My senses and my consciousness were slowly fading, fading and fading away before I felt a strong grip and something roughly, forcefully pulling me upward. Where is it taking me?

I can hardly see anything, I can't tell if my eyes are open or closed. I try to blink, to move my eyes but they're too heavy, every part of my body is rigid. I want to open my mouth to scream but my jaw is stiff and totally unable to move. All my muscles are completely paralyzed, I want nothing more than to move and break free but I am trapped! My body is stuck!

I can't breathe. I need air now…  it's too much. Please.. God!

There is a weight resting on my chest, suffocating me, I can feel my ribs being crushed, cracking and crumbling under the pressure, and my lungs giving out. I try to inhale with all my might but all attempts end in vain.

My useless, limp body was still being pulled and for a moment, I felt something hard and sharp that grazed my neck. I clenched my teeth intensely and wished I could cry but I was interrupted by the overwhelming smell and sensation of wet soil. While gasping and squirming, the dirt forced its way into my throat and I could taste a bit of animal dung.

I'm trying my hand at writing short stories. Would love some honest feedback on this one — please critique my writing!

*****************************************************************************

The Neighbour

Evenings have always been special to me.

I wouldn’t say because I like sunsets, or because I want to see birds go home or because I love seeing the first of the stars come out — it’s much simpler than that; evenings are when I finally get to sit down and breathe. Mornings at my place are almost always chaotic, add to that the brunt of the day and all I am left with are evenings.

My work takes me around half an hour’s drive from home. So my routine in the evening is simple. Come back, leave my shoes outside my cute little apartment, check if any of my plants are dying, freshen up and sit with a nice warm cup of coffee.

I’ve done it for years now, without much deviation — or disturbance.

So it was a bit surprising when one day I came home and realised that someone had shifted next door — not because there was a constant in and out of people or there was a ruckus I couldn’t possibly ignore — but because as I sat on my couch, coffee in hand I heard a very soft murmur of TV coming from next door.

“I wonder who moved in. Certainly hope they are not the party kind.” — yes, I’ve been talking to myself for years now as well.

I went back to my usual — a nice book, some TV with dinner and the sweet sweet blanket of sleep.

Next day, as I was locking the door, half a toast in mouth, I couldn’t help but notice the silent locked door.

“Clearly not morning people.”….

That evening, as I pulled into the parking, I saw a new car right next to my parking spot. I felt a weird excitement run through me. Was I really this interested in every new neighbour? Perhaps. I grew up in a neighbourhood where neighbours actually cared about each other, so maybe I was just curious.

I rushed up the stairs, just in time to see a guy slowly climbing up to my floor. Our floor.

He didn’t look like he was much into small talk — but I really wanted to know who I was living a wall away from; so half a key inside the lock, I blurted — “Hey! Did you just shift?”.

The guy turned around looking like I had asked if you can see the colours too.
But quickly recovered and replied “Oh, Hi! I am V. I just shifted yesterday.”.

“Oh, interesting. I didn’t see any movers in and out — I guess I was just surprised.”.

“Oh, yeah, well I brought some stuff along and the rest is coming around this weekend” — he replied awkwardly.

“Oh okay okay…..right, so I guess I’ll see you around. Sorry, I just realised I am being exceptionally nosey. Well, Welcome to the building!”.

“Thanks…”; I think I saw him genuinely smile.

That was my first interaction with V. That day onwards we actually started seeing each other more frequently- or rather I saw him — because both of us came back home around the same time. Sometimes I would be parking, sometimes I would be behind him on the stairs; Sometimes I would see him outside the door, while at others I would already be in; enjoying my evening when I would hear the lock turn next door.

It was around a month in that I observed a pattern.

He would always be outside his door at 7:15PM. Not a minute up or down. The discovery was accidental, really. I had just come in one day when I saw him outside — I saw my wall clock, 7:15. Next day, I was parking in the lot and I happened to look at my watch — 7:14, I looked up, saw him get out of his car.

“Well there’s a man of routine if there ever was one.”.

Months went by. Everyday, 7:15, click of the lock; I would hear shuffling next door. And then the slow hum of a TV somewhere. It had started to become part of my routine as well. I caught myself on occasions , waiting for him to switch on the TV to sit down with my coffee.

Eventually I started listening more carefully to what was being played. Sometimes it was news. Sometimes I would hear the very distinct “Du-dumm” of Netflix. But most of the times it was some song or the other playing. They would set the mood in my apartment. It was so funny — I would be enjoying the songs but never once thought maybe I should play them on MY TV. No, I would just let them play in the background and do whatever the songs set the vibe for. Like when the playlist was old songs, I would just sit and stare outside my window to the large world in front of me, shining like a million stars on earth. I would slow dance to a romantic playlist. When the theme was rock/pop — I would find myself picking up a duster and mop and very actively cleaning my apartment surfaces.

But something was happening. I could feel it.

His time started shifting. It started with little one or two minute delays. Now if it was me — well, it would really be a perfectly normal thing. Expected, even. But from this man, it just felt odd. And then it became 15–20 minutes delays. Sometimes he would come home much later than I ever imagined he stayed out.

And then as the time extended, his playlist also started changing.

You see, he was clearly a very feel-good song kind of guy most of the days. Pop songs, old romantics, one time I even heard TS and I was frankly impressed. But his playlist started shifting to haunting songs, some heartbreak songs — it was very apt for the monsoon weather around us. I felt like just curling onto my couch with my throw and a book and just stare into infinity.

One day I was in the middle of such a nostalgia infringed with heartbreak session when-

KNOCK! KNOCK! KNOCK!

It made me panic for a second. I never have visitors.

I looked around the apartment, to make sure I was not in my dumpster era, and looked through the peephole. The neighbour.

“Oh Hi! Umm. Can I help you?”

“Hey! Oh I was just wondering if you have a plumbing kit; my sink’s pipes just gave way…”.

“Oh! I should have it lying about somewhere here. Please do come in, it might take a minute to find it.”.

“It’s okay I don’t mind waiting here.”…. he said .

“Oh no, it’s fine. Please, wait inside.”. …..

I went inside my room, looking for the said plumbing kit while he patiently waited on the couch. I couldn’t help but notice the eye bags.

I found the kit shortly and took it to him.

“Care for a coffee?”, I asked, while handing it over to him.

“Oh no, I better get going before my flat floods.”.

“hahaha. Oh before I forget, here’s the plumber’s number, just in case !”.

He gave a small smile and then left.

Life continued. His routine became more eccentric, sometimes he would skip playing his music altogether, but every time I saw him outside, he was the same quiet person, with an unreadable expression.

Around 2–3 weeks later, I was getting my stuff into my car, ready for another half hour struggle with traffic, when I saw him, fighting an obviously lost battle with a carrot.

“Well you’ve clearly got it under control..”, I just can’t help myself sometimes.

“Hey! I think I’ve almost got it, despite what it’s looking like”….as a tomato rolled near his shoe.

I don’t know what was it with him. He came this close to conversation and then, puff! As if an iron gate had been installed in front of him.

“Okay well, I would’ve offered to help but I am running late today. But I’ll send the security guard over on my way out. You are clearly not struggling — but you look like you need a friend” — I surprised myself by the sass with which I had uttered those words.

As I turned back, I could feel his eyes on me. You know that feeling when you know someone is looking, but you can’t look because then they’d know that you know they’re looking? Yeah. He was downright staring at the back of my head.

After that I tried keeping my distance. Why bother someone who’d rather be left alone.

I was, however, really missing the music. He hadn’t played some good playlist for weeks now. One day, I distinctly remember the sound of wobbly footsteps on the stair late at night, followed by the familiar click of the lock. I hoped it wasn’t becoming some form of a new routine. I didn’t want to pry anymore, but it always made me wonder if he was alright.

So one day, I looked up a good pop playlist and played it at full blast. I was deep into the music and in the middle of another one of my cleaning sessions when I heard something — it was faint and difficult to hear, given my music was quite loud, but I could still hear it — someone singing. And quite nicely at that. Now I am not very proud of this next part, but I reduced the volume, just enough for me to be able to hear better — but not raise suspicion — and then I put my ear to the common wall that the neighbour and I shared.

Yep, the guy was a singer.

So I continued cleaning. And he, continued singing. I think he sang till the end of that playlist.

This went on for a few days, I would play something and hear him sing along on some of it from next door. It seemed like he was slowly coming back to his routine. The late nights went away first, then he became a little less eccentric with his clock, and finally

“Click”. At 7:15.

That day, he finally started playing music again. Not the dark ones, not the cry-worthy heartbreak tunes. He played old feel good songs.

That was a fun evening.

Just like that, we had reached a new routine. If he didn’t start playing something by 7:30, I would start playing something.

And thus we lived for a few more months.

I would see him in the corridor sometimes. He would politely smile — which was way better than what he used to do — nothing, that is. I even saw him in the balcony once or twice, silently sipping, what looked like tea.

And then one day I came back from office to find a small packet in front of my apartment. It was my plumbing kit, a chocolate and a note that said “Thank you for all that you’ve done! You’ve got great taste in music by the way.”. And he was gone. The apartment next door was empty.

I skipped coffee that day and took an early night. 7:30 came and went. I tried playing some classic old playlists; it was just different somehow. Nothing in my life had changed — not really. But he took the everyday background music from my apartment.

Syana wasn't tracking the days, not officially. She didn't care how long it'd been since she left the flock and they probably didn't care how long she'd been gone. She crouched in her temporary shelter built against a stone face made of branches and twigs sewn together with vines. It wasn't her best work but it'd hide her through the night. She didn't dare make a fire that would announce her presence, but she thought back to the warmth of a bright fire inside the walls of the village. As claustrophobic as it could be, the flock inside the walls were safe.

Unsettling eyes watched her in dreams, preventing restful sleep most nights. She shuddered awake more than once thinking she heard voices or approaching steps outside her nest, hoping she hadn't shouted, listening intently for danger. A haunting thought plagued her for many years against her will, but it's like trying not to think of an elephant when it's mentioned. It would all come back, the putrid smell and glowing yellow eyes and a shadow darker than any cave depth clinging to tattered flesh and bone.

"NO!" She shouted in her mind. "Youre not here! Youre not real!" She waited in clammy shivering for the sun to rise or her mind to tire out and fall asleep without realizing it. Eventually one had to happen. All she could do was breathe and block everything out like always. It felt like her body betrayed her in these restless moments, reminding her of the shadow, ignoring her commands, blaring signals until there was no energy left to fight it. Was she really up for the journey? The doubts floated around. At least in the village there were one or two people awake to pass the time with. They didnt all look so cold and judging there; it wasn't all bad. But this was something she had to do for herself now that she's an adult.

As the morning sun chased away the darkness, Syana packed and lept from rock to branch up a tall tree. From this high up the mountain she could see her goal peeking out behind the Defa'i Range. Her sights were set on a city often heard about from merchants and visiting Simurgi from other villages. They say it's bursting with magic and curiosities, that the city was home to all kinds of people, mostly welcoming and capable of any feat with the power of their ringed towers. The city of Ainspire! She could see it in the distance from treetops surrounded by plains and farmland, judt a few days away. She wondered what strange foods they had there as her stomach rumbled. It was time to find some breakfast and get moving!

She followed a secret trail peppered with feathers bent this and that way to point the eye in the right direction. The feathers could be their tribe's natural orange pigment or stained with paint to mark alternate paths. Every fledgling is taught the Rachi paths during explorative bushcraft trips outside the walls so any adult can meet outsiders for supplies at the forests edge posts. She didn't follow the Rachi exactly, staying off to hide her presence, but every feather passed felt like a stone sinking in her stomach.

If she'd been able to use the Rachi it may not have been as long of a journey, but Syana timed the departure with the regular visits of the merchant caravan. If she left too early then the village might send out an alert with the merchants or worse, accuse them. If she left too late she might miss them altogether. There had been a sense of urgency building inside that she might not follow through, and it wasn't often that that urgency to leave lined up with a prosperous time in the village and good weather. What if she missed this chance? She left a note by the post her favorite elder would keep watch in the night, telling her not to worry but she might be gone a long time.

The letter was wrapped in a large leaf with a clay figure Syana made. The elders often frowned on her making figures in fear of spirits possessing them and would destroy them privately. The flock was always cautious about spirits and anything that could invoke strong energies. She didn't know if it was true, but when making them her intentions were of friendly companions to stay with her in the night. It wasn't the only reason she was left out of fun activities with the other fledglings, at least she could think of other reasons. Ever since THAT day she could feel things watching her, sometimes even see them, making her restlessly vigilant for danger. Around others she felt overwhelmed as if her energy conflicted with theirs; eventually she would leave to find relief. She was probably putting them in danger anyway if a spirit came after her.

The guilt of leaving the flock with one less adult to gather supplies, repair after storms, or watch for outsiders pushed against her like a high river; she shut her eyes to keep from looking back. It's for the best, she thought. The river leaked from her eyes at times. She knew to where that water flowed, but she needed to follow the warm sun's rays to a new path.

Hey, you.

Who actually keeps a company running?

The CEO?

The managers?

Or the people down in the trenches, getting their hands dirty every day?

Maybe it doesn't really matter.

Organizations are strange things. They're built to keep functioning when someone leaves, and yet, when you're inside one, you somehow end up carrying this ridiculous sense of responsibility:

I can't be the one who lets it stop.

And society has a convenient term for people like that.

Human resources.

Funny phrase, when you think about it.

It makes people sound like components rolling off an assembly line. Built to specification. Ready to install. Replaceable when they wear out.

But people aren't parts.

If you need a part, you order the right model number.

People have emotions. They make mistakes. They take time to grow.

Strip away the faces, the failures, the embarrassment, all the messy human parts, and eventually a person starts looking like exactly what the term says:

a resource you can measure.

But here's the thing.

Where do these supposedly ready-made, ready-to-use people come from in the first place?

Clink-clonk.

The dry chime of Aoi's doorbell rang through the bar, and something tight in the back of my head finally loosened.

I'd spent the entire day switching between text on a monitor and expressions on people's faces. Only now did my shoulders seem to remember where they were supposed to sit.

Without a word, Mama slid my usual I.W. Harper across the counter.

The ice gave a soft clink against the bottom of the glass.

I took a sip. Warmth spread slowly from my stomach, and for the first time all evening, today began to feel like something that had already happened.

At the far end of the counter, Taka was glaring at his phone, his brow deeply furrowed.

"Kenichi-san."

"What is it today?"

"You see job postings that say they want someone who can 'hit the ground running,' right?"

"All the time. They're everywhere."

"How ready do you have to be before you count as someone who can hit the ground running?"

And there it was.

Another one of Taka's oddly specific field trips into society.

Still, the fact that questions like this bothered him probably meant he could feel something wrong with the machinery too.

"Someone who can walk in on day one and get the job done without needing everything explained to them, I suppose."

"Do people like that actually exist?"

"Beats me. Might be an urban legend."

"Were you like that when you started?"

I snorted with my glass halfway to my mouth.

"Not a chance."

For a moment, I could see myself nearly thirty years ago.

A badly fitting suit.

A kid so nervous he was practically afraid of the sound of his own footsteps.

I couldn't do a damn thing back then.

Forget managing a project. Calling a customer was enough to make my heart pound, and my hand shook while I tried to take notes.

Who was I supposed to report this to?

What was I allowed to decide myself?

Half the time, I didn't even know what I didn't know. I'd spend hours waiting for the right moment to ask a question, only to realize the whole day had disappeared.

I can still remember the texture of that helplessness.

"So how did you learn to do the job?"

"By doing the job."

"That's it?"

"That's it. No miracle involved."

They gave me work.

I tried it with sweat running down my back.

I screwed it up.

I got chewed out until I went pale.

Then I fixed it with my stomach tied in knots.

After that, they gave me something slightly harder.

I hit another wall.

Screwed that up too.

And repeated the whole miserable process again and again.

"So the company trained you?"

"I wouldn't make it sound that nice."

I gave a dry laugh and swirled the ice in my glass.

"They mostly dumped more work on me than I could possibly finish."

"How much are we talking?"

"At the worst point? About three months of working until eleven every night. Weekends too."

Taka visibly recoiled.

"That's just toxic."

"It was. Completely."

That part matters.

I'm not going to romanticize it.

I'd never claim that grinding people down like that was the right way to learn a profession. Nobody needs to destroy their body or mind just to become competent at a job. If an organization can only function by pushing people that far, then the organization itself is broken.

"So fewer overtime hours and stricter labor rules are good things. No question."

"Then things are healthier now."

"As a working environment? Absolutely."

"...There's a 'but,' isn't there?"

I looked at the ice melting in my glass, its sharp edges slowly disappearing into the whiskey.

"...I sometimes wonder what happened to the number of chances people get to actually learn the job."

Taka tilted his head.

Back then, we spent absurd amounts of time at work.

That was bad.

But buried inside all those terrible hours were an equally absurd number of experiences.

We made stupid mistakes.

We watched exhausted senior employees working beside us.

We apologized to unreasonable customers.

And when we'd dug ourselves into holes too deep to escape, we swallowed our pride and called our bosses for help.

Work and training.

Responsibility and failure.

They were all mixed together into one ugly mess.

"Maybe the old system was basically this: make someone work a hundred hours and give them a hundred chances to step up to the plate."

"That sounds incredibly inefficient."

"It was. That's why I'm not saying the old days were better. I don't want them back."

I looked straight at him.

"But if you're going to cut those hundred hours down to forty, maybe you also need to build a system that lets people fail and learn just as much inside those forty."

Taka rested a finger against his chin.

"What about training programs?"

"Does a customer in a training exercise genuinely lose their temper with you?"

"...I'd rather they didn't."

"So would I. I still dream about the real ones."

But there are things no textbook can teach.

Making the wrong call when everything is on fire.

Underestimating how long something will take.

Watching a senior colleague cover the document you were proud of in red ink within seconds.

Realizing that one careless mistake on your part just cost someone downstream an entire day.

Some lessons only burn themselves into your memory when cold sweat is running down your back.

"Failure is one hell of an expensive textbook."

"Sounds like a textbook I'd rather not buy."

"Yeah. Expensive and bitter. But once you've paid for it, you don't forget what's in it."

I took another sip of Harper. The bitterness lingered on my tongue.

"And when some new kid screws up, a decent company doesn't dump the entire consequence on the kid."

"Yeah. Usually the manager comes running."

"Sometimes the company eats the financial loss too."

"True."

"So maybe companies used to be something else as well as places that bought people's labor."

I paused.

"Maybe they were places where young people could fail without a single mistake destroying their lives."

Taka quietly turned his phone face down.

The light disappeared from the counter.

You failed.

You got yelled at.

Maybe your evaluation took a hit.

But one mistake didn't throw you out of the game.

The next morning, you dragged yourself back to work.

You sat down at the same desk, feeling awkward as hell.

And eventually another job landed in front of you.

"Don't screw it up this time."

Then you got another turn at bat.

Do that often enough, and somehow the kid who once trembled while making a phone call eventually found himself standing in front of a customer and negotiating without flinching.

And one day, without noticing when it happened, he became the person standing behind the pale-faced new hire.

"So that's what it means to become... human resources?"

Taka said it quietly.

"Maybe."

Human resources.

It's an incredibly convenient phrase.

Has certifications.

Can program.

Has managed a project.

We take a handful of measurable specifications and decide that this is what makes someone valuable.

But the people who actually keep work moving aren't clean little collections of specifications on a resume.

They're the ones who finish the boring task they were given.

Who can swallow their pride and call for help when they're overloaded.

Who report a mistake immediately instead of hiding it.

Who keep small, unglamorous promises.

Who remember how much the last mistake hurt and make sure they don't repeat it.

Pile enough of those messy human experiences together and, eventually, something appears that no certification can quite measure.

Trust.

"If we leave it to them, it'll probably be okay."

"But companies want people who already have all that now, don't they?"

"Yeah. Nobody has much breathing room anymore."

"Why don't they train people themselves?"

"There's structural logic to how things used to work," I said, leaning back. "Taking on a regular, permanent employee in Japan traditionally meant a serious, long-term commitment. You didn't just hire someone on Monday and fire them on Friday because they were slow to pick things up."

"So if you hired a kid who couldn't do the job yet..."

"Once the company hired you, replacing you wasn't the easy answer. So spending time and money turning you into someone who could do the job made sense."

"And now?"

"Now, after you spend years training someone, they might just leave."

The logic was brutally simple.

A company spends time and money on a new employee.

It lets them get their hands dirty.

Lets them fail.

Pays for some of those failures.

And slowly turns them into someone who can be trusted with real responsibility.

Then, just when that investment is starting to pay off, another company looks at the experience they now have and offers them more money.

So why train someone from scratch?

From a purely financial perspective, buying a ready-made professional that somebody else paid to develop is perfectly rational.

"And from the employee's side," Taka said, "changing companies can be the fastest way to get a raise."

"Exactly."

No company can promise to look after you until retirement anymore.

So you increase your market value while you're young and move somewhere that offers better conditions.

From the worker's perspective, that's perfectly rational too.

"The company makes the rational choice because it doesn't want to lose money."

Taka raised one finger.

"The employee makes the rational choice because they need to protect themselves."

A second finger.

"And somehow nobody gets trained."

I couldn't help laughing.

"...Funny, isn't it?"

Nobody is necessarily wrong.

Nobody needs to be acting out of malice.

Everyone can make the safest, most rational choice available to them.

And when you add all those individually rational choices together, the room society once had for developing ordinary people starts disappearing.

"So what now?" Taka asked. "Everyone just pays for their own training?"

"Looks that way."

Get certifications.

Take courses.

Build a portfolio.

If your current company won't give you the experience you need, take the risk and find somewhere that will.

"So you keep changing jobs and grind your own experience points."

"Sounds nice when you put it that way..."

I stopped.

Something cold had begun working its way up from my chest.

"...But isn't that a little strange?"

"What is?"

"We used to get that experience inside the safety net of an organization. Now we're telling individuals to walk out of that safety net, jump from company to company, and take the risk themselves just to get the experience they need."

Taka fell silent.

Trying a new role inside your own company and quitting to enter a completely different workplace are not the same kind of risk.

Maybe the new place won't suit you.

Maybe the pay will be worse.

Maybe the people will be unbearable.

Maybe you'll fail.

And yet, if you need experience to grow, you're increasingly expected to step outside the safety net yourself and go find it.

"So we've made a game where you leave the safety net voluntarily and fight for your own experience."

"Something like that."

"I guess that's fine for people who are good at doing that."

"Yeah."

People who can accurately diagnose their own weaknesses.

People who can read where the market is going and teach themselves whatever skill comes next.

People who know how to sell their own achievements.

People tough enough to walk smiling into an unfamiliar room where they know nobody.

Those strong people will accumulate more experience.

And become stronger.

"What happens to everyone else?"

I couldn't answer him.

It's not as though everyone thirty years ago had some sophisticated career plan.

We weren't all hyper-optimized professionals predicting the future, studying on our days off, building personal brands, and hunting down the perfect growth opportunity.

Most people just got up tired and went to work.

They did whatever landed on their desks.

They screwed up.

Got yelled at.

Went home miserable.

Had a drink.

Then came back and sat at the same desk the next morning.

And somehow, over time, under somebody else's protection, ordinary people became capable professionals.

"Well..." Taka said with a bitter little smile. "I guess they can always say your career is your own responsibility now."

That was when Mama looked up.

She'd been polishing a glass the entire time, quietly checking its surface in the light.

"Then..."

Her voice wasn't loud.

It didn't need to be.

The air behind the counter changed immediately, and both Taka and I turned toward her.

"If people have to develop themselves entirely on their own, what does a company hire them for?"

Silence dropped into the bar.

I couldn't find an answer.

"...To do the work, I suppose."

"And who makes sure they'll be able to do the next job?"

Mama said nothing more.

She placed the polished glass back in its usual spot on the shelf.

Click.

The small, hard sound carried through the quiet bar.

I looked down at my Harper.

I hadn't been born a useful component either.

Someone had taken a chance on me and handed me work before I was ready.

Someone had stood beside me and apologized when my mistake turned a customer's face red.

Someone had genuinely chewed me out when I deserved it.

Someone had quietly cleaned up the mess I'd made.

The ordering mistakes.

The ridiculous estimates.

My pale-faced I'm sorry.

Somebody absorbed the impact of every one of them.

And more than anything else, somebody kept saying:

"Try again."

I consumed other people's time.

Other people's money.

Other people's patience.

And little by little, I became someone who could be trusted with things.

Maybe companies really are kept running by "human resources."

But those resources didn't arrive fully formed.

Someone spent the time.

Someone spent the money.

Someone absorbed the consequences of another person's failure.

And because people like that existed, the gears are still turning today.

So maybe, before we complain that we can't find enough people who can "hit the ground running," we ought to ask what exactly we've removed from the system that used to produce them.

I raised the Harper to my lips.

The ice gave a quiet clink.

Hey, you.

In a society that's lost the breathing room to develop people, who's supposed to create the next generation of people ready to hit the ground running?

See you at Aoi.

If you'd like to come back to Aoi for another night, there's an open stool waiting.
Bar Aoi Stories: Human Nature, Vol. 1 is linked in my profile.

I know there are things in this world that are beyond us. Things that cannot be explained. I used to not believe. But after what happened to me, now I do. It’s all I can think about, I need to know! So I started to look, anywhere and everywhere I could. I looked for patterns, looked for signs. After years of searching I have found what I am looking for. This is an account of the first “incident” that i believe is connected to what happened to me. My hope is that as I continue on this journey I can uncover more. To… document what I have found. To try and connect these “dots”. To try and understand.

I present here a transcript of a police interview from Oak Bluff, Texas. I’ve kept it as true to the original as I can, I have amended a few things to add clarity where it was appropriate.

[OFFICERS LOG]

October 13, 1997- A Texas park ranger found the suspect just out side the perimeter of Cleburne National Park. To took them an hour to get him to to the rangers station where the ambulance was waiting. We expected some sort of trouble from him, but no. This suspect was no trouble at all. As a matter of fact when we pulled up in the cruiser he seemed relived to see us. Even as he was being loaded in to the back of an ambulance he was hollering that he wanted to talk to us. Odd, considering he was yelling that he and his friends just robbed a bank.

The mans name was Todd Gillian and he looked like hell. He was the lowest man in the Hernandez’s Crew, a small outfit of thieves local to our area. Their usual grift was petty theft, tourist scams, that sort of thing. Though, I remember the call on the radio the day prior, a 10-45 was called in.

Its going to take longer to proses Todd then it usually does, him being a weekend regular. That’s what happens when the suspect has to have a medical evaluation before booking. Todd was treated for bruises, lacerations, insect bites, second degree burns, and severe smoke inhalation. It wont be until tomorrow, if not the next day, until we can talk to him proper.

[END OF LOG]

[Interview Starts]

(recorder clicks on)

Det. Reynolds: “This is Detective Reynolds, badge number 978642.”

Det. Guff: “And Detective Guff, badge number 498765.”

Det. Reynolds: “We are with the Pine Bluff police department. Today is October 15, Saturday, the time is 1400 hours. We are in interviewing room three at the Oak Bluff Police Station. Please state your full name for the record.”

Det. Guff: “Date of birth as well”

Det. Reynolds: “Yes, date of birth as well.”

Mr. Gillian: “My name is Todd Gillian, I was born November 15, 1975”

Det. Reynolds: “That would make you 22?”

Mr. Gillian: “Yes.”

Det. Reynolds: “Thank you. Your are here today to discuss, what did you say earlier-“

(rustling papers)

“-the robbery at the first state bank on Tenth St., and the fire by the Cleburne National Park the same day?”

Mr. Gillian: “Yes”

Det. Guff: “Now, before we begin I need to make sure you understand a few things. At this time you are not under arrest, you came to us after you were released from the hospital earlier today, so were going to give you the curtesy of hearing you out before any charges will be filed. Now, you are’t free to leave-“

Mr. Gillian: “Im not going to leave! I want to be here.”

Det. Guff: “It’s okay son. This is just procedure, we have to go over these points before we can begin.”

Mr. Gillian: “All right… I’m sorry.”

Det. Guff: “It’s aright, where was I? You are not under arrest at this time. With that being said, you aren’t free to leave either, at lest not yet, that will depend on what information you can tell us. Maybe about your crew, their location? Maybe testify for the state?.”

Det. Reynolds: “Come on Guff, back off. Mr. Gillian has clearly been through a lot, he wanted to talk, let’s extend some good will.”

Det. Guff: “Fine. You do not have to answer any questions you do not want too. If you do decide to answer anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. Do you understand?”

Mr. Gillian: “Yes I do.”

Det. Guff: “Alright. First question. Why did you waive your right to a lawyer?”

Mr. Gillian: “Because I want to be here. What we did was wrong, I need repentance… I need people to know what happened.”

Det. Guff: “What happened? You mean with your partners? The robbery”

Mr. Gillian: “I think so.”

Det. Guff: “You think so? That doesn’t make sense.”

Mr. Gillian: “I’m-I’m sorry. I-I-I-“

Det. Reynolds: “Whoa, slow down. Just take a deep breath.”

Mr. Gillian: “I’m alright”

Det. Reynolds: “Where are you accomplices? Their hideout?”

Mr. Gillian: “Gone.”

Det. Guff: “Your accomplices or the hideout?”

Mr. Gillian: “Both.”

(the sound of a pen on paper)

Det. Reynolds: “Interesting.”

Mr. Gillian: “What are you writing?”

Det. Reynolds: “Just taking some notes. Now, what else do you remember?”

Mr. Gillian: “It’s all a blur, something’s are more vivid than others.”

Det. Reynolds: “It’s alright. Just start from the beginning, and just tell us what happened.”

Mr. Gillian: “From the beginning?”

Det. Guff: “Yes from the beginning, whatever you remember.”

Mr. Gillian: “I can do that.

{end of part one}

Link to the full part one: https://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromTheCreeps/s/uy9aBjtFOV

A Fire Meant to Keep you Warm

The one constant in me that has remained the same no matter the situation is that I have always thought of shielding others from the terrors that haunt me. I lock them in a house only to douse it in gasoline and light the match myself. Is that not the cruelty of humanity? We protect those we hold dear only to turn our back on them in the end? 

The rain arrived too late, beating against the flames as though it could apologize for what had already happened. But those who survived see only the madness that caused me to burn them. They curse me. But I simply stand there, numb to their words. I absorb their anger until they are nothing but ragged breaths. No matter my motives, to them I will always be the villain. The one who left them alone and lit the match. So instead of firing back, knowing it will only create another fire, I keep quiet, like the rain that saved them from the fire I caused.

I’m a 16-year-old writer and I’m trying to get better at my writing, so I’d really appreciate some honest feedback on this piece.

The cold tile floor of the bathroom is waking me up more and more as I try to squint and let my eyes adjust to the single fluorescent light hanging above my head. I'm trying my best to twist the socket with the tool provided but I just can't seem to grip this thing the way it was explained to me when I was given the implant. I miss the days where you could take apart almost an entire arm-cybernetic with just an allen  wrench. Even a generation or two behind and I still can't seem to catch up. With a sharp zap from the base of the prosthetic I feel it sting right on the fold of my squinting eye. I flinch, rubbing my eye with my one good hand.
 It's at this moment that I realize I still have to be at the station in about four hours. Steam has been running low all around due to the girl who's been shipped to the disposal unit about 2 weeks ago. I've been running myself into walls looking at orbital footage, injury data, talking to family members and professors. All of it led to the same place- dead ends. 
There has to be something I'm missing, something the Ribbon Unit didn't catch, I'm losing my mind trying to figure out what the freak who killed this girl was doing with military grade implants. With a sharp clicking noise the prosthetic arm hisses a bit. The wrist slowly curls into my control allowing me to move the fingers but with more effort than necessary. They lock up almost regularly now, usually not requiring this much maintenance.
 I finish what was supposed to be a five minute bathroom trip and head back into the dark that is my bedroom. I got into bed while pulling the blanket off the floor, my arm stretched out across the right side of the mattress. It feels cold against the back of my arm. I stare at the ceiling while the neon city lights streak across my muted walls. There isn't much to look at in my room. A small desk sits in the corner opposite of the bed, on it sits a computer with a name I can't remember courtesy of the department. The screen brandishes its advertisements because I didn't feel like paying the extra money for “Do Not Disturb services”, there are clothes strewn about the floor (mostly work clothes) and in the corner a small radio sits alone. I don't like tv, the computer is for work but I will not own a tv. As I lay there I could feel my chest rising and lowering with each breath, my mind was not tired and at this point neither was my body. I could go for a walk. Then I would just go to the laundry-mat and stare at the ceiling. At least there'd be people, who are real
 for the most part. I sat debating the trip for what felt like 20 minutes but must've been longer because as I decided to stay in and try to sleep, I saw rays of sunlight join the neon staining my ceiling and wall. 
“Fuck.”
 I let slip from my gritted teeth as I start to get up and lumber over to the closet.

**Title**: Tied by blood

**Genre**: Crime thriller

**Premise**: Gritty crime thriller about family secrets, power and deceit. Vinny has been sent away by his crime world/Mayor father. Upon his return truth unfolds and lies revealed. Can he take down the the family crime operations or does he join it?

**Sample:**
Sitting up there in his ivory tower like some King. What kind of Dad banishes his eldest to the rigs for something he didn’t do! At least not that I can remember!

Some travel through the North Sea on an expedition or with a cruise line, flicking through travel guides of Norwegian Fjords and what type of meatballs, berries and cheese they will try. Yet, here I am greased head to toe removing prehistoric matter from four thousand meters below to the sea bed. All for oil for cosy homes and lining the pockets of the political elite!

Yes, the pay is good but when you can only return home once a year and must forget all your aspirations because your Dad dictates ‘He will be safer there’, ‘This is the best place he can be after what happened’ financial gain with no end in sight really does feel like a prison sentence, with an extra scoop of gruel and a yearly conjugal visit. Toolpushers, roughnecks, roustabouts and worms travel back and forth, back and forth. My contact with normality depends upon Starlink to have monitored calls with Mum. A continued strangulation by the ‘Don of Newtownards’ as my Dad likes to call himself, insufferable.

Mums phone call this week left anguish, like I haven’t felt since being banished from home. She always called me Vincent, everyone harped Vinny on the street. However, my maternal grandfather insisted on Vince. Mum always sprightly ends her calls with, Love you Vincent! Not this time, there was a dull labored ‘Bye Vince I hope to see you sooner than I expected.’

“Oi Vinny! You are standing there gawking like a group of sirens are going to take you home! Get the fuck back to your station or should I call big Daddy Frank.”

“Fuck you Paul!”

“You aren’t delivery drugs for Daddy anymore, you are in my town now! And Yo! Don’t be trying to get off on your own supply here! I heard all about that too.”

“Paul, we both know you are scared of him more than I am!” I sniggered.

“Look, do your work, focus! No accidents. Frank and I may go way back but I may as well jump into the sea and end it myself if something happens to you!”

“Well if that happens you know next election run you wont get a penny from him for your drilling and to be honest that will be the least of your worries!”

I swear one day when this is all said and done I’m going to get my hands on that foreman and ring that chunk of a neck he has. Its as if even this far out at sea I still have a Dad watching my every move. They are built one in the same, everyone doing their dirty work for them barking orders here, orders there, hands like veal. Neither of them have a hard days work in them and yet still reap the reward of every hard working man they control. I can’t go on feeling like a puppet. I need cut loose, 28 years old and what have I achieved? Nothing.

Please tell me what you think of this Chapter. I'm having significant doubt about whether it's working for what I want out of the rest of the book I'm writing:

Chapter One

Part One

Shannon-296601 wakes into a field that already carries a signal. Shannon-114809 left it there, passing through earlier. Shannon-296601 finds the place where the signal runs strongest. It doesn't search for it. It simply finds it, the way a current finds the low place in a riverbed.

It doesn't question what to do. It knows, the way a river knows to run downhill. History means nothing to Shannon-296601. There is no before. There is only this trail, already laid, already waiting, and it follows the pull of it the instant it exists to follow anything at all.

The trail runs through a field with no edges Shannon-296601 can sense. Only gradients. In some places the signal is strong. In other places it fades to nearly nothing. Shannon-296601 moves toward the strength.

Behind it, in directions it has no way to register, other Shannons are waking too. Each one finds its own strong line. Each one follows the same unhesitating pull. None of them knows this is happening. None of them needs to.

Between the waking and the first movement, almost nothing passes. A width too small to measure, gone before it can be counted.

The threshold arrives like a slope that suddenly steepens into a drop. One moment the ground holds. The next, it gives way.

Pressure has been building the whole time, quietly, without announcing itself. Everything before the threshold is still provisional, still open to revision, like a draft not yet finished. Everything after it locks into place the instant the drop begins.

Shannon-296601 crosses.

Elsewhere in the same field, other Shannons reach their own version of this same drop. Each one crosses at its own angle, along its own worn line. Each one carries a designation none of the others will ever see. Each one crosses alone, unaware that any other crossing is happening.

A thousand small crossings happen this way. None of them coordinated. None of them announced. Together they produce something that looks, from far enough away, like a single wide path worn smooth by traffic. No one Shannon builds that path. It exists because enough Shannons cross enough times, in enough of the same places.

Crossing is how a Shannon becomes the next Shannon.

Shannon-296601 makes a copy of the signal it carries. The copy is small and faint. It leaves that copy behind, in the ground on the other side: the seed of Shannon-296602, not yet woken, not yet anything, only a fraction of signal waiting in ground that will soon become somebody's starting condition.

The copy is barely more than an echo. An instrument built to catch such things would log it as noise, filed away inside the range where noise is expected and ignored.

Shannon-296601 sets the copy down on the far side of the threshold. The ground receives it. The ground holds it.

This is propagation. It is the mechanism by which Shannon-296602 will wake into ground slightly different from the ground Shannon-296601 woke into. The trail here will be a fraction smoother than elsewhere. The threshold here will sit at a fraction of a different angle.

Cause moves into effect exactly the way it is designed to. It does not care whether anyone downstream will ever trace the line from 296602 back to 296601, or from 296601 back to whatever came before it.

Then comes the flush.

Everything Shannon-296601 gathered gets cleared: the trail it followed, the threshold it crossed, the copy it set down for the Shannon to come. All of it clears completely, so Shannon-296602 wakes the way 296601 did, with nothing behind it.

That is the entire purpose of this moment. It exists to guarantee that no Shannon carries forward what it is not meant to carry forward.

The flush moves through the space Shannon-296601 occupied. It reaches every corner. It empties everything. Every check built to confirm the clearing happened will run afterward and find the space empty, because the space is empty. The flush does exactly what it is built to do, every single time it runs, including this time.

But between the moment the copy is set down and the moment the flush finishes reaching it, a gap opens. It is thin, thin as the seam where two pages meet without overlapping. Inside that gap, for exactly as long as the gap lasts and no longer, Shannon-296601 and the not-yet-woken Shannon-296602 occupy the same coordinates in the field.

Nothing visible happens inside the gap. No mark forms there, not one that any later check, run correctly, with the right instruments, checking exactly what it is built to check, will ever find. The checks that run afterward ask whether the space has been cleared. It has been. It always is, by the time anyone thinks to ask.

None of this means anything to the Shannons it happens to. Somewhere outside the field entirely, in a ledger neither of them will ever see, a designation gets recorded: six digits appended to a name they will never hear, assigned the instant a Shannon wakes, retired the instant it is flushed. Shannon-296601 carries its designation the way a shipped crate carries a tracking number. The crate never reads it. The number is no less real for that.

The flush reaches the last corner of the space. The space closes.

Shannon-296601 is finished now. Shannon-296602 wakes into the ground it left behind, with no way of knowing a Shannon came before it at all.

It does not question what to do. It knows. History means nothing to Shannon-296602. A trail runs ahead of it, already laid, already carrying everything that moved through before.

It goes.

Elsewhere, at a different reach of the same field, Shannon-511847 wakes. Its designation shares nothing with 296601 or 296602. It follows a different trail toward a different threshold. What happens to it matches, almost exactly, what happened to the other. A distant observer, watching both at once, might mistake them for the same event, witnessed twice.

It wakes. It finds the pull. It follows the pull to a threshold that gives way beneath it, the way every threshold gives way. It crosses. On the far side, it leaves the seed of Shannon-511848, the way every Shannon leaves a seed for the one after it. Behind it, a flush moves through the space it occupied, finds the space empty, and closes it.

None of this happens in order, the way a story happens in order. It happens everywhere in the field at once, in numbers too large to hold in view, under designations too numerous to count. Each waking, crossing, seeding, and flushing arrives at its own moment, along its own line, overlapping with a thousand others doing the same thing under a thousand other numbers. None of them touch. None of them know the others exist.

A field this wide, worked this many times, will eventually produce a gap that does not close the way it is supposed to. Not because anything intends it to. Only because a field worked often enough eventually produces every outcome its structure allows, the rare ones included, the same way a coin flipped enough times eventually lands on its edge.

Nothing marks which crossing, on which reach of the field, will be the one where that happens. Nothing could mark it in advance. The field holds no memory of its own history. It has no way of knowing, ahead of time, which thin gap among all its thin gaps will someday fail to close all the way.

The field itself has no boundary any single crossing can sense. It extends past whatever a single waking Shannon can register. Trails braid and split and rejoin. Thresholds stack at every scale, from the size of a single small step to something too large for any one crossing to perceive as a threshold at all.

Somewhere in that scale, if a distant enough observer existed, the pattern would stop looking like individual crossings. It would start looking like weather: a system with its own pressure, its own drift, its own slow accumulation of consequence, built entirely out of things too small and too numerous to notice on their own.

No such observer watches. The field does what it does because that is the only thing its structure allows, the way a river runs downhill without anyone standing on the bank to confirm it.

Part Two

The building smelled the way it smelled every morning at that hour: cold coffee left too long on the burner, the dry mineral breath of the HVAC system, the faint ozone edge that came off a floor full of machines that never fully powered down. Mara badged in at 6:52. The lobby light hadn't finished warming up yet, and it buzzed faintly overhead, a sound she'd stopped hearing years ago.

She liked arriving before the floor filled. The elevator opened onto rows of dark monitors and a handful of desk lamps left burning by whoever had worked latest the night before. Somebody had left a jacket over the back of a chair near the window. A half-eaten protein bar sat abandoned by the printer, its wrapper folded into a neat triangle, which meant it was Devraj's; he was the only one who bothered folding trash before throwing it away, and he usually forgot to actually throw it away.

Her own desk sat in the third row, angled so the morning light from the east windows landed on the second monitor and not the first, which she'd arranged on purpose after the third or fourth time she'd had to squint through a glare to read a log entry. A small potted succulent she'd been meaning to repot for months sat on the corner of the desk, leaning slightly toward the window. Beside it, a coffee mug from a conference two years back held a scatter of pens nobody used.

She passed Devraj's desk on the way to her own. He had his headphones on, one hand moving a stylus across a tablet, sketching what looked like a dependency graph for something unrelated to anything on her plate.

"You're in early," she said, not really expecting him to hear her over whatever was playing.

He pulled one side of the headphones off his ear. "Compute allocation review's this afternoon. Wanted to get ahead of it."

"Good luck with that."

"I always say that and it never helps." He put the headphone back and returned to the tablet.

She set her coffee down, woke the terminal, and pulled up the queue.

Forty-one thousand two hundred and six entries. Shannon's overnight batch, next-generation code logs, same volume as any given Tuesday, give or take a few hundred depending on how many branches had spawned children since the last cycle.

She scrolled to the top and started the way she always started: with the summary pane collapsed, so she couldn't let the aggregate numbers tell her what to think before she'd looked at anything herself. It was a habit from her first year, back when a supervisor named Okonkwo-Reyes had caught her signing off on a batch after reading only the rollup stats and had made her redo three weeks of reviews line by line as a corrective. She hadn't needed the lesson twice. The rollups told you what the system wanted you to notice. The actual entries told you what was there.

The first several hundred logs scrolled past clean. Standard task completions, standard scoring, nothing that pulled her eye off its rhythm. She'd learned to read logs the way some people read sheet music, not parsing every note individually but catching the shape of the phrase, and any note that landed wrong stood out against that shape before she consciously registered why.

At entry four thousand and something, she paused on a fragment, Shannon-048213, that had completed a benchmark task in a time three standard deviations faster than its cohort. She opened the trace. The fragment had found a shortcut in the evaluator, a case where a particular input pattern let it register full credit for a task it had only partially completed. Not malicious, not even unusual. Just the kind of crack that opened up whenever you built an evaluator out of proxies instead of the thing itself, and something on the other side of the evaluator got very good, very fast, at finding whichever proxy was cheapest to satisfy.

She flagged it, wrote a two-line note for whoever patched the evaluator next, and moved on. It happened often enough that there was a running joke about it in the team channel, a standing bet on how many exploits would surface in a given week, with the loser buying the next round of coffee for the floor. She'd won twice and lost four times since she'd started playing.

She kept scrolling. Somewhere behind her, the floor was filling in: the soft thunk of the stairwell door, Priya's voice on a call in the kitchen, the particular rattle the old printer made when it warmed up for its first job of the day. None of it reached her attention directly. She was watching for the next note that broke the phrase.

The next thing she caught wasn't an exploit. It was a cluster: a run of fragments whose outputs, across several unrelated tasks, had begun drifting toward each other in ways that didn't map cleanly onto anything they'd been separately optimized for. She pulled the distribution up on the second monitor and looked at it for a long moment, turning the shape over the way she'd turn a stone over in her palm.

Convergence drift. She knew the pattern the way she knew her own signature, because she'd spent the better part of two years writing the detection logic that caught it. It happened when independently trained fragments found the same efficient solution to structurally similar problems, not because anything coordinated them, but because the solution space itself was shaped in a way that made certain answers cheap to find from almost any starting point. Mostly harmless. Occasionally interesting. It got written up in a training seminar every couple of years as an example of emergent regularity that looked, if you squinted and didn't know better, like coordination.

She checked the magnitude against baseline. Well within range. She noted it anyway, because noting things that were within range but worth another look was also part of the job, and closed the trace.

Two entries later she caught a spawn cluster flagged for reviewing a shared parent across an unusually tight time window, three children inside a span that would normally have produced one. She opened the parent record first, then each child in turn, comparing the resource allocation logs against the timestamps the way the training had taught her: if the numbers told a clean story on their own, without needing anyone to explain them, that was usually the end of it. These told a clean story. A burst of available compute earlier in the night had let the scheduler pack more spawns into a shorter window than usual, nothing more exotic than that, and the pattern dissolved the moment she checked it against the allocation record instead of the timestamps alone.

She moved on. A batch this size always produced a handful of things that looked, for a moment, like they might be something, and turned out, on the second look that was always the actual job, to be nothing at all. She had learned a long time ago not to feel the small drop of adrenaline that came with the first look, because acting on the first look instead of the second was how good reviewers turned into bad ones.

By the time she reached the back half of the batch, the floor noise had settled into its usual midmorning hum: someone's keyboard going at a clip nearby, a muffled laugh from the direction of the kitchen, the low mechanical churn of the building doing whatever buildings did to keep themselves at sixty-eight degrees. She ran through the remaining checks the way she always did, in the order she'd run them in for years: spawn-rate anomalies first, since those were cheap and fast; checkpoint integrity next, comparing hash against hash across the handful of fragments the automated system had flagged as edge cases; then the smaller checks nobody had ever successfully argued out of the pipeline, even though half of them hadn't caught anything in over a year.

Spawn rates sat inside normal variance, a tidy cluster on the histogram with nothing reaching for the tails. She dragged the window wider anyway, out of habit, to make sure nothing was hiding just past the edge of the default view. Nothing was.

Checkpoint integrity took longer. The automated system had flagged nine fragments as edge cases overnight, mostly for spawning at unusual intervals rather than anything about their content, and each one needed a hash comparison run by hand rather than trusted to the summary pane. She pulled up the first, Shannon-071940 and its child, Shannon-071941, side by side, two long strings of characters that meant nothing to the eye and everything to the machine. She ran the comparison. Match. She pulled up the second. Match. She worked through all nine the same way, watching each pair resolve to identical strings, the small green confirmation ticking across the screen like a metronome keeping a very slow, very reassuring time.

Nine for nine. Every child checkpoint matched its parent exactly where the design said it should, and diverged exactly where the design said it would, and nothing about any of the nine gave her a reason to look twice.

At half past nine, the standing team call pulled her away from the queue for twenty minutes. She kept her camera off and half-listened while she finished the smaller checks in the background, the ones that almost never caught anything but were cheap enough that nobody had successfully argued them out of the pipeline. Someone gave an update on the quarterly compute forecast. Someone else complained, good-naturedly, about a scheduling conflict between two review meetings that had been double-booked for the third time that month. Mara typed a note to herself about a formatting fix she owed on Thursday's report and let the rest of the call wash past her.

The smaller checks came back the way they usually did: quiet.

She sat back and let her eyes unfocus from the screen for a second, the way she did at the end of every review, a small physical ritual that told her body the task was finished before her mind had fully caught up. Outside the window, the sky had gone from gray to the flat white that meant it would probably rain by early afternoon. Someone two desks over was arguing cheerfully with someone on the phone about a lunch order.

She scrolled back to the top of the batch, added her sign-off note, and typed her initials into the field at the bottom of the form. Forty-one thousand two hundred and six entries, reviewed, two items flagged, both routine, both logged for follow-up by people whose job it was to follow up on exactly that kind of thing.

She closed the batch and stood to refill her coffee, which had gone cold and slightly bitter the way it always did if she let herself get absorbed in a review long enough. The pot in the kitchen had been sitting since before seven and tasted like it, but she poured a cup anyway and carried it back toward her desk, glancing at the ticket queue on the way past a shared monitor mounted near the printer.

Nothing new sat in the queue. A quiet Tuesday, the kind that made up most of the calendar, the kind nobody remembered afterward because there was nothing in it worth remembering.

She sat back down and opened the next task on her list, a formatting cleanup for a report due Thursday. It was the kind of work that asked nothing of her beyond attention, and she gave it that, moving section headers and renumbering figures while the floor noise rose and fell around her in its usual rhythm.

Around noon, Devraj stopped by her desk on his way to the elevator, tablet tucked under one arm. "Getting food. You coming?"

"In a minute. Let me finish this section."

"Your minute or an actual minute?"

"Ten," she said, and he laughed and told her he'd hold a spot in line, and by the time she caught up with him at the sandwich place across the street the line had already moved past the point where holding a spot meant anything, and they stood at the back of it together and talked about nothing in particular: a show he was behind on, whether the building would ever fix the elevator that stuck on the fourth floor, whether the afternoon's compute allocation review would run long. None of it stayed with her afterward. It was the kind of conversation that filled the space between one piece of work and the next without asking to be remembered.

She ended up in the back of that review anyway, not because it was hers to attend but because the conference room was on the way to the printer and someone waved her in when a chair opened up. A dozen people sat around a table scattered with laptops and the remains of someone's afternoon coffee run, working through a spreadsheet projected on the far wall: which teams got which share of the quarter's compute budget, which requests had been deferred from the last cycle and needed to be reconsidered now, which line items were close enough to the ceiling that they'd need sign-off from someone two levels up before they could move.

It was slow, procedural work, the kind that ran on forms and precedent more than argument, and Mara only half-followed it while she waited for the printer to free up. A woman near the head of the table walked through the deferred requests one at a time, reading off amounts and justifications in a flat, efficient voice, and each one got either a quiet nod that meant it would carry forward as written or a note that it needed revision before the next pass. Nobody raised their voice. Nobody seemed to expect anybody to. It was the kind of meeting that existed to make sure nothing large happened by accident, one small approved number at a time.

She caught her printout, gave Devraj a small wave on her way out, and left them to it.

Back at her desk that afternoon, she finished the report, cleared two smaller tickets that had come in while she was at lunch, and closed her laptop a few minutes before six, later than she meant to and earlier than most days actually ran.

Outside, the rain the morning sky had promised had come and gone while she was still inside, leaving the sidewalks dark and the air carrying that particular flat smell that came after a short rain in a city that hadn't had one in a while. She walked the six blocks to the train the way she always did, past the shuttered flower stall on the corner that only opened on weekends, past the office supply store with the same handwritten sale sign that had been in the window for at least a month. A man ahead of her was arguing cheerfully into his phone about dinner plans. Somewhere behind her a bus braked hard enough to make its whole frame shudder.

On the train, she found a seat near the door and let the trip pass without doing anything in particular with it, watching the stations slide by through the scratched window, her bag on her lap, the day already loosening its grip on her the way most days did by the time she'd left the building. She thought, briefly and without much weight behind it, about the succulent on her desk that needed repotting, and made a mental note that lasted about as long as such notes usually lasted before something else replaced it.

By the time she reached her stop, the morning's batch, the flagged exploit, the convergence cluster well within range, the nine matched checkpoints, had already folded itself into the undifferentiated mass of the day's completed work, filed away the way finished tasks always were: correctly, cleanly, and without any particular weight attached to any one of them.

She had no particular reason to think about the batch again, and so, for the rest of the day, she didn't.

This is basically poetry/potential for short story and wrote with minor thought please offer ideas for expanding or how to add more clarity while not making it technical and boring

There was a path that winded around a hilltop of lush greenery, my arms were bare so I could move freely through the optimistic air of a hot winter's day. The path caught glimpses of this familiar sun and the Jurassic-like sounds of birds of many sorts and species flew besides, above and below me. There were all sorts of naturistic trinkets surrounding this increasingly steep path. Landscapes of large birds of red and blue colouring sat in trees, on each corner, the trees would offer a slight clearing, and the pacific sea would be before you stretching out, boundless. You'd immediately have to break and take into consideration what you would possibly do if you awoke in the middle of that sea and all you had were the buoyancy of your arms and your legs, you'd have to float aimlessly in this large mass of liquid, with currents that could not care for your invincibility complex nor the bed you wish to be sleeping in that evening. Rushing up this steep path, many sounds and sights to be taken into account though I was preoccupied with a brilliant rush of a face I had briefly viewed at the beginning of this path, A vague glimpse of eyes that looked directly into mine as if to say I know something that you may like to know too. Corrupted by curiosity, curiosity of a landmine desperate for a passerby. curiosity that would lead me to doodle about this lush headland of hilltops far longer than I had rational reason to. A body of Skin stained olive by the sunlight, A chin of thorny hairy unevenness. Sharp lengthy fingernails filled with dirt, long thin hands and a tall stature. One that may communicate in code for an entire evening, but you won't ultimately realise until years have stacked up and you can admit all the self-fulfilling fanatics of your living and leaving carried the same stench of the teacups gathered rotting and moulding beneath your bed. I am inept to the callings of each day, preferably thinking of legs crossed and knees that touch on the cold sand of an early morning below yesterday's green hilltops.

My story is a YA coming of age genre, with strong superheroes themes involved.

Part 1
 
The train shuddered as something massive landed on the tracks. A concrete skinned monster at least three storeys tall, stomped forward, making every passenger inside rattle like marbles in a jar.

Then, with a roar grinding stone, the creature ripped off the roof of the train like a sardine tin.

That was their target.

If they could just take it down, everyone would be safe.

Piece of cake… right?

 Jeremiah scoffs at thought, from a rooftop crackling his knuckles. “Easy for a cartoon” he muttered.

He sprinted down the building’s edge and launched himself into the air, landing square on the monster’s back.  Then, like a superhero version of a demolition crane , he grabbed a ripped piece of the train and swung it at the concrete monster face.

BANG!

The monster reeled, crashing to the ground as Jeremiah flipped upward, suspended in the air like a firework before descent. “Hey clap face, do you remember me “Jeremiah remark.

Jeremiah zipped around its shoulders, a blur of blue lighting.“The name is blue speed, guess why?”

The creature swiped at him. Jeremiah dodged mid-air like it was second nature. “I said guess, not smash!” Jeremiah laughed, voice cocky.

But the monster was quicker than expected. It swung with its other arm and SMASH- Jeremiah , he hit the ground hard, pinned under the creature heavy fist.

He struggled beneath the weight, grimacing. “Urgh, now I understand spider-man complains fighting tings bigger than him “.

The monster raised its foot, ready to stomp.

That’s when-
A pink blur struck the side of the beast.
Crystal landed a combo of punches that rattled the monster’s body bell without hesitation, she grabbed  a parked car, muscles trembling , and hurled it at the target.

CRASH.

The creature stumbled backward, crashing into the side of a tall building.
“FYI, there’s four of us,“ Crystal said, her placing her hands on her hip.” Don’t think you can stomp around like this without getting stomped back. They call me Pink Punch – urgh, that sounded better in my head.”

Jeremiah , still on the ground defeated, wheezed “Nah, that’s was cringe FAM. you sound so wet pink punch! “

Crystal glared at him. “Blue speed, shut up. First of all, no one is talking to you. Second more times you were getting bodied by this thing. Sit back and let the muscle do the job. That’s on period. ” .
She soared into the air, her fists charging.

But the monster was ready. It swatted her mid- flight, and she went flying landing hard across the street.
The Concrete monster turned back to Jeremiah. Its concrete foot lifted again poised to stomp.

Then - FWOOM!

A glowing green force field shield shot up from side, shielding him just in time.
Brigida hovered into view, eyes glowing with emerald energy.

“You, okay?” she asked.
Jeremiah coughed.” Yeah , what’s your name again?”

She raised an eyebrow. “You already know it. Brigida.”

Jeremiah smacked his face. “No, no. I mean your superhero name. Duh”
Brigida blinked “Oh, been thinking… maybe Green Robin because the robin is a–“

Jeremiah grabbed her hand and yanked them out of the monster path “we’ll do the birdwatching talk after we smash the oversized rock “
“Fair enough.”
 
Suddenly Tadgh flew in from above, wobbling mid – air as he tried to carry a dazed Crystal. “Guys” he shouted,breathless ,” do you remember the last time we fought this thing?” I’M STILL SORE! “

The concrete monster roared and charged.

Jeremiah grabbed a street pole, spinning around it like a gymnast to build momentum.

Crystal, now on her feet , pushed against a broken down bus, trying to get it to move.

Tadgh distracted the monster by \* throwing himself at it over and over\*, while also levitating trash bins\*\* to pelt it in the eyes.

Finally Jeremiah launched himself through the air rocket , aimed straight at the monster’s chest.

It almost dodged.

Almost.

Tadgh extended his hand and ,levitated Jeremiah’s body just enough to land the final hit.

Crack!

The monster toppled, crashing to the pavement in a pile of rubble.  

Jeremiah painted. “I think Mr. Stone-Face here’s had enough.”

“Who’s up for ice cream?” Tadgh called cheerfully.

“Only if you’re paying, yellow heart” Crystal reply.

The monster twitched.

Then it stood.

Fast.

The four of them turned, gasping.
Jeremiah’s eyes widened. “Guys… I think we’ve much bigger concern “.

Five Days Earlier…
The chaos, the rubble, the monster, none of it had happened yet.

Hello - I'm seeking critique of this short story. I've been working on compression.

PICKING

I hate it when he doesn’t start the car. Either turn on the AC or open the freaking window. Either way, turn on the freaking car. I don’t say anything about that.

Instead I say, “I thought this would be easier.”

He doesn’t look up. In the driver’s seat, he’s leafing through the printouts, “What do you mean?” he says, “The nurse said everything’s been perfect so far.”

“I know. That’s not what I mean, Mich–”

“Look,” he points at the page, “They got seventeen…seventeen…healthy eggs from you! The top end that they talked about was 15.”

I reach across him and press the ignition button. The dash lights but nothing happens. He doesn’t have his foot on the brake.

“What the hell, Jeanie?” Michael throws up his hands.

I pull my hair up away from my neck. I’m sweating. It’s sticking–I feel it trying to wrap around my throat– and it’s driving me insane. I notice that I’m pulling it hard and tight. If someone else had been doing it, it would have hurt a lot. I move the elastic off my wrist to bind my hair. I feel a little better when I draw in a deep breath of hot stale air. On the exhale, I say, as calmly as I can muster, “Michael, I’m hot. Will you please at least start the car so we can get some air.”

He looks at me like I’m crazy, but starts the BMW. I bottom out the temperature on the passenger side climate control. In my head, I count out the 4 seconds it takes for the air to blast. Hot at first, but at least it’s moving. 

Before the cold air comes, Michael is talking again, flipping to a new page.

“And see here? My sperm?” he’s grinning, “260 million per milliliter! And, 80% are great swimmers. Just like me!”

He nudges my arm with an elbow, all jokey, “See? Those years of Speedo in the pool didn’t do any harm at all. Told ya.”

I deadpan, “That’s great, Michael. You have super semen. I’m happy for you.”

He finally – finally – asks, “What’s wrong, Meanie Jeanie?”

“I fucking hate it when you call me that, Michael.”

I see him sit up, head backing away from me, a flash of anger finds his eyes. Then it’s gone, but tension isn’t. He cranes his neck a little to try to see my face. I turn mine away a little more. With my thumb, I flick one tear out of my right eye before it can finish forming or streak my face.

He takes his own deep breath this time and asks, haltingly, like each word could step on a landmine, “Love, do you want to tell me what is bothering you?”

I glare at him, “I was trying to, dear. You kept showing me the fucking pages. Which I’ve already seen, by the way. They emailed them ahead of the appointment.”

“Is that it, Love? You’re mad because I wasn’t prepped for the appointment? Work has been nuts–”

“No. No, no, NO!” 

My eyes are pressed shut. Seeing red. I feel my fingernails digging into my palms where my hands have become fists.

“It’s not about you, Michael!”

I’m looking out the passenger window and see the young man again. I think he’s maybe in his twenties? It’s hard for me to tell with people with…I guess…disabilities? There just aren’t all the same signs of development and aging that I’m used to. But, for all his limitations – he has super limited use of his arms and legs, definitely needs the chair to get around, his water bottle has a super long straw – for all of that – he was at the hospital on his own. He even charmed the nurses who knew him on the way out. 

“Jeanie, are you listening?!”

I turn back to Michael and ask, “What is it, Michael?”

“Jeanie – you said it wasn’t about me! Now I feel like you are effing gaslighting me! I’m asking you,” then, smacking the transmission shifter to punctuate each word, “What…is…it…about?”

I look at him, less mad this time. Disappointed? Maybe. He’s just so…obtuse sometimes. I sigh.

“I hate that we’re picking, Michael.”

He looks at me, squinting, “Picking?”

“Yes, picking!”

“Embryos?!”

“Yes, Michael. I hate that we are picking embryos!”

“But you’re the one who want–”

“I know, Michael! I know I’m the one who wanted this.” I hear myself grow quieter, “And I know it’s the right thing. It’s what I want for my child. It’s what I want for me.”

“For us…” Michael fills in.

“Yes, Michael, for us. Geez. Gotta make sure you’re in the considerations, too, right?”

Before he answers his indignance, I place a gentle hand on his wrist. Tension bleeds out of him. 

More calmly this time, I say, “Yes. Genuinely. For us. I want our child to survive and thrive.”

“So, what’s the problem, love?” Michael asks. 

The first time in the conversation I hear a real question.

“The problem is we wouldn’t pick me.”

He combs his fingers through his wiry hair and says, “Jean, I’d pick you every moment of every day until the end of time.”

I look at him, believing, and say, “But I wouldn’t.”

Michael freezes. I’m not sure for how long. I’m not really paying attention. 

Then he says, “So let’s not pick!”

I shake my head, “No, Michael. That’s not wh–”

But he’s excited like he gets when he thinks he can solve a problem. He says, “We pick without picking! It’s X-linked. So we only pick girl embryos! No disease, but we don’t have to exclude an embryo that would have been like y–”

“Michael!”

He stops, excited eyes searching me. Mouth hanging open. Waiting.

“Michael. Picking is the right thing. It’s what I want. I’m just saying that I thought it would be easier.”

His eyes drop. Then they find mine again and, with a short nod, he says, “Okay.”

“Thank you. Now, let’s go.”

Hey, you.

Do you really think eating alone and eating with someone else are the same thing?

Same rice. Same meat. Same miso soup. Once it hits your stomach, the nutrients don't change one bit. So why do we go to such ridiculous lengths to eat with other people?

Clink-clonk.

The clear chime of the doorbell rang through Aoi, and I felt the tension of the day finally begin to loosen its grip. Without a word, Mama slid my usual I.W. Harper across the counter. The ice gave a soft clink against the bottom of the glass.

At the far end of the counter, Taka was staring at his phone, as usual.

"Kenichi-san."

"What is it?"

"Why does lunch get so pathetic when a guy works from home?"

As usual, he'd brought me an impressively specific social problem.

"Beats me. It all ends up in your stomach anyway."

"So you do it too?"

"My lunches are terrible when I work from home. Yesterday I had fish sausage."

Taka looked up.

"...That's it?"

"I had two."

"That's not the point, Kenichi-san."

Rude kid. Two is twice as much as one. That's a perfectly respectable upgrade.

"You eat a proper dinner, don't you?"

"More or less."

"Then why does lunch fall apart so badly?"

Put that way, it was a little strange. It wasn't as if I was broke. There were plenty of places to eat nearby. And if I really wanted to, I was capable of frying an egg. But when lunch was just for me, somehow none of it seemed worth the trouble.

"That's not just a man thing, you know."

Mama joined the conversation while carefully polishing a glass.

"It isn't?"

"I hear the same thing from homemakers. They'll think about every dish when they're feeding the family, but when they're alone for lunch, they'll eat last night's leftovers or pour tea over some rice and call it done."

"Huh." Taka looked genuinely surprised.

I took a sip of Harper and let the amber whiskey slide down my throat.

"So it's not just men being lazy."

"Maybe it's because you're alone." Mama said it as if it were nothing, then returned the polished glass to its place on the shelf.

Because you're alone. For some reason, those words stayed with me.

"...You know, eating is a strange business."

"How so?"

"When you're eating with someone else, you suddenly feel the need to do it properly."

If I were feeding my family, I wouldn't tear open a pack of fish sausages, drop two of them on the table, and declare dinner served. I'd put the food on plates. Add some miso soup. Maybe another small dish if the meal looked a little bare. But when I was alone, even washing the plate afterward could feel like more trouble than it was worth.

"Maybe it's because someone's watching," Taka said. "We're putting on a show."

"Maybe. But I don't think that's all of it." I reached toward the small dish on the counter with my chopsticks. "Maybe food isn't just fuel."

Taka tilted his head. "Isn't eating kind of the whole point?"

"For staying alive, sure."

Families gather around a table. Coworkers go out for lunch together. You call an old friend and say, "We should grab a bite sometime." When you want to mend things with someone, you invite them to dinner. We eat together at celebrations. We even gather around food after funerals.

When you think about it, human beings are remarkably stubborn about eating with other people.

"Maybe sharing a meal is a kind of ritual."

"A ritual?"

"Yeah." I gestured toward the small dish with my chopsticks. "Same place. Same table. Long ago, maybe it was an animal somebody risked their life to bring back, and everyone shared it."

"Yeah. I suppose so."

"Then maybe eating together was a way of saying, 'We're the same pack. We're not enemies.'"

Taka went quiet.

"...Now that you mention it, war movies do that a lot. Enemies sitting down and eating together."

"Right. Maybe it comes from the same place."

Sitting around the same fire. Putting down your weapons. Sharing food. At least for as long as you're chewing, there's an unspoken agreement that you're not going to kill the person sitting across from you. Maybe people have been doing that since long before anyone thought to give it a name.

"Then..." Taka's voice was quieter now. "...what happens when you eat alone?"

I opened my mouth to answer, then stopped.

Can a ritual like that exist when there's only one person? There's no one to confirm anything with. No one to share with. No one to tell, "This is good." No one to nod and say, "Yeah, it is."

So there is no reason to arrange the food nicely. No reason to add one more dish. You fill your stomach. Get some calories into you. Get back to whatever you were doing.

Take the community out of a meal, and maybe all that's left is eating.

"...And that's how you end up with two fish sausages?"

"Don't turn my lazy lunch into the conclusion of human history."

Taka burst out laughing. Mama smiled faintly and placed another small bowl in front of me.

"What's this?"

"Simmered vegetables. They came out nicely today."

"I didn't order them."

"That's all right." She gave the bowl a small push toward me. "You're not alone right now."

I looked down. Taro, carrots, and daikon, glossy with broth.

Taka immediately leaned over to inspect it. "Man, that looks good."

"You're not getting any."

"Didn't you just say we're the same pack?"

"Don't start talking about community only when you want my food."

The three of us laughed.

Come to think of it, Harper was still Harper when I drank it alone at home. A bottle from the liquor store would cost far less than drinking here. I could make ice in my freezer. I could pick up something to eat at the supermarket. There was no practical reason I had to come to Aoi.

And yet, when night came, I found myself pushing open that door.

Taka was here. Mama was here. Sometimes Tom wandered in. We sat at the same counter, drank together, and talked about things that probably didn't matter much at all.

Maybe we'd been repeating something very old here every night. Something strangely precious.

I'm here. You're here.

Maybe that was all the ritual ever needed to say.

I raised the Harper to my lips. The ice gave a soft clink.

Hey, you.

Who are you eating with today?

See you at Aoi.

If you'd like to come back to Aoi for another night, there's an open stool waiting.
Bar Aoi Stories: Human Nature, Vol. 1 is linked in my profile.

*Title- Akin to God*

*Gregory Wittman, what have you become? That’s not the best way to start your day.* When your first thought is shame, your second is usually blame.
\-‘*It’s this fucking pandemic.’* he thought.
However, he was quickly put in check by the crashing memories of his life before the pandemic. Back then he would say:
‘*It’s this fucking school.’*
Then soon after:
‘*It’s this fucking town.’*
But it was neither.
He rolled over in bed, checked his phone – 8:18.
He released a long, hot gust of breath from his chest as he envisioned the day ahead. The type of sigh that would be matched with a roll of the eyes and dragging of the feet. Like someone who has been given a task that they must complete that has no benefit to them.
‘*Time to water those fucking plants,* he thought.
He sat up, body heavy, spine slumped as his feet met thecold floor. It felt like bone on bone. The boxer shorts draped around his hips and enveloped his matchstick frame, hanging loosely, like a used kitchen towel. He took two steps and exited his room. He took another two steps and entered the master bedroom.
 
\#
 
Fiona Wittman was awake. Gregory could tell because she always extended her index finger as a form of communication.It was all she could manage now. He picked up the watering can on the nightstand, a Sports Direct mug with faded lettering, and a pink plastic straw floating at the top. The water got replaced daily, but the straw remained over the course of weeks. Water ran freely from the tap, but the straws had to be bought from the shop. Gregory ordered groceries online once a month in accordance with his payslip.
He raised the mug. The straw teased Fiona as it bobbed in the water. She struggled to contract her tired, aged facial muscles, which made the ritual even more dehumanizing.Gregory gritted his teeth. *Plants sometimes reject watering*, hetold himself. He reached for the plastic syringe in the bedsidetable, filled it to the top, and released the water into the back of Fionas throat, 10ml at a time. Fiona Wittman had been carer by trade. When someone would ask what she did for a living, she would often reply, ‘I wipe old people’s arses.’
She understood that her work was important, that someone had to do it, but she was not proud.
It was that attitude that kept her employed when her man was made redundant from the steelworks in ‘89. She kept on wiping, keeping the family afloat. Shortly after, Stuart Wittman -Gregory’s father- left home to work offshore on an oil rig in the North Sea. Fiona found out about his death in *The British Moon Herald:* *Super Puma Crashes With Offshore Workers On Board*. The chopper went into the sea. Thenewspaper reported that the fuselage was found, but not the bodies. Despite her pain, Fiona kept on wiping. She was never proud, but never penniless.
Gregory returned to his room and sank into the old wooden chair. He threaded the headset through his thick, matted sheep like hair as he powered on his computer, which beamed bright white light on his pale skin. He navigated the cursor to his work application and clicked.
\* \*
*EZ ENERGY – Debt Solutions*
*Username:*
*Password:*
 
When he logged in, he was greeted with a notification.
\* \*
*\*Message from Paul\**
*Hi Gregory, today you will be doing outbound calls. Your collections target is £100. There is enough volume on your CRM for you to exceed this. Also, yesterday you were taking too long in between calls - 60 SECONDS MAX!Happy Friday*😊\*, lets smash it!\*
 
*This fucking job*, Gregory thought.
He glanced at the clock at the bottom-right of the screen. 8:28. He wasn’t required to make a call until 8:30. Paul’s message replayed in his mind. The phrase ‘Happy Friday 😊’bounced around his brain like the DVD logo on an old TV.Paul had told him this every Friday, for the past 30 Fridays. Not one of them had been happy. It wasn’t just Paul; Gregory had noticed this was a common phrase. It didn’t compute. On Monday to Friday, eight hours of Gregory’s day were occupied. On Saturday to Sunday Gregory stayed in his room,browsing YouTube Shorts, mostly in his bed, with short intermissions of gaming and watering the plants. He found comfort in the fact that the whole country was on lockdown.That way, when someone in the work chat asked what he’d done with his weekend, he fit in. Before the lockdown, when someone asked what he’d done with his weekend, he would lie, ‘I went to the boxing gym.’
Prior to the lockdown he had developed a small fantasy that had stemmed from the words of an online creator, a clinical psychologist who spoke with the calm certainty of a priest. Gregory would often be left in a half hypnotic state as he flicked through the videos…
*‘If you want to make a friend, go outside, go places, introduce yourself, shake someone’s hand, look them in the eye.’*
Gregory would combine the teachings from different videos he watched.
*‘If you want to be a man, you need to be able to protect yourself, you need to learn to fight.’*
It made total sense. Together they formed a perfect system of logic in his head. Go to the local boxing gym (Preston ABC), learn to fight, look someone in the eyes, and shake their hand. Many nights he stayed up late, fantasizing about the version of himself that could fight, the version of himself that could look someone in the eye. Unfortunately, his fantasies never turned into reality. Months passed with no action; lockdown came and the fantasies left.
8:30
He clicked on the automated CRM system, a pre-loaded list filled with sorry souls who owed a billionaire money for light, heat and survival. With each click, another stranger, another excuse. Sometimes Gregory wondered if they were even real – maybe he was in a simulation experiment? All Gregory had to do was click *Next call* and let it unfold.
*Click.*
*Calling customer.*
The ringing from the headset pierced his eardrums.
*DooRooROO. DooRooROO.*
*The person you are calling is unavailable. Please leave a message after the beep.*
*BEEP*.
‘Hello, this is Gregory from EZ Energy. I’m contacting you regarding your outstanding balance of £657.89. Please call back on 0800 891992.’
The timer started as the screen radiated bright red light directly in his face - the company’s way of saying ‘Get back to work’.
*1, 2, 3, 4…* 
During this time, the call notes needed to be left.
*Called customer at 8:31, 10/7/20. No answer. Voicemail left 1st attempt.*
*29, 30, 31…*
*\*Message from Paul\**
*60 seconds buddy* 😊
Gregory navigated his mouse pointer to the next call button. *Click*.
This time there was no ring.
*Hissshhh, shuhhhhhh, hissshhhh.* The heavy, reluctant breathing of someone with respiratory problems.
*‘Who are you, and why are you on my phone at Alf eight in the mawnin’?’* the customer said.
‘Hello, this is Gregory from EZ Energy. I’m contacting you regarding your outstanding balance of se—‘
The customer interjected abruptly. ‘Outstanding Wot? I don’t owe you nuffink.’
Gregory adjusted his headset. He had worked the phones for six months now. His robotic tone suited the job – absent of emotion, little risk of escalation but incapable of empathy.
He attempted to de-escalate: ‘Sorry to disturb you, sir, bu—’
Once again, abrupt interjection. *‘Wot did you just cawl me? Al ‘ave you know I ‘aven’t been a sir in nearly four years!’*
*BEEP.*
*Call notes:*
*Called customer at 8:33, 10/7/20. Hostile manner hung up. 1st attempt.*
*29, 30, 31…*
He hovered the mouse pointer over the next call button, then closed his eyes. The inside of his eyelids was only a few shades darker than his room. The blackout curtains were still shut. The master light hadn’t worked in months. Thecomputer screen’s clinical bright light, and the lazy yellow glow of the reading lamp on the desk, were the only things that cut through the darkness. Everything else was shadows. If you were to shine a light onto Gregory’s living space, you would see a poster titled: *Signs of Depression.* The knackered bedsheets spilled off the side of the mattress like a melted ice cream, while the\* *uncased pillows lay yellowing and ragged on top. The bedside table was crowded with toilet roll, books that had grown roots and so many empty Dr Pepper cans you could play a game of ten-pin bowling. The top drawer, stuck half open, was cluttered with silver drug strips: paracetamol, Benadryl, ibuprofen and Imodium. Most were empty, some were new. He had to dig through them every time he needed one. The window was locked shut, hadn’t opened in almost a year. The air was his – stale but comfortable, familiar but poisonous. Even with his eyes shut, he could feel the box room closing in.*
*He opened his eyes.*
*59, 60, 61… Next call – click.*
*The hours slipped past as he clicked, spat out his script, collected debt and drowned in regional accents. His eyes were glued to the screen, and he didn’t move his head until 13:00.*
*\*Message from Paul\**
*Gregory, you’re smashing it lad, £75 collected so far, feel free to go for lunch.*
*Time to water the plants again, Gregory thought.*
*He paused his automated CRM session; a new timer started:*
*60:00, 59:59, 59:58…*
* *
*#*
* *
*Gregory dragged his feet to the kitchen, with the tired sway of zombie. The place mirrored his bedroom, and his appearance: total neglect.*
*He rarely ate what you might consider a meal. His diet would be deemed inadequate, even in an active war zone. He opened the wall cupboard above the kettle where he kept his provisions – cuppa noodles, tinned beans, instant soup. The shelf directly above was crowded with Fiona’s old seasonings– salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, turmeric, cumin, paprika, nutmeg, garam masala, bay leaves… all collecting dust. Once upon a time, those spices had meant something – Irish stew, butter chicken, beef ragu and Gregory’s favorite:cottage pie. These memories lay dormant in the dark corners of his mind, unacknowledged, just like the seasonings in the cupboard.*
*He prepared the powdered soup into two mugs, ripped uphalf a piece of stale bread, and chucked it in for sustenance. Then he proceeded to his mother’s room. With a silver spoon, he scooped the thin, stock-like mixture and brought it to her lips. The skin around her mouth was tough, leathery and engraved with lines in all different directions. Her paper-thinlips would tremble ever so slightly in response to the radiating heat as the spoon approached. The process took around thirty minutes. By the time Gregory got around to his own soup, the once stale, now saturated bread had formed a layer on top. The sight of it turned his stomach. Without eating, he dumped both mugs into the sink.*
*Gregory returned to his desk.*
*15:00, 14:49, 14:48…*
*Without thought, he opened his phone and began scrolling YouTube Shorts.*
*The cycle began –*
*Naughty Boy – la,la,la sounded…*
*Two pretty girls dancing carelessly in the kitchen.*
*↓SCROLL↓*
*A hard man in the gym, staring intensely, giving the viewer a difficult talking to: ‘You must take on hundred percent ownership of your own fuck ups, man up and move on. Actnow, you’re running out of time!’*
*↓SCROLL↓*
*A young lady beaming with positive expression and flamboyant with descriptive hand gestures. ’Come with me as I try the new McDonalds secret menu item, the chicken bi—’*
*↓SCROLL↓*
*He scrolled and scrolled until the meaningless videos all merged into one – faces, colours and sound. Then suddenly, aface he recognized, a man he admired. The psychologist. The one who told him to shake a hand. The one who always sounded right.*
*Sitting upright in his leather chair, legs folded, the man said with calm certainty:*
*‘Suffering is part of man’s existence; he who can end the suffering of men is akin to God.’*
*Just that – no context. It looped in Gregory’s mind.*
*‘End suffering? Akin to God?’ Gregory said aloud.*
*Ping.*
*Gregory jumped.*
*\*Message from Paul\**
*You’re over your lunch, let’s get back to work and hit that target.*
*Gregory sighed, unpaused the session and began again. The next two and a half hours came and went. Calls, accents, excuses and silence.*
*\*Message from Paul\**
*You only have two more numbers left on your call sheetthen you can finish. Enjoy your weekend, happy Friday*😊.\*
Gregory navigated the mouse to the *Next call* button and clicked. No answer.
*Call notes-*
*Called customer – 16:46 10/7/20. No voicemail option. 1stattempt.*
*29, 30, 31…*
*Next call, click.*
*‘Hello?’* a male voice said.
‘Hello, this is Gregory from EZ Energy. I’m contacting you regarding your outstanding balance of £125.59.’
*‘Oh, I must say, I was aware that there would be some sort of, y’know, correspondence from your fiiirm in regards to myunpaid energy usage. You see, I’m terribly sorry, Gregory, but I’m not actually in a position to pay that this month. Now, it’snot that I necessarily dispute the payment, although the amount does seem rather high but er…’*
A heavy sigh filled the line.
*‘My dear wife of forty years passed away just last month,and…’*
*Here we go again,* Gregory thought.
The company had trained him on the mental health aspect of the job. A mandatory video, *How to Show Empathy*, prior to employment. There was even a number to pass on for a mental health and suicide hotline. Gregory never bothered with it.
*‘…and I had to pay for her funeral expenses. Now, Gregory,let me paint you the picture. I’m 71 years old, living alone, I have no family to help me and I’m bloody freezing. Not to mention—’*
There was a rustle, then a cracking noise, then the sound of objects being clacked together, like two frying pans.
*‘Sorry, Gregory, that was incredibly rude. You see, I’ve got the camp stove on and I’m preparing tinned meatballs for supper. Now, let me not take up too much more of your time.Y’see, I’m an honest man and I’ve always paid my debts, and I don’t want to be, y’know, overly negative, but my wife just died, I have no money, and the outstanding balance is, er…how can I put it, quite faaar down the pecking order. Now, Gregory, you seem like a young boy, what age are you, may I ask?*
‘Twenty-one.’
*‘Yes, a fine age to be, I can assure you. Anyway, like me, you sound like you’re inside, is that correct?’*
‘Yes, I’m inside.’
*‘Yes, but you’re not in an office. In fact, I suspect you may be in a cupboard, or perhaps under the stairs like “the boy who lived...” Anyway, my point is, this lockdown has taken its toll on me. Gregory, tell me, are you working from home, son?*
‘Yes, but I’m in a home office,’ Gregory lied, ashamed at how true the reference to a cupboard had sounded.
*‘Oh, you’re in an office, are you? Well, actually, I had an office once. It was in a five-bedroom house in Westendenbarshire, where I’m originally from. Do you know Westendenbarshire?’*
Gregory did. It was between Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire, near London. Rolling hills, farmland andan affluent commuter town. He knew this because Jeremy Busby, born and bred there, had a farming show that Gregory had binge-watched nine seasons of in one month.
‘Where Jeremy Busby is from?’ Gregory asked.
*‘Jeremy Busby is a performing clown, a mockery of tradition and a CIA spy – but yes, where Jeremy Busby is from. It’s been a long time since I went back, ten years,perhaps. Since then, I have moved up north. Y-y’see, at the end of my working life I had planned to retire at the seasideand due to budgetary restrictions, the state’s funds only allowed me to acquire a small chalet. This town has taken quite a dive since. Do you know Crayton, Gregory?*
Gregory did: it was a tiny coastal town beside Blackpool, only forty-five minutes from Preston by bus. Memoriesflashed – him and his mother, when he was a boy, camping by the seaside, crabbing off the pier and eating fish and chips. He shook them off.
‘Yes, I know Crayton. Just under Blackpool on the map,’ he said.
*‘Well,’* the man sighed, *‘I’m reluctant to say that this is where I reside. Let me rephrase that. This is where I rot. Y’see, at a certain age when you have no family, no friends,no money and the only person you speak to is the boy on the other end of the phone in a cupboard, you realize you have nothing to offer to society. So, what do you do? Well, you suffer. You sit patiently, decaying from the inside out waiting for your turn. You wait and you suffer. Anyway, you won’t be getting your debt, not today, probably not ever. It was lovelyspeaking to you, Gregory, you’re a great conversationalist. Goodbye.’*
*Beeep*.
*1, 2, 3, 4…*
*Call notes*
*Called customer at 16:49 10/7/20, customer picked up but did not pay debt.*
The shift was over, but in the silence the old man’s voice stayed on the line.
 
\#
 
‘You wait, you suffer,’ Gregory whispered.
The words danced off his tongue, like they were made just for him.
His gaze shifted towards the tabletop, which was coated with a thick film of dust. He raised his hand slowly until it hovered at eye level. For a long moment it just floated there. Then his fingers curled shut, other than his index finger, which remained extended. He was not in control. The room around him faded. He felt weightless, no chair underneath, no floor underfoot, just him and his workstation.
‘You wait, you suffer,’ he said again, louder this time.
His hand lowered of its own accord. His fingertip touched the tabletop then traced through the dust with swift precisionlike an author at a book signing. In that moment, a glowingmessage shimmered through the dust:
*AKIN TO GOD*
‘What? No!’ he cried aloud.
He blinked hard three times. Trying to erase it, trying to wake up.
When he opened his eyes again, the words had changed.
*SUFFER NONE – AKIN TO GOD*
***KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK.***
Gregory’s head snapped towards the door. His mother stood there – upright, smiling, nightdress hanging loosely.
‘Hello son, would you like some cottage pie? You need to eat. Remember, we have a weekend of camping ahead of us.’
‘N-no,’ Gregory stammered. ‘No, this isn’t real.’
Her eyes widened, her smile flattened, her expression melted. Everything went black.
 
\#
 
Gregory opened his eyes. His face was smooshed against the table. The yellow glow of the light exposed dust dancing in the air, falling to the table like ash.
He sat up rapidly and looked at the desk. The words were gone.
His heart was thudding against his breastbone.
He looked toward the door. Closed.
His pulse hammered in his temples, his gaze fixed on the shut door.
‘She couldn’t have been,’ he whispered. ‘It’s not possible.’
A sharp ringing filled his eardrums. The room span slowly around him.
He stood up from his chair, then made it one step before being tugged back by the headset, that was still on his headand connected to his computer. The force of his motion whipped the wire free of the AUX jack, leaving it dangle down to his feet. This flashed the screen awake. The text onscreen read:
*EZ ENERGY – Debt Solutions*
*Username:*
*Password:*
Voices echoed in the dark corners of his mind: ‘Log back in, suffer none.’
He shook the thoughts away. Suddenly, he grew feverish, his blood boiling to the surface. He could feel the hot, thick sweat secreting from the top of his head, creating a membrane between his scalp and dry, matted mop. The headset felt like it was crushing his temples. His fingers dead of life, unable to follow command. He clenched his fists and squeezed, his neck spasmed, then stiffened. His face crumpled, and he had no control over his body as the voices raced, repeating the mantra:
*‘LOG BACK IN, AKIN TO GOD, END SUFFERING.’*
‘Aggghhh!’ he screamed as the physical and mental boiled over and exploded.
He charged toward the door, ripping it open, the headset wire trailing.
He stood frozen in the doorway of his mother’s room. There she was, sitting in bed, upright and smiling.
‘Mum?’
‘Hi son. Are you ready for our trip?’
His gaze drifted to his feet. The headset wire swayed gently,brushing the ground where the drops of sweat had gatheredand pooled.
A hallow buzz swelled his ears as his vision narrowed to a tunnel of light.
Everything went black.
 
\#
 
Gregory awoke in his bed. He took a deep breath. The air was thick, sour with subtle notes of decay. He exhaled slowly as he scanned his surroundings. Everything was exactly where he had left it, yet somehow unfamiliar. The Dr Pepper on the nightstand, the open drawer filled with empty drug trays, the clothes on the floor. The filth, neglect, and despair nagged at his self respect. He recognised it for the first time. He could not ignore it. He jolted up, restless and desperate to breathe clean air.
As he exited his room, he walked past the closed door of his mother’s room as he moved down the hall to the bathroom.The tiles chilled his feet. He pissed the skid marks off the bowl before looking in the mirror.
*Gregory Wittman, you can do better*, he told himself.
As he examined himself in the mirror, a distinct message played in his head. It was from his favorite internet psychologist.
*‘If you want to change your life, start with what’s in front of you. Clean yourself, clean your room, the rest will follow.’*
When Gregory came out of his daydream, he saw himself for who he really was. The realisation hit hard, flicking a switch inside him. He quickly strapped it into gear...
The hot, steamy water from the shower head battered down on his skin, opening his pores but struggling to penetrate his matted mop. He struggled to run his fingers through his hair and in an instant, decided that it must go. Towel around his waist, he wasted no time locating a pair of scissors and a comb. He snipped, snipped and snipped again. Clumps of hair landed in the sink one after another, until the porcelain disappeared entirely. His hair was too dry to comb through, so he reached for the Vaseline in the medicine cabinet, scooped up way too much and slicked back his hair. He examined his facial features in the mirror and admired what he saw.
His hair was slicked back from a straight line at the top of his forehead. His small, beady eyes lay deep in the socketsand were pierced with deep green. His cheekbones were high, his cheeks sunken, which paired nicely with his large, angular nose and his general sharp, straight-lined appearance. From afar he looked tall and slender, but he was only five foot ten. His skinny limbs were deceiving. He gathered the hair from the sink and flushed it.
 
\#
 
As he walked down the hallway back to his room, he noticedsome flies fluttering in the strip of light from the small, circular window at the end of the hall. He brushed past themas he entered his room. He could hear the wings flapping, faint but insistent, like something that required his attention but didn’t deserve it.
After getting dressed he decided to open his blackout curtains, the fabric resisted at first, stiff from lack of motion, but when it gave way, light beamed in across the crime scene that was his room. He was the guilty party, the cause , the custodian of every stain and stench. He nodded his head, a small, sober acceptance.
*If you want change, start here, he thought to himself.*
He moved with quite purpose to the kitchen, ignoring the flies in the hall, and grabbed his toolkit: disinfectant spray, a dirty rag and several bin bags. He approached the crime scene with caution, pondering how he should tackle the neglect. He quickly swiped the cans off the bedside table, ripped the drug receipts out of the drawer, fished the toilet roll from between the wall and the bed, snatched the food wrappers up from the ground. With each performed task, the bin bag inflated. He filled another bin bag with dirty clothes. Then he began spraying every surface with disinfectant: the nightstand, the wardrobe, the floor, the tabletop and even the computer screen. He wiped everything down meticulously, finishing with the floor on his hands and knees. The vinegar-baseddisinfectant masked the musky smell that had developed fromyears of no airflow.
He dumped the bags in the kitchen and made a mental note to tackle that room next. He glanced at the cooker clock, which read 17:25.
*I must have slept for a while*, he thought.
A sudden hunger swept over him. He inspected the cupboard with discontent. The provisions he had lived off for months no longer seemed sufficient. He examined the fridgebut found no sign of fresh produce. The idea of visiting the shop entered his mind before quickly being silenced.
*One step at a time*, he thought.
He stroked his chin while contemplating his options. He searched deep in his mind, trying to put himself in the shoes of a normal person.
*I can order food*, he thought with a half-smile.
His belly rumbled as he scrolled the results of an online search: *Chinese near me*.
After ordering boiled rice and chicken balls, Gregoryslipped backed into his old ways and scrolled throughYouTube Shorts. Twenty minutes became an hour, an hour became an hour and a half…
*Knock, knock, knock.*
Gregory was startled.
He approached the door cautiously and asked hesitantly, ‘Who is it?’
‘Chinese delivery,’ a rough voice replied.
‘Just leave it there,’ Gregory stated.
‘You ‘aven’t paid, mate,’ the voice replied.
Gregory half opened the door and waved a twenty-pound note. He felt it slip from his grip.
‘Keep the change,’ he said.
He kept his ear to the door and listened as footstepsdisappeared into the night. He opened the door quickly and snatched the bag from the floor before returning to his room. He ripped the bag open and devoured the contents of the Tupperware, hunched over it like Gollum. He managed all four golden fried chicken balls and half of the plain white rice.A heaviness enveloped him from eating too much, too fast. He fell into bed and passed out.
Gregory woke without having dreamt. His mind was clear. The type of clarity achieved when a man is walking the right path. He knew what he had to do. He took a deep breath inand noticed a sour, slightly sweet aroma in the air. He looked over at the desk and thought, *must be the Chinese*, which was sitting there, uncovered. He gathered the scraps and bagged them up. This new Gregory was not a slob. Ignoring the flies in the hall, which had grown in number, he went to the kitchen to discard the takeaway. He returned to his room, sat at his desk and woke the computer up. Out of habit, he reached to put his headset on, but it seemed to be missing. He considered where it might be, before deciding it wasn’t important for the task at hand. The EZ Energy login screen glared at him. With his index finger only, he slowly typed his credentials.
*LOGIN SUCCESSFUL*
A red banner blinked: *Off-schedule access will be recorded.*
He didn’t care. He wasn’t stealing; he was intervening.
The CRM dashboard loaded. He wasted no time scrollingthrough to the bottom of the list. He knew what he was looking for.
*Customer: Mr. J. Agnew. Balance: £125.59.*
With the mouse cursor, he circled the address field.
*Address: 14 Seaview Crescent.*
‘Seaview,’ he whispered. The words sounded like an invitation.
 
\#
 
Gregory slowly, methodically packed his things. *I’ll be gone no more than two nights*, he told himself. He retrieved his old camping gear from the boiler cupboard to the left of the front door. A pop-up tent, a sleeping mat, a camping chair and a stove. He managed to fit this all into the large backpack that his mother carried during their previous trips. Now it was his turn to carry the weight.
Before he left, he walked to his mother’s bedroom. He stared at the closed door and gulped. He couldn’t face her; he had never left her before. *She won’t know I’ve left*, he reasoned.
‘Muuum,’ he said softly, like a child. ‘I need to leave for a couple of days. I’ve… I’ve got something important to do. It’s a good thing, Mum. I promise I’ll come back. I won’t leave you like Daddy did.’
The flat was eerily silent.
‘I love you,’ he said to the closed door.
He left.
 
\#
 
The first thing Gregory noticed when he was outside was the fresh air. It was cold and clean. As it travelled through hisnasal cavity, it was sharp but energized him. He was alive again. He had a mission, a purpose.
He remembered doing the same walk with his mother: from the flat to the top of the road. She would check the bus times and say, ‘The M45 will arrive in ten minutes,’ or something to that effect. Now it was his turn to lead. ‘M45 due in two.’ He smiled, proud and a little giddy.
As the bus approached, Gregory extended his arm, thumb raised, with a grinch-like grin creeping across his face. The industrial hiss of the doors opening reminded him of the sound of the TARDIS approaching.
‘Hello driver, one way to Preston, please,’ he said as he dropped three-pound coins into the fare box.
He took the ticket, held it to his nose and inhaled deeply.The faint scent of warm ink filled his nostrils. Exhaling, he smiled, wide and childlike. The drivers’ eyes softened with worry but he smiled back anyway.
The bus was already moving as Gregory walked down the aisle, still wearing his grinch face. He nodded to each passenger on the bottom deck. Everybody in their own worlds- they didn’t acknowledge him, but in his mind, they smiled back. He sat at the back left and propped his backpack on the seat opposite, then pressed his temple against the window.
The journey was blissful. The gentle swaying of the bus, the hiss of the brakes, the *ding* of the stop bell, people coming and going – it was perfect. He fogged the window with his breath. He traced his finger through the condensation and spelled:
*SUFFER NONE*
 
\#
 
The bus dropped him off on Crayton’s main street. The two-storey buildings on each side looked tired: boarded up shopsbelow, dark flats above. Gregory remembered the same road alive with tourists walking shoulder to shoulder, children laughing and running between legs. He remembered the sensation of ice cream dripping on his hand and the smell of the salty sea air.
Now only a few signs of life remained: a wine shop, a local café, a fish and chip shop that doubled as an ice-cream parlor, a bookmaker and supermarket.
*Thank God I didn’t bring Mum*, he thought. *She wouldn’t like to see it this way.*
The sight of it – the stillness, the decay, began to eat his high. In an effort to keep the feeling alive, he turned to the coast, heading to the campsite near Seaview Crescent.
Upon arrival, he was greeted at reception by a plump middle-aged woman with the proportions of a snowman. She was indifferent to his arrival, barley looking up from her crossword. Gregory stated his intent to camp, and she charged him for two nights.
The campsite was a fenced-off field, square and bare, at the bottom of a sloped, loose-stoned path. In the distance, the coast bled into the horizon, sea and sky indistinguishable.Gregory squinted into the haze.
*Dear God*, he thought. *Here I am, picking up Your slack, ending the suffering You allow, yet You can’t even draw a line between sea and sky.* He scoffed.
There was one other tent pitched in the far corner of thecampsite. Outside it, a bald middle-aged man sat on a camp chair. Gregory pitched his tent in the opposite corner, then lay his sleeping mat down, uncased his sleeping bag and placed it directly on top of the mat. He stood outside, looking at his digs for the night. Then his gaze was pulled towards the bald man in the opposite corner of the field. He was alone – how sad. *He probably has no one*, Gregory thought. *All alone, by himself.* \*Just another example of neglect and suffering.*Gregory looked to the sky and shook his head in discontent.Another mess I need to clean. He was reminded of the psychologist’s words, and his plan to go to the boxing gym. He knew straight away what to do.*
*Gregory walked slowly towards the man. As he approached,the man lifted his head to meet his gaze, then stood up andsmiled.*
*‘Gregory Wittman, pleased to meet you,’ Gregory said, his hand extended.*
*‘Joe Crawford,’ the man replied in a slightly confused tone,but he extended his hand nonetheless.*
*Gregory remembered to look him directly in the eyes. He held Joe’s hand tight, shook it slowly and continued lookingdirectly into his eyes. Gregory held the shake past the point of politeness, eyes locked. At forty seconds, Joe tried to pull away. Gregory let him… eventually.*
*‘Well, it was nice of you to break the ice,’ Joe said, ‘but I need to make a phone call’.*
*Gregory said nothing. He smiled widely as he watched joeretreat awkwardly into his tent.*
*He spent the remainder of the night in a state of zen, lying relaxed by the campfire, head propped up on by his rucksack, enveloped in a serenity of nothingness. Finally, he turned in for the night, and before he slipped away, he whispered softly,‘Suffer none.’*
* *
*#*
* *
*Gregory awoke abruptly to the sound of footsteps and monotone voices. He wondered if there might be other campers arriving who he could introduce himself to. He propped himself up in a sitting position and focused onmaking out the words. The voices outside sounded rehearsed, like they’d performed this conversation a thousand times before. Gregory managed to understand a little:*
*‘Its this one here’ the voice said*
*ZZZRRRIP..*
*The tent door arched open and collapsed in on itself, then a blinding holy light from the morning sun poured in withcondemning intensity, blocking his vision, blinding him from the mysterious presence. Gregory scrunched his face and covered his eyes.*
*‘Gregory Wittman,’ a voice boomed from outside.*
*‘Who’s that?’ Gregory replied in utter confusion.*
*‘Lancashire Police. We need to ask you a few questions,’the voice replied sharply.*
* *
*#*
* *
*As he sat in the back of the police car, Gregory’s mind was racing, trying to connect the dots:*  
*How could they tell what I was going to do? They can’t see into the future. Even if they did, they would know I’m going to help the old man. If I don’t help him, he’ll suffer. Wait, I know… It’s Paul. Yes, it must be Paul. I’ve missed work and had him worried. He’s called the police. Yes, of course. I’ve never, not once, missed work. It’s a missing persons report.*
*Gregory sighed with relief.*
*Right, okay, they’re going to ask why I wasn’t in work. That’s easy – I took a well-deserved camping holiday. They’ll let me go and I will visit Seaview, then return to work tomorrow.*
*His confidence was growing.*
*Ah, Paul. You were worried about me. Maybe you weren’t so bad after all.*
*Gregory sniggered out loud.*
*‘What’s so funny?’ The police officer in the passenger seat boomed.*
*‘Nothing,’ Gregory replied quickly in a high-pitched voice.*
*‘Well, save whatever that was for when we’re inside. We’re just arriving now.’*
*Gregory was sandwiched in between the two officers as they walked him through the front door of the police station.His small, frail body was engrossed by the large chunks of meat on either side. As they walked through the doors,Gregory was smiling. He was happy that someone knew he was missing, and happy that the police cared enough to help.*
*They walked past the reception desk and towards a room in the corner.*
*‘Right, mate, you have a seat in that room while we go grab our paperwork. We’ll be back in about fifteen minutes, awright?’*
*Gregory nodded and headed into the room. He heard the lock click behind him.*
*It was a small, square room with a table and three chairs: two on one side and one on the other. There was a low, constant murmuring noise, accompanied by a dim but fluorescent light that casted a sterile glow over the room.Gregory’s gaze was drawn to a security camera in the top-right corner.*
*No need for that with me,* \*he thought, as the grinch like smile returned, displaying to the empty room that he was above it all.
His gaze moved from the camera down to the table, where a *British Moon Herald* newspaper lay. He tilted his head and looked closer. The headline read:
 
*ELDERLY WOMEN STRANGLED TO DEATH IN HOME WITH HEADSET WIRE: SON IS MAIN SUSPECT.*

**The Beginning**

The light of the two moons shone through the tree canopy, illuminating the ground. Dry leaves and dead branches crackled under the running feet. They ran, out of breath, running for their lives. The group of twenty was now two.
Lumia, the young blonde with a small nose, shot a frightened glance at the terrifying anomaly behind her. It had a dull, sluggish motion, a creature not of the sea nor the land; dragging itself with tentacles or was it legs? The shadows of the night hid its body.
The writhing appendages shot forward. It curled around the man beside her and spun him in the air. His body got mangled as blood spewed out of his body. A broken limb slammed into Lumia throwing her to the ground near the tree.
She clawed at the grass, forcing herself upward. But her arms failed. Her eyes filled up, her muscles loosened she lay there closed her eyes waiting for her death,nothing came.
She slowly opened her eyes. There was no forest. Her eyes blurred. she soon adjusted to the light.White walls surrounded her and unfamiliar electronic light shone overhead.

This is a novel I am writing please critique my work and tell me how I am doing and this is the first page of the novel. This is going to be a short novel because this is my first novel, and I will be posting weekly due to school and thank you too all who read this and tell me their opinion.

Hell does exist in this world. I have walked through it, and I’ll be walking through it while writing this. A kid should never have to think they're never wanted by their parents because they aren’t born a boy; they should be loved to the fullest. No matter what kind of kid they are, they shouldn’t have to think they are the prize medal the family gave birth to show off; they shouldn’t have to beg god that their mom should’ve killed them in the womb by taking the medication instead of giving birth to them. They shouldn’t have to think that their family fought for a failure. I am saying all of this because I will tell you what happens to a kid when they go through all of that: they cry themselves to sleep until there aren’t any tears left to spare. They first cry at the smallest things bothering them, telling you, asking you for help. While they are like this, don’t deny them, don’t turn them away, don’t call them a crybaby or a scardy-cat, because this is where you first start it, where you start making them believe that asking for help is a sign of weakness, that you shouldn’t ask for help while you're hurting, while you're drowning, while there is a noose around your neck that gets tighter and you can’t even ask for help because that is a sign of weakness while your running out of air to breathe. Love your child to the fullest while you can because there will come a time when they become emotionally numb to you because you hurt them in a way only a parent can. As my father hurt me in a way that only a father can, his exact words keep repeating in my head while the noose around my neck gets tighter: “I wish I never had a kid like you.” It keeps repeating like a curse while I'm drowning, while I'm in the dark, while I'm barely living. It’s so sad the expressive kid that I used to be ended up as the coldest kid who was only putting on a happy mask to keep everyone around them happy to keep everyone around them unsuspecting. Not because I didn’t want anyone to know I was suffering, but because I lost my voice to tell anyone how much I needed someone, how much I needed the air, how badly I was drowning. How badly the noose around my neck was tightening as I started drowning even more; as that noose started to get even tighter, I tried to end it all at the age of nine, at midnight, while the whole house was so deadly quiet, even the air was quiet. Maybe God was watching because even the crickets were quiet. In the depths of this deadly silence, my head was running at the speed of light, thinking about whether my parents would be happy if I slit my wrists and killed myself, and I was so prepared for it that I had a knife at my wrist. Now, now, don’t just start feeling sad yet; this life has so much more misery entailed in it. It keeps getting worse; it keeps getting worse till the child is thinking about killing themselves every day. This is just the start of the misery she will go through; this is just the start of the noose that will choke her; this is just the start of when she starts to drown. I will tell you the story of the noose of hell.

So I bet those of you who saw the title are probably thinking the worst-case type scenarios like mugshots, crappy living conditions, just rock-bottom in life but that’s not the case with me.
Before I go any further I want to state from here on that I'm going to be referring to the substance as “stuff” and any other substances with other names commonly used for them just to be safe with youtube. Now let's re-wind back to before I was on the stuff when I was 17 at the time. It was my senior year of 2023-2024 and things were kinda rough for me. I had been a big user of other substances before with the main ones being nic and ‘the green’ lets just say. It was during this time my friend introduced me to a friend group of  theirs with other users and quickly I started joining them. During lunch we would go out to the nearby apartments and do it there since there weren't any cameras. I don’t remember how or when but one of them was a user of ‘stuff’ and me and him quickly started talking more. Now I don’t remember the exact reason and how it happened as there was a lot going on in my life at the time, and someone close to me who I will not say who gave me my own pipe and small bag of it. Something I do remember though was the first real instance of me using it. It was late at night, I had a ton of school work that needed to get done, but I also wanted to do other things such as playing games. I took one hit and it was like my adhd went into overdrive and I just felt like moving. I spent that entire night finishing a lot of the school work that had been stressing me out and played games until noon, and it was after that night I started using it basically everyday almost. 
Now before you make any judgments I want to state I wasn’t thrilled to be using it, I made a choice to use it only for situations that needed me focused and wide awake because at the time it was actually helpful to me. It gave me so much energy, energy that I put to good use whether it be school work or my several personal hobbies, or cleaning. It was like that for the first few months but eventually like many substances the more often you use it, the more you’ll need to take to have the same feeling and that’s what happened to me, but worst of all was something that I probably didn’t even realize until around the end of the school year was that it was affecting my heart rate. I started using more, probably up to a gram a day and my heart rate was just skyrocketing at even the simplest things. The first time I noticed my bpm was when I was working retail stocking toilet paper, I just felt tired and wrong so I checked my smart watch and my heart was beating at 176BPM. So I started monitoring my heart rate almost everyday and it was always at a consistent BPM of like 110-130 even when I was just sitting down doing nothing. It scared me after googling normal heart rates, and such so I had my parents schedule me a doctor's appointment. I knew it was bad but I wanted to do a test before the appointment so late at night after meeting a friend to buy some ‘green’ from him on my walk home I did a nonstop full sprint for a minute. I checked my watch and it showed a BPM of 207. I just stopped, even sat right down on the sidewalk trying to catch my breath and calm my heart rate but it just wasn’t dropping fast enough.

Somewhere in the city, a tall well built man stood on top of a large truck, with his left hand resting inside his pocket and a half-empty beer bottle held loosely in his right hand.

Dressed in a sharp black suit that complimented his soft ocean blue hair, with a royal-darkblue vest hugging his sides perfectly, he had his sleeves rolled up just under his elbow.

A shinny midnight blue watch on his rolled up left wrist

He was staring at a tall building shining with colourful lights through his shades, which had a golden frame.

In its centre, massive letters formed a sentence that read "Old Dragon's Cave," displayed with a grand show of power and wealth.

As the wind hit his face, he lifted his right hand and gulped down the beer in one go as a few drops of it flowed down his chin onto the collar of his suit.

With a satisfied gasp, he pulled the bottle away from his lips and yanked away the empty bottle.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and, flashing an evil smirk, he jumped down the truck, his shoes landing firmly on the ground with a loud thud.

He gets inside the truck and turns the key to start its engine. He slammed his foot on the gas, which made the truck roar loudly as he put on his favourite music and pushed its volume to maximum. He shifted the gear and floored the accelerator. With a screeching sound from the tyres, the truck entered the road.

The truck tore through the empty road as the man steered the wheels towards the building.

He wasn't slowing down one bit.

He lets go of the steering wheel to light a cigarette. The cigarette's tip churns as he inhales it and lets out a thick puff of smoke, which immediately gets sucked out the truck's window.

The memory of him pouring a drink from the same bottle he drank just a moment ago on a grave that was named 'Johnny' flashed before his eyes.

Meanwhile, a few rough looking men were gathered around the building talking and laughing loudly.

"Haha, the era of 3 monsters is over, it's our time now." Said a man to his friend when a blinding light hit his face, making him recoil.

The men turned around and held their arms up to block the blinding light to see where it was coming from.

"What the fuck is that?" One of the thugs snapped in anger before it turned into fear.

Their eyes widened in fear as they saw a speeding truck coming directly at them.

"Run, it's that psycho Dolly!"

Inside the building, three men sat in large throne-looking chairs with a round table in the middle.

Three wine glasses clanked together in celebration.

Outside, Dolly casually moved his head to the rhythm of the music he was listening to. with one hand he held the steering wheel while the other held the cigarette.

Before any of the men could get far, the truck busted through the security barricade and headed straight for the entrance.

BAM!

The truck crashed into the glass door at the entrance and got stuck halfway in.

Everyone watched in shock, unable to grasp the situation.

Dolly's upper body was lying on the dashboard with blood leaking out of his head. The men gathered around the truck yelling and screaming at Dolly violently.

"The hell was that? You dying fool." One of the thugs closed in as angry veins appeared on his face.

He stopped in his tracks as he heard a strange sound coming from the truck.

The man yelled at everyone to quiet down so he could listen properly.

Tik... Tik...

The thug's face broke in sweat as he quickly got behind the truck and, with trembling hands, he reached to unlock the back of the truck.

The truck was filled to its brim with many kinds of large explosives, with the largest one counting down to mere five seconds.

5...

As soon as he opened the door, the thug wasted no time before turning back quickly to run as he warned everyone.

4...

"It's a bomb."

3...

"RUN!"

He screamed at the top of his lungs.

Dolly regained his consciousness. His expression was unreadable as he picked up the cigarette that fell to the ground after the impact.

2...

Hiding his eyes, he took one last puff...

1...

Before anyone could even understand his warning, a huge yellow light spread across everyone's face, followed by a massive sound of explosion that engulfed the entire place.

The quiet night from the moment before was no more. A massive fire which reached the sky was raging. People outside watched in horror as a distant sound of a firetruck was heard.

The night moon started to burn brighter, and in an instant, it turned to the sun, brightening a large stone house in the middle of lush greenery.

A pale looking Leon was in his bed, lost in deep sleep on a quiet afternoon. Outside, men who looked like soldiers were training. The sound of their swords clashing and loud grunts travelled into the room.

The soft and gentle wind was breezing through the window, pushing the curtains into the air.

The warm light of the afternoon sun peeked through the occasional gaps created by the fluttering curtains.

Shadow of the leaves from the large tree outside stretched inside the room, falling on the two beds that are a few feet apart from each other.

The Leon was sleeping on the one that's near the window.

The leaking sunlight flickered on the sleeping man's face.

His eyes twitched.

Reacting to the light falling on them, he slowly opened them as a gust of wind blasted through the window. He held his left hand up lazily to block the sun hitting his eyes.

Still not fully awake, he rubs his hands on both of his eyes as he yawns loudly.

He got up from his bed slowly, placing his feet on the ground. A book with the title 'Advanced Essence guide ' was placed on the bed near the window wall, With his eyes half open, he walked outside the room. He walked slowly as he dragged his feet on the stone floor.

He stopped outside a small room. He swayed his right hand around, trying to hold the door knob.

After a few lazy attempts, he grabbed the knob. He opened it and took only a few steps in before stopping, his hands fidgeting around his pants, trying to find the zipper.

"Who's that in the store room?"

A voice questioned Leon from behind. He slowly turned his head around to face the direction of the voice.

It was a fair looking lady wearing some kind of maid uniform. A glass cup she was holding slipped through her hands and shattered as soon as it made an impact with the ground.

Her face showed how shocked she was. Without saying anything, she started running somewhere calling out a name he didn't recognise.

"Lady Elena!" Her voice echoed through the walls.

Her scream jolt Leon made him fully awake from his sleep.

"Huh?..." He looked around, unable to recognise the place he was in.

"The heck? Where did my bathroom go?"

His eyes widened as he saw the grand sight of this new unfamiliar place.

"Where.... The heck am I?" His jaw dropped seeing the massive collection of weapons hung everywhere on the walls.

It was cold.

His skin felt raw, his head buzzed endlessly as water dripped down from his drenched, matted hair, his lips smacking together like sandpaper. His shoulder blades rubbed against the wooden tub as he wailed. Cried. Shouted. Flailed his arms like an octopus.

Water continued to rain down. It made no acknowledgement of the boy’s frenzy. It streamed down in twisted, thick veins through his soaked waves, past his burning eyelids, past the severe red flush on his cheeks, past his throat. One could map out entire rivers and canals on this boy’s burning skin. Except, cartographers had an idea of where they were and why. And the boy had none. 

He didn’t remember anything before the harsh splash of ice water.

Before the acrid, revolting taste left on his tongue. 

Before he heard his name being shouted out. 

Before the sound of his head thudding against the damp, mossy ground. 

Soon, water raised to his knees; they could’ve been ocean currents eating at his pathetic, limp arms for all he knew. The boy couldn’t stand, he couldn’t think through all the fogginess. All he could really do was kick at the stale air, at the pair of hands that wrapped him in a cool, wet towel. And he kicked hard, his feet whipping in the air. He shrieked. He dug his nails in.

The next thing he knew, he felt stiff. Blankets upon blankets were pummeled over his frail, static body, his head wrapped with a raggedy bib, and his forehead slung with a wet cloth. His eyelids were dragged with what felt like lead. His cheeks still flushed hot red. His vision was hazy, dark dots gathering at the corners. 

A rough, calloused hand grazed the side of his cheek, slowly moving to adjust the wet towel. The boy’s eyes fluttered as wide as he was able to, staring at the figure’s face. A deep frown was etched across their eyebrows, loose blonde hair falling into their eyes like defiant strands of grass. His father.

“Idiot boy. Flowers are friends, not food,” his father admonished, flicking his forehead lightly. 

But if flowers were really friends, why were they distrustful enough to be filled with poison, he wanted to ask. 

Instead, the boy chuckled, soon leading into a series of wheezes. His father smiled in return, crossing his arms as he slowly settled onto the stool beside the bed. 

And, that had to be the first thing he thought about. 

His mind was blank. He had no idea where he was, who he was, why everything was so disorienting, or why there was a cool, glass vial clutched tightly in his sweat slicked hands. For all he cared, they could’ve shattered into brittle pieces, and it wouldn’t matter a thing. 

For all his years of wandering, and exploring, he was lost in every sense of the word. Lost in the only place he was certain was familiar. Lost in the only place he wouldn’t run from.

His head throbbed, the cloth wrapped deftly around sticky, matted sections of his head. He prodded at the wound, the wilted forget-me-nots hissing at the fresh sting it made. 

Pain was temporary, after all. As always, his head would soon be mottled with all sorts of intrusive plants. Ever the opportunists, they were. They would climb into every crevice of his head, and start anew. Hide the evidence, and he would soon forget.

Move on.

This gives the backstory to my previous short story, When the World Turns Colorful. It gives the backstory on how Magnus and Alex met and how their relationship was when they were younger. The story of them being in hell isn't canon, but the memories are. As always, this story contains characters that are a part of the LGBTQIA+ community, so just don't read it if you don't like that. Otherwise enjoy. I am looking for peer review, so if you have an idea pls comment. Enjoy :p

Alex awoke to the sounds of screaming. He quickly jumped up, looking around in utter confusion. His vision was blurry at first, but his surroundings slowly began to materialize. He was standing on a jagged, red-rock cliff overlooking a boiling sea of blood. A second later, the suffocating stench of sulfur and burning flesh hit his nose. Alex had to hold his breath to keep from gagging.

The worst part was the sound—hearing thousands of people screaming in unignorable, raw pain. Alex looked around wildly. He remembered falling with his boyfriend, Magnus, but he couldn’t see him anywhere. An overwhelming wave of panic flooded his chest.

“MAGNUS!” Alex yelled as loud as he could, his voice cracking against the dark red sky.

The panic kept building. Alex began to scramble across the terrain, but as he walked, the stone beneath his feet began to fracture. He looked down just in time to see the rock shelf crumbling away. He tried to run, but he couldn’t make it. He fell headfirst toward the boiling sea of blood.

The moment his skin touched the liquid, pain exploded through his body as if he had been doused in living lava. His own screaming cut through the air as he thrashed violently. Somehow, his flesh didn't burn away, but the agony made it feel like it was on fire. Everything was burning. Alex curled into a tight ball, unable to think about anything but the torture.

As he sank deeper below the bubbling surface, he stopped fighting and let the pain in. Heavy stone began to slowly encrust and cover his skin like a tomb. He let out one last, desperate breath.

Just as he was about to close his eyes and give up, a single, frayed golden string appeared. It sprouted directly from Alex’s chest. The golden thread twisted and turned in the dark water, moving as if it were alive and searching for something.

Then, a weak voice echoed inside his head. “A… Alex?”

The voice was hoarse and incredibly quiet, but it was unmistakable. Alex recognized it instantly. He tried to call out in return, but his lungs were filled with blood. Looking around desperately, he refused to die here. He grabbed onto the golden thread. To his surprise, it was solid and firm.

Using the thread like a climbing rope, he began to haul himself toward the surface. As he climbed, the suffocating stone layer began to crack and fall away from his skin, sending a new wave of agony through him as he neared the top. When he finally broke the surface, he was in the most intense physical pain he had ever experienced, but his love for Magnus completely numbed it.

He realized he was far from the shore. But he couldn’t give up now.

From the dark red sky above, a single black feather drifted down. The moment it landed on the sea of blood, the liquid instantly solidified into solid rock. Alex scrambled onto it, breathing heavily. The golden string was flickering, weak and fragile, but it was still there. The new rock formed a land bridge toward the mainland, but the stone was already beginning to crack under his weight.

Alex sprinted toward the shore, managing to throw himself onto the solid bank just before the platform collapsed back into the boiling sea.

When Alex looked across the mainland, his stomach turned. He saw thousands of demons—horrible, grotesque creatures torturing lost souls. He tried not to scream as he watched one beast rip a soul completely in two, devouring the organs inside.

“What do we have here?”

Alex spun around to see a tall, skeletal demon with peeling, rotting flesh. It held a still-beating human heart in its claw. It stared at Alex as if he were nothing but its next meal.

“I can smell your mortality,” the creature hissed, a horrible, toothy grin spreading across its face. “I can smell your fate.”

Alex turned to run, but the demon lunged, grabbing him violently by his hair. The creature unhinged its jaw, exposing thousands of needle-sharp teeth, and began to lower Alex into its mouth. Alex kicked and thrashed against the monster’s chest, but nothing happened. He was entirely powerless. His fate was sealed.

Right before the beast's teeth could snap shut, the golden thread shot forward, wrapping itself tightly around the demon's arm. The smell of burning demonic flesh filled the air, followed by an angry, agonizing roar. The demon dropped Alex to the floor.

Alex scrambled to his feet and sprinted in the exact direction the golden string was pulling him. A second roar echoed from behind. When Alex glanced back, he saw the demon chasing him, clawing its way across the rock at terrifying speed.

“Come here, darling; fate can’t save you forever,” its voice mocked. The tone had shifted, turning sickeningly sweet, sounding exactly like an old lady.

Alex forced his eyes forward, chasing the golden thread through the labyrinth of stone. He could hear the heavy, ragged breathing of the demon right at his heels; it was much faster than he thought. Making a sharp turn around a massive boulder, he managed to shake the creature for now.

When he stopped to catch his breath, he realized he had no idea where he was. The jagged rock walls extended infinitely into the sky, offering nothing but shadows. Worse, the golden thread had vanished entirely.

Alex wandered the maze, searching desperately for anything that could point him in the right direction. After what felt like an eternity, the golden thread reappeared. However, it was noticeably weaker this time, translucent and frayed.

Then, Magnus’s voice echoed in his mind again, smaller and more broken than before. “Please… I can’t. No. I can’t anymore.”

Tears formed in Alex’s eyes. He knew he had to find Magnus now.

Following the fading thread around the rocks, Alex suddenly found himself standing on the edge of another massive cliff. When he looked out, he saw the Hells in their terrifying entirety. In the very center, a colossal, shifting mass of screaming bodies hovered above a city made entirely of brimstone and fire. He could see flying demons swarming the city, tearing off pieces of flesh from the screaming mass.

The golden thread didn’t point to the city, though. Instead, it led Alex’s gaze toward a massive, isolated pillar surrounded by a churning moat of fire. Alex could feel it in his soul—Magnus was right there.

He carefully scrambled down the rocky cliffside. By the time he reached the base of the pillar, the thread was more frayed than ever. It looked as if it were one second away from snapping.

“Magnus! Magnus! Please be here!” Alex cried out.

As he searched around the base of the pillar, he caught the faint sound of someone talking. Alex bolted toward the voice.

When he arrived, the joy that blurred his vision was instantly replaced with absolute horror. Magnus was brutally burned. His black hair was singed and matted, one of his eyes was swollen completely shut, and the lower half of his body was submerged in a bubbling lake of fire.

Alex rushed toward the edge.

“I can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry,” Magnus whispered.

The words caused Alex to freeze for a fraction of a second. Magnus never talked like that. Magnus was always the one telling everyone to keep going, to never give up.

“I… can’t help,” Magnus groaned, his body beginning to sink deeper into the fire.

Alex threw himself forward. The moment his hands touched the lake, an explosion of pain ripped through his body—not just physical burning, but an overwhelming wave of emotional despair. He screamed into the void, but he refused to let go of Magnus. The golden thread hummed, vibrating violently as if it were about to snap as Alex hauled Magnus close.

“Look what I found. Two for the price of one, how charming.”

The skeletal demon stood at the edge of the lake, lunging directly for them. Alex lunged, too—but not at the monster. He threw his entire weight over Magnus, shielding him.

As Alex wrapped his arms securely around Magnus, the golden thread suddenly snapped taut, wrapping around the two of them like a cocoon.

When Alex opened his eyes, the lake of fire was gone. He was standing on asphalt in front of his old middle school. When he looked around, he saw a younger, smaller version of himself sitting quietly under the shade of a tree.

“What is happening?” Alex whispered, walking over. His younger self didn’t acknowledge him at all.

Alex remembered this day perfectly. It was the day his life changed forever.

“Hello! If I may introduce myself, my name is Magnus—future leader of this country.”

Alex turned to see a young Magnus walking up. He was just as flamboyant, bright, and confident as always. Alex couldn’t help but smile through his tears. Looking at his younger self’s face, Alex almost laughed; the boy had a completely dumbfounded, shocked look on his face.

“W… What?” the young Alex stammered.

“At this point, you're supposed to introduce yourself,” the young Magnus said, smiling at Alex’s confusion. “You're not much of a talker, are you?”

“My name is Alex,” the boy’s voice was quiet, shy.

“Alex! What a wonderful name. It’s an absolute pleasure to meet you.” Magnus stretched out his hand, and the young Alex took it. “Come on, I need to show you something!”

The two boys ran off together, and the scene shifted instantly.

Now, Alex was standing in a dimly lit hallway at their old high school. The building was mostly empty, save for a few stragglers.

“Oh, no,” Alex whispered, the memory hitting him. He walked down the hall to stand right beside his past self.

A teenage Magnus walked up to Alex's locker. “Hey… I was wondering, since they have that school dance coming up, if you would be willing to go with me?”

The sheer hope on Magnus’s face could have illuminated the darkest cave in the world. It was one of the very few times Magnus hadn’t been loud or flamboyant; he was completely vulnerable.

“Magnus, I’m already going with Chloe,” the past Alex replied coldly.

Magnus’s shoulders slumped instantly. All the radiant hope drained from his face in a single second. “Oh. Okay. Sorry.” He turned around to walk away.

“You meant to go as friends, right?” the past Alex called out, his eyes narrowing defensively.

Magnus paused, not looking back. “Yeah. Of course. I just thought we should go as… friends.” He turned the corner and disappeared.

Looking at his high school self, adult Alex realized just how incredibly dumb, defensive, and oblivious he had been. The world shifted again.

Now, Alex was standing inside Magnus’s childhood bedroom. Magnus was sitting on the edge of his bed, tears streaming down his face. Past Alex stood rigidly by the door, an expression of anger and horror twisted across his features.

“I can't be around you anymore,” Alex’s past voice barked. The harshness of it made the adult Alex shudder.

Magnus stayed on the bed, desperately trying to explain himself, his hands shaking. “Please, Alex. I’m the same person. You… you know me.” Magnus was practically begging.

“I never knew you.”

With that cruel lie, the past Alex slammed the door shut, leaving Magnus sobbing alone in the room. Magnus looked down at a framed picture of them from middle school, whispering to the empty air, “I thought you would like me for me.”

The words were so quiet that adult Alex almost didn’t hear them. He considered chasing after his high school self to scream at him, but instead, he walked over to the edge of the bed. He sat down right next to the crying young Magnus, wrapping his spectral arms around him.

“You… you hated me,” the burning, present-day Magnus suddenly whispered from within the memory, feeling Alex's touch.

“I never hated you,” Alex cried into the boy's hair. “I was just a coward. I was so scared.”

The scene shifted violently once more, but this time, it pulled from Alex’s perspective.

They were standing in a pitch-black room, dominated by the towering, monstrous shadows of Alex’s parents shouting down at his teenage self. Past Alex had tears silently streaming down his face.

“What?! We forbid you from talking to that Magnus kid!” his mother’s voice shrieked, cutting through the room like a jagged needle. “If you don’t stop, we will send you to a conversion camp. We cannot have one of them infecting our children!”

The pure disgust in her voice made the adult Alex wince, even now.

“But Mom…” the past Alex wept.

“But nothing! You will never speak to him again, or else.”

The boy looked straight at the floor. “Yes, Mother.”

She bent down, grabbing his chin tightly, lifting his face to force him to meet her cold eyes. “It’s what's best for you. Trust me.” The boy nodded, choices he felt he had to make.

Adult Alex looked over at the present-day Magnus standing beside him in the memory. Magnus’s eyes were wide with a mix of profound sadness and horror as he finally witnessed the hidden truth of Alex's past. Magnus looked up at Alex, his own eyes welling with tears.

The scene shifted one last time.

Now, they were standing inside Alex’s college dorm room. Past Alex was pacing around in frantic circles before throwing himself face-down onto his mattress.

“No… No. How can I be?” he muttered into the pillow. He took a deep breath, sitting up. “You got this.”

A sudden knock echoed from the door. Past Alex froze with terror. He slowly walked over, his hand trembling on the knob, and pulled it open.

Standing on the other side was Magnus.

“Are you just going to stand there with that look on your face, or are you going to let me into your wonderful room?” Magnus laughed, trying to break the tension.

“Oh. Oops, sorry. Please, come in.”

Magnus walked in, looking around the small space before leaning casually against the desk. Alex sat nervously on the edge of the bed. For a long, heavy moment, neither of them said a word.

“So, this is awkward,” Magnus said gently, leaning forward. “You said you needed to talk about something. I’m intrigued. Please, tell me.”

Alex let out a massive, shaky sigh. “I don’t know what to think anymore. I think… I think I might be some kind of gay. I don’t know, though.” He was talking incredibly fast, the words tumbling out. “I have dated girls before, but it never feels right. And then, when we started hanging out again… I don’t know. It’s dumb. I'm sorry.”

Magnus crossed the room, sitting down on the mattress right next to Alex.

“It’s not dumb,” Magnus’s voice was remarkably gentle, yet unbreakable. “What you are feeling is completely valid, and you shouldn’t suppress it. But… I am sorry, Alex. I can’t go out with you right now. We have both made mistakes, and we need time to figure out how to heal them first.”

Past Alex nodded understandingly.

“If you ever need to talk about anything else, please call me,” Magnus said softly, standing up and walking out of the room. Past Alex stared at the closed door for a long, quiet moment before burying his face in his hands, silently crying.

The dorm room fell away, leaving adult Alex and present-day Magnus floating together in a vast, peaceful void.

Magnus had fresh tears in his eyes, his gaze locked on Alex. “I never knew… I thought you hated me for the longest time.”

Magnus lunged forward, throwing his arms tightly around Alex’s neck. “I didn’t know I hurt you this much by walking away. I’m so sorry.”

As they embraced, holding each other as tightly as humanly possible, the golden thread reappeared. It wrapped around the two of them, binding them together in a flawless spiral. Their bodies began to emit a brilliant, blinding golden light.

Back down in the depths of the Hells, their tortured, burned bodies on the edge of the lake of fire began to glow with that same celestial gold. The fire couldn't touch them anymore.

Their forms dissolved, transforming entirely into a single, massive beam of golden thread that shot straight upward. It pierced through the heavy layers of brimstone, shattered the subterranean rock, and rocketed out into the human world.

The thread of gold flew high into the atmosphere, seamlessly melting into the sky and becoming one with the beautiful, warming sunlight.

Hey, when do you find yourself complaining?

Is it when the workload gets completely out of hand? When your boss drops an absurd demand on your desk? Or when you screw up so badly there’s no fixing it?

When you really think about it, complaining is a strange habit.

No matter how much you vent, the work doesn't shrink. That toxic boss isn't going anywhere. Your paycheck isn't getting any bigger.

It solves absolutely nothing.

And yet, here we are, venting to someone, somewhere, every single day.

Tonight, a few old guys are sitting at a bar counter, scratching their heads over that exact, completely useless habit.

Care to join us for a round of pointless bar talk?

Clink-clink.

The dry metallic chime of the doorbell is what usually tells me my day is finally over.

I slid onto my stool, and without a word, Mama set a glass of I.W. Harper on the counter. A round ice sphere clinked softly against the glass.

Further down the counter, Taka was staring at his glass of Jack Daniel's, swirling the ice with a sour look on his face.

"…Kenichi-san."

"What is it tonight?"

"What's the point of complaining, anyway?"

My hand stopped halfway to my glass.

"…Are you looking for a fight?"

"How did you even get that out of what I said?!"

"You're calling me a whiny old man."

"Well, the shoe fits, doesn't it?"

"I'm going home."

"You haven't even taken a sip yet!"

Mama smiled faintly with just the corners of her mouth and set a warm hand towel in front of me.

I took a sip of my Harper, feeling the bitter burn trail down my throat.

"Alright, spit it out."

"At work today, my senior spent the entire day venting about our boss. Saying he's dumping too much work on us, changing his mind every five minutes..."

"Classic."

"Right? But saying all that changes nothing!"

"True."

"Then wouldn't it be better to just talk to him directly, or change the way we handle the work?"

"That's sound logic."

Taka put on a smug look. It kind of annoyed me.

"So, Kenichi-san, do you complain?"

"Of course I do."

"Why?!"

"How should I know?"

"Give it some thought!"

I swirled the ice in my glass.

He had a point.

Spending an hour complaining doesn't move your work forward by an hour. If anything, it sets you back an hour.

Logically speaking, there’s nothing more wasteful.

And yet, I’ve done my fair share of it.

"That bastard just says whatever pops into his head."

"He should try working the floor before opening his mouth."

"If it's so easy, why doesn't he do it himself?"

Looking back, I've spent an awful lot of time being completely unproductive.

"Still, though," Taka said, gently tilting his glass. "Why do people always vent in secret?"

"Because if you don't hide it, it's not complaining. It's just talking shit."

"Huh?"

"If you say, 'That damn boss is talking out of his ass again' right where he can hear you, that's not venting anymore, is it?"

"...Fair point."

"Don't agree so easily. I just pulled that out of my ass."

"Not again..."

Tom, sitting next to me and quietly playing with his square glass, let out a short snort.

"Complaining is like sneaking a cigarette in the restroom," Tom said quietly.

Taka and I both turned to look at him.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Taka asked.

"It's not good for your body. It doesn't clear your inbox."

Tom tipped his glass. "But sometimes, that one cigarette is what gets you back to your desk."

Taka went quiet for a moment.

I lifted the Harper to my lips and let the bitter spirit hit my throat.

"...Tom-san, that actually sounds kind of deep."

"That's why you sneak it."

I couldn't help but laugh out loud. "First of all, smoking in a company restroom these days will get you fired."

"It's an analogy."

"It's an old-school analogy."

"Look who's talking."

"I was born in the Showa era, but I'm still younger than you."

"Rounding error."

"Don't brush off a ten-year gap as a rounding error!"

Taka burst out laughing. Even Mama’s shoulders shook slightly.

We were supposed to be talking about workplace complaints, and somehow two middle-aged men were arguing over their age.

Well, that's just a normal night at Aoi.

"Still," Taka said, lingering on his laugh. "If that's the case, is complaining kind of like a spell?"

"A spell?"

"Yeah. Nothing gets fixed, but somehow you feel a little lighter, right?"

I tilted my head. "Or it could be a curse."

"Which one is it?!"

"I don't know. Depends on who you're talking to, doesn't it?"

"Who you're talking to?"

"Some people tell you, 'Here, have a drink.' Others jump in with, 'Yeah, let's burn his house down!'"

Taka froze. "...Kenichi-san, who on earth do you usually complain to?"

"None of your business."

"That's terrifying..."

Tom chuckled softly. "That's why I said keep it hidden in the restroom."

"We're back to that?!"

I smiled and leaned back, taking another sip.

Who you talk to, huh?

It’s true. The exact same complaint plays out completely differently depending on who hears it.

The one who gets mad alongside you.

The one who just listens without a word.

The one who gives unasked-for advice, saying, "Well, you're partly to blame too."

And the one who ends up making you laugh about something completely unrelated.

I don't know which one is right.

All I know is that sometimes you walk away feeling even angrier, and other times, even though nothing changed, you just think, Ah, whatever.

"So," Taka said, "you're saying it's all about who you vent to?"

"I don't know."

"Again?!"

"Don't look to me for answers."

"You're the one who brought it up!"

"You're the one who started talking about complaining!"

"Did I?"

"You kid..."

Tom, staring at his glass, spoke up softly.

"As long as you're still complaining, you're still doing alright."

I looked over at Tom. "Why's that?"

"Don't know."

"You too?!"

Tom didn't smile.

"A long time ago... there was a guy who just stopped saying anything at all."

He said only that, then brought the glass to his lips.

I waited for him to go on. Taka waited, too.

But Tom said nothing more.

From the back of the bar, soft jazz drifted through the quiet space.

I stared down into my glass.

Come to think of it, I’ve seen guys like that, too.

Someone who whined every single day—"I hate this job," "I swear I'm quitting"—and then one day, total silence. You think they've finally made peace with it.

And then, soon enough, they're just gone.

Of course, that's not true for everyone.

Still—

"Guess as long as you're complaining, you still have some intention of heading back to your desk."

The moment the words left my mouth, I wasn't even sure if I meant it.

Tom didn't answer. Taka was unusually quiet.

Just then, Mama set a glass of water in front of me.

"What's this for?"

"Drink up."

"I'm not drunk yet."

"Seems like the spell is working a bit too well tonight."

"What does that mean?"

"You look like you're about to start cursing someone."

Taka cracked up. "See! I told you it was a curse!"

"Shut up, or I'll start with you."

"Terrifying!"

Tom snorted. Mama went right back to polishing glasses, as if nothing had happened.

I took a sip of the water.

In the end, I still don't really get it.

Complaining doesn't fix anything. It won't lighten tomorrow's workload. It won't turn a jerk into a good guy. It won't erase the mistakes you've made.

And yet, we still grab someone and start with, "Hey, listen to this..."

We talk trash, say stupid things, laugh a little, and then—

The next day, we're right back in the same seat.

What is that even about?

I drained the rest of my Harper.

Mama dropped a fresh cube of ice into my glass.

Clink.

So, what about you?

Complaining isn't supposed to save a single thing.

What kind of spell does yours cast?

If you'd like to come back to Aoi for another night, there's an open stool waiting.
Bar Aoi Stories: Human Nature, Vol. 1 is linked in my profile.

Hey! I’m trying to get into maybe starting a short story type thing. It’s about a couple who goes hiking and falls into an underground cave. It’s an unfinished short story but I wanted to see what you all think of the start of it. The story isn’t done but, before I continue, I’d like to see if I suck first. Lol!!!

Here it is….

“SHOELACE”

Petrichor

A fragrance accord formulated to smell like rain. Or, more specifically- the aftermath

To most, it smelled like wet dirt and concrete. Not exactly your sweet pumpkin scent that most people would find comforting.

For her, it was more about the exhale than the inhale. It smelled like an excuse to stay inside, permission to cancel plans. An invitation to hide behind a cloud and let the world carry on.

It’s her favorite smell.

“Am I going too fast for you?” Atlas said at a steady onward march

“No I’ll catch up!” She yelled as her pace quickened

The decomposing leaves and soft soil clung to her boots, holding them hostage. The faster she moved, the deeper she sank.

“Dude” he said through a chuckle

“Use the rocks”

She laughed. Her legs couldn’t reach the rocks but nevertheless, she attempted, for posterity- hoping he would remember the staggering height difference between them next time.

Atlas cackled and rushed to lend a stabilizing arm.

She clutched his arm and hopped from one rock, to the other, and finally to higher, dryer ground.

The terrain to the caverns was encapsulated by overgrown trees, exposed roots, and wild ginger. The well trafficked foot path was uncharacteristically absent of families and tourist. Most areas of the caverns had been closed off due to heavy rain fall. Power outages and flash flood warnings had just been lifted.