readings

I turn to you every night

my Book of Sand

lean close to feel your breath

to listen to the story of you

colder and warmer music lilting

while green-eyed cats knead the bedclothes 

birch-bark paper leaves 

strands of autumn red hair

bookmark pages I'll never see again

save the runes etched in my mind

in one of the thousand outcomes

where I'm found without you

Sculpting

The pain crept up from nowhere. It seized his mind like a toothache, a rotten tendril snaking up the synapses already worn raw by regret. He tried to ignore it. The clinking of his point chisel against the marble as he worked seem to stave off the worst of it. 

The sculpture was coming along slowly. The figure inside didn't seem to want to come out this time. He'd caught a glimpse of it, in the marble quarry, beckoning to him, and he had selected the stone. 

Even now, in the clouds of dust that swirled in the evening light, it breathed. 

The pain would get worse, he knew, once the figure was free. But then it might get better. He worked on, in the last of the light. 

THE END FOR NOW 

dream floating

Bedroom window shatters and purple flowers blossom from the pieces of broken glass

Wished we'd been together forever but I learned so much when I was missing you

Closing windows too early

Keeps the cold out

The drapes can be blankets

Erect a fort against the sunlight

Stuff the chinks in the armor

With crumpled pages

faded watercolor landscapes

and endless rough drafts

The Ghost In The Corridor

There is a little ghost haunting the corridor of my parent's house. It's always been there, as far as I can remember. It's funny now, but it scared me when I first saw it. It wears a sheet, but there is definitely a ghost underneath. It has no feet, but there are partial legs sticking out. 

My parents are Catholic, and so I was I, in the beginning, and my mom said the house had been blessed by a priest so I figured if the blessing wasn't stopping the ghost, then it probably wasn't evil. Probably. 

I'd wake up at night and need to use the bathroom. I was afraid of the dark. I'd climb down from the bunk bed and pad down the corridor. The ghost didn't block my way. The bathroom was halfway down, and the ghost usually hovered at the end, before it opened up into the living room and kitchen. 

Oh yeah, it changes sheets. It takes whatever's clean. When we were all little, this meant it was often in a sheet with cartoon animals, or superheroes, and stars and galaxies. 

In the morning, the sheet would be folded up neatly and placed back in the linen closet. 

I don't understand it all. 

If it wasn't there to scare us, or hurt us, or to help us in some way, why was it there?

Catholicism didn't really have any answers because the teachings on ghosts gets surprisingly muddy. 

And none of the teachings mentioned actual bedsheets. 

I'm not religious anymore, and I don't hold any beliefs about gods and devils fighting for the souls of humans, but if I were pressed, I'd have to admit I believe in at least one little ghost, wearing in a bedsheet, floating in a corridor of my mom and dad's house. 

THE END

The Night Watchman

What night, from dusk until dawn, he guarded the empty, rotting grain silo on Baseline road. Years before, when he had been hired, there were fields of grain, and of cotton, of orange groves, and miles and miles of flowers. 

All that was gone now, replaced by tract housing, apartment complexes, gated communities, and a few cows and pigs. 

Everything had changed all around him. Except the grain silo that still stood in the middle of a couple acres of dirt behind a crooked, wooden fence.

His work has given him enough to live, to build a life during the day, at least when he wasn't asleep. He had breakfast for dinner with his family, and then once his wife went to work and his kids went to school, he slept. His real morning was the middle of the afternoon, when he would awaken and pick up the children from school. He would make dinner (his breakfast) and help them with their homework. As the sun began to set, he was off again. 

He didn't know why the silo still needed a guard. Every night. He wasn't allowed to read, or talk on the phone, or write. He would pace the perimeter, shine his flashlight now and then, and think about all the things he'd rather be doing. As far as he could tell, no one watched him. He could have slept, or used his phone, or read all those books he meant to read, or write down his life story. 

But he was a man of his word. So every night, he watched. He was free to think, and that was enough. He watched, and waited for the sun to rise and send him home. 

THE END

The Hidden Constellations

The stars will move for you, if you can convince them. They like little gestures, and consistency. They've had their fill of heroes and odysseys; it is so easy for humans to set some noble goal and think of nothing but attaining it. It's charming, in a way, but it no longer moves them. 

A constellation is a name we give them based on our own perspective. They are not their true names, although some come surprisingly close. 

What does move them now are acts of kindness, over time. The heroes of old proclaimed to all what they hoped to do, and the stars had believed them, millenia ago. 

Today, tonight, every day, every night, they watch us still and look for other signs. Gentle words, kind acts, sparks of warmth between the creatures that spend half their lives in the dark. 

Only sparks, not fires. Fire consumes; what the stars do is fusion. They look for that; consistency, connections.  

Keep doing that, and they will move for you too. 

THE END

Sleep Paralysis

Every night, he dreaded falling asleep. Every night, he tried to fight it. He'd drink a pot of coffee. He played loud music. He downloaded addictive games onto his cell phone. He exercised. He'd write down everything he did that day. Tried an expensive lamp that mimics daylight. Ice-cold showers. Caffeine pills. Other, less legal pills. 

He got rid of his bed. Broke it up with an axe and burned it in the backyard. Threw every pillow and blanket into the flames. 

Every night, he'd fight it, and every night, he'd fail.  No matter what, at midnight, his body would betray him. He'd slowly collapse, deflating like a balloon. Crumpling onto the ground, he would fall asleep. But he wasn't asleep. He could hear, and he could see. But he couldn't move. 

Then the beast would come. 

He heard the claws clicking against the floor. Guttural growling, deep, that he could feel in his chest. It lumbered towards him. It looked like a brown bear, except for its face. The head was a elongated skull, like a horse skull, gleaming white and slicked with viscera. 

It hunched over him. The grinning maw pressed up against his face, snuffling and snorting through its bony nostrils. The incisors click-click-clicked. It tilted its head and turned an empty eye socket to look into his. It opened its bony jaws and spoke. 

"Go the fuck to sleep."

THE END

Your Billion Future Selves

It has been only a handful of generations since humans had unlocked the ability to edit their own genetic code, and now there were no humans left. No true humans, anyway. They still looked like  humans, but biologically, they are now siphonophores. 

The Portuguese Man O' War is often mistaken for a jellyfish. It is related to jellyfish, but the jellyfish is a single organism, with one genome. The Man O' War contains multitudes. It is a colony; multiple units of creatures called zooids. Genetically identical, all from a single egg, but still individual. Each zooid becomea specialized to its role in the colony. And from the outside, it looks like one big jellyfish. These things that look like humans, are made up not of cells, but of, essentially, tiny humans. 

Before, a human might lose a finger. But now, there is no human to lose it. The finger was born to be a finger, the hand was born to be a hand, and the arm, and the torso, and the head the eyes the brain all of it, each one a zooid. The lost finger is alive, as a finger, and it knows it is alone. It will not survive long without the rest of the colony. Not long at all. 

It's confusing, I know, why anyone would want this. They're immortal now, functionally, these new humans. If a liver or a kidney fails, the lab can grow a new one. If the new human were to be cut in half at the waist, and the lab was sufficiently prepared, each half could be made into a whole. This wasn't done, at least not yet, but it could be. 

Individuality, down to the last body part.

Immortality achieved, at the cost of the self.

These new humans appear content, on the whole. Except those of us who work in the labs, raising the zooids into the parts they will play. We monitor every vital sign, every nerve, every . We get the same patterns, the same jagged waves on the electro-cellulargrams, over and over again. 

They are screaming. 

Author's Note: I really thought tonight was going to be the night I ended my streak. It's late, and I'm tired, and work was hard. But then Sibbitt went and wrote this really cool poem about a different kind of immortality and that got me to thinking...

This story needs work; I think the distinction between a single organism and exactly what siphonophores are is not explained very well. It's okay, because I think overall the story is headed in the right direction in evoking an atmosphere of existential dread for that very reason. At least that's what I'm telling myself because it is late and I must sleep. To learn more about siphonophores, visit your local library! Or you can read these notes I copied from Wikipedia and pasted below to re-read ah I struggled to convey how these things are very much alike in concept to a single organism, but the way they go about it is still uncanny as hell. Goodnight!

Siphonophores are highly polymorphic and complex organisms.[4] Although they may appear to be individual organisms, each specimen is in fact a colonial organism composed of medusoid and polypoid zooids that are morphologically and functionally specialized.[5] Zooids are multicellular units that develop from a single fertilized egg and combine to create functional colonies able to reproduce, digest, float, maintain body positioning,

The Town of Crows

The town of Corvus lay nestled in the verdant Carrina Valley. It was surrounded miles of cornfields, the engine of the town's economy. A railroad ran through the valley, ChenIn the middle of the largest field, Woodford Bennett was starting his last shift. He climbed up onto a wooden platform, pushed up the brim of his straw hat, and looked up into the clear blue sky, scanning for crows. 

The Carrina Valley was special. The crop yield per acre was three times that of the entire rest of the state. The town had to protect their investment. 

They had tried traditional scarecrows. But these crows knew. They would come by the thousands, darken the sky, and ravage the corn until there was nothing left. 

But they wouldn't hurt the corn if an actual person was watching over it. Woodford had been hauled out of an empty railcar by the railroad cops when the train had stopped to load up the corn. He had fallen on hard times, as evidenced by his threadbare flannel shirt, torn, frayed overalls. The railroad cops had made him an offer: keep the crows away from the corn, or get locked up in jail. He chose the scarecrow job. 

The cops had treated him real well after that. They even gave him a huge breakfast in the diner. Coffee, hash browns, biscuits and gravy, bacon, sausage, and pancakes. Woodford hadn't eaten that well in months. He would have liked some scrambled eggs, but the server had said they didn't have any today. 

And now he was standing on the platform in the middle of a cornfield on a beautiful spring day. Best job he'd ever had, so far. He bent his head down to light a cigarette. 

A shadow fell over him, and he heard the sound of thousand wings. He looked up, and the crows were upon him. 

The corn would be safe for a few more days. 

THE END

The Skulking Terror That Came To Wash

She didn't feel like planning for the hunt, not tonight. The villagers would have what they always had: torches, blades, a few flintlock rifles, and sheer numbers. They knew she would come when the moon was full, and the forest that surrounded the modest village of Wash, practically swallowing it, would be shrouded in the steam fog from the lake; typical of the warm summer nights. It was perfect cover for her; because she was a sleek, silvery-grey cat. From a distance, she appeared to be a regular house cat, but for her size. She was as large as a panther, and much more powerful. Her kind were rare, and she had no name. Cats have no use for names. 

The villagers has tried to stay inside at first. Barricaded themselves behind locked doors and boarded up windows, as if against a natural disaster. And yet, when the morning came and the villagers undid the fortifications, one house would not awaken. All the doors would still be locked from the inside, all the windows still fastened shut, and no trace of the former inhabitants. 

Now, on the night of the full moon, the villagers gathered and went out into the woods to hunt for the creature that took entire families. 

She easily slipped past them and made her way into the village. 

She found the very first house that had been taken, months ago. The doors had been broken in by worried villagers, but had since been boarded up. The windows were also still shut and sealed. The houses were treated as cursed. 

She was able to get inside by going through the chimney. It was a tight fit. 

She investigated the entire house. The kitchen chairs were knocked over, the cupboards were open, and drawers were pulled out completely, their contents strewn across the floor. Almost looked like the work of bandits. But there was no blood, and no real damage. Nothing to indicate people had been battling for their lives. 

She moved on to the second house. Again, she entered through the chimney. It was much the same, except this house was from a more well-to-do family. Their portrait hung on the wall, a painting of the mother, father, and two young children. The children had one peculiarity; their eyes were different colors. The mother had green eyes, and the father had blue. The children each had one green eye and one blue eye. Heterochromia. And no sign of any of them. 

And so she searched the next house, and then the next, with no further insights. She knew she was missing something. All these houses, each left  undisturbed after each disappearance. Why, the neighbors hadn't even bothered to clean up the mess...

She dashed back to the first house and wriggled down the chimney. The house smelled...like a house. Not exactly a clean house, but not a dirty house. No hint of rotting food. She checked the trash cans. 

They were empty.

She raced through through the other houses, down the chimney and back out again. Again, they were all the same. Empty trash cans. 

She had a hunch. 

She ran into the forest, slipping past the prowling villagers with ease, and searched the forest. There, in a foggy glen, she found two little raccoons. They looked up at her, shivering in fear, each with one green eye and one blue eye. 

She licked their faces with her rough tongue, and soon the little kits clung to her. She ran deep into the forest and took them to her den. Then she ran back to search for the rest of the transformed villagers. She could not find them. Perhaps they had been scared away by the mob of villagers, or had been caught in the many traps that had been set out. 

The great silvery cat did not return to the village. She cared for the baby raccoons. They grew much larger than regular raccoons, and the three of them would go on to have many adventures. 

She still didn't have a name, because cats have no use for names, normally, but her kits needed to call her something, so she allowed it. They called her "Mom."

THE END

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I apologize for how rough this one is; you can absolutely tell where I just gave up trying to describe things mid-sentence, but overall I'm pretty happy with it. It's late, which is why there's no explanation given for the original source of the vamp-raccoon, if you will, but I assure you there is one. As the title suggests, I was kind of going for Lovecraft's The Lurking Fear and The Doom That Came To Sarnath but with... raccoons. And a cat detective. 

Right. Thanks for reading. This was fun. Kinda wish I didn't have a day job because I am going to be hurting tomorrow. Oh well. That's future Guillermo's problem, not mine. 

Goodnight!