by any other name

I find that nobody can remember my name. This has been going on for some years now, but in the past few months the problem seems to be getting worse--which is how I first noticed it. For a while I assumed it was some quirk of my friends, that they couldn't pick a name for me. Then I moved, and the problem moved with me. Perhaps my names don't fit me, I thought. I find that when I think of my names, nothing comes to mind--they're blank places in my thought, and maybe they're just not very interesting names. Who knows?

But then people who'd known me for years started forgetting my name, and though they acted like they'd known me for a while, they stopped acting like they knew anything about me. I was this person they knew, but they couldn't tell you how they knew me, or anything about me. I was a person-shaped void in their lives. I started making it a point to say my name as often as possible, and I adopted quirks and affectations that would make me more memorable. This seemed to work for a while, but if I let them out of my sight I'd have to remind them who I was again with my quirks.

And then they weren't even remembering me, just my stupid affectations. But it was close enough to living that I managed for a while. It wasn't until my girlfriend started giving me that glassy stare when she saw me, that 'how do I know you again?' look, that I started to lose control. "It's me," I'd tell her, and I could tell she knew we were dating, but the details had become just a blur.

I had to break up with her, of course. I couldn't stand it, and thanks to her I couldn't stand any of it now. It wasn't just that people couldn't remember anything about me, I decided--it was that there was nothing about me to remember.

i don't trust this sky

I've been reading the sky since I was a kid. I could always tell what the weather would be by looking at it--where other people, even the weather forecasters, seemed to have a hard time of it. I just knew. The rest of the world had its secrets, but the sky revealed everything to me. So I always made sure I lived somewhere with plenty of sky. I had a brief stint in the city and found it intolerable. There was too much in the way.

It's been strange these days. It's showing me things it's never shown me before, and none of them are good. Each one is telling me the world's going to end soon, and the time is getting closer. Vermin and fire falling from the sky, the sky furling up like a scroll, freak weather phenomena. This is the end.

The problem is, when it's not warning me about the end, the rest of it is getting harder and harder to understand, and the weather's getting more and more unpredictable. I feel like I did in the city now all the time--like there's something in the way, something preventing me from getting at my sky. It's worse now, though, because it's the sky that's in the way.

damn your secrets

I was given my choice of superpowers, and I chose the ability to know everyone's secrets. I had been lied to enough. I wanted truth for a change. There wasn't even a specific truth I wanted to unveil--I just wanted to live in a more honest world.

To my great regret, I was granted my wish.

It's not that everyone has secrets that are really best kept buried--though certainly most people do. I could cope with that. I'm used to terrible things. No, it's all these tiny little secrets--the ones nobody knows about, even the bearers of those secrets. They're insignificant things that weren't even worth keeping or remembering, so they're forgotten.

Or they would be, but now there's me. Every time I see someone I'm flooded with these secrets. I know all the things people will never find out. There's no room for thought anymore. Suddenly the entirety of everyone was laid bare to me. Everything beautiful and terrible and ugly and desperate and alive about someone flooded my brain in an instant. Just seeing someone--anyone--was almost too much to bear. I even broke down a couple times. I haven't left my room in days.

I understand now that it's not just that everyone has secrets. We're made of them. We don't even know about them, but we're made of them. And maybe even that would be okay, maybe I could live with that, but the worst part of it is I can see everyone's but my own. I'm sure it's just a quirk of how my gift works, but I can't help the fear that maybe it's simply because I, alone of all men, have no secrets to share.

endless

There's a sinister little apartment complex hidden away a few blocks from here. It's in a place where you don't really expect there to be anything, so most people don't know it's there. I only knew it was there because someone mentioned it once--and eventually I went to visit.

There's a strange iron gate that doesn't seem to lock guarding the too-perfect courtyard--and once it clanged shut behind me I felt not so much trapped as enclosed. The door to the lobby similarly doesn't seem to lock. Inside is an endless maze of hallways. At first I thought maybe it's normal, just some strange design--no doubt the residents get used to it. But the further in I wandered the more it seemed that these identical hallways were actually endless.

I knocked on the door of one of the apartments, and stood outside and stared down the hall, wondering if it was an end I could see, or just some trick of the building. There was that, too: the building seemed impossibly quiet, and the longer I spent in its corridors the less I trusted my senses. It was toying with me.

A resident answered the door. She looked perfectly normal, or at least real--not at all like the malevolent ghosts I expected to be living here. I muttered something about having the wrong door and hurried off, hoping the exit would still be where I left it.

haunted house

When I was a kid, there was a haunted house at the end of my street, and we'd dare each other to run up to it and touch the side. So much fear went into those little rituals--the rest of us standing at the sidewalk, as far as we could stand without actually being in the street, or too far to see.

"Did you do it?" we'd ask when our unfortunate comrade returned, invariably panting--was it from running, or was it from fear? They'd nod. They couldn't talk. Sometimes when it was me, I'd say that I heard noises coming from inside. Some of my friends thought I was lying. To the rest, this made me much cooler. Encouraged, I kept telling these stories. And somewhere down the line, I started believing them--or at least wishing they were true.

My friends all grew out of it, but not me. I stayed on that street. At nights I'd sneak out and go to the house, and sit inside. I'd swear I could hear or feel a ghost there. It was secret, sacred, mine. Throughout high school I only ever told a few people about it. Mostly they didn't understand, so eventually I stopped. I knew it was just for me.

I moved off for college, and discovered it had been destroyed when I came back. They'd built a spec house in its place, all soulless and generic. I broke into it, but there was nothing there. So I started exploring lost and abandoned places, looking for my ghost. Sometimes I thought maybe I'd found it, but the feeling was fleeting. Some of the ghosts out there didn't like my searching.

But I kept on. We had something, and I wasn't going to give that up.

ballad of a thin man

My girlfriend was the first to notice that I was getting thinner--or the first to comment, anyway. I hadn't changed any of my exercise or eating habits, so this was a strange development, but I figured that our metabolisms change as we get older. It might be nothing. But I kept getting thinner.

It was slow at first. I didn't weigh myself but you had to be really paying attention to notice as my face slowly got more gaunt, as my waistline dwindled. I had to buy new belts, then new pants. But even that could have been explained normally--but it kept getting worse. I found that I was hungry all the time, no matter how much I ate.

It only got worse as time wore. I couldn't afford to eat enough to sustain myself--if that was even possible--so I just started to diminish. There isn't really a better word for it. Eventually I was too ashamed to go out in public, or even to let anyone I knew see me. I sealed myself away and admitted defeat. Much later, I wondered if there would be anything left when they came to collect my remains.

no more poetry

Everything she touched was unbearably beautiful. Of course I fell in love with her--how could I not? She was more than just perfect--they don't have words for what she was. The world seemed more alive around her. And I'd heard so many of her admirers confide in me that they were sure nobody understood her like they did--so confident that they thought her perfection was meant just for them. Like only they could appreciate her beauty.

Of course I decided she had to die.

She was kind enough to have dinner with me regularly, but I was smart enough to know she would never--could never--actually love someone like me. Maybe she couldn't love at all. She was an altogether higher class of being. But she liked me because I made her laugh, and I didn't try to win her over. I let her talk. I listened.

I don't think I even understood why she had to die. Perhaps it was simple, base jealousy--I could never attain such perfection, so no one else could--but I think it was more than that. I was doing her a favor. Perfection is such a fleeting thing. Life has its way of dragging even the best of us down, and I couldn't bear to think of her looking back on life and wondering what had happened, how she'd squandered her perfection. There is no greater tragedy than those who were once great realizing what they lost.

The only weapon I could bring myself to use was poison. I slipped foxglove into her tea. I watched her excuse herself to the restroom. I paid the check and quietly left before anyone at the restaurant had time to realize she was dead, had time to panic. I could flee the city before anyone could pin this one on me, and by then it would be too late.

i think my spaceship knows which way to go

Can you hear me, Major Tom?

I'm the sole waking member of one of the last colony ships to leave the planet Earth. It will be a decade before we reach our destination, and someone needs to make sure the ship is intact when it gets there. There are emergency backups in place in case something happens to me, but mostly the ship's systems are designed to keep that from happening.

Depending on how you look at it, the planet isn't dying--if we'd waited that long we wouldn't have been able to send ships at all. But there's no disputing it now: Earth's days are numbered. We don't know how long, but we know that it's coming up soon. Probably even in our lifetimes. The colony ships are meant to give the human race a chance to survive.

For a while I kept in touch with the planet via radio transmissions that got slower and slower as I traveled further away. They sent me news of the world below: all the wars and disasters and tragedies that have colored all of human history. At first I thought I liked getting the news, but after a year or two I had to turn it off. I haven't spoken with another human being in a year now. To keep my sanity, I have books and movies. I write where I can. I'm trying to learn to draw.

But the transmission that made me turn it off--some tragedy that I guess was too much for me--has never left me. Is that what I'm preserving here? More of the same that happened down below? I used to have these utopian visions for the future. In space we'd only have colonists who volunteered, who became part of the colony because they believed. I thought it would be a chance to make something new. But I can't believe that now. Humans are humans no matter where they are--even if where they are is in a distant colony.

More than once I've thought about aborting the mission in the only way I know how. I could destroy this ship. Nobody would feel anything, except me. Do humans really deserve a chance at survival? Shouldn't we just burn up on our dying world? But every time I consider it, I stop myself. I've got a databank full of beautiful things humans have created. There's always hope that somewhere down the line, we'll strive to be the best we can be rather than fight to see who can be the worst.

while rome burns

The world has felt less real to me since I started working on my masterpiece. With every stroke of the pen it's become less and less solid, while the world I'm creating with my words has only gotten more real. It didn't take me long to figure out that I was sapping the world of its realness to make my own--long enough that my relationships felt like I was watching them through a screen, like we were just actors, however convincing. I could turn them off at any time I wanted.

The more I wrote, the more it seemed that my relationships were just predictable plot devices in a film. My girlfriend would constantly berate me for spending more time on my art than on her--the same one who, when she was real, was so supportive of my efforts, told me I should never sacrifice the integrity of my art.

I barely registered when she left. I'd expected shouting, violence, something. But she just left quietly, without even a note. Everything that was hers was gone. Everything that was mine was left right where it was--not that I touched any of it now. With a world so full of fleeting ghosts, how could I not focus on my art? How could I not make the world of my imagining real?

twisted metal burning upwards

All the electronics on the planet stopped working at the same time. The scientists had been saying there would be some solar activity or something, but they didn't think it was anything to worry about--maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was something they didn't or couldn't know about. That sort of thing happens a fair amount.

Every single stupid little thing died. Even the lights--probably. Even if the whole grid hadn't gone down, the backup generators some people tried to use were dead too. We don't even have a way to power things to check if they still work. I still try to turn them on sometimes, only to remember, oh wait, there's no power anywhere.

I was so sure this would be the end of the world, but it hasn't really, at least not for me. I spend a lot of time at the library now. The loss of all our technology doesn't bother me much. But it's strange, walking past these rows of what used to be computers. They don't have a function anymore. They just sit there like ghosts, reminding us of something that used to be.

waste and void

One day I woke up and the world had stopped existing--or mostly, anyway. Everything was empty. There was no sky, not even really any ground to speak of--just kind of something shapeless. You probably couldn't stand on it if you wanted to, but there was no gravity, either, so it didn't really matter. Mostly you just sort of moved--I'd say with a thought, but there was nowhere to go, so nowhere I wanted to be. I think motion just happened.

There was no apocalypse, nothing to announce it. I went to sleep in my bed in my house under a roof and a sky and the next morning no such thing existed. There was just me, and miles and miles of nothing.

I floated like this for what must have been days--there was apparently no such thing as hunger--and was fairly certain I was the only one to survive what I can only assume was the end. I finally met someone, and it had been so long I almost forgot how to speak. Our conversation was beautiful in its simple humanity--it was about nothing at all, making stupid jokes about the end, because what else can you do when faced with a formless nothingness as far as the eye can see?

But we drifted, as drifters do, and that drifting led us apart. I'm going to learn how to make this place work. I'm going to give it shape and purpose. I'm going to find my fellow survivors, if there are any, if I didn't imagine the whole thing. I'm going to make the world again.

all i need

I've worked my whole life so I wouldn't need to rely on anybody for help, mostly because my family was always there to help me with anything I needed--provided what I needed was money. I hated asking for money even when I was a kid, I think because I knew the answer would be yes. You come to rely on it, after a while, even while you're trying to fight it. I went to college mostly because they insisted, and started working at a coffee shop mostly because it turns out there's not a whole lot you can do with my degree.

And no, I wasn't happy. But I got by. I even made friends--and alienated most of them, but a few. It's as close to living as most people get, right?

But everything started going all wrong. I was happy with my self-reliance, such as it was, when someone beautiful came along--beautiful like as a person, I mean. With everyone else, I kept them at a distance, but her? It was like being a teen again, getting disapproving looks from parents for something I did or didn't do, and that sick, hideous feeling in my gut like the only thing important in the world was pleasing them, making it right.

So I did what anyone else would do in my situation. I abased myself. I let her in. Somehow she even reciprocated for a while. Then I did what normal people don't do in my situation: I completely lost it. I pushed her away, begged her to come back, told her I hated her, told her I loved her, meant it every time, even when I thought that saying it was supposed to be a good way to get her to do what I wanted. I lied and cheated and manipulated, and when she was gone I had never felt so alone--so much like I needed someone.

I wish I could say I started drinking to cope, but I'd started long before that. I was already relying on all the coping mechanisms I had just to get through day-to-day life. Now I'm not sure what to do.

the sincerest form of flattery

She spent years living in my shadow. I never really thought much of it--I tell people because I just got used to it, but if I'm being honest, it's because I was just too self-absorbed to let it do otherwise. But everything I did, she did. She adopted my clothes, my sayings, even the little quirks I didn't even notice that I had. I don't know how obvious it was to others, but I couldn't get rid of her if I tried--and I did once or twice. What good is having a self if someone else is just going to copy it? Sometimes I'd lash out and tell her to stop. And I settled disputes by pretending they never happened--and for her part, so did she.

We spent years apart when we both went off to university, and I never gave her any thought in all those years, except occasionally wondering if she still tried to look like me. One night, stoned out of my mind, I became convinced she had spies in my dorm to watch me and report. I couldn't sleep that night.

But that was still early on in my academic career, and soon other thoughts occupied my mind entirely. It wouldn't be until I had long since dropped out and settled into the life of a courier that I met her again--though at first I didn't recognize her, nor she me. She worked at one of the law offices I delivered to on a regular basis--her with her business suit, all polished and professional, just like I always imagined I'd be, if only life had worked out the way I planned.

She'd grown up, but there was something about how she moved--she never put it behind her. She was as surprised as I was to realize it was me, and offered to take me out to dinner that weekend. It wasn't as awkward as I expected. Indeed, it wasn't awkward at all. Despite never having given her any thought in all the years she'd been following me, it was like I'd known her forever.

We got good and drunk that night on her dime, and, since she lived in the suburbs, fucked in my Belltown apartment. She was gone by the time I woke up. I smoked a bowl to help with the hangover, and spent the rest of the day trying to shake the feeling that she had finally supplanted my identity, that I was living in the cracks because she was the real me now and I was the pale copy.

perfect diction

I have this recurring nightmare that I can't speak anymore--or rather, that I lose the ability to choose my words, to compare and contrast, to array them in perfection. I stop being clever, become inarticulate, mundane, boring. I can neither express nor obfuscate. Of all the dreams I've had, I count it among the worst, and it always comes up when my words have failed me. Words are all I have. I have to be careful with them.

There's a boy I've been seeing, or rather I very pointedly haven't been seeing, who doesn't give a fuck about words. I don't know what it is--he's very clever and bright and even occasionally eloquent, but he takes no joy in language. He's the sort of person who says things like "they're just words." He doesn't celebrate a clever turn of phrase. He doesn't care about precise phrasing.

All of it adds up to make him seem completely and utterly confident. Or perhaps confident isn't the right word--perhaps comfortable? Like his attitude towards words extends to the world. It doesn't matter if it's just right, if it's arrayed perfectly. As far as he's concerned, none of it matters--not so long as his idea gets across in the end.

It's fascinating on some level. On some other level, I hate him for it. If words are all I have, he doesn't care about it. He doesn't need it. He practically disdains it. He gets this condescending little smirk when I talk, like he thinks I'm silly and unenlightened for striving to find the perfect turn of phrase. But there's something compelling about it--sometimes, when it's late at night and I'm too tired or drunk to resist, I can almost imagine that he's right, and I really am the ridiculous one.

collateral damage

When the end came, they drafted me--the one draft I couldn't find it in me to dodge. They sent us to some frozen wasteland, and there we watched fire fall from the sky from the safety of our bunkers. This was just an overture, they said. There would be fighting soon enough, they said. But we all knew it was a lie, even if nobody was willing to admit it. It would only get worse from here.

Reports of civilian casualties were all we ever got from home. We had no orders except to survive. And even then--sometimes, with all that snow and ice around, one of the lads would go out and just walk, hoping there would be something to see. We heard rumor the seas had turned to blood, but you couldn't tell from here. Sometimes they'd come back. Sometimes they wouldn't. The lucky ones probably froze to death. Most of them, we figured, were hit by meteorites before that happened.

I started a little collection of them. I don't know why. This is the last place I'll ever see, I know that now. But I can't make myself think that, no matter how I try. So I have my collection that I'll take home. It'll be just like in the movies. I'll see the girl I left behind, though there isn't one, and tell her I brought these from the apocalypse for her. I'd tell her stories of my adventures, though there aren't any.

Fighting the apocalypse--who knows? Maybe we'll see some action before the ground swallows us all. Humanity's last stand against forces too huge to care. It's why I came out here. That's the most human way to go.

the end is near

There's more and more disasters every day. The world's half a step away from destroying itself utterly, and it's not showing any interest in stopping--and so there's people on street corners all the time now, with their little signs warning about the end. Some of them are saying that this is God's judgment. He's punishing us for our sinful ways, they're saying, but it doesn't seem like much of a punishment to me.

"Repent," they say, "for the end is upon us!"

On the news, it's all death tolls and grim statistics--some of them don't even make any sense. I guess it's still the same cheap sensationalism, but people are finally talking about something besides the latest celebrity meltdown or which sports team they think is going to win. The worse it gets the less people talk about politics or religion or philosophy.

Every single awful thing this world holds dear, every horrible accomplishment, is being wiped away in a series of untold catastrophes. The end is upon us, and finally, finally, I can look at the world with a smile on my face.

the question

I was supposed to propose to her at dinner that night. We'd been together for five years that very day. We had reservations at our favorite restaurant. I'd arranged the whole evening so it would be perfect, bribed the waiter so he'd bring out the ring with our meal. I didn't have to do anything.

The plan was to pick her up at 7. She lived about fifteen minutes out of town by car. I wish I knew what happened. I hit the freeway and saw that beautiful skyline and something inside me broke. I passed her exit and kept driving north. The urban sprawl was starting to give way when my phone rang, but I ignored it. She tried several more times. I don't know if she stopped trying or if I left my coverage area, but when the city was just a distant memory the phone stopped and the rain started.

An hour or so later, I pulled off onto some old forestry road and turned off the car and sat there, listening to the steady patter of rain in silence, watching the windows fog up. I don't know how long I stayed there, but only a few cars passed, and none of them noticed me. Then I stepped out of the car and started laughing, long and loud.

I left the car then and started walking. I didn't know where I was going, but I knew how I was getting there.

lies

That's a lie, but I say it with a smile.

I've discovered I have the ability to tell a perfectly convincing lie. No matter what it is, everyone who hears it will believe it utterly. The only problem is, so will I.

It took a while to deduce that I have the ability, of course, since every time I lie it becomes the truth, as far as anyone else is concerned. And when it turns out the truth was wrong, it's easy enough to lie to myself to explain what must have happened, and it doesn't take much for other people to believe that this new fiction is plausible.

But eventually all the little facts of my life added up to this. On some level, now, I'm aware that much of what I believe to be true about myself are lies. It's hard to use to my advantage, though. I can't just rob a bank, for instance, by saying I'm a legitimate auditor, because then I'll believe it, too, and I'll just perform an audit.

But I do perform it on accident, and it's made the world around me so utterly perfect. Everything I do works, everyone I know loves me. I feel like I should worry about this--the fact that my life is basically just an elaborate fiction I've concocted--but I don't. There's something almost comforting about it, even. Like there's always hope that things will get better.

sunset

Late one morning, the sun just went out. There was no explosion, not even a little fanfare. It just went black in the sky, and we were plunged into darkness in an instant. I always felt that if this sort of thing happened, it should creep across the world instantly. There should be something strange in the sky--something. But instead it just went black. And it's stayed black for months now.

You'd think it would be colder now, but it's not that much colder--no worse than the difference between day and night, anyway, and the temperature still rises and falls with changes in weather patterns. This sort of forced a lot of our leading scientific theories to be reevaluated--like the one where our sun heats our world or is necessary to sustain life.

Crime rates have gone up, since it's dark everywhere all the time now, but mostly things have gone back to normal. Sometimes on the news they talk about it, and how the government wants to do something to find out what happened--send a team up into space to find where the sun should be. Maybe they will, but I don't think it'll help. They're hoping to understand what happened, to make sense of it--to prove that things don't just happen like that, that the universe isn't completely absurd.

I hope they try. I always admire people who set out to do the impossible.

keep calm and carry on

She has a calendar at home where she marks off the days since she last cried, and she is going for a new record. The old record is quite a large number of days, but things always fall apart in the end. Sometimes she'd break her streak for stupid reasons. Sometimes it was a good reason. She remembered each time perfectly, though she didn't write it down. All the calendar said was '8:44 pm.' And then, instead of a number like 47, the number became 0.

The calendar is there to tell her she has failed, not to make excuses for it.

The calendar is a secret, but she often practices what she'll say if someone asks her about it. She'll tell them, the world is full of terrible, senseless things, and it doesn't do anyone any good to cry about it. She has decided, she'll say, that she's going to survive, and to survive you have to be tough.

She has been practicing that since she started, several years ago. Sometimes her guests have asked about it, and she's always just made something up, mumbling under her breath. They seemed satisfied. Probably they weren't really even curious. The last time she cried, thirteen days ago, was because the boy she was seeing asked and then didn't even listen to her answer. She cried because he didn't care, and because she knew he didn't care, and because she still lied even though she knew he wouldn't pay attention to the answer.

Her relationships tended to be short, because mostly she was very good at being tough. Things didn't get to her, and sometimes that got to others. On some level she was drawn to those who still let the world get to them, though she couldn't have articulated why this was. She said she liked to see them get jaded.

But sometimes stupid things like this happened, and she cried when one of them became what she said she hoped he would be. And she still couldn't figure out why.