again with another stroke of lightning in my chest. He was still there on the sidewalk, smoking the last cigarette from a now-empty pack, watching the skies and occasionally shaking his mug with a few macro M-chips inside.

Again I had a hard time telling if God was a man or woman, or even one of those who’d been born into the middle sex given by a feat of nature and technology. For a split second I wondered what he would prefer I call him. Should I address this person as ‘Sir’? ‘Ma’am’? Perhaps even ‘thei’ as had been the overall middle term for the last century?

Instead, I lost my chance -- God looked my way, dirty pudgy face and all, broken teeth jutting to the side here and there, and grime colonies seeming to decay the very flesh upon which growth was enabled. This was a person on the verge of death as well and I wondered for a split second if that was ironic. “Well don’t just stand there,” thei called, “come closer, share a smoke with me, eh?”

I wanted to move, but found myself frozen in place. What did one say to the living patron saint of the longest-lived, though still dead, religion of Earth?

We stared through billows of smoke for ages before God shook the cup again and received a few chips from a passing soul while, in the distance, someone succeeded where I had faltered. I heard the horrendous smack and winced, though no one else seemed to even notice. These days it was far too common a sight in the cities.

“Sad, that one,” God mumbled, taking another draw of the tobacco. Those eyes still held me, keeping me staring, no matter how hard I tried to get away. “Single theilen, obviously no offspring, with a fanatic tendency to paint like no other.” God pursed it’s lips to the side, “I always wondered when those chemicals would start to affect thei and convince thei to end it.”

God lifted a grubby finger with more oily dirt on it than I had ever seen this deep in the city. “Almost like you, I might add.” A welcoming, warm smile appeared and I found myself sitting cross-legged on the ionic-edge street side with someone so low comparatively that most must have thought I’d lost it. “See? No harm done, my little lamb. None at all.”

Dumbfounded I just leaned on my knees and shrugged. “Where’ve you been?” I finally breathed.

“Here,” she handed me the tobacco and I took it gingerly, since I didn’t really think I had the choice of saying ‘no’ to a smoke from God. “Now what’s this about my whereabouts?”

I drew the first breath of smoke that I’d ever done in my life and coughed instantly, much to God’s cackling humor. When I finally caught myself again, I shot him a look of annoyed wonder. “Where have you been all my life?”

God raised thei’s bushy, unshaven eyebrows as though over the wires of a pair of spectacles. “You mean to say you, or anyone living in your religiousless times for that matter, need the likes of me?”

“Well, yeah.”

“As in I, the famed-” she scowled, “well, at one time I was -- creator of all things in this universe?”

I glanced to people casually passing by as the world counted down it’s last moments. They all seemed so calm, so eerily unaware. I wanted to grab one of them by the shoulders and shake them, asking frantically “don’t you care? Are you not afraid? Am I the only one who sees this?!” Instead I returned my gaze to God’s eyes, those magnificent eyes that held eons of everything imaginable. It was ironic that suddenly I had the inspiration to write books upon books on anything that came to mind, and all when I had perhaps a day or so to live. “Well I sort of had a bad week last week.”

“Meaning?”

“I stubbed my toe when getting out of my sleeping capsule, then forgot to put on my autodetection ring and was locked out of the vehicle pod for hours while I searched through messes of everything in my home for it, and things just kept getting worse for me.”

“And you just assumed I had nothing better to do.”

I shrugged, “if there was ever a time where I wished a god existed to control my fate then that was it!”

She nodded with lips pursed around the cigarette, “hmm, you wanted someone to blame it all on.” Her face became a flurry of wrinkles as she drew again and frowned at me, then handed the tobacco back for me to do the same. “Alright, lamb,” God mumbled while streaming thick smoke from her nostrils, “look at me. What do you see?”

I finally inhaled smoke without choking and let it sit in my lungs for a bit, as I’d seen God do, before releasing it into the wild air again. But I did look him over as commanded, noting the scraps of sullied trash bags used as a makeshift belt, the stains of God-knew-what, and gave myself a moment to chuckle at that thought, coating his every last garment. He wore sneakers three sizes too small, his toes peeking out of mouth-like holes in the forefronts, and laces so frayed it looked like God had assembled them from body hair over the years. He was overweight, yet anorexically thin in the same glance, where the rags neglected to cover his pasty diseased skin, and each breath both expanded his visible ribcage as well as tightened the cellulite beneath that.

“Are you looking?” Thei asked. “I mean really, truly looking at me?”

“Yeah, and?”

“Krishna, lamb!” She cursed. “Why do you think I look like this? Why would an all-powerful being choose to be poorer than dirt, or eat scraps of food leftover after the rats are done, eh?”

I was silent, trying to figure out a good response.

“Or how about this one,” he shot again, “if I were so benevolent and all-powerful, why would I allow the universe to be about to collapse for your kind?”

I frowned at my one remaining glossy neosuede shoe, letting the tobacco ease my anxiety. “Because… you’re just an asshole?” As soon as I’d said it, I hated myself.

God smirked joyously and I watched as thei made the cigarette grow back to full length and reignite itself, then took a dramatically long pull. As thei released the smoke with a sigh, God rolled thei’s eyes toward me awkwardly. “Exactly.”

Suddenly I felt wronged. The world was about to end and all because the last living god had simply decided he was annoyed with humanity? What gave him -- her -- thei the right? “Are you serious?” I jabbed and snatched the tobacco away from the bastard.

“Completely,” she sniffed angrily. She crossed her arms and fell backwards onto her pile of things that looked more like trash blown in on the wind. “Think of it this way, lamb: I am the last god out there. All the others faded away as science inevitably snipped us out of the human mind. We once reigned over everything, you know, our power limited only by the vast numbers of those who worshipped us, and now only I exist due to scholars unwillingly acknowledging me because of a book I, more or less, wrote eons before their time.” She rolled onto her side to face me as she took the tobacco back for another pull. “Obviously I was pissed. Science had, in fact, won out on us all and there wasn’t even a god at it’s center for us to complain to. So I made an ultimatum: starting on this coming Tuesday I will only allow your universe to exist for one day for each soul that believes in me. Just one, each.”

I gaped and smoke dribbled from my lips. “No shit,” I breathed exasperatedly.

“Trust me, there’s shit,” he huffed angrily, “and it’s all your lousy asses that walk this earth, too. Nothin’ shittier than a bunch of worshipers ignoring you and your miracles for the plain-old screen of the latest phone.”

Then it struck me: there was a loophole. “So, wait, you mean to say that if, say, three people were to start worshipping you right now you would let the earth live for another three days beyond Tuesday?”

Thei grinned. “That’s exactly what I mean, little lamb.”

“So,” I hesitated; how to word this in a way that God would tell me completely? “How do I get atheists to start believing in a disproven god?” Then I startled with a shock of realization. “Wait -- how do I prove you to me? I can’t go out there spreading the word of your sorry ass if I don’t even believe in you.”

Crossing his nasty-smelling arms under his head as a pillow, God laughed lightly. “Well you can always wait until December twenty-fifth to find out for yourself if I’m legitimate or not.”

“But that’s this Tuesday!”

“As I said: I’m giving you humans until my son’s birthday to start worshipping me, and from then on I will only give you shits one day per believer to continue existing.” The grin on her lips was frighteningly dark.

Dearest Humanity,

"Dearest Humanity,"

a short story

Gary Baker, June 2013

Dearest Humanity,

Today’s been a bad day for me, which, I can guarantee none of you could ever imagine -- trust me.

I’ve had the sort of day where you’re home alone, music playing softly, and your greatest crush bursts through your door practically begging to get laid... and you refuse on account of having too much self respect. The kind where a millionare pulls over in a billion-dollar car, tosses you the keys and says “take it, it’s all yours, no strings attached”... and you pass due to being unwilling to pay the insurance.

Yeah, I’ve had that kind of day -- the day that never seems to end, except, get this, mine never did. Ever.