A Feast of Wire

Hey Everybody Look At Me I Don't Finish Anything Ever I'm Dumb

2010-03-23T11:03:00.011-04:00

This one ends with explosions but don't get your hopes up because I didn't write them yet
And so, there I was, falling. Once again. "How do I get myself in these situations?" I said to no one in particular, the air rushing past as it pulled the words from my lips. Actually, more like shook them free. The air has a funny way of jiggling the loose fleshiness of lips as a body hurtles through it nearing terminal velocity. "Ugh, why me?" This was always happening, lately more often than in the past. I should have chosen a safer profession. Maybe being a secret agent rocket scientist rock star was just a little too exciting for me, I needed a job where I could sit my ass in a seat and stare at a computer screen all day. That would cheer me up. The sound of an approaching scream made me wish I didn't have such awesome super hearing, somehow the sound waves from the approaching ninja's yells were able to break their way through the loud whoosh of air screaming past my lips. "AAAAHHHHHHH." He wasn't used to this, falling; his body should have been flat and horizontal to the ground to slow him down, instead he was plummeting headfirst. "Amateur," I told him as he flew past me toward certain death. This mess could be traced back to my parents, the jerks. First they made a baby as handsome as I am which destined me to be a rock star, I couldn't let this luscious hair go to waste, and then they forced me to follow in both of their footsteps. If only I would have been born hideously ugly and they let me live my own life I could be sipping coffee in a homeless shelter right now. I made a note to tell them off if I survived.

It Is a Story Called "Robutts"
The year is 2075.

"What?"

Shhh, let me finish.

"Finish what?"

I'm narrating, sheesh. The year is 2075. In a dystopian former United States, we join our protagonist, Izzy, as she continues her fight against the robot overlords that have since overrun the entirety of the world. She plans to begin her crusade in the country that birthed her, but eventually she will end up saving the world from certain doom. On this particular afternoon she is strapped face down on a cold, surgical table. Naked from the waist down she is forced to expose her nicely shaped ass for all to see as the robots prepare to violate her. Could this be the end for our beautiful heroine? Will she survive the horrors that these metal monster plan on inflicting upon her insides? Clearly she will, as I've already foreshadowed that she saves the whole world, but stay on the edge of your seat in the interim.

"You done yet?" Izzy said. "I thought you were here for moral support but all you've done so far is chatter on. Hold my hand already, I've never had anything shoved in my ass before and I'm a tiny bit creeped out about the whole idea."

She couldn't deal with the situation she was facing, the only way she knew how to get through was to imagine she was somewhere else, in a better time with her amazing boyfriend Henry.

"Try ex-boyfriend."

In her mind, Isabel was back in a doctor's office shortly before the uprising. One of the first to test the abilities of these micro robots, she never would have believed this moment would later give her the knowledge to save the human race. Due to cancer, much of her intestines had to be removed. In the past this would have meant a colostomy bag for the rest of her life, but recently there had been advances in robotics that allowed thousands of them to be injected inside her in order to help process and push the waste out of her body. She was merely a test subject but had high hopes for this day to make her life somewhat normal again because she wouldn't have to carry a bag of shit and piss around with her everywhere.

"Oh so this is the future? Then why are you holding that bag of feces? Just happened to find it on the street on the way to your next narration gig?"

That never happened. There is no bag of feces in your narrator's hand.

Uh Oh Probably Bad Idea to Write About Sucky Things
I climbed in out of despair. Naked feet wrapped stiffly around my lower incisors. This process had to be performed as quickly as possible so as to prevent myself from biting down while only partially through the gap. Nobody wants to get cut in half by their own mouth.

I jumped down from my perch, landing squarely on the spongy, slippery tongue below. It slipped between my toes, tickling the mostly untickled spaces between them. My toes aren't the prettiest of toes, by the way, crooked in weird ways, the big toes are a Fred Flintstonian mess. This kept me from looking at them too much and allowed a bit of an earlier turkey sandwich to get lodged between my big toe and whatever toe sits next to it.

"Where to begin?" I wondered out loud. The soft tissues of my mouth ate the words, stifling any possibilities of echoes in the open cavern surrounding me.

The further I ventured in the more hot and humid it became. Past the uvula, down the esophagus, and finally finding my place inside my stomach as it expanded and contracted.

My day had been consumed with extremes. This had been the case for months at this point, the emotions within me were tearing me apart by the day. It grew ever stronger on this particular day. It all became too much. One minute I couldn't bear the weight of the world, the despair within me ate my very soul. The next moment the world was my oyster, birds were singing, the wun was shining, optimism flowed from my veins in painfully joyous rivers.

And then it was back to the pit of despair. This was where my emotions were located at the time that I decided to venture within my nerve wracked body. The pessimism, the self doubt, self hatred, self loathing, rushing and coursing. Would I forever be alone? Would she ever love me again? I could feel the desperation eating away at my insides. Stomach falling in on itself.

Ugghhh...Crap...Zombies? Srsly?

2010-01-29T09:40:00.007-05:00

The group struggled to pull open the massive stone doors covering the entrance.

"Maybe we should give up on this," Carl said. It sort of slid out of his throat, pushed out all at once by the labored breaths he was taking in.

"Shut up you out of shape bastard, this could be the find of the century and you want to leave it the fuck alone because you can't catch your motherfucking breath? Man up, pussy." God, I sure do have a potty mouth.

The other three with us grunted in agreement, most likely with me since they continued pulling.

"Well, no, just..maybe it's locked?"

"You see a keyhole numb nuts? Just shut up and reposition the pry bar."

An hour before this argument we had been fighting our way through the Brazilian jungle. Specifically, we were trying to find our way back out. Our plane had crashed nearby, us being the only survivors out of the hundred or so on board. It was a terrifying experience, both during the crash and wandering our way through the jungle. We came across this temple quite suddenly and were intrigued, drawn to it. There was something that told us that we had to get inside, and that's how we got where we are now.

All at once the five of us fell back as the doors finally broke free.

"Finally!" I said under my breath as we dusted ourselves off. "I knew it would jar loose at some point."

We slowly pulled the doors the rest of the way open, dirt falling away from the pitted rock with each inch. Light rays broke through the thinning dust, pointing out the most spectacular areas of the beautiful room ahead of us. Carefully we progressed inward, breathless, unable to express the amazement we felt for our discovery.

The walls were coated in gold, each inch shinier than the last. There were goblets filled with gems of all colors, jewelry made of every precious metal imaginable. But something wasn't right, I could feel there was something that I was overlooking in my excitement over all the money we would now have.

And then it hit me, the retched odor pervading the room, and I guess the corpses strewn across the floor, hanging from the chandeliers, bent over the stair and balcony banisters. Corpses of men, women, children. They were piled up in heaps wearing clothing that could only be hundreds of years old. And yet, they were perfectly preserved. These weren't skeletons but rather full fleshy corpses, slightly decomposed and surely worse for the wear but after hundreds of years they should not have been in this condition. Were they somehow fresh? Had there been a society here for hundreds of years that mysteriously passed away recently?

I stepped near one, peering down at it hoping to decipher something from the twisted face below me. Suddenly the corpse reached out and grabbed my leg.

"Fuck!" I screamed in a high pitched, little girl screech.

Fingers tore through the leg of my jeans, ripping into the flesh of my calf and shin. I ripped my leg away from its grasp and fell backward into Carl's awaiting arms behind me. The corpse slowly worked its way to its feet and I realized that this wasn't the only one still alive. Every corpse strewn throughout the massive room was either attempting to stand up on rotten limbs or already lumbering toward the group of us.

"What's going on? How are these things still alive?" Carl said in my ear.

"There's no time to ponder this shit, Carl! We need to get out of here!"

I regained my balance and followed the others as they began running toward the blinding square entrance we had just come from. Somehow a few of these corpses, zombies possibly, had snuck up behind us and were between us and the doorway. Thinking fast I noticed a huge gold chain laying in our path. Picking it up I began swinging it wildly above my head.

"Duck!" I yelled to the four ahead of me. They trusted me and dropped to the ground just as I flung the chain forward. It connected with the neck of the closest zombie and tore his head off in one quick motion. With head no longer attached the rest of his body limply toppled to the ground. I kept swinging this chain, tearing off legs and arms all the way, as my friends followed behind me fighting off the zombies coming from the other direction.

We finally reached the doors and put all our weight into closing them. Slowly the opening got smaller and smaller, as the zombies got ever closer. Luckily it was much easier going on the way inward. Just as the zombies arrived we were able to close the doorway, catching a few arms in the gap. The snap of them as they shattered was sickening.

"What the fuck were those?" everyone said in unison. We had known eachother for so long that we knew what the others would say.

"I don't know, zombies I guess? They were pretty rotten but nowhere near what they should have been by how old they were." I had a little experience with diseases of past civilizations from a class I took in elementary school by the same name, and this seemed like something I remembered happening in Peru. "It's possible that there was something inside that temple that made them this way. I wonder if there was an idol that did that."

The more I thought about it the more plausible it sounded.

"I be they were trying to plunder this temple when they came across the idol. It's probably too beautiful to resist, and this is how it spreads its curse. I've seen this on movies and tv shows a lot. It's probably best that they attacked us before we saw it."

We waited outside there for a short while longer, catching our breath, praying that none of us were inflicted by the disease. And decided to forget it had ever happened, continuing to fight our way through the jungle in hopes of escaping the death that awaited us, the death even outside the temple.

Kick Fight Punch

2010-01-27T23:14:00.004-05:00

I watched the bodies float past me, downriver, as rivers tend to head. Bullet ridden, face down. They swam in their own blood. Blood that twisted and swirled around the outstretched limbs that had moments before wrestled with the rushing rapids.

"Friends of yours?"

"You could say I knew them a whole lot."

She just stared back blankly.

"You know, bullet hole? Whole lot?"

"Oh I got it, it was just a terrible pun. After being with you for this long you'd think your stupid humor would have rubbed off on me by now." Her mouth moved to the left side of her face. "Nope, still nothing."

Ashley had been in my life for roughly three years at this point. Both of us work long hours which makes it difficult to meet other people, friends in general, lovers more specifically. As luck would have it we were both working when we first met, we were on opposite sides of the situation but it was clearly love at first sight.

Sometimes ninjas meet in battle. Sometimes these ninjas fall in love.

"So, bullets? You couldn't have disposed of them in a more clean and efficient manner?" She wasn't a fan of such methods, her trainer always taught her that there was always a body part or blunt object to take care of your problems.

"Eh, wasn't by choice. They came at me with guns and I wasn't about to let the fuckers shoot me, so I grabbed the first guy's gun and shot the rest. You would have done the same in my situation, baby. Besides, as you can see I just snapped the neck of the dude I took the gun from."

She looked down river at the thug I was pointing at. "That's a girl! I'd hope you would be able to take care of her without a gun, pussy."

"Whatever, did you grab the diamonds?"

"Yeah, yeah. They're right here in my ass pocket." She shook her ass in my direction to prove it.

"Sweet, now can we please get out of here? I've gotta meet the guys soon, the football game is about to start."

Whore Ass Bitch

2010-01-26T13:57:00.002-05:00

"Don't close your eyes."

"Huh?" John was startled back into consciousness. He had been daydreaming again, as usual, this time it was about beetles. It seemed to him that were basically roaches but smaller. Huge shell on their back, low to the ground, tiny little legs for scurrying. What distinguished the two things? "You know, the idea with taking spontaneous pictures is to be actually spontaneous. Your subject shouldn't see it coming, it makes for much more real pictures that way, you don't get a dopey stare at the camera like you're about to get from me."

John let his cheeks and mouth droop down, pulling at the skin below his eyes ever so slightly, not enough for a person to consciously notice it but still enough for the brain to grasp the difference. He looked bored this way, mouth slightly ajar, almost as if he was a brainless zombie ready for his next meal.

"Just don't close them!" Maria yelled at him. "And look natural!"

"You're not getting it, I can't just act natural, I have to be natural."

"Shut your face. And your mouth, nobody wants to see your tongue laying there behind your stupid lips!"

An outsider would have thought they were angry with each other but that was far from the case. This banter came natural to the two of them, it was something that made them both feel comfortable. A certain kind of give and take. Mostly consisting of giving shit, followed by taking that shit and giving it back.

"Can we go yet? This beach is more of a needle filled rock quarry than a beach, where's the fucking sand?"

Maria glared at him from around her camera. "I said be natural, dick! Go stand on that rock and look off into the distance like you're off daydreaming."

"Maybe you should have just taken a picture of me when I was actually daydreaming, genius."

This back and forth gave them the brain exercise that they so craved. Although it mostly consisted of juvenile insults, calling each other stupid names usually, something about it felt like they were being creative and quelled their needs to actually create for the moment.

"Whatever, jerk."

"Twat."

"Fuck ass."

John had finally had enough and took a flying leap from the rock he was perched on, tackling her to the hard, jagged gravel below. "A fuck ass? What does that even mean?" He taunted her while sitting on top of her chest, holding her wrists down so she couldn't start swinging as she normally would.

Maria hissed at him like an angry cat. A trickle of blood began to appear from beneath one of her wrists and John let up his grip on her, slowly climbing off the top of her and helping her up to her feet.

He wiped the blood from her wrist and licked it off his finger.

As he cleaned his finger off, Maria looked up at him with hopeful eyes.

"So, does this mean you want a second date?"

Enjoin

2010-01-05T22:51:00.002-05:00

I stood upon what little earth would hold my weight, fingers digging into the rock above me, muscles tightening as they worked to pull me up. I had been here for months, on the side of this mountain bearing the elements at my back. The top only inches from my grasp.

But as I moved skyward so did the earth, ever so slightly but just enough.

"We'll be there soon honey," I yelled over my shoulder, downward. She hung there, swinging, as she had done for as long as I could remember. Her lifeless body just dangling from the rope that we had tied between us as we began our ascent of this great peak. She looked peaceful while she dug the rope into my shoulders. Ripping. Tearing. Burning. My skin had given way to pure meat, and yet I couldn't bring myself to cut her loose. We had set out to conquer this, together.

"It can't be," she had told me numerous times. Although I did listen to her, I never did take it to heart. I have always been stubborn, believing that if I work hard enough I can make anything happen. My mother is probably to blame for this thinking. Anything is possible.

"It's worth trying though, we'll regret it for the rest of our lives if we don't at least try."

If I could have seen the future I may not have pushed so hard for this. We would have parted ways and never spoke of it again. But I of course trudged on toward the infinity that extended above us, the same infinity that would soon rest below.

I pulled myself further upward.

The cliff face stretched vertically, parallel with my straining body. Wind whipping perpendicular to us as I tried to pull myself as close to the rock as possible, wishing to be thinner, wishing to be one with the mountain so I couldn't be pushed off into the abyss.

A single rock crumbled off beneath me. I regained my footing adeptly and listened for the rock to finish its descent. All I heard was the whistle of it as it plummeted, slowly fading away into nothing.

"Well, maybe not the whole mountain is safe," I told her.

Silence.

Things continued this way for weeks to come. I climbed and yet made no ground.

I never did reach the peak, we would both end up back at the base of this mountain that we had set out to climb despite the odds against us. My body finally gave up on me as she had given up on us so many times before we began. The fall was much quicker than one would assume given the distance covered in the previous months, but it was enough time to remember the life we had led, give her one last kiss, and hold on to her until we met the ground.

I always hold on too long, maybe if I had let her go earlier things would have ended better for me. She was doomed from the moment she said she was, I just allowed myself to be pulled into the void alongside her.

So Awkward; I Shouldn't Try Things Like This Again

2009-12-15T14:09:00.003-05:00

The doorbell rang.

"What now?" Pete said to himself.

He peered out the window in an attempt at seeing who was at the door. The house was old and hadn't been built very well though, the wall seemed to curve which made it impossible to see anyone standing in front of the door unless they were a few steps back. This was not the case, whomever was standing there knew the way the building was warped and didn't want to be seen.

"Joe? Is that you?" he yelled through the door. Joe was his landlord, the only one who ever stopped by regularly and one of the only ones who would know about the wall. Incidentally he was also the only one who would have a reason to hide from Pete. "I can hear you breathing!" He couldn't.

Pete thought to himself that maybe it was ninjas out there prepared to attack him when he opened the door. He looked through the window again for any signs of them hiding in the bushes. Nothing.

Finally he decided he might as well open the door. It was Joe, just as he had expected.

"What do you want this time? I already paid my rent for the month!"

Joe looked puzzled as he opened up his ledger.

"Oops, seems we were wrong. Have a nice day." He turned around and headed for his car, still running in the driveway.

Pete quickly closed the door, locking each of the four latches from top to bottom. He returned to his computer nearby and began typing.

The windows exploded around me.

"Frig ass!" I said in exasperation. "Again?"

I peered out one of the shattered windows, looking for the ninjas that were sure to be out there. Yep, hiding in trees, on top of neighboring houses, inside the dog house, one was even hanging from the power line. Not the most stealthy ninjas I'd ever encountered, I would have still noticed them even without them alerting me of their presence by tossing sound waves through my windows.

"Leave me alone!" I screamed. "And get out of Fluffy's dog house!"

A tap on the shoulder made me turn around quicker than I should have, sending me off balance and toppling to the floor.

"Oh look at that, you can be stealthy at times." Joe the Ninja Master had reached me while I worried about them spilling Fluffy's food out of her bowl. "What do you want this time? I already paid my rent for the month!"

He looked puzzled as he opened up his ledger.

"Oops, seems we were wrong. Have a nice day." He slowly walked away, climbing out the window being careful of the shards of glass still wedged in the frame.

Catalyst + MongoDB = wat?

2009-12-14T18:16:00.002-05:00

This probably wasn't the smartest of ways to begin learning how MongoDB works. I probably could have started with something much more simple to get used to MongoDB before jumping into something that didn't have any current support for it. There's a simple way to use Mysql with Catalyst, just use DBIx::Class as your model and you're all set. Not so with something as new as MongoDB.

I've found myself creating and recreating ways to do the model as I learn a better way to do work in Mongo. At this point, most of what I've done has been cannibalized from other spots online, taking full advantage of Moose. I hope full advantage.

My first hurdle so far was making a simple MongoDB model for Catalyst, which I made and then found a better one on Git, here thanks to orlandov

With that working I've slightly modified his usage of it to fit the models I've got, and have moved onto making a Catalyst Authentication class for MongoDB. I modeled this after the KiokuDB Authentication/User stuff, removing role stuff for now and changing it to fit my needs. The main change being:


sub find_user {
    my ($self, $userinfo, $c) = @_;

    my $db = $c->model($self->{config}->{user_model});

    return $db->first_user({_id => $userinfo->{id}}) if $userinfo->{id};
    return bless $db->first_user($userinfo), $self->config->{'store_user_class'};
}

At this point it looks like I've got the hard part out of the way. Now I just need to flesh out the controls and views, should be ready in a day or two in a very ugly state, my design skills sure are shittastic.

Palliate

2009-12-14T09:19:00.008-05:00

Hubert Caldwell was never a fan of Mozart's music, something about it was grating on his ears, and yet he was forced to listen to it more often than he would like. Well, since he wouldn't like to at all, any amount was too much. Being a composer in training, though, really messed up any plans he had made to cut Mozart out of his life. Hubert was nearing the end of his schooling and had assumed this would be the last that Mozart would be able to affect him negatively. Until recently this was looking promising, but he wasn't out of the grasp of the long dead Wolfgang yet.

On this night Hubert once again woke up with a full bladder, as had been the case for the past few weeks. It was getting worse though, each night consisting of more trips to the bathroom than the last. A foamy, weak colored piss that came around as often as that of an old man or a young child. And when it came, it needed to be released quickly, the strain on his bladder was becoming taxing on him mentally.

"Fuck!" he whisper yelled as he stubbed his toe on a toy truck his son had left in the hallway. He had become quite adept at navigating the house in complete darkness but this didn't work out all the time, the addition of random elements threw off the rhythm he had as he weaved through the halls of the house. "Why did they build this shit hole with the bathroom so far away from the master bedroom?" It wasn't a shit hole, it was actually quite the nice home that Hubert and his wife had bought for nearly nothing when the price of real estate was at rock bottom. He wasn't sure where the cursing came from, his family hadn't been overly profane, it was easier to blame it on things that he couldn't help though than to just admit that he found it exhilarating to curse throughout his mundane life.

"We're all made up of bits and pieces of those that came before us," the doctor had explained, "As we decompose, all of those bits of matter have to go somewhere. Quite often they end up just a piece of the ground for thousands of years but it all eventually works its way back into the human population. It's obviously not just other humans that make us up, animals and plants, all matter in fact, makes its way out into the world to form the things we see today. You may be a mum, a rutabaga, a baby woolly mammoth that died in a tar pit. It's all here in this scan that we've taken of you. Now, we can't be certain of where everything came from originally, the path it took to reach your body, but there are some famous people in history that we have been able to identify the atoms that have passed through them."

Mozart was one of these people found to make up Hubert.

He winced as the stream began, realizing it would palliate the kidney disease for a few hours at best.

He pulled a tape recorder out of his robe pocket and clicked it on. "I'm suddenly overcome by a great feeling of sadness like no other. Thoughts of suicide. Unfounded, of course, but it runs through my body more powerfully than any emotion I have ever felt. It rushes through my blood, I can feel the pain as it reaches my extremities, I never knew that I could feel this much in my fingertips. Probably Virginia Woolf. Lucky for me this one just came while still of my own mind, the complete transference of her memories as has happened in the past with others may have proved fatal."

Hubert clicked the recorder off and placed it back into his robe. He made his way back through the house, this time stepping deftly over the truck blocking his path. His mind was still good at some things, a well oiled machine at some times while a rusty mess at others, unable to distinguish between reality and the past that it finds itself in and unable to escape from.

The recognition of these moments has seemed to help lesson the effects, this sadness wouldn't last as long as it could have had he not put his mind toward gathering his thoughts enough to record them. It would never fully alleviate what was going on within him but he hoped to palliate it the best he could.

He slipped into bed next to his wife.

"Mozart?" she said, yawning.

"Mozart," he confirmed, "And a little Virginia Woolf. I recorded that bit, I'm glad I was able to, who knows if the sadness would have been too much otherwise. These slips seem to be happening more often than they used to, I'm not sure if there's something triggering them or not. It may just be my mind decaying, at least they don't lost as long and don't affect me as much as previously, maybe my mind is getting stronger."

"You worry me sometimes," she said as she wrapped her arms around him, "Don't forget about your appointment in the morning, maybe the doctor can make more sense of this all."

She slipped back asleep.

Hubert wasn't sure that he could be helped. The more he thought about his childhood the larger the gaps in time became. He realized that this had probably been happening to him since he was born. Hubert was just more affected than most by what he was made up of, who, he was made up of.

Sleep finally came to him for the night, pushing the worry out of his mind for the time being. Morning would bring its own troubles as he would wake up in London with a burning hatred for the prostitutes walking the streets.

Cogitate

2009-12-12T18:47:00.001-05:00

"Retreat! Retreat!"

My mind screamed it, my mouth just pursed in thought.

"Run away as far as you can! Even that isn't far enough, you still have a chance to get out of this!"

It wouldn't shut up, it never shut up. That was something that I had always wondered about other people, how they shut their mind up, how they just didn't listen to it. Maybe theirs wasn't as insistent as mine. Most nights it became so bad that I couldn't sleep, laying there tossing and turning as it refuse to stop. It always seemed to believe it knew what was best for me, and then when I followed its requests I would soon find out that it sure as hell didn't. Not once did it make the right decision, not once did I think "Gee, I don't regret the crap out of this." Over the years I've come to realize that I just don't know anything except failure. Slowly I've learned to just not listen to myself, do the opposite of what I think should be done.

"Fuck!" I screamed. Audibly.

The crowd around me shuffled away, dispersing like the fallout of a bomb. I, the bomb. Shopping had become a chore for me, as usual, I just wasn't made for such great lengths of human interaction. Even though there is no need to actually speak to those around me, I'm still required to be in their presence. The physicallity of it all is mentally draining. I need to get out of here, I can't cogitate in this environment.

Their eyes run up and down my body. Judging.

Fatuous

2009-12-09T21:41:00.001-05:00

"That was fatuous!" Gil chuckled.

Swarley stared at him blankly, "What?"

"I said that was totally fatuous!" he chuckled again. Gil was pleased with the word he used. It made him feel smart, something he rarely felt in the presence of Swarley. In fact, he rarely felt it around anyone. Especially Swarley, he corrected himself internally.

"Yeah, I got that, but it just wasn't. Do you know what fatuous even means? You were actually using it on something that was the exact opposite of fatuous, I have a feeling you didn't realize that either though."

Gil stood there, twiddling his thumbs in search of some bit of a brain cell to grasp on and ride to an idea. This was much more difficult for him than one would assume, the brain activity was few and far between in the space within his ears. Those big ears. Hair sticking out of them, reaching as if feelers in search of something to touch. Swarley wanted to touch them to see if they were prickly.

"Well, let me answer that with another question," Gil finally stuttered, "What color is the belly of a horse fly?"

"Black, obviously, since the rest of the fly is black. They're not multi-colored."

"Oh."

Swarley climbed down from his flaming unicycle, it had become too hot on there and that was making him sweat. The sweat of course made it hard to juggle.

"Ok so I was eating an apple," Gil again wanted to keep the conversation going, "And I wondered, what if there were a family of worms inside this apple and what if I was eating their home? Where would they live?"

"You should have been thinking more about what would happen if they were in there and you ate them, wouldn't that be on your mind? Not some fatuous worry over where they would live at were they to live."

Gil snorted loudly.

"What?" Swarley was impatient, he always was with Gil involved.

"Farts."

"Huh?"

"You said flatulence!" he laughed even harder, barely able to get the end of the word out of his mouth.

"Umm, no, I said fatuous. The word you had just attempted to use, you fool."

Gil scratched his head. He was balding, but what sparse hair he had left was filled with lice. It wasn't immediately apparent whether or not he was scratching because of the lice or because he was confused over the sentence that Swarley had just spoken. The extremely simple sentence, at that.

"Did you forget already?" Swarley took a swig of milk. "You'll remember it soon enough, I have faith in you."

"Mmmm, faith, like religion."

"No, I do not worship you, I don't believe you're the second coming of anything except maybe God's lunch."

The lights suddenly went out as the fixtures around them exploded. All you could hear was the two of them breathing in the dark. It was an interesting sound, their breathing seemed to begin matching in rhythm the longer it went on.

Swarley was the first to speak up, "You notice our breath matching? It probably has to do with our heightened sense of hearing without our vision to get in the way. The extra hearing coupled with our need to survive makes us subconsciously try to match breaths in case the other is an enemy trying to find us by our breath, if it happens at the same time as his he wouldn't be able to hear us."

"How fatuous!" Gil blurted out.

Bonhomie

2009-12-07T10:15:00.001-05:00

It is a strange feeling to rely completely on others for ones own bonhomie, and yet here I am, a man controlled by society's hands. Quite literally. At my best I am the model human, attentive to my friends and family, a productive member of society in both my professional and personal lives. As a psychological disease researcher I spend my days attempting to cure the human condition, trying to understand the difference between those with legitimate mental disorders and those that are just unable to function as society would wish. It's a very thin line, cloud shrouded in most areas. Outside of the lab I do much of the same, participating in fund raisers to keep my own research going. It's an ugly circle and sometimes I wonder why it's so difficult to find the money for such important research while the most vapid, meaningless of music brings "artists" billions of dollars a year.

Somewhere along the way our priorities got mixed up.

I feel the cool metal of the key as it presses firmly into my spine, it makes sleeping on my back nearly impossible. At least it keeps me from snoring like my wife laying next to me. Like she used to, that is.

At my worst I am a man of no control, a man who must watch himself go through these motions with no ability to stop himself. Trapped within my own body, horrified at what it is capable of as its hands drip blood. Someone else's blood. For as long as I have been on this earth there has been this dichotomy within myself, but most never knew of the depths that the dark side of me extended into. As a boy, my parents knew that I was much more mischievous and cold-hearted when unwound. This wasn't very difficult for them to remedy, luckily, and so they just made sure that I was wound up at all times. No one but them and close friends knew of the key in my spine, it tucked itself nicely into my back so it was never exposed to the world unless shirtless. Because of this, I was never shirtless.

Once I moved out on my own they could no longer protect me from my bad side. It became my job to convince only my closest of friends to reach into the back of my shirt and keep me under control. This wasn't always a possibility though, whether because I had no one around to do it or I was just too lazy to ask for their help. It was at one of these times that my bad side took its turn for the worst. Walking through the park late one night in college it suddenly occurred to me that I wasn't the one in control of my own legs, they seemed to guide my body along as I watched helplessly through my eyes. Everything was just as clear to me as had been only minutes before, but my body was no longer a machine of my mind. It had a mind of its own, intentions that drew it through the park toward a lone college girl lost in thought.

I recognized this girl, she was in one of my classes. I tried to call out to her, ask her for help to bring me back under control, but it didn't work. All I could do was watch as she became closer and closer as I gained on her. Then it happened, the moment that would define who I was for the rest of my life. I pulled the pocket knife out of my pocket, grabbed her around her waist, and slit her throat. She fell to the ground with blood rushing from the open wound. As she hit, her head turned to the side and I could see the fear in her eyes. She knew she was going to die. I wondered if she could see the fear in mine as well, the need to retch, could she see the way I screamed inside?

The second she was dead I returned home and my dorm mate performed his nightly windup.

This went on for years, I have no count of the number of people that I have murdered. I have tried to push it out of my mind, it is too much for me to think about, too many lives ruined. There has been no pattern to who succumbs to my mindless hands, it appears to just be a crime of opportunity. The first person I come across in private is my next victim. I'm very good at hiding it though, being a serial killer for this long and not being found out is something of an accomplishment. Well, there had been no pattern until recently. After my parents passed away I slowly began killing the few people who still knew about my windup key, always in ways such as to make it look like accidents or suicides. Falling from ladders. Carbon monoxide from a running car in the garage. Simple, yet effective.

Which brings us to tonight, laying here next to my wife as blood slowly runs out of the slit in her neck. It had long since stopped pumping out, finally slowing to a trickle. She was the last person alive who knew of my affliction, the last to know that I must be wound up throughout the day. She had been there for me through it all, knowing the torment that I went through every day. I never told her the extent of what was going on in my mind, there were a few times I nearly confided in her of my double life but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I couldn't live with the consequences of her knowing that I was a murderer, of my own will or not. She wouldn't have understood, no one ever could. And now, I must live with the consequences of not telling them, the blood on my hands from my past and future.

I will forever be trapped in this body. Looking out through these eyes. There is no one left to stop me now.

Roborant

2009-12-05T00:45:00.000-05:00

There he is again. Following. Watching.

I glance around for cover. Something. Anything that will hide me from this constant, nagging reminder of what I am. Hide me from the black stare that refuses to let me be. Sometimes in front. Others behind. Always there, always watching as heavy cloud on the most sun filled day. I drag this shadow along with me as I would a ball and chain. My past not just quietly creeping behind me but actively working at these feet to hold me back. Dwelling. Continually dwelling. Not a particularly roborant activity.

I cannot hide from the truth though, the truth is all there is. One cannot move on from this in life. I've let my anger get the better of me once again. It could have ended no other way for someone as out of control as myself. What is it about this passion that consumes me so?

And it is so large, this shadow of mine, feeling of buildings while I struggle beneath it a rat.

Myrmidon

2009-12-03T20:31:00.000-05:00

She narrowed her eyes at me, finally. I was getting under her skin, she was no longer enjoying this. I had known from the start that she was only enticed by this lifestyle because it wasn't her own, once engulfed in it she no longer found thrill in being out of control. Her muscles strained against the skin that surrounded them, but for the time being the makeshift shackles were holding their own.

"You've had enough, haven't you?"

She stared up at me, dejected, eyes holding back tears. Just days earlier she had been begging me for more as she kneeled before me. There was nothing that she wouldn't do for me then as I led her around on a leash. Those days her eyes were filled with pashion, with lust, craving my every order. The attention filled her with a sense of fulfillment, that she was being as a woman should be, serving her man. My shoes were cleaner then thanks to her eager tongue. And, as I watched her lick the rough soles of my shoes, I stood over her with chest outstretched feeling the strength emanate from within me, overpowering her. I stood there as a man in control of his fate, a man in control of the woman he loved.

"It was fun while it lasted, we both knew it couldn't last though," I told her knowing it was the end. "We were both new to this side of the world. I the aggressor, finally moving the earth as I so wished to do all my life, watching as my every wish was fulfilled with no complaints. You, a woman molded within my hands, blindly following her master as the fates decided her future, my myrmidon."

I liked that word, the way it felt within my mouth. Beginning at the lips on its way through the mouth, marble middled, the end of tongue tips and mouth roofs. It included all it could manage to within the confines of ones mouth, doing all it could to please me as did she.

Tears streamed down her rosy, high cheekbones. Rolling downward as she sniffed back the snot that tried to escape from her beautiful nose, a nose made even more perfect by the imperfect freckle that held onto the tip of it. Her lips quivered, exposing the birth mark that was nestled almost invisibly within the top one. She was always ashamed of it, attempting to cover it up and worrying that I could feel it when I kissed her. Because of this I'd begun pointing it out at any chance I could get, first in a playful manner but eventually it turned into more than that. Humiliation. Deep down she enjoyed it, she felt she deserved nothing more than to be turned into a speck of dust.

"I guess so," her voice cracked, "I've been having my doubts for awhile and didn't know how to tell you, I didn't want this to end between us, worried that the end of these games we play would be the end of us as a whole. There was more to us before we found this side of each other, wasn't there? You were first attracted to me because of my confidence, you couldn't have known that deep down I was anything but. Is that the case? Will I never see you again?"

Pacing back and forth in front of her I pondered the question over in my mind. Had this whole thing been based on this one simple act of rebellion against ourselves? Did we have a life together outside of the world we had created for ourselves, the world we had dreamt up with no intention of ever acting on it, ever making it real? There had to be more to us than the excitement of the act, there had to be some amount of excitement for one another.

"I cannot be your humble servant, I refuse to go fully back to that," I began while undoing her shackles. "I enjoyed the power that I felt when you were doing what I asked of you. For once in my life I felt like the man that I could never be to anyone else. Up until these nights with you I had been seen by my peers as someone that could be stepped on, looked down upon, and generally just someone that they could get to do their bidding. I can't be that child again, I've felt what it is to be a man and I will not lose that. And, besides, you look beautiful when you're submitting to me, submission suits you."

"As does domination suit you. I don't expect a 180 from either of us, both sides are enjoyable ways to live, maybe we don't have to go to extremes anymore, maybe we can survive in that murky middle area. It's exciting to be your slave to a healthy level, but lately we have just taken it too far at times."

I yanked the leash attached to her neck. "And this?"

"And this can stay, I'm still your myrmidon, always willing to please you as you wish."