Hello sirs/ma’ams. If this has reached the incorrect department, I kindly request you forward it to those whom were intended to receive it. I am writing to express my disappointment in the performance of your product BLOODGRIND.

I purchased BLOODGRIND in good faith based on your advertisements, which appeared in the magazine Photos Of Wet & Dry Blood, published in January, February, and March of 1995.

These advertisements promised, and I quote directly from your copy, to inflict upon me “Infinite Miseries” and “Undying Pain.” I regret to inform you that despite incapacitating me acceptably, after a mere two month stay in the hospital I am nearly back to full health. My misery level has almost returned to a normal level, and due to my modified schedule of painkillers, I am practically pain-free. This is unacceptable.

What are YOU going to do about it?

Please respond care of

Mrs. Fuller-Weiff, London, OH

Despite our best efforts, Father keeps crawling into the oven. He has carelessly tossed out casseroles and pies and full roasts to make room for his large body, scattering Mother's food and breaking her crockery across the kitchen floor. It has come to the point where when the oven needs to be turned on, to cook food for the family, we each of us sit in shifts with a chair dragged to the face of the oven, to block Father with our bodies from opening the door, where he would grab onto blisteringly hot food and racks with his bare hands to remove and dash them to the ground, before crawling inside.

This of course does not stop him from crawling inside while the oven is not in use, and turning it on himself. Mother must go to work at the printers, after all, for Father's meagre income at the cannery cannot support us all. There are several hours a day where Mother and Father's schedules uncouple and he has free reign to put himself in the oven and self-immolate, unless he is watched like a hawk.

Mother has withdrawn me from school and tasked me with standing watch in the kitchen during these hours. It is a blow to my education, but I understand. If father were to cook himself to death, we would not have the money for any of the children to have an education, and I am the oldest and have the most ability to stop Father.

When he is stopped from getting into the oven, Father does not fight. He accepts the defeat peaceably, and he will meet his opponent's eye, often with a faint smile, and comply. He will walk away into another part of the house, and sleep, or look at the wall, or place his hand upon his chest to feel himself breathing. He does not respond to questions, and we have given up asking.

Despite the rough terrain you're able to check your watch, which your insurance gave you for free to monitor your steps to get a reduced premium. Your heart rate is, admittedly, still pretty high, but nowhere near where it was when you last were able to check, an hour and a half ago, hiding in the camp closet with all the fishing poles and tackle boxes and loose hooks that clawed up your legs and neck, waiting to be found.

Right now you're rocking about a 99 bpm. Pretty bad! You know that were at 180 or 185 in that closet, though, and you bet it spiked even higher when the killer crashed through the rotting sideboards and dragged you out by your hair and jammed a butcher's S-hook through the meat of your calf and started dragging you by it across the rough gravel of the camp and out past the flags that denoted the property line, into the woods.

For the first hour or so you really kept up a pretty good panic, but at this point you don't think you're going to bleed out, and the killer keeps stopping and looking at their phone. They seem to be lost, in fact. You wonder if it's appropriate to ask if they need directions.

Probably not, but frankly, you're getting quite bored. The initial shooting, blinding pain of the impalement has dulled and you've sort of gone into a comfy shock. It hurts a lot, you know that, but you don't really feel it.

"Hello, killer," you say, next time they stop by a tree, sort of hiding behind it as they breathe heavily. You're not a light person, something you've been meaning to work on, but now, because it is making the spree killer (who has murdered all of your co-workers and many of the wards entrusted to your care as camp counselor) really work up a sweat, you are glad you hadn't started hitting the gym quite yet.

They lift their mask and spit out a big loogie.

"Aw killer," you say. "Tough haul?"

They peek back around the tree, and, having not quite returned their mask to the original position, you now see it is the owner of the camp, Paul Gripley, who was in fact the one who technically bought you this smartwatch, by authorizing and paying for your health insurance.

You're not really sure why he's killing everyone, but the tremendous shock that has ripped through your system and the substantial bloodloss makes you fairly lightheaded and easygoing. You do not really care.

"Hi Paul," you say.

"Hi, Sofía," he says back.

"What's with all the killin?"

"I don't really want to talk about it."

"That's okay, I don't really-"

"It's sort of a sex thing, but not, like, I don't want you to feel like you're being objectified in any way. Sex thing, but in like a, uh, turned-inward, not in a- Is- nobody's feeling like this is, like they're being objectified, do- did they? Did anybody mention that they felt objectified or like the killer was being pervy while you were all hiding in the boat shed? God, god, I really freakin hope not, is anybody... oh, heck, I watched that same harassment-in-the-workplace training video as all of yous, I don't want... ah, jeez."

"I was just about to tell you I didn't want to know, Paul. But I guess now that you mention it, I do feel a little objectified, and certainly not that respected. You are treating me like meat."

"Ah, shit," says Paul, and lowers his mask, again, and removes the hunting knife from the holster hooked to his belt. It glints dully in the moonlight. There's some of Diego's blood still streaking up the blade and drying in brown matte on the soft leather handle.

You check your watch again as he approaches, and a smile spreads unbidden across your face. You show him the watch. "But hey, look at this, my heartbeat's at a solid 75 bpm."

He stops, confused.

"So you're not mad at me?"

"Oh, Paul, I'm mad at you. But I'm not stressin. You going to kill me now?"

"Yes, Sofía."

"Fuckin dickhead."

"Aw jeez."

Spooktober Stories, Year Twelve.

Jonathan Phillips, erstwhile author of Spooktober Stories, has ceased to exist in any real sense, and now persists only as a ghost, haunting his own life.

He seems to observe himself from a great distance, in a world he no longer recognizes as one that he inhabits, a world of deep and repugnant ugliness and pointless cruelty and stupidity. He believes that his actions might still have consequences in that world, but he is no longer able to observe or even intuit what those consequences might be. Even if he could, he wouldn't want to. He suspects that he is also ugly and pointlessly cruel and exceedingly stupid.

Jonathan Phillips, the ghost, spends a little bit of each day monitoring the actions of that real Jonathan Phillips, (the ugly, cruel, stupid one) but he finds him frankly completely uninteresting and somewhat depressing to watch. He prefers to be a ghost. As a ghost he can stare dully at the void and feel nothing at all about it. Also, he has taken up baking, which is a nice thing for a ghost to do.

If you are a ghost too, I recommend taking up baking. You have to pay attention to a lot of little details, and internalize the intricacies of sourdough starter rise and ambient temperature and bulk proofing and wet kneading and lamination and all sorts of things that really take up a lot of ghost time, which you, as a ghost, have an excess of.

Anyhow, welcome to year twelve of Spooktober Stories.

SPOOKTOBER STORY, YEAR 11.

#1.

throughout each october for the past decade i've done some short horror-themed flash fiction called 'spooktober stories' and posted them on facebook. i didn't do them this year. here is my apology video

Spooktober supplemental xII

A feud between Jon Phillips and a mysterious stranger.

Tribute to Spooktober Revival XXX

“Torture them, imprison them, deport them! They’re attacking the very core of what we tolerate, and who we are. Tell them I’m a cowboy. I have a real-life, goddamned cock, and I’m full of rage. Rage on behalf of my American citizens. I’m a sex cowboy, and a patriot, and just so we’re clear: my intention is to tie a rope into a loose slipknot and then toss it around the neck of any lawbreaking traitor, pulling tight as my steed tramples the scum from the bag. Transparently, I would bind her hands and feet to one another. If I were to speak from the heart, I’d add that I would flay her, and then wash, tan, and stretch the little one’s skin and then probably sell it. Maybe the president of The United States of America would sign it first, significantly increasing its value at auction. Maybe it’d just have to wear it myself if that were the case, but, I recognize that the kid, the raging illegals, the bull, may still be alive without her skin. Ok, so what? No mercy for the bovine ugliness of domestic crime. I’ll tell you what: I love hunters. All of the hunters I know will tell you these EXACT SAME three things. In order:

One: I love my country.

Two: I love God.

Three: Never waste a kill (and never let the mortally wounded die without a knife in their neck).

I would be REMISS to leave out the details of my patriotic and masculine convictions in any address I give. Today is special; I have a self-righteous responsibility to speak the truth when given this sacred, radiant podium as my pulpit. Under the dark abyss of all radical-left intellect, I tell you, and the president would agree, that in the event that the skinless illegal is still alive, my position keeps me beyond justified in violently mounting its bleeding mass. Less skin, but the same amount of holes—until I stick my knife—which is a well polished, mid 20th century antique—into the neck, as I was taught to do in the 5th grade. The rot before me is no match for my carrion nature. I ravage a bounty of inhuman flesh. The power of American nucleogravitational portals shall gurgle and spew the wrought-iron flails and pointed helms of every manner of imp and ghoul, and all will obey my command, and the flesh flows in excess to my maw as it has forever and as will never cease. And because I took hunter’s safety, which, frankly, should be mandatory for all boys, I allow nothing to go to waste. So, as a gesture to living things, I offer the leftover sinew and bones of this… bull

to my… houseguests.

This is the leadership I stand on, just as the culmination of every liver torn from the defiled corpses of my prey pile onto my chest, literally, every evening between 8:44pm and 12:09am in an America First reversal of crushing. Giles Corey was a loser, anti-american, an illegal immigrant, and most importantly, a witch sympathizer. He was friends with the likes of Harriet Tubman, Malcom X, and, most obviously, Satan. Truly a terrorist, and despicable. By unbound sorcery, manipulation, or command, may berserkers shred the common populus with bloodthirst, but without remorse. God bless the fifty six beautiful stars and stripes.

∧,,,∧

( ̳• · • ̳)

/ づ♡ ᓚᘏᗢ U 8==<3 - - -

time to put on your dancin shoes
and dance away the blues...

...hello?

are you there...?

...oh no... you took too long...

you missed it...

...no, no...

...no more.

please take off your dancin shoes...

...just take them off god damn it.

you have fated us all to experience the blues...

...forever...

...god damn you...

...god ...damn... you...

i got a potato in my pocket

who put the potato in my pocket

i didn't put a potato in my pocket

why would i need one there

do i need a potato in my pocket?

potato pocket panic sets in

i will never let go of this potato

i will die if anyone ever takes this potato

someone takes potato while im asleep

how will i live without pocket potato

hear potato rolling around

no no no

pocket potato haunting me

move to new house, pocket potato there

pocket potato in my mind, they tell me

pocket potato ruins all my interpersonal relationships

the end

Notes on drowning oneself in potato-leek soup.

1. Allow to cool. Act with too much haste and you will end up scalding your nose and not much else.

2. Use a sufficiently sized bowl. Even if it may be more meaningful to use the shallow ceramic dinner bowl you first served this dish for her with, drowning can only be achieved by completely immersing ones nostrils and mouth completely, which is quite logistically difficult when you are focused on the act of drowning itself. Your nose will crush on the bottom of the bowl in a painful manner, and continued adjustments to try to immerse your mouth as well will prove very complicated. I suggest a bowl at least 3 ½ to 4 inches deep, though preferably one should use a six inch deep serving bowl.

3. Don’t be afraid to modify the recipe to be more liquid. While a traditional potato-leek soup is quite thick, this can lead to issues with intake. While your intention may to simply breathe the soup *in*, your body will attempt to expel the aspirated soup, and if it is too thick it will allow for a channel to be created from your mouth to the surface, where oxygen can be attained, as well as spattering soup all over the table in a big mess. Return to the pot, then add water to the soup at a slow simmer until the desired consistency is achieved, about the thickness of half-and-half. (Remember to allow to cool before your attempt!)

4. Expel all breath from your lungs before placing your face in the soup. Otherwise you are just blowing bubbles.

5. While your mind may be convinced that this is the only way to express the internal turmoil you are feeling, remember, your body doesn’t want to drown! It is worth practicing mindfulness exercises, and coming up with mantras to soothe your body’s rejection of the experience. Keep these short: “This is how I want to be discovered, I need this, I can’t go on like this, I need this,” is too long. Something pithy like “She will never be able to forgive herself” is more appropriate. If words are difficult to keep in your mind, try visualizations, such as her screaming face, or everyone sitting far away from her at the funeral.

6. The mind is only half the battle, and once you’ve aspirated a fair amount of soup, the body will take over. Be sure to bind your hands behind your back with zip ties from the garden shed.

7. Do not wait until the following day to continue your attempts, as the soup you have already aspirated will potentially induce pneumonia, making you very, very sick.

8. Don’t be afraid to use chemical assistance. Alcohol in excess and a handful of pills she left in the medicine cupboard will help numb the ability for your body to try to pull away from the bowl, spilling soup across the table and floor, shattering the ceramic into a huge mess you then have to spend hours cleaning up, barely able to see through tears.

9. Try more pills and more gin

10. Try more pills andn mo re gin

11.

The light from the dog’s mouth carries with it an uneasy quality, and standing exposed in it for any amount of time makes the illuminated person feel deeply melancholy, and activates their salivary response to an uncomfortable degree.

Still, it’s the only light down here, so we take turns holding the dog, who is very at ease with being held and seems pleased with the physical attention, and shine its mouth light ahead of us as we navigate the darkness.

“Let’s take a right,” I suggest, at the next junction, though the passages left and straight-on are clotted with some sort of wet stringy stuff that reminds me of pumpkin pulp and seem exceedingly uninviting. Still, I’m trying to re-establish myself as leader of our group after being completely humiliated at the meal we called breakfast yesterday.

No one speaks, but we all turn right, and I consider that at least a small win. The dog shifts in Mel’s arms, yawning, temporarily illuminating the entire right chasm.

“Food!” Stefan cries, and rushes towards the hole in the wall seeping McDonalds fries and what smells like KFC gravy onto a pile of undifferentiated fast-food matter, slowly decomposing in the fetid air. Everyone rushes to it, greedily scooping anything that seems edible into their rucksacks.

As their self-appointed leader, I make what I consider a very leaderly choice to not tell them about their own faces protruding from the far wall, staring at their backs as they chatter and are overjoyed with their find, scarfing handfuls of fries, gravy, patties, bread soaked through and glistening with Subway sweet teryaki sauce. They’ll see it soon enough.

My face was not on the far wall, so I take leader’s privilege, collect some of the items they dropped on their run to the fast-food wall, a large knife, a bag filled with survival supplies, the dog’s kibble, and back quietly into the darkness of the other room with it held in my arms. If they survive this encounter, they will need a strong leader, someone well supplied, someone with vision, someone with a clear head and their wits about them.

There was a singular moment, then, after a long, satisfactory dinner of conversation and fellowship, as he stacked one dirty dish atop another to pass along to his wife, who was at the sink up to her elbows with suds, laughing at a joke told by her father she’d heard a thousand times before, but laughing with tears in the corners of her blue eyes as if it was the first time... and he was surrounded by beloved friends, beloved family, happy chatter, the warmth of the kitchen, and outside the leaves were collecting on the ground in a lazy carpet that signified the arrival of fall, and children chased each other with sticks and discovered whole new worlds under overturned stones, and at this singular moment, he felt all the collected beauty of the world converge here, in this kitchen, with these people, and his mind reeled with devastating, immense, profound love, with the importance of this, here, now, and he was overwhelmed with the need to tell them, to let them know how beautiful and special each of them were, how…

“Do you…” he started, but too quietly, his voice trembling with emotion, and no one heard him over his wife’s father telling another old joke, and he realized he did not know what words to say, and he tried, desperately, to hold onto that feeling, still surging within him, and he opened his mouth again, then closed it, then opened it again, and he said, again, “Do you…” and his oldest friend turned to him, face still grinning from another conversation, and his oldest friend said “What’s that?” but he found himself incapable of putting it into words, representing this unbearable beauty in any comprehensible way, he just shook his head, smiled meekly, kept handing over dirty dishes, the clear, perfect images of crystallized beauty crumbling within him each passing moment he found himself unable to describe any of it, until it was gone, until the moment had lapsed into a hazy, incomplete memory, until he had lost that moment, that feeling, forever.

That lost moment planted itself in him like a seed, twisting roots through him, and with each setback in his life it grew, breaking him apart, if only he’d said something, even a clumsy, halting thing, incomplete but grasping at the whole, he could have preserved some of that beauty, kept the friends from growing apart and forgetting their love for one another and then forgetting one another entirely, kept at bay the little squabbles that grew into squalls that tore his family apart, kept away the doubt and self-loathing that grew in him each day, hating his own cowardice and stupidity, until it obsessed him, until it drove his wife to resent him, until it drove her to leave him entirely and seek solace in the arms of someone better, more whole, more capable of expressing themselves.

The moment was gone forever, and losing it destroyed him, and as he stared at the notebook open before him on the scratched and stained plastic kitchen table, even now, decades later, a lifetime later, he was still unable to express, explain, even to himself, how any of this happened.

So he left the page blank, hoping that where words failed him, maybe whoever discovered his body, a week from now, two weeks from now, could see, could intuit, some of the beauty he had seen in his life.

Creepy pasta.

We like pasta. It has carbs and is coated in good juice. But. What if a pasta was creepy? That would be bad. No one would like it. These are the conversations we must have as members of the human race, to consider these things, like what if pasta was creepy instead of normal.

What if I saw a creepy pasta? Maybe I did… it was on a plate at a restaurant. It said some really upsetting things about people with brown skin and trans people and then went on to state a bunch of statistics that are not even true, but it did it in a weird dog-whistly way that I think it thought I was supposed to find funny. The rest of the pasta at the restaurant was really normal and just tasted good, and didn’t say anything about anybody, good or bad.

I said, creepy pasta, you are wrong about all those statistics you just quoted from the weird forums you go to. None of that is even true, and it is insulting that you think I am part of the “in group” for your mean dog whistle jokes. I think trans people and brown people are good, actually. They’re just regular human beings trying to get by like anybody else.

The creepy pasta told me to get on Facebook to debate it. I did not want to and so I didn’t. It called me a racial slur and a coward and said I was just proving its point. I asked how I was proving its point, and it said, oh, so now you want to debate me, and then sent me a gore video from a Mexican cartel and called me a homophobic slur. Then when I didn’t respond it sent me another homophobic slur and then the r-word and also a photo from Google Maps of my apartment and said we know about you now. I said who knows about me now but then it just sent me the flag of the Republic of Kekistan and instructions on how to kill myself. Then later that night it sent me a flashing gif meant to give me a seizure, but I don’t have epilepsy so it didn’t work.

Anyway, I had a cacio e pepe at the restaurant, which was not creepy and tasted very good. The interaction with the creepy pasta, however, did not improve my life. It traced over a picture of my face and tried to turn me into a wojack meme but it didn’t catch on, so it put my sister’s phone number on its forum and she has had to change it twice because she kept getting death threats in the middle of the night.

I would rate the creepy pasta a solid no-way-Jose out of ten

Accidentally sucked in a spider now the gone darned thing is makin webs in my lungs.

The egg sacs I don’t mind, they just tickle a little when they pop. But the webs make it hard for me to breathe good.

Gotta have to take up smoking again.

SPOOKTOBER STORY 8.

In the beginning, there was nothing, forever and forever, except for Stel, the Lady of the Moon. Stel wondered for a long time what that meant, “Lady of the Moon,” since it was just her, there, in that void, and things like “lady” and “moon” and even “of the” meant nothing, since “of the” implies one thing having a relationship to another thing, and there wasn’t another thing. There was just Stel.

Stel didn’t know how she knew that she was the Lady of the Moon or that her name was Stel, she just did, and she wondered if that meant someone else had created her for some reason. She thought about that for a very long time as well, and did not come to any conclusions except that she knew her name was Stel, she was the Lady of the Moon, which was not very much, but she guessed she should do something about it.

So, at what can’t be called the end of a timeless eternity but was just before the start of a timeful eternity so it might be helpful to think about the thing before the beginning of time as the end of a span of time even though such a thing didn’t exist yet and wouldn’t forever except until it did, Stel invented time.

This new thing (time) gave Stel some little measure markers to organize things into a neat row, sort of see things in perspective. It was pretty helpful! She thought about what she should do “first,” a concept she had just made up off the top of her dome.

The “first” thing Stel did now that time existed was invent matter. Bloop! She made a little rock.

Unfortunately, she didn’t think the rock through very well and it was composed of extremely volatile and unstable compounds. It exploded in her hand like a firecracker and created the universe.

Hey, give her a break. It was the first time anyone had done anything like this. She was making it up as she went along!

Stel, the Lady of the Moon, felt pretty overwhelmed. In the beginning, forever and forever, there had been nothing, and now not only was there time, it was filled with a whole bunch of junk floating everywhere! What a mess! She zippy quick invented gravity to try to scoop things together to make them easier to clean up.

All the little chunks of random gas and matter and junk started collecting themselves into convenient spheres, and Stel nodded happily to herself, pleased with her reflexes and quick thinking.

She took another week or so inventing different, better forces to keep the spheres of junk together once gravity had collected them, and she saw that it was good, but that it wasn’t really an end-game, because there was a whole lot of trash everywhere, it was just in balls now.

So, over the next few billions of years she spent time and effort cleaning up the mess, but in doing so, she discovered another new concept: fatigue. She’d cleaned up and destroyed a lot of matter that she had inadvertently created, but there was still a lot more to go, and cleaning was a lot less interesting than creating.

Stel considered this. Was there a way to invent like a destroyer thing, that would do her work for her so she could sit back and think about new things to do instead?

She found a nearby ball of junk and squinted at it. There was an idea brewing in her head, but she hadn’t quite figured it out yet. Something to do with the composition of this ball of junk. If she jazzed it in just the right way, could it… maybe…

Stel, being able to see all of time and possibility, kept one eye way forward in time, and experimented with the ball, until she came across an eventuality that suited her needs. “This will do,” she said, the first words spoken in the Universe since the beginning of time, and then she picked up some random nearby crap and threw it as hard as she could at the ball of junk.

Whammo! The crap hit the junk ball and blasted some of it apart in just such a way that pleased her. It created a lot of heat and high pressure that caused a chain reaction with some of the junk remaining.

Now all she had to do was wait. She went over to the random junk that had been ejected from the junk ball when it was impacted by the crap, which gravity had already started to collect into a rough sphere, locked in an unsteady orbit around the junk ball.

She sat on the accreting junk, which seemed like a good vantage point, and decided to wait and watch what happened. Over millions of years, the heat and pressure she had created by hitting the junk ball with the random crap created little self replicating chains of stuff, and those self replicating chains started replicating in more elaborate and interesting ways. It was fun to watch.

When Stel wasn’t watching the self replicating chains of stuff, she was inventing new dimensions and physical laws to toy around with.

The replicating chains of stuff became bigger and bigger, and developed ways of protecting themselves from the elements. Stel thought it was a hoot.

Some of the chains started destroying the other chains, and it was good.

One particular set of self-replicating chains started spreading over the whole junk ball, destroying a lot of junk in its path, and it was good.

A while after that, the same self-replicating chains started destroying the junk-ball, but Stel wasn’t worried, she could check the width and breadth of all of time whenever she wanted, to make sure the process was continuing correctly, and, it was. Good!

The self-replicating chains destroyed enough of the junk-ball that, as a method of self-preservation, they developed ways of getting off the junk ball and going to other spheres of collected crap. The process repeated whenever they populated a new crap sphere, destroying a lot of it, moving on.

Stel was pleased with her little destructors. They kept developing new methods of destruction that were better and quicker and more effective, zapping whole crap balls out of existence, even (or especially) if it was covered in other destructors.

One day, Stel went into one of the other dimensions she’d invented and created a new branch of metaphysics composed of numbers she’d found scattered around (and it was good), and when she returned, everything was gone. The damn destructor things had destroyed all matter in the universe, even the little ball she sat on, and she was surprised to find that she was saddened by its loss.

“Oh, huh,” she said. “My ball.”

There was nothing for it. They’d done exactly what she’d foreseen they would do. She looked around at the completely empty void, and spent a few days grieving the loss of all the different types of junk, and the destructor things she’d grown fond of, and then moved on with what she was doing. She still didn’t know what “Lady” or “Moon” meant, but at least she’d figured out “of the,” which she supposed was a win.

She created a pyramid made of thought and then destroyed it. She destroyed magnetism for a little, then brought it back. But as she did these things she felt a strange sensation, a little itch, that bothered her. Stel ignored it for a few millennia but after a while the itch became all she thought about, so, she investigated.

It wasn’t in time, it wasn’t in space, it was somewhere in between. She pried open the veil between the two and peeked around, and there it was. One of the self-replicating chains! It had survived! Wow! What a trooper!

It was very old, and had degraded quite a lot, but she shrunk herself down to its size to see what was going on. “Hello,” she said in its clumsy language. “I thought you had all destroyed yourselves, what’s up? How are you doing?”

The last destructor chain lifted the part of itself that could perceive visual wavelengths to perceive hers. “You!” it cried.

“Me,” she agreed. “What’s up?”

“I am the Heleth Nelbik, Trewþe Emperor of All-Space,” croaked the destructor chain, through its severely decayed noise-making parts. “I persist, past Frashoketeri, past the theomachy against Gog and Magog, past the cleansing fire of Elspith’s Gun, and have waited for impossible aeons in my sheltered abomination of desolation, that I may seek a single answer.”

“Oh?” asked Stel, Lady of the Moon. “That’s nice. What would you like answered?”

“My lady,” whispered the chain, through its ruined anatomy. “My question is simple, I only ask… why?”

Stel considered this. She squinted at the chain, trying to divine its meaning. “What?” she asked.

“Why?” it begged, trembling, pulling itself from its throne, collapsing onto the floor of its shelter, its lightwave orbs turned up towards her. “Why?”

“Uhh…” she said, backing away. “What do you mean.”

It crawled towards her, pulling itself on its ruined limbs. “Why…” it gasped. “...the suffering… the defiling… insanity… cruelty… the… the…”

She backed all the way into the corner of the room, watching the ruined chain dragging itself towards her. This was very unpleasant.

“Why? Why? Why?” it screamed at her, before sagging, its energy stores spent.

Stel stared at it for a while. “Um,” she began. “I guess I grabbed some random crap and whipped it at a ball of junk? Does that make sense?”

The rapidly disintegrating self-replicating chain did not move when it spoke. “No.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, anyhow, goodbye.”

The chain lay still and silent, and she saw that it was crumbling at its seams. It seemed very distraught. She reversed its entropy, so that it would persist forever, but removed its ability to interact with her, so that she would not feel that annoying itch any more.

Then, she left, and thought about all of this for a week, then moved on to projects that were more entertaining and forgot about it for forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever.

Everyone I know is dead and I am impaled upon one of the many glass-sharp, sickly antlers protruding from the Wall of Rot, beset by the boiling curse smeared across my flesh which keeps me alive through unknowable and terrible means.

The Fallen Beast stalks the length of the Wall of Rot, inflicting its disease and scourge and torture upon those of us unlucky enough to have survived and be hung. I think I am really getting on its nerves. It plucks my right eye from my head and forces me to eat it.

Once I’ve swallowed the slick viscera of my eyeball, I shrug and say, for the thousandth, thousandth time, “Ah well, these things happen.”

The Fallen Beast really hates it when I do this. It grunts, steam rising from its back, its dozen legs working in frustration. The tortured, bloody chasm of my eye socket begins to regrow the eyeball, each time more painful than the last.

“Ah well, these things happen,” I repeat once more. It tears out my tongue and rips from me my arms and legs. “Ah well, these-” I begin, before it tears out my tongue and eats it.

I wait in darkness, as pain blossoms through me, the boiling curse keeping me alive despite everything, the destroyed parts of my body knitting together in horrific agony. I hear the Fallen Beast stomp away, muttering in bestial grunts to itself. I can’t wait for my tongue to grow back. I know exactly what I’m going to say.

God’s not dead, but He is very sick. He sends out an AM radio broadcast updating everyone on His condition, but by this point, we have all sort of figured it out for ourselves. The gossamer veil between Heaven and Earth had started to degrade a few months ago. Plague and famine spread across the lands, the animals left somehow, the crops turned black, fallen Seraphim, driven mad with some unknowable hunger, convened on Vatican City and started feasting on locuses of holy artifacts. I, myself, saw some wild shit crawling up the stairs of the Queens Plaza Station and went insane for about three weeks, but I’m better now.

“Hi guys,” God says, His voice crackling over the medium-wave AM band He chose for some reason. His voice lacks any identifiable accent or timbre, maybe a side effect of compression, but maybe He just sounds like that. “Hate to do this, I’m more a hands off sort of watchmaker guy, but I figured I should give you a heads-up. Been feeling pretty bad for a while now, and from what they’re telling me, it’s not going to get better. So uh… hi, and bye. This was fun, you guys were fun.”

Our makeshift bunker is silent except for the hiss of the radio for a while. I really have to pee, but I figure I should stick around to hear what else He has to say.

“Um. I really liked The Stooges, you were really doing something there. Didn’t read as much as I should have, but I liked the King James translation, that was fun. Movies… movies… you ever see Airport? 1970, Burt Lancaster picture. Exciting stuff. The Japanese got food right, but I guess you know that already. Oh, and jollof rice, jollof rice is great. Nailed it.

“Anyhow. Sorry about everything. I didn’t do things as good as I could have, I was just sort of making stuff up as I went. Er… what else. You could have done less war, I sort of told you guys not to murder right off the bat, but whatever. Oh, and, and, being gay is okay, all right? You can be gay or straight or bi or whatever. Just to clarify, I don’t really care about any of that.

“Okay. Anyway. I’ll try to get to a few more prayers before I’m, uh, done. Gone. Goodbye. Thanks. Sorry again.”

The transmission ends. Everyone else in the bunker is very excited by the broadcast, and start shouting at each other. I take the opportunity to sneak a tin of stewed peaches off the shared food shelf, take it to my bunk, and eat it in secret. Stewed peaches, I think to myself, are good.