Don’t rouse

The sold to self vagabonds

That give deaf ear

To your hard won daily fights

Through a crushing world’s fist

And

Love those who neglect you

But make a divide

And let them bridge the chasm

For your weathered hands

Serve as a tapestry of sacrifice

Met by indifference

And you deserve love

Without impossibly damning prerequisites.

The rain poured down in torrents, drumming against the windows as if trying to break through, while inside, I sat motionless, staring at the flickering candle that seemed to hold the last shred of warmth in the cold, silent room. Every drop felt like a heartbeat, a reminder that the world outside was still alive, even if everything inside felt like it had stopped.

Sleep does not come willingly. It’s a fight against an opponent who does not weaken, and who does not feel the strain of stamina. It’s an opponent which I no longer step into the ring with. Laura snores softly beside me, her body facing the opposite direction. Some evenings, the poison of midnight conversations with myself, can drive me to near lunacy. It’s a world that I should not be a part of. It’s a world that should be fast forwarded while I’m deep in the trenches of REM sleep. There are monsters that live in this darkness. Not the type of monsters that you see in horror movies but the type that have no solid foundation. The type that softly echoes all of the things that you avoid during the day because there are a million things to do. At night, all you can do is sleep, or think.

I decide at 2am, to swing my legs off the side of the bed and sit upright for a moment. Then I get up and open the door slowly as the hinges creak noisily. But Laura is undisturbed, she’s a traveler, a thousand miles away. I close the door behind me and look in on the kids. They’re sleeping peacefully and I wonder what they’re dreaming about. What I’d give to slide right inside their heads and breathe in the fantasy of childhood wonder. The places they can imagine, where all is well, and the heroes always prevail.

Downstairs I open the fridge and take out a carton of milk and then pour it into a glass with a thin crack spreading down the center like varicose veins. I take a drink, and wonder why I decided to have a glass of milk. I never drink milk.

I take out my phone and begin mindlessly scrolling, hoping that by the time I look up from it, the sun will be rising, I’ll make a cup of coffee and a sense of normalcy will return. As usual, I feel that my phone is reading my mind. Because I’m thinking about parallel universes. The theory that out there in the vastness of space, there’s another me. But he isn’t sitting in the kitchen, drinking milk, and wondering how much longer his marriage is going to last, and why he can’t beat this depression. He’s happy, and sure of himself. I laugh at that idea.

Then on my phone, I see an ad for an app. The Parallel Universe Finder. All you need to do is download it, enter some of your personal information, and it’ll show you what the other versions of yourself are up to.

I go to the app store and download it. I don’t know why, other than I’m an insomniac with hours to kill, and it was a thought that was running through my mind anyway. Is this the best version of me? Or were there other versions that took opposite paths on those many forks in the road?

A screen pops up. It’s a pretty shade of orange and it tells me to enter my address. I do. Then it tells me to take a picture of myself. I sigh, but I oblige. Then it shows the top of my house like on Google Maps and then quickly it pans out. Then I can see the entire world, and then the solar system and it keeps going faster and faster, until a giant light seemingly leaps out of the phone, and I drop it.

“Ow!” I say, rubbing my eyes with the palm of my hands. What on earth was that?

I grab my phone from the floor and the tiles are different. They look like the tiles that Laura and I looked at the hardware store. Something we used to do when we were broke and bored. A way to pretend that we were of a higher class than we were. We liked to wrap our arms around each other and point at the different tiles, or go through the paint and each grab a sheet of colors, and talk about painting the exterior of a house that we didn’t own.

This was the Forest Valley flooring. I knew it. I rubbed my hands across it. It glistened unlike our tiles which were cracked and separated, an ugly brown crack filler lazily filling in the gaps. But that was gone. For a moment, I thought that I did fall asleep, but if so, this was the most vivid dream I’d ever had. I could smell new paint and hardwood, mixed with some kind of exotic fragrance.

I walked into the spare room where I had a tiny music setup in the far left corner, with an old beat up guitar hanging from a wall mount just above the turntable. But above the turntable was a dozen guitars hanging in perfect unison above a thousand vinyl records in hardwood crates like at an Indie record store.

On the far wall above a 60 inch TV was a line of gold and platinum records with my name on the bottom. “I’m a rockstar.” I said. “Fuck me, I’m a rockstar.”

I stared in awe at the man cave of my dreams and then decided to take a look upstairs. The stairs were beautiful, and the railing was something out of an early 20th century mansion. The kind that Shirley Temple would be tap dancing in. The hall upstairs was three times as long, and five or six times as wide with strange Art Deco shapes crawling along the walls like an invasive species of plant. I rubbed my hands along the walls, and I could hear giggling coming from the first room on the right.

Inside were two beautiful blonde women, laughing, drinking tall glasses of bubbly champagne and snorting white powder off of a piece of broken glass. They both looked up at me with white circles on the tip of their noses. “Tysooonnnnnnnnnn” They called out together, and continued laughing.

“Where have you been, baby? You said you were only going to be gone for just a whittle minute.” One of them said, mimicking a baby with pouting lips, while holding her thumb and forefinger less than an inch apart. “But you lied, mister. And you need to get punished.”

Without having any control over my body, I feel myself almost gliding towards this king sized bed shaped like a sphere with silk sheets the color of an Ancient Roman toga. I fall face first into the mattress and the girls corrall my body within an instant. They kiss my cheeks, then my lips, then each other. Then they put the piece of small glass in front of my face, and before I know it the powder is in my nose, then coursing through my system. Then the champagne, and more powder. The world is spinning off its axis, and I think I'm going to be sick.

I lean over the bed to throw up my guts, but nothing comes out. Then I look up into a life size mirror. Something tall and strange like you’d see at the carnival. Faces and bodies distorted, and all I could see was a mane of dirty blonde hair crawling down bumble bee sunglassed eyes, like I was the male version of Jackie O. My arms are like a connect the dots, leading me to believe that I was battling serious substance abuse issues.

“Where’s Laura?” I ask.

“Who?” The girls say in unison. Laughing.

“Laura. My wife.” They laugh again. “What’s fo fucking funny? Where’s my wife? My wife?”

“You were never married, hun. Said it wasn’t for you.”

“What?”

“You had a girl, baby. But she got pregnant. Don’t you remember? You told us the story a hundred times. You were drinking and playing guitar, getting ready for a show. Your girl said she needed to talk to you and said she was pregnant. You told her to take a hike. You had no interest in raising kids, remember?”

“I, uh, don’t remember saying that.”

“Well, hunny, don’t act like you did the wrong thing. Look at this palace. Look at us.” They started to kiss again. “You don’t need anyone holding you back, baby. You created this all on your own.”

“I, uh, I need to get my phone.”

I walk back downstairs, the world around me going in and out of focus as the drugs take over my system.

In the kitchen I find my phone sitting on the floor. I scroll through and look for the app. I can’t find it. After a few minutes, there’s a pop-up that says, “Do you want to return?” I click “Yes” then it says, “Are you sure?” and I click “Yes,” then it says, “Are you really sure, Tyson?” “Yes” “Okay. Just a reminder that in the other world you’re an insomniac bordering on depression. Who works at 9-5 and has a marriage that’s dissolving like skin in battery acid. Here? Sure. You have a little drug problem, but that’s part of the excess. You made it. You won. So, I’ll ask again. Are you sure?

And for a moment, I hesitate. I’m not happy. I’m drowning, but maybe I’m drowning for good reason. Maybe, what I think is drowning is actually just responsibility rearing its head and telling me that I need to be a good father and a good husband. Telling me that I need to slow down with the drinking and nightly self-deprecating ritual that I take part in. That without the responsibility, I could have done something, maybe, but it would have come at a cost.

My thumb hovers above the phone and I click yes.

The light hits me again and I’m back in my middle class home, my fingers on the floor placed right in the crack filler. The glass of milk with the crack, shattered to my right. It was time, I suppose. It was time.

I check for the app but it’s gone and when I search for it, there’s nothing.

I walk to the man cave and it’s the middle class one again with the barely functioning turntable, a small milk crate of records, and my old man’s beat up Fender hanging crooked on a cheap plastic wall mount. But it seems better now. I feel better, like I could sleep for a fortnight.

Is Laura upstairs? I ask myself and I drag myself feeling nervous about this fever dream. Feeling like I might have had a psychotic episode and I’m actually in a straight jacket in a padded cell somewhere banging my head against the cushion and laughing. Laughing like the blondes.

But when I reach the top of the stairs the Art Deco is gone and replaced with an old stained white color that’s peeling and in dire need of an upgrade. Then I peek my head into Laura’s room and there’s a body there, sleeping with her face against the opposite wall. I walk over to her side of the bed, and see her mouth slightly ajar, with a little bubble of drool coming out, and yup, it’s Laura.

The kids' rooms are both occupied with my children and then I decide to lay my head on the pillow.

Sleep is coming, I can feel it. I don’t fight it. I smile, but for a moment before sleep takes me, I hear Laura’s snoring and think.

“I could have been somebody.”

And then I fall asleep.

The checkout line two aisles away looks much shorter. So I push my grocery cart to that one.

Soon, the shopper at the front of my new line is having trouble with her credit card. And the other lines are shrinking.

So I move again.

But dizziness overwhelms me. The feeling runs out of my feet and head. My shopping cart disappears. I reach to hold onto a magazine rack and close my eyes tightly. I feel that I am sitting somehow. A classical piano piece is playing, but where?

I slowly open my eyes and look down at my hands. They are moving effortlessly and masterfully over the keyboard of a grand piano. And with great flourishes. I am mesmerized--and bewildered, because the only instrument I can play is a guitar, and I am just a beginner.

An arpeggio ensues followed by a low chord--and loud applause. I look up and people are clapping wildly. The audience fills a massive auditorium. I feel myself stand, take a bow, and run off stage.

I am met by at least a dozen people. A young man is telling me to get changed because we have to fly to Boston for a concert. An older woman tells me no, the schedule has changed. I have to go to Milwaukee to sit for a deposition in my divorce case, before I fly to Boston. Another aide says I am now the target of class-action lawsuits in Austin, Texas, and Reno, Nevada, because I skipped concerts there due to my illness that...that nobody wants to say the "c" word in front of me. Somehow I know this.

"You're next."

Who said that? I'm next to what? To die? To lose my spouse? My money? To...

"Sir, you're next!"

I blink. And I am back in the supermarket line. I look down and see my hands placing groceries on the conveyor belt.

The sense of dread is gone. And I silently thank my Lord that I am just a middle-aged bus driver with a loving wife and two children and a penchant for finding sales when I shop.

Three years after my sister disappeared, my parents and I moved to an old farmhouse built on slanted land and surrounded by towering trees.

Our closest neighbors were deer and far too many bugs. The move was long overdue, and we hoped it might help us heal. It felt like a betrayal to Mom—and it was—but it was also about self-preservation.

We had to let Marie go if we were going to continue living. We couldn’t keep clinging to the hope that one day she’d show up at our doorstep, in tears and apologizing.

“I’m sorry for making you all worry!”

Mom didn’t speak to Dad or me for months after we moved. She locked herself in her room, no longer seeing me but looking right through me as if I were a ghost. It made my body burn, and my heart ache.

Dad sympathized and told me to give her space, but I noticed he didn’t look me in the eye either.

I missed my sister and knew my parents blamed me for what happened. They were right—Marie’s disappearance was my fault alone.

\*It should have been you; \* unspoken words hung in the air.

Yes, it should be me instead of Marie, rotting under a pile of dirt, waiting to be unearthed and held.

\*\*\*

Marie often came to me at night—I’d hear her singing from the woods.

Her voice had always been beautiful, and it still was. She pressed her palms against my window, leaving imprints surrounded by frost.

When she smiled, her lips quivered, and her eyes shone like starlight. She whispered my name throughout the night, taught me curses, and hissed enchantments; she sang low and sweet—songs only the dead know.

“It’s not real,” I told myself. “You’re being stupid. It’s just the wind and your imagination.” But the wind doesn’t know my name, and my imagination can’t leave scratches on the window.

I tried to reassure myself that they were simply dreams. Of course, Marie wouldn’t be at my window; I was on the second floor. Of course, my sister would come to the door as we all hoped.

She wasn’t a ghost; she couldn’t possibly be haunting me. I was her twin sister, her best friend. She… wouldn’t.

But deep down, I knew the truth.

And on a foggy morning, I proved myself right.

I found Marie’s locket on my windowsill, coated in thick black mud. She would never have taken it off. My hands trembled as I wiped away the grime and read the inscription. Maybe I was wrong, but once again, I knew I wasn’t.

**“A 2 M 4EVR”**

**“2 U w ❤“**

The sight of it shattered me. I had told myself for years that she was gone, that I had repressed hope, but I hadn’t truly abandoned it. Now, there was no hope left.

\*\*\*

I lost my mind that day.

I ran to the fields and screamed until my throat was raw. I lay on the itchy grass and stared at the sky, watching it darken as the moon bloomed like an iridescent flower.

The fields glittered with lightning bugs. I chased and captured them, ripping their wings off one by one.

Watching their glow fade away made me wonder how long it had taken Marie to die. Had she just lain there, accepting her fate and feeling life drain out of her?

I crushed the bugs, stared at the luminescent smear on my palms, and stuck my fingers into my mouth; it was bitter and sweet.

\*\*\*

The guilt gnawed at me relentlessly. It was my fault Marie was dead. I had pressured her into going to the party. I knew she didn’t want to go—it wasn’t her thing—but I needed a designated driver. The more she refused, the more I cajoled, begged, and taunted her.

“It’ll be fun! Come on! Are you going to waste the rest of your life watching TV with Mom and Dad?”

“God, Marie, don’t you get tired of being the dutiful daughter?”

“How do you think it makes me feel? Oh, Asha, why can’t you be like Marie? Why are you so irresponsible? So dumb?”

“Have a drink, just one. You’ll be fine.”

“Aren’t you tired of living such a boring life?”

“I love you, you know. Come on, Marie! You only live once.”

Marie had come, and I ignored her completely. Instead, I smoked and drank and smoked and drank. I passed out, and when I woke up, I had 20 missed calls from Marie and twice as many from my parents.

My heart dropped into my stomach, and I tried my hardest not to throw up. I immediately knew something was wrong. I knew something terrible had happened to my sweet sister.

\*\*\*

In the aftermath, I tried to connect with Dad in the only way he seemed to notice me—helping around the house.

Our ladder was old and terrifying, but he insisted on using it, so I held it steady as he cleaned the gutters. I stood in his shadow, feeling sick.

I imagined him falling and cracking his head open at my feet, his brain spilling out, his eyes weeping blood.

I was relieved when he finally descended, but the image of his mangled body never left me.

That night, I dreamt of Marie again. She stood in the corner of my room, looking at me. Her tangled hair was full of bugs and earth, and her lips had rotted away, revealing black gums and rotten teeth. I asked what she wanted and begged her to go away.

She smiled and stared at me, and then her eyes rolled back, revealing empty sockets wriggling with maggots.

Sometimes, I smelled blood in the air, and that’s when I knew Marie was nearby. I know Mom sensed her, too.

On the rare occasions we encountered each other, she would look at me, terrified. I imagined Marie clinging to my back, caressing and tracing my face with blood-stained fingertips.

I lost Dad during the height of summer. I found him sitting in the kitchen, staring at a corner, his eyes were unfocused and full of tears.

“She’s here,” he told me. “Asha, your sister is here. I can see her. We shouldn’t have left her. We shouldn’t have left her. We need to find her.”

Then he got up and left, the door banging shut behind him. Days would pass, and he would return home with dirt in his pockets and eyes as red as blood. He would sit at the table and cry, talking to Marie. He apologized to her. She wanted us to find her, and she was upset that we had given up on her.

\*\*\*

The days grew longer, summer felt endless, and Marie’s anger grew with the season. A storm blew in, rain lashed the windows, and the wind shook the house. After it was over, we went outside to check for damage. The house gazed back at us with hundreds of pairs of eyes.

Marie glared at us accusingly. “Have You Seen Me?” her missing posters read.

Yes, sweet sister. I believe we have.

Come back to us.

The ground was soft and sprinkled with teeth. I picked them up while Dad collected the posters. His mouth twitched, and his eyes were cold. I knew he was gone.

As I write this, his body lies crumpled under my window. I heard the crack as his neck broke on impact, and I know I’ll never forget the sound.

Mom has barricaded herself in her room. Occasionally, I hear her laughing, followed by wailing.

Nothing matters anymore. Marie is here, and she’s waiting for me.

The window is open, and I hear her. She’s singing and laughing, her voice warped by time, dirt, and larvae. From the woods, she emerges, beautiful and dark. She gazes up at me and smiles.

The moon is exceptionally bright tonight, and the sky is full of stars. I run outside and try to touch her face, but she pulls away and runs back into the woods. I chase her, and around me, the trees vibrate, and the air shimmers.

I’m going to find her. It has all led to this. I know what to do and where to go. I will sift through the dirt, unearth her bones, and shroud myself in her hair. Together, we will wait for the sun to rise and say goodbye to this world.

We were born together and will leave this life forever. There’s no one left to haunt and nothing left to mourn; all that’s left is the parting of the veil.

Marie, I’m so happy you’re back.

Finally, you’re home.

I dreamed

About how I would

Die

Last night.

Hinging right,

Turned me

Towards

The towering hoofs

Of an unyielding bull,

His

Deep lethal charcoal

Storming my mortal gates,

Smothering me

Into a splat human accordion

While I prayed

To God

That He would

Take me to heaven

And that my underwear

Would remain clean

For all eventual

Investigating parties.

Terminal axons

Potassium channels

Flickering

halogen

Sodium bulbs

Synaptic flashes

Dashes of light

Bright insight

Blighted by

Cognitive collapses

Photogenic genetics

Software crashes

Temporal

Half life

Progressing

at the rate

of decay.

Bioluminescent

Full

Partial

Then, Crescent.

Alkaline spirit

Renewable essence.

Art is a life held in the hands, voices, bodies, and minds of many. Inspiration at the mind's peak, looking, seeing, hearing, and feeling art come through and flow into your soul. For one to be able to bend and shape worlds of our own where kings and queens are just teenagers, worlds where dogs can fly, worlds with any and every possibility, where every dream you have ever dreamt comes to life. Worlds of every emotion whether it be fear, rage, exhilaration, sorrow, or even love. No matter what shape it may take, All art has something in common, Whether it be paintings, stories, poems, music, or dance, They all have Soul they all have heart. They are Art. -C.W.B

Dark hours arrive on

bright days,

Blossoms

On graves.

Sadness makes it’s way

Past laughter

In subtle streams

And tidal waves.

Heart break

Is the ache

Of a great abyss,

There’s no bottom

To sorrow, and

no way to resist.

Warm skies

Smeared by

Tears of pain.

Soul cries

Dulled by

Tones of gray

Faces

Of loved ones

Taken away.

Big goat

Phone tote

Community vote

Validate

Gossip show

Party gloat

Beach float

Serenade

Deep throat

Motor boat

Soul smote

Scarcity

Lies wrote

Fake joke

Time goes

Calamity