It is an ongoing joke between my husband and son that I am probably in the CIA, living undercover in the suburbs of New Jersey with my Russian immigrant husband and son as cover. I’ve never understood what they imagine my assignment to be; nor what about me encourages their thinking. I am an African-American educator with a PhD in Hispanic literature. I am a devoted wife. An adoring mother. Indeed, it is so unlikely as to be far-fetched albeit quite amusing.

Until it wasn’t. I mean, if I tell you, I have to kill you is not merely a line of fiction.

It’s my life.

And so, the day they made the joke in front of my husband’s worthless half brother, Aleksandr, (“former” KGB, ha, unbeknownst to his family), and his gaze sharpened on me, and I knew he knew that I knew that he knew. And he had to die.

And it had to be quick, fatal and undetectable.

My specialty.

“I’ll be right back, guys,” I said, getting up from the dining room table. The cookies should be done.”

“Chocolate chip?” my son asked. I nodded. “I hope you made at least three dozen. I could eat them all. Although Anna’s cookies are great, too,” he added about his girlfriend of the moment.

“I can always bake more, sweetheart,” I replied over my shoulder as I went to the kitchen.

After removing the cookie sheets from the oven, I placed several cookies on three dessert plates: one for my husband, one for my son, and one for Aleksandr. Grabbing a small brown jar from the back of the spice cabinet, I added a drop of the contents to the top cookie on Aleksandr’s plate. I replaced the jar before I picked up the plates and re-entered the dining room.

“Here you go guys! Let me know if you want more” I said, placing an identical plate in front of each of them. “Milk?”

Mouths full, I got a nod of yes from my son, no from Aleksandr and my husband. I could feel Aleksandr’s eyes following me as I left the room.

Back in the kitchen, I took a glass from the cabinet and milk from the refrigerator. As I poured, I heard a chair scrape the wood floor and fall in the dining room.

“What are you three doing now?”

“It’s Aleksandr!” my husband said. “Something’s wrong!”

I ran in the room. Aleksandr was on the floor, clutching his chest. He looked at me in pain and bewilderment. “Oh my God,” I screamed, kneeling next to my husband. “Call 911!” I said to my son.

The EMTs arrived within five minutes.

He was dead within three.

The medical examiner’s report ruled it a heart attack.

My secret is safe.

Chapter 38

Out of the quarter. No feeling of change as it had been, the stranger,

when they had passed the café, the lights were off in back.

No feeling of change.

What that did mean, the seams blending for those to enter.

One of the last lines written to make way for the quarter to become

what it would. The work of them.

This, out of his thoughts, for Aria alone.

His mind for her tonight, only for her.

Where she would be the time after the next dusk, he would only

hold on to hope.

Up the street, her hand in his. The beauty of the city.

Love shining down.

Into pubs, into the cafés.

Live music of the free.

A thought from her, while they listened to the saxophone of a man

to play. The quarter, a change. Passing the tattoo shop, the only one

she would go, one artist inside. Boarded up now, dark. When they had

walked past. Her thoughts, further back in the quarter. The floor of the

building, their floor. They were the only two on it. The rest of the

tenants below. The quiet of them.

In the room, the sounds of music. Out the windows, a filter for neon.

His kiss to her neck. The applause between songs.

The people in the room. She had not seen them in the quarter. They

lived in the true city, graced by chance to not know the pull of the

quarter. Her mind, understanding more from the body of the stranger.

Pieces of mystery, they floated upon strings in the night. Her man, a

man she would kill to die for, the crescendo of song on the stage before

them. His hand holding the two of hers.

The love between them, strong

throughout time.

When the stranger thought of this. Something inside to take him

deep down into the past, into the changing of heart at the table.

It creeped upon him there, held his heart.

Encased in her stomach, what he would feel under the night. The

stars above. A celebration of swirls, the love from there.

Come what would, between death and the time before it.

What he had with her, the time from their first night alone to what

was waiting after the dusk of tomorrow.

Aria, her long ghost. From a hole in a door, he had waited for her,

to let her know who she was for the time fixed ahead.

He was successful in the dream of it.

Her hands in his, what he saw.

Something he would know and she would not believe.

What the quarter had done to her. How it had moved in, through

her skin. What he knew from their first drink outside the quarter, in

the place across. The table by the window.

To understand the lengths of what the quarter had done to her,

blocked from him. If she would go west, he knew their time together

had meant as much as the love from soil to the space above, the swirls

of dust and dream.

---From The Velocity of Ink. I read from it this morning for my channel, if you want to listen. This is just a small part of this morning's session.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8O5H15bsUGg&t=1354s

[used to have an account on here last year by the user ‘strawberry’ ,, going to repost some of my writing on this new account :) ]

so, what now?

i told you i loved you and you clamped your hand over my mouth.

i still love you; my mouth is still sealed.

will that change if the sound of trains racing across tracks drowns out the confession?

will it cease to exist if you turn up the music in the car when my tongue wraps around the last syllable?

i still love you; you still know of it.

is there no hope for us, after all?

your teeth marks are still imprinted on my clavicle,

your hands still bruised against my hip,

your saliva still mingled with the bile from my vomit —

do you truly think if we pretend to be shadows in the night, the sun will forget we burn as fire in the day?

On more than one occasion, while walking past the basement aquarium in which Hampture resides, I asked myself how my life arrived to this point. It is not a well adjusted man who constructs a fully functional scale model underwater habitat for hamsters, much less makes use of it.

If someday I'm asked about it on an authors panel at one convention or another, I dare not answer honestly that it was a tripartite cocktail of depression, autism and LSD. It's a tightly knit industry and one which expects its representatives to be at least somewhat family friendly, in the bucolic corpo-clean sort of way.

But that is indeed how it happened, and I doubt it could've otherwise. My trauma isn't special, anyone who grows up autistic will tell you a similar sob story of being beaten, tricked, ridiculed and force fed slugs behind the gym. Maybe not that last one, though slugs are a nutritious low calorie snack with a rich, smoky flavor one ought to try before they knock.

I might've had an easier time of school, had I not been the only one convinced of evolution at a fundamentalist private school which taught young Earth creationism from the A.C.E. curriculum. Stubbornly single minded about factual accuracy as my neurotribe tends to be, it was the proverbial meeting of an unstoppable force and an immovable object.

Humiliation and ostracization by staff and fellow students alike only let up when I became receptive to their efforts at social correction, agreeing to meet with a faith based child psychologist who would get to the root of my evolutionist brainwashing.

Something like a G rated version of Winston's interrogation in 1984, I eventually confessed that indeed 2+2=5, Earth is not older than ten thousand years, and received an end of year "most improved" award for my compliance. Turns out, the force was never actually unstoppable!

This left me less trusting of authority, and humans not in my immediate family, than I should've been. But this too is probably a common experience (and supervillain origin story) not worth wringing my hands over.

I've lived a worthwhile life so far not because of such experiences, howevermuch chest thumpers insist that what doesnt kill us makes us stronger (not accounting for the third possibility of becoming crippled).

Rather, I carried on and developed myself according to my ideals anyway, because of how I coped with that trauma. After many years of circling the drain, that familiar downward spiral with death at the bottom, it was no longer in me to swim upstream. I came to a point where, if I didn't do something drastic to alter the trajectory I was on, I would certainly have killed myself.

So, I started a hobby. After all no shortage of well meaning family and friends throughout my life advised me that I needed a hobby. Only to then turn around and say "not that one" upon discovering I was submerging rodents.

It was an engineering challenge, an excuse to care for animal companions, and something to differentiate one day from the next during a period in my life when days had a way of blurring together.

Simply witnessing incremental progress proved therapeutic after spending so long accomplishing nothing at the bottom of a deep, dark pit. That pit can become seductively homey once you resign yourself to the conviction that you belong there.

This is also how I discovered darknet psychedelics, which I soon became a voracious consumer of. Like a horse with a feedbag of cubensis mushrooms around its neck, an explosion of fresh insight and motivation followed, then it was off to the races.

This was by far my most productive writing period. There were week long stretches during which I hammered out one full short story every night. Not my best work, but one can't worry too much about that or they will never write anything for fear of not being perfect from the start.

To be a writer one must write, and prolifically, trusting that quality will come with practice at some point downstream. (Everything written prior to that point may be thrown away. Then you can finally posture as if you were always effortlessly talented.)

This is how I attracted the attention of my first publisher, with whom I put out two tradpubbed anthologies. It's also how I was brought onboard by Honor Code to work on Narcosis, a deep sea horror themed VR game, and how I finessed my way into the Mars Desert Research Program, a mockup Mars base in the Utah Desert where I simulated EVAs by day.

By night I wrote a well received report on sea-space analog principles for Robert Zubrin's Mars Society. During my stay, amid various adult make believe activities, I was interviewed by a journalist to whom I gifted my only copy of Ian Koblick's Living and Working in the Sea. I regret parting with it, given the eye-watering sum it goes for nowadays.

Maybe it was all wasted on me, as I've long been more fascinated by the sea than the heavens. I was space obsessed as any young boy between the ages of 3 and 12. But one quickly runs out of manned missions to obsess over and memorize every detail of. There's a much longer, and lesser known, history of manned undersea activity.

This would lead me to become involved with Dennis Chamberland's Atlantica Expeditions. Chamberland being aptly named, for a man who hopes to establish an undersea land of interconnected chambers. What he managed by the time I joined was the Scott Carpenter Analog Station, a micro habitat fit for two occupants, roughly the size of a delivery van, emplaced in less than thirty feet of water.

The same Floridian lagoon, in fact, which also hosted the Jules Undersea Lodge (formerly La Chalupa) and Marinelab, now in a museum. The month long duration of that mission was the only time in history when three separate undersea habitats were continually manned in close proximity. Conshelf 2 may also qualify, depending what counts as "close".

But fundraising for round two proved more difficult than anticipated. So when years passed without any further subaquatic expeditions, I took matters into my own hands. Using what I learned building heated, humidity controlled positive pressure hamster habitats, I constructed my own solar powered, surface supplied diving helmet.

Inelegant but functional (as with most of my inventions), I built it from a 5 gallon square sided jug into which I inset plexiglass windows. Flat because curved windows distort ones view like lenses in water, and because a diving helmet is under no pressure differential.

It won't surprise you to learn that I immediately used this contraption to trip balls underwater, for up to five hours on one occasion, at the bottom of a Minnesotan lake. Less impressive than it sounds, as limits on the electric compressor meant I could venture no deeper than 35 feet, and mostly hung out around 15 feet.

Helmet diving's quite different from scuba. Posture must remain upright, due to having a buoyant pocket of trapped air on/around the noggin. One may "moon jump" if only slightly weighted. One peers out through big windows into the surrounding water, from within an air-filled sanctuary. Very "Jules Verne". Curious minnows swam right up to the faceplate, undoubtedly more astonished by the encounter than I was.

I saw and felt things that would've been indescribable, if not for my experience as an author. It is the job of authors, after all, to eff the ineffable. The surface undulated overhead like time lapse cloud cover. Shimmering god rays danced between murky shadows, which morphed into whatever I most feared might be lurking in the water with me.

I wrote up this encounter as an article for Psychedelic Frontier, which last I checked is still online. It was one of many such psychedelic expeditions, into subterranean lava tubes and whatnot, by far the most instructive.

It's difficult, after the fact, to give a satisfactory explanation for most of these actions. The closest I've come, (besides "autism and drugs") is to quote Larry Walters, the fella who made news decades back for rigging hundreds of helium balloons to a lawn chair, which then carried him skyward: "A man can't just sit around all day."

Four writers were approaching, and the wind began to howl...except replace wind with bloodletting of words, and ink into veins from these authors blessed and crazed with no other way to let it out, than to put it across a screen, and into our hearts with only pure aim.

Here's the link to the show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s3J_TYQqaM

And here are the pieces featured.

https://www.theprose.com/post/828745/king-of-california https://www.theprose.com/post/828053/the-drug-in-me-is-you https://www.theprose.com/post/828235/mile-run https://www.theprose.com/post/828263/the-only-shore

And.

As always.

Thank you for being here.

-The Prose. team

Tonight

Sadness pours thickly cruel

7 shades of 7 evening screens,

That spill their witch capped clouds

Upon my tear stained sheets,

Seeding gnarled tree dreams

’Round the heart’s mummified leaf.

Beware the watchdog of night,

Whose nerve shredding barks

Are black knives that bite.

Tonight

Sleepless desire

Sweats out blood droplet stars

To provoke a rupture of colour

Upon the inky nether’s funeral bedspread.

Beware the watchdog of night,

Whose nerve shredding barks

Are black knives that bite.

My portentous hope for daylight’s torch

Is a lip swollen cage of grimacing want,

Where the floodgates close earlier than I can rise.

I loathe your phantom embers.

the difference between

desert and ocean

is slight

by which I mean

its only question is

of extremes

Man is out there,

or not,

depending on

how far gone,

to the edge

of civilization,

one might yet hold on

to some buoy

of hopeful

reflection

that neither

is lost.

08.27.2024

Towering Dunes challenge @cjmoznette35

everything is so volatile

in this halfway house

where we push and shove

until the plaster collapses.

you shoot up your veins

and i finger the needle

after you fling it away,

toeing the line between

wanting to puncture you throat

and lick the rust clean.

do you even see me?

between the hot flashes

and raging calamities,

do you see me as i am?

could i ever see you as you are?

could i ever see you as you were?

i pull you towards me at night

on the air mattress

where you lost your virginity

for the cheapest high of your life.

i retreat into the familiar fantasy

of a time

where your mistress never existed;

a time where i never had to share you

with this concubine of catastrophe.

the night always ends the same way;

you sleeping through the sounds of my sobs.

i hover my hands over your throat,

wanting to press and twist

until your eyes bulge and pop.

i think killing you might be worth it

if it means she’ll die with you.

but she never will.

she travels through your bloodstream;

i never even cross your mind

when you’re doped up

and choking on lust

for the whore who frequents your body.

you will take her to the grave

and she will lie with you in your slumber

whilst i live in hiding

from the ghosts of your infidelity.

all i ask is that you promise me one thing –

that in the next life

i won’t have to see her claw marks on your skin,

and i won’t have to soothe your sweats

when she leaves you aching for her touch,

and i won’t have to sell myself to bring her back to you,

and i won’t have to clean up the reminders

of the nights you share together.

it will be just us.

it will be just us

I have had a firm belief that the construction of ones mind is a mere product of its decomposition. Spending years plummeting into a self sustained abyss hoping that one day there will be an emptiness waiting. A freedom from conscience. A nothingness that marks the morsel of being I have so often longed to be. However this barricade, something I have never reached, is something that appears to be suspended in the depths of madness. The freedom from emotion, rather a curse, a defiance of humanity. The freedom I longed for in reality a disconnection from natural order. However this abyss was not a linear creation, the end could never be reached. Instead it had become a concordant loop hole. Each member of humanity circling its grounds, some hiding in the crevices of the soul sickened dirt, begging for safety. Others marching through in aims for an end as if a lieutenant disillusioned by battle. All striding for an escape, an escape that provides a promise greatness. An escape that no one will reach. As the end is merely a delusion people allow to consume them, their bodies pursued by this insanity so well cultivated in the ground beneath our feet.

She arched her back one more time, before bending back down to her task. She thrusted the large pestle round and round, thinning the grain few at a time. The granite mortar screeched as she mixed again, round and round, for what felt like hours. After a moment, she let go of her tight grip of the pestle, and gave an appreciative sigh of the beautifully thinned flour that lay before her eyes.

"Yara!"

While pushing her matted hair off her face with the back of a hand, she turned her head at the sight of the three men, coming in their cavernous home with large sacks balanced on their shoulders. "More wheat for us, mama," the boy said with a grin. Yara closed her eyes and groaned.