Negative Space

by B.R. Yeager

All the world blurred, a vibrating hemorrhage, and it was fine because I could finally feel how little impact I’d ever have on the world. Losing that dread that one day you’ll somehow ruin everything, for yourself and everyone else. The realization that I could simply leave and the world wouldn’t miss me.

Kinsfield’s

King's Field, maybe? This author seems online enough for that.

yeh this EDM guy did a dope version of it you can hear it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QAqJAfBjN8

Venetian Snares, eh?

Minute after minute rotted by.

The basement and music had become this incomprehensible landscape threatening to split me open. Like meeting God finally and learning he hates you.

I’d forgotten he’d become a cop. When he was 14 and I was 10, he’d shown me the swastika he’d tattooed on his leg with a needle and a broken pen. Then he asked if I wanted a kiss.

Sounds about right.

I spoke calmly. Composed. Waiting for the conversation to end. Trying to keep my worries from bleeding into hers, and hers into mine.

No one said anything about how he used to be dead.

“Sometimes that’s the only way you can save someone.” He smiled and wagged his head. “You’ve seen the way God sees. And God’s hurting people all the time.”

I don’t know whether I actually did anything. Whether I was actually responsible for or had any influence on her escape. But I let her believe it, because it meant the world could be something more than just the people trying to destroy us.

No matter what happens to you, everyone eventually makes you pretend like everything’s back to normal.

The campus was a dead vision of the future. A span of ages. Old, pilloried buildings broken up by blocky Blade Runner towers. Grey concrete corridors buried beneath the ground. All like alien ruins.

The computer was new but the phone was decades old. I don’t think I’d ever seen a landline before.

He named me his caretaker. I moved into his apartment and we held each other for years, feeling each other’s bodies soften and warp.

I laughed. “So what’s the moral?” Another pause, and then: “One day, no one will ever know you were here.”