They were well-meaning dogs that didn’t understand their own needs, their own demands—how easily they could tear your cornea from your face with their horned and padded feet. They were…gregarious bears that could kill you with a happy swipe.

Or maybe they were not so forgivable as all that. Maybe they were hungry for the inner skin. Maybe they were wolves working a red velvet rope.

They’d say tell me the truuuuuuuth. And that means tiny red flowers that open across your face and forehead and chest and let all the air out of your dreams until you wake up drowning.

But no fear, they don’t really want the truth from you, anyway. She knew that. She’d tried that. She dared feel there was absolution in that path, but was soon disabused of the fantasy.

No, she was a monster, and she accepted that now. They would hunt her down and destroy her if she dared buy into their proletariat fantasies of community and friendship. They’d nail her to the confessional door.

All alone, unobserved, she fought with all her might against the Pulling Apart, against the Falling Away. She fought to keep it together, straining in a private shadow world where nobody else had eyes, where nobody could even see to sympathize with her contortions. But she did make progress. And she fought for every bit of ground gained. The effort left her with prematurely white hair. But it was that, or simply go slack. Uncurl the fingers and fly into the abyss.

It was that thought that scared her more than anything else she could think of. Maybe because it was so very appealing.

She made it make sense. That is what you do. That is what matters in the end, after all. Life is not that story on the screen where a brass ensemble trills and booms, marking a much-needed resolution to injustice. Life is chaos and chroma and relentless hunger, and unpredictable ragas of light and dark and at all times an energetic and hushed chewing, a wet chewing, a monstrous sigh of gratitude as everything eats everything else.

This thing you call the devil will deflower you as an infant if it wants to. (And it wants to). This thing called mother will hand you to him if that’s your fate. There will be no retraction or compensation. This thing called public education will kick the trapdoor shut on your mind when it is still trying to slide it’s gelatinous fingers around the hatch, and if that doesn’t get your face in the mud, then your so-called friends will finish the job before you are out of your 20s. And you can work it all out in college, but even after 12 years of school, there is no truth so strong that it cannot be shattered by the subzero waters of the unexpected and unmentionable.

Anticipate the drastic.

In a world like this, there is no sense to be had but what you make. If you are good at making sense of out things, you can walk on by. You can climb on up. But if not…if you lose your hold on the dates, and forget when to bow and when to put away the clown shoes, they will lock you into a room and maybe write you a card or two before it’s just too uncomfortable to keep penning your name across the envelope. Their laughter will fade more every day as you waste away and madness eats at your head, gulping huge mouthfuls of bone and swallowing everything that once made you appear beautiful to regular people.

And it was the regular people, after all, who were the beautiful ones. So she studied them. With attention so focused it might resemble devotion or tenderness to an outside eye, she learned. She replaced her own dangerous and glimmering world with the things and thoughts that regular people found notable and worthwhile. She understood that at the bottom of every person’s well of identity and rationale lie madness. She understood how close that bottom was. So she padded the distance between it and herself with items, notions, phrases, memories, pictures, and postcards that others found interesting enough to purchase and give to her or display in their room.

The truuuuuuuth? Vulnerability! Vulnerability. Well of course that’s what the wolf wants, sniffing at your belt, curling a thin gray tongue into the moist thistle of your tenderness. That’s all the wolf wants.

Why do you protect yourself so much? he’d moan. You can’t live in fear of being vulnerable. So said her last (whining and pathetic) lover, begging for another Honesty fix. Why won’t you truuuuuust me? Why won’t you let me truly knooooow you?

“You can’t hold my hand, junior” she said to the empty room.

She immediately laughed. Her words sounded ridiculous. Hello Morose Kitty.

Facing the large windows on the far wall of her apartment, she pulled her lips back to bare as many teeth as she could. Her clowning reflection leered back at her. Through the windows she had a rain-spackled view of the dim brick walls of the adjacent building. For a moment, she let her mind imagine herself getting to her feet, running across the length of the room and hurling herself through the window, sailing down down down to where the night met the concrete. She shivered, watching the movie play out in her head.

The strong overhead light cast dark shadows under her eyes, and rendered a grim image of the grinning girl. Her hair hung down to her waist, black (except for the thick streaks of white) and with bangs that looked as if they had been cut with a dull scissor. The dour aura was, however, somewhat contradicted by the opaque green tights under red corduroy shorts and the bright yellow T-shirt. Whiny-boy once told her she dressed like a box of crayons. She shrugged and replied that he dressed like a teenager from Ohio who had found his way to the island of Manhattan and thought he’d discovered the New Planet of Black Fabrics. Soon, she grew tired of his criticism and his constant demands. She felt enough stress from the outside world to behave. She wasn’t interested in coming home to live up to his requirements.

And that’s how it ended. Again. With her making faces to a silent reflection. With her, hours later, both crying and masturbating at once, sneering at the shadowed face in the glass as she hooked crooked, furious fingers into her starved pudding-flesh.

Or laughing at the TV in bed and turning to look over and laugh with him only to realize nobody was there.

She’d wake up with someone new. Many new Someones.

She craved touch like a desert flower thirsts for even one tiny drop of dew….and she stayed just as thirsty. No matter how many hands moved over her skin, she couldn’t make them stay, she couldn’t make it stick. She couldn’t feel the dent of those probing fingers; those clasping fingers; those wonderfully bruising fingers—down deep, deep, deep, where her craving bloomed ferociously. Where the itch threatened, every single day, to tear the lid off of her day to day pleasantries.

“Are you coming to bed?” asked a male voice behind her.

She didn’t say anything for a moment. Tried to conjure up a face to match the voice.

“Yeah,” she whispered. “In a minute.”

She walked to the window.

The rain swirled down from the sky, dashing itself into a million fragments on the glass and running down into the darkness below. The wind howled, and pried at the windows.

“Can you turn off the light?” she asked the man in her bed.

“Sure, babe.”

A few moments later, she felt his hands prying at her thighs. His lips, softly sipping on her neck. She turned, in the darkness and opened her legs. She let him rush in, like an eager boy, his hands shaking; his lungs hitching. She let the reflected moon lap up her hunger. There was more than enough to go around.

Tanya sat at the keyboard, facing the screen, fingers laid softly upon the home row. She could think of nothing.

What had been her last thought? How was she going to connect Nadioch and The Coming of the Dark days?

Her index fingers skated lightly in minute circles over the nubs on the F and J keys as she hung, poised on the edge of action.

Suddenly she sat up straight, arms moving to her lower back. It ached. She massaged the muscles. It felt good.

She let out a long breath. Leaned back to the keyboard. Typed.

Too many people confuse Narcissism with simple self-centeredness.

Smiling, she leaned into the thought. That’s it. It was just the kind of thing he’d say.

Self-centeredness is the peasant’s brew. Clear, of basic recipe, and cheap. Narcissism is mottled, perhaps, yet bestowed with a rare spice. Self-centeredness lurches into a corner and can go no further; Narcissism veers in elegant, mad loops toward an undeclared and distant vector. Self-centeredness is unambitious and dull and requires immediate attention; Narcissism is complex, fascinating, deranged…and of surprisingly patient temperament.

She laughed out loud. So perfect. A paean to Narcissism! Who would dare? Only Lord Nadioch, who was living—perhaps—somewhere in the late 1800s, and who only deigned to lift his nose when Tanya saw fit to type him into motion.

She had the thread again.

Tanya stood up and circled the room happily. Smiling, her eyes glinted and she squinted as she let the image of Nadioch fill her mind. She saw his hard-etched scowl. His leathery, rouge eyelids. She smelled the acrid flask. She squinted, finding a dangerous gleam flashing from a black hatband. She assumed Nadioch’s shape; sunk her head between her shoulders and scowled. She strode to the door and reached for her jacket, performing for the empty room.

“A self-centered person thinks: A truly good woman would attend my back before I dip my pen and begin. A Narcissist—” and here she used Nadioch’s voice, which allowed the word no “r” sound and instead substituted about eight Hs instead, “A Nahhhhhcissist will think: A truly good woman would rub my back and be overwhelmed with gratitude that she should be allowed to trace her small hands over my exquisite and rare physique.”

Tanya tilted her head up and laughed out loud. She loved this crazy jackass. It was liberating to sketch out the extreme ends of the human condition. It helped you fill in the map. And learn to love your street.

She was still chuckling as she shut the front door, put her hands into her sweatshirt pockets and started walking. She did need a damn backrub. And she needed to walk around a little. Spin out the thread. Nadioch’s thoughts justifying Narcissism—and later, the most extreme and amoral shapes of greed—were not a tangent, it was a central problem that had been plaguing her novel for almost a week.

—

Lord Nadioch was—unbeknownst to himself—on the verge of penning what would be a reknowned political canon in his world, The End of A P(l)easant Delusion: Meditations Upon A Proper Society. The tome would break with other scribes at the time, who often attempted a condescending but necessary view of the poor as charges of their betters, and insisted upon some sort of token obligation to the peasant class. Nadioch was having none of that, and his work would spell out and trumpet a perverse morality which was in all respects, class division bereft of pangs of conscience. The book would become a fixture of reverence in the well-kept homes of the rich, and would in time be used by the King himself to institute horrific measures that protected the ruling classes while the poor suffered in poverty, disease and death. Nadioch was the intellectual force upon whose work would be used to usher in a class of laws which would be known as “The Iron Five” and sometimes simply as “The Gate.”

Lord Nadioch was a driven and smart, but wicked man. He was lost to the forces of evil, there was no doubt about that. But Tanya was smiling as she constructed his particular brand of madness. It was good to be flowing again, to have the mind turned on and working. This bad man would help the hungry writer with the aching back make a good point. She hoped.

Tanya pushed open the glass door to the local bakery. Stood in line behind a large man in a rust-colored jacket. Found her attention fixed on the tantalizing baked goods behind the glass. Hell with it, I’m getting something with lots of Yum in it, she thought. I deserve it. I’m writing!

“I’ll take the last Cheese Danish then,” a man with a well-waxed white mustache said at the front of the line. “And…I’ll bring Kat the cruller.”

Deep in the story again, Tanya’s eyes were soon as glazed as some of the rolls behind the glass. What happens once Nadioch’s book takes off? Will Nadioch be rewarded by the King? Of course. Nadioch would be a celebrity to the ruling classes. He’d be their savior. Saving them from their own conscience. His voice is the symphony that will drown out the wailing of babies and the screaming of new widows. His elegant prose will be to the hard hearts of the aristocrats as satin sheets are to their soft bodies.

“Oh! Don’t be selfish, now, Karl!” said the red-haired woman at the counter, softly. Smiling. “Give Katherine the Cheese Danish…and tell her I said hi.”

Tanya flicked her eyes up briefly at the words being spoken around her, but only to quickly gauge if the line was going to move in any dramatic fashion.

“No…she doesn’t mind,” said Karl, letting a bill slip from his fingers to float down into the tip jar. He slid his money clip back into his pocket as he made his way to the door, past the elderly family, past the tall man in the rust-colored jacket, past the short woman with tight curls under her sweatshirt hood with a face deep in thought.

With one foot on the sidewalk, the man named Karl swung his head back into the bakery and spoke with enough bass for his voice to carry over the heads of the people in line, and settle, perhaps, into the tip jar, too.

“Selfishness is a peasant’s brew, Mina. My specific thirst requires a bit more spice, yes?” and then he was on the street, the door swinging shut.

Tanya felt her heart lurch in her chest at the words.

She moved her head around the Man in the Rust Colored Jacket and looked at Mina, the counter worker. Her face was perhaps a bit flushed, but…otherwise, nothing seemed out of place as she took the order of an elderly woman standing next to what looked like her husband.

“Did he…” said Tanya, turning back to the closed door.

The Man in the Rust Colored Jacket was still looking quizzically in the same direction.

“Weirdo,” he muttered. He swung his head back toward the counter, down to his newspaper.

Tanya left her place in line (there were now three people behind her) and walked to the front door. She put her face nearly against the glass surface, scanning the outside world, but saw no sign of the man who had spoken words, nearly verbatim, that she had typed less than 15 minutes ago.

She pushed the door open, feeling as if in a dream. Standing on the sidewalk, she spoke to herself.

“Did I just read that somewhere? Did someone else write that phrase?”

No…she was sure she had made that up herself. Didn’t she?

She sunk, slowly to a crouched position, leaning her back against the bakery. She looked up and down the street again.

It was confusing. In a sense, she felt like everything she wrote was stolen. She’d always felt that way, on some level. The most creative person in her family, maybe…and always juggling a fear that really she was no more than a clever thief and reassembler. It was her worst nightmare that one day she’d find she had done nothing more than reproduce a book already written. Or worse yet, that everything she had ever written was a copy of something else. Granted, ‘there were no new stories,’ and so on. But that line the man had spoken…it was pretty specific.

She stood up, and dusted off her back. Abrubtly, she laughed. Shook her head to herself, smiling.

“This is silly. I must have read it somewhere else…” she looked back into the bakery, but her appetite was gone. “I mean…what are the alternatives?”

She stood still for one more moment, thinking. She didn’t have an answer for herself. But she needed to write. She knew that.

Tanya’s walk became a jog, and she was home in less than five minutes.

Standing next to the large man, her eyes pointed up at his back.

Ding, sang the elevator car, descending.

The Big Man With the Little Giggle was not laughing. He was sweating. He was counting millions in his mind. He was close to home free. He was still ignoring the little brown-faced brat, whose name he did not know; whom he thought of only as the last delivery.

The elevator hummed, moving earthward at the pace of falling dust.

He glanced down to his sleeve and flicked a particularly offensive piece of lint from the charcoal gray fabric. Tapped his foot one time. Slid his eyes to the glowing buttons on the wall next to him. Nineteen floors and one block to go.

Nineteen floors and one block, and he was golden.

Ding.

He glanced at his Cartier. It was close.

The Little Girl With the Spider Tattoo on her forehead stood by his side and slightly behind him. Her deep-set eyes would meet his anytime he was forced to look at her. Which he tried not to do.

He was trying not to focus on it, he wasn’t big on kicking stupid shit around his head. She just kept getting weirder and weirder and he didn’t need this right now. It’s not that he liked this gig but…a person should act certain ways. It wasn’t natural, the way this kid had been looking at him and talking to him since the pickup. It was working on his nerves. It was throwing him off-stride, and he wasn’t used to that.

Fuck it. He was gonna be fucking God in under ten minutes.  Richer than any other poor fuck in this entire building, that’s for sure. Hell, he’d have  more money than the goddamn mayor by the end of the hour. The last  year’s work was gonna pay off, finally.

He looked down to his hands. The nails were trimmed to the skin, which was as bright and blank and crumb-less as hands that have been scrubbed with iron wool and bleached clean.

“Greed,” said the small voice behind him.

Ding. Eleventh floor.

He straightened up and shoved his hands back into his pockets. Lifted his head up and gazed through the glass wall of the elevator. He drew a deep breath and refocused on the good feeling.

Couldn’t find it.

Nothing comes for free. Deal. Deal. Almost there. Just a little walk across the street, and up to 11th. Home free, man. Home free!

That made him smile a little, finally.

He looked ahead to his reflection in the glass door. Opened his smile wider so he could inspect his teeth. Clean, good.

“Yeah. Deal with it,” he said to nobody.

He jammed the “L” button with his thumb. Hard. He held it in the wall until his nail turned white. He did not release it.

Ding, chirped the elevator, finally, as the car reached the lobby.

—

He was walking as fast as a grown man can drag a small girl along with him without arousing any suspicion, which was still pretty fast. She said nothing, just tried to keep up with his large strides, but fell to the curb and crumpled up clutching her knee.

“Okay, come on, let’s go.” he snapped as she crouched there, holding her knee, face wrinkling up.

It made him feel good to see her unblinking front shattered by pain and emotion. Good. She wasn’t so weird or scary. Just another creepy street rat. As anxious as he was about being so close to finished, he felt his lungs fill with a sigh of relief as he looked down at her tears.

Inside of 1226 11th street, they stood again in an elevator. This time there was no gold and red rug, no smell of fine scents and clean floors . In the tiny metal box of an elevator were the odors only of lysol, caked-on cigarette smoke, and hints of urine. A single, bluish bulb lit the interior of the small enclosure.

The Little Girl With the Spider Tattoo on Her Forehead stood silent next to him, her face again calm and smooth.

“So,” the Big Man With the Little Giggle said, still staring ahead at the crack between the two elevator doors. “This is it. This is where you’ll live now. You’ll…make…friends…” But he couldn’t finish the little ramble of bullshit he typically delivered at this point, and his voice faded out.

Truth is, what happened to her now didn’t concern him at all. He just needed to get the fuck out of this place for good, these walls painted with decades of paint, these tiny, dank passages in this old building. He needed sun, yeah. He needed a vacation. And he’d take one. Maybe Thailand or something. He’d heard good things. He deserved a little R&R after this last year.

“You got that laminated thing, right?” he said as the doors opened. Sub-basement level. “I gave it to you in the car. Right after I…picked you up?  You still got that?”

She said nothing. She followed him when he walked and stopped walking when he did. They were at an elbow in the basement passage, which was lined with dusty pipes snaking overhead, and shadows damply stuck to the walls. He stopped and finally looked down to her.

“Listen,  you’ll need that here.” Angrily. “ I’m helping you out. If you don’t have that, you’ll…you’ll start from the lowest rung. I’m tryin’ to help you.”

The Little Girl With the Spider Tattoo on Her Forehead lifted her eyes to meet his. The oily bulb in the corner of the passage glinted from her shadowed eyes.

“You didn’t pick me up, Big Man,” she said, softly. “That was someone else.”

He felt the hairs stand up all over his scalp and arms at the sound.

“What are you talkin’, about? What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he spat out, holding his voice steady.

“I’m talking about what you’ve done,” she hissed. “You picked up a little girl with a spider tattoo on her forehead.”

In the basement gloom, he squinted hard at the spidery design that looked almost…embossed on the skin between her eyes. He leaned closer to her.

“Yeah, so…isn’t it a spider? What the hell is it, then?” he grunted, only inches from her head.

“It’s not a tattoo,” she whispered, and darkness leapt up and flew into the big man’s shrieking face.

Finally, we stopped, and she turned to face me. Her dark eyes glimmered with the intensity of spirit for which she was known so well.

“Do you remember why we are here?” she asked me.

I did. I said so.

“Yes,” she replied when I had finished. She seemed relieved to hear the answer. Then, she shifted into a softer posture. “And now…we part ways again.”

She looked to the window for a moment. The ocean was an amazing sight in the near-dark, waxily reflecting the huge moon above. “And we will go on.” Quietly, then. To the sea.

“Will I see you again?” I said.

“Yes.” She turned to me and smiled. “Of course. As you always do. But you won’t know me. Nor I, you. Not in words.”

There was a moment, then, of nothing but the distant roar of the waves falling onto the beach below.

“I may even be your schoolteacher next time! Or maybe I’ll beat you up at recess,” she said, grinning.

We both laughed, then. It was good, there. In that safe, joyous space we’ve shared for so long. And then, suddenly, I felt my face began to wrinkle into tears. It surprised me.

“I’m afraid,” I blurted out, feeling utterly ashamed of myself and my tears. What was wrong with me? I wiped my face with the soft, satiny sleeve of my robe.

“So,” I said, feeling irritated. “I’m an old, weak, fear-filled fool at the end of it all, is that it?”

She hushed me. ”No, my love.” Put her hands gently on my cheeks, looking into my eyes and making me look into hers. “You are as wise now as the day you were born.”

Her laugh was gentle, and she pulled me close in an embrace. Her long, black hair was smooth and cool against my face, which I realized suddenly felt very hot. Feverish, almost.

“You are playing one of your characters, silly,” she said into the side of my neck. “Stop pretending you aren’t a boastful, successful and famous playwright. False modesty is so…not you!”

“That’s not funny,” I said. The odd feeling persisted that I had no idea of what I was about to say, and when I did, that it wasn’t my voice at all.

She drew back from me slowly.

“You don’t remember the celebration, then?” she whispered, her question ending a little flat.

“Where did the moon go?” I heard myself say, sounding a bit frantic. Over her shoulder the sky had grown darker. I couldn’t see past her, now.

“It is beginning,” you said,  your face growing smaller. “Oh, dear Emil. Be at peace. You have done good for many in this world, my darling. I will remember you well. And I will see you again.”

“What is beginning?” he asked the nurse, his voice rising now to a high pitch. “What’s beginning?”

He tried to sit up but could barely move his body, and slumped back into the scarred, metal headboard with a sigh. The streetlight glared dully against the window, its weave of shatter-proof wires and dried, yellowy, spackle deflecting the weak rays.

“Where is the damn moon? It was just there!” Ed Hernandez yelled from the only bed in E3.

“Shhh, it’s gonna be fine, Mister Hernandez,” said Sharon, who was exhausted and couldn’t wait to get out of CCU and back into Public Health and doing home visits. “Let me open the curtain a little for you, okay, darlin’?”

“…the ocean…” he said, in a whisper.

“Hmm?” Sharon asked over her shoulder, tugging on the curtain.

And he was gone.

Mictli could never understand why it was that people didn’t seem to want to take the time to know one another. Sometimes he wondered if they heard each other at all, or if they were mostly terrified to listen, terrified to hear the stories that the world has been trying to tell itself since it began. Afraid of having to rebuild, to destroy, to question, to become something new. Or maybe the constant rush and mumble was a self-comforting behavior, like rocking yourself to sleep under your blanket on your knees.

Sometimes when he entered society, he felt as if he were moving on a different temporal plane, as if he couldn’t catch up with people. Probably why they had put him in all the advanced classes as a child. They mistook his utter inability to make sense of how one was supposed to do things with originality.

He needed time to look things over. Things change shape even when you notice them. The world talks back to you at all times. But you have to be listening for it, watching for it. Were people really so brilliant that they got everything about everything so very fast? To Mictli, it seemed that before he could make up his own mind about a moment, others had ruled on it. He learned to move with them, lift his eyebrows properly and then offer his own similar thoughts. He became very good at this. Sometimes he’d completely forget that he was playing along. Sometimes he mistook himself for the reflections cast by his earthly form. Sometimes he lost the boundary between his own aching arms and that of the silhouette of the televised conductor.

The man had stopped talking about Brown University, or the seismic sensors in the shed, and was plucking tines now with someone else. Mictli felt the sun fall on his cheek as he turned to walk back home. He felt the blue of morning roaring through his bones. Holding his paper bag close to his side, he stepped through the automatic door.

The air from outside washed over him with a faint pear scent that he could not place. The world is always a garden, too, he thought. He imagined his smile as a tiny hawk, soaring through the sky of his mind.

The last time Niqo felt this rumbling it had been on a ship, not a planet. He had been nine the last time his people fled an Imurgic planet in a Leaving. He is 109, now. The Cuardaq typically live to around 300  years of age, and while still young, Niqo is well-respected, and not only because of his family line but for how he spends his time. Mostly tending Public Garden #3, where he sits this evening.

The rain falls hard on the silent man, as he sits in the downpour. His eyes are focused on the smokey, golden horizon, and if the pelting drops bother him, it doesn’t show. He has all the time in the world, in one sense. Or certainly no reason to rush around.

It was just in March that he had received news that he was to be honored in the groundbreaking ceremony on the new planet for his work in the community. Many said he was taking after his father. He mostly nodded and smiled to so much of that…he had plans none of them knew about, even then.

The rain seems gleeful to be alone with him now, falling with a velocity nearly hostile. It pounds into the stones and the soil and his forehead and the leaves of every plant in the Garden as if it is throwing itself a planet-claiming party. It’s all yours now, Mother, Niqo thinks, his dark brown, rain-slick skin shining in the setting sunlight. I’m just here to hand it off, if you don’t mind.

But the rain doesn’t answer, doesn’t listen, doesn’t slow. Today, nothing a man wants will matter. And how long the planet has waited.

Niqo lifts his glass of scotch, which is by now watered down considerably from the rain. The taste has grown sharp and sour. He swallows it in one gulp.

–

The last rites were observed last month, and everything since then has been preparation. A Joyful, tearful, whirlwind of ceremony, tears, speeches, parties, rituals, gifts, last grasps, last flings, last words, last looks…. Niqo’s experience of the Leaving is much different this time than it was when he was a boy. But he is a man now, and his life has been filled with many people and moments and lessons since then. He wonders if the years bring weight more than anything else. Weight upon your body that wears it down to dust. Weight upon the mind that brings a caution and regret.

Or maybe it’s just him. Niqo smiles at his morose turn of thought. It’s the rain, he thinks. The sky’s sorrow is filling my heart.

A planet in an Imurgic Spring becomes deadly to human beings, and in more ways than a human being can possibly prepare for. The water becomes a slow-acting depressant to the central nervous system, the plant life becomes caustic to the skin, the air gradually ceases to hold enough oxygen. The entire eco-system shapes itself deliberately fatal to human beings. There are competing scientific theories as well as endless philosophical discussions (and even college courses) dedicated to whether or not the Imurgic condition evolved as a means of cleansing the Cuardaq people from the Universe, a cosmic immunological condition to solve a particularly resistant strain of mammal. There are still no definitive answers to this, and the entire discussion ceases to interest Niqo mostly because whether or not it’s personal, Imurgic planets are deadly to him and people like him. And that’s all he needs to know.

Niqo has one last hand to play in the entire game, however.

—

The first time Niqo’s ancestors learned about the Imurga had been four hundred years before Niqo was born. Of course it remains a core lesson in Cuardaq history. After all, that lesson was what set them all in motion, was what culled 80% of them from the planet upon which they had begun, what had yanked those celebrated ancestors from the world of the living.

It was, by every account of the word, a massacre. Doctors mistook the various illnesses and environmental problems as separate conditions and events for far too long. Thousands upon thousands died before anyone began to think in new ways, ways that led to the very first understanding of the seemingly endless series of new diseases, new conditions, new hazards, new dangers….and tied them together as an apparently conscious effort by the planet to kill off human beings.

The Book, as the Cuardaq people call the history and lessons of their kind, is stocked with the classic gruesome images: The Green Morning, The WorldWide Scream, The Last Tangle, The Parting, The Escape…. Some complain, as time between the first Imurgic Morning goes by and fades somewhat in the collective memory, that the Cuardaq History texts used in school should be modernized a little, so that their history didn’t seem to have at its core a grisly horror story. The typical petitions for less shocking images, etc, are passed around. But each new phase of the Imurga on a new planet quickly quells or shrinks that margin of voices. Most of the Cuardaq are aware at all times that to forget this history is to fall into another Tangle, and from one they might not escape.

On the other side of the spectrum from those who want to shy away from the troublesome history the Cuardaq share are those who jump at the appearance of any new sprout that pokes its head from the soil each Spring. It is they who begin packing as early as January, when the ships aren’t to leave until June—still 3 months earlier than the dangerous phases of the Imurgic Spring appear. And it is they who often lapse into total anxiety the last month or so before the Leaving. Thankfully, their numbers are small.

Unfortunately, all manners of mental stressors and conditions worsen during this time. Ignoring this reality is what led, in time, to the Cuardaq initiating the Leaving three months earlier than historically observed.

But that’s a story for another day.

—

It’s not easy to move an entire civilization, even one as small as that of the Cuardaq people’s. But there is no arguing the phases that precede Imurgic Spring. The rapid disappearance of entire animal species. The temporal changes. The dangerously acid levels of water. Finally, the reversal of seasons.

The planet has entered the last stage that Imurgic planets host before they become inhospitable to humans. Though not yet dangerous, the appearance of small vines with blisters as green as lime-candies have begun to sprout forth from every tree, every lilypad, every patch of moss and they bring a bright note of alarm. Come winter, these blisters will begin breaking. After that, one must avoid contact with all plant life. This is harder than one might think.

This July marks the fourth time the Cuardaq have moved, and whether it is their luck in eco-systems or simply the universe growing more Imurgic over time, Niqo does not yet know. But as they are an adaptive People, they have come to think of this coming and going and watching the signs of nature so as to keep out of her way a manner of living, not something to fight, or overcome, or stop.

The Cuardaq learned long ago that a thorough education is paramount in banishing this kind of fear. Typically, by the time children are five they can identify Imurgic vegetation as well are recite the story of the First Leaving, complete with environmental cues in linear order.

Plants that resemble Imurgic strains in any way were long ago declared against the law to grow. There aren’t many, but nobody wants to have them lying about. It has proved easier to outlaw them, than to deal with the distraction.

—

Niqo’s hand lays folded out upon the ground. He had been reaching for the scotch. But now it rests on the wet grass, his knuckles grazing the flattened stalks. The skies are still again, the ships have gone, the bottle is forgotten, and the old man sits deep in thought. The sun is red, and her last rays envelope Niqo’s lined forehead with care. On this planet quickly growing malevolent, it seems a noble charity to give this last human clinging to her surface.

Niqo lifts his eyes, then, to the garden before him. He sits at the community center, Public Garden #3, now surreally empty. Dusk has moved on and in the darkness, his is the lone figure. But of course, all the streets and buildings and gardens are abandoned tonight.

The truth of it is, nobody knows that Niqo chose to stay on the planet’s surface. His choice to remain behind was communicated to only one person. And even then, not directly. And before she could respond, Niqo had gratefully accepted her embrace as a way of forgetting his confession, and then he had taken more from her. And as always, she was more than happy to give to him. And he had forgotten for the rest of the night, though now her face hangs before him no matter which way he turns his gaze.

But those whispered promises and unadorned admissions belong to stories Niqo will tell himself in his mind in the coming days, as he walks an empty city preparing for a sacrifice he has long felt was his to make.

For now, he sits drinking from a scotch glass as soon as the sky refills it, watching the communal gardens droop under the pre-Imurgic deluge. The dark water lays heavy on the bent leaves, dragging them down to the soil, shaping into barbs underneath. Gleaming blackly as the earth drinks up her own evening aperitif.

It’s like a day of rimjobs on Ecstasy squeezed into an unhappy half-minute at the Dentist’s Office, he thinks, his head agoo with the strange, bright energy often careening about his mind in the wake of the Plug. Almost lost my way in the Milky Way, he thinks, turning off the timer.

He pauses to squint through a darting cloud of bright and dark in his vision; it is as if he is blacking out in reverse.

“A Swarm of Pinprick Stars as your own royal mosquito horizon,” he shouts, partially to keep himself oriented. “The bloody track marks of Cosmic Dust all spattered across your mental margarine!”

Undoing the straps, still breathing hard. Rising from the cockpit. The echoes of his voice go on for a long time.

“Remember!” shrieks the attractive, large woman by the pod, “We don’t count visits to your own lifetime or consciousness!”

You’re not really here he thinks, not believing himself. But she flickers with a blue sheen and vanishes, still smiling warmly as he passes her. She reappears ahead of him at the door.

“I thought you wanted to talk,” she says, suddenly sounding sad. “I stayed up late.”

He walks on, the walls of the room fading behind him. He is tempted to turn his head and see if she is watching him, but he knows there’s no point to that. The seduction quality of static is overrated. He especially feels that way at the end of a session. There’s a wet spot in my soul, he thinks, and laughs at the thought.

Outside, he jumps into  a Zoomer and begins rolling up his sleeve hurriedly.

“To the Oval Office, of course,” he says to the driver. “And remember to follow me on Twitter, you fuck.”

“Yes, Mister President” says the man in whiteface as they come to a traffic circle. “Though I prefer Google Chat for all my professional interactions.”