Only Darkness Remained

This was written for an exercise, I took about ten minutes writing and editing this piece and then did some finer/minor tuning when I transferred it to digital. This short short is a self contained tale, I meant it to be something of a commentary on attitudinal difference between my generation and its parent generation as well as some other old world themes. As always, I am open to any commentary or criticism. Enjoy!

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The crowd hissed and swayed, a chorus of ten thousand locusts. They paid for blood, from the lowly, wracked gambler to the naïve infantile, who knows something momentous is occurring and yet can not comprehend its vessel. ‘DEATH,’ they jeered, screeched, and volleyed. The dim arena below, a macabre theater of abject gore, beheld two nameless figures too sorry to have escaped such a fate. One stands bent albeit proud, a gray and withering old man. On the arena floor, drowning in both blood and bile lies the other, a helpless adolescent hardly able to wield the sword issued to him at the start of the duel. The surging masses in the stands mouths frothed with ravenous bloodlust, eager for the axe’s inevitable and terminal descent. The grizzled victor to-be towers over his young challenger. Shaking and haggard, he knows he will not see the New Year’s dawn but reassures himself that his life is worth this one last effort. Anything to ensure his own survival, he reassures himself, as he raises his bloodied and worn axe.

“I am sorry, my son, for I have not the courage to face my own mortality. And so I must perpetuate this season of death so that I, not you, may inherit this defunct world to which I have you brought you in to. One last day, for myself.” And then only darkness remained.

Under The Dunes

Part II of my cruel revival, this is shorter and less edited but more developed than my previous post. Here I dissect the question of motivation at large. Enjoy!

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I’ve spent countless nights willingly feeding my soul to the toiling of ostensible failure, digitally submitting my life as I search for its very definition. What is it about my emotional discharge that fascinates me so? What is it inside of me that forces me to exit my fantasy and begin to pour myself onto digital canvas? It is my unwillingness to conform to the forgotten body that is my generation? It is my unending effort’s fruition that, although seemingly forced, causes me to record these fleeting gasps of breath as they radiate from the recent corpse that is my creative instinct. Who am I kidding? I just want to become famous and remain unforgotten whence my corporeal form has returned to the soil from which it came. I only want to live long enough to see my constructs bury me, and only then will I be able to slip into the sands and rest under their dunes.

To Be Forgotten

It's been over two years since I've taken anything and put it online. I've grown significantly in terms of cognitive maturity, the voice I write with, and the subjects I prefer to linger on. I willingly let this project slip away while I went about whatever it was I was doing. Anyway, I've decided to start fresh by not dumping what I've written during this two year gap and instead to post some things that were written today. I think it's a good start to what may evolve into a routine, which is what I intended to do with this project when I began. Enjoy!

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I’m obsessed with filling a void I’m told exists within the depths of my conscious soul. This void is played out in a meaningless menagerie of thoughtlessness insistent on being that which is thoughtfulness. I’m told this void exists in every person, and I’ve observed how my peers and associates cope with their own existence in the shadow of humanity’s pass. I am unlike my peers in that I am exactly like them; I proclaim my individuality by proclaiming my singularity. Every thought and every opinion is not of my own just as every material possession in my home is not of my own making. I have barricaded my soul behind the thoughts and dreams of recent decades passed and I am content with living in moral squalor so that I may be comfortably lulled to sleep by what the world tells me is important. I constantly question my motives for continuing my journey, naively believing that I know enough to see my path's conclusion. My happiness is wrought digitally, my sadness, however, is culminated in a fine mist that is only apparent when I occasionally open my eyes. The age of harmlessness is in actuality the most deadly age we have ever come upon, where a man cannot disappear into the wildness of nature to construct his living but rather must disappear into the masses to construct his identity among an unending sea of dreams that have already been dreamt. And even then, what was it all for? To be remembered is to be immortal, to be forgotten is to have lived. Mortality is our gift to each other before and after, it is a tribute to never be conquered nor matched. Mortality is what equalizes the façade of conjured happiness, wealth, and notoriety. It proves to us that we are no greater than the sculptures we create in our likeness or the winds generated by our wings’ flap. In that thought, I find great comfort.

The Happening at Barna

This piece was written a few months ago, emailed, forgotten about, and rediscovered. I am aiming for a hind-sighted dystopian plot in this short story. I am revisiting the plot line loosely outlined in this story for a longer short story, more news later. As always, leave comments and feed back! I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it!

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As the dying gas giant lights the united surface, the remnants of the evolutionarily excluded stage a coup in the Stronghold of Barna atop the Pangaeic mountain range central to the previously divided world. Knowing was the key, knowing their demise under the heel of a sister race which sprung from the stars, perhaps their best weapon was simply the fact of knowing their acts were futile no matter what direction they transpired in. When The Visitor arrived, the surging masses were unaware and unprepared, but how could they be for something so out of their naive control? In the night, a film spread throughout the land and sea from an ever expanding point somewhere in the deep azulite recesses of the ocean Pacific, a film unknown to this dimension that radiated and permeated onto everything it touched in an endless cycle that could only terminate upon completion. Upon awakening, those possessing what scientists would confirm to be ‘the God gene’ endured a meta-evolutionary process that resulted in heightened psycho-mental awareness and mass inter-humanoid communication via the mind. Those excluded from the supposed ‘God gene’ pool were routinely hunted and slaughtered or forced into hiding as the fear of dismemberment or being the subject to uncouth experimentation until annihilation was a threat all too real to allow stagnant stubbornness keep the unaffected undetected. The Stronghold at Barna crowns a mountain range with naturally occurring labyrinthine caverns, water dredged vaults, and a sheer face allowing no mountaineer any quarter for footing as the drop climbs to thousands of feet. For six years after the spreading of The Visitor’s gift the Stronghold at Barna shelled only small amounts of its population in exchange for an innumerable amount of invading ‘God gene’ possessors. Coordinated and focused attacks stressed the very chakra points of the structure, forcing its denizens deep into the tunnels and hidden pass-ways. In its last days, the stronghold’s reinforced walls and bolted metal doors gave birth to the unified world’s last three surviving homo sapiens, the last known free-thinkers of the new monadian world order. The surrender was peaceful, they were taken into custody as the rest of the world saw visions of their capture, interrogation, execution, and the dissection of their thoughts and bodies. These minds were among the most coveted, providing one final insight into who we used to be and how the individual mind worked in the petty squabbles and stresses of the previously modern world. Emotions unique to life were sensed one last time as the new face of hive-minded humanity took turn as a wholly unified and truly interconnected utopia of transparency. Individualism’s death was the key to a utilitarian life that until The Visitor appeared, remained a dream unseen in the eyes of Earth’s leaders. When the last of the Stronghold at Barna’s vaults had been pried open and investigators narrowed in on the most sought after room, a question was scrolled in human blood upon the walls of the hallway leading down deep into the mountain range’s core. The meaning of this question sent a shockwave of calculated and weighed response throughout the connected collected mind of humanity at large. It read, “Choice is the spawn of chaos, a gift unlike any entrusted upon us, will the death of deviance in thought quench our thirst for control or will our quenching of chaos only fuel thought in the direction of deviance?” Behind that last vaulted door of homo sapien withholding was a vibrant orchard in bloom with color, fruit, and aroma. In the center was the long decayed corpse of a woman, the most vivid colors of sprout came from her bones that peeked timidly from the soil. This perplexing mystery remains unknown as the hive-mind surges upon itself until the dormancy of chaos awakens from slumber, whenever that may be.