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The Bitter Taste of Freedom
I did it.
I finally did it.
I killed the bastard, using the same hunting knife he had used on me many times before. My only regret is his wife found me with his blood-emptied body and called the cops.
Now I am running for my life; a life I finally got back. I'll be damned if anyone will ever put me in a cage again.
My lungs are on fire as I harshly inhale the humid morning air, the fresh air almost makes me queasy, I am so accustomed to the rotting musk from the basement, that my body doesn't know how to handle the clean air. The muscles in my legs are protesting, but I push my body, running as fast as I can down the stirring street.
The town I haven't seen in... well I have no idea how long... blurs past me. I want to stop and see if the small cafe my mother used to bring me to every Friday before hockey practice is still there. The buttery chocolate croissant is damn near melting in my mouth from the thought. My stomach lets out a roar and I curse under my breath; when was the last time that bastard fed me? The days I spent in the cage blurred together with no window in sight, and my captor didn't bother to ensure I maintained a healthy diet. I can’t stop, not for nostalgia, not for anything.
The sirens are getting louder. Shop owners begin stumbling onto the sidewalk to see what could be causing such a disturbance in their quaint little town. A wave of desperation comes crashing into me, like a sickly chill, the feeling of premature agony.
I need an escape.
As if I manifested it, a red door appears on the side of a crumbling brick building. I have lived in this town my entire young adult life, and I know before the kidnapping, that door hadn't existed. A large sign on the building's front, "condemned", draws my eyes. The door is out of place. But I don't have the time to stop and ponder its existence as tires screech on the pavement at the curve of the road only a few meters away.
I am panting like a dog in heat. I know my gelatinous leg muscles will give out if I dare try to run again, so I do what any sane person would do in my situation... I yank open the red door, surprised to find it unlocked and slam it behind me.
I move to the side, ducking under a window I know, sure as hell, wasn't there a minute ago.
I hold my breath as the sirens race past me, the police oblivious to my escape. Once it quiets outside, and the only sound is my heart thundering inside my chest, I dare peek out the window. The street is filled with nosey onlookers, but nothing more. I have graced the townspeople with something new to gossip about for weeks.
I let out a deep breath, the window fogging around my lips. I decide to turn away from the window, if someone spots me looking all ominous and creepy they may call the cops back.
The area around me is dark, darker than normal dark if that’s even possible. It's as if the shadows are alive as they morph their onyx forms around the three men staring at me.
Oh shit.
Three beady red eyes meet mine. A look of shock is all I can make out on their faces before the shadows swallow their faces, leaving the metal table they are gathered around visible. Another man is strapped to the table with cuffs around his ankles and wrists, his golden skin is marred with gouges and blood dripping into crimson pools on the cement floor beneath him. Six sets of latex-gloved hands hold instruments of doom above the man, whose impossibly purple eyes meet mine.
What in the actual fuck.
I clear my throat, reaching behind me, feeling the wall for the door so I can escape, but the cold rigid stone bricks are all I can feel. I turn my head in a flash, weary about facing away from the horror-movie-worth-scene in front of me.
The door is gone. The window is gone. There is nothing but a solid wall without any indication of how I got here.
“You are not going anywhere,” a gravelly voice comes from one of the men.
I whip my head back in their direction. The shadows are lining them like a demonic aura, their faces clearer, and their Cheshire-worthy smirks have my gut sinking low in my stomach.
Jail.
Jail is looking much better than this.
Meagan Verstraten.
Escape Plan
"How did we get here?"
He asks the question rhetorically, and she watches his face carefully. She's grown accustomed to his monologues, but she's never sure if he's seriously asking until she looks at him.
Her eyes dart from him to her fingernails. They've been freshly painted, but she looks for chips and waits for him to continue.
"It seems like only yesterday." He looks down at her and she catches his eye. She grins convincingly, and he leans down to place a hand on her head.
She ignores that it feels so very like when she used to scratch her dog.
"Do you need anything from the store, love?" His voice is soft, but she knows the kindness is only temporary. She is one missed que, one wrong word away from wrath.
Sometimes wrath pays a visit anyway.
"Could you bring me some peanut M & Ms?" She lays on a little charm, but not too thick. Puppy-dogs her eyes but doesn't bat her lashes. Lips set in just the right amount of pout.
"You've never asked for candy before! Certainly. Anything for my best girl."
She's reminded of that dog again, but she pretends to laugh good naturedly. "Thank you," she purrs.
He sighs. "It seems like yesterday when you hid in my little corner shop."
She nods. It was seven hundred and thirty two days ago, you fuck, she thinks, but can never say. "I love you," is a lie that slips past her lips so often that it leaves her mouth feeling oily.
"Be back soon." He leaves, and she sighs when the padlock clicks against the steel door. While not gilded, the cage is comfortable enough.
Buried twenty feet below the man's Brooklyn bodega, she remembers the night she dodged the cops and became a fly stuck in a far worse web. He let her into the store room, gave her a slushy, and she woke up a literal kept woman.
Her escape is imminent, though. For years, she'd studied him. Learned what made him angry, what made him happy. She feigned hope and good cheer, even though both had withered on the vine and rotted away long ago.
What he didn't know was that she nearly died in the sixth grade when she was at a slumber party. The host never considered severe allergies when she served peanut-butter chocolate chip cookies to the kid who didn't pay attention before taking a bite.
She'd never asked him for candy before, and she felt lucky to know she would never need to ask again.
Rotting Teeth, Rotting Lips
They say there's something in the water.
They always say that.
Cynics. I know, right?
Maybe I am one too.
Who knows?
I think it's highly probable.
There is this thing,
where people hide behind screens to mask their duping delight.
Where they mask their unchecked, unhealed trauma and turn to users without faces so they might... Appease their inner anger? Their disgust and balk and chase at people with their fingers.
And so they seek to be on the upper end of things.
"You're wrong."
"I don't know where you heard that from."
"Then you're poor educated..."
And so on and so forth, but there is no tact behind such words.
Blatant and in your face? Yes.
But what purpose does it serve?
People like to degrade and demean others all the time.
They all do it at one point or another.
Nice words, slivered with poison.
Poison drenched in black.
What's the point if the opinion isn't yours?
Why not just go on the attack?
And then people take breaks.
I take breaks.
Because honestly, who wants to be around that shit?
I certainly fucking don't.
And I seclude myself from the vitriol.
Because honestly, who likes drinking laced coffee?
If I wanted to poison myself, I'd do so willingly.
And I think.
I'm fucking done giving my opinion.
People just love taking the piss.
Taking the ever loving piss out of things.
Nothing better to do.
And I go on.
I slip away.
Shut down and turn away.
Fucking done with it.
It's the platform.
It's the medium.
No, it's the fucking people.
The people choose to be this way.
They choose to make the forum that way.
They choose it and no Community Standard is going to fix that.
___________________________________________________________________
Author Notes: Not my favorite, but a lot of people seemed to like it. Interesting how some of my more wretched feelings that I post about seem to garner more attention. Maybe it's more relatable, or maybe there's something in the air that makes us all on the same frequency to where it seems we all are either in process or in the end of process of feeling rather annoyed and defeated. I'm not really sure, all I know is that there's a high probability the reason this one was liked, which I absolutely wish I retitled, vibed with more people. Anyway, enjoy. -D.F.
Forty-Two
Natural woodgrain, smoothly shaped into
the form of the thing it will be.
“It’s a good line,” he says of the boat,
running his hand along the raw gunwale before
eyeing it once more from the stern.
The sawdusted floor dwarfs his house, and that’s
room one. He’s reorganizing his tools, and we
walk among their groups to the door and gravel path.
He almost died on his fortieth birthday.
He was not, luckily, in this cabin, where pain would have
rendered the phone bric-a-brac among the books.
His mother had said he needed a doctor, and
his father had helped him off the floor.
“Forty-two is time for a partner,” he says, a
second tumbler of fine scotch in his head.
Another friend has another someone
to meet, he says, strumming a few chords.
But what would he do in Wilmington, he laughs.
He has an open-air bath tub, a reloading table,
a coop with three chickens, DVDs from the library,
a whiteboard wall with three dozen recommendations
of books and poets and conversations and films.
Tomorrow someone will pay him a few grand for
new molding, and three more word-of-mouth jobs await.
For now, he sleeps in his loft next to books from seminary,
dreaming perhaps of a boat that will wend toward
in-season geese, maybe soon.
Expiry Date
My name is Harper and in six months I am going to die.
I know this because I paid for the privilege. You can do testing for anything nowadays, and apparently your expiration date is one of them.
I had money to spare, I was bored, and yes, I foolishly thought the test would tell me some distant faraway age like eighty-two or maybe even one hundred and two. When I found out my expiry date was in six months, I began to have a really, really bad case of buyer’s remorse.
I went through quite a lengthy denial period, where I thought I could go through the rest of my life pretending that if I just do things exactly the same way and not change anything I would conveniently forget and everything would be fine and dandy. (This was by far my favorite coping mechanism. But it didn’t last. Eventually my anxiety bubbled up and exploded like a shaken champagne bottle.)
Next came an obsessive, defiant, planning phase. Everyday I would think of elaborate plans to avoid death like I could somehow scheme my way out of it. I mean, theoretically, it seems doable. Plane crash? Don’t go on a plane. Car accident? Just stay home all week. Heck, heart attack? Pop three baby aspirins and hang out in the hospital lobby, right next to the crash cart ready to wave a big sign that says “I’m having a heart attack.” Unfortunately the test didn’t provide the cause of death, just the exact time, so I couldn’t really plan in specifics.
Eventually all the planning became incredibly exhausting and I settled into a kind of defeated acceptance. My plan was still not to actively put myself in a situation where I could die, I was not quite ready to submit to my annihilation, but if I somehow still find myself in that situation anyway, I figured I should really work on trying to be okay with that.
So then I commenced on a hedonistic three months where I blew half of my life savings and did literally anything I could think of. I ziplined through the forests of Peru, skydived over the French countryside, drank the best wines and indulged in rich Italian food, snorkeled off the shores of Bali, shopped with abandon while perusing the streets of Tokyo, London, Dubai…
You get the idea.
The most pathetic part of this whole thing was that I didn’t have a family to spend my last few days with. Or close friends, really. My impending death would not be filled with earnest mourning and last minute tearful proclamations of love and reminiscing. Oh sure, my funeral would be packed, but nobody would miss me, not really. As an orphaned twenty-two year old who inherited too much money at an early age, not only was I kind of an entitled asshole, I also haven’t really lived yet. I haven’t fallen in love or had kids, wrote that great American novel, won a Pulitzer, or experienced any of that syrupy sweet stuff life is supposedly made of.
Anyway, that’s why I’m hanging out in the hospice ward.
My friend here is Lucas. He is twenty-nine and has end stage heart failure from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. He described it as his heart being too big - literally but I suspect it's also an accurate description of him figuratively. I befriended him five months ago when I found out I was going to die. And no, surprisingly, he does not have any wisdom to impart about acceptance and healing and the meaning of life. He is very not okay with his young, awesome life being cut short, thank you very much.
He did have some useful information for me though.
“It’s quite experimental.” Lucas warned in an ominous tone.
“Obviously.”
“They usually only accept terminal patients… you know, because of the ethical issues.” He eyed me warily. “But in your case, they made an exception.”
He was adorable. He said that last line like a late night infomercial. Or maybe a used car salesman.
“This is not some elaborate black market scam to harvest my organs, is it?” I raise an eyebrow at him. “I mean, no offense, but you look like you could use a new heart.”
Lucas had to grab his oxygen mask after laughing so hard at that one. The nurse at the station gave me a dirty look.
After Lucas recovered he looked me in the eye. “How much do you have left?”
“Time? Or money?” I joked. The look on his face was not amused. I cleared my throat. “One month. And as you know, money is not an object.”
“Well, one month can give you… at least eighty years in virtual time. So pretty much a whole lifetime, if you decide on it.” Lucas shrugged. “Once you jack in though, there’s no going back. Your clock will end as scheduled and that’s the only way out. Also, it’s totally immersive, so you won’t even know you’re in virtual. It will be like… you’re in a dream but you don’t know you’re in a dream.”
“So I would really believe everything was real? Like I would grow up to be ninety years old and I would actually think I lived all those years even though really it will only be one month?”
“Mostly, yes.”
“How many of the other people will be real?”
“Most will be computer generated. You might meet some real ones, if they are in the same time dilation settings as you. There are very few people with the resources for a whole month, you know. Most people can only afford one day.”
“So there’s a chance that I will marry a program?” I furrowed my brows. “And then if we have kids, they will also be programs?”
Lucas cocked an eyebrow. “There’s a high chance, statistically. Like I said, there’s only a few real participants at any given time. Not that it would matter to you, you won’t know the difference.”
I thought about this. Would it really bother me if I didn’t know? I bet my computer generated kids would be adorable.
His expression suddenly turned serious. “There’s something else. It’s rare, but there are a few cases of people noticing little things not quite right and they become increasingly convinced they’re in a simulation. Which of course is true, but when you’re jacked in and you’re not completely sure if you’re crazy or just being paranoid, it can be terrifying. They call it Simulation Induced Paranoia, or SIP.” He paused. “Participants become really…. distressed.”
I chewed on this for a second. “I still want to do it.”
He looked surprised. “Really?”
“I really don’t have anything to lose.” I replied nonchalantly, like I just decided on a dinner entree. I should probably be alarmed that I was acting so cavalier. Lucas wasn’t exactly giving a stellar sales pitch. Then again, it was true, I really had nothing left to lose. I’ve done what I could with my twenty-two years. Might as well have another lifetime to try again.
Lucas stared at me for a moment then sighed. “That’s the thing. The longer you’re in virtual, the higher the chance you might experience SIP. Remember, Harper, a month is a lifetime. The chances are very low of course - less than 1%, the virtual worlds are very meticulously programmed after all. But if you experience SIP, there’s no cure, no safe word, you’re stuck until your clock runs out.”
“I already decided.” I said resolutely. Once I’ve made up my mind on something I was usually unshakable. It was one of my many flaws. “In fact, let’s do it tonight. I want to get my whole lifetime, not a year less.”
—
Everything was too bright, the sounds too loud. I wanted to scream but I couldn’t. Jacking in was a very jarring process, it felt as if all my neurons were firing up all at once. Somehow I felt tremendous pain and the heights of delirious ecstasy simultaneously. Like I was feeling every possible thing all at the same time. There was a terrifying moment when everything went black, and for what felt like an eternity but was probably only a few seconds, I truly wholeheartedly believed I was actively dying.
Maybe I was supposed to die on the table during the procedure. Or maybe I really did unwittingly offer to have my organs harvested for the black market. Damn it, I probably caused my own death in my extreme efforts to avoid it...
I blinked twice. The room slowly came into focus.
“Hey, sleeping beauty.” A familiar voice.
It was Lucas. But also, it was not Lucas. He did not have his portable oxygen tank close by. His lips did not have their usual bluish tint. He looked… healthy.
Everything came back to me at once.
“Oh shit, Lucas. That was nuts.” I shook my head, clearing the cobwebs. “That felt too real. I really felt like I was in there for twenty-two years.” I checked my watch. I’ve only been in Virtual for twenty-two minutes.
He chuckled, swiveling back and forth on the expensive office chair I bought him for Christmas last year. My boyfriend never could sit still. “You’re a champ, Harper, you were the one who wanted to push the time dilation to a year per minute. I was worried pushing it that far would compromise the world building, but your mind was amazing at meeting the program halfway to fill in the gaps. You made yourself a rich orphan, really? Money is no object? Hah!”
I disconnected my neurojack from the surgically implanted access port behind my right ear. That rich orphan stuff was my subconscious free at the wheel. I didn’t intentionally decide on it. I turned back to Lucas. “Why did you add all that stuff about Virtual in there, and SIP? Don’t you think that was a little too… meta?”
Lucas suddenly broke into that grin that melted my heart so many years ago when we met during undergrad at MIT. “Well, since you wanted to put the expiry dates into the program so people would know how much time they had left, I thought, what the heck, why not make it interesting? Why not make a virtual game in Virtual?”
I was not amused. Lucas had a penchant for bloated code and unnecessary side doors. Also, for not telling me about an adjustment until after he has done it. “That’s messed up. You should have run that by me. The expiry date was a suggestion from the beta testers and we all agreed on it. We didn’t agree on putting the game into the Virtual Universe as a side door..” I paused. “Also, what if I didn’t jack in? I would have died in a car accident or something?”
Lucas turned back to his computer and typed a few lines of code. “I had carbon monoxide poisoning ready to go, but I was prepared to improvise. And anyway, I didn’t actually think you would gravitate towards the game during the beta test, I just put it in there as an Easter egg of sorts. I figured most clients would only think about jacking in when they were close to their expiry dates, if they do at all. But on second thought, maybe I should take it out of the programming, it’s too much work to keep up.”
I jumped off the table and stretched my legs. My entire body felt stiff like I haven’t used it for months. “Yea, take it out. You’ll have enough work as it is when we start accepting our first commercial clients next week. We have four people scheduled on our first day which I already think is too much.”
“We’ll be fine.” Lucas was now typing more purposefully. “That reminds me, I need to finish debugging this before Monday. Do you mind picking up dinner?”
“Sure.. from that new Thai place again?”
“Sounds good.”
I smiled as I gave Lucas a quick peck on the cheek before I grabbed my purse to pick up the take out. Everything was going well for our start up. It was hard to believe that only two years ago Lucas and I were broke PhD dropouts who took a leap of faith building Virtual from our one bedroom Boston apartment. And now… well, let’s just say our first official month in business is projected to generate six figures in profits even after subtracting overhead. Mid six figures. And as soon as we open up our second and third facilities the growth would be exponential.
To top it all off, I was pretty sure Lucas was planning on proposing to me next week on my birthday. I saw a charge from some jewelry company on his credit card statement while I was doing some filing last month. Judging from the amount, it could only be an engagement ring. Lucas never would have spent that much on a piece of jewelry otherwise.
I sauntered out of the elevator from our high rise office with a pep in my step. The weather outside was just the right amount of sunny. Even the Boston air didn’t feel as suffocatingly polluted. Yes, everything was going well. Perfect, even. I eyed a meticulously trimmed bush suspiciously as I walked by. Maybe too perfect.
I felt a sudden stab of panic. The smile dissipated from my face.
Oh no.
tragic morning
we met between the moss patch and the rock,
tentative, I extended my antenna,
I feared you were predatory,
I’m so soft, and life’s too short.
you oozed excitment, I could smell.
you too, felt the dampness of the soil vanishing, and the ticking away of time.
we will soon shrivel, or carried off by the raven. the storm in my heart stirred.
i felt you with my radula. you did not object, enticing me, with froth.
we then locked our tracks, deseperately sucking on each other, fearing separation .
the kids found us then, they tore us apart, just when the jelly was right.
I do not know what became of you, my love.
the salt burned only for a while.
I melted away, leaving only the calcium, a monument to our temporality.
but perhaps all was not lost.
Anatomical Alliteration
Run ribbons of red roses ’round ribcages, radiating ridicule, reverberating recklessness
Vying violets vacate veins, valiantly venturing, veering vivid valleys
Daisies dancing down damp dimples, dissect doubts, discuss disparities
Pink peonies primly prance in my peripheral, petals peering partially, parading pastel performance perfection
Growing gardenias grace gargantuan granules, getting garbled
Blue bunches of baby’s breath becoming breathless, bronchi breaking, barely bitten biscuits, blooming buttercups blush
Hydrangeas hiss, Hallmark haunting, hycainths howl, heroes halt, heads hardly hurting
Windpipe whistle wilts, wisteria wants, wishes, wobbles, wearily wondering whenever, whatever, weaving wastelands
Every evening, euphorbia enters eye sockets, entertains, eyelashes elongate evermore
Necessary! no, narcissus knows nothing, nymphaea needs nothing, never neurotic, non-negotiable, neurons, nuisances
Leaping lilies laugh, lotuses loving, leaving, lounging, licking lavender lips, lucky to be living
Tigerlilies trample, teetering, towering, toppling the trachea towards terror
Flax floats, flurrying, flowing from frigid falls, forget-me-nots falling, face-first, forever fearless, freedoms, fleeting forgotten, fallen fairy, foreign fate, fickle features
Melancholy madness melts, mistakes making magnolias mourn, mellow muscles meet misery, missing me
Suffocate my sorrows in sage and scarlet strawberry shrubs, suppose the stars seldom soar swiftly, soapy stains smear some, sardonic sacrilege, sacrificing security, sternum straining, singing sporadic schizophrenia softly
Asphyxiating August’s azaleas, abdomen aching, artistic alleviating anxieties along, arduously, always attractively ascending
Irises, instinct, ill, icy, invalidation, indoctrination, insurmountable, indigo is imagining interesting inadequacies infinitely
Cobalt cornflower cranium crests, carnations close, collarbones clench, cluelessly cowering, can’t contain cacophony, calamities clamoring, cardiologists chide, contrast, confound, condemn, condescend, conveying candidly, comparing capitalism to capitalizing, captivating cardinals cry cataclysmic catastrophe;
correct