Absinthe Man (Brief Intro)

Samantha woke up and realized that her gray silk pillow was submerged in sweat. The smell was musty and sour. When she slightly moved her head, the pillow felt cold and jolting. The room was dark and she could hear an electric buzz coming from her muted television. She turned over and felt overwhelmed by paralysis. Her clock read 3:01 am. How did she manage to sleep so long and miss nearly an entire day?

She pushed her lower body off of the bed and lazily shifted herself into an upright sitting position. All she could think about was the night before. It didn’t seem real. Was it real? Some man with a dark green suit approached Samantha and told her that she would no longer be the same. He walked away afterwards and she instantly began to feel disoriented as if the world she just woke up in was an artificial setup of the world she was once familiar with. Everything looked the same, but felt quite different.

The Yearning Well

Under the bright warm green light, he fell fast asleep below a jet black sky teeming with pulsating stars as big as planets. His sleep state carried him into a very strange world.

As he slipped down into what seemed like a never-ending well made of smooth round-cornered stone blocks, rich forest-colored devils with emerald jewels for eyes and mouths that stretched open to reveal dancing screaming teeth, reached out to him with long two-fingered hands revealing semi-translucent, shiny, taut skin.

As he looked up while falling further below into...something...somewhere...he could see the coal black sky shrink to a tiny point which eventually disappeared.

He looked down and could finally see the end of the well. It was an open mouth with a large gleaming rapidly blinking eye in the middle. He felt he would die, feel excruciating pain or encounter a sensation which would obliterate him, but once his body fell through the open mouth and into the fluttering eye, he realized he was submerged in a very warm, embracing body of liquid. Liquid that composed the image of the large flickering eye.

Immediately, his mind and consciousness shifted and he experienced the perception of everyone that he had known and seen throughout his entire life. It was an indescribable and profound happening. He let out a mixed series of yowls, laughter, screams and indefinable vocalizations.

----

Glenda leaned over the bed and looked at her husband. He was in a deep sleep. She decided to wear her exotic black sweater tonight with shimmering crystal sequins. It made her feel elegant and special.

Tomorrow she would be leaving to explore new opportunities. It was time. He looked so peaceful in bed. So very vulnerable and innocent.

He never saw her for who she was. She knew that once he awoke, he would still be asleep, but alive somewhere else. With her he was dead and tired. No longer did her beautiful green eyes create a stir in his soul. Those days were gone.

She decided that the disappearance of special days held great wisdom. They were mothers embedded within a world of watchful esper mothers, swirling around amongst one another with their glorious strands of pixie hair, shaking off gorgeous particles of intoxicating sighs and snowy loving whispers.

She was infinite birth and an apotheosis of all seasons.

----

As all of the omniscient sensations emptied out of his body with each wild utterance, he felt the grasp of a hand becoming stronger around his left leg. The water felt so warm and fluid that he wondered if he was floating within a liquid illusion. He pushed his body around and saw that the hand was attached to no one. It bore a crisp-looking diamond ring with a gold band on the ring finger. The hand looked like it belonged to a woman. A woman with a slight pleasant build. Someone familiar but someone he couldn't recall no matter how hard he tried. The skin was delicate; as if it would tear away from the hand upon the gentlest of touches.

He reached down to grab the hand around his left leg and saw that it disappeared and reappeared on his right leg. However, upon reappearance, the hand was now decayed-looking, mottled gray in hue and the skin was jaggedly broken in several areas with an old worn leathery texture. The diamond ring was now replaced by a bulbous black spider with its thick hairy legs clenched around the hand's ring finger.

Something violently pulled him down into the liquid. He held his breath as he frantically felt his body moving further down into the liquid abyss. He could not make out any direction. He could not see and the temperature of the water became colder. So cold that he felt like he was going to become frozen. His body started to go into shock and he could no longer hold his breath due to time and panic. Just as he was about to give up, he felt his body land onto a soft springy surface. The coldness went away and he was no longer in liquid.

The area was dark but it began to brighten and reveal the interior of his bedroom. It was morning outside the open window next to his bed. The closets were open and his wife's clothes and belongings were gone. He could not move or speak although everything was visible.

His wife came back in the room to stand in the doorway and look over at him again. He tried to call out to her but she could not hear him. He tried again and failed.

He could only hear echoes of his voice as he looked into her eyes. Staring into them conjured up a fervent fever of aching and longing within. Like the early days.

The room disappeared abruptly and Glenda appeared everywhere. Even as he blinked, visions of Glenda appeared as split-second snapshots, reaching out to him in a faraway distance. He looked down at his body and saw thousands of copies of her hands reaching out to feel, grab and seize him.

The floor, filled with faces and garments of Glenda, broke away and revealed the opening of the stone-made well. He began to fall forever...always seeing the beckoning and smiling face of Glenda at the bottom.

The Candy Bar

As Patrick pulled up to the remote hospital near the outskirts of town, he noticed that the parking lots and the premises overall were empty. There was only one car near the front of the hospital entryway and it appeared to be an abandoned slick black Camaro. The Camaro had odd characters carved into the paint job and the tires were missing.

Patrick wondered if the hospital was closed. He also wondered what kind of hospital this was. It was strange and in a very remote part of town that he'd never been to. Why did his friend recommend this place to him last week? There was no one here. Could he even get in?

Patrick took his cell phone out of his pocket and decided to call Thomas. He wanted to verify that he was at the correct address but Patrick noticed that his cell phone could not pick up a signal. He looked again at the building through his car window and saw that the street address matched what he wrote down on paper.

1771.

He was certainly on the street of Uriah. He was on time for his appointment. He also knew that there was no other hospital around the area, so this had to be it.

Patrick decided to get out of his car and walk up to the entrance. As soon as he neared two feet of the entry doors, he was asked to insert his driver’s license into a nearby slot on the left wall for identification. This bewildered Patrick but he figured since he had an appointment, this might be the way that the hospital allowed certain people in during, what seemed so far to be, off-hours.

Once he inserted his ID, the doors automatically slid open and the whimsical and exciting sound of coins falling rapidly and repeatedly out of slot machines could be heard, although there were no slot machines to be seen near the doors and it made no sense to hear them. The place was certainly not a casino of any kind.

He noticed that all of the lobby seats were empty as well. The black and white tiled flooring created a continuous Escher pattern and the walls were decorated in loud, hypnotic, spiral motifs. The chairs arranged around the wall in the lobby were in greens, blues, reds and pinks. They were very modern-looking and resembled the shape of the letter s with wavy indentations.

No one was at the front desk.

Soon, over the speaker system, Patrick heard an echo of melodious chuckles, a clearing of the throat and then a voice prompt, in a strange high-pitched voice with deep undertones, telling him to take a seat only on a green chair and patiently wait to be assisted.

Patrick looked around. He felt a bit scared and extremely confused. What was this place? Where were the staff and medical professionals? None of this made sense.

He walked over to a dark green chair and hesitantly sat down on it. He waited awhile and looked toward his right which stretched down into a very long and slightly dark hallway. He could see no end to the hallway due to the increasing darkness within its visible depth. However, he began to hear something.

Footsteps.

Light footsteps.

As he strained his eyes and edged over the dark green chair to see clearly into the hallway horizon, he started to see a small figure make its way toward the lobby. The figure looked like it belonged to a small child. As the figure emerged into the lobby, Patrick could see that it was indeed a child. The child was unusual looking. It was a girl and she looked like no girl Patrick had ever seen.

She had very black skin like the color of a traditional bowling ball and platinum blond hair that seemed natural rather than dyed. Her cheeks were rotund, shiny and plump so much that they looked like artificial protrusions that hid surgical implants underneath. The little girl's eyes were a piercing glowing green. But a dark emerald green, like the chair Patrick was told to sit in earlier. Her little legs awkwardly crossed over one another as she walked. It was a very rhythmic and robotic walk and cadence. Patrick saw that she was dressed in tiny pantaloons that were puffy around the thighs. The shirt, which exposed her smooth and chubby dark belly and hosted an image of a circle on the front, had puffy short sleeves to match the pants. The entire outfit was lime green.

The little girl was holding a green tray and as she came close to Patrick, he saw that the tray contained a light green candy bar with an infinity symbol embedded on it. The coating of the bar seemed to be some kind of fondant.



Patrick felt paralyzed. He had no idea what was going on and who this peculiar little girl was. He also thought about her parents. Didn't she have parents around? Who was supervising this weird little girl?

"Hey there...are you here by yourself?"

The little girl continued to stare at Patrick with the tray in front of her. She slowly formed a wide but closed-mouth smile but made no other gesture.

"What is your name? Can you understand me? Where are your mother and father? Are they around? Is anyone else around the hospital? Can you tell me?"

The little girl stopped smiling and raised the tray higher and closer to Patrick.

"Eat," she said in a very babyish voice.

"Eat what? The candy bar?"

The little girl giggled and nodded her head playfully. Patrick didn't want to eat anything from the tray. The bar appeared to be clean and no one had bitten into it, but although this was a child, this was a stranger nonetheless and he didn't know what to expect.

"If you tell me your name and get someone to come to the front desk, I will eat a piece of your candy bar OK? Deal?"

The little girl's lips began to quiver and form into a pout and her crystal dark-green eyes started to tear up. She lowered her head and began to cry.

Patrick looked around alarmed to his left and right, especially toward the hallway to see if anyone heard her crying. No one came and the girl cried louder.

"Shhhhhh! Please...stop crying. I'm sorry. Look...I'll eat a piece of your candy bar OK? Just a small piece. But after this you'll have to call someone in to begin my appointment or else I am going to leave."

The little girl looked up from the tray into Patrick's eyes and began to smile again. Patrick picked up the bar from the tray and held it up to his nose. It smelled strongly of vanilla and lemon. The smell was inviting and he could not detect any foulness or decay in its odor.

He broke open the candy bar and was shocked to notice that not only was the inside of the bar hollow but the interior of each broken piece contained a minuscule room with little humans inside of it. They were in the middle of various scenes within a torn apart living room space. He could see a woman in the kitchen cooking, a tiny man on the couch watching TV, 2 miniature children on the floor playing board games with one another and a couple of older people at a dining room table reading.

They all, except for one little man, were oblivious to Patrick's surreal intrusion. Before Patrick could react, he saw that the little man on the left broken piece of the bar stopped watching television, turned around to stare at Patrick and got off the couch. He walked toward the jagged end of the broken bar and sat down with his small legs dangling off the edge. He lifted his diminutive hand and pointed directly at Patrick.

Patrick got the chills, jumped back, let out a yelp and dropped the bar pieces onto the floor and immediately felt the beginning of tremors below the ground and around the walls in the hospital room. It felt like an earthquake. The little girl was gone without a trace although the tray was now on the floor near the disjointed candy bar. The candy bar pieces now looked like the parts of a smashed green scarab beetle with perfectly round blood clots.

Patrick backed away from the wall in horror and began to call out for help. No one came. He saw that the wall behind the chairs was developing cracks and that with each tremor the cracks were fracturing further.

He ran toward the entrance doors on the let but he could not get out. They were locked and would no longer slide open. He banged on the glass doors repeatedly but they still would not open. Patrick saw a full parking lot outside of the glass doors and a thriving community of people walking around. He screamed frantically for assistance and desperately hoped that someone outside would hear him.

No one paid attention.

No one heard him.

The wall as well as the flooring was now splitting fully into two sections...and each side was moving in different motions as if they were on a balancing scale. Patrick stood with his back flat against the glass entry doors in sheer terror watching as the room continued to split in half. He was on the verge of fainting when he saw what the split began to reveal. A pair of extremely large eyes slowly materialized through the ever-growing split revealing a human face with a wide-eyed curious expression.

Patrick started to feel an eerie sensation in his limbs. The sensation forced one of his arms to propel upward and point to the face between the opening. He could fully see the human now. They were holding up each end of the broken-apart hospital room with their gigantic hands. He jutted out his index finger to point at the face peering further into his side of the hospital lobby and let out an unearthly long shriek between his wildly-tortured, stretched-open mouth.

At that moment both sides of the room were released by the humongous hands and Patrick's body slammed hard against the glass doors as he felt a dramatic drop into an indescribable abyss...

Contact

He walked into the Chinese restaurant and waited to be greeted and seated. He was led to a dimly lit seating booth and given a menu to browse.

He maintained a pleasant and modest smile throughout his exploration and eventually decided upon a blended cocktail drink and a sirloin steak dinner.

The waiter came to take his order and politely left the table.

The man surveyed the restaurant and took notice of the various shapes, colors and beings placed around him. It was all very stimulating...and catalytic.

The waiter made his way back with the man's cocktail drink along with a clear glass of cold iced water. The man's eyes became wider and wetter around the edges as the cocktail drink was placed on his table. The alcoholic drink contained a bright red maraschino cherry impaled by a decorative transparent pick.

The waiter asked if the man would like anything else and the man gave a firm motion of his hand to indicate no. The waiter announced that his dinner would arrive soon and left the table.

As the man looked around again to glance about the room, he noticed that shapes, hues and sounds were all one and this was a sign. The feeling and the message were very intense to him, but he had to wait until the right moment. The right moment would be the defining point and purpose.

He slowly rocked back and forth in his seat and licked his lips continuously to keep them wet and sensitive. He intermittently placed his middle finger straight down in the cold glass of water and sucked on it until the skin was irritated and taut.

Soon the waiter arrived with the man's steak dinner. He greeted the man with an obligatory and hospitable grin and placed his plate on the table warning the man that the plate was hot. The man moved his cocktail drink in front of himself and casually plucked off the cherry impaled on the pick. He held the pick between his right thumb and index finger in a precise manner and as the waiter begin to question if the man desired anything more, the man then dramatically shoved the pick into his left eye until only a point was visible.

Contact had been made and the moment was gloriously defined...

So Close and Far Away

A bucket full of bruised baby hearts was found alongside a twisted gray road. A worn traveler made the discovery and felt compelled to bring the keepsakes home. He had heartless bodies waiting in the ground in his backyard and finally, it seemed as if they could serve a purpose and fulfill their destinies.

The bodies were dug up after the traveler finished a hearty meal of clam chowder and cornmeal biscuits. His temples were sore and tight from vigorous chewing.

Bodies were placed side by side on the cynical grass, like sardines resting in a tin can, as the earth was disturbed. Each body had been preserved well in plastic casings filled and submerged with curious and strangely aromatic oils, salts and resins. The traveler looked over all of the bodies as they were uncovered and placed his hand over his heart in sacred sentimentality. He felt a vibration underneath his hand and yearned for something very promising and unspeakable. He suddenly imagined a sky full of luminous stars bleeding brightly with softly jagged and hazy light auras.

He pulled the bucket of injured baby hearts near and began to fondle them in his hands to feel their texture, moistness and power. He knew that these would do very well. They had history but they also had a future. The very nature of their condition established this fact and the traveler was the magician. The traveler now imagined a universe completely packed with infinitude of bodies each possessing a center with radiating life orbs.

He took a pocket knife and slashed open one of the body casings and complicated liquid gushed out all over the grass and onto the traveler's steel-toed boots. He began to whistle peacefully and proceeded to cut open the other body casings. Invisible lives were being murdered and replaced with tangibility.

Once all of the casings were completely opened, he gathered a baby heart in his hand from the bucket and placed one directly into the withered but well preserved and black blood-crusted hole of the chest cavity of one of the bodies. The traveler's whistling got a little louder and sharp and he continued embedding hearts into each body. Thirteen bodies total were invaded.

The traveler began to feel weak and the initial vibrating in his chest became more tremulous. His vision also began to darken and blur and his mouth and throat locked up and became arid. His whistling turned into fierce and desperate expulsions of air; a violent zephyr-kissed melody.

The traveler tried to stand up but instead collapsed theatrically onto ground. The bodies on the grass began to transform and shape-shift. All of the traveler's clothing articles disappeared into the secrets of air. The traveler's body unfolded out on the grass in stark nakedness with steady trembling and shaking.

The mouths of the corpses each formed into the shape of a small circle and staccato puffs of air came out of all of them. The spurts of air eventually took on the familiar sound of the traveler's smooth and elegant whistling that he previously was able to express. The casings fell away and the torsos of the bodies rose slowly until they reached upright and erect sitting positions.

Each face on the body slowly took on the features of the traveler's face as the mouths continued to churn out haunting whistles. The bodies eventually began to stand up and gather great strength and vitality. Each turned out to be complete duplicates of the traveler's physical disposition.

They all drew near the traveler's lifeless corpse and stood over him in a tight gathering while staring down at his body with wide and penetrating bloodshot sets of eyes. The live facsimiles joined hands and walked around the traveler's body in a clockwise path. As they circled around continuously, his body began to dry out, shrink and erode and in his place, a startling pile of clothing garments and many pairs of steel-toed boots materialized. The circling slowed down to a halt and each entity grabbed a piece of clothing to get dressed in.

There was much to be done. They cleared out and cleaned up the yard and the casings were thrown away completely. Each of the entities needed to get some rest and prepare for the next day's mission, which was to gather enough food and clothing, set out onto town roads, hitchhike and make homes in new areas.

Once the entities were settled into their new abodes, their silent killing sprees would begin in local areas and pristine backyards would soon be filled with fresh, dehearted and mercurially preserved vessels.