I See You, And Were Not Alone.

I see you, and we’re not alone.

When people like the things I write, I get very happy and excited, and sometimes I’ll ask them things on their page, almost always anonymously, as my way of showing them that I see them. I feel them. That little moment of connection is brilliant and beautiful as any summer blossom. It says to me “I see you”. And I want someone to know that I see them too, and that in this moment, we’re all not so alone in this world.

Dinosaurs on the Brain

I have dinosaurs on the brain. That’s a bit silly, isn’t it? But I swear: I’ve dinosaurs on the brain. I can feel their breath, their movement when they pass by. I can hear their rumbling and chirping and crying and howling, feel their knightly armor or exotic feathery-tuft. I can sense their passage; swift and quick or slow and graceful.

At the library, on the way home, at the park, at the restaurant: I have dinosaurs on the brain. I can feel things like the unseen breeze. I watch them amble down packed highways, or stride along crowded beaches. Softball games dont phase them, cookouts neither. Graduations are just another boring shindig for the dinosaurs on their way. Hooting movie theaters dont scare them away either, not one bit.

So here I sit on my front porch under the summer night sky, beneath stars the dinosaurs wouldn’t recognize, in a neighborhood crowded with houses and metal stumps we funnily call cars. The dinosaurs don’t mind. Not at all. Their never-ending August goes on, gorgeous and unreachable, primeval paradise in all its savage, strange, stinging reality.

I’ve dinosaurs on the brain. Really, it’s true.

Ask me anything? Does that even work on tumblr? Lol

Boring Saturday evening for me after picking up the house and having some nice dinner. Talk to me, if you’d like! Hopefully to post a story or two later tonight

The Murky Jungle

The air is hot, and putrid. Is this what Hell is like? Where every breath burns in your lungs, sickly sweet with syrupy humidity exhausting each inhalation? Where every movement of your body is like moving through sucking, enveloping water and submerged depths? Heat is unbearable. So fucking hot that sweat pours into my eyes with an unending flood as if I were crying hot tears and contorting the vividly green-black world around me into grotesque smears. Trying to wipe my forehead, or rub at my eyes, or move in the slightest beyond walking forward is a laborious, hellish effort that seems to increase the sweating tenfold. I’ve given up, stumbling through this jungle. It has to be hell. It has to be.

Hell is dim. Sunlight is swallowed up by the enveloping green inferno, murky blackness impaled by threatening glassy sunlight shards that appear to search for me as they wander in isolated breaks between foliage. When did I see the sky last? Is it night now?

When the chopper had crashed it’d seemed like a miracle so many of us had lived. Darren had said it was a blessing of good luck from boot camp, us fresh grunts alive and kicking to go kill Charlie in the jungle. I’d laughed at that. Banged up but alive, standing on the shore that we’d quickly come to the conclusion had to be Vietnam or Laos. No one had died. Radio didn’t work. With dumb, shit-eating grins on our faces and half wobbles in our march, we’d gone off into the jungle, idiots hungry for a fight. Darren and Jack, Conrad and Louis, Davie and Leonard, and lastly myself. Alive. Laughing, cracking jokes as flies ate us alive. No one seemed to understand that the joke was on us. A horrible, bloody, nightmarish fucking joke.

It is human instinct to know when you’re being hunted. It’s been only a geological blink of an eye to realize that up until relatively recently, Humanity was on the menu, hunted in the blackness and in the tall grass, sought after by terrible things of the sky, the sea, and the earth. It was only relatively recently when the night was banished by the flame, by electricity. It was only relatively recently when Man summoned God unto his life, clinging to the hope that distant angelic kingdoms could defend from the unspoken, primeval terrors. Hardwired into our bones and blood, in the neurons of your reptile brain: you know when a predator is near.

The fire had been flickering. It was the second, the third night? They all blend together now.. Sitting by the fire in silence because now it had been too long. Too long since we’d seen anyone, too long since we’d heard a fucking bird so much as rustle to shit.. Too long since anything but the shadows and the heat and the flies that didn’t stop even when you begged the Virgin Mary to so much as ebb the flow for a moment. Nothing. I had sat across from Leonard lost in my own thoughts as my brains boiled and simmered, and like some unreal dream, I’d watched Leonard simply be.. plucked into the air. Lifted. I watched it in slow motion. He was on his log there, until he wasn’t, until he was up in the air. A horrid obsidian barb like some nightmare thorn had speared him through his stomach, his mouth, his eyes. Lifted him up like a child would heft a doll. Deep crimson blood contrasted obsidian black chitin, and without so much as a whisper, Leonard vanished into swallowing foliage.

Conrad pulled screaming and begging and crying into the pitch-dark river water by tentacles thicker than a mans arm. For a single heartbeat I’d seen an ungodly shape there beneath that rippling surface before it settled into perfect, utter, unsettling stillness. Louis came later. Just vanished one night. Gone. Davie and Jack put bullets in their own heads that morning. Darren was snatched up into the canopy by something with shuddering crimson feathers and black curving jaws that blossomed open in horrible petals ringed by teeth.

I don’t know where we are. Silence rests here in such a complete and perfect dominion I can hear my blood pumping. I can hear the thrum of my own heart. There isn’t even wind. I can smell godawful sulfur and putrid, decaying something on the wind on the rare times it blows. Like smelling the circles of Hell themselves. It’s been an unnatural time since I have drank, yet I can still move, even as crippling thirst seems to pry at my insides. Hunger is the same. I feel.. something on my skin.. something growing on the places I can’t reach. When I rest, when so much as cease to walk for a second, even when I fucking stumble: I can feel it. Pulsing. Growing. When I vomit, I vomit black pools that seem impossibly thick, too much, too much..

I stumble. Electricity tingles up my spine. Hair prickles, skin ripples. I feel a terrible cold in my teeth, and a disgusting weightlessness in my stomach. Anticipation that makes my heart pound like some parasite crawling from my chest to my throat. That growth digs into the bones of my back with sudden, crippling pain.

It lets me see it, just this once, a delightfully terrible gift from hunter to hunted. Chitinous plates that flare and flex in the deathly scented breeze. Flexing clawed hands ending in thorny talons that can pry flesh from bone and sanity from mind. Flowering jaws opening in a hundred haunting petals, ringed by midnight-glassy teeth. Eyes burning with green fire seem to lurch up and out of slit-sockets.

Thinking, watching, hungering eyes.

Home is where the heart is

I’d like an island. Hidden away in the South Pacific, right in the middle of where warm western waters mix with the colder currents welling upward from Antarctica.

The southern portions of the island are chillier, it’s mountains shrouded in thick misty fog and bruised-cloudscapes. In spring and summer it rains plenty, drenching downpours that flood down the lowlands in muddy torrents while in autumn and winter it frosts, even snows sometimes, pristinely alasbter.

Northwest, my isolated home is richly alive, from spring to autumn, with well-watered woodland sprouting vibrantly. Enormous trees illuminated by glassy slanted sunlight. Crystalline creeks chatter enthusiastically down rocky paths, branches hanging low over their beautifully still surfaces, dew-coated leaves gently swaying. Craggy inlets hold comfortable, wet ponds in tiny cup valleys as if carved to be quaint.

Northerly are the lowlands and endless grassy plains, scattered with island forests or birds-egg blue lakes. The air is sweet and ripe and welcoming, winds tussling endlessly.

An Unlikely Pair: The Colossus and the Scout

Derros grumbled and Nastrea chuckled at him. They were both sweating in the sweltering, primeval heat. Insects, some as fat as a charcoal-colored chitin finger, orbited about their exposed skin along their heavy scaly armor. Angry sunlight stabbed between colossal tree trunks like glassy shards, wind tussling richly enshrouded trunks covered in mossy plated growths.

“Derros”, said Nastrea with a smirking laugh on her lips, “you seem like a hatchling, you know that? Pale as a weaver-worm freshly spurted from its-”

Derros interrupted. Irritated at the tall black woman, and also trying to hide his own laughter behind an unhappy expression.

“Would you hush up, you talkative squaking menace? I’m not sure what’ll drop me first: the predators, the parasites, the heat, or goddamn you!” Much to the young mans dismay: Nastrea burst further into laughter and clutched her stomach, wheezing in syrupy humid heat.

Derros sighed, wiped his brow. The young man was tall, but not as tall as his companion, and pale skinned. His lengthy curly hair was unruly. His armor was light and simple, fit for a scout to traverse the steaming jungle with ease. Nastrea on the other hand was tall and crowned by midnight dark hair, with vigilantly speckled green eyes. The woman’s armor was heavy, but organic with slick curves and tactical gear: ammunition cartridges, communications maintainers, chemical disperers, even a small active reactor that could be used for a rapid deployment vehicle or long term campsite. The pair trudged through the scraping forest floor.

As they walked, little did they know: they were being hunted. For deep in the shadows of the murky jungle, predators are abound always..