it startled me how silent it had become. that was when i realized something was up. it was not your run of the mill black out, not in piltover, not with syphoning power from hextech. it was, quite simply put, more of a nothingness than anything. it was almost as if i had been blinked to an engulfing, disorienting void where but a photon existed. teleportation was not what set the whole thing up to be bizarre, less so the destination of the warp. little did i know, and before i even knew it, i was already in way over my head. thoughts the better part of scrambled, i almost didnt notice the second shift in scenery. suddenly i found myself standing atop a, uh, what the fuck was it ? for the most part it resembled one of those abandoned plots i used to follow cait around playing cops and robbers. Only thing is the premise was cut off preemptively within a square’s perimeter, a cloudless crimson sky afoot. i tried looking around some more, and as soon as i caught a glimpse of that nauseating smirk i had grown so tired of seeing, we both spat almost simultaneously at each other the fuck you doing here fuckface. well the “fuckface” was her word, not mine. i opted for something slightly more elegant out of courtesy for that cunty bee word. seriously though, do u know what the fuck happened ? i forced out the words, disgruntled by the obvious lack of any retrievable answers. do i LOOK like i know what the fuck’s up ? figured as much, ye boobless. there was a lunge, or rather an attempt at it, in my direction as jinx decided, apparently, that she would bite my head off in retaliation. that was when the most prostrating yet of our realizations sank in, we could not move. what the he… just as i was about to finish we were warped. again. this time we felt it. the vortex spat us out onto a similar set up, scale-wise. on this imperial dragon etched island, however, we werent alone. i recognized those guys from the wanted posters decades ago. graves and some serial con artist that goes by the name of twisted fate. they looked, if possible, even more confused than us. more noticeable still was two towering figures casting immense shadows over us from two opposing corners of the field. even with my back turned the burning sensation of its intent gaze was very much perceptible. then there was the countdown. it wasnt very explicit. but i didnt need anyone to spell it out for me. it sounded urgent. my body tensed up in wait as the secondly intervals tapered to an end. next thing i know, my body began moving of its own, not mine, volition. my gauntlets were looking for targets, and soon enough started hammering into the graves guy with the crazy looking gun. we didnt exchange much except for blows but from the look he gave me i knew he hated this every bit as i did. the sound of bullets zipped past the air around me as jinx unloaded her barrage of artillery, involuntarily i assumed, onto the poor dudes’ temples. come to think about it, i had ever only been going up against pow pow and fishbone before. funny how it should work out this way i thought to myself. though i could not quite help thinking how furious cait wouldve been at the knowledge of this cute little collaboration.
the fight ended before we even knew it. there was no blood, mind you, they just sort of, uh, disappeared, like when your character runs out of hp in a video game. i did catch an instant when the giant fox-butterfly ( yes and yes ) in front of us winced, perhaps in pain, before we were teleported back to where we had been a minute prior, unscathed, and more debilitatingly confused than ever before. if i gave it a long hard look, i would start to notice similar assets way in the distance, appearing to be floating islands held up by magic most arcane, each adorned with its own sprite, the same ones that watched on our skirmishes like side betters. this was either a terrible practical joke, or we had been dragged into a sick game.
My attire turned yet again a more robust shade of red. Much like the twisted psychopath mind still stained rouge from the viscera of his last victim, I was mired in sweat as crisscrosses of adrenaline plagued my every single pulse. Also much like the fang-baring maniac dripping with intravenous bloodstreams, I just committed a murder. The listless husk of my former self sprawled outwards in a prefabricated manner, the psionic blades of my own mental dispossession still warm within its midriff gash. This was but the first and last time I killed.
[Untitled#2] 10/08/2018
I had yet to pop another bubble when she snapped me out of my own’s. I heard Tim’s coming over this weekend. She said. Though it sounded more to me like oodles of blabberish, a mangled series of inarticulate utterances my befuddled little mind cannot quite make out. Somehow the distance of 5 mere feet between us seemed so distant, so much so that, before I even came to realize, i was idly grasping at what appeared to me at the time the ethereal duplicate of her already ghostly cadaver. She purportedly picked up on how weirdly I was acting because the immediacy with which the water exited the glass on her hand and onto my face would have brought even the deepest of intoxications to a humbling defeat. Her left arm still inclined towards me, she drilled yet another nail into my moth-eaten coffin of bubbly expectations. Have you been drinking again. Momentarily I found myself caught within a forcefield of hesitation. I should’ve just acquiesced to go spruce myself up and handed in the two empty bottles I hastily tucked away underneath my seat when I heard her walk in earlier. That wouldve at least appeased her fury. But instead I just had to succumb to the disquieting inebriation dispossessing me of all my sensibility, smiled docilely at her and said. No honey Ive been here all night blowing bubbles, dont you see ?, brandishing a hellokitty container I got from the corner store in a spontaneous fit of crapulence. God forbid the idiocy. At least I wasnt entirely lying. Just as the words left me, I caught on to how much of a mistake I made. That’s it Kelsey. You’ve had way too much. I’VE had way too much. Have you any idea how longingly i wait everyday to see you, and you expect me to look forward to coming home to THIS. Have some respect for yourself, THEN you can think about me… As she laid into me with sequences of neverending blows, for a second I was ecstatic. I chortled like the 7-year-old Kelsey discovering dogs for the first time. But then also came the bitter actualization that I was gonna lose her yet again, this time forever. Her, the sole reason keeping me going. In a dying urge of a woman fighting for her life, I lunged forward into her ghostly phantasm, into a tug-of-war with death. You lost. A voice drummeled into the walls of my ears. Hers. Next thing I know, I was standing alone in the kitchen, the flourescent light on the counter poorly lit. There was the sound of glassbreaking. That was 10 minutes ago, from when i shoved the bottles under my seat when she came in. My face felt dryer than ever. I rushed to the bedroom where I stashed my revolver for a casual game of russian roulette, mumbling to myself and myself only. Only this time, I’ll win.
[Untitled#3] unfinished circa August 2018
An eerie premonition glued my eyes shut when the shuttle door busted off its hinges. The tangible vacuum of space enveloped me like a primordial blanket made of dark matter, interwoven with the gleaming aura of the stars. Fleeting though it was, my body shuddered as I felt the caress of Mother Celestials, her succulent breasts nursing me back to life upon streams of scintillating cosmos. For a second I was not lost, for I, was home. But then came the rotund actualization that the soothing feeling was extinguished. Terminated. Gone. In its place stood a rhapsody of fear and I exasperation, whose resonance could be felt even through the sono-intransmissible extra-terrestrial expanse. The harness binding me within the simulated gravity of the ship loosened up, releasing my tensed-up body into a weightless sensation I never brought myself to get used to. it had been 9 years since our first mission. 9 long years since any human contact. 9 years since, well, everything. You could be forgiven for thinking that after doing this for so long, i would eventually grow out of my nightmares and isolation. But somehow, i felt called upon not to let up, even for a second, for fear of being consumed by an abstract horror, fear of the unknown, haunting me in my sleep. Sleep was, hence, an enigmatic parameter i could not solve. More than ever I thirst for the sweet embrace of death putting me out of misery by scything the soul out of my blood-pumped vessel.
[Untitled#4] 14/09/2018
I gasped for another breath in a fight for my own life. It did not help in the slightest when depression kept on garroting, and my stomach took another dive into the abyss. Is this penance ? i heard the sound of self-interrogation drumming incessantly against my eardrums. I don’t know. I replied. What with everything that was going on, I WISH that was self-expiation. It would mean that all of this was not real, and was merely a phantasmic child of all my lows at once. I felt alone. I WAS alone.
I turned to my phone as per usual to temporarily deviate from the morbidness. maybe I was amidst a stroke of reverie, or my memory was severely hampered from the fit, but I swore that button had never been there before. Located on the bottom left of the screen where my thumb usually rested, the barely visible scarlet button read “escape”. What’s the worst that can happen ? A strand of thought raced past me as I pressed down on the flickering pixels on the lcd. unlike anything my momentary inebriation could associate the word “escape” with, there was no teleportation voodoo or apparitional monkey business going on. I was still there, in the safety-not-at-all of the rented space barely qualifying as an apartment, but this time jampacked with every person I had ever loved before. this is not real. I thought. How can it BE real ? some of them were miles beyond borders, others downtrodden with death. Part of me knew that they were merely the astral projection of their true selves, but somehow I felt implored to believe in that they were really there, more alive and real than ever. They began to talk to me, one by one, and one after another they injected into me a consistently deeper shot of happiness. I was exhilirated. I was free.
Then came the tears. It did not stop. I did not want it to stop. Sizzling droplets of salt-strewn dew burnt deep, fleshy grooves into my used to be grooveless cheeks. Just then, one by one, they vanished, as fleeting as their arrival, leaving me forlorn in the drafty four-cornered den, but this time feeling a smidgen better than the last. Yeah, it’s gonna be better from now on. I KNEW it was gonna be better, even without the cheery voices in my head telling me so, for true affection had been made available to me at finger’s reach. At the literal press of a button. To the people I’ve loved before
[Untitled #5] 10/10/2018
A burning, muted ache woke me up at 6 am sharp, as per usual. It certainly did not help to be presbyopic as my hands trembled to take the glasses out of their leatherpadded casing. With the greatest feat of strength a 80-yo man could’ve mustered, I clambered from the tumbledown elevation barely qualified as a bed, almost tumbling down myself, and so begun the never-ending journey into the kitchen. The frigid floor left much to be desired and a freezing sensation on my good feet, only then did it occur to me to put slippers on. The countertop was ridden with pills, capsules and tablets. Two red, one white and green and half of the yellow with a P inlaid into one side. Yes I remembered distinctly my prescriptions, though what they did were most arcane, just that whenever I took them, my heart thanked me a little. I fumbled, and mumbled, and burnt the last 2 eggs I was gonna have for breakfast, to the rumble of construction in the periphery. The whole place reeked of gas, and well, cremated unhatched chickens having so much to live for. Eve used to make splendid eggs, and all kinds of them too, but what was the point anyway. Just then, “these eggs arent gonna eat themselves”, my prostration thought. So chagrined though I was, and in yet another one of my daily struggles, I trudged the span of my living room out into the front porch, barely holding onto a behemoth cast iron pan, and plopped down panting. The eggs were tasteless, as were most things at the time, especially those kids who kept swooshing to and fro the bandwagon of rock music on their shiny unscratched Davidsons. Once finished, I left the pan as was on the veranda, just a little something for the forensics to puzzle out, and went to check on the mailbox. The sad dusty metal bin suspended to one of the two moss-strewn pivots was left there to gather dust, as well as the occasional graffiti imbued from contemporary artists in the offing. Otherwise it was doing a spectacular job of stashing out-of-subscription papers, bi-weekly pamphlets from retchedly resolute nursing homes, and much unwelcome memos of someone’s death. Save for the resident pain in my lower back and the numbness in four of my remaining toes, dotage had served me well enough. I wasn’t dead, that was the thing. But it also meant watching powerlessly as one after another everyone in my life took to the earth. Death comes to those quick to wither, oh how I so envied the daisies seared in the south central heat and the irresponsibility of a 12-yo boy. It was Charlie that came in the mail that day. Charlie Dickinson. Dilated kidney tumors, what nasty little nuisances they were. Must’ve been painful, I tutted. Not a note anybody would want to leave on. No sir. Not at all. Eve, out of all people, sure didn’t deserve that. I wished I could’ve cried a little. At least it would have meant i still had hatchets unburied in this life. But no tears came to trickle hellward, none, zero, not after such a winding procession of dead bodies had lined up before your own’s like that. I was dying to meet Eve, and Charlie, and Matt, and my dogs, and Foggy, and Karen, and Kengo and Anna, the cows that butcher lady took away from me, and so I would. I tucked myself in earlier than usual, preemptively accounting for the metaphorical tossing and turning as the unrelenting pain confined me to an ossified comtemplative state. Fuck the ache, and fuck the pills to. Rinse. But there’d be no repeat from there on out.
Toaster Oven Potato 