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Compensation. What a funny word, I think, gazing down at my paycheck. As if any amount of pay for my menial tasks at the company really serves as retribution for the wasted hours of my life. Hours I no doubt would waste anyway, be they on a stupid game or masquerading as a whole human.

The brilliant story I have been saving is now foggy in my memory, and I am positive that the retelling will be lacking. So, when I head out to dinner with my roommate, I will probably never bring it up. If I head out to dinner. Will the consequences of not going be worse than the actual attendance? It doesn’t matter. Whatever he wants, he will get, because I lack the will to fight and care not to vanquish his will to do what I can not.

Outside the rotating doors, a solitary leaf spirals to the ground.

He watches it idly, mind reeling in tandem. Its colors grow richer, the lame beige deepening to copper with accents of bronze and burgundy striking through and shimmering metallically in the blades of light cutting through the canopy. It lands, settling on a palatial, white throat, and Sod flinches at the stark contrast. Hands dropping to his sides, he remembers why he was shaking her, and why he is shaking. Abruptly forcing his knees to straighten and his feet to support an unsteady frame, he wonders if any of these phantom females are real. Is his mind playing with him? They’re so strikingly familiar, so obeisant, so pure.

So dead.

A gasp erupts from his throat and he rushes away. Foolishly in the morning light. Loudly through the brambles of the meadow bordering the forest. Like a criminal. Like a murderer. Like what he is. A groan carves its way out of his mouth, thrashing forth on a crest of spittle, and he dashes headlong through a stream. Then an arrow rips into his flank, and he drops into the water, gasping for breath. In a moment of shock, he watches the slow current bear his blood away, his paling fingers flexing around a cruel shaft protruding from beneath his arm. Pushing himself up, he wills himself to flee, but by the time he pulls his cheek from the flood an indomitable force is pressing down from the other side.



“So how is dinner? Knock knock? Anyone there?”

“What the hell are you playing? Turn it off. Now,” I shout, gazing angrily across the table toward the proprietor, forgetting not only myself but my friend.

Elysian expectations yield to lurking horrors of the inscrutable - what am I doing? Vain, worthless poetry, quoth I in tedious rote! Can it be said there is comfort in an empty rite? Not for me. Not for me. Such a sentiment is a wholly meaningless abstraction of experiences; a quaint bulwark I contrive solely to separate frailties: to barricade my fears in autonomous chambers and forestall their collusion. Nebulous syllogisms do nothing to ease a hemorrhaging soul. Nothing!

Libertas re vera. Oh, it is a pitiless monster. May it shred the lids from my eyes.

Sweeping across the knoll is a hasty breeze darting with algor across the monuments to the dead. As numbing as the wind and rain and granite are to flesh, there is no anesthetic for the beleaguered consciousness. I embrace blind sleep in closing my eyes, but my mind hastens to palpable dread. Embellishment on the matter does it injustice. Enough words of delay!

I hate myself. She is dead. Where her spirit went, if anywhere, I don’t know.

Such sharp pain does further cruelty by reminding me of my own mortality, for I know not where such a bankrupt spirit as mine will, if anywhere, go. My own selfishness eludes me and, through sheer exhaustion, my body slips into a deep, shivering slumber atop the grave of my...

“He is a sorrowful one, isn’t he?” squeaks a tiny voice very near. A peculiar sound, fracturing from the patter of an afternoon drizzle.

“Who said that?” chokes out Sod, lifting his portrait from muddy ground and opening a blood-shot eye to see a crude palisade jutting awkwardly skyward. Bark is peeling haphazardly off the poles, but the sharp edges are nonetheless intimidating. His tongue cleaves to his dry hard palate and his breathing is laborious. Even the faint, hazy light stings his one open eye: a brilliance eclipsed as the small form of a field mouse navigates its way into his field of view.

“Well, look at that, he’s awake!” it peeps, leaning close to Sod’s nose and twitching the long, stiff whiskers extending from its own.

“What sort of sick dream is this?” Sod moans, receiving a handful of mud in his clawing hands on trying to push himself upward, alas, to no avail.

A little chorus of high-pitch laughter emanates from the ground near his head, and he sees two more little mice come into view. The first, their spokesman, says, “He says he is dreaming. Hah! Look at that. I suppose were I him, I would wish I were dreaming too.”

“Stop vexing and let the lug rest,” declares a noticeably older voice.