Snippet #1541617

When the flow'ring temples o' her body
Sink into th' dying sea
There shall she stand my Eliza
Taken, taken, from me

Joseph stopped for a moment, to take a sip of something alcoholic and allow Calliope's walls to stop juddering and looking for razors.

"Silly walls. You don't have wrists." He patted one and it started crying again. "You don't have tear ducts either..... I can see why you'd want to cry though. In this horrible place. Our horrible world. Nothing's ever worth not crying." He left the wall, confused by his double negatives yet still looking for an efficient form of wall suicide, and he went downstairs looking for more alcohol and possibly his muse of Epic poetry. He found the first, and took a few gulps of Old Bailey's something or other until he felt the room begin to shake like an epileptic at a rave. Momentarily satisfied, "as much as anyone can be satisfied in this shell of a world!" Shut up... please, just shut up. "There is no reason to live, nothing in life is good! You're born and you die and nothing worthwhile happens in the middle!"

The narrator reached down and smacked J.J.J into the bar until he passed out. Joseph woke up a few minutes later, realizing that he'd left a large portion of the area around him gray in his sleep. "Oh, god my head. Maybe I won't drink as much." He picked himself up and left the bar with a satchel swung around his shoulder. As he walked towards the trolley station he thought about how horrible his life was. The Angel's party was loud around him and flakes of confetti danced on his skin before blanching and shriveling in his presence. His colorless bubble soon became an actual bubble as people moved to the side to avoid this dark mark on their nice, happy, futile party. The angels are never coming back. He thought, and good riddance too.[i/] He stopped to look around for a bolt of lightning or, as was their new modus operandi lately, a bolt of cease and desist orders, but none came.

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[i]I have an audience with the...
Joseph looked around for the source of the music and saw a heavyset man with a small drum kit and a pair of eyes in either hand. He sighed and tipped his fedora over his eyes. Oh how horrible the life of a man who......He reached about for reasons to hate his life other than the normal metaphysical and pulled up straws....who can't go to sleep without turning his bed into a caricature. he finished dejectedly. Well, at least he'd depressed himself one way. Before long, Joseph found himself getting bored with sitting and letting the trolley take him across the city to the Bohemian crypts and started looking over at his fellow passengers. The large man with the drums, a miniature kettledrum, now had another set of eyes in his hand. The new set was brown against the others light blue.

"Mommy, where did everything go?"

Joseph kept his eyes firmly pointed down for the rest of the ride. It wasn't a long way to go, just a few more alleyways to impossibly squeeze through and he would be gold. Well, more like pyrite in his case. When the trolley came to a firm stop at an "illegal" opium den Joseph hopped out and walked to the back. Now, normally there would have been a bouncer. Some big son of a so-and-so with a shaved head and battle scars from some war he refused to talk about. Joseph always thought he just really sucked at shaving. This time though, the door was open and there was a smell in the air. A bitter, metallic smell that coated the inside of Joseph's mouth and made him gag. He stepped over the threshold of the den and it instantly became stronger. For good reason too, there is no way to describe the gore in the room without bringing forth three minor demons of literature. Joseph took a step forward and felt his shoes sink into the bloodstained shag carpet. It was going to be hell for whoever had to clean that up. After the first few sickeningly squishy steps, and helped by the aroma of opium smoke filtering through the air, Joseph kept walking for what he hoped to find.

He, hesitantly, turned over bodies and, not so hesitantly, turned over furniture to find what he had come for. "Oh god no." The thought of not finding it-No, he kicked an armchair over onto a stripper and patted the soaked shag with his foot. He looked up at the narrator and pleaded with him for help, even though he knew that the narrator did not approve of metaphysical help. He kicked the armchair in frustration and noticed that the body underneath did not give a blood-curdling squelch as much as it did a blood curdling squelch followed by a string of curses. Joseph picked the string up and put it in his pockets. This lady must be one of the Literalists He once again applied foot to armchair and it rolled off of her again. "Are you okay? What happened here? Have you seen a humming jade box?" He put one hand against her arm and flipped her over, then he saw the mess her face had become and flipped back onto her stomach.

He let out a sick little moan and Joseph cringed a bit, better to leave her there and go to look for his own thing. He strode purposefully into his opium dealer's office and vomited at the sight of her. He smiled while he was doing though, and attempted to (unsuccessfully) gasp, in her hands, open wide, sat a jade box without a single BLOODY disc in it. He stopped, whimpered, and proceeded to start smashing things.