Casy’s ankles interlocked just below my stomach, in the same movement as she rapidly wrapped up my neck with another loop and fell back putting all her upper body’s weight on the cord. She had me! Before I could even fall back to slam her into the rocky ground, blackness came in from all around, my vision failed from the edges, shadows swept over all I saw from outside, inwards, and I fell backwards into total silence and darkness--not even perceiving the sensation of her little body in between me and the ground. I just kept falling as the blood was departed from my starving brain--her words echoing over and over. “Your worthless, you deserve to die, you fucking scumbag!”
I need to take a moment to explain how it came to be that such a sweet young girl like Casy would resort to cold-blooded murder. Ya see, it’s not the girl, it’s the environment that creates these conditions. As it usualy the case...
Eden’s Hell
By Q.B. Smith
“Time is gravity, the gravity of time is ceaseless and celestial, we have been given much, but we pray forgiveness for our sins, for we have wasted time. Amen”
(The Timekeeper’s Prayer)
Knowing in advance is horror, the impact, the dying, the fear, the hope decaying, the ruins of man and the ever-present signs of no return. There would be no return this time, this time we’d been long weaned from our milking oil; it was all gone. This time the pyramids crumbled under a billion years of gamma radiation within the blink of the observer’s eye and they too, are gone. This time all of the books were found by the priest of man and by the fuming match; and god still would not save the last of us.
“Perfection can not be sustained, be it by the participant or by the condition or by both. This is axiomatic; perfection begot complacency--complacency was imperfect.” I didn’t know who said it, or when I had heard it, but I repeated it often quietly in my mind, more and more as time when by.
This verse was like a seed of great importance growing beyond the soil of my own wits, the egg of an infestation, which left me to itch and scratch and with an observance only to be soothed with more knowledge--unavailable, unobtainable knowledge. It was that that had drawn me to Barney. He was forbidden, but he was not a heretic to the Timekeepers, and he was my friend, or so I told myself in both cases.
Once Barney said, “It’s strange you know, Andromeda has always been far too far away to fly to, and now it’s here--all at the same time too.” This was strange because today Andromeda has nearly collided into our life, into our time and our very existence. Though the mass of Andromeda’s bodies are yet 2.5 billion years away, an unknown element collided into us--a never before seen or measured energy has reached us. Time. Our time homogenizes with theirs. It seems to be violently reactive. They call it T.D.D. They call it Temporal Distortion Drift. Barney could have explained it better than me. But I will try my best in that which is sure to follow.
T.D.D. is where a man may be standing in the street and a part of him--for this story, let’s say that maybe his hand will abruptly turn to dust. Time in itself has never been identified as a substance, but T.D.D. is another indicator that time is indeed there and it is certainly another type of mass. We know it’s a solid as sure as that unlucky man’s hand blows away like so much dust in the breeze. He lays there dead frozen in stalled time.
The man I saw this happen to would have screamed if he could have. He lacked the gumption and ironically, he lacked the time he needed to show his unnerve; usually the shock combined with the immediate spread of toxic oxidants engulfing the bloodstream from the point of T.D.D. exposure would attack the rest of the body far too fast for a victim of this thing to react. No time to warn those around him. No time to scream. But really, what is time when you melt below its random acceleration? The observers knew it though, he was said to see it slowly happening--miserably slow in fact, as it may have seemed so fast to others--he froze and he suffered. Right then, he was said to have known god--but not piece or heaven. After a while the smell of dust, of burning hair and of ozone became a recognizable horror. To most of us, it still is.
“No one figures that in some much, much more grandiose scheme of things and from a step farther back, this picture is such a simple one, more modest than we will ever over complicate.” Or at least that was what a good man told me once, Barney, he was found of saying: “Time is mass and is apparently very reactant when disrupted.” He understood these things and tried to help me understand them too, as he would so often put it, something like, “There’s an old school of thought that drifts like the two galaxy’s time-fields, through one generation of Timekeepers to the next, until now, and now, it has drifted to us.” He’d say. We were the Timekeepers, ‘us’ meant Timekeepers, even clear back when he’d say: “It’s an old idea, yet the newest science that man has achieved--achieved, just to let die; a theory of sorts, though less understood today than it was a hundred years ago, before the ‘big burn.’” He often used sarcasm this way; and because we were Timekeepers, being light of heart, was blasphemy, but still he’d say: “It’s a school of thought that basically says that in the same way a number can be multiplied by itself, again and again and again and on into eternity, so can a molecule be divided into it’s smallest parts, over and over and on into infinity. And Andy--” he’d say, I’m Andy by the way-- “somewhere near the smallest we got to, we saw time; and though it is only seen in no more than a glimpse of thought and theory, the smallest things are these particles of time and still we can’t inelegantly say ‘that we’re sure there’s nothing smaller.’” Now thatwould have been construed as blasphemy, I didn’t mind it though. He was always careful that no deacons or bishops would ever hear our talks.
The truth he set out to convey to me was, smaller than we had minds to know, still meant mass-—mass not beyond our comprehension, mass below our comprehension, much smaller than we could intelligibly grasp. He was answering the question I had earlier asked. I had asked “How can time put so much force on the moon.” I should mention now it was falling down and had slowly been doing so, long before I met Barney--I never knew Barney’s last name come to think of it.
“There is a lot of it my friend, time. “He said about the moon. “There is a lot of mass of the moon for it to impress its will upon. Besides Andy, maybe it has always been falling, just now the reality we observe is in some sort of hellish fast-forward view.” I didn’t know what any of that really meant, but that was normal back and forth between us back then. Maybe it was his steady confident voice that I had always found so comforting; I never knew what the hell he was talking about but I liked how he said it. I forgive him. He was the only person who could tell me I was going to die and make me feel that his words meant it was going to be ok, and he did just that exact thing one day.
He once said “Time doesn’t have mass, it is mass, and as the two galaxies stars grow closer and as gravity gains, time grows distance; that is why now it seems instant in places and prolonged in others; and distorted all over, that’s T.D.D.” he said. “If you took a video of a man from a million years ago, and one from today of men walking in the sand, somehow joined the two images so an observer in a far away galaxy could watch them at the same time, the man from today would seem to be moving in slow motion while the man from a million years ago, would be hard to see at all because he’d be moving so fast.” Saying man lived a million years ago was surely considered Timekeeper’s blasphemy. I still didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but I knew that I had been watching the hour hands move farther and faster than my coping skills could reach--from far off anyway. I watched my own hope melt beneath it all, second by second, day-by-day disparity gained.
Barney was blasphemy--
Close up, time still looked like the time we had always known. Immersed in it, one would never see the change, but that is how nowis now, and why without ample warning we are here already, when only yesterday we were free to waste all the time we wanted to.
“Time is gravity, the gravity of time is ceaseless and celestial, we have been given much, but we pray forgiveness for our sins, for we have wasted time. Amen”
In our skeptical shambles, in the wasted runoff of our twisted bleak awareness, we took to the deserts. Water could no longer be trusted; we stayed away from its bodies. We could have it, hold and drink it, but it may be older than the rest of world, billions of years older and heavy with thousands of years of relatively constant sunshine. So old that it’s smallest non-viewable parts often held a billion years of solar radioactivity; then as all that flows behaves, the heavy water mixed with the rest, so the only drink we could trust was straight from the collector fabric of the morning or from the cool of dusk or that which we carried directly on our person. Touching contaminated water with but fingertip was a death sentence. It took just a drop of it, to fall the hair from a head as if it where dry grass upon a dusty stone, and after the rapidly balding those who were contaminated would all soon die--they would become a type of witching-rod, warning of all the areas to be avoided. One would not dare to retrace the steps of hairless dead.
Three people awoke this day with fistfuls of hair, falling like exploding cattails. The two men seemed very somber next to the likes of the hysterical woman who woke up with them; but to be fair she had always loved her long curly, red flowing hair. So did they, I think. Anyway, we moved fast from that place but worshiped slow. I slowed down when I noticed lose strains of red familiarity draped all over on the man directly ahead of me. I fell back and swallowed hard when I noticed I too was adorned with one of the dead woman’s whole, crimson ringlets, I closed my eyes tight to see if I could see death-light--it was too bright so I covered my face to see of it sparked beneath the shade of hands--I was safe this time.
The say when you’re exposed to the radiation of heavy water, your eyes see the light of god sparkling, even in the dark and even if closed you see sparks. I never wanted to see god like that. I saw no sparks but still I tussled my hair to see if more than my fair share came out. I was finally convinced I was safe. Soon I past the man I let take the lead. I let him get far, far in front of me. He set a stone covering his eyes crying, irregular balled spots covered his head so I gave him a wide birth. I wanted to ask him if he really saw sparks, but I also didn’t want to get close enough that he could hear me. The later won the day.
We stop and we prayed came the night. Just as we prayed every night so that maybe they could see our lights, so that maybe no one else died bald.
We prayed that night but we looked for them always. Every night we prayed, with only hope at first, we quickly forgot about the contaminated trio--like all the death before; then with a desire that rivaled thirst, with the end growing nearer and nearer we never failed, even when people perished along the way like today, we never missed what we called church. “Today we had only lost three.” A blessing I thought, “I hope they don’t make me set up the hanging post.” I selfishly prayed away my survivor’s guilt, I wanted the deacons to do it, I hated touch the hanging post.
We only prayed they were there at first, when we first started praying, when I became a Timekeeper. When I was a boy the Timekeeper’s current consensus was not fully coagulated. Then we waned and waxed--ebb and flow, we prayed that they were there until gradually from within our prayers, somehow we knew that they were. They were watching for us, flying over us, they were there. Now we prayed so they would know, we knew that they were there. Maybe they would not interfere--unless of course we told them we knew they were there. We needed to believe with everything we had that they were there, or otherwise they may feel it unethical, immoral to save us. Surely they would not interfere with the nature of a lesser life form. We are Timekeepers and this is our faith and we prayed each night by insisting in code of light, “We know you’re real and we grant you the custodial rights over us.”
Another night, with our relics of faith we signaled. We signal with the car batteries we salvaged along our journey, with the acid we make from berries and minerals from the earth. “Keep them charged and fresh,” The leaders said; and with our lights that even in a time when many thirsted to death, we prided more than for water we ever had.
Now, we send our beacons of faith upwards. With our code we send up the last of our collective hope.
We tell ourselves that of course they are there, this event is of the most rare throughout all of the galaxies; and we knew it was coming for over a thousand years. We had long ago reached a point where we had a great view of more than a million solar systems, and the first time that we had observed this event was in our own Milky Way. Our home would be destroyed, collided with by Andromeda, we just didn’t know back then how time worked--to be fair we still don’t understand it, we just know that together, the Milkyway and Andromeda’s time, dose not work at all.
Never before had we seen this happen--this epic catastrophe, this T.D.D. This had to bring spectators; and we believed this because it was our only hope; and in this hope, a new god was born. Sometimes I wondered if maybe it was because we said it enough that we couldn’t help but believe it; but then I’d repent in private and attempt to absolve myself from that prideful sin. Blasphemy, cursed heresy. “Maybe if everyone believed it, it would become true; maybe nothing existed without our observation.” Such vanity I hinted towards, but quickly after I again repented my pride away.
Five hundred years ago and yet five hundred years too soon we often said, but what is time when the T.D.D. effect began. No measured distance between now and then exists anymore; this is an unquantifiable enigma. All is an uncertainty, save for that is when we really got scared. Fear. Fear, from which sprung our only calculable factor. Fear. With this noticeable increase of fear, we’d attempt to one-up our neighbors as fear’s figures gained; our efforts coinciding with their attempts to out do us too. Stone upon stone, wars within wars. The same rivaling factions used the same strategies but instead of the same old intangible scare-tactics they used this, this unseen thing, as their reason to control others.
In the cities we killed our own countrymen. As so, leaders attempted to direct the force of fear outward, abroad, we became chauvinists, fascists, sexists, anything at all to define any sort of parameter of the new groups--each as arbitrarily esoteric as the next. For whatever god, name or cause, we destroyed--destroyed and ruptured all the world’s societies. We rioted until civility came to the point of hemorrhaging, until all whom God had left with breath were barbarous and were just as comforted by raping and killing and pillaging, as they had been with piece in the time with time-a-plenty. And the Timekeepers finally won, if you could call it winning--we were the last to die.
I guess that was why our leaders lied. I understood then, by being alive and seeing it unravel, why our forbearers had the Great Burn. Books had expressed a world with hope, and too much of that world lingered in the great stories locked away under pen and print. Hell isn’t hell when the demonic beasts are so commonplace. Ignorance is not stupidity when stupidity is average or even considered wise. Man is not an evil animal if there was no greater man past or present in pen and press--so they burned them all. They destroyed them all to repent the vanity of our forbearers away into the ashes.
Only now, when looking back, can I see the foolishness that that all was. I’m glad I didn’t see it them, first hand I mean. I may have joined all those souls who burned with their precious parchments, set a blaze with their genealogies and Asimovs, their Shakespeare and Astronomies, their Koontz and Herberts, their Homer and their Vonneguts; or much, much worse, I may have burned them too.
But that was then and I was a kid, and this is when we worship--not like ever before--now we worship! Now we worship because we must, we must know! If we don’t know then they will leave us to die after the moon falls from the sky; now the dogma lies entirely in our will to survive, humanity breaths its new religion just as much as our survival mandates this faith. We’re learning how time and gravity work together, we know that this cosmic experiment is rare, we only hope we’ll be lifted from the test-tube before we reach the burner. We pray to live on, even if only as slaves to a greater species. We’ve even adapted the bible for this goal of ours; we hardly had to change a single word to do it. Except for now, worship means service and when it is read aloud, someone usually starts with the Timekeeper’s Prayer of the Damned. “Time is gravity, the gravity of time is ceaseless and celestial, we have been given much, but we pray forgiveness for our sins, for we have wasted time. Amen” And then we read about how only the righteous will be lifted from the burning Earth, how sinners will be burned, Revelations, has changed not a word for us and out cause. The Bible is the only book left.
The priests explain it before church; they say it better than I ever can. I wonder who will speak today? Soon I see it will be Trevor McAlister. He molests the collar of his cape, straitens his tattered cloak. He stands on the new ground by the old hanging pipe and lets his low voice rumble over those standing in the front row, reaching yet loudly all those keeping their faces low--like for instance, me. “Today a witch is someone who does not believe!” he yells.
I let my eyes scan the crowd careful not to move differently than any other of the soon to be accusers--or accused. “emulation saves.” Barney claimed. This is the start of the new calling, our quarterly witch-hunt begins. “Don’t stand out!” I thought as Bishop McAlister spoke on.
“Before, a witch may have been your wife when we had left a century, there would be time for her to repent without cleansing. Soon after, a witch would have been never more than a distant friend, no loving conspirator would turn family in; but when we had left only a decade or so, then a witch was never more than your enemy--your worst enemy! And still you’d not accuse an innocent man, unless you wanted to murder him in sin. Now we have about a year and if there is a witch within our veneration, they hide themselves well, for I say unto you brothers and sisters, there is no forgiveness for this sin! The only time left is time for the cleansing of them.” We all knew cleansing meant by fire. Now we await each familiar quote, quotes he had preached before. “Do not doubt that they are here amongst us doubting. For those who doubt and still waste our precious time, here is an invitation to find piece on your own before this season’s calling.” He steps to the side and with his head bowed he leads his upwards facing palm towards the hanging pipe and says with his holy showmanship resounding: “amen!” now we too all join the bowing of heads and in unison, we repeated him, “amen!”
It was time to share our testimonies, it was time to reason with the mob, testifying things like: “I am not a which!” we each took turns saying things the equivalent of--better to accuse them be accused. Thus we said things like “What else can we do but believe? How can we face another day using up our water, our time, while bouncing our existence’s check, hopelessly our lives are over spent? They must, they must, oh lord they must be there…” the man speaking points upward towards the open stars and continue his testimony. “The must be there! Watching over us, watching for any sign that we know and except their interference with what they may believe is our nature, I know they are their just waiting until we all believe.” He accused the crowd with an unfocused gaze. “We all must believe, all of us!” his shift to a menacingly accusation was a common one, before the final and modest, humble “Amen.” We all say Amen again. We all take turns until early morning saying basically the same thing with different words.
It’s hot with the northern sky half filled with a total lunar vista, not because the moon is hot or closer… well maybe, no scientistare left to say. None left anyway, who can tell us if the moon heats the Earth now. Barney could of told me; but even the uneducated eye can see that beneath the moon rain never falls, high tides have all evaporated and saturate the air with sticky misery. So much so, tt is hard to breath some days; but water collects generously--a blessing left each day on the dew-collectors in the morning.
Another day. Maybe. Defiantly there was a change of light in our new immeasurable time scape. We must move because we fill distortion, we hear it in the words we speak--being sped up and slowed down simultaneously. We move in silence and don’t look back, for we know that by the shore those who did look back had all turned to pillars of salt who are still there to blow in your face and burn away the vision of unfaithful eyes. How can any argue this when many alive had seen this thing as their last, and now they too are blindly lead by others. Barney said it was like looking at the sun for days in a single fleeting second. He said never look at the sun when someone is moving faster or slower than they ought to be moving. He said, “When the words you speak sound retarded, don’t look at the sun, or even towards it.”
I know it’s bad, it all bad! The damnable moon is falling--it’s bad I know it is, all of it is bad! Though I say out loud, and thus to my-truest-self betray but still I say, “it’s good!” because we all say “it is good.” We say it’s good because they are there and that is our religion because we are the fucking Timekeepers--oh but we can’t keep even the time of day these days, it flows in our minds like lumpy blood mixed with sand through our guilty hands. “Oh, they must be here to watch such an event…” and so on and so on, in different ways--we say it for all to hear at the end of every damn day, “day?”ha! If that’s what we can even call it, the moment when it’s not dark even though sometimes it last only an instant; A day, a god damn day comes and goes before I can remove my penis from my pants to pee!Lately, I think bullshit though I never speak it--oh but I think it, oh God how I think it! I think: “It is all bad because Barney, my best friend killed him self, he did it for all of us too; that’s how much he believed--He, with all his damn science, his sardonic mockery, really fucking believed! I noticed how much my clenched teeth hurt and remembered to breathe. I need to stay calm if I don’t want to be sanctioned as a which, as a heretic. I need to stay calm but I miss Barney, he’d know what to say right now. I’m to thirsty to cry!
One day he said to me, the last thing he said to me, “I think I don’t believe, maybe it is because of me they do not come to save us all, maybe it’s my lack of faith, maybe that’s why they don’t come to save us.”
I think but I never speak, I didn’t say to Barney that day “you have twice the faith as me.” But I thought it, I did, I could have saved him and I’m the witch. The next day there he was by his own hand, hanging from a shoestring, dangling from the hanging pipe--the hanging pipe that I set up. His batteries and light bulbs in a neat pile, swaddled gently in hemp-clothe, topped with my name on a card outside my tent’s zipper door. Countless footsteps in the sand in the morning before me, attested to the thousand arrangements he had made of his most precious relics. This way, not that way--before he finally must have thought it was a perfect last gesture of friendship--before he balanced himself on the end of the well-used four by four--bit of wood. A tool that when collapses and lying flat, would no longer sustain the life of anyone with a bootstrap wrapped around their neck and tied to the hanging pipe. Also clear in the sand’s below his corps a story was told--he had wobbled more than normal as if towards the end Barney might have changed his mind. I wondered if he had cried out for me, but I slept on, just a tent and micro measurement of synthetic fabric away from him, dangling wriggling, and dying.
Exhaustion. That was it, exhaustion. Some nights it was great, like that night was. I wouldn’t get up to untie a heretic not even a friend, I cried dry tears outwardly but laugh within. “I did not believe they were there!” I was the witch and I would never have kicked out the four by four like Barney had. My laughter died by breakfast time. There was long hair in my food.
I stayed my guilt by saying over and over and over and on. “If they were there, they wouldn’t know my thoughts, just so long as I went through the motions with the others—they couldn’t possibly read minds, not from orbit.”
Another day came and went, another life also went the way Barney’s had. The hanging pipe was used each night by those afraid of fire. One would die each day, every day either way by fire or pipe--we were Timekeepers and this was our way.
The yellow sun fell away and left the world blue but bright. The Earth’s shadow took a cookie cutter’s bite from the moon, the mountains that the sun fell behind where the light was slash from view, made the appearance of crooked teeth eating at the moon; it looked like teeth marks biting at the lunar surface. The little ocean we here had left, but left receded, had drawn a mirage on the moon as well; it looked like oceans were on the moon itself.
In my mind I was trying to explain that visual effect to a child who had only just learned that the moon could not be reached by climbing a tree, and it could not be fixed with a large rocket ship, nor could we ever flee from it’s collision course with us… It was a heart wrenching thought I had, one that was only made worse when for the first time I let myself notice a new horrible thing. I noticed just then that I haven’t seen a child for months--“so where’d they go?” I asked myself, “where?” they used to be all around--oblivious to death’s march on us, playing. I wondered but I could never ask, questions like that were only asked by heretics, or lunatics; but either way, questions like that led to fire.
I also wondered, “Was it sacrilegious to express concern that with the moon’s light so bright, our light signals may fail?” I wonder this as much as I wondered if anyone else was wondering it silently to themselves just as I did? Could we not all see these things, these edict of unforgiving logic. “Were we all witches hiding in a witch’s coven disguised as a church, disguised as Timekeepers?” I think but never speak.
I thought but I never spoke. I would never ask the elders such questions, I just pored my fresh acid into my Eveready at the end of everyday and wired up my halogens and sat in that circle where we all and communally prayed. On off, on off, held some on longer, quick blink off, then on for a long blink, pause--and so on we prayed. “We understand you are there” pause and blink… “please save us, we believe in you” pause and blink… “and we give you authority over us.” Pause and blink, pause and blink… “We all kneel and synchronize our lights shown upward.” Again and again, over and over each night we pray with our lights; we pause and blink, on and off and over and over again and again, everyday.
I wonder if the time is distorted to the point that our code is gibberish when it reaches space, reaches them, and I still wonder if they are really there? I very much doubt that they are but I say nothing. Never speak of heresy. Never! I don’t want to be burned alive with the other witches--the one who spoke. Again I wonder if we’re all witches who act to please the others but quickly stop thinking like that. “Those are the kind of thoughts that lead to confessions and confessions lead to burning human flesh.” I warn myself about myself and tell myself, I’m not to trust. I should try to sleep instead.
The T.D.D. effect dissolves a far off mountain, the biggest I’ve ever seen crumble yet. I wonder how many lived there? Some, I bet. I wondered if they were witches too. I wondered if everyone who killed themselves were really the only ones who actually believed this shit.Was our faith like the ocean-mirage on the moon? Were all of us who were left, only those who appeared to believe when looked at from afar, while all those who were really truly faithful, hung above the freshly pee soaked soil--where we’d find them every morning?
The moon is bigger than the Earth in view, I can see a large circle in the center and I only assume it is Earth’s distorted shadow--it must be. Someone says “You know--we’re bigger than the moon, the Earth is; but the sun is larger yet so it looks that way, besides like time, light is a particle so it yields to our gravity.” She reminds me of Barney, he’d only been dead for a few days, he said things like that, I missed him bad and I missed those things he said. I never understood him, but his cyphers of logic made be feel better, they always did. Her eyes are green like his were.
I remembered something Barney said, and I wonder if she knows that light yields to the laws of mass and still she refuses to question the light from us--from our beacons of faith? “Does it yelled to our gravity also, is it pulled back down on us?” I think but do not ask; I wonder if her words are a trap or in fact, heresy. I think but would never say. Its time to sleep anyway, I know I must sleep tonight. I ward her off as I fictitiously pray. I want be trapped like this!
Morning. And I find that someone has left a shoelace and the failure four by four, a square log, two feet long--a little less that a meter long, and well seasoned with a decade of non-retainable urine, laying at my tent’s zipper door; I suspect that they suspect I’m a witch, and that I don’t believe. They’d be right but still I wonder who they are; who has read my mind “was it the green eyed girl who spoke of light and gravity? Is she who left the killing tools for me this way?” This day fills with confusing thoughts, the thoughts all flow together; one thought leads to the next, two thoughts lead to the next day and no sleep comes again. I wonder if someone will accuse me of heresy tonight at church. I wonder if I’ll be strapped to the growing pile of fags and set-a-blaze like so many others were, I wonder if a shoelace and the community’s four by four is a nicer way to go, I wonder if I’ll bleach the pee-stained wood a little more than those who went before had. I remember how thirsty I am at that.
The day flies by and nothing’s done--no acid made, no iron pyrite found to make it, no dry desert berries to aid in the electrolysis effect. My battery is not its strongest so my lights are not their brightest, I wonder who will notice. “Will they take it as a sign of me loosing my faith?” I wonder if I could explain my fear of death away? No, not death, but being burned alive, and how that distraction has caused this exhaustion that inturn had caused my failure of faith. Then I think, “if I could explain that, than how come no one else has?” Now it seems one thought caries over, that thought, the fear of burning, leads to church, to night, it’s dark too. So dark that maybe no one will see how dim my token of belief has become--I truly pray for this.
We sit a circle, the prayer is said. “Oh great ones please here us, we bag you take us away from doom, we bag you save our souls and use our labors to will our fates, let us serve you, let us live, amen.” And again louder we repeat until finally a few times the code is blinked.
No one notices my light grows dim for yet another, a woman’s is far dimmer. And with his death and with his hemp swaddled gifts, Barney has saved my life once again. I miss him. His battery was charged, not fully, but more than mine. A women of the east of camp has let her light grow even dimmer than my own. I place the shoelace before her tent, I place the four by four adjacent while she pees in the dizzying background of paranoia’s eyes and the growing clouds of accusations. Too tired for guilt now, too tired to wonder who sees me. I think she was nice but I know at least, she’s not me.
Now I pee too, looking East, off the edge of the Earth, the mountain range had all but crumbled, the T.D.D. field reaches out towards us. To the South, the sky is red, the moon lifts the ground there, lava seeps out, not everywhere; but everywhere over there is much too hot to live near. To the North and West others range, we’re lucky they don’t take what little space we have left, what Earth we have to hide on for now, it is that precious.
Relief comes in the form of accepting hopelessness and a tormented rest bit follows, I dream of Barney, he’s happy.
“I have so much room to run.” He tells me. “I have so much time to do it.” He laughs and asks me to join him. “Did you not get my gifts?” he asks. “I made sure they’d come to you.” He smiles.
“I did, it saved my life, my friend.”
“Life?” he spits at the ground--the ground is green? “Not my damned lights and ancient car battery, my cord and platform, the shoelace and four by four. Did you not find it waiting?”
I know I am dreaming but I don’t know if I am talking in my sleep, so even now I take care with the words I speak. “I’ll live my life as my faith guides me.” I wonder if he heard me, as he does not answer my retort at first. He spits again then finally speaks.
“For reals man?” he looks surprised. “life, faith, whatever you think it is, it’s all in your head.”
I don’t understand so I only say. “I’m glad you’re happy, I know soon I’ll see you.”
“Cut the shit Andy!” he desperately yells, I’m shocked to hear Barney reprimand me this way, even in a dream--especially in a dream! We had never exchanged more than the melancholy of our hopeless words before. “I never took you for the type to believe all this holy bullshit, you wont ever see me again Andy, not if you don’t do it yourself. If you burn alive you can’t come, if your lost in a T.D.D. field they can’t link to your mind and your lost, gone forever, the end man--the mother fucking end of all ends! Take the cord and platform, grow some fucking balls and do the right thing, come with us.”
I lie because even in sleep I am scared it’s a trap so I plead “but I do believe Barney, I know they are there, they have to be.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you jack ass, they are really here, shit man, I’m here with them, but don’t you think they have their own ways of doing things. Life, faith, all that shit is in your head. It’s all in your fucking head! They only need your head--well, you mind anyway.” He took a deep breath then said. “You have seven days and six nights, on the seventh night the ground folds beneath you, and all will burn but you--Andy, you will burn on the fourth day for heresy--jack ass!” he toke a deep breath, I wondered if him breathing was necessary for my own imagination as he said. “Snap out of it Andy, snap out of the never ending poetic march to your certain doom, your in a surreal state and logic thus eludes you. You have to snap out of it and think about what I have said, please just remember to remember and god dammit Andy. Think!” He was gone and the day was here.
I clean the sleep from my eyes and I hear his words resonate, not the words from the dream I just had though, but from five years before, when I first met him. When I met him we were melting led and out from nowhere he had said something like, “Just like a number can be multiplied by its self, a molecule can my divided in half, over and over and on into infinity.” I try to place those words in the dream, but I think they were not there--no I remember clearly everything from the dream--I know those old words of his weren’t there. Those timeworn words felt so important now, all his knowledge was as important as it was lost, as we would all be lost and our own knowledge lost as well. I wanted for someone else to feel that way about me one day, but what is a day now.
The women from the East of camp with the dim lights, was hanging from the hanging pipe, the ground beneath her was wet--so much water wasted. She had done what I had tried the night before but could not. I had enough sleep to feel the guilt now. Shame came heavy on me as a storm of self-loathing, but I could not show my anguish just then.
I looked amongst the men to see if one or more, was her secret lover. These days, it was expected from the lovers of the hanging, reciprocity. Normality was, that no one talked to each other, but yet, some made love as there still were quite lovers amongst us. They were just as normal as the others who took sex, took it by force. Rape. We were not proud anymore, moreover, we were as an artist’s painting on a burning canvass, the portrait wasn’t always of the brightest colors and many did all they knew just to get a stroke of themselves down before it all faded to ash.
I knew the looks people gave by now, and after allocating a moment for each, I surveyed every man in the crowed, there was no lovers here, only the familiar taker’s faces leered, and they weren’t mad yet, for they still could take for now. And that fetid scum, well, they took until she became too stiff to take more from.
The red passed where the crumbled mountains lay as dust. Slowly over night grey came from the crimson blush. The T.D.D. field came closer, the brown to the West turned red, the heat seared all around us and my skin too, began to blister. The ground below rumbled as I thought of something horrible Barney had said to me in a dream. “7 days. But four for you.” I looked about, it sounded right when I ran the numbers in my head. “Jack ass.” He had also called me. Not long ago mornings like this, this time of year, would take fog from my hot breath, today it was hot, so hot, much hotter than my breath and humid.
Breakfast was fresh--freshly used, and disgusting, but it was something. Something was better than days stacked upon days of nothing to eat after nothing. At least this time there were no long lengths of familiar hair within the scorched cubes of meat.
It’s different than Barney was, maybe because Barney was my friend, maybe because he was older than… I wish I never had to analyze such a thing; but here I was, taste testing the utmost macabre, rolling in my mouth, the worst kind of humanity’s history.
Over night three shoelaces and one familiar four by four was left at my zipper door, I was wrong about the lover though I was sure--not a single man refuse to eat, I wondered who this monster was. “Who could eat his own lover?” I asked myself but then remembered my friend Barney. I realized I’m that monster; I too did not turn him down come breakfast’s hunger. I guess as the end draws close, the reverence towards our fallen loved ones counts for not--something is better than nothing and we had enough nothing to go around.
I briefly thought back before this morbid world seemed so normal, when people thought they could fly away from this shit one day, when hope was still alive and was more than our blind faith. Then one after the other after the other, star ships failed and fell back to earth on fire, until we gave up and faced it. Our technology was lacking and lost, and with the books all gone, the stories of man leaving the Earth might as well have been fables and legends as far as we were concerned. Now I knew, we gave up long before, hope had burned with the stories, the history and the old books from back then.
The ground shook me softly, the heat washed my body in dust, sleep came jealously and slow but finally it came to the smell of ozone and scorched dirt.
“Five days left, and they’re going to burn you alive in three!” Said my dead friend.
“Thanks for not using my body, but you should of stopped them, you should have said something. Couldn’t you have just told them that what they were doing wasn’t right?” The woman from the East was with Barney now, she looked refreshed but freshly angered. I wonder and hoped she wouldn’t know, that not only had I failed to stop the dirty corpsers, but I was the one who had left the cord and board that morning for her? She must know despite my hopes.
“Oh my Hell! You’re here for one day and now you’re a fucking idealist.” Barney was now talking to her. To me it seemed she seemed more real to him than I seemed to be, he went on as he lowered his single, day counting, finger. “Would you have said anything if you were in his shoes, would you have tried to stop them--did you try to stop them when it was you they were taking, while you were down there?”
“At first I did.” She maintained. “Besides what is a day there, Barney? That isn’t a fair question. What should I have done?”
“What should he have done for you that you could not do yourself?”
“I don’t know. Just said something?” she said “but a day feels longer here, I’ve been here watching forever--”
“--It’s still all a day.” Barney stoped her from carrying on. “a day is a day is a day. You only fought back at first because it was new to you, men have always been animals and you should know by now that your body down there is worthless, it is damned, even the very dust of it, will never assume life again.”
“Well, he should of tried, that’s all I’m saying.” She was pointing at me but looking at him. They looked right at each other--to each other their eye contact was sharp and decisive. That’s why they seemed more real to each other than I assumed I seemed to them, it was their gaze at me--it was vague and indirect and each of them seemed to look past me in different lines of sight.
“Well, he never touched you when you were there?” Barney looked to me and asked the both of us, with a cocked sideways tiled head--looking prepared to be shocked and disappointed but he still asked. “Did he?” They should know these things if the great ones had really saved them I thought, she should know I had placed the cord at her tent, Barney should know that I never did take someone without consent, I had willing participants for those kinds of lascivious intents.
“No, not him.” She finally said, Barney appeared as relieve as me, it was just a dream, she could have said anything, I wondered why I cared so much if she was dead.
“Hey!” I finally interjected. “Were are you two anyway?”
“Here, with them.” The woman from the east answered, she sounded happy again. I wondered if she knew she gave me an upset stomach, I wondered if I’d ever see her in real life again, I knew I was dreaming, I remembered falling asleep under the blistering heat, I somehow still felt the waves of relentless warmth washing over me.
“Them?” I asked, I wonder who they were, if they were who we thought they would be--I knew it was a dream but still I yielded to my subconscious curiosity.
“Them, there just like us, they are not little green men like we had imagined--the only difference is they are taller and thinner, they have longer fingers and toes but they are just like us otherwise.” She said “They have higher gravity where they are from, so they grew different.” She explained on.
“They even speak English.” Barney added.
“What is this place?” It looked like a massive desert with many green plants, so thick and all encompassing, it smelled good too, not like fetid waste and dirty men of the campsite, but it smelled good like nothing smells--there was no smell at all. The horizon was vast; it was like I was standing on top of a mound, the slope of which seemed to fall for miles and miles at an increasing angle--a gaining curve, though, the ground did not fade by falling off some distant bent horizon; but it faded out only by the limitations of my vision. The distant sky was strange as well, it was not blue but of hues of gradually fading green the higher up I gazed, and the sun was long too, it was not a single point or beckon overhead, but ran the length and limit of my eye sight. “This must be a dream.” There was no computers, no control panels, no menagerie of humans or animals, no alien scientist measuring unseen elements of our present destructive condition like those of which we constantly prayed to.
Barney watch me observe this massive place, He looked over his shoulder towards where I was looking then back at me and said. “This will be home, if you don’t burn, or if you don’t get taken by the temporal distortion drift.” He opened his hands towards me in the universal body-language expression of “this” and said: “they can only take your mind if it is at rest at death and it wont rest if your burned alive, and they wont be able to establish a link if you are lost in a T.D.D. field.” Interlocking his finger in front of himself, his movement reeked of certainty.
“How do I know this is not just a dream?” I asked--I couldn’t trust this, I seen both these people’s bodies, I knew they were dead, both hung themselves a few days apart. I ate of their burnt flesh, I past it already--I went to bed sick of her--I wondered why I resentedher because of the discomfort and indigestion I remembered last, but somehow, could presently feel. I was sure she was dead, as sure as I was sick!
“You can’t know, how do you know you’re not dead already, what makes you think you’ll even know what death is when you find it?” The woman’s cryptic answer was no help.
“She’s right man, you can’t know; but I can give you a hint--just remember this, and, remember to remember it! Tomorrow, when all that to your left, to your right and in front of you, falls into T.D.D. fields, and all the Earth behind you burns as the crust of the earth rules into itself under the pull of the waxing moon, all manner of life will share the last island of livable planet on your hemisphere; if this is just a dream then what I am saying should not happen, if this is real then it will. Shit man, even if it is just a dream--if I’m right about the animals, then I’m right about everything. Right? You just need to remember to remember what I’m saying to know for yourself.”
Just then, minutes later or a hundred years from then, I woke up. Again time felt indifferent to life and reason. Out side of my tent, it seemed the ground was gone just across the horizon, a hundred feet or so I thought. Probably miles though, but with time distorted, the distance covering the ground was vague to my perception--like looking a picture for and hour in a split second--how better to explain a thing no words for yet existed?
The people scavenging at the outskirts of camp kept looking over to us who where camped in the center. They moved sluggishly slow. A pan fell from a far off table, it fell for hours, likes being lowered from a diligent twine from the table made of an overturned power cable spool--a giant bobbin once used to sew the ancient power lines across the ancient scape of dissolving desert, now acted as a indicator of temporal uncertainty. They crowded closer in, increasing in speed as they removed themselves farther from the timeless edges of the world… Just like Barney had said.
I wondered if I was moving as fast to them as they seemed to move slow to me, they seem to look at us, holding prolonged stares. Maybe they were just glances frozen there. I did not know what they saw; I only knew what I saw and what I saw must mean. T.D.D. was upon us and soon we’d have to move again. But where?
It was in that instant when I grew heavy beneath the dreams I had been having. The realization that I was refusing to face. “Remember to remember!” There was nowhere to go. While I wondered weather or not I was the only one having these freaky dreams, I noticed we had been cornered by the melting Earth and the approaching T.D.D. field; and just like in the dream, it was clear that man was not the only manner of beast to whom this had been happening.
“They strode together, signaling the end was near
They held a tight formation, trusting no man yet having nowhere else to turn…”
(The Last Days)
Three massive mule deer buck’s led the way, and two does tailed. They watch cautiously the men who where watching them with hunger showing through their salivating mouths--still; they joined the crowded camp in a deliberate stride. One man his with his knife drawn, slowly approached the leading buck. The five deer stopped, the three males formed a semi circle around the two does, and with but a slight cock of the massive antlers and a instance of fleeting eye contact, we all quickly learned our new place as the knifed man backed away slower than he had started approaching. Soon mice were amongst us too, as were the rabbits and foxes and coyotes. They seemed somehow more enlighten, not aggressive and nothing like the unintelligible beast of old stories. It was clear why they were here. They came to share with us the last precious moments of time and earth.
Ironic joy came to me as I wondered if they were asking us to save them too, like we had been asking the empty sky to save us. I was caught laughing at my thoughts by Bishop McAlister. I did not care anymore but my laughter died a little when I noticed the nipples and enlarged bellies on those two does. I was briefly washed in sadness partly because of our children seemed to be missing, and partly because these unborn deer would never see daylight. I looked past McAlister’s gaze, attempting to capture me in eye contact.
Soon sadness didn’t mater, nor did my fear of Bishop McAlister. I knew my dreams were real--I denied what I knew, I knew it didn’t matter if they weren’t real, not for much longer anyway. I knew what I had to do. I laughed again, I didn’t care who was there, I didn’t care what McAlister thought--him or anybody else. McAlister was clearly on the verge of sanctioning my as a which and condemning me to death by fire, but before he could muster up the right pious words I asked loud enough for all nearby to hear, “So Bishop, where are all the children? I haven’t seen them around as of late. What do you say Brother McAlister? Is that your doing?” A murmur gradually filled the hollows written in the shocked silence caused by a member, me speaking out of turn to a Bishop, the Bishop over seeing all the Bishops, Bishop McAlister.
A day. I bought myself a day at most. A day before Brother Carns or Brother Haslehuff sanctioned me at McAlister vengeful behest. Bizarrely, vindictively sardonic, I knew I’d hang myself before then--“that’ll show him.” I marveled at the oddity of this fucked up reality. “It would show them all?” Well, it would.
I found once again at my tent’s zipper door, a four by four and shoelace. It was dark, but still I took it to the hanging pipe. I set looking at it until the sun rose the next day. “Could I do it?” I tirelessly wondered another night away. I didn’t do that night--last night and I knew both my batteries would be dead today. I knew that when someone does not bring their lights fully charged to church they were thought, not to believe. I knew I did not believe and I knew everyone else soon would see that truth about me--Bishop McAlister must have already. I was a witch; I knew that we all were. What were these great ones waiting for anyway? I remembered the dream; I thought, “Last night I should’ve slept instead of what it was I had done.”
What to do, I didn’t dare hang myself and I didn’t want to burn as witch, I didn’t want to dissolve like the mountains had or like that man I seen die in the street had; and I didn’t have much time to do anything else.
At least the stress was renewing, the fear of death was refreshing in its own sick way. I started the day with renewed fervor and a purpose; I still had no clew of what to do. I thought how each moment only gets worse yet that was enough of a mental place to abode myself from to fear the end that was sure to come. And since I knew it could, and would, get worse, I knew it couldn’t be as bad as it could get. Not yet anyway. I’d always thought before the fires, those who killed themselves were all vampires--feeding on a life of spreading sorrow to their friends and family. Spreading pain so much so that at their ends and their most addicted state of abusing all around them, they overdose and killed themselves, so we were all affected by their selfishness.
I flashed my lights on cue but my beam was clearly the dimmest this night. Trevor McAlister, the leader of the leaders, brought me the cord and board before bed, he handed it to me himself. He was giving me one last chance to do the right thing before they set me a blaze, he seen me laugh earlier, and he knew my batteries were dead. The only reason he didn’t burn me yet was because of my question about the missing kids. As such, he said “the light of heart can’t feel the presences of God, he’d pray for me as I kicked the log.” His rhyme was childish and I think he laughed under his breath as he was off. I could guess what happened to the children, now. He said “the light of heart can’t feel the presence of God…” he could only have been talking about me, but I knew he was answering my question from the day before. I had asked “Where were all the kids?” They werelight of heart as sure as they were--no longer. I was sick, I hated that man, that rapist that corpser that scumbag motherfucker.
I knew what I’d prefer between the two roads that he had laid before me, still I found blame in all manner of historical utterings. “What had he done to the children?” I asked but saccharinely disgusted, and anguished from knowing, horrified by an obvious dogmatic fact, I knew what that sick fuck did. I knew! Barney used to rant about how those “fucking priest” like McAlister, have destroyed all the technical manuscripts, and the digital data banks to keep their asinine power. Barney used to say how the manuscripts must have contained a way from this shit, he said that it was they, who had doomed us to this dying planet, and he blamed them for anything else done that was conducive to their complete control over us.
I wondered if I hated them too, now, for their arrogance, or if I was just going through the motions Barney had towards the end. Anger, designed to postpone what I knew I should do. I wanted to sleep a little before I died, maybe I would be reassured by my dreams again that hanging wasn’t the end. I worried I would lose track of time and wake to find my self being wrestled to the hanging pipe, but by my wrists and not my neck, while the desperate people gathered anything flammable they could scrounge. With the end so evidently near, with the heat and literal edges of the earth melting away at the thresholds of camp, I wondered, “would they burn their own tents and cloths to insure my sacrifice is noticed by those great ones?” they must realize they wont need those things much longer. Again I laughed. I wondered if crazy people laughed at disparity because they saw something no one else saw, or if they laughed because they were scared of something--real or not?
I didn’t know how long I was sleeping when I heard a scratch on my zipper door, then there was a quiet hissing voice asking, “Are you sleeping?” The green-eyed woman who reminded me of my dead friend Barney enquired through nylon patched with cellophane.
“No.” What could she want? I wondered, maybe sex, I hoped. “No I’m not a sleep. Come in.” I said with all that above considered.
“Hi.” She ducked under the low arch of patched over fabric and said.
“Hi.” I said back, I still had no idea what this was about.
“I seen Trevor at your tent earlier. I wanted to see you before you made up your mind.”
She was dark skinned, not black, not Mexican, but deep eastern maybe, or a small part Chinese or all Indian, her face had taken on the same stress induced aging as mine, the same exposure under the same sun coupled with eyes drenched in timeless sorrow. I wondered if I had lost my distinguishable features illuminating me as the 38-year-old white man I was? I wondered if she was once white too, maybe before our group set out under the sun, I wondered if that even mattered; and how it had ever mattered what color we all were. Most of all I wondered what she wanted--Sex I hoped.
She stood there in silence looking only at me. The whole venue was to sobering to feel awkward about. “Sit down.” I said without emotion or any kind inflecting in my voice. “Please sit down.” When she stayed frozen, shaking and silent I said please again.
Slowly she did as I kindly asked. “I’m, I’m… my name is Cassidy, you can just call me Casy, Sheena always did--Sheena called me Casy, so you can call me Casy.”
“Hi Casy, I’m Andy.” I tried but I couldn’t remember anything about her or—did she just say Sheena? I asked my self then asked out loud. “Who’s Sheena again?”
For an instant I thought I saw raw evil anger dance upon her dimly lit face; but before I could classify it as such, she was smiling at me again, her dark skin made her teeth stand out like star brightened ivory. A chill ran through me from what I had imagined as the cold of bitter resolve of murder appear on her face, I could not easily discount it as just another exhaustion fueled hallucination fast enough to feel the comfort from her beautiful smile; a smile that was currently gracing her much younger face. I shook my head and tried to smile softly. I tried to ward off what I only assumed, and desperately hoped, was only a hallucination; her sweet face was of to much of a contrast to what I had thought I had just seen.
“What can I do for you?” It was a sentence I remembered saying in nicer times. An idle question that usually had no good answers, even when it was asked back then, this time it would--well, I hoped so.
“I don’t need anything from you Andy, I actually am here because I wondered if there was anything I could do for you? I seen him at your tent, I seen him hand you the cord and board, you know what that means? Oh I’m sure you know what that means Andy.”
“Well, how can I help you, help me? What can you do?” I kept my voice polite but what a thing to asked a man at this point in his life. Who is this woman? I wondered if she thought I was going to take her like I knew so many others probably had, like brother McAlister surely had, she was pretty and she was a timekeeper and that was McAlister’s only two qualifiers to what he took. He didn’t care about gender, consent, or even if the victim had a still beating heart. Oh but I wasn’t a taker; but I wasn’t someone who could die at my own hands either. I wondered what could this sort of desperation make me do?
“You don’t want to burn Andy, you don’t!” She was pleading with me now, I was uncomfortable with her using my name so effortlessly,just having learned it a second ago.
“I don’t want to die but if tomorrow I’m not hung, I’ll be burned or killed by one of those crazy deer out there. If not tomorrow, well, were all going to die the next day--Casy, was it?”
“Yeah.” She said softly while strongly piercing my eyes with her own stare. She clearly had gasped at those words. “You had the dream didn’t you?” She finally broke the silence and asked as her eyes welled with moisture.
“Yes, I believe so.” I didn’t see the significance she apparently did. Dreams were drawn by what people worried about most and seen most recently, and, since we all seen the same things and were worrying about those same things, it stands to reason we’re having similar dreams.
Her watering eyes turned to suppressed sobs and sniffles. “I can’t do it either, Andy.” She confessed, then she lipped the same three words that had of late, made a wretch out of me. “I don’t believe.”
“Neither do I.” though I only quietly whispered those so, so, flammable words, I instantly wished I had only lipped them too. Even the sudden movement within my own tent, startled the hell out of me. She had been sitting on her butt with her legs crossed in front of her; but at that instant she lifted her self up onto her folded knees then fell into an embrace with me. “Sheena was my love you know? She was my everything and she believed, everyone who had hung themselves did I think. They were the only ones who really believed, it’s not fair that they are all died.” She beat my chest in a display of disparity. “It’s not fair!” Now she cried with out restraint.
I was happy she was here. I felt energy that I had not felt since before Barney hung himself, it was pure comfort like when he slept in my tent, our plutonic companionship in a dark place and time. Wait! She just said the Sheena was her love. I hadn’t thought about that possibility when Sheena was served for breakfast, I tried to remember if Casy ate that day but their was no hope of my memory to satisfy my morbid curiosity, I had been only focused on the men to have notice if she did or not, to have noticed her at all. “How could I have missed such a common place condition, with men always taking, woman often found comfort in other women. This was so sure of a condition at camp, that I could only find comfort in Barney albeit platonic, No women trusted men here. It would not take a great hike in the milieu to have found more in him I assumed. Casy was gay! I had never ever even thought of referring to Barney as ‘my love,’ and was sure that was Casy had just said. What did she want? She must hate me! I remembered the look I worked so hard to discount as just one more exhaustion drawn hallucination--chills overcame me.
I never believed in being a Timekeeper, I never wanted to believe in the old ways either, it sounded to me so awful--being taken into bondage only to stay alive. A meager existence at best; that was the sum of what us Timekeepers were meant to believe. Barney, if only in my dreams, had shown me a world that I could love, he was there and he seemed happy and free. I wanted so badly to see him happy again, I wanted everyone to be happy, I wanted to see another smile on his face--on anyone’s face! Barney, the world he’d shown me in my dreams, that was what I wanted to believe. I knew I needed to make myself believe that to do what I needed to do. Only Barney could tell me I was going to die and make feel like everything was going to be all right.
I didn’t know what to do now, so I wrapped my sunburnt arms around this stranger, this Casy; who without a doubt, must have hated my guts. “Tell me about your dreams.” She asked me, to my great relief.
I would tell her of the world that we could retreat to, I imagined we all had dreams rooted within the answers to all our problems. I told her about the gift Barney left me. She forced my eyes wide as she told me she knew because it was her you left it for me and it was Barney who had told her to leave it. Shock shook me. “What else did you dream?” Now I asked her.
“Sheena was there. Barney told me to say hi, I think he was talking about you, he seemed to assume I would know who to say hi to. Sheena was mad that I let those men take her like they did.”
Cassidy spoke on about her dreams but I was caught up with the part about Sheena being mad, could that be a coinciden
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