UNTITLED (K.)

You're going to hell so fast, K. said and laughed.

Ethan couldn't think of any witty rebuttal, so he didn't say anything at all. He was wearing a white windbreaker. They walked down the asphalt street. The place was really going to seed. When they got to his house, they dropped some acid and everything really got weird after that.

You can always tell when someone is lying about acid because they make up fantastical stories that don't even approach the reality of eating a tab. When you're tripping, you don't see billions of miniature Christs leap out of the faucet and parade around your bathroom, you don't cower away from threatening dinosaur hallucinations. Acid is about atmosphere; it exaggerates what's already inside of your head. You might feel like you're clinging to a cliff edge in the hallway: to you, it's real, but acid-induced reality doesn't even resemble the objective reality in which it is frequently described.

UNTITLED (On Boys)

1.

James touches the other boy on the chest. Faint bruises discolor his leonine face. His nose is crooked where once broken; perhaps the recipient of a careless or malicious blow. When James asks the boy what happened, he tells him that he had been in a car accident. He tells him that his name is Evian. James knows that this is not the boy's real name, but he says nothing.

He takes off his clothes. James wants to break that nose again. He wants to discolor that face more deeply, but he restrains himself. Instead, he steps forward and kisses the boy, a soft disparation. He pets Evian harshly and the boy moans. Later, when they finish fucking, he pays the boy in cash.

2.

Killing the boy had crossed his mind several times while he fucked him. Reaching down to his chin, caressing Evian's jawline as he groaned, then pulling abruptly backwards. Cleanly breaking his neck. Evian wouldn't feel a thing, but James would feel everything in the world.

Too late now. But he wouldn't have done it anyway.

UNTITLED

When the petals of the magnolia's blossom open, the scent of death is released into the air. Nothing smells more like a graveyard than a stand of magnolia trees in bloom. This is because magnolias feed on the rotting flesh of corpses. That tiny blush of scarlet at the center of a white blossom is blood filtered through the veins of the tree.

A number of famous individuals are buried in the graveyard, but no one can remember their names because the inscriptions on the tombs have been eaten away by a certain variety of yellow lichen. Caretakers routinely spray this parasitic lichen with poison, but it is impossible to remove post-humously as it etches the stone with a powerful acid released at death.

Where the lichen's acid spills, a breed of toxic mushrooms grow, and these mushrooms are the most aggravating problem facing the graveyard's caretakers. Each is small and red-capped, like malicious gnomes, and each has surprisingly deep roots for a fungus, burrowing down into the hardest of stones and cracking their facades. As a result, every tombstone looks like a massive spider with impossibly black silk has weaved a web around it. While the lichen only disfigures the mausoleums, the mushrooms destroy it.

Faded green moss overhangs the entire cemetary, drooling off of black limbs of unnatural trees like bizarre party decorations. Evident sunlight is filtered if present at all, and the graveyard is shrouded in a dimness that is just dark enough to depress and not dark enough to be noticeable. Such subtlety of ambience is observed by only the keenest of minds.

UNTITLED

The seedy brick that covered the building before him might have once been yellow. Now it was a filthy brown, like dry shit, cleft with black spider-web cracks as though the building was about to crumble into nothing any moment, like a sand castle exposed too long to wind and surf. The four stairs that led up to the dented metal door were no better, gray near black with oil and vomit and piss. Blood, perhaps. Needles were scattered on the ground.

Like pine needles in a noxious forest, hypodermics littered this neighborhood. Crunched on the ground under his heavy black boots. Stuck in the thick rubber sole before snapping off at the tip or falling away, having completing their odyssey.

The man stopped in front of the door. Taking a deep breath and looking around clandestinely slipping the automatic .357 magnum from the inside of his heavy coat. He jacked the slide back with that unmistakable vorpal-blade snicker-snack of a large-caliber pistol.

He knocked on the door, heavy thuds like minuscule thunder. After a moment, the door opened, revealing a dirty sunken chest man with a seven day-old beard scruff and filthy hair. Tracks ran up and down his arms like roads to some godless land. He wore a maroon t-shirt, with darker stains here and there. He stank.

“What?” he said, irritation evident in his voice. He was no more than fifteen.The man raised the pistol quickly, leveling the barrel with the boy’s face. He squeezed the trigger.

The bottle silencer on the muzzle muffled the blast only a little, and it still nearly deafened the man. The boy’s body flew backwards, head snapping backwards hard enough to break the neck, as if that mattered anymore. Blood and bone chunks and brain matter was ejected from the back of his head, spattering the concrete, carpetless hall behind him. His body hit the floor within a second and a half, no slow-motion fall like in a movie.

No glory in death, no majestic death throes or last words. Just a frail, crumpled body, pale and dirty, lying on the concrete, blood and skin harsh-lit by unrelenting fluorescent lights, stark and flickering.

UNTITLED

The orchid is slender and white. It is fluted, with a small offspring of long, tapered petals. They expand with the subtle and complex beauty of a frozen star. No one cares about this orchid, because it is a dying flower. The blossom that is visible now will vanish within several days, and the silky petals will have wilted away. Its green stem is pale, and it disappears into the tall white vase in which the flower stands.

A vase is chosen by the tasteful buyer to suit the flower that it will hold. The decision should be made with cool consideration and an keen discernment because a vase is the living flower’s coffin. Inside this edifice, the flower will slowly waste away. The vase and the flower must complement one another beautifully. Perhaps beauty will obscure the fact that the centerpiece is nothing but a tiny monument to ruin.

This vase sits on a black table in a white room by a window so clear that it does not exist. Sunlight cuts the silence in the room with a harsh consistency, etching out perfection on the carpet. Two black bookcases disturb the perfect stillness of the room’s bare walls, guarding the doorway that leads into the hall.

Atmosphere must be tangible in order to be perceived. This is dead space, filled with the flat air of an abandoned museum, but dwindling life circulates through the slowing veins of the dying flower. This is the heartbeat of the world, the pulse of a dead vegetable. Life means nothing, and silence is a creature of infinite patience.