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He gave the kid a hand out of the taxi; his mom followed out and lead him, slowly, limping slightly, to the hospital gate. He paid the driver and fell in beside them.

His cousin's stomach hurt; it would hurt repeatedly throughout the year on occasions of stress or excitement or having had a heavy meal, and sometimes for no discernible reason at all. It was a condition he had had since he was eight. Now, twelve years later, it still plagued him. It was the smoking that made it worse, the kid's mother insisted.

Usually, on severe bouts of the pain, his medications sufficed. Once in a while, however, he would have the twisting, tearing serpent in his stomach acting up for several days nonstop. It was then that he would have to be taken to the hospital for a quick checkup, to rule out other possible medical causes and have a dose of a painkiller more powerful for a bit of relief.

He led his aunt and cousin past the gate, through the side entrance away from the trolleyed cacophony of the ambulance access, and up to the reception desk.

He stood close as the nurses took the kid's blood, set him up for an X-ray and ultrasound; he could manage to move around steadily by himself by then. All results came back negative; it was the old genetic condition that was the culprit like always. Hardly good news, but at least no worse.

It all took 2 hours. There were only two computers available for the staff to pull up a patient's results, and one of them was broken, so a backlog of wheelchairs, trolleys topped with passed out, agitated, or incoherently mumbling patients, people on their feet, and double that number in relatives had accrued in the waiting area and throughout the emergency department. The pain had started to bore into his bowels again.

He still accompanied them, as a resident and a nurse found his cousin a bed and hung a solution with the medicine hooked up to his vein. The kid lay on his side, curled into a ball to shore up and focus the drill grinding and stabbing chaotically at his insides onto a single point. His mother sat at the foot of the bed, rubbing her knee. She hadn't looked at all concerned; just stoic, getting on with it, even smiling and chatty.

'I've got bad knees, you see; it's the osteoarthritis.' She flicked her face towards her son, gesturing. 'That's all the good he does to me. It's actually me who's ill right now not him. You might see the state he's in and think he's the sick one, but no, it's me.'

He looked past her, at the kid who had had severe colicky pain for six days, eaten little, vomited, and slept terribly, if at all, and again at the woman with no current medical emergencies, with manageable joint pain, and quite manageable anxiety (counterpointed, in fact, with a not so admirably hidden frustration) and shook his head. 'I'm positive he's the sick one.' He even pointed to the dripping infusion.

'No, no, it's me. It's been me everytime his condition flared all these years.'

He was reminded of a friend of his whose parents hated his depression, not because it caused him misery, but for how his newfound unsmiling sad nature was a gloomy affliction upon them that they just didn't appreciate or need. "When are you going to be normal again and save us the downcast?" was the standard pressuring question.

She had been the one who called to ask him for help carrying her son to the hospital. But since the kid "was never sick", his job there was done. Still, for his own moral scruple, he made sure the medicine was going to right his cousin's condition, bid the kid farewell, and took his leave.

***

'A lot of the time I find myself thinking it was an uncalculated mistake of medicine to enable humans to live to a ripe old age, and have ourselves dementia-rusted minds still ruling the world. We were not built as a species to survive well beyond middle age and still arrogantly diffuse the maladous self-destruction mechanisms that cry for our natural end. And those old people still consume, still preserve and enforce their own narrative, so children, generation after inheriting generation, are forever cloaked in the mistakes and wrong choices and inadequacies of the elders, instead of starting afresh.

'We've always lived the narrative of adults, back from a time when kids were grabbed and garbed and made squires or soldiers before they were even ten so that they could be trooped off to fight in some old man's war, up till now when the grudges and enmities between tribes and countries and religions have to be downloaded anew onto each new pure set of young minds, that they may carry on the corrupt message of hateful, jealous, and xenophobic predecessors. Imagine that each generation along the way, children may have had the chance to make fewer enemies or usher in local or world peace, or in the worst case, end a tens-of-years-running war in order to have a shorter, more modern, and more pressing conflict. All possible if not for the indoctrinated narrative.

'The self-centered narrative of an individual adult is like a video game in which they are the only real, conscious player, while the rest are non-player characters (NPC). From that viewpoint, you can't really (and it doesn't make sense to) empathize with an NPC, as they are just there to affect or guide or serve your quest in some way. You (the adult) can still empathize with how they make you feel, however; with how horrified you were at a particularly convincing sight of blood and gore, how sad someone's backstory or pitiful state made you, and how joyous a display of talent and creativity felt to watch. (It's analogous to condemning two football teams to keep playing for as long as one pleased for no pay if one had that power, which is partly what television channels achieved, except it wouldn't have been possible without taking into consideration the pay and recovery time and logistics requirements for every team—all matters that are, coming back to the point, irrelevant from the point of view and the scope of the viewer's empathy, who is just tuning in for his or her own enjoyment)

'Children are being begotten as NPCs too, sometimes (in the old contraceptionless days) as the unfortunate byproduct of taking one's pleasure from the opposite sex, but also in other cases, the fortunate spawning of many sons to strengthen one's bloodline, clan, and legacy. Mostly, in the benign days of every era old and new, adults just want offspring to help them with chores and earning a living, to fill their halls and apartments with some noise and laughter, and to serve them as they grow old and feeble. All simple wishes that can be sympathized with, only if the granters were real unthinking, unmain human NPCs. For all those wishes are disregarding and discarding of the children's subjective narrative, own wishes, and freedom of will. Under this perspective, it's finally clear why it's a reprehensible shock when a child tells the main player parents that he or she "wants to be or do something else".

'It's now clear why an adult's child at the hospital isn't actually suffering, but the adult is the one suffering for watching them suffer, and it's further comprehensible how a daughter with a mood disorder, depression say, becomes the parent's affliction, not the afflicted.

'Note how they have solidified that self-serving narrative with religion and custom and bad totalitarian philosophy. Children must obey. Respect your elders. Don't talk back. Father knows best. Disobedience will earn you a place in hell. And the most pernicious of them all, repay them in their later years for keeping you alive while young and weak! As though it had all been an insurance. Or as though you had forced their hand into birthing you instead of them just acting on their genes' call for progeny. Nonsense. If we really wanted to repay the frail demented old in kind we would yell at and beat them and break their wills and have them do and behave as we saw fit. But no, suddenly when it's not them doing all those atrocious things to the more frail, helpless young, it's wrong. If you accept that, notice how you're adopting your place in their narrative like a good NPC.

'Children don't owe them anything and it's ridiculous to suggest otherwise. Someone buying a car always weighs their options, takes full responsibility for their decision, cares for the car, cleans it, maintains it, changes its gas. Can you really suggest any less care at a minimum is due a living breathing human child? Repay you for feeding them and cleaning their waste? What the hell did you expect, that you were "buying" a child to let it die?! And you're further not letting it die out of your own genes-interest, not a genuine self-effacing altruism.

'I know this raises a lot of red flags for moral degeneration and ungratefulness. I ask you, how was it morally decent of them to create a warring world for millennia and force our hands into nurturing the carnage? It never was, but they were blind to those red flags soaked with blood. So we have a moral decision to make, one that our youth forebears either ignored or never got the chance to see clearly when they grew up; either be like them, or end the reverberating status-quo, sacrificing in the process our promised privileges as oppressive adults for a more ethical immediate empowerment in the present.

'The narrative of a 50 year old plus should not be relevant or dominant in the 30-40 years of prime age the younger generation present at that time has available to enjoy.

'This is what we will be doing, shifting the narrative from the self-centered viewpoint of every elder to accommodate the lives of the young, by solving the issue of jobs and dismantling that old subservient system of social hierarchy.

'That is my premise.'

'It's 5:00 pm. It's almost time.'

His twitching knees, seizing as if with the intention of generating electricity, stopped, and he slowly raised his face from his twining arms. 'Go, then. Make the arrangements,' he said, pushing back from the table. He squeezed his eyelids and listened to the wet rubbing sound with some amusement.

His hands left his eyes blurry and went up, stretching him into a bodily yawn. He froze mid-motion and looked quizzically around the table at their hunched backs and concerned expressions. 'Is something wrong?' His elbows fell to the table surface, collapsing under their extinguished momentum, like a rubber band released.

'Step Z,' one of them volunteered, weary, voice shaking. He tapped a small notebook in front of him with his pencil. 'We've been through them all but one.' He shrugged, working the knots from his shoulders.

The first guy had his eyes fixed where the pencil landed, as though just noticing it. 'You're going to make sure those notes never existed, aren't you?' he said. They all looked at the offending article. 'We agreed that all communication or information will be limited to our own app. Never be seen using it in public. Never be heard talking about it in public (for now). And don't write anything down.'

He searched the gathering left and right; they were all nodding. A grandfather clock was ticking across the room, knocking ominously between their ears. The long brass pendulum, deftly tended by a temporal Charon, stroked this way and that like an oar, sweeping the old dead moments away. He smiled at the resemblance. A worn rush mat covered the floor of that room, short of the rest of the tiny flat. The walls were bare, stained, some cracked, fault-lines revealing the rough greyness of cement that once bound them united. In the street outside, by way of the open balcony, the play and shouting of kids could be heard.

'Yes, but Step Z?' the guy insisted, checking his watch. 'Come on, man. We're losing time now.'

'No, we're not.' He got up, prompting them to do the same, and did a couple of fractional squatting movements to smooth down his jeans. 'Leave that one to me.' He smiled. 'And relax a little, you look like shit.'

'An hour from now then.' The one nearest the door said, opening the old chapped wooden thing and gesturing them through to a dark stairwell. It was his late grandfather's flat, so he stayed behind, along with our guy, whom they called by the nickname Maxim, the brain behind the most of it.

'We've hatched a plan to overthrow the elders from inside one of their apartments,' he said, joining his friend Maxim at the head of the table.

'Everything is theirs, and that's the whole issue. Property, money, narrative.' He picked up his soda and drained the last of it. 'Life itself. We would only have a whack at living when they were all dead and we had inherited their wealth and shook off their influence, unless we did what we are about to do.'

'Why does this feel so easy, though? Almost like another multiplayer online game.' He punched him in the shoulder, not too hard. 'And you're the boss.'

'Nah, some of them were stressed as hell; you're just the maniac.' Maxim rubbed the site of the blow. 'Don't call me boss, Amir; we're all brothers and sisters in this. Maxim is fine; it was my online gaming name as well.'

'See, that's the problem. I told you, and I still think, they'll try to spin it as communism to the people in order to justify dismissing it. That's all they need to do to band every one of theirs against us, by showing them how we threaten the flowers on their manacles. Not them, mind you—there would be nothing new to most citizens having a lowly status if that was our campaign—but the promises of a reward bonus life to recompense them for the one they wasted,' Amir said. He leaned lightly against the table and shrugged. 'If you so much as feint an attempt to lift that veil of deluded consolation, you'll invite people to leap off the ground and tear you to pieces. It's nowhere near our purpose to take away anyone's faith, but that's what they'll make it look like.' He looked at his friend staring stoically in the direction of the balcony. 'Your name, meaning "the greatest", isn't helping either. Hell, my name means prince and it might compound our trouble!' He shook his head, and tapped his fingers on the edge of the table. 'You know how they peddle their propaganda, and those are all the pieces they would need. And we're simply handing them over.'

'Not simply; you would first have to be caught for them to know your name; and my nickname should easily remain a secret,' Maxim said, heading over to the balcony. 'We'll confuse the shit out of them because we won't be offering leaders that can be struck down and smeared. Instead, we're presenting a new process, a mechanism for change, with enough leverage to make it happen, or at least to make a bang with a tenacious, lasting effect on the discourse. For every person who adopts or considers our ideas, a tiny Maxim and Amir will be born in their mind. That's how we replicate. That's how we go viral. And before they know it, they will have Maxims and Amirs everywhere to contend with. In every house and family, every company and small business, every university.' He put his arm high up on one of the open doors and rested his forehead on it, looking outside. 'If the short-term, acute change doesn't work, we still win the long-term battle, as the natural turn-over of generations happen.'

Amir came up beside him, folding his arms. 'The genie is out of the bottle.'

'Most of our poor generation are only following the obsolete narrative of the elders because they haven't heard of any other alternatives. But this... this will spark a curious overturn of the table.'

They stood there, peeking over the guardrail of the small, decrepit balcony from within the aridly furnished flat. The bad design of the poor neighborhood had the ugly red-brick-walled back of another tenement facing them, blocking out any view of sky and sun. On both sides of that, the row of housing continued in motley—some of them facing the right way round, windows and sun-shaded balconies with laundry lines hanging their slack charges in windless evening, and others devoted to the next street, interrupting the austerely dull glimmers of life—like a line of morse code.

Read the full story (11500 words) here :

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She cycled through the seasons and spun into the void.

A moth seeking a cosmic lantern, but never reaching. Never burning.

Though the Earth would’ve welcomed the flaming union with the stellar womb of matter.

Over expiring in the dark embrace of the universe.

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He told her he loved her

It escaped him, more like

an exhale desperate to be born into this world

His chest was alight

a flame he had caught from her

And it filled him with such lightness

he could rise like an air balloon

and meet those scintillating, beckoning gems

on the night's dress

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She rocked her body back and forth, squirming against the floor, trying to catch some sense of stability and solidness from it. ‘It's like I have a fucking sinkhole inside my chest draining everything to fill up, to clog itself shut, but it never has enough. And it only ends up eating everything away.’ She stared, eyes peeled. ‘Eating life away.’

She felt her heart hammering away like an overzealous gavel. ‘Are you sad too little one? See what your blood has fueled? What your beats have sentenced?’ She listened to the muffled thuds, eruptions of thunder far away yet so close. ‘Yet you still sentence me to more life?’

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When the plane banked acutely to the side, correcting course for the runway, she felt as though falling through the window to the abyssal night below and the city lights burning like legions of fireflies. The touchdown was a smooth glide unzipping her way to a new life in alien lands.

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A grandfather clock was ticking across the room, knocking ominously between their ears. The long brass pendulum, deftly tended by a temporal Charon, stroked this way and that like an oar, sweeping the old dead moments away.

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The shadows were a welcome guest,

the wind a silent audience,

flitting between trees like a child playing hide and seek

The rising army of trees answering the sun’s call-to-arms

trawled her light,

losing the star her dominion over that piece of land.

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Dark clouds like exploding gun shells spattered the evening sky, their expanding grey-blackness soon consumed the fiery-yellow lights of the low-set sun blossoming silently around their edges. She looked down at the dusk-dimmed view of the tents camped on the stone grounds of the campus. There was a flurry of movement, fleetingly visible around the lampposts down below. The night was settling in heavily and evening out the game among the clouds. She let the white curtains flutter back ghostly against the window and turned to the room.

She moved to the wardrobe, her naked feet slapping lightly on the wooden floorboards, and opened the door. Only few items were left on their hangers, and a large academic gown took the center. She ran her hands along the unseamed, black surface.

‘You keep checking on that,’ a voice said behind her. ‘It’s not going anywhere you know.’

She caught a sleeve and rolled the fabric between two fingers. ‘Yeah,’ she sighed, feeling the tiny vibrations the smooth sliding motion sent through her hand. ‘It’s just... it’s taken so long.’ She replaced the arm and shut the wardrobe, her own face stared at her from the mirror fixed on the door, she tilted her head a little, revealing the girl sitting cross-legged on the bed behind her. ‘At one point it felt like we’d never leave this place.’

‘We’re only one night away, honey,’ the girl said, laughing, and picked up her notebook, then scowled at the page for a moment and put it down.

She leaned back against the wardrobe, facing the real image of the room. ‘Sooner, if it weren’t for their stupid ritual,’ she gestured to the notebook.

The girl clasped her hands and held them heartily to one cheek. ‘The Chant,’ she said in mock adoration. ‘It would help if the lines made any sense, of course.’ She turned a couple of pages. ‘Or if it were shorter.’

‘Where is your gown anyway?’

She pointed slackly to a stuffed bag at the corner, contents spilling from its open mouth. ‘Folded... and possibly crumbled all to shit by now.’

Wind whistled outside and raked the glass panes. She returned to the window and lifted the drapes to stare at the pitch-blackness. The sky was a smooth, thundery, dark matt; the lampposts had gone out and only the tents were visible as faintly glowing ghosts haunting the grounds in the lights from within.

‘There are no stars tonight,’ she said blankly after a moment.

‘Stars? Oh I assumed you were just boy-gazing.’

‘No.’ A smile played on her lips for a second. ‘Nothing can be seen from here.’ She looked at the bodies silhouetted on the trembling walls of the tents. ‘Besides, I’ve met someone.’

‘Yeah, you told me,’ the girl said, leaning on her side and risking another look at the squiggly writing in the handbook. ‘He must be doing better than those poor losers down there.’ The wind howled again. She looked up bemusedly. ‘So gallant of those administrator fuckers to let us stay in all the dorms while the boys get camped and dirty on the grounds in this weather. Could have been unnecessary of course, if they had cancelled this stupid singsong thing.’

She listened to her friend’s tirade without saying anything, the glass aquiver against her palm like a shaking, frightened animal.

‘Urgh!’ her friend gave a loud, exasperated yell and tossed the notebook across the bed. ‘I swear if I read one more line. I can’t memorize all that crap. Won’t, at any case. You want to brush up on your Chant?’

‘Thanks,’ she said, leaving the window once again and sitting on the end of the bed where the notebook lay.

‘I’m just going to mumble the rest. Pretty sure everyone else will do the same and it’ll sound like crap. But no worries; we’re graduates now, bitches.’

She picked up the notebook and read silently.

***

They woke up the next morning to silvery light filtering through the drapes. An unbroken grey ceiling flicked with darker blemishes rumbled overhead. They had breakfast and slipped on their academic dresses in the room, then got out and were added to the drops of graduates walking the corridors to join the stream jabbering excitedly down the stairs. She had torn off the few pages of The Chant and carried them in her pocket.

They passed the tents, where dishevelled boys in wrinkled dresses were poking slit-eyed faces out in caution before leaving the tents with disgruntled downward curls of the lips. The grounds were misty and tops of trees hazed in the distance like stooping giants. They followed the stone path winding across the campus, where the buildings around loomed behind thick veils of air, and the shrubbery on both sides of their myopic party had turned grey in the fog-dulled morning. The chatter had died to a few whispers.

‘This feels uncannily gloomy,’ her friend said, grabbing her elbow.

She nodded, watching the disappearing caps further ahead in their funereal procession. ‘Do we know what the older classes thought about all of this?’

‘I’ve only met one. She graduated like 10 years ago or so. She’s a doctor and a researcher now. Brilliant, but a bit insane if you ask me. She mentioned offhandedly that you have to finish The Chant that’s all. I never asked much because it hadn’t been a big deal for us then. We had just started college.’

They finally reached their destination, a large, imposing building with many broad steps a little distance inside the university gates; the dean had been leading their front. They were told to line up the steps in preparation. Several other administrators showed up, all in academic gowns, and took their place together with the dean in front. ‘Douchbags’, her friend muttered into her ear as she passed, heading up the steps, while she remained in the second row, owing to her short height. An excited buzz of conversation rose as the graduates took their places and were happy with their arrangement, then the dean gave a signal and everyone fell silent. She pressed her pocket and felt the paper crinkle against her leg.

The dean brought his hand down and The Chant started, in chorus, as they had been instructed. The first few seconds went ok, with no noticeable singing out of line or marked stuttering. She sang in a normal voice, straining her memory for what came next and ignoring the person slurring and dropping words next to her. A chill draught from behind caught her dress, and fog came billowing forward between their ranks. She felt extremely cold and started rubbing her shoulders. The first hint of disorganization was just surfacing in the chorus. She sang on, although a bit distracted. The air current and the fresh silvery fog. She teased the next line out of her memory. But their backs were straight to a large building.

Then the first screams sounded from behind and froze her blood. Shrill, hysterical, throat-wrenching, soul-exhaling screams mixed with an unearthly drone. She turned around, as did all others, cursing the very fact that she had to, and felt her heart sink into the deepest pit possible.

The building was gone and the stairs stretched way back, seemingly unending, into the sky, only obscured at the farthest point by miasmic layers of beating white fog. Worn-out, gaunt people in similar academic dresses, and similarly horror-struck, littered the extra steps; their faces got more hollow-eyed and ramshackle further back, their gowns in tatters. Skeletal, moaning figures topped the visible end of the stairs, some of them collapsing immediately into dusty, black-coffined heaps.

The spectral people nearest to them charged at her class as frightened shrieks swelled in the air on her side. She felt a tremendous force applied to her as their whole mass leaned forward like one, giant wave and crashed on the stone ground. They all staggered and fought and pushed and climbed onto each other. She managed to extract herself from the tangle of bodies and fled from the protruding, grasping tangle of hands into the mist ahead, her legs leaping over the ground in a way they had never done before. Cool air chilled her wheezing, whimpering chest as she bounded manically away in search of the gate.

She never reached the gate. She stopped and doubled up, panting and shaking and turning and re-turning to where screams and rattling croaks issued and echoed each other balefully everywhere around her womb of fog. Dark figures skirted her line of visibility and wrestled someone down. She ran away again, heaving big gulps of breath, the wind roaring in her ears and flapping her dress behind her, before she collapsed helplessly to the ground. She grazed her knee and turned over to sit on her bottom, trembling like the glass panes the night before.

Then she had an idea. She mentioned offhandedly that you had to finish The Chant. That doctor had done it, had made it past whatever this is. She must have meant finish reciting it, not that it was merely a ceremony one had to go through. She clawed the papers out of her pocket feverishly, found the line she had stopped at and resumed singing in a low, quavering voice.

Loud, deep moans boomed in the thick air around her like foghorns the more she sang. She clutched the paper with such strength it almost ripped in two as she traced the lines with her thumb. She had got through the first page when a hand thumped on her shoulder. She emptied her lungs and yanked free and lunged forward and was dragged back and aimed a number of hysterical kicks to whatever it was until it let go, then she applied her legs to the ground again. The rapping of her footfalls racing with her heartbeats. She brought the papers to her face, but couldn’t read, so she stopped, panting noisily, and grunted and coughed line after line as her breath allowed, keeping watch out of the corner of her eyes on the shadowy figures that materialized out of the haze everywhere. She reached the last page, they were homing in on her. She blocked their sight with the creased paper and mumbled on. She made it to the last line and looked up.

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Tootsie on my event horizon,

Let the keening wail of stellar wind

fill your sail, be your one liaison

with all realms I upend

So quiet, heart, your frenzied flutter

Come leeward, to fizzle out of this world

No friend, no love, not the flimsiest succor

Shall have to answer or suffer you no more

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