Remember when you were young? And you still had dreams. You thought it was possible they might come true. Maybe you wanted to marry a prince. Maybe you wanted to be a billionaire in a mansion with exotic pet elephants and doors that opened when they sensed your presence. Maybe you wanted world peace. Maybe you thought you could be anything. The world was an open book. A blank page. An empty canvas. And there you were the artist, ready to write and draw. There was a wide, beautiful expanse in front of you. Like the Great Plains of America before the Europeans butchered the natives, raped their women, and enslaved their children.

Reality hits fast and hard. You couldn’t be a ball player because you struck out in front of the whole class. Little Maddie Ray spit in your face when you finally found the courage to ask her out. Little Johnny Rascal ripped up the love letter you gave him. You got married and had kids and found it was nothing but hard work and heartbreak. You found your husband fucking your best friend on the pool table in the basement. You turned to alcohol and drugs when the world came crashing down on your head.

Maybe life is nothing but heartbreak and pain and suffering. Then maybe we’re the gods with our imaginations and dreams and ideas that are so much better than this harsh reality. Or maybe we’re the ones who destroyed this reality. Maybe the Christians are right and we’re all hopeless sinners mired in this world of pain and suffering and we need a God to save us. Or maybe the Jews are right and God has a chosen people and the reason things suck so bad for me is I’m not one of them. Or maybe the Muslims are right and we’re all failing miserably to live up to God’s golden standard and that’s why this world is such a shit hole. Or maybe the Hindus are right and we all keep getting reincarnated over and over in this world of filth until we finally figure our shit out. Or maybe the Buddhists are right and we need to find a way to transcend all of this somehow. Or maybe they’re all full of shit and we’re all fucked.

Maybe we’re all just breezes blowing through this world with no destination, no purpose, just meandering and wandering, building knowledge, gaining and losing friendships and loves, biding our time and filling our days until one day we die and it’s all over.

<>

This flew through metal rungs and out over moving bodies. Repetitive sounds vibrated all around as it flew into dark holes and flapping fabric. Darkness filled the space like closing walls as this flew. This shot through smoke, dispersing clouds of sweet stench, over reflections of white powder and over a crowded floor. Through an open door and out into the night, towards the tiny lights in the darkness above, past clouds and towards the largest round light with bumps and ridges and shadows, and down over water, from land to land and sea to sea and back again to do it all over every day and every night until stillness settled like a falling curtain.

<>

Billy had received an invite to the club from none other than Jerry Holiday. The man, the myth, the legend. He’d been hearing stories forever, and now here he was, tripping balls and rolling, candy flipping as the techno beats blasted and ravers danced like Fred Astaire on speed, feet busting moves, spinning on the floor as strobe lights flashed and televisions showed scenes from long forgotten Anime movies.

He walked over to a couch and sat down to find his bearings. Women with pigtails and pacifiers were putting ice in peoples’ mouths. Everyone suddenly looked like little kids. Billy heard a subtle slurping sound just underneath the dark beats and turned to see a beautiful woman with a cute, doe-eyed face giving a muscular black man a blowjob. Right there in the club in front of everyone.

The dancers continued dancing and Billy stood and joined them, taking his place on the floor inside a glowing yellow ring. He moved his feet as the beats thumped and closed his eyes and smiled. He looked up as the light on the ceiling opened up, revealing God. Billy felt the light coming down on him and realized there were strings of light reaching down to everyone on the dance floor and everyone outside and everyone in the world. They were all linked to God and each other in one endless neural network of feeling and euphoria of light.

He opened his eyes and all of the dancers suddenly looked like zombies, or was it lizards? Billy stood and started walking towards the exit. He sensed angels crying for his lost existence as he stepped out of the club to see a black-haired vixen wearing a tight red dress. He recognized her narrow face and made the connection that she was Maddy Starlight, a famous singer and DJ. His friend had told him that she’d be spinning there.

Maddy smiled a gorgeous, million dollar star smile with shiny white teeth. “Hey.”

Billy eyed her like a deer in headlights. Finally his mind caught up with his mouth, or was it vice versa? “Hey.” The world around them wavered and Billy suddenly had the overwhelming desire to touch someone.

“Wanna go for a walk?”

“With me?” Billy asked. He wasn’t sure if this was real or not but he decided he’d just go with it. Everything seemed to have a pink and purple day glow tint and everything was wavering. Billy wondered if he was actually looking at the atoms that pieced everything together.

“Yes, with you. Come on. Let’s go for a walk. This might just be your lucky night, sunshine sugarcane.” Billy wasn’t sure exactly if that was what she’d said but that’s the way his mind processed it.

Billy shrugged. “Okay then. Why not?”

They walked along dark blue alleys. Everything strangely smelled like piss. Billy had the sudden fear he’d pissed himself, but felt his pants and they were dry. He then distinctly felt something coming out of his cock, but he felt again and his pants were dry.

“Don’t start now,” she said. “I’m not ready yet.”

Billy had no idea what she was talking about.

“So what brought you to the club tonight?”

Billy glanced at her perfect, pale cheek. “Jerry Holiday. I got an invite from him.”

“In person?” Maddy asked.

Billy shook his head as they walked. “Email.”

“I should have known.” Maddy chuckled. “He’s a crazy one, that Jerry Holiday. Some of the stories about him…”

“I know,” Billy said. “I heard he knows celebrities in Los Angeles. Hobnobs with all those famous people you see on TV.” He chuckled. “But you probably do all that, too.”

“Tell me about it,” Maddy said. “But have you heard the crazy stories? I mean the real crazy ones?”

Billy looked into her shining green eyes and shook his head. “Like what?”

“Like that he went down to South America, bushwhacked his way to one of those villages where they’ve never seen another human, and smoked some rare plant that sent him to other dimensions and shit like that?”

Billy laughed. “Never heard that one.”

Maddy nodded as they walked. “How about the time he was attacked by five Russian gangsters and he talked one of them into killing the other four and then committing suicide?”

“That sounds ridiculous,” Billy said. He couldn’t believe he was walking with Maddy Starlight. He’d had a crush on her as long as he could remember. A crush from afar. From television and magazines. This was like a dream come true.

“Yeah,” Maddy agreed. “I guess. But after he’d killed his four friends, it wasn’t so hard for Jerry to talk him into killing himself. All that guilt and everything.”

“Where are we going?” Billy asked.

“My friend’s house,” Maddy said. “She was actually one of Jerry’s girlfriends for a while. Small world.”

“Yeah,” Billy said.

He followed her up some steps and through a wooden door with crystals that seemed to refract light like broken rainbow shards. They walked up rickety stairs past pictures of children with missing teeth and all their Elementary School smiles. He noticed one little girl in particular, a redhead with huge, purple-rimmed heart-shaped glasses.

They made it to a bedroom with an old fashioned bed with a canopy. The wooden posts holding up the canopy were carved into beautiful naked female bodies. Before long there was one such body sitting in front of Billy, eyeing him mischievously as she unbuttoned his pants. Just beyond her, Billy noticed a painting on the wall picturing a pirate with an eyepatch and a pipe. A scar on his right cheek was shaped like a star.

Billy couldn’t believe he was getting a blowjob from the crush of his life. He closed his eyes and looked at the kaleidoscopic shapes on his eyelids as he felt the wet ecstasy of her lips. He exploded inside again and again, his pants pushing out rainbows. And he finally came like an explosion of passion ecstatic fire warmth and thunder flashing lightning nuclear explosions of energy.

When he was done, he looked up at Maddy and saw that she wasn’t Maddy at all. She was a toothless middle aged woman who looked like she’d lived life a little too hard. “What the fuck is going on?” he asked.

“I think you must be tripping or something,” she said. “Hey, Coco. Slug ’im.”

A big, muscular fist smashed into Billy’s face.

When he came through, he was in the back seat of a car. His head was bleeding with sharp pain. He wailed as the car screeched to a halt. He felt a sharp pain in his stomach when he realized Coco was stabbing him. Billy flew out of the back of the car and slammed painfully into the street.

Billy lay in the street holding his bleeding stomach. He realized his wallet was gone, but that was the least of his worries. “Help me.” He reached up towards a woman walking by. She had a grey trench coat and one of those French beanies. It was red like the blood spilling from Billy’s stomach. “Help…”

The woman walked away with a disgusted look on her round face. Billy closed his eyes and thought to himself this was how he was going to die.

Birth is when it all begins. A blank slate. Empty page or canvas waiting for paint to be spilled, words to leak out from broken pens, bristly brushes. And the chaos that follows engulfs us like we’re swimmers bobbing up and down in hurricane waters.

We don’t know where the currents will take us, how hard the waves will hit, the waters splash, but we know it won’t be easy. Surfers trying to take their boards out get knocked by massive waves and the boards smash their faces and crack teeth.

Every baby cries once it hits the world and realizes that it wants, and it needs. There’s a lack from the beginning. An emptiness that needs to be filled. And there are our mothers to quiet us with a waiting breast. But as we get older we no longer have that sure thing. The world melts away and leaves us alone to fend for ourselves.

And here we are, like sand castles on a beach waiting for the tides to come in. Like baby sea turtles wobbling into the darkness. And the water permeates everything. It fills every space it enters. It expands and contracts, flows and settles. And it freezes into ice when the nights get cold.

<>

This stays still in a clear hard cylinder on a ledge full of green plants. Until an arm knocks it and glass shatters, and this flows along the floor, through cracks beneath the door, travels into the yard and some seeps down into dirt, feeding roots, keeping worms moist so the birds can find them in the mornings. Some slips into roadsides, rolling into gutters and flowing with rain into storm drains and out into rivers that flow into oceans. And the waves crash on sandy beaches and the water evaporates and gathers in clouds to rain down again. And people and animals drink and are hydrated and water becomes a part of them. Because water permeates everything.

<>

Molly swept the broken glass off the floor. She discarded it in the trash and grabbed another glass from the shelf. She filled it with water and hydrated the plants on the shelf above the sink. Her house felt so empty since Ed left. That asshole took all the vinyl they’d bought together. Her Frank Sinatra albums. That would probably remind her of him anyway. She didn’t need that dipshit. Men need women a lot more than women need men.

She walked into her living room and sat on the couch, wondering what to do next. She was finished working. She didn’t really know anyone to call. She didn’t really know anywhere to go. She didn’t drink so there weren’t many options for going out. “I’m not lonely,” she muttered to herself. She turned on the television as her fluffy brown cat, Mr. Wuzzles hopped onto her lap.

“…has been missing for two weeks now,” the female reporter said. She had a plastic credit card face with a plastic credit card smile. If there was a red that was perfect in the middle red with no pinkish or purplish or orangish or brownish tint whatsoever, that was the color her lips were. Boring humdrum red. “Police have been searching but have yet to find anything. Her parents have no idea where she could be. They didn’t see her leave with anyone. They just woke up one morning and she was gone.” The woman spoke like a monotone robot. She sat still like a wax figurine in a museum.

A picture of a little girl’s face flashed on the screen. She had a cute face with freckles and her hair was curly reddish orange. On her face were huge glasses with heart-shaped lenses.

Molly turned off the TV and sighed as she petted Mr. Wuzzles, feeling his soft fur between her fingers as he purred. “What the hell am I gonna do tonight?” She had some romance novels and a vibrator. Those beat Ed any day. But she was lonely. Especially during the nights. Her nights had always revolved around Ed.

She shook her head and frowned. “I can turn over a new leaf. Maybe I’ll start drawing again. Or exercising. Or I’ll learn to play an instrument.” Now she was talking to an empty room. She really was going insane.

She looked at the box on the coffee table. She’d found it in her mom’s attic shortly after she died. Her mom had been a nurse and a midwife and somehow the box had been filled with birth certificates. Molly had no idea how her mom had happened upon them, or why she’d saved them.

She leaned over Mr. Wuzzles and opened it and started looking through the papers and reading the names. Simon Beauregard. Phillip Johnson. Mary Jane Roland. Jerry Holiday. That had always been an interesting name to her for some reason. It sounded like someone who was a singer on a cruise ship. Or an adventurer in South America. He sounded interesting and exciting.

She lay back on the couch and closed her eyes as she continued petting Mr. Wuzzles and he continued purring. “Jerry Holiday.” She pictured the baby being born into her mother’s arms, crying as he entered the world. Her mother cut the chord and washed the child, then gave him to his real life mom. A new life. Now he was in his fifties probably.

“Who are you, Jerry Holiday?” She decided to make a life for him in her head. That’s what she could do with her newfound spare time. Make lives for all the people in the box. And maybe she could write stories. She could be a writer.

“Shortly after he was born,” she began, still talking to the empty room, “Jerry Holiday’s mom moved him to England to start a new life. His dad had left her and she was alone. But she managed. What woman needs a man anyway? They just get in our ways and cause us troubles.”

“Anyway, Jerry moved to England and went to school over there and did really well. When he was eighteen, he joined the navy and became a submarine commander. He became claustrophobic and had to quit. So he started working on cruise ships playing guitar, which he’d learned while attending school in England, and singing. One day, they had docked in South America and he decided to leave and go on adventures in the jungles there, looking for rare animals and remote tribal villages. He came back to the states, where he met Molly Wilkins in a coffee shop. They hit it off, started dating, got engaged, and were soon married.” She laughed and stared at the blank television screen.

She put the papers back in the box and closed it. “I’m fine. I really am.” She turned on the television again and watched old reruns until her eyes got heavy. Mr. Wuzzles leapt off her lap and made his way to the kitchen, where his food and water were.

“This is how I’m going to die,” Molly said. “I’ll have a heart attack alone watching sitcoms.” She chuckled at the idea as she drifted away.

Toddlers are always so curious and energetic. Like a tornado that has no purpose or destination but just appears and spins and destroys and brings chaos and then disappears.

Or an alien explorer who comes to a new world and doesn’t understand the signs, the streets, the cars. So it looks and discovers and asks a million questions as it finds its bearings and begins to discover its new world.

If we could all be so curious, so energetic, we could learn so much, see so much, experience so much. But we grow calloused and hardened with our eyes and minds fixed on money, sex, power. We search for comfort and sameness rather than excitement and chaos. We fix ourselves in our bunkers and build walls, aim cannons, dig holes deep into the ground. Become like stoic mountains.

Mountain ranges so high and steep no one can pass. Mountains that block the land from the sea, and create desert wastelands on the other side. Hot, vast expanses of sand. Nothingness. Like the emptiness of space. A space with no stars, no planets, no moons or suns. A space of nothing but the vacuum of our own cold thoughts. And then we hope that someone out there can find us. That someone out there will be brave and strong enough to scale our mountain ranges.

<>

These have been here for millennia. They were created by slow, violent crashes of land. These impenetrable mounds of rock pointing at the sky like jagged fingers. Like ridged knife blades. And the rain has pummeled them and the winds have blown against them and shaped them. But they still stand. Tips covered with blankets of snow. Bottoms clothed in trees with lush green leaves. And there are climbers and even scattered homes and buildings. But at their core they are rock. Strong and stalwart. Mighty and majestic, and so high they reach into the clouds. Like imaginative minds searching the skies for meaning and purpose, gazing into the deep unknown of space.

<>

I forgot who I was for a second. Looking out at the expanse that was spread before me. The towns in the distance. Their lights like tiny golden specks on the horizon. The trees skirting the sides of mountains, distant foothills. Reflecting pools looked like small mirrors. This was a vastness that couldn’t be captured in a picture. That could only be experienced. You only got the full effect when you were surrounded by it all.

And she was there with me. Beautiful Evelyn with her long, golden hair. Her black tights and blue shirt. Her backpack with everything she’d need to survive up here. And she was looking at me with those blue eyes. Those blue eyes I always lost myself in like I was looking at the sky. Even at our advanced ages. She looked the same to me as she did when we met all those years ago in college.

“You’re so beautiful,” I said.

She laughed at me. “Donnie. We’re all the way up here surrounded by all this beauty, and you’re talking about little old me?”

I smiled. “Of course. What else is there to talk about?”

She shook her head. “But I guess that’s what I love so much about you. You’ve always noticed me. Even up here with all this beauty and splendor. You’ve always looked out for me.”

“It’s so quiet above the tree line.” I watched a marmot shuffle between some rocks. “I have trouble concentrating in this quiet.”

“Back when I taught those toddlers in preschool…” she chuckled. “Taught is the wrong word. It was more like babysitting. Anyway, all those years, decades ago, there was a little boy I remember who used to say that same exact thing.”

“What thing?”

She grinned as she reminisced. “I have trouble concentrating in this quiet. His name was Jerry Holiday. And I can’t remember what he looked like at all. But I remember his energy. His defiance. His inability to follow the simplest instructions. And he would yell and talk and scream when it was nap time. And when I reprimanded him, he would say those same words. I have trouble concentrating in this quiet.”

“That’s a strange thing to remember right now,” I said.

“I only remember because you said it.”

I looked out at a rocky mountainside as it turned pink with Alpenglow. The sun was setting, spilling its orange beauty across the sky. Then I watched as gray clouds swallowed the top of that mountain. “Oh no.”

“What?” she asked.

“There’s a storm coming. We need to get down below the tree line ASAP. We don’t want to be the highest things when the lightning strikes.”

We started down the mountainside as yellow flashed inside the oncoming clouds. Then the thunder sounded, shaking the landscape. We picked up our pace and ran, and the sky grew dark above us. We ran as fast as we could until we were in the trees once again.

I was out of breath. “I think we’re safe now.”

“If we don’t die of heart attacks,” Evelyn said with a smile.

“Evie, don’t joke about that. Not at our age. We need to drink water.” I pulled the bottle out of my pack and drank, then glanced at her pretty face. “Come on. Drink up. We just went down a lot of mountainside in a short time. We don’t want to end up with acute mountain sickness.”

She was trying hard to catch her breath.

“We’re gonna be fine.” The lightning was close. The rain started pouring down in sheets, pummeling us like tiny wet fists.

“What are we gonna do?” she asked. “I can’t go any further.”

I’d been lifting weights. And she was 120 pounds or so. But I lifted her like I was carrying her over the threshold but I carried her down the mountainside. Through trees and slippery ground. I slipped a bit but was able to catch myself. Then we hit a particularly slippery slope and I slid on my ass, still holding her as we sped down towards a cliff side. The cliff was probably three hundred feet or more. “Oh my God!” she shouted.

I grabbed her wrist with a strong grip. There was no way I was ever letting go of her. And I spun and grabbed a hanging branch.

Her feet were dangling off the cliff side. But I pulled her up through the mud and we both leaned against a particularly thick tree stump.

She smiled at me. “Well, there was another near death experience.”

I grinned. “Honey, this is how we’re gonna die one day. Alone on a mountain, where no one can find us.”

We start learning the day we’re born. We learn that if we cry, our mothers will always be there to comfort us. We learn to make sounds and then talk. We learn to stand, take steps, and then walk. We learn to sing, to dance. To draw and write. We learn to pee and poop in a toilet. And we go to school and learn math and reading and art and science.

We learn social skills. We learn how to make friends. And how to make enemies. How to look up to the popular kids. How to ridicule the outcasts. How to bully and torment and fight. How to like and play and love.

And we keep learning as we grow older. We read and experience nature. We go to new places, try new things. We explore new roads, sail new seas, fly new skies. Like astronauts, explorers, setting out to the far reaches of space, the vast unknown. We are always trying to make the unknown known.

And space waits in lighted darkness. A vast expanse of black with distant stars, lights like tiny pinpoints. Planets, balls of land and water and gas spinning and circling bright shining suns. Black holes that suck in everything, including light. Places where time doesn’t exist. Places where time and space fold in on themselves and become some strange unspeakable thing that’s impossible to understand, impossible to know. The great unknown.

<>

This is emptiness. Lack of matter, lack of liquid, earth, gas, and air. A supreme nothingness that goes on into infinity. Until it reaches shining stars, nuclear explosions filling the void with light. Until the stars implode in on themselves and collapse into infinite darkness contained in an infinitely small space, sucking in all matter, air, and light. Or some stars are circled by balls of rock and water and ice and gas. Huge spheres spinning with awesome majesty. Huge and massive beyond comprehension. And of all of these spheres, one has insects and fish and dogs and cats, lions and elephants, and humans with all their buildings and roads and cars and airplanes. One has beings capable of writing these words and of reading them.

<>

Megan stared out the window at the stars and the moon. “You think there’s anything out there?” she asked. “I mean, like aliens or anything like that?”

“If there are I bet they don’t fuck like you do,” the naked man in the bed said. She tried to remember his name. Was it Fred? Or Bill? No Bill was the guy from a few hours ago. But maybe this guy was Bill too. Who the fuck cared anyway?

She smiled. “Thanks.”

“How much more time we got?” he asked.

“20 minutes.”

“Well,” he said, “why don’t you stop starin’ out the window and get over here and suck my cock? You’re wastin’ my money.”

He was an asshole. Some guys actually tried to make sure she was enjoying herself. Some guys even tried to give her orgasms. A few were even successful. There were two kinds of guys in the world. Gentlemen and assholes. This guy was definitely an asshole. Still, he paid her. So she walked over to him, got on her knees, and sucked his tiny, skinny little dick.

When she was done, he fucked her doggy style one more time and left before she had the chance to check his wallet, which she only did with the assholes. He’d been a real mother fucker. She was a mother after all, so that actually did make him a mother fucker. She’d put her kid up for adoption but she still considered herself a mother. Biological, anyway. She wondered if her daughter would ever come to try to find her. Hopefully she’d have a real job by then.

She pulled up her black thong, put her black bra back on, slipped into her little black dress, walked over to the bathroom, and looked in the mirror. Her lipstick needed to be redone so she took care of that. She brushed her teeth out of respect for the next guy, and she needed to fix her long blonde hair so she did that. The last guy pulled the shit out of it, and not in a good way. She looked into her pretty blue eyes. All the guys loved her eyes. She wasn’t so drunk they were bloodshot, which was a good thing.

She checked her schedule on her phone and noticed she had a break for an hour before she had to fuck the next guy. Her eleven o’clock chickened out. Maybe he was a married guy who’d had second thoughts about cheating on his wife. Or maybe he was just scared. Who knew? Who cared? She’d lose a little money but she didn’t mind having a little break after that last asshole. At least he didn’t try to fuck her in the ass with that tiny little dick of his.

She sat at her desk and poured some vodka into her glass. She swigged it as she looked at the box on the floor. Some crap she’d bought at a yard sale. She mainly got the box for the cool lamp that was in it, which was now on her desk. A mermaid holding a pearl which was the light. Really cool. At least she thought so. And sexy in a way. Perfect for her room.

There was other stuff in the box, though. A pair of black maracas. She thought those could be fun somehow. Maybe she could find some sexy dance she could do with them online somewhere. Or maybe she could just have a party and invite a bunch of her musician friends. There was a math book. Too bad she’d dropped out of school. And a Teddy Bear.

She reached in and grabbed the bear. Reminded her of her childhood. It was small and tan, with a blue sweater, and shiny green eyes. Somebody wrote their name on his foot. Jerry Holiday. Was that their name or the bear’s name? Maybe both.

She pictured Jerry Holiday as a little toddler boy holding the bear. Playing with the bear and talking to the bear. Maybe he didn’t have any real friends and the bear was the only one he could talk to. Maybe his parents neglected him because they were junkies and the bear was his only real friend. She realized she was projecting her own childhood onto his. She thought about her daughter. She wondered what her name was. She wondered how her childhood was. It was probably great. She had parents who really wanted a kid. Why else would they adopt?

She thought a little more about little toddler Jerry Holiday, hugged the bear and laughed. She put it back in the box and chugged the rest of the vodka, then looked out the window at the stars. She found the brightest star, the wishing star, and smiled. “I wish my daughter is having a great childhood and will grow up to be a great woman.” She frowned. “And that she’ll come find me some day. Some day when the sun shines a little brighter.” That was a lot of wishes.

There was a knock on the door. It was midnight. Next customer. This was another first timer. She wondered if it would be a gentleman or an asshole. She looked at the wishing star again. “Let this one be a nice guy,” she whispered. She frowned. “This is how I’m gonna die. One of these assholes is gonna kill me one day.”