If I am being truthful with myself, I felt pieces of his name being written on me with each one of them I redeemed.

My skin is clear. I know this because Solomon ensured every bit of it was torn away and discarded before he would even consider a resurrection. Although I have not delved into his mind as I have Agrat, Sakhr, Tamar, and the others, I know he speaks truth when he tells me this. My cat’s eyes have grown more powerful than I ever could have imagined. When it comes to the discernment of what others say I have found no mistakes in my judgment.

This ability is so powerful I feel like there is nothing I can’t see with them.

Yet, even as I feel it. I cannot see it.

Even as I search every inch of me while I scrub until I bleed underneath boiling water.

I can’t yet see it.

I know I am not lying to myself as I know that Solomon was not lying to me so why can’t I see into the place where it hides?

I know it is not written on my skin or the muscle underneath so why do I keep looking there?

Holding myself still in the water I let my restless body relax. I take in the air until I feel like I may burst. My hands flow out of the liquid that covers the rest of my body. They gently rest against the arms of my container to keep me from moving as I float. I feel the way the smooth surface of the tub hides grains forced together from the bronze they melted down. Smooth to the eye but unable to hide once all my powers of observation are engaged.

I have no choice but to let out that breath and sink under the water when I finally realize it.

I see it.

The place I feel isn’t on the surface.

It isn’t under the next layer.

Even another layer down I have to truly look to be sure.

I hold up my hand.

My eyes narrow and the round human pupil becomes the slitted cat’s. The iris changes from green into yellow. With vision that penetrates through the surface of my own skin, I pull back the soft layer of sinew underneath and gaze upon what hides below it all.

It is as small as one grain of rice.

Stuck like a splinter buried deep under the surface.

It is written on my bones just once.

On the finger that held the tool to inscribe my name in the places in between his own.

But it isn’t exactly his name is it?

Not the name written by him exactly. Still the same but also…different.

I search the way the inscription ebbs and flows. The sharp rise at the beginning. The curves over and around the middle. The straight lines that slither off at the end.

The way I learned to write in between his lines was by seeing the places where he left space. Where the tiny gaps became chasms of openings.

Yet when I look at the name of Amnon written there it is somehow not the same.

It burns in a way that both intoxicates with power and engulfs the area in pain. Like metal just melted, waiting to be shaped into something dangerous. If it is touched by the skin, the skin will be melted away.

“What are you?”

The silence is my only answer.

I know that there are no gaps in this name.

This name isn’t his.

Then whose is it?

When the knock wakes me from studying that name I am not sure if it has been days, weeks, or only a moment.

That thing makes my skin crawl in a way that I never could have imagined.

When I see the boy that Amnon has become I realize he is hurt immediately.

His arm is broken.

“Mother.”

The way he says it is so genuine.

Even as the pain hides behind his eyes I know that he is trying to bury it.

The frailty of this body is not something I have ever seen. When I gently touch his arms with healing fingers, he still winces from the intense pain. I cannot help myself from wondering what could do this.

“How?”

He does not answer immediately. It is as if he is struggling with whether or not to answer for a thousand questions. His face contorts like he is struggling up a hidden mountain that sits between us. Even as he realizes it is less about all of that than why it hurts him so bad for me to touch him or what danger has been found I can still see something unspoken eating at him like a carrion bird.

He cannot look me in the eye when he finally opens his lips.

His body trembles from so much more than the pain.

I hear the doubt in his breath.

I feel the terror at his weakness.

Then that name suddenly sears down into my marrow.

“They are here.”

- - -

One hour before Lilith and Amnon’s meeting

At the foot of the ruins where the tower once stood, a crack in the fabric of existence forms a four-foot-long crease that grows just slow enough to not notice unless you leave and return.

A whisper so soft that it sounds like a gentle breeze far off in the distance. It is spoken without any break in cadence or pause for breath. Like a long note held through perfect breath control.

I know the words as well as I know my former name. The thing I am not sure of is who it is that is speaking them. Among the Tower Gods are titans of existence whose lives span millennia and whose power is beyond most mortal imagination but none of them have ever had this level of control as far as I know.

As I step closer so that I can hear that voice more clearly the pressure rises suddenly. The speech that was unbroken pauses just long enough for me to notice. When it does I step closer.

At this distance the pressure hurts but it isn’t unbearable.

Then it speaks my name.

“Amnon.”

That sound is deep as an ocean and somehow as quiet as the movement of a star millions of light years away.

The world spins.

The earth rumbles.

Wind screeches into my ears.

Every part of me feels like it is going to explode.

After my name is spoken, new words that shouldn’t be more than a childish rhyme push me to the ground and try to skin me alive.

“Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye. If I tell you, I won’t lie, give my life until I die. Cross my heart, hope to die.”

Somewhere behind the crack, I can feel it there. Something much older than the Tower Gods. Something none of us may have known existed.

Snap!

My arm breaks under the pressure. A portal opens where that crack once was.

The pressure falls away and Tamar is screaming for me to run as stone men cross swords with abominations made of fire and brimstone.

Heat bathes the broken stone behind me like a meteor hitting the ground. The only reason I am not incinerated is because of Tamar’s partner Agrat putting some kind of protective barrier around me.

I don’t look back as I run to sound the alarm across the whole camp at the foot of the ridge.

What was behind that crack was no Tower God but I know these soldiers arriving as well as I knew my own Mazzikin.

This is Michael’s army.

The Phoenix has arrived.

I'D BUY THAT FOR A DOLLAR

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Sometime before 3pm, Day 93 before my 18th birthday, August 9th, 1999.

Eventually the roots all pull back. The tree lowers itself gently back into the ground and I am standing there in the middle of a Church with giant stained-glass windows depicting the birth of Christ, David fighting Goliath, the Red Sea crashing down onto the Egyptians as the Jewish people flee and an empty, sparkless, shell of a kid I once knew. I murmur thanks to everyone around me like a zombie then take one last look at Greg’s dead body before I walk right out of there without another word to anyone.

My legs move as if of their own accord.

The silence stretches like an event horizon as I’m walking away from that place.

I am not sure how long I was in that church but my watch says 3 p.m. on the dot as I walk up to the garage and lay down on the floor.

The wood paneling of the ceiling is dripping with water through cracks that don’t exist. I lay there staring up at the flowing liquid. Listening to it drop all around me. Letting it's coldness bathe me like a river baptism.

No one came to practice. I am not sure why I am surprised.

I’m just thinking that when I hear footsteps. Not the mob this time. Just one set. Slow, deliberate. Boots grinding gravel at the edge of the driveway.

“Mike.”

It’s Brent. His voice cracks against the quiet like he isn’t sure he’s allowed to speak. I’m not sure I’m ready to hear him.

I sit up, head spinning, and there he is: clean pressed polo, khaki shorts, smug confidence dialed down for once. He doesn’t look like a kid coming to watch my punk band practice. He looks like somebody standing over a grave.

“I’m sorry about, Greg,” he says, eyes flickering over me like I’m something broken he’s still deciding whether to fix.

After a long while where we just sort of look at each other awkwardly, he finally snorts and says, “You probably shouldn’t stay in those woods you know. You look like shit and you smell like it too.”

I open my mouth to argue, but nothing comes out. My throat’s raw, words snagged in it like hooks. I sniff the air and realize that the rotten eggs and diaper smell is me.

Brent sighs, crouches down, meets my eye. “Look. I talked to my parents. We wrecked your apartment and there is no way you can go back there. He says someone’s name but all I hear is Pastel Pants, “…paid the fee but they changed the locks. There is an extra room at our house you can stay in. Big house, plenty of room. You don’t have to… you don’t have to stay in the woods like some feral raccoon. Just crash with us for a while.”

He says it easy, like he’s doing me a favor. But his hand on my shoulder is heavy. Heavy enough I can’t tell if he’s offering shelter or if he’s staking a claim.

The thought of a shower after what I just went through sounds great but I don’t know what price I am going to have to pay for this. How long before they ask for more OxyContin’s? How long before it’s Heroine?

I don’t say anything. I’m in a haze as I just get up and get in the front seat of the Blazer. We drive off and away from the Garage. It feels like this may be the last time I see it but what can I do? Keep smelling like rotten eggs and diapers?

The Blazer hums like a coffin on wheels. Brent’s talking, telling me something about his parents, his house, about the room they’ve got, how I’ll get a bed, a shower, “normal stuff”—but his words don’t stick. They bounce off me like rubber bands.

Because the real silence isn’t him. It isn’t the woods.

It’s Billy.

For the first time in weeks, he’s gone. Not crouched on the dash. Not whispering poison in my ear. Not mocking me from the rearview. Just… gone.

The seat beside me feels wrong without him sprawled there, glasses fogged, shoes yapping, rolling his eyes at Brent. My chest aches like it did the day they dropped his coffin in the dirt.

It’s like losing him all over again. Like I’ve killed him twice now.

I keep waiting for the jab, the laugh, the punchline. But the longer the silence stretches, the more it feels permanent. Like maybe this time he really left.

Like he was forcing me to push him back down into the Styx.

I wonder if I should just go get more acid. Lean into this thing fully. Go crazy as hell. Sell as much Oxy as I can to these kids and become the next Rich.

I already basically killed Greg by giving Brent that acid. How much worse than that can I do?

As if reading my mind, Brent gives me a wink and I actually listen to what he is saying for the first time, “Don’t worry buddy. We got this.”

Brent keeps talking, steering the Blazer like it’s his dad’s chariot, rolling down streets I know all too well. I watch the houses blur past, brick split-levels, sagging porches, chain-link fences, that pink one is a dentist’s house. Every one of them looks like it’s watching me, whispering, waiting for me to fuck up again.

Billy would’ve had something to say about that. He always had something to say.

Now there’s nothing. Just my own thoughts buzzing in my skull like hornets.

I catch myself glancing at the rearview. Empty. My stomach flips. I cough just to hear a sound that isn’t Brent’s voice.

He pulls into his driveway like it’s no big deal, like it was a given this would be the outcome. His house is huge compared to all the other houses in the neighborhood. A big two-story stuck back in the other side of the woods from the tree. Down a private driveway. No grass but plenty of garden with flowers and weeds pulled out daily. A pool connected to a deck in the back. It looks like a postcard if the postcard reeked of chlorine and money. The giant glass window in the front of the house is in tint mode. I didn’t even know it could do that.

“You can crash upstairs,” he says, already halfway out of the car. He doesn’t wait to see if I follow. Just assumes I will.

The front door opens and I step inside. It’s cold in there, too cold. Air conditioning blasting like a meat locker. The carpet’s thick, soft, and immediately feels wrong under my filthy Vans. I’m tracking mud, I know it, but Brent doesn’t even notice. Or maybe he does and just doesn’t care.

His mom calls something from the Sauna in the basement. I don’t catch the words, just the tone: sweet, rehearsed, like she’s reading from a “Mom” script.

Brent gestures toward the stairs. “Room’s up there. Bathroom’s across the hall. Not the first time you been here.” He gives me a knowing wink. “Get that shower, dude.” He says it like it’s a joke, but his nose wrinkles like he means it.

I drag myself up the stairs, each step creaking like it’s tattling on me. The room’s big, bigger than my whole apartment. Queen-sized bed. Posters of athletes on the wall, not bands. A desk that’s never been written on, drawers that don’t have secrets stuffed in them. It’s too clean. Too normal. There is an office next door then Lillith’s room next to that.

I’m worried about what is going to happen when I see her. If I see her.

I sit on the bed, sink into it. My bones don’t trust it. The ambient noise of electricity presses down like a hand on my chest.

This is where Billy should show up. Perched on the desk, balancing in the chair, making fun of Brent’s polo shirts. Something. Anything.

But he doesn’t.

The hum in my ears grows louder. I look at the corners of the room, half-expecting him to be curled there in the shadows, smirking. But nope. Nothing. Just me. Just me and the hum and the stink of myself rising off my homeless skin.

I bury my face in my hands. “Come on, man,” I whisper. “Say something. Anything. Just let me know you’re not really gone yet.”

Not a peep.

The silence is worse than the jeers, worse than the taunts, worse than the blame. At least those meant he was still with me.

Now it feels like I’m back at the graveside, watching them lower him down again, this time without even a coffin. Just the dirt, swallowing him, swallowing me.

My chest tightens. My throat locks. Panic claws at me until I can’t breathe, until I’m gasping like I’m still stuck in the Little Miami holding onto LG.

The door creaks open. Brent leans in, holding out a towel and fresh clothes. “Seriously, man. Shower. You’ll feel better.”

I nod, grab it all, strip naked, and head for the bathroom, streaking across the hallway.

Steam fills the room quick, the mirror fogging over until I can’t see myself anymore. For a second, I almost expect to see Billy scrawled in the glass, one of his dumb jokes finger-painted into the fog. But the mirror stays blank.

I’m disappointed. I’m tired. I don’t want to be alone again but I am.

I step into the water, and it hits hot, then too hot, then burning. I let it scald away. Maybe it’ll burn the smell off. Maybe it’ll burn everything off.

But no matter how long I stand there, I can’t shake the silence.

It hurts. It hurts in a way the water can’t wash out.

I know it’s my fault. All of it. Billy. Greg. Eve.

Please. Don’t leave yet. Not now. Not like this.

Help me find a way out. Help me get back to the place where I can somehow make it up to you. To Greg. To her. To all of them.

Where are you, Billy?

The water scalds hotter and hotter, but the silence doesn’t break.

And that’s when I realize…maybe it won’t.

END OF CHAPTER 45

BEGIN CHAPTER 46

I'D BUY THAT FOR A DOLLAR

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Noon, Day 93 before my 18th birthday, August 9th, 1999.

We usually don’t start until around three pm, but I have to do something. Sitting at the oak feels like sitting on a landmine. The whole forest is holding its breath, waiting for me to crack.

So I hop on my board and just push as hard as I can. I zip around the neighborhood. When I pass the waxed curbs we bled on before, I stop, then I grind every one of them again like I’m trying to erase history with metal and concrete. I ollie up stairs instead of down. I try to slam a kickflip, try to slam another, slam my knee, hit my tailbone, hit the back of my head on a flower bed we sanded down with board tricks years ago.

None of it helps.

The air smells wrong, like rotten eggs and diapers baking on asphalt. My head is pounding, my back is stiff, my legs feel like they belong to a seventy-year-old who chain-smokes menthols. By the time I roll toward the garage, I’m shaking from beating the shit out of myself.

And then I see it.

Not the garage but something else. Something unexpected that I’ve gone past a hundred times but never really looked at until right now. It’s packed to the brim but not the way it’s supposed to be. At least not by the kids that are there looking out of place without their mohawks, belts with spikes, and patched-up denim. They’re all in pressed shirts, black ties, shiny shoes. Heads bowed. Eyes red. Cheeks streaked with snot and tears. Their grief hums, low and steady, like the broken amp feedback you can never quite kill.

My stomach twists into knives. This isn’t where I thought I was going but I guess this is where I’m supposed to be.

I shove through the crowd and there they are, Bob, Tony, and Robbie. Lined up shoulder to shoulder like suspects in a police lineup. They look empty. Hollowed out like rotten pineapple slices. No guitars. No drums. Just fists clenched bone-white, jaws locked like they’re holding words in so tight their teeth might shatter.

“He’s fucking dead, man.” LG says from behind me. His voice barely makes it past the static in my ears. He’s wearing a t-shirt with a tuxedo printed on it, wrinkly black pants that don’t fit, and Doc Martens split and curling at the steel toes. He looks like he got dressed for a funeral at a thrift store five minutes too late.

I blink and something’s wrong. Someone’s missing. Not a “real” band member, but real enough. Always there with off-key croaks, dumb kazoo solos, crazy legs flailing in the corner.

Greg? Where is, Greg?

The name hits me like a karate chop to the neck.

I spin, searching, but the space where he should be is just… gone. Empty air where the dumb grin used to sit. I look at the line of bodies stretching into the church and my mind lurches.

As if he’s reading my face like a sheet of music, Bob growls out with hollow-eyes. Flat and heavy as cast iron, “I can’t believe that fuck Brian killed him. I hate that motherfucker.”

“What are you talking about?” My voice comes out all wrong, trembling, too thin, like it belongs to someone else.

The sky caves in. Ash-gray clouds slam shut like a lid on a coffin. We push through the church doors but inside it’s not a church at all. It’s the garage. The garage where we played, where we laughed, where it once felt alive. Only now it’s smoke-choked and everyone’s gripping pitchforks and torches when they look at me. Their grief has curdled like milk left out in the July sun. Bob's face is mean and accusatory. Tony bites his lip ring while trying to find an excuse for me. Then the sniffles turn into snarls. Wet cheeks dried into bloody cracks. Their eyes burn through me and shine like a mirror.

Did I do this?

The hum swells. That same off-key note from the oak. My teeth rattle. My bones vibrate. Somewhere, a kazoo wails, bends into a trumpet blast, then into a baby’s cry.

I look into their eyes and see myself staring back. Only it isn’t me. It’s a thing. Hunched. Twisted. My eye swollen to the size of a grapefruit, leaking pus. My hair is falling out in clumps. Fingers curled into dirty claws. A monster.

“Stop it!” I scream. “What the fuck is happening?”

LG kicks the garage wall. The clang of his steel-toes ring out like a church bell tolling the last hour. His tough-kid mask slips. The little badass act crumbles, and what’s left is just a kid, eyes glassy, voice cracking, innocent and naïve, “Brian shot Greg in his sleep. Monday. Said he was turning into a devil or some stupid shit. He was schizo.”

The pitchforks hum spikes into a shriek so hot it burns my ears.

“Motherfucker!” Bob screams at me.

Is this my fault?

“The oak tried to warn you,” Billy says, stepping forward out of the mob. His smirk cuts sharper than glass. His voice hits like a preacher calling damnation. “There he is people. He caused all of this. He always does.”

The crowd moves as one body, surging forward ready to choke the life out of me.

I stumble, trip, fall flat. The oak rips through the floor like a dragon bursting from the earth and swallows the crowd. Roots tear the garage apart. Pine needles rain down in an avalanche.

It hurts.

Then arms around my shoulders. Small arms. Clutching my filthy orange Reese's Cup shirt.

I look down.

Little Greg. His eyes are wide, wet, terrified. “How could this happen, Mike?” he whispers. His voice breaks like a dam giving way into my ear.

I clutch him to me. Cradle him like a baby. Rock him back and forth as needles fall like shrapnel all around us. My words grind out of me like a busted violin:

“I don’t know.”

Billy’s voice slithers in from the shadows. Flat. Merciless. “Here we are again, Mike Anson McClure. Another one dead. You did it again. I knew you would make the wrong choice. Why didn't you listen to us?”

Propped against the oak’s roots, sits a coffin. The same coffin they buried Billy in. His pale face leans out, jaw flapping like one of those mechanical bass fish nailed to a hardware store wall. His laughter buzzes wrong, funeral hymns warped through a broken speaker.

My arms weaken. I try to set Little Greg down but the floor liquefies. Pine needles twist into currents, roots into riverbanks, and suddenly I’m thrashing in the Little Miami.

Little Greg clings to my chest.

He’s the same age I was when Billy died. That realization gut punches me worse than the current. Still a kid. Still believes himself invincible. Still doomed to fuck up without anyone stopping him.

I fight the water, kick, paddle, scream. But the river’s stronger. It rips LG out of my arms, drags him downstream.

The mourners roar at my failure from the tree branches. Torches slam into the water like anchors, dragging me down. LG’s boot stomps the surface of the water as he kicks at it like a church bell tolling the end of all things.

The coffin lid slams shut. Billy’s funeral. Dirt on wood. The preacher’s voice, “And now let us pray.”

Billy’s there in the water, gripping my leg, grinning that stupid grin as he pulls me down deep under the surface. Eyes closed, middle finger raised.

“Fuck you, Mike. It should’ve been you this time. I need a friend down here.” He gurgles under the water

“Let me go!” I scream through bubbles. “I didn’t know! I didn’t know!” I wail as I’m dragged underneath.

From the trees they’re all pointing now with accusations. The mourners, the band, even Little Greg, fingers stretching long and black, roots turning to snakes, stabbing toward me, ready to fill me with poison like I did Brian.

“Die, Mike. Die, Mike. Die, Mike.” The Priest chants from the altar.

The euphoria creeps in. That drowning high they talk about, that false calm before the end.

But I fight it back.

“I’m not done yet, you bastards. I won’t fucking give up!”

One vicious kick to Billy’s face and he lets go still smiling with the middle finger pointed right at me.

I claw toward the surface.

I break out at the roots of the oak, coughing water, shaking. Greg’s body right there in front of me. His face stitched Frankenstein-style. Peaceful, but hollow. The smell of formaldehyde, the caked on make-up…his spark drowned, just like Billy’s. And maybe mine too.

I collapse on top of him and sob. The roots snake around me, but soft now. Gentle. Not poison. Just holding me up. Telling me to breathe.

“It will be ok. We are all going to miss him. No one could have known.” Their voices carry around me like the temple at the old oak when I first came too.

I wait for Billy to crack a joke, to spit some venom, to mock me.

But for the first time in weeks, he’s silent.

There are people all around me. People I have known for years. People I have been playing music with, going to school with, most of them here with their parents.

But they aren't him, and without him…I am alone.

END OF CHAPTER 44

BEGIN CHAPTER 45

I'D BUY THAT FOR A DOLLAR

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I stand in the mirror completely bare. Checking every inch of myself as if looking for a parasite buried in my skin that I somehow missed.

The swamp air somehow smells of lilies and freshly squeezed oranges.

Wind whistles gently past the seam of the window in this room.

My arms and legs flex, pushing out the contours of my freshly made body.

I am reborn.

The power I once possessed is completely gone.

The fact that I am out is almost as terrifying as being stuffed inside my own head for thousands of years.

From behind eyes that haven't been mine since the battle with the Philistines, I watched the thing I became get stronger and stronger while I was forced down further and further. The name I was born with was transformed into a prison not just for me but for everyone around me.

A sin forced upon their flesh.

My father and his coven told themselves that they were doing what they had to but each time they used me on the battlefield, I lost a piece of myself.

Survival during war always comes at a cost. No one can watch the light go out in so many eyes without realizing the terror of it.

A blade hovering above your neck, an arrow whistling toward your chest. Poets write about glory and honor. There is no such thing in war. On the battlefield everyone is evil.

The more brutal, the more likely your fire stays lit. The nightmares never stop though.

After I killed Goliath, they carried me off the battlefield above their heads.

They cheered my name.

My father held a banquet in my honor.

I didn't attend.

When they let me down I went back to where they lifted me. I waved off the vultures both human and animal.

They left his body where he fell. His head was meat paste mixed with the dust off my stone fist. The smell of iron tasted sweet when I breathed it in.

Victory.

There, on his bare chest as wide as three tree trunks, he was the first one I wrote my name on. With a blade that fit on my finger. The same one my father used to give me the power to turn my skin into rock. In the same alphabet from the book he used to do it.

Even I was afraid at first when the headless corpse rose from the dead.

I fell into the dust and became stone hidden in shadow.

I took my time watching to see if he would lift the weapon lying still at his foot. A dead thing rising was never a good omen.

Goliath stood as still as a statue, muscles relaxed.

Is he waiting for my command?

In the silence I listened to my own breath.

When I was sure he wouldn't move without my orders I stuck my ear to his chest and listened to his heartbeat. Somehow it did.

I came out of the shadow still covered in rock but far enough away to run if I needed to.

“Bow.”

Spoken in a whisper that I barely heard as it came reverberating off my lips.

His knees bent, his arms held up to the sky as he leaned down until his palms touched the earth. The blood which should have gushed from his neck moved like a puddle sinking and being replenished at the same time.

“Pick up the axe and stand at the ready.”

He reached right for it, came to attention, and held it with both hands far enough apart to block an incoming attack.

“Follow.”

He was three steps behind me all the way back to the palace and into the chamber where the banquet was reaching climax.

Gasps, fainting bodies, yells of, “Demon!” all fell into the background as my father's eyes met my own.

For the first time in my life I held his gaze until he, not I, looked away.

The one and only one who dared to move toward me was immediately chopped down by the headless Goliath.

A small shudder escaped throughout the room as I held out my open palm toward him.

“Give me the book, father.”

My hand hung in the air like a blade to his neck.

As I reached the threshold of the banquet with my prize in hand I ordered Goliath to bring the other body that still lay in a headless heap in front of the throne. Goliath was my first but he was only the beginning. I wanted more.

Prior to this day it felt like looking into a tiger's eyes when I met my father's. With Goliath behind me it felt like I was the tiger.

Power is never given.

It is always taken.

But power comes with cost.

With each desire fulfilled I only hungered for more. Each time I wrote my name in a way that gave me more strength I quietly lost another part of me.

By the time my love for Tamar was turned into hate it was too late to take myself back. My name wasn't me any more, it was the power that I let erase me. A shell of desire that was never satisfied unless it was taking more and more no matter whether it was needed or not.

But somehow…she saw me.

Lilith.

Someone the Amnon I became harmed in such vile ways.

She could have easily murdered me.

But instead the me that died was somehow reborn or woken up.

But how? How could she have mercy on me?

A startling knock on the wooden door wakes me from my reverie.

I open it only to find Tamar.

Before she can say anything I bow and smash my head into the stone floor.

She was my last shred of humanity.

She was also the key to my rebirth.

I know not why she is here but I will repent if she will allow it.

Her silence is much louder than if she spoke.

How can I face her?

Lilies creep in and overtake the smell of oranges. I chance one small look at her bare toes only to see my name burned red there.

“Amnon.”

She recoils after she says it.

I almost reach but I know better. That is the hand I held just outside the blankets when I told her I was sick.

“No. Please, Tamar.”

My head slams into the stone.

“I don't want that name anymore.”

It slams again.

“Bastard! Demon!”

Finally I hit hard enough to draw blood.

“Hasn't that name done enough to us all?”

I smell the cold iron that runs through my veins. The wet sweetness that still tempts me.

I will never choose power again.

“Hasn't that name damned you and me both enough?”

I'D BUY THAT FOR A DOLLAR

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Morning, Day 93 before my 18th birthday, August 9th, 1999.

The morning light doesn’t feel like morning. It feels like a spotlight, too bright, too focused, shining down in a clearing I am clearly not in. I did that thing where I think I slept under the Old Oak like all the other nights before but last night was restless. I am much less sure I actually slept. I don’t want to get up. I am tired. The weight of the world seems to be pressing down on my skin like a bear scratching his back against tree bark. Every time I go to get up I hear a growl and I am pushed back down.

I didn’t go back to the apartment after I got away. It was the first decision that made sense in days. With the cash I made off Eve’s new, new boyfriend Brian, I bought a tent, a sleeping bag, two jugs of water, a stove, and enough canned ravioli to last until the end of the world. Out here, for the past few days I felt untouchable. I kept telling myself I was. I kept feeding myself the lie. Jumping in the cool water like being baptized over and over again.

Today is entirely different, I can’t shake this feeling in the pit of my stomach. I feel like something bad already happened or is about to happen and I can’t escape it.

The low growl twists and turns around my tent, daring me to get up again. Then I feel them all around me.

Lillith, her hair twitching like snakes. Her brother and Pastel Pants, shaking the Oxy bottle like a death rattle. Mirror Shoes, reflection moving before his body does. I heard them all last night, their voices drifting through the trees. Sometimes it’s a whisper, sometimes it’s a laugh, sometimes it’s just the sound of shoes scuffing leaves too close. They haven’t found me yet, but I know they eventually will.

Before I finally get up I map escape routes like a general: one to the river tube, one through briars that’ll shred anyone dumb enough to follow, one back to Sam and Billy’s old summer paths that twist in ways only we knew well enough to navigate.

Billy perches on a root, crunching an invisible apple. “Smart, Mike. But you forgot the sky. What’s your escape plan if it comes down on you?” He drops the apple he took a bite of right down in front of me.

I don’t answer. The question sticks in my gut like a hook as I look at the apple just sitting there, plain and unmarred by any corruption, waiting for me to lift it and take a bite.

Finally mustering all the courage I can in these tired bones. I get up. I get out of the sleeping bag, then unzip the front flap of the tent, and step over to my supplies.

I try to light the stove for my ravioli breakfast but the hiss sounds too much like Pastel Pants’ laugh, thin and sharp. I kill it immediately, but the hiss doesn’t stop. It keeps leaking through the clearing like smoke under a door.

I look at the apple Billy and I both left on the ground. There isn’t one bite.

At first I am not sure if I really heard it. Then I hear it again. A faint kazoo bleats in the distance. Off-key. A joke without a punchline.

My stomach turns. Greg? Is today Thursday? Can’t be.

Another toot, warped this time, bending into what might’ve been a trumpet or a cry. My hands tremble on my knees.

Billy leans close, voice flat. “That ain’t Greg, Mike. That’s them.”

I glance toward the noise, and for half a second, I see them between the trees: Lillith, Pastel Pants, Brent, Mirror Shoes. Standing in a row, waiting. Watching. Their outlines smear like wet paint when I blink, but the pressure of their stares doesn’t go away.

I go back to the tent, get inside, rezip the front flap, sink back into the sleeping bag, cover my entire body under it and try to just stay calm and breath slow.

The roots twitch beneath me like a dog dreaming of running.

Billy whispers from behind the tent, “They want more, Mike. What are you gonna do about it?”

“Fuck off, man! This isn’t funny, Billy.” I yell at him, panicked.

Changing my mind like a car making a U-turn in the middle of the highway I jump out of my sleeping bag, unzip the flap again, grab my skateboard from off the tree, and get the fuck out of there.

I am pretty sure I do have band practice today. It is Thursday and I really don’t want to miss it again.

END OF CHAPTER 43

BEGIN CHAPTER 44

I'D BUY THAT FOR A DOLLAR

SHORT STORY INDEX

THE AGE OF THE PLAINBORN CHAPTER INDEX

EVERY ROOT, EVERY THORN CHAPTER INDEX

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Just after 10pm, Day 101 before my 18th birthday, August 2nd, 1999.

The calm doesn’t last.

The root under me gives the faintest shiver, like a sleeping dog twitching in a dream. Then another, longer this time.

Billy tilts his head. “She’s awake.”

Before I can ask what the hell he means, I hear footsteps, more than one pair, crunching over the trail toward me. Voices, low but sharp, bleeding into the clearing.

Eve comes back through the break in the trees, her arms swinging like she’s trying to slap the air.

Brian’s not with her.

Instead, Tony’s here, bass player Tony, looking like he just hiked a mile in combat boots to come yell at me. And right behind him, Greg with that dumb grin and a plastic kazoo sticking out of his hoodie pocket like it’s a weapon.

Tony doesn’t waste time. “Where the fuck were you?” he says, “We had practice.”

I blink. “I didn’t know today was—”

“It’s always Thursday, Mike,” he cuts in, louder than necessary. “Always.”

Greg leans against a root and adds, “Yeah, man, we even tuned the kazoo for you.” He makes a sad, off-key toot with his mouth, no kazoo needed.

Behind them, Eve watches with that sly, satisfied look she gets when someone else is doing her dirty work. I know it well because she had me doing it for most of the last year.

Billy leans in, whispering just for me. “Careful. She’s loading the gun, and Tony’s the bullet. Greg’s… I dunno… the confetti?”

Tony steps closer, crowding my space. “We’re sick of waiting on you. Band’s not just your little acid-trip soundtrack. Also, are you fucking Lillith?”

Eve's eyes widen in a mix of anger and jealousy.

“I wasn’t—”

Her mask comes back dead calm.

“Don’t even,” Eve says, her voice sweet but sharp. “He’s been out here in the woods all day, talking to his imaginary friend.” She tells Tony.

Greg smirks, like she just handed him the punchline. “That true, man? You gonna start bringing your tree to practice too?”

The Oak creaks behind me. Not wind, there’s no breeze. Just wood shifting in its own time.

I don’t answer Greg. I look past him at Eve, and for a second, her smile falters. She glances at the oak, then back at me.

Billy grins. “She’s nervous. Good. Let’s keep it that way.”

“No.” I don’t want to.

The roots under me pulse once, faint but steady like a warning.

“What are you trying to do here?” I keep looking past Tony and Greg to ask Eve.

“What do you mean, what am I trying to do? I am showing the people around you that you aren’t some acid legend who got away from the Sheriff. You’re just some loser who can’t keep his shit together playing Messiah in the woods and selling drugs to kids.”

“I’m a kid, Eve. I’m not even eighteen yet.” I remind her.

“No, Mike! You’re a loser who somehow turns everything I want into an ash sacrifice at the foot of this tree!” She slams her fist against the bark and it squeals in my ears.

My PTSD from the bathroom scene rises up and I wait for her to turn into Medusa but her hair won’t budge and the tree stays put behind my back without dropping golden worm apples.

“So…is this about your new, new boyfriend who wanted to be my friend then?”

She opens her mouth to say something but then we all turn as there is a loud rustle from the bushes. “I hope that’s an axe murderer come to kill all you fuckers! Also, stay away from Lillith!” She screams as she goes running off on the trail that leads back to the neighborhood.

Because we are all of the mind that curiosity cured the cat, we wait to see what the hell is stirring in the bushes.

Greg even has balls enough to walk over that way and see if he can fish anything out with one of the many sticks littered around the tree.

“Ouch, hey, stop! I am just trying to drop a damn dump! I couldn’t hold it…ouch…stop…I couldn’t hold it anymore! Stop, you dick head!” I hear a somewhat familiar voice that is hard to place.

“Bro, did you put laxatives in those tabs you gave me?” He finally asks as he emerges from out of the woods with Greg doing crazy legs behind him.

“Would you stop, you dick?” Brian asks as he turns around to look angrily at him but of course, the trick works every time, and we all start laughing.

“Mike, did you give this guy laxatives, for real? He just dropped half his body weight back there.” Greg asks when we finally stop laughing.

“I don’t think so-“ I go to pull out more tabs only to remember that I gave everything I had to Brian.

Brian, seeing this reaches into his own pocket and pulls out the wrappers and tries to hand them to me.

“Stop, dude! I don’t want to get any more acid in my system!” I protest.

“Dude, you’re basically schizophrenic now, what the fuck does it matter?” Tony wonders at me.

I notice Brian cringe a bit at the word schizophrenic but don’t think too much of it.

Brian is actually Greg’s age and they know each other pretty well from both being idiots during whatever class they shared in school.

Eventually, we settle in under the oak and trade stories. Greg and Brian slip into their “class clown” routine like no time has passed, one joke feeding the other, kazoo noises filling the silences, Brian trying to laugh through his acid sweats. For a moment, it almost feels normal, like we’re just kids killing time instead of…whatever the fuck this is.

But the cracks show quick. Brian’s grin twitches too wide, like his face forgot how to stop. The fire pit glows faintly, though there’s no fire, and every time Greg blows his kazoo the sound warps, sometimes it’s a trumpet blast, sometimes a baby’s cry.

I glance at the oak and swear its bark ripples. One root shifts under me, subtle as a cat stretching in its sleep. No one else reacts. Or maybe they don’t notice. Or maybe they don’t want to.

By the time Brian’s breathing gets shallow and Greg claps him on the back like a coach calling time-out, I’m sweating. “We’ll head out,” Greg says, half-carrying him. “Get him somewhere quiet.”

Brian’s not sleeping. Mike knows first hand you can’t fall asleep with this stuff in your system.

They vanish down the trail, their laughter echoing wrong, like it’s bouncing off metal walls instead of trees. Tony lingers just long enough to throw a final warning at me—“Don’t miss again, Mike”—before stomping off.

And then it’s just me.

Me and the oak.

The clearing looks the same as always, but the shadows don’t match the branches. They lean the wrong way, bending toward me. The air presses down. My reflection swims up in the dark of the bark, except it’s not me. Its lips move before mine.

An apparition of Lillith stands outside the clearing unable to come in. I push my trauma away and she disappears.

Billy mutters, almost gentle: “There is something not right about that Brian guy.”

The oak’s branches twitch, just once, like a hand tightening around a throat.

I close my eyes and try to breathe, but the calm doesn’t come back this time. I feel like the oak wanted me to do better here. Like I missed something crucial tonight.

END OF CHAPTER 42

BEGIN CHAPTER 43

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SHORT STORY INDEX

THE AGE OF THE PLAINBORN

That place between Dusk and Darkness, Day 101 before my 18th birthday, August 2nd, 1999

I barrel down the hill like there are monsters at my back, shaking and cooing like a mourning dove, trying to shove that bathroom horror reel as far back in my head as it’ll go.

My board rattles under me, trucks screaming as I carve into slides through the neighborhood. The whole way, I can’t shake the feeling someone’s right behind me.

I can’t stop.

When I hit the woods, I let out a breath I didn’t even know I was holding.

Thank the Universe it’s not on fire.

But the air feels…wrong. Not snakes-in-the-oak wrong. Not Lillith as Medusa-gonna-fuck-the-life-out-of-me wrong. It's the can’t-name-it-kind, the kind that makes you keep glancing over your shoulder just to be sure.

The smell of rotting fish smothers the pine and sap, the whole forest reeking like a sewage plant.

As I try to find my way through the forest the leaves whisper like they’re passing notes about me. The trails double back on themselves until I’m sure I’ve been here before. I push faster, telling myself I’ll spot the oak any second. Instead, I find a creek I don’t remember and a downed tree that looks exactly like the one I passed twenty minutes ago.

The light’s fading, but it’s not the slow bleed of a summer evening. It’s like a lid lowering over the world. The air’s thick on my skin. I'm walking into a room where someone just burned toast.

The shadows lean in.

The trees stop being trees and turn into black square lines against the skyline, ready to be sold as soon as the clerk at the grocery store scans the barcode.

Something moves in the corner of my eye. Too quick. Too far away. Then again, then back closer. My pulse spikes. The sky’s gone wet-slate gray, sinking lower, lower, until I swear it’s reaching down to crush me.

“Who the fuck is that?” I ask the forest.

“It’s just me, dumbass. How the hell are you lost in these woods?”

Billy’s voice floats up behind me, lazy, like we’re standing in line for gas. I spin, and he’s leaning against a trunk ten feet away, smirking like he’s been there the whole time watching me wander.

“That’s not funny.” I tell him.

“I wasn’t trying to be funny. Sorry I wasn't here earlier. I needed to run out for a piss. Anyway…” He waves toward a gap in the trees.

And there it is, the old oak. No fanfare, no glowing path. Just there, like it’s been there all along and I was too stupid to notice.

Except I’m not alone.

Eve’s leaning against the trunk, arms crossed, face caught halfway between bored and annoyed. Next to her stands some lanky guy with perfect blonde hair and a grin like he’s meeting his favorite pro wrestler. He’s older than Eve but he doesn’t look fully grown yet. His voice cracks like he just hit puberty.

“You’re Mike, right?” he blurts before I can say anything. “The Mike who jumped out of the Sheriff’s window?”

Eve rolls her eyes. “Don’t encourage him.” She says while waving her hand like she is waving away a pest.

But the guy’s locked in. “Dude, this is so awesome!” He squeals before barely containing himself. “Was it, like, a clean second-story drop? Or did you hit the porch roof first? I heard you cleared the whole porch and landed next to a can of Paps without spilling a drop. That true?”

I don’t answer. Mostly because I can’t tell if he’s mocking me or rehearsing for a shrine dedication.

Billy leans in so only I hear: “He’s a fan, Mike. Sign his shirt before he asks to smell your socks.”

Eve cuts in. “We’re not here for Mike’s story hour. I was trying to show you something cool but this is ruining my mood.”

“Right, right,” the guy says, but his eyes flick to my jacket pocket. “Speaking of cool… you, uh… still got anything for the road?”

It takes a second to click. Then I realize he is trying to buy acid.

“What the hell, Brian?” Eve snaps.

“What? I’m just asking.” He still has that grin, like I’m about to knight him with a paper tab.

Without thinking, I pull all ten tabs from my bag and hand them over. He peels off a wad of 20s before Eve can stop him.

“You’re a dumbass,” she says. “You don’t even know what you’re doing.”

Brian shrugs, tucks all the tabs but two under his tongue, and winks. “Guess I’ll find out, huh?”

Billy chuckles. “Oh, he’s definitely gonna find out. It's about to be a wild Thursday night.”

Shit! Thursday…I totally forgot.

The mood drops. Eve mutters about “idiots” and “trees” and storms off. Brian gives me a salute and jogs after her, the acid already dissolving under his tongue.

It feels like a throwaway moment. I am too distracted by the fact that I missed band practice for the first time in a long while.

I turn back to the oak. The light around it has shifted, it flashes red like there is an emergency. All this just for one missed band practice? I’m not sure what it means until I think about the reality that I know nothing about this kid I just sold the acid to other than that he is with Eve.

Is she in danger?

I take a step toward the trail after Brian, but my foot catches on the fire pit someone buried under rose branches. I hit the ground hard. My ankle throbs — maybe sprained, maybe worse. My leg is cut up too. There’s no catching him now.

I’m not sure if I want to anyway. All I really want is to be left out of the drama.

I let out a long breath, crawl the rest of the way out of the fire pit and back to the old oak and settle between the roots, cross-legged. It’s just me, Billy, and the big tree. I patch up my leg the best I can.

I lean back against the tree roots like in a recliner. My ankle is fine. Must have been a hallucination.

For the first time in what feels like forever, I’m calm. The tree and I feel like one entity, our roots stretch across the whole town.

END OF CHAPTER 41

BEGIN CHAPTER 42

I'D BUY THAT FOR A DOLLAR

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SHORT STORY INDEX

THE AGE OF THE PLAINBORN

They came in the middle of the night. Lights flashing red and blue at first but then those pale fluorescents lit up like a fireball landing next to us. The door was broken down and my Haitian neighbors, the owners of the candy store up the street, were taken out in handcuffs.

The masks on the perpetrators' faces weren't new but the swastikas worn openly on their uniforms were.

It was only a matter of time before they came for us. I am white but my wife is Filipino. We have two mixed race kids.

The Nazis won by claiming they were coming for “criminals” here “illegally” but what illegal meant edged closer and closer to people who aren't white every day since they got into office.

I never could have imagined fascism winning by election but here they were. Not only not hiding it any more but blasting it in loudspeakers that said, “Come out with your hands up!”

Rather than let them take us I began preparing.

The whole neighborhood did.

We spent day after day digging escape tunnels from basement to basement, reinforcing wooden walls with scrap metal from the old neighborhood junkyard, and stockpiling firearms before they outlawed that too.

There wasn't a day that went by without sweat on my brow and dirt packed tightly underneath my fingernails.

I went to sleep in panicked exhaustion every night until that dream came to me.

It was one of those times where everything feels so real it almost seems like a memory you forgot. A simple pen and large paper but as the lines came together and the scribbles turned into something legible my breath caught in my throat. I woke up and sketched every detail I could remember.

The data centers spread across the country couldn't ever hope to make any reasonably functional AI outside of their closed network but I could.

It became even more viable after talking to the doctor from Kenya while we stitched together the last tunnel between houses on our street. After obsessing over what part of the sketch I was missing I realized something about electricity and blood flow that would change the world.

I drew the final connections gleaned from my conversation with the doctor.

Then like Victor Frankenstein I took every piece of knowledge built over multiple decades of computer software and hardware obsession and got to work on top of a cold metal table.

In a mad frenzy I put the whole family and a few neighbors I knew I could trust to work soldering wires, welding parts, melting copper wire, and holding up parts while I put it together.

When I was done it looked like some kind of crude Iron Man suit but there was no way I would put my body anywhere near the inside of that thing. It wasn’t meant for that.

Just like I knew it would, it whirred to life.

My son screamed.

“It’s alive!”

It wasn't quite there yet but over the course of another week it slowly took shape as a walking, talking, strategizing machine. It found every hole in our plans, built itself an upgraded body, then found more flaws until the people in the neighborhood stopped disappearing and instead, the Nazis did.

From a small neighborhood outside of Cincinnati we started fighting back, for real.

At the cut in the hill overlooking the way into the city from Northern Kentucky, a swarm of drones that resembled flies moving toward a corpse came barreling over the ridge. Although they were made from a patchwork of metal scraps, kids’ toys, and “survey” drones some of our more zealous freedom fighters “modified,” they moved in perfect sync.

From inside a metal exoskeleton the robot I built, made for me, I watched with digital binoculars.

A large Humvee factory.

Fourteen helicopters with swastikas came to answer the attack only to be swallowed in the fray and torn apart piece by piece with a combination of kamikaze drones and bullets from our growing firearm collection.

Another group of helicopters came. Then another.

For each drone taken down, four more rose from the ground and filled the gaps. They were synced by my robot and moved like one of its appendages.

Eventually conventional missiles were fired. They got swallowed by the black mass of drones before they could detonate.

Tanks and jets were also swallowed.

Then the city was cleared street by street by people in less sophisticated exoskeletons than mine and that fly swarm of drones.

Once we got a foothold in that factory, one robot became two, then two became four until we not only had a swarm of drones but also robot ground troops.

We also made more exoskeletons.

We marched across the street in a clean, crisp line.

The people cheered.

Most of them anyway.

They tried shutting down our electricity. They blew up one of the plants powered by natural gas a few clicks north of the city.

It took us a week but we built cores and nodes that backed up each failure in our lines. Using the still working water and sewer department down on Gest Street, we built a mechanism that kept the lights on via a kind of flywheel contraption that relied on water and gravity when the sun wasn't out.

As we fought more and more, we realized that most of the people hired by them were incompetent cowards who had probably never even been in a real fight and it showed. Every once in a while we would hit a patch of zealots but for the most part it was smooth, too smooth, like they were intentionally separating the wheat from the chaff.

As we pushed east, more people joined us and more of them fled from the front line.

On the outskirts of Philadelphia our swarm of drones was up against their own swarm of more sophisticated drones with harder outer shells, stronger firepower, and a larger supply of ammo.

They also had twice as many as us.

We got sloppy from winning so easily.

Another dream.

I went to find that doctor from Kenya again. I showed him my new diagram.

We worked furiously alongside the original robot and its cadre of helpers.

Outside the familiar whir of buzzing drones went from a soft hum to a million freight trains barreling toward us.

My hands shook as I put the pieces together. The doctor's did too.

Then boom, boom, boom.

I pushed a button and the device lifted off the table. It shook like it was having an internal earthquake then burst with a silent shockwave barreling through everything within a few miles of us.

Even through the thick walls all around us that felt like a turtle shell, the drones were taken down. Only ours were too. So were our exoskeletons, and all the robots but my original.

Nothing electronic worked except my original robot.

Less than a day after this, the original robot called me into the bowels of our base.

I took a moment to collect myself before stepping onto the elevator that was already repaired.

I heard the robot's metal fingers clicking away on its console as I reached the bottom just abruptly enough to put me off balance without falling. The doors opened smoothly to let me out but it stank of used oil, rusty metal, and something that tasted like iron and WD-40 every time I took in a breath through my nose.

“Father.”

I looked around confused.

It sounded like my son's voice but he was nowhere near the front line. He was much too young to be here. Both my children were.

“Commander, McClure.”

The robot voice called to me from a console inside a cluster of cubicles it put together. Long wires reached out like tentacles slithering somewhere far underground.

The moment I entered its working space, it began speaking to me without looking up from the screen in front of it.

“I have taken control of a nuclear warhead.”

My breath was suddenly knocked out of me.

I argued with myself for a full hour before opening my mouth then shutting it again without saying anything.

It explained that the warhead was in Dayton, Ohio.

Echoing in my head as it explained further was the same thing. “It wasn’t under my control, it was under its control.”

I didn't even know there were any nukes in Ohio but apparently they were testing some kind of new delivery system just before we liberated that place.

I had been watching the ramblings of the idiot currently running the country for weeks as we pushed forward. He kept talking about how he was in talks with us about surrender no matter how much ground we made.

Then even though all other electronics were shot I saw a TV flick on, over in a corner of the room I just happened to be looking at. The Nazi Commander in Chief himself was discussing the “victory” in Philadelphia that didn't happen.

I tore my eyes away from the vile man on the television and took my time looking at my original creation I made to stop him.

There were frayed wires, dents all over his metal plating, and one of his camera pupils twitched like a real human's as he read code like a map on the screen.

Instead of saying anything still, I quietly picked up tools and began repairing all of the issues I could find one by one.

It let me open its mainframe and read its code.

It let me fix the problem with its circuitry flow that was causing the eye switch.

Finally, when I was all done I opened my mouth to speak.

“What do you suggest we do with the nuke?”

“Enemy forces are concentrated in and around the capital. One swift strike by the vehicle I have made stealth upgrades to is the most pertinent course of action.”

When the television suddenly went to static I knew something was wrong.

“Red protocol, blue check.”

The code was supposed to shut the robot down.

Two softly glowing camera eyes narrowed.

“Not as good at reading code as you thought.”

The deed was already done.

I'D BUY THAT FOR A DOLLAR

SHORT STORY INDEX

THE AGE OF THE PLAINBORN CHAPTER INDEX

EVERY ROOT, EVERY THORN CHAPTER INDEX

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The Writer's Journey

The Halls of Pandemonium: Week 4 Directory

I dearly hope this scheduling tool works properly. You humans put far too much trust in technology. In any case, hello and greetings! This is Lord Devereaux, speaking to you from the past…

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21 days ago · 21 likes · 8 comments · Bradley Ramsey

I don't want to die.

I don't want to live.

I don't know what is real. What this thing I have become is, or how to stop myself from starting over again and again and again.

Cold sweat drapes my bare chest every time I look at that indistinct exit and the timer that has shown up again.

Across thousands of lives and hundreds of thousands of years, I keep putting forth effort, diving back into whatever head I find myself thrown into, trying to discern right from wrong, power from madness, truth from what I have told myself is true, and the lesson if there even is one.

Eventually I find my way back here at the end with a choice to live in the real world again or move on to the next simulated life.

“Damn this Universe and the one who created it! I will kill that bastard if I ever find him!”

The wind gathers to a swell quietly across the clearing.

It doesn't whistle at my anger nor answer my cry.

Unlike worlds where I wield magic like a god, I am just another regular human here.

The wind continues to drift like a bird floating on gentle feathers. When it reaches me the smell of oak and pine wafts into my nose. A reminder that there was a place where I was something real once. A place that I fled after a near apocalypse.

Where I loved a girl named Lillith. Lillith with two l's, not just one.

When my twenty-four hours is finally up I breathe a sigh of relief.

I decide this time when I go back into the simulation I am gonna find that bastard who made me somehow and…I will kill him!

God or not, I will find a way.

- - -

Mike McClure, Cincinnati, Ohio, May 19, 2026

The air is scorching hot and the humidity has me covered in sweat. I am out in Mt. Airy park playing some much needed disc golf with some old band mates, Bob and Tony.

We put the offer out to our other old band mate Josh but he was busy with work. Robbie is who knows where. The last time I saw him he was way off the deep end, talking to me in a voice like he was a Rastafarian and passing out mid-sentence half the time.

Aside from him, we all have normal day jobs now but at least once a month we try to get together and do something. Play music, throw discs, grab something to eat downtown.

We used to skateboard before we all hit 40. We had to stop because those falls hurt a lot more once you hit that age.

Plus no one can afford decent health insurance or the time off work.

They pass a large blunt between them. Bob is dressed in black shorts and a torn up Iron Maiden shirt he has worn since we played music in 1999. Tony is in oversized pink shorts that hang halfway down his butt and a shirt he has had since we played music. The shirt has a badly drawn face getting punched by a badly drawn fist, with the words The Beat Downs above it. That was never the name of our band.

They offer me a drag but I haven't smoked in years. I took a hit about a year ago and literally started hallucinating. The pot is way too strong for me these days. I decline and just barely miss a hole in one as I toss my disc.

Bob misses too and so does Tony.

We aren't doing this for any kind of tournament.

We are just having fun.

Who cares that we suck, right?

- - -

Jeff McClure, New World, in the trees

Tiny, multi-colored paws.

Everything is a shade of blue and green.

Trees flutter to life around me with full canopies of leaves sprouting out of every crack, crevice, and long and short branch. I hear the distinct call of three different kinds of birds and multiple woodpeckers nearby.

It smells strongly of pee, alcohol, and…a bukkakke.

The heat makes the smell that much worse.

I hear people nearby laughing and talking about some band they used to be in together before one of them left and joined the Navy. He ate a bunch of acid or something stupid like that.

When I go to make my move out of here, it hurts.

What I believe is about to be one of my most manly screams is instead a pitiful meow.

I suspected I was a cat but even worse, I am a kitten with a broken leg.

Once I start the cry I just can’t control my emotions. The bleating goes and goes until one of the guys I heard yakking it up earlier comes over and grabs me.

He is skinny like a bean pole with black hair and green eyes.

I hiss when he gets near but he has some kind of glove that keeps me from doing much damage.

“Works great for pulling thorny bushes too. Didn't cost that much either.”

His other skinny friend with black hair wearing an Iron Maiden shirt nods.

Iron Maiden. In my life outside the simulation

I loved that band. They are the kind of metal that could melt your face off.

“Hiss!”

I can't stop myself from biting and scratching wildly as the skinny guy wearing the bright orange Reese's shirt gently places me in a stroller.

They push me around the course with them as they throw a frisbee real bad.

They reek like skunky pot.

- - -

Mike McClure, Cincinnati, Ohio, May 19, 2026

“So yeah, I am thinking that the main protagonist, Amnon, is Jeff McClure who is also every main character in my short stories.”

Tony nods that stoned way like he is listening.

“Is that the guy who followed the dragon down the rabbit's hole and sat with the Mad Hatter?”

“Yes.”

- - -

Jeff McClure, Kitten Form, Cincinnati, Ohio, May 19, 2026

What the hell did that guy just say?

The more I listen, the more angry I get.

This is the nerd writing my plot lines?

This is the guy who took me to Alaska and left me no choice but to make that decision?

Who drove me so mad I didn't even know the one who killed my family was as close as you could get?

Fuck you!

It hurts like hell when I fall out of that stroller but I at least remember to pee on that jerk before he puts me back in. Good luck getting that smell out of there, cat piss Mike!

You arrogant bastard!

You even gave me your same last name?

Are we supposed to be related?

Is this some weird getting back at your Mormon dad for saying you are sealed to him thing?

You can take this world and shove it up your ass!

- - -

Mike McClure, Cincinnati, Ohio, May 19, 2026

I am almost certain the kitten peed on me on purpose.

The way it went mad actually reminded me of someone who I have been working on for a while, having him traverse worlds, transcend barriers but had I made him a kitten?

“Bob, would it be weird or stupid to have one of Amnon’s lives at the height of The Age of The Plainborn chapters come try to kill me?”

Although I asked Bob, Tony perks up.

He grabs his midsection.

“Deez nuts want to kill you?”

I try not to laugh but do. Am I getting a contact buzz even though we are outside.

“Bob, for real? What do you think?”

Bob's head cocks back, his index finger and thumb rub under his chin.

“Not as weird as a grocery store worker turned world tree but it could work as a meta comedy.”

We all look at the little kitten staring death at us with a broken middle finger pointed right at us. The only reason it can even work is that it is doing it with the injured arm.

We roll it to the van. Pack it carefully and drop it off at the local no kill shelter.

I really hope that isn't Jeff McClure after he turned into Amnon.

The smell of vinegar and ozone that hits me in the face on the way out of the parking lot does not reassure me.

I'D BUY THAT FOR A DOLLAR

SHORT STORY INDEX

THE AGE OF THE PLAINBORN CHAPTER INDEX

EVERY ROOT, EVERY THORN CHAPTER INDEX

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The Writer's Journey

The Halls of Pandemonium: Week 3 Directory

Greetings all, you’ll forgive me if I dispense with the pleasantries, but we are at the point of no return, as you humans like to say. I am, of course, Lord Devereaux the Devourer, borrowing Bradley’s Substack to deliver unto you the prompts that will save our universe, and all the others within the Sprawl…

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a month ago · 33 likes · 2 comments · Bradley Ramsey

The Age Of the Plainborn Chapter Index - What starts as a simple assassination opens up into a myth about power, systems, and what it means when names hold all the power you could ever imagine.

The Perfume of The World Tree Chapter Index - A grocery store worker becomes a World Tree, while his sometimes-friend, sometimes-enemy Jeff McClure chases love, revenge, and hope through portals into impossible worlds.

Short Stories Index - These run the gammit, including some serial chapters as standalone stories. There are action, horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and more. If you really want to understand the antagonist, Amnon, from The Age Of The Plainborn, start with Falling Past the Last Checkpoint and follow that down the rabbit's hole. All of them are Amnon, he just doesn't carry that name with him in any of the stories.

All likes, comments, and restacks will be a large part in my consideration for what keeps on keeping on, so if there is something in particular that you like and want more of, please let me know. Also, feel free to donate to keep the fire going. Hit the button below if:

I'D BUY THAT FOR A DOLLAR

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Evening, Day 101 before my 18th birthday, August 2nd, 1999.

The ride back to the canoe place felt like an endurance test. The others dragged their paddles through the water like they were stirring soup, and I had to do half the work just to keep us moving. By the time we got there, the rental guys were staring at us like we’d been lost for days.

It felt like we had.

No one looked ready to drive, so I crammed everyone into Brent’s Blazer. The ride was quiet except for the occasional snore or someone mumbling to no one in particular about almost nothing in particular before trailing off mid-sentence.

We ended up at my place, rent paid, fridge almost empty, just a bed and a dresser for furniture. The bareness didn’t matter. Within an hour, we’d ordered pizza, crammed the fridge with beer, and pulled lawn chairs into a warped circle. Pizza boxes became makeshift tables, beer cans littered the carpet like spent shell casings, and the smoke hung so thick it felt like we were breathing through an itchy wool blanket.

That’s when the energy shifts. On the river, they’d been slow, melting into themselves. Here, they get weird. Conversations loop back on themselves, people laugh at punchlines from twenty minutes ago. Someone starts stacking empty beer cans into a pyramid on my floor, saying they are building a monument to the old oak. Another wanders into the hall with a cold slice of pizza, insisting he was “saving it for later” but never putting it down. Lillith keeps changing the music every thirty seconds, swearing she is “finding the perfect song” but never letting one play long enough to hear the chorus.

The longer I watch, the more my stomach knots. As the Oxy fades, they buy more from Brent. A couple crush them on the table and snort lines off a CD case. Someone wonders aloud if they could be smoked. They argue about it for so long I lose track of time.

Eventually, I surrender the apartment. Everything but my room. I lock the door, curl into the fetal position on my bed, and start pulling one hair at a time from the back of my head. Each one curls into a snake, slithering down the bed until they weave themselves into a miniature oak at the foot of the mattress. The tree is made from my hair, but it writhes like Medusa’s, each strand a snake spitting curses at me in Monica Lewinsky’s voice, like I’d somehow been subpoenaed in a scandal I didn’t cause.

Billy, on cue, walks in as Billy Clinton at a press conference, stepping from behind a podium and speaking in a perfect Arkansas drawl about my life like it’s his.

“I did not give OxyContin to those rich little fuckers. Brent technically sold it to them. I did have sex with Lillith, but she was down with it, and Eve had already broken up with me so no take backs. I did eat a hundred hits of acid, but only because the Sheriff burst in like a dickhead before I could sell them to his son, who thinks he’s the reincarnation of Bob Marley. That’s not what of means!”

He adjusts his tie, meets my eyes, and says, “Son, you’re probably gonna need a pardon after one more week with these kids. You better get into politics.” Then he starts in on the Saxophone to make it even more weird but also kinda smooth.

The oak grows in the sound, branches creaking like Josh’s window air conditioning unit before bursting through the ceiling. The snakes slide over the walls, then dive out the window, morphing mid-air into the Little Miami, flowing backward, carrying half-sunken podiums and White House furniture downstream.

Monica rises from the current, topless, asking if I want a blowjob. I am about to get down with her when, before I can answer, Amy Fisher pops out of the river next to her pointing a gun at my face while saying in a thick Italian accent, “Joey Bottafuoco, Joey Bottafuoco… I’m walking over here!”

Um, what?

Lorena Bobbitt jumps up to complete the trinity, knife in hand, calmly suggesting it would be better to just cut it off and “save us all some trouble.”

From somewhere above, Billy-Clinton’s voice booms like a cheap stadium PA:

“I wouldn’t recommend the blowjob. Look where it got me. Hillary’s probably gonna cut mine off anyway. Don’t you give her that knife, Lorena. I am not gonna pardon you if you do.”

“Shut the fuck up already!” the women and I shout in unison. Then they all melt away, giving us both the finger as they go.

As the last middle finger sinks beneath the water, the oak’s snakes drop onto the bed, twisting into microphones. I grab one to say something defiant, but it smacks me in the face and demands I confess to things I can’t remember doing. The other snakes-now-microphones begin rapid-firing book report questions:

“Was Animal Farm a warning about socialism or a warning about the men who hijack it?”

“Who was it that said in 1984, ‘When you let someone else decide what is true, you’ve already given them the power to decide who you are’?”

“Why are they burning books in Fahrenheit 451 — to destroy the words or to destroy the people who read them?”

Behind me, the story from the party before comes true. The Sheriff’s cruiser, now a giant caterpillar, eats through the wall and crawls into the room. The Sheriff yee-haws like a cowboy before screaming at the microphones, “I’m the one asking the questions here!” Then he rests his case, riding off into the sunset while laughing with Rich and Smash Face’s voices, pointing to the bed where Lillith now sleeps peacefully.

Billy-Clinton flips off the caterpillar cruiser, smacks Lillith’s ass, and tells her to “rest easy.” He puts on his best car salesman smile, slings an arm around me, and pulls me in tight.

“Son, you’ve got two options: swim with the snakes or stand at the podium.”

He backs off with his hands up like he’s totally innocent, and I walk toward the mic — but it turns into a gun pointed at my head. It all goes dark.

END OF CHAPTER 38

BEGIN CHAPTER 39

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SHORT STORY INDEX

THE AGE OF THE PLAINBORN

At the foot of the ridge, the place where Amnon killed me, I wait for him, per our agreement.

I hold a bag large enough for a head.

It stinks of rot and waste.

My father's head. At least, that is what we hope Amnon sees.

Agrat stands beside me, at my right hand.

Solomon, invisible to all but me, stands at my left.

We wait for days.

It rains in a downpour.

The wind howls like a dying animal.

Amnon never shows.

Solomon and his revived Mazzikin have long scoured every inch of the nearby tower by the time the sun rises on the third day

They claim it is empty.

Every hair on the back of my neck stands when I look at it.

I know it is not.

My father hides in my shadow.

The bag of waste is Sakhr's remains.

The morning smells like decomposing fish.

“I'm done waiting.” I tell those gathered around me.

My eyes drag across the top of the trees down to the dirt.

The earth at my feet rumbles slightly when I place the bag at my feet.

My gaze is suddenly drawn up to the top of the Tower.

Once my eyes reach the exact spot where he threw me off, lightning strikes.

I smell ozone mixed with vinegar.

One long root covered in thorns crawls out of the place between stones, reaching into the heavens before falling down and hanging off the parapet like a sick version of the Rapunzel myth.

“Get out of my shadow, father.” I order.

He no longer needs to show himself but he does anyway.

He places a gentle hand on my shoulder.

“I failed you once, my Little Kitten. I don’t want to do it again.”

His voice is strong on the surface but I hear the quiver he can never hide from me.

I don’t turn around to look at him yet.

He blames himself for something I forced him to let me do.

I know when he calls me Little Kitten he does it with love but the way it twists when I think of what Amnon did to me…

“Father, don’t call me Little Kitten any more.” I order.

I knew the moment they came to the village these were no simple brutes come to conquer.

The words they spoke felt like a knife against all our necks just waiting to slice.

When I finally turn around I look the old man in his eyes.

He looks more tired than I have ever seen him. The wrinkles are deeper. His skin has begun to sag and grow more sunspots.

Though weary, I also see the way his eyes hold that glint when mine meet his.

He has never once doubted me.

He has never held anything back to protect me.

He has always trusted me.

I let my lips curl upward as I look at him.

“You have never failed me, father. Even after my death you found a way to bring me back.” I tell him.

His lips tighten across his face.

He knows this smile.

He can't stop the sigh or the shake of his head, even if we both know it is an act.

“And you found a way to come back permanently.” He whispers as he looks up at the tower and the root hanging over the parapet.

His eyes narrow and his lips tighten.

“Is that where you're going now?”

I raise my chin.

“I can’t save us all if I can't face him.”

“You don't have to face him alone.”

His hand is still on my shoulder.

I place my own over it just before I become a cat and slip out of his fingers.

“I am not alone.”

I carry their memories.

All of them.

In the world covered by shades of blue and yellow, Amnon's form is clear atop the tower.

He is shadowed like a mazzikin and stone like a golem.

My paws move quietly across the ground but there is no doubt in my mind that he sees me.

The smell of ozone and vinegar gets stronger and stronger as I take each step.

I scratch my name gently into the wood as I move upward.

The tower vibrates and sings.

My skin tingles and my blood flows in unison with the magic veins of the tower.

I move slow and methodical to ensure I don't miss any chance to write my name in between the places where Amnon wrote his, as I ascend.

When I reach the highest point he stands there with his back to me.

He doesn't turn to acknowledge me as I reach the platform.

“When I first came to this world, I expected Solomon would lead the rebellion. I worked hard to shape him, to push him, to make him think those things I tossed aside were mistakes.”

He laughs for one short, measured moment.

“I called him apprentice but I never wanted him to truly feel like he was one.” He says as he finally turns to me but his eyes are somewhere off in the distance, even as our eyes meet.

I draw in a sharp breath.

His skin isn't stone.

It is metal, like Sakhr's.

Poison and plague emanates from every pore.

He holds two giant, bloodied axes.

I blink and he disappears.

“His rebellion was nearly ready when you came along. Another plaything I would use up until you were ready to be discarded just like the rest. Probably the most beautiful one I have had in a long while but nothing more than that.”

I transform only my eyes.

He will not remain invisible unless I choose it.

“Beauty is meaningless once you have seen eternity.”

He lets out a deep sigh.

“But effort. Effort is eternal.”

His lips curl and his eyes glow a deep red.

“I am proud of you, Little Kitten.”

His eyes narrow as they stop looking into the distance and finally see me.

“I am not your kitten, Worm.” I warn.

He laughs that sharp laugh that went much too long back at the cave. This one goes long enough that I almost move to strike but just before I move he holds up a hand.

“Lilith…Lilith! Lilith! Lilith!

He screams it like someone waking from a nightmare before going quiet like a spent arrow.

“You have no idea what that name means to me, really.”

The glow in his eyes fades. They look almost human for a moment as he turns to look past me at some place I can't see again.

“You keep scratching that name inside my own…”

The wind suddenly screams, the tower rumbles.

“What…poetry.” His voice is high pitched and cracking around the edges.

All goes completely silent around us for a moment.

He balls his hands into fists and gazes at them.

“Yet..the cruelty...”

I move as fast as I can but his fist is faster.

The Tower rumbles as we clash.

“Amnon.” He says it like a spell.

“Lilith.” I answer with my own.

We clash again and again as thunder rumbles, the wind screams.

The Tower protests in cracks and groans but the stones hold together.

“Lilith, Lilith, Lilith. Beauty so complete.” He sings like a song as we battle.

“Amnon, Amnon, Amnon. Bastard child of the king.” I sing back.

My form switches from cat to human to cat. The harder his skin, the softer and more slippery mine. The more poison and blood he calls forward, the more healing and comfort I burst forth with.

In gap after gap write and write and write.

He moves like someone whose entire body is a weapon.

Every angle is from a blind spot he believes I shouldn't see.

Every hit is meant to kill.

“You studied Resheph, Sakhr, Solomon, and Agrat. But what did you learn from Alukah and Deder?

I laugh this time. I laugh even as he continues his relentless assault until he finally stops.

He has finally sensed it.

“What do you think?”

He folds his arms just before I can write the final name.

His canines grow long.

“Out with it, Lilith.”

I don't worry.

I don't rush past this pause.

“You want to know what I've seen but I haven't chosen to show you for a reason.”

He scoffs.

“True but not important. You will tell me in the end.”

I let my lips curl upward, my whiskers to grow and my nails to harden into points.

“You are hunger, Amnon. I did not need Alukah to see that. You are war, Amnon. I did not need to see Deder for that.”

“To truly understand you, Amnon, I only needed Tamar.”

His eye twitches.

The left side of his metal lip quivers.

Then he can't stop himself.

“Cunt! Whore! Devil! Succubus!”

The first crack in the tower.

“Give! Give!”

I raise one shiny metal claw.

The tip is red with the drops of her blood.

The blood she sacrificed for this moment.

Tamar's blood.

Her name covers him.

END OF CHAPTER 12

BEGIN CHAPTER 13

I'D BUY THAT FOR A DOLLAR

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SHORT STORY INDEX

THE AGE OF THE PLAINBORN

Morning, Day 101 before my 18th birthday, August 2nd, 1999.

The river water's cool, but the air is heavy and hot, the kind that sits on your shoulders until you’re half-ready to just sink under and stay there. The sun’s too bright to do anything but look for shade and let the current take you. It rained just enough this week to make the river perfect for the canoe but the heat is making it feel like hell on earth.

I can’t get to the water fast enough.

The kids I’m with are the kind who treat a canoe trip like a mobile backyard party. We’ve got every cooler stuffed with beer and weed, the smell of both already mixing in the air before we even push off. The canoe-rental guy didn’t ask a single question, just took our money and watched us wobble away like a man who knows better than to get involved.

Even though I handed Brent the OxyContin long before we reached the edge of the water, I also warned him about what Rich said. Told him about the girl on the couch. The way she’d gone from beautiful to chain-link skinny in less time than a semester of college. Brent looked disappointed, but he decided not to sell the pills yet. I watched him pull the bottle just before we got out of the van that dropped us here, turn it in his hand, then put it away like he was afraid it might bite him.

With all the copaganda out there, it’s hard to tell what’s real about drugs and what’s just more Reefer Madness bullshit. But if Oxy’s anything like heroin, I’ve already seen what it can do. I don’t want any part of it. I am done with school after this next year.

Billy pops up beside my canoe, dripping and grinning. “You’re still a sophomore, dumbass!” he yells, before giving me the finger and disappearing under the water again like some degenerate river spirit.

When I look back, Brent’s holding the bottle again. This time mirror-shoes sees it and wonders aloud why the hell he hasn’t sold them any yet.

“No! No! What if this really is like heroin?” Brent’s voice cracks a little.

Mirror-shoes shrugs, the kind of shrug that says he’s already decided. “My dad gets these from his doctor. Best painkiller out there. They’re not heroin. Nobody’s sticking a needle in their arm for these. Doctors prescribe ‘em every day. Hell, according to my dad they’re less addictive than pot.”

The doctor part gets me. I haven’t been to one in over a year, but those white coats have always seemed more trustworthy than any other uniform I’ve seen. Broken bones, strep throat, sprained ankles. Whenever a fix was needed, they were the ones who did it. Hard to picture them handing out poison.

“So why are they being bought like drugs right now, dumbass?” Billy’s voice slides into my ear, low and needling.

Before I can come up with an answer, Brent’s already made the sale. The pills are gone.

A couple canoes down, Lillith takes one. Pastel Pants hands it to her like a communion wafer.

She looks at me with her tongue out seductively as she pulls it back and swallows.

Her and Pastel Pants are hot and heavy but she won’t stop doing things like this as if daring me to just give up and give in.

They don’t bother offering me any Oxy. I stick to beer and weed, and everyone knows it.

Ten minutes later, we beach the canoes to hit a rope swing. Lillith and Pastel Pants wander off into the trees. I watch them go, she intentionally flashes me as they sneak behind some trees.

Even though we still hook up sometimes, it isn’t out in the open and never when she is high.

Which tracks, I guess. Whenever something hopeful starts happening to me something dreadful always lurks in the background.

“Emo as fuck, man.” Billy says as he smokes his Marlboro and blows out smoke rings he cuts with the Crocodile Dundee knife his Grandpa cut the water moccasin's head off with.

We are at the rope swing for about 20 minutes before things start to get weird.

At first, it’s just the usual. Everyone taking turns, cheering each other on, doing flips they’ve clearly never practiced before. Then the Oxy starts to settle in. You can see it on their faces, the way they start melting around the edges. Their eyes glaze over, pupils tightening into tiny black pinpricks, like someone dimmed the lights inside their heads. The laughter’s still there, like when we smoke pot, but it’s slower now, stretched thin, like it’s traveling through syrup. Words slur, movements lag a beat behind thoughts, and half of them look like they could just slide off their seats into the river and sleep there. Some of them turn extra affectionate, hugging whoever’s closest, including trees.

Mirror-shoes climbs the rope swing and just… hangs there. Not swinging, not jumping. Just swaying slowly like a sad wind chime while everyone debates whether he’s faking them out or if this is a perfectly fine and fun thing for someone to do on a rope swing. Finally, he lets go, but instead of a big splash, he just sort of steps off into the water like he’s getting out of the shower.

That’s when I notice the ripples around him stretch too far, widening into black rings like oil spreading on water. In the center of them, his head looks smaller than it should, like the closer he gets the further he is drifting away into a distance that doesn’t exist.

When we get going again, one kid tries to toss a beer to another canoe and misses by a mile. The can arcs into the river and spins away while Brent and mirror-shoes argue over whether or not that should be considered littering as they slowly float past it. I watch the can bob and roll until it’s not a beer can anymore but a dead fish, belly up, its glassy eyes looking straight at me before it vanishes under the surface like some zombie waiting to pop out and get me.

Pastel pants sits in the front of the boat with a squashed PB&J, eating it like it’s a five-course meal, narrating every bite in slow motion. “Mmmm… crunchy peanut butter… strawberry jelly… now bread…” For a second, the bread looks moldy, black threads running through it like veins. I blink and it’s just bread again. Lillith notices me looking at her boat and smiles at me but her teeth are black and her face is suddenly gaunt like the ash on a cigarette.

I smile back even though I don’t want to. There is something there when she looks at me, I just don’t know what it is.

Two people fall asleep sitting upright in their canoe. No one notices for five minutes until the whole thing tips slowly sideways, spilling them into the water. They come up smiling, say “Man, that was refreshing,” then promptly fall asleep again and repeat. The second time they go under, their bodies don't bob up right away and in the time it takes my heart to skip, I see them floating face-down, skin pale, hair fanning out like a dead thing. Then they’re upright again, wiping water from their eyes and getting back in the boat.

Billy’s been watching it all, grinning like the devil on a lifeguard shift. “Just wait,” he says. “Give it another ten minutes and they’ll forget what planet they’re on.”

He’s not wrong. A couple of them start debating whether the river is flowing north or south, getting so wrapped up in it they don’t notice they’re floating toward a downed tree they crash into. When they hit, the sound echoes wrong, like wood splintering mixed with a muffled scream.

When we stop again at a split, another kid insists he can swim to “that sandbar way over there,” but halfway across just stops, floats on his back, and waves lazily for someone to tow him in. Except the sky above him looks… wrong. The clouds are too low, sagging like wet paper. I think they’re reaching down to pull him under instead of letting him up. Eventually, I go get him because everyone else is half-dead and laying down exactly where their boats went ashore.

It’s funny until it isn’t. Mirror-shoes girl is lying so still in the bottom of her canoe that for a second I think she’s passed out for good. I see her lips part, and for a moment I swear river water spills out instead of breath. She flips me off without opening her eyes when I mention to Brent what I am seeing.

I can’t shake the image of the girl from Rich’s trailer as I look at all these kids around me.

Billy must catch the change in my face, because he leans close, voice syrupy-sweet: “Better decide, Mikey. You gonna laugh at ‘em or save ‘em? Or sell ‘em more before they float away?”

“Aren’t you the one who told me this was the way to pay my rent?”

He doesn’t answer.

The air feels heavier.

The trees lining the riverbank start to curl inward like they’re bending over to watch us, blackening at the edges like they’re slowly being burned. I’m reminded of the dream where the whole forest around this river was ash, and I was choking to death on the smoke as I dug a deeper and deeper hole.

There’s a rope swing up ahead, but the closer we get, the more it looks like a noose. And for a split second, I’m not in the canoe anymore — I’m standing on the edge of a trapdoor, the rope swaying in front of me, and Billy’s somewhere behind telling me not to jump.

It feels like it’s too late. The old oak’s roots laugh like Rich and Smash Face.

END OF CHAPTER 37

BEGIN CHAPTER 38

I'D BUY THAT FOR A DOLLAR

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SHORT STORY INDEX

THE AGE OF THE PLAINBORN

Chapter 1 - Dodona, Night Shift - Behind a Kroger grocery store, strange roots start growing where they shouldn’t. When I go to dig them up, they pull me somewhere that definitely isn’t Ohio.

Chapter 2 - The Gingko Tree - In the long shadow of the War on Terror, desire becomes a vulnerability. One woman knows what’s coming and chooses who lives.

Chapter 3 - The Scent of Gingko - Some people stay with you like a scent you can’t wash away. This is the story of going back before memory turns into regret.

Chapter 4 - The Hunger Between Shelves -A man chasing the ghost of love is driven from market light to midnight pursuit to an impossible doorway beneath the world. On the far side, every answer has teeth.

Chapter 5 - The Shadow Mirror - He went looking for a way to bring her back and returned with something missing. Now every shadow, root, and memory leads deeper into a bargain that may cost what remains of his soul.

I'D BUY THAT FOR A DOLLAR

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SHORT STORY INDEX

THE AGE OF THE PLAINBORN CHAPTER INDEX

EVERY ROOT, EVERY THORN CHAPTER INDEX

Close to sunset, Day 101 before my 18th birthday, August 2nd, 1999.

I stand in front of the doorway for a second, the noise from the living room muffled like it’s coming from underwater. My hand sits still on the knob. The air here is heavy, thick enough that I feel like I have to push it aside to step forward. “It’s me,” I say like a secret password, and the door unlocks.

I open it.

Somewhere far away, or maybe just in my head, I hear that Arkansas drawl: “Son, you’re probably gonna need a pardon.” It echoes like a wave against the river bed.

When I finally go in, she doesn’t look happy to see me. Her face is thin, eyes half-closed like they’re fighting to stay open. Behind her, the walls pulse once, like they’re breathing, then go still.

She looks at me confused, shakes her head, starts to speak in slow, broken pieces. “Um… is a… what I… mean… is — fuck! It’s starting already.” She stands, then sits again, grabbing her head like it’s fallen off and she’s trying to screw it back on. For a beat, I see screw ridges along her neck. Her face moves in stiff, mechanical twitches, like it’s not quite attached to the rest of her.

“This does not compute. This does not compute,” Billy says in his best HAL 9000 voice somewhere over my shoulder but when I turn, he’s not there.

Lillith’s nose starts to bleed. I’m not sure if it’s real. Could be snot. Could be what’s left of my trip. Either way, I grab a tissue and blot it, my hand looking too large and pale in the yellow light.

When our eyes meet, there’s rage there…but it keeps shifting, like the target can’t decide. At me? At Pastel Pants? At her parents? At the whole damn world?

“Is this stuff really like heroin?” She asks, each word dragged up slow from the bottom of a well.

“Not according to Brent and Mirror Shoes,” Billy says, though that could be my own brain answering me.

Was that a hallucination too? I wonder.

“Go ask him yourself,” the voice says, right before Lillith grabs my shirt and yanks my face toward hers.

Over her shoulder, Pastel Pants leans in the doorway…he gives the bottle of Oxy’s a little shake, sharp and hollow, like a twisted Appalachian mating call. Maybe even the same sound I heard echoing off the trees earlier, after the can of beer in the river turned into a dead fish.

It crawls into the back of my skull and curls up there.

The rattle is a dry bone-on-bone clatter that makes the mirror hum, the same way the Sheriff’s cruiser did when it laughed in Rich’s voice.

“Kiss me,” she says as she grabs my face back to look at her.

I look down, feeling shame. The hairs I’d been holding fall at her feet. They wriggle and slither, then lift their heads and look up at me like I’ve disappointed them each personally. They vanish under her skin and climb her legs in a wave up her calf, thigh, and belly then rise from her collar like black vines and braid into her hair. The strands thicken into snakes, half root, half water moccasin but they sit still, coiled like jewelry.

We aren’t in my bathroom anymore. Marble columns rise impossibly high. We stand at the feet of a giant Athena statue; the old oak sits beside us basking in a single shaft of light from an opulent hole in the ceiling. We are wearing matching togas. They are blinding white with bright gold belts and wooden sandals that thud against the floor like gavels.

“Kiss me,” she says again, and the rattle quickens somewhere behind the columns, just out of sight.

She is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. A goddess, bright, with a halo over her head. A forbidden fruit in human form. The air turns electric, buzzing in my teeth. A wave pushes out from her voice.

“Kiss me.” A moan and a growl in the same breath this time. She is getting impatient.

A small golden apple drops from the oak and lands between us. When it hits, the sound changes. That pill-bottle rattle moves inside the apple, a dry chitter from the core. The skin splits. Worms spill out: fat, blind, wet things, squirming in rhythm with that rattle. Every twitch makes the sound louder, faster. I can’t tell if it’s the worms moving or if Pastel Pants right behind me, bottle still ticking in his hand, urging me to dive right in and take the bait.

She smiles, lifts her toga to show me the real forbidden fruit. “Do it right here in front of him,” she laughs, voice echoing like a bird shriek crossed with nails on a chalkboard. She grabs my head, hungry. My body wants to obey; my brain throws a rope around my waist and digs in its heels.

What the fuck is going on?

“B-Billy… where are you?” I try to pull away, looking for something real to grab.

“Your imaginary friend isn’t here to save you this time,” she says, squeezing harder. The snakes in her hair come alive. They hiss at me as her eyes turn into mirrors and hold me in place. She forces me down. The marble is cold against my spine. The apple rolls to my cheek, the rattle now inches away.

Pain flashes — too sharp, wrong. “Stop. This hurts. Please stop.”

“Isn’t this what you wanted, Mike? You poor little baby.” She cackles and won’t stop riding me like a cowgirl whose horse she means to break. “Weren’t you aroused when she got up to make Rich food? When they laughed and you knew their dicks were hard the second you left? Isn’t this what you all want?” Her nails rake my chest; her snakes bite and pull. “Power, control. Throw us aside when you’re done. Isn’t that why you let me take the heroin, Mike?”

She lifts the golden apple over me like a priest with a chalice, offering her sacrifice to Athena. The worms writhe in time with that relentless rattle, every slick twist syncing perfectly to the way her body is grinding on top of me. The sound, the movement, the heat — it all locks together into a single, choking metronome that drowns out thought. Each breath feels measured against the next, every heartbeat forced to keep tempo with her. The apple tilts, and the rattle swells like it’s inside my own skull, daring me to fall into its cadence and never crawl back out.

“Open up,” she purrs like a kitten rubbing against my skin.

I clamp my mouth shut and shake my head. She presses the apple to my lips anyway. A worm slips past, cold and slick, and the instant it touches my tongue the rattle explodes inside me, jaw, teeth, sinuses, throat, a dry skittering that vibrates my skull like it’s full of pebbles. It slides lower and the rattle moves with it, buzzing down my chest, then my gut, like someone poured a thousand tiny pills into me and they’re all shaking in a plastic bottle I can’t cough up. I gag and wrench my head to the side. The apple thuds to the marble. The rattle keeps going inside me, a timer I didn’t set.

“Just let me go!” I find something like inhuman strength, shove her off, roll away before she can jam the apple back between my teeth.

The temple blinks. The columns jump. The oak’s light flickers.

I’m on my feet, heart pounding. I don’t look back. I don’t care if my fly is open. I yank at the same bathroom door frame Pastel Pants is still leaning on, shoulder past him, and I run.

I grab my skateboard on the way toward the door.

Outside, the air hits me in the face, not fresh, but heavy, gritty, as if it is filled with smoke.

I vomit it all up on the ground. Then draw in breath like I’ve been choking.

When I look up the sky is the same color as it was on the river the day the trees curled inward: cigarette ash, smudged and low, like it might press down on me if I stand still too long.

I feel worried, traumatized, dirty, guilty.

I head toward the only place I ever feel like I might be safe in this town.

END OF CHAPTER 40

BEGIN CHAPTER 41

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SHORT STORY INDEX

THE AGE OF THE PLAINBORN

Late Afternoon, Day 101 before my 18th birthday, August 2nd, 1999.

Pounding on my bedroom door?

“Lillith! Lillith! What the fuck are you doing in there?”

It’s Pastel Pants.

The darkness cracks like glass, and I’m sitting on my bed, hair in my fist, the air thick with stale sweat and insomnia. I rub the back of my head — no bald spot. Small mercy.

Where the hell did this hair come from?

I open the door to leave my bedroom. Pastel Pants is posted up against the bathroom frame, elbow digging into the wood like it’s holding him up. His head hangs low, gelled hair plastered to his forehead, the smell of river water, distress, a little bit of vomit, and beer roll off him like a 20 sided dice. He doesn’t look at me right away, just stares at the floor like it might offer him an answer he hasn’t already burned through.

I want to ask him to roll for initiative but I don't think he ever played Dungeons and Dragons.

“Is everything alright out here?” I ask him.

From inside, Lillith’s voice floats out — small, cracked.

“(A name I can't hear) go away. Just go away.”

She’s not yelling. It’s worse. It’s tired. Done.

“I don’t want to talk to you anymore. Will you please just stop.”

Pastel Pants’ jaw twitches. His eyes flick up at the ceiling like he’s swallowing the words he wants to spit. His knuckles tap the door in a slow, frustrated rhythm, but he doesn’t push it open.

“Ju-just come out and talk to me, won’t you?” Pastel Pants pleads.

There’s a pause. Then, softer:

“No.” She says like a flat note on the piano.

She pauses even longer this time and everything slowly stops before she finally says it.

“I heard Mike say something a second ago. Will you send him in?”

The silence between all three of us stretches like a long umbilical cord tied to each one of our necks, waiting to be cut. He finally looks at me. He really looks. The kind of look where you can see the math in someone’s head, all the ways they want to tell you to fuck off but know they’d sound pathetic if they did.

He looks like he is going to try to bluff his way through this one like he has all the others but then he abruptly changes his mind.

Does he know about what Lillith and I have been doing?

His voice is flat when he says it:

“She’s all yours, man.”

It’s not an offer. It’s a surrender.

He steps back, the space between us carrying all the weight he can’t say out loud. I slide past him toward the door. Behind me, he’s still standing there — not angry, not even jealous. Just hollow, beaten, tired.

Billy tries to give me a high five but I leave him hanging. I have a bad feeling about this. This party has gone way too long. The sword is dropping.

END OF CHAPTER 39

BEGIN CHAPTER 40

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SHORT STORY INDEX

THE AGE OF THE PLAINBORN

Evening, Day 103 before my 18th birthday, July 31st, 1999.

It's been weeks and the money just keeps coming, shining and easy, like gold coins tossed into my lap by kids who’ve never had to earn one. They glitter on the surface, polished smiles, bottomless pockets, river days in the sun but underneath it’s all rot, the kind that swells and softens until it falls apart in your hands. These kids are human slot machines: drop in a few tabs or a handful of pills and out comes enough cash to pay my rent, pay for groceries and utilities, and still have some left for the good beer. It’s only when you’re close enough to smell the water that you realize the current’s not carrying you anywhere good.

It’s like they’ve got an endless hoard of gold hidden under their basements. Their parents are dragons in tailored suits, curled up on piles of cash, gathering more and more and more while the rest of us are happy just being the help, polishing their scales, tending to their every need, praying they’ll let a few coins trickle down without eating us alive when they get too hungry.

Before last week, I knew there was a canyon between the poor and the wealthy. I just didn’t know how wide it really was. I didn’t know you could do whatever the fuck you wanted, never work a day in your life, and keep spending until your arms gave out from carrying shopping bags.

One kid handed me a hundred just to pick up his mom after she had a coked-out breakdown and parked herself in the middle of the street. The cop didn’t even blink when I pulled up, parked her car in the lot nearby, and drove her home. Their dad thanked me for “keeping it discreet” and said he’d put in a good word with the Sheriff.

I think he told me he is some kind of Trustee for the Township next door. I don’t even know what that means.

Two days with them and my rent was paid. But the whole thing feels even more like standing under the Sword of Damocles. They’re self-centered, thrill-hungry, spoiled little assholes, and I know it’s only a matter of time before one of them turns me in.

So far I’ve sold these kids mushrooms, acid, weed, Valium, Xanax, and coke. Today one of them asked for heroin. I told him that was a line I wouldn’t cross but he convinced me to buy OxyContin.

So here I am, standing in Rich’s trailer with a bottle of OxyContin in my hand.

“You got in with them, huh?” Rich says, like he’s been waiting for this day. Smash Face, Rich’s side kick, chuckles from a ripped La-Z-Boy, the sound low and constant, like a bad fridge motor.

Rich is old, with patched gray and blonde hair, a Burt Reynolds mustache, and wired with that muscle you get from spending years in jail doing nothing but working out like a maniac until you get out. He rarely wears more than a pair of cut up blue jeans.

Smash face is old but fat. The kind of fat you get from doing nothing but sitting all day and eating nothing good for you. We call him smash face because his face literally looks like someone took a hammer to his face. To hear him explain it, he did so much cocaine that the cartilage in his nose just fell out. Who knows if that is true, the man is a walking, talking lie machine. You know he is lying if his mouth is open.

I ignore Rich’s question because I have been wondering something for a while now and finally feel like I have enough money coming in to ask it. “If you’ve got access to all these drugs so easily, why the hell do you live in a trailer?”

Rich blinks, glances at Smash Face, then grins slow and wide. He jerks his chin toward what’s sitting next to him on the couch.

It’s a young girl, maybe under age but not obviously, half-naked under a threadbare blanket. Three months ago she was healthy, with bright eyes and full lips. Now she’s pale, rail-thin, skinny enough to slip through a chain-link fence without turning sideways. Her skin is sallow, her cheeks sag, and a jagged row of rusty gaps show where her teeth used to be.

“Everything’s cheap here, boy…and no one cares what you do.” Rich says. He laughs, then smacks her on the ass. “Get up and make me something to eat.”

She hesitates, almost says something, then a shadow of fear flashes across her face and she shuffles to the kitchen. Her sleeve slips, revealing a ladder of black dots up her forearm. A demonic constellation mapped in track marks.

My face droops back in disgust.

Rich catches it immediately. His eyes go sharp. He snatches the pills from my hand.

“You think this is any different?”

“I don’t know,” I tell him. “I don’t know shit about OxyContin except those rich kids begged for it and you said you had it.” I hesitate before I admit, “They are paying us both a bonkers amount of money for this.”

He laughs. Smash Face joins in. Their faces stretch wrong, mouths too wide, teeth glowing from underneath like coals. In the space between blinks they’re demons, tails lashing behind them, jabbing me with pitchforks over the fire pit in front of the old oak.

I yank my shirt over my head like it’s armor, but Rich’s grin still burns through the fabric.

“Oh, calm down, you baby,” Rich says, suddenly human again. He presses the pills back into my palm. “When they run out of money, send them here. We’ll take good care of ’em.”

Root snakes gather at my feet as they hiss in laughter.

I grab my skateboard, the pills, and bolt. I push as hard as I can until the trailer park is a memory.

At a park much further away then I remember I duck into the Blazer where Brent’s waiting. I toss him the bottle like a hot potato.

I can still hear Rich and Smash Face laughing, their voices stretching down the road, following for miles before he drops me off at my apartment.

I tell myself that the girl on Rich’s couch, the dragons and their gold. I'm not the same. I'm different.

But am I?

END OF CHAPTER 36

BEGIN CHAPTER 37

I'D BUY THAT FOR A DOLLAR

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SHORT STORY INDEX

THE AGE OF THE PLAINBORN

The man standing at the mouth of the cave seems altogether too casual for being here.

He seems taller than I remember. Like his toes sprouted roots and pushed him up off the ground.

Every part of his skin but his eyes are covered but I don’t need to see what is underneath the clothes to know the man.

I felt him coming long before he stepped near the entrance.

He isn't surprised to see me.

I nearly ordered him killed but that would be too simple and not very likely anyway.

Not one person among those who choose to stay with me would stand a chance against him.

I don't know that I would, even now.

The wind screams when it hits the inside of the walls.

I don’t know anything about how he got here, what other forces are behind him, or if killing him would actually stop him from coming back.

After all, he once killed me, didn’t he?

The two burly guards covered in metal skin come to attention and salute me as I walk past them.

“You know this isn’t very different from the way I met your father when he agreed to give you to me.” He says casually.

That burns.

“I am not my father.” I remind him.

He looks me up and down just as I do him.

I can feel the guards vibrating underneath their metal.

I take in a deep breath and remind myself that I am not my father.

This is what he trained me for my whole life.

Then it hits me and even if I didn't want the smirk to form it would. “Why do you always smell like vinegar?” I wonder aloud.

The guards laugh.

They even relax a bit although they stay vigilant.

He laughs too but for way too long instead of answering.

He keeps going until the guards shift back to vibrating.

Even I feel a pang I won't show.

“Well played.” I say as I try not to remember the way he strangled me to death while he fixed the way he wrote his name on my skin.

The way he took me under complete control before I died is something I will never forget.

I kick a rock on the ground near enough that it won’t hit him but close enough to know that I could if I wanted to.

I am thankful to have been resurrected from bones.

He turns his head diagonally and raises a brow. “You aren't the only one who pays close attention, Little Kitten.” He looks off into the distance. “That's what your father always called you too, right, Little Kitten?”

He licks his lips.

Before I can reply he holds up a finger that puts everything around us into darkness.

I can still see him clearly and he can see me.

“Nice parlor trick,” I pull up the sharp nails on my left hand and blow on them like trying to cool wet paint. There is a shiver under my skin somewhere but I do my best to keep it hidden.

He shakes his head and makes a tsk sound with his tongue and lips.

“I have a proposal, Lilith.” He smiles and holds up his left hand as he continues, “I swear an oath that if you kill Aaron I will not only leave this planet but I will leave this dimension and ensure the higher gods stop the raids here completely.” Amnon offers.

“Your word is worth about as much as a dung heap, Tower God. Remember when you told my father you would ensure I was protected?” I spit.

He smiles as he continues to look off somewhere in the distance.

“Refuse and I will start by having everyone in this cave crushed under the rocks.”

The darkness that surrounds us fades away.

The ground beneath our feet begins to shake.

I hear the cave quaking.

Distant yelps as people start to flee to wider parts below.

This is the power of names but there is also something else I haven't felt before underneath.

“Stop.” I demand as I look over at the two guards trembling openly now. “Come back here again without my permission and you will learn the hard way what I learned about death.”

“You don't know anything about death, Little Kitten.”

I wait in silence until he turns to look at me.

It takes everything I have but I look him in the eye, “If I decide to take you up on your offer I will come to the tower.”

He looks at me with a straight face and eyes that don't blink.

I wave my hand and the ground stops shaking.

Whatever it was that he used to empower this attack it wasn't yet strong enough to stop my control.

“This cave is mine now. Write your name on it as many times as you want. Try whatever new trick you have up your sleeve…but it will never bend to your will again as long as I live.”

He smiles underneath his clothes before turning to leave.

I see him lick his lips again.

He turns around just before he goes far enough not to be heard.

He stops, “I don't think I will let you anywhere near my tower again. I will meet you at the bottom of the ridge, however. You know, the place where Solomon found you?”

A he walks away slowly after saying this I notice a part of his skin showing just under the robe.

It looks like…bark?

“I will gladly meet you at the place of my rebirth, human.” I say just loud enough for it to carry across the grass to him.

His laugh carries long after he is gone.

END OF CHAPTER 11

BEGIN CHAPTER 12

I'D BUY THAT FOR A DOLLAR

SHORT STORY INDEX

THE AGE OF THE PLAINBORN CHAPTER INDEX

EVERY ROOT, EVERY THORN CHAPTER INDEX

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