Matt Maxwell's Blog: Highway 62 on Goodreads, page 4

FULL BLEED: DIVISION RUINE

No, don't worry. That's just the song playing right now. By Carpenter Brut from their third EP, which only feels like it came out a million years ago. Probably more like five or six. Or eight. Tracking time gets harder and harder with so much of it piling up.

So in case you missed the news of yesterday, the pledges for the Fake Believe Kickstarter campaign hit the funding goal in less than twelve hours. At twenty four hours, it was past 150%. Right now it's just under 200%, but I'm asking folks to honor the consumer walk-out today and hold pledges. It's not crucial that the threshold gets passed quickly. Just that it gets passed. I'll be crazy pleased if we can get to 300% over a week. Not sure how likely that is.

It's still weird to participate in what is rightly regarded as a success. That's something that I've struggled with for a long time. Let's just say since I first sent off a manuscript in 1992 to an editor at one of the big SF houses then. Got a nice letter back passing on the book but asking me if I had a fantasy novel ready to shoot to them. I said I didn't. And by the time I did, there didn't seem much point in sending it to them. By lots of measures, that was a success. I got personal attention from an editor and my manuscript back on their dime. I should have been over the moon. I was not. It was a no. It wasn't a no, never and fuck right off. It wasn't being ghosted. I should have seen that for a success. I didn't, because the writers I'd observed (namely my parents) didn't conform to what had happened to me. Yes, that's dumb, but myopia is dumb and I was a naive kid at twenty... five? Something like that.

Here I am now, thirty-plus years later running Kickstarter campaigns. Something I should have done a long time ago, or maybe it had to wait until now. That's an imponderable. Can't calculate all the variables and can't change the past anyways, so not even worth talking about. Point is that I'm doing them now and at the one a year rate, they seem to be succeeding. Honestly, though, I'm still appalled at how much I have to charge for books to make a little more than production cost and pay for postage. Folks are rolling the dice on these things being worth their time and money, and yeah, that's probably something that I shouldn't be overthinking, it's something I can't help but think about.

But, as I've said before, the money really isn't the biggest deal. It's the sense that there's an audience out there for these books and that they're not merely being swallowed up into the churn of titles that come and go and disappear and it continues forever and ever. We can't go on; we must go on. That's not a motivational poster. That's recognition that we're in the existential struggle, the only game in town and you play or leave the game or give up. Those two not necessarily being the same thing, mind you.

I've largely tried to withdraw from the game of publishing because it fucking sucked. I rarely got the sense that my work was appreciated, though I've had editors be impressed at how quick I could turn things around from an outline to a short story. As it turns out, you can do that too fast, so don't appear to be really really super fast. You'll never impress anyone; only make them suspicious. Even when I had a contract with a well-regarded though small indie press, I felt disconnected from the whole thing. Of course, bookeeping wasn't really a thing, so I never had a sense of sales. Any reviews that happened were because I was beating the bushes for them. Blurbs, too. But there wasn't a sense that these books were going anywhere.

At least now I know they're headed to actual people. The money is nice to keep things going (though according to my tax guy, it's not really very much money and it would better to be written down via business expenses which for some reason rankled me.) And, in truth, I'm making more percentage wise off these books than I did for anything in indie publishing. My one good contract paid a bigger chunk up front. But this went away in taxes and eventually in my paying that publisher/editor for his editing work and the cover artist for a cover that would go unusued -- but I felt bad because this was all on me and it felt like a dick move to not pay people for their work even if that left me with pocket lint. I'm accustomed to the feeling. My self-published comics never broke even and every distributor and artist got paid before I realized that there wasn't much coming to me as writer, creator, project editor and publisher. Say la veeeeee. (I know French, please don't correct me, I'm being funny.)

Writing in isolation sucks. Sorry, it does. All that effort and seeing it just get swallowed up? Yeah. I almost gave up. And it's still tough, but this makes it a lot easier. It's a tiny audience, sure. I'm also an outsider writer who bares his teeth when asked what genre I write in. Those teeth are sharp and I'm longer in 'em than I used to be, but they're still teeth. I don't regard it as a friendly question. I regard it as a way to put me in a box. So, yeah, a small audience of people is fine. They're willing to put energy into it. I can keep doing so. I can keep writing the stuff that makes sense to me, doing things the way I think they should be done. Not have a committee of franchise review making sure that I'm keeping the exact tone right and not maintaining shareholder value.

We're very early in the campaign. And it's a success. I'm taking it as a win. It's difficult for me to do so because of my own history and inclinations and everything else. I'm trying to learn. I'm trying to demonstrate some level of neuroplasticity and not just repeating the dumb stuff and dumb assumptions of the past. It's not ever easy.

So, again, thank you for your faith in me and my work. As much as it's weird to call it my work since I try very hard to just be a conduit for something else when it's time to sit down and actually draft. But I'll save that for another time.

I'll be back to boosting the campaign tomorrow. Then I should probably get to page layout of the actual book and acknowledgements and any supplemental material that ends up in it.

Then writing the next one. Actual writing, not plotting or thinking. I try not to think when I'm actually writing. Really gets in the way.

And since I've been reminded that I need to talk about what the book I'm actually selling is about.

Fake Believe is seven short stories from the streets of (mostly) Eighties Los Angeles that is slipping into a much weirder place. They weave together weird fantasy, horror and crime into something that defies easy genre categorization. My writing has been described as "smoky" and "elegaic" and "the good shit" so take from that what you will.

The Kickstarter campaign for Fake Believe can be found here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/highway62/fake-believe

A breakdown of the stories themselves, plus a long preview of the one entitled "Suicide Jewelry" can be found here: https://www.highway62press.com/single-post/full-bleed-let-s-fake-believe

FULL BLEED: SEVEN STORIES TALL

“In a tall building there is so much to do.”

You said it, Robert.

So, Fake Believe is happening. Like that on-again/off-again planet-killing asteroid that may or may not be on a collision course with us this year or next.

The ultimate insane project, a one-author anthology. Hey, at least they’re not all stories off the same prompt, unless that prompt happens to be “interesting stuff that’s happening in a Los Angeles of the eighties which is slowly sliding into a world of strange magic” and I guess that does sound sorta interesting. Seriously, though, one-author anthologies are what self-publishing was made for, like Tyrone Power and the life of a geek in Nightmare Alley. Yes, Ray Bradbury has plenty of collections of his own stories. Bradbury also came up in a world with so many paying writing markets that paid very well compared to the cost of living that it’s nearly unbelievable. And you could actually develop a mainstream career as a writer of short stories.

“So why even do this if you’re going to be so down on yourself?” you might ask.

Because it was the only thing that made any sense. In an insane world, etc etc. All of these stories are just that, stand-alone stories. Sure, they might lead to something else, but there wasn’t enough there there to spin them into novellas or novels.

Can’t recall if I’ve talked about this before, but one of the not-secret inspirations for the Hazeland books themselves came from reading comics that spun into long-form stories. I’m not talking about just Watchmen, for instance, which was always of a defined scope and twelve-issue duration. I’m talking about runs of comics like Uncanny X-Men (94-150 even if that original plan got sidetracked and spun out longer), the Moore (and many artists) run on Swamp Thing, The Invisibles and Doom Patrol (Grant Morrison and many artists), Hellblazer’s original run from say 1-41 or whenever Jamie Delano and Dave McKean brought the story to a close (but it kept going). Yes, even The Sandman by Gaiman and others. All of those ran very long, telling an entire story (but sometimes still going because franchise has its demands). And honestly, I should probably write up something on these series and others which really hit me at the right time, but not right now.

One of the things that happened in those series was that we got single issues that also told a whole story, maybe illuminating a new corner of that fictional world, or exploring a character who could look at things differently, offering a change of pace and tone. That was the idea with the stories that ended up in Fake Believe. Play with some ideas that will get folded into the bigger work but in a more contained fashion.

There was a time that I thought I could place stories in anthologies or fiction magazines. For a time, I did. A short time. Everything after that has been either too long or not genre enough or just what the editor wanted (which is how you really get story sales and don’t think it’s anything different.) I even tried to place a few of these from Fake Believe, but it never happened. Including one which I think is probably the closest I’ve come to writing a successful short story since I stumbled into a little success with them. Oh well. But hearing from the editor that “it just didn’t do it for me” in many more words than that is frustrating. Particularly when you go on to see that editor on video panels talking about how only the best of the best get to be on their pages now, but not explaining what that actually is. Yeah, I’m salty. I was born salty.

Maybe these are really just short short novels. A short story is actually a different beast altogether. And, truthfully, I’ve been better at novels. Or at least I think that’s the case. Im a little too close to tell for sure. I do know that I can’t really make 5k words as an upper limit work. I’m rolling around then. I regard it as a personal failing. And let’s not speak of flash. I have no sense for it whatsoever. I’d be better off writing blank verse.

So these were fun stories to write, mostly coming pretty easily. Some were a little more tortured, mostly in the front half. Im not always great with the setups and a bit/lot unfocused. They all came together in the end. And I won’t lie. Some are much more horror than others. Don’t let that worry you. Unless you’re reading horror to get gnarly. In that case you’ve probably already figured that I’m not your guy.

They are all fantastic, even if they’re not straight fantasy. Particularly if they’re not urban fantasy. Which is weird, because these are all stories based in an urban setting, and they’re fantasy. But urban fantasy has become shorthand for tattooed badass heroes and heroines fighting vampires in gritty settings. Or taking them to bed. Or both. So maybe I’m trying to reclaim the term. Or maybe I don’t care since all those designations are for shelving books more than anything. Call these stories what you want. I don’t know what else to other than fantasy slash horror slash crime.

Like all the other Hazeland books, they’re what I wanted to write. Though there’s been some drift in that over the years. The first one in particular, the Queen of No Tomorrows, I put some things in and handled some characters in a particular way because of the expectations of horror. There’s some I’d rewrite. But I didn’t do it a couple years ago when I had the chance. I didn’t want to turn into George Lucas special-edition-izing that original trilogy. TQONT happened and it’s done. Good or bad, it’s the base. I’ve pushed things in different directions since then and continued to do so. I’m hoping I won’t lose folks along the way, But I’m not spending a lot of time thinking about that.

That’s what the direct appeal via Kickstarter is for. To sidestep all the genre gatekeeping and get right to the audience.

So let’s roll those dice.

One more day.

If you missed it, there's a more thorough breakdown of the stories in Fake Believe right here. It also includes the first third or so of the story "Suicide Jewelry" which should give you a sense of whether or not you want to stick around for more.

See you tomorrow.

FULL BLEED: ‘CAUSE IF WE DON’T, WE BLOW THE WHOLE THING

I should be writing about the upcoming Kickstarter for Fake Believe. I will again this week, I’m sure. And over and over. Spent a bunch of time in my truncated last week doing outreach for the book and campaign, towards a whole bunch of websites and blogs I was assured were totally jazzed about covering new writers and upcoming projects in whatever genre and… I got a solid 5 percent return rate. Neat. For cold calls, I guess that’s not too bad. I’m not Stephen King. I’m not even Laird Barron. So yeah, lots of “who the hell does this guy think he is?” going on, I suppose.

But I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to dig into another topic altogether. I’m here to get with cringe.

You already know what I’m talking about. Or maybe you don’t. Cringe is one of those drifting words, as with any repurposed language that’s still in flux. Particularly if there’s any controversy around its usage. Say, it’s used as cringe (derogatory). Which it started out as, at least in my encountering it. Mostly from younger to old as in “Dad, that’s so cringe.” Perhaps I tried to use current lingo. Perhaps I expressed liking a thing that wasn’t to their taste. Cringe, babies.

Now, there’s been some float. I’ve seen a much wider usage of the word, but oftentimes it’s an expression that a thing simply isn’t cool. Not just out of fashion, but that’s certainly part of the equation, but fundamentally weak or flabby or outsider and not in a good way. Of course, with any word like this, there’s a lot of power put on the speaker to define that which is bad and therefore cringe.

For instance, say, expressions of empathy get labeled as cringe from the right. Because they think themselves ascendant and tough and strong. Anything not tough and strong gets the label. Or not performatively tough and strong. Not walking the walk hup hup hup.

Then again, the figureheads on the right often get slapped with cringe as they wander around glassy-eyed and shoving and barking orders. And yeah, I think the behavior is reprehensible, betraying a weakness that they’d literally do anything to hide, whether that’s putting obnoxious bumper stickers on giant trucks or tactical wear or open carrying more guns than an FPS character or unthinking loyalty to the dudes who promise that Anti-Life will justify their actions.

I’d rather drill down a little on cringe as weakness, as being out of touch, uncool. This applies to say liking the Marvel movies, or not liking them. Language is fun! It’s relational. But cringe even gets tossed around in the expression of opinion directly, not couching things in glibness and sarcasm and other linguistic armors. I’m as guilty as anyone of this. I like to think that I try to keep it in check, but just as often as not, I don’t. Even after having done online communication as long as I have, which is a, well, a long long time. Though when it comes to the stuff that I stand in opposition to, we’ll, they’re gonna get the arsenal.

I guess what I’m bristling at is how cringe has become a shorthand for an attack on, lacking a better word, earnestness. Which is what I was trying to get at with the directness phrase above. An attack on being human instead of carefully constructed and bulletproof. Maybe I’m looking at more of a continuum that runs from cool to cringe. Cool is tough and hard and can’t be stopped. Cringe is human and fallible.

Let’s maybe look at some examples. Say Roy Baty from The film version of Blade Runner. We start out with him and he’s a brooding, glowering menace. He’s cool and hard and a badass replicant who can perform superhuman feats. We get to the end of the film and he’s not only embracing his own mortality (which he’s spent the film trying to sidestep) but revealing his humanity in that brilliant bit of improvised dialogue on the rainy rooftop. Cool to cringe. He’s cast away all that hardness and left himself open, ultimately dying to/for it.

And let’s take the example of Rust Cohle from True Detective. Cool as fuck. Handsome and detached, spouting profundities and beating information from low-lifes. He sees the big picture in a way that mere humans don’t ever allow themselves to. But all that’s an act. Doesn’t take long for that to fall away. Sure, he’s tough as hell as a cop, but ask him to come to a dinner party and he has to show up three sheets to the wind with sad-sack flowers in hand just to get through a night with his partner’s family. There’s the real Rust. There’s the beating heart.

There’s the cringe. There’s something real.

Just like every posting warrior (including me) wants to come off as Rust Cohle or John Shaft or any of a dozen Toshiro Mifune roles, impervious. And the fact is we all got beating hearts down there. This isn’t me saying that we should listen to what nazis and homophobes and transphobes have to say. Fuck that. But maybe we’d all do better to embrace some cringe. Or maybe the advice is just for me.

And there’s lots of folks out there walking that walk, not feeling like they’re operating a cool machine. Fact is, though, that it takes some bravery to walk out onto the internet like that, much less in real life. Of course, this kind of humanity isn’t me saying that you should turn the other cheek and put up with bullshit and abuse. Particularly on the net. Block, or report and block or detach quote then block. You shouldn’t have to put up with trash, or being treated as less than anyone else because of who you are. Yeah, I’m aware there’s lots of people who go out of their way to do just that. Do what you can.

But do think about the people who go hardest to project a position of strength and use that as a way to hold others down. Think about how fascism and authoritarianism and a bunch of other isms do whatever hey can to appear as not cringe. To appear as being monumental and towering and inevitable. Fascism is anti-cringe because it doesn’t allow difference, anything that steps out of the imposed forms, out of its own desired outcomes.

And once again, we return to the paradox of cringe. To adopt fascism or dogeism or whatever is cringey. Reprehensible. Anti-life. Whatever you want to call it. Which is why I might go out on a limb some and suggest that cringe is at the heart of things.

To call things cringe means that they are a failure. I’d flip that and suggest that cringe is about being human. Robots can’t be cringe (thought that white rubber abomination that got announced today sure is) because they can’t make mistakes. Metaphorically speaking that is. Reality is a whole different matter, particularly when it’s constructed by race-to-the-bottom venture capital guys who want to get past that funding round and then out.

Maybe I’m especially sensitive to this because I’ve already lived through this whole fight a generation plus ago. Back in the 90s, there was a big ironic detachment in the pursuit of cool thing, and speaking directly was frowned if not spit upon. Hell, there were whole shows about it. Maybe there still are, I dunno. But cool as armor never really went away. Maybe it won’t ever.

Which is why you gotta be on guard for it.

I know. Strong prescription, giving up cool. I doubt I’m up to it.

Kidding. I’m immensely uncool. Ask anyone.

More this week as I gear up for only the second Kickstarter I’ve ever run. And in the face of a “don’t buy anything day” protest this Friday. Not looking like a great start.

FULL BLEED: LET'S FAKE BELIEVE

So as you all know, I'm working on a Kickstarter campaign for the next Hazeland book, a collection of stories under the name Fake Believe. They're all standalone, though they fit into the greater network of the Hazeland books. In that, Fake Believe makes a good jumping-on point. If you like what you read here, then you can always go pick up the first two books (and indeed, there's deals to do so in the pledges for the upcoming Kickstarter campaign, along with some other fun tiers.)

Here's that link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/highway62/fake-believe. It goes live 3/27 but there's a quick preview and a sign-up link to be notified when the campaign goes live.

Here's a quick breakdown/preview of the stories themselves. Stick around for a lengthy preview of one of the stories themselves, "Suicide Jewelry" for those of you following along at home.

A Crate of Bottle-Fed GhostsA veteran returns to his childhood neighborhood finding it gone but for one house and the ghosts within it need his help.

Cut/Paste

A private detective digs at the secret behind gentrification in downtown and the fabricated and inhuman residents moving in.

Third Saturdays

A girl at a mysterious block party confronts her past and future and a place that might not even exist.

In What Furnace

A ragtag crew of filmmakers chases down the Bigfoot of the Southland and instead finds something terrible that wants to be set free.

Suicide Jewelry

An industrial/goth singer flees to LA and finds that someone just like her already blazed that trail and haunts her assumed identity.

Club Closed: Private Party

Two luckless strongarm men try to rob the wrong bar on the wrong night and find a witch in need of entertainment.

The Cinderhaus

A book forger attends an auction where her career is one of the featured items.

Okay, there's the basics. Here's the meaty preview. This is from "Suicide Jewelry" which is one of my favorite stories in the book. Yeah, it's hard to choose. All of them do different things that I like. In particular, "Club Closed: Private Party" which recasts one of my favorite characters in a new light.

---

SUICIDE JEWELRY

The first thing Lucy did when she got to Los Angeles was to fix her lipstick. She lay down on the sun-warm sidewalk and got in close to the hubcap of the parked Porsche to check her face in the distorted reflection. The black and severe hair still caught her by surprise. Her lipstick matched at least. She worked it a moment, filling out the curve in the pitted chrome. People flowed around her without even a perceptible change in pace as easily as a river around rock.

Most of them.

“Do you mind?” growled a pinched biddy dressed for Sunday.

Maybe it even was. Lucy wasn’t sure.

“Not at all,” she replied without taking her eyes off the warped reflection. She closed her lipstick and pocketed it.

Sunday schoolmarm harrumphed a reply that sounded more like dry phlegm and trotted off. Lucy stuck out her tongue to the reflection, almost touching the hubcap with the tip. Then she coughed at the smell of the city and gutter damp with something that couldn’t have been rain this time of year. She pushed up off the sidewalk and dusted her palms clean, clutched close by the reckoning that she didn’t know anyone over here. There had been rumors that folks came to LA, sure. There was always talk about it. Rochelle and her boyfriend swore they’d make it someday. Not so much as a postcard or word up the grapevine about her. Or anyone else who’d left home to come here. In more than a year.

But at least they’d done more than talk about going and actually did it. More juice in that than a hundred brave words over beers and Stoli. They’d done it.

Just like Lucy Emerson AKA Lorissa Licht had. Too many nights in shitty bars screaming her lungs out backed up by a band that was barely more enthusiastic than the drunks and deadites in the crowd. All the lights and fog in the world couldn’t make people care, so she saved on stage effects by using those caged work lights, scattering them so they burned there like fallen and guttering comets. She held one in her off hand to light her face from below and turn her mouth not into an instrument but an opening to a smoking Gehenna.

It had almost worked, too. She’d built a small following that would crowd the stage no matter what dingy dive she played in and she’d played them all, gotten stiffed in them all, barely clawed past the hollow gaze of the folks who’d given up life to drink there.

But she wasn’t going to get any further than that unless she struck out for bigger places. Or at least other territories with unknown pleasures.

Trouble with the unknown was being unsure where to start. The crowd continued past her and she took their measure, eyeing the street fashions and how clothes hung differently, folks clutching cups of fast food restaurants she mostly recognized, but didn’t quite remember. Unfamiliar cars sputtered and groaned past her on Broadway, all of them spitting out smog and she wondered how anyone could actually live like this.

She was going to have to learn how to. It almost was home but not, the differences catching her like splinters in her fingertips. She looked at the reflection of her now-raven hair in a square-cut bob, but for a fingers-width that fell past her shoulders out front. She looked at it and was caught outside of her own expectation.

“Right. This is who I am,” she said to the reflection. Then she fixed on the silhouetted figure who hovered off to her left. He’d been standing and watching as long as she had herself. Only his eye was hungrier, more approving but somehow even less believing.

She’d figured there were going to be weirdos but had hoped she’d have gotten more than five minutes before she’d had to deal with one. Without thought, she squared her shoulders under the surplus trench coat she’d dyed bruise purple. The words kein zuhause außer hier were painted out in tight blocks of white strokes. She tightened her fist over a set of keys that she’d never use again.

“Look,” Lucy said. She turned in place and faced the guy “Go find someone else to creep on!”

He didn’t take the step back like she’d wanted. He was motionless but for his eyes. They went wide and green like he’d seen Marilyn Monroe walking the streets in a nighty. Shock overpowered everything else, but she saw a flash of an abstract sort of wanting something beneath it. Maybe not for her exactly, but for a lost something. Brief and terrible recognition took over after, coming through like makeup now wiped off.

“Oh my god.” Baby mice weren’t as quiet.

“What?” She tightened her fist and shook it a little.

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re a dead ringer for Lux Nova, the singer?” He said the name like it was one Lucy should have known. But there were lots of singers out there. That’s what kept things going – an endless supply of girls willing to do whatever to get ahead.

“I’d be lying if I said ‘yes.’” She shifted her weight but did not release the keys from her right hand. “Who is Lux Nova?”

“Was,” he said.

Lucy imagined that he was dressed fashionably, leather suit jacket but no fringe or beadwork, turtleneck sweater that was too tight and pants that were the same. She thought she saw a scar or welt atop the collar on his left side. It looked itchy, like something picked at and never let to heal.

“She was almost a big thing.”

“That’s too bad. She quit singing?” Lucy tried not to think too deeply about quitting herself.

“She, ah, quit everything.” His expression went from reckoning to a over-cooked dread, graying his complexion.

“You talk like you knew her.”

“I thought I did,” he said. “Toby.” He extended his hand. “Toby Farmer.”

Lucy looked at the hand as if it were holding a still-gasping goldfish in it.

“I’m very sorry I stared at you. That was rude.” He pulled his hand back, dead slow. “I was just caught off-guard.”

Lucy let go of the keys and stuck her hand out where his had been. “Lucy Emerson. I just got into town and am wiped out. I didn’t mean to snap.”

“You meant to, but it’s okay. I deserved it.” He took her hand and his was cool and dry. “It’s good to meet you.”

“Same.” She withdrew and wondered what his story was. He vibed producer or agent, but not one of the successful ones. One of the hungry ones who breathed in air and breathed out promises. But Lucy could breathe promises too. And it might be good to have a friend in a strange town. At least for a little while. “Look, you can make it up to me if you want. Buy me a drink?”

Roaring and backfiring, a couple of bikes rolled down the boulevard, bearded and grimy leather-clad riders whooping wildly. Toby didn’t even flinch at it.

“Yeah, sure. The Criss-Cross is right across the intersection there.” He pointed past a tall, adobe-colored brick building older than Lucy’s grandparents, to a corner lot across Second Street and a once-tony bar that had seen better days.

Lucy though about day drinking and must have made a face unconsciously. She mopped up her expression.

He shrugged, all wobbly. “I mean, it’s a little early, but yeah. Yeah.”

“Delightful.” She patted the fender of the Porsche and said “Thanks for being my mirror,” then followed Toby over to the blinking red neon of the Criss-Cross Club.

Lux Nova was a singer who’d made the rounds, going through backing bands like Janis Joplin had gone through whiskey bottles, draining them dry and tossing the empties into a pile that littered the better part of Sunset Boulevard. That was, if you took Toby’s recounting at face value. Lucy didn’t have a good reason not to. When he talked about Nova, he wasn’t talking about an act that he’d lost by getting signed to a better, more-connected agent. He’d lost a limb, just managed to hide that fact until he got a couple old-fashioned in him. And the bartender had poured like he was mad at the boss.

Nova finally made a connection with a band and reworked material, somewhere between punk anthems spat in the face of lined cops and liturgical material meant to harrow and kiss damnation. She would transfix. She would shatter. And if she felt it that night, she’d rebuild all that was broken. But it wasn’t a thing that could be put on vinyl or tape. It was all magic that happened live. Nova burned like her name and you can’t hold onto something burning for long, Toby joked.

Then he breathed in through broken ribs like he was about to spit blood. In the red cast of the little bar, his tears were sanguine. Lucy pulled out a ragged and lace-trimmed handkerchief, usually a stage prop, and wiped his face with it. If he knew he was crying, he wouldn’t admit it.

“She was really something, huh?”

“More like everything. I just wish… I didn’t know how troubled she was. Or I didn’t want to admit it.”

“So, what, she left? She signed to Harper or maybe Death?”

Toby blinked. “What?”

“You know, another label. I figured…”

“Oh no. Lux Nova killed herself.”

“Holy shit.”

“Sorry. She OD’d,” he added as an afterthought or correction, dabbing over the misstatement. “I knew she used even after I gave it up. I just didn’t know how bad it was. Heroin.”

“Sure,” Lucy lied. “I just thought coke was what the cool kids were doing.”

Toby shook his head without laughing. “Lux didn’t do anything because it was cool. She had a mission. Think she was saving souls one night at a time. Just she needed to work on hers and never found the time or inclination.”

Lucy put her hand atop his, resting on his thigh. “Hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I figured you were maybe her agent or something. Nothing more than professional.”

He swirled the last of the bourbon-washed ice in the glass where it looked like molten glass cooling. Then he drained the drink and chewed the ice thoughtfully.

“I didn’t either. Not until she was gone.” He flexed his fingers under hers.

“Did it happen long ago?”

He stiffened like there was something bitter in the ice. “A couple years. There are people who still scrawl her name on lampposts and call in for ‘Never Forget’ on KXLU or even KROQ. We got that single out the week before she threw it all away.” His hand tensed into a fist and he shot forward, leaning on the bar hard. “Hey, can we get another round here?”

The bartender watched him with his good eye and took a moment to get moving.

“Please,” Toby added. “Just, please.”

The bartender nodded and grabbed the Wild Turkey bottle like he was going to perform some violence with it.

“I better not,” Lucy said.

“Then watch me drink. Or just talk to me while I do.”

“You know I don’t just go into bars with dudes, right?”

“Don’t worry. Neither do I.”

The fresh drinks arrived, looking more like grenadine in the jukebox light.

“So,” Toby asked after a hefty belt. “What do you do, anyways?”

She shrugged and shrank in place. “Do? I just got here. I don’t have a job.”

“Yeah, but you planned to have one, right?” His skin glowed, but at least he wasn’t weeping. “Movies? TV? Dancer?”

Lucy tried not to be hurt by him not asking whether she wanted to sing or not, especially after talking about Lux Nova for the last hour and she’d been thinking about how Lux was doing exactly what Lucy had been trying to. Like there was a space already cut out for her, a road already paved and waiting, just needing someone to walk it.

“I’m a singer,” she said, after taking a hit from the drink. It went down hot.

“You’re a what?” Toby asked, leaning in like the bar noise was too much for her to get over.

“A singer,” she said. Louder this time.

“What?” he all but yelled.

“A SINGERRRRR!” Lucy projected the shout, filling her chest with it, not for tone-shaping, but for raw output.

He laughed and then she did, both slipping out of themselves for a moment. She was just someone new in town and he was just a guy who’d remembered to be nice to her. After being weird to her, but at least he’d tried.

“Yeah, I figured you were. Just wanted to hear you project.” He took his drink to half with a slug. “What sort of stuff you sing? You don’t look ratty enough to do punk. Not angular enough for new wave.”

“Maybe I’m just dressed to be out and not for the goddamn stage.”

“You wanna be famous, you know you gotta be ready to do the stage face all the time. You gotta put it on and keep it on. So what do you wanna do?”

“Scary shit.” Lucy rolled the drink between her two open palms, welling the condensation at its base. “I wanna be a vampire.”

She snatched up the drink and took it down then wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist. “I want to shout the truth in someone’s face and scare them to death with it.”

“Tall order.”

“I’ve gotten the regulars at the Nile Club to give up seats they’ve held since the bar opened. I figure that’s a start.”

“Maybe it is at that.” He studied his drink but did not finish it.

***

Toby popped the cassette into the deck at the back of the rehearsal space. The walls were ratty off-white, probably had never been clean, scuffs and marks worn into the paint by frustrated or bored or triumphant musicians over the space’s history.

“You own this place or what?” Lucy asked, setting her bag down. It lay on the industrial carpet like something coughed up by the sea.

“My friends Gary and Ty use this for their band. And I know the guy who runs the place.”

“They’re not gonna mind?” Lucy asked. “I don’t want ‘em just bursting in in the middle of this.”

“I’m not asking you to take off your clothes, Lucy. I just want to hear you sing.”

Something turned around inside her, whispering that this was a mistake and she knew it was. The same thing that had talked her out of shows in the past or even coming out of that little room in the big house she’d rented. The little voice that said no.

“You wish.”

“Figure of speech.” The hatch on the tape machine closed with a plastic CLACK. “I’m not going to mess with the settings or anything. Just go over and let it rip.” He pointed at the stand-up microphone.

Lucy slid the mic down to her level and stood in front of it and froze. She tried to think about what to sing that would make an impression that she could even remember after a couple drinks on an empty stomach. Her skin crawled with worry. She tried to climb over the no in her mind.

“We’ve got all afternoon.” He was joking and not.

She breathed loud enough that it was probably going right to tape, then she let her breaths get deeper, like she was falling not into sleep, but nightmare. Each one ended a little more ragged, with a twitching at the end. Then she drew in a final breath and held it.

That thing you gave me

Won’t ever forget

That thing, going to the grave

I’ll always regret

I’ll always regret

I’ll always regret

Then her voice rose to a scream, one unfamiliar even to herself and she spat the rest of the lines to her own song “Black Gifts” but like she’d never sung it before. She filled it with fear. Here she’d just come to this stupid city with no friends and no plan, desperate to go anywhere other than where she’d been, to leave the familiar behind. She breathed and shouted her song into something new, soaring then growling then begging then holding a blade that could cut through anything and that blade was her voice.

Lucy finished the song and stood there panting for breath even as the back of her throat was bubbling hot tar. She’d given something that she didn’t even know she had.

She looked up over at him and he stared back at her, eyes wide as if he’d been walking through a glittering trainwreck, energy and power and shattering devastation unmaking a thing and leaving beautiful debris in its wake.

“I might’ve fucked up the words some,” she said with a soft rasp. “I just lost myself there.”

“I’d say more like you found yourself.” He stabbed the controls with an extended finger. “Holy shit. Where’d you say you were from?”

“I didn’t.” And she didn’t have an easy way to say it, either, so she left it dead.

“Well, you’re here. And if you can sing like that four nights a week, maybe we can get that somewhere.”

“LA is just fine for a start.”

“LA is not going to be ready for what hit it.” He looked at her, flensing past the skin and going deeper.

“You got a stage name?”

“I’d gone under Lorissa Licht. Kinda goth-y.” She cleared her throat and tried to hum some of the numbness out.

“And?” The expression on his face bled to bored.

She tried to hide behind the mic stand. “Well, that was it. I was worried about the material more than the whole persona.”

“Hmm.” He hit the eject on the tape and maybe it was all over just like that.

“You’re acting like you’ve got a better idea.”

“Maybe I do.” The cassette went into a case and then into a jacket pocket as easily as a lost business card.

“Well, what kind of idea?”

“You know why people dress up and put on makeup and do their hair weird, right? All that punk stuff?” He crossed his arms before him.

“To stand out. To be individual.”

His head shook slowly. “That’s not enough. It’s to make an image. To pretend to be someone else, something else, way bigger than themselves. Then the audience tacks the legend onto that. Ain’t nobody wants to build a myth on just a regular Joe or Jane. They want something bigger. They crave it. They think they can control it, not knowing they themselves made it.”

“Okay, mister psychology. So I work on an image.” She waved her hand from her hair down. “I’m more than halfway there. And I’m not even in makeup.”

“Right. But who are you going to make yourself up to be?”

“I dunno. I’ll figure something out.”

“How about we make you up so that nobody could look away.” He stepped in closer, quicker than she could react. “Then people drop their defenses. They let you in. And then you can melt them with that goddamn voice of yours.” His eyes rested on her throat.

“Okay, but who would that be?”

“This might sound weird, but how about a revival act?”

She shook her head, not getting it yet.

***

Lucy had thought that he’d just been shining her on, that whole thing about Lux Nova and her being dead ringers. But once back at his place in the lower reaches of the Hollywood hills, looking through the collection of flyers and photos and posters he’d kept from managing Lux, the resemblance was more than casual. It clawed its way over to uncanny. Every page turned chiseled out another little detail that Lucy couldn’t shake.

Lux Nova could live again. Why not? What hell could hold her? What heaven would keep her prisoner and not let the destroying angel fly free? The legend wrote itself and ran the headlines.

Lucy traced Lux’s profile in an 8 by 10 glossy and a chill crawled down her spine on a thousand tiny little legs, each of them topped by a little prickling hook that caught and dug. She wanted to throw the book in the fireplace. She wanted to keep looking. Another page turned and there Lux was, only half-draped in flowing white cloth, one breast exposed as she grasped a spear and brandished it across her frame. It was more than the face. Lucy recognized the body and all its markers, but for a weird scar a few inches below her own navel.

She had a cluster of moles across the small of her back that she was acutely conscious of and thankful that no pictures seem to have captured Lux from that angle.

Toby came in with two glasses of wine to join the bagged hamburgers that sat on the low table before her.

“Red for beef, right? I’m sure the burgers are mostly beef.”

“I never drink… wine,” She said with an accent then a giggle, mostly to distract herself from the weird sensation of seeing pictures that could have been her being the performer she could have been if only she was brave enough. The space between her and Lux disappeared for a moment and Lucy felt prickly dry ice fog and the shouts of fans who demanded damnation and release.

She caught herself with a start and grabbed the glass, taking a big enough drink to make her gasp.

“Hey, you okay?” Toby asked.

“Yeah, sorry.” She coughed onto the back of her hand then rubbed it against her t-shirt. “I’m just really tired. Been a longer day than I thought.”

He sat on the couch next to her and it creaked audibly. “Estate sale find. I just love old stuff, odd stuff. Got a history.”

“Might even be haunted?” She took a second drink, this one more measured.

“No such thing as ghosts. Not even in LA. But hey, if you can convince someone to pay more because something’s haunted? That’s all right by me. Elvis acts do big money. People want to see the same thing remade over and over.”

She stared at the page open before her and ate the image up, eyes blue and wide. “You really think that I can do this? I mean, the voice stuff, I can sing like that 45 you played.” She tapped the picture with Lux and the spear, Lux the Impaler, and sighed. “I don’t know about this.”

He slipped a laugh. “You’re kidding me, right? It’s like I’m sitting right next to her again, looking at you.”

Lucy felt herself freeze, despite the bolts of wine. “You and she weren’t…”

Toby caught himself between breaths. “Not like you think.” He took a very focused sip of wine and tilted the glass back, legs sketched out in the kitchenette fluorescents. “Loving her was like loving a tornado. Good way to get ground into the dirt.”

“But you did anyways, right?”

“Yeah. I did.” He sought out her eyes. “This fucks things up, huh?”

“What things? I’m not planning on sleeping with you. You’re cute, but don’t get ahead of yourself.”

“Even wanting to be around me, much less letting me manage you.” He set the glass down roughly but didn’t spill it.

“No, that’s fine, Toby. I’m just trying to get a handle on this.” She opened the bag and pulled out the first of the foil-wrapped hamburgers, still warm but cooling quickly. She held it out, waiting for him to reach out. “But you bought drinks and this fancy dinner and you at least act well-connected enough to fool me.”

“I appreciate your confidence.” He took the food from her and she reached back into the bag immediately after.

She waved around with her free hand. “I don’t know this whole world,” she said as she pulled out her dinner and tore into the foil. Something told her that she shouldn’t have said it so she focused on the fast food.

“What?”

She took a bite, unable to wait any longer, not remembering how long ago her last meal had been. “LA. The music scene.” The bite went down all corners somehow.

His expression softened some. “Okay. Hey, it’s okay to be worried about this. It’s a world of difference going from… where did you say you came from?”

“Lawrence, Kansas.” It was a lie but only she knew that.

“Holy cow. Yeah. That’s nowhere.”

“Hey. There’s a college there. It’s not all wheat farms.”

“Sure.”

“There’s soybeans too. And some corn, despite what Iowa would tell you.” She took another quick gulp of wine. She tried to keep the lies neatly stacked.

“Okay, so it’s a place.” He leaned in some. “But it’s not LA, is it?”

“Nope. After being here a bit, I can say that it’s like no place I’ve ever been. And, I’m sorry if I sound like an ungrateful asshole. This all just happened kinda fast. I mean, I was on the Greyhound this morning, stopping in Vegas I think. I’m barely caught up on that.” She stretched the tension out of her back, torqued in ways that she didn’t know had been possible.

He watched the quick contortions, maybe calculating the curve of skin and flesh beneath the ragged black and denim.

“I’m not ready to deal with being Lux Nova and my damage and maybe making your dream come true.”

“Look, let’s just do no pressure, okay? Sleep on it and we figure stuff out.” He finally took a bite into the drippy cheese and burger.

Lucy chewed the bite in her mouth, finally tasting it. She nodded and swallowed. “You know a place where I can stay?”

“Other than here.”

She nodded. “No pressure. You just said it yourself.”

“You don’t believe I’m a perfect gentleman?”

“There aren’t any,” she said grimly. “Not where I came from and I’m sure as hell not here.”

He leaned back on the couch and it creaked like a lab door from a horror movie. “Good. You’re getting smart. Even if you walked right into a bar with a guy you didn’t know today.”

“I didn’t drink that much.”

“And you ended up in his apartment.”

The food boiled in her stomach. He was right. And she’d just fallen right for it. “Not for the night. Besides, he’s kinda cute. Even if he’s a little broken up over falling in love with a genuine star. Just what I saw in the photos gave me chills.”

“You got no idea. And I’ll tell you a little more. After I call my sister make sure you can crash at her pad.” He watched for a response. She saw that out in the open, that he’d let her right off the hook she’d climbed onto.

“That’d be very kind.”

“You say that before seeing the place. It’s downtown. I mean, worse than you’ve seen already. But she’s cool.”

“I don’t know how to repay you for any of this.”

“I’ll think of something.” Then he smiled at her.

“Don’t do that,” she said. “I was almost believing you were a nice guy, then you pull this.”

“Okay, twenty percent.” His smile went billboard bright. It was a good one, charming and disarming enough that Lucy wondered if she was wrong or right about him or even wanted to be. The answer was definitely yes.

“Standard terms?”

“Standard as it comes.” He stood up, leaving the half-eaten burger on the table, far away from any of the precious memorabilia and walked over to the phone hanging on the wall with its weirdly coiled cable.

---

Sure there's more. Lots more. But I already give away enough fiction for free here.

I'll be doing another couple posts on this, but I wanted to get a quick preview and landing page up to direct folks to. Don't worry, I'm not done talking about it. Heck, I'll probably talk about it until I'm sick of it, but hopefully not you.

FULL BLEED: THE SOUNDS OF LAUGHTER

Been a little while, yeah. I stepped away from things for a little bit. Mostly after the Inauguration, for pretty obvious reasons. The screaming got bad. Now at least people seem to be screaming at their senators instead of simply at anyone in range. That’s a little better. Still only borderline tolerable.

There’s a few repeated screams I’ve been seeing from the first time around this guy’s presidency. There was, of course, the whole “these kinds of administrations are so good for punk rock – Look at Reagan.”

Yeah. That was a time period that was completely different and other from what we’re living today. Hell, back then people actually talked to one another in public spaces. They had to, because there weren’t many other options. The Internet (and Covid and the destruction of public life, most notably cities, the withering of various subcultures and scenes, loss of spaces beyond home and school for kids to be in) did a number on all of these things. You simply can’t dump phenomena from one time into another and expect them to do anything other than die from transplant shock.

So we can write that little urgent call off. Particularly since the last time I saw it, it was coming out of the mouth of one Amanda Palmer, most known for getting folks to work for her for free (then; now she’s better known for, ah, yeah I won’t go into it.) I mean, it’s a nice thought, I guess. It’s nice to think that there’s going to be a groundswell of popular rebellion and…

Nevermind that punk even in 1984 and by 1988 was still a firmly subcultural affair. Yes, it broke through in the mainstream in caricature (but not nearly to the extent that beatniks did in the fifties or the hippies did into the seventies). Musically, punk had moved on into what we call postpunk now, beyond splintering into other less recognizable forms. Okay, the hardcore dudes who were busily making mosh pits into hellholes called themselves punks. Sure there were punk bands still, and there was that whole wave past Green Day where arguably punk finally hit the mainstream pretty hard (sure, X did pretty well with their cover of “Wild Thing” but they’d stopped being a pure punk band if they ever really were in the first place.)

What I’m saying is all that backwards looking was cart before the horse. Punk had been happening the whole time through the second half of the seventies. Punk didn’t need Reagan, though he was an awful convenient target of the howl from the underground.

So, yeah. Sometimes administrations are just bad news even if you think they inspire great art. Or even art you like. The last time the current president was in office, that was true. It’s gonna be true this time around.

I’ve also seen “You have to keep creating! These times really need it!” Which draws a heavy sigh from me. That sounds like a death march being issued from someone who just wants a free stream of artistic work to consume on their favorite social media platforms. It’s the equivalent of “Batman and Robin will never die!” as written by Grant Morrison in one of his early Batman run issues. That’s not a cry of triumph. That’s a recognition of horror, that the franchise machine will keep squeezing them forever and ever.

Look, if you feel the drive to keep creating, keep making work and putting it out there, then do it. I’ve long ago moved past the whole identity-creation by way of hopefully-monetized hobbies thing. If you want to write, write. And so forth. That may be what you need to do. And you may need to show it in public or just lock it in a desk drawer after its done. I can’t tell you what you need to do.

I can say that I see an awful lot of people who are performatively demanding this stream of artwork continue and that it feeds souls etc. It also feeds content scrapers. It also feeds the dudes who steal designs for t-shirts and get those designs out an hour after seeing it on the internet. It feeds the dudes who talk about art in whatever field and genre and gets them hits and Twitch follows and etc. It feeds the social media companies who always need a constant flood of material to keep subscribers engaged. It feeds the telecom companies who are collecting monthly for all those internet feeds.

Feeds a lot of people who aren’t artists. Maybe it gets artists exposure. Maybe. I know that 95% of the people who put money down on the All Waters Are Graves funding campaign last year did so because of posts that I put up on Bluesky. And I’ll be doing the same for a book called Fake Believe in maybe a month or two. I’m just as dependent on that kind of word of mouth as any writer now. Also, I don’t know which palms to grease to get books read. And if you think you don’t need to do that at my level (ie, indie and no indie publisher behind me) then you’re kidding yourself. Just go check into those influencers who are happy to maybe read your book if you buy some ad time. I know. This is America, what did I expect?

Back to the matter at hand. Another cry I heard more than a little of was “You need to get back to your blogs! Get off these platforms run by insane billionaires!” Which I support in theory. We need alternatives to Facebook etc. Thing is, blogs, like punk rock and Reagan, were of a time. Yes, punk rock still exists. So do Reaganites, sigh. And even blogs do. But they’re no longer seen as the place to go to. Instead they’re something that’s occasionally linked back to on Twitter or Bluesky or Tiktok or whatever. Sometimes that content ends up on a big platform. And it's digested, snacklike then the scrolling feed continues. It’s forgotten in not so long a time. Poof. That platform needs more subscriber chow in the meantime, and the subscribers are happy to contribute it. I mean, you remember that “Football in the future, played across the whole of America?” story that went around a few years ago? Everyone was talking about it. And it was an interesting bit of fiction combined with a great, sticky sort of presentation.

It came and went.

Today, blogs aren’t a regular stop for any normal human. It’s getting to the point that off-network websites in general (except maybe for shopping) aren’t a stop for websurfing. Because we don’t websurf. We hook up to our platform of choice and just absorb what comes through there.

So, sure, post to your blog. And advertise it on your favorite social media site. Maybe you get some hits. But you’re not building an audience because you’re operating out of a strip mall in your neighborhood and everyone else is going to Wal-Mart. So unless you’re able to build a network of folks actively leading others to you, or unless you’re writing for an outlet that gets injected into the feed then you might be on the road to small audiences. I can tell you for a fact that my blog got ten… twenty… fifty… times the readers back in the early-mid 2000s than it does now. Because blogs were a thing. Now they’re like compact discs. Sure, there’s still a market. Not a big one.

Of course, there’s Substack and the less said about that the better. But there’s other mailing list services and the like. Including one called Ghost that I was recommended and took a look at it and all I could see was “This is how you can monetize your social contacts on the internet with our system” and I ran away screaming. There’s also Patreon. Which works for some folks. But I can’t bring myself to directly charge for the sorts of things that I post to my blog for free, movie reviews or essays on the nature of reading and readership, the usual for me. I’ve made my peace with Kickstarter. That’s enough for now, maybe. I’d just like people to trade me some money for books.

Where’s that bring us to? Dance for someone else’s tune? Only it’s tricker to get those jobs. Like Jack Barron said “What happens when you’re ready to sell out but nobody’s buying?” I realize this is a different set of concerns than perhaps what I started out with. One being the call to keep on creating because that’s just what survivors or creators do, and creator is a self-chosen title as much as anything else these days. You make stuff? You’re a creator. Oh, but maybe not an important one unless you land that contract and make an impact in the genre world that you’re working in. You all know where I stand on that. I hate it.

When I’m brave. When I’m not awake at 3am wondering what the hell is coming next.

I made my break with the genre markets to stay sane, you understand. I did that because I couldn’t stay in step with any genre or subgenre. The market spoke. Got it. Heard, Chef. Only I didn’t quit. That said, I’m not wild about just working for nothing on my end and other dudes collecting their shavings of pennies off of it. I guess that makes me an impure artist, huh? I’ve internalized capitalism. Whoops.

But I'm also a weirdo who thinks that sure, as a creator you're entitled to some level of recognition in this new world. Yeah, you can't eat likes, and you certainly can get attached to 'em. You may become resentful in their absence. That said, likes are not nothing, at least when you're stuck in the wilderness. Yes, you can start bending things towards parasocial fame (or even infamy, which I've seen and that path never ever works long-term.) You aren't owed indifference. Nobody should have to face it on the regular. Even if that's the world we live in.

Particularly since we're in a world now where the folks who are putting out paying projects aren't all that interested in a having, ah, an actual point of view. And that's the only reason to even be making art. It is. That means it's gonna be political. Someone will call it out on those grounds. Get used to it. But yeah, the money is scared. Rightfully so, I suppose, what with comics looking at incoming tariffs on printing and raw materials. It'll be the same for printed books, too. They're all scared. Scared that they're finally going to have to start spending out of their bedrock money and we both know that's not gonna happen. They'll cut to the bone first. That or vaunted publishers of the past will create an AI of Ernest Hemingway to serve as your personal writing coach or some other mechanized hell of mirrors that sounds like the best idea ever if you’re absolutely bugfuck insane and disconnected from art or anything like it.

Which leaves making stuff to just about anyone else. For likely little recognition and less pay. Yeah, sorry. Particularly if you've any interest in doing things outside the lines. And the real funny thing is, those lines are all recent inventions. The best work was being done without thought to whether or not it was this genre or that. You think Tolkien was worried about keeping Lord of the Rings in High Fantasy? Yeah.

Yet if you want boosting, you better get in line and show devotion to the correct way of doing things. Which is, yeah, not actually doing the work.

I know. I've wandered around some. It's the times. I'm lucky to have enough focus to get much of anything done. Much less anything of substance. Like another novel. Or doing support for the short story collection which is coming over the horizon like an incoming ICBM. Bill's coming due. I've talked about it a fair bit. Now it's time to actually start working getting the book out there. Just like it's one thing to talk about that fun creative career and how you're so intensely in it. But you gotta get something out there. In the meantime, don't do a thing because someone tells you to do it or that it has to be this way or that. Or because it's the only way to stand up to what's happening. There isn't any one way. You've got a life to live. Better that you call the shots where you can.

And in case you missed it as I went through a round of final panic-tweaks and corrections, here's the cover for Fake Believe, ahead of the kickstarter announcement. Probably within the month, or likely the start of March. Seven new stories all in the familiar setting of Los Angeles in the eighties, just like the two previous Hazeland books. And when I say stories, the marketplace would say "novellas" so you're getting your money's worth. Yes, single-author anthologies are a bad idea. I'm well aware of it. It's the only way I know to do this, so I'm going ahead with it.

Until next time licking the third rail.

FULL BLEED: HAUNTED BY NOTHING AT ALL

I’m wondering when it all became combat between audiences and artists. Kind of a grim thought to have. The king of all grim thoughts, really. Here is this thing that people are supposed to love, to enjoy, maybe pass a couple hours with when things are cold and rough outside, think about something else for just a little while. And now, well, kinda Hobbesian out there. Art isn’t something enjoy, it’s something to be dissected and subjugated, it's something to defeat and dethrone, it’s grist for a thousand content mills on YouTube and Patreon and Twitch and Substack. Want points? Take something down. Want clicks? Take a controversial side on a beloved or behated piece of franchise. But don’t dare not have an opinion a piece of culture. Don’t leave clicks on the table, someone else is gonna snap them up.

Now this for sure goes for things like politics and whatever. But I’m burned out on that entire subject. Looking outside is just too depressing and maybe telling generations of kids that they have the power at the ballot box to make real change was not a kindness after all. Let’s talk about art. And more closely, how engagement looks these days.

Granted, this a view that’s been jaundiced. Or perhaps it’s just optimism and youth gone rancid, like all things biological over time. Or even the spirit if we’re being honest.

Anyways, in the era of social media it seems that art maybe only exists to generate more social media. And once you attach personal income to that, well, that which is not forbidden becomes obligatory, dig? Now this is likely to ruffle feathers, particularly amongst folks who make their livings doing media criticism. I’m not talking, however, about media criticism by and large. Though I do sometimes wonder about the enterprise as a whole. And by that, who is this for? To make the publication look smart with those column inches? It’s not for the folks making media (though those words get used to attack or bolster – just take a look at blurbs on movies and TV shows, for as much as these things are advertised now – which isn’t much.) Is it even for the readers to make informed judgements on how to spend their time or whether or not they should take in the latest Lion King remake at the multiplex? I’m sure glad that those writers can get paid for talking about their relationship with art. Though how often does that happen?

I won’t get too deeply into the whole phenomena of movies and shows using glowing pull quotes direct from social media users and throwing those into their advertisements, because… lol. Yeah, that’s just thirsty and desperate. But hey, everyone’s there right now. So I guess it’s good to be in the company of, uh, giant multimedia studio marketing departments. Celebrities! They’re just like us!

All this of course coming from the vast and shallow sea of entertainment now. Nobody knows much about effective marketing unless they’re handling a tall dollar item, and then it’s either a magnificent success or an empty flop. Nevermind that one of the best movies of last year died out of the gate and the stuff that’s getting showing after showing is empty retread literal shot for shot remakes of movies that have existed for thirty or maybe even a hundred years (The Lion King and the upcoming Show White in this case.) So much media being produced and shoveled out there, much in the manner of, ah, software that was produced in the early DC-ROM era by the truckload only to end up in giant bins at Egghead Software or Borders or any other dead brand big box store. Yeah, shovelware. Produced faster than could even be tracked, all to be abandoned still shrinkwrapped at fire sale prices. All that effort. All that product.

Same thing now, just hyperaccelerated for your convenience. All sold on Netflix or any other streaming service (but last I heard, Netflix still holds a laughably high percentage of that market, but hey, they’re just measuring two-minute streams that show the breathless engagement of their audience. Yes, of course it’s all hot air and smoke and mirrors of self-reported numbers while they’re coasting not on subscriber numbers but stock value. How many new shows a week? How many standup specials? How few movies made before 2000? How complete the obliteration of film history?

So much stuff out there that it’s become valueless and review proof. There’s probably some juice left in writing follow-along columns for serial shows. But are those bringing in new viewers much less new subscribers? Honestly, of what value is critical appraisal and engagement in the face of this sort of content onslaught? Why even think about what you’re watching, you’re just two-screening it anyways. (I two-screen when my wife is watching Hallmark movies, which I do not under duress, but I’m not cheering the whole thing.) It’s just moving wallpaper.

Which brings us to the reaction machines on social media. The reactions themselves don’t matter so much as that they’re there. Good or bad, so long as it’s being talked about. Surely that must matter, right? That’s all free advertising. Get a couple big influencers to talk up the show and that’s even better than actual advertising (because it’s the only advertising that studios know how to do now.) So surely the discourse matters.

Well, it matters to folks whose material situation is tied to the discourse and being a trusted voice in it. Assuming these folks are on a platform that can be monetized properly. Or perhaps it’s clout that’s being sought. Maybe both. So perhaps we need to expand this consideration to ego as much as money.

Thus the need to be seen as an expert, a trusted voice.

I realize this is rich coming from a dude who posts this stuff on the internet for free and has been doing so for a very long time. But still, bear with me.

Authority is being sought. Authority and audience.

So now every new thing in a certain sphere becomes an important point of discussion. Like Kurtz and his trading company staring at a blank map, that map must be filled in. Territory must be marked and claimed. And if need, war must be waged. War over content. War over aesthetic. War over place in the canon. War. War never changes. Art isn’t a thing to be experienced but a resource to be seized and utilized. A work isn’t good or bad or even enjoyed any longer. It’s another piece of ivory to be considered, white and jellied hands tracing the creamy smoothness, teasing out not value but a price for exchange.

And the individual? Had a bad day? Well you can take a shot at someone else’s work, really a right rogering. There. You showed them. You’re better than that piece of art. You defeated it. And now its subjugated to you. You never need to think about it again. Yes, I’m guilty of this too. Why just last night I commented on how an upcoming movie looks dreary and dull and unappealing if not emblematic of Everything I’m Tired Of. You got me. I got me.

I don’t have an excuse for it. But then neither does anyone else. And maybe that’s just something that’s happening in the face of exhaustion. There’s more than you or I could watch, even if we were able to pick out just the very best of what’s being offered right now. Maybe the flippant is a grasp at psychic self-defense saying that this doesn’t matter because all of it is made to not matter now. At least by the behavior of the companies distributing all this work.

That said, Art as Thing to Triumph Over is sadly a real thing. TV shows aren’t experienced, they’re crowed at when the foreshadowing pays off. They’re reduced to a paragraph of salient plot points while jettisoning notions of nuance or aesthetic or hell even the joy of having a beautiful thing to watch. Tune in next week (or to the next installment of the franchise at the theatres – be sure to catch the after-credit stinger to have something to talk about instead of the whole-ass movie you just watched.) Face front, true believers!

Which is crazy. Should be a great time, right? More to watch than you ever possibly could? Most of it made with production values which would have made audiences in the eighties weep openly. Instead, the special has not even been made routine but something to be endured. Or worse, afraid you’ll miss the moment of and won’t be Part of the Conversation. Oh no.

It's especially weird when something big comes along in any genre because it then becomes a discourse lodestar. A high-value target. A priority action item. Everyone’s got to get their finger on it, to see if its politics or look or script or place in the genre offer up a particular avenue of attack (or for celebration, to be fair.) What can be succinctly put into a single-serving post (conveniently wrapped in plastic, not unlike a pillow mint or perhaps a Q-tip?) The most prized elephant in the herd offering up its tusks for valuation. Quick, Mr. Kurtz snaps, my biggest gun to bring down the beast in bloody spectacle.

Lately it’s been Nosferatu. Which to me was a horrifying film, beautiful and severe (but also lit with moments of strange comedy amongst all the heartbreak). It is a serious film, taking itself quite seriously. And yes, it’s a remake of a derivative work, but one that operates in the spirit of the original and not a slavish updating. I think that the film succeeded in what it was setting out to do. But then, my thoughts as to what the film was trying to do aren’t of anyone’s concern to me. They’re certainly not part of Robert Eggers’ calculation or intent or effort. (Nor should they be.)

But watching the movie be turned into a cultural football over the period of what, three weeks? Yeah, that gets old. I just wanna watch the movies, not declare war over them or turn them into personal totems of anything else. I know, the solution you suggest would be “just tune out.”

And I would counter suggest that maybe people should change the rules of engagement. I realize that’s impossible on a platform where a bumper sticker reads like a novel. Particularly if outrage is supposed to be the primary mode. So maybe look at those instead.

As for anything else important, let’s see. My kids are all back at their homes from winter break so I’m trying to see what the new normal looks like now in 2025. I’m going to be muting a whole bunch of words on Bluesky or I’m going to end up deleting it and hiding. Which sucks because that’s mostly how I stay in touch with folks. My Instagram (which sucked for actually talking with anyone) is all but done, officially deleted this week. I have a weblog, and I love to hear everyone saying “Dust off your blog! It's important!” without any indication or plan as to how to get people to read your blog when they’re only interested in stuff that gets posted to a platform they’re involved with.

I’m really trying to write actual words again. It’s terrifying. I’ll be honest. It’s hard to do six months or more of work and watch it get tossed into the ocean.

Until next time.

FULL BLEED: WHEN YOU GIVE THE GAME AWAY WITHOUT EVEN KNOWING

Happy New Year, everyone. It’s here whether you want it or not. Jury’s out on the decks of the mothership, though I sure got enough of 2024 by the time it ended, and maybe a little time before that even. It was a rough year in patches and those patches grew in size as they often do, becoming slippery and un-navigable where you just sort of keep a hold on the steering wheel and know that you’ve lost contact with the road and simply ride it out until things stabilize.

Sometimes they even do. Sometimes you just keep holding on.

Last year had some high points. I found almost fifty people who’d roll the dice on giving me money in exchange for my books, and one that had a troubled upbringing to boot. I’m thankful to everyone who bought a copy of All Waters Are Graves (and doubly thankful if you bought a copy of The Queen of No Tomorrows as well – a book that never really went anywhere, mostly because it wasn’t engineered to by way of writing or publishing.) My wife and I got to visit Paris which was an utterly amazing place and had I the means, I’d probably relocate there (I don’t; you’re stuck with me.) Cooked some nice meals at home. Got to LA in the early part of the year and saw people who I only see when I’m there, which isn’t often enough.

There was also a lot of wheel-spinning and frustration, only some of it having to do with writing and publishing. Which is a stone bummer because the world that we’re in is pretty hard on all creative folks, even if you’re not trying to make a living on it or even part of a living. I’d like to say that I believe we’re at the nadir of that right now. I’d like to say that. I’m not going to because I don’t believe it.

But what other choice do we have? Something about not doing a thing because we want to but because we feel compelled. Well, maybe you’re compelled. I’ve managed not to write actual words for almost three years. Well, blog and social media posts, but those aren’t longform narrative fiction. I did some revisions sure, but that’s not the something from nothing of drafting. Revisions are just putting patches where there’s leaks. It’s not writing. (Neither is pre-writing, which is essential but not the actual act.) Scared to hell of going back to it and finding that there’s no there there. Maybe I will surprise myself.

So, the work. In a landscape which is actively hostile to creative effort and is not likely to be any friendlier in the near future, I do wonder. Are we actively insane. I know I am. It’s about the only explanation that makes any sense. Insane or stupid. Or stubborn. Or recognizing that this is about the only thing I can do well that I can offer to folks outside say my immediate family.

But maybe I’m not so great at it after all, given my track record. Long time into this and I’m still a scrappy little indie writer with boxes of copies of my own work which is a situation I swore I’d never be back in after tossing a vanful’s worth of copies of earlier books into an actual landfill last year. And I still have some to get rid of. Yeah. Feels great.

I’m aware. We live in a new world now. Gotta define our own levels of success and failure and enduring when we fall short on both marks. Or maybe it’s just me.

So, engaging with failure as a benchmark, I started reading a book recommended to me on the subject. In this case On Writing and Failure, or, on the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer by Stephen Marche. I post the name and title as I suppose the author of the book has some manner of Google alert or the like on the title (an easy one to set up as that title does indeed stand out -- and he did repost my post about diving into the book on Friday.) I will perhaps engage with some of the book in ways that he wouldn’t be down with. Who knows. So if you’re listening, Stephen, I found the book valuable and… not.

I will say that within the first couple of pages, I could see an awful lot of myself in it. Particularly regarding the awkwardness and improbability of writers (and any creative laborer) even existing apart from their work and how failure is woven into the fabric of this manner of life. It’s pretty easy to look at things and see what is not, yeah? Or count up the hours versus the returns and invoices and yeah. Maybe we better not do that. Let’s not.

Because it’s not about money, right? Sure. It is. But it’s not. It’s not supposed to be. There’s just being seen. There’s the feeling that you got to your readers or viewers or subscribers or whatever makes up an audience now. At least you hope that. You’re hoping that what you were meaning to convey actually got to someone. Even in a world seemingly primed to produce bad-faith and clout-chasing reactions where interlocutors are happy to tell their viewers and followers what the work is actually about and oh, sorry, I’ve just described Hell. Yet we’re here.

And I haven’t even touched on the world of literature and the academy. Can’t speak to that, only to the rabble and hoi polloi of the world of social media and the froth of the everyday. Genre fiction. Common as dirt.

So anyways, I’m reading this meditation on failure and success and writing as a process and I’m understanding and feeling it and I figure out that… this book isn’t about me or to me. Though it is. Though I had a couple of oh shit, heart sinking because of all the lead in it ‘cause those shots hit and they hit directly. But that book wasn’t aimed at me at all. It was aimed at literature and the writers of that. Shakespeare, Confucius, Hemingway and Fitzgerald in this terrible combination that I wasn’t aware of before. These are writers I’m not fit to clean the piss of their shadows, yeah?

Oh, it’s true. No illusions there.

This made it difficult for me to keep going with the book. I ultimately did, though truthfully, the meat of it is laid out front, the black meat from the centipedes, you know, the stuff that Dr. Benway traffics in. What you (or I) needed to take away from it was there and early. Which is good, ‘cause I’m not going to be the guy writing for journals of any prestige (nor those fiercely snarl their independence from the legacy media). I realize that the level at which you find your work isn’t the issue at all. I know that. I keep telling myself that. It’s really about the process.

But I can’t help feeling that it actually is an issue. Probably because I’m not in that world and am not gonna be. But I better be careful here and not worry too much about the difference between literature and mere genre, other than to be wryly amused when one gleefully borrows from the other yet insists it is the purer strain.

So what if your dream ain’t to be represented in the pages of The Atlantic or the NYT or hell, even Rolling Stone (I know folks who’ve written for all of them. No disrespect to them. It’s a big deal. But like many kinds of big deals, it ends up being ephemeral in the endless churn.) I always knew the game wasn’t going to end up there for me. Nor should it. I refused to play. Hell, I refused to play by even the rules of genre. I’m still there, I suppose. I should be happy with it. Takes just as much effort to be happy as sad, right? Castaneda said that some years back. He also made up a bunch of the anthropological work that he got famous for. Makes you think.

But I looked at what was happening out there in genre and figured I just couldn’t do it. It seemed that all the market wanted was work that had been written before. Sure, you get cracks that let new things in, new subgenres, new amalgamations of flavor crystals to sprinkle over things. But the majority of things were copies of copies of copies. And I saw this decades ago. Now the world of genre is so small and the mainstream of it is so flat. Makes me think of that great dead spot in the Gulf of Mexico, the one where all the fertilizer from all the runoff from all the farms along the eastern watershed of the US of A have all spilled and settled, creating patches of overfed algae that have choked out all the oxygen in the water. Starved out.

Why not strike out on your own? Failure on that measure couldn’t be all that far from success in those addled waters. Even if that’s the dream, right? Making it in this world on your own terms, writing something new, not just something safe because that’s what publishers want. The trick is to not rely on oxygen, but to become anaerobic. To live off starvation. It’s not an easy trick. I haven’t anywhere near mastered it. Doubt I will.

Anyways, I’ve wandered afield. Back to success and failure. It does seem that the only way to win this game (I know, this statement fails at self-reflexivity, as does so much advice given in this field) is not to play it. Is that slicing the Gordian knot in two or just ignoring it? Does it matter if the knot is no longer binding you?

It is a strange business and a strange undertaking and a stranger profession, to write and create in this world. Even in the world of forty or a hundred years ago. Or thousands. Marche undertakes a brief examination of Jesus and failure, where the words attributed to him two millennia ago are instead reinterpreted and repurposed into the Gospels and you sure bet that the churches based on those truths are into peace and love and acceptance and refusal of worldly wealth weighed against the blissful eternity of the afterlife. It’s hard to argue any of this a success. And yet, these fictions are inescapable (at least in the Western world). But certainly not what’s intended, right there out in the open. They’re not particularly complicated words, but somehow “reject wealth, do good works, give to the poor” has become the prosperity gospel which is precisely zero steps away from Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s (now quaint and charming) Wall Street. Failure in success.

Of course, there’s the third option, being forgotten or never being at all. Hold up. Fifty buyers last year. I can’t say that. But not making a ripple in even the small world of genre that you inhabit, having given up on any of the bigger and more prestigious ponds. That’s a real thing. So I guess that’s failure. But I wrote the books. I’m trying to work up to writing the next one. I’ve been trying that for a while now. So, success?

So, neither.

It’s tough. It’s always been tough. Maybe it’d be tougher with a contract demanding books in a certain range and on a set schedule for an audience that may not be there for a publisher that is going to hope you put the book on TikTok and wait for lightning to strike else it’ll just get mulched into the machine that people will look to instead of stories by humans one day. It’s not any one thing, but everything.

And still to keep working in this.

Oh, but there’s kind advice from writers in genre who are successes and if only you do what they did, then you can taste success too. Perhaps if you had a time machine and could enact that advice when they themselves did (if they even did) and were them, then perhaps that success advice might apply to you. But daring to say that those kind words aren’t to be taken up thankfully and immediately? Yeah, that gets you kicked out of the clubhouse. Or harried endlessly by fans of said advisor. It happens. I've watched it.

Anyways, here’s to 2025. I hope to get a novel and more written then. I plan on getting a new book of Hazeland stories entitled Fake Believe through the Kickstarter process. Maybe I’ll even take a trip with my wife, if we’re able. I’ll watch my youngest graduate from college and that chapter will be closed. I try not to think too hard on the other chapters that will be closed as well, and what those closing will open us up to. My suspicions are that it will be something we’ve never seen before, and it will not be driven by kindness.

Take care of yourselves. Be kinder to your own successes and nurture your own failures. We’re going to need it.

FULL BLEED: NOT WITHOUT YOU

For the end of the year, I'm dragging out another trunked horror story. This one was written in response to a call for survival horror stories a couple of years back. Yeah, that's funny. I hate those. But I figured I could do something interesting with it, even with the expectations that the form has baked into it now. Funny thing was this story got me a "You were so close, just eliminated in the last round" sort of rejection letter. No indication as to why, no notes and by the time I got the story back I bet the anthology was being POD printed.

It's fine. I wasn't gonna rewrite it anyways. I think it works just like it does. Maybe you will, too.

--

Lily watched the plane parked out on the tarmac, off-kilter to the terminals and their passenger gantries un-deployed. The cockpit escape window was popped open. A red sheen glazed sticky on the plastic. It burned wetly in the setting sun. There was a flurry of dirty finger markings smeared on the white enamel of the fuselage nearby, a flock of apostrophes and hesitation marks.

She’d never seen the pilot. It had been two weeks. Maybe more. She’d watched as the interior windows of the parked plane grew darker, increasingly smeared with a soup of what must have been blood and worse. Every night another one was marked off like someone was counting down to something terrible.

But all the terrible things had already happened. Every one that she could have imagined, anyways. Instead of waving goodbyes to loved ones, the air had swollen and burst with a clamor of shrieks and wails and moans, everyone losing their minds as easily as a set of misplaced keys or a knife from one step to the next. They fell on each other, hunger and rage and mindlessness unleashed. It had taken only hours.

After that the strange kites fell out of the contused sky, floating then spilling tangles of opalescent tendrils that fingered along the ground. They drew up bodies or those who’d survived, pulling them upwards and passing them through unseen mouths. Inside the triangular abdomens, you could still see the remains, curled on themselves like fetuses awaiting birthing. It took several days for one of the creatures to digest. The kites would walk in the day, sunlight filtering through their bodies like cloudy bodies of marmalade. Victims within them lost their skin, their flesh and finally their bones. Sometimes there was an imprint left in the flesh of the creatures, an echo of the consumed.

Something moved outside, deftly slipping from the shadow of a gangway and across the concrete. Another shadow with nothing to cast it. As easily as people had lost their minds, they seemed to have lost their shadows. Unattached, the shadows grew hungry. Hungry but wary of the kites. Wary but feeding on the scuttling insects or crabs or whatever they were, that had come along with the broken sky. Something had come through cracks in the world, from spaces long hidden. They had brought their simple appetites to Earth, to America and everywhere else, Lily guessed. The TVs didn’t have any signals, even when they had power. The cell phones had signal but it was poisoned now, crowded with lilting whispers of no language that she could recognize.

There was no help coming. Not for her and not for Thomas. But at least his infection was breaking, having spent most of this time too weak to be delirious. He was hardly aware of where he was, and that wouldn’t do. She had to be the help for the both of them. She watched the shadows flock around the plane parked by the jetway, circling hungry as sharks, their patience eroding bit by bit every day. They couldn’t get in, and they were afraid of the kites and their anemone-like tentacles trailing behind. She wasn’t afraid of them. But she was afraid of losing Thomas, so soon after having gotten him back.

She inspected the pistol once more, making sure the one loaded chamber was lined up. It was still there. Still ready. Because that time was coming.

Lily crept back, low to the ground, as was her habit now, in a crouch so she could burst past anything that got in her way or made a move. She knew that there weren’t many things left to fear, but she’d never seen that pilot who’d gotten away and left his flight to die by rows out there. Maybe he hadn’t been insane and he needed help.

And maybe he was just waiting for Lily to drop her guard.

She picked her way back to the Memories souvenir shop, logo written out in a blue cursive squiggle, almost unreadable. She’d done her best to make it look like it had already been ransacked, bags torn open and contents crushed to colorful dust, the orange grime of cheese curls in a scuffle of footsteps.

Crossing the threshold into the space behind the register, the crinkle of a plastic and foil bag scratched at the air. Lily froze and scanned the grimed gray industrial carpet flecked with consumer debris and strips of colored trash. A gleam of oily green shell, there. The legs all half-curled up like a lazy hand half-clutch, too many fingers.

The crabs had come along too scavenging what they could, but Lily had seen a group of them tear into one of the bomb or drug-sniffing dogs. They took live prey when they could. Suppressing disgust, Lily swung the pipe with the end she’d sharpened as best she could, thrusting at the jointed creature before it could get away. The shell cracked and the thing didn’t squeal, but it did clatter against the plastic counter, uselessly grabbing for purchase until Lily tipped the spear up, keeping the thing at a respectful distance. It reached for air, the multitude of legs all working in a slow cycle almost like a machine, not like something alive at all.

“No supper for you tonight,” she said as she adjusted her grip and then raised the impaled thing up before smashing it down hard enough to split. The non-shattered half tried to scuttle away, dragging the ruin behind. Lily brought down the pipe again and ended it. She then pushed the carcass out into the empty foyer, where the shell and meat and ichor flew a wobbly arc into a growing collection of such bodies.

They didn’t eat their dead. But the cockroaches did.

Lily drew a breath. Sweat beaded at her temples and armpits. Not that it mattered. She hadn't been able to wash since everything went wrong and she didn't know when that would happen again, if ever. Water was for drinking, when she could find it.

She scanned back to the recessed door behind the register, the one that led to her and Thomas' hiding place. She was sure that she'd latched it before she set out, almost an hour ago. She was sure.

There was a dark gap where the door was faintly ajar, a finger-width. Sickness sloshed around her, not from the bugs or the memory of that dog but from the thought that someone or something had seen her leave and gone to investigate that little hidey-hole she'd come out of. Then they'd find Thomas and they'd--

She gripped the rod with one hand and checked her pocket for the gun. It wasn't any use against a shadow, and probably not even a kite, but they didn't follow and prowl the same way that humans did. They walked like they had nothing to fear. Humans and those who were still close enough to being human, they were a worry. Cleverness and stealth was more fearful than the inexplicable.

The door swung back as she pressed the rod against it gently. The tunnel behind that was velvety dark, sweet with the smell of spilled sodas and ripped-open packages of cake. Blue-white spill from the whining fluorescent lantern vibrated faintly.

Something black and stretched out lay in the floor of the passageway. Lily started, believing it was one of the sourceless shadows. It wasn’t. She calmed herself then realized that it was Thomas. The rod clattered to the floor and she fell towards him, fearing the worst, that something had gotten in here and gotten to him. Her hands ran along him, trying to find a wound or blood or anything. She pressed near the splint in his leg and his entire body locked in spasm, ragged breath sucking in over opened teeth.

“Aaaah! Fuck!”

He was okay. He was going to be okay. Lily let her heart start beating again.

Thomas was back laying on the nest of coats and child’s sleeping bag that Lily had scavenged not long after setting up their little den. Pastel-maned cartoon unicorns shared space with stains that she didn’t care to identify and Thomas was too tired or weak to have ever cared about. Nothing was new anymore. Nothing would be new again. It was okay to hold onto old things, Lily decided. Sometimes they were all you ever had.

She lay an oversized and heavy peacoat on top of him, tucking the edges in as best she could. “What on earth were you doing up? You’re supposed to be recovering.”

“I woke up and I wondered where…” He grimaced, pain tugging at his expression like half-melted wax. “Where…”

“Where I was?” she finished the question for him. “I told you I was out hunting while I could. I should be out there right now. There’s only so much dusk time to use before it goes black.”

“I got worried.”

“You don’t have the strength enough to worry right now. But you’re getting better. Blood loss then fever. You’ve been down a long time.”

She peeled back the coat to look at the wound that ran down his right leg, from mid-thigh to past his knee. It had been a clean wound at first, the knife making its bite, but then he had started wrestling with an enraged ticket-taker, blood and froth running down the front of their white uniform shirt. The flexing and scraping had turned it to a ragged and dirty highway of blood and opened muscle beneath. That was then. Now, it was sutured up with dental floss and a sewing kit from someone’s spilled hospitality bag. That and most of their supply of medicinal alcohol had kept him alive.

After the ticket-taker had been dispatched. Lily saw Thomas struggling with an enraged navy-blue pantsuit-wearing attacker and realized that no, he couldn’t die there. He had to live.

That was the first time that she’d ever really fought anyone past schoolyard scrapes or the end of that shift were everyone’s nerves were so frayed that McGillicudy had finally picked the fight she’d so badly wanted forever. Lily had felt bad about giving her fellow nurse stitches. The ticket-taker, however, took no thought at all. Once the decision was made, that Tom had to live through all this, Lily thought about the insane and feral woman as an obstacle to be removed. Her jaws had snapped and raged when Lily pulled her off, eyes rolling and seeing nothing. Lily’s trip-kick brought the woman’s skull to the end of one of those fixed rows of seats, eye-socket proving to be no match for the cast metal of the arm.

Lily felt worse about the crab-swarmed dog than any person she’d had to end since thing went crazy. The dog didn’t know any better. They were just doing their job. They were just here when it happened when insects from wherever showed up and everyone else went insane. Dog was just dog, another bite in a new food chain.

“The leg’s not opened, by some miracle,” Lily said after a quick inspection of the improvised sutures and checking the temperature of the wound for the second or third time today. Warmer, but not hot enough to be a concern. The infection might have just been pushed back, not ended. If it came back… that would have been a terrible way to go. But not the right one.

There was only so much that her skills and cobbled-together instrument kit could do here. Even if there had been a hospital just across the tarmac, it would have been just as easy to swim to the moon.

“I’m just lucky that you found me,” he said, voice dry. “I’m still trying to--“

“Here, drink this,” Lily said, pushing the freshly-opened bottle of water to his lips. “I know you like soda, probably a little too much.”

He took the gulp. “Water just makes me piss.”

“And soda is going to kill you.”

“Better than waiting out this nightmare.”

“You,” Lily said, leaning hard into sternness “barely know what’s going on outside. I’m there every day. In here,” she then swept her hand, fingers outstretched through the pale blue gloom, indicating their collected belongings “you’re safe and can get better and then.” She paused. “Then we can figure things out.”

Thomas closed his eyes in reply, sweat or tears trickling from the corners of one of them. Without thought, Lily wiped it away with the edge of a sleeve.

“Hey, it’s okay,” she said.

“No. It’s not that.” He turned his head fully to the side and stared blankly, unable to meet her gaze. “It’s that I feel so helpless and stupid. I don’t even know what hurt me. I don’t have an explanation for what’s going on.”

“You’re not in charge.” She waited for the words to hit.

Tom swallowed like he was trying to stuff his own skull down his throat.

“I feel so fucking helpless.”

She closed her fingers and drew her hand slowly down his cheek and his neck. “You have me. And I’m not going anywhere.”

“I thought that… No, forget it.” His jaw clenched, long muscles bunched under the skin of his jaw and face.

“Go ahead.”

“I’m such a goddamn pussy.”

“I’m the only other person around to judge you, Thomas. And you aren’t. You’re lucky to be alive.”

“Yeah.” He turned and locked eyes with her, his burning with tiny flecks of fire in the blue. “And I freaked out ‘cause I thought you abandoned me today. I was going to go out look for you.”

“You’re not a coward. And you’re not a pussy. You got really unlucky and then really lucky again. I’ll make sure you get better.”

“I thought you hated me, you know. After that fight, back before everything got stupid.”

Lily leaned her weight back on her hips and sighed. “I already told you I don’t want to talk about this again. Not anymore. That happened in a world that’s…” Lily drew a torn breath and she felt a heaviness drape across her, one that she rejected. “That world is fucking gone, okay? It’s over. We have a new one now, and whatever happened before, I don’t want you to talk about it.”

“But the party and--“

“I SAID STOP!” Lily felt her face twist in anger and she couldn’t hide it. She shook the emotion from herself, but it left behind a cloying feeling, like unclean teeth. “Just don’t. Okay? It’s over. We get to start all over again. Just think about how lucky we are in that. That we didn’t go insane and we were around for each other.”

Thomas sat up on an elbow, wincing as he did. “I wish I could take it back.”

“You don’t get to. We only get to push forward from now on, okay?” She patted his face and pressed the water bottle into his free hand. “Drink some more. Eat some nuts, something with some protein. I’ll see if I can find something better tonight.”

“Okay,” he said like a scolded child offered a treat, taking it reluctantly.

“And don’t move around. Those things could pop right open.” She pointed at the wounded leg. “Got lucky patching you up once. A second time might not happen. Promise me?”

“Yeah, this time. I promise.”

They both well knew that Thomas hadn’t done so well with promises before. But Lily let this one slide.

She arranged a couple bags of nuts and some paperback books within his reach then pulled the door closed behind her. Lily thought she heard a chuckle or a sigh on the other side of the door, but left him his space.

Outside the sky was orange with red veins shot through it like an exotic and sanguine marble. It belonged in a fancy house somewhere, the kind where people didn’t have to cook for themselves, where someone waited hand and foot. She laughed at that. One of them was already there.

The kites were gathered, picking at the body of a coyote or wolf, whichever it was that lived around here. Their tendrils played over it, lit by the emergency lights at the bases of the gangplanks. Their translucence was bloody. Occasionally birds swooped out from overhangs and picked at the kites, pecking and fleeing just ahead of the sweeps of the coelenterate arms like undersea ferns. Lily wondered if nature, her nature was fighting back. What was that movie with the Martians and the germs?

“Work faster, germs,” she muttered.

The dying light flushed through the tramway, chaos of the last couple weeks still evident in the trash and litter left behind. She’d made herself cart the bodies away as best she could, thinking that they’d distract whatever might make it inside or whoever else had survived that night.

But then she got to thinking about how she hadn’t gone through the pockets of those bodies, maybe missing opportunities for new weapons or some piece of novelty to pass the time or a lighter. Those would always be handy.

“They don’t let lighters on planes now, stupid,” she told herself.

Still, her pocket knife had gone missing in all the frenzy of the initial disaster. The gun she found then carried had but the one bullet and you could only do so much damage with food court cutlery. There was the prep blade, but that was only threatening to chunks of pizza dough. Anyone getting close in would not be reachable with the rod.

Lily checked her gear and watched a pack of starlings pick at the kite, remains of its last meal glowing inside that tough and fleshy gelatin body. Then she started down to where the bodies were kept, pipe out crosswise between her and the rest of the world.

The corpses were in a tangle, mislaid and exhausted. Limbs that didn’t quite match jutted out from the mass. The smell was bad enough that Lily rethought things. It was one thing to drag them down here over the course of days, but another to go through the pockets of now-ripened stiffs, hoping for a treasure to pay for the boiling nausea.

She let go of the idea and decided to check the food court once more. The freezer area and its looming door might be an obstacle she could overcome. And maybe there was something she’d missed in a drawer or under a counter. Something processed and not yet rotten. Things went bad faster than she’d have guessed they would.

Then Lily saw the dirty once-white shirt and captain’s cap atop the head slumped down on the chest of the body at the far end of the pile. It was one that she hadn’t placed. She would have remembered a pilot, at least she thought she would’ve. There were things that she’d had to do in the past fortnight, things she would have thought unimaginable before. Reminded her of why she liked those frozen microwave meals. No prep, no cutting, no mess. No notions that it was even stuff that had once been alive.

The gap between those things was far close than she’d ever thought. The days of easy meals were long gone. And the packaged snacks would not hold out forever. The bottoms of those cupboards were clear enough.

She made her way down in the gloom, towards the body she hadn’t accounted for. A stubborn clutch of LED lights from a bathroom alcove shed enough light to see, making it so she couldn’t have missed it, really. She was sure he hadn’t been there before. Something tugged at her, making her flesh crawl and wrenching adrenalin from her body, reserves that she thought would have been tapped by now.

The captain’s head was bowed, chin on chest, comical as a kid who’d fallen asleep in class. His hat was tugged forward, covering his eyes. She saw that well enough, and registered the gleam in them as they spun and locked on her.

He was up in a crouch and ready to leap as she brought the rod up, interposed between him and her. Lily was on the slight and short side of things, which she was painfully aware of, so even an average man could be a serious threat should they choose to be. Subtract reason from this and she felt the danger of the moment galvanize her.

“Saw you. Thought I’d lost my mind,” he rasped. Bloody spittle ran from his lips. “I waited.”

Lily said nothing, not knowing if he was one of the insane frenzies or just a man trotted out to the edge of insanity for long enough to have decided not to come back.

The captain was in his half-crouch, eyes more on the rod and the glint of the roughly-sharp end than on her. “Can’t you speak?”

Lily just let her lips twist in reply.

“Okay, you be like that,” he said. His body relaxed and he put his weight to his backwards foot. “I was just trying to be friendly.”

He sprang before the last syllable left his lips. Lily brought the pipe up but couldn’t get the cutting end up in time. She braced herself and locked her arms, trying to get the length of the pipe to hit something fragile. Shock of impact rolled up her and pushed her backwards, throwing her onto the hard floor.

The captain fell short of her, taking the pipe across his face before knocking it free of her grip. An uneven and bloody welt ran down the side of his face. Interrupting the mark, his eyes were white and wild.

“Not hardly fair. Thought you’d be happy to see a man.” He came to his feet. Lily was already up, hand shot to her pocket to pull the gun free. Only one bullet. It was supposed to be special. She was supposed to save it. But keeping it didn’t matter much if she were dead.

“Oh, you got a gun in there? Is that it?” He ran two fingers down his face and they came back bloody. Then he jammed them into his mouth and sucked, leering. He spat a stream of red down his chin.

Fear burned the back of her skull as she tried to wrench the gun loose. The windbreaker fabric was wadded up all around it, making the pocket impassable. She reached across herself and tried to hold the jacket fast.

“You’re a woman. I’m a man. Let’s just let nature take its course, okay? Cute little thing like you needs protecting.” He took a step closer. “But you got to stop this silly game.” The captain was just using his body to block her in, throwing his space around her. He wasn’t scared. He wasn’t scared of anything.

Lily’s back hit the wall and she tore at the fabric, tore like she’d been buried alive and this was the only way up, the only way out. She wrenched the gun free and brought it up as the captain was close enough to shed his corpse stink camouflage. Cold click of the hammer pulled back and she stared right through him.

“That isn’t real or it isn’t loaded.” His eyes narrowed from wide crazy to more feral and calculating. “It’s a lighter.”

Lily shook her head slowly, giving him every chance to move on. She wished there was a better way out than the bullet. Finding the pistol with just the one shot. It had been an omen or a gift. She knew it hadn’t been meant for now, but plans have to change sometimes.

“I’ll just take away whatever you got squirreled away in that little hiding spot.” The captain gloated as he drew back his jaw and thrust his teeth over it, making a wet noise. “Then you won’t have a--“

The sound was loud, but not as much as Lily had expected. She’d heard shots, far away, through other parts of the airport, peppering the air as things broke loose, like squeals from an amusement park when the rides whipped by. This was brief, leaving only a slight ringing behind, not even an echo. The captain clutched at his chest, dark and thick liquid welling between splayed fingers.

The animal look never left his face. Even as he dropped to his knees. His eyes tracked Lily as she picked up the pipe and gripped it like a baseball bat in two hands and wound up.

He made a noise that conveyed no meaning other than deflation, whatever animating force he’d retained was escaping, crawling out the clenched teeth of his mouth. They were darkened by stains that suggested an appetite best left unexamined. Lily swung before he finished his protest or defiance, whatever he thought it was.

His body joined the others, but not before she checked his pockets. She pulled out an inexplicable collection of foil gum wrappers, all rolled up into little BBs of grotty silver. Then a lighter and a crumpled pack of cigarettes. Tom used to sneak those, thinking she was dumb enough not to notice. Even before a date, he’d suck down a drink or mint and that taste was always underneath his kiss. Tar and the breath of ash. She let him get away with it because, well, because it made him feel like he was smarter than he actually was. She’d loved him, even knowing his faults. Until his faults…

Lily bit back the thought and went through the dead man’s pockets. The uniform hung on him baggy, not from going hungry, either. Her fingers closed on something smooth and warm from being on his thigh. A knife.

Not her knife, the one she’d lost that night. She’d never even wanted to carry it, but she knew that most people, even most muggers, lost their nerve once they’d seen their own blood. She’d never used it until hell broke loose, thinking the chance was slipping away. Then she missed it after it was gone. But that was for the best. She didn’t want any more reminders.

Lily pulled out the weapon. The handle was matte black and rubberized, filthy with gunk like lichen in the diamond-pattern grip. She tested unfolding the blade, finding that it was oil-smooth and quiet, easy with just a little pressure from her thumb. Borderline legal, just one step away from a gravity knife. But legal didn’t really matter any longer, did it? She pocketed it and then rolled the captain, whoever he had been, onto the pile. She’d have to do something about that, one day.

One hand carrying the pipe and the other close to her mangled pocket with the new knife in it, Lily went about her rounds, showing little for her troubles besides an intact scotch bottle half-full and an off-brand smartphone. There was just enough battery power on it to see it was choked with unanswered messages. The top one was frantic enough to make Lily’s heart curl up before she tossed it into the wall. She made sure it was broken enough not to read any more. She had enough problems to not want to hear about anyone else’s needs or fears.

Outside it was good and dark, afterimages of the veins in the sky dully lit. One of the gelatinous kites held fast to the parked jet’s wing in a wind strong enough to voice whistling cries along the face of the terminal. Tentacles lashed, not driven by the wind alone, but trying to brush off more harrying birds. Or maybe they weren’t even birds, but another chunk of alien ecosystem feeding on itself. No free lunches, not even in this new world. Lily stopped in front of the smudgy window and tapped with a middle finger topped by a ragged nail.

“Don’t mess with Baltimore, asshole.”

Maybe it would be gone by the morning, nibbled to death by blackbirds or seagulls or whatever they were.

That moment, that hope of respite hit her with the weight of a runaway truck. She’d been pushing through days and nights with raw nerve, focused on her own continuing and Thomas’ as well. To think that maybe there was an end to this didn’t give her life. It just made her feel everything she’d pushed away. She collapsed into one of the chairs nearby and choked on her own breath, refusing to sob, refusing to cry for anyone who she’d hurt or killed or let die or even live. There wasn’t space in her for that. She was broken as the phone filled with messages.

But she would not cry.

She got up and went back to the lounge to call it a night and not sleep, not until the morning when the shadows cast by nothing would be outside and hungry, unless the birds found a way to eat them too.

Lily pushed open the door then shut it behind her. She nosed her way down the passage, dragging the pipe-spear behind her. Thomas wasn’t on the floor again. Maybe he’d actually rested. The light was off, the big emergency lantern. Some red-orange seeped in, the color of her old clock-radio when she was a kid. It was dim enough that she couldn’t see Tom in the nest of coats. She thought she heard him breathing though.

“Tom? Where are--“

The question went unfinished as something hit her from behind, just a little low to be a good kidney shot. A yawning star of pain opened up beneath her hip, eating awareness of all other things.

“Dumb bitch.” Thomas’ words were a fraying hiss. “You think I didn’t know.”

She dropped to the floor, the spear hitting it before she did. Blood lapped slowly from the wound. Stabbed somehow.

“What are you talking about?”

“Stop talking!” he yelled. His voice was near to shrieking. “I’m not as stupid as you think! I figured it out.”

Lily tried to roll over out of range of his voice. “Figured out what? Aaaah!” Her hipbone ground the cut into the floor as she completed the turn.

“It was you. You’ve been stalking me. You were the one who stabbed me that day.” He grunted and the emergency light came on, making her eyes dazzle.

“That’s crazy, Tom! You’re not thinking right!”

The rod was kicked away, hard enough that it clanged against a wall and echoed with a thud. “And that’s you without a weapon. Christ that hurts. Okay, get up slow.”

Lily did as she was ordered. No reason to let him think he was wrong. It always worked. She held out one hand up. “Hurt my arm when I went down. I can’t lift it.”

“Fine. Whatever.” He grunted. “Now admit it. I wanna hear it from you.”

She turned and he was standing, but swaying under the strain of the pain and exertion. His face was sweat-covered and glossy smooth in the light. He heavily favored his right leg and in his left hand, he carried a small knife, still red and wet with her blood.

Her blood, her knife. She kept her expression dead, wondering how he’d hidden it all this time.

“I was protecting you,” she said. “I saved your life.”

She didn’t say why.

“Stop it.” His expression slackened. “It’s over. I’m well enough to walk and you were too stupid to see that. But what the hell. It was nice to have you wait hand and foot on me while the world went to shit.”

“We got another chance, Tom.” Tears rolled down her cheek, acid hot. “Look me in the eyes and say you really think that!”

His eyes came up slowly, dumbly, afraid of what he might see.

“You’re still weak. You’re not in great shape. Just…”

His eyes locked on her and she took the moment to slide her new knife open. It didn’t even click as it locked.

“Look at my eyes. We got another chance. I brought you this far, okay? We’ll get through this. And after that, if you really want to…”

He looked into her, almost pleadingly, his own strength wavering, as if the knife in his hand weighed as much as that jet outside.

“Want to what?” the question came out like air from a leaking balloon, hollow and small.

“If you want to figure out what went wrong before, then we can.”

New waves of sweat, sweat without end wept out of his pores and his eyes rolled back in his head. He still held the knife as he dropped to the floor, energy and willpower spent. He’d always overestimated himself.

Lily breathed out through the pain as she toed the knife from his sleeping-child grip. Then she wrapped him in jackets where he lay, too heavy to move just now.

“You just get some sleep,” she said, kissing him on the forehead. “We’ll figure it all out.”

Lily slid the knife closed and smiled at him as he breathed deeply and unevenly. She wouldn’t need it just yet. But there was the question of whether he’d put things together or if he had just guessed. He couldn’t have known. She’d been very, very careful. Not perfect, obviously, but very careful. But not as much as she had been patient. Some things just can’t go unanswered.

She went to find the medical kit. Her wound wasn’t deep, but it wouldn’t stop bleeding on its own. She’d have to stop it herself. It wasn’t the first time he’d hurt her, not by far. But it would not happen again.

She watched him breathe in that cold light.

She watched for a long time.

FULL BLEED: WITH A SHORE LEAVE WRISTWATCH UNDERNEATH MY SLEEVE

Hey, you hear there’s money in publishing? Damn right. A lot of it. Lots of money in movies, too. Oh, and music. Tons of money. It’s just growing on trees, just there for the picking. Don’t even to have to bend over and grab those dollar bills.

I mean, why else would all these tech guys be trying to get in and disrupt these business ecosystems? They’re only interested in making money, so why would they go where it isn’t?

Good question.

Look, even Spotify is changing things up, right? Paying out less while the dudes at the top are cashing out stock. Harper Collins is out there asking its authors to please please please let them feed the LLM mulch machine. For what? LLMs are being fed by scripts that are specifically forbidden from the practice. You ask OpenAI to draw a frame from a Marvel movie and sure thing, man. I’ll get you that and it looks exactly like the original material only worse. But you can sure as hell tell that it’s being traced from someone else’s work. There’s a company that wants to publish eight thousand books a year, in a field that’s already impossible to navigate due to sheer scale. Amazon says “Yeah, dudes, keep ‘em coming.”

These aren’t activities that are undertaken by businesses that have any respect for the work that is created under their aegis. These are the actions of groups that are desperately using whatever means they can to squeeze more capital out of systems that are running past capacity. Already connected to every eyeball on the planet or pair of ears out there and nope, not enough.

These dudes are out there trying to automate the production of content, reduce it to a series of sliders massaging the flavor crystals being dropped onto ones and zeroes that get turned into something like music or art or anything we can perceive. They’re making mush. As cheaply as possible. And they’re trying to do it with music and art and books.

Which is funny, because it’s hard to imagine a time when these things have been more devalued by the markets that trade in them. Napster annihilated the value of recorded music and it’s been a race to the bottom since then. Ebooks were once a brave new market, now they’re the dumping ground for people writing thirty books a year because they can’t stop. Visual art and photography? Yeah, that too.

In the abstract, these things are less valuable then ever. But these absolute geniuses are creating a series of ever more expensive systems to keep pushing units out as quickly as possible. I’m not even going to touch on the pure Anti-Life nature of these units of content being created without actual human input. Were already agreed on this. I’m talking pure economics.

And the economics for art creation suck. To some degree, they always did.

But these geniuses need to make things that will pull in clicks or draw monthly subscriptions (because that’s how books and music and movies and tv shows are sold now) but still cost nearly nothing to produce. But these works, individually, are basically worthless. They only matter as part of a swarming system. Digital distribution has sucked the value out of th8s, but they’re depending on digital distribution to bring in enough money to make that line go up.

Maybe you like me see the problem with this.

Maybe you like me wonder if they’ve figured this out.

So if the money is mostly out of the equation, but for some big whale creators, what’s the game? Where’s the big returns that these guys need in order to justify the huge hardware and resource costs? Aisde from suckering all of the US work force into picking up and depending ont these tools (which only do what people already should be doing), I’m hard pressed to see where this goes. Maybe they believe they can replace the entertainment industry, but that’s an industry that’s in the process of being looted already.

It’s baffling. But then fads and schemes usually are.

Still, it’s a remarkable example of repurposed theft. All the human output that’s fed the internet is convertible into mulch to feed these script systems. And they got away with it because it’s a crime that we really don’t have a name for yet. But then we’ve got crimes like that happening right in front of us right now. Maybe it’s all crimes.

Not sure what’s to be done about it except not put out your work digitally. There’s a thought. The one thing that was going to save independent artist (and instead made ISPs rich after they got the government to foot the bill for all that infrastructure) became the poisoned chalice.

Of course that’s not possible. Not now. But yeah, I don’t have an answer. Just that I know a problem when I see it. The bigger problem is that the big studios and publishers and distribution networks are all complicit in it, which is something else entirely. Yeah.

As for the rest of things, we’re neck-deep in the holidays at least here in the US. Family gatherings, being pulled in too many directions at once, the whole nine yards. I’m trying to smash the outline for The Missing Pieces into a shape that I can work from and hopefully write a first draft before I start the Kickstarter for Fake Believe, likely in April.

I’ll probably continue to put up some short fiction for free here. Nobody buys the goddamn collections and I’d just rather that these things got read.

Happy holidays, everyone.

FULL BLEED: THE GRANITE SLAP

So there's gonna be a little text from me before the main feature. Then the main feature. You can punch out then or you can stick around to hear the joke explained, since precious few have gotten it in the ten or so years that this story has been out in the wild.

This is "Chunked" which was a story that I wrote for in response to an anthology call that was put out by an indie publisher, I think in late 2014 or early 2015. I dunno. It's been a long time. I wrote it and was pretty sure that they'd pass just like every other anthology had passed on all my work previously. I was getting used to that feeling.

Instead of that happening, the publisher accepted the story. A few minor changes. And it went into the volume of future-set SF with a Lovecraftian/Cthulhu mythos grounding. I went on to work with them a couple more times and they put out the first printing of The Queen of No Tomorrows. Then we parted ways.

I will say that when they accepted the book that was to be The Queen of No Tomorrows, I kinda sold it on being related to this story. I, in short, mostly lied about that. I was much more interested in that story and this one was a one-off and a mean joke at that. I didn't see much value in it. Until I let my brain chew on it in the background for awhile. And now it actually does have a place in the Hazeland setting. Not gonna say how, because I'm not even sure things will get to that point. But there'd certainly be no Hazeland books if this story hadn't come out. So I guess it's important in that regard.

On with the show.

CHUNKED

by Matt Maxwell

Originally printed in Tomorrow's Cthulhu from Broken Eye Books. 2015, I believe.

This text is somewhat modified from that printing and includes a passage that was removed to fit their word counts. I'm not big on word counts.

I was on the ship before I knew its name.

The deckhand who led me on board was tall and bony and wrapped in a leather poncho. He walked stooped and black like a bat wrapping itself with its wings against the warm wet.

"Thought it wasn't supposed to rain in LA," he said as he half-turned to regard the sky with a glare that could draw blood at a distance.

Past the congeries of light on the shore, the open steel structures of the cranes lined up like skeleton hands. Then night swallowed everything.

"We're not in Los Angeles," I said as I pulled my own jacket tight. "This is Terminal Island, Long Beach."

"First name suits it better." His scowl turned to mocking, lips pulled back enough to show the greening pink of his gums atop yellowed teeth. "How far away is LA?"

"Too close." I strained to match the action of the boat as I stepped off the ladder. My hesitation cost me some dignity as I waited too long to drop to the dirty white launch deck.

Above me, the deckhand settled over the controls, digesting them. He hadn't heard my fall or didn't care, instead drawing a finger out of his mouth to pull out something that had stuck between his teeth.

His head swiveled back. "Why would anyone not working want to come on board a flenser, anyways?" Suspicion seethed out of the centers of his eyes. "Not like we run all-inclusives, y'know?"

"Survey for Essential Affairs," I said then fidgeted audibly with the bag. "Cleared with your captain or we wouldn't be here."

"Oh sure, he's satisfied. Just I was curious on my own." He made a smacking sound like the last of lunch going down. "Thought you guys were a myth."

"Too real, I assure you. I observe. I write." The words came out clumsy, slippery as my feet had been on the wet aluminum steps where the grip-tape had worn out.

He swept slitted eyes up and down me like I said I was from Internal Revenue. "Where's your computer?" Then he settled back on his heels and laughed while the rain dripped off his folded bat-cape. He was paid well enough to wear gaunt leathers. But then, he was close to the source.

"It all goes on the phone," I offered. The luminous surface went bright as I swiped it. "I just dictate then let the machine format it."

"More like you're a talker then." His blue eyes laughed above his long yellow teeth. "And what's that on your lock screen, man? It's all blurry and fuzzy."

My eye went to it. The picture was black and white and grainy, a lake surface disturbed by elliptical ripples. In the center of it was a thing that looked like a long curved neck with a tiny head atop it. It suggested motion, of something much larger and barely seen, only just below the surface.

"Oh, that. It's the Loch Ness Monster. The 'Surgeon's photograph'. Almost a hundred years old."

"Kinda odd choice. Me? I got a rotating selection of hot-tots." He ran his eyes up and down me. "You wouldn't make the cut." Then a chuckle. "Why that? History buff?"

Even under the rain, my neck flushed hot but I resisted the urge to fiddle with the collar. "I guess I wanted a reminder of when the essentials were just hoaxes." Like my position. Like my reason for being here, which even I couldn't fully articulate to myself.

"No hoaxes out here, son. Just wild Benthi-Treats waiting to be harvested. But if I see any real sea monsters, I'll be glad to point 'em out to you."

I hoped the Captain was friendlier.

Essential Affairs was a toothless department but there wasn't a single ship captain who'd been happy to see someone from the office step on board. At the same time, they couldn't afford to turn us away. Perception being nine-tenths and such. I was more often than not seen as an advocate for murderers and nightmares, hence the easy job openings. Big turnover in the department but a solid per diem and mostly boring work. Mostly.

Trick was that I no longer worked for them, though my credentials still seemed to carry weight with enough people to get me here. The captain didn't need to know that and with luck he'd never figure it out.

The ship loomed on top of the water, reflected in the greasy moonlight. Wet surface lurched slowly, twitching like an animal's lips during dream time. Yellow light spilled from the superstructure, catching steam and smoke from countless pipes and exhaust ducts. It made its own weather, leaving only glimpses of what might lay behind the mist. My eyes swept to the name on the hull, written in white block letters taller than a man. I slid down my glasses to read.

Something touched my shoulder and I jerked.

The deckhand laughed. "You're just a barrel of entertainment." He flinched and lifted his arms, wiggling his fingers "Ooooooo! I'm a scary monster!"

I sucked back a breath and willed my heart to stop rattling around in my chest.

"You okay?" His amusement cooled down to something harder. "Gotta be made of stronger stuff than that if you wanna step on board. The stuff we catch—"

"I'm well aware of that," I snapped. "And I'll be fine." The pulse rushing through my neck put a small lie to that.

Drizzle ran down the black of his hood and he nodded like he knew I was lying. "Okay, buddy. I mean, no shame in turning back. Hell, most folk wouldn't have even waited on the dock. I mean, they're happy to pop open a cup and eat it cold, but—"

"Knowing where it comes from is another thing."

"Sure enough," he said as he docked the craft at the retractable landing.

I looked up at the metal angles and watched the water sheeting off of the hull, like it had just been thrust up from the ocean floor, shedding the Pacific as it settled on the surface.

-

The captain was a big man, weight pressing at the seams of the uniform shirt that was taut beneath the big orange overcoat. It was stained with something, a color that hovered uneasily between moldy green and dirty brown.

"Welcome aboard meester Lou-ellyn," he said with an accent so heavy that it had its own gravitational pull. His lips twitched with the words he held back.

"Thanks," I said as I wiped my glasses dry and replaced them. "Not like Russia out there, right?" I pointed to the rain slicked windows, yellow drops hanging and glittering in the corners.

His frown could have curdled blood to scabs. "Ukranian. Not Russian." He spat something from between his big teeth. It hissed into the corner and skittered away into the dark. His lips were stained green from Lulu.

"I'm very sorry." The phrase flipped out of my mouth, covered in stupid.

"It is okay, Lew-ellyn," he replied. "Ukraine only here now." His fist thudded against the shirt, right above his heart. He swiped at his lip with the back of his hand, not noticing the smear that it left. Brittle chips of something like insect shell hung in the spit.

"I wanted to, to thank you for letting me on board on such short notice."

He turned away with a shrug of shoulders that was lost under the stained orange fabric. "Your paperwork cleared. And—"

"And?" I stifled a cough, guts kicking. He knew.

The captain's eyes narrowed in mirth. "Never seen EA man actually do the job. Kind of myth. Was curious to see what kind of man would wander onto flenser." His hand swept around the deck, tiny shards of moisture on the windows glinting in the yellow light. When finished, he turned and his eyes were lit with a sharpness.

"I've been to the accelerator gateway in Blackrock, Nevada. And to the aeries and tanneries of Bangkok." I lay it out to him like an offering.

"Got my leathers from there. Ain't nothing cuts through these babies." The deckhand slapped his leg and the sound was sharp.

"So you are a Collector? Preserver? I hear about people like that. Want see them all."

He was closer to right than wrong but didn't need to be told that. "Hard to get a census on ships," I said after a moment. "And I wanted to see the final frontier. I mean, you're after the big one, right?"

"You hear correct." The Captain pointed at the helmsman and snapped his fingers. "We finish out Devil's Reef, every last one of those bastards. Even the big one down around the Horn. Day-something. Took a week to process. Quality product, too. Then we come up here."

Lit from below, the helmsman looked like a drowning man, downturned lips and protruding mouth painted in the emerald light of his console. "Locked in, Captain. Day at half power."

"A day?" I asked. "I thought it would be longer." The idea of it having been so close all this time ate at me suddenly. A hundred days would have been too close, once I'd known it was there.

"Is that fear?" The Captain laughed. "And you have been to Blackrock? Surely that was more frightening with the colors and the—"

"Geometries?"

"Yes. Ge-om-et-ries." He repeated the word, playing with each of the syllables like it was a piece of fatty tuna on his tongue. "The abstractions." His finger thrust out from his fist and he rotated it around his ear and whistled.

"It was safer than you'd think. There was a distance between us and the Essential at the gateway." I coughed and shifted on my feet. "A day?"

"Hah!" He fished out a translucent plastic bag from inside his jacket. The instrument lights shone through it, showing turquoise-colored gelatin. Suspended in that were strings of something like fungus, dotted with the metallic chitin I'd seen earlier.

Pure Lulu.

He took three fingers and shaped up a wad of it, then stuffed it into his cheek. Of course I knew what Lulu did. I also knew it wasn't for me. It made the walls reverberate and let you see around corners and in-between words. It was essential for Flensers, letting them find prey more easily. Letting them look at the things with the distance necessary to do the job and not go insane. Or only go insane in a way that let them keep being productive.

The captain offered the pouch to the helmsman, who took a generous helping and stuffed it underneath his cheek, getting back to the first knuckle of his hand as he did. His fingers came out wet and he stared ahead, uncaring.

Fingers reached past me as the deckhand leaned for a pinch as well. The bag stopped in front of me and the captain shook it. Contents jiggling, they caught the console lights like a stars in a splashed puddle.

I held up my hand, palm out.

"That stuff gets in the way of my reports."

"Your talking, you mean," said the deckhand. His words went flabby around the Lulu in his cheek.

"So, you want tour of the ship?" The captain clapped his hand on my shoulder and it felt like a dead cat there. "Quiet time. Won't last. Almost done processing. Caught one in Gulf of Mexico. So many legs." His eyes were black and dead as the Lulu took hold.

"A big one, I hope?"

"Only big ones left. Little ones easy to snap up. Use trawl-field. Big ones we need to fight. Old school." He struck a pose like drunken wrestler and more drool than growl escaped his lips.

"Trawl is a big drain on the power plant," the deckhand interrupted. Then he sucked his fingers, getting the last bits of it off. "So we have to use a grounding line instead. You time it right and there's no escaping. Come on. I'll show you." He shrugged his shoulder and rolled the gesture all the way out to his pointing finger, which wavered now.

"Go on. Nothing happen to you here, Lew-ellyn. You get home in one piece. I don't want mess. You don't want mess. We same." His hand landed on me hard. "Just don't sample the merchandise before processing. Have to work up to that." He winked and his lips pursed then smacked.

The captain's hand slid away and I could only feel relief.

-

There was no sense of motion any more, as if the world itself was moving around the ship now. I followed the deckhand down the metal stairs to the cargo hold, each step making a skeletal clang. The smell of the pushers was unbearable down here, even though fans worked to pump fresh air in, blowing hard enough to make me wish I'd worn a hat. Fetid and moist air swam up inside me but I held back the gag.

"You ever get used to it?" I asked my guide. "The smell?"

"What smell?"

"Why did I ask."

Maybe there wasn't any fresh air to be had, not with the clinging weather following the ship around.

I watched as a pusher sidled up to a pallet double-loaded with yellow barrels, each easily reaching up to my shoulder. They were held in place with sheets of shrinkwrap that had a hazy sheen of color and ghost-writing when seen at an angle. The pusher itself was a rough blackish cube, perhaps eight feet to an edge. It was tough to tell, as the shape only stayed mostly fixed. Two prongs extruded from its front face as it approached, like icicles melting in reverse. They slid under the pallet and the pusher surged, bunching up in the back and rippling the power forward as it lifted.

It moved along like a snail, but more quickly, at jogging speed even pushing tons. Individual motions disappeared into a fluid whole and it shoved the load along the empty floor, soundless but for a hushed scuffing. I expected a sheen of slime, was disappointed when it wasn't there. The overhead lights made the pusher's shadow monolithic as it surged.

I stared at the skin of the thing, which looked like stone, evidence of texture and striation that changed with every flexing.

"Ever had a problem with your pushers?" I asked.

"Naw. Them things are easy to control once you get them configured right. The looser the shape, the more likely they are to buck. Gotta keep 'em enclosed physically so they stay enclosed mentally, y'know? Come on."

He walked forward, taking us right to the pusher, without thought or hesitation. Maybe he didn't know about the incident in Sunnyvale or maybe he thought that couldn't happen here.

Something cold and oily coiled up in me but I knew that if I refused, I'd be tormented without end. It was just a simple machine, after all. No moving parts, even.

The deckhand in gaunt leathers stopped, impossibly skinny and black next to the thing. He then put his hand out and smacked it flat on the pusher. It didn't have skin, or it was all its skin. I missed that lecture.

"Come on. It's as close to touching an elephant as anyone like you is going to get these days."

"Land or sea?"

"Land elephants? You funnin' me?"

My steps echoed as the palm-slap died down in my ears. I took a breath and tried to rein in my raging pulse. Controlled, just like the pusher. My hand made contact and I jumped only a little when I felt the surface twitch under my touch, like an irritated horse shaking off a bluebottle. The whole thing moved under my palm, neither cold nor warm, roughness only perceived fleetingly.

"See? Perfectly safe."

"How are you…?" There was something intoxicating about the sensation of this much power underneath my fingertips. Maybe this was what Lulu was like.

"Coherence induck prods." He grinned dumbly at the thing, teeth showing green. That must have been the light. "Yeah, these babies are tamer than kittens. Configurations made for obedience. And if you think this is a trip, take a look at the ones in the engine room. Yeah, we don't even allow those to take a shape past a cylinder. Safety first."

My stomach turned at the thought. How titanic must the things have been to keep a ship this big moving?

"I'd have thought that this ship used nuclear or something."

"Sure as hell ain't diesel. Dinosaurs all been burned up. And these things are better pushers than fuel, y'know?"

The cube shuddered under my touch, different this time and my hand jumped back like it had been resting on a hot stove.

"Have a little faith!" He laughed but pulled his hand away too.

"Where is this one from?" I asked. "Down south?"

"Waaay down south. That's the only place to get good source now."

"I heard there was a lab in Boston that's growing these. Hand-tamed. Use them for vehicles, even pets."

"Pet rocks? Whatever sells, man."

The pusher continued along its path, neither stone nor jelly but somewhere upsettingly in-between. The feeling of it still rested in my palm like muscle memory of a roller-coaster or one of those tingler strength testers you’d find at an old carnival.

"You have any other essentials down here?" I asked. I'd only seen human crew members aside from the pusher. "No leather cukes or lobsters?"

"Maybe in the hold. This here's a flenser. All we do is catch and strip and early reduction. Nothing fancy. If we see a lobster out here, it better not interfere is all I'm saying. We can flense them too."

He strode on ahead but I stopped in place. "Hey!" I called.

The cloak drooped around him as he came to a halt. "What?"

"This is all just hitting me now. You think we can finish the tour tomorrow?" My pulse roared through my temples. I'd been able to hold things off this long, but no longer. "I'd like to go to my cabin now. Need to start filing the preliminary."

"What? Oh, sure." He slid past me like grease. "You're lucky, guest quarters are above the waterline on our ship. You don't want to bunking in down there."

"Why not?"

"If you think this place smells, you wouldn't make it long."

-

The room was no bigger than a rich man's hearse. I slept but not well.

It wasn't seasickness but something else. I couldn't feel any sensation of movement, even though we were under power to our destination, south and west of here. That much I could gather from the helmsman's screen. I drank from my supply of water that I'd brought on board and tore open the foil on an Icthyo bar. I hadn't sourced it personally, but the dealer was reputable. Who knew what kind of food they'd be serving here? Probably cut straight from whatever they'd caught. That was a little too close to the start of the supply chain for me.

The protein stick was too salty by half, so I cut it with some crackers. Dry, but plain enough to work. My fingers lingered over the pear in the bag, but I'd save that for a real emergency. Or for trade, if anyone on this ship would have anything I thought worth giving up fresh fruit for.

Checked messages and found only the automated garbage. More promises of jobs with "real outlets" after building a portfolio of apprentice work with an agent. Funny how none of the stuff I'd done before could carry over. Proprietary work was full of teeth like that.

The door knock rang through the small room and I pulled my glasses on. "Yes, what is it?" My voice sounded unsure and tentative, even to me.

"Hey there. Captain thought you might want to know that the timetable's moved up. We're expecting contact in a few hours."

My heart strangled in my throat, double wrapped by arteries come loose. "Hours? But it was supposed to be tonight?"

"And even that was a little close, yeah?" The deckhand laughed on the other side. "Target's moving and what's more, moving right towards us. Probably was the whole time."

I slid out of the cot and took the two steps to reach the door, sliding it to one side. "Towards us?" I prayed that I'd heard it wrong.

"Doesn't take too much to get you out of bed, does it?"

"Towards us?"

"Yeah, this one's full of piss and vinegar. Big one, too. Point eight seven hull lengths." He grinned and his long face distorted without mirth. "Ya ain't scared, are ya?"

"If you aren't, then I'm not."

His empty blue eyes flicked up and down. "Gawd but you are a terrible liar. Get yourself dressed and on the deck if you want to catch the show."

"Is that safe? I mean, to look at it directly?"

"Well, you might need rubber pants, but it's safe enough. Lulu would help but you've already made your stand on that, right?"

The idea of partaking twitched in my stomach like a live crab. "How about the glasses?"

"Lenses, you mean?" His lip rose into a sneer but he didn't let it come to full. "You won't find a pair on the ship. Those things mess with your head."

"Good enough for the crews at Blackrock and near any other containment facility."

"Gutless cowards, all of you. Yeah, put your lenses on if it'll make you feel better." He turned without saying another word, oozing contempt as he pulled out a clear pouch that shone blue and grabbed a wad.

-

The rain had broken but the sea still did a slow roil like molten lead. Churning from beneath formed hundreds of chaotic whorls on the surface. The sky itself was dull and metallic, dark above but greenish at the horizon, reversing the image of the water. It didn't feel like we were anywhere now, sea and sky looking the same in either direction. The wind that blew smelled like fish, like meat left out at low tide.

Something ahead of us surged off the port side bow. It broke through the water but wasn't visible through the spray and wake. Coy, unlike the subject of the Surgeon Photograph. It wasn't teasing or there to elicit wonder, no such pretense.

The smell intensified and I pulled out a mask, holding it to my mouth and sucking in on the bleach and alcohol. As much as they stung upon the inhale, they beat the alternative.

On the level below, black-clad workers shifted and made the line ready. Spools of metal shone silver as they peeled the yellow sheathing off, leaving it like aside jellied snake skins. Another clutch of them fussed over the harpoon cannon, with a bore large enough to drive a car down. One of the overhead gantries brought the piercing rod into place, holding the missile low enough so the crew could attach the grounding cable.

I'd never understood how it worked, but then the metaphysics involved went over just about everyone's heads, including most of EA, who simply signed off on what they couldn't comprehend so long as the results kept coming. But what I did understand was that the essentials needed to be grounded in order to be flensed. They existed in some kind of half-life until their state could be fixed and then they could be worked. Before that, they were real enough to split the ship's hull in half, just not to be consumed.

"You all know the drill," the voice boomed out of the loudspeaker. "And that's cash money out there flopping around in the surf. We don't leave any of that on the table."

The men in their still-slick black clothing all nodded as the thing in the water broke again. Something like an arm broke the surface and made a clawing forward stroke into the sea. Distortion hovered around it, like it was a video only half-loaded, giant chunks of it being interpolated or only guessed at. The low sun didn't help at all, just giving it enough light to show a sheath of greenish slime like liquid emerald.

But I knew it wasn't a just a sheath. It looked like that all the way through. Underwater green, always wet.

I wished for it to be a hoax, a simple trick. Sunlight scattered and my brain imagining anything else, a giant squid half-chewed and spit out by a whale bigger than anyone had on record. I wanted it to be not real, which it somehow was, only to be made realer in a few moments.

The piercer was shunted into the barrel, thousands of meters of the grounding cable coiled on giant spools now uncovered. Sunlight gleamed off it, shining like a mirror hammered out into wire thicker around than a man's arm.

Water around the thing boiled. The sea wasn't attached to the thing's motion, but it was as if even coming into contact with the thing made the water explode, matter and anti-matter combining into swirling chaos. Like this thing fundamentally didn't belong here, disintegrating any reality it touched.

Of course. It was only partly real now. It wasn't grounded.

"Good to see you out here, even if it is with crutch." The captain's voice boomed behind me, but I didn't jump this time.

"Crutch?"

He pointed to the lenses and made a face to indicate the mask. "You know why you need those, yes?"

"The smell is revolting," I said.

He laughed. "Your attachment to aesthetic is touching, but is wrong." He folded the bag as he stuffed his fingers deep into his cheek. They came back slick as that thing in the water.

"Without the glasses I'd go crazy. Unless I started crazy that is."

"Ha! None of us is crazy here."

Crazy for Lulu maybe.

"So why do I need these things?" I thought about taking the mask off, but a whiff of what lay on the water sneaked past a corner and I had to choke back a gag.

"Sentiment, my friend." He put an arm around me and leaned in close enough so I could smell the Lulu on his breath, like jellyfish-flavored mints. "You think this represents something more than it is." The crinkles on his face deepened as he smiled, knowing I wouldn't get it.

"And what is it?"

"Lots of goop to process. Jobs for a thousand flensers. Heart of thriving industry. Frozen dinners waiting to happen."

He squeezed me like a gorilla squeezing an orange, flush with pride.

"Nothing to be afraid of at all?"

"It only smell bad. It is not bad."

The thing on the port side lurched forward like an island cut free and rolling on a storm surge, part liquid, part solid, hideously in-between states. It raised an arm that looked more like a melting skyscraper wrapped in green glass. The sunlight passed through it murkily and beneath the skin something swam, sluggish. I sucked in the mask and tried to see it like the Captain did. Countless individual servings of Benthi-Chow in those bright green and yellow tubs on store shelves.

I couldn't do it. Something boiled up at the back of my throat and I retched over the rail, nearly hitting a black-clad lineman. He didn't notice, running a gloved hand over the grounding line one last time. My mask hung by one ear in the breeze.

"See, I tell you. You no need stupid mask." The Captain's laugh barked out like a seal. "Face it as it will be, my friend."

His hand smacked again between my shoulder blades and I lost the last of my sparse breakfast and mask as that fluttered away and over the side.

"If it make you feel better, that big boy won't be a bother in about five minutes."

I was dimly aware of the shadow cast by the launcher's barrel as it turned towards the thing. The creature seethed in the water, reaching for the ship, neither urgent nor afraid, like it was reaching for one of several snacks just within reach.

"Smile, you son of blubber." The captain's whisper was hoarse and ragged now. He was all up in the Lulu. Maybe the words for was whatever he saw in his head now and not the thing bearing down on us.

Through the mist was a green hellscape, gelatinous and shifting. There were two black spaces in the center of it, almost like eyes, but nothing could have eyes like this. The urge to rip off my lenses bit at me, but I kept my hands on the rail instead.

"Fire!" the captain yelled. "Fire to bring supper home!"

No other sound existed after that. Just a horrible woosh that ramped up for the space of a heartbeat and then cut out. Several tons of decompressing propellant hissed around the barrel of the spear gun, more weather, quickly lost in the smokestack miasma that trailed behind us.

The grounding line shot out in silence, only my brain imagining a KERRANG! of metal against metal. Cable shone hard as it unspooled behind, men laying flat on the deck to avoid being decapitated by flying steel.

I looked up to see the line go tight for a second then slack as the cable's momentum caught up to the spear sticking out of the thing. It jutted out, embedded some distance below the eyes. Lulu addicts or not, the crew knew their business.

The thing stopped now, lowering its arm into the water slowly and curiously, distracted by sensation.

"Throw the current!" The captain yelled now. "Ground that piece of meat!" The words were muffled like they were through a hundred feet of cotton batting, though he was right next to me.

I felt a galvanic snap and my hair stood up and my jaw clenched. At Blackrock they kept the field and the essentials isolated far enough away that you only noticed a slight buzzing in the back of your skull. This was a somatic shock through the whole body. Were I not holding onto the railing, I'd have dropped to the deck or thrown myself over in spasm. But I didn't need the rubber pants after all.

The thing shook once, ripped from a state of shifting in-between to that of leaden certainty, of reality so solid that it could now be cut by knives and carved into bite-sized chunks. It could be reckoned entirely. And now known, the creature stopped moving, only so much gelid meat awaiting the butchers.

-

Seagulls wheeled above it but did not land. Instead they dodged in and out of the bright white arc lights that played over the massive carcass alongside the ship. Their screams were insane, chattering.

"Is it always like this?" I asked one of the black-slickered men.

He looked up and his features were once-strong but now molded into something paler and duller. His lips stained green as he parted them to answer. "No. This is different. Gulls usually won't eat this until it's been processed."

Which was smarter than the handful of workers I'd seen down on the muscle shoals floating alongside, kneeling and grabbing up handfuls of slime, licking their fingers clean. They did it mechanically, without joy or shame. Perhaps the captain had been down their earlier, beefing up his stash. More likely was that the choicest goop was being turned into Lulu for his consumption and these poor souls were skimming some for themselves.

The carcass was being maneuvered by a series of hovering skimmers, each of them with grounding hooks attached. They worked with the currents and wind, reading each and calculating the best vectoring paths. Their blades whirred with an eerie pulsing rhythm. The gulls pecked at them, seeing these things as nothing more than larger, blacker birds invading their territory, taking pieces of their kill.

Ever so slowly, the drones pushed the titan corpse into the receiving bay at the back of the ship. A single deck extended from the starboard side, busy with activity, wranglers driving the skimmers driving the giant mass of now-flesh.

I tried not to think about where the power for all this came from, to watch it dispassionately as the captain had urged me to with his drunken manner and breath that betrayed appetites that I couldn't dare contemplate. The body floated, sheared from gravity as teams of men in yellow hoods flashed electric chainsaw blades that bit through the meat and great strips of it were flensed away from the mass.

They couldn't even wait for it to be lashed down to the work docks.

"Beautiful sight, ain't it?" The deckhand settled next to me on the rail, loose and flush with what must have been very fresh Lulu.

"I suppose." The green of the thing was bilious now, more yellow than emerald. Maybe it was already starting to rot, locked in our world.

"Enthusiasm, Lou-ellyn," he said in a dire imitation of the captain's accent.

"Sorry. Just that when essentials are harvested over at Blackrock, it's more like watching a light-show or fireworks. This is different."

"Captain's right. You're a preservationist." He whistled and as he did, the light rimmed his face and he looked like a crescent moon-man with the face on the wrong side. "But a man's gotta eat. Woman, for that matter."

"I don't care for seafood." Not that I could think about eating. Even the pear waiting back in my bag in the room was rotten in my mind, mealy and slimy.

"Maybe you just need a taste of the right stuff instead. You'll stop fretting." His smile had no reassurance.

The swarms of men, what seemed like every hand on the ship, were down there now, flensing the fiction off the bone and slipping it into giant polyethylene sleeves or siphon tubes that ate giant chunks of flesh as fast as they could be fed. Above them, the seagulls continued their chattering, an odd sing-song quality behind it now, with a rhythm that was clear to me, though nobody else seemed to hear it.

"No," I lied. "I just need to file my report and then get back on dry land."

"What report? That stuff you babble into your phone?" His smile turned wicked now. "Oh yeah, we all figured it out."

I went back to gripping the rail, pressing my flesh to the cold metal to have something to hold onto, otherwise my brain would scatter off into a thousand directions. I checked my breath and held it down.

"Figured what?" My lie, for once, convinced even me.

"Why you like hoaxes so much. You know." Lips pulled tight against teeth, just a line of green between them.

I shook my head. "Enlighten me."

"You'd rather have that thing be not real, you know? Half-real. Strong enough to hurt you but invincible. We'd rather have it so we can take ourselves a bite. Solid. Known." He pointed and even with the weight of the gloves, his finger seemed impossibly skinny. "You're sad because you've seen it and now it's real and just meat, not like that sea monster on the phone."

I let him think he was right. I listened to the sounds of the seagulls and let them make more sense to me than him.

"Nothing to say, mister EA report talker? Gonna let your tears stain the pages?"

The sigh escaped me without thought. A little heavy.

"So there's the dream, man. Squid meat in vacuum packed bags. Chunked. Dig it." He waited for a response which I wasn't going to give then shrugged and swept away.

-

I was hollow in the room, staring at the metal ceiling, scratched and marked with graffiti from a hundred others. The sound of the seagulls continued somewhere in the back of my mind.

The room lurched, as if we'd hit something or suddenly picked up speed. I rolled out of the cot and took to the floor before another something shook the whole ship. A red LED dome started flashing along with a chirp that dug into my skull, letting me hear nothing else while it blared. My jacket was on and I was out the door before it pulsed again.

Clamor bubbled around me and below. Feet and hands hitting the deck and slamming bulkhead doors back with empty clangs. Everyone was moving.

And then they weren't. The deck shook and jarred and over the chaos, I heard the screaming of seagulls. They were laughing as the ship yawed and I was thrown to the wall become floor, before it snapped back sickeningly. Something roared like all the seas being dumped out in mile-high waves and crashing down. It must have been the ocean itself.

Tears welled up in my eyes. I thought it from the sharp pain in my elbow which felt broken, having taken most of my weight and useless now. But it wasn't that.

Crewmen screamed and cried in reply, gasps and shock welling up in a torrent of realized fear. I could have jarred and preserved it, so thick was it around me.

The ship settled back, but something was wrong. We were pitched backwards, as if a mighty weight at the tail end was pulling us down. I felt the engines go to full in response, a shudder braking through my feet as I stood uneasily.

The captain started babbling something over the loudspeaker between those incessant chirps. It must have been Russian or Ukranian, whatever was the language of his heart. But it didn't sound human at all. As he spoke, the seagulls hushed and the roar subsided, replaced by another sound.

Creaking. A groan ten miles long snaked past me and I felt the engines go dead beneath me with a loud CHUNK. The ship lolled in the water and I could feel the angle of descent steepen. Outside the door, men were splashing overboard and screaming at one another or the sea or the sky, helplessly and flailing.

Something moved far below me, down under the skewed decks beneath. There was sensation of power, like the engines starting up, but it wasn't that. There was no regularity in it, but there was unleashed strength. It hammered in every direction at once. The ship shook again, but this time it was from within. Violence pulsed as bulkheads below me shattered and tore.

I thought of the pushers on the cargo deck and how they were small by comparison to the engine room menagerie. I thought about the shapes they'd take once the induction fields were off, the horrible unchained freedom.

The life vest felt already wet beneath my fingers, but I took it anyways. The thought of going back for the pear flashed through my mind, but there wouldn't be time. The ship would only last moments if even that.

Tears flooded down my face, hot and stinging, even where they welled behind my glasses. The night wind whipped over my face as I slipped out the door and onto the deck. I didn't look at the bodies, imagining them glistening with a sheen of fresh emerald slime instead. That was enough.

The water below was black and choppy with the thrashing of hundreds of limbs and another, larger set of waves driving away from the ship. Something had dove under the surface and was still leashed to the ship, bringing it down as well. The whole works heaved. The grounding line had gone tight.

I stood canted at a sickening angle, high up, but I could make it. There was a moment of dreamy weightlessness and rushing before the granite slap of impact on the water.

-

The dull fire of my arm roused me, though I didn't let go of the life jacket, which I was holding onto more than wearing by now. It was still night and the gulls still laughed above my head, but now it was a chaotic and disorderly sound. There was nothing underneath it as before.

My head lolled up to the night sky, still black and huge. I turned, groaning as I did. Rimmed by the remnants of its own strange weather, the prow of the ship jutted out of the calming sea like a misplaced monolith, suggesting so much of what was happening beneath the surface. The sea lurched and the bow itself shook like a toy in a palsied hand.

It slid beneath the surface without me knowing its full name, only the letters PROVIDENCE written in man-high writing, never to be read again.

--

Stop reading here if you don't want the artist's statement changing what you might think of the story. Yeah, I could go on about that whole relationship for some time. I won't here.

So this was me declaring war on, I dunno, mythos revisionism I suppose. Or simply getting these dead ideas to dance around. The Lovecraft Industrial Complex, perhaps. I literalized it. I expected folks to take umbrage, after all there's a lot of people out there doing HPL revisions or working out from a piece of marginalia or hooking onto what is ultimately a franchise that's free for them the use. Now, I did no different. You got me there. Satire is a vampiric or parasitic process. There has to be a host body to latch onto. But I'm doing it to bite the hand. Not to fix HPL's work or repurpose it. Perhaps I'm a preservationist. Perhaps I understand that the damage has been done and he's in the DNA of contemporary horror, at least a strain or five of it, and isn't going away. It was shots fired. Only instead of being seen as that, it was just a fun little mythos story. Certainly not what I intended and led in directions I couldn't have guessed.

More than you probably wanted to know.