The Cipher

by Kathe Koja

Pure black and the sense of pulsation, especially when you looked at it too closely, the sense of something not living but alive, not even something but some—process.

You always think you’d like it if the Twilight Zone came true. You can forget that shit.

This time I saw the beauty, if there is beauty in death, little weird corpses I didn’t want to touch.

but it wasn’t so much the accusation of fear as the implication that she was somehow—it sounds ridiculous—intellectually braver than I, that she had the guts to push a thing past its limits, to turn it upside down and shake it with all her might, when I was frightened to handle it at all.

“A shitty little pet-store rat is hardly a human being,” but there was something there I didn’t like at all, maybe the too obvious disgust at my words, the shifty overplay.

and I thought, Something bad will happen now, worse than the bugs.

This kind of adventure was not only her climate, it was maybe the only climate in which she was meant to live.

Ah God, the happy hells I can create, you too, all of us. Even Nakota. We are all our worst best friends. Don’t agree? Go fuck yourself.

I’m not one who wants to know the future: at the best it spoils the present, with longing or dismay, and at the worst, well.

I’ll take my now, waking with a lover’s scent still on me, around me, take my hopes before they’re maybe tragedy; a good morning is still a good morning, even if it leads to apocalypse at night.

Or maybe we were just the particularly stupid brand of geek who doesn’t believe it till it’s on TV.

that kind of winter calm where every step is magnified, my friends the crows in bleak formation and me crunch, crunch, through the bitter crust beneath;

Curiosity is a horrible thing.

Was the darkness always there? Was all it needed to infiltrate a lack of determination to keep it out? and had I really done all this to myself, by myself, by being the little I was?

I was so tired of hating myself. But I was so good at it, it was such a comfortable way to be,

It’s so easy to be nothing. It requires very little thought or afterthought, you can always find people to drink with you, hang out with you, everybody needs a little nothing in their life, right?

What do I want. I thought. Transformation? Do I want, at all?

Because in the end we are what we are, we want what we want, whether we know it or not. Whether we care to resist or not, or whether in the end it’s worth resistance after all.

A depression, that’s what a hole was, no matter how dark and lively, no matter how ultimately full.

And below that I was simply scared shitless, a postcard from the devil, or more ominously a collect call from God himself, will you accept charges?

And dreamed for once of a paradise that even I could reach, past darkness, a place where there was nothing left for my heart to carry. And I lay at rest there in paradise, and, looking up, saw distant and far above me a circle edged in black, and beyond that circle, like a living cloud, the quiet darkness of the empty storage room.