Ask Me Anything? Does That Even Work On Tumblr? Lol

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

Neighbors in the Rain

It is storming today. Bruised thunderclouds rumble, lit internally by crackling lightning; electric spears.

The man sits in his lawn chair on the patio, overlooking the sheer lawn and slick aphsalt street. Prim houses line both sides of this road. Rain pelts the roof, splashing with metallic noise.

A car drives quietly up the street, it’s electric engine softly humming. It’s the neighbors. More rain patters it’s window and windshield.

The man watches. Sips his coffee.

They’re the neighbors. They are short, maybe five feet tall at the absolute most. Their skin is grey like dull clay, and they are eerily gaunt, thin. Lengthy arms and legs, with hands that end in disturbingly long fingers. Four fingers. Enormous, almond shaped eyes stare out from bulbous heads on thin necks.

Thunder grumbles when the last car door is closed. The man watches as his neighbors disappear inside their small, suburban home.

He sips his coffee. The rain patters on.

Beneath

I never thought about what Aunt Lily did in her basement, or why she went down their so often. You’d be surprised what you don’t notice when you’re young and there’s a big sprawling tv screen clear as any window and you’re up in the countryside with ponds to splash in, woods to play in. You don’t notice when the adult your with—especially someone as lovely and kind and fun as Aunt Lily—disappears for several hours at time. You just don’t notice.

Then I got a little older. While now I had a phone, and a game system I could carry in my backpack, I started to get a little.. bored. The pond seemed dinky and tiny. The woods were hot, filled with too many bugs too eager to nip and bite.

And I started to notice Aunt Lily disappearing. I noticed how bare her lovely country home seemed. Few pictures or artworks, just a bit furniture.. It was like Aunt Lily didn’t really do much other than spend time in her basement. And by the time she finished it was only an hour of tv or so with me before she was snoring away.

It’d be always been a kind of unspoken rule between us to not go into the basement. I wasn’t a fussy kid, and didn’t break rules: so why would I just barge down there? Aunt Lily was obviously busy on something, so by right could I go on and barge in, disrupt her? As a kid, the thought seemed impossibly rude, nearly sacrilegious.

Now, things seemed different. I noticed how Aunt Lily had numerous solar panels on the roof and even three churning turbines like odd, white trees on the hillside. I noticed how sometimes the power seemed to fluctuate, oddly. I noticed how far away Lily lived from everything, even in the country; easily a four hour drive, two of which seemed only dirt roads deep in redwood country..

By the time I was eighteen and spending a last summer there before college; I couldn’t contain my curiosity.

What the fuck was Aunt Lily doing down there?

One night she went to bed. Tired as always after our of tv and some supper, she kissed my cheek and ruffled my hair before climbing the steps. As soon as I heard her door close my heart began to race. My skin tingled. Thoughts raced. I waited fifteen, twenty minutes. Just to be sure.

The basement door was colossal, and heavy. Metal like something out of a laboratory or security room, not a dainty little wood entrance. The stairs went down into a hallway, and onward.

To where?

I descended. Heart thrumming with intensity. The hallway seemed to go on for moments, smoothly carved black rock with soft but discernible lights carved at equal distance. I noticed how strangely tall the ceiling was, how wide the walls were from another. Almost like a hospital..?

I waked for five, ten minutes. It seemed longer.

The room was large. Larger than the entire house above it, easily twice or double that, maybe more. Dark electric blue-black light played over the slick, sterile surfaces. Bulbous machines seemed to line the walls in rows, like twisted glassy-synthetic plants from some otherworldly oasis. Scientifc instruments and mechanisms sprawled along the tables and islands, files in open piles.

What the fuck was she doing down here?

I noticed the hatchery.

A singular, bowl-shaped placement the width and breadth of a dinner table covered by a glass top. Within was a bedding of grass or moss, and a thin fog seemed to trail within.

There were eggs. Easily twenty, thirty eggs. Maybe more. The smallest were seemingly normal chicken-sized eggs, ovular and grey. Then.. there were the others. Eggs thin and lengthy, with leathery coatings, which seemed to softly breathe. Round, ball-shaped eggs with dark splotched coverings in bizarre patterns. Skinny almost tubular eggs tinted a rich, almost creepy bluish purple.

A singular camera or watching device dangled from the glass dome, gently swiveling, ever observant.

Was Aunt Lily some kind of farmer..? A really weird, underground chicken breeder?

When my hand touched the cool glass, a digital printout sprang to life under my fingertips, outlining the egg in a soft virtual outline. Temperature readings, internal diagnostics, likelihood of hatching within a certain timeframe..

But what caught my attention were the species names.

Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Triceratops Horridus.

Allosaurus Fragilis.

They were dinosaurs. And in that moment, I understood.

Sunset at Dawn

Time is changing.

Things waver like heat rising off of distant highway asphalt. They shiver and shudder, mirages in the desolate desert, before vanishing.

Cities melt in on themselves, warping beneath Gods’ gaze, disheleved and surreal, glassy dreams crashing without sound. Highways buckle to dust. Swallowed by hungry earth. Monuments vanish with furious whispers as history is rewritten under an unending tide of revision. For heartbeats—for moments—the Earth shudders beneath paradoxical floods, human history and construct devoured by nightmarish blur.

And then: change. Birth. Colossal woodland seems to warble into the timeline melody with vigor. Wet greenery. Enormous trees hundreds of meters tall, centuries old, armor-plated bark crisscrossed by slippery clover, dripping moss. Soil dark as midnight, alive with scent, moving as living things course inside. Forgotten mountains blossom like stony flowers, topped by monumental glaciers or vivid lava flows down shadowed sides; visages turned real from this ethereal fog. Angry rivers pulse through reinvigorated channels; rebirthed by new waters. Valleys crag from split earth, swamps and marshes millions of years dried once again humidly infernal.

Life. Creatures once again. Beings big and small. Armored in scales, adorned in feathers. Titanic structures of black stone thrown up at the sky, thorny, and imposing. Crimson light hums, throbs, glows.

Humanity lies in fragments. Quiet and enthralled. Afraid. Night comes, speaking in a million animal languages. Gifted new breath from fossil tombs. And electric minds dance, electricity and glass, electricity and glass..

I • Am • Risen

The world is on fire.

Black flames rise and scream with horrendous agonized howls, spreading to every corner of a wretched, twisted, blackened globe. The fire is grotesque, like liquid night that scalds, hungrily ablaze.

Buildings fold in on themselves—inverted, bending lines that groan out in terrible pain. Wriggling worming tormented shadows of human beings are glimpsed in those half seconds before thorny tendrils snatch at them, impaling, grasping, pulling.

Midnight fire warbles in non-Euclidian geometries. Resonant symphonies made in un-sound notation ring out like some nightmare cathedral billowing it’s bells, but these notes scream and scream and scream, the very fundamentals of reality aglow in this awful terror.

An unending sky cracks with jagged shards like broken glass, like starving and diseased teeth; shattering downward to devour all of the Earth, all of forever..

Ocean waves curl upward and upward and upward, unnaturally colossal. Crimson waves shake and shudder and squirm with livid suffering from unseen slithering serpents.

All of the Earth is burning in black flame, rising and screaming, crumbling sanities cascading into unending dark pits.

I

AM

RISEN

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.