magnus greel 
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(7/30/07 5:29 am)
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ANIMA TOWN: DREAMS OF THE DEAD
ANIMA TOWN: DREAMS OF THE DEAD
New colors appeared in the sky daily, never to be seen again. Not blue, red, yellow, or purple, orange or green, or any combination. I was waiting for the wrong combination of signs to appear. Amongst several discoveries I made during these months spent in twilight was the fact that as it turns out, I did not need to eat. I never had.
I chose to walk across town by way of an alley that went on forever, lined with stained, crumbling brick walls with faded signs from fifty years earlier. Whirlwinds, one after another after another, blew loose trash through the alley and around my feet. They often met and collided, or slowed to converse for a minute. Once I saw one reverse direction, to match that of its companion, and they joined. It seems like a happy ending, until you realize that this sort of thing probably caused the hurricane, the big one, the one my sister had the premonitions about. That's why I'm here.
I love decay. I love doom and destruction, as long as I'm not suffering any consequences from it, personally... This place was in a blessed, eternal state of deterioration, always crumbling, but never gone. It was never new. This trash... was it being blown by wind, really, or did it follow these paths of its own free will? Was it just a coincidence that the wind happened to be going in the same direction? The trash may be more alive than anything else here.... Anyway, no one ever made this trash. The empty cartridges, candy wrappers, and wet cigarette butts were never fresh ammunition, candy bars, or Marlboros. These winos were sober once, though, and all these people came from someplace else. Change happens, but it follows different rules.
A nearby apartment chose that moment to explode. I couldn't see it happen, that nauseating bubble that protrudes from the second-story window, then the putrified bursting.... not from the narrow alley I was nearing the end of. The sound was ricocheting everyplace, so I couldn't track it. There wasn't a single damn thing I could do, except lie later about it, and hope I wouldn't get caught.
The alleyway ended. I turned right onto whatever side street this was, and the sky was a deep purple, with orange stormclouds that seemed to be bearing down on me. Familiar colors, but I wasn't so sure about the combination. They seemed too heavy, somehow, I can't explain better than that... and I had to stop looking up. That never happened to me before. If the wind were to shift right now, I thought, I might just have to learn to live without oxygen for the next few minutes. That explosion was awfully close.
Then the ground lurched. I forgot about this instantly, and only know it happened because of the transcripts from witnesses who actually live there, and have techniques they've taught themselves to enhance memory in this environment.
That afternoon, downtown of course, alternate manifestation number six, if you believe Henderson....
I was just standing around, waiting for something to happen. Drugs didn't work here, but my toxic headache seemed to be going away all by itself. Fewer people passed by as time went on. A very conspicuous tumbleweed blew by at that moment, which I imagine was somebody's idea of a joke.... and the small, random group of loiterers in front of the last two businesses still standing gradually broke up and scattered, except for one rather self-absorbed person, who knew how to make her own fun.
The teenager, the girl, this topless straight-haired blonde in the unzipped blue jeans and boots who had been leaning against a brick wall and masturbating in public for half an hour, suddenly dropped what she was doing, walked right up to me, slapped the side of my head, hard, and yelled at me.
"It's the gravity! You can't do that in a confined space, or the substance of the shadows will congeal into the saddest story the earth has ever heard!" (Read the transcripts.) She stopped, looked longer and harder into my eyes than I ever had myself... and kissed me lightly on the forehead.
She was in charge. Before I had started looking, I'd found the new world's protector. Her unzipped jeans had dropped to her ankles. Then... she swayed, closed her eyes, put her hand to her forehead, and would have fallen if I hadn't caught her. Then...
Her heart burned blue. It ignited inside her like a star. Her back arched. Her skeleton was now clearly visible, as her naked body was lit from within.
Without realizing it, I'd just started doing what she had slapped me for... my hand was through the pane of glass of the storefront window next to me, and had expanded to five times its normal size. A shock wave from the first tremor caused the brilliant blue light inside Bairna's chest to sputter, wink out for two and a half horrible seconds which felt more like hours... then the power dropped down into the earth.
She stood up straight, and said, "Come on, I'll buy you a Coke. I'm rich now, ever since I started burning." She turned toward the drug store, then looked down, and noticed that her pants were down around her ankles.
"I didn't know enough to look for you."
"I know. That's how it's supposed to be. The solutions keep changing, because the problem is different each time. From this point on, I could burn each time a particular syllable or phrase is spoken, or every time someone chooses not to look out of her window."
"No wonder you're rich." I paused. "Will I burn?" I asked, in as level and even a voice as I could manage, under the circumstances.
"We all burn." She had sat down on the sidewalk, and was pulling off her boots.
"We..."
"All of us." Bairna had pulled off her jeans, and she now stood, and threw them at the nearest dumpster, missing it. "But not yet! And I'm thirsty, and I crave carbonation! I haven't belched all day, how about you?"
"I think you just threw your disposable income at the dumpster," I answered, as she dropped back down onto the pavement and pulled her right boot back on, then the left. "Never mind, though. I'm sure all you have to do is walk in there and announce to the druggist that you just took eighteen years off of his life, and strangely enough, he'll probably give you the keys to the store."
My new owner stood, and tried to dust the dust, twigs, whatnot, off of herself as best she could, back and front (plucking a gum wrapper off of her right calf and a butt from her butt) and tried not to look me in the eye, as she turned to walk into the pharmacy. The glass door closed behind her, and I saw the druggist wake up a bit, and then really wake up, as he realized his first customer in a week was a naked 19-year-old blonde in black boots. It seemed to be taking him a minute, to understand the simple request for two sodas, if that was in fact what she was asking for. I couldn't quite tell if in the middle of the conversation, he shot a glance my way... if so, he covered it well.
She returned with huge cups of Coke in each hand, backwards, leading with her ass which was, for a few moments, pressed and flattened against the glass of the door, time enough for the gold and black tattoo of the Sun on her right cheek to catch my attention.
"Mmmmm! Coke! There's a big lump of vanilla ice cream in each one, too! It might be the 1940's in there today, there's an old-fashioned soda shop and everything! Don't ever say I don't take good care of you people!"
"Fine. Thanks." I grabbed a cup.
"I mean it," she said. "Don't ever say that to anyone, alright?"
I wasn't listening. I looked up at the sky. If no one was waiting, what was the point of this?
"I know what you're thinking. It's the Moon. It gets closer and closer each day."
"No," I replied. "I'm imagining it. Besides, if the Moon's as close as you seem to think it is, you won't have to worry about it for long."
Bairna was jolted by this, and pointed with her free hand down the street. "None of them would ever say anything like that to me! It wouldn't even occur to them!"
"Fine. Are you done?"
The ground lurched. My new owner's third eye appeared on her forehead, just barely. It then sank back into the flesh. Nothing that did not happen backwards could be seen any longer. My organs did not feel as if they were mine.
I had to say it. "If you own me, then I own you."
"Agreed."
Apparently I had to say this, too: "You've probably got brick imprints all over your ass."
"I know for an absolute fact that I have. Now let's..." Bairna's voice trailed off, and to her credit, she didn't scream. I almost did. Despite our long future history together, neither of us would ever see anything like this before, so to speak. Half a man walked by us. The bottom half. A pasty, slightly overweight, naked bottom half of a man walked slowly past us on the sidewalk.
***************
At some point in the following account, circumstances begin to speak for themselves, and my point of view is almost entirely lost.
Drawings of mine:visualdevice.blogspot.com/
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